Rethinking the First World War

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Rethinking the First World WarCarole Blair aa Department of Communication Studies, University of NorthCarolina,Published online: 21 Jan 2010.

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REVIEW ESSAY

Davis Houck, Editor

Rethinking the First World WarCarole Blair

‘‘The problem with the American memory of World War I is that there seems to benone.’’ Snell (‘‘Preface,’’ xv)

Christopher Capozzola, UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU: WORLD WAR I AND THE

MAKING OF THE MODERN AMERICAN CITIZEN. New York: Oxford University

Press, 2008; ixþ 334 pp. ISBN: 978-0195335491, $35.00 (cloth).

Kimberly Jensen, MOBILIZING MINERVA: AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE FIRST

WORLD WAR. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008; xviiþ 244 pp. ISBN:

978-0252074967, $30.00 (paper).

Alan Kramer, DYNAMIC OF DESTRUCTION: CULTURE AND MASS KILLING IN

THE FIRST WORLD WAR. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; xiþ 434 pp.

ISBN: 978-0199543779, $22.95 (paper).

Michael S. Neiberg, THE SECOND BATTLE OF THE MARNE. Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press, 2008; xþ 217 pp. ISBN: 978-0253351463, $27.95 (cloth).

Mark A. Snell, ed., UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: THE AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY

FORCES IN MEMORY AND REMEMBRANCE. Kent, OH: Kent State University

Press, 2008; xviþ 274 pp. ISBN: 978-0873389402, $34.95 (cloth).

David Williams, MEDIA, MEMORY, AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR. Montreal:

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009; xiiþ 321 pp. ISBN: 978-0773535077,

$49.95 (cloth).

People are writing new books about what? The First World War? Really? Why? More

pertinently, what should U.S. communication studies scholars find at all interesting

Carole Blair, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina. Correspondence to: Carole

Blair, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina, CB #3285, Chapel Hill, NC 27599.

E-mail: [email protected]

Southern Communication Journal

Vol. 75, No. 1, January–March 2010, pp. 94–116

ISSN 1041-794x (print)/1930-3203 (online)

# 2010 Southern States Communication Association. DOI: 10.1080/10417940903485285

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about them? After all, World War I (WWI) ended more than 90 years ago, and the

United States’ duration and degree of involvement were significantly less than those

of many other combatant countries. Plus, the ‘‘Great War’’ did nothing much except

to slaughter hundreds of thousands senselessly and to lay the groundwork for a

second, much more devastating—and consequential—world war 20 years later, right?

And again, what does it have to do with communication studies anyway?

In actuality, writing about WWI has never really slowed down much in the past 90

years. Nor has fascination with the war and its aftermath been exhausted, even by the

treatments of it that one finds in its historical classics (such as Barbara Tuchman’s,

John Keegan’s, Hew Strachan’s, or Niall Ferguson’s multiple and powerful books),

or in its novels, poetry, and film (such as memorable works by Wilfred Owen,

Siegfried Sassoon, John MacCrae, Erich Maria Remarque, etc.). And while particular

commonplaces about WWI have become widely embraced, some recirculated as

platitudinous mantras, there are good reasons to reexamine, to rethink, and to

reevaluate them, as these new books (and others) make plain.

The question about the relevance to communication studies, though, must be the

principal burden of this review. Two answers are possible. The first, and perhaps

most provocative, is that WWI should be of at least some interest to communication

scholars in the United States because of our contemporary discipline’s history. Of

course, it was pure historical accident that the field’s originary moment (November)

occurred barely more than three months after the outbreak of WWI (August), in

1914. Accident notwithstanding, in the early years of the discipline and of the

National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking (NAATPS), the war

was very much on the minds of the field’s founders and early writers. Although

the 1915, 1916, and early 1917 volumes of the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking

(QJPS) contain surprisingly few references to the war in Europe, the war became

suddenly prominent in the pages of QJPS in October 1917, an only slightly delayed

reaction to the U.S. entry into the war that April.1

There may have been doubters or even ‘‘slackers’’ among the early members of the

discipline, but, if so, they were nowhere in evidence in QJPS. The association formed

a ‘‘War Committee,’’ and many of the articles, editorials, and forum entries in the

early journal issues offer advice for promoting the war effort, sometimes lurching

from professional guidance to outright war advocacy.2 The 1918 convention was can-

celed, as explained by NAATPS president Howard S. Woodward: ‘‘The reasons for

this action hardly need stating. The first purpose of everyone is to beat the Hun.

For many of us this means a large amount of extra work . . . . So may we help our-

selves and our fellows professionally and meet next year, or when the Potsdam gang

is routed, not only better Americans but also better teachers.’’3 This is not the venue

to detail the kinds of war-related work the association and its members did. And it

should be a matter not of conjecture but of historical inquiry to determine the degree

and longevity of the impact(s) on the discipline of the work of its founders in sup-

porting various wartime initiatives. But it seems fair at least to suggest that some of

our field’s formative years were committed heavily—in print and in the activities of

its members—to the war agenda and that it likely had some lasting effects on how

Rethinking the First World War 95

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communication scholars understood their role in the academy and vis-a-vis

the nation.

In addition to this general historical interest, and as the books reviewed here dem-

onstrate definitively, new scholarship about WWI holds more sectarian interest for a

number of areas of communication studies. The most obvious is memory studies;

two of the books (Snell and Williams) deal explicitly with public memory. Snell’s

observation at the beginning of this essay, about the lack of U.S. memory about

WWI, may be accurate, but his and most of the other authors’ works here raise

the question of why there is such a deficit.4 In addition, though, these works and

additional new research on WWI address concerns important to particular areas

and issues in communication scholarship, e.g., gender, military and peace studies,

mediation theory, race, cultural studies, international communication, political econ-

omy, visual rhetoric, and ethics, just for starters.

The books reviewed here argue strongly and in very different ways for two propo-

sitions (of my making, not theirs) that (a) rethinking the truisms associated with

WWI is both possible and desirable and that (b) there is good reason to reconsider

both the U.S. role in WWI and the consequences for the nation of its involvement.

Two of the books, those by Kramer and Williams, forward arguments explicitly only

for the first proposition. I will address those first, along with Neiberg. The others,

including Neiberg, can be taken as propounding both propositions, more or less

forcefully or explicitly. Both because of their differential complexity and relevance

of their arguments, some of the books receive more detailed and lengthy treatments

than others, but each is important and worthy in its own right.

Rethinking First World War Truisms

Via Transnational Cultural History

The most powerful book here, Alan Kramer’s Dynamic of Destruction, is a dazzling, if

dense, reexamination of some of the most widely held platitudes about WWI; among

them, that once sparked the war took on a life of its own; that German militarism

created a singular culture of destructiveness; that the signature trench experience

of the war created a massive and widespread demoralization; that the devastating

slaughter was a pointless result of the cupidity of (mostly) British generals; that

the Battle of the Somme was a disaster; that the Versailles Treaty essentially created

the conditions for World War II; that the Second World War was essentially a con-

tinuation of WWI; and so on. Simply put, Kramer, professor of European history at

Trinity College Dublin, challenges a great many WWI verities, and, in doing so, he

takes up perhaps the broadest cultural history project of any related to WWI. Trump-

ing Jay Winter and his compatriots in France (e.g., Annette Becker and Stephane

Audoin-Rouzeau), who capitalize on comparative French, British, and German cul-

tural histories, Kramer takes up a far broader (and deeper) comparative cultural his-

tory that includes those three nations, plus Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Italy, the

Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Belgium. He uses the term ‘‘transnational’’ to describe

his perspective, because ‘‘perceptions, events, and developments in the war were not

96 The Southern Communication Journal

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purely national, but arose through interaction between nations’’ (3). Kramer’s title

reflects the central claim of his book that ‘‘there was a ‘dynamic of destruction’ which

produced the most extensive cultural devastation and mass killing in Europe since the

Thirty Years War. However, it did not operate in a mechanical sense, or in the sense

of a law of nature’’ (5). He insists that there were, throughout, civilian and military

leaders ‘‘with the power to modify the process’’ (5).

