Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 5: U-Z
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
WORLD CUPENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
181
McKinzie, Richard D. The New Deal for Artists. Princeton, New
Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1973.
O’Connor, Francis V., editor. Art for the Millions: Essays from the
1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art
Project. Greenwich, Connecticut, New York Graphic Society, 1973.
Park, Marlene, and Gerald E. Markowitz. Democratic Vistas: Post
Offices and Public Art in the New Deal. Philadelphia, Temple
University Press, 1984.
World Cup
The World Cup of football, or soccer as the game is called in the
United States, is the most popular sporting event in the world. For two
years, teams representing virtually every country in the world com-
pete for the right to play in the summer tournament, which has been
Members of the U.S. National Team Alexi Lalas (right) and Cobi Jones (foreground) play for the World Cup.
staged in different countries every four years since 1930. In front of a
worldwide television audience, the winners claim the title of the best
soccer team in the world. Although the U.S. team reached the semi-
finals of the tournament in its inaugural year, the World Cup and
soccer have had little impact on American popular culture.
In the late nineteenth century soccer became a leading spectator
sport in many major countries. Rules of the game were systematized,
clubs were formed, and leagues were established. In 1900, the
Olympic Games introduced soccer as one of its sports. In 1904,
Frenchman Jules Rimet assumed the presidency of the newly created
world governing body of soccer, the Federation Internationale de
Football Associations (FIFA), with the intention of creating an
international soccer tournament. However, the competition did not
materialize for more than twenty years because of conflict among
national federations over whether to allow only amateur players to
compete, as in the Olympic Games, or to accept professional players,
who were becoming more prevalent in Europe. Finally, FIFA agreed
to include professional players and to hold the tournament every four
years, alternating with the Olympic Games.
WORLD SERIES ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
182
FIFA selected Uruguay to host the first ever World Cup finals in
1930. Uruguay was chosen partly based on the country’s dominance
in capturing gold medals in the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Games and
partly because no other viable candidate came forward. Only thirteen
teams, including the USA, competed in the very first World Cup
tournament. Belgium, France, Romania, and Yugoslavia were the
only Europeans to enter because of the three weeks it took to
get to Uruguay by boat. The hosts beat Argentina 4-2 in the fi-
nal in Montevideo to become the first winners of the FIFA
world championship.
Although the USA has never won the tournament, between 1930
and 1998 it qualified six times, and its best finish was the semi-final in
1930. Soccer has, however, always played a shadowy existence in
American popular culture. In the late nineteenth century, immigrants
from Europe formed soccer clubs and organized into local leagues,
but as soccer flourished in Europe, U.S. political and business elites
sought to create their own national identity in a land of immigrants by
promoting American sports like baseball. Soccer received no state
support and was played in few U.S. colleges or schools. As Ameri-
canization movements increased at the turn of the century, more
pressure was put on foreigners to assimilate by adopting American
games such as baseball or gridiron football. Thus, the U.S. teams that
competed in the World Cups of 1930, 1934, and 1950 consisted
largely of immigrant players.
After World War II, soccer became the most popular sport on the
planet. The sport produced international stars of the caliber of the
Brazilian Pele and great teams like Brazil—which won the World
Cup four times between 1958 and 1994—Argentina, Germany, and
Italy. FIFA increased the number of teams competing in the World
Cup from its original thirteen participants in 1930 to sixteen in 1958
and to twenty-four in 1982. Because of Cold War nationalism and the
increase in television coverage of U.S. sports, however, the American
public remained uninterested in soccer. In the 1950s baseball was still
supreme, American football began its rise to prominence, and in the
1960s ice hockey and basketball captured a national television
audience. Soccer, with its continuous forty-five minutes of play, was
less suitable for commercial television and held little interest for the
major television networks. Between 1950 and 1990, the USA never
qualified for the World Cup finals. In the 1970s the North American
Soccer League operated, but this effort soon collapsed.
After the 1970s, however, the World Cup and soccer in general
gained popularity with some sections of the American population.
Relying more on skill than size or strength, soccer became a popular
participatory sport amongst many American women and youth. In
1991 the USA women’s team won the first ever FIFA Women’s
World Cup in China with a 2-1 win over Norway. At the same time,
FIFA, commercial sponsors, and television networks saw America as
the last major market to be conquered by soccer. As a result, FIFA
selected the United States to stage the World Cup finals for the first
time in 1994. The tournament was a great success as it gained national
television coverage and was played in packed stadiums, including
95,000 for the final in Los Angeles between Italy and the eventual
winners, Brazil. Subsequently, Major League Soccer was formed in
America and began its first season in 1996. It remains to be seen
whether this new soccer league can gain the attention of the American
public and whether the United States can produce a team talented
enough to mount a serious challenge for the World Cup.
—John F. Lyons
F
URTHER READING:
Granville, Brian. The History of the World Cup. London, Faber and
Faber, 1980.
Murray, Bill. Football: A History of the World Game. London, Scolar
Press, 1994.
Robinson, John. The FIFA World Cup 1930-1986. Grimsby, Marks-
man, 1986.
World Series
Throughout much of the twentieth century, the annual World
Series baseball championship has consistently set standards for well-
staged national sporting scenarios, earning its reputation as the ‘‘Fall
Classic.’’ There have been heroes, villains, fools, and unknowns who
have stolen the spotlight from ‘‘superstars.’’
The term ‘‘World Series’’ was first coined for a nine-game series
between the Boston Pilgrims and the Pittsburgh Pirates, an informal
outgrowth of a 1903 ‘‘peace treaty’’ signed between the two compet-
ing ‘‘major’’ baseball leagues, the 27-year-old National League
(N.L.) and the upstart 2-year-old American League (A.L.). The A.L.
champion Pilgrims (later called the Red Sox) won, five games to
three, to surprisingly good crowds and gate receipts. Yet the follow-
ing year, manager John McGraw and owner John Brush of the
runaway National League champion New York Giants refused to face
the repeating Boston club, stating publicly that such a meeting was
beneath the quality of their team, which showcased future Hall of
Fame pitcher, Christy Mathewson. A less publicized reason, howev-
er, was that they had objected to the growing popularity of the new
A.L. franchise in New York City, the Highlanders (soon to be known
as the Yankees).
