Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War

By Jeanette Keith

During World War I, thousands of rural southern men, black and white, refused to serve in the military. Some failed to register for the draft, while others deserted after being inducted. In the countryside, armed bands of deserters defied local authorities; capturing them required the dispatch of federal troops into three southern states.

Jeanette Keith traces southern draft resistance to several sources, including whites' long-term political opposition to militarism, southern blacks' reluctance to serve a nation that refused to respect their rights, the peace witness of southern churches, and, above all, anger at class bias in federal conscription policies. Keith shows how draft dodgers' success in avoiding service resulted from the failure of southern states to create effective mechanisms for identifying and classifying individuals. Lacking local-level data on draft evaders, the federal government used agencies of surveillance both to find reluctant conscripts and to squelch antiwar dissent in rural areas.

Drawing upon rarely used local draft board reports, Selective Service archives, Bureau of Investigation reports, and southern political leaders' constituent files, Keith offers new insights into rural southern politics and society as well as the growing power of the nation-state in early twentieth-century America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 12, 2005
• ISBN: 9780807875896

Jeanette Keith

Originally trained as a journalist, Jeanette Keith obtained her PhD in history from Vanderbilt University in 1990 and is currently professor of history at Bloomsburg University. She is the author of several books, including Country People in the New South and the award-winning Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. Southern Antimilitarists on the Eve of War

Chapter 2. Which War, Whose Fight?: White Southerners Debate the Declaration of War and the Draft, 1917

Chapter 3. Fathers, Farmers, and Christians

Chapter 4. Agrarian Protest Begins

Chapter 5. Race, Class, Gender, and Draft Dodging

Chapter 6. The Surveillance State Comes to Rural Shade: Propaganda and Domestic Espionage in the Southern Countryside

Chapter 7. Resistance

Epilogue: After the War

Notes

Bibliography

Map 1. Ratio of Outstanding Desertions to Total Registration, by State

Map 2. Counties in Southern States Having at Least 50 Percent Black Population, 1910

Rich Man’s War,

Poor Man’s Fight

Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South

during the First World War

Jeanette Keith

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2004 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Minion type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

abc The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Keith, Jeanette.

Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight : race, class, and power in the rural South during the first world war / by Jeanette Keith.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-8078-2897-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8078-5562-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN : 9780807875896

1. World War, 1914–1918—Protest movements—Southern States. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Draft resisters—Southern States. 3. Southern States—Race relations. 4. Southern States—Social conditions—1865–1945. 5. Social classes—Southern States—History—20th century. 6. Southern States—Rural conditions. 7. Farmers—Southern States—Political activity—History—20th century. 8. Dissenters—Southern States—History—20th century. I. Title.

D639.P77K45 2004

940.3'16—dc22

2004003685

A portion of this book appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, in ‘‘The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917–1918: Class, Race and Conscription in the Rural South,’’ Journal of American History 87 (March 2001): 1335–61, and is reprinted here with the permission of the Organization of American Historians.

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Preface

An American president leads the nation into an unpopular war with a distant enemy. He says that the United States is fighting for democracy and freedom, but his critics suggest that the war is being fought to benefit select economic interests. Major national media follow the administration party line, saturating the nation with prowar propaganda, but many people remain unconvinced. Frightened of potential terrorist attacks from the enemy, Congress passes laws penalizing dissent. Authorities squelch antiwar protests, sending scores of dissidents to jail. People who oppose the war learn to lower their voices in public, while self-proclaimed patriots demand total loyalty not only to ‘‘our boys’’ overseas but to the President. People who fail to conform lose their jobs and sometimes their liberty. Americans face questions about power and politics, propaganda and the manipulation of public opinion, secrecy and surveillance.

This was the state of affairs in the United States in 1917. In this book, I explore the development of dissent during World War I in a most unexpected place, the rural South, where ordinary black and white farmers proved that, despite strident propaganda and punitive laws, American citizens could yet maintain minds and opinions of their own.

MY RESEARCH into rural southern antiwar and antidraft dissent was funded by two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a summer stipend and a yearlong Grant for College Teachers. I received travel grants from the American Philosophical Society and from the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education Faculty Development Fund. Bloomsburg University awarded me a sabbatical, which I spent at Yale University, under the auspices of the Agrarian Studies Program.

