THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO DEMOCRATIC VIOLENCE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN MORAL SENTIMENTS IN THE “GOOD WAR” A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY JOHN MARTIN MCCALLUM III CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2017 Copyright © 2017 John Martin McCallum III All rights reserved For Mom, and for the memory of Dad And for Kate TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ...………………………………………………………………………………….v Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………..…………...…vi Abstract ………………...………………………………………………………………..……… ix Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………….…...… 1 Chapter 1 Violence Across the “American Century”: 1865-1945 ……………………………………………………………………………………………..…… 29 Chapter 2 Morale Censorship and Moral Sentiments: Knowing Total War in “Unbombed America,” 1941-1945 ………………………………………….…………………………………………….…………. 85 Chapter 3 “Remember Manila”: From Empire to Realism in Narratives of Savage War, 1941-44 ………………………………………………...……………………………………………..… 134 Chapter 4 “Excellent Education Against a Negotiated Peace”: Imperial and Totalitarian Violence in the Office of War Information’s Hollywood …………………………………………………………………………………………………. 192 Chapter 5 “I Didn’t Make Pleasant Remarks”: Pain as Realism in the War Book Culture …………………………………………………………………………………………………. 252 Chapter 6 Violence at the “Threshold of Democracy”: Toy Soldiers, Nervous Mothers, and Realist Childhood …………………………………………………………………………………………………. 316 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………….. 367 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….…………………….. 387 ! iv! LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Lt. Charles Shuman explains his ballot for New York elections to Pvt. Alex Kwaisufu, a “curious native” in the Solomon Islands Labour Corps, October 1943………………………... 7 Figure 2: Ballots and bombs: completing paperwork for absentee ballots in the 7th Army Air Force, a major hub in the transit of men and weapons west across the Pacific. ………………… 8 Figure 3: Gary Cooper and Roque de la Ysla of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce examine a Filipino bolo knife, 1942. …………………..…………………..…………………..………… 152 ! v! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For the resources to complete this dissertation I am indebted first of all to the University of Chicago. The History Department supported my work from its offer of admission, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights provided generous research funding and a venue for the presentation of early research, and the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) has been an outstanding home in which to teach and think as I finished writing. These pages owe a lot to Dain Borges, Chad Cyrenne, Darcy Hughes Heuring, Susan Gzesh, Meyosha Smiley, Tekeisha Yelton-Hunter, David Goodwine, Sonja Rusnak, and many others, especially the MAPSS students who have forced me to explain my arguments. I also owe countless debts to archivists and librarians at the Regenstein Library, the National Archives in College Park, the Library of Congress, Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Northwestern University Library, the New York Public Library, and the Chicago, Wheaton, and Glen Ellyn Public Libraries. Often overlooked in institutional acknowledgements are the small public spaces where writers take shelter, so thanks as well to innumerable coffee shops across the country, with special appreciation for The Unicorn Café in Evanston, Illinois. My co-chairs, Mark Bradley and Jim Sparrow, gave their time, attention, and patience from the proposal to the final draft. Jim pushed me to think more deeply about democracy and the state since my first days on campus, when he forced his colloquium to answer the blunt question: “Is the United States a democracy?” I’m sticking by my qualified “yes,” Jim, but the question has only become more complicated. To say that Mark helped me think through problems of moral history, transnational history, and more is true but an understatement. I’ve never left his office hours without a fresh enthusiasm for the work. Bruce Cumings has influenced my thinking more than he knows, and I’ve carried around sections of his writing in ! vi! my head for years. Michael Geyer read drafts with a perceptiveness that always found something I had not yet noticed. I could not have asked for a better committee. And I could not have asked for better teachers over an extended educational career. Nancy Conradt, Alice Snelgrove, and Cathy Stablein helped start my academic life at the College of DuPage. I left Northwestern University determined to go into historical research because of Henry Binford, Peter Hayes, Harvey Neptune, Frank Safford, and Garry Wills. In Hyde Park I benefitted from the wisdom of the faculty