For this post, I want to start out by responding to Annie’s post below about the optimism exhibited in the 1918 edition of the Crisis as a way to contrast this optimism with an essay I found in an earlier edition of The Crisis magazine. By this time (1918), the US has entered the war, spurring the various types of war propaganda that emerge through posters and newspapers. In magazines like The Crisis writers are similarly putting forth sentiments of encouragement, hope, and the belief that the soldiers fighting against the Germans are promoting a myriad of crucial social, racial, and national causes.

Within this positive propaganda, one of the rhetorical techniques used is references to the impact of the war on families, and particularly children. In “A Comrade to Comrades,” Germany’s advancement means “slavery chains for our wives, sweethearts, mothers, fathers and children, more galling and hopeless than those of ant-bellum days in the United States” (59). Here the concern is for the people who are not soldiers – the family members and the children for whom the soldiers are fighting and the prospect of their failure in Europe has the potential for extremely drastic and terrible racially constructed consequences. In the “War Profiles,” the soldiers and the oppressed (be they from Ethiopia, India, Israel, or Poland) are likened to children. Section V begins “God heard his children in the night” and later Johnson writes “Tis the children of the oppressed crying for succor” (65).

In an earlier publication of The Crisis, there is an edition entitled “the children’s number,” dated October 1914, which is solely dedicated to the subject of children. In one particular creative essay, entitled “of the Children of Peace” we see the same rhetorical linking of soldiers and perhaps citizens to children as we did in the 1918 edition, though this essay offers a harrowing contrast to the optimism and support for the war that emerges four years later. This particular essay, disguised through some of the language it uses as a story that a parent might tell their child, actually describes the wholesale and needless slaughter of the soldiers in Europe, and displays an overwhelming disillusionment and harsh critique of the war. The essay gets extremely graphic: “Then six million human beings left their fields of golden grain and the busy hum of their factories and taking their own children for weapons dashed them against the trees and the lampposts and the churches and wallowed and gasped in their blood!” (290) and even includes a side note to the reader: “Nay, shrink not, my children; horrible as the tale may be, the truth is worse and you must know it” (290). The way that this essay not only condemns the war as barbaric murder but also the way that it aligns the soldiers with children and fuses the language that you would speak to a child with the graphic language of war is extremely interesting, especially if we contrast this essay with the type of discourse that this same magazine is publishing four years later. Rather than the glossing of war atrocities that exists in the later war propaganda, this essay is telling readers to look more closely, to find the truth, and to realize that, as horrible as this essay is, the reality of the war is much worse. There obviously grew a huge change in the way that people thought about the war, undoubtedly spurred by propaganda and America’s entering the war, but it is interesting that, not only do these different types of propaganda (for and against the war) adopt seemingly opposite messages, but also that they utilize similar rhetorical devices in different ways to put forth opinions about the war.

Immediately following this essay from the 1914 magazine is an advertisement for joining the NAACP in which the author states “The bogey of race prejudice, again brought to the fore by those who seek to disguise the real issues of the ghastly war now raging and to justify its awful carnage, we are pledged to defy” (291). So, to bring this post back to the issue of race, it seems that the authors are trying to actually downplay the issue of “race prejudice” in light of the greater concern for the atrocities of the “ghastly war”. As Keen’s article demonstrated, this does not seem to be a universal position for citizens or for African American citizens throughout different periods of the war, but the way that the two issues are linked (or not linked) here in this edition of the magazine is definitely an important and interesting facet to our larger discussion.