European journal of American studies

7-2 | 2012 Special Issue: Wars and New Beginnings in American History

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/9479 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.9479 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 7-2 | 2012, “Special Issue: Wars and New Beginnings in American History” [Online], Online since 29 March 2012, connection on 09 July 2021. URL: https:// journals.openedition.org/ejas/9479; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.9479

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

A brief foreword to « Wars and New Beginnings in American History: An American National Rhetoric from the Early Republic to the Obama Presidency » Jenel Virden

Editors’ Introduction Rob Kroes and Jean Kempf

“A Peculiar National Character”: Transatlantic Realignment and the Birth of American Cultural Nationalism after 1815 Jaap Verheul

Washington Crossing the Media: American Presidential Rhetoric and Cultural Iconography Jutta Ernst

Photographic Histories of the Civil War and the First World War and Rebirth Mark Meigs

War and National Renewal: Civil Religion and Blood Sacrifice in American Culture Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Soundtracks of Empire: “The White Man’s Burden,” the War in the Philippines, the“Ideals of America,” and Tin Pan Alley Robert W. Rydell

The American challenge in uniform: the arrival of America’s armies in World War II and European women David Ellwood

‘A Modern Liberation’. Belgium and the Start of the American Century, 1944-1946 Peter Schrijvers

Preparing for Victory. The U.S. Office of War Information Overseas Branch’s illustrated magazines in the Netherlands and the foundations for the American Century, 1944-1945 Marja Roholl

The Promises of “Young Europe”: Cultural Diplomacy, Cosmopolitanism, and Youth Culture in the Films of the Marshall Plan Frank Mehring

Making a homefront without a battlefront: The manufacturing of domestic enemies in the early Cold War culture Jean-Paul Gabilliet

The Many Meanings of D-Day Kate Delaney

The power of rhetoric and the rhetoric of power: Exploring a tension within the Obama presidency Rob Kroes

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A brief foreword to « Wars and New Beginnings in American History: An American National Rhetoric from the Early Republic to the Obama Presidency »

Jenel Virden

1 War has been a defining moment in the history of nations and no more so than in the United States. It gives the editors of EJAS great pleasure to present this excellent volume of essays focussed on the issue of American national rhetoric and American wars. This volume is comprised of essays that were presented at a workshop on “Wars and New Beginnings in American History”, which took place in Dublin in 2010 at the biennial conference of the European Association for American Studies, or are invited contributions on the topic of American wars. While these essays explore the rhetorical theme of renewal and rejuvenation they also add new insights into wartime rhetoric. This collection is well-conceived and the essays hold together in a clear, logical way, in great part due to the splendid work of the co-editors Rob Kroes and Jean Kempf. This collection clearly demonstrates the quality of the work being done by European scholars and their colleagues on the history of the United States. The topic of war and America is, sadly, almost always current, which makes this volume particularly relevant and extremely topical. I am sure that the readers of EJAS will enjoy this latest volume of the journal.

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AUTHOR

JENEL VIRDEN co-editor EJAS

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Editors’ Introduction

Rob Kroes and Jean Kempf

1 A new birth of freedom. These words spoken by Abraham Lincoln on a Civil War battlefield catch what this volume intends to explore. Repeatedly wars have been seen as offering new beginnings, requiring a new start, promising rejuvenation. At the time of World War I Randolph Bourne advocated American non-intervention, seeing it as America’s chance to cut the umbilical cord with the English mother culture, as a chance for America finally to come into its own as a “transnational culture.”1 If war in this case was seen as offering a promise of American cultural emancipation from European tutelage, almost a century later leading European public intellectuals, such as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, saw the Europe-wide protest against the American-led invasion of Iraq as the harbinger of a truly European public finding its voice, a new birth of European freedom. Clearly, in the trans-Atlantic relationship, times of war may exacerbate the quest for a collective identity through strategies that cast either America or Europe as an oppressive and overbearing “Other.” On different occasions, as in the years following World War II, war brought the two sides of the Atlantic together, in a shared sense of having to “start from scratch,” as artist Barnett Newman put it in 1967, of erasing the past and make a tabula rasa. From the arts to the world of politics renewal and reconstruction were the key words in those years, with America prominently weighing in as a force for renewal. Later, in April 2007, Barack Obama, while still a senator and a presidential contender, gave new resonance to those words, when he said: “The American moment has not passed. The American moment is here. And like generations before us, we will seize that moment, and begin the world anew” thus proving that the trope is still very much alive today and may still strike “mystic chords of memory” for present-day audiences.

2 This volume sets out to explore the various ways in which wars have given rise to moods that inspired a language of renewal, rejuvenation or even a fresh start. It intends to explore the various configurations of America and Europe either as adversarial parties divided by the Atlantic, or as partners joined together by it. A central question throughout these explorations is the issue of American exceptionalism. Is it typically for Americans to conceive of wars as offering a release from history, an opportunity to start the world anew? Are Europeans mired too much

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in the tragedies of their own war-torn histories, where wars only lead to further wars in an unending settling of scores? Do Europeans need the inspirational model of the American idealist rhetoric before they make such language and tropes their own? Does it take a European’s cynical eye to deconstruct the language of wars and new beginnings and see it as a case of American cant and hypocrisy, a rhetorical façade hiding the more mundane motives for waging war that Europeans would instantly recognise, such as national and security interests, and balances of power? As recent studies such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Culture of Defeat again illustrate, the French after the Franco-Prussian War, and the Germans after World War I, all emphasized the fact that the next war would lead to a new beginning, yet one rooted in victory over the former foes.2 Clearly, the new beginnings as envisaged here are more like cycles repeating themselves, as if “Europe [were] too thickly planted with Kingdoms to be long at peace,” to quote Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776).

3 As for Americans, on the other hand, it is not simply a matter of wars being waged “to end all wars.” Not long before his untimely death the historian Tony Judt observed that “For many American commentators and policymakers the message of the twentieth century is that war works.”3 As military historian Andrew Bacevich, quoting Judt, adds: “Judt might have gone even further,”4 in the sense that well beyond the circle of experts and insiders, many ordinary Americans even today at least tacitly share that view.

4 This reading of the twentieth century has had profound implications for U. S. policy in the twenty-first century. Bacevich goes on to say that with the possible exception of Israel, the United States today is the only developed nation in which belief in war’s efficacy continues to enjoy widespread acceptance.

5 Others – the citizens of Great Britain and France, of Germany and Japan – took from the twentieth century a different lesson: War devastates. It impoverishes. It coarsens. Even when seemingly necessary or justified, it entails brutality, barbarism, and the killing of innocents. To choose war is to leap into the dark, entrusting the nation’s fate to forces beyond human control. Recent U.S. military history confirms this somber premonition. Has the country thereby gone against its long-standing foreign-policy wisdoms formulated by George Washington in his Farewell Address (1796) : “Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all”? Issues such as these are central to the various contributions to this volume.

6 They range over time, from the early days of the American republic, when the renewed conflict with England in the War of 1812 offered the occasion for a re-invigorated debate on the identity of the new nation, through the years of Civil War when the nation had torn itself apart and found itself in need of giving meaning to the sacrifice both sides in the conflict had made. From the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century on through two World Wars Americans had to explain to themselves in what different ways and on what different grounds they waged international wars, different from the traditional war aims that motivated European countries, aims seen as colonialist or imperialist. These wars occasioned Americans to develop a national rhetoric and form of public speech to express their exceptionalism, giving shape to a rhetorical tradition that time and again as an inspirational language would serve to ready the nation for war through a renewal of the national sense of mission and “manifest destiny.” In this respect, this collection revisits and rehabilitates the longue durée in American history, the deep pattern that recent historiography has tended to

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play down. Yet, as recent controversies have taught us, it is at the same time a tradition that on occasion appears as its own travesty, debasing a language of high ideals for purposes of naked belligerence. The Iraq War is the most recent illustration of that happening.

7 This volume explores the formation of this national rhetoric as well as its transformation over time. It was never uncontested, nationally nor internationally. From the early days on there was always this paradox of a nation defining itself against others, as non pareil, while at the same time, on behalf of those others as it were, speaking the language of universalism and internationalism. It may have been for others to try and “deconstruct” such language and translate it in the more cynical terms of national interest and political realism. If such deconstruction served as a tool of anti-Americanism abroad, it may paradoxically have served as well to inspire America’s critics with precisely the sort of idealism they may have accused America of subverting. If in their eyes America was falling short of living up to its vaunted ideals, such ideals then became the standard for others in taking America’s measure. Thus, paradoxically, America through its wars and international conflicts may have inspired others with its language of new beginnings.

8 There are those whose life history has come to illustrate the paradox. Thus, Jürgen Habermas in the early days of the Iraq War may have felt the inner stirrings of anti- Americanism, while conceiving of the moment as Europe´s new beginning, a promise of emancipation from American tutelage; he could at the same time be aware of what he owed America. In a 2004 interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, he testified to his current disillusionment and disenchantment with the U.S. administration and its standard-bearers. The experience, he said, was all the more painful because, as he acknowledged, he could not have come into his own as a philosopher of public space and democratic debate without the impact of America´s pluralist liberalism and its philosophy of pragmatism. Ever since he was sixteen, his political ideas had been nourished by the American enlightenment ideals, thanks to a sensible reeducation policy in the postwar years of American occupation in Germany.5 If there had been a paradox then, it was of an occupying power successfully transmitting the ideas and ideals by which it professed to live, successfully articulating the concept of “war of liberation” and reinventing the boundaries of international law. If there was a new beginning at the time, for Germany and other countries in Europe, it was one designed in America, not one that had to be defined against America as in the days of President Bush’s Iraq War. If America was “right on message” at the time, with the American Century, presciently announced by Henry Luce in 1941, rapidly shaping up, it was more a matter of Europe being ready to receive the message than of America inventing one for the occasion. In a sense America was reiterating language it had been using from the days of its Declaration of Independence, if not before, going back to colonial times.6 From the height of its City upon a Hill, it spoke in a voice of universalism, for all of humanity. Although geographically at the margin, far from the center of world history, it arrogated the role for itself of pilot nation, charting the course of world history for others to join. This discourse was powerfully rearticulated in the 19th century as a secularized Christian mythology named “Manifest Destiny,” and expressed in the most successful historical text of American history, Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier thesis.7

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9 When Lincoln spoke on the battlefield of Gettysburg he saw it as his mission to remind the nation of its founding creed, to take it back to its republican origins and enthusiasms. Only in the return to republican ideals could the nation hope to give a new birth to freedom and to give meaning to the death of so many in the fraternal carnage of a nation gone astray. Lincoln’s address is in the rhetorical mode of the Jeremiad, reconfiguring a tragic present with a view to evoking the promise of the past. 8 Lincoln thus followed Machiavelli’s precept that for republics to survive they need to go back to their origins and founding principles, in order that –as Lincoln reminded his audience - “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

10 Although his language was universalist, speaking of the Americans as “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” it was not inclusive of all Americans. Lincoln had come to dedicate and consecrate a national cemetery for those who had given their lives that that nation – “so conceived” – might live, not a cemetery for those who had given their lives for a different cause, the “Lost Cause,” as Southerners would ruefully remember it. Or could it be argued that in Lincoln’s rhetorical gesture, conceiving of the Civil War as a testing ground for the endurance of republican principles, the Southern sacrifice of life had in its defeat contributed equally to the “new birth of freedom”? It is certainly not the reading that the South, in its retrieval of meaning in its defeat, chose to adopt. As the only section in the reconstituted United States that knew the experience of defeat and the tragic sense of life, it lived within existential parameters that brought it closer to a European sense of history, as the great historian of the South, C. Vann Woodward, never tired of reminding us.9

11 Yet, in the decades following the Civil War, Lincoln’s reference to “the brave men who struggled here” suggested an inclusive reading of the battle that came to dominate the shared remembrance, North and South, of the Civil War as the testing ground, if not crucible, fomenting a revolution in the way whites would henceforth think about themselves in terms of shared racial identification.10 The South powerfully contributed to this new reading, turning defeat into eventual victory, in The Birth of a Nation, a film classic based on Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman. A view of the United States as a White Republic, to use historian Alexander Saxton’s coinage,11 undergirded numerous revisits of Civil War documents, such as photographs re-combined and re-contextualized in popular albums, as in the 1911 ten-volume Photographic History of the Civil War, assembled by Francis Trevelyn Miller.12In the ritualized memories of the war which entered popular culture in the early twentieth century, the war came to seem an experience Americans shared rather than one that had divided them. In this volume Mark Meigs traces a similar development in the reading of Civil War photographs, while contrasting it to the sobering anti-war readings later given to World War I photographs. He thus emphasizes the inherently unstable quality of war photographs as historic documents and their ambivalent place in cultures of memory.

12 Yet another Southerner, Woodrow Wilson, in a remarkable address entitled “The Ideals of America,” delivered in 1901 on the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Trenton, held out the prospect of a new American revolution, one that would restore national unity by transforming the United States into an imperial power capable of taking up Rudyard Kipling’s challenge to the Americans to take on “the white man’s burden.” Indeed, according to Wilson, that new American revolution had already occurred when the

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United States occupied the Philippine Islands during the Spanish American War. “No war,” Wilson declared, “ever transformed us quite as the war with Spain transformed us.” As a result, the “nation that was one hundred and twenty-five years in the making has now stepped forth into the open arena of the world.”13 American popular culture was quick to reflect this general attitude and to disperse it among a mass audience. A popular song at the time played on this theme of a newly found unity of purpose among Civil War veterans in North and South: He Laid Away a Suit of Gray to Wear the Union Blue. The role played by the early popular music industry, Tin Pan Alley, centered on Northern and mid-Western cities like New York and Chicago, is the topic of one chapter in this volume by Robert W. Rydell. As he reminds us, what is striking is that so many compositions attempted to use the Spanish-American War to bleach out - not to say: “whiten” - the “bloody shirt” of still lingering Civil War memories and erase memories of the bitter sectional conflicts.

13 For readers of this volume this is an important point to keep in mind. Lincoln’s ringing invocation of a new birth of freedom captures a high-minded republican creed wrested from the carnage of Civil War. It inspired his fellow citizens, while giving succinct expression to an Americanism that would henceforth also inspire non-Americans, like Jürgen Habermas in the ruins of war-ravaged Germany. But it was never the whole message. As we have just seen it could also be a message giving a much narrower reading of the idea of America and the Americans, excluding race and gender from its definition while at the same time justifying an American imperialism as a white man’s mission. This alternative conflicting reading of America has always been one that the outside world had to sort out for itself and make sense of.

14 Wilson saw in the Spanish-American War the moment when America finally came into its own, giving it a civilizing mission in the world as well as internally, in a moral mode of uplift and paternalism. It was also a war, in his eyes, that had a healing effect on the nation allowing it to overcome the wounds of the Civil War, in a new configuration of cultural hegemony.

15 More generally this volume looks at wars as defining, if not re-defining, moments where the sacrifice of life and limb of American citizens transmuted into the sanctification of the nation. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address can be given such a Durkheimian reading, as suggested by Agnieszka Soltysik in this volume. For both North and South, blood spilled on the battlefield could sacralize such tokens of remembrance, if not totems of collective survival, as the flag, confederate or Union, the bloody shirt, or the national anthem. Ironically, the “Star-spangled Banner” evokes a previous war in American history, the War of 1812, which Soltysik dismisses as among the less significant wars, leaving no trace in American self-reflection. In disagreement, Jaap Verheul takes up the opening chapter arguing that more than the Revolutionary War, which brought political freedom and independence, the War of 1812 led Americans culturally to emancipate themselves from tutelage of the old mother- country, and to explore and define the contours of American nationhood. Cultural forces came to a head which had been building before, even in colonial times, leading colonial subjects to conceive of themselves, no longer as British subjects, but as Americans. Cultural nationalists had spoken up before 1812. In an early burst of nationalist rapture the American poet Joel Barlow dedicated his epic poem The Columbiad (1807) to Columbus, the visionary, the man able to foresee the later glory of the American republic. But the War of 1812 may well have brought the full birth of

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cultural freedom, the freedom to define the national identity by American, not British or European standards.

16 This is not to deny that the American War of Independence — tellingly known as “the American Revolution” — is the fount of many of the emblematic tropes that have inspired America’s rhetorical and iconographic tradition. It has spawned collectively shared repertoires of images and remembered stories that serve as so many places of memory, instantly triggering feelings of national affiliation and patriotism. Mention a crucial historical moment like George Washington crossing the Delaware and people will see an image before their eyes resembling the painting by German-born painter Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, which as an icon has entered the domain of the mass- circulation of images and can be found on stamps, coffee mugs, and T-shirts. As Jutta Ernst points out, the painting itself, more than being simply the source of later heroic readings, is already in a traditional painterly mode of heroic representation. It stands in a line of what we called emblematic tropes that travel back and forth between linguistic forms of rhetoric and their visual equivalents. Tracing the afterlife of this established emblem Ernst finds it meeting its deconstruction at the hands of contemporary American artists.

17 In the interplay of wars and a rhetoric of new beginnings in visual and linguistic forms, as explored in this volume, time and time again wars have served as the triggering moments for a dormant repertoire of emblematic tropes to spring back to life and to serve in the quest for meaning to be salvaged from the wreckage of war. One such repertoire in America has always had to do with a sense of the new and modern as a defining element in the American sense of self. It is a Promethean quality, cherished by Americans themselves, and recognized early on by outside observers.14 Over time American modernity has shown various faces, of political modernity, of technological and entrepreneurial prowess, and of existential modernity where the American appeared as “a New Man,” to the point of providing French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre with the cinematic persona of the lone existential hero in Hollywood movies.15 In various combinations these faces of modernity were assembled to give expression to the sense of a new beginning through the test of wars.

18 While America had gained expertise in this exercise for domestic use throughout its nineteenth-century wars, the following century would challenge it to produce visions of new beginnings for international use, as a tool of cultural diplomacy. How well it did this, particularly in connection with World War II, is explored in several chapters. David Ellwood looks at the role of American armies in Europe as a revolutionary force affecting the traditional cultural place of women in European countries. Peter Schrijvers, focusing on the liberation of Belgium, looks at American armies as a publicity caravan, as ambassadors of abundance, setting in motion what David Ellwood calls a revolution of rising expectations. In the Belgian case they were expectations of personal pleasure, inspiring a cult of abundance. The Americans, moreover, displayed new models of interracial and gender interaction which worked to undermine established cultural patterns in Belgium. Marja Roholl explores the inventive new ways in which the American Office of War Information (OWI) packaged American forms of modernity, in industry and economic life, in politics, in education, and had them ready for distribution in various printed media. Frank Mehring continues in this vein, looking at films made for the Marshall Plan, educating Europeans in a new scale of self-

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conception transcending their narrow national identities and instilling a message of trans-national co-operation.

19 As we have argued before, this shining message of American modernity was never the sole and uncontested face of its self-presentation to the world. There was always the darker side of patterns of racial, gender and class inequality, translated into repertoires of stereotypical representation permeating American popular culture. Mehring finds one example of this in his close reading of one Marshall Plan film where a black boy is cast in the mould of old “Coon” or Sambo stereotypes, which take us back to Robert Rydell´s chapter in this volume. Jean-Paul Gabilliet more directly explores this reverse side of what was presented as America´s Promethean modernity. Not all Americans at the time were quite so sure of this reading of themselves, universalist and cosmopolitan. Domestically, there was an anguished retrenchment from the frontiers of new beginnings behind a much narrower provincialism. Feelings of anxiety translated into a number of scares, of Communists, of organized crime, of Unidentified Flying Objects, which may well have been the contemporary response to the threats of an emerging Cold War. Europeans of a more critical bent were hard put to rhyme these conflicting faces of the new power orchestrating their collective lives. And diplomats and politicians were equally hard put to stay on message and salvage the vision of an Atlantic World as a new beginning. Kate Delaney has chosen to look at festive gatherings at one powerful site of memory, the landing beaches in Normandy. In the changing composition of the group of invitees she sees the continuing attempt at projecting new alliances among states and statesmen connecting them back to the hopes and enthusiasms of D-Day.

20 Once again our aim is not to oversimplify the issue, iron out differences and produce a historically erroneous unanimity called either modernity or universalism. On the other hand it would be a grave misunderstanding to see the contradictions within American history and society as the product of either hypocrisy (the moral reading) or the alienating power of ideology (the Marxist reading). Quite the opposite in fact. Because of its idealistic origins, origins it shares with many other nations, the United States is structurally caught in the classic dilemma of interests versus principles.

21 This is why this book about new beginnings must have an open ending. The last chapter explores a tension within the Obama administration between the high hopes it brought after the warmongering political culture of the preceding years and the inspirational rhetoric it applied to the task, and the constraints set by entrenched political groups and the vitriolic and toxic language that seems to define the political culture in the land. The two faces of American power that publics abroad have become intimately aware of and which have fed feelings of affiliation and of disaffection alternately pop up. The jury is still out on what in the end will be the real face of the Obama administration.

22 One thing, however, seems clear. The possibility of new beginnings, the permanent myth of reincarnation that has constituted one of the sturdiest fabrications of the 19th century is over. Despite the powerful attraction of the United States for millions in the world, the very possibility of eternal rebirth and eternal youth that the country invented for itself is gone with the end of exceptionalism. Of course such an enduring and endearing myth will not disappear overnight. But we believe that it will as it came to represent the last triumphant embodiment of perhaps the most central trope of the western world: that of resurrection.

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NOTES

1. Randolph Bourne, “American Independence and the War,” The Seven Arts, supplement to the April issue (May 16, 1917).

2. Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Jefferson S. Chase, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003) 3. Tony Judt, “What Have We Learned, If Anything?” The New York Review of Books (April 13, 2008) 4. Andrew Bacevich, “The Revisionist Imperative: Rethinking Twentieth-Century Wars,” The annual George C. Marshall Lecture on Military History, delivered on January 7, 2012. The History News Network (HNN) recorded video of the lecture available at http://hnn.us/blogs/andrew-j- bacevich-revisionist-imperative 5. Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 18, 2004, p. 15. 6. S. Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). 7. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1953; reprint: New York: Dover, 1996), 1-38. 8. S. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 9. C.Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955); American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964). In Culture of Defeat (Cf. note 2), Schivelbusch and Chase include the American South, comparing it as an American case to Germany and France. 10. In Lincoln’s own words: “But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.” 11. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America(London: Verso, 2003). 12. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989)76-79. 13. Woodrow Wilson, “The Ideals of America,” Atlantic Monthly 90 (1902), pp. 726, 730-732. 14. Our use of the word Promethean may put the reader in mind of David Nye’s work, particularly his recent America As Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) But ever since early work like The American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994) Nye has revisited the theme of the Promethean quality of American culture as second creation, as natural, or divine creation done all over again under human auspices. 15. On this point, see: Rob Kroes, “Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists: French Views of American Modernity, ” in: Them and Us: Questions of Citizenship in a Globalizing World (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000) 147-166.

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AUTHORS

ROB KROES Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam

JEAN KEMPF Université Lumière-Lyon 2

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“A Peculiar National Character”: Transatlantic Realignment and the Birth of American Cultural Nationalism after 1815

Jaap Verheul

Just as 1776 saw the birth of political independence for the United States as a new nation, the year 1815 saw the quickening of its quest for cultural independence. The year that finally brought an end to the War of 1812 was the starting point for a wave of national pride in which Americans redefined their own national purpose, their collective cultural identity, and – perhaps most of all – their relation to the Old World. This recalibration of the transatlantic ties and the fundamental changes it brought to the American perception of Europe are perhaps the most intriguing and problematic features of the emerging American nationalism that characterized the early nineteenth century. It fed a vitriolic anti-European rhetoric that soon informed American foreign relations and economic policy, and would never completely disappear from the American intellectual horizon. But it also changed the way Americans defined what it meant to be a great nation.

1 The cultural dialogue with the Old World was crucial to the emergence of a new era of cultural nationalism in the United States. As Henry Adams famously put it: “In 1815 for the first time Americans ceased to doubt the path they were to follow. Not only was the unity of their nation established, but its probable divergence from older societies was also well defined.” That departure from “older societies” was particularly critical, for Adams believed that the United States had finally escaped from the “Old-World development” and could define its national ethos, character and identity in contrast to Europe. By not only adopting its own political system, but also following an independent course in social, religious, literary and scientific development, he felt, “the difference between Europe and America was decided.” Since it was henceforward inconceivable that the United States would revert to European models and ways of thinking, Adams concluded that “a new episode in American history began in 1815.”1

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2 Although Adams and others have argued that a new American cultural nationalism developed in self-confident opposition to the Old World, the powerful cultural thralldom to Europe was not broken that easily or suddenly. In fact, the American quest for nationality shows the familiar complexities of a cultural decolonization process.2 Although American intellectuals redefined Europe as a useful “other” against which they could construct their own collective identity, they long retained a legacy of European standards of civilization and esthetics. More importantly, they were thoroughly influenced by European ideas about the relationship between culture and nation. Ironically, the cultural differentiation with the Old World was informed by new standards of nationhood that were developed in England, and in particular in continental Europe, the romantic laboratory of nationalism of the early nineteenth century.3

1. The Tenacity of Trans-Atlantic Ties

Until the young republic entered its second war with the former mother country, few of its citizens expressed concerns about the cultural identity of their nation. When Americans pondered the rising glory of their nation, it had mostly been as an “Empire of Liberty,” as Jefferson famously named it, which had explored a new system of government based on freedom and equality. As Joyce Appleby argues, the first generation of Americans who inherited the Revolution felt that the War of Independence simply had not supplied “the shared sentiments, symbols, and social explanations necessary for an integrative national identity.”4 Although the revolution had provided the nation with shared histories, documents and sentiments, and foreign travelers already noticed distinctive American characteristics, the ideal of a national culture took a longer time to emerge. The revolutionary generation had defined nationhood characteristically in terms of political, social and economic participation, and had little interest – or accomplishments, for that matter – in culture and refinement.5 It took another war to start that process of cultural nationalism.

3 While they treasured their political independence and nationalism, prior to 1815 most Americans embraced the cultural ties with the Old World. As Gordon S. Wood emphasizes, the revolutionary generation still thought in terms of a translatio imperii and “never intended to create an original and peculiar indigenous culture. […] They were seeking not to cut themselves off from Europe’s cultural heritage but to embrace it and in fact to fulfill it.”6 The revolutionary generation had been emphatically cosmopolitan, and if anything, aimed to import as many fruits of Enlightenment culture from Europe into their young nation as possible. Jefferson and other founders lived parts of their lives in Europe, mentally if not physically. These Americans were not seeking to separate themselves from western civilization, but saw themselves as members of a cosmopolitan community, a “trans-Atlantic intellectual fraternity.”7 In the concept of culture that had developed during the Enlightenment, all civilized people belonged to the same family of nations, and all nations were marching towards the same goal of human perfection and artistic achievement.

4 David Hackett Fischer and others have reminded us that Americans clung to the English language and folkways with feelings of nostalgia, even if they vehemently rejected English political tyranny, autocracy and monarchy.8 London remained the undisputed cultural center of the new republic. For standards of taste in painting, sculpture,

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architecture, literature, poetry and even language, Americans still referred to England. 9 As far as there was an element of cultural transatlantic competition, it was because Americans were eager to prove that they, too, could contribute to the common achievements of humanity. Also linguistically, the former colonies shared an undisputed common cultural core with England, even if its inhabitants sometimes diverged from the prescribed practice of pronunciation and spelling. Early proposals to discard the English language were therefore laughed away. As one delegate at the Constitutional Convention joked: “it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it was, and make the English speak Greek.”10

5 Yet within this seemingly unbroken transatlantic civilization early calls for American cultural independence could be heard, even if they did not coalesce into a shared program of cultural nationalism. Significantly, anti-English feelings did make their way into some early proposals to liberate American English from the linguistic norms of the former mother country, challenging of the most obvious forms of shared cultural heritage. The lawyer and lexicographer Noah Webster would become the most outspoken proponent of a separate American dictionary and orthography. As he already insisted in 1789: “As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own in language as well as government.” His attempt to “declare American linguistic independence” was largely practical and had been informed by ideas about development and standardization of languages that were current in Europe.

6 Recognizing that language was an essential ingredient of cultural identity, Webster was convinced that a uniform national language was a requirement for “political harmony” and national unity, and would help to “inspire us with a suitable respect for our own national character.” 11 He firmly rejected Anglophilia and repeatedly warned that the linguistic ties with “a transatlantic nation” were the result of perilous foreign cultural influences on American taste and manners. In a flood of political essays he continued to caution that the American Revolution could not be completed if his country would remain culturally dependent on England. To Webster’s dismay, however, his warnings fell on deaf ears or met with ridicule, as most of his collocutors preferred a more gradual development of the American language. He was forced to tone down his reform proposals and it was only well after 1815 that his dictionary was widely adopted and Webster became the “Schoolmaster to America.”12

7 Similarly, indigenous writers who tried to develop an authentic style had difficulty in receiving recognition from American readers and critics during the first decades of independence. The authors known as the Connecticut Wits, who celebrated their own society but modeled their work on English literary styles, met with some success. But the literary career of a more original writer such as Charles Brockden Brown, who developed his own style independent from English literary norms, was bitterly short- lived. Lack of sales and popularity as American novelist drove him to spend his last years as political pamphletist and editor of his own magazines.13

8 Charles Brockden Brown was only recognized and heralded as an early American literary nationalist in 1815, five years after his death. His first biography, which was published in that year, started off with a sharp condemnation of the difficulties Brown had faced in competing with English authors. His close friend and biographer, the dramatist and painter William Dunlap, now hailed Brown as one of the first adventurers of American fiction “who first saw the propriety of men in a new and

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better political state, throwing off the shackles of an absurd prejudice in favour of European opinions and writings, as they had thrown from them the proffered chains and rejected the pretensions of European tyranny.” As if to enlist his protagonist in a new struggle for cultural independence, Dunlap reminded his readers that Brown had identified the “remoteness of their situation from the ordinary range of European politics and influence of European ambition.”14 Following Dunlop in his praise, other writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Hickling Prescott in the subsequent decades also posthumously rediscovered Brockden Brown as the father of a truly indigenous American literature.15

9 Until the War of 1812, the American society treasured its political independence and economic prowess, but remained well-embedded in the cultural traditions of the Old Word. Put differently, although the War of Independence and the debate over the Constitution had created a strong sense of statehood, the new republic was not yet united by a cultural nationalism, which presupposed a unique, shared culture. It would take another war to push the United States into an era of nationalism that fostered ideas of exceptionalism and cultural isolation.

2. The Second War for Independence

Accentuating the end of warfare as a new beginning for the nation, the War of 1812 was already dubbed a “Second War for Independence” by the first history of the war that was published in 1815.16 This second battle for freedom was not only fought with guns, however, but also became a battle of words. The war marked the beginning of a true communication revolution in which a host of new periodicals, newspapers and new publishing houses connected the American citizens and formed a national forum of opinion that was vital for the construction of a national identity.17 These new means of communication were used to calibrate and interrogate the relation to the Old World.

10 Even when the War of 1812 was still being fought on the high seas and the American continent, Americans prepared for what one scholar called “a campaign of periodicals” against the former mother country by starting literary and cultural journals to express their new national sentiment. Some magazines explicitly referred to the parallel between the two battle fields. The Democratic leaning Port-Folio, for instance, encouraged its writers to “emulate the ambition, diligence and zeal that have so eminently characterized our gentlemen of the sword,” and hoped the United States would in a few years “become as renowned in literature, as she is in arms.”18

11 Between 1815 and 1830 no less than thirty one new periodicals were founded. Many of these journals encouraged native writers to rise against foreign interference and shed intellectual homage to England. Among them was the Portico started in 1816 in Baltimore, the self-professed “Rome of the United States,” by wealthy literati who aimed to meet European standards of culture, not only by erecting monuments, constructing buildings and founding museums, but also by raising a new generation of “native genius […] to produce a literature that would be a worthy asset to America’s reputation.”19 The new journal decried “the literary sycophants who would Europeanize America,” explicitly defied British magazines and their reviewers, and claimed their own national literature, and – almost as important – language. “Americans,” the editor of the Portico boasted, “are perfectly competent to carry on the

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‘war of words’ with any Europeans.” Instead of leaning on foreign education, they were to “exercise [their] own talents.”20

12 It was the North American Review, however, that would rapidly become the most influential magazine of the republic, unmodestly claiming to print “the best that has been said and thought.”21 The magazine was founded in May 1815 by William Tudor, a wealthy merchant who is credited with the first reference to Boston as “the Athens of America.” Just returning from Europe, he intended his new periodical as a rival to leading British magazines he had read there, such as the Edinburgh Review and the London-based Quarterly Review. Transatlantic cultural rivalry was essential to Tudor´s publication project. His magazine aimed to foster genuine American culture by countering the criticism of American society and culture that was voiced by British periodicals. “The spirit of the work was national and independent as regarded foreign countries,” Tudor explained.22 In its pages collective opinion was formed about politics, history, science and literature in the American republic, but it also closely watched new ideas, developments and—most of all—recent literature that originated from Europe. In spite of its nationalistic agenda, it remained emphatically transatlantic and comparative in its approach and tastes, and for instance eagerly debated English romanticism and German philosophy. As Tudor intended, the North American quickly became the most important forum for the new cultural nationalism that spread within the young nation. 23

3. The Quest for National Character

In its first years, the North American Review most of all expressed the ambitions of the cultural elite that dominated Boston intellectual life, as Tudor managed to recruit many of these Brahmins to write for his journal. A fitting opening volley in the new battle of words was delivered in 1815 by the Boston physician Walter Channing. Dr. Walter, who would become the nation´s foremost obstetrician, was the younger brother of William Ellery Channing, the author and clergyman who would become the founder of the Unitarian church and one of the most influential intellectual leaders of Boston. 24 In a long article that was printed in two issues of the first volume of the Review, the young doctor voiced his concern for national literature and the arts. He accused his fellow Americans of a “delinquency in that, to which every other civilized nation chiefly owes its character,” namely in producing a distinctive and original national literature. Painting a large canvas that placed the new republic in the family of civilizations, he warned that “the great events of our history” would be insufficient to confer “national character” on the United States if it remained without original intellect and “extraordinary men of genius.” Unfortunately, it was precisely in this department that he found his country deficient. The doctor sadly concluded that the United States lacked “the pride of a nation,” a literature that could do justice to its “national peculiarities,” such as climate, landscape, social institutions and history, and hence would be essentially original. “Unfortunately for this country, there is no national character, unless its absence constitutes one,” Channing concluded.25

13 Channing directed his tirade above all against the cultural subservience of his compatriots to England, the former colonizer and recent enemy, as he firmly deplored “the dependence of Americans on English literature, and their consequent negligence of the exhortation of their own intellectual powers.” After identifying the “slavery to a

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common tongue” as one of the main causes of the literary dependence of the new republic, he went on to analyze the intricate relations between language and literature. How futile it was, he conceded, to “describe Niagara in language fitted for the falls at London bridge.” It was only in the language of American Indians, he suggested, that one could find authentic beauty and “genuine originality.” The Native Americans who refused to attend an American school, he suggested, probably realized “the debilitating effects of an English education on this national literature.”26

14 But the apprehensive doctor also placed blame on the disadvantageous situation of the literary market and deplored the fact that American authors depended on the “literary tyranny” of the English critics and reading public, because their American readers were “too liberal and patriotick [sic] to allow the excellence of domestic manufacture.” He explained this dependence on English literature, which had prevented the blossoming of American originality, from the colonial origins of the American republic, and pondered that perhaps “colonies may not be the favourites of the muses.” Channing suggested related historical explanations for the surprising “barrenness of American Literature,” such as the lack of a publishing infrastructure or patronage, which would allow for professional authors. But most of all he blamed his compatriots for the lack of “genuine intellectual courage” to resist the enslaving foreign influences of English literature.27

15 Walter Channing’s contributions to the earliest issues of the North American Review have been described as the first expression of self-conscious literary criticism in the United States.28 If sometimes haltingly and convoluted, he developed a novel language of cultural nationalism that explored such essential themes as cultural influence, literary originality, criticism, taste, national language, and the relation between individual genius and national pride. Although all of these ingredients had a longer genealogy, he was blending them into an argument that was new in at least two important ways. First, he was defining national greatness in cultural terms, rather than in those of constitutional republicanism, and hence broadened the demarcation of nationhood. He argued that national identity not only implied victories in the traditional arenas of warfare and politics, but just as much in the fields of the arts and sciences. This is why language and literature, the topic of his articles, became so important for the creation of “national character.” As another contributor to the North American Review would summarize this concern a few years later: “The rank that people take among nations is not measured by its population, wealth and military power, but often by the number of its distinguished individuals of former ages — and often by its superiority of its men of letters.”29 But Channing was also keenly aware that these accomplishments not only required men of genius to express the national particularities, but just as much the participation of indigenous critics, patrons, publishers, and audiences of citizens who appreciated and shared that national culture.

16 Second, defining the greatness of the United States within the family of nations implied a new comparative perspective. In a sharp break with the Enlightenment notion of human unity, Channing started to draw cultural boundaries between his own nation and the influences from the Old World. He effectively divided the common cultural core that had united England and its colonies into separate civilizations on both sides of the Atlantic. He assumed that each nation expressed its specific identity in its own literature, language en other peculiarities. In short, national identity not only implied specific intuitions and social arrangements, but also an indigenous culture, language,

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customs, and manners that grew out of specific local geography and circumstances. This implied a nationalized concept of culture in which the unique identity of a nation, the “national peculiarities,” were expressed in a range of forms, such as literature, language, morals, religion, social institutions and politics. From this unitary perspective of authenticity, “foreign” influences suddenly became pernicious. This was the main reason why the doctor warned against the contamination by European culture.

4. Under the European Influence

Intriguingly, the ideas about authenticity, national genius and national identity that Channing and his compatriots voiced, were influenced by notions about nationalism that were emerging in Europe. Connected to the Old World Europe by ties of trade and learning, the Boston elite was well-informed about current developments in European thought and many graduates of Harvard spent one or two years in Europe to complete their studies. Two years before war broke out Dr. Channing had studied in London and Edinburgh where he had mingled with the elites of these two centers of intellectual innovation. After the war of 1812, however, many of them avoided England and rather travelled to the European continent. Influenced by the publication of an English translation of Madame De Staël’s popular book about Germany, the universities of Göttingen and Berlin became a destination of choice for a new generation of pioneers of European culture, such as Edward Everett, George Ticknor, George Bancroft and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. There they absorbed German ideas about linguistics, folklore, history and national culture that were developed by Johann Gottfried von Herder and the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

17 It was no coincidence that Walter Channing’s publication was prompted by a review of August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s works that had appeared in the London Quarterly Review earlier that year. Schlegel, who had been the travel companion of Madame De Staël, became one of the most important philosophers and disseminators of the romantic movement in Germany who forcefully stimulated an interest in the national origins of literature and the arts. In the reviewed lectures Schlegel had assessed the factors that had facilitated the development of dramatic literature in different countries from classical Greece to modern times. His comparison between the level of civilization and refinement of various nations not only discussed the role of language, criticism and taste, but most of all underlined the necessity of superior genius to achieve originality and resist the imitation of classical examples.

18 Although Schlegel was not yet widely known in the United States Channing was quick to adopt many of his categories and terms.30 He explicitly responded to the claim, quoted at the head of his first article, that there were so many connections between nations in the modern world that “intellectual originality may justly be regarded as one of the greatest phenomena in nature.” Nothing is of greater importance, the reviewer had suggested, than the manner in which “a bold and inventive imagination erects a fabric entirely of its own creation,” independent from the progress of other countries.31 Dr. Channing measured the development of his own nation against the standards of authenticity that were established by this romantic theory of national character. Significantly, he referred in seventy-five instances to the concepts of “nation” and

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“country,” used forty-five times a version of the words “peculiar” and “original,” and repeatedly cautioned against the contagion of “foreign” influences.

19 Although Channing expressed much praise for Germans thinkers, he was just as likely influenced by ideas about the relation between culture and national character that had been developed in England and Scotland. His argument bears close resemblance, for instance, to the doctrine of associationism that had been developed in Britain during the eighteenth century, which held that taste depended on the association with national or individual ideas or images. This meant that aesthetics were not absolute but flourished within a specific national context. As was explained by the Scottish clergyman Archibald Alison, who had popularized this theory, a national scenery only aroused “emotions of sublimity and beauty” by mental associations that were determined by a specific historical and national context. This Scottish aesthetic theory could easily be mobilized to argue for a distinctiveness of American cultural expressions that sprung from the specific landscape and historical circumstances of the United States. Walter Channing seemed almost to quote Alison when he found that “the remotest germs of literature are the native peculiarities of the country in which it is to spring. These are diversified beyond all estimation, by the climate and the various other circumstances which produce them.”32

20 As Channing’s use of German and Scottish cultural terminology illustrates, American intellectual rivalry with the Old World coincided with an implicit dependence on European norms and criteria for excellence in literature and scholarship. At the same time, Americans explored and developed essentialist conceptions of Europe as an “other” against which they defined their own emerging civilization. These two intellectual developments received urgency and new meaning in the wake of the recent war, which became the cradle of American nationalism.

5. Winning the War of Words

After Walter Channing had sounded the opening shots in the new battle of words in 1815, his intellectual peers around the North American joined his quest of nationality. As if they were working on a collective program, these American intellectuals began to tackle the various questions of American cultural identity in their publications, lectures and addresses, sometimes explicitly, but more often inserted in reviews or other occasional articles. While they spoke from individual viewpoints and reached different conclusions, the transatlantic relation with the Old World was the dominant basso continuo which provided a common structure for this intellectual debate. Some were merely comparing literary and cultural achievements on American soil with established European standards of taste, as had been done during the first decades after the American Revolution. But more and more they engaged in a discourse about difference that underlined the inherent originality and authenticity of American art as it was grounded in experiences, democratic principles, natural geography and indigenous peoples only to be found in the New World.33

21 It was Walter Channing’s younger brother Edward Tyrell Channing, soon to become the first Harvard professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, who perhaps best summarized the new creed of cultural isolationism and militant resistance to foreign influences, when he stated in the 1816 volume of the Review:

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that the literature of a country is just as domestick [sic] and individual, as its character of political institutions. Its charm is its nativeness. It is made for home […] A country then must be the former and finisher of its own genius. It has, or should have, nothing to do with strangers. 34 In similar vein, the question of the specific American contributions to literature, poetry and language was discussed in the North American and other periodicals in the United States, where some authors voiced a buoyant perspective on the prospects of their nation in comparison to Europe, and others shared the guarded pessimism that had marked Walter Channing’s first essays.

22 The virtual battle over ideas soon translated into the real world as the American republic took concrete measures to curb European influence on its side of the Atlantic. When Congress passed its first tariff bill on April 27, 1816 to protect indigenous industry against European competition, it had explicitly included books with a duty of 15 percent, only exempting colleges and other scholarly institutes. After no one less than Thomas Jefferson, in his capacity as president of the University of Virginia, had petitioned for a repeal of that duty on the importation of books, the Senate in 1822 flatly refused to budge, citing arguments that seemed lifted from the debate Walter Channing had initiated. The Senatorial committee not only feared that foreign books would inundate the literary market, but also pointed at the grave danger of “these means of foreign influence” posed for American schools, where “our youth are taught by British authors, wedded to their own institutions, and exultingly proud of their country, constitution and laws.” A discernment of the close association between ideas and national origins spoke from its observation that “our government is peculiar to ourselves, and our books of instruction should be adapted to the nature of the government and the genius of the people.” Following the committee’s conclusion that these foreign books could lead to “habits of thinking adverse to our prosperity, unfriendly to our government, and dangerous to our liberties,” the US Senate upheld the tariff that intended to break the supremacy of European learning.35

23 One year later president James Monroe used similar arguments when he announced his famous doctrine which sought to prevent European intervention in the Western hemisphere. Since “the political system of the allied powers is essentially different” from that of the United States, he argued, his government considered “any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”36 The former colonial empire was not only ready to write back, but also proved prepared to act against European hegemony.

6. The Continuation of War by Other Means

When Ralph Waldo Emerson presented his oration on the “American Scholar” to the members of the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard on August 31, 1837, he mostly repeated what so many of his American friends and colleagues had been arguing during the decades before. The difference was perhaps that he declared the mission of cultural independence accomplished. After all, he famously announced that “[o]ur day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. […] We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” It has become somewhat of a trope to describe his famous lecture as America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” That epithet was craftily coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the hagiographical biography that he published in 1884, and has been tirelessly repeated

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ever since. Yet, as his biographer Robert Richardson dryly remarks, comparable language of cultural resistance had been heard around Boston so often that “it had become a standard undergraduate theme topic.”37

24 Rather than sounding the first “trumpet call” for a new war of independence, as Holmes suggested, Emerson was fighting a rearguard action in a cultural struggle that had already erupted in full force when the War of 1812 ended. In a sense, the quest for nationality that marked the first decades after 1815 was a continuation of that same war against the Old World by cultural means. As the writer James Fenimore Cooper had to remind his readers in 1837 “it is much easier to declare war, and gain victories in the field, and establish a political independence, than to emancipate the mind.” Similarly, a few years later his colleague Edgar Allen Poe still felt the need to call for a “Declaration of War” in the battlefield of Letters to achieve what the Declaration of Independence had done for Government.38

25 The appeal of that bellicose metaphor was significant. After all, the American cultural nationalism that was propagated and negotiated after 1815 emerged from a struggle against a European culture that was now felt to be hegemonial and menacing. American writers began to deplore American “dependence,” “servitude” and “idolatry” towards European cultural achievements, and theorized the dismal effects of European “influence” on indigenous genius and national pride. Just as Europeans after the Second World War began to define their own cultural achievements and national identities in opposition to an almost irresistible American imperialism of popular culture and consumerism, early Americans had done the reverse after the War of 1812. 39 Both constructed a cultural opponent who threatened to seduce their compatriots with an overpowering culture that reflected foreign political and social ideals. And in both cases the cultural realignments followed fundamental shifts in international relations after a major war.

26 The new cultural nationalism that emerged after 1815 in the United States was not only a result of the transatlantic war. The domestic political power struggle that ended in an Era of Good Feelings, economic prosperity and territorial expansion all contributed to the upsurge of nationalism. At the same time sectionalism and the debate over slavery threatened national unity. Also, new ideas about national culture and romanticism broadened and changed the definitions of nationality which now included the arts, science and culture as areas of national pride. Yet the outcome of the war fostered a westward-orientated isolationism and turned the United States against European cultural and territorial aspirations. In that context the new transatlantic realignment and the emergence of a new national culture inevitably reinforced each other in the wake of the War of 1812.

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NOTES

1. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Second Administration of James Madison (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 220-21, 41. See also Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 382. 2. Edward Watts, Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Lawrence Buell, “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon,” American Literary History 4, no. 3 (1992). 3. Elise Marienstras, “Nationality and Citizenship,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994). Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd ed., New Perspectives on the Past (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006). 4. Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2000), 240. 5. For the post-revolutionary American interest in cultural achievements, see Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763-1789 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Norman S. Grabo, “The Cultural Effects of the Revolution,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994); Michal J. Rozbicki, “The Cultural Development of the Colonies,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994). 6. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 543 ff. 7. Ibid., 545. 8. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. America, a Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 55-57, passim. 9. Benjamin Townley Spencer, The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign ([Syracuse, NY]: Syracuse University Press, 1957). 10. John Hurt Fisher, “British and American, Continuity and Divergence,” in The Cambridge History of the English Language, ed. John Algeo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 59. 11. Noah Webster, “Dissertations on the English Language, Etc. [1789],” in The American Literary Revolution, 1783-1837, ed. Robert Ernest Spiller (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967), 61. 12. David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Eve Kornfeld, Creating an American Culture, 1775-1800: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 13. For the literary market in which Charles Brockden Brown operated, see Steven Watts, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 1-26, 131-63. See also Philip Barnard, Mark Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro, Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 143; Donald A. Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown, Twayne’s United States Authors Series, 98 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966). 14. William Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: John P. Parke, 1815), I, 3. Dunlap’s biography was based on an earlier manuscript that was commissioned by Brown’s family one year earlier, but had remained unfinished. The cited remarks about Brown’s resistance to European standards are written by Dunlop in 1815. Watts, Romance of Real Life, 225-26.

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15. Spencer, Quest for Nationality, 80-81; [Edward Tyrrel Channing], “Brown’s Life and Writings,” review of The Life of Charles Brockden Brown by William Dunlap, North American Review, June 1819. 16. Samuel R. Brown, An Authentic History of the Second War for Independence: Comprising Details of the Military and Naval Operations, from the Commencement to the Close of the Recent War; Enriched with Numerous Geographical and Biographical Notes (Auburn, N.Y.: J. G. Hathaway, Kellogg & Beardslee, 1815), 3. 17. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, The Oxford History of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 18. John C. McCloskey, “The Campaign of Periodicals after the War of 1812 for National American Literature,” PMLA 50, no. 1 (1935): 264. For the paper war with England, see also Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 183ff. 19. McCloskey, “Campaign of Periodicals,” 267; Mott, History of American Magazines, 293-96. 20. Marshall W. Fishwick, “The Portico and Literary Nationalism after the War of 1812,” The William and Mary Quarterly 8, no. 2 (1951). 21. Quoted in James Playsted Wood, Magazines in the United States (New York: Ronald Press, 1971), 43. See also Mott, History of American Magazines. 22. William Tudor, Miscellanies (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1821), 59; Mott, History of American Magazines. 23. Robert Ernest Spiller, The American Literary Revolution, 1783-1837, Documents in American Civilization Series (Garden City, N.Y.,: Anchor Books, 1967), 109-11; William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 174-75; Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850-1865 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), check pages. 24. Amalie M. Kass, Midwifery and Medicine in Boston: Walter Channing, M.D., 1786-1876 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 5-59; Amalie M. Kass, “‘My Brother Preaches, I Practice’: Walter Channing, M.D., Antebellum Obstetrician,” Massachusetts Historical Review 1 (1999). 25. Although published in two subsequent issues under different titles, the two contributions should be read as one long argument, probably divided into two episodes for reasons of space. As usual, the contributions in the NAR were not signed, although most readers would be able to identify the author. [Walter Channing], “American Language and Literature,” North American Review, September 1815, 261; [Walter Channing], “Reflections on the Literary Delinquency of America,” North American Review, November 1815. 26. [Walter Channing], “Language and Literature.” 27. Ibid., 243; [Walter Channing], “Reflections on the Literary Delinquency of America.” 28. Albert D. Van Nostrand, Literary Criticism in America, The American Heritage Series, No. 16 (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), ix, 3; Spiller, American Literary Revolution, 112-31. 29. [John Knapp], “National Poetry,” North American Review, December 1819, 170. 30. For the American discovery of Schlegel, see Charvat, American Critical Thought, 57, 60-63. 31. [Francis Hare-Naylor], “Schlegel’s Cours De Littérature Dramatique,” Quarterly Review, October 1814. Although dated October 1814, the article had only appeared in London early 1815. Its author was most likely the English historian and writer Francis Hare-Naylor who had lived in Europe for many years. Jonathan Cutmore, ed., Quarterly Review Archive, http://www.rc.umd.edu/ reference/qr/index/23.html. 32. [Walter Channing], “Reflections on the Literary Delinquency of America.” For the influence of Scottish aesthetic theory on William Ellery and Eward Tyrrel Channing see Charvat, American Critical Thought; Arthur W. Brown, Always Young for Liberty: A Biography of William Ellery Channing ([Syracuse, N.Y.]: Syracuse University Press, 1956), 192; Arthur W. Brown, William Ellery Channing (New York,: Twayne Publishers, 1962), 108; Robert E. Streeter, “Association Psychology and Literary Nationalism in the North American Review, 1815-1825,” American Literature 17, no. 3 (1945).

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33. For an overview of some of these publications see Spiller, American Literary Revolution; Spencer, Quest for Nationality; Van Nostrand, Literary Criticism in America. 34. [Edward Tyrell Channing], “On Models in Literature,” North American Review, July 1816, 207. 35. Duty on Books, 622, HR, 17th Cong., 1st sess. (January 8, 1822); Duty on Books, 627, HR, 17th Cong., 1st sess. (January 8, 1822). The chairman of the Senatorial committee on finance that issued this report was John Holmes (1773 - 1843) of Maine. See also Catherine Seville, The International Copyright Law: Books, Buccaneers and the Black Flag in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 192. 36. President James Monroe’s seventh annual message to Congress, December 2, 1823. http:// www.ourdocuments.gov. 37. Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, a Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 263. See also Perry Bliss, “Emerson’s Most Famous Speech,” in The Praise of Folly, and Other Papers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923). 38. Spencer, Quest for Nationality, 78. 39. Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War Ii (New York: BasicBooks, 1997); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005).

RÉSUMÉS

This article argues that the emergence of American cultural nationalism after the War of 1812 developed in self-confident opposition to the Old World, yet was thoroughly influenced by European standards of nationhood. American intellectuals who campaigned for cultural independence from Europe at the same time retained European standards of civilization and esthetics, and were thoroughly influenced by ideas about the relationship between culture and nation that developed in England and Germany. This articles discusses these postcolonial complexities are reflected in debates about American cultural identity in newly founded magazines such as the North American Review that long predated Emerson’s famous “Intellectual Declaration of Independence” of 1837.

INDEX

Keywords : aesthetic theory, Anglophilia, associationism, Berlin, Connecticut Wits, Constitutional Convention, cultural identity, Edinburgh, Edinburgh Review, England, Enlightenment, Europe, Göttingen, Greece, Harvard, literary criticism, literature, London, nationalism, North American Review, Old World, Phi Beta Kappa Society, Port-Folio, Portico, Quarterly Review, romanticism, Scotland, translatio imperii, United States, University of Virginia, US Congress, War of 1812, War of Independence

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AUTEUR

JAAP VERHEUL University of Utrecht

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Washington Crossing the Media: American Presidential Rhetoric and Cultural Iconography

Jutta Ernst

1 In American history, the Revolutionary War holds a central position. As a foundational moment it includes a strong mythical dimension and thus has been of prime importance to American self-perceptions and to the formation of its national identity. The war which, in due course, cut the ties with the British mother country and led to independence is deeply rooted in American cultural memory in the sense of shared experience and common knowledge about the people and its past.1 As acts of remembrance do not solely pertain to times gone by, but rather link an event from the past to the present, ultimately reconstructing the historical moment from a later perspective2 in order to achieve “a usable past,” 3the outcome is a proliferation of different views giving us varying stories of the nation’s beginning. But even if there are multiple and conflicting versions of origin, usually a standard repertoire for referring to one people’s history develops, for here, too, just as in other cases of representation and mediation, processes of canonization are at work. Not surprisingly, in their speeches and written communications, the nation’s leaders often rely on the most widely accepted cultural iconography to recall past events, drawing on both verbal and visual accounts as well as on performative reenactments that have been enshrined in the people’s minds.

2 A time-honored, traditional discourse might, however, go together with the use of contemporary media technology as a means of distribution, as in the case of Barack Obama. For not only did he make ample use of the Internet in his election campaign, he also launched “the first live Internet video chat by an American president” in March 2009.4 Framing Obama’s rhetorical strategies within 19th- and 20th-century artistic representations of one specific historical moment from the Revolutionary War, I would like to contribute to an enlarged understanding of the intricate relations between politics, the arts, and media development and of the ways they appropriate the past. A short introduction to the historic event in question will be followed by a discussion of

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Obama’s references to it. In a second part, I will present different artistic renderings, from the realm of painting and from the realm of poetry, that shed light on the current President’s rhetorical choices.

3 1.

4 The summer and fall of 1776 marked a low point for Commander-in-Chief George Washington and the Continental Army. They could not defend New York, lost Fort Washington and Fort Lee and were pushed back to Pennsylvania, where the fall of Philadelphia, the seat of the Continental Congress, had to be feared.5 In this seemingly desperate situation, Washington decided on an attack. On Christmas Eve 1776, he had his severely diminished regiment cross the Delaware and successfully assault a Hessian garrison at Trenton in the morning of December 26th. On January 3, 1777 the Continental Army defeated British troops at Princeton. According to legend, these two American victories brought a decisive turn in the War of Independence.6 The Revolution, which, in the eyes of many, had already faltered,7 gained new momentum and finally led to the well-known result: in the Treaty of Paris (1783) Great Britain accepted the colonies’ independence and agreed to a retreat of the King’s troops from American soil.8

5 Interestingly, it was not only Washington’s triumph in a militarily difficult situation that made the crossing of the Delaware a milestone of American history and turned the General into a national hero. The disadvantageous weather conditions, which obstructed the operations, added to these effects. After a cold and clear day, it had started to rain, to hail, and to snow. A strong northeastern storm had set in, which produced dangerous floats of ice on the Delaware.9 The darkness of the night made the crossing even more perilous. For only if Washington’s troops crossed the river unobserved and started a surprise attack before day break, was there a chance of success.10 Despite a considerable loss of time and the failure of parts of the army to reach the Jersey shore, the General’s plan succeeded in the end. Colonel Rall, commander of the Hessian troops at Trenton, had not believed that the “clod-hoppers,” as he called the Americans,11 would venture an attack.12

6 Over the years, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River has been depicted and interpreted in many different ways. While British General William Howe, in his reports, held the Hessian mercenaries and their allegedly incompetent leaders responsible for the defeat at Trenton, the American loyalists felt that Howe himself had to take the blame, all the more so as he had not grasped the chance of completely destroying Washington’s army.13 What both readings have in common, though, is the downplaying of the role of Washington and his troops. These actors, however, usually stand in the center of American representations: George Washington is seen as a fighter for freedom and Republican ideals.14

7 It is not only historians who have recourse to Washington’s crossing. Politicians, too, from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama, have referred to this event, thus illustrating the emblematic potential of this historical moment and the persistence of American presidential rhetoric. Lincoln stated in 1861, at the beginning of the American Civil War: “Of [Washington’s] struggles none fixed itself on my mind so indelibly as the crossing of the Delaware preceding the battle of Trenton. I remember these great struggles were made for some object. I am exceeding anxious that the object they fought for – liberty, and the Union and Constitution they formed – shall be perpetual.”15 Approximately 150 years later, George Washington and his deeds, at least

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as reported by popular legends, became a preferred point of reference for Barack Obama. As was hoped by Obama, the press started to equate the current U.S. President with the first. This is illustrated, for instance, by a cover photo from the New York regional magazine InsideOutHudson Valley and another one from The New Yorker, which both show Obama as a latter-day George Washington.16

8 My first example for an Obama reference to Washington’s crossing stems from the 2008 Holiday Radio Address, which Obama, then President-elect, delivered to the nation:17 232 years ago, when America was newly born as a nation, George Washington and his Army faced impossible odds as they struggled to free themselves from the grip of an empire. It was Christmas Day – December 25th, 1776 – that they fought through ice and cold to make an improbable crossing of the Delaware River. They caught the enemy off guard, won victories in Trenton and Princeton, and gave new momentum to a beleaguered Army and new hope to the cause of Independence. Many ages have passed since that first American Christmas. We have crossed many rivers as a people. But the lessons that have carried us through are the same lessons that […] guide us to this very day: that hope endures, and that a new birth of peace is always possible.18

9 At a time when the country was facing a severe economic crisis and was engaged in difficult military missions abroad, the nation, so Obama insinuates, had to emulate the virtues shown by Washington and his troops, that is, to be optimistic and active rather than lose confidence and give in to seemingly unfavorable circumstances. Courage was needed in the eyes of the President, belief and trust in the nation’s abilities that were so aptly demonstrated, not only in 1776, but time and again, as his earlier reference to “the unbroken line of heroism” and the phrase “We have crossed many rivers as a people” make clear. Past successful behavior thus becomes the benchmark for future action. Repeatedly employing the terms “new” and “hope” and expressing his conviction that “[…] a new birth of peace is always possible,” Obama tries to make the nation anticipate better times, to see the chance for a fresh start, thereby adding a visionary quality to his Holiday Radio Address.

