America Reflected: Language, Satire, Film, and the National Mind. Peter C. Rollins
years. The basic differences behind their language studies are explored; while Whorf hungered for belief, Sapir was a modern humanist (Chapter 8). Previously unpublished papers by Whorf provided me with a new perspective on the religious concerns of Sapir’s prize pupil. As a believer, Whorf saw the empirical validity of the doctrine of original sin in the world around him; he deplored the arms race of his day, and he predicted a future war from the air which would target civilian population centers. At the same time, he lamented the vulgarization of science by pundits such as H.L. Mencken—whom the New Englander hoped to challenge in public debate after publication of a potentially controversial novel entitled The Ruler of the Universe (1925). Alas, Whorf never enjoyed the public exposure he sought because no publisher would take up the manuscript.
But Whorf never lost interest in finding a place for faith in an age of science. This motivation suffused his language studies and is the major difference between the New Englander and his teacher. Sapir was a gifted anthropologist and linguist, but also a sophisticated modern who took joy in the arts—he was both a poet and a pianist—without the need to introduce the topic of religious faith. Drawing on the insights of Franz Boas, pioneer of American Indian studies at the Smithsonian, Sapir explored the unique formal characteristics and poetic qualities of the American Indian languages. The Yale professor was impressed by the spiritual richness of American Indian culture, but he did not detect a special gift in the Navaho and Hopi tongues to praise, nor a dangerous limitation in English to cause alarm. In contrast, a close reading of Whorf reveals that he discerned metaphysical promises in the pioneering work of both Boas and Sapir. The “linguistic relativity hypothesis” would be Whorf’s special “spin” on this heritage with the goal of relieving the spiritual drought of a lost generation (Chapter 8).
Whorf offered the Native American world view as an alternative. In the late 1930s, his ideas burgeoned about the spiritual resources of Hopi and Navaho language and culture—in part because of his anthropological studies and in part as a result of exposure to the writings of French and German linguists. Both Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1767-1825) and F. Max Müller (1823-1900) were visionaries who laced their linguistic studies with a soupçon of mysticism. Their books encouraged Whorf to postulate an antinomy between Indo-European languages (which he designated “Standard Average European” and abbreviated as SAE) and Amer-Indian tongues. The latter group—especially the Navaho and Hopi—communicated in languages more facile with the spiritual dimension of life while offering a more agile way of describing the world of energy and matter revealed by the “new physics.” By doing so, they proved the insularity of SAE (Chapter 9). These findings clearly went beyond mere linguistic studies and provided the basis for a broad perspective on the putative “progress” of what we now call the “first world.”
For Whorf, the continued use of military force was a sign that Western cultures were in much need of complementary perspectives.
America’s Wars: Reflections in Film and Television
One of the career-changing decisions I made in the 1970s was to tap my experience as a Marine Corps officer (1963-1966). Academic studies of novels, films, and television documentaries revealed to me such basic ignorance of the tactics and equipment that the generalizations reached by such works lost credibility. With basic facts in error, how could the conclusions built upon them not be in error? For example, if you do not know the difference between an M-79 grenade launcher and a 3.5 rocket launcher, what else do you miss in studying America’s infantry at war? What are the three basic types of ambush and what are the advantages of each? Why are the two most dangerous elements on the battlefield a Marine lieutenant and his map? For lack of understanding of similar details—or appreciation that the last query is a sardonic joke—it seemed obvious that academics were unable to differentiate the realities and images of war in personal narratives, novels, poems, and films. Having spent three years of my life on active duty (plus grueling boot camps during college summers), I decided that it would not be off target as a scholar to apply the cultural perspective to America’s wars (see Preface and Chapter 24 for details about my military experiences).
Part 2 of America Reflected devotes attention to military images and realities for World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and Vietnam.
Lt. Rollins Aboard the USS Renville, 1964
Sixteen chapters interweave historical themes with readings of literature and motion pictures devoted to the conflicts; throughout, there is a pervasive concern about how perception and memory affect interpretation of these tragic historical crises.
World War I
World War I inflicted a trauma on Western civilization from which we are still attempting to recuperate. The leading academic study of World War I in our time has been Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, a volume which has received much-deserved éclat. In America Reflected, “Memories of War” (Chapter 10) tries to give a balanced assessment of how WWI was remembered: Fussell has stimulating insights to offer about the disillusionment evidenced by prominent writers after the conflict, but—perhaps because of his own combat experiences and wounds during WWII—he overlooks the heroic version which was much more evident in popular poems, monuments, and statues such as E.M. Viquesney’s “The Spirit of the American Doughboy” installed by the American Legion on hundreds of public squares and the lawns of public buildings across the land. While such powerful films as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) perpetuated a memory of defeat and suffering, other motion pictures—such as The Big Parade (1925) and Wings (1927)—counterbalanced the pain and loss with national pride in the battlefield valor of America’s fighting men. Disillusionment was prevalent during the decade following the war, but not dominant. As a second world war seemed to become inevitable, the heroic version of WWI emerged in such WWI films as Sergeant York (1941) and the documentary feature by the March of Time group entitled The Ramparts We Watch (1940).
Drawing on the work of Fussell, but also synthesizing research concerning the ripple effects of the war in linguistics and the arts, I address the Great War’s legacy (Chapter 11). WWI is still with us and has defined, for example, the way in which the Vietnam conflict was interpreted by American culture—and its film culture. Two documentaries by the Cadre historian group are the focus of this exploration so that the study is at the same time a close reading of two award-winning short films, while having more general application to the experience of WWI. Americans lost a sense of innocence in WWI—a theme at the heart of both Goodbye Billy (1972) and The Frozen War (1973)—for the world-wide conflict marked the end of the “Whig interpretation of history” in which technological advancement was equated with moral progress. As a member of the post-war generation, this issue was a major concern of Benjamin Whorf in his novel, The Ruler of the Universe, but also an embedded theme of the Whorf hypothesis. The two documentaries under examination stressed the perspective that “war is the health of the state,” another theme of importance to Whorf. Finally, the films demonstrate that language has been disjoined from truth after a “war to end all wars.” In The Meaning of Meaning (1923) and a lifetime of scholarship and pedagogy, I. A. Richards pursued this theme as an influential scholar and teacher. Outside of Academe, post-war panaceas claimed to cure the breakdown of communication. In Esperanto, reformers attempted to create an international language, hoping that a shared means of communication would promote world peace. Others devised a General Semantics filter to restore trust in language. As earlier, the issue of how we know what we know (epistemology) shines through as relevant to WWI studies as the balance of power or the economic consequences of the war. The ripple effects continue into our own time and are a source of constant discussion on the Internet—as will become evident by an Internet search for “Whorf.”
World War II and the Cold War via Compilation Documentaries
Before, during, and after World War II, the struggle against the Axis powers gave impetus to some of America’s most ambitious films of persuasion. The academy award-winning director Frank Capra was a Sicilian immigrant who, at the age of six, came to the United States and embraced the American Dream. His Gary Cooper and James Stewart films about of the triumph of democracy inspired courage and hope for millions during the Great Depression. When war came to America in 1941, he was “drafted”