Among the many people I wish to thank are K. Walter Hickel; Pete Daniel; Crandall Shifflett; Hal Barron; Kriste Lindenmeyer; Jack Kirby; Susan Stemont; Paul Freedman; Mary Neth; Kay Mansfield; James C. Scott; Leah Porter; Michael Casey; Ben Johnson; Anastatia Sims; Nancy Gentile Ford; Harold Forsythe; Glenda Gilmore and her graduate students in American studies and history at Yale; my colleagues at the Agrarian Studies Program, especially Cindy Hahamovitch and Scott Nelson; Mitch Yockelson at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; Wayne Moore and the Tennessee State Library and Archives staff; and the professional and helpful staff members of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, the Memphis and Shelby County Public Library, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, the National Archives and Record Division at East Point, Georgia, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Some of the research presented here was previously published in the Journal of American History. I thank the Journal’s reviewers (especially Gaines Foster and David Kennedy) and staff, especially the editor, David Nord, for astute and helpful criticism. Thanks to the Organization of American Historians for their reprint permission. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Southern History who considered a previous draft of the material presented here on surveillance in the rural South. I learned a great deal from their critique.

Here at Bloomsburg University, I am especially indebted to my colleagues in the Department of History. Our department chair, William Hudon, has been consistently supportive of this project. Joyce Bielen, our secretary, read manuscripts and checked figures, as did Mike Yoder, one of our student workers. I owe special thanks to Michael Hickey, who has heard more about the U.S. draft during World War I than any historian of Russia will ever need to know. Michael provided materials and insights about the topic of surveillance that helped me enlarge my perspective on that issue. In addition, he and James Matta, currently serving as the dean of graduate studies at Bloomsburg, taught me how to write grants; much thanks.

At the University of North Carolina Press, Chuck Grench has been most supportive of this project. Thanks also to Amanda McMillan, Ron Maner, and John Wilson: great people to work with.

Finally, I am grateful to my husband, Tony Allen, without whose help, support, and confidence this work would never have been completed. To him, this book is dedicated.

Introduction

In the spring of 1918, the sheriff of DeKalb County, Tennessee, went up into the hills to bring out John Smith, a deserter from the U.S. Army. Drafted in1917 for service in the First World War, Smith had come home on leave in March and had failed to return to camp. Smith, his wife, and their children lived with Smith’s parents. Other deserters throughout the South fought sheriffs, local posses, Texas Rangers, and even federal troops rather than return to the army, but Smith offered no resistance. As the sheriff took him away, Smith’s parents made their own protest: ‘‘the screams of the old people could be heard for some distance.’’¹

The historical record does not tell us much about John Smith, just that he was a deserter, a husband, a father, and a son and that his family desperately wanted him to stay home. But it is possible to use Smith, with his emblematic Everyman’s name, as a way of entering into a rarely explored aspect of the history of the World War I home front: resistance to the war in the rural South. The South had many ‘‘slackers,’’ to use the term of the times, from deserters like Smith, to draft evaders, to people who cooperated reluctantly, if at all, with wartime mobilization and security measures. Although southern slackers also lived in suburbs and cities, federal and state authorities at the time, and historians since, discovered most resistance in the countryside. Small-town businessmen and their wives, charged with mobilizing the population for war, sometimes found that their mandate evaporated at the end of the paved roads. Country women refused to register for war work. Backwoods preachers condemned war. In rural communities, neighbors sheltered deserters and warned them of approaching federal agents.

