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

Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight

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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

©  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  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 and index.  --- (alk. paper) —  --- (pbk. : alk. paper) . World War, –—Protest movements—Southern States. . World War, –—Draft resisters—Southern States. . Southern States—Race relations. . Southern States— Social conditions—–. . Social classes—Southern States— History—th century. . Southern States—Rural conditions. . Farmers—Southern States—Political activity—History—th century. . Dissenters—Southern States—History—th century. I. Title. .  .'—dc  A portion of this book appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, in ‘‘The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, –: Class, Race and Conscription in the Rural South,’’ Journal of American History  (March ): –, and is reprinted here with the permission of the Organization of American Historians. cloth

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paper     

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Contents

Preface, vii Introduction,  . Southern Antimilitarists on the Eve of War,  . Which War, Whose Fight?: White Southerners Debate the Declaration of War and the Draft, ,  . Fathers, Farmers, and Christians,  . Agrarian Protest Begins,  . Race, Class, Gender, and Draft Dodging,  . The Surveillance State Comes to Rural Shade: Propaganda and Domestic Espionage in the Southern Countryside,  . Resistance,  Epilogue: After the War,  Notes,  Bibliography,  Index, 

Map . Ratio of Outstanding Desertions to Total Registration, by State,  Map . Counties in Southern States Having at Least  Percent Black Population, , 

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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 . 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.   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, vii

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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.

Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight

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Introduction

I

n the spring of , the sheriff of DeKalb County, Tennessee, went up into the hills to bring out John Smith, a deserter from the U.S. Army. Drafted in  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  percent of the men in the first registration (June ) requested exemptions. Southern politicians’ mailbags overflowed with letters from potential conscripts and their parents asking for help obtaining exemptions. The army inducted six hundred thou

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Introduction

sand southern men during the First World War, but the Selective Service System listed over ninety-five thousand southerners as deserters. Thus, approximately  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  but did not respond to their draft board’s induction notice. Under the rules of –, 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 . 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 midtwentieth-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 , 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

Introduction  the ’s desired military reforms furthered the interests of the nation’s northeastern 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  program for his election campaign in . 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. Antimilitarist southern politicians tended to be liberals, as such categories were defined in . 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 , 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 s: ‘‘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 . Southern agrarian protests continued until the federal government squelched antiwar newspapers and jailed antidraft radicals. Although radical arguments could no longer be published by , 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.

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Introduction

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 , 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  what many Americans said in : 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 – 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.    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 . 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

Introduction 

Map . Ratio of Outstanding Desertions to Total Registration, by State (national average, . percent). Source: Final Report of the Provost Marshal General to the Secretary of War ().

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. 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

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Introduction

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  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 middleclass 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 farmeroriented 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

Introduction  Green Corn Rebellion in the summer of . 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 – 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 dur-

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Introduction

ing 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 prowar 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 –  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 somewhat 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

Introduction  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 –, 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 , 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 , 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 –. Because southern state governments had not created the kind of modern statistical apparatuses necessary to render a popu-

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Introduction

lation 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 manpower shortages in , for instance, Congress extended the age limits of the draft from – to – rather than draft married men.’’ Selective Service statistics indicate that of the men in the first draft registrations (those twentyone to thirty years of age), ,, were married. Of that number, , 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 () in April  and placed journalist George Creel in charge of the na-

Introduction  tion’s first official propaganda agency. To advertise America, as Creel put it, the  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 informed 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 , 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 , surprising numbers voted for congressional candidates labeled traitors by Wilson administration supporters. This raises the questions, How effective was the  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 antiwar 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



Introduction

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 people, not just black radicals or supposed Wobblies. Rather than arresting German agents (of whom there were none), agents in the rural South spent a lot of time tracing down antiwar talk and threatening dissenters until they promised to shut up. The bureau used fear to suppress dissent.   is a complex story, unfolding in a seemingly simple place. Understanding the forces that led to John Smith’s progress down a country road to war, with his parents’ screams echoing behind him, requires incorporating elements of political, religious, social, cultural, and policy history, plus a perspective that moves from the microcosmic level of rural communities to the macrocosm of the national state. As told from the perspective of southern country people, the story will differ significantly in detail from the dominant narratives of southern history and of the World War I home front. We begin with politics and with a quote from a speech given in Congress in , concerning conscription and the people who supported it: Anyone acquainted with American finance and big business will at once recognize these names. They are identified with all that is monopolistic, oppressive, and unjust in American business life. They and their associates are the men who practically run this country. They have monopolized our natural resources; they are exploiting the people, not only of America, but of a large part of the world; they control public opinion through their parasite newspapers. Indeed, they bestride the new world like colossi, and common men exist largely through their sufferance. . . . There can be no democracy when these men rule. There will be none where their schemes are put through. The interests behind conscription are largely big business and big finance. Its champions are dreamers, but they dream vicious dreams of world conquest and exploitation. Their dreams are of the American flag sent into the remote corners of the world to protect their operations and to guard the extension of the systems whereby they have brought America under their feet.15 The speaker was not a socialist, not a midwestern antiwar spokesman like Robert La Follette or George Norris. He was a southern congressman, George Huddleston of Alabama.

CHAPTER ONE

Southern Antimilitarists on the Eve of War

A

pril , . It was past midnight when Claude Kitchin of North Carolina rose to speak to the House of Representatives. For hours, congressmen had passionately debated President Woodrow Wilson’s request that Congress declare war on Germany. All knew that the declaration would pass, but few could resist going on record at this historic moment. While prowar congressmen reiterated their anger at Germany’s abuses and violations of international law, antiwar congressmen—a distinct minority—insisted that the war going on in Europe was not America’s fight and cited equally egregious British infringements on the nation’s rights as a neutral power. Now, in the early morning hours, the galleries were packed. Kitchin, the Democratic majority leader in the House, rose not to push the Democratic president’s war declaration forward but to speak against it. Usually a forceful, clear-voiced extemporaneous speaker, Kitchin read from a written text, his voice tired and husky as he asked his colleagues to reconsider what they were about to do before they took the ‘‘measureless step’’ of a declaration of war. After hours of prowar speakers who called antiwar congressmen disloyal cowards, Kitchin drew applause when he said, ‘‘let me at once remind the House that it takes neither moral nor physical courage to declare a war for others to fight.’’ He continued, ‘‘It is evidence of neither loyalty nor patriotism for one to urge others to get into a war when he knows that he himself is going to keep out.’’ 1 Kitchin understood that his speech would be unpopular: ‘‘for my vote I shall be not only criticized, but denounced from one end of the country to the other. The whole yelping pack of defamers and revilers in the Nation will be at once set upon my heels.’’ Yet, he said, he had no inheritance to leave his children but honor. He spoke eloquently about America’s status as ‘‘the last anchor of peace in the world . . . the last remaining star of hope for Christen-





Southern Antimilitarists

dom,’’ and said, ‘‘by passage of this resolution we enter the war, and the universe becomes one vast drama of horrors and blood. . . . I shall always believe we could and ought to have kept out of this war.’’ 2 Kitchin reviewed the nation’s conduct during the past three years of the Great War. Like other antiwar speakers, he denied that the Wilson administration’s policies had been truly neutral, noting that the United States had tolerated British violations of neutral rights while refusing to tolerate similar violations from Germany. Kitchin said, ‘‘We are told that Germany has destroyed American lives while Great Britain destroyed only property. Great Britain destroyed no American lives, because this nation kept her ships and her citizens out of her war zone. . . .’’ Further, he denied that Germany threatened the United States in any way. Then he reached the heart of his argument. Kitchin warned the House that a declaration of war did not commit the United States solely to defending its shipping rights. Instead, he said, ‘‘We are to make the cause of Great Britain, France, and Russia, right or wrong, our cause. . . .’’ Kitchin said that the United States was going to commit ‘‘men, money and credit’’ to fight out ‘‘a difference between the belligerents of Europe to which we were and are utter strangers.’’ He added, ‘‘Nothing in that cause, nothing in that quarrel, has or does involve a moral or equitable or material interest in or obligation of our Government or of our people.’’ Kitchin had known that his cause was lost before he took the floor. In his concluding remarks, he compared himself to a son desperately trying to dissuade his father from fighting, ‘‘but when the final word is spoken and blows are about to be given, taking off his coat and struggling with all his soul and might in defense of that father.’’ Once the decision for war was taken, Kitchin said, he would emulate that son. The House rose in a standing ovation for the popular majority leader, who had made what many considered ‘‘the speech of the night.’’ Although now largely forgotten, Kitchin’s speech ranks in quality and in contemporary significance with those given by George Norris and Robert La Follette against the United States’ entry into the Great War.3 As he predicted, the prowar press excoriated Kitchin. However, he must have been heartened by the flood of praise, affection, and blessing sent his way by his fellow Tar Heels. A laudatory telegram stated, ‘‘A man and sane in the midst of a crazed nation congratulations.’’ From Durham, a correspondent wrote that he had read Kitchin’s speech to four workers: ‘‘When I had finished your speech their eyes were wet . . . they said almost together, ‘God bless Claude Kitchin!’ I said ‘Amen’ in good old Methodist fashion.’’ 4 When rural southerners of both races evaded conscription, when southern blacks could not be found by draft boards, and when white southerners barricaded themselves in mountain cabins and shot at the authorities sent to

Southern Antimilitarists  round them up, federal and state authorities attributed their recalcitrance to ignorance. To do otherwise, to acknowledge southern draft resisters’ political motives, risked legitimating actions contrary to the interests of the nationstate. Rather than saying, ‘‘These people are shooting at the sheriff because they don’t want to go to war,’’ authorities from the provost marshal general’s office on down found it more expedient—and less politically embarrassing— to say, ‘‘These people are patriotic and loyal; they are just ignorant.’’ Yet rural southerners’ draft evasion had political roots. By  the rural South, like the rest of the nation, had been debating issues of war for years. Some congressmen, like Kitchin, had constituent correspondent files that bulged with letters from rural southern whites, sent in during the – ‘‘preparedness’’ controversies and the  debates over war and conscription. Because of this constituent pressure, southern congressmen numbered among the most stalwart opposition to the Wilson administration’s proposed prewar military buildup and to the institution of conscription after war was declared. Southern politicians who declared that wartime draft evasion emerged out of ignorance sheltered their constituents from the consequences of their actions and themselves from political embarrassment, but their excuses were disingenuous at best. Rural southern political thought as manifested in the  debate emerged from the political world of the early twentieth-century South, where southern antimilitarists honed their arguments in national and regional debates on preparedness, neutral rights, and war. For southern politicians and their constituents, agrarian and otherwise, this debate revolved around conflicting concepts of honor, duty, history, and what it meant to be southern.

Southern Politics in the Early Twentieth Century The southern political world of  was a white male domain. Through disfranchisement, the establishment of segregation, and the application of violence, white southerners had labeled certain areas of southern life for ‘‘whites only.’’ Of these, politics was paramount, and politics dealing with foreign policy even more so. African Americans in the South, like white women, could act politically but, for the most part, only outside the realm of electoral politics. Black southern leaders could, with great care and judicious language, weigh in on a few select public issues, such as education or public health —always making it clear that they were asking for favors or charity from the white community, never demanding better treatment as a right. In some Upper South cities, black men could still vote, as long as they voted as instructed by powerful white politicians. But affairs of state, such as raising



Southern Antimilitarists

armies and going to war, were matters for white men, and black southern men who meddled therein literally risked their lives.5 Southern whites argued vociferously over all aspects of politics except white supremacy, which by  had become as sacrosanct within the region as apple pie and motherhood. With their own racial superiority as a given, white southerners felt free to disagree, often violently, on issues relating to economics and foreign policy. Whites’ stances for or against war and conscription in  reflected the complexity of politics and white culture in the region. In the South of –, most political battles were fought out in the Democratic Party. These were the days of the one-party South, the Democratic ‘‘Solid South.’’ Throughout most of the region, the Republican Party made only token campaigns for office. Outside of pockets of Republican strength in Appalachia, white southerners were Democrats. White Democrats controlled state governments in . White Democratic political hegemony led to bitter interparty factionalism, a fact of significance to this story. At the risk of oversimplifying a byzantine political scene, it is roughly accurate to say that in  white southern Democrats were divided into three factions: conservatives (a.k.a. ‘‘Bourbons’’), progressives, and agrarians. Most progressives came from the region’s small towns and cities, while Bourbons and agrarians represented very different rural interests.6 Bourbons, named after the postrevolutionary restored kings of France, believed in their right to rule as firmly as any hereditary aristocrat of Europe. Politically ensconced in plantation districts, where most of the population was black, disfranchised, and economically under the thumb of white landlords, Bourbons fought their primary political battles with agrarian and progressive reformers. Fiscal as well as social conservatives, they preferred low taxes and minimal state spending, especially on things like public schools, which they saw as a waste of money: Who needed educated farm workers, whether black or white? Bourbons affected a paternalistic concern for the well-being of blacks, whom they considered dependent inferiors, and they usually avoided the extremes of white supremacist rhetoric, perhaps because they considered it both ungentlemanly and unnecessary. Bourbons reserved their most virulent scorn for people outside their dominance, such as white small farmers and working people of the hill districts, whom they called poor whites, rednecks, wool-hat boys, crackers, hillbillies, and poor white trash. These were, of course, the people who voted for agrarian politicians. Political histories of this period use the term ‘‘agrarian’’ to describe a group of politicians () who were from the countryside, often from farming backgrounds, () who affiliated with William Jennings Bryan’s political faction in the national Democratic Party, and () who had sympathized with or partici-

Southern Antimilitarists  pated in the populist movement of the s. Sometimes a politician united these characteristics in one person, but not always. In general, agrarian politicians positioned themselves as the champions of the dirt farmers who made up the majority of the southern white population. If a liberal is a politician willing to use state power to better the economic conditions of the poor, then southern agrarian leaders like Claude Kitchin, James Vardaman, and Tom Watson were liberals whereas Bourbons were conservatives. These liberals were also committed white supremacists.7 Since the Second World War, an expressed commitment to racial justice has been the hallmark of American liberalism, its shibboleth without which no politician of the left could pass muster. Therefore it seems strange to talk about liberal racists. However, in the early twentieth-century United States, no southern white politician attacked the Jim Crow system: no Republicans, no Bourbons, no progressives, no agrarians, not even Socialists, who were in favor of blacks’ having the vote but not of ‘‘social equality,’’ that is, desegregation. (For that matter, no prominent northern politician made racial justice an issue either.) In this era, liberalism was defined in economic, not racial, terms.8 To get elected, agrarian politicians (and progressives) race-baited their Bourbon opponents. The classic example is James Vardaman of Mississippi, whose rhetorical abuse of black Mississippians and support for white supremacy went over the top, even by the standards of that state and that time. He called blacks ‘‘lazy, lying, lustful animal[s]’’ incapable of citizenship, and as governor, he cut funding for the state’s black normal school on the grounds that education for the black man served to ‘‘sharpen his cunning, breeds hopes that cannot be fulfilled, inspires aspirations that cannot be gratified, creates an inclination to avoid honest labor, promotes indolence and . . . leads to crime.’’ Wincing at Vardaman’s vicious words, it is easy to forget that his great patrician antagonists William Percy and John Sharp Williams were as committed as he to white supremacy. In , when Williams and Vardaman vied for election to the Senate, Vardaman’s supporters accused Williams of treating his white servant and his black cook as equals. Not so, Williams replied: When he found out that the white servant was eating meals with his cook, he fired the white woman, thus demonstrating his commitment to white supremacy and the maintenance of the color line, even in his kitchen.9 Agrarian politicians wanted to use government to better the lives of the southern white rural majority, whereas Bourbons did not. In  Mississippi, Vardaman the archracist was also the leading liberal. He supported measures to ease farm credit, a graduated income tax, the initiative and referendum, child labor laws, women’s suffrage, antitrust laws—and white supremacy. In parts of the South less racially obsessed than Mississippi, agrarian politicians



Southern Antimilitarists

rose to power by sponsoring economic agendas that echoed those proposed by the Populist Party in the s, including banking reform, antitrust laws, and the income tax. In that regard, many agrarian Democrats were populists, without being, or having been, members of the defunct People’s Party.10 The reforms that agrarian politicians supported usually appealed also to Democratic progressives. The latter faction, rather smaller than the other two in most states, included the region’s reformers and activists but also many members of the South’s business and urban elites, people with economic and social ties to members of the same class throughout the nation. Progressives and agrarians agreed on many issues but differed in style. Progressives were townsfolk, business and professional people interested in a long list of reforms (prohibition, public health, better roads, better schools) designed to make the region’s growing cities safer and healthier for the bourgeoisie and to facilitate economic development. The tone of southern progressivism was that of uplift and benevolence, extended by the well-to-do toward the less fortunate. Agrarian politicians might—often did—support many of the same reforms as urban progressives but used a different rhetoric, one of economic justice and respect for the common white man. Of course, both race-baited when needed to get elected.11 This synopsis of the early twentieth-century political scene should not lead the reader to think that the different factions described above were orderly, disciplined, or consistent in their internal ideological stances. In the highly volatile world of southern politics, faction leaders made and broke alliances election by election, on the basis of momentary political expediency. Thus ‘‘crackers’’ voted on occasion for Bourbons, and progressives courted the support of backwoods pols.

Preparedness and Its Foes In the years before the Great War, Americans participated in a great national debate on ‘‘preparedness.’’ Supposedly about what kind of military the United States should have, the preparedness debate was actually about what kind of nation it should be. Led by Theodore Roosevelt, conservative nationalists made a military buildup part of their agenda, along with Anglophilia, immigration restriction, Americanization, eugenics, and strident glorification of manhood and ‘‘patriotic Motherhood.’’ Preparedness originated in the Republican Party, apparently at least in part as an attempt to find an issue around which that institution could coalesce after its split into Old Guard and Bull Moose factions and subsequent defeat by the Democrats in the  elections. Influenced by his friend General Leonard Wood, Theodore Roosevelt led other

Southern Antimilitarists   progressives into an alliance with conservative Republicans in support of a much larger, modernized military, plus universal military training and the creation of a national reserve army to replace the state-run National Guard. The elites who joined the preparedness movement did so for various reasons. Some believed that the United States needed a bigger, better navy so that the nation could assert its power in the world at large. While some members of the preparedness elite favored a military buildup for defensive purposes, others were frankly imperialists, anxious to see the United States capable of competing in the worldwide game for colonies and economic advantage. However, most members of the preparedness movement seem to have concentrated their hopes on the establishment of universal military training and service, not for its strategic or military benefits, but for the supposed good it would do for the men of the country. Concerned that industrial society offered few opportunities for the exercise of true manhood, men of the American elite joined Theodore Roosevelt in emphasizing sports, hunting, the strenuous outdoor life, and the martial virtues; like their English counterparts, they read books glorifying adventure and war. Universal military training would, they thought, literally make men out of the effete sons of the upper class. Moreover, military training would help discipline and ‘‘Americanize’’ the nation’s immigrant and native working class, who would learn patriotism under the care of their upper-class officers. As Herbert Crowley noted, ‘‘Americans who are advocating ‘preparedness’ are basing their approval largely upon the better order, which it is expected to impose upon our time honored internal chaos.’’ In effect, members of the American upper class wanted to send their social inferiors to military school.12 Within the U.S. Army, support for preparedness was not universal but was rather the hobbyhorse of military reformers and supporters of General Wood. The movement offered a vehicle through which pressure could be put upon Congress to increase military appropriations and to reform the structure of the American military establishment. In particular, preparedness supporters within the military hoped to use the preparedness movement to institute conscription and get rid of the state-run National Guard units. Thus military reformers called for universal military training as a way of getting the public to accept the concept that all men owed such service to the state. This would be a first step on the way to conscription.13 Although Wood and his allies had been agitating for military reform since Wood became chief of staff in , the outbreak of war in Europe in  strengthened their arguments and popularized their issue by giving the American public a prototypical enemy on which to project their fears: Germany. While preparedness movement leaders tried to separate military reform from

 Southern Antimilitarists any specific potential threat, everyone knew who the expected enemy was. Preparedness advocates both feared and admired the German state, leading more than one of their opponents to comment that people like Roosevelt wanted the United States to get ready to fight Germany by becoming more like Germany. In particular, preparedness propaganda in favor of universal military service raised queries: Did the preparedness movement want to turn America into Prussia by replacing a volunteer army in the Anglo-American tradition with a European-model conscript army? 14 To arouse support for preparedness, General Wood sponsored voluntary summer officer training camps at which men of the nation’s elite could learn the rudiments of drill and command. Wood wanted neither members of the working class nor African Americans and was especially scornful of the idea of black officers, ‘‘with whom our descendants cannot intermarry without producing a race of mongrels. . . .’’ Theodore Roosevelt visited the first training camp at Plattsburg, New York, in the summer of  and made a speech lambasting Woodrow Wilson. In the coming months, Plattsburgers became strong advocates of military reform, including universal military service.15 As the sons of the northeastern upper class trained at Plattsburg, the conservative nationalist core of the preparedness movement consolidated its support among urban elites. By the summer of , the preparedness movement had created numerous ‘‘defense societies,’’ including the bipartisan National Security League, the Navy League, the Army League, the American Defense Society, and the Aero Club. At first, defense societies attracted the nation’s corporate and social upper crust. The National Security League (), the largest of the preparedness organizations, was created by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s son-in-law and included among its influential members bankers, corporate lawyers, and Henry L. Stimson, former and future secretary of war. The  got its money from (among others) J. P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, the directors of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, the Guggenheim brothers, and the DuPont family.16 From  on, the defense societies expanded their appeal to the urban middle class, building a network of preparedness supporters in cities throughout the nation. Preparedness groups sponsored speakers and mailed out tons of pamphlets to small-town business and civic groups. Hudson Maxim, of the Maxim Munitions family, published a pamphlet, Defenseless America, warning that American women would become prey to victorious invading armies unless the nation armed itself. However, the preparedness movement’s greatest influence seems to have been on the publishers and editors of the sorts of newspapers, magazines, and films that appealed to the nation’s middle class. Metropolitan newspapers were ‘‘unanimously committed to preparedness,’’

Southern Antimilitarists  according to John Patrick Finnegan. Popular middle-class magazines carried titles like ‘‘The Invasion of America’’ and ‘‘Get Ready,’’ the latter of which included a map showing the United States as ‘‘New Prussia,’’ with the West Coast given over to the Japanese. Maxim’s pamphlet became a film, The Battle Cry of Peace, featuring the invasion of New York by unspecified soldiers who were, as the New York Times put it, ‘‘certainly not Portuguese. . . .’’ 17 Gradually, preparedness became less a Republican issue than a class issue, with support for a military buildup and for universal training strongest among the ‘‘upper classes’’ of towns from New York to the smallest whistle-stop in southern Georgia. As Simeon Strunsky, a Socialist journalist from New York, noted in , armament had become fashionable among the well-to-do. Strunsky suggested that the American upper class’s support for preparedness did not grow directly from a desire for increased profits or world power but from a sense of duty and noblesse oblige and from a desire to have some useful work to do in the world: ‘‘I cannot help thinking that a great many young men of wealth, who hitherto have seen no field open to them in the service of the nation, now think they have such an opportunity opening for them.’’ However, Strunsky said, ‘‘if the militarization of the United States should be brought about by the economically and socially superior classes exercising an influence beyond their numerical strength, militarism would come to us as a class policy.’’ Then, he warned, farmers and workers would feel that ‘‘the policy of armament has been forced upon the country by the moneyed classes for their own interests. . . .’’ Southern dirt farmers probably did not read Strunsky’s essay, which was published in  in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. However, Strunsky predicted to a tee their rationale for opposing first preparedness and then the draft.18 Like the preparedness movement, antipreparedness forces were officially bipartisan; unlike the preparedness people, they also tended to be diverse ethnically, socially, and ideologically, drawing from German American communities, conservative Republicans, progressive pacifists and feminists, socialists, the labor unions, and farmers. Historians who have studied the opposition to preparedness have devoted most of their attention to that movement’s middle-class feminist, pacifist, and socialist adherents, who left behind much printed propaganda to be mined for insights into antimilitarist ideology. Antipreparedness forces included many well-known leaders of the progressive movement. Feminists Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt founded the Women’s Peace Party, and a group centered at Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement House formed the core of the American Union Against Militarism (), with Crystal Eastman serving at the union’s New York office director. The ’s membership included pacifists, among them rich Philadel-

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Southern Antimilitarists

phia Quakers who helped pay the bills, but they did not try to sell pacifism per se to the American public. Instead, they countered the preparedness movement’s arguments that universal military training would build better men and a stronger nation by contending that it fostered servility and obedience rather than democracy and personal independence. In , the  sponsored an antipreparedness speaking tour, distributed hundreds of thousands of pieces of propaganda, and sent a delegation to the White House to lobby Wilson himself.19 However, a high profile does not necessarily equate with power. The social workers, feminists, and socialists of the  had relatively little political clout. For that, the union had to depend on congressmen from rural districts, who in turn derived their power from the votes of farmers, who comprised the largest faction of the antipreparedness movement. As Finnegan explains, farmers ‘‘remained suspicious of great corporations and militarism, concerned about taxes, and sturdily indifferent to the hue and cry over defense.’’ The National Farmers Union and the Grange both spoke out against universal military service. Southern agrarian Democrats and their constituents made up one of the largest centers of antimilitarist sentiment in the country. From this group’s prewar rhetoric, southern slackers and draft resisters drew much of their arguments in the years –.20 Southern antimilitarists held a traditional American aversion to standing armies as intrinsically antidemocratic institutions that had been used throughout history to overthrow republics and establish dictatorships. Instead of a standing army, southern agrarians preferred state militias, or (as militias had become by ) the National Guard. Preparedness advocates complained that the state militias were far from professional in their training or command. This was true, and southerners in general liked it that way. Neither the Civil War nor the Spanish-American War had impressed the southern public with the superiority of professional military men, or ‘‘West Pointers.’’ Quite the contrary: Any student of Confederate military history could cite examples of professionally trained fools and amateur military geniuses. Southerners also contended that men fought better when surrounded by their neighbors and friends, a tradition that universal service would destroy. In addition, southern political leaders found the National Guard useful for racial reasons: Since it was under state control, governors could ensure that it remained an all-white force. Finally, placing control over the state militias in the hands of state governors also acted as a check against impetuous use of military force by the national government. At various times in the nation’s past, governors had refused presidential requests to send militia troops for national service, and as

Southern Antimilitarists  late as  the attorney general had issued a ruling that National Guard troops could not be deployed overseas.21 Antimilitarist southerners’ opposition to changes in the nation’s military structure also reflected their understanding that the ways in which armies are raised are not separate from the uses to which those armies are put. The traditional American military structure was overwhelmingly defensive in its orientation. Southern antimilitarists argued that when the nation needed defending, American men would volunteer for the military, as they had in all previous wars, and they opposed building up a conscripted military force large enough to allow the U.S. government to go adventuring overseas. Moreover, antimilitarists argued, the defense societies’ new model army would cost too much in taxes. Opposition to military reform also drew from the southern rural model of class analysis. Many southern antimilitarists did not believe that the proposed new army would be used to defend the country but would be used instead to further the interests of a group they identified as the ‘‘money power.’’ For many, the very names of the prominent men in the defense agencies—the Morgans, the DuPonts, Wall Street lawyers, corporate leaders, and investment bankers—told them all they needed to know about whose army this was going to be. Finally, after , antimilitarists saw building up the army as the first step to the United States’ entry into the European bloodbath. As the conservative Commercial and Financial Chronicle (hardly a southern agrarian journal) said, ‘‘an armament party is a war party.’’ 22 A Texas antimilitarist, speaking at a rally in , distinguished himself from the  crowd by declaring, ‘‘I ain’t any pacifist,’’ and an  staffer described his group’s lobbying work as uniting ‘‘the pacifist, and his profane Jeffersonian ally, the anti-militarist.’’ By present-day definitions, ‘‘pacifist’’ means someone who refuses to fight, regardless of provocation, for reasons of personal conscience or religious conviction. It is true that in – the definition of pacifism was somewhat more flexible, allowing people like Newton Baker to call himself a pacifist in  and yet, as the secretary of war, to support war with Germany in . However, in a recent article, Anthony Gaughan says that some southern congressmen who spoke against preparedness and against war from  through  ‘‘openly embraced pacifism’’ or (in the case of Wilson supporters) ‘‘expressed pacifist sentiments’’ despite their loyalty to the president. But preferring peace to war and butter to guns does not a pacifist make: If it did, then Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and most of the men who ever took up arms for the United States would qualify as pacifists. Many southern agrarian politicians of this period opposed preparedness measures that would enable the United States to pursue a course of military

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Southern Antimilitarists

aggression overseas, but none abjured defensive war, the state militias, or the tradition of the American citizen-soldier.23

Democrats and Preparedness In Congress, southern Democrats led the antimilitarist movement at a time when southern Democrats wielded more power than they had for generations. In , the Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress. Woodrow Wilson became the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland in  and the first southern president since before the Civil War. Wilson’s administration contained many southerners, although, like the president himself, they often came to power through nonpolitical careers in northern states. In the House and the Senate, southern congressmen filled key committee chairs. The Democratic Party could legislate as it pleased, as long as Democrats held together and maintained party discipline. This meant that the real action in Washington between  and  was within the Democratic Party itself and the congressional committees that it controlled. It was there that party policy, and therefore national policy, unfolded. President Wilson came to office determined to lead, but he found quickly that many members of his party had needs and ideas of their own. Party hacks simply wanted patronage, and Wilson acquiesced as Postmaster General Burleson parceled out offices as per the requests of Democratic senators and congressmen. In return, the men Wilson and Burleson referred to as ‘‘old standpatters’’ followed the party line. By the summer of , Wilson told Burleson, ‘‘I can rely on them better than I can on some of my own crowd.’’ While the president got along well with Bourbon Democrats, he found his leadership frequently challenged by southern agrarian Democrats, including Claude Kitchin.24 In Congress since , by  Kitchin had risen to powerful positions as chair of the Ways and Means Committee and majority leader for the Democratic Party. He was also an unofficial leader of the southern agrarian faction. During Wilson’s first term in office, Kitchin and other southern agrarians fought for their programs in party conferences and often forced Wilson to modify legislation in order to satisfy them. Because of the southern agrarians, the Federal Reserve Act included provisions decentralizing the Federal Reserve banking system and placing it under the ultimate control of presidential appointees. Southern agrarians in Congress pushed Wilson to include prolabor provisions in the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, to support the Rural Credits Act of , the Smith-Lever Act for agricultural extension work, and the Federal Highways Act of . In short, the southern agrarians in Congress were

Southern Antimilitarists  responsible for about half of the legislation that earned Woodrow Wilson his reputation for liberalism, legislation that significantly increased the power and regulatory functions of the central government.25 Northeastern newspapers, mostly affiliated with the Republican Party, took pleasure in depicting Kitchin as a bumpkin. (The fact that his home village was named Scotland Neck did not help matters much.) In fact, as U.S. representatives went, Kitchin was not especially backwoods or down-home. His father, a Confederate veteran, had been a mover and shaker in Democratic politics for years; his brother, a former congressman and governor of North Carolina, went on to become the president of Wake Forest, a Baptist-affiliated college. Kitchin himself was a graduate of Wake Forest and a lawyer, although he maintained connections with his rural constituents by operating a farm as well. Like many southern Democrats, Kitchin combined populist economic principles with white supremacy. The Kitchin family opposed the Populist Party in North Carolina, particularly when that party fused with the  to win state elections with black votes in the s. Kitchin supported the political revolution that drove black men out of North Carolina politics in the latter part of that decade. He came to Congress in  as part of the faction of North Carolinians aligned with Governor Charles Aycock, who sponsored disfranchising legislation that foreclosed any possibility of political power for black men in North Carolina. However, Kitchin also supported banking, antitrust, tax, and tariff reform, all stands designed to appeal to the white farmers in his district. He was also, like them, an admirer of William Jennings Bryan, and he clearly drew heavily from Bryan’s ideas about America’s proper foreign policy.26 Bryan, now remembered as an anti-Darwinist clown, was in  better known as one of the nation’s leading anti-imperialists and a long-term advocate of peace causes. Appointed secretary of state by President Wilson, Bryan broke with Wilson in  over the administration’s policy toward Germany. When Germany used submarines to blockade the British Isles and announced that ships violating that blockade would be sunk without warning, Bryan argued against confrontation. He thought that giving up some legitimate neutral rights, such as that of unimpeded trade, would be an acceptable sacrifice if it kept the United States out of the Great War. Nor did he believe that citizens of the United States effectively carried their own neutrality with them wherever they went. He contended that those who sailed on belligerent vessels or traveled into war zones contributed to their own danger and that their deaths did not require national vengeance. Bryan was holding his own in cabinet debates over the issue until the sinking of the British luxury liner Lusitania in May , with the loss of  American lives. When President Wilson responded in June by proposing to send Germany a formal protest note condemning submarine

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Southern Antimilitarists

warfare as a violation of the rights of humanity and demanding its immediate cessation, Bryan resigned. However, Bryan’s views circa  are reflected not only in Kitchin’s April  speech against the declaration of war but also in the words of ordinary white southerners against the war. In this case, the Great Commoner seems to have articulated the thoughts of a large percentage of rural Americans, particularly in the South.27 Until the autumn of , southern agrarian Democrats rested secure in the knowledge that their leader, Woodrow Wilson, shared their opposition to the Republican-led preparedness movement. They were surprised when Wilson, in a November  speech, called for reorganizing and expanding the nation’s armed forces. Although Wilson’s preparedness plan did not go as far as Roosevelt and the Plattsburgers wanted, it went much further than Kitchin and the congressional agrarians were prepared to go. Wilson called for a naval buildup plus an increase in the regular army, accompanied by the creation of a national reserve, the Continental Army, to replace the National Guard. Composed of volunteers, the Continental Army would train for two months each summer for three years under officers drawn from the Plattsburg camps, from collegiate military training programs, and from the regular army.28 Historians have attributed Wilson’s change of heart to both domestic and international pressures. By supporting moderate preparedness, the president could undercut the ’s plans to use the issue in the upcoming election of . An American military buildup would also enhance the nation’s status internationally and make it easier for Wilson to speak from a position of power in his dealings with the Germans over the submarine issue. His reversal on this issue, however, did not receive overwhelming support from Democrats in the House of Representatives. Kitchin, by this time the Democratic majority leader, particularly opposed it. He wrote to William Jennings Bryan, ‘‘I am brokenhearted over the position which the President has taken in regard to ‘preparedness.’ . . . The present attitude of the President, so surprising and disappointing, has worried me more than anything in my political life.’’ With the support of about thirty Democratic representatives from rural districts in the South and West, Kitchin fought the president’s bill, using his powers as majority leader to place his supporters on key House committees.29 His opposition to Wilson’s preparedness measures earned Kitchin derisive editorial comment from metropolitan newspapers plus pointed, harsh criticism from fellow southern Democrats, many of whom put aside their antipreparedness beliefs for the sake of party unity and loyalty to Wilson. He alienated middle-class southerners for whom supporting the president was paramount. However, he received a deluge of mail supporting his stand, much of it from leftist antimilitarists throughout the nation but also from his fel-

Southern Antimilitarists  low southerners. This correspondence provides insight into the reasons why some white southern Democrats held to antimilitarism, even in defiance of party discipline, and helps explain how antimilitarism fueled opposition to conscription. One of the most articulate statements of antimilitarism came from Hugh A. White, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates from Rockbridge County. White wrote to Kitchin in December , ‘‘It is perfectly clear that this crusade has been originated by the wealthy manufacturers, and especially the manufacturers of war munitions.’’ White continued, ‘‘The sentiment in favor of England has been manufactured from the very beginning by the money power, which is so closely interwoven with the finances of Great Britain that they fear the consequences if they take any other position; and the papers, in my judgment, are largely subsidized and paid enormously for creating a sentiment which will ultimately redound to the benefit of the great money barons.’’ Like others of Kitchin’s correspondents, White wondered what had happened to Woodrow Wilson, whose ‘‘about-face’’ he thought ‘‘utterly inexplicable. . . .’’ White said that many of Wilson’s ‘‘strong supporters believe that he has yielded to the dictates of Wall Street.’’ For White, it seemed ‘‘fairly clear that the matter of preparedness is only the first step looking towards bringing on war. . . .’’ Once Congress had authorized a military buildup, White said, a declaration of war against Germany would be ‘‘forced through Congress by a popular clamor manufactured out of the horrors of war, and not out of any good grounds.’’ White tied up his argument by stating that he believed the nation’s ‘‘great manufacturing interests’’ wanted a war ‘‘with a view to a restoration of a high tariff and a consequent monopoly and profit of millions.’’ 30 From November  and into the new year, Kitchin received similar letters from people throughout the South, alleging that preparedness was a ploy to enrich munitions makers and draw the United States into the Great War in order to protect the investments made by J. P. Morgan. It should be pointed out that this interpretation, while seemingly paranoid, was not conjured out of thin air. Although the extent of the United States’ economic entanglement with the Allies was not known to the general public in –, it did not take a financial genius to understand that American banks and industrial interests had invested in an Allied victory or to worry about the influence such powerful economic forces might have on U.S. policy. The fact that the boards of directors of preparedness lobbying groups tended to be filled with the nation’s corporate elite did nothing to allay suspicion among southern rural folk that preparedness was a Wall Street plot.31 From Cameron, Texas, attorney W. T. Hefley wrote a lengthy longhand message to Kitchin, praising him for his willingness to defend democracy and the

 Southern Antimilitarists people, whether their enemies ‘‘be democrats or republicans.’’ Hefley said that Wilson’s about-face had ‘‘broken the hearts and spirits of all true democrats’’ and went on to air dark suspicions: ‘‘There be many who believe that Wilson and Lancing [Secretary of State Robert Lansing] have violated in spirit every definition of neutrality and are carrying out the messages of Elbert H. Gary, the spoken and written voice of the premier of the ‘invisible empire’— J. P. Morgan and the munitions manufacturers of death and murder to feed the fires of war in Europe. This must stop and a complete embargo must be placed on this traffic in murder or this nation and our people will have to pay for this crime in blood and tears to the very uttermost. . . .’’ Hefley concluded, ‘‘I know you will find some faithful ones who have not bowed the knee to Baal and my prayer is that the spirit of the Lord may come upon you and help you to save our people.’’ 32 Not all of Kitchin’s mail supported antipreparedness. Among those who wrote to criticize his stand was the North Carolina Cotton Seed Crushers’ Association, which urged him to support the president, and A. C. House, president of the Florence Lumber Company of Weldon County, North Carolina, who informed Kitchin that most of the public was against him and urged him to support a military buildup sufficient to protect the country, ‘‘a veritable treasure house without sufficient protection. . . .’’ (The phrase ‘‘treasure house’’ probably reflected House’s reading: In , Scientific American carried a series of propreparedness articles titled ‘‘Our Undefended Treasure Land,’’ later reissued in pamphlet form.) To all such letters, Kitchin fired off a spirited response, asking his critics, in effect, if they knew what they were talking about: ‘‘I am inclined to believe that if you and the people in your community knew the real facts about this matter we would not be so far apart.’’ 33 On the antimilitarist issue, Claude Kitchin was a true believer whose stand grew from personal conviction. However, many of the congressmen in his band of antimilitarists probably opposed the president’s bill not out of principle but out of political expediency. Farmers throughout the country opposed the bill. John Patrick Finnegan quotes a journalist’s description of a southern member of the House Military Affairs Committee going through his mail: ‘‘on his desk is a pile of letters from the folks back home that causes a clammy sweat to moisten his brow as he reads them. They are mostly in cheap envelopes, with no printed returns. A good many of them are superscribed in pencil. . . . They express the fixed opinion of hard-headed, even if wrongheaded people.’’ 34 Meanwhile, James Hay of Virginia, the chair of the House Military Affairs Committee, promised to support the president’s bill as presented by Secretary of War Garrison and then gutted it. Hay and other congressmen faced con-

Southern Antimilitarists  siderable pressure from the National Guard leadership, who were understandably unhappy about losing their existence as independent military units and, unlike the regular army, were empowered with political connections in every state of the Union. In January , Hay reported to Wilson that his committee would not support the Continental Army. Incensed, Secretary Garrison demanded that Wilson intervene to save his program. Wilson refused, but in January he attempted to build support for his bill by appealing to the public in a speaking tour that took him from Pennsylvania into the Midwest, where he spoke in favor of preparedness before cheering urban crowds. As Finnegan notes, however, the president was preaching to the choir and not to the unconverted countryside or to the rural representatives in Congress. When the president got back to Washington, Hay told him that the Military Affairs Committee and the House as a whole did not support the Continental Army. Hay cited two reasons: first, that witnesses advocating the Continental Army had testified to the committee that they supported conscription; and second, that southern congressmen feared that the new army would enroll blacks. Instead of the Continental Army, Hay proposed federalizing the National Guard, a compromise that Kitchin and the agrarian opposition would accept. In the spring of , the House passed Hay’s bill with the support of southern and midwestern antimilitarists. Claude Kitchin wrote to a friend, ‘‘I think, myself, that we have scored a victory in the Military bill as it passed the House.’’ Realizing that Wilson would not fight his party members for a stronger bill, Secretary Garrison resigned in protest. However, over in the Senate, preparedness forces had more success. The Senate passed a bill that significantly increased the size of the army and created a national reserve force reminiscent of the now defunct proposal for a Continental Army.35 Compromise on the two bills took considerable negotiation, conducted against a backdrop of increased international tension. In the spring of , Pancho Villa’s raids across the Mexican border threatened to further embroil the United States in the unfolding Mexican Revolution, and events in Europe further exposed the differences between Wilson and agrarian southern Democrats in Congress concerning foreign policy. This time the issue was Germany’s use of the submarine and the rights of neutrals to freedom of the seas.36 Both Britain and Germany violated American neutrality rights during the First World War. Britain’s naval blockade almost halted American shipments to Germany. The British navy boarded American vessels, took off passengers, and forced American ships into British ports so that mailbags en route to Europe could be searched. However, the British navy killed no Americans. The German navy used a new weapon, the submarine, in ways that endangered American lives.

 Southern Antimilitarists Under the traditional rules of war at sea, ships did not fire on unarmed merchant vessels without warning but instead stopped them, boarded them, checked them for contraband, and then either sank them, after evacuating passengers and crew, or took them as prizes of war. Submarines could not operate in that way but had to fire without warning. In justification, the German government cited the damage done to the German economy and the civilian population by the British blockade, which illegally blocked shipment of food and medical supplies. Breaking the British blockade required using the submarine. Moreover, the German government contended that British merchant vessels carried war materiel and were therefore legitimate targets under the rules of war. (In the case of the Lusitania, this was quite true: Far below the salons and staterooms, the liner was loaded with munitions being carried from American plants to Britain.) In addition, some British merchant ships had been mounted with deck guns capable of causing significant damage to a submarine if it surfaced to search for contraband. Overall, the German government insisted that it had the right to use this new weapon to attack enemy merchant shipping even if that meant the deaths of civilians, some of whom might be from neutral countries.37 Wilson replied with a series of diplomatic notes to Germany. He stated that Americans had the right, as neutrals, to travel safely on merchant ships regardless of their nationality or state of belligerence, and he called upon Germany to give up attacking merchant ships altogether. He condemned the use of the submarine as a danger to neutral rights. Unwilling to risk war with the United States, Germany backed down and in August  effectively agreed to Wilson’s demands. But in February , unable to break the British blockade, the German government announced that its navy would sink all armed enemy merchant vessels on sight as of March . The Wilson administration responded strongly, again upholding the rights of Americans as neutrals to sail on merchant ships of belligerent nations.38 Believing that Wilson’s policy on the submarine would lead to war with Germany, Democrats in Congress rebelled. Representative Jeff McLemore of Texas offered a resolution asking the president to warn all Americans to stop traveling on armed belligerent merchant vessels. In the Senate, Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma already had in the works a similar, but stronger, resolution that would have denied U.S. passports to Americans traveling on belligerent ships. Both of these resolutions received support from William Jennings Bryan, the unofficial leader of the party’s agrarian branch. On February , the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William J. Stone of Missouri, told Wilson ‘‘that the American people did not want to go to war to vindicate the right of a few people to travel or work on armed vessels,’’ according to Wilson

Southern Antimilitarists  biographer Arthur Link. As debate swirled through Congress, the McLemore resolution appeared certain to pass. On February , House Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri requested that the president meet with him, Representative Hal D. Flood of Virginia, who was chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Majority Leader Kitchin. The congressmen waited in their offices in vain for a summons to the White House, finally going home after dark. Engrossed in working out his own response to the crisis, Wilson spent the evening writing a reply to a letter from Senator Stone challenging his position. Wilson wrote, ‘‘I cannot consent to any abridgement of the rights of American citizens in any respect. The honor and self-respect of the nation is involved. We covet peace, and shall preserve it any cost but the loss of honor.’’ Wilson said that to ‘‘forbid our people to exercise their rights for fear we might be called upon to vindicate them would be a deep humiliation indeed.’’ That night, Wilson released Stone’s letter and his reply to the press, which published it in the February  early editions, already on the street by the time that Clark, Flood, and Kitchin met with the president that morning. It was his reply to the congressional rebellion and signaled that he would not back down on the submarine issue. Clark, Flood, and Kitchin came back from their meeting to find support for the Gore and McLemore resolutions melting away. Unwilling to confront their own party leader, congressional Democrats supported moves to table the resolutions in early March.39 Claude Kitchin returned from the ‘‘Sunrise Conference’’ convinced that Woodrow Wilson meant to lead the United States into war with Germany. On February , Kitchin wrote to the Reverend Charles Nashe, ‘‘Confidentially, I think the President is anxious for war with Germany—his sympathies are so strong with the Allies. . . . I fear the President is going to watch for the first opportunity to strike at Germany and involve this country in a world-wide war. . . . It seems to me a crime against civilization and humanity for this Christian nation to plunge into war and make a slaughter-house of the whole world.’’ 40 Kitchin’s letter was in response to an earlier missive from Nashe urging support for the Gore and McLemore resolutions. In that letter, the Greensboro, North Carolina, minister also reflected on Wilson’s defense of neutral rights and national honor: ‘‘I am sorrowfully and profoundly convinced that our great and good President is making the greatest mistake of his life. His forceful use of the popular and powerful words ‘honor’ and ‘rights’ are moral misapplications of those words, however sincere he doubtless is. . . . So, in the name of ‘Honor’ our government must officially give passports to selfish, reckless men who rush into needless danger and imperil the lives of thousands!’’ 41 On March , two Americans died when a U-boat sank the French ship Sussex. Wilson announced that unless Germany ceased such actions the United

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Southern Antimilitarists

States would sever diplomatic relations. Once again, Germany backed down and pledged not to attack merchant ships without warning. As before, the German government took this action to keep the United States out of the war— and also because their submarine construction program had not yet supplied them with enough boats to be really effective against the Allies’ navies. However, to many Americans it looked as though the president’s policy had been just tough enough to uphold American honor without getting the country into the Great War.42 While Wilson’s adroit use of the press scotched a Democratic rebellion in favor of the McLemore and Gore resolutions, he did not have his way on the issue of preparedness. The National Defense Act, finally passed by both houses of Congress in May , embodied less than Wilson had originally asked for and much less than the defense societies and their allies in Congress had demanded. However, as John Whiteclay Chambers notes, this legislation had tidbits for everyone. Kitchin and other stalwart antimilitarists could claim victory for killing the Continental Army concept. Legislators who supported the National Guard could say that they had saved the militia. The army got authorization to increase enlistments, and the defense societies won funding for Plattsburg-type camps and a Reserve Officer Training Corps (). The passage of the act also demonstrated that Wilson and the Democrats were concerned about national security, allowing Wilson to co-opt the issue from the  before the election of . The fact remained, however, that in the National Defense Act’s long march from Hay’s House committee to Wilson’s desk, southern agrarian representatives in Congress had destroyed the secretary of war’s program for military expansion and had dealt preparedness a significant defeat.43 With the popular hit ‘‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier’’ resounding from Victrolas throughout the land, Woodrow Wilson won reelection under the slogan ‘‘He Kept Us Out of War.’’ Days after his inaugural in March , pushed by the German government’s announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare that would target neutral and belligerent shipping alike, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany.44

C H A P T E R T WO

Which War, Whose Fight? White Southerners Debate the Declaration of War and the Draft, 

A

mong white southerners, the approach of the Great War occasioned intense contention over history, heritage, and the meaning of being southern. What southern whites thought about war in  often grew out of what they thought about a previous war, ‘‘back in the sixties.’’ Understandably, the descendants of southern Unionists (the ‘‘mountain Republicans’’ of ) had different memories of the war years than did the sons and daughters of the Confederacy. But even among Confederate families, memories of the Civil War were still contested and fraught with pain. For some, the southern heritage was one of glory and honor, even in defeat; for others, that heritage called forth memories of hunger, loss, and grief. In , Union General William T. Sherman had justified his march to the sea by saying that he could make war so terrible that it would be generations before the people of the South would be willing to resort to it again. The reaction of some southern whites to the prospect of entry into the Great War indicates that he succeeded. Yet southerners on both sides of the issue in  also drew upon more recent history: that of the two previous years of debate over preparedness. Rural antiwar southerners, in particular, based their opposition to war and to the draft on the same grounds they had used to justify their opposition to the preparedness movement. Whether small businessmen or dirt farmers, they used terms and phrases indicating (with varying levels of literacy) a class analysis of America’s road to war.

Heritage Rhetoric versus Class Rhetoric In April , as southern congressmen and senators faced votes on President Wilson’s declaration of war and then almost immediately afterward his administration’s conscription bill, they debated those issues self-consciously as 



Which War, Whose Fight?

southerners. Pro- and antiwar congressmen argued from a specifically southern cultural text but arrived at drastically different conclusions. Thus in the speeches of southern congressmen, statements about German aggression, submarine warfare, and international rights, the staples of congressional debate in April , run alongside evocations of the Civil War that illustrate how deeply contested its meaning still was. Claude Kitchin’s speech against the United States’ entry into the Great War provoked an immediate and self-consciously ‘‘southern’’ response. Tom Heflin, congressman from Alabama, rose to attack Kitchin, saying that he should have resigned as majority leader before giving such a speech. To a mixture of applause and hisses (from his fellow Democrats), Heflin assailed Kitchin and did so in distinctly regional terms: Let me say to you gentlemen from the East, the North and the West, who are standing loyally by the president and the country today, that the South, thank God, is with you. The descendants of the men who followed Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are ready to stand with the soldiers of New York and Massachusetts, California, Nebraska, and the other states. . . . Today the South is saying . . . , like Ruth to Naomi, ‘Whithersoever thou goest, I will go. Thy people are my people and thy God, my God. [Applause.] We will not follow the suggestions of the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Kitchin]. In the position he has taken he does not speak for the people of the South. No man born South of the Mason-Dixon line is ready to surrender his country’s self-respect and honor and lie down and crawl because the Kaiser has a Krupp gun and a submarine.1 Heflin’s denunciation of Kitchin contains many of the staple themes of selfconsciously southern rhetoric of the period: the appeal to the glorious Confederate past, the use of biblical quotes out of context, and above all, the evocation of manhood and honor—that no man born in the South would ever back down to the Kaiser. In this moment of high drama, Heflin wrapped himself in a version of the southern white heritage that was recognizable to his audience and remains so today. It is easy to accept Heflin as a stereotypical southerner, a role he cultivated. Son of a country doctor, Heflin sported swallow-tailed frock coats, decorative vests, and string ties, costumes far out of fashion in the early twentieth century, and he affected an exaggerated loyalty to the code of honor. (In , as a new congressman, Heflin faced assault charges after he pulled a pistol on a District streetcar and shot at a black man who was drinking liquor on the car in the presence of a white woman.)2 However, Heflin’s attempt to speak for the South did not go unchallenged.

Which War, Whose Fight?  Incensed by Heflin’s attack, one of Kitchin’s supporters made an attempt to wrest the rhetorical Stars and Bars from the gentleman from Alabama and from the prowar forces in general. Representative John Burnett, also of Alabama, spoke from personal memories of the Confederacy: ‘‘I was a boy  years old when the first gun was fired at Sumter. I saw the first company of gray jackets that went out from my native town and country. I saw them as they went out to follow the Stars and Bars in the Maytime of , hopeful and happy and buoyant. I saw them as they came back in the springtime of , the few that did come back, but oh, how changed. . . .’’ Burnett continued, ‘‘I remember hearing the same kind of war-mad speeches that I have heard today on the floor of this House. I heard men who declared that they would wade up to their armpits in blood; that they would catch all the bullets that were fired and drink all the blood that was shed. But, Mr. Chairman, when the tocsin of real war was sounded . . . these men who had made those declarations were never the ones that smelled gunpowder.’’ Burnett then challenged Heflin to go home to Coosa County and enlist, to ‘‘take his place among the privates and those good people there who will go into the Army.’’ When Heflin protested, ‘‘One son of my only sister has come from the border. I have another nephew that will go, and now my only son—’’ Burnett interrupted him: ‘‘Oh, I object, Mr. Chairman; that is not the question. I decline to yield any further for a speech. Oh yes; these fellows who were going to drink all the blood were willing to send somebody else to war.’’ To laughter and applause from the House, Burnett continued: ‘‘They were willing to have their sister’s sons go; they were willing to have their neighbors’ boys go, but they never got where the death grapple raged between brave men who wore the blue and the brave men who wore the gray. . . .’’ Unlike prowar congressmen, Burnett linked the declaration of war to the means by which the war would be fought: ‘‘Mr. Chairman, conscription is coming this week or the week after. Read the resolution; see the power that is given by Congress to the President; and next week we will be asked to carry out the provisions of this resolution by conscription. Why conscription, if the country wants war?’’ Burnett asked Heflin if he planned to vote to conscript his constituents. Heflin answered evasively: ‘‘I have not reached that question yet, and I want to do anything for the good of my country, to help it beat Germany.’’ Although his answer provoked applause and cheers from the House, so did Burnett’s retort: ‘‘Oh, your country! Then you ought to go and fight for your country.’’ Burnett and Heflin shouted at each other until stopped by the sergeant at arms.3 For Representative Heflin, the spirits of Lee and Jackson could be summoned to battle against the Hohenzollern, and a refusal to fight was a repudia-

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Which War, Whose Fight?

tion of southernness and of manhood itself. Representative Burnett drew upon personal memories of the Civil War to oppose entry into the Great War and accused ‘‘war-mad’’ congressmen of being cowards who were willing to get others to do their fighting for them. In both cases, southern history formed the subtext. Like their congressmen, members of the southern urban middle class brought self-conscious southernness to their support for the declaration of war. For them, Woodrow Wilson was a presidential dream come true: He was one of their own, an educated, reconstructed middle-class southerner come to national power, even though his route lay through Princeton University and the governorship of New Jersey. Urban middle-class southerners supported the United States’ entry into the Great War in large part because Woodrow Wilson told them that it was necessary, and they wrote their congressmen to urge them to support the president as well. When Claude Kitchin spoke against the war declaration, an incensed Goldsboro, North Carolina, lumberman wrote to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels (a fellow Tar Heel), ‘‘I believe that ninety-five percent of the men in North Carolina will stand solidly behind the President. . . . How Claud Kitchen [sic] could have been born of a North Carolina woman and be as craven hearted as he is passes my understanding, I feel that he is not only a disgrace to North Carolina, but to the South.’’ 4 Sociologist John Shelton Reed’s research in the s and s found that urban middle-class southerners were more likely to make much of their southern identity than were residents of the region’s small towns and rural areas, who identified more with their community than with the region as a whole. Documents written by southerners in  indicate that a similar phenomenon existed then. When the South is mentioned, it is a good bet that the writer was prowar, a member of the region’s business or educational elite, and a believer in the Lost Cause, that extraordinary public movement glorifying the dead heroes and living veterans of the defeated Confederacy.5 The creation and elaboration of the Lost Cause movement has been effectively studied by Paul Gaston, Gaines Foster, Charles Reagan Wilson, and David W. Blight. Beginning in the s, Confederate veterans, widows, and the literal sons and daughters of the Confederacy began to construct elaborate public rituals to memorialize the losers of the Civil War and the causes for which they fought. By the early twentieth century, Lost Cause devotees had succeeded, through the use of ritual, speech, memoirs, histories, novels, and the new medium, film, in constructing a public memory of the Confederacy and the Old South that appealed not only to southerners but to other Americans as well. The Lost Cause mythology allowed white southerners to memo-

Which War, Whose Fight?  rialize the Old South while jettisoning their commitment to that society’s agrarian way of life, facilitating the region’s newfound commitment to industrialization in the late nineteenth century.6 Although southerners of all classes probably enjoyed and participated in Confederate memorial parades and other public events, Lost Cause organizations (like all civic groups) drew membership from the middling sort, people who had the money and time to devote to community work, people who lived close enough to town to come to organizational meetings. While Lost Cause rhetoric glorified the prototypical common Confederate soldier, the illiterate farmer who served for years with honor in the Confederate infantry, such men did not often get invited to make speeches on Confederate Memorial Day and often lacked the money or the time to attend regional or national Confederate reunions. Those who did were more likely to share the class background of the event’s organizers.7 The Lost Cause movement has been studied primarily as a cultural phenomenon, a unifying ideology bringing together white southerners across Democratic factional lines and supplying them with a rhetoric that allowed them to make sense of defeat and national reconciliation while justifying the reestablishment of white supremacy. However, analysis of the use of Lost Cause rhetoric in  indicates that the movement had foreign-policy implications as well. After a full generation of indoctrination glorifying military prowess and masculine honor, many middle-class southerners were accustomed to think well of war and to condemn those less willing to fight as unmanly and dishonorable. They used highly gendered language to urge their congressmen to uphold honor and manhood. Public reaction to Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, a representative of that state’s Bourbon faction, best exemplifies the Lost Cause tradition at work in the politics of . Williams gained national attention after he answered the defiant speech of Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin against the war declaration. The senior senator from Mississippi rose to lambaste La Follette as a traitor. In his speech, he declared death in defense of honor better than life as a coward. He received letters of congratulations from around the South. From Batesville, Arkansas, a correspondent wrote that if America failed in this ‘‘trying hour’’ then ‘‘we are a craven and degenerate race.’’ From Memphis came the declaration ‘‘The Sons of the south know what is ‘Patriotism.’ ’’ A correspondent from Birmingham, Alabama, wrote, ‘‘I sincerely approve and thank you for your noble declaration of true Americanism and especially value the utterance as it comes from one of my own people, a Southerner.’’ The Birmingham writer hoped that the nation would walk in ‘‘True Manhood.’’ 8 Williams’s Mississippi correspondents favorably contrasted his stand with

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Which War, Whose Fight?

that of the state’s junior senator, James Vardaman, who had joined La Follette in opposing the United States’ entry into the war. In February, the principal of the Marshall County High School in Slayden wrote to Williams, ‘‘Let the ‘sissies’ and the rabble follow Bryan and Vardaman if they wish.’’ On April , a constituent from Grenada wrote, ‘‘We are heartily ashamed of our Junior Senator. . . . Practically every businessman in this town, who has ever supported him, is outspoken against him.’’ (Later in the month, Williams received a telegram from Yazoo City praising his support for the president and announcing the formation of the Yazoo City Home Guard; the unit had  members by early May and was drilling three times a week.) The president of the Mississippi Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy wrote to Williams, ‘‘The women of Dixie are behind you and will give you their loyal support in this crisis.’’ 9 Personally, Williams was a reluctant warrior. As late as March , , he wrote to a constituent, ‘‘I shall . . . use my influence to keep this country out of war, provided I can keep it out with honor.’’ Educated at Heidelberg, Williams spoke of his long-term affection for Germans on the floor of the Senate during the debate over the war declaration. Yet, like his correspondents, Williams saw the issue in April  as one of honor, regional as well as national. In response to congratulations on his speech, Williams wrote, ‘‘Nothing could make me more proud than to believe that the South is proud of me or anything I ever did,’’ and ‘‘I hope the South will show up better in this fight than any other part of the Union. . . .’’ Chagrined by his own age-related weakness, Williams wrote a friend that he would join ‘‘this row’’ if he were physically capable. Unlike many prominent southerners who combined public support for the war with backstage attempts to get their sons either exempted from service or safely ensconced in noncombat positions, Williams noted with pride that three of his sons had volunteered for service. The senator had encouraged the fourth to stay home and farm, but when that son was drafted in August , Williams wrote, ‘‘I suppose [he] will have to go.’’ 10 While Williams’s literate middle-class correspondents tended to share his regional pride, his rural constituents rarely wrote in ways indicating nostalgia for the Lost Cause. They did not worry publicly about manhood or honor. Neither did they seem to care about the imperative, felt by middle-class Democrats, to support the president. Their interests were otherwise, as a letter from Hickory Flat, Mississippi, on April  indicated: ‘‘You may go ahead and declare war in order to satisfy a very few but I hear the men behind the plow say they are not going for they have nothing in Wilson’s war. Just remember the war of the rebellion when what was called the fifteen negro law, was passed, how the men went to the woods they had nothing in it. We still have nothing

Which War, Whose Fight?  in men going on beligerent ships for the purpose of courting trouble. We love our nation but we don’t all endourse the administration by a tank full. . . .’’ 11 Although  citizens of Grenada, Mississippi, sent Williams a petition on February , , endorsing President Wilson’s decision to sever diplomatic relations with Germany, a letter from a Vardaman supporter, a farmer from Oxford, Mississippi, on March  indicated different views: ‘‘I write to let you know that you are mistaken when you think that the people of Mississippi are behind Wilson in his recent move. We are not, the common people are not, on every corner you hear it. . . . We know that you are not neutral, that Wilson is helping England. . . .’’ 12 Williams’s prowar, pro-Wilson stance was well known in Mississippi and probably limited the number of letters he got from antiwar constituents. On the other hand, antiwar southerners had reason to believe that Edwin Yates Webb, Claude Kitchin’s colleague from North Carolina, and John Burnett of Alabama shared their sentiments. In the early months of , southerners wrote to Webb, Kitchin, and Burnett urging them to oppose the United States’ entry into the Great War. Antiwar southerners blamed the rich for dragging the United States into the conflict. ‘‘Let John D. Rockefeller and the shiping Co. keep away from the war zone . . . ,’’ wrote one of Webb’s correspondents. Another wrote, ‘‘it is a very plaine case to me that those that gaines and profits by war will be the ones that have already greatly profited by the European war. And that same class are now doing all that they can to bring us in this terable war that they may continue piling up thire millions with the blood and lives of American people. Please let me ask what are we going to fight for. . . .’’ Percy L. Gardner of Lakeview, North Carolina, similarly blamed the war on the ‘‘munitionists’’ who wanted to ‘‘continue sending war supplies and death machines to the savage, fighting nations of Europe.’’ Gardner asked why more than a hundred million people should go to war because ‘‘an exceedingly few, probably less than one percent, are temporarily denied the right to travel on errands largely really unneutral in a certain, small circumscribed zone around the warring nations.’’ From Alabama, a Confederate veteran wrote to Burnett, ‘‘Had pleasure seekers and munitions merchants kept off the seas we would not have been in any way involved.’’ 13 Over and over again, southerners wrote their congressmen to say that they were willing to fight to defend the country from invasion but were unwilling to send an army overseas to defend economic interests they defined variously as those of New England, the munitions makers, the ‘‘money power,’’ and so on. Nor were they willing to fight for Britain (‘‘Has she not persistently and outrageously, from the start of this awful war, raped our neutral rights . . . ?’’ asked the Farmer’s Tribune of Anderson, South Carolina) or in a conflict between

 Which War, Whose Fight? the kings of Europe. From Spring Hope, North Carolina, a minister wrote that there was ‘‘very little sentiment for the war resolutions, hardly any in the country districts, the sentiments is much expressed the rich man’s war (munitions makers) the poor man’s fight, and they say let those fight who want to if there must be war.’’ 14 Sure that the country as a whole did not want war, antiwar southerners accused the national press of dishonest, slanted reporting. Siler City produce dealer W. S. Durham wrote to Kitchin to say that in conversations with hundreds of men, ‘‘I have not found one who was willing to volunteer to fight, not even a young man. If this matter was left to a vote of the citizens of each state in the union, not % of them would cast their vote for war.’’ Pastor G. W. Stanley of New London, North Carolina, wrote Representative Webb that the leading authorities seemed to be trying to convince the president that the people supported the war, but ‘‘I want to say that if the people was tried by straw vote that there would be very little war spirit manifested. . . .’’ Mrs. Lina May Pickler wrote Webb, ‘‘News papers are misrepresenting things. They talk like people are wanting to do their part in war, but you take a straw vote and see how many men will vote to go to war. I will say, but few.’’ Some antiwar writers hinted darkly that the nation’s press had been bought off by munitions makers or by the British.15 Antiwar writers understood that the Wilson administration’s course from  on had not been that of strict neutrality. As a salesman from Texas wrote Kitchin, the men he met in the course of his travels ‘‘will say: if the United States had been neutral. If they had not treated England as an ally—we would have no cause for war.’’ 16 In stark contrast to the use of Lost Cause rhetoric in support of the war, the Confederate veterans who wrote Kitchin favored peace. From Wadesboro, North Carolina, a Confederate veteran (an aged doctor) wrote, ‘‘I am not German, Scotch-Irish I am, and I can’t see any reason for making war against Germany.’’ And from Catawba County, another veteran wrote, ‘‘I know what it takes to face and charge a line of battle, or retreat, for I was in the Civil War. Enterd in  came out in  a cripple for life. . . .’’ He added, ‘‘I don’t want to see my sons and the sons of our country men to see such slaughter as I and those who fought the late war. . . .’’ Mrs. P. M. Mull of Catawba County wrote Webb in behalf of her husband, a former captain, ‘‘who knows all about the horrors of war’’ and hoped never to see the country engaged in bloody war again. On the other hand, not all antiwar Confederate veterans based their opposition to the United States’ entry into the Great War on bitter memories of combat. G. M. Simpson of Alabama opposed sending soldiers overseas and denied that conscription was necessary for national defense. If Germany invaded, he said,

Which War, Whose Fight?  ‘‘Raise the old Confederate flag and play Dixie, and we old Confederate veterans will make an army, and if you will let Germany come over here we will whip them before breakfast. . . .’’ 17 Some of Webb’s correspondents saw the possibility of war in racial terms: ‘‘I want to no what you all are goin to do with the niger if this country git in war . . . hit won’t do to take the white and leave the niger we all no that. . . .’’ This racial theme would become more pronounced in the debate over conscription but never dominated the discourse of antiwar southerners.18 It is hard to assess the economic status of letter writers, given the propensity of all Americans to portray themselves as ‘‘typical,’’ but nonetheless, it is possible to say something about the class locus of pro- and antiwar sentiment by looking at the very way in which the letters were written. Handwritten letters, in pencil or ink, with spelling or grammatical errors, were most often antiwar, as were all the letters surveyed in which writers identified themselves as workers or farmers. On the other hand, small-town merchants and traders with ties to the rural community often shared their neighbors’ political sentiments, which they expressed more eloquently in typed letters, often on business or personal stationery. Most notably, support for the United States’ entry into the war seemed to increase in direct proportion to the amount of education achieved by the writer. The poorly schooled scrawled out with great difficulty their prayer that war be averted. Conversely, university faculty and students often registered prowar views.19 Regardless of what their constituents wrote to them, all of the southern congressmen but Kitchin, Webb, Burnett, Edward B. Almon of Alabama, Fred H. Dominick of South Carolina, and Jeff McLemore of Texas voted for the declaration of war. In the Senate, the only southerner voting against war was James Vardaman of Mississippi. Speeches in Congress indicate that at this juncture the intraparty divisions among southern Democrats all but disappeared, with agrarians and ‘‘standpatters’’ equally convinced that the nation was under attack, that national honor required the vote, and most of all, that Woodrow Wilson deserved their support. ‘‘The President of the United States has said there must be war,’’ said Congressman J. Willard Ragsdale of South Carolina. Like Tom Heflin, southern congressmen made rousing patriotic speeches evoking the unity of the Blue and the Gray against this new enemy. But it would be a mistake to assume that the South, or the nation as a whole, uniformly supported the declaration of war. As Arthur Link notes, Claude Kitchin’s constituent correspondence files indicate ‘‘overwhelming sentiment’’ against the United States’ entry into the Great War. As Link points out, this correspondence does not mean that the country did not support the declaration of war in —but it indicates clearly that not all of the country did.20

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Which War, Whose Fight?

