Changed Men: Veterans in American Popular Culture after World War II by Erin Lee Mock

Nearly all veterans who return home from battlefields must make the difficult transition from military to civilian, an often-troubling passage fraught with tensions for both veterans and their families. Erin Lee Mock’s Changed Men: Veterans in American Popular Culture after World War II cogently explores how the American public tried “to open its arms” to those who had changed while in service to their country (8). The veterans not only had acquired combat skills that “would prove both inappropriate and frightening in the context of civilian life” (8), but also had returned with new understandings of race, particularly for African Americans and Japanese Americans, and new understandings of sex, when “[t]housands of teenaged GIs had their first sexual experiences with women and men whose languages they could not understand” (16).

The book begins with an introduction, which provides a useful overview of the veterans’ return, followed by a prologue, which uses wartime letters exchanged between servicemen and civilians to demonstrate what Mock terms “the repression-expression conundrum in which both full openness and complete silence are imagined to be dangerous” (41). The letters themselves provide highly revealing glimpses into the personal concerns and anxieties of the correspondents, even if their relevance to the book’s focus on American popular culture is not always clear.

It is not until we get to the book’s four central chapters that the role of popular culture clearly emerges. Chapter 1 brings together three very different works of literature—all published in 1947 and all featuring World War II veterans as their protagonists: I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane; In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes; and A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Although the veterans have decidedly dissimilar personalities, Mock draws some intriguing connections among them.

Equally intriguing is Chapter 2, which focuses on films from the 1940s and 1950s featuring Van Heflin and Glenn Ford. Although those two stars are generally not in the Hollywood pantheon, Mock points out that “Heflin and Ford were in many more films than [Marlon] Brando and a wider variety of performances than [Humphrey] Bogart, and therefore show other sides of masculinity in postwar Hollywood” (99). Mock’s close readings of the films help us better understand some of the messages—particularly those about masculinity—embedded in mainstream Hollywood films.

Chapter 3 explores the postwar phenomenon of Playboy magazine, created by Hugh Hefner in the early 1950s. As Mock smartly observes, Hefner was “GI Bill-educated, married white midwestern father, taking dull desk jobs to support his family but deeply uncomfortable with the contradictions of postwar life” (133). She convincingly demonstrates how Playboy could be both entertaining and therapeutic: it “trained men in what they may have needed most in the postwar era: getting comfortable” (134).

The emerging and soon-to-be-dominant medium of television provides the focus for chapter 4, in which Mock analyzes several domestic sitcoms from the 1950s. Although shows like Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, Make Room for Daddy, and Ozzie and Harriet may appear to present safe and secure home environments, Mock maintains otherwise: “The 1950s sitcoms showed that violence and sexual threat awakened by the war were newly replanted in the domestic sphere and, thus, highlighted the vulnerability of women and children in their own homes” (177).

Throughout the pages of Changed Men, Mock cites an impressive array of secondary sources on history, film, literature, popular culture, and psychology. However, I wish that someone had paid more attention to how the book cites those sources. I checked twenty-three citations—selected randomly, albeit based on the availability of those sources in a university library—that appear in the book’s introduction and prologue. Fourteen of them (or sixty percent) are incorrect—largely due to words that are missing or wrongly rendered from the original quotations. But some errors are more serious. Indeed, the book’s very first endnote cites an article about The Best Years of Our Lives, which does not contain any of the sentences quoted by Mock (1). The book’s prologue botches the names of at least two letter-writers: Steinus should be Stenius (45) and Shepherd should be Shepard (47). Moreover, several sources are missing from the bibliography and several citations omit the necessary page numbers. Another perplexing omission is the identity of Lewis Mock, whose letters appear several times throughout the prologue. The bibliography tells us that Mock’s letters are in the “Personal Collection of the Author” (p. 253), so presumably he is a family relation. Accordingly, I do not understand why the author never provides any background, other than that Lewis Mock is a “white Marine” (52) who served in the Pacific and who “disappeared for weeks” when he returned from overseas (56).

These instances of carelessness notwithstanding, Changed Men sheds important light, often with original and cogent observations, on how wide-ranging examples of popular culture depicted World War II veterans and the ways in which those veterans changed as a result of the war.