VICTOR SCHMITT-BUSH
Assistant News Editor
Way back in the garden area of Fredonia’s Reed library, students, staff and a number of U.S. veterans joined together to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the war to end all wars. Appropriately titled “World War I Centennial: Ending War, Talking Peace,” the event, which happened last week, took place over two days.
The first day was a show-and-tell of sorts. All attendees were encouraged to walk up to the podium and share poems and excerpts from their favorite WWI era authors. The area was accompanied by an exhibit that displayed even more WWI era literature: a collection of works by the Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer Stefan Zweig.
Megan Howes, a senior journalism major, expressed to the audience what it means to her to come from a long line of service men and women. She also read “What the Thunder Said,” from T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland.
“I picked this verse because it talks about how one seemingly static thing can actually be seen in different ways, and if two things come together, another thing can be created in the process,” she said.
Fredonia’s Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Andy Karafa, also attended the event. He made it clear that he was pleased with the event, and thanked the organizers for putting it together. He then shared his poem, too.
“It’s called, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches,’” he said. “It was written by Isaac Rosenberg. He was born in 1890 and died while serving in WWI in 1918. The main character here is a rat, so the author imagines what men fighting in the trenches of WWI might have looked like from the perspective of a rodent.”
Perhaps what each poem had in common was a sense of disgust, terror and realism. Each author depicted the state of WWI as hell on earth and put together a piece of art intended to absolve its readers of antipathy.
On the second day, Brian Castner, a U.S. veteran, and two other well known WWI intellectuals each led separate presentations.
Distinguished author Christopher Capozzola, who wrote “Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen,” presented first.
Capozzola’s presentation was centered around the development of Uncle Sam and how this iconic figure established a culture of war in the U.S.
“The image first appeared on July 16, 1916, on the cover of Leslie’s Magazine underneath a heading that said, ‘What are you doing for preparedness?’ meaning you had to prepare in case the U.S. enters the first world war,” said Capozzola.
“If the government wasn’t going to [make people prepare for the war], then Americans were going to do it themselves by tapping into their traditions of volunteering in centers of society: schools, clubs, churches and workplaces. So in a sense, the U.S. involvement in WWI was done by the people that Uncle Sam was pointing to,” he continued. “This expansion of power from state to federal was something that Americans did themselves in their everyday institutions. The Selective Service Act was actually a compromise of sorts, even though viability to register was universal.”
The next speaker was Castner, who compared and contrasted the apocalyptic state of affairs of WWI that were brief in comparison to the “Forever Wars” we experience as Americans today.
“By ‘Forever War’ I mean the post 9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and many others that began in the early 2000s and still continue today,” said Castner. “You really need three things to make a forever war go, and that’s foreign soil, compliant citizenry and technological disparity between warring factions.”
According to Castner, fighting wars today is a lot different than it was back then.
“Public sentiment during WWI was supportive of the war, but not ignorant to it like we are today,” he said. “The reason why it ended was because the technology of each warring faction was equivalent. It was gruesome. It was the tech that made people say, ‘We will never be able to fight another war again.’”
“So, I think the lesson is that the forever war is only possible when it happens on someone else’s soil, when one faction has clear power over the other,” Castner concluded. “America is clearly an empire and we thrive off of colonialism. We might be uncomfortable admitting that, but that is the hard truth.”
The final speaker was U.S. veteran Ian Fishback, a Ph.D. student of philosophy at the University of Michigan. He finalized the panel discussion by looking at the contentious dispute between John Dewey’s pragmatism in relation to WWI, and Randolph Bourne’s argument against this philosophy.
Dewey posits that under democracy, diversity thrives.
“[Democratic principles] have epistemic value because all moral stakeholders have a voice,” he said. “When they have a voice, they can be heard in the system, and therefore end up contributing to finding better solutions that are more valuable to all citizens.”
According to Fishback, Dewey supports World War I “because he wants to see [a diverse democratic system] not only thrive in the U.S. but also be exported to the rest of the national community.”
Fishback explained that Bourne was entirely against Dewey’s point of view because war even on the homefront undermines all that democracy stands for. According to Bourne, citizens should not be required to offer their entire allegiance to the state. Wars should not be an exception in terms of promising its citizenry basic American freedoms and sovereignty.
According to Fishback, although America does act like an empire, the incentive in influencing other countries has changed.
“Instead of seeing things from the perspective of a nation, international affairs have shifted to an era where the main imperative is to influence societies to become democratic. We are moving into an era where war is fought to protect the rights of minority groups.”