“War is not a time for the exercise of the emotions of youth; it is a time for sober, rational reflection. ” — E.W.M.
The Enlistment Problem. “Patriotism or Common Sense”. Amherst Monthly. March 1917.
Text Analysis
The essays are primarily opinion pieces detailing different stances concerning the war. One two-part text titled The Enlistment Problem grapples with the conflicting values of defending one’s nation and pursuing peace. The first part of this text titled Patriotism or Common Sense authored by E.W.M. discusses the immediate concern of college men volunteering for military service. E.W.M. attributes much of the nation’s future leadership to the skill and intellect of college men and he questions that if this source of talent is harmed by the tragedy of war how will the nation fare with this sudden decrease in talent. E.W.M. also encourages college men to consider pursuing valuable endeavors at home rather than dangerous military enlistment. The second piece of The Enlistment Problem titled War and the College-Bred by J.D.C, takes a differing stance from that of E.W.M. J.D.C. acknowledges that war is an evil that should be generally avoided, but he also insists that all men, even college men, should deem the freedom of their nation a cause worth fighting for.
The results of the text analysis for the above essays and those not discussed reflects a consistent theme within the texts to support rational thought, discussion, and codes of morality. With a vocabulary density of 0.324 and 22.0 average words per sentence the most frequent words in the corpus are time (10); giving (9); life (9); think (9); world (9).
Topic Modeling
The essays are a vocabulary dense set of documents with longer sentences than the other text types so it was expected that these texts would produce easily identifiable topics. These documents also happen to contain distinct opinions or ideologies that are the focal point of each essay so it was also predicted that each of the three topics would represent one overarching argument. As revealed by the topic model’s results in the below table this initial hypothesis was not necessarily supported.
Rather than each topic containing an argument or overarching opinion – each topic instead contained one of three themes which happened to be used as supporting context for each writer’s essay regardless of the essay’s ideological focus. These themes are the value of rational thought and debate; the need to discuss issues of war in terms of morality and peacemaking; and the pursuit of ideals such as liberty and freedom.
For example, in War and the College-Bred by J.D.C, although he ultimately encourages college men to take up the fight in pursuit of freedom and enlist in the army he also acknowledges that “We shall all hail the day when war’s substitute is discovered” as “The ideal of peace is not as visionary as it was a generation ago”.
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