Tag: reference

ilgaksu:

howlingsoldier:

Books:
The Machinery of War
Front Field Tactics
Heroes of the Western

OKAY LET’S BACK UP AND TALK ABOUT THIS 

i study children’s literature as part of my undergrad and last year, i wrote a whole critical argument analysing the reading habits of working class edwardian boys in imperial britain and how this linked to enlistment rates of the working class in ww1 during the volunteer period. and i feel like this has a lot of crossover here, although possibly in a more nuanced way. in the UK, books were given out as prizes to working class children and they were usually books glorifying imperial war and, more important for this attempt at huge cultural cross-over, war in general. this was often the only non-school book a working class child of the period had that was actually his – so when it comes to enlisting for conflict, he goes, because he has bought into the narrative he has known all his life, maybe the only version of the narrative he has ever read.

although i imagine in the US, the imperial factor wasn’t there, i imagine it was replaced by tales of early americans ‘taming’ the land they had come to – wild west novels, for example. one of steve’s books is heroes of the western. steve is probably one of those children. he’s a tactical genius, i imagine he was a good student for however long his mother could manage to keep him in school. he’s also, what, early twenties in this scene? boys in their early twenties don’t carry around children’s books, especially in an era and an institution characterised by appearing stereotypically masculine. look how he takes it out first and covers it with the other books. 

but they do if they’re steve rogers. they do if it’s a book he got in a spelling competition or something when he was younger (you could also get them for attendance, but our steve isn’t getting that one honestly). they do if it’s one of the only books he owns and he’s read it all his life and marvelled at it and knows every sentence off by heart. they do if they’re worried they’ll forget where they came from because of war. 

because this is a lot more nuanced than a clear-cut social engineering of the legitimisation of conflict. steve’s two other books? are not idealistic children’s books. they are books that remind us pre-serum he’s still that tactical genius. they are books that are not trying to glorify war; they’re trying to end it as quickly as possible. because that’s another facet of steve’s character. he’s grown up in a society that has seen ww1; seen the ww1 veterans come home missing body parts or shaking with shellshock. he probably heard their neighbours in the tenements wake up screaming from nightmares most nights of his life and them look slighly ashamed when they saw him and bucky the next morning, listened to their wives or their families or their friends whisper quietly to them “well, you know, he had a very hard war.” this is a post-ww1 world where pacifism is seen as a noble attitude until very late on in the 30s, where his own father died in conflict, where the mass media has picked up on the horrors of war

yes, after ww1 there was a social engineering of attitudes to focus on the “noble sacrifice” instead of the cruelty and banality of millions of men dying awful deaths for no reason, but this is a world where ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ (1930) wins an oscar award. (i’m probably going to eventually use my depictions of war in film module to make a list of films steve probably saw during ww2 or was aware of existing but not today).

ww1, if anything, encouraged america’s isolationist policy when it came to ww2 – it was another european war that they were wary to take part in pre-pearl harbour (as a very simplified version of the political stance). hollywood is actually afraid of alienating the german market in early-to-mid 30s. (again, for another post on the film industry). 

yes, steve is idealistic. but he’s not going in blindly. he’s going in with both eyes open. i think this in itself says a lot about the strength of the idealism that fuels him, and maybe how long it’s been going on for. probably his whole life, really.