10 Obama mentions Washington’s crossing again in an even more important speech, namely his Inaugural Address. The address is structured in such a way that the reference to Washington’s crossing, which appears at a most prominent place at the very end, is gradually prepared for: having alluded to the “Declaration of Independence”19 and to “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things […] who have carried us up the long rugged path towards prosperity and freedom,” Obama closes as follows: So let us mark this day with remembrance of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At the moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words to be read to the people: “Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].” America: In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace

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upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.20

11 As the initial phrase of this passage shows, Obama, in his attempt at assessing the current situation of the American nation, draws on past achievements and reminds of the progress that has been made (“remembrance,” “how far we have traveled”). But references to earlier accomplishments not only serve as a means of explaining the present and of defining a collective identity (“who we are”); in a teleological fashion, they also allow for an outlook into the future. They help to construct a time which is as yet unsure and may thus be perceived as threatening by many people. Endowed with a design and purpose derived from the past, the future might appear less insecure and, in the end, more manageable.21 Among the pivotal historical moments with a stabilizing function, once again the events of Christmas 1776 loom large. George Washington is not mentioned by name but the term “the father of our nation” together with the phrase “the year of America’s birth” leaves no doubt as to whom Obama refers. The crossing of the Delaware River, clearly indicated by “brave […] the icy currents,” is turned in this speech into an emblem for the perseverance of the American people in most adverse conditions. Interestingly, however, the words which Obama quotes in the final passage of his address, and which, as he says, “the father of our nation ordered […] to be read to the people,” are not Washington’s own. They come from Thomas Paine’s tract “The Crisis,” which appeared on December 19, 1776 in the Pennsylvania Journal and which was reissued a few days later in the form of a pamphlet.22 The fact that the words in question are the quotation of a quotation reinforces the mythical and archetypal anchoring of Obama’s speech.

12 In addition, Obama’s Inaugural Address, in many different ways, harks back to the Bible and thus to a remote Christian past, the beginnings of which remain even more indeterminate. First of all, the idea of being “tested” recalls Abraham’s experience with God, who asked him to sacrifice his only son.23 Secondly, “remembrance” is a central Biblical concern, as is apparent, for instance, from Jesus’ words uttered with reference to the Eucharist: “[…] Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.”24 The same might be said for “hope” and “virtue,” 25 two key words in the quoted passage, that, together with the phrase “our children’s children,”26 further support the religious tradition that Obama inscribes himself in. Stylistically, too, the Bible served Obama as a source of inspiration. Paratactical syntax abounds in both the Bible and Obama’s Inaugural Address as does the repetition of key words and the formula “let us.” By recalling an important moment from the nation’s past and linking it to Biblical contexts, Obama makes use of two rhetorical strands that, in American historical discourse, were often intertwined, thus broadening the basis of examples for possible future developments. A seemingly hopeless situation, both traditions teach, might not be the end but rather a new beginning.

13 Obama’s references to Washington’s crossing in his 2008 Holiday Radio Address and in his Inaugural Address, speeches which were directed to the whole nation, prove an important point: namely that Obama and his chief speech writer Jon Favreau27 started from the premise that the historical event the President alludes to is widely known. And it is, indeed, a moment deeply engrained in American memory. For Washington’s crossing of the Delaware is among the historical moments that are extensively dealt with in high schools and colleges. However, not only lessons and history books are responsible for the general public’s acquaintance with what happened on Christmas Eve 1776. Washington’s crossing of the Delaware has inspired many artists and writers,

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who have contributed to making this event known, turning it into a truly popular moment whose function it is to create social belonging. Their repeated and often revisionary treatments of the subject will serve me in the following as a means of framing Obama’s references.

14 2.

15 The most famous visual rendering of Washington crossing the Delaware, which also finds itself on stamps, coffee mugs, and T-shirts,28 stems from the German-American Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816-1868). Leutze, who, in the 1840s, had enrolled in the Düsseldorf Art Academy, was a liberal who tried to combine his political convictions with his artistic practice.29 This is illustrated, among other things, by his painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, which he started in Düsseldorf in the fall of 1849.30 Leutze’s decision to embark on the representation of this event from the American past was, no doubt, triggered by its importance for the history of the United States.31 However, there is a second reason, closely linked to the contemporary situation in Germany. Since 1848, there had been political and social uproar in the German states, quarrels pro and con a united Germany with a democratic form of government.32 But when the National Assembly was dissolved (June 1849), the German revolutionaries lost hope. In this situation, Leutze’s painting could have functioned as a psychological stimulus for the German population, rekindling the revolutionary spirit. In November 1850, however, shortly before Leutze finished the painting, fire broke out in the artist’s studio and severely damaged the canvas. Leutze started a second version, once again under the title Washington Crossing the Delaware. The second picture was shown in New York and Washington in late 1851 and early 1852 and evoked most positive commentaries in the press.33 Today this painting belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.34

Leutze, Emanuel Gottlieb (1816-1868): Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Oil on canvas, 149 x 255 in. (378.5 x 647.7 cm). Gift of John Stewart Kennedy, 1897. Acc. n.: 97. 34. Image© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

16 Leutze’s painting is rather simply and efficiently symbolical, stressing the diversity of the Americans, on the one hand, while underlining their common effort and their shared ultimate goal, on the other hand. In the foreground, the monumental canvas shows 13 figures, alluding to the 13 American states that had declared their

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independence.35 The majority of these figures represent types, but some are individualized historical persons. The people’s outward appearance, both their clothing and their complexions, serve to indicate their different origins and their past experiences: farmers with big hats, who might come from Pennsylvania or New Jersey, a Western hunter in deerskin leggings, a seaman in a tarpaulin jacket, whose relatively dark complexion might point to his African descent. Another man is wearing a Balmoral bonnet and might therefore be identified as a Scottish immigrant.36

17 In the prow of the boat, a man in the uniform of the Continental Army is visible and a second one, who bears the American flag. They represent George Washington and Lieutenant James Monroe.37 Washington’s role as General is indicated by his central position within the painting, but also by the way he is depicted: he is standing upright, towering above his fellow men, with one foot on the front bench of the boat, a posture that suggests a stepping forward and upward, for short, an advancement to a higher level. Washington appears in profile with a resolute facial expression,38 sure of what will await him, for there is no need to use the telescope which he holds in his right hand. With his eyes fixed on the New Jersey shore, he seems to fearlessly anticipate the future. Ultimately, Washington appears not only as the determined commander of the Continental Army, but also as the dignified statesman he was later to become.

18 Further details in Leutze’s painting support this forging together of past, present, and future. Swords and guns document the troop’s readiness to fight, once they will have reached the New Jersey shore. Conversely, the bandaged head of one soldier reminds of a previous battle, in the course of which members of the Continental Army had been wounded.39 The unfavorable weather conditions on Christmas Eve 1776 are clearly discernible in the picture: the furled flag points to the storm, floats of ice are to be seen, and the sky is full of clouds. But even with respect to the meteorological elements of his painting, Leutze has transcended the present. In the upper left, a star is visible, which symbolically indicates hope for the future.40 Leutze’s, painting, then, contrary to its title, does not concentrate on the present, on the moment of crossing the Delaware River, but fuses different time levels and thereby creates a historical continuum.

19 Again and again, critics have pointed to obvious inaccuracies in Leutze’s painting. Already in 1851, a commentator remarked: The time is twilight, and the atmosphere hazy and snowy, corresponding with the record of history. […] The river is very full, almost jammed, with floating ice, which perhaps may be subject to a slight remark of criticism. Such ice as is there represented could not have been in the river at that time of the year, (25th of December,) when the young and thin ice is forming. But the painting is a truthful and beautiful representation of ice suddenly broken up by a freshet in the spring of the year. Then the sturdy fellow sitting on the bow of the boat might in reality encounter an iceberg two or three feet thick which should defy his utmost efforts with his boathook. However, Mr. Leutze has given us excellent ice, and excellent water, and every way an excellent painting; and if spring ice was more effective for his purpose than the ice of autumn, perhaps a justifiable poetic licence would allow him to use it.41

20 These and other observations, as, for instance, the statement that Washington and his troops could not have carried the flag shown in the picture, for it was only introduced in 1777,42 counter the idea of a documentary effort on the part of Leutze, while supporting a reading of his painting in the sense of mythic beginnings and prolepsis of future developments.

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21 The central idea of continuity and progress43 is enhanced by the perspective that Leutze chose for his painting. Whereas Washington and his men crossed the Delaware in a west-east direction, Leutze’s pictorial representation, at least if one applies the conventions of mapping with the west being on the viewer’s left and the east on his or her right, suggests that the boat is heading west. Given this spatial orientation, the crossing of the Delaware recalls the first settlers’ voyage across the Atlantic, thereby underlining the emancipation from the British mother country44 and, with Washington stepping upward, the establishment of a superior nation in the New World. Leutze’s painting, then, draws on diverse watershed moments of American history and, in a synthetic fashion, illustrates both the mythic origin of the U.S.A. and their potential for renewal. Through the inclusion of the star, which might be interpreted as a reference to the Biblical legend of the three Magi,45 Leutze, moreover, makes the course of American history appear as God’s providential plan.

22 Interestingly, the symbolic import of Leutze’s painting is not limited to the U.S.A. It hints at the idea of civilizatory advancement in a more general fashion, all the more so as, in art and cultural history, humanity’s progress has usually been depicted as a westward movement.46 The following lines by the Irish philosopher and writer George Berkeley (1685-1753) illustrate this very clearly: Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last.47

23 Washington’s crossing of the Delaware is thus turned into an event which is not only central to American history, but to the history of mankind.

24 In 1953, the American artist Larry Rivers (1923-2002) took up Leutze’s subject and produced a history painting with exactly the same title: Washington Crossing the Delaware.

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Rivers, Larry (1923-2002): Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1953. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMa). Oil, graphite, and charcoal on linen, 6ꞌ 11 5/8ꞌ x 9ꞌ 3 5/8ꞌ (212.4 x 283.5 cm). Given anonymously. Acc. n.: 25. 1955. © 2012. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

25 In contrast to Leutze’s painting, where the Americans form a compact group, the human figures in the Rivers painting are relatively isolated, with Washington dominating in the center. The outlines of persons and objects are blurred; they appear incomplete and two-dimensional like “sketchy versions of children’s book illustrations,”48 so that it is hard for the viewer to assess the whole scene. Ultimately, it is only the title of the painting which allows to identify the represented event as Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. Whereas Leutze gave an ex post facto representation of the historical moment, depicting Washington’s crossing with a conscious reference to events set in the future and thereby glorifying it, Rivers places the viewer in medias res, showing the crossing from the perspective of the participants, who severely suffered and could not be sure of a victory at Trenton. Rivers’ own statement clearly supports this thesis: The last painting that dealt with George and the rebels is hanging in the Met and was painted by a coarse German nineteenth-century academician named Leutze who really loved Napoleon more than anyone and thought crossing a river on a late December afternoon was just another excuse for a general to assume a heroic, slightly tragic pose. […] What I saw in the crossing was quite different. I saw the moment as nerve-wracking and uncomfortable. I couldn’t picture anyone getting into a chilly river around Christmas time with anything resembling hand-on-chest- heroics.49

26 What is also revealed here is the revisionary impulse behind Rivers’ work of art: his painting calls into question the national founding myth which Leutze’s picture built upon and helped to perpetuate. In Rivers’ version, George Washington neither appears as the courageous hero nor his crossing as a great feat. The General, though depicted in

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a larger scale than the other figures,50 is a static participant in a dubious venture, the outcome of which lies in the dark. The lack of hat or wig marks him as an ordinary, private figure rather than as a national icon.51 In addition, as Raphael J. Schulte argues, “[…] the angle of his boat suggests a movement downward, as if sinking.”52 In the end, however, Rivers substitutes one myth for another, for his “post-modern Washington” is just as much removed from the historical person than Leutze’s.53

27 Larry Rivers, an important transitory figure between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art54 who, at the high time of McCarthyism, fashioned his version of Washington Crossing the Delaware with the contemporary political situation in the U.S.A. in view,55 had close ties to John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and other New York poets.56 With O’Hara (1926-1966), who also was an art critic and later worked as curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,57 Rivers started a fruitful artistic collaboration across different media. A prominent example is O’Hara’s poetic response to Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware: in 1955, he published the poem “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art.” Rather than as a traditional example of ekphrasis, O’Hara’s poem can be regarded as the author’s attempt to adopt painterly techniques, to achieve with words what Rivers accomplished with paint and brush.58 Most importantly, he, too, challenges the hackneyed representations of George Washington and his crossing of the Delaware. The first stanza of the poem is very telling in this respect: Now that our hero has come back to us in his white pants and we know his nose trembling like a flag under fire, we see the calm cold river is supporting our forces, the beautiful history.59

28 O’Hara’s poem sets in with the completion of a memorial process which has brought back to the present (“Now”) a figure from the past. The commemorative act is a communal one, for the speaker uses personal pronouns in the plural form (“our,” “us,” “we”). “[O]ur hero,” “a flag,” “the […] cold river”, “our forces,” and “the beautiful history” serve to recall the well-known national narrative of Washington’s passage across the Delaware. But some of those phrases, given the context in which they are used, undermine that very tale. The flag, for instance, is only a simile indicating the intensive trembling of Washington’s nose. As a possible sign of nervousness, this detail undercuts the idea of Washington as a hero and stresses his average humanity instead. A similar turnaround is noticeable with regard to the natural element of the river. Whereas in the most frequently cited version of the legend, Washington and his troops had to battle against the floats of ice and could reach the New Jersey shore only thanks to their hardihood, O’Hara characterizes the Delaware as “calm” and supportive of the Continental Army, thereby further reducing Washington’s role as brave Commander- in-Chief.

29 Throughout the poem, the “[d]ear father of our country,” as he is ironically addressed in stanza four, is demythologized and reinvented, a process which reaches its climax at the very end: “Don’t shoot until, the white of freedom glinting / on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.” The last two words may not only be understood in the sense of ‘the fear of the public’ but also in the sense of ‘General Washington shows fear.’ This pun adds to the depiction of Washington as a contradictory figure, a figure, which is ultimately revealed as a fiction.60 The colloquial, irreverent style of the poem stands in stark contrast to the epic topic and plays its part in freeing a historical figure from

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stock connotations.61 The total effect is one of indeterminacy, a blurring of meanings, quite similar to the effect of Larry Rivers’ canvas.62

30 As a work of art which refers to a painting that is based on an earlier painting which reconstructs and necessarily interprets a crucial moment from the Revolutionary War, O’Hara’s poem aptly stresses the futility of attempts at authentic representation.63 There is no original point in the past that could be captured and objectively fixed. There are only layers of rhetoric and iconography that stylize a mythic beginning according to the needs of the present.

31 This also holds true for Obama’s 2008 Holiday Radio Address and his Inaugural Address. In a moment of crisis, Obama reminds of past achievements, of victory and progress, and projects these into the future with the help of traditional rhetoric and cultural iconography. He prolongs the myth of Washington crossing the Delaware, even if he uses the latest media technology to do so. Ultimately, his plea: “[…] let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come”64 is a more elaborate version of his election campaign slogan: “Yes, we can,” highlighting the American potential for recommencement.

NOTES

1. See Jan Assmann, who defines cultural memory as “that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity.” Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” trans. John Czaplicka, New German Critique 65 (Spring–Summer 1995): 132. 2. Cf. Astrid Erll, “Literatur als Medium des kollektiven Gedächtnisses,” in Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft: Theoretische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 252. 3. Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial 64, no. 764, 11 April 1918, 339. 4. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Obama Makes History in Live Internet Video Chat,” New York Times, 27 March 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/us/politics/27obama.html. 5. David Bonk, Trenton and Princeton, 1776-77: Washington Crosses the Delaware (New York: Osprey, 2009), 44; John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 156, 161; and David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 10. 6. Paul S. Boyer, Clifford E. Clark, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch, eds., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People. 6th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 163; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 178; and Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 5, 142-143. 7. Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 186; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 117, 137, 363. 8. Boyer et al., Enduring Vision, 169. 9. Bonk, Trenton and Princeton, 48. 10. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 219. 11. Bonk, Trenton and Princeton, 49.

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12. Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 175-176. 13. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 426-427. 14. Ibid., 428. 15. Quoted in ibid., 438. 16. Cover. InsideOut Hudson Valley, November–December 2008, http://www.insideouthv.com/ Cover_NovDec08.jpg; Cover. New Yorker, 26 January 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ toc/2009/ 01/26/toc. 17. A video clip of this speech can be accessed on YouTube. 18. Barack Obama, “Holiday Radio Address,” 24 December 2008, http://www.cbsnews.com/ 8301-503544_162-4685856-503544.html. 19. Apart from the term “our founding documents” the following phrase in Obama’s address is pertinent: “The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” Barack Obama, “Inaugural Address,” 20 January 2009, http:// www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address/. Cf. Thomas Jefferson, “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled,” in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Random House, 1972), 22. 20. Obama, “Inaugural Address.” 21. As Michiko Kakutani convincingly argues in The New York Times, “[t]alking of the continuum of history enables Mr. Obama to remind us of the progress that has been made toward perfecting this nation, and this Enlightenment faith in progress, in turn, offers the hope that today’s challenges, too, can be met and conquered […].” Michiko Kakutani, “Speech Puts a New Frame on Obama’s Call to Serve,” New YorkTimes, 20 January 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/ us/politics/21kakutani.html?fta =y. 22. Thomas Paine, The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway, vol. 1, http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/3741/3741-h/3741-h.htm; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 169; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 141. 23. The King James Bible,http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10/10-h/10-h.htm, Gen. 22: 1-19. 24. Ibid., 1 Cor. 11: 24. 25. See, for instance, ibid., Rom. 8: 24 and 2 Pet. 1: 3. 26. This phrase is used, for example, in ibid., Ps. 103: 17. 27. Eli Saslow, “Helping to Write History,” Washington Post, 18 December 2008, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/17/AR2008121703903.html. 28. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 4. 29. Barbara S. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 1816-1868: Freedom Is the Only King (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975), 16, 29. 30. Ibid., 34, 83. Leutze’s painting was neither the first nor the last depicting this pivotal moment of American history, as Thomas Sully’s The Passage of the Delaware (1819), Edward Hicks’ Washington Crossed Here (c. 1833), George Caleb Bingham’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1856-71), and Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1974-75), among others, prove. For a comparison of some these representations see Karsten Fitz, “Contested Space: Washington Crossing the Delaware as a Site of American Cultural Memory,” in Space in America: Theory, History, Culture, ed. Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 561-575. 31. Leutze owned two publications in which this historic event is described, George Bancroft’s History of the United States (1834-74) and J. Spark’s Life of Washington (1829). Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 65n31. 32. Ibid., 30.

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33. A commentator for The Literary World remarked, “We saw this painting under great disadvantages, it being set against the wall, without a frame, and in a bad position for light, but we are sure that the highly-wrought anticipations of the public will be more than realized. It is incomparably the best painting yet executed of an American subject. […] It is abundantly varied in character, strong in color, and full of emphasis and earnestness without exaggeration.” “Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Literary World, 18 October 1851, 311. Under the rubric “Editor’s Correspondence,” the Daily National Intelligencer published the following assessment: “Much of the strong interest excited by this painting is undoubtedly to be attributed to the subject. The artist has been happy in selecting a subject that comes home at once to the heart of every American, and powerfully stirs and kindles the patriotic sentiment. […] But whatever, interest may attach to the subject, the handling and the execution of the artist are equally essential to the success of the work; and these, it appears to me, are such as to command success. […] The whole landscape and perspective are admirably presented. […] Such a work as the artist has given us deserves the gratitude of the country, as a worthy record of one of the most interesting incidents of our history, and as a stimulus to patriotism and love of the Union.” Bird’s-Eye, “Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Daily National Intelligencer, 26 November 1851, A. 34. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 37-38, 40, 83n56. 35. The 13th person is hidden from sight, but his weapon is to be seen. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 2. 36. Ibid., 1-2. 37. Ibid. 38. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 34. 39. Fitz, “Contested Space,” 564n11. 40. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 2. Udo J. Hebel rightly calls Leutze’s painting “the quintessential representation of George Washington’s historical role as the larger-than-life epic hero leading the emerging U.S.-American nation into a bright future of glory and progress.” Udo J. Hebel, “Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories and Cultures,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 52. 41. Bird’s-Eye, “Leutze’s Washington,” A. 42. In 1776, the Grand Union Flag was used, which fused the British Union Jack with thirteen stripes. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 10. 43. See Truettner, who remarks, “Leutze apparently believed that history paintings were composed around important or ‘clear’ ideas that […] enabled one to see history developing […] toward well-defined, progressive goals. These ideas not only transcended time and place, but also drove a historical process that required each succeeding age to appear more enlightened than its predecessor.” William H. Truettner, “Storming the Teocalli – Again; Or, Further Thoughts on Reading History Paintings,” American Art 9, no. 3 (1995): 73. 44. Cf. Fitz, who identifies “the landing-theme” and “the rite de passage-motif” in Leutze’s painting. Fitz, “Contested Space,” 573-574. 45. Ibid., 569. 46. Ibid., 568-569, 572-573. 47. George Berkeley, “On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” in Library of the World’s Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, ed. Charles Dudley Warner, vol. 4, 1896, http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/13220/13220-h/13220-h.htm. In 1862, Leutze painted Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way for the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. Truettner, “Storming the Teocalli,” 70. 48. Suzanne Ferguson, “Crossing the Delaware with Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara: The Post- Modern Hero at the Battle of Signifiers,” Word & Image 2, no. 1 (January–March 1986): 29.

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49. Quoted in Raphael J. Schulte, “Re-Imagining the ‘Beautiful History’: Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers,” Fu Jen Studies 32 (1999): 49. 50. Ferguson, “Crossing the Delaware,” 30. Interestingly, David Hackett Fischer takes the “small eccentric figure, mounted on a prancing white horse in the upper left corner of the painting” as Washington. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 453. Contradictory readings, such as the ones by Suzanne Ferguson and Fischer, clearly support the painting’s indeterminacy. 51. Ferguson, “Crossing the Delaware,” 30. 52. Schulte, “Re-Imagining,” 50. 53. Ferguson, “Crossing the Delaware,” 29. 54. Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Knopf, 1993), 238. 55. Schulte, “Re-Imagining,” 48-49. 56. Carl Haenlein, Larry Rivers: Retrospektive – Zeichnungen (Hannover: Kestner-Gesellschaft, 1980), 19. 57. Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 118. 58. Michael Davidson, “Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Painter Poem,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 1 (Autumn 1983): 71-72; Helen Koriath, Larry Rivers:Bildende Kunst in Beziehung zur Dichtung Frank O’Haras (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1990), 100, 105. 59. Frank O’Hara, The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Knopf, 1974), 101. 60. Davidson, “Ekphrasis,” 73. 61. Cf. Shaw, Frank O’Hara, 34. 62. David L. Sweet, “Parodic Nostalgia for Aesthetic Machismo: Frank O’Hara and Jackson Pollock,” Journal of Modern Literature 23, no. 3-4 (Summer 2000): 386. 63. See Davidson, “Ekphrasis,” 72; John Lowney, “The ‘Post-Anti-Esthetic’ Poetics of Frank O’Hara,” Contemporary Literature 32, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 247. 64. Obama, “Inaugural Address.”

RÉSUMÉS

The Revolutionary War has been of prime importance to American self-perceptions and to the formation of its national identity. As a foundational moment with a strong mythical dimension it has become a cherished point of reference for the nation’s leaders, who, in their speeches and written communications, rely on the most widely accepted cultural iconography to recall this event. A time-honored, traditional discourse might, however, go together with the use of contemporary media technology as a means of distribution, as in the case of Barack Obama. Framing Obama’s rhetorical strategies within 19th- and 20th-century artistic representations of one specific historical moment from the Revolutionary War, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware river, this paper seeks to contribute to an enlarged understanding of the intricate relations between politics, the arts, and media development and of the ways they appropriate the past

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INDEX

Keywords : American Painting, Cultural Iconography, Holiday Radio Address, Inaugural Address, Presidential Rhetoric, Revolutionary War

AUTEURS

JUTTA ERNST Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz

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Photographic Histories of the Civil War and the First World War and Rebirth

Mark Meigs

1 In the photographs taken in wartime, used as news, sold as souvenirs and postcards, distributed as propaganda and collected afterwards as evidence for polemical arguments, as nostalgia or as the nation building memory, we would expect to find different kinds of rebirth. After all, those photographs can be captioned in different ways that change and give new meanings for all those different purposes. But will we always find national renewal or a “new birth of Freedom” in the sense that Abraham Lincoln meant when he used the phrase at Gettysburg in 1863? Two large collections of photographs, The Photographic History of the Civil War, published in 1912 in ten quarto volumes and A Photographic History of the First World War, published in 1933 in a single quarto volume, display similar titles, are of the same page size, and testify to a similar editorial desire to re-cycle war photographs.1 Seen together, however, these two works lead to no easy conclusion about what will be re-born when war photographs find their way into commemorative volumes, except that rebirth, recasting, reinterpretation will certainly take place.

2 When Lincoln spoke of a “new birth of freedom,” on November 19, 1863 towards the end of his Gettysburg Address, he must have referred to literal freedom for African- Americans as well as the more philosophic and political freedom implied by the famous phrase “government of the people by the people for the people.” After all, he started the speech by saying that “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He does not mention this equality again in the speech, but only fourteen months after signing the Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862 and less than a year after the beginning of the official policy of emancipation that the Proclamation put into motion, his meaning must be clear. The phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” gives a hint of this as well. Lincoln took the phrase, according to his biographer and sometime law partner William Herndon, from a text by the

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abolitionist, Theodore Parker who had defined democracy as “direct self government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.”2 The Photographic History of the Civil War ignored this. With an astonishing singleness of purpose given the huge and diverse number of its authors, the work threw itself into the task of building or birthing the American nation on the shared memory of suffering by white people in that war while doing its best to both forget slavery and deny that the war had brought about any change in the status of African-Americans. A Photographic History of the First World War, with its laconic captions by a single author, had a very different purpose. It set out to warn that war was nothing but death and destruction. At the time of publication in 1933 when only one world war was generally given the name World War, it warned that there was a Second World War on the way pitting forces stirred up by Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Kemal Pasha (Kemal Attaturk) against each other.3 The Photographic History of the Civil War has turned the suffering of that war into a positive, even essential experience in building the nation. The First World War book turns a victory into overture for disaster to come.

3 When Abraham Lincoln used the words that the introduction to this collection of articles repeats, he was giving his “Gettysburg Address,” at the dedication ceremony, November 19, 1863, for the battlefield memorial that was being arranged at the time. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” has been echoed ever since its first delivery in the graveside speeches of American presidents and others in time of war, and itself refers to Pericles’ Funeral Oration delivered in 430 BC, after the first year, of the Peloponnesian War. This kind of speech is part of a long echo of “our cause” against theirs, supported by “our” dead who cannot be allowed to have died in vain and against “their” dead who have most assuredly died in vain. Lincoln’s speech pointed out that it was the dead of the Battle of Gettysburg who had dedicated that place, “far above our poor power to add or detract.” His task, therefore, was calling for the re-dedication of his listeners to the cause of American freedom and to the cause of government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The Civil War continued even as he spoke pitting the northern states and their populations against the southern states and their populations. And even as he spoke northern dead were being put in graves marked with headstones inscribed, where possible, with the identity of the dead soldier, marking them as counters in support of “our cause,” while southern soldier dead at Gettysburg, the enemy, were being put in long common pits erasing their identity and their possible use as counters in support of “their” cause. In other words, while Lincoln spoke of “a new birth of Freedom,” that new birth was going to emerge from a victory for one side and the destruction of the other, both results being actively assisted by the northerners who listened to him. What the introduction to his collection of articles refers to when quoting Lincoln’s ringing words, is something quite different. The introduction here refers to the ability of nations and of peoples, more specifically perhaps, the uncanny ability on the part of the citizens of the United States, to arrive at new birth and make a fresh start after the disasters of war, using the experience itself as a kind of springboard to something else: to forget and distort the experience and enmity of war and move on.

4 Lincoln, the North in general, and no doubt some who had been listening that day in November 1863, pursued the war vigorously. It ended a year and a half later in the only way it could given the weapons of the time, the difficulty of offensive tactics, the North’s determination and overwhelming superiority in resources and the South’s refusal to capitulate. General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, defeated in its last

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offensive action at Gettysburg, July 2 and 3, 1863, fought on defensively in a war of attrition until it had no force left at all. The Confederate armies further west and south did the same. The northern strategy famously extended beyond military destruction and military attrition to include the destruction of a wide band of the South as General Sherman took his army from Atlanta, Georgia to the Atlantic coast and then north. Attrition as the main strategy that won the war is important because of its implication that all the gallantry and intelligence of one side or the other ended up counting for little as all men got reduced to cannon fodder and the side with the most fodder won. Birth of anything after such destruction would be an accomplishment, that it be achieved by a unified nation verges on the miraculous.

5 Yet that unified nation was illustrated, if not given birth, by The Photographic History of the Civil War when it appeared in its monumental form in 1912 with the bold advertisement “Semi-Centennial Memorial” on the title page. The ten volumes, published in New York by the Review of Reviews Company, each contained about 250 pages divided into multiple parts. These parts corresponded sometimes to battles or campaigns and sometimes to special aspects of the war: cavalry, artillery and forts, prison camps, hospitals, the war at sea, songs and poetry, portraits of important people. They provided a format in which editor-in-chief, Francis Trevelyan Miller (1877-1959) and managing editor Robert S. Lanier (1880-?) could be supported by hosts of preface, article and caption writers from North and South volume after volume and Part by Part. Multiple editors, sons of editors, Generals and sons of Generals, Presidents and sons of Presidents contributed—a younger Lee, a Grant, and Tad Lincoln all participated—along with congressmen, poets, song writers, cabinet secretaries and professors. The format, divided as it was between photographs, their captions and the many essays on different subjects written by many different hands, permitted the re- enforcement of some subjects when text, photograph and caption agreed, but also permitted a kind of erasure or at least confusion, when these different parts were not in agreement.

6 President William Howard Taft’s greeting in the first volume set the unifying tone: “We have reached a point, I am glad to say, when the North can admire to the full the heroes of the South, and the South admire to the full the heroes of the North.” The dedication “To the men in blue and gray whose valor and devotion have become the priceless heritage of a united nation,” underlined the point: bravery that could not win frontal assaults at Cold Harbor or Picket’s Charge could nevertheless be reborn. An acknowledgement from the publisher thanked a host of military and veterans organizations and associations, commemorative groups and individuals for photographs, an “Editorial Introduction” by Francis Trevelyan Miller and no less than five prefaces on subjects like the state of photography at the time of the Civil War, the use of photographs as historical documents, the strategy of the war’s military leaders and the state of war records in the North and the South were part of this front matter. The message of this multiple introductory framing, like the graphic framing of the many title pages and text sections showing silent canon and battle flags at rest, was double and harmonious. First, and emphatically, the war was over. No further animosity existed between North and South the reader learned again and again. The two Sections had fought and suffered and by 1912 they had been joined together in pain and the memory of common bravery. The second message of this framing was theatrical: the book arranged the war like a classical play according to a plan of rising action, crowned by the suspenseful “Crisis” at the battle of Gettysburg and followed by

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the working out of the plot during General Grant’s campaigns of 1864 and 1865, when the superior numbers of northern soldiers ground away at the diminishing resources of the South. The volumes on subjects like prison camps and hospitals presented a tensionless denouement of sorrow equally spread between North and South and mixed with an assured patriotism underlined by the volume of portraits. In the graphic decoration of the title and text pages the draped flags of Union and Confederacy constructed so many theatrical or proscenium arches for the text.

7 This double strength structure could frame pain and sorrow and produce a unified country. Pain serving as unifying balm was applied in great quantities in The Photographic History of the Civil War. There were many photographs of the dead. The state of outdoor photography in the 1860s contributed to this. A dead man did not move. A photographer at the time required a portable darkroom near the subject where the photographer prepared his plates. He would carry this pane of glass coated with damp chemicals in a light-proof container to the place were it was to be exposed, expose it for the required amount of time in his camera, and then return to the darkroom. Photographers had tents and wagons for this purpose, but it was almost impossible for them to work on the battlefield while the battle raged. Furthermore, exposure times meant that many subjects were impossible or produced eerie effects. If an American flag was blowing in the wind over a color guard at attention, it appeared as a kind of striped ghost hovering over the rigid men. The volume of the History devoted to cavalry is strangely devoid of horses except standing still with men on foot holding them. Horses in movement were too fast. Even on the brightest days, at attention on parade, there are blurred heads and tails. Men engaged in combat, even if the photographer could have his equipment nearby, were impossible too.

8 The Photographic History of the Civil War made up for this by animating pictures of still scenes using prolix captions. The volume on Cavalry shows “A Well-Equipped Horse of the first Massachusetts Cavalry,”(vol. 4, p. 53). The horse stood quietly with its trooper. The caption says “this is one of the horses and men that charged Stuart’s cavalry so fiercely on the night of the third day at Gettysburg.” A year has passed between that action and the photograph. There is no way now, and probably there was not then, to be certain that that horse was ever anywhere near Gettysburg. Yet the book acknowledged no loss for this necessity of asking readers to make the jump from the quiet horse to a horse in action. Why should the editors have worried about that act of imagination when again and again quiet stood for battle and the glint in the eye of a studio posed portrait stood for martial determination? The photograph was just a sign of the battle, that it contained a sign of a sign did it no harm.

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In The Devil’s Den (Vol. 2, p. 249)4

9 Still, among signs of battle, that could be reproduced later, some were better than others. The photographs of the dead had a special place. A horse could be caparisoned for war even where there was no war; buildings can burn for many reasons that have nothing to do with bombardments; but a field or dell strewn or draped with the dead, especially the dead grotesquely swollen, days after the event, must be the terrible and unmistakable result of war.

10 Alexander Gardner (1821-1882) had quit his association with Mathew Brady (1822-1896), the great photographic entrepreneur of the Civil War, in a dispute over photographic credits sometime after Brady’s New York exhibition of photographs from the Battle of Antietam (September 16-18, 1862). In the summer of 1863, Gardner was directing his own operation out of Washington, D. C. He understood very well the special relationship between photographs of bodies and an impression of the immediacy of battle. It was his pictures of the dead after the battle of Antietam that had received considerable publicity. Almost a year later, in the first days of July, 1863, when he received the news of the battle in Pennsylvania between Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac, he hurried to the scene to repeat his success.

11 Upon arrival on July 5, a day after the battle, and a day after the Union army set about burying the dead, he immediately set to work photographing what he could see of the battlefield that still looked like evidence of an epic fight: the bodies of men killed July 2, the second day of the battle, at the Rose farm, near the road that approached the town of Gettysburg from Washington, the road Gardner was on. He needed strong light for his work, and so had to stop by five in the afternoon. The following day took him to the rocky northern approaches known as Devil’s Den and Slaughter Pen. That is where Gardner spent most of July 6, and that is where the picture above was taken.5

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12 Little Round Top eventually anchored the extreme left or western end of the north facing Union Army. On the second day of the battle, southern officers had become aware of the importance of this topographic feature at the same time as their northern opponents. Southerners moved towards it through the very difficult terrain of Devil’s Den and fought fiercely with Union men up the rocky slopes and in the dell beside Little Round Top (the “Slaughter Pen” of Gardner’s photographs, a name perhaps invented by Gardner for dramatic effect). Had the Union forces not been able to hold onto the position, and several times they were pushed off its summit, it is quite likely that they would have lost the battle, as from those heights their line to the east was exposed. But Union men prevailed and the southerners retired back down the hill to Devil’s Den, which made a good position for snipers. A deadly duel ensued where northern soldiers sent exploding shells into the rocks and southern marksmen tried to pick off northern officers. The photograph caught a victim of this important duel during the last battle in which the South might have demoralized the North to the point of threatening the northern cause politically. Victory might also have helped the South obtain European recognition and aid. North and South, though unequal in population, wealth and industry, were yet equal in the narrative of the war at the war’s climax as presented here in The Photographic History.

13 The History used the photograph twice, once on the title page of the Gettysburg section, under the words “The Crisis,” and once where it appeared in the chronology of battle sites (vol. 2, pp. 227 and 250). The caption of the photograph made the book’s dramatic intentions clear. Upon this wide, steep hill…was a chasm named by the country folk, “the Devil’s Den.” When the position fell into the hands of the Confederates…it became the stronghold of their sharpshooters, and well did it fulfill its name. It was a most dangerous post to occupy, since the Federal batteries on the Round Top were constantly shelling it in an effort to dislodge the hardy riflemen, many of whom, met the fate of the one in the picture. Their deadly work continued, however, and many a gallant officer of the Federals was picked off during the fighting on the afternoon of the second day. General Vincent was one of the first victims; General Weed fell likewise; and as Lieutenant Hazlett bent over him to catch his last words, a bullet through the head prostrated that officer lifeless on the body of his chief.

14 What the camera caught of the soldier’s face was undamaged and his body, though awkward and a bit puffed up with decomposition, yet retained more animation than the grotesquely swollen bodies in many other photographs, for example “A Harvest of Death,” attributed to Timothy O’Sullivan, who worked for Alexander Gardner at Gettysburg. The often reproduced, “A Harvest of Death” appeared in The History small, with another photograph on the same page, under the title “The First Day’s Toll”(vol. 2, p. 239).6 The featured “sharpshooter” was in better shape, perhaps, because he has been in the shaded ravine, and not out in the sun. A relative would have recognized him easily. Importantly for The History, in the narrative of the battle he was linked forever in a North/South symmetry with the officers he may have had a hand in killing: General Weed, perhaps, and the filial and attentive Lieutenant Hazlett, whose desire to hear the final words of his general placed his head in the path of a bullet. The “hardy” sharpshooter’s marksmanship was no disloyal sneak attack. He too was exposed and paid for any damage he may have caused with his own life.

15 Alexander Gardner, or his assistants, recognized this dead man as a great find and photographed him maybe five times. Of the photographs he took on July 5 and 6, forty-

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five out of sixty, or 75%, were of cadavers. The views of this man included the present view, a stereoscopic double exposure of the same pose, and two versions of a pose Gardner and his assistants invented near a sharpshooter’s stone shelter some tens of yards away, and a stereoscopic view of that pose (“Home of a rebel sharpshooter”).7

16 To say posed, is a matter of degree. The photographer always chooses the approach to a subject, after all, and in all the photographs of this man, and others on the Gettysburg battlefield, Gardner had most likely supplied the gun. According to William Frassanito, from whom much technical information for this article comes, no sharpshooter used the kind of gun in the photographs, and it is unlikely that two days after the battle, such an exposed souvenir would have remained. The second pose, however, included an elaborate story that Gardner entirely invented. He had the sharpshooter await his death, stoically, with a knapsack under his head for a pillow. For Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War, published in 1866, he described finding the body turned to a skeleton, and the gun rusted and rotted, but still leaning on a rock, months later.8

17 Through either intuition, or restraint, the editors of The Photographic History chose not to use the more heavily posed picture, but used instead the one here. They ignored Gardner’s attempt to push the moment of history, represented by the body, across months to the time of Abraham Lincoln’s visit to the battlefield and the moment of his famous address. Instead they contented themselves with a moment extended over space in the narrative that maintained the balance and an emotional tie between the deaths of northerners and southerners. They placed the anonymous sharpshooter in Devil’s Den in the same story as General Weed and Lieutenant Hazlett. Was Lieutenant Hazlett as handsome and young as this soldier?

18 Some subjects, however, did not lend themselves to this elegiac treatment and it is with those subjects that The History exercised its ability to erase even while showing. Neither volume titles nor table of content entries mentioned black people directly. In the ninth volume, however, the one devoted to “Poetry and Eloquence of Blue and Gray,” the entry, “The Lighter Side” (vol. 9, pages 173-184), turned out to announce little that could produce a laugh from today’s readers, but rather the presentation of black Americans’ side of the war in a tortured humorous vein for eleven pages. The heavy ironies and startling contradictions of these pages demonstrated the profound difficulties inherent in discussing the participation of African American soldiers on the winning side of the war in a book that celebrated the pictorial proof of the discovery of what it called “a shared heritage of valor.”

19 To call the section about black soldiers “The Lighter Side,” may have recalled the black- face minstrel tradition of the Jim Crow period in which African Americans, in order to appear on stage with white actors and actresses and in front of white audiences, wore heavy makeup that disguised them as white people disguised as black people. Of course the section title also frames as comedy the very real accomplishments and sacrifices of black soldiers in military actions mentioned there. One of the most convoluted paragraphs in American historiography, written as a caption (vol. 9, pp.174 and 175) and included in this humor section, explained photographs of two plantation houses with black soldiers standing in smart formation nearby. The caption’s title, “To Illustrate ‘Sambo’s Right to be Kilt’” is also the title of a poem (found in vol. 9, p. 176 and 177), written by Charles Graham Halpine (1829-1868), a northern journalist of Irish origins turned soldier then staff officer in the Union Army. He versified in Irish dialect under the name of Private Miles O’Reilly. The poem that appeared near the

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photographs expressed his willingness to have black Americans included in the army and killed in his place. The picture caption explained the verse, as well as the photographs of black people and white mansions: A beautiful Southern mansion stands in flickering shadows of walnut and elm and white oak, and in front are some of the negro troops that have been formed from “contrabands.” The passions of the period waxed particularly bitter over the question of employing Negroes in warfare. Charles Graham Halpine comes to the rescue, in his poem that follows on page 176, with a saving sense of Irish humor. He suggests that, “men who object to Sambo should take his place and fight.” As for himself, he will object not at all “if Sambo’s body should stop a ball that was coming for me direct”…The human side of this problem helps to solve it, as with others. Certainly, the line above presents a firm and soldierly front. Many of the colored regiments came to be well-disciplined and serviceable. Their bravery is attested by the loss of life at Battery Wagner and in the charges at Petersburg crater.

20 The “beauty of the Southern mansion” was contrasted with “contrabands,” the term for former slaves before any judicial or Constitutional determination had been made about their status. “Contrabands” implied illegitimacy, and so the soldiers needed explaining, even an apology, in the context of the handsome houses. “Contrabands” may be former slaves, but they are still Sambos, which is to say they still conform to the stereotype of the foolish happy “darkie,” a word often used in this section. Many photographs of destroyed and partially destroyed southern buildings decorated the pages of the History without captions drawing attention to their beauty. When the white northern army destroyed something, apparently, it could be part of that great test of shared valor and pain that the book created. When black people seemed to take possession, as in these pictures, images of that possession, or merely presence, were viewed by The History as a desecration. The poem so well condensed by its title, “Sambo’s Right to be Kilt,” means that a Negro in warfare could be legitimate only as cannon fodder, taking a ball in the place of a white man. Today this might be interpreted as a cruel or self serving idea on the part of a white writer, but in the context of shared white memory of the war that the book presented, the poem could be read as self-deprecating humor: as “the human side,” which is to say, a momentary lapse from that uniform valor that North and South should share. North and South can now share this human weakness too. Thus the “line above” that “presents a firm and soldierly front” may just as easily refer to stead-fast scorn for black people combined with indulgence of human (white) weakness shared by northerners and southerners represented in the line “Sambo’s right to be kilt,” as it can refer to the lines of black soldiers in the photographs. By the time a reader arrived at the “facts” of the bravery of African American soldiers, mentioned at the end of the quote above, they are an embarrassing shadow, well behind the new identity of white people.

21 Halpine published several volumes of poems and articles he wrote during the Civil War before his death in 1868. His work was popular or important enough to be reprinted in 1926, and again in 1973. According to The History, some of that work came from what he wrote for the New York Herald while a major, serving on the staff of General David Hunter on Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 1862. Hilton Head, one of the southern Sea Islands, was among the first southern territories taken by the Union forces. General Hunter trained members of its large freed slave population into the first African American unit in the Army. Halpine must have been part of that training program. Presumably his dialect poetry was part of a propaganda effort to make black soldiers acceptable to New Yorkers, especially Irish New Yorkers, whose racism and resentment

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of participating in a war that would free black slaves, contributed to the New York draft riots of July, 1863, in which black neighborhoods were destroyed. The poems, that seem to us either cynical or racist or both and were presented in so equivocal a fashion in The History, were probably carefully calculated during the war to promote the cause of black fighting men.

22 The History hardly mentioned slavery and certainly not in any overt political way: neither as abolitionism, the cause that would have put an end to slavery, nor as states rights that made it possible for some states to permit slavery while other states forbade it, nor as the political prohibition of slavery’s expansion, which was the successful campaign position of Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election that precipitated the war. This author has seen one photograph of slaves among all those volumes. “De Darkies got so Lonesome,” again in the “Lighter Side” (vol. 9, p.183). It illustrated the song “The Year of Jubilee,” by Henry Clay Work (1832-1884) who made his reputation with “Marching Through Georgia,” (1865) and “My Grandfather’s Clock,” (1876). Work was the son of abolitionists in Connecticut and his dialect song (this time African American dialect) told of slaves taking possession of a plantation house when the master went off to fight. The former slaves lived in the parlor and drank up the wine and cider. De massa runn, ha, ha! De darkey stay, ho, ho! It mus’ be now de kingdom comin’ An’ de yar ob jubilo.

23 The paragraph about the song assured readers that though black soldiers sang it as they entered Richmond on April 3, 1865, it soon became a favorite among white southerners. That and the photograph of “slaves” enjoying an idle moment on a Mississippi plantation assured readers that African Americans, who, “had been supposed to be on the point of rising and inaugurating a race-war, remained quietly at work on the large plantations.” The caption went on to negate any change that the war might have brought about for former slaves. “The picture…is typical of all the four years of the conflict and of later negro life.” (vol. 9, p. 183, emphasis added). Southerners could simply laugh at the idea of African Americans taking possession of property, in this case, or having power over property, as in the photographs of former slaves in military formation at plantation houses. In the context of The History, northerners agreed with them.

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“De Darkies Got so Lonesome” Illustration for “The Year of Jubilee” (Vol. 9, p. 183)9

24 The other notable gap among all these photographs are the shocking images of prisoners at Andersonville, Georgia, taken from photographs and published as engravings in Harper’s and Leslie’s magazines in the summer of 1865, just after the war’s end. Those pictures show starving prisoners, unable to stand, some with their lower limbs literally rotting away. Man for man, the images show bodily harm as haunting as any picture from Nazi death camps, but with the important difference that they are evidence of inhumanity to a number of soldiers, and not evidence of mass extermination. Neither the fate of African Americans, nor the extreme inhumanity demonstrated by those Andersonville images could be included in these volumes that sought reconciliation. Instead we have white heroes, dead and alive.

25 The reason for all this obscurity must have been that African Americans represented the unfinished business of the Civil War and a great political and social question that the United States would not face satisfactorily before the 1960s, and that has only been put to rest bit by bit, the last important moment in this long history being the inauguration of President Obama in 2009! The volumes of The Photographic History of the Civil War were intended to unite white Americans with a heroic past and a shared heritage, to use the words of the dedication, against the anxieties engendered by the possibility of someday changing the suppressed status of the former slaves and their descendants. Photographs of black soldiers with a caption that said clearly what they had accomplished, like the terrible photographs from Andersonville, might have proved destabilizing to an equality of suffering important to the birth of that unity.

26 Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the others who took the photographs of the Civil War did it as a business. The photographs were sold individually to put in albums and in stereoscopic pairs in great numbers during and after the war. So anxious were soldiers to have a studio portrait that William Frassanito reported them lining up for

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this purpose outside Gettysburg’s photography studio during the first day of the battle there. So common were photographic portraits of individual soldiers that the United States Military History Institute at Carlisle, Pennsylvania numbers among its projects the collection of a photograph of every single military participant in the war. Conceivably they will succeed.

27 Photographs published in collections in books were too expensive to have so wide a distribution as stereoscopic views or the many individual portraits. Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of 1866, perhaps sold in the hundreds of copies. George N. Barnard’s Photographic Views of the Sherman Campaign, also of 1866, was beautifully produced and expensive and probably sold fewer copies. The Photographic History’s preface, “Photographing the Civil War” (vol. 1, pp. 30-52) told the story of Mathew Brady’s $100,000 investment in over 7,000 photographs to produce an archive or book. He lost his negatives—one set in payment to his photographic supplier in the 1870s, one set to the Library of Congress for $25,000—before he could exploit them. He died poor and forgotten, the victim of over-confidence in the appetite for Civil War photographs in the period just after the war.

28 By 1912, when the huge project of The Photographic History of the Civil War reached publication, the editors, both of whom were born after the Civil War, thought that the appetite for these images had revived, crystallized around the idea of a unity of memory and peace rather than the memory of actual fighting. Using the photographs, the book expressed the linking of North to South and the celebration of that reunion made possible by a shared memory of pain and made possible by a shared forgetfulness of the reasons behind the wartime desire and necessity to destroy the army of the other Section. In his introduction, Francis Trevelyan Miller, who made a career of photographic war volumes up through the Korean War, remarked that “military writers have informed me that they cannot understand why the American people have been so little interested in this remarkable war,”(vol. 1, p. 15-16). He concluded that Americans were peace loving and not military, and so he would give them a history of the war devoted to peace, notwithstanding the fact that the materials he had at hand had once served to rededicate populations to a military purpose of destruction.

29 Earlier this job of reconciliation with photographs would not have been possible. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his much-quoted article on photography in the Atlantic Monthly of July, 1863 (the month of the battle of Gettysburg) had tried to understand the photographs of the dead at Antietam. “Let him who wishes to know what war is, look at this series of illustrations,” Holmes had written of the Brady/Gardner photographs. “It was so nearly like visiting the battle-field to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the remains of the dead they too vividly represented.” Holmes had visited the field of Antietam shortly after the battle, searching for his son, the future Supreme Court Justice, who had been wounded there. His presence on the field almost certainly coincided with the visit of the photographers because bodies were buried as quickly as possible. His sensibilities and emotions were hugely strained by the experience, but he could yet face the necessity of winning the war even at the cost of what he saw. “The end to be attained justifies the means, we are willing to believe but the sight of these pictures is a commentary on civilization such as a savage might well triumph to show

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its missionaries.” Holmes cast himself as among the missionaries, and though shaken, could still answer the savage with the sanctity of the northern cause.

30 When Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous address at Gettysburg (November 19, 1863) he would have agreed with Holmes. His audience was northern. He spoke of the deeds of the northern soldiers. If anyone had cared to look, northern soldiers were being arranged in graves with markers on the battlefield. The task would be completed by the spring of 1864. Southern soldiers meanwhile, remained in the mass graves where northern soldiers had been quick to heave them right after the battle. They remained in those mass graves until 3,320 of their unidentifiable bodies were removed to southern locations through the efforts of a southern women’s organization between 1870 and 1873. Oliver Wendell Holmes, close to the time of battle and in the midst of war, like Lincoln, had seen and understood this at Antietam. “These wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps or arranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but yesterday…An officer, here and there, may be recognized; but for the rest, if enemies, they will be counted, and that is all.” While in the utterly human act of searching the battlefield for his own son, he could still refer to the dead sons of others as enemies and acknowledge, clear eyed, their anonymous fate.

31 By 1912, however, the message of the photographs had changed with the meaning of the dead bodies they so often portrayed. The Photographic History included a section on “The Meaning of Battle Losses” (vol. 10, 117-138). The author, Hilary A. Herbert (1834-1919), a southern colonel and later Grover Cleveland’s Secretary of the Navy and a congressman from Alabama, produced statistical evidence to show that northern and southern regiments had sometimes lost great percentages of their men in battles, and yet managed to prevail. The statistics for the Civil War showed more courage in this way than any of Napoleon’s regiments before the Civil War or the Japanese regiments in the war of 1905 against the Russians, which in 1912, was considered the acme of fortitude under fire. “Waterloo is eclipsed by Gettysburg; Gettysburg is eclipsed by Sharpsburg, and Sharpsburg eclipsed by Chickamauga,” wrote Herbert (vol. 10, p. 122). Chickamauga, the gold standard of bravery according to this science, cost the Confederate victors 27% of their men. The Japanese victors at Lio-Yang lost a mere 18.5%.

32 Not unexpectedly in a military context in 1912, the message took on a Darwinist nationalism. The Civil War had proved that Americans were ready to face the world. “The forces here credited with these ‘brilliant achievements’ in 1861-65 are now thoroughly united, and would stand shoulder to shoulder against a foreign foe. Our population has increased threefold, while our military resources, our capacity to equip and convey food to armies, to manufacture arms, and to build ships…has increased tenfold,” Herbert said on the way to his conclusion (vol. 10, p. 136). The war has made the country unite in valor and the losses, the photographs of the dead along with memorials and ceremonies, were essential elements in bringing the birth of that union about. “The meeting of the Philadelphia Brigade and Pickett’s men at Gettysburg, the visits of Massachusetts soldiers to Richmond, and of Virginia Confederates to Boston…these coupled with the strewing of flowers, in 1867, by Southern women at Columbus Mississippi, on the graves of Union soldiers…Presidents Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft have each and all, by deeds and words, had their full share in the work of perfect union.”(vol. 10, p. 138).

33 Since 1912 the photographs have had other meanings still. William Frassanito insisted in 1975, that the photographs should bring history into the present and bring the past

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to life. In this his words were not unlike the prefaces to The History. But with remarkable energy, he reconstructed the history of taking the photographs against the background of the photographers’ desire to document and exploit the war. He succeeded very well. But by studying the photographers he placed Alexander Gardner and his colleagues, their ambitions and needs, between readers and the events of the battle and made the photographs into documents in the history of photography and the biographies of a handful of men, more than documents in the history of the Civil War. Alan Trachtenberg in an Article of 1985 placed those same photographs in a rich cultural setting and invited his learned readers to “recapture and recaption such images, to win them from authorized functions…” in other words to do the work of analyzing the photographs themselves, giving them the freedom to bring about the re- birth of those documents with every new generation, rather than privilege any moment in history with that task.10 The Photographic History of the Civil War had done the job too well and turned the photographs into a representation of “The Birth of a Nation” with the message of white unity against a black minority that just three years later D. W. Griffith’s iconographic movie of that name would capture on film.

34 A Photographic History of the First World War in a single quarto volume of 298 pages of photographs along with a few pages of front and back matter, was a far more modest work of editing than The Photographic History of the Civil War, but it still managed to recast the documents at its disposal in as dramatic a way as the Civil War work. With the slight difference in titles, A Photographic History as against The Photographic History, it is easy to believe that author and his publisher were very aware of the similarities and the differences between the two enterprises. The comparison shows just how different the uses of photographs from the two wars could be. The Photographic History had multiple prefaces, introductions, articles and long titled captions written by a host of well-known or scholarly persons from both the North and the South. A Photographic History had but one author and editor who wrote laconic captions and introduced his volume with just a couple of double spaced pages of curt argument. For The History of the Civil War underlined the fact that the war was over by the theatrical arrangement of the themes in the many volumes and by the proscenium graphics and funereal flags that decorated so many pages. For A History, the war was not over. There was no rising action coming to a crisis and denouement and no proscenium barrier to push the horror of war back into the past or into a theatrical structure away from the spectators. The First World War pictures were almost always bled to the edges of pages, with only a space for the brutally printed block capital captions on a strip of white paper at the bottom. Sometimes the small captions were pasted or cut into a white rectangle in an insignificant part of the picture. These captions do not attempt elaborate arguments like the caption described above entitled “To Illustrate ‘Sambo’s Right to be Kilt.’” The Civil War volumes went to great interpretative and rhetorical length to put the war in the past, ignore freed black people and join northern and southern whites into This Republic of Suffering, to use the title of a recent important Civil War book that borrowed the phrase from Frederick Law Olmstead as he watched the wounded arriving at hospital ships after a battle in 1862.11 The lone editor and author of A Photographic History of the First World War, Laurence Stallings (1894-1968), had only one consistent if many-faceted anti-war message to recount in the briefest of captions he attached to the photographs: suffering caused by war had not welded people into any kind of republic, the soldiers all died in vain, and by 1933, the date of the book’s confection, there was every reason to believe that Europe would drag the world into an even worse debacle

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soon. In his title and in his introduction, after all, he perhaps coined the name First World War implying that there would be at least a second. The words receive lower case letters in the introduction, an indication that this idea was in its formative stage in Stallings’ hands.12

35 The introduction set the stage for his position, which he made crystal clear on just about every page of photographs. In this anthology of pictures of the first world war there was no effort to satisfy any special interest or taste. A militarist will be disappointed in them for there are not enough pictures of guns and tactical groups. A pacifist will not find enough horror, nor enough of cadavers. And a student of war can hardly follow, from these pictorial representations, the methods of infantry combat slowly evolving from close-packed slaughter of the trenches to the loosely-held butcheries later on…The editor is conscious of his short-comings in the matter of captions. Many should be more expert, more military. A military expert, to paraphrase, is one who carefully avoids all the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. This book, at least, avoids that fallacy. There is no conclusion to it. Man made this world in four years, and saw that it was good, if we are to believe Versailles. Well, here it is in the making, just as man made it, caught by many a camera eye. The pictures are placed more or less chronologically, but for the most part in a senseless fashion…If this picture book survives, doubtless it will get in time another preface, and one which will make sense out of chaos.

