World War I

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WORLD WAR I

The United States entered World War I in April 1917. By 11 November 1918, Armistice Day, it had sent an army of two million across the Atlantic and had contributed decisively to the defeat of Germany and the Central Powers. The brief involvement brought about the end of American isolation from the politics and tensions of Europe. It also increased the country's knowledge about industrial production, mass organization, and the destructive capacities of modern science. Over the succeeding two decades and beyond, these experiences flowed into American social life, politics, and literature. Writers who had lived through the war often invoked the conflict, overtly or by implication, as the threshold that they had crossed on a journey to personal and artistic maturity, political commitment, or a rejection of the compromised values of an earlier era. This idea is expressed in the lines of the poet Amy Lowell:

For I have time for nothing

But the endeavor to balance myself

Upon a broken world.

(P. 45)

THE DECISION

When President Woodrow Wilson went before the United States Congress on 2 April 1917 to request the power to declare war on the Empire of Germany, the greater part of Europe and the Near East had been at war for almost three years. The spark that ignited the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina on 28 June 1914. Within a few weeks, a sequence of diplomatic threats, military mobilizations, and activation of treaty alliances culminated in full-scale hostilities throughout Europe. The so-called Triple Entente, an alliance between Britain, France, and Russia (a group later known, after the inclusion of Italy, as the Allies) found itself at war with the Central Powers, consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. Initially, the German invasion forces gained ground in Belgium and France but then found their progress blocked. From that point on, the war was marked by a combination of strategic stalemate, makeshift fortifications, and the profitless, mutual massacres that became known as trench warfare. By 1917 the so-called Western Front of the war extended for four hundred miles, from the English Channel to the Swiss border. The casualties suffered by all sides had been, and continued to be, immense. The war abounded in new and frightening technologies such as the flame-thrower, poison gas, and the submarine. The latter (originally an American invention from the time of the Civil War) came into its own in the shape of the German U-boats that scoured the Atlantic for British and French shipping. Merchant ships and vessels from neutral countries were also targeted by the U-boats.

In the United States, public opinion was divided, although the desire to keep the war on the other side of the ocean initially tended to override all other loyalties. The print media were flooded by various kinds of partisan propaganda as well as appeals for strict American neutrality. The chosen forms were not restricted to reporting and opinion pieces: in an era where poetry still found a place in the pages of newspapers, pro-British verse, for example, could appear in prompt, angry response to an anti-British poem that had appeared a day or two earlier. Beyond the shadowboxing, the first incident to touch Americans in any substantial way was the sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania by a German U-Boat off the southwestern coast of Ireland on 7 May 1915, an attack that cost over a thousand lives including those of about 125 American citizens. Despite the ambiguous status of the ship with its cargo of munitions and its defensive armaments, much of the public saw only the cold-blooded murder of civilians and rejected German attempts at justification. For his part, President Wilson took a sharp and uncompromising line with the German government. The Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, was a convinced pacifist and neutralist and resigned after the Lusitania incident, believing that Wilson was mentally preparing for war with Germany. Wilson, however, ran for a second term as president in 1916 with neutrality as his central plank. His election to a second term suggested that Americans were still unwilling to risk lives and assets in a foreign conflict, despite a broadly supportive attitude toward Britain and France.

The revelation in early 1917 of the so-called Zimmermann Note, however, sparked a furious reaction in America. Actually an intercepted telegram, the message revealed that the German government was seeking a covert arrangement with the government of Mexico; in return for war assistance, the Germans promised to help Mexico recover territories lost to the United States in 1848. (The Mexican government denied any responsibility for the plan and declined the German offer.) This development helped convince President Wilson that nonintervention was no longer an option—much to the relief of the Allies, who knew that American troops in large numbers represented the only real possibility of victory on the Western Front. With the admission that the note was genuine and the announcement by Germany that it would begin unrestricted submarine warfare against any ships supplying the Allies, the antiwar movement found itself suddenly confused and divided. On 6 April 1917 the United States officially declared war on Germany.

