Notes
189 Notes Introduction 1. Henry D. Thoreau, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2004), 219, 222. 2. Ibid., 274–276. 3. Only in certain battlefield photographs of the era was the war starkly presented without the usual romantic gloss. Matthew Brady, a prominent photographer of the era, displayed in his New York gallery in October 1862 a selection of graphic images taken by two of his employees shortly after the Battle of Antietam. As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.” The reality depicted in these photographs from Antietam is, as Alan Trachtenberg notes in Reading American Photographs, “the reality of violence, the effects of shells and bullets on human flesh and bone.” Most writers of the era, however, offered no such boldly graphic depictions of war’s carnage. New York Times quoted in Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 62–63; Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 74. 4. These wars with Native American tribes did not result in the publication of antiwar literature as such and fall beyond the scope of this study. 5. John Underhill, Newes from America; or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England; Containing, a True Relation of Their War-like Proceedings These Two Yeares Last Past (London: J. D[awson] for Peter Cole, 1638), 2. 6. John Limon, Writing after War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7; Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (1882; Boston: David R. Godine, 1971), 60. 7. Underhill, 39, 32. 8. The full title of the essay is “A Narrative of the Late Massacres, in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians, Friends of This Province, By Persons Unknown. With Some Observations on the Same.” Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. John Bigelow, vol. 4 (New York: Putnam, 1904), 25, 28, 45. 9. Underhill, 2. 10. The works that have come closest to focusing on the subject are Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles (1978); Wayne Charles Miller, An Armed America, Its Face in Fiction: A History of the American Military Novel (1970); Peter Aichinger, The American Soldier in Fiction, 1880–1963: A History of Attitudes toward 190 notes to pages 8–10 Warfare and the Military Establishment (1975); and Rebecca W. Smith, The Civil War and Its Aftermath in American Fiction, 1861–1899 (1937). A broad study of the subsequent period is provided in Jeffrey Walsh, American War Literature, 1914 to Vietnam (1982). 11. The literary critic Leslie Fiedler once commented, “The chief lasting accomplishment of World War I was the invention of the antiwar novel. . . . It is certainly true that before the 1920’s that genre did not exist, though it had been prophesied in . . . The Red Badge of Courage; and that since the 1920’s, it has become a standard form: both a standard way of responding to combat experience and a standard way of starting a literary career.” Fiedler’s observation reflects the neglect that scholars continue to pay to American antiwar writers—including novelists such as Ernest Crosby, Harold Frederic, Mark Twain, and Joseph Kirkland—who expressed their criticism of war during the nearly fifty years that separated the Civil War from World War I. Leslie Fielder, foreword to The Good Soldier Schweik, by Jaroslav Hasek (1930; New York: New American Library, 1963), vi. Similarly, Peter Aichinger asserts, “It seems possible to show that in the period before the nation actually went to war against a major external enemy the novels were objective and idealistic; after World War I the novels reflected the horror and chagrin of a people who had tasted combat for the first time.” Peter Aichinger, The American Soldier in Fiction, 1880–1963: A History of Attitudes toward Warfare and the Military Establishment (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975), x. 12. For example, Bernard Bergonzi contends, “The dominant movement in the literature of the Great War was . . . from a myth-dominated to a demythologized world. Violent action could be regarded as meaningful, even sacred, when it was sanctified by the traditional canons of heroic behavior; when these canons came to seem no longer acceptable, then...
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