Many southern draft boards reported that over 80 percent of the men in the first registration (June 1917) requested exemptions. Southern politicians’ mailbags overflowed with letters from potential conscripts and their parents asking for help obtaining exemptions. The army inducted six hundred thousand southern men during the First World War, but the Selective Service System listed over ninety-five thousand southerners as deserters. Thus, approximately 28 percent of the nation’s deserters came from the states of the former Confederacy. Some, like Smith, went absent without leave. Others registered for the draft in June 1917 but did not respond to their draft board’s induction notice. Under the rules of 1917–18, those men were deserters too. This number does not include the southern share of the estimated two to three million men, nationwide, who evaded the draft by failing to register. If southern men refused to register at a rate reflecting their proportion of the national population, then approximately half a million never signed up and therefore do not appear on federal records at all.²

Smith did not explain why he deserted, but a close study of the rural South during the First World War indicates several possible reasons. Smith may have been a religious pacifist, a member of the Church of Christ or one of the Holiness sects. Many such men applied for conscientious objector status in 1917. Because their churches lacked either written pacifist creeds or unambiguous histories as peace churches, draft boards denied them exemptions and sent them to the army. On the other hand, Smith might have deserted because his family needed him. A married man with children, supporting aged parents, Smith would have been given an automatic draft exemption in America’s MID-twentieth-century wars, but during World War I a peculiar combination of federal regulations, class privilege, and racial prejudice made it hard for men like him to obtain dependency deferments. Perhaps anger over manifest injustice provoked Smith’s desertion. Whites and blacks alike in the South complained that draft boards favored the sons of the rich and politically powerful, while filling their quotas with the poor of both races.

In deserting, Smith could have been following a family tradition dating back to the Civil War. Many citizens of the Confederacy, resentful of the abuse they suffered under a government geared to serve the class interests of the elite, withheld support. Common white southerners deserted the Confederate army by the hundreds, and as Confederate military defeat became obvious, by the thousands.³

Smith’s desertion could have been motivated by political opposition to war. During the three-year buildup to America’s entry into the Great War, rural southerners and their political representatives in Congress had been among the nation’s strongest voices in favor of neutrality and against ‘‘militarism,’’ a term they used to describe the Republican-sponsored preparedness campaign, begun in 1912, which pushed for a stronger army and navy and for mandatory military service for all American men. In opposition, southern agrarian political leaders developed a class critique of militarism, arguing that the GOP’s desired military reforms furthered the interests of the nation’s north-eastern industrial and financial elites. Southern antimilitarist Democrats and their constituents opposed preparedness proposals even when those proposals came from their party leader, Woodrow Wilson, who co-opted aspects of the GOP program for his election campaign in 1916. They cheered the reelection of Woodrow Wilson under the slogan ‘‘He Kept Us Out of War.’’ Antimilitarist southern politicians in Washington included such disparate characters as North Carolinian Claude Kitchin, the House majority leader; James Vardaman, Mississippi’s virulently racist senator; and George Huddleston, representative of the miners and farmers in Alabama’s Birmingham district. Anti-militarist southern politicians tended to be liberals, as such categories were defined in 1917. On the other hand, southern conservatives, including men who waved the rhetorical Stars and Bars in speeches, evoked the glory days of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and talked self-consciously and floridly about the South, generally supported the war and the expansion of national power necessary for its successful prosecution.

While party discipline brought most antimilitarist southern members of Congress into line behind the president in April 1917, their rural white constituents often lagged behind. Having been told for years that Wall Street, munitions makers, and the Morgan bank lay behind attempts to militarize the United States and lead it into the Great War, they continued to find the argument convincing and resurrected an old slogan from the 1860s: ‘‘It’s a rich man’s war, and a poor man’s fight.’’ Nor were rural white Democrats the only reluctant warriors. Former Populist leader Tom Watson, southern socialists, and farmers’ union members all spoke out against the war in the spring and summer of 1917. Southern agrarian protests continued until the federal government squelched antiwar newspapers and jailed antidraft radicals. Although radical arguments could no longer be published by 1918, they continued to be repeated throughout the southern countryside.

Smith was in one way an atypical deserter: He was white. The majority of southern deserters were black men. Southern state officials explained away that fact by saying that their black constituents did not intend to desert, they were just irresponsible, illiterate, and mobile and therefore either missed or disregarded draft notices. But while southern governors praised black patriotism and black urban leaders organized prowar rallies and parades, other voices from the South offered differing testimony. White southerners, worried about a black uprising, reported to the federal government that blacks publicly scoffed at the idea of fighting for a nation that denied them political rights. Whether because of politics or because of simple apathy, black southerners ‘‘deserted’’ in droves.

