Book Description

Taking as its focus the figure of the disabled soldier, Encountering injury: modern war and the problem of the wounded soldier examines the United States' tortured evolution into a global military power between the Civil War and World War II. Specifically, it explores Americans' anxieties about the social, political, and physical legacies of war-produced disability in an age of modern warfare. During much of the late nineteenth century, disabled veterans were venerated as icons of manly courage and national sacrifice. By the start of World War I, however, the social significance of disabled veterans had become a subject of fierce debate. While government propagandists continued to integrate severely injured soldiers into their fund-raising campaigns, many in the United States came to associate the nation's wounded warriors with pathological dependency, compromised masculinity, and the dangers the United States would have to face (and overcome) if committed to policies of martial interventionism. Drawing upon a wide range of primary sources-- including rehabilitation films, veterans' writings, antiwar photo-journals, and government memos-- this dissertation traces the emergence of the disabled soldier as a social, cultural, and foreign policy "problem" in early twentieth century America. At its core, it shows how concerns about wounded soldiers and mass-produced injury altered Americans' attitudes toward war, peace, and the veterans' welfare state. More broadly, it casts new light on Americans' attempts to reconcile their national and international ambitions with the bodily hazards of mechanized warfare