Southerners and WWI
Posted on May 3rd, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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It is a strange thing that Southerners are for some reason being blamed of late for some undue attachment to the policies of Woodrow Wilson, when the South provided no less than two of the Senators of the six who opposed the declaration of war in 1917. In an era when Southerners were keen to demonstrate their loyalty, and general servility to a pro-war executive was the rule all over the country, this seems to me to be a somewhat significant sign of Southern resistance rather than support. Needless to say, there was little or no dissent from the Northeast. It is also hardly a secret that the greatest proponents of the war were progressive Christians, not conservative and fundamentalist Christians, and these were typically concentrated more in the urban centers of the North. Considerable resistance to the war and wartime policies of conscription emerged in the South, and “[w]hen war was finally declared in April 1917, some of the most vocal opponents were southern Democrats.” Claude Kitchin of North Carolina is one counter-example of a Southern Democrat who continued in office after 1918–his constituents did not punish him for having opposed entry into the war.
Vardaman’s later electoral defeat is taken as evidence of some Southern enthusiasm for Wilsonian fantasies, when it is unfortunately evidence of a much more dangerous tendency common to all Americans of punishing members of Congress who go against the executive. Sen. Stone of Missouri died before the Armistice and the 1918 election, so we will never know if his consituents were going to vote him out. Opponents of the war were relatively few and scattered all over the country (Lane from Oregon, Gronna from North Dakota, Norris from Nebraska, LaFollette from Wisconsin), yet they plainly represented the overwhelming majority of the population in 1917. Yet, the fact remains that in 1918 some Democratic politicians who quite correctly and wisely voted against entry into the war were defeated, in part because they had gone against the President of their party and had been seen to side with his predominantly Republican opponents. However, war hysteria managed to sink the careers of some Republican politicians in other parts of the country as well, including the well-known Jeannete Rankin of Montana.
Filed under: foreign policy, history, politics
But does Missouri really count as a Southern State? If it doesn’t you’re left with one Senator in the whole of the South against the war — not much opposition.
And what gives you the idea that the war was unpopular? Please don’t confuse postwar misgivings about US involvement for the sentiment of 1917.
Six votes against the war out of 96 in the Senate. And we haven’t looked at the House yet. If there were, as I heard, 50 votes against the war out of 435 Congressmen and Congress reflected public opinion, that amounts to a lot of support for going to war.
Where were those Congressmen from? I haven’t been able to find out. I’d surmise at least a few came from districts with large German-American populations (which would mostly be outside the South).
Pitting progressive and fundamentalist Christians against each other over the war is another one of those questionable dichotomies: Billy Sunday certainly wasn’t against the war, nor was the Southern Baptist Convention.
Your opposition may reflect current thinking rather than what was going on at the time. Divisions about dogma weren’t always reflected in ideas about society. In 1917 a Southern evangelical or fundamentalist wouldn’t automatically be anti-government or pro-free market in his thinking. He might dislike the Northeast, but not for the reasons given so often today.
I don’t doubt that some obscure Southern preachers and sects opposed the war (as did some in the North), but to pit them against well-known and prominent Northerners would be to distort things. Apples and oranges, again.
There was some opposition to the war from Pentacostalists, but really, a look at the Quakers, the Amish, the Brethren, the Mennonites, or the Hutterites (concentrated in Northern states) is enough to call into question the idea that Southern Christians would be more likely to oppose war in 1917.
The links should explain some of this. Fundamentalists did tend to be more opposed to entry into the war and liberal Protestants were more likely to support entry, as War for Righteousness makes clear. Something like 70% of the public opposed entry into the war. This can be found in biographies of La Follette and elsewhere. I am *not* saying that there were not Southern war supporters, or that there were no opponents from the Northeast, but that an overwhelming majority of the entire country was against entering the war. Just as in 1846, this had little or no effect on how people in Congress voted. Northeasterners and Whigs were adamantly opposed for the most part to going to war with Mexico, but that didn’t show up very much in the votes on declaring war. Southerners had an extra problem in worrying that opposition to the war would appear as disloyalty, a stigma the promoters of the “New South” were trying to shake off. To cite election results after two years of sustained war hysteria as evidence for some deep Southern support for armed Wilsonianism seems fairly perverse, when just two years earlier these same people had rallied to a ticket that was became identified with the phrase “he kept us out of war.” And, yes, I would count Missouri as culturally part of the South; it certainly was then, whether or not you still want to treat it that way today.