KEITH, JEANETTE. Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class and Power in the Rural South during the First World War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. viii + 260 pp. Introduction, notes and index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-5562-6.

     What happened to Progressivism during the First World War is a question that has informed a host of studies on America's experience during the conflagration that consumed the world from 1914-1918. In Over Here, David Kennedy claimed that Progressive reformers suffered a stunning blow to their expectation that the newly empowered wartime state would be a force for positive social reform. More recently, Nancy Gentile Ford asserted in Americans All! that by working within critical governmental agencies such as the military, Progressives were able to introduce key reforms that lessened the coercive nature of state power. Clearly siding with those who have traced the rise of a powerful police state apparatus during the war, Jeannette Keith in her new monograph, Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight, links the emergence of these new investigative powers to a novel and intriguing question: what happened to populism during the First World War?

     Keith shifts her focus away from urban elites, the traditional core of many histories of the Progressive Era, to investigate the reaction to war and conscription among the southern rural poor, especially their objections to both. Keith objects to historians' casual acceptance of the government's explanation that draft dodging and anti-war feelings were simply the result of an isolated people's ignorance and fears. Instead, she convincingly demonstrates that many of the South's rural poor exhibited an astute political interpretation of the war and conscription, which they cast in the lingering class rhetoric of the defunct populist movement. In the language of the congressmen who represented them, the union leaders attempting to organize them, the petitions they signed, and the barely literate letters that they sometimes wrote, Keith has uncovered a hidden political culture that kept the populist dream alive throughout the South during the war years. Interpreting world events through the prism of populism, many rural southerners believed that villainous banks and northeastern businesses pushed the country into the war to continue their profitable war trade with Great Britain. According to this line of reasoning, the draft was an unconstitutional extension of federal power over the rights of states and individuals to make their own decisions about whether to fight to advance the interests of the moneyed class.