Texas and World War I by Gregory W. Ball (review)

Perfectly timed for the centennial of the first World War, Gregory W. Ball’s Texas and World War I makes a fitting addition to the Texas State Historical Association’s Fred Rider Cotten Popular History Series. It now joins Ralph Wooster’s Texas and Texans in the Great War (State House Press, 2009) as one of only two general works to date that provide an overview of Texas’s important yet overlooked role in World War I. For that reason alone, it is an important contribution to a sorely neglected subject.

This short, seven-chapter book ostensibly covers the war from “origins” (chapter 1) to “legacies” (chapter 7), although its primary contribution is as a condensed history of Texas mobilization, the use of training facilities in the state, and the deployment of select Texans abroad. Ball provides some political and social context, most notably at the intersections of woman suffrage, alcohol prohibition, and party politics. Where he really shines, however, is his coverage of the growth and evolution of America’s military forces, primarily infantry, from the beginning of the nation’s Preparedness Movement all the way through the 1918 armistice and demobilization.

Ball carefully parses the mechanics of selective service in Texas: the debate over its implementation, the mechanics of how it was executed, the role of local communities, and its uneasy co-existence with voluntary enlistment. Due to his previous work, They Called Them Soldier Boys: A Texas Infantry Regiment in World War I (University of North Texas Press, 2013), Ball is particularly good when he covers the two “Texas divisions” of the American Expeditionary Forces, the 36th and 90th Infantry Divisions. An entire chapter devoted to Texans in combat gives a compressed but detail-packed account of their time at the Western Front.

The book is on less firm ground when it strays from the author’s strengths, and there are noticeable blind spots for an overview book. By disproportionately favoring infantry, Ball has little to say on Texans who served in U.S. Army support units and only slightly more on the other branches of service. Ball covers historically marginalized groups with less specificity, often discussing them in the abstract; for example, he provides no details about which units African American Texans served in, and their military service is largely framed within the prism of how white Texans viewed or reacted to it. Similarly, the contributions of Texas women as army nurses are not well explored, and the existence of female navy yeomen and women marines is omitted entirely. And although specific examples of draft resistance are highlighted, they are curiously divorced from a wider discussion of war dissent, which we know from Jeanette Keith’s Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) was more pervasive than is widely acknowledged. An engagement with the civil rights abuses that accompanied the passing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 would also have been welcomed.

On balance, however, Texas and World War I is a great resource for anyone with an interest in Texas military history and World War I. At 156 pages it is the perfect length for non-specialists wanting an introduction to the subject, and the content is well-organized and easy to follow. For the more advanced or specialist reader, it will serve as a refresher while also providing the occasional gem of information. And perhaps most importantly, it covers just enough ground, one hopes, to inspire all readers to seek further information.