Public and press outcry was so great against the Giants that
Brush relented in 1905 and proposed a seven-game World Series as a
mandatory annual event. The Giants won easily that year (with
Mathewson pitching the first three of his still-standing record four
Series shutouts), but would not prove to be as transcendent as Brush
and McGraw believed, for they failed to win another Series until
1921. A worse fate awaited the Chicago Cubs, another early dominat-
ing N.L. team. After winning Series in 1907 and 1908, they never won
again, and never even reached another Series after 1945. Starting in
1910, A.L. teams won eight out of the next ten Series, establishing an
edge over the N.L. that they have yet to relinquish.
The World Series soon gained formal acceptance, with President
Woodrow Wilson attending the second game of the 1915 Boston Red
Sox-Philadelphia Phillies Series. The year 1915 also marked the
Series debut of Boston pitcher George Herman ‘‘Babe’’ Ruth. Ruth
set a Series record of 29 2/3 scoreless innings pitched, spanning Red
Sox Series Championships in 1916 and 1918. The next year, after
converting Ruth into an outfielder and watching him shatter all
previous home run (and league attendance) records, Red Sox owner
Harry Frazee sold the Babe to the New York Yankees for $100,000
and a $350,000 loan to cover one of his Broadway shows. For Boston
fans, thus was cast the ‘‘Curse of the Bambino’’—after winning four
Series in the decade, the Red Sox, like the Cubs, never won a Series
again. The Yankees would be another story.
In 1919, the World Series endured its worst scandal. Many
players had long felt the owners were denying them their fair share of
WORLD SERIESENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
183
Frankie Frisch of the New York Giants in action during the 1922 World Series.
club profits, and in no more obvious instance than in the World Series,
where the triumphant owners were taking in record receipts and were
rumored to have sold tickets to scalpers to make even more. The
owners countered with rumors of their own, to the effect that players
were being bribed to throw games by professional gamblers. Tensions
had even precipitated a brief player’s strike before the fifth game of
the Red Sox-Cubs Series in 1918, but the worst was yet to come.
Questionable betting patterns on the 1919 Series, in which the
Cincinnati Reds upset the Chicago White Sox, prompted a grand jury
investigation. In 1920 eight White Sox players were indicted for
taking bribes. Among them was ‘‘Shoeless Joe’’ Jackson, the star
who was confronted on the courtroom steps by a young fan with the
soon-to-be-famous line, ‘‘Say it ain’t so, Joe!’’ The eight players
were ultimately acquitted in court, but as a result of what was now
known as the ‘‘Black Sox’’ scandal, were subsequently banned from
baseball for life in 1921. The rather draconian measure was enacted
by the Baseball Commissioner, a post newly created by the owners in
order to quickly restore baseball’s image as well as maintain their own
authority over the players.
The World Series not only bounced back in the 1920s, but came
to form the centerpiece of a new era of popularity and stability for
baseball. Key factors were the rise of the New York Yankees and the
coinciding development of radio as a mass medium. John McGraw’s
Giants had returned to the World Series in 1921 to find they were in
the first of 13 ‘‘Subway Series,’’ facing their co-tenants at the Polo
Grounds, the Yankees, who now had the biggest star in sports, Babe
Ruth. In the first of their 29 Series appearances over the next 44 years,
the Yankees bowed to McGraw’s veteran club. McGraw’s pitchers
kept throwing low curve balls to Ruth in 1922 as well, allowing the
Giants to sweep the first World Series to be broadcast by radio (the
announcer was Grantland Rice) and the last Series triumph for
their manager.
In 1923, Yankee Stadium was completed across the Harlem
River in the Bronx, to be christened ‘‘the house that Ruth built’’ as all
previous league attendance records were smashed. Ruth hit three
homers in that year’s rematch with the Giants, bringing the Yankees
their first of 20 Series victories. By their 1927 sweep, which was also
the first Series broadcast coast-to-coast, they had become America’s
team, setting a standard of excellence that McGraw and his Giants had
never quite achieved, and they maintained a stranglehold on money
and talent that most of the teams in the rest of the country could only
admire from afar. All knew, however, that a victory over the Yankees
in the Series would assure their place in the annals of baseball. Such
was the case when grizzled pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander
braved the Yankees ‘‘Murderer’s Row’’ to preserve a 1926 Series
victory for the St. Louis Cardinals, a feat later to be immortalized on
film (with Ronald Reagan playing Alexander).
On through the Great Depression and World War II, radio
provided the yearly vignettes about players both rough-edged (‘‘Pep-
per’’ Martin) and refined (Joe DiMaggio) that would cheer millions of
Americans. However, one episode stood out particularly during this
period. In the 1932 Cubs-Yankees series, the faltering Babe Ruth,
brushing off ancestral slurs from the Cub bench and the hostile crowd
at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, paused to point to the centerfield bleach-
ers. He soon followed with his 15th and last World Series home run.
The Yankees went on to sweep the Series, but the ‘‘called shot’’ is
what is still remembered and discussed today.
The climax of World War II brought with it the appearance of
television and the breaking of the unofficial color line in baseball with
Brooklyn Dodger star Jackie Robinson. The postwar years also
marked the period of greatest dominance for the Yankees, who
appeared in 15 of 18 Series through 1964, winning 10 (including 5 in a
row between 1949 and 1953) mostly with manager Casey Stengel and
WORLD TRADE CENTER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
184
new stars Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford. The phrase
‘‘wait ’til next year’’ was made famous by Brooklyn fans as their
‘‘Bums’’ lost five Series to the Yankees before winning in 1955, their
only Series championship before they relocated with the Giants three
years later to California. Also in 1955, the Most Valuable Player
Award was initiated, won first by Johnny Podres of the Dodgers.
