MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

Of

Karsten H. Piep

Candidate for the Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

________________________________________ Rodrigo Lazo, Director

__________________________________________ Timothy Melley, Reader

_________________________________________ Katharine Gillespie, Reader

________________________________________ Morris Young, Reader

________________________________________ Allan Winkler, Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

EMBATTLED HOMEFRONTS: POLITICS AND REPRESENTATION IN AMERICAN WORLD WAR I NOVELS

By Karsten H. Piep

This dissertation examines both canonized and marginalized American World War I novels within the context of socio-political debates over shifting class, gender, and race relations. The study contends that American literary representations of the Great War are shaped less by universal insights into modern society’s self-destructiveness than by concerted and often highly conflicted efforts to fashion class-, gender-, and race-specific experiences of industrial warfare in ways that create, stabilize, or heighten particular group identities. In moving beyond the customary focus on ironic war representations, Embattled Homefronts endeavors to show that the representational and ideological battles fought within the diverse body of American World War I literature not only shed light on the emergence of powerful identity-political concepts such as the “New Liberal,” the “New Proletariat,” the “New Woman, and the “New Negro,” but also speak to the (re)appearance of utopian, communitarian, and social protest fictions in the early 1930s. Chapter two investigates how John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms adapt elements of the protest novel so as to revalidate (neo)romantic ideas of bourgeois individualism vis-à-vis the presumed failures of the progressive movement. Chapter three scrutinizes the ways in which two Proletarian war novels—Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins and William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion—utilize the Bildungsroman genre in an attempt to commemorate the battles fought by and within the American laboring classes for revolutionary purposes. Chapter four investigates how Dorothy Canfield Fisher’ Home Fires in France and Gertrude Atherton’s The White Morning heighten and exploit war-induced notions of an “apotheosis of femaleness” by combining older motifs of female-centered communities with images of the emergent “New Woman.” Lastly, taking a close look at Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and Walter F. White’s The Fire in the Flint, chapter five demonstrates that African American Great War writings transcend the confines of mere protest fiction by adapting conventions of the historical romance so as to create exemplary black protagonists, whose dedication to racial self-improvement, communal work, and heroic resistance mark them as standard bearers of the American democratic ideal.

EMBATTLED HOMEFRONTS: POLITICS AND REPRESENTATION IN AMERICAN WORLD WAR I NOVELS

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

By

Karsten H. Piep

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2005

Dissertation Director: Dr. Rodrigo Lazo

ii

Contents

Acknowledgments iii

Preface 1 1. Modern Memory Revisited: The Canon, Narrative Truth, Modernism, and the Recovery of Lost Voices 4

2. “A Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness:” War as Individualist Protest Novel in John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms 36

3. “For the Red Revolt –‘tis Marked by Fate:” War as Proletarian Bildungsroman in Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins and William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion 101

4. “The Hens are Eagles:” War as Feminist Utopia in Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Homefires in France, Gertrude Atherton’s The White Morning, and Henry Sydnor Harrison’s Saint Teresa 154

5. “Sons of Freedom:” War as Historical Romance in Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint 202 Postscript 260 Bibliography 267

iii

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my entire dissertation committee, but especially Rodrigo Lazo, for providing me with invaluable help and encouragement during all stages of this project. My special thanks goes out to my wife, Diana Tweeddale Piep, as well as to my parents, Hans-Rudolf Piep and Margrit Piep-Wolgast, without whose aid and assistance I could have never even attempted this work.

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Preface

Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word over there— That the Yanks are coming, The Yanks are coming, The drums rum-tumming Ev'rywhere. So prepare, say a pray'r, Send the word, send the word to beware. We'll be over, we're coming over, And we won't come back till it's over

Over there. —George M. Cohan, “Over There” (1917)

FROM the U.S. perspective, what by 1917 was still called the “European War” at

first appeared to be a distant affair that took place somewhere “over there” on the

battlefields of an “old Europe,” ruled by feuding monarchs and petty aristocrats. Yet, the

very rhetoric with which President Wilson led the United States into war as the promoter

of democracy, champion of equality, advocate of self-determination, and bringer of social

peace made it soon apparent that some of the fiercest battles in the war “over there”

would be fought right “over here.” Another popular war song, Ed Morton and Alfred

Bryan’s “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” portended as much in early 1915.

When it became clear that the United States would “rush to the rescue” of a

Europe that was drowning itself in mud and blood, the hitherto seemingly immutable

concepts of American democracy and culture were suddenly thrown into question at

home. In light of impending war, long simmering contradictions broke forth into the

open: How could conscription be reconciled with an American tradition of volunteerism?

How could the tenets of rugged individualism be brought in line with the need for

Prussian-like discipline? How could official war propaganda coexist with the right of

freedom of speech? How could dissent be silenced democratically? How could the

dissimilar interests of capital and labor be reconciled so as to facilitate the mass

mobilization of people and material? How could a war be fought in the name of

democracy when women and minorities remained disenfranchised? How could America

rush to the defense of maltreated Belgians when at home lynchings occurred almost on a

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daily basis? How could a war be fought against Prussian Junkerdom by a society that is

itself marked by ridged social hierarchies?

Perhaps even more unsettling was a host of related concerns that threatened to

upset America’s societal organization forever: What role would women play in the war

and how would their involvement affect the already strained gender relations? Would

female employment during wartime topple established family structures? What effect

would the war have on class relations? Would restrictive wartime policies heighten

revolutionary sentiments among the working classes, most of which had been opposed to

war in the first place? And what implications would the war have on the status of

African Americans in society? Would and could African Americans demand social

equality in exchange for services rendered?

Obviously, these and other questions related to the American war effort not only

concerned government officials, politicians, pundits, sociologists, historians, and

philosophers, but every individual and every group of people who lived through these

tumultuous times, producers of literature emphatically included. And more often than

not, the very way in which these and other questions would be framed by members of

different social groups revealed American society to be the site of simmering class,

gender, and race conflicts. Hence, while many laborites sensed that the national war

effort would lead to more or less fundamental shifts in the relationship between capital

and labor, not a few women’s rights activists perceived that America’s involvement in the

armed conflict abroad would eventually bestow females with greater political sway and

economic independence. Similarly, numerous African Americans began to express their

views that Wilson’s “War for Democracy” had to be fought first and foremost on the

American homefront.

The following study, then, is a historically contextualized inquiry into the highly

conflicted and often remarkably contradictory American experience of World War I as it

plays itself out in the diverse body of literary works to which it has given rise and by

which it has been, in turn, shaped and commemorated. As such, this study, like most of

its predecessors, naturally concerns itself with the formal aspects of literary

representations of World War I. But rather than merely endeavoring to discern how

American writers from various social backgrounds chose to depict World War I, the

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present study undertakes to shed light on the particular ideologies and political practices

that inform these often very group-specific representational choices. In short, the study

endeavors to do nothing more and nothing less than to retrace the American literary

history of World War I by keeping a firm eye on American political history.

It is my central premise that American literary works of World War I were

inextricably embroiled in contemporaneous debates about shifting class, gender, and race

relations. Hence, I argue that even the most sophisticated among them do not represent

and commemorate the war “as it really was,” but in ways that draw upon both the official

and the unofficial rhetoric surrounding the war so as to redefine, reassert, and/or heighten

particular group identities. To emphasize this point, I depart from most preceding

investigations by scrutinizing canonized American World War I texts—written almost

exclusively from a white middle class male perspective—alongside marginalized works

by proletarian, feminist, and/or African American authors. Moreover, to facilitate the

close reading of First World War novels written from diverse class, gender, and race

positions, I am painstakingly resituating individual texts within the larger socio-political

contexts and debates that surround them. In this way, I hope to contribute to a richer

understanding of a fascinating body of literature that for the most part still leads a

shadowy existence in the annals of American literary history.

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1

Modern Memory Revisited

THE CANON, NARRATIVE TRUTH, MODERNISM, AND THE RECOVERY OF LOST VOICES

We have had no desire to attain an authentic history; but have rather aimed to record our impressions and facts in a simple way.

—Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson, Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.

For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Memory, then, is not only a backward retrieval of a vanished event, but also a posting forward, at the remembered instant, to all other future moments of corresponding circumstance.

—Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance NOTWITHSTANDING William Dean Howells’s edict in 1914 that “war stops

literature” and W. B. Yeats’s lasting distaste for trench poetry, the First World War was

undeniably a literary event on the grand scale, even if only in number of publications.1

From the very first day of hostilities, the 1914-18 war inspired enormous quantities of

poetry and fiction. In England alone, Catherine W. Reilly has counted 2,225 poets of the

1 In his editorial foreword to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 (Oxford UP, 1936), W. B. Yeats declared, “I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are in all anthologies, but I have substituted Herbert Read's 'End of a War' written long after. The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military Cross; their letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joy - for all skill is joyful - but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his 'Empedocles on Etna' from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has withdrawn into quicksilver at the back of the mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write 'The Persians', 'Agincourt', 'Chevy Chase': some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road - that is all. If war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature fell, or as we forget the worst moments of a more painful disease” (xxxiv-xxxv).

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First World War, 1,808 of whom were civilians.2 The listing of French wartime poets in

Jean Vic’s La Litterature de la Guerre runs to eighteen pages. Claims that more than

three million war poems were written in Germany are difficult to substantiate, but the

catalogues of the Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt list 355 German-language novels of

World War I. Under the subject heading “World War, 1914-1918,” the New York Public

Library records 1420 pieces of fiction, 1111 volumes of poetry, 622 personal narratives,

and 149 biographical accounts. In The Novels of World War I: An Annotated

Bibliography (1981), Philip E. Hager and Desmond Taylor catalog nearly 1,400 titles,

published between 1914 and 1978. If one adds to these the tens of thousands of war

memoirs, short stories, autobiographies, letters, journals, and diaries that were written by

nurses, combatants, relief workers, journalists, homefront activists, and civilians from all

walks of life, it is easy to see why some commentators have claimed that the First World

War generated “as much writing as fighting.”3

I

But whilst the Great War continues to inspire literary responses such as Pat Barker’s

acclaimed novel Regeneration (1991), a mere twenty or so World War I novels have

received sustained critical attention and achieved canonical status.4 Perhaps another forty

works are frequently discussed within the specialized field of war literature studies, but

the vast bulk of literary responses to the First World War have been for the most part

forgotten. The reasons cited for such forgetfulness are manifold. Chief among them is

the alleged inferiority of much WW I literature in general and of works by US American

authors in particular, whose vicarious or at best limited exposure to the horrific realities

2 A. D. Harvey, “First World War Literature,” History Today 43 (1993): 11 3 Qtd. in Neil Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity: World War I and American Society (New York: Holms & Meyer, 1986) xiii. The written response to World War I becomes greater still, if one includes the countless broadsides, partisan poems, and short pieces of fiction that were published in magazines and newspapers. 4 Philip E. Hager and Desmond Taylor come up with the following list “of the twenty most significant novels of the Great War:” Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1917), Vicente Blasco Ibanez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1918), Herman Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1932), Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night (1934), Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory (1935), John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921), Ford Madox Ford’s trilogy Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929), William March’s Company K (1933), Stratis Myrivilia’s Life in the Tomb (1927/1977), Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quite on the Western Front (1929), Jules Romains’s Verdun (1940), Michail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), Fritz Unruh’s The Way of Sacrifice (1928), and Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grisha (1929).

6

of modern trench warfare is said to have delayed a radical break with the conventions of

19th century war narratives.5 “To Americans,” Paul Fussell observes in his seminal study,

The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), “the Great War in France was as remote, as,

let’s say, the Second War in the Solomon Islands: ‘Over There’ (meaning way Over

There) is characteristically an American, not a British, war song.” According to Fussell,

this in part accounts for the fact that, unlike the British “intercourse with literature,”

which was “instinctive and unapologetic,” the American “way with literature” remained

“less assured, likely to be apologetic and self-conscious.”6 Comparing American novels

of World War I with those that thematize World War II, Malcolm Cowley sounded a

similar note in 1954, assessing that more of the latter “reach a certain level of competence

and that, as a group, they compose a sounder body of work.”7 Studies ranging from

Stanley Cooperman’s World War 1 and the American Novel (1967) to Peter Aichinger’s

The American Soldier in Fiction, 1880-1963 (1975) and Peter G. Jones’s War and the

Novelist (1976) have since seconded Cowley’s assessment and sketched out the gradual

development of American war writings into a “distinguishable genre” that adequately

represents the realities of modern warfare.8 The “formal objectivity perfected by

Hemingway and Dos Passos,” Cooperman explains, was “carried on by World War II

writers…who…could concentrate on total realism not only of event, but of dialogue,

politics, and sexual or social motivation.”9

Though put forth time after time, such value judgments concerning the

“competence,” “soundness,” and “formal objectivity” of war literature appear to be

far from self-evident so that one must ask on what grounds and for what purpose certain

forms of expressions are upheld, while others are deemed inadequate. As Jane Tompkins

has demonstrated in Sensational Designs (1985), critical postulations of standards of

5 Taking issue with claims by Paul Fussell and others that literary modernism was born on the European battlefields of World War I, Ann Douglas argues that the Civil War, not the Great War, was the first modern war and that the modernist revolution had been well under way in cultural centers such as New York, when the USA deployed its troops to Europe in 1917. Consequently, the First World War functioned not as an incubator but as an “accelerator.” Ann Douglas, Terribly Honest: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1995) 179-193. 6 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Literature (London: Oxford UP, 1975) 221, 160-61. 7 Malcolm, Cowley, The Literary Situation (New York: Viking Press, 1954) 34. 8 Peter G. Jones, War and the Novelist: Appraising the American War Novel (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1976) 3. 9 Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967) 241.

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artistic merit and representational fidelity not only serve to mask prevailing ideological

stances but also to obscure both the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic “cultural work”

literary pieces perform in direct confrontation with each other as well as society at large.

The “soundness” of World War I literature and hence its literary “value” has

habitually been ascertained on the basis of how accurately a particular novel projects

postwar sentiments of disillusionment and expresses sharp disgust with the war as well as

its attendant rhetoric.10 Partially in reaction to the hyper-patriotic war propaganda, so

effectively disseminated in the United States by the Creel Committee, many critics

exhibit an understandable penchant for “anti-war” or “protest novels,” which debunk the

language of the “Great Crusade” that portended, in Woodrow Wilson’s memorable

phrase, “to make the world save for democracy.” Not surprisingly, then, most critical

assessments of World War I literature that seek to map out the development of American

war literature into a “distinguishable genre” suggest that the “unsound” fiction written

during the 1914-1918 period was pro-war, while the more “objective” novels of the later

phase were characterized by disillusionment and finally outrage. As Philip E. Hager and

Desmond Taylor have shown, however, this literary-historical division of World War I

literature into early pro-war and later anti-war works is scarcely tenable. “It is now

apparent,” Hager and Taylor write, “that the themes of the novels did not change from

fervent patriotism or even jingoism to revulsion and outrage as the human casualties were

recognized back home.”11 Comparing wartime with postwar novels, Hager and Taylor

conclude that mundane themes such as “life in war,” “day-to-day activities,”

“conversations,” and “thoughts of draft-aged youths in love with village girls”

predominate the written response to World War I. And even though critics have become

more aware of the difficulties involved in circumscribing the “thematic and ideological

thrust” of anti-war novels, relatively few studies of American First World War literature

pause to consider the political uses to which images of shell-shocked and victimized

10 One notable exception to this apparent rule is Ernst Jünger’s Storms of Steel, whose aestheticization of the Fronterlebnis has been regarded as stylistically innovative and is seen as pointing toward the Fascist apotheosis of war that marks the writings of Italian futurists. 11 Philip Hager and Desmond Taylor, The Novels of World War I: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1981) 4.

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soldiers are put within particularly “praiseworthy” works of anti-war fiction. 12 Hence,

Evelyn Cobley notes that the “self-image of the soldier as sacrificial victim” constitutes a

form of ironic “ennoblement,” but stops short of asking what day-to-day practices and

attitudes such re-ennoblement of the war veteran serves to legitimize.13 Similarly,

whereas much attention has been paid to the uncompromising manner in which

“exemplary” novels expose the “deceptive rhetoric of progress within a cultural system

that no longer permits the authentic individual experience of values,” comparatively little

notice has been taken of the ways in which American World War I texts by authors of

both genders and of different racial backgrounds buttress, subvert, or rework cultural

assumptions concerning the status of women, minorities, immigrants, and the working

class.14 Dorothy Goldman’s remark that “in terms of literary history and the canon of

war writing, the Great War was a man’s war” attests to this, as does David Lundberg’s

observation that “even though some [black soldiers] were poets and novelists who left

accounts of their war experience…none of [the recent scholarship] deals explicitly with

the black literary response to the war.”15

When Walt Whitman wrote after the Civil War that “the real war will never get

in the books,” he might have been closer to the truth than many a literary critic who

berates “the failure of American writers to grasp the reality of the war.”16 No matter how

sophisticated its representational techniques and no matter how up-to-date its vocabulary,

every war narrative that emerges from the pages of history books or works of fiction

creates the very realities its represents.17 And what Amy Kaplan has observed with

regard to 19th century realist narratives is also applicable to early 20th century war

narratives (modernist or otherwise): they “actively construct the coherent social world

12 Walter Hölbling, Fiktionen vom Krieg im neueren amerikanischen Roman (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987) 52. 13 Evelyn Cobley, “Violence and Sacrifice in Modern War Narratives, “ SubStance 23.3 (1994): 77. 14Hölbling 56. 15 Dorothy Goldman, Women Writers and the Great War (New York: Twayne, 1995) ix-x; David Lundberg, “The American Literature of War: The Civil War, World War I, and World War II, American Quarterly 36.3 (1984): 381. 16 Jeffrey Walsh, American War Literature, 1914 to Vietnam (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982) 17. 17 And it is not on the battlefields of war, but on the cultural battleground at home—on the streets, in the dens of academics, on the desks of publishers, in the chambers of commerce and the halls of politics, in the pages of magazines and newspapers, et cetera—that the myriad of possible narrative realities are sorted out, discarded and espoused, before they begin to remerge as a streamlined master narrative of the “Real War.”

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they represent; and they do this not in a vacuum of fictionality but in direct confrontation

with the elusive process of social change.”18

At the heart of Kaplan’s social constructivist approach to literature stands the

central supposition that history—“the elusive process of social change”—is never directly

reflected in the form and content of a given text, but instead appears always already

mediated by personal and cultural ideologies. Yet, since “the subject matter of war

literature is still widely believed to be historically verifiable,” as Evelyn Cobley notes,

many literary critics have focused primarily on the self-professed truthfulness of war

narratives rather than on the ways in which fictions of war at once generate and suppress

historical possibilities for social change.19 Akin to those young white male authors, who,

after “the show” was over, set out to tell the “truth” about the horrors of modern warfare,

critics have labored hard to explain the appearance of new modes of understanding and

representation as the anticipated and seemingly inevitable outcome of history.20 Gertrude

Stein’s literary-political edict that modernism made World War I decipherable for it

“created the completed recognition of the contemporary composition,” appears to have

been accepted by a majority of critics without a great deal of modification.21 Paying

henceforth scant attention to the ways in which Stein and her fellow writers “actively

construct the coherent world they represent,” critical studies ranging from John W.

Aldridge’s After the Lost Generation (1951) to Bernhard Bergonzi’s Heroes’ Twilight

(1965) to Holger Klein’s The First World War in Fiction (1976) have persisted in judging

the significance of war novels on the basis of their artistic facilities to bestow appropriate

forms upon new historical realities (or “signs of the times”) that are supposed to be

accessible as the Kantian “thing-in-itself.”

18 Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 9. 19 Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993) 14. 20 Although one searches in vein for expressions of enthusiasm about the war in the bleak novels by lost generation authors, Ann Douglas reports that Gertrude Stein mentioned on several occasions that “the war had given them the time of their lives” (199). Certain passages in John Dos Passos’s war journal seem to confirm Stein’s impression. “I feel more alive than ever,” Dos Passos wrote while at the front, and concerning his motives to enlist, he simply states: “I wanted to see the show” (qtd. in Douglas 199). In a similar vein, trying to explain the growing fascination with war among American intellectuals, the maverik commentator Randolph Bourne speculated in the June 1917 edition of Seven Arts that “[t]here was the itch to be in the great experience which the rest of the world was having” (141). 21 Gertrude Stein, “Composition and Explanation,” Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909-45, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (New York: Penguin, 1984) 28.

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In his preface to The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell describes what he

perceives to be the “reciprocal process by which life feeds materials to literature while

literature returns the favor by conforming forms upon life.”22 Taking note of Bernhard

Bergonzi’s retrospective insight that “[t]he problems of relating texts of literature and the

texts of history now loom larger and more dauntingly,” the present study aims to

complicate Fussell’s reciprocal process insofar as it assumes that life itself (e.g., war,

social change, history) cannot come into view independently of the very texts that give

form to it. 23 I am thus proceeding from Frederic Jameson’s understanding that

“history…as an absent cause…is inaccessible to us except in textual form [so] that our

approach to it and to the Real necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its

narrativization in the political unconscious.”24 Literature, as Frederic Jameson has

argued convincingly, is not an artistic reflection of historical realities, but a “socially

symbolic act”—“a way of doing something to the world.”25 Hence, instead of attempting

to measure literary depictions of the war against dominant historical master narratives

concerning the “Real War” or against standards of what William E. Matsen calls the

evolving “writer’s craft” to accurately capture the spirit of the times, Embattled

Homefronts sets out to discern the types of cultural work in which American World War I

literature engages.26

“[E]ach life,” the self-reflexive “amateur historian” in Richard Powers’s

World War I novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985) concludes, “both

theorizes on and works out the spirit of its epoch. Each discrete life examines and

explains everything it touches in a constant exchange of mutual defining and

reshaping…. They create each other, as making and understanding create each other.”27

Embattled Homefronts takes a similar epistemological turn. Heeding Jameson’s call to

reconstruct the historical “subtexts” that surround and underlie individual literary texts,

22 Fussell i. 23 Bernhard Bergonzi, Heroes Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, 2nd ed. (London: MacMillan Press, 1980) 10. 24 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981) 35. 25 Ibid 12. 26 William E. Matsen, The Great War and the American Novel: Versions of Reality and the Writer’s Craft in Select Fiction of the First World War (New York: P. Lang, 1993). 27 Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (New York: Morrow, 1985) 206-207.

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including so-called timeless classics, I am, first of all, endeavoring to restore some of the

marginalized or lost literary voice of the First World War, most notably those of women,

African Americans, and writers concerned with a working-class perspective. “Such

reconstruction,” as Jameson points out, “is of a piece with the reaffirmation of the

existence of marginalized or oppositional cultures in our own time, and the reaudition of

the oppositional voices of black or ethnic cultures, women’s and gay literature, ‘naïve’ or

marginalized folk art, and the like.”28

Now, since “the reaffirmation of the existence of marginalized or oppositional

groups” has lately come under sharp attack, a few words of clarification seem to be in

order here. Leading the assault against what he perceives to be self-defeating trends

within current political literary criticism, Walter Benn Michaels has charged that late

twentieth-century versions of identity politics fall into the early twentieth-century trap of

“pluralist racism.”29 Michaels certainly does well to remind us of the inherent structural

limitations of identity political concepts based upon difference. What Michaels tends to

overlook, however, is that pluralist formulations of difference are usually in flux and

often foster strategic coalitions across race, gender, and class lines (perhaps the latest

example of this is the white rapper Eminem). Moreover, as Raymond Williams reminds

us, even after new or emergent cultural practices have been incorporated into the

structure of a dominant culture, they are never singular, fixed, or stable. They “have

continually to be renewed, recreated, and defended and by the same token…can be

continually challenged and in certain respects modified.”30 Eager to expose “the

conceptual apparatus of pluralist racism,” Michaels, it appears, falls into the postmodern

trap of structural determinism when he not only indiscriminately equates white

28 Jameson 85. 29 Reading a wide variety of early twentieth-century texts, ranging from the Immigration Act of 1924 to Nella Larsen’s Passing to William Faulkner’s The Sound of the Fury, Walter Benn Michaels notes a conceptual shift from Progressive-era notions of racial, ethnic, and cultural hierarchies toward modern ideas of pluralism based upon “Difference not Inferiority.” According to Michaels, however, this new conceptual emphasis on racial, ethnic, and cultural differences is hardly designed to promote greater tolerance. To the contrary, in Michaels’s view it merely constitutes a more sophisticated form of racism because “the commitment to difference itself represent a theoretical intensification that has nothing do to with feelings of tolerance or intolerance toward other races and everything to do with the conceptual apparatus of pluralist racism”(65). See Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 30 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: NLB, 1980) 35.

12

supremacist with black nationalist positions, but also fails to consider the social

conditions under which literary constructions of a cultural race consciousness function as

potent weapons in the political fight against oppression. “Conceptual similarities often

underlie antagonistic positions,” Eric Lott observes, “but this hardly means that the

positions are indistinguishable or that we should care more about conceptual

underpinnings than political conflicts.”31

Without close attention to specific political conflicts, I maintain, the study of

American World War I literature yields little more than formalistic dichotomies, which

demarcate genteel against modernist fiction, but—by and in themselves—reveal hardly

anything about the social practices of war novels and their relations to society at large.

Thus, in shifting the focus from artistic responses to modern warfare “over there” to

literary interventions in the political battles “over here,” I am departing from most

previous studies by starting form the assumption that American World War I novels were

actively engaged in the class, gender, and race conflicts that threatened to explode the

nation’s social fabric. For as historian David M. Kennedy reminds us, “Americans went

to war in 1917 not only against Germans in the fields of France but against each other at

home. They entered on a deadly serious contest to determine the consequences of the

crisis for the character of American economic, social, and political life.”32 Based upon

these suppositions, I contend that literary representations of the Great War are shaped less

by sudden and universal insights into modern society’s “futility and self-destructive

horror” than by concerted and often conflicting efforts to fashion the “realities” of (class,

gender, race) warfare in ways that create, stabilize, or heighten particular group identities.

And these efforts to create, stabilize, or heighten particular group identities are

characterized on the one hand, by a harking back to “residual” cultural experiences,

meanings, and values (for example, the African American experience of slavery) and, on

the other, by a fostering of “emergent” cultural experiences, meanings, and values (for

instance, the growing experience of women in the business world).33

31 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford UP, 1995) 28. 32 David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford UP, 1980) 41. 33 Here, as in subsequent discussions, my analysis draws freely upon Raymond Williams theoretical writings, particularly his aforecited collection of essays, Problems in Materialism and Culture.

13

Before the backdrop of mounting labor conflicts, an unprecedented influx of

women into the workforce, and the spread of bloody race riots, marginalized World War I

novels such as Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins, Gertrude Atherton’s White Morning,

and Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hopes Highway, actively participate in the creation of a

heightened class, race, and gender consciousness that eventually gave rise to the identity-

politically concepts of the “New Proletariat,” the “New Woman,” and the “New Negro.”

Striving to sketch out specific communal responses to World War I, these works do not,

as has been charged, stubbornly cling to the “outdated” representational mode of the

historical romance. Instead, they adapt and modify existing conventions of the

bildungsroman, the feminist utopia, and the historical romance so as to chart out the

course of future political action based upon the collective memory of past struggles and

past abuses. And in doing so, the forgotten war novels discussed in this study provide

some of the missing links that connect, for example, early 20th century muckraking

novels such as Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) with 1930s social novels such as John

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), late 19th century women’s novels Sarah Orne

Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Fires (1896) with 1930s communitarian novels such

as Meridel LeSueur’s The Girl (1936) and post-Civil War reconstruction novels such as

Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) with black protest novels such as

Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938).

Of course, American World War I novels written from proletarian, feminist, and

black perspectives were not the only ones concerned with redefining class, gender, and

race positions. Far from representing the realities of war in a detached and objective

manner, self-consciously modernist war novels such as John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers

and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms labored equally hard to redraw the contours

of a white male middle-class identity whose cultural authority seemed to be eroding. But

in contrast to the collective or communal war novels mentioned above, these modernist

works persist in depicting the Great War as the great isolating experience that renders

meaningful political discourses well nigh impossible. Angrily discarding hopes for an

exalted collective destiny that progressive reformers continued to voice, they turn public

struggles into private ones, until the self becomes the sole arbiter on questions of

14

morality, politics, and—not incidentally—relations between the classes, sexes, and the

nature of manhood and womanhood.

Given the longstanding valorization of individualism and self-reliance

within Western literature in general and American literature in particular, it is easy to

see why the modernist privatization of political conflicts continues to appeal to critics of

World War I literature. Erich Kahler’s assessment of Hemingway’s A Farewell of Arms

is emblematic. Noting the “clarity” with which Hemingway conveys “the bitter

experience and disillusionment of the generation,” Kahler finds special praise for the

book’s omission of “detail, social commentary, and explicit psychology.”34 It remains

puzzling, to say the least, how the eschewal of “detail, social commentary, and explicit

psychology” may elucidate the roots of disillusionment among not just young male war

veterans, but an entire generation. Apparently, critics such as Kahler and Peter G. Jones

are less interested in the precise sources of the protagonist’s “existentialist anxiety” than

in his ability to revalidate traditional tenets of (white male) individualism through

“calculated detachment” or other such strategies.35 And indeed, Frederic Henry’s

“separate peace” in A Farewell to Arms as well as John Andrews’s private “gesture,

feeble as it is, towards human freedom” in Three Soldiers forcefully reassert “authentic”

man’s ability to define himself through his inner strengths and to create his own vision of

existence independently of friends, foes, family, society, and tradition.

First World War novels written from proletarian, feminist, or African American

perspectives by and large tend to resist such politics of (re)individualization. In these

novels, loners or those who sever their communal ties almost invariably turn out to be

losers. Hence, rather than providing an ominous picture of the potentially devastating

effects of modern mass warfare, mass slaughter, and mass demagoguery on the

individual, they depict and explore various collective responses to the sweltering social

conflicts that had been aggravated by the war. Moreover, written, for the most part, from

a perspective of the already-oppressed, proletarian, feminist, and black World War I

novels do not just depict what some called the “rich man’s” or the “white man’s war”

with a certain amount of malicious glee, but as a historical signpost that portends radical

34 Erich Kahler The Tower and the Abyss (New York: Braziller, 1967) 98-99. 35 Jones 8.

15

shifts in the nation’s cultural, social, and political power structures.

Ultimately, my focus on the ways in which American authors struggled to

represent the impact of World War I on different segments of the populace aims to

illuminate where and how venues for emancipatory social action were opened up,

blocked, or both. The present study aspires to do more than to discern some of the ways

in which American World War I literature—unwittingly or not—buttresses hegemonic

power structures. It also and perhaps more importantly seeks to recover certain utopian

impulses that underlie these works. For if, as Walter Benjamin famously stated, “there is

no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” the

inverse conclusion appears to be equally permissible; namely, that there is no cultural

artifact which—in documenting barbarism—does not also project utopian longings for

emancipatory social action.36 Benjamin’s own approach in his fragmentary Passagen-

Werk, wherein he seeks “to recover the revolutionary potential of the archaic images of

the collective wish for social utopia” points the way to such an interpretative double

move that aims to illuminate how literary appropriations of cultural myth at once bolster

and undercut existing power structures.37

The circulation of hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses within American

World War I literature is much too complex to be understood as a clash between

“genteel” and “modernist” war representations. Both more traditionalistic war

representations, which by and large hold on to progessivist tenets of social reform, and

more modernistic war representations, which for the most part reject notions of societal

amelioration, at times challenge, at times replicate elements of a hegemonic order that, as

Antonio Gramsci has shown, is subject to constant rifts, shifts, and transformations.38

And it is precisely in light of these incessant changes within the hegemonic order that the

rereading of canonical alongside marginalized World War I novels assumes significance.

Because once alternative or oppositional practices, meanings, and experiences have been

thoroughly incorporated into a dominant culture (as happened, for example, with the

modernist trope of disillusionment), they tend to become part and parcel of a new cultural 36 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 199) 256. 37 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993) 116. 38 See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere / Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia UP, 1991).

16

system of domination. Viewed in this light, it might be more than coincidence that the

rise of American literary modernism went hand-in-hand with the spread of a

neoconservative politics of “normalcy” and the rapid demise of social critical fiction

(until the latter was again revived in the early 1930s under the impact of the Great

Depression).

This, then, brings me to a final point already alluded to above; namely, that the

oppositional or alternative tendencies within marginalized World War I novels written

from a feminist, black, and proletarian perspective were obviously muted but never fully

incorporated into the dominant cultures of ensuing decades. As a result, these war

representations maintained potentially transformative qualities or images (such as

depictions of war-worn women who topple a militaristic government, black war heroes

who become communal leaders, or multiracial coalitions among rebellious workers) that

bespeak the unrealized hopes and aspirations of the “lost” generations of war brides,

black servicemen, and ammunition workers. To be sure, many, if not all, of these war

and postwar hopes have subsequently been articulated through different channels. Yet

the specific and often highly conflicted cultural practices, meanings, experiences that

millions of women, blacks, and members of the working-classes shared during the First

World War have long since been lost. Literally overwritten by a palimpsestic modern

memory of the Great War that “derives primarily from images of the trenches in France

and Belgium,” they have been rendered nearly invisible.39

II

In the final chapter of Willa Cather’s Pulitzer-prize-winning World War I novel, One of

Ours (1922), Mrs. Wheeler finds solace in the thought that her fallen son had been spared

the inevitable disillusionment that was to follow the war:

He died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than

any country can ever be. And those were beautiful beliefs to die with.

Perhaps it was well to see that vision, and then to see no more. She would

have dreaded the awakening—she sometimes even doubts whether he

could have borne at all that last, desolating disappointment.40

39 Fussell i. 40 Willa Cather, One of Ours (New York: A Knopf, 1922) 458.

17

Having painstakingly traced Claude Wheeler’s transformation from a dull, frustrated

Nebraska farm boy into an invigorated and overly idealistic war hero, Cather disposes of

her protagonist at the height of his masculine powers. Unlike John Dos Passos, who in

Three Soldiers sends John Andrews “out on the Crusade in order to achieve meaning

through sacrifice” only to throw him into self-doubt and deep personal anguish, Cather

charts Claude’s growing obsession with power and violence to its climactic end.41

Primarily interested in the psychological links between idolized notions of women,

repressive sexual mores, and violence, Cather deliberately preempts Claude’s postwar

disillusionment, which, Mrs. Wheeler surmises, might have prompted him to commit

suicide.

“That last, desolating disappointment,” which Cather both evokes and, to the

chagrin of her critics, suppresses, has undoubtedly become the most enduring legacy of

of America’s Great War experience, not least because a postwar generation of self-

consciously modern writers made it their signature theme. “All hopes were reduced to

ashes in the savage absurdity of war,” Stanley Cooperman writes in his pioneering study

World War I and the American Novel. Initially “seized upon” as a “means for escaping

materialism, for achieving personal nobility” and “for carrying the banner of disinterested

justice,” the “war was discovered to be an excrescence of hypocritical values and a

tragically flawed society. This was the final—and unforgivable—disillusion.” Out of

this unforgivable disillusionment, Cooperman notes, “a movement of counter-rhetoric

developed during the twenties and early thirties, bringing into articulate focus the general

cynicism represented by the work of Eliot Paul, the anesthetized ‘I’ of Hemingway’s

heroes, and the broad, objective, scientific noninvolvement of Dos Passos’ collectivist

novels.”42

In short, the Great War not only gave America’s budding literary modernism its

frightfully exhilarating baptism of fire, but also its defining gestures of angry protest

and disenchantment. In Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, published two years after the war, Ezra

Pound forcefully articulates the new self-image of a maimed and shell-shocked yet

wizened-up and defiant “lost generation:”

41 Cooperman 176. 42 Ibid 44-45.

18

These fought in any case,

…

believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving

came home, home to a lie,

home to many deceits,

home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick

and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.

Young blood and high blood,

fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,

disillusion as never told in the old days,

hysterias, trench confessions,

laughter out of dead bellies.43

Having witnessed “wastage as never before” and suffered bouts of hitherto unmanly

hysteria in the trenches, the new vanguard of American culture—i.e., well-educated,

privileged, white young males such as Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, John

Dos Passos, and William Faulkner—are called upon to expose “old lies and new infamy”

and to speak frankly of “disillusion as never told in the old days.” For those who “fought

in any case,” wearing their hard-won disillusionment as a red badge of courage, Pound

sees standing poised to serve a death-knell to “an old bitch gone in the teeth / […] a

botched civilization.”44

Given Pound’s prominent account of the genesis of modern man in opposition to

a feminized Victorian culture, it is hardly surprising that literary critics have tended to

43 Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” Personae, the Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1926) 187-88. 44 Ibid 188.

19

gauge the impact of World War I on the production of literature in terms of its catalytic

effects on the innovative writings by British “soldier-poets” such as Siegfried Sassoon

and Robert Graves or American “medical corps literati” such as John Dos Passos and

Ernest Hemingway. In order to expose “old lies and new infamy,” the well-worn

argument goes, new literary forms were required that had to be derived from the direct

experience of industrialized mass warfare. And in line with the revisionist histories of

the Great War that began appearing as early as 1920, the gist of this experience was to be

“horror, dehumanization, numbness, absurdity, and education into political, cultural, and

sexual realities.”45 Hence, stressing the unbridgeable difference between homefront and

trench experience and, by extension, between pre- and postwar aesthetics, Paul Fussell

categorically asserts that “[e]ven if those at home had wanted to know the realities of the

war, they couldn’t have without experiencing them: its conditions were too novel, its

industrialized ghastliness was too unprecedented. The war would have been simply

unbelievable.”46 Following Pound’s poetic analysis, Fussell not merely perceives the

Great War as a ritual of initiation for young innocent men, but as the entrance rite into the

modern world so that a select body of British and American World War I writings

becomes the source of all genuinely modern—because historically circumscribed and

necessarily ironic —war literature. “I am saying,” Fussell writes, “that there seems to be

one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it

originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great

War.”47

As numerous feminist scholars were quick to point out, Fussell’s emphasis

on ironic representations of trench warfare by a disillusioned generation of young war 45 Cooperman 125. On revisionist histories of the 1920s, see John Lukas, “Revising the Twentieth Century,” American Heritage 45.5 (1994): 83-89. 46 Fussell 87. 47 Ibid 35. According to this definition of “modern understanding,” then, Cather’s One of Ours must appear decidedly “un-modern,” because it violates these “new paradigms for the fictional rendering of war experience” in two ways. First, what Walter Hölbling calls Cather’s “regrettably premature ending” avoids irony born of postwar disillusionment (55). Thus, Walsh compares the protagonist of One of Ours to Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer, remarking wryly: “Claude Wheeler…dies before he has time to grow disaffected with war” (84). Secondly, unlike John Dos Passos, whose account of the devastating effects of authoritarian power on the individual psyche in Three Soldiers derives from “the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War,” Cather harks back to prewar life on the Nebraska plains in order to explore the roots of Claude’s fascination with power and violence. Hence, critics ranging from H. L. Menecken to Jeffery Walsh find praise for part of One of Ours, but at the same attest Cather’s “inability to deal with army and combat realities far removed from her own experience” (Cooperman 129).

20

poets has resulted in an epistemological privileging of a particular white male perspective

over that of women, blacks, homefront activists, and civilians.48 In effect, Fussell as well

as many other critics of the “war poet school” assert that war writings by women and

civilians are somehow less “real” and less “modern” than those of combatants. The

shortcomings of such a narrow focus on war literature produced largely from a white

male perspective are at least twofold. First, as Susan Schweik has argued, it serves to

conceal various social struggles that took place at the remote American homefront, e.g.,

conflicts within the working class, within the progressive movement, among women’s

rights advocates, and among the black populace.49 Secondly, in their insistence that “the

war itself becomes a genuine dividing line between the literary generations,” critics such

as Charles A. Fenton bestow with genuineness only the particular, trench-born protest of

the so-called “lost generation,” thereby casting aside other literary attempts to remember,

represent, and reconstruct World War I.50

“The myth of a lost generation,” Walsh observes, “is one of the most potent

imaginative impulses and orientations in the traditions of American war writing.”

The political potency of this myth, however, lies not simply in its “aura of betrayal” and

“disillusionment,” but most of all in its experiential claim of being the sole depository of

truly modern memory.51 For as self-consciously modern writers such as Hemingway,

Dos Passos, and Faulkner “began to capitalize upon their self-image of separateness, of

being initiated,” not only the modernist aesthetics of these writers—most notably “a

suspension of time” and “a modification of customary space” (i.e., what Gertrude Stein

called a “cubist change of perspective”)—achieved “exemplary status,” but so did their

particular kind of “radical cultural critique.”52

48 See, for instance, Helen Cooper et al (eds.), Arms and the Women: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1989). 49 See Susan Schweik’s A Gulf Cut So Deeply: American Women Poets and the Second World War. (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991) 293-94. 50 Charles A. Fenton, “A Literary Fracture of World War I,” American Quarterly 12.2 (1960): 119-32. 51 Walsh 5. 52 F.J Hoffman’s The Twenties (New York: Harcourt, 1965) 87; Walsh 80-81. Walter Hölbling, for instance, argues that although “both the aesthetic innovations and the radical cultural critique of authors such as Cummings, Dos Passos, Hemingway and Faulkner…[initially] affected only a relatively small circle of contemporary intellectuals, especially the novels by Dos Passos and Hemingway set new paradigms for the fictional representation of war, which, meanwhile conventionalized, have maintained their exemplary status into the present” (55). Similarly, Peter G. Jones argues in War and the Novelist: “Three earlier works constitute prototypes for contemporary war novels. In terms of structure,

21

Swift to denounce war novels “by lady authors” who “were themselves products

of older, more sentimental concepts of war,” few critics of American World War I

literature have paused to consider why the “radical cultural critique” of A Farewell to

Arms, Three Soldiers, and Soldiers’ Pay achieved such credence among intellectual

circles during the late 1920s and early 1930s.53 Only of late have cultural critics begun to

reevaluate the politics of modernist representation vis-à-vis persistent national anxieties

concerning the status of women, minorities, and immigrants. Citing Malcolm Cowely’s

observation that “the admired writers of the generation were men in the great majority”

who were also “white, middle-class, mostly Protestant by upbringing, and mostly English

and Scottish by decent,” David Minter argues that the appeal of the lost-generation brand

of cultural critique was not so much rooted in its radicalism as in its exclusiveness:

“Rather than reach out to recent immigrants, women, or African-Americans, they

[Fitzgerald and his contemporaries] remained almost as jealous of their status and control

as Tom Buchanan is of his.”54 While Cowley’s “admired writers” “bemoaned the

Senate’s acts in the aftermath of the war; denounced the KKK, the Red Scare…and

condemned the vulgar materialism and ruthless profiteering of businessmen,” Minter

points out, many of them “harbored and even expressed versions of the ambitions and

prejudices they thought of themselves as rebelling against.” This, Minter concludes,

“may help to explain why society rewarded Fitzgerald & Co. “in ways that it never

rewarded black writers of Harlem, Jewish writers of New York’s East Side and women

writers anywhere…many of whom it pushed into the marginalized tasks of running

bookstores, editing small journals, and writing diaries.” 55

Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, to be sure, were well-established novelists long

before Word World I and remained so long afterwards. It seems undeniable, though, that

the authorial and critical insistence on modernist aesthetics and its attendant variety of

characterization, and exploitation of the genre’s potential as a means of more general expression, they established precedents that still exert a strong influence. These books are: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms“ (5). 53 Cooperman 21, 33. 54 David Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel, Henry James to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge UP, 1994) 113. 55 Ibid. 118. In Class, Gray Day makes a similar point when he argues: “Modernist artists may have tried to distance themselves from the mass society of capitalism, judging it spiritually impoverished and culturally barren, but their work underwrites its economic form and relations of domination” (New York: Routledge, 2001) 159.

22

“radical cultural critique” has lead to a devaluation of the homefront writings by women,

whose depictions of World War I are said to be tainted by an adherence to conventions of

the historical romance.56 And although the Harlem Renaissance is said to have been

greatly impacted by the Great War, African-American literary responses to the war such

as Victor Daly’s Not Only War (1932) have received little to no critical attention, which

seems especially disconcerting since over 367,000 African-American soldiers served in

the conflict.57 Obviously, this is as much an aesthetic as a political move, because in

assigning sole representational authority to works by white male modernists, revered

critics such as Bernard Bergonzi, Stanley Cooperman, and Paul Fussell have created a

cultural history of World War I that excludes black voices (much like an U.S. Army that

relegated black soldiers to “Service of Supply” units) and undermines the validity of

everything female writers such as Cather may contribute to a more polymorphous view of

“modern understanding.” Ernest Hemingway’s blunt rejection of One of Ours in a 1923

letter to Edmund Wilson offers a case in point: “Look at One of Ours,” Hemingway

wrote, “Prize, big sale, people taking it seriously…. Wasn’t that last scene in the lines

wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I

identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman she has to get her war

experience somewhere.”58

Hemingway might be correct in detecting a strain of Nativism in Cather’s One of

Ours, but his insistence on combat experience as the requisite for both narrative and

historical validity, however, tends to suppress the multiplicity of ways in which authors

from different backgrounds and perspectives sought to understand and shape the socio-

political implications of World War I. Put differently, critical presuppositions that only

certain texts, utilizing certain experiences in a particular fashion provide an adequately

“modern understanding” of American postwar culture, at best limits, at worst forestalls

56 Hölbling 50-51. 57 See Nathan Irving Huggins’s influential Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford UP, 1971). Over 367,000 African-American soldiers served in WWI, 1400 of whom were commissioned officers. Most blacks were placed in noncombat Services of Supply (SOS) units (i.e., labor battalions); for example, 33 percent of the stevedore force in Europe was black. At least 100,000 African Americans were sent to France during WWI. Despite the American restriction on the use of blacks in combat units, about 40,000 African Americans fought in the war. See Arthur E. Barbeau’s and Florette Henri’s The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1974). 58 Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1952) 118.

23

any analysis of the ways in which American World War I writings strive to intervene in

ongoing public discourses on gender, race, and class relations.

“War, like writing, shapes perception,” Trudi Tate points out.59 Modernism,

according to Gertrude Stein, made World War I decipherable. Yet, modernist fiction is

certainly neither the only nor the most authentic form of writing that makes war readable.

Thus, to gain, as it were, a fuller perception of the ways in which various representational

approaches compete with each other in the construction of a “modern understanding” of

the World War I experience, it becomes necessary to read avowedly modernist war

writings by young, privileged white males in conjunction with habitually dismissed war

texts by authors of different gender, class affiliation, and/or color.60 For as Cary Nelson

has demonstrated in Repression and Recovery, the cultural work of modernist literature

remains obscured until “other vital poetries and other engaged audiences for poetry [that]

were also at work” are taken into consideration.61

III

Feminist scholarship on war writings by women, especially within the British context,

has already laid some groundwork for a more inclusive study of World War I literature

that complicates Fussell’s notion of “modern memory” as the loss of innocence and the

ascent of ironic representation. Since the early 1980s, feminist critics have been

excavating long-forgotten novels, poems, and diaries that not only depict “real” suffering

on the homefront and testify to female complicity in war making, but also illustrate how

the Great War, with all its “scene[s] of bondage, frustration, or absurdity,” held the

utopian promise of emancipatory social change.62 Most notably, Sandra Gilbert and

Susan Gubar’s survey of World War I literature in No Man’s Land (1988) has served

notice that the Great War, far from inevitably culminating in disillusionment, angry

protest, and modernist irony, “functioned in so many ways to liberate women—offering a

59 Trudi Tate, Modernism, History, and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998) 4. 60 In Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (New York: Cambridge UP, 1997), Mark W. Van Wienen makes a similar argument. “The critics who have reified the literary history of the period into a lopsided contest between experiential modernist poetry and traditional, genteel verse,” he writes, “ have simply ignored the variety of poetry limped together under the non-modernist, ‘genteel’ heading.” Thus, “we cannot pretend to offer a literary history of modern American poetry when we treat those poems that seem to us unreadable as if they had never been written” (22-23). 61 Cary Nelson, Recovery and Repression: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989) 22. 62 Fussell 312.

24

revolution in economic expectations, a release of passionate energies, a reunion of

previously fragmented sisters, and a revision of social and aesthetic dreams.”63 The war,

in short, sparked a radical reversal of gender roles or “sexchanges” so

that as young men became increasingly alienated from their prewar selves,

increasingly immured in the muck and blood of no man’s land,

increasingly abandoned by the civilization of which they had ostensibly

been heirs, women seemed to become, as if by an uncanny swing of the

pendulum, ever more powerful. As nurses, as mistresses, as munitions

workers, bus drivers, or soldiers in the “land army,” even as wives and

mothers, these formerly subservient creatures began to loom malevolently

larger.64

Not surprisingly, then, this real or perceived “apotheosis of femaleness”

culminated in a fierce backlash shortly after the war. Barraged by a flood of “anti-

homefront poems,” “trench novels,” and revisionist histories that blamed an overly

feminized culture for the war, women writers became increasingly tormented by feelings

of “survivor’s guilt,” begun to internalize “the postwar misogyny that was so ‘strikingly

in fashion’,” and eventually buried their dreams of “a reversionary Herland, a utopia

arisen from the ashes of apocalypse and founded on the revelation of a new social

order.”65

Drawing upon Gilbert and Gubar’s study, James Longbach also stresses the

interconnection between the battles “of modernism, sexism, and the Somme.”66

According to Longbach, however, the literary war between the sexes neither originated at

the Somme nor ended with the passage of female suffrage laws. For although male

authors were quick to portray the war as “the apocalypse” that had shattered old-

fashioned sexual mores and beget more progressive gender relations, in the war writings

of women authors such as Rebecca West “there is no sense that one age has ended and a

new age begun. And if the men on 1914 wanted to believe that the battle of the sexes had 63 Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2 Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988) 348. 64 Ibid. 263. 65 Ibid 321, 303. 66 James Longbach, “The Men and Women of 1914,” Arms and The Women: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, eds. Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, & Susan Merrill Squier (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1989) 98.

25

been won with the Great War,” Longbach writes, “the women of 1914 suspected that

more battles would be fought.”67

Writing in particular of A Son of the Front but making wider claims concerning

the legacy of World War I novels by women, Judith Sensibar has argued that Edith

Wharton “anticipated feminist critics of the late twentieth century by asking how the

social disruptions of the Great War reveal and affect socially constructed notions of

masculinity and femininity.”68 Accordingly, Sensibar emphasizes that women “write a

different war, a war behind the lines and within that…will continue as long as

masculine homophobic gender classifications are in place.”69

“The war,” Dorothy Goldman concurs, “made women more alert to

contemporary gender systems, and their views on them and their inherent inequality were

widely, if not always explicitly, expressed.” This heightened attentiveness to

“contemporary gender system,” however, is not restricted to World War I writings by

women, Goldman underscores. During and after the war, she points out, “both men and

women were struggling to understand the social and gender roles that had been imposed

on them,” and they did so in open dialogue with each other. Rejecting analyses that trace

a mounting gender “antagonism” back to divergent wartime experiences of men and

women, Goldman stresses that “it was the construction of the reality of war that came

between men and women.” Hence, formal and thematic differences in the ways in which

male and female authors represent World War I must be understood as part and parcel of

an ongoing “reconceptualization of gender roles.” 70

As Trudi Tate has pointed out, the reconceptualization of gender roles during and

after the war provides but one of several subtexts that have affected the form and content

of Great War novels. Another significant subtext, especially in the American framework,

is undoubtedly the ongoing reconceptualization of race relations that received new

impetus during World War I. But although most scholars seem to agree that the war was

crucial to the emergence of the “New Negro” as well as the Harlem Renaissance, few

studies have dealt explicitly with black literary responses to World War I. This might 67 Ibid. 118. 68 Judith Sensibar, “‘Behind the Lines’ in Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front: Rewriting the Masculinist Tradition,” Journal of American Studies 24.2 (1990): 118. 69 Ibid. 198. 70 Goldman 33, 39, 47.

26

explain why literary critics often reduce the African American war experience to the

familiar tropes of victimization, hopelessness, and alienation. Observes Wendy Steiner:

Black soldiers, doubly victimized by the European enemy and by white

American soldiers, suffered discrimination and brutality abroad and upon

their return home. For them, the war dimmed any real hope of

assimilation. Their alienation from the land they had fought to preserve

was confirmed by the bloody riots of the summer of 1919.71

Given the literary historical insistence on modernist disillusionment, it is no

wonder that that the browbeaten veterans at the “Golden Day” in Ralph Ellison’s

Invisible Man (1947) and the “ravaged” Shadrack, who celebrates an annual “National

Suicide Day” in Tony Morrison’s Sula (1973), should have become the most enduring

images of black World War I soldiers in American literature. “Blasted and permanently

astonished by the events of 1917,” these black veterans, much like Dos Passos’s John

Andrews and Faulkner’s Donald Mahon, come to represent the paralyzing aphasia of

modern man.72 While there is no doubt that many black veterans felt victimized and

disillusioned, especially earlier Great War writings by black men and women do more

than just bear witness to dehumanization; they also reaffirm a black potential for heroic

action and begin to chart out a new race consciousness that holds the promise of self-

emancipation. As Claire Tylee writes, “African American women’s writing of the Great

War period articulated the pride and dramatized the Black Energy which helped fire the

cultural revolution of the Harlem Renaissance…[they] intervene in national politics, both

by publicizing the dilemmas of African American men and by demonstrating that their

people were worthy of respectful attention.”73

Moreover, as Lee J. Green notes, the “double victimization” of black soldiers is

often rendered as a form of empowerment in African American war novels, because “as a

consequence of their travels abroad, these soldiers discover a metaphorical New Eden.

The standard situation is that as a result of white Europeans’ humane treatment of them,

71 Wendy Steiner, “The Diversity of American Fiction, 1910-1945,” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 850. 72 Tony Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam, 1977). 73 Claire Tylee, “Womanist Propaganda, African-American Great War Experience, and Cultural Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance: Plays by Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mary P. Burrill,” Women’s Studies International Forum 20.1 (1997): 161.

27

the soldiers more readily affirm their rightful place as members of the human family and

refute white America’s claim that they are naturally depraved and subhuman.”74 In his

“Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War” (1919), W. E. B. DuBois

makes a similar point, claiming that “this double experience of deliberate and devilish

persecution from their own countrymen, coupled with a taste of real democracy and

world-old culture, was revolutionizing. They began to hate prejudice and discrimination

as they had never hated it before” so that a “new, radical Negro spirit has been born in

France.”75

Attempts to gauge African American literary responses to Word War I, both

Tylee and Green underscore, cannot rely on constructions of the “realities” of war that

draw upon the literary representations of white male authors in order to describe the

purported nature of black postwar disillusionment. As will be argued throughout, what

these constructions fail to consider is that black characters in novels such as Sarah Lee

Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and Walter White’s Fire in the Flint assess their war

experiences before the backdrop of a long history of racial victimization and

disillusionment. Unlike the privileged white male characters in “exemplary” war novels,

for whom the Great War and its aftermath comes to signify the “First Encounter” with “a

botched civilization,” black characters perceive the war as merely one in a long series of

much more humiliating encounters with an inherently flawed society that denies them

subject status. Derived from a renewed alertness to the long history of victimization and

passive suffering, the decidedly un-modern affirmations of romantic notions such as

valor, heroism, and sacrifice that permeate many African American accounts of World

War I become a rhetorical tool in the daily struggles against racism.

Aside from growing cultural concerns about the war’s impact on gender and race

relations, an equally notable—albeit even less frequently observed—subtext of American

World War I literature revolves around the specter of social revolution or open class

warfare. Dismayed by Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war, following his reelection on

the slogan “he has kept us out of war,” Dos Passos remembers that he “began listening

seriously to the Socialists. Their song was that all that was needed was to abolish

74 Lee J. Green, Blacks in Eden (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996) 131. 75 W. E. B. Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Holt, 1995) 699.

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capitalism. Turn the industrial plant over to the people who did the work and man’s

aggressive instincts would be channeled into constructive efforts.”76 But even though it

has been often remarked that so-called “protest novels” of the postwar period tend to

indict the war as a nefarious scheme to enrich unscrupulous capitalists, mock quasi-

aristocratic military hierarchies, and depict how the trench experience forges close bonds

among men across social classes, full-fledge studies on the treatment of class in

American World War I literature remain exceedingly rare. Rarer still are serious analyses

of partisan novels that depict working class struggles to come to terms with the First

World War.

Several factors may account for this. First of all, since the First World War is said

to have “pretty much finished the Socialist Party as an effective political force in the

United States,” considerations of working-class resistance to hegemonic war and post-

war ideologies are deemed more or less superfluous.77 Moreover, it was evidently not the

Great War but the Great Depression that became the signature theme of the Great

American proletarian novel, which enjoyed its “golden age” during the 1930s. Lastly and

perhaps most ominously, New Critical paradigms have cultivated a longstanding critical

distaste for “tendentious” or overtly partisan fiction, as Barbara Foley has shown.78

Propelled by waves of anti-Marxism, repeated declarations by Allen Tate, Robert Penn

Warren, and other right-wing literati, according to which the intermingling of art and

politics results in “heresy,” underwrote an exclusionary neoconservative aesthetic that

privileges literary qualities such as opacity, paradox, ambiguity, and non-commitment.

As I have already outlined above, critics of World War I literature have therefore been

less interested in discussing, for example, Ernest Hemingway’s portrayal of mutinous

working-class characters in A Farewell to Arms than in extolling the book’s omission of

“social commentary,” its “atmosphere of existential anxiety,” and its “calculated

detachment.”79 In a similar vein, World War I novels that assume an openly socialist

stance and/or probe the emergence or suppression of class consciousness such as Upton 76 John Dos Passos, “Foreword,” One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (Ithaca: 1969) 2. 77 Peter Buitenhuis, “Upton Sinclair and the Response to World War I,” Canadian Review of American Studies 14.2 (1983): 121. 78 In Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941, Barbara Foley attributes this distaste for proletarian representations to the legacy of anti-Marxism in American literary circles 79 Jones 8.

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Sinclair’s Jimmy Higgins (1919) and William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion

(1932) have either been dismissed as stylistically awkward “window dressing” for

“ideological” positions or simply been ignored altogether.80

Within the past decade, however, a few scholarly works have begun to retrieve

literary engagements with the working class perspective on World War I from the

modern dumping ground of cultural forgetfulness and lost possibilities. In Partisan

and Poets (1997), Mark Van Wienen analyzes a vast array of popular war verse and

broadsides that were published in newspapers as well as in the partisan organs of the

IWW, the Women’s Peace Party, and the NAACP. Arguing “that all American

poetries…were always already political,” Van Wienen demonstrates that popular “Great

War poetry,” though nowadays dismissed as ephemeral, proved itself capable not only of

shaping the domestic debates over the status of workers, women, and African Americans

but also of fulfilling “a self-consciously political, politically transformative, role.” More

specifically, in his discussion of popular working class verse, Van Wienen shows how

“the IWW’s production and practice of poetry and songs” confronted “Americans with

the nation’s class diversity and social inequality,” while conceptualizing “class division”

both “as an opportunity to be exploited” and a “problem to be solved.” Similar to

numerous homefront writings by blacks and women, Van Wienen underscores, working-

class literature of the Great War uses the subject matter of war not only to highlight past

and present grievances, but to redefine subject positions and to envision social change,

e.g., the “coming of a great ‘class war.’”81 And even though the latter did not occur,

postwar reflections on lost homefront battles and missed opportunities such as Henry

George Weiss’s 1935 poem Remember bid workers to recall “that when they

demonstrated / against starvation / they were Reds / that when they talked of rights / they

had no rights” and to remain steadfast their conviction “that Communism is bread /

Communism plenty / Communism workers’ rule.”82 Just as the modern memory of

African Americans seemed to have been shaped less by passive suffering in the trenches

than by increasingly violent racial discrimination at home, the modern memory of

80 Cooperman 95. 81 Van Wienen 16, 75, 1. 82 Qtd. in Van Wienen 236.

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working class men and women appears to have been marked for the most part by wartime

“bread politics” and political repression.

IV

Despite several promising efforts to present a more diverse picture of the literary

imaginings of the Great War, Neil A. Wynn’s observation in From Progressivism to

Prosperity (1986) that First World War histories “relegate the home front in America to a

secondary place in the narrative” still holds also largely true for critical surveys of

American World War I literature.83 Hence, building upon the revisionist studies surveyed

above as well as recent historiographical undertakings to rewrite “America’s Great War”

as a domestic struggle, I have selected primary texts that reflect a broad range of literary

engagements in the war and postwar constructions of class, gender, and race.84

Individual works, then, have neither been chosen on the basis of their current status as

war literature, nor necessarily in light of their “influence in mainstream ideology,” but

with an eye toward their placement within the ideologies and political practices of

particular groups.85

Accordingly, the study scrutinizes two overtly proletarian novels of (re)education:

Upton Sinclair’s Jimmy Higgins (1919) and William Cunningham’s The Green Corn

Rebellion (1935). Moreover, it juxtaposes two feminist novels—Dorothy Canfield

Fischer’s Home Fires in France (1918) and Gertrude Atherton’s war utopia, The White

Morning (1918)—with Henry Sydnor Harrison’s gender-obsessed homefront fantasy,

Saint Teresa (1924); explores the ideological underpinnings of the quest for masculine

autonomy and individualism in John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921) and Ernest

Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929); and subsequently examines African American

strategies of and resistance and accommodation in Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s racial

uplift novel, Hope’s Highway (1918) and Walter White’s bleak reconstruction work, The

Fire in the Flint (1924).

83 Neil A. Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity: World War I and American Society (New York: Holms & Meier, 1986) xiv. 84 In addition to Neil A. Wynn’s study, at least two more histories have recently discussed the American gender, class, and race politics of the 1910s and 1920s: David J Goldberg’s Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999) and Robert H. Zieger’s America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). 85 Jennifer Haytock, At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003) 123.

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The emphasis on literary representations not only of the war experiences on the

homefront, but also of life during the immediate pre- and postwar periods seems further

justified by the fact that even American soldier-poets, unlike numerous of their European

counterparts, have rarely produced “pure” combat novels or Frontromane such as Henri

Barbusse’s Le Feu (1917) and Ernst Jünger’s Stahlgewitter (1920). The principal setting

of E.E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922), for example, is a squalid French

prison, which ironically becomes a refuge of spiritual salvation. Likewise, two hospitals,

tranquil Lake Como, and the peaceful Swiss countryside furnish three of the four main

settings in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). At the heart of these and

similar American war novels by combatants, Stanley Cooperman and Peter G. Jones have

shown, lies not the front experience as such, but the retreat from war and the struggle of

“individual reconciliation” with a flawed society. And it is precisely this purportedly

apolitical or transhistorical attempt at “individual reconciliation” that concerns me as I

seek, in Jameson’s words, “to restore the specificity of the political content of everyday

life and of individual fantasy-experience.” 86

The endeavor to rewrite a still small but fairly diverse body of American World

War I literature would be remiss, unless it not also reconsiders the question of how

individual texts (or groups thereof) adopt and adapt available generic forms of literary

representation. For as Evelyn Cobley has shown, “formal choices are never ideologically

innocent” in that they “determine, at least to some extent, what kind of events can be

included and how they are to be treated.”87 The following thematic analyses are therefore

framed by interrelated considerations of four genre types or subtypes. Two of these,

namely the protest novel and the Bildungsroman with its leitmotif of the romantic quest,

have already received some considerable formal scrutiny within critical studies of war

literature.88 The two other genres, namely the feminist utopia and the historical romance,

86 Jones 4-9, Cooperman 22. 87 Cobley 16. Postmodern tendencies to disregard generic forms notwithstanding, the value of paying attention to generic concepts “clearly lies, as Jameson states, “in the mediatory function of the notion of genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life” (105). 88 See chapter two of Peter G. Jones’s War and the Novelist and Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, esp. chapter IV, entitled “Myth, Ritual, and Romance,” which examines the revival of romantic forms. In the latter work, Paul Fussell eloquently describes how the trench experience led combatants to believe that they belonged to an isolated, subterranean world “full of secrets, conversions, metamorphoses and rebirth…a world of reinvigorated myth” (115). For many soldiers, Fussell writes, the war experience

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have so far rarely been discussed within the context of World War I literature. The

significance of the present study, however, rests less on the identification of various

genre adaptations within a varied body of American World War I fictions than on the

recognition of the conflicted ideologies about gender, class, and race that underlie literary

representations of the Great War. The story to be told here therefore focuses less on

literary history as such than on literary interventions within political history. It traces

stylistic innovations or trends only insofar as they illuminate changes in cultural

formations and political stances. And while it closely scrutinizes individual authors and

their texts, it remains primarily concerned with the larger processes of group formations

and reformations.

Chapter two, “A Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness: War as Individualist

Protest Novel,” argues that works by young American soldier-poets strive to fashion the

war experiences in ways that revalidate core tenets of white male liberalism—autonomy,

singularity, self-expression—which seemed to be fast diminishing amid heightened

wartime demands for cooperation, collaboration, and unity of sentiments. As a

historically contextualized look at John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers and Ernest

Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms shall show, so-called protest novels of World War I

are concerned less with exposing “the realities of the Versailles, the role of financial

interests, the nature of ideological suppression” than with retrieving (neo-) romantic ideas

of heroic individuality in light of the apparent failures of the progressive reform

movement.89 The war provided young protests novelists with an opportunity to remake

and to redefine themselves not only in opposition to Dos Passos’s “bankers in their

offices” and the “bediamoned old ladies,” but also vis-à-vis the various social reform

groups, working-class organizations, and women’s rights movements, whose continued

faith in strategies of mass mobilization, political agitation, and communal activism came

to be seen as dangerously anachronistic. In highlighting their own novel experience of

victimization at the hands of a jingoistic, profit-driven, and thoroughly materialistic

consumer culture, white male protest novelist of World War I were able join the ranks of

came to resemble a medieval quest, whose shape was defined by the routine of the journey to the front and the rituals of “going up the line.” 89 Cooperman 99.

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the traditionally oppressed, selectively co-opt some of their positions, and thus reclaim

intellectual leadership as the most radical and sophisticated critics of culture.

Drawing on contemporaneous debates concerning the role of labor during the

war as well as on Barbara Foley’s observations concerning the forms and functions

of working class fiction, chapter three, “‘For the Red Revolt—‘tis Marked by Fate’”:

War as Proletarian Bildungsroman,” considers how Upton Sinclair’s propagandistic

Jimmy Higgins and William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion adapt conventions

of the Bildungsroman—a quintessentially bourgeois genre—to create stories of

ideological conversion and reconversion before the backdrop of war. Both novels evoke

the specter of impending social revolution so as to sketch out appropriate working class

responses to the First World War. Using mostly local settings, namely the factories of

fictional Leesville and the sharecropping farms of rural Oklahoma, the war in these

Proletarian bildungsromans functions as a catalyst for the protagonists’ political

radicalization. Under mounting ideological pressures from within and without, however,

the heroes of these bildungsromans not only struggle to sustain their revolutionary

consciousness, but ultimately succumb to a more or less conformist stance. Following

the ill-prepared and abortive attempt to march against Washington, Jim Tetley in William

Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion betrays the revolutionary cause by joining the

US army. And Upton Sinclair’s Jimmy Higgins finds himself condemned to die a

martyr’s death at the hand of his own government, after realizing that his heroics on the

battlefield had only served the interests of rich capitalists at home. But rather than

succumbing to a fatalistic sense of defeatism, chapter three asserts, both novels ground

their heroes’ struggles into a historical context so as to warn and inspire future

revolutionaries.

Applying Jane Donawerth’s and Carole A. Kolmerten’s pioneering work on

utopian novels by women, chapter four, “‘The Hens are Eagles’: War as Feminist

Utopia,” investigates how Dorothy Canfield Fisher’ Home Fires in France and Gertrude

Atherton’s The White Morning heighten and exploit war-induced notions of an

“apotheosis of femaleness” by combining older motifs of female-centered communities

with images of the emergent “New Woman” and then discusses how Henry Sydnor

Harrison’s Saint Teresa struggles to absorb feminist utopian impulses within a

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normalizing narrative that draws upon contemporary notions of companionate marriage.

Despite a reliance on essentialized gender categories as well as strong tendencies to

uphold political and economical hierarchies, chapter four argues, the novels’ varied

adaptations of utopian forms challenge and subvert traditional gender roles, especially

within the public domain.

Expanding upon what Lee J. Green has identified as the “black quest for Eden,”

chapter five, “‘Sons of Freedom’: War as Historical Romance,” analyzes the ways in

which Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and Walter White’s The Fire in the

Flint adapt and modify generic conventions of the sentimental novel, racial uplift

narratives, and the post-Civil War reconstruction novel to fashion a distinctly African

American response to World War I that stresses duty and sacrifice, while vacillating

between hope and despair. Just as in the slave narratives, reconstruction and uplift novels

that preceded them, at the center of the African American World War I fiction stands the

concern for black self-determination and the possibility of racial conciliation. Unlike

World War I novels by white writers, who by and large omit overt references to race,

Fleming’s and White’s narratives insists that, in W. E. B. Du Bois prescient words, “the

problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”90 Appositely

enough, rather than foregrounding the black military experience, African American war

novels from the late 1910s to the early 1930s “juxtapose historical formations…to

emphasize the ongoing civil war between blacks and whites.”91 Collectively, then, these

novels seek not only to impress the contributions of black soldiers onto the national

consciousness, but also to highlight the contradictions inherent in America’s war efforts

while concomitantly establishing a counter-history of the World War I experience that

speaks directly to the “modern memory” of African Americans.

