Part of the "WWI America" exhibition at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, an ambulance from World War I was recreated from new and used parts, following plans from the Ford Motor Co.'s 1918 design. (Photo courtesy Minnesota History Center)
They called it the First World War not in anticipation of a series, but due to the cataclysmic scale of death and destruction.
You can get a view of how the Great War affected the United States and Virginia in the immersive “WWI America” exhibition that has traveled here from the Minnesota Historical Society, and the complementing and thought-provoking “The Commonwealth and the Great War,” at the newly christened Virginia Museum of History & Culture. “WWI” is up through July 29, and “The Commonwealth and the Great War” through the centennial of the war’s end, Nov. 18. The traveling exhibition is making its single East Coast stop here and is $10 for adults, $5 for visitors ages 6 to 17. Admission is free for active and retired military members and their immediate families.
The convulsion of that conflict a century ago provided the Big Bang for the modernity of the 20th century. Like the echoes astrophysicists can detect from the cosmic event that exploded the universe into existence, so it is that what transpired from 1914 through 1918 resonates today in the root causes behind many international, national and sometimes even regional headlines.
Brian Horrigan, who led the Minnesota team that prepared the “WWI” exhibition, recently said that in popular memory, the war is viewed through a nostalgic filter. In thinking about the period, what often comes to mind are patriotic posters, serried ranks of doughboys, the jubilant crowds of Liberty Loan rallies and robust choruses of Irving Berlin’s “Over There.” That’s not even half the story.
During the war period, racially charged conflagrations burned swaths of U.S. cities — more disturbances occurred in 1919, the year after the war ended, than in any year of the late 1960s. Workers went on strike and demanded better conditions and more pay and found themselves confronted by machine guns manned by veterans of the Western Front. Women marching and protesting for the right to vote were arrested, jailed and tortured, and the government sought to squelch dissident voices opposing the war through surveillance, incarceration and wholesale arrests. Hyphenated Americans came under suspicion and were harassed. Immigrants were deported. In Richmond, August Dietz, the German-born founder of the respected Dietz Press (the firm’s Gothic Revival building remains at 109 W. Cary St.) was among those here who were ostracized and insulted.
The “WWI” exhibition gives insights to this period through the use of 19 “Witnesses,” a diverse gallery of personalities including entertainer Harry Houdini (who, on his draft card, identified himself as Harry Handcuff Houdini — no quotes or parentheses); Herbert Hoover, who, prior to his unfortunate connection to the Great Depression, engineered the mass war-relief effort to stave off starvation in post-war Europe; social reformer Jane Addams; African-American activist W.E.B. DuBois; evangelist Billy Sunday; wartime volunteer nurse and ambulance driver Alice O’Brien; and Hollywood star Mary Pickford.
Though fought thousands of miles away, the war transformed the United States from a provincial power to a global industrial and military force led by a strong central government. Military bases sprouted up throughout Virginia that remain to this day — Fort Lee in Petersburg and Fort Eustis near Newport News — and shipbuilding and dry-docking burgeoned in Hampton Roads.
The 116,000 U.S. military deaths and more than 4,000 Virginians who died wrenched families and disrupted communities as the returning of thousands of maimed and psychologically traumatized service personnel created a need for care that hadn’t existed before.
Staunton-born Woodrow Wilson served as president; he was the former president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey who, as novelist E.L. Doctorow wrote, said he’d keep the country out of war and then fought it like an affronted school master, which he was. Wilson went from seeking to keep the U.S. out of foreign entanglements to needing to gin up support for sending the U.S. military overseas. Wilson wasn’t charismatic by today’s standards. Horrigan explains, “What people respected Wilson for at the time was that, first he was president, and he not only read books — but he wrote them. They admired his intellect. He had a brain, and he used it.”
Wilson also demonstrated a great idealism that manifested in his efforts not only to end the war but to maintain peace with his 14 Points and the League of Nations. He perhaps possessed an idealism more for other countries than his own. Women who sought the vote, African-Americans who wanted their civil rights, and jailed dissidents such as the socialist Eugene V. Debs and deported anarchist Emma Goldman didn’t think much of the Wilsonian style of governance. And, Horrigan considers, “That idealism took him to war because he knew these European monarchies had to go and nobody else [was] around to lead that task; thus, for Wilson, it fell to the U.S. to guide the spread of democracy across the world.”
In Richmond, the war was memorialized in what became the Carillon in Byrd Park, where for a time the first-level galleries were used to display artifacts. Near the tennis courts is an American Legion flagpole that at its base carries four plaques bearing 251 names of service personnel who went to war and did not return. The organization of the names shows plainly the language of the day, as 27 of them are labeled as “Colored.”
Amid the ubiquitous proliferation of national banners (often flown, rarely tended to, and by their ubiquity, almost unnoticed), from that pole no such flag billows. The metal lanyard for raising and lowering one, though, is rattled by a winter breeze into an erratic tapping that signals how, after the great hurrah that sent them, some did not come back from over there.
