How War Came to Arcadia, N. Y.

"How War Came to Arcadia, N. Y." is told from a first-person limited point-of-view. The narrator is adolescent Don Birnam, the "alter ego and fictional surrogate" of the author.^[2] The story is set in the fictional town of Arcadia, New York in 1916—the year the United States entered World War I. The story opens when the United States Congress has yet to become militarily involved in a European conflict. Don is one of several boys who delivers the local newspapers in Arcadia. He enjoys the self-importance of being the bearer of breaking overseas news to subscribers.

A "sharply defined caste system" determines that boys from well-to-do families are assigned the morning routes serving homes of subscribers.^[3] The afternoon routes are delegated to the poorer boys whose wages supplement their family income; they are required to hock any remaining papers on downtown streets; this is considered a mildly disreputable task. Though not a member of the social elite, the 13-year-old Don delivers the morning paper; he relishes the sixty-cent-a-week job that allows him to discover interesting parts of town. He particularly enjoys delivering papers to a blacksmith shop operated by two German immigrant brothers, Hans and Fritz Schmidt. He is fascinated by the men's outfits and the equipment they skillfully operate performing their trade, often lingering to watch them: "I loved Schmidts’ blacksmith shop."^[4] He teases the Schmidt brothers—both stanch German nationalists—when their country of origin experiences military defeats. The men, nonetheless, engage Don seriously as a mature youth.

The unfolding war in Europe and Arcadia’s preoccupation with it takes on a festive quality creating "a kind of holiday" atmosphere.^[5] Far from the realities of the war, Don and his classmates —all Anglophiles and Francophiles—propose techniques by which Wilhelm II, Kaiser of Germany might be tortured. One boy suggests that his testicles be placed on an anvil and repeatedly pounded with a small hammer: this meets with general approval. Don discovers that the Schimidts have displayed a German flag in their shop; he informs them that the German navy has suffered a setback at the Battle of Jutland. The patriot brothers remain obdurate, assuring Don that Germany will prevail, but regret that Americans may suffer as a result. The boy secretly prays that the United States will never enter the war. On his fourteenth birthday, April 6, 1917, the US Congress declared war on Germany. Don exults that he will be the bearer of this momentous news to his community. Rather than inform the Schimdts personally, he furtively drops off their newspaper at their shop.

War fever takes hold of Arcadia; American flags festoon every public and private venue. The wartime mobilization includes propaganda pamphlets with sexually lurid descriptions of purported German atrocities: "I had never seen such things in print before, and neither had the other boys."^[6] After US troops land in Europe, Don grasps that his relationship with the Schmidts has become impossibly strained and unnatural. The brothers have changed their business placard to read "Carl and Henry Smith, Blacksmiths" due to anti-German hostility.^[7]

Don's feelings about the war are conflicted after viewing the American propaganda film The Beast of Berlin. He becomes fascinated by the lobby poster depicting the Kaiser; he obtains the image and mounts it in his bedroom closet.

When the son of the a Hamilton family who live in the Birnam neighborhood dies in France, his parents hang a gold star on their service flag. After grieving, they finally accept their loss. Arcadia honors their sacrifice. A year and a half later—long after the war has ended—the family is informed that the boys’ corpse has been exhumed and shipped to them from overseas in a box. Dismayed, the parents retrieve the remains from the train station and place it on their front porch. They endure an agony performing the formal burial of their son. The narrator Don observes:

To us it had been a brief reminder that something had really been going on after all—something, at least, besides all the fun we had been having in Arcadia.^[8][9][10]

Biographer Blake Bailey ranks the story among Jackson's post-1948 work, indulging in more in "individual felicities" than establishing clear thematic schemes.^[11] Literary critic Mark Connelly regards Jackson's ability to depict episodes from his early youth as a virtue:

Jackson goes to great lengths to demonstrate the power of total recall, compiling numerous details to carefully reconstruct small town life in the first decades of the twentieth century.^[12]