Book review: 'Kentucky and the Great War'

“Kentucky and the Great War: World War I on the Homefront” by David J. Bettez. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 440 pages. $45 (hardcover).

The title on the cover of David J. Bettez’s new Thomas D. Clark Medallion-winning book is actually misleading. The words “GREAT WAR” dominate while “Kentucky” is almost unnoticed. Yet the 14 chapters that make up the book focus wonderfully on just the opposite.

The exhaustively referenced book – it contains a full 100 pages of notes – shows how Kentucky was affected by the events leading up to and during World War I, both for better and for worse, and how some effects are still either being felt or just taken for granted today.

Bettez puts the mood of the state in context right at the beginning, writing that “only about 50 years after the Civil War divided Kentucky and Kentuckians, World War I united everyone against a common enemy like never before.” Emotions were enflamed, and an anti-German sentiment sprang up after the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat. The Courier-Journal’s editorials celebrating the country’s entry into the war won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize.

Bettez quotes Kentucky state historian Jim Klotter as calling this time in the commonwealth’s history a “Portrait in Paradox.” The progressive policies of Gov. Augustus Owsley Stanley made strides in child labor, workers’ rights, woman’s suffrage and more. But there were also regressive policies. Just 10 years earlier, the Day Law was passed that officially established segregation in schools and, although an entire chapter is devoted to how well African-Americans acquitted themselves during the war, little had changed to make their lives better by Armistice Day.

It’s also hard not to be struck by some of the similarities in Kentucky’s, and the country’s, problems and challenges then and today, 100 years later, during our continuing wartime era. There was a divide over the sale of alcohol, with wet/dry votes being taken then as they are today. On the farm, tobacco was a main crop with hemp declining. Diverse groups of immigrants flocked to the state’s two major cities. Coal mining increased in the eastern mountains to replace a dwindling timber industry but, similar to today, most of the coal wealth went out of state. Racial problems, illiteracy and poor health care were common.

There was fighting in Europe against, mostly, an aggressive German campaign for more than two years before America officially joined the war. During that time, the bold-faced Kentuckians of the day, the names we all know now, the Browns, Bullitts and Breckenridges, led relief efforts of money, goods and food for people caught in the war in Germany, Austria, France and Belgium. People then had the luxury of time and distance to hold public and private debates about the causes of the conflict, what should be done next and how it should be done. President Woodrow Wilson brought his message of keeping the U.S. out of the war to Kentucky as late as September 1916. More than 20,000 crowded the Abraham Lincoln birthplace in Hodgenville to hear Wilson’s plea, but just six months later war was declared. The luxury of time and distance was over.

The declaration of war received Kentucky’s full-throated support. All Kentuckians were expected to “do their part,” and men from the western counties along the Mississippi to the mountains left offices, farms, factories and families to do just that. The worst thing was to be labeled a “slacker” as a huge patriotic pro-war surge swept the country. The only problem was, the country wasn’t ready for war and one major problem was something basic and vital: food.

The president of what was then known as Western Kentucky State Normal School, now Western Kentucky University, was Dr. Henry Hardin Cherry. He became chairman of the publicity committee of the Kentucky Council for Defense, which was one of many committees that sprang up during the war to interface between Washington, D.C., and the hundreds of counties, towns and hamlets throughout the state. He summed up the problem to the people of Kentucky on his many speaking tours by saying, “It is not only going to take bullets but bread to win the great battle that is now being waged.” He was one of many leaders who saw to it that America started increasing production of both. The Kentucky Council for Defense promoted on a county level the increased production, and just as importantly, the increased conservation of food.

At the beginning of the war, the U.S. increased food exports to our Allies. But a poor wheat crop in 1916 showed the need to take care to be able to feed our own troops as well. With most people at the time, for the most part, growing what they ate, it quickly became apparent there was a need for increased production, a decrease in consumption and the better transport of food. Farmers were encouraged to grow less tobacco, which was primarily a cash crop, and more wheat and corn.