The first chapter contains a riveting (and exceptionally well documented) account

of the gratuitous burning of the university library at Louvain, Belgium, in August

1914; accounts of other instances of cultural atrocity, including the destruction of

Dinant, Ypres, Peronne, and Treviso; the deportation to Germany and forced labor

of civilians; the violence toward and forced prostitution of women in war zones;

and the shelling of Reims Cathedral, are addressed briefly here and in more detail

throughout the book. The importance of such cases, he argues is that ‘‘cultural

destruction is a particularly symbolic transgression—a ‘self mutilation’ of humanity’’’

(2). Louvain also became an international scandal, circulated early in the war as evi-

dence of Germany’s depravity and disregard for international law, and occasioning

appeals to neutral nations, like the United States. Kramer argues that while ‘‘German

warfare was held at the time to represent a reversion to barbarism,’’ it was instead ‘‘an

expression of something entirely modern: the logic of annihilation, and its roots are

to be found in modern mentalities and modern culture’’ (27).

Kramer locates these mentalities in prewar events, cultural and socialization prac-

tices, and political culture. His careful examination of the various prewar imperial

and national political cultures is compelling, especially in his insistence upon exam-

ining the beliefs of the Habsburg state in its willingness to risk a European war. Even

though it proved willing because it ‘‘feared that a loss of prestige incurred in not

fighting would destroy the state’’ (85, italics original), it was Germany that ‘‘had

the decisive role in the July crisis’’ (90). Kramer neither singles out Germany nor

exonerates Vienna. In fact, he argues, ‘‘The dynamic of destruction began with two

deliberate violations of international law. The other violation [in addition to the

invasion of neutral Belgium], almost a week earlier, the Austro-Hungarian bombard-

ment of Belgrade on 29 July, although destined to be almost entirely forgotten in the

western world, was equally the prelude to further breaches of international law,

culminating in the utter devastation of Serbia’’ (113).

As Kramer argues convincingly, Germany’s ‘‘singularity’’ in terms of waging total

war cannot be maintained, for in the end, most of the combatant nations were dri-

ven—albeit, in some cases, in response to German aggression—to adopt the logic of

annihilation: ‘‘It would be quite incorrect to speak of a German singularity of

destructiveness, although it is clear that the German military doctrine and practice

of annihilation tended to radicalize warfare on all sides’’ (158). He argues that

destructiveness, atrocity, and mass death were not the special province of the Western

Front nor merely incidental to the war. In fact, as he notes, ‘‘No state pushed the

dynamic of destruction further than the Ottoman empire’’ (158).

Probing the cultural roots of the war’s destructiveness, he finds many, including the

enthusiastic support for war among leading intellectuals, many artists, mainstream


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nationalists, and religious figures. Indeed, while war certainly was not sought or

welcomed equally by European cultures, there was a strong sense among ‘‘many intel-

lectuals in Europe that society was so rotten that the only solution was a ‘purifying’

war’’ (162). Religious figures, both Protestant and Catholic, keyed to this theme, with

death in warfare equated to martyrdom, and the battle of cultures promising purifi-

cation or progress (175–177). Still, Kramer is careful to distinguish among national

mentalities, arguing that ‘‘The distinctions between the cultures, as expressed in the

wartime mobilization of theologians, artists, academics, and writers, are indicative

of broader differences between Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Italy. It is simply

not the case, as is implied in the writings of George Mosse, that there was a common

‘myth of the war experience’ that was valid everywhere. Beyond certain similarities in

the cultural and mental responses to war one cannot extrapolate from the German war

experience to draw conclusions for other nations at war’’ (210).5

In analyzing what surely is the commonplace icon of WWI, the trench experience,

Kramer trains his attention on the Somme and Verdun, the ‘‘two battles [that] above

all others stand for the horrors of trench warfare and the vain attempt to restore

mobility through massive frontal attack’’ (211). The case of the Somme is perhaps

most interesting here (although his treatment of Verdun is important as well). As

he notes, ‘‘The Somme is often described as a useless slaughter, in which inept gen-

erals, above all General Haig, sent brave British, Irish, and Dominion men to certain

death. Commanders are described as unimaginative and inflexible in their tactics,

continuing to send men in even when it was obvious that they would be killed—as today’s press cliche puts it, ‘lions led by donkeys.’ In popular imagination in

the English-speaking world the Somme is reduced to that first day of battle [July

1, 1916], and it remains a symbol of futility of the First World War’’ (212). But he

argues that the French actually achieved their objectives in their sector of the Somme

‘‘for comparatively light losses’’ (214). More important, he suggests that the battle’s

first day ‘‘has become a kind of trauma in British national memory that has obscured

the real history of the battle,’’ and that ‘‘The entire course of the . . . battle should be

considered, not only the first day, as part of a steep learning curve for the British

army, at the end of which it had become a highly trained, well-equipped, and effective

fighting force which succeeded in taking the initiative away from Germany and

restoring mobility to warfare in 1917 and 1918’’ (214). The results of the battles of

the Somme and Verdun, for Kramer, were profound, for they created a ‘‘crisis

in the German leadership’’ (221) and set German policy on several new courses,

not the least of which was revisiting its 1915 decision to halt unrestricted sub-

marine warfare (225). The decision to reinstitute it not only intensified the destruc-

tiveness of the war but also was one of the factors that brought the United States into

the conflict (225).

Perhaps the most devastating chapter of Kramer’s book is one entitled ‘‘War,

Bodies, and Minds,’’ in which he examines the motivations of ordinary soldiers,

through diaries, letters, poems, novels, commemoration, and propaganda

photographs. He also discusses the violence against civilian populations, focusing

particularly on women. And finally he takes up the decimation of bodies and


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minds. ‘‘Almost 9 million men were killed in military action, and almost 6 million

civilians died as a result of the war. A total of 20 million men suffered injury’’

(251). The statistics and graphic descriptions of injury pile up, along with tertiary

consequences, e.g., the effects on practices of psychoanalysis and the interests of

avant-garde artists in representing trauma (260).

The longest chapter of this complex tale, ‘‘Victory, Trauma, and the Post-War Dis-

order,’’ addresses the interwar period. In it Kramer traces the degree to which the

Habsburg and Russian empires were destabilized by the war, as well as the differential

responses among ‘‘nations, and different cultures within nations’’ to the war, in terms

of their postwar histories of violence (278). He addresses Germany’s ‘‘legend of the

‘stab in the back’, which did so much to delegitimize the Weimar republic’’ (279),

as well as the specific ways in which interwar anti-Semitism arose, in part, from

the ‘‘Jew Census’’ conducted during the war (281). Kramer also describes the

different paces of national demobilization, as well as postrevolutionary society in

Russia and the beginnings of Fascist rule in Italy (294–300). He addresses clearly

and forthrightly the much-discussed ‘‘war guilt’’ clause (Article 231) of the Versailles

Treaty and claims that it was ‘‘not intended as a moral condemnation of Germany’’

but ‘‘was inserted to provide a legal basis for reparation’’ (315). And despite the many

historical denunciations of the Treaty, particularly on the part of Germany, Kramer

concludes that ‘‘Versailles was a compromise peace far more moderate than German

leaders expected in 1918’’ (316).

Perhaps the most interesting portion of this chapter, though, is dedicated to what

Kramer calls ‘‘subterranean shifts of mentality’’ in interwar Germany (324). Among

these is his argument that a ‘‘small minority of soldiers,’’ among them Adolf Hitler,

‘‘were never able to overcome their war experience’’ (325). He recounts the story of

Hitler’s service record in WWI and his blinding in a gas attack near Ypres, in October

1918 (324–325). Hitler’s malady was diagnosed as ‘‘hysterical blindness,’’ by a neur-

ologist, and when Hitler was released from care, he ‘‘never complained subsequently

about his eyesight’’ (324). But after he came to power in 1933, the diagnosing phys-

ician, Edmund Forster, traveled to Paris with hospital records to give to anti-Nazi

exiles there. ‘‘Fearing the Gestapo would arrest him for making defamatory remarks

about leading personnel of the Reich,’’ Forster committed suicide. Others who knew

and spoke about the cause of Hitler’s blindness were systematically executed.

