Revisiting the terms of this conflict not only provides insight into how and why visual art came to be so politicized in the 1980s, but also sheds light on the debates of our present historical moment, which, in many ways, parallel the debates of that period regarding the social purpose of art. I am always incredibly moved and heartened, especially when a veteran tells me that The Wall has helped them in some wayit could not mean more to me. Photo by William Bill Lecky. Unlike previous wars, where only still images or short movie newsreels were available for conveying images, this was Americas first television war. As Michael Clark points out in the essay, Remembering Vietnam, by the late 1960s, Hollywood and the mass media seized on this aspect of the veteran experience, creating variations of a fictionalized veteran who threatened at every moment to bring the war home with him in the form of flashbacks that turned firecrackers into artillery and passersby into the enemy.10 In Clarks analysis, these depictions of veterans served, for nonmilitary American citizens, as a way to launder the violence of the war by relegating it to some other place: Southeast Asia, and the [veterans] psychotic unconscious.11 Such representations enabled film viewers to reframe their experiences of the contemporaneous violence occurring at home, on American soil. Social critics and commentators quickly picked up and elaborated on Carharts characterization of the memorial. The jurors began by touring the site and then returned to Hangar #3 at Andrews to view each of the 1,421 designs individually. He also said there would be a pause in the air attacks on North Vietnam as the first step to de-escalate and promised America would substantially reduce the present level of hostilities.. The more people you got to co-sponsor, the more people wanted to join.. With permit in hand, Doubek instructedto commence construction immediately. It was also a hard-earned victory, leaving more than 300 U.S. movements and weakening the morale of Americans fighting in Vietnam. You may have been tear-choked as you touched or watched others touch "the Wall" at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the most visited war memorial in our nation's capital. By Thursday morning, it was down to 39. The administration was caught by surprise, however, when Diem was murdered during the coup, which was led by General Duong Van Minh. Undoubtedly, news media played an important role in Americans saying, Enough. Indeed, Vo Nyugen Giap had always envisioned using media as one of his spear points for victory. Antiwar protests continued across America and in many other countries, but on April 28, 1967, Gen. Westmoreland became the first battlefield commander ever to address a joint session of Congress in wartime, and Time magazine named him Man of the Year. Which Secretary of the Interior James Watt then threatens to scuttle! Letters came from moms, dads, grandparents, sons and daughters with heartfelt notes accompanied by checks and dollar bills. The families of service members who were missing in action originally wanted their names listed separately. Though a congressional investigative committee the previous year had warned that America could find itself slipping into in a morass that would require more and more military participation in Vietnam, Johnson began a steady escalation of the war, hoping to bring it to a quick conclusion. The first American fatality was Air Force Technical Sergeant Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr., killed June 8, 1956. The jury evaluation took place over five days, from April 27 through May 1, 1981. On that January day, There was a big explosion, Scruggs recalled. That disparity would decline before the war ended, but the racial tensions at home began to insert themselves into the military in Vietnam, damaging unit morale. But several weeks after the announcement, a handful of people began to protest the design. In an article in the Washington Post, writer Tom Wolfe defined the debate over the inclusion of Harts figurative memorial as a story of art experts and the Vietnam veteransand of how the veterans asked for a war memorial and wound up with an enormous pit they now refer to as a tribute to Jane Fonda. Not only was Harts statue included at the memorial site, but a flagpole was added as well. Two U.S. helicopter units arrived in Saigon in 1961. When the time came, however, Diem resisted the elections; the more populous north would certainly win. I heard that those present agreed to double their contributions after Taylor completed her remarks, Scruggs said. Perhaps thats an appropriate design for those who would spit on us still. 3. The choice of the lettering style Optima, designed by Hermann Zapf was a font Lin selected after considering a multitude of options.The font Optima seemed to fit that desire to match an almost printed quality with a hand-cut feel. By the end of the first afternoon, one of the jurors, Harry Weese, returned to our impromptu conference lounge and told me, Paul, there are two designs out there that could do it.. Even white troops were beginning to protest. By endowing memorials with the ability to accomplish these tasks, we bestow them with an extraordinary amount of power and authority. 7. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, also called The Wall, national monument in Washington, D.C., honouring members of the U.S. armed forces who served and died in the Vietnam War (195575). In the Rose Garden of the White House, immediately following President Jimmy Carters signing of the bill, Scruggs explained to the press the vision of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF), the non-profit organization that collected and administered the funds for the memorial. The selected design then had to go through Federal agency approval and development into finished plans. The two sections were not unlike North and South in the United States prior to the Civil War; their people did not fully trust each other. As Scruggs had always envisioned, the Memorial would feature all of the names of those who had died. Thus, it is unsurprising that the first skirmish of the culture wars of the 1980s can be traced back to the public debate that broke out in reaction to Maya Lins design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. North Vietnam, had by then established a presence in Laos and developed the Ho Chi Minh Trail through that country in order to resupply and reinforce its forces in South Vietnam. In fact, throughout the 1970s, there was little political impetus on any front to address these shortcomings. Swartz, 95. Just as the American people could be a part of building the Memorial through their contributions and support, they could also have an opportunity to participate in its design. Sturken, 322; Anne Swartz, American Art After September 11: A Consideration of the Twin Towers, Symploke 14, nos. Everyone wanted to join the effort. An official groundbreaking ceremony was held on March 26, 1982. They were real guys. Others questioned the intent of the Memorial. Paul Haagas spouse, Heather Sturt Haaga, soon came forward to lend her experience in fund raising. However, that posed a problem of how tolocate an individual name. Washington, D.C. As memorials are objects of public commemoration, we demand a lot of them. He, in turn, called the Buddhists VC sympathizers. 2) It applauded feminist efforts. Why the Battle for Hamburger Hill Was So Controversial. Another article in the same issue of the Post echoed Wolfes definition of the terms of the debate, commenting that: There is a discordance between the sophisticated wall and the unsophisticated statue. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? The controversy overshadowed the mission and what we were doing, until the Salute brought it all together. The Civil Rights Movement had produced significant victories, but many blacks had come to describe Vietnam as a white mans war, a black mans fight. Between 1961 and 1966, black males accounted for about 13 percent of the U.S. population and less than 10 percent of military personnel but almost 20 percent of all combat-related deaths. For the first time, MACV worked with South Vietnams government to create annual plans. Instead they found bitterness and discontent and they were often disliked by the public. The Memorial had several purposes, he explained. The chief design criteria were that the memorial be 1) reflective and contemplative in character; 2) be harmonious with its site and environment, 3) make no political statement about the war itself, and 4) contain the names of all who died or remained missing. ", 3: The Political Controversy, North Vietnamese officers, after the war, said the only thing they feared was an American-led invasion of the north, but the U.S. was not going to risk starting World War III, and at the time that seemed to loom as a distinct possibility. Every major engagement between U.S. forces and VC or NVA was an American victory, and the casualty (body count) ratio always showed significantly larger casualties for the communist forces than for the Americans. In 2009 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund assumed responsibility for the maintenance of the site. Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. https://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/vietnam/r3/october/, https://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/vietnam/r4/1982/, https://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3407, Extending Beyond Craftsmanship, into Inquiry and Exploration, Horror, Contemporary Art, and Film: In Conversation with Dan Herschlein and Chad Laird. An electrical storm was interfering with the ships radar and may have given the impression of approaching attack boats. Scruggs was raised in a rural Maryland town between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. His mother was a waitress; his father a milkman. The reputation of the jurors was important to attract the best designers and to minimize second guessing by the Federal approval bodies. Scruggs, Wheeler, and Doubek then scouted the Mall sometimes by bicycle to identify the ideal spot: a stretch of parkland known as Constitution Gardens, located on the National Mall adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial. Ibid. In November 2003, the LMDC placed the proposals of the eight finalists on display for public review.16 According to Sturken and art historian Anne Swartz, criticism of the designs, including that of the eventual winner, Peter Walkers and Michael Arads Reflecting Absence, revolved in large part around their perceived minimalist aesthetic, once again drawing on the rhetoric involved in the Tilted Arc debate. As soon as the design was chosen,the next step was to consider the all-important details of getting it built. On Saturday, a grand parade took place where veterans marched joyously out of sync, some hand-in-hand or with their arms draped around one another, holding banners, flags, and signs. Support for the war eroded further. It was World War II and her family lived in Nam Dinh, an industrial city and military target on the north coast of Vietnam. As Scruggs analyzed the concept of collective psychological states, he realized that, just as veterans needed psychological healing, so too did the nation. Associated Press correspondent Malcolm Mal Browne photographed him sitting quietly in the lotus position as the flames consumed him. Traumatic memoriessuch as those of police officers brutally beating anti-war protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and members of the National Guard opening fire on students protesting the war at Kent State University in Ohiowere removed, like a tumor, from the body of the nation and assigned to another geographical location: Vietnam. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a tribute to the dead of the United States ' longest, most unpopular, and least successful war. Lin moved to Washington and immediately became part of an internal struggle for control of the design. The South Vietnamese Army was showing improvement, winning 37 of their last 45 major engagements. If all of the names could be in one place, these names would have great powera power to heal. 4: The Artistic Controversy, 3/1982-11/1985 >>>>> 1988. The senior staffers were against it. Hidden in a hole in the ground, with no means of access for those Vietnam veterans who are condemned to spend the rest of their days in a wheelchair. American drawdown continued, with only 43,000 personnel left in-country by mid-August. As soon as ground was broken for The Wall in March 1982, planning for its dedication ceremonies began. Or, people would tell me, Well why did you let him go? Of course, what choice do you have?. A few preliminary concepts were embraced. Mathias and Warner continued to rally support and ferry the legislation. Lin and VVMF eventually selectedthe Cooper-Lecky Partnership as the architect-of-record, with Lin as the projects design consultant. The vision of VVMF is to ensure a society in which all who have served and sacrificed in our nation's Armed Forces are properly honored and receive the recognition they justly deserve. It just resonated, he explained. The program, which had been poorly managed, was abandoned after about two years, following the coup that deposed Diem. It's the most-visited memorial on the National Mall in Washington, attracting more than 5 million people each year - the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Daniel Libeskind. On April 30, their tanks entered Saigon. Please leave evidence I will report anything other than this 1 See answer Advertisement lheduardomarques The peasants resented being forced from their ancestral lands, and consolidating them gave the VC better targets. Then, in October 1980, veteran and lawyer Tom Carhart, also a former supporter, testified before the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) against the design, saying that One needs no artistic education to see this design for what it is, a black trench that scars the Mall. But the fact that the language deployed to critique Arads and Walkers design so closely echoed the criticism launched against Lin in the early 1980s signifies that the debates of that era remain unresolved. By the March 31, 1981, deadline, 1,421 design entries were submitted for judging. During the 1970s, it . monument, Washington, District of Columbia, United States. Carhart equated artists and their defenders with individuals who engaged in acts of aggression against returned soldiers, and who were thus correlated with the entirety of the anti-war movement. We are all equal in combat. She is still remembered fondly by veterans for the moving Memorial she designed for them. A few of the most vocal opponents, including James Webb and H. Ross Perot, had previously been strong supporters of a memorial. The battle was suddenly over.. I remember The Washington Post had pages and pages of stories in the A section. Vietnam veterans were, at long last, receiving the recognition they deserved. Sturken notes, "the memorial was seen as a monument to defeat, one that spoke more directly to a nation's guilt than to the honor of the war dead and the veterans." The disagreements over the design revealed anxiety about ownership of the war's representation. The walls are inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 men and women . Throughout the judging process, one of the judges, Grady Clay, had taken meticulous notes of the jurys discussions. The added component of military security made the location even more attractive, since it would ensure no interference with the designs or the judging. Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund | 3033 Wilson Blvd, Suite 300 | Arlington VA 22201 | 202.393.0090 They were either ignored or shouted at and called vicious names. Then, on March 30, 1972, the North Vietnamese attacked across the 17th parallel with 14 divisions and additional individual regiments. Together with Spreiregen, he composed a report based on these thoughtful comments. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) advised that was not the caseAmerica had a strong military presence in the Pacific that would serve as a deterrent. The They were the only father-son pair to die in Vietnam.) Frances military involvement in Vietnam began when it sent warships in 1847, ostensibly to protect Christians from the ruling emperor Gia Long. Marinesnear Van Truong, from the VC point of view. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial stands as a symbol of America's honor and recognition of the men and women who served and sacrificed their lives in the Vietnam War. A different feeling prevailed among many within the U.S. government. VVMFagreed to the statue compromise, as well as to adding a flag and to reviewing the inscription on the Memorial, but they did not want to wait untila statue was designed before breaking ground. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington D.C. Like many veterans, Carhart read Lins design through the lens of his own experience: encountering an America that was at best indifferent and at worst outright hostile towards soldiers returning from Vietnam. It seemed every time they contacted someone, they were greeted with enthusiasm for the idea. For years, American society as a whole, regardless of political affiliation, had studiously ignored Vietnam veterans, their presence a painful reminder of the wars moral ambiguity. Ibid. Mathias set up a meeting so he could learn more. Eventually, a compromise was reached with the commissioning of a traditional statue depicting three servicemen with a flag to stand at the entrance to the memorial. In this sense, it was a complex ideological battle. The Three Soldiers, 198284. Just before Christmas 1979, Warner hosted a fundraising breakfast in his Georgetown home. Buddhists, who comprised South Vietnams majority, claimed Diem, a Catholic, favored citizens of his religion in distributing aid. Scruggs added: Make this place look like an airstrike was called in, he instructed. Originally, Vietnam ended at the 17th parallel, but it gradually conquered all the area southward along the coastline of the South China Sea and west to Cambodia. Jan came to our headquarters to see if we had any room to help them get started, Cupp remembered. Ultimately, the VVMF Board agreed on a jury of the most experienced and prestigious artists and designers that could be found, since it took a mature eye to envision from two-dimensional renderings how a design would look when built. He had spent three months recovering in a hospital before being sent back to fight with rocket-propelled grenade fragments permanently embedded in his body. A cadre was drawn from those who went north; they were trained, equipped and sent back to the south to aid in organizing and guiding the insurgency. . It set the tone for the ensuing cultural debates pitting the people against the elites, as found in Tom Wolfes criticism of Lins memorial design. Spreiregen recommended having a multi-disciplinary panel: two architects, two landscape architects, two sculptors, and one generalist with extensive knowledge about art, architecture, and design. The insurgency was called the National Liberation Front (PLF); however, its soldiers and operatives became more commonly known by their opponents as the Viet Cong (VC), short for Vietnamese Communists. They are a treasure of design insight and included many prescient thoughts as to how the Memorial would likely be experienced, Spreiregen wrote of Clays notes. Maya Lin, has gone on to become a respected architect and artist, with a studio in New York City. A lingering question of the war is what might have happened if Eisenhower and Ho had arranged a meeting; possibly, an accord could have been reached, or possibly Ho was simply seeking to limit American involvement, in order to more easily depose the Diem government. 18. The controversy over the planned 9/11 memorial at the former site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, which began nearly a decade ago, harkened back to the debates of the early 1980s and heralds the current resurgence of cultural warfare. An author, teacher, and lecturer, Spreiregen had written the authoritative book on design competitions. By the end of 1967, there were 540,000 American troops in Vietnam, and the military draft was set to call up 302,000 young men in the coming year, an increase of 72,000 over 1967. They were also keenly aware that the legislation made the Memorials design subject to the approval of the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), and the Secretary of the Interior. The communist takeover of China and subsequent war in Korea (1950-53) against North Korean and Chinese troops had focused a great deal of attention on Southeast Asia as a place to take a strong stand against the spread of communism. On one side were the proponents of Lins memorials, defined in the media and the public imagination as Wolfes elitist art mullahs, draft dodgers, the future New Leftists, and, of course, followers of Jane Fonda (infamously dubbed Hanoi Jane after a trip to North Vietnam, during which she made statements condemning the U.S. military). Kennedy saw American efforts in Southeast Asia almost as a crusade and believed increasing the military advisor program, coupled with political reform in South Vietnam, would strengthen the south and bring peace. The Best Answer To The Question Why was the vietnam war memorial so controversial? The design aroused a great deal of controversy, reflecting the lack of resolution of the national conflicts over the war as well as the lack of consensus over what constituted an appropriate memorial at the end of the 20th century. As VVMF focused on fundraising, Sens. Better armed than ever before, thanks to increased aid from the Soviet Union, they employed tanks for the first time. The Vietnam War was the longest in U.S. history until the Afghanistan War (20012021). Civilian loss of life was also very heavy, with the lowest estimates around 415,000. Also known as "America's Longest War," U.S. involvement in Vietnam War did not end until 1973. Many who visit leave behind items in memoriam to those that have served. Color meant nothing on the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam. They were also the most collegial people, who would deliberate intensely but never argue or posture, Spreiregen remembered. They serve as testaments