TOO WAR-WEARY?
REMEMBERING A FORGOTTEN WAR
The centennial commission says interest will pick up with the anniversary of U.S. participation. PBS, for example, will air a three-part, six-hour series, The Great War. Washington is awash in exhibitions, including ones at the Library of Congress, the National Museum of American History, the Capitol Visitors Center, Arlington National Cemetery, the Postal Museum and the National Cryptologic Museum. Communities across the nation hold lectures, readings, symposia and workshops, some involving veterans of more recent wars.
The impact is unclear. “There’s an official recognition that we have to mark this occasion, and there’s a spate of books and exhibitions, but it hasn’t seeped into the public consciousness, or my students’,” says Gillon, who teaches at the University of Oklahoma.
He says popular, commercial culture hasn’t bought in: “If NBC or HBO was doing a three-part series, that would be different.” Yet in some ways, World War I is more relevant than ever.
“The war mirrors our disillusionment with war, fear of terrorism and the tension between civil liberties and national security,” says Jennifer Keene, a Chapman University historian who’s on the commission’s advisory board. “There are parallels to our time that are more striking than those with World War II.”
Take the Middle East, she says. Thinking of Saddam Hussein in WWII terms — as Hitler — ended up making little sense. But the Islamic State and militant Islam are products of instability dating back to the end of World War I, when the winners carved up the region arbitrarily out of what had been the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
More generally, “I don’t think there could be more timely a moment for Americans to think about World War I, when our role in the world may be shifting dramatically,” Balogh says.
Two of the war’s personalities are quite relevant for Trump: Woodrow Wilson and John J. Pershing.
Wilson is popularly regarded, Balogh says, “as a woolly-headed Princeton professor whose ideas for peace failed after the war.” But he was skilled at leading public opinion — against the war before 1917, for the war in 1917 and in favor of international cooperation after the armistice.
Pershing is, for most Americans, no more than a memorable nickname (“Black Jack”) and a grainy photo from high school history. He was a shrewd strategist who resisted French and British demands to throw his green troops into battle with insufficient training; insisted on preserving a separate identity for the U.S. force; and stressed maneuverability over trench warfare. How America looks back at World War I reflects how it looks at the present. The war has gone in our imaginations and textbooks from a pointless slaughter to a crusade for democracy to a squandered opportunity to a cautionary tale to a Cold War rallying point to a pointless slaughter.
After 16 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, is America too weary of war to enthusiastically commemorate another one?
That would be a shame, says Richard Rubin, author of several books on the war: “There was a time when the war was terribly important. What did people once know that we’ve forgotten?”