Articulate. Brilliant. Fascinating. Incredible. A living legend.
Read what former students of Jefferson D. Futch III, professor emeritus of history at Washington and Lee University, have to say about him and you’ll soon get the idea that he was one legendary teacher. I’m grateful to him because he introduced me to a life-changing book.
Lexington, Virginia was panting-hot in September 1989. On the first day of my junior year as an exchange student at W&L, my roommates gasped as they watched me enter Newcomb Hall for my European History class. I took a seat, and was soon surrounded by dozens of guys who grabbed vintage ties from a box by the door and slung them around their necks. Our teacher, Dr. Futch, entered the classroom, looked out of his signature round horn-rimmed glasses, and said, “Gentlemen, we have a lady in our midst.” Talk about a way to begin my first day of coeducation.
The shy girl in the sailor dress soon lost her nervousness and gained an appreciative audience when she correctly answered a question about Queen Victoria. That launched a semester of fascinating discussions about everything from the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Otto von Bismarck to highlights from “Popes for Dopes,” the nickname for Dr. Futch’s course on the history of the Papacy. When the syllabus turned to World War I, Dr. Futch assigned Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.
Image may be NSFW.
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Named by the Modern Library as one of the 20th century’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, the book explores what the war was like for British soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front, how they got through that “troglodyte world,” and how they expressed their feelings about their no-man’s land experiences in poetry and literature. From the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen to the photo on the book’s cover, I was hooked.
“I came across this picture by sheer accident in the War Museum, and sensed that the boy’s expression was unmistakably ‘twentieth century,'” Fussell wrote in a new afterword prepared for a special Oxford University Press 25th anniversary edition of the book. “If anyone ever looked aware of being doomed to meaningless death, it is this boy.”
My fascination with the War to End All Wars didn’t stop at the end of the book. Machine guns, poisonous gas, trench warfare, the after-effects of the war – everything about it was different, and life in the century that promised tremendous progress and improvement would never be the same.
Two years later, I still couldn’t stop reading about the Great War, even when I was studying journalism at Ohio State University. When I learned about how the poster’s concise text, striking illustrations, design make a quick, but lasting impression as a form of mass communication, I thought about how Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, Howard Chandler Christy, Joseph Christian Leyendecker and other Great War poster artists worked much like journalists as they helped the Committee on Public Information mobilize American public opinion about the war. Choosing the subject for my thesis was easy: I explored how posters communicated essential information about World War I, instilled a sense of duty in Americans and shaped public opinion about it.
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Sure, We’ll Finish The Job, Ohio History Connection
Narrowing my focus to the image of women in British and American posters of the Great War, I analyzed dozens of posters, describing how the placement of figures, their attractiveness, expression, eye contact, pose, activity, and other details were used to relay the intended message. I discussed how graphic design techniques, symbolism, artistic traditions and language were employed to attract attention, appeal to emotions and evoke reactions in viewers. To provide context, I consulted photographs, researched archival documents, and undertook a terrific independent study on the literature of the Great War.
2017 marks the centennial of the United States’ involvement in World War I. To use the term that British soldiers used to express their thoughts about leaving the safety of their trenches to attack their enemy across open ground, I’m “over the top” about all the new books, exhibitions and special programs about the Great War that are taking place this year. Here are a few of my favorites.
