Frank Capra's take on "Why We Fight": American Propaganda in WWII

For this assignment, I watched the first episode of Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” series: Prelude to War. A series of seven films, “Why We Fight” was commissioned by the US Government during WWII. Capra was tapped by the US Office of War Information and General George Marshall to direct the films due to his reputation as a master storyteller and acclaimed filmmaker.

Frank Capra was born in Sicily and immigrated to the United States in 1903. Six-year old Capra came to the US with parents and two siblings to join an uncle already settled in California. Capra attended an arts high school in Los Angeles and went on to attend what is now the California Institute of Technology. Capra became a US citizen in 1920, two years after being honorably discharged from the US Army during WWI. Capra became a major Hollywood player with 1934’s It Happened One Night, for which he won his first Oscar for Best Director. Capra went on to enjoy critical and box office success with his films throughout the 1930s.

The basic premise behind the creation of this film series was that US troops would rally under the war’s cause if it were explained “properly” to them. The resulting “Why We Fight” series (mandatory viewing before soldiers were deployed) is classic WWII propaganda. Officially sanctioned by the War Department, the seven films were eventually shown in theaters across the US home front as well as to troops. The “Why We Fight” series was made between 1942 and 1948. The series consists of Prelude to War (1942), The Nazis Strike (1942), The Battle of Britain (1943), Divide and Conquer (1943), Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), Tunisian Victory (1945), and Two Down and One to Go (1945).

Prelude to War opens with a quote by Secretary of War Henry Stimson: “The purpose of these films is to give factual information as to the causes, the events leading up to our entry into the war and the principles for which we are fighting.” Of course, the film doesn’t present any factually incorrect information (that I caught) but it does present the story of how WWII came to be in a very biased interpretation. Among other gems, the film tells us that the US didn’t join the war effort after the Japanese invasion of Nanking because we couldn’t convince an Iowa farm boy to enlist to save a burning mud hut across the ocean (A similar quote about another burning mud hut and Midwestern farm boy is used to explain why Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia didn’t kick the US in the pants, either).

I think this film could be used in many ways. I would not show the entire film, but use it for a lesson on propaganda for a 90 minute block period. There are extended scenes that show Nazi and Italian rallies could be fast forwarded through—eight minutes of marching would probably lose their interest. I would use this film after having looked at the causes of WWII—I would want students to have background knowledge and context for the war in Europe and why the US eventually joins in. Students could watch portions of this film as well as look at examples of propaganda from the Axis Powers to try to find similarities and differences in how each “side’ of the war twisted its message to suit their audience. “Why We Fight” could help students see that EVERYONE uses propaganda, not just the “bad guys.” “Why We Fight” clearly vilifies the Axis Powers. It refers to them as “a slave world” and shows an image of an earth swathed in light (us) and one in shadow (them). It also uses music very interestingly in the film. I would ask students to think about the music they hear when different counties are being discussed (angelic vs. foreboding), as well as the word choices used. “Why We Fight” draws heavily on the US as an enlightened, Christian nation whose founding fathers insisted we were special and a model for the world. Capra wants the audience to understand that the US worked hard through our depression instead of turning to fascism or Nazism. Students could use a simple T chart to compare how the Axis Powers are presented vs. the United States. The same approach could be used when looking at German propaganda. The message of both is the same: we are somehow better than our enemy. Helping students come to this realization via a culminating class discussion could be powerful to show that “good guys” and ‘bad guys” aren’t so one-sided. “Us” and “them” designations are useful in times of war because you want people to rally around your cause. Often times, the cause is much more appealing when you have a dark, evil “slave world” to compare yourself to. For homework, students could write a response discussing if they think the US’ use of propaganda was justified? Germany’s? Why or why not?

