Chapter 4 focuses on democracy, specifically the creation of a violent American political process. By the 1840s, the right to vote expanded to include nearly all White men in the United States. The establishment of this racialized and gendered space put the nation at the global forefront of White male political participation. These voters elected militant candidates, used violence to set boundaries around the electorate, and physically intimidated political opponents. They demonstrated the import of Whiteness and violence to democratic development. The chapter covers Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the election of 1828, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, and Bleeding Kansas.

In the late 1930s, the studio system and its ancillary institutions (museums, newspapers, and trade journals) engaged in a concerted effort to narrate the industry’s maturation. This tendency manifested onscreen in the emergence of the historiographical backstudio picture, led by David Selznick’s A Star is Born (1937) and followed by Warners’ Boy Meets Girl (1938) and Fox’s Hollywood Cavalcade (1939). The belief in Hollywood’s coming-of-age gave rise to a countervailing sense that the Hollywood novel had become exhausted. Writers as different as Cedric Belfrage (Promised Land, 1938), Horace McCoy (I Should Have Stayed Home, 1938), and Patsy Ruth Miller (That Flannigan Girl, 1939), among others, used this heightened historical sense to renovate the genre. No renovator was more successful or less understood than Nathanael West. In The Day of the Locust (1939), West contributed to American modernist inscrutability in his occult bildungsroman of painter Tod Hackett. West dared readers to see Tod’s monstrous coming of age alongside the studio system’s own in Tod’s submissions to the order of Hollywood’s aesthetics and the law of the police that rescue him in the novel’s concluding riot.

Chapter 8 provides a brief history of US air power doctrine development after World War II, along with a synopsis of the modern air wars since Vietnam. Four operational and five environmental factors that impacted air operations in Vietnam are introduced to help explain when air power is likely to be effective. These nine factors are air superiority, air-to-ground capability, friendly ground force capability, enemy ground force capability, weather, lighting, geography and terrain, civilians, and concealment and cover. A summative assessment follows, which correlates these conditional factors with the military and political outcomes for the twenty-three modern US air campaigns. Finally, nine general observations are provided as to the overall effectiveness of modern air power.

Chapter 3 examines the first two years of major US combat operations from 1965 through 1966. Over North Vietnam, the Rolling Thunder air campaign failed to either isolate communist forces in South Vietnam or coerce North Vietnam to withdraw its support of the insurgency. Air power proved more effective in the direct attack of the North Vietnam Army and Viet Cong (NVA/VC) in South Vietnam. The US combined arms campaign thwarted an offensive aimed at dividing South Vietnam. Instead, well-executed allied air-to-ground operations compelled the enemy to disperse and hide.

This chapter considers the literary ramifications of Hollywood’s global presence during the brief epoch of World War II and its immediate aftermath. For the queer American poet and film critic Parker Tyler and the Anglo-Canadian novelist Malcolm Lowry, Hollywood functioned like the ordering myths employed by the high modernists. Tyler’s The Granite Butterfly (1945) and Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), works of grand self-consciously modernist ambition, took shape as the war radically altered everyday life. When defending the form of Under the Volcano to his publisher Jonathan Cape, Lowry insisted that the “book is written on numerous planes with provision made, it was my fond hope, for almost every kind of reader.” This belief resonates with film theorist Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism thesis, which hold that Hollywood films achieved dominance by meaning different things to different people. For Tyler and especially Lowry, the myth of Hollywood functions as a means of exploring an implicit theoretical problem – can a work of literature be both meaningful (i.e., authored) and open to any interpretation? – and it provides scholars one way to observe how modernism found its limits.

In the early 1910s, the extension of copyright protection to moving picture adaptations of literary works resulted in the emergence of film rights, and this phenomenon had a profound effect on film production and the writing of fiction. Paramount Studios, originally the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, became the most powerful studio of the 1910s and 1920s, in part, due to its unparalleled ability to exploit preexisting literary and dramatic properties: to produce “Famous Plays with Famous Players.” At the same time, this new regime altered the constitution of the American literary field. Authors and studios alike reflected on the importance of preparing fiction for eventual adaptation. I call the capacity for authors to imagine the afterlives of their prose works before writing the “transmedial possibility” of fiction. This possibility influenced the work of several writers who published in American modernism's great year 1925, all of whom responded in some way to Paramount: Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

British military institutions embraced a hierarchy backed by cruel physical punishment. The defiant soldier could face gauntlets, brandings, wooden horses, floggings, hangings, and firing squads. In certain places in British North America, though, White male colonists in militias and provincial armies enacted a more egalitarian organization - one that tilted authority toward the common soldier and curbed the most egregious aspects of military discipline. Such egalitarianism structured the Massachusetts Army in the American Revolution. But the supposed democratic rebellion would not feature a more democratic fighting force. When George Washington assumed command of the Massachusetts troops (soon known as the Continental Army), he made sure that hostile differences and bodily reprimand shaped the inaugural institutionalization of American state violence. “Every one is made to know his place and keep in it,” said the Reverend William Emerson of Washington’s army, “or be tied up and receive thirty or forty lashes according to his crime.”

This book concludes in 1952, the year that the Miracle decision (Joseph Burstyn Inc. v. Wilson) established motion pictures as protected speech, to suggest one way to mark a common endpoint to the eras of the studio system and American modernism. That year, several books were either completed or published that serve as early instances of genres or attitudes that would come to the fore in postwar American fiction. This conclusion briefly addresses three such works: Lillian Ross’s Picture, James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, and Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. These books suggest a transformation of writers’ attitudes toward Hollywood, one that coincides with the identification of artistic strategies – the nonfiction novel; the conception of moviegoing as an experience worthy of artistic rendering; the campus novel – that would become increasingly prevalent in subsequent decades. The conclusion ends by giving Hollywood movies the chance to speak for themselves, attending to two MGM films of 1952: Singin’ in the Rain and, more intently, The Bad and the Beautiful. I read the latter as MGM’s version of a literary history of the studio system.

Chapter 4 evaluates US tactical air power from 1967 to 1968. Over North Vietnam, the Rolling Thunder air interdiction campaign struggled to isolate NVA/VC forces. Simultaneously, a strategic bombing campaign could not coerce Hanoi to withdraw its support of the insurgency. The direct attack of the NVA/VC forces in South Vietnam proved more effective, with the ultimate test occurring near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) at the US Marine base at Khe Sanh. Here, the NVA massed two divisions hoping to overrun the marines to achieve a decisive victory as they had against the French in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. Instead, the American combined arms campaign defeated the NVA. The massing of ground forces at Khe Sanh differed from the NVA’s previous tactics of dispersing and taking sanctuary in Laos and Cambodia. Such defensive measures had previously allowed the NVA/VC to survive but had also delayed plans to launch a General Offensive and General Uprising. When the NVA/VC finally commenced their offensive in early 1968, they failed militarily at Khe Sanh and, more broadly, in the Tet Offensive. However, more importantly, the North Vietnamese succeeded politically as American support for the war evaporated.