“The Spirit of the American Doughboy” has stood in front of the Frenchtown school ever since 1926, the year the school opened.
Mayor Frank E. Grim led the campaign to buy the Doughboy in honor of the many Frenchtown men who served in World War I, and the four who died.
The statue was sculpted and marketed by E.M. “Dick” Viquesney (1876-1946), a Spanish-American War veteran from Spencer, Ind. The statue is made of 75 pieces of pressed bronze, welded onto a frame, and weighing only about 200 pounds. The sculptor got high marks from veterans for the accuracy of the Doughboy's uniform and equipment, including his 1903 Springfield rifle.
There are more than 140 iterations of this statue around the U.S., 120 of them of pressed bronze like Frenchtown's. Eight of the statues are in New Jersey.
Note that Viquesney's soldier is not charging; he is striding confidently through no-man's land. On a website dedicated to Viquesney and his work, Earl Goldsmith of Texas posited that Viquesney, a master marketer, had deliberately added subliminal appeal by posing the Doughboy like the Statue of Liberty – right arm straight up (holding a grenade instead of a torch) and right leg in mid-stride, with the knee bent and the heel coming off the ground.
Claiming that any town could afford a Doughboy statue, he offered a marketing kit that included a 6-foot-tall poster and raffle tickets, with foot-tall Doughboy statuettes as prizes. He also offered Doughboy lamps for sale – the upraised right hand was holding a lightbulb socket instead of a grenade. More than 25,000 were made, although they were easily knocked over, thrown off-balance by the weight of the lightbulb and lamp shade.
Hoping to make a similar hit with a “Spirit of the American Sailor,” Viquesney sculpted such a figure waving his hat. It failed to click with the public, and he only sold seven of the full-sized statues. During World War II he tried again with “Spirit of the Fighting Yank,” but only five of them were produced. There's a reason these follow-up statues didn't click with the public: They were not nearly as good.
Marian Hobson-Lutz (1942-2016), a waitress working a couple blocks away from Frenchtown's Doughboy at the Cornerstone Cafe and also at Ma De's in Milford, was an admirer of the statue. She used to spend her vacations cruising with her longtime companion, Benjamin Burke, on a Honda Gold Wing motorcycle, searching out and photographing other copies of the sculpture.
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