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.The hollow statueweighed only 200 pounds, and reputedly accounted for 10 percent of the monumentserected to the honor the memory of First World War soldiers.Miniature replicas of thestatue advertised in the American Legion Monthly Magazine also found readycustomers throughout the United States, as did memorial plaques, lamps, and candle-sticks fashioned from the Spirit of the American Doughboy design.Viquesney created COMING HOME 191 The Spirit of the Doughboy became the model for numerous monuments erected in townsquares throughout the United States.It was also marketed in miniature form as a desktop statueor lamp to veterans interested in purchasing a keepsake to commemorate the war.(Courtesy of theNational Archives)an accompanying Spirit of the American Navy statue that was less popular, but sevenstill stand today alongside the doughboy statue in town squares throughout thesouth and Midwest.Remembering the DeadEvery Legion post bore the name of a fallen soldier and each Armistice Day localposts reminded communities of the past war by organizing exhibits of war relics,providing drill demonstrations, and marching in parades.At 11 o clock in the morning,legionnaires led their towns in observing 2 minutes of silence to remember the fallenand honor the cause of peace.The Legion also pressured local governments to renamestreets and bridges after fallen comrades, placed commemorative plaques in court 192 WORLD WAR Ihouses, and raised funds for hospitals, libraries, parks, playgrounds, schools, andmeeting halls, which they named in honor of the community s war dead or the nation swar goals.These living memorials were meant to ensure that remembrance of the warremained part of the fabric of everyday life.The U.S.government also commemorated the fallen soldiers of the war in a varietyof ways.The War Department let families choose whether they wanted the governmentto bring the bodies of deceased soldiers back to the United States for burial at home orre-inter them in one of the official national cemeteries established overseas.Over 40,000families, or nearly 70 percent, chose to repatriate their fallen relative and the governmentbore the cost of transporting the body to a cemetery selected by the family.These fami-lies withstood a vigorous campaign by the government urging them to leave their boysbodies in France.Though concerned about the huge expenditure of funds required totransport these coffins home, the government worried mostly that depopulating Franceof American gravesites reduced the power of a collective gravesite to convey the scopeof the nation s sacrifice.Consequently, the government tried to discourage families fromscattering individual bodies throughout the United States where they would quickly beforgotten by all but their nearest and dearest.Only a minority of families acceded to thegovernment s request that they let their sons lay in official military cemeteries overseas.With so few bodies left overseas, the government decided to group them into eightnational cemeteries where ample spacing between graves helped bolster the physicalpresence of American war dead on foreign soil.No regimental or personal monumentswere allowed in the cemeteries, and each man regardless of rank received a regulationcross or Star of David to mark his grave.Each cemetery also housed a small chapel.Inthe early 1930s, in recognition of the sacrifice that individual families had made, thegovernment funded a series of pilgrimages for mothers and widows to visit their sonsgraves.The Gold Star Mothers (so-named for the gold starred flag that families withwar dead hung in their windows) and widows headed to France at the height of theGreat Depression from 1931 to 1933 to visit the battlefields and cemeteries and enjoysome sightseeing and receptions held in their honor.Often part of the working poor,many had never traveled outside the country before
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