2022 Jacques Barzun Prize

The recipient of the 2022 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is Elizabeth D. Samet, in recognition of her book, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).  Dr. Samet has been a Professor of English at West Point (United States Military Academy), since 1997. The 2022 Barzun Prize was presented at the Society's November 2022 Meeting.

‘Miraculously’, Elizabeth Samet writes with some irony, ‘the deadliest conflict in human history became something inherently virtuous’.  We turned the damage and loss of the Second World War into a scene of rescue, an American saving of the face of democracy and kindness.  ‘Each generation has found a new use for the Good War’, Samet says.  It is seen as the only one of its kind, the war that all other wars fail to be.  The ‘keynotes’ of the myth, as she defines them, include the following claims: the United States joined the war for idealistic reasons; Americans were united in the war effort; Americans ‘fight decently reluctantly, only when they must’.  Without wishing to deny the heroism of many soldiers or the horrors committed by the enemies, Samet asks us to attend to a more complex view of the long historical situation.

When she quotes a war industry worker as saying that World War II was ‘the last time in the history of the country when a full-blown spirit of patriotism was in every heart’, Samet doesn’t deny that the spirit was in some hearts, only asks us to wonder what was going on in the hearts that didn’t feel that way, and what happens to our sense of history if we fail to take them into account.  This is her recurring theme, as she explores stories of the good war in political campaigns, history books, tv series, movies, guidebooks, comics, memorial speeches, and much else.    The myth of World War II excuses other, more questionable combats, she says, so that ‘we allow our guilt to obscure the realities of devastating, indecisive wars’, and thereby ‘increase the likelihood of finding ourselves in a similar predicament once again’.  Samet is particularly persuasive on the topic of lateness, both in wartime and after.  Which ardent defendants of democracy were paying attention when Italy took over Ethiopia and civil war broke out in Spain?  Even in England, after the Munich agreement, there was a will to do nothing until after the last minute.  ‘It was easier’, Samet says, ‘to think of all those veterans of Spain as premature anti-fascists than it was to accept that one had been too late’.  Looking for the Good War is a defense of history in the fullest sense, a model examination of one of our most dangerous habits: replacing accounts of what happened with flattering posthumous fables.  Even when the fables are partially true, it’s usually worth taking another look at them.

The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded annually to the author whose book exhibits distinguished work in American or European cultural history.  Established by a former student of Jacques Barzun, the prize honors this historian and cultural critic who was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1984.

The selection committee consisted of Michael Wood (chair), Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University; David Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley; and Robert B. Pippin, Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago.