Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925

26. A Window on the War

A Window on the War atlantic writers and world war i at times of national crisis, the Atlantic had a clear sense of its calling to fight despotism and defend liberty. The Civil War had presented such a crisis, but though the parallels between that war and the one threatening the sovereignty of Belgium and France seemed obvious to someone like Theodore Roosevelt, it did not to many Atlantic contributors, who either respected Germany’s achievements in the arts and sciences or considered a war in Europe to be none of America’s business. The growing conflagration in Europe demanded that the Atlantic increase the offerings of foreign contributors and its analysis of foreign politics. Having earlier become, as William Dean Howells said, more “southern, midwestern , and far-western” in its sympathies, the magazine now focused on three interrelated fronts, which might broadly be characterized as domestic, European, and Pan-Pacific.1 The JapanesejournalistKiyoshiK .Kawakami,forexample , who studied at the Universities of Iowa and Wisconsin, argued as early as November 1914 that the destiny of the Pacific lay in the hands of Great Britain, Japan, and the United States. Peace in the Far East, he warned in “Japan and the European War” (November 1914), could not be “maintained without preserving the territorial integrity of China.”2 Considered an apol26 Literary history and all history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one. ralph waldo emerson, “Aspects of Culture,” Atlantic, January 1868 r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 234 ] ogist for Japanese abuses in China and Manchuria, Kawakami did not differ from many Atlantic writers who opposed the war but supported imperialism when it advanced the interests of their home country. As the guns of August announced the beginning of the war, Germany, having planned its route through Belgium decades before, broke into northern France, smashing Belgian, English, and French armies, while soldiers began to dig new borders with trenches that would reach from the North Sea to Switzerland. Neither the offenders nor the defenders, nor writers wanting to understand the principles at stake, saw anything but brutal chaos. Trying to piece together the full picture proved especially challenging when allies seemed more foreign than foes, or foes happened to be the relatives of neighbors. By the end of 1914, half of the Atlantic’s contents were related directly to the war, its coverage, analysis, and consequences. As if it were not hard enough for contributors to separate fact from feeling, arguments about specifics had a way of bleeding into larger discussions about slippery topics such as “culture,” “nationalism,” and “colonialism.” This had happened during the Dreyfus and Zola trials, when, as John T. Morse noted, the issue for French nationals had been “the Jew,” not treason (May 1898).3 During the First World War, measures had a way of transforming. To give just two examples: Belgium, recently condemned for its policies of forced labor and systematic terror in the Congo, became a model nation compared to Germany. And the French author Paul Hervieu credited Germans , who had been previously lauded for scientific expertise, with a special talent for killing: “If these unholy innovations were to blaze the way for the future, we should find the war-makers of to-morrow causing the wheat-fields to bear a poisoned harvest and forcing the very clouds in heaven to rain down pestilences whose germs are known to us now, or would in time be brought to birth in the alembics of German laboratories.”4 John Dewey cautioned Atlantic readers about thinking they could understand “the German mind,” because it “still entertains a type of moral conception which has well-nigh evaporated in the cultures of other modern nationalities” (February 1916).5 According to Dewey, language has embedded in it the history and thought of a people, which makes cross-cultural translation difficult. Events abroad helped to feed domestic fears and intolerance. With the spread of socialism, the distrust of German Americans, and wide- Atlantic Writers & World War I [ 235 ] spread labor unrest, the country seemed to lose its bearings. Ford Motor Company had to raise wages from $2.40 for nine hours to $5 for eight hours, with profit-sharing. Writing in the Atlantic, John D. Rockefeller Jr. made protest seem unpatriotic. “In the development of this partnership [between labor and capital],” he said, “the greatest social...