collectively, and especially from the early assistance and inspiration of Tom Holt, Amy Stanley, Christine Stansell, and Mauricio Tenorio. Jane Dailey read drafts of chapters, offered sound advice, served as a model of clarity in the classroom, and (not least from my perspective at the time!) bailed me out with work as a Teaching Assistant in a tough funding moment. My arguments have also been sharpened by comments from Elizabeth Borgwardt, Mary Dudziak, Petra Goedde, Gretchen Heefner, and Joel Isaac, who all took the time to read fragments of the work as it was presented at various venues along the way, as well as by the anonymous reviewers for Diplomatic History who provided helpful critiques of parts of chapter 2. Some of the most important suggestions have come from other students at the University of Chicago, including Maru Balandrán, Sabine Cadeau, Chris Dingwall, Susannah Engstrom, Rachel Feinmark, Johnhenry Gonzalez, Sara Hume, Ingu Hwang, Hayden Kantor, Patrick Kelly, Sam Lebovic, Tyson Leuchter, Toussaint Losier, Sarah Miller-Davenport, Shaul Mitelpunkt, Covell Meyskens, Sarah Panzer, Carolyn Purnell, Emily Remus, Katy Schumaker, Savitri Sedlacek, Ilona Simins, Dan Webb, Lael Weinberger, and many others whose stray comments and tips on books and journals enriched my view of the past. For years, Taeju Kim carved out a convivial place for group study on the second floor of the Regenstein – where he introduced me ! vii! to my wife, Kate. Not quite sure how to pay that one back, Taeju. The first student I met in my first seminar was Richard Del Rio, who has been an outstanding friend and who has sharpened my thinking every time we’ve talked for years. For support at various moments in the development of this manuscript I cannot adequately thank Jon Kodera, Matt Mance, Marius Pakalniskis, Alex Pegg, and Jack Zahora. Prajwal Ciryam finished two degrees and learned to practice medicine in his spare time while I was writing, but always had time to talk about politics and academic careers. Lexi Patin has similarly been there every step of the way while finishing her various degrees, ready to exchange misgivings about thesis drafts and life in general. David and Fiona: your book is on the way, but give it a few years. Finally, I literally couldn’t have done any of this without my family. Pat, Stan, and Sarah took me into their home while I was researching in College Park, and have been supportive and wonderful in-laws. My brothers Dan and Ken are the smartest people I know, and have kept me on an even keel while I wrote. My Dad passed away before the proposal took shape, but his kindness has been with me throughout as a reminder that there was more than war in the world he entered in 1942. My Mom gave me my love of books, and set me off in search of the past in the first place. And Kate is the silent coauthor, who made it all work and made it all worthwhile. ! viii! ABSTRACT In the first half of the 1940s the productive and imaginative energies of 100 million citizens of the United States were harnessed to a sustained project of global violence under the rubric of “total war” mobilization. This dissertation is a study of American moral sentiments under the pressure of that mobilization, which presented profound challenges to assumptions about permissible and impermissible killing, about the responsibility of individuals for state action in a democracy, and about the appropriate (and inappropriate) ways to experience mediated knowledge of a distant conflict. As Americans worked to reconcile their commitment to the war with day-to-day knowledge of its horrors, a broad range of actors – including military censors and civilian journalists, state officials and publishers, child psychologists and children themselves – articulated a vernacular “realism” which acknowledged the moral ambiguity of firebombing and other extreme forms of violence, yet accepted those acts as ethically tolerable. World War II Americans did not erase or turn a blind eye to their polity’s deep implication in international violence; instead, they found ways to come to terms with it at an affective level. In so doing, they established the foundations for Cold War justifications of lethal force which transcended racial and imperial understandings of force rooted in continental expansion and overseas empire. This dissertation draws on a wide range of published and unpublished records, including underutilized military and civilian censorship records, mass circulation print media, public and private surveys of popular opinion, the correspondence of public figures such as Life magazine publisher Henry Luce, and debates over children’s war play, in order to trace and document a transformation in the moral common sense of violence in the American Century. ! ix! Introduction At around two in the afternoon on December 19, 1941,