Although Kramer is careful in mapping the continuities between the two world wars,

he argues that ‘‘the uncanny parallels in these two pathological careers [Hitler’s and

Mussolini’s] indicate that they represented a broader collective trauma among a

minority of men, and they confirm the formative role of the First World War in

the catastrophic rise of fascism’’ (325).

Although he locates this and various continuities between the two world wars in

the interwar shifts of mentalities, Kramer is careful to note the vast differences in the

conditions that gave rise to each (328). In the end, Kramer insists again against the

‘‘modern truism,’’ that he has argued against throughout the book, that the two

world wars have been characterized by an ‘‘unstoppable engine of war’’ (344). He

argues that, ‘‘no matter how complex the arms technology, no matter how deep


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the cultural mobilization of hatred, no matter how impersonal the dynamic of

destruction, it was ultimately identifiable human beings who had choices to make’’

(344).

It is nearly impossible to do justice to the complexity and specificities of Kramer’s

argument, which is a tour de force by almost any measure. In my view, this is cultural

history at its best. It draws upon a vast range of historical materials, from art works to

medical practices, from propaganda posters to poetry, and from period military

documents to economics, and all across multiple national and subnational cultures.

Not every WWI truism is completely undone by this single book, of course, but some

of them are placed in serious jeopardy by Kramer’s arguments; indeed, some of the

‘‘things we know’’ about WWI begin to appear more as ritual cants than as matters of

facticity. It is not an easy book to read, partly because of its sometimes turgid prose,

but most because of the wrenching violence, from which Kramer never backs away in

representing WWI. But it should be read not only by those interested in the world

wars but by anyone interested in twentieth-century culture, and perhaps especially

by scholars and students seeking a model of sweeping cultural analysis that nowhere

sacrifices depth for breadth.

Via Media Studies

David Williams, professor of English at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba,

makes the intriguing claim, based in mediation theory, that ‘‘the Great War funda-

mentally reshaped our experience of time’’ (271). He argues that ‘‘our memory of

the conflict seems to have been conditioned by . . . the growth of cinema as a new

mode of information in the decades leading up to the Great War and new forms

of ‘cinematic memory’ that were transferable to prose and poetry, as well as represen-

tations on film after that war—both serving to open a window on time itself, refigur-

ing our human relation to temporality’’ (271). By ‘‘our’’ memory, Williams appears,

by turns, to mean that of Canada, the former British Empire, or everyone.

Williams situates his inquiry within a fray that charges much of WWI memory

studies, addressing the issue of tradition versus modernity in the cultural forms by

which the war has been framed. He argues against Jay Winter’s claim that the ‘‘cul-

tural encoding,’’ of the war was accomplished essentially through the continuity of

highly traditional forms—notably ‘‘the symbolic language of romantic, classical,

and religious reference.’’6 Williams nominally takes Paul Fussell’s (and modernity’s)

side,7 arguing that WWI marked a dramatic shift of epistemology, but he takes

issue with Fussell’s specific arguments for the modernity of war memory. He

suggests—correctly—that Fussell’s view of ‘‘modern memory’’ as a turn to the

ironic was too narrow. But in one of several gratuitous, caustic remarks about

the United States, Williams charges Fussell (an American) with creating a reductive

‘‘fiction of ‘modernity’ that can include his own nation—long missing in action in

the Great War’’ (7). Simply one of several such cheap shots, the casual dismissal of

the United States may, in the end, subvert the rather extravagant claim that

Williams advances.


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At times, Williams’ analysis is gripping. He begins with Homer, leading the reader

through Achilleus’ loss of faith in the capacity of oral tradition to remember him, and

through Virgil’s fashioning of the myth of Aeneas to read history forward, to project

desire through script. The latter he sees as prefiguring Barometer Rising (1941) ‘‘a

canonical novel about the Great War, by Canadian Hugh MacLennan’’ (78). Williams

hits his stride and the central part of his argument, though, in his discussion of the

cinematic. Here, he argues not only that the cinema was the central medium of WWI

but that the literary world of the poets, memoirists, and novelists assumed a

cinematic grammar in forwarding their ‘‘spectral images’’ of the war. Cinematic

‘‘grammar’’ collapses past and present, he argues, by importing the past into the

present. The treatment of the films and literary works here is stunning, as are most

of Williams’ critical readings of various memory works. And one of his central

observations—that the traditional, literate medium enacted a grammatical appropri-

ation of the new cinematic one—is important and insightful.

In subsequent chapters, Williams takes up the photographic structure of Timothy

Findley’s novel, The Wars (1977), the performance of ‘‘relativity’’ in the multimedia

performance of R. H. Thomson’s The Lost Boys (2001), and the construction of a

‘‘new Homeric mode’’ in History Television’s For King And Empire (2001), a six-part

series about Canadian soldiers in WWI. His final analytic chapter begins with an

online digital archive, the Dominion Institute’sMemory Project, which contains audio

recordings of veterans’ stories. Here and in his analyses of three WWI museum

exhibitions, Williams brings his argument to ground, that the increasingly aural

character of (some) new museum and archives projects, reflects a renewed oral

culture. His contrast of a very traditional museum (the Great War Gallery, in le

Musee de l’Infanterie, in Montpellier, France), a ‘‘postmodern,’’ national museum

(the Canadian War Museum, in Ottawa), and an ‘‘international type’’ (represented

by l’Historial de la Grande Guerre, in Peronne, France) shows both the strengths

and flaws of his argument.

Apparently preferring the national Canadian War Museum to the other museum

‘‘types,’’ Williams’ critique of l’Historial—a much touted exhibition that promises to

internationalize understandings of WWI, by its triangular focus on Britain, France,

and Germany—has to do, in the end, with its ‘‘silence.’’ Although certainly not a tra-

ditional museum, l’Historial does refuse the flashier, modes of ‘‘interactivity’’ one

finds in many new museums and exhibitions, preferring a staid, more ‘‘objective’’

tone to its social history. L’Historial seems to share a problem—if not quite by

Williams’ account—with le Musee de l’Infanterie, namely that the objects do not

‘‘speak.’’ Williams’ critique of l’Historial seems fair; although it is not simply lack

of sound that renders the objects mute. Many of the museum’s home front objects

from the three countries are displayed serially, and some of them (inexplicably)

without naming or interpretive labels.8 Since the museum’s audio guide does little

more than reproduce the print labels, its muteness is about both script and sound.

The case of Williams’ treatment of le Musee de l’Infanterie is more problematic,

for it seems to fundamentally misunderstand the ancient art of memory he calls

on to assess the museum. If, he avers, ‘‘every museum is descended from the classical


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‘art of memory’ . . . then the very placement of these objects ought to speak with the

considerable authority of classical rhetoric.’’ He continues: ‘‘The practice in ancient

oral culture, in fact, was to ‘write’ in the mind’s eye every thing or idea one wanted to

remember by setting it in a particular place. . . . The museum, at its foundation, was

evidently built on the classical art of memory, with a place for everything and every-

thing in its place. The problem, of course, with such an ‘art’ is that it still depends on

the work of the viewer to call each space to mind, and after that to recall images for

each assigned place’’ (246). What Williams neglects here must seem obvious to rhet-

oricians; he misses precisely the point that memoria in ancient rhetoric did not

‘‘speak’’ in the absence of actio; memoria was not itself rhetoric but a functional part

of it. No audience in ancient Rome was tasked with trying to read a rhetor’s mind, to

locate the images assigned to a particular memory place. The audience precisely lis-

tened to the rhetorically invented, disposed, worded, and articulated memory. What

Williams seems to object to in this museum is not a problem with the ancient art of

memory but with a severely truncated rhetoric.

Such relatively small (if exasperating) problems, notwithstanding, Williams’

individual chapters invite the reader to rethink highly varied and important memory

representations of WWI. Each offers a strong analysis of the memory work(s) in

question. His critical repertoire is impressive, as are the insights that arise from his

critiques, whether of classic works by Wilfred Own or Siegfried Sassoon, or of newer,

‘‘electronic’’ memory oeuvres as represented by For King and Empire.9 Emergent in

Williams’ book, even if it is not quite the position he wishes to stake, is a strong sense

of how WWI memory has evolved. And indeed, his argument about the mediation of

WWI by film makes a convincing case for the ‘‘modernity’’ of that war’s memory.