Throughout, the study focuses on particular war novels and their constitutive

practices or social uses, thereby turning literature into the principal vehicle for analyzing

American culture during and after World War I. Individual chapters proceed more or less

chronologically in order to reveal both subtle shifts and obvious continuities within

literary representations of the Great War by authors writing from specific class, gender,

90 See W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks (New York: Vintage, 1990). 91 Green 135.

35

and race perspectives. The study as a whole, however, is arranged in dialectic fashion so

as to further highlight tensions and interconnections between variously dominant and

nondominant groups as well as ongoing debates within these groups.

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2

“A Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness”

WAR AS INDIVIDUALIST PROTEST NOVEL IN JOHN DOS PASSOS’S THREE SOLDIERS AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S A FAREWELL TO ARMS

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members…the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1844)

War is the health of the State. Only when the State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic devotion, co-operation of services, which have always been the ideal of the State lover.

—Randolph Bourne, “The State” (1919)

Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the big city crowd aroused in those who first observed it…James Ensor tirelessly confronted its discipline with its wildness; he liked to put military groups in his carnival mobs, and both got along splendidly—as the prototype of totalitarian states, in which the police makes common cause with the looters.

—Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939)

In Christian doctrine disillusionment was regarded as a positive experience…But in the First World War disillusionment describes not an ascent toward grace but a spiritual and social decent…[upper class men] were compelled to resign themselves to the omnipotence of those material realities which were already familiar to the working classes—realities which were summarized in the terms “industrialized” and “technological” warfare.

—Eric J. Leed, “Class and Disillusionment” (1978) SOMETIME in the late summer of 1918, as General Pershing was preparing to send

half a million doughboys into the slaughter of the battle at Saint-Mihiel, Randolph

Bourne finished one of his last fictional character sketches, “The Artist in Wartime”

(1918). In it, Bourne, always a step ahead of his time, augured the return of an old social

type: the disengaged “flâneur” who regards the masses with a mixture of personal terror

and aloof reproach.1 His name is Sebert and like many sensitive young intellectuals who

would follow him in both literature and real life, the wartime experience of mass hysteria,

1 According to Walter Benjamin, the figure of the flâneur, which first appeared in early 19th-century literature, is at bottom a “traumatophile type.” The flâneur’s repeated “contact with the metropolitan masses” amounts to a series of “shock experiences,” Benjamin explains, in that these close encounters challenge bourgeois concepts of autonomy and individualism. Perceived not as “classes or any sort of collective,” the masses appear to the flâneur as an unreasoning, threatening, and repulsively “amorphous crowed;” “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (Illuminations 164-65).

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mass mobilization, and mounting public intolerance has thoroughly disabused him of any

faith in the advancement of American society.

In his earlier years, though, Sebert had been an “uncompromising” idealist,

imbued with a pronounced “social consciousness” and the desire to contribute to the

“amelioration” of a “flawed” yet, at bottom, worthwhile “society.”2 “I saw my future to

be that of riding at the head of crusades and revolutions, on a white horse,” the fledgling

writer recalls. “I felt keenly my duty towards society to remove its terrible evils and

enlighten its terrible stupidities” (410). So firm was his social commitment that initially

“even the war” could not sway him off course, for he considered it to be merely “a

momentary aberration” (411). But, like many self-consciously modernist writers of the

postwar era, Sebert quickly comes to regard the Great War as the ultimate manifestation

of the modern condition rather than an temporary deviation thereof. “Society,” he

assesses, “turns out to be not a slowly repenting sinner, but a hysterical mob” (411).

What offends Sebert’s cultured bourgeois sensibility the most, however, is that this “new

era” of mass organization and mass mobilization threatens to wipe out his deeply

internalized notions of personal autonomy and heroic individuality. “I look around,”

Sebert says, “and find almost every institution, every group, every social engine,

enthusiastic for this multiplication of pain. I see individuals cooperating, either

delightedly or under coercion, in the myriad branches of this enterprise. And my heart

turns sour within me” (412). In short, the national war effort has revealed to him that,

pushed to their logical conclusion, the tenets of progressivism—e.g., cooperation,

collectivism, organization, institutionalization—are antithetical to the principles of

bourgeois individualism. The upshot of this disillusioning apprehension is that Sebert’s

“social conscience no longer operates to make [him] feel part of this society” (412).

Feeling not only betrayed, but victimized by a society at large that “insists on engaging

itself in what is either destructive or futile,” he withdraws himself in protest, turning his

back toward all institutions, groups, social engines, and parties that had heretofore

beckoned with the promise of universal progress:

2 Randolph Bourne, “The Artist in Wartime,” The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1910-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1992) 410-11. This and others essays in the same volume are hereafter cited parenthetically.

38

I am not leading revolutionists against barricades. I am not agitating for

the oppressed proletariat. I am not even exciting the liberals of the world

with a plan to end the war. Instead…I remain in a hibernating state,

waiting for the world to stop its raging, and become interested again, if it

ever was such, in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (410)

Although Sebert is obviously an overdrawn character—intended to convey an

emergent mood or temper rather than a set of settled convictions—his move from naïve

social activist to detached individualist is paradigmatic of the ways in which young

American soldier-poets fashioned their purportedly “realistic examination of war and

postwar experiences” so as to redefine a white male liberalism, whose moral, cultural,

and political authority appeared to be eroding amidst the socio-political upheavals of

World War I.3 As a contextualized look at John Dos Passos Three Soldiers and Ernest

Hemingway A Farewell to Arms shall demonstrate, in making the white male middle

class protagonist’s novel experience of victimization at the hands of authoritarian

governments, misguided reform movements, “unreasoning women,” and “hysterical

mobs” the centerpiece of their “realistic examination,” World War I protest novels not

just level sharp attacks against big business, corrupt politicians, and hardnosed

bureaucrats. 4 They furthermore lay at least partial blame for the dehumanizing war

before the doorsteps of the traditional victims of oppressions and their hapless

organizations. Consequently, “the representative anti-hero of World War I protest

novels” finds himself both disillusioned and isolated.5 Yet, as Sebert’s example

underscores, the totalizing assessment that “every institution, every group, every social

engine” participates in “this multiplication of pain” also has a “strangely” liberating

effect in that the educated “anti-hero’s” close encounters with “apathetic” proletarian

crowds as well as mobs of “self-obsessed” females enable him to shed both class guilt

and idealized notions about women. His disillusionment with and isolation from

members of the lower classes and the opposite sex thus morally legitimizes and

politically authorize the protagonist’s “individualist protest” against “every institution,

every group, every social engine” that threatens to wipe out white male middle class

3 Cooperman 3. 4 Kennedy 222; Cooperman 99. 5 Cooperman 165.

39

concepts of autonomy and singularity.6 And having grown appalled by what Emerson

denounced as the “feminine rage” of hypocritical social reformers with their “thousand-

fold Relief Societies” as well as the helpless “indignation” of the “ignorant and the poor,”

the disenchanted white middle-class protagonist reaches the Emersonian resolve to “[l]ive

no longer to the expectation of these deceiving and deceived people.”7 In grounding their

antiwar protests in the protagonist’s growing awareness of the inherent dangers of

organization, collectivization, and institutionalization, works such as Three Soldiers and

A Farwell to Arms turn public struggles into private ones, until the embattled white male

middle class self reemerges as the sole arbiter on questions of morality, politics, and the

relationship between the classes and sexes.

Similar to the fictional Sebert, budding American literati such as John Dos Passos,

E. E. Cummings, Lawrence Stallings, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway came of

age in the early 1900s, visualizing themselves “riding at the head of crusades and

revolutions.” Imbued with a vague sense of “revolt from middleclass standards” and

dismayed by an America society that worshipped “the popular gods of materialism,” they

longed to overcome “the stodgy complacency of the nineteenth century.”8 Moreover,

akin to Sebert, they had long suffered from a white middle-class “guilt of littering the

world with poverty, disease and ugliness” that made them feel more “keenly [their] duty

toward society to remove its terrible evils and enlighten its terrible stupidities” (410-11).

“Millions of men perform labor narrowing and stultifying…without ever a chance of self-

expression,” Dos Passos wrote while still at Harvard. “This is the time of all others for

casting up the balance sheet of Industrialism, of our scientific civilization.”9 Under the

ether cone of college life, however, prospective reformers and incipient anti-

establishment rebels such as Dos Passos had found little opportunity to act upon their

social designs. Thus, when the “world fell into a cataclysm,” restless young men of the

6 Iain Colley, Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair (London: MacMillan, 1978) 38. 7 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” The Portable Emerson, eds. Carl Bode & Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin, 1981), 142, 145, 154, 155. 8 Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: Viking Press, 1951),35; John Dos Passos, “A Humble Protest,” The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988) 32. 9 John Dos Passos, The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988) 34.

40

educated classes sensed a chance for self-defining action (410).10 “In conflict…would

arise a reason for this now unreasonable existence,” many of them thought in line with

Thomas Boyd’s William Hicks of Through the Wheat.11 “I go to the front tomorrow,”

19-year-old Ernest Hemingway reported back to the Kansas City Star. “Oh Boy!!! I am

glad I am in it”12 “I am dying to get to Belgium & exhaust surplus energy,” a likewise

anticipant Dos Passos confided to Arthur McComb.13 Early on in One Man’s Initiation,

Martin Howe thinks of war as “the flame that would consume to ashes all the lies in the

world.”14 War, young idealist such as Martin Howe believed, would provide not only “an

escape from everything implicit in the notion of modern industrial society,” but a

“transformative experience of community” that would affect “fundamental social

changes,” revolutionary or otherwise.15 “Form that point of view I approve heartily of

military service,” Dos Passos declared, “because it would make young men rub shoulders

more, get to know people outside of their class—be actually instead of theoretically

democratic.”16

Needless to say, few among the idealistic college-men who volunteered for

military service discovered what they had set out to find. To begin with, the

impersonality of modern trench warfare rendered heroics on the battlefields pretty much

impossible. “It [shellfire] makes one feel so helpless, there is no chance of reprisal for

10 Even before American neutrality officially ended in April 1917, many young men of the upper and middle classes saw in the war abroad an opportunity for the sort of heroic adventure that had slipped beyond their immediate reach, since Frederick Jackson Turner declared the American frontier closed. Like Henry Fleming in Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895)—a perennial favorite among high school and college students of the time—they harbored a romantic longing to test their mettle in open battle and to ground their budding manhood “in the bedrock of primeval antagonism.” Their heads filled with images of heroic self-sacrifice, young college graduates such as the poets Joyce Kilmer and Allan Seeger grew impatient with Wilson’s neutrality stance and enlisted in foreign services, determined to have their ennobling “rendezvous with Death / At some disputed barricade.” Several others such as John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and Ernest Hemingway, who were either found unfit for military service, objected to war on principle, or held some doubts as to its justification, nevertheless joined up with one of the American Ambulance Filed Service, outfitted by Norton, Morgan-Harjes, and the Red Cross. 11 Boyd, Through the Wheat 4. 12 Qtd. in Charles A. Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 58. 13 Melvin Landsberg, ed., John Dos Passos’ Correspondence with Arthur K. McComb, or, “Learn to Sing the Carmagnole” (Niwot, CO: UP of Colorado: 1991), 24. 14 John Dos Passos, One Man’s Initiation (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969), 60. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 15 Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat & Identity in World War I (New York: Cambridge UP, 1979), 42. 16 John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, ed. Townsend Ludington (Boston: Gambit, 1973), 45.

41

the individual man,” William Langer elucidated succinctly. “The advantage is all with

the shell, and you have no comeback.”17 Langer’s anguished feeling of helplessness in

the face of a modern war of attrition was shared by many doughboys and undoubtedly

contributed to their rapid disenchantment with what they had anticipated to be “a great

show.” Nevertheless, since American troops saw comparatively little combat in World

War I, the mentally and physically debilitating effects of modern warfare seem to belong

more properly to the disillusionment experience of the European soldier, whose

protracted agony has found memorable literary manifestation in sadly broken characters

such as Siegfried Sasson’s George Sherston or D. H. Lawrence’s Clifford Chatterley.18

More than either the physical violation of the male body or the mental abuse of the male

psyche during actual battle, it appeared to have been the sudden confrontation with a

high-handed government authority that disabused American “gentlemen volunteers” of

their erstwhile hope in the democratization of society. “Military hierarchy and

subordination chafed against ingrained American values of equality and individualism,”

Kennedy notes.19 It was not so much the slaughter on the battlefields as the

impersonality of a cold and calculating bureaucratic machine that incurred some of the

angriest protest by American soldier-poets. Tellingly, both Dos Passos’s John Andrews

and Hemingway’s Frederic Henry resolve to go AWOL not as a consequence of their

wounding, but as a result of their abuse at the hands of the US military police and the

Italian carabinieri respectively. In protest novel after protest novel, then, a recognizable

pattern emerges, whereby the war provides an extended metaphor for the corruption of an

American culture that had apparently sold its birthright, its sense of democracy, and, most

devastatingly, its concern for the individual. Not war per se, but the mobilization,

organization, and maintenance of a vast military machine comes to signify man’s decent

into the abyss of an industrial age that breeds docile conformity through mass

demagoguery, mass production, and mass consumption.

17 Qtd. in Kennedy 211. 18 To be sure, both Faulkner’s Donald Mahon in Soldiers’ Pay and Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises give gruesome testimony of the emasculating affects of mechanized warfare. But for the most part, protagonists of American World War I novels return physically unscathed and mentally relatively healthy from the battlefield. David M. Kennedy makes a very similar point with respect to American war narratives of WWI in Over Here 205-18. 19 Kennedy 210.

42

In due course, the “transformative experience of community” that was supposed

to inaugurate sweeping societal changes came to be seen as a self-deluding chimera. For

example, rather than bringing the sexes closer together, the war appeared to have further

estranged them. In Hemingway’s “The End of Something,” Nick breaks up with

Marjorie, because she cannot understand why “he feels as though everything was gone to

hell inside of [him].”20 Similarly, the maimed war veterans in William Faulkner’s

Soldiers’ Pay feel utterly misunderstood and rejected by society. Relegated to the far

corner of the dancehall, the soldiers talk loudly among themselves, “drowning the

imitation of dancers they could not emulate, of girls who once waited upon their favors

and now ignored them—the hang-over of warfare in a society tired of warfare. Puzzled

and lost, poor devils.”21 The victimization of young war heroes, Faulkner emphasizes in

this passage, is twofold. First, a jingoistic society promised its young men honor and

glory on the battlefields, but only delivered senseless bloodshed. Brett Ashley’s

enthusiasm for violence in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises further highlights the

gendered dimension of the soldiers’ sense of victimization. Secondly, the very women

who had cheered them into the slaughterhouse of war now refuse to have anything to do

with the returning veterans. “If you touch me, I’ll vomit,” says Effie by way of

welcoming her disfigured fiancée in William March’s Company K.22

Even in the trenches “there was no true comradeship” to be found, recalled John

Campbell. “It was simply a case of members of the working classes held down by brutal

and iron discipline. Different rations, different pay, and different risk. The class line was

as clear in France as it is at home; there was no comradeship in the trenches to

perpetuate.”23 “You are a foreigner,” the priest tells Frederic Henry in A Farewell to

Arms. “But you are nearer to the officers than you are to the men” (70). Several chapters

later, the “Tenente,” like Nick Adams of “In Another Country,” is bewildered to be

20 Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (New York: Scribner 1987), 34 21 Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay 115. 22 William March, Company K (New York: Smith & Hass, 1933), 156. 23 Qtd in Eric Leed, “Class and Disillusionment,” The Journal of Modern History 50:4 (1978), 681. At this point it might be worth to remember that most of the “gentlemen volunteers” who flocked from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other prestigious institutions of higher learning to the muddy battlefields of Europe served in rather privileged capacities as ambulance drivers, translators, aviators, signal corps engineers, etc.

43

confronted by the common soldier’s angry shouts of “A basso gli ufficiali!”24 Still more

disillusioning, upon closer contact, the “lower classes,” who in One Man’s Initiation are

still seen as harbingers of “a new world order,” appeared to be nothing but an apathetic

mass, incapable of true revolutionary thought and action.25 “Politically, I have given up

hope entirely…There are too many who go singing to the sacrifice—who throw

themselves gladly, abjectly beneath the Juggernaut,” Dos Passos voiced from France.26

Not surprisingly, although their novel and novelized experience of victimization by an

authoritative state renders them more conscious of “all the old sorrows of the race, black

or yellow or white,” the wizened-up sons of the educated bourgeoisie tend to assume a

rather condescending attitude toward incorrigible idealists, who still seek to better the lot

of the traditionally oppressed through channels of political organizations, parties, and

institutions.27 Hemingway’s short-short story “The Revolutionist” from In Our Time

(1925) offers a case in pointlessness. Here, as later in A Farewell to Arms, the narrator

chances upon a young idealist, who stubbornly “believed altogether in the world

revolution” and the Communist Party.28 Predictably, his naïve hope to organize the

Italian peasantry comes to naught and the “last” the shrewd veteran-narrator hears of him

is that “the Swiss had him in jail near Sion” (82). The lesson is obvious and no doubt

reflects the author’s own disillusionment with the many “aborted revolutions” he had

witnessed.29 Hemingway’s sad précis of the course of revolutions in Green Hills of

Africa (1935) speaks volumes: “They are beautiful. Really. For quite a while. Then

they go bad.” 30

Like Bourne’s hibernating Sebert, Dos Passos’s John Andrews and Hemingway’s

Frederic Henry at last strive to reaffirm their inundated middle-class concepts of heroic

individuality by disassociating themselves not only from a debased state that demands

“uncritical patriotic devotion” and “co-operation of services,” but from all forms of social

24 A Farewell to Arms 219; “In Another Country,” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York; Scribner, 1953) 268. 25 Dos Passos, One Man’s Initiation (163). 26 Correspondence 52-53. 27 Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay 306. 28 Hemingway, In Our Time (New York: Collier, 1986) 81. 29 Robert O. Stephens, Hemingway’s Nonfiction: The Public Voice (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1968) 183-89. 30 Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribner’s, 1996) 192.

44

relations that appear to challenge, upset, restrict, stifle, or abuse the educated white male

middle class self.31 Just as in Sebert’s account, a heightened, war-induced awareness that

progressive ideals of cooperation, organization, self-subsumption, and disinterested

service bear the seeds of totalitarianism leads these young protagonists of World War I

protest novels to reject or dismiss them wholesale. “It was inevitable that the crowds

should sink deeper and deeper into slavery,” John Andrews concludes near the end of

Three Soldiers. Whichever won, tyranny from above or spontaneous organization from

below, there could be no individuals” (373, italics added). “Put him [the peasant] in

power and see how wise he is,” Frederic Henry says by way of deflating the priest’s

incipient socialism in A Farewell to Arms (179). Only by abandoning outdated dreams of

a collectivist world, then, can enlightened liberals such as Sebert, John Andrews, and

Frederic Henry reassert white male middle-class concepts of individuality vis-à-vis

progressive reform movements, working-class organizations, and women’s rights groups,

whose naïve pursuit of collectivization, organization, and communal activism was seen to

have contributed to the fateful demise of “the swaggering independence of our pioneers”

and “hardheaded individuality of our old Yankee skippers.”32

I

Debates over American preparedness and intervention proved to be no less taxing and no

less haunting for the white liberal establishment than for Socialists, laborites, feminists,

women’s rights organizations, and nascent black civil rights groups. As Christopher Lash

has shown, inflated proressivist expectations that a concerted national war effort would

put an end to “gross materialism,” self-centeredness, and exploitive social relations lead

to “disillusionment with popular government” and triggered a sweeping “postwar

reaction against progressivism.”33 Nativism, Red Scare, and “the capitalist domination of

the state” came to be viewed as direct outgrowths of the war effort so that the heretofore

31 “To have a final farewell to arms,” Alex Vernon notes, the “male soldier, especially during World War 1…must lose all obligatory social ties,” “War, Gender, and Ernest Hemingway,” The Hemingway Review 22.1 (2002): 49-50. Characteristically, Three Soldiers, Soldiers’ Pay, and A Farewell to Arms do not simply end with the heroes’ self-withdrawal from army-life, but with the disassociation—voluntary or otherwise—from their respective love interests, who in one way or another threaten to confine them within a domesticated role. 32 Dos Passos, The Major Nonfictional Prose 56. 33 Christopher Lash, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991) 360-63.

45

dominant political concepts of progress, collectivism, organization, institutional reform,

and social evolution appeared to have been thoroughly discredited.34 “We must learn the

stern truth now that there is no such thing as automatic progress,” Randolph Bourne

concluded as early as 1917 in a pamphlet, prophetically entitled “The Disillusionment”

(404).

On virtually all fronts, President Wilson’s much invoked wartime “spirit of

cooperation” seemed to collapse under the weight of dismal postwar realities, giving

sway not only to labor unrest and racial violence, but also to unprecedented levels of

public intolerance and government repression. The war, progressive social commentators

such as Walter Lippmann and Ray Stannard Baker acknowledged, had not erased the

nation’s festering problems. Consequently, “by late 1918, the reformer banners that

many progressives, trade unionists, blacks, and women had carried faithfully through the

fighting and into the Armistice were shredded by the storm of reaction.”35 “Our

prophecies were false, our remedies in vain,” a dejected Baker conceded.36 At every

corner, the veneer of progressive reform seemed to be peeling off, laying bare the gray

brick and cold steel of a social edifice that was ruled by shameless war profiteers, corrupt

politicians, and unscrupulous demagogues. “It was suddenly clear for a second in the

thundering glare what war was about, what peace was about,” Dos Passos wrote in 1919.

“In America, in Europe, the old men won. The bankers in their offices took a deep

breath, the bediamonded old ladies of the leisure class went back to clipping their

coupons in the refined quiet of their safedeposit vaults, the last puffs of the ozone of

revolt went stale in the whisper of speakeasy arguments.”37

Amidst this postwar “storm of reaction,” left-leaning middle class intellectuals

began to perceive themselves as a beleaguered or, in H. L. Mencken’s words, a “civilized

34 Ibid 320. Explains Frederic Lewis Allen, “[f]rom the coercion of alien enemies and supposed pro-Germans it was a short step, as we have seen, to the coercion of racial minorities and supposed Bolsheviks. From war-time censorship it was a short step to peace-time censorship of newspapers and books and public speech. And from legislating sobriety in war-time it was a short step to imbedding prohibition permanently in the Constitution and trying to write the moral code of the majority into the statute-books; Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Wiley, 1997) 172. 35 Kennedy 287. 36 Qtd. in John A. Thompson, Reformers and War: Progressive Publicists and the First World War (New York: Cambridge UP, 1987) 271. 37 Qtd. in Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1980) 191.

46

minority.” Once again labeling themselves ‘liberals’ rather than ‘progressives,’ they now

started propagating a detached “New Liberalism” that identified itself with “hatred of

compulsion,” “tolerance,” and, most importantly, “respect for the individual.”38 In a

postwar America filled with the discordant clamor of “political idealists, diplomats, labor

leaders, prohibitionists, feminists, reformers, revolutionaries,” Harold Stearns declared in

Liberalism in America (1919), the liberal mind must remain “au-de-sus de la mêlée” and

apply its faculties to “creating a certain tolerant temper in society at large.”39

Of course, just a few years earlier most liberal minds had found themselves very

much au centre de la mêlée. Though initially united in their assessment that America

should stir clear of “Europe’s relapse into barbarism,” and that the “real cause of war is to

be found in the new economic and financial forces…bent on the exploitation of weaker

peoples,” a growing number of progressives soon came to view America’s potential

involvement in the war as an opportunity to affect radical social reforms at home.40 “As

early as November 1915,” John A. Thompson notes, the editors of the New Republic had

tacitly “suggested that preparedness might serve as ‘a Trojan Horse’ for the infiltration of

radical reforms.”41 One of the first progressives to openly break ranks was the eminent

social philosopher and educator John Dewey. In a string of essays for the New Republic,

written between 1916 and 1918, Dewey counseled fellow-progressives to abandon their

“pacifist absolutism” and recognize “the immense impetus to reorganization afforded by

this war.” The war, in Dewey’s eyes, constituted a “plastic juncture” in history that was

charged with “social possibilities.” He therefore urged progressive reformers not to shun

but to exploit the “current crisis” as a means to foster “the more conscious and extensive

use of science for communal purposes,” devise “instrumentalities for enforcing the public

interest in all the agencies of production and exchange,” and temper “the individualistic

38 Harold Stearns, Liberalism in America: Its Origin, Its Temporary Collapse, Its Future (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919) 10. Turn-of-century social reformers, Christopher Lash explains, described themselves as ‘progressives’ rather than ‘liberals’ in order to disassociate themselves from the liberal program of laissez-faire economics. “Only in the closing phase of World War I did the term come back into favor, partly because advocates of peaceful change now found it necessary to distinguish themselves from the Bolsheviks and their partisans, but also because wartime repression gave new importance to the defense of civil liberties” (412). 39 Stearns 18. 40 John Haynes qtd. in Thompson 87. 41 John A. Thompson, Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (New York: Cambridge UP, 1987) 141.

47

tradition” by highlighting “the supremacy of public need over private possession.”42 To

social engineers like Dewey, the war was not so much a “Great Crusade” for moral purity

as a great socializing experience.

Progressive publicists such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann began voicing

equally sanguine hopes that participation in the war would not just purge the country of

its gross materialism, social callousness, and petty self-interest, but in its wake might also

trigger a new wave of social reform activism. “I do not wish to underestimate the forces

of reaction in our country,” Lippmann wrote in 1917. But, he added,

We shall know how to deal with them. Forces have been let loose which

they can no longer control, and out of this immense horror ideas have

arisen to possess men’s souls…We shall stand committed as never before

to the realization of democracy in America…We shall turn with fresh

interest to our own tyrannies—to our Colorado mines, our autocratic steel

industries, our sweatshops and our slums. We shall call that man un-

American and no patriot who prates of liberty in Europe and resists it at

home. A force is loose in America as well. Our own reactionaries will

not assuage it with their Billy Sundays or control through lawyers and

politicians of the Old Guard.43

Others, though, remained skeptical that especially the economic forces unleashed by a

national war effort could be so easily harnessed for “the realization of democracy in

America.” “The shouters for exorbitant armament are using preparedness as an argument

with which to intrench more firmly the doctrine of the sacredness of monopoly and

extortion,” Amos Pinchot warned President Wilson.44 Using recent history as his guide,

Frederic C. Howe made a similar point by arguing that “[d]uring the Civil War banking

interests, financial interests, tariff interests, railroad interests, land-grabbing interests,

made their way into government. Imperialism, a great budget, a great navy, and the

possible wars which may come from imperialism mean that financial interests will

continue to be powerful,” Howe cautioned, adding that “[i]n case of great emergency

42 John Dewey, “The Social Possibilities of War,” Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy by John Dewey, Vol. 2, ed. Joseph Ratner (New York: Holt, 1929) 551-61. 43 Walter Lippmann, “The World Conflict in Relation to American Democracy,” Annals 72 (1917): 1-10. 44 Qtd. in Thompson 137.

48

they will be called in to rule, much as they have been in Europe.”45

Still others were troubled less by the reign of financial interests as a consequence

of war than by the “organization, system, routine, and discipline” a war would

necessitate. “A new sense of the obligations of citizenship will transform the spirit of the

nation,” the columnist Frederick Lewis Allen conceded. “But it is also inevitable that the

drill sergeant will receive authority,” he cautioned. “Socialism will take tremendous

strides forward,” Allen foresaw, yet at the same time:

We shall be delivered into the hands of officers and executives who put

victory first and justice second. We shall have to lay by our good-natured

individualism and march in step and command. The only way to fight

Prussianism is with Prussian tools. The danger is lest we forget the lesson

of Prussia: that the bad brother of discipline is tyranny…I would be an

evil day for America if we threw overboard liberty to make room for

efficiency.46

As Kennedy has noted, Allen’s hopes and apprehensions in “The American Tradition and

the War” went to the heart of “a problem that had preoccupied thoughtful Americans for

at least a generation:” the proper balance between individual freedom and social

responsibility.47 Once the dust clouds of patriotic appeals to civic duty began to settle in

the aftermath of World War I, it was precisely this precarious relation between personal

liberty and societal obligation that would again be of central concern to young war

novelists of the middle classes such as John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, William

Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. At the time America formally abandoned neutrality in

April 1917, however, demands of the (bourgeois) self against the public realm seemed to

go up with the smoke of battle. Muses John Andrews in Three Soldiers, to be of “one

organism…was what he had sought when he had enlisted…He was sick of revolt, of

thought, of carrying his individuality like a banner over the turmoil” (26).

“Once the decision had been made,” Thompson observes, “most of those who had

45 Frederic C. Howe, “Democracy or Imperialism – The Alternative that Confronts Us,” Annals 66 (1916): 252. 46 Frederic Lewis Allen, “The American Tradition and the War,” Nation 104 (Apr. 26, 1917): 484-85. 47 Kennedy 43.

49

opposed intervention abandoned, or at least suspended, overt criticism of it.”48 And for

the time being, the majority of progressive intellectuals followed Dewey’s instrumentalist

lead in openly welcoming “war as the forge in whose fires they might shape a new ethos

of social duty and civic responsibility.”49 By May 1917, a jubilant Lippmann reassured

labor leaders that “we stand at the threshold of a collectivism that is greater than any as

yet planned by a socialist party.”50 “The world wherein the right of the individual to

profits was paramount to the right of society to fair prices was blown up with the

Austrian grand duke,” William Allen White chimed in a year later.51 Of course, while

they hailed the establishment of a slew of new regulatory agencies, progressives also

grew worried about the government’s rapid curtailment of civil liberties. Especially

conscription and censorship became rather contentious issues. Even so, for the most part

progressive pundits defended “inconvenient” or “temporary” limitations of personal

freedoms as indispensable in wartime. Others, like White, even went so far as to

welcome the draft as “a perfect plan…to sink the individual into a social unit.”52 The

chief objection to the suppression of dissent was not that it violated fundamental rights,

but that it would further polarize society, engender public intolerance, and “subsequently

make the task of realizing the constructive purposes which lie behind American fighting

excessively and unnecessarily difficult.”53

Among the small and increasingly isolated group of white liberals who discerned

no “constructive purposes…behind American fighting” was Randolph Bourne. In “The

War and the Intellectuals” (1917)—the first in a series of antiwar essays that would end

the short life of the Seven Arts—Bourne sternly denounced “the unanimity with which

the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the

crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-

republicans, practitioners of literature,” he charged, “have vied with each other in

confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the

war-mind on a hundred million more of the world’s people” (307). In Bourne’s eyes, the

48 Thompson 177. 49 Kennedy 44. 50 Qtd. in Thompson 212 51 William Allen White, “Regulation of Food,” Survey 38 (30 June 1917): 217. 52 Qtd. in Thompson 222. 53 Herbert Croly qtd. in Thompson 227.

50

rapid spread of the war “sentiment” was “a class-phenomenon” and so he largely

exempted “the great masses” from direct blame (308, 310). Yet, his insight into the

opportunism of what he liked to call the “significant classes” is matched by his

pessimism about the political abilities of the “apathetic” and “inarticulate” “farmers” and

“workingmen” (310). “Many men will not like being sucked into the actual fighting

mechanism,” Bourne surmises in “A War Diary” (1917), but “[i]t is unlikely that enough

men will be taken from the potentially revolting classes seriously to embitter their spirit”

(319). Like most World War I protest novelists, Bourne thus finds himself without a

suitable revolutionary force on which to hang his political hopes.

This had not always been the case. In 1913, Bourne had made a name for himself

as the spokesperson of a “Young America” with the publication of Youth and Life, a

collection of mildly rebellious essays that feature polemics against the “old rigid

morality, with its emphasis on the prudential” and call upon young middle class

Americans to embrace “all the adventurous quality that makes [life] worth living” (98).

“Our times,” he wrote elatedly in Youth and Life, “gives no check to the radical

tendencies of youth. On the contrary, they give the directest stimulation…There is a

radical philosophy [Dewey’s instrumentalism] that illuminates our environment, gives us

terms in which to express what we see, and coordinates our otherwise aimless reactions”

(104). Issued four years before America plunged headlong into the carnage of World

War I, Bourne’s spirited admonition to challenge the strictures of “family, business,

church, society, state” with youthful “heroism” anticipates much of the initial excitement

and subsequent disillusionment with which young, educated males of the upper and

middle classes came to regarded the Great War (96). To be sure, Bourne himself, unlike

young Dos Passos, Faulkner, or Hemingway, never betrayed even so much as a fleeting

fascination with war. In contrast to many of his slightly younger contemporaries, who

sought the war experience as an outlet for their penned-up rebelliousness, Bourne clung

to intellectualized notions of “adventure” and “heroism” that were incompatible with

war.54 Yet, this did not shield him from experiencing a sense of “overwhelming…loss”

and “disillusionment,” usually associated with the succeeding, the “lost generation”55

54 “War simply did no mix with anything that he had learned to feel was desirable,” Christopher Lasch notes in The New Radicalism in American, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York:

51

Since disillusionment must figure prominently in any discussion of World

War I protest novels, and since, as David Minter has shown, “survivors of the Great War

turned to writers like Bourne as their guides,” it is crucial at this juncture to probe deeper

into the sources and consequences of Bourne’s disillusionment.56 According to Bruce

Clayton, Bourne’s disillusionment stemmed from an overly romantic view of politics that

proved unsustainable during the war. “In Youth and Life,” writes Clayton, “Bourne had

espoused a politics based on the romantic conviction that America needed to be

revitalized by radical personalities. Viewed in light of the war, his earlier nonpragmatic

prescriptions for youth seemed dreamy, paper thin, of a piece with a romantic era, too

fragile for the world.”57

Bourne, no doubt, would have resisted Clayton’s characterization of his prewar

politics as “nonpragmatic” and “romantic.” After all, in “John Dewey’s Philosophy”

(1915) he had declared himself an ardent practitioner of Dewey’s “ultra-democratic”

instrumentalism (332). More to the point, in “A Moral Equivalent to Universal Military

Service” (1915), Bourne, recognizing “a very genuine sentiment for unity of sentiment,

for service,” envisioned an idealistic “army of youth,” “swarming over the land,

spreading the health knowledge, the knowledge of domestic science, of gardening, of

tastefulness, that they have learned in school” (49-50). This advocacy of voluntary

civilian service in place of compulsory military service explains his claim in “The War

and the Intellectuals,” that “[t]he war caused in America a recrudescence of nebulous

ideals which a younger generation was fast outgrowing because it had passed the wistful

stage and was discovering concrete ways of getting them incarnated in actual institutions.

The shock of war threw us back from this pragmatic work into an emotional bath of these

old ideals” (313-14, italics added). As one reads on, however, “the shock of war” turns

out to be much more than a simple throwback, for it seems to have effectively terminated

the “pragmatic work” of “clarify[ing]” and “incarnat[ing]” radical ideas “in actual

institutions,” begun by “Young Americans” such as himself. “The real casualty of the

1965), because “patriotism” and “the neurotic fury about self-defense seemed to come from types and classes he instinctively detested” (80-81). 55 Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984) 226. 56 Minter 71. 57 Clayton 226.

52

war was Bourne’s faith in pragmatism,” observes Casey Nelson Blake.58 “One has a

sense,” Bourne confessed in “Twilight of Idols” (1917), “of having come to a sudden,

short stop at then end of intellectual era” (342). In Youth and Life, Bourne had warned

young intellectuals against becoming “all or nothing radicals” and advised them to

infiltrate social institutions so as to gradually transform them from the inside (300-304).

Along similar lines, in “Law and Order” (1912), he had argued that “the State…should

become progressively Socialistic and devote all its efforts to the abolition of the class-

war” (354). Just four years later, he decried America’s move toward “semi-militaristic

State-socialism” and saw the sole role left for the uncorrupted intellectual as that of

perpetual “dissenter[],” “irreconcilable radical[],” or “spiritual vagabond,” whose

“declassed mind” “will continue to roam widely and ceaselessly (320, 317).59

Bourne’s politics, it seems, became more rather than less romantic “in light of the

war.” Tellingly, in the “Twilight of Idols,” Bourne locates “the root of our dissatisfaction

with much of the current political and social realism” in “a real shortage of spiritual

values” and “the lack of poetic vision in our pragmatist ‘awakeners’” (342-45). Dewey’s

embrace of war as an instrument for social reform, he argues, has revealed the

fundamental shortcoming of American pragmatism: “an exaggerated emphasis on the

mechanics of life at the expense of the quality of living” (345). Modern warfare, with its

reliance on the mobilization, organization, and maintenance of a vast military machinery,

Bourne stresses tirelessly in his later writings, brings to the fore the latent totalitarianism

of a scrupulously rationalized and seemingly enlightened bourgeoisie society. “Wartime

brings the ideal of the State out into clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that

were hidden,” Bourne explains in “The State” (359). “The more terrifying the occasion

of defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence

upon each member of the herd” until the “State” emerges as “the inexorable arbiter and

determinant of man’s business and attitudes and opinions” (359). “Loyalty—or mystic

devotion to the State—becomes the major imagined human value” (361).

Bourne concedes in “Twilight of Idols” that the progressive “philosophy of

‘adaptation’ or ‘adjustment’…worked when we were trying to get that material

58 Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, & Lewis Mumsford (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990) 157. 59 “Traps for the Unwary” qtd. in Clayton 246.

53

foundation for American life in which more impassioned living could flourish” (345).

But “when we are faced with inexorable disaster and the hysterias of the mob,” he insists,

the “old philosophy, the old radicalism” shows its inherently reactionary tendencies

(345). For in their technocratic zeal to first conjure up and then harness the primeval

forces of public belligerence to the wheel of progress, “pragmatist ‘awakeners’” have

aligned themselves with “the least liberal and least democratic elements” so that

ultimately “they become mere agents and expositors of forces as they are” (342, 330).

And instead of overcoming the “tyrannical herd instinct,” the progressive philosophy of

old merely disguises it behind “the technical organization of war by an earnest group of

young liberals, who direct their course by an opportunist programme of State-socialism at

home and a league of benevolent imperialistic nation abroad” (308, 345).60 This is

“technically admirable,” scoffs Bourne, “only there is nothing in the outlook that touches

in any way the happiness of the individual, the vivifying of the personality, the

comprehension of social forces, the flair of art—in other words, the quality of life” (345).

Abandoned by his fellow-liberals “turned ‘realists’” and unable or unwilling to

find support from the proletariat (or, for that matter, the small bands of staunch anti-war

feminists and dissenting civil rights leaders), the only hope Bourne holds for the

“malcontent” intellectual is that “[h]is apathy towards war should take the form of a

heightened energy and enthusiasm for education, the art, the interpretation that make for

life in the midst of death” (316-17). But even this retreat into education, art, and

interpretation—a gesture empathically repeated by E. E. Cummings’s unnamed narrator

in The Enormous Room as well as Dos Passos’s John Andrews in Three Soldiers—hardly

seems to provide a satisfactory solution to the “terrible dilemma” faced by the upright

“intellectual.” As Bourne saw it, the intellectual could “either support what is going on,

in which case you count for nothing because you are swallowed in the mass and great

incalculable forces bear on you; or remain aloof, passively resistant, in case you count for

nothing because you are outside the machine of reality” (14).61 Almost without fail,

60 The “programme of such a League,” Bourne elucidates in “The War and the Intellectuals,” “contains no provision for dynamic national growth or for international economic justice. I a world which requires recognition of economic internationalism far more than of political internationalism, an idea is reactionary which proposes to petrify and federate the nations as political and economical units” (312). 61 Bourne’s use of the word “machine” in order to describe the wartime “reality” of intellectual coercion is instructive, for it looks forward to the way in which First World War protest novels by young white males

54

Bourne’s antiwar essays end in what Evelyn Cobley has identified as the characteristic

posture of the modernist war novel: “romantic despair.”62

Both Bourne’s mounting concern for the individual and his proportionally waning

faith in organizational or institutional politics, it becomes clear, are rooted at least

partially in his personal confrontations with a state authority that not only seemed to grow

all-powerful as a result of war, but also sanctioned “a white terrorism...against pacifists,

socialists, enemy aliens, and…all persons or movements that can be imagined as

connected with the enemy” (367). “Dissenters” such as himself, Bourne complains, are

not simply “excommunicated,” but become unprotected game in the public’s “pursuit of

enemies within,” which “outweighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the enemy

without” (316, 367). “War becomes almost a sport between the hunters and hunted,” he

concludes (367).

The “personal shock” that, in Bourne’s account, leads a “younger generation” to

recoil from “pragmatic work” within institutions and organizations is thus not very

different form those mind-altering “shocks” experienced by Cummings’s narrator in The

Enormous Room, who is arrested for writing “seditious letters” or, more dramatically, by

Hemingway’s Frederic Henry, who suddenly finds himself “ordered to be shot” by

henchmen of the Italian government (313, Farewell 224). It is not so much the

knowledge or experience of carnage on the battlefield, then, as the sudden and

unexpected confrontation with an unreasoning state authority that instills sensitive sons

of the bourgeoisie with their deepest and longest-lasting sense of injury and resentment.

Revealingly, Bourne—an avid reader of both Freud and Jung—couches his investigation

of state authority in psycho-analytical terms, when he speaks of the general public’s

“adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the

of the upper and middle classes frequently link images of mechanization, industrialization, collectivization, and unbridled state authority to the demise of independent thought and the blotting out of the individual. 62 Cobley, 12. Of course, this posture of “romantic despair” is not quite as apolitical as critics such as Cooperman would have it. For although Three Soldiers, The Enormous Room, Soldiers’ Pay, and A Farewell to Arms, unlike Gertrude Atherton’s The White Morning or Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway, fail to outline a clear course of political action, they, nevertheless, put forth a vigorous and, one might say, romantic defense of white middle class notions of individualism. In leveling devastating attacks against warmongering capitalists, demagogues, doctrinaires, bureaucrats, and technocrats, they also always seek to reassert the moral and intellectual leadership claim of the strenuously dissenting and heroically isolated white male middle class protagonist, whose heightened consciousness of victimization both validates and elevates his self-defining antiwar protest.

55

quasi-personal symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of your

definite action and ideas” (365).63 Bourne himself had once regarded John Dewey with a

likewise “filial look.” But as the distinguished professor bore the force of his public

authority upon him and sought to conscript him into the army of prowar pragmatists,

Bourne’s angry denunciation of Dewey’s progressivism seemed to acquire the same tone

of filial betrayal and indignation that animates Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

Faced with a nation that univocally demanded unquestioning obedience and

selfless sacrifice, young liberals came to revile what Bourne described as “the

consciousness of collectivity” that devours all “individuality” and bestows “the masses”

with “a feeling of strength, which in turn arouses pugnacity” (362). As Eric J. Leed has

pointed out in his brilliant study of British and German World War I writings, to young

intellectuals of the middle classes “it was much more painful to be denuded of those

positive and wholly internalized values of bourgeois culture—the values of equality,

freedom from mechanical necessities, the vision of heroic individuality—than it was to

leave behind those negative images formulated in the bourgeois critique of itself—

‘materialism,’ ‘egotism,’ purely ‘contractual’ or ‘exploitive’ social relationships, the

‘machine age.’”64 In their war-induced fervor to complete the latter, the old wardens of

progressivism had seriously imperiled the former, young liberals such as Bourne judged.

Henceforth, painfully aware that the war had eroded “values of equality, freedom from

mechanical necessities, the vision of heroic individuality,” young white male writers

were only too eager to denounce progressive remedies for societal ills and to replace

them with transcendentalist notions of self-reliance that were grounded in what Ralph

Waldo Emerson famously called “the infinitude of the private man.”65 The resurgence of

such romantic sentiments, though understandable in light of the glaring failures of

progressive politics, obviously rendered these rebellious liberals rather shaky allies of

those groups that, while much more adversely affected by the misguided politics of the

progressive establishment, had fewer stakes in notions of self-reliance, none the least

because a long history of repression had taught them to rely on principles of collectivism,

63 On Bourne’s acquaintance with the writings of Freud and Jung, see Clayton 173-74. 64 Leed, No Man’s Land 94. 65 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, 16 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1960-1982) VII, 342.

56

organization, institutional reform, judicial protection, et cetera. After all, it was one thing

for comparatively well-situated men like Bourne’s Sebert or Dos Passos’s John Andrews

to dwell on their own infinitude and quite another for Walter White’s black sharecroppers

in rural Georgia or William Cunningham’s white “dirt farmers” on the Oklahoma plains.

This is not to imply that the vehement antiwar protest by Bourne and those

younger war-poets who would follow his lead lacks profundity or that it is not informed

by sincere humanitarian concerns. To the contrary, these middle-class writers’ shocking

because novel experience of victimization—however small in comparison to the

oppression endured by workers, women, African Americans, and other minorities on a

daily basis—often coalesce into new forms of social knowledge that foster a keener

understanding of the societal mechanisms of subjugation.66 In “The State,” for example,

Bourne notes that life under quasi-totalitarian control, in its manifest form an exception

for the middle classes, approximates the working classes’ quotidian experience of

powerlessness:

The members of the working [classes]…live habitually in an industrial

serfdom, by which, though nominally free, they are in practice as a class

bound to a system of machine-production the implements of which they

do not own, and in the distribution of whose product they have not the

slightest voice, except what they can occasionally exert by a veiled

intimidation which draws slightly more of the product in their direction.

From such serfdom, military conscription is not so great a change. (365)

Frederic Henry’s statement in A Farewell to Arms that “the peasant has wisdom, because

he is defeated from the start,” reveals the same insight, as does, of course, John

Andrews’s more explicit observation in Three Soldiers that “this [army life] is the world

as it has appeared to the majority of men, this is just the lower half of the pyramid (179,

32). The experience of war, not as the advertised heroic adventure, but as tedious,

monotonous, mechanical work further compounds the uniformed middle class author’s

understanding of the economic underpinnings of industrial society. The long column of

dust-stirring, gun-carrying soldiers that disturbs the “late summer” idyll in the opening

66 “The shock experience which the passer-by has in a crowd corresponds to what the worker ‘experiences’ at his machine,” notes Walter Benjamin in a slightly different context; Illuminations 176.

57

pages of A Farewell to Arm not only announces modern man’s violation of nature, but

also evokes images of the daily processions of industrial workers, marching into the hell

fires of Chicago steel mills (3). By the same token, Passini’s expressed pride in doing a

“fine job” because he is a “mechanic” inextricably connects war to the routine of work.

Frederic Henry’s men, though opposed to the war, go about it as they go about their

work. “From the point of view of the worker,” Bourne writes in “A War Diary,” it will

make little difference whether his work contributes to annihilation overseas or to

construction at home” (319). To the college-trained John Andrews in Three Soldiers, by

contrast, the new experience of war-work quickly becomes excruciatingly painful. Like

his creator, he nearly goes mad when ordered to clean endless rows of windows at camp:

“‘How long do we have to do this?’ he asked the man who was working with him…I’ll

go crazy if stay here three months….I’ve been here a week’ muttered Andrews between

his teeth as he climbed down and moved his ladder to the next window” (21). Becoming

intimately acquainted with the dehumanizing implications of industrial labor, Andrews

undergoes what Eric Leed has described as the process of “militarized proletarianization”

as he keeps “remarking to himself how strange it was that he was not thinking of

anything” (21).67

“The dislocation brought on by World War I,” Wendy Steiner comments,

“provoked a profound analysis of the phenomenon of victimization.”68 Yet, this

“profound analysis of the phenomenon of victimization” in World War I protest novels

rarely seems to lead to more than very uneasy identifications with the traditional victims

of oppression. For example, at the very instant John Andrews begins to feel an

(enforced) kinship with members of the lower classes, he must also recognize that “they

seemed to be at home in this army life. They did not seem appalled by the loss of their

liberty” (32). “Where was the connection?,” the malcontent intellectual Andrews

wonders, as his idealized notions of “declassing” himself begin to unravel. Similarly,

while Bourne notices that the “proletariat” is “notoriously less affected by the symbolism

of the State” and “shows more resistance,” he observes that, “still into the military they

go, not with the hurrahs of the significant classes whose instincts war so powerfully

67 Leed, No Man’s Land 694. 68 Steiner 850.

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feeds, but with the same apathy with which they enter and continue in the industrial

enterprise” (365). And “Signor Tenente” Frederic Henry, though on exceptionally

personable terms with his men, can never help but to mock their expressions of

revolutionary sentiments as naïve regurgitations of stale doctrines. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

novelette, “May Day” (1920) offers yet another dramatization of the common soldiers’

fuzzy sense of resentment and rebellion. Fitzgerald describes the dislocated war veterans

in stark naturalistic terms:

They were ugly, ill-nourished, devoid of all except the very lowest form of

intelligence…they were lately vermin-ridden, cold, and hungry in a dirty

town of a strange land; their were poor, friendless…They were dressed in

the uniform of the United States Army, and on the shoulder of each was

the insignia of a drafted division from New Jersey, landed three days

before.69

“Uncertain, resentful, and somewhat ill at ease,” these discharged soldiers instinctively

know that they had been taken advantage off. “—What have you got outa the war?” one

of them asks. “Look arounja, look arounja! Are you rich?…—no, you’re lucky if you’re

alive and got both your legs.” But when they chance upon the May Day parade, their

accumulate anger is directed against the “God damn Bolsheviki” and they randomly

attack marchers as well as bystanders. “The human race has come a long way,”

Fitzgerald has Henry, one of the story’s malcontent intellectuals explain, “but most of us

are throw-backs; the soldiers don’t know what they want, or what they hate, or what they

like. They’re used to acting in large bodies, and they seem to have to make

demonstrations.”70 The lower classes, dulled out of their senses by industrial serfdom,

simply cannot comprehend the larger implications of their situation. And it is precisely

this realization that, as Eric Leed has pointed out, eventually precipitates a “diminution

both of the guilt and the idealization with which morally uncomfortable sons of the

bourgeoisie regarded the working classes.”71

By parading their newly acquired share of victimization like a red badge of

69 F. Scott Fitzgerald, “May Day,” The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Scribner’s, 1989) 106. 70 Ibid. 107, 108, 128. 71 Leed, No Man’s Land 694

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courage, educated white male authors tend to both morally legitimize and culturally

elevate their own brand of antiwar protest, casting it as the most original, most incisive,

and most definitive forms of social critique available. Alienated workers,

disenfranchised women, and quasi-enslaved blacks suffer too, but theirs are regarded as

ordinary, unreflective forms of suffering that do not generate “new values” and “a new

orientation of the spirit that shall be modern.”72 A new “feeling given fiber and outline

by intelligence,” Bourne insists, “can come…only from those who are thorough

malcontents”—“men who could not stomach the war, or that reactionary idealism that

has followed it its train” (345-46). Malcolm Cowley, having noted elsewhere that “the

admired writers of the generation were men in the great majority” who were also “white,

middle-class, mostly Protestant in upbringing, and mostly English or Scottish by decent,”

made this lore of the malcontent war novelist’s superior or elevated suffering part of

modern literary history:73

War novelists are not sociologists or historians, but neither are they

average soldiers. The special training and talent of novelists lead them to

express special moods. They are usually critical in temper and often are

self-critical to the point of being burdened with feelings of guilt. They are

sensitive—about themselves in the beginning; but if they have any

imagination (and they need it) they learn to be sensitive for others…In

military service, many future writers were men of whom their comrades

said that they were “always goofing off by themselves.” They suffered

more than others from the enforced promiscuity of army and shipboard

life. Most of them were rebels against discipline when they thought it was

illogical—which they usually did—and rebels against the system…When

we find them in substantial agreement on a number of topics, we should

listen attentively to what they say.74

Again, it appears impossible to deny that the experience of trench warfare

72 The “sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause,” writes Emerson in “Self-Reliance,” but are put on and off as the wind blows and the newspapers direct;” The Portable Emerson, 145. 73 Qtd. in Minter 117. 74 Malcolm Cowley, The Literary Situation (New York: Scribner’s, 1947) 25-26. According to Stanley Cooperman, this passage represents “perhaps the most reasonable defense of the artist-in-the-army” (198).

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rendered “many future writers” in uniform more aware of the restrictive living conditions

of “others.” As numerous studies have pointed out, circumstances such as the

hierarchical organization of army life, enforced passivity in the trenches, economic

dependency, censorship, restriction of social contacts, exclusion from political decisions,

et cetera, represented grave curtailments of personal liberties that men, unlike women,

had traditionally taken for granted.75 Moreover, under the pressures of war, soldiers

adopted any number of behavioral and emotional traits—ranging from the execution of

domestic chores to caring for the sick to outbursts of uncontrollable hysteria—that had

usually been associated with women. Nevertheless, as Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert,

Alex Vernon and others have also shown, this very experience of what might be called

the militarized feminization of men frequently gave rise to “intense anxieties about

masculinity” as well as the loss of social privileges. These, in turn, beget “anger directed

specially against the female because women did not fight;” because “they loosened

conventional gender restrictions on their behavior; and because they remained ignorant of

the facts of front while enthusiastically supporting the war.”76 Thus, while by and large

sympathetic toward female demands for the franchise and greater social freedoms, World

War I protest novels tend to chastise the “excessive” behaviors of “devouring females” or

radical “new feminists,” who seem to further victimize the already maimed male

protagonist.

Once more, Bourne’s expansive writings help to shed light on the gender-political

aspects that inform the self-assertive antiwar protests of white male middle class authors.

Like most educated liberals of his time, Bourne had been an ardent supporter of women’s

rights. In a 1915 character sketch for the New Republic, he lauded the achievements of

the “New Woman,” supported calls for birth control and, following Charlotte Perkins

Gilman’s main contention, denounced women’s economic servitude to men.77 By 1916,

75 See, for instance, Jennifer Haytock, At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003). 76 Vernon 43; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Penguin, 1987), 172. In The Female Malady, Showalter interprets shell-shock as a form of male hysteria, and shows how this reaction to the physical and emotional rigors of fighting made men question their natural capability for the socially designated role as soldiers. The loss of power in decision making and of control over their own bodies called into question men’s ability to fulfill the ultimate masculine role of the soldier. The independence and strength, which were seen as the characteristics of true masculinity, were often shattered by war experiences rather than bolstered by them. 77 See Clayton 172-73.

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however, his views on feminism had dimmed considerably. Especially organized

feminists, Bourne perceived, had grown too preoccupied with being females rather than

individuals. Thus, in “Making One’s Contribution,” Bourne depicts a young man baffled

by women who can think of nothing but making a contribution “as women.”78 Likewise,

in “Karen,” he portrays a young emancipated college girl gone awry, who makes herself

“hideous in mannish skirts and waists” and becomes “intimate with feminists whose

feminism had done little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely

conscious of the cloven hoof of the male” (446). And in his galling review of Clemence

Dane’s thinly-veiled lesbian novel, Regiment of Women (1917), Bourne uses words like

“neurotic,” “diabolical,” and “wanton” to describe the book’s “vampire-like” heroine,

who, he assesses, is a “type of woman which must inevitable become rather common in

the manless world which women are trying to make for themselves”79 Aside from

revealing deep-rooted male anxieties about lesbianism, Bourne’s critique of feminism is

in so far interesting as it blames the “excesses” of female behavior at least in part on “the

times [of war] that produce the type of fair and serious and life-denying women, who in

the name of career and her pride…destroys not only you but herself.”80 War, Bourne

recognizes uneasily, has provided women with greater opportunities to pursue careers and

lead economically independent lives. Yet, instead of approaching “sympathetic men”

such as himself in a spirit of growing gender equality, these “newest new women” only

seemed to intensify their vilifications of “Man,” seemed to band together even closer,

and, in the manner of scrupulous war-profiteers, appeared to openly relish the prospect of

a “manless world.”81

In light of Gertrude Atherton’s radically feministic and betimes outright

murderous wartime fantasies in Mrs. Belfame and The White Morning, Bourne’s fears

might not appear overly far-fetched. But be that as it may, what is important to note is

that sensitive young male literati began to feel that feminists and their organizations

deliberately used the war to further undermine the diminishing status of man “as a self-

78 Randolph Bourne, “Making One’s Contribution,” New Republic (Aug. 26, 1916): 91-92. 79 Qtd in Clayton 178. 80 See Bourne’s letter to Alyse Gregory, qtd. in Clayton 176. 81 Ibid. On notions of the “newest new woman” in Hemingway’s fiction see chapter three in Betsy L. Nies, Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920’s (New York: Routledge, 2002) 45-66.

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willed being.”82 Moreover, since women—like the proletariat—had long been equated

with “the inferior reasoning of crowds” and since the “hysteria surrounding World War I”

came to be perceived as a “quintessential crowd phenomenon,” it is hardly astonishing

that male war novelist often connect feelings of enochlophobia with outgoing female

characters such as Bret Ashley in the Sun Also Rises, Geneviéve Rod in Three Soldiers,

or Margaret Powers in Soldiers’ Pay, whose promiscuous sociability threatens to

overwhelm the protagonists’ beleaguered sense of self.83 “The fear of the masses,” notes

Andreas Huyssen, “is also always a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the

unconscious, of sexuality, of loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass.”84 In

the end, then, is not sufficient for the enlightened protagonist of World War I protest

novels to simply renounce misguided progressivist doctrines of mass organization, mass

agitation, and mass collectivization. To attain some sort of transcendent personal liberty

within a modern world determined by outside forces that seek to enslave, tame, and/or

domesticate the besieged male middle class self, heroically resisting characters such as

Frederic Henry and John Andrews must purge their private lives of all sentimental

attachments to “others,” who, though themselves subjugated by powers beyond their

control and understanding, have become in their turn oppressors.

II

One Man’s Initiation: 1917, Dos Passos’s first attempt to formulate a literary response to

the Great War, depicts a young American ambulance driver’s reaction to the slaughter in

France. Throughout the early chapters of the novel, Martin Howe remains very much the

detached “gentleman volunteer,” who marvels at the sights in Paris, enjoys the

conviviality of French officers, and waxes abstractly about war: “the flood of scarlet

poppies seemed the blood of fighting men slaughtered through all time” (52). But as

Howe is “initiated in all the circles of hell,” he grows more and more aware of the

concrete suffering around him (69). Observing a group of men playing cards in the

dugout, “[s]uddenly he thinks of all the lives that must, in these three years have ended”

(85). And while “listlessly” watching a German prisoner, Howe wonders: “Did he accept

82 Colley 38. 83 Janet Galligani Casey, Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine (New York: Oxford UP, 1998) 27. 84 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 52.

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all this stench an filth and degradation of slavery as part of the divine order of things. Or

did he burn with loathing and revolt?” (146). To be sure, Howe, can never quite shed his

tendency to scrutinize common soldiers—both friends and foes—as others, “noting

intelligent faces, beautiful faces, faces brutally gay, miserable faces like those of sobbing

drunkards” (64-65). Eventually, however, the random violence of war allows Howe to

identify with the plight of the common men, who for “generations” had “worn away their

lives in mines and factories and forges, in fields and work-shops.” (147). In a cathartic

scene that momentarily transcends differences of class and nationality, Howe springs into

action when the very German prisoner, whose progress down the road he had watched

“listlessly,” is all of a sudden hit by shrapnel: “he clutched the wounded man tightly to

him in the effort of carrying him towards the dugout. The effort gave Martin a strange

contentment. It was if his body were taking part in the agony of this man’s body. At last

they washed out, all the hatreds, all the lies, in blood and sweat. Nothing was left but the

quiet friendliness of beings alike in every part, eternally alike” (148).

As Robert C. Rosen has argued, One Man’s Initiation not only “serves as an

indictment of war,” but, in tracing Howe’s “incipient political awareness,” also provides

a glimpse of young Dos Passos own incipient hope for revolutionary action.85 During a

long political discussion toward the end of the novel, Howe falls under the sway of the

“carefully articulated systems of thought” by four young French radicals.86 Under

Socratic questioning, Howe comes to denounce “American Idealism” as mere

“camouflage” and assesses that “America is ruled by the press,” which in turn is ruled by

“dark forces” that have succeeded in turning young intellectuals into “slaves of bought

intellect, willing slaves” (158-59). Howe, not unlike Dos Passos in “A Humble Protest,”

perceives that the classes are equally enslaved to “industry, to money, to the mammon of

business, the great God of our times.”87 It is the French socialist André Dubois, who

instills him with a vision of a war-induced revolution from below. “We are merely

intellectuals. We cling to the mummified world. But they have the power and the

nerve,” Dubois explains in good Marxist fashion:

85 Robert C. Rosen, John Dos Passos: Politics and the Writer (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1981) 10. 86 Dos Passos, “Preface 1945,” One Man’s Initiation 38. 87 Major Nonfictional Prose 32.

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What we want is organization from the bottom, organization by the

ungreedy, by the humane, by the uncunning, socialism of the masses that

shall spring from the natural need of men to help one another; not

socialism from the top to the ends of the governors, that they may clamp

us tighter in their fetters…the unspeakable misery of this war is driving

men closer into fraternity, co-operation. It is the lower classes, therefore,

that the new world must be founded one…We only can combat the lies.

(163-69)

Howe drinks with his new comrades somewhat confusedly to “Revolution, to Anarchy, to

the Socialist state” (168). And when he walks back to the dugout, he elatedly informs

Tom Randolph: “With people like these we needn’t despair of civilization” (169). The

novel sustains Howe’s optimism even though the final chapter brings death to Dubois,

Merrier, Lully, and Norman. “It’s not for long,” a dying Norman ensures Howe. “To-

morrow, the next day….” (174).

“In my disillusionment [with Western Civilization],” Dos Passos recalled nearly

50 years later, “I began listening seriously to the Socialist…Why shouldn’t the working

people, who had everything to lose and nothing to gain from war and aggression, knit the

fabric up again? We were young hotheads. We took to shouting all the warcries of the

Socialist dogma.”88 But even as a much younger, still politically radicalized men, Dos

Passos was apparently unable to sustain One Man’s Initiation’s faith in the “ungreedy,”

“humane,” “uncunning, socialism of the masses” for long. The succession of misfired

revolutions in France, Portugal, Austria, and Germany as well as Lenin’s embrace of

totalitarian methods in post-revolutionary Russia gradually made him doubt “the power

and the nerve” of the working classes.89 More immediately, though, it seemed to have

been his second initiation—this time into the “hell” of “industrial serfdom”—that

shattered his idealized view of the lower classes, further compounded his longstanding

fears of falling victim to the “very pathetic…ways” of “the mob,” and subsequently

turned him into an ardent champion of “the supreme individual,” who denounces

88 Dos Passos, “Introduction, 1968,” One Man’s Initiation 3-4. 89 On Dos Passos’s disillusionment with the Bolshevik Revolution, see his essays collected in Orient Express (New York: Harper, 1927).

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“organization” both “from the top” and “from the bottom”90

Despite the fact that Dos Passos, like his friend E. E. Cummings, had been

dishonorably discharged from the ambulance service for mailing treasonable letters, he

was eager to get back into the army while the war still lasted.91 With the help of

influential relatives, Dos Passos succeeded. In September of 1918, he reported to Camp

Crane in Allentown, Pennsylvania. As one of the “gentlemen volunteers” at Section 60

of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, Dos Passos had cultivated an abstract taste for

revolution; among the common soldiers at Camp Crane he hoped to get closer to its

sources. “I have always wanted to divest myself of class and the monied background—

the army seemed to best way—From the bottom—thought I, one can see clear,” Dos

Passos reported back to Arthur McComb in early October.92

Yet the letters and diary entries Dos Passos wrote at Camp Crane reveal that the

“mechanics of declassing oneself” turned out to be much more difficult and disillusioning

than he had expected. Unaccustomed to obey orders, army discipline quickly became

unbearable to Dos Passos and he began counting his days in “captivity.” Long hours of

“enforced labor” rendered him “most miserable” as he fell “into a state of sullen rage so

that one can’t even talk to new found people.” Often, Dos Passos confided, the dull

routine of work made him feel “so stupidly unintelligent—so emptyheaded—that he

would not even take “the trouble” to “get into conversation with” common soldiers.93

“Organization is death, organization is death,” he chanted in a letter to McComb. During

the early days of “captivity,” Dos Passos could still praise “the simply and sublime

amiability of the average American soldier” and note expectantly: “Here is clay for the

molding. Who is to be potter? That is the great question.” 94 But a mere week later, the

immediate answer seemed to confirm his worst fears. In attendance during the screening

of a particularly atrocious propaganda movie, he “could feel a wave of hatred go through

the men…the men were furious with war—kill kill kill.” Army life as an extension of

industrial serfdom, he discovered, was neither conducive to genuine “comradeship” nor

to an awakening of revolutionary sentiments among the common men. To the contrary, 90 Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose 30-31. 91 Dos Passos details his discharge in “The Camera Eye 32” of U.S.A. 92 Landsberg 109-10. 93 Dos Passos, Fourteenth Chronicle 212. 94 Dos Passos, Fourteenth Chronicle 252, 212; Landsberg 109, 107.

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“put in charge of the mess hall,” Dos Passos “notice[ed] the sheeplike look army life

gives them—a dumb submissive look about the eyes. They usually submit cowardly to

my shoutings to move on with the look of hurt dogs that have been illtreated.”95

In line with Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (1916)—a book he greatly admired—Dos

Passos nevertheless concluded that the war had to be fought to its bitter end in order to

generate sufficient revolutionary discontent among the masses. Finding himself in Paris

after the armistice, he excitedly awaited the general strike, set for May 1, 1919 by the

General Labor Federation. “Loafing around in little old bars full of the teasing fragrances

of history,” he “eagerly collected intimations of the urge towards the common good.”96

But to his great disappointment, no second French Revolution occurred. The

gendarmerie brutally interfered with the May Day demonstration and the general strike

was aborted. Agitated crowds of workers and discharged soldiers clashed with each other

and turned to smashing windows and looting shops—a scene that replayed itself in a

number of European and American cities. Dos Passos once again returned to his beloved

Spain, where lack of “modern centralization” and the “intense individualism” of its

inhabitants afforded refuge from “this immense machine, the Industrial system.” Writing

from Madrid, he expressed his mounting ambivalence toward the very masses he had

hoped revolution would liberate:

Overpopulation combined with a breakdown of food has wrecked the checks

and balances of the industrialized world. In ten years we may be cavemen

snatching the last bit of food from each others mouths amid the stinking ruins of

our cities, or we may be slaving—antlike—in some utterly systematized world

where the individual will be crushed so that the mob (or the princes) may live.97

It was in this mood of apocalyptic despair that Dos Passos finished writing his second

World War I novel, Three Soldiers.

Though initially conceived as a “collectivist novel,” which relates shared war

experiences of three American soldiers from different regional and socio-economic

backgrounds, it is the perspective of the educated, upper-class character John Andrews

95 Fourteenth Chronicle 219, 218, 230. 96 Dos Passos, “Grosz Comes to America,” qtd. in Landsberg, Dos Passos Path 65. 97 Major Nonfictional Prose 41, 34; Fourteenth Chronicle 281.

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that comes to dominate the latter half of the book.98 Taken as a whole, many critics have

remarked, the novel dramatize how the “army turns men into automatons, turns

individuals into faceless cogs of an inhuman mechanism.”99 But if one takes a more

discriminating look at the novel’s depictions of its three ostensibly representative

protagonists—Dan Fuselli as the representative of an opportunistic petit bourgeoisie, Joe

Chrisfield as the representative of a brutalized proletariat, and John Andrews as the

representative of a world-weary Bildungsbürgertum—it becomes apparent that only

Andrews possesses the intellectual facilities to fully grasp the inherent inhumanities of

the modern condition. The three characters might be on some level doubles of each

other, as Michael Clark suggests, but Fuselli and Chrisfield, in marked contrast to

Andrews, remain utterly oblivious as to the nature of their oppression.100 Moreover,

through their unreflective actions Fuselli and Chrisfield tend to unwittingly compound

their own miseries as well as those of others. Hence, even though Andrews, too, comes

“under the wheels” of a “life-denying system,” his personal “gesture, feeble as it is,

towards human freedom” receives moral as well as political sanctioning by the text as the

only sensible response to the dehumanizing war experience. And in the process, any

prospect of revolutionary action, though not completely cancelled out, is being redefined

in largely individualistic terms.

Three Soldiers commences the exposure of the dehumanizing character of army

life by depicting the inevitable degradation of its least comprehending victim with ironic

distance. Dan Fuselli, a second-generation Italian-American store clerk from San

Francisco, is thoroughly imbued with the narrow outlooks, deep-rooted prejudices, and

turgid aspirations of American mass culture, as Dos Passos saw them. Upon entering the

army, Fuselli harbors several movie-inspired notions of heroic action on the battlefield

(40). But his true aim is to get ahead in the army. War, he senses opportunistically, will

give him the chance to solidify his claim to middle class respectability: “‘Gee,’ he says

98 For a discussion of Three Soldiers as a “collectivist novel,” see Hartwig Isernhagen, Ästhetische Innovation und Kulturkritik: Das Frühwerk von John Dos Passos, 1916-1938 (München: Fink Verlag, 1983) 111-120. 99 Rosen 15. 100 Michael Clark, Dos Passos Early Fiction (Selingsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1987) 80. As Casey notes, “Andrews is more conscious of the precise nature of the oppressive effects of the military regime that for Fuselli and Chrisfield seems only a nebulous, unnamable, and all-powerful controlling force;” Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine 82.

