Dec 6, 2004
Michael True: Review of Jeanette Keith's Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South During the First World War (North Carolina, 2004)
Michael True, author of An Energy Field More Intense Than War: The Nonviolent Tradition and American Literature (Syracuse University Press, 1995) is emeritus professor, Assumption College and a member of the International Peace Research Association Foundation.
Occasionally, a history provides new information about and perspective on a significant period, with important implications for understanding the present. In her eminently readable and carefully researched study of draft and war resistance in the rural South during the First World War, Jeannette Keith has done just that, at a time when the implications of Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda campaign for war and repressive legislation have special resonance for our own time.
“Get together boys and don’t go. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight. If you don’t go J. P. Morgan is lost. Speculation is the only cause of the war. Rebel now.” So argued the posters supporting the Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma in 1917. Although that Rebellion remains perhaps the best known anti-conscription movement during the First World War, its populist sentiments were familiar in other regions of the country, in the well-known voices of Wisconsin’s Senator Robert La Follette, the Socialist Party’s Eugene Victor Debs, Anti-Conscription League’s Emma Goldman, and Industrial Workers of the World’s Big Bill Haywood. Until now, the contributions of less public voices in the rural South have gone practically unnoticed.
The Farmers and Laborers Protective Association (FLPA), also originating in Oklahoma, for example, had 197 chapters throughout Texas by 1917, numbering about ten thousand members. A tri-racial agrarian worker’s union, it spread throughout the South, among people willing to take up arms in their own defense, but unwilling to fight for the nation-state.
Relying on Selective Service records, files of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, small-town newspapers, and similar documents, Professor Keith provides a thoughtful, discerning account of the distinctive character of an anti-war movement in the rural South, which was radical in its economics, but sometimes racist in its orientation. James Vardaman was elected to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi, for example, on a platform of white supremacy and progressive reforms supporting child labor laws, farm credit associations, and women’s suffrage.
Keith, professor of history at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, describes the formidable resistance of farmers and other rural Southerners to the war propaganda, legislation, and surveillance that accompanied the rise of the modern managerial state under Wilson. Some men resisted conscription; many others, particularly black men, simply “deserted.” But since much of the resistance took place in isolated areas, in areas seldom accounted for in the press, it has failed to evoke the response it deserves. Informed by the language of southern anti-militarists, populists, and socialists, a substantial number of citizens openly resisted or quietly disappeared, frustrating draft boards and others responsible for imposing laws that discriminated against poor whites and blacks.
Following the initiation of the draft on June 5, 1917, they resorted to evading conscription or, under the leadership of Tom Watson of Georgia, to openly fighting it. In Tennessee, resisters and deserters hid in the hills, sometimes supporting themselves by making whiskey or extorting food from local residents, who then shielded them from authorities. Such practices continued despite passage of the Espionage Act and Trading with the Enemy Act in1917, and the Sedition Act the following year. Under these repressive laws, it became illegal to say practically anything that conflicted with the Wilson administration’s rush toward war. They made criticism of the draft a crime, and sent three thousand dissenters, particularly Wobblies and Green Corn rebels, to prison.
On the basis of her research and historical reconstruction, Professor Keith indicates what draft resistance in the region tells us about southern society in 1917, and as well as about the construction of the history of the First World War itself. She argues convincingly that class differences explain the conflicting attitudes between the educated, urban population supporting the war and rural southern whites resisting it. Furthermore, the latter’s “witness for peace belies the notion of southern Protestant political and cultural homogeneity.”
Truths emerging from this focus on grassroots responses to the draft also contribute to our understanding of the development of American culture since the First World War, even during the present war on Iraq. The description of the extent of Wilson’s propaganda and legislative march to war has, in other words, a familiar ring. “The Bureau of Investigation, the Military Intelligence Division, and the American Protective League were not just spying on leftists, feminists, pacifists, and immigrants—the usual suspects in the history of state suppression of the American left—they were spying on just about everybody, with the gleeful compliance of everybody’s neighbors.” Now, in the Age of the Patriot Act, “the intensity and breadth of surveillance that heralded the birth of the American surveillance state,” rides again.
Pledging that he would keep the U.S. out of the war in his 1916 re-election campaign, Woodrow Wilson then “oversold” the war, historians generally agree, unleashing a jingoist hysteria that led to mistreatment and vigilantism against progressives, immigrants and German Americans. The novelist Theodore Dreiser was a victim of it; Randolph Bourne, a social and literary critic known for his statement, “War is the Health of the State,” was another.
Often dismissed as ignorant or naive, citizens of the rural South have been ignored, though their critique of the draft and the war were based on arguments every bit as sophisticated as those of the well-educated young socialists from universities and urban centers. The evidence supporting this claim is a welcome addition to the history of the period, suggesting a need for more research on the relationship between race and class, as Professor Keith maintains, as well as on “the evolution of the modern American state during the Great War.”
