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.
General
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