Journal of Southern History

The centennial of World War I has contributed to new published studies about the conflict and its impact. The three works under review focus on the [End Page 202] home front in southern states and battlefront encounters by southern men. Together they offer new insight into regional experiences during a national emergency and thus fit well with the growing number of local studies about American involvement in the First World War. Individually, they demonstrate that, although the need to produce foodstuffs and weaponry hastened the transition of the agricultural economy of the South into a more modern and industrialized one, social and political traditions changed at a much slower pace despite new challenges brought on by the war.

Texas and World War I by Gregory W. Ball is a concise study that evaluates the many changes the war caused in Texas. The author expertly places the arrival of World War I into the context of Texas’s heightened sense of preparedness for military action owing to the unrest along its border with revolutionary Mexico. Texans, like so many Americans, greeted the declaration of war with public assertions of patriotism, formed home guard companies in several communities to counter any potential threats from Mexico, joined American Red Cross chapters, and purchased more Liberty Bonds than required. The state’s Council of Defense created hundreds of county and community councils to coordinate the war effort at the local level. Despite drought conditions, Texas increased food and livestock production. Women in Texas, as they did throughout the nation, conserved food, served as nurses, and worked in factories. Although strained racial tensions contributed to the Houston riot in 1917, African Americans nevertheless held patriotic meetings, supported the war effort, and sent their men to war.

Texans were also suspicious of foreigners, especially German immigrants who were not naturalized citizens. Newspapers fanned growing anti-German sentiment by publishing rumors of German spy activities and the arrests of suspected saboteurs. Ball, however, does not evaluate just how many of the accused actually received convictions under the Espionage Act (1917) and whether any of the existing German-language newspapers suffered as a result of the Trading with the Enemy Act (1917). Such analysis could have measured the depth of anti-German sentiment in the state.

The remaining chapters focus on military aspects, especially the implementation of the Selective Service Act in Texas (1917), the turning of men into soldiers at several training camps in the state, and their experiences on the western front in Europe. The author effectively illustrates that the appeal to the volunteer spirit to enlarge the ranks of the Texas National Guard and the drafting of men into the regular army was quite successful because the state was already prepared for military action due to unrest along the Texas-Mexico border. Ball concludes that the war also had a political impact on the home front because younger politicians, such as Sam Rayburn, replaced the older ones and guided the nation into a new political direction by asking what power the national government had over its citizens.

Ball has read numerous Texas and out-of-state newspapers and letters to learn about the battlefield encounters of Texas soldiers assigned to the Thirty-sixth and Ninetieth Army divisions. These primary accounts are the best aspect of this well-structured study. The secondary sources consulted lack the standard Over Here: The First World War and American Society by David M. Kennedy (New York, 1980) and Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making [End Page 203] of the Modern American Citizen by Christopher Capozzola (New York, 2008). That, however, does not distract from the overall quality of a concise work that will appeal to any general reader interested in Texas history during World War I.

North Carolina’s Experience during the First World War, edited by Shepherd W. McKinley and Steven Sabol, is a collection of essays that began as papers presented during conferences and symposiums commemorating the war. The anthology addresses military affairs, politics, remembrance, life on the home front, and issues related to business and labor. Individual chapters focus on the construction of Fort Bragg, the soldier settlement movement, contributions by women on the home front and the war front, the experience of black soldiers from Tar Heel communities, work by the North Carolina Council of Defense, treatment of German Americans, and the expansion of health-care services owing to the return of permanently disabled soldiers and the influenza pandemic.

Of particular interest are essays discussing the war’s economic impact on the state. Evan P. Bennett argues in “Years of Promise: Tobacco Agriculture and the Great War” that smoking cigarettes developed into an acceptable habit because the government placed them into rations, YMCA volunteers handed them out to soldiers, and patriotic families mailed them to their men. Consequently, demand rose and continued to do so after the war; the previously depressed tobacco industry experienced a boom; and farmers, including African Americans, felt increased standards of living. This prosperity, however, was short-lived because, by the end of the 1920s, prices had again fallen to prewar levels owing to overproduction.

The war had a similar impact on the textile industry, as Annette Cox outlines in “Towels, Socks, and Denim: World War I and North Carolina’s Cotton Mills.” Despite the loss of German dyes, the high demand for textiles in European and American militaries inspired mill owners to increase production, hire more workers—including African Americans—and pay higher wages. The war also accelerated the move of the nation’s textile industry from northern to southern states. Once the demand for cotton products declined after the war ended, mill owners laid off laborers and lowered wages. When workers reacted with strikes, employers sped up production and increased output per person. Additional factors that contributed to the decline of the cotton textile industry were an unreliable supply of cotton and changing trends in fashions during the 1920s.

The well-researched chapters in this anthology demonstrate that the war impacted the lives of North Carolinians in many ways, yet social and racial structures changed little in the state. Indeed, readers may be surprised to learn that, despite the many contributions by women to the war effort, North Carolina’s General Assembly did not ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until 1971.

The American South and the Great War, 1914–1924, edited by Matthew L. Downs and M. Ryan Floyd, is another collection of essays that address several issues related to the conflict and their impact on southern states. Unlike the other works under review, the chapters in this anthology describe more dramatic and far-reaching changes for African Americans, women, and rural farmers. These challenges to the status quo were necessary steps in the transition to the modern South. [End Page 204]

For example, Floyd argues in “‘A Diarrhea of Plans and Constipation of Action’: The Influence of Alabama Cotton Farmers, Merchants, and Brokers on Anglo-American Diplomacy during the First World War, 1914–1915” that southern farmers and merchants, who were concerned about the war’s impact on the international cotton trade, politically threatened governors and state legislators, who in turn shared these concerns with national politicians. In the process, these groups not only influenced Allied economic policy against Germany but also reasserted the South’s important political role in the nation. The war, especially the political aim to spread democracy across the globe, also challenged traditional race relations. In “The Great War and Expanding Equality?: Black Carolinians Test Boundaries,” Janet G. Hudson evaluates how African Americans navigated the demands for patriotism while living in a segregated society. She asserts that supporting the war and combining loyalty with demands for racial equality laid the rhetorical foundation for the future civil rights movement. Lee Sartain’s study of the NAACP, “‘The Race’s Greatest Opportunity since Emancipation’: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Great War, and the South,” comes to a similar conclusion, asserting that the young organization transformed itself into the preeminent civil rights organization through its role in the mobilization of African Americans for the war effort.

The authors in the three publications under review use traditional primary documents, including a wide array of newspapers, letters, and U.S. census and congressional records, as well as underutilized correspondence between politicians and their constituents, oral history interviews, shipping company records, contemporary medical journals, women’s magazines, and textile journals. Together these books demonstrate the many challenges to the status quo in the South during World War I. Consequent political, economic, and social changes, even if minute, created the foundations for the even more dramatic transformations that occurred during and after World War II. All three are a must-read for any scholar of the American South and anyone interested in the many changes that occurred, not just in this region but also across the nation, as a result of the First World War.