Mark Twain's 'the War-Prayer,' Youth Culture in the Rural Midwest, and the Problem of Placing Religion in Historical Narratives About the 1960s

Abstract

Mark Twain Studies Vol. 2 Mark Twain’s “The War-Prayer,” Youth Culture in the Rural Midwest, and the Problem of Placing Religion in Historical Narratives about the 1960s Mark HULSETHER During the early 1970s, I was a reasonable candidate to join the ranks of Richard Nixon’s silent majority. At this time I was a high school student in a small town in rural Iowa, with moderate-to-conservative parents who had bought me a World Book Encyclo- pedia, let me watch network TV, but otherwise largely sheltered me from the world usu- ally signied by “the sixties.” My school’s academic standards were low and I can best convey its political consciousness through noting that its idea of a controversial library acquisition was Ebony magazine. My town’s school board banned The Grapes of Wrath because it considered Preacher Casey too hostile to religion—and this did not even make most of the students curious enough to read the book. My friends read almost nothing except magazines like Sports Illustrated and Seventeen; they took their cultural inspiration from Top 40 radio. In this context, cultural seeds were planted that helped me grow by the 1980s into a person well to the Left on the political spectrum, an organizer against aspects of U.S. foreign and military policy, and a scholar working within the American Studies movement on the interplay between religion and Left-liberal social movements. One of the seeds that helped me move in this direction was Mark Twain’s “The War-Prayer.” This essay describes how I came to quote “The War-Prayer” in my  rst public speech against U.S. military policy; it goes on to suggest that this episode is not merely idiosyncratic and trivial—that it may help us rethink certain aspects of how we tell a broader story about religion and oppositional movements of the 1960s and 1970s. When scholars in American Studies write about historical trends of the 1960s, they typically stress the breakdown of a New Deal coalition and the rise of the Civil Rights movement and New Left. In the past quarter-century they have also focused on feminism and paid increasing attention to queer theory, post-1965 immigration, issues of empire, and the rise of the New Right. 1 When it comes to treating the role of religion in this history, however, their attention has been quite circumscribed. Religion is often an optional add-on that appears (if at all) near the end of lists beginning with race, class, and gender. Insofar as religion does gain attention, it is often treated within a limited repertoire of categories: