America and the Great War: an Interdisciplinary Seminar in Literature and History

America and the Great War: An Interdisciplinary Seminar in Literature and History

Dear Colleague,

Our NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers will explore America's involvement with the First World War. Drawing on literature, history, and visual artifacts, we will look at the ways in which the Great War affected the United States (the “Home Front”), the nature of American participation in the War (the “War Front”), and how Americans represented, remembered, and memorialized the War in the decades following its ending in November 1918.

The Great War had a profound effect on world history. It shattered a century of relative peace, raising profound questions about human nature, politics, and progress that we are still dealing with. Communism, Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Cold War, NATO, and the UN were only possible in its aftermath. Modern literature, modern art, and Freudian psychology developed or were popularized in its wake. For the first time, governments worked to integrate the War Front and the Home Front (concepts invented during the War), and at its end women in many nations received the vote. The mobilization of all aspects of science by governments, the alliance of the military and industry, the welfare state, and economic planning began during World War I. The War also changed forever how Western societies remember wars. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the endless listing of the names of ordinary soldiers, and national days of remembrance in almost every country in Europe and the English-speaking world date from the First World War. In many ways, then, the War has shaped our world down to the present.

Historians of the United States are now recognizing that the Great War is much more important to modern American history than has been thought—to put it differently, that the “great war” in modern American history may not be World War II. The Great War intersected with and influenced enormous post-Civil War changes in the United States: industrial expansion and technological innovation, the transition from a primarily rural to a predominantly urban society, huge waves of immigration from eastern and southern Europe, dramatic developments in transportation and communication, the campaign for women’s suffrage, the Great Migration of African-Americans from the south to industrial and commercial centers in the middle west and northeast, and the acquisition of colonies during the 1898 Spanish-American War. Pivotal components of America’s industrial and agricultural economy experienced dramatic growth because of the demands occasioned by American supply to belligerent nations long before the American Expeditionary Force sailed to France. The War impacted the Constitution, leading to women’s suffrage on the one hand but curtailing civil liberties on the other, with wartime passage of new Alien and Sedition Acts. Participation in the War gave the United States a place on the world stage for the first time, but also led to post-War isolationist restrictions on immigration. The War also increased the size and importance of the federal government, shifting the country’s center of power to Washington; dragged the American military into modernity; disrupted or destroyed progressive labor and social reforms; and introduced the United States to dramatic changes in literature and the visual and performing arts in which numerous Americans then played a role. Our five-week seminar will draw on this belated recognition.

One assumption of our seminar is that literature and history do not exist in a one-to-one correlation, but instead play off of each other in complex ways. Another is that war, a major human activity, is reflected in a great range of texts. We do not define war literature as synonymous with “battlefield” texts, because large-scale, mechanized, modern war affects a wide variety of people in complicated ways. Thus we will be working with female and male authors, canonical and little-known writing, texts set on and off the War Front, and written both during and after the War.

Seminar Highlights

We will begin with a buffet dinner and informal gathering at the home of Prof. Ted Wilson on Sunday, June 27, 2010, the night before the Seminar begins. Another highlight of Week I will be a field trip to the Liberty Memorial and National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, the only full-fledged institution in the United States entirely devoted to World War I (see Week I). The Museum holds the largest collection of World War I artifacts in the U.S., its only rival in the world being the Imperial War Museum in Britain, and presents the War as the beginning of America’s encounter with modem war and its entrance into global politics.

We will take a second field trip (Week II) to nearby Fort Leavenworth, originally a frontier outpost established in 1827, which, as the Command and General Staff College, has served for more than a century as the primary educational experience for U.S. Army officers selected for staff and command appointments. The CGSC trained the generation of officers who, having served in World War I, went on to higher command in World War II. Today the CGSC is considered to be the intellectual center of matters military. Fort Leavenworth, an open post, is a center for research and study. It offers the student of World War I a wealth of documentary materials (housed in the internationally-renowned Combined Arms Research Library), historic structures dating from the Great War, and artifacts in the Frontier Army Museum.