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to himself, ‘this war’s a lucky thing for me. I might have been in the R.C. Vicker

Company’s store for five years without a raise. An’ here in the army I got a chance to do

almost anything…Sure he’d get private first-class as soon as they got overseas. Then in a

couple of months he might be corporal” (43, 48). His eyes fixed firmly on the

corporalship, Fuselli strives hard to please his superior, whose self-assured, “business-

like” demeanor reminds him of the “president of the Company that owned the optical

goods store” (35, 64). Trying to “get in on the good side” with the “top-sergeant,” Fuselli

denounces socialism, regurgitates patriotic slogans, and cracks anti-Semitic jokes (58,

92). Still, rewards for his vulgar professions of patriotism and loyalty are slow to come.

Ordered “to straighten out Lieutenant Stanford’s room at eight sharp in Officers’

Barracks, Number Four,” Fuselli is stung by the sudden realization that he has lost even

his petit bourgeoisie status as a store clerk. “This was the first time he’d had to do

servants’ work,” Fuselli reflects crossly. “He hadn’t joined the army to be a slave to any

damned first loot.” (63). Nonetheless, his incipient anger is immediately contained by his

ingrained fear of and respect for authority. Forever hoping to advance while kicking

those still below him, Fuselli is a prime example of the petit bourgeoisie, who obediently

executes every order from above.101 At last, though, Fuselli’s “dog-like” servility seems

to pay off when he is appointed “1st-class private, acting corporal” (99).

Of course, this promotion merely sets Fuselli up for his certain downfall. In

exchange for the promise of securing him the permanent corporalship, Fuselli, flush

“[w]ith a delicious feeling of leadership,” panders his girl, Yvonne, to the lusty old top-

sergeant (68). But despite his trafficking in women, the papers never materialize and, to

add insult to injury, Fuselli is transferred to a menial clerk job at “headquarters

company.” For a fleeting moment, Fuselli senses the bleakness of his condition as he is

overwhelmed by “hopeless anger against this vast treadmill to which he was bound”

(113). In characteristic fashion, however, Fuselli swiftly restores his unshakable faith in

the system, consoling himself with the thought that “at last…he had a job where he could

show what he was good for. He walked up and down whistling shrilly” (119). One-

hundred-eighty-one pages later, the reader catches a final glimpse of Fuselli, which

101 In this respect, Fuselli bears uncanny resembles with Diedrich Hessling in Heinrich Mann’s acerbic critique of the Wilhelmian era, Man of Straw (1914).

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completes the picture of his demise. Following his demotion to “a labor battalion” for

contracting a venereal disease, a disheveled Fuselli finds himself “on the permanent

K.P.,” “emptying ash cans and shoveling coal” (303). “Not a bad job,” Fuselli ensures

Chrisfield and Andrews who stare at him in utter consternation, “off two days a week; no

drill, good eats” (303). Fuselli’s capacity for mindless suffering seems infinite.

Hoosier farm boy Joe Chrisfield is rendered much more sympathetically, not least

because he “personifies the anger and hatred Fuselli has repressed.”102 His virility and

naïve forthrightness almost make him a character out of the 1930s Proletkult, which

colors William Cunningham’s portrayal of Jim Tetley in The Green Corn Rebellion. But

his association with the organic “flow of agrarian life” also make him part of the old

Jeffersonian tradition that, just as in Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins, appears to be sadly

but irretrievable lost in Three Soldiers.103 Both of which explains why Andrews at first

views the unspoiled “wild man” Chrisfield with mixture of revolutionary expectation and

romantic admiration (167). When Chrisfield expresses his desire do be “like you, Andy,”

Andrews replies self-depreciatively: “Chris, I belong to crowd that just fakes learning. I

guess the best thing that can happen to us is to get killed in this butchery. We are a tame

generation….It’s you that it matters to kill” (168).

In due course, however, close contact with the corrupted modern world—

represented via army discipline and industrialized warfare—brings out a number of

highly undesirable traits in Chrisfield, which cast dark shadows over the “ungreedy,”

“humane,” “uncunning, socialism of the masses.” For it turns out that Chrisfield in his

righteous anger comes to actually enjoy killing. Not, as Andrews might have hoped, in a

conscious act of rebellion against authority, but in form of personal vengeance and

arbitrary rage. In the chaos that follows a botched assault against German positions, for

instance, Chrisfield not just murders his personal nemesis, Sergeant Anderson, a rather

inoffensive character, but also engages in the gross abuse of “a ragged” German soldier,

who attempts to surrender. “Chrisfield kicked him. The man shambled on without

turning round. Chrisfield kicked him again, feeling the point of the man’s spine and the

soft flesh of his thighs against his toes with each kick, laughing so hard all the while that

102 Rosen 17. 103 Colley 43.

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he could hardly see where he was going” (189). Chrisfield keeps on laughing as he

accepts his “buddies” offer “to take keer o’ him [the prisoner],” because there “ain’t no

use sendin’ him back” (189). War has turned Chrisfield into a brutalized brutalizer—a

well-functioning cog within the military machinery: “His feet beat the ground in time

with the other feet. He would not have to think whether to go to the right or to the left.

He would do as others did” (190).

“It’s part of the system. You’ve got to turn men into beasts before ye can get ‘em

to act that way,” the Socialist Eisenstein had cautioned earlier, only to earn the ridicule of

the younger recruits (46). Predictably, having succeeded in turning Chrisfield into a

“beast,” who wants “to strip himself naked, to squeeze the wrist of a girl until she

screams,” the army promptly promotes him to corporal (160). Even more dramatically

than in Fuselli’s case, the promotion finalizes Chrisfield’s moral descent from rebellious

“wild man” to opportunistic “member of the herd.” Two subsequent encounters with

John Andrews draw attention to Chrisfield’s regression into a cowardly mob attitude.

Dispatched to Coblenz as part of the army of occupation, Chrisfield boasts about how

“easy” killing has become to him, rebukes Andrews for wanting to “end…soldiering,”

and finally seeks to entice his old friend into joining him with the prospect of “liv[ing]

like kings up there” in Germany (265). Andrews is first shocked, then noticeable angered

by this proposition. “The trouble is, Chris, that I don’t want to live like a king, or a

sergeant or a major general,” Andrews tries to explain before abruptly “jumping to his

feet” and taking leave unceremoniously (265-67).

Any hope that the Chrisfields of the world may yet rise up in righteous revolt

against the brutalizing system, of which they have been unwittingly made part, comes to

naught during a final meeting between the two protagonists in Paris. Having both gone

A.W.O.L.—Andrews “by pure accident” and Chrisfield for fear of having publicly

bragged about killing Anderson—they find themselves holed up in the basement of

warehouse among a bunch of fellow-deserters and petty criminals (423). While the men

contemplate various courses of action, the May Day demonstrations on the streets of

Paris turn violent. To the middle class rebel Andrews, the unrest seems to signal the

much anticipated “overthrow” of “the government” and he instantly seeks to rouse

revolutionary sentiment among the “ordinary” men around him, “who are tiered of being

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ordered round” (400). In line with Aubrey, who had earlier read the Russian Revolution

as a sign that “the new era is opening up,” Andrews’s argues that “this will be the first

great gesture towards a newer and better world” (297). His browbeaten lower class

associates, however, have long abandoned hope in “a newer and better world.” “Fellers

like us ain’t got it in ‘em to buck the system, Andy,” Chrisfield counsels his excited

friend (400). What war and army-life has taught “fellers” such a Chrisfield is not how to

“buck the system,” but how to play along in order to improve their personal lot. “D’you

know what I’ll do when the revolution comes?” one of the men in the hideout asks

Andrews provocatively. “I’ll go straight to one of those jewelry stores, Rue Royal, and

fill my pockets and come home with my hands full of diamonds” (400). “What good’ll

that do you?” Andrews responds perplexed, “they won’t be worth anything. It’ll only be

work that is worth anything” (400). “I’ll need them in the end,” the man insists, adding

prophetically, “D’you know what it’ll mean, your revolution? Another system! When

there’s a system there are always men to be bought with diamonds. That’s what the

world is like” (400). To confirm the men’s defeatist attitude, the chapter ends on an

appropriately low note. Word comes that the incipient revolt had been crushed and that

the police is on the hunt for straggling would-be revolutionaries who have turned to

smashing windows and looting stores. “Beat it,” a dejected Andrews advises a terrified

Chrisfield. “There may be no time to waste” (407).

In the near-deterministic world of Three Soldiers, both the servile petit bourgeois

Fuselli and the brutalized proletarian Chrisfield have proven incapable of “bucking the

system.” Three Soldiers “shows,” remarks Casey, “that the machinery of warfare

deadens men and that the men are unable collectively to transcend the limitations that

allow that deadening.”104 But this deadening is not necessarily a dead end, as Casey

suggests, since the operative term here is ‘collectively.’ In marked contrast to Fuselli and

Chrisfield, John Andrews, with his deep intellectual roots in pre-progressive notions of

bourgeois individualism, does manage to at least partially “transcend the limitations that

allow that deadening” and thereby to reassert man’s capacity for rebellious action, albeit

in strictly individualist terms. This is not an easy undertaking, the novel makes clear, for

it requires Andrews to become intimately acquainted with the physical world as it

104 Casey 84.

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appears “to the majority of men” while guarding himself against “sink[ing] too deeply

into the helpless mentality of the soldier” (32, 31). Nor is arriving at his final “gesture,

feeble as it is, toward human freedom” an intellectually painless charge, Three Soldier’s

underscores, because it entails, among other things, the sobering realization that the

experience of “common slavery” is far from edifying and that members of the lower

classes and/or the opposite sex are not unspoiled, romantic beings, who somehow hold

the keys to a better world (443, 26).

At the outset, Andrews, muck like his creator, views his decision to join the army

as a forceful renunciation of his own cultivated bourgeois background. Ashamed of his

sheltered upbringing on a Virginia plantation, bored with “the stale air” of his intellectual

life, and displeased about his inability to create musical compositions, Andrews sees war

as an opportunity to remake himself by getting in touch with the mass of people, their

“actual” work, their “real” suffering, their “unadulterated” vitality, and their “genuine”

solidarity. “[S]ick of [personal] revolt, of [independent] thought, of carrying his

individuality like a banner above the turmoil,” Andrews hopes to find a collective sense

of direction among the “unspoiled” masses that “seemed at moments to be but one

organism” (26). “Ever since his first year at college he seemed to have done nothing but

to think about himself, talk about himself,” Andrews reflects self-critically. “At least at

the bottom, in the utterest degradation of slavery, he could find forgetfulness and start

rebuilding the fabric of his life, out of real things this time, out of work and comradeship

and scorn” (31).

What follows, however, is Andrews slow and painful recognition that modern

industrial society has all but negated the socially beneficial and/or potentially liberating

aspects of work, comradeship, and scorn. Work has become mind-numbing industrial

labor (Andrews “washing windows,” Fuselli’s “endless sweeping,” Chrisfield’s cleaning

of “latrines,” the “interminable monotony of drills and lineups”), comradeship has

deteriorated into enforced cooperation (“marching in ranks,” “running with the pack”

“the crowds dutifully cheering”), and scorn has been redeployed to deepen divisions and

to fuel intolerance (Fuselli’s hatred of “kikes,” “frogs,” and “socialists,” “the ‘Y’ man”

spreading “atrocity stories,” Chrisfield kicking a German prisoner), Andrews is made to

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discover.105 “So was civilization nothing but a vast edifice of shame, and the war,

instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression,” Andrews

concludes disappointedly” (210).

In lieu of any prospect for an exalted collective destiny, regaining “dominion over

himself” and “asserting [his] right of individual liberty” become Andrews’s new chief

objectives (207, 394). To be sure, in retrospect Andrews views his desertion, like his

initial decision to enlist, as a political act—“a gesture, however feeble, however forlorn,

for other people’s freedom”—, but his final rebellion remains fundamentally directed

against what he perceives to be his own enslavement (431). “I was not willing to submit

any longer to the treadmill,” he explains his decision to desert. “I could not submit any

longer to the discipline…. Oh, those long Roman words, what millstones are around

men’s necks! That was silly, too; I was quite willing to help in the killings of Germans, I

had no quarrel with that, out of curiosity or cowardice…. You see, it has taken me so long

to find out how the world is. There was no one to show me the way (421, italics added).

Both wizened-up and purified by his own first-hand experience of victimization in the

army, Dos Passos’ Andrews, analogous to Bourne’s Sebert, has freed himself from the

social guilty of “think[ing] about himself, talk[ing] about himself,” since the masses’

unwitting complicity in its own subjugation has demonstrated the inherent pitfalls of a

naïve faith in collective thought and organizational action. “It seems to me,” Andrews

expounds his neo-Emersonian (and in many ways proto-Foucaultian) philosophy still

somewhat hesitantly, “that human society has been always that, and perhaps will be

always that: organizations growing and stifling individuals, and individuals revolting

hopelessly against them, and at last forming new societies to crush old societies and

becoming slaves again in their turn….” (412).106

“Carrying his individuality like a banner above the turmoil” has thus been

revalidated as the sole authentic stance of defiance available to thinking modern man.

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself,

and you shall have the suffrage of the world”—this Emersonian dictum comes to inform

105 Three Soldiers 20, 120, 168, 113, 190, 211, 207, 157, 210, 198. 106 “Society never advances,” Emerson expounds in similar terms. “It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration” (“Self-Reliance” 161).

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the final chapters of Three Soldiers.107 For like the modern middle class rebels in Pío

Baroja’s novels, with whom Dos Passos identifies himself in Rosinante on the Road

Again (1922), Andrews realizes that his “slavery has been an isolated slavery which has

unfitted him forever from becoming truly part of a community.” 108 And because his

isolation remains at least partially self-willed, it is not merely a “mechanical” one, but a

“spiritual” one, “that is,” an “elevation” in that it allows him to “use the vast powers of

knowledge which training has give him to put the acid test to existing institutions, and to

strip the veils off them.”109 “Andrews is the most pure and extreme form of the early Dos

Passos hero,” notes Ian Colley, “the man who fails but in his failure creates his own

identity and gives existential meaning to the act of revolt for which he is condemned.”110

To be certain, it is not just military authority and army-life that threaten to drag

Andrews “into the mud of” an undignified “common slavery” from which individualistic

escape would indeed be impossible (26). In part 5, “The World Outside” and part 6,

“Under the Wheels,” Andrews’s postwar struggles against the oppressive system are

principally depicted through his disillusioning relationships with three selfish women, all

of whom, their different class backgrounds notwithstanding, in one way or another seek

to domesticate, “tame,” and imprison him (416). Female characters in Three Soldiers,

Cobley points out, “are Oedipally encoded as a threat to male identity.”111 Hence, just as

Andrews is made to see that his idealized notions about the common workmen had been

misplaced, he must learn that his romantic fantasies about women are untenable. For

rather than providing a counterpoint to the blind conformity, random violence, and

systematic oppression around him, Jeanne, Rosaline, and Geneviève appear to be in

cahoots with a system that denies men all expressions of heroic individuality. Tellingly,

it is a fourth woman, Andrews’s “fat” landlady, who affects his final arrest by the

military police (409).

While on the frontlines, Andrews, treading in the footsteps of his idealistic

predecessor Martin Howe, repeatedly indulges in romantic visions of imaginary women

that afford him temporary relief from the sordidness of his wartime surroundings. Once 107 Emerson, “Self-Reliance” 141. 108 John Dos Passos, Rosinante on the Road Again (New York: Doran, 1922), 93. 109 “Self-Reliance” 154; Rosinante on the Road Again 94. 110 Colley 34. 111 Cobley 162.

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the sobering realities of war-work have lead him to abandon plans for an ode to

character-building labor, tentatively entitled “Arbeit und Rhythmus,” Andrews seeks

artistic refuge from the world by composing a sensual orchestra piece based on Flaubert’s

La Tentatione Saint Antoine. The sight of a nurse in the hospital ward is sufficient to

trigger Orientalistic fantasies about the seductive Queen of Sheba:

Standing in the dark in the desert of his despair, he would hear the sound

of a caravan in the distance…Then the music would burst in a sudden hot

whirlwind about him…Naked slaves would bend their gleaming backs

before him as they laid out a carpet at his feet; and, through the flare of

torchlight, the Queen of Sheba would advance towards him, covered with

emeralds and dull-gold ornaments…She would put her hand with its slim

fantastic nails on his shoulders; and, in looking into her eyes, he would

suddenly feel within reach all the fiery imaginings of his desire. (204)

As Casey has pointed out, “Andrews’s idealized visions of the Queen of Sheba…have

much to do with his inability to see woman as anything more than projections of his own

ideas and desires”112 This, then, might also explain why none of his brief relationships

with the aspiring Jeanne, the suffocating Rosaline, and the fiercely materialistic

Geneviève work out. It is noteworthy, however, that Andrews’s musical “projections of

his own ideas are desires” are considerably complicated by the fact that Christian

tradition has made King Solomon Queen Sheba’s conqueror and so inspired and validated

many other apparent victories of the West over the Orient, of man over women, of “truth”

over error. Andrews strives hard to fulfill Solomon’s Judeo-Christian legacy, but always

falls short of capturing her through his art. After many trials and errors, he abandons his

composition and instead resumes work on another unfeasible project, “The Soul and

Body of John Brown,” a “madman who wanted to free people” (423). Corrupted by

profiteering and embroiled in senseless a war, modern Western civilization has

apparently lost its moral authority over the “savage” world. Since modern Western man

has forfeited his Solomonic virtues, the African Queen is no longer conquerable and thus

seems to stand, “quite and inscrutable,” for the uncanny ascendancy of both her gender

and her race (289).

112 Casey 83.

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Lest Andrews becomes too ensnared by the “imaginings of his desires,” Dos

Passos has him run into several “real” women, who one after another cure him of his

quixotic ideas about the liberating powers of love (289). Fittingly, Andrews’s exuberant

shouts, “C’est la armistice” and “Libertad, Libertad, allons, ma femme,” do not culminate

in his forgetting of “himself and the army and everything in crazy, romantic love,” but

land him rather anticlimactically in prison (279, 343). Andrews’s initial “imaginings of

his desire” come to an abrupt end, when the unimagined women in his presence sternly

rebukes the “boys” in the hospital ward for their unpatriotic talk and admonishes them to

“remember what the Huns did in Belgium…poor Miss Cavell, a nurse just like me”

(204). Encounters with ultra-patriotic characters such the unnamed nurse or the nameless

women Martin Howe meets abroad ship to France clearly serve to associate females with

wartime propaganda and postwar advertisement, both as objects and consumers thereof.

To varying degrees, all women characters in Three Soldiers reinforce notions about both

the shallowness and the callousness of a postwar consumer culture that during the anti-

consumerist protest of the early 1920s was conventionally gendered as female.113

In the wake of the armistices, Andrews plays up to the sense of middle class

solidarity among his officers and succeeds in engineering his transfer to Paris, where he,

though still under army auspices, is allowed to enroll at the Sorbonne’s “Schola

Cantorum” (279). At first, “the world outside” seems to afford everything he has longed

for: “the Paris of Diderot and Voltaire and Jean-Jacques…he felt very languid and

happy” (285-6). I like it,” Andrews explains to Henslowe, who wants him to join a Red

Cross detachment in Poland. “I’m getting a better course in orchestration than I imagined

existed, and I met a girl the other day, and I’m crazy over Paris” (309). The thought of

Jeanne, a lowly dressmaker with an affable smile, fills Andrews’s love-starved “mind and

body with a reverberation of all the rhythms of men and women moving in the frieze of

life before his eyes; no more like wooden automatons knowing only the motions of the

113 Notes Frederick Lewis Allen retrospectively: “In 1920 the department store was in the mind of the average college girl a rather bourgeois institution which employed ‘poor shop girls’; by the end of the decade college girls were standing in line for openings in the misses’ sportswear department and even selling behind the counter in the hope that some day fortune might smile upon them and make them buyers or stylists. Small-town girls who once would have been contented to stay in Sauk Center all their days were now borrowing from father to go to New York or Chicago to seek their fortunes—in Best’s or Macy’s or Marshall Field’s;” qtd. in Stuart A. Kallen, The Roaring Twenties (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2002) 138.

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drill manual, but supple and varied, full of force and tragedy” (289).

As the infatuated Andrews becomes better acquainted with the reserved Jeanne,

however, he is quickly forced to realize that she belongs very much to the mundane world

of “wooden automatons,” who are merely struggling to advance and whose eyes are

firmly fixed up the social ladder. In one of his more effusive moods, Andrews proclaims:

“It’s funny, Jeanne, I threw myself into the army. I was so sick of being free and not

getting anywhere. Now I have learnt that live is to be used, not just held in the hand like

a box of bonbons that nobody eats” (322). In response, Jeanne stares “at him blankly.”

Not capable to follow his existentialist notions of freedom, she thinks of life in purely

materialistic terms, hoping “to be rich some day, like princes and princess in fairy tales”

(320). And the comparatively well-to-do Andrews, who buys her food and drink and

boxes of bonbons, appears to be a means by which to attain her goal. “I suppose one

must pay for one’s dinner,” Jeanne says “maliciously” when Andrews invites her upstairs

(330)

That Jeanne views their relationship largely through utilitarian glasses becomes

clear during a preceding exchange. “You are so well educated,” Jeanne muses while

contemplating the prospect of a future together. “How is it you are only an ordinary

soldier?” “Good God!,” Andrews exclaims noticeably irritated, “I wouldn’t be an

officer” (323). “Why, it must be rather nice to be an officer,” the upwardly-mobile

Jeanne replies uncomprehendingly (323). The upshot of this awkward conversation is

that Andrews senses an unbridgeable difference between them. He begins to feel choked

by the stale air of domestic tedium that clouds their joyous outing in the countryside.

“They sat looking at each other silently. Andrews felt weary and melancholy. He could

think of nothing to say. Jeanne was playing with some tiny white daisies with pink tips to

their petals, arranging them in circles and crosses on the table” (324). The brief affair

ends on a note of “passionate disgust,” which is further amplified by Andrews’s sudden

annoyance with the bustling city life that initially had seemed so vigorous and “full” of

“insane hope of the future” (340, 285). “Today everything was congestion, the scurrying

of crowds; men had become ant-like,” Andrews observes “mournfully” (343).

A chance encounter with Rosaline, the alluring daughter of a self-professed

anarchist who shelters him on his river barge from the military police, seems to afford

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Andrews yet another opportunity to “forget himself and the army and everything.”

Unlike the conventional working class girl Jeanne, Rosaline shares Andrews’s desire to

“live very much” (302). “We could have could times together…You must amuse

yourself when you can in this life,” she suggests invitingly (382-83). Andrews is

obviously tempted to accept her offer. “Oh, it must be a wonderful life,” he croons

romantically. “This barge seems like heaven after the army” (381). On second thought,

however, Andrews realizes that Rosaline’s sexual forthrightness springs largely from her

own “boredom” with “all these barges” and is nothing but a desperate attempt to ensnare

him (382). “All the boys go away to the cities,” she sighs at one point, before craftily

reminding him of his precarious status as “a deserter,” who is liable to be shot at “any

time” (383). Rosaline’s offer that he “can help the old man to run the boat” sounds

innocent enough, but the “trembling eagerness” in her “eyes” gives her away (379).

Andrews makes a hasty exit.

Twice disappointed by the possessiveness of selfish women, Andrews pines his

last hope for romantic redemption on the cultivated Geneviéve Rod, whom he had met

earlier in Paris. As turns out, however, Geneviéve is even less inclined than either Jeanne

or Rosaline to help him “piece together the future” (412). For the most part, Geneviéve is

too caught up in her shallow social life to shower Andrews with the considerate attention

he craves. “Whenever he looked at her, some well-dressed person stepped in front of her

with a gesture of politeness. He felt caught in a ring of well-dressed conventions that

dance about him with grotesque politeness” (418). When they are alone, Geneviéve

professes her sympathy for Andrews, allows him to kiss her, and even concedes that he

was “treated with horrible injustice” (423). But to Andrews growing irritation, she

steadfastly refuses to see his desertion as an act of courage. “What induced you to do

such a thing?,” Geneviéve asks as uncomprehendingly as Jeanne (421). “Why couldn’t

you have talked it over with me first, before cutting off every chance of going back…the

shame of it, the danger of being found out all the time” (427, 428). Emancipated yet

thoroughly imbued with outdated beliefs in middle-class respectability and bourgeois

pragmatism, she is unable to share Andrews’s hard-won “notions of individual liberty”

(428). “I am ashamed of many things in my life, Geneviéve. I am rather proud of this,”

Andrews replies laconically (428).

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In the closing chapter, Andrews gradually reverses Heloise’s prayer in Gertrude

Atherton’s The White Morning—“O God…deliver us from war and deliver us from

men”—, by projecting his accumulated hatred for the dehumanizing “military machine”

squarely onto Geneviéve. Exasperated by her flirtations with other men and her long

motor-excursions through the French countryside, Andrews snaps at Geneviéve: “I’m

under the wheels of your system. If your system doesn’t succeed in killing me, it will be

that much weaker, it will have less strength to kill others” (419, emphasis added).

Geneviéve, a young upper-class woman no less hedonistic than Andrews himself, comes

to personify the exploitive nature of a capitalistic system that thrives on war for profit.

Unable to contain her, Andrews anxiety over his loss of male self-control grows steadily.

At one point, holding “Geneviéve’s revolver,” he even contemplates suicide. Similar to

the dejected veterans in Soldier’s Pay, Andrews casts himself in the role of a hapless

victim of female selfishness: “a slave to stand cap in hand for someone of stronger will to

tell him to act” (208).

Thus, after Geneviéve has stood him up repeatedly, it dawns on him that she

merely wants “a tame pianist as an ornament to a clever young woman’s drawing room”

(416). The charge that women enjoyed easy lives in drawing rooms during the war is a

familiar trope in male World War I writings; Dos Passos invokes it in Three Soldiers to

prompt Andrews’s final “gesture, feeble as it is, towards human freedom.” 114 Convinced

that Geneviéve seeks to stifle his male individuality in the stuffy atmosphere of her

drawing room, Andrews leaves her and stoically awaits his impending arrest while

listlessly resuming work on the “first movement of the ‘Soul and Body of John Brown’”

(430). “Yet people were always alone, really,” Andrews consoles himself; “however

much they love each other, there could be no real union. Those who rode in the great car

could never feel as others felt; the toads hoping across the road” (425). In the end, then,

Andrews gesture of defiance appears to be directed less against military “organizations

growing and stifling individuals” than against the perceived threat posed by the type of

self-indulgent “New Woman” whom Geneviéve represents (421).

III

Since Phillip Young’s influential reconsideration of the Hemingway oeuvre in 1966,

114 See Longbach, “The Woman and Men of 1914” 114.

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much attention has been ladled on the writer’s literary struggles to overcome his

traumatic “wounding” on the Italian front.115 And indeed, especially in Hemingway’s

earlier works such as In Our Time, Men Without Women, and The Sun Also Rises

wounded, traumatized, and otherwise disheartened war veterans occupy central roles. As

Stephen Cooper has pointed out, however, “for Hemingway himself in summer and fall

1918, political disillusionment had yet to set in, and his trauma was well disguised.”116 In

contrast to Dos Passos, who was three years his senior and intellectually mature beyond

his age, Hemingway did not write of disillusionment with “Mr. Wilson’s war to end all

wars” in his letters to friends and family. Instead, he dispatched usually upbeat reports

about life in the trenches, which were often interspersed with expressions of his unbroken

commitment to spreading the gospel of American democracy: “I will always go where I

can do the most good you know and that’s what we are here for.”117 And despite his leg

injury, which entitled to him to medical leave, he intrepidly avowed, “I will stay here just

as long as I can hobble and there is a war to hobble to.”118 Unlike Frederic Henry, young

Ernest Hemingway seemed in no way “embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and

sacrifice, and the expression in vain” (184).

Back in Oak Park after the war in 1919, Hemingway relished his role of local war

hero, showing off war mementos and providing impressionable high school students with

thrilling accounts of his exploits on the Italian front. In an interview with Roselle Dean

for The Oak Parker, he struck the patriotic chord that was expected by the good denizens

of his affluent, conservative Chicago suburb. “I went because I wanted to go,”

Hemingway declared. “I was big and strong, my country needed me, and I went and did

whatever I was told—and anything I did outside of that was simply my duty.”119 Even as

late as March 1920, Hemingway would dash off a mocking article for the Toronto Star

about slackers pretending to be war veterans.120 Though private doubts about the war

might have already been fomenting by 1920, Hemingway had obviously not arrived at the

kind of “separate peace” and uncompromising individualism that cap the development of 115 Phillip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1966). 116 Stephen Cooper, The Politics of Ernest Hemingway (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1987) 3. 117 Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner, 1981) 18. 118 Ibid 19. 119 Qtd. in Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner, 1969) 18. 120 Ernest Hemingway, “Popular in Peace—Slacker in War,” Dateline Toronto, The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920-1924, ed. William White (New York: Scribner, 1985) 10-11.

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Nick Adams In Our Times and Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms. Above and

beyond the experience of modern warfare, for disillusioned, self-searching characters

such as Nick Adams and Frederic Henry to emerge it took Hemingway’s exposure to the

convoluted politics of the postwar era. Chief among which were (1) his brief

involvement in the cooperative movement, which cured him of any lingering trust in

progressive reforms; (2) his coverage of the wrangling for political power in Europe,

which not only filled with him with contempt for “politicians, profiteers, generals, staff

officers and whores,” but also confirmed his skepticism about leftist mass movements;

and (3) his acquaintance with the raucous gender debates of the 1920s, which fueled his

suspicions about feminism and stirred him toward the theories of liberal-minded

sexologist such as Havelock Ellis and Benjamin Lindsey.121

One direct result of food rationing and unscrupulously wartime profiteering was a

brief resurgence of the American cooperative movement in the early 1920s.122 In most

major cities, nonprofit consumer organizations sprung up, whose aim it was to reduce

commodity prices by pooling the purchasing power of its members. This involved taking

charge of distribution through wholesale facilities and local co-op stores, whose activities

were coordinate by an umbrella organization, the National Cooperative Society.

Hemingway, who, based on his farmhand experience in Michigan, believed that “a co-

operative thing was straight,” became involved in the movement partly out of idealism

and partly because he needed job.123 In response to an advertisement by the Chicago-

based Co-operative Society of America, he was offered and accepted a position as copy

editor for the society’s “slicked-up” monthly, Cooperative Commonwealth. “Have

what’s really a pretty darned good job now,” Hemingway announced in his letters,

qualifying a tad hesitantly that “[i]f almost any part of what they say about this

movement is true it is quelque movement.”124 Surrounded “by idealistic young students”

121 Ernest Hemingway, “Wings Always Over Africa,,” By-Line Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (New York: Scribner, 1967) 234. 122 For a succinct yet somewhat dated survey of the cooperative movement in America see Florence E. Parker, “Consumer’s Cooperation in the United States,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 191 (May, 1937) 91-102; for a much broader historical account see Edward Spann, Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for a Cooperative Society, 1820-1920 (New York: Columbia UP, 1989). 123 Fenton, The Apprenticeship 98. 124 Selected Letters 52, 42.

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who “conceived of themselves as partners in an evangelical crusade,” Hemingway spent

winter 1920 and spring 1921 churning out glowing articles about the society’s

activities.125

As Hemingway was soon to find out, however, Harrison Parker’s Co-operative

Society, unlike the legitimate and highly respected Cooperative League, was a giant

fraud. Unbeknownst to its thousands of small-time investors, Parker had shifted the

cooperative’s trust funds into private ventures as well as into his own pockets. Adjudged

bankrupt on October 6, 1922, it was disclosed that the Co-Operative Society of America

had accumulated $15,000,000 in debts. When the U.S. District Court began its

investigation of Parker’s pseudo-cooperative in early 1921, Hemingway quickly

convinced himself that “it was crooked” yet resolved to stay “on a little while thinking

[he] could write and expose it.” In the end, he “just rack[ed] it up as experience and the

hell with it.”126 Hemingway’s disappointing association with Parker undoubtedly

contributed to his lasting aversion against self-professed do-gooders and idealistic reform

movements of all sorts. Notes Charles A. Fenton, “Hemingway could not have been

placed in an atmosphere better calculated to increase his distaste for certain American

values and his determination to avoid permanent bondage to any such employment.”127

An assignment to cover European politics for The Toronto Star seemed to offer

Hemingway escape from “permanent bondage” to sanctimonious meliorists and the all-

encompassing sordidness of modern American commercial life. But the postwar Europe

he found, embroiled as it was in bitter economical and political strive, hardly provided

reasons for hope in a better future. Everywhere, it appeared to him, opportunities to affect

fundamental societal changes had been gambled away, brutally suppressed, or both. “If

Lenin is the Napoleon that made a dictatorship out of the Russian revolution, [Soviet

foreign minister] Tchitcherin is his Talleyrand,” Hemingway assessed.128 Meanwhile, he

observed, German interests are represented by Hugo Stinnes, “the industrial dictator,”

Italy it is on the verge of bending to the will of “Benito Mussolini, the renegade

Socialist,” and France’s Premier Raymond Ponicaré meekly “submits to the dictatorship

125 Fenton, The Apprenticeship 98, 107. 126 Qtd. ibid 108. 127 Ibid 107. 128 Hemingway, Dateline Toronto 153.

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of Léon Daudet, the Royalist.”129 Hemmingway’s reports on the 1922 World Economic

Conference at Genoa, the Lausanne Conference to end the Greco-Turkish War, and the

French occupation of the Ruhr reveal his mounting disgust with politics. The war,

Hemingway came to see, was far from over; it had merely shifted from the battlefields to

the conference tables, whence it spilled back into the volatile streets where reactionary

mobs such as the Italian Fascisti, French Camelots du Roi, and German Braunhemden

seized the initiative. Perhaps no piece of writing from that time highlights Hemingway’s

level of frustration better than his sarcastic poem, “They All Made Peace—What is

Peace” (1923), which aims blunt ad hominem attacks against the world’s political

leadership:

Lord Curzon likes young boys.

So does Chicherin.

So does Mustapha Kemal. He is good looking too. His eyes

are to close together but he makes war. That is the way

he is.

…

Monsieur Barrèré gets telegrams. So does Marquis Garroni.

His telegrams come on motorcycles from MUSSOLINI.

MUSSOLINI has nigger eyes and a bodyguard and has his

picture taken reading a book upside down. MUSSOLINI is

wonderful. Read the Daily Mail.

…

M. Stambuliski walks up the hill and down the hill. Don’t talk

About M. Venizelos. He is wicked. You can see it. His beard

shows it.

Mr. Child is not wicked.

Mrs. Child has flat breasts and Mr. Child is an idealist and

wrote Harding’s campaign speeches and calls Senator

Beveridge Al.

You know me Al.

129 Ibid 155, 175, 266.

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Lincoln Steffens is with Child. The big C. makes the joke easy.130

Six years later, these depraved politicians and misguided idealist would form part of the

ominously amorphous “they” in A Farewell to Arms, who perpetuate the war and

unfailingly “killed you in the end. You can count on that. Stay around and they would

kill you” (327). The solution, obviously, is not to stay around by withdrawing one’s self

as far as possible from politics.

Politicians were not the only ones in whom Hemingway had lost faith by 1923.

Even more devastatingly was his concomitant disillusionment with the failure of leftist

mass movements to carryout the looming postwar revolution. “The world was much

closer to revolution in the years after the war than it is now,” the “Old Newsman”

counseled young American radicals in 1934.

In those days we who believed in it looked for it at any time, expected it,

hoped for it—for it was the logical thing. But everywhere it came it was

aborted. For a long time I could not understand it, but finally I figured it

out. If you study history you will see that there can never be a Communist

revolution without, first, a complete military debacle…that is the

necessary catharsis before revolution. No country was ever riper for

revolution than Italy after the war but the revolution was doomed to fail

because her defeat was not complete; because after Caporetto she fought

and won in June and July of 1918 on the Piave. From the Piave, by way

of the Banca Commerciale, the Credito Italiano, the merchants of Milan

who wanted the prosperous socialist co-operative societies and the

socialist municipal government of that city smashed, came fascism.131

The same fate befell an only half-beaten France, Hemingway further argues in “Old

Newsman Writes,” when Clemenceau mobilized the reactionary Garde Republicaine to

disperse the Parisian May Day crowds. “Nobody who saw that,” he concludes with

reference to the 1932 veterans march on Washington, “could be expected to think

something new was happening when Hoover had the troops disperse the bonus army.”132

130 Ernest Hemingway, Complete Poems, ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979) 63-64. 131 By-Line Ernest Hemingway 180-81. 132 Ibid 182.

85

Ten years earlier, while attending the Genoa Conference, Hemingway had

reported that “sections of Italy, principally Tuscany and the north, have seen bloody

fighting, murders, reprisals and pitched battles in the last few months over communism.”

Yet the real threat “to the peace of Italy,” he is quick to stress in his articles, are not the

tame Italian communists, but the Fascisti—units of “young ex-veterans” who, under “the

tacit protection of the government,” served the “very definite purpose” of “crush[ing]

what looked like a coming revolution.” For once the Fascisti had acquired a “taste of

killing under police protection,” they showed no sign of letting up, Hemingway writes.

What’s more, having succeeded in recruiting “several hundreds of thousands of workers

disgusted with the communism,” the “Fascisti leaders, seeing their well-organized gang,

have developed political ambitions and want to make a solid political party of their

followers.”133

Hemingway clearly blames the government for molding a righteous groundswell

of popular postwar discontent into a by now uncontrollable and exceedingly dangerous

reactionary force. Yet his generally mocking depictions of “malicious Reds,” though in

part designed to assuage his readerships’ fears of communism, also hint quite a bit of

disillusionment with the lack of genuine revolutionary spirit among the working classes.

Although the “Reds of Genoa” frequently engage in revolutionary talk, accompanied by

“toasts to Lenin and shouts for Trotsky,” Hemingway reports, “[c]losing the cafés usually

stops them. Uninspired by the vinous products of their native land, the Italian

Communist cannot keep his enthusiasm up to the demonstration point for long.” The

“Italian Red,” Hemingway explains, “is father of a family and a good workman six days

out of seven; on the seventh he talks politics. His leaders have formally rejected Russian

communism and he is Red as some Canadians are Liberal. He does not want to fight for

it, or convert the world to it, he merely wants to talk about it, as he has from time

immemorial.” No wonder, then, that Mussolini’s “shock troops” had such an easy time

quelling the revolution before it could take spread. Like Bourne and Dos Passos before

him, Hemingway is left without an apposite revolutionary force upon which to hang his

barely sprouting political hopes. What he is left with, though, is a sad picture of the

impotence of the communist party and a keen understanding of the ways in which

133 Hemingway, Dateline Toronto 131, 173, 175.

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“counterrevolutionary” powers are capable of utilizing principals of political propaganda

and mass organization to erect totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian states that deny man all

forms of individual expression.134

Hemingway’s political writings throughout the 1920s centered chiefly on the

impending threats fascist and totalitarian movements posed to middle class concepts of

male autonomy. Some of his human interest pieces and many of his fictions, though,

also register a rising male unease about the position of women within a postwar society

that was rapidly loosening its sexual mores. Flappers, dance crazes, dating, petting had

already been hot topics prior to World War I. With the popularization of serious sex

studies by Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and Ellen Key in the early 1920s, however,

unsettling notions of a “sexual revolution” and a “new morality” took firm hold in the

public consciousness. The sex instinct came to be regarded as central to life, its

repression as damaging to health and psyche. Clearly, such changing views affected

women’s roles more fundamentally than those of men, since the latter had long been

assumed to possess aggressively sexual natures. Ellis’s authoritative pronouncement that

the “sexual impulse in women” exists apart from a “reproductive instinct,” suddenly

seemed to bring an equality of desire. “The myth of the pure woman is almost at an end,”

announced V. F. Calverton in 1928. “Women’s demands for equal rights have extended

to the sexual sphere as well as the social.”135 Naturally, even liberal observers such as

Calverton quickly noticed that the sexual emancipation of women had a flipside. For

one, it was feared that the separation of the sexual impulse from the reproductive instinct

might encourage and excuse female promiscuity. A “man-eating” Hemingway heroine

like Bret Ashley comes to mind, who aggressively pursues her sexual desires at the

expense of the already sadly emasculated war veteran Jake Barnes. Moreover, as the

“myth of the pure woman” lost scientific credibility, assertive female sexuality often

came to be associated with blood lust and a general fascination with violence; two

attributes that had hitherto been regarded provenances of masculinity. It is easy to see

how such associations took on a decidedly sinister hue after the bloodshed of World War 134 “The Hemingway critique of both fascists and Communists is an interesting political position,” notes Rodrigo Lazo, “in that it facilitates his emergence as the writer outside of a collective. He is a genius who stands outside of his time” (E-mail Conversation. 15. September, 2004). 135 Qtd. in Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience, vol.2 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994) 397.

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I. Revealingly, in a 1920 Star article on the first Toronto prizefights held with women in

attendance, Hemingway describes the female audience’s unrestrained enthusiasm for

bloody fistfights as a resurgence of long repressed destructive drives: “Is it the magic

name Arena that brings back to the alleged gentler sex their old Roman attributes?

Lecky, the historian, says that the majority of the old gladiatorial crowds were women.”

Sensible women, he implies in closing, should stay home and wait for their husbands.136

After all, as “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Maycomber” (1936) would later

suggest, once women’s “old Roman attributes” have been reawakened, even the home

may no longer be safe for men.137

The third threat with which the so-called “sexual liberation” of women confronted

men was lesbianism—a threat fueled, no doubt, by the publication of a slew of openly

lesbian plays and novels ranging from Clemence Dane’s controversial Regiment of

Women to Radclyffe Hall’s “scandalous” The Well of Loneliness (1928). Prior to the

sexual revolution of the 1920s, same-sex relationship between women, so-called “Boston

marriages,” had been silently tolerated. But “once love between women was seen as

sexual,” Nancy Woloch points out, “such relationships no longer seemed harmless, but

rather a hazard—a barrier to sexual happiness.”138 Sexologists struggled to contain this

new hazard by devising novel theories of abnormality. As early as 1905, Havelock Ellis,

whose writings Hemingway knew well, had come up with an elaborate scheme that

distinguished between “congenital inverts,” who are hereditarily unable to change their

inclinations, and mere “homosexuals,” whose same-sex inclinations are “acquired

characteristics—preventable and curable.”139 Ellis’s model, which became widely

accepted, had the obvious advantage that it reduced male fears of lesbianism by isolating

“girl ravishing” congenital inverts as the true social threat. In addition, experts such as

Judge Benjamin Lindsey began to propagate a new type of “companionate marriage” that

focused on the romantic-sexual union between husband and wife (rather than on the

136 Hemingway, Dateline Toronto 30-32. 137 This much analyzed short-story depicts a wife who first cuckolds and then “accidentally” shoots her husband. 138 Woloch 403. 139 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 276.

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family unit) and stressed values such as compatibility, reciprocity, and mutuality.140

Contraceptives as well as easier divorces were also part of this proposed package deal,

which in essence represented an extension of established dating practices. Of course, no

marriage reform occurred during the 1920s; yet the concept of “companionate marriage

represented an influential attempt of mainstream marriage ideology to adapt to women’s

perceived new social and sexual powers…[It] direct female sexual energies toward men

and heterosexual partnerships.”141 Small wonder, then, that Hemingway’s A Farewell to

Arms adapts contemporaneous ideas of companionate marriage so as to dispel the triple

threats of female promiscuity, blood lust, and lesbianism by redirecting Catherine’s

sexual energies toward Frederic.

As several critics have noted, Frederic Henry’s development from naïve idealist to

seasoned war veteran, who considers the war a “rotten game,” is basically concluded

when A Farewell to Arms commences. By 1929, Hemingway could evidently rest

assured that his readership would take a generally unfavorable view of the war, which,

incidentally, might also explain Frederic’s somewhat incongruent claim that he has

always been embarrassed by expressions of patriotism and traditional notions of heroism.

In any case, Frederic’s Bildung involves less the recognition of “the realities of modern

warfare” than the realization or achievement of a stable, self-sufficient, white male

middle class persona. This realization is dramatized through a number of interpersonal

relationships and encounters, most conspicuously with Catherine and the priest, but no

less significantly with his Socialist mechanics (Passini, Manera, Bonello, Piani, Aymo),

the proto-fascist Ettore, two unnamed sergeants, the Italian carabinieri, and last but not

least Catherine’s ever-present shadow, Helen Ferguson. In fact, Frederic’s interactions

with these often overlooked minor characters shed perhaps the clearest light on the

novel’s underlying ideological trajectories. For as in John Andrews’s case, Frederic’s

self-realization involves a series of painful renunciation of social ties (what Emerson

might call “an absolving of the self”). Sooner or later, all of Frederic’s acquaintances

come to embody various societal impositions and/or threats, from which Frederic must

release (absolve) himself in his quest for a “separate peace.”

140 Ben B. Lindsey & Wainwright Evans, The Companionate Marriage (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927). 141 Christina Simmons, “Companionate Marriage and Lesbian Threat,” Frontiers 4.3 (1979): 55-56.

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Although Frederic expresses his disgust with the war early on in the book, until

his fateful confrontation with the “battle police,” he, nevertheless, retains a strong sense

of duty. The fact that Frederic tolerates his drivers’ “seditious” talk and freely socializes

with them cannot mask some fundamental differences in attitudes and outlooks between

officers and enlisted men. A brief exchange with Passini and Manera sums up Frederic’s

ambiguous attitude toward his men:

“You should not let us talk this way, Tenente. Evviva l’esercito,” Passini

said sarcastically.

“I know how you talk,” I said. “but as long as you drive the cars and

behave—“

“—and don’t talk so other officers can hear,” Manera finished. (49)

Like his creator in 1942, Frederic avows that he “hates war and hates all politicians,” but

insists that “once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won.”142 This

view separates him for his men, a group of self-declared Socialists, who subscribe to a

doctrine of passive resistance. “War is not won by victory,” Passini, the most level-

headed among Frederic’s men, declares. “One side must stop fighting. Why don’t we

stop fighting? If they come down into Italy they will get tired and go away. They have

their own country. But no, instead there is war…There is a class that controls a country

that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war”

(50-51). According to Passini’s analysis, the war is largely a manifestation of ongoing

internal oppression and coercion. Frederic, by contrast, still perceives the war along

official lines as a fight against forces from without. “I think you do not know anything

about being conquered and so you think it is not bad,” he counters rather weakly (50). It

is not until his run-in with the “battle police” that Frederic senses some of the wisdom in

Passini’s argument that the real enemies are the proto-fascistic carabinieri, who suppress

dissent, enforce order with “a bayonet,” and strip whole populations of their “civil rights”

(49).

Passini’s attempt to “convert” Frederic is cut short by a sudden “trench mortar”

attack that sends the former to his death and the latter to the hospital (51-52). Yet, during

142 Ernest Hemingway, “Introduction,” Men At War: The Best War Stories of All Time (New York: Crown, 1942) xi.

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a conversation with the priest at the field lazaretto, Frederic is again made aware of his

class status and for the first time begins to question his own role in the war. Baffled by

the priest’s statement that he, even though a foreigner, is “nearer the officers…than to the

men,” Frederic asks: “What is the difference?” “I cannot say it easily,” the priest

responds.

“There are people who would make war. In this country there are many

like that. There are other people who would not make war.”

“But the first ones make them do it.”

“Yes.”

“And I help them.”

Frederic’s realization that he is aiding a system that coerces people to “make war” is

obviously unsettling, prompting him to further inquire: “And the ones who would not

make war? Can they stop it?…Have they ever been able to stop it?” (71). The priest’s

dejected answer—which echoes quite a bit of Hemingway’s own disillusionment with

leftist mass movements and their dishonest leadership—leaves little hope for political

change through collective action: “They are not organized to stop things and when they

get organized their leaders sell them out” (71). Accordingly, the speculative conversation

turns toward the redemptive power of interpersonal love; and as the priest leaves,

Frederic finds solace in fantasying about an untainted, bucolic life in the Abruzzi, where

“Don” and peasants coexist in perfect harmony (72-73).

Soon thereafter, while convalescing in Milan, Frederic does experience the

redemptive powers of interpersonal love, courtesy of the self-effacing Catherine. Before

he can plot his final escape to neutral Switzerland, however, Frederic must undergo one

last disillusioning trial under fire. Upon his return to the frontlines, the situation has

markedly changed. Rain, “bare” trees, and “muddy “roads” forebode trouble. In the

wake of several phyrric victories—“the Italians had lost one hundred and fifty thousand

men on the Bainsizza plateau and on San Gabriel”—morale is at nadir. Frederic gets

word of “bad rioting in Turin” and other municipalities (133). Again in conversation

with the priest, Frederic now concedes that he, too, no longer believes in victory. But

defeat, “though it may be better,” is still no option for him (179). In the early 1930s, at a

time when revolutionary sentiments again carried high currency among American

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intellectuals, Hemingway would argue that a “purging away of all existing standards,

faiths and loyalties” in the aftermath of a “great military debacle” begets the necessary

preconditions for the successful revolution.143 Interestingly enough, in his novelistic

account of the defeat at Caporetto, the “purging away of all existing standards, faiths and

loyalties” betrays no hint of revolutionary possibilities. To the contrary, all that the

chaotic retreat conjures up are the imminent dangers of both mob rule and its first cousin,

the fascist reign of terror. In parting, Frederic prophetically warns the priest that the

peasants, if in power, would behave no different than their oppressors. Subsequent

scenes corroborate those fears.

While Frederic grows “very angry” at the sight of the ill-organized retreat—“why

isn’t there somebody here to stop them?”—the men under his command become

progressively more elated (211). In the face of a sudden collapse of the entire command

structure, Bonello, Piani, and Aymo not only speak glowingly of the prospects of a swift

peace, but also begin to exhibit their pent-up class hatred for officers, rich borgehse, and

everyone else with money or authority. Helping themselves to the wine reserves of an

abandoned “villa,” while deliberately soiling the former occupants’ beds with their

“muddy boots,” the men boisterously proclaim the onset of the revolution. “To-morrow

we’ll be in Udine. We’ll drink champagne. That’s were the slackers live…To-morrow

we’ll sleep in the king’s bed” (192). Frederic, at first mildly amused, eventually becomes

annoyed and, when Bonello adds distasteful remarks about sleeping “with the queen,”

puts an end to the celebration: “‘Shut up,” I said. ‘You get too funny with a little wine”

(192).

On the following day, Frederic’s determination to execute his orders amidst the

mounting disarray is again tested when his ambulances get “stuck in a muddy road

about…ten kilometers from Udine” (203). His nerves already strained, Frederic snaps,

when two sergeants, whom they had picked up along the road, openly disobey his orders

“to cut brush” and instead make off toward the forest (204). Having shot and wounded

one of the deserters, Frederic watches on as Bonello cold-bloodedly finishes him off.

Frederic might have overreacted in bringing down the sergeant, but his knee-jerk decision

derives at least partially justification from the emergency situation at hand, the novel

143 By-Line Ernest Hemingway 181.

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appears to suggest. Bonello’s killing of the sergeant, on the other hand, seems to afford a

much more unsettling glimpse into the abyss of blind class hatred. For Bonello, similar

to the brutalized Chrisfield, takes a perverted pride in having killed the wounded

sergeant. “I never killed anybody in this war, and all my life I’ve wanted to kill a

sergeant…That’s one thing I can always remember. I killed that——of a sergeant”

(207). Bonello’s statement, which elicits laughter and cheers from Paini and Aymo, not

only conjures up images of bloody mob rule, but furthermore raises serious doubts about

the men’s professed commitment to socialist ideals. Asked by Frederic how they did “get

to be socialists,” they uncomprehendingly reply in unison: “We’re all socialists.

Everybody is a socialist. We’ve always been socialists” (208). Even Mussolini,

Hemingway informs us elsewhere, had once been a socialist so that nomenclature appears

to be the only difference between “socialists” such as Bonello and fascists such as Ettore.

It is characteristic of Frederic that he inquires no further into Bonello’s motives until the

latter, in an act of cowardice, betrays his friends by crossing enemy lines.

Forced to abandon their vehicles, Frederic and Piani join the main column of the

retreating army, where they are greeted by shouts of “Brigata di Pace! and “a basso gli

ufficiali! Before Frederic can fully grasp the situation, he is suddenly confronted by

mobs of revolting foot soldiers, threatening to shoot all officers, and by exasperated

carabineri, summarily executing field officers separated from their units. Neither sniper

fire nor his wounding by a mortar shell could instill Frederic with any greater sense of

personal violation than suddenly finding himself the target of lethal animosity left and

right—in the literal as well as the political sense. His self-image of an enlightened officer

who hates “war,” “tyranny,” and “injustice,” but nonetheless “believe[s] that war c[an]

only be ended by fighting that war through and winning it,” has landed him in a

precarious situation. The “working people” bear him “hatred,” because they see him

merely as a representative of the very government that, in turn, is set on making him into

a scapegoat for its own failures. 144 Thus, rather than taking any chances with either the

rioters or the government’s henchmen (two sides of the same coin), he throws himself

headlong into the river. At last, the river washes Frederic clean of the entire sordid mess

that is wartime politics. Like Bourne’s Sebert, his “social conscience no longer operates

144 Ibid 233.

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to make [him] feel part of this society.” Or, as Frederic himself puts it by way of a

civilian analogy,

You were out of it now. You had no more obligation. If they shot

floorwalkers after a fire in the department store because they spoke with

an accent they always had, then certainly the floorwalkers would not be

expected to return when store opened again for business…I was through.

(232)

After declaring himself free of all obligations, Frederic sets out “to forget the

war” in his blossoming love relationship with the pliant Catherine (243). Yet, even here,

on the most private level, the wartime seeds of personal disintegration and societal

bondage have already been sown. Catherine’s unplanned pregnancy—first announced in

the same chapter that mentions the outbreak of riots—threatens to tear apart the young

lovers’ intimate attachment, only to replace it with the new social obligations of

marriage, parenthood, and childcare. When Catherine seeks Frederic’s reassurance that

“[s]he won’t come between us, will she? The little brat,” she is merely preparing him for

the inevitable (304). For even though Frederic has unbeknownst to himself weaned

Catherine away from the incipient danger of lesbianism—represented through Helen

Ferguson—her impending motherhood is still bound to divert her sexual energies away

from him. Again, it is Catherine, who most clearly foresees that their sexual-romantic

notions of “oneness” and absolute compatibility are destined to unravel under the strain

of social pressures and obligations. “People,” she cautions hesitantly, “love each other

and they misunderstand on purpose and they fight and suddenly they aren’t the same

anymore” (139).

Even so, for the time being, Catherine appears to embody the perfect antidote to

the self-seeking, violence-loving, men-devouring female figures that populate so many

male-imagined World War I books. To begin with, when Frederic first meets Catherine,

she has already outgrown “silly” female ideas that her fiancé “might come to the hospital

where I was. With a sabre cut…Something picturesque” (20). Moreover, she exhibits

not only an acute awareness of the suffering endured by men in war (“They blew him all

to bits”), but also a heightened desire to heal the war-wounded male ego. Conceding a

measure of naiveté during he pervious relationship, she informs Frederic: “I wanted to

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do something for him. You see I didn’t care about the other thing [marriage] and he

could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known”

(19). Catherine’s qualifications as devoted lover and faithful companion seem fabulous

indeed.

What slightly complicates Frederic’s romantic conquest of Catherine, however, is

her close association with Helene Ferguson, which seems to bear traces of homosocial, if

not homoerotic desire. From the start, Helene is Catherine’s constant companion. The

two women enter the novel together, they work side-by-side at the hospital in Gorizia,

both affect their transfer to Milan, and when Catherine goes to Stresa to meet Frederic,

Helene tags along. Moreover, as Miriam Mandel has pointed out, Frederic repeatedly

encounters the two women in “conventionally romantic settings;” for example, the garden

behind the British hospital and the dining room at the plush hotel in Stresa.145 To be sure,

as soon as Catherine shows sexual interest in Frederic, Helene quickly takes a backseat.

Yet she still manages to constantly irritate Frederic. In Milan, for instances, Helene not

just admonishes Frederic to “let her [Catherine] stay off nights a little while,” but

furthermore predicts that their relationship will end in fighting and even offers to “kill”

him, should he “get her in trouble” (108-09). And in a key scene at Stresa, where

Frederic and Catherine make preparations to “sneak off,” a tearful Helene goes on a

jealous tirade, comparing Frederic to “snake” and accusing him of having “ruined”

Catherine with “his sneaking Italian tricks” (246). Frederic, “sick of Fergy,” voluntarily

withdraws himself to the bar. But when Catherine’s final meeting with Helene takes

longer than he had expected, it is Frederic’s turn to grow fidgety. In the tense exchange

that ensues upon her return, Catherine reassures Frederic of her love by asking him to

consider “how much we have and she hasn’t anything.” Frederic’s retort, “I don’t think

she wants what we have,” shows him to be still largely unaware of any sexual

competition, prompting Catherine to rejoin, “You don’t know much, darling, for such a

wise guy” (257).

145 Miriam Mandel, “Ferguson and Lesbian Love: Unspoken Subplots in A Farewell to Arms,’’ The Hemingway Review 14.1 (1994): 2. It is Rinaldi who provides the first two clues as to Helene’s sexual orientation. Confused by the Scotswoman’s distaste for the English, he asks, “Not like Miss Barkley?,” whereupon Helene’s immediately clarifies, “Oh, that’s different. You mustn’t take everything so literal” (21). Shortly after the double date, Rinaldi states that he does not like Helene.

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Largely because Catherine is willing to become “whatever [he] want[s],” then,

Henry manages to momentarily restore his war-shattered sense of manhood (105). In a

sense, Catherine is to Frederic what Willa Cather’s Gladys Farmer—“who would have

made any sacrifice to help him on”—could have been to Claude Wheeler in One of

Ours.146 Not simply because she offers easy access to sex, but because she grants him

total control over herself, fully aware, though, that “[t]his is a rotten game [they] play”

(31). What Henry needs to become “whole again” is not a wife, nor simply a lover and

companion, but a woman who ceases to be a woman, i.e., a being that is not different

from him. Traditional marriage, with its bureaucratic “formalities,” legal responsibilities,

and static gender roles, Catherine senses, would merely reproduce the social constraints

Frederic seeks to overcome (115). Thus, on the subject of marriage Catherine flatly

declares: “What good would it do to marry now? We’re really married. I couldn’t be

any more married…. There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me” (115).

Only through Catherine becoming like him, can Frederic restore his sense of self himself

as a freely acting agent.

In a conversation prior to his injury, Frederic Henry stubbornly rejects Passini’s

claim that “[t]here is no finish to war” (51). During his convalescence, however, Henry

begins to doubt his position, wondering, “[p]erhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe

they went on forever” (119). Childbirth under such conditions would be less a sign of

change or renewal than a confirmation of Nietzsche’s dictum of the “always the same.”

“For three years I looked forward very childishly to the war ending at Christmas,”

Catherine states sardonically. “But now I look forward till when our son will be a

lieutenant commander” (141). Within a world of perpetual warfare, Catherine’s

pregnancy recalls the novel’s opening image of soldiers, “carrying long 6.5 mm

cartridges” under their capes “as though they were six month pregnant” (4).147

Catherine’s destruction, just as the soldiers’ deaths, and the revolution’s demise, have

been foregone conclusions. In the end, then, Catherine’s stillbirth and her subsequent

death in childbed might represent nothing more and nothing less than two more tragic

war causalities. At the same time, though, as heartrending the death of Catherine and

146 Willa Cather, One of Ours 208. 147 Cf. Jennifer Haytock, “Hemingway’s Soldiers and Their Pregnant Women: Domestic Rituals in World War I, The Hemingway Review 19.2 (2000): 57-72.

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child may be, these final causalities of the book also signify Frederic’s release from his

last remaining social ties and obligations. His heart might be broken, his ideals might be

shattered, but at last he is free to bid his farewell to every kind of arms, appendages,

attachments that imperil his hard-won independence.

IV

The extent to which novels such as Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms have impacted

the American literature of World War II has long been the subject of heated debates. One

of the few consensuses that seems to have emerged is that World War II novels such as

John Horne Burns’s The Gallery (1947), Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead

(1948), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1955) remain principally concerned with the ironic

demise of the individual.148 As in the World War I novels discussed above, the

experience of war and army life are rendered as expressions of a Leviathan-like

totalitarian system, which induces the individual to conform to a pattern of values that

destroy his identity—only more so and often to the point of absurdity. Brutalized

brutalizers such Dos Passos’s Chrisfield and Hemingway’s Bonello are the norm in The

Naked and the Dead. Even the gentle Martinez prods a dead Japanese in the gentiles.

None of the characters in Mailer’s book seem capable of undertaking the kind of self-

redemption action implied in Frederic Henry’s “separate peace” or John Andrews’s

“gesture, feeble as it is, toward human freedom.” Mailer’s Robert Hearn, a left-leaning

intellectual who imagines himself a political assassin, comes closest, but he, too,

eventually looses both his moral and social bearings in “the isolation of the army.”

Similar to John Andrews and Fredric Henry, Hearn fails establish meaningful rapport

with his platoon. Any impulse toward collective revolts against dehumanizing

oppression, still tangible in Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms, is precluded from the

start. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the dropping of two atomic bombs, it had

been replaced by General Cummings’s fascist postulate that “the only morality of the

future is power morality”149 “In the 1944 war,” concludes Burns’s narrator,” everyone’s

hand ended by being against everyone else’s. Civilization was already dead, but nobody

148 See Walsh 112-28. 149 Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Rinehart, 1948) 277.

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bothered to admit this to himself.”150 To be sure, Joseph Heller’s Yossarian does manage

to break free from the catch-22 that is the military-industrial complex when he resolves to

desert to Sweden. But the motives for his long-delayed act of defiance, like those of

Frederic Henry and John Andrews, remain highly individualistic (“there is nothing

negative about running away to save my life”) and do not signal a fundamental

reorganization of society.151

If there was a war that bestowed white American middle-class writers with

renewed faith in revolutionary action and again lent credence to notions of a collective

identity, it was clearly the Spanish Civil War (1936-1937). Galvanized by the seemingly

unstoppable spread of fascism and totalitarianism—Japan's invasion of Manchuria in

1931, Hitler's ascendance to power in 1933, and Italy's assault on Ethiopia in 1934—

2,800 American volunteers joined the International Brigades in an effort to aid the

Spanish Socialist and Marxists in their fight against General Franco’s troops.152

Countless war correspondents, among them John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway,

followed in their wake, supplying the American readership with a steady stream of

reports on the Republican cause in Spain. Perhaps the two most widely discussed

American literary works to come out of the Spanish Civil War were Alvah Bessie’s Men

in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939) and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the

Bell Tolls (1940). Bessie’s and Hemingway’s public quarrels over their respective

representations of the Republican cause have been discussed at length elsewhere and do

not concern here.153 What is of interest in light of the foregoing analysis of Three

Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms is the way in which Men in Battle and For Whom the

Bell Tolls render the middle-class individual’s war experience not as an education in

passive suffering and heroic isolation, but as an education in collective action and

communalism.

For instance, in marked contrast to depictions of the coercive and dehumanizing

150 John Horne Burns, The Gallery (New York: Avon Books, 1977) 157. 151 Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Dell, 1963), 461. Interestingly enough, Heller’s Catch-22 owes much of its enduring popularity to the readers of the Vietnam War generation, who literally picked up where Yossarian had left off by expanding his individualist antiwar protest into a broad-based counterculture movement that was to change face, if not the core, of America’s political and social life. 152 On American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, see Robert Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pegasus, 1969). 153 See, for example, Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story.

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nature of American military life in many World War I novels by young soldier-poets,

Bessie describes the internal organization of the Abraham International Brigades as a

model of social democracy in action, wherein individual and collective needs achieve

proper balance:

It was understood that soldiers would obey their officers’ commands in

action: question them later. And therein lies the distinction that made this

army unique in military history. For while certain manifestations of

individualism had to be restrained in the interest of unified action, every

soldier retained the right to question his command, his officers and

commissars, and to bring his grievances to the attention of his fellow

soldiers and his superiors. This was done in an organized and democratic

fashion through the medium of the political meeting, for this was a

political army first to last.154

Robert Jordan, the hero of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, is much less sanguine

about the democratic commitment of his commissars. But he, too, accepts that

“individualism had to be restrained in the interest of unified action:”

Here in Spain the Communists offered the best discipline and the soundest

and sanest for the prosecution of the war. He accepted their discipline for

the duration of the war because, in the conduct of the war, they were the

only party whose programme and whose discipline he could respect.155

Bessie’s motives for volunteering in the Spanish Civil War are very similar to

those of John Andrews’s in Three Soldiers: he seeks escape from the stifling atmosphere

of American middle-class life. But where Andrews (and his creator) fails in his attempt

to declass himself, Bessie succeeds in creating a new, other-directed identity for himself:

It was necessary for me, at that stage of my development as a man, to

work (for the first time} in a large body of men; to submerge myself in the

mass, seeking neither distinction nor preferment (the reverse of my

activities for the past several years) and in this way achieve self-discipline,

patience, and unselfishness—the opposite of a long middle-class

154 Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (New York: Scribner’s, 1939) 54. 155 Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls (New York: Scribner’s, 1940) 167.

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training—and the construction of a life that would be geared to other men

and the world events that subscribe them.156

To Robert Jordan, the major educative force is less the close contact with the socially and

economically “other” (although he certainly develops a strong solidarity with the novel’s

gypsies) than the transformative power of love. In many ways a more mature version of

Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan’s relationship with Maria transcends the purely personal in

that it encompasses a much more elemental love of mankind. He loves Maria, Jordan

says, as he loves “liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be

hungry.”157

Like Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms Men in War, Men in Battle and For

Whom the Bells are postwar books—a fact that somewhat dampens their enthusiasm. By

1939, Franco, with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini, had prevailed in the Spanish Civil

War. The various Socialist, Marxist, and Anarchist hopes for revolution that the war had

spawned did not come to pass, none the least because of quarrels and conflicts within the

Popular Front. Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls provides detailed descriptions of

the in-fighting among the Republicans (a major reason why Bessie denounced For Whom

The Bell Tolls’). Yet, Robert Jordan’s last heroic stand against the fascists still conveys

an aura of hope (albeit also signifies a return to individualism). Predictably, Bessie

commemorates the legacy of the war more broadly in world-historical terms. Similar to

Upton Sinclair in Jimmie Higgins and William Cunningham in The Green Corn

Rebellion, he refuses to regard the deaths and defeats of his fellow-strugglers in vein.

Their memory must live one, he insists, for

the very existence of this army…was the guarantee of international

working class brotherhood; the final proof that those who perform the

work of the world possess a common interest and an identical obligation.

It was the living embodiment of the unity that exists between all men of

good will, whatever their nationality, their political or

religious conviction, or their way of making a living on this earth. 158

156 Men in Battle 81. 157 For Whom The Bell Tolls 343. 158 Men in Battle 111.

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Obviously, World War I and the Spanish Civil War were two very different wars,

not just on ideological grounds, but also because the former involved government-

directed mass mobilization and conscription, whereas the latter merely saw the

participation of a few thousands committed volunteers. Even so, as the next chapter shall

show, with respect to a literary insistence on both the possibility and the need for

emancipatory collective action, proletarian World War I novels such as William

Cummings’s The Green Corn Rebellion and Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins are much

closer to novels such For Whom the Bell Tolls and especially Men in Battle than to

individualist protest novels such as Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms. For all their

cultural weight, Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms were clearly neither the first nor

the last words on World War I.

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3

“For the Red Revolt –‘tis Marked by Fate”

WAR AS PROLETARIAN BILDUNGSROMAN IN UPTON SINCLAIR’S JIMMIE HIGGINS AND WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM’S THE GREEN CORN REBELLION

Living experience, the political oppression of the existing governments compels the workers to occupy themselves with politics whether they like it or not, be it for political or for social goals.

—Karl Marx, Speech in London, 21 September 1871

You workers in Ohio, enlisted in the greatest cause ever organized in the interest of your class, are making history today in the face of threatening opposition of all kinds—history that is going to be read with profound interest by coming generations.

—Eugene V. Debs, Speech in Canton, Ohio, 16 June 1918

The man of letters who systematically stands aside from the major social and political issues wastes and dishonors his vocation as a writer and as a man, since the horrors which exist throughout the world can be changed by political means only.

– Henri Barbusse, Founding Manifesto of the Clarét Society, 1919

And always they were in fear of a principal—three hundred thousand—if they ever move under a leader—the end. Three hundred thousand, hungry and miserable; if they ever know themselves, the land will be theirs, and all the gas, all the rifles in the world won’t stop them.

