-
4. For That Cause They Will Fight to the Death: Wartime Usages of the Gettysburg Address
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
115 4 For That Cause They Will Fight to the Death: Wartime Usages of the Gettysburg Address These . . . words will arouse the hearts of his countrymen to purer patriotic purposes in generation[s] to come. —Reverend Thomas Field, 1865, Funeral Observances at New London, Connecticut In June 1917, as the first American soldiers landed in France to join the fight against the Central Powers, the Times of London assured its readers, “The men in these ships, and the millions they left behind them, know well what is the cause for which they are ready to sacrifice their all. It was defined for them and for the kindred democracies of the world once for all in the cemetery of Gettysburg. They are fighting that this world ‘under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ And for that cause they will fight to the death.”1 The Times editorial was perhaps more hopeful than accurate. Would Americans in 1917, and later in 1941, really fight and die for the ideals Lincoln put forth in the Gettysburg Address? All Americans? All the ideals? From 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945,the Gettysburg Address was invoked more often and for greater purposes than ever before.As the Times editorial suggests,these invocations took three main forms.First,the document was used within the United States to encourage Americans to sacrifice their bodies and pocketbooks in defense of the ideals to which Lincoln dedicated the nation at Gettysburg.Second,Lincoln’s words were cited by those trying to explain to international audiences why the United States fought alongside the Allies. Last, foreigners praised the speech to make common cause with the United States by showing their appreciation for the most succinct expression of what America stood for or to suggest a model for reforming their own government as the postwar period neared They Will Fight to the Death 116 in both eras. Despite frequent references to Lincoln’s words, how and by whom the speech was invoked reveal the deep cultural divide that remained in the nation and an interpretation of the Gettysburg Address that had far to go before reclaiming Lincoln’s full message. The United States avoided any serious foreign entanglements in the generation after the Civil War. During the War of 1898, former Confederate and Union officers became brothers-in-arms once again, and feelings of sectionalism ebbed slightly. While some prominent anti-imperialists, including Mark Twain and William Jennings Bryan, questioned what a democracy was doing inaugurating such wars, a full wartime consideration of the meaning of democracy was still two decades in the future. While European powers mobilized their armies in 1914 following the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the United States attempted to stay out of the war.It was not a foregone conclusion that the United States would support the Allies over the Central Powers at first; though the United States was culturally closest to Great Britain,German Americans made up a considerable slice of the population,and two hundred thousand Germans had fought for the North during the Civil War. Germans admired and praised Lincoln as much as Britons, evidenced by the nine German-language biographies of the American president published between 1865 and 1914, a number greater than that produced in Britain.2 The shift toward considering the Gettysburg Address as a philosophy of government that might apply abroad as well as at home did not take place overnight. During the years of neutrality, most Americans responded to the Gettysburg Address as they had over the preceding fifty years. In 1914, Gettysburg again held a substantial commemorative ceremony. Whereas the event in 1913 addressed questions such as an official version of the speech and whether or not there was applause—issues of national attention—the 1914 observation was more overtly local. The focus of the event was the placement of three bronze tablets on the pew at Gettysburg’s Presbyterian Church occupied by Lincoln and John Burns on the evening of November 19, 1863. As in 1913, somewhere around fifty people who attended the original ceremony in 1863 found their way back to the cemetery again in 1914. Several men delivered their reminiscences both of John Burns’s actions during the battle and his visit with Lincoln. The local newspapers all covered the event, and the Compiler published a pamphlet of the day’s...