The recruitment and training of a large military force began immediately. As American society organized itself behind the war effort, an overconfident take-charge mood prevailed, reflected in George M. Cohan's famous song "Over There" ("The Yanks are coming. . . . / And we won't come back till it's over over there"). Under the command of General John J. Pershing, the first units of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) shipped out for Europe during the summer of 1917. Known as the doughboys, the U.S. forces represented an enthusiastic but untried military that would be, for the first time, an American army at war on the European mainland. They were not, however, the first Americans to take up arms.

"CONSCRIPTS OF DESTINY"

For some Americans, Paris had become the alternative to native cultural provinciality. For such people, the German invasion of France and Belgium in August 1914 was not merely a European crisis but a threat to the existence of civilization itself. Before the United States entered the war, American citizens had joined other armies to fight, as they saw it, for a cosmopolitan patriotism. The American squadron in the French Air Corps, known as the Lafayette Escadrille, was perhaps the most glamorous example. The poet Alan Seeger (1888–1916) no doubt spoke for many in his article in the New Republic in 1915:

"I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH"

For many young men in the early part of the war, its potential for trials of courage, suffering, and death seemed to fill them with reverence and a desire for self-sacrifice. This was true on all sides in the conflict, and Alan Seeger was one of the many who wrote in prose and verse about their vision.

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When Spring comes back with rustling shade

And apple-blossoms fill the air—

I have a rendezvous with Death

When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath—

It may be I shall pass him still.

I have a rendezvous with Death

on some scarred slope of battered hill,

When Spring comes round again this year

And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep

Pillowed in silk and scented down,

Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .

But I've a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Alan Seeger, "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," North American Review 204, no. 4 (October 1916): 594.

Paris was in peril. ...Without renouncing their nationality they had yet chosen to make their homes here beyond any other city in the world. Did not the benefits and the blessings they had received point them a duty that heart and conscience could not deny? (P. 66)

Seeger was a Harvard graduate who had traveled in Mexico and Europe before settling on Paris as his home. He joined the French Foreign Legion in 1915. His letters to his parents and occasional articles in journals reveal an intense love of France and the French, as well as the kind of romantic insouciance that marked the English poetic style at that early stage of the war, when the full force of the ongoing slaughter had not quite penetrated the public mind. His manuscripts were collected by friends and published posthumously in 1916, but the traditional diction of the poems and their uncritical approval of the war led to the marginalization of his work in the postwar literary landscape. Today he is remembered for only one poem, "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," originally published in The North American Review, whose solemn cadences and naked lyricism combine to express acceptance of—almost a wish for—martyrdom in battle. Alan Seeger was killed during the night of 4–5 July 1916.

A fictional treatment of the fusion of aesthetic sensibility and belief in the universal value of French civilization appears in the work of Edith Wharton (1862–1937), who already had an established literary career of two decades' standing. Her attitudes emerge most strongly in the novella The Marne (1918). The young protagonist, Troy Belknap, is deeply influenced by his vacations in France as a boy and by his beloved tutor, Paul Gantier. When war breaks out in 1914, Troy is fifteen years old and frustrated by his youth and inability to join the struggle to defend France. Back home in the United States, he finds a smug isolationism to be the dominant attitude. He feels a sense of responsibility toward Gantier, who is killed in fighting along the Marne River. In 1917, on his eighteenth birthday, Troy leaves for Europe to drive an ambulance in France. Later, after the arrival of American troops offers him an unexpected chance to join the fighting at Château-Thierry, his feelings toward his homeland change radically.

Edward Estlin Cummings, later to become e.e. cummings (1894–1962), poet of lower-case name and experimental punctuation, went to Europe in 1915 as a driver with the Norton-Harjes Volunteer Ambulance Corps. A series of misunderstandings on the part of the French censorship authorities led to the arrest of Cummings and a friend in October 1917, which in turn led to imprisonment for three months in the La Ferté military detention center. This experience, combining personal hardship with the sense of being helpless before a Kafkaesque military bureaucracy, was the basis for Cummings's first book The Enormous Room (1922). The title refers to the holding cell in the prison, which was home to a diverse company of unfortunate men from all over Europe. His account is permeated by images of degradation and brutality, thrown into sharp relief by the poised, self-deprecating narrative voice that seems to be the protagonist's only protection against his environment.

