In the last decade a new interest has arisen in the memoirs of the soldiers that fought the war

Contents

Introduction 3

Chapter One: Cultural Memory and the American Soldier of the Great War 7

Chapter Two: Technologies of Memory and the Reification of the Hardship of War 20

Chapter Three: Cultural Memory and National Identity 30

Conclusion 38

Works Cited 40

Appendix I: Pictures from His time in Hell 43

Appendix II: DULCE ET DECORUM EST by Wilfred Owen 45

Cover illustration: Marines' fight for Belleau Wood during World War I painted by Tom Lovell.

Introduction

It has now been more than an average lifetime since the First World War ended in 1918. With only one U.S. veteran of the Great War still alive, we are on the cusp of passing into a new era of memory about the American soldier of the Great War.¹ Thus, the four million American soldiers that served in Europe have died and their “communicative memories” are passed on through textual images and representations. In the last decade a new interest has arisen in the memoirs of the soldiers that fought the war. Marking the transition of “communicative memory” into the arena of objectivized culture, such memoirs have been edited and published, or reprinted. ² The individual memoirs of these American soldiers have now entered into the cultural memory of the American nation and have been important in the creation of its cultural memory. The entering of individual memories into the cultural memory of a nation is a complex phenomenon. There has never been a fierce battle about these

memories as opposed to memories of other American wars, such as the Vietnam War; in the latter instance, hegemonic and counter-cultural perspectives on the war engendered a range of conflicting representations as part of the production of the nation’s cultural memory.

Memories of the First World War in the United States are largely uncontroversial, what Kansteiner calls “low-intensity memories.” Such memories are omnipresent in American society and seemingly universal, ie. most Americans have some image of what it was like to be in the trenches of WWI without any of them really being there. Kansteiner argues that

“most groups settle temporarily on such collective memories and reproduce them for years and decades until they are questioned and perhaps overturned, often in the wake of

generational turn-over.” For example, the African American soldier got incorporated in the image of the soldier but one important part of the image remained the same; the focus on the soldiers’ hardship in war still characterized their ‘Americanness.’ This study will interrogate the ideological processes that are occluded by this myth of transparency. It will demonstrate that the cultural memory about the American soldier in the First World War has become a low intensity memory. The individual memoirs of the soldiers have supplanted the actual

individual memory and have become the basis of the collective remembering of the war. This dissertation will argue that the codification of the cultural memory about the American soldier was enabled largely because the image confirms core American values and because the

1 The last U.S. veteran of the Great War is Frank Woodruff Buckles. He is 107 years old and lives in Charles Town, West Virginia. See Fred Brown, “The Great Warrior: Last U.S. WWI Veteran has Seen, Survived Much,”

in Knoxnews.com (Charles Town, W. Va., 2008 [cited 5 June 2008]); available from http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/may/25/052508vet/; INTERNET.

2 Jan Assman and John Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (Spring –Summer, 1995): 126-7.

memoir creates through the process of reification a disturbed memory of the experience of the war, in order to make the memory commonplace in society. The cultural memory about the American soldier in the Great War demonstrates that the white male went through immense hardship for his country in the war and thus the cultural memory offers a way to reflect on what makes one an American citizen.

To research this issue the first chapter will explicate the workings of cultural memory in general, and specifically how individual memories are converted into the cultural memory of the nation. To do this, I will adapt the theoretical framework deployed by Marita Sturken in her book Tangled Memories. This framework will help me to describe what Wulf Kansteiner calls the “hermeneutical triangle.”³ This triangle includes the three primary elements in the creation of cultural memory: the maker, the object, and the consumer. Sturken investigates how personal memories become part of cultural memory, thereby articulating how cultural memory is distinct from both personal memory and history. Here one needs to make the clear distinction between individual memories and cultural memories. Maurice Halbwachs argued:

“the idea of an individual memory, absolutely separate from social memory, is an abstraction almost devoid of meaning.”⁴ In other words no memory is purely individual─ there is always social baggage. On the other hand, to avoid the methodological error of perceiving cultural memory “in terms of psychological and emotional dynamics of individual remembering,” we should not investigate cultural memory like individual memory.⁵ To investigate this cultural memory we need to focus on the social, political and cultural factors at work.

Following Sturken, the significance of narrative will be discussed, adhering to her insight that memory is “a narrative rather than a replica of an experience that can be retrieved and relived.”⁶ This methodological approach will enable me to avoid fruitless discussion of the veracity of the memoirs (their fidelity or infidelity to “real” events can never be

definitively proven, and is not the most interesting thing one can say about them) and to focus instead on how cultural memory is made, in terms of what social and political powers are at work in the interpretation of the text by American society. In addition, it will be investigated what is forgotten in these memories, for, as various post-Freudian critics note, forgetting plays an active role in the creation of memory.

3 Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,”

History and Theory 41, no. 2 (May 2002): 197.

4 Qtd in Kansteiner, 185.

5 Kansteiner, 186.

6 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7.