36 Stallings has set out to present his interpretation of the war, which, by 1933, was shared by all people disappointed in the Versailles settlement and disillusioned with propaganda machines that had promoted the cause of the war while it was being fought. The photographs, with brutal artlessness, show first the breakdown from European concert to aggression. The first picture is a reproduction of the well-known print of elegant diplomats in Vienna in 1814 settling the affairs of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon and the disturbances of the French Revolution. Next comes a series of prints and photographs of the less and less harmonious and less and less elegant meetings of the “concert of Europe” through the 19th Century. Page 2 shows photographs indicating the German, British and French arms race leading up to 1914. Franz-Ferdinand’s bloody tunic from June 16, 1914 gets a funereal black boarder and all of page 4.

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Pictures showing British soldiers enthusiastically enlisting or going off to war. Similar photographs of German and French soldiers appeared nearby. A Photographic History of the First World War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1933), 85.

37 Then come pages of comparison: enthusiastic volunteers in the capital cities of all the belligerent countries; refugees heading in every direction; cheerful soldiers heading to the front; the waving Germans in a cramped car intended for live stock on page 10, will be echoed by waving Americans in the same cramped car on page 183. Human suffering made its appearance on all sides.

38 Given the slight difference in titles, A Photographic History as against The Photographic History, Stallings’s publisher, Max Lincoln Schuster, no doubt aware of the similarities and the differences between the two enterprises and embarrassed by the lack of front and back matter and comparative editorial light weight in his book, wrote a page and a half of preface in which he insisted on the scholarly effort that had gone into what might otherwise have appeared as a slapdash exploitation of photographs. “Almost three years of research work,” he said, went into the book. Archives from military colleges were examined. He gives credit in this brief preface to the known and unknown photographers, too numerous to be cited here, he said, and their publishers, and collectors who are simply listed in a nearly incomprehensible way at the end of the volume. There the corporate sounding Acme News Pictures appeared near the seemingly private individual Paul Thomas; Mrs. Cockburn-Lance rubbed against The New York Times; and expressions like “Italian Official Photos” or “French Official Photos,” distress now, and no doubt distressed then, the spirit of any scholar. The self conscious assurance of The Photographic History of the Civil War has been replaced by opinion that the author has the modesty to think may change with time: “If this picture book survives, doubtless it will get in time another preface, and one which will make sense out of chaos,” Stallings had written in his introduction. The contrast with the heavy definitive editorializing in The Photographic History could not have been greater.

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The first page of an explanatory article in The Photographic History showing not only the elaborate memorial graphics that decorated the book, but also an historic awareness of the place of photography in the writing of history, an awareness forgotten or not considered in the First World War book. Digitalized by the Boston Public Library.

39 Changes in the interpretation of Stallings photographs had already taken place, as he well knew. When he captioned the photograph reproduced above, “FOR KING AND COUNTRY,” he intended irony so heavy that readers can easily hear the echo, “poor deluded young men.” But the young men of the photograph were not considered deluded at the time of their enthusiastic enlistment and the photograph might easily have been used as propaganda to motivate others like them. To another photograph of enlisting young Englishmen he attaches the title, “IF I SHOULD DIE THINK ONLY THIS OF ME,” referring to the opening line of the famous poem by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), “The Soldier” published in 1914 and Other Poems, within a month of Brooke’s death and reprinted many times, sometimes with patriotic motives, on the part of Brooke’s literary executor, Edward Marsh, who as an assistant of Winston Churchill’s during and after World War One, had a sideline in patriotic propaganda.

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Determined men of military age preparing to enlist early in the war with a caption from Rupert Brooke’s poem, “The Soldier.”

40 The Brooke poem is again evoked, later in the book and later in the war in a photograph captioned, “…some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.” The photograph, this time of two stunned looking soldiers sitting in the bottom of an enormous bomb crater while comrades look down on them from a blasted forest, has turned the wistful and unspeakably sad poem into a nightmare. In Brooke’s verses of 1914, the soldier poet imagines that upon his own death in a foreign field, “There shall be/In that rich earth a richer dust concealed,” that is of course himself, a cell of English beauty, modesty, genius and content. But here, the English sappers have left destruction instead. Their own dead and the dead of the enemy, no matter how “Washed by rivers, blest by suns of home,” cannot possibly sanctify this wreck.

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A bomb crater (pages 119 and 120 of A Photographic History of the First World War) using the continuation of the verses of Rupert Brooke to make the meaning thoroughly ironic.

41 The poetry of John Masefield was used in a similar way. His poem, “August 1914” was used in a caption of page 6, a collage of newspaper reports and refugees. “How still this quiet corn-field is tonight,” the Masefield line, finds itself overwhelmed by the unquiet disruptions early in the war. Titles from after the war, which shared Stallings’s disappointment in the accomplishments of the war and the Versailles Treaty, became captions. Thus, “All quiet on the eastern front,” echoing Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel, captions a picture of German machine gunners (p. 31); “Death in the Afternoon” used Ernest Hemingway’s 1932 novel to comment upon bodies of men and horses strewn across a railroad station or factory yard (page 194); and “Italian Farewell to Arms” employed the same author’s 1929 title to underline the grim pathos of a trench full of dead Italian soldiers (p. 204). Lines from well-known hymns and popular songs, lines from Shakespeare and discredited slogans were all used this way. Stallings deliberately played with the literary record. He came down on the anti-war side building up a consensus by 1933 that would not have existed during, or just after the war. In a sense he betrayed the gentle spirit of early patriotic poems that he turns to heavy irony.

42 He had come to this position by stages. In 1924 he had helped write the very successful play, “What Price Glory,” that mocked any romantic notion of war but did not condemn the enterprise of World War One beyond that. In the same year he wrote his autobiographical novel Plumes, that mocked wartime romance and wartime rhetoric too. The novel must have struck a chord: it enjoyed nine printings in its first year and its screen adaptation was MGM’s greatest box office success until “Gone with the Wind.” But what Stallings and John Dos Passos, like E. E. Cummings and the other “disillusioned” authors of the 1920s, tapped into was a literary rebellion against the staid optimism and provincialism of the pre-war and moralizing “Victorian” culture of the United States, or what George Santayana had already criticized in 1910 as “The Genteel Tradition.” Historian David Kennedy quoting Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin,

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Ramon Guthrie and others explained this connection between literary rebellion and disgust with the way World War One had been carried out by an older generation of late Victorian generals in a few succinct pages. These young literary men, Kennedy pointed out, had enjoyed the excitement and adventure of the war. Hemingway and Stallings continued to seek out and celebrate this sort of adventure all their lives.13 In spite of age and the leg he lost in 1922 because of a war injury (he would lose his second leg to his World War One injuries later), Stallings managed to involve himself actively in World War II. After the experience of World War One, American authors put that same sense of adventure into the project of re-creating American letters. Stallings, a member of the Algonquin Round Table along with the creators of both The Stars and Stripes and The New Yorker, World War One veterans Harold Ross and Alexander Woollcott, was very well placed to see how a new critical point of view could be created out of the experience of the successful propaganda machinery of the war. What is extraordinary about Stallings is that he followed these literary permutations in spite of his terrible injuries. The one group almost certain to finish World War One disillusioned and remain thoroughly “disillusioned” by the war in a age of uplift, were those with serious injuries.14 But Stallings followed the literary and critical trends, births and re-births with unfailing energy.

43 What is visible in his 1933 publication that was not visible in his earlier anti-war “What Price Glory,” (two amiable drunks fighting over a not very savory woman who maybe stands in for Europe), or Plumes (a story whose anti-war stance was really anti-heroic or a mockery of chivalry), is a political focus. In A Photographic History of the First World War Stallings focused his efficient literary energy upon a new approaching disaster. Stallings put the rhetorical heart of the book smack in the middle on pages 147 and 148. There he gave a picture of a farm village street reduced to rubble the title, “This was a home.” A British non-commissioned officer looking into an overturned church bell in a heap of stones and broken beams got the caption, “This was a church.” On the following page leafless, branchless broken trees with French officers among them, bore the title, “This was a forest.” The fourth picture in this quadrant, a picture of wreckage unrecognizable except for an eye socket as empty and haunting as the hole in a tragic mask, inevitably received the title, “This was a man.”

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Pictures from the middle pages (147 and 148) of A Photographic History of the First World War: Stallings in his simplest and most brutal rhetorical mode.

44 If Stallings married words and pictures on these middle pages with a ferocious directness that is hard to find in Hemingway or Dos Passos where the story or the literature can always intervene and humanize, he put his reasons for this immediacy almost at the very end on pages 293 and 294. These last pictures (the two pages that follow are collages of newspaper headlines, pictures and statistics of war destruction) must have been uncanny in 1933. That date, “1933” is the simple caption of each of the four pictures. In each photograph, a crowd of enthusiasts, larger than any World War One crowd, is shown expressing rapt emotion. Over each crowd, cut out, pasted in, and outlined in white, hovers, like a malevolent angel, the hero appropriate to the crowd. Germans got a frowning Adolf Hitler; Russians a dour Stalin; Italians get a posturing Mussolini; and Turks, each in a fez, get Kamel Pasha in the biggest fez of all. Stallings may not have had all the enemies of World War II picked just right, but he had certainly seen the totalitarian writing on the wall. In 1933 he has brought about the re-birth of World War One disillusion strengthened by the terrible forces it has let loose in the world.

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The last pictures of A Photographic History of the First World War, pages 293 and 294.

45 He has seen no “rebirth of Freedom,” or of comfortable unity that characterized the purpose of The Photographic History of the Civil War, but perhaps he solicits, implores, demands, a rebirth of Freedom to act against war and against the tragic inevitability of history.

46 His political anti-war position like his critical anti-romantic position, did not prove permanent. In 1963, five years before his death in 1968, Stallings published The Doughboys; the Story of the A.E.F., 1917-1918, a celebratory, nostalgic and largely anecdotal informal history of American involvement in World War One. This last book may have been calculated to capture the memory market of aging World War One veterans, but at the time of its publication, and even more when it was reissued in 1966, it seemed to underline a difference in point of view and quality of patriotism between Stallings’s World War One generation and the Vietnam generation. But any young Vietnam protestors who cared to look back at the publishing history would have seen that the lessons of World War One, like the lessons of other wars had been reborn several times already. Such a revelation might have made Vietnam protesters less convinced of the truths they thought their war revealed. But that is unlikely. Rebirth of war memories and war lessons seem inevitable while freedom from the thrall of war seems to elude us.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Suggestions for further reading:

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Important Civil War Photograph Collections:

George Barnard, Barnard’s Photograph Views of Sherman’s Campaign. 1866.

Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War (Washington, D.C.: Philp and Solomons, 1866).

Michael L. Carlebach, The Origins of Photojournalism in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1992).

Steven Conn, “Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why are These Pictures so Terrible?” History and Theory, vol. 41, no. 4 (Dec. 2002): 17-42.

William A. Frassanito, Gettysburg: A Journey Through Time (New York: Scribners, 1975).

Kirk Savag, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

W. Fletcher Thompson, Jr., The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960).

Alan Trachtenberg, “Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs,” Representations, 9, Special Issue: American Culture Between the Civil War and World War I (Winter, 1985): 1-32.

NOTES

1. Francis Travelyan Miller and Robert S. Lanier, eds., The Photographic History of the Civil War (New York: The Review of Reviews, Co, 1912); Laurence Stallings, A Photographic History of the First World War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1933). 2. Quoted by Albert Shaw, ed. The American Monthly Review of Reviews, vol. XXIII (January-June, 1901): 336. It is interesting to note that this will be the publisher of The Photographic History of the Civil War. 3. Stallings, A Photographic History of the First World War, 292-293. Portraits of these four men are cut and pasted over photographs of the great enthusiastic and sometimes uniformed crowds they stirred up. 4. The present image is taken from the Library of Congress Digital Catalogue: “Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Dead Confederate sharpshooter in "The devil's den.” CALL NUMBER: LC-B817- 7096[P&P] REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-DIG-cwpb-03701 (digital file from original neg.) 5. I am much indebted to the analysis of Alexander Gardner’s work and methods exposed by William A. Frassanito in Gettysburg: Journey in Time (New York: Scribners, 1975). 6. It can be found as Library of Congress reproduction: LC-DIG-ppmsca-12557 (digital file from original photograph). 7. Library of Congress reproduction: LC-DIG-ppmsca-12562 (digital file from original photograph). 8. Frassanito, Gettysburg. 9. ). The photograph was copyrighted to the Review of Reviews and has been taken from the book, digitized by the Boston Public Library. 10. Alan Trachtenberg, “Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs,” Representations, 9, Special Issue: American Culture Between the Civil War and World War I (Winter, 1985): 1-32. 11. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), xiii. 12. The Oxford English Dictionary and the Webster’s International Dictionary give no indication that Stallings was not in fact the originator of the name “First World War.”

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13. David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980): 220-24. 14. Mark Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War (New York and London: New York University Press and Macmillan, 1997).

ABSTRACTS

The article compares The Photographic History of the Civil War published in 1912, with A Photographic History of the First World War, published in 1933. The author is looking for similarities in the reworking of interpretations of war photography after the war and discovers that the photographs in conjunction with their editing can be made to cover up as much as they reveal. The Photographic History of the Civil War, published at the height of the Jim Crow era, with its hugely elaborate editorial structure, manages to deny the importance of slavery to the war and the importance of freed slaves afterwards. Even photographs of the dead of Gettysburg take on a meaning more appropriate to 1912 than to the event that produced them. The comparatively direct A Photographic History of the First World War, manages loyalty only to the thought of the author at the moment of its publication. Other interpretations were possible at other times as the author editor followed literary fashion and history.

INDEX

Keywords: Alexander Gardner, Civil War, First World War, History of Photography, Laurence Stallings, Matthew Brady, War Photography

AUTHOR

MARK MEIGS Université Paris-Diderot

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War and National Renewal: Civil Religion and Blood Sacrifice in American Culture

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

1 Wars are often associated with a rhetoric of renewal or “new beginnings.” Putting aside for a moment the possibility that this is only rhetoric, I would like to examine the conditions which allow war – sometimes – to function as an occasion for a new purchase on a shared sense of national identity and common purpose. One critical frame that brings such a proposition into focus is the sociology of religion and group identity founded by Emile Durkheim and developed in America since the 1960s in terms of the notion of civil religion. Specifically, I will consider a recent book which combines Durkheim’s insights with Réné Girard’s claims about the social function of ritualized sacrifice into a troubling argument about modern national cohesion as dependent on blood sacrifice. Even if many modern nation states define themselves as quintessentially secular and legal entities, inspiring healthy patriotism rather than overly emotional nationalism, they share with explicitly descent-based nationalisms a substratum of more “mystical” ideals and rituals.1 The most important, complex, and seemingly irrational of these is self-sacrifice for the common good or the group. This willingness, closely associated with military valor and patriotic heroism, is in fact essential to the cohesiveness and endurance of any group, argue Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle in their book, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation. Without it, a nation will not be able to defend itself and will not even want to. A nation that cannot inspire its members to lay down their life for it will inevitably fragment into clashing groups and lose its sovereignty.

2 Since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the beginning of the age of the modern nation-state, patriotic sacrifice has been regarded as the noblest and most civilized gesture a man can perform for his country. Yet modern scholars of nationalism and national identity view self-sacrifice uneasily. While recognizing its central place in definitions of viable nations (those that produce a lasting sense of coherence and continuity in their populations), historians and scholars of national

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identity are at pains to account for the intensity of attachment that would induce individuals to die for their nation. Moreover, the specter of Japanese suicide pilots and Islamic airplane hijackers, whose deaths may be understood as heroic sacrifices in their own cultural contexts but as terrorism in ours, complicates the work of distinguishing “appropriate” martyrdom from religious fanaticism. If, as Tom Nairn has suggested, the nation is “the modern Janus,” no other aspect of national experience is more double- faced than patriotic self-sacrifice.2 This essay will attempt to unpack some of the paradoxes raised by the notion of sacrifice in the context of US military history as well as the media treatment of the September 11 attacks, with a special focus on the sacred status of the flag and the ambivalent position of the soldier (and other uniformed servicemen such as police and firefighters). My final objective is to probe the theory of national renewal based on blood sacrifice advanced by Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle by testing its explanatory power for two images that have become iconic as representations of military service and sacrifice: Rosenthal’s photo of the flag-planting at Iwo Jima and Thomas Franklin’s photo of Ground Zero.

3 Any discussion of the relationship between war and national renewal should begin with the fact that most nations conceptualize and narrate their origins in terms of foundational wars. In France, this was the Revolution of 1789, in Germany, the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, and for many postcolonial nations, such as the United States, their war of independence. Many nations also structure their national histories around the subsequent wars that they waged with other nations or internally. These are the events that organize national history and they are sometimes (but far from always) associated with a regeneration of national cohesion and patriotic attachment. In the United States, the Civil War and the Second World War are widely regarded as the two most important military conflicts in terms of reorganizing national identity and renewing a sense of national purpose. World War I also had an important impact on the country, but its place in national memory is more controversial and complex due to the lack of clarity about its objectives in the minds of American citizens and soldiers alike. The many other wars conducted by the United States, e.g. the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf Wars, may have generated brief moments of patriotic effervescence, gained territory and political and economic objectives, and produced important collective memories and rituals, but none of them can be said to have reset the clock of nation-time and boosted an enduring sense of national collective purpose in any way remotely like the Civil War and World War II.3

4 If America was “born” in the Revolutionary War, it is justifiable to say that it was “reborn” in the Civil War. Robert Penn Warren has claimed that the “The Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history.”4 Before the Civil War, Warren contends, the United States “had no history in the deepest and most inward sense.” John Neff has recently proposed that the Civil War produced two separate national ideologies which could each be called a civil religion: the Lost Cause of the South, and the “Cause Victorious” of the North.5 Yet, as most historians would agree, by the time the U.S. had entered into World War I, the Southern myth of its martyrdom had begun to converge with Northern narratives to produce a revisionist history that conceived of the Civil War as a shared experience of national suffering. This was the argument made by Woodrow Wilson’s A History of the American People (1902) and was popularized by D.W. Griffith’s film A Birth of a Nation (1914), which drew on Wilson’s work for its historical claims. It was on this basis that Warren could claim

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that the Civil War gave the United States a history that it had not had before: as the foundation of a newly reconceived nation. Most historians would agree that American national self-understanding changed significantly during the Civil War. One concrete example of this transformation is the shift in usage from the plural to the singular in relation to the United States, as in “The United States is a republic” as opposed to “The United States are a republic.” This shift is generally dated to around 1861, which is to say, the beginning of the Civil War, and helped American conceptualize the entity or cause they were fighting for (on the Union side, that is).6 Another example of how the Civil War helped create a sense of common national identity is the way in which it occasioned the founding of a national military cemetery system. Up until the Civil War, the bodies of slain American soldiers had not been retrieved systematically from battlefields nor been the objects of special reverence. It was in 1862 that, for the first time, the U.S. government decided to set aside, by Act of Congress, special cemeteries to bury the bodies of those who gave their lives in defense of the Republic, and an entire network of sacred national sites was thereby created.7

5 The single most famous formulation of the way in which war is linked to a discourse of national renewal is Abraham Lincoln’s address at the dedication of one of the first of these national military cemeteries: the Soldier’s National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863, exactly midway through the Civil War. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is a powerful mixture of political and religious rhetoric that should serve as a point of departure for any analysis of the notion of American civil religion. Although this concept no longer inspires the same intensity of debate as it did in the decade following Robert Bellah’s influential essay on the subject in 1967, it remains a compelling framework through which to understand the emotional and quasi-mystical dimensions of American politics.8 Civil religion has been defined in a variety of ways, but I use it to refer to the way in which national institutions, rituals and ideologies function like a religion: dividing the world into sacred and profane spheres, providing constituents with a sense of supra-individual transcendence and collective continuity, and offering an emotionally satisfying frame for coping with death. If national civil religion resembles traditional religions in these three aspects, the modern nation has wrested from religion a fourth aspect that it now monopolizes completely: the power to kill non-members for the sake of its self-preservation and to ask members to die in its name. Currently, only the nation-state legitimately holds this right, which is why the nation can be said to have replaced religion in the social organization of death.

6 Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg offers a revealing blueprint of how religious notions structure American political ideology. The word “dedicated” is used seven times in this speech of 267 words. The first use is completely neutral, in the sense of “committed to” or “defined by”: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” However, in the next lines, Lincoln begins to rework the meaning of this word, pushing it steadily into a religious frame. For example, the third appearance of the term is synonymous to “consecrate” or set aside as sacred, without actually saying so explicitly: “We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”

7 To speak of “dedicating” a piece of land for burial purposes, while not in itself overtly religious, shifts the register of the term in a more religious direction by referring to an activity, that of burial, which had traditionally been a function

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performed by the church and not the state. Building upon this sense of the word, Lincoln repeats it once more in the next line, this time as an exact synonym of “consecrate,” and reinforces this meaning by the even more explicitly religious verb “to hallow.”

8 In other words, “dedication” has at least two different meanings in the Gettysburg Address: that of committing one’s self to a course of action or program, and a setting aside for religious or special purposes. When Lincoln says in the third paragraph that “we can not dedicate” this ground, he performs a subtle but significant confusion between the two senses. By arguing that the battle itself has “consecrated” the land, Lincoln shifts from the neutral to the religious sense of the word and moreover implies that the battle itself is somehow sacred. Sociologically, in the light of Durkheim’s theory, which locates the sacred in the experience of the collective, this makes sense, i.e. the battle is sacred because it is about the fate of the nation.

9 The concepts invoked here, i.e. dedication, consecration, and devotion, are used in ways that need to be understood not only for their rhetorical value but for their ritual and performative function in the context of the official event at which they are uttered: the dedication of one of the very first war cemeteries. Lincoln was not only dedicating this one cemetery, he was defining the meaning and purpose of the war cemetery as a national institution. In doing so, he articulated one of the most enigmatic paradoxes of national identity: namely, that it is strengthened by the lives that are lost in its name. The “devotion” inspired in the survivors by the sacrifice of the dead produces a “new birth of freedom,” a phrase that refigures the deaths of the soldiers into an image of birth linked to national identity through the word “freedom” (a term which vaguely but unmistakably signifies “America”). In other words, death, figured and understood as willing sacrifice, invests the nation with a sense of purpose, collective feeling, and renewed unity. Although Lincoln’s speech invokes this transformative magic by which death becomes a “new birth,” it does not explain how it works.9 After all, the many deaths at Gettysburg could seem to dilute the cohesion of the Union and be figured as a tragedy to be regretted rather than an occasion for regeneration. The logic by which death re-energizes national solidarity and cohesion can best be understood through the disciplines of sociology and anthropology and will be examined in a moment.

10 Since the Civil War, only World War II has come close to playing a comparable role of renewing a sense of sacred feeling and common purpose.10 In both cases, I am referring to a sense of collective unity that is articulated most clearly after the fact, in the national narrative and memory that finally takes stock of the event, and do not wish to eclipse the complexity of cultural forces that were in play during the actual events. During the Civil War, there were riots by draft resisters, and many Americans on both sides of the conflict felt that the price to pay for Union and Emancipation was far too high. American participation in the Second World War also had its opponents and critics, even after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, World War II has been dubbed “The Good War” in common parlance because of its seeming moral clarity. The dropping of the atomic bomb and the firebombing of German cities may have tainted the moral high-ground claimed by the Allies for some observers, but the Second World War has nevertheless entered American national memory as the most important episode of collective effort and public solidarity in the twentieth century. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo recalls the Second World War as the “last time that this country believed anything profoundly, any great single cause”:

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We are good, they are bad. Let’s all get together we said, and we creamed them. We started from way behind. We found strength in this common commitment, this commonality, community, family. The idea of coming together was best served in my lifetime in the Second World War.11

11 Besides evoking a Manichean moral simplicity commonly associated with WWII, Cuomo’s description of the war is most revealing in its curious last phrase: the idea of coming together being “best served” by the Second World War. “Coming together” is necessary for any group that wants to endure, and Cuomo’s slightly awkward phrasing inadvertently suggests that war is a means of fulfilling this need. The currently recognized effectiveness of the Second World War in performing this function is clear from Cuomo’s emphatically redundant description of the unparalleled solidarity it created: “this common commitment, this commonality, community, family.” As if this series of cognates of “common” were not enough, Cuomo follows up with the phrase “coming together,” emphasizing that the unity he describes does did not emerge automatically from a natural solidarity but is more accurately described as a defensive reaction to an outside threat, so therefore necessarily ephemeral. Rapturous accounts of World War II unity are inevitably either eulogies or jeremiads, but their shared trait is a regret that the sense of cohesion did not last longer.

12 Nonetheless, even if the glow of World War II as a collective experience faded in the decades that followed, and was overshadowed by the divisive war in Vietnam and other crises of political authority, it can be said that World War II still remains for the time being the most effective functional paradigm for interpreting large-scale death in a national narrative. This became especially clear during the Sept. 11 attacks in New York. Although the initial comparison that many commentators made was with Pearl Harbor, the image that dominated the media in the weeks after the attacks (and which has since been immortalized as a postage stamp), Thomas Franklin’s photo of firefighters raising a flag, drew comparisons with a very different World War II event: the planting of the flag on Iwo Jima. If the comparison with Pearl Harbor needs no explanation (though it certainly requires qualification), the logic of mapping Joseph Rosenthal’s famous photograph onto the rubble of the Twin Towers deserves careful unpacking. Why should that image of territory-marking in the Pacific be a framework for mediating and understanding the attack on New York? What exactly is the connection, besides the compositional similarity of the photos? One obvious answer is the “rising from the rubble” metaphor suggested by the devastated landscape of both images. Yet this answer is not entirely satisfying since the devastated landscape on Iwo Jima is foreign land and the flag-raisers are the authors rather than victims of an attack. In other words, the rubble is not theirs to rise from.

13 I would suggest that Iwo Jima was invoked in the wake of 9/11 for another reason: its depiction of American sacrifice as a ritual of national regeneration. Although the photo is generally understood to signify victory, it is also understood to evoke the high cost of that victory. The fact that Iwo Jima was one of the bloodiest landings of the Pacific campaign is indissociably linked to the cultural status of the photo. Among the various meanings attributable to the Rosenthal photo, then, mass death is one. In fact, as Clint Eastwood’s 2006 film, Flags of Our Fathers, reminded us, three of the six soldiers in the Rosenthal photo died in the days following the picture-taking (the photo was taken on the third day of a month-long battle). However, instead of depicting corpses or wounded men, as many war photos do, the photo depicts in the most vivid possible

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terms the loyalty of American troops to the American flag and therefore to America (the photo depicts this regardless of the question of whether the soldiers actually felt such patriotism or had simply been ordered to raise the flag). The tacit message behind this deliberately choreographed show of patriotism is that these young men are willingly fighting and dying for America.12 In Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, Marvin and Ingle argue that only willing self-sacrifice can function successfully to create a sense of national renewal. Soldiers and other uniformed servicemen, by definition, are understood to be willing to lay down their lives for the nation or for others. In other words, the photo of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima became such a powerful and popular icon of military service because it shows soldiers demonstrating their loyalty to the flag, and thereby to the nation it represents, in a clear and unambiguous tableau, against an invisible backdrop of massive fatality. The fact that the deaths at Iwo Jima can therefore be considered willing sacrifices gives them great ritual power in terms of generating the “heightened devotion” invoked by Lincoln at Gettysburg.

14 Accordingly, it could be argued that the American media invoked Iwo Jima as an interpretive schema to make sense of the Sept. 11 attacks in order to frame them in the regenerative terms of national sacrifice. Yet, since most of the 2976 people who died in those two buildings were not willing sacrifices, unlike soldiers in battle, they did not fit well in this narrative. Marvin and Ingle’s insistence that group members must seem willing to die for the group in order for their deaths to successfully generate group cohesion can help explain the way firefighters and other uniformed public servants became the almost obsessive focus of the national media in the weeks following the attacks. It is particularly striking how much emphasis was placed on the volunteer aspect of their commitment to their work. The thirst for narratives of self-sacrifice was so strong that one woman, Tania Head, became nationally famous for her fraudulent account of being saved by a man who then went back into one of the towers and died. The revealing thing about this hoax is that the perpetrator did not invent a story of her own miraculous escape or heroism but a story of someone else’s heroic death.13 She intuitively sensed that self-sacrifice generates far more emotional and symbolic currency than survival, no matter how lucky.

15 If the immediate reaction of the media was to read the Sept. 11 attacks in terms of World War II frames of reference, President Barack Obama gestured rhetorically back to Gettysburg in his speech commemorating the attacks in 2009. Calling on the American public to make Sept. 11 serve as an occasion for national renewal, Obama said: “On a day when others sought to sap our confidence, let us renew our common purpose, let us remember how we came together as one nation, as one people, as Americans united.” Echoing Cuomo’s description of World War II, Obama invokes the ideals of “coming together,” a “common purpose,” “one nation” and “one people.” Speaking of the death of nearly 3000 Americans as an occasion for unity, Obama invokes the familiar rhetoric of national renewal based on mass death.

16 In order better to understand how a compelling sense of national unity and renewal can be generated by a massacre like the Sept. 11 attacks, we need to look into sociology and specifically the concept of civil religion, which is concerned with the religious or emotional aspects of nationalism. This is a field that historians shy away from because it does not lend itself to the same kind of empirical analysis as political speeches and historical events – yet it exerts a fascination because it represents the unexamined core of patriotism as attachment or strong feeling that is defined precisely by a willingness

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to die for one’s country. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), one of the most influential recent works on national identity, begins and ends with attempts to reflect on this question and yet consistently shies away from engaging with it head on. In the preceding chapters I have tried to delineate the processes by which the nation came to be imagined... But it is doubtful whether either social change or transformed consciousness, in themselves, do much to explain the attachment that people feel for the inventions of their imaginations--or, to return to a question raised at the beginning of this text-- why people are ready to die for these inventions.14

17 As Anderson reminds his readers in this passage, the processes of national identity formation through media and shared texts do not fully account for the power of these attachments. Anderson can only express puzzlement at the force of these feelings, which he consistently equates with and defines by the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the idea of the nation. It is this willingness that motivates yet eludes his efforts at analysis, as they focus on tangible institutions such as museums, newspapers, the census, and other inventions of written culture. However, the willingness to die for one’s group is not an invention of the nation state. It has a far longer pedigree and can attach itself to groups of any size. Nevertheless, the nation-state is currently the only group that can legally demand its members to sacrifice themselves for its sake.15

18 The social theorist whose work has been the most pertinent to this issue is Emile Durkheim, especially in his late work Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915). Durkheim’s most influential idea in this study is that social belonging is essentially the root of religion, since religious feelings (i.e. awe, submission to a greater power, and a sense of the sacred and profane) originate in the admiration and fear that the individual feels before the power of the collectivity. The collectivity has the power to protect or to harm the individual, and so the individual’s basic attitude towards the group is necessarily an ambivalent one of attraction/attachment and awe/terror. Durkheim argues that every human society makes a distinction between the sacred and profane and that this too is rooted in collective experience. That which is set aside as “sacred” is invested with the meaning and the power which is basically that of the group, i.e. it is a sign for the collectivity. In the aboriginal tribes that Durkheim used as the basis of his theory, the sacred takes the form of a totem. Durkheim further argues that the religious practices of aboriginal tribes are able to reveal the universal traits of all religions and all societies. Their “primitivism” does not make them qualitatively different from the monotheism of more” advanced” societies, but gives them rather the status of basic common denominator or structural skeleton of all religions. Interestingly, when Durkheim casts about for a modern equivalent to the totem, he does not cite the Christian cross but the national flag.16 Flags are our modern totems insofar as they are the emblems that represent the most widely respected collective units, not tribes in our case but nation-states. In Durkheimian sociology, then, the modern equivalents of totem and tribe are flag and country.

19 This insight intersects with some of the work done in the field of civil religion. However, much of the work on American civil religion in the 1970s that followed Robert Bellah’s attempt to apply Durkheimian notions to American culture may have misconceived the location of the sacred in American society. While scholars debated the interpenetration of religion and politics in Presidents’ speeches and the supposed sanctity of the Constitution in American politics, the totemic status of the flag as an

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embodied symbol of American sovereignty was largely overlooked. In other words, historians focused on texts, myths and rhetoric, but ignored the quasi-religious rites and sacred objects that could define American civil religion. Yet, when we think of the omnipresence of the American flag at official ceremonies, government offices, public buildings, schools and sports events, as well as the elaborate rules that govern its fabrication, handling and disposal, it is impossible to deny that there is an element of the sacred attached to this object.17 More striking still is the way in which the bodies of dead soldiers are ritualistically covered by flags, and how flags are given to families in lieu of the body of the slain soldier. There is a physical continuity between the flag- body and the soldier-body that Durkheim’s theory of the religious basis of society goes further towards explaining than any official account of why flags are given to soldiers’ families. Finally, not only the intense emotions around flag-burning and flag desecration, but the various Supreme Court decisions concerning the treatment of the flag suggest that it is not explicitly treated as a religious object only because its status is regarded tacitly as higher than any other religious symbol.18 This is the point missed by Robert Bellah and other scholars: civil religion does not function like other existing religions because it transcends them in relation to the collectivity as a whole. While many people have abandoned religious beliefs and practice, it is almost impossible to have no nationality. Even people who have lost their citizenship one way or another usually consider themselves as “belonging” to some nation in at least a spiritual and cultural sense. The main point here is that nationality is generally the first and most important way that social life on this planet is organized. It commands the most primary emotions and its leaders, representatives, institutions, and flags require the highest degree of respect.19

20 While the claim that the American flag is a kind of totem may still be accepted by most historians, Marvin and Ingle’s argument that the nation is regenerated most effectively by blood sacrifice is more problematic. This is where Réné Girard’s work on the sacrifice comes in. In Violence and the Sacred (1972), Girard argued that societies are naturally rife with tensions and conflicts and that they can avoid internal violence only by directing this aggression towards a common object. This sacrificial scapegoat allows the group to maintain internal peace by being purged or destroyed. Similarly, Anthony Marx argues in a recent study of national origins that nation-states did not merely replace the Church, as is commonly accepted, but that they harnessed the exclusionary tactics and deep passions of religious identity into nationalist politics.20 Linking Christian martyrology to modern nation-formation,Marvin and Ingle argue that national cohesion is always constituted on the basis of a collective “victimage” or collective sacrifice.21 In other words, as nations tend to view their history in terms of foundational moments of collective sacrifice, such as wars of liberation or other moments of great loss of life, the intensity of their sense of national unity and loyalty is based on a sense of ongoing identification with these foundational sacrifices. Here we return to Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg and his hope that the casualties buried in that new war cemetery would inspire the living to “dedicate” themselves to the cause of American nationhood.

21 Although nationalistic rhetoric tends to rely heavily on the notion of sacrifice, and we are all familiar with such phrases in political speeches, the idea that nations might actually “need” members to be willing to die for them can appear prima facie as a revolting claim. For many modern subjects, the idea of the nation serves as a powerful ideal of community and social justice. Civic nationalism promises to transcend and

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reconcile ethnic, religious, and all other differences by congealing a disparate population into a kind of imagined family linked by citizenship and mutual solidarity, and it is in this utopian guise that the idea of the nation inspires powerful emotions in people across the political spectrum. Modern political theory defines the role of the nation-state primarily as one of protection: of nationals from non-nationals, and of citizens from each other. Therefore, nothing could seem more wrong (even “sacrilegious”) than to propose that the nation might need members to die for it on a regular basis in order to sustain its sense of unity. Following Girard’s contention that some rituals require participants to be unaware of their true meaning and function, Marvin and Ingle argue that the true nature of war as national sacrificial ritual is the object of a powerful taboo. Although willing sacrifices create powerful group feeling, and political speeches such as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address tacitly acknowledge this, the group or nation cannot know that it needs members to die or that it finds ways to send them to die. This fact cannot be explicitly articulated or understood or the ritual will not work.

22 The class of willing sacrifices that every viable nation possesses is its military, which is why soldiers are something like a priestly order: subject to strict selection, training, rules, and privileges. In the US, the mandatory Soldier’s Oath binds the pledger to protect the Constitution and obey orders given by the President and his representatives: "I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962). The mixture of national and religious rhetoric (“true faith”, “So help me God,” “appointed” officers) is striking for a nation which has made the separation of church and state a cornerstone of its national creed, but this is to miss the point that the state is itself a kind of church for all practical purposes.

23 The other striking thing about the Oath is that it contains several important omissions. While explicitly naming the Constitution as the sacred text of the United States, it respects the taboo on naming the real sacred symbol, i.e. the flag. Nevertheless, while many soldiers would lay down their life to keep an American flag safe, none would risk injury to protect a copy of the Constitution (or even the original document, for that matter). The other important omission in the Soldier’s Oath is any reference to killing or dying, which finally are the two basic tasks that the soldier is authorized to do and which sets him/her apart from ordinary citizens.22 These all- important implications are couched in the neutral pledge to obey the President and one’s hierarchical superiors in the Army who represent his sovereign authority.

24 The direct and explicit relationship of each soldier to the highest sovereign power in the group articulated in the Soldier’s Oath, binding each oath-taker directly to the President, reveals something about why military service occupies such a charged and often coveted place in national experience. Military service confers on soldiers a privileged relationship to totemic power, the power linked to sovereignty and to the most sacred sites, objects and moments in national life. This heightened relationship to national belonging is the reason why military service continues to be prized by young men seeking a rite of passage and a link to something greater than their individual

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lives. It is also the reason why women have fought to be accepted into the military and why African Americans and other ethnic groups have eagerly served in every major war. Military service bears a special relationship to citizenship and offers the promise of unassailable national credentials.

25 And yet, soldiers are often objects of intense popular ambivalence. The negative stereotypes of soldiers as unthinking automatons or lawless brutes are rooted in a common perception that soldiers are qualitatively different from civilians: they are linked to death, either by killing or agreeing to be killed. The unquestioning willingness to die, though appreciable in certain specific circumstances, nevertheless creates suspicion that servicemen are uncritical: naive fools in the best of cases, brainwashed robots in the worst. These negative perceptions are even greater in the case of combat veterans who have killed as well as risked their lives. The fear and contempt aroused by Vietnam veterans in the 1970s (before their rehabilitation by official ceremonies and shifts in media depictions in the mid 1980s) revealed a discomfort that is latent in the civilian attitude towards veterans of any war. The official and public respect accorded to military personnel, all the more ubiquitous and ostentatious since the beginning of the Iraq War, conceals the fact that there is necessarily a tension between civilians, focused on their pleasure and profit, and the class of people designated for exposure to death and injury supposedly to protect them (though, in actual fact, few American wars have been truly defensive, most advancing economic and imperial interests of limited relevance to the majority of the population). Thus, the suspicion and distrust is often mutual (with veterans voicing resentment about having been sent into danger by a population that doesn’t seem to appreciate what soldiers have risked and lost). This mutual incomprehension came to a head during the Vietnam War but is always present to some degree.

26 Military service possesses a truly unusual status in relation to the nation-state: it is defined by a direct appropriation of the individual in the service of the group. In fact, the whole point is to de-individualize the individual and to make him as unlike a civilian as possible. Thus, military training is characterized by strict discipline and the foregoing of civilian freedoms. The overt rationale for the strictness of military discipline is to make soldiers effective and to save lives, but an anthropological view would focus on the ritualistic aspect of practices that organize access to legalized murder and self-sacrifice. Surely one of the most shocking images in Michael Moore’s anti-war film Fahrenheit 9/11 was that of American soldiers in Iraq drunk and stoned and blasting loud rock music as they careened lawlessly through Iraqi streets shooting from tanks. Moore’s objective in showing these images was to undermine the credibility of the entire military operation, since soldiers are supposed to be chaste and sober in order for their access to killing to be acceptable. By showing the irreverent attitude of American servicemen to their mission, Moore wished to show that the war itself was corrupt and wrong. In doing so, he was reviving a cultural narrative that had emerged during the Vietnam War, which characterized the soldiers of that war also as lawless and the war itself as illegal. The image of the Vietnam soldier as insubordinate and generally lawless is often linked to the fact that America failed in Vietnam. In fact, all wars since WWII have been failures, as far as regenerating a collective sense of purpose and national cohesion is concerned: so-called successful ones, such as the Panama Invasion and Persian Gulf, as ineffective in this respect as the failures (e.g. Vietnam) and stalemates (e.g. Korea).

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27 The issue of why some wars “work” as national rituals of renewal and some do not is the subject of a chapter of Marvin and Ingle’s book listing several “conditions” that need to be met. These conditions are rooted in the ritual aspect of the theory and need to be understood in anthropological rather than political terms. First of all, according to Marvin and Ingle, the greater the number of deaths, the greater the effect of national “coming together” and patriotism. The two most “successful” wars in this regard in the history of the United States were the Civil War and World War II. In the first, nearly one in ten able-bodied adult males were killed or injured. In the second, the percentage of deaths relative to the population was smaller, but 82% of American men between the age of 20 and 25 were drafted or enlisted, and therefore at risk.

28 An important corollary of the first condition is that only member deaths count, not enemy deaths. This would explain why the effects of the First Gulf War, with over 85,000 Iraqi deaths but only 147 American casualties, were so fleeting. Common sense would suggest that such a resounding victory would translate into a longer lasting sense of national unity and pride, but scholars all agree that the war faded quickly from popular memory and concern. Similarly, the War of 1812 (with 2,260 killed), the Mexican American war of 1846-48 (with 1733 deaths) and the Spanish American War of 1898 (with 385) both had little long-term impact on American national self-definition, and even the Korean and Vietnam Wars (with around 50 and 60 thousand casualties, respectively) did not touch nearly as much of the population as WWII with its 400,000 deaths (and over a million combined deaths and wounded).

29 However, Korea and Vietnam failed to meet other ritual conditions listed by Marvin and Ingle, including the requirement that the sacrificial victim must be (or appear to be) willing. The victims, and again, this refers generally to soldiers, must declare themselves willing to die for the cause, and the group must declare itself willing to sacrifice them. If the Soldier’s Oath is the formal declaration of the soldier’s willingness, an official declaration of war is the standard way in which the nation indicates its willingness to bear the cost of war in soldiers’ lives. The Vietnam War was a failure in all respects, as far as this condition is concerned, because first of all, the US government never formally declared war on Vietnam, and secondly U.S. soldiers were increasingly unwilling to die or even fight in the war as it lost popular support in later years.

30 Popular support is, in fact, another condition for a war to have lasting effects on national cohesion. The most reliable producer of what Marvin and Ingle call “unanimous victimage” (i.e. widespread popular consent for member sacrifice) is a credible enemy.23 WWII was an ideal war because it offered enemies that were unambiguously worth killing and being killed by. The pretext for war must also be seen as coming from the outside, so as to better conceal the fact that the nation will benefit from its soldiers’ deaths. Again, Pearl Harbor offered the US an ideal war situation, and Presidents have always made an effort to create the impression that American military involvement is a reaction to a belligerent attack rather than a preemptive move (e.g. the fictive Gulf of Tonkin missile attack in 1964 cited by Johnson as his casus belli in Vietnam).

31 Fourth, there must be genuine uncertainty of the outcome, and the greater the uncertainty, the greater the ritual magic and enduring effects of the outcome. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War and WWII all share this feature. There was no certainty from the start that the American rebels would succeed or that the Southern

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rebels wouldn’t. It is also plausible that Normandy has had such an enduring power over the national imagination because its outcome was so unsure at the time. Similarly, James Bradley’s account of the Battle of Iwo Jima in Flags of Our Fathers lays special stress on the way in which the unexpectedly high losses caused “a sickening anxiety” about the outcome of that operation.24 It took 23 days to secure the island, far more than anyone predicted, and success was likely but far from guaranteed. Iwo Jima was the only battle of the war where the losses of the victors outnumbered the losses of the defenders.

32 Fifth, the outcome must be definite: victory or loss must be clear and borders re- consecrated in order for time to begin again. The outcome itself is less important than its clarity. Even a loss can have a tremendously unifying effect on a group (one thinks of the Alamo or Weimar Germany). In contrast, an ambiguous outcome, such as that in Korea, cannot create a feeling of national unity. This theory can help explain the memory hole into which the Korean War disappeared in spite of its 36,574 dead and 103,284 American wounded.25

33 Finally, only another ritual can repair a failed ritual. It is interesting in this light to see how the First Gulf War was offered by President Bush Sr. as an attempt to repair the failed ritual of the Vietnam War, and how the war in Iraq was understood widely to be Bush Jr.’s attempt to repair the ultimately failed ritual of the First Gulf War. Since popular elections are also social rituals whose ritual agency can be compared to that of member sacrifice, it is important to see how Clinton’s election in 1992, on his promise of a “new covenant” with America, and more recently, Obama’s election in 2008, were understood by many Americans as rituals that could heal the divisions that have been plaguing America since the failure of the Vietnam War.26 Obama’s failure to bridge the gap between the left and right in the US (and what political figure could?) has shown how quickly such hopes can evaporate.

34 In the past six decades, the only event that came even close to generating the kind of national feeling Mario Cuomo describes having about WWII was the Sept. 11 attack. Yet the deaths at the Twin Towers ultimately did not have the cohesive effect of the deaths of soldiers at Iwo Jima. For one thing, as already mentioned, most victims of 9/11 were not willing sacrifices in any possible sense of those words. Secondly, even the media sanctification of the firefighters in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, which worked initially to position them like soldiers and therefore like national heroes in their sacrifice, eventually wore off as revelations of the sometimes less than heroic side of firefighters appeared in 2002. For example, William Langewiesche’s American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (2002) took away some of their saintly luster with his description of firefighters treating their own dead with “elaborate flag-draped ceremonials” while adopting a callous “bag ‘em and tag ‘em” attitude toward civilian dead.27 As a result, tensions arose in the weeks after the attacks between firefighters and the civilian construction workers, who felt that the civilian dead were being forgotten in the media hype about firefighters.

35 Perhaps the biggest reason for the lack of enduring solidarity as an effect of the Sept. 11 attacks is the way the emotions of that day were channeled by the Bush administration into a strategy of revenge that targeted what turned out to be an unrelated country and to have had very ambiguous results. Iraq is no longer ruled by a unstable dictator, but the war has brought no tangible benefits to the United States (though many private corporations have profited greatly), and certainly no sense of

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national regeneration or rededication to a common cause. On the contrary, the war in Iraq has left America heavily in debt and more polarized than ever.

36 Precisely because most wars America has waged have failed so utterly at producing any kind of national solidarity, something that needs to be examined in this discussion of ritual conditions and ritual agency is the question of what level this logic operates on. Clearly, it is not the level of individual actors, since no American official would ever think of himself as sending American soldiers to die in order to strengthen national cohesion.28 Even less is this the logic of official state discourse or reasoning. In fact, the ignorance of individuals and states of the advantages of war sacrifice as ritualized social glue is obvious from how often wars are conducted ineptly, from a ritual point of view, robbing them of any efficacy whatsoever. In any case, as Girard insists, and Marvin and Ingle concur, the real motives for the group-member sacrifice must be unknown to the participants of the ritual.29 A war must seem to be provoked by an external enemy and not sought out by the group. The sacrifice will not work to generate group feeling and solidarity if there is any hint of recognition that the group desired the sacrifice in any way. This split between the explicitly articulated and the tacit ritual meaning of sacrificial violence is the reason why analysis of political speeches, documents, and memos may not explain everything about a nation’s behavior. By definition, the collective will and agency operates on a level that is not conscious or epistemologically available to individuals. It is a level that is necessarily supra-individual even though individuals will have their own sense of why they are doing something like enlisting in the military or visiting a national memorial. At the same time, the collective meaning, agency and effects of such actions and institutions will exist on a different plane of social reality than the meaning and effects of individuals’ actions and how they perceive them.30

37 It is often said that wars are launched as a means of generating unity and distracting a civilian population from domestic discord. This is the cynical commonplace that was made about Clinton’s bombing of Serbia and Kosovo as well as Bush Sr.’s decision to attack Iraq in 1990. Like many clichés, it may be partly true, and some wars do indeed create powerful feelings of national solidarity, spawning institutions and commemoration practices that give the country momentum for a while. Yet Marvin and Ingle’s theory of blood sacrifice and civil religion suggests that this solidarity comes not from facing or defeating a common enemy, real or invented, but from the deaths of members/soldiers willing to die in the name of the nation. In other words, the only kind of war that could possibly create real national renewal is one that is so cataclysmic that it would cost not thousands, but hundreds of thousands, of lives. If Americans realized that they cannot get national unity with military action on the cheap, perhaps we might rethink our willingness, generation after generation, to believe that war can offer any kind of desirable solution to international conflict. As H.W. Brands reminds us, “during the past two hundred years no country has sent military forces into battle more often than the United States.”31 If we understood better the mixed motivations that drive American politicians to choose war as a foreign policy option, we might have a better chance at making other choices. If we also understood better the powerful mechanisms at work in collective and national identifications, we might become more adept at creating group solidarity by means of elections and other popular democratic processes instead of so often looking for a quick fix of regeneration through violence.

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NOTES

1. I follow Aviel Roshwald in not making a distinction between patriotism and nationalism, which are commonly differentiated into a healthy devotion to an existing state (for the former) and an ideological commitment to establishing a sovereign nation-state (for the latter). Roshwald argues that such a distinction is not useful in understanding the complex relationship between states and the national ideals that they claim to represent. See Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4. Similarly, I would claim that making a distinction between civic nationalism (such as that of the United States) and religious nationalism (defined by a notion of sacred mission or chosenness) provides no significant critical traction with respect to the United States, which has been defined in terms of the latter as often as the former despite the officially secular status of the Constitution. 2. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain (London: New Left Books, 1977), 329-63. 3. For a divergent view of the War of 1812 see Jaap Verheul’s analysis in this issue. 4. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (University of Nebraska Press, 1998, 1961), 3. 5. John Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead (University of Kansas, 2004), 8-10. 6. James McPherson, "Out of War, A New Nation," Prologue Magazine 42.1 (Spring 2010), an online version of this article is available at: http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/ spring/newnation.html 7. George Mosse, “National Cemeteries and National Revival: The Cult of the Fallen Soldiers in Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 14/1 (Jan. 1979): 8. 8. Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96 (1967): 1-21. Bellah’s use of the term is signifantly different from mine since he is concerned mainly with the Christian structure of American legitimating myths, and focuses his analysis on the content of Presidential speeches. Although I examine Lincoln’s speech carefully, my larger interest is not textual so much as anthropological, focusing on the forms and rites of national observance rather than its doctrine or expressed content. 9. In Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills compares the speech to Athenian Epitaphioi (funeral orations), where the “Attic citizens” are “earth-born” (autochthones) in the sense that they are produced by both the traditions of the fathers (progonoi) and the “motherhood of the earth itself,” but this does not explain how a nation is reborn from the deaths of its citizens. See Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 77. 10. Concrete evidence of the way World War One is overshadowed by the Civil War and WWII in national historical memory is the small space devoted to it at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., a key institution of national commemoration. According to Scott Boehm, the World War One part of the permanent Price of Freedom exhibition, documenting American wars from independence to Iraqi Freedom, is “paltry” compared to other displays. See “Privatizing Public Memory: The Price of Patriotic Philanthropy and the Post-9/11 Politics of Display,” American Quarterly 58: 4 (Dec. 2006): 1163. 11. New York Times, March 19, 1995: 41. 12. By “choreographed, ” I refer to the way the flag-planting as a whole was a morale-boosting symbolic event, and do not mean to imply that the planting was staged for the photo, as has sometimes been claimed. See Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 67-79. 13. The New York Times, Sept. 27, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/nyregion/ 27survivor.html. Accessed June 14, 2010. 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 129.

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15. There are other groups who occasionally attempt to re-appropriate this power for themselves, e.g. religious sects, gangs, militias, but they can only appropriate this power from the nation and so they become illegal organizations the moment they claim the right to manage member life and death in the same way the nation-state is permitted. 16. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Joseph Ward Swain (New York: The Free Press, 1915, 1965), 236. 17. Marvin and Ingle point out that there are two kinds of flags: totemic flags, such as those used on official occasions and linked to the rituals and institutions of state power, and popular flags, which come in all shapes and sizes and are used by ordinary people on popular occasions. Only the first are subject to special protocols of production, handling and disposal, and only these possess the quasi-mystical power that is attributed to the totem. See Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice, 217. 18. The 1940 Supreme Court decision Minersville School District v. Gobitis ruled that the flag was not a religious object and that saluting it was therefore not an issue covered by the First Amendment. The result was that the Johovah’s Witnesses were refused exemption from saluting the flag and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Three years later the Supreme Court revisited the issue and ruled the other way (possibly in light of increased revulsion at the Nazi regime and its compulsory forms of national celebration). The 1943 Supreme Court decision Burnette v. The West Virginia Board of Education permitted Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, thus, according to Marvin and Ingle, indirectly acknowledging the religious status of the flag and the oath. See Blood Sacrifice, p. 28. For a discussion of the possible motives behind the Supreme Court’s reversal, see Arnaldo Testi, Capture the Flag: The Stars and Stripes in American History (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010), 48-50. 19. Though admittedly the degree of respect accorded the flag varies widely, and according to British psychologist Michael Billig, only the United States is currently the “home of what Renan called ‘the cult of the flag.’” See Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), 39. 20. Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25-29. 21. Nevertheless, sacrifice is not the only ritual that unifies and regenerates nations, according to Marvin and Ingle. They devote a large part of their book to the electoral process, and the ritualistic aspects of voting, sovereignty, and inaugurations, which they analyze in anthropological terms. 22. The founder of a blog called the “Oathkeeper’s blogspot” writes at the beginning of his blog: “This is the Soldiers Oath I voluntarily took back in May of 1981. The day I took this pledge was a defining moment of my life. I still get emotional just reading it. You see, I knew full well (or thought I did) the implications of the Oath and the responsibilities that I was assuming. I was taking my place in that long line of idealistic young men and women, Patriots, who would, if necessary, give their lives in the defense of this great Nation.” The Oathkeeper’s Blogspot is a webpage for members of the military or other uniformed services who are uncomfortable with the use of the military to police American citizens or violate the Constitution. Yet, in spite of their wide-ranging resistance to the notion of “blindly following orders” and their willingness to refuse orders that violate the Bill of Rights, there is no trace of any reservations about the tacit willingness of any soldier or uniformed person to sacrifice their life if required in the line of duty. This is apparently an aspect of national service that is beyond all rational examination. Source: http://oath-keepers.blogspot.com/2009/03/soldiers-oath.html Accessed on April 7, 2010. Last accessed on April 7, 2010. 23. Blood Sacrifice, 90-91. 24. James Bradley, with Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers (New York: Bantam, 2000), 334. 25. Source: Anne Leland and Mari-Jana Oboroceanu, “American War and Military Casualties: Lists and Statistics,” Congressional Research Service, February 26, 2010, 3.

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26. Marvin and Ingle have an entire chapter on American quadrennial presidential elections as “contrived group crisis” which select a totem leader for “future sacrifice.” See Blood Sacrifice, 248. This process can be as regenerative as a successful blood sacrifice, which it parallels in structure, they argue, but usually lacks the “impact” of the latter (250). 27. William Langewiesche, American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (New York: North Point Press, 2002), 70. 28. However, the cynical realpolitik of American neocons comes very close. For example, according to Ashley Dawson and Malini Scheuller, drawing on Anne Norton’s work, Paul Wolfowitz and his circle believe that “the United States can be united only when confronted by an external threat and that if such a threat does not exist, it must be manufactured.” See Dawson and Scheuller, Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 17, and Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). The reasoning here is very close to that of Réné Girard and the logic of the sacrifice as a means to channel social aggression and tension to a scapegoat. See Réné Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977, 1972). 29. See Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 7. 30. Durkheim theorized this supra-individual level of agency and motivation with what he called homo duplex. With this notion Durkheim sought to account for how, “in so far as he belongs to society, the individual transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he acts.” This “transcendent” level of thought and action is the level on which the social logic of group feeling and blood sacrifice should be understood. See Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 29. In Victor Turner’s tri-part classification of the meanings of a symbol or ritual, the “positional” level, which remains unconscious or hidden from participants and refers to the symbol’s relationship to other symbols in a total ritual system, could also be applied to this theory. See Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 50-52. 31. H.W. Brands, “Preface: War and Forgetfulness,” Revue française d’études américaines 107 (mars 2006): 9.