Many call this baseball’s and the Series’ ‘‘golden era.’’ The many
highlights from this period include Willie Mays’ incredible over-the-
shoulder catch in his Giants’ sweep of the Cleveland Indians in 1954,
Yankee Don Larsen’s perfect game over the Dodgers in 1956, and
Pittsburgh Pirate Bill Mazeroski’s Series-winning home run in 1960.
A revamping of baseball’s amateur draft rules, the sharing of
network broadcast revenues among all franchises, and internal tur-
moil eventually restored mortality to the Yankees, and after 1964 they
failed to appear in the post-season for 12 years. Apart from the
flamboyant, mustachioed ‘‘Swinging’’ Oakland A’s of 1972 to 1974,
no team would again win more than two Series in a row. The advent of
free agency allowed the players to get even (financially) with the
owners, and exploding player salaries and bidding wars from the mid
1970s onward added some of the roster unpredictability of the early
days to the game. As television ratings came to be regarded as a
measure of success, the Series encountered increasingly stiff compe-
tition from the National Basketball Association championship, foot-
ball’s Super Bowl, and even its own playoff system, created in 1969.
Yet the Series has persevered, adding more classic moments for each
generation: Carleton Fisk waving his homer fair in the sixth game of
the 1975 Red Sox-Reds Series; Reggie Jackson hitting three homers
on three pitches off three different pitchers in the sixth game of the
1977 Yankees-Dodgers Series, the New York crowd chanting ‘‘Reg-
gie!’’; The Curse of the Bambino willing New York Met Mookie
Wilson’s grounder through Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner’s legs
in 1986; pinch-hitter Kirk Gibson homering off ‘‘closer’’ Dennis
Eckersley to win the first game of the 1988 Dodgers-A’s Series.
Continuing animosity between the owners and players’ union in
1994 caused what even two World Wars could not: the cancellation of
the World Series, as the result of a strike. Through the efforts of many,
including President Bill Clinton, the two sides declared a truce and the
season and Series were resumed in 1995. Well played (and watched)
seven-game Series in 1996 and 1997 at least temporarily silenced the
doomsayers predicting the coming end of the World Series as a
‘‘marquee event.’’ For day-to-day sustained interest, capping a six-
month-long season’s endeavors, it is still hard to imagine any other
event in sports ever surpassing the intensity of World Series
competitive drama.
—C. Kenyon Silvey
F
URTHER READING:
Schoor, Gene. The History of the World Series. New York, William
Morrow & Co., 1990.
Devaney, John, and Burt Goldblatt. The World Series: The Complete
Pictorial History. New York, Rand McNally & Co., 1972.
Boswell, Thomas. How Life Imitates the World Series. New York,
Doubleday & Co., 1982.
Schiffer, Don, editor. World Series Encyclopedia. New York, Tho-
mas Nelson & Sons, 1961.
World Trade Center
The two massive buildings of the World Trade Center are the
tallest structures on Manhattan Island. The twin towers designed by
Minoru Yamasaki and Associates in the early 1970s stand 1,350 feet,
surpassing the Empire State Building by 100 feet, but the World
Trade Center’s faceless Modernist aesthetic lacks the character that
has made its predecessor an enduring urban landmark. After a run of
initial publicity, and a prominent appearance in the 1976 remake of
the film King Kong, the World Trade Center began to fade into the
urban fabric, failing to become the symbol of New York City that its
developers had hoped. It has, however, become an icon of corporate
America to some discontented groups. In February, 1993, one of the
towers was bombed by Islamic terrorists attempting to strike a blow at
the heart of American society. Amazingly, the building survived with
no structural damage.
—Dale Allen Gyure
F
URTHER READING:
Douglas, George H. Skyscrapers: A Social History of the Very Tall
Building in America. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London,
McFarland & Company, Inc., 1996.
Goldberger, Paul. The Skyscraper. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
World War I
The Great War (World War I), fought between 1914 and 1918,
was one of the most decisive events of the twentieth century. The
political and economic catastrophes in its wake led to another, even
greater conflict from 1939 to 1945, leading some historians to view
the two World Wars as aspects of the same struggle, separated by an
uneasy truce in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the ethnic and national-
identity conflicts left unresolved at the Versailles peace conference of
1919 are still sources of tension and open hostility in the Balkans. It
was in that fractious region of eastern Europe that World War I began
when Serbian nationalists assassinated the heir to the throne of
Austria-Hungary in the city of Sarajevo. As a total war, World War I
required the unlimited commitment of all the resources of each
warring society. Governments were forced to allocate human and
natural resources, set economic priorities, and take measures to
ensure the full cooperation of their citizens. Some societies cracked
under the pressure. Monarchies collapsed in Russia, Germany, and
Austria-Hungary. Even the victors, especially France and Belgium,
were deeply scarred. The human sacrifices were appalling; the
economic cost was overwhelming. World War I marked the decisive
end of the old order in Europe, which, except for the Crimean War and
the Franco-Prussian War and a few minor skirmishes, seemed to have
weathered a century of relative peace after the Napoleonic wars that
had ended exactly 100 years earlier.
The outbreak of the war had at first been greeted with jingoistic
enthusiasm. It was not until the combatants experienced a tremendous
loss of life in the trenches on the western front that this view was
shattered. By the end of the war, pessimism and disillusion were
endemic. For many in the West, the war denied the notion of progress.
The same science and technology that had dazzled the nineteenth
WORLD WAR IENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
185
Soldiers in a foxhole during World War I.
century with advances in medicine, communication, and transporta-
tion had produced poison gas, machine guns, and terror weapons. The
Great War’s legacy would include a deep pessimism, expressed in
many forms, including antiwar literature that would be translated to
the screen in the form of popular film.
