People will decide war's name despite official label

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© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 8, 2001

Gary Mormino, a professor of history at the University of South Florida, sends along a United Press dispatch from April 1942, with the headline, "White House Swamped With Suggestions for War Name."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had asked Americans for suggestions for naming the 5-month-old war. According to the dispatch, FDR personally did not like "World War II" or "War Against the Axis."

"Telegrams suggesting names began arriving at the White House a few hours after the press conference," the article said. "A flood of telegrams and letters followed today.

"Among the suggestions were:

"War for freedom, war of free peoples, war of the dictators, war of all nations, war for democracy, liberty war, civilization's last stand, battle for freedom, total war, global war, war of the continents, all-out war, everybody's war, war to end war, war of the hemispheres, universal war, evil madness, rat killing, totally totalitarian war and war of the universe."

Of course, "World War II" was the inevitable name. That meant, in turn, that the war fought a generation earlier became World War I. (Until then it had been the "World War" or the "Great War," a label that some still use exclusively, considering it a titanic struggle that deserves its own name.)

Ultimately the people decide what a war's name is. Even though the government offered us the impressive "Desert Shield" followed by "Desert Storm," those were names of operations. A decade later, everybody knows what you mean when you say the Gulf War.

In that vein, it does not matter how often the government insisted that Korea was a "police action," or described Vietnam as a "conflict" -- Americans were fighting and dying and coming home in boxes. Undeclared or not, the nation knew wars when it saw them.

Neither does it matter that the Hundred Years' War really spanned 120 years. The War of 1812 ended in 1815. And few students of history insist on the stuffy and unheard-of "Third Silesian War" in place of the instantly graspable label, the Seven Years' War.

The names of wars also can have political significance. The Southern side of the American Civil War applied all manner of alternative names to that conflict: the War of Northern Aggression, the War Between the States, the War for Southern Independence and so forth. None of them changed the result.

Before World War II, when a strong isolationist movement raged in the United States, it was no coincidence that another name for the first world war was "The European War." This was geographically accurate, but it also carried a certain none-of-our-business tinge.

Now, in 2001, the United States has been attacked, and we are answering, militarily and otherwise. It is a different kind of war, a war against a strain of fanaticism instead of a nation-state, but it is a war nonetheless. What will it be named?

Already forgotten is the one-day operational moniker, "Infinite Justice," which accidentally trod on the entire Muslim religion, because "infinite justice" refers to something that can be provided only by Allah.

Now we have "Enduring Freedom," which is a fine concept, but not much of a war name. If the names of U.S. military operations seem a little canned these days, it's because they are -- according to the Washington Post, a computer spits out suggestions and the top brass pick and choose from them.

The Terrorist War? Makes it sound like they have the upper hand. The War on Terrorism? More apt, but not much ring to it. It might be that the war's defining attribute is yet to come. Maybe it will be geographic (the Afghan War, the Asian War). Some people think the scope of this effort justifies the name "World War III," but for those of us who spent a few decades equating that term with global extinction, no thank you.

My own suggestion is based in the precedent of the naming of the War of 1812, which lasted for some time after that date. It would be a good way, as well, to remember always why events unfolded as they did:

The September 11 War.

- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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