ABSTRACTS

Wars are often associated with a rhetoric of renewal or new beginnings. This essay explores this claim through the lens of civil religion and a recent book by Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, which combines Emile Durkheim with Réné Girard in proposing that modern national cohesion depends on blood sacrifice. I unpack some of the paradoxes raised by this theory of national renewal in the context of 9/11, with a special focus on the sacred status of the flag and the special attention given to uniformed serviceman in the American body politic

INDEX

Keywords: 9/11, Abraham Lincoln, Benedict Anderson, Carolyn Marvin, civil religion, Civil War, David Ingle, death, Emile Durkheim, flag, freedom, Gary Wills, Gettysburg Address, Iwo Jima, military, nationalism, patriotism, Réné Girard, renewal, ritual, Robert Bellah, Robert Penn Warren, self-sacrifice, Soldier’s Oath, Thomas Franklin, United States, war

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AUTHOR

AGNIESZKA SOLTYSIK MONNET Université de Lausanne

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Soundtracks of Empire: “The White Man’s Burden,” the War in the Philippines, the“Ideals of America,” and Tin Pan Alley

Robert W. Rydell

1 If the Civil War represented a “new birth of freedom” for mid-nineteenth-century Americans, the War in the Philippines heralded a similar possibility for Americans living in the fin-de-siècle era. Exhorted (baited?) by Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem to “Take Up the White Man’s Burden” in the Philippines, thousands of American soldiers answered the call to arms and made short work of Spain’s efforts to retain control of its colonies in the Pacific and Caribbean. Not all Americans, of course, flocked to the call of war. Some like Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan, and Susan B. Anthony decried imperialism as contrary to America’s republican ideals.1 But Woodrow Wilson, recently appointed president of Princeton University, and U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge would have none of this dissent. Standing on the threshold of an important career in national politics, Wilson gave one of the most important, albeit little remembered, speeches of his career to support US efforts to retain control of the Philippines in the wake of the Philippine Insurgency that followed the American occupation of the islands. In “The Ideals of America” (1902), Wilson likened the Battle of Manila to the Battle of Trenton, condemned the war’s critics, and tellingly asserted: “liberty is the privilege of maturity, of self-control, of self-mastery and a thoughtful care for righteous dealings—that some peoples may have it, therefore others may not.” This was exactly what Senator Beveridge had tried to get across a couple of years earlier, when he declared about the Filipinos: “How shall they, in the twinkling of an eye, be exalted to the heights of self- governing peoples which required a thousand years for us to reach, Anglo-Saxon though we are?”2

2 Wilson, a Democrat, and Beveridge, a Republican, may have scripted the policy libretto for America’s imperial adventures overseas, but the tune was called in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco by Tin Pan Alley songsters like Charles K. Harris (Ma Filipino

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Babe); J. A. Wallace (Yankee Doodle Dewey); and Edward M. Wickes and Ben Jansen (He Laid Away a Suit of Gray to Wear the Union Blue) to name only a few.3 Although none of these songs reached the status of Julia Ward Howe’s Civil War anthem, Battle Hymn of the Republic, they signaled the nationalistic rapture many Americans felt, at least temporarily, as they set off to make the Philippines safe for democracy. Freedom, empire, high national purpose, and no small measure of joy (call it the pursuit of imperial happiness) defined this moment in time—one that would have profound consequences for the United States and the world.

3 Importantly, the joys of imperial pursuits were also laden with deep anxieties, not so much about the rightness of war, but about the “burden” of adding to America’s already existing “race problems.” This last point is worth thinking about and goes to the crux of how music publishers had their cake(walk) and ate(danced) it too. On the one hand, songs of empire helped build support for the War with Spain. On the other, these songs, sometimes called “parlor songs,” encouraged an “emotional contagion” about empire that resonated with already existing feelings about race and gender.4 At once deeply racialized and engendered, these songs underscored thinking about “outliers” in America’s “outlying possessions” as being incapable of reaching, as Beveridge put it, “the heights of self-governing peoples” because they were racially debased.5

4 Of the many music publishers, composers, and lyricists who outfitted Americans with soundtracks for empire, one, Sol Bloom, is particularly interesting. Bloom was the impresario who organized the entertainment concessions along the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. He made a small fortune off this endeavor, but the larger fortune he could have made—but didn’t—stuck forever in his craw. Bloom actually composed the tune to accompany the “hootchy-kootchy” belly dancers in the Algerian Village. Almost instantly the tune became—and remains to this day—the quintessential orientalist ditty (which you can find at: http://www.shira.net/ streets-of-cairo.htm). Bloom wrote it, but in a mistake he would never repeat, failed to copyright it.6

5 With the money he made from running Midway shows, Bloom followed his passion for music and his show-business talents directly into Chicago’s booming popular music industry. Flush with success and capital from his Midway triumph, Bloom began soliciting and publishing tunes that he hoped would capture the fancy of mass audiences. He scored some early success with Nellie Revell’s Don’t Send Me Away, Daddy, but determined his play list lacked one particular genre of music, “the coon song,” that was taking the nation by storm in the late 1890s. In 1900, he filled this gap with the wildly popular “Coon, Coon, Coon” that helped establish Bloom’s growing reputation

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as America’s “music man” and embed the coon song into the ongoing cultural reconstruction of the United States after the Civil War as an instrument of imperialism. 7

6 Bloom’s genius as an ideological innovator who enabled Americans to derive some joy from taking up the “white man’s burden” is difficult to comprehend apart from some understanding of the origin of the “coon song.” Like any complex artistic creation, it has multiple creation stories associated with it. Linguistically, according to historian David Roediger, the association of the word “coon” with African Americans dates to the mid eighteenth century. In the 1840s, blackface minstrels, through the character of Zip Coon, turned the word into a white supremacist slur. But the conflation of word and song into a distinctive musical genre occurred after the Civil War at the end of the nineteenth century.8 Most musicologists credit African American performer Ernest Hogan’s million-seller All Coons Look Alike to Me, published in 1896, as foundational.

7 Hogan’s chorus perfectly captured the racialized core of the song:

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All coons look alike to me, I’ve got another beau, you see, And he’s just as good to me as you, nig! Ever tried to be; He spends his money free, I know we can’t agree, So I don’t like you no how, All coons look alike to me.9

8 Add to these lyrics the sheet music’s demeaning cover art and a tune that white children routinely whistled to demean blacks and one gets somewhere near the molten core of the popular mood at the moment the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Plessey v. Ferguson, a decision that lent legitimacy to racial apartheid in the United States.10

9 Why did Hogan write this song? Was he selling out to white audiences? Was the song the product of depression and self-hatred? Hogan would live until 1912 and would admit that All Coons Look Alike to Me “caused a lot of trouble in and out of show business.” But, as a million-seller, it made him a lot of money. He also claimed that it opened performance spaces for African American and white performers alike who otherwise would have faced extreme hardship in an era marked by prolonged economic depressions and financial panics. Some scholars have agreed. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, for instance, have suggested that coon songs, as sung by women “coon shouters,” paved the way for acceptance of the “blues” and ragtime.11 There is much to debate about the merits of Hogan’s tactics—and those of fellow African American composer Will Marion Cook--in their war of position to find paying outlets for African American artistic expressions. What is clear, however, is that if “coon songs” did open some possibilities for commercial success for some African Americans, the commercial success of those songs just as quickly opened the eyes of white music publishers to their potential for generating profits. With access to greater financial resources than African American composers, publishers like Sol Bloom and Leo Feist began saturating mass markets with compositions by some black, but mostly white composers, who sought opportunities to work with novel and modern musical idioms by anchoring them to the bedrock of familiar forms of white supremacy found in blackface minstrelsy—a performance tradition that had also mastered the art of narrating in musical (and emotional) form contemporary social, economic, and political issues. What Bloom and his fellow “Tin Pan Alley” song writers and publishers did was update, by expanding, the repertoire of “coon songs” to include commentary on America’s “splendid little” war with Spain and its consequences for America’s new beginning as an overseas imperial power.12

10 This was a stroke of artistic—and commercial—genius. It was also hard work. Music publishers and composers alike operated in a world where success, measured by profit, hinged on their ability to understand through emotional cognition the yearnings of their audiences. But publishers and composers never thought of themselves solely in terms of satisfying popular tastes. They actively sought to shape them. Following the example of Charles K. Harris, who had planted “song pluggers” in vaudeville theatres to drum up applause for new releases like his hit tune After the Ball is Over, music publishers actively promoted their songs in order to shape popular desires. But more than merely promoting songs, music publishers produced them on a factory scale, generating vast quantities of theme-driven songs that would enable them to both test and shape markets for tunes that would become “hits.” By the end of the century, this

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process of give-and-take between composers, publishers, and audiences resulted in the creation of Tin Pan alley—more of a sound than a place—that anchored its early identity and success to scoring music that addressed prevailing anxieties about the economic and political fault lines spreading across American society in the aftermath of the 1893 Depression as Americans wrestled with the uncomfortable reality that the United States, like Europe, was prone to a deadly run of political assassinations, culminating in the 1901 murder of President McKinley.

11 Not nearly enough has been written about Tin Pan Alley music publishers and composers and their role as interlocutors between ideology and popular taste in this context of real and perceived mayhem. Even less has been written about the performance spaces for these songs, especially the parlors of middle-class homes, where the process of domesticating empire actually occurred.13 Two things are striking about this process: first, the speed with which music publishers set to generating musical scores about the War with Spain and the Philippine Occupation; second, the ingenuity they showed in adapting “coon songs” to helping middle-class audiences develop in their own domestic spaces an emotional and intellectual connection to sustaining empire.

12 The immediate catalyst for mass-producing songs in support of the War with Spain came with the sinking of the Maine. In 1898 and 1899, over 100 pieces of sheet music carried titles like Brave Dewey and His Men14 (with the lyrics: “and Dewey brave/quick orders gave,/which made new history”) and the Charge of the Roosevelt Riders and Teddy, Teddy Rough and Ready. These helped make heroes out of mortals and fan the flames of war fever and nationalism.15 What is so revealing about these songs is not so much that they promoted war (for instance, Bloom’s own composition, In Memoriam of the Maine). What is striking is that so many compositions attempted to use the war to bleach out the “bloody shirt” of still-lingering Civil War memories and erase memories of the bitter sectional conflict. In 1898, for instance, Charles Graham composed and F. A. Mills published Fighting Side by Side the Blue and Gray. “Forgotten is the bitter past/North and South United,” ran the lyrics, “and so we strike for Liberty and Cuba now knighted.” Not to be outdone, Coupon Music in Boston published Laura Leigh’s We’ll All be Good Yankees in a Fight. Best selling songster, Paul Dressler also went to work and, in 1901, composed and published There’s No North or South Today. His lyrics about a parade of Civil War veterans bear notice for their generational tug: “’Father, come tell me who are those men,’ I heard a youngster say. ‘Although they are old, with a step firm and bold/They march in blue, some in gray? Why are they marching along side by side/ Tears in every eye?’ The old man just choked back a sob as he turned to the youngster and made this reply:/’There is always a West, There is always an East, Where the sun shall rise, they say:/But we’re marching abreast./From the East to the West./For there’s no North or South today.” Edward M. Wickes and Ben Jansen underscored these sentiments with their ballad, He Laid Away a Suit of Gray to Wear the Union Blue, as did H. A. Brumbaugh with Re-United States. One of the co-founders of International Harvester, John J. Glessner, who was an amateur composer himself, outdid the others when he titled his nationalistic song “The Yankee-Dixie.”16

13 Yet, for all of the joy expressed by songs about Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba, about Dewey’s sinking of the Spanish fleet in Manila, and possibilities for putting to rest bitter sectional memories from the Civil War, there remained the troubling question: “now what?” No less a figure than President William McKinley struggled to

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find an answer. In remarks to visiting church leaders, he explained how he paced the floors of the White House. Then, as he explained: “I am not ashamed to tell you gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way…1) That we could not give them back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable; 2) that we could not turn them over to France and Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be bad business and discreditable; 3) that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government—and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and 4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States (pointing to a large map on the wall of his office), and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!”17 McKinley’s revelation no doubt helped him sleep well, but as it became clear that the US government intended to occupy the Philippines and other islands acquired from Spain, popular enthusiasm for the war gave way to sharp debate about empire. 18As the nation divided, music publishers hit on a way to frame the debate in a way that would make money. They expanded the narrative structure of the “coon song” to address the “race problems” posed by the addition of Filipinos, Cubans, Hawaiians, and “others” to the American orbit.

14 Composer and, by the late 1890s, a music publisher in his own right, Charles K. Harris, helped lead the way with his Ma Filipino Babe. It appeared in his songbook right between My Genuine African Blond and Mammy’s Little Alligator Bait and bears quoting in full: On a war boat from Manila, Steaming proudly o’er the foam, There were many sailors’ hearts fill’d with regret; Gazing backwards at the islands, Where they’d spent such happy days Making love to ev’ry pretty girl they met; When up spoke a colored sailor lad With bright eyes all aglow, ‘Just take a look at ma gal’s photograph.’ How the white crew laugh’d and chaffed him. Where shiny face they saw. But he said: “I love ma Filipino baby.” Chorus— She’s ma Filipino baby, She’s ma treasure and ma pet. There’s no yaller gal that’s dearer, Though her face is black as jet For her lips are sweet as honey, And her heart is pure I know; She’s ma pretty blackfaced Filipino baby. In a little rustic cottage In the far off Philippines, Sits a little black-faced maiden all alone, Waiting for sailor lover; Though he’s black as black can be, Yet she loves him and her heart for him does yearn. Suddenly she hears his dear voice,

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As he cries out, ‘Carolin, I’ve come back to the only gal I love.’ And that night there was a wedding, All the ship’s crew gathered there. When he wedded his black Filipino baby.19

15 On one level, this song is about a touching reunion between two lovers separated by the fortunes of war. And the song certainly reflected the reality of African American troops fighting in the Philippines. But, Harris complicates the story by invoking terms that went to the core of prevailing fears in the United States about miscegenation.20 The chorus, with its refrain about “no yaller gal that’s dearer” called to mind the growing concern in the United States about mixed races, while at the same time drawing attention to alleged similarities between Filipinos with their faces “black as jet” and African Americans. On one level, the song, with its reference to a “war boat” seemed to extol the virtues of the war in the Philippines. But, on another level, by suggesting a bond between an African American soldier and a dark-skinned Filipino, with not so subtle references to the soldier’s “black Filipino baby” (a reference both to his lover and to their offspring?), Harris brilliantly played to imperialists and anti-imperialists alike. He never called the rightness of the war into question (the battleship steams “proudly”), but, by underscoring the mutual attraction of African American males and Filipinas, he did call into question the fitness of Filipinos for anything like eventual American citizenship.21

16 Other songsters, drawing on deeply rooted racist stereotypes of African Americans, made the same case about other people recently embraced by US imperial expansion. In “My Honolulu Queen,” composed by John O’Dea and William Penn and published by Bloom, the chorus sang out: “For she’s the belle of all the Honolulu ladies,/Just the sweetest ever was seen,/And although her face a dusky shade is,/She is my Honolulu

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Queen./For she’s the Queen.”22 Similar sentiments echoed from Lee Johnson’s “My Honolulu Lady,” a piece of sheet music billed as “The Latest Coon Conquest.” I went down to a swell coon ball Last night and took my bride; She set dem crazy. I lead dat colored festival, With Lulu by my side. My love divine. We eat de pigeon wing, De coons did shout and sing, When we did the Honolulu Pas-ma-la. Den we glided by de judge’s stand, De coons and wenches sighed When my Lou she took first prize.23

17 Linking newly minted colonial subjects to African Americans and their alleged lasciviousness was one tactic used by music publishers to racialize imperial discourse by harnessing demeaning images of African Americans to images of dark-skinned people who now found themselves under the American imperial umbrella. At the core of these songs was the constant reminder that the United States had a “race problem” of its own with African Americans and that becoming an imperial republic ran the risk of adding to an already existing social problem. Magnifying this problem was the rhetoric of desire. Clearly, the “wenches” in My Honolulu Lady and the “pretty blackfaced Filipino baby” in Ma Filipino Babe drew on sexual stereotypes long imposed by whites on African American women to buttress political and social apartheid in the United States. But African Americans were only one point of comparison for Tin Pan Alley songsters.

18 Another was revealed by Paul Reubens’s composition, Pow-Wow Dance of the Philippine Igorrotes, inspired by the Igorot exhibit that was part of the Philippines Reservation of

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1,200 Filipinos at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. For the cover of this dance music, the publisher included this telling description: “When the Igorrotes first arrived at the St. Louis fair, the cold weather made it necessary to keep them indoors. With the advance of Spring, these children of the Philippines were taken out into the sunshine. Their pleasure at the change was expressed in prolonged dancing. Forming into clans, or bands, these Indians of the Archipelago continued the performance until compelled by those in charge to stop for rest.” To be sure, there was something alluring in the anti- modernist exoticism of the Igorots, but calling Filipinos “Indians of the Archipelago” also served to remind Americans of the not-so-distant wars on the Upper Plains and evoked associations with “savagery.”24

19 In some respects, one might argue that these stereotypes of sexual wantonness and savagery simply reflected dominant popular opinions of most white Americans. But these songs did much more. Like photographs and cartoons that helped Americans visualize empire, these songs, with their graphic covers, made empire visible and audible. And in the context of the time and the question being debated as what to do with the occupants of America’s imperial archipelago, the songs carried important implications for policy. Should possibilities of future citizenship even be entertained for islanders? The songs made a positive answer seem remote at best and may well have contributed to the strange contortions in how islands that formed America’s imperial archipelago came to be considered as “outlying possessions,” or “insular possessions,” or “incorporated territories.” The distinctions may seem arcane, but, in the series of Insular Cases decided by the Supreme Court in the early twentieth century, the Court held that U.S. sovereignty over the islands did not convey citizenship rights to its inhabitants. Coon songs, as much as any other medium, certainly helped set the stage for these legal contortions.

20 To appreciate the full effect of these songs on America’s new, post-Civil War beginnings with the Spanish-American War and subsequent war of occupation in the Philippines, it is important to bear in mind that the content of these songs played out on keyboards and in tuneful voices raised within the domestic spaces of middle-class households largely controlled by white women. So, how exactly, were these songs incorporated within the domestic sphere? The answer is that we do not know. But Kristin Hoganson’s important Consumer’s Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 provides some clues. According to Hoganson, “countless women in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States dealt with the confines of domesticity by turning their homes into imperial outposts and by escaping—if only imaginatively—into the wider world.” (p. 255). Within the domestic “imperium,” coon songs, played in the new rhythms of “ragged time,” may well have served as handmaidens of the processes of modernization, cosmopolitanism, and consumerism that, in Hoganson’s words, transformed the home into “a global midway.”25 One might also add this observation: songs about war and empire provided the emotional contagion for acquiring overseas territory and for denying colonial subjects human rights. What music publishers succeeded in doing was rooting imperialist sentiments in middle-class parlors and making imperialism understandable in terms of both race and gender, suggesting that to the allures of empire—both sexual and economic—had to be added concerns about making people deemed racially inferior future citizens of the United States.26

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21 We can never know how many Americans turned the pages of Harris’s patriotic hit, Break the News to Mother, a song initially written in 1891 about a fire fighter but subsequently rewritten to extol the virtues of a soldiers who died in a valiant effort to save the American flag, and then raised their voices to sing Bloom’s Coon, Coon, Coon. But until we can at least imagine the powerful emotional entanglements at work here, we may find ourselves thinking about the American fin-de-siècle primarily in terms of “rooted cosmopolitanism.” What I am suggesting is that we also need to consider the emergence of a “rooted imperialism” made possible, in part, by the articulation of ideology through music. Without such a concept, we will never be able to understand the appeal of ragtime music or be able to understand the “ragged time” of America’s global expansion at century’s turn. 27

NOTES

1. Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968). The literature on American empire is expanding. Recent insights are developed in James T. Campbell, Race, Nation, and Empire in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007) and David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 2. There is a growing literature on the War with Spain and the Philippine Insurgency. An excellent overview of the American war in the Philippines is provided by Paul Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North

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Carolina, 2006); Woodrow Wilson, “The Ideals of America,” The Atlantic Monthly 90 (1902): 721-734; Albert J. Beveridge, Congressional Record, Senate, 56th Congress, 1st session, Jan. 9, 1900, 704-712. 3. Not much has been produced about these songs and their importance for America’s imperial wars at the beginning of the twentieth century. A useful starting point is: “Crucible of Empire: The Spanish American War,” PBS, 1999 http://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/_music.html. 4. I derive the phrase “emotional contagion” from Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York: Harmony Books, 2009), 67. 5. On the breadth of depth of racialized and engendered thinking about the War in the Philippines, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and, Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 6. I am currently at work on a biography of Bloom. 7. Bloom, 147. Leo Friedman, comp. and Gene Jefferson, lyrics, Coon, Coon, Coon (Chicago: Sol Bloom, [1900]) in Library of Congress, American Memory Project. 8. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 97-100. 9. Ernest Hogan comp. and lyrics, All Coons Look Alike to Me, New York: M. Widmark, 1896, in Detroit Public Library, E. Azalia Hackley Collection. 10. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 14. 11. Hogan quoted in Maurice Peress, Dvorak to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American Roots (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 39; Abbott and Seroff, 23, 35-38. 12. On minstrelsy, see especially Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 3-28; and Eric Lott, Love& Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 13. Kristin Hoganson has launched a fruitful investigation of how domesticity conjugated imperialism in Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), but does not address the popularity of “coon song” sheet music. 14. George Dewey was naval commander at the battle of Manila. 15. Anne Cipriano Venzon, America’s War with Spain. A Selected Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 187-194. 16. These songs can be found in the Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin, the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and the James Francis Driscoll Collection at the Newberry Library. 17. General James Rusling, “Interview with President William McKinley,” The Christian Advocate 22 January 1903, 17. Reprinted in Daniel Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 22–23. 18. Robert Beisner, Twelve Against Empire (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968); Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 19. Charles K. Harris, Charles K. Harris’ Complete Songster (Chicago: Frederick J. Drake Co., 1903), 88-90. The sheet music cover is reproduced from Charles H. Templeton, Sr., Sheet Music Collection, Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries. For another cover for this music see: the PBS “Crucible of Empire” Website: http://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/ _music.html. 20. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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21. For a variation on this theme, see also James G. Dewey, Ma Filipino Baby: A Coon Simplicity with Rag-time Chorus (San Francisco: Wright and Kochman, 1899) in Mary Kay Duggan, 19th-Century California Sheet Music, University of California, Berkeley from http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~mkduggan/neh.html. 22. James O’Dea and William Penn, My Honolulu Queen (New York: Sol Bloom, 1899) from ibid, http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/csmp_img/cahs_imgs.5/cahs0003880010.jpg. 23. Lee Johnson, “My Honolulu Lady” (San Francisco: Zeno Mauvais Co., 1898) and his Ma Honolulu Man: An Oriental Coon Song (San Francisco: Lee Johnson & Co., 1899), both from http:// www.mip.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/csmp_search_new.cgi. 24. Paul Reubens, Pow-Wow Dance of the Philippine Igorrotes (New York: Sol Bloom, 1904) in Music Division, Library of Congress. 25. Hoganson, The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2007), 254. 26. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood. 27. Charles K. Harris, comp. and lyrics, Break the News to Mother (Milwaukee, WI: Charles K. Harris, [1897-1898]), in Historic American Sheet Music, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, also available from Library of Congress, American Memory.

RÉSUMÉS

America’s War with Spain inspired Tin Pan Alley music publishers to generate popular songs to accompany America’s military victories and subsequent occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines. By expanding the genre of the so-called “coon song” to include the people of these islands, composers and publishers contributed to the domestication of empire in fin-de- siècle America.

INDEX

Keywords : Chicago World's Columbian Exposition; "Coon Song"; Hawaii; Minstrelsy; Philippines; Ragtime; Spanish-American War; Tin Pan Alley.

AUTEUR

ROBERT W. RYDELL Montana State University, Bozeman

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The American challenge in uniform: the arrival of America’s armies in World War II and European women

David Ellwood

1 In Iraq and Afghanistan today we see confirmed once more an ancient truth: that no matter how friendly the intentions of foreign armies upon their arrival in a given territory, no matter how short or long their stay, their presence always involves some form of dilution, suspension or transfer of sovereignty from local peoples to those armies. The question then arises of how willingly that transfer takes place, how to manage the conflicts that inevitably arise, in direct proportion of number and intensity to the length of time those armies remain.1 In World War II it was the British who first identified the challenge represented by the American armed forces, after they began arriving in vast numbers in the UK from early 1942. It was British popular culture which best identified the three great complaints which would be heard against the Americans everywhere they went in the world from that time onwards. Americans in uniform were said to be ‘over-sexed, over-paid and over here.’ In other words they represented – among many other things - a vast male challenge to every local tradition of feminine identity, custom and practice. They possessed a unique currency of power in their material riches; and they upset all the definitions of local sovereignty taken for granted in matters large and small by peoples everywhere.

2 This paper explores some of the consequences of this encounter between civilisations, seen from the perspective of local women in the ‘liberated territories’. It suggests that wittingly and unwttingly, U.S. armed services did indeed act as agents of America’s models of modernity. But if the medium was the message, its reception, translation and reconfiguration by the peoples exposed to this demonstration of cultural as well as material force suggests that a complex dialectical interaction took place over time, which changed both sides mentally and socially for years afterwards, perhaps permanently. In no social area is this reality more plain to see than in the confrontation between the Americans in all their forms and the women of Britain, Italy, Austria and Germany from 1942 onwards.

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3 Every expeditionary army in history has, sooner or later, provoked forms of generalised resentment among local populations wherever it landed. But the wry British phrase also implies there was a different and new quality about the American military as a force of foreign invasion, of which it had only limited experience. The experience of all those involved – the men in uniform at all levels and the local peoples in all their social variety - soon suggested that a series of highly visible factors contributed to the impact of these forces when they arrived from across the Atlantic during World War II, and to the reception that subsequently greeted them:

4 A. the inheritance in any liberated territory of all the prevailing myths of America there, and of all the previous, direct experiences of its people of the reality of the U.S. in all its forms: the weight of stereotypes created by the mass media, Hollywood in particular; the legacy of memories and stories left by native emigrants, and by American tourists, bankers and industrialists come to Europe. 2

5 B. the explicit ideology which the liberators brought. One legend said that the military banknotes the Americans brought to Italy bore the Four Freedoms printed on their reverse side. Obviously Wilsonian and Rooseveltian, the fighting ‘United Nations’ promised salvation from all the misery, backwardness, class struggle and wars of all the centuries.

6 C. the dynamism, technology, material comforts and subliminal messages of the American way of making war. The opulence flowed everywhere, blinding, distorting, often corrupting everything it came into contact with. Scholars would demonstrate later that this was not the casual thoughtlessness of a newly rich nation, but the key technique chosen by the General Staff under George Marshall to hold together armed forces which were not fighting to defend home and hearth; a huge, raw mass of individuals in uniform from a land with scarce military traditions, and a strong commitment to citizen democracy. 3

7 D. the uniquely American might of Hollywood films. Everywhere the armed forces went, the movie industry followed right behind. With four thousand of its people in military service, and permission to act as ‘the only commercial set-up’ functioning in the war zones, Hollywood was determined to recapture markets, parade the products of the years of absence, turn the war itself into legend, myth and entertainment, and exalt the American way of life. For its part the State Department expected that the industry would send abroad films which would ‘reflect credit on the good name of this country and its institutions.’ 4

8 E. an almost complete lack of preparation - historical, cultural, mental – for all the responsibilities awaiting a force of liberation in modern times. There were paper plans and schemes, there were 60-day courses in a specially created school. But no-one knew how to apply the lessons taught there, how to balance control and local initiative, civil and military priorities, relations with Allies and relations with the liberated peoples.5 A semi-official report of 1948 recalled that Southern Italy “turned into a laboratory where we tested out our theories”.6

9 F. together with all the apparent confidence and swagger, a self-critical attitude which would quickly emerge in newspaper reports, then filter into official reports and hearings, and into memoirs, novels, films. The paradoxes of ‘imposed democracy’ – of peoples ‘forced to be free’ - escaped no-one, at the time or later. John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano, was written by a rising reporter from Time magazine

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to highlight the difficulties of bringing democracy to pre-modern societies like the villages of Sicily, burdened by time and Fascism. Although written as a novel, the text predicted that America was coming into the world with its armies, and would be judged by the behaviour of these armies and of the men serving in them. Over sixty years later, Hershey’s prediction would be acknowledged in an apparently quite different context.7

1.The British experience of America’s armed forces

10 Between the start of their arrival and the demobilisation after VE-Day in May 1945, nearly three million Americans in uniform passed through Britain8. It was called the ‘friendly invasion’. It was generally friendly – but also as a result of vast and unique efforts by both governments to make it so. But it was undoubtedly an invasion. The US authorities accepted no limits to their sovereignty, and Parliament had to pass a special act, half in secret, to give the US armies exemption from British law. This was a precedent of enormous importance. American armed forces abroad from this time on would expect to enjoy a different kind of sovereignty to those of other nations. This had all kinds of consequences for dealing with conflicts on the ground, especially those involving local women.

11 The Americans enjoyed unlimited material resources. They had their own vast bases, their own leisure facilities, their own radio stations. This separateness was negotiated on all sorts of issues, official and otherwise, but it was also because they were seen on both sides, in so many ways, as a anticipation of the future that so much attention was paid to how the impact and reception of the Americans functioned in wartime Britain. ‘Are you our destiny ?’ was a question which re-surfaced once more among the British people, and soon began to disturb souls at every level of society, and not just among the almost 38,000 women who would become GI brides.

12 If ever there was need for confirmation of the ‘soft power’ theory of America’s impact on the world, it must be surely found among the young women of Britain between 1942 and 1945. Nowhere in Europe was popular feeling so well documented as it was during that experience, and what all the surveys, opinion polls, interviews of the time and later confirm is that, as an ex-serviceman put it: ‘never in history has there been such a conquest of women by men as was won by the American army in Britain in World War II’. One of the many feminine witnesses on record recalled: I suppose we were as jubilant as everyone else in the country when the Americans came into the war. In Bournemouth we had seen troops of almost every colour and nationality, but when these GIs hit town, commandeering our homes and our countryside, we were captivated at once. With their smooth, beautifully tailored uniforms, one could hardly tell a private from a colonel. They swaggered, they boasted and they threw their money about, bringing a shot in the arm to business, such as it was, and an enormous lift to the female population. 9

13 The lax discipline, lack of soldiery spirit, and conspicuous consumption of the invaders upset plenty of male minds, cultivated and otherwise. By mid-1944 even the GI’s themselves could tell the British were getting “edgy.”10 But like so many products of American popular culture, America’s servicemen seemed to young women to possess built-in features not easily found elsewhere. “It as if the cinema had come to life”, recalled a woman who went onto have a screen career of her own, “They were so handsome and well groomed and clean.” Another pointed out that “they used

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deodorants and after-shave – things unknown to 99 per cent of British men.” Others talked of the exuberance, drive and confidence, while a woman Red Cross worker recalled how the GIs “brought with them colour, romance, warmth – and a tremendous hospitality to our dark, shadowed island.” 11 There were of course conflicts, and these are well portrayed in the numerous films nad novels which have come down to us from the experience, even in the present.12 Although every film made featuring uniformed Americans in Britain dealt with the jealousies and tensions,13 the most graphic of them came long after the end of the war. In John Schlesinger’s 1979 production of Yanks, set in small-town northern England, Hollywood glamour in the form of Richard Gere plays an ordinary small-town American boy interpreting the Hollywood glamour of 1943. The film depicts the effects of money, alcohol, sex-appeal and above all the myths of the future the Americans bring, but doesn’t hide the nasty side, especially the race divisions in the US army. In a heroic scene, taken from reality, it’s local working class women who save the dignity of the black Americans by dancing with them, when the white boys try to prevent this. At the time, cinema was used extensively by the authorities as they tried to manage the inevitable surges of feelings on both sides as the war wore on and illusions wore off.14 Even the anthropologist Margaret Mead was mobilised to try to explain to the authorities, and through them to the men themselves, the differences in courtship rituals which were causing so much friction.

2. Italy: liberation or occupation ?

14 No such trouble was taken when the Allied armies arrived in Italy from July 1943 onwards. Because the Allies could not decide whether the Italians were to be treated as potential friends or defeated enemies, the net result of all their activities was profoundly ambiguous, and has continued to generate argument in all the succeeding decades.15 The American army was different from all the others present not just because of the opulence of its facilities and its relatively loose discipline, but also as a result of its detached attitude to the Italian people and their politics. It was the army of a nation with - until this time - an extremely small stake in the country it was fighting over. The result was that the long-drawn out process of liberation gradually turned in many areas into a special kind of occupation.16 In the second of Roberto Rossellini’s neo-realist film classics, Paisà of 1946, the stages of this evolution are vividly depicted, with the effects of the black market, poverty and mass prostitution in Rome and the south particularly in evidence. An Afro-American soldier is brought to realise that there are people in Naples much worse off materially than he is, people who consider him a conquering hero. In the middle section of the film, set in Rome, time, money and idleness seem to turn every American soldier into a prostitute’s potential client. Unemployment and starvation corrupt the finest local girl.17

15 Liberated Naples of course had presented the most dramatic order of challenge, and the records of that experience from all sides – official material, memoirs, diaries, films, plays, novels, - portray something like a clash of civilizations erupting along with Vesuvius in the old Bourbon city. For the American soldiery, the bombed out, starving metropolis allegedly represented everything they hated about the Old World. The soldiers “figured it this way”, wrote John Horne Burns in his postwar novel The Gallery: ‘These Ginsoes have made war on us; so it doesn’t matter what we do to them, boost their prices, shatter their economy, and shack up with their women…’

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16 Burns the narrator comments: In the broadest sense we promised the Italians security and democracy if they came over to our side. All we actually did was to knock the hell out of their system and give them nothing to put in its place. …I remember that my heart finally broke in Naples…. I found out that America was a country just like any other, except that she had more material wealth and more advanced plumbing… And I found out that outside the propaganda writers…Americans were very poor spiritually. Their ideals were something to make dollars on. They had bankrupt souls. Perhaps this is true of most of the people of the twentieth century. Therefore my heart broke.18

17 In their desperate struggle for survival, many Neapolitans seemed to take pride in flaunting their anti-modernism. A British diarist claimed, with ample evidence, that the war had pushed them “back into the Middle Ages.”19 Yet the playwright Eduardo De Filippo took a different view. His play Napoli milionaria, written and set in the midst of the liberation/occupation experience, became a triumphant symbol of the Neapolitan spirit in adversity, and made him a national hero. Later he recalled: The new century, this twentieth century did not reach Naples until the arrival of the Allies; here in Naples, it seems to me, the Second World War made a hundred years pass overnight.20

18 The greatest Italian novel of the war, Curzio Malaparte’s La Pelle, also set largely in Naples, emphasized instead national abjection. In Malaparte’s deeply pessimistic world view, self-abasement turns into a form of exhibitionism. As such it represents a generalised defiance of the Anglo-Americans’ logic of liberation, especially their bizarre blend of moralism and materialism. Malaparte rejected the conventional definitions of victory and defeat, liberation and occupation. Once an unorthodox Fascist, now a liaison officer between the Allies and the remains of the Italian armies, the writer declared that the Neapolitans, with all their centuries of foreign invasions, were never likely to feel defeated just because a new invader had arrived. As for these Allied armies, it was useless for them to claim to liberate people and at the same time want to make them feel defeated. Either they were free or they were vanquished. In truth, claimed Malaparte, the Neapolitans felt neither.21

19 The novel and its narrator – who never disowned his Fascist past - ridicule American optimism and innocence. Not only was their hubris un-Christian, their pity and compassion for the defeated/liberated people of Italy were grotesquely hypocritical. Indeed they brought with them a plague of vice, provoking the Neapolitans to pay for their humiliation and starvation with every form of corruption: mercenary, carnal, moral; an abandonment of human dignity never seen under the Germans. In the end, the force of this plague overwhelmed its carriers, bringing shame and self-hate on the liberators and all their ideas. 22

20 Yet in a short story which remained unpublished until 2007, Curzio Malaparte claimed that the total defeat of 1943 had sparked an exodus of people from the South – he mentions Sicily in particular - led by women, who saw an opportunity to escape from misery and search for a land which gave them plenty, justice, order and dignity. Malaparte however did not link this mass movement to the arrival of the Allies, but to an age-old pattern in which the defeat of the existing order always brought an ‘opportunity for liberty’ to the poorest people. 23

21 Unfortunately, in the collective memory of the American and other allied armies it is their protracted experience in Italy’s southern provinces and Rome which has left the greatest impact. And there - as seen in innumerable films and novels - the image of

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the prostitute comes to symbolise the behaviour of the nation, and not just the main means of survival of a desperate population. After all, to most outsiders, this looked like a people which, when things started going wrong, had dumped the leader they had worshipped for 20 years – Mussolini – and apparently without a moment’s hesitation had sought to join the Anglo-American camp. Mike Nichols’s 1972 film of Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, is the most explicit testimony of this perception from outside. In its famous brothel scene, the vile old man who lives there makes very clear to a young American aviator (played by Art Garfunkel) that whoever guarantees his survival will find his favour: Fascists, Germans, Americans to him they are all just passing waves of foreigners to be exploited and used. He has seen it all. As he solemnly tells the innocent young American: “I am 107 years old.” In this sort of scenario, the women of the Resistance, of the families who sheltered Allied soldiers and airmen, the mothers, wives or girlfriends of the Italian soldiers working as prisoners-of-war for the Allies even after the 8th of September, or fighting alongside them, get no mention at all. 24

3. Austria: the start of ‘coca-colonization’ ?

22 Austrian historians who ponder the theme of the ‘Americanization’ or ‘Westernization’ of their nation after the Second World War – making inevitable comparisons with West Germany – all emphasise the role of the occupation experience, and its centrality in that effort of national re-definition which went on as soon as physical survival was guaranteed in the beleaguered country. In the long term, they say, the methods the Americans used to socialise and legitimise their hegemony made certain key sectors of the populace – especially youth and women – ‘ “mature” (?) enough for the central message of the American way of life: the culture of consumption.” 25 The GIs, says Reinhold Wagnleitner, played their own role in this transformation: ‘ while (they) did not always act like victors, they certainly looked the part.’ They could supply extraordinary forms of provocation and inspiration: In 1946, the starving and freezing people of Salzburg were quite impressed when they learned that the U.S. occupation army managed to feed its fifteen thousand troops sixty thousand portions of ice cream as dessert on a daily basis.

23 An army fighting on its stomach in this fashion invited all sorts of disparagement and scorn from traditionalists of every hue. But the “daily demonstration of abundance and wealth’ left its mark, endearing the GIs ‘to large groups of the young who had had more than enough of senseless order and military marching music.” In the 1950s they would turn into the “children of schmaltz and Coca-Cola,” argues Wagnleitner. 26

24 But in the years right after the war few of these silent transformations were on display.27 The only group which seemed to have a glimpse of the revolution of rising expectations was those young women from rural western Austria who began to spend time in wealthy Switzerland to make money. They would be the ones most likely to strike up friendships with the GI’s in their neighbourhood on their return. The phenomenon of these Amibräute, as they were derisively known, ‘was simply the manifestation of a shifted horizon of expectations on the part of young females in general’, judges Ingrid Bauer. Through the GIs, these women had “instant access to .. money, leisure time and pleasure”. They anticipated the “hedonistic intensification of life” which the rest of society would come to know only years later. 28

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25 But they paid a heavy price for the privilege. In the conservative media, in bishops’ sermons, in police reports and elsewhere, they were accused of a form of betrayal of ‘Austrian honour’, and their life-style evoked much disparaging comment at a time of ‘dreary forced frugality’. “Honourable” women were directed by one newspaper letter writer to show their contempt directly to the ‘chocolate girls’, and to “boycott all those who besmirch your honor and that of your family and drag Austria’s good name into the dirt.” 29 At the same time the reconstruction of national identity which took place after the war - ‘re-Austrification’ - was an overwhelmingly conservative movement. If technological and economic renovation there had to be, then the family – and the women in it in particular – were expected to be a stronghold of re-discovered traditional values.30

26 As elsewhere in Europe, a general postwar return to the home was also a form of revolt against an excess of modernity, whether of the warlike or peacetime varieties, an attempt by the traditional sources of authority to restore moral and social hierarchies in the family and in the nation. In Austria this meant coming to terms with the meaning of seven years of membership of the Third Reich, at least as much as understanding the world of the Four Freedoms, the GIs and Hollywood. Returning veterans were the most bitter, with a sense of grievance which would endure in the years. Already compromised by defeat, the manliness of these individuals was directly threatened by the liberators. One pamphleteer wrote: “They took five years to achieve victory over German soldiers but he [i.e. the foreign soldier] only needs five minutes for the conquest of some Austrian women!”31

4. Germany: relieving the occupation G.I. blues

27 “The first human contact with the Allies was via us women.” 32 So wrote one of the many witnesses whose memories have survived, and been incorporated in a vast German effort to reconstruct a form of national identity partly on the basis of what happened in those years.33 Through women Germans discovered that Allies were not so censorious or fearsome as the official public relations machine in the early years made them out to be. Witnesses talked of “soldiers who appeared extraordinarily rested and well-cared for”, while an actress who later married one of them, said: “they had beautiful teeth, they were so healthy, clean and well-fed.” Another feminine voice talked of them sitting in outdoor cafés reading “funny books” and drinking Coke from a straw. She wished she could “erase all the sad memories of the past and act as young and spirited as they did”. Petra Goedde comments that contacts with GIs “enabled young women to tap some of that material abundance and carefree leisure time.” 34

28 For their part the local women helped American men to overcome or at least cope with some of their inhibitions, the stereotypes they had brought with them, and their sense of existential alienation. It was the women who quietly convinced the Americans that their stern non-fraternization policies could never work, and as such opened the way to the end of the notion of undifferentiated, collective guilt. They made sure that when non-fraternization was finally dropped in October 1945 a great boom of relations would take place: ‘Army investigators estimated that 50 to 90% of American troops “fraternized” with German women in 1946; among married servicemen, one in eight had “found a home” - that is, entered a relatively stable relationship – in Germany.’ By the end of 1947 2,262 women had married occupation soldiers. 35

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29 The love market generated controversy then and forever after. Until the currency reform of June 1948, which largely killed it off, female company and sex were among the major items available in the all-encompassing barter economy. Once more, the Americans supplied the demand, the locals the supply. Some women offered domestic services, others the warmth and comfort of a home environment, still others brought German luxury items and souvenirs to the market. The Americans could provide almost any material good, but what mattered above all in the desperate years was food. “Some women resorted to prostitution to save themselves and their families from starvation”, reports Petra Goedde, “(f)or others it became an additional source of income… whatever the original motivation, food had become a central aspect of American- German interactions.” 36

30 Commercial sex rapidly acquired similar meanings, and there was a great deal of unease among authorities on both sides of the relationship, as well as among the male and older population in general.37 The Yanks sweetheart was “no heroine”, comments Elizabeth Heineman. “She became the symbol of Germany’s moral decline – and, as such, implied that the decline occurred with the collapse of, rather than during, Nazi rule.” 38 Just as in Austria, Veronika Dankeschon (Veronika Thank-You-Very-Much, whose initials were VD) was seen as a great slur on national honour, and yet another threat to the positive heritage in the German national identity. She got pleasure out of what to others was bitter material necessity, and confirmed that the loss of national self-determination extended to the sexual order. Here was the true meaning of defeat. In Hans Habe’s novel Off Limits, a best-seller of 1955, the prostitute becomes a metaphor for the entire society in which she lives. The character is killed off in the novel after the currency reform of 1948, but the Yanks are depicted as missionaries “with the Bible in one hand and the knout in the other”… “’unless you are willing I shall have to use force”.’ The message, says Elizabeth Heineman, was that the West Germans had to attain their own form of national sovereignty and oblige the foreigner to return home. 39

31 Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times, reporting from Vienna in August 1945 said: “In an unhappy and uncertain world [the GI] seemed happy and confident of the future.” The youth of America, the GI, incarnated not just its wealth, and new- found power. The comment he commonly provoked, she noted, was: “America must be a happy country.”40 But time quickly shifted that judgment. All armed liberations quickly turn into occupations by a foreign army, no matter how friendly or high- minded the intentions. After many months in Bavaria a veteran British relief worker wrote: All large armies of occupation are disastrous. They strangle the conquered and demoralise and make helpless the conqueror. 41

32 The Americans of World War II and after convinced themselves neverthless that their armies were different, that they were a revolutionary force promoting democracy, liberty and progress as Americans understood it. Right after the outbreak of the Korean war the Marshall Planner Harlan Cleveland asked: Wasn’t the American GI, with his wrist watch and his flash-light, his jeep and his airplane, one of the most revolutionary forces that has ever been let loose in the world ? The revolution that is now endemic in Asia is not Communism - it might better be called the ‘revolution of rising expectations’.42

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33 Ms McCormick put it this way: the “well-fed, well-equipped, opulent doughboy”, had left behind him, “a rosy and disturbing vision of a plenty more widespread than any other country has achieved…(he) sowed in his wake the fertile seeds of envy and rebellion.” 43 In Britain, “It was so drab when they had gone,” lamented one English woman, “The whole world had been opened up to me and then it was closed down again…We realised how confining England was..”. The social historian Juliet Gardner, who wrote a classic book on the impact of the GI’s, on women in particular, suggested that the American armies had camped such a long time on British soil that by the end one conclusion seemed obvious: it wasn’t the American troops who were overpaid, it was the British who were underpaid. 44 In western Germany the true revolution of material expectations that an American army could inspire happened after the GI’s return on a massive, long-term scale after 1951, under the auspices of NATO. A ‘Gold Rush’ atmosphere broke out, reports Maria Höhn, requiring a great crusade by the defenders of re-born German moral integrity for its containment. And once again women were the key protagonists. 45

34 In Italy, however, as the journalist Eugenio Scalfari wrote in L’autunno della repubblica in 1969, the arrival of the Americans was credited with setting in motion the subterranean psychological processes – a revolution of rising expectations ? - which produced the great internal migrations of the boom era of the 1950’s.46 For sure their presence left memories whose sweetness was related directly to its brevity. In Bologna the Allies remained roughly six weeks. A 1995 celebration of the city’s liberation, published by the local edition of the post-Communist newspaper L’Unità, dwelt on the music and dancing the Americans had brought, the baseball and Camel cigarettes, the colour-filled images of a renewed way of life and an un-dreamt of prosperity. But a memoir from Naples, where the Allies stayed over 18 months, published in the same year by another post-Communist writer, Ermanno Rhea, offered a pained and bitter portrait of the experience, seen as prelude to a long-term occupation under the flag of NATO. 47

35 To conclude: these Americans left, in effect, a rather ambiguous legacy, as one may read in the testimony from a young woman who witnessed the liberation of Bologna, as reproduced in the 1995 Unità supplement : “… we all ran out to see the Americans arrive. There were all sorts of colours, whites, blacks, Indians.. They were our salvation. They were nice and friendly, just like in their films. They didn’t act like liberators.. They were free men, they came from a country where life had never been interrupted [by war] and you could tell. They were full of energy and cheer. Like us, but ours was a cheerfulness which exploded after twenty years of terror. Mamma suddenly started singing Red Flag at the top of her voice. Just like when we were kids, when we learned to sing the International from a priest who was our cousin.” 48

36 To each one, in other words, her own revolution of expectations.

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NOTES

1. Eric Carlton, Occupation. The Policies and Practices of Military Conquerors, (London: Routledge, 1992), 1,5. 2. German case in Detlef Junker, “The Continuity of Ambivalence: German Views of America, 1933-1945”, in David E. Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, eds, Transatlantic Images and Perceptions. Germany and America since 1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Hilary Footitt, War and Liberation in France. Living with the Liberators (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), 28; Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War. The Cultural Mission in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 27, 44 3. David Reynolds, Rich Relations. The American Occupation of Britain 1942-1945, (London: HarperCollins 1995), Ch.6; rawness vividly evoked in Edwin P.Hoyt, The GI’s War. American Soldiers in Europe during World War II, (New York: Macmillan, 2000), xvii, Ch.2-4, based on individual accounts; some of the extraordinary privileges of the U.S. citizen in uniform are listed in Franklin M. Davis, Come as a Conqueror. The United States Army’s Occupation of Germany 1945-1949, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1967), 35-6. 4. Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization, 237-9; Paul Swann, “The Little State Department: Washington and Hollywood’s Rhetoric of the Postwar Audience”, in Ellwood and Rob Kroes, eds, Hollywood in Europe. Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam: VU Press, 1994). 5. Davis, Come as a Conqueror 20-6, 50-2. 6. Merle Fainsod, “The Development of American Military Government Policy during World War II”, in C.J. Friedrich et al., eds., American Experiences in Military Government in World War II (New York: Rinehart, 1948), cit. at 31. 7. Robert D.Kaplan, “Supremacy by Stealth”, in Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003, 69. In discussing the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, Kaplan makes explicit reference to Hershey’s novel. 8. Juliet Gardiner, “Over Here”. The GI’s in Wartime Britain (London, Collins & Brown 1992), 41. 9. Cit. in Gardiner, “Over Here,” 110; a typical encounter is reconstructed ‘verbatim’ in Hoyt, The GI’s War, 3-4. 10. The novelist and playwright J.B.Priestley, vastly prominent in his day, gave a glimpse of working class male resentment in the character of Tommy Loftus, a non-combatant, in his instant end-of-war novel Three Men in New Suits (London: Allison & Busby, 1984, reprint of 1945 edn.), 54, 59; GI reaction to British testiness reported in Hoyt, The GI’s War, 290. 11. Cit. in Gardiner, “‘Over Here’, 52-3, 111-12 (emphasis in original); GI experiences of the encounter recounted – with poems - in Hoyt, The GI’s War, 73-4, 283-90; the other north Americans in Europe – the Canadians- could also provoke the same reactions on occasion, as the Dutch liberation experience testified; summary in David Stafford, Endgame 1945. Victory, Retribution, Liberation (London: Little, Brown, 2007), 350-2. 12. In 1982 London Weekend Television produced a 12 hour mini-serial set in a fictional small town in Suffolk, We’ll Meet Again. Annie Groves’s novel The Grafton Girls (London: HarperCollins, 2007) graphically portrays the illusions and disillusions experienced by a group of local and imported English girls, of various social classes, in contact with different levels of American soldiery in wartime Liverpool. 13. Wartime cinema-society relationship explained in Angus Calder, The People’s War. Britain 1939-1945, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 367-73. The Ministry of Information promoted the production of a number of films in the cause of Anglo-American understanding, particularly A Yank in the RAF (Lou Edelmen 1941), The Way to the Stars (Anthony Asquith 1945), A Matter of Life and Death (Powell and Pressburger 1946).

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14. A glimpse of the documentary material made for this purpose may be seen in A Welcome to Britain (1943) and Letter from Ulster (1943) available from Panamint Cinema (www.panamint.co.uk); discussion by George Orwell of propaganda problems in ‘Letter to Partisan Review’, 3 Jan. 1943, in The Collected Essays..Vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 321-22. 15. Early semi-official assessment in George C.S. Benson and Maurice Neufeld, “American Military Government in Italy”, in Friedrich, American Experiences; some 60th anniversary debates captured in Eric Gobetti, ed., 1943-1945. La Lunga liberazione (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2007). 16. Ellwood, Italy 1943-1945. The Politics of Liberation (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1985), Ch.7. 17. Full contextualisation in Christopher Wagstaff, “Italian Cinema of the Resistance and Liberation”, in Italy and America 1943-44. Italian, American and Italian American Experiences of the Liberation of the Mezzogiorno (Naples: La Città del Sole, 1997), esp. 538-9. 18. J.H.Burns, The Gallery (New York: Bantam Books, 1947), 280-2, emphasis in original 19. Norman Lewis, Naples ’44 (London: Collins, 1978), 108, 132, 145, 151. 20. Cit. in “Naples ’44 / ‘Tammurriata Nera’, Ladri di Bicicletta”, in Italy and America 1943-44, 442; on the play, Gabriella Gribaudi, “Napoli 1943-45. La costruzione di un’epopea,” in ibid., 303-5; the piece was written from direct experience and first staged in May 1945. 21. C.Malaparte, La pelle (Milan: Adelphi 2010; first edition Milan: Aria d’Italia 1949; film version Liliana Cavani 1981), 4; similar sentiments are expressed by the old man the young American flyers find in a Roman bordello in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (London: Corgi Books, 1982; reprint of 1962 edition), 258-64; full discussion of Malaparte, Burns, Lewis and others in John Gatt-Rutter, “Naples 1944: Liberation and Literature,” in Italy and America 1943-44. 22. Malaparte, La pelle, 25-32; Burns, The Gallery 280 passim, 367; Gribaudi, “Napoli 1943-45”; although seriously concerned by the situation, the case-hardened British were much more detached in their judgments: journalistic comment in Alan Moorehead, Eclipse (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945), 62-3 and The Listener, 6 April 1944; a celebrated reconstruction of his experience as an intelligence officer is in the writer Lewis’s ‘diary’, Naples ’44. 23. Malaparte, Il compagno di viaggio (Milan: Excelsior 1881, 2007), 74-5. Malaparte’s outlook continues to be controversial in Italy, cf. Raffaele La Capria, “Malaparte gran bugiardo. Il suo trucco c’è e si vede,” Corriere della Sera, April 21, 2009. This was a highly critical discussion published on the occasion of the re-appearance of key Malaparte texts; contrasting judgment, qualifying La pelle as ‘a great book’, from leading literary and film critic Goffredo Fofi, in Internazionale, Feb.11, 2011. 24. Even in Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna of 2005, the two young Italian women glimpsed are characterised only in sexual terms. 25. Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization, 271 (emphasis in original); cf. The Americanization / Westernization of Austria, Contemporary Austrian Studies, Vol. 12, Günther Bischof, Anton Pelinka, eds., (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004); Günther Bischof, “Two Sides of the Coin: The Americanization of Austria and Austrian Anti-Americanism,” in Alexander Stephan, ed., The Americanization of Europe. Culture, Diplomacy and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). 26. Wagnleitner, “The Empire of the Fun, or Talkin’ Soviet Union Blues: The Sound of Freedom and U.S. Cultural Hegemony in Europe,” in Michael J.Hogan, ed., The Ambiguous Legacy. U.S. Foreign Relations in the”American Century” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 474; Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization, Ch.9. 27. There is no mention of them in the day-by-day memoir of the military government officer Whitnah, even in the generally positive summing up; Donald R.Whitnah and Florentine E.Witnah, Salzburg Under Seige. U.S. Occupation, 1945-1955 (New York: Greenwood Press,1991), 15-16, Ch.12; the author was a military government officer in Salzburg, his wife a local girl.

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28. Ingrid Bauer, “Americanizing/Westernizing Austrian Women: Three Scenarios from the 1950s to the 1970s”, in Bischof, Pelinka, The Americanization, 172. 29. Cit. in “ ‘Austria’s Prestige Dragged into the Dirt’? The ‘GI-Brides’ and Postwar Austrian Society (1945-1955),” in Günther Bischof et al., eds, Women in Austria, Contemporary Austrian Studies Vol. 6 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 44. 30. Ibid., 42-4, 50. 31. Ibid., 47-8; this quote came from the French zone, but would have been even more appropriate in the US-controlled areas: Bauer, ‘’The GI Bride’: On the (De)Construction of an Austrian Postwar Stereotype’, in Claire Duchen and Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann, eds, When the War Was Over. Women, War and Peace in Europe, 1940-1956 (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), 223, 226-9. 32. Elizabeth Heineman, “The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s ‘Crisis Years’ and West German National Identity,” American Historical Review 101/2 (1996): 390. 33. Cf. Michael Ermarth, ed., America and the Shaping of German Society 1945-1955 (Providence/ Oxford: Berg, 1993); Reiner Pommerin, ed., The American Impact on Postwar Germany (Providence/ Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995); Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore, eds, The German-American Encounter. Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, Part 2 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001); Alexander Stephan, ed., Americanization and Anti-Americanism. The German encounter with American culture after 1945 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005); Konrad H. Jarausch, “The Federal Republic at Sixty”, in German Politics and Society 28/1 (2010): 10-29. 34. Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans. Culture, Gender and Foreign Relations 1945-1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 106-7. 35. Heineman, “The Hour of the Woman”, 81 and n. 68; Goedde, GIs and Germans, 42-60, 71-9; Stafford, Endgame, 493-5. 36. Goedde, GIs and Germans, 91; for semi-official American views, Davis, Come as a Conqueror, 115-17; Harold Zink, The United States in Germany 1945-1955 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 137-8. 37. Detailed examination of the comparable situation in France in Mary Louise Roberts, “The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease and the American Military in France, 1944-1946,” American Historical Review 115/4 (2010): 1002-30. This analysis demonstrates that while the French authorities insisted that their nation was neither liberated or occupied – the Free French forces of de Gaulle had done it all – the ruthlessness of the American armies in their demands for and use of prostitutes revealed all the attitudes of a force of occupation. 38. Heineman, “The Hour of the Woman,” 380-1; cf. Konrad H.Jarausch, After Hitler. Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 32 39. Heinemann, “The Hour of the Woman,” 383-6. The ambiguous feelings and behaviour produced on both sides by these realities are effectively dramatized in the Billy Wilder film, A Foreign Affair (1949) and by Rainer Fassbinder’s The Marrige of Maria Braun (1978). However, the German film expert Thomas Elsaesser insists that the millions of GI’s who passed through the Federal Republic in all the postwar years ‘seem to have left virtually no trace in the German cinema.’ The one major, partial, exception is Fassbinder’s production, a highly allegorical film in which the heroine survives by bestowing her ‘love’ on an Afro-American GI, only to kill him when the husband she married under the Anglo-American bombs finally returns from the war; cf. T.P.Elsaesser, “German Postwar Cinema and Hollywood”, in Ellwood and Kroes, Hollywood in Europe, 285 40. McCormick, “The Revolutionary Influence of the American Soldier,” New York Times, August 1, 1945. 41. Cit. in Stafford, Endgame, 507-8. 42. Cleveland, “Reflections on the “Revolution of Rising Expectations,” Address before the Colgate University Conference on American Foreign Policy, July 9, 1950, in National Archives,

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Washington D.C., Record Group 469, Assistant Administrator for Program. Deputy Assistant Administrator, Subject Files of Harlan Cleveland; (emphasis added). 43. Mc Cormick, “The Revolutionary Influence.” 44. Mc Cormick, “The Revolutionary Influence”; Gardiner, “‘Over Here’, 211-13. 45. Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins. The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 19, 31-6, 39-51, 226-9. 46. Eugenio Scalfari, L’autunno delle Repubblica (Milan: ETAS Compass, 1969), 95-6. 47. Ermanno Rhea, Mistero napoletano (Turin: Einaudi, 1995). 48. L’Unità, April 21, 1995.