As a white man, however, Smith still had plenty of company. Over forty-five thousand of the region’s deserters were white. They comprised the majority of deserters in Tennessee and Texas. While state authorities saw black deserters as ignorant but good natured, they viewed white deserters as dangerous. Bolstered by community support, white deserters in various locales throughout the South often fought law enforcement officials sent after them. By the summer of 1918, armed white deserter bands, hidden in the South’s forests, swamps, and mountains, had become a problem requiring the dispatch of federal troops.

Finally, we do not know who turned John Smith in, but the chances are good that the informer was a friend or neighbor. The First World War exposed deep fissures in the supposedly Solid (white) South. In southern villages and crossroads towns, neighbor denounced neighbor, not openly in the village square, but surreptitiously, in letters to state and federal authorities. Angry fathers complained that other men’s sons did not deserve deferment from the draft. Whites accused blacks of being ‘‘pro-German.’’ Democrats loyal to the Wilson administration informed on political dissenters whose main crime was saying in 1918 what many Americans said in 1916: that the nation’s northeastern financial establishment had a vested interest in U.S. intervention on the side of the allies. Federal domestic espionage agents stationed in the South in 1917–18 stayed busy checking out accusations of slacking, draft dodging, dissent, and treason. The long arm of the federal surveillance state reached into the farthest reaches of the rural South during the war, but it did so primarily at the invitation of white southerners.

AMERICAN HISTORIANS LOCATE the Great War’s significance not in the trenches of France but on the home front. Historians studying the rise of the modern managerial state find its origins in the Wilson administration’s war measures, which included the mobilization of men through conscription, the mobilization of money through a series of public bond issues, and the mobilization and regulation of the economy through a plethora of new government agencies. During the war, the U.S. government distributed massive amounts of propaganda in an attempt to mold public opinion and deployed surveillance to stifle dissent. In the United States, the Great War was the birthplace of the modern state.⁴

This book is an examination of state power and the rural South during the Great War. The focus is on the countryside, rather than on the region as a whole, because the South was still an agrarian region in 1917. Therefore, rural history is the history of the majority of the southern population. In addition, studying the rural South during the war provides a new perspective on state mobilization policies that had been designed to protect the nation’s industrial strength. Finally, some of the most determined resistance to the World War I draft took place in isolated areas in the rural South, but until now no full-length study has been done to find out why.⁵ The evidence presented here comes mostly from sources that have been underused in writing the history of the World War I home front: the state and local board records of the Selective Service System, the files of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the letters that constituents wrote to southern political leaders, small-town newspapers, and court files.

Map 1. Ratio of Outstanding Desertions to Total Registration, by State (national average, 0.72 percent). Source: Final Report of the Provost Marshal General to the Secretary of War (1920).

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Studying World War I conscription provides insight into the nature of the agrarian South and that society’s relationship with the state. Raising mass armies is one of the means by which modern states are created and national identities defined. For peasants, service as conscripts in national armies facilitates assimilation into larger and more abstract identities, as Eugene Weber described in Peasants into Frenchmen over twenty years ago. Nor is this an alien concept in U.S. and southern historiography. Civil War historians have long expressed an interest in the ways in which that war forged the modern American state, while some historians of the Confederacy have argued that its failures in state building doomed the rebellion. Paul Escott, in particular, has written about the ways in which Confederate mobilization policies, including conscription, helped destroy the southern common folk’s tenuous loyalty to the Confederate States of America.⁶

Investigating the grassroots implementation of the World War I draft also leads to questions about other aspects of war mobilization and, ultimately, to the consideration of larger themes and issues in southern and national history. On the regional level, the story of war mobilization in the countryside calls into question the concept of the ‘‘martial South,’’ the meaning of ‘‘states’ rights,’’ the uses of white supremacy, and the nature of southern politics and society itself during the era of the Solid South. On the national level, the topics raised include the impact of race and class in conscription, the efficacy of propaganda in forming public opinion, and the development of the surveillance state.

