World War I

The full-page advertisement on page 98 of our class reading of The Crisis (Volume 16 Number 2) can seem easy to overlook as merely an advertisement for beauty products.  However, the woman behind this ad was a major player in American civil rights history.

Madame C. J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove, was America's first female self-made millionaire (her 1919 obituary in The New York Times called her "New York's wealthiest Negress") and a major contributor to numerous charities focused on supporting African Americans.

Walker was born on December 23,1867, to recently-freed slaves working as sharecroppers in Delta, Louisiana.  Orphaned at age 7, she worked with her sister to pick cotten in both Delta and Vicksburg, Mississippi.

After her husband, Moses McWilliams, died in 1887, Walker and her daughter, A'Lelia, moved to St. Louis, where her brothers ran a barber shop.  Working as a washer woman for $1.50 a day (about $37.90 today), Walker paid her daughter's way in local public schools.

However, during the 1890s Walker developed a scalp disease.  Exacerbated by lack of indoor plumbing and contemporary irregular bathing practices, she like many women started to go bald.  After conferring with her brothers and experimenting with home remedies, Walker created her own formula to fight her condition.

Around this time, Walker was commissioned as a sales representative for Annie Turnbo Malone, a black businesswoman who sold shampoos and hair irons.  After spending some time working for Malone in Denver, she recruited the help of her new husband, ad man Charles J. Walker, to help advertise her salves under the name "Madame C. J. Walker."  This enterprise became very successful; in fact, her business is still operating today. 

After settling her headquarters and factory in Indianapolis, she and her daughter moved to Harlem to run the New York branch.  It is at this time that Walker became much more active in the Civil Rights movement.  In addition to donating a hefty $1,000 to the creation of a YMCA in the black community within Indianapolis, she supported the Tuskeegee Institute as well as smaller colleges, businesses, and orphanes serving African Americans; before her death in 1919, she donated $5,000 (about a million dollars today) to the NAACP.  

Walker also took a very active role in the WWI-era Civil Rights movment.  After being consistently ignored by Booker T. Washington during 1912's conference of the National Negro Business League (NNBL), Walker stood in her seat and vocally called him out for ignoring her rags-to-riches story, which greatly aligned with his message of African Americans working for respect and wealth.  In 1913, she was the keynote speaker for the conference.  When a white mob in Indianapolis murdered three dozen black citizens in St. Louis in 1917, Walker joined several Harlem leaders at a White House to present a petition for anti-lynching legislation.

In 1917, Walker retired to the home she built at Irving-on-the-Hudson, close to those of John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould.  There, on May 25, 1919, Walker died of hypertension at age 51.  She left about a third of her wealth to her daughter, and donated the rest to charities.

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, in conjunction with Merton College, Oxford University, have made available some letters between Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton. Roland attended Merton until enlisting. This could be of interest to anyone considering a project on Brittain.

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/leighton

It is also worth looking at Merton's page about the war and its former students.

http://share.merton.ox.ac.uk/exhibits/show/merton-at-war

In a January 15, 1911 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, a writer poses a seemingly innocuous question about the styling of her readers’ tresses. In her title, she asks, “Can a Woman’s Hair be Worn Simply?” Then, the subhead: “How the Six Most Distinguished Women in the United States Answer the Question.” The article’s opening paragraphs initially read as one writer’s personal vendetta against what she refers to as the artificiality of “rats” and “puffs” in hairstyling. To create the quaffed volume of the decade’s most popular updo, some had turned to using these “rats” for a little extra plumpness in their pompadour (think of a bump-it made of either human hair or, more commonly, horse hair). The six influential women the writer interviews, but refuses to name “for obvious reasons,” naturally support the author’s disdain for this trendy hairdo and deride women for faking volume they don’t have.