RÉSUMÉS

A vast body of material exists – memoirs, diaries, films, plays, novels, official records – on the impact and reception of America’s armed forces armies in Europe after 1942. Britain, Italy, France, Austria and of course Germany all offer relevant evidence. The popular British phrase about the GI’s being ‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here’ brilliantly sums up many of the tensions the encounter threw up: over money and life-styles, courtship rituals and the treatment of local women, over sovereignty and the American impulse to requisition every local resource they could get their hands on. Local men thought ‘their’ women were being requisitioned. The Americans had not come to do ‘nation-building’, and yet their presence left memories, changed attitudes and altered prospects on the future, especially among women. Afterwards American experts claimed that their armed forces had set off a ‘revolution of rising expectations’. Although a contradictory, complex encounter, there is enough evidence to suggest they might have been right.

INDEX

Keywords : Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Liberation, occupation, US armed services, western Europe, women and war, World War II

AUTEUR

DAVID ELLWOOD Università di Bologna

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‘A Modern Liberation’. Belgium and the Start of the American Century, 1944-1946

Peter Schrijvers

1 If the Germans had taken only eighteen days to inflict on Belgium a humiliating defeat in May 1940, the Allies after the breakout in Normandy needed no more than ten days to flush out the Nazi occupiers from the small country. On September 8, 1944, Belgian Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot and his government returned to Brussels after more than four years of exile in London, making Belgium the first liberated country with a restored constitutional government. Two days later, British Major-General George Erskine arrived in the Belgian capital. He and his American adjunct, Colonel John Sherman, established the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) Mission to Belgium that took control of Allied affairs at the national level. The Allied Mission included a Civil Affairs staff that was to handle all problems of national scope. At the same time, American and British forces created Civil Affairs detachments at the provincial and local levels that were to act as their eyes and ears, to encourage good relations, to coordinate efforts with the local administration, and to aid the Belgians by providing food, medical supplies, and transportation.1

2 The Germans did manage to put up a fight north of Antwerp and the Albert Canal and in northern West Flanders province until early November. But such resistance could not lessen among troops and civilians a sense of immense relief about the comparatively minimal losses and damage with which the liberation of Belgium had been accomplished. All this, as much as the satisfaction of having regained their freedom, explains why Belgians across the country received their liberators amidst chaotic scenes of joy and gratitude so intense that they would impress many an Allied commander and soldier for the rest of their lives. It probably also goes a long way in explaining why much of the literature on the liberation of Belgium has traditionally been focused on the stunning military feats of the Allies and why the memories of the liberated are often content to linger on the initial euphoria and the clichés of chewing gum and chocolate. They would almost make us believe that, after the cheers and kisses

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in September 1944, the Allied armies packed up, moved on to Nazi Germany, and vanished from Belgium altogether, allowing the country to get back to normal all by itself.

3 The reality was, however, that as long as the campaign against neighboring Germany continued, there remained a mass presence of Allied troops in Belgium. Indeed, even when Germany was defeated in May 1945, pulling out troops and equipment took time, so that even by the spring of 1946 a significant number of Allied soldiers remained on Belgian soil. American forces were concentrated mostly in the French-speaking southern part of Belgium whereas Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north encountered predominantly British and Canadian (and some Polish) liberators. Still, with high concentrations of GIs in Brussels, the key logistical hub of Antwerp, the ports of Bruges and Ghent, and the easternmost Flemish province of Limburg, it is fair to say that the American presence was massive across the width and breadth of the country.

1. Waves of Admiration

4 All of the liberators, whatever their country of origin, could count on being mobbed by a population that showed itself ecstatically grateful. Commenting on the scenes, one American intelligence report stated: “Civil Affairs coming into Belgium found their welcome more warm hearted than in France; and there was no doubt of the warmth of the sentiment of this somewhat emotional people.” Indeed, American liberators were looming particularly large in the imagination of Belgians from the earliest moments of deliverance. “They had such confidence,” beamed a man who watched the Americans arrive in Liège, “that it was a joy to behold.”2

5 That confidence seemed particularly justified when measured by the staggering material wealth of the American military. A historian of the French liberation has noted that the US convoys had the impact of “a publicity caravan,” instantly selling the liberated on America’s “youth, power, and wealth.” It was no different in Belgium. Children in Liège, for example, could be seen running after American convoys from which GIs would “scatter onto the sidewalks badges, cartridge cases, cans, and even coins showing the US eagle.” As well as the more traditional offerings of peacetime publicity, of course, like fruit and candy and even chocolate and the ceaselessly amazing chewing gum.3

6 Even the details of uniforms and weapons seemed to indicate that the future belonged to the Allies, and especially to the Americans. A boy in Ottignies watched the GIs’ every move. “The Americans moved about with ease,” the young villager observed with a sharp eye for detail. “Their uniform was made of a lighter fabric that allowed them more comfort and freedom of movement. Their shoes were made of soft leather and without the hobnails of the German boots, and the soldiers gave me the impression that they were dancing while they marched.” Like the GIs in Ottignies, American soldiers across Belgium were about to dance their way into the hearts of many, easily outshining the Brits and Canadians who came across as the much poorer cousins of the mighty Anglo-Saxon family.4

7 The waves of admiration for the Americans continued to ripple and reverberate as long as they remained on Belgian territory from 1944 to 1946. The GIs were seen as powerful symbols of hope, not least because of the material abundance they represented. Belgians had been conditioned to think of the GIs as ambassadors of abundance even

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before they arrived. The US had remained largely unknown in Belgium before 1914. It was the massive American campaign to provide relief during World War I that had caused the country to take firmer shape in Belgian consciousness. Many would never forget the wheat, corn, rice, sugar, and lard that had helped alleviate hunger courtesy of the Americans.

8 In the course of World War II, much of the Allied as well as the enemy propaganda regarding the US revolved around the role it had announced for itself as the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’. As soon as the US entered the war, British aircraft were dropping leaflets over Belgium extolling the industrial might of the ally that had now at last officially joined the alliance. Great Britain, one such pamphlet said encouragingly, could now count on “munitions, heavy and light arms, airplanes straight from the Ford factories that for the time being have suspended the production of cars.” Another leaflet showed a drawing of airplanes and other war materials spilling from President Roosevelt’s arms as if he were a modern-day Santa Claus. The influential British radio broadcasts played on similar themes. Indeed, economic might constituted so potent a feature of the American war contribution that Nazi propagandists in Belgium considered it vital to try and undermine that particular image.

9 Continuous hammering on the same theme by supporters and detractors of the US alike ensured, however, that economic might was exactly that which, by the time of the liberation, had become most impressive about America in people’s minds. Not least because it reached back across the Great Depression to tap into older European images of the US as the home of modernity and wealth. Those images had begun to take shape at the end of the nineteenth century and become firmly entrenched during the decade that followed World War I. They now took on a new life in the big void brought about by the dramatic failure of Germany’s professed New Order.5

10 It was the motorized and mechanized aspects of the American military that caused by far the most awe and admiration. This was vividly illustrated by the vehicle that most easily caught the imagination of civilians: the jeep. In September 1944, when the phenomenon was still new and unusual, Belgian journalists could be seen misspelling the odd-sounding name as ‘yeep’. But there were no more such irreverent mistakes by the time the distinct-looking vehicle was commonplace in cities and rural areas alike and the admiration for its speed and versatility virtually universal. The jeep is, one newspaper declared, “as fast and as maneuverable as the American cars.” Indeed, if the GIs were ambassadors for a society of abundance, the countless jeeps were just as many mobile billboards for the motor industries of Detroit, and by extension for America’s roaring consumer culture. Belgium had experienced the first clear glimpses of its seductive power after World War I, when marketing and products of American brands like Singer, Otis, Columbia, and Ford – to name just a few – had become ubiquitous. Now, at the end of this war, as one Belgian newspaper reported in September 1944, the US would reduce its war industries by no less than forty percent. Inquisitive readers could not but ask themselves what kinds of consumer products these highly efficient industries might be turning to next.6

11 The liberators, and again the Americans in particular, represented cultural dazzle as much as material abundance. If the Americans plunged Belgians into darkness it was most often a pleasant and comforting one that allowed people to escape at last. “Went to the cinema with mom this afternoon,” a teenage girl from Antwerp scribbled in her war diary in August 1944, “a sad film: Immensee starring Kristina Söderbaum.” Barely

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two weeks after the liberation, however, on September 21, the same girl was over the moon as she confided to paper that, the following day, she and a friend would go see “the first American movie.” The feature film had the much more upbeat title Little Princess, a role played by the infectiously glamorous child star Shirley Temple.7

12 The sudden rupture in movie fare could be felt in theaters across the country in the fall of 1944. American movies had been very popular in Europe and Belgium before the Nazi-German occupation. It was Nazi Germany, however, that slammed the door shut for English-language movies. Keenly aware of the propaganda value of motion pictures and determined to make their own film industry the dominant one in Europe, they banned Anglo-American products at home as well as in the occupied territories. Belgium was no exception. By the summer of 1940 all British and American films had been impounded and carted off to factories to be processed into chemicals useful for the war effort. Yet the liberation caused Hollywood to stage a spectacular comeback. In the six months following liberation, barely 2.5 percent of the movies that were screening in Brussels were of Soviet origin, while slightly less than 9 percent were French, and another 9 percent British. Almost 79 percent of the movies for which people in the Belgian capital were queuing were made in the US.

13 Weary of the fear and stress, people now also craved music, not so much for its soothing words as for its pulsing beat. They were tired of listening and obeying; they wanted to move, experience their bodies, feel alive again. What music then could better suit the mood of the times than that which had sprung from ragtime and blues, the melodies and rhythms that black slaves had developed in America to give expression to their deep longing for freedom. Nothing could feel more liberating at the end of four years of authoritarian rule than to dance to the improvisations and deliberate distortions of jazz, the lively rhythm of swing, the emotional excitement of hot, and the nonsense of scat.

14 These exciting new forms of American music, like the motion pictures made in the US, had already found enthusiastic audiences in the Old World before the war. In fact, it was a Belgian, Robert Goffin, who as early as 1921 had published one of the first jazz magazines. What had been a trickle of American music before the war, however, turned into a flood with the arrival of the Allies. The Nazi ban on American music had all but ensured its popularity. Thanks to much illegal tuning in to the BBC, by the time of the liberation, without the help of record sales or live performances, Glenn Miller had become a household name among Belgians, and his brand of swing a symbol of freedom. Moreover, it was in the heady multicultural atmosphere of liberated Brussels that postwar icons of Belgian jazz like Bobby Jaspar, René Thomas, and Toots Thielemans would cut their teeth. But although the epicenter of the new music was located in the capital, shock waves reverberated across the country. By March 1945 newspapers were lamenting what was described as a “dance fury” infecting every town and village. Indeed, before long, Belgians were referring to any small orchestra simply as a ‘zjas’.8

15 The liberated Belgians danced to the Allied beat with total abandon. They did not need Hollywood’s master illusionists to convince them that what Anglo-Saxon societies stood for was much more appealing than anything the false Nazi prophets had ever promised. “There is,” General Erskine acknowledged in mid-October 1944, “a very healthy appetite for British and American news, information, films, and literature.” Still, SHAEF did not intend to leave anything to chance in this deeply ideological war and showed

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itself keen to help mold the Allied message wherever it could. “As a means of rubbing out past Nazi efforts and instilling sound ideas in future,” Erskine continued, “I hope every endeavour will be made to meet our requirements.”9

16 Special responsibility for the cultivation of “sound ideas” fell to two SHAEF branches. The first, the Public Relations branch, was responsible for censorship. But Allied authorities spent much more time facilitating the spread of information likely to sustain and increase confidence in Britain and the US. This was largely the responsibility of a second SHAEF section, the Psychological Warfare branch. The American Office of War Information (OWI) played a significant part in this campaign for hearts and minds. At the end of 1942, for example, it had been given the power to ban the export of films highlighting the less attractive side of American society. This affected not only films dealing with racial or labor conflicts, for example, but also Westerns and crime movies where law and order failed to come out on top. Also, early in 1945, the OWI invited Belgian newspapermen over to the US. By the spring of 1945 this initiative was bearing considerable fruit. Extensive coverage of the US by the major Belgian newspapers was splashed across front pages. The aim had initially been to have the Belgian correspondents impress the home readership with America’s war effort. But with the war in Europe over by the time the Belgians set out on their tour of the US, their hosts decided that the newspapermen might just as well use the occasion to enlighten their audiences back home about America’s giant potential in a future world at peace. Which is why in June 1945 Belgians found themselves reading not just rapt reports about yards “where ships shoot up like mushrooms,” but about the cargo that would soon be filling their holds, from the meat processed in Chicago to the fantasies generated by Walt Disney and the film studios of California.10

17 The liberated Belgium of 1944 did not have the Stunde Null (the Zero Hour) experience of a defeated Germany in 1945. But its people had experienced sufficient trauma and its society enough of a setback to accept that inspiration for the time being would have to come from elsewhere. Far removed from the crash of Europe’s ruin, America now more than ever before appeared to be the beacon of modernity. “Skyscrapers,” admitted Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the leading philosophers of postwar Europe, “were the architecture of the future, just as the cinema was the art and jazz the music of the future.” If this was true, then America was the country of the future. Many in Belgium certainly thought so at the end of the second global war imploding the Old World. Journalists of a regional Flemish newspaper were happy to report that the small country in its cleanliness and industriousness reminded many an American soldier of home. And they were even happier to relay to their readers the ultimate compliment: “Everywhere the American has been thus far people were one hundred years behind America. In Belgium we are only twenty years behind!”11

2. Currents of Discontent

18 All the while, however, it was by no means merely love and good feelings between the civilian population and the mass of Allied soldiers. Even while much of Belgium was dancing to the mesmerizing beat of the liberators, currents of discontent were gaining significant force beneath the waves of admiration. The Allies had a first major crisis in public relations on their hands when in the winter of 1944-45 they dramatically failed to meet the high expectations created by their very arrival. The first winter of

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liberation proved to be unusually harsh. In addition to a shortage of civilian transportation and badly damaged infrastructure (mainly as a result of Allied air attacks in preparation for the Normandy invasion), frozen canals and icy roads quickly caused the distribution of food and coal to be slowed down. But things were made still worse when the Germans launched a massive counteroffensive in the Ardennes and stepped up their V-weapons offensive against the logistical hub of Antwerp. By mid- December 1944, after three months of Allied control, the official food ration, measured in calories per day, continued to be slightly worse than it had been under the Germans before the Normandy invasion. SHAEF in the first week of January was describing the coal situation as “very critical.” Not surprisingly, confidence in the Allied management of the country plummeted. Street protests erupted across the country with placards and banners demanding more to eat and better heating.12

19 The especially grating comment that the Germans had succeeded where the Allies had failed in terms of bringing coal to the people, General Erskine did not deign worthy of a complex answer in a nationwide radio broadcast on February 4, 1945. Instead of discontent, Erskine asked Belgians to show loyal acceptance of Allied decisions “as a demonstration of our complete support of General Eisenhower.” And if that was not forthcoming, Erskine chided the Belgians, they should do well to consider that the situation in their country, bad as it might be, was still not “as hard as it is in Poland, Holland and Greece.” Finally, before wishing listeners good night, Erskine pointedly noted that he did not believe “there is a single Belgian who would exchange even the hardest conditions of life, and freedom – for German occupation, Gestapo, torture and murder.”13

20 If that was true, however, it did not stop Belgians from taking offense at the increasing humiliation that American abundance was causing them. Military logic dictated that absolute priority had to be given to the defeat of Nazi Germany. But to people who had lived through hard times for four years, in the first winter of liberation that logic appeared exceedingly perverse. Reports from Belgian liaison officers in Charleroi observed that, since most of the people in this industrial region were laborers and miners who were having a hard time making ends meet, a “chill” had descended on relations with the Americans who were receiving more than they could possibly consume. And that was true not only of meat and fats, but even of luxuries like coffee and chocolate. What was making civilians really angry, reports from across the American sector warned, was that GIs thought nothing of wasting food in full view of those going hungry. Convoys of army trucks loaded with food and cigarettes stood parked along the boulevards of Mons without tarpaulins. “The goods,” one observer ruefully remarked, “are exposed to the bad weather and are spoiling while the population lacks everything.” Elsewhere in Mons civilians employed by the Americans claimed they saw soldiers throw food in dumpsters day after day. Rather than hand them out to the Belgian workers, GIs in their depots at Cronfestu preferred to burn entire boxes of chocolate bars for no other reason than that they showed slight traces of humidity. People in Arlon were deeply insulted to see Americans plow left-over food into the soil or douse it with petrol to make it unsuited for consumption.14

21 Walter Ganshof van der Meersch, the head of the state security section within the Belgian liaison mission with SHAEF, believed that the situation was grave enough to warrant a blunt message to the Allied command. “It has been reported to me several times,” he wrote to General Erskine in English as early as January, “that the American

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Armies are destroying or wasting great quantities of army food in front of the local population. In the very distressing state of the population, this creates, of course, an extremely unfavourable impression.”15

22 The sight of GIs flaunting their country’s abundance harked back to age-old images of America as the country where the roads were paved with gold. But it just as easily revived concerns about the rampant economic power of the Americans. That power had become particularly threatening by the late nineteenth century. The New Order press during the occupation had shrewdly manipulated these fears by calling on Belgians and other Europeans to unite under German leadership against the Anglo- Saxon bloc and its imperialist ambitions. In the dark winter of 1944-45 there were fresh fears that so much economic pull might leave Belgium and its more vital resources vulnerable. These fears were soon being fueled by rumors across the American sector that giant depots were being built up not only for military victory, but also with an eye to a postwar economic offensive. Many of the rumors originated with Belgians who worked in the depots. They were astounded not only by the “immense quantities” of supplies, but also by the “extremely diverse” range of American items. What raised most suspicion was that many of those items seemed to have nothing to do with the military. People in Soignies talked of crates full of combs and lipstick. In Jemappes there were said to be large stocks of feminine beauty products and lingerie. Workers at Cronfestu insisted that the depots held everything from pocket knives to lighters and wallets. One stupefied Belgian employee there insisted he had seen at least fifty cubic meters of crates filled with nothing but playing cards. “An approximate calculation,” an equally incredulous liaison officer reported, “has enabled me to estimate the packs of cards at one million if the information I was given is correct.”

23 Some of these stories took on lives of their own and became necessarily exaggerated. Most of them were true, however, as they merely inventoried the merchandise that post exchanges on military installations sold to GIs as a matter of routine. But even if people had known this, it would have been impossible for them to believe that soldiers fighting a war were having easier access to consumer articles than civilians who had been deprived of them for so long. Inevitably, therefore, conspiracy theories arose to explain what did not seem to make any sense otherwise. In Jemappes a liaison officer reported that the population had concluded the Americans could only be building up such stocks “to pave the way for a postwar market that no other industry can compete with.” Indeed, the allegations were stirring up sufficient unrest for Belgian authorities in mid-March 1945 to launch an investigation and to be given access to the depots. The investigating officer afterwards reported that he had found no evidence of supplies for women, although he added that because of the large number of women in the US military such supplies might be present in depots elsewhere. The Jemappes depots did hold large quantities of candy and chocolate, but, the officer pointed out, everyone knew that American troops were “crazy” about sweets and that these were part of their standard ration. In short, he concluded, there was no foundation for “rumors that the American government supposedly engages in commercial activity under the cover of its army.” “What is true,” he emphasized, “is that all these rumors seriously sap public opinion’s confidence in our allies from the United States.”16

24 It was the end of winter that caused the crisis mood to recede and with it any danger of public opinion mutinying against liberators who had so much more than the liberated. Still, in the course of spring, a new crisis in Belgian-American relations emerged.

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Indeed, the end of the war in Europe was soon causing large swathes of the Belgian population to feel unsafe in the presence of American troops. This had everything to do with the way in which the US War Department was handling the demobilization of forces in Europe. The pullout took place in such haste and amidst so much chaos that even a US Army study later admitted it resembled an “organized rout” more than anything else. It was by no means only the Americans who caused disturbances in Europe following the surrender of Nazi Germany. On July 4 and 5, 1945, for example, Canadian troops caused riots with much looting and damage in the English town of Aldershot. Yet even the American press was making much of the arrogance and misbehavior that appeared to characterize US troops in particular. In November 1945, for example, Time magazine admitted that across Europe this was often causing relations with civilians to be “strained to the utmost.”17

25 Belgian authorities in July 1945 reported from the industrial city of La Louvière: “The population has grown tired of the Allied troops. That attitude is due to the fact that we have emerged from a long enemy occupation only to find it replaced with another foreign occupation.” Even people in the somewhat quieter countryside shared the attitude of the people in La Louvière with regards to the GIs. “They have brought to us,” a report on Visé summed up in September 1945, “habits that the population was not accustomed to: gangster exploits across Belgium, the propagation of venereal diseases, massive requisitions of buildings, and the exploitation of interests vital to our national economy. That atmosphere has made even a region as hospitable as ours embrace the current saying: ‘from our liberators, oh Lord, liberate us.’”18

3. Whispers of Change

26 Still, despite serious tension and several crises in the relationship with the American liberators, the GIs caused stubborn whispers of change to persist in Belgian society long after their noisy departure. The Belgians would never again manage to get back to life as they had known it before the war. For that, the trauma of war, the humiliation of German occupation, and the exhilaration of liberation had seeped too deep into the foundations of society. Their combined impact made five years feel like an eternity. On September 14, 1944, the liberation in Verviers was celebrated with a band, veterans bearing flags, and men and women of the resistance marching proudly in their uniforms. Behind them in the parade followed the mayor, two aldermen, and a judge. Not on foot like the others, but in a stately horse-drawn carriage. Such a scene, juxtaposed with the memory of German Panzers and the omnipresence of American jeeps, appeared archaic and suddenly strangely out of place.

27 The presence and prestige of the Americans in particular had served as a catalyst of change. It is true that Belgium’s political elite returned to the stage largely intact. However, this relative restoration went hand in hand with a groundswell of democratization that dramatically impacted people’s very expectations.19 Quite ironically for a generation that had come of age during the Great Depression, the GIs had done much to spread a cult of abundance. For a people that had known years of shortages under the Germans and was experiencing the humiliation of having to beg and steal from the Anglo-Americans, the longing for a better life involved above all an obsession with material progress. Belgians could and would no longer be satisfied with a life of subsistence. And American troops liberated their minds into believing that a

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life of affluence was not only perfectly feasible, but that it lay waiting just around the corner. Which is perhaps why, as Alain Brossat has noted in his work on France in 1944-45, so many of the liberated have found their memory of “the American moment” so irrevocably condensed into a number of “fetish objects” like chewing gum, cigarettes, instant coffee, the jerrican, and the jeep.20

28 At the end of September 1944, one Flemish newspaper was confident that peace would usher in a democratic renaissance. Tellingly, however, the newspaper was not in the first place referring to political democracy, but “democracy in this sense: that the standard of living will be much higher than before the war.” Belgians bought into the American cult of abundance with barely disguised eagerness. Historian Mark Mazower has rightly pointed out that in the postwar period, because of an initial lack of money to spend, the “production of desires” manifested itself quite some time before the actual “purchase of goods.” But rather than the advertising agencies and retailers of the 1950s which Mazower identifies, it was the Allied and especially the American publicity convoys of 1944-45 that set this production of desires in motion.21

29 Substantial pay increases in 1944 and 1945 and a rapid industrial resurgence fueling employment had foreign observers talk about “the Belgian miracle” before there was any mention even of a Marshall Plan. That miracle was translated almost immediately into a rising demand for consumer items, a trend further strengthened by redistribution set in motion by the newly introduced social security system. With stops and starts, Europe’s old bourgeois regime of consumption in the postwar years would be transformed inexorably into one of mass consumerism. Belgium was among the spearheads of that evolution and, in order to keep the momentum going and its population happy as well as productive, gladly integrated itself into what historian Victoria de Grazia has called America’s Market Empire. It took the Belgian retail trade slightly more than two years after the war to exceed its prewar volume. Visiting Belgium for the American State Department in mid-1946, economist Charles Kindleberger in a letter to his wife expressed surprise at the quantities of luxury items that were being imported from the US. These included cars, spirits, soft drinks, and above all expensive nylons of which in 1947 alone Belgians purchased some ten million pairs.22

30 The American presence in many ways also contributed to the erosion of authority. The rigid social order was shaken, a contemporary Belgian sociologist noted, not only because war had destroyed and disrupted much of society, but also because in some unexpected ways it had opened new vistas that promised to erode provincialism. “Workers whose lives were particularly narrow and whose possibilities for advancement were excessively limited,” the sociologist wrote, “have traveled, worked with people greatly different from themselves, established relationships with people of all nationalities, learned new customs, and gained realization of things they had not dreamed of.” The sociologist specifically mentioned the experience of the 200,000 Belgians who had volunteered or been forced to work in Nazi Germany. But since he was writing in an American journal at the end of 1945, he might just as well have been alluding to the hundreds of thousands of Belgians who had worked for or had otherwise become closely acquainted with the Anglo-Americans at home.

31 Indeed, conservative elements in Belgium and across Europe, from Britain to Germany, were particularly anxious about the mass presence of Americans that the war had suddenly made possible. That anxiety harked back all the way to the nineteenth

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century, when America’s rising mass democracy had caused much dislike for that society among European elites on different ends of the political spectrum. If those elites had not been able to hide a measure of admiration for America’s technology, management skills, and efficiency, they showed much trepidation in the face of an egalitarianism that was the other side of what Dutch historian Rob Kroes has called its “unfettered modernity.” It was that blatant egalitarianism more than anything else that made America a potentially subversive force in the eyes of anyone keen on preserving and cultivating the advantages of status, whether economic, political, or cultural. And it was those most threatened who traditionally had been keenest to associate America with decadence, degeneracy, and Unkultur.23

32 A moral panic took hold of various authorities, and not least Belgium’s powerful Catholic Church. A popular Belgian riddle in 1945 asked what the difference was between the occupation and the liberation. Answer: during the former, women had to hide their men; during the latter, men their women. The joke betrayed the impotence of Belgian men during the war. But it also hinted that the liberation’s licentiousness could not have arisen had American troops been oversexed and Belgian women completely unwilling. The loosening of social controls, the presence of large numbers of young and exotic liberators and, not unimportant in a predominantly Catholic country, the sudden mass availability of contraceptives in the form of condoms, allowed many women actively to pursue sexual pleasure during the liberation. Historian Marilyn Lake has made the case that this “wartime stimulation of female desire” was carried over into marriages old and new in the form of “high expectations of personal pleasure.” With sexual as well as household roles shaken up, some women renegotiated their marriages. Still others decided to take full control of their personal lives by filing for divorce. A majority of the high percentage of women in Liège who became divorced in 1947, for example, had been married between five and fifteen years. The average age of the divorcées was between 30 and 40 and most of them went ahead with the decision without holding a job outside of the home.24

33 There were worries too about the changes that the liberation had set in motion among young people. Historian Fabrice Maerten in research on the French-speaking part of Belgium has made the point that the mentality of young people had begun to undergo fundamental transformations as early as the end of World War I. That is when the emergence of a consumer society (spurred on in part by the American model) gradually made them embrace individualism and become politically disengaged. This was reflected, for example, in the decline of membership in both Christian and socialist youth movements. Maerten has argued that the depression of the 1930s and the Nazi occupation, with “their collective constraints and impetus of solidarity,” had merely “slowed down and/or masked an evolution that would become glaringly obvious again with the arrival of the Allies.”25

34 But, although Maerten is keen to emphasize that the profound change in mentality did not originate in 1944, he does not deny that the huge presence of Anglo-Americans did much to accelerate the reemerging trend. That probably helps to explain why the change appeared to be so abrupt to many in Belgium and had adults and authorities worry about youth as a force of destabilization. The Catholic press in particular railed against children who were allowed to run wild. “Not just in the cities and the workers’ quarters,” one newspaper lamented a year after the liberation, “but even in our good old villages things are going downhill. Modern youth has no more guidance in life, has

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lost its bearings and just lets things roll. These days, children no older than 14-15 go where they want, to cafés, cinemas, and dance halls. And since the liberation our boys and girls have seen and learned things that have had a perverse impact on their young natures.” Boys and girls alike, it was said, were enjoying “strong cognac and exotic cigarettes as if there was no tomorrow.” Allied uniforms appeared to have the effect on girls of magnets. Teenage girls hung around dance halls hoping to be picked up and not caring if the GIs were black or white. “On train and tram girls and soldiers are in each others’ arms, in poses that are far from edifying.” It is not difficult to recognize behind these concerns about moral corruption, older European images of American habits as culturally shallow, vulgarly materialistic and, ultimately, insidiously subversive. In that context, arguments between adolescents and adults over American influences can be understood, in the words of historian Uta Poiger, as “contests over moral, cultural, and political authority.”26

35 Finally, yet another contest over authority was announced by the presence of many thousands of African-American troops who served in Belgium as part of the logistical rear. Their presence sent mixed messages and the Belgian response to black American troops was equally complex. The segregation and discrimination of black GIs surprised and disappointed many Belgians who regarded them as liberators like all others. One woman said she had expected the Americans to be “ahead of the others.” At the same time, however, the mere sight of blacks in crisp uniforms carrying weapons and handling heavy artillery appeared to be announcing a brave new world in which continued control over the vast and rich colony of the Congo no longer seemed as certain as it had been before the war. Although much tension arose from relations between Belgian women and Allied troops in general, it is telling that in several peace parades, floats acted out the presence of Americans by showing women in the intimate and compromising company of inhabitants dressed up as black GIs.

36 In their peace parade on July 22, 1945, inhabitants of the village of Oneux near Comblain offered perhaps the most incisive synthesis of what the liberation meant to them and many other Belgians. In one particular group, three villagers were dressed like GIs who could easily be understood to stand for the new world order in which American power, hard and soft, had moved center stage. That they had chosen to be black soldiers to represent the US and that another actor had painted his face half- black and half-white sent out clear signals of changes in racial relations and the challenges this posed in terms of imperial future and national identity. That the other two actors in this group were young women was equally revealing. They simply played themselves. But by showing themselves provocatively intimate with the black Americans and defiantly in control of the steering wheel of the vehicle transporting the group, they demonstrated that it was not just white dominance, but male authority, too, that might never again be what it had been before. The vehicle, at last, was a horse-drawn, canvas replica of a jeep, symbol of the imaginative power of science and technology, but even more so of a cult of abundance promising to smother painful memories of the era of sacrifice. This truly was, bright letters summed up on the driver’s side, a “modern liberation.”27

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NOTES

1. F. S. V. Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government: North-West Europe, 1944-1946 (London: HMSO, 1961), 37-40, 111-119, and 469-471. 2. Harry L. Coles and Albert K. Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1964) 805. 3. André Kaspi, La libération de la France, juin 1944 – janvier 1946 (Paris: Perrin, 1995) 473. 4. Désiré Debroux, “Histoire d’un gamin (1939-1945): Ottignies-Limelette,” AB 2240, Center for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society, Brussels (WCS). 5. Nathalie Maleux, “La propagande parachutée d’Angleterre sur la Belgique occupée: Analyse de la forme et du contenu.” (Thesis, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1995), 36 and 71-72. 6. Het Belang van Limburg (HBVL), 23 and 30 September 1944. 7. D. Aerts, AB 1591, WCS. 8. Cécile Marechal, “Le cinéma et le jazz à Bruxelles à la Libération (sept. 1944 – fév. 1945)” (Thesis, Université Catholique de Louvain, 1985), Vol. A, 6-7. 9. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Belgium (SHAEFB), Fortnightly Report (FR) No. 2, 3, 17 October 1944, WO 202/682, AA 1230, WCS. 10. Le Soir, 10 June 1945. 11. Sartre is quoted in Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann, The Rebirth of the West: The Americanization of the Democratic World, 1945-1958 (London and Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 410. HBVL, 1 October 1944. 12. SHAEFB, FR No. 6, 2, 12 December 1944, WO 202/686, AA 1230, WCS. 13. SHAEFB, FR No. 10, Annexure II to Appendix E, 6 February 1945, WO 202/682, AA 1230, WCS. 14. Reports in Folders 972, 1005, and 1020 of the Archives du Haut Commissariat à la Sécurité de l’État (SE), WCS. 15. Ganshof to General Erskine, January 1945, Folder 528, AA 1311, WCS. 16. Reports SE in Folders 526-527 and 1098, AA 1311, WCS. 17. On Aldershot, see Le Peuple, 7 July 1945. On the American press, see John Willoughby, Remaking the Conquering Heroes: The Social and Geopolitical Impact of the Postwar American Occupation of Germany (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 149. 18. SE reports, Folders 526 and 1054, AA 1311, WCS. 19. David Elwood makes a similar point in this issue when he refers to “the revolution of rising expectations.” 20. Alain Brossat, Libération, fête folle, 6 juin 44 – 8 mai 45: Mythes et rites ou le grand théâtre des passions populaires (Paris: Autrement, 1994) 163-164. 21. HBVL, 24-25 September 1944. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. (London: Penguin Books, 1999) 307. 22. Karel Veraghtert, “De naoorlogse economie en het Marshallplan, 1944-1960.” In Oost West West Best: België onder de Koude Oorlog, 1947-1989. Edited by Mark Van den Wijngaert and Lieve Beullens. (Tielt: Lannoo, 1997) 70-71. ‘Market Empire’ and ‘bourgeois regime of consumption’ are concepts taken from Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire (Harvard University Press, 2005). 23. Guillaume Jacquemyns, “Readjustment Problems of the Repatriates” in: Smith Simpson, ed., “Belgium in Transition.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 247 (September 1946): 86. Rob Kroes, “European Anti-Americanism: What’s New?” Journal of American History 93, no. 2 (2006): 428. 24. Marilyn Lake, “Female Desires: The Meaning of World War II,” Australian Historical Studies 24, no. 95 (1990): 275 and 282-284. Marc Malevez, “Aspects démographiques de la libération.” (Thesis, Université Catholique de Louvain, 1985) 87-89.

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25. Fabrice Maerten, “Jeunesse et résistance. Entre mythe et réalité: Le cas du Hainaut, 1940-1944,” Cahiers d’Histoire du Temps Présent No. 8 (2001): 304-305. 26. HBVL, 22 September and 19 August 1945. Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000) 2. 27. Photo No. 104379, CWS.

ABSTRACTS

The historiography of the liberation of Belgium traditionally focuses on military operations and the first enthusiastic encounters with Allied troops in September 1944. In reality, however, Allied forces remained stationed on Belgian soil until late in 1945, causing relations to be much more complex than is generally remembered. This paper examines the American presence in Belgium, both in terms of waves of admiration and currents of discontent, and concludes that, despite their mixed reception, American troops more than any others came to represent a ‘modern’ liberation creating rising expectations

AUTHOR

PETER SCHRIJVERS University of New South Wales, Sydney

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Preparing for Victory. The U.S. Office of War Information Overseas Branch’s illustrated magazines in the Netherlands and the foundations for the American Century, 1944-1945

Marja Roholl

1 Winning the war against the Axis countries was not the only goal the American government had in mind during the Second World War. It also worked towards creating a new world order in which the United States, as the new world leader, would play a major role. To make its performance more credible, the Roosevelt administration felt it necessary to inform the rest of the world of America’s ideas and ideals, and to explain the successes of the American way of life. Although the Americans were confident that the role they played in the Second World War was highly appreciated, they were wary of the effects of German and Japanese propaganda, and aware of some general ‘misunderstandings’ regarding the nation dating back to the pre-war era. Therefore the Overseas Branch of the US Office of War Information (OWI) was instructed to develop propaganda programs for their allies, for instance England and Australia, as well as for countries to be liberated by the Americans, such as France and the Netherlands.By telling the story of ‘how America lives,’ the OWI Overseas Branch aimed to persuade people in these nations of “both the attractiveness of American principles and the weight of American power, [so that they] will, accordingly, be prepared for a strong American influence on the future peace.”1 Most studies of US post-war cultural diplomacy (mine included) start their story after WWII, with the official beginning of peacetime programs. This essay, however, show that especially during the last phase of the war, the content and approach of the activities undertaken by the OWI Overseas Branch anticipated the programs produced

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by the State Department and the United States Information Agency (USIA), this despite very different political and international circumstances. Incorporating this story more fully into the history of cultural diplomacy may help to illustrate that there is more continuity than previously assumed, whether through asserting America’s leadership of the post-war world, explaining the essence of the American way of life, promoting democracy, exporting the ideology of economic growth, or simply through promising abundance in people’s personal lives, especially in and around the kitchen. I’ll make the case for this continuity by discussing the OWI’s program for the Netherlands, focusing on the illustrated magazines it produced - KIJK, (LOOK), De Amerikaansche Vrouw (American Women) and Victory - which would play an important role in informing the general Dutch public about America.2 Although these publications were to a certain extent tailored to this specific audience, they also reveal the messages the US government tried to get across in post-war Europe more generally.

2 In the Dutch context, the only official goal of the Office of War Information was to inform the people of the Netherlands about “the world news in word and image” until such time as the Dutch media could perform the task themselves.3 But the content of these magazines suggests that the Americans had different functions in mind as well. Positioned at the transition between war and peace, these publications raise interesting questions regarding policy and politics, production and distribution, audiences and the preferred self-image of America.

3 In the following pages, I will locate the illustrated magazines KIJK, De Amerikaansche Vrouw and Victory within the broader context and goals of the OWI, and the circumstances of the Netherlands more generally, before turning to some of their dominant themes. Next to short-term war-related goals, they reveal a longer-term strategy that can be read as paving the way for what Henry Luce famously called the ‘American Century’ in a Life magazine editorial (February 17, 1941), addressing the expansion of the nation’s political, economic, moral and cultural influence in the midst of a world at war. The aftermath of World War II was carefully planned even as battles were still being fought; and some of those plans were ‘communicated’ with the Dutch through these OWI magazines.

1. The Office of War Information

4 In June 1942, as one of the responses to ‘Pearl Harbor’ and America’s subsequent total involvement in the war, President Roosevelt created the US Office of War Information, consolidating a number of earlier created organizations charged with propaganda and information activities at home and overseas.4 The OWI consisted of two branches, the Domestic branch and the Overseas Branch.

5 The goals of the Domestic Branch were short-term and war-related. Although the necessity of informing the American people about war-related rules and regulations, mobilizing women for the defense industry, etc., was generally acknowledged, many Republicans, but also many Southern Democrats, were suspicious of putting this kind of power into the hands of the Roosevelt administration; it would, they feared, be ‘more New Deal propaganda.’5 And they had a point. Many of the people working for the OWI and its predecessors were active supporters of the New Deal. For instance Archibald MacLeish, Pulitzer prize winning poet, head of the Library of Congress and staunch supporter (and close friend) of Roosevelt, became assistant director of the OWI, and

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Milton Eisenhower, who used to work for one of the New Deal agencies became OWI’s associate director. Robert Sherwood, playwright, film critic for Life and one of Roosevelt’s confidants, became the director of the Overseas Branch. However, Elmer Davis, director of the OWI, although a Democrat, was not part of the clique. His appointment was based in the first place on his reputation as a journalist for the New York Times and CBS, and Democrats and Republicans alike considered him a non- partisan, trusted and trustworthy voice.6 The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in charge of ‘black propaganda’ abroad, by contrast, was seen as a stronghold of the Republicans.7

6 The short-term goals for the Overseas Branch included stimulating a bond among the Allies, counteracting Axis characterizations of America, and helping to prevent frictions between American armies and the liberated countries’ civilian populations, whether these were enemies or allies. The long-term strategy was to create a new and robust image of America, and to prepare audiences abroad for America’s role as the new world leader.8 In the words of the OWI: “As the long-range directive implies, one of our chief duties is to convince people of the world of the ‘overwhelming power and good faith of this country’. By informing peoples of other countries fully concerning the nature of this country and of its people, sympathy, trust and friendliness will grow”. America had a mission. Carson summarizes the goals of the OWI Overseas Branch as not only to help to win the war, but also to lay the foundations of a new order, led by Americans.9

7 The structure of the Office of War Information was complicated. The director’s office and the Domestic Branch were located in Washington, while the communication and news center, together with the offices of the Overseas Branch, were mainly located in New York. Congressional discussions, differences of opinion over strategy, and some personal rivalries led to shifts in budgets and personnel in the spring of 1943. Congress especially was very critical of the Domestic Branch. This branch lost most of its funding, whereas the Overseas Branch was cut by only 10%. Regarding personnel employed by the Overseas Branch, Edward Barrett replaced Sherwood as the head of the US based Overseas Branch; and Sherwood, in turn, became the head of the London post. Sherwood had a background in illustrated magazines, and was interested in human-interest stories and photo-essays; Barrett had a background in news magazines, and favored more text and a more impersonal social science approach.10 These changes were to have an impact on the magazines.

8 From spring 1944, work by the Overseas Branch was increasingly done by the outposts, of which London was the most important. In 1944 a total of approximately 5,000 people worked for the Overseas Branch, of whom roughly 1,200 (about 500 Americans and 700 locals) worked at the London Outpost.11 The Americans in London came from all 48 states and were “thus fitted to express a composite of American attitudes.”12 The Netherlands - and partly its colony, the Dutch East Indies – were served by London. London was closer to the actual theater of war, and home to many governments in exile. The London Outpost was thus in a better position to address the needs of different countries, including propaganda clearance requirements.13 It could also serve as the ‘ears and eyes’ for the US based offices.14

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2. The liberation of the Netherlands

9 The Americans braced themselves for the liberation of Axis-dominated countries and the occupation of Axis countries, preparing anthropological reports on their inhabitants and developing information program guidelines. For the Netherlands, apart from the usual military preparations, the Office of War Information instructed its Bureau of Overseas Intelligence on 10 January 1944 to create a portrait of the Dutch. The well-known anthropologist Ruth Benedict, working for this office, was of the opinion that information on ‘national character’ was essential for accomplishing a lasting peace.15 According to Van Ginkel, the OWI wanted to avoid friction between American soldiers and Dutch civilians and felt the troops should have an idea of what kind of people the Dutch were. By January 26 1944, Ruth Benedict had completed her work. Based on her and other reports, the army was to provide the troops with cultural insights and a list of “Do’s and Don’ts”.16 Her reports – due to war circumstances based on secondary literature, proverbs, resistance newspapers, and interviews with Dutch- Americans rather than direct fieldwork – make an interesting read, and I will come to it shortly.

10 It took the American, British, Canadian and Polish armies longer than anticipated to liberate the Netherlands. Combat lasted from September 1944 until May 1945, with the liberation of the Dutch East Indies following in August 1945. Soldiers were the first line of contact with the population, leaving the important first impression. And of all the liberating armies, the American - and Canadian - soldiers to this day remain fresh in the public memory because they were ‘good looking’ liberators and in a position to provide people with ‘goodies’, products of America’s popular culture and consumer society, such as food, cigarettes, chocolate, jazz and more – embodying the promises of an American led future. The Americans and Canadians were, moreover, around much longer than the British and Polish soldiers. After the end of the hostilities, some Dutch cities functioned as leave centers for American soldiers stationed in Germany; the Canadian soldiers spent time in the Netherlands itself. Benedict offered American soldiers tips on how to get invited into people’s homes. She described Dutch culture as very home-oriented, and the women as devoted and protective mothers. She advised the soldiers to present themselves as temporarily ‘home-sick boys,’ a nice example of applied anthropology indeed. We see this advice reflected in the War Department’s Pocket Guide to the Cities in the Netherlands:“Since Amsterdam people entertain at home more than they go out, your best bet for a pleasant evening with a girl is to get yourself an invitation from a Dutch family; as Amsterdamers are very hospitable, this should not be too difficult.”17 And the soldiers indeed spent time in people’s homes, enjoying nice evenings with the family, and with their daughters, sometimes without the ‘protective mothers’ being present. Some of these and other encounters led to weddings with war brides, others to ‘bevrijdertjes’ (babies with American fathers), and still more to VD. For instance in Maastricht, which for a year served as a rest center for American soldiers, approximately 250 Dutch-American babies were born. (The same story can be told of the Canadian soldiers, and since they played a more important part in the liberation and stayed longer in the Netherlands, there were even more Canadian war brides, babies etc.) These intimate relationships generally caused great resentment among the Dutch, especially Dutch men, just as Ruth Benedict predicted.18

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3. The OWI program

11 The Office of War Information’s program for the liberated Netherlands, just as for other countries, was remarkably large-scale and diverse, and drew upon multiple media. Radio was the most important short-term medium, with broadcasts in Dutch from Luxemburg and London. Over sixty cinemas, some still in rubble, were provided with the Free World Newsreel in Dutch, covering the war, as well as with documentaries on America’s contribution to the war (including the Why We Fight series by Capra, and Autobiography of a Jeep), on specific immigrant groups (for instance Italian-Americans, in Toscanini: Hymn of the Nations), and on the American way of life (The American Dream). Moreover, the Americans offered the cinemas an OWI-approved selection of Hollywood films designed to create ‘the right impression’ of America.19 According to an OWI report, the Hollywood studios and other commercial media were not governed by the consideration of what Europeans should learn about America, but by profit maximization. In OWI’s own expressive language:

12 Sensationalism often displaced good sense; so that the American backbone of idealism and solid achievement was scarcely visible beneath the flashy outer fabric of penthouse civilization, spectacular divorces, murders, zoot suits and other racy but unrepresentative items in the era stretching from flag-pole sitters and marathon dancers to collegiate goldfish swallowers and jitterbugs.20

13 The studios allowed the OWI to choose forty movies for free distribution in the newly liberated countries. OWI’s aim was to eliminate films dealing with political corruption and lawlessness in the US; films that might imply American acceptance of the racial inferiority of non-whites, or any politically and commercially imperialistic designs on the part of the US; or films boasting of American opulence. Among the selected forty films were Frank Capra’s 1936 Mr.Deeds Goes to Town (small town values), Hitchcock’s 1940 Foreign Correspondent (taking sides in the crisis in Europe in the late 1930s), and Disney’s Dumbo and Bambi.21 The films most asked for in liberated areas were Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, and Gone with the Wind. The studios, however, did not make these available to the OWI Overseas Branch. At the same time, “but by no means directly in recompense to this,” the OWI took care of shipping and distribution for 257 feature films from fourteen different studios, opening the market for Hollywood films; these films had been, as it were, left on the shelf during the war.22 Thus in the post-war era movies were supposed to fulfill a double function: as important commercial products; but also, according to a State Department’s memo from February 1944, of equal or greater importance was “the value of the screen as an international builder of public opinion.”23

14 The publication program, however, was OWI Overseas Branch’s most elaborate endeavor. Part of it was specifically directed towards elites, demonstrating that “America does not only fight or work or eat or amuse itself, but America thinks.”24 The key magazine for this mission was U.S.A. Beknopt Beeld van Amerika en Amerikanen (a translation of USA: An American Review ), containing articles from other American magazines, and speeches by president Roosevelt, general Marshall and others.25 Moreover, books on American accomplishments and literature were translated into Dutch. The OWI considered books an important long-term instrument in its propaganda efforts, especially in translated form.26 In neutral and allied non-occupied countries, the OWI Overseas Branch opened libraries and documentation centers

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during the war.27 After the war, it would do that as well in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam and The Hague.

15 For the Dutch market, the OWI produced 15,000 copies of each selected title; these were produced during the war and stockpiled so that they would be available the moment hostilities ceased. The Dutch government in exile had to give permission for distribution. The books were sold via local booksellers, with prices controlled.28 The selected titles would serve various goals: to provide news and information on America’s role in the war, for instance Edward Stettinius Jr.’s Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory and Joseph C. Grew’s Report from Tokyo; and to explain America’s foreign policy, Walter Lipmann’s U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic. The OWI also thought it important to introduce people to books on American history – an example would be the 1939 Pulitzer prize winning biography Benjamin Franklin by Carl Van Doren. 29 For a very specialized audience, the OWI provided books in English on the latest developments in the sciences, especially the medical. The choice of Julian Huxley’s TVA: Adventure in Planning is an interesting one. On the one hand the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a New Deal/Roosevelt identified project, a project that caused a lot of controversy in the US itself. From that perspective it might have been a political risk to include it on the OWI bookshelf. Yet, from another perspective, the choice made sense. In Europe, many people were critical of America’s social and economic system. However, the Tennessee Valley project was admired by many as a model example of planning, because it provided a better life for millions of people. For instance the Dutch planner J. M. de Casseres describes the TVA very positively in his study Het andere Amerika (The other America, 1939).30 Moreover, Huxley was an internationally famous evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist – and, not unimportantly, British, so not one of Roosevelt’s New Dealers. For a more general public, OWI produced J. C. Furnas’ How America Lives, based on portraits of American families previously published in Lady’s Home Journal. Unfortunately, the Dutch version was not illustrated. Aside from fulfilling a long-term propaganda purpose, the book program also played a post-war commercial role. Just as with the film industry, the OWI helped American publishers to open up the European market, and helped them secure rights. This confirmed the suspicion held by some that the US could (mis)use its strong post-war position.

4. Illustrated magazines

16 Illustrated magazines catering to a general public formed the core of the publication program. The OWI stressed the importance of photographs and illustrated magazines in its long-range strategy.Accordingly, it drew its journalists and editors from magazines such as Life, Look and Parade, and its photographers from these outlets and the photo section of the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration and other government agencies.31 The OWI’s core magazine was Victory, created as early as 1942 by the Foreign Information Service (FIS), one of the predecessors of the OWI Overseas Branch, to counter Nazi Germany’s leading propaganda magazine, Signal. The latter was published bi-monthly in twenty-five languages and had at its peak a circulation of 2.5 million copies. Signal was patterned after Life magazine, with attractive photo- essays and an appealing lay-out; most issues had some color photographs. Just like Life, Signal’s covers were composed of a page-size photograph with the title in red. Signal, however, came out on newsprint instead of glossy paper; moreover, it did not carry advertisements.

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Signal, while focusing on the war, also carried human-interest stories. Its most explicit propaganda was directed against Jews, the Soviet Union and the United States.32 OWI’s Victory was modeled after Life magazine as well: the title in bold red letters, a page size photo on the cover, and some pages in full color. In contrast with Signal, Victory was printed on higher quality coated paper. OWI Overseas Branch in the US was responsible for the content, but Victory was published by a commercial publisher, the Crowell- Collier Publishing Company. The OWI assumed that the magazine would be more effective and trusted as a commercial, rather than governmental, publication; the OWI however took care of the costs involved. Despite this nod towards the commercial market, the magazine lacked advertisements until the end of the war. It was produced six times a year, and at its peak in 1945, it was translated intonine languages with a circulation of over one million copies. The tone of the magazine was factual, in accordance with OWI’s preference for ‘a strategy of truth’. Due to its lengthy production schedule, Victory carried general articles on America’s war effort and ‘evergreen’ pieces focusing on showing ‘how America lives’, both OWI’s propaganda goals for a broad audience. It was sold via vendors and was very popular. But the magazine was not always favorably received, with criticism reaching the OWI through the Outposts. People, especially in the U.K., reacted unfavorably to the glossiness of the magazine; they also thought it showed American opulence in an offensive way particularly at a moment when so many nations and peoples were suffering from the war. In the United States, some members of congress questioned the costs involved and the efficacy of the ‘strategy of truth’ in fighting Signal.33

17 Neither Signaal (Dutch version of the German Signal) nor Victory catered to specific audience groups but to the Dutch public in general. And that was new in the Netherlands. In the pre-war period, illustrated magazines were very popular, and each denominational group had its own magazines: Catholics, socialists, Protestants, and ‘neutrals’. Some of the Dutch pre-war magazines complied with the guidelines set by the Germans, while others were discontinued. Signaal, consistent with Signal, published many anti-American stories.34 Yet, during the occupation, Americans had no access to the Dutch market to counter this. The OWI produced only one issue of Victory for the Dutch market before the end of the magazine’s run, and distributed it after hostilities ceased. Thus, Victory played only a marginal role in OWI Overseas Branch’s strategy for the Netherlands. But, as I will show later, it best symbolized the transition within the OWI Overseas Branch, from a focus on the war to a focus on America’s promise for the post-war world.

18 The core magazine for the Netherlands was KIJK. Together with De Amerikaansche Vrouw and Victory, these magazines represent different stages and strategies within the OWI, with the emphasis shifting ever more to the post-war world. KIJK was produced and printed at the OWI Outpost in London by the Photo Review Section. Bishop mentions that KIJK- and other national versions - were translations of Photo Review. A Picture Parade of the United Nations.35 This turned out to be incorrect, though. Photo Review was produced in New York and sent to outposts around the world, including London. It contained sheets of photos with captions; sometimes these more or less form ‘a picture story’, more often they don’t. This visual approach resembles the layout ofthe magazine Parade, after which it was modeled. KIJK, by contrast, along with versions such as Fotorevy (its Norwegian counterpart) were ‘normal’ illustrated magazines, with photo-essays, single photographs, maps etc. and with more text than Photo Review.

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Moreover, parts of the magazines were tailored to fit specific national audiences, taking into account local stories and circumstances. KIJK, of course,used Photo Review as one of its sources, especially for its current affairs section, its biographies of generals and war related stories, and in this sense it served as a kind of ‘newsreel’.36But for stories on the Netherlands and on ‘the way America lives’, London relied on other sources. It may be the case that the earlier versions of the French VOIR resembled Photo Review more closely. We don’t know much about the reception of these magazines, but from an evaluation in France we learn that the magazine was very popular, yet also that people had some complaints: the French preferred a larger-size magazine, with more text and fewer photos.37 It may be that these French preferences were taken into account with the production of KIJK. The impact of local circumstances on size and format can be seen with the Norwegian version, Fotorevy. The text was prepared in English, in London, and sent to the OWI Outpost in neutral Stockholm, and there translated and printed as a small-size illustrated magazine. The reason for this small size was that the OWI wanted it to be smuggled into German-occupied Norway.38

19 London produced a new 32-page issue of KIJK every fourteen days for over a year, between September 1944 and December 1945, as well as a special sixty page souvenir number,bringing it to a total of thirty-one issues. The circulation was 100,000; extra copies of KIJK were produced for Flanders, the Flemish speaking part of Belgium.39 The Dutch government in exile granted permission for distributing this material, and Dutch journalists in exile probably advised the magazine’s production.Approximately two- thirds of each issue was made up of photographs with the remaining third being text. Each issue contained on average ten articles and sixty photos, and another three or four illustrations of other kinds: maps, drawings, and paintings. The magazine was published in black and white, sometimes with a touch of red or blue in the maps.

20 KIJK was one of the products that entered the country in the soldiers’ wake, and was extremely popular with the Dutch public. After years of German occupation, there was a pent-up hunger for real news. And due to a shortage of paper, the Dutch press was not yet functioning properly. People queued up to get copies, and the hundred thousand copies sold through regular vendors were far too few to satisfy the public’s appetite.40 In the words of an OWI officer involved: I must tell you how KIJK was sold in a forward area on the Maas [in the South of Holland]. To begin with, this town is three or four miles from the battle-line. When I arrived in our lorry with a load of KIJK, it took me several hours to find our chief distributor there. The reason was that the town has been leveled almost completely and that the business was being carried on nevertheless in the heart of shambles. We finally located our man behind several ruined buildings. He was endeavoring to repair his small printing plant in half his shed. When we started to unload, the word got around the town that KIJK had arrived. Then, before we had a chance to tally everything properly, a queue began to form. Soon KIJK was being sold over a packing case, with people standing in line over heaps of rubble. 41

21 And stories from other parts of the country and letters sent to the editor give the same impression.42

22 De Amerikaansche Vrouw was a very different case. It was a one-issue magazine, produced in the New York office of the OWI Overseas Branch. It contained eighty pages of much higher quality paper than KIJK, but it was less glossy than Victory. Although it had many photographs, it had more text and charts than KIJK and Victory, reflecting Barrett’s preference for a more text-based and social-scientific approach. The magazine

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consisted of three parts: women at home, women at work, and women and the war. It was produced for four countries, Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands, countries that shared, according to the OWI, a conservative attitude towards women. (Perhaps Benedict’s report played a role in this assessment.) The magazine is exactly the same for each of the four countries without any local modulations (aside from language). De Amerikaansche Vrouw was shipped to Europe in March 1945 with a circulation of about 40,000 for the Dutch market, and was distributed at the end of the war.43

23 Let’s now take a closer look at the magazines. There are differences between KIJK, De Amerikaansche Vrouw and Victory, in tone, function and content, yet, there were significant overlaps as well.

5. Dutch and Russian contributions to the war

24 KIJK covered many more topics than can be discussed here, and the main focus will be on the representation of ‘the American Way of Life’ – a long-term issue. However, one of OWI’s short-term goals with KIJK was to inform the Dutch on current developments in the war in Europe, the Pacific and the rest of the world, functioning as a ‘newsreel’ of sorts. Readers were very eager for this kind of ‘hard news’, having been deprived of reliable information during the German occupation. The focus was on the American role in the war, but Dutch contributions to the war were more than generously acknowledged.44 The many stories on this topic can be seen as part of the strategy of building a positive relationship with the Dutch population that would last into the post- war period. This is consistent with the approach that Ruth Benedict suggested.45 It also reflects OWI’s policy of tailoring KIJK – and its national counterparts – to local circumstances. Moreover, even as the first issues were distributed in the newly liberated parts of the Netherlands in September 1944, the war continued in the rest of the country, and in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). KIJK provided the Dutch with stories and photographs of the ongoing war in all parts of the world, the battles fought, and the joys of victory, region by region. It acknowledged the difficulties and hardships facing the population: the many who died and were wounded in the war; the shortage of food; the many homes in rubble; the heavily damaged infrastructure, industry and agriculture. KIJK, however, maintained a silence regarding the fate of (Dutch) Jews, a silence consistent with other American publications and documentaries from the period.46

25 Another short-term goal was ‘selling’ the Soviet Union as a crucial new and friendly ally, a task that posed quite a challenge to the OWI at home and in the Netherlands. The Netherlands shared with the US a long history of anti-communism and anti-Soviet Union policy. The Roosevelt administration and the military had urged the OWI to present the Soviet society and its contributions in a positive light, both at home and abroad, to counter old hostilities recently reactivated by the Nazi-magazine Signal, that covered the Soviet Union extensively and in a very negative way.47 OWI director Davis agreed and instructed the Overseas Branch accordingly. The military contributions and the Russian war industry were praised in many photo essays in KIJK; De Amerikaansche Vrouw highlighted the contributions by Russian women. Stalin and Molotov were presented in photos and texts as brilliant war planners, as good ‘regular’ people, with the former watching movies, the latter skating with his children. KIJK described collective agriculture and the state-run schools and orphanages positively, presenting

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them as just another way of organizing a society; the kolkhoz was presented as the Russian equivalent of the highly cherished American town hall democracy, and so on.48 Yet, consistent with the growing tensions between the US and the Soviet Union, from May 1945 onwards, the OWI New York no longer presented positive stories on the USSR – we see this reflected in the Dutch one-issue of Victory; KIJK however continued its positive coverage of Russia’s role in the war. This may reflect different choices made at the Outpost in London and in the US based offices.