The presence within the South of men like John Smith and his fellow deserters seems a contradiction to one of the truisms of southern culture: White southerners, the nation’s most militaristic people, stand always ready to fight their country’s wars. Indeed, there is good evidence for the martial South as presented in books from John Hope Franklin’s Militant South onward. Moreover, in 1917 many white southerners vociferously upheld the southern martial tradition. Southern congressmen called upon the shades of Lee and Jackson to bolster their arguments that national honor required war with Germany. Major southern newspapers enthusiastically supported the war, and middle-class men and women in the region’s cities and towns hurried to do their bit for the war by organizing prowar parades, drives, and programs. Therefore, while recognizing that the South contained what George Tindall termed a ‘‘latent rural-progressive opposition’’ to war, historians of the region have generally agreed with Tindall, Joseph Fry, Anthony Gaughan, and others that most southerners quickly rallied to support the war, leaving behind only a small minority of dissenters, mostly rural.⁷

Antiwar and antidraft sentiments existed throughout rural America, not just in the South. The best-documented incidents of protest against the war occurred in the Middle West. In the Great Plains, members of the farmer-oriented Non-Partisan League publicly opposed the war, which they alleged was being fought (in the words of one speaker) ‘‘to protect the moneyed interests and Wall Street,’’ and the league’s leaders spoke out against conscription. In Oklahoma, members of the rural Working Class Union launched the Green Corn Rebellion in the summer of 1917. According to press reports, they planned to march on Washington, gathering support from other leftist organizations along the way. (A sheriff ’s posse put a stop to the protest before it left the chief organizer’s farm, and the leaders went to jail.) This putative rebellion still stands as the most famous example of armed draft resistance in U.S. history.⁸

The research presented here, while focusing on the South rather than the Middle West, provides an agrarian political context that allows us to recognize the Non-Partisan League’s antiwar activities as an articulate statement of farmer sentiment far from the wheat fields of the Dakotas. Moreover, it situates the Green Corn Rebellion as but one of many incidents of armed resistance to service in the Great War. Southern slackers, rebels, and war resisters featured here shared a class-based political vocabulary with the Non-Partisan League and the Green Corn rebels. Populists and agrarian Democrats throughout the South agreed with socialists that the war was being fought for Wall Street, or (like the Green Corn rebels) that this was a ‘‘Rich mans war. Poor mans fight.’’⁹

Tindall, Fry, Gaughan, and others do provide overwhelming evidence that southern political and social elites supported President Wilson’s war. They draw from the records left by those elites, in the form of editorials and stories from papers affiliated with the Democratic Party, speeches, letters, and public documents. Yet, lacking the sort of intensive polling now standard practice in American political life, we cannot infer from those documents that the entire population of the South agreed with (for example) the South Carolina council of defense when it announced that there was no room for ambiguity in public response to the war: ‘‘Those who are not for us are against us.’’¹⁰

In 1917–18 many rural southerners, white and black, spoke against war and conscription in a vocabulary drawn from the prewar southern Democratic antimilitarists, from populism, and from socialism. In rural communities, these men became thorns in the sides of war mobilization organizers. Blatant class and race biases in the operation of the draft alienated other rural southerners, who dodged the draft, deserted, armed themselves, and hid out in the region’s forests, swamps, and mountains. Although willing to take up arms in their own defense, these southerners refused to fight for the nation-state. However, because their rebellions (unlike the one in Oklahoma) failed to draw national press attention, they have remained obscure, buried in the records of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation and the Selective Service Administration’s World War I files.

One could argue that the records examined here are as skewed toward dissent as the published record is toward the demonstration of a prowar consensus. This is true. The story told here is not the history of the entire South during the First World War but rather the hitherto obscure history of southern rural dissent and resistance to the war. No claim is made that southern rural dissenters spoke for the South as a whole. They may have been, as Joseph Fry suggests, a distinct minority. On the other hand, staunchly prowar people may have been in the minority too. There is no real way of knowing, given that pro-war people spoke freely, while antiwar sentiments, expressed in public, could earn a man a visit from federal agents, arrest for sedition, and a sojourn in federal prison. One thing can be said, based on the available evidence: Many people in the South supported Woodrow Wilson’s war, and many dissented.