The article brings a number of interesting ideas to light. Of particular note is the author’s insistence on her sources anonymity due to the perplexing labeling of hairstyling as “a matter so essentially personal.” Paradoxically, this fiercely private matter is open daily to public scrutiny. But calling hair “essentially personal” raises another important issue, and that is the coupling of hair and dress with a woman’s essence, or in other words, her selfhood and individuality. By pairing the two together, The Ladies’ Home Journal commissions a woman to make careful decisions about her physical appearance because it is a direct reflection of her identity. While hair and dress may seem trivial, the article suggests that at least they are qualities of personhood one can control and package accordingly (more on that below). For several sentences, the article then makes the expected jabs at those who sport this contrived—and misleading—style by emphatically othering the women using a hair accessory so “unsanitary and ridiculous.” This is where things escalate quickly. One source declares, “I would infinitely rather go without hair if need be than live a lie to myself, my husband and my children.” Then, the ambitious inductive reasoning: “It is a safe rule to go by…that a woman who will deliberately live a lie by the wearing of shams, whether in hair, dress or jewelry, is very likely to live a lie or act a lie in other respects.” Finally, the zinger statement the author’s argument eddies around: “…it may safely be put down as an inflexible rule that just in proportion as a woman strikes the true note in her clothes just so does she reveal her true inner self. Dress is the surest revelation of ourselves.”

Certainly much can be said of the maxim of dress being self-revelatory, but what I want to focus on is not the article’s chosen agency for individuality (dress and “authentic” hairstyles) but on its obsession with this consciousness of self in the first place. Such a preoccupation with forging an identity through self-awareness finds revealing—and unexpected—parallels in Dora Marsden’s editorial “Creation and Immortality” in The Freewoman. In this editorial and throughout Marsden’s publication, there exists a cry for women to become freewomen by cultivating their own personalities separate from their identity as wife or mother. The common charge for thorough and deliberate self-examination finds its way onto the pages of two publications supporting radically disparate ideologies. These echoes testify to a widespread concern with the creation of an authentic feminine self during the years leading up to the gender-role game changer of World War I. The Ladies’ Home Journal article closes with the argument that a woman is “either herself or she is not; one or the other. There is no meeting the issue half-way: not if she is true to herself, and true to what a woman who is a woman should stand for….As we dress, so we are." And then The Freewoman’s strikingly similar refrain from the editorial: “We are what we are; that and no more, whatever the toll of our sons and daughters may be” (362). The former offers dress and hairstyling as a means of individuality; the latter distances selfhood from maternal identification with one’s children. What’s important in this comparison is not how these two publications differ in their respective opinions on how to achieve true womanhood and individuality. The greater focus should highlight their profound overlaps in this common obsession with self-consciousness and existential questioning (“As we dress, so we are” coinciding with the claim that “We are what we are”).

In “Creation and Immortality,” Marsden identifies “high” artistic creation as the chief avenue leading to a greater awareness of individuality. The Freewomen editorial thus supposes that clothes and the pompadours of The Ladies’ Home Journal inhabit the "lower, which is physical creation, travailing…in the material" as opposed to the "higher, artistic travailing…in the mind" (362). Both, however, appeal to their female readers’ creative prowess. And, as Barbara Green explains in her “Introduction to The Freewoman,” even a suffrage activist like Mary Gawthorpe reveled in acquiring a pair of handmade sandals as symbols of a fashion choice “of an alternative socialist lifestyle.” Thus, although a publication like Marsden’s appears to eschew the kinds of preoccupations with dress and hair found in The Ladies’ Home Journal, material culture helps even the freewoman fashion (literally) her identity as well.

I’ve recently read a work by the theorist Habermas and though he writes much later than the authors we are reading today, since some of his ideas are so directly related to parts of the reading today, I thought it would be worthwhile to bring them up. In Europe, The Faltering Project, Habermas discusses media and the way that, historically, it has mostly been asymmetrical and patriarchal. In this context, the transfer of information is given to the public from the few who possess the power of information. Wanting to democratize this flow of information sharing, Habermas argues for a deliberative model, concerned with “reasonableness of discourse and communications,” in which citizens discuss “divisive problems” in an inclusive, transparent, and equally participatory exchange of ideas with the “shared purpose of finding legitimate solutions” (144). Rather than a linear transfer of information and opinions, he argues that information should be shared, deliberated, and discussed in an inclusive way, with multiple perspectives and voices entering the discussion until a rational decision or consensus can be reached.

