When contemplating history, Americans tend to prefer romanticism versus realism, and this has the implication of pining for not only nostalgic pasts, but an unrealistic past, impeding progressing in the present and future. This sensibility and yearning is particularly potent with how Americans view war. On the 80-year anniversary of D-Day, it was appropriate that I listened to Elizabeth Samet’s 2021 book, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, as read by Suzanne Toren.
Samet is a professor of English at West Point, and so, she examines the ways in which literature and film influence our thinking about war — and importantly, offer contemporaneous understandings of war divorced from any amnesia — including those waging it, who evoke the plays of Shakespeare, for example. [Small aside, one of the Goodreads criticisms I saw of the book complained about how many references to literature were in Samet’s book, and I’m thinking, did you not get that she’s a professor of English?!]
Interestingly, myth-building around WWII is relatively new, coming around the 50th-anniversary commemoration, with journalist Tom Brokaw’s christening of that generation as the “Greatest Generation,” with a book of the same name, historian Stephen Ambrose’ series of books about WWII (including one which became HBO’s Band of Brothers), and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Samet in particular rightly spends considerable time taking Ambrose to task for his intentionally rosy depiction of WWII. To the latter, Samet leans on Studs Terkel’s 1997 work, The Good War: An Oral History of WWII, to show how veterans post-WWII had disparate views about the war, experienced a return to domesticity differently, and were treated differently, far from the histrionics we would think.
[By the way, I don’t have a good place to insert this, but can we talk about, as Samet does to show contemporaneous issues with WWII, including after the fact, how wildly impressive 1939 was for film? You had Gone with the Wind (itself a great depiction of revisionist Civil War revisionist narratives), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Of Mice and Men, and so on. I can see why some think 1939 is the greatest singular year in film history.]
What I found particularly intriguing about Samet’s thesis about American amnesia with respect to war, most profoundly and provocatively, with the so-called Good War of WWII, is the parallel she draws between WWII and the American Civil War. The Civil War has been completely whitewashed (a fitting word if ever there was one) by the losers, the Confederacy, the South. They remade the war and its aims in their image, that of so-called state’s rights and this conception of Southern manners and manliness, otherwise known as the Lost Cause. Reconstruction and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution were rebranded as negative, resulting in the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, the institution of the black codes, which then segued into nearly 100 years of Jim Crow. Not to say anything, obviously, of the veneration of those who fought the war, like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and others, whose likeness appears in statues and on buildings, including military bases, throughout the South (and the North!). The Lost Cause won. That’s a comfortable, safe romanticism versus the reality: that the South separated from the United States to form the Confederacy, a government formed for the express purpose of maintaining a slave empire, even if it meant violence.
But what about WWII? The lift seems harder there, right? After all, America, along with our Allies, fought the Nazis and Imperial Japan. We were bombed at Pearl Harbor. Germany declared war on us! Well, first, let’s get what seems like semantics out of the way. There is no such thing as a “good” war. The very notion is obscene. War is awful and violent, and even when it becomes necessary, it’s still awful, violent, and never “good.” At this point, you may be wondering if Samet is arguing against entry into WWII. Not at all. She believes the war was justified and necessary, but again, justified and necessary does not mean good, nor that it was a universally-agreed upon war, nor that it ought to be remembered by Americans as that of American triumphalism erased of all nuance, nor that we should elevate men beyond their foibles at the detriment to the present and future of the country. But beyond that, Samet points out how much propaganda was needed by the federal government to encourage Americans to fight — post-Pearl Harbor! President Roosevelt, Samet tells us, felt Americans were becoming complacent after the Pearl Harbor attack. An astonishing, but forgotten tidbit of history! In fact, something that might be surprising to Americans of today is that more Americans volunteered for the war in Vietnam than WWII. That surprised me. About 38 percent of the force for WWII were volunteers vs. 66 percent in Vietnam. We certainly don’t talk about the number of WWII deserters, either, numbering the thousands, and as Samet quips, there would have been more in the Pacific Theater if they had anywhere to go.