Southern Divisions over Conscription In his fiery exchange with Tom Heflin, Representative John Burnett of Alabama had raised an issue most prowar speakers preferred to skirt: the kind of war that the United States was about to fight. When Burnett warned that American men would be conscripted to fight in France, his was still a minority voice. Many congressmen and many members of the public seem to have assumed that the United States’ entry into the Great War would not require either enlarging the army or sending more than a token number of troops to Europe. Thus, Richard H. Dabney, a University of Virginia professor, wrote a collegial letter to Wilson during the debate over the country’s entry into the war urging him to carry the fight to the finish—with loans, monetary aid, and a symbolic detachment of five thousand U.S. regulars. Given that submarine attacks on American shipping provided Wilson’s ostensive reason for war, congressmen may have thought that the declaration of war was mostly about authorizing the navy to attack U-boats. This sort of thinking would explain the response of Senator Thomas S. Martin of Virginia when he was informed by the Wilson administration that it planned to conscript men for service in Europe. Martin was stunned: ‘‘Good Lord!’’ he said, ‘‘you’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?’’ 21 Burnett’s contention that the administration had already made the decision for conscription was correct. On February , the president instructed Secretary of War Newton Baker to make plans for a draft. Baker put Judge Advocate General Enoch Crowder to work on the project, and quiet orders went out to the Government Printing Office for forms. While the decision to send troops to France was not officially made until May, the Wilson administration opted for conscription before the declaration of war.22 Historians have credited the federal government’s decision for conscription in  to various factors, among them the necessity of protecting industrial labor, the belief that conscription was scientific and efficient (always Progressive Era watchwords), and the example of the British, whose industrial capacity had been damaged when skilled workers volunteered in . The decision to conscript American men for service in the Great War also reflected the preparedness movement’s demands for ‘‘universal military service.’’ Discussing conscription during the preparedness crusade in , Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend that he favored ‘‘universal service, which of course means compulsory service,’’ because without it the married man with children would volunteer while his ‘‘idle brother’’ stayed home. Roosevelt wrote, ‘‘I wish to send the idle brother to the front and make the other man either go to the front or work in the munition factory, as the country deems best.’’ Years of

Which War, Whose Fight?  propaganda for universal military training accustomed the public, or at least the part of it which read newspapers, to the concept that all men owed their country military service. Wilson himself justified conscription as a method for sorting men all willing to join the army, stating that it was ‘‘selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.’’ 23 In fact, the men of the nation had not ‘‘volunteered in mass,’’ nor did they show any signs of doing so, as Senator John Sharp Williams, a conscription supporter, explained on April  in a letter to a constituent who wanted the country to try a volunteer army first: ‘‘A great many people seem to forget that for  days we have been trying the volunteer system; the country has been inviting volunteers; and only thirty five hundred out of one hundred million have enlisted, so that to those who would try the volunteer system first, my reply is, it has been tried.’’ Williams contrasted this war with the Civil War: ‘‘We cannot expect young men to be rushing to the colors in a war like this as they did in a war like that between the States. . . . We are mainly fighting a fight between democracy and autocracy and despotism now,—a very sacred fight, but it is for an abstract principle.’’ 24 To a prodraft constituent, Williams was even more outspoken, to the point of (characteristic) bluntness. Volunteers would be inadequate, undemocratic, and uneugenic: ‘‘It merely calls for the best blood and the bravest spirits to go to the front and be killed or crippled and leave the skulkers and the other cowards at home to begat the next race, which necessarily from that fact, would be of an inferior mold.’’ 25 Although the stated governmental rationales for conscription all contain an element of truth, Williams explained well the primary reason for the United States’ resort to it in : Without it, the nation would not be able to raise sufficient troops to pursue the war. To paraphrase a slogan from a later period, in  the U.S. government announced a war, and American men declined the invitation. Enlistments came in slowly in April and May . This was especially true in the southern states, often thought to be the home of the nation’s most ardent patriots and volunteers. On April , the Atlanta Constitution reported that Georgia led the South in recruiting, with , enlistments in the first twenty-four days of April. The enlistments in the other southern states were as follows: Florida, ; Texas, ,; Louisiana, ; Tennessee, ; Alabama, ; Mississippi, ; Virginia, ; Arkansas, ; North Carolina, ; and South Carolina, . It fell to an Ohio Republican congressman to state the problem clearly during the April–May  debates over the draft: ‘‘I do not believe you can raise half a million men as volunteers in this country to be sent abroad. This is no baby war.’’ 26 On April , , Secretary of War Baker presented to Congress a bill au-

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Which War, Whose Fight?

thorizing the expansion and nationalization of the National Guard, the expansion of the regular army, and the authority to draft up to . million men, to serve for the duration. The bill went to the House Military Affairs Committee, which was dominated by southern and midwestern agrarian politicians.27 At this juncture, the Democratic leadership of the Military Affairs Committee tried to finesse Wilson’s request for conscription as they had his request for a Continental Army in , by substituting their bill for Wilson’s. On April , the committee reported in favor of a proposal made by Chairman S. Hubert Dent, a Democrat from Alabama. Under Dent’s plan, the army and the National Guard would be increased, as requested by the president, but the government would be required to call for volunteers before instituting conscription. If the volunteer system failed, then the president could institute conscription.28 Although Dent seems to have been sincerely opposed to conscription, other members of the committee probably supported his bill because of constituent pressure. They needed to be on record as having opposed the draft, even if they personally believed conscription both necessary and inevitable. Under Dent’s plan, Wilson alone would decide when to begin conscripting men— and Wilson alone would take the blame if the draft proved unpopular. It is also possible that the Military Affairs Committee envisioned creating a two-tiered army, one of volunteers for overseas service, and one conscripted for defense. At any rate, the Dent bill proved to be an ineffective and misguided attempt at compromise, as a representative pointed out to Congressman James W. Wise of Georgia, a member of the committee, during debate: ‘‘Why did you not bring in a straight volunteer proposition instead of this mongrel?’’ By reporting a bill that allowed conscription, antidraft congressmen undercut their own stated convictions that the draft was an undemocratic violation of American traditions.29 Those traditions had deep roots, reaching across the Atlantic to Great Britain and linking American anticonscription thought to the Commonwealth nations of Canada and Australia. The British fought the first sixteen months of the Great War with an all-volunteer army; the first conscription bill was introduced in January . In the spring of , when the American Congress debated conscription, the Canadians had not yet resorted to a draft. When the Canadian government did finally institute conscription later in , the draft proved very unpopular and ineffective. Nationwide, over  percent of the eligible men requested exemptions. The Quebecois, understanding that the legislation had been drafted to force them into the Crown’s service, refused cooperation. Attempts to enforce the law in Quebec resulted in riots. By November , Canada had managed to send only twenty-four thousand conscripted

Which War, Whose Fight?  men to France. The Australians, given the opportunity to vote on conscripting soldiers for the Great War, voted it down twice, in bitterly contested elections that shattered Labor Party unity and set the stage for Australian politics for much of the twentieth century. Australia finished the war with an all-volunteer army, the only combatant nation to do so. Southern anticonscriptionists in Congress repeatedly referenced the Canadian and Australian refusal to institute conscription as evidence that the draft was neither necessary nor right: ‘‘Are we less democratic than Canada and Australia? Are we more willing to surrender or liberties and submit to an odious system of forced military service than they?’’ 30 On April , the Daily Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, reported that President Wilson was said to be embarrassed by the attitude of southern congressmen toward the army bill. Among Democrats in the House from Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, all but three (one from Tennessee and two from Mississippi) opposed conscription. Hitherto his most loyal supporters, the paper noted, southern Democratic congressmen would fight Wilson’s plan while the Republicans supported it: ‘‘Most of the Southern Democratic Congressmen are opposed to the selective draft because, they say, the farmers back home will not stand for their boys, some of them not yet out of their teens, being jerked up and carried off to the army.’’ Unable to get the Democrats on the Military Affairs Committee to report the bill he wanted, Wilson had to call upon the Republicans on the committee for support. Representative Julius Kahn of California, a German immigrant, presented amendments to the Dent bill that embodied the Wilson administration’s army plan. Therefore, in the House, a vote for the Dent bill was anticonscription, while a vote for the Kahn amendments was proconscription. Meanwhile, the Senate Military Affairs Committee had voted for the president’s bill. There, agrarians led by Senator Kenneth McKellar proposed a measure similar to the Dent bill. In both houses, the ensuing debates pitted agrarian congressmen from the South and Midwest against the coasts, with support for the president’s plan especially strong in New England among Republicans and Wilson loyalists.31 As debates over conscription began in both houses, the preparedness lobbies swung into action. They sent telegrams to congressmen’s home districts urging members of the local elites to support conscription as the fairest, most efficient method of raising an army and the one favored by the president and the army, to whose expertise they urged the public to defer. Although the administration’s proposal called for selective military service based on universal liability, not universal service, the mail and telegrams that piled up in Capitol Hill offices generally called for universal military service. Army prepared-

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ness advocates who had believed that conscription could only come through a national commitment to universal service were thus vindicated: By , the portion of the public committed to preparedness confused the draft with universal service.32 Scores of people wrote Kitchin, Webb, and Williams about conscription. Anticonscription people, like antipreparedness and antiwar people, often used class-based arguments, while proconscription voices tended to evoke the preparedness movement’s support for universal military service and demanded loyalty to President Wilson. Florence Moran, a self-described poor woman from Badin, North Carolina, urged Kitchin to fight conscription: ‘‘the plan for the rich man to furnish his money, and the poor man his sons, is more than we feel like we can bear.’’ H. Q. Alexander, president of the North Carolina Farmers Union, sent the entire state congressional delegation a blistering letter warning against proposals to set prices on agricultural products and denouncing conscription: ‘‘If this war was to protect the free institutions of America, our homes, women and children, selective conscription might be justified; but in that case there would be no need of conscription. . . . our President gives away the case in demanding conscription and declaring that he will accept no compromise. He knows that the casus belli does not appeal to the masses of the people, and so he would compel them to make a useless and unjust sacrifice for the benefit of others.’’ J. B. Ivey of Charlotte wrote Webb, ‘‘While all of us are in favor of War for defense, I can see no occasion for sending our best young men to be shot up by the Germans.’’ And W. T. Buchanan wrote, ‘‘Furnishing money, ammunition, and food to the European countries . . . should be enough sacrifice to a foreign country.’’ Many letters reflected a belief that conscription for national defense was acceptable but that sending a conscript army overseas was not. Others worried about the safety of their wives and children if white men were drafted but black men were not. As early as April , Webb received a letter from W. M. Black, a Presbyterian home missionary, describing local sentiment as approaching desperation: I have been in many parts of our State and in South Carolina and Virginia recently and I tell you the people are . Many mothers are desperate, and the thought of an unjustifiable, useless war to be backed up by  of our boys into a fight of which they do not approve, and the expenditures of sums, such as the world has never heard of, for War, of the ’s money, has spread like a Pall all over our country and I tell you almost every home is sad and in one or more cases I have heard of some of their inmates losing their minds.33

Which War, Whose Fight?  On the other hand, both Representative Webb and Senator Williams received mail in favor of the draft. Mass meetings at Raleigh and Rocky Point produced resolutions in favor (respectively) of universal military service (but in state units) and selective conscription, a sentiment echoed in a letter from Thomas Dixon, author of Birth of a Nation. Williams received letters from old men wanting to get into the war, including a petition from twenty Gulfport men asking that the conscription age be raised to sixty, which would make them also eligible. Throughout the South, urban elites organized meetings and demonstrations in support of the president, the war, and the draft.34

Congressmen Debate the Draft In House and Senate debates, proconscription southerners also followed the line of argumentation laid out by the preparedness lobbies for the past two years. They argued that the draft would be more efficient, raising an army faster than the volunteer process. They said the draft was fairer than the volunteer system and would make sure that slackers contributed their share to the war effort. Proconscriptionists drew support from history, citing George Washington’s dissatisfaction with militia troops and pointing to the use of conscripts by both sides during the Civil War. They assumed the universal male obligation to military service at time of war. Most of all, they called upon their fellow southern Democrats to rally behind President Wilson. Anything less they labeled unpatriotic at best, pro-German at worst. The proconscription speech of Congressman William B. Bankhead of Alabama on April  took the rhetorical high road. Acknowledging that his first inclination had been loyalty to the volunteer system, Bankhead explained that reflection had led him to a more nationalistic position: ‘‘Universal obligations of service and burden are inextricably interwoven in all our political and civic relations to the State.’’ But Bankhead based his ultimate decision on loyalty to Wilson, and he believed his constituents would do the same: ‘‘the great and overwhelming majority of the people of Alabama will say that we elected that man as Chief Executive, that we believe in him and stand behind the reasonable and logical policies of our Commander in Chief, the leader of our party, the Chief Executive of the Nation, Woodrow Wilson, and I am willing to share his judgment and to follow his leadership.’’ 35 By contrast, Tom Heflin made a fighting speech, condemning Germany and warning against German spies: ‘‘the sooner the Secret Service force makes public the list of their names and the sooner the Government shoots to death some of these criminals and murderers the better it will be for this country.’’

 Which War, Whose Fight? Like other proconscription speakers, Heflin drew lessons from history, arguing that conscription as proposed had little in common with the old-style Confederate draft so unpopular in the South, which he admitted had been unfair. He believed that the new method would be fairer to young men and to their parents, who were not willing ‘‘for their boys, simply because they have the courage and the disposition to volunteer and fight, to do so, while others who owe the same kind of service are permitted to shirk their duty.’’ Heflin argued that under a volunteer system the South would contribute more than its share of troops, and he raised the specter of the ‘‘negro problem,’’ suggesting that unless black men went into the army proportionately to white men, whites would refuse to volunteer for fear that their communities would be menaced by ‘‘negro boys’’ who would become the ‘‘tools of German spies and agents. . . .’’ However, like Bankhead and like proconscriptionists from around the nation, Heflin at this point emphasized nationalism, arguing that a man of fighting age ‘‘belongs to the standing Army of the United States and when Congress declares that the country is at war, no able-bodied man of the fighting age has the right to remain at home in his comfort and ease simply because he does not want to fight.’’ 36 In the House, Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri delivered a famous speech against conscription during which he said that, in the minds of his constituents, a conscript was no better than a convict. After the national press pummeled him for this defamation of draftees, Clark and his House colleagues tried to make it clear that he had been speaking facetiously. Yet many lesserknown southern Democrats made statements against conscription much more outspoken than Clark’s. Their speeches were more individualistic than those of prodraft congressmen, perhaps because they lacked a coherent body of propaganda from which to draw arguments, or perhaps because their reasons for opposing conscription varied so widely.37 The simplest argument against voting for conscription, and the one that explains best why so many southern congressmen opposed the draft, was given in the House by Thetus W. Sims of Tennessee. In , Sims said, his Republican opponent had accused him of selling out ‘‘the masses’’ and favoring measures that would allow ‘‘this extreme militaristic influence to clutch the American people by the throat.’’ Sims had promised his constituents that he would never vote for conscription and had won the election by the barest of margins. Challenged to follow his own judgment rather than that of his constituents, Sims retorted that he had made a pledge, and he would keep it. The congressman from Tennessee reminded his colleague that wars required ballots as well as bullets: ‘‘When you go out . . . and seek re-election after you have reversed the entire American policy, the policy of free choice and free system for the

Which War, Whose Fight?  European continental compulsory service system, how many do you think will get back here?’’ 38 Some southern congressmen saw the draft as class legislation designed to protect the American upper class’s wealth, manufacturing interests, and sons. Representative James W. Wise of Georgia acknowledged that the publicity campaign for the draft was working but insisted that the public had never seen the bill before the House and would not vote for it if they had. If the bill passed, Wise asked, who would be drafted? Not the slacker, who would evade service even at the cost of prison, nor the rich, who would be able to get medical deferments: ‘‘It will be the poor, unfortunate devil that cannot hurt the politician after he is sent. We need not fool ourselves about who will do the fighting and dying in this war. It will be the same old story. The helpless will be compelled to go. . . .’’ 39 Representative Jeff McLemore of Texas noted that support for the draft seemed to be highest among the nation’s elites, saying that he received proconscription propaganda from organizations headquartered in New York, such as ‘‘the American Defense Society, the National Security League, and other similar organizations . . . said to be financed by munitions manufacturers and certain other selfish interests that make money out of war. . . .’’ McLemore described the methods used by the preparedness propagandists, who sent form telegrams to influential men, often bankers, urging them to organize mass meetings in support of universal military service and to send letters and telegrams to him. He commented caustically that if he ever decided to take his orders from New York, he would do so directly and save his constituents the expense of forwarding the instructions to him. More seriously, McLemore stated that he had received many letters and telegrams for and against conscription. Those from the cities ‘‘have come principally from boards of trade and chambers of commerce and other commercial bodies, and were in favor of conscription; those from the country have come chiefly from farmers, and were against conscription.’’ 40 No congressman was more outspoken in denouncing the class bias of the draft than Representative George Huddleston of Birmingham, representing the Ninth District of Alabama.41 Huddleston described the preparedness leaders as ‘‘the old guard of munitions makers, war contractors, captains of industry, Wall Street speculators, metropolitan financiers, reactionary and corrupt newspapers and all their crowd of underlings and liberty-hating parasites, snobs and flatterers.’’ Later in his speech, the congressman read the names of the Union League Club members supporting conscription, including Chauncey Depew, Elihu Root, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, and denounced them as monopolists identified with all that was oppressive and unjust in Ameri-

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can business. Such men, Huddleston said, exploited ‘‘the people, not only of America, but of a large part of the world; they control public opinion through their newspapers. . . . They are the natural enemies of democracy. . . .’’ Moreover, conscriptionists wanted ‘‘big armies for home use,’’ Huddleston said: ‘‘They say, ‘We have too much discontent, too many Socialists, too many I.W.W.’s, too many strikes, too much industrial disorder, too much freedom of speech, too many ranting demagogues and labor agitators.’ They would suppress all this with the iron hand of the military.’’ Huddleston charged that proconscriptionists wanted to use military service as a means of indoctrinating American youth in antidemocratic principles so that ‘‘the New World might be made over to resemble the Old, with its castes of prestige and privilege.’’ Identifying conscription as ‘‘State slavery,’’ Huddleston described the draft as a system that forced men into an autocratic system ‘‘in which the rewards go to place and not to capacity, in which servile obedience is the highest virtue and independence and individuality the most serious vice.’’ Out of this system, Huddleston said, would come humble, docile, and unimaginative men, ‘‘but never virile, aggressive and reasoning citizens.’’ In his conclusion, Huddleston, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, said, ‘‘I would be willing to shed my blood defending my country against a foreign invader. I am no less willing to defend American liberties with my life if need be when they are assailed by internal foes.’’ 42 Although Huddleston had been raised on a farm and drew most of his popularity from the rural and mining districts around Birmingham proper, he was sui generis in his politics and can hardly be considered a representative of southern agrarianism.43 Some of the strongest southern voices against the draft in the Senate, however, come closer to fitting that mold: Senators William Kirby of Arkansas, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, and Thomas Hardwick of Georgia. Kirby, son of a Confederate soldier, was one of many southern anticonscriptionists who justified his opposition to the draft in  with references to the Confederate experience. He pulled out all the rhetorical stops to glorify volunteers and denigrate conscripts: ‘‘there is a deep-rooted conviction in the minds of [Civil War veterans] . . . that a conscript was a coward, a skulker, a slacker, and would not fight.’’ Not all anticonscriptionists, however, attributed bad motives to draft resisters. After Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee described the failure of conscription in the South during the Civil War, Senator George Chamberlain of Oregon asked if the debacle had not been the fault of state officials. No, said McKellar, ‘‘It was due to the fact that in all instances where men have been free they have objected to be treated as slaves. . . . It is due to the

Which War, Whose Fight?  fact that conscription has always been considered in this country as the most despicable form of military despotism.’’ 44 Thomas Hardwick, senator from Georgia, had supported the declaration of war, believing it necessary to avenge the United States’ honor, but after that he deviated considerably from the Wilson party line. He attacked conscription and later opposed the Sedition Act. Moreover, in a speech before the Senate on April , , Hardwick did something few other Democrats dared: He suggested that Wilson’s rhetoric about fighting for democracy was so much bunk. To the statement of Senator J. Stone that ‘‘the President says, and it has been generally said, that we have gone into this war in the interest of democracy and humanity and liberty,’’ Hardwick replied, ‘‘I do not concede that to be true. That is a pretty bald way to state it, but I do not believe that, and I did not support the declaration of war on that basis. I voted for it simply and solely because American citizens were being murdered on the high seas. . . .’’ Questioning the necessity of an alliance with England and France, Hardwick suggested that the United States should support the Allies with money, with the U.S. Navy, and with a symbolic detachment of army regulars, but he refused to accept the contention that the United States had any obligation to stay in the war until the British and French achieved their war aims. (How much American blood, he asked, had to be shed to exact reparation from Germany for the sinking of three or four ships?) Moreover, Hardwick refused to follow the president’s lead on conscription: ‘‘my own judgment is that the President of the United States does not know a great deal personally about this matter. My own judgment is that he is not better informed on this subject than the average Member of either House of Congress, although it may be considered almost treason to suggest it.’’ A strong advocate of the volunteer military, Hardwick considered conscription ‘‘fundamentally subversive of American principles . . . ,’’ and added, ‘‘They say conscription is democratic. God forgive them for the profanation of the word.’’ 45 Hardwick raised an issue also named by other anticonscription advocates: the desire of American men to go to war beside their kin and neighbors rather than in regular army units. Representative Thomas U. Sisson of Mississippi blamed the low enlistment rate on public aversion to the regular army: ‘‘Our boys do not want to get into the Standing Army. When they enlist in the Standing Army no assurance can be given them as to what company they will belong to or who their captain will be, what regiment they will serve in or where they will be sent. . . .’’ George Huddleston spoke in defense of the National Guard and against the ‘‘caste spirit’’ of the regular army: ‘‘The average Army officer lives in a rigid groove of caste prejudice and professional practices. The



Which War, Whose Fight?

Volunteer officer tends to disrupt this system.’’ Most of all, Huddleston said, the regular army officers wanted to keep the National Guard out of the army. Rather than National Guard officers, the regulars preferred ‘‘unformed boys of the upper classes, who may be easily shaped into the Army caste. . . .’’ To further efficiency, Huddleston said, the army proposed to do away with local and state regiments: ‘‘There will be no Alabama troops, no Ohio troops, merely troops of the United States—conscripts all.’’ Huddleston doubted that such an army could ever have the morale or fighting qualities of troops ‘‘organized under the old system, where friend stood along with friend and brother by brother’s side.’’ Representative Samuel J. Nicholls of South Carolina agreed: ‘‘When a man goes out to fight for his country he would rather fight side by side with a neighbor. . . .’’ Nicholls was one of the few anticonscriptionists to raise the race issue, noting that placing a white boy from South Carolina in a Massachusetts Negro regiment would ignite war here at home—not, he hastened to say, that he thought the government had any such plans.46 Statements such as Nicholls’s have been quoted at times to indicate that southern anticonscriptionists were primarily motivated by racism. In fact, the issue was more complex. Both sides used racist arguments. Senator James Vardaman, the professional political racist from Mississippi, did interject racism into his opposition to the draft, arguing that drafting black men, arming them, and giving them military training would endanger white supremacy in the South. However, as noted above, proconscriptionists also used racism to justify their support for the draft, insisting that without conscription blacks would not volunteer for service, and whites would be afraid to if it meant leaving their wives and daughters unprotected. As in so many political issues in the early twentieth-century United States, racism figured not only as a political given but as an arguing point for both sides, each of which justified its position as a means of bolstering white supremacy.47 While racial issues did not dominate southern congressmen’s public statements on the draft, race and white control over racially based systems of labor seem to have figured behind the scene during the debate over conscription in both houses. Some southern politicians wanted blacks exempted from service entirely, on both political and economic grounds. They feared that black men would come home from the war unwilling to accept the regional racial status quo, and they wanted to keep black tenants on the plantations growing cotton. Others, like Heflin, wanted blacks drafted along with whites to preserve white supremacy in southern communities. Needing southern votes for conscription, the Wilson administration seems to have told some southern congressmen that blacks would not be drafted at all, while others got the message

Which War, Whose Fight?  that blacks and whites would be drafted in proportion to their percentage of the population. The racial issue as refracted through the draft became more inflammatory as the war proceeded and became a factor in the increase of lynching and other race-related crimes in  and . Nonetheless, it is a mistake to attribute all, or even most, of southern opposition to the draft in  to fear of black soldiers. Indeed, one of the clearest statements of racial anxiety concerning the draft was made by that supporter of conscription, Tom Heflin.48 While some southern congressmen worried about protecting plantation labor, many others were more concerned about protecting their constituents, the ordinary white ‘‘dirt farmers’’ of the South. In the House debates on April , Representative James F. Byrnes of South Carolina inquired, ‘‘Tell me who is going to be exempted. There is but one class of people whom they say will be drafted, and that is the poolroom sharks. . . . Are you going to defeat Germany with an army of pool-room sharks?’’ Presciently, Byrnes warned that wealthy people, who could frame affidavits, would obtain occupational exemptions while the poor ‘‘will have their sons conscripted.’’ Byrnes continued, ‘‘In order to secure support for conscription, efforts have been made to lead the farmers of the South to believe the bill would exempt them from service. There is not one word in the bill exempting farmers from service.’’ However, behind the scenes, Wilson, Secretary of War Baker, and other members of the administration assured the agrarian politicians that essential farm labor would be exempted from the draft, and they passed these assurances on to their constituents. As events transpired, Byrnes and other skeptical congressmen were right, and the congressmen who told their farmer constituents not to worry were deceived.49 When the House Military Affairs Committee reported the Dent bill to the floor of the House, members of that committee thought they could carry their position, as they had in , and require the president to try raising a volunteer army before instituting conscription. This time, however, they faced orchestrated opposition from their own prodraft constituents. Pressured by letters from chambers of commerce, commercial organizations, and members of their hometown elites, members of the House and Senate who had opposed conscription began to rethink their position. The Wilson administration’s assurances that farmers would not be drafted surely made reconsideration easier. But ultimately, many southern congressmen came around to vote for conscription because Woodrow Wilson pressured them to do so. Wilson had been willing to compromise on the  National Defense Act; he was unwilling to compromise on the draft. His stand proved determinant. As an antidraft Republican noted, ‘‘No one can appreciate the enormous influence the President

 Which War, Whose Fight? has had in Congress, unless he can actually see it working . . . what he wants he gets.’’ In early April, the House anticonscriptionists had been confident that they would win; three weeks later, they lost.50 When the Dent bill came up for a vote on April , it failed. The House then voted on the Kahn amendments (that is, Wilson’s bill), and they passed,  to . Southern representatives voted for the Kahn amendments  to . This vote left the southern agrarian opposition with limited options. They could support the president and vote for his bill or cast a symbolic and useless vote against raising an army at all. For antidraft congressmen whose votes had represented their constituents’ convictions, rather than their own, this probably presented no great dilemma. Having made a public fight against conscription, they could then switch over to support Wilson, as their prodraft constituents demanded. Those who genuinely opposed the draft, like Claude Kitchin, could take Kitchin’s antiwar speech as their model and, having lost their in-family quarrel, reunite to support the president. Wilson’s bill passed  to , with only six southern members of the House (Burnett of Alabama, Clark of Florida, Dominick of South Carolina, Huddleston of Alabama, Sears of Florida, and Sisson of Mississippi) voting against it.51 In the Senate, where the Military Affairs Committee had reported out the president’s requested bill, antidraft forces supported the amendment of Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, which required that a volunteer army be tried first. The McKellar amendment went down to defeat,  to . Most of the southern senators voted with the majority, with Hardwick, Kirby, Vardaman, Park Trammell of Florida, and McKellar himself voting for a volunteer army. The draft bill then passed,  to , with senators, like their colleagues in the House, rallying to present a picture of unity in the final votes.52 In a last gesture, members in both houses tried to offer amendments stating that conscripted armies would not be sent overseas; all such attempts failed.53 Ultimately, Woodrow Wilson got what he wanted from southern Democrats in Congress; but not without weeks and months of debate, political wrangling, consultation, and compromise. Moreover, southern Democrats’ speeches were more pro-Wilson than their votes. Congressman W. W. Larsen of Georgia, who said that the sons of the Confederacy would follow the flag with the same fervor their ancestors devoted to following Gordon, Jackson, and Lee, opposed the draft, as did most of the Georgia delegation. Nor were southern Democrats necessarily consistent in their stands for or against what Wilson wanted. Representatives Webb and Almon voted against the war but for the draft; Senator Hardwick voted for the war but against the draft; Senator McKellar, usually a pro-Wilson stalwart, nonetheless attempted to amend Wilson’s army bill to require that the president try volunteers before institut-

Which War, Whose Fight?  ing conscription—but wrote to a friend stating privately his belief in conscription in time of war. Clearly, in assessing the southern congressional delegations’ stance toward war and conscription, it would be a good idea to pay more attention to what they did than to what they said.54 One-third of the southern delegations voted for the Dent bill and against the Kahn amendments. Among those men were House leaders like Kitchin (chair, Ways and Means), Dent (chair, Military Affairs), Lemuel Padgett (chair, Naval Affairs), and Thetus Sims (chair, Interstate Commerce), plus some leaders of the future: Joseph Byrns of Tennessee, later Speaker of the House; James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, later senator, Supreme Court justice, and Harry Truman’s secretary of state; and Cordell Hull of Tennessee, later secretary of state, ‘‘father of the United Nations,’’ and Nobel Peace Prize–winner. Some of them, like Kitchin, surely voted out of conviction, whereas others probably voted as they did because of constituent pressure. Nonetheless, they fought conscription as long as they could and only voted for Wilson’s plan when it became clear that they had lost.55 These men were not pacifists. Most had voted for the declaration of war. Most had supported Wilson’s dispatch of troops to Mexico in . (John Burnett had backed up his words with his fists, punching a man on a Washington train for criticizing Wilson’s policy.) Kitchin and the others had supported ‘‘armed neutrality,’’ President Wilson’s proposal to arm American merchant ships. Nor were men like Kitchin, Byrnes, and Hull isolationists. Free traders in principle, after the war they supported the League of Nations. Nor were the southern agrarians rebels against Wilson himself. They were ‘‘his crowd,’’ among his strongest supporters in the party and in Congress. However, they also represented voters who did not want to send their sons to war—at least, not this war, for this cause.56 The southern congressmen who voted for conscription in  did so without understanding the details of the process, which had not, in fact, been completely formulated at the time of congressional approval. In effect, they gave the Wilson administration a blank check and trusted in the promises they had received. Those who opposed conscription did so in large part because of constituent pressure. The decision having been made, most of them emulated Claude Kitchin, who put in long hours in loyal service to the Wilson administration during the war. For most congressmen, the struggle over conscription ended with the vote. For rural southerners, the fight had just begun. In May, a North Carolinian wrote to Edwin Yates Webb, ‘‘you have no idea how our people are rought [wrought] up over it[,] it looks to me like it is going to bring on sivel war there is hundreds of men that will go to the woods then robing and [stealing] will

 Which War, Whose Fight? commence. . . .’’ In June, a rural constituent informed Webb, ‘‘It is inconseivable to think that the people are agoin to fight in foreign contry for and idile [ideal] or principel that their own government falls far short of given them.’’ In the summer of , such sentiments as these fueled widespread political protests against conscription.57   and , Americans conducted a great national debate over military structure and foreign policy, understanding all the while that the two were intrinsically related. People like Theodore Roosevelt supported a big navy and universal military service for all American men precisely because they wanted the nation to get on with what he called its work in the world. That is, the military expansionists wanted an expansionist foreign policy. Conversely, members of the American left, from socialists to agrarian Democrats to progressive Republicans, opposed preparedness because they opposed militarism both abroad and at home. Although southern politicians could be found on both sides of this debate, their contribution to it drew heavily, and self-consciously, from the South’s peculiar heritage of military glory and abject defeat. What one thought about Mr. Wilson’s war tended to reflect memories, whether personal or familial, about the South’s own great war in the s. But there was another kind of memory at work in , the socially constructed memory of the Civil War as enshrined in the Lost Cause cult. This proved to be potent indeed, a narrative of manhood and honor upon which supporters of the United States’ entry into World War I (or, one would think, of any war at any time) could draw at will. Highly gendered, with constant references to manhood, Lost Cause rhetoric conspicuously ignored class issues.58 To the rhetoric of manhood, the Lost Cause, and what grandfather did in the war, southern opponents of preparedness and war opposed a discourse of class. Southern antiwar rhetoric asked what men, specifically, would be required to prove their manhood in the trenches of France, and whose pockets would they enrich by doing so? In , this kind of talk was old-fashioned, grounded as it was in populist concepts of the dangers of concentrated economic power, but it evidently appealed to many white rural southerners just the same. Upper- and middle-class white southerners most often employed the rhetoric of heritage, manhood, and honor, while poor whites talked economics. And although race operated as an undercurrent in this (as in all) American controversy, it rarely surfaced as a debating point between white southerners when the issues were preparedness and war. Race became more salient in the summer of  when the provost marshal general implemented the Selective Draft Act in the rural South.

CHAPTER THREE

Fathers, Farmers, and Christians

I

n April , when the United States declared war on Germany, the nation’s ground forces consisted of , men in the U.S. Army, , in the National Guard, and , in the U.S. Marines. By the late summer of , the United States had raised an army of . million men (. million of them conscripts) and transported over a million of them to the Western Front. Conscription made this possible. The United States could not have so quickly mobilized a mass army composed exclusively of volunteers, because they were not rushing to the colors in the spring of . Without a draft, the American Expeditionary Force would have been a much smaller, much different army. In the end, conscripts composed over  percent of the wartime army.1 The United States’ First World War conscription plan has been lauded as a near miracle of mobilization, evidence of what military historian John Keegan refers to as ‘‘America’s extraordinary capacity for industrial production and human organization.’’ Educated by the failures of both Union and Confederate conscription during the Civil War and steeped in years of debate over preparedness, Provost Marshal General Enoch Crowder and his staff constructed a system that was both national in scope and decentralized in operation, embodying progressive ideals of efficiency and democracy. Crowder felt justifiable pride in the operation of the World War I draft, which indisputably did what it was designed to do: put an army in the field in France in time to influence the outcome of the Great War. At the end of the war, the provost marshal general () boasted that the draft had been accomplished ‘‘without friction and without the slightest manifestation of antagonism on the part of any disturbing elements. . . .’’ 2 In fact, like many another famous victory, the success of the World War I draft was a near-run thing. Crowder’s own statistics, as parsed by John Whiteclay Chambers, show that in – the ‘‘Selective Service registered . mil



Fathers, Farmers, and Christians

lion men, eighteen to forty-five, and drafted . million of them,’’ but ‘‘between  and  million men never registered, and , (% of those drafted) failed to report when called or deserted after arrival at training camp.’’ During –, more men evaded military service than during the Vietnam era, often held to be the height (or nadir, depending on one’s politics) of draft dodging.3 Local draft boards, serving as the frontline troops in the battle of conscription, bore the brunt of public opposition to conscription and took the blame for its inequities. As a Virginia draft board member wrote, ‘‘No man after serving on a Local Board can ever have any political aspirations in the future, for he could never be elected to any office, and of all men, they are and will ever be the most unpopular.’’ Draft board members served (as Crowder said) as ‘‘buffers’’ between the citizenry and the federal government. Crowder noted that resentment against the draft thus ‘‘grounding at , local points dissipated its force, and enabled the central war machine to function smoothly without the disturbance that might have been caused by the concentrated total of dissatisfaction.’’ This he found of ‘‘enormous’’ value.4 In , the federal government formulated draft policy but left interpretation and application up to local draft boards. Every student of policy history knows that the devil is always in the details, an adage that evokes the law of unforeseen consequences and of the road paved with good intentions. Placed in the role of mediators between the needs of the state and the desires of individuals, most of the men on rural southern draft boards did the best they could and served their country as ‘‘buffers’’ and ‘‘grounds’’ without release for months on end. But some used their power to further their own political ends, while others administered the draft with prejudice against blacks and poor whites. Either way, draft boards’ actions often puzzled, confused, and infuriated their neighbors and led to high rates of draft evasion, desertion, and ultimately, armed resistance to the draft. Understanding why requires detailed analysis of the mechanisms, the policy guidelines, and the implementation of the draft on the local level in the rural South.

Mechanisms John Whiteclay Chambers’s study To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America describes the theory and practice of the World War I draft. Contrary to prodraft congressmen’s rhetoric during the congressional debates over conscription, universal military service was the last thing that the Wilson administration wanted in . Understanding that the nation’s industrial power was at least as important to an Allied victory as any army the United States might sent to Europe, the Wilson administration created a system of selective

Fathers, Farmers, and Christians



service, designed to shelter personnel in key economic sectors. To administer this system, Wilson chose Judge Advocate General Enoch Crowder, an experienced ‘‘military bureaucrat’’ who was (according to Chambers) more savvy about what civilians would and would not put up with than the average military man. Appointed provost marshal general in May, just after the passage of the Selective Service Act, Crowder filled in the blank check given him by Congress.5 Crowder’s agenda was as follows: () register the nation’s eligible men, () select the draftees, and () get them to camp by September. To do so, he created a system that combined local, state, and federal authority in ways that allowed the army to control the draft from behind the scenes, while civilians did the work of selection and took the criticism. The first step was registration. Although later calls would draft men as young as eighteen and as old as forty-five, the first registration of June , , enrolled men from twenty-one to thirty years of age. Crowder decided to use the county as his basic organization unit. For the first registration, Secretary of War Newton Baker urged state governors to appoint a board of three men: the county sheriff, the county court clerk, and the county medical officer. These registration boards supervised teams of volunteers who took down names and filled out cards at voting precincts.6 Registration went marvelously well in the rural South as it did throughout the nation. In May, newspapers throughout the South began to prepare the public for the occasion, featuring stories that explained the registration process and equated compliance with patriotism and dissent with treason. In Jackson, Mississippi, the Daily Clarion-Ledger noted that members of the National Guard would not have to register (and also noted that enlistments in the Guard were up). While married men would register, the paper said, they could claim exemptions. In Georgia, the Augusta Chronicle warned that ‘‘anticonscriptionists’’ would be charged with treason and editorialized that ‘‘there is no radical opposition in the South, and this section, as it has always done in the past, will furnish its quota of men and money to the cause. . . .’’ Registration day came one day after Jefferson Davis’s birthday and at a time when Confederate veterans were having their annual reunion—that year, in Washington, D.C. Papers across the South highlighted the historical serendipity: ‘‘Rebel Yell Resounds in Nation’s Capital,’’ according to the Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee. In rural areas, newspapers also did their best to publicize the draft to potential registrants, and local authorities also asked preachers, millers, and others in frequent contact with the public to spread the word about registration day.7 To choose from the mass pool of registrants who signed up on June ,



Fathers, Farmers, and Christians

Crowder devised a lottery system. According to the plan, men would be conscripted according to their number. This rather simple system, however, became complicated by state-level issues. Using the lottery system, each state had to fill a quota of conscripts based on the state’s population but also on the number of men from the state already serving in the military. Relatively few southern white men volunteered for military service in the Great War, and southern black men had not been allowed to volunteer. Therefore, the southern states’ draft quotas were higher in proportion to the state population than were quotas in, for example, New England.8 Moreover, racial issues complicated the plan to call men to service in strict numerical order. Registration having been successful, the hard process of selection began. On the county level, a draft board—or as it was often called, ‘‘exemption board’’—made the first selection, deciding who would and who would not have to go to war in September. The Selective Service Act required that board members be appointed by President Wilson. To staff draft boards, Wilson drew upon lists sent to him by the governors of the states. Governors supplied the names of men they knew: elected officials, prominent people, and above all, their political supporters. Crowder had hoped that the draft boards, like the registration boards, would be local-level elected officials. As it turned out, throughout the nation each draft board had one member who was a doctor, but the rest of the personnel varied widely: ‘‘twenty percent . . . were local officials . . .  percent were lawyers, and  percent were business people.’’ In some southern states, elected officials served on the exemption boards, while in others prominent businessmen, bankers, prosperous farmers, and other members of local elites predominated. In Mississippi, boards included county sheriffs and circuit court clerks; in Louisiana, county coroners and court clerks; in Georgia, a local doctor, the county sheriff, and the superior court clerk; in Tennessee, local doctors, lawyers, and businessmen; in Alabama, county sheriffs, county health officers, and circuit court clerks; in North Carolina, local businessmen, doctors, and the elected county clerk. Throughout the South, the common denominators among exemption board members were that the governor, or his staff, knew their names and that they were (as political actors in the Jim Crow South) all male and all white.9 District boards in each federal judicial district supervised the local boards and acted as courts of appeal for men unsatisfied with local board rulings. As Chambers notes, the Wilson administration sought to add legitimacy to these boards by staffing them with ‘‘notables.’’ 10 Officially, the civilian structure of the Selective Service System ran upward to the office of President Wilson, to whom ultimate appeals for exemption on

Fathers, Farmers, and Christians



occupational grounds could be addressed. In practice, however, the system culminated in Crowder’s office: It was he who ran the system and made decisions, although (as Chambers notes) with a weather eye to the political consequences thereof. Most of all, Crowder created the policies that governed the operations of the draft.11

Policies On August , , Provost Marshal General Crowder telegraphed Mississippi governor Theodore Bilbo on the subject of the draft: ‘‘The controlling necessity is to raise an army period.’’ Around that imperative, Crowder and the staff of the Selective Service System constructed the policy directives sent down to county level exemption boards.12 Some men were exempted from military service by the Selective Service Act and by President Wilson’s decree: legislators (federal and state); officials of the federal, state, and local governments; clergymen and students preparing for the ministry or priesthood; policemen, firemen, and sailors actually so then employed; and religious pacifists. In addition, men who were in some way physically, mentally, or morally deficient received exemptions.13 Rural southern men who requested exemptions from local level boards generally did so on the grounds of either dependency, occupation, or religion, with the first two being much more common than the latter. In the summer of , boards made their decisions on these issues based on guidelines supplied by Crowder’s office. In September, after the first selection of men had already departed for army camps, the provost marshal general and his staff codified policy, creating four levels of liability for service. By , they had developed a questionnaire for boards to use in deciding how to classify a man. This amplification of paperwork structured and channeled policy decisions made by Crowder in the summer of  but did not substantially change the substance of policy.14 Dependency Crowder and his staff took a stringent view of dependency. Being married or having children would not be enough for a man to earn an exemption from the draft. In July of , the provost marshal general’s office ruled that married men could not claim exemption on the grounds of dependent family () if the parents of either husband or wife were willing and able to support the wife and/or children, () if the wife owned land that could be rented to produce income, or () if the soldier’s pay would be adequate for the family’s support. On August , after President Wilson had said, ‘‘We ought as far as practicable



Fathers, Farmers, and Christians

to raise this new National Army without creating the hardships necessarily entailed when the head of a family is taken . . . ,’’ the provost marshal general’s office sent draft boards another directive, which reiterated that dependency, not marriage, was the key issue. (This stance was also clearly upheld in Wilson’s statement: ‘‘the selective service law makes the fact of the dependents, rather than the fact of marriage, the basis for exemption. . . .’’) In his telegram to Governor Bilbo, Crowder noted that requests for exemptions in some districts rose as high as  percent. He warned that local draft boards must deal with the situation, ‘‘since any such percentage of exemption as reports of claims indicate would nullify the law and prevent the raising of an army.’’ 15 On August , draft boards received a memo from Crowder further clarifying exemption policy. Paraphrased, this memo said that a man could get a dependency exemption if his wife and children were actually dependent on his labor, the provost marshal general having no intention of forcing wives to go to work to support themselves—but if the family could be supported adequately on the soldier’s pay, then dependency claims should be denied. Finally, in September, after the first conscripts were already on the way to camp, Crowder and his staff outlined for the draft boards and for the nation a system of classification designed to settle requests for exemption on the grounds of dependence or occupation.16 The provost marshal general’s office ranked conscripts in four classes, with Class I being the most liable to be drafted and Class IV the least. In Class I were single men, married men without children, and married men with families who did not support their families, or who were dependent on their wife’s support, or whose families were not dependent for some other reason (inherited wealth, for example.) Class II was married men with children or other dependents who could obtain support from some other source. Class III included married men gainfully employed, and Class IV married men whose families were completely dependent on them for support.17 Although the differences between Classes I and IV were clear, draft boards must have puzzled over whether to place a man in Class II or III. In his postwar report, Crowder acknowledged the gray areas in his regulations, stating that a man’s status depended on the following question: ‘‘Generally, what wife should be expected to assume employment outside her home duties, and what wife should be allowed to remain at home through the deferment of her husband on dependency grounds?’’ He left it up to local draft boards to decide which wives could support themselves.18 In the long run, the government drafted only men in Class I. This has led many historians to assume that the doughboys of – were all single men. But according to John Whiteclay Chambers, approximately  percent of the

Fathers, Farmers, and Christians



. million husbands called in the first draft of  were conscripted; for the war as a whole,  percent of the husbands called were taken. This apparent contradiction of the provost marshal general’s own regulations resulted from another of Crowder’s instructions to the draft boards. Since the dependents of American soldiers would receive allowances and allotments totaling about thirty dollars a month, Crowder urged draft boards to place in Class I those family men whose incomes as civilians did not exceed what their families would receive in benefits if they were drafted.19 Crowder reported the results in : ‘‘in the South, as a whole, the average annual income of those making dependency claims is surprisingly low, and the average for the colored race is undoubtedly lower than for the whites.’’ He noted, ‘‘The result has been that many registrants both white and colored have been put in Class I on the ground that their allotment and allowances while in the Army would furnish an equivalent support to their dependents.’’ 20 Crowder made it a policy not to encourage discharges from the army. In September , Crowder wrote to the governors of all states acknowledging that in some cases the Selective Service had mistakenly drafted men ‘‘who ought to have been exempted.’’ If such a man had not yet been inducted, his local board could reopen his case. However, if he had been inducted and was already in camp, he could no longer be discharged by his local board. Crowder outlined a convoluted policy by which a man’s local board or his commander at camp could petition the adjutant general of his state for permission to reopen the case. If the adjutant general agreed, the case would then be processed through the local and district board before coming back to the adjutant general, who would then forward his decision to the man’s commander at camp. Evidence suggests that Crowder intended the appeals process to be daunting. In October , North Carolina governor Thomas Bickett visited Crowder to discuss the conscription of married men. When he returned to North Carolina, Bickett wrote the local draft boards urging them to reconsider married men’s cases and, if necessary, to initiate the process for exemption by sending the case to the state adjutant general. In a letter to Claude Kitchin about Bickett’s action, Crowder said, ‘‘I deprecate at this late date any reopening of this general class of cases’’ because it would ‘‘certainly jeopardize the ability of a State to produce its quota in this first draft within the prescribed period.’’ Crowder added, ‘‘We are in danger of losing ourselves in the trial of exemptions and delaying the training of reinforcements which General Pershing very much needs.’’ It seems likely that once in camp, most married men stayed in the army, unless they had a particularly compassionate commander or a particularly persistent advocate back home. Kitchin himself received mail from a constituent in behalf of young men who had received their exemption from



Fathers, Farmers, and Christians

the district board after they had been sent to camp. M. T. Chilton, the superior court clerk of Stokes County, said that despite the district board’s ruling, ‘‘we are unable to get their discharge.’’ 21 Although Crowder may have been surprised at the low incomes prevalent throughout the rural South, it is hard to believe that President Wilson and the southerners in his cabinet could have been. President Wilson seems to have made no comment on this ‘‘draft the poor first’’ policy, if indeed he knew of its existence. Aloof from all but the ceremonial aspects of the draft, Wilson rarely involved himself with conscription. This disconnect between the commander in chief and federal conscription policy ultimately had serious political repercussions. Senator Henry F. Hollis of New Hampshire warned Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, in August , ‘‘You have slipped a cog on Senator Johnson, and I am afraid we have lost him.’’ Senator Hiram Johnson of California, a progressive Republican who had been an occasional ally of the administration, turned bitterly against Wilson when it appeared that Wilson’s assurances that married men would not be drafted were ‘‘merely more ‘weasel words.’ ’’ Johnson’s son, a married man with two children, had been denied a dependency exemption. Hollis noted, ‘‘The problem is that the President says one thing and Crowder gives instructions to the local boards that are the opposite. Crowder is naturally trying to get an army, and he is taking advantage of technicalities in order to get it.’’ Hollis wrote to Tumulty, ‘‘I have done my best to see the President and the Secretary of War to have this matter of exemptions definitely settled so that the Boards will rule the same all over the country, but I have not been able to see either of them, and it is too late now, I am afraid.’’ Hiram Johnson became one of Wilson’s most intransigent foes in the Senate and helped rally public sentiment against Wilson in the League of Nations fight in .22 In the fall of , Crowder and his staff began refining the conscription system. To aid in classification, they created an elaborate questionnaire for prospective conscripts. In the eventual printed volume of Selective Service ‘‘Rules and Regulations,’’ this questionnaire takes up twelve pages. Although focused mostly on ascertaining whether a man deserved an occupational exemption from the draft, the new questionnaire also required a registrant to provide information about his family in order to prove dependency: ‘‘Have you a wife, or child or aged, infirm, or invalid parents or grandparents, or brother under  or sister under  years of age, or a helpless brother or sister of whatever age, mostly dependent on your physical or mental labor for support?’’ Registrants were asked to state the total and the monthly support supplied for their wife and children for the last twelve months and to itemize their property, in-

Fathers, Farmers, and Christians



come, earnings, and taxes paid. The questionnaire asked how much money those claimed as dependents had and where they obtained it; whether the registrant’s wife had ever worked, and if so at what; and whether she was skilled. Finally, the form asked if the registrant and his wife lived with his parents.23 The questionnaire was used to classify potential conscripts after the fall of , including the two new groups of registrants: those who had turned twenty-one since June , , who registered in the summer of ; and the third and final group of conscripts, all American men ages eighteen to fortyfive, who registered on September , . Since most of these two groups were still being processed when the war came to an end in November , the questionnaire was most often applied to men who had registered in June  but had not been called up for the first draft. In a form letter sent to all state governors announcing the new questionnaire, Crowder stated that the new system would place in deferred classes men who might have been discharged under the old system, but he warned that boards would not be allowed to go back and reclassify men who had already been drafted.24 Occupation To get the Selective Draft Act of  through Congress, the Wilson administration made promises that agricultural labor would receive the same protections accorded to industrial workers. In the event, those promises proved hollow. As Representative Frank Clark of Florida wrote in a letter to President Wilson in September , ‘‘the proponents of the bill expressly stated that those engaged in farming, whose services were necessary to a particular farm and who were raising produce, grain and other agricultural products which the country needed both for the army and for the people, would be exempted from the operation of the law.’’ Clark protested, ‘‘the rules and regulations issued by the War Department do not at all comport with the declarations of the proponents of the [conscription] bill.’’ 25 As Secretary of War Newton Baker explained, the men who were placed in Class I were those ‘‘not needed in industry.’’ The Selective Service System had been structured to shelter skilled labor from the draft, and it did so. As for farmers, Crowder’s classification system emphasized that exemptions should only be given to those whose occupations were ‘‘useful’’ or ‘‘necessary.’’ Section , Rule XVII, of the Selective Service regulations held that ‘‘A particular agricultural or industrial enterprise shall be found to be ‘necessary’ only when it is shown of such enterprise that it is a well-conducted and going concern, contributing substantially and materially . . . to the maintenance of the national interest during the emergency. . . .’’ To get an exemption, farmers had to

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show that their enterprise was ‘‘apparently producing an appreciable amount of agricultural produce over and beyond what is necessary for the maintenance of those living on the place’’ (emphasis added). In short, the Selective Service regulations exempted only commercial farmers; subsistence farmers needed not apply.26 The questionnaire made the emphasis much clearer. Those asking for exemptions for agricultural occupations were asked whether they owned their land or were employees; what kind of farm did they work on and what was grown there; did they give all of their time to the farm, and if not, what else did they do; if they were employees, what was their job title; how long had they been farming; what was their training as farmers; how many acres did they have under cultivation and devoted to which crops; what kind of livestock did they have and how many; and the approximate cost of production, labor, fertilizer, and so on for the farm. Perhaps the key questions were, ‘‘State in terms of money value, how much the products of said farm exceed the amount consumed by all persons working on it and their families,’’ and ‘‘State why you can not be easily replaced by another person. . . .’’ 27 Religion As noted above, the Selective Draft Act exempted ministers and students enrolled in theological studies from the draft. In addition, according to Chambers, the ‘‘law authorized noncombatant military service’’ for members of ‘‘ ‘well-recognized’ ’’ religious bodies with principles opposed to participation in war. The Selective Draft Act and the system it created made no provision for religious objectors who were not members of traditionally pacifist churches like the Quakers; nor did it at first acknowledge objectors whose refusal to fight grew from humanistic rather than theistic concerns. (By December, , Secretary of War Newton Baker had modified federal policy to allow for nonreligious conscientious objectors.) The Selective Service left it up to local draft boards to decide whether or not a religious group’s pacifist principles were ‘‘well-recognized,’’ thereby entitling a member of the group to certified status as a conscientious objector. Obtaining such status did not, however, exempt men from the draft. Under World War I rules, conscientious objectors were conscripted into military service and sent to army camps, where their officers were supposed to find some sort of noncombatant work for them to do.28 Although Crowder sent local exemption boards guidelines for operation based on the regulations formulated by his staff, he also encouraged the boards to modify policy as necessary to fit local conditions. The result was a policy that varied widely from region to region within the South and even county by county.

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Draft Boards in Action In the autumn of , after the first batch of conscripts had been sent to camp, the provost marshal general’s office sent out a questionnaire to the exemption boards around the nation. The completed forms, now stored in the National Archives, supply invaluable information about the way the draft worked on the grassroots level. What follows is based upon  draft board reports from rural counties in the South.29 Draft board doctors reported that many of the men drawn in the first draft were underweight, while others had problems with their teeth and their feet. In Greene County, Tennessee, Dr. S. W. Woodyard noted that ‘‘Some of the men were just worked down during the busy season and in a few weeks, with proper exercise and diet, would gain in weight very much.’’ In Loudon County, Tennessee, the draft board reported, ‘‘We think a stout active young fellow should be taken at a lower rate (weight) and not so much attention paid to the teeth.’’ The other disability cited was flatfoot, as in Maury County in the plantation country of west Tennessee, where the draft board said, ‘‘We are inclined to think that too many men are rejected on account of flat foot, as nearly all our colored population belong to this class, and yet are splendid pedestrians.’’ 30 Draft boards throughout the rural South sometimes doubted the veracity of medical claims for exemption. Dr. Woodyard, quoted above, noted that some men starved themselves to get below the government-mandated minimum weight and added, ‘‘When this was plain we passed them regardless of weight.’’ Boards seemed to be particularly skeptical of black men’s claims to physical disability. In Chicot County, Arkansas, the draft board reported that they responded to claims of disability that they believed were fraudulent with ‘‘Positive statements to registrant that they were lying. Sometimes in extreme cases, a slap on the jaw, worked wonders, in the cases of negro registrants.’’ 31 The Selective Draft Act of  had mandated certain exemptions for immorality, much to the confusion of southern rural draft boards. Selective Service regulations made it clear that the army did not want persons ‘‘convicted of any crime which under the law of the jurisdiction of its commission is treason, felony, or an infamous crime.’’ However, Crowder also noted in his postwar report that the regular army traditionally found ‘‘certain civil offenses’’ to be ‘‘particularly intolerable’’ in soldiers. Crowder said that local boards ‘‘could not be made to understand with accuracy the strict Army tradition. . . .’’ The army’s most prominent lawyer (he had served as a judge advocate general before the war), Crowder was rarely unintentionally obscure. In his report, he defined clearly the army’s position on felons but danced around the issue of intolerable civil offenses, without ever putting a name to them. This reticence

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furthers the assumption that homosexual behavior was the unnamed ‘‘offense.’’ If so, southern rural draft boards needed more than a wink and a nudge in explanation. Most seem to have thought that immorality had to do with minor criminal offenses. The Hancock County, Tennessee, draft board said tersely of the immoral, ‘‘Send them to the front,’’ while the Hawkins County board argued that the morally deficient made good soldiers, as witness the French Foreign Legion. In Jefferson County, Tennessee, the board advised that the morally deficient could be put to work on the roads. The draft board of Cabarrus County, North Carolina, suggested that such men should be drafted if they had ‘‘paid the penalty.’’ The Onslow County, North Carolina, board seems to have surmised that morals had something to do with health issues, perhaps venereal disease; they thought that the morally deficient ‘‘ought to serve at the front provided they could be classed and used apart from clean men.’’ 32 In Bleckley County, Georgia, the clerk who filled out the draft board report racialized the question of morals: ‘‘We have all through the South, a race that will be a greater menace to the girls of France and Belgium than have been the much abused Germans. . . . what will our turpentine negroes, our slum negroes, and the big city tough do when our army is victorious and passes the Rhine?’’ 33 As the responses quoted above indicate, southern rural draft boards refracted the federal government’s regulations through a matrix of local and personal prejudices and ideas about who did, and who did not, deserve an exemption from military service. This tendency is most evident in the ways in which boards dealt with the biggest question they had to consider: Who would receive an exemption for dependency? In deciding who qualified as a father and husband, draft boards found their lives complicated by the expressed disinclination of southern rural white men to fight in the Great War. Throughout the South, many boards acknowledged that most of the men in their conscript pool did not want to go to war and that reluctant conscripts’ attempts to evade service had the full support of their communities. Crowder’s questionnaire for the draft boards included a question about ‘‘community attitude.’’ Out of  rural county draft board reports, , or . percent, reported that community sentiment supported the filing of exemption claims.34 In Cherokee County, Georgia, the board wrote, ‘‘The attitude of the public was to file a claim if they could ascertain a grounds upon which to base one.’’ In Henry County, Tennessee, the board reported, ‘‘The attitude of the community was to take advantage of all available opportunities for discharges or exemption.’’ In Cheatham County, Tennessee, the board reported that they did not have enough forms for all the requested exemptions, while in Macon

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County, ‘‘Every body filed that could, and tried to escape the draft.’’ In Jasper County, South Carolina, the board reported the ‘‘Community almost unanimous in wanting to file claims of some sort,’’ while the Chester County board complained that ‘‘every man called wanted to file a claim.’’ In Saluda County, South Carolina, the board reported, ‘‘General attitude of this community seems to be to get out of the service if possible, and let the other fellow do the fighting.’’ In Caldwell County, Texas, the board said that ‘‘The Community who were not personally interested were opposed to the applicants filing claims for exemption, naturally, for each man exempted brought their loved ones that much nearer to a call.’’ In McCulloch County, Texas, ‘‘There was a general effort made by most all to get exempted, especially among the wealthy class. . . .’’ Conversely, the Shelby County, Texas, board reported that ‘‘In the towns the general attitude of the people was against filing claims. In the rural districts it was largely in favor of filing claims and in a majority of cases neighbors would go to extremes in assisting a registrant in obtaining a discharge.’’ 35 The most interesting statement, historically, came from Gordon County, Georgia, where the board reported, ‘‘General attitude was to file any claim possible under Regulations. People generally did not want their men to go. They have not forgotten the Civil War. The Sherman-Johnston campaign passed through this county.’’ 36 Faced with widespread reluctance on the part of conscripts, exemption board members also had to deal with a complication not so common in other parts of the country. It was not really possible for southern draft boards to exempt all married men, since a majority, . percent, of the pool of draftage men were married. As the Walker County, Alabama, draft board informed Provost Marshal General Crowder, ‘‘We recall instances in this county where the man was only  years old and was the father of  or  children in wedlock, and the Lord only knows how many out of it.’’ By contrast, outside the South, . percent of the registrants were married. (In the highly urbanized states of Massachusetts and New York, . and . percent of the registrants, respectively, were married.) As a result, southern draft boards exempted fewer married men than did boards elsewhere in the nation. In the South, . percent of married registrants were exempted, while outside the region, . percent received exemptions. Within the South, the range of exemptions for married registrants ran from Florida’s low of . percent to North Carolina’s high of . percent. In contrast, South Dakota exempted . percent of married registrants.37 Faced with drafting at least some married men, draft boards tried to decide which ones deserved protected status as husbands and fathers. Federal regulations clearly encouraged boards to deny exemptions to men who made

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less than thirty dollars a month. However, many draft boards throughout the region, falling back on Provost Marshal General Crowder’s instructions to modify regulations as necessary, made their choices based upon community needs, exempting men whose families might become public charges. Boards also drew upon concepts of manhood and of family that strayed far from the Selective Service’s simple equation of income (money earned) with support. In James County, Tennessee, the draft board felt that family discipline required a man’s touch: ‘‘In fact a woman can not control children as a man can and in bringing them up they need a father, no matter whether dependent for support or not.’’ Several draft boards refused to draft married men because their families needed them for protection. Some draft boards based exemption on virility: Men who had been married for several years without producing children might as well be sent to the front since, as the Caldwell County, Texas, board said, ‘‘what use are they anyway?’’ Other draft boards, in direct contradiction to Selective Service regulations, thought the sons of the rich should be drafted first. In many cases, boards followed the provost marshal general’s suggestion to consider the capacity of the extended family to support the wives and children of soldiers, and some expressed frustration that they were unable to call fathers and fathers-in-law before them to question them about their ability and willingness to take care of a soldier’s immediate dependents. Other draft boards considered the marriage tie less important than the support sons owed to aged parents. As the Wilkes County, North Carolina, board stated, ‘‘it is undoubtedly better to take some married men, especially those without children, than to make up the entire quota of single men, especially where this would threaten the breaking up of an old established home so that one or more parents would be driven to seek homes with married children or elsewhere. . . .’’ Besides, the board said, many young wives would be just as well off financially with their husbands in the army, as long as the men sent home half of their pay: ‘‘Many of them do not own their homes or much personal property and they can secure good board and necessary clothing in rural communities on less money than they would thus get and live as well or better, barring the mere presence and society of their husbands. . . .’’ 38 The Wilkes County board summarized the feeling of many draft boards throughout the South when it reported, ‘‘In general, we believe that policy should be pursued which does less violence, not to individual, but to the community feeling.’’ Thus, the Appomattox County, Virginia, board exempted married sharecroppers on the grounds that their wives would have to leave the area and find housing in the city; the board believed that the women, unused to urban life, would have a hard time managing in town, even with their husbands’ allotments. Of course, this policy also benefited landowners by ex-

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empting their tenants from the draft, a policy also documented in the south Georgia plantation belt. Similarly, the Greenville, South Carolina, draft board exempted cotton mill operatives, since their families, living in mill housing, would be evicted if they were drafted. This policy obviously served the interests of mill owners as well as workers. ‘‘Community feeling’’ in many cases was shorthand for the interests and needs of local elites. Therefore, draft boards used conscription to rid their communities of those considered shiftless, immoral, or criminal. As the Franklin County, Tennessee, board said, ‘‘Where a man was a good citizen and had more than one child we would discharge him. If he was a bad citizen it didn’t make any difference how many children he had, we took him.’’ 39 The majority of southern draft boards, however, made their choices based upon their calculus of the potential conscript’s ‘‘station,’’ a combination of economic class, social status, and personal character. The Hawkins County, Tennessee, board explained that they had considered the potential conscript’s ‘‘earning capacity, his standard of life, his willingness to work and the station and condition of those dependent upon him. . . .’’ In addition, station could include residence in town. Farmers charged that boards drafted their sons while exempting store clerks and bank tellers, particularly if they were the sons of prominent local men. In September , Clay County, Arkansas, ‘‘farmers and citizens’’ sent a petition to the provost marshal general alleging that married men with children had been called to camp ‘‘and refused even a few days in which to wind up their crop . . . ,’’ while townsmen without dependents had not been drafted. In Frederick County, Virginia, the local draft board added its weight to citizens’ complaints that a local rich man’s son had received an agricultural deferment from the district board after he quit his job as a banker and bought a farm from his father for one dollar. The board stated that the district board ‘‘persistently exempted rich men’s sons in this county, which has brought about a great deal of criticism in regard to the Draft Law . . . as most of the rich men’s sons spend most of their time riding around in Automobiles and amount to very little as an Agricultural Asset.’’ 40 The southern draft boards’ concepts of ‘‘station’’ mattered most in their treatment of the region’s poorest and least influential men. During World War I, African American men were drafted in disproportionate numbers: One-third of black registrants were conscripted, as compared to one-quarter of whites. Since approximately  percent of the nation’s African American population lived in the South, historians have attributed the draft’s inequities to racism, noting that in five southern states (Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) more blacks were drafted than whites. However, if draft boards had applied Selective Service regulations without regard

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to color, they still would have drafted black men in disproportionate numbers. Given regional wage standards, a totally color-blind draft operating in a totally color-blind state would have proportionately taken more black men than whites in the nation as a whole, since most black men in the nation lived in its poorest region and were the poorest people in the region.41 But southern draft boards were not color-blind. Some draft boards openly announced their intention to ‘‘take care of the white registrants and send the negros to answer the call,’’ as in Taliaferro County, Georgia, where the first call-up consisted of sixty-four blacks and four whites. Moreover, boards habitually considered the race of a registrant as part of his station in life and especially so when considering exemptions for dependency. As the Montgomery County, Alabama, board stated, ‘‘The majority of registrants within the jurisdiction of this Board are africans and their average wages are around  per month. . . . it was considered that the husband in the army could send the wife more than he had heretofore contributed, and further, that negro women are always in demand as cooks.’’ The report added, ‘‘The matter of loneliness during the absence of the husband was not taken into consideration.’’ In Monroe County, Alabama, the draft board conscripted childless married white men as well as black men who had only one child: ‘‘Not that we intend to discriminate between the races, but because it is a matter of common knowledge that it requires more for a white man and his wife to live than it does a negro man and his wife, due to their respective station in life.’’ 42 In considering requests for exemptions on grounds of dependency, white draft boards often made decisions indicating that they did not believe that blacks had families in the same sense that whites did. Draft board records casually disparage the character of black men as husbands and fathers. Thus, in Chester County, South Carolina, the draft board complained that they could not fill their quota without drafting black married men, ‘‘as they marry young, and don’t regard the home ties.’’ Similarly, the Chatham County, Georgia, draft board wrote, ‘‘The negroes tended to exaggerate their claims for exemption. These people as a class are usually trifling and many of them so conduct themselves that it is difficult to know whether they are married or not or whether they have children or not.’’ 43 When draft boards decided which men deserved exemptions as husbands and fathers, they were also passing judgment on the dependency of prospective conscripts’ wives. In doing so, they drew upon intrinsically racialized concepts of womanhood. Boards operated on the assumption that white women needed more protection and support than black women did. In Lowndes County, Mississippi, the draft board wanted to extend the grounds for exemption to include ‘‘protection of Females in remote and sparely settled commu-

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nities. . . .’’ In Cherokee County, in the mountains of Georgia, where  of the  men certified for service filed claims for exemption, the board reported, ‘‘The fact of husbands being rightfully the bread winner, and the unquestionable need for his presence in the average family as the protector of the home made the discharge of the average married man almost imperative.’’ While these boards made no specific racial references, it is hard to believe that the ‘‘Females’’ for whom they were concerned were black. In Caldwell County, Louisiana, the board followed the federal income guidelines for drafting husbands but gave discharges in cases where the ‘‘personal attention of the husband was in our judgement a more important consideration than mere financial support.’’ 44 Draft boards made their biggest distinction between black and white women in their attitudes toward women working outside the home. Southern rural draft boards simply assumed that black women worked for wages and that white women did not. In Lee County, Arkansas, the board stated bluntly that very few black wives were dependent on their husbands for support and refused to give dependency exemptions ‘‘in cases where the wife had always worked by her husband in the crops. If the wife was accustomed to making her living by assisting in the crops we believed she could support herself during the husband’s absence with or without help from his pay as a soldier. . . .’’ Other boards throughout the region shared the Lee County board’s attitude that any black woman could find a job and support herself as long as she was not encumbered by very small children.45 In judging claims for exemption, draft boards typically took testimony or affidavits from community members as to the status of a man’s family life. In St. Landry County, Louisiana, the draft board urged that only reputable heads of families should be allowed to vouch for a claimant and wanted especially to ‘‘forbid negroes to vouch for each other.’’ Conversely, in Marion County, South Carolina, the board complained that the Eastern South Carolina District Board, in dependency cases, refused to hear testimony from blacks: ‘‘This Board . . . had never heard that the testimony of a negro was not to be accepted merely because he was a negro. When it came to the number of children in a negro’s family, this Board was of opinion that ofttimes a negro could best testify to this.’’ 46 While draft boards drew the color line in their considerations of dependency claims, federal regulations, by defining support as income, drew a different line, that of class. In doing so, the provost marshal general exposed one of the truths that Jim Crow had been constructed to obscure: In their poverty, black and white small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers were equals. By denying fathers and husbands draft exemptions because they were poor, the

