Biography | Nancy Coonsman Hahn — The Doughboy Memphis Unveiled Here, Then Argued About

People who look up the sculptor of an American First World War monument usually expect a man.

Nancy Coonsman was born in St. Louis on 28 August 1887 and trained at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University under George Julian Zolnay.

By her mid-thirties she had a state's war-memorial commission and a monument standing in France: the figure she made for the State of Missouri went up near Cheppy, in the Meuse, in 1922.

Memphis came next.

The Daughters of the American Revolution here commissioned her to make the city's memorial to its war dead, paid for, the plaque records, by public subscription and by schoolchildren.

What she gave them was not an allegory. It is a soldier in a helmet and greatcoat climbing over a boulder, rifle and fixed bayonet held across his body, face set.

It was unveiled on 21 September 1926. The bronze honour roll on the front of the stone carries 230 names of Memphis and Shelby County men who died between 1917 and 1919.

Then the city argued about it.

Memphis magazine's account of the row has a local high-school art teacher, Michael Abt, telling the newspapers that the figure carried the spirit of a beast rather than of noble defence, and calling its modelling and composition bad.

The oddest objection was technical. Critics said the soldier's stance was wrong for a man with a fixed bayonet, and by that same account the argument was ended by producing an army drill manual showing the stance was right.

Hahn kept working, turning in later years to small figures and portrait busts. She died in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1976.

The doughboy is still here, on its ring of cobbles at the centre of what is now Veterans Plaza, ringed in turn by memorials to the wars that came after.

📸 Cover: "Doughboy Statue in Overton Park, Memphis TN" by Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.