Two on-campus opportunities will be organized in conjunction with the Seminar. The first is an exhibit of World War I art. Prof. Steven Goddard, Senior Curator at the Spenser Museum of Art, is mounting a major exhibit entitled "Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts" during spring semester 2010, and will remount a portion of it for the Seminar. During Week III we will view the exhibit as a group and also look at additional artifacts in his company. Finally, Prof. John Staniunas, who is Chair of Theatre and Film and a professional actor, will offer a summer season production of John E. Gray and Eric Peterson’s 1982 play Billy Bishop Goes to War, based on the life and memories of a famous Canadian World War I ace, in which he will take the lead (this involves playing fifteen different parts in addition to the title role). Participants will attend the performance of their choice.

During Week IV, we will be joined by Dr. Roger Spiller, an internationally-renowned historian whose focus is the history of military service in the United States Army in the 20th century. Prof. Spiller taught history for some twenty-five years at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and served as the Distinguished George C. Marshall Professor of History from 1992 until his retirement in 2005. The author of five books and more than sixty articles and essays, Spiller is especially interested in the attitudes and effects of modern war, the portrayal of military service in visual media, and in intersections between history and literature.

We will ask the participants to work with and write a short report on a primary document as their special contribution to the Seminar. In the category of “document” we place a wide variety of materials. Examples might include a few interrelated propaganda posters; letters home from an AEF soldier; the dairy of a troop-ship doctor; a first-person memoir published by an obscure local press; an American children’s book in which the main character (which may be an animal) joins the war effort; pamphlets directed at housewives by the federal government; or Edith Wharton’s Book of the Homeless, which was printed in limited copies and sold to raise funds for relief efforts, and which has never been reprinted. KU’s libraries and art museum possess all of these and many more. For participants with transportation and desire, numerous documents are available at the National WWI Museum and the Combined Arms Research Library. Staff members at these institutions will explain their resources during our field trips. After an informal meal at Prof. Janet Sharistanian’s house during Week V, participants will discuss their work, which will also circulate among Seminar members in electronic format. At the close of the seminar, the Directors will present participants with letters stating that their efforts are the equivalent of three graduate credit hours at the University of Kansas.

Seminar Schedule (28 June-30 July 2010)

We will meet in a comfortable room in the new Hall Center for the Humanities building four afternoons a week for three hours of discussion, with the remainder of the week available for preparation, field trips, and other activities.

Week I: A Broad Overview of America and the Great War

The first week will provide an overview of our topic based on presentations by the Seminar co-directors and selected historical and literary readings. On the historical side, our major text will be Jennifer D. Keene’s compact The United States and the First World War (2000). Keene focuses on how the War changed American society, whether the government used its power appropriately during the War, whether the War would give America a permanent role in world affairs, and whether it was a just war for the U.S. (Keene, 2-3). We will employ readings from David Kennedy’s classic account of American society during World War I, Over Here:The First World War and American Society (25th anniversary ed., 2004) to expand upon themes presented in Keene’s overview. The excerpted material from his study sets the stage for later discussions by confronting such issues as the national mood on the eve of war, conflicting depictions of the war by writers and critics, and initial efforts to memorialize and give meaning to the sacrifice of those who served.

On the literary side, we will read a manageable selection of short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose that sets out some of the range and complexity of Americans’ political and personal responses to the Great War before and during U.S. participation in the conflict. Additionally, these readings represent traditional, popular, and more experimental literary forms, and some readings explicitly address what it means to write literature about war. These texts will include a few pages from social activist Jane

Addams’ “Women and Internationalism” and journalist Mary Roberts Rinehart’s “No Man’s Land”; short fiction by William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Edith Wharton; and poetry by Louise Bogan, Alfred Bryan, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, John McRae, Alan Seeger, Wallace Stevens, and Louis Untermeyer, among others.

Week I will end with a trip to the National World War I Museum and Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, <http: where we will view the collections, visit the original structures of the Memorial, meet with the archivist, and—for those with a tolerance for heights—take the elevator to the top of the 217-foot Memorial Tower. This trip will allow Seminar participants to view, hear, and experience literally thousands of unique artifacts from the War: ration books, machine guns, paperbacks to be read in the trenches, gas masks, recruitment posters, artillery pieces, wartime diaries, trenching tools, regimental banners, photos, films, paintings, and songs.

Week II: The United States Enters and Organizes for War

The Seminar’s second week focuses first on the story of how and why the U.S. entered the Great War, the effects of the Wilson administration’s stance with regard to neutral rights and duties, and the responses of Americans who wrote about these events. A second emphasis, elaborated via the readings, discussions, and the visit to Fort Leavenworth, will be consideration of dramatic changes in the relationship between the federal government and the public resulting from wartime mobilization.

