Download World War I: Loyalty and Dissent in Mississippi During the Great War

World War I: Loyalty and Dissent in Mississippi During
the Great War, 1917-1918
By Richard V. Damms
The president of the United States addressed the nation and called for war. Tyrants, he said,
could not be allowed to destroy the bonds of civilization by engaging in inhumane and
immoral actions that oppressed their own people and threatened their neighbors. The world
had to be made safe for democracy.
The nation's leading newspapers overwhelmingly agreed with the president, but the American
people were divided. While some enthusiastically backed the official call to arms, critics
suggested that the war was being undertaken to further privileged economic interests.
No, this was not President George W. Bush seeking military action against Iraq in 2003;
rather, it was Woodrow Wilson in 1917 mobilizing the United States for war against Germany.
President Wilson's April 2, 1917, war message to Congress identified the major reasons he
believed the United States had to enter the conflict which had ravaged Europe since August
1914. The principal provocation was Germany's adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare
against the Allies (primarily Britain, France, Italy, and Russia), which violated the neutral
rights of the United States to engage in peaceful commerce with warring nations. By March
1917, German submarines had already sunk several American ships and Wilson denounced
this new method of warfare as inhumane. Wilson also railed against the authoritarian regime
in Germany, contrasting it unfavorably with the democratic governments of the Allied powers.
The Zimmermann Telegram, an inept German attempt to form a military alliance with Mexico
against the United States, further suggested German hostility. Thus, in Wilson's view, the
United States had no choice but to go to war to defend its rights and those of free peoples
everywhere. The state of Mississippi was not immune from the great debate over war and
peace. Indeed, Mississippi's two U.S. senators took diametrically opposed positions. The
senior senator, John Sharp Williams, fully supported President Wilson's call to arms. James
Kimble Vardaman, however, not only voted against the declaration of war, but he resisted the
administration's call for selective conscription and went on to oppose other measures that the
Wilson administration deemed essential for the war effort. An examination of the views of
Williams and Vardaman, and of their respective constituents, suggests that Mississippians
were far from unified behind Wilson's war.
Williams and Vardaman
The respective stances of senators Williams and Vardaman can be explained, in part, by the
fact that each represented distinct interests and factions within the Mississippi Democratic
Party of the early 20th century. Williams was an archetypal Bourbon Democrat, primarily
representing the planter and business class of the state who considered themselves the natural
leaders of society. The Bourbons were social and political conservatives who supported the
interests of white landowners and generally favored low taxes and minimal state
spending. They took a paternalistic attitude toward African Americans, whom they
considered to be inherently inferior and dependent on white guidance. Vardaman,
meanwhile, represented the agrarian wing of the party. Heirs to the Populist tradition of the
1890s, the agrarians were willing to use state power to further the interests of poorer whites,
mostly small farmers. Vardaman supported such progressive reforms as a graduated income
tax, restrictions on child labor, woman suffrage, and antitrust measures to break up the
concentrated economic power of the giant corporations. Vardaman's populism, however, was
strictly for whites only. He was an inveterate racist. He frequently deployed extremist rhetoric
about African Americans to garner the votes of poor whites against his Bourbon opponents.
Debating war
Williams's response to President Wilson's call for a declaration of war, like that of many
upper-income southerners, drew upon the Lost Cause mythology of the American Civil
War. On the floor of the Senate, he insisted that American manhood and honor required the
United States to fight to defend its interests against the continuing German transgressions of
neutral rights. He suggested that opponents of the war were guilty of treason and declared
that it was better to die with honor than live as a coward. While too old himself to fight,
Williams later expressed pride in the fact that three of his four sons volunteered for military
service. Across Mississippi, the overwhelming majority of newspapers backed the president
and praised Williams's leadership. Even former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to
express his support of the senator's efforts. Meanwhile, Williams's junior colleague and
bitter political rival cast one of only six Senate votes against the declaration of war. Rather
than glorifying the Lost Cause, Vardaman and his predominantly rural constituents recalled
the horrors of the Civil War, characterizing it as a “rich man's war and a poor man's fight” in
which the latter had suffered the heaviest losses. Vardaman suggested that, once again, the
United States was being drawn into war by privileged economic interests, such as bankers and
munitions makers. He argued that most ordinary Americans had no desire to join the
European conflagration, and suggested that “the great toiling masses of America” who would
pay the heaviest price in lives and treasure ought to have a voice in any decision for
war. While recognizing that he held a minority view, he argued that his conscience required
him to oppose the declaration of war. His words were of no avail. The Senate voted for war
on April 4, 1917.
The draft
The political divide between Williams and Vardaman, and their respective interests, spilled
over into the question of conscription, or the draft. Immediately following the declaration of
war, the Wilson administration requested legislation to draft up to 1.7 million men for the
duration of the war. Williams agreed that only compulsory military service for the duration
would enable the United States to mobilize its manpower rapidly and efficiently, and avoid the
persistent problem Civil War armies had faced with short-term enlistees leaving in midcampaign. Compulsory service, moreover, was democratic in that it would ensure that all
social classes carried their fair share of the military burden. Again, Vardaman saw things
differently. Anticipating that military service would fall most heavily on the backs of the rural
and urban poor, he threw his support behind efforts to amend the administration's bill to
require that the War Department seek an all-volunteer army first, and only resort to
conscription if enlistments proved to be inadequate.
