The Volunteers Join World War I: Inside a History Exhibition

Creating historical narratives through exhibitions always forces hot debates about what to show, how to reach visitors on their feet, and which cherished notions to cut from the final piece. The poster presentation on The Volunteers Join World War I, 1914-1919, looks inside the creative process of the exhibition that opened at the National World War Museum in October 11, 2014 in Kansas City and will travel to the Smithsonian in spring 2015. Backed by AFS Intercultural Programs, which began during the Great War as an organization of volunteer ambulance drivers, the exhibition opens up questions about American engagement abroad during the neutrality period. The poster session offers a glimpse of public history in action, as the host engages in conversation about the team process of finding sources, shaping narratives, and curating within spatial constraints.

What made some Americans eager to risk life and limb in a war President Wilson initially refused to fight? How did women fashion organizations from scratch and learn new skills, roles and pride as they delivered relief and medical services? What changed for volunteers engaged in private efforts when Uncle Sam went to war? And how did the small-scale operations of 1914 lay the groundwork for the landscape of international volunteering that emerged in the later 20^thcentury? The stories that derive from these experiences provide a lively insight into changing relations between citizens and the state. Fighter pilots such as Kiffin Rockwell and Eugene Bullard forged a legend of derring-do with a terrible death rate in the Escadrille Lafayette Flying Corps.  Ambulance drivers, who included many eager college men, as well as such famous characters as Ernest Hemmingway and John Dos Passos, rattled their hastily out-fitted Ford ambulances over cobblestoned Paris streets and cratered French roads. Nurses fought persistent infections from their work as wound-dressers.

A Herbert Hoover recalled by few Americans today, organized a vast food supply operation, called the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. In order to deliver these grain supplies in the German-occupied zone, he had to organize what one diplomat called a “piratical state of benevolence” flying its own neutral flag over the CRB ships. The Belgians returned the empty flour sacks embroidered with thanks and flags.

The curatorial team based in Europe, Boston and New York collaborated online to organize the show. What design scheme would best represent the small  black and white photographs which supplied the major materials? What exhibition strategies could show American public response to the stories volunteers sent back home, asking them to choose sides between the Allies and the Central Powers? What could track the path of volunteers who changed affiliations from private organizations to the American Expeditionary Force or from French Foreign Legion to Flying Corps, from Detroit workingman to solider in the Canadian American Legion?  Selected images taken from different stages of curating will reveal this work process. A computer PowerPoint showing examples of rejects should stimulate visitor commentary on how they would have done it themselves. (http://thevolunteers.afs.org)