Occasionally, a history provides new information about and perspective on a significant period, with important implications for understanding the present. In her eminently readable and carefully researched study of draft and war resistance in the rural South during the First World War, Jeannette Keith has done just that, at a time when the implications of Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda campaign for war and repressive legislation have special resonance for our own time.
“Get together boys and don’t go. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight. If you don’t go J. P. Morgan is lost. Speculation is the only cause of the war. Rebel now.” So argued the posters supporting the Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma in 1917. Although that Rebellion remains perhaps the best known anti-conscription movement during the First World War, its populist sentiments were familiar in other regions of the country, in the well-known voices of Wisconsin’s Senator Robert La Follette, the Socialist Party’s Eugene Victor Debs, Anti-Conscription League’s Emma Goldman, and Industrial Workers of the World’s Big Bill Haywood. Until now, the contributions of less public voices in the rural South have gone practically unnoticed.
The Farmers and Laborers Protective Association (FLPA), also originating in Oklahoma, for example, had 197 chapters throughout Texas by 1917, numbering about ten thousand members. A tri-racial agrarian worker’s union, it spread throughout the South, among people willing to take up arms in their own defense, but unwilling to fight for the nation-state.
Relying on Selective Service records, files of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, small-town newspapers, and similar documents, Professor Keith provides a thoughtful, discerning account of the distinctive character of an anti-war movement in the rural South, which was radical in its economics, but sometimes racist in its orientation. James Vardaman was elected to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi, for example, on a platform of white supremacy and progressive reforms supporting child labor laws, farm credit associations, and women’s suffrage.
Keith, professor of history at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, describes the formidable resistance of farmers and other rural Southerners to the war propaganda, legislation, and surveillance that accompanied the rise of the modern managerial state under Wilson. Some men resisted conscription; many others, particularly black men, simply “deserted.” But since much of the resistance took place in isolated areas, in areas seldom accounted for in the press, it has failed to evoke the response it deserves. Informed by the language of southern anti-militarists, populists, and socialists, a substantial number of citizens openly resisted or quietly disappeared, frustrating draft boards and others responsible for imposing laws that discriminated against poor whites and blacks.
Following the initiation of the draft on June 5, 1917, they resorted to evading conscription or, under the leadership of Tom Watson of Georgia, to openly fighting it. In Tennessee, resisters and deserters hid in the hills, sometimes supporting themselves by making whiskey or extorting food from local residents, who then shielded them from authorities. Such practices continued despite passage of the Espionage Act and Trading with the Enemy Act in1917, and the Sedition Act the following year. Under these repressive laws, it became illegal to say practically anything that conflicted with the Wilson administration’s rush toward war. They made criticism of the draft a crime, and sent three thousand dissenters, particularly Wobblies and Green Corn rebels, to prison.
On the basis of her research and historical reconstruction, Professor Keith indicates what draft resistance in the region tells us about southern society in 1917, and as well as about the construction of the history of the First World War itself. She argues convincingly that class differences explain the conflicting attitudes between the educated, urban population supporting the war and rural southern whites resisting it. Furthermore, the latter’s “witness for peace belies the notion of southern Protestant political and cultural homogeneity.”
Truths emerging from this focus on grassroots responses to the draft also contribute to our understanding of the development of American culture since the First World War, even during the present war on Iraq. The description of the extent of Wilson’s propaganda and legislative march to war has, in other words, a familiar ring. “The Bureau of Investigation, the Military Intelligence Division, and the American Protective League were not just spying on leftists, feminists, pacifists, and immigrants—the usual suspects in the history of state suppression of the American left—they were spying on just about everybody, with the gleeful compliance of everybody’s neighbors.” Now, in the Age of the Patriot Act, “the intensity and breadth of surveillance that heralded the birth of the American surveillance state,” rides again.
Pledging that he would keep the U.S. out of the war in his 1916 re-election campaign, Woodrow Wilson then “oversold” the war, historians generally agree, unleashing a jingoist hysteria that led to mistreatment and vigilantism against progressives, immigrants and German Americans. The novelist Theodore Dreiser was a victim of it; Randolph Bourne, a social and literary critic known for his statement, “War is the Health of the State,” was another.
Often dismissed as ignorant or naive, citizens of the rural South have been ignored, though their critique of the draft and the war were based on arguments every bit as sophisticated as those of the well-educated young socialists from universities and urban centers. The evidence supporting this claim is a welcome addition to the history of the period, suggesting a need for more research on the relationship between race and class, as Professor Keith maintains, as well as on “the evolution of the modern American state during the Great War.”