Moving from the maker to the object, or what Sturken calls the technologies of memory, the second chapter will focus in detail on the memoirs of the soldiers. This part of this study will be an investigation into the influence of first hand accounts of soldiers of the First World War on cultural memory, notably what it means that these personal accounts have been put into print and have become a mass medium in the transference of the image of the American soldier. Further, in this part the interaction between different technologies of memory of the war will be investigated. The focus will not only be on the actual text of the books but also on the pictures in the book. This is important because as Sturken argues: “[t]he image . . . remains the most compelling of memory objects.”⁷ This chapter will demonstrate how these technologies are subject to the process of reification; a process that Richard Terdiman describes as a “systematic perturbation in the realm of memory.” ⁸ The process describes how according to Theodor Adorno commodities become “‘hollowed-out’ objects, available for investment by any meaning whatsoever.”⁹ In addition, the chapter explains how the technologies of memory, like the Belleau Wood monument and the pictures added by the editor to Warren R. Jackson’s memoir trivialize the memory of war. This trivialization is necessary to make the horrifying experience mundane in order to make it accessible as a cultural memory.

Finally the third chapter will turn to the issue of consumption, that is, how cultural memory is imbricated in national identity. This chapter agrees with Sturken’s central premise that “cultural memory is a central aspect of how American culture functions and how the nation is defined.”¹⁰ Jonathan Vance argues that in the interaction with history, cultural memory is constructed to create an image that “claims the status quo.”¹¹ The images from the past become an excuse for the present, justifying the social and political order of today. The cultural memory about the soldiers can be seen as part of the “national symbolic.” When people engage in reading the memoirs of the soldiers they perceive themselves not at distance from these soldiers but instead identify with them. They see in these images a way of being American, a way of conceptualizing themselves as a citizen of the United States. This last part of my research will investigate how cultural memory establishes a definition of

“Americanness.” We must understand that the creation of this particular cultural memory is a

7 Sturken, 11.

8 Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 12.

9 Terdiman, 12.

10 Sturken, 2.

11 Jonathan F. Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 9.

complex phenomenon and this dissertation does not pretend to explicate it exhaustively. It focuses on a major aspect of the memory, namely the experience of hardship in the war.

Following Ann Rigney, this is also the reason why the term cultural memory in preference to collective memory is used. She argues that collective memory suggests that there is “some unified collective entity or superindividual which does the remembering.”¹² One can never argue that every individual’s sense of citizenship is influenced by the cultural memory about the soldiers. Therefore this study does not claim that the cultural memory about the soldiers collectively creates a sense of Americaness; it is only one part in the genealogy of the creation of the idea of citizenship. In addition, this study investigates cultural memory as something that defines the image that is shared by a society and distances itself from historical discourse in the way that it investigates the entanglement with history by cultural products (the

memoirs) that are imbued with cultural meaning.

Kansteiner’s three modalities of cultural memory will be explicated in three chapters of which the first two are case studies of first world war memoirs, namely, His Time in Hell:

A Texas Marine in France: The World War I Memoir of Warren R. Jackson edited by George and Toward the Flame: A Memoir of World War I by Hervy Allen. The first one is a recent edition from 1993; the second memoir was first published in 1923 but reprinted in 2003. The recent editions and reprints reveal America’s anxiety of losing the communicative memories of WW1 soldiers and demonstrate that the memoirs are important in American cultural memory.

Recent scholarship on cultural memory has mostly been interested in controversial cultural memories, such as Sturken’s work on the Vietnam War and the Aids epidemic. These phenomena are interesting because here the politics of memory are explicit. However, it is also important to analyze the workings of cultural memories that have stabilized in society, such as the image of the American soldiers of the Great War. It is these memories that, according to Kansteiner, are “the backbone of collective memories.”¹³ Ultimately, by investigating the entities that seem universal in American society, one can gain a deeper understanding of the nation.

12 Ann Rigney, “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans,” Poetics Today 25, no. 2 (2004): 365.

13 Kansteiner, 190. Even though I distanced myself from using collective memory preferring cultural memory, it is still used in this quote. Kansteiner uses collective memory to identify memories that are socially constructed.

That aspect of the term is the same as cultural memory. Therefore collective memory will be used when I quote Kansteiner.

Chapter one: Cultural Memory and the American Soldier of the Great War

The first modality of Wulf Kansteiner’s hermeneutical triangle will be investigated by a case study of Hervey Allen’s memoir Toward the Flame. This chapter focuses on what Kansteiner calls the maker, or how past experiences enter into cultural memory. Allen ends the introduction to his memoir thus: “It is a purely personal narrative. [...] This book is not propaganda of any kind. It is much more than that; it is a picture of war, broken off when the film burned out.”¹⁴ With the publication of this personal memoir it became an object, used for remembrance of the war by the public. The meaning of this personal narrative of the war changes as soon as it is shared. Read by the public, the memoir becomes part of cultural memory; read and used by historians it acquires historical meaning. This chapter is concerned with the process of the creation of cultural memory, insofar as how the personal memoir of a soldier (as a cultural object) moves through the realms of history and personal memories. This chapter will address the questions that arise here: do individual memories really exist, or are they, contrary to Freud’s idea of memory, a social product? What is the distinction between cultural memory and history and how do the memoirs interact with history and cultural memory? This chapter will demonstrate that the memoirs, history and cultural memory are entangled through narrative. The meaning of the narratives of personal memory, history and cultural memory can be different at some points but more importantly have a common denominator; all focus on experience that the soldiers endured during the war.

