“Seeing Is Not Enough”: World War I Battlefield Tourism

German Stahlhelm and postcard sent to
Louise and Bertha Trainer, 1921

After an unintentionally long hiatus, the Alice News blog is back with a story inspired by our recent exhibit of World War I artifacts at the Centennial Summer Fair. Most of the war relics in the Alice’s collection were obtained by servicemen who acquired them during their time overseas. However, one battered and rusty German helmet was given to Louise and Bertha Trainer by a friend of theirs who visited the battlefields of Belgium in 1921. Emma Kindl was one of thousands of tourists who made pilgrimages to sites in France and Belgium in the years after the Great War.

While we are accustomed to the idea of battlefield tourism today, we probably tend to associate it with the visiting of sites like Civil War battlefields—places where time has removed the most obvious evidence of their violent past. It may seem strange that people were interested in visiting trenches and ruined villages in the immediate aftermath of the war. But even before the armistice, commentators were predicting that there would be a boom in battlefield tourism. The war had been such a profound and life-altering event for so many people that it seemed inevitable that they would want to witness for themselves the places whose names had become part of their vocabulary: Ypres, Vimy, Passchendaele, Verdun.

Another factor encouraging travel was the decision not to return the bodies of the fallen to their home countries but to bury them on or near the battlefields. Bereaved family members had to travel in order to visit the graves of their loved ones. World War I also produced an extraordinarily large number of bodies that were never identified or otherwise remained unaccounted for. For the families of these missing men, a trip to a battlefield or war memorial was the closest they would come to visiting their final resting place. 

From the Michelin Guide
Ypres and the Battle of Ypres (1919)

Widows, parents, and children did not think of themselves as battlefield tourists but as pilgrims, visiting hallowed ground. Nevertheless, they frequently required guidance to locate the sites they wanted to visit, and a variety of charitable organizations were established in the post-war years to assist families and ex-servicemen. Travel agencies like Thomas Cook offered organized tours of sites associated with the war in France, Belgium, Italy, and the Middle East, and Michelin issued its first battlefield guidebooks in 1919. Volume I of this series, The First Battle of the Marne, stated quite explicitly, “The contemplated visit should be a pilgrimage; not merely a journey across the ravished land. Seeing is not enough, the visitor must understand; ruins are more impressive when coupled with a knowledge of their origin and destruction.”

From the Michelin Guide
Lille Before and During the War (1919)

The Michelin guides (31 titles in French and 15 in English) all followed a similar pattern. They began with an overview of the battles covered in the guide (“a clear comprehension of the action as a whole is absolutely necessary to a full understanding of the separate engagements”), after which itineraries were laid out. These itineraries were, in some ways, not all that different than those in ordinary guidebooks, including driving directions, histories of towns and villages, and information about churches and other landmarks. But they were also detailed accounts of battles, bombings, and wartime deprivation, often including first-hand accounts from those who had experienced them. The books were lavishly illustrated with photographs, many of them before-and-after views which highlighted the destruction wrought upon the landscape. Using the Michelin guides, the visitor could retrace the daily—almost hourly—progression of the war.

The idea that one could recreate the experiences of the past through visiting the battlefields seems to have been an important one both for families and for ex-servicemen. For the bereaved, retracing the steps of their loved ones helped them feel closer to those they had lost. The journey to the grave or battlefield was an essential part of the grieving process for many people, allowing them a venue to confront their emotions and emerge afterwards in a more hopeful and accepting frame of mind. Some ex-servicemen found revisiting battlefields therapeutic as well. By reliving their pasts and facing their memories, they could come to terms with the effects of the war.

Postcard of the battlefield at Kemmel. A note on the back states that
this field is where Mlle. Kindl picked up the helmet.