—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

AS the First World War wore on, collective acts of insubordination such as draft

evasions, mass surrenders, desertions, strikes, and outright mutinies became increasingly

common in all of the belligerent countries.1 On the side of the Allies, the French Army

Mutiny of 1917 is probably the best-known example of how the war experience imbued

common soldiers with a growing political awareness.2 Following yet another disastrous

attack on the Aisne in April 1917, some 40,000 troops refused to be used up as cannon

fodder. Word spread and soon fifty-four divisions, or nearly half the French army,

disobeyed orders. Untold thousands deserted. The demands of the soldiers were diverse,

1 See, for example, Gloden Dallas & Douglass Gill, The Unknown Army: Mutinies in the British Army During World War 1 (London: Verso, 1985); Daniel Horn, The German Navel Mutinies of World War I (Rutgers UP, 1969); and Leonard Smith, “War and ‘Politics’: The French Army Mutiny of 1917,” War in History 2 (1995): 180-201. 2 In Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), Leonard V. Smith highlights the French soldiers role in setting the war’s moral limits by politicizing them. “By definition, the citizen-soldier will not entirely relinquish the rights of the citizen,” Smith writes. “Authority and obedience will be thus constantly subject to questioning and negotiation from below” (11).

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ranging from an end to the offensive war, to immediate peace negations, to bread for

wives and children, to a general improvement of living conditions. Initially, the French

High Command attempted to crush the widening insurrection through court-martial and

on-the-spot executions. But as public support for the rebellious soldiers mounted and

civilian protestors took to the streets of Paris, General Neville was hurriedly replaced by

General Pétain, who managed to appease the troops by negotiating concessions. 3

Although the French Mutiny of 1917, unlike the Petrograd Uprising of the

same year or the Kiel Naval Rebellion of 1918, did not escalate into a full-scale

revolution, it demonstrated that Western democracies too had become exceedingly

vulnerable in the face of a rising wartime discontent among the masses. Accordingly,

leftist writers such as Henri Barbusse were quick to capitalize on the signs of impending

social revolt. In Clarét (1919; translated as Light, 1919), his second and in America

largely unknown Great War novel, Barbusse seeks to preserve the potentially explosive

memory of the mutiny by using it as a backdrop for the politicization of his protagonist,

Paul Simon.4 Plotted as a novel of education, Clarét traces Simon’s move from passivity

and self-indulgent individualism to an awareness of the exploitation of the laboring

classes and eventually to radical social action. Near the end of war, an enlightened

Simon, much like his creator, vows to devote his life to the propagation of humanitarian

and socialist ideals.5 Outraged after visiting the new “musée de guerre,” designed to

venerate “la grande nation” as “le preserver l’ordre est de la liberté,” Simon composes his

first political pamphlet, “proclaim[ing] the inevitable advent of the universal republic:”

3 “Leave was doubled, army food was improved. Above all, Pétain conveyed the assurance that there would be no other great offensive,” A. J. P. Taylor writes. “In the end, “over a hundred thousand soldiers were court martialled. 23,000 were found guilty, though only 432 were sentenced to death and only 55 were officially shot. A good many more were shot without sentence” (177). A. J. P. Taylor, The First World War: An Illustrated History (New York: Perigee, 1980). 4 In the United Sates, the first and only English translation of Clarét was published in 1919 by the small New York publishing house E. P. Dutton & Company. The novel has long since been out of print. 5 In October of 1919, Henri Barbusse, Raymond, Lefebvre, Paul Vaillant, and other French intellectucals founded “Clarét: The Intelecctuals’ International,” an organization dedicated to putting the arts into the service of pacficism, internationalism, and socialism. The group’s first international steering committee included such luminaries as Charles Gide, Thomas Hardy, Upton Sinclair, H.G. Wells, and Stefan Zweig. Closley associated with the Third International, the group split in 1921 when its left-wing under Barbusse endorsed violent revolutionary tactics. Plagued by financial problems, Clarét was officially disabonded in 1923. See Nicole Racine, “The Clarét Movement in France, 1919-1921,” Journal of Contemporary History 2.2 (1967) 195-208.

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O you people of the world, you the unwearying vanquished of History, I

appeal to your justice and I appeal to your anger. Over the vague quarrels

which drench the strands with blood, over the plunderers of shipwrecks,

over the jetsam and the reefs, and the palaces and monuments built upon

sand, I see the high tide coming. Truth is only revolutionary by reason of

error’s disorder. Revolution is Order.6

As the previous chapter has shown, dissent, acts of insubordination, and

desertions among the troops also figure prominently in the few “exemplary” American

World War I novels, deemed worthy of critical attention. Two of the main characters in

John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, Joe Chrisfield and John Andrews, desert the army and

go “underground.” Having been thrown into prison for allegedly writing subversive

letters, the unnamed protagonist in E. E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room bitterly

denounces government oppression in a parodistic fashion. And in Ernest Hemingway’s A

Farewell to Arms, the desertion of 400,000 Italian troops, following the bloody defeat at

Caporetto, triggers Frederic Henry’s sudden recognition that he “was through” with war

and that “it was not [his] show any more” (232). But unlike in a number of European

romans de guerre such as Barbusse’s Clarét or Fritz Unruh’s Opfergang (1919;

translated as Way of Sacrifice, 1928), where the veteran emerges politically radicalized

from the trenches, in these American war novels, acts of rebelliousness remain highly

individualistic and subsequently dilute rather than distill possibilities for collective

political action.7 Denied the sort of self-affirming heroism that reconstitutes Henry

Fleming in the final chapters of Stephen Crane’s A Red Badge of Courage, for this

generation of adventures doughboys, the “great show” proves to be one, protracted

letdown. As a pattern, potentially explosive anger gives way to paralyzing

disillusionment—“l’état moderne quientessciel.” Perhaps understandably, then, one

finds ample critical discussions of how young American soldier poets grew increasingly

6 Henri Barbusse, Light, trans. Fitzwater Wray (New York: Dutton, 1919) 273-74, 295. 7 One exception is Humphrey’s Cobb’s novel Path of Glory (1935), which, in dramatizing the French army mutiny, represents military disobedience not as an individual revolt, but a collective awakening of political consciousness.

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despondent, became alienated from “a botched civilization,” and eventually fashioned

“the new literary tools the modern experience demanded.”8

What has gotten lost amidst these efforts to establish the literariness of American

World War I writings, though, are ostensibly pedestrian literary representations of the

more mundane but no less onerous, tumultuous, and conflicted (working-class)

experience on the homefront. “Alone among the combatants in World War I, Americans

located the Great War’s significance, not in the trenches of France, but on the home

front,” historian Jeanette Keith writes notably.9 Yet one rarely, if ever, comes across

critical considerations of literary works that depict the fierce labor unrests which rattled

wartime America, represent strategies of labor opposition to the war “over there,” or

portray homegrown revolts such as the ill-fated Green Corn Rebellion, instigated by a

multiracial alliance of impoverished white, black, and Indian draft resisters in rural

Oklahoma.

In an effort to call attention to alternative constructions of the modern memory of

World War I, this chapter scrutinizes the ways in which two Proletarian war novels

—Upton Sinclair’s serialized Jimmie Higgins (1918-19) and William Cunningham’s The

Green Corn Rebellion (1935)—attempt to re-present, shape, and memorialize the

material as well as the ideological battles fought by and within the American laboring

classes. Following a brief comparison of adaptations of the Bildungsroman format in war

novels by self-consciously modernist and self-consciously Proletarian writers, the chapter

offers two contextualized readings of Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion.

As we shall see, both novels register post-war disillusionment and project a sense of

modernist irony. But similar to Barbusse’s Clarét and Unruh’s Opfergang, these

Proletarian Bildungsromans go beyond a concern for the individual by striving to create a

collective working class memory of specific wartime conflicts and abuses that reasserts

the need for concerted political action and social change. Moreover, challenging

8 Ann Douglass, Terribly Honest: Mongol Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1995) 199. 9 Jeanette Keith, “The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917-1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South,” The Journal of American History 87.4 (2001), 1336

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simplistic assessments according to which a hitherto “innocent” nation allowed itself to

be cajoled into “The Great American Crusade,”10 Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn

Rebellion not only bear witness to persistent war resentment from “below,” but also

testify to the possibility of counterhegemonic activism during periods of severe

government repression.11

Prefiguring John Steinbeck’s literary call for communal social activism in The

Grapes of Wrath (1939), Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion seeks to overcome a

sense of postwar defeatism by evoking the spirit of rebelliousness and interracial

cooperation during the brief Oklahoma uprising, while explaining its failure due to an

excess of individualism and a lack of both organization and leadership. Begun in 1918

and originally conceived as a pro-war propaganda tool, Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins

aims to deflect wartime labor dissatisfaction and to counter a radical rhetoric that equated

the world war abroad with the class war at home. But despite its patriotic overtones, in

representing the drawn-out conversion of the titular hero from labor activist to war hero

to defender of the Bolshevik Revolution, Jimmie Higgins provides a forum for radical

leftist positions that otherwise could not have been voiced and that by the end of novel

appear to be in some measure confirmed.

I

Critics have described “the war novel as Bildungsroman” in terms of the young hero’s

accelerated quest for wisdom. Almost invariably the hero is said to enter the story in a

state of romantic innocence or blissful ignorance until the experience of warfare initiates

him into the realties of modern life. “The process of education, irrevocable acts or

irreversible decisions, instances of initiation and maturation, and moments of revelation,”

Peter G. Jones writes, mark the American war novel from “Crane’s classic tale” to Dos

Passos’s Three Soldiers to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.12

In most “paradigmatic” novels of the First World War, the outcome of this

process of wartime education is the individual’s realization that he is pitted against a 10 See, for example, Cooperman’s explanation in World War and the American Novel (esp. pp. 3-56) as well as Meirion and Susie Harries’s assessment in The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917-1918 (New York: Vintage, 1997). 11 For a somewhat dated but concise overview of anti-World War I activism in the United States, see James Weinstein, “Anti-War Sentiment and the Socialist Party, 1917-1918,” Political Science Quarterly 74.1 (1956) 215-39. 12 Jones 21.

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cruel, debased, and at bottom absurd society. His direct confrontations with trench life,

mechanized warfare, mass slaughter, and severe bodily as well as mental injury teach him

not only that romantic notions of heroism are no longer tenable, but also that adversity,

subjugation, and isolation are part of the universal human condition.13 Obviously, such

modernist adaptations of the 19th-century Bildungsroman form fly into the face of

traditional definitions that “consider an accommodation between the individual and

society an essential characteristic of the genre.”14 In his reading of what is widely

considered the quintessential modern Bildungsroman—Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg

(1924; translated as The Magic Mountain, 1924)—Martin Swales therefore recognizes a

distinctive loss of all teleological underpinnings, noting that at the end of the novel there

is not harmony but chaos and violence.15 Written “under the impact of the 1914-1918

war,” The Magic Mountain portrays Hans Castrop’s seven-year-long “journey into self-

knowledge,” only to dismantle his dreamlike “vision of the wholeness of man” as he

“finds himself plunged into the holocaust of the First World War.”16 Ultimately, Mann’s

Hans Castrop, akin to Dos Passos’s John Andrews and Hemingway’s Frederic Henry, is

trapped in a static world of the always-the-same, which reflects the stalemate on the

Western Front and underscores the basic irony of his existence. As Georg Lukács has

argued in his betimes acrimonious critique of literary modernism, “the only

‘development’ in this literature is the gradual revelation of the human condition.

Man is now what he has always been and always will be.”17

The novel of education, at least in its modernist application to the war novel,

becomes what Swales terms a “parodistic” Bildungsroman that mocks society’s false

13 Stanley Cooperman describes the learning curve in this way: “the antihero enlists for a Cause; becomes bitterly conscious of the futility of the Cause; carries on the job as job until by its own absurdity the Cause rejects the antihero and forces his physical no less than emotional withdrawal” (189). 14 James Hardin, “Introduction,” Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, ed. James Hardin. (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991) xxi. 15 Martin Swales, “Irony and the Novel: Reflections on the German Bildungsroman,” Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, ed. James Hardin (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991) 46-68. 16 Swales 58. 17 Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963) 21. Hereafter cited parenthetically. According to Lukács, the development of character in much modernist literature is restricted in two ways. “First, the hero is strictly confined within the limits of his own experience” (21). Secondly, he is depicted “as a solitary being, incapable of meaningful relationships” (24). Applied to Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms this seems to hold true indeed.

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hopes in boundless progress, democratization, and applied science.18 In doing so,

however, the war novel as modern Bildungsroman tends to register changing social

formations only insofar as they stifle or enslave the individual and reconfirm an always

already limited human potential for concrete political action. Hence, in Mann’s The

Magic Mountain, as in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the Great War is stripped of all

its specificities, of all its historical causes and consequences. Turned into a universal

metaphor of man’s struggle, the war appears to have “always been there.” No one is

more aware of this elementary stasis than the “peasant,” whose inborn “wisdom,”

according to Frederic Henry, lies in the fact that “he is defeated from the start” (179).

Passive endurance is the peasant’s and, by extension, humanities unalterable fate, A

Farewell to Arms posits, because no matter how “much courage” people bring “to this

world the world has to kill them to break them” (249).

Moreover, generically, the modern or “parodistic” Bildungsroman “impl[ies] a

restriction to the private sphere, to the inner life of the individual, his psyche, where the

epoch and society play only the role of background and foil.”19 Consequently, in Three

Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms the impact of war and its outcomes remain confined

within the limits of the protagonist’s personal experience. “For Andrews war becomes a

crime against the individual,” Stanley Cooperman notes, whereas for “Frederic Henry

war becomes a threat to existence, virility, and love.”20 And although these “antiheroes”

of the modern Bildungsroman attempt to devise “alternatives beyond withdrawal,” their

individualistic actions, gestures, rituals only call renewed attention to the futility of man’s

solitary struggle against the powers that be, further stressing the “Oh, wearisome

condition of humanity,” lamented by the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville.21

That the (anti)hero’s quasi-existentialist isolation, which Lukács with reference to

Heidegger describes as a modernist sense of “thrownness-into-being (Geworfenheit ins

Dasein),” is not so much a passive reflection as an active creation of modern postwar

18 Swales elucidates, “I have in mind the self-consciousness of the Bildungsroman, its discursiveness and self-reflectivity, its narrative obliqueness, its concern for the elusiveness of selfhood, its dialectical critique of the role of plot in the novel” (63). 19 Hartmut Steinecke, “The Novel and the Individual: The Significance of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister in the Debate about the Bildungsroman,” Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, ed. James Hardin (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991) 94. 20 Cooperman 175. 21 Fulke Greville, Baron Brooke, The Tragedy of Mustapha (London: [J. Windet] for N. Butler, 1609).

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realities becomes clear when one takes a look at Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins and

William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion.22 To varying degrees, the adaptations

of the Bildungsroman genre in these two war novels work against the seemingly

inevitable isolation of the representative (anti)hero. For even though the protagonists in

both of these novels also ultimately retreat into themselves, the narratives entangle them

and make them part of an ongoing historical movement toward liberation from servitude.

In Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion, like in most Proletarian

Bildungsromans, the protagonists’ “espousal of—or at least growth toward—

revolutionary class consciousness embodies in microcosm the change that is occurring

and must continue to occur on a larger scale, in the working class.”23 Before the

backdrop of World War I and its attendant surge of reactionary nationalism, however, the

exemplary protagonists find themselves especially hard pressed to (a) sustain and (b) act

upon their revolutionary class consciousness in a consistent manner. Thus, cajoled into

believing that the fight against German Junkerdom will erase all class distinctions and

miraculously democratize American society, Jimmie Higgins temporarily loses his

identity-giving working class consciousness and becomes a soulless henchman for the

reactionary forces. When history finally catches up with him on the icy planes of Siberia,

forlorn Jimmie comes to the woeful realization that he has nearly betrayed himself, his

comrades, and the revolution. The final image of his self-punitive martyrdom serves

future generations both as a warning and an inspiration to carry on the inescapable class

struggle. Jim Tetley’s story in The Green Corn Rebellion too bespeaks the disuniting

confusion that had gripped the working class during World War I, but concomitantly

spotlights moments of interracial solidarity and acts of desperate courage that point

toward social change. Overly sanguine that “this here war…for profits” would prompt

farmers and workers everywhere to rise up in arms against “the damned capitalists in

Washington,” Jim and his white, black, and Indian fellow-sharecroppers stage a local

rebellion.24 The uprising is crushed, sure enough, and a dejected Jim, fearful that his

marital infidelities might be exposed, joins the army. His self-punishing decision to turn

22 Lukács 20. 23 Foley, 327. 24 William Cunningham, The Green Corn Rebellion (New York: Vanguard, 1935) 47. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text.

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“traitor,” however, is purely personal, for his erstwhile comrades quietly regroup and

vow passive resistance. More importantly, though, Jim’s loss of faith notwithstanding,

the memory of the possibility of interracial cooperation and revolutionary action is

preserved and passed on to the next generation. In the inexorable course of history, the

memory of past defeats (and personal failures) only heightens the prospect of future

victories, both Cunningham’s and Sinclair’s war novels stress in best working class

fiction tradition.25

What looms in the background of Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion

is, of course, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, either as an anticipated or an unfolding

event. “The workers of Russia having shown the way, nevermore would the workers of

any nation bow to the yoke of slavery,” Sinclair has his titular hero Jimmie Higgins

augur.26 “Yes, even in the so-called republics, such as France, which was ruled by

bankers, and America, which was ruled by Wall Street—even here, the workers would

read the real lessons of revolt!” (118-119). Similarly, Jim Tetley’s personal capitulation

following the failed rebellion is offset by the inclusion of a newspaper headline,

announcing: “Lenin and Trotsky Seize Power in Russia” (302). And what the bourgeois

press denounces as a “bloody reign in Russia” provides fresh impetus to Mack McGee’s

revolutionary hope that the young generation “will maybe help finish up this job that we

made such as mess of “ (302). Though its full significance for the struggles of the

American workers remains sketchy, the Bolshevik Revolution comes to signify what

Amy Kaplan dubs “the elusive process of social change,” against the backdrop of which

the protagonists’ growth and development (or failure thereof) is represented. Put another

way, unlike in the deliberately un- or anti-historical works by modernist writers, the

hero’s personal education (both positive and negative) in these two Proletarian war

novels is depicted vis-à-vis liberating social formations that seem to be hovering on

history’s horizon.

25 For example, in Samuel Guy Endore’s novel Babouk (1934), the narrator concedes defeat yet seeks to rescue the memory of Babouk’s heroic struggles in the crushed Santo Domingo slave rebellion of 1791, “Your voice is lost in the past…And yet it cannot be lost altogether, Babouk…[I]t will some day be woven into a great net and…pull down that deaf master…into the muddy, stinking field.”25 In Endore’s novel, the Haitian Revolution and subsequent Independence of 1804 portends an end to segregation and racial injustice in the USA of the 1930s. 26 Upton Sinclair, Jimmie Higgins: A Story (Racine, Wis.: Western Printing, 1919) 118. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text.

110

Grounded in a Marxist view of history, Sinclair’s as well as Cunningham’s

adaptations of the traditional Bildungsroman format in Jimmie Higgins and The Green

Corn Rebellion clearly go beyond the concern for the individual and his tragic or ironic

fate. For it is not the protagonist’s personal failures and disappointments but the struggle

“to correlate his/her particularity with the destiny of his/her class” that provides the

central focus of these two stories.27 According to John M. Reilly, “the subject matter of

the [Proletarian] novel is not only individuals, but specific groups, represented by

individuals acting in opposition to other groups, and, within the conflict, constituting

history.”28 Applied to the Proletarian World War I novel—at least as represented by

Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion—Reilly’s observation must be expanded

to include the ideological battles that took place within the working class and its

leadership.

More than any other event, the Great War brought into ever sharper focus the

ideological split in the aging labor movement. Under the leadership of Samuel Gompers,

the powerful American Federation of Labor (AFL), pledged its unwavering support for

the war in exchange for governmental concessions such as the establishment of shop

committees, arbitration boards, the 8-hour workday, and draft exemptions for skilled

workers. In late 1917, with Gompers as a newly appointed member of the Council of

National Defense by his side, Wilson became the first U.S. president to address a labor

convention, promising delegates to the AFL’s gathering in Buffalo, “ I am with you if

you are with me.”29 Meanwhile, the left-wing of the labor movement, represented by the

Socialist Party of America (SPA) under Eugene V. Debs and the International Workers of

the World (IWW) staunchly opposed Gomper’s blanket support for Wilson. To them, the

war was an “inherently illiberal” enterprise, “promoted by profit-seeking capitalist but

fought and paid for by oppressed workers.”30 This inherent clash of interests, the

majority of socialists believed, should be vigorously exploited, no the least since the

Bolshevik Revolution had already highlighted the internal vulnerability of belligerent

27 Foley, 359. 28 John M. Reilly, “Images in Gastonia: A Revolutionary Chapter in American Social Fiction,” Georgia Review 28 (1972): 512. 29 Qtd. in Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) 118. 30 Ibid.

111

governments, including that of the United States. Hence, fearful that Gompers’s

accommodationist course would forestall any fundamental reorganization of capital and

labor in America, most socialists sought to further strengthen the worker’s bargaining

powers through concerted antiwar agitation, appeals to international solidarity, aggressive

organization, and the threat of general strikes.31 As patriotic sentiments swept the nation

and the Wilson government implemented a carrot-and-stick approach toward labor, not

only the strategic aims of unionists and socialists, but the very future of the entire

movement appeared to be at stake.

To Cunningham, writing during the heydays of the Popular Front movement in

the 1930s, these conflicts seemed largely settled and so The Green Corn Rebellion

touches only briefly on the split—for the most part in order to extol the virtues of

Leninism. To Sinclair, however, these internal battles between right- and left-wingers

provided the central point of reference, as he wrestled, amid the fog of war, to map out an

appropriate working class response to the Great War. As he told his readership when the

first installment of Jimmie Higgins appeared in his self-published journal, Upton

Sinclair’s, on October 1918, “You cannot understand what is now happening in the world

unless you understand what Socialism is and what sort of people Socialists are.”32

Sinclair’s ambitious aim, then, was not merely to chart out Jimmie Higgins gradual

conversion from misguided labor “propagandist” to staunch patriot, but to provide—from

his own rather isolated standpoint of a pro-war Socialist—a detailed account of the

conflicts within the labor movement concerning questions of internationalism vs.

nationalism, strike vs. negotiation, revolution vs. reform, et cetera. And it is precisely

this ambition to reproduce the multitude of conflicting positions within the Socialist

movement that not only lays bare contradictions within Sinclair’s own position, but along

the way also undermines some of the conservative tendencies inherent in the classic

Bildungsroman genre by stressing conflict over accommodation.

Foregoing, moreover, the traditional Bildungsroman’s drive toward closure,

neither Jimmie Higgins nor The Green Corn Rebellion allow their respective protagonists 31 This is without doubt an overly simplistic account of the conflicts within labor during the war. The rifts over wartime policies went right through the AFL, SPA, IWW and many other labor organizations. For a fuller account, see Phillip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. VII: Labor and World War I, 1914-1918 (New York: International Publishers, 1987). 32 Upton Sinclair’s 1 (October 1918): 2.

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to ride off into the sunset. Jimmie Higgins realizes too late that his embrace of jingoistic

patriotism has seriously undermined the working class struggle for emancipation.

Desperately seeking redemption, Jimmie assumes the role of isolated martyr. Similarly,

it is only after he has joined the army, betrayed his comrades, and abandoned his family

in a fit of selfish fatalism that it seems to dawn on Jim Tetley that he has given up hope

for the revolution too soon. But in sharp contrast to Three Soldiers and A Farewell to

Arms, the personal defeats and shortcomings of the protagonists in Jimmie Higgins and

The Green Corn Rebellion do not signify “a universal condition humaine.” Nor do they

provide a rationale for the abandonment of collectivist ideals and organizational

strategies. Instead, both novels emphasize that “the fate of…individuals is characteristic

of certain human types in specific social or historical circumstance,” because “beside and

beyond their solitariness, the common life, the strife and togetherness of other human

beings, goes on as before.”33

The time might not have been ripe, but the conflicts over and struggles for

emancipation will continue, Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion maintain,

since individual experiences of abuse and defeat seep into the collective consciousness or

memory of the working class, thereby heightening the urge for social change. Proclaims

the omniscient narrator in Jimmie Higgins:

Poor, mad Jimmie Higgins will never again trouble his country; but

Jimmie’s friends and partisan, who know the story of his experience,

cannot be thus lightly dismissed by society. In the industrial troubles

which are threatening the great democracy of the West, there will appear

men and women animated by a fierce and blazing bitterness. (282)

Quite significantly, the tactics employed by the thus “animated” working “men

and women” in the “industrial troubles” to come, will be derived directly from the late

war experience. Drawing conspicuous parallels between world war and class war, the

narrator observes with respect to Jimmie’s last and lonely stand against his own

“American troops,…made ready to join in…warfare upon organized workingmen:”

Just as once Jimmie Higgins had found himself in a strategic position

where he had held up the whole Hun army and won the battle of Château-

33 Lukács 20.

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Thierry, so now he found himself in a position of equal strategic

importance—on the line of communication of the Allied armies attacking

Russia, and threatening to cut the line and force the armies into retreat!

(280)

Looking farther ahead, Mack, Jim Tetley’s father-in-law and political mentor in The

Green Corn Rebellion, also projects confidence that future revolutionaries will absorb

the lessons of the failed uprising when he predicts that “in twenty years, or maybe fifty

years, there’ll be thousands of fellers who are real leaders and revolutionists, and million

of farmers and working men like us ready to follow these leaders” (253). In both texts,

then, the protagonist’s espousal of a rebellious course of action—fleeting, haphazard,

incomplete, conflicted, and incongruous as it may be—forebodes a growing commitment

and sophistication among the working class as a whole to bring about social change, as

the memory of both past failures and gross abuses is preserved.

II

In July of 1917, the radical International Socialist Review carried an article by one Jack

Phillips that reported on strikes and anti-war protest inside the German Empire and

discussed the possibility of a worldwide labor revolt. The article ended with a somber

reflection on how an adventure-hungry working stiff is duped into war by official

propaganda:

“See the World,” said the recruiting sign.

And the hungry young workman eager for adventure walked in,

passed the exam, and became an enlisted man in the United States army.

Now he is with Pershing’s corps on the western battlefront.

They will be shot off the horizon and form a pyramid of skulls.

They will never understand just what the recruiting sign meant by

“See the World.”34

One month later, the mainstream Chicago Evening Post printed a staunch pro-war poem,

entitled “The Four Brothers,” in which a Whitmanesque narrator sings the gathering

workmen-troops off into battle with the German Empire by glorifying the national

memory of the Civil War:

34 Qtd. in Philip Yannella, The Other Carl Sandburg (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996) 94.

114

Cowpunchers, cornhuskers, shopmen, ready in khaki;

Ballplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki;

A million, ten million, singing, “I am ready.”

This the sun looks on between two seaboards,

In the land of Lincoln, in the Land of Grant and Lee.

I heard one say, “I am ready to be killed.”

I heard another say, “I am ready to be killed.”

O sunburned clear-eyed boys!

I stand on sidewalks and you go by with drums and guns and bugles,

You--and the flag!

And my heart tightens, a fist of something feels my throat

When you go by,

You on the kaiser hunt, you and your faces saying, “I am ready to be

killed.”35

Both pieces had sprung from the pen of Carl Sandburg.

Like Upton Sinclair and Jack London, Sandburg was a one-time Socialist and

public supporter of President Woodrow Wilson, whose commitments were manifestly

split during the war. Convinced that the autocratic Hohenzollern regime represented a

dangerous anachronism, he did not hesitate to crank out jingoistic pieces for the

government, backed by the conservative Alliance for Labor and Democracy. Yet

unwilling to abandon faith in more direct and radical labor action on the homefront,

Sandburg continued writing for the antiwar International Socialist Review. Under the

pseudonym Jack Phillips, he supplied scathing critiques of the government’s persecution

of the International Workers of the World (IWW), arguing, “that the war should be

supported not for patriotic or any other conventional reasons but because it promised to

lead to a worldwide working-class revolution, and saw the overthrow of the czar by

35 In “Sandburg and World War I.” Modern American Poetry: An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000). Ed. Cary Nelson. 20. Nov. 2002. <http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sandburg/war.htm>.

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Russian workers in the spring of 1917 and then the Bolshevik revolution of October as

portents of the wondrous world to come.”36

Though Sandburg’s personality split may have been an extreme case, what

Philip R. Yannella has called the poet’s “zigzags in wartime” are quite characteristic of

the political and ideological turmoil that had gripped many American intellectuals on the

left. For example, in a 1915 letter to the Committee of the Anti-Enlistment League,

Upton Sinclair insisted that he “hates militarism and all the trappings and symbols of

militarism,” while pledging his unwavering support for the allies “until the last German

soldier has been driven back from the soil of France, Belgium, and Russia.”37 Three

years later, Sinclair advertised his novel-in-progress, Jimmie Higgins, to Wilson’s chief

propagandist, George Creel, as a literary means “to win and hold the radical part of

labor,” but at the same time issued an angry open letter to the President, highlighting the

absurdity of “helping to win democracy abroad, [while] we are losing it at home.”38

Similarly, in a letter to John Malmsbury Wright, an aging Jack London expressed his

belief that “War is a silly nonintellectual function performed by men who are themselves

only partly civilized,” while elsewhere proclaiming the purifying effects of war. “The

world war,” London wrote in his comment to Pathe Exchange (1916), “has redeemed

[humanity] from the fat and gross materialism of generations of peace, and caught

mankind up in a blaze of the spirit.”39

During the early decades of the 20th century radical American literature was

marked by an “equivocal commitment” to the tenets of international socialism and world

revolution.40 Such “equivocal commitments” on the radical literary front undoubtedly

replicated many of the conflicts and contradictions within the Socialist movement as a

whole. “While the socialist movement contained any number of tendencies and a variety

of factions,” writes Francis Robert Shor, “it was riddled throughout with tensions over

36 Yannella, 92. 37 Qtd. in Laslett, John and Symour M. Lipsett, Failure or Dream?: Essays in the History of American Socialism (Berkley: U of California P, 1984) 304-05. 38 Leon A. Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Crowell, 1975) 224-26. George Creel, by the way, politletly rejected Sinclair’s propaganda novel, ostensibly because the “whole proposition…would be to expensive for [him] to handle” (qtd. in Buitenhuis 124). 39 Qtd. in Michael F. Hanlon, “Jack London on the Great War,” Trenches on the Web, ed. Mike Iavarone, Nov. 2002. <http://www.worldwar1.com/sflondon.htm>. 40 Eric Homberger, American Writers & Radical Politics, 1900-39 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986).

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ethnicity and class and plagued by debates over evolution versus revolution,

organizational alignments, and political versus direct action strategies and tactics.”41

Hence, although both Upton Sinclair and Jack London had greeted the initial promise of

the Russian Revolution of 1905 with enthusiasm, they grew increasingly fearful about the

outlook of unchecked mob rule.42 Large-scale labor uprisings and revolts might furnish

the historically mandated solution within backward countries such as Russia and

Germany, they came to believe, but could prove disastrous within “advanced

democracies” such as the United States. Alarmed, moreover, by the steady influx of

foreign-born radicals, who, not assuaged by the experience of American democracy,

might push labor down a violent path, many native-born intellectuals on the left

advocated an “evolutionary socialism,” which was firmly rooted in the ideals of Franklin,

Jefferson, and Lincoln and would mold the heterogeneous laboring masses into a

distinctly American working class.43 And even younger American left-wing radicals like

John Reed, Homberger argues, clung to the idea of American exceptionalism, according

to which “the specific and exceptional features of American economic and political life

largely exempted America from the Comintern theses on the imminent

collapse of capitalism in the West.”44

As a result, Socialist rhetoric of impending class warfare, tempered by the notion

of American exceptionalism and kept in check through a strong dose of Nativist imagery,

permeates quite a few literary responses to the Great War from the American left.

Sandburg’s successive invocations of “fighters gaunt with the red band of labor’s sorrow”

and “the pen of Tom Jefferson, the ashes of Abraham Lincoln” in The Four Brothers,

exemplify attempts by left-leaning practitioners of literature to bolster the patriotism of

the working classes so as to redirect its growing wartime discontent against a common

enemy on the outside.45 Karl Marx’s “specter of communism,” it seemed, had been

temporarily subdued by the ghost of nationalism.

41 Francis Robert Shor, Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997) 85. 42 These anxieties are evident in Jack London’s novel The Iron Heel (1907), when the Chicago Commune mistakes the converted heroine for an agent of the enemy, suddenly turns into a “fiendish” mob, and temporarily loses its moral superiority to the reactionary caste of Oligarchs. 43 See also Peter Buitenhuis’s “Upton Sinclair and the Socialist Response to World War I.” 44 Homberger 117. 45 The Four Brothers, reproduced in “Sandburg and World War I” (see above).

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The apparent incongruities of many such statements by American left-wing

literati did not go unnoticed, of course. Remarked the maverick commentator

Randolph Bourne—yet another one-time Socialist—in June of 1917: “And when they

declared for the war they showed how thin was the intellectual veneer of their socialism.

For they called us in terms that might have emanated from any bourgeois journal to

defend democracy and capitalist civilizations that socialists had been fighting for

decades.”46 Bourne’s sour remarks, to be sure, were directed for the most part against a

relatively small intellectual circle within the Socialist Party of America (SPA), not the

party as a whole. Unlike its faltering counterparts in Germany, France, England, and

Russia, the SPA maintained its antiwar stance even more vigorously after Wilson had

urged Congress to endorse his declaration of war against Germany, thereby exposing the

hollowness of his popular reelection campaign slogan, “he has kept us out of the war.”

During the hastily convened emergency meeting at St. Louis on April 7, 1917, the 193

SPA delegates overwhelming adopted the party’s majority report, declaring,

The Socialist Party of the United States in the present grave crisis

reaffirms its allegiance to the principle of internationalism and working

class solidarity the world over, and proclaims its unalterable opposition to

the war juts declared by the government of the United States….47

Although the “majority report” stopped short of calling for a general strike, it promised

“an even more vigorous prosecution of the class struggle during wartime” and pledged

“continuous active and public opposition to the war,” including,

unyielding opposition to all proposed legislation for military and industrial

conscription…vigorous resistance to all reactionary measures, such as

censorship of the press and mails, restriction of the right of free speech,

assemblage and organization, or compulsory arbitration and limitation of

the right to strike.”48

In addition, the delegates endorsed an “extension of the campaign of education among the

46 Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals,” The Seven Arts (June 1917) 133-46. 47 Qtd in Phillip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. VII: Labor and World War I, 1914-1918 (New York: International Publishers, 1987) 33. 48 Ibid.

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workers to organize them into strong, class-conscious and closely unified political and

industrial organization.”49

More than anything else, it was this call for a massive education campaign among

the workers that prompted Upton Sinclair to write a Proletarian Bildungsroman of

reeducation that would—“in the most easily assimilable form”—showcase the

representative protagonist’s gradual conversion from labor activist to radical antiwar

agitator to steadfast patriot.50 Jimmie Higgins’s conversion to a patriotic pro-war stance

was to undermine calls by the “Candidate” (Sinclair’s tag for Eugene V. Debs) to “let

them organize and establish their own machinery of information and propaganda”

(Jimmie Higgins 22). Even before America’s official war entry, dissenting pro-Ally

Socialists such as Upton Sinclair, John Spargo, Phelps Stokes, Charles Edward Russell,

and Jack London had started a countereducation campaign of their own. Publishing in

the Socialist Party Bulletin and the New York Call, they contended “that the proper aim

of Socialist world-politics at the present time is an alliance of the politically advanced

nations for the defense of the democratic principle thruout the world” and urged all

Socialists to abandon the fight against military preparedness.51 When the majority report

was ratified during the emergency convention in St. Louis, numerous dissidents—among

them Sinclair—left the party, arguing that the SPA had become “un-American” and could

therefore no longer represent the best interest of the working class. The predicted mass

exodus of “rank-and-file” members did not occur, however.

Peter Buithuis has chalked up growing pro-war sentiments among American left-

wing intellectuals and writers “as a yet another victory for British propaganda in the

United States,” concluding that “in supporting the war and himself disseminating Allied

propaganda, Sinclair indirectly contributed to the destruction of the Socialist Party in the

United States and to the delaying of many of the social reforms for which he had fought

all his life”52 In 1926 Sinclair seemed to have admitted as much himself when he

declared “that if at the beginning of 1917 I had known what I know today, I would have

49 Ibid. 50 Upton Sinclair’s 1 (October, 1918): 2 51 Qtd in Foner 29. 52 Buithus 129.

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opposed the war and gone to jail with the pacifist radicals.”53

Sinclair’s belated pacifism aside, it remains noteworthy that Jimmie Higgins,

though conceived as a pro-war propaganda novel, not only ends with an embittered

denunciation of American military interventionism, but also provides a detailed record of

the political struggles within the Socialist Party that constantly challenges and undercuts

the work’s dominant ideological thrust.54 In the process of representing the titular hero’s

slow conversion to patriotic war doctrines, the novel provides an extensive platform for

the arguments of the very “radical part of labor” Sinclair hoped to “win and hold.” As

shall shortly be shown in greater detail, while the narrator’s interventions seek to mold

the represented proletarian discourses into one great master narrative, the oppositional

discourses resists such authoritative assimilation attempts and persistently slip away from

it. The result is a heteroglot text full of contradictions.55 Eventually, the novel’s

ideological edifice collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, when Sinclair,

outraged about American military intervention in Siberia, has Jimmie die the martyr’s

death at the hand of a reactionary United States Army. Jimmie, to be certain, ends up as

an ironic hero, but one whose death inextricably links the promise of American

democracy with the defense of the Bolshevik revolution.

III

In line with Sinclair’s intention to provide a snapshot of the divided labor movement as a

whole, Jimmie Higgins’s education proceeds along several intertwined pathways, leading

him to associate with a chapter of divided “bona-fide Socialists” from various ethnic

backgrounds, to spend an enlightening afternoon with the charismatic “Candidate,” and

to join a band of radical “wobblie” organizers. Moreover, naïve Jimmie Higgins

becomes tangled up in the nefarious schemes of German spies, makes friends with a

53 Quoted in Floyd Dell, Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930) 150. 54 “Unfortunately,” William Bloodworth assesses in Upton Sinclair (Boston: Twayne, 1977), “the story shifts too often with the shifting attitudes of its author and too often suggests his intrusive presence between reader and experience” (96). 55 The term ‘heteroglot’ here is used in the Bakhtinan sense as signifying the contradictory coexistence of different social discourse within a single text. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), Michael Bakhtin explains, “at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given bodily form. These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying ‘languages’” (347).

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patriotic Civil War veteran (who tries to teach him what it means to be a “true

American”) and, while recuperating in a British “war-hospital,” even lectures the British

Monarch, “Mr. King,” on how to “get rid o’ the profit-system” (209). Jimmie’s chance

encounter with the contrite and meanwhile thoroughly reformed heir to Leesville’s

“Empire Machine Shop” in the trenches was to finalize his education, affording him a

glimpse into “the other side of the problem of riches and poverty” (243). Counter to the

author’s original plans, however, Jimmie Higgins’s last mentor becomes “a little Jew”

from New York, who has joined the Bolsheviks and once again radicalizes him in

defense of the new Soviet and brings him face to face with Colonel Nye, an infamous

Colorado “coal-strike” crusher who “had occupied himself in turning loose machine-guns

on tent-colonies filled with women and children” (252, 274). The short “democracy of

pain” turns out to be a chimera, as Jimmie must realize that the techniques of

oppression employed in the war abroad closely mirror those perfected in the class war at

home (240).

In 1909, Upton Sinclair had defended his position that future wars could be

prevented by sticking to the core principles of socialism; namely, “international solidarity

and universal brotherhood.” “We cannot depart from it in any detail, nor under any

circumstance,” Sinclair stated unequivocally, “without ceasing to be Socialists and

abandoning our cause.” 56 A mere nine years later, writing Jimmie Higgins, he apparently

tried to achieve that which by his own account was impossible. As Sinclair was at pains

to explain in a letter to John Reed, this abrupt turnabout had sprung from his newfound

insight that the “German menace” had to be subdued before “a free political democracy

anywhere else in the world” could arise. At the same time, though, he harbored no

illusions as to the “predatory” character of “American capitalism” and the corruption of

“American politics.”57 His challenge in writing Jimmie Higgins, then, consisted of

maintaining the fundamental justness of America’s “war to make the world save to

democracy” without ceasing to denounce the “predatory” character of America capitalism 56 Upton Sinclair, “War: A Manifesto Against It. An Appeal to the Socialist Movement,” Wilshire’s Magazine (Sept. 1909): 7. 57 On October 22, 1918, Upton Sinclair wrote in a letter to John Reed: “American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whenever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it. The same thing is not true of Germany, and until it was made true in Germany, there could be no free political democracy anywhere else in the world.”

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and the blatant deficiencies of the current democratic system. Obviously, this proved to

be increasingly problematic, as US American involvement in the war abroad not only

curtailed democratic freedoms at home, but also highlighted ethnic divisions, aggravated

domestic labor disputes, and, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, even raised the

fearsome specter of a violent social revolution.

The reader first meets Jimmie Higgins right around the outbreak of the European

War in fictional “Leesville, U.S.A.,” where he puts in twelve-hour workdays at “old

man” Granitch’s “Empire Machine Shops.” A rank-and-file member of the local chapter

of the Socialist Party, Jimmie quickly finds himself embroiled in the divisive debates

concerning the impact and consequences the war “over there” has on workers “over

here.” Although according to official party line “the fountain-head of the war was world-

capitalism, clamouring for markets, seeking to get rid of its surplus products,” it becomes

apparent that the local chapter is split on the issue along ethnic lines (21). “[O]n the one

side the Germans and the Austrians, the Russian Jews, the Irish, and the religious

pacifists; on the other side two English glass-blowers, a French waiter, and several

Americans, who, because of college education or other snobbish weakness, were

suspected of tenderness for John Bull” (51).

The narrator’s sympathies lie with the latter faction, ably represented by the

patriotic parlor Socialists Dr. Service and Lawyer Norwood. Cast as the voices of reason

and moderation, in party meeting after party meeting Comrades Dr. Service and Lawyer

Norwood seek to instill the workers with a faith in the American democratic system,

arguing that it is necessary “to forgo revolutionary agitation, until the Kaiser had been put

out of business” (146). Recalcitrant Jimmie Higgins, however, still imbued with his

creator’s erstwhile faith in “international solidarity and universal brotherhood,” firmly

sides with the former faction of self-declared “anti-nationalists” (47). To him, the

experience of continued repression and war-time profiteering outweighs the President’s

lofty “appeals for justice and democracy” shrouded in “the beautiful language of

idealism” (119). Contradicting Wilson’s vision of America as an essentially classless

society, the class consciousness of Jimmie and his fellow workers actually increases as

the war abroad sharpens the economic conflicts at home.

Initially, the switch from peace- to wartime production mollifies rank-and-file

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opposition to the war as employment opportunities abound. “Wages went up, almost for

the asking; never did the unskilled man have so much money in his pocket, while the man

who could pretend to any skill at all found himself in the plutocratic class” (39). But

soon it becomes apparent that only the factory owners and “speculators” profit from the

“boom conditions” (96). Inflation shoots through the roof and “men discovered the worm

in this luscious war-fruit; prices were going up almost as fast as wages—in some places

even faster. The sums you had to pay to the landlord surpassed belief… Food was scarce

and of poor quality; before long you found yourself begin asked to pay six cents for a

hunk of pie or a cup of coffee—and then seven cents, and then ten” (39). Before long,

“the shops were seething with discontent” and Jimmie finds himself at the forefront of

those who call for “strike!, strike!” (57-58).

In subsequent chapters, Sinclair shows how the government’s increasingly

ruthless interventions on behalf of the “shop owners” play into the hand of Socialist anti-

war agitators, who denounce the war as a scheme to further enrich the capitalists and to

“rivet[] forever on the people of America” a “system of militarism and suppression”

(147). Predictably, the strike at the Empire Machine Shop is crushed before it can gather

momentum. The National Guard moves in, Jimmie and his comrades are viciously

beaten and thrown into jail. Upon release, Jimmie and his fellow strike leaders find

themselves “blacklisted” not just in Leesville but in nearby Hubbardstown and all the

surrounding communities as well. Struggling to eek out a living by performing odd jobs,

Jimmie loses the last shred of hope in the promise of American democracy. Having

become too familiar with “the ways of American wage-slavery, euphemistically referred

to as ‘industrial serfdom,’” Jimmie Higgins’s “sense of loyalty’ is no longer “to his

country, but to his class which had been exploited, hounded, driven from pillar to post”

(91, 119). Society’s failure to care for those who produce its wealth, Sinclair

underscores, has turned Jimmie and his fellow “wage-slaves” into vaterlandslose

Gesellen—lads without a fatherland—whose shared experience of exploitation under

international capitalism render notions of citizenship nominal.

Meanwhile, the seeds of armed rebellion begin to sprout. Under the influence of

“Wild Bill,” a radical Socialist of Irish extraction, Jimmie contemplates renouncing his

pacifist stance in favor of taking up arms in the class war: “There were several things

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you could say. War gave the workers guns, and them to use them; how would it be if

some day they turned these guns about and fought their own battles?” (48). In the wake

of the worker’s uprising in Petrograd as well as Wilson’s post-election efforts to “sweep

the country into war,” Sinclair shows, such radical thoughts begin to take a wider hold

among the laboring class (117). During a “great mass-meeting in celebration of the

Russian Revolution,” Comrade Smith, “editor of the ‘Worker,’” draws a “clamour of

applause from the audience” when he announces:

I am not a pacifist, I am not opposed to war—it is merely that I purpose to

choose the war in which I fight. If they try to put a gun into my hands, I

shall not refuse to take it—not much, for I and my fellow wage-slaves

have long wished for guns! But I shall use my own judgment as to where

I aim that gun—whether at enemies in front of me, or at enemies behind

me—whether at my brothers, the workingmen of Germany, or at my

oppressors, the exploiters of Wall Street, their newspaper lackeys and

military martinets. (121)

Apparently, the danger Sinclair perceives here—that America’s engagement in the world

war might trigger an uncontrollable class war on the homefront—was indeed quite

tangible. For in the years leading up to America’s war entry, Smith’s militant rhetoric

resounded in the popular verse and prose of many IWW propagandists. Seeking to

demonstrate the folly of allowing class loyalties to be supplanted by national loyalties,

the IWW journal Solidarity, for example, ran a poem that admonished its readers in no

uncertain terms to: “Unite! unite! for your own fight / You slaves of shop and mills, /

How much better far such battles are / Than all the streaming ways of war / Where slaves

fight slaves to kill.”58

To Sinclair, it seems, such talk of impending class warfare posed a challenge to

his notion of an evolutionary socialism that would grow out of the American radical

tradition and draw on images of Jeffersonian agrarianism, Jacksonian leveling, John

Brown anti-slavery, and Lincoln Republicanism. Thus Sinclair attempts to style Jimmie

into a more home-grown revolutionary by sending him “back to the bosom of his ancient

Mother [Nature]” (92). Working as a farmhand, “six miles out in the country,” the “little

58 Ralph Chaplin, “Slaves, to the Slaughter!” Solidarity (Aug. 1914): 2.

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Socialist” Jimmie regains some of his old “cheerfulness” as “all summer long he

ploughed and harrowed and hoed, he tended horses and cows and pigs and chickens, and

drove to town with farm-truck to be sold” (92). Most importantly, though, it is during his

stint at the farm that he meets “old Peter Drew,” a jovial farmer who “had been in the

first battle of Bull Run, and had fought with the Army of Northern Virginia all the way to

Richmond” (93). The setting for Jimmie’s incipient Americanization is appropriately

picturesque: resting “under the shade of an elm tree by the kitchen-door,” Peter Drew

tells Jimmie of bygone days and lectures him on the historical achievements of his

country. Impressed by the “kind, gentle, generous” manner of the Civil War veteran,

“little by little” Jimmie senses “that there might be such a thing as the soul of America”

and begins to wonder if “[p]erhaps there was really more to the country than Wall Street

speculators and grafting politicians, policemen with clubs and militiamen with bayonets

to stick into the bodies of workingmen who tried to improve their lot in life” (95).

Eventually, however, the halcyon days of summer, which afford Jimmie a

nostalgic glimpse of a rural past that is fundamentally at odds with the 20th century

working class experience, are bound to come to an end. Once again confronted with the

grim realities of a twelve-hour workday in the ammunition factory, Jimmie averts his

eyes from the residual promise of liberation, represented by old Peter Drew, and looks

hopefully toward the emergence of a “newer and broader kind of democracy,”

represented by the “workers of Russia” (118). Though still sentimentally attached to the

ways of old Peter Drew, who “had made his impression not so much by his arguments,

which [he] considered sixty years out of date, as by his personality,” Jimmie cannot

sustain his budding nativist faith in the self-redemptory “American soul.” Reflecting

Sinclair’s own sporadic doubts as to the feasibility of reforming the capitalist system

from within, Jimmie and Wild Bill decide to “take the road” after the police had shut

down yet another Socialist convention and carded off its keynote speakers to prison.

Using language reminiscent of his abovementioned letter to Wilson, an obviously

indignant Sinclair writes: “The two of them had to stand there and see the fundamental

constitutional rights of American citizens set at naught, to see liberty trampled in the dust

beneath the boots of a brutal soldiery, to see justice strangled and raped in the innermost

shrine of her temple” (131).

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Sinclair, it becomes apparent, is not blind to the arguments of the majority of anti-

war Socialists, who, pointing to the “suppression of their papers,” wondered aloud about

“the use of fighting for Democracy abroad, if you had to sacrifice every particle of

Democracy at home in order to win the fight?” (147). Nor does he flinch from explaining

how “a social system based upon oppression and knavery” induces the “radical part of

labor” to promulgate acts of sabotage and violence (138). Thus, following his retreat into

America’s rural past, Jimmie finds himself “in the front-line trenches of the class war”

when he joins a band of wobblies (139). Just as old Peter Drew had impressed upon him

the lessons of the American Revolution and the Civil War, “here around the

campfires…the guerillas of the class struggle” instill Jimmie with the communal memory

“of their sufferings and their exploits” (139). Although Jimmie, unlike Wild Bill, never

fully espouses wobblie strategies, he comes to apprehend the suffering and pain that

compels the “blanket stiffs” to militant resistance: “These men wandered about from one

job to another, at the mercy of the seasons and the fluctuations of industry. They were

deprived of votes, and therefore their status of citizens; they were deprived of a chance to

organize, and therefore of their status as human begins” (139). Always susceptible to his

surroundings, Jimmie not only perceives the elemental “justness of their cause” and

learns “the all-precious lesson of Solidarity,” but also begins to identify himself with

these outlaws, who at bottom “had kept their gentleness, their sweetness of soul” (140-

141). Upon leaving the wobblies, Jimmie fancies himself “no longer a blind and helpless

victim of a false economic system, but a revolutionist, fully class-conscious, trained in a

grim school” (138).

As it turns out, Jimmie’s new life as radical labor agitator in wartime America is

fraught with dangers. Labeled a “traitor” and a “criminal” by the “capitalistic press,”

Jimmie on several occasions only narrowly escapes the patriotic wrath of vigilante

groups, threatening to lynch him on the spot. His wobblie associates fare even worse.

Shortly after Jimmie’s departure, local militiaman “surround[] the camp,” shoot one of

the wobblies, and load the rest of them “into half a dozen automobiles” (141). But these

and other incidents of governmental oppression—such as the increasingly “fashionable”

arrest of Socialists and the jailing of “conscientious objectors”—merely reinforce

Jimmie’s resolve to wage “war on the country” (138). Feeling “more than ever a part of

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society,” Jimmie grows “fairly happy again—happier than he had thought he could ever

be” for “he had the greatest thing in the world to live for, the vision of a just and sane

society” (144).

“The second revolution, the uprising of the Bolsheviki” in November of 1917

further strengthens Jimmie’s conviction that an international revolution is afoot and that

the hour of the American workmen has struck. (153). Having joined a “Socialist local in

Irontown, still active and determined, in spite of the fact that its office had been raided by

the police,” a jubilant Jimmie celebrates “the first proletarian government in history” with

his comrades (151, 153). Anticipating that the “German proletariat” would follow the

lead of the “Russian proletariat,” Jimmie and his comrades call for another strike,

denouncing “the capitalists, making fervid speeches about patriotism, but refusing to give

up the whip-hand over their wage-slaves” (158).

Sinclair might have harbored similar hopes that the Russian Revolution signaled

the internal collapse of the European War. But when the German government first

crushed a series of solidarity strikes within its own country and then sent its troops deep

into the territory of Bolshevik Russia, he seemed more convinced than ever that the

“German menace” had to be overcome before “a free political democracy anywhere else

in the world” could come to pass. Moreover, Wilson’s overtures toward labor appeared

to validate John Spargo’s plan to “seize upon [the war’s] opportunities to extend our

collectivist program, and demand the representation of labor upon all boards and

governing bodies formed during the war.”59

So Jimmie’s conversion from an anti- to pro-war stance occurs at the height of

both his class consciousness and his commitment to the international revolution. Stunned

by the willingness of the German workers to force the punitive peace treaty of Brest-

Litovsk upon their brethrens, Jimmie’s mind is “literally torn in half; he found himself,

every twenty-four hours of his life, of two absolutely contradictory and diametrically

opposite points of view. He would vow destruction to the hated German armies; and then

he would turn about and vow destruction to the men at home who were managing the job

of destroying the German armies” (157). Cast as a simplistic either-or proposition,

Jimmie’s decision to “take the plunge” and to join the army as a machinist is a foregone

59 Qtd. In David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1955) 97.

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conclusion, especially since the national war effort appears to miraculously erase all class

distinctions and antagonisms at home (176).

Returning to Leesville, Jimmie first encounters a platoon of marching recruits,

among whom he spots “a son of Ashton Chalmers, president of the First National Bank of

Leesville, being order about and hauled over the coals by an ex-blacksmith’s helper”

(162). Next, he learns from his old friends and comrades that “the government sent an

arbitration commission” that “broke old Granitch down—made him recognise the union

and grant the basic eight hour days” (167). And finally, Comrade Emil, who had already

been converted, hands Jimmie a speech by Ashton Chalmers in which he admonishes his

fellow bankers: “We face a new era, when labour is coming into its own. If we do not

want to be left behind as derelicts, we shall have to get busy and do our part to bring in

this new era, which otherwise will come with bloodshed and destruction” (167).

Jimmie’s last impulse to resist “unthinking militarism” is broken when even Comrade

Stankewitz, a self-declared “anti-nationalist,” flatly states that “the revolution kin vait”

and announces his plans to enlist (159, 177).

Predictably enough, Sinclair’s subsequent descriptions of Jimmie’s heroic feats

in the fight against the “Huns” read like a condensed version of Arthur Guy Emprey’s

best-selling potboiler Over the Top (1917). Having witnessed all sorts of German

atrocities, including submarine and gas attacks as well as the crucifixion of an English

sergeant, Jimmie, volunteering as a motorcycle dispatcher, single-handedly staves off

the German advance at Château-Thierry.60 Swept away by patriotic frenzy, Jimmie, at

least for the moment, forgets both the lessons of the “class-war” he had learned among

the wobblies and his earlier fears that “the system of militarism and suppression” might

be “riveted forever on the people of America” (147). To him, as well as to Sinclair, the

war appears to be a purifying, redemptory event that “would lead to vast changes in the

world” (187). Having crushed the Prussian Junkerdom, Jimmie foresees, “the people

would nevermore let themselves be hoodwinked and exploited as they had” (187).

Brought together in a “Great Crusade” to purge the world of the last autocratic monarchy 60 As Paul Fussell points out in The Great War and Modern Memory, rumors that the Germans cruxified enemy soldiers were widespread among Allied troops and often represented as fact in newspapers. On the front, the “troops readily embarced the image as quintessentially symbolic of their own suffering and ‘sacrifice,’” Fussell explains (118). In the hinterland, the cruxifiction story became an emblem for the “Great Crusade” against the barbarian Huns.

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on the continent, old class distinctions will diminish so that the American people can

finish their historical task of building Lincoln’s egalitarian republic.

To underscore this point, Sinclair has Jimmie run into his former nemesis, Lacey

Granitch, “young lord of Leesville” (240). What follows is a sentimental scene of class

reconciliation in the trenches. War, due to its close association with death, the great

equalizer, has meanwhile taught this once “proud, free, rich, and young aristocrat” the

meaning of suffering and imparted him with “respect for his fellowmen” (240). Thus,

when Jimmie tells him “about starvation and neglect, about overwork and

unemployment, about strikes and jails, and manifold oppressions,” Lacey is first “moved”

and then begins to recognize the inherent flaws within the capitalistic system (241).

Gaining insights into each other’s “side of the problems of riches and poverty,” the two

men “from opposite poles of social life” become fast friends (243, 239). In parting,

Lacey, apparently on route to becoming a moderate Socialist himself, promises his new

friend “to read” all of the recommended “books,” leaving Jimmie with “a vision of the

Empire Machine Shops turned over to the control of the workers” (246).

But Jimmie’s wartime education does not end with these sanguine images

of peaceful collectivization and amicable class reconciliation. In yet another reversal,

the final three chapters of Jimmie Higgins seem to bear out Marx’s prediction that “the

growth of the of the international character of the capitalistic regime” will worsen “the

mass of misery, slavery, degradation.”61 Shipped off to Archangel in Northern Russia,

the “little Socialist machinist from Leesville, USA,” who just a few months ago had

changed the “whole course of the world’s history,” must suddenly discover that he has

been made part of a reactionary coup d’état to turn back the clock of history, when he

learns that the goal of “this expedition” was not “to fight the Germans…but to fight the

Bolsheviki!” (234).

Recognizing that Wilsonian internationalism had turned into a ruse to bolster the

capitalist system of “wage-slavery” worldwide, Jimmie’s subdued hatred for “corrupt

politicians” in cahoots with “greedy capitalists” reemerges ever more vehemently,

revealing not a little of Sinclair’s own sense of betrayal: “He had swallowed their

propaganda, he had filled himself up with their patriotism, he had dropped everything to

61 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977) 929.

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come and fight for Democracy…And now they had broken their bargain with him, they

had brought him here and ordered him to fight working men—just as if he had been a

militiaman at home! Democracy indeed!” (251). 62 The bitter irony of Jimmie’s

situation, fittingly revealed in the “wilderness of ice and desolation” under the “Arctic

Circle,” could not be any clearer (252).63 Having shut out his class consciousness,

ignored his experience, and disregarded the advise of his “irreconcilable” comrades,

Jimmie sees his greatest fears come true as “bound and gagged, lashed to the chariot of

Militarism” he “was to take part in destroying the first proletarian government in

history!” (250).

Before Sinclair has his self-ensnared protagonist “escape” into sheer madness,

however, Jimmie makes one last and desperate attempt to reaffirm his dedication to

“international working-class solidarity” (281, 256). Painfully aware that the “fight for

democracy” had further curtailed his “rights as a citizen,” Jimmie recalls the pain of

suffering inflicted upon his class. Stirred by mental recollections of police beatings and

unscrupulous “shop owners,” he reassumes his role as a “soldier” in the “class-war that

had been going on for ages,” vowing to put up “a struggle” (140, 248). When he meets a

radical “little Jew” from New York in Siberia, Jimmie therefore eagerly seizes the offered

opportunity to distribute leaflets among the American troops, calling on them to cross the

lines and to join the Russian Revolutionary Army’s “march to the victory of freedom”

(256).

Jimmie’s revolutionary propaganda falls on fertile ground, but before long his

activities raise suspicion and he is thrown into jail. There he comes face-to-face with

Colonel Nye, an infamous Colorado coal strike crusher, who subjects Jimmie to the

“water cure” and other such tortures regularly employed by American “police-authorities

in small town and villages” (270). In spite of horrendous pain, Jimmie does not break

62 On August 20, 1918, in an open “Letter to American Workers,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin made a similar point, writing that “the American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires, and find themselves playing the role of hired thugs who, for the benefit of wealthy scoundrels, throttled the Philippines in 1898 on the pretext of ‘liberating’ them, and are throttling the Russian Socialist Republic in 1918 on the pretext of ‘protecting’ it from the Germans.” V. I. Lenin, “Letter to American Workers,” Collected Works, 4th ed., vol. 28, ed. George Hanna (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966) 62-75. 63 In Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), Northrop Frye describes the “ironic mode” at length as “the mythos of winter.” See esp. pages 223-39.

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and stalwartly refuses to divulge the names of his coconspirators. Hung up by his thumbs

in a damp prison cell, Jimmie’s private suffering takes on a larger, symbolic meaning

when he hears a “feeble whisper” shortly before his mind cracks: “You are the

revolution. You are social justice, struggling for life in this world. You are humanity,

setting its face to the light, striving to reach a new goal, to put behind it an old horror”

(269). Jimmie, in short, is turned into a Christ-figure for the Socialist movement.

Jimmie Higgins might lose his lonely struggle, but his personal suffering, endured

on behalf of untold thousands of revolutionaries, becomes an indelible part of the

collective working class memory of World War I, Sinclair insists in these final pages.

“Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical

knowledge,” which “appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the

task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden,” Walter Benjamin

would later write in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (260). Sinclair’s view of

the transmission of “historical knowledge” toward the end of Jimmie Higgins is strikingly

similar. The “story of [Jimmie’s] experiences” will not just be remembered, the narrator

promises, but the shared memory of his representative plight will in due course spark

revolutionary action. “There will appear men and women animated by a fierce and

blazing bitterness,” ready to seize “‘all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred

and fifty years of unrequited toil’” and to repay “‘every drop of blood drawn with the

lash’” (282). Ending Jimmie Higgins with a quote by Lincoln, Sinclair, not unlike Lenin

in his three letters to the “American Workers,” hitches the stalled wagon of American

self-emancipation onto the steam gathering locomotive of the Bolshevik Revolution,

which is “leading the way for mankind to a newer and broader kind of democracy” (240).

To be sure, Jimmie Higgins might show Upton Sinclair to be one of Lenin’s

“craven, half-hearted ‘socialists’ who are thoroughly imbued with the prejudices of

bourgeois democracy, who yesterday defended ‘their’ imperialist governments and today

limit themselves to platonic ‘protests’ against military intervention in Russia.”64 Still, all

told, Sinclair’s misguided foray into jingoistic nationalism might have actually brought

him closer to Lenin’s view that “bourgeois parliamentarism” can no longer serve the

64 V. I. Lenin, “Letter to the Workers of Europe and America,” Collected Works, 4th ed., vol. 28, ed. George Hanna (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966) 453-77.

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workers’ interests in the wake of the Bolshevist Revolution.65 Assessing the success of

Bolshevist strategies to establish a Russian “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the January

1919 edition of his journal, Sinclair suggested that even within “advanced democracies”

such as the USA violent revolutions might become necessary, unless the government sees

to the “speedy and ungrudging concession of the workers’ demands for the full product of

their labor and full control of the conditions of their labor.”66

“Those Socialists who had been trapped into supporting the President’s war

programme would wake up some morning with a fearful dark-brown taste in their

mouths,” Jimmie had augured in chapter XIV (148). In the wake of the Palmer Raids

and the ensuing Red Scare of 1919, the “dark-brown taste” in Sinclair’s own mouth must

have seemed almost unbearable. “Retrospectively,” Mari Jo Buhle judges, 1919 marked

“the close of a distinct era in the history of American radicalism,”.67 And indeed, by

most accounts, the worker’s movement lay dormant throughout the 1920s as Harding’s

administration returned to a politics of “normalcy” and negated many of the gains labor

had achieved during wartime. Moreover, amidst the hedonistic and self-absorbed

“flapper culture” of the “Roaring Twenties,” youthful rebelliousness was directed inward

and the “story of [Jimmie’s] experiences” quickly fell into oblivion. “Look,” Dos

Passos’s John Andrews explains his decision to go A.W.O.L., “it’s a purely personal

matter…I just want to get away” (393). It took another decade before “men and women

animated by a fierce and blazing bitterness” would again rally around the battle flag of

socialism that had held such promise yet was so battered during the First World War.

Not quite unexpectedly, it was Upton Sinclair himself who had a hand in rallying

the next generation of radical political activists. In 1934, the old muckraker turned

politician swept the Democratic primary for governor of California, frightening a

65 On January 21, 1919, in the above cited “Letter to the Workers of Europe and America,” Lenin also proclaimed then end of parliamentary cooperation: “The socialists, the fighters for the emancipation of the working people from exploitation, had to utilise the bourgeois parliaments as a platform, as a base, for propaganda, agitation and organisation as long as our struggle was confined to the framework of the bourgeois system. Now that world history has brought up the question of destroying the whole of that system, of overthrowing and suppressing the exploiters, of passing from capitalism to socialism, it would be a shameful betrayal of the proletariat, deserting to its class enemy, the bourgeoisie, and being a traitor and a renegade to confine oneself to bourgeois parliamentarism, to bourgeois democracy, to present it as “democracy” in general, to obscure its bourgeois character, to forget that as long as capitalist property exists universal suffrage is an instrument of the bourgeois state” (458). 66 “What About Bolshevism?”, Upton Sinclair’s 9 (Jan. 1919): 4. 67 Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981) 318.

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comfortably entrenched establishment with the prospect of a Socialist governor of the

nation’s most volatile state. Noting how quickly Sinclair’s grass-roots campaign had

gathered momentum, the New York Times called it “the first serious movement against

the profit-system in the United States.” And even though Sinclair, like “the Candidate”

Debs before him, was in the end defeated at the ballot box, his bid, as Greg Mitchell

points out, both “energized” and “radicalized a whole generation of activists, many of

them artists, performers, intellectuals, and writers.”68

IV

Perhaps one of the most poignant episodes of the Great War on the American homefront

occurred on August 2, 1917 in southeastern Oklahoma. Indignant about the war-time

profiteering of wealthy landlords and incensed by the new federal conscription law, a

motley group of radical tenant farmers staged what has since become known as the

“Green Corn Rebellion.” Believing rumors that a nationwide workers’ uprising was

imminent, the would-be revolutionaries, organized under the banner of the syndicalist

Working Class Union (WCU), ambushed the Seminole County sheriff, cut down

telegraph lines, and burned several railroad bridges. On the following morning, the band

of armed rebels gathered on a farmstead in Pontotoc County, raising the red flag and

awaiting marching orders. They anticipated to shortly join thousands of other farmers

from all over the state in a march on Washington that would topple the government.

The collation of white, black, and Indian farmers waited in vein. Unbeknownst to

the rebels, the SPA had worked behind the scene to discourage other WCU chapters from

participating, because it was feared that an armed rebellion might give the government

yet another pretext to jail leftists indiscriminately. A hastily assembled posse of

“patriots” made short shrift of the revolt that was left without reinforcements. When the

smoke had cleared, 3 men lay dead and 450 others were rounded up for partaking in the

insurgence. One-hundred-fifty rebels were eventually convicted, many of whom served

out long sentences in the infamous Leavenworth penitentiary.69

68 Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of a Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992). 69 For background on the Green Corn Rebellion see Nigel Anthony Sellars, Oil Wheat & Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905-1930 (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998) as well as Sam Marcy, Bolsheviks and War: Lessons for Today’s Anti-War Movement (New York: World View

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Eighteen years later, Pontotoc County native William Cunningham fictionalized

these events in his first novel, The Green Corn Rebellion.70 Thirty-three-year-old

Cunningham, a journalist, teacher, and aspiring writer from the “dustbowl,” was among

those who had followed Sinclair’s election campaign in California with growing

enthusiasm. Raised in a household of staunch Eugene V. Debs supporters, Cunningham

as well as his younger sister, Agnes “Sis” Cunningham—the folk protest singer and co-

publisher of the small but influential 1960’s magazine Broadside—had developed a deep

commitment to the labor cause early on in life.71 Upton Sinclair’s run for governor, “Sis”

Cunningham recollects in her autobiography, inspired them to place their art fully into the

service of politics.72 The Green Corn Rebellion was a direct outgrowth of this

commitment to political art as well as William Cunningham’s involvement with the

Oklahoma’s Writer’s Project, which he headed from 1935 to 1938 and under

whose auspices he had previously collected Indian folktales and researched local labor

history.

