The war story was sold, told, and understood as a love story, as well. Americans often cast World War I as a defense of traditional familial roles, women, and the home—all threatened not only by Germany’s assault on chivalric virtue but by domestic forces in politics and culture. This poster will document the resonance of such wartime cultural messages, moreover, with ordinary Americans through letters from soldiers to loved ones and back to doughboys in France. All of this served to make the horrific war palatable, even salutary, but also personal. Even (or especially) for those who opposed the war, family drama served as the narrative model as well, with antiwar people lamenting the disruption of domestic tranquility. In the end, however, attempts to frame the war story as a love story collapsed amid the realities of wartime death, familial separation, and moral breakdown at the front.
This poster presentation will document these changes before, during, and after United States entry into the war. Before 1917 Americans confronted news of Germany’s “rape of Belgium,” the killing of the British nurse Edith Cavell, and civilian deaths on the high seas—and thus heard calls for the United States to enter the war to defend womanhood. Propaganda posters would quickly take up this theme, with simian German villains hoisting knocked-out maidens beneath calls to enlist or buy war bonds. Meanwhile, some Americans believed that the push for woman suffrage and a spate of “sex novels” in popular culture were threatening traditional domestic respectability, and the war soon appeared to offer a chance to put things right. Anti-suffragists argued in newspaper articles that this was the time to “remasculinize” the country, with men in their proper protective roles in the military or government and women stoking the home fires. Thus visual culture, wartime novels, and some soldiers’ letters sentimentalized the separation of families as part of a broad chivalric drama. At the same time, antiwar culture mourned the potential destruction of families, most vividly in the song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.” By 1918, the conflation of war and love stories was proving hollow. Images of virtuous doughboys staying faithful to waiting war brides crashed up against the realities of venereal disease and prostitution in France. For thousands of families, the war brought painful separation and death, and after it mothers made state-sanctioned pilgrimages to the battlefields where their sons had fallen. In these and other ways, the war story eventually overwhelmed the love story.