BATTLE FRONT, HOME FRONT

As the country prepared for war in 1917, the Wilson administration encouraged labor to put class interests aside in favor of a unified national effort. Those who failed to compromise were ostracized and sometimes, as in the case of the socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs, put in prison. The relationship between federal authority and corporate America was also difficult at times. For both business and government, the war brought about confrontations over the ominous fact that inefficiency (in railroad management and operations, for example) could be profitable and difficult to eradicate. In contrast to World War II a generation later, the World War I performance of American industry in respect to logistics and supply for the troops overseas was unimpressive.

The struggle to exact "100% Americanism" from immigrant communities began to distort culture and education. Even before the United States entered the war, there were tensions between ethnic communities such as the Irish Americans, whose agenda involved support for nationalist resistance to British authority in Ireland, and the eastern establishment, who distrusted Catholics and inclined toward a pro-British view of the world. Americans of German and Austrian extraction were naturally somewhat divided in their feelings. After war was declared, suggestions of unpatriotic attitudes metastasized into a broad attack on German literature and thought, much to the disgust of people who saw a kind of cultural mob rule at work. "What on earth is the use of suddenly running down Goethe. . . . Why write books to prove he started the war . . . ?" (p. 150) wonders Amory Blaine, the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920). Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler told faculty at the commencement ceremony in 1917 that the articulation of antiwar views would no longer be tolerated on campus. The broad front of the pragmatist philosophical movement, taking in writers such as John Dewey and Randolph Bourne and activists such as Jane Addams, split over support for the war. This division suggested that the implications for the future were enough to divide people who had been through much controversy and acrimony over the previous twenty years and who largely shared each other's attitudes and views. The war, and particularly the United States' intervention, cast a shadow over the progressive causes of the early twentieth century. These intellectuals had not suddenly become conservatives, but the war made them realize that they no longer agreed on what was and was not progressive. Indeed, new, radical political models such as Soviet communism were transforming the parameters of political loyalty and belief. The journalist and war reporter John Reed (1887–1920)—a graduate of the same Harvard class as Alan Seeger—came to see economic and political imperialism and class warfare as ultimately more important than conflicts between nations. Embracing the communist cause, Reed went on to write Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), a dramatic account of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. After his early death in 1920, he was buried in the Kremlin.

The scholar and writer W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), editor of The Crisis (a journal dedicated to advocacy for African Americans), devoted much time to encouraging blacks to join the armed forces and whites to accept the reality of black comrades-in-arms. The resistance to that pressure, however, particularly with respect to black officer commissions, training, and combat assignments, was stubborn inside and outside the armed forces. Nonetheless, for many African American servicemen France was an unforgettable experience. Socializing with white Frenchmen and women in unsegregated social contexts—much to the irritation of white American military personnel—the soldiers discovered a sense of freedom and social worth, and the experience resonated for many decades in the idealization of Paris and the French among black Americans. As Du Bois wrote in The Crisis in March 1919:

The American army is going to return to America determined to disparage the black officer and eliminate him from the army despite his record. And the black officer and private? They return at once bitter and exalted! They will not submit to American caste and they will ever love France! (P. 223)

Du Bois knew that black American units had been prevented from marching in the Bastille Day victory parade in Paris with their white fellow soldiers, something that had been an unchallenged right of French colonial troops from Africa. After that casually malicious gesture on the part of U.S. military authorities, it was perhaps no surprise that the stateside reality to which African American soldiers returned was also a bleak one, marked by race riots in northern cities in 1919. Nevertheless, the war had brought about subtle but irreversible changes in racial attitudes, and service overseas had shown many African Americans another world.

THE DEATH OF NAÏVETÉ

The 1920s and 1930s saw the appearance of a number of books set during the war, often with an antiheroic posture that echoed the dogged attitude of the ordinary recruit rather than the self-sacrificial enthusiasm of volunteers like Alan Seeger. John Dos Passos (1896–1970) published his long and angry novel Three Soldiers in 1921, a story of how the personality can be dehumanized and destroyed by military organization. The three men of the title, Fuselli, Chrisfield, and Andrews—from an urban working-class, a farming, and an educated middle-class background, respectively—come to know each other in the army. Each meets with frustration and brutality at the hands of the authorities. The chapter titles "Making the Mould," "The Metal Cools," "Machines," and "Rust" suggest anonymous industrial processes and the mass production of soldiers and weaponry alike. As Andrews says finally: "I'm sick of being ordered round. One more order shouted at my head is not worth living to be eighty" (p. 426). Dos Passos would go on to transform the motif of Americans at war into a more complex and powerful form in his 1932 novel 1919, the second volume in the U.S.A. trilogy.

