Introduction: Faces of the War One a War Warning
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NOTES Introduction: Faces of the War 1. The War was released in September 2007. My book, having been written from 2003 through 2006, could not examine Burns’ documentary in detail. Having watched it and found it uniquely valuable, I have endeavored to include it briefly in my revised version. 2. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “Memorial Day,” in The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ed. Richard A. Posner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 80–87. One A War Warning 1. Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946, 1-Volume Paperback Edition (New York: Library of America, 2001), 760–761. 2. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 3–7. 3. See Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black’s Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) for thorough treatment of this period, esp. 17–34. 4. Information in this paragraph concerning the “Short of War” policy comes from Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1963), 29–30. 5. In this paragraph, factual information about American neutrality and opposition to anti- Nazi films in Hollywood comes from Koppes and Black, 1–16. 6. Until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, many on the American Left were also critical of Hollywood’s support for the Allies. 7. In this paragraph, my information on The March of Time series comes from Roger Manvell’s Films and the Second World War (New York: A Delta Book, Dell, 1974), 15–21, 86–92. 8. Once attacked by Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union would also take on the mantle of a defender of freedom, despite its history of purges and oppression. 9. Koppes and Black, 34. 10. Working for the Institute of International Education during the early 1930s, Murrow helped bring 335 German scholars, persecuted by the Nazis, to American universities. See 240 Notes Mark Bernstein and Alex Lubertozzi, World War II on the Air: Edward R. Murrow and the Broadcasts That Riveted a Nation (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks-mediaFusion, 2003), 22–23. 11. Throughout this and the subsequent three paragraphs, factual details about the work of Murrow and his correspondents is from Bernstein and Lubertozzi, 94–102. The sum- maries, analyses, and interpretations of his broadcasts are my own, based on listening to recordings accompanying the Bernstein/Lubertozzi text, as well as on reading the texts of those broadcasts as published in Edward R. Murrow’s This Is London (New York: Schocken Books, 1989). 12. Murrow, 181. 13. Murrow, 148. 14. Murrow, 144. 15. Murrow, 145–146. 16. Factual information in this paragraph represents general knowledge derived from wide reading about Murrow and his team. 17. President Franklin Roosevelt coined the term “Arsenal of Democracy” in a fireside chat on December 29, 1940. See “Fireside Chat, Dec. 29, 1940” in A Rendezvous with Destiny: Addresses and Opinions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ed. J. B. S. Hardman, 1944 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing Reprint, 2005), 164–173. 18. William L. Bird, Jr. and Harry R. Rubenstein, Design for Victory: World War II Posters on the American Home Front (New York: Princeton, 1998), 24. 19. Initiated by a New York philanthropist, the “Bundles for Britain” program collected both funds and homemade garments for the English. See “Give Us the Tools,” Time, March 3, 1941, 15–16. 20. For more on the “Flying Tigers,” see Geoffrey Perret’s Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II (New York: Random House, 1993), 63–65, 153–159. 21. Quoted in Joe Morella, Edward Z. Epstein, and John Griggs, The Films of World War II (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1975), 56. 22. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood generally represented World War I in antiwar films. From 1939 to 1941, however, Hollywood used World War I subject matter to give a prowar message. The Fighting 69th (1940) and Sergeant York (1941), quasi docudramas, brought back the positive quality of the old song lyric, “the Yanks are coming.” Two “Why We Fight” 1. Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 11. 2. Throughout this and the following paragraph, my information on these plans comes from Ronald H. Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), Chapter 2, esp. 55–59. 3. Japan’s attack, and our subsequent declaration of war against it, led both Germany and Italy, bound by treaty obligations, to declare war on the United States by December 11, 1941. America immediately reciprocated, bringing us to war with all Axis powers. The FDR administration had assumed that war with any Axis power would lead to war with the others. 4. One cannot help but think, today, of our preemptive strike against Baghdad that began our war in Iraq in March 2003. 5. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1963), 51–53, 69–76; Edwin T. Layton, “And I Was There”: Pearl Harbor and Midway—Breaking the Secrets (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 300–301. 6. Morison, 59. Notes 241 7. One may study the shaping of national consciousness from a variety of theoretical perspec- tives. Theorists such as Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser have examined how powerful cultural forces shape concepts of individual identity and group consciousness in mass cul- tures. Earlier, Jacques Ellul explored the structures of propaganda used by governments and other institutions to create social solidarity or to focus collective fear and anger—integration and agitation propaganda, respectively. These and other approaches are useful, but my inter- pretive approach examines what I call the “rhetoric of cultural narrative”—how cultures construct persuasive stories that shape our sense of personal identity and social relationships. My approach draws on several theories: Wayne Booth’s and James Phelan’s concepts of rhe- torical narrative; Kenneth Burke’s social-rhetorical theory; Mikhail Bakhtin’s compelling analyses of social discourses; and Walter J. Ong’s study of media and cultural epistemology. 8. All references to the speech are based on the version reprinted in Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946, 1-Volume Paperback Edition (New York: Library of America, 2001), 99–100. 9. John Dower’s War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), examines in detail the U.S. government’s representations of the Japanese as our enemy, including in Roosevelt’s speech. 10. See Bernard F. Dick, The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 102. 11. See William L. Bird Jr. and Harry R. Rubenstein’s Design for Victory: World War II Posters on the American Home Front (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 1–9. 12. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black’s Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 58–59. 13. On agitation propaganda, see Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 70–79. 14. See Dower, 15–32. 15. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), xviii. Ellul’s concept of propaganda, artic- ulated in the 1960s, is consistent with what a number of Marxist and material cultural critics generally describe as ideology. According to Ellul, agitation propaganda was a tool for developing governments “to galvanize energies to mobilize the entire nation for war.” Integration propaganda, however, is “a propaganda of conformity,” in modern, developed mass cultures. Throughout the twentieth century, most governments and cultures have engaged in both kinds of propaganda. Regardless of the terms we use, when we speak of fundamental assumptions about national identity, we speak of cultural epistemology—how we construct our knowledge of who we are as a nation. We are speaking also of the rhetori- cal processes of constructing that epistemology through all forms of cultural representation. See Ellul, 70–79. 16. “Polyphony” is a concept found in the writings of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. In Bakhtin’s theory, every use of language is potentially shot through with the words of oth- ers. He uses this musical metaphor/analogy to talk about those situations in language and discourse where the audience simultaneously experiences several voices or points of view. 17. The two texts are Henry Luce’s “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, and Henry Wallace’s 1942 speech “The Century of the Common Man,” both of which are referred to in Koppes and Black, 66–67. I am indebted to Koppes and Black for their analysis of these important statements by Luce and Wallace. 18. In postwar films such as Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire (both 1947), Hollywood explored the ongoing problem of American anti-Semitism. 19. Complete treatment of this censorship may be found in George H. Roeder Jr.’s The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War Two (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 242 Notes 20. Certainly Ken Burns’ documentary The War would have been impossible without the extensive film records from both military and civilian sources. 21. Even Ernie Pyle was constrained by censorship. See Paul Fussell’s The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944–1945 (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 50.