On Using Graphic Novels

As I read Cromer and Clark, I realized that I know very little about graphic novels, comic books, and what differentiates the two. This is probably a failing on my part. I think it is important to be “in the loop” about what students are looking at (my excuse for my recent reading of the Twilight series and new-found love for Edward Cullen). If you know what they like, what they are talking about, and what gets their attention, and I certainly think using a graphic novel would, I’m all for it. I could not believe the whining I got in my 12^th grade government class about reading. It was unbelievable, and my telling them that college professors often demand chapters or even entire books as a reading assignment fell on deaf ears. At first glance, graphic novels almost deceive the reader into thinking they are reading Peanuts or Garfield. Thanks to their intertextuality, students have to pay as much attention to the words (which at least 12^th graders at Mt. Vernon seem to despise) with images. Teachers can also benefit from the reverse psychology vis-à-vis the “cultural legitimacy” question of graphic novels. Cromer and Clark note research which says graphic novels are usually perceived as having “seedy” quality to them. If you bring something perceived as violent or seedy or just generally non-mainstream, you’ll likely have their attention, or it will at least liven up the routine. I admit that I also have this “seedy” perception of graphic novels, basically because the only graphic novels I know of, Sin City and 300, are both really violent and sexual. I was glad to see graphic novels referenced that weren’t made into a gory Bruce Willis film. The “In the Shadow of No Towers” graphic novel, referenced several times, piqued my interest. It sounds like a really interesting resource to approach a difficult, traumatic event and involves Bruce Willis not at all.

I was struck by the following quote on page 587: “Traditional Western historiography has generally privileged a single narrative (progress) and a single medium of pedagogic delivery (text). These a priori judgments of the relationship between facts and events have suffered the ill winds of postmodern critique.”

By substituting “GW” for “postmodern critique”, I think I have a pretty good summary of my experience with GW’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development. Textbooks have sufficiently been demonized and teachers who rely on them backward. I feel like this is a little unfair, as believe it or not, textbooks can provide good information and some students do learn very well from reading text. I was student teaching a subject I knew nothing about, and I had to rely on my textbook heavily to provide some context (a politically correct way of saying it taught me whatever I needed to know before I had to teach it to a room full of students). If I didn’t have it, I would have been lost. I think it is important to vary the routine and think outside the box, to bring in resources not traditionally used, such as graphic novels. But, when it comes to textbooks, I sometimes think we are throwing the out the baby with the bathwater. Hopefully, textbooks are written by intelligent people who are versed in what they are writing about. Hopefully. In my humble opinion, which is usually outside the GW box, I think that’s one baby worth saving.

Popcorn not required

Among my friends, I have the annoying distinction of pointing out a movie’s every historical inaccuracy (amongst making other generally nerdy comments throughout). The most recent victim of my know-it-all-ness was the new Robin Hood movie from Ridley Scott. The opening scene is a great depiction of medieval siege warfare, which I announced aloud to the theater and the chagrin of my friend, but the plot twist that Robin’s father, a stone mason, had a hand in Magna Carta is utter bollocks, as was their chronology about the signing of Magna Carta by King John. Anyway, I really liked Stoddard and Marcus’s article that discussed purposefully choosing and using film in the classroom. I do think social studies, and especially history, is lucky in that we have a wealth of film resources to draw on to enhance our lessons. If, for instance, I were teaching world history (which generally seems to cover the Middle Ages), I would absolutely show the opening scene of this movie. It’s a fantastic way for students to “see” siege warfare. Reading about it is one thing, seeing it, hearing it is quite another. It must have been something to behold, and terrifying.

Also terrifying is the research that shows that Americans get their history from films and video games. If we are to take another Ridley Scott film, Gladiator, as an example, we may as well hang our heads in shame. There is no way a Caesar would fight a gladiator in the Coliseum (and there is certainly no way that a gladiator would kill a Caesar in the Coliseum). The historical accuracy of the plot is preposterous (but it’s such an entertaining movie!). I also really liked Woelder’s suggestion of using a film as one source, and having it compared with another source. I found last night’s exercise using Black Hawk Down*, the Walter Clark interview, and statistics from the UN to be really interesting and helpful. I will absolutely try to use this in my own classroom. Having students critically look at a film and compare it as ONE source of information against others is a terrific way to enhance student’s media literacy. If students (and adults) are getting a good deal of their history education from Hollywood (shudder) this seems like an especially apt and worthy goal for history teachers: make students dissect a film and be critical consumers of its information. For Robin Hood, I could use the opening scene of laying siege to a French castle, and could also look for artwork of a siege or weapons used in a siege, and written descriptions of siege warfare. This would help students think critically about the film and not just treat watching a movie as a “break” from thinking.

*Ridley Scott is not paying me to talk up all his films, I swear.

