why was the vietnam war memorial so controversial?

(Some in the North Vietnamese government thought the course of war in the south was unwise, but they were overruled.) United States: 540,000 The location secured, the seemingly uncontroversial process of articulating goals for a memorial and staging a competition draws over 1100 entries then the largest such design competition in the United States and the winner is Maya Lin's "Wall. New York Close Up artist Dan Herschlein, and professor, Chad Laird, discuss the intersection of contemporary art, film and horror. And if they themselves didnt know how to help, they knew someone who did. In large part, this was accomplished through a series of conflicts waged at the level of culture. Most, like the Lincoln Memorial, were competitions between select designers. The VVMF organizers soon learned that it required an Act of Congress to build a memorial on Federal land, and Scruggs first called one of the senators for his home state of Maryland. The How should we remember a war that we "lost"? And if they were bitter, who could blame them? The U.S., possessing the largest foreign military presence, essentiallydirected the war from 1965 to 1968. 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. Throughout the judging process, one of the judges, Grady Clay, had taken meticulous notes of the jurys discussions. Associated Press correspondent Malcolm Mal Browne photographed him sitting quietly in the lotus position as the flames consumed him. Which Secretary of the Interior James Watt then threatens to scuttle! By June 1977, Scruggs was attending graduate school at American University in Washington, D.C. and had embarked on a research study exploring the social and psychological consequences of Vietnam military duties. Initially, however, homefront support for the war effort grew, but by March Americans, perceiving no change in strategy that would bring the war to a conclusion, became increasingly disillusioned. Omissions? 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. The Inspiration. They really worked well together and were the driving force. Private Funding No government funds were used to build the memorial, only public land. American troops had won every major battle they fought, and General Nguyen Van Thieu had come to power in South Vietnam in September; he would remain in office until 1975, bringing a new measure of stability to the government, though he could not end its endemic corruption. 3. The fact that such nongovernmental entities as the New York Times, CNN, and the Max Protetch Gallery took it upon themselves to solicit designs for both the new World Trade Center buildings and for suitable memorials to the attacks indicates the extent to which the American public writ large was attuned to the sites future. It was also a hard-earned victory, leaving more than 300 U.S. Instead, Lin found John Benson, a master stonecutter, to hand cut the text at the apex the years of the earliest and latest casualties from the Department of Defense list and the brief prologue and epilogue adjacent to the dates. How did people react to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial? Among South Vietnams other allies, Australia had over 400 killed and 2,400 wounded; New Zealand, over 80 KIA; Republic of Korea, 4,400 KIA; and Thailand 350 killed. Like all stereotypes, this one was unfair. Based on a program the British had employed successfully against insurgents in Malaya, it didnt work in Vietnam. The following week, Kurt Anderson recapped the festivities for TIME magazine: Saturdays three-hour parade down Constitution Avenue, led by [Gen. William] Westmoreland, was the vets own show. He could still picture the faces of his 12 buddies, but the passing years were making it harder and harder to remember their names. 7. Veterans needed this, and so did the nation. North Vietnam was a prodigy of both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Red China. These mass-media fictions enabled the very real neglect of veterans by the institutions tasked with tending to their needs. It seemed unfair and inappropriate that there should be no recognition.. Significant funding cuts to programs that had been instigated in the 1960s under Lyndon Johnsons Great Society domestic agenda followed, in addition to a major attack on union power. Military personnel, including nurses, were warned not to wear their uniforms in the States. Larry Century, a young inventor from Cleveland, Ohio,was selected to serve as a consultant to Binswanger Glass Company in Memphis, Tennessee, which was awarded the contract for inscribing the names. The Selective Service System during the Vietnam war was highly controversial, especially because early in the war draftees came disproportionately from poor, working-class, rural, and minority populations. Most importantly, they needed to navigate the channels of government authorizations and approvals. The battle was suddenly over.. In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. His research had proven that post-traumatic stress was real and had shone a light on the challenges faced by a significant number of military veterans. 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. She greeted each visitor in a regal fashion, wearing a dressing gown, perfect makeup, and beautiful shoes that curled up at the toes. The In Memory plaque, dedicated in 2004, is near The Three Servicemen and honors the men and women who died as a result of their service in Vietnam. On April 30, their tanks entered Saigon. Additionally, the emergence of Park51the proposed Muslim community and cultural center to be located a few blocks from the former World Trade Center siteas a major point of public interest and debate, which peaked during the 2010 congressional elections, confirms the continued political potency and cultural power of memorials as embodiments of representational practice. What they did need, however, was an acceptable location for the Memorial and enough support to push the idea through various governmental committees and agencies. Overview Military conscription, commonly known as "the draft," is one of the most complex topics related to the Vietnam War. The love and acceptance that the American people gave to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial have continued unabated for over 25 years. Memorials are built to give context and, possibly, meaning to suffering that is otherwise incomprehensible. Vietnam Veterans Memorial | Encyclopedia.com Why was the memorial so controversial? The Three Servicemen Statue Vietnam Women's Memorial And Vietnam In the nine months since he'd been in-country, Scruggs had already seen a lot of action and had been wounded in a battle near Xuan Loc. Sturken, 322. Perhaps Lins centralitytwenty years after the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorialto the debate over Arads and Walkers design was inevitable, given her presence on the design competitions selection committee as well as her legacy as the definitive memorial builder of the late twentieth century. One of Mathias early key suggestions was that the memorial should be on the Mall, especially because the anti-war demonstrations had taken place there. They complained about the walls being black. (His son, Marine Corps lance corporal Richard Fitzgibbon III would be killed in action in Vietnam September 7, 1965. