On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941

by Steven Kirk Trout

This work is a detailed study of how Americans in the 1920s and 1930s interpreted and remembered the First World War. Steven Trout asserts that from the beginning American memory of the war was fractured and unsettled, more a matter of competing sets of collective memories—each set with its own spokespeople— than a unified body of myth. The members of the American Legion remembered the war as a time of assimilation and national harmony. However, African Americans and radicalized whites recalled a very different war, and so did many of the nation’s writers, filmmakers, and painters. Trout studies a wide range of cultural products for their implications concerning the legacy of the John Dos Passos’s novels Three Soldiers and 1919 , Willa Cather’s One of Ours , William March’s Company K , and Laurence Stallings’s Plumes ; paintings by Harvey Dunn, Horace Pippin, and John Steuart Curry; portrayals of the war in The American Legion Weekly and The American Legion Monthly; war memorials and public monuments like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; and commemorative products such as the twelve-inch tall Spirit of the American Doughboy statue. <!--? prefix = o ns = "" /-->Trout argues that American memory of World War I was not only confused and contradictory during the ‘20s and ‘30s, but confused and contradictory in ways that accommodated affirmative interpretations of modern warfare and military service. Somewhat in the face of conventional wisdom, Trout shows that World War I did not destroy the glamour of war for all, or even most, Americans and enhanced it for many.

Genres: World War I

344 pages, Hardcover

First published August 22, 2010

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a wonderful study on all the ways in which Americans memorialized WWI – the Great War – before the start of WWII. On a personal level, I enjoyed all the connections to Kansas City, and even Kansas with the section n John Steuart Curry, and the highlighting of the WWI Museum and Liberty Memorial from which I work right across the street, and the Liberty Memorial is by far my favorite memorial so I loved that Trout included a discussion of it.

Trout had a great command of the subject. The chapter on the rise of the American Legion and the power it exerted over American memory was fascinating. Trout did a wonderful job of detailing how even within a single organization the memory of WWI was fractured and filled with tension.

And it was a well-written book. Trout kept tight control over his subject matter and successfully resisted whatever urges he may have had to wander off topic. He was succinct, but also thorough. He covered a lot of ground, and yet his prose stayed fresh and engaging.

I highly recommend this to anyone interested in WWI and the interwar period.