Of course, over time, the landscape of the battlefields changed, and it became harder to relive the past. In the early 1920s, the destruction of the war was still very clear. As one guidebook put it, “The ruined villages are as the shells and bombs left them. Everywhere are branchless trees and stumps, shell craters roughly filled in, trenches, barbed wire entanglements, and shelters for men and ammunition. Thousands of shells, shell casings, rifles, gun-limbers, and machine-guns lie scattered about.” Some battlefields and trenches were preserved in their wartime state, either by commercial operators or by Dominion governments (for example, the Canadian government was instrumental in preserving portions of Vimy Ridge), but for the most part, nature and agriculture reclaimed the fields. In this context, souvenirs took on great significance. Locating and bringing home a tangible reminder of the battlefield became even more important as time passed and the material effects of the war were less obvious.

Sources:

This post is primarily drawn from the David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, and Canada, 1919-1939 (Berg, 1998). Other sources on battlefield tourism include Brian Murphy, “Dark Tourism and the Michelin World War I Battlefield Guides,” Journal of Franco-Irish Studies v. 4 (2015) and Caroline Winter, “Tourism, Social Memory, and the Great War,” Annals of Tourism Research v. 36 no. 4 (October 2009). An excellent source on monuments and the memory of World War I more broadly is Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Everything Is Lafayette: The Last General’s American Tour, 1824-25

Dedicated readers of this blog (if indeed there are any) may recall back in November 2014 when I included Lafayette commemorative ceramics in my series on New York scenes on transferware. The featured items depicted the Marquis de Lafayette’s arrival in New York harbor on August 16, 1824, at the beginning of his tour of the United States. I thought it would be fun to return to this topic and take a closer look at Lafayette’s grand tour, and some more of the items made to commemorate it.

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, had first come to North America in 1777 as a 19-year-old full of enthusiasm for the cause of independence. Now he was in his late sixties and had survived both the American Revolution and the French Revolution and its aftermath (and would experience one more revolution, in July 1830). He was accompanied on this trip by his son, Georges Washington Lafayette, and his secretary, Auguste Levasseur, who would later publish an account of the tour. Originally, Lafayette planned to visit the 13 original states and stay for four months; such was the response that he ended up visiting all 24 states over the course of 13 months.

“Welcome La Fayett” jug by an unknown maker,
in the collection of the Alice T. Miner Museum

President James Monroe had chosen an auspicious moment to invite Lafayette to be “the Nation’s Guest.” The United States was enjoying a period of peace and prosperity, and new roads, canals, and steamboats made travel around the country relatively quick and pleasant. By the 1820s, Americans were becoming ever more aware that the Revolutionary generation was passing away. Lafayette was the only one of George Washington’s major generals still alive in 1824; he was a significant figure in his own right for his military contributions, and as a close friend of Washington he provided a personal link to the great men of the past. As one Lafayette biographer has written of the tour, “It was a mystical experience they would relate to their heirs through generations to come. Lafayette had materialized from a distant age, the last leader and hero at the nation’s defining moment. They knew they and the world would never see his kind again.”

Lafayette gloves in the Alice’s collection

Lafayette and his companions passed through our part of the country in late June 1825. They arrived in Burlington, Vermont, on June 28. There they admired the city’s “beautiful situation” on Lake Champlain, and were greeted by local citizens and the militia. There was a public dinner, and many speeches, after which Lafayette was taken to lay the cornerstone of the new South College building (now known as Old Mill) at the University of Vermont. After a reception at the home of Governor Cornelius Van Ness, Lafayette boarded the steamboat Phoenix, which would take him to Whitehall via Lake Champlain. En route, they passed through (in Levasseur’s words) “that movable field of battle on which Commodore M’Donough, and his fearless mariners, covered themselves with glory, on the 11th of September, 1814.” According to Levasseur, they would have liked to visit Plattsburgh, but were expected to arrive in New York by July 4th, and did not have time. They did make a brief stop in Whitehall before boarding the carriages that would take them to Albany, where Lafayette was greeted by “an arch formed of 200 flags of all nations, by the sound of artillery, and two rows of little girls, who covered him with flowers, the moment he passed before them.”