 Fathers, Farmers, and Christians federal government declared them not truly husbands or fathers; not men at all, or at least not family men with rights that middle-class Americans were obliged to respect. Black rural southerners, however injured, could not have been surprised by this attitude, but for poor whites it must have been galling beyond belief, a violation of all the tenets of honor and manhood by which they thought they distinguished themselves from their black neighbors. Having been judged nonessential to their families, poor whites and blacks also found they were considered extraneous to the wartime economy: not farmers, at least not under the definition of the provost marshal general’s office. As noted above, the regulations of that office put great emphasis on farm production for market. The impact of these regulations would have been greatest upon the small landowning farmers of the South. Although landowning farmers had to produce some crops for market—if for no other reason, to pay their state and local land taxes—generations of rural wisdom counseled against devoting too much of the farmer’s land and the family’s labor to production for market. Instead, small farmers tended to what Gavin Wright calls ‘‘safety first’’ strategies: producing enough to feed the family and livestock and then marketing the surpluses. Many would have been hard put to even calculate ‘‘how much the products of said farm exceed the amount consumed by all persons working on it.’’ The draft exemption regulations made it easier for either a sharecropper or a plantation owner to claim exemption than for an independent small farmer to do so, since a sharecropper by definition produced (mostly cotton) for market, and a plantation owner could argue that his supervisory skills were necessary to the management of his tenants’ production for market. As a result, those men that rural southerners called ‘‘big farmers’’ could obtain draft exemptions for themselves and their labor, while ‘‘dirt farmers’’ often could not. Or as a group of concerned citizens from Benton County, Tennessee, wrote their governor, ‘‘We have been told that such farmers as are in Benton County are not considered by the government.’’ 47 If local and district boards denied a man an occupational deferment, he could appeal to President Wilson. Appeals from southern states wound up in the Selective Service files and are now in the National Archives and Records Administration’s East Point, Georgia, branch. The appeals contain marginal notes indicating that they were read, but whether it was by the president himself, by a staff member, or by members of the provost marshal general’s staff is not clear. The latter seems most likely, as decisions were sent back to the district boards by Crowder, acting in behalf of the president.48 Most men’s appeals failed, with the grounds for denial varying: not enough information given; not enough explanation of why the person appealing was essential to the enterprise; not enough ‘‘stability,’’ a common reason given

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for rejecting a tenant farmer’s application. The notations on an appeal from Willie Rankin of Monroe County, Alabama, are fairly typical: ‘‘Registrant aged . Married dependent wife and one child. Dependency claim denied on the grounds he could make more money to support them in army. Tenure of farm not given. Indications are he is a tenant farmer. ‘His crops,’  ac. cotton,  corn,  sorghum,  beans, ¼ pot. Makes mark in signing name. . . . Conclusions: Either tenant farmer or farming on shares. Character duration and stability of enterprise not sufficiently disclosed.’’ 49 In addition to information from the farmers themselves, the files contain comments from the local boards whose decisions were being appealed. Alonzo LaFayette Simonton of Gwinnett County, Georgia, asked for an occupational exemption on the grounds that he was a general farmer and a rural school teacher whose one brother had also been called to service. The local board’s report noted that the ‘‘main thing above party has done for past few months is to go over County and make dates for anticonscription meetings—Reg. has been one of main backers in these meetings—father says this son of his never has worked on farm much—do anything besides help his father.’’ Simonton’s appeal was denied.50 The appeals files indicate no class bias on the part of Crowder and his staff, who treated wealthy men and poor men alike. Marion Glenn Stringfellow, whose father ran a ,-acre farm in Florida that included  acres of beans,  acres of sea island cotton,  acres of corn, as well as  cattle and  hogs, appealed for an exemption, and Congressman Frank Clark of Florida wrote to Secretary of War Baker on his behalf. Nonetheless, his appeal was denied, on the grounds that while his father’s enterprise did qualify as essential, young Stringfellow was only learning the trade of farming, and his father could manage without him.51 However, most of the men making appeals were not wealthy. They were of the sort that southerners of that period called dirt farmers, one-horse farmers, or one-gallus farmers: owners of small farms, tenants, or sharecroppers. One after another, their appeals were denied. The printed report forms sent to draft boards in the fall of  included a section in which they were invited to give advice on how conscientious objectors should be treated. The Wilmington, North Carolina, draft board declined comment, saying, ‘‘We have had no claims of religious or conscientious objectors. These sentiments are not indigenous to this soil.’’ 52 The Wilmington draft board probably presumed that most American pacifists were Quakers or Mennonites, relatively few of whom lived in the South at that time. However, the Wilmington board’s comment also touches on something larger, the presumption that southerners do not ever say no to war for reasons of conscience. The myth of the martial South, as fostered by Lost Cause promoters, affected

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the way that southern draft boards dealt with conscientious objectors in , and it lives on today in the culturally created memories of the people of the region. The history of southern-based religious pacifism has been almost forgotten, even (perhaps especially) in the churches. The largest pacifist religious body in the nation in  was not the Quakers or Mennonites but the Churches of Christ, whose congregations were (and still are) predominantly located in the Upper South and in the Southwest, with heavy representation in Tennessee and in Texas. In his postwar report, Crowder noted that ‘‘This body has no published creed, but a leading elder stated that the churches believe in ‘nonresistance.’ ’’ Crowder labeled the Churches of Christ the largest of the ‘‘Religious denominations opposed to war,’’ with , members, of whom , were male.53 The Churches of Christ hold themselves to be the true representatives on earth of the church founded by the risen Christ on the day of Pentecost. In more worldly terms, the Churches of Christ originated in the nineteenthcentury Restoration Movement that hoped to unify Christianity by restoring first-century forms of worship and church polity. Followers of the movement became known as the Disciples of Christ.54 The Disciples’ way of looking at the world and the Christian’s place in it, including the Christian’s relationship with the state, contained inherent contradictions. The movement’s chief spokesman, Alexander Campbell, was heavily influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment. According to historian Richard T. Hughes, Campbell believed that restoration ‘‘was a response to the authority of Scripture, understood in some respects as a technical, even scientific, manual for the recovery of primitive Christianity.’’ Optimistic and energetic, Campbell believed that not only Christianity but the world in general could be reformed using the Bible and common sense. However, the movement also produced Barton Stone, a greatly beloved backwoods preacher of Calvinist background, whose beliefs Hughes labels ‘‘apocalyptic primitivism.’’ Believing in the imminent end of time, Stone urged his congregations to turn away from worldly concerns. He praised poverty and simplicity. As Hughes notes, Stone’s views had a major impact on the Churches of Christ, particularly those in middle Tennessee: ‘‘This tradition held that civil government—including American democracy—was both demonic and illegitimate and that Christians should refuse all active participation in government and politics, including voting.’’ 55 Whether more influenced by Stone or by Campbell, Disciples of Christ congregations distinguished themselves from the general run of American evangelicals by their repudiation of the conversion experience itself. Disciples expected to come to Jesus rationally, through the Bible, not by being born again. Although they believed that their church was founded on the day of Pentecost,

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they were not at all related to the Pentecostal movement, and as that movement developed, they opposed it. Insisting that they spoke where the Bible spoke and were silent where the Bible was silent, Disciples had no creed. Nor did they have any mechanism for creating one. The church polity was radically congregational, without synods, bishops, or even the type of conventions that loosely unified the Southern Baptists. A Disciples minister commented in  that the Disciples of Christ did not have bishops, ‘‘they have editors.’’ Members of the Restoration Movement supported various regional newspapers, which supplied news of the movement as well as providing column space for theological debates. David Lipscomb, whose paper the Gospel Advocate was published in Nashville, was one of the most influential of these editors at the turn of the last century. Lipscomb was a conservative, a believer in biblical inerrancy and literalism, a fundamentalist before the term existed, and also a man who believed that God’s grace was most likely to be found among the poor, simple, and lowly. In the early twentieth century, concerned that many Disciples congregations had become too worldly, Lipscomb and his supporters responded to the Census of Religious Bodies of  by declaring themselves not Disciples but members of the Church of Christ.56 David Lipscomb was a pacifist. Hughes traces this to Barton Stone’s influence on the Restoration churches of middle Tennessee. However, it should also be noted that Lipscomb lived through the Civil War in a part of the South where the conflict was often literally brother against brother. After the war, he wrote a series of articles on the proper relationship of Christians to government, which he collected and published in  as Civil Government. In it, Lipscomb enjoined members of the Church of Christ not to involve themselves in politics, not to vote, and, emphatically, not to fight. According to church historian Robert E. Hooper, ‘‘Lipscomb often quoted Jesus: ‘If my kingdom were of this world, then would my disciples fight.’ ’’ 57 Lipscomb died in the spring of , but his legacy of pacifism lived on in the pages of the Gospel Advocate and in other Church of Christ publications for a while longer. In March , Lipscomb’s nephew A. B. Lipscomb published an article, ‘‘Why I Am a Pacifist,’’ in which he wrote, ‘‘ ‘Because Jesus was,’ is the best answer I have to give.’’ 58 In , several prominent Church of Christ leaders tried to get the government to recognize the ‘‘nonresistant’’ status of the Churches of Christ. E. A. Elam, a Church of Christ minister who frequently wrote for the Gospel Advocate, promised help to any young man who wanted an exemption for pacifism and wrote a pamphlet urging that Church of Christ members be exempted from military service. He sent this to Congressman Cordell Hull, who wrote

 Fathers, Farmers, and Christians back promising to bring this issue to the attention of Senator Kenneth McKellar and Provost Marshal General Crowder. Hull did not offer much hope, however, saying that awarding exemptions was up to the exemption boards, which had been set up on purpose to avoid interference from federal officials and from individuals. In January , months after the first conscripts left for training, H. Leo Boles, the president of the Nashville Bible School (now David Lipscomb University) wrote to Senator McKellar asking help for church members ‘‘conscientiously opposed to carnal warfare.’’ A. J. Jernigan, an Elk City, Oklahoma, Church of Christ minister, published a letter to President Wilson in which he stated that members of the church could not ‘‘conscientiously take up arms to kill.’’ He petitioned the president to exempt every member of the Church of Christ from compulsory military service.59 Such open dissent did not last for long. The Gospel Advocate stopped publishing pacifist essays after the U.S. attorney general for Middle Tennessee threatened to arrest J. C. McQuiddy, the publisher of the newspaper. However, members of the Church of Christ continued to petition state and national politicians for recognition of their status as pacifists and to request conscientious objector status from local draft boards. Petitions following the wording of Jernigan’s letter to Wilson appear in Claude Kitchin’s papers, and the Church of Christ members meeting at Nicholson’s Schoolhouse, in Marietta, Prentiss County, Mississippi, wrote their own petition to Governor Theodore Bilbo to urge that a member be exempted: taking the Bible as our creed and the teaching and precepts of Christ as our example [we] find that carnal warfare is forbidden and so teach by both word and practice—Rom. (–) Matt. (–). We teach and practice respect, honor, and obedience to our government except when the mandates of such government conflict with the commands of God. In such cases we believe our duty to be to God rather than to man. Rom. (–) Acts (–) We also find that the government has made provision for such service by Sec.  of the Draft Act of  in that it provides for our exemption upon these grounds. Also, the members of this church were exempt from military service in .60 Had the Church of Christ congregations consistently maintained this stance, they might have achieved the sort of recognition as a peace sect that would have made dealing with draft boards much easier for their pacifist members. However, the fellowship was not united on this issue. Numerous prominent Church of Christ preachers not only disagreed with Lipscomb on pacifism but had done so vigorously and in print for decades. If pacifism was most common in Middle Tennessee, then bellicosity (both religious and civic) cen-

Fathers, Farmers, and Christians



tered in Texas. Members of Church of Christ congregations in Texas not only voted but often went into politics and ran for office. In rhetorical battles with rival Christian denominations and among themselves, Texas ministers used language strikingly devoid of Christian charity, a habit of mind that Church of Christ historian Richard T. Hughes calls the ‘‘fighting style.’’ Although Texas had its pacifists, the leaders of the church in the southwest generally supported the war. In the fall of , Abilene Christian College established a student officer training corps. This division within the ranks made it hard for Church of Christ members to convince draft boards that they came from a ‘‘wellrecognized’’ peace sect.61 The McCulloch County, Texas, draft board wrote on the  report, ‘‘We don’t think any of these religious fellows ought to be exempted. A religion that prevents a man from defending his home, his country, and his rights is an awful sorry branch of religion. We did not exempt any on this ground.’’ The board reported that Church of Christ members ‘‘are claiming their creed teaches that kind of stuff. One Member of this board, Judge Adkins, says he has been intimately associated with this church organization for many years, and to his certain knowledge they are the most war like people religiously in the country. . . .’’ Judge Adkins said that if the members of the Church of Christ could not find anyone else to fight with, they would fight among themselves.62 Other draft boards showed somewhat more sympathy toward Church of Christ pacifists but were stymied by Selective Service regulations requiring that religious objectors belong to well-recognized sects with pacifist creeds. The Tippah County, Mississippi, board denied ‘‘Campbellites’’ exemption because they were divided on this issue. In Prentiss County, in which the petition for exemption quoted above originated, the board reported that they had been at a loss when three members of the church applied for exemption: The regulations required that pacifists belong to a ‘‘body’’ that collectively held to pacifist beliefs, and the Church of Christ congregations did not uniformly do so. The Prentiss County board believed that the three Church of Christ members were sincere in their pacifism, but the board drafted them anyway. The Gibson County, Tennessee, draft board recorded that its only applicants for conscientious objector status were members of the Church of Christ, ‘‘and we put them in the army as they had no written creed.’’ 63 Members of the Church of Christ were not the only southerners pondering the correct response of a Christian to war. Ministers from mainstream southern denominations preached prowar sermons, such as the one delivered by the Presbyterian minister in Dunn, North Carolina, in January  and headlined in the Raleigh News and Observer: ‘‘Teutons Cannot Win, Proof from Bible.’’ However, other Christians had different views. In March , before



Fathers, Farmers, and Christians

the declaration of war, a group of ministers from Littleton, North Carolina, wrote to Claude Kitchin that ‘‘war entered into until every effort that can be made to avert it is made is murder.’’ Signed by ministers from the Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Protestant, Church of Christ, and Presbyterian Churches, this document reflects not pacifism but ‘‘just war’’ theory. Others, while opposing war, hoped still that good might come of it. Sylvester Hassell, the editor of the Gospel Messenger of Martin County, North Carolina, wrote to Kitchin to commend him for his ‘‘most Christian’’ vote against the declaration of war. Hassell suggested that ‘‘Perhaps the purpose of the Lord in suffering this is to disgust the world with war, and bring on a universal and millennial peace.’’ Others took a more militantly pacifistic stance. On the Sunday before draft registration day in June , Pleas White, minister of the Macedonia Free Will Baptist Church in Warren, Arkansas, delivered a sermon entitled ‘‘Thou Shalt Not Murder,’’ during which he said that the war was for the glorification of President Wilson. This sermon made it into the newspapers because of the actions of a young woman in White’s congregation. Saying, ‘‘You may stay and hear this old coward, but I am going to leave,’’ Lucile McCullough walked out of the meeting. Members of the congregation had her arrested for inciting a riot. She was acquitted by a local magistrate, but sixty-five members of the congregation signed a petition asking that she be rearrested. Meanwhile, federal authorities wrote to Warren asking that the names of the people who agreed with the minister be sent to them.64 Many rural southern congregations must have been as divided by the war as the Macedonia Free Will Baptist Church. The technicalities of the Selective Service Act of  made those divisions momentous for would-be southern rural pacifists. Unless a religious body could speak with one voice on the issue of pacifism, draft boards denied their members status as religious objectors. In addition, the law’s requirement that the religious body’s stand be ‘‘wellrecognized’’ favored groups with long and well-documented pacifist stances. This technicality worked against the second largest group of southern pacifists, men from the Holiness and Pentecostal churches. If the Churches of Christ had a long history of division on the issue of pacifism, Holiness and Pentecostal churches were hampered by having little history on the topic at all. Originating in the sanctification movement that swept through Methodist Churches in the late nineteenth century, most Holiness denominations had been in existence only a few decades, if that long. At the risk of oversimplifying, it can be said that sanctification advocates argued that people were saved by the grace of God—the ‘‘first blessing’’ of the Holy Spirit—but that a further, second blessing was possible, a sanctification of the individual that would allow him or her to live a holy life without sin.

Fathers, Farmers, and Christians



According to church historian Vinson Synan, the Holiness people’s ambitions toward ‘‘re-creating the Methodist church in a holiness image’’ ended in the late s, when Methodist Church authorities closed their denomination’s pulpits to Holiness evangelists. After that, Holiness groups began to meet independently, ultimately coalescing into the Church of the Nazarene, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, and others. Meanwhile, some Holiness ministers began to preach that in addition to the first work of grace (salvation) and the second (sanctification) there was a third work of grace, baptism of the Holy Spirit as on Pentecost. Pentecostals who had been baptized in the fire of the Holy Spirit usually exhibited physical symptoms, including shouting, fainting, and speaking in tongues. By , Pentecostal groups had proliferated into the multiple Churches and Assemblies of God.65 Today one of the largest religious movements in the nation, the Holiness and Pentecostal movement was despised when it first appeared. Southern white religious leaders, in particular, had good reasons to deride and to fear the so-called holy rollers. First, Holiness and Pentecostal churches threatened the dominance of mainstream evangelical churches in the South. Second, the Pentecostal churches appealed to the southern rural poor, traditionally Baptists and Methodists, who found themselves increasingly uncomfortable in middle-class southern congregations. Finally, and most significantly, the spirit-filled churches did not exactly erase the color line, but in their early years, they smudged it. Many present-day Pentecostal groups trace their origins back to the revival begun in a black church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in . When that revival hit its stride, it made converts not only from blacks and whites but also from Hispanics and from every other ethnic group found in California. Wherever social mores allowed, Holiness people were not biracial so much as multiracial. Even in the South, blacks and whites worshiped together in Pentecostal churches well into the s. Prior to the First World War, Charles Harrison Mason, the African American leader of the Church of God in Christ (centered in Memphis) ordained scores of white ministers and occasionally informed his predominantly black congregations about the progress of the ‘‘White work of the church,’’ a delicious phrase that mocked and inverted white denominations’ historical propensity to send missionaries to the African American community and call it the ‘‘colored work of the church.’’ 66 Poor peoples’ churches, black peoples’ churches, new churches with peculiar beliefs and unorthodox practices, the Pentecostal and Holiness congregations had little hope of being acknowledged as ‘‘well-recognized’’ peace sects in . Nonetheless, various leaders of the movement tried to get their sects so designated. On April , , the General Council of the Assemblies of God

 Fathers, Farmers, and Christians wrote to President Wilson asking that their members be recognized as conscientious objectors. The Church of God in Christ’s doctrine prohibited the shedding of human blood, and Bishop Mason urged the men in his church to request conscientious objector status. However, like the Churches of Christ, the Pentecostals were not unified on this issue. In Texas (again), the District Council of the Assemblies of God in  disavowed ‘‘radicals’’ who spoke against the government. E. N. Bell, editor of one of the movement’s leading newspapers, wrote antipacifist editorials in . There were twenty-one Pentecostal groups in . Thirteen of them claimed to be pacifist. As in the case of the Churches of Christ, Pentecostal divisions over pacifism made it hard for individual members of the movement to claim pacifism.67 Southern rural draft board reports rarely mentioned Holiness and Pentecostal denominations by name, as they did the Churches of Christ. However, these denominations did attract attention of another sort: They quickly came under federal government surveillance, as did other southern religious pacifists. This history will be dealt with in greater detail in chapter . In general, southern rural draft boards gave pacifism short shrift. Few expressed even minimal respect for religious objectors. To the question posed to them in their  report to the provost marshal general, What should be done about religious objectors? the Alleghany County, North Carolina, draft board wrote, ‘‘Put them in the front lines.’’ In Burke County, the draft board wrote, ‘‘No man has the right to claim his conscience forbids him to defend his country. Our forefathers established this Government by the might of the sword and no man is fit to live under [it] who will not protest by the sword.’’ In Loudon County, Tennessee, the board said, ‘‘We would not allow a man to escape service on any claim of his conscience, a country worth living in is worth fighting for.’’ In Lowndes County, Mississippi, the draft board suggested that ministers should not get draft exemptions. They were used to fighting spiritual evil, the board said, so let them fight Germans: ‘‘He has the theory, give him experience.’’ The draft board in Itawamba County said simply, ‘‘Conscience won’t do for a guide every time.’’ 68    and the army officers who created the Selective Service System in  did so in order to get an army to France with minimal disruption to the nation’s strategically crucial industrial work force. With this goal in mind, they crafted a system that ranked small farmers as expendable. In their desire to shelter men whose labor truly supported dependents, they drew up rules that defined the worth of a husband and father by the income that he brought to the household. Finally, the regulations concerning

Fathers, Farmers, and Christians



religious objectors to war privileged the traditional peace churches while ignoring the complexities of newer varieties of Protestantism. Under the rubric of fairness, the Selective Service System favored industrial workers, middleclass fathers, and established religious bodies and in doing so fastened a disproportionate burden on the southern rural poor.

CHAPTER FOUR

Agrarian Protest Begins

P

resident Wilson signed the Selective Draft Act on May , . By the end of summer, the first conscripts were on their way to training camps. The rapidity and efficiency of the World War I draft attested to the nation’s increasing modernity. This triumph of modernism, however, also had political implications. The sheer speed with which men were enrolled, classified, conscripted, and entrained for camps in itself helped to forestall protest. Antidraft dissenters, caught unprepared by the passage of the Selective Draft Act, had only just begun to mobilize against conscription when the first registration was held in June. At that time, they could not have known how very small their window of opportunity for protest was to be or how quickly the federal government’s wartime measures of political suppression would be employed to squelch dissent.1 Most public dissenters were white. While many rural black southerners had their own suspicions about the ‘‘rich man’s war,’’ black leaders within the South publicly insisted on their race’s loyalty to the nation and black men’s willingness to serve in the armed forces. In the context of early twentieth-century America, to do anything else would have been suicidal. As we shall see (in chapter ), black dissenters’ resistance most often manifested itself in footdragging or evasion, methods befitting the politically and socially oppressed. On the other hand, most white dissenters opposed the draft with tactics taken directly from the vocabulary of nineteenth-century American reform: protest letters, petitions proposing legislation modifying the Selective Draft Act, and lawsuits designed to test its constitutional validity. The Wilson administration did not allow these protests time to come to fruition. As antidraft leaders organized protest meetings and circulated petitions against the draft, the federal government began to repress dissent throughout the nation. By late summer, when ‘‘the boys’’ shipped out for camp, southern rural dissenters had been thoroughly intimidated: denied ac

Agrarian Protest Begins  cess to the mails, spied upon by agents of the federal government, denounced by their local political enemies, and in some cases, accused of sedition and incarcerated.

The Sources of Political Protest The war exposed the myth of the politically Solid South and illuminated the class divisions usually sublimated into loyalty to the Democratic Party and white supremacy. While regular Democrats rallied behind their president, agrarian Democrats organized protests against the draft. Aging former Populists, most of them by now nominal Democrats, made common cause with Socialists, who were themselves divided over the war. Whether agrarian Democrat, Populist, or Socialist, those opposed to the draft rallied behind the old slogan ‘‘rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.’’ First used by southern white common folk in bitter comment on the class biases of the Confederate draft, that slogan was resurrected by many different people in the spring and summer of . During the Senate debates over conscription, Senator William Kirby, Democrat of Arkansas, said that in the passage of conscription he had seen ‘‘more corroboration of the old statement ‘A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight’ . . . than in anything which has ever come to my observation in the whole history of my life.’’ The Green Corn rebels of Oklahoma used the phrase, as did antiwar protesters throughout the South. On June , , four days after the first draft registration, Lawrence W. Pearson, a socialist, labor leader, and barber of Roanoke, Virginia, was arrested by Justice Department agents for distributing a circular headed ‘‘A Rich Man’s War and a Poor Man’s Fight.’’ In November , President Wilson himself warned his cabinet to take measures to make sure that this was not ‘‘a rich man’s war,’’ as critics were saying. As the war progressed, prowar speakers kept the phrase in circulation by denouncing it repeatedly.2 The ubiquity of this phrase reflects the complicated nature of the grassroots political protests against the draft that emerged in the spring of . The protesters’ ideological rationales blur: Were these people agrarian Democrats, populists, or socialists? The question is further complicated by the personal histories of many antidraft activists. Southern socialists often began their political careers in the s as members of the Farmers Alliance and then the Populist Party. In the early twentieth century, they joined post-Alliance organizations like the Farmers Union and the Working Class Union and finally moved to socialism, all in search of a way to fight their economic enemies, the forces that populists called ‘‘the money power’’ and socialists called capitalism. Many agrarian Democrats had populist backgrounds as well but had moved



Agrarian Protest Begins

back into the Democratic Party, the only arena for political activism in much of the South after the People’s Party died in the late s. To a political theorist, populism, socialism, and left-wing agrarian Democracy might be very different, but to the southern man holding the short end of the economic stick, they probably seemed, as the saying goes, close enough for government work. Although their ultimate aims were revolutionary, as a matter of practical politics southern socialists proposed measures designed to reform capitalism and make it more responsive to the needs of the common man. Like the Populist Party a generation earlier, southern socialists advocated cooperative associations, redistributive income taxes, land reform, and the nationalization of essential industries. More conservative than socialists and much more committed to private property, southern agrarian Democrats nonetheless shared their suspicions about concentrated corporate power. They supported income taxes, antitrust laws, and banking reform. All three groups had in common their rejection of laissez-faire government and their attempt to speak for the southern rural poor.3 Southern conservatives recognized the commonalities of populism, socialism, and agrarian Democracy. In June , a Mississippi lawyer wrote to the attorney general to inform him of antidraft talk emanating from a group he identified as descendants of deserters from the Confederate army, ‘‘reformed (?) populiates [populists], worshippers of Tom Watson. . . .’’ In August , a Bureau of Investigation agent in rural Mississippi identified draft resisters as socialists and followers of Watson and Vardaman, while another agent investigating draft resistance in Red River and Franklin Parishes, Louisiana, charged that ‘‘the primitive passions of these people have been played on by a few misguided agitators,’’ who took their texts from the Jeffersonian and The Appeal of Reason. The former was Tom Watson’s paper, the latter (misnamed by the agent) was the premier midwestern Socialist weekly.4 Class-based politics united socialists, populists, and agrarian Democrats and explains their willingness to protest the ‘‘rich man’s war.’’ However, their commonalities do not make them identical. In the early twentieth-century South, socialists represented the far left of the political spectrum, agrarian Democrats the acceptable left of an established political party, and the populists—a dying dream. Nor were the three groups treated the same by the federal government. To illustrate the common themes of antidraft dissent, explore the differences between dissenting groups, and highlight the forms that federal repression took in , I offer two case studies: that of the Farmers and Laborers Union of Texas, and that of Tom Watson of Georgia.

Agrarian Protest Begins 

The Farmers and Laborers Protective Association and the Repression of Grassroots Socialism In these days, when ‘‘liberal’’ has become a term of abuse denoting the far left limits of American electoral politics, it may be useful to note that there once was an American left, one that was not confined to university campuses, bookstores, and the secret hearts of labor organizers. The left was internally divided between varieties of communism, socialism, and anarchism. Yet all factions had in common an oppositional stance toward capitalism as it was then unfolding in industrializing America, and all proposed solutions to the economic inequities capitalism highlighted. The Socialist Party formed the largest faction of the early twentieth-century American left. Like all political parties a coalition of groups, factions, and individuals, the Socialist Party members were unified by their belief in changing political and social institutions in order to guarantee to American workers a better share of the wealth produced by their labor. Drawing on the ideas of Karl Marx but also on other European political theorists and on indigenous American concepts of economic justice, most party members looked to an activist government to redress the inequities created by capitalism, but others believed that a revolution would be necessary. In a practical political sense, Socialists supported the organization of labor unions and cooperative associations; the passage of laws improving wages and working conditions; measures to redistribute wealth, such as the graduated income tax; and the reform of critical elements of transportation and communication, such as the railroad system, to make them more responsive to the needs of consumers. As the list of Socialist goals above may indicate, the party in general was not very far left of liberal progressivism or of the s New Deal. Most American Socialists were what Europeans call ‘‘social democrats,’’ committed to reform through conventional politics and through the rule of law. However, the party also had a left wing, composed in part of communists and of members of the Industrial Workers of the World (), who were willing to work for reform while waiting for revolution. These factions continually vied with the social democrats for control of the party.5 Despite its internal divisions, the Socialist Party, unlike other American leftist groups before and since, was actually capable of contesting elections and even of winning them. In early twentieth-century America, there were Socialist school board members, city aldermen, county magistrates, mayors, and state legislators. In , most literate rural and small-town southerners would have been familiar with Socialist ideas and catchphrases, which were part of the political currency of the day. Socialist newspapers circulated widely.

 Agrarian Protest Begins The most popular, the Appeal to Reason, had a readership in the hundreds of thousands. Significantly, it was published not in New York or Chicago but in Girard, Kansas, by veteran Socialist Julius Wayland, who moved there after leaving a failed agricultural commune in Tennessee. Rather to the dismay of urban immigrant Socialists, publications like the Appeal to Reason preached socialism with a distinctly American accent. Lowbrow, strident, and supported by advertisements for patent medicines, the Appeal to Reason expressed the views of native-born American Socialists, often in terms that strayed far from the Marxist ideological correctness preferred in more doctrinaire circles. This kind of Socialist journalism could also be found in smaller papers in several southwestern states, including ‘‘Red Tom’’ Hickey’s Texas paper, the Rebel.6 Socialist ideology posited a class conflict between the working class and the middle class, defined as those who owned the means of production. According to Marxist theory, small farmers as landowners were class enemies of the workers, on the same side as corporate leaders, bank presidents, and other representatives of the capitalist ‘‘money power.’’ For that reason,  organizers worked among agricultural day laborers but did not organize small farmers. Southwestern state-level Socialist parties held intense and heated debates over the class nature of the region’s farming population.7 To a southern dirt farmer one crop away from losing his land to the banker or merchant who held his lien, the concept that he shared class interests with John D. Rockefeller rather than with his tenant neighbor must have been nonsensical. So, too, the classic Marxist solution to the problems of agriculture, collectivization. From the countryside, collectivization looked a lot like what was already happening, ‘‘the concentration of land into the hands of large landowners and merchants.’’ Southern farmers wanted to get off the plantations, not to become workers on them. An Oklahoma Socialist editor stated the position: ‘‘Without land, man cannot exist. . . . it is the exclusion of wage workers from the soil that places them at the mercy of their employers and binds the chains of slavery upon them. There can be no solution of the economic question that does not restore the land to the people.’’ 8 Throughout the southwest, Socialists succeeded in creating a rarity in American history, a truly popular, grassroots leftist movement that drew from folk culture rather than alienating it. Jim Bissett, whose book Agrarian Socialism in America has the intriguing subtitle Marx, Jefferson and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, –, explains that the southwestern Socialists synthesized elements of traditional American political thought, evangelical Christianity, and Marxism. Pointing out that Jesus was a carpenter, Socialists opened meetings with prayer and concluded them with hymns. More to the point, southwestern Socialists drew from evangelical Protestantism a cri-

Agrarian Protest Begins  tique of capitalism prefiguring Catholic liberation theology’s tenet that God holds a preferential interest in the poor. As a Texas Socialist explained, ‘‘Jesus denounced the ruling classes, and they in turn denounced Him as an agitator who stirreth up the people by teaching the poor that they should inherit the earth.’’ 9 In Texas, Tom Hickey’s Rebel preached ‘‘Bible socialism’’ to a circulation of over twenty thousand in . Evoking the first Christian congregation in Jerusalem, which held all things in common, writers in the Rebel also drew upon Jefferson and Tom Paine to insist that the natural rights of humanity outweighed the property rights of landlords. Indeed, socialists so naturalized themselves to their environment that they sometimes slipped into racist rhetoric, even though the party’s official stance favored black political (if not social) equality and class unity across racial lines.10 The sources of Socialist Party votes in  tell us much about the nature of that party’s constituency in the southwest. Eugene Debs, running for the presidency as head of the Socialist Party, won over , votes (. percent of the total) in Oklahoma, drawing most of his support from the southern counties and from cotton-growing tenant farmers. In Louisiana, he received . percent of the vote, mostly from the state’s hill country (long a bastion of populism.) In Arkansas, Debs got over , votes, but the Socialist candidate for governor won , votes, most of them from the small farmers of the Ozarks. And in Texas, Debs got , votes, most of them from small farmers and workers.11 Between  and , the Socialist parties in the southwestern states fought against the reaction that their own success had provoked. The southwestern state Democratic parties used their control of the electoral machinery to disfranchise Socialist voters whenever possible. Democratic landowners ran off Socialist tenants, often replacing them with black farmers, already largely disfranchised. An already tense situation grew even more so in  when the British cotton blockade sent cotton prices into a downward spiral.12 Pressed to the wall, farmers in the southwest formed quasisocialist, secretive direct action ‘‘unions,’’ such as the Working Class Union. Influenced by the  (but not directly affiliated with it), the  organized black and white tenant farmers to fight against usury. They also used traditional southern folk protest methods that included robbing banks, burning barns, and ‘‘night riding.’’ In addition, the -affiliated Brotherhood of Timber Workers tried to organize the region’s loggers and sawmill workers. Under the influence of the  national leadership, the  became racially integrated. As a Wobbly explained, in the One Big Union there were white, black, and Mexican men, ‘‘but no ‘niggers,’ ‘greasers’ or ‘white trash.’ All men are on the side of the Union. . . .’’ 13



Agrarian Protest Begins

Meanwhile, Tom Hickey, long interested in the Irish Land League, cheered on the radicals of the Mexican Revolution in the pages of the Rebel, writing in the fall of , ‘‘For all of us who struggle for land and liberty in Texas, Oklahoma, and in all portions of the cotton kingdom, I say, God speed Zapata.’’ The Rebel printed Zapata’s plans for land reform and warned Texas landlords to take heed or ‘‘look for another Zapata to arise on this side of the Rio Grande.’’ 14 In the Nueces Strip, the south Texas territory bordering the Rio Grande, ‘‘Tejanos’’ (native-born American citizens of Mexican descent) resented the influx of midwestern settlers who had rushed into the region after a newly built railroad line made it prime agricultural territory. Unlike the older Anglo settlers, mostly ranchers, who had acclimated to both the place and the people, the new farmers showed little respect for Tejano nuances of class, education, or nationality. Increasingly displaced in their own native land, Tejanos became restive. In January , Basilio Ramos, a Mexican national, came to the Nueces Strip to stir up revolution; or at least, that is what he said to leaders of the Tejano community, who promptly turned him in to federal authorities. Ramos carried with him papers outlining the ‘‘Plan of San Diego,’’ which called upon African Americans to rise up, take control of the former Mexican territories (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California), and establish a new republic on the border. A second version of the plan, dated February , condemned American racial segregation and called for social revolution and the redistribution of land. Initially incredulous to the point of derision, federal and state authorities in Texas began to take the Plan of San Diego more seriously when Tejanos carried out armed raids on Anglo farms and ranches in the summer of , taking vengeance on Anglos whose behavior had been particularly brutal and also targeting various members of the Tejano upper class. The Tejano uprising terrified Anglos all along the border and led to vicious retaliation by the Texas Rangers. Ironically, Tejanos looked to the U.S. Army regulars in the region to keep order and to protect them from the Rangers. The rebellion faded out by , but it left a legacy of anxiety among Anglos in Texas and as far east as Mississippi.15 This was the background from which the Farmers and Laborers Protective Association () emerged. A triracial agrarian workers’ union first formed in Oklahoma in , the  organized its first local in Texas in , and that state became the organization’s home after the Oklahoma locals affiliated with other groups. Although not officially affiliated with the Oklahoma Working Class Union or the Industrial Workers of the World, the , like them, was imbued with the spirit and rhetoric of southwestern socialism and

Agrarian Protest Begins  agrarian reform. The ’s most prominent organizer, George T. Bryant, had been a member of the Farmers Alliance and the Farmers Educational and CoOperative Union before becoming a socialist, a political trajectory typical of southwestern socialists.16 By May , the  had  locals in Texas, five co-operative stores, and approximately ten thousand members, white, black, and Mexican. All laborers were welcome but no bankers, lawyers, merchants, doctors, salaried preachers, politicians, newspaper men, civil service men, or members of the cotton ginner’s association. The ’s selling point seems to have been its proposed buyers’ co-ops. As one member noted in his deposition before federal agents in , such co-ops could lower members’ cost of living by  percent. Although leaders of the union were committed leftists of various stripes, the tenants, farmers, laborers, and miners who made up the membership seem to have been less politically active.17 Rather than having open membership and meetings, the  organized secretly, with closed meetings of the ‘‘lodges.’’ The initiation process for new members included a melodramatic ‘‘obligation,’’ or oath, sworn on a leather strap, a pistol, a dagger, and a Bible. While supposedly symbolic of the workers’ oppression and their will to resistance, the initiation also suggests that the men who formed the  had experience with the secret rites of other lodges and knew that ritual appealed to their prospective recruits. (This was, after all, the heyday of men’s clubs, from the Masons, Elks, and Moose Lodges to the newly reconstituted Ku Klux Klan.) Organizing tenant farmers and opening co-op stores put the  in opposition to some of the most powerful men in rural southern society, the landowners and merchants who formed the local elite. The ’s secrecy sheltered its members from economic retaliation. At any rate, the  was not very secret: George Bryant gave a report on the organization and its growth at the Texas Socialist Party convention in November , and the ’s second annual convention, held February , received coverage in Tom Hickey’s Rebel.18 The ’s secrecy did not protect the members from hostile surveillance. Records do not indicate exactly when and why federal agents began watching the , but letters and memos in the Bureau of Investigation’s file on the  indicate that the bureau had an informant in the organization for some time prior to June . Code-named ‘‘Operative ,’’ he was a member and an officer of the  and, apparently, an employee of McCane’s Detective Agency. The bureau also received intelligence on the  from small-town businessmen in counties where the organization was active.19 As the United States slid toward war with Germany in the spring of , the  prepared to protest. At their annual meeting in February, the organi-

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zation passed a resolution stating that they refused ‘‘to invade a foreign country at command of the capitalist class and refuse to shoot our fellow man,’’ and that ‘‘should war be declared against the will of the people we request the president down to constable to resign and go to war and leave the American people in peace.’’ The resolution passed, after some editing. The original had declared the  unwilling to go fight at the ‘‘command of the United States government.’’ That was changed to ‘‘command of the capitalist class’’ after one delegate protested that the first version was treason. Proposing the change, delegate Will Glidewell said to the meeting, ‘‘We don’t want to get our tails in the crack right at the start.’’ 20 On May , as the Selective Draft Bill made its way through Congress,   delegates convened for a special meeting to work out the organization’s response to the draft. At the preliminary meeting, ‘‘all who are willing to resist conscription’’ were asked to stand, and almost all of the delegates rose to their feet. However, what kind of resistance remained to be debated. Militants advocated resistance by any means necessary, including a general strike on ‘‘conscription day.’’ Insisting that their point of view represented the mass of  members, they termed their resolution ‘‘the majority report.’’ Some  members later testified in court that the radicals had outlined plans for a rural revolution in which union members would cut telephone and telegraph wires, blow up trains, mine the highways, take over towns in west Texas, and redistribute the contents of banks and groceries to the membership.21 But most  members were not ready for outright rebellion. In a session during which, a witness remembered, the gathered tenant farmers and agricultural laborers wept enough tears to scour the schoolroom in which they sat, the  approved a resolution that committed the union to conventional political protest. The lodges would circulate petitions urging the president and Congress not to enact conscription. The  majority did take a step toward greater militancy by authorizing a delegation to go up to Oklahoma and make contact with the  and the Working Class Union to see if they were interested in coordinating opposition to the draft.22 As the  members prepared to protest the draft, the federal government’s representatives in Texas convened a federal grand jury to investigate the union. In mid-May, the  state secretary mailed locals a report on the recent meeting and a copy of the approved petition to the president and Congress. The petition referred to conscription as un-American, undemocratic and a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting involuntary servitude. The next day, May , U.S. Attorney Wilmot Odell reported to the attorney general in Washington about the : ‘‘Main purpose of organization is to resist conscription and oppose Government power generally. All members

Agrarian Protest Begins  instructed to obtain high power rifle and use when necessary. Members disclosing information threatened with death.’’ Odell went on to describe rural Texas in a panic: ‘‘Twenty citizens of Snyder guarded that town last night. Local authorities at Snyder placed in jail last night five members of organization without instructions from us. . . . Believe some action at this time absolutely necessary for protection of our witnesses and to relieve tension generally.’’ Odell said that the  claimed ‘‘close affiliation’’ with the  and the Socialist Party, and he offered in evidence a letter from the president of the Socialist Party to the  state secretary urging resistance to conscription. Odell continued, in telegraphic style, ‘‘Believe evidence undoubtedly sufficient if conscription law was in effect and probably sufficient as conspiracy to oppose authority of United States. . . .’’ 23 On May , the federal authorities in Texas made public their charges against the . William E. Allen, the assistant district attorney for the Northern Federal Judicial District of Texas, announced that federal authorities had discovered a conspiracy to resist the draft. The Dallas Morning News, the Abilene Daily Reporter and the Houston Chronicle began to run stories about the alleged conspiracy, detailing the ’s plans to burn towns, destroy railroad bridges, and kill their enemies. Meanwhile, the federal investigation proceeded apace through the small towns of rural northern Texas. Before arriving in an area, federal officials sent word to local officials, including the county’s judge, attorney, and sheriff, and to the Texas Rangers. This local law enforcement team would round up  members and make them available for questioning when the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation agents got to town. Mass arrests followed at Rotan, Sweetwater, Haskell, and Wichita Falls. Newspaper reports indicate that at least  men were arrested for conspiracy during the  investigation.24  members were not the only ones targeted. During the investigation, federal agents implied that the  was a socialist union and that this alleged affiliation was in itself evidence of conspiracy. On the other hand, the investigation of the  provided a rationale for attacks on the Texas Socialist Party. If  members were guilty because they were socialists, then Socialists were guilty because they supported the . Following this somewhat circular logic, federal authorities arrested J. T. Taft of Gilmer, a Socialist candidate for the state legislature in , W. T. Webb, the secretary of the Texas Socialist Party, and ‘‘Red Tom’’ Hickey, who was held by Texas Rangers for two days without a warrant or a charge. Hickey, who was not an  member, was not charged with conspiracy. On June , , Hickey published an account of his ‘‘kidnapping’’ in the Rebel; on June , Postmaster General Burleson denied his newspaper access to the mails. Hickey charged that he had been shut down to

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keep him from exposing an attempt by ‘‘landlords and bankers’’ to railroad people whose only crime was union membership.25 By registration day, June , the ’s militant leadership had been arrested and members of local lodges were running for cover. Lodges stopped meeting or disbanded outright. The lodge in Delk, Texas, turned over its records to federal authorities in return for a promise that the members would not be prosecuted. Throughout Texas,  members sat down to long interviews with Bureau of Investigation agents. The agents’ reports illuminate the nature and the limitations of draft resistance in the  in .26 The Bureau of Investigation agents looked for evidence that  leaders had advocated armed resistance to the draft. Many of the scores of men interviewed by the bureau’s agents could cite occasions on which union members voiced their opposition to the draft, vowed not to register, or said that they would fight before they would go to Germany. However, most of these statements were not made in the course of  meetings but outside them. Under interrogation,  members admitted that there had been talk about getting guns but seemed confused about how and why. Some suggested that the  had been planning to obtain weapons from the U.S. government itself so that the union could serve as a home guard. Others said that the plan was to use the home guard as a subterfuge to get guns and then mount an armed resistance to the draft. Some men did recall  members practicing marching but insisted that they were just drilling for parades, like the teams sponsored by other civic organizations. At any rate, the bureau failed to find any arms depots or any serious evidence that the  was training its members to fight. Agents discovered that in some small towns hardware store owners had refused to sell guns to known socialists. On the other hand, in Vernon, Texas, numerous rifles had been sold—to citizens arming themselves against a possible uprising by the . 27 The Plan of San Diego and the  insurrection in south Texas seem to have influenced the direction of the bureau’s investigations into the , leading agents to look for evidence of interracial rebellion. The testimony of Wichita Falls  members, rounded up by city police and brought before U.S. Commissioner J. A. Lantz in early June , is one of the most detailed records in the bureau’s  file.  members recalled radical statements from the local president, H. C. Lawrence, and from two Mexicans, A. A. Hernandez and a man identified only as ‘‘Lopez.’’ The  members said that Lawrence advocated arming ‘‘the negroes,’’ whom, he said, could use guns as well as whites. According to depositions, Lawrence, Lopez, and Hernandez all urged armed resistance to the draft. The bureau agent concluded that the Wichita Falls  had only two radical members, Lawrence and Hernandez, and that the ma-

Agrarian Protest Begins  jority of the union members did not support armed resistance.28 While probably accurate, the agent’s conclusion also suggests that he had found what he was looking for: whites and Mexicans conspiring together to arm blacks for rebellion. In this atmosphere, black  members questioned by the Bureau of Investigation must have been especially nervous. The Reverend J. W. Fowler, leader of an African American  lodge in Prairieville, Kaufman County, managed to tell his interrogator enough to appear cooperative without getting himself, or any white man, into trouble. Fowler had been initiated into the  by George Bryant. He told the bureau that Bryant cursed too much, and he said he had ‘‘told my people that I did not think he was the right kind of a man to head a good organization.’’ Fowler recalled that during the initiation Bryant ‘‘urged us to get some kind of a weapon; that if we could not afford to buy a gun to get a knife, this to protect ourselves against oppression by the money class.’’ But Fowler repeatedly denied that Bryant’s talk about guns had anything to do with the war: ‘‘I am positive that Bryant or any other member did not tell us to arm ourselves and oppose selective draft and the war.’’ 29 Nothing in the bureau’s  files indicates that the union was prepared for armed resistance in . The picture painted by those files is that of a rank and file composed of farmers interested in building co-op stores, led by a small group of radical socialists, including a few hotheads who liked to talk big about revolution. It could be argued that the men interrogated by the bureau had every reason to play down the ’s radicalism and to hide any plans underway for an uprising. But the files do not read that way. Most of the men questioned by the bureau did not exhibit much solidarity with the union. Instead, they cooperated with the agents and named names quite freely. Their testimony indicated that the would-be revolutionaries were a minority within the , as indeed the actions of the May  union meeting would have indicated.30 The federal government’s case against the , as a group, was therefore quite weak. The preponderance of evidence indicated that some of the union’s leaders had advocated armed resistance to conscription, but no evidence showed that the union as a whole had decided on that course. Moreover, Bryant and the other  radicals had made their more inflammatory statements weeks before the passage of the Selective Draft Act. The Espionage Act, passed in May, did criminalize any criticism of the government, the war, or any aspect of war mobilization, but that act had not yet passed in February or early May when the union met. The federal case skirted close to prosecuting people ex post facto, for actions that had not been illegal when committed. To make the case against the union look like anything at all, it was necessary to

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combine all the little charges against individual  members into one conspiracy case.31 In the late spring and early summer, jurors across the state of Texas handed the federal team a series of decisions that demonstrated the difficulties of making a legal case against the . In May, a grand jury in Jones County investigated the  at Anson, one of the union strongholds, and issued three indictments against union members: two for carrying a pistol, and one for unlawful assembly, minor offenses of the sort that crowded the dockets in every courthouse in the South. A federal grand jury in Sherman, Texas, investigated the  and brought no indictments. Neither did a county grand jury after its investigation in Eastland. In Abilene, a grand jury investigation produced only some rhetoric labeling the  leaders Wobblies and some indictments for unlawful assembly. Finally, a federal grand jury, convened in Dallas May – June , indicted fifty-five  members on seven counts of seditious conspiracy for allegedly planning armed resistance to conscription. Having obtained their mass indictments, the federal prosecution team then had to repeat their performance yet again in Abilene, because Dallas was technically outside the jurisdiction of the alleged crimes. In September, federal prosecutors obtained indictments against fifty-six union members on eight separate counts of sedition.32 To defend themselves, union leaders solicited contributions from members across the state. They hired two socialist attorneys, W. D. Simpson of Cisco and Clarence Nugent of Hamlin, but entrusted the defense primarily to William Hawley Atwell of Dallas. A former U.S. district attorney, Atwell was one of the best-known Republicans in Texas and a star of the Dallas bar. In , Atwell ran unsuccessfully for governor of Texas, and in , President Harding appointed him U.S. district judge for the Northern District of Texas, a position he held until . A surprising, but brilliant, choice for the defender of a tenant farmers’ union, Atwell was the legal equivalent of the high-powered guns the  was accused of buying.33 The  trial began in Abilene in September. By that time, young men in Texas and across the nation had registered for the draft, draft boards had made their selections, and the first trainloads of men had already left for army camps. Federal authorities had suppressed antidraft protests, had shut down dissenters’ newspapers, and had begun the process of sending draft resisters to jail. In September, President Wilson authorized raids on  offices throughout the nation, and mass arrests of Wobbly leaders followed. More significant for the  defendants, however, was the rise and fall of the Oklahoma ‘‘Green Corn’’ Rebellion.34 During the summer of , Oklahoma newspapers reported numerous ar-

Agrarian Protest Begins  rests for draft resistance. Many of those arrested were members of the Working Class Union. In late July, resisters gathered at the farm of John Spears, near Sasakwa on the South Canadian River. ‘‘Old Man’’ Spears raised Old Glory and a homemade socialist flag, and the resisters made plans to march on Washington. One of the group’s leaders, a veteran  member, promised them that they would receive support from the  and from other antiwar groups, who would fall in behind them as they marched across the South. They planned to feed themselves on corn, which by then was ripening in gardens and fields along the road; thus the name of the putative rebellion. By August , over four hundred men had gathered at Spears’s farm, ready to set out for Washington.35 At that point, the so-called rebellion disintegrated into farce. When the assembled farmers realized that a -man posse led by a local sheriff was advancing toward them, most bolted. Later, one participant explained that, having no interest in shooting Germans, he had even less in exchanging fire with his neighbors. The farmers ran, with posses pursuing them. After a week of manhunts and minor skirmishes,  men were killed and  arrested. Ultimately,  were indicted, and  were either convicted or pled guilty, receiving prison sentences ranging from two months to ten years.36 The Green Corn Rebellion is the best-known instance of armed resistance to conscription during World War I and as such has been written about at length. In their classic, Opponents of War, Peterson and Fite describe the Oklahomans who participated in the so-called rebellion as beset with ‘‘much ignorance, religious superstition, and discontent,’’ and they add, ‘‘These sharecroppers had never known anything but poverty and want. Their economic complaints were great and they did not understand the war.’’ Evidence indicates the contrary. Posters put up in Marshall and Bryan Counties stated, ‘‘Now is the time to rebel against this war with Germany boys. Get together boys and don’t go. Rich mans war. Poor mans fight. If you dont go J. P. Morgan is lost. Speculation is the only cause of the war. Rebel now.’’ While roughly written, these posters recapitulated the arguments against the war made by Senators Robert La Follette and George Norris, not to mention socialists and populists throughout the South. On the other hand, leftist historians have been perhaps too willing to believe that the Green Corn rebels were actually trying to raise an army of rebellion, as opposed to a protest march like Coxey’s Army. In this stance, ironically, they duplicate the attitude taken by southwestern socialism’s enemies.37 If the Green Corn rebels actually planned to raise an army, they failed to coordinate their activities with other leftist groups. At the May  union meeting,  members had authorized the leadership to see whether the union could coordinate anticonscription protests with the  and the . Some

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Oklahoma radicals had similar ideas during the summer of , envisioning a grand protest union of all sorts of antiwar groups. These attempts to coordinate resistance failed, largely due to the ideological intransigence of the leftists involved. The  had been formed in the first place because the  leadership had refused to organize tenant farmers. As an  member delegated to make overtures to the two Oklahoma groups found out, the  itself drew the line at landowners. Thus attempts to coordinate the draft resistance offered by three of the strongest leftist organizations in the southwest dissolved into tantalizing might-have-beens.38 However, the Green Corn Rebellion did have an impact on the government’s case against the . The Oklahoma fiasco received extensive coverage throughout the nation, making the , an obscure sodbusters’ union, suddenly famous. When the union’s trial opened in September in Abilene, federal prosecutor Wilmot Odell charged that the Green Corn Rebellion itself was proof of the ’s conspiracy against the government. He also asked prospective jurors whether they opposed the war or conscription or read Tom Hickey’s Rebel, the Appeal to Reason, or Tom Watson’s Jeffersonian.39 Meanwhile, the Bureau of Investigation examined potential jurors’ backgrounds and kept tabs on their politics. On July , U.S. Attorney Odell wrote to Agent Barnes, saying that his office wanted ‘‘complete information in reference to their [jurors’] local affiliations, etc.’’ Agent Charles Breniman, detailed to surveil the jury, reported in September on the pretrial statements of one juror who had said that the defendants ought to be ‘‘given a good scare but probably not convicted.’’ Breniman noted that the juror, as a Republican, was well acquainted with ‘‘Judge Atwell,’’ but he also noted that the juror had a reputation for upholding law and order and a solid middle-class background: ‘‘He caters to the merchant and banker trade at Stamford.’’ Breniman also had an informant close to the defense who reported to him on statements made by the defendants during the course of the trial. Odell’s July  letter asking for the bureau’s help in surveillance provides a troubling suggestion as to who that informant might have been. Odell wrote that he believed it would also be ‘‘necessary to keep in touch to some extent’’ with one of the  lawyers ‘‘whose reputation in the community where he has lived is rather unsavory.’’ Odell hastened to say that he was not talking about Atwell, ‘‘whose reputation is above reproach.’’ While ambiguous, Odell’s letter certainly lends itself to the interpretation that one of the ’s lawyers was ‘‘keeping in touch’’ with the prosecution team.40 The government’s case for conspiracy by the  was based upon two premises: that the organization had been formed to resist the draft, and that union officers plotted revolution. To show the conspiratorial nature of the

Agrarian Protest Begins  union, the federal prosecution devoted much time to eliciting the details of the oath recruits took on strap, pistol, and dagger. Prosecutor Odell said that  members began to purchase high-powered rifles following the February union conference; moreover, ‘‘organizers were sent out to organize negro lodges for the same purpose.’’ For the most part, however, the federal case hinged on what  radicals had said. Witnesses testified that union leaders advocated buying rifles, forming drill companies, and resisting conscription.41 The most melodramatic testimony in the trial concerned the ’s connections with the Wobblies. J. B. Hollis, a Jones County farmer who joined the Delk lodge in April, two weeks before the  meeting in May, told the court about the report that the Delk delegates made about the May meeting. According to him, delegate Hunter ‘‘told how the revolt would start and end. Abilene was used as an illustration as to how easy it would [be] to accomplish their purpose . . . that they were to all act on a set night at a set minute and reverse the whole order of things.’’ Hollis described Hunter as saying that ‘‘they would blow hell out of the railroads, burn the bridges, put the town in darkness, set fire to houses in different parts of the town so as to get the people to running and then to blow up the banks and stores, etc., and get the money, etc.’’ 42 When Hollis protested that the plan was impractical, he testified, delegate Mills retorted that he had been an  member for eleven years, and that he had fought under Pancho Villa. Hollis recalled, ‘‘He throwed back his coat while speaking and displayed a pistol and said he was revolting as hell and rearing to go. He said he had sold his crop for . and was going to spend . of that money for a high powered rifle and five dollars for ammunition.’’ According to Hollis, Mills said that ‘‘the I.W.W. had been trying for fifteen years to get a bridle on the farmers, and now they had them and they were going to keep them.’’ 43 William Atwell’s case for the defense was simple: The  members were completely innocent of the charges against them. He contended that they were loyal citizens whose opposition to conscription had been conducted by legitimate means and before the conscription act actually passed. Atwell introduced witnesses to establish that () the  was not formed to resist conscription but to establish co-ops; () some defendants had obtained rifles for personal use and family protection, but fewer than a dozen of the defendants even owned guns; () the drill teams mentioned by the prosecution were modeled after those of the Woodmen of the World and were intended to be decorative rather than military; () the  had nothing to do with the ; and ()  delegates had voted down the radicals’ proposals for draft resistance. In cross-examinations, he cast doubt on the government witnesses’ motives and credibility, eliciting from J. B. Hollis an admission that he had been a

 Agrarian Protest Begins deputy sheriff and justice of the peace in Eastland County and had joined the  to ‘‘find out what it was for myself and for the Government.’’ (Hollis denied, however, that he had been asked to act as a spy.)44 Atwell’s spirited defense did not impress Judge George Whitefield Jack, a Shreveport jurist who had taken the trial on assignment due to the illness of the regular federal district judge. Jack, a pro-Wilson, prowar Democrat, made a speech at a Lion’s Club meeting during the trial in which he said, ‘‘We shall not brook any criticism because of America’s being in the war.’’ At the trial’s close, Jack summarized the government’s case against the  while ignoring the defense case. He was not happy with the jury’s decision.45 On October , the jury returned verdicts of not guilty for all of the defendants except George T. Bryant, the union organizer, and Z. L. Risley and Samuel J. Powell, the union president and the secretary-treasurer, respectively. Judge Jack lectured the forty acquitted union members, telling them that they needed to prove their patriotism by buying war bonds, which they should frame and hang over their front doors. Then he sentenced Bryant, Risley, and Powell to six years each in prison.46 While Atwell fought their appeal through the federal court system, the three  leaders stayed in custody until their release on bond in the spring of . On October , , the Supreme Court refused to review the  case, and Bryant, Powell, and Risley were sent to Leavenworth. Finally, in the summer of , President Harding’s attorney general pardoned the three men on the grounds that their offenses had been committed before the passage of the Selective Draft Act and that no evidence showed their actions had caused draft resistance.47 In the context of World War I era conspiracy trials, the  got off easy. The  leadership, tried under the Espionage Act, went to jail en masse, as did the Green Corn rebels. The federal government imprisoned some three thousand dissenters during the course of the war. But despite months of publicity, an antagonistic judge, and a prosecution designed to be frightening, the Abilene jury refused to buy the government’s case against the . This surely was due in large part to the ’s astute choice of attorney. William Atwell was not only an excellent lawyer, he was also imminently respectable. When he argued against the illogic and hearsay of the government’s case, he did so as a former U.S. attorney and a member of the Texas legal establishment, not as a leftist. But the  also benefited from being the focus of what amounted to a test case. The  trial was one of the first of a series of mass trials of antiwar dissenters staged by the federal government during World War I. In his study of the  in Oklahoma, Nigel Sellars suggests that the trials of the Green Corn

Agrarian Protest Begins  rebels, the , and other southwestern leftists were for the Justice Department but a warm-up for the main event, an all-out attack on the . According to Sellars, these trials ‘‘clearly gave the justice department the necessary confidence and know-how to pursue indictments against the  in Chicago, Wichita, and Omaha, Nebraska. The , therefore, inadvertently provided the authorities with the hammer they could use to smash the Wobblies. . . .’’ Viewed from this perspective, the  indictments and trials provided a dress rehearsal for federal prosecutions of larger and more important prey.48 The  case, with its echoes of the Plan of San Diego and its evocation of both class and racial fears, also raises some other interesting issues. First, there is the presence of ‘‘Operative ,’’ a private detective in the employ of the Bureau of Investigation, snooping on the  for some time before the arrests of union members began. This indicates that the bureau did more domestic surveillance of leftist radicals prior to World War I than has generally been assumed. Whoever ‘‘Operative ’’ was, he had been there long enough to become an officer in the . Second, there is the government’s decision to prosecute union members en masse, rather than singling out the few radicals against whom they had serious evidence of seditious talk, if not action. Men named by witnesses as radicals advocating armed resistance and revolution walked free from the Abilene courtroom while the union president and secretary went to jail. Risley and Powell were rarely named in the bureau’s investigation files, and they seem to have been guilty of nothing but presiding over meetings at which other men said dangerous things. Clearly, the point of the prosecution was not to jail dangerous radicals but to smash the . In this, the government succeeded.49 In August, the mayor of Cisco, Texas, and the local postmaster informed Bureau of Investigation agent Breniman that the locale was almost agitationfree: ‘‘very little disloyalty and pro German activity.’’ However, there was one G. W. Daniels, a middle-aged grain-and-feed merchant and socialist, who had been ‘‘quoting   of the ‘Jeffersonian’ to the effect that the conscription law is unconstitutional and will not stand the test of the supreme court.’’ While southwestern socialists and dirt-farmer union members were kept busy dealing with federal conspiracy indictments, federal and state authorities in the southeast directed surveillance attention to another source of antidraft rhetoric, the former People’s Party leader Tom Watson.50

Tom Watson and Rural Antidraft Resistance By , Watson’s erratic career had taken him far from his attempt to build a biracial People’s Party in the South in the s. C. Vann Woodward’s 

 Agrarian Protest Begins biography of Watson describes his years of political nullity after what Woodward terms the ‘‘debacle’’ of . In that year, the Populists destroyed their nascent party by fusing with the Democrats behind William Jennings Bryan’s losing crusade for free silver. For eight years thereafter, Watson avoided politics and repaired his finances by writing immensely popular histories and historical novels and by practicing law. When he reemerged onto the Georgia political scene early in the new century, he had modified his politics to suit the modern, more overtly racist, age.51 In , Watson lent his support to the Georgia disfranchisement movement, thereby briefly aligning himself with the progressive Hoke Smith, who won the governorship of the state in that year with the aid of Watson’s vituperative race-baiting speeches. The southern progressive rationale for disfranchisement was simple: Remove the black man from politics, and whites would be able to debate among themselves the necessity for social reform without the distraction of the race issue. While Watson paid lip service to this goal, his own was apparently much more simple: Remove black voters, and the country folk who comprised his political following would hold the balance of electoral power in Georgia. From  to his death in the s, Watson rallied his loyal supporters for and against various Democrats, both progressive and conservative, and made and broke alliances and careers with alacrity. By , Watson had more power in Georgia politics than he had ever wielded in the glory days of the People’s Party.52 Watson made his influence felt through his weekly newspaper, the Jeffersonian, published in his hometown of Thomson, Georgia. Widely circulated throughout the South, the Jeffersonian served as Watson’s bullhorn on state and national issues. In it, he vented his spleen against the traditional enemies of the common folk (trusts, corrupt politicians, the money power) and against some new foes invented by himself. In , Watson began publishing a series of scurrilous attacks on the Roman Catholic Church. In , he was arrested for obscenity after he published material—in Latin—alleging the immorality of the Catholic hierarchy. Watson’s spirited defense led to the first indictment against him being quashed; a second attempt to try him ended in mistrial and a third in acquittal. Whatever his motivation, his anti-Catholicism seems to have been personal and deep-felt. His anti-Semitism, emerging as it did during the Leo Frank affair, may have been more circumstantial and contingent upon both Watson’s pity for the slain Mary Phagan (a white girl of the common rural folk) and his desire to use the case for his own ends in Georgia politics. If so, this would have been no consolation to the Frank family: Watson’s diatribes contributed directly to the lynching of Leo Frank in , the creation of a climate of fear for Georgia’s Jews, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.53

Agrarian Protest Begins  By , Watson’s power in Georgia was at an all-time high while his national reputation had been forever darkened by his anti-Semitism, antiCatholicism, and race-baiting. However, Watson was somewhat more than an avatar of ‘‘reactionary populism,’’ to use Nancy Maclean’s phrase. As his earlier career had indicated, he was capable of great courage in defense of people he considered to be poor, helpless, and oppressed. In , he found a new enemy in Woodrow Wilson.54 By opposing the war, Watson risked imprisonment and made himself vulnerable to his enemies in Georgia politics, most of whom supported war mobilization. The pages of the Jeffersonian from April to August  illustrate the evolution of Watson’s thinking about the war, his pursuit of various methods of impeding conscription, and his ultimate defeat. A perpetual rebel, Watson found in the struggle against war mobilization the focus that had eluded him since the s. Fighting the draft, he drew on all his considerable skills of invective and logic and pleaded the case of the underdog, the repressed, and the mistreated with indignation and eloquence. Thus Watson, at that time probably the nation’s most infamous anti-Semite, upheld the free-speech rights of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and made an ally of New York civil liberties lawyer Harry Weinberger. Watson, no friend of organized labor and much less of the radical left, savagely condemned the treatment of  miners at Bisbee, Arizona, as an example of untrammeled corporate power. During the months of his antiwar crusade, the pages of the Jeffersonian contained rather less racist rhetoric than was normal for southern newspapers at the time; one would find more ‘‘coon stories’’ in the Atlanta Constitution. (Watson was less able to control his anti-Catholicism; it erupted into discussions of war mobilization and foreign policy like an uncontrollable tic.)55 Watson’s first editorials on the war, written in early May of , strike themes that he would develop further as the summer progressed. First, Watson accused President Wilson of betraying his implicit promise to the American people to keep the nation out of war. What, asked Watson, had Germany done since November  as heinous as the sinking of the Lusitania? Yet, Watson said, Wilson and the Democrats had been willing to overlook that particular crime against humanity, and indeed to pass by the sinking of actual American vessels, all for the sake of peace. On April , the Jeffersonian editorialized, ‘‘Last November, when you hurrahed for the Democratic Party, and voted for Woodrow Wilson, did you dream that, in less than a month after his second inauguration, he would be landing you in the European War, and demanding that your sons be conscripted for service beyond the seas?’’ 56 On May , the Jeffersonian published an article titled ‘‘Our Foreign War, by Adoption’’ and subtitled ‘‘Do You Want Your Son Killed in Europe in a

 Agrarian Protest Begins Quarrel You Have Nothing to Do with?’’ Watson scoffed at the idea that Germany posed a threat to the United States: ‘‘You’d think that Hindenberg’s [sic] German hosts were slaughtering folks in New York, and coming ahead, this way, for another march to the sea.’’ Watson continued, ‘‘If the country at large doesn’t want war, it is morally wrong for the President and Congress to force a war upon it. If the country does want war, there will be volunteers in plenty.’’ 57 On May , Watson asked his readers to consider what the war would mean for American life: ‘‘When a nation goes to war, it expects to resume business at the old stand, in the same old way, after the war, but it never does.’’ Asking of President Wilson, ‘‘What is he aiming at? What does he hope to accomplish?’’ and repeatedly querying, ‘‘What are we fighting for?’’ Watson described the atmosphere in the country as being ‘‘Like folks at a revival that has been running for weeks, and which has caught up the whole community in its swirl.’’ People were, Watson said, ‘‘hardly conscious of what they say and do, but are mesmerized by that irresistible current of unusual emotions.’’ Watson went on to prophesy what he saw in the future: a union of federal and corporate interests, with the trusts in ascendancy over the government.58 A highly skilled lawyer, Watson did not make the mistake of calling for armed rebellion against the federal government. Instead, he grounded his protest at first on the First Amendment right of petition. On May , he provided a sample form, ‘‘Petition Against Sending Our Young Men to War in Europe,’’ calling for American neutrality in the struggle between Germany and the Allies, insisting that the federal government had no constitutional authority to order troops ‘‘out of the states to which they belong, except ‘to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrection, and repel invasion,’ ’’ and labeling conscription a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. Watson included instructions: ‘‘Paste this heading on sheets of paper; sign in duplicate. Send one copy to your Representative in Congress, and the other to one of the U.S. Senators.’’ 59 Watson soon found out that ‘‘people are actually afraid to sign a petition to the government.’’ In June, he wrote that the ‘‘average citizen is cowed’’ by the ‘‘intimidations’’ published by the daily press. Watson contended, ‘‘Those in power were putting upon the country a revolutionary change of military system, as Secretary Lansing admitted, and it was necessary to terrorize its victims. They must be made to feel that, if they protested, they would be punished as criminals.’’ The passage of the Selective Service Act having rendered his first petition drive obsolete, Watson proposed another supporting legislation ( , introduced June  by Representative William E. Mason of Illinois) that would have amended the Selective Service Act to confine the service of conscripted men to the territorial limits of the United States, unless the

Agrarian Protest Begins  draftees volunteered for service in Europe. In July, Watson urged his readers to send Congress petitions in favor of Mason’s bill: ‘‘After the paper has been signed by all the men who are not afraid the Booger Man will catch ’em, mail it to the Representative of your Congressional District.’’ Eventually, Watson dropped his petition drives and announced that he would challenge the conscription law directly in the courts on the grounds that it violated the Thirteenth Amendment. To that end, he solicited contributions from his readers. He ultimately obtained over , for the fight.60 Watson had reason to know how much pressure could be brought against war resisters. Just a week before the mass draft registration on June , the governor of Georgia, Nathaniel E. Harris, sent a telegram to Secretary of War Newton Baker assuring him that, having been read the draft statute and shown the ‘‘consequences’’ of interfering with the draft, ‘‘the publisher of the newspaper to which I referred’’ now advised resistance ‘‘in the courts only.’’ 61 If Harris thought that his conference with Watson would shut Watson down, he was wrong. Through the spring and summer of , Watson courted federal prosecution with rhetoric far surpassing in vitriol and nerve the statements that resulted in socialist leader Eugene Debs’s arrest in . Contending that the war had been fomented by the wealthy, Watson poured scorn on the idea that the United States was fighting for any sort of ideal: ! Wall Street Capitalists, Chicago Trusts, Standard Oil Magnates, Steel Kings, Coal Kings, Copper Kings, Aair-ship [sic] Trusts, Powder Trusts, Food Trusts, Leather Trusts, Flour Trusts—such human vultures do not precipitate wars for health, pleasure or ideals. They cause wars and panics for the money they can make out of them.62 Watson’s editorial protests made him the target of the nation’s nascent agencies of surveillance for the duration of the war. The Post Office, the Bureau of Investigation, the Military Intelligence Division, and local-level mobilization agencies reported with dismay that speakers at protest meetings across the South used arguments from Watson’s paper. As early as mid-May , the Bureau of Investigation began looking for a way to arrest Watson. An agent’s report filed on May  noted that Watson was stirring up opposition to draft registration and made it clear that the bureau was looking for a personal letter from Watson advocating resistance. Watson was not such a fool. All the agent could find to append to his report was a Jeffersonian editorial calling for testing the draft law in the courts. Eventually, the bureau filed incidents of draft protest and resistance from  and  in Georgia, South Carolina, Tennes-