Viewed within the political and cultural contexts of the mid-1930s, Cunningham’s

The Green Corn Rebellion furthermore betrays its origins in the Popular Front movement

that sought, among many other things, to recover or reinvent a distinctly American

tradition of political radicalism. Following the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain,

and Hitler in Germany, the Popular Front was initially conceived by the 7th World

Forum, 1985). An earlier eye-witness account from a “yellow” perspective is provided in Oscar Ameringer’s If You Don’t Weaken (New York: Holt, 1940). 70 Published in 1935 by Vanguard in New York, the novel was at best a moderate success, but nevertheless proved him to be enough of a literary man to receive the appointment as director of the Oklahoma Writer’s Project in the same year. His appointment lasted only until 1938. Due to his radical leftist leanings a controversial figure from the start, Cunningham was replaced by Jim Thompson. Cunningham moved to Washington, where he worked for two years with the Federal Writers Project. Throughout the 1940s, Cunningham gathered stories for the Soviet news agency TASS in New York City. Aside from two nonfiction works, How to Work Your Way Through College (1927) and The Real Book About Daniel Boone (1952), he wrote numerous short stories that appeared in Harper and Collier. In addition, Cunningham published altogether three novels, The Green Corn Rebellion (1935), Pretty Boy (1936), and Danny (1953), coauthored with his wife, Sarah Brown. William Cunningham died in 1967. For a brief biographical sketch, see Larry O’Dell, “Cunningham, William,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture (Oklahoma City: Forthcoming, 2007) < http://www.ok-history.mus.ok.us/enc/cunningham.htm>. 71 Having been blacklisted for their political views during the McCarthy era, “Sis” Cunningham and her husband, the writer Gordon Friesen, launched Broadside in 1962. The magazine was instrumental in promoting the careers of many singer-songwriters, publishing the first works of such artists as Bob Dylan, Janis Ian, Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Tom Paxton, as well as the works of more established figures, including Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger. 72 Agnes Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, Red Dust and Broadside: A Joint Autobiography (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999).

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Congress of the Comintern as an antifascist coalition of Communists, Socialists, and

Liberals. In retrospect, the Popular Front movement has often been described as nothing

more than a communist ploy—financed and directed by Moscow—to harness leftists

sentiments during the depression years. Particularly in France and the United Sates,

however, the Popular Front promptly evolved into a populist culture movement, uniting

left-leaning writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, literary critics, and movie makers

from diverse backgrounds and with divergent political agendas in a common fight for

civil liberties and sweeping social reforms. Moving away from scathing critiques of

American middle class life such as Sinclair Lewis’s Babitt (1922), Popular Front artists

and intellectuals began to represent the experiences of an “other,” invisible America—

one peopled with factory workers, immigrants, and dispossessed farmers—in order to

promote solidarity across class lines. Documentaries such as Lewis Hine’s’ Men At Work

(1932), Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor’s An American Exodus (1935), novels

such as Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), poetical works such as Carl Sandburg’s

The People, Yes (1936), and innovative musical pieces such as Marc Blitzstein’s opera

The Cradle will Rock (1937), not simply sought to depict the daily hardships endured by

immigrant coal miners, urban textile workers, black sharecroppers, and displaced

farmers, but to highlight the determination and ingenuity with which the disposed masses

struggle for a better life in a better America. The result of this convergence of working

class insurgency, Marxist ideology, social democratic politics, and artistic commitment

was a new, if incomplete, “cultural enfranchisement” of working people as well as the

saturation of popular culture with class-based images and themes.73 “Under the sign of

the ‘people’,” Michael Denning writes, “this Popular Front public culture sought to forge

ethnic and racial alliances, mediating between Anglo American culture, the culture of

ethnic workers, and African American culture, in part by reclaiming the figure of

‘America’ itself, imagining an Americanism that would provide a usable past.”74

In seeking to provide “a usable past” that points toward the possibilities of social

transformation in the present, William Cunningham, like many other young midwestern,

southwestern, and western writers of the 1930s, contributed to the rise of what Benjamin

73 See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996) 329. See esp. xvi-xx, 3-21, 56-64. 74 Denning 9.

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Botkin has termed “proletarian regionalism.”75 Scorned by orthodox Marxist critics such

as Granville Hicks, regionalism had been viewed throughout the 1920s and early 1930s

as an irredeemably reactionary genre that glorified past ways of life and forestalled social

changes. The white supremacist nostalgia evoked in many regionalist works by the

southern Agrarians certainly reinforced such views.76 In its Popular Front reincarnation

as “proletarian regionalism” or “sectional realism,” however, the representation of folk

expression gradually came to be seen as a literary “means of understanding (for purposes

of revolution) our apparently standardized but deeply divided and enigmatic native

life.”77 Following B. A. Botkin’s influential redefinition of the study of folklore, rural

America was no longer regarded nostalgically as an insular space wherein old traditions

and values had somehow weathered the storms of urbanization, industrialization,

mechanization, and population shifts. Rather, in highlighting the inherent diversity of

American regions, their inhabitants, and their customs, Botkin and others formulated a

dynamic view of American culture “in which cosmopolitanism and provincialism were

complementary, not hostile, approaches.” Where modernists such as T.S. Eliot “saw

fragmentation and the threat of cultural decay,” notes Jerrold Hirsch, “Botkin saw

pluralism and the opportunity for creating a new revitalized culture and democratic

community based on knowledge of diverse folk traditions.78 To “discount the spirit of a

region, its customs, folklore and native speech,” Constance Rourke therefore argued in

1933, would mean to overlook “the humble influences of place and kinship and common

emotion that accumulate through generations to shape and condition a distinctive native

consciousness.” Not mere “intellectual synthesis,” but folk expression provides “the

basis from which…a revolutionary literature can develop,” Rourke maintained.79

Praised by novelist Jack Conroy as “an excellent specimen of sectional

realism…of a variety too long neglected by our contemporary proletarian novelist,” The

Green Corn Rebellion illustrates 1930s literary attempts to salvage revolutionary images

preserved in regional folk expression that bespeak a long overlooked tradition of 75 Denning 133. 76 See, for example, Stark Young’s regionalist novels Heaven Trees (1926) and So Red the Rose (1934), which romanticize antebellum plantation life and mourn the loss of old-fashioned Southern values. 77 Constance Rourke, “The Significance of Sections,” New Republic ( Sept. 20, 1933): 148-51. 78 Jerrold Hirsch, “Folklore in the Making: B. A. Botkin,” The Journal of American Folklore 100.395 (1987): 11-12. 79 Rourke 149 & 151.

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American radicalism.80 Hence, rather than once again summoning up the great figures of

the American Revolution and the Civil War, Depression era works of proletarian

regionalism such as Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion and Meridel Le Sueur’s

The Girl (1939) seek to capture the localized emergence of (proto-)revolutionary

sentiments among Oklahoma’s impecunious farmers and St. Paul’s browbeaten working

girls respectively. According to Le Sueur, the role of “the so-called writer” in this

endeavor was that of a sympathetic ethnographer or scribe, who records the quotidian

trials, failures, and triumphs of the hitherto voiceless segments of society. Writing of

“the great and heroic women of the depression” women who had provided her with the

raw material for The Girl, Le Sueur recalls, “they looked upon me as a woman who wrote

(like the old letter writers) and who strangely and wonderfully insisted that their lives

were not defeated, trashed, defenseless.”81 Equally insistent on giving import to the

struggles of the ostensibly vanquished, Cunningham set out to mine local “word-of-

mouth legend,” turning his “bare-footed, dust- and sandstorm-covered” narrative into a

novelized rendition of a folkloristically persevered counterhistory that both breaks

official silence about and challenges official accounts of the 1917 Oklahoma uprising.82

At the time of the novel’s inception, little had been written about the Green Corn

Rebellion. “The war-time censorship saw to it that such events were ignored in the daily

papers,” Conroy explains in his review of the Green Corn Rebellion.83 The few

newspaper and government reports that did deal with the Green Corn Rebellion without

fail ignored the festering tensions that had lead up to it.84 Neither the preceding land

allotment revolts of the Seminoles and Creeks, nor the longstanding protests of white

farmers against “predatory lending practices,” nor the growing public opposition to the

Great War and its resultant conscription laws were given as motives for the uprising.85

Instead, contemporary accounts as well as official histories cast the rebellion as a

80 Jack Conroy, “The Green Corn Rebellion,” Windsor Quarterly 3.1 (1935) 76-77. 81 Le Sueur, Meridel, The Girl (Los Angeles: West End Pres, 1978) 150. 82 Conroy 77. 83 Ibid. 84 Two brief surveys of government reports on the Green Corn Rebellion can be found in Garin Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red: The Gospel of Socialism in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1910-1924 (Westport, Conn., 1976) and James R Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 (Baton Rouge, 1978). 85 Burbank 126.

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spontaneous insurrection by a “shiftless” lumpenproletariat that had brought economic

despair onto itself and hardly knew why it had taken up arms. “In many respects,”

Charles D. Beard assessed in a 1932 monograph, “these men were little more than serfs

or peons, slaves to the ‘cash crop’ demanded by their landlords. Yet they did but little to

help themselves. When they did have money, they spent it freely and often foolishly.

The practice of saving was generally neglected and they lived from crop to crop, year to

year, vaguely dissatisfied, always dreaming of a new country somewhere.”86 In a similar

vein, the role played by Native and African Americans in the rebellion was habitually

belittled and disparaged.87 Remarked Charles D. Bush: “A few Negroes, usually coerced

into joining the disaffected party, and a very small number of irreconcilable Snake

Indians made up a minority racial group, but the vast majority of the people were

white.”88 The very idea that hitherto seemingly “docile” blacks and notoriously

“obstinate” Indians had not only become conscious of a common enemy, but moreover

proved capable of forming an interracial alliance, was apparently too frightening to be

acknowledged.

The most pointed critique of the Green Corn Rebellion came not from the

right, which reveled in its apparent defeat, but from within the anti-war left, which

struggled to remain operative amidst the tempest of war-induced patriotism. Oscar

Ameringer’s view of the rebellion in his political memoir, If You Don’t Weaken (1940),

exemplifies the official SPA position. Ameringer, who had been dispatched to Oklahoma

by the party leadership with instructions to quell the simmering revolt before it could

erupt, deemed the “ill-advised” Green Corn Rebellion as one of the “worst” things that

could have happened during the war. 89 Blaming the Oklahoma rebels for the subsequent

arrest of “thousands of our members,” Ameringer concluded that the “regrettable”

rebellion resulted from a lack of party discipline among the isolated “farmers,” who,

86 Charles D. Bush, “The Green Corn Rebellion,” Thesis (University of Oklahoma, 1932) 25. 87 See Erik M. Zissu, “Conscription, Sovereignty, and Land: American Indian Resistance During World War I, Pacific Historical Review 64. 4 (1995): 537-67. 88 Bush 24. Anecdotal accounts collected among longtime residents paint a very different picture. An “elderly Seminole Muskogee Indian woman,” interviewed by Dunbar-Ortiz, remembers that her tribe had “conceived of the rebellion” and that “it was not easy to persuade our poor white and black brothers and sisters to rise up.” Others recall that “a group of African-Americans set off the rebellion” and that the rebels, among them “hundreds of whites and Muskogee Indians,” were “well organized.” 89 See and Oscar Ameringer, If You Don’t Weaken (New York: Holt, 1940).

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“naturally given to direct action or self-help,” were too ignorant to understand the “policy

and tactics of the Socialists.”90 The “Party” therefore opted to quickly forget this “most

unfortunate” episode.

Yet, as Roxanna Dunbar-Ortiz relates in her autobiography, Red Dirt: Growing

Up Okie, the memory of the Green Corn Rebellion continued to live on in the oral

traditions of Oklahoma’s impoverished black, white, and Indian tenant farmers. Among

the rural poor, Dunbar-Ortiz recalls, the “Green Corn Rebellion” was not viewed as a

“defeat,” but as “a great moment of heroism, and a moment of unity, betrayed by the

‘electric-light city’ Socialists, who scorned it.”91 By the mid-1930s, as long treks of

dispossessed Oklahoma farmer made their arduous journey to California, a politically

energized Cunningham set out to actively recall and reevaluate the lessons of the Green

Corn Rebellion. In his resulting novel, Cunningham evidently seeks to recuperate those

folkloristically preserved moments of “heroism” and “unity,” posting them forward as

early harbingers of the Popular Front Movement.

V

Premature as it turns to be, the celebratory gathering of the united “farmer’s army” upon

“the hill,” where “whites… danced with the Indians” and “Negroes were treated just like

whites,” provides the novel’s guiding image of things to come (227, 218, 230).

Moreover, contesting official accounts according to which the rebellion was an apolitical

riot by transient “hillbillies” from “Arkansas, Tennessee, and other Southern States,” The

Green Corn Rebellion maps out the emergence of a revolutionary alliance between

Oklahoma’s white “dirt farmers,” black sharecroppers, and dispossessed Indians, who

apprehend that their life-stifling economic misery is the result of a repressive political

system, tailored to suit the exploitive aims of “the bankers…the landowners…the big

railroad…and…Standard Oil”(165).92 Drawing upon a well-established pattern in

regionalist literature, the novel privileges the unforgiving yet “authentic” rural experience

as the native seedbed of revolutionary sentiments, while disparaging the deceitfully

comfortable urban life as a bulwark of reactionary conformism. “When you thought

about the cities you wondered how anything could happen that would change things,” Jim

90 Ameringer 186. 91 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (New York: Verso, 1997). 92 Bush 26.

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Tetley reflects in one of his many pensive moments (203). “So damned many people,

and you felt like most of them never even heard of socialism. Patriotic, and ready to go

to war and fight for the capitalists. How could you ever knock anything into their

hands?” (203-204).

Once the emergence of a unifying working class consciousness has been firmly

anchored within the farmers’ shared experience of economic and political oppression,

though, Cunningham’s novel, siding in part with the official SPA assessment, depicts the

rebellion as having been triggered by a rash impulse to hasten “the big shake up” (99).

“The American people ain’t ready,” the defeated rebel leader Mack McGee judges

retrospectively and acknowledges, “Us fellers went off half-cocked. “We wasn’t ready to

overthrow the government. You can’t get ready overnight or in a month, or even in a

year” (252). Faced with the deadly prospect of becoming cannon fodder in “a rich man’s

war,” Cunningham stresses, the already desperate farmers jumped at the promise of

revolution, even though they had been utterly unprepared for it (119). But in an obvious

slight against dithering SPA officers such as Oscar Ameringer (who makes two brief

appearances as Fred Niek in the novel), Cunningham also lays blame for the rebels’

rashness at the doorsteps of “these damn big Socialists in Oklahoma City,” whose “big

talk” had excited “farmer’s into raisn’ hell” without properly preparing and organizing

them for the task (247, 253).93 The failure of the Green Corn Rebellion, Cunningham has

his characters suggest, is not so much a reflection of the farmer’s ignorance as of

inconsistencies within the SPA’s perpetually shifting “policy and tactics.” “The Socialist

party ain’t got enough good leaders,” Mack McGee observes, concluding in Leninist

fashion that the eventual success of the proletariat’s emancipation will rest in the hands of

a young “vanguard” of professional revolutionaries.94 “You know how it is with farmin’,

93 Although the Socialist Party had gained a strong foothold in Oklahoma between 1906-1917, according to Dunbar-Ortiz, it was only in the 1930s that socialists and communists began to consider “the Okies as an organizable group.” 94 Lenin first outlined his plan for the establishment of a small “vanguard” of professional revolutionaries in “What is to be Done?” (1902). Over the objections of revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg , Lenin implemented the plan after the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time Cunningham wrote his novel, Joseph Stalin had turned the vanguard of professional revolutionaries into a political police that suppressed all forms of dissent. According to Lenin’s initial plan, however, “a ‘dozen’ experienced revolutionaries, no less professionally trained than the police, will centralise all the secret side of the work-prepare leaflets, work out approximate plans and appoint bodies of leaders for each urban district, for each factory district and to each educational institution, etc. (I know that exception will be taken to my "undemocratic" views,

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a feller ought to be born and raised on the farm to know very much about it, and I guess

it’s like that with revolution: we got to wait till we got thousands of youngsters who

don’t think or talk about anything but revolution, before we can do a damn thing” (253).

As Mack’s comments highlight, Bildung lies at the heart of Cunningham’s The

Green Corn Rebellion in two ways: First, in the sense of the Herausbildung or formation

of a class consciousness that is grounded in shared everyday experiences and constitutive

of an emergent society. Second, in the sense of the Ausbildung or practical training that

enables the class conscious to bring about desired social change. The initial formation of

class-consciousness, although grounded in the recognition of shared experiences, is

represented as a more or less organic process, tied to essentialized concepts of virility,

naturalness, and place. Thus, manly and unaffected farmhands such as Jim Tetley seem

to have an intuitive grasp of the socioeconomic forces that stifle their existence, whereas

effeminate city-dwellers such as his crippled brother Ted are bound to a “false

consciousness” that makes them rejoice in their state of servitude. Similarly, uncorrupted

Native Americans such as John Medicine and Dick Cottontail, who have managed to

maintained their connection with the land, seem to apprehend their part in the collective

struggle almost instinctively, whereas “the rest of the tribe,” enfeebled by its forced

reliance on government handouts, has become too “damned lazy” to “turn over a finger to

win back the whole state” (217). The subsequent practical training of those who have

attained class-consciousness, on the other hand, is sketched out as a slow learning

process, requiring iron self-discipline, persistence, forethought, and unwavering

commitment. And it is precisely at this latter hurdle, Cunningham underscores, that the

“natural” rebels stumble over their intuitive yet crude perception of the revolution to

come. Largely ignorant of the political conditions outside of their immediate purview,

“life-hungry” Jim Tetley and his fellow rebels gorge themselves on the unfermented

notion that “the revolution…was going to start in a few weeks, right here and now” and

subsequently come to resemble the “heifer,” which they encounter during their first raid: but I shall reply to this altogether unintelligent objection later on.) The centralisation of the more secret functions in an organisation of revolutionaries will not diminish, but rather increase the extent and the quality of the activity of a large number of other organisations intended for wide membership and which, therefore, can be as loose and as public as possible, for example, trade unions, workers' circles for self-education and the reading of illegal literature, and socialist and also democratic circles for all other sections of the population. V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement, 1st ed. (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1973).

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“She was badly bloated from eating too many roasting ears. One of the boys whetted his

pocket knife on his gun barrel, measured off a span from the left hip bone, and plunged

the knife into her belly. Gas hissed out of the wound. ‘She’ll git all right,’ the boy said,

‘but maybe it’ll learn her a lesson’” (153, 226).

Jim Tetley, like Jack Conroy’s Larry Donovan in The Disinherited (1933) a

“true proletarian” of “crude vigor,” comes to personify both the promises and the

shortcomings of the “green” rebellion.95 On the one hand, Jim’s native wit, keen sense of

justice, and readiness to take direct action make him a natural revolutionary in the vein of

Josh Green in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition or Bob Harper in Walter

White’s The Fire in the Flint. Moreover, Jim’s awareness that poor whites like himself,

dispossessed Indians like Dick Cottontail, and maltreated blacks like the Spanish–

American War veteran Bill Johnson share a common interest in disposing of “this

damned competitive system that made people liars and thieves,” shows him to be a

prototypical Popular Front warrior (155). On the other hand, however, uneducated Jim,

much like Josh and Bob, lacks both sufficient retrospection and adequate prescience to

sustain an effective fight against the powers that be. Living almost exclusively in and for

the moment, Jim’s admirable propensity for direct action remains hampered by his

inability to think and act with an eye toward his long-term obligations in the ongoing

revolutionary struggle, Cunningham emphasizes. Thus, rather than fastidiously preparing

the ground for “the big shake-up” by “gittin’” the “fellers… organized,” acquiring “some

trainin’” in revolutionary tactics, and nurturing the next generation of revolutionaries by

way of raising his son, Jim, “like a stallion hitched to a plow,” seeks instantaneous

deliverance from all constricting harness (233, 133). Following the failure of the

insurgence, Jim is therefore all too easily overcome by a sense of (postwar) defeatism and

despite reassurances that he “ain’t changed” his “mind none about things,” abandons the

revolutionary cause in a misdirected attempt at self-punishment for personal indiscretions

(293).

Resorting to the stark realism of late 19th century regionalist works such as

Hamlin Garlands’ Main Traveled Roads (1891), Cunningham depicts Jim Tetley’s rural

95 Larry Hanley, “Class Struggles in the Contact Zone: The Monstrous Project of Proletarian Literature,” American Studies Association Annual Conference (Washington DC: 11. Nov. 2001).

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existence in Oklahoma as marked by hardships and limitations. After the family farm

had been “mortgaged up” to sent his older brother, Ted, “through high school and then to

linotype school,” the parents died, leaving Jim to grow up as an uneducated sharecropper

(39). Having gotten “married too damned soon” to the frugal neighbor’s daughter Jennie

McGee, hard-toiling Jim, though usually performing “the work of two men,” barely

manages to eek out a living for himself and his pregnant wife (37, 84). “A fellow could

work twenty-fours a day and still never make anything,” Jim reflects (37). Harassed by

the banks over outstanding loan payments, Jim, like most of his fellow-sharecroppers,

constantly teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and is forced to rely on his brother for

occasional monetary support. And in-between long working hours, rural life offers little

diversions for twenty-five-year-old Jim. “He was just at the age to enjoy life and really

have a little fun,” the narrator explains Jim’s pent-up frustration, “but there wasn’t a

damned thing that he could do that he wanted to do. He was like a stallion hitched up to

the plow…” (41).

Too obsessed with his own plight, it takes young Tetley a while to fathom that

his personal predicaments are part and parcel of the larger class conflicts that have been

shaping up all around him. Talk of America’s impending war entry and the prospect of

conscription first rouses Jim’s political curiosity. Invited by Mack McGee, his father-in-

law, and Uncle Billy Turner, Jim attends a Socialist anti-war rally, featuring Fred Niek

(Oscar Ameringer) as keynote speaker. Although much of the speech is lost on Jim, he

develops a sense of solidarity with the “farmers and poor people from town” and begins

to share their anger directed at “damned capitalists and politicians,” seeking to “send

boys to Europe to be killed” (49). Moreover, in the middle of debates concerning the

veracity of German war atrocity stories, the “sudden[]” memory of having witnessed “a

crowd of fellers cut a Negro once,” leads Jim to doubt “American faith and loyalty to the

great fundamental doctrine of the Declaration of Independence” (47, 122).

Following “the big Socialist meeting,” Jim becomes more receptive of the

suffering around him, thereby gaining deeper insights into the exploitive mechanisms of

the capitalist system (45). Listening to accounts of how “Old Filmore” and “a dozen

other fellows” conspired with the local “Indian agent” to “relieve” Indian farmers of their

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land and observing first hand how his penniless neighbor, Ned Wellhof, is driven into

alcoholism and thievery, Jim begins to understand his own inability “to get ahead” not as

a personal fault, but as symptomatic of “this damned competitive system that made

people liars and thieves” (58, 59, 155).

At home, though, Jim’s subtle transformation from malcontent yet acquiescent

sharecropper to class-conscious labor activist brings him into conflict with “good-

hearted” but “old-fashioned” Jeannie. Increasingly irritated by his wife’s persistent

demands for “a decent house and some decent clothes,” Jim seeks to challenge her

confidence in the capitalist gospel of Protestant work ethics, arguing that “the whole

damned system is rotten and people that work themselves to death ain’t got time to find

out, and they don’t do a damned thing about it” (94, 93). But Jeannie, who “ke[eps]

alive and me[ets] all her troubles” by “always…doing something,” remains undeterred

(210). Dismissing Jim’s socialist notions of “justice in the world” as unrealistic (“that

won’t come in our time”), “commonsensical” Jeannie pleads with Jim to accept his lot

and to keep on “workin’ like a nigger dog” (93). Outwardly, Jim acquiesces, makes a

show of working twice as hard as before, and even stops reading articles in the socialist

Appeal To Reason.96 Inwardly, however, Jim grows more and more convinced that

Jeannie’s trust in the redemptive powers of hard labor is ultimately self-destructive. A

few days later, fixing up the barn while awaiting his son’s birth son, Jim concludes for

himself, “You can’t blame a capitalist for making money. Anybody would do the same

thing. But if there is going to be any happiness in the world you’ve got to destroy the

capitalists, just like rattlesnakes, and change the rules so there can’t be any more

capitalists” (106).

America’s official war entry accelerates Jim’s conversion from malcontent

sharecropper to conscious working class radical. Reading of efforts to pass national

96 Founded in 1897 by Julius Wayland, Appeal to Reason published a mix of articles and book excerpts by radical thinkers such as Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, John Ruskin, and Edward Bellamy. Voicing positions from the far-left, the journal was frequently attacked and found itself under tight government scrutiny throughout its existence. Nevertheless, the journal proved to be very popular among union members and socialists and at the height of its popularity in 1913 sold 700,000 copies weekly. With the outbreak of World War I, Appeal to Reason staunchly opposed American participation in the conflict. Following Wilson’s declaration of war, however, the journal came under government pressure and reversed its anti-war policy rather than ceasing publication. Circulation declined dramatically and the journal eventually faltered in 1922.

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conscription laws, Jim no longer accepts war as something that somehow occurs naturally

(103). Noting, furthermore, a steep increase in prices for farm supplies, Jim senses that

“this war here is fought for profits” and is subsequently repulsed by the thought that

“now the lives of millions of peaceful and innocent people had to be sacrificed because of

property” (123). Thus, when Mack, who had become his political mentor, furtively hints

that soon “hell’s gonna break loose over this war business,” Jim readily agrees to

accompany him during a coordinating meeting of the Working Class Union in Oklahoma

City (124).

Left to his own devises for a few hours prior to the meeting, impressionable Jim

quickly forgets “about this socialist business” (148). Bedazzled by the big city lights, the

bustle on the streets, the vaudeville shows, the motion picture theaters, and the expensive

hotels, Jim daydreams of being wealthy and meeting showgirls. But before long, the

natural working class hero begins feeling thoroughly out of place amidst the artificial

glare of the city. Confronted with his own image in a mirror, Jim wonders “why it was

that when he got dressed up he didn’t look like much, but when he had on his old greasy

overall he looked pretty good” (139). Based on this self-reflection, Jim intuits that it

might not be so “swell to live in the city” after all and resolves that “a man who had an

education and lived in the city and made money might…not be a damned bit happier than

a country jake in the long run” (140, 142). And in marked contrast to his degenerated

brother, Ted, who seeks the anonymity of the big city in order to get drunken and amuse

himself with prostitutes, Jim begins to detest the unthinking crowds that lure after “girls

with almost nothing on” and take in war pictures, “with smoke and airplanes,” for sheer

“excitement” (142, 141, 204). “It made you sick to the stomach,” he concludes (143).

Jim’s decision “to risk his life to help change the damned system” is premised less

on what he hears during the W.C.U. meeting than on his random perceptions of grave

societal ills around him (155). Not given to contemplating the particulars of how the

local rebellion is supposed to trigger a full-scale revolution of the “American working

class,” Jim therefore pays scant attention to the warnings of “red Socialist” turned

“yellow Socialist” Fred Niek, who advises the gathering: “Eferything you’re saying here

tonight will pe on file in Washington tomorrow morning…Now you poys forgit all about

stoppin’s this war and scatter out very thin. You better hide your guns and ammunitions

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where you can’t never find’ em (149-51). Caught up in the general excitement “about the

rebellion that would start that July,” Jim jumps at the chance to make “things happen

right away” and joins the revolutionary army without a moment’s hesitation (157).

Under the local command of Comrade McGee, Comrade Tetley’s first assignment

is to scout out and recruit potential revolutionaries among the “poorest farmers in the

neighborhood” (156). This assignment not only brings Jim in closer contact with other

“tenant farmers who could not borrow money from the banks because they had voted the

Socialist ticket,” but also acquaints him with the grievances of the county’s “Negro” and

“Indian” populations (155). Although not always related directly through Jim’s

consciousness, the novel’s interspersed accounts of the maltreatment of poor whites,

defrauded Indians, and disenfranchised blacks suggest a rising awareness among the

county’s farmers that social hierarchies based on either class or race serve the same

exploitive ends.

Chapter 2, for example, recounts apparently well-known stories of how local

authorities conspire with wealthy landowners to defraud Indians of their properties and to

obliterate traditional lifestyles. Following a particularly unscrupulous land allocation

scheme as well as attempts by white settlers to cut back government assistance programs,

“some of the bucks got drunk in a saloon and told the saloon-keeper that the Indians were

going to kill every white in the country” (13). This led to a “bad Indian scare” and

Sheriff Gladson, hoping to ensure his reelection by ruthlessly quelling the rumored

uprising, “rode into the Indian camp in the middle of the night,” randomly killing three

members of the tribe (13-14). Chapter 8 relates how Bud Filmore acquired the “high-

class mission furniture” owned by “a couple of nigger servants” for “little or nothing”

(58-60). Chapter 23 describes Ned Wellhoff’s unsuccessful endeavors to procure a loan

from the bank in order to pay for his wife’s medical treatment. Rudely rebuffed by the

banker, Ned tries to save every penny, but in the end he must watch helplessly as his

wife dies in childbirth. Chapter 25 provides a gruesome account of how Glen Rhelin, “a

rich landowner “with a reputation for beating Negroes out of what he owed them,” first

forces Bill Johnson, “Negro farmer and veteran of the Spanish –American War,” to eat a

“raw mouse,” then brutally beats him, and finally has him thrown into jail for “tryin’ to

steal…wheat” (194, 191, 198). And at the height of the rebellion in chapter 29, the

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memory of a lynching Jim had observed as a boy leads him to identify with the victim of

white racism: “He couldn’t help but put himself in the Negroes’ place and imagine a

dozen hands gripping him while fists crushed against his mouth” (231).

Given these shared experiences of violent expropriation, Jim’s recruitment efforts

fall on fertile ground and the rebellion gathers momentum. Reassured by Comrade

Carson, “the leader of the Oklahoma army,” that over a “hundred thousand” W.C.U.

members nationwide are preparing to “kick the capitalists out of power forever,” the

motley band of local tenant farmers “order guns and ammunition right away from a mail

order house” (157-58). After several postponements, which make Jim fear “he would go

on year after year plodding behind a plow,” “hell” finally breaks “loose” on “the night of

August 2” (165, 211).

Cutting fences and telegraph poles under the cover of night, Mack, Jim and

“about a dozen” other rebels march toward their appointed meeting point, “adding a few

new men to the group” along the way (218). But from the start, the novel leaves little

doubt that the entire undertaking had been organized rather badly. Approaching several

“deserted house,” the rebels are stunned to find out that a number of farmers have

reneged on their promise to join the uprising and “run into town” (216). More bad news

awaits them at the “Indian Camp.” There, only “John Medicine, Dick Cottontail and

some others” stand ready to join the fight” (217). “The rest of the tribe lives off the

government, and they’re so damned lazy that they won’t turn over a finger to win back

the whole state,” a disappointed Mack explains, apparently forgetting previous Indian

revolts that had been violently put down by Sheriff Gladson. News from adjoining

counties are equally unsettling. “There’s been eight or nine of our boys arrested in

Pottawatomie County,” Comrade Daniels, the sectional leader, reports. “The waterworks

at Dewar was blown to hell and they got nine of our men in jail” (219). Despite these

setbacks, however, the rebels proceed determinedly, showing themselves to be quite apt

in the tactics of guerilla warfare. Under Jim’s command, a small black and white crew

burns a strategically important bridge, while another group carries out a successful raid

against the police outpost.

At dawn the rebels set up camp upon a pastured hill and for a brief moment

experience the thrill of having established a truly egalitarian Socialist community. As the

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“big pole…with a red flag” goes up, Jim revels in the notion that “this was the first flag

of the new worker’s and farmer’s republic” (227). Gathering around their hoisted banner,

the exhausted men adopt the Indian custom of roasting green corn on an open fire, swap

stories, share food, and feel a strong sense of race-transcending “solidarity.” “Up here on

the hill Negroes were treated just like whites,” Jim contemplates (230). And in line with

1930s Popular Front sentiments, according to which “economic oppression and common

cause were supposed automatically to erase white supremacy,” Cunningham has Jim

explain: “it was always like this among Socialist farmers because Socialists knew that all

working men white or black, were in the same boat” (230).97 Thus, when the time for

“speechmaking” has come, Jim urges Bill Johnson, the black Spanish-American war

veteran, to say “a little bit about how to march and fight” (238). Picking up on the men’s

general feeling of solidarity, Johnson reminds his comrades that “all of us boys has got to

stick togetheh, no matteh if wea’h balck owa white owa red. And if we do that and get

the otheh wukin’ people with us on owa mawch they ain’t nothin’ can stop us, even if we

ain’t trained soljaws, all of us” (238).

Politically potent and portended as these images of interracial working class

unity may be, Cunningham quickly refocuses the reader’s attention on the practical

obstacles faced by the “green” rebels. Anxiously on the lookout for promised

reinforcements, the inexperienced revolutionaries are beseeched by doubts as a full day

passes and no orders arrive. “There was something wrong with Carson and the Socialists

in Oklahoma City,” Jim surmises on the second day, “or they would have got word

through before this” (241). And when the rebels suddenly find themselves confronted not

with Carson’s troops, but a local posse lead by Sheriff Gladson and Jim’s jingoistic

brother Ted, Johnson’s fear that “jest as soon as the fight stawts weah’ blowed up” bears

itself out (233). Spotting some of their neighbors, acquaintances, and relatives among the

vigilantes, one insurgent after another “start[s] running (246). Even Mack and Jim

eventually drop their guns without having fired a single shot, until only “about ten men,

black and white, remained with Johnson” (247). This final contingent is at once

overwhelmed and in a triumphant procession marched off to prison.

97 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “One or Two Things I Know about Us: Rethinking the Image and Role of the ‘Okies’,” Heartland Review 5.1 (2003): 3-14.

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Watching his “scattered” comrades being “picked up one at a time” and awaiting

his own turn, Jim is overwhelmed by a sense of defeatism (274). Afraid that he might be

trapped “forever” in “the old work-house way of living,” Jim’s personal tragedy lies in

the apprehension that “a change would have to come some time, but not soon enough to

do [him] any good” (170, 291). Moreover, Jim’s private troubles are compounded by

feelings of shame and guilt about a brief affair with Agnes McGee, his wife’s coy sister.

Thus, when his patriotic brother threatens to expose the tryst, lest he sets a “patriotic”

example by joining the army, Jim, as it were, capitulates on all fronts: Too cowardly to

admit his marital indiscretion to Jennie, who had already become suspicious and signaled

forgiveness, Jim selfishly agrees to the bargain, betraying not only his old friends and

associates, but also abandoning his own wife and son. Turing a deaf ear to Jennie’s

pleadings, Jim fatalistically resolves that it is “better” to “be dead and buried…than be

dead and still ploddin’ away on top of the ground” (273, 290). At least for the moment,

Jim shares Frederic Henry’s despairing assessment that the peasantry “is defeated from

the start” (179). “But [the situation in Oklahoma] was really no different from anywhere

else,” Jim contemplates. “[T]he poor went around in a daze all their lives doing what

they were told. And if they develop any wills of their own the banker got a bunch of

town loafers and the sheriff to shoot hell out of them and arrest them” (291).

As Cunningham makes apparent, however, Jim’s paralyzing despair is only

“characteristic of certain human types in specific social or historical circumstance,”

because “beside and beyond” his self-assumed “solitariness, the common life, the strife

and togetherness of other human beings, goes on as before” (Lukács 20). Trying to rally

his beaten troops for the battles still ahead, Mack concedes, “When we talked about

overthrowin’ the capitalist system we was like a bunch of roosters in the henhouse

crowin’ at midnight,” but “at the same time” avers unfalteringly, “you can be sure they’ll

start crowin’ again in a few hours, and that time they’ll be right” (254). Hence, carted off

to prison, Jim’s beaten yet still defiant fellow rebels find consolation in the fact that “at

least” they “won’t be raisin’ wheat for the soldiers to eat while they’re killin’ Dutchmen”

(283). Far from signaling surrender, the rebels’ choice of imprisonment over forced

enlistment becomes a final public gesture of resistance, leading one of their guards to

reflect that “he didn’t want to go to war either” (282). That “none” of “those farmers

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who had been released on good behavior” can be cajoled into joining the army is a further

indication of the rebels’ determination to continue their “struggle and strive” by different

means (287). Rather than resigning in despair, some of the farmers “grab their guns and

take to the sticks and hide out, like the members of the ‘Jones Family,’” while others such

as McSlarrow and Uncle Bill quietly regroup and organize “secret get-togethers” (204,

292).98

Told in no uncertain terms by McSlarrow “that considerin’” his “goin’ off to the

army” he “ought” not “to come back any more to this here community,” Jim appears

destined to become “one of these God-damned dead heroes” (292-3). Still, Cunningham

ends the novel on a hopeful note, as he has Jim come to the belated recognition that the

short-lived rebellion was not for naught and that “change” is already well underway.

Waving at his son from the window of a military train bound for boot camp, “Jim

remember[s] all at once something that Mack had said: That kid of yours will maybe

help finish up this job that we made such as mess of” (301-2). If nothing else,

Cunningham reiterates in this final scene, Jim has planted the seed of the coming

revolution both literally and figuratively. And even though his self-isolating retreat into

defeatism might prevent him from nurturing the next generation of revolutionaries, his

very example will serve them as both a warning and an inspiration. Last but not least, a

newspaper headline announcing, “Lenin and Trotsky Seize Power in Russia,” makes it

patently clear that Jim had abandon hope too hastily (302). Personal time, Jim must learn

again, is seldom in sync with historical time. But his closing resolve to “read all about

the bloody reign in Russia” as soon as the “boy in the seat ahead” would discard the

paper also seems to suggest that Jim will “watch his chance” to join the working class

struggle once more (302).

VI

Following the Armistices of 1918, America’s intelligentsia—at first shocked, then

morbidly delighted by the serrated poetry and indignant prose of young soldier-literati—

came to perceive the “Great War” as the traumatic event that had altered human relations

forever. Most average Americans, however, quickly came to regard the Great War as

98 “The Jones Family,” Cunningham explains in his novel, “was an organization of fellows who didn’t want to go to war, and they were hiding out in the timber and in caves in the hills, and they came at night to houses of people they knew to get grub” (205).

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nothing more than a botched prelude to a time of unprecedented wealth, prosperity, and

personal freedom. Throughout the 1920s, consumerism reached record heights as

unemployment figures dropped and an increasing number of young men and women

filled white collar jobs. But with the onset of Depression in the early 1930s, old class

conflicts again intensified and the wartime experiences of profiteering capitalists, calling

in local militia and federal troops to violently subdue strikes in New England, Arizona,

and Seattle, assumed a new presence in the public mind.99 Thus, during the labor

disputes of the 1930s, union flyers would frequently condemn patterns of governmental

interference on behalf of “big business” by recalling the infamous Bisbee Deportation of

1917.100 Similarly, in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), arguably the most influential work of

social critical realism in the 20th century, John Steinbeck demonstrates how lingering

images of mustard gas attacks on the Western Front could be transhistorically mobilized

to denounce present mechanisms of working class oppression—

The land fell into fewer hands, the number of disposed increased, and

every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money

was spent on arms, for gas to protect the great holdings….more and more

families scampered on the highways, looking for crumbs from the great

holdings, lusting after the land beside the roads. The great owners formed

associations for protection, and they met to discuss ways to intimidate, to

kill, to gas.101

—and to serve a reminder that war (or the use of war-like methods) has toppled more

than one regime in the past—

And always they were in fear of a principal—three hundred thousand—if

they ever move under a leader—the end. Three hundred thousand, hungry

and miserable; if they ever know themselves, the land will be theirs, and

all the gas, all the rifles in the world won’t stop them.102

99 From 1914 to 1920, the I.W.W. alone led over 150 strikes, including America’s first general strike in Seattle (1919). Many of these strikes were brutally put down by state and federal troops. The 1917 silver mine strike in Arizona led to the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1,100 union members to Columbus, New Mexico. See Nicholas N. Kittrie and Eldon D. Wedlock, eds., The Tree of Liberty: A Documentary History of Rebellion and Political Crime in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998). 100 Kittrie and Wedlock 312. 101 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 1992) 324-325. 102 Steinbeck 325.

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While it would be quite a stretch to read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a sequel to

Cunningham’s and Sinclair’s proletarian war novels, certain parallels and continuities are

obvious: increasingly violent class conflicts, strikes, localized government repression,

communal resistance, and the specter of social revolution provide the background in all

three works. The plea for “a leader” in the passage above recall Mack’s vision of

“thousands of fellers who are real leaders and revolutionists” (253). Jim Casey’s Christ-

like sacrifice in the labor struggle is reminiscent of Jimmie Higgins’s martyr’s death.

And Tom Joad’s development from displaced farmer to determined labor activist

resembles the “learning curve” of the protagonists in The Green Corn Rebellion and

Jimmie Higgins. These are, of course, patterns one finds in any number of proletarian

novels. But in light of the narrator’s references to wartime profiteering (“Get enough

wars and cotton’ll hit the ceiling”) and tractors rolling over the fields like “tanks” in

interchapter 5, Tom Joad appears as the inheritor of Jim Tetley’s and Jimmie Higgins’s

lost struggles, who picks up the fight for working class liberation in the name of

generations of the downtrodden.

Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion clearly resist authoritative literary

assessments, according to which the disillusioned and anxiety-ridden “protest novels” by

young male war veterans are the sole depositories of the “reality of modern warfare.”

Written explicitly to re-present and re-shape the working class memory of World War I,

Sinclair’s and Cunningham’s war novels not only seek to preserve, but to historicize the

war-related conflicts on the homefront. Put another way, they represent the Great War

not as an isolated (and isolating) event, but within the larger context of past and future

working class struggles toward liberation.

Hence, unlike middle class observers of American culture such as the Review of

Reviews, which in January of 1914 confidentially claimed that “a period of peace,

industry and world-wide friendship is dawning,” the protagonists in The Green Corn

Rebellion and Jimmie Higgins come of age within an American prewar society torn by

violent class conflicts, industrial upheavals, and racial hatred.103 In these proletarian

Bildungsromans, the recognition that ruthless capitalists conspire with corrupt politicians

to exploit the masses, impoverished farmers nearly starve to death, strikes are crushed,

103 Qtd. in Walter Millis, Road to War, American 1914-1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935) 15.

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Indians are forcibly removed, and blacks are routinely lynched precedes and in many

ways supercedes the first-hand experience of mass-slaughter in Europe’s trenches. The

Great War abroad is thus presented as much less inconceivable, shocking, and “ideal-

shattering” than in “protest novels” by so-called lost generation authors, for it ultimately

confirms what experience had taught Jim and Jimmie all along about the inherent flaws

of the capitalist system and the shortcomings of American democracy (Cooperman 7).

Based upon this pre-knowledge, then, the Great War—far from inducing

paralyzing trauma—offers a tangible opportunity to mobilize the working class since it

amplifies inherent conflicts of interest and throws the government into a crisis of

legitimization, which, in turn, results in the deployment of nationalistic sentiment and

governmental force against dissenters. Images of growing labor unrest, anti-war rallies,

strikes, acts of subversion, and outright rebellions henceforth highlight the possibility of

coordinated resistance during periods of severe government repression and forcefully

reiterate the need for working class solidarity, which, most explicitly in Cunningham’s

version, must transcend racial and ethnic boundaries based upon the recognition of a

“common cause.”

In the end, though, Sinclair’s and Cunningham’s literary attempts to provide a

“usable past” of the internal and external conflicts that had gripped the American

working class during the Great War remain fraught with a “mechanistic optimism” that

not just veils, but indeed reinforces essentialist notions about race and gender behind the

smokescreen of the coming, all-redeeming revolution.104 In both texts, it is the

emergence of (or struggle for) an unaffected, native-born, white male working class

consciousness that becomes the principal carrier of America’s revolutionary promise.

Foreign-born immigrants, blacks, and Indians may join this historical movement toward

general liberation, The Green Corn Rebellion and Jimmie Higgins point out, but only

provided they learn to align their own interests and strategies of opposition with those of

the class-conscious white proletariat. The black war veteran Bill Johnson and the Indian

farmer Dick Cottontail in The Green Corn Rebellion as well as Stankewitz, “the little

Roumanian Jew” and “the little Jew” from New York Jimmie meets in Jimmie Higgins

104 See Gabriel Kolko, “The Decline of American Radicalism in the Twentieth Century,” For a New America: Essays in History and Politics from “Studies on the Left, “ 1957-1967, ed. James Weinstein and David W. Eakins (New York: Vintage, 1970).

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provide glowing examples of how minority concerns and grievances are to be subsumed

within the larger “common cause.” But most racially and ethnically marked characters in

Sinclair’s and Cunningham’s proletarian Bildungsromans fail to understand this and are

hence depicted as docile victims of the capitalist system. The “lazy” Indians, living “off

the government,” in The Green Corn Rebellion and the happy-go-lucky “plantation

niggers from Louisiana and Alabama” in Jimmie Higgins clearly fall into the latter

category (214).

In a similar vein, the majority of female characters are portrayed as natural

conservatives, who are so engrossed in their household duties that they are incapable of

developing any revolutionary consciousness of their own. Upwardly mobile, both

Jimmie’s and Jim’s wives vigorously object to their husbands’ involvement in radical

politics, but eventually acquiesce, comprehending that their “first duty was to [their] men

folks (156). And the few political active women that do appear in Jimmie Higgins are

also quickly relegated to a supporting role in their husbands’ political endeavors. Hence,

once safely married off to Comrade Gerrity, the self-proclaimed “advanced feminists”

Evelyn puts aside “her handbag” full of “leaflets on Birth Control,” and instead agitates

on behalf of her husband’s conscientious objector campaign (71).

Barbara Foley’s general conclusion in Radical Representation that “many

proletarian novels, despite their projection of what Gold called ‘revolutionary élan,’

uncritically reproduced a range of received assumptions about selfhood…‘the Negro

question,’ and ‘the woman question,’” to some extent holds also for Sinclair’s Jimmie

Higgins and Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion (444). Moreover, by clinging

rather rigidly to a Marxist teleology of the orthodox strand, Sinclair’s and Cunningham’s

proletarian war novels can be said to give certain evidence to what Foley identifies as

“the left’s shortcomings in breaking with inherited ways of thinking and doing” (444).

And yet, especially when considered within the narrower context of the political, social,

and cultural significance of the Great War, what makes both Jimmie Higgins and The

Green Corn Rebellion noteworthy is their effort to preserve and retell the wartime

struggles of the working classes in such a manner that their “revolutionary élan” and

utopian desires become inheritable and thus form a potentially transformative link with

the past.

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4

“The Hens are Eagles”

WAR AS FEMINIST UTOPIA IN DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER’S HOMEFIRES IN FRANCE, GERTRUDE ATHERTON’S THE WHITE MORNING, AND HENRY SYDNOR HARRISON’S SAINT TERESA

Now is the time for practical Utopias. —Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “A Woman’s Utopia” (1907)

See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above the battle-fields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for women!

—Mabel Potter Daggett, Women Wanted (1918)

The greatest thing to come out of the war was the emancipation of women. —Carrie Chapman Catt, “Woman and War” (1921)

As utopia permits a glimpse at what life can be, we notice, critically or hopefully, what life is.

—Jean Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America (1984)

IN 1915, as Europe’s war toll was mounting and hopes for a quick peace

settlement were fading, Charlotte Perkins Gilman presented readers of her magazine

Forerunner with a very different world: a world without “wars,” “kings,” “priest,” and

“aristocracies;” a rural world of fecund pastures and lush peach groves, where disease

and poverty are unknown; a world in which the upbringing and education of children is

the highest societal duty; a world dedicated to the pursuit of beauty, health, intellect, and

strength of character; a world populated by “the best kind of people,” who are bound

“together—not by competition, but by united action.”1

Significantly, Herland is also a world without men. For Gilman, whose Women

and Economics (1898) had established her alongside Edward Bellamy as one of

America’s preeminent feminists and (non-Marxist) Fabian socialists, masculinity,

warfare, and domination were inextricably linked.2 Gilman, like most of her

contemporaries, subscribed to the theory of innate gender differences. Men, according to

this generally accepted notion, possessed certain sex traits that predisposed them to a

1 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998) 51. 2 When Edward Bellamy died in 1898, his national-socialist middle class utopia, Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887 (1888), had sold over a half million copies in the United States and was seen as having “exerted” a tremendous “influence upon the social beliefs of his fellow beings.” Qtd. in Shor, 29.

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combative, competitive, and highly individualistic (“self-expressive”) behavior, which

found full expression within patriarchic or, in her words, “androcentric” societies.3

Women, by contrast, were born with a strong mothering instinct that made them

peaceable, nurturing, and cooperative. War was therefore seen as an essentially

masculine activity (“unbridled masculinity” at its “absurdest extreme”), whereas peace

was understood to be the natural domain of female action.4 “Maleness means war,”

Gilman asserts unequivocally in The Man-Made World (1911), thereby offering a

seemingly unimpeachable biological rationale for the necessity of broader female

involvement in the arena of public politics, where women could put their inherent

propensities for peacemaking and peacekeeping into the service of universal

“betterment.”5 Given the right circumstances, then, women could forge a model society

devoid of the aggression, competitiveness, and domination that had hitherto characterized

“our man-made world.”6

Like the majority of fin-de-siècle feminists, Gilman considered herself to be a

“pacifist, of settled convictions,” arguing that “peace is a primary essential to human

growth.” At the same time, however, Gilman made it clear that her brand of pacifism did

not entail a commitment to passive non-resistance. “One may be an extremely peaceful

citizen, quite gunless and knifeless, yet fight valiantly when it becomes necessary,” she

explained in “Peace in Three Pieces” (1916).7 As Gilman saw it, the biblical command to

“love and serve” one’s enemy was a call to direct action that might sometimes even

demand the use of violent resistance. Recounting the genesis of her utopian female

society in Herland, Gilman outlines such a condition under which violent action becomes

indispensable. After a combination of natural disasters and prolonged warfare had

annihilated most men of the ur-society, a band of male slaves “rose in revolt,” killing

everyone, except the young girls, whom they intended to enslave. But “instead of

3 See Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Charlton, 1911). 4 The Man-Made World 211. 5 The Man-Made World 292. 6 This brief sketch of Gilman’s views during World War I draws upon Margaret Hobbs’s excellent essay, “The Perils of ‘Unbridled Masculinity’: Pacifist Elements in the Feminists and Socialist Thought of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Women and Peace, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson (New York: Croom Helm, 1987) 149-65. 7 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Peace in Three Pieces,” Forerunner 7 (1916): 270.

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submitting” themselves passively, the “infuriated virgins” without delay instigated a

second a rebellion and “in sheer desperation slew their brutal conquers.”8 Interestingly

enough, it is this second gender revolt rather than first class revolt that is sanctioned by

the text. In an obvious attempt to revise Marxist notions of history as a series of class

struggles, Gilman predicates her visions for a better world on a successful woman’s

revolution. And the Great War, she seems to hint, might just infuriate the “new mothers

of a new world” enough to rise up in “sheer desperation” and to once and for all put an

end to “men’s wars,” “men’s quarrels,” and “men’s competition.”9 Needless to say,

Gilman’s radical feminist utopia did not come to fruition. Still, as more and more women

writers formulated their responses to the man-made slaughter abroad, they not only grew

progressively more conscious of the war’s potential to alter established gender relations,

but also began to spawn competing visions of a Herland that might fill the fast expanding

void of No Man’s Land.

I

When war erupted in Europe, women as well as men were taken by surprise. The two

decades preceding the Great War had been a time of unrelenting optimism in the

perfectibility of human society. Under liberal-minded President Wilson, the progressive

movement flourished and “there was reform after reform.”10 Young idealists, Malcolm

Cowley recalls, were convinced that “the world was going in their direction, the new

standards were winning out, and America in ten or fifteen years would not only be a

fatherland of the arts, but also a socialist commonwealth.”11 War among the “civilized

nations” seemed unfeasible. “It is difficult now,” literary critic Amy Loveman wrote

during the Second World War, “to realize how sincerely the men and women of the first

decade of the twentieth century believed that humanity was on the march to happiness.”12

Once this “march to happiness” had come to a screeching halt, though, some

women seemed to remember Gilman’s dour verdict of 1911, according to which

“[u]nbridled masculinity means the kind of civilization…that bursts forth, over and over,

8 Gilman, Herland 47. 9 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The New Mothers of a New World,” Forerunner 4 (1913): 148. 10 Cooperman 7. 11 Qtd. in Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock , 1942) 172. 12 Amy Loveman, “Then and Now,” Saturday Review of Literature (5 August 1944): 45

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in the riot of open war.”13 “After this war, there will be many other wars,” American

field nurse Ellen La Motte augurs in her introduction to The Backwash of War (1915).14

“[A]nd man had made it,” the narrator in Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Home Fires in

France reminds herself, while contrasting the “man-wrought” beauty of a church nave

with the “scarred, mutilated, sightless faces of young men in their prime.”15 Increasingly

dissatisfied with the “masculine management of the existing Peace Societies,” which, as

Jane Addams put it, had “lulled” the “woman of this country into inattention to the great

military question of the war,” female activists involved in suffrage (such as Carrie

Chapman Catt), social work (such as Lillian Wald), and labor reform (such Mary Dier)

quickly formed a new peace alliance, determined to take matters into their own hands.16

On August 29, 1914, more than 1,500 women, clad in white gowns and beating muffled

drums, gathered in the streets of New York City to stage one of the first anti-war rallies in

the United States.17 Several months later, the Woman’s Peace Party (WPP) was founded

with Jane Addams at its head. By mid-1915, the fast-growing WPP could already boast

over 40,000 active members in all 48 states.

In line with the accepted idea that women are “natural” peacemakers, the platform

of the WPP called for the enlistment of “all American women in arousing the nations…to

abolish war.” But the peace agenda was also understood as a means to push for women’s

rights in general. Among other things, the party called for “the extension of the franchise

to women” and demanded that women are given their equal “share in deciding between

war and peace in all the courts of high debate: within the home, the school, the church,

the industrial order, and the state.”18 Perceiving that upholding the moral high ground in

homes, schools, and churches had proved insufficient, the WPP sought direct

involvement of women in business and government. The terrible man-made war abroad,

13 The Man-Made World 211. 14 Ellen N. La Motte, The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse (New York: Putnam’s, 1915) vi. 15 Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Home Fires in France (New York: Holt), 83. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text. 16 Jane Addams in a letter to Carrie Chapman Catt, dated 21 December 1914. Qtd. in Erika Kuhlman, Petticoats and White Feathers: Gender Conformity, Race, the Progressive Peace Movement, and the Debate over War, 1895-1919 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997) 38. 17 Incidentally, some of the first peace marches in Britain and the German Empire were also organized by women, underscoring the international character of the movement, which culminated in the 1915 Peace Conference in The Hague, Netherlands. 18 Qtd. in Kuhlman 39.

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it seems, provided American women with the rhetorical armaments to demand equal say-

so in matters of state affairs.

Numerous WPP poems, broadsides, and songs illustrate how female peace

activists sought to exploit their supposed moral authority within the domestic sphere so as

to gain greater influence on the political stage.19 Mina Packard’s poem “Woman’s

Armaments” (1915) graphically highlights the dehumanizing effects of warfare on the

nation’s children:

It makes the baby faces,

So pale; and scared; and white!

It makes the boys, so young and fair,

We taught should never fight,

Go out to kill! and scatter blood

And brains upon the dirt!

Till those fair lithesome bodies

Lie still! and cold! inert!

Based on these horrific images of young male “brains” scattered “upon the dirt,” the

poem concludes with a provocative challenge to place state affairs into caring female

hands:

Just give a women power and see

How she will heed the calls,

To hand out earthly comforts

Instead of cannon balls!20

With the shadow of war hanging over the nation, Packard and her sisters in the peace

movement are able to envision a women’s republic that resembles Gilman’s Herland

insofar as it legitimizes female demands for political power both on moral and on

practical grounds (women “hand out earthly comforts” rather than “cannon balls” and

prevent the decimation of youth).

19 The great popularity of Al Piantadosi and Alfred Bryan’s anti-war song, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” which sold 650,000 copies in the first month of 1915, fueled hopes within the WPP that a mass movement was afoot. 20 Qtd. in Van Wienen 50.

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Before long, however, the WPP’s sway over the public war debate started to

wane. Following the German torpedo attack on the RMS Lusitania, ideological rifts

between radicals, moderates, and conservatives within the various women’s peace and

relief organizations widened. “How terrible is this Lusitania sinking—the loathsome

brutes,” Gertrude Atherton recorded privately, before publicly breaking with Jane

Addams in a 1916 New York Times piece, wherein she declared that the pacifistic

doctrine of nonresistance now seemed “the one thing more abominable than war.”21

All the while, the anglophile “preparedness” movement was gathering steam,

employing some of the same arguments and tactics that the WPP had used so effectively.

In posters, pamphlets, and songs, the German state was represented as the epitome of

male aggressiveness and cruel domination. Racialized images of brutish-looking, dark-

skinned, broad-shouldered, and hairy “Huns” raping a feminized Belgium were circulated

widely through the press. Pointedly expressing the racist zeitgeist, one of Edith

Wharton’s characters in A Son at the Front (1923) pronounces “Germans not fit to live

with white people.”22 The highly publicized execution of the English nurse Edith Cavell

in 1915 furnished additional proof of the Teutonic male’s barbarian misogyny.23

One after another, female peace activists broke ranks and openly sided with the

cause of the Allies. Gilman distanced herself from the WPP’s internationalist peace

platform in 1916. Never shy to expound and expand her racist notions, she declared

Germany a “Frankenstein among the nations,” “an ultra-masculine culture, in a male

world, finding natural associates among the Mohamedans, with their theory of glorified

war and subject womanhood.”24 Wharton’s and Gilman’s inclination to cast the war in

racist terms as “a culture war” is indicative of a strong nativist strain in turn-of-the-

century feminism. Writing chiefly about Gilman’s work, but making wider claims about

the ideology of American fin-de-siècle feminism, Susan S. Lanser notes that “despite her

21 Otd. in Emily Wortis Leider, California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) 265, 268. Although Gertrude Atherton had not joined the WPP, she belong to the Committee of Mercy, a “strictly neutral organization for the collection of funds for the destitute women and children of Europe” (Leider 267). 22 Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (New York: Scribner, 1923), 132. 23 See Peter Buitenhus, The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1987). 24 “Studies in Social Pathology,” Forerunner 7 (1916): 297; “Growth and Combat, Forerunner 7 (1916): 307.

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socialist values” and “her active participation in movements for reform…Gilman…

[frequently] inscribed racism, nationalism, and classism into her proposals for social

change.”25 Of course, as Lanser also points out, white middle class feminists were not

the only one’s plagued by anxieties about race and ethnicity. Throughout the late 19th

and early 20th centuries, writes Lanser, “white, Christian, American-born intellectuals—

novelists, political scientists, economists, sociologists, crusaders for social reform—not

only shared this racial anxiety, but, as John Higham puts it, ‘blazed the way for ordinary

nativists’ by giving popular racism an ‘intellectual respectability’.”26 It therefore seems

scarcely astounding that, especially following Wilson’s proclamation of war in April

1917, Creel’s propaganda machine was so successful in unleashing a wave of “100

percent Americanism” that engulfed most white, native-born middle class women.27 As

pacifism became a treasonous concept, American women felt compelled to demonstrate

their patriotism by actively supporting the war effort as “war mothers,” nurses, relief

workers, shell makers, streetcar conductors, registration officers, propagandists,

informants. Even stalwart Jane Addams worked for Hoover’s Food Administration,

allowed Hull House to become a registration center for draft-aged men, and in 1918

spoke at several Liberty Loan rallies.28

This move from pacifism to “preparedness,” to all-out support of American

military invention can also be traced through best-selling war novels by female authors

such as Temple Bailey’s The Tin Soldier (1918) and Edith Wharton’s The Marne (1918),

where initially pacifistic young women are made to realize that it is their womanly duty

to aid and cheer their fighting men. “I must go out to them,” Bailey’s Drusilla resolves,

joins the corps of war nurses, and subsequently intonates Christian hymns for the “tired

and spent” soldiers, who see “in her…America coming fresh and unworn to fight a

winning battle to the end.”29 Marice Rutledge Gibson Hale’s Children of Fate (1917) is

one of the very few novels written during the war that contests such patriotically

25 Susan S. Lanser, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America,” Feminist Studies 15.3 (1989): 432. 26 Lanser 430. 27 Only the WPP chapter in New York remained steadfastly opposed to America’s intervention in the European War (see Kuhlman, 101-24). 28 Hobbs, 159; Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) 141. 29 Temple Bailey, The Tin Soldier (Philadelphia: Grossett & Dunlap, 1918) 456.

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prescribed female role of vacuous cheerleader. Perhaps anticipating the harsh backlash

against perceived female jingoism by disillusioned male veterans, Natalie, the novel’s

American heroine, comes to regret having idealized warfare.30 Word that Pierre, her

French fiancé, is eager to return to the front after sustaining a wound at Verdun, prompts

Natalie to accuse herself and her sex of abetting senseless slaughter:

What had they done?…For such a war, made by men and upheld by

women, menaced generations…These men sent to kill, for one reason or

another, killed in the name of women. Such women as she, Natalie, were

responsible for their deeds; in the intricate workings of their minds, they

themselves labeled their killing with fair names.31

But for the most part, both female and male writers agitated with increasing vigor on

behalf of America’s official mission “to make the world safe for democracy.” Under the

auspices of the Vigilantes, Gertrude Atherton, for instance, edited several numbers of a

propaganda organ called The American Woman’s Magazine, whose motto was “Service-

Loyalty-Responsibility.”32 Correspondingly, Dorothy Canfield Fisher portrays “a little

Kansas leaven” in Home Fires in France whose display of democratic duty and loyalty

toward the “poor Belgian mothers” shames the young men of her Midwestern village into

volunteering for war. 30 “Glory of Women,” the first in a series of anti-homefront poems by British soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon, had appeared in October 1917: Glory of Women �

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave, Or wounded in a mentionable place. You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace. You make us shells. You listen with delight, By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. You crown our distant ardours while we fight, And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed. You can't believe that British troops 'retire' When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses-blind with blood. O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

31 Marice Rutledge [Gibson Hale], Children of Fate (New York: Stokes, 1917) 72. 32 Leider 279-80. The Vigilantes, co-founded in 1916 by the German-American poet Herman Hagedorn, was a “military-style” organization of intellectuals and writers dedicated to propagate American interventionism abroad. Among its recruits were prominent literary figures such as Edith Thomas, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, George Washington Cable, and Hamlin Garland. See Van Wienen, 155-56.

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Nationalistic frenzy provides one explanation for the women’s embrace of war.

But there were evidently other, much more practical considerations that drew women

toward supporting the war effort. Similar to African American leaders such as W.E.B.

Du Bois, many suffragists reasoned that their work in the service and supply lines would

accelerate their ascend to full citizenship. As Alice Hay Wadsworth noted in a 1917 New

York Times editorial, “Women’s essential contribution to the country’s war needs

apparently has emphasized their claim to political recognition, and the year 1917 has

recorded the greatest actual gains in the history of the American suffrage movement.”33

At least with regard to female suffrage, ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920

bore out Wadsworth’s assessment.

On a more immediate level, the war offered women unprecedented economic

independence and social freedoms. As young men were sent overseas, middle class

women, who had previously been confined to domestic and charity work, suddenly found

it to be their patriotic duty to seek gainful employment outside the home in a wide variety

of occupations, ranging from industrial jobs to higher salaried clerical and managerial

positions. “All told,” Neil A. Wynn calculates, “one million additional women entered

wage labor during the war, and within the female work force there was a considerable

shift as women already in employment moved into better-paying occupations.”34

Growing economic independence translated into greater personal freedom as well.

Observed the British Daily Mail: “The wartime business girl is to be seen any night

dining out alone or with a friend in the moderate-price restaurants in London. Formerly

she would never have had her evening meal in town unless in the company of a man

friend. But now with money and without men she is more and more beginning to dine

out.”35

In the eyes of quite a few women, then, war not merely freed them from the

constraints of traditional gender roles, but made “the blood course through the[ir] veins”

by sending them “up the scaling-ladder, and out into ‘All Man’s Land.’”36 In the absence

of men, women recognized a historical chance to escape from the confines of the home

33 Qtd. in Wynn 149. 34 Wynn 139. 35 Qtd. in Goldman 14. 36 Harriet Stanton Blatch, Mobilizing Woman-Power (New York: The Womans Press, 1918) 86.

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for good. “I think we may write it down in history that on August 14, 1914, the door of

the Doll’s House opened,” muses American journalist Mable Potter Daggett in Woman

Wanted (1918):

She who stood at the threshold where the tides of the ages surged, waved a

brave farewell to lines of gleaming bayonets going down the street. Then

the clock on her mantel ticked off the wonderful moment of the centuries

that only God himself had planned. The force primeval that had held her

in bondage, this is what should set her free.”37

In The White Morning, Gertrude Atherton’s Mariette captures the same exhilarating

sense of escaping the “Doll’s House” more succinctly: “Think of the freedom of being

a Red Cross nurse, and all the men at the front.”38 “It is a marvelous life,” the unnamed

nurse “with the Rank of Lieutenant” in Mademoiselle Miss (1916) concurs, “and

strangely enough, despite all the tragedy, I call it a healthy one…for the first time in my

life I begin to feel as a normal being should.”39 Similarly, the war widows Marguerite

and Madeleine in Fisher’s Home Fires in France quickly regain their health and feel “as

strong as ever” once they put themselves in charge of running a “tenement-house for

children” and a pharmacy respectively (289, 257). And for all her inflated patriotism,

Temple Bailey’s Drusilla seems very cognizant of the war’s potential to turn customary

gender relations up-side-down, when as a female ambulance driver in France she

encounters “men as tender as women, and women as brave as men” (360).

“Women writers,” Dorothy Goldman points out, “almost without exception,

do not…describe warfare” (195). Instead, many of them represent a homefront vacated

by man that affords woman long-sought opportunities to reach and create “A State of Her

Own.”40 As Daggett saw it, the “star of opportunity has taken its course directly from the

battlefields of Europe.”41 Suddenly, amid the upheaval of war, utopia—the mythical

37 Mabel Potter Daggett, Woman Wanted: The Story Written in Blood Red Letters on the Horizon of the Great World War (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918) 91-92. 38 Gertrude Atherton, The White Morning: A Novel of the Power of the German Women in Wartime (New York: Stokes, 1918) 8. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 39 Mademoiselle Miss: Letters from an American Girl Serving with the Rank of a Lieutenant in a French Army Hospital at the Front (Boston: Butterfield, 1916) 4. 40 Title of chapter 7 in Jean Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1984) 141. 41 Daggett 63.

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nowhere—appeared to be localizable on the women-dominated homefront. To be sure, in

foregrounding the war’s liberating impact on white middle class women, war writings by

“American lady authors” might, as Cooperman asserts, appear to be “utterly unrealistic.”

But then again, not a few commentators have argued persuasively that it was the

decidedly “unreal” experiences of working in ammunition plants, organizing war relief

funds, performing clerical duties, associating with men professionally, and dinning out

alone that contributed to making the “single, highly educated, economically independent

New Woman” of the 1920s a reality.42 “The growth of women’s political consciousness

went hand in hand with their [novel] experience of war work,” Goldman assesses (15).

And while it might be true that “American lady authors” by and large tended to

romanticize warfare, their homefront novels certainly complicate the picture of women’s

complicity in the slaughter of millions. For even as most female writers were abandoning

the peace plank in 1917, they continued to challenge and subvert patriarchical structures

of domination, including what they understood to be a universally masculine proclivity

for destruction and bloodshed. “Sick or well, German, English, French, I loathe them all

alike,” the politically radicalized feminist Heloise declares in The White Morning and

prays, “‘O God!…Deliver us! Deliver us from war and deliver us from men’” (65).

Above and beyond more or less radical indictments against male aggression,

war writings by American women such as Mildred Aldrich, Mable Potter Daggett,

Temple Baily, Willa Cather, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Gertrude Atherton sketch out

the contours of a new, female-centered society that is to emerge from the ruins of

androcentric society. Stressing, in Aldrich’s words, “that it is the women who are

changing,” they depict independent women neglecting their household duties, laboring in

factories, running businesses, forming collectives, rejecting motherhood, interrogating

heterosexual relationships, instigating revolutions, and attending to state affairs, thereby

replacing traditional concepts of “True Womanhood” with distinctly modern images of

the “New Woman.”43 In the eyes of radical middle class feminists such as Gertrude

Atherton, it was precisely through her involvement in the war effort that early 20th- 42 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), 245. See also, Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience, Volume Two: From 1860 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994) 269-302. 43 Mildred Aldrich, The Peak of the Land: The Waiting Months on the Hilltop from the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes to the Second Victory on the Marne (Boston: Small & Maynard, 1918) 196.

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century woman came into her own as both a homo economicus and a homo politicus.

“[N]ever,” Atherton observes, “prior to the Great War, was such an enormous body of

women awake after the lethargic submission of centuries, and clamoring for their rights.

Never before have millions of women been supporting themselves; never before had they

even contemplated organization and the direct political attack.”44

Atherton’s anticipation of “the direct political attack” notwithstanding, literary

representations of self-supporting and politically active women in homefront novels

remain conflicted and often revert back to valorizations of matrimony, motherhood, and

domesticity. The very title of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Home Fires in France suggests

an fundamental separation of spheres. Enid’s failure to provide Claude with a good home

in Cather’s One of Ours seems to drive him away and into battle. Marriage (albeit

liberalized) and childbearing, it turns out, remain the liberated heroine’s ultimate raison

d’être in Gilman’s Herland. Even Atherton’s own The White Morning ends with a

picture of the triumphant revolutionary, Gisela, mourning her dead lover, “who had been

her other part and whose heart and hers she had slain” (174).

