SOLDIER
SNAPSHOTS
SOLDIER SNAPSHOTS
Masculinity, Play, and Friendship
in the Everyday Photographs of
Men in the American Military
JAY MECHLING
University Press of Kansas
2021 by the University Press of Kansas
All rights reserved
Photos courtesy of authors collection.
Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mechling, Jay, 1945 .
Title: Soldier snapshots: masculinity, play, and friendship in the everyday photographs of men in the American military / Jay Mechling.
Description: Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020048514
ISBN 9780700632435 (cloth)
ISBN 9780700632923 (ebook)
ISBN 9780700632442 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Vernacular photographyUnited States. | Male friendshipUnited StatesPictorial works. | SoldiersRecreationUnited StatesPictorial works. | Photographic criticism.
Classification: LCC TR23 .S66 2021 | DDC 770dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048514.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available.
Printed in the United States of America
10987654321
The paper used in the print publication is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.481992.
For
Simon J. Bronner
and
John Paul Wallis,
two men from different generations,
both coauthors with me and each my friend
Contents
Acknowledgments
I have dedicated this book to Simon J. Bronner and John Paul (JP) Wallis. Simon and I have been friends and coauthors for about four decades, and I owe him an intellectual and friendship debt too long to describe here. I met JP just as I retired from teaching American studies at the University of California, Davis, in 2009 after thirty-eight years. He is a Marine veteran of two tours in Iraq, and our collaboration began with my helping him with his senior honors thesis in American studies, and that led to our writing two articles and a book together. I have learned a great deal from both men.
This project began with a book chapter I wrote for a volume of military folklore edited by Tad Tuleja and Eric Eliason, and I am grateful that they invited me into the project. Later, Tad was our editor for a book chapter I wrote with JP for a volume on resistance in the military.
Over the years Jon Wagner has been a good friend and intellectual playmate. I always learn from him.
This book benefited greatly from commentary by John Ibson and Richard Burns, for which I am grateful.
I deeply appreciate the confidence in the project and the encouragement from Joyce Harrison, editor in chief at the University Press of Kansas.
Finally, I am nothing without the love and support and advice from my spouse and longtime coauthor, Elizabeth Walker Mechling. Always.
Introduction
The snapshot opening this Introduction sets the tone for what is to follow. As is typical of the snapshots in this book, I do not know the names of the two men in the snapshot. I do not even know their branch of service, so I will just call them soldiers. The bed and metal lockers behind them suggest they are in a more formal and comfortable barracks than a tent in a field. They are looking at an array of snapshots spread out on the bed, and from what we can tell the snapshots are of women, probably girlfriends or family members or both. The snapshot of the two soldiers, though, conveys more. These two soldiers are buddies, and they are experiencing a moment of strong bonding looking at these snapshots together, doing something side by side. The snapshots on the bed probably belong to just one of the soldiers (my guess is the one on our right, given his primary body position over the snapshots and the buddys body position from the side). They are smiling, and if we see the snapshot as a moment in an ongoing story of their relationship, we might guess that the owner of the array of snapshots (possibly recently sent from home) has been telling his buddy stories about the people in the snapshots. Moreover, the men are not afraid to be touching shoulders. Their friendship permits casual touching. We know nothing about these two men, yet this snapshot of them tells us a great deal. That is the point of this book.
This snapshot also points to two fundamental themes explored in this book. The first theme is how American men socially construct their performance of masculinity in everyday life in all-male friendship groups. The construction of masculinity is not an easy project for the individual, as we shall see. The male friendship group creates paradoxes for that project. The second theme, therefore, is how men use their folk practices in the male group to manage the paradoxes of their friendship and comradeship (not the same thing) under sometimes stressful conditions. Most of the folk practices, the folklore, the vernacular, everyday culture, have elements of play. They use play to manage their friendships and to manage their feelings. The title of this book conveniently includes these keywords: masculinity, play, and friendship.
This is an interdisciplinary American studies book. As in all of my scholarship, the subject of the book or essay is American culture. I seek an understanding of American culture by subjecting particular bits of evidence to scrutiny to see how the part can reveal the whole. The book in your hands is about vernacular photography, snapshots, by American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and aviators; the snapshots are the evidence, the parts I suspect will reveal something about the whole. And since almost all of the snapshots I have available in my pool of evidence are photographs taken of men most likely by other men, this is also a book about the social construction, performance, and repair (if necessary) of American masculinity. From snapshots to ideas about the everyday lives of male soldiers to ideas about the lives of men in groups to ideas about American culture. Parts and wholes.
In this Introduction I explore some key issues always involved with the study of cultures. I have never put together in one place my thoughts about how one undertakes the interdisciplinary study of American culture, and this Introduction is as good a place as any to do that. This Introduction also introduces you to the voice I use in writingit is a very personal voice and I know that I break many norms of scholarly writing. Those norms sometimes need to be broken.
I also try to explain some complex ideas in everyday language easy for all readers to understand. I joked in one article I wrote, laying out ten axioms for doing American studies, that the writer should eschew obfuscation (Mechling 1997). Accordingly, I avoid the specialized jargon found in the disciplines I must often tap, and when I must use a word or phrase for which there is no easy substitute, I explain the meaning of that word or phrase. My intellectual hero is William James, one of the fathers of American psychology and the philosopher who founded the American school of philosophy still alive todayPragmatism. James gave public lectures in which he introduced his complex ideas in language the lay audience, often schoolteachers, could understand. James was announcing a radical idea that truth is something that happens to an idea, that there are no absolute truths except as people construct them and agree to the construction. Those truths are always tentative. Imagine a late-nineteenth-century or early-twentieth-century audience hearing that radical idea. Jamess Pragmatism (1907/1975) was the first book I read in college, and years later I read Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmanns The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge (1967), a book very much in the tradition of American Pragmatism (Mechling 1985; Mechling 1986; Mechling and Mechling 1999). The present books focus on the actual everyday practices of Americans, in this case soldiers (which I use often as shorthand for soldiers, Marines, sailors, and aviators), works from that Pragmatic tradition.
