Chapter 22 - The Nation

Summary

This chapter examines the drive for nationality as it took shape in US culture leading into and out of World War I. Considering primarily the war novel but also the broader political discourses surrounding the war and its fallout, it describes the variety of cultural interests—some right, some left, some ambiguously centrist—that sought to compel, through representations of military intervention abroad, contradictory justifications for national unity. Well into the war’s aftermath, US artists and commentators continued to use the occasion of the conflict to foment a culture of national regeneration: sometimes to promote revitalized masculinity; sometimes to challenge the self-serving values of capitalism; sometimes with hopes of assimilating immigrant factionalism; sometimes—especially during the war years—to propagate subservience to an authoritarian state. Throughout, the chapter  explores how the tensions underpinning  cultural hegemony  constrained or advanced the rhetorical project of national renewal. However, it also acknowledges protests and refusals of that culture of collectivization, often driven by invocations of American ideals. After the war especially,  faith in militarism’s re-enchantment of the nation unraveled  in the face of growing modernist backlash and the wider embrace of cultural pluralism.