These novels centered on the female war experiences, “utterly unrealistic” as they

may be, clearly perform notable “cultural work” in that they contribute to a general

broadening of “the horizons of expectations for women,” which, according to Francis

Shor and Rosalind Rosenberg, helped to push socio-political concepts of womanhood

“beyond” the ideology of “separate spheres.”45 More specifically, in projecting feminist

utopia desires onto the homefront experiences of female characters, women writers were

able to harness conventions of the utopian genre in ostensibly realistic—because at once

experientially verifiable—fashion so as to critique and revise existing gender relations.46

Carol A. Kolmerten has shown that throughout late 19th and early 20th century

women writers effectively employed utopian forms in a three-pronged assault against

structures of patriarchical society.47 Wartime perceptions of women seemed to further

44 Gertrude Atherton, The Living Present (New York: Stokes, 1917), 207. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 45 Shor 28; see also See Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982). 46 Hence, at the request of her publisher, Atherton appended her fictional account of a “Woman’s Revolution” in Germany with “An Argument for My ‘The White Morning’.” 47 For an extended discussion of utopian forms in American literature, see Jean Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1984) 3-25.

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substantiate the grounds of such efforts.48 First, Kolmerten points out, utopian writings

facilitated a sustained critique of what many women perceived to be “destructive male

values.”49 With the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, many women saw war-making as

the utmost expression of inherent patriarchal desires to dominate through brute force.

Thus popular depictions of the hyper-masculine Hun provided women writers with easy,

politically acceptable targets. Secondly, following in the footsteps of earlier feminist

social novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), adaptation of utopian forms

allowed for the creation of “a supportive female-centered community,” which, if not

exclusively female, is at least guided by “feminine” values.50 Given the real or imagined

absence of men during war, such creations of female-centered communities not only

appeared to be quite plausible but indeed indispensable and hence found their way quite

naturally into many war novels by women. Thirdly, the utopian form permitted the

depiction of female characters who find fulfillment in a variety of roles, activities, trades,

and professions that in “real life” were occupied by males. By 1917, this too seemed less

utopian than ever, for the enormous national war effort required women to take over

scores of jobs that had been vacated by draft-aged males. Homefront novels by women

abound with female characters who not only work as nurses or social workers, but also as

farmers, bakers, doctors, pharmacists, shopkeepers, business executives, etc.

As the following discussion of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Home Fires in France

and Gertrude Atherton’s The White Morning shall show in greater detail, homefront

novels written from a feminist perspective tend to heighten utopian expectations released

by war in order to revise and to realign existing gender relations. And in doing so,

women writers of the Great War became intimately involved in the often loud and

impassioned gender debates of war and postwar periods. Through their sometimes

hesitant sometimes provocatively brazen representations of the war’s liberating potential

48 It is interesting to note that the Great War occurred at a time when utopian fictions were in vogue. “Between 1869 and 1920, amid a general increase in women’s writing, there was a sudden efflorescence of utopian narratives, Darby Lewes notes. “More than a hundred texts of astonishing diversity appeared: profeminist and antifeminist, socialist and capitalist; placed in Kentucky or London, or on Mars; set in the past, present, future, or outside time altogether.” Darby Lewes, Dream Revisonaries: Gender and Genre in Women’s Utopian Fiction, 1870-1920 (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995) 1 49 Carol A. Kolmerten, “Texts and Contexts: American Women Envision Utopia, 1890-1920,” Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, eds. Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (Syracuse: Syracuse UP. 1994) 108. 50 Kolmerten 108.

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for women, they rattled on the very foundations of a patriarchical society, struggling to

come to grips with the ripple effects of industrial warfare. Depictions of women who

seemed to somehow miraculously grow independent and self-assertive amidst the turmoil

of war, sent an unmistakable signal that male supremacy was volatile. The general sense

of disillusionment that was to follow the war only enhanced these signals (and

consequentially triggered a fierce antifeminist backlash).

Still, both Atherton’s radical utopian dream in The White Morning and Fisher’s

somewhat nostalgic vision of a gentler, kinder, feminized society already seem to carry

their own seeds of destruction. For as liberating as these dreams and visions might be,

they are undercut by efforts to revalidate and reinforce traditional notions of essential

gender differences. Deeply ingrained notions that women are by nature less aggressive,

less competitive, less self-interested, and less domineering than men not only limit the

range of representable female activities, but also give rise to valorized depictions of

female-centered communities that obscure, among other things, class- and race-based

mechanisms of societal domination. Perhaps nobody was more aware of these tendencies

within much of the feminist literature of the early 20th century than Emma Goldman, who

in characteristic brashness declared the “American suffrage movement…altogether a

parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people” and repudiated

both the deification and the demonization of woman as complementary means to turn her

into an otherworldly, inhuman, and essentially unnatural creature. “[W]oman’s greatest

misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil,” Goldman avers in

“Woman Suffrage” (1910), since it prevented her from “being considered human, and

therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes.”51

As a concluding look at Henry Sydnor Harrison’s Saint Teresa will highlight,

idolized utopian images of unfettered heroines could consequently be blunted and

contained through satirical modes of representation that stress the self-denying

“unnaturalness” of radical, “old-style” feminists. Both the utopian and the satirical mode,

a number of critics have pointed out, draw upon the same impulse to heighten or

51 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969) 207 & 199.

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exaggerate the experience of reality.52 Thus, heightened to the point of near absurdity,

Harrison’s Saint Teresa absorbs images of the “single, highly educated, economically

independent New Woman” within an increasingly popular, pseudo-scientific normalizing

discourse that invents categories of deviance so as to predicate true fulfillment upon new

concepts of mutual surrender and companionate marriage. The end product is a new

woman whose demand for greater independence is acknowledged, but who has somehow

lost her political and culture-critical edge.

II

Like Edith Wharton, Mildred Aldrich, Gertrude Atherton, and several other literary

women of her time, Dorothy Canfield Fisher experienced the war firsthand behind the

French lines. Unable “to put up with” the “inactivity” of the distant observer, Dorothy

Canfield and her husband John Fisher had decided early on in the war “to do

something.”53 On April 22, 1916, John Fisher sailed to France where he would serve

with the American Ambulance Service of the American Ambulance Hospital in Neuilly.

At home in Vermont, Dorothy Fisher’s restlessness increased. Three months later,

against the strong urgings of family and friends, she took her children and followed her

husband to Paris. There Fisher got involved in volunteer work at a rehabilitation center

for the war blind and later spearheaded efforts to print and disseminate Braille books.

The Fishers stayed oversees for the duration of World War I.

During her two-and-a-half years in France, Fisher managed to write incessantly,

supplying her publishers with a steady stream of war sketches and short stories that

appeared in Collier’s Weekly and Harper’s Bazaar. Perceiving that the people back

home remained largely oblivious to the tremendous changes precipitated by the European

conflict, Fisher was determined to shake the American public out of its isolationist

complacency. As she explained afterwards, “my object…was to try to get something to

the American public which would sound real to them, would sound like what might

happen to any of us, in comfortable homes in suburbs.”54 Fisher, who never considered

herself a pacifist, clearly sought to heighten pro-war sentiments in America through some 52 See, for example, Jean Pfaelzer’s discussion in her opening chapter of The Utopian Novel in America, 1869-1896. 53 Qtd. in Margaret L. Clark, “Above the Battle and Above the Noise: Tiers of Propaganda in Great War Literature” (Unpublished Dissertation: Louisiana State U., 2003) 69. 54 Ibid. 72.

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of her melodramatic stories such as “A Little Kansas Leaven.” But on a perhaps more

subtle level, Fisher also wanted to make the war politically relevant by highlighting its

far-reaching effects on a domestic sphere that had hitherto appeared to be comfortably

secure, stable, unchanging. Writing of her short story, “La Pharmacienne,” Fisher

elucidates her growing interest in what she saw as the evolutionary transformation

processes women undergo during wartime:

It is a study of a Frenchwomen, typical nice, housekeeper, good-mother-

variety, who is hard hit by the war, living in the war-zone, and is little by

little transformed out of being a house-cat into being one of the stern,

unconsciously heroic obscure heroines of France. To my mind, the study

has value because nobody has said a word as yet about the processes by

which all this unexpected heroism has been evolved out of the French

people.55

About half of her sociological character studies that were to be collected in Home

Fires in France and Days of Glory (1919) revolve around the wartime experiences of

stern Frenchwomen, who in the face of extreme danger and adversity, develop their

innate potential for heroic action. Partially grounded in older notions of “true

womanhood,” Homes Fires in France extols the “simple virtues” of “close-knit,” child-

rearing female communities like those envisioned in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of

the Pointed Furs (1896). Amid the death and destruction wrought by war, women are

time and again depicted as the true standard bearers of civilization who heroically resist

extreme male aggression at the hand of barbaric German soldiers, while commencing the

deliberate civilatory task of creating a gentler, more peaceable society guided feminine

values. Neither depicted as the harbinger of a coming social revolution, as in proletarian

war novels, nor rendered as the shocking revelation of man’s absurd existence in a fully

industrialized world, as in modernist protest novels, in Fisher’s homefront sketches the

Great War is represented as the bloodstained birth bed of modern gender relations, which,

after the violent throes have subsided, promise a new and improved normalcy.

Significantly, in “Vignettes from Life at the Rear,” it is a French soldier who explicitly

55 Otd. in Ida H. Washington, Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography (Shelburne, VT: The New England Press, 1982) 160.

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links the birth of new ideas to the experience of labor pain: “When a mother gives birth

to a child, she suffers, suffers horribly. Perhaps all the world is now trying to give birth

to a new idea, which have we talked of, but never felt before” (75). And as if on cue,

when the recently windowed Madeleine in “La Pharmacienne” awakes from her deathlike

slumber, she feels that “some tremendous change had come over the world,” cleans up

her late husband’s store, and dutifully assumes her new communal role as the village

pharmacist (289).

Fisher’s literary attempts to make the war “real” for her readership, then, do not

end at producing sympathetic identification, but persist in generating exemplary female

figures whose bold ventures into the public realm put America’s contentedly stagnant

housewives to shame. “There has been a great deal exclaiming and admiring,” Fisher

notes, “but I have a notion that most Americans don’t realize by what hard and bitter and

horrible phases the Frenchwomen had to pass before they emerged from being just nice

home-keepers into being guardians of the public weal, as they are to so great an extent in

the deserted villages and towns.”56 In their new public roles, Frenchwomen, Fisher

suggests, show their American sisters how “the organizations created to achieve suffrage”

might in due course “become powerful weapons with which to wrest from men

significant portions of real power.”57

One of these “horrible phases,” with which American women are familiar but to

which their heroic French sisters are subjected in its “absurdest extreme,” is living under

the yoke of “unbridled masculinity.” In Fisher’s Home Fires in France the critique of

“destructive male values,” so characteristic of late 19th- and early 20th-century feminist

writings, surfaces time and again in depictions of marauding German troops, upsetting

the well-ordered life of female villagers in French border towns. Drawing upon easily

recognizable propaganda images, Fisher represents German soldiers as atavistic

creatures—barely human—who snatch food from the lips of emaciated children, mistreat

prisoners, engage in drunken revelries, beat and rape women at will. In two typical

scenes from “La Pharmacienne,” German troops invade Madeleine’s household,

demanding their spoils of war:

56 Qtd. in Washington 60. 57 Zieger 151.

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Madeleine went into the kitchen and brought back on a big tray everything

ready-cooked which was there…The men drinking at the sideboard cried

aloud hoarsely and fell upon the contents of the tray, clutching, cramming

food in their mouths…still tearing off huge mouthfuls from the cheese, the

bread, the meat, they held, masticating them with wild animal noises,

turned and clattered down the stairs again, having paid no more attention

to Madeleine than if she had been a piece of the furniture. (276)

Following this first violent disruption of domestic tranquility, Madeleine is left in a state

of shock: “Everywhere she looked, she [still] saw yellow teeth, gnawing and tearing at

food; bulging jaw-muscles straining; dirty foreheads streaked with perspiration, wrinkled

like those of eating dogs; bloodshot eyes glaring in physical greed” (277). But she soon

recovers and vows unyielding resistance against future onslaughts by “the dirty beasts”

(277). “Her fear left her, never to come back, swept away by a bitter contempt” (277).

Yet, an officer’s request to prepare food and lodging, uttered in the “casual tone of a man

giving an order to a servant,” further humiliates Madeleine, as she must recognize “her

absolute defenselessness in the face of physical force” (278). Reduced to the status of

servant when “four Herr-Lieutenants and one Herr-Captain” take up quarter in her house,

Madeleine nonetheless musters the strength to fend off a desperately drunk soldier, trying

to rape her household help:

Simone struggled and screamed, shriek after shriek, horribly. Madeleine

screamed too, and snatching up the poker flung herself on the man. He

released his hold, too uncertain on his feet to resist. Both women threw

themselves against him, pushing him to the door an shoving him out on

the narrow landing, where he lost his balance and fell heavily, rolling over

and over, down the stairs. (280-81)

Aside from their time-specific propaganda value, these two scenes certainly bespeak

widely shared female apprehensions within a male-dominated world. Though desires to

exploit and to violate women are projected squarely onto the “yellow-toothed,” dog-like

German über-male here, few among Fisher’s female readers would have missed the

pointed critique of patriarchic domination in general. “To feel it [the sense of her

defenselessness] again, is to be bitterly shamed,” the narrator states, serving a somber

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reminder that even in peacetime “modern[]” women enjoy few legal protections (278).

And “in the face of” this inherent vulnerability, Madeleine’s and Simone’s concerted

action seems to suggest that women of all stations must learn to work together so as to

organize their collective defense.

Of course, unlike more radical feminists such as Atherton and Gilman, Fisher

appears to have never even toyed with the idea of a woman’s revolution. Yet, similar to

Atherton and Gilman, Fisher grew more convinced throughout the war that passive non-

resistance ultimately strengthens the oppressive powers that be. Having sympathized

with pacifist organizations before the war, Fisher did not reach this conviction easily,

especially since she was confronted daily with the consequence of industrial warfare.

Surrounded by maimed and mutilated soldiers in France, Fisher at times nearly lost faith

in the “war to end all wars,” as a letter to Sarah Cleghorn reveals:

I wonder if you realize how faint-hearted and sick I am most of the time,

even with the feeling not wavering that there was nothing for the French and

Belgians to do but to defend their country?…I have the feeling that our

generation is pretty well done for, stunned and stupefied with the bludgeon

of the war, and that it is only for the children that the future will draw enough

vitality to stagger along…What do you suppose I am writing? I am setting

down for my own benefit the reasons why I am not a thorough-going non-

resistant pacifist.58

Proclivities toward becoming a “thorough-going non-resistant pacifist” would eventually

resurface in her third Great War book, The Deepening Stream (1930). In 1917, however,

Fisher could reassure herself that force requires counterforce. Detecting socio-

pathological parallels between sudden outbursts of uncontrollable male aggression and

Prussian designs to conquer the world, Fisher insists on the necessity of active resistance

with reference to one of her earlier short stories. “I know you won’t remember a sketch I

wrote years ago,” Fisher begins a another letter to Cleghorn,

about a young wife who found that her new husband had fits of

inexplicable bad temper—when now matter how gentle and ingenious

58 Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, ed. Mark J. Madigan (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993) 90.

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tender she was, everything she did only irritated him the more. After a

conversation with his old nurse who described him as a child, she takes

another course, flies into a pretended rage herself, scolds and threatens and

cries. He is astonished and a little bit daunted, finally…quite changed in

humor, pets her…and ends by carrying her off to the theatre and supper

afterwards… I couldn’t let it go like that and made an unexpected turn at

the ending, where the young wife has a tragic gaze into the future as she

sees what manner of man she has united her life to…. I have observed, or

think I have that there are certain natures, whom non-resistance acts upon

like a sort of irresistible excitant, like a poison, like a powerful drug which

they can’t resist. It excites them to deeds of brutality…. Now it has been

my feeling that the Prussian military party is, among nations what that sort

of man is among people…. I don’t think moral suasion can work with such

people nor appeals to their honor.59

Unlike the founding mothers of Herland, the women in Fisher’s Home Fires in France do

not slay their brutal male conquerors. But in accordance with Fisher’s rejection of

passive non-resistance, they do learn to engage in acts of open defiance and covert

subversion—a reflection, perhaps, of the increasingly militant methods employed by

American suffragists at home.

In “The Refugee,” an unnamed heroine, described as “the very type and symbol

of the intelligent, modern woman,” recounts her village’s struggles during German

occupation (111). At first, the townspeople, consisting “only of old men and defenseless

women” (125), submit themselves passively to the oppressors, breaking none “of ‘their’

rules” and hoping “constantly for deliverance” (119, 114). Abiding by “‘their’ rules,”

however, merely leads to greater oppression. The “Boches” begin to publicly flog

prisoners, ban Frenchwomen from hospital work, “at any hour of the day or

night…search house[s] from top to bottom,” seal off the town and attempt to shut down

its schools (119).

Resentment grows until the unnamed heroine realizes “how deeply even a modern

woman can be forced to hate” (119). Invigorated by their righteous hatred, the

59 Ibid 91.

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townswomen keep open the schools and in brash defiance of the authorities publicly

intonate the Marseilles, while “a regiment of German guards” stands by idly (125).

Moreover, the women begin to secretly obtain French newspapers and smuggle letters

across the lines. “That rule, like all their rules, is broken as often as we can,” the heroine

proudly informs her readership (125). As a result of their subversive activities, many

townswomen are strip-searched, imprisoned, or deported. Yet, “we did not weep,” the

resolute heroine recalls, “we have never shown them how they can torture us. Not a tear

was shed” (131).

Though weary and exhausted, the women in Home Fires in France grow stronger

and ever more self-confident in the face of brutal adversity. Men, meanwhile, appear to

become proportionally weaker, reverting back into a feeble child-like state that requires

motherly oversight and protection. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have pointed out,

perceptions of World War I and its social consequences were oftentimes very gender-

specific: “as young men became increasingly alienated from their prewar selves, women

seemed to become, as if by some uncanny swing of history's pendulum, ever more

powerful” (425). The “war that has traditionally been defined as an apocalypse of

masculinism, Gilbert and Gubar conclude, “seems to have led to an apotheosis of

femaleness” (424-425).

Although Gilbert’s and Gubar’s claim may be a bit sweeping, Fisher’s short story,

“Eyes for the Blind,” seems to bespeak just such “an apotheosis of femaleness,” for it not

only registers the war’s potential to dramatically alter gender relations, but actively

creates a world stripped of all vestiges of masculine authority. Before the war a passive

woman whose husband afforded her a life of luxury, the unmanned heroine of Fisher’s

story rises to the occasion when called upon to lead a rehabilitation center for the “war-

blind” (176). Aside from training the blind veterans to become “professional knitters”

and shouldering full responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the institute, the

“Directrice” assumes the role of mother and confessor. Surrounded by broken,

disoriented men who nod, salute, and disperse “like obedient children,” she acts as their

sole pillar of strength and support (176). Even the “great-shouldered, massively muscular

fellow clutched at her like a scared child, and began in rapid, hysteric whisper to tell her

of the awful things he saw in his eternity of blackness” (177). The transfer of power from

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men to women is absolute in this story; rendered blind and hysterical by yellow gas, the

men are thankful to perform feminine tasks, while the “Victorian matriarch” orders the

world around them.60 And even though the Directrice does not actually “wear the black

and penitential garb of the Mother Superior,” she exhibits “all of a Mother Superior’s

firm, penetrating authority and calm manner” (179).

Fisher’s vision of the new, feminized order that is to emerge from the ruins of a

war-ravaged world takes most conspicuous shape in the two stories that frame Homes

Fires in France: “Notes from a French Village in the War Zone” and “La

Pharmacienne.”61 In both of these two sketches Fisher depicts a proto-capitalistic society

that is constructed around the needs of women and therefore deeply invested in ostensibly

feminine values such as tutoring, communitarianism, and non-competitiveness.

Inversely put, the text creates a society that defies a modern industrial order guided by

supposedly masculine ideals such as strenuous exercise, individualism, profiteering, and

one-upmanship. Ultimately, then, this communitarian society founded not so much on

socialists principles as one the aforementioned nurturing feminine values, resolves

simmering class conflicts by tempering modern capitalism’s masculine emphasis on

competition as well as its masculine proclivity for exploitation.

Set up through light banter between an “American boy” and a maternal tour-guide

narrator, the opening story, “Notes from a French Village in the War Zone,” provides a

yearning glimpse of an idyllic yet industrious rural world that still affords a “really

sociable community life” (5). In sharp contrast to contemporary American “country life,”

which has become marked by “the isolation and loneliness of the women and children,”

there “is no isolation possible here,”62

when, to shake hands with the woman of the next farm, you have only to

lean out of your front window and have her lean out of hers, when your

children go to get water from the fountain along with all the other children

of the to region, when you are less than five minutes’ walk from church

60 Douglass 6. 61 “Self determination and collectivity permeate Canfield’s early war sketches,” notes Margaret L. Clark in “Above the Noise and Above the Glory: Tiers of Propaganda in Great War Literature (unpublished Dissertation: Louisiana State University, 2003) 79. To Clark, however, Fisher’s emphasis on collectivity merely signifies a return to “familial domestic tranquility” (82). 62 The same theme of rural isolation also underlies Susan Glaspell’s one-act play, Trifles (1916).

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and the grocery-store, when your children can wait till the school-bell is

ringing before snatching up their books to go to school. (4-5)

The town’s “close-knit communal organization,” the narrator extols, extends far beyond

mere sociability. Among other things, it is conducive to specialization and a pooling of

resources so that “labors…are better done in centralized activity” (13). As part of this

pre-industrial arrangement, the “village bakeress” supplies the entire community with

“well-baked loaves,” while Madame Beaugard, “the village fruit-seller…adds greatly to

the variety and tastefulness of the diet of the village” (14). And on wash days too the

“community puts its resources together instead of scattering them” (14). But communal

work is more than an efficient pooling of resources; it is also always a time for friendly

sociability:

Here during the communal lavoir…our housewife finds an assortment of

her friends and neighbors…gets whatever news from the outer world is

going around jokes and scolds, sympathizes and laughs…gets, in short the

same refreshing and entire change from the inevitable monotony of the

home routine which an American housewife of a more prosperous class

gets in her club meeting, and which the American housewife of the same

class gets, alas! almost never. (15)

Similarly, “the younger girls of the town are brought together” in a school, where they

“learn how to sew and cook and keep their household accounts” (18). Further, in keeping

with the villagers’ mercantilist spirit, “older girls, instead of being forced to go away

from home, as in most American villages, to work in factories or shops, may earn an

excellent living” at the communal “embroidery” enterprise that “sell[s] direct[ly] to

consumers” (19). At a time when wartime strikes and labor unrest ridiculed middle class

notions of social peace in America, Fisher’s decidedly premodern utopia, which harks

back to “preindustrial ideas of capitalism,” is not only alive and well in these whimsical

portraits of classless female industriousness, but also ostensible free from the ugly

blemishes of poverty, overproduction, unemployment, competitiveness, profiteering,

exploitation, etc.63 Run—in the noticeable absence of men—exclusively by and for the

63 Richard Grassby, The Idea of Capitalism before the Industrial Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.

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women of Crouy, this insular, self-sufficient settlement comes very close indeed to

resembling Gilman’s Herland.

So does, not coincidentally, Fisher’s final portrayal of post-occupation life in “La

Pharmacienne.” Having withstood utter degradation at the hand of beastly German

mercenaries, Madeleine and her fellow-townswomen “feel as strong as ever,” sense that

“some tremendous change had come over the world” (289) and “without knowing it” take

“a first step forward into a new life” (292). When Sœus Ste. Lucie’s breaks the spell by

observing, “We haven’t any mayor and the priest is dead, and we haven’t any pharmacy

and the baker is mobilized, and there isn’t one strong, well man left in town,” the brave

women of this new world “emerge[] from being just nice home-keepers into being

guardians of the public weal” (295). Henceforth, the women literally act as executors or

inheritors of the patriarchal estate and for the first time seem to feel a strong sense of

purpose and self-ownership: The “wife of the baker” gets “up at two o’clock in the

morning” to “heat the oven,” the “white-haired wife of the old mayor” takes over his

place at the town hall, and Madeleine, “stepp[ing] forward into a new and awful and

wonderful world,” announces: “Yes, oh yes, I shall keep the pharmacy open” (304-

306).

It remains unclear what the “new and awful and wonderful world” will hold for

Fisher’s grief-stricken yet expectant and visible empowered female characters. The

closing image of Madeleine, “put[ting] down her head and walk[ing] forward strongly, as

though breasting and conquering a great wind,” seems to suggest that she will never

again be a “house-cat” of the “typical nice, housekeeper, good-mother-variety” (309). In

the end, Fisher’s Home Fires in France appears to second Gertrude Atherton’s defiant

conclusion in The Living Present that the new women of World War I are here to stay:

“Thousands have, under the spur, developed unsuspected capacities, energies, endurance,

above all genuine executive abilities. That these women should be swept back into

private life by the selfishness of men when the killing business is over is simply

unthinkable” (207). Of course, the very vehemence of Atherton’s pronouncement betrays

her (and Fisher’s) awareness that the “unthinkable” was already happening at home. As

early as 1917, in a rare show of unanimity, labor leaders, industrialists, and government

officials alike began citing prevailing medical opinion, according to which sustained

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labor was detrimental to women’s delicate organs. The implied message was that women

should resume their domestic roles as soon as fighting ends. Moreover, even though a

number of “women activist” and “social feminists” had managed to secure executive

positions within new regulatory agencies such as the National War Labor Board, a

predominantly male bureaucracy strenuously resisted implementing ordinances that

would grant women equal pay, work-place security, and the opportunity for job

advancement.64 The NWLB, historian Valerie Connor concludes, “was unable to accept

women as responsible partners in the formation and administration of policy because

fundamentally, it rejected the basic equality of women in industrial matters.”65 (234).

And sure enough, as the end of war seemed imminent, NWLB Secretary W. Jett Lauck

brushed off demands to afford women the same kind of workplace protection that men

enjoyed by flatly declaring, “Women are the mothers of the race…and cannot be dealt

with on the same terms as men workers.”66

III

Meanwhile, the war abroad gave rise to some outright murderous fantasies at home.

Inspired by the highly publicized murder trial of one Florence Carman, Gertrude

Atherton concocted her topical novel Mrs. Belfame in 1916. Set among the upwardly

mobile smart set of provincial Elsinore, the novel traces Enid Belfame’s dubious rise to

fame as the prime suspect in her husband’s murder. Modestly wealthy and well-

connected, Enid’s homicidal designs spring less from any particular disgust with her

boorish husband than from a general longing “for a room, a separate personal existence,

of her own.”67 “Divorce being out of the question,” the thought of deposing “David

Belfame, superfluous husband,” takes “definite form” in Enid’s mind during a lecture at

the “Friday Club” on the theme “The European War vs. Women” (11, 8). “[S]purred” by

the speaker’s lurid accounts of German war atrocities, Enid’s scruples about taking a life

diminish, as she reasons, “‘Why not?’ Over there men were being torn and shot to pieces

by wholesale, joking across the trenches in their intervals of rest, to kill again when the

64 Zieger 147-48 65 Valerie Jean Connor, The National War labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I (Chapel Hill: u of North Carolina P, 1983) 234. 66 Qtd. in Connor 215. 67 Gertrude Atherton, Mrs. Belfame: A Novel (New York: Stokes, 1916) 2. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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signal was given with as little compunction as she herself had often aimed at a target, or

wrung a chicken that had fed from her hand. And these were men, the makers of law, the

self-elected rulers of the world” (8). Equating her personal misery with the world-wide

“human sufferings” caused by the man-made war, Enid turns the planned “removal” of

her husband into an indictment against the entire male sex (14). In her mind, the mayhem

abroad furnishes sufficient evidence “that not civilization but man was a failure” so that

the elimination of one more of these failed creatures might actually be a blessing (14).

Three-hundred-odd pages later, the reader learns that Enid never got to act

upon her murderous inclinations. A surprise confession read in court revels that “dear

friend” Anna Steuer had unbeknownst to Enid acted on her behalf out of sheer sisterly

love (317). Unrepentant till the end, Anna justifies the killing of Enid’s husband in her

“ante-mortem statement” as a revolutionary challenge to the glaringly obvious

lawlessness of a male-dominated world at war:

Millions of men in the greatest civilizations of earth are killing one

another daily for no reason whatever save that man, who seeks to direct

the destinies of the world, is a complete and pitiful failure. Why, pray,

should a woman repent having broken one of his laws and removed one of

the most worthless and abominable of his sex, who had made the life of a

beloved friend past enduring. Moreover, I have saved hundreds of lives at

the risk of my own. (329)

Set free not only from the prison of legal law, but from the jail of gender relations as

well, Enid honors the “martyrdom” of her friend by bidding final farewell to her current

admirer and sailing off to the “battlefields” of Europe, where “in some small measure”

she intends to “take [Anna’s] place” as a “nurse” (334).

Having committed to print her nascent ideas that it might take some form of

violent rebellion to deliver woman from a bellicose patriarchy, Atherton soon followed

her character Enid to Europe. In France, aside from making her usual rounds of the

Parisian high society circles, Atherton toured numerous field hospitals in the war zone,

observed wartime life on the streets, and conducted several interviews with French girls

of different classes and backgrounds. These interviews and observations formed the

basis of her essays in The Living Present, wherein she repeatedly augured a fundamental

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and lasting revolution in gender relations. But it was through her second war novel that

she could finally enact her vision of an Amazonian revolution to end all wars and to

deliver women from the yoke.

Deemed “grotesque,” a “screaming extravaganza,” and “a thesis more…than a

novel” by some reviewers, The White Morning, in the words of a more complimentary

New York Times critic, “seeks to express a great possibility, to reveal that there is perhaps

on the edge of history a revolution unlike any other the world has yet seen.” 68 Covering

roughly a fifteen year time-span from 1903 to 1918, the novel depicts the steady up swell

of rebellious sentiments among German women, until they are so disgusted by their

domineering and warmongering fathers, brothers, husbands, lovers in field gray that they

stage a violent “woman’s revolution,” which puts an immediate end to war and leads to

the establishment of a republic, “acknowledged by the great powers of the world” (169).

Revealing not a little of Atherton’s contempt for the lower classes, the uprising is very

much a revolution from above. “I made Gisela a junker at birth,” Atherton explains in

her appended “Argument for My The White Morning,” “because a rebel from the top,

with qualities of leadership, would make a deeper impression in Germany than one of the

many avowed extremists of humbler origins” (193). Thus, the novel’s heroine and

eventual leader of the revolution is a Countess von Niebuhr, who assumes the common

surname Döring when mingling with the Bohemian crowd in Munich, studying English

as a governess in the United States, trying to declass pesky wooers of lower station, or

making contact with aforementioned “extremists of humbler origins.” Portrayed as a

palpable goddess of wrath, Gisela, is, to use Emily Wortis Leider’s apt description,

“Atherton’s Siegfried-slaying answer to Richard Wagner’s ‘Brunhilde on the rock’ who

“awaken[s] not at the kiss of man, but at the summons of Germany in her darkest hour.”69

In accord with Atherton’s belief that it requires an “educated and systematically

trained” mind of “leisure” to conceive radical feminist ideas, the novel begins with a

prewar portrayal of Gisela’s growth and development into a champion of women’s rights

(189). Raised under the riding boot of a despotic Prussian patriarch, Gisela and her

68 C. K. Mitchner, rev. of The White Morning by Gertrude Atherton (Bellman 6 April 1918: 385); rev. of The White Morning by Gertrude Atherton (Dial 28 Feb. 1918: 205); “The War in England and Germany,” rev. of The White Morning by Gertrude Atherton (New York Times 27 June 1918: 55). 69 Leider 273.

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sisters had early on in their lives “solemnly pledged one another never to marry” (2). But

it is not until her four-year stay as a governess in New York that Gisela comes into close

contact with emancipated Anglo-Saxon upper-class girls and develops a truly feminist

consciousness. Returning from the States with a “developing sense of revolt against the

attitude of the German male” (32), talented Gisela fashions herself into a successful

author, publishing works that “appeal[] subtly but clearly to the growing rebellion of the

German women” (45). In one of the novel’s frequent lecture sections, the intrusive

narrator describes the fomenting sub-current of female discontent, which the heroine

manages to gather and distill within her plays:

Those who have not lived in Germany have not even an inkling of the

deep slow secret revolt against the insolent and inconsiderate attitude of

the German male that had been growing among its women for some

fifteen years before the outbreak of the war. They ventured no public

meetings or militant acts of any sort, for men were far too strong for them

yet, and the German women is by nature retiring, however individualistic

her ego. Their only outward manifestation was the hideous reformkleid,70

a typical manifestation in even the women of a nation whose art is as ugly

as it is often interesting. But thousands of them were muttering to one

another and reading with envy the literature of woman’s revolt in other

lands. When one of their own sex rose, a women of highest intellect and

an impeccable style…their own vague protest slowly crystallized and they

grew to look upon her as a leader, who one day would show them the path

out of bondage. (47-48)

The White Morning obviously contains much propagandistic value in its stereotypical

renditions of the subservient, disciplined, pedantic and always a bit oafish German

character. Yet, not unlike Fisher’s Home Fires in France, the novel’s exaggerated

depictions of the inherent misogynism of “German Kultur” also serves as a convenient

window dressing for its piercing critique of patriarchal designs to keep women in a

70 At the turn of the century, German women’s right activists and physicians propagated the so-called “Reformkleid,” a simple, loose-hanging dress that was to free middle-class women from the constraints of the corset.

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passive state of subservience (46). Incidentally, American suffragettes often employed

similar strategies, unfurling, for example, banners in front of the White House, reminding

“Kaiser Wilson” that “20,000,000 American women are not self-governed” (qtd. in

Kuhlman 30).

In the patriotic guise of its avowedly anti-German stance, The White Morning

presents a radical feminist response to the Great War through which Atherton seeks to

realize her hopes that “if this war lasts long enough women for the first time in the

history of civilization will have it in them to seize one at least of the world’s reins”

(Living Present 213). For the roots of the Great War, Atherton emphasizes in The White

Morning, are to be found in the very structure of patriarchal societies, whose

characteristically aggressive capitalism had set them on an unbending course toward

mutual destruction. Discussing the causes of the war, Mimi, one of Gisela’s close

associates, keenly assesses:

It was also more than possible that [Germany’s] aggressive prosperity

might one of these days excite the apprehension of Great Britain, who

would then show more than her teeth. Gradually the idea must have

permeated, taken possession of the minds of men who had vast fortunes to

increase or lose, that sooner or later they must fight for what they had and

that it were better perhaps to strike first, at a moment they might choose

themselves—however little they might sympathize with the ambitions of

the Pan-German Party for supreme power in Europe—. (86)

Given the avaricious mindset of men, striving to “increase” and protect their “vast

fortunes” by whatever means possible, the war was all but inevitable and Germany’s

opening salvo constituted nothing more and nothing less than an ill-advised preemptive

strike, the novel intimates rather subversively. But at any rate, once men have begun to

slaughter each other over their “vast fortunes,” The White Morning contends, the war

releases so much internal friction that it finally ignites the long fuse of the “deep slow

secret revolt…that had been growing among …women.”

Accordingly, as the war drags on and news reaches the homefront that “more than

half a million young Germans had fallen before Verdun,” budding thoughts of a

revolution take concrete shape in the minds of Gisela and her associates (69). “War and

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misery and starving children, the loss of men and boys they loved, and a profound

distrust of their rulers…fill[] them with a cold and bitter hatred of an autocracy convicted

of lying and aggressive purpose out of its own mouth” (140). “They feared for their

daughters at homes even as they feared for their young sons in the trenches…Barring a

revolution, the war might last for years…years” (108). “God! How they hate the war—

every women I know,” Gisela’s sister Mariette exclaims (104). “O God!,” Heloise joins

the chorus of exasperated women and, like Enid and Anna in Mrs. Belfame, projects her

hatred of war squarely onto the entire male half of the world’s population: “Sick or well,

German, English, French, I loathe them all alike…Deliver us! Deliver us from war and

deliver us from men!” (65).

United by a shared determination to stamp out or at least to curtail masculine

propensities for domination through brute force, the vengeance-filled women in The

White Morning not only display “genuine executive abilities” when they begin to secretly

plan the revolution, but also develop deep bonds of friendship among themselves that

challenge and transcend traditional heterosexual relationships. What starts as a political

revolution becomes a sexual revolution that portends an uncanny erasure of masculinity,

which William Faulkner’s sexless Donald Mahon in Soldier’s Pay seems to complete.

Similar to Anna in Mrs. Belfame, Gisela “fe[els] a sudden inclusive love of her sex, an

overpowering desire to deliver it form the sadness and horror of war; a profounder

emotion than anything it had inspired in those far off days of peace (67). Consequently,

“the friends of her inner circle [are] all women” and even though Gisela once in awhile

“crave[s]” the “society” of some men, “she g[ives] her real sympathies and affections to

her women friends” (68). The long-term satisfaction Gisela finds in homosocial

relationships with her women friends supercede the short-lived pleasure of heterosexual

love, especially since the latter threatens to confine her within the patriarchal institution

of marriage.

Organized with Prussian precision and in strictly hierarchical fashion—Gisela has

dispatched her “lieutenants” into all four corners of the empire—the revolutionary

women’s army, “dressed uniformly in gray,” awaits their leader’s signal to advance

(130). Before Gisela can give the go-ahead for the violent uprising, though, she has to

prove herself in a thespian crisis of consciousness. Having unexpectedly met her old

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beau, Franz, a Prussian autocrat of the gentler sort, Gisela allows herself to be seduced

into a night of ecstatic lovemaking on the very eve of the planned revolution. The

surrounding air of violence excites stern Gisela to such a degree that she cannot help but

turn into a sexually passionate and pliant lover—so much so that she even dreams of

eloping and forsaking the revolution altogether. “Spain! Franz! For a moment her

imagination rioted” (130). But by the dawn of the white morning that “would change the

face of the world” (136), Gisela quickly regains her composure, realizing that she would

be “utterly in his power if he awakened and chose to exert it” (125). Reasoning moreover

that “even if she won Franz over, her power would be sapped” (131), Gisela comes to the

sobering conclusion that “he was the one deadly menace to the future of his country”

(134). Whereupon she quickly reaches for her dagger, drives “it into his heart to the

guard,” and accords him the “honor” of being “the first man” sacrificed “on the altar of

the Woman’s Revolution” (134). At last, having unceremoniously “dropped” his corpse

“into the swiftly flowing Isar” (135), Gisela gives order to let the “inferno” breaks loose

(138).

“Bayonets fixed” to their rifles, the women make short shrift of what little

resistance they encounter from the awe-stricken soldiers, guarding palaces, ministries,

post offices, railway and telegraph stations (137). “There was sniping, of course, from

the windows, but the women made a concerted rush and disposed of the terrified

offender” (148). At the end of day—the emperor detained and peace secured—the

women unfurl the republic’s new flag, showing “a hen in successive stages of evolution,”

the “final phase” being “an eagle” with the “grim, leering, vengeful, pitiless”

countenance of a “woman” (146). “The hens are eagles—all over Germany,” Gisela

“announces in her full carrying voice,” officially proclaiming victory (147).

Curiously, even though Atherton provides her Amazonian warriors with a suitable

banner, the novel stops short of envisioning a state of matriarchy a la Gilman’s Herland.

At the inquest of her friends and supporters as to whether she intends to establish a

“Woman’s Republic” with herself “as President,” Gisela exclaims, “certainly not!,” and

then explains rather inconsistently:

It is not in the German women—not yet—to crave the grinding cares of

public life. We shall make the men do the work, and we will live for the

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first time. Delivered from Cæsarism and junkerism and with the advanced

men of Germany at the head of a Republic, I should feel too secure of

Germany’s future to demand any of the ugly duties of government—

although the women will speak through the men. Their day of silence and

submission is forever passed—.” (99-100)

Possibly in order to broaden the public appeal of The White Morning, here, in one short

paragraph, Atherton apparently turns Gisela from a radical feminist visionary into a

reactionary guardian of the nineteenth-century separate spheres ideology, which rejected

female suffrage on the grounds that women should exert their influence vicariously by

putting their husbands, brothers, sons onto the path of morality. More incongruous still,

just moments before Gisela thrusts her dagger deep into Franz’s heart—a highly symbolic

act that not only seems to denote an end to male potency, but perhaps the beginning of

woman’s sexual liberation as well—Atherton has her heroine disavow all “political

ambitions” in favor of passively shining as the moral “beacon-light of the new

Republic…until some one man (she knew of none) or some group of men became strong

enough to control its destinies” (130-31). Thus, in accordance with the character’s

resolve but in clear contradiction of its author’s claims elsewhere that it “is simply

unthinkable” that “women should be swept back into private life by the selfishness of

men when the killing business is over,” the novel ends with Gisela mourning over her

lover’s coffin and retiring into a private sanctuary of lettered solitude. What Wortis

Leider perceives as Atherton’s “new willingness to countenance revolution” appears to

come at a sudden stop on the closing pages of The White Morning.71

Even so, the novel earned Atherton applause from an old nemesis. “It appears

that her views have radically changed,” noted Upton Sinclair noted in his self-published

bi-monthly. “She seems willing to contemplate revolution as a not wholly undesirable

thing.”72 But even though Sinclair considered this change in “our premiere exponent of

the aristocratic tradition” a step into the right direction, he still rebuked Atherton for

making the novel’s heroine “hochwohlgeboren” (born into high station) and advised her:

“When the revolt in Germany comes…you will not see rich German women killing rich

71 Leider 275. 72 Upton Sinclair, rev. of The White Morning by Gertrude Atherton (Upton Sinclair’s July 1918: 7).

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German men; you will see rich German women killing poor German women—and

calling on rich German men to help.”73 A mere three months later, the short November

Revolution of 1918 seemed to confirm Sinclair’s suspicion, throwing into further doubt

Atherton’s premise that the shared experience of patriarchal oppression outweighs all

other conflicts of interest between rich and poor female revolutionaries.

Sinclair’s hopes for a proletarian revolution and Atherton’s vision of a woman’s

revolution are obviously poles apart. For Atherton, in marked contrast to Sinclair, social

progress is not tied to the eradication of class distinctions, but to the removal of existing

gender barriers, which had prevented women from bring to bear their superior

“humanitarian instincts” upon the body politics of world affairs (The White Morning

221). Because woman is by nature less power hungry and less avaricious than man,

Atherton insists, the apparent injustices of this world would be greatly diminished, once

women “seize one at least of the world’s reins.” As she expounds confidently in The

Living Present:

Assuredly if we grasp and hold the reins of the world there will never be

another war. We are not, in the first place, as greedy as men; we will

divide the world up in strict accordance with race, and let every nation

have its own place in the sun. Commercial greed has no place in our

make-up, and with the hideous examples of history it will never obtain

entrance. (221) 74

Unencumbered by “the sort of blood that goes to the head” (222), women, in Atherton’s

view, would thenceforth “devote [their] abilities, uninterrupted by war, to solving the

problem of poverty (the acutest evidence of man’s failure), and to fostering the talents of

millions of men and women that to-day constitute part of the wastage of Earth” (221). In

short, gender is not seen as a social construct, but a behavioral determinant that, in Emma

Goldman’s words, “predestines woman to accomplish that wherein man has failed”

(198). To Goldman, of course, this was a preposterous notion, none the least because it 73 Ibid. 74 Atherton’s use of the term ‘race’ here seems to imply ethnicity or nationality and thus refers to President Wilson’s plan of redrawing European borders along ethnic and national rather than political lines. As Wilson declared in a speech on February 12, 1918: “National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril” (qtd. in Zieger 129).

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would “credit woman with supernatural powers.”75 Yet Atherton, it becomes clear, seeks

to safely transport essentialist notions of the moral superiority of woman into a postwar

era that beckons her with the promise of greater social, economical, and political

influence. At least for foreseeable future, though, this attempt to safeguard feminine

claims of moral superiority seems to prevent women from claiming their equal share of

“the grinding cares of public life.” For in order to shine as the righteous “beacon-light of

the new Republic,” Gisela’s must decline “the ugly duties of government”—a reference,

perhaps, to Wilson’s growing irritation with the territorial claims of his allies—in favor

of affecting public policies circuitously through her plays and short stories. In due

course, then, such depictions of Gisela as at once of and above the fray of daily politics,

cast an ever brighter “beacon-light” on the text’s struggles of proclaiming the advent of

gender equality on the basis of woman’s inborn moral ascendancy over man.

Apparent incongruities notwithstanding, Atherton’s The White Morning no doubt

succeeds in stirring up old gender debates by representing the war as an climatic episode

in the ongoing of battle of the sexes, from which women emerge if not fully victorious, so

at least visibly empowered, politically energized, and closely united. What's more, in

presenting her heroine as the avenger of her gender, who, swooping over the battlefield in

an aeroplane, “discharge[s] her revolver into the shoulder of a big officer,” Atherton puts

the world on notice that nothing will be sacrosanct in the fight for self-determination

(147-48). Enraged by the horrors of warfare, Atherton suggests most explicitly in The

Living Present, women will be “flinging off…tradition and displaying a shining armor of

indifference toward man as man” (214), refusing “to settle down and keep house for

tiresome creatures” (219), and “making a bold bid for political equality” (217). In the

end, “even the much depended upon maternal instinct may subside,” Atherton surmises,

as women everywhere exclaim in unison: “No! For a generation at least the world shall

be ours, and then it may limp on with a depleted population or go to the dogs (219-20).

IV

In light of Atherton’s subversive portrayal of a radicalized generation of new women,

who refuse marriage, forego matrimony, share “real sympathies and affections” only with

“women friends,” and, like praying mantises, kill male lovers after the sex act, it is hardly

75 Emma Goldman 198.

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surprising that progressive thinkers felt compelled to blunt the blow of radical feminist

sentiments that had been heightened by the war experience. Subversive reinvocations of

earlier metaphors of social disorder such as “The-Woman-on-Top” or “The-World-

Upside-Down” seemed to suggest that the feminist crusade had literally gone over the

top.76 Aware, though, that a return to the prewar order was neither likely nor wholly

desirable, progressive reformers began to search for ways to realign gender relations with

the new realities of postwar life. Modern theories of sexual repression, propagated since

the late 19th century by Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, combined with novel

business approaches, emphasizing the benefits of cooperation, partnership, and

efficiency, seemed to proffer scientific explanations and solutions to the “battle of

the sexes” that would lead to normalized gender relations.

The fast-growing discipline of sexology seemed to furnish “scientific” proof

that feminists who demanded absolute equality and new women who single-mindedly

followed a career path ran the risk of becoming selfish deviants. In the scholarly works

of influential sexologists such as Havelock Ellis, “overly” self-assertive women emerged

as neurotic “female inverts” who harm themselves as well as society at large by aping

masculine behavior. Equating feminism and demands for women’s rights with the

socially acknowledged perils of lesbianism, Ellis asserts:

The modern movement of emancipation—the movement to obtain the

same rights and duties, the same freedom and responsibility, the same

education and the same work, must be regarded as on the whole a

wholesome and inevitable movement. But it carries with it certain

disadvantages. It has involved an increase in feminine criminality and

feminine insanity, which are being elevated towards the masculine

standard…Having been taught independence of men and disdain for the

old theory which placed women in the moated grange of the home…a

tendency develops for women to carry this independence still further and

to find love where they find work. I do not say that these unquestionable

influences of modern movements can directly cause sexual inversion…but

they develop the germs of it, and they probably cause a spurious imitation.

76 See Gilbert and Gubar’s No Man’s Land 262-64.

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This spurious imitation is due to the fact that the congenital anomaly

occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence who,

voluntarily or involuntarily, influence others.77

Given Ellis’s authoritative scientific account of the latent dangers of “sexual inversion”

or the “spurious imitation” thereof, popular images of the headstrong, independent, and

political active women took on a decidedly sinister hue. “Having ‘unnaturally’ denied

her own sexual impulses,” she was depicted as seeking “emotional release through man-

hating and bellicose and outdated feminist rhetoric.”78 The mannish pugnacious with she

continues to clamor for women’s rights and a female-centered world came to be seen as

no more than a protective façade behind which her deeply discontented, sexually

perverted, unfulfilled inner self hides. Vociferated William Lee Howard in the New York

Medical Journal: “The female possessed of masculine ideas of independence, the virago

who would sit in the public highways and lift up her pseudo-virile voice, proclaiming her

sole right to decide questions of war or religion…and that disgusting antisocial being, the

female sexual pervert, are simply degrees of the same class—degenerates.”79 Before

long, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg points out, “the New Woman had become a repressed, at

time ludicrous, figure,” whose radical political aspiration had been safely contained

within a normalizing discourse of sexual deviance.80

But the new woman’s public makeover did not stop there. For out of the shadows

of her “ludicrous figure” stepped the character of the “new New Woman,” who considers

her mother’s struggle for emancipation a fait accompli and henceforth seeks personal

liberation within the confides of a modern heterosexual relationship. Writing in the

October 1927 issue of Harper’s, Dorothy Bromley draws a sharp distinction between

“‘Feminist—New Style’ and the feminist old-style” in interrelated terms of appearance

and attitude: “The latter wore flat heels, disliked men, and, accepting that women could

not have both a career and marriage, opted for the career. The new-style feminist was a

‘good dresser’ and a ‘pal’ to men, and fully expected to have marriage, children, and a

77 Havelock Ellis, “Sexual Inversion in Women;” qtd. in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford UP, 1985) 279. 78 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg 282. 79 Qtd. in Smith-Rosenberg 280. 80 Ibid 282.

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career, too.”81 Gone are utopian notions that politicized woman will fundamentally

transform the world. Content with and secure in her visibly more public role, the

liberated woman can allow herself to put on her flashiest dress so as to attract a suitable

new man who treats her like a companion or a partner rather than servant or a saint.

Freely yielding to her innermost desires, the new women realizes that true fulfillment can

only be found through a companionate marriage based upon the new business ideals of

cooperation, mutual satisfaction, and an efficient division of labor.82 Within the

corporate framework of the companionate marriage as an enterprise between equals, then,

the liberated woman could return home without loosing face, conducting her appointed

work of raising children and increasing consumption in a self-respecting and scientific

manner. “Only the ‘unnatural’ women continued to struggle with men for economic

independence and political power,” notes Smith-Rosenberg. 83

Written from an avowedly progressive and modern perspective on feminism,

Henry Sydnor Harrison’s post-war novel Saint Teresa partakes in this public makeover of

the new woman. Conceived not as an antifeminist work, but as a broadside against

obsolete manifestations of “old-style feminism,” Harrison’s Saint Teresa portrays the

titular heroine, Teresa De Silver, as an exaggeratedly pugnacious, “mannish” women’s

libber who wears pantaloons, rejects marriage, flies “aeroplanes,” manipulates the stock

market and, on “sheer principle,” directs her steel company to shift production from

shells to peacetime goods.84 As the storyline unfolds and the tussle between Teresa and

Dean Masury, a pro-war “efficiency expert,” assumes a decidedly personal character, it

becomes clear that the novel advocates a realignment of marriage roles, which breaks

with the traditional separation of spheres while upholding romantic notions of

masculinity and femininity. Too headstrong to recognize that they are destined for each

81 Dorothy M. Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s (Boston: Twayne, 1987) 33. 82 See Brown, 9. Brown summarizes the new business credo of postwar America with a quote by the vice president of the Chemical National Bank of New York: “We know that real success in business is not attained at the expense of others. Business can succeed only in the long run by acquiring and holding the goodwill o people” (9). 83 Smith-Rosenberg 289. Citing Rayna Rapp and Ellen Ross, Smith-Rosenberg further links the idea of “companionate-marriage” to a “carefully orchestrated…campaign” by “big business,” seeking “to return women to the home and transform the redomesticated woman into the bulwark of America’s new consumer economy” (282). 84 Henry Sydnor Harrison, Saint Teresa: A Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922) 19 & 95. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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other, Teresa and Dean must first prove each other worthy foes in the worlds of

commerce and politics, before they can glimpse the complementary fulfillment that

modern companionate marriage offers. At the close of the novel, the self-deceiving

“Saint Teresa” has been transformed from the “ludicrous figure” of an old-style feminist

into a “truly” liberated woman, who willingly merges Herland into Hisland.

Prior to World War I, Henry Sydnor Harrison, a Virginia liberal who considered

himself a lifelong advocate of women’s rights, had achieved considerable fame as a

writer of “popular novels involving themes of class conflict and cultural change.”85 His

two best-known novels, Queed (1911) and V.V.’s Eyes (1913) both made it onto the

bestseller list. Shortly after war broke out in Europe, Harrison turned his literary

attention to the state of female emancipation in America. In his resulting novel, Angela’s

Business (1915), Harrison favorably contrasts the fortunes of the unaffected Mary Wing,

an independent and self-supporting professional, with those of the “womanly” Angela

Flower, whose only “business” consists of finding wealthy suitors. As later in Saint

Teresa, Mary Wing’s ability to succeed in the business world first antagonizes but then

earns her the respect of a male colleague, with whom she eventually finds personal

fulfillment in a partnership of equals. This sympathetic portrayal of an independent

businesswoman clearly challenged customary notions of gender roles and thus earned

Harrison the esteem of Adele Clark, a “pioneer suffragist” from his native Richmond,

Virginia.86

Following the publication of Angela’s Business, Harrison volunteered with the

American Ambulance Service and saw several months of active duty in Flanders and

Northern France. Writing of his brief experiences behind the lines in Dunkirk and Ypres,

a noticeably downcast Harrison tries hard to find any meaning in the suffering he has

witnessed:

I have never forgotten that the very last soldier I carried in my ambulance

(on June 23, 1915) was one whose throat, while he slept, had been quietly

cut by a flying sliver of a shell thrown from a gun twenty-two miles away.

85 George C. Longest, “Harrison, Henry Sydnor,” American National Biography, vol. 10, eds. John Garraty & Mark C. Careens (New York: Oxford UP, 1999). 86 See Edgar E. MacDonald, “Henry Sydnor Harrison: Southern Feminist,” Southern Literary Journal 13.1 (1980): 42-54.

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But it will not do, I am aware, to over-emphasize the purely mechanical

side of modern war, the deadly impersonality which often seems to

characterize it, the terrible meaninglessness of its deaths at times…

Individual exaltation, fear and the victory over fear, conscious

consecration to an idea and ideal, all the subtle promptings and stark

behavior by which the common man chooses and avows that there are

ways of dying which transcend all life,---this, we know, must have been

the experience of hundreds of thousands of the young soldiers of France.87

“The purely mechanical side of modern war, the deadly impersonality which often seems

to characterize it, the terrible meaninglessness of its deaths,” would subsequently become

the signature theme of a younger generation of American war novelists. Harrison

managed to uphold his belief in the righteousness of the Allies fight against Prussian

militarism and, when the United States officially entered the conflict, obtained a

commission as first lieutenant in the United States Navel Reserves. “And if our old

Uncle Sammy gets into trouble some day,” Harrison’s had his southern heroine in Queed

presage, “never fear but we’ll be on hand to pull him out, with the best troops that ever

stepped, and another Lee to lead them.”88 Being over age for active duty in 1917,

Harrison was assigned to a desk job with “Uncle Sammy” in Washington. In early 1918,

word reached Harrison that his brother Jack had been killed in France. After being

decommissioned in 1919, Harrison published “When I Come Back,” a short eulogy

based on his brother’s letters that romanticizes warfare and emphasizes one’s patriotic

duty to the nation. Three years later, he presented his homefront novel Saint Teresa to

the public, in which he seeks to reconcile the new woman’s war-induced claim to gender

equality with the demands of modern society.

Recent critical assessments according to which Saint Teresa is a “feminist novel

truly ahead of its time” that presents the “ultimate in gender equality” cannot obscure the

view of Harrison’s literary attempts to discredit the radical political methods and aims of

contemporaneous feminists through stereotypical representations of the novel’s heroine

87 Henry Sydnor Harrison, “At the Back of the Front: Dunkirk and Ypres,” Friends of France: The Field Service of the American Ambulance as Seen by Its Members (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916). 88 Henry Sydnor Harrison, Queed: A Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 269.

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as an overzealous women’s libber, fighting quixotic battles.89 Providing both “an

example and a warning,” the “noisy Miss DeSilver” appears in the early part of the novel

as the “perfectly familiar type” of the radical feminist, who, in denial of her true nature,

strikes a “misogamist pose” to garner public notoriety (22, 19, 32). Driven by “her

instinctive feeling that marriage and motherhood would go deep with her—change her—

soften her—put out her fires,” Teresa exhibits “the pretences to a noble sexlessness” as

well as a classic superiority to nature and the ways of men” (115, 33). Accordingly, the

young heiress to “Old Joshia DeSilver’s” fortunes has made a name for herself by

authoring a “much advertised” pamphlet “called ‘The Woman Who Hates Love,” racing

her “speedy motor boat as big as yacht,” crashing “an early airship from Willbur Wright,”

getting lost on a hunting expedition “in the Canadian Rockies” and catching “a sea-

serpent” at” Catalina Island” (21, 33). In later years, the “suffrage issue was her first

obvious prey” on the political front (33). Having, “of course, joined the extreme Left of

the cause,” she became “a picketer, etc.” and “was generally credited with having

originated the punitive card-index system, by which the ‘personal record’ of every Solon

was investigated and tabulated, and his life, if need was, turned into hell” (33). “Here,”

the narrator explains, “she had clearly displayed the overbearing qualities, indeed the

ruthlessness, for which the men of her family were celebrated” (33-34). Directing her

fight for women’s rights from a “humdrum…working office,” adorned with prints

“ranging from Mary Shelly to Jane Addams” and “a large bust of Susan B. Anthony” that

“gather[s] dust upon a pedestal,” the mannish-acting heroine comes to exemplify the

anachronism of old-style feminism (47).

In “reckless disregard of herself,” Teresa, like her feminist heroines of bygone

days, displays an “unfeminine salience of…idealism” that inexorably thrusts her at the

epicenter of political conflicts (346). And beset with an “aversion for men—and” an

even deeper “aversion for men’s worst and most characteristic activity—war,” Harrison’s

Teresa, similar to Atherton’s Gisela, seeks to grab and hold the reigns of power (116).

“The power some men got it in this country, it makes my blood boil just to think about

it,” Teresa grumbles (205). The outbreak of war in Europe affords Teresa with an

opportunity to publicly defy patriarchical authority once more. Declaring herself a

89 Longest 211 & MacDonald 52.

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“pacifist” on “sheer principle,” she acquires a controlling share of stocks in the

Whitestone Steel Company and immediately shuts down its “shell plant.” Predictably

enough, her actions cause a great public stir and she suspected of being a “Hun lover.”

Moreover, what is widely seen as her “misguided” and “dangerous” demonstration of

“power” arouses the “unexampled antagonism” of Dean Masury, a pro-Allies business

journalist, who is convinced that “it was certainly no moment for a born fool to be

monkeying with one of the world’s vital industries” (295, 20). Appalled by the thought

that “a woman” would not just “assume control of the business,” but “throw on the

sidewalk the experienced men who were successfully building it up,” the novel’s hero

hires on as Teresa’s “efficiency expert,” secretly scheming to ousts his employer (19).

In the ensuing battle of wills, however, Teresa proves herself a “fit antagonist for

a man” and thus gradually earns the grudging respect of Dean (172). Sticking to her

principled anti-war stance, while keeping the company afloat through the acquisition of

new contracts outside of the booming war industry, Teresa exhibits the “genuine

executive abilities,” discerned by Atherton among the women of World War I. “Perhaps

I understand your course here better than anyone else, Dean assures “headstrong” Teresa

following a heated debate over the company’s wartime production, “and I must tell you

how impressed I’ve been all along, by your perfectly single-minded devotion to your

righteousness—a quality which I can admire without reference to the fact that it’s

brought you, in this case, so vigorously against me” (325, 324). As Dean’s assuaging

words indicate, what has started as a fierce ideological fight over “views of war and

peace” and “a few shares of stock” has become a “far subtler” battle of the sexes, during

which both parties are forced to recognize their complementary qualities as well as their

mutual interdependence (452). For as it turns out, without Dean’s expertise in scientific

management, Teresa would have had to shut down the steel mill. In addition, even

though Dean continues his own behind-the-scene efforts to restart the company’s shell

production, it is he who alerts Teresa to the fact that her “rubber-heeled secretary” and

longtime “confidant,” Miss Janney, is not only spying for a competitor, but spreading

defamatory rumors of her employer’s alleged “sympathies with the rape of Belgium and

the German Kaiser” (127, 135). Despite their persistent differences over the war issues,

both, it becomes clear, have learned to see the benefits of an cooperative business

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relationship so that Dean must acknowledge Teresa’s executive abilities to lead the steel

company, while Teresa feels compelled to recognize Dean’s “invaluable services” by

promoting him to the position of “secretary of the company” (304, 305).

Slowly but surely, then, the personal relationship between Teresa and Dean also

“subtly change[s],” as both begin to look beyond their “undying difference” to discover

unmistakable temperamental affinities (303, 275). “I now see much that’s remarkable,

and quite admirable, in Miss DeSilver, Dean feels obliged to admit and the narrator

further elucidates, “It was as if that community of sympathy he had been obliged to share

with her, more than once now, had left behind its ineradicable mark” (257, 303).

Likewise, Teresa begins to “soften” in Dean’s presence. Shedding her “ridiculous

costume” and her “superimposed mannerism,” Teresa changes from a “flat executive

behind the equally flat desk” into a “natural[]” and “animat[ed]” “girl,” no longer

“colorless at all, but on the contrary quite vivid with life” (172, 265).

“Yet the end of conflict was not yet,” the narrator forebodes at the beginning of

chapter XVIII (326). Equally stubborn in their pursuits to gain and maintain control over

the steel company’s wartime production, the battle of the sexes reaches its rambunctious

crescendo when Dean informs Teresa that he has procured the stocks necessary to install

a pro-war advocate as the company’s new head. Flushed with victory, Dean mocks,

ridicules, and throws “insufferable insults” at Teresa, until she, in turn, “hurl[s] herself

bodily upon him, her adversary” (364). A ludicrous fistfight ensues during which Teresa,

a “frenzied athlete, who use[s] her body like a bludgeon,” quickly gains the upper-hand

and knocks Dean unconscious (368). The war-torn world of gender relations, it seems, is

turned upside down once again as Dean’s “manhood” and “unyielding will” suffers a

mighty double blow (453). After he has “crept out” of “the blackness” that had engulfed

him, Dean must learn that his was not a even Pyrrhic victory (377). For Teresa, aware of

Dean’s designs on the company, had previously schemed to obtain enough additional

shares to prevent the hostile takeover. But unlike Atherton’s goddess of wrath or the

infuriated foremothers of Gilman’s Herland, Teresa shows herself be a conciliatory and

quite magnanimous “conqueror” of man (451). Having proven herself capable of

succeeding on her own in the rough and tumble business world of man, “the power of

anger, which had given worth and dignity to their conflict, was no longer in her” so that

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she can find no lasting satisfaction in her “singular triumph” (437). When she learns of

Dean’s decision to volunteer for service in Europe, the already softened Teresa is struck

by remorse and overcome by a betraying nervousness: “her…face, already sufficiently

white, had gone a little whiter; one of her hands rose unconsciously to her breast, whose

rise and fall had suddenly become noticeable” (419).

Ostensibly visiting Dean to bid her last farewell, Teresa not only offers to bury

the war hatchet, but also officially notifies her erstwhile adversary that she has “canceled

the transaction,” which would have ensured her control over the Whitestone Steel

Company (436). This sudden peace offer leads Dean to reflect that “she was beating him

here in an epilogue” and so he, too, is suddenly “left” with “nothing to triumph over”

(452, 445). But while neither side renounces its principled stand on the devise “war

issue,” Teresa and Dean declare a truce and “agree to disagree” (449). Finally, both can

give free reigns to their “natural” feelings (449). Completing her metamorphosis from a

self-denying, sexless, man-hating women’s libber into a liberated woman who finds

genuine fulfillment in heterosexual love, Teresa “unquestioning, yield[s] herself” to

Dean: “Now she felt her veiled face taken between hard hands, forcibly turned upward;

and so upon her virgin lips, other lips, lips not virginal at all and scarred for life for just

such a thing as this, crushed terribly down” (453). Having allowed Dean to regain the

initiative by reasserting masculine control over her, “all was changed, now, all was

changed. Her movement was slight; her eyes, which had closed after the fashion of

women, did not open; her lashes lay like a curtain on her cheek. Teresa’s movement was

gentle this time: yet it broke this man, her adversary forever. She had put aside her

veil—for him” and so “he, like her, must submit himself to find in surrender his most

excellent triumph (453-54).

Mutual surrender—the seemingly natural merging of complementary interest—

Harrison suggests in Saint Teresa, provides a progressive solution to the battle of the

sexes that acknowledges shifts in gender roles while reaffirming the social reproductive

necessity of heterosexual marriage relations. On closer inspection, though, it becomes

quite apparent that the novel’s ideal of mutual surrender is not so much predicated upon

the recognition of gender equality than upon the refeminization and redomestication of

the heroine in accordance with rather traditional gender notions. Tellingly, it is only after

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Teresa has shed her “ridiculous costume” of belligerent old-style feminism and only after

she has graciously resigned as company head that Dean views the “new” Teresa as

“forever his superior” and “comes up into the mountain and take[s] the chaste goddess:

to find her his beautiful fellow-creature at last” (454-55). In short, Dean partially

redeifies his future mate and thereby reabsorbs feminist claims to greater moral purity

within the old patriarchical metaphor of “The Angel in the House.”90 Accordingly,

Teresa is granted “the knowledge of her ultimate conquest,” but it is Dean who emerges

“immeasurably the gainer: for through this long and unguessed future, love would be a

lamp to the feet, and hearth and home in his soul” (455). As the successive references to

“hearth” and “home” in conjunction with “love” indicate, Teresa’s and Dean’s

“unguessed future” will likely be marked by an adherence to fairly conventional gender

roles. And indeed, departing overseas for service with an American ambulance unit,

Dean elicits Teresa’s promise that she shall wait for him. “Oh, I will, I will—no fear,”

she reassures her smitten lover on the novel’s very last page, “Didn’t I say that you’d put

your mark upon my heart?” (455). Love conquers all, even hardened feminist of the old

school.

V

In the decade following World War I, women hardly lacked their share of new role

models who vigorously defied old stereotypes of the meek and passive violet. In 1924,

Hazel Wightman captured the nation’s attention as she became the first American woman

to win the tennis championship at Wimbledon. A few years later, Helen Wills surpassed

Wightman’s achievement, winning an unprecedented eight times at Wimbledon and

dominating the world’s tennis courts well into the1930s. In 1926, at age nineteen, the

German American butcher’s daughter, Gertrude Ederle, was declared a national heroine

after she had swum across the English Channel. The first woman ever to accomplish this

feat, she even set a new record doing so at fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes. Media

excitement over Ederle’s triumph was eventually eclipsed in 1928, when Amelia Earhart,

quickly dubbed “our Lady Lindy,” became the first woman to fly an airplane across the

Atlantic Ocean.

Throughout the 1920s, these were the athletic, cheerful, hale and hearty new

90 See Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poetic praise of female devotion and domestic bliss.

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women that postwar American society loved to celebrate. “A woman could not possibly

have accomplished this same feat thirty years ago,” the Washington Star judged in an

article on Gertrude Ederle, “for corsets and other ridiculously unnecessary clothing

hampered her physical condition…Physical education has brought about an evolution of

common sense that has wrought a complete turnover, not only in woman’s physical

condition but in her mental attitude.”91 Amidst this “complete turnover” in “physical

condition” and “mental attitude,” however, radical feminist claims to economical

independence and political leadership seemed to erode rapidly. Hand in hand with the

rise of what some historians have described as “life-style feminism” went endeavors to

co-opt “many feminist issues by linking personal identity and fulfillment with

companionate marriage, heterosexual pleasure, motherhood as a career, and

consumerism.”92 A number of literary products of the early 1920s testify to these

endeavors. Preceding Harrison’s sanguine portrayal of the happily redomesticated

heroine in Saint Teresa, the rebellious Carol Kennicott in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street

(1920) is made to find her true vocation as a modern wife and mother. In light of “the

great war” and the “coming of woman suffrage,” Carol, like “many other women,”

initially makes good on her threat “to chuck it [housework]…and [to] come out and play

with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you’ve cleverly kept for yourselves.” 93

But after only one year of “real work” with the “Bureau of War Risk Insurance” in

Washington, Carol grows “tired of the office” as “her association with women who had

organized suffrage associations in hostile cities” leads her to detest the “impersonal

attitude” of political activism (316, 320). By and by, the increasingly irritable Carol

gives up her “perfectly selfish” dream of “building up real political power for women,”

realizes that she “ha[s] one thing…a baby to hug,” and once “again s[ees] Gopher Prairie

as her home” (327, 329). Finally, on the train back to her husband’s rural Midwestern

town, Carol’s newfound domestic “devotion” reaches such heights that she is “willing to

give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott” (330). Emancipation,

91 Qtd. in Brown 43. 92 Barbara Laslett & Johanna Brenner, “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives, Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 395. 93 Sinclair Lewis, Lewis at Zenith: A Three-Novel Omnibus (New York: Harcourt, 1961) 244 & 313. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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in short, is no longer defined in terms of utopian desires for a Herland, but by way of

woman’s renewed interest and expanded engagement in Hisland.