This dissertation is based on the premise that memories, like history, are a narrative.

Therefore we need to focus on the construction of narrative for this investigation. The investigation into the narrative of the memories averts the discussion from the fruitless question whether the memoirs are a true reflection of the “real experience.” It enables me to focus on how the cultural memory about the soldier is made, in terms of what social and political powers are at work in the interpretation of the text. In addition, a narrative is always selective; one can never recollect everything that has happened. This means that many things are forgotten. In every cultural memory forgetting is an active part in its creation. We will see that this forgetting is also socially determined; the narratives forget the people who are not included in the image of the American citizen, such as African Americans, Native Americans, and women.

14 Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A Memoir of World War I, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), xx.

Allen’s book was published in 1926 and reprinted in 1934 and 2003. He was born in 1889 in Pittsburgh, finished university in 1915 and served in the 18^th Pennsylvania Infantry as a National Guard on the Mexican Border in 1916. On 14 May 1918 Allen landed on French ground to be sent to the Marne sector to fight the last months of the war. What he tried to do with his memoir is to preserve his experience in France by putting it into words. The book is a narrative constructed from letters Allen wrote home from a hospital in France “immediately after the events it related,” supplemented by pieces he wrote in 1919 just after his “return to the United States when the memories were still so strong as to be almost photographic.”¹⁵ Allen’s intention was not to keep his own memory alive for he clearly remembered the war, his memories troubled him at night, but his intention was to rid himself of his “subjective war by trying to make it objective in writing [...] without any thought at the time of publishing it.”¹⁶ In this sense the book had a personal meaning for the writer, using it as a medicine to deal with the memories that haunted him after the war.

Allen writes that the memoir is “a purely personal narrative.” Personal memory has always been considered as antithetical to the idea of collective memory. However, Maurice Halbwachs believed that personal memories are socially produced. One cannot separate oneself from the patterns of social thought through which identity is constructed. One needs to use narration to make a memory meaningful to anybody, even to oneself. Wulf Kansteiner writes: “The very language and narrative patterns that we use to express memories, even autobiographical memories, are inseparable from the social standards of plausibility and authenticity that they embody. In this sense ‘there is no such thing as individual memory.’”¹⁷ So even when this memoir was used only for personal use, as was first intended by Allen, it was socially determined.

When the memoirs are published and read by the public, their meaning becomes a social product. As soon as the memoirs are published they are imbued with a different meaning. They become a vehicle to transfer the memory of the war to others. Allen writes:

“[i]t is a narrative, plain, unvarnished, without heroics, and true. It is what I saw as nearly as memory has preserved it, and I have set it down as a picture of war with no comment, except a very little here and there by way of explanation. This book shows how it looked ‘over there.’”¹⁸ Indeed, one can look at the memoirs as photographs. Like photographs the memoirs

15 Allen, xxiv.

16 Idem.

17 Kansteiner, 185.

18 Allen, xx.

try to close “the gap between first-hand experience and secondary witnessing.”¹⁹ They try to create a picture through narrative of how it was in the trenches. This makes the memoirs important for the public because it creates access to an experience that most people did not have. As Jay Winters argues: “It is in this notion of ‘war experience’ that we can see the most striking legacy of these [German war letters] and other writings about the Great War.”²⁰ The memoirs become “the perfect window into war,” as Steven Trout calls Allen’s memoir in his introduction to Toward the Flame.²¹ The memoirs display an experience of violence, hardship and suffering; an experience most of the public will never have. They show us a picture of a different world; an experience that only the soldiers have, “an ‘inner experience,’ something extraordinary, something overwhelming, a secret which only they could know.”²²

This meaning of the experience is one that gives the memoirs their authority. The first sentence of the book begins by creating this difference between those who were there and understand and those who need to understand. Allen starts his book with: “Can any one who took part in those route marches in France from the sea to the front ever forget them?”²³ By saying this he states that the memory is in those who were there. This demonstrates that the memoirs are seen as a narrative that conveys the experience in an essentialist way. That is, that the experience of the route marches in France or any other matter was fixed. When the experiences are told, the meaning of these experiences does not change. Those who took part in the war tried by a narrative to explain to others what this experience was; where the soldier was or who he was. By reading these memoirs one could understand “what the war ‘meant’ in a way which only those who had fought could know.”²⁴

With the publication and reprints of the memoirs experience acquires a second meaning. This second meaning is important in the creation of the cultural memory about the soldiers. The idea of the authority of eye witnesses’ experiences is a result of historical discourse that sees the survivors of historical events as “figures of cultural authority and values.”²⁵ Joan Scott argues that we need to view ‘experience’ differently. The experience should not be something that is the origin of the explanation but something that should be investigated. According to Scott, experience is not something that is only in the soldier

19 Kansteiner, 191.

20 Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 114.

21 Allen, ix.

22 Winter, 114.

23Allen, 3.

