The Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890–1964 by Jonathan Vincent

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890–1964 by Jonathan Vincent Alex Vernon Jonathan Vincent. The Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890–1964. Oxford UP, 2017. xii + 312 pp. $78.00. One of the pleasures in teaching my American War Literature course at the introductory level—for many students, the only literature course of their college careers—is how evident it becomes to them that the texts we study matter. The students are quick to realize that the way we talk about war—particularly the stories we tell—influences how we think about soldiering and war, how we make personal and collective decisions. It has real consequences. [End Page 569] The relationship between stories about past wars and the ongoing exigencies of the nation-state during the so-called long modern period of American letters is the subject of Jonathan Vincent's excellent new book, The Health of the State. As Vincent describes the book in his introduction, "it traces, in the rhetorical space between self and society, between past and present forms of historical consciousness, between public and private registers of civic authority, critical evolutions in attitudes toward political associations that modern war discourse so persistently induces, deepening and thickening the interdependence between modern citizens and state power. And it is a story of didactic futurists that modernist writing makes legible in the most vivid of ways" (7). One of the great strengths of The Health of the State involves how thoroughly it interweaves the evolving ideological ideas regarding the role of the nation-state; societal attitudes toward war, preparedness, and a professional military; and, of course, literature (Vincent's book focuses almost entirely on novels, with a handful of essays and short stories). How does a society rooted in allegiance to the local and to liberal laissez-faire individualism, with a foundational distrust of state power, transform into a society that embraces the regulatory principles of a standing military? And how has literature contributed to and critiqued this transformation? Vincent smartly calls out the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as the supreme symbol of the nationally incorporated self, where allegiance to the local and insistent individualism are superseded by a nameless body interred in federal land. Had his study gone beyond 1964, it might have noted that the country's first national war memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, appropriated for the nation-state an approximately century-old practice of local memorials listing the hometown dead. Vincent has immersed himself in primary and secondary material, from historical figures writing about war, citizenship, and the state such as Samuel Huntington and Emory Upton, to contemporary literary critics such as John Limon and Margot Norris in addition to the literary texts. Indeed, The Health of the State is as much a work of recovery as it is of sharp analysis. Anyone researching or teaching American war literature would be wise to consult this book. Looking for something to pair with The Red Badge of Courage? Try Ellen Glasgow's The Battle-Ground—or, even more lost on today's readers, the Civil War novels of Mary Johnston. For African American perspectives, in addition to Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, there's Jessie Redmon Fauset's There Is Confusion. One of the advantages of Vincent's method is his equal and integrated treatment of texts by [End Page 570] veterans and those by civilians, by men and by women, by whites and by blacks. War is everybody's business, and war narratives contribute to the social imaginary regardless of their source. The heart of the book is its first part, which covers representations of the Civil War beginning in the 1890s, when the United States found itself increasingly on an overseas war footing, through the wake of the Great War. As Vincent argues, the stakes go beyond military preparedness: "Writers in the early ferment of the Progressive Era embraced [the Civil War's] socializing prospects, particularly its story of collective sacrifice" (16). "They exploited it," he explains, "for its many models of social amalgamation, for its visions of self-integration and political intensification...