Until now, scholars have portrayed America's antiwar literature
as an outgrowth of World War I, manifested in the works of writers
such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. But in War No More,
Cynthia Wachtell corrects the record by tracing the steady and
inexorable rise of antiwar writing in American literature from the
Civil War to the eve of World War I.
Beginning with an examination of three very different renderings
of the chaotic Battle of Chickamauga -- a diary entry by a northern
infantry officer, a poem romanticizing war authored by a young
southerner a few months later, and a gruesome story penned by the
veteran Ambrose Bierce -- Wachtell traces the gradual shift in the
late nineteenth century away from highly idealized depictions of
the Civil War. Even as the war was under way, she shows, certain
writers -- including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, John William De
Forest, and Nathaniel Hawthorne -- quietly questioned the meaning
and morality of the conflict.
As Wachtell demonstrates, antiwar writing made steady gains in
public acceptance and popularity in the final years of the
nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth,
especially during the Spanish-American War and the war in the
Philippines. While much of the era's war writing continued the long
tradition of glorifying battle, works by Bierce, Stephen Crane,
Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, William James, and others
increasingly presented war as immoral and the modernization and
mechanization of combat as something to be deeply feared. Wachtell
also explores, through the works of Theodore Roosevelt and others,
the resistance that the antiwar impulse met.
Drawing upon a wide range of published and unpublished sources,
including letters, diaries, essays, poems, short stories, novels,
memoirs, speeches, magazine and newspaper articles, and religious
tracts, Wachtell makes strikingly clear that pacifism had never
been more popular than in the years preceding World War I. War No
More concludes by charting the development of antiwar literature
from World War I to the present, thus offering the first
comprehensive overview of one hundred and fifty years of American
antiwar writing.
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