This year marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, thus it is no surprise that over the past few years there has been a renewed interest in the "War to end all wars." At times, it seemed that the Great War was the forgotten war, easily overshadowed by the next war that pushed the Great War on the back burner, even though the decisions and impact of World War I are still with us. While we have some firsthand accounts available, the material is sparse compared to the efforts of preserving the memories of subsequent wars. On a positive note, it seems that we learned something from history, namely to preserve Veterans' experiences of the war. The Library of Congress has a small collection, accessible here www.loc.gov/vets/stories/wwi-trenches.html; and a quick search on Youtube also yields some results www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_EURh1ws_s . I assume that the vast majority of World War I Veterans simply did not want to talk about their war experience. Just like James Fredwin Crook, they continued their pre-war lives - got married, raised a family, trying to keep the family farm during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, and then seeing their sons off to fight yet another World War. 
What has been better preserved and easily available are World War I Propaganda Posters. A simple internet search can leave you spending hours looking at these artistic marvels. 

The US came late to the Great War and thus war propaganda. The British by 1917 were the real masters of the propaganda poster trade, and the US simply recycled quite a few of the posters - adjusted for the US audience of course. Unlike the British, the US had a large German population. The US tried to walk a fine line to convince the American population that they were waging war against "Prussianism, Kaiserism, German Militarism" and not the German population (across the Atlantic as well as on US soil). Judging by reports of anti-German sentiments ranging from school children being beaten up because of their German last name to painting German houses yellow to taking and selling livestock of Mennonite farmers to buy Liberty Bonds to the lynching of Robert Prager I wonder if the American public was able to make that distinction. The posters clearly appealed to the public's emotions, and in a sense painted every German-American living in the US as a disloyal, unpatriotic traitor. The posters created the image of the "uncivilized Hun" that needed to be defeated to save not only Europe but also American civilization. The posters created, encouraged, and maintained the image of the enemy at home, German-Americans.

One of my favorite Anti-German World War One Propaganda Poster is Destroy this Mad Brute, created by Harry R. Hopps in 1918. The poster was used as a recruitment tool, encouraging men to enlist. It depicts a King Kong look-alike gorilla wearing a German-style military helmet (Pickelhaube) with “Militarism” imprinted on it. The ape-like creature also sports a blond mustache, eerily similar to Kaiser Wilhelm II. The creature is drooling, his mouth is wide open, showing his teeth. He is holding a white woman in his left arm. She is partially wearing a light blue dress and is showing her bare breasts. The woman is covering her eyes with her right hand. The gorilla is holding a large wooden club with the word “Kultur” (culture) printed on it in his right hand. Both hands of the gorilla and the club are bloody. In the background is the silhouette of a destroyed city. Between the city and the gorilla is a body of water, presumably the Atlantic Ocean. It seems that the gorilla just arrived on the shores of the United States, as “America” is printed under his feet, thus playing on the public’s fears of a German invasion. The underlying message of this poster revealed that the enemy might already be in the country. Americans needed to be concerned with the enemy among them. This enemy was the millions of German-Americans who from the outset of the war were suspected of being spies and traitors. 
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The poster has a striking resemblance to King Kong from the 1933 movie, even down to holding a distressed damsel, representing western civilization, in his arms. I wonder if Hollywood took this poster as a model, and if it brought back memories of the "uncivilized Hun" at a time when a former Private in the Imperial German Army during the Great War was appointed Chancellor of Germany.

Zonenrand has been quiet for a while now. A lot has happened since the last post, mainly a move halfway across the US to attend graduate school, which is still ongoing. One of my research interests lies in the US involvement during the Great War, or World War I. Having moved to North Dakota, a state whose population can trace its roots to either Scandinavian (Norwegian and Swedish) or German (mainly Germans from Russia) heritage, with a sprinkling of the usual Anglo-Saxons, it is interesting to research North Dakotans' attitudes to US involvement in the Great War. One of my classes kind of touched on that. The idea of the class was to "Trace the Dead," where each student would trace the lives of six to eight US soldiers who served in the Great War and died during the war (either killed in action, or died of wounds or influenza). Our class focused on tracing the war dead of Polk County, Minnesota. The class quickly turned into an addiction for me - it was/is simply fascinating to retrace the lives of the average soldier from the northern Prairie drafted for the Great War. Simply using a genealogy search engine like Ancestry provided this class access to each soldier's live. Instead of being merely a number of the 116,516 US war dead, the class told each soldier's story. By using War Registration Cards and US Census records, we were able to trace our soldiers and gain a glimpse into not only their lives but their families as well. 

