Remembering America's Great War Experience Between the Wars

In her 2020 essay "Finding a Place for World War I in American History: 1914-2018" historian Jennifer Keene wrestled with the question as to how World War I became our nation's "Forgotten War." In her most interesting passage, however, she points out that, although this has been the case in the late 20th and early 21st centuries,  this was not the case in the 1920s and 30s when in a number of ways the war had a firm place in America's collective memory. [Full Essay HERE.]

Hollywood Certainly Didn't Forget the War

. . .From 1918 through 1945, the war was anything but forgotten, suggesting that “forgetting” [the First World War] is a more recent phenomenon. America grappled with the loss of 120,000 soldiers (half of these in combat, the rest mostly as a result of the influenza epidemic), and the reintegration of nearly 200,000 wounded men. Historian G. Kurt Piehler has traced the physical presence of World War I in towns and cities where Americans drove their cars on Pershing Drives, attended meetings in Memorial Halls, and watched football games on Soldiers’ Fields. Critical of the plethora of mass-produced statues erected after the Civil War that lionized leaders and foot soldiers, memorialization in the 1920s took a utilitarian turn, honoring servicemen through the creation of community structures that improved civic life. In 1921, the remains of an unidentified soldier were buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery, a noteworthy alteration of the nation’s commemorative landscape. At a time when no wars had national monuments (the present structures dedicated to World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam War appeared toward the end of the 20th century), the creation of a national site of mourning and remembrance explicitly for World War I represented a unique commemorative practice.

Almost immediately, however, Americans splintered in the meaning they attached to the Unknown Soldier. Americans debated whether the tomb represented victory, peace, or valor (the sarcophagus erected in 1932 over the grave included allegorical figures for all three). African American civil rights activists adopted the trope of the Unknown Soldier to highlight the nation’s refusal to adequately recognize the contributions of black soldiers. Town monuments also reflected this ambiguity over whether the nation was commemorating victory or mourning loss in the statues they erected with plaques listing the community’s war dead.

Peace and Valor from the Tomb of the Unknowns

Over time, townsfolk added the names of fallen soldiers from other wars to these plaques, weakening their symbolic link to World War I. A similar dilution occurred when the remains of unidentified soldiers from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam were buried in the Tomb of the  Unknown Soldier. The same fate befell the annual Armistice Day commemorations that began on 11 November 1919 to remember the fallen in World War I. In 1954 Armistice Day became Veterans Day, a holiday dedicated to honoring all living and deceased members of the armed forces. Such transformations were not unique to American remembrance of World War I. The passage of time had weakened ties between the Civil War and Decoration Days—originally two separate days when relatives in the North and South decorated the graves of fallen soldiers. By the 20th century, as the divisions between North and South healed, the term Memorial Day came into vogue with commemorations now honoring the fallen of all wars on the same day in May. Memorial Day became an official federal holiday in 1971.

In the interwar period, the government erected eight national overseas military cemeteries in France and Belgium, placing the grave sites of individual soldiers in the shadows of massive memorials recalling the scope and complexity of American combat operations. Lisa M. Budreau argues that the government constructed overseas memorials and cemeteries to underscore the emergence of the United States as a major world power during the war, but burying fallen American soldiers overseas proved domestically contentious. In 1917, Secretary of War Newton Baker had promised to return the bodies of war dead to their families for burial in local communities. In 1919, however, the government reversed course and began pressuring families to keep their loved ones near the field of honor where they fell. The specter of thousands of coffins arriving home presented the worrisome prospect that grief might become the predominant memory of the war. Equally disturbing, the possibility that bringing home all war dead would allow France and Britain to downplay the American contribution to the overall victory. In the end, nearly 70 percent of families demanded that the government repatriate the bodies of their loved ones. With fewer bodies available to offer visual evidence of America’s contribution to the victory, the American Battlefield Monument Commission designed the official overseas cemeteries with ample space between gravestones to camouflage the fact that so few American soldiers were buried in them.

The distinctly American way of mourning privileged some forms of remembrance over others. In Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War, Erika Kuhlman argues that war widows became public symbols through which American society could grieve for the war dead but only if they exhibited stoic acceptance influenza or combat became private rather than public stories. Sustained despair and grief were culturally unacceptable within the United States, a society that privileged optimism and progress.

The war exerted its greatest impact on American domestic political culture during the 1930s. Two singular events in American history, the Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages and 1932 Bonus March by World War I veterans, revealed the resonance of the war’s legacy during the Great Depression. These two staged events highlighted the emotional and financial cost of the war to average citizens, underscoring the government’s responsibility to mitigate that suffering. . .

Bonus Marchers from Utah on Their Way to Washington
The March Ended in One of the Saddest Episodes in
American History

During the most severe years of the Great Depression, the nation proved willing to expend $5 million to send 6,685 mothers and widows to visit graves overseas. The demand by veterans in the early 1930s that the government pay them their promised bonus proved much more contentious. Controversy over the soldiers’ bonus extended back to 1920.

In Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America I argued that conscription created a social compact between the state and conscripted soldiers that endured well after they returned home.  In veterans’ eyes, if the state had the power to draft men, it also had the ability and responsibility to prevent war from financially ruining the lives of those it conscripted.

In 1924, Congress awarded World War I veterans a monetary bonus in the form of a bond that matured in 1945. Once the Depression hit, however, veterans began agitating for early payment of the bond. This grassroots movement culminated in the 1932 Bonus March when 30,000 World War I veterans marched on Washington, DC, and set up an encampment that lasted for six weeks until the army violently evicted the protesters from the capital. Veterans ultimately received their bonus payment in 1936.