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: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War. By Jeanette Keith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. viii, 260 pp. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-80782897-1. $22.50 (paper). ISBN 0-8078-5562-6.

As the subtitle of this work indicates, the rural South during World War I is the focus of Jeanette Keith's new book. Keith argues the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" thesis most forcefully with her assertion that thousands of rural southerners, black and white, opposed U.S. entry into the war, the passage of selective service, and enforcement of the draft law because they viewed the war as benefiting monied interests. Keith argues that class issues lay at the heart of much, if not most, of the dissent in the South. In fact, combining the issues of race and class, Keith at one point concludes that World War I was more accurately a "poor white man's fight" (p. 134) because of the federal government's hesitancy in drafting African Americans. This conclusion perhaps would have been a stronger thesis.

A close second in reasons for dissent was religious conviction that killing another was morally wrong. As Keith shows, however, conscientious objectors in the South (mostly members of Pentecostal and Holiness sects) often experienced difficulty in convincing federal agents or local draft boards that their church met the criteria necessary for gaining conscientious-objector status.

Keith also addresses the issues of surveillance in the South, concluding that surveillance was more widespread than once believed. In fact, "Bureau of Investigation agents were all over the rural South" (p. 136). The author concludes that such "intrusion of federal police power" into the rural South must have been "startling indeed" and that "what impact this left on political discourse in the region and on regional attitudes toward the state can only be imagined" (pp. 199-200).

One drawback to the work, exemplified in the passage above, is the author's recurring tendency to draw broad conclusions based on scanty information. Another instance can be found in Keith's use of the records of the American Protective League (APL), which she identifies as the "largest, most powerful volunteer surveillance force during the war" (p. 151). The National Archives kept APL files on only the "representative" states of Arkansas and North Carolina, and even these were purged of FBI correspondence. Thus, two states' incomplete files are available for study of the APL's activities in the South. The Arkansas files, Keith notes, had little useful information, leaving only North Carolina's files to study. The question that arises, of course, is whether the files of one state are representative of the region as a whole? The author apparently believes that the files may, in fact, be used to extrapolate general conclusions about surveillance throughout the South. The evidence, however, is insufficient to justify such a conclusion.

Alabama readers will be disappointed to find relatively little that relates specifically to the state. Most of the information on Alabama comes from the voting record and speeches of the state's congressional delegation. The author used Mississippi and Tennessee state archives but not the Alabama Department of Archives and History.

Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight is primarily a book of exceptional cases, relating apparently atypical occurrences in the southern response to World War I. Keith acknowledges that the work is a look at 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" (p. 8). As long as the reader bears this caveat in mind, the work is most useful as an introduction to the dissent of rural southerners from 1916 to 1918. Keith notes that 28 percent of the total number of deserters came from the states of the former Confederacy (p. 2). Thereafter, little quantification of data exists. The anecdotal examples used to argue the thesis concerning race, class, and power are interesting and even at limes comic, and they certainly bolster Keith's assertions. The reader is unable, however, to determine how representative these examples are. One wishes for a clearer impression of the depth of southern dissent. Were the percentages any greater for rural than for urban dwellers? Were they any different for the South as a region than for the nation as a whole? Indeed, at the most elemental level, how widespread was dissent in the rural South? Perhaps future historians can answer some of these questions.

Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight will likely be of limited appeal to general readers. Historians of the period might find it challenging and almost certainly will find at least some of its conclusions problematic.

RUTH SMITH TRUSS

University of Montevallo

Copyright University of Alabama Press Oct 2005
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