| This study explores how and why the mechanisms of popular memory failed to generate a set of collective understandings about the First World War, even before the larger and more encompassing experiences of the Second World War came to dominate American consciousness.;While European collective memory of the war has been explored in-depth by numerous scholars, American collective memory of the war is relatively unstudied. This analysis seeks to fill that void. This dissertation argues that an attitude of purposeful indifference prevailed after the First World War and substantially hindered the emergence of war documentation, including soldiers' stories - the reflections of war that seep into the collective conscious and become ingrained in popular culture.;The analysis explores how war stories were disseminated through four different vectors during the interwar years—war histories, soldier memoirs, war fiction and war films—and how the public received those stories. It concludes that veterans and the general public foiled efforts to craft war histories as memorials to those who served, and readers largely ignored the almost five hundred personal narratives that framed the American part in the war for posterity. Novels gained a larger audience, but the split between authors who believed the war served a purpose, and those who rejected it outright, did little to bridge divided American opinions about the war. The same duality is found in war films of the interwar period. War films had the awesome power of offering iconic representations of the war to millions of Americans at once, yet they, too, presented conflicting perceptions of the war, and, perhaps more importantly failed to focus on those experiences that were uniquely American. Ultimately, the interwar generation never established a "collected memory" of the war, never reconciling their conflicting views of the war, or simply choosing to forget it entirely. |
