This is a review of Gerald E. Shenk\u27s  \u27Work Or Fight!\u27 Race, Gender, And The Draft In World War One By Gerald E. Shenk

Keene, Jennifer D.

English

Chapman University Digital Commons

Chapman UniversityChapman University Digital CommonsHistory Faculty Articles and Research History2006Review of "'Work Or Fight!' Race, Gender, AndThe Draft In World War One" By Gerald E. ShenkJennifer D. KeeneChapman University, keene@chapman.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_articlesPart of the Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons,Military History Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, and the United States HistoryCommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the History at Chapman University Digital Commons. It has been accepted forinclusion in History Faculty Articles and Research by an authorized administrator of Chapman University Digital Commons. For more information,please contact laughtin@chapman.edu.Recommended CitationKeene, Jennifer D. "Work Or Fight!" Race, Gender, And The Draft In World War One By Gerald E. Shenk." Register Of The KentuckyHistorical Society 104, no.3 (2006): 746-748. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005.Review of "'Work Or Fight!' Race, Gender, And The Draft In World WarOne" By Gerald E. ShenkCommentsThis review was originally published in Register Of The Kentucky Historical Society, volume 104, issue 3, in2006.CopyrightKentucky Historical SocietyThis book review is available at Chapman University Digital Commons: http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_articles/21746 REGISTER OF THE KENTUCKY HISTORICAL SOCIETY Catholic leaders collaborated through the Catholic Press Association (1890) and the Commission on Religious Prejudices (1914) and brought the power of litigation to bear upon the papers. More sympathetic Protestant clergy and editors of secular magazines also came to the defense of American Catholics. Many Americans boycotted products advertised in anti-Catholic papers. These combined efforts oftentimes blunted Nativist attacks, drained the coffers of anti-Romanist papers, and diminished the credibility of their editors and writers. The most definitive development in countering these tabloids, however, was witnessed in the contributions made by American Catholics during World War I. By war's end, anti-Catholic papers, once numbering about sixty, had slipped to a mere handful. While most textbooks provide coverage of the Know-Nothing movement, the American Protective Association, and the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, very little, if anything, is ever mentioned about anti-Catholicism in the Progressive Era. Nordstrom's book fills that void. His examination of anti-Catholicism through print culture en ables historians and communications specialists to determine how effectively some groups used modern information resources for negative purposes. If there is a shortcoming, Nordstrom clearly states that his research was fragmented due to the lack of extant records among these newspapers. Nevertheless, he has brought to the surface enough evidence to enable scholars to carefully examine anti-Catholic journalism so often overlooked in the Progressive Era. A. J. Scopino Jr. is a member of the history department at Central Connecticut State University. He is author of Healing the Brokenness: A Centennial Portrait of the Capitol Region Conference of Churches, 1900-2000 (2000). "Work or Fight!" Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One. By Gerald E. Sherik. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Pp. x, 194. $79.95 cloth; $26.95 paper.) 'Work or Fight!" Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One is an ambitious book. Shifting our focus away from the halls of Congress and the offices of the War Department, Gerald Shenk examines the workings of the World War I draft in Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, and California. Rather than detailing the creation of policies from above, Shenk proposes that the operation of the Selective Service Sys tem in individual communities reveals much about race and gender in American society. Jeannette Keith recently made the same point in her excellent treatment of draft resistance in the South during the This content downloaded from 206.211.139.218 on Fri, 15 May 2015 18:41:08 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBOOK REVIEWS 747 First World War in her book Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South During the First World War (2004). Ultimately, Keith's decision to focus on one region rather than four proves more successful. By attempting so much in so few pages, Shenk ends up skimming the surface of multiple issues that deserve fuller scrutiny. In Georgia, Illinois, and New Jersey, for instance, Shenk details how the white elite who dominated the local draft boards used their position to protect the existing racial order. In California, how ever, Selective Service regulations challenged the state's prevailing definition of who was white by requiring that local boards classify all men of Asian descent as white. Shenk makes this intriguing point and situates it well in the discriminatory