 Agrarian Protest Begins see, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana under Watson’s name. As late as October , Brigadier General M. Churchill of the  wrote to Bureau of Investigation chief Bielaski, asking that Watson’s activities be followed closely, as he had inspired more disloyalty in Georgia and the South generally than any other person. Noting that Watson was a lawyer of exceptional ability and ingenuity, Churchill offered  cooperation to nail him: ‘‘we sincerely hope that in this instance you will be successful in having proper punishment meted out to the person who so vigorously opposed the Selective Draft Law and who so vigorously denounced nearly every form of war activity.’’ 63 From the spring of  on, Bureau of Investigation agents followed Tom Watson as he attempted to organize antidraft resistance, and they dropped in on meetings organized in his name. Therefore, the bureau’s Watson file provides quick access into the grassroots southern rural antidraft movement. The conversations and speeches that the agents recorded give insight into the motivations of Watson’s followers; they also offer insight into the investigative methods of the bureau at that time. In June , Agent George G. Calmes reported on a mass meeting advertised in Watson’s own town, Thomson, Georgia, ‘‘to Defeat Purposes of Selective Conscription Act.’’ After collecting handbills advertising the meeting, the agent went to Thomson to check out the situation. He met with the local bank president, some lawyers, the editor of the town paper, and the postmaster, all of whom told him that the meeting had been organized by Watson. The agent attended the meeting, along with about five hundred people from McDuffie, Columbia, Wilkes, Warren, Taliaferro, Richmond, Jefferson, and Glascock Counties. He took careful notes on Watson’s speech, which he entered into his report. Watson, the agent reported, said that ‘‘never before in the history of the world had such inequalities existed between the rich and the poor. . . .’’ Having grounded his protest in class, Watson went on to say that ‘‘the people had a right to assemble peaceably for the common good’’ and to apply to those vested with the powers of government. Watson contended the people were being deprived of liberty without due process by being compelled to register and that when either black or white were held against their will it was involuntary servitude, prohibited under the Thirteenth Amendment. Citing British jurist William Blackstone on the common law shared by both nations, Watson said that a man has a right to stay in his own country. Conscription was not needed, he argued, since the United States was not being invaded. He urged his listeners to petition Congress to repeal conscription or to employ lawyers to test the legislation, which he called an ‘‘undemocratic, reactionary measure.’’ After his speech, the meeting adopted a resolution: ‘‘It appears exceedingly re-

Agrarian Protest Begins  pugnant to us that the administration should take away the liberty of our own people in the name of destroying autocracy abroad.’’ 64 Another agent reported on a similar meeting, although one without Watson, in Chamblee, Georgia, also in June. At this meeting, a circular published by the Emergency Peace Federation of New York City was handed out; it contained the statement ‘‘If this were a people’s war there would be no need to talk conscription. If free Americans are failing to rally to the case, may the fault lie not in their loyalty’’ but in the cause itself ? In the same neighborhood, at Ebenezer, Georgia, a local pastor told a protest meeting that conscription was wrong and added, ‘‘I hope our flag will never fly over another country and a European battlefield, but if she does, let her fly free.’’ Some draft protest leaders carried into the movement the same class consciousness raised in prewar opposition to preparedness. The Ebenezer meeting’s organizer told the group that poor people were being ‘‘hoodwinked’’ on conscription. Perhaps the ultimate rationale for southern white draft resistance is revealed by the crowd’s reaction to a circulating antidraft petition. Men rallied their neighbors to sign, saying, ‘‘Come on and sign, if you don’t want to send your boy to war.’’ This was antiwar resistance at its simplest: a refusal to see precious lives sacrificed for what appeared to be no good reason.65 Bureau of Investigation agents traced the Tom Watson connection to anticonscription agitation throughout the South. In August, the bureau’s agent in charge in North Carolina, Dorsey E. Phillips, reported that Frank Burns of Goldston, North Carolina, had been raising money for the Tom Watson fund and advising men to avoid the draft. Phillips reported that he had arrested Burns under Section  of the Espionage Act and advised that he planned to investigate Dr. H. Q. Alexander, the president of the North Carolina Farmers Union (whose letter to the state’s congressional delegation was quoted in chapter ). Phillips had time for lesser luminaries as well. In Catawba County, he attended a meeting that netted sixty signatures for a petition to repeal conscription, ‘‘and we ask for free press and free speech.’’ Phillips dealt with the matter by talking to the meeting organizer, who promised to refrain from future agitation. The bureau’s agent noted that the man, a farmer, was ‘‘plainly frightened.’’ Also in August, a federal agent reported investigating an anticonscription meeting in Steele, Alabama, where he was assured by a local organizer, a Seventh-Day Adventist minister, that the focus of the meeting was strictly constitutional: petitioning for a change in the law. Seemingly mollified, the agent went on to interview another antidraft activist, J. E. Poynter. The agent reported, ‘‘I gave him to understand that if he was even reported for making dis-loyal statements again, I would put him in jail.’’ Another bureau agent suppressed an anticonscription meeting in Talladega. Most amusingly, the bureau



Agrarian Protest Begins

reported disturbances in Coosa County, Alabama, home of prowar congressman Tom Heflin. Agent E. R. Beckwith reported that the leader of the opposition was a Republican who served as the cashier of the Coosa County Bank. (It should be noted that a cashier then was equivalent in social standing to a bank vice president now.)66 Mississippi quickly emerged as a center of antidraft agitation. While some local authorities attributed this to the influence of Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi, John Sharp Williams located the roots of resistance elsewhere: ‘‘Certain people in Mississippi got a wrong way of looking at things way back yonder in Tom Watson days and have been looking at everything from a wrong standpoint ever since.’’ 67 Wherever Mississippi antidraft agitators got their viewpoint, their rhetoric, as recorded in the Bureau of Investigation’s files, exceeded in violence that heard anywhere else in the South. In early August, at an antidraft meeting in Alva, witnesses reported that an antidraft speaker, Wesley Dale, said that ‘‘he and his sons would die in his front yard before any of them would go,’’ and that another said that ‘‘there never was a night but what his last thoughts on retiring, and his first thoughts in the morning were, the time is fast approaching when my wife and daughters will see me and my sons dead in our front yard.’’ A local man who had not taken a stand against the draft had been visited by some horsemen who left a steel-faced cartridge in his mailbox, apparently as a warning. He told agents that an antidraft neighbor had asked him, ‘‘are we going to stand up like men and put down this draft business, or are we going to be run over?’’ 68 Meanwhile, Watson himself proceeded to challenge the draft law in the courts. Serving as counsel for two African American men appealing for release from conscription under habeas corpus, he charged that conscription abused states’ rights, violated the common-law provision that a man should not be sent against his will outside the ‘‘realm,’’ and violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibitions against involuntary servitude. Held before Judge Emory Speer in Augusta on August , the trial attracted such a crowd that the judge moved the proceedings out of the courtroom into the open air before ruling that the conscription act was constitutional.69 In his decision, Judge Speer wrote that to agree with Watson’s contention, ‘‘we must conclude that a soldier is a slave. Nothing could be more abhorrent to the truth, nothing more degrading to the indispensable and gallant body of citizens trained in arms, to whose manhood, skill and courage, is, and must be committed the task of maintaining the very existence of the nation and all its people hold dear.’’ As the tone of this quote may indicate, Speer’s decision had little to do with conscription per se: ‘‘The Grand Army of the Republic,

Agrarian Protest Begins  the Confederate Veterans and the Sons of Veterans are not maintained to preserve the traditions of slavery. Nations do not pension slaves, to commemorate their valor.’’ Judge Speer denied the appeal to common law as invalid in the United States when overridden by an act of Congress. In such cases, laws must be judged by the Constitution. Speer argued that conscription was constitutional, citing both the document itself (Clause , Article , Section ) and precedent cases. He also denied Watson’s contention that conscription violated states’ rights, saying that the nation’s right to raise an army could not be ‘‘defeated’’ by the states. However, most of his opinion had nothing to do with law and much to do with the awful consequences he foresaw if U.S. military forces were not sent to Europe. Speer wrote, ‘‘Deprived of our aid in the field, successive defeats will visit and crush our allies. Their lands conquered, their navies taken, we must then in turn, solitary and alone, meet on our own soil the impact of the victorious and barbarous legions. . . .’’ 70 Prior to his court defeat, Watson had announced plans for a ‘‘state convention’’ to be held in Macon, Georgia, ‘‘for peaceable protest against the recent usurpations of power by Congress, the President, and the Post Office Department,’’ who, he said, had spat on the Constitution they had sworn to defend. When he received warning that military force would be used against the gathering, Watson called it off, announcing, ‘‘The world must be made safe for democracy, even though none is left in these United States.’’ In late August, Postmaster General Burleson sent to Congress a message labeling the Jeffersonian and the socialist paper the Masses the two most egregious violators of the Espionage Act. Shortly thereafter, Burleson officially denied Watson’s paper its mailing privileges, a development Watson announced with a headline calling the president ‘‘Kaiser Wilson.’’ But that paper never reached most of Watson’s readers; the Post Office had not delivered the Jeffersonian since mid-July. In a last-ditch effort, Watson sued in equity court, seeking an injunction to compel the postmaster at Thomson to accept the paper. Heard before Judge Speer, the suit failed. Speer said that Watson had published ‘‘propaganda against the nation as distinct as it is truculent and dangerous’’ and charged that Watson had not come to equity court with ‘‘clean hands.’’ Speer warned that Watson’s anticonscription ‘‘propaganda’’ might convince American soldiers that they were ‘‘victims of lawless and unconstitutional oppression.’’ If so, Speer said, the American army, like that of Russia, would disintegrate under fire, the United States would be conquered, and democracy would be destroyed. His equity suit having failed, Watson was cut off from his public. Well aware that he was in danger of imprisonment, grieving over the death of his daughter, and in ill health, he gave up the fight.71 The Jeffersonian’s fate indicates that the federal government’s most effective

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Agrarian Protest Begins

weapon against rural dissent was not the arrest and trial of dissenters (as used against the ) but the suppression of the rural radical press. On June , , Congress passed the Espionage Act, which with the later Sedition Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act placed severe limitations on freedom of speech and press. In June, post offices began to deny mailing privileges to newspapers containing material critical of the war or war mobilization measures. In July, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson publicly announced that mailing privileges would be denied to publications that said the war had been caused by munitions makers or Wall Street.72 This was the line taken by socialist newspapers and by Watson. By denying the small radical press mailing privileges, the federal government silenced the voice of political protest from the hinterlands and forestalled any possibility that geographically isolated rural dissent could be drawn together into a coherent protest movement. From about mid-June through the end of the war, government propaganda dominated the field of public discourse, filling the front pages of prowar southern newspapers. The time frame is significant: Draft registration began on June , , and the first trainloads of soldiers pulled out of southern depots in late summer. By the point rural southerners had begun to feel the true impact of conscription, the federal government had made it dangerous, if not impossible, to call for the abolition of the draft. At that point, dissenters had three alternatives: accept the situation and work within it, protest passively through evasion, or fight. By the summer of , southern rural resisters had tried all three.

CHAPTER FIVE

Race, Class, Gender, and Draft Dodging

I

n March , Vivian Roark wrote to John Sharp Williams about the latest draft calls in Mississippi. Two young men had been exempted the previous fall for the same physical problems. She said, ‘‘This last call got Mr. Rucker while Mr. Cato was put in fourth class. Mr. Cato’s father is said to have made a remark similar to this. ‘My business needs a young man at its head and I want my son at home.’ Mr. Cato is wealthy, Mr. Rucker is not.’’ She noted that the local judge’s son had also been placed in the fourth class. According to Roark, the draft board’s decision formed the primary topic of conversation among the ‘‘boys’’ waiting for the troop train in Fayette: ‘‘Not much true patriotism did I see and several times did I hear the remark, ‘the rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight.’ So many of the home folks are thinking it is the same old thing—money talks.’’ She added, ‘‘The very atmosphere seemed charged with the feeling of injustice and indignation.’’ 1 Conscription spotlighted class inequities in southern rural communities. In a culture dominated by white supremacy, some whites were more supreme than others. They could use their power to get their sons exempted from service. However, powerful white men also intervened with draft boards to obtain exemption for their black workers and tenants. The prerogatives of white power, manifested through the power structures of the rural South, therefore meant that black men under white patronage were less likely to go to war in  than poor whites or aspiring middle-class blacks. Moreover, white supremacy on the national level had the ironic effect of delaying the induction of black conscripts into the army and of relegating them to noncombatant service. African American conscripts, although drafted in larger percentages than whites, entered the army months later than whites and rarely went into harm’s way. In the crisis of the Great War, it became clear that despite the rhetoric of racial solidarity, all whites did not share the same racial interests. In the South, 

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Draft Dodging

the draft worked to further the interests of upper-class whites, often to the detriment of the needs and desires of poor whites. Unfortunately, but all too typically, black southerners paid in blood for upper-class white men’s privilege and lower-class white men’s anger.

Draft Dodging and Class As members of the Vietnam generation will testify, one of the best ways to avoid conscription into the army infantry is to join another branch of service, preferably one in which the chances of being shot at are minimal. Moreover, it is always better to go as an officer. This strategy recommended itself to members of the southern white political elite in the spring of . As it became clear that the Selective Draft bill might pass, fathers hurried to place their sons and friends as officers in the National Guard or the army. Uncertain as to the mechanism of obtaining commissions, many wrote to their governors, congressmen, and senators. Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi cited this behavior as a reason for voting for conscription, noting sarcastically, ‘‘I have had enough applications for commissions to furnish the entire army we are going to raise. Nobody has bothered me about getting in as a private.’’ While some of the powerful just wanted to assure their boys’ rank, others expressed their desire to keep their sons safe in class-related terms. A constituent who asked Tennessee governor Thomas Rye to intervene with the army to place a man in the quartermaster corps argued that ‘‘young men who have had special training for the important business enterprises’’ should be kept ‘‘from filling out the ranks of soldiers while the men who have not had any special training for anything stay back to do things for which they are not fitted.’’ 2 Those with political clout continued trying to use it to avoid combat well into the second year of the war. In May , E. H. Crump, the famous ‘‘Boss Crump’’ of Memphis, wrote to his political ally, Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, on behalf of a teller at the Commercial Trust and Savings Bank who was ‘‘anxious’’ to get into the quartermaster corps (clearly the service preferred by young southern white men with business training). Such requests lay behind McKellar’s weary complaint to H. C. Adler of the Chattanooga Times in March . Commenting that the draft law was working well, McKellar wrote: Yet, Mr. Adler, if you could see the enormous number of letters that I receive on this subject, not monthly, not weekly, but daily, where young men, or their parents or friends, on one pretext or another, are constantly seeking to avoid the draft, and if you could see, as I do, how many

Draft Dodging  of those who have influence are able to get into some sheltered place during the war, rather than go into the trenches as drafted men, while the man without influence has to serve, you would see that even as successful as the draft law has been, it is not a perfect piece of machinery by any means. . . . My daily mail is enormous and I imagine it is a safe estimate to say that nearly one-half of it is about the draft law in some form or another. There is not an hour in the day that some young man, or some father, brother, or relative, or friend, is not in my office seeking to get some relation from the draft law. . . .’’ 3 While public patriotism and private string-pulling seem to have been common among the southern middle class, few left as clear a record of how the two could be combined, without any overt consciousness of hypocrisy, than Eugene Cunningham Branson, a professor of rural economics and sociology at the University of North Carolina. Branson served on the North Carolina Council of Defense and worked to mobilize public opinion in favor of the war. While publicly calling for patriotism and sacrifice, however, Branson conspired with his son’s employer to place his son in departments of the employer’s manufacturing concern that would be most likely to earn the young man an industrial deferment. Branson noted that his son might want to enlist: ‘‘This boy is willing enough to give his life to his country, but he’ll serve humanity better alive than dead, I think.’’ To explain himself to his son’s employer, Branson noted that his wife was frantic with fear for the boy’s life.4 C. P. Mooney, the editor of the Commercial Appeal of Memphis, was also very much involved in war mobilization, but as a concerned father he wrote to Tennessee governor Rye to pull strings on behalf of his son. Charles Mooney (a sickly boy, according to his father) had volunteered thinking that he would be given headquarters duties but had instead been assigned to the stables. Mooney forwarded to Rye a letter from his son: ‘‘Can you imagine Charles Mooney, the son of C. P. J. Mooney doing that, the most menial and despisable job in the army. When it comes to falling, Beelzebub hasn’t anything on your son.’’ Young Mooney also complained, ‘‘Besides there is a non-pork-eating sergeant from South Chicago there who does not care an awful lot for yours truly.’’ Mooney asked that Rye intervene to get Charles assigned lighter duties.5

‘‘My Husband Taken One Othe’’ As Senator McKellar’s complaint above indicates, many southerners did not know how to negotiate the Selective Service System’s exemption process. Moreover, many people understood that political pull might help them ob-

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Draft Dodging

tain release from military service. While powerful men like Mooney and Boss Crump wrote confident letters requesting that men be assigned safer duties, most of the letters sent to Governors Rye of Tennessee and Bilbo of Mississippi begged for mercy and release. These letters illustrate how far many southern rural families’ structures and patterns of everyday life diverged from the model (income equals support) envisioned by the provost marshal general’s regulations. To the writers of these letters, removing a son or husband threatened the very existence of their home. A sister wrote to Governor Rye that her two brothers were both sickly, her mother weak, ‘‘and there is no negros in this part of the country so can’t hire help and it is against our religion to shed blood[.] I pray you and our God will not take my brothers from my poor sickly mother[.] I am married and live far from my mother [and] cant be with her.’’ In the fall of , a barely literate widow from Greenfield, Tennessee, wrote to Rye that ‘‘the . . . Board did not do us right thay taken my only subpoart and [broke] up my home.’’ She begged that the governor intervene to send her son home. Ernest W. Morelock of Bulls Gap, Tennessee, wrote to Rye in September , ‘‘I am up against the greatest trouble of my life, and I appeal to you for help.’’ Morelock explained that, lacking a sister, he had been the family member designated to help his mother with the washing, milking, churning, and general housework, as well as helping his brother on the farm. Morelock added, ‘‘Us farmers are ignorant and unfamiliar with the exemption provisions, and consequently when we want exempted we don’t know what to do.’’ To this letter, as to most such pleas, Governor Rye responded by sending a letter disavowing control over the draft and outlining the process by which exemptions could be obtained through the Selective Service System.6 Mrs. Virgil O’Connor of Yazoo County, Mississippi, wrote to Governor Bilbo to complain that men who owned department stores and autos had been exempted from military service while her husband had been drafted. The O’Connors apparently had no children of their own but were raising a ten-year-old nephew. In her letter, Mrs. O’Connor asked how the government could compel her husband to break his marriage vows: ‘‘You know my husband taken one othe when he said he would support me when we were married  years past.’’ 7 To the provost marshal general’s office, the support a man could provide equaled the money he earned: With the approximately thirty dollars a month they received from the army, the wives and mothers of poor men should be able to maintain the standard of living to which they were accustomed. This may have been true for the urban poor. But on farms, money was not the sole measure of masculine support. Something much more old-fashioned and pri-

Draft Dodging  mal had to be factored in as well: the superior physical strength of males, without which the common routines of farm life became very difficult indeed. Consider the simplest, most basic technology of rural southern life, circa : the building of fires. Most families had wood-burning stoves or fireplaces. To fuel the stoves, farmers cut down trees, trimmed the trees into logs, cut the logs into liftable chunks, loaded those chunks of wood into wagons, and hauled them home, where the chunks would be split into stove-sized pieces of wood and piled up, usually along the side of the house or a barn. While most farm women could split wood for the kitchen stove, few would have had the experience of chopping down trees with an axe or a crosscut saw. That was man’s work. Nor would most women have had the sheer upper-body strength necessary to swing an ax or pull a saw for hours. The division of tasks concerning firewood is only one example. In the rural South, as in most rural societies, women put in more hours at work, but men more muscle, concentrating on tasks that women generally lacked the strength to do. Men plowed fields that women then helped plant, weed, and hoe. Men killed hogs, hoisting the carcasses to drain the blood, then scalded the carcasses in boiling water so they could be skinned: a major task, given that each hog weighed about three hundred pounds. Women then stepped in to help butcher the meat, make sausages, and smoke the hams. Almost every aspect of work on southern farms was divided by gender. One suspects that in September  many men on southern farms spent frantic hours getting in the harvest and piling up wood to see their families through the winter; and on farms where that did not happen, wives and mothers must have wondered what condition they would be in by spring.8 In early October , a young wife from Enid, Mississippi, wrote to Governor Bilbo to plead for her husband’s release from the army. Mrs. Leon A. Bright, although the wife of a poor man, was literate and articulate. She wrote that the local board had asked her husband about his property, ‘‘and he told what little we owned, also the condition of our family. He told them we owned  acres of poor hill land;  little horses;  cows, and  sow and pigs.’’ The board told Bright that his wife could rent the land while he was gone. But with so small an acreage, Mrs. Bright said, ‘‘the land would not pay the taxes.’’ The Brights filed all the requisite paperwork to get an exemption for Leon but never heard anything back. Mrs. Bright wrote, ‘‘I have two children, one little girl, who will be four years of age the th inst. And a little baby one week old,’’ who was born on the day that Leon was shipped out to Little Rock. Despite his pleas, he had not been allowed to stay long enough to see the baby born. Mrs. Bright begged Governor Bilbo to get her husband an honorable discharge ‘‘and let him come home to care for us. ‘We are on the mercy of the world.’ ’’ 9

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Draft Dodging

As bad as Mrs. Bright’s condition may have been, there were others who had it worse. Mrs. Bright’s husband owned his land, so she could at least stay in her home during his absence. However, tenant farmers’ houses went with their jobs. When a tenant or sharecropper was drafted, his wife would need to find other lodgings.

Class and the Exemption Process Men who wanted exemption from the draft often went through a two-stage process. A man could be exempted for dependency and allowed to go home, but his exemption for occupation would be automatically reviewed by the district board. On the other hand, if the local board denied him exemption for dependency, he could appeal to the district board. People in the South (and in the nation as a whole, for that matter) complained that men with ‘‘pull’’ got special treatment at both levels.10 In February , H. E. Hildebrand, a member of the Western District Board in Texas, forwarded to Provost Marshal General Crowder on behalf of members of the four district boards of Texas a resolution requesting that anyone running for office be removed from local boards, on the grounds that ‘‘local boards had given or recommended deferred classification to registrants, not on account to the merits of the claim made but solely on account of the political standing of such registrant and that for the same reason claims of those who are clearly entitled to deferred classification had been denied.’’ 11 Hildebrand wrote, ‘‘The claim of the humblest laborer who is trying to make an honest living by the sweat of his brow on a dry Texas farm ought to be given the same consideration by a board as that of the son of the political boss’’ in a given county, thus neatly making the connection between political power and class that was evident to observers of the conscription process throughout the South. While the Texas district boards thought the countylevel boards were too conscious of class and political pull, county-level boards often reversed the accusation. In McNairy County, Tennessee, the board complained that district boards would exempt a man they had conscripted ‘‘especially if he was a strong man and able to lay his claim for exemption clearly and strongly. . . .’’ In Toombs County, Georgia, the board stated, ‘‘We are impressed with the idea that the rich man should be shown no more favors in the matter of exemptions than the man who works today for the meals of tomorrow,’’ while protesting that lawyers were being used to get men exemptions before the district board—an accusation echoed in Burleson and Comal Counties, Texas.12

Draft Dodging  Concerns that the draft be not only fair but be seen to be so led to federal scrutiny of perhaps the highest-profile exemption claims filed in Texas in : those of the young men of the Kleberg family of the King Ranch. At over , acres, the King Ranch is today bigger than Rhode Island, and it is said to be the largest ranch in the world. The operation was already enormous in –, when it was under the direction of Robert J. Kleberg, husband of the founder’s daughter. In June , a Bureau of Investigation report, forwarded to the provost marshal general’s office, noted that Kleberg’s son-in-law, Tom East, had claimed an exemption on the grounds of dependency. The agent was skeptical: ‘‘So far as living comfortably, even luxuriously is concerned Mrs. Tom East would not miss Mr. Tom East if he should go to war and never return.’’ The agent warned that favoritism shown to Kleberg’s son-in-law would cause public relations problems for the Selective Service System. A year later, in June , another agent filed a report on yet another King Ranch deferment, that of Robert J. Kleberg Jr., whose status had been fixed at 1-A by the local draft board but who had been given an agricultural deferment by the district board. The agent mentioned the presence on the ranch of both Kleberg’s father and his older brother but said blandly that Robert Kleberg Jr., who was a scientifically trained agriculturalist, was considered more useful where he was than he would be in the army. (In fairness to young Robert, the agent reported him willing to go if drafted.) The agent said that people in the area complained that they ‘‘didn’t believe Bob Kleberg did much of anything other than ride around high powered automobiles; and they felt certain that he being the son of a rich man he had been favored while their sons were sent to the front.’’ However, these critics did not want their names used, being afraid of the power of the King Ranch. While recording the complaints, the agent found no evidence of corruption on the part of the district board. Neither did the officer in charge of the draft in Texas, Major John C. Townes, who said that the charges reflected nothing but the socialistic tendencies of those making them.13 For evidence that this was a ‘‘rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,’’ disgruntled rural southerners throughout the region could cite multiple cases. A married man with a child might be drafted, while another’s ‘‘station’’ gained him an exemption; a small farmer might be drafted, while his tenant neighbor obtained an exemption through the influence of a powerful landowner. To make the situation worse, the provost marshal general’s instructions urging exemption boards to make decisions based on local conditions led to a complete lack of uniformity in policy throughout the region: Men with family and occupational situations so alike as to be nearly identical were drafted in one county, exempted in the next.

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Draft Dodging

Race by Class, with Geography By , all of the states of the former Confederacy had enacted laws to segregate and disfranchise African Americans, and white southerners had completed the cultural-legal-political edifice known as Jim Crow. Throughout the nation, public discourse of all kinds, from the new moving pictures to the old minstrel shows, exhibited white supremacy and reinforced concepts of black inferiority at all turns. American society in the early twentieth century privileged all whites. But white supremacy did not—could not—serve the interests of all whites simultaneously and at all times, since those interests varied widely by class. Nell Irvin Painter notes that in the discourse of the early twentieth-century South, ‘‘The hierarchy of racism expressed a clear ranking of classes, in which the word white, unless modified, indicated a member of the upper class, and black, unless modified, equaled impoverished worker.’’ Painter points out that ‘‘deviation from these assumptions required the use of adjectives: poor white, middle-class black.’’ 14 The language of white power in the New South thus obscured the realities of life in the region. In fact, most southern whites were not upper class, or even middle class. Most were small landowners, tenants or sharecroppers, coal miners, textile workers: in short, poor. Working-class southerners had no reason to think of blacks collectively as their property, as the elite did. The women of this class did not have black servants. They raised their own children, did their own housework, and often worked in the fields and factories besides. Their men were more likely to see blacks as potential economic competitors than as servants or employees. If we take as a given that the vast majority of southern whites supported white supremacy, we still have to acknowledge that white supremacy meant different things to different classes. Consider a slogan like ‘‘The South is a white man’s country.’’ A Mississippi cotton planter might take that to mean that ‘‘our Negroes’’ belonged to whites collectively and existed to serve them. But a white small farmer in the hills of North Georgia might take the same slogan to mean that blacks should get out of his town, that they had no right to exist in the South at all. Both would have agreed that whites should always have more power than blacks, but they would have disagreed profoundly on how that power should be exerted. White supremacist rhetoric was so useful to white southern politicians precisely because it was amorphous: It meant whatever the hearer wanted it to mean, like some political slogans of our own day—‘‘family values’’ comes to mind. Southern blacks had their own class divisions, and the black middle class’s

Draft Dodging  interests were not necessarily those of the race’s mostly rural working class. Many members of the black middle class saw the war as an opportunity for racial advancement. They supported the drafting of blacks along with whites, agitated for integrated training camps for black and white officers, and agreed with W. E. B. Du Bois’s July  call for the race to ‘‘close ranks’’ with white Americans for the duration. However, support for the war was not unanimous, even among Du Bois’s fellow activists, many of whom denounced him as a sell-out. (The fact that Du Bois was angling for a commission as an officer in Military Intelligence at the time when he wrote his famous editorial provided ammunition for his enemies.) Moreover, in his recent work on federal surveillance of African Americans during the war, Theodore Kornweibel documents a widespread belief among working-class blacks that the war was simply not their fight. Their struggle for democracy was much closer than France. Kornweibel argues that at least half of the black population did not support the war, instead exhibiting opposition, apathy, or ignorance: ‘‘If some concluded that it was a white man’s war, others added that it was a rich man’s war.’’ 15 Middle-class black leaders’ patriotic pronouncements so irritated one black Mississippian that he published (anonymously) an antiwar circular. Signed ‘‘Negro Educator,’’ the circular found at Friars Point, Mississippi, urged black men and boys to avoid service: ‘‘Some of our well educated negros are touring the country urging our young race to be killed up like sheep, for nothing. . . . Rather than fight I would rather commit self-death.’’ 16 The South’s peculiar social and political geography amplified regional race and class variations. Most southern blacks lived in the old plantation districts or in the cities. The hill-country districts had smaller black populations, and some Appalachian counties had minuscule numbers of black residents. The plantation districts also had a higher rate of tenancy than the hill country. The South’s growing industrial base, the mines, mills, and factories, were most often found in or on the edge of the hills, not in the plantation districts, which remained staunchly agrarian. These socioeconomic differences, rooted in antebellum settlement patterns, formed the matrix for traditional southern state politics. Conflict between the flatland and the hill country exhibited local variations but was often inflected by race. As an example, disfranchisement of black male voters struck not only at the potential of black political power but also at the reality of white planters’ political power, which had been based on their ability to ‘‘vote’’ their tenants.17 During World War I, the Selective Service System’s conscription policies intruded into the racial structures of southern society and further complicated an already byzantine situation. Although allegiance to white supremacy as a slogan united southern whites across class and regional lines, local draft

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Draft Dodging

Map . Counties in Southern States Having at Least  Percent Black Population, . Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, , vol. , Population ().

boards’ implementation of conscription required them to define in concrete terms what white supremacy meant. Did whites’ status as the privileged race require them to go to war while blacks stayed home to work the fields? Or did white privilege mean that white men were entitled to avoid service altogether? Ultimately, the solution to these questions reflected the region’s racial geography and class divisions, much to the anger and dismay of poor whites.

‘‘When the Negroes Marched By’’ In the tense atmosphere following the declaration of war in , African American leaders in the South rushed to the colors, avowing loyalty and promising their people’s support for the war. However, in demonstrating their patriotism, many black leaders asked that their people’s rights, as well as their responsibilities, be expanded. Ironically, the more actively blacks supported the war, the less they resembled the complacent darkies beloved by white conservatives and the more likely they were to arouse white paranoia.

Draft Dodging  In Atlanta, leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People () pledged their support to President Wilson and asked that ‘‘the doors of enlistment . . . be opened without regard to race, color or restriction to every male citizen. . . .’’ The Reverend H. H. Proctor suggested that young black men be organized into companies and young women be given Red Cross work to do. While acknowledging that ‘‘we have our local differences,’’ Proctor said that blacks had everything to gain by being loyal. The Reverend James Bond said that the black man could be depended on: ‘‘All he asks for is a chance to fight, and if need be die for the flag of his country. . . . He wants to stand shoulder to shoulder with his white brother. . . . It is fitting that in this hour of the nation’s peril all internal differences cease and that black men and white men alike be welded into one mighty unit for the country’s good.’’ 18 Like whites, blacks attended the mass patriotic rallies common throughout the region in the spring and early summer of . In Purvis, Mississippi, blacks rallied to demonstrate their loyalty to the government. In Augusta, Georgia, a rally of eight hundred blacks ‘‘passed patriotic resolutions, announced their readiness to take up arms for the flag, and appealed to the state and federal governments that they be shown a way they can enlist under the colors.’’ In Thomasville, Georgia, a prominent black leader promised that he could raise a company of black soldiers whenever the government called for troops.19 This could hardly have been reassuring to white racists, who feared armed and trained blacks. Some southern whites had opposed the draft because it would put black men in uniform and give them guns. In July , A. T. Dent, a Macon, Mississippi, lawyer, wrote to Senator John Sharp Williams concerning the possibility of black officers giving orders to white enlisted men: ‘‘this will cause serious friction, and will either cause open rebellion in camp, or serious trouble with the negros who remain at home, and who will hear and know of this. . . . Some would prefer German to negro control.’’ Dent wanted no black soldiers at all, saying, ‘‘We would much prefer to do all the fighting for the negro, and exempt him entirely from army duty. You know that no southern man can eat with a negro, at the same table, nor will they take  from a negro.’’ Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi warned in April  that the draft would put ‘‘arrogant strutting representatives of the black soldiery in every community.’’ Events in the summer of  did little to allay these fears.20 When the United States entered World War I, about ten thousand black men served as regulars in the U.S. Army. Rather than sending these men to France, the army shifted them to guard duty in the Philippines, Hawaii, and along the Mexican border: in short, to places where they would be less likely

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to encounter white Americans allergic to the sight of black men in uniform. However, the Third Battalion, Twenty-fourth Infantry, was sent to Houston, Texas, in July to serve during the construction of Camp Logan. The men of the Third Battalion chafed over their treatment in Houston and were targeted for abuse by the Houston city police. On August , one of the soldiers saw a white policeman beating up a black woman. He tried to intervene but was himself beaten and arrested. When a corporal came to the jail to see about him, he was also beaten. That night a group of men from the battalion armed themselves and marched into Houston. When the evening was over, four white policemen and eleven white civilians had been killed, along with four of the black soldiers (two shot, accidentally, by their own men.) The army called the affair a mutiny, arrested the entire battalion, and eventually court-martialed and executed nineteen black soldiers.21 The Daily Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, captured southern white reaction with an August  editorial: ‘‘It is not a matter of who is to blame. It matters not after the damage has been done. It is a certainty that so long as negro troops are located in the South, such things . . . will continue to take place.’’ The editorial continued, ‘‘The white people of the South know it, and so do the negroes, and the sooner Secretary Baker learns it and removes these negro soldiers, the better it will be.’’ 22 The Houston riot seriously disrupted the Wilson administration’s war mobilization plans. During the summer of , draft boards throughout the nation labored to process the men who had been registered in June. By August, the boards had begun to announce their call-ups. The southern draft boards produced lists that reflected the impact of the provost marshal general’s rules on dependency and income, as well as the draft boards’ own prejudices and susceptibility to local pressures. Although  percent of the national population was black,  percent of the first draft call of , men was African American. These men were scheduled to go to army camps in late summer and early fall. But after the Houston riot, southern political leaders demanded that black troops be removed from their states. Under pressure from powerful southern congressmen, Secretary of War Newton Baker halted the call-up of black men on September . While white southern men boarded trains for army camps, black men stayed home. The federal government did not resume inducting blacks into the army until the spring of .23 Once inducted, black soldiers rarely saw combat. The U.S. Army’s white officer corps did not believe that black men could serve effectively as soldiers in a modern army at war. Over  percent of all blacks in the World War I army served in labor battalions. Only two divisions, the Ninety-third and the Ninety-second, actually went into battle. The Ninety-third was, in effect, given

Draft Dodging  to the French to command—with instructions from the American army not to ‘‘spoil’’ black troops by treating them as social equals. Despite this, the Ninetythird served with great distinction, took high casualties, and piled up honors: Three of the division’s four regiments were awarded the Croix de Guerre. The Ninety-second, under control of the U.S. Army, was misused and mistreated, and at the end of the war, it was held up as an example of the inefficiency and cowardice of black troops. No black soldiers were allowed to march in the Allied victory parade through Paris at the end of the war.24 While many planters in the black belt must have sighed with relief to find that their black labor would not be called up during the harvest season of , other white southerners reacted with anger against what they saw as racially based injustice. In Franklin County, North Carolina, the draft board stated, ‘‘All whites so far have been sent to Camp and no negroes which has created bitter unrest and dissatisfaction among our people, and it is difficult to explain the lack of camp facilities to the complainants.’’ In their reports to the provost marshal general in the fall of , draft boards throughout the region stated that they found it difficult to fill their draft quotas without inducting blacks. In North Carolina, Arkansas, and Florida, boards noted public discontent with the government’s failure to take black men into the army at the same time as whites and warned that this resentment would have adverse effects on race relations in their locales. In February , a congressman from Kentucky wrote to President Wilson complaining that no black men from his district had been called to service. Representative R. Y. Thomas Jr. said, ‘‘People in Kentucky are not liking it very well, that the negroes are permitted to stay at home and hang around the towns and steal, while the white boys are taken from the farms and sent into the army.’’ These reports suggest that federal draft policies, along with the social and economic upheavals accompanying war, may have contributed to the marked increase of lynching in –.25 Wartime lynchings, according to Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, ‘‘sometimes showed a shocking new tendency toward hysterical hatred and sadism.’’ This may be evidenced by looking at a string of murders in Tennessee. In May , a mob abducted accused murderer El Persons from the Memphis jail, cut his ears off, and burned him to death before a cheering crowd of thousands. In December , a crowd in Dyersburg burned Ligon Scott at the stake, having previously tortured him with hot pokers. (One black newspaper headlined its story on the Scott murder ‘‘Tennessee Lynching Outrivals Worst German Atrocities.’’) In February , lynchers in Estill Springs killed a black man named McLeherran and also the Reverend George W. Wyse, a black clergyman accused of having given him shelter. In May , Thomas Devert was lynched at Erwin. Whites then forced the entire black population of the

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town to witness the burning of Devert’s body. In July , lynchers in Memphis recapitulated the Persons lynching with modifications: This time they threw the head of the man they had killed into a roomful of black physicians.26 These lynchings shocked the state’s genteel whites and provoked protests from black radicals and moderates alike. S. L. Chesnutt of Rogersville, who characterized himself as a lawyer, a Democrat, the son of a slaveholder, and a ‘‘Southern man,’’ called on Governor Rye to prosecute the local authorities in Estill Springs who had allowed the lynching to take place. In , the most prominent businessmen of Nashville formed a Law and Order League, which they hoped would prevent further lynchings. The ’s national secretary, John Shillady, sent a telegram to Rye asking that he bring the lynchers to justice. In April , the Reverend J. A. Jones, the presiding elder of the North Nashville District of the Tennessee Conference, African Methodist Episcopal () Church, wrote to the governor after a black bootlegger had been hanged and burned in Lexington. Jones asked the governor why he did not do something about mob violence in the state: ‘‘Governor, we have boys at the front, fighting for this country.’’ To this letter, Rye replied that he had done as much as the law allowed: In the specific case referred to by Reverend Jones, he had called local authorities to see if help was needed and had been told no.27 Rye’s files also contain one letter from a self-identified ‘‘former mob leader’’ justifying the practice: ‘‘Womanhood is our Glory and what keeps us all from being barbarians[.] So let us all protect it and give thanks that we have it in this world to protect.’’ The use of traditional sexualized rhetoric to defend lynching, however, should not obscure the fact that the context in which such rhetoric was being used had changed and that whites were responding to those changes with violence. Despite President Wilson’s announcement that ‘‘lynching is unpatriotic,’’ reported lynchings in the nation as a whole increased during the war.28 In ‘‘The Sociogenesis of Lynching,’’ Roberta Senechal de la Roche argues that lynching, which she sees as a form of social control, occurred most often in situations manifesting certain structural characteristics. She notes that white southerners rarely lynched blacks they knew well or that they needed as workers. In short, white southerners lynched strangers, not the people they called ‘‘our Negroes.’’ Applying this concept to the World War I period, when thousands of working-class southerners, black and white, moved from locales where they were well known to take up jobs in places where they were newcomers, helps in part to explain the increase in lynching. However, the presence of black strangers in many southern communities in – was itself a product of the war and the draft, which took white men off to the army while leaving black men at home. It is hard to believe that the wartime increase in

Draft Dodging  lynching did not reflect, at least in part, resentment of what white southerners perceived as an injustice. The nation’s draft policies were in no way under the control of the southern black population and indeed reflected the bigotry prevalent in the nation and its institutions, including the army; but when did rationality ever stop scapegoating? 29 In March , black men were finally called up for service. The black newspaper in Savannah described the passage of trains to Camp Gordon, Georgia: ‘‘The Tennessee contingent of Negroes on their way to camp, passed by the bloody pyre of a burned negro . . . on their way to fight for the enthronement of that magic institution, Democracy.’’ The trains carrying Georgia conscripts rolled past ‘‘the stark and mutilated bodies of Best and Dansey.’’ And then, ‘‘farther on, at break of day,’’ the Georgia conscripts saw the body of another black man, ‘‘shot up the night before’’ by reveling ‘‘white brutes who in day time wear the soubriquet of ‘citizens and Americans.’ ’’ The writer concluded by evoking the usual banalities of well-meaning white rhetoric about race: ‘‘we know,’’ he said, that blacks are loyal, have made progress, have reduced illiteracy; ‘‘we know’’ that the South is the race’s natural home—but ‘‘We don’t want to hear it any more.’’ He called on whites to stop lynching. Significantly, the editorial was entitled ‘‘America’s Changing Heart.’’ 30 This was the context in which black Americans were urged to show their patriotism. In the spring of , local agencies of war mobilization, acting under the imprimatur of the federal government, organized mass patriotic rallies in support of the latest Liberty loans or War Savings Stamp drives in communities from Maine to California. In the South, these patriotic pageants took on a specific racial spin. In New Orleans, blacks marched carrying American flags and banners that read, ‘‘What It Takes to Lick the Kaiser, We’ve Got It’’ and ‘‘The Colored Man is No Slacker.’’ In Savannah, the black community put on a parade in support of Thrift Stamps. The local black newspaper reported that twenty thousand people, including students, businesspeople, fraternal organizations, club members, and the ‘‘husky, robust, stalwart men of the waterfront, some  strong,’’ marched through town for an hour and forty minutes.31 In Georgia, blacks put on displays that demonstrated not only patriotism but also racial pride, thrown in the face of lynchers and their own government’s degradation of black men. In April , ten thousand blacks marched through Atlanta, led by two detachments of black soldiers from Camp Gordon. A sign in the parade read, ‘‘Mr. Kaiser, you’d better lay down your gun; fast black will never run.’’ Following them were contingents from the black fraternal and sororal organizations, black college students, messenger boys, chauffeurs, and waiters from the town’s finest restaurants. One group of waiters had prepared a float, ‘‘which showed these men arranging spotless napery and

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shining silver on tempting banquet boards.’’ The Atlanta Constitution reporter who covered the story described an elderly black man, ‘‘gray and feeble, but he marched stubbornly along with his little flag bravely waving above his head. As he marched, from time to time, he raised his head and intoned: ‘Ebenezer Baptis’ goin’ ovah—les’ go!’’ The reporter commented that every house in Atlanta must have been missing ‘‘its cooks and butlers and maids today . . . and washing will come home a day late for a certainty. But not a person will complain who saw that parade. It was worth it.’’ Despite the writer’s patronizing attitude (and his class-based blindness: not every white household in Atlanta had a maid, let alone a cook and a butler), he recognized that he was seeing a display of power: ‘‘A weapon now forging which, when ready, will not be the least of the many instruments of vengeance which will compel restitution from the Kaiser and his staff. . . .’’ 32 Such parades intrinsically violated the New South racial order. Had blacks been marching for their own cause, the parades would not have been tolerated by white civic authorities. But under the mandate of war mobilization, black southerners got to drop their cloaks of invisibility and appear as themselves, not simply as hands turned to labor. They marched as members of churches, schools, and clubs, not as maids, cooks, and butlers. Those who did appear in their occupational roles made points about how they saw themselves (as elegant and debonair, in the case of the Atlanta waiters). Consider the spectacle of nine hundred Savannah stevedores marching through town, exemplars of masculine strength, patriotism, and pride: not attributes white racists wanted to see embodied in black men. The Atlanta Constitution headlined its story, ‘‘When the Negroes Marched By.’’ Imagining the impact upon whites of black soldiers marching through Atlanta and Savannah, one may wonder if the reporter’s decision to open his story by calling the assembled black marchers ‘‘A weapon now being forged’’ was not, in some way, a Freudian slip. In St. Louis, Missouri, just across the state line from the site of the worst race riot of , blacks marched on June , , for ‘‘Negro Loyalty Day.’’ 33

White Paternalism, Black Labor In his essay on rural Georgia during World War I, Gerald E. Shenk examines the impact of class, race, and gender on conscription and concludes that ‘‘there was little distinction between private power and public, or state, authority’’ and that ‘‘the state was an extension of the informal social relations by which dominant white males justified their exercise of power.’’ During the war, wealthy white Georgians used various mechanisms to ensure that they maintained control of their black labor. They influenced local draft boards to obtain

Draft Dodging  exemptions for their workers. If their men were drafted, they obtained lengthy agricultural furloughs for them. Some planters kept control of their black labor by either denying them access to their mail, so that they never received their draft notices, or refusing to read them the notices when they came. Men who never answered their draft notices became ‘‘deserters,’’ according to draft regulations. Their employers could then turn them in and receive a monetary reward. Meanwhile, Shenk notes, women planters and white small farmers received no such consideration: Women had trouble getting their workers exempted, and white farmers complained that black labor got furloughs when they could not. In Georgia in –, it paid to be ‘‘the man.’’ 34 Selective Service records indicate that the pattern Shenk discerned in Georgia’s black belt was duplicated throughout the South. In –, many southern whites continued to act as if they owned black labor, as individuals and as a race. In Houston County, Alabama, people suspected the draft board of telling conscripts that they had been exempted and then arresting them as deserters for the federal government’s fifty-dollar reward. The draft board chairman, John A. May, also did favors for prominent whites in Dothan, the Houston County seat. C. R. Newsome, a landowner and proprietor of a local hotel, was upset when one of his farm workers was called to service. ‘‘I asked Mr. May if he could not let Ulasas finish my crop, as I had no one to attend to it. . . . I told him that I had four negroes around the hotel and that he could substitute either one of these for Ulasas.’’ Newsome told federal investigators that ‘‘the negro went back to the farm and stayed four or five weeks’’ before he was called and sent to camp.35 In Leon County, Texas, the local draft board faced accusations of violating the federal peonage law after members of the board threatened to revoke draft exemptions unless men went to work for them. In one case, Jim Turner, married, with two children, and by all evidence a respectable and valued worker, had been assured of an exemption by a member of the draft board, Dr. Boggs. But in October , Turner was called for examination. As board members later told a Bureau of Investigation agent, they reclassified Turner as A-1 because they heard that he had said he would have a white wife and a farm when the white boys were gone, but then they reexempted him because ‘‘they decided he could work for Dr. Boggs and make a crop there this coming year and that [a white friend of Boggs] would keep a watch on Jim Turner and be responsible for his good conduct.’’ In a later investigation, Turner ‘‘bitterly denied’’ that he had ever publicly coveted white men’s women or lands, and other blacks in the county backed him up. But in the summer of , facing the threat of conscription, Turner agreed to work for Boggs. Instead, however, he took a job on the Wilson plantation, moving his family with him. The draft

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board found him, and Boggs and two other white men showed up at the Wilson plantation to take him away. But Thomas D. Wilson and his overseer, Offa Williams, blocked them. Wilson told the board that if Turner had an exemption they had no power to send him to war. Bud Gilbert, a man described by the Bureau of Investigation as one of the board’s ‘‘hangers on,’’ replied, ‘‘that often one could do certain things by influence and place of responsibility.’’ Boggs and Gilbert tried to buy off the overseer, Offa Williams, but to no avail: ‘‘They offered to pay me what the negro owed me. I had assured the negro protection and saw that he did not want to go, so I told Mr. Gilbert and Boggs that I did not want their money.’’ 36 By coming onto the Wilson plantation and interfering with workers there, the Leon County Draft Board overstepped the lines of courtesy between whites and infuriated both Wilson and Williams. Both men filed affidavits in defense of Turner and went on record saying that ‘‘the negroes are being treated outrageously.’’ Eventually, Boggs, Gilbert, Green, and others were accused of violating federal peonage laws and had to defend themselves before federal investigators, whose reports wound up in the provost marshal general’s records. Indeed, Turner’s case was not the one for which Boggs and the others were being prosecuted. Instead, two other men, Seley Cooper and Bully Drayden, were named as victims.37 The provost marshal general’s records do not indicate the outcome of the peonage charges against the Leon County draft board members. The case seems to have petered out with the end of the war. Turner’s employer, Thomas Wilson, continued to take an interest in him and in April  wrote to bureau investigator C. B. Braun to tell him that Turner had been deferred by the local board until the end of the present quota. Given the timing, it seems likely that Turner was able to stay out of the army through the end of the war. It also seems likely that, if the board had not affronted Wilson and Williams, Turner’s fate would have been very different.38 Without white sponsorship, blacks who complained about draft boards found it hard to obtain satisfaction. Many wrote to Emmett J. Scott, the special assistant to the secretary of war. Scott, formerly Booker T. Washington’s private secretary, had been appointed by Secretary Baker as his liaison to the black community in August  after the Houston riot. In July , Charles C. Hodges wrote to him in clear, educated cursive: We the colored people of Fayett Co. [Tennessee] feels that we are not treated justly before our local board on examining colored draftees. We are perfectly willing to go forward in the discharge of our duty in this great conflict, which is now disturbing the people of every nation . . .

Draft Dodging  and everone should feel that he has a part to play and can and must do something to win democracy for this country. But to win we must be fair with one another, and not divided against ourselves. We have freely taken out Liberty Bonds . . . and donated to the Red Cross and sent our sons at the call of the government to the camps and are willing to move in any direction that Sec. Baker or Pres. Wilson should say for us to go. Mr. Scott you know better than I that there are some who claims to be loyal to this government are traitors to its cause but I can say with a clear conscience that the most dangerous ones are not in the Negro race. Hodges complained that a local white family had certified a certain Earnest Walker as draft age, although Walker was actually thirty-four: ‘‘The Crooks comes and get him and cares him before the board, his mother his friends who know when he was born all testified and swore that he was  years old, but Mr. Crook who is an enemy to all negroes’’ convinced the board that Walker was under thirty-one, ‘‘so the board forced him to register at once and sent him to camp yesterday.’’ Hodges charged that the white family was making money by turning in supposed slackers, obtaining a fifty-dollar reward for each man brought in.39 Scott forwarded the complaint to Provost Marshal General Crowder, who forwarded it to Tennessee governor Thomas Rye, who sent it to Rutledge Smith, the man in charge of conscription and war mobilization in Tennessee, who sent it back to Crowder on August , saying that the local board in Fayette County had witnesses who would attest that Walker was subject to registration. Crowder then forwarded the communications back to Scott with a note saying that if Scott wanted more information, he should let Crowder know. By that time, Walker would have been in camp for more than a month, and there, apparently, he stayed.40 Scott asked that Arkansas authorities investigate the draft boards of Pulaski County after he received a letter in July  from Milton Wayman Guy, a Little Rock attorney, alleging that blacks were not being treated fairly. Guy wrote, ‘‘The injustice is all the more flagrant because if a Negro is a tenant or works for some influential white man, he can ‘get by the board’ as they put it. The Negro who is somewhat dependent, has his own farm or business, is the one who is hard hit. White men in the same class are placed in Class IV, while Negroes are placed in .’’ State investigators concluded that the allegations were not well founded. In one case, the state investigator found that a black married man who had been drafted contributed  annually to his wife, mother, and sister, but the investigator argued that the man’s contribution to his wife was no more than he would make in the army and that his mother and sister could be

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supported by other family members. Therefore, the investigator argued, the man’s 2-B classification should actually be upgraded to 1-A, making him more eligible for the draft. In this case, Scott’s intervention seems to have actually made matters worse for the black man involved.41 Provost Marshal General Crowder, the Bureau of Investigation, and North Carolina governor Thomas Bickett were all stymied by the behavior of one of the board members in Pitt County. In December , Governor Bickett received a letter alleging that J. J. Laughinghouse cursed at registrants and called people slackers. The writer, who signed himself ‘‘A. Trencher,’’ wrote, ‘‘we weaklings over whom you have placed him, must go to the trenches out of order to suit his unfair whims.’’ 42 A long investigation ensued. Bureau agent Dorsey Phillips reported in January  that the Pitt County board had exempted wealthy white men’s sons ‘‘on very flimsy grounds.’’ The physician who worked with the board had quit in disgust. On the other hand, the board had drafted by mistake a black man whose last name happened to be the same as that of the actual conscript. This mistake was discovered when the man was already at the depot to board the train for camp. The draft board’s clerk had phoned Laughinghouse to ask him what to do and was told, ‘‘Oh well! He has his ticket now let him go on.’’ In April , Phillips filed an additional report. In it, he outlined other complaints made against Laughinghouse: that he made changes in men’s classifications without consultation with other members of the board; that he made changes in the questionnaires filled out by potential conscripts; that he had said the board should send all negroes possible and save the white men. Board members remembered hearing Laughinghouse say, ‘‘Hell, laws are made to be violated, aren’t they violated every day?’’ One of the clerks working for the board quit when Laughinghouse told her to place on the deferred list a black man who worked as a clerk for a friend of his and to send someone else in his place.43 Although state and federal authorities agreed that Laughinghouse had to be removed from the Pitt County Draft Board, doing so proved difficult. He was politically prominent, having managed campaigns for previous governors, and his son-in-law was the state’s current secretary of state. The Bickett administration was unable to get Laughinghouse to resign. In May , the entire Pitt County Draft Board was reconstituted and Laughinghouse was removed. In the late fall and early winter of , the Bureau of Investigation and the provost marshal general’s office were still considering prosecuting Laughinghouse. In December, John D. Langston, the ‘‘Acting Chief of Classification Division’’ in North Carolina, wrote to the provost marshal general’s office to suggest that prosecuting Laughinghouse would not be worth the trouble. Al-

Draft Dodging  though Laughinghouse was ‘‘one of the worst scoundrels yet unhung,’’ he was over seventy years old, he had already been discredited and humiliated, and prosecuting him might raise public sympathy for him.44 The provost marshal general’s records do not indicate what happened to the man who was sent in place of Laughinghouse’s friend’s cook nor what befell the man who was sent to war because he had the wrong last name. As the Laughinghouse story illustrates, draft board abuses often had as much to do with class as with race. In many parts of the South, blacks got exemptions or did not get exemptions according to their value, or lack thereof, to influential whites. The sons of rich white men could ‘‘get by the board,’’ but ordinary white men, having no influential friends, might not be able to get exemptions at all. (It may be noted that the original complaint against Laughinghouse from ‘‘A. Trencher’’ makes no mention of race, a good indication that the writer was white.) On the other hand, evidence that some draft boards abused poor people regardless of color does not mean that class always mattered more than race. An examination of southern applications of workor-fight laws illustrates the point. By the spring of , national indignation over ‘‘slackers’’ produced calls for legislation forcing men to either join the army or get jobs. By that date, several states had already enacted work-or-fight laws, with Maryland and South Dakota leading the way, having passed legislation in August  and January , respectively. In May , Provost Marshal General Crowder issued a national ‘‘work or fight’’ order requiring men to take jobs in farms or factories and threatening slackers with immediate conscription. In the South, Georgia and Louisiana followed Crowder’s initiative by passing their own work-orfight laws.45 As Cindy Hahamovitch has shown, much of the impetus for the state and national work-or-fight laws came from farmers who complained that they could not get workers to tend their crops. Southern farm owners in particular cited labor shortages. As Hahamovitch notes, planters did not really run short of available workers but rather experienced shortages of people who were willing in – to work for the wages that southern employers were willing to pay them.46 In August , the Mississippi State Council of National Defense took up the problem of black workers leaving the state. The assembled members of the council agreed that something had to be done ‘‘to satisfy the labor of the State by the payment of better wages and the rendering of justice in all the courts’’ and passed resolutions calling for all Mississippians to respect ‘‘the liberty and property rights of the negroes.’’ At the meeting, various members of the council acknowledged that blacks were leaving because they could get better pay

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Draft Dodging

elsewhere. Once gone, they were hard to get back, according to E. C. McInnis, the district farm demonstrator from the Delta. He told the council that the businessmen of Washington County had recently sent a delegation to St. Louis to obtain one thousand negroes, ‘‘but they returned with but four.’’ This part of the meeting was concluded by a statement by L. J. Rowan, the president of Alcorn A&M College for Negroes, ‘‘one of the most intelligent members of his race in the South,’’ who said that the speakers’s ‘‘deductions as to the cause of the exodus of the negroes coincided with his and that of other leaders of the race. All they wanted was a square deal. . . .’’ Or, as a black man waiting for the northbound train told a Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper reporter in July , ‘‘I’ve been working here for a dollar and four bits a day and thats good wages for a nigger in Jackson. Flour is costing me nearly two dollars a sack, meat is so high I can’t eat it. I am leaving because I can’t buy food and keep my folks up on what I can make. If you white folks wants de niggers to stay in the South you will have to make the folks we work for pay us more money.’’ 47 The passage of state work-or-fight laws, followed by Crowder’s order, made it easier for southern planters to control their labor. In Georgia, black men were required to carry employment cards and to have them punched by their employers every day. In Florida, black workers who left an orange grove for higher pay at a neighboring one were rounded up by the sheriff and returned to their former employer. The sheriff told the workers that they could stay where they were or go ‘‘to war, or to jail.’’ 48 One might, by stretching the point, make the case that the production of oranges was essential for the war effort. But it is hard to see how forcing black women to do housework for white women could possibly be construed as contributing to the war. Yet abundant evidence indicates that whites used, or attempted to use, the work-or-fight orders to force black women to work as servants. Hahamovitch cites incidents in Tampa, Florida, where a black woman was arrested for refusing to take a job as cook in a white household; in New Orleans, where twenty-five black women were arrested for not having jobs; in Vicksburg, where two women whose husbands were in the military were tarred and feathered for refusing to work; and in Wetumpka, Alabama, where a judge had his own cook arrested after she quit work. In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, planters complained that black women who received allotments from their soldier husbands would no longer work as domestics and asked that the secretary of war apply the work-or-fight order to women. However, white southern elites apparently did not think that ‘‘work or fight’’ applied to white women at all and certainly not to white women of their class.49 In Bainbridge, Georgia, where police arrested numerous black married women for being unemployed, black men held a protest meeting at the court-

Draft Dodging  house and announced that any attempt to force their wives to take jobs would cause a race riot in which they ‘‘as Colored men would fight them as long as we could get hold of a piece of them.’’ The Bainbridge strategy worked: Fines were assessed, the women were remitted, and the work-or-fight order went unenforced thereafter. According to Hahamovitch, blacks in cities throughout the South, like those in Bainbridge, organized against the application of ‘‘work or fight’’ to black women and mostly succeeded. However, she says that in rural areas, whites continued to use work-or-fight orders to coerce labor for private use.50

Poor Man’s Fight As noted earlier, many white rural southerners believed that a conspiracy of the rich and powerful had driven the United States into World War I to protect their investments. The operations of the draft in the South could only have ratified their suspicion that this was a rich man’s war. The Selective Service’s own regulations required that poor men be denied dependency exemptions if their income was less than a soldier’s pay. Poor whites complained that draft boards favored the rich and politically connected, while filling their quotas with the poor. The federal government’s decision to hold back inducting black troops until the spring of  also had the unintended consequence of placing the South’s share of the burden of fighting in World War I disproportionately on the backs of poor whites. When the Selective Service stopped calling up blacks in September , they did not make a corresponding reduction in the number of troops due from each southern state. Instead, Provost Marshal General Crowder ordered states to fill their quotas for  with white men. Crowder telegraphed Mississippi governor Bilbo to send in  percent of the state’s quota, white men only, to Camp Pike at Little Rock beginning on September . Crowder wrote, ‘‘To compensate for counties that have such a proportion of negroes as to be unable to furnish forty per cent white, send larger increments from counties with high percentages of whites. . . .’’ 51 When Bilbo protested, saying that the district boards could not process exemptions that fast and adding that Crowder’s order would require the induction of practically every white man registered in some counties, Crowder modified his demands. On September , Bilbo informed the district boards of new instructions from the War Department: They were to send in all the men they had available and to continue sending men in as soon as they were certified for service. However, no change was made in the racial composition of the call.52



Draft Dodging

Unable to satisfy the fall  draft quotas without stripping black-majority counties of all white men subject to conscription, governors throughout the South had to do as Crowder instructed Bilbo and fill their quotas from counties with smaller black populations. Given the racial geography of the South, this meant that the draft calls of  fell disproportionately on the hill and mountain counties, where the population was majority white. The decision to draft whites first was made very hurriedly. The Houston riot happened on August , Secretary of War Newton Baker decided on September  to defer inducting blacks, and Crowder’s telegrams to the southern governors went out soon thereafter.53 District and local draft boards had, at most, no more than ten days to modify their rosters, taking black men’s names off and adding whites. In the rush to get the troops to camps by mid-September, local and district draft boards must have felt pressured to certify men for service as quickly as possible. This may explain why a man with a small child and a pregnant wife, like Leon Bright, could not get a dependency deferment or even a day’s delay in his induction to be with his wife during her labor. To assure southern political leaders that the  calls would not be so racially imbalanced, the Selective Service devised a new quota system based on the proportion of black and white population per state. However, inductions based on the new system did not begin until the spring of , when the white troops drafted in the fall of  were already on their way to France. At that point, to ‘‘even the account,’’ as Crowder put it, blacks were drafted in ‘‘unduly large percentages.’’ As John Whiteclay Chambers documents, the ‘‘Selective Service drafted one-third of the black registrants, but only one-quarter of the whites.’’ Most of these black conscripts were, however, in no danger of being shot at, as they were placed in labor battalions. African American troops who went into battle during World War I came mostly from National Guard units.54 Because of racism, black southern draftees went into the service later than whites and rarely were placed in harm’s way. Because of class, wealthy southern whites, their sons, and their black workers received deferments. The combination of those two factors meant that, in the South, World War I really was a poor white man’s fight.

CHAPTER SIX

The Surveillance State Comes to Rural Shade Propaganda and Domestic Espionage in the Southern Countryside

T

he modern-day American surveillance state originated during World War I. In the perceived crisis of war, numerous federal, state, municipal, and military agencies flourished into a sudden excrescence of spies. New intelligence offices were created, and old ones grew. By the end of , Americans were being spied on by the Treasury Department’s Secret Service, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (), the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence, the Post Office, state intelligence agencies, municipal ‘‘Red Squads,’’ and volunteer junior G-men ranging from the Boy Scouts to the enormous, nationwide American Protective League (). In , the attorney general wrote in his annual report, ‘‘It is safe to say that never in its history has this nation been so thoroughly policed as at the present time.’’ 1 In the decades since, historians of many different political standpoints have constructed a rough consensus as to how these events should be told and interpreted. This consensus is founded on two basic assumptions: first, that there was no significant grassroots opposition to the United States’ participation in the First World War; second, that ‘‘hysteria,’’ stirred up by the Wilson administration’s propaganda barrage, prompted the proliferation of home-front spies and vigilantes, who focused mostly on leftists, immigrants, or other supposed outsiders. In recent years, this narrative has been complicated by the recognition that the Bureau of Investigation and , in particular, devoted a great deal of attention during the war to the surveillance of urban, northern African American leaders who were outspoken in their opposition to racial discrimination. Nonetheless, historians of the modern American state tend to treat the World War I period as a stage from which J. Edgar Hoover (then toiling as a lowly file clerk at the bureau) emerged to create the modern . 2 A discussion of the origins of the surveillance state may, therefore, seem



 The Surveillance State out of place in a book about the draft and rural southerners. Yet during World War I, Bureau of Investigation agents were all over the rural South. They drove out into the country to interrogate local merchants in Mississippi, assessed Holiness churches’ claims to pacifism, looked into reported sedition in an all-black community in rural Texas, and traveled deep into the Tennessee countryside to investigate allegations that American soldiers were being sent to France to be made into soap. The rural southerners being investigated were not German spies, immigrants, or even leftists. They were ordinary people, white and black, who in some way or another dissented from service in the Great War. They included young men who refused to show up for their draft induction, black men who spoke clearly about the hypocrisy of the nation’s war for democracy, merchants who would not buy war bonds, preachers who thought that killing people was incompatible with Christianity, and rumormongers whose tales contradicted war propaganda. Historians attentive to the pageant of parades, bond drives, posters, pamphlets, movies, and speeches staged by agencies of war mobilization may have overestimated public support for U.S. intervention in the Great War. In April , federal officials from President Wilson down worried about whether the people of the United States would fall in line behind the administration’s leadership. That concern led to the creation of the nation’s first propaganda bureau and its first serious forays into surveillance and suppression of dissent. To form public opinion, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (), headed by journalist George Creel. Meanwhile, government agents from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation filed reports indicating widespread antiwar dissent among native-born white southerners and even more among blacks. With this knowledge, the Wilson administration’s violations of the rights of free speech, press, assembly, petition, and religion appear in a different light. When Wilson’s team shut down the rural radical press, stifled Tom Watson, attacked the  and jailed its leadership, and sent Bureau of Investigation agents into the southern boondocks to stifle dissent, they may have been acting unconstitutionally, but they were not being silly. The national government reacted seriously to a rational fear that dissent, if allowed to continue, would grow until it impeded the war effort. Targeting dissent, agents of war mobilization from the Bureau of Investigation, , and  moved to shut up dissenters and coerce participation in the war effort.3 In addition to intimidating people into supporting war mobilization and serving as a weapon for various factions in local quarrels, the bureau’s men also acted as the eyes of the state, which was having a hard time seeing into the rural South. As James Scott explained in Seeing like a State, unless people can be named and counted, quantified, studied, and watched, the state can-

The Surveillance State  not, in effect, ‘‘see’’ the population. As Scott notes, this illegibility is one of the traditional forms of resistance to the state, which finds it difficult to order the invisible. Rural southerners were good at being illegible, having no birth certificates, no drivers licenses, no identity cards, and often no standard ways of spelling their names, plus no fixed addresses. Black rural southerners carried opacity before authorities to the level of an art form. State coercion depends on the state’s ability to locate and threaten individuals. In the rural South of –, that was hard to do.4 But the state was not the only actor on stage in the rural South during the war. Ordinary white southerners used the state’s surveillance apparatus to further their own ends, calling in the Bureau of Investigation to maintain their dominance over blacks and assiduously informing on dissenting neighbors, especially those with whom they had personal bones to pick. These are the interlocking themes of this chapter: propaganda and its limitations; surveillance as a weapon to force compliance and as a method of seeing into rural society; and the multitudinous ways in which rural southerners used propaganda and surveillance for their own ends.