World War I began when Serbian nationalists assassinated
Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-
Hungary. Austria’s attack upon Serbia on July 28 led to war with her
protector, Russia. Prewar alliances assured that Germany would
declare war on Russia. When the French announced their intention to
honor their commitments to Russia, Germany declared war on
France. As the German armies passed through neutral Belgium to get
at France, Britain declared war on Germany. Within a week of
Austria’s attack upon Serbia, the other four great European powers
had gone to war over issues that few truly understood, or indeed, cared
about. They seemed to have been swept along by their alliances in an
inevitable cascade of falling dominos over which humans had
little control.
On the Western front, the German armies smashed through
Belgium and into France, where they were halted 25 miles north of
Paris. Both armies tried to get around the other in a ‘‘race to the sea.’’
When they failed, the exhausted armies dug defensive positions. Two
lines of trenches, six to eight feet deep, zigzagged across northern
France, from the Swiss border to the English Channel. The distance
between the Allied trenches and those of the Germans depended upon
the terrain, and ranged from 150 yards in Flanders to 500 yards at
Cambrai. The great irony of warfare in the industrial age was that
modern weapons forced the armies to live below ground and use
periscopes to observe the other side. Steps in the sides of the trenches
were used as platforms for firing at the enemy. The trench soldiers
slept in sleeping holes dug into the sides of the trenches, where they
suffered from rain, cold, poor sanitary facilities, lice, flies, trench
foot, and a constant stench. Rats as big as small dogs fed on the dead.
Of the casualties on the Western front, 50 percent were directly
attributable to conditions in the trenches.
In 1916, the major efforts to break the stalemate came at Verdun,
and on the Somme river. The Germans decided to attack Verdun, an
historic city they knew the French would defend at all costs. The two
sides fired more than 40 million artillery shells into a narrow front of
less than 10 miles. When the firing ceased after 302 days, each side
had suffered half a million casualties, with more than one hundred
thousand dead. To relieve Verdun, the British opened an offensive on
WORLD WAR I ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
186
the Somme. An artillery bombardment of a million and a half shells
was supposed to decimate the German positions. When the British
army went ‘‘over the top’’ on July 1, however, they were cut down by
German machine guns. On the first day of battle on the Somme, the
British suffered 60,000 casualties, including 20,000 dead. After
gaining five miles of territory, at the cost of 420,000 casualties, the
British halted the offensive on November 13.
When the war began, the common assumption was that it would
be over within six months. In the prewar years, many seemingly
perceptive writers had written that modern economies were too
integrated to accept a long war. There was also a general ignorance
about what war in the industrial age would be like. There had not been
a general European war since the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in
1815. Bourgeois middle class life seemed boring and lacking in
adventure. When World War I began, the armies marched to war with
enthusiastic support. Intellectuals signed manifestos supporting the
war. Sigmund Freud offered ‘‘all his libido to Austria-Hungary.’’
Young men literally raced to the recruiting centers to sign up so they
could be sure of getting into combat before the war was over. Fired by
patriotism, and martial values of honor and glory, they were the first
to be mowed down. In ‘‘From 1914,’’ Rupert Brooke, the English
poet, expressed his belief that his death in battle would sanctify a
‘‘foreign field’’ as ‘‘for ever England.’’ The most popular poem of
the war, John McCrae’s ‘‘In Flanders Fields’’ appeared anonymously
in Punch in December 1915. The poem may describe how ‘‘the
poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row,’’ but as Paul Fussell
writes, the poem ends with ‘‘recruiting-poster rhetoric’’ demanding
that others pick up the torch and not ‘‘break faith with us who die.’’
These viewpoints changed with the reality of mass death and stale-
mate. Fussell observes that Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and
Siegfried Sassoon came to an image of the war as lasting forever.
Trench warfare, in which neither side could gain the advantage,
regardless of their courage, honor, and valor, suggested that humans
had lost control of their history. Indeed, what did courage, honor and
valor have to do with modern war? In 1924, the German expressionist
painter Otto Dix wrote thus of his trench experiences: ‘‘Lice, rats,
barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood,
liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel; that is
what war is. It is the work of the devil.’’
To raise the large armies needed to continue the struggle,
governments turned to the use of posters. The British Parliamentary
Recruitment Committee commissioned a poster featuring Lord
Kitchener’s head and finger pointing at the viewer. The caption read
‘‘Your Country Wants You.’’ As enlistments declined, the emphasis
shifted to shaming those healthy young men still in Britain. The
message was blunt in the poster ‘‘Women of Britain say, GO.’’ A
more subtle, but perhaps as effective, message was expressed in the
British poster showing a little girl sitting on her father’s knee, with an
open book in her lap. The writing at the bottom of the poster asked the
question, ‘‘Daddy, what did You do in the Great War?’’ At the
father’s feet was a little boy playing with a toy army and about to place
a new soldier in the ranks. The Committee would eventually commis-
sion 100 different posters, some of which were published in lots of
40,000. It is estimated that these posters generated one-quarter of all
British enlistments. While most conscientious objectors accepted
noncombatant alternatives, a hard core of 1500 refused to accept any
position that indirectly supported the war. They were sent to prison
where they suffered brutal treatment—70 of them died there. Poster
art certainly contributed to this view that in time of war, a man’s place
was in uniform.
The failure of the armies to achieve success led each side to seek
new allies, open new fronts, resort to new military technologies, and
engage in new forms of warfare. In 1915, Italy joined the Allies, and
new fronts against the Austrians were opened in the Swiss Alps and
on the Izonzo River. In the same year, the British opened a new front
at Gallipoli, but, after nearly a year of being pinned down on the
beaches by Turkish guns, were forced to withdraw. The Germans
introduced gas warfare in 1915; the British introduced the tank in
1916. The romantic nature of air combat yielded to a more deadly
form as machine guns were added to fighter aircraft. Germans
bombed British cities; the British bombed German cities. The British
mined German harbors and blockaded German ports; Germany
responded with unrestricted submarine warfare. In the face of Ameri-
can protests, following the sinking of the Lusitania, the Germans
suspended their attacks in 1915.
