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Introducing Fair Game from Vanity Fair
Join Mark Guiducci for a series of wide-ranging conversations with cultural leaders from the worlds of Hollywood, Politics, Style, Silicon Valley, and beyond.
On every episode, Vanity Fair pulls back the curtain on how some of the most interesting and powerful minds in our society work – and where they see us going. On Fair Game from Vanity Fair, no subject is off limits.
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—— ON THIS DAY ——
NOVEMBER 13, 1982
Washington, D.C., USA
44 years ago
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, dedicated on November 13, 1982, carrying the names of more than fifty-eight thousand American dead.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated on November 13, 1982, at the end of a week of commemorations in Washington that included a continuous reading of the names of the American dead in the National Cathedral, which took close to three days. The memorial itself is two walls of polished black granite set into a slope, meeting at an angle, carrying more than fifty-eight thousand names in the order in which the people died.
The design had been chosen in 1981 from more than fourteen hundred anonymous entries in an open competition. The winner was Maya Lin, a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at Yale who had submitted the design as a class project and received a B for it. The jury did not know who she was when they picked it. The memorial was paid for entirely by private donations, raised by a veterans' organization led by Jan Scruggs, who had served as an infantryman in Vietnam.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Vietnam War, the conflict in which more than fifty-eight thousand Americans and several million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians died, and whose divisions shaped the argument over how it should be remembered.
The reaction to the design was hostile. Critics objected that it was black rather than white, that it was set below ground rather than rising above it, that it bore no flag, no soldier, no inscription about honour or victory. One prominent opponent called it a black gash of shame. Some of the attacks were directed at Lin personally and at her Chinese American background. The dispute was serious enough that a compromise was imposed: a representational bronze sculpture of three servicemen and a flagpole were added nearby, set apart from the wall rather than on it.
What changed the argument was the memorial itself. Visitors found that the polished granite reflects the viewer standing among the names, that the walls descend as the list grows and rise again as the war ends, and that the chronological ordering turns the list into a record of a war rather than an alphabetical roster. People began leaving objects at the base almost immediately: letters, photographs, boots, medals, cans of beer. The National Park Service has collected and catalogued more than four hundred thousand items left there.
The memorial became a model that reshaped commemorative design worldwide. The emphasis on names rather than allegory, on individual loss rather than national triumph, and on a space that invites touch and quiet rather than ceremony, has been followed by memorials to the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, and many others. Maya Lin went on to a career as an artist and architect. Names continue to be added to the wall as veterans die from wounds and exposure attributable to the war.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It changed how memorials are designed. Listing every name, refusing allegory, and creating a space for private grief rather than public triumph became the dominant approach to commemorating loss, followed by memorials around the world since.
It gave a divided country a place to put the war. Vietnam had split American society more deeply than any conflict since the Civil War, and the memorial deliberately honoured the dead without offering a verdict on the war, which is why people who disagreed about everything else could stand there together.
The fight over it shows how public art gets judged before it exists. A design attacked in advance as shameful became, once built, one of the most visited and most loved places in Washington, a reminder of how little a drawing conveys about what a built space will do.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
A twenty-one-year-old student won an anonymous competition with a design she had turned in for a class and got a B on. Critics called it a black gash of shame and forced a statue to be added nearby. The wall was dedicated on November 13, 1982, and people have been leaving letters at the bottom of it ever since.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“I wanted to describe a journey, a journey that would make you experience death.”
— Maya Lin, on her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the competition Maya Lin won, the controversy over the design, and the objects left at the wall?