Connections to Practice-Using Documentaries

Much to my chagrin, in March I found myself in charge of thirty 11th and 12th graders taking a sociology class. I taught a lengthy unit on social institutions, feeling like I was flying by the seat of my pants (for instance, despite having taught a unit on this topic, I still can’t really define what a social institution is without using both “social” and “institution”—eek). Essentially, we were looking at complex organized beliefs, rules, and practices that establishes how a society will attempt to meet basic needs and sustain itself (part of that is copied from the internet, I admit). For the lesson on religion, we spent the last 45- 50 minutes of the 90 minute block period discussing cults. The kids went NUTS. I had no idea cults were so interesting to high schoolers, but they are. After we went over the basic characteristics of a cult, I presented a cult case study by using portions of a PBS documentary on People’s Temple and Jim Jones (“Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple”). I’m not sure how this particular documentary fits in with Marcus, Stoddard, or Hess’ assertion that documentaries usually present non-mainstream ideas. Certainly People’s Temple (and cults in general) are controversial and their beliefs non-mainstream. The documentary itself was aimed at explaining Jones’ background, what his appeal was, and how he managed to exert such power over others. It relied heavily on first-hand accounts, old video and audio recordings. Many former cult members spoke about their experiences. I did not take time in the class to talk about the use of sources or potential bias. I paused often to reiterate an idea or ask a clarifying question. The students really responded to the video. It is a tragic story, particularly the ending, which had the actual audio of Jim Jones telling mothers to lay down their children. It also showed the pictures of piles of cult members lying in the ground at the compound, dead (I did warn them that they would see some graphic images). The kids were dead silent and at the end. I did not create a written guide like Woelders suggested, but I did “fill in the gaps” of the documentary, which was divided into 10 parts. We only watched 4 and a portion of the last due to time constraints. Most of the students were horrified and had a heated discussion about how they couldn’t believe this could happen, it was murder, not suicide. I had them write a response for homework having them explains if it was murder or suicide and why, based on what we saw and discussed. I got some interesting responses where students thought about free will vs. brainwashing. I think this lesson was successful on the whole because the actual content was really interesting to the students. A few came in the following week asking me questions or still talking about People’s Temple (one girl related that she talked to her grandmother about it and was told that she had relatives who had joined this cult).
Despite the lesson going well, if I were to do this again, I would try to use more firsthand accounts of People’s Temple. Students could then compare what they read in these primary sources with what they saw and heard in the documentary. This would lend itself to Woelders’ modified KWL chart.

PBS site on Jonestown documentary:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/jonestown/

YouTube divides the documentary into 10 parts. Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7IxGGfpSWk

On making up your own mind

In Chapter 4 Barton and Levstik discuss the need to search for connections and relationships in history—a need that requires an “analytic stance”. I found it interesting that while young American students can articulate the first two criteria of the analytic stance--history as a means of explaining the present and learning lessons from the past--but do not make any mention of the third; namely, learning how historical accounts are created (in laymen’s terms, learning about how historians know what they know, the process of using research and evidence to create historical knowledge). As opposed to their American counterparts, students in Northern Ireland do mention this last piece of analysis as a reason for studying history: “…so we can make up our own mind.” I was struck by this because I remember “making up my own mind” vis-à-vis history, but it certainly wasn’t in my early school years. I was, however, in Great Britain (though not Northern Ireland, thank god), studying abroad as a third year college student in a (so they say) prestigious program. Maybe I’m just undeserving of the title prestigious, maybe I’m not enough of a questioner, maybe my thinking stays inside the box more than it should, but I very much subscribed to the school of thought that emphasized narrative, reading, and lecture from an expert when it came to studying history. At any rate, history was very much (to me) story-telling, and it was even more exciting for me to hear it from a stereotypical Oxford don in a tweed blazer complete with a classy Ralph Fiennes-esque accent. I’m not sure what made that day any different, but I finally questioned my professor about his underlying assumptions that colonized group X needed British colonization to better themselves. Perhaps I had reached my tipping point in the study of Eurocentric slave owners and their progeny, be they actual Europeans or Americans cast in their mold (I’d like to give a shout out to Barton and Levstik and their dislike of George Washington as a meaningful historical figure). Whatever it was, I felt like I was, for the first time, seriously and publicly making up my own mind about the past. So perhaps in a way I am jealous of the little Northern Irish and their belief that history helps them think for themselves. This is no small realization. I think it is the most sophisticated of the three critiera making up the analytical stance, and frankly, I think it will be very difficult to have students to as much in my classroom. I did like Barton and Levstik’s suggestion of having students decide if there is a “lesson” to be learned from history and if so, having them articulate it. I think this sets them on the right path of thinking for themselves, but it just that, setting them on a path. I can’t control where their path goes and realizing that they can and should make up their own mind isn’t something I can hope to accomplish with every student in a school year. I can hope that having my students consider alternative views and reining in lecture and reading (as much as I freakishly love it) they will begin to think about what history, or anything means for them. It is a daunting task to make up the minds of 90-odd young ones. Much better for them to do it themselves, I think.

