The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On

Five: The Great War: Midwife to Modern Memory?

159 five The Great War Midwife to Modern Memory? Jay Winter, Yale University Robert Wohl, University of California at Los Angeles Kemper: I’m Crosby Kemper, the director of the Kansas City Public Library, and it is my pleasure and my honor to welcome you to this symposium cosponsored by the Liberty Memorial and the National World War I Museum, the Truman Library and Truman Library Institute, and the Kansas City Public Library. Winter: Thank you, Crosby. I do want to say a word or two about the venue, where we are, and the proximity of the museum to it. Crosby ’s work and that of his colleagues in creating a space in which intellectual and cultural life can gravitate towards a major library is a remarkable achievement.As someone who lived and taught in Britain for thirty years—I know this kind of municipal library functions as an icon of urban pride. There is no such thing as a major city without a major library, and you’ve helped extend a long and distinguished tradition. The second point that I’d like to draw to your attention is that when I first saw the memorial and the museum, it struck me as extraordinarily 160 Jay Winter and Robert Wohl British, probably unintentionally so, although cities—Kansas City and let’s say, Birmingham or Liverpool or Leeds—these cities have very powerful memories of the Protestant voluntary tradition, where it is not the state, not the federal government or the regional authorities, that create institutions of significance, institutions which last; it is civil society. And it is for that reason that I have an answer when people ask me, as they have done many times, why is it that there’s a museum and a great national memorial in Kansas City—why here? The answer to that question is that local and urban initiatives last. When things are done from on high, when Congress proposes or even disposes or provides money, which I gather they have not done in this case—what they’ve done is to legitimate a museum, to give it its seal of approval. But in the 1920s and yet again today, it was and remains the citizens of Kansas City who made it happen. It was the same in British cities, and it remains so today. The most powerful commemorative act in Britain is still the purchase of poppies—red poppies, which are sold by the millions in November every year. When they buy the poppies, people wear a little war memorial on their lapel.And the money goes to a charitable foundation which provides for the families of veterans, veterans of all the wars of the twentieth century and the twenty-first as well as for their families. This is an act not of the state, but of the people. Now this notion that commemoration comes from below is a very powerful point to raise at the outset of our discussion. Today we are in the middle of what I call a memory boom. Everybody outside the academy and thousands in the academy are obsessed with memory. And one reason why I think this is so is that in war, family history and national history come together. Families know what war is. We have to distinguish between national narratives told and sold by those in power and the stories people remember about their kith and kin. The length of wars matter here. The First World War did not leave a deep trace on family histories since, fortunately for the United States, this country experienced only eighteen months of bloodshed. The Second World War was worse: four years of combat for American soldiers and sailors, less than the six most of Europe knew. The fighting in Vietnam lasted long­ er, though the surge in troop numbers came in 1967. This meant that the five years of combat until the administration recognized the war was lost roughly approximated the length of time American men spent in uniform in World War II. My father was drafted in 1942 and came home The Great War: Midwife to Modern Memory? 161 in 1947. American casualties were much lower in the Vietnam War than in the Second World War, but the bitterness of soldiers returning home after 1972 separated their and our experience of war from that of “the Great Generation” coming home after 1945. For us,theVietnamWar was...