Annotations from the Archives: Armistice Day
On November 11, we’ll honor our nation’s fallen soldiers on Veteran’s Day, the 70th year that the United States has commemorated the sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of young men and women in military conflicts. Willa Cather would have known November 11 as Armistice Day, a day when the veterans of World War I were honored, and our collections are rich with museum and archival items that further our understanding of the World War I experience and Cather’s depictions of it in One of Ours.
Wherever you went in the United States, it was impossible to escape the war. Descriptions of key battles and updates from local boys, now serving overseas, filled the local newspapers and periodicals like Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. But even women’s magazines dedicated many of their pages to the war: messages from President Woodrow Wilson, artistic renderings of battles, and sentimental covers depicting life in the trenches were all featured alongside the more practical, for domestic readership at least, recipes built around wartime rationing and thrift. This issue of Ladies' Home Journal is just one such example from our collections.
In One of Ours, Cather wrote:
"It was curious . . . Paris seemed suddenly to have become the capital, not of France, but of the world! He knew he was not the only farmer boy who wished himself tonight beside the Marne. . . . Lying still and thinking fast, Claude felt that even he could clear the bar of French "politeness"—so much more terrifying than German bullets—and slip unnoticed into that outnumbered army. One's manners wouldn't matter on the Marne tonight, the night of the eighth of September, 1914. There was nothing on earth he would so gladly be as an atom in that wall of flesh and blood that rose and melted and rose again before the city which had meant so much through all the centuries—but had never meant so much before. Its name had come to have the purity of an abstract idea. In great sleepy continents, in land-locked harvest towns, in the little islands of the sea, for four days men watched that name as they might stand out at night to watch a comet, or to see a star fall."
Philip Lyford was a well-known illustrator in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century. His painting "Flanders Fields" (right) was used—and possibly commissioned by—surgical supplies merchant Bauer & Black. It appears on a Liberty Bond poster and a sheet music adaptation using the poem "In Flanders Fields," written by Dr. John McCrae, a Canadian army medical doctor.
Though the poem was written in May 1915 and published in Punch in December 1915, the poem took on a life of its own as one of the war's most popular pieces. When the Bauer & Black advertisement utilized Lyford's art and McCrae's poem (albeit mistitled) in November 1918, it was to urge the American public to further their sacrifices for the war effort. Publishers had no way of knowing that even as the magazine was being delivered to thousands of mailboxes, an Armistice was being organized.
This issue of the Ladies' Home Journal still reaches us today. Moina Michael worked at the YMCA Overseas Secretaries training headquarters when, on November 9, 1918, a soldier gave Michael a copy of that month's Ladies' Home Journal. She saw Lyford's haunting image of ghostly soldiers, fire, and poppies, accompanying the poem "We Shall Not Sleep" in the Bauer & Black advertisement. Inspired, Michael jotted down a poem of her own; it was a response to McCrae's, and in it she vowed to wear a poppy from that day on. At the urging of others, she bought poppies and sold them, so others might also wear them in remembrance. In 1920, the American Legion adopted the poppy as their official symbol of remembrance.
When peace finally came, celebrations were held all across the United States—and the world. In Red Cloud, a parade was held on Webster Street.
President Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day on November 11, 1919, with these words: “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations. . . ."
Celebrations included parades and public meetings following a two-minute moment of silence at 11:00 a.m., all across the United States, Great Britain, and France. In 1954, after the conclusion of the second World War, the United States designated November 11 as Veterans Day to honor veterans of all U.S. wars. You can learn more about the history of Armistice Day and Veteran's Day at the Library of Congress.
Beside the materials listed here, our collections contain a number of WW1-era periodicals, materials related to the life, death, and military service of Grosvenor P. Cather, and much more. To use the collections at the National Willa Cather Center, please reach out to archivist Tracy Sanford Tucker (ttucker@willacather.org) to schedule an appointment.