Work or Fight!: Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One [Paperback]

During World War I the U.S. demanded that all able-bodied men work or fight. White men who were husbands and fathers, owned property or worked at approved jobs had the benefits of citizenship without fighting. Others were often barred from achieving these benefits. This book tells the stories of those affected by the Selective Service System.Introduction 'The Finest Type of Manhood': Local Government and the Grounding of White Manhood Picking 'The Flowers of American Manhood': Local Draft Boards and Their Communities 'The Darkness in Georgia': State Selective Service in Georgia A Man is No Man That is Not Willing To Fight: State Selective Service in Illinois 'He's His mother's Boy; Go and Get Him': State Selective Service in New Jersey 'But No Negroes': State Selective Service in California 'The Final Report'

A probing, complex, and provocative study of the state, citizenship, and local power in early twentieth-century America. It combines in depth case studies with a remarkable analysis that privileges the intersections of race and gender in the unfolding of public policy and social conflicts. And, in drawing our attention to the dynamics of military conscription, it speaks directly to the political and moral issues of our own time. - Steven Hahn, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

Extensively researched, engaging, and provocative. Simply the best account available on the actual operation of the draft and its relationship to power and identity in America in World War I. A real tour de force! - John Whiteclay Chambers II, Rutgers University, editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to American Military History

Shenk's richly textured analysis not only delivers a compelling and vividly told history but provides a complex view of the operation of white supremacist patriarchy. He helps us see how small decisionslĂB