Over the past 40 years, memorials to America’s 20th century wars have sprung up across Washington, D.C., with one conspicuous omission: There was no national memorial to veterans of World War I in our nation’s capital.

“If you ask anybody on the streets where the World War I memorial is in D.C., most of them will point you to the D.C. Veterans Memorial,” said Joe Weishaar. “For a long time people assumed that it was the national memorial. But the little rotunda that’s there is only to district residents.”

In 2015, Weishaar was a 25-year-old intern at a Chicago architecture firm when he heard about an open design competition for D.C.’s first national World War I memorial. “I set up a shelf in my closet, I set my computer on the shelf, and that was my office,” he said. “I was doing this, like, in nights and weekends after work.”

He sent off his design and then forgot about it, until … “I got a very strange phone call and they’re like, ‘You’re one of five finalists. We need you in Washington, like, tomorrow,’” he said.

Weishaar had never even been to Washington. “No, I had never been. Didn’t own a suit!”

Weishaar’s design beat out more than 360 applicants from over 20 countries.   

When the memorial opened to the public in 2021, only one thing was missing: an intricate, 60-foot-long bronze relief, the memorial’s centerpiece, created by classical sculptor Sabin Howard, a firebrand and self-appointed bulwark against the scourge of modern art. “Artists like de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, I’m in opposition to them,” said Howard. “It’s a scam, what’s happened in the last 100 years. I’m here to rectify that scam.”

For his tableau depicting World War I, he said, “I threw out the last hundred years of history in the art world, and I went back to what preceded that period of time.”

Shepherding Howard through the byzantine approvals process was his client, the Congressionally-created World War I Centennial Commission.

“You go to these meetings, and none of the people in the room are artists; they’re all lawyers and, you know, Washington bureaucrats,” Howard said. “The commission asked me, ‘We need to see more – a dying soldier, perhaps, and more suffering.’ I started posing the models. You had madness, you had amputations, death. So, I went pretty deep.”

When he brought that iteration into the commission office, he said chairs were literally thrown in the room.

“I was treated as, ‘You’re working for us.’ And I took that for a long time. But then we got to a moment in the relationship, I stood up and I said, ‘I will not compromise this design. And if you don’t like it, you sculpt it, and I’ll send you some webinars.’”

The World War I Centennial Commission said they are “proud of the magnificent Memorial that Joe Weishaar and Sabin Howard have created,” and that it “provides a model of how a complex and collaborative process can work.”

Howard may lack tact, but he doesn’t lack confidence. His sculpture charts a soldier’s wartime journey, from his ambivalent departure, to his wordless homecoming, to the animal savagery of combat in-between. Pointing to one soldier, he said, “If you look at this figure, I don’t think in the history of art that there’s ever been a figure with this much explosive energy.”

Howard’s “movie in bronze,” consisting of 38 figures weighing 25 tons, ends with a soldier, home from war, lowering a helmet to a young girl.

For World War I historian Jennifer Keene, the sculpture’s final tableau illustrates the heavy toll the war exacted on its veterans: “They were not prepared for what they were going to find – the quagmire, the terror of artillery shells, rats and lice and trench feet. No, they are completely unprepared.”

Keene said, “I think that idea at the end, that it’s just a gesture, right? ‘Here’s the helmet.’ There’s no words there, because maybe there aren’t words that can really describe what that soldier has been through.”

The sculpture, which will be unveiled at a ceremony later this month, took nine years of Sabin Howard’s life. “Yeah, but that’s not a lot, when you think about it,” he said.

Asked what he hopes visitors to the memorial a century from now would experience, Howard replied, “I want the visitor 100 years from now to have the same feeling that I had when I went to go see the David when I was 25. We are made in God’s image. That sculpture is made in God’s image. So is mine. It’s a simple thing, but very deep.”

For more info:

      
Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Joseph Frandino. 

      
See also: 

In roughly 30 minutes, a new era of Husky football kicks off on the Big Ten Network. As noted in the open thread posted earlier, this is your spot to comment on the game and follow along during all of the action with your fellow Husky fans.

We will be extremely loose with the definition of trolling and any offenders will be banned. Also, any comments directed at other posters will be deleted and the offenders may be placed on pre-moderate mode.

*****

Make sure you didn’t miss our week of scouting the Wildcats.

Weber State Offensive Preview

*****

Weber State defensive Preview

*****

Q&A with Wildcats beat reporter Brett Hein of the Standard-Examiner

*****

The Prediction

*****

How to Watch

*****

Go Dawgs!

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker criticized Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for exaggerating elements of his career for “political gain” in an op-ed published on Friday. 

“I’m not saying that Walz lies, precisely,” Parker wrote in an op-ed headlined, “Tim Walz isn’t exactly what he seems.” “But he tends to gild his résumé for political gain.” 

Walz has been forced to defend a number of controversies that have emerged following Vice President Harris’ announcement that he would be her running mate. In particular, Walz has had to explain his record in the National Guard and his 2006 congressional campaign’s statements on his 1995 drunk driving incident. 

‘MASTERFUL SHAPESHIFTER’ WALZ GETS POINTED MESSAGE FROM MINNESOTA VOTERS AT STATE FAIR BOOTH

Parker called out Walz’s statements about his 1995 arrest for drunk driving.

“Walz, then a 31-year-old high school teacher, was clocked at 96 mph in a 55-mph zone in Nebraska,” Parker wrote. “He was pulled over by a state trooper, who, upon smelling alcohol, asked Walz to take a field sobriety test, which he failed. Walz then submitted to a hospital for a blood test, which revealed his blood alcohol level to be 0.128, well above the state’s legal limit.” 

While that info is verifiable by police records, Walz’s 2006 congressional campaign staff told the press that the candidate was not drinking and actually failed to understand the police officer’s directions because of hearing loss, blaming an injury relating to his time in the National Guard. 

Parker also responded to Walz’s interview alongside Harris with CNN. 

WALZ ON ABORTION, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS ‘ON PAR WITH CHINA AND NORTH KOREA,’ SAYS PARENTAL RIGHTS ADVOCATE

Veterans who served alongside Walz in the same battalion when he was in the National Guard have spoken out against his honesty about his service record.  (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

“Morning show softballs may give comfort to the ill-prepared, but they deny viewers the content they need to be better-informed voters,” Parker wrote. “Nothing about the pair’s first (taped) interview Thursday night, with CNN’s Dana Bash, satisfied that imperative. Although Harris handled the interview relatively well, Walz seemed to be a mixed-up mess.”

“He answered none of the four questions he was asked, including whether he had misspoken when he said he had carried a gun ‘in war’ when he never was deployed to a combat zone,” Parker wrote. “A simple ‘yes’ might have sufficed, but instead he sputtered evasive nonsense and, to be rhetorically accurate, gobbledygook.”

Veterans who served alongside Walz in the same battalion when he was in the National Guard have spoken out against his honesty about his service record. 

The Harris-Walz campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital. 

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP