The Politics of Southern Draft
Resistance, 1917–1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South

Jeanette Keith

In the darkness of an early summer morning in 1918, a truck loaded with fifty soldiers lumbered up into the hills north of Atlanta, Georgia, part of a federal-state expedition into rural Cherokee County, a reported center of resistance to the World War I draft. After interrogating suspected deserters' families and intimidating a local antidraft activist, troops and law enforcement agents loaded up again and drove even deeper into the hills, in search of another deserter's home. At this point, what had been a successful raid took an unexpected turn. To reach the next target, the convoy had to pass over a wooden bridge spanning the Etowah River. The heavy truck carrying the soldiers crashed through the bridge and fell into the river below, killing three soldiers and seriously injuring eight. At the scene of the crash, an agent from the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation noted that farmers seemed to appear from nowhere to rescue the injured men. Suspicious, he investigated the timbers supporting the bridge and found that they had been sawed almost through. When he asked an elderly man at the scene about the bridge's condition, he was told that the timbers had been damaged during the Civil War. The agent discounted this possibility and recorded his suspicion of sabotage.1	1
The agent's report wound up in the files of the Bureau of Investigation, one of scores of reports on draft resistance in the rural South. Those files, combined with information from the records of other agencies involved in World War I mobilization, present a view of the World War I home front that significantly diverges from the accepted narrative of overwhelming support for the policies of Woodrow Wilson's administration. Behind the patriotic pageant staged by war mobilization agencies are transcripts of resistance.2	2
Alone among the combatants in World War I, Americans locate the Great War's significance, not in the trenches of France, but on the home front. Historians studying the modern managerial state find its origins in the Wilson administration's war mobilization measures, while others see in the government's wartime suppression of liberties a foreshadowing of the Cold War and the national security state. Taking one or the other of those aspects of the home front as theme, historians have produced admirable works that nonetheless raise as many questions as they answer. The most significant of them can be simply summarized: To what extent did the American public support Mr. Wilson's war and the mobilization methods used to pursue it?3	3
Consider the standard book on the World War I draft, John Whiteclay Chambers II's To Raise an Army, a well-written, thoroughly researched, whiggish policy history. Chambers acknowledges that the draft was unpopular with the American people. He estimates that between 2.4 and 3.6 million men avoided service by refusing to register. Citing statistics compiled by the provost marshal general's (PMG) office, Chambers notes that 337,649 men "deserted," either by failing to show up for induction (considered desertion during World War I) or by running away from training camps. As he notes, about 12 percent of the 2.8 million men drafted thus "deserted." Nonetheless, Chambers considers the conscription policy successful since it allowed the United States to raise an army by 1918. From a political standpoint, however, the very existence of so much draft evasion cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. If most Americans supported the war, as home front historians assume, then why the high rate of draft evasion?4	. . .