In “A Discussion Circle,” there seems to be this very same idea of a society which receives information and opinions not through a more traditional linear means of communicating information or by reading, but by collectively  exploring ideas through a rational discussion “until some conclusions had been reached” (373). The fact that this type of project and these assemblies are taking place, though it seems somewhat benign, is actually quite revolutionary and, whether intentionally or organically, challenges subtle patriarchal systems that are often taken for granted. The idea of having an open conversation, as opposed to just passing on information and opinions through writing, as some of the earlier articles in this issue cannot help but do, carries on in the next section “Correspondence”. The letters to the editor, though still not as “free and extensive” as a face-to-face discussion, allow readers to become writers, and to interact with the articles, and with current events, in an interesting way. The fact that the editor (in a few cases) is further engaging with those conversations seems to be helping to support this same purpose. Opinions of the reader-writers, even ones that different from those of the editor, are presented rationally, and when the editor chooses to continue the conversation by responding to them, she gives them fair consideration even if she does not accept them entirely.

Meaning, opinions, and information thus become a concern and an integral part of the community, rather than merely a concern or source of consumption for the individual.  Within the correspondence, the issues raised further support this larger idea. In the first letter to the editor, the writer states that “we must have money for these men’s defence” and that “any influence we can bring to bear…will be useful” (373). This one judicial case, suddenly becomes an issue that “we” or the community need to be concerned or involved in. There is no hesitation or qualm about this. In the next letter, the author states that “well-reared and well-educated young people are a national asset” thus arguing that the concerns of the domestic are actually concerns of the nation, an prespective that sums many early feminist arguments (373).

Altogether, this issue of The Freewoman shows that there seems to be a larger trend towards unity, but one that is inclusive of multiple and various viewpoints. Discussion, and rational deliberation are encouraged, not just in theory, but in practice through the structure of this journal and its dialogic exchange of opinions, as well as the priority of putting together assemblies to “thresh out…topics” (373). Thought the presence of the war, and its reverting linear propaganda may perhaps have caused this type of community discourse to cease, I think that it is extremely interesting that it gets picked up many years later with Habermas. 

Works Cited:
Habermas, Jurgen. Europe, the Faltering Project. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Malden, MA: Polity, 2010.

I really enjoyed reading Claire Buck’s “British Women’s Writing of the Great War.” Buck lends greater perspective to the variety of forces at work in literature during and after the war and the ways that writing evolved in the wake of apocalypse. The rising focus on experience as its own legitimate source  (88) is particularly interesting to me inasmuch as it relates to the ongoing dialogue that takes place in literary developments in this period. Just as optimism and disillusionment continued to coincide throughout the war (88), so did people continue to respond to each other’s work in terms of both style and content. If there are only so many ways to tell a story, there are only so many ways to innovate it; in this respect, Buck’s discussion of wartime poetry’s common perception as “disappointedly backward-looking” (89) bears an interesting contrast to more modernist prose developments in prose (103-106).

As writers endeavored to find new ways to experiment with representations of their own experience, they still often blended traditional poetic techniques or, in the case of modernism, adapted old traditions to construct their own (Pound’s development during and after the war is striking in this sense). In either case, a sense of literary conversation emerges. Just as “women wrote both autobiography and fictionalized war memoir, using the authority of personal experience to present the bleak horror of the Great War” (105) in response to the rising number of male narratives, other authors still managed to build on the work that already existed to paradoxically make their own experience more legitimate. I guess my point is that I’m really interested in the ways that authors grew increasingly individualistic in terms of representing the terror of war from their own perspective while still continuing to build an “increasingly uniform story” (105) of the individual experience. This relationship between the personal and the universal seems to shed a different light on the common perceptions of a Lost Generation (note we still think of it in terms of a Generation) completely isolated and unable to relate to an objective reality anymore, but reflects the more realistic perspective of someone like Brittain who conveys the sense of loss while still acknowledging the power of shared experience--particularly when it centers on a cataclysmic event. In that respect, maybe not much ever really changes in literature, no matter the time or occasion. When the power of an objective narrative is lost, all you have left is the one you make with other people.

