For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front

Introduction

As a child of the sixties, I cut my philosophical eye teeth, as it were, on the lyrics of Bob Dylan. He expressed exactly my dissatisfaction with the culture of the Eisenhower fifties, still very much intact in small-town America of the sixties. While the Cuban Missile Crisis taught us to live for the moment, Vietnam offered more complicated lessons concerning the overlap of political strategy and strategy on the front lines. In 1965, the year T. S. Eliot died, Dylan released a sort of kitchen sink protest song that lambasted everything from war to materialism to the ubiquitous issue of middle-class morality. Aside from being the source of one of Jimmy Carter’s favorite aphorisms—“He not being born / Is busy dying”—Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” raises another issue, that of propaganda. Dylan cites propaganda along with hypocritical morality and greed: Old lady judges . . . . . . push fake morals, insult and stare While money doesn’t talk it swears Obscenity, who really cares Propaganda, all is phony.1 In Dylan’s view, propaganda includes everything promoting that vacuous fifties way of life, from advertising to tv sitcoms. Since Dylan whacked the establishment, other rock groups have used the subject of propaganda as a way of rejecting whatever Introduction 2 | Introduction happen to be current political trends. Green Day’s “American Idiot,” for instance, attacks contemporary militarism and, their word, paranoia. As the song goes, Now everybody do the propaganda! And sing along to the age of paranoia Don’t want to be an American idiot One nation controlled by the media information age of hysteria Calling out to idiot America.2 Obviously not as iconic as Dylan, Green Day has become a spokesgroup for disillusioned youth who see in the contemporary politics of fear the same threat Dylan saw forty years ago in the politics of conformity. Whatever its subject, propaganda is the enemy, the destroyer of individual integrity. In The Peculiar Sanity of War, I examined, among other things, the way rumor becomes or parallels propaganda on a very basic level. The First World War often turned rumors into atrocity stories, which in many cases found their way into print as “eyewitness accounts.” The British “Bryce Report” is perhaps the best known collection of such otherwise undocumented atrocity stories. An official publication titled Evidence and Documents Laid Before the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, the Bryce report contains testimonials from Belgian refugees—farmers and other noncombatants as well as fleeing soldiers—of German atrocities as Germany advanced through Belgium in 1914. Most contemporary sources regard the Bryce Report as largely apocryphal. Addressing the Bryce report, Arthur Ponsonby argues, “At best, human testimony is unreliable, even in ordinary occurrences of no consequences, but where bias, sentiment, passion, and socalled patriotism disturb the emotions, a personal affirmation becomes of no value whatsoever.”3 Many of the atrocity stories Introduction | 3 became legendary, transcending even the force of rumor or the necessity of personal affirmation. Few civilians from the Allied nations doubted that Germany had left a path of mutilated civilians, including children, across Belgium or that given the chance, Germany would pursue its goal of carnage across the rest of Europe and Great Britain. Modernism, Propaganda, and Blurred National Identities Perhaps because of the war, literary modernism became an international moment in literary history. International issues informed most literature of the period and of the war itself. Vorticism had its roots in Italian Futurism and involved the British Wyndham Lewis as well as the American Ezra Pound in the magazine Blast, which published, among others, Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce. Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, and Edith Wharton lived in Paris between the wars, and Henry James and T. S. Eliot became British citizens. Joyce lived in Paris for a time after the war and published Ulysses there. Modernist writers seemed to have little need to settle in one place or to be governed by nationality. Undoubtedly because of the war, ordinary citizens who seldom thought beyond the boundaries of their local communities learned the names and locations of places such as the Marne, the Argonne Forest, Paschendale, and Gallipoli. The American “Somewhere” series by Martha Trent, part of the focus of chapter 3, includes a novel and heroine for each of the Allied countries and sees that all the heroines cross paths “somewhere...