Most soldiers were first-generation American citizens, their parents immigrating to the US from Norway and Sweden. A few were born abroad and came to the US as toddlers. Researching the family origins at times proved to be challenging - last names being spelled differently on each US Census, the draft registration card, the US Army Transport Service Passenger Lists, and gravestones (How many different spellings of Ingebretsen can you come up with?). Some soldiers were easier to trace than others. One of my soldiers turned out to be a bit of a mystery man, at least that was my nickname for him. Henry Lindblom registered for the draft on June 5, 1917. On his draft card, he did not claim an exemption from the draft, he did not have any dependents, and he was single. Henry was inducted into the Army on February 23, 1918. Two months later he was sailing on the USS Leviathan to join the roughly 2 million doughboys fighting in the trenches of France to "make the world safe for democracy" and fight "the war to end all wars." Sadly, Henry did not make it back to eastern Minnesota to continue his life as a farmer. He was killed on October 22, 1918 during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. His final resting place is at Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial in Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, Lorraine, France, in plot D, row 23, grave 19. 

What makes Henry Lindblom a mystery man is that he lists a Selma Olson Lindblom as his wife and emergency contact on the troop ship's embarkation record. This means, Henry must have gotten married some time after he registered for the draft on June 5, 1917 and April 24, 1918, when he embarked on the USS Leviathan to France. I was unable to locate a marriage license, or any record that would indicate Henry and Selma were married. So perhaps, he listed her as his wife when "legally" she was not. In addition, Henry Lindblom left behind a son, Harry Eugene Lindblom, wo was born about 6 weeks before his father's death. It is unclear if news of the birth made it to France. Like his father, Harry served in the US Army as a Private First Class from March 6, 1942 to January 4, 1946. Unlike his father, Harry survived the Second World War and returned home. He died October 15, 2000, and is buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery. 

Tracing individual stories like Henry Lindblom bring the Great War home to the prairie and show us how world events impacted even the Northern Great Plains. While traveling through western North Dakota this past week, my husband and I stumbled upon Sunny Side Cemetery near Trotters, North Dakota. Trotters is located in Golden Valley County, about 30 miles north of Beach, North Dakota, on highway ND-16. Cemeteries in the proverbial middle of nowhere are typical of ND. Considering the sparse population in homesteading country, this is no surprise. Sunny Side Cemetery was small, about 80 graves, ranging in dates from the late 1880s to 2015. The graves of US Military Veterans, about ten percent of the graves, were decorated with the US flag and a sign indicating the service and conflict. The majority served during the Korean War, with World War II closely following. And then my husband saw the World War I marker on one gravestone. It was quite the humbling experience to see the grave of a World War I Veteran in the prairie, surrounded by nothing but wheat fields as far as the eye could see. There, in one of the most remote places, the Great War still impacted a community. James Fredwin Crook survived the war. I am not even sure if he even went overseas to join his fellow Northern Prairie doughboys, as I was unable to locate his name on the US Army Transport Service Passenger Lists. But I did find his Draft Registration Card. Like Henry Lindblom, James registered for the draft on June 5, 1917. He served as a Private in Battery C, 40th Field Artillery from July 21, 1918 to February 7, 1919. After his military service, Private Crook returned to farming in the Golden Valley County and died on February 22, 1973 at the age of 83. Like thousands of other doughboys from small communities of the Northern Great Plains, Private Crook's service during the Great War is remembered at his final resting place. A war 5000 miles away was not this abstract far-away battle between empires, but impacted even small farming communities on the prairie of western North Dakota.