Triumphant Hate

My brother and his wife dropped by for a visit this week.  We’ve talked non-stop of family memories, school friends and neighbors of long ago, politics, social issues, travel experiences, and our own concerns, opinions,  and issues.  It has been special time, a special visit with John and Reola.

Our mother was born in the year 1919.  Reading Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday for the umpteenth time (an account of what happened in the US between the years 1919-1929—the first ten years of our mother’s life), has been fascinating. 

On November 11, 1919 (our mother was born on November 10th) the Armistice ending World War I was signed.  Americans celebrated that day, some posting signs on their shops and stores which read “Closed for the Kaiser’s Funeral,”  Over 155 tons of ticker tape and torn paper were dropped from the windows along New York’s Fifth Avenue. The mood of the American people was mixed.  For some it was a “pious thanksgiving,” but for many others it was a time of “triumphant hate.”  Crowds gathered all across the nation to burn the Kaiser in effigy, or to carry a coffin (made of cardboard boxes) down the street, shouting that the Kaiser was within it, “resting in pieces.”  Over two million soldiers were still in Europe and in the trenches on that Armistice day, making ready for the march into Germany.  As the lights were turned back on, and American cities became “white” again, the new era of peace began—but it was a peace that seemed to embrace the “triumphant hate” more than it did the “pious thanksgiving.”

This “triumphant hate” grew out of many things. The influenza epidemic was just ending in 1919.  That epidemic took more American lives than the war itself.   Thousands of Americans went about in fear, with white cloth masks over their faces. Even after the Armistice was signed, the war casualty lists continued.  Mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, read those lists day after day, in fearful apprehension that their son or brother’s name might yet appear even though the war was over.  There was a deep resentment about America being engaged and entangled in the affairs of the world—and most Americans simply wanted to be free of those connections for fear of getting entangled again.  Americans didn’t care about what happened elsewhere in the world.  There was a strong emphasis on “America First!”  This “triumphant hate” permeated the whole of American society during the decade recorded by Allen in Only Yesterday.  In some ways, I sense a “triumphant hate” directing our current journey as a nation.  Does history repeat itself?  

Our mother (center) with siblings circa 1928