George Washington would have supported media literacy

As I read Segall and Schmidt s article on the newspaper as a social text, I felt a pang of guilt: “They [newspapers] give teachers a sense of modernizing instruction and relating the curriculum to students lives and interests.” Ooops. Guilty. In my student teaching I used newspapers in nearly every lesson. I prided myself on using a variety of papers and patted myself of the back for hardly touching the textbook and instead bringing in current events. Isn’t this what good teachers do?

Segall, Schmidt and Considine imply it isn’t. Using a newspaper to make yourself feel good that you are leaving the cursed textbook shut and bringing in “real-life” isn’t going to get me teacher of the year. While I do think it is good to bring in current events in the news daily, I never had an explicit lesson on how to approach the news, how to access, analyze and evaluate its message. We discussed bias, certainly, but nothing approaching the TAP model. And for this, the authors would surely revoke my non-existent teaching license.

I really appreciated Considine’s discussion of media literacy and how crucial it is for young people to develop. We are living in a media crazy world, and we should be helping media crazy boys and girls to make sense of that world by looking at the very stuff that floods them with information. If students are drowning in information and starved for knowledge, perhaps media literacy will be their life preserver.

I appreciated the straightforwardness and practicality of the TAP model. I think this could be used with students just as he presents it. I also liked the practicality of representing the TAP approach as a triangle. Straightforward, usable, and not in any way asserting that history teachers should delegate George Washington to the backseat or disregard him altogether (!?!). I love it. I was also happy to see several websites and clear examples of how to approach analyzing media with students. The Cinderella Man example made me think back to how much I took for granted when watching the movie. It is exciting to think that I can go back again and look at it with new, more focused, media-approach savvy eyes, and perhaps bring this to my students in a lesson the Great Depression. Any day that links the Great Depression with Russell Crowe is a good day.

Barton, Levstik, and Wineburg. O my.

I like the idea of using history to train students to just question, full stop. Whether this questioning leads to community organizing or stay-at-home-mom-ing, I'm not interested. It's not my place to dictate how a student should use their skills or make their choices (unless of course, they are doing something which is outright harming themselves or others). Students are individuals who make their own choices and, in the end, will choose to do as they will. I am uncomfortable with Barton and Levstik assertion that the goal of social studies education should be to train students to deliberate over the public good. I’m not a world changer. I just want students to think. In a world of Jersey Shore and Real Housewives of (insert city here), someone certainly needs to. But for the public good? I think it is a little presumptuous. "The public" is so broad and ambiguous, our country so big and diverse, how is anyone to know what is best for everyone, or even most? Can't we say that history educators should train students to be critical consumers of information, to read well, and express themselves amiably? I'm perfectly happy to leave it at that. But tacking on "for the future purposes of the deliberating on the public good" makes me a little uneasy. After a 14-week reality check in Title 1 schools, I'll be honest. I'd be happy if young people just deliberate ANYTHING courteously, respectfully, and with evidence to support their view. Start small and go from there. They are, after all, children. They should be treated with respect, but don’t forget that, if given the opportunity, they will draw boobs on the board and eat pop tarts and Coke for every meal.

I responded much better to Wineburg’s article on historical thinking. I liked the idea of viewing the past as a foreign country, needing “culture shock” or being uncomfortable. I appreciated his assertion that the past is a difference place because people saw differently then: “Much as we try, we can never fully cross the Rubicon that flows between our mind and Caesar’s.” Poetic.

I also agreed with his warning that while it is important for students to find something to identify with or relate to when looking at the past, it shouldn’t be presented as so foreign that kids just throw up their hands. Really, people from the past weren’t SO different from us. They were people; they were no better or worse than we are now. I think we dwell so much on differences, but similarities can be helpful in getting kids to look at the past and connect in some way. If one goal of history education is to deepen or expand one’s view of humanity, this is essential.