Men were recruited to be shipbuilders, stevedores, mechanics and railroad workers. In one of the best examples of government intrusion into personal lives, a slogan of the program was “Let the government decide where you’re most needed.” But with all the recruiting of workers, farmers and miners were left alone … food and fuel. In fact, there was a massive and successful volunteer effort for businessmen and non-farmers to work on farms, especially at harvest. Men left their offices or their own businesses to work from a couple of days to a couple of weeks at a time.

The American propaganda machine was rolling, and soon there were thousands of “war gardens” and even “school gardens” popping up.

Thousands of school children were soon cultivating hundreds of acres providing money for war bonds and war savings stamps. Boys could plant a war savings acre while also raising a war savings pig. Girls could tend a war savings flock of hens and participate in a war savings canning club.

As important as producing and conserving food, and raising money, was conserving fuel … meaning coal. For the most part there was plenty of it, but getting it to the towns and homes around the state was a problem since most of the focus was on national distribution for the war effort. Again, Kentuckians rallied to the government’s call for conservation.

Stores turned off their electric signs, people substituted wood for coal, there were “lightless days” and “heatless and woodless Mondays.” By the end of the war, a full 10 percent of the coal supplied was saved.

There are really good chapters under the general headings of “Army Camps,” “Women and Children,” “The Economy,” “Religion” and “Higher Education.” But Bettez wisely doesn’t confine his writing to just these strict titles. Many issues overlap several categories and he weaves them in well. If there’s one quibble, it’s with the author’s tendency to go a little “Pollyanna” sometimes and to give his blue sky imprimatur. There are more than a few assertions that “programs worked well,” “not many problems” and “good attitudes.” But, to his credit, one thing Bettez does not gloss over or pull any punches on is one of the most insidious and far-reaching negatives of the war years, domestic spying. He cites a perfect phrase from historian Christopher Capozzola – “coercive volunteerism” – when he talks about the societal pressure to support the war effort wholeheartedly, again, so as not be labeled the dreaded “slacker.” The support included not just actions but words as well.

The Kentucky State Guard became the Kentucky National Guard to keep an eye on domestic security during the war and that included conversations. Anti-German civic groups with disarmingly wholesome names like the Citizens Patriotic League and the American Protective League joined them on the local level. It was a time when all things German began to disappear. People stopped patronizing businesses with German names even though in some cases they had been shopping there for more than 25 years. The German language stopped being spoken and high schools and colleges stopped teaching it.

I kept looking for dissenters against the war in various chapters of the book without success. The simple answer is there really weren’t any, at least in any great number. There was the lone minister or two who raised their voices, most notably, the Rev. H. Boyce Taylor of Murray, a prominent figure in the Kentucky Baptist movement. He believed in “rendering therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” He preached war was “anarchy against international law as truly as mob violence is anarchy against state law.” Surprisingly, all that didn’t prevent Taylor from being chosen as the head of the General Association of Baptists in Kentucky in November 1917.

The Kentucky Council of Defense held a public investigation six months before that for his comments urging men to request a non-fighting unit, to serve as a cook or a medic, and if they couldn’t get that, they should refuse to fight. The U.S. attorney ultimately decided not to prosecute because the comments were made before the Sedition Act went into effect in 1918, which forbade damaging language against the U.S. The Espionage Act was passed a year earlier. It established fines and jail terms of up to 20 years, or both, for false reports or statements that hurt the U.S. or helped the enemy. More than 850 Americans were convicted of violating one act or the other between June 1917 and July 1919.

“Kentucky and the Great War” looks like and will probably be used as a textbook. Like a textbook writer, Bettez recaps each chapter in the chapter’s final page. He does that at the book’s end as well, hitting on the main points of the good and the bad that World War I brought to Kentucky.

But don’t let that dissuade you from reading and enjoying the book. It chronicles a time when, in Bettez’s words, local events and the impact of the war “made Kentuckians become aware that they were part of a larger community … they realized they were part of a larger national consciousness that played a role in international events.” He writes that during the war all Kentuckians came together in support that personified the first part of the state’s motto: “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” It would be beneficial to not forget that today.

– Reviewed by Joe Corcoran, weekday host and news anchor of “Morning Edition” on WKU Public Radio.

– Editor’s note: The author will speak and sign copies of his book at 7 p.m. Thursday at Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Campbell Lane.