26 Building a legacy and preparing the way for the conditions Henry Luce had described as “the American Century” were important motivations for the production of the magazines, and as the war progressed, the representation of America took an ever- more central position.The United States was ready to lead the world and the OWI Overseas Branch wanted to show the nation’s commitments and potentials to her allies, and to the world. In the following I will sketch the approaches taken by these OWI publications to a number of US - centered topics, in particular the American way of life, with its promise of mass production, consumption and democracy; and the role of women and African Americans in American society.

6. Arsenal of Democracy

27 In his fireside chat of 29 December 1940, Roosevelt referred to America’s war industry as ‘the Arsenal of Democracy’, a phrase that would regularly be invoked by the OWI.49 Only a strong America would be able to defend democracy at home and abroad. The power and success of America’s military forces reflected the industrial might behind it. No other country was able to produce so many jeeps, tanks, airplanes, bombs and ships. The very first issue of KIJK stated: “In the triumphs of the American armies in France, Italy and the Atlantic Ocean, the wonder of America’s production reveals itself: mass production.”50 The article provides some impressive numbers, but the impression is above all created by the photos: only about 10% of the four page spread is text; the rest is made up of page-filling photographs – it’s a photo story close to the tradition of Parade, with a lay-out that resembled the contact sheet lay-out of Photo Review. The photos were taken from a low angle perspective, probably by photographers working for Alfred Palmer’s Domestic Photo Section, which produced this kind of ‘inspirational’ modernist imagery: the machine is the main actor and it holds center stage. Bombs roll down the assembly line, dominating the much smaller appearance of humans in the photos. In other articles we see ‘Victory’ and ‘Liberty’ ships being built in rows – thanks to pre-fabrication techniques. And we see rows of landings barges and super fortresses in action as well– an impressive sight.51 The Jeep, an American invention and a World War II icon, gets special attention, complete with drawings.52

28 The OWI always emphasized the hardship of the people in the occupied countries, but also presented many stories about how the war affected the American Home Front as well. We see a soldier leaving his family and fiancée; cars standing idle because of gasoline rationing; a broken vacuum cleaner that cannot be replaced because of the factory’s conversion to war industry. We see women taking jobs in the war industry, leaving their children with parents or in government care (I’ll return to the coverage of women in greater detail later). And we see soldiers in rehab, illustrating the high human costs of the war, also on the American side.53 (Due to censorship rules we don’t see bodies of dead Americans.) These and other examples were designed to show that

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the US did its very best, on all fronts, to help its allies. The stories are often personalized in the photos and captions, rather than in the main text. In the series ‘America Accommodates to the War’, we see portraits of a soldier, a machine worker, a nurse and a farmer – they represent the four sectors: American forces, war industry & transport, industry & services, and agriculture, - and the effects the war had on them and their families.54 An interesting article, it takes a hybrid approach combining Barrett’s preference for charts with Sherwood’s preference for personal stories.

29 The OWI also stressed that Americans used their superior technology and production not only to fight wars, but also ‘for the betterment of mankind’, the latter, an American tradition. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a typical New Deal topic and popular with OWI’s Overseas Branch, is presented as such, as are other technological and medical inventions that the US was willing to share with the world, such as for instance penicillin.55 We see Russian dams being restored with American help. And there was a promise: after the war, the assembly line production of fighter planes, tanks and munitions will go back to the production of refrigerators, cars, vacuum cleaners and consumption goods; planes will be used for civilians; pre-fab methods will be applied to building homes. Where production was once used to save democracy, now it will again serve the democracy of consumption. A photo in one of KIJK’s last issues refers to this transition: technology and the machine no longer dominate; rather, the consumer takes central stage.56 And as we’ll see, this is even more clearly reflected in Victory.

30 KIJK stressed that the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ would not have been possible without a firm political democracy in place. The small town personified American democracy– evident in the centrality of the family, small town architecture, the church, town hall meetings; the photos resembled Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms posters. Town hall meetings and Congress were discussed in detail, and used to illustrate democracy at work.57A lot of attention was also paid to the more rural and remote areas, with stories on the county fair, the 4-H groups, the county nurse and agent, emphasizing the strong sense of community. (KIJK and Victory carried some of the same stories, with the difference that Victory used also color photos.58) This strategy was also used to stave off the idea, present in German propaganda, that America was a ‘dollar democracy’, where money reigned instead of ‘the people’.

7. America’s democratic culture

31 One of OWI’s goals was to counter the Nazi representation of America as an uncultured nation.59 As we have seen, the OWI Overseas Branch also blamed Hollywood films for creating this poor impression and therefore claimed a decisive voice in the selection of Hollywood films exported to the newly liberated countries.60 Yet, this prejudice regarding America’s cultural status had a long history in Europe, and preceded the film industry’s existence. Yet the OWI wanted to do more; it wanted to show that America had a democratic culture. Roosevelt’s New Deal program for artists, t effectively provided the benchmark for public and democratic American art. Unconstrained by European art conventions, it was to connect all aspects of American life, functioning as a social and educational force.61 Roosevelt pointedly described the results of the New Deal’s federal art projects: an American middle-brow culture, which combined with other 1930s media expressions such as Life and Look, formed America’s new national vernacular culture.62 As Roosevelt put it:

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32 There was a time when the people of this country would not have thought that the inheritance of art belonged to them or that they had responsibilities to guard it. A few generations ago, the people of this country were taught by their writers and by their critics and by their teachers to believe that art was something foreign to America and to themselves - something imported from another continent and from an age which was not theirs - something they had no part in, save to go to see it in a guarded room on holidays or Sundays. But recently, within the last few years, - yes, in our lifetime - they have discovered that they have a part. They have seen in their own towns, in their own villages, in schoolhouses, in post offices, in the back rooms of shops and stores, pictures painted by their sons, their neighbors - people they have known and lived beside and talked to. They have seen, across these last few years, rooms full of paintings by Americans, walls covered with the paintings of Americans - some of it good, some of it not good, but all of it native, human, eager and alive - all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things that they know and look at often and have touched and loved.63

33 The idea that America had its own genuine culture, something to be proud of, appeared in OWI’s instructions to the Overseas Branch. Many of the OWI workers were part of a cultural elite that preferred European over American art. In a move that echoed Germany’s promotion of a Volkskultur, they were urged to shed this view and to present America’s – popular – culture “in a positive and non–apologetic manner.” And that’s exactly what KIJK, De Amerikaansche Vrouw and Victory did. Musicals fit this description of a genuine American popular culture quite well. Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma (1943) received a lot of attention. Moreover, it counteracted images of Oklahoma’s ‘dust bowl’ and extolled the theme of good life in small town America, a theme very popular with people like Robert Sherwood, the director of the Overseas Branch. In addition, the musical generated attractive photos, showing the chorus dancing and other dramatic scenes. KIJK also carried a spread on folk dancing, complete with accompanying texts.64

34 Another topic that illustrated the theme of democratic art and the United States as a cultured country was art education. The pages of KIJK, but also of Victory, are generously illustrated with contributions on children taking painting and sculpture classes in a museum – something that would have struck Dutch readers as rather unusual at the time. De Amerikaansche Vrouw carried articles on women enjoying art exhibits. Music was presented in this context as well, with domestically situated pianos making a frequent appearance in the magazines, as people listened to and above all played the instrument.65 In addition, KIJK paid attention to American performances of Shakespeare, and European and American classical music, asserting America’s rightful place on that platform as well.

8. African Americans

35 African Americans (and other minorities for that matter) were largely absent in all three magazines, with KIJK paying most, and Victory least attention to this group. One place where they appeared most was in the cultural section, which served to give their accomplishments in jazz, opera and theater some attention. Despite this, the more general invisibility of African Americans reflects the political reality that the American

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government was unwilling to work towards a Double Victory - “Wait until V-Day to reform the world.”66 Even the military, fighting that war, was almost totally segregated.

36 The OWI Overseas Branch’s employees would have preferred a different scenario: some on principle, others because they considered the position of African Americans to be a liability overseas. The position of African American as second class citizens was an easy target for Axis propaganda, but allies also questioned this practice, since they witnessed a segregated army fighting to secure democracy for all. The OWI therefore agreed with Gunnar Myrdal’s analysis in An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) that the civil rights issue would be a litmus test of America’s leadership and democracy in the post-war world: “America for its international prestige, power, and future security, needs to demonstrate to the world that American Negroes can be satisfactorily integrated into its democracy.”67 The pages of the illustrated magazines stood as bleak testimony that the integration project had not advanced much. The decision to include Paul Robeson, Lena Horn and Marian Anderson in the cultural section is therefore interesting. They were certainly famous for their artistic endeavors, but they were also well known as civil rights activists.

37 KIJK’s two-page spread on Paul Robeson makes a curious read in this context. He was the son of a slave who had escaped to the North, and had risen to be one of the most talented and successful singers and actors of his time, implying that in the U.S. even an African America, one generation removed from slavery could make it to the top.68 It may also imply that discrimination was a Southern problem, not an American problem, an approach the United States Information Agency would take after the war. KIJK showed Paul Robeson’s successful career in photos and text. The magazine also gave Robeson and his wife the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with the civil rights situation: “it’s time to claim our political, economic and social equality;” “freedom for all” and: “only when America allows all its inhabitants to contribute to the fullest, can America be strongest.” Was this perhaps the way for the OWI Overseas Branch to get its own ideas across on this sensitive topic?

38 Curiously, in another article, KIJK depicted Robeson in a full-page photo as Othello, standing over the body of his dead (white) wife – an image that might be read in terms of his achievements in high culture, and of integration, or an image that in the U.S. might speak to underlying fears of Black masculinity. The focus on Paul Robeson is also ironic, knowing that during the Cold War he would be persona non grata due to his sympathy for the Soviet Union and his ongoing criticism of racial injustice in the U.S. During the Cold War, the civil rights situation would continue to be America’s Achilles heel. The State Department considered desegregation ‘a Cold War imperative,’ very much in line with the OWI Overseas Branch’s and Myrdall’s analyses during WWII.69

9. American women

39 The representation of women made the transition from Rosie the Riveter to Rosie the Housewife, reflecting the transition from a war industry to the promise of a consumer society, both at home and abroad. KIJK (re)presented the war efforts overseas, and at home in the defense industry, in the first place as a male world, under-representing women’s contributions to both. Yet, in the fifth issue there is a series on women and the war, cut from the fabric of Rosie the Riveter. We see for example, a woman working behind an enormous hydraulic press, dwarfed by the machine. We see her from behind,

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while she confidently handles the machine.There are also other photographs of women in jobs usually associated with men: riveting in an aircraft factory, felling trees in the lumber business, cleaning locomotives, and welding. These photographs of hardworking, capable women, are not composed in a particularly inspirational way, as had been the Home Front norm at the time, but closer to the style deployed by Roy Stryker’s New Deal-era Farm Security Administration photo unit, the style, that is, of engaged social documentation. The text emphasized the importance of their contributions, and the capacity of women to do ‘a man’s job.’ The text also stressed the patriotism of these women, implying that these were temporary jobs.70 Most women at work, however, were portrayed in traditional female professions such as working in the garment industry, or as secretaries and nurses. Pains were often taken to explain that these women were not (yet) married. In that sense, their jobs were presented as temporary as well.

40 This is where De Amerikaansche Vrouw, with its stronger post-war focus took over. The magazine presented women working in the war industry in a significantly different way than KIJK. On the first page we see a full-page photograph of two women, facing the reader, busy behind a workbench. The main figure looks well cared for, with manicured nails, lipstick and depilated eyebrows. Whereas in KIJK, women worked with large machines, these women work with machines more comparable to appliances at home.71 The photo resembled the photographs and propaganda shorts used in some campaigns at the Home Front to mobilize – white - women for the war industry. The message is that working in the war industry does not affect women’s femininity, and that the work is temporary. This is reflected in subsequent stories focusing on the world of white middle class women in small town and suburban America, where the war was no longer present in the photographs. At the heart of the magazine are stories about women and their ‘natural’ roles: being a wife and mother is presented as every woman’s calling. In a page and a third spread, we see a photo of a woman reading to her son: she wears a dress, with a necklace and matching bracelet, as she curls up on the bed.72 Moreover, De Amerikaansche Vrouw portrays a very desirable lifestyle, particularly a nice house (which surely spoke to Dutch women in the immediate post-war period). We see her buying groceries, making breakfast, helping the kids to school, taking pictures of the family, doing laundry with the washing machine, making clothing on the electric sewing machine. The time saved by using these household appliances was not, as Dutch pre-war illustrated magazines suggested, spent in idleness on herself. American women took courses in childrearing and in art, played the piano and sang with the whole family, and fulfilled services for the local community, the church and the children’s school.73 De Amerikaansche Vrouw showed working women, but these were usually, as in KIJK, identified as unmarried. The professions presented as best suited for women appear, from today’s perspective, as stereotypically female: a nurse, librarian, teacher, radio- announcer and analyst. The magazine, however, also occasionally portrays women positively in ‘other professions’, such as politics and art. The kind of jobs women performed during the war in industry, in agriculture and the army are not covered in the section ‘women at work’. Instead, working on the farm now appears as part of the section ‘women at home’ where she is presented as helping her husband. The magazine was produced for France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, countries, according to the OWI, that held conservative values when it came to the position of women. In her report on the Netherlands, Ruth Benedict came to the same conclusion. De Amerikaansche Vrouw shows that living an ‘American’ lifestyle did not negatively

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affect the role of women as wife, mother and homemaker -- something many feared. In De Amerikaansche Vrouw, the ‘natural order’, challenged by the circumstances of war, has been restored.

41 Victory did not carry stories on the role of women in the war and society; instead, it carried Dutch language advertisements for household appliances, showing (American) women as consumers, and inviting the Dutch to join in as well. The text reads: “we are still working for the war, but when that’s over, all these appliances will be available again…..” In the ad we see a woman and her young daughter in the kitchen behind the stove, with a large refrigerator and a washing machine against the wall. In the next image, the two are sitting in the living room, listening to the radio together, implying that these time- saving devices lead to a better quality of family-life. These ads literally sell the Dutch the same American lifestyle as earlier portrayed in De Amerikaansche Vrouw. Victory made clear that the USA was the one country capable – and willing – to provide Dutch women and their families in the post-war years with this ‘American’ life- style. All they had to do was follow the American example…. Other stories in KIJK and Victory share the same perspective: some explain the use of pre-fabricated building methods in making homes instead of military ships and planes; others present plans for the conversion from military to civilian aviation. In the latter case, the story appears in Victory and was accompanied by an ad for Beech Aircraft, offering its services. America – and particularly the fruits of its industry -- is now for sale. For years, the Dutch would not be able to afford the life-style depicted in these magazines, yet these publications, together with Hollywood films, helped to pave the way for a society of mass production and consumption, with the U.S. functioning as the primary role model.

10. Conclusions

42 Before the German Occupation, Dutch illustrated magazines showed an America of skyscrapers, violence, inventions, and Hollywood stars, and thus did not provide much detail regarding US foreign policy or the inner values and logics of the American way of life. America was still a far away country.74 World War II changed all that. While America was still fighting, the OWI Overseas Branch was involved in preparing the post-war world for the “American Century”, a modern world led in all of its aspects by the US. Its approach was systematic. American soldiers, as first-line ambassadors, were briefed on the countries they were about to liberate. For the Netherlands, the anthropological reports by Ruth Benedict speak to this endeavor. The US government charged the OWI Overseas Branch with developing the next step in the process: a large- scale propaganda program. In this context, films and photos were seen as very effective carriers of propaganda messages. This essay focused on one aspect of this larger whole: illustrated magazines. In the Netherlands, as in other liberated countries, OWI’s publications were able to fill the vacuum between the just-ousted Nazi press, and the not yet functioning national press. OWI’s illustrated magazines KIJK, De Amerikaansche Vrouw and Victory proved to be very popular. For the Netherlands, the core magazine was KIJK, with thirty-one issues covering the current affairs of the war and ‘the American Way of Life’, in photos and text. With respect to the war, KIJK emphasized America’s preparedness and ability to make a critical contribution to the war, all over the globe, including the Netherlands. Its readers must have gotten a very good impression of ‘the Arsenal of Democracy’, that large-scale mass producing war industry

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that made possible the efforts not just of the American military, but also of the allies. Interestingly enough, that help was downplayed in KIJK and the other magazines, while the efforts by the allies were stressed, whether by Russia, Great Britain, China, or the Netherlands. The OWI hoped to secure positive bonds among its allies, but perhaps it was also wary of public reactions to so much military and economic power concentrated in the hands of the US, anticipating fears regarding what the Americans would do with it after WWII.

43 Yet, the American government unabashedly saw the US as providing a high moral example for others countries: “The things we stand for and believe in constitute the one ideology that men of freedom and goodwill can turn to,” and it was the OWI Overseas Branch’s responsibility to inform people about ‘the American Way of Life’.75 The Overseas Branch explained and visualized America’s values as embodied in the Four Freedoms, in (small town) democracy and in public art. To be sure, the OWI composed a picture of America that systematically underrepresented city life and boomtowns, minorities and more, while over representing small-town America and all it stands for.

44 But above all, the US “offered the world the keys to a consumer’s society” based on mass production, mass marketing, and labor saving devices.76 But even here, the OWI acted cautiously, or perhaps better, strategically. The Office of War Information assessed Dutch society as essentially conservative in character. De Amerikaansche Vrouw, published specifically for the conservative countries in Europe, showed that the desirable and commodity-rich American lifestyle would not undermine the ‘natural order’; quite the contrary. From that perspective, Victory was the last step in this process, promoting American products to the Dutch market. Yet, OWI was not merely creating a desire for the American way of life, the OWI actively used the instruments at its disposal to open up markets for publishers and Hollywood studios.

45 This study of the OWI Overseas Branch has been primarily concerned with its illustrated magazines. As stated earlier, OWI Overseas Branch’s campaign played out across media forms, with magazines, books, radio programs and films, all being considered as international builders of public opinion. But across these media, the effect was the same: the Overseas Branch foreshadowed America’s postwar cultural diplomatic agenda. In content and approach, the OWI Overseas Branch anticipated the State Department’s information programs and the United States Information Agency (USIA), emphasizing the same values and using many of the same tools, and encountering some of the same problems (e.g., the civil rights situation).

46 Of course, there were differences as well -- a new old enemy: the Soviet Union and communism, and a new international role for the Dutch. Yet, the forging of a bond between allies under the umbrella of the US, the promise of ‘people’s capitalism,’ of satisfying consumers’ desires, and of promoting American culture and commerce, remained. After the war, the Marshall Plan, too, would take up the good work and play an important role in propagating the American way of life and preparing people for an ideology of economic growth for the benefit of the common man. The broad contours of the narrative established during the war years by the OWI would linger on in the Brussels’ World’s Fair of 1958, and would even brave the lion in his den in Moscow, in 1959, with the USIA in both cases presenting the American kitchen as a shortcut to ‘the American way of life’. The end of the war meant the beginning of ‘an irresistible empire’.

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NOTES

1. Cited in Jeanie Cooper Carson, Interpreting National Identity in Time of War: Competing Views in United States Office of War Information (OWI) photography, 1940-1945 (unpublished dissertation, Boston University, 1995), 216. 2. De Amerikaansche Vrouw (The American Woman in the singular) was the translated version of the magazine American Women. The title Victory was not translated into Dutch, rightly assuming that everyone would know that word; it’s very close to the Dutch ‘victorie’. 3. See colophon of all issues of KIJK. Of the other liberating forces, only the British produced this kind of publication, viz. the nine issues of Big Ben, with the official goal of giving the Dutch some idea of life “as this really was.” The Dutch had been given a distorted picture due to “lying Nazi propaganda”, and Big Ben would help to ‘correct’ that: see Big Ben, published by His Majesty’s Stationary Office, London, s.a. [1944-1945], in particular no. 9, 2. 4. The administration deliberately used the word information instead of propaganda, to differentiate itself from Axis propaganda, and its own heavily criticized propaganda during WWI. For a full institutional history see A. M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda. The Office of War Information, 1942-1945 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1978). 5. Kathleen E. R. Smith, God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 2003). 6. Robert Lee Bishop, The Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information (unpublished dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1966), 1-25. 7. Bishop, The Overseas Branch, 184. 8. For Nazi propaganda in occupied Europe, and more specifically the illustrated magazine Signal see: Rainer Rutz, Signal: Eine deutsche Auslandsillustrierte als Propagandainstrument im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2007). See also: L. Zweers and T. Luijendijk, Foute foto’s. De geïllustreerde pers tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1993). At its peak, Signal was translated into twenty languages, with a circulation of 2.5 million. 9. Cited in Carson, Interpreting National Identity, 1-2. 10. Idem, 18-21. 11. C. D. Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors: America’s Crusade against Nazi Germany (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1996), 186; U.S. O.W.I., OWI in the ETO. A Report on the Activities of the Office of War Information in the European Theatre of Operations, January 1944 – January 1945 [London, 1945], 37. 12. OWI in the ETO, 5. 13. Idem, 15. 14. Bishop, The Overseas Branch, 182-184. The situation in France was complicated because no recognized government in exile existed, due to rival organizations claiming the exclusive right to speak for France. 15. Judith Schachter – Modell, Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 268. Other prominent anthropologists, including Margaret Mead, were involved as well. 16. R. van Ginkel, “Typically Dutch…. Ruth Benedict on the ‘National Character’ of the Netherlanders,” Netherlands’ Journal of Social Sciences 28(1)(1992), 50‑71. Idem, “Typisch Nederlands….. Ruth Benedict over het ‘nationaal karakter’ van Nederlanders,’ Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift, vol. 18, no. 2 (October 1991), 37-66, see 46-47. Ruth Benedict’s best known study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946), focuses on Japan. See also Rudolf V. A. Janssens, What Future for Japan? U.S. Wartime Planning for the Postwar Era, 1942-1945 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995). 17. War Department, Pocket Guide to the Cities of the Netherlands (Washington, D.C., s.a.[1944]), 8.

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18. Martin Bossenbroek, Oranje Bitter, Nederland Bevrijd! (Zwolle: Waanders, 2010); Herman de Liagre Böhl, De bevrijding van Amsterdam: Een strijd om macht en moraal (Amsterdam: Gemeentearchief, 1989); Van Ginkel, Typically Dutch, 55 19. OWI in ETO, 42; Ian Scott, “From Toscanini to Tennessee: Robert Riskin, the OWI and the Construction of American Propaganda in World War II,” Journal of American Studies, 40 (2006), 2, 347-366. 20. OWI in ETO, 35-36, 42; citation, see 36. 21. Bishop, Overseas Branch, 91-93; Charles A. H. Thomson, Overseas Information Service of the United States Government [Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution] (Menasha, Wis.: George Banta Publishing, 1948), 66-67; Kerry Segrave, American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995), 131-133. See also: Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign. The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920 -1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 22. Bishop, The Overseas Branch, 93 - 94; 269; OWI in ETO, 12. 23. Cited in Segrave, American Films Abroad, 131. 24. Mildred Allen, Long Range Operational Plan for Holland, March 13, 1945. NARA, RG 208: OWI, Records of the Historian. Area File: 1943-1945, box 2: file Holland. 25. Amerikaansche Bureau voor Oorlogsinlichtingen, U.S.A. Beknopt beeld van Amerika en de Amerikanen. (s.l., s.a. [London, 1944-1945]). Translation of USA: An American Review. 26. OWI in ETO, 44. 27. Bishop, The Overseas Branch, 210-211; 323-324; 360-361; Pamela Spence Richards, “Information for the Allies: Office of War Information Libraries in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa,” The Library Quarterly, vol. 52 (1982), 4, 325-347. 28. Bishop, The Overseas Branch, 44-45; 265-266. 29. OWI in ETO, 18, 47. 30. C.J.M. Schuyt and Ed Taverne, 1950. Welvaart in zwart-wit (Den Haag: Sdu uitgevers, 2000), 64-65. 31. Carson, Interpreting National Identity, 15 and Chapter 3. 32. For Nazi propaganda in occupied Europe, and specifically the illustrated magazine Signal see: Rutz, Signal. 33. Bishop, The Overseas Branch, 84; Life, March 22,1943, 11-15. 34. Zweers and Luijendijk, Foute foto’s, 6-7, 11, 34, 104-107. 35. Bishop, The Overseas Branch, 86. 36. Carson, Interpreting National Identity, 25. 37. Bishop, Overseas Branch, 54 and 407. 38. OWI in ETO, 16. 39. Idem, 4. 40. OWI in the ETO, 2 and 16; Bishop, The Overseas Branch, 265; Thomson, Overseas Information Service, 62 - 63. 41. Cited in OWI in the ETO, 2. 42. See KIJK for excerpts from letters; R. Nieman, “Capo da Capo,” Elseviers Weekblad, April 17, 1962. Here, Nieman, photography editor of this weekly reminisces about KIJK in The Hague in June 1945. See also Het Parool, April 1974, on the occasion of the reprint of a selection of KIJK articles. 43. Allen, Long Range Operational Plan for Holland. 44. For instance, KIJK, no.1, “Nederlandse troepen naar huis toe;” KIJK, no. 2, “Hollandia en de N.I.C.A;” KIJK, no.3, “De K.L.M. 25 jaar;” KIJK, no.4, “De Nederlandsche Koopvaardij;” KIJK, no.6, “Een vernieuwd korps mariniers;” KIJK, no.7, “Een wakker vrouwelijk hulpkorps;” KIJK, no 29/30, “Nederland streed overall mee.” When in 1974/1979 a selection from KIJK was reprinted by a

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Dutch publisher the emphasis was on these Dutch contributions to the war. I’m not sure whether that was what the OWI had in mind….. 45. Van Ginkel, Typisch Nederlands, 44. 46. An example would be the American documentary Todesmühlen. 47. Zweers and Luijendijk, Foute foto’s, 29, 30, 72, 80-89. 48. See for instance: KIJK, no.1, “Twee maanden Russisch offensief;” KIJK, no.5, “Hoe de Russische legers vochten;” KIJK, no. 8, “Industrieele kracht van Rusland;” KIJK, no.16, “Boeren in Rusland;” KIJK, no.23, “Russisch staatsman;” “kinderzorg in Soviet-Rusland;” KIJK, no.24, “Rusland’s hartland;” KIJK, no.27, “De Vrouwen herstellen Leningrad;” KIJK, no.29/30, “Rusland aan den opbouw nu het weer vrede is.” 49. The expression was originally used by playwright Robert Sherwood, in May 1940, but Roosevelt is credited for it, with Sherwood’s permission. 50. KIJK, no.1, “De Amerikaansche productie.” 51. See for instance: KIJK, no. 7, “Zuidzee-landing;” KIJK, no.11, “De ‘Liberty’ schepen voeden de fronten;” idem, “Een industrieel van groot formaat” (on Henry J.Kaiser). 52. KIJK, no.2, “De Jeep – Manusje van alles.” 53. KIJK, 29/30, ‘Zorg voor invaliden in Amerika;’ ‘De hond voor den blinde.’ 54. KIJK, no. 18, “Amerika stelt zich in op den oorlog.” 55. KIJK, no.3, “T.V.A. doet dood land herleven;” KIJK, no.24, “Wat is penicilline?” 56. KIJK, no. 29/30, “Plannen voor het luchtverkeer;” see also: KIJK, no.10, “Amerika stelt zich in op de oorlog.” 57. KIJK, no.11, “Het Congres der V.S.;” Victory, “De ‘Stadsraad. New Englanders houden hun kolonisten-gebruiken in stand.” 58. KIJK, no.1, “Vrijheid en democratie;” KIJK, no.15, “Verpleegsters in bergland;” KIJK, no.25, “Landbouwconsulenten in de VS;” KIJK, no.26, “De County-kermissen in de Vereenigde Staten;” Victory, “Districts-agent.” 59. Bishop, Overseas Branch, 54-55. 60. Outpost News, March 1945, 20. 61. See for instance, Victoria Grieve, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 62. Marja Roholl and William Uricchio, “From New Deal Propaganda to National Vernacular: Pare Lorentz and the Construction of an American Public Culture,” Kate Delenay and Ruud Janssens, eds., Over (T)here: Transatlantic Essays in Honor of Rob Kroes. European Contributions to American Studies, volume 60 (VU Uitgeverij: Amsterdam, 2005), 107-122; Paul Filmer, Val Rimmer and Dave Walsh, “Oklahoma! Ideology and Politics in the Vernacular Tradition of the American Musical,” Popular Music, volume 18 (1999), 2, 381 – 395. 63. F. D. Roosevelt, Address at the Dedication of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 17 March, 1941. 64. KIJK, no.10, “Oude volksdansen in de V.S.;” KIJK, no.29/30, “New Yorks Theatergilde;” De Amerikaansche Vrouw, “De vrouw aan het werk: de kunst.” 65. De Amerikaansche Vrouw, “Vrouwen thuis. De huisvrouw.” 66. Cited in Carson, Interpreting National Identity, 145. 67. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944), 1061. 68. KIJK, no.10, “Paul Robeson;” KIJK, no.29/30, “New York’s Theatergilde.” 69. Mary L. Dudziak, "Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative," Stanford Law Review, 41 (Nov. 1988), 61–120; Marja Roholl, “Rassendiscriminatie in de Verenigde Staten. Een schandvlek op het blazoen van een vriend. Nederlandse persreacties en Amerikaanse propaganda tijdens de Koude Oorlog, 1945-1960,” Sociologie, 2008, 2/3, 135-155.

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70. KIJK, no.5, “Vrouwen der V.S. in oorlogstijd.” See also for instance: Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda in World War II (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: Germany and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 71. De Amerikaansche Vrouw, “De Amerikaansche vrouw.” See also for instance Bilge Yesil, “’Who Said This Was a Man’s War?’ Propaganda, Advertising Discourse and the Representation of War Worker Women During the Second World War,” Media History, vol.10 (2004), 3, 103-117. 72. De Amerikaansche Vrouw, “Vrouw en moeder: de roeping der Amerikaansche vrouwen,” “Vrouwen thuis: trouwen.” 73. De Amerikaansche Vrouw, “Vrouwen thuis.” See also: Marja Roholl, “A Catholic Wonderland: Pictorial Images of America in Katholieke Ilustratie, 1867-1942,” D.E.Nye and M.Gidley, eds., American Photographs in Europe (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), 130-157. 74. Roholl, A Catholic Wonderland; Joop Toebes, “’A Country Too Far Away’: Images of the United States in the Dutch Illustrated Press in the 1920s,” D.Bosscher, M.Roholl and M.van Elteren, eds., American Culture in the Netherlands (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996), 24-43. 75. Cited in Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 155. 76. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th - Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 11. See also for instance Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachman, eds., Cold War Kitchen. Americanization, Technology, and EuropeanUsers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

ABSTRACTS

Winning the war against the Axis countries was not the only goal the US government had in mind; it was also working towards a new US led world order. Analysis of three illustrated magazines produced by the Office of War Information Overseas Branch for the Netherlands shows that in addition to short-term war-related goals, long-term goals sought to pave the way for the American Century. This essay also shows that, more than previously assumed, the content and approach of the activities undertaken by the OWI Overseas Branch during the last phase of the war anticipated the State Department's and United States Information Agency's post-war programs.

INDEX

Keywords: American propaganda (WWII, De Amerikaansche Vrouw, President F.D Roosevelt, Robert Sherwood., Ruth Benedict, the Netherlands); U.S. Office of War Information Overseas Branch; U.S. Office of War Overseas Branch’s illustrated magazines: Kijk, Victory ; Edward Barrett

AUTHOR

MARJA ROHOLL University of Utrecht

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The Promises of “Young Europe”: Cultural Diplomacy, Cosmopolitanism, and Youth Culture in the Films of the Marshall Plan

Frank Mehring

1 At the Berlinale Film Festival in 2004, a key element in the successful strategy of the post-World War II “European Recovery Program” (ERP) was rediscovered and brought back on the screen: the comprehensive and complex film program of the Marshall Plan to win the “hearts and minds” of both allies and former enemies. These short documentary films from seventeen countries1 offer valuable insights into the many ways in which the promise of a new beginning could be translated into compelling audio-visual narratives.2 Apart from economic visions regarding issues of free trade and fresh opportunities of international cooperation, the films focused on democratic (re)education, tolerance in multiethnic societies, multilingualism, and the hitherto untapped opportunities of a “New United States of Europe.” The efforts of forging a new cosmopolitan society after the disaster of World War II placed special emphasis on modern educational methods and innovative school concepts. Boys and girls from all over Europe played a double role in the Marshall Plan films: first, they acted in documentary films embodying a future generation according to American democratic ideals. Their screen presence suggested that they represented the living proof of the motto e pluribus unum. Second, in the Marshall Plan films young people also served as a commodity of modern entertainment for audiences hungry for innovative success stories in post-war Europe. The “new Europe” would therefore also be a “young Europe” anticipated via child actors on the screen.

2 My article will analyze how European film makers of the Marshall Plan used docudramas to envisage a multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan “young Europe” free from the political baggage of the past (in particular connected to the World War II experience).

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From this perspective, a number of questions arise. What kind of audio-visual strategies did Marshall Plan films employ in order to overcome national chauvinism, ethnic confrontations, and language barriers? What continuities and differences from World War II to post-war Europe can be traced in the films produced in Austria, Germany, Great Britain or France? What kind of processes regarding cultural translation, cultural diplomacy, propaganda and censorship are at work in the films financed with American taxpayers’ money? And, how far do Marshall Plan films denounce themselves as idealized fictions of new beginnings American style?3

1. Re-Education, Friendly Persuasion, and Propaganda for Democracy: Lessons Learnt from Post-WW I.

3 After World War II, the European continent lay in ruins, its people had been physically and emotionally devastated. Cultural diplomacy emerged as an important element to press on with efforts of re-educating and democratizing former enemies as well as secure geo-strategic interests of the US in Europe. Cultural diplomacy in the sense of the former Minister in the U.S. Foreign Service, Hans N. Tuch, refers to a “government’s process of communicating with foreign publics in an attempt to bring about understanding for its nation’s ideas and ideals, for its institutions and culture, as well as for its national goals and current policies.”4 Mass media such as radio, advertisement, and films played a crucial role in what can be described as “propaganda for democracy.”5 The European Reconstruction Program, as the American Marshall Plan was officially called, was designed to stabilize the dire economic situation in Europe, create strong allies overseas, and to promote cross-cultural understanding, European solidarity and cooperation. The Truman Administration launched a comprehensive marketing campaign to document the progress of reconstruction and democracy.6 The Economic Cooperation Administration’s (ECA) Office of Information set out to promote an understanding among European people regarding the motives of the United States. They included extending recovery aid, explaining the objectives and methods of the program, informing about the help which America is providing, and generating awareness in Europe about the ERP, its progress and operations. The program capitalized on experience gained during the New Deal and WWII.7

4 One of the most challenging problems was the question how to restructure educational systems in order to prepare a young generation of German, Austrian, French, Italian, or children from other Marshall Plan countries for the new challenges in a democratic United States of Europe. In how far could the American school system serve as a model? Issues of transcultural differences had to be taken into account in order to successfully implement a process of democratic re-education. The German-American social scientist Kurt Lewin recognized already in 1936 the remarkable “gap between the ideals which the educational procedure pretends to follow and the actual procedure.” (Lewin, A, 17) In the transatlantic context, the difference in school education and the relationship between child and adult, between student and teacher appeared to be decidedly different. Lewin argued that obedience, inferiority and servility of the young child towards adults were part of German education systems. In the United States, Lewin found that the system encourages the child to “become practically independent as soon as possible.”8 In order to influence cultural patterns propaganda offers a means to change the culture of a group which remains on its native soil. Kurt Lewin understood

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that the term “democracy” had different connotations for Germans and Americans. A German might associate individualist freedom with the term. However, “if an American defines democracy,” Lewin explains, “he too very frequently stresses individualistic freedom and forgets that leadership is fully as important in a democracy as in an autocracy. But the American happens to live in a country where the efficiency of the process of group decisions is relatively highly developed, at least in small groups, and where democratic leadership is thoroughly accepted as a cultural pattern and taught in practice to children in school.” (Lewin, B, 37) Thus, representations of new school systems need to introduce democratic decision making processes in a performative way so that children intuitively grasp the meaning of a new cultural pattern. This became one of the challenges in Marshall Plan films about re-educating the young.

5 The Marshall Planners had to take into account new ways regarding how to connect with a large number of people spread over 5000 miles of territory with a great diversity of culture and traditions including a diversity of 14 languages (not including regional dialects). As a consequence, increased emphasis was put on information activities and technologies. In addition to radio broadcasts, travelling exhibits, news reports, photos, graphs, and posters, the medium of film was regarded as an essential means of propaganda for the sake of democracy. The ingenious idea behind the Marshall Plan documentaries promoted a climate that encouraged artists in Europe to address the challenges of democracy in their home countries, instead of having the means, methods, and images dictated by the American authorities.9 The Motion Picture Unit of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) firmly believed that Europeans would “speak most effectively to other Europeans.” (Schulberg, 10) Thus, e.g., a film for an Austrian audience was developed by Austrian talents including script writers, actors, and directors. Specific national economic and cultural challenges had to be combined with intra-European visions in line with the ECA chiefs in Paris. Thus, the Marshall Plan films not only show a one-way process of cultural imperialism. Rather, they reflect a creative process of appropriation and re-appropriation. However, they also became the site of cultural misunderstandings and transcultural confrontations.

6 The films function as a highly successful instrument of American cultural diplomacy in the effort to democratize the former fascist enemies and persuade European countries to follow the United States in fostering a new exchange on economic, political, social and cultural levels.10 The promise for those who accepted the support of technical know-how, modern machinery, and financial aid offered by the Marshall Plan suggested: “You, too, can be like us.”11 Considering the growing irritation regarding segregation within US occupation troops abroad and segregation in schools and public life at home in the American South, this promise assumed ambiguous undertones in Europe. In the media campaign, this had to be avoided at all cost. After all, the Marshall Plan films were designed to offer easily understandable narratives of the American democratic promise. Usually, the films employed powerful symbols such as a ship arriving on the shore loaded with goods, tools, or machines to restore the economy of the 18 nations who accepted help from the United States. They documented economic success stories such as constructions of river dams, restoring the life of formerly destroyed city centers, the building of new factories and conveying information about more efficient ways to cultivate the land.12

7 Marshall Plan documentary films were intended to be shown in movie theatres before the main feature films. However, it was clear to the chief planners that other venues

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had to be utilized as well in order to heighten the general awareness. Therefore, the heads of the Marshal Plan film unit in Paris made sure that the films were being shown in Amerika-Häuser (America Houses) and Education Service Centers. In addition, the films were being rented to schools. Mobile film units criss-crossed the countries to bring the documentary films into remote corners where they were shown at public places such as schools or town halls.13 One of the target audiences were young children and students. Several films deal with issues regarding a new educational system and innovative learning environments. In March 1951, a survey documented that more than 2 million people had seen Marshall Plan films.

Chart: Marshall Plan Film Program Attendance (Office of Public Affa irs) for the Federal Republic of Germany and Berlin (non-commercial) from Jan. 1949 to March 1951.14

8 The awareness of the main Marshall Plan messages among the population of various European countries was remarkably high. For example, by 1951, 88 percent of Austrians had received detailed information on the European Reconstruction Program via mass media, in Norway the numbers were even higher with 94 percent of the population. Among the films which are dedicated to young audiences, four films stand out:

9 1) The prize-winning color cartoon The Shoemaker and the Hatter created in Great Britain by John Halas (1912-1995) and Joy Batchelor (1914-1991) in 1950 translates issues of free trade vs. protectionism into an entertaining story (not only) for children. The creative team, which later turned George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1954) into a by now classic animation feature film, ingeniously portrays a shoemaker and a hatter who live next to each other. In order to revive their businesses they follow different strategies. While the hatter decides to produce few hats which he intends to sell for a comparatively high price, the shoemaker recognizes the need for inexpensive shoes for a large number of people. In order to lower costs, he looks for new ways of mass production and profit through export and free trade. With this innovative mindset comes a cultural opportunity for intercultural understanding: The shoemaker needs to travel all across Europe in order to gain information about the socio-economic situation and opportunities. On his adventurous trips to create a business network he engages with people from different European countries. Unfortunately, these people are reduced to a few stereotypical (economic) features such as a hyper-masculine woodcutter in Austria,

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a dairy connoisseur in Switzerland, or a technical engineer in Germany. The New Europe of The Shoemaker and the Hatter relies on and enforces stereotypical reductions of national identities. This paradox of promoting a new European consciousness and the reliance on familiar ethnic and national stereotypes is highly recognizable in the visual style. Most of the films turn a blind eye on themes regarding cultural appropriation or migration. In The Shoemaker and the Hatter, “exchange” may be the key term. However, despite the innovative framework of cultural diplomacy in which the Marshall Plan films were produced, the term “exchange” is reduced to technical means of transporting goods in order to raise consumer standards of living. With its focus on economic issues, the film is more interested in economic strategies for a new Europe rather than showcasing the potential of intercultural communication and understanding. The Marshall Plan filmography by Linda Christenson lists no less than seven language versions.15 This is a valuable hint at the success and popularity of the film reaching far beyond British audiences. The Shoemaker and the Hatter offers an approach to visualizing abstract concepts of a free market economy that other animation films such as Transatlantique (1953) would take as a model. Documentaries which employ corresponding narrative structures and animation techniques to attract the young include Freundschaft Ohne Grenzen (1948-1950) and Trois Hommes au Travail (1951).16

Fig. 1: National stereotypes in Austria, France, and Germany, four stills from The Shoemaker and the Hatter.

10 The animation films tell stories for children about a new form of international cooperation. Instead of featuring children, the colorful animation sequences show an ideal democratic future in which they will become key players. While The Shoemaker and the Hatter relies on adult protagonists and vivid colors to translate complex and abstract issues of free market economy, cross-cultural understanding, and the potential

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of democratic discourses for school children, other films offer different approaches. For example:

11 2) The black and white documentary Frischer Wind in Alten Gassen produced in Germany and directed by Fritz Peter Buch in 1951. It uses school children as protagonists. Following the motto “young people in charge,” the film shows an unusual experiment in democratic education. In order to learn about the basic challenges of political life and local government, the city of Eberbach am Neckar hands over its political power to children. The documentary film with its young German lay characters reflects small town life as a basis to educate a new generation of a homogenous group of white children in political life. The town mayor of the tiny village of Eberbach, who steps down in order to give his position to a young boy is played by Wolfgang Preiss who had been cast in Nazi propaganda films in the 1940s such as Die Grosse Liebe (1942) or Besatzung Dora (1943). His presence provides a comment on the need for new leaders. It also shows how democratic ideas resembled a mask which is put on because it allowed actors to continue their careers. This element of continuity in the history of German film before and after 1945 is problematic. It shows the doubleness of films as providing important lessons in political education and at the same time masking the links to ideologically opposite directions in the not too distant past. On a positive note one might argue that Preiss’s role in the film suggests the success of the re-education and democratization efforts of the Marshall Plan films. As was typical for German feature productions of the 1950s as well, the settings moved away from modern metropolitan centers to more rural places and spaces where the disastrous havoc of the destruction during the last phase of World War II was less visible. As such, it combines escapism with a willingness to look ahead instead of coming to terms with the political burdens of the past.17

12 Frischer Wind in Alten Gassen is remarkable in its emphasis on a group of young people from one nation compared to similar efforts in which only one boy or girl overcomes problems of everyday life such as The Story of Koula (1951) where a Greek boy yokes a large American mule from the harbour to his tiny village or Bergbauern von Morgen (1950) in which a young farmer’s boy raises a prize calf.

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Fig. 2: School children learning about democratic decision making processes in a performative way, four stills from Frischer Wind in alten Gassen.

13 The film Frischer Wind in Alten Gassen follows an ideal of offering a performative way to learn about democratic decision making processes instead of simply commanding new ways of socio-political conduct. Lewin recognized that “[d]emocracy cannot be imposed upon a person; it has to be learned by a process of voluntary and responsible participation. Changing from autocracy to democracy is a process which takes more time than changing in the opposite direction.” (Lewin, B, 38) Frischer Wind in Alten Gassen offers a lesson in the experiment of training future democratic leaders. Unfortunately, the film cannot escape the aesthetic narrative patterns of the past which lead to an idealization of rural German family life as a nucleus for recruiting support for the Nazi ideology. Nevertheless, the film argues convincingly that the notion of democracy cannot simply be superimposed from American traditions but needs to take into account the specific disposition of the country and its cultural heritage. Metaphorically, it expresses the dire need to exchange the familiar role models of leaders and obedient followers.

14 3) The black-and-white film Let’s Be Childish produced in France by George Freedland (aka Georges Friedland, 1910-1993) in 1950 offers an innovative approach to multilingual understanding. With a group of children from different European countries and unusual camera work, Freedland translates the idea of a New Europe into striking visual imagery. As in the quaint, parochial Frischer Wind in alten Gassen, Freedland also avoids displaying urban centers in favour of the typical tradition of what became popular under the catchword “Heimatfilm” in Germany of the 1950s. Indeed, the film depicts an Alpine resort where children of various nationalities live and play together. Time and time again, the camera moves away from the action to find peace and assurance in the sublime image of the mountains. The repeated evocation of

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Nature’s grandeur creates a nexus with the children suggesting an inherent harmony between the scenic landscapes and young Europeans.

Fig. 3: Familiar national stereotypes. Stills from Let’s Be Childish.

15 Let’s be Childish effectively emphasizes the perspective of children with low camera angles. Apart from the final scene, adults are exclusively shown without body and head. Freedland positions the camera in a way that the audience can only see the feet and hear the voices. Freedland focuses on children as a nucleus of different Europeans with their own languages who find ways to interact harmoniously and solve problems. Language plays a key role as a cultural and national marker. Accordingly the children from France, Italy, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands and Great Britain each speak their own language. When the young protagonist Toni enters the scene, she is immediately identified as an outsider. Her speckled face and obvious shyness serve as visual markers of somebody who will not automatically and seamlessly blend in with the group of children. They have already actively engaged in a contest in the snow. No one is willing to interact with her. The general response of Swedish, Italian, or French children to her wish to participate in the action is as short as it is telling: “don’t understand.” The ensuing snowball fight between the children is turned into an allegory of war and creates visual echoes from the not so distant past. One boy even shouts the word “war” in German – “Krieg.” – which leaves no doubt as to the film maker’s trajectory. Despite the idyllic mountain scenery and the presence of playful children, the recent past of war-torn Europe looms heavily over the seemingly innocent games.

16 When Toni’s head is injured, she needs to be brought into a nearby house and treated by a doctor. In order to cheer her up, the children conceive of an ingenious plan. Instead of each building their own national monument in the now, they all work together and create a fictitious city which they name “Toniville.” At the end, the prize is given to all the children.

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Fig. 4: Winning the prize, stills from Let’s Be Childish.

17 The mise-en-scène evokes an idealist visual translation of a united New Europe in which the young generation overcomes not only language barriers but is able to collaborate productively beyond chauvinistic national preconceptions. In accordance with the clear allegorical visual constructions, the film ends on a heavy didactic note when the organizer of the event states in explicit terms the underlying agenda of the strategies conceived by the Marshall Planners in Paris: These children from all the corners of Europe have overcome the barrier of language that separates their countries. They have understood each other and united their efforts to make their contest their common cause. May their initiative serve as an example to the world at large. May it be a lesson to our adult world. [Freedland, 1950]

18 The long shots depicting the young representatives of the various European countries reduce the individuals by displaying types. This common technique can be found in all of the Marshall Plan films I have been able to spot. The lesson to be learned seems to be a guideline implemented by the Marshall Planners. To a certain degree, Let’s Be Childish re-enacts the typical immigrant experience in American cultural history as the struggle of coming to terms with a new socio-cultural environment and language system. A similar narrative can be found in a film about educational issues of a new generation of European children by an Austrian filmmaker.

19 4) The black and white film Wie die Jungen Sungen produced in Austria by Georg Tressler (1917-2007) in 1954 stands out with its direct comments on the African American Civil Rights movement. It offers a revealing glance at the ambiguity of the promise of “you too can be like us” of the Marshall Planners and the conflicting reality at home between democratic principles and practices. Tressler was an aspiring young filmmaker from Vienna who embraced the invitation to promote the European Reconstruction Program. Young directors who had shown signs of promise in their previous films were

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asked to work out story lines that might be of interest for their audience, in Tressler’s case the Austrian people. We tried to find out how new techniques are being implemented. For instance, the agricultural section or the paper industry in Linz, or the green land in Steiermark. What is done to raise production levels? There were quite a few people, groups and companies exploring new methods. There were nice American officers and people who would say, “George, you do that, you care [about] that— Bring me some information and let’s talk about it.” That’s the way it worked. So I had to make myself clear about what was going on in Austria.18

20 In 1952, Tressler wrote and directed several entertaining documentary films about industrialized chicken farms and more efficient methods of agriculture modelled after developments in the United States. In Traudl’s Neuer Gemüsegarten (1952), he charmingly recommends adopting new methods of growing and eating healthy vegetables. The protagonist plays the young daughter of old fashioned Austrian farmers who are finally convinced of the new ideas suggested by an agricultural advisor (presumably working with ECA support). In Hansl und die 200.000 Kücken (1952), a young boy becomes the model for a new generation of entrepreneurs. In order to buy himself a new bicycle, Hansl increases the production of eggs by accepting a consignment of Marshall Plan chicks. The instructions on how to build a more efficient chicken house are mirrored by the efforts of other farmers to produce eggs in great masses in specially designed factory-like buildings.19 Tressler would later continue to become an influential director in Germany with celebrated films such as Die Halbstarken (1956), Endstation Liebe (1957/58), or Das Totenschiff (1959) based on the the adaption of B. Traven’s novel The Death Ship. Two years after his successful documentaries funded with Marshall Plan money, Tressler shifted his focus from economic to cultural themes in his docudrama Wie die Jungen Sungen financed by the United States Information Service. Despite the new challenge of the film program after 1950 to explain to Europeans the urgent need for defense during the Korean War and collective security within the Cold War, Tressler’s social utopia of a United States of Europe surpassed the American framework in more than one aspect.

2. Cross-Cultural Networks, Multi-Lingual Education, and the Risks of Color Blindness

21 Wie die Jungen Sungen tackles three different themes at the same time: first, the future of a new transnational Europe; second, multilingualism vs. French as a new European lingua franca; third, redirecting pre-war racial prejudice towards a climate of racial tolerance in the future. The third topic is particularly important to understand the potential connotations in translating the “promise of Young Europe” via the medium of film into a transatlantic context. The title Wie die Jungen Sungenoffers a revealing twist of a popular saying: “Wie die Alten sungen, so zwitschern es die Jungen” which roughly translates into “the way the old folks sing, the young twitter accordingly.” Tressler reverses the call and response pattern of the popular saying. In post-war Europe, the old are well advised to learn from a new generation of young, open-minded future citizens of a united New Europe whose cosmopolitan attitude would hopefully render another world war impossible. Tressler finds an intriguing visual narrative in portraying new educational models in what might be labelled a docudrama.

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22 Tressler sets his story in the metropolitan center of Austria in the newly established international Lycée Français in Vienna.20 Here, children from all over Europe come together and form a multi-national and multi-racial nucleus. The protagonist of the story is a little blond Austrian girl called Gerti who is about to enter the Lycée Français. Tressler does not shy away from referring to the aesthetic language of the past. Instead, he re-appropriates successful strategies to utilize them for a different kind of “propaganda.” As in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (1935) and Billy Wilder’s black satire of the American occupation troops in Germany aptly entitled A Foreign Affair (1948), Tressler begins his film with aerial shots. The audience, however, is not introduced to Berlin but to Vienna. With a documentary approach he portrays the Lycée Français de Vienne where students come from all over the world: Peter is from Hungary, Sidney from the United States, Michèle is French, and Karin Swedish. In their new environment, they must – just like in Freedland’s Let’s Be Childish - interact and overcome language barriers. The camera follows Gerti, a little blonde girl from the city, who has just arrived with her mother. She appears isolated in a panoramic view shot within the main hall of the school. A wall of glass separates her from the familiar cityscapes of her home town. This feeling of isolation makes her cry. Among those who seem to be most curious about the shy newcomer is a black boy.

Fig. 5: Gerti’s initiation at school, stills from Wie die Jungen Sungen

23 The contrast of color and the assignment of colors to competing groups of people have played a major role in the ideological warfare of the past. Familiar connotations of black and white have been routinely used in World War II propaganda on both sides of the Atlantic and spilled over in the re-education films conceived under the Office of Military Government US (OMGUS).21 For example, with the establishment of the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942, a centralized agency was created to control all government press, radio and film productions and general contact with the media.

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Michael Hoenisch has called the OWI the “most powerful propaganda institution in the U.S.” (Hoenisch, 199) One of the most influential and complex efforts in this vein is the series Why We Fight (1943-45). The American director Frank Capra activated the talents at Disney studios for elaborate animation sequences in which the global threat of Nazism was used to counterbalance fascism with democracy by contrasting the colors black and white. After World War II, Stuart Schulberg, the American director and head of the Marshall Plan Film program in Paris, used these techniques to visualize the geo- strategic situation in Europe in films such as Hunger (1948) or Me and Mr. Marshall (1949).22 Those countries, which accepted the offerings and help of the Marshall plan, assumed the color white. Those who rejected the helping hand from across the Atlantic changed their color and became black.

24 From this perspective, the first inter-racial encounter in Tressler’s film is crucial. The introduction of a black boy as a fellow outsider who would bond with the blonde newcomer undermines the conventions audiences had been accustomed to by propaganda efforts of the past. The emphasis on the visual contrasts of color is intensified by the nonverbal exchange of looks. This sequence sets the stage for a story that will follow certain conventions: two outsiders must overcome their limitations, rise to the occasion and emulate the Cinderella pattern of turning inferiority into superiority. With the help of the black boy and his playful nature Gerti gains self- confidence. This allows her to interact more freely with her classmates. Later, she assumes the role of a tourist guide on the Vienna Ferris Wheel pointing out the various sites. In turn she gets invited to visit the home countries of her newly found friends in Sweden, Italy, France, and even to Africa. One of the close observers of Gerti’s success story at school is the bus driver. Realizing that children from different corners of the continent with different skin color do not exhibit any inhibitions interacting with each other, he starts to learn French himself. At the end of the film, he even brings his son to the Lycée Français. The sequence reflects the essential message which had been at the core of the preceding Marshall Plan films. In a dialogue in heavy Austrian dialect the father tells his sceptical friend about his change of mind. It is the children who will lead the way toward a better understanding. The final word goes to the sceptic while he observes the children entering the gates of the school: “Was die Leute alles probieren… Na ja, Probieren geht über Studieren. Vielleicht kommen sie auf diese Art zu einer Verständigung in der Welt.”23

25 The film seems to be a perfect candidate for the kind of subtle propaganda that Marshall Planners had in mind: By focussing on the perspective of school children Tressler adapts the American creed “e pluribus unum” and the democratic ideal of the American Constitution to the cultural framework of the European continent, namely that all human beings are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The children’s initiation at the international school is turned into an aesthetic and didactic tool. By stylizing the way they cope with each other’s different national backgrounds and languages, children emerge as persuasive role models for their parents, showing them how to make a multicultural and multinational society work. Tressler’s message is one of self- empowerment. There are no didactic voice-overs as in numerous other Marshall Plan films. The director relies completely on the enchanting power of his children actors, the story, and the positive implications of his aesthetic compositions. Apart from the initial reference that the production was funded by the “US Information Service,” there

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are no explicit references to American models or the Marshall program. And yet, the notion that Europe might be able to emulate the American way of life and its democratic promise of equality runs through the picture like an invisible undercurrent. Does Wie die Jungen Sungen have anything to say about what W.E.B. Du Bois identified as the problem of the 20th century, namely the color line? Let us look at a scene in which color becomes the subject in class, albeit not in an explicit conversation about racial issues but veiled as an exercise in writing.

26 One might argue that in Tressler’s film “e pluribus unum” translates into “la grenouille est verte” – a sentence, which the teacher of a writing class asks a student to spell out on the blackboard. When another student remarks that actually not all frogs are green the teacher does not recognize the contribution as valuable. This explicit color- blindness may be interpreted as a metaphor. Tressler finds a concrete visual reference to allude to the goal of the Marshal Plan to re-educate the former enemies and persuade them to create a new socio-political environment where all are considered equal, sharing in the same dream of a unified Europe with one language of communication. In a literal sense, color as a racial marker does not exist any more. The white school girl Gerti does not seem to be aware of racial differences. This perspective turns out to be persuasive for adults as well. While at the beginning, nobody wanted to sit next to Gerti, the black boy is happy to enjoy the presence of his new friend during various occasions. When the bus driver looks in the rear view mirror and observes this joyful interaction of black and white children he learns a crucial message: “It is unbelievable how children can get used to each other.” What are the audio-visual strategies to convey this innovative message? In how far can Wie die Jungen Sungen be described as a successful contribution to overcoming racial prejudice and opening up a new dialogue about identity constructions that are inclusive instead of exclusive?

