[Cherubim (adventure Erotic Game)l
Gildo Santiago
In The Music Man, a musical comedy set in the early 1900s, the conman and boys' band salesman Harold Hill, who is aboard a train bound for central Iowa, answers the question "How far are you going, friend?" with the quip "Wherever the people are as green as the money, friend." This answer, though comic, conveys a perception of the people of Middle America that Cather undoubtedly recognized and, to some degree, embraced. The American doughboys she pictures in One of Ours, and not just Claude Wheeler, are representatives of this American type and of what her friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher called "dear, tender-hearted, uncomprehending America" (241). While Claude has rightfully been described and criticized as a romantic quester and idealist whose beautiful beliefs make his character unbelievable in the face of the realities of war, what has gone largely unrecognized is that Claude and his compatriots are cut from the same cloth. They are all, or once were, as green as their money, and if Claude is innocent in the extreme, his fellow doughboys are equally nafs, bumbling young Adams before the Fall.
In the first chapters of "The Voyage of the Anchises," Cather repeatedly refers to the recruits as "boys," using "men" almost exclusively when they act in concert and under command. As boys, they "moan and shout" (267) when their train makes an unexpected stop, they crowd to the windows to discover the cause, and they come running back to leap aboard the train as it, "like an old turkey-hen," recalls its brood (269). The "boys were disappointed," Cather writes (272), when a misty morning obscures the New York skyline and ruins their "vacation" vista. For the "twenty-five hundred boys, as for Claude" (273), their first glimpse of Lady Liberty inspires a fierce patriotism, and they sail forth "like nothing but a crowd of American boys going to a football game somewhere" (272). They wear looks of "fine candour, . . . cheerful expectancy and confident goodwill" (280-81). In Claude's estimation a "modelled" face like that of the marine Albert Usher stands out as more manly. His regrets and reminiscences seem filled with experiential meaning that is lacking in the Swedish "boys" whose rendition of "Long, Long Ago" entertains the troops (283).
That Cather chose the term "boy" to characterize these raw recruits is hardly accidental. As Steven Trout notes in his work on Cather and the iconography of the war, "Cather relied in part on the kind of imagery used by organizations such as the American Legion, the Red Cross, and the Society of the First Division" (66) in writing One of Ours as a kind of memorial fiction to her lost cousin, and to those Nebraska boys so like him. Surrounded by the greatest propaganda campaign in history in support of a war, Cather realistically described the nave enthusiasm of her culture in recruiting its boys for what would be the greatest slaughter of the modern era. In Words That Won the War, James R. Mock and Cedric Larson summarize the power of that campaign on the nation as a whole: "The Committee on Public Information had done its work so well that there was a burning eagerness to believe, to conform, to feel the exaltation of joining in a great and selfless enterprise" (6). The campaign reached into even the remotest areas and targeted specifically those rugged youths of rural America whose strength and stamina would offer the best hope for "bleeding France." So effective was the dissemination of this propaganda that when a "simple, uneducated family, far from urban centers of information and five thousand miles across the sea and land from the battlefields of France, sat down to a threshers' supper in the summer of 1918 they were more conscious of the World War than many more literate people had been of any war since fighting began" (Mock and Larson 6).
That vast appeal to the nation to give up its sons, its boys, was reinforced by a barrage of war posters, which Cather undoubtedly saw.[1] To secure family support for the doughboys, the Victory Boys organization, for example, launched its poster campaign with phrases such as "A million boys behind a million fighters" and "Every American Boy should Enroll in the Victory Boys." For the brothers who were left out of the great adventure because they were too young, here was the opportunity to support the older "boys." One Victory Boys poster showed a little farm boy in overalls with his hand on the shoulder of a soldier who thrusts his bayonet forward. Even if they were too young to serve, boys were not too young to help the war effort. Likewise, the YMCA campaign touted, "Help Us Help Our Boys." In these posters, youth like Claude and his compatriots are pictured as uniformed boys who are little different than they were back home. The YMCA lass pours coffee "For Your Boy"; the Red Cross is "Our Boys' Big Brother," ushering them toward a cozy, lighted home on a hillside in France. Numerous posters call for socks and books for "our boys," and the Salvation Army, picturing an all-American maid with doughnuts and coffee, assures that they "get it to the boys in the trenches over there."[2] Parents are pictured encouraging others to buy liberty bonds for their boys. "You Help My Boy Win the War," pleads one mother whose soldier son's arm encircles her. Even industry is targeted through the U.S. Fuel Administration poster to "Stand by the Boys in the Trenches: Mine More Coal."
