Mississippians in the Great War: Selected Letters ed. by Anne L. Webster (review)

This volume is a welcome addition to Mississippi historiography. Though World War I provided the Magnolia State’s first wholesale encounter with some of the modern forces shaping the outside world, scholars have had little to say about that encounter. As the book’s back cover blurb notes, “Even Mississippi textbooks rarely mention the part Mississippi men and women played” in the conflict. Anne L. Webster, the former longtime director of reference services for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH), has contributed a valuable first step toward filling that void.

Playing to her strength, Webster has gleaned from the MDAH’s manuscript holdings and newspapers around the state letters home from servicemen and volunteer workers engaged in various aspects of the war effort. Following an introduction that briefly but adequately recounts the phases of American involvement are four chapters—“Americans Enter the War,” mostly about military training; “Crossing the Pond and Getting Ready”; “Over the Top and into Battle,” the longest and most gripping section; and “All Quiet on the Western Front”—and an epilogue that summarizes the impact of the war.

The letters portray an amazing array of experiences, from the boredom of camp life to the exhilaration and terror of combat. They encompass an equally diverse range of topics: censorship, disease and quarantine, ubiquitous racial prejudice, patriotism, homesickness, the wonders of the wider world (“The ocean is a beautiful place but there is entirely too much of it. It is much larger than the ponds I have been used to fishing in”) and the carnage wrought by war (“As we walked along we saw the dead, heaps on heaps. Our own and the Germans”) (pp. 101, 203). Some letters are eloquent: one remarks, “How quickly events move; and how insignificant we all are, blown about like leaves on the winds of fate!” (p. 63). Others are poignant, as shown by the plea of a training camp commander to Governor Theodore G. Bilbo that he urge “mothers, wives, and sweethearts” to refrain from begging their soldier loved ones to come home, because those sincere and well-intentioned words “engender homesickness and discontent in the hearts of the boys” (pp. 48, 49).

The letter writers are likewise diverse: college-educated and barely literate, noted (William Alexander Percy and Harris Dickson) and obscure. They include farmers, planters, merchants, doctors, lawyers, and factory workers, in addition to an automobile salesman, a livery stable operator, a deputy chancery clerk, a former head of the state insane asylum, and the son of lumber baron Edward Hines. Webster has added a humanizing touch by laboring, no doubt tediously, to identify the correspondents, to note those who perished during the war and the circumstances of their deaths, and to unearth some essential details of the postwar careers of those who survived. She also supplies a useful list of World War I terminology and notes popular songs, books, poems, and other contemporary allusions mentioned in the letters.

One can hope that publication of this splendid collection will arouse among scholars a renewed interest in the story of Mississippi and the Great War. If so, they will find here much that will enhance their labors.