[This is the first in a series of excerpts from an unpublished book.]
Tour the Civil War memorials in Manhattan and you’ll probably feel uplifted, patriotic, even martial. Tour the World War I memorials and you’ll more likely feel depressed. The two sculptures shown here are at either end of a radical change in memorials raised to our troops from the 1860s to the 1920s.
Ward, Seventh Regiment Memorial, 1869
Ward, the most famous American sculptor of his day, was commissioned to commemorate the courage and dedication of the New York-based Seventh Regiment. Rather than creating a portrait of one of its officers, he represented an anonymous foot soldier in spotless uniform, standing proudly upright and alert. Portraying a rank-and-file soldier was at the time unprecedented in New York war memorials, but it struck a chord. Ward’s work was imitated and mass produced for sale to hundreds of towns from the Atlantic to the Rockies who wished to honor their Civil War dead. The inscription on the front of the pedestal is a summary of the positive side of military service: “Pro patria et gloria,” “For homeland and honor.”
Ward, Seventh Regiment Memorial, 1869
The Inwood Memorial also shows rank-and-file soldiers, but how different they are from Ward’s! A staggering figure supports a collapsing comrade, while a third kneels to look into the wounded man’s face – or is he, too, collapsing? Between them, these soldiers have only one helmet and one rifle. In the figures and the inscription (“Erected by the people of Washington Heights in commemoration of the men who gave their lives in the World War”), Whitney stressed not the motivation or courage of the soldiers, but the horrors of war.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Inwood War Memorial, 1921
The Inwood Memorial is typical of World War I memorials in New York. All but one show unnamed foot soldiers, most of whom are wounded, dying, or dead. Significantly, the only portrait is of Father Duffy, a chaplain rather than an officer.
If you’re seeking explanations of this change in memorials, you might consider Marx’s emphasis on the importance of the proletariat, Meunier’s sculptures of working men (see his Marteleur on the campus of Columbia University), Rodin’s sculptures of anonymous and often fragmentary figures, and the changing ideas of American intellectuals on the international role of the United States and its military. (At what point did it become nobler to suffer and die than to win?) In any case, by the 1920s it was rare to see a sculpture of a military hero produced as a public monument in New York.
For more on Ward, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide, essays 6, 7, 11, 18, 24, and 37; on war memorials, see essay 27 (on Duffy). On Meunier’s Marteleur, see Forgotten Delights: The Producers, essay 13.
