@article{Transformation:1465,
      recid = {1465},
      author = {McCallum III, John Martin},
      title = {Democratic Violence and the Transformation of American  Moral Sentiments in the 'Good War'},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2017-08},
      pages = {424},
      abstract = {In the first half of the 1940s the productive and  imaginative energies of 100 million citizens of the United  States were harnessed to a sustained project of global  violence under the rubric of “total war” mobilization. This  dissertation is a study of American moral sentiments under  the pressure of that mobilization, which presented profound  challenges to assumptions about permissible and  impermissible killing, about the responsibility of  individuals for state action in a democracy, and about the  appropriate (and inappropriate) ways to experience mediated  knowledge of a distant conflict. As Americans worked to  reconcile their commitment to the war with day-to-day  knowledge of its horrors, a broad range of actors –  including military censors and civilian journalists, state  officials and publishers, child psychologists and children  themselves – articulated a vernacular “realism” which  acknowledged the moral ambiguity of firebombing and other  extreme forms of violence, yet accepted those acts as  ethically tolerable. World War II Americans did not erase  or turn a blind eye to their polity’s deep implication in  international violence; instead, they found ways to come to  terms with it at an affective level. In so doing, they  established the foundations for Cold War justifications of  lethal force which transcended racial and imperial  understandings of force rooted in continental expansion and  overseas empire. This dissertation draws on a wide range of  published and unpublished records, including underutilized  military and civilian censorship records, mass circulation  print media, public and private surveys of popular opinion,  the correspondence of public figures such as Life magazine  publisher Henry Luce, and debates over children’s war play,  in order to trace and document a transformation in the  moral common sense of violence in the American Century.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1465},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1465},
}