24 Winters, 115.

25 Sturken, 5.

himself, but it is something he uses to create an image of himself. “It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience. Experience in this definition then becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather the social construction of knowledge by people who define themselves in terms of what they know.”²⁶ The soldier uses the experience to create his own identity. In other words the experience had a meaning that was socially constituted. When one sees experience in this way, one can understand that the memoirs in later years became material out of which the identity of the American citizen was constituted. It is a narrative that the public understands, something they can identify with.

“[C]ollective memory works by subsuming individual experiences under cultural schemes that make them comprehensible and therefore, meaningful.”²⁷Toward the Flame has gone through both stages of the meaning of experience. First when the memoir was published in 1926 it was seen as an authoritative narrative that was used as a window into the war by people who stayed at home to understand how it was ‘over there.’ Over time, the experience in the reprints in 1934 and 2003 were used to constitute the image of the American citizen.

We will come back to this issue in chapter three.

In any given culture, narration is an indispensable tool to give meaning to its experiences. Just as in individual memory, experiences in the past are mere flashes, and it is only when they are narrated that one can give meaning to them, thus enabling a society to understand them. One important aspect of narration is emplotment: in order to narrate memory one needs to give it a plot. The narrator structures the story in such a way that it gives meaning to the present, thus bestowing cultural meaning upon historical events.

However, the meaning that is assigned to such a narrative is not merely a consequence of how the story is narrated: it is also shaped by the receiver’s interpretation of the narrative. The creation of meaning by narration is thus not monolithically produced, but is a dialectical process between past experiences, narrator and receiver. This is what Kansteiner describes as the “hermeneutical triangle” that “implies an open dialogue between the object, the maker, and the consumer in constructing meaning. All three elements should be the actors and heroes of histories of collective memory.”²⁸

If narrative is a cultural construction, it thus reflects the dominant values of a society, and influences the construction of cultural memory in such a way that memory consequently

26 Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 779-80.

27 Kansteiner, 189.

28 Kansteiner, 197.

also reflects these dominant values. In any given culture, narrative influences the social construction of reality: it is “narrative’s distinctive capacity to give shape to the temporal dimension of human experience. Put differently, narrative endows the inherent historicity of human existence with cultural meanings.”²⁹ This narration is always the result of the dominant value system in that society, for when a writer writes a book, he or she always has to engage with this value system to some extent. The book will then be narrated consciously or unconsciously in such a way that it will uphold the dominant narrative structure. Alex Argyros argues:

Narrative is seen as one way in which the social construction of reality is effected by the diffuse web of hegemonic power-relations constitutive of a given regime of power/truth. Although constructivists tend to acknowledge the power of narrative, they see their ideological work as demystification, an attempt to unveil the oppressive codes functioning in all semiotic systems, including narrative.³⁰

It thus becomes clear that a narrative influences the hegemonic system and in this way it helps to uphold the hegemonic power. Because cultural memory is a product of narration, it is obvious then that it will also reflect the hegemonic system’s dominant values. However, it is important to understand that hegemony is never determined; dominant powers are in a constant struggle to uphold their dominant values. A low-intensity memory like the cultural memory about the American soldier is a memory that is subject to a much less struggle than for example the controversial memory of the American soldier of the Vietnam War.

One example is that Allen’s memoir portrays the dominant value of American exceptionalism. The narrative about the battle of Chateau Thierry and the battle of Fismette are stories that embody America’s exceptionalism. American exceptionalism can be seen as the oldest ideology of the United States. The country has always felt as ‘the city upon the hill’; a new and improved state compared to the old Europe. This idea of exceptionalism comes back in many ideas about its history, politics, literature, science and also its military forces. According to Micheal Kammen, “American exceptionalism is as old as the nation itself and, equally important, it has played an integral part in the society’s sense of its own

29 Jens Brockmeier, “Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory,” Culture and Psychology 8, no. 1 (2002): 27.

30 Alex Argyros, “Narrative and Chaos,” New Literary History 23 (summer 1992): 660.

identity.”³¹ The idea is present everywhere in American society; Irvin Howe even argued that American exceptionalism took “primarily an ideological or a mythic form. A devotion to the idea that this country could be exempt from the historical burdens that had overwhelmed Europe.”³² This demonstrates that the uniqueness of America was mostly derived from their opposition to the old countries in Europe.

Both battles are remembered as battles where the American way of fighting, (in tactics in the case of Chateau Thierry or in warfare in Fismette) outmatched their allies. At the end of May 1918 the German army was pushing to the Marne River in the second Marne offensive. The French general Henri Petain asked the American divisions to help stop the German push toward the French capital. The most important area was a salient (a curve in the battle line) of which the tip was near the city of Chateau Thierry only forty miles from Paris.

General Pershing of the American Army ordered two divisions to the area, forcing his men to march through the torn up country of France toward the Marne. Here they came under French command. General DeGoutte, the XXI French Corps commander had suffered serious losses in the last days and had no reinforcements to send to the lines. On their arrival, DeGoutte ordered the American divisions to join the fighting with the French under French command.

