The same patriotic Amos Van Horn who had left money for the Lincoln memorial had also provided for a monument to George Washington, which was created by the sculptor J. Massey Rhind, and for a third memorial to the soldiers and sailors of all our wars, to the men who had given their lives in making and maintaining the republic. Since Mr. Van Horn’s death, World War I had been added to the list. Almost before the Lincoln was finished, Ralph Lum asked Gutzon to begin thinking about the military monument, but the sum of a hundred thousand dollars bequeathed for the purpose was not immediately available and he had to wait. Of his idea to portray mass action the sculptor wrote:
We do things in the mass, not as individuals. Mass action is the keynote of our civilization. Why should it not inspire our monuments? What opportunities there have been in our history for the inspiration of great sculpture animated by that mass spirit. What I should like to see, for instance, is a monument to Lincoln that would include his cabinet. The more one grows, the more his close associates grow with him. And there are the colonial settlements, the founders of the republic and the Western pioneers still waiting to be memorialized in mass action.
The sculptor began his first designs in more or less the conventional way. He adopted the shaft or the upright column, which is often used as a symbol of civilization, and surrounded that shaft with figures, struggling, rising above material difficulties. In making this model he discovered that it failed completely to express the natural impulses of the human being under stress, either attacking or defending himself against an enemy. All war monuments, he decided, should be planned to depict emotions when threatened by loss of a way of life which was at once familiar and sacred to every family, tribe or nation.
When that idea became clear the problem of a memorial to men who had sacrificed their lives for home and country became one of human anxiety and confusion out of which order, organization and direction gradually developed. This went hand in hand with the thought that the wars of America were defensive wars, that America was not a crusader in a militant sense. The war with England, for example, was a declaration of independence, in no way a struggle for dominion beyond America’s own boundaries. And the First World War was, in the sculptor’s own words, “probably the most remarkable example of utter disinterestedness in conquest.” Monuments that are built for war, he concluded, generally treat battle and fighting as part of the process of civilization, while in fact civilization develops its lines of peace on confidence and in ways that are antagonistic to war. Of how the plan slowly developed in his mind he said:
My first sketch, following abandonment of the shaft idea, represented a confused group of men who were attempting to organize
themselves and move toward leadership, with Washington and Lincoln symbolically present. But symbolism, though necessary in a group of this kind, had great disadvantages in that it introduced an unnecessary idea of unreality in the passing of great individuals, which appeared to me to be hurtful in a work of art. It seemed that Lincoln and Washington standing together as historic characters introduced a thought that was hurtful to the life and reality of the group. It might give a mystical character that would detract from its vitality.
Finally in the last sketch I introduced two horses because the horse is not only a companion to man but is his closest companion in times of danger, as a carrier, a weapon, or a friend. Artistically and sculpturally his excitement and nervous tension can be used either realistically or symbolically in a group to add life and strength and to suggest a fear that we would not want to show in a human figure. I felt also that in a group of so many figures an upward movement was preferable to keeping them flat on the ground. When I elevated the center of the base of the monument the change instantly increased the sense of struggle and effect.