Looking at how white southerners responded to the crisis of war in 1917–18 also offers new insight into their allegiance to states’ rights and white supremacy. Historians have explained many aspects of southern history, from politics to the southern take on foreign policy, in light of the white southern population’s adherence to these two principles. Examining the behavior of southern whites during the wartime crisis, however, leads to this question: Were white southerners loyal to states’ rights and white supremacy as a matter of principle, or expediency? Were states’ rights and white supremacy things that mattered intrinsically to white southerners, or merely slogans used to cloak the things that really mattered?When war mobilization presented southern white elites with the necessity of deciding whether to stand by states’ rights and white supremacy, or to further other interests, what did they choose?¹¹

Finally, studying conscription through state and federal records provides a new and different angle on the nature of southern rural society itself—which is to say, on the nature of the world in which most southerners lived. Traditional historians studied elites, and southern historians even more so, drawing upon the letters, diaries, and memoirs of those who could read and write in a society that well into the mid-twentieth century denied most of its population an education much beyond bare literacy. In the past forty years, historians have attempted to integrate other voices into historical writing, incorporating the stories of workers, women, ethnic and racial minorities, common soldiers, and urban neighborhoods: Any topic that might illuminate the lives of common people. Southern historians followed suit but have been some-what hampered by the nature of available sources, which tend to be products of the region’s white, literate elite. Some of the best work done in southern social history has been based on oral histories, but that technique has obvious temporal limitations. Therefore, it has been difficult to study the region’s numerical majority, the black and white men, women, and children who made their living on the land. We may know how many black sharecroppers lived in Alabama or how many white small farmers in the Georgia hills, but records rarely offer much insight into how those people thought or felt, particularly about great national events like the First World War, now so long in the past as to be beyond the reach of oral historians.

The characteristics of southern rural society that currently frustrate the research efforts of historians had much the same impact on the federal, state, and local elites trying, in 1917–18, to mobilize the rural population for war. That is, the lack of records available now reflects the lack of information available then to would-be organizers. In 1917, most of the southern population lived in the countryside, along unmapped, rutted dirt roads that were impassable after rains, often a day’s wagon drive from the county seat. The dispersed nature of the population made locating people problematic at best. Moreover, most of the southern population lacked any state-legitimized, verifiable proof of individual identity, such as birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, or educational records. Being weak, state governments in the South produced poor statistics. If a man wanted to say that he was too old for the draft, authorities had a hard time proving that he was not. If he wanted to hide in the laurel thickets of North Carolina, what outsider could find him? If he slipped away into the industrial workforce of wartime Birmingham and assumed a new name, how could he be located? In 1917, no one in the South or the nation even had a very clear idea as to how many draft-age men lived in any southern county or in the region as a whole.

To understand the southern rural world and the ways in which rural society itself molded the forms of resistance, I have drawn insights from the work of anthropologist/political scientist James Scott, perhaps best known for his theories concerning the ways in which the supposedly powerless manage to thwart their nominal superiors by employing the ‘‘weapons of the weak,’’ ideas of considerable salience in this project. In addition, Scott has recently turned his attention to the interactions of modern states and agrarian societies. In his book Seeing like a State, he introduces the concept of ‘‘legibility.’’ Scott argues that modern states impose artificial, abstract, and highly regular categories of measurement upon the messiness of human life and of nature. By reducing the complexities of reality to categories that can be quantified, states can see them and therefore govern them—although, Scott would argue, what the state sees is never the reality but a map thereof, stripped of its particularities and reduced to aspects that can be measured, quantified, and otherwise rendered legible. The ability to see a population and render it legible is a hallmark of the modern state, as well as being a goal toward which developing states strive, sometimes at great cost to their people.¹²

Federal records indicate that the nation-state had great difficulties seeing into the rural South in 1917–18. Because southern state governments had not created the kind of modern statistical apparatuses necessary to render a population legible, southern rural folk remained hard to locate, hard to enumerate, hard to identify, and therefore relatively hard to coerce. On the other hand, citizens had little difficulty ‘‘seeing’’ the state. The federal government wanted people to know and do various things (register for the draft, buy Liberty bonds, refrain from criticizing the war), and it announced its desires loudly and repetitively through propaganda. The state could certainly be seen by individual southerners if they cared to do so, but the state had trouble putting its finger on individuals. Similarly, federal law enforcement officials found it difficult to operate in the southern countryside without native guides, but rural southerners could ride to the nearest railroad depot, take the train, and disappear at any point along the nation’s transportation system. In the contest between local experience and national power, the advantages of asymmetrical knowledge went to the people on the grassroots level. In this book, we will explore the ways in which the premodern, traditional aspects of southern rural society affected war mobilization.

