The great appeal of history is its ability to surprise, and challenge
what we think we know. Online publication of the G.I. Pamphlet series of the American
Historical Association provides just this sort of appeal, as it forces us to rethink
the hard and fast divisions historians and the general public typically make about
the 20th-century. Between the depression era and the ColdWar, the war years are
typically depicted as a time when all other considerations except the prosecution
of the war were swept away. However, the G.I. Pamphlet series was prepared under
the direction of the Army’s Division of Information and Education between 1943
and 1945, “to increase the effectiveness of the soldiers and officers as fighters
during the war and as citizens after the war.” The accent in the pamphlets is
on what the postwar world would look like, and reassuring servicemen that they
would have a place in postwar America. As I note in my review
of somewhat similar sites on the Web, this is strikingly different from the
way the war years are generally presented online, where all eyes are turned toward
the military side of things, and even the home front is generally depicted only
in relation to the battlefields of Europe and Asia. These pamphlets provide an
intriguing indicator that the postwar world was being seriously considered and
developed fairly early in the military campaign. Even if historians of the present
have divided the 20th-century at 1945, the historians at the time were looking
to the pre-war years as a guide to build what was to come after the war. For
the purposes of this proposal, the goal of this project is simply to create an
archival web site that will publish the text and images from the 44 pamphlets
that were ultimately produced. Admittedly, the pamphlets initially seem to be
no more than an amusing glimpse into the past. Certainly, the tackiness of some
of the images and topics, like the pamphlets on “Do
You Want Your Wife to Work after the War” and “Will
There Be a Plane in Every Garage” are the sort of cringe-inducing embarrassment
that allows Americans in the new millennium look back with a certain smugness
on bygone eras. However, aside from the latent misogyny in a couple of the essays,
the pamphlets are generally quite serious in their tone and suggest a serious
and thoughtful consideration of the issues. In all the series produced pamphlets
on topics ranging from economic and cultural anxieties at home—particularly around
women, crime, and jobs—to foreign policy issues in a postwar world. And each of
them offers a fairly detailed social scientific analysis of the state of affairs
on the home front. Cover
of Will There Be Work for All? Beyond an archival interest, the series also opens to interesting lines
of analysis that could serve as a basis for further exploration in an essay or
two. On the one hand, they provide an interesting way of assessing the rather
topical issue of what role intellectuals (and particularly historians, of course)
can and should serve in a time of national mobilization and crisis. The rather
embarassing way in which some of these pamphlets have stood the test of time suggests
the need for caution, as does the complaints about the problems encountered in
their battles with government bureaucrats and censors (detailed in some of the
background documents). Beyond those issues,
I would also like to further explore my intuition that what we now think of as
postwar culture was deeply rooted in the war years, and dividing the 20th century
around 1945 requires some further consideration. An admittedly cursory review
of the secondary literature suggests that this subject has received very little
attention. Alan Brinkley's End of Reform is fairly typical of those that
touch on the subject; treating it as a policy question that largely took place
only among the power elite in Washington. The trajectory from in war planning
for the postwar world, and what we now conceive of as cultural phenomenon of "the
fifties" remains largely unexplored. Obviously there is a significant
problem in framing the topic this way, particularly the extent to which it can
be seen (or at least described) as an effort to diminish the value and sacrifice
of the men who fought and died in the war. However, as the close interest of the
Army's Division of Morale attests, a close attention to life after the war was
viewed as an essential part of their success in battle. At the same time, given
some of the other types of histories I've noted on the Web, I think there is some
clear evidence that this can have a wide appeal for those who are curious about
what was going on at home during the war--the pamphlets offer a rich array of
facts and figures about the war years--as well as those interested in exploring
the roots of the postwar world. The digital medium is the ideal format for
this, given the rather daunting costs of creating reproduction of the print version
of these, many of which were printed on exceptionally cheap paper that is beginning
to degrade--yellow and crack--and seem unlikely to last much longer without transfer
to an electronic medium. Similarly, the online environment provides the prefect
opportunity to make them available to a much wider audience than they could ever
receive in print. Looking at it realistically, this can only appeal to a very
narrow and specialized audience. The electronic medium also makes it much more
feasible for this audience to find them through the larger database functions
of the World Wide Web. So while it will the series offers no shattering
insights, and certainly offers little appeal to the History Channel crowd, the
series merits publication online for all those curious about an important time
of transition in U.S. history.
