Talk about surprises.

You’re walking around a corner in a quiet residential neighborhood in Kansas City Kansas, and then there it is: A full triumphal arch, the Rosedale Memorial Arch. rising out of the hillside like it belongs in Paris. And in a sense, it does. The architect, John Leroy Marshall, was a veteran of World War I and he designed it in the tradition of the Arc de Triomphe. And then he built it right here, in 1924, in the community that sent those men to war.

Rosedale was once its own city — incorporated in 1877, a community built around mills and industry, with its own identity and civic pride. Rosedale itself was eventually absorbed into Kansas City, Kansas in 1922. The inscription carved across the top of the arch: “Erected by the people of Rosedale in honor of its citizens who answered their country’s call and served under arms for the triumph of right over might in the World War.”

Here’s the story: In June of 1917, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Travis assembled 375 men on top of Mount Marty — right here — and had them sworn in. Those men became part of the 117th Ammunition Train, which became part of the 42nd Infantry Division.

The 42nd became known as the Rainbow Division, which was assembled from National Guard units across 26 states and the District of Columbia — a deliberate choice to make it truly national. Its units stretched from coast to coast “like a rainbow,” as Colonel Douglas MacArthur described it. MacArthur served as its Chief of Staff before commanding one of its brigades, and the division went on to see more than 164 days of combat in World War I — one of the longest combat records of any American division. They fought in the Champagne-Marne, the Aisne-Marne, Saint-Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

They suffered more than 50 percent casualties.

Those aren’t statistics. Those were neighbors.

That’s what memorials in small towns understand that sometimes get lost in the larger telling of history. The 375 men sworn in on Mount Marty didn’t come from a city of millions. They came from here. From these streets. Everyone in Rosedale knew someone who went. And everyone in Rosedale felt it when someone didn’t come back.

You see that same story in small towns all over America — though the arch is a stunning monument, its equivalent is everywhere. You’ll find a modest arch, a park, a plaque on a courthouse wall honoring men and women from communities where the losses were personal and the grief was shared. That kind of sacrifice doesn’t just mark history. It binds a community together in ways that nothing else quite does. When you give something that large, you become permanently tied to the people you gave it alongside. Shared sacrifice creates shared identity. And that identity is what communities carry forward.

The personal weight of that hit me differently this time, because I was thinking about my uncle, Lovice Coe.

Uncle Lovice landed at Normandy on D-Day. And for the rest of his life — all of it — he never talked about it. Not to his wife. Not to his children. Not to anyone in the family.

The only thing anyone ever knew was from a letter he wrote home, not long after the landing. In it, he said he hadn’t been able to hold food down for a week because of the devastation around him — the loss of his comrades — was so overwhelming that his body simply couldn’t function normally. That was it. One letter. A window cracked open and then closed for the rest of his life.

I’ve thought about that silence for a long time. At first, it seemed like absence. But the older I get, the more I think it was something else. It was a man who had seen the cost of something larger than himself and understood that what happened there wasn’t his to keep. The weight of it belonged to history. To the mission. To the men who didn’t make it back.

That’s not about him.

That’s not about now.

And that, I think, is the deepest form of servant leadership I’ve ever encountered. Not the kind you read about in management books. The kind that’s forged under conditions most of us will never face, carried quietly for a lifetime, and buried without ceremony.

The inscription on the Rosedale arch — “the triumph of right over might” — wasn’t written as a slogan. It was written as a testimony. These were people who believed that some things are worth standing up for, even when standing up is costly. Even when it costs everything.

In a world that sometimes seems to have forgotten that distinction, I think we need that inscription more than ever.

Right over might.

It’s not a complicated idea. But it takes an uncommon kind of courage to live it out — in war, in leadership, and in the quiet, ordinary decisions that define who we are as communities.

To learn more about the Rosedale Memorial Arch, visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosedale_World_War_I_Memorial_Arch

About Ron on the Road

Ron Holifield speaks to over 2,000 local government officials annually and has coffee with over 250 local government officials each year as part of his travels. If you have a cool site you think he should visit, email Ron@CivicMarketplace.com. 

NOTE: This column was written with the assistance of Melissa Valentine, senior director of operations and support at Civic Marketplace. 

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