(Mis)uses of War: Reading Willa Cather's One of Ours with William James' "The Moral Equivalent of War"

On 25 February 1906, the eminent psychologist and philosopher William James delivered an address entitled "The Moral Equivalent of War" at Stanford University.¹ In this lecture, James exhorted his audience to preserve "such martial virtues as courage, sacrifice, and endurance" while seeking an end to militarism.² Although the wastefulness of war disgusted him, James feared that peace-loving societies, which lacked the martial spirit, would quickly become decadent. To avoid such cultural degeneration, he encouraged his auditors to develop moral equivalents of war such as civilian service programs that would perform the disciplinary functions of the military. The speech was well received. James' wife Alice considered it a "great triumph," and one English professor at the university lauded it as "the most beautiful example of 'form' in structure he had ever heard in a public address."³ James later decided to modify the lecture for publication, and he mailed a revised version to McClure's Magazine on 13 December 1909.⁴ The essay was accepted, and "The Moral Equivalent of War" appeared in the August 1910 issue. The managing editor of the magazine at this time was Willa Cather.⁵

The appearance of James' essay in McClure's is significant to Cather studies for two reasons. First, it proves that Cather read a James text. This information is particularly useful for critics interested in examining James' influence on Cather's thought and aesthetics. Emphasizing the breadth of this influence, Merrill Maguire Skaggs contends that James' Psychology: The Briefer Course "releases spores that root and branch out in all Cather's major fictions."⁶ Skaggs also detects residues of Jamesian philosophy in Cather's novels, arguing that the narrative structure of My Ántonia reflects James' theory of radical empiricism and that James' The Varieties of Religious Experience informs Cather's portrayal of Jean Marie Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop.⁷ While she draws striking parallels between James' work and Cather's fiction, Skaggs does not offer any proof that Cather actually read James. She insists, however, that Cather probably encountered the philosopher's work through Viola Roseboro', "the Cather editor and mentor who proselytized for James."⁸ Significantly, the 1910 publication of "The Moral Equivalent of War" in McClure's reinforces Skaggs' claims about James' influence on Cather, establishing a direct connection between the two writers.⁹ The appearance of this article in McClure's is also important for Cather studies because the essay provides a new context for studying Cather's complex treatment of war in her 1922 novel One of Ours. By reading this novel with James' article, one can appreciate nuances in this treatment that deserve attention.

Critics have not always been sensitive to these nuances. Although One of Ours was a commercial success, and Cather received the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1923, many influential writers were disappointed with the novel when it first appeared. H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, who admired Cather's earlier novels, both wrote unfavorable reviews of One of Ours.¹⁰ Mencken was particularly critical of Cather's portrayal of her protagonist's experiences on the Western Front during World War I, and while he "praised the Nebraska parts of the novel," he "dismissed the war chapters as unreal."¹¹ For Mencken, Dos Passos' Three Soldiers was more authentic because "it disposed of oceans of romance and blather" about combat.¹² Apparently, Mencken read Three Soldiers as "a novel in the modern war tradition of lost innocence and grand futility."¹³ In this tradition, disillusionment was the proper response to war. Cather's protagonist Claude Wheeler was not, however, disillusioned by his combat experiences, and he maintained his sentimental patriotism up to his death. Assuming that Cather shared Claude's naïve faith in the war enterprise, Mencken concluded that One of Ours romanticized military conflict.

Other critics, notably Edmund Wilson, seconded Mencken's assessment of the novel. In his October 1922 Vanity Fair review of One of Ours, Wilson stated explicitly what Mencken merely implied. Labeling Cather's novel "a pretty flat failure...