Abstract
This chapter focuses on the work of three American reporters, Irvin S. Cobb, Floyd Gibbons, and Will Irwin, and discusses how these authors portrayed the American entry to the war. The reporters’ individual journeys to the front mirror a collective experience of war that may be interpreted as a national rite of passage. The three authors adapted the American travel writing tradition to explain the American intervention in the war. From the rite of separation in crossing the Atlantic to the first encounters of American troops in Europe, the three correspondents wove a narrative that linked together the individual and the collective to create an appealing picture of the First World War in the United States.
The information about Will Irwin included in this chapter, as well as some of the ideas discussed in relation to his work, have been published in my book chapter “Pure Propaganda? Will Irwin’s A Reporter at Armageddon: A Journey Beyond the Front” (Prieto 2016).
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Notes
- 1.
The British offensive at Arras proved how the British had learned from the mistakes they had made in the Battle of the Somme. The British and Canadian forces launched an attack on a scale almost as large as the one on the first day of the Somme, but British casualties were less than half of the ones they had suffered in that fateful offensive. In this attack, the Allied forces managed to penetrate the Hindenburg Line and more than five thousand Germans were made prisoners (Gilbert 2011, p. 422; Stevenson 2005, p. 176).
- 2.
Back in 1796 George Washington had explained in his “Farewell Address” that the United States and Europe were very remote territories and European interests were “essentially foreign to our concerns.” For this reason, Washington warned America against implicating itself in “the ordinary vicissitudes of [Europe’s] politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities” (American Daily Advertiser, 19 September 1796).
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- 4.
On 13 April 1917, only a week after the declaration of war, President Woodrow Wilson appointed the Committee on Public Information (CPI). The CPI was created to disseminate facts about the war, coordinate propaganda material, and to serve as the institutional liaison with newspapers. The investigative journalist George Creel was designated as the director of the Committee that he himself had suggested creating. At the beginning, Creel did not establish any institutional censorship; instead, he issued a brief mandatory code asking editors to censor themselves. Creel was concerned with the “creation of thought” (Axelrod 2009, p. 81). He conceived the war as “the fight for the minds of men” (Creel 1920, p. 3). The aim of the CPI was to initiate a campaign “to spread the word of America’s war aims and appeal for public support” (Creel in St. John III 2010, p. 40), and to educate Americans and others in the “gospel of Wilsonian democracy” (Axelrod 2009, p. 82), offering the image of a country going “to the rescue of civilization” (Mock and Larson 1939, p. 5).
- 5.
As Robert Zieger has argued, President Wilson combined “a potent mixture of Christian redemptionism, American exceptionalism, and determination to rescue European moral and cultural values from the folly of the Europeans” (2000, p. 1).
- 6.
In early 1918, after the Bolshevik government had signed an armistice with Germany, President Wilson wrote a declaration of America’s objectives in its war against the German Empire. He presented his objectives in his famous “Fourteen Points ” discourse, delivered in the US Congress on 8 January 1918. The last point claimed that “a general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike” (Wilson 1918). This discourse suddenly became the first great manifesto of the First World War. In it, Wilson summarised a liberal programme for peace, in opposition to the communist proposals (Ambrosius 1987; Link 1997, p. 628).
- 7.
Irvin S. Cobb was one of the five American correspondents who signed a document denying German atrocities in 1914—a disclaimer that was misinterpreted as a sign of weakness after his imprisonment by the German army. At the beginning of the war, the British had started a propaganda campaign in the United States in which many American writers were involved to support the Allied cause. Hundreds of pamphlets and books were published in the United States by famous British novelists and poets. Pro-Allied texts emphasised the stories of atrocities committed in “plucky little Belgium” by the invading armies and the Germans were presented as inhuman barbarians who had attacked a “tiny defenceless country” (Ross 1996, p. 47). American reporters on the Western Front, such as Richard Harding Davis or Alexander Powell, helped to create and consolidate this negative image of the Germans. To counterbalance this negative campaign against Germany, the Associated Press published on 7 September 1914 a report denying atrocities on the German side. In addition to Irvin S. Cobb, this document was signed by Harry Hausen , Rower Lewis , John T. McCutcheon , and James O’Donnell Bennett (Crozier 1959, pp. 41–42; Stephen 1916, p. 119).