The larger argument of Williams’ book, however, is troubling. Williams

admittedly is attempting to answer very large and very important questions: ‘‘how

to account for such a vigorous persistence of the Great War in our cultural memory?’’

(270), and why ‘‘the Great War feels ‘epochal’ in a way that the Second World War

still does not?’’ (271). These questions may seem alien to a U.S. reader, for precisely

the reason of Snell’s observation above about U.S. memory of WWI. But the

questions make sense in relation to Canada, where public memory of WWI is highly

significant to the national imaginary. Still, Williams dismisses the possibility of a

nation-centric answer, suggesting that ‘‘it would not begin to account for the strength

of the British need to reimagine the Great War,’’ and that the mythos of Canada’s

national ‘‘origins’’ at Vimy ‘‘cuts against the grain of our contemporary myth of

Canada as a peacekeeper’’ (270). Although he is right on both counts, the answer still

is much more complicated than his reduction of it to the character of mediation. The

nation-centric answers—about Canada or Britain—are not sufficient by themselves

either. Or at the very least, they would not be identical answers. The British Empire

certainly harbored no ‘‘national origin’’ myth from the 1914–1918 war, as Canada

has, but it cultivates a strong—and imperial cum national—memory of WWI,

frequently predicated upon the conceit that it was the British (and its dominions)

who won the war. The Canadian and British degrees of attachment to and seeming

‘‘need to reimagine’’ the war are parallel, but there are substantial differences too.


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Similarly, Williams’ identification of a contradiction between national public

memory contents in Canada is neither surprising nor a rationale to dismiss the

national specificity of how and why the Great War persists in memory. Memory

scholarship constantly identifies cases of contradictory memory contents being

embraced by collectives. So, that too fails to justify the argumentative move.

Perhaps the most serious case against the reductive mediation explanation,

though, is the very one that Williams so casually and caustically dismisses at various

points. He may harbor a contempt for the United States because of its ‘‘late’’ entry

into WWI, but it is precisely the United States that upends his argument. If we could

attribute the persistence and significant affect of Great War memory solely to

mediation and its effects, Canada’s neighbor to the south surely would have a mark-

edly different relationship to WWI than it has. That claim of the United States can

hardly be dismissed, for it not only had circulation of and familiarity with many

(if not most) of the literary and filmic works Williams discusses but it even produced

a few of them.10 The point is not that this should be a work about U.S. memory or

that the latter should be the measure of this or any account of public memory.

However, if the new cinematic epistemology was the causative force of the shift, then

that cause should account for other instances of national remembering as well, not

just Canada’s and Britain’s. To account for public memory requires that we under-

stand it as overdetermined, not reducible any more exclusively to mediative changes

than to distancing by irony.

One of many important and interesting features of WWI memory was its early

construction by precisely the cinematic grammar that Williams so carefully and

convincingly lays bare. But another is that public memory of that war was and is

embraced in very different registers across even the allied nations (including, and per-

haps especially, the former dominial states). Thus my objection is not that memory of

the war was or is purely a function of national difference; there are far too many

convergences for that to be the case. We should pay careful attention to national

differences, though, as well as to the mediated temporality shifting that Williams

argues for, because both may account—partially, differently, and persuasively—for

how various collectives have understand and continue to re-understand WWI.

Via Military History

Michael S. Neiberg, a historian at the University of Southern Mississippi, recounts

the origin of his book in the acknowledgment pages. During a conversation at a con-

ference, he was asked by a colleague, Spencer C. Tucker, if any battle of the First

World War should be included in a new series on twentieth-century battles. He

answered ‘‘that the Second Battle of the Marne was, in my view, the most important

twentieth-century battle about which there was no scholarly monograph’’ (ix). His

resulting book, part of the Twentieth-Century Battles series edited by Tucker, makes

the case plainly and convincingly and, in so doing, challenges, at least indirectly,

much scholarship that claims one battle or another as decisive in winning WWI.

Importantly, Neiberg does not claim that the war was won definitively at the


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Marne, but his work casts considerable doubt on the often overclaimed cases for

other battles’ decisiveness. Although I have no horse in this race, I do think that bet-

ter arguments can be mustered for what won WWI, rather than by whom or by which

battle, plus it seems a more interesting question to begin with. In any case, that is one

reason that Neiberg’s book is appealing to me, but there are others as well. Among

them, this book is proof positive that military history, even read by a rank outsider,

does not have to be—although it sometimes seems—dry.

Neiberg sets Second Marne (July 1918) in the temporal context of other battles

that preceded it, including 1914’s stand in the same area, which would come to be

mythologized as ‘‘the Miracle of the Marne’’ (8), for it pushed the German advance

back from targeted Paris. In the process of setting the context, Neiberg does some

important redemptive work for the allied generals, for example in his exemplar of

Verdun in 1916: ‘‘The notion of holding every inch of unoccupied territory had

important symbolic value. Thus when generals ordered their men to stand in place

or die trying they were not necessarily being pigheaded or needlessly stubborn.

The famous French rallying cry at Verdun, ‘They shall not pass,’ represented one

example of inspiring men by ordering them to hold on to territory at any cost’’

(37). But finally, after several successful offensive initiatives in the spring of 1918,

German forces again threatened Paris; they had moved ‘‘close enough to begin

random bombardments of the city with airplanes and massive long-range artillery

pieces’’ (6).

Of course, the centerpiece of the book is a detailed military chronicle of the battle.

It is an exhilarating tale, not least because of the allies’ fine intelligence gathering in

advance, that allowed their forces to preempt a planned German attack on the first

day, and because of General Ferdinand Foch’s apparent capacity to divine German

plans. Here Neiberg is particularly interesting because he seems to have such a strong

sense of Foch, about whom he wrote a 2003 book. There had been considerable dis-

agreement among British and French general staffs about whether the Germans

planned an attack in the Marne sector as a feint to distract from a larger offensive

in the Somme. Foch, who had taken over as supreme commander of allied forces,

guessed correctly.

The Second Battle of the Marne, as Neiberg tells its story, is particularly fascinat-

ing, because of its multinational and multilingual character. Unlike most of WWI, in

which different allied nations were responsible for different parts of the front, and in

which there appeared often to be little coordination or cooperation between the Brit-

ish and French, this allied consolidation into four multinational, French-commanded

armies was remarkably managed, especially, given that ‘‘Allied officers were giving

orders in at least four languages (French, English, Italian, and Arabic for some of

the French colonial and Moroccan units)’’ (120). Although other WWI battles have

overshadowed Second Marne, Neiberg offers good reasons to re-understand some of

them, e.g., the Amiens offensive in August 1918, in terms of the damage Second

Marne had inflicted on the German army. In fact, Neiberg suggests, ‘‘[General Erich]

Ludendorff’s postmortem essentially meant that he knew the war was over when the

Allied counterstroke of July 18 succeeded’’ (185).


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Neiberg’s challenges to truisms about WWI, though, go further than chronicling

an important but understudied battle or even than attributing such importance to it.

In the conclusion, he poses the same question to his book that Foch occasionally

posed of his officers: ‘‘De quoi s’agit-il?’’ which ‘‘roughly translated . . .means ‘what

is it really about?’’’ (185). Among other conclusions, and with the condition that the

claim would require more research, he suggests that ‘‘one could safely advance the

argument that the negative images (or simple absence) of the French army in histor-

ies of 1918, which have become so commonplace in Anglo-American renderings of

the war today, are an anachronistic and backward misreading of later events’’

(188), because they superimpose the 1940 collapse of the French military onto histor-

ies of WWI. He suggests, more pointedly, that ‘‘Anglo-American historians and

popular writers have . . . built a veritable cottage industry undermining French efforts

in the world wars, in some cases to highlight by contrast the contributions of their own

armies’’ (188; emphasis added).

Neiberg’s book also points us to the second section of this review, about rethink-

ing the U.S. role in WWI. His book tells the story not only of Second Marne but also

of the role of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in waging it. It was not the

first combat that U.S. units saw in WWI, but the U.S. role was an important one.

