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PLAYING ON UNCLE SAM'S TEAM: AMERICAN CHILDHOODS DURING WORLD WAR I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2018

Mischa Honeck
Mischa Honeck*
Affiliation:
Humboldt University of Berlin
*
email: [email protected]
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Abstract

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.

Type
Special Issue: Americans and WWI: 100 Years Later
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 677 - 690
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2018 

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References

NOTES

1 “Kills His Sister in Playing War,” Washington Post, Oct. 19, 1917. For similar incidents, see “Girl Playing War Shot in Eye with Air Gun,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 19, 1917; “Vermont Boy and New York Girl Killed Playing War,” Boston Daily Globe, Oct. 1917; “Brockton Boy Shot While Playing War with Chum,” ibid., Dec. 29, 1917; “Youth Kills Baby Brother,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 27, 1918.

2 Examples of the emerging field of research on the history of childhood and war are Marten, James, ed., Children and War: An Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Goodenough, Elizabeth and Immel, Andrea, eds., Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Honeck, Mischa and Marten, James, eds., War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar. For works focused on the United States, see Tuttle, William M., Daddy's Gone To War: The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Marten, James, ed., Children and Youth during the Civil War Era (New York: New York University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Gleason, Mona, “Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education,” Journal of the History of Education 45:4 (2016): 446–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 For works on children in World War I dealing with other national contexts, see Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, La guerre des enfants (1914–1918). Essai d'histoire culturelle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993)Google Scholar; Hämmerle, Christa, ed., Kindheit im Ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna: Böhlau, 1993)Google Scholar; Donson, Andrew, Youth in the Fatherless Land: Pedagogy, Authority, and Nationalism in Germany, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Kennedy, Rosie, The Children's War, Britain 1914–1918 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)Google Scholar.

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12 On “war pedgogy” in World War I Germany, see Donson, Andrew, Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

13 See MacLeod, David I., “Socializing American Youth to Be Citizen-Soldiers” in Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, eds. Boerneke, Manfred F., Chickering, Roger, and Förster, Stig (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 143–46Google Scholar.

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16 On the Anglo-American origins of the Boy Scouts, see Jordan, Benjamin R., Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment, 1910–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 17–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Honeck, Mischa, Our Frontier is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Capozzola, Christopher, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 George Creel quoted in Van Schaak, Eric, “The Division of Pictorial Publicity in World War I,” Design Issues 22:1 (Winter 2006): 33Google Scholar.

19 Markham, Edwin, Lindsey, Benjamin Barr, Creel, George et al. , Children in Bondage: A Complete and Careful Presentation of the Anxious Problem of Child Labor (New York: Hearst's International Library, 1914)Google Scholar.

20 My distinction of the victimized and patriotic child is loosely based on Donson, “Children and Youth” in International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 1914–1918, http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/children_and_youth (accessed June 1, 2017).

21 “Motherless, Fatherless, Starving—How Much to Save These Little Lives” (May 1917), http://www.loc. gov/pictures/collection/wwipos/item/2002708932/ (accessed June 6, 2017).

22 Briggs, Laura, “Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption,” Gender & History 15:2 (Aug. 2003): 179-200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 This image was first printed in the July 25, 1915, edition of Life.

24 U.S. Treasury Department, “Save Your Child from Autocracy and Poverty: Buy War Saving Stamps” (probably early 1918), http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/wwipos/item/94513692/ (accessed June 6, 2017).

25 U.S. Food Administration, “Little Americans, Do Your Bit: Eat Oatmeal” (May 1917), http://www.loc. gov/pictures/collection/wwipos/item/2002712335/ (accessed June 6, 2017).

26 On the importance of race in the evolution of modern concepts of childhood innocence, see Bernstein, Robin, Racial Innocence: Performing Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

27 See, for example, U.S. Committee on Public Information, “Lest We Perish: Campaign for $30,000,000, American Committee for Relief in the Near East” (undated, probably 1918), http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ collection/wwipos/item/98503175/ (accessed June 6, 2017).

28 See Cabanes, Bruno, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 249–51Google Scholar; and Sarah Miglio, “America's Sacred Duty: Near East Relief and the Armenian Crisis, 1915–1930” in Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports Online (2009), eds. Ken Rose and Erwin Levold, http://rockarch.org/publications/resrep/miglio.pdf (accessed June 6, 2017).

29 Macleod, , Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 253, 376Google Scholar.

30 For the BSA in World War I, see Jordan, Modern Manhood, 105–7. On the growth of Girl Scouting in the same period, see Proctor, Tammy M., Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Praeger, 2009), 28–32Google Scholar.

31 See Kent, Kathryn R., Making Girls into Women: American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 111–13Google Scholar.

32 On burning newspapers, see the photograph “Anti-German Feeling in US: Boy Scouts Burning the German Newspaper, Wächter&Anzeiger, in Brooklyn, Cleveland, Ohio,” 165-WW-68D-3, American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs, Record Group 165, National Archives, College Park, Maryland. On adults asking children to expose disloyal teachers, see Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 99. On the BSA's war garden program, see MacLeod, “Socializing American Youth,” 163.

33 Florence Woolston, “Billy and the World War,” New Republic 17 (Jan. 1919): 369–70.

34 “By the President of the United States: A Proclamation,” Boys’ Life (June 1919): 3.

35 U.S. Department of Labor, Reports of the Department of Labor, 1918 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 189–90Google Scholar.

36 Winthrop D. Lane, “Making the War Safe for Childhood: Delinquency in Wartime,” The Survey 41, Mar. 29, 1919, 452.

37 Brill quoted in Engelbrecht, H.C., Revolt Against War (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937), 190Google Scholar.

38 “Controversy of Boy Scouts Is Explained,” The Christian Science Monitor, Apr. 20, 1917.

39 Scout quoted in Peterson, Robert W., The Boy Scouts: An American Adventure (New York: American Heritage, 1984), 85Google Scholar.

40 See Oberdorfer, Don, Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great American Statesman and Diplomat (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 26Google Scholar.

41 See Lewis, David Levering, W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 352Google Scholar.

42 See Wittke, Carl, German-Americans and the World War: With Special Emphasis on Ohio's German-Language Press (Columbus, OH: J. S. Ozer, 1936), 145Google Scholar.

43 See Wüstenbecker, Katja, Deutsch-Amerikaner im Ersten Weltkrieg: US-Politik und nationale Identitäten im Mittleren Westen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), 207Google Scholar.

44 Hawes quoted in Dale Russakoff, “On Campus, It's the Children's Hour,” Washington Post, Nov. 13, 1998.