The Americans did not agree with the French tactics and suggested that the French comply with the American tactics. The tactics of the French and British had been an offensive tactic throughout the war but the American was one of defence. DeGoute was reluctant to comply with the Americans but he finally resolved the impasse in favour of the Americans. The Americans dug themselves in behind the French to hold that defensive line as the French came back through.³³ The Americans held the line and turned the German attack. The French General Ferdinand Foch ordered a counter-attack, sending the American divisions into Belleau Wood and the village of Fismette where Allan describes the horrendous house-to- house fighting. Due to wrong information (Belleau Wood) and lack of tactical insight of the French command (Fismette) the Americans suffered heavy casualties. One of the two divisions lost 1811 soldiers and 9777 were wounded. None the less, both battles are recorded in American history as victories despite the losses.

Allen’s narrative of the battles becomes part of the cultural memory because it fits in the dominant ideology of American exceptionalism. The battle of Chateau Thierry is an

31 Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1993): 6.

32Qtd in Kammen, 11.

33Robert B. Asprey, At Belleau Wood (Denton Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1996), 81-89. And Donald M. Goldstein and Harry J. Maihafer, America in World War I: the Story and Photographs (Washington:

Potomac Books, 2000), 121-4.

example where the American tactics were used over the old tactics of the European countries which consequently led to a victory. This idea is clearly expressed in Robert B. Asprey’s book where he argues: “The French and British may have scorned the American claim to a tactical doctrine, but the Americans still believed in it. Nothing observed since their arrival in France had caused them to throw over their basic ways in preference to Allied method.”³⁴ The battles symbolise the idea that America was a new country that lived without the burdens (in this case the old tactics) of Europe; that the French had to retreat and had to hide behind the Americans obviously contributes to this feeling. Asprey writes: “DeGoutte’s expressed desire represented a tactical attempt to absorb the American identity, which Pershing had been fighting so hard to retain.”³⁵ Also the battle of Fismette contributes to this idea of exeptionalism. In the history books the focus is on the wrong reconnaissance of the French and the stupidity of the order to take the city, but also on the courage and the excellence of the American soldiers who managed to hold the city against all odds. Allen’s story does not mention the faulty reconnaissance or any doubt about the order. So in the first print of 1926 this memoir does not have this meaning. As I mentioned before, it was predominantly meant to offer a window onto the war. In the 2003 reprint, history has caught up with the memoir. In the 2003 edition Steven Trout describes what happened in Fismette, mentioning the French errors. “Yet Maj. Gen. Jean DeGoutte, the French Army commander under whom the 28^th Division served, wanted more. Working from faulty intelligence ─and even faultier military doctrine─ DeGouttte ordered the capture of Fismette.”³⁶Because this narrative of the battles fits within the framework of an ideology that is still present in American society it is incorporated into the cultural memory of the war without difficulty. History writing creates this narrative of the battles, demonstrating the exeptionalism of the American army. The memoir creates a picture of what happens within that narrative focussing on the soldiers that fought there. In this way the soldier becomes part of that narrative connecting him to the dominant ideology.

It is important to understand that there is a difference between the narrative of the soldier and the narrative of the cultural memory. Allen’s narrative starts at the Marne, there is no mention of any training, no memories of friends or family that were left behind but it starts immediately with the hardship of war. The narrative is focussed on the experience of the soldiers who went through the hardship of the battles. Due to the entanglement of history and

34Asprey, 88.

35 Asprey, 89.

36 In Steven Trout’s introduction to Toward the Flame, xi.

cultural memory, the historical writings about the battles, the memoir is placed by the public within this narrative. Consequently, one cannot read the memoir without this historical narrative in mind. The experience of the individual soldier is connected with the idea of American exeptionalism. This is how the cultural memory about the soldier is constructed.

The memory is in a narrative tangle with the historical writing. This is possible because this narrative fits “within a framework of contemporary interests.’”³⁷ This demonstrates that there is no clear distinction between history writing and cultural memory as opposed to Pierre Nora who sees memory in opposition to history. He writes: “[a]t the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory.” ³⁸History is not antithetical to memory, but I would rather agree with Marita Sturken when she argues that they are entangled.³⁹

Besides narrative, within the production of cultural memory there is another aspect that demonstrates that cultural memory upholds dominant values, namely the process of forgetting. Forgetting and remembering are both important in the construction of a memory.

No culture can remember all the details of the past, therefore some details need to be forgotten and some will be remembered. In order to produce a collective memory of a nation’s past that relates logically to its present consciousness, a nation is selective in what it remembers.

Halbwachs recognized that the constructions of memory, i.e. remembering and forgetting, are fundamental to societies, since societies tend to forget those experiences of the past that do not fit in with their dominant values.⁴⁰ Because everybody accepts these values, collective memory is culturally constructed in a form that adheres to the dominant values. As Brockmeier argues:

[a]s we are members of a variety of such contexts of cultural participation ―families, classes, professional organizations, political parties, and the like― we remember according to several social frames that emphasize different aspects of our experienced reality. Those aspects that do not fit the collective frame of memory, and, thus, are not passed on from one generation to another, will be forgotten.⁴¹

Most forgetting will therefore occur according to the dominant values of society.

The memoirs of the Great War are irredeemably masculine, that is that they forget the female war experience. The experience of war is narrowed down only to those who bore arms.

37 Kansteiner, 187-8.

38 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations no. 26 (1989): 9.

39 Sturken, 5.

40 Brockmeier, 23.

41 Idem.

A large part of the war experience is forgotten. The image of the soldier does not reach further than the trenches where only men fought, even though many women contributed to the war effort in France. More than 25,000 American women served overseas. Already in 1914, three years before the American intervention, American women went over to France to allay the suffering of the war. It was the first time that women were service members. More than 10,000 nurses served in the Army and Navy Nurse Corpse and around 13,000 enlisted in the navy and worked as Yeomen or “Yeomanettes” as they were popularly known, of which some went over to France to work in hospitals, and the Army Signal Corps had more than 200 women telephone operators.⁴² Some of the women held a “quasi-military status as nurses” but they did not get paid by the military and most of the time funded their own stay. These were not the only jobs they performed. “Memoirs, letters, diaries, newspaper reports, and novels─reveal them in all their remarkable diversity. Doctors, pilots, photographers, journalists, interpreters, telephone operators, entertainers─ they were the foremothers of today’s feminists and social workers, physical therapists and media women, and women in the military.”⁴³

The reason the war experience of these women has “vanished from memory” was not because their war experience was without hardship. Dorothy and Carl Schneider argue: “[t]he American Women who served in Europe during the ‘Great War,’ despite wide variations in their occupations and geographical situations, shared many hazards and hardships.”⁴⁴First of all, getting there was a hazardous undertaking. German submarines roamed the Atlantic and the chance of a boat being hit was one out of four. Diseases on the boats were even more hazardous than the German submarines. Catastrophic flu epidemics that broke out on ships, carrying troops and workers, caused more casualties than German torpedoes.⁴⁵The most hardship was endured by the nurses caring for the non-stop flow of wounded soldiers. These nurses worked under great stresses and strains, seeing young boys blown apart coming in day after day. Laura Frost, a U.S. nurse, recalled the wounded coming in June 1918 from the Marne battles.

When the wounded began to come in, the stretchers were laid on the ground and the corpsmen stripped them of their muddy clothes and deloused them, usually before we received them in

42 Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider, Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I (Harmondsworth:

Penguin Books Ltd, 1991), 12.

43 From the cover of Into the Breach.

44 Schneider, 25.

45 Schneider, 26.

the operating tent. I can still hear the sound of a leg being sawed off and remember the boy who had one side of his face blown away, asking: ‘Do I look bad?’

We worked eight hours on and eight hours off, around the clock. By the time we got up and got into bed, it was more like six hours off in the twenty-four.⁴⁶

Nurse Eva Belle Babcock remembers her last months before the Armistice of 1918. She said she never forgot that

[w]hen the trains came in full of wounded, we knew it was time to get into the harness and start pawing the air. [...] During the long hours we couldn’t stop to eat. Just grab a bite off the mess cart, or a cup of coffee. It was awful to see those poor kids strapped on a board with their backs broken, or an arm or both legs off. It was terribly trying on your nerves.⁴⁷

These efforts of American women were soon forgotten. Dorothy and Carl Schneider write:

While at its end the woman who had served overseas might still personally feel ‘crowned with her glorious French achievement’ and vaunting ‘the usual scalps at her belt,’ the public soon forgot her contribution, and her government chose not to reward it. Her deeds were largely written out of history.⁴⁸

One can argue that the image of the soldier only entails men in uniform; the men who bore arms. This is true when one only looks at the uniform, but the cultural memory about the soldier is not focused on the uniform, it is focused on the experience; the hardship of war.

Then, is the experience of a female nurse that endured the hardship of war of less value? The experiences of the women are forgotten in the cultural memory, because the stories of the memoirs told by the male soldier fit in the framework of a male dominated ideology. Only when we incorporate the stories of American women who served the army in the Great War do we have a more complete cultural memory. We will see in chapter three that a more inclusive cultural memory is important in the creation of the idea of citizenship in the United States.

46 Lettie Gavin, American Women in World War I They Also Served (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1997), 50.

47 Gavin, 55.

48 Schneider, 285.

Another way the memoirs fit easily in the framework of the dominant ideology is that they exclude other racial groups like African Americans and Native Indians. The title of Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri’s book, The Unknown Soldiers demonstrates that the African American soldier has been forgotten in the image of the American soldier of the Great War.⁴⁹ 370,000 African Americans labored, fought and died in France. In a segregated army, they not only fought the Germans but also racial prejudice. Most of the black soldiers were used as laborers in France because they were seen by the Army commanders as inferior and

“natural cowards.”⁵⁰ Two battalions went into combat in France, one battalion serving under French command after General Pershing gave the four regiments of the 93rd division to the French. Although Pershing wanted to keep his American army to remain autonomous, he did transfer four black infantry regiments to the French army. It was clear they were unwanted.

The 93d division only had four regiments, the same amount Pershing had promised the French. It was thus the perfect solution for Pershing, he got rid of the black soldiers and he gave the French what he promised.