It represented, among other things, the evolution toward establishment of an inde-

pendent U.S. army that would make its own marks in the battles of St. Mihiel and

Meuse-Argonne in subsequent months (157). But before that, U.S. army divisions

were already taking on increasingly independent action during Second Marne, in

the campaign of Tardenois, in late July 1918, to which ‘‘newly promoted Brigadier

General Douglas MacArthur’’ would be assigned to replace a ‘‘brigade commander

who had ‘virtually collapsed under the strain of fighting’’’ (173). In the end, Neiberg

argues that Second Marne was ‘‘a critical event in American military history, and it

must be recognized as such’’ (189). And in his penultimate paragraph he adds fuel to

the importance of this and all of the books discussed in this review: ‘‘For all that the

war did to shape the modern world and for all of the importance that scholars ascribe

to it, the war remains badly understood and curiously understudied, especially in the

United States’’ (190).

Rethinking the U.S. Role and Its Consequences

Via Memory Studies

As one might anticipate from the headnote of this essay, borrowed from editor Mark

Snell’s preface, as well as from his punned title—Unknown Soldiers—this collection

amounts to a plea for more attention to WWI in U.S. memory. Snell, a specialist

in U.S. Civil War history at Shepherd University, branches out here to take up a

much more difficult, because nearly nonexistent, public memory. Divided into three

parts, ‘‘Remembering the AEF,’’ ‘‘Soldiers and their Units in Battle and Beyond,’’ and

‘‘The AEF in Popular Memory,’’ the collection seems to shift between a focus on

memory studies and biography. Although contemporary memory studies have been

occasionally amenable to a focus on public memory of individuals,11 it typically has


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not tended in biographical directions. Still, there is merit in Snell’s approach, because

of the character of the chapters in question, but also especially given his assumption

that WWI memory in the United States is essentially dormant.

Snell’s preface, which introduces the volume, is worth a reading in its own right.

His prose in the preface, and in his lead chapter, is that of both professional historian

and personal, contemporary witness. In the preface, he recounts a visit to the

Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and his encounter with then assistant cemetery

superintendent Craig Rahanian and his wife Lorna. Snell’s self-described ‘‘funk’’ in

visiting the largest U.S. military cemetery in Europe was eased by a glass of wine

and by Lorna’s description of the soldiers interred in the cemetery: ‘‘They are all

my sons out there’’ (ix).12 Although Snell does not name this visit to Meuse-Argonne

or his first encounter with the Rahanians as his inspiration for a shift of scholarly

attention to WWI, his account has that feel to it. And it is this and other tales that

enliven his preview of the book as well as his own chapter that immediately follows.

In that lead chapter, Snell offers up two themes: a summary of the U.S. military

role in WWI and a broad overview of overseas and domestic U.S. commemoration

of the war. His description of the U.S. military effort is stunning in its compactness

and conciseness. Granted, the U.S. war was brief by comparison to that of other

involved countries, but the actions of its various ‘‘attached’’ units on different areas

of the front, its formation of an independent, national army thereafter, and its

actions, especially in Champagne, the St. Mihiel area, and the Argonne Forest, made

for a rather complicated 20 months. So, Snell’s accomplishment of a clear but not

overly simplified account is useful in its own right, and exceptionally so for those

not familiar with U.S. participation in WWI. It takes on an emotional timbre in

a story about his grandfather, tales of whose AEF service had turned out to be a

fabrication, and in his account of commemorating the war.

Some readers may recognize G. Kurt Piehler’s chapter as the third chapter of his

own 1995 book, Remembering War the American Way.13 That book, and this repro-

duced chapter, represent some of the best scholarship available on U.S. commemor-

ation. He recounts the struggles over repatriation of the war dead and focuses on the

Gold Star Mothers’ pilgrimages of the 1930s. Although excellent, it seems rather a

shame that Piehler could not be induced to elaborate on or to extend the earlier work

for this volume. Rounding out the first part of the collection is Jennifer D. Keene’s

chapter on WWI memory in the African American community; in it, she examines

writing, films, and photos that focus on African Americans’ war experience and its

impact on their continuing struggle for equality in America. It is one of the most

interesting and provocative chapters, not only because she covers so much territory

but also because there is so much more ground still to locate and explore.

Two of the chapters in Part 2 are rather traditional biographies, but they take

up interesting figures—Robert McCormick and General Charles P. Summerall.

McCormick was the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who commanded the 1st

Battalion, 5th Field Artillery. After the war, McCormick would return to Illinois, rename

his estate (now a museum and research center) ‘‘Cantigny,’’ after a French town in the

Somme, the site of one of the early U.S. military actions in WWI. W. Gary Nichols’


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chapter about Summerall, who commanded the U.S. 1st Division at Soissons, St,

Mihiel, and Meuse-Argonne, is an interesting account of an important military

figure; one who, like many, was so overshadowed early on by Pershing that he is

not well known for his First World War exploits, even in the United States. Nichols’

account follows Summerall’s career after the war too, when he was named head of the

Citadel and credited with saving the institution from the ravages of the Great

Depression.

Michael Miller’s chapter on a rifle company in the battle of Belleau Wood is a

mostly biographical account of several members of the company, accompanied by

a narrative of one day of this very famous battle (June 6, 1918), the various fates

of the individuals introduced, and the memories of those few who lived to tell about

it. The essay is moving, in part because it relies on the voices of survivors and in part

because Belleau Wood is such a central story of WWI, thanks to the U.S. Marine

Corps’ acumen in cultivating publicity and memory. Taylor V. Beattie’s chapter

begins with the exploits and mythology of Sergeant Alvin C. York, who gained

international fame for singlehandedly killing two dozen Germans and capturing

132 others, along with their 35 machine guns (168). But Beattie’s fascinating essay

is focused on the attempts to locate the exact location of York’s October 1918 heroics.

There is sufficient certainty now, because of the research efforts of several groups, to

have marked the site with a monument in October 2008.

I have taken up the chapters in Part 2 out of order, largely to save Mitchell Yock-

elson’s—in my view the best—for last. His chapter about the 27th and 30th American

Divisions who served with the British Army addresses the operations of units within

these two divisions, relations between the doughboys and their British and Australian

counterparts, and their commemoration in monuments and welcome home festiv-

ities. He concludes by arguing, among other things, that these were the model for

the British-American cooperation in the Second World War. Yockelson’s chapter,

not surprisingly since he has long worked in the National Archives and Records

Administration’s Modern Military Branch, is heavy with primary documentation.

But he is such a superb writer that it feels like light reading. The chapter offers a rela-

tively brief sample of the excellent and more expansive work Yockelson undertakes in

his recent book, Borrowed Soldiers: Americans Under British Command, 1918.14

The final part of Snell’s collection, on ‘‘popular memory,’’ consists of two impress-

ive chapters. Jack Capps’ ‘‘Literature of the AEF: A Doughboy Legacy’’ is a marve-

lously hued pastiche of memoir, diary, historical record, drama, and poetry. Its

capacious reach moves from the pre-1917 period of individual American volunteers

with the French, British, and dominial forces to the postwar disillusionment and

beyond. Even then, he is led to conclude that ‘‘the resources of fresh material for

AEF historians and novelists are far from exhausted’’ (228). Michael E. Birdwell pulls

off a similar feat with the music and films that were legacies of WWI. But as he con-

cludes, ‘‘The AEF’s contributions to the conflict deserve a greater audience and more

serious representation,’’ in film (259). It is a fitting conclusion to a collection that

makes a persuasive bid for a greater audience and more serious representation for

WWI across the board.


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Via Gender Studies

Kimberly Jensen, professor of history and gender studies at Western Oregon Univer-

sity, offers a fascinating, carefully documented study of three loosely configured

groups of American women—‘‘women-at-arms,’’ female physicians, and nurses—who in very different ways challenged ‘‘the new masculinity’’ constructed on ‘‘social

Darwinism and the anxieties of empire’’ (15). Although the U.S. declaration of war

in 1917 seemed to many (especially suffragists who claimed pacifist allegiances) a

setback to women’s citizenship rights, Jensen gives us some reason to believe that

women’s wartime service, as well as their various challenges to violence against

women, may have accelerated the rights cause.