THE "DOUGHBOYS"

The term for the American soldier in World War I has a mysterious etymology. The word goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century and may have its roots in the Mexican-American war of 1846–1848. One theory is that the pipe clay used to whiten the uniform belts worn by American troops had the appearance of the white clay used for adobe-based bricks, and the word "adobe" morphed into an English acoustic equivalent, "doughboy," which began in turn to attach to the soldier himself. Irrespective of its origins, that name failed to survive beyond World War I: "G.I." emerged in World War II, and to a large extent has remained to this day as a generic term for enlisted men and women in the U.S. Army.

The figure of the doughboy in Europe was also put on the stage in What Price Glory?, a dour, realistic play by Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959) and Laurence Stallings (1894–1968) about an AEF platoon stationed in a French village. It opened on Broadway in 1924 and was successful enough to permit Anderson to give up journalism and devote himself to a career as a playwright. Anderson's collaborator Stallings had put memories of his own war service in the AEF into the writing, and he would go on, over thirty years later, to write The Doughboys (1963), a subjective but conscientious history of the American soldier in France.

In 1926 William Faulkner (1897–1962), who had gone to Canada to enlist with the Royal Air Force as a pilot but was frustrated by the war's sudden end in November 1918, used the war as the backdrop to his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926). The return of a disfigured veteran, Lieutenant Mahon, to his southern home town and his failure to reach any mutual understanding with the people who surround him is not only a narrative of trauma and death but also a vehicle for Faulkner to illuminate the social and emotional makeup of the contemporary South. More successful than Faulkner at getting near the fighting, Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) left his Kansas City reporter's job and joined a field medical unit with the Italian infantry. Out of this experience came, among other works, his third novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). The story of Frederic Henry and his doomed love affair with the English nurse Catherine Barkley is a modern romance carried on under the pressure of war. The chaos and possibility of injury and death are refracted through a laconic, pared-down style of writing for which Hemingway was to be praised, excoriated, and parodied. Nonetheless, the sparse dialogue and the grim ending represented, for many readers, the most authentic effort yet made by a writer to structure the meaning of his war experience, not only in the plot and the characters but also in the most intimate workings of his prose style.

The novel Company K by William March (a pen-name for William Edward March Campbell, 1893–1954) appeared in 1933. March, himself a much-decorated veteran, composed a series of 113 vignettes, each giving a particular soldier's perception of the company's journey from training camp through the fighting and into the postwar era. The narrative moves along laterally from one perspective to another, but a defining moment comes when the massacre of a group of German prisoners is ordered by the company commander, Captain Matlock—an act that psychologically destroys many of the men who take part in the shooting. After the war, one ex-soldier comes to believe that the misfortunes his family and their farm are suffering are retribution for his participation in the massacre, and he shoots himself. The organization of Company K reflects the combination of anonymity and shared intensity experienced by members of a combat unit. It suggests an atomized universe in which private thoughts and subjective psychic processes have very little to do with structures imposed from above, whether it be orders from officers or the hollow invocation of theological legitimacy for the war by military chaplains.

The delayed disillusion of a war veteran was reflected in another way—and in another media—in the early 1930s. As the Great Depression hit its peak, a young singer named Bing Crosby had a hit with his version of a song cowritten by the lyricist E. Y. Harburg, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" Its narrator is a World War I veteran fallen on hard times who is ignored by former acquaintances as he panhandles on the street.