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Keep the Hun Out!, Billy Ireland, Ohio History Connection
Susan Talbot-Stanaway, retired director of the Zanesville Museum of Art, is traveling Ohio to talk about World War I posters from the perspective of Ohio history, sharing archival photos and fascinating facts about the artists who created them, their role in the war effort, and and their lasting importance in American culture. When I heard her at the Westerville Public Library this spring, this fellow poster-lover shared all sorts of interesting trivia. James Montgomery Flagg painted a life-sized version of his “Tell That to the Marines” poster on the New York Public Library steps in August 1918. Gerrit Benecker immortalized a Cleveland factory worker in his “Sure We’ll Finish the Job” poster; in fact, a 24-sheet billboard of the image hung next to the Ohio Statehouse. A snowball-throwing game called “Swap the Hohenzollerns & Ring the Bell for Our War Chest” was played on the Statehouse grounds. Maginel Wright Enright, Frank Lloyd Wright’s sister, illustrated books and posters for the war effort. And my old friend Billy Ireland, cartoonist for The Columbus Dispatch, created “Keep the Hun Out,” a poster for war savings stamps, and “They Took My Daddy And This From Me,” a poster immortalizing civilian mistreatment when Germany invaded and occupied Belgium. Susan is helping to create a database of the 3,000 World War I posters in the Ohio History Connection’s collection, which is housed in State Archives Series 2729 AV: World War I Posters Collection.
“Tommies,” a BBC radio drama series, is being broadcast over a four-year period through Autumn 2018, the same length of time as the Great War itself. Named after the nickname for British World War I soldiers, “Tommies” is based on actual war diaries and follows the lives of those who experienced the war, telling their stories exactly 100 years ago to the day. Learn more about it on this episode of the BBC History Extra podcast.
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True Blue (1919), The Library Company of Philadelphia
Together We Win: The Philadelphia Homefront During the First World War, an exhibition I saw at the Library Company of Philadelphia in April, displayed books, posters, photographs, audio clips of World War I-era music, scrapbooks and other ephemera illustrating the contributions that Philadelphians made in supporting the war effort. The exhibition website features recordings and sheet music from World War I, images of posters and recipes for apple brown betty, sweet potato gingerbread and bean loaf from wartime cookbooks in the collection.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has developed a website and a free “Remembering WWI” app for exploring World War I-related objects, photos and digitized archival film footage in its collection.
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World War I gas mask, Ohio History Connection
World War I and the Visual Arts, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through January 7, 2018, focuses on how artists reacted to and represented the war. Closer to home, Mobilize for War: American Recruiting Posters of World War I is an Ohio Statehouse exhibit continuing through October 21. A World War I display at the Ohio History Connection presents gas masks, military uniforms, helmets, weapons, patriotic pins, ephemera and souvenirs American soldiers brought home from Europe.
To commemorate the World War I centennial, Erik Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania and Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear, by Lindsay Mattick, are this year’s Westerville Reads selections. The Westerville Public Library is offering several complementary programs this fall, including cemetery tours, reader’s theater, history programs and a visit from Erik Larson, who will discuss his approach to writing narrative nonfiction.
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Walter Phalor’s World War I uniform, Westerville Public Library Local History Center
Over There: A World War I Exhibit, in the Westerville Public Library’s Local History Center, presents artifacts such as the uniform jacket Westerville resident Walter Phalor wore while serving in France and Germany and masks to protect the horses which transported supplies and messages to the front from poison gas attacks. A public information notice titled “Avoid Worry, Fear and Fatigue” documents the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, which caused 50 million fatalities worldwide. Take home a reproduction of a World War I-era postcard from its collection as a souvenir of the exhibit.
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World War I soldier doll, Ohio History Connection
If you’d like some Great War-inspired reading, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, are World War I-inspired classics. Check out World War I and America: Told by the Americans Who Lived It, by A. Scott Berg; Working for Victory?: Images of Women in the First World War, 1914-1918, by Diana Condell and Jean Liddiard; Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, by Stanley Weintraub; Christmas in the Trenches, by John McCutcheon; and War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo, as well as the movie it inspired. Regeneration, by Pat Barker, explores the psychological effects of World War I and their treatments. World War I Remembered, a National Park Service publication edited by Robert J. Dalessandro and Robert K. Sutton, is a new collection of essays by World War I scholars about the contributions the United States made to the Allies’ victory. Wake Up, America!: World War I and the American Poster, by Walton Rawls, and Posters of the First World War, by Maurice Rickards, will always take up prime real estate on my bookcase.