3. Screening Color Blindness in a Transatlantic Context

27 The controversial topic of so-called “brown babies” was widely discussed before and during the time Tressler conceived his idea of a film about school children at the Lycée Français. For example, the cover picture of Alfons Simon`s pedagogical booklet Maxi unser Negerbub (Max our Negro Lad) from 1952 shows an Afro-German boy in Lederhosen next to a blond boy suggesting successful integration in school. In Germany, heated debates about challenges of integrating these babies into society grossly exaggerated the number of so-called black “Mischlingskinder” (children of mixed race).24 A highly successful German movie called Toxi, also from 1952 (and followed by Der Dunkle Stern in 1955 with the same Afro-German actress Elfie Fiegert), displayed the integration of Afro-Germans both as a political and humanitarian problem of national importance. The film reinforces and reifies, as Heide Fehrenbach remarks, “the black-white binary, since it insists that the pull of race is as strong among black as among white characters.” (Fehrenbach, 129) Themes of racial tolerance and multiethnic integration played an important role in black press reports about Germany. In the 1950s, the fate of about 3000 occupation children conceived by African American GIs and German women shifted the focus to American concerns of moral responsibility. Articles such as “German War Babies” (1951), “Germany’s Tragic War Babies” (1952), “We Adopted a Brown Baby” (1953), or “Should White Parents Adopt Brown Babies” (1958) focussed on

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the need to help these children in their uncommon living situation abroad. In general this meant bringing them “home” to the United States, which is also the main story line in the German film production Toxi. The legal challenges of incorporating “brown babies” in the United States was reported widely and in many cases celebrated as a “triumph of American democracy.”25

28 The situation in Austria was not too dissimilar. As the oral history project “Welcome Ami Go Home” reveals, Austrians emphasized black soldiers’ friendliness towards children during the first decade of the occupation.26 Nevertheless, these attitudes do not necessarily translate into a new acceptance of racial diversity. Instead, interviews show that Austrians vacillated between regarding Americans as liberators or conquerors, sneered at mixed relationships and entertained racial prejudices reminiscent of national socialist propaganda. Despite Tressler’s effort of showing an ideal new society with no racial biases and cultural frictions, the docudrama becomes an ambivalent trope of European blindness to racial discrimination and stereotyping. The trajectory was clearly to present the black boy as a likable and unthreatening member of society. In several cases, I will argue, this was accomplished in racist ways drawing on a familiar set of racial stereotypes.

29 In Wie die Jungen Sungen, Tressler avoids the discussion of Austrian identity constructions and the challenge of mixed-race off-springs right from the start. In the opening credit sequence, the children’s names and nationalities are identified. Gerti is Austrian, Peter Hungarian, Michèle French, and Karin Swedish. Only Boula, the black boy whose name is actually never mentioned in the film explicitly, does not have a nationality. The title cards introduce him with reference to a continent. Boula is labelled “ein Afrikaner,” an African. The question of racial integration was important not only to Austria. Considering that in the early 1950s about 3000 bi-racial occupation babies were entering an all white German school system,27 it can be assumed that the boy playing Boula may be the off-spring of an Austrian woman and an African American GI.

30 In his docudrama, Tressler offers a seemingly innovative approach, which proved to be quite controversial at the time – not so much to Europeans but to the American heads at the United States Information Services. Tressler’s film argues that children provide a test case that racial differences do not need to matter. A peculiar classroom situation about spelling out the color of frogs in French is again revealing in this context. Wie die Jungen Sungen suggests that color blindness is not an inherent characteristic of children. Instead, it is indoctrinated by teachers. When a girl critically insists that “not all frogs are green” the teacher replies in a harsh voice that nobody was interested in her opinion. The classmate who is asked to write the sentence on the blackboard makes a telling mistake mismatching the French conjunction “et” (“and”) with the modal verb “est” (“is”). Instead of ascribing the color green to the frog, the girl intuitively divides the spheres of colors and beings into separate categories. Within the confinements of the film script, the separation of color becomes visible in various scenes of multi-racial interaction.

31 Boula, the black boy does not engage intellectually with his classmates. As a matter of fact, he does not seem to know any language at all. His preferred means of communication is through exaggerated mimicry and gestures. Two scenes make this clear. First, during lunch Boula holds fork and knife in the wrong hands, sticks out his tongue in disgust, and exaggerates his facial expressions thereby getting sympathetic

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laughs from his fellow classmates. Second, Boula plays the class clown in the ethnological museum of Vienna. He is particularly attracted to an Austrian carnival mask. It displays the very grotesquely overdrawn features connected to American minstrelsy: thick protruding lips and large round eyes. The black boy lives up to the blackface tradition by assuming these features himself. Standing in front of the mask, he shapes his lips to make them appear larger. Gerti then asks him to imitate another evil looking mask. Boula follows suit by pretending to have horns with an undistinguished expression on his face while at the same time sticking out his tongue. An elaborate set of tin soldiers with their colourful traditional Austrian uniform, which is presented by the museum guide with considerable pride, is of no interest to the black boy.

32 The playful interaction between the black boy and the white female protagonist on the bus during the ride home from a visit of the Vienna Ferris Wheel is also nonverbal. Boula tries to kiss Gerti. In response, she laughs, pretends to bite him and finally kisses him joyfully. Thus, the evocative image from the beginning where the black boy hides behind a classmate to observe Gerti’s introduction to school with keen eyes is resolved by an image of harmony. The two outsiders at school have finally successfully bonded. However, they have done so by paying a different price.

33 The various scenes between Boula and Gerti are intended to overcome racial hierarchies and argue in favour of racial equality. Nevertheless, the sequences re- establish stereotypes from American minstrel shows, caricatures, and movies. Despite honourable efforts to subvert fascist and national socialist propaganda, the visual codes continue along the lines of appropriated forms of discrimination. They also hark back to American cultural traditions of black representation: Black degeneracy, animality, and sexual madness became standard racial stereotypes in American culture with Thomas Dixon`s popular novel The Clansman, published in 1905 and turned into a highly successful film by David Griffith under the title The Birth of a Nation (1915). The climax of the book is the rape of a young white virgin. Similar visual codes were established by post Worlds War I propaganda in German films such as Die Schwarze Schmach (The Black Shame, 1921), where black French soldiers raped German women of the occupied Rhineland thereby “poisoning” allegedly pure Aryan blood. In his political autobiography Mein Kampf, Hitler envisioned a conspiracy against German purity by an unholy alliance of French, Jews, and Blacks.28 During the third Reich, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels preached racial discrimination labelling African and African American culture degenerate; minister of the interior, Hermann Göring, ordered the sterilization of almost 400 black occupation children which the Nazi jargon stigmatised as “Rhineland bastards.” (Pommerin, 56)

34 Tressler clearly subverts the white fantasy of the “brutal black buck” or the alleged fear of miscegenation in favour of a more open-minded approach. He does so at the cost of pushing the black boy to the margins. The presence of blackness in an international European school is important and part of an emerging tolerant society mirrored in the interaction of young school children. Many of the scenes described above, however, regress to the American stereotypical notion of black kids as picaninny caricatures. Black children were exploited for comic effects as early as 1904 when Thomas Alva Edison presented the Ten Picaninnies.29 Established in the 1920s via comedy short films such as The Little Rascals, a motley collection of black school children called Farina, Sunshine Sammy, Pineapple, Stymie, and Buckwheat became popular foolish coon

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characters easily recognizable for their stereotypical depiction.30 Boula’s ridiculous efforts to eat his meal resemble picaninny scenes such as played by Farina trying to eat an entire chicken in one piece in one of Hal Roach’s Our Gang (1922) shorts or images of black kids eating gigantic watermelons. The black boy Boula is thus far from being represented as an equal person among equals. Within the German and Austrian racial discourse the threatening, violent, sexualised racial other has shifted towards acceptance as the feeble-minded, joyful simpleton who serves as a re-enforcement of white dominance.

Fig. 6: The “African boy” called Boula, four stills from Wie die Jungen Sungen

4. Transatlantic Repercussions

35 The daring proposition and images of multi-racial encounters caused transatlantic frictions. Al Hemsing, then head of the Marshall Plan film program in Paris, felt obliged to censor the final sequence of Gerti and the black boy playing with each other on the bus. According to Tressler, the American representative considered the mise en scène too provocative. There were many different kids of different nations. One was a little Negro boy — a little black boy with a very funny face, yes? — and he made fun with another— with one of the pupils around him. A little blonde girl, a kid of six or seven. So they had fun together, ja? In a museum which they visited by school. They went all in a museum. They went to a museum of Austrian history. And then when some masks in the museum, put on the wall, and this little Negro boy was just asking about it. He said, "Oh, they make faces, you know". And they had a wonderful time, all of them. And then, a friendship began, in a way. And then they were taken by a bus to — I don’t know — to the school back again. And you saw them, this little Negro boy and Susi, or whatever — Gerti, she was called — had fun. And the driver sees it in the mirror in the car. And so that’s charming, they all get together, you see? And

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[Al] Hemsing said, “Ah, I don’t know – racists may be open to that—I said, “Al!”. "Yeah, George, that’s a problem. And so we had to shorten it. It doesn’t have to be too fraternization, and so forth – Yeah. So we cut it — arranged it. I shortened it a little bit, so that he was satisfied. I found it a little strange. I told him, “Al, what’s so …?” “Yeah, you know, this situation in America (and so forth) that the blacks -- blah, blah, blah—“ You know? I said, “If you want to, but I find it ridiculous.” But we did shorten it a little bit, so he was satisfied.31

36 One of the guidelines of film productions maintained that contents of documentaries should not “endanger the security or prestige of the Occupying Forces or give offense to existing moral standards or arouse racial or religious hatreds.”32 With this reasoning and considering that the film was produced with American money, Tressler’s film qualified for censorship. The black and white relationships on the screen bore the stigma of miscegenation for the head of the Marshall Plan film program in Paris. Despite Tressler’s efforts to argue in favour of the democratic message underlying the sequence, Hemsing insisted on cuts to shorten the scene.

Fig. 7: Boula and Gerti on the bus, stills from Wie die Jungen Sungen

37 The sequence was, indeed, highly controversial considering that the gates to schools in large parts of the United States had been closed for blacks.33 At about the same time that Tressler shot his story about school integration from the perspective of a little white girl and a black boy, the Supreme Court justices announced a decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education which said that separate schools were not equal. The demand to integrate public schools sparked nationwide civil rights activities. In addition, the courage and moral integrity exhibited by Rosa Parks when she refused to obey to the Jim Crow laws in Montgomery on December 1, 1955 “restaged” in a widely distributed photo offers yet another reference to the scene of interracial contacts on a bus.34 Rosa Parks set an example regarding how to courageously respond to democratic

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gaps in the U.S. South. The scene and the famous photo echoes the sequence, which Al Hemsing ordered to be censored from Tressler’s film.

38 Thus, Tressler’s film created a transatlantic mirror regarding the integration of school children and provided a critical commentary on the discrepancy between the principles and practices of American democracy.35 However, by introducing Boula as an African, his sojourn at the Lycée Français is only temporary before he will return to his home country. This narrative uses a potential cosmopolitan framework in which young children are educated. However, the reality of racial mixing and the presence of young dark-skinned German or Austrian citizens resemble a blind spot. Instead, Tressler points his flashlight towards international settings of innovative school systems. This technique ultimately stabilizes national conceptions of citizenship and cultural traditions.36 Nevertheless, the message of powerful images caught on film such as the final sequence of Gerti and Boula kissing each other on the bus struck a transatlantic chord in 1954.37

Conclusion

39 Marshall Plan films relied on the persuasive power of children actors to tell stories about a future United States of Europe. While the 18 Marshall Plan countries were encouraged to produce their own narratives about democracy and the success of the Marshall Plan aid, the challenges of overcoming national stereotypes, coping with language barriers, and acting out the role of cosmopolitan Europeans resembled autobiographic stories of immigration and acculturation to American culture from the late 19th and early 20th century. As spelled out in Let’s Be Childish “[m]ay their initiative serve as an example to the world at large” the promises of young Europe followed along the lines of American fantasies and fantasies about America. Only one film, however, introduces racial encounters. It thereby challenges the model character of America. Tressler’s Wie die Jungen Sungen functioned as a European mirror to American educational and racial issues in which an important lesson of democracy was turned into practice: no segregation in schools based on color.

40 The case of Wie die Jungen Sungen shows a surprising, unforeseen twist of the re- education program: in the context of the early civil rights movement in the US, the democratic re-education efforts produced a European visual narrative that seemed to suggest that the American ideals could be turned into practice in Europe in a more thorough way than in the American South. This idealized image, however, comes at a high price. It localizes the racial other not within but outside the European continent. Tressler’s film stylizes the presence of blackness as African or African American and thereby outside of Europe instead of integrating it as a part of the Austrian, German, or European society. This misconception undermined the basis of the promises of a new “Young Europe,” which would be built on a cosmopolitan spirit of international exchange and intercultural communication.

41 25. Anonymous, “Should White Parents Adopt Brown Babies?” EBONY (June 1958): 26-30, 28. In the immediacy after World War II, the majority of newly recruited black GIs emphasized the warm-hearted German responses regarding the presence of black GI’s and a surprising lack or racist attitudes. Under the headline “Germany meets the Negro Soldier,” EBONY magazine featured an article on the notion of racial equality in occupied German in 1946. “Strangely enough, here where once

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Aryanism ruled supreme, Negroes are finding more friendship, more respect and more equality than they would back home - either in Dixie or on Broadway. […] Today in Berlin the common people of Germany, minus uniforms and no longer goose-stepping, are meeting black Americans face-to-face after lifting of the U.S. ban against fraternization. Race hate has faded with better acquaintance and inter- racialism in Berlin flourishes.” (EBONY, 1946: 5) Other articles created sites of cultural contrast to question American racial politics. In “Brown Babies Go to Work,” EBONY ran an extensive article on what appeared to be a frictionless move for 1500 Afro-Germans to assume their place as equal citizens in democratic Western Germany. “As a whole, the country has risen to the challenge posed by its newest minority and is eagerly seizing the opportunities to erase the stigma which Hitler’s brutal enforcement of his ‘super race’ schemes attached to the nation.” (EBONY: November 1960, 97)

42 28. The National Socialist vision/nightmare of an elitist Aryan mono-cultural society produced the illusion that being black meant at the same time being an (inferior) outsider. During the first three decades of the 20th century, black people in Germany were mostly recognized as exotic curiosities displayed in ethnic shows called “Afrika-Völkerschauen” in zoos (Thode-Arora, 26) or demonised for propaganda purposes in the context of the French Rhineland occupation (Campt: 2004, 33). In their historical overview of Afro-German culture, Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver remark that the German society continues to recognize those citizens of mixed German and African or African American parentage as “foreigners”, i.e. not German (Mazón and Steingröver, 2).

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Fehrenbach, Heide, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005)

Fritsche, Maria, “Der filmische Blick im Museum. Dekonstruktion des Eigenen und Fremden im US-amerikanischen Informationsfilm Wie die Jungen Sungen (R: Georg Tressler, 1954),” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde LXV114/3 (2011): 349-366

Goergen, Jeanpaul, “Blick nach vorne: Re-orientation-Filme unter HICOG 1949-1952” in: Ursula Heukenkamp, ed., Schuld und Sühne. Kriegserlebnis und Kriegsdeutung in Deutschen Medien der Nachkriegszeit (1945-1961) (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001), 415-428

Gould, Allan, “Germany`s Tragic War Babies,” EBONY (December, 1952): 74-78

Hahn, Brigitte J., Umerziehung durch Dokumentarfilm? Ein Instrument amerikanischer Kulturpolitik im Nachkriegsdeutschland (1945-1953) (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1997)

Hartenian, Larry, Controlling Information in U.S. Occupied Germany, 1945-1949. Media Manipulation and Propaganda (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003)

Hemsing, Al, “The Marshall Plan’s European Film Unit, 1948-1955: A Memoir and Filmography,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 14 (1994): 269-297

Höhn, Maria, Amis, Cadillacs und “Negerliebchen”: GI’s im Nachkriegsdeutschland [Translated by Karolina May-Chu] (Berlin: VBB, 2008)

Hoenisch, Michael, “Film as an Instrument of the U.S. Reeducation Program in Germany after 1945 and the Example of ‘Todesmühlen’,” Englisch Amerikanische Studien. Zeitschrift für Unterricht, Wissenschaft und Politik, 1.2 (1982): 196-210

Kennedy, Liam and Scott Lucas, “Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy,” American Quarterly, 57.2 (2005): 309-333

Klimke, Martin, “The African American Civil Rights Struggle and Germany, 1945-1989,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute (Washington, D.C., Fall 2008): 91-106

Kroes, Rob. “Americanization: What are we talking about?” Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe, in: Rob Kroes, Robert W. Rydell, Doeko F.J. Bosscher, eds. (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993) 302-318

–––– “Imaginary Americas in Europe’s Public Space,” in: Alexander Stephan, ed., The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006) 337-360

Lewin, Kurt, (A) “Some Social-Psychological Differences Between the United States and Germany” (1936) in: Gertrud Weiss Lewin, ed., Resolving Social Conflicts: Field Theory in Social Science. Kurt Lewin. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2008) 15-33

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–––– (B) “Cultural Reconstruction,” in: Gertrud Weiss Lewin, ed., Resolving Social Conflicts: Field Theory in Social Science. Kurt Lewin (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2008) 35-39

Lissner, Erich, “We Adopted a Brown Baby,” EBONY (May 1953): 38-45

Mazón, Patricia and Reinhild Steingröver, eds., “Introduction,” Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000 (University of Rochester Press, 2005) 1-23

Mead, Margaret, “Food and Feeding in Occupied Territory,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 7 (1943): 618-628

Mehring, Frank, “Propaganda für die Demokratie? Deutschland und das ‘Neue Europa’ in den Filmen des Marshall Plans,” Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin. URL: http://www.dhm.de/ filmarchiv/film-im-kontext/propaganda/

–––– “Selling Democracy – Winning the Peace: Die Marshall-Plan-Filme in New York,” Filmdienst/Rheinischer Merkur Spezial zur 56. Berlinale (2005): 16-17

Morrison, Toni, Remember: The Story to School Integration (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004)

Nye, Joseph S., Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go it Alone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Pilgert, Henry, The History of the Development of Information Services Through Information Centers and Documentary Films (1951)

Pommerin, Reiner, “Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde”: Das Schicksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit, 1918-1937 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1979)

Pratkanis, Anthony and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use of and Abuse of Persuasion Rev. ed. (New York: W.H. Freeman, 2002)

Reichert, Ramón, Im Kino der Humanwissenschaften: Studien zur Medialisierung wissenschaftlichen Wissens (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007)

Schröder, Hans-Jürgen, “Marshall Plan Propaganda in Austria and Western Germany,” in: Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dieter Stiefel, eds., The Marshall Plan in Austria (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2000) 212-246

Schulberg, Stuart, “Making Marshall Plan Movies,” Film News (1951): 10

–––– “Of All People,” Hollywood Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1949): 206-208

Sproule, J. Michael, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Suid, Lawrence H., ed., Film and Propaganda in America: A Documentary History, 4 vols. (New York, Westport, London: Greenwood Press, 1991)

Thode-Arora, Hilke, “Afrika-Völkerschauen in Deutschland“, in: Mariann Bechhaus-Gerst and Reinhard Klein-Arendt, eds., Afrikaner/Innen in Deutschland und schwarze Deutsche :Geschichte und Gegenwart (Münster: LIT, 2004) 25-40

Tressler, Georg, “Interview. Conducted by Linda, Eric Christenson, and Frank Mehring in Berlin on February 12, 2004,” Witnesses to Austria and the Marshall Plan: Interviews 1993-1996 with Austrians. Audio-CD prepared by Eric and Linda Christenson with the assistance from Christoph Höllriegl for the 2008 conference Images of the Marshall Plan: Film Photographs, Exhibits, Posters, May 19-20, 2008

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Tuch, Hans, “Communicating with the World: The U.S. Government’s Practice of Public Diplomacy,” A Study prepared for the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, DC, 1989.

APPENDIXES

Filmography Air of Freedom. Germany, 1950. Director: Unknown. B/W, 11 minutes. Animal Farm. Great Britain, 1954. Directors: John Halas and Joy Batchelor. Color, 72 min. Bergbauern von Morgen. Austria, 1950. Director: Victor Vicas. B/W, 20 min. Besatzung Dora. West Germany, 1943. Director: Karl Ritter. B/W, 91 min. Birth of a Nation, The. United States, 1915. Director: D.W. Griffith. B/W, 190 min. Dunkle Stern, Der. West Germany, 1955. Director: Hermann Kugelstadt. B/W, 95 min. Ein interessanter Nachrmittag. 1952. Austria and West Germany. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 7 min. Endstation Liebe. West Germany, 1957. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 85 min. Ertragreicher Kartoffelanbau. 1951. Austria. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 20 min. Foreign Affair, A. Germany and United States, 1948. Director: Billy Wilder. B/W, 116 minutes. Freundschaft Ohne Grenzen. 1948-1950. Director: Jacques Asseo. 7 min. Frischer Wind in Alten Gassen. West Germany, 1951. Director: Fritz Peter Buch. B/W, 16 min. Grosse Liebe, Die. West Germany, 1942. Director: Rolf Hansen. B/W, 102 min. Gute Ernte. Austria, 1950. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 15 min. Halbstarken, Die. West Germany, 1957. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 96 min. Hansl und die 200000 Kücken (Hansl and the 200.000 Chicks). Austria, 1952. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 14 min. Hunger. Germany, 1948. Director: Stuart Schulberg. B/W, 12 min. Ich und Mr. Marshall (Me and Mr. Marshall). Germany, 1949. Director: Stuart Schulberg. B/ W, 13 min. Keine Sorge Franzl. 1955. Austria and West Germany. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 15 min. Let’s Be Childish. France, 1950. Director: George Freedland. B/W, 19 min. Our Gang. United States, 1922. Director: Robert F. McGowan. B/W, 20 min. Rund um die Milchwirtschaft. 1954. Austria and West Germany. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 26 min. Schwarze Schmach, Die. Germany, 1921. Director: Carl Boese. B/W.

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Shoemaker and the Hatter, The. Great Britain, 1950. Directors: John Halas and Joy Batchelor. Color, 16 min. Story of Koula, The. Greece, 1951. Produced by Vittorio Gallo Films, Rome. B/W. 21 min. Tom Schuler – Cobbler, Statesman. Great Britain, 1952. Director: n.i. Color, 28 min. Totenschiff, Das. West Germany, 1959. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 79 min. Toxi. West Germany, 1952. Director: Robert A. Stemmle. B/W, 79 min. Transatlantique. France, 1953. Directors: Jacques Asseo and Andre Sarrut. Color, 10 min. Traudls Neuer Gemüsegarten (Traudl’s New Vegetable Garden). Austria, 1952. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 16 minutes. Triumph des Willens. Germany, 1935. Director: Leni Reifenstahl. B/W, 114 min. Trois Hommes au Travail. France, 1951. Director: n.i. Color, 8 min. Why We Fight: Prelude To War. United States, 1943. Director: Frank Capra. B/W, 53 minutes. Wie die Jungen Sungen. Austria, 1954. Director: Georg Tressler. B/W, 25 minutes. Without Fear. Great Britain, 1951. Director: Peter Sachs. Color, 15 minutes.

NOTES

1. The roughly 300 films include newsreel style reports about the economic progress in the Marshall Plan countries, re-enactments of economic success stories due to Marshall Plan aid, docudramas, and animation films. 2. As Brigitte J. Hahn pointed out, while substantial research has been devoted to the impact of American feature films on German (and European) markets, the impact of the weekly news reel reports WELT IM FILM produced by the U.S. and British military governments, and the development of the West-German film industry, documentary films have received surprisingly little attention to understand the complex American reeducation program. See Brigitte J. Hahn, Umerziehung durch Dokumentarfilm? Ein Instrument amerikanischer Kulturpolitik im Nachkriegsdeutschland (1945-1953)(Münster: LIT Verlag, 1997), 6-7. 3. My work on the films of the Marshall Plan draws on the archival work conducted by Linda Christenson in her Marshall Plan Filmography (MPF). Thanks to her continuing support and kind hospitality during various research trips to the National Archives in Washington, DC, I was able to complete this project. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to Eric Christenson, Ed Carter, David Ellwood, Esther Hemsing, Dieter Kosslick, Rainer Rother, Sandra Schulberg, and Georg Tressler, who took time to do interviews regarding their work on or involvement in the production/re-screening of Marshall Plan films. I would also like to thank the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy and Jessica Gienow-Hecht, who organized the international conference “Culture and International History IV” in December 2009. This article is dedicated to the late Georg Tressler. 4. See Hans Tuch, “Communicating with the World. The U.S. Government’s Practice of Public Diplomacy,” A Study prepared for the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, DC, 1989. p. 13. Quoted in Manuela Aguilar, Cultural Diplomacy and Foreign Policy. German-American Relations, 1955-1968 (New York: Lang, 1996), 10.

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5. See in this context my article “Propaganda für die Demokratie? Deutschland und das Neue Europa in den Filmen des Marshall Plans,” German Historical Museum Berlin. Film Archive (http://www.dhm.de/filmarchiv/film-im-kontext/propaganda) 6. In order to coordinate foreign information measures, the National Security Council (NSC) confirmed that the State Department would manage existing outlets and initiatives such as the radio system Voice of America, the Fulbright educational and cultural exchanges, as well as the United States Information Service. The backing for the latter was provided in 1948 with the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act (commonly referred to as the Smith- Mundt Act). It laid the groundwork for the collaboration between U.S. official agencies and private groups to implement political, economic, and cultural programs. It supported U.S. foreign policy for “the preparation, and dissemination abroad, of information about the U.S., its people, and its policies, though press, publications, radio, motion pictures, and other information media, and through information centers and instructors abroad.” The ultimate goal was to ensure “a better understanding of the U.S. in other countries and to increase mutual understanding.” U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act, January 1949, Public Law 402, 80th Congress, 2nd Session, 62 Stat. 6. Quoted in Liam Kennedy and Scott Lucas, “Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy,” American Quarterly 57.2 (2005): 309-333. 313. 7. See in this context Hans-Jürgen Schröder, “Marshall Plan Propaganda in Austria and Western Germany,” in Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dieter Stiefel, eds., The Marshall Plan in Austria (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 212-246, 214. 8. Ibid. 18. In addition, anthropologist Margaret Mead explored at the same time efforts to facilitate cultural transformation by using food as a means to trigger feelings of acceptance and gratitude. See Margaret Mead, “Food and Feeding in Occupied Territory,” Public Opinion Quarterly 7 (1943): 618-628. 9. These national variants display not only the unavoidable presence of American culture but tell different stories of reception. Cultural critic Rob Kroes recognized and traced back similar effects in other media contexts in postwar Europe. See Rob Kroes, “Americanization: What are we talking about?” Cultural Transmissions and Receptions. American Mass Culture in Europe, in Rob Kroes, Robert W. Rydell, Doeko F.J. Bosscher, eds., (Amsterdam: VU Press, 1993), 302-318, 313. 10. The efforts of winning the hearts and minds of the former enemy are concerned with the relation of information and power. The US finds itself in a competitive situation in which the goals and benefits for both sides need to be communicated. As Joseph Nye Jr. asserts, the difference between asymmetrical situations, the world of trade and information, is striking. In economic terms, power “goes to those who can afford to hold back or break trade ties, power in information flows goes to those who can edit and authoritatively validate information, sorting out what is both correct and important.” Nye, Joseph S., Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go it Alone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 67. 11. David Ellwood summed up the message of the Marshall Plan neatly in his talk on Oct. 16, 2004 at the Symposium on the “Films of the Marshall Plan” in the Goethe Institute of New York. The change of strategy from aggressive didactic re-education to a more subtle tone of friendly persuasion encouraged an optimistic outlook on the future. It became, in the words of historian David Ellwood, “the biggest propaganda effort ever seen in peace time.” Instead of visualizing the moral and political failures of the past or addressing questions of guilt, the promise “you too can be like us” set the tone for a utopian language of a United States of Europe. See my report “Selling Democracy – Winning the Peace: Die Marshall-Plan-Filme in New York,” Filmdienst/Rheinischer Merkur Spezial zur 56. Berlinale (2005): 16-17. See also my article “You too can be like us! Friendly Persuasion, Self-Americanization, and the Utopia of a

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New Europe” in Rainer Rother, ed., Selling Democracy / Friendly Persuasion (Berlin: DHM, 2006), 35-46. See also David Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar Reconstruction (London and New York: Longman, 1992). 12. The chief officers of the film unit in the information and film sections in Paris knew that democratic persuasion had to be treated with particular skill and care considering the harsh propaganda war lead by Minister Josef Goebbels. For example, the logo of the European Reconstruction Program “ERP” was supposed to appear in a subtle manner only once every reel of 20 minutes. For a detailed evolution of the propaganda efforts the guidelines in a similar media context see Larry Hartenian, Controlling Information in U.S. Occupied Germany, 1945-1949. Media Manipulation and Propaganda (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). 13. For a description of the various channels of distribution of the 16mm films refer to Al Hemsing’s article “The Marshall Plan’s European Film Unit, 1948-1955: A Memoir and Filmography,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television14 (1994): 269-297. 14. Based on information collected for the Historical Division Office of the Executive Secretary, Office of the U.S. High Commissioner For Germany in 1951, compiled and explained by Henry Pilgert in The History of the Development of Information Services Through Information Centers and Documentary Films (1951). Chart by F. Mehring. 15. See Linda Christenson’s archival compilation “Marshall Plan Filmography,” 17 July 2010. URL: http://www.marshallfilms.org/mpfdetail.asp 16. In the animation film Tom Schuler – Cobbler, Statesman (1952), the success story of a shoemaker turned delegate to the first American congress is on display. In some cases, the ideological counterpart to the American efforts in cultural diplomacy is rendered visible. Compared to the emphasis on technological wizardry and entertaining transcultural encounters in The Shoemaker and the Hatter, the anti-Communist-themed animation film Without Fear (1951) differs in its ideological overtone due to a more abstract and darker visual language. 17. Regarding the controversial focus on future oriented therapeutic encouragement of democratic behaviour while largely blending out reflections on WWII and the Holocaust see Jeanpaul Goergen’s excellent article “Blick nach vorne: Re-orientation-Filme unter HICOG 1949-1952,” in Ursula Heukenkamp, ed., Schuld und Sühne: Kriegserlebnis und Kriegsdeutung in Deutschen Medien der Nachkriegszeit (1945-1961) (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001), 415-428. 18. Interview with Georg Tressler conducted by Linda and Eric Christenson and Frank Mehring in Berlin on February 12, 2004. Published on Witnesses to Austria and the Marshall Plan: Interviews 1993-1996 with Austrians. Audio-CD prepared by Eric and Linda Christenson with the assistance from Christoph Höllriegl for the 2008 conference Images of the Marshall Plan: Film Photographs, Exhibits, Posters. May 19-20, 2008. The artistic liberties, which Tressler enjoyed regarding potential themes and narratives, had to be played down when the American audience was informed about the Marshall Film Program. In his Article “Of All People” from 1949, the head of the Marshall Plan film unit at the time, Stuart Schulberg, implies total control over the film units. The trajectory in Germany was twofold: ideological and aesthetic manipulation. See Stuart Schulberg, “Of All People,” Hollywood Quarterly, 4, 2 (Winter, 1949): 206-208. 19. Other films by Tressler include Gute Ernte (1950), Ertragreicher Kartoffelanbau (1951), Ein interessanter Nachmittag (1952), Rund umdie Milchwirtschaft (1954), or Keine Sorge Franzl (1955). For an analysis of gender specific depictions in Tressler’s Gute Ernte see Ramón Reichert, Im Kino der Humanwissenschaften: Studien zur Medialisierung wissenschaftlichen Wissens (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007), 240-241. 20. The United States had a vital interest in creating strong Austrian allies. Like in Germany, US- American troops were stationed in large numbers in Austria after World War II; the

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metropolitan centers Viennaand Berlin were divided into four occupation sectors respectively. Political de-Nazification and cultural re-education went hand in hand. The establishment of a new international school in Vienna in 1954 proved to be a welcome topic for a film which would qualify to be financially supported from the United States. 21. The terminology of psychological warfare was transformed from the blatant reference of “propaganda” to neutral sound expressions such as “persuasion”, “communication”, and “information.” Sproule analyses the transformation from “propaganda” to “communication” by analyzing the emerging field of communication under sociologist Bernard Berelson, Robert Leigh, Paul Lazarfeld, and Harold Innis. See J. Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 218-222. In this context see also Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda. The Everyday Use of and Abuse of Persuasion Rev. ed. (New York: W.H. Freeman, 2002). See also James Coms and Dan Nimmo, The New Propaganda: The Dictatorship of Palaver in Contemporary Politics (New York: Longman, 1993). See also Michael Sproule, Propagandaand Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 22. Schulberg understood the peculiar ideological situation in Germany. “The U.S. documentary program is designed primarily, of course, for the political, social, and economic reorientation of the German people. A secondary aim, however, has been the reorientation of German short-film producers. Here, as in so many other fields, we have bumped into the traditional German lack of political and social initiative. Too many of our licensed producers are still dedicating themselves to “Schönheit über alles,” a propensity which brings forth “Kulturfilme” rather than documentaries [“People” 208]. Despite his professional background, multilingual competence, and cultural sensitivity, Schulberg’s efforts failed at the beginning, too. A case in point is his first production “Hunger” from 1948. It portrayed the terrible living conditions in Europe after World War II following a two-part strategy: to inform the German population about the havoc they brought to their neighbouring countries and to contextualize their frustrating situation with those of British, French, Greek, or Italian people. Schulberg utilized Third Reich propaganda material to identify Nazi leaders as the cause of ongoing economic and social crises. Images of marching soldiers before the war are contrasted with destroyed cities after 1945. The film displayed great technical skill, effectively employed super-impositions, and featured an excellent audio-visual dramaturgy. 23. “It is amazing what people are willing to try out. Oh well, the proof of pudding is in the eating. Maybe this is the solution to accomplish a better understanding in this world.” Translation F. Mehring. 24. As Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria points out, the debates in the United States about the future of dark-skinned children in Germany were also dominated by ideology and exaggeration. For example, news reports claimed that “almost half a million black children” were treated in an inhuman way. See Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria, Zwischen Fürsorge und Ausgrenzung: Afrodeutsche „Besatzungskinder“ im Nachkriegsdeutschland (Berlin: Metropol, 2002), 167. Regarding the evaluation of Afro-German children and their chances of successfully integrating into West German society see the report of Hermann Ebeling, Das Problem der deutschen Mischlingskinder: Zur zweiten Konferenz der World Brotherhood über das Schicksal der farbigen Mischlingskinder in Deutschland. Nachdruck aus der Monatsschrift für Pädagogik, Bildung und Erziehung, 7 (1954): 612-630. 26. See Ingrid Bauer, ed., “Welcome Ami Go Home“: Die Amerikanischen Besatzung in Salzburg 1945-1955 : Erinnerungslandschaften aus einem Oral History Projekt (Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet, 1998). 27. See Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 74.

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29. For a critical overview of African American caricatures on popular culture see Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 7. 30. On early popular culture uses of the coon character see R.W. Rydell’s article in this issue. 31. Interview with Georg Tressler conducted by Linda and Eric Christenson and Frank Mehring in Berlin on February 12, 2004. 32. Document 23, Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.), Motion Picture Branch, ‘Operation Report’, March 21, 1949. Box 242, Record Group 260, Records of the United States Occupation Headquarters, World War II, GAD-Suitland. Lawrence H. Suid, ed., Film and Propaganda in America: A Documentary History , 4 vols. (New York, Westport, London: Greenwood Press, 1991), Vol. 4. 58. 33. In her detailed case study of the city of Baumholder, Maria Höhn has pointed out that inter- racial encounters had caused heated discussions about decorum and questionable sexual relationships in occupied Germany. Particularly in 1954, popular magazines featured photos of black GIs dancing or embracing blonde German women. The reports combined voyeurism with moral finger pointing. See Maria Höhn, Amis, Cadillacs und “Negerliebchen,” in particular pp. 206 and 329. 34. The photo taken by a UPI reporter on December 21, 1956 (one day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Montgomery’s segregated bus system illegal) shows a somber Rosa Park on a school bus sitting in front of a white man (reporter Nicholas C. Chriss) in black dress. 35. I investigate the connection between process of democratization and the Civil Rights Movement in detail in my monograph The Democratic Gap: Transcultural Confrontations of German Immigrants and the Promise of American Democracy (Heidelberg: [forthcoming 2012]). 36. In a way, the films document what Rob Kroes defined as “Europe’s inner contradictions,” namely the struggle between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. See Rob Kroes, “Imaginary Americas in Europe’s Public Space,” in Alexander Stephan, ed., The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 337-360. 354. 37. The African American press used reports regarding a growing tolerant society within the lines of former enemies to criticize the situation at home. The general notion was summed up in the impression that democracy had more meaning in the former capital of Nazi fascism than in the American South. In the late 1940s, the Pittsburgh Courier ran similar articles announcing on the front page that few GIs were eager to return to the United States. Compared to their white fellow occupation forces, African American soldiers developed a special sensitivity regarding the respect they received from people in Germany. The appreciative responses from Germans, who seemed to downplay racial differences in favor of racial tolerance, reaffirmed not only their American identity but also generated a new sense of self-respect. Heide Fehrenbach emphasizes that Germany had not become a “racial paradise.” Rather, the elevated economic status and socio-political power of the occupational forces determined responses of respect and (relative) friendliness among Germans (Fehrenbach, 37). For an analysis of the function of the re-education program overseas and the segregation in the American South see e.g. Martin Klimke, “The African American Civil Rights Struggle and Germany, 1945-1989,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute (Washington, D.C., Fall 2008): 91-106 (in particular 95-98).

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ABSTRACTS

Marshall Plan films played a crucial role in US cultural diplomacy. This paper will analyze how European film makers of the Marshall Plan used docudramas to envisage a multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan “young Europe” free from the political baggage of the past.

INDEX

Keywords: cosmopolitanism, cultural diplomacy, democratization., documentary film, Marshall Plan, reeducation

AUTHOR

FRANK MEHRING Freie Universität, Berlin

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Making a homefront without a battlefront: The manufacturing of domestic enemies in the early Cold War culture

Jean-Paul Gabilliet

1 Although the Cold War was an undeclared conflict without actual battlefront one of its earliest charcteristics was the emergence in the United States of a homefront-based “war culture” targetting domestic enemies. 1947 witnessed the rise in news media of anxieties over alleged threats to domestic stability: in the first few months of the year, a Crime Scare reactivating pre-war concerns about the Mob and, in the summer, the first reported UFO sightings. In both cases the media and public responses to these events evidenced a collective interest triggered by news stories that singled out exaggerated or fictitious domestic threats and produced scapegoats (ethnic mobsters and alleged extra-terrestrial visitors) that implicitly confirmed the Americans’ perception of their country as an embattled homefront.

2 In 1945 most Americans looked forward to the postwar time as an age when stability and prosperity would finally thrive after the fifteen-year-long hiatus of the Depression and Second World War. The hardships of the 1930s, which were very real — unemployment hit a quarter of the white working population at the worst time of the depression — while the social changes that became increasingly conspicuous under the Roosevelt administrations, such as women’s employment and juvenile delinquency, fostered collective self-representations of a fragilized and threatened society that could find salvation only in the return to an ideal, if entirely mythical, status quo. The idea that loomed largest in the period’s popular culture was that of an implicit return to normality, to the prosperity of the idealized “Jazz Age” or “Roaring Twenties.” This belief was shored up by the consensus about Americanism, i.e. the equation of American collective identity with a superior moral value system and uniquely abundant American way of life. In its most extreme manichaean expression Americanism was singling out Communism as the epitome of un-Americanism and economic failure while

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subscribing to a neo-Victorian public ethos based on the wholesale promotion of the nuclear family ideal, the sexual division of labor between female homemakers and male breadwinners, and a worldview of “domestic containment” to use Elaine Tyler May’s phrase.1

3 In his classic study The Culture of the Cold War Stephen J. Whitfield documented the rise in post-World War II US culture of a consensual public opinion that prompted Americans to unconditionally believe in the necessity to protect themselves from domestic enemies, a multifarious notion that referred to both American and foreign Communists but also any and all individuals or groups liable to be described as “subversive.” Although the Cold War was not an armed conflict per se but a half- century-long power struggle between two geopolitical blocs it still provides us with a very interesting example of an era in which a country, the United States of America, developed a corresponding “war culture.” This complex notion2 refers to all collective representations correlated to the state of war which a given country experiences at a given time and the practices shaping the social world that stem from it. This definition predicates the prevalence of reality effects: a war culture may arise and grow in a country that is not experiencing warfare on its soil.

4 In this respect the USA may be regarded as the emblematic example of a country where successive war cultures thrived long after it was last ravaged by armed conflict – as in the Revolutionary War (1776-1783), its War of 1812 (1812-1815), following the Civil War (1861-1865), the 1898 Spanish-American War, and the First and Second World Wars – which, though geographically distant conflicts, nevertheless impacted American collective representations by generating mechanisms of enemy identification, homefront-battlefront dialectics, and postwar celebration rituals.3 The specificity of the Cold War in its early phase, i.e. until the Korean War broke out in the summer of 1950, was its ability to fuel a war culture that, in the absence of a clearly identified battlefront, relied on the implicit notion of an endangered homefront threatened by a multipronged fifth column.

5 1947 is considered by most historians of the United States as the year when the Cold War began with the implementation of the “Truman Doctrine” to contain the propagation of world Communism, which give rise to the anti-communist hysteria of the following years. Nevertheless this essentially political periodization deserves to be nuanced in the light of arguably “minor” historical facts which still convey particular significance in the context of cultural history and which will be the focus of the following analysis. 1947 was the year when a low-key Crime Scare occurred in the wake of a renewed surge of media interest in organized crime and when the first UFO sightings were reported in the summer. In both cases these phenomena triggered different public and governmental reactions that can be analyzed in retrospect against the backdrop of the Cold War’s endangered-homefront dynamics. The United States entered the Cold War not only through political agency but also because the American population were mentally disposed, if not predisposed, to enter this momentous phase of their history. As noted at the time, it was the “Age of Anxiety”.

1. The 1947 Crime Scare

6 The Crime Scare publicized by a substantial segment of the American press early in 1947 is forgotten in most US history books. The surge of media interest in organized

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crime that occurred in the first half of the year should be placed in a double context. Since Prohibition (1920-1933) the press had typically described organized crime as a nationwide conspiracy engineered by foreign criminals—essentially Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants. Federal authorities, on the contrary, denied how “organized” it was and insisted – via the influence of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in particular – that the delinquency the country should worry about was really a matter of various examples of “Public Enemy Number One”. The view of a nationwide conspiracy engineered by foreign criminals ironically contradicted the official position of both the New Deal administrators and the FBI itself, which blamed the permanent rise of crime statistics not on ethnic mobsters but on American-born bandits (à la Bonnie and Clyde or John Dillinger). America’s highwaymen and women were presented by federal authorities as former juvenile delinquents produced by the weakening of parental authority, a persistent concern in the traumatic contexts of the Depression and World War II.4

7 The second important contextual element was the then current debate on the nationwide legalization of gambling. Since the late 1930s Americans’ rising purchasing power (following the end of the depression and simultaneous onset of the wartime economy that restricted the availability of consumer durables into the second half of the 1940s) had mechanically led to an increase in illegal gambling. Millions of dollars were spent on off-track race-betting and local lotteries (numbers, policy) thanks to which even the poorest households could hope to hit the jackpot. The huge income thus generated was pocketed by gangsters and partially used to bribe local law enforcement into looking away, partially used for self-serving, communitarian philanthropic projects (in the manner of the old, urban political “machines”). While many in the postwar context called for a moralization of society, the economic arguments voiced by the supporters of legalization ran up against the moral arguments of very well-organized lobbies, such as citizens’ crime commissions or religious associations.5

8 After years of relative discretion organized crime made headlines again in the first days of 1947. According to “The Heirs of Capone,” an article published in the January 13 issue of Newsweek, Al Capone’s criminal empire was once again a hotbed of violence. The Chicago police had made public the 1946 testimony of James M. Ragen, the gangster who controlled Continental Press, one of the illegal wire news services that provided off-track information on dog and horse races. Such services were very lucrative operations for which gangsters were prepared to fight with extreme violence. In his 98-page testimony to the Cook County District Attorney Ragen revealed he had received death threats from members of the former Capone outfit who supported his main competitor Trans-American. This information was all the more sensational and apparently relevant since Ragen was murdered in mysterious circumstances soon after testifying and the two rival news services subsequently merged (not without a great deal of mob violence) under the leadership of Jake Guzik, a former Capone acolyte who had risen in the organization’s ranks since the boss’s demise. On top of this the Newsweek piece described Guzik’s attempt to bribe a Dallas, Texas, sheriff-elect and police lieutenant when he tried to take control of the local gambling scene. According to this story the Chicago Outfit seemed to be back in business with a vengeance. By pure coincidence it was back in the limelight two weeks later: on January 25 Al Capone died of a stroke at the age of 48 in his Palm Beach mansion where he had lived as a recluse since leaving Alcatraz in 1939.6

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9 If newspapers and magazines devoted considerable copy to Capone in February another prominent mobster attracted public attention two months later. In a lengthy article published in two consecutive issues of the weekly muckraker magazine Collier’s in April, Herbert Asbury, a journalist specializing in underworld affairs, presented the career of Frank Costello. Unlike his famous peers Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, this key figure of the New York City mob had remained out of law’s reach since 1926. For a quarter century Costello had methodically constructed the public image of an Italian- American philanthropist with close ties to the local Democratic Party machine — which meant criminal collusion with Tammany Hall’s Irish-controlled patronage system. Asbury’s very well-informed exposé described how for two decades Costello’s exemplary daily life had concealed the behind-the-scenes activities of the crime family formerly led by Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese. The revelations about his life upset Costello so much that—more than a half-century before HBO’s Tony Soprano—he eventually consulted a psychiatrist in 1948.7 But his health issues were minor by comparison with those of his long-time Jewish associate Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who was found murdered in his mistress Virginia Hill’s Beverly Hills home on June 20. Also at issue here was not just lurid gang tales and infighting, but the newer, postwar factor of these criminals’ need to convert illegitimate to legitimate businesses and, while doing so, create new ways to launder illegal profits and secure tax evasion.

10 The attention paid by the media to organized crime in the first half of 1947 had several objective consequences. In popular cultural terms, for instance, the comic book industry experienced a boom in crime titles whereas this genre had been marginally successful since its appearance in 1942.8 This domain had previously been mainly the realm of American movies as the gangster or criminal film, starting with D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), a medium which had virtually monopolized the production and diffusion of criminal legends in twentieth century US popular culture (preceded by American dime novels telling city tales of high life and low life crime in the second half of the nineteenth century).

11 In the political field several significant decisions were made in postwar America regarding crime. The California Legislature finally appropriated funds for a special study group on organized crime first requested by Governor Earl Warren in 1945. In Washington, DC Attorney General Tom Clark’s Justice Department created a so-called “racket squad” to be sent to major cities preparatory to initiating grand jury investigations. Across the country the various crime commissions, local citizens’ groups monitoring underworld activities, developed renewed visibility and started growing in number.9

12 Although underworld activities had never ceased since the highly publicized mob trials of the 1930s — featuring such big names as Capone and Luciano and driven on the East Coast by New York County’s District Attorney Thomas Dewey — the year 1947 witnessed an actual, if subdued, panic about the alleged rebirth of the Mafia. It triggered off a new surge of public concern that eventually culminated in 1950-51 with the then unprecedented media coverage of the Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver’s “Special Senate Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce,” whose televised hearings were the very first politically significant use of the TV screen in US politics.

13 The American public’s post-war responses to the resurgence of organized crime in 1947 call for two remarks. First, note the paradox : the media engaged in a campaign

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touched off by facts of admittedly limited gravity — neither bloodshed nor civilian casualties were deplored as often happened during Prohibition. Second, whereas the view of organized crime as a foreign conspiracy eating away at the US economy was widely disseminated in the press in the 1930s, it was not until the end of the following decade that most Americans responded to the stigmatization of mobsters — next to Communists — as scapegoats of the troubles experienced by US society. (And one should note in passing that there was soon a spill over in this renewed fear about mobsters which was affiliated to a new social anxiety about young, white, middle-class American teenagers becoming juvenile delinquents – as in James Dean’s movie Rebel Without a Cause of 1955.) By the early 1950s the Kefauver Committee, whose actual goal was to serve the Tennessee Senator’s presidential ambitions, managed to instil into US public opinion a view of organized crime as a national conspiracy engineered by foreign gangsters — whereas all independent investigations conducted by journalists or academics underscored the largely local nature of this criminality. In the late 1940s’ Crime Scare the American public seemed less prepared to listen to the truth than to propagandist interpretations diffused by opinion-makers. Both gangsters and Communists were literally reshaped as scapegoats for various societal issues in a period of excessive susceptibility to collective anxieties.

2. The first UFOs

14 Yet even collective anxieties must be put in their historical context.10 Although flying saucers were among the first cultural products of the Cold War era they, unlike mobsters, did not elicit much response from the American public at first. According to a June 25, 1947 Associated Press dispatch, Kenneth Arnold, a young pilot, spotted nine unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier in Washington State at 3 PM the previous day. He estimated the saucer-shaped aircraft were flying at 1,200 mph around 10,000 feet high. In those days when there were no circular airborne vessels, five months before Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in southern California on October 14, Arnold’s sighting sounded perfectly extraordinary. Even more surprising was the multiplication of similar testimonies across the country in the following weeks. In a July 8 statement the US Army announced that a flying disc found by a local farmer at Roswell, New Mexico, had been brought to the local air base. After being shipped to Fort Worth, Texas, for further analysis, the rubber strips, tinfoil, tough paper, sticks and flower tape making up the “disc” turned out to be the remains of a weather balloon. This arguably unimportant incident sparked limited media interest for a few days, just long enough for the local Roswell Daily Record to make a couple of headlines and get the farmer who had discovered the saucer to candidly confess that he had come across the debris by chance and never seen anything resembling a flying saucer.

15 Early in August Jack Wilcox, an FBI agent stationed in Washington State, wrote an official report about alleged sightings of “doughnut-shaped” flying discs off Maury Island near Tacoma on June 21 which, he concluded, were a hoax. On July 30, a few days before Wilcox filed his report, the USAF and FBI had initiated a cooperation program to investigate flying disc sightings after General George Schulgen, a Pentagon high- ranking officer, convinced J. Edgar Hoover that the FBI should interrogate anyone who claimed to have sighted UFOs to ensure they were not Communist sympathizers attempting to touch off collective hysteria by taking advantage of the public’s fear of

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Soviet secret weapons. The un-natural alliance of the military and the Feds petered out in less than two months when Hoover came across a for-your-eyes-only Air Force letter which made it clear that the Army relied on the Bureau to look into the increasingly numerous probable UFO hoaxes while the military intelligence worked on the more “serious” cases. After the FBI unilaterally terminated the cooperation agreement, military investigations into UFO sightings were handed over to “Project Sign,” a program under the supervision of Air Materiel Command (the Army services in charge of research, development, and logistics), which never ruled out any of the three main hypotheses to account for the phenomena—Soviet weapons, ultra-secret US weapons, or extra-terrestrial spaceships.

16 A Gallup poll conducted from July 25 through 30, one month after Kenneth Arnold’s first flying disc sighting, sheds light on the public’s reaction to the enigma that seemed to matter so much to the military. To the question “Have you heard of flying saucers or read about them?” 90% of respondents gave a positive answer. The second question “What do you think these saucers are?” the responses were more diverse : 42% said they did not know what they were, 29% thought they were optical illusions or mirages, 15% believed they were secret US weapons, 10% viewed them as hoaxes, 3% as weather devices, 2% as searchlights on airplanes, and only 1% believed they were Soviet weapons!

17 This poll undermines several present-day preconceptions about the Cold War mindset. First it implies that the hypothesis of alien visitors was not relevant to the general public then—a point that justifies the necessity to qualify the would-be collective panic stirred up by Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast a decade before the first UFO sightings. Hence, US mass media was trumpeting and distorting its own effects. It also suggests that in the summer of 1947, while the United States still had its nuclear monopoly, the fear of secret Soviet weapons was practically non-existent whereas the belief in the existence of advanced US-made weapons was shared by one out of six Americans.

3. Domestic enemies for want of a battlefront

18 What do these phenomena tell us? The feared resurgence of mob violence and the first alleged UFO sightings are perfect examples of the representations that were to structure the Cold War zeitgeist in the coming years. The media’s ostensible rediscovery of the Mafia stimulated anxieties about a foreign domestic enemy engaging in clandestine activities, largely the same anxieties as those the conservative opponents to the New Deal had cultivated since the previous year’s mid-term election campaign ending in a Republican landslide in Congress. As America entered the Cold War and the public was becoming increasingly sensitive to the issue of domestic subversion it was difficult for both FBI and the Truman administration to continue to downplay the hold of organized crime on American society and economy that had been building up since the Twenties — though in a more discreet way since the repeal of Prohibition.

19 In the summer of 1947 the impact of the first alleged UFOs on the American public was at best limited, actually in inverse proportion to the Army intelligence’s concerns about the true nature of “saucers.” Only after 1949 did the number of stories about encounters with extra-planetary aliens start increasing, along with radio shows, movies or comic books dealing with invasions of the planet by Martians and their likes. In US

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cinema alone a few outstanding examples would be the beguiling The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), the chilling movie The Thing (1951), and the truly spooky socio- political scifi thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The chronological discrepancy between the initial phenomenon and its widespread assimilation by popular culture likely results from gradual changes in the American mindset following the ending of the US nuclear monopoly (August 1949), the founding of the People’s Republic of China (October 1949) and the Korean War (summer 1950). This discrepancy may also be understood as culture lag: the difference between the appearance of a true or false phenomenon and the time it takes for a society to catch up and deal with it.

20 Moreover, the flying saucer sightings of 1947 mattered little to the public because Americans had not experienced wartime bombings, unlike their distant European neighbors, but had internalized trust in the United States’ nuclear monopoly after the destructions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Only when the Soviets finally mastered atomic power did flying saucers assume a new significance as vessels supposedly carrying extra-terrestrial weaponry and life-forms. This representation of UFOs seems self-evident to early 21st-century Westerners, particularly those raised on a steady diet of CGI-laced big-budget science-fiction Hollywood movies. But it was foreign to the American public of 1947 who were indoctrinated into dreading a domestic enemy in disguise on US soil rather than unidentified (albeit necessarily alien) foes swooping down from the skies.

21 The scapegoating of genuine and virtual disruptive elements has been a constant in American history, as Michael Rogin demonstrated when he tracked down the recurrence of “political demonology” phenomena in the United States since the country’s origin.11 In this respect the media and public responses to these admittedly minor events of 1947 perpetuated traditional reactions to “sensational” news stories. Beyond their anecdotal and often entertaining dimensions the Crime Scare and UFO sightings of 1947 exemplify how the American early Cold War culture manufactured domestic enemies, either by putting in the limelight actual subversives that had inconspicuously infiltrated the country’s economic and political fabric for decades or by echoing the analysis of inexplicable atmospheric phenomena as possible signs of extra-terrestrial life. In both cases the facts and incidents highlighted by American media were interpreted by the press, the authorities, the public and the popular culture as phenomena that confirmed the implicit necessity for Americans to view their country as an embattled homefront and act accordingly. They were also preludes to the subsequent victimization into the 1950s of writers, academics, artists, intellectuals, homosexuals, essentially all the individuals liable to public stigmatization not because of any crimes they had committed but of their failure to comply with the appearances of the mainstream American way of life.

22 As specifically post-war phenomena the Crime scare and UFO sightings exemplified no fresh start in public paranoia however. They were rather classic collective responses to the emergence of elements potentially disruptive to the national well-being and prospective long-term prosperity. It is worthwhile noting that the temporal anchorings of both issues were poles apart. Mob-related anxieties were rooted in the not-too- distant pre-war past of the Twenties and Thirties and ethnic gangsters had been largely overshadowed by Japanazis as the nation’s most convincing public enemies during the war years. Conversely UFOs, which were not yet futuristic mainstays of popular culture, initally stirred concern mostly among the military whereas the public was still basking

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in the confidence of a perpetual US nuclear monopoly. To make a final comparison the Crime Scare was a resurgence, a sort of collective return of the repressed in which society peered into itself at real bogeymen who had been shunning publicity with what amounted to the active complicity of federal authorities for over fifteen years. The early flying disc sightings, on the contrary, adumbrated future visions of armed menace, in which threats would assume the form of extra-powerful flying weapons instead of invading armies. In sum post-war Americans experienced the transition from hot war to cold war in the context of a permanently reconfigured war culture as they looked inward at organized crime and outward to strange vessels allegedly zooming across the skies.

NOTES

1. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (NY : Basic Books, 1990), 16-36. 2. The notion of war culture (culture de guerre) came into currency among European World War I historians Annette Becker, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, John Horne in the 1990s. Cf. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, “Guerre et cultures de guerre” in Christian Delporte et al. (eds.), Dictionnaire d’histoire culturelle de la France contemporaine (Paris : PUF, 2010), 373-377; Leonard V. Smith, “The ‘Culture de guerre’ and French Historiography of the Great War of 1914-1918,” History Compass 5.6 (2007): 167-179; Pierre Purseigle, “A very French debate. The 1914-18 ‘war culture,’” Journal of War and Culture Studies 1.1 (2008): 9-14. 3. Unsurprisingly similar mechanisms were activated following 9/11. Cf. French historian Bruno Cabanes and journalist Jean-Marc Pitte’s description of the disaster’s early cultural fallout, “Choses vues à Manhattan. Le 11 septembre 2001 et l’émergence d’une culture de guerre,” Esprit 279 (November 2001), 39-48 and the book in which they expanded their analysis, 11 septembre. La Grande Guerre des Américains (Paris : A. Colin, 2003). 4. Claire Bond Potter, War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998), 169-195. 5. William Howard Moore, The Kefauver Committee and the Politics of Crime, 1950-1952 (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1974), 33-41. 6. Moore, The Kefauver Committee, 26-29. 7. Moore, The Kefauver Committee, 29-33. 8. Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2009), 36-37. 9. Moore, The Kefauver Committee, 37-43. 10. The information about the 1947 UFO sightings is drawn from “Eté 1947, l’invention des soucoupes volantes,” chapter 1 of Pierre Lagrange’s La Rumeur de Roswell (Paris : La Découverte, 1996), 13-36. 11. See Michael Rogin’s enlightening collection of political history essays Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987).