- 8.
During the war, Cobb “carried his fair share of racial prejudice” (Dubbs 2017, p. 220), but he also wrote articles in which he highlighted the heroism of some of the African American men involved in the fighting (ibid.).
- 9.
It is written in epistolary journalism form, a genre that “assimilates traditions of journalistic writing and the discursive functionality of personal correspondence” (Quinn 2011, p. 33).
- 10.
The Tuscania was travelling to Europe in the same camouflaged convoy as Cobb’s ship. The German submarine U-77 torpedoed it on 5 February 1918 near the coast of Islay. It had over two thousand American soldiers on board, and more than two hundred American and thirty-five British soldiers were drowned as a result (Harpham 1976, pp. 285–288; Scott 2012, pp. 211–212).
- 11.
I have borrowed the expression from Shari Benstock’s essay “Landscapes of Desire: Edith Wharton and Europe” (1993).
- 12.
The events Gibbons records before encountering this second “Eden of beauty” were significant for the United States. The Germans had launched a major offensive on 21 March 1918 with the purpose of expelling the British from the Somme and getting the Aisne from the French in order to threat Paris. Although the American troops were not yet ready to fight on their own, the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, asked President Wilson to order Pershing to put some of the American troops in Europe into action. As a consequence, some of the American troops who were training on the continent joined the French and the British in their effort to halt the German offensive (Gilbert 2011, pp. 530–538; Stevenson 2005, pp. 408–410).
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
In the spring of 1918, a German offensive had brought Paris within the range of the enemy artillery. At the beginning of June the Americans to the South of the Marne joined in an attack that stopped the German advancement (Eisenhower 2001, pp. 135–161; Harries and Harries 1997, pp. 261–272; 311–321).
- 16.
In May 1917, the American government started issuing orders regarding censorship. The Preliminary Statement , published on 28 May 1917, issued a series of recommendations that the press needed to follow to comply with America’s interest in the war. It was complemented by the Espionage Bill , enacted on 15 June 1917, and the Sedition Act , passed on 18 May 1918, which censored and punished any activities suspicious of serving the enemy, violating America’s interest in the war, and constituting criticism towards the activities carried out by the American Forces. Additionally, in October 1917, the Trading with the Enemy Act “authorized censorship of all communications moving in or out of the United States, and provided that translations of newspaper or magazine articles published in foreign languages could be demanded by the post-office” (Emery et al. 1992, p. 257). An official censorship board was established in October 1917. When President Wilson declared war on Germany, American correspondents in France were freer to observe any actions of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) than correspondents of other Allied armies. They were allowed to enter lines without military escorts, although their reports were still subject to censorship. This job was carried out by the press section of the Military Intelligent Service, headed by the journalist Frederick Palmer , who was very familiar with the war, having been the American correspondent of the Associate Press at the British Front and also correspondent for Collier’s Magazine and Everybody’s Weekly in 1915 (Palmer 1915, p. vi). Palmer considered press accreditation a privilege, and also shared Creel’s opinion that the press had the duty to support the war and encourage military and civilian morale.
- 17.
The Battle of Caporetto , fought from 24 October 1917 and 19 November 1917, was one of the biggest successes of the Central Powers in late 1917. The Austro-Hungarian forces, reinforced by German units, made use of flamethrowers and poison gas to break up the Italian lines. It was a total disaster for the Italian Army that resulted in an important loss of territory and the capture of two hundred and ninety-four thousand of its soldiers (Stevenson 2005, pp. 377–379).
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Prieto, S. (2018). The American Rite of Passage. In: Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68594-6_5
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