Abstract
If the experience of war can ever really be called typical, then for a member of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), Private First Class Edward W. Miller had a fairly typical encounter with the First World War. He enlisted in June 1917 two months after the United States entered the conflict, but wasn’t shipped to France until April of the following year, where he fought in some of the war’s last major engagements at Château Thierry, Champagne-Marne and the Meuse Argonne. Although gassed on the Western Front, his injuries did not preclude him from serving in the US occupation forces in France at the war’s end; lingering health concerns did, however, briefly land him in a veterans’ hospital upon his return home. Nor was Miller’s military service the only experience that marked him as an average representative of his generation. Born somewhere in the Balkans, he had arrived in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century amidst the heaviest waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Like many young immigrant men (Miller was 22 when he enlisted in the AEF), he was eager to prove his loyalty to his adopted country by voluntarily returning to Europe — dressed in an American military uniform.
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Notes
William Pencak, For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989) is the best scholarly history of the Legion.
Susan A. Brewer, Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (eds), Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1.
My analysis extends what historian Patricia West, among others, calls the ‘domestication of history’; see Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins ofAmerica’s House Museums (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999);
Seth C. Bruggeman (ed.), Born in the U.S.A.: Birth, Commemoration, and American Public Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).
Nicole Eustace, ‘Emotion and Political Change’, in Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns (ed.), Doing Emotions History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014),163–183, here 172.
Richard J. Ellis, To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005).
For an analogous case, see Stephanie Olsen, Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen, 1880–1914 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014);
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). Wiebe’s iconic 1967 text suggests that the First World War put a halt to the search, but scholarship written in its wake argues that the interwar years continue it.
See e.g. Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and their Institutions, 1917–1933 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979);
Joseph M. Hawes, Children between the Wars: American Childhood, 1920–1940 (New York: Twayne, 1997). Joseph M. Hawes argues that this is also crucial in understanding youth.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (New York: Verso, 2006).
Susan A. Miller, Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
Tammy M. Proctor, Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009).
Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
On cultural conversations about the gang instinct, see Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Kriste Lindenmeyer, The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005).
Jane H. Hunter firmly established the worth of youth-edited school newspapers for access to young people’s self-created culture; see Jane H. Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
For siblings, see Leonore Davidoff, Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780–1920 (Oxford University Press, 2012);
C. Dallett Hemphill, Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History (Oxford University Press, 2011).
There is some debate in the literature over this. See David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983);
Kenneth B. Kidd, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) for varying degrees of fraternity among‘boy workers’.
Bob Olmstead, ‘What Democracy Means to Me’, The Cornhusker (9 June 1941), front page.
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© 2015 Susan A. Miller
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Miller, S.A. (2015). Feeling Like a Citizen: The American Legion’s Boys State Programme and the Promise of Americanism. In: Olsen, S. (eds) Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484840_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484840_9
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