No, we’re not talking about the conflict in Iraq, but rather opposition
from the American public to involvement in World War I. In his review
of Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the
Rural South during the First World War, George Leef told readers of Freedom Daily that author
Jeanette Keith weaves an original analysis of history. The book
includes, for example, a look at how freedom of speech came under
attack following the declaration of war in 1917. To stop rampant
criticism, the Wilson administration pushed Congress to pass the
Espionage and Sedition Acts. The book, Leef concluded, is “a unique
view of the United States in its first modern war, the extraordinary
lengths to which the government was willing to go to choke off dissent,
and the reaction to the war in a region of the country that most people
would assume reflexively supported a Democratic president who had done
his utmost to generate war fever in the nation.”