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Americans today harbor no strong or consistent collective memory of the First World War. Ask why they fought or what they accomplished, and "democracy" is the most likely if vague response.
The circulation of confusing or lofty rationales for intervention started from the moment President Woodrow Wilson secured a war declaration in April 1917. Yet amid those shifting justifications, Love and Death in the Great War argues, was a more durable and resonant one: Americans would fight for home and family.
Intervention came at a moment when arbiters of tradition regarded those very institutions-the white family in particular-under pressure from all sides: industrial work, women's employment, immigration, urban vice, woman suffrage, and most incendiary, the imagined threat of black sexual aggression. Alleged German crimes in France and Belgium seemed to further imperil women and children. Americans would fight, many said, to protect the family literally, but also indirectly. War promised to
restore convention, stabilize gender roles, and sharpen male character.
Love and Death in the Great War tracks such ideas of redemptive war across public and private spaces, policy and implementation, home and front, popular culture and personal correspondence. Huebner merges untold stories of men and women from Missouri, Wisconsin, Alabama, Louisiana, and other places with a history of wartime culture. Studying the radiating impact of war alongside the management of opinion, he recovers the conflict's emotional dimensions-its everyday rhythms, heartbreaking
losses, soaring possibilities, and broken promises.
Telling the war story as a love story, however, generated contradictions and challenges, some subtle, some transformative, some violent. African Americans and women serving in the army disrupted narratives of white chivalric rescue. Military life proved inhospitable to virtue. Death and injury brought destruction not regeneration. An army of mostly drafted men sought recompense for lives interrupted as much as patriotic or personal credibility. After the Great War, the mobilization of real and
symbolic families would never quite look the same again.
List of contents
- Note on Sources
- Prologue
- Chapter 1: Johnny Get Your Gun
- Chapter 2: Make Your Daddy Glad
- Chapter 3: Tell Your Sweetheart not to Pine
- Chapter 4: The Yanks are Coming
- Chapter 5: So Prepare, Say a Prayer
- Chapter 6: Yankee Doodle Do or Die
- Chapter 7: It's Over Over There
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Andrew J. Huebner is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era.
Summary
Love and Death in the Great War merges the stories of several American families with analysis of wartime popular culture. It argues that family, in lived experience and as symbolic motivator, gave the war meaning, recovering the conflict's personal dimensions. But that narrative had undergone transformative challenges by war's end.
Additional text
Love and Death in the Great War is a well-written, insightful, and cogent telling of wartime culture in America during World War I, and it makes a significant contribution to an understanding of the presence, power, and permanency of such crucial concepts as love and family as well as their complex and interwoven relationship with World War I... Students, scholars, and general readers alike should all profit from reading Huebner's vivid telling of and cogent analysis about such a critical moment in American history.
Report
There have been few attempts to bind the home- and war-front worlds. So, it is with pleasure and relief that one can now turn to Andrew J. Huebner's book as a work that successfully bridges these divides and links microhistory with larger perspectives as it sensitively conveys how the worlds of home and war intermingled for those in the United States ... Starting with the era immediately before the United States entered the First World War and continuing through its armistice, Huebner's book helps us to understand the human scope of a war that often overwhelms us by its sheer numbers, both of those mobilised and those who died ... Huebner's work ... effectively brings the individual and family stories of this war into sharp focus in a way that should engage students and scholars alike. Susan R. Grayzel, English Historical Review