Donald Campbell's article "The English Criminal" in the The Freewoman was not exactly what I expected. While there are a lot of politically, spiritually, and socially progressive articles in the journal, as I began to read "The English Criminal," I expected a bit of humorous levity. It starts innocently enough taking a jab at English intellectualism; "The cleverest of those who dabble in the 'ologies are liable to lose their sense of proportion" (369). This seemed to me to be a light-hearted criticism of English academics and intellectuals to remind them that no matter the depth of their research in their specialties that there are very obvious and problematic social issues to be seen on any street corner in London. It continues, "Each nation has its own type of criminal, part of its local colour, as an artist might say, and there are certain fundamental truths which apply to thieves of all countries" (369). At this point, I expected there to be less humor and more of the progressive agenda propagating a message along the lines of, "equality for us all, even among our faults, we're not perfect either, we must clean up our streets." However, I was wrong again.

Campbell continues on to say that the English thieves are in fact less violent and more refined than their counterparts in rival nations. He says, "This little fact shows the whole difference between the English thief and his colleagues from Russia, Germany, or Italy....A good thief in this island never kills. Here is where he differs from the Latin or Slav" (370). My immediate thought was, what the hell is a "good" thief? Morally good? No. Mannerly? Well, it's not polite to steal someone's wallet, so that can't be it. Perhaps, successful in that he makes a living and isn't caught? Well, maybe, but Campbell quickly explains that even the best pickpockets get turned in by older, less talented grifters (370). So what is "good" about English thieves, other than that they don't kill (which is obvious because then they'd be called "murderers")?

It seems that Campbell likes "proportion," just as he alluded to in his opening. A "good" thief, to Campbell, is one that is first and foremost English (xenophobe, anyone?) and one that is proportional, or not egregiously violent or greedy. He explains that "English thieves" are not even, in fact, mainly responsible for the rising criminal problem in England! He writes, "England is the happy hunting-ground of the 'fence,' or receiver of stolen goods, and the 'fence' always like to dominate those who serve him....If the Criminal Investigation Department would give more attention to the receivers of stolen property there would not be as much crime in English cities as there is to-day" (370). A "receiver" is certainly not one born a thief--as Campbell states that "[a] thief born a thief lacks foresight and imagination" (370) , or a blue-collar Englishman. One begins to wonder, who is this mysterious "receiver?" Is he even English at all? It seems that his ties to Europe imply a certain knowledge of the continent at large and having liaisons with people outside of England who are anything but proper English gentleman. So, Mr. Campbell points his finger at the government bureaucracy that is in charge of suppressing crime and tells them to leave the English thief alone and focus on the (very likely) non-English "receiver" who at the very least associates illegally with non-English.

Campbell makes one more sly implication that the criminal problem in London does not lie in an Englishman's hands, but, instead, in the poverty stricken hands, homes, and shops of London's immigrants who largely populate its slums, meat-packing districts, and red-light districts. He writes, "Reducing one idea of a possible remedy of the criminal problem to its shortest possible expression, it might be a formula of two words--the simple life--that the vice and ignorance bred between the diseased walls of city slums and in the curtained houses of tenderloins and red-light districts might be cured by a reversion to the simple life" (372). Surely, this is the answer. Have every (English)man return to the "simpl[y English] life." This seems a few rhetorically sly steps short of arguing in favor of ethnic cleansing (though, that's not to say that the Irish nationalists didn't argue for this exact remedy in the early 20th century). On the other hand, perhaps the problem and solution might lie elsewhere. Perhaps the problem lies with "any and all" the people of a country, including Mr. Campbell, who neglect to properly diagnose the social ills indiscriminately infecting the country by pointing their "clean" hands at the outsiders in the social margins as the unclean carriers of the criminal disease.