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INDEX

Keywords: Al Capone, Cold War, collective anxieties, Estes Kefauver, Frank Costello, homefront, J. Edgar Hoover, Jake Guzik, James M. Ragen., Kenneth Arnold, organized crime, UFOs, war culture

AUTHOR

JEAN-PAUL GABILLIET Université Bordeaux 3

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The Many Meanings of D-Day

Kate Delaney

1 For Americans, June 6, 1944 “D-Day” has come to symbolize World War II, with commemorations at home and abroad. How did this date come to assume such significance and how have the commemorations changed over the 65 years since the Normandy landings? How does D-Day function in U.S. cultural memory and in domestic politics and foreign policy? This paper will look at some of the major trends in D-Day remembrances, particularly in international commemorations and D-Day’s meaning in U.S. and Allied foreign policy. Although war commemorations are ostensibly directed at reflecting on the hallowed past, the D-Day observances, particularly since the 1980s, have also marked new beginnings in both domestic and foreign policy.

2 As the invasion was taking place in June 1944, there was, of course, a great deal of coverage in the U.S. media. The events in Normandy, however, shared the June headlines with other simultaneous developments on the European front including the fall of Rome.1

1. Early Years

3 The very first anniversary of the D-Day landings was marked on June 6, 1945 by a holiday for the Allied forces. In his message to the troops announcing the holiday General Eisenhower stated that “formal ceremonies would be avoided.”2

4 By the time the invasion’s fifth anniversary rolled around in 1949 the day was marked by a “colorful but modest memorial service” at the beach. The U.S. was represented at the event by the military attaché and the naval attaché of the U.S. Embassy in Paris. A French naval guard, a local bugle corps and an honor guard from an American Legion Post in Paris all took part. A pair of young girls from the surrounding villages placed wreaths on the beach, and a U.S. Air Force Flying Fortresses passed over, firing rockets and dropping flowers.3

5 The anniversaries of the early 1950s reflected the tenor of the times, evoking both the economic and military Cold War projects of the U.S. in Europe: the Marshall Plan and NATO. Barry Bingham, head of the Marshall Plan Mission in France, used the occasion

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of the 1950 D-Day commemoration ceremony to praise France’s postwar recovery efforts.4 Held in the middle of the Korean War, the 1952 D-Day commemoration at Utah Beach proved an opportunity for General Matthew D. Ridgway, Supreme Commander Allied Forces in Europe and a D-Day veteran, to speak of U.S. purpose in the Cold War against “a new and more fearful totalitarianism.” He warned the Communist powers not to “underestimate our resolve to live as free men in our own territories….We will gather the strength we have pledged to one another and set it before our people and our lands as a protective shield until reason backed by strength halts further aggression….” Referring to both his status as a D-Day participant and his current role as military commander of NATO, Ridgway pledged: “The last time I came here, I came as one of thousands to wage war. This time I come to wage peace.”5

6 The tenth anniversary of the D-Day landings found President Dwight Eisenhower, who as Commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) had led the Normandy invasion, strolling through a wheat field in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.6 Eisenhower sent a statement to be read at the Utah Beach commemoration ceremony by the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. who was the President’s personal representative at the anniversary events. In contrast to the bellicose remarks of General Ridgway a few years earlier, Eisenhower in 1954 expressed “profound regret” that all of “the members of the Grand Alliance have not maintained in time of peace the spirit of that wartime union.” Eisenhower used this anniversary occasion to recall “my pleasant association with the outstanding Soviet Soldier, Marshall Zhukov, and the victorious meeting at the Elbe of the armies of the West and of the East.”7 A decade later, in preparation for the twentieth anniversary of the D-Day landings, Eisenhower, no longer president, returned to the Normandy beaches in 1963 to film a D-Day TV special for CBS.8

7 In between the tenth and twentieth anniversaries, U.S. domestic interest in the Normandy landings had been stoked by Cornelius Ryan’s 1959 best-seller The Longest Day and the 1962 Hollywood epic that Darryl F. Zanuck produced based on Ryan’s book. The film was also notable for giving separate attention to the contributions of the British and Canadian forces as well as those of the French Resistance. The German actions in Normandy were depicted without demonization. Leading German actors (speaking German) gave voice to the professional military’s criticism of Hitler’s leadership. This empathetic portrayal was an indication perhaps of West Germany’s position in the NATO alliance. Clocking in at 178 minutes and shot in black and white for a documentary feel, The Longest Day boasted a cast that was a Who’s-who of British and American male stars of the era: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Peter Lawford, Sean Connery, Richard Beymer, Red Buttons, Eddie Albert, and teen heart-throbs Fabian, Paul Anka, Tommy Sands and Sal Mineo. This display of bold-face names served to undercut the film’s intended documentary effect as their presence constantly reminded the viewers that they were watching a Hollywood production. Critics pointed out that Zanuck’s attention to period detail in weapons, equipment and language did not carry through to a realistic depiction of combat death and casualties—a charge that could not be laid against Steven Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan a 1998 Hollywood D-Day block-buster.9

8 In spite of this heightened public interest in D-Day, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, absorbed in both his ambitious domestic agenda—including trying to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act-- and the Vietnam War, did not travel to Normandy for the

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twentieth anniversary. Instead he sent General Omar N. Bradley, one of the commanders of the 1944 landings.10

9 For the twenty-fifth anniversary in 1969 President Richard Nixon, focused on Vietnam, issued a boilerplate proclamation, calling the Allied landings in 1944 “‘a historical landmark in the history of freedom.’”11 When the time came for the thirtieth anniversary of D-Day in 1974, Nixon again was too preoccupied to travel to Normandy. Congress had already begun impeachment hearings against him on charges of obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress arising from the Watergate affair. Nixon would resign in August 1974, and Presidential attention for the rest of the 1970s was directed at the aftermath of Vietnam and at new crisis like those involving the U.S. economy, energy, and the seizing of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran. The moment for actively reinvigorating the memory of World War II had not yet arrived.

10 As the G-7 leaders12 gathered in Paris for their meetings at Versailles in early June 1982, President Ronald Reagan made D-Day the focus of his radio broadcast to U.S. audiences on June 5. He also prepared taped remarks on D-Day for broadcast on French television. 13 Although the President himself did not travel to the landing sites in 1982, U.S. First Lady Nancy Reagan paid a three-hour visit to Normandy to mark the thirty-eighth anniversary of D-Day.14 Accompanied by the Defense and Army attachés of the U.S. Embassy in Paris, she laid a wreath at the memorial statue in the U.S. cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer and made some brief remarks to a small crowd: “If my husband were here today, he would tell you how deeply he feels the responsibilities of peace and freedom. He would tell you how we can best insure that other young men on other beaches and other fields will not have to die. And I think he would tell you of his ideas for nuclear peace.”15

2. “Morning Again in America”

11 Two years later on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day in June 1984 her husband President Ronald Reagan would get the chance to personally address those gathered to commemorate the Normandy invasion. But this time the crowd was no longer small. Speaking at the Ranger Monument at Pointe du Hoc at 1:20 p.m. (timed to coincide with the morning TV programs on the U.S. East Coast and designed as part of Reagan’s re- election campaign) President Reagan delivered his now-famous “boys of Pointe du Hoc” address to a television audience of millions as well as to the veterans and Allied leaders gathered on the Normandy coast. In remarks carefully crafted by Peggy Noonan, Reagan first paid tribute to the Ranger veterans, recreating dramatically their heroic deeds in scaling the cliffs: “They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting, only ninety could still bear arms.” He went on to pay tribute to the Allies, mentioning by name “the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Poland's 24th Lancers, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeomen of England's armored divisions, the forces of Free France, the Coast Guard's ‘Matchbox Fleet’ and you, the American Rangers.” Not leaving out Germany and Italy, Reagan spoke of the reconciliation with former enemies “all of whom had suffered so greatly. The United States did its part, creating the Marshall plan to help rebuild our allies and

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our former enemies. The Marshall plan led to the Atlantic alliance -- a great alliance that serves to this day as our shield for freedom, for prosperity, and for peace.” Toward the Russians, Reagan presented two faces.16 First, he lamented: “Some liberated countries were lost. The great sadness of this loss echoes down to our own time in the streets of Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin. Soviet troops that came to the center of this continent did not leave when peace came. They're still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost 40 years after the war.” Then he added: “It's fitting to remember here the great losses also suffered by the Russian people during World War II: 20 million perished…. We look for some sign from the Soviet Union that they are willing to move forward, that they share our desire and love for peace, and that they will give up the ways of conquest.” After his remarks he unveiled two memorial plaques honoring the Rangers.17

12 The Pointe du Hoc speech served as the opening salvo in Reagan’s “morning again in America” re-election campaign. Using snippets from this speech in a popular television advertisement, the campaign transformed a look back at a forty-year-old battle into a new beginning for the nation.18

13 A few hours after the Pointe du Hoc speech Reagan gave another address on Omaha Beach, this time paying special tribute to the efforts of the French Resistance, directing his remarks at President Mitterrand, who had participated in the Resistance. “Your valiant struggle for France did so much to cripple the enemy and spur the advance of the armies of liberation. The French Forces of the Interior will forever personify courage and national spirit.” Reminding Americans and Europeans of the importance of postwar efforts like NATO, he concluded: “Our alliance, forged in the crucible of war, tempered and shaped by the realities of the postwar world, has succeeded. In Europe, the threat has been contained, the peace has been kept.”19

14 Later that same day President Reagan joined President Mitterrand and other Allied leaders (Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands, King Olav V of Norway, King Baudouin I of Belgium, Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg, and Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau of Canada) at Utah Beach. Mitterrand’s remarks stressed reconciliation with Germany: “‘the adversaries of yesterday are reconciled and are building the Europe of freedom.’”20 Chancellor Helmut Kohl had not been invited to the ceremonies, but the day’s events and speeches buttressed a NATO alliance that included (West) Germany.

15 This emphasis on the continuing importance of the NATO alliance was far from accidental. There are been widespread protests in Europe in 1984 over the installation of U.S. Cruise and Pershing missiles in accordance with a 1979 NATO decision. The “family portrait” of the assembled Allies on Utah Beach and the tribute to their absent member Germany sent a signal to publics on both sides of the Atlantic about the continuing commitment to joint defense of “the Europe of freedom.” The 1984 celebrations set a new standard for D-Day commemorations and established a pattern that would be followed (with variations) for the next twenty-five years. By looking at these variations in subsequent years we can monitor changes in transatlantic relations.

3. A New Europe

16 By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day the map of Europe had shifted once again. The Warsaw Pact had dissolved; Germany had reunited; Czechoslovakia had split;

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the Soviet Union was no more. In June 1994 leaders of all the countries that had participated in the invasion gathered at Normandy: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the UK and the U.S. and this year for the first time leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic and Slovakia—a visible symbol of the changed faced of Europe since 1989 and yet another new beginning for the continent. In addition the year marked a generational shift, with the U.S. represented in Normandy by President Clinton who had been born after the end of World War II.

17 Clinton, of course, had a hard act to follow given the iconic status that Reagan’s “boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech had attained over the past decade. He also had the disadvantage of never having served in the military and of having famously avoided serving in the Vietnam War. In a new wrinkle to D-Day celebrations, Clinton, along with Queen Elizabeth and other Allied leaders, sailed from Portsmouth, England to the French coast in a “massive flotilla” accompanied by Lancaster bombers to recreate and commemorate the 1944 invasion.21 In France Clinton participated in four ceremonies marking the anniversary of the landings. In his address at the American cemetery he turned his seeming disadvantage of lack of WWII experience into an advantage as he stressed the ties between generations: “‘We are the children of your sacrifice,’” he told the veterans of D-Day. “‘The flame of your youth became freedom's lamp, and we see its light reflected in your faces still, and in the faces of your children and grandchildren….We commit ourselves, as you did, to keep that lamp burning for those who will follow. You completed your mission here. But the mission of freedom goes on; the battle continues. The `longest day' is not yet over.’”22

18 D-Day anniversaries were not only occasions for major political gatherings and speeches, but had also become important tourist attractions and income generators for Western Europe, especially France, with Normandy hotels and guest houses fully booked for early June. In 1994 France alone hosted more than 350 events commemorating the D-Day landings. Many specialized tours were designed for veterans and their families. The QE2 even offered a cruise to Cherbourg featuring 1940s big bands, Vera Lynn and Bob Hope.23 Across the Channel, thousands of veterans and their families were also welcomed at anniversary events in England.24

19 Ten years later for the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day President George W. Bush faced a double challenge: how to repair the Alliance after the visible rupture over the Iraq War and how to compete with the memory of Ronald Reagan, whose exquisitely timed death on June 5, 2004 insured that the Great Communicator’s 1984 D-Day speeches would be replayed prominently on June 6, making comparisons between the two presidents unavoidable. The attack on Iraq in 2003 had become a point of contention among NATO Allies, with France and Germany refusing to support the war. French President Chirac as host of the Normandy commemorations invited German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to the commemorations held in Caen and Arromanche, the first time a German leader had been included in the celebrations.25 Although Chirac’s predecessor Mitterrand had gone out of his way to emphasize conciliation with Germany in his remarks twenty years before, on the fiftieth anniversary in 1994 Chancellor Helmut Kohl had not been invited to attend any Normandy events. At the time Kohl remarked, “There was ‘no reason’ for a chancellor of Germany ‘to celebrate when others mark a battle in which tens of thousands of Germans met miserable deaths.’” Schröder declared that his invitation to the 2004 Normandy commemoration “meant that

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‘Germany's long journey to the West has now been completed,’”26 signaling a new beginning for German identity within the community of Western nations.

20 The 1944 Normandy invasion had been, of course, an attack on German forces occupying France, but Schröder had been allied with Chirac in opposing the 2003 Iraq War. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, who supported the Iraq War, on the other hand, was not invited to the 2004 celebrations. However, Tony Blair, Bush’s close ally in the Iraq War, was there along with Queen Elizabeth. President Vladimir Putin of Russia also attended-- another first. During the Cold War the Soviet Union had not been included in the Normandy celebrations, in spite of its contributions to the Allied victory in World War II. Leaders and royalty from Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia and New Zealand also participated in the sixtieth anniversary events.

21 President Bush addressed the gathered veterans and heads of state at the Normandy American Cemetery above Omaha Beach, with a speech that focused on recounting the events of 1944 and on paying tribute to those who had participated in the invasion. “Mr. Bush said those who faced the hail of German machine gun fire and artillery, some who made it up over the cliffs and some who did not, had served ‘the noblest of causes’ and would never be forgotten.”27 He turned toward President Chirac to add “And America would do it again, for our friends.” After the speech Chirac warmly clasped Bush’s hand.28

22 Bush in his remarks also reminded the Allies present that the “nations that battled across the continent would become trusted partners in the cause of peace, and our great alliance of freedom is strong, and it is still needed today,” a not-so-subtle hint to the French about the need for solidarity in the War on Terror. At the same event President Chirac vowed that “France will ‘never forget what it owes to America, its friend forever.’”29 Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, the star and director of Saving Private Ryan, were among the crowd—a mixing of real veterans with those who represented them in Hollywood.

4. A New Generation

23 In 2009 with the numbers of surviving WWII veterans drastically shrinking, heads of state again returned to Normandy to mark D-Day—the 65th anniversary of the landings. If President Chirac had made history by inviting Chancellor Schröder and President Putin, President Sarkozy made headlines when it was learned that Queen Elizabeth had not been invited to the anniversary celebrations. French and British officials traded charges about where the blame lay and in the end, after intervention by the Obama administration, Prince Charles attended the Normandy commemoration along with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.30 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper also took part. The generational shift first evident in 1994 was now complete. With the absence of Queen Elizabeth, all the Allied leaders taking part in the ceremonies had been born after World War II and had no direct personal memories to contribute. A fresh generation had assumed command, but continued to honor the past while celebrating the new. President Obama “invoked his deceased grandfather, ‘who arrived on this beach six weeks after D-Day and marched across Europe in Patton’s Army.’ And he introduced his great-uncle, Charles Payne, who fought in Germany and traveled here from Chicago.”31 More than had his predecessors Obama also paid extensive tribute to

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America’s World War II home front “On farms and in factories millions of men and women worked three shifts a day, month after month, year after year. Trucks and tanks came from plants in Michigan and Indiana, New York and Illinois. Bombers and fighter planes rolled off assembly lines in Ohio and Kansas, where my grandmother did her part as an inspector.”32 With President Sarkozy beaming on screen behind President Obama throughout the U.S. President’s remarks, the 2009 showcased a visibly warmer Franco-American relationship than had been on display five years earlier. In his own remarks, Sarkozy noted: “The great totalitarian systems of the 20th century have been defeated. The threats that loom over the future of humanity today are of a different kind, but they are no less serious.”33 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was so dazzled to be in the presence of the new American president that he made the Freudian slip of referring to Omaha Beach as “Obama Beach.”34

24 Placing himself in the tradition that had started with President Reagan, Obama acknowledged, “I’m not the first American President to come and mark this anniversary, and I likely will not be the last.”35 Over the twenty-five years since the invention of the Normandy “summits,” these events have become useful indicators of the state of the transatlantic relationship as well as of intra-European alignments. As the number of WWII veterans decreases to the point of elimination and the ties of the participating Allied leaders to the events become ever more attenuated, the meanings of D-Day become more about the present than the past. But looking back at even the early celebrations of the 1950s where the Marshall Plan and NATO were showcased we see that this has always been the case. The D-Day commemorations simultaneously honored the past while marking new beginnings in domestic politics and transatlantic relations.

NOTES

1. Marianna Torgovnick, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 23. Torgovnick also points out (pp. 40-41) that the total U.S. casualty figures for D- Day were 3581, 2403 of whom were killed. These numbers are much lower than those for some other WWII battles that have not acquired D-Day’s iconic status. 2. “D-Day Anniversary to be holiday for troops,” The New York Times, 3 June 1945, 2. 3. “Normandy Marks D-Day Anniversary,” The New York Times, 6 June 1949, 1. 4. “Recovery in France is Hailed,” The New York Times, 6 June 1950, 2. 5. “Reds Warned by Ridgway to Avoid War,” Washington Post, 7 1952, 3. 6. “Eisenhower Day Serene,” The New York Times, 6 June 1954, 30. 7. “Eisenhower Cites D-Day Solidarity,” New York Times, 6 June 1954, 30. 8. Val Adams, “Eisenhower going to Normandy to film D-Day program,” The New York Times, 15July . 1963, 43. 9. Robert Brent Toplin, “Hollywood’s D-Day from the Perspective of the 1960s and 1990s,” in: Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds. , Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008) 306.

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10. “British Ceremonies on Observances of 20th D-Day Anniversary,” Washington Post, 4 June 1964, A8. 11. “D-Day Noted,” The New York Times, 1 June1969, 34. 12. The G-7, of course, included nations that fought on both sides of WWII: U.S., France, Britain and Canada representing the Allied forces on D-Day and Germany, Italy and Japan the Axis Powers in WWII. 13. Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe de Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) 4-5 14. Nancy Reagan had received much negative criticism during the first year of the Reagan presidency for wearing designer dresses and spending large sums redecorating the White House (including purchasing a new china service) during a recession. The D-Day program as well as her visit to the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris would serve to polish the First Lady’s public image and divert the focus from fashion during the Reagans’ time in France. 15. Enid Nemy, “Mrs. Reagan Visits U.S. Cemetery in Normandy on D-Day Anniversary,” The New York Times, 7 June 1982, D7. 16. These two approaches towards the Soviet Union reflect an internal administration debate over the address. See Brinkley, 156. 17. URL: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/60684a.htm (accessed 3/20/2010) 18. Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) 161. 19. URL: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/60684b.htm (accessed 3/20/2010) 20. John Vinocur, “Mitterrand Stresses Conciliation,: New York Times, 7 June 1984, A12. 21. William Tuohy, “Allies Sail for D-Day plus 50,” Los Angeles Times, 6June 1994. 22. Jeffrey Birnbaum, “Reporter’s Notebook: Clinton, Facing Comparison with Reagan’s D-Day Speech Rises to occasion,” The Wall Street Journal, 7 June 1994, A16. 23. Mary Blume, “Normandy’s 50th Anniversary Invasion,” The New York Times, 22 January 1994. 24. William Schmidt, “The D-Day Tour: Reminiscences,” The New York Times, 4 June 1994. 25. Schröder, however, was not present for President Bush's address at the American Cemetery. 26. Richard Bernstein, “Europa--So far, only silence for a remarkable visit,” The New York Times, 28 May 2004. 27. Richard W. Stevenson, “In Normandy, Bush Honors Veterans of D-Day,” The New York Times, 6 June 2004. 28. Carl M. Cannon, “Obama in Good Company on D-Day,” Politics Daily URL: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/06/06/obama-in-good-company-on-d-day/(accessed 3/20/2010) 29. Richard W. Stevenson, “In Normandy, Bush Honors Veterans of D-Day,” New York Times, 6 June 2004. 30. Andrew Pierce, “Prince of Wales to attend 65 th D-Day Anniversary,” The Daily Telegraph, 2 June 2009. 31. Jeff Zeleny, “Obama Hails D-Day Heroes at Normandy,” The New York Times, 6 June 2009. 32. URL: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-d-day-65th- anniversary-ceremony (accessed 3/21/2010) 33. Jeff Zeleny, “Obama Hails D-Day Heroes at Normandy,” The New York Times, 6 June 2009. 34. Ibid. 35. URL: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-d-day-65th- anniversary-ceremony (accessed 3/21/2010)

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ABSTRACTS

This essay investigates what D-Day has symbolized for Americans and how and why its meaning has changed over the past six decades. While the commemoration functions differently in U.S. domestic and foreign policies, in both cases it has been used to mark new beginnings. Ronald Reagan launched his “morning again in America” 1984 re-election campaign from the Pointe du Hoc, and the international commemorations on the Normandy beaches since 1990 have been occasions to display the changing face of Europe and the realignment of allies.

INDEX

Keywords: D-Day, War commemorations, World War II

AUTHOR

KATE DELANEY Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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The power of rhetoric and the rhetoric of power: Exploring a tension within the Obama presidency

Rob Kroes

1. The power of rhetoric

1 Of Bill Clinton it has been said that he was America’s first black president due to his apparent affinity with America’s black population. Of Barack Obama it might be said that he is America’s first “white president of color.” From the first moment he entered public life, none of the templates that Americans use to handle the racial and ethnic diversity of their compatriots seemed to apply to Obama. He seemed equally at ease presenting himself as a person of white origin or as the son of an immigrant from Kenya. His life history and formative experiences allowed him to affiliate with black and white, with poor and rich, with the world of Christianity and Islam. He had spent part of his life growing up in those different worlds. A leading black intellectual in America, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, recognized these qualities in the early days of Obama’s rise as a political phenomenon: “Most whites don’t feel threatened by him. Even moderate racists – not the hard core, obviously – can say ‘I like this guy.’ For the first time they feel at ease with a black man: he gives them the feeling that they are not racists.”1 Patterson himself, an immigrant from the Caribbean, like so many black immigrants feels difference from and distance toward America’s native black population. Although perceived and treated as just another black person by America’s white population, black immigrants elude such profiling. They are more socially mobile than the average American-born blacks and have more often reached positions of leadership, such as Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, Stokeley Carmichael in the 1960s, or Colin Powell in the late 20th century.

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2 Obama resembles such immigrant blacks in the greater freedom of affiliation he may have felt was open to him. His time as a community developer on Chicago’s South Side where he worked for poor whites and blacks helped him give sense and purpose to his life. Yet at the same time he moved in leading intellectual circles at the University of Chicago. His sense of affiliation with America’s black population may be reflected in his choice of a marriage partner, Michelle Obama. Unlike her husband she stems from what Dutch historian Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt once called “the people that walk in darkness,” the title to his history of America’s black population.2 It is a fitting image for a population group that in its collective memory of slavery, repression, and the struggle for emancipation and civil rights has indeed come to resemble a nation unto itself. But to the extent that this shared recollection of white racism, of exploitation and discrimination, still feeds a reservoir of hatred and anger among America’s blacks, Obama forms no part of it. The test came when in the run-up to the presidential election, at the height of the campaign, Obama’s trusted friend and confidant, black preacher Jeremiah Wright, raged against America’s sustained racism, domestically and internationally. Obama felt forced to respond in an impressive public address in Philadelphia, reminding all Americans of the high ideals that from its inception had inspired the American republic.3 At the same time Obama reminded Americans of the long history of compromise between these ideals and the practice of slavery. Obama used his oratorical mastery to call on Americans not to use their history as a source of division, inspiring the sort of “incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.” This, like many other of Obama’s public addresses, is still accessible on the Internet. It is this use of the Internet as a medium of mass communication that is typical of Obama’s political style. He has radically broken with the mindless reduction of political debate to the mere sound and fury of inane “sound bites.” He takes his time to develop his thoughts, thus inviting his audience to take its time for reflecting on them.

3 An illustrious precursor like President Abraham Lincoln, past master in America´s rhetorical tradition, had experienced the problem of slavery as posing the central dilemma in his political life. He famously found the rhetorical language to express this dilemma, as in his “House Divided ” speech (a “house,” that is to say the Union, the United States, will not stand if it is divided against itself, half slave, and half free). Lincoln, as a statesman who found himself caught on the horns of this dilemma, felt forced to find a compromise solution between two ideals, of emancipating the slave population and of preserving the Union. Tragically torn between the two, he reached the conclusion that preserving the Union, in order to save America´s Great Experiment in democratic self-government, must weigh in more heavily than the emancipation of the slaves. As he put it: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”4Addressing his democratic audience Lincoln offered no easy answers. Rather than use the power of public speech to delude his audience with rousing visions of a beckoning future, he invited it to ponder the complexities of the present. While evoking the inspirational history of American ideals, in the grand manner of the American Jeremiad as Sacvan Bercovitch called it, he publicly shared his inner torment in the face of the ethical dilemmas that confronted him.5

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4 Like Lincoln, Obama has proved a master of public speech. In his relatively short public career, he has used the power of rhetoric to bring messages of hope and new beginnings, inspiring people to follow and support him. But like Lincoln, he also used his rhetorical mastery, during the campaign as well as in his presidency, publicly to account for the dilemmas he confronted and the conscientious choices he saw had to be made. Yet, in politics, as Lincoln was well aware, rhetorical visions in the end always have to face the test of reality, of practical action. Rhetoric at some point must translate into action if it is not to lose its power of persuasion. This clear and present danger became manifest shortly after Obama´s accession to the presidency. Soon it appeared that the enthusiasm he had inspired among his followers turned into disillusionment, a sense that he was no more than a “faux liberal.” At the time of his Cairo speech, in June 2009, before a student audience but addressed at the larger world of Islam, this was the general response among the audience: the words were fine, but where were the actions?6 When Obama first entered the fray of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, demanding radical change in the way Israel behaved in the occupied Palestinian territories, the general impression prevailed that Israel had quickly called Obama´s bluff. Ever since Obama has appeared unable to face up to the entrenched lobbies and veto groups, at home or abroad, preventing even minimal progress toward a future so eloquently evoked in speech. More generally, when held up against the daring visions outlined in speech after speech, in areas of foreign or domestic policy, Obama´s actions were deemed wanting. Rather than riding the groundswell of support that carried him into the White House, he has seemed to be leading from behind, leaving it to entrenched power balances in Washington politics or in the international arena to work out compromise solutions for him to endorse. Too rarely, it seemed, did he choose to rise above the din of partisan votes and voices to speak in his own voice, addressing the nation to rekindle the enthusiasms among the larger populace that had carried him into the White House. Too often did he seem to leave the field where public opinion plays itself out to the demolition crews spurred on by right-wing media and an obstructionist opposition, in Congress and in the country.

5 There is an enigmatic side to Obama in all this. While patiently riding out storms, he has managed to build a solid record of legislative achievement. If patience is one of Obama’s strengths he nonetheless may have neglected to exert his talents in setting the terms of public debate, in constructing a winning narrative to present and explain his achievements. Patience is a quality direly lacking among the larger population whose mood is set by frenzy and urgency better served, it seems, by sloganeering Tea Party populists, promising to “take America back.” This rampant anti-intellectualism leaves little room for Obama to keep his Olympian cool. Spurred into rhetorical action by the 2010 mid-term elections his rather lame contribution to public discourse was his call that having worked hard to change the guard, now was the time to guard the change.7 It didn’t do much to change the terms of public debate.

6 Yet when the occasion presents itself, Obama can rise to it and eloquently address the dilemmas of power as he perceives them. An impressive example is his speech in Oslo on his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oslo Nobel Committee’s decision had met with widespread cynical glee. Here was a man receiving a peace prize who shortly before had decided in favor of a military surge in Afghanistan. Obama did not share in the cynicism when accepting the prize. In a characteristic, conscientious speech he accounted for the path he had chosen to follow between the goal of peace and

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understanding in the world and the rival goal of national security in a world where good and evil are locked in combat. There were those who heard echoes of George W. Bush, who had turned “evil” into a facile sound bite and used it as a sufficient explanation of what moves the terrorists of this world. Obama on the other hand invites further reflection and intellectual struggle with the problem of evil. One may of course beg to differ and not quite see Obama´s strategic decisions as serving America´s security interests in the long run. Yet, simply looking at the time for deliberation Obama had taken for reaching his decision, weighing a great number of policy options against each other, show that he is a different political animal than his predecessor in the latter’s unseemly rush to invade Iraq. It would be hard to see Obama as a pliable puppet in the hands of entrenched power groups in Washington.

7 At the top of his rhetorical mastery, in speeches concerning racism as a divisive force in American society, or the use of military power in foreign policy, Obama finds his place in America´s great tradition of the statesman as public orator and master of rhetoric. In that role he explains, renders account, and invites the public to reflect. Obama is keenly aware of this long line of history, using it to place himself squarely in an American political tradition.8 Repeatedly he takes his cue from inspiring predecessors. Taking this inspirational role Obama not only addresses his fellow Americans, inciting them to political participation. He also speaks to the world, rekindling an enthusiasm for American leadership after the damage done to it during eight long years of the Bush presidency. When still a candidate vying for the presidency Obama gave a speech in Berlin, on 24 July, 2008, before a crowd of thousands whose lost hopes for America Obama seemed to restore and personify.9 In fine rhetorical balance he brought together a reference to the Berlin Wall with Lincoln´s metaphor of the house divided. It brought the audience in mind of Kennedy´s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech delivered during his visit to Berlin in the days of the Cold War. Obama wanted to present himself as the embodiment of an America with which Europeans could once again feel affiliated: “The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand”. Thus in a city not long before divided by a wall – “divided against itself”- Lincoln´s words assumed a poignant resonance, and called forth an association with his “half slave, half free.” When words like these come from the mouths of Americans, the danger is always of an implied missionary zeal, of interventionist intentions even, particularly today after the cynical misuse of similar language to justify military adventurism by the Bush administration. Obama is too much like Lincoln in his awareness of the tragic tension between politics and ethics, between idealism and realism. When confronting such hard choices he is rather a man of steel, not the weed that waves with the tides. He does not hesitate to speak his mind on matters of great concern to him, whether it is bankers and their obscene remunerations, or the failing security apparatus in America. The Homeland security bureaucracy was in for a hiding, when Obama publicly argued that it is incapable of connecting the dots on a map of imminent threats and simply reproduces the intelligence failures of pre-9/11 days. Bush has never been willing to own up to such failures. His response was simply to pile on new bureaucratic layers, compounding the problem.10

8 Even his most fervent supporters must have felt for Obama when he acceded to the presidency in view of the shambles, domestically and internationally, that the Bush administration had left in its wake. The discomfiture of an economic system, wars without end, the continuing threat of terrorism, an unprecedented level of partisan division, were the dish that was set before the new president. No way he could hope to

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start with a clean slate. Probably the greatest paradox that Obama had to face up to was the deeply ingrained anti-statism among Americans. According to opinion polls majorities among them wish for better health care, better education, better infrastructure, yet are opposed to concerted government efforts to tackle such problems, rallying against them with hysterical cries of “socialism.” This intuitive distrust had received official blessing since the Reagan years and its view of government as “not the solution, but part of the problem.” But the paradox goes back farther in time and can be discerned from the early opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal project. Ever since, the pattern of support for and opposition to a view of government as the collective instrument for pursuing the public interest has hardened into the partisan mould of Democrats versus Republicans. The New Deal, supported by a coalition of forces known as the Roosevelt coalition, constituting the Democratic Party that for decades assumed the role of the natural party of government, gave rise to the slow and contested early formation of a welfare state on American soil. Incrementally, step by step, its further development took place under Democratic Party auspices well into the 1960s. Obama wishes to continue in that tradition, albeit in a political climate more resistant than ever before. The solid Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress since the 2008 elections may have seemed to open a window of opportunity, yet the hardening of political support and opposition, if not obstruction, along strictly partisan lines, in addition to the loud-mouthed populism in the media and among the population at large never boded well.

9 In view of the forbidding pile of problems that Obama has to confront, it was clear he needed time. Yet time has been running out fast. If Obama manages to ride out the storm of populist and right-wing obstruction, he may in the end effect a change in the political climate, if not the political culture of the country, not unlike the late 1930s. Then, the continuing depression had offered Roosevelt the opportunity the bring about a culture that gave central place to a sense of solidarity and collective endeavor. The period might be referred to as a populist moment in American history, in the sense that Lawrence Goodwyn used those words for an earlier period in American history, describing functioning political institutions constructed in terms of an inclusive populist paradigm but only for a historical “moment.”11 The late 1930s, early 1940s, may have been another such moment of inclusiveness, centering on “the people” and “the common man” not only as rhetorical figures of speech, but as central subjects of collective action, brought together around government as the collective body in charge of seeing to the common interest, the “res publica.” In this role government had not only sponsored many employment programs, but also, for the first time in American history, had seen fit to sponsor the arts. Thus it promoted a range of artistic projects that aimed at the common people as its audience. In literature, in music and the theater, in photography and painting, artists went through a vernacular, or folk, period in their careers. They chose to descend from their elitist, ivory towers and opened themselves up to the common American as their public, which, in government- sponsored projects, they set out to serve.

10 A prime example of this trend is the work of American composer Aaron Copland. Orienting himself in the 1920s upon the international musical avant-garde, in the late 1930s he turned to the use of American folk repertoire to find his vernacular voice. A typical composition in this vein is his Fanfare for the Common Man, an ode to the common man seen as the central support of American democracy. Another composition from this period – the Lincoln Portrait of 1944 - is an ode to Lincoln, or rather to his inspired

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use of language. At precisely the time that Roosevelt himself powerfully availed himself of America’s hallowed rhetorical tradition Copland reconnected to Lincoln’s inspirational language. At the dramatic culmination of the piece Lincoln’s urgent call, in the concluding words to his Gettysburg Address, words spoken on a Civil War battlefield, soar above the music: “… that we here solemnly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” There is a memorable television recording of a performance of the Lincoln Portrait, with the composer reciting and his former student Leonard Bernstein conducting. Visually Copland is no Lincoln. He is a shy and slightly awkward man, not the type of a public orator. Yet he manages to rise above himself when in his thin voice he takes the text to its climax. In his modest way he brings an ode to Lincoln, or rather an ode to the high ideals of democracy.

11 There are many enlightening studies, by Garry Wills among others, of Lincoln’s use of public speech, of his rhetorical mastery.12 But rarely does this mastery affect us as strongly as in Copland’s musical tribute. Something like that same mastery we may recognize in Obama’s political appeal. It already is his solid claim to fame. At the time of my writing this, he has been in power for over three years with a solid record of legislative achievement. It is to be hoped that he has many more years to translate his inspired and inspirational visions in speech as well as in action. Perhaps he proves able to revive the broad alliance of enthused voters that like a virtual Internet community carried him to the presidency and to turn it into a lasting support of his political power. To that end he must remain what he had been for so many during the campaign, a man holding high the hopes of a new beginning. Tied up as he is now in the imbroglio of Washington politics, he must at the same time, much like Roosevelt, rise above it and reach out to his nation-wide constituency. He must keep alive a sense of closeness and inclusion among his supporters, rather than leave them mired in alienation. If successful, Obama may well lead Americans on the way to overcoming their internal divisions and once again inspire, as under Roosevelt, a sense of common effort and collective destiny. And who knows, a new Copland may arise to give musical expression to such a new political and cultural climate.

2. The rhetoric of power

12 When acceding to the presidency in early 2009 Barack Obama appeared as the anti- Bush that many during the campaign had come to see in him. When he took the oath of office, swearing to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States, it seemed like the first step in rolling back the relentless encroachment upon the restraints of executive power set by the Constitution and by international law as endorsed by the United States. Obama had all the right credentials for this role. As a senator he had voted against the war in Iraq as an illegal war of aggression. As a candidate he promised to close Guantanamo Bay’s detention center, which in the eyes of the world had come to symbolize the illegitimacy of the ways in which America, under President Bush, had chosen to wage its global war on terrorism. Obama appeared like the man who would bring to light the dark and secret world, beyond the reach of law and legal protections, that America had ventured upon, a world of illegal surveillance of its own citizenry, a world of secret renditions of terrorist suspects, and of torture and hi-tech retaliatory

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assassination. He appeared to bring a promise of ending all this and to return to a presidency under the law, rather than above it. In words from his inaugural address: “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

13 If hopes were pinned so high on the Obama presidency, how would this square with the trends in American presidential leadership that commonly come under the name of the unitary executive? The trend was seen by many observers, in the United States and Europe, as a continued erosion of America’s democratic and constitutional order, a continued power grab by the American president who as chief executive officer in charge of the national interest felt unduly hampered by established constitutional constraints, such as the institutional checks-and-balances or constitutional protection of civil rights. Ever more intrusive in the fabric of social relations in the name of anti- terrorist surveillance, ever more scornful of institutional countervailing powers, the Bush presidency subverted the American constitution, although held by oath to protect it. This can be seen as only the latest, most daring, version of what Arthur Schlesinger in his 1968 book, The Imperial Presidency, warned Americans against.13

14 In fact this suspicion of slow democratic erosion goes back farther, to such World War I American pacifists like Jane Addams, who reminded Americans of the connection between a warfare state and dictatorship. Precisely Bush’s war on terrorism, a war without an exit option, allowed him to venture ever further on the way to the unitary executive. Thus he rewrote legislation, duly enacted by Congress, with signing statements giving him leeway not to implement laws as enacted. Thus he could create dark zones beyond the reach of American law, such as most ignominiously at Guantanamo Bay. Glaring examples abound. When President Bush signed a new law, sponsored by Senator McCain, restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees, he also issued a Presidential signing statement. That statement asserted that his power as Commander-in-Chief gives him the authority to bypass the very law he had just signed. This news came fast on the heels of Bush´s admission that, since 2002, he had repeatedly authorized the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant, in flagrant violation of applicable federal law. And before that, Bush declared he had the unilateral authority to ignore the Geneva Conventions and indefinitely to detain without due process both immigrants and citizens as enemy combatants. The pattern behind all these blatant presidential intrusions on the law and the Constitution led to pointed revisits, in the later years of the Bush Administration, of the phrase “unitary executive” as almost a code word for a doctrine favoring nearly unlimited executive power.14

15 Many of the worries and concerns in Europe about this imperial drift in American politics fed directly into Europe’s feelings of anti-Americanism. Hopes were that Obama, taking his oratorical cues from Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, might indeed take America back to its first high principles (which as Machiavelli reminds us is the central recipe for preserving a republic). This would require a more direct, and intellectually articulate, communication with his American and world audience. Yet, given the pressure on him to exert his leadership as a president who called the war in Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” temptations must be great to cut constitutional corners in the manner of his predecessor. Obama may find it hard to give up gains in executive power as they have accrued to the presidency over the last several years. Yet in a democratic spirit, upholding the constitution, while scaling back

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some of the legal enormities of the Bush administration, he may develop ways of forceful leadership that Americans and non-Americans alike will see as convincing and legitimate.

16 At present, though, things do not bode well. In fact, early signs seemed to point rather in the direction of continuity with Bush administration practices. Thus, in the crucial civil rights area of the treatment of detainees held in the context of the war on terror, the Obama administration took steps and invented arguments to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight. The man who as presidential candidate had still spoken of the false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus, and had rejected the Bush administration’s attempt at creating a black hole at Guantanamo, now did exactly that by moving detainees to Bagram airbase, beyond the reach of constitutional protections.15 In the same vein, the man who as presidential candidate reminded his audience that as a former constitutional law professor he would, unlike the current president (i.e. George W. Bush), actually respect the Constitution, acted in contravention of the 1973 War Powers Resolution adopted by Congress when he authorized U.S. military intervention in Libya.16 In the tortured language of Orwellian newspeak, Obama denied the Libyan intervention was a war at all. Hence, the War Powers Resolution did not apply.17 Ironically, Obama thus cast aside a congressional resolution whose intention it had been to restore the balance between the powers of congress and the presidency after years of the balance tilting toward the executive.

17 As a further point, rather than the government itself living up to its promise of “unprecedented openness,” we see a resurgence of leakers of secret government policies – of “whistleblowers” – reminiscent of the days of the leaked Pentagon Papers. The culmination point so far is the flood of Wikileaks foreign policy documents. The Obama administration’s response was vindictive and very much in the manner of an insulted sovereign. In the manner of a unitary executive, without due process, it has held an alleged leaker of documents, Bradley Manning, in solitary confinement, it steps into the field of economic transactions, blocking credit card payments to Wikileaks, in addition to pressuring foreign governments in its search for the main culprit, Julian Assange.18 Even before the Wikileaks furor, though, the New York Review of Books, over the names of left-wing luminaries, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, published a paid page-long call “To end the complicity of silence,” reminding the readers that “Crimes are Crimes No Matter Who Does Them.” Side by side are two portraits of Bush Jr. and Obama linked by this caption: “Crimes under Bush are crimes under Obama and must be resisted by anyone who claims a shred of conscience.”19 High on the list of government abominations is the freedom it takes in composing lists of suspects of terrorism, including U.S. citizens, selected for assassination. The text goes on to indict the Obama administration for expanding the use of drone attacks and for arguing that the U.S. has the authority under international law to use extrajudicial killing in sovereign countries with which it is not at war. Such acts have now been consecrated into “standard operating procedure” by Obama, who claims, as did Bush, executive privilege and state secrecy in defending the crime of aggressive war.

18 Like the phrase “unitary executive” the words “executive privilege” are suggestive of constitutional law doctrines justifying the leeway presidents grant themselves in their unilateral choice of means in their defense of the national interest. On several previous occasions, as in the Truman Steel Seizure Case or the Nixon Administration’s refusal to

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make public the Oval Office secret tapes, the claim of executive privilege was tested by the Supreme Court and found wanting.20 The Obama administration has not yet come up to a similar test. Not surprisingly the president has seen his policies of secrecy given the blessing of conservative commentators. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled “Barack Obama: Defender of State Secrets,” Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, has this to say: “It is not an overstatement to say that secrecy today is one of the most critical tools of national defense. Leaks of counterterrorism secrets to the press, and disclosure of counterterrorism techniques and procedures in courtrooms, can imperil the war effort. We are thus faced squarely with the abiding tension between liberty and security.” What Schoenfeld calls the “carping civil- libertarian critics” may, as he admits, serve a useful purpose in guarding against government excesses. But Schoenfeld goes on to conclude: “the more voluble they become, the more apparent it also becomes that Mr. Obama is doing the right thing.”21 Judged by the company he attracts, we would be hard put to recognize in him what so many during the campaign had hopefully anticipated. As president he now finds himself in a role as commander-in-chief, fighting two ground wars and a more general one against the elusive enemy of global terrorism, without a clear exit strategy. They are wars he took over when entering office, and which he pursues by means that make it hard to see a personal touch to distinguish him from his predecessor, let alone to recognize the signs of a transformational presidency. Yet those were the words that Colin Powell, a black Republican, used in his quiet and eloquent television endorsement of Obama during the electoral campaign.22 There is irony today in referring back to this moment. Here we had a man who had given his name to a military doctrine, the Powell doctrine, reminding military planners never to enter a war without a clear exit strategy. A full two years later, President Obama is mired in wars without exit strategies, expanding programs of secret action in the Mideast, without any prospect of the endeavor holding the promise of a new beginning.23 But more than that, Obama seems mired in the insider ways of Washington while losing the rapport he had with the broad constituency that carried him to the presidency. If his march to the White House testified to the power of rhetoric, Obama has found no way yet, it seems, to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to engage and educate his public in the moral dilemmas of the exercise of power. In other words, he has not yet developed a rhetoric of power.

19 Such a demanding form of rhetorical discourse would call for more of course than Bush’s sound bite uttered with a smirk: “I am the decider,”24 or more generally the boastful language accompanying America’s position as “sole remaining superpower,” following the collapse of the Soviet Union. If there was a rhetoric of power discernable at all in those days, it was the language of arms speaking, of the “shock and awe” inspired by America’s arsenal of high-tech weapons. In contrast to this, a rhetoric of power, as I here envision it, would demand Obama once again to rise above himself, above the din of voices in Washington circles and the media, and to address the ethical dilemmas and quandaries of democratic leadership, to address the tension between secrecy and national security, and to become the democratic educator that Lincoln was before him. It would entail more than the rhetorical projection of power in the face of external threats confronting the nation, more than the construction of an enemy image and the demonization of the enemy, as in president Reagan’s rhetoric of power, when he spoke of the Soviet Union as “the evil empire.”25 It would entail rendering a public account of the unintended consequences of the uses of power, as they range from open military confrontation, and its accompanying “collateral damage” of civilians killed by

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U.S. fire, to secret programs of assassination, rendition and imprisonment. These are all means of confrontation that may well result in swelling the ranks of enemy forces rather than quelling them. Using public speech to convey such a sense of irony, if not of the tragic quality of democratic leadership, is a tall order and does not necessarily go down well with the larger public. When President Carter tried to wean Americans off the conventional rhetoric of the Cold War, speaking instead of the “inordinate fear of Communism,”26 it was taken as a sign of softness, if not weakness.

20 The problem confronting President Obama in this respect is that on a number of occasions he has, in public speeches, reached out toward the Muslim world, trying to take away its inordinate fear of America, and to contribute to mutual understanding through diplomatic means and the power of public speech. Yet, neither in the Middle East nor among the American public, has he managed to reconcile his guiding visions with the actual policies that he pursues or leaves in place.

3. Wars of Necessity and New Beginnings?

21 Addressing the Chicago Council of Global Affairs on April 23d, 2007, when still a Democratic Senator and presidential hopeful, Barack Obama said: “I still believe that America is the last, best hope of Earth. We just have to show the world why this is so. This President (i.e. George W. Bush) may occupy the White House, but for the last six years the position of leader of the free world has remained open. And it’s time to fill that role once more. The American moment has not passed. The American moment is here. And like generations before us, we will seize that moment, and begin the world anew.”27 Casting himself as a Promethean pretender to the role of leader of the free world, he could never hope to make a fresh start with a clean slate. While aiming at beginning the world anew, he had to confront a world as it was left to him, like a chess player taking over a game halfway through, confronting all the constraints that it set before him. Entering the Washington corridors of power with a freshly won mandate, must have felt like stepping into an arena ring-fenced by entrenched interests, veto groups, and contending ideological views of the national interest and America’s place as a world power.

22 In 2010 it was fifty years since President Eisenhower left office and used the occasion to reflect on the ominous rise of what he called the military-industrial complex, commonly referred to later as the military-industrial-political complex. Eisenhower, at the height of the Cold War, warned against an American foreign policy set on a course of undue militarization, while undermining America’s democratic ways.28 Ironically, it was only after the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union that such militarization proceeded apace. What had been gestating as a neo-conservative project, envisioning a 21st-century America whose military power would be unrivalled and pre- eminent, now became the accepted discourse, touted by right-wing politicians and media pundits alike.

23 Currently, the American defense budget approaches the combined defense budgets of all other nations, friends and foes combined. U.S. defense outlays now consume roughly half of all federal discretionary dollars. The U.S. now has between 700 and a 1000 military bases all over the globe. It can project military power in ever new technological ways. Yet if this policy is to be more than a very expensive insurance policy, against what threat, what enemy, is it meant to offer protection?

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24 Here, I would argue, President Obama has his work cut out for him. Rather than letting himself be co-opted into this militarized view of the world and American foreign policy, he should grasp the moment and start to educate the American people. At a time when deficits at all levels of government threaten America´s infrastructure, its education, health and welfare institutions, as well as its over-all prosperity, Obama should address these issues by publicly reflecting on the costs of the current national security state, its financial costs as well as its human costs. As one opinion poll after another makes clear, the American people is stunningly unaware of such things. Given the right-wing control of the parameters of public discourse, here is a challenge for the master of the art of rhetoric that Obama has proven to be. Were he to take it up, it would be a new beginning indeed.

25 And yet, for a man with Obama’s powers of speech there are strange moments of silence, of speechlessness. Surely, as on the occasion of the January, 2011, point-blank fusillade in Tucson, where a deranged youngster wounded a Congresswoman among a number of others and killed six people, among whom a young girl, Obama finds the words of consolation for grieving parents and a grieving nation. Rising above the vitriolic cesspool of what ranks as public debate and discourse in the U.S. today, he grasps the moment to educate the nation in the ways of civility and civilized debate. Yet, when the child killed is not American, but a Pakistani or Afghan victim of the American way of war, killed on Obama’s watch as commander-in-chief, he has not so far addressed the terrible moral dilemma that presents itself.29 There is no echo yet of the 1960s’anti-war chant – “Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” – in fact there is no anti-war movement out on the streets at all. Distant wars are being fought at the far-away limes of empire, passed over in silence by the American people.

26 There is irony, if not tragedy, galore. Now the Middle East is finally going through the birth pangs of democratization – in ways far removed from what then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice thought she could read in the ongoing war and turmoil in the Middle East, speaking of “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.”30 Obama in fact may have been instrumental in getting current developments going with his seminal June, 2009, Cairo speech. But now, rather than appearing to the people in the Middle East as a new Lincoln, speaking words from the Gettysburg address – “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” – he must seem to them more like one of the distant autarchs that people all over the Middle East are busy ridding themselves of for good.

NOTES

1. In an interview with Gary Younge, The Guardian Weekly, 20 August 2007. Patterson’s reflections on the lukewarm support for Obama’s presidential candidacy among America’s black population led him to speak of “black nativism.” CF. Orlando Patterson, “The New Black Nativism,” Time Magazine, 8 Feb. 2007, 34-5.

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2. J.W. Schulte Nordholt, Het volk dat in duisternis wandelt: De geschiedenis van de negers in Amerika (Deventer: Van Loghum Slaterus, 1968) 3. Obama speech “A more perfect Union,” (Constitution Center, Philadelphia, March 18, 2008) URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-th_n_92077.html 4. Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862. 5. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978) 6. Obama Cairo speech, video and full text URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/04/ obama-speech-in-cairo-vid_n_211215.html 7. September 19, 2010 URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68I03S20100919 8. James T. Kloppenberg, in his Reading Obama, looks at Obama’s writing and record of public speech to do for Obama what Obama does for himself: demonstrating the extent to which he as a politician and a statesman is rooted in an American political and intellectual tradition. [James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)] See also: Susan Schulten, “Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, and John Dewey,” Denver University Law Review 86 (2009) URL: http://law.du.edu/documents/ denver-university-law-review/schulten.pdf 9. URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/24/obama-in-berlin-video-of_n_114771.html 10. URL: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4107132/Barack-Obama-on-Homeland-Security This is an electoral campaign document, summarizing Obama’s views of the Homeland Security counterterrorism apparatus and strategy. It contains telling policy projects that today, in the eyes of critics, seem to be honored in the breach. Among the promises made we find the following: “Obama also would restore habeas corpus so that those who pose a danger are swiftly tried and brought to justice and those who do not have sufficient due process to ensure that we are not wrongfully denying them their liberty.” 11. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) xiii. 12. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Touchstone, 1992) 13. Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973) 14. Jennifer van Bergen, “The Unitary Executive: Is the Doctrine Behind the Bush Presidency Consistent with a Democratic State? URL: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/ 20060109_bergen.html.Jennifer van Bergen, The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America (Monroe, ME.: Common Courage Press, 2004). One particular occasion for renewed debate on the unitary executive were the congressional hearings of Supreme Court nominee Judge Alito. Advocates differ on the degree of executive authority. Some believe only that Congress cannot create agencies or officers that operate outside the president's direction. Others contend the president has executive powers beyond those granted by Congress or listed in the Constitution. Bush administration lawyers, in confidential memorandums, adopted this broader view after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They contended that the "unitary" nature of presidential power over national security meant Mr. Bush could not be constrained either by treaties or laws passed by Congress that governed treatment of enemy prisoners. The Justice Department later withdrew that internal legal opinion, but it has not backed away from its theory on presidential power, which also underlies the domestic surveillance program and the detention of U.S. citizens as enemy combatants. In all three instances, the president has asserted an inherent power to take actions that critics say are contrary to specific laws -- respectively, the 1994 Torture Statute, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the 1971 Non-Detention Act. Since 9/11 President Bush’s use of the words unitary executive, in combination with signing statements, shot up to a total of 110 at the time of Judge Alito’s confirmation hearings. Under his three predecessors the total was 7. Cf. Jess Bravin, “Judge Alito's View Of the Presidency: Expansive Powers,” The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2006, A1.

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15. Glenn Greenwald, “Obama Wins the Right to Detain People with no Habeas Review,” (23 may, 2010) URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25517.htm 16. This is a point raised by Robert Naiman (“An Open Letter to Liberal Supporters of the Lybia War” URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/an-open-letter-to- liberal_b_841505.html ), in his response to Juan Cole’s “An Open letter to the Left on Lybia,” which is generally supportive of the war (URL: http://www.juancole.com/2011/03/an-open- letter-to-the-left-on-libya.html) Naiman uses strong language and speaks of a power grab by the executive. 17. To get to this linguistic stretch President Obama had had to overrule the lawyers in the Justice and Defense Departments and turn to more pliant ones in the White House and State Department. Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale, said in the New York Times that this could open the way for “even more blatant acts of presidential war-making in the decades ahead.” (“Legal Acrobatics, Illegal War,” URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/ opinion/21Ackerman.html) 18. Following a sustained public outcry, culminating in a public letter over the signature of over 250 top legal scholars,including Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who taught Obama constitutional law, and published in the New York Review of Books, LVIII,5 (12-25 May 2011): 62, Bradley Manning was transferred to a more normal detention regime. 19. The New York Review of Books, (27 May 2010): 17. 20. Maeva Marcus, Truman and the Steel Seizure Case:The Limits of Presidential Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) 21. Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Barack Obama: Defender of State Secrets,” Wall Street Journal, 30 September 2010, 17. 22. Colin Powell’s words of praise and endorsement can still be heard on the Internet: URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_NMZv6Vfh8 It is an excerpt from NBC’s Meet the Press, October 19, 2008. 23. For a critical review of alternative policies, see Juan Cole, Engaging the Muslim World (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) 24. “But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best”. Words spoken on the White House Lawn, April 18, 2006. 25. For the text of Reagan’s “Evil Empire Speech” see URL: http://www.nationalcenter.org/ ReaganEvilEmpire1983.html 26. President Jimmy Carter, Commencement Speech given at Notre Dame University, June 1977, URL: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=727 27. URL: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/fpccga 28. For an enlightening revisit of Eisenhower´s farewell speech, see Andrew J. Bacevich, “The Tyranny of Defense Inc.,” The Atlantic (January/February 2011) Available online at URL: http:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-tyranny-of-defense-inc/8342/ 29. In an online town hall, sponsored by Google, on 30 January 2012, President Obama for the first time publicly addressed the new policy of targeted executions of suspects of terrorism by drones. He called the program “precise” and “judicious.” As for collateral damage, he pointed to the high-precision nature of drones and to the fact that those killed were on a list authorized by the president. Shortly after, in a speech at Northwestern University, on March 5th 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the implied issues of the protection of legal rights, such as due process, arguing in effect that under circumstances of international threats of terrorism the president should be the sole judge and arbiter in selecting targets for execution and ordering them killed. The argument is only further confirmation of the continuing general drift towards a unitary presidency. Cf. Glenn Greenwald, “Attorney General Holder defends execution without charges,” URL: http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/

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30. Condoleezza Rice in a press conference she had called on the occasion of the Israel-Libanon conflict in July, 2006. Answering a question why she had not got involved in shuttle diplomacy, she had this to say: “What we're seeing here is, in a sense, the growing—the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East.” (July 21, 2006)

ABSTRACTS

When Barack Obama acceded to the Presidency of the United States he held out the promise of a new beginning. As a master of political rhetoric he had spoken of a new start following the dismal years of the Bush administration. He would take America back to its inspirational creed of freedom and democracy. He augured a break with policies infringing on civil liberties and government under the law. Once in office, though, the power of rhetoric that had carried him into the White House ran into the hard reality of political rule under conditions of ongoing wars in far-away countries and the threat of terrorism, lurking at home and abroad. This chapter will explore how well President Obama managed to preserve democratic freedoms at home while fighting terrorism.

INDEX

Keywords: Aaron Copland, Abraham Lincoln, Afghanistan, anti-Americanism, anti- intellectualism, anti-terrorist surveillance, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Barack Obama, Bradley Manning, Civil War, Cold War, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Daniel Ellsberg, Democratic Party, Dwight D. Eisenhower, executive power, executive privilege, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gabriel Schoenfeld, Garry Wills, Geneva Conventions, George W. Bush, Gettysburg Address, Guantanamo Bay, Homeland Security, Internet, Islam, Israel, J.W. Schulte Nordholt, Jeremiah Wright, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, John McCain, Julian Assange, Lawrence Goodwyn, Libya, Machiavelli, Marcus Garvey, Martin L. King Jr., Middle East; Bill Clinton, National Security Agency, New Deal, Nobel Peace prize, Orlando Patterson, Pentagon Papers, Ronald Reagan, Sacvan Bercovitch, signing statement, Soviet Union, Stokeley Carmichael, Truman Steel Seizure Case, unitary executive, War Powers Resolution, welfare state, Wikileaks

AUTHOR

ROB KROES Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam

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