Western American Literature

Steven Trout’s study analyzing American memory of the First World War proves a much needed counterpart to Paul Fussell’s seminal The Great War and Modern Memory (1977) and to other works of expansion and revision such as Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (2004). Trout’s focus on “collective memory” provides important information about a conflict that left as many questions as casualties in its wake.

Trout rejects claims that the war has been forgotten and instead paints a picture of memory in flux, manipulated and manipulable. He unearths a plethora of narratives and interpretations that, he argues, led to a gap in American collective memory. The war is not so much forgotten as always confronting a void due to a lack of a stable, shared perspective. The efficacy of Trout’s argument becomes evident when we consider its applicability to the evolving stances taken by veteran’s leagues such as the American Legion as well as the fractured narratives of the Lost Generation. Trout maintains that the reason for this gap lay in the need to answer an unanswerable question—why?—a question made even more complex for Americans who went or sent their loved ones to fight a foreign conflict. Even as Trout uncovers diverse responses to the war, this unavoidable but unanswerable “why?” sustains readings of the war’s futility and waste.

Trout’s chapters range broadly in subject, beginning with the influence of veteran’s organizations, particularly the American Legion, before turning to public attempts at memorializing seen in the mass-produced statue Spirit of the American Doughboy as well as the enigmatic Unknown Soldier. He then analyzes artistic responses to the war, ranging from the modernist paintings of Horace Pippin—veteran of the famed “Harlem Hellfighters” regiment—to the etchings of Kerr Eby. In his concluding chapter, Trout contends that the posthumous saga of Quentin Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt’s youngest son) reveals America’s shifting perspective on the war, which began with feelings of democratic solidarity between [End Page 459] France and the United States and ended with a focus on immediate family and American exceptionalism that came to dominate memory after WWII.

The volume includes many points likely to interest scholars of the American West. Trout’s emphasis on American memory away from urban capitals provides a regional perspective on the war that includes communities in the Midwest and West. This regionalism appears in the American Expeditionary Force’s combat units, generally organized by geography, and in the prominence of the American Legion on local and national scales in the construction of war responses. Specifically, the Legion developed and maintained a narrative that emphasized robust masculinity acquired in the theater of war even as it grew increasingly isolationist politically. It thus used tropes that clearly stem from mythologies of the West and the frontier to endorse American exceptionalism. Trout’s picture of war memory also includes work by western modernists such as Hemingway and Cather, and midwestern painters Harvey Dunn and John Steuart Curry. Ultimately, the study will prove invaluable to scholars of modernism, the First World War, or war, memory, and mourning more generally.