To be somewhat fairer, Campbell intends to argue that the government is insufficiently remedying the criminal problem in London, and he notes that the country's judges (i.e. the "learned gentleman in wig and gown" [372]) are also not helpful enough. He closes by saying that "medical specialists" are needed in dealing with criminals. I'm not exactly sure what "medical specialists" have to do with eliminating "fences" or those that can violate and betray the security of English borders with illicit goods; however, I don't think Mr. Campbell is entirely aware of his biases either.

In The Egoist Vol. 1, No. 3 in the Views and Comments section titled “The Chastity of Women,” (44-46) the unknown author of the article—possibly the editor, Dora Marsden—responds to Christabel Pankhurst’s “The Hidden Scourge and how to end it.” Pankhurst’s original piece, as described in “The Chastity of Women,” argues that to end the “scourge” (venereal disease), society requires “Votes for Women as for men, and Chastity for Men as for women” (44). The Egoist interrogates this claim and, in doing so, examines the odd connection between women’s sexuality and their right to vote, as well as the rhetoric of “purity.”

That Pankhurst makes a connection between suffrage for women and chastity for men is important, even outside of The Egoist’s response, because her argument so clearly reveals a correlation in early 20th century public consciousness between purity and political power. For women, their power is often reduced to their purity—so much so that chastity becomes a commodity ensuring their happy future. As The Egoist articulates, for young women to abstain from pre-marital sex “serves to keep up their value as saleable goods before marriage” (46). While men had various forms of political, economic, and social power—the vote is a key example of this power—women had only their sexual currency. The Egoist describes the way in which women “give themselves in marriage”: “the attitude they adopt is not that of persons who satisfy their own desires, but of those who in kindness allow others to satisfy theirs” (45). A woman’s virginity, saved to ‘give’ to her husband, then becomes her one commodity, and her sexuality exists, not for her own pleasure, but for someone else’s. As Pankhurst’s argument seems to imply, if women are given another power in society—that of the vote—then their value would rise in society, and they would be worth more than just their sexuality. Pankhurst’s plan seeks to give women another social power; however, she does not seek to radically alter the system of social power all together. Pankhurst does not commit to freeing women from the pressure of purity, but instead she condemns men to the same rules and anxieties regarding purity and sexual shame that women have long endured.

Pankhurst’s suggested proposal reveals a foundational belief in early 20th century culture that posits a woman’s sexual purity as her most valuable possession. However, what Pankhurst fails to realize is that purity rhetoric must be abandoned completely for women to ever be free of its power to define their worth. The Egoist, in analyzing Pankhurst’s use of the word “chastity,” comes to the important conclusion that what Pankhurst is really concerned with is not chastity—the mental, emotional, spiritual state of being “chaste”—but rather the physical state of virginity. The Egoist concludes, “That is is to be “virgin” rather than chaste she has in mind is supported by the fact that the word she uses in developing her argument is “untouched,” which is speaking enough and might be taken to be conclusive” (45). While Pankhurst connects the suffrage movement to women’s chastity, implying that a woman’s worth lies in her chaste nature, The Egoist sees through this connection. Instead, the article places Pankhurst’s argument precisely on the female body, suggesting that Pankhurst’s parallelism between suffragism and chastity is obsessed, not with purity of virtue, but purity of body and the physical state of being a virgin.

The Egoist article spends much of its space examining the downfalls of remaining “pure.” While it would seem that the response and solution to this problem would then be individual complete sexual looseness, The Egoist instead lumps together the idea of both sexual promiscuity and sexual purity as problems to be solved. The notion of constructing one’s identity around either of these two categories perpetuates the same unhealthy dichotomy created by purity culture. The Egoist states, ““Vice” cannot throw off its “pure” character. The two are one-—related to each other as the observe and reverse of a coin: the under and over of the same psychological condition” (46). The rhetoric of vice or purity as integral to one’s identity must instead be abandoned completely; only then can women free themselves from shame-based purity rhetoric and distance themselves from the notion that their sexuality is a commodity to be cashed in for someone else’s benefit.