Even living in Frankfort, Nebraska, Claude too would have been inundated by such images and influenced by their sophistries. Like his companions, Claude is, to a large degree, "the provincial American midwesterner [who] was not accustomed to dealing with words and abstractions" (Cooperman 52-53). Embracing the war rhetoric that described not only himself but also the bestial Hun, Claude is forced to reconsider his preconceived notions of self-identity and of otherness. The idea of the German Menace, as depicted in war posters, is foreign to his experience. He has only known hard-working German farm neighbors and the well-educated, gracious Erlich brothers, all of whom he admires. Claude muses, "a month ago he would have said they had all the ideals a decent American boy would fight for. . . . He still cherished the hope that there had been some great mistake; that this splendid people would apologize and right itself with the world" (166, italics added). To justify his enlistment, Claude can embrace the war rhetoric, even if never fully convinced of its truth, and he remains, as Stanley Cooperman writes, "a good boy, a pure adolescent," and he will be "a brave soldier, an effective officer" (130).
When he then finds himself part of the AEF, Claude is neither still a boy, though perhaps he longs to be, nor yet fully a man. The iconography of the war confirms that he must, though, play a double role in the national imagination. The posters refer to the men in uniform when the troops are wounded or at a military disadvantage: "Our men need drugs and bandages," proclaims one war bond poster; "Our men need first aid kits," reads another. "Shoot Ships to Germany and help American Win," claims a 1917 poster, for without ships, "our men will not have an equal chance to fight." As Cooperman argues, then, "It was still possible for the young men setting out on their bold journey in 1916 or 1917, backed by rhetoric and traditional ideas of what was involved with fighting, to think of war in terms of traditional heroism and a chance for a free visit to a Europe they knew largely from novels" (46). Anxious to escape the narrow experiences of small-town Middle America, they could envision themselves joining "the men of history books, the brave soldiers of destiny, doing something more vital than putting in a crop and wondering what the prices would be next harvest time" (Cooperman 52, italics added).
Convinced that they harbor secret knowledge that could repair and restore "bleeding France," these boys vow to return after the war and to establish an American Eden, themselves acting as young Adams who will install waterworks and teach the French peasant how to farm. This singular self-assuredness of youth is a cultural bluster that disguises an innocence both attractive in its idealism and repulsive in its arrogance. Claude reminds his "boys" about Americans' bad reputation for "butting in on things" (343), but they laugh off the idea as ludicrous. In their navet they are confident that they best model all that is great and good in life, and they cling to time-honored beliefs, one even stoutly arguing that cherubim still guard the Garden of Eden.
All in all, the young Americans, who believe themselves progressive and knowing, mimic the Pal Battalions of "fresh-faced school boys" that they encounter (377). Like the British youth battalions, who, as Claude observes, were "a giggly lot," the American doughboys too are "very young" (374), Cather writes. But Claude doesn't believe that "American boys ever seem as young as that" (378). Claude implicitly makes the distinction between his American boys and British lads, a linguistic variant that underscores the kind of relationship Claude would later develop with the troops under his command. Members of the Pal Battalions are the endearing lads of the Victorian aesthetic movement: fair-haired, "especially beautiful, brave, pure, and vulnerable," the "bright boy knights" (Fussell 275). Cather, an admirer of A. E. Housman's work, was surely aware that the Shropshire Lad (1896) had essentially given to the war the image of the "beautiful brave doomed boy" (Fussell 282). In British diction, though, the designation "brave boys" is an homoerotic extension of the term "men" but connotes less sexual attachment than the term "lad" (Fussell 282). Claude, who embraces the American idiom, does not perceive of these "fresh-faced schoolboys" in such terms. Rather than potential lovers, they are pathetic sacrifices to a god of war. He dismisses them as unlike his own doughboys, who were true soldiers, the rightful subjects of patriotic song: "Turn the dark cloud inside out, / Till the boys come home" ("Keep the Home Fires Burning"). Claude would separate the men from the boys, but for Americans back home, the men of the AEF were their boys.
795a8134c1