Scars of the Past: American Manhood and Memory in World War II Conscientious Objection

This article explores how memories of World War I, both personal and culturally transmitted, shaped conscientious objection as both a legal construct and a personal, gendered experience during World War II. Debates around the formation of Civilian Public Service (CPS), the alternative service arrangement established in 1940 for conscientious objectors (COs) to the war, revolved around contested memories of manhood in the earlier war. Following CPS’s formation, the Great War remained a powerful framework for understanding one’s position as a pacifist man in wartime. Indeed, COs and their enemies used the products of pacifist memory, including Hollywood productions of All Quiet on the Western Front and Sergeant York, to stake diverging claims over what it meant to be a pacifist in the United States in the 1940s. At all points, gendered assumptions underscored both the memories of individual COs and the more capacious discourses of memory in which they participated.