In Germany, general rationing went into effect in 1916. The
winter of 1916-1917, known as the ‘‘turnip winter,’’ was particularly
difficult. Bread riots, wage strikes, and a burgeoning black market
that separated rich and poor threatened support for the war. There
were also demands for political reform as a condition for continued
support. In January 1917, the German government made the fateful
decision to return to unrestricted submarine warfare with the full
knowledge this could lead to war with the United States. The German
decision was predicated upon the belief that Britain could be starved
out of the war before the United States could train a large army and
send it to Europe.
Up to this point, the United States had been officially neutral
during the war, keeping with its long tradition of avoiding ‘‘foreign
entanglements.’’ By 1917, however, its sympathies and economic
interests had shifted to the allied side. British propaganda had been
highly effective in accusing Germans of atrocities in Belgium.
President Woodrow Wilson resisted going to war because he feared
what it would do to the progressive reforms of his administration, and
that war would release ugly patriotic excesses that would be difficult
to control. His hand was forced by the sinking of American merchant
ships and the Zimmerman telegram suggesting that in return for a
successful alliance, Germany would aid Mexico in its reacquisition of
Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico. Finally, Congress declared war on
Germany on April 6, 1917, a move that Wilson promised would
‘‘make the world safe for democracy.’’
To raise a mighty army to fight in Europe, the American
government was forced to resort to locally supervised conscription.
Unfortunately, these local boards often lacked objectivity. Not only
was preference on exemptions given to family and friends, but
African Americans were drafted in disproportionate numbers, and
conscientious objectors without religious affiliations were either
drafted or sent to prison. The government sought to encourage
enlistments and discourage draft resisters by using British posters as a
model. The Kitchener poster was deemed to be so effective that
Americans substituted Uncle Sam’s head, and included the same
caption ‘‘I Want You.’’ The power of shame was also evident in the
American poster that featured a young women dressed in sailor’s
uniform with the caption, ‘‘Gee, I Wish I Were a Man, I’d Join
the Navy.’’
By 1917, all of the major belligerents had begun to regulate their
industries and agriculture, borrow money to finance the war, ration
food, and employ women in areas of the economy where they had not
before worked. They also shaped consent for their policies and
discouraged dissent. The War Industries Board, headed by Bernard
Baruch, regulated American industries and set priorities. The Fuel
WORLD WAR IENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
187
Administration increased coal production by one-third and cam-
paigned for heatless Mondays and gasless Sundays. The American
Food Administration’s appeal for food conservation included wheatless
Mondays and Wednesdays, meatless Tuesdays, and porkless Thurs-
days and Saturdays. This voluntary conservation worked to such an
extent that America was able to feed her armies, and increase food
exports to allies by one third without having to resort to rationing.
Before radio and television, with film still in its infancy, the poster
was a highly effective method of generating support. Posters were
used to inspire industrial effort, urge citizens to conserve needed
materials, and in general, to support the war effort. Posters were also
used extensively to gain support for the purchase of war bonds. While
all the nations did this, none matched the American effort in this
regard. For the third Liberty Loan drive, nine million posters
were produced.
While voluntary sacrifices and poster art made everyone feel
they were part of the war effort, they tended to generate emotional
patriotic fervor. In America, this reached heights of absurdity. High
schools stopped teaching German, frankfurters became hot dogs, and
orchestras stopped playing Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven. None of
this was humorous to German Americans, who were attacked verbal-
ly and physically. These attacks seemed to have the support of the
American government. The Committee of Public Information, direct-
ed by George Creel, not only kept the public informed about war news
through films and pamphlets, but sent out 75,000 speakers to church-
es, schools, and movie theatres, where they lectured on war aims and
German atrocities. The Post Office denied mail delivery to ‘‘radical,’’
‘‘socialist,’’ and foreign language newspapers and periodicals. The
May 1918 Sedition Act made it a crime to speak or publish anything
disloyal. This could be and was used against those questioning
American participation in the war, the nation’s war aims, and how it
managed the war effort. Robert Goldstein, a Hollywood producer,
was sentenced to 10 years in prison because his film The Spirit of ’76
was not supportive of our British ally. The film, set in the period of the
American Revolution, had shown British soldiers bayoneting civil-
ians. Particularly vulnerable were Socialists such as Eugene Debs,
who was sentenced to 10 years, and leaders of the International
Workers of the World (I.W.W.), who were given 20-year sentences.
Their offenses stemmed more from their opposition to capitalism than
to the war itself. The U.S. Justice Department brought charges
of opposition to the war against 2200 people, of whom 1055
were convicted.
World War I brought forth great songs that would be sung long
after the war was over. Many of these originated in London music
halls, French cabarets, and on Broadway. Some of America’s greatest
songwriters, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, and
George Gershwin, participated in this creative explosion. The most
famous of these songs were the French ‘‘Madelon’’; the British
‘‘Your King and Country Want You,’’ ‘‘There’s a Long, Long,
Trail,’’ ‘‘Roses of Picardy,’’ and ‘‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’’;
and the American ‘‘Pack Up Your Troubles in an Old Kit Bag,’’
‘‘Over There,’’ ‘‘Keep the Home Fires Burning,’’ ‘‘Goodbye Broad-
way, Hello France,’’ ‘‘Mademoiselle from Armentieres,’’ and ‘‘How
Ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm?’’ These songs were sung at
bond rallies, but were also taught to the troops by official army song
leaders. Most of the songs were comic, sentimental, and innocent.
They were offered as a means to lift morale and provide a human
respite for soldiers in an inhumane existence. Only the unofficial
French song, ‘‘La Chanson de Craonne,’’ which declared soldiers
doomed and victims of a wretched war, reflected the reality of
the front.