CONSEQUENCES

Despite the joyous celebrations on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, as crowds cheered and danced in the streets of cities across America, the problems of peace were to prove to be as complex as the demands of war. The Great War (as it became known in Europe) had become the most sustained mass slaughter in human history. Against the backdrop of several million French, British, Russian, German and other warrelated deaths, American losses of approximately 49,000 in combat and 73,000 from other causes out of a total AEF combat strength of 1.1 million troops on active duty seemed almost insignificant. The relatively low casualty figures and short duration of direct American involvement in the war, however, are misleading. The reverberations of the war—including the creation of the Soviet Union—in culture, economic life, and political loyalties would be heard in America through the prosperity of the 1920s, the economic crisis of the 1930s, and into the gathering storm of the next major conflict. The seeds of future hostilities were sown at the postwar Paris Conference (January to June 1919), which sought to regulate the new international situation and provide for appropriate arrangements with a defeated Germany: these arrangements were known as the Treaty of Versailles. Although the Armistice had been accepted originally on the basis of President Wilson's far-sighted "Fourteen Points" (promising, among other things, open diplomacy, self-determination, and fair treatment for the defeated nations) the final treaty was regarded by Germans as a humiliating punishment—the result of the uncompromising position of the French. The questions of German responsibilities, territorial losses, and reparations formed only one dimension of the Paris negotiations, however.

The collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires had brought new nations into being and created new territorial problems from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf. Sometimes decisions made in Paris caused disaster elsewhere. Hemingway's brief short story "On the Quai at Smyrna" is a literary snapshot of the human suffering that followed an ill-advised plan to redraw territorial boundaries in western Turkey. Attempts on the part of Britain and France to block many of Wilson's proposed reforms of the international order soured the postwar era. Also, the United States' propensity to raise wildly optimistic expectations with its rhetoric of high moral purpose—expectations it could not satisfy—meant that much of the Versailles legacy was hatred and unresolved national and ethnic problems in Europe and the Middle East. The League of Nations, the world assembly that many fervently hoped would be the tool to avoid future armed conflicts, was hobbled before it could start by the disinterest of the European powers, impossible procedural rules, and the absence of the United States. (Congress failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and refused to approve the country's membership in the League.) President Wilson suffered a massive stroke in October 1919 and was incapacitated for the remainder of his term. The League of Nations, despite its birth among a chorus of good intentions, failed to exert influence on any significant military conflict during the two decades of its existence and was rendered irrelevant by the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

Some major constitutional reforms were probably accelerated by the war: the Eighteenth (Prohibition) and Nineteenth (women's suffrage) Amendments to the United States Constitution were the most important; the short life of the Eighteenth Amendment became an object lesson in the problems of trying to legislate social behavior. Some individuals and their actions would retain a niche in popular memory. The infantryman Sergeant Alvin Cullum York (1887–1964) and the aviator Captain Edward Vernon ("Eddie") Rickenbacker (1890–1973) were two such figures. Both were decorated war heroes who came from unassuming backgrounds—York from a remote corner of Appalachia and Rickenbacker from a Swiss American family in Columbus, Ohio—and their exploits became triumphal symbols of the American character. The transformation of that symbolism into organizational power was reflected in the founding of the American Legion in 1919. The legion would become the nation's largest veterans' organization and, at times, a powerful conservative lobby. It gave ex-servicemen not only effective representation on the national level but also a vehicle by which the atmosphere, loyalties, and hierarchies of military service could be retained in somewhat diluted form in civilian life.

THE EDGE OF MEMORY

A memorable later effort by an author to use World War I as a setting was William Faulkner's allegorical novel A Fable (1954). In this ambitious work (which won a Pulitzer Prize), the execution of a young French soldier on charges of pacifism and mutiny becomes a modern parable of a Christ-like sacrifice which embodies an appeal to reject war forever.

In the decades since A Fable was published, World War I has largely vanished as a theme or backdrop in American literature, drama, and cinema, even for writers looking for new angles on issues of race, conflict, and sexuality. (Indeed, parts of the war's history—the volunteer ambulance drivers, for example, or the African American soldiers' experiences in France—beg for some author or filmmaker to take up the story in an original way.) This lack of attention is a contrast to other American wars such as World War II and Vietnam. The Civil War also receives significantly more attention than World War I, even though it is more historically distant. The memory and meaning of those conflicts are still, for good or ill, inspirations for literary and cultural work in the United States. Perhaps involvement in World War I was too short-lived, and the subsequent marginalization of American ideas and interests, reflected in President Wilson's physical and political decline, proved too discouraging for extended consideration. Unlike the still-resonant names of Shiloh, Normandy, or Khe Sanh, the battlegrounds of World War I such as Château-Thierry and Meuse-Argonne have become obscure, on the far edge of American historical memory.