Propaganda As the United States government mobilized for war in , President Wilson issued an executive order creating the nation’s first propaganda bureau, the Committee on Public Information, which was funded directly from the president’s executive budget. Under George Creel’s guidance, the  distributed about  million pamphlets, issued six thousand press releases, placed advertisements in magazines, sponsored exhibitions, produced films, and sent out seventy-five thousand ‘‘Four Minute Men,’’ charged with haranguing the public, wherever it gathered, with prowar messages.5 On the local and state level, mobilizing public opinion and financial support for the war fell to the councils of defense. Created as part of the National Defense Act of June , the Council of National Defense () was supposed to help mobilize the economy in time of war. To facilitate this process, state-level councils were created, and below them local-level councils. William Breen’s study of the  indicates that this form of organization, based as it was on the structures of local, state, and federal governance, fit neither the modernizing U.S. economy nor the territorial imperatives of federal government departments. After months of floundering, federal departments and agencies organized for mobilization not by state but by economic sector. Denied any real power, Breen says, the role of the national council and its state and local tributaries became essentially that of mobilizing public opin-



The Surveillance State

ion in favor of the war. In many states, that included directing the suppression of dissenters.6 The southern state councils were the nation’s weakest, receiving at best paltry support from state governments. Mississippi, Arkansas, and South Carolina appropriated no state funds for their councils, while Virginia’s council received ,, and Georgia’s ,. Louisiana’s council received , from the state, making it the best-funded council in the region. In order to operate at all, state councils in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama solicited contributions from the public. Arkansas’s council borrowed money from ‘‘wealthy individuals to finance the work.’’ With the exception of Tennessee, southern states’ councils functioned poorly, if at all. Breen suggests that in Georgia and Mississippi the inefficiency may have been deliberate. Georgia governor Hugh M. Dorsey had been elected with Tom Watson’s support and well knew that many of his constituents did not support the war. In Mississippi, Governor Bilbo, a protégé of Senator Vardaman, faced a conflict between the demands of the Council of National Defense for efficiency and his own desire to be reelected. Bilbo tried to finesse the situation by talking prowar but doing nothing. Breen quotes a July  report that found that the state council in Mississippi ‘‘has not reported any cooperation with the federal government. They have not replied to our first or second questionnaires, and their acknowledgment of our bulletins and letters is not satisfactory.’’ The State Councils Division of the  attributed Bilbo’s attitude to politics, public opinion in Mississippi being ‘‘largely opposed to the war.’’ 7 Disorganized and poorly funded as they may have been, state- and locallevel councils still served as the primary conduit by which war mobilization propaganda reached the rural South. Local councils helped distribute  publications, supported the Red Cross, and promoted Liberty loans and War Savings Stamps. This sounds more complicated than it really was. In most small southern towns, the people who ran the various local mobilization agencies came from the same class and social set. Some states looked to the farm-andhome demonstration agent structures to reach the rural population, and a few tentatively enlisted the cooperation of black leaders in mobilization, always under white supervision. For example, in South Carolina, Sumter County’s council organized committees in black communities, and ‘‘the members of the white township committee visited ‘every colored family and preach[ed] the doctrine of extraordinary food production.’ ’’ However, as such outreach efforts indicate, rural and small-town white elites ran local-level war mobilization efforts in the rural South.8 In areas where patriotism and managerial ability combined, the councils of defense passed the war years in a bustle of publicity and fund-raising. Such was

The Surveillance State



the case in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where town and gown organized war work down to the last knitted sock. Nor did the Chapel Hill council and its fellow agents of mobilization neglect propaganda. For registration day, June , , the local Red Cross purchased flags to be placed on houses and helped organize a parade for the registered men. On July , the town put on a fullscale celebration, with bands, the University of North Carolina  unit, speeches, and a pageant illustrating the friendship of America and France.9 People living outside of Orange County’s towns were certainly welcome to participate in the Chapel Hill council’s activities but sometimes found it hard to do so. Indicative of the effort to include county residents, the Red Cross had a ‘‘Committee on Country Auxiliaries,’’ which made hospital shirts, comfort kits, and bandages and knitted garments. The council’s postwar report explained that such things did not require standardization and were therefore appealing to country women who worked alone in isolated areas. In October , E. C. Branson of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, sociology department sent out prestamped postcards to county residents asking that recipients indicate whether they could help in the next Liberty bond sales drive. While most people said they would be happy to help, some begged off due to the press of work and their inability to get help on the farm.10 For all their inclusiveness, the Chapel Hill organizers probably drew most of their support from the local middle class. Buying Liberty bonds and War Savings Stamps required some disposable income, and doing volunteer work required time. Factory workers, farmers, and farm wives could not often have had the time to come into Chapel Hill for committee meetings, nor could they have devoted much of their work day to volunteer activities. Farm wives donated eggs, jelly, and farm produce and knitted garments, but few could contribute much time to the war effort and maintain the heavy workload of family and farm at home. Much of the councils’ mundane work was done by middleclass women, for whom volunteer work was a kind of reverse conspicuous consumption: By doing volunteer work, a woman demonstrated that the family had enough money to hire someone to do her work in the home. Town and country intersected most on the issue of food production and conservation. The Chapel Hill council’s postwar report commented that ‘‘No single thing showed the patriotic spirit of the people of Orange County during the war more than the cheerful way in which they carried out the irksome rules and regulations of the Food Administration.’’ As a case in point, the report describes how the county food administration decided that no farmers would be allowed to thresh their wheat before July . Although most threshermen acceded to this directive, one or two did not. The report calls this a violation of the law and states that the men involved pled guilty but then voluntarily

 The Surveillance State contributed to the Red Cross, so charges against them were dropped. Since not even Herbert Hoover, the head of the federal Food Administration, could issue edicts with the force of law, one wonders what exactly the two threshermen had been charged with. Nonetheless, this anecdote illustrates the ways in which local war mobilization leaders appropriated to themselves authority not given to them by statute.11 Local councils throughout the South spent a great deal of time promoting the war: urging people to buy war bonds, selling the American cause, rallying support in various ways. Yet the question remains: How much war propaganda actually reached rural southerners, and how much did they buy of what they heard? The Creel committee plastered the nation with posters and sent out millions of pamphlets, a swarm of speakers, numerous touring war expositions, and a series of films, as well as supplying the nation’s teachers with indoctrination materials for their classes. In doing all this, the committee ‘‘mobilized the advertising forces of the country,’’ using the communications and distribution networks already in place to reach into cities and small towns. However, the committee’s efforts to reach the rural population seem to have been relatively minimal, targeting state fairs and the county weekly press. In the summer and fall of , the  sent exhibits to fairs at Waco, Texas; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Atlanta and Valdosta, Georgia; and Jacksonville, Florida. Planned exhibits at Dallas, Texas; Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia; Knoxville, Tennessee; Macon, Georgia; and Shreveport, Louisiana, had to be canceled due to the influenza epidemic. The committee’s news division sent out weekly news summaries to more than twelve thousand ‘‘country’’ papers, which printed (the  estimated) ‘‘as high as , columns a week’’ of government propaganda.12 Despite these efforts, it seems safe to say that rural southerners did not see or hear during their daily routines in home and field the propaganda messages encountered by urban Americans at every turn. The problem was compounded by widespread illiteracy, particularly among African Americans. The  census shows that Texas was the only southern state with an illiteracy rate less than  percent (.), and in several states, illiteracy was in excess of  percent, reaching the regional high in Louisiana at  percent. What good were broadsides, newspaper stories, magazine articles, and so on in reaching a population that could not read them? The classic answer has been that such materials would be read by the literate to their illiterate friends, but that presupposes an interest in prowar propaganda that may or may not have existed. Factor in that most of the war mobilization leaders in the rural South were white small-town bankers, lawyers, and merchants, not exactly the people with

The Surveillance State  whom the rural poor of either race felt comfortable, and the process of transmission becomes even more problematic.13 Consider the problems faced by war mobilizers in rural northeastern Mississippi, where town elites did their best to support the war, with only grudging support from the countryside. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, the local newspaper (the Neshoba Democrat) supported the Wilson administration and devoted much column space to war boosting. In January , the paper ran Red Cross and War Stamp drive news, announced a mass meeting planned by the War Savings Stamps () Committee, and ran a letter from a local serviceman urging that any slackers in the county be blown off the globe. On January , under the heading ‘‘Our Nation,’’ the paper explained that the town’s ministers and leading public men were about to embark upon a speaking tour of rural churches, urging people to be patriotic and buy bonds. In each beat, the war mobilization leaders would speak at multiple rural churches on each of three following Sundays. Beat  alone had meetings scheduled at Herbert, Bethesda, Hester’s Chapel, Mars Hill, Pine Grove, and Golden Grove. The fact that so many meetings were planned shows how widely dispersed the rural population was, while scheduling speeches at churches on Sundays indicates where the town leaders thought they could find their rural neighbors. Yet despite the townsfolk’s careful planning, the speaking tour fell through. On January , the paper announced, ‘‘The extreme bad weather and the inability to use cars in filling these appointments caused the cancellation.’’ 14 In April , the Neshoba Democrat warned the community against what the headline called ‘‘Senseless Talk.’’ According to the paper, ‘‘some men in this county have said some very foolish things about the Liberty Bonds and Thrift Stamps. Some say that the people in town who are active in selling these bonds get half of the amount subscribed and the government the other half, and as long as these bonds are bought by the people the war will continue.’’ Condemning this ‘‘very foolish talk,’’ the writer said, ‘‘Men of intelligence will not make any such remarks. Men who read the papers will know better. . . .’’ The writer continued, ‘‘Then there are others who threaten to take their money from the banks and bury it in order to put it beyond the knowledge of the government authorities.’’ The writer warned that such talk could lead to government prosecution.15 As the Neshoba County mobilization committee’s failed attempt to circuitride for the war effort indicated, it was hard to reach the people who did not read the papers. However, war mobilizers faced different, and sometimes greater, challenges from those who had read the papers until the Wilson administration shut down the antiwar press. Far from being tabulae rasae, ready for inscription with received opinion from Washington, many rural southern-



The Surveillance State

ers had ideas about the war already and maintained those ideas despite propaganda. Ironically, some antiwar southerners drew their texts from propaganda itself. In January , the Bureau of Investigation looked into allegations made against F. M. Orr, a member of the local exemption board in Wildersville, Tennessee, after his chief local political enemy wrote a letter to a Memphis newspaper denouncing him. People in Wildersville said that Orr had cursed President Wilson, saying that he ought to be killed. He had attributed the war to the ‘‘money interests.’’ He had said that this was ‘‘ ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.’ ’’ Finally, Orr had said that young men were being sent to war to be made into soap. Although Orr himself was a Republican, his statements reflect familiarity with socialist and populist antimilitarist rhetoric, especially in his reference to the ‘‘money interests.’’ However, his most inflammatory statement against the war, the accusation that American soldiers were heading for rendering plants, can actually be traced to British propaganda, printed in American newspapers in May , that alleged that the German government was gathering up the bodies of its dead and rendering their fats for soap.16 When propaganda failed, or backfired, direct intervention by federal agents served as the iron fist of state power to force compliance with war mobilization. Federal agents intervened in the rural South for three basic reasons: () to assuage white southerners’ fears; () to squelch religious and political dissenters, not by arresting them (which would have filled the jails and embarrassed the Wilson administration) but by warning them to shut up; and () to find out whether men were of draft age.

White Southerners, the Bureau of Investigation, and the Maintenance of the Southern Racial Order In February , Riley M. Fletcher Berry, a home demonstration agent from Sanford, Florida, wrote to the ‘‘Chief ’’ of the Department of Justice to warn him that trouble was ‘‘being stirred up here among our negroes very evidently by pro-German agents.’’ Having been informed by a local woman farmer that the blacks on her farm had said ‘‘They had no country, etc.,’’ Mrs. Berry began her own personal investigations by interrogating a black woman whom she had known for years. Mrs. Berry asked her ‘‘why her people did not uphold the U.S. government. She said she had not heard much said but the negroes felt they had no ‘say-so’ about anything. I of course told her they could not expect to when so many of them lied and stole (Which she granted as true).’’ While Mrs. Berry worried about the patriotism of Sanford’s blacks, her informant (whom she never names) had a different set of rumors to check out:

The Surveillance State  ‘‘she told me that the day before this a white woman had stopped at a store patronized by negroes . . . and told her that our Gov. Catts was then signing papers to send the negroes back to Africa.’’ Not so, Mrs. Berry said, ‘‘if it were true my husband and I, who work for the Government, would know it. . . .’’ Whether reassured or not, Mrs. Berry’s informant went on to tell her that black women were ‘‘going to stop washing and ironing, and go to farming.’’ Go ahead, said Mrs. Berry, we have plenty of labor to replace you, and besides, my husband (a county agent) tells me that no one will make any money farming this year. Mrs. Berry wrote, ‘‘I mention this as apparently coming from proGermans to make both men and women negroes discontented.’’ In what was apparently a parting shot, the black woman told Mrs. Berry ‘‘that there were Germans here who would ‘set down and talk with the colored people,’ which of course no white person here would do—socially as she meant.’’ 17 Mrs. Berry articulates the great fear confronting many southern whites during the First World War: that blacks, being stirred up by German agents, would rise in rebellion. During  and , southern newspapers repeatedly printed rumors of unrest among the subjugated race. Like Mrs. Berry, other white southerners wrote to the Department of Justice warning of blacks’ disloyalty. What makes Mrs. Berry’s letter so striking is her thoroughness. In only three pages, she managed to hit most of the themes of white paranoia: that blacks were disloyal; that they were liars and thieves; that they would quit working for whites; that black men would attack white women (‘‘Mrs. Harrington said . . . that a little negro boy had told her little son things the negroes intended to do to the white women here when our white men had all been called to war’’); and that, in short, the racial world would be turned upside down (‘‘A white man overhead two negroes say that they would soon be living in the ‘white folks houses’ ’’).18 Mrs. Berry’s tone is also a clue to race relations during World War I. Chatty and informal, she combines the vocabulary of sedition and paranoia with that of domesticity. Because the conversation comes to us through Mrs. Berry, we have only her point of view and, as is so often the case in southern history, see the black woman in the room through white eyes. Even so, Mrs. Berry’s artless narrative tells us more about her informant’s thoughts and attitudes than Mrs. Berry herself seems to have seen. The unintentional comedy of the letter comes in part from the intimation that Mrs. Berry’s helper, while being interrogated about what the black folks were up to, was doing the best she could to use the occasion to interrogate Mrs. Berry herself about what the white folks were up to. Moreover, the woman’s conversation, as recorded by Mrs. Berry, captures something at least of the feelings of one individual black woman in . Mrs. Berry’s ‘‘dependable’’ old acquaintance comes close to open defi-

 The Surveillance State ance of the New South order when she tells her employer that blacks resented their oppression and had plans to leave servitude for self-employment. In –, many black and white southerners’ fears of each other must have been heightened by the intimacy of day-to-day interaction. Whites were afraid that blacks would rise against them, while blacks feared government plots to ship them back to Africa. Perhaps more presciently, upper-class whites worried that the service of black hands would be withdrawn, and then who would do the hard, dirty domestic chores, from changing diapers to scrubbing floors? Many of these concerned whites wrote letters to the federal government that wound up in the files of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. On April , , William Kirten, the deputy prosecuting attorney in Lake Village, Arkansas, wrote to the bureau that Walter Davis, a plantation owner, had told him that the local Negro lodge was plotting insurrection and an alliance with Germany. Kirten added that whites in Lake Village had organized a home guard. By April , an investigation had failed to reveal any planned rebellion, but Kirten informed the bureau, ‘‘our citizens have very effectively by their prompt and vigorous manner brought the Negroes to a full realization of the fact that at all times they will be kept under strict surveillance. . . .’’ Kirten said that any black who failed to ‘‘obey the injunction of the President, ‘Obey the law and keep his mouth shut,’ will be dealt with accordingly.’’ (The ‘‘injunction’’ was actually from Attorney General Thomas Gregory and directed to German aliens living in the United States, not to American citizens, but the fact that Kirten applied it to native-born blacks is in itself significant.)19 On August , , the chair of the Beaumont, Texas, Vigilance Committee hand-delivered to the bureau an affidavit alleging that ‘‘Monroe Bean (Colored)’’ of Buna, Texas, had said that if he had to go to war, ‘‘I will not fight for the United States, but for Germany, for they will equalize with me.’’ 20 H. D. Cocke of Crystal Spring, Mississippi, wrote to President Wilson on March , , to warn him of the potential of a black uprising. Cocke thought that drafting blacks as soldiers would be dangerous but leaving them at home worse. They were not the ‘‘kind and docile’’ people of antebellum times: ‘‘Only yesterday one cook told my daughter that ‘they are saying why should niggers fight for the United States, for they cannot vote, and if Germany gets the United States niggers will be treated better.’ ’’ 21 From Longview, Texas, a would-be informant wrote to President Wilson on April , , that blacks had laid plans to wait until the white men were away at war, at which point they would kill all the old white people and the children and take the women. Also, the Texan wrote, blacks were saying, ‘‘The white man can’t make us go. This is the white man’s country. This is not our country therefore we are not going to fight. The negro’s has’nt got any country.’’ 22

The Surveillance State

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Blacks in Texas might not have felt that they had a country, but some certainly had territory. In April , a bureau agent reported from Victoria, Texas, that whites were concerned about two black preachers who were allegedly inciting an uprising. The problem was that the preachers were at Cedar Lake, an all-black settlement in Big Caney Bottom. The agent pointed out that strange white men would get nowhere in Cedar Lake, because no one would talk to them. Moreover, there had been intermittent warfare between Cedar Lake and neighboring whites for forty years. The agent assured his superiors that there was no reason to go to Cedar Lake: Local whites who had heard the preachers said that their sermons were on mission work in Africa, not the war.23 Some of the conspiracy theories floating out of the South in  seem to have been cobbled together out of old news stories about the Plan of San Diego and newer stories about the Zimmerman telegram. Bureau agent Robert S. Phifer, investigating accusations of sedition in Sharkey County, Mississippi in late April , reported rumors that blacks were planning to go to Mexico to join the Germans. Phifer scoffed: ‘‘I don’t think there is anything in this at all. No nigger in the world is going to leave the Delta for an army in Mexico.’’ Whites in Sharkey County did not all share Phifer’s optimism. The bureau agent recorded a conversation with a local informant who pointed out that blacks outnumbered whites sixteen to one in the county; moreover, the local man said, all the blacks were armed. If Germans tried to stir up trouble, the informant said, whites would take no chances. They would ‘‘murder or massacre the negroes until the trouble is quieted.’’ 24 With rumors of insurrection in the wind, many southern whites maintained their trust in ‘‘our Negroes,’’ while doubting the loyalty of blacks in other parts of the South. Thus the Atlanta Constitution published reports of black ‘‘unrest’’ in Richmond, Virginia (‘‘a sullen and ugly spirit prevails among the younger negroes which has caused uneasiness among the older ones’’), and in Jacksonville, Florida (a school janitor ‘‘spoke disparagingly of the white population to school children’’). But the Constitution ran numerous stories describing the loyalty of local Georgia blacks, including a dispatch from Augusta headlined ‘‘Georgia Negroes Hoot at Idea of Disloyalty.’’ On April , , the Constitution published an editorial, ‘‘On a Cold Scent!’’ stating that the idea that German agents could win over blacks to their cause ‘‘will not be taken seriously here in the south, where the negro is better known than anywhere else.’’ To prove that blacks were trustworthy, Clark Howell, the editor, cited their behavior during the Civil War, when black men had protected white women and children, the aged, and the crippled: ‘‘history does not record an instance in which a negro as much as lifted his finger in violation of the honor or the

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The Surveillance State

rights of the helpless ones in their keeping.’’ To think that ‘‘negroes would lend themselves to the enemies of their country’’ now, ‘‘when all are free and privileged to enjoy life as they will,’’ Howell said, was ‘‘preposterous.’’ Howell did not quote from the black newspapers around the country then denouncing the hypocrisy of a government supposedly fighting for freedom while denying liberty and equal protection to black citizens. In a July , , article in the Baltimore Afro-American titled ‘‘Thinks We Ought to Leave if We Are Not Treated Better,’’ Albert Johnson Jr. asked why black men should go into the army without being drafted, given that ‘‘Dogs of the South have more privilege than a black man in East St. Louis.’’ 25 The nation’s domestic intelligence agencies and the Wilson administration in general shared white rural southerners’ suspicion of blacks and their assumption that discontent with the existing racial order was de facto ‘‘proGerman.’’ Yet while federal surveillance targeted the  and militant black newspapers like the Chicago Defender, agents in the South also paid visits to ordinary black men and women who said things that seemed subversive to whites. In April , Jacob Sutton, a black, seventy-year-old Virginian, was denounced to the Bureau of Investigation for saying ‘‘we niggers don’t have to go to war anyhow, let the Germans come over here’’ and ‘‘A white man can do what he pleases with a negro woman, and nothing is done or said, but just let us look at a white woman, and they are ready to lynch us.’’ According to Agent Jos. H. Bauserman, local whites were talking about lynching the outspoken old man. To avert this, agents brought him in for a lecture, in which they warned him to ‘‘preach the doctrine of pure unadulterated Americanism.’’ 26 A similar intervention in Texas had a happier outcome for the supposed ‘‘Negro Agitator’’ involved. In a ten-page report, agent J. H. Harper described how he traveled out from Corsicana in August  to investigate reports against Ollie Bryant, who was accused of stirring up dissatisfaction among ‘‘the negroes living down below the town of Kerene about ten miles near the Post Offices of Rural Shade and Round Prairie, Texas.’’ According to Sheriff Currington, Bryant was a ‘‘forward nigger’’ who urged his black neighbors to be ‘‘independent, trade with each other and wherever possible favor each other to the exclusion of the white people. . . .’’ The sheriff said that Bryant ‘‘had of late been encouraging the ignorant ones to cease enlisting, and if necessary to resist the draft, stay at home, and be ready when the young men had gone home to take the country. . . .’’ Harper made his way out to the vicinity of Rural Shade and commenced his investigation. When questioned, the people who were the supposed source of the accusations against Bryant could not recall ever hearing him say anything inflammatory. (One white man did remember hearing Bryant’s stepfather, with whom he was feuding, make accusations

The Surveillance State  against him.) Harper came to the conclusion that a white bootlegger in the community had denounced Bryant in order to get a bureau man to come out and scare the black population, which, Harper said, had clearly worked: ‘‘it acted in a salutary manner upon the negroes in that country and will be talked of by them for some time to come.’’ 27 In their search for potentially dangerous black rebels, bureau agents ignored crimes by whites against blacks. In June , Agent Mark Hanna investigated a complaint by an informant in Birmingham against F. W. Matthews, who was accused of saying that when the white men left, ‘‘the negroes would have things their own way, and come into their own, and then marry white women.’’ Hanna went down to the commissary of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company to inquire after Matthews. The clerks told him that Matthews ‘‘had skipped out, because a night or two ago, two negroes had quoted him regarding his statement as to white women, and that the next morning these same two negroes were found dead out in a nearby ditch.’’ Hanna concluded that the murders had ‘‘put a quietus on the negro element of this section. . . . I am of the opinion that there will be no further trouble in this neighborhood over war arguments.’’ 28 The records do not indicate whether Hanna thought that the murder of two black men for nothing more than talking might have a detrimental effect on attempts to gain black support for the war. Bureau records from this period show that most agents took white violence against blacks for granted. Agents wrote about white-on-black violence casually, without shock and without any suggestion that murdering black men was against the law. The provost marshal general’s office, on the other hand, did on occasion try to intervene in southern racial matters. In June , informed that a local constable had severely beaten a black man who was passing through his town on the way home to register for the draft, Crowder’s staff sent a letter that condemned the action as ‘‘inexcusable’’ and pressured state and local authorities to take action against the constable. But while the bureau sent agents deep into the southern hinterlands to investigate sexualized, paranoid rumors of racial insurrection, white terror against the black population seems to have fallen under the heading of business as usual.29

Matters of Faith While interrogating people in Rural Shade and Round Prairie, Texas, about the ‘‘forward’’ Ollie Bryant, bureau agent Harper also heard another disturbing rumor: ‘‘Was told that the negroes were holding meetings all night at a Masonic Hall or Negro Lodge Room of some kind. That it was picketed; that

 The Surveillance State no white man could get near it and hear anything. . . .’’ Harper decided to investigate. After dusk fell that night, he took a companion and walked through the fields to the meeting place, which proved to be a church. Harper described what he found: If there were any ‘‘Pickets’’, we saw none; if the meeting was a secret one failed to discover it, as a colored brother was busily engaged in sending one to heaven and about nine of his congregation to the other place, if his description of them was a true one, and the only thing evident was that he undoubtedly believed in long prayers. . . . in fact it was nothing but a negro meeting such as can be seen at this time of year, when roving from place to place picking cotton, in [unintelligible] town in the Southwest. If all the other ‘‘meetings’’ were like this one there was not much to be anticipated in the way of trouble, and a cessation of raids on fowl roosts of their white neighbors, while they were at ‘‘worship,’’ would be a blessing. On going home heard them make no remarks as they seemed occupied in singing. Their thoughts seemed to be on things ‘‘heavenly.’’ [That] All of the negro cabins for two miles around were lightened was called to Employee’s attention, but could not see anything to this as after the preaching was over about an hour the lights went out.30 As comical as the picture of a bureau agent skulking through the cotton fields to keep watch over a revival meeting may be, Harper’s surveillance of people at church was not unusual in –. Although most of the mainstream Christian denominations, evangelical and otherwise, decided in  that Jesus would want them to kill Germans, not all ministers agreed. Throughout the nation, dissenting ministers lost their pulpits and were beaten and jailed. Quakers came in for their usual share of abuse. The nascent religious body now known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses also suffered greatly from federal surveillance and prosecution during the war, mostly for distributing a book, The Finished Mystery, by their founder, Charles T. Russell, in which he described patriotism as satanic. Ultimately, the federal government prosecuted the Russellite leadership under the Espionage Act. Convicted, they were sentenced to twenty years in prison.31 Although quantifying government surveillance of religious bodies is not possible, it seems likely that the Holiness people rivaled the Jehovah’s Witnesses as the most snooped-upon religious body, with the Church of God in Christ drawing particular attention from the Bureau of Investigation. Headquartered in Memphis, the  drew members from the black working class in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas and founded new urban congregations when southern blacks moved north. Under

The Surveillance State  the leadership of Charles Harrison Mason, the  had developed what Theodore Kornweibel calls ‘‘an unambiguous prohibition against combatant military service.’’ Mason urged his people to buy Liberty bonds, and he prayed for an American victory, but he also told the young men in his congregations to file for conscientious objector status. Moreover, he labeled the conflict a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. Whites denounced Mason to federal authorities, and the bureau began a long investigation in September . Meanwhile, in January , Mason began enrolling all church members by name and assessing them each twenty-five cents monthly to pay for lawyers for conscripted church members. Whites complained to the bureau that Mason was telling his congregations that men who wanted to stay out of the army should join the church.32 The bureau sent agents to investigate  Churches from California to the rural South. At least one agent filed a report suggesting that Mason be charged with treason. In the spring of , bureau chief Bruce Bielaski ordered that a ‘‘strong case should be prepared [against Mason] in order to make a striking example of some of the alleged agitators.’’ Mason was arrested in June . Bureau agents redoubled their efforts to build their case, interrogating preachers and congregation members throughout the nation and surveilling  services. In late October , the federal government carried its case to a grand jury in Paris, Texas, charging Mason and other  leaders with conspiracy to hinder the draft. When the grand jury refused to indict for lack of evidence, federal prosecutors changed their tactics, charging Mason with swindling his congregations by collecting the twenty-five-cent monthly fee for legal representation. Mason was arrested again, but the war ended, and the cases against him and other  preachers were allowed to lapse.33 The bureau’s investigations of religious people also led agents into the world of wonders that is the homeland of American folk Protestantism, where we teeter on the edge of the End Times, Armageddon is always right around the corner, and John the Revelator speaks directly to the headlines in today’s paper. While members of mainstream American denominations saw World War I as a crusade against evil, Protestant sects were not so sure. In , many rural southerners searched the Book of Revelation for more evidence that the Second Coming of Christ was at hand. In that book, the oncoming Apocalypse is signified by the emergence of the Antichrist, who requires that everyone who wants to buy or sell in the marketplace receive the ‘‘mark of the Beast’’ on their heads. The local board of Morgan County, Kentucky, wrote to the War Department in March  that Holiness preacher Kellie Dyre ‘‘says he will not go to war and fight and says he will not ware the colors and says they cannot make him. He says he would just as soon kill a American as a German.’’ Dyre

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The Surveillance State

had also witnessed a portent. He had seen ‘‘the women with the mark of the beast on their foreheads, which was the Red Cross badge that so many people ware today. . . .’’ 34 W. W. Giles of Browns Summit, North Carolina, also connected the war with the End Times. In , Giles’s publication of a series of religious tracts on current events prompted a bureau investigation. Of particular interest was Giles’s tract ‘‘The Mark of the Beast.’’ Giles wrote, ‘‘We ask, what can this ‘mark’ be?’’ He concluded that it was an invisible sign, placed on the forehead of those who willingly cooperated with the Antichrist and on the right hand of those who were coerced into cooperation. One obtained the mark, Giles said, by paying war taxes. In a later tract, Giles further identified the mark of the beast with militarism. In July , the U.S. Post Office held Giles’s tract ‘‘nonmailable’’ under the Espionage Act. After investigation, the bureau decided to leave Giles alone, barring a warning against distributing his tracts ‘‘for improper purposes.’’ However, in August the chief of , Colonel Churchill, wrote to bureau chief Bielaski suggesting that action be taken against Giles. The bureau’s files do not indicate what happened after that.35

Friends and Neighbors Most white people scrutinized by the Bureau of Investigation got into trouble because they were informed upon by neighbors. Here is an exemplary case: Dr. J. T. Cobb of Haralson County, Georgia, wrote a letter to the U.S. attorney in Atlanta on May , , denouncing a man he termed his ‘‘good friend’’ and ‘‘neighbor,’’ C. S. McLarin. Dr. Cobb wrote, ‘‘I asked him the other day if he really wanted Germany to win this war, and he said what difference would it make with us, and I told him if we won the war it would destroy autocracy in Germany and establish a democracy, and he said that it would not destroy autocracy at Washington, D.C.’’ Agent George G. Calmes went out to Haralson County and interrogated a number of McLarin’s acquaintances, all of whom agreed that the middle-aged farmer was bright, well-educated, a man of good character, and a socialist. He had not bought any Liberty bonds or given anything to the Red Cross. McLarin had, on various occasions, praised Germany, criticized U.S. policies, said that he would not go to war if called, and attributed the United States’ entry into the war to the influence of Wall Street and the Standard Oil Company. Moreover, he had said these things in front of draft-age men, thereby violating the Espionage Act. Agent Calmes got Dr. Cobb to introduce him to McLarin as a traveling salesman. In conversation, McLarin said that the Bolsheviks had the best form of government and predicted that when the war was over, the United States would establish a simi-

The Surveillance State  lar government. On June , Agent Calmes had McLarin arrested. The agent and a U.S. marshal took McLarin to Rome, Georgia, where he was bound over for the U.S. district court. What happened after that, the bureau’s records do not tell.36 In dealing with white dissenters, as with blacks, bureau agents did not usually investigate and arrest. Instead, they intervened as agents of the state to command obedience to war mobilization policies. An agent warned a white Mississippi merchant about his antiwar talk: ‘‘the best thing for me to do was to tell him to keep his mouth shut in the future, especially when negroes were around. He was scared to death.’’ On notice that an anticonscription meeting was being planned in Talladega, Georgia, the bureau sent a ‘‘special employee’’ to the scene; the agent did not find the meeting organizer but did suppress the meeting, sending home the five hundred people waiting for the speaker. Throughout the South, bureau agents disrupted antidraft meetings, threatened dissenters, and preached at the ‘‘ignorant.’’ Clearly, the bureau agent’s role in the southern countryside was as much that of enforcer as of investigator.37 No one who knows anything about the behavior of human beings would be surprised to see people using the awful powers of the wartime state as a weapon against small-town political enemies, detested in-laws, or rival religious factions. However, the very local nature of the quarrels tells us something. In other sections of the country, prowar people abused German Americans, or leftists, or foreigners in general, accusing all sorts of ‘‘others’’ of disloyalty. In the South, blacks served as the ‘‘other,’’ and as we have seen, whites worried obsessively that the war would lead to a racial revolution. Yet many, if not most, vocally antiwar southerners were white, and not only that: They were native-born, of English or Scotch Irish ancestry, and part of the same community as prowar southerners. These were people who had lived in close proximity to prowar southerners for years and would presumably continue to do so after the war. This situation may have had an impact on the conduct within the South of the largest, most powerful volunteer surveillance force during the war, the American Protective League ().

The  in the Rural South In March , A. M. Briggs, a Chicago advertising executive, proposed to Attorney General Thomas Gregory that he be allowed to form a sort of volunteer espionage force. Bureau of Investigation chief Bielaski concurred with this idea. As eventually implemented, the  enrolled about a quarter of a million mostly middle-aged, mostly middle-class business types, who snooped on the

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The Surveillance State

‘‘disloyal’’ and the ‘‘slackers’’ in communities all over the nation. David Kennedy calls them ‘‘a rambunctious, unruly posse comitatus on an unprecedented national scale.’’ They carried cards that said ‘‘Secret Service Division,’’ much to the chagrin of the real Secret Service. The  intimidated dissenters, opened people’s mail, conducted investigations of job applicants for the , the Red Cross, and the War Department, and in general enjoyed many of the privileges and none of the responsibilities of federal agents.38 The foremost scholar of the , Joan Jensen, notes that the ’s organizational structure, which was clear on paper, was actually very disorganized and impromptu. Each state had an  unit, as did most large cities. In her  book, The Price of Vigilance, Jensen documents the ’s activities around the nation sufficiently to send cold chills up the spine of any civil libertarian. Yet research into the organization’s war work has been hampered by the decision of National Archives staffers in the s to only keep ‘‘representative’’ files (New York, North Carolina, Arkansas, California, and Kansas) and to destroy the rest. On orders of the , the  files were also purged of all the bureau’s correspondence. Thus we must infer the activities of the  in the South from the purged North Carolina and Arkansas files. The Arkansas file consists mostly of organizational correspondence. The North Carolina file, on the other hand, illustrates the difficulties the  faced in the rural South.39 Take the town of Statesville, North Carolina. On July , , the  national headquarters in Chicago processed a form letter to George E. French of Statesville asking him to organize an  unit in his town. The letter stated that the  worked under the Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, in ‘‘securing information of the activities of Agents of foreign governments, or persons unfriendly to this government for the protection of public property, etc.’’ The letter instructed French to enroll only American citizens of good standing, adding that throughout the nation the  had recruited ‘‘from the highest type of business and professional men in each town.’’ Once enrolled, the letter continued, the  forces should be organized to keep watch as follows: Company A—hotels, restaurants, and railroad stations, looking for ‘‘unfriendly activity on the part of transients’’; Company B—industrial plants; Company C—telegraph and telephone lines; Company D—steel mills; and Company E—the chemical trade, ‘‘to see that the chemicals used in the manufacture of munitions are not sold to unreliable people.’’ The letter noted that not all these companies might be needed in Statesville and urged French to coordinate his work with ‘‘your Government Agent,’’ previously named as James H. Hammond, special agent, Department of Justice, Columbia, South Carolina.40 On August , , French wrote back to the  declining the assignment.

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First, he said, Statesville had no alien population, ‘‘except a small number of Greeks and one or two Syrians. One Greek and one Syrian have enlisted in the local company of the National Guard.’’ French had consulted with a number of leading citizens about forming an  unit. He, the mayor of Statesville, the president of the flour milling company, a leading attorney, the editor of the local newspaper, and the lieutenant colonel of the ‘‘First North Carolina Regiment’’ all agreed that it was just not necessary. Having twice repeated his earlier statement about the lack of foreign population in North Carolina, French also noted that the factories in the town produced flour, cotton thread, and brick, hardly materials essential to the war effort. Moreover, ‘‘there is no clash or conflict with the working classes.’’ Having bowed out, French included a postscript at the request of the mayor: ‘‘he is having all strangers who stop in the town who look at all suspicious brought before him, and he satisfies himself as to who they are, their business, etc.’’ The  filed the letter with the notation, ‘‘Seems unwilling to accept. Shall we drop—.’’ 41 French was not the only North Carolinian to respectfully decline the position of domestic spy. W. T. Parker of the Parker Paper and Twine Company, High Point, wrote a letter to the  in  stating that the organization the  proposed was too elaborate for High Point. All he needed, he said, was a few people who would inform him about disloyal elements. He would then investigate. The  national headquarters wrote back, insisting that the organizational plan, complete with ‘‘sworn operatives,’’ be followed. In January , Parker wrote a very irritated letter to the  in Washington, asking that they take him off the mailing list. He complained of the ‘‘perfect flood of literature’’ that he had been inundated with since . Parker said that he had helped investigate local cases, at his own expense, but that he had not formed an  unit: ‘‘There would have been a hundred times more work in organizing and keeping it up than in doing the real work of the organization.’’ The files also include other letters expressing doubt concerning the necessity of  units: from North Wilkesboro (‘‘the balance of the county is largely mountainous and is composed of people who have not a great amount of respect for the government and its powers . . . yet there is very little evidence of any disloyalty . . .’’) and from Rockingham (‘‘I do not see that it is needed here. Our population is native with the exception of a few Jews and Russians who are all loyal to the Stars and Stripes’’).42 The  never succeeded in organizing throughout North Carolina. On January , , Bureau of Investigation agent Dorsey Phillips wrote to Charles Daniel Frey, the national director of the , that only two North Carolina counties, New Hanover and Wake, had  organizations. In October , Burett H. Stephens, the  state inspector, wrote to the national

 The Surveillance State headquarters to say that of the one hundred counties in North Carolina, twenty-five had been organized and twelve were ‘‘in process for organization.’’ He hoped to have the state organized by January , . Stephens added that he had so far personally financed the state inspector’s office, but that he hoped that county units could be made self-supporting. His aim, he said, was to ‘‘try and establish a patriotic fraternal spirit and require each member to contribute a fixed amount quarterly to be used in carrying out their work.’’ Stephens’s plan may in itself help explain why prominent North Carolinians were reluctant to sign on for surveillance work: In addition to helping out in all kinds of war mobilization efforts and donating time, they would be asked to pay dues. Moreover, papers in the Wilkes County file indicate that at least some of the  units received information that their  oath placed them under the jurisdiction of the conscription act: ‘‘and you must comply with the instructions sent you, or lay yourself open for prosecution. . . .’’ 43 Although the  never achieved real organizational success in North Carolina, the organization did do its bit for war mobilization. In September , the  chief in Hickory (who was also secretary of the chamber of commerce) wrote to the national organization to denounce the ‘‘pro-German’’ feeling in his community, by which he meant opposition to the draft. He especially singled out H. Q. Alexander, the head of the North Carolina Farmers Union, for his ‘‘radical speech’’ against the draft. In March , E. C. Ivey, the manager of the Ivey Power Company in Lenoir and ‘‘# A.P.L.’’ for the town, asked bureau agent Ernest Hawkins, stationed in Knoxville, to send an agent undercover as a farm laborer or peddler to investigate a local farmer, ‘‘a man of education and a leader in his section,’’ whose influence was ‘‘peculiarly bad.’’ Ivey noted that the neighbors would ‘‘not give evidence when it comes to a show-down’’ but that, in his judgment, it was ‘‘high time to shut the mouths of such men as I have described, as their intelligence and standing in a community largely nullifies the work of patriots.’’ R. D. Lusk, a lumberman from Lexington, negotiated the surrender of several draft evaders who had, Lusk said, ‘‘ ‘stepped back’ into the ‘brush’ to await the war’s end.’’ The Madison  rounded up deserters and sent them off to camp. The Monroe  had ‘‘several cases of slacking on religious grounds. These were handled promptly and sent to Camp Greene, N.C.’’ From Morgantown, Chief R. T. Claywell (secretary of the state board of elections) reported on how the  had investigated Dr. Albert Houk of the local state hospital, who had made what the  considered to be seditious statements. Houk lost his job and was expected to leave town. Claywell wrote, ‘‘as soon as I learn where he will locate, I will notify you, for he should be further watched.’’ The  chief in Salisbury, still on the job in December , laid information against Congressman James H. Pou, who

The Surveillance State  in a private conversation had called President Wilson a Jesuit. The  man asked, ‘‘If as prominent a man as Mr. Pou is, can delibertly speak of our President, as an insidsous treauger [sic], what may we expect of lesser people.’’ 44 When the war ended, the  national headquarters requested each unit to send in a report on its activities. The forms the  supplied included spaces for statistical information (there was a blank for cases of treason, for example) and for a narrative report. The Salisbury ’s report is more complete than most in the National Archives file. The Salisbury unit took responsibility for sending one male ‘‘enemy alien’’ to prison for a year. They had one citizen then facing trial in federal court for disloyalty but noted that others had been brought around by the ‘‘chief ’s persuasion.’’ They had dealt with four cases under the Selective Service regulations and two desertions from camp without leave. They had processed fifteen cases under the work-or-fight law, had investigated six civilian applicants for overseas service, and had sent two prostitutes to the workhouse. In his narrative report, Frank Brown explained, ‘‘We possible worked a little different from the work done by the order in other sections of the country.’’ Having very few aliens, Salisbury had a number of conscientious objectors. Brown visited them and talked to them about why the United States was at war, speaking to them with what one objector termed ‘‘simplicity and kindness.’’ His biggest problem, Brown said, was Lutherans.45 As one of the biggest cities in North Carolina, Wilmington lies outside the scope of this work’s focus on the rural South. Yet the Wilmington ’s file illustrates a very telling point about the organization: It was intended to be white-only. Ironically, the Wilmington  got in trouble for taking seriously its mandate to gather intelligence. Wilmington enrolled Pullman porters, who were certainly in a good position to watch transients. But Pullman porters were black. In addition, the  in Washington heard from the Bureau of Investigation that one of the Wilmington-based Pullman porters was a bootlegger. The national organization wrote to Wilmington stating that they had confiscated the porter’s badge and cautioning, ‘‘It is needless to say that the enrollment of colored men should be approached with great care and discretion not only because of the fact that they are colored men’’ but because ‘‘in most instances the necessary qualities of training, education and cool judgment are not qualities of that race.’’ The Wilmington chief replied that he quite agreed. When the  first organized, they took in fourteen black men and two black women, some of whom, the ‘‘chief ’’ said, were ‘‘excellent, and have proved good agents, but as you say ‘only under my supervision.’ ’’ The national office commended Wilmington for halting the practice of enrolling colored members.46 The  files, incomplete as they are, indicate that the organization did not

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The Surveillance State

have the impact in the rural South that it had in some northern and western states. Other federal records also bear out this conclusion. The organization is rarely, if ever, mentioned in connection with rural areas in the Selective Service records, the Bureau of Investigation records, governors’ papers, or rural newspapers. It may be that the  kept its work in the rural South truly secret; it may be that the bureau’s files have been purged. However, it seems most likely, based on the North Carolina material discussed above, that the ’s presence in the rural South was minimal at best. The southern rural men the  tapped to establish county units seem to have believed that the organization’s purpose was to thwart German agents. Their letters repeatedly state that their locales had no significant foreign population, as a way of either justifying their reluctance to serve or explaining why, having served, they accomplished so little. In the spring and summer of , the  participated in a series of ‘‘slacker raids’’ that swept urban streets for draft evaders. The southern  branches conducted slacker raids in some cities (or so the records indicate), including Wilmington, Little Rock, and Birmingham. However, when  units dealt with rural dissenters, they seem to have followed the route described by R. D. Lusk of Lexington and Frank Brown of Salisbury: They tried to cajole cooperation from draft dodgers and conscientious objectors rather than confronting them. E. C. Ivey stated that it was hard to move against prominent men of good standing in the community. However, Lusk said, ‘‘it was a simple matter to reach [the draft evader] with the advice of a trusted friend—much simpler than sending armed men into a laurel thicket after the fugitive.’’ The enemies of the state faced by the  in the South were not aliens, immigrants, or radicals—not easily stigmatized as ‘‘other.’’ Dealing with them required caution. As Frank Brown said, apropos of Congressman Pou, ‘‘I don’t wish to get up a row among any of our people, and want to keep clear of such.’’ 47

Bureaucracy and Knowledge During the First World War, Mississippi governor Bilbo and Provost Marshal General Crowder corresponded extensively on the topics of paperwork, filing, regulations, and enumeration, and Bilbo passed on what he learned to the Mississippi draft boards: ‘‘The Government has had printed a vast amount of forms which will be required in the work now before you.’’ Bilbo also lectured the boards about the necessity to actually understand the Selective Service regulations: ‘‘The best minds at the command of the War Department have prepared these forms and Rulings in order that every question would be met in advance. If you will thoroughly digest the Regylations [sic] and Rulings, I feel sure there will be no necessity for calling upon me or the Adjutant Gen-

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eral for advice. . . .’’ 48 While thus passing the buck, Bilbo also registered his amazement at the amount of paperwork necessary for raising an army. Nor was he alone. In November , the Jackson newspaper marveled at the arrival of the government’s new questionnaires: ‘‘practically a solid car load of forms, instruction books, etc., sacked and labelled, was hauled to the State Capitol.’’ The paper noted that the shipment included , questionnaires, classification lists, minute books, registration cards, dockets, classification notice forms, exemption forms, physical examination forms, and more.49 Bilbo’s administration also had trouble with the math of conscription. On September , , Bilbo wrote to Crowder that in order to determine the apportionment of the draft quota by county, he had been forced to hire a certified public accountant, as there was no one in the capital with experience in doing math to the seventh decimal place. Bilbo said that it took the accountant five days to work out the quotas, and he asked that the Selective Service System reimburse the State of Mississippi for the man’s wages of ten dollars a day.50 At various points during the war, Bilbo responded to Crowder’s request for data with the bland statement that he did not know, nor had he any way of knowing, the numbers that Crowder requested. On September , , Crowder asked Bilbo how many Mississippians had failed to report to their local boards for entrainment to army camps. Bilbo replied by return telegram that he did not know because he was ‘‘without any data whatsoever.’’ Similarly, in November, Bilbo replied to Crowder’s request for information on how many men from Mississippi had made it to Camp Pike by saying that the only way he had of knowing those figures was by asking at Camp Pike, since local boards did not report to him.51 As noted earlier, federal authorities considered Bilbo, because he was a protégé of James Vardaman, something of a slacker when it came to war mobilization. They cited as evidence for this contention Bilbo’s unwillingness to fill out forms. Yet the governor’s disaffection for paperwork, politically motivated though it may have been, was also symptomatic of the state of southern society at that time. Southern states kept few records and usually kept them badly, as anyone who has tried to do historical research or genealogy in the southern states can testify. Moreover, people in the region lacked the sort of respect for government forms that would, perhaps, have been typical in more modern parts of the world at that time.52 By , most European states had some form of national birth registration, and many required internal passports or identity cards. The United States did not. During the First World War, the federal government tried very hard to develop statistical data on Americans en masse and individually. Many of the Wilson administration’s war mobilization measures may be seen as an attempt

 The Surveillance State to institute surveillance in the sense of gathering and quantifying information into forms that could be used by the state. Take, for example, the establishment of conscription, which required that quotas be set per state and district based upon the male military-age population. The latest information that the federal government had on that issue was seven years out of date, the  population census. It is not surprising that in some corners of government, the mass draft registration of men twenty-one to thirty years of age in June  was called a military census. Further censuses followed: the registration of all the nation’s women, as an attempt to see who might be available for war work and what kinds of skills might be available; and the registration of households through Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration. Even the Wilson administration’s war finance plan took on aspects of both enumeration and surveillance, as war mobilization agencies made lists of ‘‘slackers’’ who did not buy bonds and turned those lists over to the Bureau of Investigation or to the Army’s Military Intelligence Division for investigation.53 Making lists and sorting persons thus became essential components of war mobilization. But numbering the people was more than just a wartime measure. Censuses and statistical compilations are hallmarks of the modern state, tools through which the populace can be seen and worked upon. However, seeing into the South, and particularly the rural South, was well-nigh as difficult in  as it had been in . Consider what was not there: no requirements for birth registration; no drivers’ licenses; no uniform compulsory education laws, so no really usable school records; and no death certificates. There were no parish records, as in England, because (except in Louisiana) there were no parishes. For southern men, the draft card of  must have been their first piece of official identification. One wonders if they even had wallets to stow it in, given the propensity of rural southern men to carry their money (when they had it) in rolls secured by rubber bands.54 During the war, the Census Bureau began a drive to get the states to register all births. While statistic keeping improved in the South in the s, reliable birth registration in the region awaited the replacement of midwives and home births with doctors and hospitals, who took on the task of sending birth certificates to the state governments. Southern baby boomers typically have birth certificates, but their parents in the World War II generation often had to establish their existence and age for the Social Security System by bringing the family Bible, in which births and deaths were usually recorded, to a judge for certification. Deserters during World War I could do the opposite: lose the family Bible, hope their neighbors’ memories were fuzzy, and try to convince the draft board that they were either too young or too old for the draft. (This tactic may explain a story that ran in the Dallas Morning News in June ,

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which said, ‘‘It used to be the fashion to register births in the family Bible, a formality that was attended by some ceremony, but in recent years as a general custom it is said to have been dropped.’’)55 Of all the undocumented persons, southern black men were the most obscure. This played to the advantage of those who wanted to avoid the draft and to the detriment of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, whose agents spent an inordinate amount of time in the rural South trying to find out how old black men were. A report filed in January  from Savannah illustrates the point. In it, Agent Arthur M. Gregory describes his recent research trip into rural South Carolina to investigate a typewritten list of ‘‘alleged negro ‘slackers’ ’’ sent to authorities anonymously. At Ridgeway, South Carolina, members of the local draft board and county officials helped Gregory determine that four of the men listed were, in fact, underage. Another was overage and had died since registration day. The local authorities noted that ‘‘they knew nothing of the other negroes, as they were ‘floating niggers,’ working mostly at different portable sawmills and lumber camps, never remaining in any one place for any length of time.’’ Gregory then turned to county records for information. In the superior court clerk’s office, with the help of the ‘‘lady clerk’’ and the county treasurer, Gregory looked through the voter registration books ‘‘but did not find where a single one of the negroes as listed, were registered. Officer also made inquiries as to marriage licenses, and other records but was unable to find any.’’ On the following day, Gregory went on to Tillman, eleven miles away. Somewhat defensively, he recorded that he had ‘‘hired a machine,’’ because taking the train would have involved taking the Atlantic Coast line to Hardesville, changing there, and returning on the Southern Railway to Tillman, ‘‘which would have taken all morning.’’ In his automobile, Gregory drove to the home of the local registrar, who lived three miles out of town. Gregory recorded, ‘‘He seemed to know very little about the . . . negroes, stating that they were transient and ‘fleeting niggers,’ and that the only way their ages could be arrived at was from appearances.’’ Proceeding on to Tillman, a town of , Gregory interviewed the Southern Railway stationmaster and agent, a local justice of the peace, an elderly merchant and his sons, and several other white people. Here, Gregory finally solved the mystery of who had sent in the anonymous list to begin with: It was the stationmaster. He and other local people had used this method to call for an investigation of local black men who had not registered (claiming they were too young) but who had previously stated their ages as over twenty-one so they could buy liquor. In the course of Gregory’s investigation, it became clear that the stationmaster and his friends had no evidence that the men involved were, in fact,

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The Surveillance State

draft dodgers. They wanted the Bureau of Investigation to find out for them what local records and information could not substantiate: ‘‘They also stated that it was practically impossible to ascertain most of the other negroes ages except from appearances, as they were unmarried, worked at different places, and had no records of their ages, most of them not even knowing their own age.’’ For two days, an agent of the federal Bureau of Investigation had been driving around the countryside, interviewing people, researching local records (including, comically, voting records in a state that disfranchised black men), and all to find out the most basic data about individuals recorded by the modern state: their date of birth. In the end, the agent was defeated by the southern rural failure to keep records.56 Similar cases of ‘‘failure to register’’ on the part of men of both races kept agents occupied throughout the rural South. To find out how old people were, agents consulted neighbors and family members, looked at family Bibles, and consulted employment records (where, of course, rural southerners of both races were prone to overstate their ages in order to evade child labor laws). Meanwhile, blacks and whites alike complicated matters by being casual about the ways in which they spelled their names and gave their addresses; some denied knowing their own age or any of their family’s addresses. In June , a federal agent elicited from a supposed black slacker the information that he had been born in Carrioncrow, Louisiana, that his parents were dead, that he did not know the addresses of his surviving brothers and sisters, that he had no real idea as to how old he was, nor did he think that ‘‘there was any possibility of finding out from Louisiana.’’ At this point, the agent simply threw up his hands and guessed: ‘‘This negro is fully six feet tall, young and strong and the writer does not believe that he is over twenty years of age, if not less.’’ 57 Sometimes, the only accurate records available were in Washington. When eighty-six citizens of White County, Tennessee, claimed to be too old or too young for the draft, the governor forwarded their names to the federal provost marshal general’s office, asking him to get the Census Bureau to find their ages in the  census. The governor’s letter was sent on July ; by July , the director of the Census Bureau had returned the list with ages appended. The contrast between the ‘‘prestate’’ rural South’s lack of records and the modern state’s record keeping apparatus as embodied in the Census Bureau is telling; so is the willingness of the Census Bureau to allow its information to be used, illegally, for state purposes.58    , the federal government extended unprecedented power into the rural South, using propaganda to build a consensus for state policies and employing espionage agents to stifle dissent. Yet the state did not

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have an unimpeded field in which to operate nor a public with opinions that could be manipulated at will. The physical isolation and illiteracy of the rural population made transmitting propaganda difficult. Moreover, rural southerners, black and white, already had ideas about whose war and whose fight they were being called upon to support. On occasions when propaganda failed to bring rural southerners to cheerful compliance with war mobilization, the state fell back upon surveillance. Early domestic espionage in the United States did not just target urban radicals, militant leftists, and foreigners nor was it exclusively focused on antiwar dissent. Instead, the federal government spied on everyone even remotely suspected of noncompliance with war mobilization. But while the state took action to coerce conformity with its policies, it was itself acted upon by the population. People otherwise relatively powerless could summon the Department of Justice’s agents, direct their attention to selected personal targets, and use the powers of the state to obtain desired goals, ranging from intimidating ‘‘forward niggers’’ to settling long-term political or social scores. Rural southerners who chose to opt out of conscription and war work found their best refuge in the premodern aspects of southern rural society itself. Without state-registered identities, southerners of both races could, if they chose, make themselves well-nigh invisible to the state and, with luck, slip through the war unnoticed. If they did attract the attention of authorities, their behavior stood a good chance of being taken for ignorance rather than defiance. This alternative only worked, however, if the slackers themselves were willing to play dumb, bow to state authority, and comply with orders. In , a surprising number of rural southerners refused this easy out.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Resistance

S

ixty miles east of Nashville, DeKalb County lies in the eastern Highland Rim, where steep, thickly wooded hills slope down into gorges cut by the Caney Fork, the Calfkiller, and other rivers tributary to the Cumberland. In , railroads skirted the edges of the region, and one line, the Tennessee Central, cut across it en route from Nashville to Knoxville, but travel through the Highland Rim was easier than travel within it. Few roads stretched out from the area’s small county seat towns into the countryside, and those that did exist were unpaved and often impassable in rainy weather. Although county seats in the region had their own weekly newspapers, and some had telegraph and telephone connections, communication generally progressed at the speed of horses. Nonetheless, people in the hills kept up with national politics. Some subscribed to Nashville papers, and some took Tom Watson’s Jeffersonian. In the summer of , Watson’s writings probably gave local anticonscription people the idea of petitioning their representative in Congress, Cordell Hull, to vote for  , a bill that would have modified the Selective Service act to confine conscripts’ service to the territorial limits of the United States. In August , Hull received petitions from Macon County, one county north of DeKalb, and from Smith County, adjacent to DeKalb.1 When the draft began, the DeKalb County board had to deal with considerable local opposition, recording in their  report that ‘‘The community as a whole abused it, and the board took it.’’ Men in DeKalb, as in neighboring counties, filed many requests for exemptions on dependency grounds but also reported an unusual number of health problems, asking for exemptions for afflictions ranging from serious disabilities to ‘‘piles.’’ 2 However, the board’s problems really began with Dell Fuston, a local salesman. In June , Fuston refused to register for the draft on the grounds that he was thirty-three. Skeptical, the board looked for sources in which Fuston might have stated his age. There being no statewide system of birth registra

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tion, they turned to Fuston’s lodge records and to the  and  federal censuses. All three of these sources showed his being of military age. Therefore, in April , the draft board registered Fuston and gave him a draft number that resulted in his being called up for service immediately. Fuston refused to show up for induction and discouraged others from doing so as well. On April , the local sheriff arrested Fuston and took him before the draft board, which instructed the sheriff to take Fuston to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, as a deserter. The sheriff got as far as Chattanooga with Fuston, when his progress was stopped by a writ of habeas corpus issued by a federal district court judge. In a May , , hearing, the judge ruled that the local draft board had exceeded its authority, set Fuston free, and sent him home.3 While Fuston used the law to fight conscription, his fellow citizens of DeKalb County opted for direct action, refusing to show up for induction or going absent without leave. In World War I, men who did either were called deserters. In the spring of , Rutledge Smith, who headed both the Council of National Defense and the Selective Service System in Tennessee, wrote to Provost Marshal General Crowder that if Fuston got away with his habeas corpus strategy, the federal government could give up putting down desertion in DeKalb County. About ten or fifteen men from the county had already deserted, Smith said, and the local sheriff claimed he was ‘‘absolutely unable’’ to catch them. Smith continued, ‘‘the people in that section apparently are shielding these deserters.’’ 4 In the spring, the authorities began to tighten up on antiwar dissent and desertion in DeKalb. At the urging of federal authorities, in early May the DeKalb sheriff picked up two local deserters, among them John Smith, the young man whose story was told in the introduction to this book. Empowered by the recently passed Sedition Act, a federal marshal appeared in DeKalb some weeks later to arrest L. L. McDowell, the county superintendent of schools, who was accused of ‘‘uttering language unfriendly to President Wilson, and in opposition to plans and policies of the United States in the war with Germany.’’ Meanwhile, Rutledge Smith made plans to clean up the deserter problem. Smith wrote to Crowder describing a deserters’ enclave in Bee Creek Gulf, near the corners of White, Cumberland, Bledsoe, and Van Buren Counties: ‘‘We are informed that deserters from all these counties are hiding in there, and are defying arrest, being nine in number. . . .’’ (Local sources estimated that there were sixty-five ‘‘deserters and slackers’’ out in the woods.) The men supported themselves by making whiskey but also procured food at gunpoint from local residents.5 On May , Rutledge Smith wrote to Crowder asking that troops be sent to the region. Crowder at first demurred, suggesting that U.S. marshals would be

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Resistance

better than troops and writing Governor Rye that he preferred to use civilian authorities. Nonetheless, by June a cavalry troop had been detailed to round up deserters in DeKalb, Warren, Van Buren, White, and Cumberland Counties. Facing the possibility of capture by the soldiers, one deserter (a married man with a child) committed suicide. Federal troops killed another who had ‘‘absolutely defied the authorities and had drawn his gun to shoot into the squad of soldiers when one of the soldiers instantly dropped him with a bullet from his rifle.’’ 6 A few days later, Smith wrote Crowder that the local authorities should be able to handle the DeKalb situation from then on. To help, Smith had arranged for more propaganda in the county: ‘‘By public meetings with competent orators we have been trying to change the sentiment of this class of people and remove opposition to military service, and with Boards of Instruction recently appointed it is believed that good results will soon be acquired.’’ But should propaganda fail, coercion remained an option. In late August, the local people in charge of mobilization staged a big patriotic rally at Smithville, the DeKalb County seat. Over four thousand people came to this meeting of the ‘‘deferred classes.’’ The U.S. cavalry troop attended also and arrested one prominent farmer for harboring a deserter. The local paper commented that the crowd was ‘‘very quiet.’’ 7 The DeKalb County situation illustrates on a small scale the problems that the national government faced in mobilizing men and popular support for the First World War throughout the rural South. Clearly, some men in the county did not support the war for political reasons. Many of the men who registered for the draft in  did not want to go. Once drafted, some deserted and took advantage of their knowledge of local terrain to hide in the deep woods. On the other hand, Dell Fuston took advantage of the government’s lack of knowledge, in this case of his birth date, to stay out of the army. In both cases, the state’s inability to see into rural communities—to surveil them—ultimately left military intervention as the only viable option. Rutledge Smith’s comments afterward indicate that he believed the entire problem had been caused by a failure in effective propaganda. In this chapter, we will explore various forms of resistance prevalent in the rural South during the First World War, moving from the political to the infrapolitical, and from civility to violence.

Political Resistance In democracies, people who disagree with governmental policy are supposed to be able to use the political system to effect change. Thomas Jefferson ex-

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plained the process in the Declaration of Independence: Under the contract that free people have with their governments, rebellion can only be justified by a ‘‘long train of abuses,’’ including the government’s refusal to hear grievances. Before resistance should come protest, petition, and political action. However, in – the federal government criminalized the traditional methods of expressing political dissent. The passage of the Espionage Act in June , the Trading with the Enemy Act in October , and the Sedition Act in May  effectively made it illegal to utter anything that the Wilson administration did not like. Ronald Schaffer points out that the Wilson administration’s use of these laws was highly politicized. Prowar Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt could freely excoriate President Wilson’s conduct of foreign and domestic policy, and upper-class liberals with the right social connections, like the editors of the Nation, could express moderate dissent without prosecution. People that Wilson and his officers neither liked nor feared, such as Eugene Debs, went to prison for antiwar speech, while others were simply squelched for the duration. On the local level, people throughout the nation faced arrest or (more dangerously) mob violence for antiwar speech.8 Although there is no effective way to quantify dissent in the South, federal statistics on prosecutions initiated between July  and June  under the Selective Draft Act do provide interesting information. Federal authorities’ decision to prosecute depended on the politics of the situation and, one suspects, on the energy and enthusiasm of the U.S. attorneys on the scene. In Georgia, men were prosecuted under the draft laws at a rate of . per thousand, while in Mississippi the rate was ., and in North Carolina, .. Georgia’s rate was much higher than the rate prevailing in Iowa (.) or Indiana (.), although less than the rate in New York (.).9 People in the rural South who opposed the war, or who simply did not want to serve in the military, could not make their dissent public through the normal processes. Writing letters to editors, circulating petitions, speaking publicly, or even blowing off steam in casual complaint became highly dangerous activities: For these, people fell under surveillance by the Bureau of Investigation, the army’s Military Intelligence Division (), and the American Protective League () and were arrested and sent to federal prison. For white southerners accustomed to exercising their traditional rights as citizens in raucous political debate, the shock must have been considerable. When only one brand of ‘‘public opinion’’ can be safely expressed in public, it is hard to ascertain how widespread, or how sincere, the opinions expressed may actually be. By the summer of , southerners dissatisfied with the Wilson administration knew that they could not say so publicly without great personal risk. However, these people could (with some caution) still vote. Dur-

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ing the summer and early fall of , several southern political leaders who had opposed the war, conscription, or both, faced elections. Their respective stories illustrate two somewhat disparate points: first, that it is difficult to contest an election when one’s political message has been declared seditious; and second, that many southern whites were willing to vote for the seditious anyway. Targeted for removal by the Wilson administration, Senator Vardaman of Mississippi and Senator Hardwick of Georgia lost in the primaries, while George Huddleston, the congressman from Birmingham whose fiery speeches against the war were quoted previously, won reelection. Most surprisingly, Tom Watson, the arch ‘‘anti’’ of the South, ran for congress in  and did rather well. James Vardaman, the ‘‘White Chief ’’ of Mississippi politics, had won election to the Senate in  on a platform of white supremacy and progressive reform, including child labor laws, farm credit associations, the income tax, the initiative and referendum, government regulation of corporations, and women’s suffrage. He opposed preparedness and was labeled one of the ‘‘little group of willful men’’ who thwarted President Wilson’s plan to arm ships in March . When a delegation of his supporters urged him to support the United States’ entry into the war, Vardaman told them that ‘‘if it cost me my life I cannot do what you now think you want me to do.’’ He voted against the war and opposed the draft, the Espionage Act, and the Sedition Act. Vardaman condemned the latter measure, which was introduced in the House by Representative Webb of North Carolina and in the Senate by Lee Overman, also of North Carolina, as unnecessary: ‘‘You can rely upon the inherent patriotism and the individual good judgment of the citizens to take the grains of wisdom from the talks of men and . . . cast aside the chaff. The people can take care of themselves.’’ 10 In , Vardaman faced opposition in the Democratic primary from Pat Harrison, a young congressman who had the staunch support of John Sharp Williams and of the Wilson administration. Harrison publicly labeled support for Vardaman treasonous. The senator’s paper, Vardaman’s Weekly, alleged that his supporters were being threatened with denunciation to the government unless they stopped speaking in his favor. Rumors circulated in Mississippi that Vardaman had bought a plantation near Greenwood with money he had received from the German government, a smear indignantly denied by his paper (but looked into by the Bureau of Investigation). Vardaman opened his campaign with a speech focusing on class issues, but as the campaign heated up, his rhetoric became increasingly racist. Meanwhile, Harrison’s supporters made Vardaman’s antiwar stance the chief issue of the campaign with banners reading ‘‘All Vardaman men are not disloyal, but every disloyal man is

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for Vardaman.’’ At Meridian, a pro-Harrison speaker proclaimed, ‘‘We want a senator in Washington to represent Mississippi, who believes that Woodrow Wilson’s policies are the clearest expression of God’s will on earth to mankind.’’ When Vardaman spoke in Meridian on July , the crowd heckled him with cries of ‘‘Kaiser von Vardaman.’’ When he spoke at Akerman, Amory, and Charleston, Harrison supporters striped the speaker’s stand with yellow paint.11 Early in August, President Wilson made public his opposition to Vardaman’s candidacy. Vardaman’s Weekly protested that the senator was no more disloyal than Claude Kitchin or Champ Clark and contended that Vardaman was being targeted because of his long opposition to corporate special interests, as well as his recent support for an  percent tax on war profits. Ironically, Vardaman also had to defend himself against allegations that he had voted to send whites to fight the war while keeping blacks home, a sign that even his supporters had problems with the kind of racism that allocated to whites the privilege of being shot at.12 Pat Harrison won the election handily, with , votes to Vardaman’s , (a third candidate garnering ,). Vardaman’s Weekly attributed the defeat in part to voter intimidation. Harrison carried the Delta, Gulf Coast, Black Belt, and piney woods counties, but Vardaman won twenty-four counties, mostly in the northeastern hills. In his farewell letter to the people of Mississippi, Vardaman noted that President Wilson had ‘‘more power today than any potentate or ruler beneath the stars. I helped give him those powers, and I hope that in the prosecution of the war they will be properly exercised, and I believe they will be.’’ However, after the war ended, he continued, ‘‘these powers must be restored to the people,’’ and ‘‘the republic must be rehabilitated. It is going to be a difficult task to perform properly. Do not forget that ambitious men are quite as hungry for power as the miser is avaricious for gold.’’ 13 Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia, it may be remembered, had voted for the war but against conscription; moreover, he had expressed skepticism about Wilson’s war rhetoric and about Wilson himself, saying that he did not think that the president knew much more about raising an army than did Congress. He opposed the Sedition Act, pointing out that if it passed, ‘‘free speech in a free country will simply mean that one man is perfectly free to advocate war to the end of eternity and another man can not advocate peace without putting himself in a dungeon.’’ When Hardwick came up for reelection in the September  Georgia Democratic primary, the Wilson administration threw its support to William J. Harris. As Anthony Gaughan writes, ‘‘Hardwick’s patriotism quickly emerged as the dominant issue of the campaign.’’

