In This Issue

The numbers that describe World War I (WWI) defy easy understanding: 4.7 million Americans fought in the combined armed forces during WWI; of that number, from April 1, 1917, until December 31, 1918, 116,516 died. A great many more continued to suffer and die after that period from the effects of chemical weapons, post-traumatic stress disorder, degenerative diseases, and much else. And the American toll was small in comparison to the losses around the world: an estimated 37 million war casualties. On top of the war deaths came the global influenza pandemic, which killed some fifty million people. In Utah alone, one-fifth of the population fought the flu, with 2,915 deaths occurring throughout the state. 1 In recognition of the cost and consequences of the war—which officially ended one hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918—this issue of Utah Historical Quarterly focuses entirely on WWI. This is done in conjunction with the Utah World War I Centennial Commission.

Our opening article provides the international context for the war. As Tammy M. Proctor notes, the conflict “rocked the foundations of global life,” leading to the “redrawing of political and ethnic bounds, the death of empires, and the birth of a new geopolitical and economic order.” Throughout the world, civilians and soldiers alike dealt with the consequences of this total war. Those who survived the conflict faced a host of troubles—personal, environmental, and public. Likewise, the nature and scope of government power shifted throughout the world, including in the United States. “It is not hard to argue,” Proctor writes, “that the experience of WWI shaped a whole generation of people.”

Although it was far from the major zones of conflict, the state of Utah did not escape the effects of the First World War. Rather, as Allan Kent Powell argues in our second article, Utah’s citizens and leaders were “active participants” in WWI. Powell details the political, social, and economic environment of wartime Utah; its participation in the wider war effort; and the experiences of Utah soldiers. The article provides a broad look at the state, explaining what the complexities of the era could look like in daily life—at a restaurant in Price or a district court in Manti—with special attention paid to effects of ethnicity, class, and religion. Powell concludes by assessing the impact of the war on Utah, which included the loss of life, the expansion of government, the culmination of reform efforts, and the increase of nativism.

From the death certificate of Gladys Craghead Buck, a Cache Valley woman who died in January 1919 of influenza. Buck’s death was one of the millions of tragedies that occurred throughout the world as a result of World War I. (Courtesy Utah State Archives, Series 81448.)

Recent scholarship on WWI has recognized the importance of gender in both how the conflict played out and how governments and societies shaped their war efforts. Meanwhile, it has long been noted that the debacle of the First World War inspired remarkable art. 2 Our third article combines these two strains of thought. In it, Robert Means asks how poetry from contemporary Utah might compare with the works of Britain’s soldier-poets. He tackles that question by analyzing poetry from the Utah-published Relief Society Magazine—most of it written by women—and finds that gender and perspective are essential to understanding the literature created by either set of authors.

In our fourth article, Kenneth L. Alford approaches the war through the life of Calvin S. Smith, a Salt Lake City man who had the unusual circumstance of being the son of Joseph F. Smith, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and one of three chaplains provided by the LDS church. Smith was one of ten chaplains who served the “Wild West Division” and had charge of all LDS men in the division. Although Smith had no formal training as a chaplain, he proved adept at the task, working hard to provide stateside soldiers at Camp Lewis with what respite he could and going “over the top” himself at the front.

The issue’s last article, by Rebecca Andersen, offers a granular, familial recounting of the war experience by examining the letters exchanged between Emil Whitesides, a soldier in France, with his family in Davis County, Utah. Emil and his parents wrote one another almost weekly during his military service, using their correspondence “to maintain and even deepen their relationships with each other.” Andersen analyzes letter writing in this era and also how the Whitesides’s experience fit into the broader wartime picture. Emil’s time abroad placed him, as it did many other young men, in a world outside the rural, religious Utah of his youth. Likewise, Emil’s family learned vicariously through his letters, even as they became part of the worldwide conflict through politics, sacrifice, and, especially, the influenza pandemic.

These final articles remind us that however massive the scale of the war, the conflict and its aftermath were personal as well. The sorrow of the influenza pandemic traveled with my father’s family for much of the mid-twentieth century. My great-grandmother, Gladys Craghead Buck, was an expectant mother during the winter of 1918. Then, in January 1919, at eighteen years old and only three days after the birth of her first child, Buck died in Smithfield, Utah, from influenza and pneumonia. Her death—at a great physical distance from the battlegrounds of WWI—was yet one of the millions of tragedies of a war that affected lives across the globe and ushered in a new phase of modernity.

—Holly George

—Notes

1 Carol R. Byerly, “War Losses (USA),” in 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08, DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10162; Charles S. Peterson and Brian Q. Cannon, The Awkward State of Utah: Coming of Age in the Nation, 1896–1945 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press and Utah State Historical Society, 2015), 53.

2 See Nicoletta F. Gullace, “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor, eds., Gender and the Great War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).