Keeping WWI Alive for New Generations

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Lora Vogt bets she can tell you the four things you learned about World War I in school.

“A guy was shot,” Vogt began, counting out each point on her fingers in front of a case of military uniforms at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, “the Lusitania was sunk, the Americans came in and won the war, and Woodrow Wilson got 14 points.”

It’s a comically simplistic summary of the “War to End All Wars,” but one Vogt, a former teacher and the museum’s curator of education, is used to hearing: The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, the Germans sank the British passenger ship Lusitania in 1915, the United States broke its isolationist tradition and entered the war in 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson gave his Fourteen Points speech to Congress in 1918, outlining the principles that lead to the war’s end that same year.

It’s the narrative that Vogt and her colleagues at the museum are trying to expand. “There are so many more things to learn from this time period,” she said, and the museum’s contemporary efforts, 100 years after the war’s end, have proved fruitful. The number of visitors has grown by more than 60 percent since 2013.

The museum’s president, Matt Naylor, credits that growth, in part, to the museum’s contemporary-focused programming.

“That generation is gone,” said Naylor, a native of Australia who came to the museum from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 2013. “And we’re drifting further away to the fifth or sixth generation since. But we know that when we provide points of access to thinking about the war’s enduring impact, we’re dealing with topics that have deep resonance with people today.”

Recent programs include events centered around wartime whiskey, chocolate and tattooing, the origins of lingerie, and a regular Pilates class. (German-born Joseph Pilates developed the exercise program while in a British internment camp during the war). An annual Boxing Day soccer tournament draws around 30 teams each year.

The museum has forays into art and politics, as well. Among its most highly attended events recently were a concert with period organ music, and a lecture on how World War I set the stage for the modern political situation in the Middle East.

“We seek to be authentic to our core mission and responsibilities,” Naylor said. “We don’t bastardize what we do. These collaborations, these activities that we engage in, there needs to be an authentic intersection of mission. And when that happens, which is almost always, the result is really very, very good.”

Through its immersive experiences, dramatic videos and impressively encyclopedic collection of artifacts on display in its permanent exhibition, the National World War I Museum explodes the nuances of The Great War, from building out life-size replicas of trench warfare to displaying artifacts that highlight how the war touched often-forgotten places — helmets from Bosnia and Vietnam, a kilt from South Africa and prominent mural-size photos of African, Sikh and Arab soldiers.

One prominent display highlights the roles of women in the war. Another features photographs of a supply drive organized by Chinese-Americans in San Francisco — a photograph of Native American elders holding donated blankets is nearby. A temporary exhibit exploring the contributions of American Jews to the war effort ran earlier this year.

“I’m an old-school museum guy. I think people come to museums to see things they can’t see anywhere else, and there are a lot of things in our museum that you can’t see anywhere else,” said Doran Cart, a senior curator who oversees the museum’s collection, less than 10 percent of which is on display. “We’ve always collected from every nation in the war. That is the story we tell.”

While U.S.-centric, the international breadth of the museum’s content sets it apart from other World War I museums. Vogt recalled a recent commemoration of Anzac Day, which has its roots in honoring the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps members who fought the Ottoman Empire in Gallipoli in 1915. At sunrise, she and others from the museum joined Americans, Australians, New Zealanders — and Turks — on the museum’s grounds to commemorate the battle and honor the dead.

“There’s something very American about that, to be that gathering space,” Vogt said. It’s a tradition that has put Kansas City on the map for World War I veterans and scholars, across generations.

Just weeks after World War I ended in 1918, Kansas City’s residents embarked on a fundraising campaign to erect a memorial to The Great War, raising more than $2.5 million ($45 million in today’s dollars) in fewer than two weeks. In 1921, the site was dedicated by military leaders from the five Allied nations, who then traveled on to Washington to dedicate the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The memorial opened five years later, in 1926, featuring a obelisklike tower overlooking a 1920s Egyptian revivalist plaza — with two Assyrian sphinxes — and a 47-acre public park.

In 1998, Kansas City residents overwhelmingly voted to raise the sales tax to fund the memorial’s restoration. In 2004, President George W. Bush signed a bill that declared the memorial as the National World War I Museum. A new museum opened in 2006, designed by New York-based Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the firm that designed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

“That’s an extraordinary commitment of the people of this city and region,” Naylor said. “It’s right that it would be in the heartland, outside the vestiges of power.”

It is against this backdrop and history of civic support that Kansas City will gather at the museum in November, joining the world in commemorating the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.

“There is an existential moment in asking who are we post-commemoration, and I have enormous confidence in our response to that,” Naylor said.