The amnesia about the service of the black soldiers started from the beginning. In the army records, the U.S. army considered the division as nonexistent. In the official statistics of the army it shows that the 93rd division spent zero days in training and zero days in battle, also it shows zero kilometers advanced and zero prisoners taken. Though, in a remarkable bit of contradiction it does show that four men were captured by the Germans. This would indicate that the 93rd did not serve at all; however, French records, and awards to the 93rd contradict this.⁵¹ Although there are many accounts of blacks soldiers acting heroically under fire, the failure of one regiment would become the story that was remembered of the participation of African American soldiers. Due to a lack of equipment, training and command one regiment of the 92nd Division was unable to hold the line in a battle in the Argonne. Although only one Regiment failed to hold the line, the Generals of the American army labeled the whole 92nd division as a failure. Barbeau and Henri write that “the failure, for at least thirty years to come, would be pointed to as proof of the inadequacy of black soldiers and black officers and would prevent their rise in the army.”⁵² Even in 1948, at

49 Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, Unknown Soldiers: African –American Troops in World War I, 1^st ed.

(New York: Da Capo Press, 1996).

50 Robert B. Egberton, Hidden Heroism: Black Soldiers in America’s Wars ( Boulder: Westview Press, 2002), 8.

51 Frank E. Roberts, The American Foreign Legion: Black Soldiers of the 93d in World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2004), 200. The 93rd division lost 3.500 men and received forty-two Distinguished Service Crosses (which are American decorations), four Medaille Militaire, the highest French award, and 325 individual awards of the Croix de Guerre. Also the 369th Infantry held the record of the regiment that stayed in combat for most (191) continuous days.

52 Barbeau and Henri, 150.

hearings of President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and opportunity in the Armed Services, the story of the African American soldiers’ failure was retold.

Even now in 2008 the issue of remembering African Americans in the military is still a dispute. In June 2008, Spike Lee, criticized Clint Eastwood for not portraying African Americans in his movie Flags of Our Father, a movie about the Korean War. Eastwood responded that the movie was about the raising of the flag at the island of Iwo Jima and that no African Americans were present at that particular historical moment. Nonetheless, the whole movie does not show one African American even though many African American soldiers served in the Korean War after Truman had issued his Executive Order 9981 that ordered “equal treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.”⁵³

Another racial minority that fought in the war that is left out in the cultural memory about the soldier are the American Indians. The American Indian also suffered from the influence of stereotypical ideas. Contrary to the idea that the African American soldier was a natural coward, other Americans saw Native Americans as fierce warriors and fighters.

Stereotypes of that time were results of the cultural idea of the savage Indian. Americans saw them as “instinctive” soldiers and “‘blood-thirsty warriors’ particular eager to fight.”⁵⁴ In addition, American officers believed that American Indians “had a natural aptitude for scouting, tracking, and the art of concealment,” and were often used for dangerous patrols and reconnaissance missions.⁵⁵ Due to these stereotypes, officers were eager to use the Native Americans in combat, where they ended up doing the most dangerous jobs. These efforts were not left unnoticed for they earned the respect of their fellow soldiers. However, their contributions “have been largely ignored or discarded as too peripheral and insignificant to warrant serious attention.”⁵⁶ They too were forgotten in the image of the American soldier of

the Great War.

To conclude, this chapter tried to focus on the maker as one of the modalities of Kansteiner’s hermeneutical triangle by investigating Hervey Allen’s memoir of, Toward the Flame. This chapter tried to make clear how the personal memories of past experiences are

narrated and how these narratives are entangled with history and cultural memory. It

53 Egberton, 164.

54 Thomas A. Britten, American Indians in Word War I: At War and at Home (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 99.

55 Britten, 4.

56 Idem.

demonstrates that there is no clear distinction between the three. One thing they have in common in their construction of narrative is that they adhere to dominant values in American society. In this way the cultural memory about the American soldier represents the dominant group in society; it forgets to include many other subordinate groups that do not fit in the dominant framework like homosexuals and religious minorities. This chapter did not deal with these groups because there has not much research been done on these groups. This still remains an area that needs to be investigated by historians. Nonetheless there is a common denominator, the remembrance of the soldier ─whether he includes the subordinate groups or not─ is focussed on the experience of war. The meaning of this experience is socially determined and is important in the creation of the identity of the American citizen. We will look at this process in chapter three. Next, however we will look at the second modality of Kansteiner’s triangle: the object, or as Martita Sturken calls them, the technologies of memory.

Chapter two: Technologies of Memory and the Reification of the Hardship of War.

This chapter is about how memory attaches itself to objects. Memory not only resides in objects but they are also used to share, produce and give meaning to memory. Wulf Kansteiner argues: “[c]ultural memory consists of objectified culture.”⁵⁷ Wherever there is a cultural memory, there are objects such as texts, images, monuments, et cetera that reflect this memory. This demonstrates that cultural memory is not something that remains an abstract idea in culture; cultural memory has a material existence. These objects are what Marita Sturken calls the “technologies of memory;” they are the entities that articulate the memory.

These objects are created to recall important happenings in history and are crucial to how these experiences of the past are remembered. In other words, they are the representations of past events.