Without doubt, some of the most free-wheeling of these wartime women were

those who took up arms, in some cases to avoid the fate of their sisters in

German-occupied Belgium and northern France, in others to demonstrate women’s

equality, and in others to offer themselves as citizen soldiers to fight alongside U.S.

men. Women joined or formed shooting clubs in record numbers; others created

groups emulating the Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, which had formed ‘‘to

defend the Kerensky government in the Russian Revolution’’ (44–45). Annie Oakley,

retired from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, offered shooting instruction to women

but also to men in military training camps (55). Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite

(or more likely because) these groups’ ‘‘claim to soldiering disrupted powerful

cultural boundaries between women and combat and the construction of men as

Protectors’’ (77), their work had the least resonance of the three groups with most

Americans, except for gun manufacturers (173).

Nurses, of course, were urgently needed for overseas service and were the ‘‘only

group of women formally invited to service by the U.S. military for the entire length

of the war. More than 21,480 women served in the Army Nurse Corps during the

world war’’ (120). White nurses, although volunteering in large numbers, did not

all go ‘‘quietly.’’ Some, who experienced or witnessed workplace harassment or hos-

tile conditions—and ‘‘most military nurses agreed that they had experienced a hostile

workplace’’ (135)—made systematic demands that female nurses be commissioned as

officers, not only for reasons of status but as a mode of protecting themselves and

their colleagues from systemic hostility (121–123). Meanwhile, African American

nurses struggled even to be able to volunteer for the Red Cross, much less the Army

Nurse Corps (120). It would not be until 1947, with the passage of the Army-Navy

Nurses Act, that military nurses would receive ‘‘real,’’ as opposed to ‘‘relative rank’’

or temporary, commissions (139–141). Nurses, unlike their compatriot ‘‘women-at-

arms,’’ had challenged only one institution, not the entire cultural instantiation of

gendered protector-protected roles. But they had challenged the most impossibly

masculine of all U.S. institutions—the military. And while they were not successful

until much later, they at least began ‘‘to unsettle the masculinized military’’ (141).

In many ways, the most successful group that Jensen discusses were female physi-

cians who offered their services first to the U.S. military, but with the condition

that they be commissioned with rank equal to male colleagues. When they were


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unsuccessful in securing that and were offered only ‘‘contract’’ work, many declined

and either worked with organizations like the Red Cross or formed their own orga-

nizations, like the American Women’s Hospitals (AWH), to care for displaced civi-

lians (mostly women and children) in the war zone. First established at Luzancy,

France (about 15miles from Chateau-Thierry, in the Marne sector) and later moved

north to Blerancourt, the AWH would expand by the 1920s to operate ‘‘nine clinics

in Greece, the Balkans, and the Near East’’ (114).15 Although Jensen acknowledges

that ‘‘The continuing postwar work of women physicians in the American Women’s

Hospitals units across Europe was a lasting legacy’’ (169), she is rather ambivalent

about the role of women physicians in wartime, because it was ‘‘safe.’’ She explains:

‘‘It was certainly less threatening than the challenges made by women nurses to

address a hostile working environment and the claims of self-defense made by

women-at-arms’’ (170). If one takes the work of women physicians as ‘‘extrainstitu-

tional’’ (174), as opposed to innovative in creating new, international institutions,

Jensen’s position may be fair. But challenge there was in such innovative solutions

to gender barriers. Moreover, the women physicians seem to have been far more

successful in addressing the violence against women than either of the other groups.

Jensen’s claim, and Mobilizing Minerva’s general conclusions, seems rather unsa-

tisfying, in that any accomplishments these groups might claim are predicated on

their degree of challenge to masculinist beliefs and institutions. While that certainly

seems important, it also begs the question of the nature of the impact they had on

U.S. cultural rhetorics, material practices, and gender-linked policy. As suggested

earlier, this book gives us some reason to believe, although it does not claim, that

these women’s struggles actually advanced rights causes. We learn here about numer-

ous, important ways in which women confronted masculinist culture during the

most challenging of times, but we may learn even more from the next book about

the material successes of U.S. women’s activities during WWI, though its central

focus is not specifically on gender politics or women.

Via U.S. Cultural History

Christopher Capozzola, associate professor of history at MIT, makes a strong bid not

so much for rethinking the U.S. role in WWI but for considering WWI’s profound

effects on U.S. political culture. In this expansive and detailed history of the U.S.

home front, he documents clashes of discourses of citizen obligation and rights.

The U.S. decision to enter WWI, Capozzola argues, created the conditions for

re-understanding the authority of the state in citizens’ (and noncitizens’) lives, shift-

ing political obligation from the local to the national. It is a complicated story, for

even while the authorization of the nation-state expanded, its demands were often

enforced by local voluntary groups, in what he terms a ‘‘culture of coercive voluntar-

ism’’ (8). Often in conflict with the coercion was a demand for citizen protections

against rights infringements, and for the national government to guarantee those pro-

tections. As he suggests, ‘‘At times, voluntary associations were centers of resistance

to militarism and the coercions of war mobilizations; they sheltered draft dodgers,


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gave voice to workers’ demands and protected German Americans from the

onslaughts of 100% Americanism. More often than not, though, as their members

found a place for themselves in Uncle Sam’s America, voluntary associations actively

supported the war effort in a combination of coercion and voluntarism that proved

explosive’’ (10). ‘‘The American home front was not,’’ he argues, ‘‘a lawless frontier, a

police state, or a great big meeting of the Elks Club. But it looked a little like all of

these. It was an improvisational time’’ (12). The struggle over citizen obligation

ultimately would not only ‘‘give new vitality to the language of rights’’ but also

energize ‘‘the emergence of a powerful—if more latent and noiseless—state’’ (13).

Capozzola’s history is filled with individuals, some quite well known, if not

necessarily for their associations with WWI, e.g., John Dewey, Jane Addams, Carrie

Chapman Catt, even J. Edgar Hoover. The same is true of groups new to the period,

like the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Legion, and the (reestablished)

Ku Klux Klan. But it is also a history of groups we may no longer hear much about,

like the American Protective League or the National Women’s Party. This is not a

simple chronicle of, say, the Creel Commission’s efforts to seek support for the

war, but a nuanced story of the local and the national and about competing bids

for political legitimacy and authority.

The story begins with the Selective Service Act of 1917, which Capozzola labels the

‘‘centerpiece of wartime citizenship and its defining obligation’’ (21). Although the

U.S. government did conscript soldiers in the Civil War, this was ‘‘America’s first

mass draft’’ (21), and it required that ‘‘all male citizens of draft age (initially set at

twenty-one to thirty years old), as well as aliens who had taken out first papers of

citizenship’’ register with local draft boards (26). However, there was no government

system in place to administer registration, and so the conscription depended upon

the willing compliance of draft-age men and the voluntary service of citizens to serve

as local registrars. As Capozzola reminds us, ‘‘A generation later, draft officials could

track a man down through his birth certificate, his driver’s license, voter registration,

passport, or Social Security card. In 1917, however, the average American man lacked

most of these documents; some carried none of them at all’’ (28). Although 9.6 mil-

lion men showed up to register on the first day (28), not everyone was so willing. It is

unclear how many were noncompliant, but ‘‘the army’s own documents suggest that

perhaps as many as three million evaded the draft by failing to sign up at all’’ (30).

Those who were unwilling to serve (or sometimes legitimately deferred) came to

be known as ‘‘slackers’’, individuals against whom many Americans felt outrage,

forming ‘‘popular movements to capture and punish them’’ (31). ‘‘Americans who

hated slackers were pretty sure they knew who the slackers were. They knew, first

of all, that slackers were not just bad citizens but inadequate men’’ (31). Of course,

some of those ‘‘bad citizens’’ and ‘‘inadequate men’’ were noncitizens; any, for

example, who were citizens of the Central Powers were ‘‘forbidden to serve, unless

they renounced their enemy citizenship’’ (31, italics original). Asian immigrants

were barred from naturalization altogether. But even those who were U.S. citizens

often were targeted not because they had higher rates of noncompliance but for what

we would now name as outright racial or religious prejudice. Others were targeted in


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the hope of ridding the nation, at least temporarily, of labor organizers, by getting

them into the draft. Jewish men were regarded with suspicion for malingering.

