Memorial Day: What We Remember

​Hello, Friends of Core Virtues,

I have returned from a wonderful Maternity Leave, and I am grateful to be back to lead Core Virtues for the Hillsdale K-12 Education Office and for you! It is hard to believe we’re already at the end of another school year. I hope you and your students had a fruitful, joyful, and wonder-filled year!

As is tradition, this is the last month we will update the website before summer. We have updated June’s “Virtue of the Month” with all sorts of books about America’s heroes to keep with the Memorial Day theme of this month’s moving blog post by Dr. Mary Beth Klee. Kicking off with this weekend and continuing to Flag Day and Fourth of July, hopefully you’re able to enjoy them and encourage your students and their families to read all of these books in the celebratory season ahead.

In the coming months, we are launching our redesigned and reimagined Core Virtues website! We are excited to share our hard work with you and to continue to bring great stories that cultivate a love of virtue to our audience. Please be on the lookout for a link to the new website over the summer. In the meantime, this website will be up and running for you to continue to pull great stories to use in your classrooms and homes. 

Thank you!
Gabrielle Lewis
Core Virtues Director

Memorial Day: What We Remember

Sabin Howard’s New World War I Sculpture Shines a Light
Mary Beth Klee

As the school year ends and many families plan summer vacations, thousands will head to our nation’s capital. This year, Washington D.C.’s mall boasts a massive new World War I tribute, a fifty-eight-foot bronze relief installed in September 2024—it is breathtaking. A Soldier’s Journey is the fruit of eight-plus years of intense artistic labor by American sculptor Sabin Howard and his team in Englewood, New Jersey. It is our nation’s own Sistine Chapel Ceiling, and Sabin’s physical sacrifice in sculpting it rivals Michelangelo’s back-breaking work on the scaffold. It took twice as long and left him with an unusually jutting thumb. It left us with a masterpiece.
 
Thirty-eight figures surge from this narrative sculpture, which – as the title proclaims – follows a soldier’s journey: he bids farewell to the sanctuary of home, enters the camaraderie of warriors, experiences the horror of battle, the physical toll of war, the sorrowful mercy of healing, and finally returns home. The agony of combat and the pietà-like figures on the center-right rivet the viewer. A Soldier’s Journey speaks powerfully to the immense tragedy and redemptive skeins of war in our very bloody twentieth century.
 
Many historians consider World War I to be the beginning of the contemporary era. One high school student text begins with the definitive declaration: “Your world began in August 1914.” World War I was the decisive break with a Victorian past and the first salvo into a new technological, social, and political world order. The horrors of World War I repeated themselves on an even more massive scale in World War II. The nearly eighty years of peace since have been a triumph – and, from a historical standpoint, an anomaly.

On this Memorial Day, let us, along with teacher/sculptor Sabin Howard, remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed, the original title for the sculpture was to be “the weight of sacrifice,” and for good reason—of the 4.7 million Americans who served in World War I, 117,000 died. World War II would quadruple both those numbers.
 
The sculpture, which has been called “a movie in bronze,” presents the twentieth century’s distinctive cycle of violence and redemption. It begins with a soldier kneeling to accept his helmet from his daughter, as he leaves to fight “the war to end all wars.” One imagines him praying to be worthy of the charge. His wife’s arm initially rests on his shoulder, then unsuccessfully seeks to restrain him as he joins his comrades in parade and battle. War is not glorified here; the “doughboys” unite, charge, lunge, and are felled, their expressions anguished and agonized.  
 
To the center-right, medics and nurses tend the fallen under a cross-like image in the background. Some are lost, some join the ranks of shell-shocked soldiers, trudging home, their mission finished if not accomplished. The soldier who once knelt before his daughter seeking worthiness, now stands before her, weapon down, returning his helmet of war. She peers within, perhaps seeing his enormous sacrifice or perhaps the coming of World War II, the ongoing cycle of war, courage, sacrifice, and peace that has made up our era.
 
What a gift we have been given in this unique work of art. A Soldier’s Journey is the largest free-standing bronze sculpture in the world, but it is ornate, even intricate. Every face, every physical strain, every moment of agony and resolve is captured here. It is a gigantic project. The process of making it alone was of Renaissance proportions, and indeed, its sculptor claims Renaissance roots.   
 
Sabin Howard is the son of an Italian mother and American father, both of whom were university professors. His youth was spent between Torino, Italy and New York City. And it was from Italy – from the Renaissance greats like Donatello and Michelangelo, and from the Baroque genius of Bernini – that he drew his inspiration. Like his Renaissance predecessors, Howard believes that art is, above all, a “call to beauty” and that the human form is one of the great embodiments of that call. He asks us to return to contemplating the “architecture of the body.”
 
Howard’s fascination with the human form in sculpture spurred him to employ the latest digital technology in this otherwise classical work. The figures (among them Jewish, Asian, and African American soldiers) were made in imitation of live models in authentic World War I uniforms. Howard and his team took over 12,000 photographs and employed digital modeling and casting by collaborating with workshops in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The initial drawings represented 750 hours of work. A maquette was 3-D printed, allowing the artist to refine poses and expressions. All the figures were then painstakingly hand-sculpted in clay and reworked repeatedly.   
 
Howard himself spent more than 45,000 hours on the physically grueling work, which was then cast in bronze. Only in the United Kingdom could Howard find a foundry capable of casting such a large and complex high-relief work. Once the twenty-three separate bronze pieces had been cast and assembled into a seamless 58-foot relief, they were shipped to the United States for final patination beneath the hot D.C. sun, where the sculptor endured many more hours of physically grueling labor.
 
Howard’s goal, of course, was not to draw attention to himself, but to the soldier’s journey. In this he was inspired by mythologist Joseph Campbell’s description of The Hero’s Journey as a movement of departure, immersion (trials, transformations), and return. The soldier is a noble embodiment of sacrifice, loss, and courage. His daughter stares into his helmet at the end and wonders, perhaps, how long his sacrifice will matter. When will the next trial occur? In the case of World War I, the next trial came almost immediately. The narrative cycle speaks as well to that second major conflict.
 
This Memorial Day we are blessed still to bask in the nearly 80-year international peace that followed the Second World War. There have been smaller conflicts in this time, of course, and the world is now re-aligning, but on May 26th we do well to recall the heroic sacrifice of those who endured the tragedy and horror of war and gave their lives that we might be free.   
 
Likewise, we do well to celebrate the artists who are seeking “a new Renaissance” in art, bringing timeless wisdom to life with the heart-wrenching beauty of their creations. Sabin Howard believes that art serves beauty, and that its goal is to reflect universal human experience and thus bring us together. The renewal of classical figurative art, he believes, is a “call to the eternal” and a way to create community. Our nation’s latest monument – with its themes of sacrifice, courage, and redemption – does just that.

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