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. And that message got through to me.. But the memorial might not exist in the form we see today if it weren't for the support of architects who defended the young architect's controversial design. Why was Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial initially controversial? As a senior at Yale University, Lin entered a nationwide competition sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, and her design was selected from the more than 1,400 submissions that were received. The plan, however, was eventually scrapped, once the initial haggling over the racial identity of the firefighters gave way to accusations of political correctness on the part of the memorials planners.20. 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. Vietnam Veterans Memorial - Washington DC Out of the nearly fifteen hundred entries in the competition, the eight jurors of the selection committee unanimously chose Maya Lins design on May 6, 1981. Were all the result of our upbringing. For Woods, the growing coalition was a prime example of its not what you know, its who you know. These people, though a small group, were able to reach out to their networks and their extensive contacts to recruit the type of expertise and support required for such a mammoth initiative. It would be a way to honor the veterans and to help themand the countryheal. We do not memorialize bus accidents, which by nature are contextless, meaningless. Vietnam Veterans Memorial - National Park Service And Congress had declared a Vietnam Veterans Week for that April to honor those who had returned home. The VVMF group liked them all and approved of them with trust and enthusiasm, even selecting three sculptors, making a total of eight jurors. In retaliation for the invasion, and in hopes of forcing Hanoi to negotiate in good faith, Nixon ordered Haiphong harbor in North Vietnam to be mined and he intensified bombing of North Vietnam. Vietnam: A History of America's Controversial War He was in Vietnam, serving in the 199th Light Infantry Brigade. General Price, along with Senators Warner and Mathias and future Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, gave moving addresses before the command was given, and 150 shovels entered the ground with enthusiastic veterans enjoying the moment. VVMF met the prospective jurors and scrutinized their credentials. 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. 12. . Over 500,000 wounded, Explore articles from the HistoryNet archives about Vietnam War. Just before Christmas 1979, Warner hosted a fundraising breakfast in his Georgetown home. I had my ear to the ground, Mathias recalled. By the time he returned home, three months after the explosion, the country was even further divided. The senior staffers were against it. On April 30, 1980, the Senate approved legislation authorizing the Memorial, followed by approval in the House on May 20, 1980. Sturken, 320. News footage showed the fighting in Saigon and Hue. Spreiregen wrote, I saw this as a needed opportunity to honor the service and lives of the soldiers we had lost and do so by running a model competition., Arthur Mosley headed the site selection task group and was assisted by John Woods, a structural engineer, who had been permanently disabled in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. It was a direct result of the First Indochina War (1946-1954) between France, which claimed Vietnam as a colony, and the communist forces then known as Viet Minh. It was World War II and her family lived in Nam Dinh, an industrial city and military target on the north coast of Vietnam. 2) It applauded feminist efforts. By the time of World War II, a number of groups sought Vietnamese independence but as Vo Nguyen Giapwho would build Vietnams postWWII armyexpressed it, the communists were the best organized and most action-oriented of these groups. During the Second World War, Vichy France could do little to protect its colony from Japanese occupation. 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. Although publicly the war in the south was described as a civil war within South Vietnam, it was guided, equipped and reinforced by the communist leadership in Hanoi. Some antiwar protestors blamed the men and women who served in Vietnam, taunting them and spitting on them when they came home. 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. In previous war, progress and setbacks could be shown on maps; large enemy units could be engaged and destroyed. 16. Letters came from moms, dads, grandparents, sons and daughters with heartfelt notes accompanied by checks and dollar bills. In the early 20th century, Vietnamese nationalism began to rise, clashing with the French colonial rulers. He found that returning veterans were finding it hard to trust people. ", 3: The Political Controversy, 1. On January 27, 1973, peace accords were signed between North Vietnam and the U.S. The NVA suffered some 120,000 casualties. Ultimately, the Commission of Fine Arts, which had the final say in the matter, overruled Lins objections. Scruggs . Wheeler had the idea to bypass the traditional site selection route and have Congress pass legislation to award a specific area for a memorial site. 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. Lin vociferously objected to the inclusion of Harts piece, arguing that it violated the integrity of [her] design and created the sensation of being watched, as if one were on a golf green. As Sturken points out, this did little to evoke veterans sympathy: Lin stuck to her position as an outsider . 6. zThe Vietnam Wall Controversy, Round 3, October 1981January 1982, History on Trial, Lehigh University Digital Library, accessed April 21, 2011, https://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/vietnam/r3/october/. Lower Manhattan must not be transformed into a vast mausoleum, obviously, but neither must it be transformed into a theme park for advanced architectural taste.15, Such rhetoric spilled over from the initial debates surrounding the redevelopment of the site of the Twin Towers to those regarding the design for the memorial. In 1972 a poll determined he was the most trusted man in America.. Medals, toys, flowers, photographsanything and everything is left at The Wall as family and friends seek to remember their loved ones who made the ultimate sacrifice in Vietnam. Many had worked together, some in Washington. Two younger monks poured a mix of gasoline and jet fuel over him and, as the three had planned, set fire to him. On February 7, 1965, the U.S. Air Force began bombing selected sites in North Vietnam. He also found that those veterans whose units experienced high casualty rates were experiencing higher divorce rates and a greater frequency of combat-related dreams. Civilian loss of life was also very heavy, with the lowest estimates around 415,000. The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet. The ARVN bent but did not break. As they forged a partnership with Mathias and his staff, VVMF also set out to establish other key relationships.