The American South and the Great War, 1914–1924 ed. by Matthew L. Downs and M. Ryan Floyd (review)

This collection of nine scholarly essays reminds us that America's experience in World War I extends beyond the battlefields of France to the home front. Moreover, mobilization for war marked a period of transformation in southern society that laid the foundation for development of the modern South. A thematic grouping of chapters considers how the war influenced state relations with the federal government, the role of women and African Americans in society, and economic development. The study focuses mostly on six states, not the entire South. Four chapters focus on the Carolinas and two on Alabama. The remaining three chapters range the South more widely.

The introductory chapter includes an impressive review of relevant historiography. Although several books address the United States home front during World War I, the South is inadequately covered. George B. Tindall's dated classic, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge, La., 1967), comes closest to addressing the broad impact of the Great War on the South, but devotes only one chapter to it. While historians have produced a variety of single-topic studies, no comprehensive book-length study of the South during World War I exists. Martin T. Olliff's The Great War in the Heart of Dixie (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2008), provides a collection of essays aimed at the study of the home front in Alabama, while this work broadens the perspective to include more southern states.

Though the United States did not enter the war until 1917, the effects on the South were immediate. The disruption to global trade at the beginning of the war in 1914, due in part to Britain's naval policy, caused cotton prices to plummet. M. Ryan Floyd's chapter shows how Alabama farmers, merchants, and state political leaders successfully influenced U.S. diplomacy to benefit the cotton trade. Using correspondence between farmers, merchants, and state political leaders, Floyd demonstrates how international diplomacy can be a bottom-up process. Diplomacy was unable, however, to keep the United States out of the war. Once the U.S. entered the conflict, drafting a large army became necessary for the first time since the Civil War. James Hall's chapter on conscription in North Carolina explains how state and community leaders were largely successful in getting young men to support the draft. Hall uses local draft board questionnaires, documents from the North Carolina Council of Defense, and correspondence between state officials to show how appeals to the shared core values of duty, honor, and manhood supported the implementation of the Selective Service Act in North Carolina. Though there were exceptions, including cases of armed resistance, the draft was generally supported.

To galvanize support for the war effort throughout the United States, President Woodrow Wilson created a National Council of Defense and called on individual states to do the same. Fritz Hamer's essay focuses on the South Carolina Council of Defense and its "Campaign to Root out Disloyalty." State politicians exploited sentiments for and against the war to advance their goals. Governor Richard Manning appointed only his political allies to South Carolina's Council of Defense and attempted to have his rival, the former governor, convicted of treason. Suppression of dissent against the war in South Carolina included coercion of newspapers and the prosecution of German-Americans. While this chapter also discusses the state's support of war bonds and food conservation, Angela Jill Cooley's "Rural Southerners and Food Regulation" directs its attention to the implementation of Herbert Hoover's food conservation program throughout the South. Besides encouraging Victory Gardens, Hoover's program sought to increase food production while reducing domestic wheat consumption by thirty percent. These nationwide measures were intended to ensure troops and allies could be sustained. Federal bureaucrats crafted the regulations, however, without taking into account regional differences. The...