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Throughout the state, newspapers followed the Wilson administration line and pilloried Hardwick as disloyal. When Hardwick lost, with , votes (mostly from rural counties) to Harris’s ,, newspapers in Georgia and throughout the South trumpeted the victory for  percent Americanism.14 On the other hand, George Huddleston won reelection in his Alabama district, even though President Wilson denounced him as ‘‘in every way an opponent of the administration.’’ The state Democratic organization withdrew its support from him. Wilson administration supporters formed the ‘‘Jefferson County Patriotic League’’ specifically to oppose him. Birmingham newspapers ran caricatures of the congressman as a Bolshevik, a pygmy, and an anarchist. Despite all this, Champ Clark and Claude Kitchin wrote letters praising Huddleston’s patriotism, and more than fifteen thousand people attended his reelection rally in a downtown city park. Huddleston garnered , votes to his opponent’s ,. Significantly, his support came mostly from the city’s outlying rural and mine precincts.15 Tom Watson lost his bid to return to Congress in the  Democratic primary, but the election was close enough to foreshadow his successful run for the Senate two years later. Watson’s paper had been shut down in the summer of ; his daughter died shortly thereafter, and his son died in April . Watson slid into depression and drink. In June of , after Eugene Debs was arrested for a very mild antiwar speech, Watson heard that he was next on the attorney general’s list. He wrote to beg mercy, citing his recent bereavements and his poor health, and promised to stop criticizing the administration. The attorney general apparently decided to leave the old man alone, for the time being. C. Vann Woodward leaves the strong impression that Watson ran for office in  as a way of escaping from his own sadness and mental decay. Opposing incumbent Carl Vinson, the aging rabble-rouser Watson ran a muted campaign.16 Nonetheless, Watson’s return to the hustings drew federal surveillance. The  informed the Bureau of Investigation that on September , Watson criticized Wilson in a campaign speech, saying, ‘‘They may stand me up against a wall and shoot me for saying it, but as long as I am out of jail I will talk and tell the truth. I say it is not right to take the seed corn until you have used up the old nubbins,’’ probably a reference to the extension of draft registration down to men aged eighteen.17 Ironically, Watson’s most bitter attacks on Wilson, the war, and the draft were republished during the campaign not by Watson but by his opponent, Vinson, who took out big advertisements to do so. Had Watson reprinted these diatribes, the publication in which they appeared would have been denied the mail. Thus Vinson inadvertently gave Watson back the forum he had

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lost. When Vinson accused Watson of ‘‘seditious utterances’’ and pointed out that Watson had ‘‘never bought a Liberty bond, nor a war saving stamp and has never given a dollar to the Red Cross or Y.M.C.A.,’’ Watson stood by his previous views on the war but said that since the United States was in the conflict, he thought the war should be prosecuted to victory. He laughed off the Liberty loan question, saying that he did not see why he should ‘‘borrow money at  per cent to loan to the richest government on earth at about  per cent.’’ (But he let it be known that he had contributed to the Red Cross.) In a speech in Hancock County, Georgia, Watson told the crowd, ‘‘The government told me to shut up and I shut up. They said they had enough of me— and I quit.’’ Watson continued, ‘‘I certainly have enough sense to obey Uncle Sam. He shut up my printing house and told me to shut up and get out—and I got,’’ a canny way of staying on the right side of the law while protesting, between the lines, the suppression of the free press. In the end, Watson and Vinson split the twelve counties in the district, carrying six each. Georgia’s county-unit system gave Vinson sixteen votes in the Democratic Party convention to Watson’s fourteen. Although Watson contested the returns, alleging that local officials had burned the ballots in one county to prevent verification of their official count, Vinson won the election.18 Democrats opposed by the Wilson administration lost in elections throughout the South in . Cole Blease failed in his bid to become senator from South Carolina. In Texas, the state legislature redistricted Jeff McLemore out of his position as ‘‘congressman-at-large’’ (having been elected such in  in a statewide vote). McLemore had to run in what amounted to a new district. Denounced as a traitor and a coward, he won only two thousand of the twentyone thousand votes cast. James Slayden, who had served as president of the American Peace Society, was also targeted by the president, although the Texas congressman’s record was not much different from that of many other southern Democrats. Insiders suggested that Slayden’s real problem was that Postmaster General Burleson’s brother-in-law was running against him. Having been informed that the president opposed him, Slayden withdrew from the race.19 However, many congressmen who were on record as opposing various Wilson policies won reelection. John Burnett, the Alabama congressman who defended Claude Kitchin from Tom Heflin’s attack and who voted against the war and the draft, was reelected. In Mississippi, Thomas Sisson, who had been very public in his opposition to the draft, was reelected. Thetus Sims, the Tennessee congressman who refused to vote for conscription on the grounds that his constituents would not forgive him, was reelected. Kitchin himself, surely the most famous antiwar southern congressman, did yeoman service during the

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Resistance

war in Congress, although his idea of appropriate tax policies often differed markedly from that of Treasury Secretary William McAdoo (Kitchin fought to fund the war with corporate profits), and he never managed to be quite subservient enough to please Wilson. He was reelected in . In short, having opposed America’s entry into the Great War in  or having opposed conscription did not seriously damage the prospects of a southern Democratic congressman in —unless the Wilson administration specifically targeted that congressman for removal, and Wilson only did that in certain select cases. Even then, sizable numbers of white southerners, mostly from rural districts, had the nerve to go to the polls and vote for candidates who were being publicly labeled traitors.20 Although the congressional elections of  cannot be seen as a fair measure of the American public’s views on the war or on the Wilson administration, given that criticism of either could earn one time in jail, the vote in certain southern contests does suggest that thousands of people who had dissented in  continued to do so in . Why people voted the way they did is hard to determine. When forty-four thousand white Mississippians voted for Vardaman, did they do so because they liked his racism, or was it his opposition to the draft? Did George Huddleston’s seven thousand-plus voters respect his critique of the war as a corporate plot, or did they support his stand on labor issues? Was it Hardwick’s stand against the Sedition Act that earned voter loyalty, or was it his previous record in Georgia politics? There is no way to know. However, it seems clear that people who voted for Vardaman, Huddleston, Hardwick, and Watson, not to mention Sims, Sisson, and Kitchin, were at least not repulsed by their antiwar views and may, in fact, have shared them. It also seems indicative that while city and town newspapers throughout the region poured scorn on these candidates, rural voters supported them anyway. By the late summer of , voting was one of the few methods left by which rural southerners could express dissent without fear of federal prosecution— and that method was only available to whites. Given the racialized nature of southern society, it is not surprising that black and white southern dissenters took different paths. With the normal avenues of political dissent (speech, petition, assembly, and the press) closed to them for the duration, rural whites who opposed the war or the draft resorted to the forms of resistance James Scott has labeled the ‘‘infrapolitical.’’ They refused to cooperate with the Wilson administration’s war mobilization efforts or did so slowly and reluctantly; they spread rumors about the morals and ethics of local leaders of war mobilization; they evaded the draft or deserted. Some made anonymous threats of violence, while others went further than threats to actual armed resistance.

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This was, as Scott puts it, ‘‘the strategic form that the resistance of subjects must assume under conditions of great peril.’’ Black rural southerners, having lived in conditions of peril for all of their lives, specialized in methods of resistance that were less likely than armed resistance to get them lynched. Black southern men evaded the draft, and when caught, they pleaded ignorance: a kind of political judo that used whites’ own prejudices to their advantage. Whites, on the other hand, sometimes took up arms against representatives of the state. To explore the varieties of dissent expressed in the rural South during World War I, we will look at noncooperation, desertion, and outright violent resistance.21

Slackers During the First World War, the term ‘‘slacker,’’ first applied to men who failed to step forward for military service, evolved to mean all of those who were less than white-hot in their enthusiasm for the war: in short, the noncooperative. In , a Bureau of Investigation agent labeled the people of an entire county in Georgia slackers and traced their attitude to politics. The investigation of Liberty County (in the southeastern corner of the state, close to Savannah) started in May with reports that the local draft board had refused to buy Liberty bonds or to give to the Red Cross. The sheriff was also a slacker, who had turned down ‘‘the ladies’’ of the Red Cross, telling them ‘‘he had been working for the Government for nothing for the past six months.’’ The local newspaper editor told the agent that ‘‘all the county officers here are opposed to the war and have been opposed to the war all along.’’ People in the county traced this lamentable state of affairs to politics: The county had been saturated with copies of the Jeffersonian, and a member of the draft board was a veteran of the old Populist Party. The chair of the Liberty Loan Committee, who personally had three sons in the army, told the agent that ‘‘This is a county of slackers. The people here fought the draft law, they had meetings and raised a fund to employ Thomas E. Watson to resist the draft law.’’ Board members also supported Senator Hardwick, then running for reelection. The bureau agent suggested that these political attitudes had contaminated the entire war mobilization process in the county: ‘‘These men are, in effect, using a deadly peace argument in that county. They are thinking peace and the men sent out from that county . . . will be thinking peace when they leave.’’ 22 Although some southern slacking reflected long-term, principled opposition to the war and the draft, the term ‘‘slacker’’ is not equivalent to ‘‘dissenter.’’ Instead, it allows for ambiguity. An individual’s failure to buy war bonds could mean that the person opposed the war, or that he just did not care, or even that

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he did not much mind if the nation had a war, but he had other things to do at the moment. (The greatest national dramas will always strike some people as nuisances that interfere with their normal daily routines.) Whatever their motivation, rural southerners proved to be slackers when it came to cooperation with the federal government’s attempts to surveil through enumeration. Shortly after the June draft registration, the federal government announced a registration of women. This was intended as a survey of availability and skills for war work, but it was interpreted by rural southern women, at least in Tennessee, as yet another draft. The result was reported by a rural justice of the peace to Tennessee governor Thomas Rye: ‘‘Dear Sir, the Ladies Says they ar not going to register in this secion.’’ Despite assurances from Rye and from state and local mobilization leaders that the registration of women did not mean they would be drafted for war labor,  percent of Tennessee’s women refused to fill out the government’s registration cards.23 Similar resistance plagued war mobilizers’ attempts to survey the nation’s food supplies. In October , a county home-demonstration agent working near Johnson City, Tennessee, wrote to the head of the extension service to denounce a rural-route mail carrier for working against registration and the signing of Hoover pledge cards: ‘‘He also told and is telling ladies on his route, that he is employed by the Government, and is in a position to know that the can goods will all be taken, and other false reports are being circulated.’’ The extension director wrote to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, noting, ‘‘We are having more or less trouble with people of the same nature in other parts of the state.’’ Such situations were not confined to Tennessee. In January , the Raleigh News and Observer announced a ‘‘Food Survey of North Carolina,’’ to be conducted by the agricultural extension agency: ‘‘North Carolinians are asked to banish laughingly the fictitious stories, spread by German agents and spies, that the government is going to seize the food inventoried.’’ 24 Rural southerners seem to have been particularly pestered by the idea of contributing to the Red Cross. Although the Red Cross was officially a private organization, it was an integral part of the Wilson administration’s war mobilization structure. Failure to contribute to the Red Cross, like failure to buy bonds, became prima facie evidence of slacking, as the Liberty County case above illustrates. Courts held it illegal to criticize the Red Cross. Therefore, William E. Martin, a carpenter from Tennessee who was convicted of making ‘‘scurrilous and inflammatory statements’’ about President Wilson and the Red Cross, spent two years in the federal prison in Atlanta. What Martin said is not clear. Other people, including the assistant secretary of state of Wisconsin, thought that the Red Cross was a bunch of ‘‘grafters.’’ (He was sentenced to

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thirty months in Leavenworth.) Southern rural men’s anger at the Red Cross may also reflect aspects of gender and class attitudes. In most rural counties, the Red Cross fund-raisers and organizers were the wives and daughters of the town elites: ‘‘the ladies,’’ as in Liberty County. Possibly rural men resented being badgered for money by well-to-do women. They may have resented the very presence of women in the public sphere. That is at least one possible reading of the outburst that earned another Tennessean arrest for sedition. In front of a Red Cross fund-raiser, Tom Carmack of Jackson County said that money given to the institution never reached the soldiers: ‘‘When you give it to that Red Cross it goes to keep up a pack of God-damn whores.’’ However, resentment against the Red Cross was not confined solely to the backwoods. In May , Dr. O. B. Lewis was shot and killed in an altercation with a Mississippi railroad station guard over uncomplimentary remarks the doctor had made about Red Cross solicitors.25 Slacking became potentially much more serious when it involved a refusal to buy war bonds. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo’s plan to pay for the war by borrowing from the people was as much about propaganda as about money. According to David Kennedy, McAdoo thought that ‘‘any great war must necessarily be a popular movement’’ and criticized his predecessor during the Civil War for having failed to ‘‘capitalize on the emotions of the people.’’ By capitalizing on emotion, McAdoo would accomplish two things: raise money for the war; and get the public invested, emotionally and financially, in an American victory. He succeeded in the first aim. All the World War I bond issues were oversubscribed. As to whether McAdoo fulfilled his second goal, it is hard to judge, in large part because what had started out as a call for voluntary support for the nation at a time of crisis became coercive. McAdoo himself denounced anyone who failed to buy bonds as a friend of Germany, ‘‘not entitled to be an American citizen.’’ To drum up support for bond sales, the Treasury Department organized a series of propaganda campaigns equating bond purchases with patriotism. Stirred up, local patriots throughout the nation attacked people who had not purchased bonds or had purchased them in smaller amounts than councils of defense thought proper. Folks who got into trouble for their political views found it expedient to contribute quickly and publicly. In this atmosphere, Tom Watson’s joke about his refusal to borrow money at high interest to buy bonds was a political statement of considerable weight.26 The people from Neshoba County, Mississippi, who contended that ‘‘as long as these bonds are bought by the people the war will continue,’’ or who hid their money so that the government could not confiscate it, may have been politically opposed to the war. Certainly they were acting in the best tradition

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of peasants from time immemorial. In either case, they were deemed slackers. The local newspaper ran an advertisement on May , , equating people who did not buy Liberty bonds with the deserters who hid out in the woods. On June , the paper announced that everyone who did not pledge to buy War Savings Stamps would be listed as slackers and friends of the Kaiser. Similar lists were compiled in counties throughout the South and the nation.27 Revulsion against such mobilization tactics began quickly after the armistice and continues to echo in American scholarship on World War I. ‘‘Hysteria’’ is the word that historians use most often to describe the atmosphere of  and to explain the coercive nature of home-front mobilization. This implies that people would have supported the war and bought bonds without being forced to do so: a point not proven. Perhaps war mobilizers, from McAdoo on down to the local council level, correctly assessed the situation and realized that getting the public to invest emotionally in the war required sticks as well as carrots. In some parts of the nation, local councils certainly believed that ordinary Americans would not support the war unless they were forced to do so. Some of the most egregious examples of local council coercion come from the Midwest, as described in Herbert Peterson and Gilbert Fite’s Opponents of War. In Iowa, councils set up ‘‘slacker courts’’ and summoned before them farmers who had not bought as many bonds as the council deemed necessary. Throughout the Midwest, people who refused to buy bonds were threatened and sometimes attacked, tarred and feathered, or otherwise publicly shamed. In Oklahoma, councils simply confiscated slackers’ automobiles or farm produce and sold it at auction, using the money raised to buy bonds.28 The bond campaigns in the southern states seem to have been able to meet their quotas without resorting to that level of coercion. Not that meeting quotas was really the point: Most of the bonds were sold to the nation’s wealthy, and the fate of the war hardly depended on the willingness of the poor to chip in. Rather, by forcing individuals to buy bonds, war mobilizers compelled them to support the war. While it could be argued that less compulsion was needed among the South’s mostly native-born population, it is also true that the councils in the southern states, with the exception of Tennessee, were weak and unorganized to begin with and therefore unable to mount the kind of antislacker campaigns common in the Midwest. As noted above, several state councils had to solicit donations from the public in order to operate at the most minimal level. (By contrast, the Michigan legislature appropriated five million dollars for that state’s council.) Although local-level councils in southern cities mobilized community support for bond sales through parades and propaganda, how much of the hoopla reached the countryside cannot easily

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be determined. If the example of Neshoba County, cited above, is typical, then the answer is, not much. Moreover, had the small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers of the southern states been pressured to buy bonds, they might have retorted that ‘‘you can’t get blood from a turnip.’’ In an economy like that of the rural South, where so many family incomes were less than thirty dollars a month, it is hard to imagine that many farmers had enough money to buy bonds, even if they had wanted to. It is also hard to imagine southern local councils confiscating property without retaliatory violence from the targeted slackers.29

Threats, Imprecations, and Violence Southerners, the products of one of the nation’s most violent cultures, have a historical tendency toward bloodthirsty rhetoric. This was amplified and legitimated by the war. Thus Senator John Sharp Williams, a courtly, oldfashioned Bourbon, wrote in a personal letter that Mississippi deserters—his own constituents—were ‘‘cattle’’ and ‘‘traitors’’ who ‘‘ought to have been lined up and shot,’’ and he said publicly that people who did not support the war should be loaded onto ships and carried out into the Atlantic to be sunk by German submarines.30 But southern slackers came from the same violent culture, and they were not pacifistic in their rhetoric either. The Bureau of Investigation’s reports on the  in the spring and summer of  contain abundant evidence of grousing, blackguarding, and libel in rural Texas: The Red Cross was characterized as ‘‘nothing but a fake organization and a humbug,’’ and ‘‘all parties who had anything to do with it were grafters.’’ Rural Texans also said nasty things about the president: ‘‘Bedford is continually talking against the Government and the President, and among other statements said that if he could get hold of President Wilson, he would cut him in two, throw one half in Germany, and the other half in hell.’’ 31 When legislation and repression closed normal avenues of protest, rural southerners reverted to protest methods with deep roots in Anglo-American tradition. British historian E. P. Thompson has written that ‘‘The anonymous threatening letter is a characteristic form of social protest in any society which has crossed a certain threshold of literacy, in which forms of collective organized defense are weak, and in which individuals who can be identified as the organizers of protest are liable to immediate victimization.’’ This would be a good description of conditions in the rural South in –, when rural southerners wrote threatening letters to draft board members and to prowar political figures. Senator John Sharp Williams’s state correspondence files contain

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a classic example, filed with the notation ‘‘Bad grammar bad patriotism.’’ The letter follows, with its original spelling and punctuation intact. It seems as though you forgot all about good and humanity and turned your attention to honor and money a very sad mistake you first declared war on jurmany. . . . after that you votd that cursed draff law on the people a thing that was very unpopular with the people as you no a thing that would have been noct out  to  if the people would have got a chance to voted on it. A thing that has caused a lot of disturbence in ths old nation. A thing that is going to send you felows to a murdears grave. . . . a law that is going to forse them [our boys] to kill or be killed and there lives you fellows are going to be responsible for in that great day to come. . . . Uncle John I notice that you have ben saying so might hard things about the people that don’t endorse this war I notice in one of your speaches you maid the oher you said that the people that did not favor or at least loil [loyal] to the case should be loaded a board ships and sent out on the seas where they would be attacted by jurman submarenes and be drownded Now look here Uncle John that is saying to much you are just a man and you aint the only man there is this usetobe a free country and the other felow has just as much rite to his opainion. . . . some of these days you are going to have to crall out of that hole and some of theas days that man dont see like you do is going to put a load of buck shot in you for the remarks you have maid about him. . . . there is plenty of men in this old state of Miss that would kill you just as quick as they would a snake they have been talked about and accursed and forsed to do things until they are getting sore you fellows can pass laws that will keep people from talking aboot what you fellows have done and what you are doing but you cant keep them from thinking a grand thing.32 Draft boards also received threats. In Sabine County, Louisiana, the board reported that they had ‘‘received a letter threatening our Chairman with Death,’’ and the board in St. Landry complained, ‘‘we . . . are becoming more or less outcaste and are ostracized by numbers of people.’’ A Georgia draft board received an anonymous threat from a man who contended, ‘‘You have sent me to the army, Who, ought To be at home.’’ The writer told the draft board member not to bother to run for office again: ‘‘You are dead and you killed yourself.’’ Private Walter Tully wrote from Camp Beauregard, Louisiana, to the chair of the local board in El Dorado, Arkansas, to protest his treatment by the board. Tully said that men with similar family situations as his were obtaining deferments: ‘‘they family are well off to the men own farms and had plenty. I

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hope to see you all some day and you all are going to suffer for it too. . . . You could have turn me loose as were as you did some of them big men around there.’’ He signed his letter ‘‘your enemy.’’ Private Sidney Wilson, a black man serving in the th Infantry, wrote to his draft board, ‘‘It afoads to the soldier boys wich you have sent so far away from home a great deal of pledger to write you a few lines to let you know that you low-down Mother Fuckers can put a gun in our hands but who is able to take it out?’’ Wilson said that blacks, having received military training, would come back and ‘‘fight out and whip the United States,’’ and he added, ‘‘then you can all look out, for we is coming.’’ (Court-martialed for writing the letters, Wilson got ten years at hard labor.)33 Sometimes threats and imprecations crossed the line to actual violence. In Dothan, Alabama, where the draft board was particularly corrupt and registrants said that they would rather go to federal prison than to France, Stokely McCardel slashed the board chairman across the face with a knife. When accused of conspiracy to resist the draft law, he said ‘‘D the Provost Marshal, and his ruling too,’’ and was carried off to the army. McCardel’s departure from Dothan took on the nature of a triumph: Local men came to the train to see him off, gave him gifts of money, and ‘‘complimented and congratulated him on beating up a member of the Local Board.’’ 34 With this kind of public sentiment abroad in the land, elected officials who participated in the war mobilization process imperiled their careers, if not their lives. When county clerks and sheriffs were appointed to Georgia’s draft boards, they flooded the executive department and the state adjutant’s office with letters begging to be let off. In October , Major Joel B. Mallett, Georgia’s official in charge of the draft, acknowledged to the provost marshal general that in some cases in Georgia ‘‘Board members declined to serve and in some instances did not execute the oath of office until advised that this office would demand arrest and prosecution.’’ As noted earlier, Rutledge Smith found sheriffs in the Tennessee hill country disinclined to hunt down deserters. In Alabama, a sheriff helped his deserter brother-in-law hide. In Georgia, Sheriff E. C. Hixon skipped draft board meetings and refused to hunt down a deserter he considered dangerous, asking why he should risk his life for no pay. When so many rural southerners were slackers of one form or another, it is not surprising that the region sheltered so many men who refused to comply with the draft.35

The Social Construction of Desertion In July , a Mississippi deserter wrote to beg President Wilson for a discharge. Thomas C. Reed’s plea incorporated most of the rationales deserters

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offered for their actions: ‘‘I am willing and ready to die for my Lord but not for my country, and besides I wasn’t treated right no way.’’ In addition to desiring a religious deferment, Reed thought he was due one for dependency. However, the draft board disagreed and had drafted him while exempting others with similar situations. Reed maintained that he had deserted because of his religious beliefs, saying, ‘‘I will die before I ever kill any one.’’ Reed asked the president to reply to his wife’s address in Sturgis, but his plea was of no avail. Wilson’s office forwarded Reed’s plea to the provost marshal general’s office, which sent it back to the Mississippi adjutant general’s office with the suggestion that the office monitor Mrs. Reed’s mail to see whether her husband could be captured.36 Robert F. Marks of Marks, Mississippi, had better luck with the Selective Service System. Also a married man, Marks had first tried to get out of the army by claiming dependency; that failing, he had filed an agricultural deferment; that failing, he had showed up for his induction at Camp Pike, in Little Rock, with medical affidavits claiming that he was too ill to serve. Complaints that Marks had bought his way out prompted a Bureau of Investigation inquiry, but the provost marshal general’s office decided, in February , to let the matter go: Marks would be reclassified anyway when he filled out the Selective Service System’s elaborate new questionnaire.37 The Reed and Marks cases illustrate that the question of southern men’s willingness to be drafted for the Great War cannot be reduced to simple dichotomies of patriot/deserter or pacifist/warrior. Not that warriors did not exist, but they had relatively little to do with the draft system. The most martial southerners joined the two million men who volunteered for various branches of service. Conversely, the men who knew from the start that they would not cooperate with the draft system did not register for the draft at all and were therefore not included as deserters on the provost marshal general’s records. Men twenty-one to thirty years of age who were less sure either way registered for the draft. Among those men, some were more willing to serve than others. As noted earlier, in many southern counties over  percent of the potential conscripts requested exemptions. In the end, southern draft boards gave exemptions or deferments to . percent of twenty-one- to thirty-year-old men, with Louisiana’s  percent the region’s lowest exemption/deferment rate and Texas’s the highest, at  percent. (During the First World War, being deferred to Class II or lower was the equivalent of an exemption, as no men were drawn from those classes.)38 To put these statistics in context: In Mississippi, , men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty registered for the draft, and , obtained exemptions or deferments—among them Robert Marks, who worked the sys-

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tem to his advantage. This left , in the draft pool. Unable to obtain an exemption for dependency or conscientious objection, Thomas Reed fell back on desertion, as did , other Mississippians, either by failure to show up for induction or by going . The provost marshal general’s Second Report, covering the operation of the Selective Service System from  up to December , , says that  percent of the , Mississippians who registered for the draft deserted. That figure, while based on the best information that the Selective Service had available in the fall of , is still misleading. People like Marks who obtained exemptions had no reason to even contemplate desertion. In fact, the number of deserters was . percent of the , men who were subject to the draft after exemptions were awarded.39 In the southern states, desertion ranged from a low of  percent in North Carolina to a high of . percent in Florida. Using the same criteria (deserters as a percentage of men twenty-one to thirty years of age in the draft pool), all of the southern states had higher desertion rates than Iowa’s . percent. Alabama, at . percent, Mississippi, at . percent, and Texas, at . percent, all had desertion rates higher than that of Massachusetts (. percent) and comparable to those of California (. percent) and New York (. percent). At the very least, these statistics go far to explode the idea that southerners were any more enamored of military service than men elsewhere in the nation.40 By the fall of , the Selective Service System’s records indicated that , southern men had ‘‘deserted.’’ Black men comprised the majority of reported deserters in the South, outnumbering white reported deserters in the region , to ,. (Note that the figure here is for reported deserters, rather than the more accurate, and smaller, net figure for deserters, used to derive the percentages above. The Selective Service chose to use the reported, rather than net, figure in its assessment of desertion by race in the provost marshal general’s report. The total number of reported deserters in the region was ,, but by the fall of , the Selective Service System, after its investigation, gave , as the net number. Therefore, . percent of the reported, not net, deserters were black.) Both the high number of deserters and the relationship between race and desertion troubled Provost Marshal General Crowder, and he telegraphed southern governors in November to ask for explanations. The governor of Georgia cited multiple factors. He said that the black men in question were ignorant and moved around a lot, whereas many of the whites were really in the army but had been listed as deserters because they had not returned their draft questionnaires. He pointed out that local authorities had been told that they would receive a reward for deserters who were caught and brought to camp, but that camp authorities had refused to pay as advertised. As a result, the local authorities had lost enthusiasm for

 Resistance deserter roundups. Finally, he pointed out that in mountain counties both blacks and whites had been influenced by ‘‘propaganda’’ to evade the draft. Arkansas’s governor agreed with most of this assessment, saying that the high rate of desertion among blacks was ‘‘due to the general illiteracy of that race and their roving disposition and not due to lack of patriotism or intention to evade the draft on their part.’’ From Tennessee, where the majority of deserters were white, Governor Rye attributed black desertion to ignorance and a lack of moral appreciation for the seriousness of the war, but he acknowledged that black and white deserters alike had been what he called a kind of floating element, and lacking stable addresses, they missed their draft notices. Rye thought that maybe  percent deserted because of ‘‘weakness and demonstration of members of family when time approaches for departure of their sons husbands or brothers.’’ 41 As the governors’ responses to Crowder indicate, southern state authorities thought about the deserter problem differently depending on whether the deserter was white or black. The governors’ comments about the migratory nature of the black population did have merit. Black southerners drafted in the late summer of , then told that their induction notices would come at some unspecified later date, surely cannot be blamed for getting on with their lives. With the job market booming in the North and in southern cities, black men had no reason to hang around rural whistle-stops and wait for the federal government to come looking for them. Nonetheless, the governors’ comments indicate that they recognized the political motivation of white deserters but remained reluctant to attribute similar motivation to black deserters. They saw blacks as feckless and ignorant but basically good-hearted and loyal. This is quite strange, given that white southerners had been inundating federal surveillance agencies with rumors of black insurrection for at least a year. For southern governors to write as if the idea that blacks deserted for political reasons had never crossed their minds seems a classic case of denial. Note that the only governor to acknowledge even the possibility that black desertion was political attributed it to propaganda, implying that if desertion were politically motivated, the politics must have originated in the minds of people other than black Georgians. To admit that blacks might have deserted for political reasons required acknowledging that blacks had politics, and therefore agency, in a realm that whites reserved for themselves alone. Of course, blacks not only had opinions about the war and their place in it, but those opinions differed by faction and even more by class. White leaders in the South took no public cognizance of such things, at least as pertaining to the deserter issue. Instead, they acted as if blacks were children. This reinforced white supremacy,

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but at a price: If blacks were children, they could not be held fully responsible for their own actions. People without political or personal power, who have been denigrated by the dominant culture as ignorant, still have ways of getting around and getting back at those in nominal control. This has been documented by anthropologists, political scientists, and historians in traditional cultures around the world, from rural Malaysia to the antebellum South. When someone who is politically weak wishes to resist the will of the powerful, he or she may play off their presuppositions. In the early twentieth-century South, whites constantly assured themselves that they were smarter and more knowledgeable than blacks. How easy it was, then, for a black deserter to offer ignorance as an excuse for noncompliance with the state; and how likely that whites would believe it and even, perhaps, intervene to help him.42 Thus the white chairman of the Kemper County, Mississippi, draft board wrote to the state adjutant general to ask for help for James Hudson, a black man who had been arrested for desertion. The chairman noted that Hudson, who was married and had five children, lived one and one-half miles from the nearest rural route mailbox and had probably never received any mail in his life. Nor was the chairman alone in his concern. Hudson, who could not vote, received good constituent service from his congressman, Representative W. W. Venable, who wrote to the federal official in charge of the entire conscription process on his behalf: ‘‘The good, law-abiding white people feel a certain responsibility for this class of negroes, and I sincerely trust that there is no rule so inflexible as to deprive him of a right which ignorance caused him to lose.’’ All these efforts to help Hudson failed, and he was sent to the army; but we should note that his plea of ignorance may have saved him from prosecution and incarceration.43 Arkansas did more than most southern states both to round up deserters and to ease their transition into military service. In August , the local draft board of Phillips County put on what amounted to a deserters’ fair. First, the board plastered the county with announcements calling on deserters to show up for immediate entrainment. They used postmasters, plantation managers, pastors of black churches, and what the board termed ‘‘the natural tendency of Negroes to spread the news’’ to make sure that their message reached the rural population. (Note the board’s assumption that their deserters were mostly black.) On the designated day,  men showed up, of whom  were sent to camp. The board wanted to be sure that the men did not feel that they were being treated any different from normal registrants. They examined all the men, as was normal, and that took so long that the men missed the late

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train out of town. Therefore, the board reported, they had to be fed at the board’s expense, which the board noted did cost something. While the Phillips County board offered carrots in the way of good treatment, the state government itself supplied the stick. On September , , the state caused to be printed a slacker/deserter list that covered four newspaper-sized pages, accompanied by a message from the governor asking that all loyal people help locate the slackers. The list for Phillips County took up three newspaper-length columns. This action earned commendation from a national draft inspector, who informed the provost marshal general’s office that Arkansas had ‘‘a higher degree of activity on the part of the State Headquarters in regard to deserters than has yet come under his observation.’’ 44 By attributing desertion to ignorance, state authorities throughout the South could save their people’s reputation as patriots. Moreover, pretending that desertion was not deliberate but only a misunderstanding enabled state authorities to salvage men for army service, as described above. Thus religious pacifism, politics, the injustice of the draft, and the needs of families rarely figured in southern authorities’ explanations of the embarrassing fact that more than ninety-five thousand southern men had said no to military service. Instead, southern authorities argued that the men just did not know any better. This explanation fit the southern racial paradigm well when applied to blacks, but it could also be stretched to include whites, particularly if they were mountain people. In December , R. D. Lusk, the American Protective League chief in Lexington, wrote up a report for the national office concerning the situation in the North Carolina mountains: Owing to the peculiar reaction of the mountaineer’s philosophy to the draft laws, many of them ‘‘stepped back’’ in the ‘‘brush’’ to await the war’s end. In meeting this situation the Lexington chief did not think it necessary to wait formal action, but spent many days travelling about among his lumber-jack friends, sending out the word to delinquents that influenced reconsideration of many a hasty action. Knowing the psychology that prompted many an individual, isolated from inhabited centers, unable in many cases to read or write, to ‘‘step back’’ into the ‘‘brush.’’ . . . Lusk said that he doubted one in ten of the draft dodgers had ‘‘stepped back’’ out of malice. Once the situation had been explained to them, ‘‘a majority gladly came out.’’ 45 Lusk noted that North Carolina governor Bickett shared his preference for

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the direct appeal, having traveled to the mountains to speak to the people. His report included a clipping of a newspaper account of Bickett’s visit to Jefferson on June , . However, this clipping rather belied Lusk’s contention that desertion’s primary cause was ignorance. The newspaper reporter, C. M. Waynick, explained that the Ashe County boys had been told that ‘‘This is a Wilsonian war and waged to make the world safe for the Democratic party. . . .’’ Bickett denounced this as a ‘‘ ‘wicked and cruel lie’ ’’ and attempted to dissuade the deserters from the idea that when Wilson and the Democrats were gone the deserters would all be given amnesty. Do not count on it, Bickett said: ‘‘Your Uncle Samuel will still be doing business at the same old stand, and don’t you forget it. He will have a powerful large army with nothing much for it do, and every slacker will be run down, if it takes  years.’’ Waynick noted, ‘‘there is needed a county-wide public opinion aroused against desertion which will make it virtually impossible for a young man to lay down in his military harness.’’ 46 The tendency of the press to attribute desertion in the mountains to ignorance led to postwar protests. In June , Bureau of Investigation agent Frederick C. Handy claimed to have cleared all the deserters from Mitchell County, North Carolina, by offering them what amounted to a private amnesty if they would give themselves up. Handy delivered thirteen men to Camp Sevier and sent nine ‘‘delinquents’’ to Camp Jackson. However, he also allowed his exploits to be written up in the Greensboro Daily News. The story began, ‘‘Mitchell County, held by the federal department as the chief defective spot in the North Carolina mountains because of its deserters from the army and delinquents in the draft, has redeemed itself.’’ The clipping wound up in the Selective Service records and was used after the war in the compilation of the provost marshal general’s report. When that became public, the North Carolina legislature protested the disparagement of their constituents’ intelligence and patriotism, and the local board of exemptions for Mitchell County sent Crowder a lengthy rebuttal charging slander. Not only was the report inaccurate and exaggerated, according to the local board, but Handy himself had done little if anything to clear up desertion in the county, had hardly ever left the county seat, and had gotten drunk on moonshine with one of the deserters. The successful reinstatement of the deserters in the army, the local board said, was entirely due to local efforts. However, the Mitchell County board seems to have most resented the way the report presented them as backwoods rubes: ‘‘We are connected with the outside world both by telephone and telegraph and have forty miles of up-to-date railroad running entirely through our county, and we also have the reputation, based on fact, of having the best

 Resistance horse stock of any county in this State. We are justly proud of the fact that we are undiluted descendants of the early English settlers being of the purest strain of Anglo-Saxon blood.’’ 47 By blood, blacks were presupposed to be ignorant, but whites were not. On the other hand, by blood, all southern whites were presupposed to be AngloSaxon, free of contamination from immigrant strains, and therefore presumed loyal. The refusal of such people to serve in the military confounded normal expectations and raised the question, Why? By far the safest, least dangerous, and most socially useful answer had to be ignorance, which could be alleviated through education rather than political opposition. Thus the American Protective League wrote to Lusk, ‘‘Your solution is particularly interesting because so many of the men concerned were loyal Americans of the primitive blood who were breaking the law through ignorance.’’ 48 Whites and blacks who were willing to plead ignorance and submit to authority received kind treatment at the hands of state and local authorities and from the Selective Service System as a whole. Since the point of conscription was to get men into the army, punishing those who surrendered was useless and counterproductive. Yet despite the authorities’ best efforts, in the summer of  many deserters remained at large in the South and in the nation as a whole. Southern sheriffs feared to hunt down deserters and draft dodgers who hid out in the region’s woods and swamps. Moreover, many such men were armed and defiant.49

Armed Resistance Most armed resistance to the draft was small-scale, almost domestic in quality. To grasp the scope of such resistance would require reading local-level sources, such as newspapers, for the entire region. Here are some examples: – While investigating desertion in San Augustine County, Texas, Ranger Dudley White was shot and killed and his partner W. I. Wroe wounded.50 – In , white Texans killed George Cabiness, a black draft resister. Then, fearing promised revenge from his brothers, they attacked the Cabiness family home. In the ensuing gun battle, whites killed the Cabiness brothers and their mother, and the house burned.51 – In June , the local board of Gadsden, in Etowah County, Alabama, reported approximately two hundred deserters in the area.52 – Also in June , Sheriff John Lois of Gadsden was fatally shot in a raid on the home of Lige Bonds, an alleged slacker. A woman in the house was seriously wounded, and the slackers fled.53

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– In the flatlands of West Tennessee, ‘‘A general fight ensued’’ in April , when Carroll County sheriff Kirk tried to arrest deserters Dock Whittaker and his brother-in-law, E. T. Baker. Sheriff Kirk was wounded, Dock’s brother Cleveland Whittaker was killed, and his father Thomas and sister Maggie Scott were arrested for harboring deserters.54 – In August , the Comet of Johnson City (located in far northeastern Tennessee, near the Virginia boarder) ran a story describing the conviction of two mountaineers, William Vernon McCoy and John Walter Whipps, for what the paper called ‘‘anarchy and treason.’’ According to the Comet, three hundred mountaineers working at Big Stone Gap had ‘‘bonded together with a solmn [sic] oath to resist conscription . . . and at a given signal of their leaders to rise above all constituted authority, overpower the military guards located in the vicinity to guard the railroad and industrial property, seize their equipment[,] murder wealthy people among themselves and set up a law of their own.’’ McCoy, a cobbler who lived in St. Paul, a Virginia mining town, was a relative of the famous feuding family. Although we should not accept with complete credulity the idea that McCoy was trying to establish an anarchist outpost in the mountains, he was, in fact, convicted of conspiring to seize U.S. property and to oppose the government and served a sentence in federal prison from August , , to April , .55 Crowder praised the local draft boards for their role in ‘‘grounding’’ dissent at the local level and keeping it from reaching the national government. To use his metaphor, incidents of draft resistance in the rural South resembled a series of disconnected shorts, painful to the people involved in them but generally localized in their impact. However, some episodes of draft resistance reached the level of outright armed rebellion that required intervention by federal or state troops. In , the federal government sent troops into Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi to round up deserters, while the National Guard undertook a similar mission in Arkansas. In all of these cases, the deserters were white. In Tennessee, troops were sent to roust out deserters hiding in the hills east of Nashville in the summer of , with the results detailed at the head of this chapter. In Georgia, where the governor hesitated to support the war effort for fear of losing votes, where county officials begged to be left off draft boards, and where Tom Watson remained careful and quiet but by no means submissive to the Wilson administration, draft resistance required more than one application of federal force. In April , Bureau of Investigation agent Howell E.

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Jackson reported on his investigations into conditions in Cherokee County. Jackson’s chief informant was T. M. Sanders, a night policeman in Marietta, who said that he had made two trips into Cherokee to try to capture a particularly elusive deserter, Will Henry. Sanders told the federal agent that there were ten or twelve men hiding out on old man Bud Henry’s farm. He also reported that Charlie Armstrong Sr. of Cherokee had said that he would kill anyone who tried to force his son Charlie Jr. into the army, and that John Eskew, also of Cherokee, had collected money to fund Tom Watson’s lawsuit against the draft. The federal agent’s interest seems to have been particularly aroused by Sanders’s statement that Eskew and other draft evaders from Cherokee had been encouraged by a letter from Tom Watson urging them to arm themselves against the draft. In June, Jackson reported that a raid into Cherokee County had been planned by the state adjutant general, the chief of staff at Camp Gordon, the state attorney general, a revenue agent, a federal marshal, and a representative of the army’s Military Intelligence Division. Sanders, the Marietta policeman, promised to lead the raiders to the deserters’ hiding place. Jackson informed his superiors in Washington that he would go on the raid to see if he could find evidence against Watson.56 On the morning of the raid, Jackson met the military contingent, comprised of fifty soldiers under the command of two lieutenants, at the U.S. Army’s artillery range in Marietta. Federal civilian authorities on the raid included Jackson himself, at least one federal marshal, and four revenue agents. (The revenue men may have been chosen for their knowledge of local conditions and geography.) The raiders pulled out of Marietta at  .. and reached their target an hour before dawn. Jackson went with one group of raiders to Bud Henry’s house, but his son Will eluded them. The elder Henry said that he had done his best to get his son to comply with conscription and had no idea where the boy now was; probably out of state. As to accusations of sedition, Henry said that he had indeed been to meetings sponsored by supporters of Tom Watson, but he thought the purpose was to get up a petition to repeal the draft law, not to rebel. At Charlie Armstrong’s house, the raiders captured two younger Armstrongs but failed to catch Charlie Jr. The family insisted that Steve and Mayo Armstrong were underage. As for Charlie Jr., he too was out of state, according to his parents. Jackson said that he tried to appeal to Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong, who were ‘‘very ignorant mountaineers’’ but promised him to do their best to get Charlie Jr. to come in voluntarily.57 Jackson went along with five soldiers to see John Eskew, who had been a local activist against the draft. Eskew told Jackson that he had circulated a petition to repeal conscription, not to rebel against it. When the Supreme Court held the law constitutional, Eskew said, he quit holding meetings. Jack-

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son asked him if he believed in the law now. Eskew said that although he had not tried to persuade anyone to his opinion, he himself ‘‘still believed the law unconstitutional and that this Government had no right to send our men overseas.’’ 58 Having failed with this small pocket of alleged deserters and seditionists, the raiders proceeded along, Jackson in his car, and the troops back in their army trucks. At this point, the raid took an unexpected turn. In his car, Jackson crossed the Etowah River bridge and was waiting for the trucks to catch up to him when a farmer rode up to tell him that the soldiers had met with an accident. The bridge had cracked under the weight of the army trucks and had fallen forty feet into the Etowah River. Three of the soldiers were killed outright and eight were seriously injured. Agent Jackson rushed back to the bridge to find that farmers from the district had already gathered at the crash site and were helping extract men from the wreckage and transporting them to a place where they could meet the Camp Gordon ambulance. Afterward, Jackson went down to look at the bridge supports and found that several of them had been cut. The cuts looked old. When he asked about them, the farmers at the site said that the bridge supports had been cut during the Civil War. Jackson did not believe it, stating in his report that the bridge could not have held any heavy load. He thought that the bridge had been sabotaged.59 The Bureau of Investigation files on the Etowah incident do not carry the story any further. Therefore, what follows is purely speculative. It seems unlikely that a wooden bridge could have survived in the climate of rural Georgia from the s until  with supports that had been cut almost through. The farmers who told Jackson that the bridge had been cut during the Civil War may not have been talking about that specific structure but citing a historical precedent for what had just happened. The rapid arrival of local men at the scene also seems suspicious. In the rural South, farm houses tended to be widely dispersed in the countryside. How did the Cherokee County men get to the wreck so fast? Few men would have been idling around on the highway in June, a busy time on most farms. All of these factors suggest that the men who helped in the rescue were already on the scene. They may have cut the bridge supports themselves; at the least, they knew the bridge had been sabotaged and wanted to see what would happen. Possibly, they anticipated something more comic and less dramatic and deadly. They may have been shocked and horrified at the outcome and hurried down into the Etowah River gulch to try to save the men whom they would have called ‘‘soldier boys.’’ At any rate, not one of the local men at the wreck offered Jackson any information on

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Resistance

who had actually sabotaged the bridge, and apparently the Cherokee County deserters were never captured. Union County, Georgia, was also a hot spot for desertion. In June , Georgia adjutant general Mallett wrote to Provost Marshal General Crowder to inform him that there were between  and  deserters and slackers hiding out on the mountain there. An inspector who had visited the county concluded that resistance to the draft there ‘‘amounts to almost armed resistance.’’ Since the sheriff was in collusion with the deserters, it was thought that federal troops from Camp Gordon would be needed to clean them out. The commander there had suggested that one company of  men might suffice but that two companies would be better. In July, the federal attorney for the North District of Georgia sent the attorney general a letter from W. C. Candler, the U.S. commissioner, concerning two Union County men who had killed another man while they were registering for the draft. Both of the accused were apparently still at large, and neither had filled out their questionnaires. Candler noted that many people in the county made moonshine and said that most of the last year’s corn crop had gone for that purpose, so that ‘‘we now have many families in the county suffering for even corn bread, to say nothing of flour.’’ The federal attorney forwarding Candler’s letter commented that Union County had many good people as well as ‘‘many turbulent people . . . and many violaters [sic] of the revenue laws.’’ 60 In October, Inspector W. S. Nash reported to Crowder on the state of the Selective Service process in Georgia as a whole. While noting that most complaints about the operations of the draft came out of the southern part of the state, Nash said that ‘‘Discordant elements are to be found in Georgia, such as political influence, personal-liberty-lovers, and spiritual devotees and malingers. All of these classes are outlaws, and should be brought to justice.’’ He added, ‘‘In North Georgia in the mountains there exists a certain rebellious element who are not easily handled or controlled by law, probably bloodshed would be the result of an enforcement of the law.’’ 61 State and federal authorities held back in Union County, perhaps because they were convinced by Nash’s report, or because they did not want to repeat the Cherokee County fiasco, or because the war ended in November, or because winter rains made travel into the countryside too difficult. However, in the summer of , a federal marshal, Ben F. Dixon, tried to serve a warrant for slacking on George Crowley and was killed. George and various members of his family were indicted for murder as well as (respectively) desertion, failure to register, and harboring a deserter. This may have been the ‘‘disorder . . . created by certain deserters in the mountains resisting arrest’’ that prompted federal authorities to send in troops: two officers and thirty men, in January

Resistance

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. What happened next, the  records do not indicate. However, by that time most indictments for desertion and for harboring deserters were being dropped, filed away with the notation ‘‘nolle prosequi.’’ 62 The governor of Arkansas sent the National Guard into Cleburne County in July  to round up a group of Russellites (better known now as Jehovah’s Witnesses). Not technically pacifists, Russellites refused to fight in the Great War but were prepared to fight in the battle of Armageddon, which in  they expected momentarily. What the Arkansas Gazette labeled the ‘‘Cleburne County Draft War’’ began on July , when the county sheriff raided the home of Tom Adkisson, whose son Bliss was a draft evader. The sheriff anticipated earning a reward for turning Bliss in and promised to share ‘‘the spoils’’ with members of his four-man posse. The posse sneaked up on Adkisson’s house in the dark. Shots were exchanged. One of the posse was wounded and left behind to die when the sheriff ’s party retreated for reinforcements. The sheriff recruited a larger group of townsfolk from Heber Springs, Searcy, Pearson, and Quitman and then returned to the Adkisson farm, only to find that old Tom had made his own preparations. Young slackers with guns had taken up defensive positions around the house. The slackers and the posse exchanged fire for forty-five minutes before the slacker party slipped away into the forest, setting the underbrush afire behind them to block pursuit. Gathering more volunteers, including the Searcy Home Guard, sheriffs from neighboring counties, and bloodhounds, the posse swept through the countryside without ever locating the slackers. Meanwhile, townsfolk panicked as rumors circulated that scores of armed deserters would soon attack. Local authorities called on the state to help. On Monday, July , thirty men from the Fourth Arkansas Infantry, National Guard, arrived in Heber Springs, bringing with them two Vickers machine guns.63 The National Guard and the local forces searched for the slackers for seven days without success. Later, the slackers said that the searchers came within ten yards of their hiding place in a pine thicket but never saw them. Another tactic proved more useful: rounding up the slackers’ families, confining them in a local hotel, confiscating their stockpiles of food and supplies (the food being used to feed the posses), and threatening some family members with lynching. Cut off from their familial resources, the slackers went hungry. They survived on peanuts and water. By Saturday, when the National Guard took its machine guns back to Little Rock, the slackers were willing to come out of the woods. In the end, all eight deserters and Tom Adkisson himself surrendered. Carefully avoiding the posses from their own county, they turned themselves in to authorities in neighboring counties or (in the case of three men) to the Searcy-Judsonia Home Guard, which rewarded them with a big meal.64

 Resistance In the aftermath of the Cleburne County draft war, newspaper accounts blamed the Russellites’ resistance on their religion, their isolation, and their ignorance. This latter excuse could not be well used to explain Tom Adkisson, however. He was said to be a college graduate, and his speech, one reporter noted, was that of a ‘‘highly educated man.’’ Adkisson made no apology for his actions: ‘‘If it came up again like it did the last time, I would do just like I have done, I believe.’’ He served two years for voluntary manslaughter, and his son Bliss was sentenced to twenty years for second degree murder.65 In Mississippi, the federal government responded very differently to white deserters and black deserters, seeing black deserters as innocent and put-upon but white deserters as dangerous. On July , , the judge advocate’s office at Camp Shelby reported to the provost marshal general that scores of black deserters were being delivered to camp, all of whom were perfectly willing to serve in the army. The judge advocate’s officer said that local officers had made no effort to get black men’s draft notices to them, and then, when the date for induction had expired, the same officers arrested the men, delivered them to Camp Shelby, and claimed a reward: ‘‘There are civil officers in this state who are making, from these arrests, from  to  per week.’’ Selective Service headquarters urged the state government in Mississippi to take corrective measures to prevent these abuses but also assured the Mississippians that the federal government did not want to interfere in a state matter.66 White deserters were taken much more seriously, both in the state of Mississippi and in Washington. In June , Erie C. Scales, the state adjutant, reported that a band of deserters in Neshoba County were more than local authorities could handle and asked for troops. According to a letter from Richard R. Kenney of the judge advocate’s office at Camp Shelby, thirteen young white men, ten of them deserters and three draft evaders, were hiding out in the countryside twelve miles from Philadelphia. Kenney had his news from the Neshoba County sheriff, who ‘‘stated that the fathers and friends of these men had possessed themselves of arms and had so far defied the authorities to attempt to arrest the deserters or any of them.’’ Apparently, the provost marshal general’s office thought that the matter serious enough to require some level of federal intervention. Soldiers arrived in the state in early June and returned again some weeks later. Although the record is not completely clear, it appears that the officer in charge of the two expeditions preferred negotiation to battle. By the end of June, two of the Neshoba men surrendered to authorities at Meridian, and two more apparently turned themselves in at Philadelphia, while Lieutenant Newell and his men captured one, thereby (the newspaper crowed) clearing the county of slackers.67 However, the more serious military intervention occurred in northeastern

Resistance



Mississippi, in Tippah County. Tippah and the neighboring counties differed from Neshoba politically. Neshoba voted for Pat Harrison in the senatorial race in , while Tippah remained loyal to Vardaman. When a military excursion into Tippah to round up deserters ended in blood, the Neshoba Democrat said it was no wonder: ‘‘Eleven deserters were captured and carried back to the camp. The leader of the bunch sought to justify their treason by saying the draft law was unconstitutional.’’ The paper continued, ‘‘We do not have to reflect back far to learn where they got such sedition as that taught to them. Our own junior Senator flooded this state with his speech saying, ‘the selective draft is unconstitutional.’ ’’ 68 In March , the Tippah County Draft Board wrote to Mississippi adjutant general Scales to inform him that four county men had refused to entrain for camp, and ten of the men inducted had deserted: ‘‘These men are in hiding in the County around their homes, judging by reports and in open defiance to the authorities. Most of them are in the eastern part of the County in a broken country and know the surroundings minutely.’’ The board warned, ‘‘The influence of these men on the men who will be called to fill the quota this year is bad and will make the work of the Local Board difficult to do.’’ According to the board, the deserters were ‘‘heavily armed’’ and ‘‘in some instances upon meeting people have threatened to kill them if they dared tell of seeing them.’’ The draft board stated, ‘‘It is also reported that their Fathers are feeding and harboring them which is reasonable as the weather has been fierce and they have not been out in the public.’’ 69 In late April, Captain Jim Finley and twenty-two soldiers from Camp Pike came to Ripley, the Tippah County seat, to round up the deserters, which at that time apparently numbered eleven. Two local men, Lee Adams (brother of a prominent doctor) and Jim Conner, joined the sheriff and Captain Finley in a raid on the home of Bob Green, a deserter. Green shot and killed Adams and then fired at Conner, wounding him. Conner returned fire, wounding Green, who was then finished off by one of the soldiers. Green, who was about thirty years old, was married and had six children; one can only wonder on what grounds the draft board originally denied him a dependency exemption. Adams received an elaborate funeral, with soldiers as pallbearers. After all this, the remaining deserters gave themselves up, and their family members were charged with harboring them.70 In the aftermath, the Ripley newspaper defended the county against charges of disloyalty, which it attributed to politics, the county having always been loyal to Vardaman. In fact, the paper said, fifty-five other Mississippi counties had more deserters than did Tippah. It is true that other counties with more deserters did not receive visits from the army, most especially if those desert-

 Resistance ers were black. Nor did the federal government send in troops in all cases of violent white deserters. It does seem suspicious that the federal government chose to use armed force in a county strongly supportive of one of the Wilson administration’s designated enemies, at a time when that man was running for reelection. Tippah County voted for Vardaman anyway.71 The history of these federal expeditions into the South permit the drawing of some general conclusions about the conditions that facilitated armed resistance to the draft. First, in all of these cases, the federal government had to send in troops because local law enforcement personnel in rural counties —the sheriffs and constables—were either unwilling or unable to deal with the situation in the countryside. Second, it was nearly impossible for authorities, whether state, federal, or local, to find and subdue deserter bands if those bands had a network of support in the countryside. Note that the deserters in the cases above were not so much captured as negotiated out of the woods. (Of course, killing a few representative deserters probably expedited the negotiations.) Third, state authorities, with the exception of those in Arkansas, did not want to use their own powers to put down desertion. Governor Bickett of North Carolina explained why. In June , Bickett informed Crowder about the situation in Ashe County discussed above. Should his personal intervention fail, Bickett said, it would become necessary for him to call in federal troops: ‘‘I do not think that it is right to expect the neighbors to turn out and shoot down these boys. If they have to be killed, then it ought to be done by the Federal authorities and by troops who do not live in that section.’’ 72 Finally, the state authorities’ willingness to call in federal troops casts a new light on the southern states’ supposed allegiance to states’ rights. States’ rights, in –, stretched to accommodate the expedition of federal troops to Mississippi to hunt down and kill white Mississippians. Note, however, how tentatively the Selective Service asked Governor Bilbo’s administration to investigate the abuse of black men by county sheriffs, and with what delicacy the provost marshal general’s office assured the Mississippians that the Selective Service System did not want to interfere in a state matter. It seems that states’ rights had even more to do with race than historians have typically thought. We should rewrite the textbooks and make it clear that after  the federal government did, on occasion, send troops into the South to enforce federal laws: just not the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.     authorities attributed southern whites’ slacking mostly to ignorance, local people knew better. Rural areas in the South with high levels of white deserters and resistance tended to be the same areas that

Resistance



had produced petitions and protests against the draft. Moreover, the voters in these places supported antiwar agrarian politicians like Vardaman, Watson, and Hardwick even in the election of , when the full force of the Wilson administration’s political power was set against them. Despite their protestations to the contrary, southern governors indicated that they understood resistance as a political problem when they refused to use state troops against their constituents, demanding instead the dispatch of federal troops. On a smaller scale, southern sheriffs made the same political calculations and decisions in counties all over the region. Deserters drew upon the tacit backing of southern communities, the reluctance of law enforcement officials to offend voters or to risk their lives in the federal government’s cause, and the slackers’ own extensive knowledge of the countryside to ‘‘step back’’ until the war ended. As for black deserters, most played an old game, using deceit, guile, and the white folks’ willingness to believe their own myths about black men’s essential ignorance to shield them from the consequence of slacking. One of the reasons why the South had ninety-five thousand ‘‘deserters’’ was because slackers in the region had a fair chance of getting away with it.

EPILOGUE

After the War

I

n March of , Del Fuston sued the DeKalb County draft board. Fuston, who had been delivered from military service by a writ of habeas corpus, wanted , for mental anxiety and damage to his good name and an additional , in compensation for the trouble, expense, and loss of business the whole affair had cost him. Fuston lost his case and had to pay court costs, but his continued defiance is significant. Like Fuston, many slackers emerged from the shadows of wartime suppression in  unabashed.1 During the war, Wilson administration supporters had threatened postwar retribution against slackers and deserters. Governor Bickett of North Carolina had warned Ashe County deserters that their ‘‘Uncle Samuel’’ would send the army after them. In Tennessee, the head of the state council of defense had said that men who refused service would be stigmatized for life. In the end, no such things happened. Like Fuston, slackers picked up their lives unmolested. One of the last letters in the North Carolina file concerning problems with the draft is an angry note from a draft board member, who wrote in January  to complain that a deserter whom they had sent to camp just at the end of the war had returned from his ‘‘service’’ with a new army overcoat. However, the postwar attitude of North Carolina America Protective League representatives Lusk and Brown seem more typical. Lusk refused to give the right names of wartime deserters in his report for fear of embarrassing them. Brown, while willing to complain about the president’s being called a Jesuit, wanted nothing to do with causing ‘‘a row among any of our people.’’ The war being over, slackers and war mobilizers alike seem to have shaken themselves, looked around sheepishly, and gone back to their old lives without much discussion.2 Was the war a watershed in southern politics? Postwar elections indicate that it was not. Wilson administration supporters did well in , but so did men who had opposed Wilson. For example, Thomas Hardwick, who had lost his bid to be reelected to the Senate from Georgia in , was elected gover

Epilogue  nor of that state in , with the support of Tom Watson. On the other hand, Cordell Hull, of Tennessee’s Fourth District, having voted for the war and the draft, lost his House seat in . (Judge Hull returned to office in , after a stint as the chair of the national Democratic Executive Committee.) Over in Alabama, George Huddleston kept winning his Birmingham district until the s, when he ran athwart Franklin Roosevelt and lost his seat to a politician more amenable to the New Deal. In Mississippi, T. U. Sisson held his congressional seat until . Theodore Bilbo was defeated in his run for Congress in . His foes said it was because of his association with Vardaman, but his biographer attributes the loss to other causes entirely. In , Governor Bilbo signed into effect a tick dip law requiring Mississippi farmers to dip cattle every two weeks to avoid Texas tick fever. ‘‘Determined, sometimes violent’’ resistance developed in south Mississippi. When Bilbo lost the congressional race in , he lamented, ‘‘I was crucified on a cross of ticks.’’ Bilbo remained a power in Mississippi politics and made a comeback in , when he was again elected governor. He went on to serve as a U.S. senator.3 Claude Kitchin lost his place as House majority leader when the Republicans took over Congress in the  elections, but he remained in office and continued to fight for higher taxes on the rich and the corporations, for lower taxes on farmers, and for the League of Nations. In , after the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations had been defeated in the Senate, Republicans there introduced a joint resolution to declare the nation’s war with Germany over. In the House, Kitchin rose to oppose the resolution and offered a passionate defense of Woodrow Wilson. As he finished his speech, another member of the North Carolina delegation noticed that Kitchin was unable to hold his pencil and papers. He had suffered a stroke, one from which he never recovered. He continued in office but remained in poor health and died in  at the age of fifty-four. His hometown newspaper’s eulogy said, ‘‘He was as much a casualty of the war as any soldier killed on the battlefields of France.’’ 4 In the spring of , Tom Watson entered the Georgia Democratic presidential primary, opposing the administration’s candidate, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and Senator Hoke Smith of Georgia. He campaigned against ‘‘Wilsonism,’’ the League of Nations, and the Wilson administration’s wartime violation of civil liberties. (Palmer was at that time campaigning in favor of the retention of the sedition laws and their use to protect the nation against radicals.) Watson published his views in his new paper, the Columbia Sentinel, condemning Palmer for using ‘‘the irresistible force of the Federal Government to obliterate all newspapers, all preachers, all speakers, all writers, who stood for American rights and American Independence. . . .’’ As C. Vann Woodward notes, Palmer had Wilson’s endorsement, and Smith campaigned



Epilogue

throughout the state, while Watson made no speeches and hardly campaigned at all. He won , votes to Palmer’s , and Smith’s ,, but Palmer won more county unit votes, and the state party executive committee awarded the delegation to Palmer. At the party convention, Watson supporters dominated, passing resolution after resolution condemning the Wilson administration and voting to send the Watson delegation to the Democratic convention in San Francisco. Ultimately, Watson’s men and Palmer’s contingent both went to California, where the convention credentials committee chose to seat the Palmer delegation.5 That summer, Watson challenged Hoke Smith for his Senate seat in a threesided race that also included Governor Hugh M. Dorsey, who was more clearly a Wilson supporter than Smith. In this campaign, Watson criticized the Wilson administration’s conduct of the war, charged that ordinary soldiers had been viciously mistreated by the army, opposed the United States’ entry into the League of Nations, and at one point called the Ku Klux Klan to defend him against rumored attacks being planned by the American Legion, which supported Dorsey. Watson accused the American Legion of representing ‘‘a gilded brigade of rich young officers’’ and announced that he spoke for the common private soldier. In his speeches, he ‘‘described the soldier boy dragged from the fireside, hurriedly transformed into a cog in a vast war machine, hurled across the ocean and landed in a foreign country, to meet the fate of death by gallows by orders of the brutal officers put over them.’’ Watson was elected. While in office, he tried to investigate the treatment of soldiers in the American Expeditionary Force during the war, spoke up for Eugene Debs’s release from prison, condemned U.S. intervention against the new Soviet government, and opposed militarism. In a speech against increasing the size of the army, he charged that its proponents did not fear any foreign nation but rather ‘‘You are afraid of your own proletariat . . . you are afraid of the millions of men and women and children who do not have enough to eat in this land of bounteous harvests; not enough to wear in the very cotton fields where their hands bring forth the staple that clothes the world.’’ It was because of these people, he said, that ‘‘these vast combinations of capital want a standing army’’ in order to ‘‘beat down the dissatisfied, who have a right to be discontented.’’ Irascible, combative, cranky, and eloquent to the end, Watson died in office in  of a cerebral hemorrhage following severe bronchitis and asthma. His last political action in the Senate was to ask that letters sent to him from striking Pennsylvania miners and his remarks on the miners’ evictions from their homes be printed in the Congressional Record. Over seven thousand people came to his funeral back home in Georgia; floral tributes included a wreath from the  and one from Eugene Debs, who wrote to Mrs. Watson that Watson had

Epilogue  ‘‘fought the power of evil his whole life long in the interest of the common people.’’ 6    with a question: Why did so many southerners, black and white, refuse to fight in President Wilson’s war? That has proven relatively easy to answer. Slackers and war resisters had multiple, and sometimes overlapping, motives. Some opposed the war itself. Steeped in years of antipreparedness arguments, they believed that American troops were being sent overseas not to defend the nation but to uphold the economic interests of monopolistic corporations and the financiers of Wall Street. Some men deserted because they were religious pacifists. Others deserted because they had families to support and people to care for. Certainly, many southern men must have been driven into war resistance by the combination of federal draft policies, which penalized the poor, and local draft boards, who proved all too willing to exempt rich men’s sons and workers. Black southerners had all these reasons to avoid service and more: reasons that could be summed up in the statement that they had no country. In addition, the Selective Service System’s treatment of black conscripts could only have been confusing. Black men were registered and drafted, then told that they were not wanted right away, and then sent for months later. Small wonder that so many could not be found. What does southern draft resistance say about the efficacy of the World War I draft? In his postwar report, Provost Marshal General Crowder attributed southern draft resistance to ignorance, which is to say, innocence. For Crowder and the Selective Service, southern slackers were a political, not a logistical, problem. As John Whiteclay Chambers points out, the nation was so large and so powerful that it could afford less than perfect compliance with conscription. Moreover, Crowder’s method of organizing the draft, diffusing as it did dissent through anger at local draft boards, proved very effective in keeping the focus of dissent far away from Washington. This leaves us with two questions: What does the history of draft resistance in the rural South tell us about southern society in , and what does it tell us about the construction of the history of the First World War? First, this history indicates the dangers of reifying ‘‘the South,’’ of speaking of the region as if it is, or could be, in itself a political actor or could speak: ‘‘the South’’ cannot hold opinions, only southerners can; and in , southerners’ opinions varied widely. Among blacks, some supported the idea that wartime loyalty might bring postwar respect and civil rights to the race. Others were much more skeptical. White southerners were certainly paranoid when they feared a racial insurrection in , but their reports to the Bureau of Investigation that blacks were saying they had no country, or that they would just

 Epilogue as soon have Germans around as Americans, or that the good times would come when the white men left have the ring of truth. Some white southerners, particularly those of the educated, urban middle class, supported the war and worked hard on mobilization committees. Many rural southern whites, on the other hand, brought to their consideration of the war sets of ideas that they had been formulating, as John Sharp Williams put it, since Tom Watson days. Large numbers of rural southerners called it ‘‘a rich man’s war, and a poor man’s fight.’’ Educated by populists and socialists to think in class terms, rural southerners applied that critique to the war and to the ideas of American neutrality, freedom of the seas, and the world made safe for democracy, and they rejected the Wilson administration’s version of what America was doing and why. Far from being ignorant, many rural southerners exhibited a sophisticated understanding of events and motives that is, frankly, rather advanced when compared with what the supposedly well-educated American public can muster today. The fact that – protesters often expressed their politics in poor grammar and poor spelling, scrawled in pencil on children’s school tablets, should not blind us to the earnestness with which they tried to make the powerful hear their voices. Think of the members of the Farmers and Laborers Protective Association, a bunch of sharecroppers and small farmers, debating what their response should be to conscription, sitting in their small meeting room in Texas, worried, upset, and weeping. Consider the hundreds of southerners who signed Tom Watson’s petitions against the war, who came to meetings and spoke out, and who got their names listed in Bureau of Investigation files for it. These were people who took their politics seriously. Many of them also took their religion seriously. Southern white deserters’ actions contradict popular and historical ideas about the ‘‘martial South.’’ It is true that some deserters did live up to another stereotype, that of anarchic southern violence, when they fought the forces of the state rather than serve in the army. However, the most intriguing group of draft evaders and deserters were, in fact, pacifists who derived their resistance from what were then countercultural religious groups like congregations of the Church of Christ, Holiness churches, and other sects. Their witness for peace belies the notion of southern Protestant political and cultural homogeneity. What else does this history of conscription tell us about the South in ? One obvious and hardly shocking conclusion: local draft boards acted in the interests of local elites. What is surprising is the way in which race intersected with class in conscription. Draft boards used racist criteria when they considered men’s ‘‘station in life’’ before allocating exemptions. Moreover, there were

Epilogue  draft board members in the South who publicly announced their intention to send black men to France and keep whites home. But when boards got down to cases, race did not trump class. That is, rich and powerful southern white men failed to put the interests of their race ahead of their own familial and economic interests. To the contrary: Draft board members in plantation districts awarded exemptions to rich men’s hands and croppers, to rich men’s sons and sons-in-law, while sending poor whites to service on orders of the Selective Service System. Wealthy white men seem to have felt little, if any, racial solidarity with poor whites. White supremacy appears, then, to have been a political weapon used for class ends, not a force that unified all whites at all times. The history of draft resistance also casts new light on the supposed southern adherence to states’ rights. Southern conservatives of the Tom Heflin variety waved the rhetorical Stars and Bars while upholding presidential power and applauding the expansion of federal power during the war. Apparently, loyalty to the concepts of Jeffersonian restraint and local control could be jettisoned in wartime, especially when the war leader was a Democrat and a friend to southern interests. Moreover, southern governors seemingly felt no compunction in asking for federal troops to round up deserters: so much for southern politicians’ vaunted fear of federal armed intervention in the South. This suggests that like white supremacy, states’ rights was less a principle than a slogan, a useful political idea that could be evoked when needed to defend a particular policy but waived when it impeded the achievement of a desired political goal, such as avoiding the political onus of being held responsible for bringing armed intervention against deserters. Finally, what does this history tell us about the way we construct the story of American involvement in the First World War? The focus here on rural southerners, on grassroots responses to the draft, has necessarily meant the omission of other aspects of war mobilization that were central to the development of the modern American state. Yet focusing on the mostly poor and mostly powerless has highlighted the unexpected: the intensity and breadth of surveillance that heralded the birth of the American surveillance state. 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. For rural southerners, this sudden intrusion of federal police power must have been startling indeed. Curse the president, bad-mouth the Red Cross ‘‘ladies,’’ and before you knew it, you had to account for your words to a federal agent. And not in New York or Wash-



Epilogue

ington, but in the smallest, dustiest, crossroads towns in the rural South. What impact this left on political discourse in the region and on regional attitudes toward the state can only be imagined. As to how we tell the story of the American home front in World War I: We need to put aside the history of the war as seen through the Wilson administration’s propaganda (which, in itself, seems to have been rather less effective than supposed) and look again at the issue of public opinion. We have no idea how Americans actually felt about the war in , because people knew by that time that, unless they offered at least public support for the war, they risked a visit from the Bureau of Investigation at the least and time in a federal prison or death at the hands of a mob of vigilantes at the worst. We also should drop the concept of hysteria as an explanation of home-front suppression of civil liberties. The Wilson administration was not hysterical when it denied the radical press access to the mails, and vigilantes throughout the nation were not hysterical when they used violence to suppress dissent. Dissent was real, it was serious, and it did pose a danger to the war goals of the state. State surveillance and the judicious application of fear went a long way toward getting a recalcitrant and skeptical people to cooperate with war mobilization measures. This history of race, class, and power in the rural South during the First World War reiterates some old themes of southern history: that blacks were oppressed, that white elites behaved selfishly, that poor whites resented their treatment and acted out violently, that the federal government’s policies indicated a lack of knowledge or interest in the conditions of life among the rural poor. At the same time, it is the author’s hope that the material presented here will raise new questions and spur more research into the interrelations between race and class, the nature of southern rural culture, the role of religion in southern culture, and above all, the evolution of the modern American state during the Great War.

