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Walking through New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the summer of 194, visitors would be sure to see the exhibit Road to Victory, a photographic account of the American people’s reluctant entrance into the Second World War. Beginning with serene pictures of the American West and small-town life, the sequence took a dramatic turn with a large photograph of the attack on Pearl Harbor just months earlier. Nearby was a photo of Japanese emissaries to the United States laughing at some unknown joke; placed alongside images of the explosions in Hawaii, the Japanese seemed to be snickering at the American dead. From there viewers saw pictures of the great factories and farms that kept the war machine rolling, as well as large renderings of American soldiers. Along the way poetic captions explained the images. “Country boys, big city lads, home town fellers,” one placard read, “they’re in the Army now.” One otherwise fierce gi smiled confidently at onlookers from behind his bayonet. Pictures of American families underscored the simple origins and ideals that shaped the greatest warriors in the world, “Trouble-shooters in the first round-the-world war.”1 Opened five months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Road to Victory appeared at MoMA from May to October 194, drawing over 100,000 visitors. (Despite the show’s title, Allied victory was anything but guaranteed that summer, with the Germans penetrating deep into the Soviet Union and Africa, and the Japanese on the o=ensive in the Pacific until the Battle of Midway in June.) Lt. Edward Steichen, an acclaimed photographer of the First World War now employed as a chronicler of the navy, filled the exhibit with photos culled from the archives of the army, the navy, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and other alphabet agencies of the Depression years. The poet Carl Sandburg, Steichen’s brother-in-law, penned the accompanying captions. In 1943 and 1944 smaller versions of the exhibit took to the road under the sponsorship of the O;ce of War Information (owi), the new propaganda arm of the federal government. The exhibit attracted tens of thousands of visitors in Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Honolulu, and smaller venues such as Providence, Rhode Island; Davenport, Iowa; Brookings, South Dakota; Northfield, Minnesota; and Carbondale, Illinois.2 Press reaction around the country was enormously favorable. The New York Times labeled Road to Victory the “supreme war contribution.” In Cleveland journalists touted the exhibit’s “dramatic dignity” and role as an e=ecChapter ฀1 here฀Is฀฀ your฀War,฀ 1941–1945 16 | the world war ii era tive “morale builder.” The Chicago Sun called Road to Victory a “smashing presentation of modern American art, as well as a reflection of the country and the times.” In Wisconsin a reporter noted the “fine and mighty climax” of the exhibit, a “mural 1 feet by 40 feet of armed marching men,” while the St. Louis Globe-Democrat found it a “fine and high spirited exhibition.”3 The director of St. Louis’s City Art Museum reported that the show “was received with great enthusiasm on the part of those who saw it” there.4 Scores of large and small publications around the nation announced their approval of Road to Victory, many merely reproducing MoMA’s written description of the exhibit for their own papers. A few observers were not so impressed, however, and their dissent hinted at issues that would surround the warrior image throughout the conflict. Eleanor Jewett of the previously isolationist Chicago Tribune acknowledged that she and her editors were a “minority of one” but that they did not share the “tremendous enthusiasm” surrounding the show. Drawing their criticisms were the sanitized images making up most of the exhibit. Jewett charged that the display was “government propaganda” and that “sugar had been spread rather thick.” Alongside general praise for the show, another Chicago paper partially agreed with Jewett, admitting that the exhibit “tells nothing of the actual fighting.” Yet Jewett’s position broke sharply with much of the national reaction. Most observers agreed with a California paper that warned the faint of heart, “There has been no minimizing of the gravity of war.”5 Eleanor Jewett and the Tribune had a point. The photographs for Road to Victory had been selected from a limited and censored body of images and included no pictures of combat, wounded soldiers, or the dead. During World War II federal and military authorities exerted tight...

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