legal environment that created separate schools for Asian immigrants and prevented them from own ing land. During the war, Japanese men argued that their economic success demonstrated their " Americaness" while whites viewed their success as evidence of the threat that they posed to white Americans in California. Unfortunately, Shenk details this fascinating dilemma in a few pages, then shifts abruptly to a political scandal involving the draft deferment of the heir to the Scripps newspaper fortune. The differences between these four states also create a problem of narrative coherence in the book. Shenk attempts to link the quite different economic and racial struggles in each region around the framework of whiteness and manhood. While these are certainly valid analytical categories that Shenk uses to good effect at moments, in the end these theoretical concepts limit his ability to draw broader conclu sions from the rich material he presents. Examining whiteness and manhood in each state leads to repetitiveness throughout the book, with each chapter ending with the similar conclusion that white elites sought to use their role in the draft process to consolidate their control over blacks, workers, immigrants, and sometimes women. Part of the problem is the records of the Selective Service System upon which Shenk relies for many of his conclusions. The local re cords, as Shenk demonstrates, aptly reveal that regional politics and power struggles affected the operation of the draft during the war. The resolution of these struggles, however, becomes reduced in this equa tion to whether or not a man was drafted. It fails to take into account the ways that marginalized groups expected to use military service to challenge the very racial and economic oppression that powerful whites wanted to preserve or the ways that Americans resisted the draft as an extension of state control into their lives. Perhaps most importantly, the sole focus on the local draft process tends to drop the war out of the equation all together. In an account that privileges This content downloaded from 206.211.139.218 on Fri, 15 May 2015 18:41:08 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions748 REGISTER OF THE KENTUCKY HISTORICAL SOCIETY regional political struggles so completely, national debates about the war before America's entry, newspaper reports from the front, and let ters from soldiers about the war have no place, thus disconnecting the operation of the draft too much from the actual war that conscripted men would have to fight. Jennifer D. Keene :s an associate professor and chair of the history department at Chap man University. She is the author o/Doughboys, the Great War and the Remaking of America (2001) and is currently working on a book about African American soldiers in World War I. Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing of the First World War. By Neil Hanson. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Pp. xv, 474. $28.95 cloth.) In Unknown Soldiers, journalist and popular historian Neil Hanson tells two stories about the missing combatants of the First World War. In the first two-thirds of the book, he draws on a deep and broad ar ray of primary sources—diaries, letters, unit and family histories—to provide a compelling narrative of life and death in the trenches and in the air on the Western Front. In the last third of the book, Hanson tells the story of families and nations—primarily Britain and the United States—and their struggle to find the remains of missing sons, broth ers, and husbands and then to commemorate them. Hanson's main purpose is to reclaim the stories of the missing by reconstructing their daily experiences in warfare, their poignant relationships with fami lies at the home front, and their common bonds with men across the lines. He uses information from monographs, anthologies, and some journal articles but is not primarily concerned with historiographie interpretation or debate. Hanson traces the experiences of three combatants at the battle fields of the Somme through their letters and diaries and with official reports and histories. At seventeen, Alec Reader joined the British Civil Service Rifles Regiment and became a bomb thrower in a "suicide" squad. Paul Hub served with Germany's 247th Infantry "Boy" Regi ment, soon dubbed the "Regiment of the Dead." Chicagoan George Seibold's unit joined the British Twenty-second Aero Squadron, and he trained to fly Sopwith Camels. The bodies of the three, killed in action, were unrecoverable at war's end. Hanson's overarching achievement is his ability to interweave their experiences of warfare with a vast number of other primary sources to create an unforgettable account This content downloaded from 206.211.139.218 on Fri, 15 May 2015 18:41:08 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review of  \u27Work Or Fight!\u27 Race, Gender, And The Draft In World War One  By Gerald E. Shenk

https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&amp;context=history_articles

Review of \u27Work Or Fight!\u27 Race, Gender, And The Draft In World War One By Gerald E. Shenk

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Chapman University Digital Commons