Notes

           CR: LC: MDAH: MPL: NA: NARC: SHC: TSLA:

Congressional Record Library of Congress Mississippi Department of Archives and History Memphis and Shelby County Public Library and Information Center National Archives, College Park, Maryland National Archives and Record Center, East Point, Georgia Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Tennessee State Library and Archives


. Alexandria Times, May , . . See chapter  for a more detailed explication of statistics on desertion. See also Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. . See Ash, When the Yankees Came; Escott, After Secession; Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy; and McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, . . See Schaffer, America in the Great War; Kennedy, Over Here; Hawley, Great War; and Zieger, America’s Great War. . The ‘‘South’’ is defined here as the eleven states of the former Confederacy. Chambers, in To Raise an Army, , writes: ‘‘Fragmentary evidence suggests that these draft ‘deserters,’ like the non-registrants, were disproportionately members of lower-income ethnic groups in the northern industrial areas, or poor whites and impoverished blacks or Hispanics in the rural South and Southwest.’’ . See Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom; and Escott, After Secession. . See Franklin, Militant South; Tindall, Emergence of the New South, –; Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad, –; and Gaughan, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson and Interventionism.’’ The literature on southern violence, military and otherwise, is extensive. See J. Reed, ‘‘Below the Smith and Wesson Line: Southern Violence,’’ in One South, –; Cash, Mind of the South; Rose, ‘‘Race and Region in American Historical Fiction’’; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor; J. Kirby, Media-Made Dixie; C. Wilson, Baptized in Blood; Whites, ‘‘ ‘Stand by Your Man’ ’’; Gaston, New South Creed; Weaver, Southern Tradition at Bay; Gerster and Cords, ‘‘Northern Origins of Southern Mythology’’;

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 Notes to Pages –

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McWhiney, Cracker Culture; Franklin, Militant South; Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic; and Nisbett and Cohen, Culture of Honor. Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, –, quote on ; Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, –. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, –, quote on . Quoted in Tindall, Emergence of the New South, . Human nature being what it is, the majority of the southern population may not have cared much about the war one way or another, except as it impended on their own lives. In Dixie Looks Abroad, a recent book on southern contributions to U.S. foreign policy from  to , Fry isolates several characteristics that he sees as key to understanding the South’s response to international affairs: loyalty to the concept of states’ rights and opposition to ‘‘centralized governmental power’’ (); concerns about race, honor, and patriotism (–); and ‘‘devotion to Woodrow Wilson and his policies’’ (). In his discussion of southern congressmen’s responses to a series of foreign policies issues during Wilson’s first administration, Fry emphasizes that southern political leaders and ‘‘opinion makers’’ () in the press and business community followed Wilson’s lead. While this is accurate, the story is more complex than Fry’s necessarily quick summary indicates, and ‘‘the South’’ neither as unified nor as loyal to supposedly southern principles as he suggests. This is not to deny Wilson’s influence but rather to amplify it: to get what he wanted out of his own party in Congress, Wilson employed considerable political skill, and a variety of tactics from compromise and cajolery to confrontation. For works that employ race and gender as determinant factors in analysis of southern politics and culture, see Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; Hale, Making Whiteness; and Dailey et al., Jumping Jim Crow. For a critique of this approach, see Kousser, ‘‘New Postmodern Southern Political History.’’ J. Scott, Seeing like a State, especially –. Keene, Doughboys, . For statistics, see Appendix Table -A, ‘‘Married registered, deferred, and deferred for dependency,’’ Second Report, . Kennedy, Over Here, –, Lippmann quoted on ; Schaffer, America in the Great War, –; Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, –. See also Creel, How We Advertised America. Representative Huddleston, Apr. , , CR, .  


. Arnett, Claude Kitchin, –; Representative Kitchin, Apr. , , CR, –. As secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels supported Wilson’s decision for war; nonetheless, his memoir on Kitchin’s speech is highly respectful. See Daniels, Wilson Era. . CR, –. . Ibid.; Arnett, Claude Kitchin, –. . J. O. Alderman, Edenton, N.C., Apr. , , and Jas. H. Frizelle, Durham, N.C., Apr. , , Reel , Claude Kitchin Papers, SHC.

Notes to Pages –  . As the nation moved toward war, politically active black men and women debated militarism and the draft, but theirs was an in-house debate, conducted among community leaders, the patronage chiefs of the Tuskegee machine, the NAACP, and the editors of black newspapers. They argued with each other over how the community should react to policies set by whites. For a discussion of black leaders’ reactions to the war, see Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance, –, and ‘‘ ‘Closing Ranks’ ’’; and Kornweibel, ‘‘Apathy and Dissent.’’ . My understanding of southern politics in this period has been formed by reading (among others) Woodward, Origins of the New South; J. Kirby, Darkness at the Dawning; Tindall, Emergence of the New South; Ayers, Promise of the New South; Grantham, Southern Progressivism; W. Link, Paradox of Southern Progressivism; and Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow. However, the conclusions drawn here and below are my own. . See note . . On the redefinition of ‘‘liberal’’ to emphasize racial rather than economic justice, see Bartley, New South. . Vardaman quoted in Doyle, Faulkner’s County, . It may be worth noting that for Vardaman, as for most early twentieth-century racialists, ‘‘the race’’ is always masculine: the White Man, the Negro, the Red Man. On Vardaman, see Holmes, White Chief. On Williams, see Osborn, John Sharp Williams, –.
. Woodward, Origins of the New South, –; Tindall, Emergence of the New South, –. Holmes, in White Chief, –, describes Vardaman’s liberalism. On Mississippi politics during the Progressive Era, see Morgan, Redneck Liberal. Morgan highlights one of the ironies of the period: Rank racists like James Vardaman, senator from Mississippi in , and his protégé Bilbo sponsored progressive reforms, which the more paternalistic Bourbons opposed. On Kitchin and other southern agrarians, see Arnett, Claude Kitchin, –; and A. Link, ‘‘The South and the ‘New Freedom’: An Interpretation,’’ in Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson, –.

. This summation is based on Grantham, Southern Progressivism; W. Link, Paradox of Southern Progressivism; Tindall, Emergence of the New South; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; and Woodward, Tom Watson. Doyle, in Nashville in the New South, – , offers a good overview of the clash between progressive ideals and urban realities in one southern city. As above, the interpretation is my own.
. Chambers, To Raise an Army, –; Crowley quoted in Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, . Finnegan’s book is the standard work on the preparedness movement. See also Pearlman, To Make Democracy Safe for America. On the gender anxieties of the Anglo-American upper class, see Adams, Great Adventure; and Rotundo, American Manhood.
. Chambers, in To Raise an Army, –, describes civilian preparedness advocates’ disdain for the National Guard. See also Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –, –. Chambers holds that army officers knew that universal military training and service was impractical; if implemented as outlined by civilian enthusiasts, the system would produce millions of half-trained soldiers, more than the

 Notes to Pages –


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army could even use. However, ‘‘universal military training’’ was a handy euphemism for what the army did want: universal liability to a military draft. As former secretary of war Henry Stimson, a preparedness advocate, explained in a letter to an officer in , the American public would not accept conscription unless everyone bore the burden equally: ‘‘If compulsory service is to come, it must come along this avenue of general universal training’’ (Chambers, To Raise an Army, –, quote on ). Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –, . Chambers, To Raise an Army, –, Wood quoted on . The suggestion that black officers might be trained at Plattsburg camps came from Theodore Roosevelt, probably the most racially liberal politician of national standing in the United States at the time; however, after Wood’s reply, TR did not press the issue. Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –; Chambers, To Raise an Army, – . Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –, quote on ; Zieger, America’s Great War, –. Strunsky, ‘‘Armaments and Social Caste,’’ –. Thanks to my student Rozalia Thomas for bringing this to my attention. See Early, World without War; Chambers, To Raise an Army, –; and Dawley, Changing the World, , –; Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –. See also A. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, –. Link says that the ‘‘core’’ of the antipreparedness forces in Congress were southern and western Democrats and that ‘‘Their leader in the preparedness controversy was Claude Kitchin, a farmerlawyer from Scotland Neck, North Carolina.’’ Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –; Chambers, To Raise an Army, –; Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad, ; A. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, – . My reading of this issue is based largely on statements made by southern senators and congressmen in the conscription debates, to the effect that their constituents would rather fight with men from their own communities, under their own captains, in militia units. See debates, Apr. –, , CR, , , , , – , , –. Thanks to Glenda Gilmore for insights into the racialized nature of the southern states’ National Guards in the Progressive Era. See also Chambers, To Raise an Army, –, –, –; Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –, –; and Arnett, Claude Kitchin, –. Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –, quote on ; Chambers, To Raise an Army, –; A. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, –. Link notes that most progressives thought that America’s proper role in the world was modeling successful democracy, and others thought that ‘‘wars in the modern world were mainly imperialistic and economic in origin’’ (). Based on my reading of the agrarian antipreparedness movement, I would suggest that they seem to have been motivated more by the latter sentiment than the former. Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –, ; Oscar Callaway (‘‘I ain’t any

Notes to Pages – 

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. . .

pacifist’’) quoted on ; AUAM staffer quoted on . On Baker’s pacifism, see A. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, . On the nation’s leading pacifist organizations and their uneasy alliance with rural (southern and midwestern) antimilitarists, see Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. As an example of a pro-Wilson senator who ‘‘expressed pacifist sentiment,’’ Gaughan, in ‘‘Woodrow Wilson and Interventionism,’’ quotes John Sharp Williams as saying in  that it would be a good idea if all the people who vote for war in legislative assemblies had to go to the front themselves: ‘‘we would get a lot of fools killed, which would be a great advantage to the civilized world’’ (). This is a classic Williams aside and highly enjoyable but does not tell us what cause Williams was actually advocating when he made the statement. Gaughan also says that southerners opposed preparedness because it would lead to a rise in federal power, and he invokes southern memories of the  Force Bill, which, he says, was ‘‘never far from the minds of southern politicians’’ (). If so, he provides no quotes to demonstrate it. Instead, the quotations from southern congressmen that he does supply reference fears of military autocracy, Prussianism, conspiracies by the money power, and so on. He says that Rep. John Stephens ‘‘warned that American military intervention in Europe would lead to federal intervention in the South’’ but does not tell us what Stephens’s actual words on that point were, instead quoting Stephens’s opposition (in ) to the nation’s entry ‘‘into a cruel, bloody, and wasteful war’’ that would ‘‘make our republic a military autocracy or a Prussianized despotism’’ (). Stephens and others may have been afraid of a second Reconstruction, as Gaughan suggests, but their words, as quoted in his article, draw from the rhetoric of antimilitarism rather than the rhetoric of states’ rights or racism. A. Link, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Party,’’ in Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson, –, quote on , and ‘‘The South and the ‘New Freedom’: An Interpretation,’’ ibid., –. Arnett, Claude Kitchin, –; A. Link, ‘‘The South and the ‘New Freedom,’ ’’ – ; Tindall, Emergence of the New South, –. Arnett, Claude Kitchin, –. Thanks also to Glenda Gilmore for insights into North Carolina politics of the period. Historians (and present-day political pundits) generally refer to people like Kitchin, Bryan, and their rural constituents as ‘‘isolationists.’’ Thus, Kendrick Clements’s book title, William Jennings Bryan, Missionary Isolationist. I find the use of this term inappropriate and misleading, in large part because of its reactionary connotation. ‘‘Isolationist’’ is a term that evokes the s, America First, American fascists, and public reaction against the First World War itself. To favor neutrality, free trade, and American commercial expansion, while opposing colonialism, imperialism, and the United States’ participation in the Old World alliance system, is not a political stance that deserves the associations summoned up by ‘‘isolationism.’’ Unilateralism is not the same thing as isolationism. Kitchin’s supporters called themselves ‘‘antimilitarists,’’ and the term will do as well as any for a convenient label. See Clements, William Jennings Bryan, xi–xv, –.

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Notes to Pages –

. Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. See also Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –.  . Chambers, To Raise an Army, –; Arnett, Claude Kitchin, –; A. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, –. See also Kitchin to Rev. S. L. Morgan, Henderson, N.C., Dec. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC: ‘‘I think the President has made a big mistake,—one that might possibly prove fatal to his future career. He has made a great president, and I have been distressed ‘almost to death’ ever since he changed his attitude and came out for the big Military-Naval program, which he has proposed to Congress.’’  . Hugh A. White, Lexington, Va., Dec. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC. Others raised issues of political strategy in their correspondence with Kitchin. G. W. Stephenson, of Fayetteville, Tennessee, wrote on February , , ‘‘Away with the rotten idea that the Pres. knows more than any, or all others! that he should have all he asks for. . . . The President has surely lost his head! We can’t steal the Repub. Thunder, act the hypocrite and beat them at their own game’’ (Reel , ibid.). 
. Tindall, Emergence of the New South, . Such was the message of the letter sent by B. R. Powell, deputy tax collector of Kaufman County, Texas: ‘‘A great majority of our people are with you. We are against making this a great Military Gov. It is only those who have gotten rich selling war munitions to Europe that are behind this scheme.’’ Powell added, ‘‘The poor people do not want it. I am glad you are still with the common people and have not fallen under the spell of Wall Street’’ (Dec. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC). On January , , Z. T. Spencer, a self-identified ‘‘old cotton farmer’’ who was president of the Alabama Co-Operative Cotton Association, wrote to Kitchin after reading about his stand in a Farmers Union paper: ‘‘The common people are with you almont [sic] to a man. We are ready for anything that we can do to aid the right in this issue. . . . Our Farmers Union of this county Passed resolutions against the Presidents preparedness plan and endorsing your stand’’ (Gadsden, Ala., Jan. , , ibid.). By January , the Allies were deeply in debt to the House of Morgan, so much so that Morgan was preparing to deny further loans without collateral. American entry into the war came at a very opportune time for Morgan, as well as for the Allies and for the American industrial and agricultural interests that received most of the Morgan money in exchange for war materiel. Anticipating U.S. loans, the British continued to borrow from Morgan, running up an overdraft of  million by June . At that point, Morgan presented the bill to the U.S. Treasury. American funds were quietly advanced through the Federal Reserve System, bailing Morgan and the Allies out, and the federal government made massive loans to the Allies. See Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson, –. . W. T. Hefley, attorney, Cameron, Tex., Jan. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC. . Resolutions adopted by the North Carolina Cotton Seed Crushers’ Association, Norfolk, Va., Dec. , , Reel , ibid.; A. C. House, Weldon, N.C., Feb. , , Reel , ibid.; letter from Kitchin to E. C. Gowan, Windsor, R.D. , N.C., Feb. , , Reel , ibid.

Notes to Pages –  . Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –. . Ibid., –; A. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, –, –, quote on ; Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. . Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –; Chambers, To Raise an Army, – . A. Link, in Wilson: Confusions and Crises, describes the interplay of international and domestic concerns in the Wilson administration during  and . . Trask, ‘‘Lusitania, Sinking of the,’’ . See also discussion of these issues in A. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises; and Clements, William Jennings Bryan, –. . Zieger, America’s Great War, –; –, –. See also the treatment of the neutrality issue and the submarine crisis in Clements, Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, –; and A. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, –.  . Zieger, America’s Great War, –; A. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, –; Stone statement paraphrased by Link on , Wilson quoted on  (‘‘cannot consent’’) and – (‘‘forbid’’).  . Quoted in Arnett, Claude Kitchin, . 
. Chas. H. Nashe, Greensboro, N.C., Feb. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC. . Clements, Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, –. . Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. See also Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, –. . Zieger, America’s Great War, –.         
. Representative Heflin, Apr. , , CR, –; brackets in the original. . The bullet missed the supposed offender, passed through a manure pile, and hit a man on the street corner, who contracted tetanus and had to be nursed back to health by Heflin’s physician brother. Heflin himself was charged with assault with a deadly weapon. (This contretemps did not injure his political prospects in Alabama.) See Tanner, ‘‘Wonderful World of Tom Heflin’’; and Thornton, ‘‘Alabama Politics, J. Thomas Heflin.’’ . Representatives Burnett and Heflin, Apr. , , CR, –. . Nathan O’Berry, president of the Whiteville Lumber Company, Goldsboro, N.C., to Daniels, Apr. , , in General Correspondence, Reel , Josephus Daniels Papers, LC. The Claude Kitchin Papers, SHC, contain many letters attesting to Wilson’s popularity in North Carolina. On Wilson’s popularity in the South, see Tindall, Emergence of the New South, –; and A. Link, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson: The American as Southerner,’’ in Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson, –. The concept that Wilson’s support correlates with class is my own; thanks also to Glenda Gilmore and her students at Yale. . See J. Reed, Enduring South and One South. . See C. Wilson, Baptized in Blood; Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy; Gaston, New South Creed; and Blight, Race and Reunion. . See Whites, ‘‘ ‘Stand by Your Man.’ ’’

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Notes to Pages –

. Speech of Senator Williams, Apr. , , CR, –; letters from L. S. Lake, Memphis, Apr. , , R. F. Manley, Birmingham, Apr. , , and other congratulatory letters, Box , General Correspondence, File April –, , John Sharp Williams Papers, LC. For Williams’s background, see Osborn, John Sharp Williams. . Letters to Williams from J. M. Consley, Slayden, Miss., Feb. , , Box , State Correspondence , Williams Papers, LC; J. L. Barnard, Grenada, Apr. , , Box , ibid.; telegram from F. R. Bridhall, Apr. , , announcing creation of Yazoo City Home Guard and approval of president and Williams, ibid.; James S. Butler, Yazoo City Public Service Commission, May , , ibid.; Mariame Buchanan Moore, President of United Daughters of the Confederacy, Mississippi division, and other officers, Apr. , ; ibid. (The Williams Papers folders are not numbered but filed alphabetically or by date of letter.) See also Osborn, John Sharp Williams, – ; and Holmes, White Chief, –.
. Williams to A. S. Coody, Jackson, Miss., Mar. , , Box , State Correspondence, Williams Papers, LC (‘‘I shall use my influence . . .’’); speech of Senator Williams, Apr. , , CR, –; Williams’s response to congratulatory telegram, Apr. , , and letter to Claudin S. Northrup, Apr. ,  (expressing his wish that he could ‘‘walk twenty miles without dying with the palpitation of the heart’’), File: April –, , Box , General Correspondence, Williams Papers, LC; letter to E. L. Brown, Apr. ,  (expressing his wish that the South would ‘‘show up better’’), File: April , , ibid.; letter to Earl Brewer, Clarksdale, Miss., Aug. , , Box , State Correspondence , Williams Papers, LC. According to Osborn, in John Sharp Williams, –, ultimately only three of Williams’s sons served in the army. (Note that Williams’s general correspondence is filed by week, but his state correspondence is in alphabetical order.)

. J. L. Byers, Hickory Flat, Miss., to Williams, Apr. , , Box , State Correspondence , Williams Papers, LC.
. O. F. Lawrence of the Grenada Sentinel to Williams, Feb. , , Box , Special Correspondence, ibid.; A. F. Callaway, Oxford, Miss., to Williams, Mar. , , Box , State Correspondence , ibid.
. Letters to Webb from R. B. Gates, Lincolnton, N.C., Mar. , , Thomas Mosteller, Lincolnton, N.C., Mar. , , and signature illegible, Newton, N.C., Mar. , , File , Box , Edwin Yates Webb Papers, SHC; Percy L. Gardner, Lakeview, N.C., to Kitchin, Apr. , , Reel , Claude Kitchin Papers, SHC; G. M. Simpson, Odenville, Ala., to Burnett, Mar. , , in record of Apr. , , CR, .
. Farmers’ Tribune quoted in record of Apr. , , CR, ; Rev. W. J. Phipps, Spring Hope, N.C., Apr. , , Reel , Claude Kitchin Papers, SHC. See also W. F. Snider, cashier, Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, Winston-Salem, N.C., Apr. , , ibid.
. W. S. Durham, Siler City, N.C., to Kitchin, Mar. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC; G. W. Stanley, New London, N.C., to Webb, Mar. , , and Lina May Pickler, New London, N.C., to Webb, Mar. , , File , Box , Webb Papers, SHC. Files , , and  contain the bulk of Webb’s antiwar correspondence.

Notes to Pages –




. George H. Snyder, Dallas, Tex., to Kitchin, Apr. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC.
. Dr. J. M. Covington, Wadesboro, N.C., to Kitchin, Apr. , , and V. E. Sigman (signature not clear), Claremont, N.C., Apr. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC; Mrs. P. M. Mull, Newton, N.C., to Webb, Mar. , , File , Box , Webb Papers, SHC; G. M. Simpson to Burnett, Mar. , , in record of Apr. , , CR, .
. J. H. Fish, South Side, N.C., to Webb, Mar. , , illegibly written in pencil, File , Box , Webb Papers, SHC.
. See letter from C. C. Robbins, Vice President of the Piedmont Mills Company, High Point, N.C., to Kitchin, Apr. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC. Students at the University of North Carolina began military drills early in the spring of . See Josephus Daniels to Secretary of War Newton Baker, Apr. , , Josephus Daniels Papers, LC. J. G. DeRoulhad Hamilton, chair of the History Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, wrote to Kitchin on April  to disagree with his antiwar stance but also to commend the congressman for his sincerity and courage. See Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC. However, Edwin Yates Webb did receive an antiwar letter from W. H. Little, dean of German and French, Lenoir College, Hickory, North Carolina, dated March , ; see File , Box , Webb Papers, SHC. And Kitchin received a similar letter from Henry Bernard Hemmeter, president of Concordia College, dated March , ; see Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC.  . Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad, –; Representative Ragsdale, Apr. , , CR, ; vote on declaration of war, Apr. , , CR, –. A. Link, in Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, n, writes: ‘‘The Kitchin papers at the University of North Carolina deserve special study for the light that they shed on public opinion in a state that had virtually no German Americans. Telegrams and letters in this collection show on their face an overwhelming sentiment in North Carolina against war.’’ 
. Richard H. Dabney to Wilson, in Link et al., Papers of Woodrow Wilson, –; Martin quoted in Clements, Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, . I am aware of Levin’s thesis, in Woodrow Wilson and World Politics, concerning Wilson’s reasons for entering the Great War: ‘‘to use America’s moral and material powers to create a new international order, safe from the related threats of war and revolution, in which America could serve mankind from a position of political and economic pre-eminence’’ (). I am not sure that most members of Congress either understood that motive or would have voted for it if they had. Most of the debate in , both in Congress and as reflected in letters to congressmen, revolved around neutrality, blockades, submarines, and issues generally related to freedom of the seas. . Exactly when and how Wilson came to this decision is controversial. The president originally favored enlisting men into a national force to be called the U.S. Volunteers but seems to have dropped this plan and moved toward conscription due to the attempts of his old political rival, Theodore Roosevelt, to obtain authorization to raise a volunteer force of his own for service in the war. Chambers suggests that to forestall TR, Wilson decided that volunteers could only enlist in the regular army and National Guard. See Chambers, To Raise an Army, –.

 Notes to Pages – . Ibid., , –; Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson, –; Wilson quoted in Schaffer, America in the Great War, . . Williams to W. J. Dawson, Bolton, Miss., Apr. , , Box , State Correspondence , Williams Papers, LC. . Williams to C. S. Butterfield, Brookhaven, Miss., Apr. , , Box , ibid. . Chambers, in To Raise an Army, , explains that the army wanted . million men in ;  percent of that total ‘‘had already enlisted voluntarily in the regular army and the National Guard.’’ The Selective Service set up quotas for the first draft call in , based in part on state population and upon the number of men from the state who had volunteered for the regular army, National Guard, navy, or Marine Corps. Southern state quotas were larger than those for the New England states, where volunteering had been much more common. My own research indicates that, once conscription passed Congress, middle-class men hurried to enlist in their state guard, often writing to congressmen or governors for officers’ commissions. During the debates over conscription, several congressmen attributed low enlistments to the regular army’s failure to recruit and to the reluctance of southern men to volunteer for service with the regulars. ‘‘Georgia Leads Dixie in Army Recruiting,’’ Atlanta Constitution, Apr. , ; Representative Emerson of Ohio, Apr. , , CR, –. The slogan referred to in the text is from the s: ‘‘What if they gave a war, and nobody came?’’ . Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. . Ibid., –, –.  . Ibid., , –; Representative Howard to Representative Wise, Apr. , , CR, . Chambers, in To Raise an Army, , suggests that the agrarian politicians on the House Military Affairs Committee ‘‘sought not to prevent the draft, but to establish it in a more politically palatable form.’’ By reporting out a bill that emphasized a volunteer, rather than draft, army, they hoped to satisfy their constituents.  . Gilbert, First World War, . When the Canadian draft went into effect in the fall of , approximately , men failed to register, and over  percent of those who did requested exemptions—among them the entire student body of the Manitoba Agricultural College. As the latter might indicate, farmers in Canada often opposed the draft. So did the Quebecois, who rioted against the draft in the spring of . In Australia, labor and the Irish (often the same people) opposed the draft. A second attempt at a referendum, in December , also resulted in a ‘‘no’’ vote for conscription. See Granastein and Hitsman, Broken Promises, –; ‘‘Conscription’’; and Beaumont, Australia’s War, –, –. For Anticonscription references to the British, Canadian, and Australian experiences, see Representative Larsen of Georgia, Apr. , , CR, –; Representative Burnett of Alabama, Apr. , , CR, ; quote from Representative Huddleston of Alabama, Apr. , , CR, – ; Representative Byrnes of South Carolina, Apr. , , CR, ; and Senator Hardwick of Georgia, Apr. , , CR, –. 
. Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. . Ibid., –.

Notes to Pages –



. Florence Moran, Badin, N.C., to Kitchin, Apr. , , and H. Q. Alexander to the North Carolina congressional delegation, Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC; letters to Webb from J. B. Ivey, Charlotte, N.C., Apr. , , File , W. T. Buchanan, Apr. , , File , C. O. Thornberg, Dallas, N.C., Apr. , , File , Jasper Miller and Son, Charlotte, N.C., , File , and W. M. Black, General Evangelist, Committee Home Missions, Synod of North Carolina, Apr. , , File , Box , Webb Papers, SHC. . G. R. Horne, Secretary, Rocky Mount, N.C., Chamber of Commerce, Apr. , , resolution from citizens of Raleigh, N.C., Apr. , , and Thomas Dixon to Kitchin, Apr. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC; T. M. Evans to Williams, Apr. , Box , State Correspondence, Williams Papers, LC. For further evidence of prowar sentiment in the South, see Gaughan, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson and Interventionism.’’ . Representative Bankhead, Apr. , , CR, –. . Representative Heflin, Apr. , , CR, –. . Chambers, To Raise an Army, –; Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson, –; Webb to E. G. Cansler, Apr. , , File , and O. M. Mull, Shelby, N.C., to Webb, May , , File  (commending Webb’s decision to vote for conscription), Box , Webb Papers, SHC. . Representative Sims, Apr. , , CR, –. Thetus Sims figures in Fry’s Dixie Looks Abroad as an example of how ‘‘loyalty to the Democratic Party sealed overall southern allegiance to Wilson’s policies.’’ Fry quotes Sims’s statement supporting Wilson’s proposal to repeal Panama Canal tolls in : ‘‘The President of the United States is the Court of last resort, and his decision on such questions is final and unanswerable and in this sense infallible’’ (). However, as the draft controversy indicates, Sims’s servility toward Wilson had its limits.  . Representative Wise, Apr. , , CR, –.  . Representative McLemore, Apr. , , CR, –. 
. ‘‘Conscription to Pass House, Say Friends of Bill,’’ Asheville Times, Apr. , . On Huddleston, see Barnard, ‘‘George Huddleston, Sr.’’ . Representative Huddleston, Apr. , , CR, –. . Huddleston’s daughter, Nancy Huddleston Packer, describes her father’s political career in In My Father’s House, –. . Senator Kirby, Apr. , , CR, –; Senator McKellar, Apr. , , CR, . This theme was echoed by other anticonscriptionists. John Burnett of Alabama remembered the conscripts who hid out in the mountains of Alabama and Georgia and how they ‘‘would come out of the woods and mountains and steal and destroy what the women and children and negroes were raising’’ (Apr. , , CR, ). . Senator Stone and Senator Hardwick, Apr. , , CR, –. The question concerning the motivation for the war came from Senator Stone. On Hardwick, see Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, ; and A. Link, Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson, . . Senator Hardwick, Apr. , , CR, –; Representative Huddleston, Apr. ,



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Notes to Pages – , CR, –; Representative Sisson, Apr. , , CR, ; Representative Nichols, Apr. , , CR, . C. T. Hancock, real estate agent of New Bern, N.C., wrote to Congressman Claude Kitchin, Senator F. M. Simmons, and Congressman George Hood on April , warning that he had heard that a young black man in the town had said ‘‘that there was now war and the white men were going to leave, then what would happen? There would be a mix-up, and he expected that some of the colored men would then marry white women.’’ Hancock asked if it would not be possible to ‘‘quietly manage it’’ so that those blacks forced into war service be among ‘‘those worthless and possible worse than worthless element such as hang around pool halls’’ (Hancock to Simmons, Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC). See Holmes, White Chief, , . Vardaman’s comment was made in a speech in Vicksburg, Mississippi. See Chambers, To Raise an Army, n. Congressmen’s correspondence reflected some anxiety about labor and race among white southerners. See Webb to R. H. W. Barker, Apr. , , reassuring Barker that blacks would be drafted proportionately and that not many men would be taken from the farms (File , Box , Webb Papers, SHC). Williams wrote similar letters. See Williams to J. A. Bandi, Gulfport, Apr. , , Box , State Correspondence, Williams Papers, LC. See also Grantham, Southern Progressivism, ; and Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. In Newton Baker and the American War Effort, Beaver attributes southern opposition to conscription to a reluctance to see black men trained in arms. This may have been a factor for some congressmen, but it does not appear to have been a deciding one for southern delegations as a whole. On Heflin and the race issue, see note . Representative Byrnes, Apr. , , CR, –. See also Representative Burnett, Apr. , , CR, ; and Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. Chambers, To Raise an Army, –, quote on . Chambers suggests that many of the congressmen who initially supported the Dent bill did so out of political expediency and were happy enough to switch sides when that became feasible. Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad, –; vote on Kahn amendments, Apr. , , CR, ; vote on the actual bill, as modified by the Kahn amendments, Apr. , , CR, . My count is different from Fry’s because he includes Kentucky in the South. Chambers, To Raise an Army, –; vote on the McKellar amendment, Apr. , , CR, . See Chambers, To Raise an Army, –, on final passage of the House and Senate conscription bills. Congressman Austin of Tennessee offered an amendment ‘‘That before sending any of the armies of the United States to Europe opportunity shall be given to the enlisted men to volunteer for this service’’ (Apr. , , CR, – ). A similar amendment was proposed by Representative Krieder of Pennsylvania (CR, ). On April , as the House approached a vote on the declaration of war, Representative Britten of Illinois tried to amend the resolution to state that American troops could not be sent to Europe, Asia, or Africa without direct action of

Notes to Pages – 

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Congress, ‘‘excepting those troops who specifically volunteer for foreign service’’ (CR, ). Chambers, To Raise an Army, . By concentrating on rhetoric rather than votes, Fry overstates southern Democrats’ support for Wilson and the war. See Dixie Looks Abroad, –. The remarks of McKellar and Larsen are cited to demonstrate southern loyalty to Wilson. Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad, –. See also A. Link, ‘‘The South and the ‘New Freedom’: An Interpretation,’’ in Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson, –. For information about congressmen, see Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, online at . Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad, ; Arnett, Claude Kitchin, –. Kitchin’s support for ‘‘armed neutrality’’ indicates that he was willing to defend U.S. shipping, with force if necessary, as long as doing so did not lead the United States into an alliance with Britain and France. This vote was consistent with his speech against the war, in which he expressed deep concern that the United States would be fighting to support the war aims of Britain and France. Letters to Webb from J. A. Parrott, Paint Gap, N.C., May , , File , Box , and Chas. Gibson, RFD , Charlotte, N.C., June , , File  (no box), Webb Papers, SHC. Blight, in Race and Reunion, , notes that by the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, images of regional reconciliation ‘‘became a popular symbol of social peace in a time when the disorder of race riots, labor strife, class antagonism, and bewildering immigrant diversity dominated social consciousness.’’  


. Numbers in various branches of service are from Keegan, First World War, –. See also Chambers, To Raise an Army, , , and ‘‘Conscription.’’ . Keegan, First World War, –. The historiographic standard on World War I conscription is Chambers, To Raise an Army. Crowder quoted in Second Report, . . Chambers, ‘‘Conscription,’’ –. According to Chambers, ‘‘an estimated , young men illegally evaded the draft’’ in the period between  and  (). The ‘‘damn near-run thing’’ was the Duke of Wellington’s postbattle comment on his victory at Waterloo. . Wise County, Va., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA; Second Report, –. . Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. . Ibid., –. It is my supposition that volunteers helped fill out draft cards at most voting precincts in the rural South. Certainly, county officials could not have done the job alone all in one day, given the difficulties of transportation. . Daily Clarion-Ledger, May  and June , ; Augusta Chronicle, June  and , ; Commercial Appeal, June , ; Keith, Country People, .

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Notes to Pages –

. Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. . Ibid., . On the composition of local boards by state, see ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA.
. Chambers, To Raise an Army, .

. Ibid., –, describes how Crowder, the Wilson administration, and Congress balanced varying economic and political issues in administering the draft. The conclusion that Crowder, not Wilson, generally made policy is my own, based on extensive reading in Selective Service records.
. Telegram, Crowder to Bilbo, Aug. , , File , Box , Theodore Bilbo Papers, MDAH; Chambers, To Raise an Army, .
. Chambers, To Raise an Army, –.
. Ibid., . See also pamphlet Selective Service System in File: ‘‘District Board Organization, A through M,’’ Box , RG , NA; and regulations, including questionnaire, in File: ‘‘Rules and Regulations, PMG (Printed),’’ Box , ibid.
. For an early statement on dependency issues, see Memorandum for General Mann from Crowder, May , , in ‘‘District Board Organization, A thru M’’; and Second Report, –; Wilson’s statement on married men quoted on . See also Crowder to Governors of All States, Aug. , , Circular Letters and Telegrams of the Selective Service Organization, –, vol. : April , , to May , , Box , Records of the Adjutant General, RG , NA, saying that ‘‘The Selective Service law exempts no person from military service on the ground of dependency’’ (); Crowder to Bilbo, Aug. , , File , Box , Bilbo Papers, MDAH.
. Second Report, –; Chambers, To Raise an Army, –.
. Chambers, To Raise an Army, ; Second Report, –.
. Second Report, –.
. See, for example, Keegan, First World War, ; Keene, Doughboys, ; Chambers, To Raise an Army, , n; Second Report, –, –; and ‘‘Rules and Regulations,’’ RG , NA.  . Second Report, –, quotes on –; Chambers, To Raise an Army, ; ‘‘Rules and Regulations,’’ RG , NA. 
. Crowder to Governors of All States, Sept. , , – (see note ); Crowder to Kitchin, Oct. , , with clipping, ‘‘No Married Men with Dependents Wanted for Army,’’ and Chilton to Kitchin, Danbury, N.C., Oct. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC. Kitchin wrote back to Chilton, saying that sending the boys home ‘‘ought to be beyond question. I do not know how to hurry the matter up, except you should write to the boys, if the authorities will not send them home, to write direct to the Adjutnat-General [sic] of North Carolina’’ (Kitchin to Chilton, Oct. , , Reel , ibid.). Governor Bickett’s proactive stance probably accounts for the fact that North Carolina boards deferred  percent of the state’s married men, the highest exemption rate for married men in the South. See Second Report, . . Senator Henry F. Hollis to Joseph Tumulty, Aug. , , File a, Series , Reel , Woodrow Wilson Papers (microfilm,  reels), LC. On ‘‘weasel words,’’ Hollis was quoting the senators from Massachusetts, John W. Weeks and Henry Cabot

Notes to Pages –

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Lodge, who apparently used the phrase to Johnson to describe Wilson’s promises that married men would be exempted from the draft. On Johnson’s role for the rest of the war, see Livermore, Politics Is Adjourned, –; Clements, Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, ; and Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World, . ‘‘Rules and Regulations,’’ RG , NA. Form letter, File: ‘‘District Board Organization, A thru M,’’ Box , ibid.; Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. Rep. Frank Clark to Woodrow Wilson, Sept. , , File , Series , Reel , Woodrow Wilson Papers, LC. Baker quoted in Chambers, To Raise an Army, . The exact quote is ‘‘Unmarried men not needed in industry’’ (Section , Rule XVII, Classification in Respect of Engagement in Industry and Agriculture, Regulations [st Copy], ‘‘Rules and Regulations,’’ RG , NA). See ‘‘Rules and Regulations,’’ RG , NA. Chambers, To Raise an Army, , –; Schaffer, America in the Great War, –; Kennedy, Over Here, –. The ‘‘Local Board Experience’’ reports (RG , NA) are stored by state. I took notes on all the rural counties’ reports and tried to omit all reports from obviously urban areas, like New Orleans or Birmingham, and from areas with more than one draft report, since urban counties sometimes filed as ‘‘County , County , and County .’’ In the days before air-conditioning and tractors, it was not unusual for farmers to lose twenty pounds during the summer and gain it back in the fall and winter. In Sequatchie County, Tennessee, reporting that some of their first contingent of conscripts had been rejected for service at camp, the board noted, ‘‘A large percent of our rejected men are mountain men ignorant as to the laws of nature and were married under age,’’ an intriguing statement that does not explain precisely why the men were sent home from camp. See Greene and Maury Counties, Tenn., Box , and Loudon and Sequatchie Counties, Tenn., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA. Greene County, Tenn., Box , and Chicot County, Ark., Box , ibid. Hancock, Hawkins, and Jefferson Counties, Tenn., Box , Cabarrus County, N.C., Box , and Onslow County, N.C., Box , ibid.; Second Report, –. Bleckley County, Ga., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA. See ‘‘Local Board Experience’’ Files, RG , NA. The reader is cautioned: . per cent is a very subjective figure, based on the way the author read the questionnaires filled out by draft boards. These included a question asking about community sentiment. Many boards answered very briefly, indicating that local sentiment was ‘‘fine,’’ without explaining what that meant. I have included in the . percent the boards that reported that the community encouraged filing claims. Many of the boards that reported sentiment was fine also reported that -plus percent of the registrants filed for exemption. Cherokee County, Ga., Box , Henry and Cheatham Counties, Tenn., Box , Macon County, Tenn., Box , Jasper, Saluda, and Chester Counties, S.C., Box , Cald-

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Notes to Pages – well and McCulloch Counties, Tex., Box , and Shelby County, Tex., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA. Gordon County, Ga., Box , ibid. Walker County, Ala., Box , ibid. These percentages reflect married men deferred for all reasons, including occupation, and are computed from statistics in Second Report, Appendix Table -A, . James, Monroe, Polk, Rhea, Hardeman, Union, and Gibson Counties, Tenn., Box , Walker, Dallas, and Perry Counties, Ala., Box , and Craighead County, Ark., Box , Cherokee County, Ga., Box , Columbia County, Fla., Box , Caldwell County, Tex., Box , Lowndes County, Miss., Box , and Wilkes County, N.C., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA. In Columbia County, Florida, the board denied exemptions to men who had been married for three years without children, if the wife in question was in good health. Wilkes County, N.C., Box , Appomattox County, Va., Box , Greenville County, , S.C., Box , Franklin (quoted), Sequatchie, Monroe, Polk, and Rhea Counties, Tenn., Box , Cherokee, Crenshaw, and Dallas Counties, Ala., Box , ibid. For an excellent close study of the interplay of race and gender in the plantation belt, see Shenk, ‘‘Race, Manhood, and Manpower.’’ For examples, see Geneva, McIntosh, and Cherokee Counties, Ala., Box , Hawkins, Sequatchie, and Franklin Counties, Tenn., Box , Suwannee County, Fla., Box , and Lee County, Tex., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA. See also charges against the draft board of Clay County, Arkansas, including May , , letter from the board’s chief clerk alleging that the board exempted employees in town stores, deputies in county offices, and stenographers, in Arkansas File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA; petition from ‘‘farmers and citizens of Clay County, Ark.’’ to Provost Marshall General, and report from L. Hunter, Special Agent, to Hon. Lloyd England, Attorney General, Arkansas, attributing dissatisfaction in the county to local politics, Arkansas File -, ibid. Virginia File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA, contains the complaint from the local board of Frederick County. Barbeau and Henri, Unknown Soldiers, . Ibid., –; Georgia File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA; Montgomery and Monroe Counties, Ala., Box , Schley and Oconee Counties, Ga., Box , and Dillon County, S.C., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ ibid. Montgomery County, site of Alabama’s capital city, is not a rural county, but I quote the draft board there as representative of boards throughout the state—and too indicative of racial bias in the draft to leave out. Chester County, S.C., Box , and Chatham and Bleckley Counties, Ga., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ ibid. Lowndes County, Miss., Box , Cherokee County, Ga., Box , and Caldwell County, La., Box , ibid. Lee County, Ark., Box , and Schley County, Ga., Box , ibid. St. Landry County, La., Box , and Marion County, S.C., Box , ibid.

Notes to Pages –  . Land ownership rates varied widely throughout the South. In , the percentage of farm owners, by state, was as follows: Virginia, .; North Carolina, .; South Carolina, .; Georgia, .; Florida, .; Tennessee, .; Alabama, .; Mississippi, .; Arkansas, .; Louisiana, .; and Texas, .. Tenancy correlated strongly with race, with whites more likely to be owners. However, in Virginia,  percent of black farmers owned their land, whereas in Mississippi only  percent did. For the nation as a whole, the distribution was as follows: . percent owners, . percent tenants, and . percent managers. See ‘‘Table : Color and Nativity of Farmers—Per Cent Distribution of Farm Operators, by Color, Nativity, and Tenure, by Divisions and by States: ,’’ U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, :. The argument that the draft fell heaviest on small landowning farmers is mine. For southern agriculture during this period, see Ayers, Promise of the New South, –; Wright, Old South, New South, –; and Keith, Country People, –, –. The concerned citizens’ quote is from Petition from Faxon, Benton County, Tenn., File , Box , Governor Thomas Rye Papers, TSLA. . Appeal to the President of the United States from the decision of the District Board, Southern District of Alabama, for the discharge of Earl B. Hinson, on Agricultural claim, is denied by Crowder for President Wilson; Appeal No. , Monroe County, Ala., Box , Appeals to President, Selective Service, RG , NARC.  . Willie Rankin, Monroe County, Ala., Appeals to President, Box , RG , NARC.  . Appeal No. , Alonzo LaFayette Simonton, Gwinnett County, Ga., ibid. 
. ‘‘Memorandum for the Secretary of War Re: Case of Marion Glenn Stringfellow,’’ Appeal No. , Dec. , , Florida General Correspondence File, ibid. . New Hanover County (Wilmington), N.C., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA. . Second Report, –. ‘‘Nonresistance,’’ in this context, corresponds to pacifism, although historians of religion use it to describe sects like the Mennonites: ‘‘sectarian nonresistants.’’ See Chatfield, ‘‘Pacifism and Patriotism.’’ . On church history, see Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith and ‘‘Apocalyptic Origins of Churches of Christ.’’ . Hughes, ‘‘Apocalyptic Origins of Churches of Christ,’’ ‘‘was a response’’ quote on , and Reviving the Ancient Faith, –, –, ‘‘apocalyptic primitivism’’ quote on , quote concerning civil government on . . W. T. Moore quoted in ibid., . On the role of David Lipscomb, see ibid., –. . Ibid., –; Hooper, Distinct People, . . Hooper, Distinct People, –, quote on .  . Hull to Rev. E. A. Elam, McQuiddy Printing Co., July , , Reel , Cordell Hull Papers, LC; H. Leo Boles to McKellar, Jan. , , Box , Kenneth D. McKellar Papers, MPL. In his letter, Boles stated, ‘‘We are anxious to get the benefit of the provisions made in the Draft Law,’’ indicating that his aim was to obtain for the Churches of Christ the status of a ‘‘well-recognized’’ peace church. He asked whether McKellar could get a delegation of Church of Christ leaders in to see Crowder or Secretary of War Baker. No reply was filed with this letter. On Elam’s

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Notes to Pages – activities, see Keith, Country People, ; Hooper, Distinct People, –, Jernigan quoted on ; information re Jernigan, Michael Casey, Pepperdine. Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith, –; Elders of the Church of Christ at Germanton, N.C. and Elders of the Church of Christ at Boyers, N.C., to Claude Kitchin, May , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC; Church of Christ at Marietta to Bilbo, annotated, Oct. , , File , Box , Bilbo Papers, MDAH. On Church of Christ conscientious objectors from Texas (and elsewhere in the South), see Casey, ‘‘New Information on Conscientious Objectors.’’ See also Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith, –; on the ‘‘fighting style,’’ ibid., –. McCulloch County, Tex., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA. Tippah and Prentiss Counties, Miss., Box , and Gibson County, Tenn., Box , ibid. Raleigh News and Observer, Jan. , ; Francis Joyner, Rector of Episcopal Church, Andrew C. Tyre, Methodist Episcopal Church, W. E. Swain, Methodist Protestant Church, J. A. Cargill, Church of Christ, and J. M. Millard, Presbyterian Church, Littleton, N.C., Mar. , , to Kitchin, and Sylvester Hassell to Kitchin, Apr. , , Reel , Kitchin Papers, SHC. Kitchin received a letter excoriating him for his stand on the war and the draft, written on stationery from the ‘‘Pastor’s Study’’ of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Wilson, N.C., signature illegible, Apr. , , Reel , ibid. However, this letter makes little mention of religion. The Memphis Commercial Appeal, June  and , , is the source for the Warren, Arkansas, affair. Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, –. For brief histories of the many different types of Holiness and Pentecostal Churches, see the Religious Movements Homepage Project, a website prepared by Jeffrey Hadden, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, online at . On Azusa, race, and the Pentecostal movement, see Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, –, –, quote from Mason on . The comments on why southern evangelicals might fear the movement are my own, as is the enjoyment of Mason’s language on the topic of sending missionaries to whites. See Dempster, ‘‘Pacifism in Pentecostalism’’; and Kornweibel, ‘‘Race and Conscientious Objection.’’ Alleghany and Burke Counties, N.C., Box , Loudon County, Tenn., Box , and Lowndes and Itawamba Counties, Miss., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA. When draft boards failed to give southern religious pacifists exemptions and sent them to service, the pacifists had one more option. Upon arrival at army bases, they could inform their officers of their refusal to fight and hope to be assigned noncombatant duty. That was the strategy of the war’s most famous southern pacifist, Alvin York of Fentress County, Tennessee. York was lucky: His battalion commander took his religion seriously and talked York out of his pacifism with a combination of biblical texts and descriptions of the evils committed by Germany. Sergeant York went on to achieve heroism in combat and world fame. Conscientious objectors who maintained their pacifism had other fates: either noncombatant service or

Notes to Pages –



prison. See Lee, Sergeant York; Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, –; Chambers, To Raise an Army, –; and Casey, ‘‘New Information on Conscientious Objectors.’’  
. Chambers, To Raise an Army, , –, –. . Senator Kirby, Apr. , , CR, ; Daily Clarion-Ledger, June , ; Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, ; Daniels, Wilson Era, –. In April , Lt. J. Wayne Allen, ‘‘a poor Covington county boy,’’ was brought back from his station in Waco, Texas, to help the county’s Liberty loan drive. Allen made a speech denouncing ‘‘rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight’’ as a lie, based on his own experience in the army’s flying corps, where he drilled ‘‘sons of millionaires’’ every day (Daily Clarion-Ledger, Apr. , ). . My view of the connections between populism and socialism in the Southwest is based on Green, Grass-Roots Socialism. I have, however, radically simplified Green’s detailed account of the evolution of southwestern activists from populism to socialism. Green’s focus is on leaders, and mine is on the grassroots appeal of economic reform to farmers and tenants. . Letter from Sam Cooke, attorney at law, Walthall, Miss., to T. W. Gregory, Attorney General, Washington, D.C., June , , OG ,, Reel , RG , NA; Agent John Murphy, New Orleans, Aug. , , ‘‘In Re: - . Red River and Franklin Parishes,’’ and report from S. W. Garrett, Oxford, Miss., Aug. , , ‘‘Re: Reported Resistence to the Selective Draft in Grenada, [unclear], Calhoun and Montgomery Counties, Mississippi,’’ both in file on Thomas E. Watson, OG ,, Reel , ibid. . See Green, Grass-Roots Socialism; Shannon, Socialist Party of America; Salvatore, Eugene Victor Debs; Dubofsky, We Shall Be All; and Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America. . Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, –. See also Graham, ‘‘Yours for the Revolution’’; Salvatore, Eugene Victor Debs, –; and Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America. . Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, –; Sellars, Oil, Wheat and Wobblies, –. . Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America, –, Socialist editor quoted on . . Ibid., ; Texas socialist quoted in Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, –.
. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, –, –, .

. Ibid., –.
. Ibid., –, –.
. Ibid., –, –; quote on –. See also Sellars, Oil, Wheat and Wobblies.
. Quoted in Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, .
. See B. Johnson, Revolution in Texas. I am profoundly grateful to Benjamin Johnson for his willingness to share his research on this issue and for allowing me to read his book manuscript before publication.
. R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ iv, –.



Notes to Pages –


. Ibid., iv, , . The supposition that co-ops were the FLPA’s drawing card is mine, based on what members said to Bureau of Investigation agents when asked why they joined. See especially the deposition of Rev. J. W. Fowler, taken by Charles E. Breniman, Abilene, Tex., Sept. , , in United States v. Farmers and Laborers Protective Association of America, OG , Reel , RG , NA (hereafter cited as FLPA file).
. R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ , , –. While the leaders of the organization said that the strap, gun, and knife symbolized chattel slavery, wage slavery, and resistance, respectively (), U.S. Attorney William Odell, prosecuting the FLPA, argued that the implements symbolized wage slavery, selfprotection (the dagger), and the ability to oppose capitalism (the gun). One FLPA member understood the gun to symbolize the power of capitalists, as exercised recently in the Colorado strike. See FLPA file.
. In a report from San Antonio, Texas, June , , Robert L. Barnes of the Bureau of Investigation included a letter from James McCane, McCane’s Detective Agency, which itself included a letter from ‘‘Operative ,’’ reporting on his investigations into the FLPA in Canton, Texas. William Odell, U.S. attorney, Texas, wrote to Robert L. Barnes, Bureau of Investigation, San Antonio, on July , , asking for more assistance from Operative . Also, J. M. Dodson, the cashier of the First State Bank in Chilicothe, Texas, paid an informant for intelligence about FLPA plans and made this information available to the bureau. See Agent S. Heyer report, Chilicothe, Tex., May , , and Agent Will C. Austin report, Fort Worth, Tex., July , , FLPA file.  . R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ ; quotes from ‘‘Defense in FLPA Case Will Claim Organization Was Loyal to U.S., Counsel Tells Jury,’’ clipping in FLPA file. 
. R. T. Lewis of Delk, Texas, testified later in court that the revolt was scheduled to begin on June , registration day. He did not explain how the FLPA militants could have decided on that date thirteen days before the Selective Draft Act was signed into law (May , ) and thirteen days before President Wilson announced that there would be a registration day. Lewis’s testimony fits the government’s case against the organization a little too perfectly to be credible. However, statements by Lewis and other FLPA members in and out of court do make a presentable case that Bryant and others were, at the least, indulging in militant and violent rhetoric at the meeting and elsewhere. See R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ ; and ‘‘Questions on Wilson Policy Ruled Out of FLPA Trial,’’ clipping in FLPA file. See Chambers, To Raise an Army, . . R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ . The statement about tears is hearsay, a Delk FLPA member’s testimony to the court concerning the report made by a Delk delegate to the convention, a Mr. Hunter, upon his return. See ‘‘Taking of Testimony Is Resumed at Trial Here Monday Morning,’’ clipping in FLPA file. . R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ ; Odell, San Angelo, Tex., to Attorney General, Washington, D.C., May , , FLPA file.

Notes to Pages –  . R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –, –. The bargain cut by the Delk lodge is detailed in the testimony of K. T. Lewis at the FLPA trial in September, ‘‘Taking of Testimony’’ (see note ). . FLPA member S. R. Stewart said that he had joined the lodge believing it to be a cooperative buying association. Stewart testified that he had heard the FLPA organizer state that ‘‘we should not go to war and fight against laboring people of other countries,’’ but that he had heard nothing about guns or drilling. Ben Davis of Vernon, Texas, stated that FLPA members had denounced the war and conscription outside meetings. J. L. Welch, of Benjamin, Texas, said that he thought the organization was buying guns to be used for a home guard. Members consistently stated that the FLPA’s purpose was the establishment of buying co-ops. Agent Breniman reported on August , , that hardware dealers at Anson, Stamford, Sagerton, and Haskell could testify that ‘‘many inquiries were made of these for the purchase of high power rifles and cartridges during the latter part of April and May, .’’ However, the dealers ‘‘some times refused to make the sales for the reason that the prospective purchaser was known to be a socialist or F. & L.P.A.’’ On Vernon gun sales, see report of Agent Heyser, Vernon, Tex., Aug. , , FLPA file, reporting that ‘‘Smith and Berry Hardware Co., sold some  - rifles. Both Smith and Berry were out of the city, but the clerk stated that these rifles were sold to the citizens, who were afraid of the F.L.P.A.A. [sic]’’ . Agent Heyser, Wichita Falls, Tex., June , , ibid.  . Rev. J. W. Fowler’s statement to Charles E. Breniman, Abilene, Tex., Sept. , , ibid.  . This conclusion is based on a reading of the FLPA file and on R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ –, , which details FLPA members’ cooperation with authorities and the disbanding of the union. 
. The decision to fold all the cases into one for conspiracy may have been suggested by a Bureau of Investigation lawyer. See ‘‘Memorandum for Mr. Bielaski,’’ May , , FLPA file: ‘‘After carefully reading the file on this case, I believe that the nature of the evidence is such, that handled separately will minimize its effectiveness. The particular acts taken by themselves do not look so bad as when they are looked at all together. . . . The possibility of making out a successful case of the prosecution seems to depend largely upon combining the various activities in different places.’’ Only one page of this memo appears in the FBI microfilm, and it contains no signature. . Agent Charles E. Breniman, Haskell, Tex., Aug. , , FLPA file. See also R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ –. . R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ ; ‘‘Atwell, William Hawley,’’ in Handbook of Texas Online. . Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, –, –, –; Kennedy, Over Here, – . . Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, –. In July, eight members of the ‘‘Jones Family,’’ allegedly a socialist group affiliated with the Working Class Union (WCU),



. .

.

 .  . 
. . .

Notes to Pages – were arrested for plotting armed resistance to the draft in rural Pottawatomie County. Although some historians have depicted the mysterious Jones Family as the kind of grassroots resisters that British historian Eric Hobsbawn labeled ‘‘primitive rebels,’’ others have contended that the Joneses were actually members of the WCU, the tenant farmers’ union with which the FLPA had considered amalgamating in May. In an article on the Green Corn Rebellion, Oklahoma historian Nigel Sellars contends that the Jones Family, as such, did not exist. In , the WCU had opposed state-mandated tick eradication programs, in which cattle were dipped to kill the ticks thought to cause Texas fever. The WCU burned barns of officials supporting the program and dynamited dipping tanks. Union members referred to these acts of social banditry as ‘‘sending in the Jones boys,’’ leading newspapers and state authorities to think that they were a separate organization from the WCU. The name may also have derived from a tradition of rural resistance in the region dating back to the s. See Sellars, ‘‘With Folded Arms?’’; and Morton, ‘‘No Time to Quibble.’’ Fite and Peterson, Opponents of War, –; Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, –; Daily Clarion-Ledger, Aug. , ; Sellars, ‘‘With Folded Arms?’’ While some of the men at Spears’s farm may have advocated armed rebellion, the way that most of them reacted to the arrival of the posse belies any revolutionary intent. This suggests to me that the Green Corn Rebellion was not a rebellion at all but an attempt to replicate one of the more famous protests in American history, George Coxey’s  march on Washington. Like Coxey’s Army, the tenant farmers of Oklahoma would present a petition in boots against conscription. See Fite and Peterson, Opponents of War, ; and Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, –, quote on . Green draws his materials on the  draft resistance in Texas and Oklahoma largely from newspapers, which printed sensational accounts of thwarted revolution. Thus his account of the FLPA affair states that the union was stockpiling weapons. That is what the papers said, but the allegation was never proven, despite the bureau’s best efforts to do so. Sellars, Oil, Wheat and Wobblies, –; R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ ; ‘‘Defense in FLPA Case’’ (see note ). Green’s account of the FLPA’s attempt to affiliate with the IWW and the WCU, based on newspaper reports, is enjoyably melodramatic but does not reflect the records of the FLPA’s meeting at Cisco, Texas, in May . Although the government certainly said that G. T. Bryant had convinced the FLPA to prepare for armed resistance to the draft, the Cisco vote against such a plan argues otherwise. See Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, . R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ , . Odell letter in Barnes report, San Antonio, Tex., July , , and Breniman report, Abilene, Tex., Sept. , , FLPA file. R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ , –; quote from ‘‘Defense in FLPA Case’’ (see note ). ‘‘Taking of Testimony’’ (see note ). Ibid.

Notes to Pages –  . R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ –; ‘‘Defense in FLPA Case’’; Hollis quote from ‘‘Taking of Testimony.’’ . R. Wilson, ‘‘Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association,’’ –, quote from Jack on . . Ibid. . Ibid., –. . Sellars, Oil, Wheat and Wobblies, .  . Agent Breniman, in his report from Haskell, Texas, August , , in the FLPA file, states that Powell, a farmer, had until two years previously been a railroad worker. Breniman said that Powell was known as a radical socialist while working on the railway and documented that he had bought a high-powered rifle, but since his father had objected to his shooting the gun around the farm, Powell had traded it to his brother.  . Breniman, report from Fort Worth, Tex., Aug. , , FLPA file. 
. Woodward, Tom Watson, –. . Ibid. . The suggestion that Watson’s anti-Catholicism was bone deep while his antiSemitism was opportunistic is mine, and it is based on my reading of his antiwar, anticonscription essays in the Jeffersonian, March–July . On Watson’s activities just prior to the war, see Woodward, Tom Watson, –; and Maclean, ‘‘Leo Frank Case Reconsidered.’’ . Maclean, ‘‘Leo Frank Case Reconsidered’’; Woodward, Tom Watson, –. . Woodward, Tom Watson, –. On Watson’s anti-Catholic tic, see the following articles in the Jeffersonian: ‘‘ ‘The  Per Cent Patriotism’ of Cardinal Gibbons,’’ May , ; ‘‘Making the World Safe for Democracy: Down with Prussian Autocracy!’’ July ,  (contains Watson’s diatribe against the Copper Trust in Bisbee, Arizona); ‘‘To Make the World Safe for Democracy,’’ July ,  (praises Weinberger for ‘‘his courageous attempts to make this part of the world safe for democracy’’ and defends Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, whom he said were ‘‘railroaded’’ to conviction on a conspiracy charge when no evidence of conspiracy existed). See also ‘‘Statement of Hyman Lachowsky upon His Surrender to the United States Marshal for the Southern District of New York to Commence Service of  Years Sentence,’’ Columbia Sentinel (Harlem, Ga.), Mar. , . (The Sentinel was the paper Watson purchased after the Jeffersonian was suppressed; see Woodward, Tom Watson, .) The last article cited contains a comment of sympathy for Weinberger, who had been evicted from his offices because of his clients: ‘‘The alleged badness of the character of Harry’s clients was based on the fact, that their political opinions differed from those of Harry’s landlord.’’ Watson said that he had written a letter of sympathy to ‘‘my young brother in law.’’ An archivist at the National Archives in East Point, Georgia, directed my attention to the wartime alliance between Watson and Weinberger and supplied a reference to a journal article concerning the same. I misplaced the reference and have been unable to locate the journal article but wish to acknowledge here the contribution of others’ ideas.

 Notes to Pages – . . .  .  .


. . .

.

. .

.

‘‘Which ‘Autocracy’ Is Yours?’’ Jeffersonian, Apr. , . Jeffersonian, May , . Ibid., May , . Ibid.; see also ibid., July , . On Watson’s career as a lawyer, see Woodward, Tom Watson. ‘‘These Are Your Lawful Rights,’’ Jeffersonian, June , ; ‘‘Flood Congress with Petitions to Pass This Bill,’’ ibid., July , ; ‘‘To Make the World Safe for Democracy,’’ ibid., July ,  (which describes the suppression of an anticonscription meeting in Cherokee County, Alabama, and deplores the arrest and imprisonment of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman for denouncing conscription); Woodward, Tom Watson, –. Comparing conscription to slavery became a staple of antidraft protests in –. The famous case of Schenck v. U.S., which produced Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s statement that the right to free speech does not ‘‘protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre,’’ concerned Charles Schenck’s attempt to distribute leaflets alleging that conscription violated the Thirteenth Amendment. See Schenck v. U.S.,  U.S.  (), on FindLaw, . On June , , the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason ran a story on the attempt of Judge J. D. Shewalter to obtain an injunction against conscription. Shewalter, a Democrat and recent candidate for the Senate, charged that the draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment and also illegally compelled state officials to act in behalf of the federal government, in violation of states’ rights. Harris to Baker, May , , Georgia File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. ‘‘What Are We Fighting for?’’ Jeffersonian, July , . Report by Agent George C. Smith, Savannah, Ga., May , , and letter from Churchill to Bielaski, undated but attached to a report filed by Agent George G. Calmes, Irwinton, Ga., Oct. , , ‘‘In Re: Thomas E. Watson—Violation of Amendment to Espionage Act,’’ OG ,, Reel , RG , NA (hereafter cited as Bureau Watson file). Report by George G. Calmes, Thomson, Ga., June , , ‘‘In Re: Mass Meeting at Thomson, Ga., & Dearing, Ga., To Defeat Purposes of Selective Conscription Act,’’ and report with same heading, dated June , , ibid. Quotes from Agent Russell N. Anderson, June , , Bureau Watson file; Woodward, Tom Watson, –. Dorsey E. Phillips, Bureau of Investigation, Sanford, N.C., to Bielaski, Aug. , , Bureau Watson file; Phillips, Sanford, N.C., Aug. , , ‘‘in Re: Frank Burns,’’ ibid.; report from R. E. McAdory, Steele, Ala., Aug. , , ‘‘In re Anti-Conscription Matter,’’ ibid.; report by Mark Hanna, Birmingham, Ala., Aug. , , ‘‘In R Investigation Anti-Conscription meeting, Talladega, Ala.,’’ ibid.; Agent John Murphy, New Orleans, Aug. , , ‘‘In Re: - ,’’ ibid.; report of E. R. Beckwith, Montgomery, Ala., Aug. , , ‘‘Subject: Disturbances in Coosa County,’’ ibid. Letter from John Sharp Williams to J. P. James, Calhoun City, Miss., Aug. , , ibid.

Notes to Pages –  . Report from S. W. Garrett, Oxford, Miss., Aug. , , ‘‘Re: Reported Resistance to the Selective Draft in Grenada, [unclear], Calhoun, and Montgomery Counties, Miss.,’’ ibid.; Eugene Palmer, Jackson, Miss., Oct. , , ‘‘In Re: Webster County, Miss., Alleged Sedition,’’ ibid.  . Woodward, Tom Watson, –; District Court of the Southern District of Georgia, John Story and Albert Jones, Petition for Habeas Corpus, decided Aug. , , at Mt. Airy, Ga., Speer, Judge, NARC.  . District Court decision, Story and Jones petition. 
. Woodward, Tom Watson, –; Jeffersonian, Aug. , . On July , , Max Eastman, Amos Pinchot, and John Reed, editors of the Masses, wrote personally to President Wilson about the suppression of small papers. First in their list of the disappeared was the Jeffersonian. See File , Series , Reel , Woodrow Wilson Papers, LC. Judge Speer quoted in ‘‘Mailing Privileges Are Denied to Jeffersonian,’’ Atlanta Constitution, Sept. , . . Schaffer, America in the Great War, –.  
. Vivian Roark to John Sharp Williams, Mar. , , Mississippi File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. . Williams to C. S. Butterfield, Brookhaven, Miss., Apr. , , Box , State Correspondence, John Sharp Williams Papers, LC; F. Fred Johnson, Kingsport, Tenn., to Rye, May , , File , Box , Governor Thomas Rye Papers, TSLA. . E. H. Crump, Memphis, Tenn., to McKellar, May , , File May , CrumpMcKellar Correspondence, Kenneth D. McKellar Papers, MPL; McKellar to H. C. Adler, Chattanooga, Tenn., File -A, Box , ibid. See also Thad A. Cox, Johnson City, Tenn., to Thomas Rye, Dec. , , File , Box , Rye Papers, TSLA. . Branson to George Lanier, West Point Manufacturing Company, West Point, Ga., Jan. , , File , Box , Eugene Cunningham Branson Papers, SHC. . C. P. Mooney, Memphis, Tenn., to Rye, Sept. , , File , Box , Rye Papers, TSLA. . Letters to Rye from Mrs. Myrtle Chandler, Big Sandy, Benton County, Tenn., June , , File , Box , Lou C. Farmer, Greenfield, Tenn., Oct. , , File , Box , and Ernest W. Morelock, Bulls Gap, Tenn., Sept. , , File , Box , Rye Papers, TSLA. . Mrs. Virgil O’Connor, Satartia, Miss., to Bilbo, Sept. , , File , Box , Theodore Bilbo Papers, MDAH. . This description is based upon my own experience of growing up on a southern farm in the s and s. Most of the farm women I knew were very strong, capable of lifting weights that would startle today’s gym-trained athletes, but they were not as strong as their husbands. Ironically, agricultural mechanization made it possible for women to plow, using tractors, and to chop wood, using chain saws; and today, few people kill their own hogs—they take them to refrigerated slaughterhouses. On the

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Notes to Pages – topic of gendered work patterns, see Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale; Jones, Mama Learned Us to Work; and Walker, All We Knew Was to Farm. Mrs. L. A. Bright, Enid, Miss., to Bilbo, Oct. , , File , Box , Bilbo Papers, MDAH. Kennedy, Over Here, –; Chambers, To Raise an Army, –, , –. Draft boards awarded exemptions for occupation and for dependency, but district boards automatically reviewed all their decisions on occupation and reviewed the appealed decisions on dependency. See Draft Board Reports, Administrative History, RG , ‘‘Guide to Archival Holdings, National Archives and Record Administration’s Southeastern Region (Atlanta, Georgia),’’ online at . H. E. Hildebrand, Western District of Texas, to Crowder, Feb. , , ‘‘File: General Letters May   to [blank],’’ Box , RG , NA. Ibid.; McNairy County, Tenn., Box , Toombs County, Ga., Box , and Burleson and Comal Counties, Tex., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA. Comal County denied exemptions to  of its  drafted married men, the highest percentage I saw in any locale in the South. ‘‘King Ranch,’’ in Handbook of Texas Online; report by J. B. Rogers, June , , in ‘‘Re: Tom East and H. A. Flowers,’’ Texas File -, State Files, Box , RG , NA; report by E. J. Geeham, June , , in ‘‘Re: Robert Kleberg, registrant, Townes to Crowder,’’ Texas File -, State Files, Box , ibid. Painter, Southern History across the Color Line, . Barbeau and Henri, in Unknown Soldiers, –, argue that ‘‘Most black leaders backed American entry into the war . . . and the fact that they remained leaders indicates that they mirrored the views of the black masses.’’ For revisionist views, see Kornweibel, ‘‘Investigate Everything,’’ –, and ‘‘Apathy and Dissent’’; Ellis, ‘‘ ‘Closing Ranks’ ’’ and Race, War, and Surveillance, –, –; and Reich, ‘‘Soldiers of Democracy.’’ See also Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. On the black officer corps, see Baltimore Afro-American, Mar.  and , ; Chicago Defender, Apr. , ; and Barbeau and Henri, Unknown Soldiers, –. For a succinct overview of racial issues in World War I, see Zieger, America’s Great War, –, –. Agent McElveen, Memphis, Tenn., Apr. , , ‘‘In Re: Anonymous Communication Endeavoring Prevent Negro Enlistment: European Neutrality,’’ OG , Reel , Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans. On disfranchisement as a weapon in Democratic Party factional wars, see Woodward, Origins of the New South, –. The description of southern socioeconomic geography is my own. Proctor and Bond quoted in ‘‘Negro Race Loyal, Say Party Leaders,’’ Atlanta Constitution, Apr. , . ‘‘Purvis Negroes Loyal,’’ Daily Clarion-Ledger, Apr. , ; ‘‘Georgia Negroes Hoot at Idea of Disloyalty,’’ Atlanta Constitution, Apr. , . A. T. Dent, Macon, Miss., to Williams, July , , Box , State Correspondence , Williams Papers, LC; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, ; Vardaman quoted in Chambers, To Raise an Army, .