Examining closely the implementation of conscription in the rural South highlights the ways federal regulations and decisions made by local draft boards combined to amplify racial and class prejudices. This requires correcting the way historians usually tell the story of America’s involvement in the Great War. To illustrate, I quote from an otherwise excellent recent book on World War I: ‘‘The country’s commitment to exempting husbands and fathers from military service never wavered. When the War Department faced man-power shortages in 1918, for instance, Congress extended the age limits of the draft from 21–30 to 18–45 rather than draft married men.’’ Selective Service statistics indicate that of the men in the first draft registrations (those twenty-one to thirty years of age), 4,883,213 were married. Of that number, 488,537 did not receive deferments. Clearly, the nation’s commitment to keeping married men at home did not apply universally. It would be more accurate to say that draft boards mostly exempted middle-class husbands and fathers, as they were encouraged to do by Selective Service regulations that linked dependency exemptions with income. The Selective Service System also encouraged draft boards to make decisions about exemption based on local knowledge. This opened the door for the full play of racial prejudice among all-white draft boards in the South. The result was a system of conscription that maximized the impact of the draft on poor families of all races.¹³

The themes of propaganda, surveillance, and suppression of civil liberties, staples of World War I historiography, especially link southern dissenters to the larger narrative of American history. Recognizing the need to mobilize public opinion, President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) in April 1917 and placed journalist George Creel in charge of the nation’s first official propaganda agency. To advertise America, as Creel put it, the CPI blanketed the nation with propaganda materials. Propaganda convinced the initially reluctant American people that the nation’s cause was just. Indeed, most historians argue that the Wilson administration oversold the war, fostering public hysteria that led to deplorable incidents of vigilantism against leftists, immigrants, and German Americans. Seeing how easily public opinion could be formed soured many progressive intellectuals on the whole concept of democracy: How can a government represent the will of the people, they asked, when the government itself creates that will through the manipulation of information? After the war, Walter Lippmann wrote that people were, in general, ‘‘children or barbarians,’’ so incapable of judging between complex political alternatives that they must perforce be led by an educated and in-formed elite.¹⁴

A close look at southern rural dissent indicates that people’s minds were not nearly as malleable or as simple as either George Creel or Walter Lippmann supposed. In the summer of 1918, after a full year of prowar, pro-Wilson administration propaganda, antiwar dissenters in the rural South still clung to arguments used in the prewar period by southern antimilitarists. In the fall of 1918, surprising numbers voted for congressional candidates labeled traitors by Wilson administration supporters. This raises the questions, How effective was the CPI in reaching Americans who lived outside the cities? Did prowar propaganda really change people’s minds, convincing them to support the war, or did it supply new words with which to attack old enemies?What does ‘‘support for the war’’ mean? Did politicians who voted for the declaration of war, but against the draft, support the war? Did men who declared themselves loyal Americans and Wilson supporters, who bought war bonds and gave to the Red Cross, but behind the scenes finagled draft exemptions for their sons, ‘‘support’’ the war?

If wartime propaganda actually failed to win the hearts and minds of the American people, what did bring a dubious population into line? In the rural South, at least, propaganda was effectively the first stage of the federal government’s attempt to create a prowar consensus. When it fell short, harsher methods came into play: surveillance and suppression.

The First World War is the birthplace of the American surveillance state and the nadir, to date, of American civil liberties. Through the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, the Trading with the Enemy Act, and others, Congress effectively criminalized antiwar speech. The U.S. Post Office denied southern anti-war newspapers access to the mail. Government surveillance agencies targeted pacifists, leftists, and labor leaders, several thousand of whom eventually went to prison for opposing the war. Recent works by Theodore Kornweibel and Mark Ellis emphasize government surveillance of black political leaders. However, the records of the Bureau of Investigation indicate that domestic surveillance in the rural South had a greater scope, and a slightly different goal, than has usually been acknowledged. There, the bureau’s agents spied on all sorts of