![]() ![]() Black and white soldiers clashed as much with one another as they did with external enemies. In narrating the efforts of African American soldiers and activists to gain full citizenship rights as recompense for military service, Adriane Lentz-Smith illuminates how World War I mobilized a generation. They returned home to join activists working to make that world real. As a result of these contradictions, shell shock was not forgotten, on the contrary, the shell-shocked soldier quickly grew to symbolize the confusions and inconsistencies of the Great War.įor many of the 200,000 black soldiers sent to Europe with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, encounters with French civilians and colonial African troops led them to imagine a world beyond Jim Crow. There was also a real conflict between the government's wish to forget shell shock whilst memorializing the war and remembering the war dead. It is this conflict between the political rhetoric and the lived experience of many wounded veterans that explains why the government was unable to dispel the negative wartime assessment of official shell-shock treatment. Yet at the same time, many mentally-wounded veterans were struggling with a pension system which was failing to give them security. ![]() Publications ranging from John Bull to the Morning Post insisted that shell-shocked men should be treated with respect, and the Minister for Health announced that the government was committed to protecting shell-shocked men from the stigma of lunacy. Shell shock achieved a very high political profile in the years 1919-1922. These community leaders negotiated the Americanization process by promoting patriotism and loyalty to the United States while retaining key ethnic cultural traditions. Perhaps most significantly, the military enlisted the help of ethnic community leaders, who assisted in training, socializing, and Americanizing immigrant troops and who pressured the military to recognize and meet the important cultural and religious needs of the ethnic soldiers. War Department integrate this diverse group into a united fighting force? The war department drew on the experiences of progressive social welfare reformers, who worked with immigrants in urban settlement houses, and they listened to industrial efficiency experts, who connected combat performance to morale and personnel management. This surge of Old World soldiers challenged the American military's cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions and required military leaders to reconsider their training methods for the foreign-born troops. During the First World War, nearly half a million immigrant draftees from forty-six different nations served in the U.S. ![]()
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