What was most remarkable about the conflict until the end of
1916 was the willingness of European soldiers and civilians to accept
the hardships the war demanded. Millions of soldiers had left home to
face the horrors of modern war and endure life in the trenches of the
Western front. This support collapsed in 1917. The German resump-
tion of unrestricted submarine warfare reflected this change of mood.
Most significant were the riots and insurrection in Petrograd, Russia
which led directly to the abdication of the Romanovs in March 1917.
War weariness, the failure of Russian offensives in the summer of
1917, and the desertion of two million soldiers finally led to the
October Bolshevik revolution and Russia’s withdrawal from the war.
In 1917, whole units of the French army refused to go to the front;
those that did went chanting ‘‘ba ba ba’’—the bleating of sheep being
led to the slaughter. The British army’s morale was close to the
breaking point after the 1917 Flanders offensive resulted in 400,000
casualties for five captured miles of mud in which thousands of
soldiers had literally drowned. At Caporetto, the Italian army reached
its breaking point, and over 275,000 Italian soldiers surrendered in a
single day.
British and French generals desperately wanted American sol-
diers who would be merged into their own units. Wilson and his
commander John Pershing were totally opposed to this. They wanted
the United States to field her own independent army, with its own
commanders, support forces, and separate sector of operations. Both
recognized that unless a U.S. army fought as an independent entity,
the United States would not be able to shape the peace. The United
States would fight neither for the imperialistic aims of the great
powers, nor to restore the balance of power, but ‘‘to make the world
safe for democracy’’ by advocating self-determination, democratic
government, the abolition of war, freedom of the seas, and an
international organization to protect the peace. These lofty ideals
were expressed in January 1918 in Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech.
With Russia out of the war, Germany transferred its troops from
the eastern front to the western front, and launched its great offensive
in the spring of 1918. As in 1914, the Germans were halted on the
Marne river. American units put into battle at key places in the Allied
lines fought well under French overall command. This time, the
German army did not settle into a trench line, but was forced into a
continuous retreat under the pressure of Allied armies. While the
Germans were exhausted from four years of war, fresh American
soldiers were arriving at the rate of 300,000 per month, and fighting as
an independent army at Saint Mihiel and in the Argonne Forest. In
other sectors, the Central Powers collapsed. Turkey and Bulgaria
were out of the war by October 1918. Austria-Hungary disintegrated,
as the Hungarians sought a separate peace, and Slavs sought their own
nations. Within Germany, there were demonstrations at military
bases, and in Berlin. When the Kaiser abdicated, the Germans asked
for a peace based upon what they had previously scorned, the
Fourteen Points. The Germans signed the armistice, and at 11:00 a.m.
on November 11, 1918, the guns went silent.
Four years of war had resulted in nine million deaths, one million
of which were civilian. Many more millions of soldiers who lived
through the war were crippled mentally or physically. So many
soldiers were facially disfigured that a new branch of medicine,
plastic surgery, was developed. A great influenza pandemic resulted
in thousands of civilian deaths in Europe and the United States. A
deep pessimism settled over Europe. Arnold Toynbee declared that
WORLD WAR II ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
188
the news from the front led him to believe that Western Civilization
was following the same pattern that Classical Civilization had fol-
lowed in its breakdown. His 12-volume A Study of History would
argue that World War I was to the West what the Punic Wars had been
to the ancient world. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West was even
more pessimistic. W. B. Yeats’s 1919 ‘‘Second Coming’’ saw
anarchy ‘‘loosed upon the World’’ and the coming of another Dark
Age. T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘The Waste Land’’ expressed the despair and
hopelessness felt by many. Sigmund Freud admitted in Civilization
and Its Discontents that it was the events of the war that led him to
seek a second basic force at the core of human nature: the death
instinct, in constant struggle against the life instinct. Vera Britton’s
autobiographical Testament of Youth described the shattering impact
of the war on her personal life. This pessimism shared the same
viewpoint that was expressed by the war poets such as Siegfried
Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who wrote their poetry and letters while
at the front. David Kennedy has observed that he had not found this
pessimism amongst American soldiers. Whereas the pessimism of the
European writers came from the destructive impact of the war itself,
American disillusionment came from the belief that America’s en-
trance into the war had failed to create the new world of Wilson’s
vision. In addition, progressivism and protection of individual rights
at home seemed to have been reversed, and the nation retreated into
isolationism rather than follow Wilson’s lead into the new League
of Nations.
While the European and American reactions to the war were
different, there is one area of popular culture where they seem to have
coalesced. Within a decade of the war, outstanding antiwar books and
films were written and produced both in Europe and the United States.
The German film Westfront 1918 (1930) depicted French and German
soldiers dying without victory. Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937)
was another antiwar attack upon the European aristocracy that brought
forth the horrors of World War I. Ludwig Renn wrote a critically
acclaimed novel, Krieg (War), that was an impressive piece of
literature but never achieved the popularity of Erich Maria Remarque’s
antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), which described
the experiences of German youth who had gone to war as enthusiastic
soldiers. The film by the same title, released in 1930, was so
relentlessly antiwar that Remarque had to leave Germany. In 1930,
the film received an Academy Award for best picture. Another
antiwar book made into a film was Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell
to Arms (1932), which describes the fate of an American ambulance
driver who deserts the madness of the Italian retreat at Caporetto. Two
of the most powerful antiwar films done in the post-World War II
period also dealt with specific events of World War I. Stanley
Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) was based upon the mutinies in the
French army. The film starred Kirk Douglas, but it is Adolph
Menjou’s depiction of a French general demanding the random
selection and execution of three soldiers to cover his own failures that
is the picture’s most powerful image. Finally, Paramount’s film
Gallipoli (1981), appropriately starring the Australian actor Mel
Gibson, faithfully describes what happened to those idealistic young
Australian soldiers who went to war with enthusiasm and in search of
adventure, only to be slaughtered like so many of their comrades on
other fronts.