Memorial ribbon from the Alice T.
Miner Museum collection

The parades held and triumphal arches erected for Lafayette’s visit were ephemeral, but there were more lasting souvenirs. Just at the moment when English ceramic manufacturers were beginning to truly tap into the American market, they had the perfect subject for transferware. Lafayette arriving at Castle Garden, Lafayette visiting the tomb of Washington, and Lafayette’s famous face (both old and young, rather in the manner of Elvis memorabilia) decorated plates, jugs, washbasins, saltshakers, and household items of every description. Bandanas and gloves and ribbons were printed with his image, and countless engravings rolled off printing presses. One Philadelphia newspaper commented, “Everything is Lafayette, whether it be on our heads or under our feet. We wrap our bodies in Lafayette coats during the day, and repose between Lafayette blankets at night.”

Lafayette spent his 68th birthday in Washington with President John Quincy Adams, and departed for France the next day. When he died in 1834, President Andrew Jackson ordered that Lafayette receive the same memorial honors that had been bestowed on Washington in 1799. Both Houses of Congress were draped in black bunting for 30 days, and members wore mourning badges. Congress urged Americans to follow similar mourning practices. Memorial services were performed in his honor all over the United States—and more souvenir items were made.

These items would later become treasured pieces for collectors like Alice Miner and others of her generation. They, too, admired Lafayette, but they also saw these mementos as evidence of the greater patriotism of early 19th century Americans—and they hoped that by preserving and displaying them, they would inspire their fellow citizens to follow that example.

Sources:

Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; Or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States (2 volumes, 1829)

Marian Klamkin, The Return of Lafayette, 1824-25 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975)

Stanley J. Idzerda, Anne C. Loveland, and Marc H. Miller, Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds: The Art and Pageantry of His Farewell Tour of America, 1824-25 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989)

Jhennifer A. Amundson, “Staging a Triumph, Raising a Temple: Philadelphia’s ‘Welcoming Parade’ for Lafayette, 1824,” in David Gobel and Daves Rossell, eds., Commemoration in America: Essays on Monuments, Memorialization, and Memory (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2013)

The Celebration That Wasn’t: The 1914-1915 Peace Centenary

The Signing of the Treaty of Ghent
by Amédée Forestier, 1914

Everyone loves a centennial celebration, and in 1910 a group of American and British citizens were already preparing for what they believed would be a significant anniversary. 1914-1915 would mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814, ending the War of 1812 and beginning of one hundred years of peace between Britain and the US. Peace Centenary Committees had been formed on both sides of the Atlantic, and plans were being made to mark the occasion with the appropriate plaques, ceremonies, pageants, and monuments.

A pamphlet issued in 1913 laid out the aims and plans of the Committee. The members especially wished to emphasize the special relationship among English-speaking people in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, and their common cultural, legal, and political traditions. At a time when new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were arriving in ever-larger numbers, and African-Americans were pushing back against the restrictions of segregation and discrimination, many Americans of British ancestry sought ways to place so-called “Anglo-Saxon” heritage at the center of the culture—and by doing so assure the security of their own position as the political and social leaders of the nation.

Design for a commemorative postage stamp

The Committee suggested a wide range of commemorative activities for 1914-1915, from the traditional placing of historic markers to more grandiose plans, such as the erection of a companion to the Statue of Liberty, “Peace,” on an artificial island in New York Harbor. Other ideas included a ceremonial banquet to be held in Ghent on January 8, 1815, replicating the one held in 1815, “a great merchant marine parade from Buffalo to Duluth and return, with celebrations in the border cities and towns,” a “Museum of the Peaceful Arts,” to be established in New York, and memorial arches to be built at the US-Canadian border between New York and Quebec, and Washington and British Columbia. Most of these activities were to be planned and executed by local committees, of which the Northern New York Committee was by far the largest with over 300 members.

The outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 put a halt to most of these plans. While the United States did not enter the war until April 1917, the general feeling was that celebrating peace in the midst of war didn’t make a lot of sense. Moreover, there was a reluctance to spend money on pageantry and monuments when those funds could be used to support the war effort. Cities like Plattsburgh and New Orleans that had already organized commemorative events for 1914 carried on as planned, but most of the other ideas were never carried out (Ghent was under German occupation by January 1915, so no banquet), or had to wait until the war was over (a Peace Arch was eventually constructed on the Washington-British Columbia border, but not until 1921).