In Pearl James's introduction to Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture, she speaks of the ambivalent and polyvalent portrayals of the female body in World War I posters, particularly those from America. Some depict women "in new kinds of uniforms, doing new kinds of labor in new settings" while others use traditional images and "projected old-fashioned ideals to be maintained" (30). Perusing the posters in McFarlin Library Special Collections, I used James's comment about the contradictory uses of the female form to inform and guide my reading of these print images and noticed a striking element of several nursing posters that supported Vera Brittain's scathing criticisms of the profession in her memoir Testament of Youth.

I want to focus on two posters in particular. The first is one from the Red Cross, distributed to promote support--and recruit for--war nursing. The image of the larger-than-life nurse in her billowing robes dominates the composition as she cradles an injured soldier. It names this nurse "The Greatest Mother in the World." It immediately becomes apparent that this poster artist is appealing to a traditional image, and one classical artwork is uncanny in its similarity. At first glance, I did not see a war poster; I saw a retooled portrayal of Michelangelo's famous Pietá sculpture. Both feature the virginal Madonna; the injured soldier emerges as a parallel to the crucified Christ, evoking a clear religious charge for the women in the home front while also mythologizing the sacrifice of soldiers as one comparable to slain saviors. Such tactics in print images augment Brittain's claims about WWI nursing in Testament of Youth. Brittain, who served as a V.A.D., eschews this religious rhetoric in Chapter IX of her memoir where she laments that the nursing profession is "considered so holy that its organizers forget that nurses are just human beings, with human failings and human needs" and names the "'holiness' of the nursing profession" as "easily its worst handicap" (453).

Propaganda both reflected and solidified this handicap, simultaneously pushing women to take action and join a workforce outside of the domestic sphere while charging them not to forget the virginal, cloistered imagery and conduct of the past. In the War Council's Y.M.C.A. poster of a war nurse that reads "Remember the girl behind the man behind the gun," we see a clear example of traditional war nurse images in regard to their unwieldy--and outdated--uniforms. Brittain comments that despite the impracticality of their cumbersome, seven-piece nursing garb, they still had to "do our work in fancy dress" because of values that, even during the war, were "still so Victorian" (453). This waifish nurse in the poster, from her spotless, flowing dress to her little white-heeled shoes, falls within these anachronistic standards so incongruent with modern warfare. The placid face, the open palms, the milky complexion--all appeal to a Victorian image that Brittain, along with her generation, find hollow in its imaginery links between the traditional female form and its preferred and prescribed use to a nation at war.

This week, instead of choosing one poster, I wanted to try to trace patterns through several posters produced by the same company or organization to see if there were any similarities or interesting developments. One company that I noticed produced several of the posters in the McFarlin collection was the United War Work Campaign, which comprised of seven organizations (Young Men’s Christian Association, Young Women’s Christian Association, American Library Association, War Camp Community Service, national Catholic War Council (or Knights of Columbus), Jewish Welfare Board, and Salvation Army). Evidently, this group combined diverse religious, gendered, and community groups and individuals for the united goal of raising money for the war.

As an aside, while looking up information about the UWWC, I found a very interesting transcript of a “telephone brigade” associated with the organization that seems to be using familiar propaganda tactics in trying to get citizens to “do a little bit more” and not be “slackers” which is an interesting parallel to the prints we are looking at today. http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/tp/id/52867

As far as the posters, though, it looks like there are four that were produced by the United War Work Council, though I want to look at and compare two of them in this post, both incorporating the same title of “The Spirit of War Camp Community Service”. In the first, the theme is “home hospitality” while in the second, it is “Invitations to Home and Entertainments”. Both of these posters contain groups of people who are a mix of civilians and soldiers (both army and navy respectively) and both offer some sort of sentiment of the comforts and perhaps normality of the domestic or non-military life.

In the first, we see a family sitting, eating, and conversing at the dinner table, with women, parents, and young men who all seem to be in uniform. I wonder if the family depicted is that of the soldiers, or if the soldiers are being treated by an American family merely trying to help serve them by showing “home hospitality” (or perhaps both). The emphasis here certainly seems to rest on what the family (non-soldier Americans) can do for the soldiers. Perhaps by contributing money to the UWWC families can feel like they are giving soldiers in the war camps the kind of hospitality that is depicted here? In the next “Spirit of War Camp Community Service” poster, there is another group of people, seemingly comprised of navy and army soldiers, and a well-dressed woman who is helping the soldiers receive their “Invitations to Home and Entertainments”. Again, the focus seems to be on the woman, who is helping the soldiers, rather than the soldiers themselves. The soldiers are looking on, but the woman is engaging with the soldiers in a way that seems very active for a fixed poster art setting.

Thinking about the organization(s) behind these posters, there is a lot in them to unite the viewer. Every person, no matter what their gender or religion, can find comfort in a “home cooked meal” or appreciate the normalcy, safety and comfort of a domestic or family community. There is nothing particularly divisive or controversial about them, but rather these posters seem to appeal to a particular type of moment and feeling that the public might imagine the soldiers long for while they are away from home and from these types of moments. (Perhaps this particular type of perspective, i.e. imagining what the soldiers want beyond basic material elements, also centers the propaganda on the organization or community rather than the soldiers themselves). The posters seem to be arguing that even though the soldiers are not at home, we can do our part to help them to experience these moments of home once more through community efforts. The community (and all of the diverse organization that make it up) matters and can make a difference for American soldiers.

I was really drawn to the World War I posters that focus on hunger. The US Food Administration produced a lot of them to encourage people to save as much food as they could during wartime—not just for their own soldiers (and soldiers’ families), but for the “starving [multitudes] of Europe.” Throughout many of these posters runs the slogan, “Waste nothing.”

This campaign simultaneously draws in Americans across the economic/racial spectrum and emphasizes the abundance of a country distant enough from the war to have the privilege of surplus. One poster in particular stresses this reality with lots of Thanksgiving imagery. A great deal of healthy food surrounds a card that reads,

“This is what God gives us[.]
What are you giving so that others may live?
Eat less
Wheat
Meat
Fats
Sugar”

And then the kicker:

“Send more to Europe or they will starve.”

Posters like this manage to put Americans in perspective about how much less affected they are by the intense suffering taking place overseas and reinforce their sense of saving the masses from evil—not just from political destruction but from the ravages that total war wreaks. It promotes the “commonly held vision…in an idealized form” (James 19) that Pearl James talks about in her introduction to the book, Picture This. Others remind Americans of the Belgian refugees (“For three years America has fought starvation in Belgium”); another makes the religious dimension even more explicit with Cardinal Mercier’s plea. One quotes General Pershing, reminding us to ‘waste nothing’: “We must not only feed our soldiers at the front but the millions of women and children behind our lines.” All this active language evokes the sense that the home front is actually placing food in the hands of the hungry, saving lives from their safe towns across the ocean. I’d like to know more about the logistics of how this “Waste nothing” campaign played out during the War and who actually delivered food to starving people—or how much of it actually went to those it was intended to save, or how much it actually helped them.

Clearly, this altruistic campaign was not without its political ambitions. I found an interesting page from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History that describes the “Food Will Win the War” program initiated by Herbert Hoover when he was appointed head of the Food Administration (in 1917, according to this site—it also includes a poster specifically about saving France and includes the line, “Denying ourselves only a little means Life to them.”). On the Lehrman site, Sandra Trenholm discusses how Hoover’s poster campaign also appealed to recent immigrants in the ‘fight’ against hunger and communism. She quotes Hoover in 1919: “Of course, the prime objective of the United States in undertaking the fight against famine in Europe is to save the lives of starving people. The secondary object, however, and of hardly less importance, [is] to defeat Anarchy, which is the handmaiden of Hunger.” Knowing that he said this after the Armistice, this makes me even more curious to see the wider and more long-term effects of such campaigns in war-torn countries, both in the context of WWI and the many other conflicts in which we continue to swoop down from safety to rescue the helpless. Such a goal is not without its merits, but it raises a lot of questions for me about the ways that these posters color the perspective of total war for ordinary citizens and give them the illusion(?) of participation in something that could only have be seen to be understood.

("Blood or Bread" poster originally seen in McFarlin Special Collections; image taken from Fine Arts Museums from San Francisco. Artist: Henry Patrick Raleigh)