—Thomas W. Judd
F
URTHER READING:
Chambers, John. To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern
America. New York, The Free Press, 1987.
Ellis, John. Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I.
Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1976.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York,
Oxford University Press, 1975.
Gilbert, Martin. The First World War: A Complete History. New
York, Henry Holt, 1994.
Goldman, Dorothy. Woman Writers and the Great War. New York,
Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Hardach, Gerd. The First World War, 1914-1918. Berkeley, Univer-
sity of California Press, 1977.
Harries, Meiron, and Susie Harries. The Last Days of Innocence:
America At War, 1917-1918. New York, Random House, 1997.
Kennedy, David. Over Here: The First World War and American
Society. New York, Oxford University Press, 1980.
Lyons, Michael. World War I: A Short History. Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1994.
Rochester, Stuart I. American Liberal Disillusionment in the Wake of
World War I. University Park, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State
University, 1977.
Roth, Jack J. World War I: A Turning Point. New York, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1967.
Silkin, Jon, editor. First World War Poetry. London, Penguin
Books, 1979.
Stromberg, Roland. Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914.
Lawrence, Kansas, Regents Press, 1982.
Timmers, Margaret. The Power of the Poster. London, V & A
Publications, 1998.
Trask, David. The AEF & Coalition Warmaking, 1917-1918. Law-
rence, Kansas, University of Kansas Press, 1993.
Winter, Jay, and Blaine Baggett. The Great War and the Shaping of
the 20th Century. London, Penguin Books, 1996.
World War II
Despite the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, most historians
date the start of the Second World War as September 1, 1939, the day
that German forces attacked Poland. Although Polish resistance was
quickly overcome, treaty obligations brought Britain and France into
the fray, and the war for Europe began in earnest.
Strong isolationist sentiments among much of its populace kept
the United States out of the conflict until the Japanese bombed
American naval forces anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The
surprise attack, which inflicted devastating losses on the U.S. fleet,
occurred on December 7, 1941. The next day, President Franklin
Roosevelt asked for, and received, a Senate declaration of war on
Japan. Two days later, Germany and Italy, which were bound to Japan
WORLD WAR IIENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
189
Poster from the 1949 WWII film epic Sands of Iwo Jima.
in a mutual-defense treaty, declared war on the United States. The
fighting continued until August, 1945, when Japan (the last Axis
belligerent left) surrendered, following the destruction of two Japa-
nese cities by American atomic bombs.
The war affected every aspect of American life, including
popular culture in all its forms. Some of this influence was the result
of deliberate government propaganda, but much of it was simply the
nation’s response to the exigencies of life in wartime.
American moviegoers during the war were frequently exposed
to a triple dose of war-related messages. First, a newsreel would
showcase stories of recent developments in the theatres of combat,
along with a healthy dose of pleasant feature stories unrelated to the
conflict. An average newsreel ran about ten minutes, and was changed
twice each week. Although the typical moviegoer might not know it,
wartime newsreels were subject to indirect government censorship
(since all film footage from overseas passed first through the govern-
ment’s hands), as well as ‘‘guidance’’ as to content from the Office of
War Information, the government’s propaganda bureau.
The newsreel was usually followed by one or more animated
cartoons. Although many of the wartime versions were as innocuous
as ever, quite a few leavened their laughs with propaganda. Bugs
Bunny joined the war effort, poking fun at the Nazis in Confessions of
a Nutsy Spy. Bugs’ cartoon colleague at Warner Brothers, Daffy
Duck, also mocked the Third Reich in Daffy the Commando. Super-
man, America’s favorite comic book hero, took to the screen to thwart
evil Japanese agents in The Japateurs, while another cartoon, Tokyo
Jokie-o, made sport of the Japanese war effort by using blatantly
racist stereotypes.
Then came the feature film. It might be a documentary, perhaps
one of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series (1942-45). Capra, already
famous as a director, had been drafted out of Hollywood, put in a
major’s uniform, and given the task of making films for new military
recruits that would motivate them to fight in a war that many
understood dimly, if at all. Relying mostly on seized Axis propaganda
footage, Capra put together seven inspirational films covering differ-
ent aspects of the global conflict. After a screening of the first,
Prelude to War, President Roosevelt declared, ‘‘Every man, woman
and child in America must see this film!’’ All seven were eventually
shown in theatres, as well as in the boot camps for which they had
originally been intended.
Other notable Hollywood directors also made documentary
films in support of the war effort. William Wyler directed Memphis
Belle, (1943) the saga of the last combat mission flown by an
American bomber crew over Europe; John Huston helmed The Battle
of San Pietro (1945), focusing on the bloody assault by American
troops to capture an Italian town from the Germans; and John Ford
lent his talents to The Battle of Midway (1942), which chronicled the
first major American naval victory over the Japanese.
But most films playing in neighborhood theatres during the war
told fictional stories, although about one-third of these dealt with the
war in one way or another. There were combat films, often based on
actual battles fought earlier in the war. The first of these was Wake
Island (1942), and it would be followed by many others, including
Flying Tigers (1942), Bataan (1943), Destination Tokyo (1943),
The Iwo Jima Monument.
WORLD WAR II ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
190
Gung Ho! (1943), Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), and Objective
Burma! (1945).
Other films offered intrigue, focusing on the shadowy war of
spies, assassins, and double agents. These included Sherlock Holmes
and the Voice of Terror (1942), Nazi Agent (1942), Saboteur (1942),
and They Came to Blow Up America (1943). Still other productions
glorified the heroic struggle of the citizens of occupied countries who
fought against their Axis oppressors; Hangmen Also Die (1943), Till
We Meet Again (1944), and The Seventh Cross (1944) are representa-
tive of the genre.
But fully two-thirds of Hollywood films released during the war
never mentioned the conflict at all. If such films had a subtext, it was
that America was a place worth fighting for—a message conveyed
subtly in such sentimental films as Going My Way (1943), Meet Me in
St. Louis (1944), Since You Went Away (1942), and An American
Romance (1943).