Readings that illustrate the domestic and international political maneuvers that attended the drift toward war in spring, 1917 include excerpts from Robert H. Ferrell’s Woodrow Wilson and World War I (1986) and John Whiteclay Chambers’ To Raise an Army:The Draft Comes to Modern America (1987). Ronald Schaffer's America in the Great War:The Rise of the War Welfare State (1991) makes clear the Wilson administration’s efforts to coordinate the push for rapid economic development with corporate interests and its pendulum swings between appeals to patriotism, exhortations to sacrifice, threats of dire punishment, and outright coercion. The government’s attempts to mobilize popular support for the War are analyzed in excerpts from Stephen Vaughn’s insightful study of the Creel Committee, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (1980), and Craig Campbell’s survey of government-sponsored propaganda films, Reel America and World War I (1985). We will also show clips from propaganda films discussed by Vaughn and Campbell.

Our literary reading for Week II will concentrate on Willa Cather’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, One of Ours (1922). One of Ours, which is based in part on the life of Cather’s cousin G. P. Cather, a member of the AEF who died in the Argonne Forest, as well as on soldiers’ diaries, letters, and conversations that Cather had with American veterans, is set on both the Home Front and the War Front, the two linked by a troop-ship voyage. Cather explores both differences and overlaps between “home” and “war” by focusing on a protagonist whose search for a sense of purpose in life eventually leads him to respond eagerly to the country’s call to arms. His reaction is fuelled in part by his revulsion toward the increasing materialism, mechanization, standardization, and intolerance of immigrants exhibited by his land-grabbing father and money-grubbing brothers and in part by his attraction to French culture and history, which he studied in college. Cather ends this novel with an ambiguous stance on the meaning of the war that both justifies and questions American participation in Europe’s conflict and thus makes for rich interpretation.

Week III: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Context of Wartime

Literary readings on race will include editorials, drama, poetry, and prose. W.E.B. DuBois will be well-representedin a series of editorials originally published in Crisis Magazine in which he first urged African Americans temporarily to ignore racial injustice and join in the national effort, but later expressed anger at the treatment of Black soldiers during and after the war. James Weldon Johnson’s “Why Should a Negro Fight?” (1918) provides a counterpoint to DuBois. Langston Hughes’s “The Colored Soldier” will be paired with Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s home front poem, “I Sit and Sew.” A group of 1918 poems by Lucien B. Watkins, Allen Tucker, and Mary P. Burrill exhibit sharp criticism of both war and government. Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,” written following the “Red Summer” of 1919 when anti-black riots broke out in several cities, and Burrill’s short play, Aftermath, also 1919, which dramatizes an African-American soldier returning home only to learn that his father has been lynched, form another pair of readings. The African-American selections end with Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “A Legend of Versailles: An Ex-Judge at the Bar.”

Women’s work in wartime—and their objections to war—form a second cluster. Women’s work will be represented by Addie Hunton and Kathryn Johnson’s official report on “The Y.M.C.A. and Other Welfare Organizations” (1920), three stylistically-experimental short stories by writer and nurse Mary Borden, journalist Helen G. E. Mackay’s “Americans,” and two realist short stories by another nurse, Ellen Newbold LaMotte. Women’s protests against war will include journalist Corra Harris’s “Women of England and Women of France” (1914), which argues that “All wars are waged against women and children,” and Edna Saint Vincent Millay’s dramatic monologue, “Conscientious Objector.” We will also read poems written from the perspective of immigrant Americans and across a spectrum of political positions. These include

German-American intellectual and propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, mainstream writer Lurana Sheldon, and radical poet Arturo Giovannitti. We will ground the literary readings in excerpted material from historical works that treat similar issues. These readings will be contextualized by excerpted material from historical studies that treat similar issues. A selection from Nicholas Patter’s Jim Crow and The Wilson Administration (2004) will illustrate the experiences of African Americans caught in the contradictions of a system of officially-endorsed white domination, while material from William M. Tuttle’s Race Riot: Chicago in The Red Summer of 1919 (rev. ed., 1996) shows how pent-up tensions among African-Americans and whites fearful of radicalism exploded into violence in the aftermath of the war.