Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War

Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War. By Jeanette Keith. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. x, 260. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-8078-5562-6; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2897-1.)

The opening lines of Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War are shrewdly pitched to make the reader see the similarities between the First World War and more recent conflicts. This is appropriate, for throughout the work the author consciously looks for larger lessons embedded in the events of 1917-1919. This, in fact, is the book's greatest strength. While it admirably illuminates the details of the war effort in the rural South-the debates over preparedness and conscription, the mechanics by which conscription was enacted, and the government's efforts to...