And African Americans faced a nearly impossible situation, particularly in the South,

where ‘‘Defenders of white supremacy dismissed outright the notion of the black

citizen-soldier’’ (35). Capozzola argues that ‘‘African Americans often found them-

selves blamed for not fulfilling their obligations voluntarily when they were not even

allowed to volunteer’’ (36). Slackers were not rounded up by federal officials but were

targeted by local ‘‘volunteers’’ with the blessing of the U.S. government. ‘‘[American

Protective] League men embarked on unwarranted searches and seizures, detained

and arrested draft-age men without charges, intimidated allegedly disloyal

Americans, and broke up strikes. Sometimes deputized en masse by local police,

sometimes warned that they had no right to make arrests, operatives rarely paused

over the difference’’ (42).

Conscientious objectors (COs)—a new category of citizens—created an interesting

challenge to the state’s authority, confronting the government with the difficulty of

distinguishing between a draft dodger and a religious objector. Capozzola describes

the results: ‘‘The War Department embarked on a policy of scrutiny that officially

evaluated the contents of American citizens’ minds and souls,’’ but some of the

‘‘objectors pushed back, asserting their rights in a strident language of individualism’’

(57). Meanwhile, as he notes, ‘‘For many Americans, ‘conscientious objector’ was just

a fancy term for ‘slacker’’’ (59). Mennonite communities in the Midwest, for

example, ‘‘faced brutal harassment’’ (61). Other ‘‘peace churches,’’ like the Quakers,

had better success. Individuals without affiliation with a well-recognized ‘‘peace

church’’ found almost none. Regardless of affiliation, a March 1918 War Department

order required psychological examinations of all COs. Capozzola describes the risk:

‘‘The belief that conscientious objection was a mental illness—that, in short, one

would have to be crazy to be a CO—was never far from the surface . . .This visionof mental deficiency was no minor matter; some opponents of war—particularly

those who had trouble articulating their concerns in the nice, neat language of liberal

theory—found themselves labeled ‘feebleminded’ or ‘insane’ and interned for the

duration of the war, or longer’’ (74–75). But as Capozzola avers, the irony was that

COs ‘‘were some of America’s first modern citizens . . .As they seized a category of

citizenship created by the federal government to mediate the conflicting obligations

of minority groups, they forced the state to address not their group identities and

their obligations, but their individual selves, and their rights’’ (81).

U.S. women were not exempt from the ‘‘culture of obligation,’’ simply because

they were barred from active military duty. Nor were they exempt from being labeled

‘‘slackers’’ (90). The coercive voluntarism that affected women was exercised mostly

through the extensive networks of women’s clubs throughout the country. ‘‘Red

Cross volunteers alone knitted 22 million items for hospitals, 1.5 million refugee

garments, 15 million military garments, and 253 million surgical dressings’’ (83).

Women were enlisted (literally through pledges) in widespread efforts to conserve

food. As Capozzola points out, though, these efforts were not about garments or

food; they were part of a ‘‘symbolic politics of female voluntarism’’ (101). As he


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suggests, ‘‘women exerted little control over formal policy making in the federal

government. But in other areas, women wielded great power, especially over other

women’’ (95), in the form of ‘‘house-to-house visits, gossip, and public shaming’’

(19). But it cannot be emphasized too much that attempts to solicit or coerce

women’s voluntarism, as Capozzola describes it, were more about garnering consent

than bandages or food conservation.

All of the women’s ‘‘voluntary’’ activities, of course, took place within the context

of suffrage activism. Here, Capozzola’s account is superb. He discusses at length the

very different strategies adopted by different suffrage organizations, some of whom

(e.g., the National American Woman Suffrage Association) agreed to give up lobby-

ing for the duration of the war, while others (e.g., the National Woman’s Party)

stepped up their efforts. Capozzola concludes that ‘‘Women’s voluntarism was

indispensable to suffrage victory, which came with the ratification of the Nineteenth

Amendment in August 1920’’ (103).

In a most chilling chapter, Capozzola details the passage of the Espionage Act

(1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) and focuses on the concepts of ‘‘responsible

speech’’ and ‘‘responsible reading’’ as modes of social control, mostly imposed

panoptically but enforced by government action when ‘‘necessary.’’ Pacifists of all

varieties were, of course, under suspicion, as evidenced by the case of Jane Addams,

who before the war was seen as a heroic figure, but who was denounced roundly for

her outspoken views against the war. Anything resembling support for Germany was

off limits too. And the Postmaster General, empowered to police speech through the

mails, was successful in preventing pro-labor groups from sending out their newspa-

pers. But, as Capozzola claims, ‘‘For all the episodes of repression,’’ it would be inac-

curate to paint a picture of the American landscape peopled with armies of loyalty

leagues and postmasters imposing a regime of terror against fellow citizens’’ (163).

In fact, civil libertarians were hard at work, even though they also sometimes agreed

that ‘‘the declaration of war had shifted, at least temporarily, the boundaries of

legitimate and illegitimate speech’’ (163). Capozzola quotes pacifist writer Lowes

Dickinson, about the impact of the war, saying that people ‘‘seem to be terrorized

by the fear each individual has of what all the other individuals taken together are sup-

posed to be feeling and thinking, till it sometimes appears as if public opinion were the

opinion which nobody holds, but which everyone supposes other people to hold’’

(172). ‘‘Responsible’’ speech was in most instances about self-regulation through fear.

But the ‘‘birth of the surveillance state’’ had its origins more with the regulation of

‘‘enemy aliens’’ than with policing the mail (173). Although pro-German sentiment

could be expressed freely and openly before the U.S. declaration of war, that changed

rapidly in April 1917. As Capozzola points out, ‘‘German Americans often made

noisy public displays of their American loyalty’’ (197), and many did prefer America

to the ‘‘Prussian autocracy that had taken hold of their home country’’ (198), but

many others simply resorted to silence, out of legitimate fear. It is likely that some

were silenced because of lack of English language skills, in an atmosphere in which

speaking German was all but banished. The assault on German American culture

‘‘ranged from small, personal incidents . . . to mob violence and legal strictures’’


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(183). Like many of the other wartime vigilance activities, it was policed largely by the

culture of voluntarism and obligation. German books, German music, German lan-

guage instruction, sermons preached in German all were victims of voluntary civilian

repression. In Lincoln, Nebraska, German composers were eliminated from the pro-

gram of the visiting Minneapolis Symphony. Boulder, Colorado staged a book burn-

ing rally (183). ‘‘Other public celebrations included a ‘stein-breaking fest’ . . . and the

slaughter of German dog breeds’’ (184–185). Most German language instruction dis-

appeared ‘‘before any legislation was passed’’ (192). Although the state would not

resort to the mass internment of citizens that occurred in World War II, there was

serious repression, in part created by the equation of pro-German sentiment with

the dissident or ‘‘problem’’ group du jour: ‘‘Striking workers, radical suffragists,

and African-American migrants were all, at some point during the war, referred to

as ‘pro-Germans’’’ (201). It probably was little consolation to German Americans,

even if true, that ‘‘other belligerent nations regulated aliens with methods that made

American policies seem almost mild by comparison’’ (178).

Capozzola concludes that WWI was ‘‘a crucial moment in the history of American

political culture,’’ for it was ‘‘part of a massive and sometimes contradictory restruc-

turing of the relationship between Americans and state power—indeed of the basic

terms of American citizenship itself’’ (209). American society, he argues, ‘‘had been

transformed’’ (209). There can be little question of that, given his careful tracing of

the prewar culture of obligation through the vicissitudes of home-front mobilization

across the country. Indeed, one might be tempted to argue, on the basis of Capozzo-

la’s careful delineation of the massive changes, that America’s culture of obligation

had been transmuted into modern nationalism.

Capozzola’s Uncle Sam Wants You is an extraordinary and powerful book. It is

extraordinary in its range and in its depth of documentation—fully one-third of

the book’s pages are devoted to source documentation. It is powerful in part because

of its clarity and its balance. Although the range of abuses perpetrated by one’s fellow

citizens during the war is remarkable, it is also the case that many of the actions taken

voluntarily, as Capozzola makes clear, were ineffective and even farcical. As he also

demonstrates, they were countered by an emergent discourse of rights that ultimately

moved the country in the same direction as did the shift of political obligation to the

nation; the nation-state grew in importance because it was viewed as the principal

guarantor of individual rights.