In addition to those facts, amnesia comes into play with WWII in two additional ways. First, Americans were ambivalent about crossing the ocean to fight another European war, and we forget out how robust the isolationist sentiment was among Americans. Last year, I reviewed Lynne Olson’s captivating 2013 book, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over WWII, 1939-1931, which covers the debate about merely assisting Britain with weapons to fight Nazi Germany versus full-blown war. Again, history that is largely forgotten these days. Secondly, but along the same vein as the aforementioned book, is we also forget how potent the fascist message was in America prior to, during, and after WWII. There were Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists, who commanded large audiences, most infamously filling Madison Square Garden in 1939 with a Nazi rally, where they ridiculously claimed George Washington as the father of their movement. [Hint: A Nazi, a fascist, wouldn’t have voluntarily given up power as Washington, famously and rightly, did.]
Samet’s point goes beyond those issues, too, though, and goes back to the issue with nostalgic romanticism versus the reality of war. Again, she contrasts with the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, in the run-up to the Civil War and during the Civil War, “respected the past without being paralyzed by it.” He understood America’s Founders did something extraordinary in founding America, but that they were still men, with all the foibles of men. That distinction was imperative for Lincoln because in order to build America anew after the Civil War, they necessarily needed to be present- and future-focused. Pining for the past stymies the present, and we see that repeatedly with reminesencents about the Good War and the Greatest Generation: a peak of perfect men and of a country, we ought to return to rather than forging ahead in making America anew. Concretely, the implication of venerating the past too much is that it warped American sensibilities about exceptionalism, leading to arrogant and ambitious wars in Korea, Vietnam, and later, the Gulf War, and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars post-9/11. The Gulf War (and I believe the second Iraq War, too) also evoked that ready analogy to justify war: We don’t want to be another Neville Chamberlain with Hitler on the march (Saddam Hussein). Obviously, one of the most obvious present iterations of pining for the past is Donald Trump’s campaign slogan to “make America great again.”
In fact, let me put it more succinctly from Samet: WWII was a catastrophe, not a great American triumph story reminiscent of the comic books. Estimates vary, but 75 million people died in WWII, 40 million of them civilians. Six millions Jews were exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps. Which brings me to perhaps the most vital point Samet has to make in her book. Whether applied to WWII or Iraq and Afghanistan, consequence becomes original justification, which becomes original objective. In other words, America did not go to war to liberate the Nazi concentration camps and save Jews. But in the story of American triumphalism during WWII, that has become the “original objective.” It wasn’t until after the attack on Pearl Harbor that it become more widely reported in America that Nazi Germany was planning to murder all the Jews. In other words, when we think of WWII as the “Good War” where all Americans were unified around a singular cause, it just wasn’t the case, and again, the implications of that on the homefront and for more wars, can be dire.
Samet also argues that winning at war does not necessarily qualify somebody to be the “master of peace,” and yet, much to the consternation of non-interventionists (like myself) and isolationists, the United States has been the world’s policemen for more than 80 years now, resulting in various wars due to the jostling around atomic power in the Cold War.
Samet states, “There’s an irony in the fact that a country that has always been predicated on reinvention and looking to the future now seems to draw its greatest strength from an event that happened 80 years in the past.” But what’s also compelling is that 80 years later, the world created by that generation, primarily the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is under fresh, persistent attack from Trump and his acolytes. Indeed, over the last nine years, much has been written about regarding Trump’s rise to the national stage and presidency, and his acolytes. Why him? There are a variety of reasons at play, but if one were to encapsulate it into a singular phrase, Samet offers an apt phrase (which perhaps came from Terkel): “miserable peace.” A certain segment of Americans, primarily white males of a certain age, are miserable under peace and prosperity (and democracy) and thus, seek to have a larger than life, transformative experience they imbue the Greatest Generation with having had. Such is the folly of misguided and misplaced nostalgia coupled with potent amnesia.
Overall, I think as adults, and as citizens within a democracy, it is always of vital importance to understand and assess war without rose-tinted glasses, and moreover, we need to recognize the dangers and limitations of nostalgia for the past. Instead, we ought to take a page from Lincoln’s book, and respect the past while not being paralyzed by it. Arguably, 21st century America is defined by persistent paralysis owing to nostalgia for the past. May the mid-2020s start turning the ship toward the future.
Milam's Musings 