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 and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. x, 260. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-8078-5562-6; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2897-1.)

The opening lines of Rich Man's War, Poor Man ' s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War are shrewdly pitched to make the reader see the similarities between the First World War and more recent conflicts. This is appropriate, for throughout the work the author consciously looks for larger lessons embedded in the events of 1917-1919. This, in fact, is the book's greatest strength. While it admirably illuminates the details of the war effort in the rural South--the debates over preparedness and conscription, the mechanics by which conscription was enacted, and the government's efforts to ensure loyalty--the book skillfully uses those details to raise profound questions about dissent and democracy, race and class, and the rise of the modern state.

As Jeanette Keith makes clear in her title, she is convinced that among southerners, World War I was waged disproportionately by members of the lower classes. While this might not be particularly earth-shattering by itself, Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight leads to more profound lessons. The details of conscription policy, for example, demonstrate beyond doubt that the rules were transparently designed to infuse conscription with a class bias. Even more interesting is the way white supremacy affected the process in the South. Wealthy white landowners, who exerted great influence in local draft boards, saw to it that white subsistence farmers were drafted first so as not to deplete the pool of African American agricultural laborers on which they depended. As a result, in some so-called plantation districts white supremacy had the ironic effect of making blacks proportionately less likely than poor whites to fight and die in Europe.

The book also makes it clear that the war elicited significant organized opposition in the rural South, causing Keith to rethink prevailing interpretations of the government's suppression of dissent during the conflict. It is simply not true, she argues, that only "leftists" and "foreigners" felt the sting of repression; in the South, the sheer volume of opposition to the war forced the government to cast a net that went far beyond those groups. Given this level of opposition, Keith wonders whether our use of the concept of hysteria to explain governmental suppression of dissent during World War I is appropriate. While the government often acted unconstitutionally in its attempts to garner support for the war, government officials' responses were hardly hysterical. Rather, their actions (no matter how objectionable) were commensurate with the challenge they faced, representing a rational and ultimately effective way of eliciting cooperation from "a recalcitrant and skeptical people" (p. 200).

The book comes to other interesting and provocative conclusions, suggesting that during the war the federal government moved closer to becoming a modern state by increasing its ability to "see" its citizens; arguing that southern states' reliance on the federal government to deal with deserters calls into question the white South's adherence to states' rights; and pointing to the sophistication with which southern dissidents made their antiwar arguments. While some will no doubt quarrel with a few of these conclusions, the fact that they are raised in Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight means the book does precisely what good history should.

JIM BISSETT

Elon University