The question of race also figured in the discussion of the draft. Vardaman warned that
drafting African Americans would result in “arrogant strutting representatives of the black
soldiery in every community,” which could jeopardize the whole structure of white
supremacy. Williams and other conscription supporters retorted that drafting African
Americans in proportion to their presence in the general population was the only way to
ensure that they would perform military service at all. Equally important, conscription would
actually safeguard white supremacy by maintaining the existing racial balance in the South by
removing both black and white young men from the community proportionately. Vardaman's
objections notwithstanding, Congress overwhelmingly approved the administration's bill.
As the Selective Service System went into effect, Vardaman's fears for poor rural whites were
confirmed. The government's regulations classified agricultural workers as expendable, and
even married rural workers with families sometimes found it difficult to obtain exemptions
from the county draft boards dominated by members of the local white establishment. The
board members often assumed that the $30 per month that soldiers received exceeded the
typical income of most southern whites and thus was more than adequate compensation for
the absence of a male breadwinner. Meanwhile, wealthy southern whites, their sons, and
sometimes even their black workers, received deferments. In all, 157,607 Mississippians
eventually registered for the draft, 75,977 whites and 81,548 blacks, and by the end of the war,
some 19,296 whites and 24,066 blacks had been inducted into the military. The draft
situation for poor whites became more ominous in the aftermath of the August 1917 race riot
in Houston, Texas. There, several dozen regular United States Army black troops from 3rd
Battalion, 24th Infantry, had responded to repeated provocations by white law enforcement
officials in Houston by arming themselves and heading into town. In the bloodshed that
followed, four policemen, four soldiers, and eleven civilians were killed and the army
eventually court-martialed and executed nineteen soldiers for mutiny.
Following this incident, southern governors pressured the War Department to remove black
troops from their states, and the following month the Wilson administration temporarily
suspended the call-up of black draftees. The states, however, still had to meet existing troop
quotas. To make up for the shortfall of black inductees, and to avoid stripping predominantly
black counties of all eligible white males, Mississippi sent larger numbers of white draftees
from counties with a low percentage of black residents, typically the counties most heavily
populated by small white farmers. Not only were African-American draftees from Mississippi
inducted into the military later than their white counterparts, but they were also assigned to
noncombatant functions. Thus, as Vardaman had predicted, the burden of fighting fell most
heavily on poor, rural white Mississippians.
Resistance
Wartime legislation, such as the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, greatly
limited the ability of opponents of the war to speak out openly, but many ordinary
Mississippians found other ways to resist the war effort. One tactic was to refuse to buy war
bonds. In Neshoba County, for example, the staunchly pro-war newspaper condemned
“foolish talk” by unnamed locals who had apparently been urging people not to buy liberty
bonds. More tangibly, almost eight thousand Mississippians deserted by either not showing
up for induction into the military or by going absent without leave. The state's 12 percent
desertion rate was comparable to such states as Massachusetts and California. Even Governor
Theodore G. Bilbo, Vardaman's protégé, was suspected by some federal officials of footdragging in filling the state's draft quota. Occasionally, overt armed resistance
developed. In the spring of 1918, army troops were sent into Neshoba, Lauderdale, and
Tippah counties to round up armed bands of deserters in the countryside who were hiding out
and receiving support from family members and friends. Most of the deserters surrendered
peacefully, but an exchange of gunfire resulted in two deaths in Tippah County. Significantly,
the county went for Vardaman in the 1918 Democratic Senate primary.
1918 election
Ultimately, Vardaman paid a political price for his outspoken defiance of the Wilson
administration on such issues as the declaration of war, the draft, and the Sedition
Act. Congressman Pat Harrison challenged Vardaman in the 1918 Democratic Senate primary
with the backing of John Sharp Williams. Harrison's supporters continually pounded on the
theme of Vardaman's disloyalty to President Wilson and the nation. Scurrilous rumors
surfaced that Vardaman was in the pay of the German Kaiser and had bought a plantation
near Greenwood with German money. Harrison's theme became: “All Vardaman men are not
disloyal, but every disloyal man is for Vardaman.” Even President Wilson entered the fray by
publicly endorsing the efforts to unseat Vardaman. Not surprisingly, Harrison eventually
defeated Vardaman by more than 11,000 votes. On closer inspection, however, the 1918
Senate primary vote lends credence to the notion that many Mississippians remained
unreconciled to the war. Despite the hostility of most Mississippi newspapers, official
repression and intimidation of his supporters, and the intervention by the president of the
United States, Vardaman carried twenty-four mostly northeastern counties. The election
results suggest that, as federal officials had feared, a significant portion of public opinion in
Mississippi was still opposed to the war.
Richard V. Damms, Ph.D., is a professor of history at Mississippi State University.
Posted June 2005