Greencastle, IN

Artist Ernest Moore Viquesney came to prominence following World War I due to his sculpture of a doughboy titled Spirit of the American Doughboy. The full-sized design of his statue was reproduced over 130 times across 38 states. Local communities would often pitch in to purchase Viquesney’s statue for their cities and towns. The commission of these memorials served as an expression of patriotism and, as a speaker at an unveiling in Pennsylvania said, “a reminder that our civil rights can only be maintained by unwearied watchfulness.”¹ 

Viquesney and the American Legion marketed Spirit of the American Doughboy statues as a symbol against leftist radicals in America. Members of the Industrial Workers of the World had recently clashed with veterans from the American Legion. The IWW was a leftist labor union that had been protesting America’s entry into World War I and the American men who fought in the war. The newspapers slandered the labor unionists, and they advertised Visquesney’s statue as a statement against the “Bolshevism” and “disloyalty” of the IWW.² 

Sumter County, GA

A newspaper from Americus, Georgia gave an account of the process which communities underwent to commission a Spirit of the American Doughboy statue. The executive committee of the town of Americus campaigned to build the statue as a memorial to the doughboys of Sumter County, Georgia. It was purchased entirely from community donations and placed in a local park. Furthermore, the newspaper states that the memorial was dedicated to “every serviceman in Sumter county, white and colored alike.”³

Victory Monument

American society largely downplayed and dehumanized African-American soldiers. The media portrayed African-American doughboys as “lazy, superstitious, or cowardly.”⁴ They were often drawn with the stereotypical blackface features of minstrel shows. Art and propaganda also used racist imagery like the chef from Cream of Wheat packaging in place of serious depictions.⁵ In his essay on black doughboy representation, Adam McKible asserts that these were purposeful and malicious attacks on the “manhood, honor, intelligence, and humanity of the African American soldiers who served.”⁶ 

The black doughboys who fought valiantly in the first World War found themselves fighting for representation on the homefront. The largest success in this fight was the construction of the Victory Monument in 1928. This statue, modified in 1936 to include an African-American doughboy on the top, was built to honor the 369th Infantry Regiment. It is a three-faced pillar which depicts “an African American soldier, an African American woman representing motherhood, and a female allegorical personification of Columbia holding a tablet with the names of the regiment’s battles.”⁷ Its construction was a major accomplishment for African-American veterans and contemporary civil rights activists. In an effort to promote representation, W. E. B. Du Bois often included pictures of African American veterans in the NAACP journal Crisis. He believed that the proliferation of positive imagery like the Victory Monument and photographs of neatly uniformed African American doughboys would diminish racist imagery in the media.⁸