Charging Doughboy

Memphis, Tennessee

A lot of parks have World War I monuments. Some even have statues, usually of life-size Doughboy soldiers standing at attention, gun at his side, looking respectable and reassuring. This doughboy is nothing like that. It's the size of a giant, posed as if at the rim of a trench, its deadly bayonet thrust forward as if ready to disembowel everything in its path. Unveiled on September 21, 1926, the statue was condemned in the newspapers by a local art teacher, who called it "the attack of a vicious beast."

The bad press didn't stop Memphis from printing postcards of the statue as an attraction, which technically was a memorial to the World War I dead of Memphis and Shelby County. Surprisingly for its time, it was sculpted by a woman, Nancy Hahn, and a plaque on its base notes that the now-green copper statue was made "from pennies that were collected by school children."