Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1999, 1920). 2. Information in this paragraph, and the next two, is based on my interview with Milton and Ruth Brackbill, October 14, 1987, Sarasota, Florida. 3. Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1475–1490. 4. Christopher Capozzola, “The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America,” Journal of American History, 88 (March 2002): 1356. 5. The only general history of the World War I draft in the past fifty years is the excellent John Whiteclay Chambers II, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York: The Free Press, 1987). See also, John Whiteclay Chambers II, “Decision to Draft,” Magazine of History 17 (October 2002): 26–33. 6. The most complete description of this system is, Enoch Crowder, Second Report of the Provost Marshal General on the Operations of the Selective Service System through December 1918 (Washington: GPO, 1919). 7. Enoch Crowder, Final Report of the Provost Marshal General to the Secretary of War on the Operations of the Selective Service System to July 15, 1919 (Washington: GPO, 1920), 9. 8. Enoch Crowder, Report of the Provost Marshal General to the Secretary of War on the First Draft under the Selective Service Act of 1917 (Washington: GPO, 1918), 28. 9. Selective Service General Rules and Regulations, December 1917, Records of the Selective Service System, 1917–1919, Historical Files, Box 317, RG 163, National Records Center (NRC), College Park, MD. 10. Crowder, Second Report, 22–24; and Selective Service General Rules and Regulations, December 1917, Part XI. 11. U.S. attorneys complained frequently to the Justice Department about this problem. Their correspondence may be found in the Department of Justice (DOJ) correspondence files of the U.S. attorneys, 1910–1920, RG 60, NRC, College Park, MD. See also refer- ences in chapters 1 and 3, and Conclusion. 12. Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89 ( June 2002): 172. 13. George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 186–187, has the Wilson quote; Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black–White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 175–176, explores the film’s origins and con- tent and notes the use of live orchestras; Newnan Herald (Newnan, Georgia, April 27 and May 4, 1917, describes the arrival of sets in a boxcar, the twenty-piece orchestra, and the general excitement in the white community at the film’s opening. 162 / notes to pages 8–13 14. Responding to black protests, officials in several jurisdictions, including in the State of Illinois, either banned it or ordered portions censored. Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 382–383. Chapter One “The Darkness in Georgia” 1. On the historical gendering of racial identity that constructs the citizen in the United States as white and male, see Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), chapter 4. See also two books by David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), and Toward the Abolition of Whiteness (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), and Ruth Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 13, 16–18. 2. Mrs. F. H. Anderson, Danburg, Wilkes Co., Ga., to Governor Hugh Dorsey, July 30, 1918, Farm Furloughs File, Box 3, World War I, Georgia State Council of Defense (GSCD), 1917–1918, R. G. 22-1-14, Georgia Department of Archives and History (GDAH), Atlanta, Georgia. 3. According to Dolores Janiewski, “A common inheritance ‘naturally’ endowed southern white men of every class with the right to dominate the ‘naturally’ subordinated members of southern society, who included all women and black men.” Janiewski, “Southern Honor, Southern Dishonor: Managerial Ideology and the Construction of Gender, Race, and Class Relations in Southern Industry,” in Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 72. See also LeeAnn Whites, “Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Wife’s Farm: The Class and Racial Politics of Gender Reform,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 76 (Summer 1992): 354–372, and Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 38–39, 49. 4. A history of Coweta County, Georgia, published in 1919 summarized in a brief biography of one local citizen qualities that could define southern white manhood: (1) Service in the Confederate Army; (2) Successful management of a significant enterprise; (3) Success in politics; (4) Membership in a fraternal order such as the Masons; (5) Marriage and father- hood. These qualities were said to have made H. M. Couch “a fine type of manhood.” Mary G. Jones and Lily Reynolds, Coweta Chronicles for a Hundred Years (Newnan, Georgia: Daughters of the American Revolution, 1919), 65. 5. The word “negro” as commonly used in early-twentieth-century Georgia denoted a spe- cific kind of gendering. When not accompanied by a modifier, it signified generic African American male in much the same way as the words “man” or “men” may signify the universal human. Just as the word “man” has been used to universalize the experiences of males as the human experience, the word “negro” universalized the African American male as the universal African American. In addition, unmodified, it nearly always meant male African American laborer, assumed to be both relatively unfree and dependent. If he was anything other than this, the sources added a modifier. Thus we find “negro preach- ers,” “negro teachers,” “negro doctors,” “negro lawyers,” and, most disturbing to white people, “negro soldiers.” Where authors wished to indicate African American women they wrote “negro women,” or, in some cases, “colored women.” 6. Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 147–148. David T. Wellman argues that “being an American is...culturally and ideologically constructed to mean being not black.” Portraits of White Racism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 245. I would add that historically it also means not being a woman. See also Toni notes to pages 13–16 / 163 Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 6–7, 38. 7. My analysis here is inspired, in part, by the work of Edward Said, most recently in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), who is masterful in detecting ways in which meaningful silences in public discourse signify relations of power. See also the help- ful “AHR Forum” on “Subaltern Studies” by Gayan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” Florencia Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” and Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 99 (December 1994): 1475–1545. 8. Dozens of Georgia sheriffs initially defied the law by refusing to serve on local draft boards to which the president had appointed them. See Hooper Alexander, United States Attorney for Northern Georgia to The United States Attorney General, July 4, and 6, 1917; J. Van Holt Nash, Adjutant General, Georgia, to Alexander, July 7, 1917. DOJ Correspondence File No. 186233–68, R.G. 62, National Archives, Washington. 9. The term “King Cotton” appeared frequently in the local weekly newspaper, The Newnan Herald. See also, Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967). 10. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995), 279–280. 11. Interview with Lynch, January 24, 1989, Newnan, Georgia. 12. Fifth Census; or Enumeration of the Inhabitants of the United States (Washington: Printed by Duff Green, 1832), 14–15, 96–97; Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864), 72; Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900, Population, Part I (Washington: United States Census Office, 1901), 533; Thirteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1910, Vol. II, Population (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913), 378–379; Thirteenth Census, Vol. VI, Agriculture, 346–337; and Fourteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1920, Vol. III, Population (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922), 210; and Fourteenth Census, Vol. VI, Part 2, Agriculture, 306–307. On the changing nature of the planter class and the source of its power after the Civil War see Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95:1 (1991): 75–98; Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 47–50. Jonathan Wiener, “Class Structure and Economic Development in the American South, 1865–1969,” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 970; and Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). 13. Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land; The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).

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