to lives lost, as repositories of grief, and to facilitate processes of mourning. By now, we are so accustomed to its visual rhetoricthe polished black granite, the lists of names, the horizontal positioningthat to think of these components as anything but standard practice takes an act of real imagination. When Scruggs went to see the movie in early 1979, it wasnt the graphic war scenes that haunted him. Earlier, in March 1968, the Americal Division had been involved in what became known as the My Lai Massacre, in which over 100 men, women and children were killed. When I was attending law school, Vietnam veterans were an anomaly among the young single professional set of Washington, so it was something you didnt mention. remembered Doubek. Early on in the effort to get the Memorial built, there were traces of controversy. The shift, however, did not represent a resolved conflict between public art and public memory and memorialization, but merely a temporary relocation of the site of debate. The Vietnam War Starts In 1954, following the defeat of the French colonialists at the hands of the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, the last battle of the First Indochina War, the country of. One needs no artistic education to see this design for what it is, a black trench that scars the Mall. There were four phases to the design competition spanning almost one year: planning and preparation; the launch; the design phase; the design evaluation and selection; the press conference and public presentation. Hanoi offered to restart peace talks, yet remained intransigent in its demands. The truth was, veterans were no more likely to be addicted to drugs than those who did not serve. Some antiwar protestors blamed the men and women who served in Vietnam, taunting them and spitting on them when they came home. And Congress had declared a Vietnam Veterans Week for that April to honor those who had returned home. He made an impassioned plea for funding to his guests, members of the defense industry. Ho Chi Minh led a communist government in the north (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) with its capital at Hanoi, and a new Republic of South Vietnam was established under President Ngo Dinh Diem, with its capital at Saigon. Marita Sturken, The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero, American Ethnologist 31, no. Editors note: This essay was originally published on Art21.org in November 2011. At the time, well-managed open design competitions were common in Europe, but not in the United States. Population in the south was mostly clustered in a few areas along the coast; the north always enjoyed a larger population. It seemed unfair and inappropriate that there should be no recognition.. 3) It provoked antiwar sentiment. All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden.12. Why Were Vietnam War Vets Treated Poorly When They . By June they had stalled the invasion, with the help of American airpower. After 25 years, the way in which visitors have embraced and cherished this work has been a great gift to me, she wrote in the program for the 25th anniversary ceremony. Despite the fact that beyond certain superficial qualities, Lins memorial shared little in common with the work of classic Minimalist artists such as Richard Serra or Donald Judd, critics nonetheless conflated it with Serras equally controversial Tilted Arc, labeling it another example of an inscrutable Minimalist public artwork erected at taxpayers expense. Sturken, 125. 5. Corrections? You had to live through that period to really understand it. When Lin asked how many Smiths would be on The Wall, the team realized how important the chronological listing was to the design. There were so many people helping to get the legislation [passed], remembered Healy. The domino fell but did not take down any of those around it. Spreiregen, a graduate of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, was a Fulbright Scholar who had served as the director of urban design programs at the American Institute of Architects (AIA) from 1962-66 and as the first director of architecture programs at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1966-70. Jan Scruggss and VVMF members desire for a memorial that would heal the social rifts wrought by the war was wishful thinking. The Vietnam Women's Memorial was established to honor the women who risked their lives to serve their country. These meanings serve as unifying forces, reinforcing the idea of a shared national identity and healing rifts in the communal experience of nationhood. Vietnam Veterans Memorial (eBook) - Julia Hargrove 2002-03-01 The Vietnam conflict was one of the most controversial engagements in the history of the United States. Maya Lin was practically a kid when her design was selected to become the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Their initial timeline was aggressive, with an ultimate goal of dedicating the Memorial on Veterans Day 1982just a little more than 36 months away. We expect them to do the work of history writing, to draw single comprehensible narratives out of a Gorgon's nest of individual, often contradictory, experiences. He has written that he was prepared for a 25-year war; he realized he did not have to achieve military victory; he only had to avoid losing. They werent nice. The Gold Star Mothers is a group of mothers whose sons or daughters have died serving their country. But Lin doesn't like anybody "drawing mustaches" on her design and, with the support of many in the Art world, pressures the Commission of Fine Arts to scuttle the compromise and hatch a new one.