One task that the Committee was able to carry out successfully was the purchase of Sulgrave Manor, the English ancestral home of George Washington. Lawrence Washington, great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of George, acquired the manor in 1539, and members of the Washington family lived there for about 70 years. The Committee hoped that in time, Sulgrave Manor would become a “shrine” and a place of pilgrimage for Washington’s admirers in Britain, just as Mount Vernon was in the United States.

Appeal for support of Sulgrave Manor
sent to William Miner

Washington’s connection to Sulgrave Manor was fairly tenuous. By the time his great-grandfather left England for Virginia in the 1650s, the family had long since left the village of Sulgrave. Washington probably didn’t know much about his “ancestral estate” or his English forebears. But what was important to the people who preserved Sulgrave Manor in the early 20th century was the link it provided to that precious “Anglo-Saxon” heritage. It allowed them to emphasize that Washington was English, the product of many generations of English traditions, and therefore imbued with all the virtues that they associated with England, particularly those found in small rural, pre-industrial communities.

Records in the Alice’s archives show that William Miner donated $200 to the Sulgrave Institute and $250 to the Washington Manor House fund prior to 1922 (the building was officially dedicated in June 1921). At this time, Alice and William Miner were involved with the restoration of the Kent Delord House in Plattsburgh, and plans were underway for the Colonial Home in Chazy. William Miner was also engaged in researching his own English ancestry. Supporting the restoration of Sulgrave Manor would have fit into their larger philanthropic goals and ideas about historic preservation.

Sources:

Ethel Armes, The Washington Manor House: England’s Gift to the World (New York: The Sulgrave Institution, 1922).

American Committee for the Celebration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of Peace Among English-Speaking Peoples, General Prospectus of the Project to Celebrate the Centennial of the Signing of the Treaty of Ghent (New York, 1913).

Marquess of Crewe, “The Sulgrave Institution and the Anglo-American Society,” 1922 (pamphlet in museum archives).

“The Sulgrave Institution of the United States and of the British Commonwealth: A Statement and Programme,” ca. 1923 (pamphlet in museum archives).

The Place is the Hero: Plattsburgh’s Historical Pageant of the Champlain Valley

The early 20th century was the great age of historical pageantry. In communities all over the United States, and especially in the northeast, people came together to portray their towns’ histories in elaborate performances combining drama, music, and dance. Like proponents of the Colonial Revival movement, pageant organizers and creators hoped to use history as a tool for understanding the present. Pageants were usually held to mark an anniversary of the town’s founding or a significant event. And in doing so, pageants attempted to present a community’s past, present, and future as a coherent whole.

Official Program of the Centennial Celebration

Residents of Plattsburgh and surrounding areas participated in this trend when they performed the “Historical Pageant of the Champlain Valley” in September, 1914, as part of the Centennial Celebration of the Battle of Plattsburgh. This was an enormous undertaking, involving 1,200 performers, a chorus of 400 voices, and a 40-piece band. The Plattsburgh Sentinel estimated that about 5,000 people braved the chilly fall weather to attend the first performance (one of four), which was held on the parade grounds at the Plattsburgh Barracks.

Program for Margaret MacLaren Eager's Pageant of Utica

The Centenary Commission hired Margaret MacLaren Eager, a professional pageant director, to create and organize the pageant. Eager was at the peak of her career in 1914 and very well known in New York; she had directed the Pageant of Saratoga in 1913, the Pageant of Utica in the Mohawk Valley earlier in the summer of 1914, and would go on to direct the “Historical Pageant of Newburgh-on-Hudson: A Pageant of Peace and True Patriotism” the next year.

While Eager’s pageant incorporated people and events specific to the Champlain Valley, the general structure of the program would already have been familiar to audiences. The pageant was organized around a series of episodes depicting key historical moments, performed in pantomime, interspersed with symbolic interludes of music and dance. For example, in the “Pageant of the Champlain Valley,” Episode 8, depicting “The Coming of the First Settlers to Plattsburgh” was followed by an Interlude in which “the little wood creatures”—children dressed as butterflies, frogs, and crickets—“come out from among the trees, and glide stealthily about.”

In the northeast, the historical episodes tended to follow the same pattern, regardless of town: Indian life, discovery/exploration, early settlers, the Revolutionary War, 19th-century life, the Civil War. The “Pageant of the Champlain Valley” generally followed this model, though it was unusual in that concentrated on early history and skipped entirely over the 100 years between the battle and the present day—not surprising, however, given that the larger purpose of the celebration was to commemorate the Battle of Plattsburgh.

Ross Platt Lobdell as Judge Levi Platt

When casting roles in pageants, organizers loved to have descendants of key historical figures play their ancestors. This was thought to heighten the realism of the portrayal as well as make clear the connection between past and present. As an article in the Plattsburgh Sentinel reviewing the pageant put it, “The history of Plattsburgh and Clinton county is no longer comprised, limited, to the printed sheet. It is real and living and the grand-children of the grandparents have enacted the story.”

George MacDonough and his wife as
Commodore and Mrs. MacDonough

The Finale of the Champlain Valley pageant brought together past, present, and future. All of the actors from the historical episodes returned to the stage, and then were joined by residents of the towns of the Champlain Valley. “People of different and groups enter[ed], representing the various activities for good in the valley today.” Finally, the Spirit of the Mountains and the Spirit of the Valleys and the Waters entered, “form[ing] an aisle through which the Standing Army of the Future rides, led by the Angel of Peace.”

In September 1914, the war that had just begun in Europe was very much on people’s minds. Though the United States would not enter the war until 1917, Americans were concerned about the possibility, and Plattsburgh would soon become the center of the Preparedness Movement. While some Americans thought that pageants could act as a substitute for war, by providing a peaceful way of satisfying people’s needs for excitement and drama, others saw pageantry as an extension of military preparedness. Historian David Glassberg thinks that pageants “implicitly ‘prepared’ Americans for war through scenes that depicted past generations as at their best during wartime, exhibiting ingenuity, courage, solidarity, and a spirit of self-sacrifice.” This was certainly true in the 1914 pageant, with its emphasis on the Revolutionary War and, of course, the War of 1812.

Benjamin Mooers as General Mooers

We don’t know for sure if Alice Miner attended the pageant, but I like to think that she did. Certainly the ideas about history, community, and patriotism expressed in the performance aligned quite closely with her own values—the values she would express ten years later with the opening of her Colonial Collection.


Brief Outline of the Program for the Historical Pageant of the Champlain Valley

Prelude: The Face of the Waters and The First Indian
Episode 1: Discovery and Naming of Lake Champlain
Episode 2: A Party of French Soldiers and Long Sault Indians on an Exploring Expedition are attacked by Abenakis and Algonquin Indians
Episode 3: The Coming of William Gilliland’s artisans to Make a Clearing at Willsboro, May 10, 1765
Interlude: The Appeal of the Pines
Episode 4(a): The Coming of the Gilliland Family
Interlude: The Spirit of War
Episode 4(b): The Forming of the First Company in the Valley before the Revolution—Visit of General Gates and Benedict Arnold
Episode 4(c): The Arrest
Episode 5: Battle of Valcour
Episode 6: General Burgoyne Addresses Indian Tribes at the Falls of Boquet
Episode 7: The Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—Departure of Peter Sailly for the United States
Episode 8: The Coming of the First Settlers to Plattsburgh
Interlude: The Creatures of the Wood
Episode 9: The Building of the First Sawmill, called “The Glory of the Saranac”
Episode 10: Market Place on Court Day—Peter Sailly appointed Collector of Customs for the District of Champlain—The First Trip of the Steamboat Vermont
Episode 11: The War of 1812—Arrival of Courier Announcing the Declaration of War—The Essex Company
Episode 12: Murray’s Raid
Episode 13: Macdonough and his Bride on their way to Burlington
Episode 14(a): The Approach of the British
Episode 14(b): The Town of Plattsburgh Honors Commodore Macdonough
Finale: Enter Heralds of the Past, Present and Future on Horseback