Alum Led Charge in Battle for National WWI Memorial

National Memorial for the ‘Great War’ Will Be Unveiled Sept. 13 in D.C.

Some battles require tanks, bombs and ammunition; others require a good lawyer.

Edwin Fountain ’90, a University of Virginia School of Law alumnus and grandson of two World War I veterans, volunteered to join the battle to build a new national memorial to those who served in the “Great War.” After a legal and logistical saga that involved wading through 46 public hearings and meetings, street protests and a bridge collapse that snagged the mid-Atlantic’s supply chain, his vision is finally being realized on Sept. 13, when an expanded memorial will be unveiled in Washington, D.C.

“If we had known at the outset all the steps and all the hurdles that would be involved in realizing this vision … I’m not sure we would have had the resolution to undertake the project,” Fountain wrote in prepared remarks for the dedication of the expanded memorial in Pershing Park. “But we — and by ‘we’ I mean many, many people who cannot be thanked here now — took it one step at a time.”

The unveiling, timed to coincide with the 164th birthday of WWI Gen. John J. Pershing, will reveal to the public a 58-foot-long high relief sculpture depicting an American soldier’s journey, overseen by a statue of Pershing himself, who led the American forces in Europe.

Somewhere in the middle of the monument saga, Fountain left his job as a litigation partner at Jones Day to dedicate his career to remembering fallen soldiers, becoming general counsel of the American Battle Monuments Commission, a federal agency that maintains the final resting places of countless men and women who died overseas in service to their nation.

“It was a steep learning curve. I was completely unequipped to be a general counsel to a federal agency,” he said. “Having been a general litigator and touching so many areas of law, though, that breadth of my experience has been a great asset.”

A Sense of Symmetry

While he was still litigating cases as a corporate lawyer at Jones Day, Fountain got the opportunity to do pro bono work for the D.C. Preservation League, a historical preservation advocacy group in the nation’s capital. He joined the board of trustees in 2000 and eventually became its chairman.

After his term on the DCPL board ended, Fountain started the World War I Memorial Foundation to restore the district’s own World War I memorial, located on the National Mall.

The new high-relief statue shows the soldier’s journey, from being called to battle to returning home.

“If you stand at Washington’s World War I memorial, you can see the national memorials for World War II, Korea and Vietnam,” Fountain said. “I used to run past it, and it offended my sense of symmetry that we didn’t have a national World War I memorial.”

The 1986 Commemorative Works Act declared the main cross-axis of the National Mall to be a completed work of civic art — meaning a new WWI memorial couldn’t be added to that portion. The act, however, laid out the rules for the authorization, design and placement of new memorials on federal land in Washington. And, since 1998, Congress has passed statutes authorizing eight different exemptions to allow further elements to be added to the Mall.

On behalf of his foundation, Fountain — “thinking myself a clever lawyer” — proposed in 2008 that the existing local memorial be expanded into a national memorial.

Despite congressional support, the project went nowhere for five years. Then, in 2013, Congress created the World War I Centennial Commission, and Sen. Harry Reid appointed Fountain to serve on the new commission.

Game on.

“The commission was scheduled to sunset in 2019, so we had to work fast,” said Fountain, who was elected vice chair of the commission. “We could beat our head against the wall to build on the Mall, or we could go to Pershing Park [an existing memorial to General Pershing on Pennsylvania Avenue, one block from the White House] and expand that site. And that’s what the commission did.”

Read the entire article on the University of Virginia School of Law website.
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