Notes to Pages –  
. Barbeau and Henri, Unknown Soldiers, –; Chambers, To Raise an Army, – ; Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance, –; Zieger, America’s Great War, –. See also Haynes, Night of Violence; and ‘‘Houston Riot of ,’’ in Handbook of Texas Online. . ‘‘Demands Prompt Action,’’ Daily Clarion-Ledger, Aug. , . . Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. . The Ninety-third Division was made up of one regiment of drafted blacks (the st, with men from the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, plus white officers) and three regiments of National Guard units from New York, Illinois, Washington, D.C., Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, and Tennessee. One regiment of National Guards being under strength, draftees from Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois were added. However, the Ninety-second was not assembled as a division before shipping out to France. It was composed of black conscripts (, of them) from Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, New York, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and South Carolina. See Barbeau and Henri, Unknown Soldiers, –, –. See also Zieger, America’s Great War, –. The War Department stopped accepting black volunteers as soon as the ‘‘four regular army and eight northern National Guard black units had been quickly brought up to full strength’’ (Chambers, To Raise an Army, ). . Barbeau and Henri, Unknown Soldiers, ; Franklin County, N.C., Box , Bradley County, Ark., Box , and Jackson County, Fla., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA; R. Y. Thomas to President Wilson, Feb. , , File , Series , Reel , Woodrow Wilson Papers, LC. The rise in lynching is most often attributed to the tensions aroused by social upheaval, white paranoia about German-sponsored black insurrection, and the desire of white landowners to retain control over their labor. In Fitzhugh Brundage’s study of lynching in Georgia, he writes, ‘‘racial violence erupted with a ferocity unmatched since the racial hysteria that accompanied the Spanish-American War twenty years earlier. Thirty-nine blacks died at the hands of mobs between  and , and race riots broke out in cities and towns throughout Georgia’’ (Under Sentence of Death, ). . Barbeau and Henri, Unknown Soldiers, –; W. D. Hudgins, Estill Springs, Tenn., Feb. , , B. F. Lee, senior bishop AME, Episcopal residence, Nashville, Tenn., Feb. , , telegram from John R. Shillady, secretary of NAACP, Washington, D.C., May , , and Chas. W. Cansler, Knoxville, Tenn., Feb. , File , ‘‘Correspondence Re: Lynching in Tennessee—–,’’ Box , Rye Papers, TSLA. See also Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance, , which quotes the headline from an unspecified African American paper. . S. L. Chesnutt, Rogersville, Tenn., to Rye, Feb. , , Hudgins to Rye, Feb. , , Shillady telegram, May , , and Rev. J. A. Jones, AME, Nashville, to Rye, Apr. , , File , Box , Rye Papers, TSLA; ‘‘Law and Order League of Nashville, Tennessee’’ (undated pamphlet), File , Box , ibid. The Lexington story is complicated. Apparently, Berry Noyes, a local bootlegger, had shot and killed the sheriff who was trying to arrest him. He was captured and then either shot himself or was

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shot, after which he was taken to Lexington ‘‘more dead than alive’’ and was hanged and burned. See ‘‘Negro Kills Sheriff,’’ Carroll County Democrat, Apr. , . Letter to Rye, July , , File , Box , Rye Papers, TSLA. In Zieger, America’s Great War, , the following statistics are given: eighty lynchings in , fifty-four in , thirty-eight in , fifty-eight in , and seventy in . See De la Roche, ‘‘Sociogenesis of Lynching.’’ ‘‘America’s Changing Heart,’’ Savannah Tribune, Mar. , . E. Scott, Scott’s Official History, ; Savannah Tribune, May , . ‘‘When the Negroes Marched By,’’ Atlanta Constitution, Apr. , . E. Scott, Scott’s Official History, . Shenk, ‘‘Race, Manhood, and Manpower,’’ . Alabama File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA, contains information about the Houston County Draft Board in –. See also Alabama Files -, -, and -. Texas File -, Box , ibid. This enormous file contains multiple complaints against the Leon County board. Ibid. Ibid. Charles C. Hodges, Fayette County, Tenn., to Emmett Scott, July , , Tennessee File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. On Emmett J. Scott, see Zieger, America’s Great War, ; and E. Scott, Scott’s Official History. Tennessee File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. ‘‘A Trencher,’’ Dec. , , to T. W. Bickett, Arkansas File -, Box , ibid. North Carolina File -, Box , ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Hahamovitch, Fruits of Their Labor, –; Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. Hahamovitch, Fruits of Their Labor, –. ‘‘The State Council Makes Great Start for Next Year,’’ Daily Clarion-Ledger, Aug. , ; ‘‘Forty Negroes Go to Northern Towns,’’ ibid., July , . Quoted in Hahamovitch, Fruits of Their Labor, . Ibid., , –. Hahamovitch cites no instance in which work-or-fight orders were applied to white women; nor have I seen any such. Proving negatives is notoriously hard, but I believe that any attempt to force white men’s wives into employment would have produced a reaction sufficient to have made an impact on the historical record. Ibid., –. Telegram, Crowder to Bilbo, Sept. , File , Box , Bilbo Papers, MDAH. See telegram, Bilbo to Crowder, File , Box , ibid., in which he states that the problem with sending in a quota of  percent of the state’s conscripted men, all white, is that twenty counties in Mississippi had populations that were  percent black. Crowder telegraphed back, saying that the quota should then be made up from other counties (File , Box ); in a further exchange, on September ,

Notes to Pages –  Crowder pointed out that other southern states had the same problem, and they were coping. On September , Bilbo retorted that ‘‘the call for white men will take all white men ultimately to be called.’’ On September , Bilbo informed the district boards that the War Department had modified its demands, as explained in the text. See File , Box , ibid. . Chambers, To Raise an Army, –. . Ibid., –; Zieger, America’s Great War, –, –.  
. On American domestic espionage at this period, see Jeffreys-Jones, American Espionage; Jensen, Price of Vigilance; Kornweibel, ‘‘Seeing Red’’ and ‘‘Investigate Everything’’; Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance; Kohn, American Political Prisoners; Schaffer, America in the Great War, –; Kennedy, Over Here, –; Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War; Talbert, Negative Intelligence; Theoharis, ‘‘Dissent and the State’’; and Theoharis and Cox, Boss. For an overview of European surveillance in the period, see Holquist, ‘‘ ‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega.’ ’’ Quote from Annual Report of the Attorney General, , . Theodore Kornweibel’s work highlights federal surveillance of African Americans but is also the best source overall concerning the Bureau of Investigation’s general fieldwork from  into the s. In ‘‘Investigate Everything,’’ Kornweibel argues that federal agents intimidated ‘‘ ‘suspects’ ’’ because they could not arrest them (). I believe that the Bureau of Investigation’s coercive methods functioned as intended, to suppress dissent, which I consider to have been the federal government’s chief goal. In short, Kornweibel gives the bureau more credit as a law enforcement agency than do I. . In general, ‘‘hysteria’’ is attributed to vigilantes, not to the U.S. government itself. See Tindall, Emergence of the New South, –. However, Schaffer, in America in the Great War, –, notes that the Wilson administration’s attempts to squelch dissent and its propaganda helped create the atmosphere in which mobs attacked dissenters. In Over Here, Kennedy attributes wartime hysteria to the Wilson administration’s ‘‘purposeful fueling of patriotic fires’’ to motivate people to support the war. In a nicely ironic note, Kennedy says that the Wilson administration stirred people up because they were reluctant to ‘‘exercise power in a straightforward, statutory and necessarily coercive way’’ (). Peterson and Fite’s Opponents of War, written in , still remains the best single work on wartime suppression of civil liberties, but it is very much a book of its time, reflecting consensus historiography and the assumption that wartime dissenters posed no real danger to the state. . In America in the Great War, , Schaffer points out the Wilson administration’s attempts to ‘‘control the way Americans thought, felt and acted’’ and notes that, while members of the administration may have felt concern ‘‘about what it was doing to civil liberties,’’ that made little difference to the people being repressed. However, Schaffer says, if the Wilson administration had not acted as it did, Wilson would have been attacked from the right; moreover, had dissent been allowed to spread, it

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might have impeded the war effort. This suggests that wartime measures of repression were not overkill. See J. Scott, Seeing like a State, especially –, on the creation of surnames and the establishment of state-mandated legibility. See also Holquist, ‘‘ ‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega.’ ’’ Much of the Progressive Era reformers’ emphasis on information gathering and education can be seen as an attempt to surveil and propagandize. Kennedy, Over Here, –; Schaffer, America in the Great War, –. See also Creel, How We Advertised America, especially the lists of publications, –. This conclusion is based on Breen, Uncle Sam at Home, chaps.  and ; and Schaffer, America in the Great War, –. Breen, Uncle Sam at Home, –. Rutledge Smith, a prominent businessman from Cookeville, ran the Tennessee Council of Defense and also directed the Selective Service’s operations in the state, with a level of efficiency rare in the South. Ibid., –, –. See also Keith, Country People, chap. ; and James Stone, Oxford, Miss., to John Sharp Williams, May , , Mississippi File -, State Files, RG , NA: ‘‘The burden of supporting the Government and contributing to the Red Cross has so far fallen upon about % of our people.’’ See also report by Agent George G. Calmes, Oct. , , ‘‘Re: Thomas E. Watson—Violation of Amendment to Espionage Act,’’ OG ,, Reel , RG , NA, in which the agent describes the mobilization forces of Irwinton, Georgia: Mrs. Manson, editor of the local paper and chair of several different agencies in the county, including the Liberty bond drive and the Women’s Council of Defense, and her brother-in-law, state senator Carawell. When the war ended, Annie Sutton Cameron compiled a history of Orange County’s record at the behest of J. S. Webb, the chair of the county council of defense. Cameron did a very thorough job, compiling extensive lists of members of the War Stamp committees, by township, and contributors to the Red Cross, by name and amount; a report on the Liberty loan activities of the women’s committees, with amounts raised; and a list of the men sent to camp by the local draft board, by age and race. She also compiled histories of the work done during the war by the various agencies of mobilization. See Folders , , and , Orange County (N.C.) World War I Record, RG , SHC. Folders  and , ibid. Folder , ibid. U.S. Committee on Public Information, Creel Report, –, state fair tours list on , canceled exhibits on . ‘‘Table : Per Cent Illiterate in Population  Years of Age and Over: ,’’ U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, :. The southern states’ high illiteracy rates reflected poor educational opportunities for African Americans. Illiteracy rates for blacks ten years of age and older in Alabama and Louisiana were . and . percent, respectively. However, southern whites were among the nation’s most illiterate people, with illiteracy rates ranging from . percent in Texas to . percent in North Carolina and  percent in Louisiana. Carruth, in ‘‘World War I Propa-

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ganda and Its Effects in Arkansas,’’ documents the appearance of CPI pieces in Arkansas’s daily and weekly press and argues that propaganda in the state was effective. His evidence includes various vigilante actions against dissenters. While agreeing that the CPI’s distribution mechanisms worked very well, I suggest that Carruth’s own account of public outrage over dissent in Arkansas indicates that dissenters had not been effectively swayed by propaganda. Neshoba Democrat, Jan. , , and , . Ibid., Apr. , . Tennessee File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA, contains photostat of report by Agent Young, Jan. [?] , ‘‘re. F. M. Orr, alleged seditious statement.’’ On soldiersto-soap, see Jeffersonian, May , , which reprinted an extensive excerpt from the Augusta Herald describing the rendering of German soldiers for tallow, fertilizer, and ‘‘fodder for pigs.’’ (Mrs. C. M.) Riley M. Fletcher Berry to Chief of U.S. Department of Justice, Feb. , , OG , Reel , Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans. Ibid. ‘‘In Re—Letter of Deputy Prosecuting Atty. William Kirten, Lake Village, Arkansas,’’ OG , Reel , ibid. For quotation from Gregory, see Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance, xviii. For more information on the Lake Village affair, see Kornweibel, ‘‘Investigate Everything,’’ –. ‘‘In Re Monroe Bean et al (col),’’ Aug. , , OG , Reel , Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans. H. D. Cocke, Crystal Spring, Miss., to President Wilson, Mar. , , OG , Reel , ibid. Letter from Longview, Tex., to President Wilson, Apr. , , OG , Reel , ibid. See also Kornweibel’s study of wartime surveillance, ‘‘Investigate Everything’’: ‘‘A few [blacks] said they had no country . . .’’ (). J. B. Rogers, Victoria, Tex., Apr. , , ‘‘In Re: Two Negro Preachers Alleged Inciting Uprising among the Negros,’’ ibid. On black resistance in Texas, see also Reich, ‘‘Soldiers of Democracy.’’ Robert S. Phifer Jr., Agent, Jackson, Miss., Apr. , , ibid. See also the letter from the postal inspector at Clarksdale, Mississippi, April , , ibid., alleging that a local black preacher was urging blacks to join Germany, Japan, and Mexico in war against the United States. In April , the New York press began to run stories about the Plan of San Diego as if it ‘‘were of recent origin and its execution were imminent’’ (Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance, –). ‘‘Negro to Remain Loyal to Flag, Says Frizzell’’ and ‘‘On a Cold Scent!’’ Apr. , , Atlanta Constitution; ‘‘Georgia Negroes Hoot at Idea of Disloyalty’’ and ‘‘Negro Race Loyal, Say Party Leaders,’’ ibid., Apr. , ; ‘‘Thinks We Ought to Leave if We Are Not Treated Better,’’ Baltimore Afro-American, July , . The Atlanta Independent, a newspaper sponsored by the town’s black Odd Fellows Lodges, commended Howell for his stand on April , . See Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance; Kornweibel, ‘‘Seeing Red’’ and ‘‘Investigate

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Notes to Pages – Everything’’; and Jos. H. Bauserman report, Apr. , , OG , Reel , Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans. J. H. Harper, Corsicana, Tex., Aug. , , ‘‘In Re: Ollie Bryant—Negro Agitator,’’ OG , Reel , Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans. See also Kornweibel, ‘‘Investigate Everything,’’ . Despite Harper’s conclusions, local authorities jailed Bryant. Mark Hanna, Birmingham, Ala., June , , ‘‘In Re: F. W. Matthews,’’ OG , ibid. Alabama File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA, contains letter from Roscoe Conkling in the provost marshal general’s office, June , , and return letter from G. J. Hubbard, Alabama adjutant general, June , , stating that he was pressuring the local board in the county involved to bring the matter before the grand jury. What finally happened, the records do not show. Harper report, ‘‘In Re: Ollie Bryant’’ (see note ). Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, –. Kornweibel, ‘‘Race and Conscientious Objection,’’ quote on . Ibid.; Charles Harrison Mason file, OG , RG , NA. Agent L. O. Thompson, Lexington, Ky., Apr. , , ‘‘In Re: Oliver Wilson & Kellie Dyre—Alleged Violation Espionage Act,’’ OG ,, RG , NA. See also Dawley, Changing the World, –, on the war as a redemptive crusade. W. W. Giles file, OG ,, RG , NA. Giles first attracted federal attention in April , when some neighbors wrote a letter to the War Department alleging that Giles did not deserve an occupational deferment. This file also contains copies of Giles’s pamphlets, bureau memos on the topic, and a summary of the ‘‘Mark of the Beast’’ tract apparently compiled by an MID staffer. This summary follows Churchill’s letter to Bielaski and is in the format typical of MID reports, but the signatures have been crossed out. C. S. McLarin file containing multiple reports from Agent George C. Calmes, OG ,, RG , NA. Mississippi quote in OG , Reel , Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans; all other reports in OG ,, Reel , RG , NA. Kennedy, Over Here, –; Schaffer, America in the Great War, . Jensen’s Price of Vigilance is still the standard work on the APL. Arkansas, Box , Little Rock, ‘‘American Protective League, Correspondence with Field Offices, –,’’ Records of the FBI, RG , NA (hereafter cited as APL files). The papers in this file indicate that the APL in Arkansas reported to Maj. Durand Whipple, JAG, Camp Pike. Perhaps the most interesting document in the file is Major Whipple’s organizational chart, which he sketched in pencil and sent to the national headquarters. It shows the APL as one agency in a ring, coequal with the Council of National Defense, ‘‘Food and other controls,’’ the YMCA, the Red Cross, the state adjutants, ‘‘other departments,’’ the Navy Department, the War Department, and the Department of Justice. While this represents only the point of view of an officer in the judge advocate’s office, th Division, it is indicative of the

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muddle of statutory and voluntary agencies charged with war mobilization. See also Jensen, Price of Vigilance, –, –. Statesville file, North Carolina, Box , APL files. Ibid. Highpoint file, North Carolina, Box , APL files; letter, unsigned, July , , to Ernest Hawkins, Federal Bldg., Knoxville, Tenn., in North Wilkesboro file, ibid.; George S. Steele, Dec. , , to A. M. Briggs, Rockingham file, ibid. Dorsey Phillips, Jan. , , to Charles Daniel Frey, Rossboro file, ibid.; Burett H. Stephens, Oct. , , North Carolina State File, ibid.; Officers and Privates, Wilkes County Branch, Jan. , , North Wilkesboro file, ibid. A. K. Jay to A. M. Briggs, Sept. , , Hickory file, ibid.; E. C. Ivey to Ernest Hawkins, Mar. , , Lenoir file, ibid.; E. C. Caldwell to A. M. Briggs, Dec. , , Monroe file, ibid.; Madison file, ibid.; R. D. Lusk report, undated, Lexington file, ibid.; R. T. Claywell to Briggs, Apr. , , Morgantown file, ibid.; Frank Brown, apparently to national APL, report on Pou, Dec. , , ibid. Salisbury report, ibid. Wilmington file, ibid. The Wilmington APL had  cases of ‘‘counter-espionage for Naval intelligence,’’ using wireless radios;  violations of Food Administration rules ( hoarding,  waste, and  profiteering);  cases investigated for the Treasury Department, mostly concerning War Risk Insurance, fraud, etc.;  enemy alien cases;  cases of ‘‘Citizen disloyalty and sedition’’ under the Espionage Act;  cases of antimilitary activity;  cases of ‘‘word of mouth’’ propaganda, and  of printed matter;  naturalizations (during the war, the APL investigated ‘‘enemy aliens’’ who had applied for citizenship; see Jensen, Price of Vigilance, –);  impersonations of U.S. officers;  miscellaneous investigations;  investigations of Selective Service cases;  people taken up in slacker raids;  cases involving local and district board members; and  work-or-fight cases. They had investigated  job applicants. They had been involved in  cases of violations of liquor laws near training camps and  prostitution cases. Finally, they had  cases of desertion. Wilmington file, ibid.; Little Rock file, Box , APL files. Jensen, in Price of Vigilance, , says that a Birmingham slacker raid was planned and a raid in Galveston held. R. D. Lusk report, undated, Lexington file, Frank Brown, undated, Salisbury report, and E. C. Ivey to Ernest Hawkins, Mar. , , Lenoir file, Box , APL files. Bilbo, ‘‘To All Members Exemption Boards of Mississippi,’’ Dec. , , File , Box , Theodore Bilbo Papers, MDAH. Daily Clarion-Ledger, Nov. , . Bilbo to Crowder, Sept. , , File , Box , Bilbo Papers, MDAH. Telegrams, Crowder to Bilbo, Sept. , , and Bilbo to Crowder, Sept. , , Mississippi File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA; Bilbo to Crowder, Nov. , , File , Box , Bilbo Papers, MDAH. Walter Hickel, who also researched the World War I Selective Service System, expressed to me a native German’s consternation at the way that southerners treated forms: They marked through questions that they did not wish to answer and wrote

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in alternative questions that made more sense to them. Being a native southerner, I took this as more or less normal. However, I have since come to see the southern attitude toward record keeping and paperwork as more than folkish quaintness. I am drawing here primarily from the work of James C. Scott (Weapons of the Weak, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, and Seeing like a State) and from the discussion in a class taught by Scott, Paul Freedman, and Michael Dove at Yale in the fall semester . I am also indebted to fellow members of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale, especially Joan Martinez-Alier of the University Autonoma of Barcelona for his comment that weak states generate poor statistics. See Tennessee governor Rye’s use of the term ‘‘military census’’ to describe draft registration in June , File , Box , Governor Thomas Rye Papers, TSLA. On registration drives and slacker lists, see Keith, Country People, chap. . And on the sale of war bonds as a method of surveillance, see Schaffer, America in the Great War, –; Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War; Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, –; and Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America, –. On data gathering as an aspect of state building, see J. Scott, Seeing like a State, – . Dallas Morning News, June , . Agent Arthur M. Gregory, ‘‘Re: Negroes at Tillman, S.C.,’’ OG , RG , NA. Agent’s name and title of report partially illegible, Beaumont, Tex., OG , Reel , Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans. See also OG , ibid.; and OG , ibid.: ‘‘U. Carl Watson. This man registered as Ewell C. Watson. I misunderstood the Ewell for U.’’ See also OG , RG , NA. Tennessee File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA.           


. Letter from O. W. Stephens, cashier, Bank of Pleasant Shade, July , , petition attached, and letter from F. F. Fishburn, County Court Clerk, Macon County, Tenn., Aug. , , petition attached, Cordell Hull Papers, LC. Concerned, Hull wrote to H. B. McGinnis of Smith County on August , , to say that he had heard that people in Macon and Smith Counties were planning to defy conscription. He asked McGinnis to try to intervene in the situation. Hull said that McGinnis should warn people that they would come to harm if they resisted and should remind them that they owed the government obedience in time of war. . DeKalb County, Tenn., Box , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA; Keith, Country People, –. . The DeKalb situation forms a very lengthy set of reports. See Tennessee File –, Box , State Files, RG , NA, especially letter from Rutledge Smith to Crowder, May , , and letter from local board of DeKalb County to Rutledge Smith, Feb. , . See also U.S. District Court, Middle District of Tennessee, Nashville Division, Law No. , S. D. Fuston vs. Guy Davis et al., NARC.

Notes to Pages –  . Smith to Crowder, May , , Tennessee File -–, Box , State Files, RG , NA. . Keith, Country People, –, –; letter from Smith to Crowder, May , , Tennessee File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA; ‘‘Many Deserters in Gulf,’’ Crossville Chronicle, July , . . Tennessee File -, RG , NA; ‘‘Soldiers on Trail of Deserters’’ and ‘‘Deserter Ends Life with Gun,’’ Alexandria Times, July , ; ‘‘absolutely defied’’ quote from letter from Smith to Crowder, July , , Tennessee File -, State Files, Box , RG , NA. . The boards of instruction, mandated by the Selective Service System as of July , , were supposed to explain the war to conscripts before induction. The Selective Service System sent the boards a crib sheet of the most-asked questions, including one about the Lusitania: Why were Americans allowed to sail on ships carrying contraband? See Smith to Crowder, Aug. , , Tennessee File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA; ‘‘Boards of Instruction: PMGO Forms  and  and Bul  to ,’’ Box , RG , NA; ‘‘, People Here Saturday,’’ Smithville Review, Aug. , . . Schaffer, America in the Great War, –. Schaffer points out the disparities in treatment meted out to World War I dissenters and the political implications, but the opinions in this paragraph are mine. Livermore, in Politics Is Adjourned, , describes Theodore Roosevelt’s fall  public campaign against Wilson’s conduct of the war. . Computed from Annual Report of the Attorney General, , – (available at the National Archives, College Park, Md.). It may be worth noting that prosecutions under the Selective Service Act seem to have been much more common throughout the nation than prosecutions under the Espionage Act. As an example: In Alabama,  prosecutions were initiated under the Selective Service Act compared with  under the Espionage Act; in Georgia,  to ; in New York, , to .
. Holmes, White Chief, –, –. Although Vardaman opposed arming ships, he did not join the Senate filibuster against Wilson’s proposal. Quote on Sedition Act in Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, .

. Gaughan, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson and Interventionism,’’ ; Livermore, Politics Is Adjourned, ; Holmes, White Chief, viii, , –; ‘‘Too Late! Too Late!’’ Vardaman’s Weekly, Aug. , ; Special Agent Outlaw, ‘‘In Re: James K. Vardaman,’’ Mar. , , OG ,, RG , NA.
. Livermore, Politics Is Adjourned, –; ‘‘The Real Issues,’’ Vardaman’s Weekly, Aug. , .
. Holmes, White Chief, ; ‘‘The People Have Lost,’’ Vardaman’s Weekly, Aug. , ; ‘‘A Letter to the People of Mississippi,’’ ibid., Sept. , .
. Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, ; Gaughan, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson and Interventionism,’’ –.
. Livermore, Politics Is Adjourned, –; Barnard, ‘‘George Huddleston, Sr.’’; Packer, In My Father’s House, –. Packer’s charming memoir of her father is the source

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for the story about the rally and the cartoons. Packer points out that after the election Huddleston sued the newspaper for libel, filing in a friendly rural county, and won a settlement of ,. The Alabama Supreme Court overturned the decision on the grounds that the suit should have been filed in Birmingham, the site of the alleged libel. Huddleston declined to sue again but did receive a front-page retraction and apology from the newspaper. Woodward, Tom Watson, –; Gaughan, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson and Interventionism,’’ –. Letter from M. Churchill, Brigadier General, Director of Military Intelligence, to Bielaski, head of the Bureau of Investigation, Sept. , , in OG ,, Reel , RG , NA. See R. Reed, ‘‘ ‘Fighting the Devil with Fire’ ’’; and Woodward, Tom Watson, –. Gaughan, ‘‘Woodrow Wilson and Interventionism,’’ –; Livermore, Politics Is Adjourned, –. T. Johnson, ‘‘Anti-War Sentiment’’; Vardaman’s Weekly, Aug. , ; Arnett, Claude Kitchin, –. Information about Kitchin, Sims, and Burnett is also from the online Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. J. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, –, quote on . Special Agent Newman, May , , ‘‘Re: alleged disloyalty of members of Liberty County Exemption Board,’’ Georgia File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. S. J. Curtis, JP, to Rye, Oct. , , File , Box , Governor Thomas Rye Papers, TSLA. In the end, , of Tennessee’s , women registered, of which , came from Nashville. The director of registration complained that German sympathizers had discouraged registration by linking it to the suffrage movement. See Keith, Country People, –. William A. Schoenfeld, acting director, Division of Extension, Knoxville, Tenn., to Bruce Bielaski, Oct. , , RG , NA. After an investigation, the mail carrier was exonerated due to the testimony of his rural route customers. See Raleigh News and Observer, Jan. , . Martin served from October , , to September . Kohn, American Political Prisoners, ; on Wisconsin, see Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, –; on Carmack, see Keith, Country People, ; on O. B. Lewis, see Daily Clarion-Ledger, May , . Kennedy, Over Here, –, quote on ; Schaffer, America in the Great War, –; Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, –. Neshoba Democrat, May  and June , . Peterson and Fite, in Opponents of War, –, describe the treatment meted out to the Nonpartisan League in Minnesota and elsewhere; on the confiscation of property to buy bonds, see –. See also Morlan, ‘‘Reign of Terror in the Middle West.’’ Breen, Uncle Sam at Home, , –. Williams to Miss Lucille Banks, Gulfport, Miss., June , , in Box , State Correspondence, John Sharp Williams Papers, LC. An anonymous correspondent made

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reference to Williams’s threat against draft dodgers; see anonymous letter, annotated Apr. , , File B, ibid. Agent Will C. Austin, Fort Worth, Tex., June , , reporting information given to him by Sheriff Barney Barker of Weatherford, Tex., FLPA file. Anonymous letter, annotated Apr. , , File B, Box , State Correspondence, Williams Papers, LC. This letter is rather more violent in its tone than the eighteenth-century protest letters quoted by E. P. Thompson in ‘‘Crime of Anonymity’’; one assumes that most British rural rebels, willing to threaten their social superiors with barn burning and other forms of property damage, might have balked at outright death threats. Sabine and St. Landry Counties, La., Boxes  and , ‘‘Local Board Experience,’’ RG , NA; Georgia File -, Box , State Files, ibid.; Private Walter Tully, Engineers, Camp Beauregard, La., to Mr. J. L. Green, Arkansas File -, Box , ibid.; Sidney Wilson’s letter in Kornweibel, ‘‘Investigate Everything,’’ , and in Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance, . Ellis says that Wilson was court-martialed for ‘‘obstructing the draft, disgracing the army, and prejudicing good order and discipline’’ (–). On local officials’ noncompliance with the draft, see Tennessee File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA; and OG ,, RG , NA. Alabama Files -, -, -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. ‘‘County Officers Still Pleading,’’ Augusta Chronicle, June , ; Mallett to Provost Marshal General, Oct. , , Georgia File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA; ‘‘Alabama Sheriff Aided Deserter to Hide,’’ Daily Clarion-Ledger, June , ; Charles F. Reynolds, ‘‘In Re: E. C. Hixon, Alleged Violations Sec. , Selective Service Law,’’ Georgia File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. Thomas C. Reed to President Wilson, and provost marshal general’s office to adjutant general, Mississippi, Mississippi File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. Special Agent Harry Gulley, Jan. , , ‘‘Robert Marks Conscription Matter,’’ letters appended, Mississippi File -, ibid. Second Report, Appendix Table -A, . Ibid. See also Appendix Table -A, where , is the figure given for ‘‘Net reported desertions.’’ The PMG’s statistics include figures for desertions reported in the summer of , which were then adjusted downward to reflect enlistments and paperwork errors. The ‘‘Net reported desertions’’ seem to me to most likely reflect the PMG’s best knowledge as of the summer of . Note that these figures reflect registrations and desertions only among the men who registered prior to September , . On that date, all men eighteen to forty-five years of age not previously registered did so. I do not think that most of that draft pool would have had time to be called up and desert before the war ended in November. All statistics from Second Report. To arrive at these figures, I first subtracted the number of men exempted and deferred from the total number of registrants to find the number left in the draft pool, using Appendix Table -A. From Appendix Table -A, I took the net reported desertions. I then computed what percentage the net desertions were of the people who were left in the draft pool. See also Cham-

 Notes to Pages –


. . .

.

.

.

.

.  .

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bers, To Raise an Army, –; and Second Report, Appendix Table -A, principal statistical data, by local boards, –. The PMG’s figures include only men who had registered; those who dodged the draft completely by refusing to register would not be included in deserter lists. Mississippi File -, Box , Georgia File -, Box , Arkansas File -, Box , and Tennessee File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. See, for example, Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; and J. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. S. J. Creekmore to adjutant general of Mississippi, Apr. , , and Rep. W. W. Venable to PMG Crowder, Apr. , , Mississippi File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. Arkansas File -, Box , ibid. The newspaper pages and the letter concerning Arkansas’s proactive stance on the draft are also in Box  but do not have a file number. R. D. Lusk, Lexington, N.C., Dec. , Box , APL files. Lusk’s record so impressed the APL national directors that they asked him to write up his experiences. He did so, but in slightly fictionalized format, to protect former deserters. The quote comes from his original report, not the fictionalized one. Ibid. A clipping of the newspaper report is in this file. The name of the paper was Daily News, but the name of the town in which it was published was apparently cut off when the clipping was made. Local Board of Exemptions for Mitchell County, N.C., ‘‘sitting in joint session with the Legal Advisory Board of Said County together with the Government Appeal Agent,’’ to E. H. Crowder, North Carolina File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. A resolution of protest introduced by the state legislature and an apologetic letter from Crowder are also filed with this. Letter, name illegible, for the National Directors of the American Protective League, to R. D. Lusk, Dec. , , Box , APL files. In May , PMG Crowder promised leniency to North Carolina deserters. The Raleigh News and Observer headlined the story ‘‘Deserters to be Given a Chance’’ (May , ). Stokely McCardel, who defied the Dothan, Alabama, draft board and sliced up the board chairman’s nose, was sent to Camp Sevier and apparently held in confinement from late May  until September, when he was court-martialed. McCardel was sentenced to hard labor for four months, but the court-martial concluded that ‘‘in consideration of the provocation shown by the record to have been given to the accused, and of the long confinement of the accused prior to trial, that part of the sentence providing confinement at hard labor is remitted’’ (Alabama File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA). This fact emerged in the federal records when Maj. John Townes Jr., in charge of draft matters in Texas, wrote to the PMG’s office to explain that a file had been lost because Wroe took it with him to San Augustine. See Townes to PMG, Dec. , , Texas File --, Box , and the Rangers’ names and statuses, Texas File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA.

Notes to Pages –  
. Reich, ‘‘Soldiers of Democracy,’’ . . E. T. Camp, chairman, local board of Etowah County, Gadsden, Ala., to G. J. Hubbard, attorney general of Alabama, June , , Alabama File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. . Daily Clarion-Ledger, June , . . Carroll County Democrat, Apr. , . . Comet, Aug. , ; Kohn, American Political Prisoners, . . See Agent Howell E. Jackson’s reports in OG ,, Reel , RG , NA: Mar. , , ‘‘In Re: Pearce Waters, Deserter from the service of the United States Army’’; Apr. , , ‘‘In Re: Tom Watson et all’’; June , , ‘‘In re: Tom Watson et al.’’; June , , ‘‘In Re Watson.’’ . Agent Jackson, June , , ‘‘In Re Watson.’’ . Ibid.  . Ibid.  . Mallett to Crowder, June , , Georgia File -, and reports on Union County, Georgia File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. 
. Report of Inspector W. S. Nash, Oct. , , Georgia File -, ibid. . See the following records of the North District of Georgia, Northern Division, U.S. District Court, archived at NARC: File No. , United States vs. Frank Crowley alias Frank Crawley, Union County, Georgia; File No. , Case No. , U.S. vs. Rosa Crowley alias Rosa Crawley; File No. , U.S. vs. Frank Crowley alias Frank Crawley; File No. , Case No. , indictment of Frank, Felix, Rosa, and Decatur Crowley and Blaine Stewart for harboring a deserter. See also Memorandum, ‘‘Subject: Occasions upon which it has been found necessary to use Federal Troops to preserve law and order since June , ,’’ --, Box , MID, RG , NA. Troops were sent into the southern states for the following: to Columbus, Georgia, in August , during street railway and cotton mill strikes; to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in November , during a race riot (this expedition included a small tank); to Gerard, Georgia, in March , in connection with a strike; to Charleston, South Carolina, in May , during a race riot; and to Washington, D.C., in July , during a race riot. . The following account is based on Willis, ‘‘Cleburne County Draft War.’’ I am dubious about the newspaper reports quoted by Willis concerning the use of the Vickers guns. The Vickers was British-made, very large, heavy, and deadly, and I find it unlikely that the Arkansas National Guard would have obtained one, let alone two of them. I think it more likely that ‘‘Vickers’’ had become newspaper generic for a machine gun. . Ibid. . Ibid. Willis notes that an erroneous story about the conflict appeared in the New York Times. It apparently made the AP wire as well, since the Southern Sentinel of Tippah County, Mississippi, ran a story on July  recounting the deaths of Tom ‘‘Atkinson’’ and his son as well as a number of posse members.

 Notes to Pages – . Mississippi File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. See also Mississippi File -, ibid. . Mississippi File -, Box , ibid.; Neshoba Democrat, June , . Lt. Newell’s command seems to have gone first to Lauderdale County and to have negotiated for the surrender of Frank Chisholm Jr. and his friends, all of whom were allegedly armed and ready to fight. The story in the Daily Clarion-Ledger, June , , does not explain how the matter was resolved, but it seems likely that Newell managed to avoid a confrontation, based on his record later in Neshoba. . Neshoba Democrat, May , . In August, Harrison carried the county by over  votes. See Neshoba Democrat, Aug. , .  . P. B. Mohundro and Sam Nelms to Erie Scales, Mar. , , Mississippi File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA.  . Southern Sentinel, May , . 
. Ibid., May , . . In August , Bickett telegraphed Crowder asking that troops be on standby if (as was rumored) registrants in two North Carolina townships refused en masse to appear before the local exemption boards when called. Crowder told Bickett that people who did not appear would be automatically inducted and handled as deserters. This apparently averted the immediate crisis. In June , Bickett wrote to Crowder again to ask for troops. See Bickett to Crowder, Aug. , , North Carolina File -, and Bickett to Crowder, June , , North Carolina File -, Box , RG , NA. 
. U.S. District Court, Middle District of Tennessee, Nashville Division, Law No. , S. D. Fuston vs. Guy Davis et al., , NARC. . Lusk and Brown, APL files cited in previous chapter; J. W. Winborne, Marion, N.C., Jan. . , to Governor T. W. Bickett, North Carolina File -, Box , State Files, RG , NA. . Biographical information on all of these figures is from Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. See also Morgan, Redneck Liberal, quotes on , ; and Packer, In My Father’s House. . Arnett, Claude Kitchin, –, quote on . John Sharp Williams remained a staunch supporter of Wilson. During the League of Nations debates in the Senate, he condemned Henry Cabot Lodge’s ‘‘ ‘cold, New England, Brahmin cynicism’ that allowed him to scoff at ‘breaking the heart of the world’ ’’ (Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World, , ). . Woodward, Tom Watson, –, quote from Columbia Sentinel on . . Ibid., –, ‘‘a gilded brigade’’ and ‘‘described the soldier boy’’ quotes on , ‘‘you are afraid’’ on , and ‘‘fought the power’’ on . See also Martin, Georgia, a Bicentennial History; and Brown, J. J. Brown and Thomas E. Watson, chap. .

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Index

Adams, Lee, 191 Addams, Jane, 21 Adkisson, Tom, 189 Adler, H. C., 112 African Americans. See Blacks Agrarians. See Democrats Alabama, 3, 43, 75, 132; reactions to WWI in, 39, 40–41; draft boards in, 60, 69, 72, 127, 177; Bureau investigations in, 105–6, 107–8, 147; CND in, 138; slackers in, 177; desertion in, 179, 184 Alexander, H. Q., 46, 107, 154 Allen, William E., 93 Almon, Edward B., 41, 54 American Legion, 196 American Protective League (APL), 135, 136, 151–56, 182–83, 194, 199, 232 (n. 39); records of, 152, 155–56, 165; race and, 155, 182–83 American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), 21–22 Antimilitarists, 7, 13, 22–24, 26–27, 28, 205 (n. 27) Appeal to Reason, The, 86, 87–88 Arkansas, 43, 80, 89, 132, 148; draft boards in, 67, 71, 73, 123, 129–30, 176–77; CND in, 138; Bureau investigations in, 144; desertion in, 180, 181–82, 189–90; troops dispatched to, 185, 189–90 Armstrong, Charlie, Sr., 186 Army, United States, 19, 57; troops dispatched to southern states, 164, 185–92, 239 (n. 62); and preparedness, 203 (n. 13) Assemblies of God, 81–82 Atlanta, Ga., 121, 125–26 Atlanta Constitution, 103, 126, 145 Atwell, William Hawley, 96, 98, 99–100 Australia: conscription and, 44–45, 210 (n. 30) Aycock, Charles, 25

Baker, Newton, 23, 42, 43, 53, 59, 65, 75, 105, 122, 128 Baltimore Afro-American, 146 Bankhead, William B., 47, 48 Barbeau, Arthur E., 123 Barnes (Bureau agent), 98 Bauserman, Jos. H., 146 Bean, Monroe, 144 Beckwith, E. R., 108 Berkman, Alexander, 103 Berry, Riley M. Fletcher, 142–44 Bickett, Thomas, 130; and desertion, 182–83, 192, 194, 240 (n. 72) Bielaski, Bruce, 149, 150, 151 Bilbo, Theodore, 61, 62, 78, 114, 115, 133, 138, 156–57, 203 (n. 10); postwar political career of, 195 Birmingham, Ala., 3, 147, 156 Bissett, James, 88 Black, W. M., 46 Blacks, 3, 15–16, 111, 118–20, 137, 138, 197, 203 (n. 5); women, 72–73, 132–33; and reactions to draft, 84; and Plan of San Diego, 90; and Farmers and Laborers Protective Association, 94–95; class divisions among, 118–19; demonstrate patriotism, 120–21, 125–26; U.S. military and, 121–23, 125, 177, 227 (n. 24); and labor issues, 123, 126–33, 143; lynching of, 123–25, 227 (n. 25); wartime surveillance of, 135, 142–47; rumors of rebellion among, 143–47; murder of, 147; lack of documents among, 159; resistance and, 171, 181; desertion and, 179–82, 190. See also Conscription, WWI: race and; South, the; Southerners: rural; Surveillance; White supremacy Blease, Cole, 169 Blight, David W., 36

251

252 Index Boggs, Dr., 127–28 Boles, H. Leo, 78, 217 (n. 59) Bond, James, 121 Bourbons, 16–17, 24 Branson, Eugene Cunningham, 113, 139 Braun, C. B., 128 Breen, William, 137–38 Breniman, Charles, 98, 101 Briggs, A. M., 151 Bright, Leon, 115–16, 134 Bright, Mrs. Leon, 115–16 Brotherhood of Timber Workers (BTW), 89 Brown, Frank, 155, 156 Bryan, William Jennings, 16, 25–26, 30, 102 Bryant, George T., 91, 95, 100 Bryant, Ollie, 146–47 Buchanan, W. T., 146 Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, 5, 12, 86, 91, 93, 94, 95, 98, 130, 135, 136, 142, 146, 147, 152, 165, 171, 175, 199, 229 (n. 1); records of, 7, 144; investigates Tom Watson, 105–8, 186; and slacker lists, 158; used to ascertain ages, 159–60. See also Blacks: wartime surveillance of; Religion: and Bureau surveillance; Surveillance; Surveillance state; and state entries Burleson, Albert S., 24, 93, 109, 110, 169 Burnett, John, 35–36, 39, 41, 42, 54, 55, 169 Burns, Frank, 107 Byrnes, James F., 53, 55 Byrns, Joseph, 55 Cabiness, George, 184 California, 179 Calmes, George D., 106, 150–51 Camp Beauregard, La., 176 Campbell, Alexander, 76 Camp Gordon, Ga., 125, 186 Camp Greene, N.C., 154 Camp Logan, Tex., 122 Camp Pike, Ark., 133, 157, 178 Canada: conscription and, 44–45, 210 (n. 30) Candler, W. C., 188 Carmack, Tom, 173 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 21 Census, U.S., 158, 163; Bureau of, 160 Chamberlain, George, 50

Chambers, John Whiteclay, 32, 57, 58–59, 60, 62, 134, 197 Chapel Hill, N.C., 113, 139–40 Cherokee County, Ga., 186–89 Chesnutt, S. L., 124 Chilton, M. T., 64, 214 (n. 21) Churches of God, 81 Churchill, Marlborough, 106, 150 Church of Christ, 2, 76–79, 82, 198 Church of God in Christ, 81–82, 148–49 Church of the Nazarene, 81 Civil liberties: suppression of, 10–11, 12, 84–85, 110, 136, 165, 169, 225 (n. 71), 229 (n. 3) Civil War, 2, 22, 34, 43, 47, 187; conscription in, 6, 57, 211 (n. 44); legacy of, 33–41, 56, 59, 69; See also Lost Cause Clark, Champ, 31, 48, 54, 167 Clark, Frank, 65, 75 Claywell, R. T., 154 Cleburne County, Ark., 189–90 Cobb, J. T., 150 Committee on Public Information (CPI), 10, 136, 137, 138, 140 Confederate States of America, 6. See also Civil War Congress, U.S., 11, 12–13, 104, 109; southern representatives in, 2, 24; Democrats control, 24 Conner, Jim, 191 Conscientious objectors. See Conscription, WWI: exemptions; Religion Conscription, WWI: exemptions, 1–2, 10, 59, 61–83, 116–17, 177–79; and creation of modern state, 5–6; protests against, 6–7, 14–15, 84–110; class and, 10, 12, 41, 46, 49, 65, 70–71, 112–17, 133; race and, 10, 41, 48, 52–53, 60, 68, 71–74, 84, 111–12, 120–34, 180, 197, 212 (nn. 47, 48); evasion of, 14–15, 58, 111–34; and southern politics, 19, 165–70; southern politicians and, 42–56; opposition to, 46, 55–56; congressional debate over, 47–56; agriculture and, 52–53; labor issues and, 52–53; farmers and, 53, 71, 73– 75; vote in House on, 54; vote in Senate on, 54; registration for, 57–58, 59; administrative structure, 59–61; state quotas in, 60, 133–34, 158, 210 (n. 26), 228 (n. 52); policies, 61–

Index 66; classification system in, 62–63; gender issues and, 62, 68–69, 70, 72–75, 113–16; lawsuit challenging, 108–9; resistance to, 162–93, 197; attempt to limit, 212 (n. 53). See also Desertion; Draft boards; Farmers and Laborers Protective Association; Ignorance; Preparedness; Selective Service System; Watson, Tom; Work-or-fight laws Continental Army, 26, 29, 32, 44 Cooper, Seley, 128 Cotton blockade, 89 Council of National Defense (CND), 137–38; local level, 173–74. See also state entries Creel, George, 10–11, 136, 137 Crowder, Enoch, 42, 70, 74, 75, 76, 78, 116, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 147, 179, 185, 188; and conscription policy, 15, 57–66; on ‘‘immorality,’’ 67–68; correspondence with Bilbo, 156–57; and draft resistance, 163–64, 197 Crowley, George, 188–89 Crowley, Herbert, 19 Crump, E. H., 112, 114 Dabney, Richard H., 42 Dale, Wesley, 108 Daniels, G. W., 101 Daniels, Josephus, 36 Davis, Walter, 144 Debs, Eugene, 89, 105, 165, 168, 196 Defense societies. See Preparedness DeKalb County, Tenn., 1, 162–64, 194 De La Roche, Roberta Senechal, 124 Democrats, 103; southern, 3, 4, 7, 16–18, 24, 26–28, 45, 47–55, 85; agrarian, 16–17, 24–25, 26–28, 44, 53, 54, 55, 56, 85, 86; Bourbons, 16–17, 24; liberal vs. conservative, 16–17; progressive, 16, 17, 18, 102; and preparedness, 22, 24–32; control Congress, 24; southwestern, 89 Dent, A. T., 121 Dent, Hubert, 44, 55 Dent bill, 45, 53, 54, 55 Dependency. See Conscription, WWI: exemptions DePew, Chauncey, 49 Desertion, 1–4, 127, 177–93, 201 (n. 5); statistics

253

on, 237 (nn. 39, 40). See also Conscription, WWI: evasion of; and state entries Disciples of Christ, 76–77. See also Church of Christ District boards, 60, 74–75, 226 (n. 10) Dixon, Ben F., 188 Dixon, Thomas, 47 Dominick, Fred H., 41, 54 Dorsey, Hugh M., 138, 196 Draft, the. See Conscription, WWI Draft boards, 10, 58, 60–61, 67–82, 116–17, 133– 34, 215 (n. 34); class and, 10, 71, 198–99; race and, 10, 118–20, 198–99; composition of, 60; ‘‘station’’ and, 71, 117; threatened, 176–77. See also state entries Drayden, Bully, 128 Du Bois, W. E. B., 119 Dupont family, 20, 23 Durham, W. S., 40 Dyre, Kellie, 149–50 East, Tom, 117 Eastman, Crystal, 21 East St. Louis, Ill., 146 Elam, E. A., 77–78 Elections: of 1918, 165–70 Ellis, Mark, 12 Emergency Peace Federation, 107 Enlistments, WWI, 43. See also Conscription, WWI Escott, Paul, 6 Eskew, John, 186–87 Espionage Act, 11, 95, 100, 110, 148, 150, 165, 166. See also Conscription, WWI: resistance to Farmers, 114–15, 215 (n. 30); and preparedness, 21, 22, 28; and socialism, 88–90; and tenancy, 217 (n. 47). See also Conscription, WWI: exemptions; Conscription, WWI: farmers and Farmers Alliance, 85, 91 Farmers and Laborers Protective Association (FLPA), 87–101, 110, 198, 220 (nn. 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23), 221 (nn. 26, 27), 222 (n. 37, 38), 223 (n. 49) Farmers and Laborers Union, 86–101

254

Index

Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union, 91 Farmers Union, 85 Farmers’ unions, 3, 22 Feminists, 21 Finley, Jim, 191 Finnegan, John Patrick, 21, 28, 29 First Amendment, 104. See also Civil liberties Fite, Gilbert C., 97, 174 Flood, Hal D., 31 Florida, 43, 71, 132, 142, 148; draft boards in, 123; CPI in, 140 Food Administration, U.S., 139–40, 158 Food survey, 172 Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., 163 Foster, Gaines, 36 Fowler, J. W., 95 Frank, Leo, 102 Franklin, John Hope, 6 French, George E., 152–53 Frey, Charles Daniel, 153 Frick, Henry Clay, 20 Fry, Joseph, 6, 7, 8 Fuston, Dell, 162–63, 194 Gardner, Percy L., 39 Garrison, Lindley M., 28, 29 Gary, Elbert H., 28 Gaston, Paul, 36 Gaughan, Anthony, 6, 7, 23, 167, 204 (n. 23) Gender issues. See Blacks: women; Conscription, WWI: gender issues and; Whites: women; Women Georgia, 43, 71, 72, 75, 105, 131, 132; draft boards in, 60, 68, 69, 73, 116, 126–27, 177; politics in, 102, 105, 177; Bureau investigations in, 105–6, 107, 150–51, 171, 185–88; prowar demonstrations in, 121, 125–26; CND in, 138; CPI in, 140; draft resistance in, 165; election of 1918, 167–69; slackers in, 171, 177; draft boards threatened, 176; desertion in, 179–80, 185–89; troops dispatched to, 185–89. See also Blacks: lynching of German Americans, 11, 21 Germany, 19–20, 27, 29–30, 32, 47–48, 51, 103, 104, 144

Giles, W. W., 150, 232 (n. 35) Glidewell, Will, 92 Goldman, Emma, 103 Gore, Thomas P., 30 Gore resolution, 30–31, 32 Gospel Advocate, 77, 78 Grange, the, 22 Great Britain, 27, 29, 30, 39, 40, 44, 51 Great War. See World War I Green, Bob, 191 Green Corn Rebellion, 7, 85, 96–98, 100, 221 (n. 35), 222 (n. 37) Gregory, Arthur M., 159–60 Gregory, Thomas, 144, 151 Guggenheim brothers, 20 Guy, Milton Wayman, 129 Hahamovitch, Cindy, 131–32 Hammond, James H., 152 Handy, Frederick C., 183 Hanna, Mark, 147 Harding, Warren G., 96, 100 Hardwick, Thomas, 50, 51, 54, 166, 167–68, 170, 171, 193; elected governor of Georgia, 194–95 Harper, J. H., 146, 147–48 Harris, Nathaniel E., 105. See also Georgia: politics in Harris, William J., 167 Harrison, Pat, 166–67 Hassell, Sylvester, 80 Hawkins, Ernest, 154 Hay, James, 28–29 Hefley, W. T., 27–28 Heflin, Tom, 34–36, 41, 42, 47–48, 52, 53, 108, 169, 199, 207 (n. 2) Henri, Florette, 123 Henry, Bud, 186 Henry, Will, 186 Hernandez, A. A., 94 Hickey, ‘‘Red Tom,’’ 88, 89, 90, 91, 93–94, 98 Hildebrand, H. E., 116 Hixon, E. C., 177 Hodges, Charles C., 128–29 Holiness churches, 2, 80–82, 136, 148–50, 198 Hollis, Henry F., 64 Hollis, J. B., 99–100

Index Homosexuality. See Conscription, WWI: exemptions Hooper, Robert E., 77 Hoover, Herbert, 140 Hoover, J. Edgar, 135 Houk, Albert, 154 House, A. C., 28 House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 31 House Military Affairs Committee, 28, 44, 45, 53 Houston Riot, 122 Howell, Clark, 145–46 HR 5181, 104–5, 162 Huddleston, George, 3, 12, 49–50, 51–52, 54, 166, 168, 170, 195, 235 (n. 15) Hudson, James, 181 Hughes, Richard T., 76, 77, 79 Hull, Cordell, 55, 77–78, 162, 195, 234 (n. 1) Hunter (FLPA member), 99 Hysteria, wartime, 11, 135–36, 174, 200, 229 (n. 2) Ignorance: as antiwar motivation, 15; as excuse for desertion, 180–84, 192–93 Illiteracy, 8, 140–41, 161, 230 (n. 13). See also Propaganda Immigrants, 11, 135, 136 Indiana, 165 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 50, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103 ‘‘Infrapolitical’’ resistance, 170–71. See also Conscription, WWI: resistance to Iowa, 165, 174 Ivey, E. C., 154, 156 Ivey, J. B., 46 Jack, George Whitefield, 100 Jackson, Howell E., 185–88 Jackson, Stonewall, 3, 6, 34, 54 Jeffersonian, The, 86, 98, 101–10, 162, 171, 223 (nn. 53, 55) Jehovah’s Witnesses, 148, 189–90 Jensen, Joan, 152 Jernigan, A. J., 78 Jim Crow. See Blacks Johnson, Albert, Jr., 146 Johnson, Hiram, 64

255

Jones, J. A., 124 Justice Department, U.S., 85, 101, 135, 161 Kahn, Julius, 45 Kahn amendments, 45, 54, 55 Kansas, 88 Keegan, John, 57 Kennedy, David, 152, 173 King Ranch, Tex., 117 Kirby, William, 50, 54, 85 Kirten, William, 144 Kitchin, Claude, 3, 17, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41, 46, 54, 55, 63, 78, 80, 167; opposes declaration of war, 13–14; as congressional antipreparedness leader, 24–32; reelected in 1918, 169–70; in postwar period, 195; and Woodrow Wilson, 206 (n. 29); supports ‘‘armed neutrality,’’ 213 (n. 56) Kleberg family, 117 Kornweibel, Theodore, 11, 119, 149 Kuhn, Loeb and Company, 20 Ku Klux Klan, 102, 196 Labor. See Conscription, WWI: labor issues and; Work-or-fight laws La Follette, Robert, 12, 14, 37, 38, 97 Langston, John D., 130–31 Lansing, Robert, 28, 104 Lantz, J. A., 94 Larsen, W. W., 54 Laughinghouse, J. J., 130–31 Lawrence, H. C., 94 League of Nations, 55, 64, 195 Lee, Robert E., 3, 6, 34, 54 Leftists, 11, 56, 87, 135, 136. See also Industrial Workers of the World; Socialism; Socialist Party; Socialists; Working Class Union Legibility, 9 Lewis, O. B., 173 Liberty loans and bonds, 138, 139, 150, 169, 174 Link, Arthur, 41 Lippman, Walter, 11 Lipscomb, A. B., 77 Lipscomb, David, 77, 78 Little Rock, Ark., 156 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 20

256 Index Lost Cause, the, 36–37, 40, 56, 75–76. See also Civil War: legacy of Louisiana, 43, 71, 86, 89, 131; draft boards in, 60, 73; Bureau investigations in, 106; CND in, 138; CPI in, 140; draft boards threatened, 176; draft exemptions in, 178 Lusitania (ship), 25, 30, 103 Lusk, R. D., 154, 156, 182–83, 194, 238 (n. 45) Lynching. See Blacks: lynching of Maclean, Nancy, 103 Mallett, Joel, 177, 188 Mark of the Beast, 150. See also Red Cross Marks, Robert F., 178 ‘‘Martial South,’’ 6 Martin, Thomas S., 42 Martin, William E., 172 Maryland, 131 Mason, Charles Harrison, 81, 82, 149 Mason, William E., 104–5 Mason’s bill, 104–5, 162 Massachusetts, 69; desertion in, 179 Matthews, F. W., 147 Maxim, Hudson, 20 May, John A., 127 McAdoo, William, 168, 173, 174 McCane’s Detective Agency, 91 McCardel, Stokely, 177, 238 (n. 49) McCoy, William Vernon, 185 McCullough, Lucile, 80 McDowell, L. L., 163 McInnis, E. C., 132 McKellar, Kenneth, 45, 50–51, 54–55, 78, 112–13 McLarin, C. S., 150–51 McLemore, Jeff, 30, 41, 49, 169 McLemore resolution, 30–31, 32 McQuiddy, J. C., 78 Mexican Revolution, 29, 90 Mexico, 29, 55 Middle West, 6, 7, 174 Militarism, 2 Military Intelligence Division (MID), U.S. Army, 105, 119, 135, 136, 165, 186, 199; and slacker lists, 158 Mills (FLPA member), 99 Mississippi, 43, 71, 78, 90, 119, 132, 141, 148; reactions to war in, 37–39; draft boards in,

60, 79, 82, 111, 181; Bureau investigations in, 86, 106, 108, 136, 144, 145, 151, 178; pleas for draft exemption in, 114, 115–16; prowar demonstrations in, 121; CND in, 131–32, 138; war mobilization in, 141–42, 173–74; federal bureaucracy and, 156–57; draft resistance in, 165; slackers in, 174; desertion in, 177–79, 190–92; draft exemptions in, 178–79; troops dispatched to, 185, 190–92, 240 (n. 67). See also Bilbo, Theodore; Vardaman, James; Williams, John Sharp Mitchell County, N.C., 183–84 Money power, 23, 39, 85, 88 Mooney, C. P., 113, 114 Mooney, Charles, 113 Moran, Florence, 46 Morelock, Ernest W., 114 Morgan, J. P., 3, 20, 23, 27, 28, 206 (n. 31) Mull, P. W., 40 Munitions makers, 3, 27, 39, 40, 49, 110 Nash, Charles H., 31 Nash, W. S., 188 Nashville Bible School, 78 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 121, 124, 146 National Defense Act of 1916, 32, 53, 137 National Farmers Union, 22 National Guard, 19, 22–23, 26, 32, 44, 52, 57, 59, 112, 134; opposes preparedness, 29; rounds up deserters, 189 Neshoba County, Miss., 141–42, 173–74, 190 New Orleans, La., 125 Newsome, C. R., 127 New South, 144 New York, 69, 165; desertion in, 179 Nicholls, Samuel J., 52 Ninety-second Division, U.S. Army. See Blacks: U.S. Military and Ninety-third Division, U.S. Army. See Blacks: U.S. Military and Non-Partisan League, 6, 7 Norris, George, 12, 14, 97 North Carolina, 25, 43, 79, 80, 139, 150, 230 (n. 9); reactions to WWI in, 14, 31, 36, 39– 41, 47, 209 (n. 20); reactions to conscription in, 46–47, 55–56; draft boards in, 60, 68, 70,

Index 75, 82, 123, 130–31; Bureau investigations in, 106, 107, 130–31, 183; CND in, 113, 138; APL in, 152–56, 194; draft resistance in, 165; food survey in, 172; desertion in, 182–84, 194 North Carolina Cotton Seed Crushers’ Association, 28 North Carolina Farmers Union, 46, 107 Nueces Strip, 90 Nugent, Clarence, 96 O’Connor, Mrs. Virgil, 114 Odell, Wilmot, 92–93, 98 Oklahoma, 6, 7, 85, 88, 89, 90, 92, 96–98, 148, 174. See also Green Corn Rebellion Orr, F. M., 142 Overman, Lee, 166 Pacifism, 2, 23–24, 82, 204 (n. 23) Pacifists, 11, 21, 22, 66, 75–83, 197, 218 (n. 68). See also Conscription, WWI: exemptions; Desertion; Religion Padgett, Lemuel, 55 Painter, Nell Irvin, 118 Palmer, Mitchell, 195–96 Parker, W. T., 153 Pearson, Lawrence W., 85 Pentecostal churches, 80–82 Peonage, 127–28 People’s Party. See Populists Percy, William, 17 Peterson, H. C., 97, 174 Petitions, anti-conscription, 104–5, 106–7, 193 Phagan, Mary, 102 Phifer, Robert S., 145 Phillips, Dorsey E., 107, 153 Pickler, Lina May, 40 Pilgrim Holiness Church, 81 Plan of San Diego, 90, 94, 101, 145, 231 (n. 24) Plattsburg, N.Y.: training camps in, 20, 26. See also Preparedness Plattsburgers, 20, 26 Populism (ideology), 7, 86 Populist Party, 18, 25, 86, 101 Populists, 7, 85, 102 Post Office, U.S., 11, 105, 109, 135, 150 Pou, James H., 154–55, 156 Powell, Samuel J., 100, 101, 223 (n. 49)

257

Poynter, J. E., 107 Preparedness: debates over, 15, 18–24, 56; race and, 20; class and, 20–21, 23, 27, 49– 50, 56; opposition to, 21–24, 26–28, 204 (nn. 21, 22), 206 (n. 31); National Guard and, 29; conscription and, 45–46. See also Antimilitarists; South, the Proctor, H. H., 121 Progressives. See Democrats; Republicans Propaganda, 10–11, 137–42, 160–61, 164, 174–75, 230 (n. 13) Provost marshal general (PMG). See Crowder, Enoch Public opinion, 165–66 Ragsdale, J. Willard, 41 Ramos, Basilio, 90 Rankin, Willie, 75 Rebel, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93–94, 98 Red Cross, 11, 138, 139, 141, 150, 152, 169, 171, 172–73 Reed, John Shelton, 36 Reed, Thomas C., 177, 179 Religion, 75–82, 198, 218 (n. 64); and socialism, 88–89; and Bureau surveillance, 147–50. See also Conscription, WWI: exemptions Republicans, 18–19, 25; and preparedness, 18–19, 21; progressives among, 56 Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC), 32 Resistance. See Conscription, WWI: resistance to Restoration Movement. See Church of Christ; Disciples of Christ ‘‘Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight’’ (phrase), 85 Risley, Z. L., 100, 101 Roark, Vivian, 111 Roosevelt, Theodore, 18, 19, 20, 26, 42, 56, 165, 204 (n. 15), 209 (n. 22) Root, Elihu, 49 Rowan, L. J., 132 Russell, Charles T., 148 Russellites. See Jehovah’s Witnesses Rye, Thomas, 112, 113, 114, 124, 180 St. Louis, Mo., 126 Salisbury, N.C., 154–56

258 Index Sanders, T. M., 186 Savannah, Ga., 125 Scales, Erie C., 190 Schaffer, Ronald, 165 Scott, Emmett J., 128–30 Scott, James C., 9, 136–37, 170 Sears, William Joseph, 54 Secret Service, 152 Sedition Act, 11, 51, 110, 163, 165, 166 Selective Draft Act (1917), 60, 61, 67, 84, 92, 95, 100, 104, 106, 112; prosecutions under, 165 Selective Service Act. See Selective Draft Act Selective Service System, 2, 5, 10, 79, 82, 113, 114, 119, 133, 163, 178, 192, 235 (n. 7); records of, 7, 74, 127, 134, 179; creation of, 58–59; structure of, 60–61; policies of, 61– 66, 235 (n. 7); in Georgia, 188. See also Conscription, WWI Sellars, Nigel, 100–101 Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 30 Senate Military Affairs Committee, 45, 54 Shenk, Gerald E., 126 Sherman, William T., 33 Simonton, Alonzo LaFayette, 75 Simpson, G. M., 40–41 Simpson, W. D., 96 Sims, Thetis W., 48–49, 55, 169, 170, 211 (n. 38) Sisson, Thomas U., 51, 54, 169, 170, 195 Slacker lists, 174. See also Bureau of Investigation; Military Intelligence Division Slacker raids, 156 Slackers, 1, 22, 158, 161, 163, 171–75, 192–93, 197; after WWI, 194. See also Conscription, WWI: resistance to; South, the; and state entries Slayden, James, 169 Smith, Hoke, 102, 195–96 Smith, John, 1, 6, 12, 163 Smith, Rutledge, 163–65, 177 Socialism, 7, 86 Socialist Party, 85, 87–89, 91, 93 Socialists, 3, 21, 50, 85, 86, 150–51, 198 South, the, 3, 197–99, 201 (n. 5); as agrarian region, 4–5; rural, 4–5, 8–9, 10, 12, 14–15, 136–37, 138, 160–61, 170–71, 175–76; martial, 6, 75–76; militaristic, 6; politics in, 6,

15–18, 85, 119; reaction to WWI in, 6, 7, 8, 14–15, 33–41, 209 (n. 19); ‘‘legibility’’ of, 9, 10, 136–37, 157–60; antiwar sentiment in, 15, 39, 165, 170–71, 175–77, 193, 197, 209 (n. 19); early marriage in, 69; racial geography of, 118–20; poor public records in, 157–60; violent rhetoric in, 175–77; reification of, 197; and international affairs, 202 (n. 11). See also Blacks; Conscription, WWI; Desertion; Selective Draft Act; Southerners; States’ rights; Surveillance; Whites; White supremacy; World War I South Carolina, 43, 71; CND in, 7, 138; draft boards in, 69, 71, 72, 73; Bureau investigations in, 105, 159–60 South Dakota, 131 Southerners: antiwar, 14–15; reactions to WWI, 14–15, 33–41, 197–99; rural, 15, 137, 139–42, 172–75. See also Blacks; South, the; Whites Spanish-American War, 22 Spears, John, 97 Speer, Emory, 108–9 Stanley, G. W., 40 States’ rights, 6, 8, 192, 199 Statesville, N.C., 152–53 Station. See Draft boards Statistics: as aspect of state formation, 9–10; on draft registration, 57–58 Stimson, Henry L., 20 Stone, Barton, 76, 77 Stone, William J., 30, 31, 51 Stringfellow, Marion Glenn, 75 Strunsky, Simeon, 21 Submarines, German, 25–26, 29–32 Sunrise Conference, 31 Suppression. See Civil liberties: suppression of Supreme Court, 100 Surveillance, 10, 11, 12, 200; and bureaucracy, 156–60, 164. See also Bureau of Investigation; South, the: ‘‘legibility’’ of; Surveillance state; and state entries Surveillance state, 4, 11, 135–37, 157–58, 199– 200 Sussex (ship): sinking of, 31–32 Sutton, Jacob, 146 Synan, Vinson, 81

Index Taft, J. T., 93 Tejanos, 90 Tennessee, 43, 76, 148; desertion in, 1, 162–64, 180, 185; draft boards in, 60, 67, 68–69, 70, 71, 74, 79, 82, 116, 128–29, 160, 162–63; Bureau investigations in, 105–6, 136, 142; pleas for draft exemption in, 114; lynchings in, 123–24, 227 (n. 27); CND in, 138, 163, 174; CPI in, 140; draft resistance in, 162–64, 234 (n. 1); troops dispatched to, 163–64, 185; food survey in, 172; slackers in, 172, 177, 194, 236 (n. 23) Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, 147 Texas, 43, 76, 79, 82, 89, 90, 92–96, 101, 148; draft boards in, 69, 70, 79, 116–17, 127–28; Bureau investigations in, 106, 136, 144, 145, 146–48; CPI in, 140; slackers in, 175; draft exemptions in, 178; desertion in, 179, 184. See also Farmers and Laborers Protective Association Texas Rangers, 90, 93, 184 Third Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Infantry, U.S. Army, 122 Thirteenth Amendment: as basis for anticonscription protests, 92, 104, 106, 224 (n. 60) Thomas, R. Y., Jr., 123 Thompson, E. P., 175 Tindall, George, 6, 7 Tippah County, Miss., 190–92 Townes, John C., 117 Trading With the Enemy Act, 11, 110, 165 Trammell, Park, 54 Tully, Walter, 176 Tumulty, Joseph, 64 Turner, Jim, 127–28 Union County, Ga., 188–89 Union League Club, 49 Universal military training and service, 19, 22, 42–43, 45–46, 58–59 University of North Carolina, 113, 139, 209 (n. 19) Vardaman, James, 3, 17, 38, 41, 52, 54, 86, 108, 121, 138, 157, 166–67, 170, 191–92, 203 (nn. 9, 10), 235 (n. 10)

259

Vardaman’s Weekly, 166–67 Venable, W. W., 181 Vigilantes, 135, 144, 229 (n. 2) Vigilantism, 11 Villa, Pancho, 29, 99 Vinson, Carl, 168–69 Virginia, 43, 85; draft boards in, 70, 71; CND in, 138; CPI in, 140; Bureau investigations in, 146 Wald, Lillian, 21 Walker, Earnest, 129 Wall Street, 3, 6, 7, 23, 27, 49, 110 War bonds, 173–75. See also Liberty loans and bonds; McAdoo, William; War Savings Stamps War Department, U.S., 152 War Savings Stamps, 138, 139, 141 Washington, Booker T., 128 Washington, George, 47 Watson, Tom, 3, 17, 86, 98, 101–3, 136, 138, 162, 171, 173, 185, 193, 198, 223 (nn. 53, 55); and Georgia politics, 102–3; mobilizes anti-draft resistance, 104–10; anti-conscription lawsuit, 108–9; sues U.S. Post Office, 109; runs for Congress in 1918, 166, 168–69, 170; and desertion in Georgia, 186; postwar political career of, 194–95 Wayland, Julius, 88 Webb, Edwin Yates, 39, 40, 41, 46, 47, 54, 55–56, 166 Webb, W. T., 93 Weber, Eugene, 5 Weinberger, Harry, 103 Whipps, John Walter, 185 White, Hugh, 27 White, Pleas, 80 Whites, 15, 33, 126–34, 137, 151; rural, 55, 133– 34, 137, 198; class divisions among, 118, 198; racism of, 120, 121, 134; racial paranoia of, 126, 142–47, 197, 227 (n. 25); women, 132– 33, 139, 143, 146, 228 (n. 49); elite, and war mobilization, 138–42, 198; inform on neighbors, 150–51; desertion and, 180–84, 190. See also White supremacy White supremacy, 6, 8, 16, 17, 111, 118–20, 180– 81, 199. See also, Conscription, WWI: race and

260 Index Williams, John Sharp, 17, 37–39, 46, 47, 108, 111, 121, 175–76, 198, 240 (n. 4) Williams, Offa, 128 Wilmington, N.C., 155, 156, 233 (n. 46) Wilson, Charles Reagan, 36 Wilson, Sidney, 177, 237 (n. 33) Wilson, Thomas D., 128 Wilson, Woodrow, 3, 10, 12, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 36, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 78, 80, 82, 84, 85, 96, 103, 104, 109, 121, 123, 124, 136, 137, 144, 155, 177, 202 (n. 11); and preparedness, 26, 29–32, 206 (nn. 29, 30); and congressional debates over conscription, 43–56, passim; and decision for draft, 43, 209 (n. 22); and 1918 elections, 165–71; and wartime dissent, 165 Wise, James W., 49 Women, 172, 173, 225 (n. 8), 236 (n. 23). See also Blacks, women; Conscription, WWI: gender issues and; Whites, women Wood, Leonard, 18, 19, 20 Woodward, C. Vann, 101–2, 168, 195–96 Woodyard, S. W., 67

Working Class Union (WCU), 6, 85, 89, 90, 92, 97, 98, 101, 221 (n. 35) Work-or-fight laws, 131–33. See also Conscription, WWI: labor issues and World War I: home front, 5, 11, 200; protests against, 6–7; mobilization for, 10, 136, 138–42, 157–60; support for, 11, 12, 136; congressional debate over declaration, 13–14; preparedness issue and, 19–20, 23; neutral rights and, 29–32; submarine issue and, 29–32; U.S. entry into, 32, 209 (n. 21); southern reaction to, 33–41, 56; class and, 56; historical construction of, 197–200. See also Blacks; Civil liberties: suppression of; Conscription, WWI; Propaganda; South, the; Surveillance; Surveillance state; Whites Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 152, 169 Zapata, Emiliano, 90 Zimmerman telegram, 145