History in Granite

Since its birth, the U.S. has been so busy making history that it has found little time to enshrine that history in formal monuments. America's pyramids are its functional skyscrapers, and its triumphal arches are the factory girders. Last week a committee of Americans (including Milton Eisenhower, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, General Lucius Clay, John L. Lewis) announced plans for a huge monument to the U.S. past, to be erected atop Pine Mountain, near Warm Springs, Ga.

The idea for the "Hall of Our History" came to Milwaukee-born Eric Gugler, an architect who has already built a dozen memorials, but says he has "never been able to find a history of the U.S. in chronological order and in visual form in any one place." The granite history he plans will cost a monumental $25 million, to be raised by public subscription. Gugler's blueprints for the monument, which will take ten years to build, call for a roofless, granite structure (247 feet wide, 418 feet long and 90 feet high), fitted inside with high relief sculptures of the major scenes in U.S. history from 1492 to 1918. Later generations are to carry the story past World War I.

The memorial's stark, forbidding outlines seem like nothing ever seen in U.S. history. But what the "Hall of Our History" may lack in quality, it will make up in quantity. Proclaimed the project's pressagents: "Comparable to the pyramids of Egypt in immensity and transcending other wonders-of-the-world in its intent. The 'Hall of Our History' will be . . . longer than two city blocks, wider than a football field and taller than a nine-story building." Added Gugler: "No one would look at the pyramids if they were 20 or 30 feet high . . . This shrine will endure for a millennium."

The U.S. got a look at another monument to U.S. history: a statue to be placed in a memorial at Normandy's Omaha Beach, where some 9,300 U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen are buried in a military cemetery. The plaster model showed a 22-ft. figure (to be cast in bronze) of a semi-nude youth with rippling loincloth, his head and arms flung up and out, apparently on the point of taking off heavenward.

The work of Donald DeLue, an affable, 54-year-old expert in architectural sculpture (among his other works: the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial in Akron), the statue's well-meant but uninspired aping of classic works will irritate those who prize imagination as well as those who demand safe realism. DeLue's explanation: "I designed the figure as a spirit rising over the pain and toil of battle. This figure represents the triumph of the spirit over death."

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