World War I, Mass Death, and the Birth of the Modern US Soldier: A Rhetorical History

by David W Seitz

World War I, Mass Death, and the Birth of the Modern US A Rhetorical History examines the United States government’s postwar ideological and rhetorical project in establishing permanent national military cemeteries abroad. Constructed throughout Europe where citizen-soldiers had fought and perished, and sacralized as American sites, these burial grounds simultaneously linked the nation’s war dead back to American soil and the national purpose rooted there, expressed the nation’s emerging prominent role on the world’s stage, and advanced the burgeoning icon of the “sacrificial, universal” US soldier. It draws upon untapped archival and historical materials from the WWI and interwar periods, as well as original on-site research, to show how the cemeteries came to display and advance the vision of the modern US soldier as “a global force for good.” Ultimately, within the visual display of overseas cemeteries we can detect the birth of “the modern US soldier”—a potent icon in which divergent emotions, memories, beliefs, and arguments of Americans and non-Americans have been expressed for a century.

342 pages, Hardcover

Published June 20, 2018

Reviews

[George Siehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work of scholarship closely examines the rhetoric that was employed to tell the story of World War I to the American public before, during, and after the U.S. entry into that war. A central focus is on the increasingly governmental role in conveying that story as it came to involve the death of American soldiers overseas. Rhetoric here includes elements such as the written and spoken word, architecture, military cemeteries, and landscape in the shaping of public memory of the war for Americans. Seitz extensively reviews the graphic newspaper coverage of the early war that portrayed it as a vast slaughter-house. He then describes the work of the federal government to attenuate that view as American troops entered the conflict. The agency established by President Wilson to enforce this news management was the Committee on Public Information, "the nation's first propaganda ministry."

A strength of the book is its account of the government's dealing with the war dead. Early communications with the families of these casualties was insensitive. This rhetoric was gradually amended, largely in reaction to the tone used by the families in their communications. A fundamental concern of Seitz is the creation of the American military cemeteries in Europe. He describes the communications between the government and the affected families over returning the soldiers' remains or consigning them to burial oversees "where they fell." Particularly interesting is his extended discussion and description of these overseas cemeteries. He notes that the ultimate authority over the design and operation of these sites was vested in an obscure advisory group, the Commission on Fine Arts. The CFA was first formed to advise on parks and public spaces, sites of public commemorations, and memorials in Washington, DC. Its authority came to cover such elements as coinage, and in 1921, overseas military cemeteries. While it was composed of noted authorities in the fine arts--artists, architects, landscape architects, for instance-- there was public concern at the lack of public input or any representation by the military community in planning these new cemeteries. General John J. Pershing came to provide the latter expertise, and he was actively involved in the planning and development of the eight overseas cemeteries through his chairmanship of the American Battle Monuments Commission. It had an impact, although Seitz characterizes the ABMC as "a kind of Trojan Horse--an impressive and symbolically potent, but ultimately empty, vessel that could clandestinely smuggle the CFA's plans across the Atlantic and European borders." Pershing's reputation carried more weight with European authorities than the CFA, despite its domestic clout.

This is an interesting and informing account of communication across an array of rhetorical modes. Overall, Seitz finds, "it is in the eight overseas cemeteries where we see the birth (as well as most explicit and effective articulation) of the ideograph of the sacrificial, universal, modern U.S. soldier.

While this is a work of scholarship, in which Seitz takes issue with earlier work in this field, it should not deflect a general reader from examining the story he tells.