Film was certainly not the only communications medium to
portray the war. It was prominent in all media—including posters,
which could be found everywhere. Prominent artists and illustrators
such as James Montgomery Flagg, Ben Shahn, Everett Henry, Stevan
Dohanos, and John Atherton all created posters to encourage Ameri-
can citizens’ support of the war effort. Posters called men to military
service, urged women to can food at home and consider getting a
‘‘war job,’’ and extolled everyone to hate the nation’s ruthless, bestial
foes, the Axis powers. Further, although Axis espionage never
amounted to a serious threat to the United States, homefront Ameri-
cans were nonetheless given a sense that they were helping to
safeguard the nation when posters warned them not to discuss war
information in public. The most famous of these admonitions ap-
peared in a poster published by the Seagram Distillery Company.
Below an illustration of a half-submerged freighter was the slogan
‘‘Loose lips might sink ships!’’ Even Norman Rockwell lent his
distinctive vision of Americana to the war effort, with a series of four
illustrations collectively entitled ‘‘The Four Freedoms.’’
Radio was the principal entertainment medium for Americans
during World War II. Although many no doubt listened to the radio to
escape from the war and its cares, it was difficult to avoid the conflict
for very long. President Roosevelt continued to give his ‘‘fireside
chats,’’ the tradition of informal-sounding speeches that he had begun
during the 1930s. But, whereas the early addresses usually concerned
the Depression and FDR’s efforts to alleviate it, the wartime broad-
casts reflected the nation’s principal preoccupation, which was the
war itself. Roosevelt used these speeches to reassure his audience that
the war was going well and that eventual victory was assured—and
history shows that he did so even early in the war, when such
optimism was not shared by his advisors or justified by the
military situation.
The government also used radio for propaganda in less obvious
ways. William B. Lewis, head of the Office of War Information’s
Domestic Radio Division, understood that people wanted entertain-
ment from their radios, not heavy-handed propaganda. Lewis, a
former vice president of CBS, worked out a rotation system (called
the Network Allocation Plan) wherein the existing radio dramas and
comedies would voluntarily take turns integrating government propa-
ganda into their scripts, thus guaranteeing a large audience for OWI’s
messages while preserving radio’s money-making programs. As a
result, the popular comedy Fibber McGee and Molly justified the new
gas rationing program by letting the character of Fibber (already
established as a buffoon) complain about it, only to be set straight
through the humor of the other characters. On another evening, The
Jack Benny Show featured America’s most lovable tightwad finally
getting rid of his ancient automobile—by donating it to the War
Salvage Drive. Benny’s character had to be persuaded of the need for
such a contribution, but then declared afterwards that it had been the
right thing to do, indirectly encouraging his listeners to do likewise.
Radio also brought the news into American homes, and much of
that information came courtesy of a new kind of reporter: the on-air
correspondent who would broadcast live from the site of the story he
was covering. Some World War II radio correspondents, like William
L. Shirer, Charles Collingwood, and Eric Severeid, would earn
impressive reputations as journalists, but the dean of them all was
Edward R. Murrow. Whether reporting from a London rooftop in the
middle of an air raid or broadcasting a description of the Buchenwald
concentration camp on the day it was liberated by the Allies, Murrow
combined superb journalistic skills with a sonorous voice and a gift
for near-poetic language to produce a series of radio programs that are
still considered classics.
Music has always been one of the mainstays of radio, and many
of the songs that Americans listened to during the war were reflec-
tions of the era. The rousing ‘‘We Did It Before (And We Can Do It
Again)’’ was penned by Charles Tobias and Cliff Friend immediately
following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. It compared the
current struggle with World War One, and predicted the same
outcome for the Allies. Irving Berlin’s tune ‘‘Any Bonds Today?’’
was used by the government in a series of bond drives designed to
raise money for the war effort. ‘‘I’ll Walk Alone’’ by Sammy Cahn
and Jule Styne was a promise to every serviceman stationed overseas
that his wife or girlfriend would still be waiting when he returned
home. Louis Jordan, Antonio Casey, and Collenane Clark composed
‘‘Ration Blues’’ in 1943 as a good-natured lament over war-related
shortages of material goods. One of the most popular patriotic songs
of the war was Kate Smith’s rendering of ‘‘God Bless America.’’
Although written by Irving Berlin near the end of World War One, the
song went unrecorded and forgotten until the next war. It became
Smith’s trademark, and she sang it frequently, especially at a series of
hugely successful war bond rallies.
The ‘‘funnies’’ (broadly defined) also pitched in to help the war
effort. Many cartoons, comic books, and newspaper comic strips had
their characters participating in the conflict. Bill Mauldin was the
most famous of the war’s cartoonists, although much of his work was
initially drawn and published for a military audience (principally in
Yank, the armed forces newspaper). Mauldin’s characters Willie and
Joe, who could find grim humor in being wet, filthy, tired, and scared,
constituted a gritty and realistic portrayal of the average front-line
‘‘grunt’s’’ existence. Virgil Partch II, who signed his cartoons
‘‘VIP,’’ was a master of the grotesque and the absurd, and his work
showed that the war contained no shortage of either one.
Comic books were an immensely popular entertainment medi-
um in America during the 1940s. By the war’s end, more than 20
million comics were sold every month. During the war years, dozens
of comic book characters participated in the struggle against fascism
and militarism. A year before Pearl Harbor, the team of Joe Simon and
Jack Kirby created Captain America, the first comic book superhero
to fight the Nazis. Another Captain, Midnight by name, began his
career as the hero of a radio drama in the 1930s, but branched out into
comic books after America entered the war. Alan Armstrong, better
known as Spy Smasher, foiled Axis plots both at home and abroad.
Wonder Woman, virtually the only female superhero of the era, was
an Amazon warrior princess who possessed magic bracelets and a
hatred of evil. Superman, the first popular comic superhero, spent the