Conclusion

The First World War surely seems a different world to us now. But as these books

attest, our modernity has taken much of its profile from the events, conflicts, modes

of advocacy, invocations of law (both national and international), and modalities of

memory that characterized 1914–1918. In a sense, ending with Capozzola’s book

brings us full circle to the home front situation into which the NAATPS intervened

in 1917 and 1918, and about which Glenn N. Merry described some of what he saw as

that emerging profile: ‘‘Is not Europe’s trouble our own trouble? We no longer are a


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child nation isolated from Europe by three months of sea travel. Liverpool is no far-

ther today from New York than San Francisco . . .We are a grown nation, a powerful

factor in peace or in war with world interests and mature responsibilities.’’16 Merry

not only chaired the NAATPS’s War Committee but he identified himself in this 1918

essay, as ‘‘Chairman of the Iowa National Council of Defense Speakers’ Bureau,’’ one

of many voluntary organizations that promoted U.S. war aims.

It also brings us back to Mark Snell’s observation about the absence of WWI

memory in the United States. One of the most interesting questions that these books

raise for us, although only Snell’s raises it explicitly, is why WWI has not been a more

prominent topos of public memory in the United States. Any number of responses to

that question can be easily dismissed by the substance of these books. WWI cannot be

dormant in U.S. memory because it is functionally ancient history, because of its

irrelevance to contemporary concerns, because its history is all settled up, or because

it had negligible effect on the United States’ subsequent and current cultural

practices.

Even Snell’s proposed answers seem incomplete. He suggests that WWI was

‘‘eclipsed’’ by World War II and that ‘‘fewer Americans who experienced the era

remain with us’’ (23). Although his answers seem plausible, they certainly cannot,

by themselves, account for the deficit of public WWI memory in the United States.

Indeed, the Second World War overshadowed most, if not all, wars that came

before it, but the U.S. Civil War has a vibrant public memory in the United States.

And surely World War II eclipsed WWI for other nations in the world too, includ-

ing France, Britain, and some of the former dominial countries, but they currently

harbor energetic memory work vis-a-vis WWI. The same arguments can be made

about the passing of the WWI generation. Snell is correct, of course, in observing

its passing; at this writing, there is a single surviving U.S. WWI veteran—Frank

Buckles. But of course, the Civil War still captures the imagination of many

Americans, despite its generational distance. And the WWI generation is passing

as rapidly in other nations as our own. It may not be American tourists besieging

the old Western Front, but memory tourism is a major industry there, from

Flanders to Verdun, and beyond. Suffice it to say that it would be a very interesting

question to probe further: what in U.S. memory has created the conditions for the

dormancy of WWI? The question cannot be answered here, of course. But it is an

important one in the history of U.S. memory studies. Plausible answers to it are

certain to be diverse and complicated.

WWI may seem like a different world. But the books reviewed here raise serious

issues about that as well as concerns of serious interest to communication scholars.

Kramer’s observation, for example, that ‘‘cultural destruction is a particularly

symbolic transgression’’ (2) not only has resonance for the contemporary world of

international conflicts but for those in cultural studies and rhetoric interested in

materiality. Indeed, his observation, consistent with Robert Bevan’s analyses of more

contemporary acts of destruction, calls attention to the symbolic and material

domains of public memory.17 Williams’ account of mediation of WWI memory

is of obvious interest to communication studies, and it seems clear that his important


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study could be augmented to great advantage by a systematic, comparative history of

mediation and remediation of WWI. Neiberg’s conclusions point us to a serious con-

cern with rhetorics of history, and especially the nationalist biases that may intrude

upon accounts of WWI military history. Both Capozzola and Jensen raise new ques-

tions about how even deep political affiliations shift, the role of organizations and

small groups in social change, and the differential historical character of

‘‘citizenship.’’ Several authors point to the research demanding to be done on African

Americans’ wartime contributions and experiences. Every author in the Snell

collection argues for a renewed understanding of WWI in U.S. memory. Whether

the United States acknowledges the First World War explicitly in public memory,

and whether we attend to it in communication studies, it is very much with us, as

these books insist.

Notes

[1] Even the delayed response was related to the war, as noted in a sardonic editorial, in the

October 1917 issue (volume 4), entitled ‘‘Quarterly Dates.’’ The editor noted that the

1917 issues had been delayed multiple times because of ‘‘Bismarck’s influence upon

European history.’’ He explained that the problem was with the journal’s publisher: ‘‘a

number of near-catastrophies took place in connection with moving into a new plant,

doing ‘war-work’ on government military printing, and finding and training new crews

to take the places of approximately two-thirds of the [publisher’s] force who were patrioti-

cally impelled ‘to go after the Kaiser’ in one form or other of military service.’’ He claimed

that he and the business manager had ‘‘melted’’ and asked readers to melt too, though

‘‘without hearing more of the ghastly details’’ (359).

[2] See, for example, S. H. Clark, ‘‘Some Neglected Aspects of Public Speaking,’’ QJPS 3 (1917):

310–316; and Glenn N. Merry, ‘‘National Defense and Public Speaking,’’ Quarterly Journal

of Speech Education (QJSE) 4 (1918): 53–60. The name of QJPS was changed (for the first

time) in 1918.

[3] Howard S. Woodward, ‘‘Annual Convention Announcement,’’ QJSE 4 (1918): 451.

[4] I avoid the more typical term ‘‘forgetting,’’ for several reasons. First, it seems quite impre-

cise to describe many cases of what I would describe as ‘‘representational deficits’’ in public

memory content. Second, it seems inaccurate, if not utterly absurd, to suggest that the Uni-

ted States has ‘‘forgotten’’ WWI. It would be accurate to suggest that the Great War has

little purchase in American memory, but lack of representation is not the same as forget-

ting. Third, I wish to avoid the kind of assessment that Bradford Vivian quite astutely and

rightly notes on the part of many scholars who insist on the binary of remembering and

forgetting in addressing public memory. He argues that forgetting is typically understood

as an ethical and=or political problem. See Bradford Vivian, ‘‘On the Language of Forget-

ting,’’ QJS 95 (2009): 89–104. I do not mean to suggest that the United States is somehow

culpable for its ‘‘lack’’ of World War I memory. Indeed, I think these are very important

questions we might ask about that lack before rendering judgment of it.

[5] Kramer’s reference is to George L. Mosse’s influential work, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the

Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[6] Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 228.

[7] See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press,

1975).

[8] My observation is based on a visit to the Peronne museum in November 2008.


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[9] The one important flaw, in my view, in Williams’ treatment of the televisual exemplar, is

the omission of the fact that the Of King and Empire ‘‘host,’’ Norm Christie, is not just the

publisher of CEF Books, but also a tour guide in Gallipoli and on the Western Front. So,

whether it is the electronic medium or the genre of marketing that is more at stake seems an

open question. Williams notes Christie’s publications, but not his tours, the latter of which

are more directly ‘‘promoted’’ by the particular shape of the series (292, n. 43).

[10] The best known, of course, is All Quiet on the Western Front, Lewis Milestone’s 1930

Hollywood rendition of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel Im Westen nichts Neues. But

it is only the best known. Moreover, many early European and British cultural products

of World War I were widely circulated in the United States even before the United States

entered the war.

[11] See Gary Alan Fine, Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and

Controversial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

[12] Craig Rahanian is now superintendent of the Somme American Cemetery, and Lorna Raha-

nian now refers to the soldiers buried there as ‘‘her sons.’’ Personal Interview, November

25, 2008.

[13] G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, DC: Smithsonian

Institution Press, 1995).

[14] Mitchell A. Yockelson, Borrowed Soldiers: Americans Under British Command, 1918

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008).

[15] Blerancourt was already the site of much philanthropic activity on the part of American

women, especially that organized by CARD (Comite Americain pour les Regions Devas-

tees). It is now the location of a museum, le Musee National de la Cooperation

Franco-americain. See Veronique Leleu, ed., Des Americaines en Picardie: Au Service de la

France Devastee, 1917–1924 (Peronne, France: L’Historial de la Grande Guerre, 2002).

[16] Merry, ‘‘National Defense and Public Speaking,’’ 54.

[17] Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006).


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Rethinking the First World War

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