My class “The Literature of War” has now moved on to WWI. Most of the students freely admitted that they knew almost nothing about it. That’s not surprising, considering that even during the recent 100-year commemorations of the war, there was almost no mention of it in the American media. In Europe, the war was front and center in people’s minds from 2014 to 2018. Yet our President even declined to participate in the ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the end of the war last year in France. It’s as if the U.S. wasn’t “over there” at all. Yet WWI in many ways marked the beginning of America’s global engagement.
As we read in Woodrow Wilson’s War Speech to Congress in April 1917, the U.S. tried to stay out of the conflict as long as possible. But what had started essentially as Europe’s Civil War pulled in the rest of the world as colonial forces were employed and technological developments in warfare spread the conflict across the oceans. Ideologically, the war was posited as the vehicle for establishing world peace. We know how well that worked out.
After our discussions of the failure of Reconstruction, a brief period after the Civil War when black civil rights were possible, the students were primed to be skeptical of Wilson’s mission to make the world “safe for democracy.” A country in which only white men could vote had hardly earned the right to school the rest of the world on freedom. And we discussed how the Sedition Act and Espionage Act stifled free speech during the war, even leading to the arrest of Socialist leader Eugene Debs after a speech in which he merely complained of not being able to say what he really wanted to say about the war. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be looking to see how the suppression of free speech affected the literature that came out of the war.
To begin our discussion of WWI literature, we read the introduction to Stephen Trout’s book On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance.
Trout’s thesis is essentially that while Britain may have been relatively unified in its disillusionment about the war, the U.S. view is more contradictory. On the one hand, you have the Lost Generation’s disaffection, and on the other hand you have a romanticized view of war’s glory in mainstream commemorations. Due to the fact that so many American soldiers never experienced the worst of combat or even made it to Europe, WWI could still seem a grand adventure. And, Trout says, enough of that idealized view was still around in 1941 to fuel enthusiasm for America’s entrance into WWII.
My students were perhaps most interested in a passage from Trout’s introduction where he discusses the wartime experience of the era’s most famous writers.
[from p. 3]
In other words, the war had functioned for them pretty much the same way the Civil War had for Henry James. When we read his story “A Most Extraordinary Case,” we talked about the Army’s rejection of him for an unspecified injury, or what James called, the “obscure hurt” he had suffered in a fire. For all of these men, war had been a humiliating reminder that they weren’t manly enough, something they would have to prove in their writing (Hemingway, in particular). We’ll be reading Hemingway’s In Our Time in a couple of weeks. Despite the ubiquity of Hemingway bashing these days, I still love this book. Early Hemingway is much easier to swallow than later Hemingway. Before that, though, we’ll be reading Katherine Anne Porter, Claude McKay, and others. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I enjoyed this post on Americans and World War I and look forward to reading more about your course on Literature and War. I am a historian of North Africa, and I think it is important to consider US participation in WWI, particularly via literature. Right now, I am looking at Edith Wharton’s travelogue In Morocco as a war text. The Wilson administration was not readily willing to endorse the French Protectorate of Morocco. A complicating factor, this recalcitrance kept the US out of the war for a while. The Department of State definitively recognized the French Protectorate just before (the day before, I think) US troops actually fought in Europe. Throughout this back and forth between the French and American government, Edith Wharton advocated for France. And, in fact, she was in Morocco in October 1917, when the US definitively recognized the Protectorate. As I read her account of that trip, I can see remnants of those conversations about US participation in the war and the US endorsement of French empire.