From Reform to Rights: The American Culture of the Citizen Soldier and the Transformation of the Crusading Metaphor, 1917-1945

Cross, Graham ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4770-4326 (2021) From Reform to Rights: The American Culture of the Citizen Soldier and the Transformation of the Crusading Metaphor, 1917-1945. International Journal of Military History and Historiography, 41 (2). ISSN 2468-3299

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Abstract

The “crusading” imagery attached to American soldiers in the 1917-1945 period performed an important function in assigning meaning to the wars of the United States. This was the result of a complex interplay between “official” and “vernacular” culture. The doughboys of the First World War at times fought a romantic “crusade” to reform the nation, world and themselves from a morally privileged position. In the post-war era, the romantic “crusade” survived but was more in tune with the conservative corporatism of Republican administrations. By the Second World War, GIs had become the agents of a very different “crusade”. Americans now embraced statist common effort in a realist prospective vision for human rights. This fundamental change in the meaning of “crusade” attached to the experiences of American soldiers suggests a protean nature to the metaphor and problematises notions of an ideologically cohesive American “crusade” in the world during the 20th century.