Westbrook Pegler

Columbus Ledger/January 20, 1956

Can anyone explain why our Second Big War and the Korean War have produced so few statues to individual heroes and parks or squares named after generals or admirals? There are practically none of the proud patriotic landmarks which have been the tradition of organized nations and homogeneous peoples even in defeat.

If I mention the statue to the Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima I believe I have almost covered that phase of the story. But if there are other such monuments they are relatively few and this strange change may be observed negatively in all the other countries, except probably Russia. Incidentally a young West Point lieutenant of infantry remarked at the time of the Iwo flag-raising that it seemed strange to him that it took so many Leathernecks to plant a flag-staff weighing a couple of pounds. Of course that may have been the corps spirit speaking.

I saw a story of a strike riot recently which gave sidelong mention of a square in a small eastern city named for General MacArthur. But where are memorials equivalent to Grant Park, Sheridan Road and Logan Square in Chicago? Pershing Square in New York, Los Angeles and Danbury and Father Duffy Square in the confluence of Broadway and Seventh Avenue? Horace Greeley is honored with a square in New York but is General Patton?

We had Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and La Guardia Field in New York long before those statesmen were laid away, even though both had technically disapproved monuments to living persons. Roosevelt’s practical if somewhat immodest acknowledgement of his-own grandeur had been plainly implied by his preparations for the memorial library and for his grave, which soon got formal designation by the Department of the Interior as a “shrine.” His mother barely missed ennoblement in the consecration of a lounging place for skid row bums and children and their mothers on the lower East Side. Robert Moses, a churlish Republican who built this untidy reservation after a stretch of old tenements had been knocked down, frustrated La Guardia’s reverent purpose by neglecting to order the street-corner signs His primary reason for that was the old lady’s parsimony in reversing the cost of a 50-cent phone call from Hyde Park to tell him she could not be down for the dedication because she had a cold. The city paid the 50 cents but saved something on the traditional scaffolds for the orators and other dignitaries and the wages of men to tack up the bunting and take it down.

Is there an Eisenhower Boulevard somewhere that I have not heard of? It seems to me that the only memorial to Ike was a temporary and unofficial salute tinged with sarcasm in London, where Grosvenor Square, an American center, was commonly called “Eisenhower Platz.” There is in this square a big bronze figure of Roosevelt in the naval cape, a defined honor to which he was never entitled and surly Americans of contrary political and moral principles have have threatened to get drunk and desecrate it. Would I be thought ill of if I should say that this would be a good idea?

The French and the Italians have a lighthearted, mercurial way of exalting heroes temporarily and tearing them down permanently. I have often marveled that the name of President Wilson remained on a street in Paris as long as it did, but I did not make observations last trip and it may have been renamed in honor of some Communist by now. In Rome recently I met Italians who scoffed when I told them the Spanish square at the foot of the stairs had been renamed briefly by Benito Mussolini the Square, or Place, of Marshal De Bono after some successful skirmish of his in Abyssinia. The change was made on strips of paper pasted over the old signs. But his glory vanished long ago when an unfortunate victim of political change and indomitable Italian incompetence in major war condemned him to temporary ignominy at the hands of a Facist firing squad.

The West Germans have no monuments and men who surely must have been combat fighters wear nothing in their lapels. But neither do Americans nor British, and Frenchmen seem to lay more value on their Legion of Honor, which is very cheap, than on their military medal, almost as hard to come by as our Medal of Honor. Many Germans, however, and women as well as men and young persons of both sexes display proof that they were there. These are the blind, who wear a yellow brassard with dots on it, which not only identifies them as casualties of the war, but permits them to beg, and those who lost an arm or a leg. The German civilians took terrible punishment from our bombers and women and children suffered about equally with the men.

We have discouraged the Germans from honoring their heroes with massive statues and clearings. They seem not to mind but perhaps they only share the apathy which controls our strange conduct in this matter.

Most of our small towns, North and South, still maintain in their central squares those rain-washed limestone figures of the soldiers of a terrible war, and there came in the ‘twenties a good crop of that conventional Doughboy in the flat iron hat charging with a bayonet, a tedious exercise of the training areas seldom invoked in battle.

But the monument industry has failed to exploit the market since 1915, and one reason may be that we are hatefully divided on the merits of General Marshall and General MacArthur and so on down the line.

I doubt that I shall live to see a statue of Harry S. Truman, even in Kansas City.