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By Mary L. Dudziak

On 6 June 2014 at Normandy, President Barack Obama spoke movingly of the day that “blood soaked the water, bombs broke the sky,” and “entire companies’ worth of men fell in minutes.” The 70th anniversary of D-Day was a moment to remember the heroes and commemorate the fallen. The nation’s claim “written in the blood on these beaches” was to liberty, equality, freedom, and human dignity. Honoring both the veterans of D-Day and a new generation of soldiers, Obama emphasized: “people cannot live in freedom unless free people are prepared to die for it.”

Death is seen as the price of liberty in war. But war deaths are more than a trade-off or a price, shaping soldiers, communities, and the state itself. Drew Gilpin Faust wrote that during the Civil War the “work of death” was the nation’s “most fundamental and enduring undertaking.” Proximity to the dead, dying and injured transformed the United States, creating “a veritable ‘republic of suffering’ in the words [of] Frederick Law Olmsted.”

President Lincoln stood on American soil when he remembered the losses at Gettysburg. Does it matter that the site of carnage in World War II commemorated by President Obama was a transcontinental flight away? Americans were deeply affected by that war’s losses, even though the “work of death” would not so deeply permeate the national experience simply because the dying happened far away.

President Barack Obama marks the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion with veterans Clyde Combs and Ben Franklin as well as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Prince Charles on 6 June 2009. Official White House photo by Pete Souza via The White House Flickr.

Since World War II, war’s carnage has become more distant. The Korean War did not generate a republic of suffering in the United States. Instead, as Susan Brewer has shown, Americans had to be persuaded that Korea should matter to them. During the war in Vietnam, division and conflict were central to American culture and politics. A shared experience of death and dying was not.

If war and suffering played a role in constituting American identity during the Civil War, it has moved to the margins of American life in the 21st century. War losses are a defining experience for the families and communities of those deployed. Much effort is placed on minimizing even that direct experience with war deaths through the use of high-tech warfare, like drones piloted far from the battlefield.

Over time, the United States has exported its suffering, enabling the nation to kill with less risk of American casualties. Whatever the benefits of these developments, it is worth reflecting upon the opposite of Faust’s conception of Civil War culture: how American identity is constituted through isolation from the work of war death, through an export of suffering. With a protected “homeland” and exported violence, perhaps what was once a republic has become instead, in war, an empire of suffering.

Mary L. Dudziak is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory Law School. Her books include Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey and Cold War Civil Rights. Her most recent book is War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences. She will be on the panel “Scholars as Teachers: Authors Discuss Using Their Books in the Classroom” at the SHAFR 2014 Annual Meeting on Saturday, 21 June 2014. Follow her on Twitter @marydudziak.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at President Obama’s trip to the G-20 Summit. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

If there was one message President Obama wanted to send to allies in his trip to the G-20 Summit in Europe, it was to say that he is not George Bush, and the era of arrogant American unilateralism is over. In Strasbourg, France, the President said, “We exercise our leadership best when we are listening … when we show some element of humility.”

Does humility engender respect or does it evidence weakness? This week in Europe, President Obama was applauded and cheered, but this soft power didn’t seem to translate to much. The score is 0-1 in Round One of Liberalism versus Realism. I think the President knows this, and is merely waiting to cash in the store of goodwill he banked this week. As the major decisions of the presidency are made quietly behind the desk at the Oval Office, not in international summits, we should not mistake Obama’s courtesies as the prologue of things to come.

The President could not have missed the setbacks he encountered in this trip. Sure, he successfully mediated the disagreement between Chinese President Hu Jintao and French President Nicolas Sarkozy so that the G-20 would “take note” rather than fully endorse a list of rogue offshore tax havens. But the American president’s new found respect for the world did not engender newfound cooperation or an increased willingness to take America’s lead. (And we should not have expected otherwise, for courtesies are exchanged only up to the point when conflicting interests are at stake.) Europe was not malleable to the president’s call for a larger global stimulus package, and far from enthusiastic at his call to welcome Turkey into the European Union.  NATO allies only agreed to sending 5,000 more non-combat troops to aid the US war effort in Afghanistan. And of course, the President stood before a crowd of 20,000 people in Prague painting a Utopian portrait of a nuclear-free world just hours after the North Korea successfully tested a long-range missile launch.

President Obama’s European trip was a very well orchestrated and executed photo-op.  There is no doubt that Europe is feeling the love, but it is unclear if she is returning it in real ways that matter. The dance of diplomatic and royal protocols may have thrilled the public and the media, but on things that matter, the president squarely confronted the limits of symbolism and gesture.

After all, the president did let slip in the same speech in which he was extolling humility that “when we recognize we may not always have the best answer but we can always encourage the best answer.” In the end, (even ) the Liberal Way  is still the American Way. And I expect, as Theodore Roosevelt once counseled, the president’s soft voice will soon be amplified by a big stick.

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