Book Reviews Tuttle, William M, Jr. `Daddy's Gone to War': The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. During the 1996 American presidential campaign, much was made of the fact that Senator Robert Dole, the Republican candidate for President, was almost certainly the last veteran of the Second World War who would stand for the presidency. Although Dole's candidacy symbolized the closing of a 50-year era in politics dominated by men who had served in the War, it does not mark the end of the Second World War as a significant personal event in the lives of political and foreign policy elites. In an interesting and thoroughly entertaining piece of interdisciplinary research, William Tuttle demonstrates that Americans who were born or came of age during the Second World War were as profoundly affected by the experience as those in military service. Now aged 55-65 and entering the last years of their working lives, these `homefront children' will remain a dominant force in American political and foreign policy decision-making for the next decade. In Daddy's Gone to War, Professor Tuttle gives this uniquely situated demographic cadre a thorough psychological and historical scrubbing. In the introduction to Daddy's Gone to War, Professor Tuttle (a `homefront child' himself whose father served for three years as a combat thoracic surgeon in North Africa and Europe) describes how this project developed over 25 years. Although a history professor, he dedicated three separate years of concentrated study at Kansas, Stanford and Berkeley to developmental psychology. However, the author admits that after these three years of intensive study and several more years of research, his resulting 600-page history of America's homefront children was `one-dimensional and boring'. To salvage the work, Professor Tuttle wrote to the editors of 100 newspapers, requesting assistance in soliciting reminiscences from readers who were homefront children. When joined with the author's thorough skills as a historian and his later-acquired knowledge of child psychology, the 2,500 responses he received have yielded an insightful and useful cross-disciplinary study. It is the personal stories of these now-ageing homefront children - albeit unscientifically collected (and the author admits as much) - that broadens the appeal of this work from the narrow world of social historians to a much wider audience of informed readers. Beginning with the fear and confusion engendered in children by the profound emotional impact of Pearl Harbour, the author paints with a broad brush for the succeeding 14 chapters, ranging over subjects as diverse as departing fathers, changing households, nutrition and health, war worker mothers, Saturday matinee newsreels, comic books and homecoming reunions. Interesting as these topics are, particularly for those of us who are the children of homefront children, the book's broader appeal stems from Professor Tuttle's facility in weaving his descriptive narrative of child psychological development into the vast social and political changes overtaking a major industrial nation at war. The author neatly ties the micro-effects of war and mobilization on a child's individual development - and the personal reminiscences poignantly underscore this - to such profound changes in American society as the dilution of ethnic self-identification, the acceptance of state-sponsored child care, the conversion of America from a rural to an urban nation, or the undermining of traditional gender roles. Although sometimes breathtaking in his sweep, the author carries us with him as he draws his convincing and compelling connections. Because of the author's ambitious vision, there is much here for anyone interested in present-day American politics, foreign policy, culture or society. The work is not without minor faults. Not surprisingly, Professor Tuttle is most sure of himself when writing social history, and this shows through in his narrative. He occasionally adopts a rather remedial tone when discussing developmental psychology, as if needing to reassure himself and his readers that he really does understand the subject. This is more distracting than helpful. Additionally, the narrative is sometimes jerky, revealing what are apparently the points of the editor's excisions. Since the author managed twice the number of pages before adding the distillation of 2,500 personal memoirs, one suspects that Daddy's Gone to War's resulting 260 pages of text were the result of some brutal red-pencilling. Unfortunately, in some subject areas like gender or race, we are left a little unsatisfied with our certain knowledge that Professor Tuttle has much more of interest to say on these matters. Coupled with some remarkably unappealing and unrevealing cover notes, one is left expecting better from Oxford University Press. Although not a `must-read' for anyone other than twentieth-century American social historians and childhood psychologists, Professor Tuttle has offered up a truly useful work that can provide an invaluable context for anyone interested in American foreign policy-making and politics in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond. Additionally, we are given a brief but well-crafted overview of some pioneering work by a skilled historian. Particularly in the areas of ethnic identification and political socialization, one hopes that the author will produce other similar books. Jeffrey K. Walker Harvard Law School
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