To be sure, similar to Fisher’s Homefires in France and Atherton’s The White

Morning, both Lewis’s Main Street and Harrison’s Saint Teresa depict strong,

independent-minded female characters who repudiate conventional gender distinctions

and thereby destabilize some of the core tenets of patriarchical authority. Stripped of its

larger and potentially explosive political significance, however, the battle of the sexes in

Main Street and Saint Teresa becomes a mere question of reorganizing marital relations

within the requisite confines of which woman can exercises her new freedoms in a

“healthy,” mutually beneficent, publicly accepted, and socially responsibility manner.

What is evidently eradicated in this process are longstanding feminist attempts to

promote alternative societies based upon feminine values such as communalism,

education, non-competitiveness, etc. Unlike the women in Fisher’s Homefires in France

and Atherton’s The White Morning, Teresa and Carol do not forge close bonds with their

sisters and fail to find emotional, intellectual, material support within female-centered

communities so that their return to the fold seems inevitable. Gone, too, are the sharp

denouncements of innate male aggressiveness and the subsequent efforts to actively

resists patriarchical oppression that characterize Fischer’s and Atherton’s wartime

writings. New men such as Harrison’s Dean and Lewis’s Kennicott may be at times

inconsiderate, but their growing willingness to perceive women as competent partners

and genial “pals” rather than meek housemaids make blanket assaults against “unbridled

masculinity” appear ridiculously outdated.

After the war, it seems, heightened expectations for a gentler, kinder, feminized

society had run their course as not only pseudoscientific normalizing discourses began to

circulate, but also rifts within the aging women’s movement became more and more

pronounced. Strains between anti- and prowar feminist resurfaced, when the former

began to hold the latter responsible for the bloodshed. Younger middle-class women,

bend on furthering their personal careers, no longer identified with the lofty aspirations of

an older generation of feminists. Nor did black and working-class women who felt that

the patronizing touch of white middle-class reformers had held them back for too long.

And behind the postwar façade of Coolidge prosperity, simmering class antagonism and

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racial tensions flared up anew, making it patently clear that neither Fisher’s nostalgic

vision of a close-knight, female-centered community nor Atherton’s essentialist faith in

the curative powers of universal sisterhood were sufficient to stamp out persistent

conflicts of interests. By the mid-1920s it became moreover apparent that the women’s

vote had failed to materialize. Admitted Democratic Congresswoman Emily Newell

Blair: “I know of no woman today who has any influence or political power because she

is a woman. I know of no woman who has a following of other women. I know of no

politician who is afraid of the woman vote on any question under the sun.”94 Crushed

under the weight of sobering postwar realties, hopes for a feminist utopia appeared to

have been lost irretrievably.

And yet, even though the feminist movement waned during the interwar years by

all accounts, the flame of feminist utopian desires was kept alive in American women’s

literature. Interestingly enough, though, as Elaine Showalter has pointed out, feminist

themes were no longer voiced most prominently in the writings of well-connected white

middle class women, but in the long overlooked works by black authors such as Zora

Neal Hurston, Jewish novelists such as Tess Slesinger, and working-class writers such as

Meridel Le Sueur.95 Whereas prominent Anglo-Saxon female writers were plagued by

“survivor’s guilt’ and, according to Gilbert and Gubar, became “infected by the postwar

misogyny that was so ‘strikingly the correct fashion’,” minority authors as well as writers

on the Left begun to explore feminist demands within the context of their racial, ethnic,

and/or class identities (321). In Their Eyes Watching God (1937), for example, Hurston’s

Janie, not unlike Atherton’s Gisela or Enid, is forced to shoot her lover, Vergible “Tea

Cake” Woods, after a highly symbolic infection with rabies had turned him into a

personification of male violence, raving with jealousy and beating her. Acquitted by an

all-white jury and unencumbered by domestic burdens of any kind, Janie returns to her

small community, weary but satisfied, to tell her story. Similarly, in her short story

“Sweat,” Hurston traces how her black working-class heroine, Delia, disposes of her

sadistic husband, after the leading men of her all-black community had failed to intervene

94 Qtd in Elaine Showalter, “Women Writers Between the Wars,” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 823. 95 Elaine Showalter, “Women Writers Between the Wars,” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 822-41.

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on her behalf. And in The Girl (1939), Meridel Le Sueur conjures up earlier utopian

images of close-knight female communities that provide her downtrodden and abused

female characters with strength to come “alive,” “unite,” and “fight for” their rights in the

name of “the Great Mothers” that had preceded them.”96 These and other appropriations

of feminist utopian ideas, which were also deployed by white middle-class women such

as Fisher and Atherton during the gender conflicts of World War I, on the hand speak to

the enduring legacy of shared experiences of female subjugation and on the other point

up the added burdens of class- and race-based oppression.

96 Meridel Le Sueur, The Girl (Los Angeles: West End Press, 1978) 125 & 146.

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5

“Sons of Freedom”

WAR AS HISTORICAL ROMANCE IN SARAH LEE BROWN FLEMING’S HOPE’S HIGHWAY AND WALTER WHITE’S THE FIRE IN THE FLINT

They tell you this is the “white man’s war”; and you will be “no better off after than before the war”; that the getting of you into the army is to “sacrifice you on the first opportunity.” Believe them not; cowards themselves, they do not wish to have their cowardice shamed by your brave example.

—Frederick Douglass, “Men of Color, to Arms!,” March 1863 The longer the war and the bloodier, the better it will be for the colored folk.

—Richmond Planet, October 1917

If we have fought to make safe democracy for the white races, we will soon fight to make it safe for ourselves and our posterity.

—“Views of a Negro During the Red Summer of 1919”

The New Negro: When He’s Hit, He Hits Back! Rollin Lynde Hartt, 1921

DOROTHY Canfield Fisher’s short story, “The Refugee,” describes the plight of

French women and children living in a sector occupied by German troops. “One day”,

“little Marguerite” comes across Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After reading the book with

growing excitement, she exclaims:

Why, auntie, this might have been written about us, mightn’t it? It tells

about things that happen to us all the time—that we have seen. The men

who are flogged and starved and killed, the mothers trying in vain to

follow their daughters into captivity, the young girls

dragged out of their father’s arms—it’s all just like what the Germans do

to us, isn’t it? (129)

Fisher obviously wrote these lines under the impression of U.S. and British war

propaganda. Her comparison between the oppression of blacks in the antebellum South

and civilians in wartime France is nevertheless instructive, for it reveals the ignorance

shared by most whites concerning the experience of African Americans before, during,

and after World War I. Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers exhibits similar instances of

ignorance, not least because John Andrews fancies himself an abolitionist, though he at

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last admits: “No; he had not lived up to the name of James Brown” (431). Yet, Fredric

Henry’s angry retort in A Farewell to Arms that he is no Othello, because “Othello was a

nigger,” Joe Chrisfield’s complaints in Three Soldiers that “[t]his ain’t no sort o’ life for a

man to be treated lahk he was a nigger” as well as Andrews constant references to

“slavery” and “enslavement” articulate more than the racist attitudes “so prevalent at the

time of the Great Crusade;” collectively they also hint growing anxieties that white

privileges were eroding on account of the war (257, 139).1 Forced to toil alongside “evil-

odored blacks,” Thomas Boyd’s William Hicks in Through the Wheat (1923) pointedly

expresses white soldiers’ fears of having been relegated to second-class citizenship:

“Soldiering with a shovel. A hell of a way to treat a white man.”2

Though visible merely as ominous shadows in the standard narratives of World

War I, black Americas nonetheless began to emerge from the margins of official history

during the war and postwar years. No longer content to “wear the mask that grins and

lies,” an increasingly self-assertive and politically active African American populace

began to demand full citizenship in exchange for unrecognized wartime sacrifices.3

Tellingly, in his first Yoknapatawpha County novel, Sartoris (1929), William Faulkner

depicts a black veteran whose defiant attitude portends racial strife as a direct result of

World War I. Caspey, although a minor character, comes to represent the defiant attitude

of the New Negro:

I don’t take nothn’ fum no white folks no mo’. War done changed all that.

If us cullud folks is good enough ter save France from de Germans, den us

is good enough ter have de same rights de Germans is. French folks

thinks so, anyhow, and ef America don’t, dey’s ways of learnin’ ‘um.4

Works by black authors such as Addie W. Hunton’s and Katheryn M. Johnson’s

Two Colored Women With the American Expeditionary Forces (1920) seek to exploit

white anxieties over black discontent. And by highlighting the contradictions inherent in

America’s war effort, they concomitantly seek to establish a counter-history of the World

War I experience that speaks directly to the “modern memory” of African Americans. 1 Cooperman 87. 2 Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat (New York: Scribner’s, 1923) 1-2. 3 Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” African-American Poetry: An Anthology: 1773-1927, ed. Joan R. Sherman (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997) 64. 4 William Faulkner, Sartoris (New York: Random House, 1956) 45.

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Keenly aware that history is a construct rather than a reflection of reality, Hunton and

Johnson state from the outset that they have “no desire to attain to an authentic history,”

but instead aim “to record [their] impressions and facts in a simple way.”5 Similar to

Walter Benjamin, who in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” posits that “[t]o

articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “‘the way it really was’,”

Hunton and Johnson seek to capture those fleeting images of the past that disrupt “the

continuum of history” and point toward “redemption.”6

Appropriately, Hunton and Johnson, perhaps following the early example of

William Wells Brown’s pastiche-like novel Clotel (1853), intersperse their memoir with

poems, newspaper accounts, official memoranda, pictures, letters, statistics, and the like.

This technique creates a flow-disrupting, impressionistic account of World War I that

achieves multiple ends. 7 “Dedicated to the woman of our race,” the memoir, akin to

Fisher’s and Willa Cather’s World War I writings, aligns the war sacrifices of women

with those of “the young manhood” who “suffer[ed]” and “die[d] for the cause of

freedom.” The tone of the work is patriotic and clearly designed to impress the “heroic”

contributions of black soldiers onto national consciousness in a way palpable to white

taste. Its political goals, however, are quite evident (albeit in hindsight somewhat

idealistic), serving not only as a reminder that America’s promise of “life, liberty, and the

pursuit of happiness” remains unfulfilled, but also sounding a stern warning that “real

peace” cannot be achieved until “hate and its train of social and civil injustices” has been

“blott[ed] out.”8 In contributing to what Benjamin sees as the larger “tradition of the

oppressed,” Hunton and Johnson probably did not aim “to bring about a real state of

emergency” (i.e., the revolution). Even so, similar to Benjamin’s emancipatory method

of historiographical investigation, their counter-history seeks to remind its readership that

the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”9

5 Addie W. Hunton and Katheryn M. Johnson, Two Colored Women With the American Expeditionary Forces (New York: AMS Press, 1971), iii. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 6 Benjamin, Illuminations 255, 261. 7 Walter Benjamin elaborates on the revolutionary potential of pastiche-like literary representations with reference to Sergej Tetjakow’s wall news-sheets or Wandzeitungen. See Benjamin, Walter. “Der Autor als Produzent.” Versuche über Brecht. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992) 101-120. 8 Benjamin, Illuminations 239. 9 Benjamin, Illuminations 257. In “The Authoritarian State” (Telos 15 [1973]: 3-20), Max Horkheimer outlines an anti-evolutionary understanding of historical materialism that uncovers this ever-present “revolutionary chance” in the past: “Present talk of inadequate conditions is a cover for the tolerance of

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In “First Day in France,” Hunton and Johnson recall an incident that both

accentuates the contradiction inherent in the fact that black soldiers, suffering physical

and political repression at home, were sent out to “make the world safe for democracy”

and plays to white fears that armed African American troops might turn the tables.

Arriving in Bordeaux, the women are not surprised “to be greeted first of all by our own

men.”

But it did seem passing strange that we should see them guarding German

prisoners! Somehow we felt that colored soldiers found it rather

refreshing—even enjoyable for a change—having come from a country

where it seemed everybody’s business to guard them. (15)

Yet, this “refreshing” image, alluding to the possibility of an armed rebellion like

those that had occurred in the French army, is immediately supplanted by a sobering

picture of exclusion: “We remember, too, the Paris of late summer of 1919, when after

her great victory parade—in which all the victors participated except our own colored

soldiers—she began to realize her real condition” (17). Black “modern memory,”

Hunton and Johnson stress, attests to both the (revolutionary) potential for self-liberation

and the recognition that, in Benjamin’s words, “[w]however has emerged victorious

participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over

those who are lying prostrate.”10

If blacks were not the victors in this struggle, they might be the victors in the next

struggle. Quoting a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Hunton and Johnson reiterate the

importance of the African-American contribution to the war effort:

We are the army stevedores and work as we must and may.

The cross of honor will never be ours to proudly wear

away.

But the men at the Front could not be there,

And the battles could not be won

oppression. For the revolutionary, conditions have always been ripe. What in retrospect appears as a preliminary stage or premature situation was once for a revolutionary a last chance for change. …[Critical Theory] confronts history with that possibility which is always concretely visible within it. …[T]he consequence that flows from historical materialism today as formerly from Rousseau and the Bible, that is, the insight that “now or in a hundred years” the horror will come to an end, was always appropriate” (12). 10 Ibid. 256.

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If the stevedores stopped in their dull routine,

And left their work undone.

Somebody has to do this work, be glad that it isn’t you,

We are the army stevedores—give us our due. (101-102)

In addressing the disparity between the black and the white war experience (“be glad that

it isn’t you”), the poem illustrates how the degrading labor battalion experience can

nevertheless lead to a growing awareness of political strength among African Americans.

For if the “stevedores” would suddenly decide to stop their “dull routine,” or, like Claude

McKay’s Jake Brown in Home to Harlem (1928), would one after another simply go

AWOL, not just “the men at the Front” but American industrial capital would suffer

immensely.

Equally empowering can be the experience of friendly relations with white French

civilians, Hunton and Johnson underscore.11 Contrasting life under segregation at home

with life “over there” in France, Hunton and Johnson recall, “[i]t was rather an unusual as

well as a most welcome experience to be able to go into places of public accommodation

without having any hesitation or misgivings; to be at liberty to take a seat in a common

carrier “ (182). And despite concerted efforts by the U.S. war information office to warn

civilians “that their dark-skinned allies…were so brutal and vicious as to be absolutely

dangerous,” Hunton and Johnson recall, the “French people…gradually discovered that

the colored American was not the wild and vicious character” so that social contacts were

established (184).

Two Colored Women with the A.E.F., to be sure, does not present a sweeping

history of transnational exploitation and heroic black resistance in the vein of Martin R.

Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America (1861-62). No references, for example, are made

to black colonial troops serving in the French and British armies. Prior to America’s war

entry, the Crisis, edited by the very W.E.B. Du Bois who would later issue his

controversial call to “Close Ranks,” managed to expose the global contradictions of

World War I much more pointedly, when it reprinted the picture of a black colonial

11 This explains why the U.S. army command undertook every effort to prohibit black troops from fraternizing with French civilians. As Hunton and Johnson relate: “While white American soldiers were permitted to go freely about the towns, the great mass of colored American soldiers saw them for the most part, as they marched in line to and from the docks” (102).

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soldier holding a German spike-helmet in his hand with the gloss:

A Black ‘Heathen’ of the Congo, fighting to protect the wives and

daughters of the

white Belgians, who have murdered and robbed his people, against

‘Christian’

Culture represented by the German trophy in his hand!12

Moreover, just as in Pauline E. Hopkins’ Contending Forces (1900), the reader finds

numerous anecdotes of racial uplift and much advice on gradual amelioration in Two

Colored Women with the A.E.F. Still, the memoir contains abundant passages and

images that call attention to the ways in which World War I fostered a mounting

consciousness of both political power and racial identity among African Americans. As

Hunton and Johnson conclude, “[w]e learned to know that there was being developed in

France a racial consciousness and racial strength that could not have been gained in a half

century of normal living in America” (157).13

I

For white veterans returning from the battlefields of Europe, the war might have spelled

bitter disillusionment, but at least the fighting and bloodshed seemed to be over. For a

black populace subjected to white postwar resentment, by contrast, the war for social,

economic, and political self-determination had just begun. Unlike “Hemingway’s hero”

in A Farewell to Arms, notes Ralph Ellison with reference to his initial plan of centering

what was to become Invisible Man on the experiences of a black World War II veteran,

“for my pilot there was neither escape nor a loved one waiting.”14 “The World War had

ended,” Claude McKay remembers in A Long Way Home (1937). “But its end was a

12 Qtd. in Van Wienen 112. 13 Given the growing “racial consciousness and racial strength,” which according to Hunton and Johnson emerged out of the black Great War experience, it is hardly a coincidence that Joe Gilligan and Reverend Mahon stop at a black church on the last pages of Soldiers’ Pay. Observing an “occasional group of negroes,” passing them and “bearing lighted lanterns,” the Reverend admits uneasily: “No one knows why they do that” (308). Then from inside the building “welled the crooning submerged passion of the dark race. It was nothing, it was everything; then it swelled to an ecstasy, taking the white man’s words as readily as it took his remote God and made a personal Father of Him” (308). Henceforth, the threat issued by the strange and secretive doings of the black people has been contained. Gilligan and the Reverend are not only safe from potential racial upheaval; they are furthermore reinsured that their words will continue to carry paternalistic weight. At least for now. 14 Ralph Waldo Ellison, “Introduction,” Invisible Man, 30th Anniversary ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1982) xiii.

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signal for the outbreak of little wars between labor and capital and, like a plague breaking

out in sore places, between colored folk and white.”15 Hence, there was neither time for

self-pitying disillusionment, nor for the abandonment of black heroic idealism. Clad in

near-mythic terminology, Claude McKay’s sonnet, “If We Must Die” (1919), forcefully

speaks to the rise of a self-affirming “New Negro” consciousness while articulating the

urgency of black fortitude and unity in the struggles that lie ahead:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accurséd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! 16

Viewed through the eyes of black writers such as McKay, the Great War did not trigger

the sudden revulsion against “a botched civilization” that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot

articulate in their embittered postwar poetry.17 Acutely aware that the history of African

15 Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home (New York: Furman, 1937) 31. 16 Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” African-American Poetry: An Anthology: 1773-1927, ed. Joan R. Sherman (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997) 70. 17As Henry Louis Gates and Nellie McKay contend in their preface to The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: Norton, 1997): “With very few exceptions, none of the younger writers of the movement saw himself or herself as part of the radical modernist strain of literature set in motion in America mainly through the efforts of poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H. D., and Wallace Stevens or by ... James Joyce.... In part ... these writers were after a different business altogether. Most could not be completely taken, for example, by T. S. Eliot's epochal figuring of the entire modern world as a “Waste Land.” For many of them, the 1920s was a decade of unrivalled optimism, and all through the generations of slavery and neo-slavery, black American culture had of necessity emphasized the power of endurance and survival, of love and laughter, as the only efficacious response to the painful circumstances surrounding their lives” (5).

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Americans has traditionally been circumscribed by Western civilization’s persistent

betrayal of its own humanistic and democratic principles, World War I and its aftermath

was seen only as the latest episode in a protracted series of broken promises and gross

abuses. “Black history is rife with suffering, alienation, and terror,” Jane Campbell

remarks succinctly.18 Consequently, unlike white avant-garde writers who strove to

represent the dehumanizing particulars of warfare as a uniquely modern experience, black

“novelists in general did not foreground black soldiers’ military experience or the war’s

direct effects on African American civilian life. Rather,” Lee J. Green notes, “they

juxtaposed historical formations relevant to the black population that repeated themselves

during the nation’s major wars of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries to

emphasize the ongoing civil war between blacks and whites.”19 “Historically,” Ralph

Ellison writes in his 1982 introduction to Invisible Man, “most of the nation’s conflicts of

arms have been—at least for Afro-Americans—wars-within-wars. Such was true of the

Civil War, the last Indian Wars, of the Spanish American Wars, and of World Wars I and

II.”20

Accordingly, the battle lines drawn in black WWI fictions diverge noticeably

from those in white modernist war texts. Not the individual’s futile or ironic struggle

against a faceless, unthinking war machine, but the hero’s representative fight against

concrete evils such as segregation, racial prejudice, economic exploitation, and lynching

becomes the narrative focal point. And as McKay’s use of the personal pronoun ‘we’ in

If We Must Die already suggests, this fight is typically represented as part and parcel of

the historic communal struggle for social, economic, and political justice. The successes

or failures of this ongoing communal struggle, in turn, speak directly to the successes or

failures of American society at large. In this way, black Great War novels, following in

the footsteps of the sanguine romances of racial uplift and the bleaker post-reconstruction

novels of the late 19th century, “emerge[] as part of the national text…in which African

Americans create the record of their imagined American-ness, or of their resistance to

18 Jane Campbell, Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1986) xi. 19 Green 135. 20 Ralph Ellison, “Introduction,” Invisible Man, 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1982) xiii.

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it.”21

The manifestly un-modern preservation of “heroic sentimentality” in McKay’s If

We Must Die further indicates that African American literary responses to World War

One do more than just emphasize “the ongoing civil war between blacks and whites.”22

Above and beyond linking present experiences of maltreatment to the memory of past

abuses, these writings “call upon earlier myths…of power, of hope, of delivery” in order

to create messianic characters in the present, whose actions point toward a better

future.”23 As a closer examination of Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and

Walter F. White’s The Fire in the Flint shall show, African American Great War writings

transcend the confines of mere protest fiction by adapting conventions of the historical

romance so as to represent exemplary black protagonists, whose renewed dedication to

racial self-improvement, communal work, and heroic resistance mark them as the true

standard bearers of the American democratic ideal. This harking back to “earlier

myths…of power, of hope, of delivery,” as Bernard W. Bell has observed, was a strategy

widely employed in early 20th-century “Afro-American novels” that persist in

“reaffirming the possibilities of the romantic vision of black American character” vis-à-

vis “the stark reality and symbolism of ritual lynchings, obligatory Jim Crow episodes,

and international intrigue.”24 Similar to the black war historians Hunton and Johnson,

then, black war novelists such as Fleming and White not only record the continuance of

racial oppression, but also counteract a “sense of blind defeat” by rekindling the desiring

flame of romantic deliverance that has marked both African American literature and

historiography since the earliest slave narratives (Fire 93).25

According to Northrop Frye’s by now classic definition, the romance is a quest

21 Suggs 93. “As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth century,” Campbell explains, African American “heroes and heroines began to reject the delimiting values white culture attempted to impose. Instead, messianic figures began to point to and act out the real values at work, at times embracing the beauty of black speech, of violent revolt” (x). 22 Marcellus Blount, “Caged Birds: Race and Gender in the Sonnet,” Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge) 1990. 23 Campbell x. 24 Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987), 91. 25 On the impact of the slave narrative on the development of African American literature, see, for example, Henry Louis Gates, “Introduction,” The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Mentor, 1989), ix-xviii. The narrative’s characteristic “odyssey from slavery to freedom,” Gates writes, became “an emblem of every black person’s potential for higher education and the desire to be free” (x)

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narrative that unfolds in three stages: (1) “the perilous quest and the preliminary minor

adventures,” (2) “the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero

or his foe, or both, must die,” and (3) “the recognition of the hero, who has clearly proven

himself to be hero even if he does not survive the conflict.”26 This tripartite structure of

the archetypal romantic quest, though modified to address time-specific concerns,

continues to inform black World War I novels from Fleming’s expectant Hope’s

Highway to White’s skeptical The Fire in the Flint. Of course, as Paul Fussell has

shown, adaptations of the romantic quest motif in World War I literature are by no means

limited to African American writings. For many British soldier-literati, Fussell points

out, the war experience came to resemble a medieval quest, whose shape was defined by

the routine of the journey to the front and the rituals of “going up the line.”27 In black

American war novels, however, the perilous journey “up the line” does not take place in

the outlandish environment of no-man’s land, but in the familiar homefront milieu of

violence, wherein the protagonist must confront the barbed wires of race discrimination

and the exploding shells of racial violence. The fighting abroad and its resulting

interaction with less prejudiced Northerners and Europeans is therefore often portrayed as

an intellectually stimulating reprieve, during which the African American soldier-hero

revives his faith in the principles of participatory democracy.28 Thus, in Hope’s

Highway, Tom Brinley’s perilous quest is rendered as the movement from quasi-slavery

in the Jim Crow South to the relative freedom of wartime Britain and France, where the

former “no-man” has the “great opportunity” to “prove” his “manhood,” before returning

as a visionary leader of his race (154). Similarly, picking up where Hope’s Highway

leaves off, Kenneth Harper’s perilous quest in Fire in the Flint does not commence when

he arrives in France, but begins when the decorated black army physician decides to set

up a medical practice in his native Georgia.

Moreover, in marked distinction to much white modernist war prose, where the

“crucial struggle” between isolated individual and colossal war machine is deflated and 26 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957) 187. 27 Fussell 135. 28 To be certain, “the relative freedom of the North and Europe” was largely “the stuff of contemporary mythology,” as Kenneth Robert Janken underscores in White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP (New York: The New Press, 2003) 104. Still, undue as it may have been, the praise of European liberalism sung by many African American authors during and after the war served to expose the speciousness of white American claims to moral world leadership.

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turns from pathos into bathos, the battle between the representative hero and the

representative foe in African American WWI novels retains its potentially uplifting and

transformative meaning. This becomes most explicit in Hope’s Highway, where the

falsely accused Tom Brinley not only escapes from the chain gang, but receives partial

redress in court and, following his wartime education in Europe, returns “home” with a

newly acquired dedication to prevail over “unjust laws” and to serve his “people” (155).

Unlike most modernist war novels by white authors that categorically deny the possibility

of heroic recognition and hence depict the antihero’s withdrawal into himself, Hope’s

Highway harnesses the nation- and/or community-building impulse of the historical

romance in presenting the returning war hero as the empowered and self-confident leader

of his “oppressed and forsaken people” (154).29 Tom Brinley, in short, emerges as a

messianic and quintessentially romantic figure in the mold of Frederick Douglass’s

Madison Washington.30

Written under the impression of escalating postwar discrimination and violence,

The Fire and Flint obviously conveys a great deal less “faith” in America’s “future” than

Hope’s Highway. Nevertheless, White’s postwar vision is not quite as bleak as critics

commonly assert.31 For although Kenneth and Bob Harper are brutally slain by white

mobs at the close of The Fire in the Flint, their courageous challenge of entrenched white

power structures and their efforts to establish a black “co-operative society” signal

nothing short of a sea change in postwar race relations (142). Too educated and too

experienced “to do as [their] daddy did,” Kenneth—a social reformer and race leader

belonging the group of Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth”—and his militant brother Bob come

to represent the “new Negro spirit” that had been (re)awakened by the phony war for

democracy abroad (53). Like Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins and Cunningham’s Jim Tetley,

the Harper brothers are defeated in their fight on behalf of social justice and black self-

determination. But their valiant resistance in the face of overwhelming adversity revives

memories of past struggles and consequently spikes rebellious sentiments in the present.

29 On the nation-building impulse that underlies “the classical form of the historical novel,” see Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah & Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963) 24-30. 30 See Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford UP, 1996). 31 According to Suggs’s reading, Harper’s defeat in White’s The Fire in the Flint “is even more complete than” that of Charles Chesnutt’s “black doctor” in The Marrow of Tradition (177).

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“At any rate,” Kenneth reflects shortly before his death, “killing or running me away

wouldn’t kill the spirit revolt these coloured people have—it might stir it even higher”

(258). As the novel’s few perceptive (and increasingly nervous) whites are made to

recognize, “there’ll be more like him coming on—and they got too much sense to stand

for what nigras been made to suffer” (165).

“African-American writers,” Barbara Christian observes, “use the sources of

history to reimagine the terrain of the past in relation to the concerns of the present,

concerns such as how communities were constituted, and what might be the very concept

of freedom in a land which privileged the individual. Whether they wanted to or not,

they had to become a functioning group if they were to survive.”32 These overarching

social, economical, and political concerns of how African Americans can “become a

functioning group” also lie at the heart of Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and White’s The

Fire of the Flint. Aside from the harrowing imprints of white barbarity and black

suffering, they also always spot redemptive (romantic) images of individual heroism,

collective activism, and a growing common consciousness that, according to Alain

Locke, proclaimed African Americans a people.33 It is these images literary works such

as Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and White’s Fire in the Flint seek to preserve and nurture

in the African American cultural memory of the First World War.

II

Hunton and Johnson’s euphemistic reference to the “half century of normal living in

America” cannot conceal the fact that the years leading up to World War I were marked

by “lynching, disenfranchisement, inferior schools, confinement to menial and lower-paid

employment.”34 What Benjamin calls the “state of emergency,” in other words, was

endemic to the quotidian black experience in post-Reconstruction America. As Frances

E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), and Charles

Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition cogently illustrate, any progress that was achieved

32 Barbara Christian, “‘The Past is Infinite: History and Myth in Toni Morrison’s Trilogy, Social Identities 6.4 (2000): 418. Suggs identifies these historical concerns as the recurring problem of “confederation” in African American fiction. This “superstructural problem,” Suggs explains, “is stated most simply as ‘How are we to come together as a people to survive the presence of white people in the world and the laws they have written to sustain themselves’” (119). 33 See Alain Locke, The New Negro, An Interpretation (New York: Arno Press, 1968). 34 Walter F. White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (New York: Viking, 1948), 72. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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during Reconstruction had been made naught by “Southern Redemption.”35

Concentrated principally in the former Confederate states, blacks, freed de jure but not de

facto, had fallen under renewed economic control and political domination of their

former masters. The exploitive system of tenant farming and sharecropping ensured that

landless African Americans remained caught up in a vicious cycle of poverty. Poll taxes,

literacy tests, property ownership stipulations, and the notorious grandfather clause had

been instituted to disenfranchise all but a few blacks in urban areas such as Atlanta.36 So-

called “Jim Crow” laws, upheld by the Supreme Court in Plessy v Ferguson (1892), had

made segregation a way of life, relegating blacks to inferior public accommodations in

streetcars, trains, theaters, restaurants, hospitals, schools, and universities. Legal

discrimination against blacks was reinforced through public intimidation and bloody

outbursts of violence. Lynchings—involving shooting, burning, maiming, and ritualized

subordination—became regular phenomena. Throughout the 1890s, approximately 150

blacks were murdered annually and between 1900 and 1914, over 1,000 blacks fell victim

to deadly mob violence.37

Abandoned by the federal government, geographically scattered, politically

disunited, and without the aid of strong national organizations, a steady stream of black

sharecroppers begun protesting with their feet, following once again the “Northern Star”

in search for humane living conditions. Explains Jon-Christian Suggs, “[t]he fact that 90

percent of black Americans lived in rural settings hamstrung their abilities to organize in

any numbers to resist statewide actions against them, and the resultant oppression in turn

stimulated emigration to urban centers.”38 The outbreak of war in European further

accelerated the mass exodus that has since become known as the Great Migration. As

European immigration was practically halted while demand for war-related products

skyrocketed, the prospect of decent-paying factory jobs lured African American into the

industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Word-of-mouth as well as op-ed pieces

in influential black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender urged people to escape

35 See Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993) 3-36. 36 See Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1974.) 5. 37 Wynn 175. 38 Jon-Christian Suggs, Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in American Life (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000), 151.

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from the deepfreeze of modern-day slavery:

IF YOU CAN FREEZE TO DEATH in the North and be free,

why FREEZE in the South and be a slave…

The Defender Says Come.39

And come they did. Between 1914 and 1920, an estimated half-million Americans of

African lineage found their way to big manufacturing cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and

Pittsburgh as well as a host of smaller communities, thereby making the long ignored

question of race relations an issue of national concern.40

Few black Americans actually found the anticipated economic prosperity and

social acceptance in the North. Still, most believed that they had at least attained “more

freedom and less fear than in the South.”41 Like millions of Irish and Eastern European

immigrants before them, black migrants received substandard wages for backbreaking

labor. Housing was both poor and scarce and brought them in fierce competition with

white blue-collar workers. With the exception of the IWW, most trade unions rejected

black membership and collaborated with employers and city officials to confine African

Americans to menial jobs and ghettoized housing. Racial hostilities turned violent almost

immediately, as a series of anti-black riots in East St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago attest.

Unacceptable living conditions and increased racial violence notwithstanding, the

mass movement North wrought tremendous changes within the heretofore splintered

African American community and stimulated an unprecedented wave of political

activism. In the fast-growing urban ghettos, radical anti-integrationist organizations such

as the Universal Negro Improvement Association, lead by the flamboyant Marcus

Garvey, and Marxist groups such as the African Blood Brotherhood took root.

Mainstream civil rights organizations that had been fledgling before World War I, such as

the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the New York-

based Urban League, increased their membership tenfold. Having spearheaded a

publicity campaign against D. W. Griffith’s virulently racist movie Birth of a Nation

(1915), the NAACP’s membership grew rapidly, from roughly 9,000 in 1917 to

39 Chicago Defender, 24 February 1917. 40 Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) 128. 41 Barbeau & Henri 10.

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approximately 90,000 in 1919. By 1920, the NAACP could boast of more than 300 local

branches nationwide.

Initially, most African Americans were indifferent to the slaughter in distant

Europe. “The Germans ain’t done nothin’ to me, and if they have, I forgive ‘em,” was

the irony-tinged response of many.42 Soon, however, writers, intellectuals, and civil

rights activists grasped that the moralizing rhetoric surrounding World War I could be

advantageously exploited to highlight black grievances at home. “As ghastly as are the

horrors of the European war, man’s inhumanity to man is not confined to our brethren

across the sea,” the Chicago Defender editorialized in February 1916.43 Between 1914

and 1916, 126 African Americans fell victim to lynchings, prompting a writer for the

Baltimore Afro-American to point up the duplicity of a Wilson administration that

denounces German “ruthlessness on the high sea” while turning a blind eye on the

“ruthlessness in my home town.”44 The much lamented death of American civilians

aboard the torpedoed Lusitania provided black writers with an additional opportunity to

expose the double standards upheld by the overwhelming bulk of the white public. In a

New York Age article, entitled “Concerns Not Even the Sheriff,” a bitter James Weldon

Johnson noted on August 5, 1915:

It does seem like a hollow hypocrisy that this nation is…ready to raise

armies and navies to uphold the principle of international law which

guarantees protection to non-combatants aboard merchant ships; even

when those vessels belong to belligerents; and yet, the fact that within its

own borders one of its own citizens is taken from the custody of the

lawfully constituted courts and burned at the stake by a mob will not call

for the raising even of a sheriff’s posse.45

But more than any other homefront atrocity perpetrated during the war years, it

was the four-day “Negro-hunt” of East St. Louis in May 1917—charring an entire

neighborhood and leaving over 100 blacks and 8 whites dead—that galvanized the

42 James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 1930) 232-33. 43 Qtd. in William G. Jordan, Black Newspapers and America’s War for Democracy, 1914-1920 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 2001) 41. 44 Qtd. in Jordan 42. 45 Ibid. 42-43.

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African American community into action.46 While most white papers predictably blamed

“Negro residential invasion” for the bloodbath, the black press unanimously denounced

the riot in the sharpest terms.47 On July 28, 5,000 shocked and incensed African

Americans staged a protest march down New York’s Fifth Avenue, “with 20,000 more

standing in silence along the route.”48 Banners were unfurled—and quickly

confiscated—asking, “Mr. President, why not make America safe for America?”49 Other

posters, conjuring up images of abolitionist times, “showed kneeling women pleading

with President Wilson.”50 Wilson steadfastly refused to receive a black delegation about

the East St. Louis riot. In response, Kelly Miller, prominent head of the sociology

department at Howard University, penned a widely distributed (and subsequently banned)

open letter that tempers expressions of outrage with reaffirmations of black loyalty in

times of war:

It is a hollow mockery of the Negro when he is beaten and bruised in all

parts of the nation and flees to the national government for asylum, to be

denied relief on the basis of doubtful jurisdiction. The black man asks for

protection and is given a theory of government…The Negro, Mr.

President, in this emergency, will stand by you and the nation. Will you

and the nation stand by the Negro?”51

Miller’s strategy to demand federal recognition of basic citizenship rights on the

basis of a black display of patriotism is characteristic of African American responses to

the Great War after U.S. intervention had become imminent. Before the backdrop of

impending warfare, black essayists and editors—similar to pro-war socialist writers such

as Upton Sinclair and hawkish feminist authors such as Gertrude Atherton—doggedly

persisted in pointing out the increasingly blatant defects within American democracy

while simultaneously playing up the deep-rooted patriotism and unwavering loyalty of

their constituency. In the eyes of many individuals, newspaper boards, and civil rights

organizations alike, the war seemed to hold the key to full participatory membership in 46 Barbeau & Henri 24. 47 Wynn 185. 48 Wynn 186, Barbeau & Henri 26. 49 Qtd. in Wynn 186. 50 Barbeau & Henri 26. 51 Kelly Miller, “The Disgrace of Democracy: An Open Letter to President Woodrow Wilson,” 29 July 1917.

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the national family.52 Grounded in the romantic rather than the legalistic assumption that

service to the nation not just incurs gratitude, but also already denotes an unspoken de

facto recognition of citizenship, black organs of public opinion admonished their readers

to seize the day. “The opportunity we have longed for is here,” the Chicago Defender

proclaimed, “it is ours now to grasp it. The war has given us a place upon which to

stand”53 “Evasism,” [sic] Lieutenant Colonel Charles Young, the highest ranking black

officer in the U.S. armed services and hero of the 1915 military expedition into Mexico,

concurred, “has done us no good as a race, nor has it done the country at large any in this

time of need of preparation for its defense.”54

Across the country, community leaders began addressing young blacks of draft-

age as “sons of freedom,” promising, “when we have proved ourselves men, worthy to

work and die for our country, a grateful nation may gladly give us the recognition of real

men, and the rights and privileges of true and loyal citizens of these United States.”55 In

May 1917, the NAACP called on “colored fellow citizens to join heartily in this fight for

eventual world liberty.”56 And even W.E.B. Du Bois, who had sternly denounced both

European imperialism in general and the U.S. American invasion of the Dominican

Republic in particular, threw his support behind the war. “Let us not hesitate,” Du Bois

urged readers of the Crisis in July, 1918. “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special

grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens…We

make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and willingly with our eyes lifted to the

hills.”57 A month earlier, playwright Alice Dunbar-Nelson had organized a flag parade in

Delaware, during which 6,000 participants pledged “the loyalty of the Race to the 52 As David M. Kennedy observes, like other “special interest groups,” African American organizations “sought to invest America’s role in the war with their preferred meaning, and to turn the crisis to their particular advantage” (Over Here 5, 53). 53 Chicago Defender, 29 December 1917. 54 Qtd. in Van Wienen 129. 55 Qtd. in Barbeau & Henri 7. 56 Qtd. in Zieger 130. 57 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Close Ranks,” Crisis 16 (July 1918): 111. This editorial dismayed many militant black leaders such as William Monroe Trotter, a co-founder of the NAACP, who left the organization over objections to white financing and leadership. Contemporary historians such as Mark Ellis have suggested that Du Bois “struck a deal” with the army to write “Close Ranks” in exchange for the captaincy. William Jordan refutes this claim, arguing that “American racism forced black leaders to shift between tactics of accommodation and of protest.” See Mark Ellis, “‘Closing Ranks’ and ‘Seeking Honor’: W.E.B. Du Bois in World War I,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992), 96-124. For the rejoinder, see William Jordan, “‘The Damnable Dilemma’: African American Accommodation and Protest during World War I,” Journal of American History 81 (March 1995), 1562-83.

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American Flag.”58 Patriotic affirmations of loyalty to the flag, it was believed, would

turn a segregated nation into one of “fellow citizens.” Explains the narrator in Walter F.

White’s The Fire in the Flint, “[m]any of them entered the army, not so much because

they were fired with desire to fight for an abstract thing like world democracy, but,

because they were of a race oppressed, they entertained very definite beliefs that service

in France would mean a more decent regime in America.”59 In hindsight, such hopes

were no doubt “delirious,” as Barbeau and Henri duly note.60 Yet they were certainly not

new. At the onset of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass had expressed similar notions

that military services would cement black citizenship rights: “Let the black man get upon

his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his buttons and a musket on his

shoulders, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that

he has earned his right to citizenship.”61

At first, the double-barreled tactic of pledging black support for the war effort

while concurrently protesting injustices seemed to pay off as the government reluctantly

embraced the idea of black military service, not least because internal reports had

concluded that the “co-operation of this large element of our population in all civilian and

military activities is of vital importance” and “the alienation, or worse, of eleven million

people would be a serious menace to the successful prosecution of the war.”62 Stephen J.

Maher’s melodramatic The Sister of a Certain Soldier (1918) reflects the official change

in attitude toward the enlistment of black troops. One of the few World War I fictions by

a white author that features a black main character, the novella depicts the “heroic”

efforts of a black Joan d’Arc to dispel African American notions of the “hypocrisy and

cruelty…of the American white man’s heart” and “to organize a new company of colored

troops” that will revel in “the glory of the actual giving of themselves to their country.”63

At the time Maher’s novella appeared, the metaphor of the national household (albeit a

58 Qtd. in Gloria Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Woman Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987) 67. 59 Walter F. White, The Fire in the Flint (New York: Knopf, 1924), 43. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 60 Barbeau and Henri 7. 61 Qtd. in Burghardt Turner, “Foreword,” The Unknown Soldier: Black Troops in World War I by Arthur E. Barbeau and Floret Henri (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1974), xii. 62 Qtd. in Wynn 176. 63 Stephen E. Maher, The Sister of a Certain Soldier (New Haven, CT: Morehouse & Taylor, 1918), 8, 25, 42.

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strictly patriarchal and segregated one) was also deployed in recruitment posters that

portrayed young black males of draft age as “the sons of freedom,” who bravely fight

German soldiers before the superimposed image of a fatherly Abraham Lincoln.

It soon became apparent, however, that the government had no intentions of

acknowledging African Americans as equal citizens through service in the armed

forces. By and large relegated to “Services and Supply” units, most black soldiers were

only allowed to perform menial (albeit essential) tasks behind the lines. As Barbeau and

Henri put it, “almost all the black draftees would serve in the military equivalent of chain

gangs.”64 Racism in the army was rampant. Because white troops could not be expected

to serve alongside black soldiers, the armed forces were strictly segregated along both

horizontal and vertical lines. This meant that an all-white corps of officers typically

commanded all-black companies.65 Under pressure to mollify the African American

community, the government did eventually establish a training camp for black officers in

Des Moines, Iowa, but relatively few African Americans actually received

commissions.66 Almost invariably, African Americans brigades received low-grade

equipment, mediocre training, second-rate accommodation, and some of the worst

assignments imaginable.

Meanwhile, large segments of the white public loathed seeing blacks in uniform.

On the streets of Houston, black soldiers who defied segregation laws by refusing to yield

to white pedestrians were physically assaulted. The ensuing riot of August 23, 1917

resulted in seventeen white casualties (including five policemen) and the summary

execution of thirteen black soldiers.67 Incidents such as these were water on the mills of

a white mainstream press that unremittingly ran long articles, stressing the innate

64 Barbeau and Henri 90. 65 Significantly, Maher’s black Joan d’Arc convinces “white officers…to instruct the new [colored} company” (25). 66 According to Barbeau and Henri, the military reconciled itself to the decision [of training black officers] with certain reservations: (1) that no more than 2 percent of officer candidates should be black men (although 13 percent of draftees were black), (2) that few colored officers would ever be utilized…, (3) that these few should be washed out as quickly as they could be charged with incompetence, and 94) that there should be no black officers of field rank (major and up)” (58). 67 Wray R. Johnson, “Black American Radicalism and the First World War: The Secret Files of the Military Intelligence Division,” Armed Forces & Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26.1 (1999): 30.

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unruliness and race-typical ineptness of African Americans in uniform.68 But

undoubtedly the greatest fear harbored by the white public was that black soldiers would

“freely associate” with white women in France. As soon as the first black troops had

disembarked in Le Havre, army directives were dispatched, stipulating under punishment

of martial law that black “enlisted men…will not talk to or be in company with any white

woman.”69 In addition, the U.S. Army pleaded with the French High Command to

prevent any contact between African American soldiers and female civilians, “because

white Americans become greatly incensed at any public expression of intimacy between

white women and black men.”70 And sure enough, across the Atlantic even the mere

thought of possible “intimacy between white women and black men” sufficed to trigger

violent reactions. Already incensed by omnipresent propaganda images of dark-skinned

Huns raping fair Belgian maidens as well as the bigoted portrayal of black rapists in Birth

of a Nation, white miscegenation phobia reached a fever pitch shortly after the war and,

as in Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint, found release in the lynchings of black

veterans, who were said to have been “ruined” in France.71 Exclaims one member of the

faceless mob that is about to lynch Kenneth Harper in The Fire in the Flint: “I allus said

these niggers who went to France an’ ran with those damn Frenchwomen ‘d try some of

that same stuff when they came back! Ol’ Vardaman was right! Ought never ‘t have let

niggers in th’ army anyhow” (286).

Withering hopes of gaining recognition in return for their services were crushed

when returning black veterans found themselves prime targets of the nativist postwar

hysteria that lead to a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan violence not only in the “Old South,”

but in Northeastern and Midwestern states as well.72 In 1919 alone, “over eighty blacks

68 “White Americans,” Barbeau & Henri write, “considered blacks to be lacking in intelligence, judgment, and civic or professional morals—vices which presented a constant danger and required severe reprimand” (115). 69 Qtd. in Hunton & Johnson 186. 70 Qtd. in Green 144. 71 Among the “seventy-eight blacks” that were lynched in 1919, Wray R. Johnson notes, ten “were black veterans” (36). 72 The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition (2001), distinguishes between a first and a second Ku Klux Klan, active in the aftermaths of the Civil War and the First Word War respectively. “The second Ku Klux Klan, was founded in 1915 by William J. Simmons, an ex-minister and promoter of fraternal orders; its first meeting was held on Stone Mt., Ga. The new Klan had a wider program than its forerunner, for it added to “white supremacy” an intense nativism and anti-Catholicism (it was also anti-Semitic) closely related to that of the Know-Nothing movement of the middle 19th cent. Consequently its appeal was not sectional,

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were lynched, and eleven were burned at the stakes.”73 “The blood lust which World

War One was too short to satiate made the year 1919 one of almost unmitigated horror

and tension,” remembers former NAACP secretary Walter F. White in his autobiography.

“Violent and bloody race riots broke out in Washington, Chicago, Omaha, Philadelphia;

Phillips County Arkansas, and other areas.”74 Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s sweeping

historical poem, “Pictures,” in Clouds and Sunshine (1920), conveys the sour realization

that black loyalty during World War I had not brought the expected rewards. Instead,

both “Lynching” and “Discrimination” had spread North and become a national

phenomenon:

Not wanted here, not wanted there,

Such signs go up all o’er the land.

My God, then are my people free!

No vote for you, no vote for me.

Have we not borne the stripes enough,

Our cry goes up,—“How long, how long!”75

But even though the general sense of postwar humiliation was great, it quickly

became evident that African Americans as a whole would no longer passively submit to

white repression. Explained philosopher and literary critic Alain Locke, “the anticipated

rewards of the Negro’s patriotic response to the idealism of the ‘War to Save Democracy’

were not measurably realized and, spurred by the bitter disillusionment of postwar

indifference, there came that desperate intensification of the Negro’s race consciousness

and attempt to recover group morale.”76 Animated by a budding feeling of racial pride

that counteracted “bitter disillusionment,” African American writers, editors, and activists

recalled the lessons of previous struggles, and “recover[ed] group morale” by vowing that

no black person shall “tamely and meekly submit to a program of lynching, burning, and

and, aided after 1920 by the activities of professional promoters Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Y. Clarke, it spread rapidly throughout the North as well as the South. It furnished an outlet for the militant patriotism aroused by World War I, and it stressed fundamentalism in religion.” 73 Wynn 189. 74 Walter F. White, A Man Called White 44. 75 Sarah Lee Brown Fleming, Hope’s Highway / Clouds and Sunshine (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995) 216. Hereafter cited pathetically. 76 Alain L. Locke, The Negro in America (Chicago: American Library Association, 1933) 12-13.

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social ostracism.”77 The once hawkish Du Bois admitted “a deep sense disappointment,

of poignant pain” and later, like Upton Sinclair, even admitted that he “did not realize the

full horror of war and its wide impotence as a method of social reform.”78 But like

Sinclair, Du Bois refused to give up. Perceiving that a “new, radical Negro spirit” had

been born in France, he urged himself as well as his people on to “marshal every ounce of

our brain and brawn” and to uphold the hard-won fighting spirit: “We return, we return

from fighting, we return fighting.”79

III

Sarah Lee Brown Fleming was born on January 10, 1875 in Charleston, South Carolina.

When the First World War broke out, Fleming was nearly forty-years-old and lived with

her husband, the dentist Robert Stedman Fleming, in New Haven, Connecticut. Like

Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Gertrude Atherton, she thus belonged to an

older generation of writers, who by and large threw their support behind America’s “War

for Democracy.” Hope’s Highway shows Fleming to fit the mold of American pro-war

literati. Having said this, though, it is important to note that her “political project,” like

that of African American playwrights such as Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mary P. Burrill,

“was at a tangent to patriotism and pacifism.”80 To her, as to most of her African

American contemporaries, the embrace of patriotism was tied less to “an abstract thing

like world democracy” than to “very definite beliefs that service in France would mean a

more decent regime in America” (Fire 43).81 Tom Brinely’s initial eagerness “for a

chance to serve his own country by entering the service at home,” underscores Fleming’s

conviction that black displays of heroism abroad would result in greater social and

political recognition at home (151).

And so it seems hardly surprising that Fleming’s Hope’s Highway, in line with

Du Bois’s editorial praise of black soldiery, seeks to dispel white prejudices concerning

racial ineptness of black soldiers by extolling the heroism of colored colonial troops in

77 Chicago Defender, 22 February 1919. 78 Qtd. in Wynn 191. 79 W.E.B. Du Bois, “An Essay Toward the History of the Black Man in the Great War,” Crises, June 1919: 72. 80 Tylee 154. 81 Besides, “neither patriotism nor public objection as conventionally conceived by white Americans was an option available to Black Americans,” Claire M. Tylee notes (154).

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Europe.82 In a letter from Paris, Frederic Towers, husband-to-be of the novel’s white

heroine, not only remarks that the “French army has enlisted many of these black men in

the ranks,” but furthermore relates how his encounter with “[o]ne herculean black [who]

was given a medal of honor” changed his attitude toward the enlistment of black soldiers:

His physique was magnificent,—tall, erect of stature, and well

proportioned. He impressed one as he stood to receive his degree. The

French people could not do enough for him. Imagine my attending a

banquet in his honor! The French seemed to have forgotten his color, and

spoke only of his valor and bravery…I feel that we Americans are too

narrow in our feelings. What difference does it make whether bravery is

garbed in black or white? It is deeper than the skin. (58)

In its appeal to shared romantic notions of the beauty of strength, valor, bravery, and

sacrifice, this scene is evidently designed to accentuate the war’s potential of uniting the

races and of overcoming the divisive narrowness of prejudice.

As Mark W. Van Wienen has observed, “the values of martyrdom and heroism

embodied in the soldier-poet were by no means simply immanent in the white, English

soldier poet, but were uniquely developed in black American culture as well” (105).

Unlike white soldier-poets such as Allan Seeger, however, black soldier-poets (real or

imagined) could never escape the fact that they were battling on two fronts. Thus, as

soldiers both in their country’s official fight against Prussian expansionism and in their

community’s unauthorized fight against institutionalized racism, they were interpellated

into two “subjection positions” that at once reinforced and contested each other.83

Ripples of the complex and perforce contradictory interaction between these two subject

positions—which may also be described via Du Bois’s concept of “double

82 Du Bois managed to exalt in the unrequited heroism of African American “Buffalo Soldiers” even as he sternly rebuked his own country’s punitive expedition into Mexico. Writing of the battle of Carizzal, during which 80 black troops stood the ground against 120 Mexicans, Du Bois ends his editorial by assessing that the fight represented “a glory for the Mexicans who dared to defend their country and for Negro troopers who went singing to their death. And the greater glory for the black men, for Mexicans died for a land they love, while Negroes sang for a country that despises, cheats, and lynches them” (Crisis 12.4 [1916]: 165). 83 See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1971) 127-186.

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consciousness”—are clearly noticeable in Hope’s Highway.84 For Fleming’s hero, unlike

Victor Daly’s naïve Montgomery Jason in Not Only War, does not volunteer to “serve his

own country.” Instead, Tom joins the French armed forces, after a “visit to France [had]

opened his eyes to the fact that all men were equal in the French army, and his joy at this

discovery knew no bounds” (151). Like most educated African Americas who had access

to black dailies such as The Chicago Defender or the Baltimore Afro-American, Fleming

was no doubt aware of the mistreatment of African American troops. Tom’s conscious

decision to serve under the Tricolore rather than under “Old Glory” therefore appears to

be a veiled indictment against the U.S. Army’s strict segregation policies—all the more

so, because in the French army Tom is rapidly promoted to “Commander Brinley” and

showered with “[m]edals of honor…to an enviable degree” (152). Hardly any black

officers in the U.S. Army reached the rank-equivalent of Lieutenant Colonel and none

held field command.85

Apart from her novel, alas, nothing is known about Fleming’s struggles to come

to grips with American wartime politics and, for that matter, preciously little is known

about her life generally.86 What can be gleaned from her novel, though, suggests that she

concerned herself only selectively or—perhaps better—eclectically with the political

roots and social effects of war in distant Europe. According to the narrator in Hope’s

Highway, for instance, World War I had been precipitated by “a disagreement over some

African land” between Germany and France (151). Now, this overly simplistic (if not

outright mistaken) explanation may be read as an allusion to the Morocco Crisis of 1905,

in which case it might hint a sly critique of European imperialism. The narrator’s

subsequent elucidation that Tom’s military leadership was instrumental to the “settlement

of the question at issue” strongly suggests, however, that Fleming’s grasp of European

84 “One ever feels this twoness,” Du Bois famously wrote in the Souls of Black Folk (1903),“—an American and a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (496). 85 When Colonel Charles Young was in line for promotion to brigadier general, he was swiftly and unceremoniously retired on specious medical grounds. Predictably, this caused quite an uproar in the black press. Fleming, no doubt, was aware of this controversy. On the treatment of black officers in the AEF, see Barbeau & Henri 56-69. 86 The most extensive biographical entry on Fleming to date can be found in Ann Allen Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988). Additional information as well as a brief reading of Hope’s Highway can be found in Lorraine Elena Roses & Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900-1945 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990) 115-17.

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geopolitics was simply limited (152). Likewise, although Tom Brinley notes while

traveling through England and France that “the war had left its mark on devastation to a

greater or lesser degree on the different countries,” he makes the rather astonishing

observation that the “war’s killing off of millions does not seem to have produced a

scarcity here, at least” (144, 141).87

But given the daily experience of “scarcity” among poor urban blacks and

disenfranchised Southern sharecroppers alike, Tom’s impression is perhaps less

astounding than at first it may appear. As is the case with most African American World

War I writings, whether fictional or non-fictional, representations of European affairs are

of significance only insofar as they shed contrasting light on the living conditions within

the United States. Accordingly, literary accounts of the black American wartime

experience abroad tend to idealize the progressiveness of European democracy and race-

relations.88 On a narrative level, Europe, even while being torn apart by internal strife, is

frequently rendered as the literalization of the ancient Eden trope within

contemporaneous African American discourses on World War I, against the background

of which the failings of American society obtrude evermore starkly in black and white.

While in England, for instance, Fleming’s Tom Brinley is “puzzled” to be invited

to all sorts of “social functions…for he thought that socially his color would be a barrier

as long as he lived, so far as mingling with white man was concerned” (143). And in

striking contrast to the segregated institutions of higher learning in the United States,

England’s Oxford University is rendered as a paradigm of multiracial and multinational

education, even in the inherently divisive times of war: “Every instructor was keen,

earnest, and sincere. Every student had an equal chance. The great war affected this

institution very little, for within its walls all races and nations were represented” (142).

So, when a Europeanized Tom after some hesitation resolves to heed “the call of his

87 The novel’s chronology of events in Europe is also rather confusing so that Tom Brinley arrives in London after the “war’s killing off of millions…had been over some little time,” but then, following his studies at Oxford, he inexplicably decides to “resign from his paper temporarily, and enter the French army” (141, 151). The “recent triumphant end to the fight” might refer to the end of the Boer War (1899-1902), yet the “killing off of millions” in the same paragraph clearly refers to the slaughter of World War I (141) 88 Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem offers a notable exception in that it describes the racial unrest in postwar London that prompts Jake Brown to leave his white girlfriend and return to the “deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness” of Harlem (10).

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people,” his return to America acquires the nimbus of a truly messianic mission:

Duty calls me across the seas to my oppressed and forsaken people…I

shall go to my people, taking those European ideals, which I trust shall

even be a part of me…I come back to you, my country, which I love and

revere. You have unjust laws, you are unfair to my people; but I believe

in your future. I have faith in you, though you mete out partial justice to

me and mine…I and my people hope for a greater freedom. (154-55).

One immediate effect of World War I on European society that did command

Fleming’s critical attention was a perceptible shift in gender relations. A suffragist as

well as a “race person,” Fleming makes it a point to note in her novel that the war had

bestowed European women with wider economic opportunities as well as greater social

responsibilities so that a denial of suffrage based on the old separate sphere ideology

seemed no longer tenable: “It was interesting to Tom to watch the women in the different

avenues of work, which before [the war] had been filled by men…Everywhere he went

Tom was forced to the conclusion that she could never be denied the ballot for which he

had fought so ardently” (144). Everywhere, that is, except in the “motherland,” which,

just as her American offspring, is “still orthodox in this particular” and where the

“Pankhursts” are “still knocking at the door of Parliament… without success” (144).

Analogous to Fisher and Atherton, Fleming portends in Hope’s Highway that these last

barriers to female suffrage in England and, by extension, in America will soon crumble,

as a prolonged warfare “necessarily ma[k]e[s] the countries, to a greater degree,

dependent upon their women” (145). It is worth noting, here, that Fleming, unlike Fisher

and Atherton, does not justify female suffrage by claiming the supposedly innate moral

superiority of women. Rather, she portrays female suffrage as dictated by sheer

economic necessity and the logical extension of established egalitarian principles. This

allows Fleming, over the brief span of two pages, to link patriarchal objections to female

suffrage with paternalistic arguments against race equality so as to expose them both as

interconnected strategies to maintain white male dominance. Asked why the British

government persists in denying women the vote, Felton, an influential Englishmen, puts

it bluntly to Tom:

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We English do not comply with the request of our women, without

forethought. We do not believe that it is good for women to have what we

have decided is not good for them. Our attitude towards our women is the

same as the Southern attitude is towards your people. We believe that

women should always be subservient to men, and to place the ballot in

their hands would surely make them the equal of men; and that we

Englishmen do not wish. (145)

Tom, despite having been indirectly put into his place, does not demur. But the

implications of Felton’s statement are unambiguous and the reader may safely surmise

that Tom, a disenfranchised black male, opts not to internalize this particular “European

ideal.”

While the novel tends to be quite piercing in its exposure of the mechanisms of

white male domination, Tom’s silence in the above scene makes clear that Fleming’s

Hope’s Highway is reluctant to propose radical solutions to the so-called “race question.”

Seemingly unperturbed by the political currents of black nationalism that were gaining

momentum in Harlem and elsewhere, Hope’s Highway appears to guide the reader down

the accommodationist path of gradual uplift and racial conciliation that had been

prepared, most prominently, by the venerable Booker T. Washington, who is mentioned

on the novel’s dedication page. All of the mere handful of literary critics who have

discussed Fleming’s literary work comment on its accommodationist tendency, usually in

dismissive terms. “Hope’s Highway piously resolved the race problem in religion,” Carl

Milton Hughes remarks curtly.89 “Written for the purpose of extolling Negro leaders and

their sympathizers,” Hugh M. Gloster concludes along similar lines, “Hope’s Highway

has the usual overstatements of novels of its kind.”90

And indeed, following young Tom Brinley’s ascent from chain gang prisoner in

Santa Maria, a fictional Southern plantation settlement, to decorated war hero, Oxford

scholar, and champion of his race, Fleming Hope’s Highway fuses elements of slave

narratives such as Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl (1861) with features

of late 19th-century uplift novels such as Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces to create

89 Carl Milton Hughes, The Negro Novelist (New York: Citadel Press, 1953) 36. 90 Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (New York: Ruslle & Russel, 1967) 96.

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what Jane Campbell has called a “positive concept of history” (33). Before the veteran of

many battles can turn his “people’s steps away from the rough road of ignorance into the

highway of hope,” however, he must rely on the support of his white, maternal

benefactor, Grace Ennery (156). Even though the novel underscores the black potential

for self-advancement, it becomes apparent that this potential can only be realized through

the help of angelic white characters such as Grace, who understand the “Souls of Black

Folks” more or less intuitively (35).91 As in Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the

Republic (1867)—and, for that matter, the entire 19th-century sentimental tradition—,

interracial cooperation neither originates from utilitarian considerations nor results from a

series of conflicts, but bursts forth suddenly from the inborn sensibilities of exceptional

individuals. Fleming’s vision of the future is clearly romantic and stands in stark contrast

to the grim realism of the “pictures of the past, / And pictures of the present time”

(Clouds 216). Characteristically, Fleming closes her episodic poem “Pictures”—which

traces black history from “Slavery” through Civil War and Reconstruction to post-World

War I “Lynching” and “Discrimination”—with a “final picture” of racial conciliation:

‘Tis not with master, whip in hand

But it is Black and White, alike ,

Holding aloft the stars and stripes.

They’ve buried far beneath the sod

Grim prejudice and all lynch laws,

And all in one united band,

Proclaim the freedom of the land. (Clouds 217)

Yet, for all the novel’s romantic sensibilities and fantastic resolutions, it also

includes flow-disrupting scenes such as a brutal lynching, a black farmer’s conference,

the creation of the “Federation for Negro Protection,” and debates concerning the

“admittance of the Negro in the State Militia” that bring to light growing national

anxieties concerning the “race question” and testify to a growing racial self-awareness

among blacks (63, 69). Programmatic statements by old Nana, the novel’s matriarch, that

her people “must scatter themselves in all avenues of work” and that “some day them

‘white trash’ down there will get all they are lookin’ for,” further indicate a heightened

91 As Jacquelyn Y. McLendon points out, Fleming portrays Grace as a grown-up version of “poor

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awareness of the necessity for self-reliance in the ongoing struggle against racial

discrimination and physical oppression (64,101).

In line with its narrative intent to memorialize the heroic deeds of extraordinary

black men past and present, Hope’s Highway commences by tracing the rise of Enoch

Vance from a mere slave to “a true leader of his people,” who emerges on the stage of

African American history as “the first Negro qualified to teach the Blacks in the South

after Emancipation” (18). Set in “beautiful,” idyllic “Santa Maria,” where the old

“[m]asters…were more or less kind to their slaves,“ the novel pays nostalgic reverence to

the benevolence of enlightened white aristocrats in the vein of Chesnutt’s Old Mr.

Delamere (11, 12). Realizing “the freedom that the bondmen craved” was around the

corner, John Vance, a slaveholder of a “very sympathetic nature,” decides to manumit the

young Enoch and send him to a “great Western university” so that he might guide his

people out of ignorance and poverty (17, 14). Following “the announcement of

Freedom,” Enoch Vance, now a distinguished scholar, returns to Santa Maria and

establishes a college for freedmen (14). Under the favorable conditions of the

Reconstruction period, the “Institute” prospers and the Leader” is “heralded far and wide

for his great achievements” (19). Obviously modeled after Booker T. Washington’s

Tuskegee Institute (founded 1881), the Vance Institute initially emphasizes “those things

that his people most needed,—agriculture and manual training” (19).92 “As time

advanced, however,” the school quickly evolves into an institution of “Higher education

for the Black man” (19). Evidently mindful of Du Bois’s critique that the Tuskegee

Institute’s strong vocational orientation keeps black people trapped in lower social and

economic strata, Fleming updates or modernizes the Vance Institute’s curriculum in

Hope’s Highway—which explains why “this system of enlightenment” subsequently

incurs the wrath of ruthless Southern Redemptionists such as Joe Vardam, who

proclaims, “We don’t want any Niggers reading Latin and Greek,” and fight “with tooth

and nail to have the whole educational curriculum changed, so far as higher education for

Blacks [is] concerned” (20).

Eliza” in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 92 Fleming’s second poem in Clouds and Sunshine bears the title “Tuskegee” and praises “Washington” who “out of chaos… / Raised this place to glory” (168).

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Soon the forces of reaction prove too powerful for Enoch Vance. “Throughout

the South,” the narrator informs her readers, “state after state disfranchised the Blacks

and decreed against higher education for them. Thus, because of legislative interference,

the great ambition of the Leader’s life was blighted” and he dies “of a broken heart” (20,

21). But the beaten leader’s struggles were not in vain, the novel insists, for in “leaving

to the world the memory of a life well-spent” he has shown succeeding generations the

pathway to freedom. Henceforth, the task of overcoming the obstacle of post-

Reconstruction tyranny and of completing black liberation in the name of their brave

forbearer falls onto the shoulders of young and gifted men such as Tom Brinley.

The pattern outlined in the novel’s first two chapters already provides the

blueprint for the plot structure of successive chapters. Chapters III, VI, VII, VIII, trace

the awakening of Grace Ennery’s sympathies toward the “Negro” and her decision “to act

upon [her] convictions” by financing Tom Brinely’s education (58). A descendent of

Southern aristocrats, Grace had grown up free from prejudice in Boston, where she lives

a sheltered but unfulfilled life as a “Poor Little Rich Girl” (25). During a trip to her

ancestral home in Santa Maria, Grace witnesses the appalling treatment of blacks in the

South and to her astonishment learns that white legislators conspire with “Ku-Klux

Klans” to keep blacks in a state of permanent servitude (46). These tidings turn her into a

modern-day abolitionist and, with the help of her converted fiancée, she resolves to clear

her conscience by providing for Tom, whom she had met in Santa Maria.

Meanwhile, though, Joe Vardam and his ilk have falsely accused Tom of thievery

and vagabondism and condemned him to hard labor in the chain gain.93 Adopting many

conventions of the slave narrative, chapters XII-XVI detail Tom’s escape from the chain

gang, his perilous quest North to Washington and New York—which he masters due to

the aid of an underground railroad-like network of sympathizers—as well as his efforts to

93 Tom’s sentence to chain gang labor might be an oblique reference to “the fight or work” laws that were enacted in mid-1918 to keep draft-age black males in the South. “Above all,” Kenneth Robert Janken explains, “the rural and urban white elite used these laws to alleviate the wartime shortage….They were often used in conjunction with a military furlough program, in which blacks—whom military commanders in many cases did not want in uniform—were sent to work for large plantation owners. The statutes were frequently used interchangeably with vagrancy laws, under which unemployed African Americans were arrested, fined, and released into the custody of a white employer, for whom they would have to work off the fine” (38). As a young assistant secretary, Walter White was sent to Georgia by the NCAAP to investigate “fight or work” laws in Georgia.

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avoid the long reach of the corrupted Southern legal system. In a final nod to the

conventions of the slave narrative, Hope’s Highway even includes a runaway slave

advertisement in a New York paper, offering “one thousand dollars reward for the return

of a black boy who is an escaped convict” (95). Several mix-ups and a budding love

affair with a poor but noble black washer girl in New York complicate the plot

considerably, before Tom once again chances upon his white maternal benefactor while

rescuing her from a burning house. A Northern court drops the false charges against Tom

while he is already “spirited away” to Europe, where in rapid succession he takes a

degree from Oxford, proves his mettle in the French army, and subsequently receives the

offer of “an important consulate” (154). Tom, well aware that most “positions are closed

to him” in the United States, contemplates the offer (149). In the end, however, Tom,

following the example of the “great Leader,” returns to Santa Maria, where he, “without

one thought of reward,” rebuilds the “Vance Institute to its former glory” (155, 156).

Hints of Tom’s impending marriage as well as a newspaper headline, announcing,

“GREAT DEMOCRATIC OF SANTA MARIA BROKEN—VARDAM’S AND TILTON’S POWER

KILLED—REPUBLICAN RULE THE RESULT OF RECENT ELECTION,” complete the

improbable happy ending.

Hope’s Highway can be—and has been—justly classified as a “race fantasy,” for

its romantic storyline bears all the earmarks of what Sterling A. Brown has called the

“race-glorification of Negro apologists” (113). “All of the significant black characters,”

McLendon observers, are “essentially moral” and display an “innate goodness.”94 True

enough, but while Fleming’s race-glorification, just as Cunningham’s class-glorification

or Atherton’s female-glorification, might offend the artistic sensibilities of some readers,

one should not overlook the political import of such idealized self-representations.

Obviously propagandistic and frequently lacking psychological depth, advocacy literature

has long relied on group idealization as a powerful representational tool in countering

negative stereotypes and fostering positive self-images.95 In a letter to Edgar Webster,

Walter White rejected similar charges of race-glorification in The Fire in the Flint, but

94 Jacquelyn Y. McLendon, “Introduction,” Hope’s Highway / Clouds and Sunshine, by Sarah Lee Brown Fleming (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1995) xviii. 95 Which is why arguably more sophisticated and critical self- or group-representations in Appalachian, African American, Jewish, or Native American literature continue to arouse passionate debates.

