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.
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.