When one tries to represent past events there is always a gap created between the past experience and its representation. This break needs to be filled by objects and this fissure

“should be understood as powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity.”⁵⁸ Since the technologies of memory produce and embody memory they are thus subject to the power dynamics that are involved with the production of cultural memory, as described in the previous chapter. These technologies of memory are very diverse; they rely on “various combinations of discursive, visual, and spatial elements.”⁵⁹ It is impossible to investigate the entire collection of the technologies that constitute the cultural memory about the American soldier. In this chapter, therefore, Warren R. Jackson’s memoir His Time in Hell will be used as a case study to investigate several technologies of memory.

One technology of memory is obviously the memoir itself. This chapter will discuss what it means for the production of memory that these memoirs became part of the mass media at their publication. The memoir becomes a commodity and this chapter will reflect how the memoir is subject to what Georg Luckács called the “phenomenon of reification.” It will be demonstrated how the memory of the production of the memoir is disturbed. It will be argued that through the process of reification the memoir becomes a “hollowed out” object;

one that can be invested with an uncomplicated memory, in order to make the remembrance of the sufferings of war commonplace in society. Since everything in advanced capitalism, becomes commodified according to Luckács, every aspect of society has become subject to reification. Therefore, one could argue that one can apply this view to every technology of

57 Kansteiner, 182.

58 Qtd in Sturken, 9.

59 Kansteiner, 190.

memory. However, in order to avoid repetition of the argument this chapter will also explicate a different process that makes the cultural memory more mundane in American society. This is what George Moss calls “the process of trivialization;” it was a way of coping with the war,

“not by exalting and glorifying it, but by making it familiar.”⁶⁰ Thus, in this chapter it will also be argued that to remember the gruesome story of the trenches the technologies of memory produced a trivialized cultural memory of the hardship of war. We will see how the American battle monument at Belleau Wood and the pictures added by the editor, create a trivialized memory of the war.

Investigating the technologies of memory in our search for the cultural memory about the soldier is problematic. There is a tendency to give human agency a central role in history.

The representation that is made by the creator of the technology is often viewed as identical with the reception of the consumer. However, there are many occasions where the representation is interpreted very differently from what the maker intended. The technologies that are created in the past, like the memoirs, monuments or pictures are sometimes easily forgotten or viewed very differently by people in the present. In other words, how does one prove that the particular technologies represent cultural memory in a particular society?

It is a difficult process to determine what these technologies mean for a specific social group. Sturken argues that “[c]ultural memory is a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history.”⁶¹ In this negotiation some memories do not become collective, they remain cultural memories only for a small “group of a few initiated.”⁶² In addition, it is assumed that the people who have for example some knowledge of the cultural memory of the American soldier are a homogenized cultural group; that is that they all have a “substantially similar perception of the event in question and thus form a stable interpretive community."⁶³ Kansteiner outlines the problems of this assumption:

The more “collective” the medium (that is, the larger its potential or actual audience), the less likely it is that its representation will reflect the collective memory of that audience. Often, the readers of a specific book or the viewers of a particular television program do not form a cohesive interpretive community because they use the same media text for very different ends.

At the same time, despite our problems in determining the precise effect of any media event on its audience, we cannot simply exclude from memory studies the vast majority of

60 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 127.

61 Sturken, 1.

62 Kansteiner, 193.

63 Idem.

consumers who never take on the role of memory makers outside the confines of their own family or profession.⁶⁴

Kansteiner offers two solutions for this methodological deadlock. One way is to conduct a

“large-scale polling endeavor,” or use existing data about how consumers responded to media representation. There is a large amount of polling and ratings data, collected by commercial and public television systems. The other is what Margaret Archer has called the “downward conflation of structuralism.”⁶⁵ This approach argues that the technologies are social products that are created within the structures of society. The “structural characteristics” of the technologies of memory connect to the perspectives of the consumers. Kansteiner argues that

“[t]his approach acquires some validity if the representations in question are carefully contextualized, that is, if it can be shown that specific representations found large audiences and faced little competition from other media.”⁶⁶As a collective, the public does not explore counter memories if they are not portrayed by the mass media. Therefore one can assume that the representation of the memory portrayed by the mass media is the one that leaves behind its print in the minds of the public.

It is out of the scope of this research to use the former method in this investigation. It is not possible to conduct a large-scale polling endeavor, nor have I come across any existing data on the response of the public to the representation of the American soldier in the Great War. Even though the latter research method is the “least ambitious one,” it is the most practical.⁶⁷ This chapter will demonstrate that the representation of technologies of memory discussed here faced no competition by other media, and also that they were accepted and used by large audiences. Thus, we can assume that the representation given in the memoirs, the Belleau Wood monument and the pictures dominate the reception of the American citizen.

Why this representation is accepted will be discussed in chapter three; first it will be demonstrated what these technologies of memory represent.

All the memoirs discussed in this study produce a cultural memory about the soldier through the representation of the experience of hardship during the war. In Jackson’s book the past experience of war is mostly represented as immense suffering, danger and hardship or as the title suggests “a time in hell.” Every aspect of life is influenced by this hardship. Jackson describes how even the primary needs of a person’s life are influenced by this suffering. One

64 Kansteiner, 193.

65 Kansteiner, 194.

66 Idem.

67 Idem.