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Remembering World War I in America
Poised to become a significant player in the new world order, the United States truly came of age during and after World War I. Yet many Americans think of the Great War simply as a precursor to World War II. Americans, including veterans, hastened to put experiences and memories of the war years behind them, reflecting a general apathy about the war that had developed during the 1920s and 1930s and never abated.
In Remembering World War I in America Kimberly J. Lamay Licursi explores the American public’s collective memory and common perception of World War I by analyzing the extent to which it was expressed through the production of cultural artifacts related to the war. Through the analysis of four vectors of memory—war histories, memoirs, fiction, and film—Lamay Licursi shows that no consistent image or message about the war ever arose that resonated with a significant segment of the American population. Not many war histories materialized, war memoirs did not capture the public’s attention, and war novels and films presented a fictional war that either bore little resemblance to the doughboys’ experience or offered discordant views about what the war meant. In the end Americans emerged from the interwar years with limited pockets of public memory about the war that never found compromise in a dominant myth.
In Remembering World War I in America Kimberly J. Lamay Licursi explores the American public’s collective memory and common perception of World War I by analyzing the extent to which it was expressed through the production of cultural artifacts related to the war. Through the analysis of four vectors of memory—war histories, memoirs, fiction, and film—Lamay Licursi shows that no consistent image or message about the war ever arose that resonated with a significant segment of the American population. Not many war histories materialized, war memoirs did not capture the public’s attention, and war novels and films presented a fictional war that either bore little resemblance to the doughboys’ experience or offered discordant views about what the war meant. In the end Americans emerged from the interwar years with limited pockets of public memory about the war that never found compromise in a dominant myth.
294 pages, Hardcover
Published March 1, 2018
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May 29, 2024
In some ways this monograph is a little slight for the topic at hand, but the author provides a useful function by examining the failures of the efforts to provide an official meaning for war, as compared to how the general public tried to come to terms with what the war did to them.
This first case is illustrated by how the grand plans to produce state-level official histories for the most part failed to get off the ground, often done in by grim non-cooperation by the veterans themselves. Sometimes this was due to not wanting to revisit the trauma of it all themselves, sometimes to feeling as though they were sold a pack of lies as to what the war really meant, sometimes due to resentment at the lack of recognition and support when it counted, and, sometimes, simply due to feeling that the whole matter was unseemly. At the very least these men were not interested in being the pawns of a political perspective they wanted no part of. This suggests that while the start of the war partook of the narrative of state-building and reunion via battle, by the end of it all that particular effort to create a usable past was dead; not recognizing this is one of the points that undercuts this study.
As for how the American public did process the war, the author considers such media as books, magazines and pulps, and films. Lamay Licursi's insight is that the latter two categories is probably where most people received the fodder for their imaginations, as it's pointed out that the market for books was constrained, as compared to the people going to the movies and consuming disposable publications. The comparison might be that while the United States really didn't produce a novel like "All Quiet on the Western Front," it did come up with a film like "Sergeant York" that probably did a good job of representing the American psychological state of play before the experience of the Great War was subsumed by the experience of World War II.
Finally, speaking more broadly of the American experience of World War I, you could bluntly argue that there was much to forget since participation in that war went against our political traditions to that point, since it generated a tremendous amount of what can only be called domestic political oppression, and since it represented the death (as alluded to) of the strain of state-building by war-making illustrated by the Spanish-American War.
Originally written: July 12, 2019.
This first case is illustrated by how the grand plans to produce state-level official histories for the most part failed to get off the ground, often done in by grim non-cooperation by the veterans themselves. Sometimes this was due to not wanting to revisit the trauma of it all themselves, sometimes to feeling as though they were sold a pack of lies as to what the war really meant, sometimes due to resentment at the lack of recognition and support when it counted, and, sometimes, simply due to feeling that the whole matter was unseemly. At the very least these men were not interested in being the pawns of a political perspective they wanted no part of. This suggests that while the start of the war partook of the narrative of state-building and reunion via battle, by the end of it all that particular effort to create a usable past was dead; not recognizing this is one of the points that undercuts this study.
As for how the American public did process the war, the author considers such media as books, magazines and pulps, and films. Lamay Licursi's insight is that the latter two categories is probably where most people received the fodder for their imaginations, as it's pointed out that the market for books was constrained, as compared to the people going to the movies and consuming disposable publications. The comparison might be that while the United States really didn't produce a novel like "All Quiet on the Western Front," it did come up with a film like "Sergeant York" that probably did a good job of representing the American psychological state of play before the experience of the Great War was subsumed by the experience of World War II.
Finally, speaking more broadly of the American experience of World War I, you could bluntly argue that there was much to forget since participation in that war went against our political traditions to that point, since it generated a tremendous amount of what can only be called domestic political oppression, and since it represented the death (as alluded to) of the strain of state-building by war-making illustrated by the Spanish-American War.
Originally written: July 12, 2019.
Displaying 1 of 1 review