Armchair Warriors - 9781591142010

Armchair Warriors is a history of the interplay between the popular media's coverage of the nation's wars and the perception of ordinary Americans regarding military issues, from Spanish-American war through the Cold War. The book begins with the premise that the press provided most Americans with their primary source of insight into the practical military problems confronting the United States. In a nation where military service was the exception rather than the rule, the public relied on news outlets to make sense of what war "really" was. These articles and editorials not only celebrated the country's successes in war, but also attempted to explain its setbacks as well as the perils and opportunities that lay ahead.
The book makes use of hundreds of letters from average Americans to explore a previously unexamined aspect of popular participation in America's rise to global dominance. These letters provide a unique window into the minds of patriotic citizens grappling with issues ranging from grand strategy to the deadly imperatives of individual combat.
These letters also represent a form of grassroots democracy; reflecting a belief that the "man on the street" could apply common sense to solve even the most intractable military problems. The press often advanced this activity by distilling complex issues down to a level that the ordinary reader could understand and by encouraging private citizens to find solutions that had eluded the "experts." This phenomenon reflects a strain of popular anti-intellectualism or anti-elitism that no doubt found support in the uniquely American values of equality and individualism. Thus the same ideals the nation fought to protect also produced the outpouring of ideas about how to win the fight.