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nevertheless insisted on the necessity of portraying essentially good and moral black

characters. “If by doing so I am to bear the label of ‘propagandist,’” he concluded

unapologetically, “I shall do so cheerfully and with a light heart.”96

Putting aside questions concerning the identity political import of idealized self-

representations, though, Hope’s Highway’s apologist tendencies with regard to the

socioeconomic organization of early 20th-century American society are all too obvious.

One illustration thereof can be found in the novel’s predilection of uncritically

contrasting the magnanimity of white aristocrats with the vileness of poor whites. Like

White’s The Fire in the Flint, Hope’s Highway largely lays blame the resurgence of

racial violence on “an element that crowded in after slavery from the mountainous

districts to the west of Santa Maria, or that came in by immigration” (20). Even though

the novel frequently registers that “Blacks have so little protection in a country so unique

in its Republican form of government” because of the racism encoded in its “unjust

laws,” “Miss Ennry” has it made patently clear to her that “the worst enemy of the Blacks

are not the descendants of their former owners, but a class of poor whites who have

pushed in from the mountains”(43, 155, 48). The novel does bring up poverty as a cause

of “intense prejudice,” yet no mentioning is made of who ultimately profits from

perpetuating a system that pits poor whites against poor blacks (48). Nor does the novel

explore the underlying reasons for why the “idle class of Negroes” cares “little or nothing

about leaders or rights” (31)

Equally shortsighted is Fleming’s embrace of anti-immigrant sentiments in

Hope’s Highway, which had probably been stoked by wartime fears that “hyphenated

Americans” represent the “enemy within,” who propagates dangerous ideas and

sabotages the nation’s war effort.97 Thus, in line with President Wilson’s finding that

foreign-born citizens “have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our

national life” and that “[s]uch creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be

crushed,” Fleming’s narrator unequivocally endorses legislative efforts to restrict

96 Qtd. in Edward E. Waldron, Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1978) 37. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 97 Incidentally, as Hunton and Johnson relate, German war propaganda did aim to incite black citizens against their government, but such efforts were apparently of little avail.

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immigration:98

Emigration seemed to have reached a serious stage…To this land came

various classes of foreigners to avoid the responsibility that would devolve

upon them of building new homes in Europe. Upon this country’s

investigation [of?]a number of plots to blow up various buildings, it was

found that anarchists had come over in large numbers. So, in order to

avoid danger that might arise by permitting more of these anarchistic

spirits to infest the country, a ban was place upon emigration” (53).

Fleming’s adoption of the “100 Percent American” trope here obviously serves the

immediate purpose of highlighting that black citizens claim no homeland other than the

United States—a supposition that not only casts African American desires to wear

uniform in the most sincere light, but also shows blacks to be truer Americans than white

bigots such as Mr. Grant, who detest seeing “Niggers with firearms” and would sooner

“trust these emigrants that are pouring in upon our shores” (53). In the long run,

however, adopting a nativist rhetoric that seeks to erase ethnic identities appears to be

“antithetical to the interests of African Americans,” as Jordan notes in his incisive study

of the black Great War press (64). “Oppressed as a group, they needed to agitate for

redress as a group. Set apart because of their racial identity by whites, they could not

renounce their blackness because whites would ignore it” (Jordan 61).

On the whole, however, Fleming shows herself to be quite aware of the “need to

agitate for redress as a group;” and despite its obviously apologist bent, her novel charts

out the growing race consciousness among its leading black characters. For even though

these characters remain to some extent reliant on “the efforts of aristocratic whites

who…because of education and breeding are able overcome their prejudice,” they clearly

display a growing propensity toward self-initiative and self-organization (McLendon

xviii). “Tom Brinley’s escape to the North,” for instance, is financed and organized by a

certain Uncle Abbott, who bears scarce resemblance to Stowe’s passively enduring Uncle

Tom (89). An underground resistance organizer, Uncle Abbott, similar to Reverend 98 Qtd. in Arthur S. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, 1915-1916 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964) 37. Wartime fears of disloyalty lingered on and fueled postwar efforts to curb immigration. On May 5, 1921, Congress passed the first restrictive immigration quota in U.S. history. The quota was designed to maintain the “character” of the United States and mainly targeted recent immigrants from non-European countries. The 1910 census data were used to apportion immigration certificates.

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Wilson in White’s The Fire in the Flint, “poses as merely the preacher” in front of

whites” while “secretly” instructing his people “never to stand in fear of anyone” and

“teaching them…their rights” (86). In addition, unbeknownst to the Vardams and

Tiltons, he has acquired the material means (“money” as well as “tools”) and managed to

set up escape routes that enable him to shuttle out young chain gang prisoners (90, 91).

An entire chapter dedicated to “The Farmer’s Conference” indicates Fleming’s

awareness that the black struggle for freedom eventually hinges upon the achievement of

at least partial economic independence from whites. Before the backdrop of Vardam’s

ceaseless attempts to “break the spirit of the Blacks” through intimidation and violence,

Fleming, similar to Dorothy Canfield Fisher in Home Fires in France, abruptly redirects

her narrative focus to “a little town, about seventy miles from Richmond, called Hollis”

(77). Contrasting the “rickety cabins” of Santa Maria with Hollis’s impeccable

“settlement of cabins, behind which were richly cultivated tracts of land,” Fleming

conveys an idyllic picture of a predominately black farming community in the heart of

the South that thrives on cooperation and prospers on the free exchange of ideas (11, 77).

Blacks and whites have learned to work amiably side-by-side in Hollis, which has made

possible the “rise from poverty” for both (82). Tellingly, one of “the richest” farmers

“for one hundred miles around” is a “Negro” and the novel leaves no doubt that the

township’s prosperity is largely due to the “Negroes[’]…ingenious ways of doing things”

(82). Without the benefit of formal training, the observant black farmer of Hollis has

been so well “taught” by “Dame Nature” that “to-day he ship[s] more cotton of the finer

grade than any other farmer in the South” (81, 83). Observes a white visitor admiringly:

“This settlement…is one of the most progressive in the South. The Negroes are very

energetic, and this section produces larger crops for its size than any other known

settlement” (78).

“Everything look[s] too good to be true,” the same visitor remarks in closing,

thereby hinting that even this most Edenic of black agricultural communities cannot

escape the omnipresent threat of racist violence (83). Though less graphic in her

representation of white brutality than White’s The Fire in the Flint, Fleming does include

a modern-day lynching scene in Hope’s Highway that shows how little progress has been

achieved since slavery. Probably to heighten its effect on white readers, Fleming relates

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the ritualized murder through the eyes of innocent Grace. Prior to visiting Santa Maria,

She had heard and read much of lynchings, but never thought she would

witness such a barbarous scene, enacted by her own people. Yet, here was

a poor fellow,—perhaps innocent of the crime with which he was

charged,—being brutally killed, without being able to utter one single

word in defense of himself. Quickly they strung him up to a tree and,

daubing his body with pitch, struck a fired to him. (39)

Grace is later able to identify one of the killers, but the deed goes unpunished, of course.

At first, the chief aim of the foregoing scene appears to rest on moving white readers

towards the type of sympathetic identification that underlies sentimental abolitionist

novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A few chapters later, however, Fleming makes it

clear that the time of passive endurance has long since past. Careful not to induce too

much fear among her contemporary white readers while concomitantly refreshing her

black readership’s memory of heroic resistance in the past, Fleming transposes the

confrontational response to the war-induced rise in lynchings back in time. Hushed but

never entirely silenced, the black community’s collective memory of heroic resistance

begins to be vocalized again:

It was also whispered that Joe Vardam’s father, a very cruel slaveholder,

was killed by one of his slaves, because he trashed a woman slave until

she became unconscious. The slave in turn trashed him, and when

Vardam’s father drew his pistol to shoot him, the slave wrested it from his

hand and shot the master. (60)

This unnamed heroic slave—conjured up in the oral and written literatures of African

Americans in various incarnations from the mythical Jaloff prince Bras-Coupé to

Douglass’s Madison Washington to Chesnutt’s Josh Green—is as much part of Tom

Brinley’s lineage as the peaceful educator, Vance Enoch, who “died of a broken heart.”

Tom, though destined to follow in the footsteps of the old, acquiescent leader, is prepared

to fight violence with violence in his quest toward freedom. Born at a time of intensified

racial oppression, Tom, unlike the old leader, learns early on that the present generation

of African Americans must seek to manumit itself. Accordingly, when confronted by one

of the prison wardens, Tom musters the “supernatural strength” of a Jaloff prince and

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does not flinch from striking the first blow:

“To hesitate means death,” he thought. So before the guard had really

recognized him, Tom made a dive, similar to a flying tackle in foot-ball,

and threw him. The lad seemed for the moment to be endowed with

supernatural strength. Before the guard could rise or get him fully in his

grasps, Tom dealt him a blow across the head with the tool he had not yet

disposed of, and fled. (91)

As Tom is to learn when Vardam dispatches his henchmen to New York City, in

the face of a well-organized antagonist, whose influence extends into all three branches

of government, individual acts of resistance can lead to momentary success. Yet they

are hardly means to scoring broad-based and long-lasting victories. Fleming’s book

explores two approaches to the problem of devising effective strategies of resistance with

which the black leadership saw itself confronted throughout the better half of the 20th

century. The first one relies on gaining the help and assistance of sympathetic whites

such as Grace Ennery and Frederic Tower. In the world of Fleming’s Hope’s Highway,

this appears to be the preferable and most feasible solution. The second approach, which

gained prominence during the Harlem Renaissance, relies on nurturing a common

consciousness that forges African Americans into a cultural, social, and economic unit,

which possesses the collective voice and power to affect its own liberation.99 Though

less pronounced than the first approach, the contours of this second strategy also begin to

emerge in Hope’s Highway, notably in chapter IX, which complements the

abovementioned chapter on “The Farmer’s Conference.”

Entitled “The Proposal,” chapter IX seems less concerned with Fred Tower’s

marriage proposal to Grace than with providing a brief overview of various political

proposals advanced “in behalf of the Negro” (64). In a clear reference to the NAACP,

Fleming describes the goals of the “Federation for Negro Protection,—a group of

influential Whites and Blacks, formed for the protection of the rights of the black man in

the North and the South,”—and depicts a “F.N.P” conference that addresses the

“absorbing themes” of the day: “The Negro In Office, The Negro in Politics, and The

99 Of course, this was but one of many approaches advocated during the Harlem Renaissance. For a discussion of the literary-political debates during the Harlem Renaissance see George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995) 62-124.

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Negro In The Army” (63, 64). Interestingly enough, instead of recapitulating “the great

addresses” of the “numerous speakers, both white and black” Fleming’s novel focuses on

a folksy speech by old Nanna, “who stood for the highest aims of the Blacks,—with

which race she was identified (64, 63):

I ‘m a cook, an’ I’m not ashamed of my daily occupation, for a good cook

must take pride in her work; yet I would not see all my people laboring in

this field. They must scatter themselves in all avenues of work, in order to

become a well-rounded, well-developed people. I am always anxious to

know what all my people are doing. (64)

In her deceptively simple speech, Nanna not only affirms a strong sense of racial pride

that is rooted in the shared experiences of the common black folk, but also hints nascent

black nationalist efforts to make African Americans conceive of themselves as “a well-

rounded, well-developed people” in their own right. Further underscoring her role as a

maternal wellspring of black self-appreciation, the narrator makes a point of explaining

Nanna’s presence at the F.N.P conference by way of “her interest in the [conjoined]

exhibit” of African American art, “which marked an anniversary of progress for her

people” (64).

To be sure, neither Uncle Abbott’s covert acts of subversion, nor Tom’s display

of heroic resistance, nor Nanna’s affirmations of black pride make Hope’s Highway a

radical political novel. In large measure, the collective fate of black characters appears to

remain dependent upon influential whites, who are somehow moved to support African

Americans claims to full citizenship. Moreover, the specific struggles (either in court or,

more likely, on the streets) that lead up to the sudden overthrow of Santa Maria’s

reactionary regime are conspicuously muted in Hope’s Highway. Except for old Nanna’s

belligerent threat that “some day them ‘white trash’ down there will get all they are

looking for,” the novel neither spells out how “Vardam’s and Tilton’s power” had been

“killed” nor how Santa Maria’s blacks gained both the franchise and the right to higher

education as a result of this (101, 153). Nothing short of a revolution must have taken

place, yet Hope’s Highway wraps itself in silence on these vitally important matters and,

like the historical novels of 19th-century bourgeois humanists, “interpret[s] future

development in terms of a henceforth peaceful evolution on the basis of these

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achievements.”100 “As the years went on,” the narrator relates,

Tom, with Mary his wife, kept up their zealous efforts in the interest of

their people in Santa Maria.

Did he raise Vance Institute to its former glory? Yes, nor was that

glory all. He did more; for never again in the history of Santa Maria do

we hear of the injustice of the Whites to the blacks—never did a Brinley,

or an Abbott, or any other member of the Negro race, know the ignominy

of working in the chain-gang. For Tom Brinley had turned his people’s

steps away from the rough road of ignorance into the happy highway of

hope. (156)

No more struggles, no more lynchings, no more woes—“[e]verything look[s] too good to

be true” indeed, especially since Fleming’s own poem, “Pictures,” remarks critically on

the rapid spread of “Discrimination” in the aftermath of World War I.

Ultimately, however, Fleming’s buoyant vision of the future of African

Americans in Hope’s Highway might perhaps be less starry-eyed and much more in tune

with the radical notions of black separatists than these conciliatory lines indicate.101 For

on the very first page, the novel appears to shed light on its improbable claim that “never

did a Brinley, or an Abbott, or any other member of the Negro race, know the ignominy

of working in the chain-gang” by hinting the possibility that, at he story’s end, Santa

Maria has become an all-black community evocative of Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown

Eatonville. Stressing the propitious “seclusion” of “this heavenly spot,” the novel

commences by recounting the settlement history of Santa Maria and its surrounding “Bay

of Joan” area from a retreat for “wealthy Spaniards” in “the seventeenth-century” to a

“thriving” Anglo-American plantation colony during antebellum times (11). No

100 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah & Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963) 29. 101 Marcus Gravy, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1914), was arguably the most influential and most controversial proponent of black nationalism during the 1910s and 1920s. The far reaching aims of Gravy’s organization, which relocated its headquarter from Jamaica to Harlem in 1916, are reflected in the UNIA’s official motto:

One God! One Aim! One Destiny! Unite all black people into one body, and establish their own country or government, promote black pride, encourage trade and commerce between black communities, build educational institutions for blacks, strengthen independent countries of Africa and assist needy people.

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description of settlement patterns during Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction is

given, but “to-day,” the narrator explains in directing the reader’s attention “across the

bay” to “another ideal place:”

only the ruins of a once most extensive cotton plantation remain. Negro

men and women may be seen working in the fields, which show a few

patches of cultivation. Rickety cabins, scattered thickly here and there,

tell the tale of the passing of the masters of this once thriving island and of

the reign of the Blacks; for investigation will show that no white man lives

there now. (11)

Compared with the other black-lead model township, Hollis, this all-black community

that has sprung up on the ruins of the old plantation is still rather poor and

underdeveloped. The fact that “no white man lives there now,” however, seems to afford

the necessary preconditions to make this “heavenly spot” an “ideal place” for Tom’s

“zealous efforts” to turn his “people’s steps away from the rough road of ignorance into

the happy highway of hope” (11, 156). And given the narrator’s insistence that “never

again in the history of Santa Maria do we hear of the injustice of the Whites to the

blacks,” one may deduce that Tom’s doing “more” than raising the “Vance Institute to its

former glory” refers to the establishment of an African American safe haven in the New

World—the literalization of the mystical “land of the gods”—where, following the

“passing of the masters” and the expulsion of their vile successors, “the reign of the

Blacks” remains forever uncontested (156, 11).

IV

Though cognizant of the discrimination and racial strife around her, Fleming evidently

considered it her principal duty to provide the race with inspiring and elevating images of

a glorious future. Like the speaker in her poem “An Exhortation,” she felt called upon to

Sing them a wondrous story

This burdened race of men,

Paint it with all the glory that

Can come forth from your pen.

Set it a tuneful melody,

As ever man did hear,

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So that a race benighted

Will sing with heartiest cheer. (212)

In the wake of what James Weldon Johnson called the “the bloody summer of

1919,” however, faith was fast diminishing that the singing of “a wondrous story”

represented a suitable response to the postwar epidemic of racial violence.102 Beliefs

in moral suasion and millennialism suffered serious setbacks and were being supplanted

by concerted literary efforts to expose the excesses of white racism unflinchingly so as to

foreground the necessity of communal organization. The resultant “literary portraits” of

the postwar era, in the words of Howard Odum, “reflect[ed] a new realism. A new

frankness and courage to face facts without fear, excitement, or apologies.”103 For while

it was generally perceived that the war had set in motion an auspicious “quickening” of

“racial consciousness,” it became also widely understood that the struggle for basic civil

rights had just begun.104 Thus, it seems only befitting that Walter White’s first foray into

the realm of literature resulted in a novel of political awakening that critically reevaluates

the impact of World War I on “race relations, racial violence, and a nascent black

consciousness in south Georgia.”105

As U.S. war mobilization was gearing up in late 1917, twenty-four-year-old

Walter White found himself at a crucial juncture in his life. Young, well-educated, and

ambitious, White had just become a founding member of the Standard Loan and Realty

Company and his professional career looked very promising indeed. A respected

member of Atlanta’s prosperous black middle class, he had also made a name for himself

by establishing the local NCAAP branch and leading a vigorous publicity campaign to

improve the city’s floundering black school system. This civic engagement had brought

White to the attention of James Weldon Johnson, who was “impressed with the degree of

mental and physical energy he [White] seemed to be able to bring into play and center on

102 As White relates in his autobiography, “The bloody summer of 1919 was climaxed by an explosion of violence in Phillips County, Arkansas…The incident was fated to affect materially the legal rights of both Negro and white Americans. Throughout the nation newspapers published alarming stories of Negroes plotting to massacre whites and take over the government of the state. The vicious conspiracy, so the stories ran, had been nipped in the bud, but it had been necessary to kill a number of ‘black revolutionaries’ to restore law and order” (47). 103 Qtd in Waldron 39. 104 Kenneth Robert Janken, White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP (New York: The New Press, 2003) 14. 105 Janken 104.

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the job at hand.”106 Shortly after Johnson was appointed acting secretary of the NAACP,

White received an unexpected offer to serve as one of the NAACP’s assistant secretaries.

White, obviously flattered, expressed his appreciation, but hesitated to accept the

offer. Financial considerations aside, the war abroad seemed to afford a better

opportunity to prove himself a hero and to advance the race in the eyes of a skeptical

nation. With the benefit of hindsight, White recalls in A Man Called White how he

caught the fever of patriotism and was “induced” to apply for the segregated officer-

training program:

While I debated [Johnson’s] offer, a “flying squadron” of intensely

patriotic young Negroes came to Atlanta during the course of a Southern

tour to induce Negroes to volunteer for the Negro officers’ training camp

which the War Department under pressure was planning to open at Fort

Des Moines, Iowa. For the first time in history, the city of Atlanta

permitted Negroes to use the city’s auditorium for a meeting to whip a

patriotism. Some of us were invited to sit on the platform. When an

eloquent appeal for volunteers was made, I found myself spring to my feet

as one of the first to volunteer. (36)

To his great consternation, he was rejected. In White’s own account, his dismissal was

the result of “wild rumors” and “fantastic stories” that “German agents” were secretly

inciting blacks to “rise up and massacre white people in their beds…Obviously, light-

skinned Negroes [such as himself] who could easily pass a white would be the kind the

Kaiser would use!” (36). These tales—“born,” as White writes, “of guilty conscience no

doubt”—did circulate, but they probably reveal more about white mass psychoses than

about the army’s actual recruitment practices. Given White’s prominent profile as a

black community activist, it seems more likely that the local draft board simply feared

him to be a “trouble maker.”

In any event, having been denied the chance of becoming a soldier in his

country’s war for democracy in Europe, White accepted the offered NAACP position and

immediately channeled his considerable energies into becoming a warrior for social

justice at home. Dispatched by Johnson to investigate lynchings throughout the South,

106 Qtd. in Janken 27.

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White made good use of his fair skin, gathering valuable intelligence during various

undercover operations, which brought him national prominence. So legendary became

White’s exploits that they even became the stuff of fiction.107 By 1920, excerpts of the

reports White filed began appearing in mainstream papers such as the New York Evening

Post, attracting the attention of no lesser arbiter of public opinion than H.L. Mencken.

As White not only became an ardent champion of the “Negro Renaissance,” but also felt

stirrings of literary aspiration in his own veins, it was Mencken who encouraged him to

work his first-hand experience on the “frontlines” into a novel “about Negro life as it

really exists.”108 Once he had decided to try is hand at fiction, White set to work with his

customary single-mindedness of purpose: “I wrote feverishly and incessantly for twelve

days and parts of twelve nights, stopping only when complete fatigue made it physically

and mentally impossible to write another word. On the twelfth day the novel was

finished and I dropped on a near-by couch and slept for hours” (A Man 66). It took many

more month of revising and two years of haggling with publishing houses, before The

Fire and the Flint was finally published by Alfred Knopf in 1924.109

The novel’s plot bears eye-catching resemblance with T.S. Stribling’s Birthright

(1922), which depicts the abortive attempts of a Harvard-trained educator to establish a

second Tuskegee in his native Tennessee.110 But the work’s closest literary progenitor is

undoubtedly Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. “In fact,” notes Lee J. Green,

“Fire can be read as a revision of Marrow that updates it to include the context of post-

World War I race relations.”111 Centered on the experiences of two seasoned black

protagonists—one a veteran of World War I, the other a veteran in the ongoing race

war—The Fire in the Flint explores the feasibility of both ameliorant and militant actions

blacks might adopt to achieve social reform in the postwar South. Kenneth Harper, a

decorated war hero and Penn State medical school graduate, who returns to his Georgia

hometown in order to build a hospital that would serve the black community of Central

107 The light-skinned character of Vera Manning, who infiltrates the ranks of the KKK in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s anti-lynching novel There is Confusion (1924), is a female version of the young Walter White. Remarks Claude McKay in a Long Way Home: “Miss Fauset has written many novels about the people of her circle” (124). 108 Qtd. in Janken 95. 109 On the complicated publishing history of The Fire in the Flint, see Waldron 40-78. 110 White had reviewed Birthright for H.L. Mencken. 111 Green 163.

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City, represents the former approach.112 A “natural pacifist” and staunch admirer of

Booker T. Washington, Kenneth Harper is at first unaffected by the spirit of “revolt

among Negro ex-service men” (43). Reasoning that it is more prudent to attend “to his

own individual problems” and to leave “the agitation for the betterment of things in

general” to others, Kenneth Harper arranges himself with the town’s white leadership and

establishes a flourishing medical practice (47).

The militant approach is represented by Kenneth’s uneducated brother, Bob

Harper, a “natural rebel” in the vein of Chesnutt’s Josh Green for whom “revolt” is a

“creed” (24). Unlike his older brother, who returned from France instilled with

democratic idealism, Bob has experienced firsthand how the war, far from eliciting

gratitude at home, has intensified white fears and racial hatred. To the quick-tempered

Bob, any compromise with a system designed to oppress and exploit blacks is impossible.

Hence, when news of his sister’s brutal rape reaches him, Bob never thinks twice before

gunning down her two white assailants. Pursued by an angry posse, Bob only avoids the

lynching ritual by turning the gun on himself. Under the “howling and shouting” of the

cheated white mob, Bob’s corpse is subsequently dismembered and burned on the “public

square” (237).

Yet, in the end it is not so much the brothers’ irreconcilable faith in the respective

tenets of rebelliousness and gradual reform as Bob’s unbridled temperament and

Kenneth’s good-natured naiveté that spell personal doom. For as the story unfolds, it

becomes clear that both Bob and Kenneth develop rather effective strategies in their fight

for social change. Bob, for instance, attaches himself to a band of young men who

protect black farmers against white vigilante groups, while Kenneth, under the influence

of his energetic fiancée, Jane, spearheads efforts to organize a black sharecroppers’

union. In a sense, then, Bob’s and Kenneth’s community-oriented activities represent

nothing more and nothing less than updated versions of Uncle Abbott’s endeavors to

undermine the chain gang system and the efforts of the residents of Hollis to establish a

cooperative farming community.

In contrast to Hope’s Highway, however, The Fire in the Flint underscores that

112 According to White, the character of Kenneth Harper is based on one of his friends, a Harvard-trained physician, whose attempt to establish a practice in Georgia ended in failure (Suggs 171).

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blacks cannot count on the goodwill and assistance of sympathetic whites. Nor can they

hope to find redress in the white-dominated court of law. These, it appears, are two of

the lessons of the specious “War for Democracy” that Kenneth Harper is too slow to

learn. For even though Kenneth encounters enlightened characters such as Judge

Stevenson, who recognize that Southern society “is brutal and tricky and deceitful…in

trying to keep the nigras down,” he never quite understands that white Southern liberals

are merely paying lip-service to the aim of “Negro advancement” (163). Not moral but

economic reasons are behind the white elite’s unwillingness to change the system, the

novel stresses. “It all goes back to the same root,” Judge Stevenson admits frankly, “—

self-interest—how much is it going to cost me?” (160). Highlighting the degeneration of

the old aristocratic South, which had allowed “the rise of poor whites,” Judge Stevenson

has resigned himself to the fact that “[t]his here system of lynching and covering up their

lynching with lying has grown so big that any man who tries to tackle it is beat befo’ he

starts” (161). Hopes of enlisting “the support of every white man in the country who

stands for something” are therefore at best premature and at worst self-destructive, as

Kenneth is to find out tragically (158).

His unsuccessful attempt to interest a group of white Atlanta businessmen in

supporting the black sharecroppers’ cooperation may have served Kenneth as a warning

to stir clear of whites. But humanitarian considerations subsequently compel Kenneth to

make an ill-advised house call that puts himself in the position of being alone with two

white women. As might be expected, this situation provides his growing number of

white antagonists with a pretext to lynch him. Although Central City’s white liberal elite

has been aware that Kenneth had become the target of KKK intimidations, no measures

are taken to protect him. Instead, Dr. Scott had merely counseled Kenneth to give up his

“foolish fight” and admonished him: “Your race’s greatest asset…has been its wonderful

gentleness under oppression. You must continue to be sweet-tempered and patient—”

(255). Conjuring up the old stereotype of the black rapist, the final newspaper clipping

quells all hopes for racial conciliation by construing “Doc Harpers” nighttime call as a

“criminal assault on a white women, the wife of a prominent citizen of this city” (300).

To write “about Negro life as it really exits” in White’s view meant to place “the

racial and interracial conflict” at the heart of the narrative. “If one is going to write

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realistically about the Negro or Negro characters,” White argues “most passionately” in

the aforecited letter to Webster,

he cannot leave out this phase of the Negro’s life in America for no Negro,

intelligent or non-intelligent, illiterate or educated, rich or poor, ever

passes a day that, directly or indirectly, this thing called the race problem

creeps into his life. Thus I feel sure that no writer who is honest with

himself can ever ignore so important a factor as this and, if he is honest

about it, he is going to present it exactly as his characters would see the

situation.113

Accordingly, The Fire in the Flint is less focused on sketching out the precise methods by

which social change may be achieved—White, it seems, sees some promise in both the

militant and the reformist approach—than on depicting the inevitability with which the

demonstratively uninvolved Kenneth Harper is drawn into “the racial and interracial

conflict.” What Kenneth as the representative of the educated black middle class has to

learn paradigmatically is that his very race position precludes him from clinging to the

illusionary bourgeois ideal of conflict-free existence. Thus, the inescapable fact that he

belongs to an oppressed group of people “predestines him for the particular…social-

historical collision” that, according to Lukács, constitutes the “drama” within historical

romances (121).114

Having had the privilege of receiving a Northern education at a white university,

Kenneth’s initial naiveté concerning the state of racial affairs is largely the result of

willful forgetfulness. As Bob is quick to point out when Kenneth suggests gullibly that

the “coloured farmers” should seek redress in court: “That shows you’ve forgotten all

about things in the South” (29). Wanting to believe that he, for one, has single-handedly

surmounted the confines of race prejudice, Kenneth fails to see that “the civilization that

[had] permitted war—even made it necessary” is still embroiled in a bitter race war at

home (19). Characteristically, although periodically haunted by “fitful memories” of the

battles at “the Meuse, the Argonne, then Metz,” Kenneth manages to relegate “that awful

113 Qtd. in Waldron 37. 114 Lukács illuminates this point with reference to Friedrich Hebbel’s historical drama Judith (1848), wherein the tragic heroine, upon “discovering” her Jewishness, sacrifices herself in order to liberate her enslaved people.

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experience…to the background of his mind” (42, 19). Looking back, he instead

remembers the relative freedoms and opportunities that the “advantageous” war years had

afforded him (18). Similar to Fleming’s Tom Brinely, White’s Kenneth Harper revels in

the “pleasant” memory of his medical training at Penn State, where he mingled freely

with whites and made fast friends with Bill Van Fleet, whose “old Pennsylvania Dutch

was “glad to welcome a Negro into their home” (16). “I wasn’t bad at all to think of the

things he had gone through—now that they were over,” the narrator relates Kenneth

thoughts. “Especially the army. Out of Bellevue one week when the chance came to go

to the Negro officer’s training-camp at Des Moines. First lieutenant’s bars in the medical

corps” (18-19). Retrospectively, Kenneth idealizes the “exciting ride across” to Europe,

his friendly relations with the French, and the “blessed six month at the Sorbonne”

University in Paris (19).

Kenneth returns from Europe believing that race prejudice has to be lived down,

not talked down and so he tries to set a living example by opening a medical practice in

his native Central City, Georgia. To those “who were always howling about rights,”

Kenneth responds in best Washingtonian fashion: “Get a trade or profession. Get a

home. Get some property. Get a bank account. Do something! Be somebody! And

then, when enough Negroes had reached that stage, the ballot and all the other things now

denied them would come” (17). Bob, the homefront veteran, already knows better than

to cling to wartime hopes that “white folks” would come “to see that the Negro was

deserving of those rights and privileges and would freely, gladly give them to him

without his asking for them” (18). Far from having improved conditions, the war had

actually worsened race relations in the South, Bob stresses. “But, Ken,” he protests, “the

way things were…are a lot different from the way they are now. Just yesterday Old Man

Mygatt down to the bank got mad and told me I was an ‘impudent young nigger that

needed to be taught my place’ because I called his hand on a note he claimed papa owed

the bank” (26).

It does not take long before Kenneth, too, is inexorably sucked into the swirling

vortex of racial conflict. Although he tries hard to keep a low profile, his Northern

education, worldly demeanor, and professional skills make him an instant target of white

resentment. “Hope you ain’t got none of them No’then ideas ‘bout social equality while

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you was up there,” his white colleague Dr. Bennett warns Kenneth during a “courtesy”

call. “These niggers who went over to France and ran around with them Frenchwomen

been causin’ a lot of trouble ‘round here, kickin’ up a rumpus, and talkin’ ‘bout votin’

and ridin’ in the same car with white folks” (53). Kenneth dismisses Bennett’s talk, but

cannot help reflecting that “many phases of his life that…before his larger experience in

the North and France had passed by him unnoticed, he now had brought to his

attention…his was going to be a difficult course to pursue” (65).

Fathoming his own situation “more clearly,” Kenneth begins to draw upon his

“larger experience in the North and France” in appraising the war-like conditions of

African American existence (65). So far, Kenneth had successfully managed to privatize

his war experience and to shut his eyes to the “larger” historical impact of World War I

on black life in America. As he reimmerses himself in the social realities of a racially

stratified society, however, Kenneth is reawakened to the unifying “spirit and

determination” of “a race oppressed,” who had embraced “the fight for democracy in

France” so as to “get some of that same democracy” not just “for themselves,” but “all

others who were classed as Negroes” (43-44). Professional visits to the “no-man’s land”

of “Factoryville,” where lower class blacks are made to live and toil under the most

squalid conditions, raise his awareness of the mechanisms of socioeconomic oppression

and, more importantly, lead him to abandon his Enlightenment gospel of individualistic

self-reliance (125). A communal hero against his will, Kenneth reluctantly learns to

accept the demands imposed upon the individual by an oppressed people through

conversations with the community activist Reverend Wilson and his highly race

conscious fiancé, Jane.

An emancipated woman with a strong sense of social responsibility, Jane is not

afraid to hurt Kenneth’s “masculine vanity” (141). Thus, she not only tells Kenneth to

“be proud of [his] race,” but also demands that he abandons his aloofness from “the race

problem” (139). “Why, Kenneth,” she rebukes her husband-to-be, “you’ve had it mighty

soft—just think of the thousands of coloured boys all over the South who are too poor to

get even a high-school training…It’s men with your brains and education that have got to

take the leadership” (140). Moreover, in reminding him that “co-operative societies” had

been “the backbone of the movement to get rid of the Czar in Russia,” Jane shows

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Kenneth “the practical ways” to “help Tracy and Tucker and all the rest of the farmers

who’re being robbed of all they earn every year” (140-141).

With Jane’s able assistance, Kenneth begins to draw up a plan for the

establishment of the “National Negro Farmers’ Co-operative and Protective League”

(175). Setbacks such as Judge Stephenson’s refusal to support the project as well as the

appearance of a threatening note, signed “KKK,” merely increase Kenneth’s newfound

dedication to challenge the powers that be. Earlier, while lackadaisically attending a

clandestine sharecroppers’ meeting, “Kenneth had listened in amazement to the story of

exploitation, crudely told, yet with a simplicity that was convincing and eloquent” (116).

Now, contemplating “practical ways” to overcome this deeply entrenched system of

exploitation, Kenneth comes to realize that his erstwhile “hopes of peace through

compromise” had been “illusionary” (169). As he works out a system to raise capital

through “initiation fees” and “monthly dues,” Kenneth fully anticipates a clash with the

white landholders (177). Undeterred, though, a fired-up Kenneth promotes his plan in a

rousing speech before a gathering of sharecroppers at Reverend Wilson’s “little wooden

church” (177). In closing, Kenneth first employs the familiar technique of call-and-

response to remind his listeners that black wartime loyalty has remained unrequited:

You husbands and sons and brothers, three years ago were called on to

fight for liberty and justice and democracy! Are you getting it? He was

answered by a rousing ‘No!’

And then, adapting the socialist rhetoric of the day, he urges the assembly to unite in the

historical struggle for freedom:

Single-handed you can do nothing! Organized, you can strike a blow for

freedom, not only for yourselves but for countless generations of coloured

children yet unborn! No race in all history has ever had its liberties and

rights handed to them—such rights can come only when men are willing

to struggle and sacrifice and work and die, if need be, to obtain them! I

call on you here to-night to join in this movement which shall in time

strike from our hands and feet the shackles which bind them, that we may

move on as a race together to that greater freedom which have so long

desired and which so long has been denied us! (179)

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White, to be sure, never considered himself to be influenced by Marxist thought. In fact,

later in life he became a staunch anticommunist and publicly quarreled with leftist

writers such as Richard Wright. Yet, his depiction of black life in The Fire in the Flint as

a series of inescapable struggles that not only foster a politicizing race consciousness

among the oppressed, but also raise the specter of revolt, reveal a historical materialist

point of view. Similar to Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion, not abstract notions

of liberty and freedom, but the shared experience of physical suffering compels blacks to

unite and to embrace strategies of communal action.

Kenneth’s scheme to overcome the system of credit sales through cooperative

buying power also entail provisions for a legal defense fund. Still imbued with a basic

trust in the law, he plans to battle the detractors of the farmers’ association in court,

making Central City a judicial test case. Immediately following his triumphant speech at

the cooperation’s inaugural meeting, however, Kenneth is rudely awakened to the

realities of white lawlessness. Driving home through “the coloured section” of town,

Kenneth stumbles over a dazed woman, who had just been tarred and feathered by the

KKK, “because she ‘talked too much’ about the brutal, cold-blooded murder of her

husband” (188). Outraged, Kenneth’s first impulse is to report the incident to the

authorities. But when it turns out that “Sheriff Parker…and two or three other prominent

white people here” were among the mob, he concedes to himself that “there was nothing

to be done towards the punishment of the men who had so brutally beaten Nancy Ware”

(192-93).

“Much as he chafe[s]…at his own impotence in this situation,” Kenneth advises

his friends and associates to stay calm, “until the co-operative societies were well under

way and actively functioning” (194). Beneath the surface, though, the beating incident

not only brings the black community closer together, but also heightens the prospect of a

violent uprising. “Within a few hours the old esprit cordial between white and black had

been wiped out,” White’s narrator observes forebodingly . “[F]eeling that there was no

help to be expected from the law,” the blacks of Central City procure “fire-arms” and,

echoing the defiant words of McKay’s postwar poem, begin “to talk among themselves of

‘dying fighting’ if forced to the limit” (195). Among those who resolve to die “‘fighting’

if forced to the limit” is Kenneth’s brother Bob, whom the novel likens to “Garibaldi”

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and “Joan of Arc”—two fabled military leaders of national independence movements

(193). Exhibiting a somewhat conflicted belief in both legal and illegal means to attain

justice, Bob’s decision to apply for law school at Harvard does not prevent him in the

interim from joining a group of radical young men, who have pledged to meet KKK

violence head-on.

Meanwhile, Kenneth’s labors on behalf of the N. N. F. C. P. L. bear fruits. “News

of the new society that was going to end the unsatisfactory relations share-croppers had

with their landlords spread rapidly throughout the surrounding counties” and so, after

only few months of campaigning, the “Co-operative and Protective League” has “a

membership of more than twelve hundred” (195). All around the county, the “coloured

farmers” begin to regard the “inspired” and indefatigable Kenneth “as a new Moses to

lead them into the promised land of economic independence” (196). Kenneth, who had

feared that “petty politics and selfishness” might endanger the project, is elated (196)

And because his “mind [is] too full of other events that loomed on the horizon,” he fails

to discern that his unsolicited role as the “new Moses” has not only made himself, but his

whole family prime targets of the town’s reactionary forces (224). On that other horizon,

the storm that will spell personal doom is brooding. Driven by professional envy, Dr.

Williams, the town’s original black physician, becomes the novel’s Judas Iscariot figure,

when he informs the KKK of Kenneth’s prominent part in organizing the black

sharecroppers’ cooperation. Bent on preventing “the damn niggers” from organizing, the

Klan gets “busy devising schemes” that would allow for the disposal of both Kenneth, the

head, and Bob, the arm of the cooperative society (224).

While Kenneth is away in Atlanta, where his endeavors to garner monetary and

legal assistance from the white liberal establishment fall on sympathetic yet unwilling

ears, one of the Harper sisters is brutally raped by two white village thugs. Aside from

reversing white images of the brutish black rapist, this scene serves as the trigger that

hurls the plot toward personal tragedy. Predictably, the impulsive Bob avenges his

sister’s rape by killing her assailants, only to become the latest victim of white lynch

“justice.” More significantly, though, Mamie’s rape and Bob’s death finally rouse in

Kenneth the righteous indignation and “deep-rooted” spirit of “revolt” with which World

War I had instilled his more perceptive fellow “Negro ex-servicemen” all along (43).

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Earlier, contemplating the prospect for racial conciliation, Kenneth could still muse that a

disastrous event such as an external war might result in a colorblind society:

Maybe in time the race problem would be solved just like that…when

some great event would wipe away artificial lines…as in France…He

thought of the terrible days and nights in the Argonne….He remembered

the night he had seen a wounded black soldier and a wounded white

Southern one, drink from the same canteen…They didn’t think about

colour in those times…. (226)

Now, however, having experienced the unmitigated viciousness of racial violence in

postwar America first hand, Kenneth, like Du Bois, comes to the sobering conclusion that

warfare against an external enemy merely tends to intensify and brutalize internal

oppression at home.115 Kenneth, to adapt the old adage, realizes that he has escaped from

the frying-pan of World War I, only to fall into the blazing fire of America’s ongoing

race war. Animated by “fierce hatred” that stems from the excruciating pain of personal

loss, Kenneth renounces his accommodationist approach, declares that “Bob had been

right” because “[he] fought and died like a man,” and vows to thenceforth engage in open

warfare against the tormenters of his race. “I’m going to kill every damned ‘Cracker’ I

find,” he announces, justifying his homicidal designs with a sweeping diatribe against the

treachery of Western society in general and white America in particular:

‘Superior race!’ ‘Preservers of civilization!’ ‘Superior,’ indeed! They

called Africans inferior! They, with smirking hypocrisy, reviled these

Turks! They went to war against the ‘Huns’ because of Belgium! None

of these had ever done a thing so bestial as these ‘preservers of

civilization’ in Georgia! Civilization! Hell! The damned hypocrites!

The liars! The fiends! ‘White civilization’! Paugh! Black and brown and

yellow hands had built it! The white fed like carrion on the rotting flesh

115 Echoing earlier warnings about the detrimental impact of slavery on American culture, in a letter to Eugene Saxton, an associate editor with Doran and Company, White speculates on “the ultimate effect” that the prolonged victimization of “the Negro” has on “white America and civilization”: “[I]t is relatively unimportant what happens to eleven million Negroes in America if there were not an inevitable reaction on those who either oppress them or acquiesce in that oppression by their silence. The brutalization of the dominant whites of the South has come about through their exploitation and inhumane treatment of the Negro” (qtd. in Waldron 50).

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of darker peoples! And called their toil their own! And burned those on

whose bodies their vile civilization was built! (271)

In this moment of great personal anguish, Kenneth’s painful recognition of having

allowed himself to be hoodwinked into fighting for a “vile civilization” that is bent on

keeping him and his kind in a permanent state bondage culminates in a sense of self-

destructive fatalism. “To hell with everything!” he exclaims. “What was life worth

anyway? Why not end it all in one glorious orgy of killing?” (271-72). As his rage

slowly abates, however, feelings of disenchantment and resultant desires for blind

revenge give way to a more reflective “spirit of rebelliousness.” In thinking of the pain

and suffering experienced not only by his own family, but by countless black families

past and present, Kenneth decides that it “take[s] more courage to live” and to brave the

daily struggle than “to exact some kind of revenge” (273). “They did need him now!

More than ever before,” he thinks, cheering himself on (273).

Kenneth’s resolve to suppress the urge for personal revenge so as to continue his

work on behalf of the farmers’ cooperation signifies that he has matured into a true leader

of his people. Ironically, though, it is the same humanitarian impulse to serve others,

coupled with his inextinguishable naiveté of the idealist, that render Kenneth easy prey

for the Klan. Called upon to perform a life-saving emergency operation on the daughter

of a prominent white family, the still grieving Kenneth at first resists on principle, but,

like Dr. Miller in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, eventually relents due to moral

scruples. The house call, despite the fact that its medical urgency is real enough, turns

out to be trap. At last alerted by the indebted Mrs. Ewing that the Klan is after him,

Kenneth dismisses her belated concerns for his safety as “tommyrot” (295). Predictably,

as the characteristically unconcerned Kenneth leaves Mrs. Ewing’s house, he is suddenly

ambushed, brutally beaten, and—after putting up a valiant fight—eventually shot to death

by a gang of white-robed men.

Most recent critics have read The Fire in the Flint as ending “pessimistically” in

utter defeat. “White’s novel ends with no solution for any of the black characters or the

black community,” assesses Jon-Christian Suggs. “The novel’s closure suggests that in

the South’s racial civil war blacks do not have any chance of winning major battles or the

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war,” corroborates Lee J. Green.116 Interestingly enough, the majority of sympathetic

contemporaneous readers—among them the future Nobel Prize Laureate Sinclair

Lewis—as well as the author himself have interpreted The Fire in the Flint in a much

more hopeful light.117 James B. Morris of the Bystander, for example, concluded that the

novel not only “show[s] the American people the necessity of going into this problem at

the root,” but also “is destined to wake up the slumbering Negroes in the north.”118 And

along similar lines, White insisted that “while” The Fire in the Flint “ends in personal

tragedy and death for the hero, one senses that the spirit of revolt against bigotry which

he symbolizes will be accelerated rather than diminished by his death” (A Man 67-68).

White’s reading of Kenneth’s death as a personal tragedy as well as Morris’s emphasis

on the dual themes of “conflict” and “racial awakening” point to the novel’s larger socio-

historical ambitions, which present-day critics—accustomed to assessing World War I

literature in terms of the white modernist trope of disillusionment—tend to overlook. For

viewed within the context of 1920s African American politics, The Fire in the Flint

appears to be less concerned with depicting the tragic fate of exceptional individuals or

with proposing ready-made solutions to the so-called “race problem” than with sketching

out the broader historical conditions that lead to a heightening of race consciousness and

political awareness among the black populace at large. Kenneth perishes, yet—true to

the injunction of McKay’s If We Must Die—he dies a heroic death so that his hard-won

“New Negro” spirit of defiance as well as the legacy of his community activism survives

intact. Unlike the war fought in distant Europe, the ongoing internal struggle against

racism and bigotry constitutes a righteous war, White stresses, wherein “words such as

glory, honor, courage, and hallow” sound neither “abstract” nor “obscene.”119 Thus, as it

became patently obvious that America’s war for democracy had resulted in less, not more

democracy at home, other courageous leaders are destined to pick up the honorable fight

for black self-emancipation. It is Kenneth himself who predicts as much shortly before

his death: “But if something should happen—well, if can feel I’ve perhaps pointed a way

116 Suggs 180; Green 165. 117 On the critical reception of The Fire in the Flint, see John Earl Bassett, Harlem in Review: Critical Reactions to Black American Writers, 1917-1939 (Selinsgrove : Susquehanna University Press, 1992) 50-52. 118 Qtd. in Waldron 70. 119 Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms 191.

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out for my people, I can die happy…At any rate, killing or running me away wouldn’t

kill the spirit of revolt these coloured people have—it might stir it even higher” (258).

V

Amidst the postwar climate of mounting racial antagonism, Fleming’s romantic vision of

“some great approaching dawn” that will bury “far beneath the sod / Grim prejudice and

all lynch laws” seemed more distant than ever (217). Nevertheless, having proven that

blacks were indispensable in the nation’s late war effort, the general mood within the

African American community remained one of optimism. Attitudes, if not material

conditions, were rapidly changing and for a while it looked as though the infectious

“spirit of revolt”—which the heroic figure of the black veteran came to embody—might

translate into more than what novelist George Washington Lee saw as “the spiritual

emancipation of [the] race.”120 At least until the mid-1920s, literary images of decorated

World War veterans turned community activists, who “point[] a way out for [their]

people,” seemed to inspire direct political action. Between 1918 and 1923, invigorated

social activist such as A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of the radical

Messenger, “formed some half-dozen [all-black] labor organizations,” which, during their

brief heyday, were instrumental in coordinating several boycotts of white-owned

businesses that refused to hire African Americans.121 And even in the South, where the

odds were staked heavily against black self-organization, a determined group of Arkansas

sharecroppers established the short-lived “Progressive Farmers and Household Union of

America.”122 Meanwhile, the NAACP flexed its muscles on both the legislative and the

legal fronts. In 1919, to awaken the national conscience, the Association published an

exhaustive review of lynching records entitled, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United

States. This report paved the way for the introduction of the so-called “Dyer Bill” in

1922, which proposed making lynching a federal crime. The bill sailed through the

House, but was eventually filibustered by a minority of southern Democrats in the

Senate. On a number of minor cases involving voting rights, jury selection, and free

movement for blacks, the Supreme Court sided with the NAACP’s legal counselors, but

120 George Lee Washington, River George (New York: McCauley, 1937) 219. 121 Michael L. Levine, African Americans and Civil Rights: From 1619 to the Present Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1996) 153. 122 Levine 147.

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here, too, no decisive victory was scored.123 Still, prior to the Great War even these small

victories and partial advances would have been unthinkable.

Of course, given the continuation of economic exploitation and legal oppression,

which was to be further exacerbated with the onset of the Great Depression, much of “the

spirit of revolt” that had sprung from the black experience of World War I was eventually

redirected onto the cultural plane, where it found expression in an unprecedented

flowering of the black artistic impulse. “Barred from most meaningful direct political

activity,” Ann Douglas observes, the New Negro intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance

devised a “strategy of self-empowerment through cultural ascendancy rather than direct

economic or political protest.”124 By the mid-1920s, Locke’s notions that black cultural

achievement in the arts would uplift the race—redefining the meaning of blackness—and

that the self-assertive focus on the Negro was essential to the national project of creating

an “authentic” American identity reverberated throughout the artistic and intellectual

scene of Harlem. In the eyes of influential Harlem luminaries such as Locke and

Johnson, the “central problem of race was” neither economical nor political, but “one of

attitude and reputation.”125 As Johnson asserts in his preface to The Book of

American Negro Poetry (1921):

The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national

mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing

will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a

demonstration of intellectual parity of the Negro through the production of

literature and art.126

In light of this new cultural-political emphasis on the production of “great” literature and

art that transcends the confines of mere “race fiction” and “race journalism,” it is not

surprising that the literary engagement with World War I and its immediate aftermath

123 Ibid 155. In 1917, the Court declared as unconstitutional a Louisville ordinance that required blacks to live in certain sections of the city, thus challenging residential segregation through city ordinances. Court decision to follow, initiated through NAACP lawsuits, nullified the restrictive covenants - a clause in real estate deeds that pledged a white buyer never to sell the property to blacks. And in 1923, the court declared that exclusion of blacks from a jury was inconsistent with the right to a fair trial. 124 Douglas 324, 8. 125 Nathan Irvin Huggins, Revelations: American History, American Myths (New York: Oxford UP, 1995) 161. 126 Nathan I. Huggins, ed., Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford UP, 1976) 281.

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began to change. Although what Locke called somewhat euphemistically the

“galvanizing shocks and reactions of the last few years” remained central to many

African American novels of the Harlem era, outward manifestations of the ongoing race

war such as lynchings, economic exploitation, and segregation were dealt with more

indirectly and subtly.127 Put another way, the specific “shocks” of the war and postwar

periods began to be abstracted and generalized. Discarding both the uplifting impulse of

Fleming’s sweeping historical romance and the overtly propagandistic strain of White’s

analytical social history, black modernist works such as McKay’s Home to Harlem tend

to foreground the internal, mental rather than the external, physical quest for black self-

determination. In Fleming’s and White’s novels, the inhospitable “No Man’s Land” of

World War I is mapped squarely onto the geographic and social landscape of a racist

South. It is here where the socially responsible protagonist must pick up the physical

fight for survival. In Home to Harlem or Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), by contrast,

“No (Wo)Man’s Land” is virtually everywhere (London, Harlem, Chicago, Texas,

Copenhagen, Alabama) and the struggle for survival becomes primarily a psychological

quest. In McKay’s Home to Harlem the heroic war veteran of Fleming’s Hopes Highway

and White’s The Fire in the Flint is no longer depicted as a chief agent of broad social

change, but is transformed into a private person, fighting personal battles and preserving

his personal integrity. Assaulted during a strike of the black Longshoremen, Jake Brown,

like Bob Harper, does not hesitate “to hit back.” But unlike Kenneth or Tom Brinley,

Jake is not destined to become a social activist, much less a leader of his race. When he

realizes that even Harlem affords no refuge from external as well as internal racial strife,

Jake simply moves onward to Chicago, where, no doubt, more of the same will await

him.

Victor Daly’s Not Only War (1932) further exemplifies this shift in black World

War One representations from works of social uplift and protest to works of

psychological realism.128 Drawing a fine distinction between physical and psychological

torture, Daly insists in his foreword that white America’s aversion toward war is limited 127 Locke viii. 128 Daly’s novel has meanwhile sunk into oblivion. When it first appeared, though, it received accolades from no lesser critic that Alan Locke. “It is certainly to be marveled,” he wrote, “that with all of the fiction of the war, the paradoxical story of the American Negro fighting a spiritual battle within a physical battle has just now been attempted” (qtd. in Sterling A. Brown 218.)

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to its corporeal terror. “The Hell Sherman knew,” Daly writes, “was a physical one—of

rapine, destruction and death.” What Not Only War seeks to illuminate through its

depiction of the psychosexual struggle between a black and a white soldier is “[t]his

other” hell of internalized racism that “is a purgatory for the mind, for the spirit, for the

soul of men”129 Consequently, Daly’s novel shows how racism victimizes not only

blacks, but whites as well and hints that the wartime shock of indiscriminate physical

destruction may lead to racial conciliation. White’s Kenneth Harper, it might be

remembered, harbors similar hopes that “some great event would wipe away artificial

lines,” until his first-hand experience of unabated racial oppression in the South

convinces him that “the race problem” is at bottom a material struggle.

� McKay’s and Daly’s increasingly sophisticated accounts of the war veteran’s

personal quest toward “spiritual emancipation,” it seems, had been purchased at the

expense of the social commitment and political activism that lie at the heart of Fleming’s

and White’s more pedestrian World War I novels. Yet, as the self-centered spirit of the

“Jazz Age” began to crack under the hardships of the Great Depression, the heroic figure

of the politicized black soldier who “returns fighting” on behalf of his people made a

comeback. Horace Pippin’s painting End of the War: Starting Home (1933) portrays a

veteran who has obviously suffered greatly, but whose battle-hardened countenance

reveals a grim determination to continue fighting on the homefront. George Washington

Lee’s 1937 novel, River George, depicts a returning soldier, Lieutenant Aaron George,

who is appalled by the self-indulgent hedonism of a Harlem that is utterly ignorant of

leaders such as “Walter White and DuBois” who are “doing something for the Negro

race.”130 Disillusioned not so much by the betrayal of World War I as by the lack of

social conscientiousness among Northern blacks, Aaron, like Kenneth Harper, resolves to

put his college education into the service of the race, and embarks on a messianic mission

to make his Southern home safe for democracy. He, too, becomes the victim of a vicious

lynching before he can “free his people,” but Aaron’s heroic sacrifice helps to unite the

hitherto divided and defenseless black community of Beaver Dam Plantation.131

Last but not least, while Richard Wright does not overtly thematize World War I

129 Victor Daly, Not Only War (College Park, MD: McGrath, 1969) 7. 130 Lee 213. 131 Ibid 235.

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in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), his compilation of interconnected stories traces both the

racial and the political awakening of the black postwar subject in quite the same fashion

as River George, Fire and the Flint, and to a smaller degree, Hopes Highway. In “Down

by the Riverside,” Mann, analogous to Aaron, Kenneth and Tom, is inadvertently and

inescapably drawn into a number confrontations with the white community. “Long Black

Song” posits these inevitable conflicts as part and parcel of the longstanding history of

racial exploitation, when an exasperated Silas declares: “The white folks ain never

gimme a chance! They ain never give no black man a chance! There ain nothin in yo

whole life yuh kin keep from em! They take yo lan! They take yo freedom! They take yo

women! N then they take yo life!”132 In “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning

Star,” Wright, similar to White and Lee, explores the economic underpinning of racism

and stresses the need for both black self-organization and communal self-defense. In the

“Fire and Cloud,” Reverend Taylor, like Kenneth Harper, must realize that attempts to

cooperate with the town’s white power brokers only preserve the status quo and thus he

encourages his black congregation to organize a strike. Having become a true leader of

his people, Taylor exclaims: “Gawds wid the people! N the peoples gotta be real as Gawd

t us! We cant hep ourselves er the people when wes erlone...All the will, all the strength,

all the power, all the numbahs is in the people!”133 Finally, in “Bright and Morning Star”

Wright adapts the motive of personal sacrifice in the communal quest for liberty when

Johnny-Boy’s mother, Sue, kills the informant Booker. This act of violence seals her

personal fate. Yet, Sue’s heroic sacrifice not only saves Johnny-Boy’s life, but also

protects the local communist chapter, whose “meager beginnings” she has come to regard

as “another resurrection.”134

132 Richard Wright, Uncle Tom's Children (New York: HarperCollins, 1993) 152. 133 Ibid 210. 134 Ibid 225.

260

Postscript

The task to be accomplished is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past.

—Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

—James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)

THE complex and multi-layered “modern understanding” of America’s Great War

experience that begins to emerge from the pages of Three Soldiers, A Farewell to Arms,

Jimmie Higgins, The Green Corn Rebellion, Homefires in France, The White Morning,

Saint Teresa, Hopes Highway, and The Fire in the Flint cannot be summed up under the

headings “horror, dehumanization, numbness, absurdity, and education into political,

cultural, and sexual realities.”1 Nor can it be reduced to a literary mode of “irony-

assisted recall” that has its “archetypal” origin in the “primal scene” of futile slaughter

during “the first day on the Somme.”2 As this reading of war novels by “moderns” and

“ancients,” combatants and noncombatants, proletarians and bourgeois, men and women,

whites and blacks has shown, American literary responses to World War I are shaped less

by horrific images of dehumanizing battles than by growing cultural anxieties and

ongoing social struggles within U.S. society. Without a careful inquiry into the political

and social concerns that underlie particular American literary responses to World War I,

any consideration of how the phenomenon of war is represented in early 20th century

American literature remains abstract and tends to valorize certain aesthetical approaches

in accordance with prevailing tastes.

Yet, given the unabated prestige accorded to modernist war literature, it is

1 Cooperman 125. 2 Fussell 30-35. Fussell’s claim that the ironic trench experience of the Great War bestowed modern war literature with its “primal” script, which has been replayed ever since in works such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, obscures the presence of many other scripts in American post-World War I fictions that thematize war. For it is easy to see how Cather’s psychological study of Claude Wheeler’s sexual obsession with war portends Norman Mailer’s portraits of Sergeant Croft and General Cummings in The Naked and The Dead, or how Atherton’s warlike feminist Gisela prefigures the self-transformation of the narrator in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Women Warrior, or how Daly’s depiction of interracial relationships during wartime foreshadows the perverted love-hate relationship between Robert Jones and Madge Perkins in Chester Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go.

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certainly no wonder that our cultural memory of World War I remains dominated by

expressions of boundless horror, profound disillusionment, complete societal alienation,

and mockingly ironic detachment. An entire generation, we have been told time and

again, was duped into a phony war for democracy, only to be educated into the

brutalizing “realties” of modern warfare and to discover its analogies within a

dehumanizing society at large. “The impact of twentieth-century fire power,” Stanley

Cooperman writes, “helped produce the combination of absurdity, protest and numbness

which were to become characteristic of the anti-hero in the post-World War I novel.”3 In

its literary realization, then, World War I is said to complete the “historical ‘cycle’” from

the “high mimetic” of epic and tragedy to the “low mimetic” of the 18th- and 19th-century

novel to the “ironic” of the modernist novel, where “we have the sense of looking down

on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity.”4 Guided by the “dynamics and

iconography of the Great War,” both literature and history inexorably follow a singular

path toward an ironic politics of representation, Paul Fussell and others have suggested.5

What makes Fussell’s adaptation of Northrop Frye’s “Theory of Modes” so

appealing is the apparent ease with which it manages to conflate literary and historical

developments so as to postulate “one dominating form of modern understanding” that “is

essentially ironic” and that “originates largely in the application of mind and memory to

the events of the Great War.”6 Even if one rejects the broadness of Fussell’s claim that

modernist tendencies toward ironic observation “proved crucial political, rhetorical, and

artistic determinants on subsequent life,” it seems undeniable that ironic modes of

representation have left a lasting impact on our understanding of World War I and its

literature. I, too, have occasionally focused on the ways in which American war novels

deploy irony to cope with disappointing outcomes in the wake of exaggerated

expectations. And without close attention to the ways in which war novelists sometimes

exploit, sometimes veil the larger ironies of U.S. history in their texts, my argument

concerning the class, gender, and race politics of American World War I representation

would have taken a very different shape.

3 Cooperman 73. 4 Fussell quoting Frye 311. 5 Fussell ix. 6 Ibid.

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But Fussell’s persistent focus on irony conceals as well as it discloses. In

equating modernity with irony, critics such as Fussell project a sense of literary-historical

inevitability that has delimited our cultural, social, and political memory of “the events

of the Great War.” By the same token, in identifying modernist irony as the only form of

dissent available to the modern subject, this school of ironic critics projects a sense of

cultural, social, and political inevitability that has delimited our interpretive engagement

with literary representations of World War I. Hence, the critical predilection for ironic

representation has not just concealed strategic deployments of mythic, romantic, high-

and low-mimetic modes within World War I texts, but also constrained modes of reading

that foreground the potentially empowering and/or liberating aspects of war literature.7

Not unlike Dos Passos’s John Andrews and Hemingway’s Frederic Henry, who can

unflinchingly debunk the war system but remain unable to envision an end to it, critics of

the ironic school appear to excel in criticizing social systems but often seem incapable of

perceiving societal alternatives.

As I have demonstrated throughout this study, Fussell’s influential scholarship

has occluded our view of a large and varied body of World War I literature written from

proletarian, feminists, and/or African American perspectives that, for the most part, rely

on non- or less ironic forms of “modern understanding.” By placing these texts at the

center of my study, I have chosen to foreground literary representations of World War I

that have been habitually dismissed as either “propagandistic,” “fantastic,” “genteel,” or

“overly romantic” and which are still routinely judged to be out-of-step with the

“realities” of modern warfare. Such contentions, I have argued explicitly as well as

implicitly, are in part derived from a narrow and curiously traditionalistic view of the

Great War as a conflict that involved mostly young, white males and was largely

confined to the blood-soaked trenches of Europe. Obviously, a war on this scale was not

waged on the battlefields alone. America’s comparatively short involvement

notwithstanding, the enormous deployment of people, materials, and ideologies

necessitated by total warfare affected noncombatants as well as combatants, men as well

as women, workers as well as professionals, blacks as well as whites. Just as obviously,

both the short- and the long-term effects that this concerted war effort had on the modern

7 I am following here Mark Van Wienen’s argument in Partisans and Poets; see esp. 240-42.

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psyche varied widely among individuals and from group to group, revealing both a

divergence of experiential backgrounds and the persistence of a fundamental clash of

interests within American society. After all, as I have stressed tirelessly in my study, for

a majority of women, blacks, and members of the (white) proletariat the “modern”

experience of economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, legal subjugating,

physical violence, and social alienation was nothing new. What had been officially

promoted as a righteous battle for democracy quickly rekindled long simmering hopes

and fears of internal class, gender, and race warfare. It was therefore on the American

homefront rather than in the European trenches, I have argued, where some of the most

significant material and ideological battles were fought before, during, and long after

America’s active participation in this “War to end all wars.”

Cultural-historical claims according to which a “modern understanding” of the

Great War “derives primarily from images of the trenches in France and Belgium” and/or

the “impact of twentieth-century fire power” lead not only to a privileging of texts by

war-poets or medical corps literati, but also to an unhistorical dismissal of the sway that

contentious homefront debates exerted over the literary production of the war and

postwar periods. As a consequence, most scholarly treatments of World War I literature

have a tendency to discuss homefront politics only insofar as they serve to create a foil

for the purportedly realistic, uncompromising, and somehow politics-transcending war

representations by a small group of young, educated, white male combatants. Granted,

the “impact of twentieth-century fire power” and the “images of trenches in France and

Belgium” may have bestowed works by young soldier-poets such as Dos Passos and

Hemingway with the sort of cathartic scorn that in the accounts of many a cultural critic

was to free the early 20th century form the blatant hypocrisies of the late 19th century. As

we have seen, though, the sense of betrayal and bitter disillusionment that novels such

Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms convey also proved to be a formidable political

tool in reassuring embattled young white middle class males of a privileged position in

postwar society. For like all of their more sanguine, less ironic, and more overtly

political counterparts, even these most “literary” of literary renditions of World War I

ultimately sought to intervene in the social and political conflicts that rattled the

American homefronts of the war and postwar periods. And like the purportedly

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pedestrian, inartistic, or transparent war novels written within proletarian, feminist,

and/or African American traditions, war novels written in the tradition of bourgeois

liberalism pursued their political interventions through adaptations of existing aesthetic

precepts, which, not surprisingly, speak directly to the shifting class-, gender-, and race

dynamics of the day.

The “dynamics and iconography of the Great War” certainly cannot be limited to

the experience of enforced passivity and the devastating sights of endless trench lines,

barbed wires, mutilated corpses, empty ruins, and ravaged landscapes. Viewed from the

long-neglected and much maligned homefront perspective, “the dynamics and

iconography of the Great War” must also include the experience of release from certain

social constraints and the potentially empowering sights of women in managerial

positions, African Americans in uniform, workers on arbitration boards, peace marches,

rallies for women’s suffrage, black resistance against discrimination, labor revolts, work

stoppages, collective draft resistance, etc. Fleeting, fickle, and contradictory as they may

have been, it was these wartime images of imminent societal change that unabashedly

partisan writers such as Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Atherton, and Sarah Lee Brown

Fleming selectively seized upon in order to sketch out social alternatives and to preserve

the hope for a better world, guided variously by socialist, feminist, and African American

concepts of collectivity and communalism. That nearly all of these partisan homefront-

poets tended to reproduce certain mainstream ideologies which proved antithetical or

detrimental to their stated political goals does not eliminate the socio-cultural

significance of their works. For taken as a whole, these works not only bespeak periodic

resurgences of communal activism and organizational politics in American social history,

but also testify to the longstanding import of identity politics in American culture. In the

same vein, the dynamics of disillusionment, the “bitter, symbolic mockery,” the

benumbed understatement,” and the “imagery of mass, of man no longer judged by good

and evil” we have encountered in works such as Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms

must be understood in the context of attempts by young, educated middle and upper class

males to discredit 19th-century progressivist tenets of social responsibility and

collectivism so as to promote a “New Liberalism” based on bourgeois notions of

tolerance and individualism that stand in marked opposition to the mass organizational

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politics pursued by laborites, socialists, suffragettes, feminists, black separatists, and civil

rights leaders.8

To be sure, as I have also pointed out, self-consciously modernist war novelists

such as Dos Passos and Hemingway were not alone in viewing their righteous stand

against a quasi-totalitarian system as an ultimately isolating struggle. For even though all

of the openly class-, gender-, and race-conscious war novels discussed in this study

uphold progressivist notions of collectivism and communal activism, they often remain

profoundly at odds with each other. Written as much to “rally the troops” as to chart out

viable societal alternatives, their social critiques and analyses tend to rely on unitary

models of explanation. Predictably, proletarian World War I novels detect the root of all

evils in capitalist exploitation and postulate in response an intensification of the class

struggle. Feminist representations of World War I, on the other hand, fault patriarchal

structures for the continuance of social violence and seek remedy in the fictive recreation

of non-competitive, nurturing, female-centered communities. Meanwhile, African

American World War I fictions recognize the historical constraining effects of both

patriarchal domination and economic exploitation, but in light of society’s pervasive

racism seek refuge in notions of black separatism and communal independence.

Intersections between capitalism and patriarchy, patriarchy and racism, racism and

capitalism are never seriously explored in any of the books I have discussed.9 In the final

analysis, the solutions proffered are on the communal rather than the societal level. As a

result, no true and egalitarian alliances across race, class, and gender lines occur. Along

with the recognition that the war, despite its destructiveness, reopened old and created

new imaginative spaces for concrete social action, this failure to resolutely investigate the

possibility of political coalition-building ranks among the most pertinent lessons we may

yet learn from the literary struggles over the commemoration of the Great War.

David M. Kennedy might be correct in concluding that “writers such as Dos

Passos, Hemingway and Cummings slammed shut for many of their readers one of the

imagination’s last remaining exits from the enormously uncomfortable room of

8 Cooperman 88 9 That said, Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hopes Highway comes closest to exploring the intersections between patriarchy and racism, while William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion and Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint come closest to probing the relationships between capitalism and racism.

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modernity.”10 As we have seen, however, the metaphorical “room of modernity” was

filled with many voices and many audiences to whom it appeared “uncomfortable” for a

variety of reasons and whose imaginings gave rise to abundant exit strategies. An all too

narrow focus on the manner in which World War I protest novels by young, educated

white males have shaped our “modern understanding” continues to avert our eyes from

the significant cultural work performed by proletarian, feminist, and/or black World War

I novels. Not so much our incessant reading of Dos Passos, Cummings, and Hemingway

as our willful forgetfulness of writers closely affiliated with America’s socialist, feminist,

and civil rights movements has curtailed our ability to view modernity as a contested site

of political action and counteraction. Attention to the (counter-)propagandistic

heightening of class, gender, and race conflicts, the literary application of proletarian,

feminist, and African American ideals to existing socialist, women’s, and civil rights

movements, as well as the self-assertive tone and posture of frankly partisan war texts

move us beyond the customary parameters of modernism. And in doing so, they not only

oblige us to reconsider the stylistic and thematic range of modern American literary

representations, but also permit us to broaden our understanding of the social contexts in

which American World War I literature was produced, received, and acted upon.11

10 Kennedy 229. 11 See Van Wienen 241.

267

Bibliography

Primary Sources

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Entrance of the Stars and Stripes to the Second Victory on the Marne. Boston:

Small & Maynard, 1918.

Allen, Frederic Lewis. “The American Tradition and the War.” Nation 104 (Apr. 26,

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