One hundred years ago, as American troops played a major role in defeating the Kaiser's Germany to end World War I, a series of infinitely smaller but related conflicts broke out in remote stretches of northern and western Arkansas.
Now labeled as Draft Wars, these five mainly rural encounters pitted variously motivated foes of military induction against forces of law and order. Little known today, the clashes took place during a hyper-patriotic time in U.S. history, as sauerkraut became "victory cabbage" and the Bill of Rights was defiled to prosecute (and sometimes persecute) public dissent.
When Congress passed a Selective Service act after declaring war on Germany at President Woodrow Wilson's request in April 1917, it was the nation's first military draft since the Civil War a half-century earlier. Before the U.S. war entry, many Americans were isolationists opposed to joining a deadlocked conflict far across the Atlantic Ocean. Some German-Americans were even more troubled about fighting against their ancestral homeland.
But once war had been declared, defeat of the German "Hun" swiftly became an impassioned cause in Arkansas and across the land. This swelling support was accelerated by the U.S. government's relentless flag-waving and suppression of dissent. Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 forbidding anti-war activities, followed by the Sedition Act of 1918 penalizing disloyal speech.
The patriotic fervor helped set the stage for the Draft War skirmishes from May to September 1918 in Polk, Searcy, Cleburne, Logan and Newton counties.
The total number of Arkansas draft dodgers, commonly labeled as "slackers" back then, is a matter of guesswork. One set of government figures listed 8,732 Arkansans as draft evaders or deserters, not a tiny number but just a small fraction of the 199,857 men whoregistered for possible induction. The number of actual delinquents was unlikely so high.
"The Arkansas statistic should be regarded as only an approximation," wrote Judith A. Sealander in 1973 for the Ozark Historical Review. More important, she added, "is that the Arkansas hills and backwoods became stages for sometimes elaborate, sometimes tragicomic guerrilla wars between small bands of draft evaders and state and national law officials."
Writing in To Can the Kaiser: Arkansas and the Great War, published in 2015 by Butler Center Books, Phillip Stephens suggested that "while many of these rebels claimed a connection to socialism, they had neither a sophisticated understanding of that ideology nor a real affiliation with local or national representatives of the party. Ultimately, their resistance was to modernity itself."
Stephens noted that "Overall, the mood in the state was of strong patriotism and support of the war effort, but with it came a strong intolerance for those who did not conform culturally, politically or ideologically."
Efforts to track down draft evaders began in earnest only in the spring of 1918, as the demand for military manpower kept increasing. For The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, Stephens wrote that the crackdown sparked "brief episodes of armed defiance by close-knit family groups against authorities. These acts of resistance often occurred in isolated, mountainous regions, where socialism and/or organized labor had found purchase."
It may be hard to imagine socialism having the slightest popular purchase in Arkansas, especially in rural areas. But Clay Fulks, who ran on the Socialist Party ticket for governor in 1918, received 4,792 votes out of 72,984 cast.
In the first Draft Wars incident, the Polk County sheriff assembled a posse in Mena on May 25 to pursue a group of reported countryside evaders. A shootout next morning at the home of one dodger left a deputy sheriff dead, along with the suspected leader of the resisters.
Taken into custody and convicted for the deputy's murder, Ben Caughron later was electrocuted for the crime. Interviewed in prison, he told the Arkansas Gazette that his resistance stemmed partly from a lifelong commitment to socialism. By Stephens' account, his action "was more cultural than political, as the kin-based 'mountain folk' had always been defiant of central authority."
A suicide by an inductee preceded the next war, in rural Searcy County. In late 1917, Miller Goodwin had fatally shot himself rather than report for training. Evidently, suicide by distressed draftees was not unheard of.
On June 5, 1918, Miller's father Eli and brother Levi fought it out with county lawmen. Levi was killed in the gunplay, while his father and two associates were arrested. A local newspaper called the Goodwins "pernicious socialists." According to Stephens, there was no real evidence for that charge.
The July 7-16 Cleburne County war, which logged more newspaper coverage than the others, was distinctive in that the resisters had a professed religious motive.
They were Russellites, known since 1931 as Jehovah's Witnesses, fully opposed to war. One of their publications asserted that men who fought in World War I would be damned to hell. The tract labeled "wars of patriotism and nationalism" as "narrow-minded hatred of other people."
But the Russellites evidently did believe in armed self-defense. During the first arrest attempt at member Tom Adkisson's home, 10 miles from Heber Springs, a posse member was fatally shot.
Eight Russellites then took to the woods, where eventually more than 200 armed men were mobilized to round them up. Two Vickers machine guns were even brought into play. Although he had admitted to the killing, Tom Adkisson was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter. His son Bliss got 20 years in prison for second-degree murder.
In a 1967 article for Arkansas Historical Quarterly, James F. Willis called the Cleburne County conflict "a tragic comedy, all too human, both poignant and absurd when over 200 posse men and soldiers with two machine guns attempted to subdue eight Russellites."
Another posse member was shot to death on Aug. 8 in the so-called Logan County War, much of which took place in Franklin County. Four evaders, described as career criminals, were sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder. It was unclear, wrote Stephens, whether they were actual draft resisters or "simply suspected of it in conjunction with their robust criminal history."
Two novelties marked the fifth and final war in the wilds of Newton County. It was bloodless except for one slacker's minor leg wound. Second, it ended in something of a win for the draft opponents.
The confrontation took place in Cecil Cove, one of the most isolated parts of an isolated county. One resister, known as Old Lige Harp, gave this reason for the opposition in a later issue of the magazine Literary Digest:
"We all don't take no truck with strangers and we don't want our boys takin' no truck with no furriners. We didn't have no right to send folks over to Europe to fight. Tain't a free country when that's done. Wait till them Germans come over here and then fight 'em is what I said when I heard 'bout the war. If anybody was to try to invade this country, ever' man in these hills would git his rifle and pick them off."
The protesters relied on nearly impenetrable hiding places and the avid support of their neighbors. Near the end of September, six weeks before the armistice that ended the fighting in Europe, they gave themselves up in Little Rock with the understanding they wouldn't be prosecuted. They agreed to be inducted, sensing that the war was almost over.
Sealander's article in the Ozark Historical Review summed up the background of the five skirmishes:
"Perhaps the bloodshed of the Arkansas 'draft wars' could have been avoided if there had been a more imaginative effort by officials to communicate. The resisters were isolated, poorly informed, stubbornly individualistic men with a highly honed sense of distrust for government officials and their edicts."
As remote and sporadic as they may have been, the Draft Wars echoed the larger fact of widespread patriotic intolerance of dissenters that sometimes brought cruel mistreatment by authorities and ordinary Arkansans.
One of the five sets of resisters, the Cleburne County Russellites, might have qualified for status as conscientious objectors under the strict criterion in the 1917 draft law. It provided legal objector status only to members of "any well-recognized religious sect ... whose existing creed or principles forbid its members to participate in war in any form."
But any draftees who gained exemption from fighting on religious grounds still had to serve in the armed forces as noncombatants. Most were placed in stateside military camps, where they were often taunted and hazed in an effort to have them renounce their objection.
Arkansas Russellites also faced vigilante violence at times. According to Joseph Carruth's 1997 article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, four members of the pacifist creed "were tarred and feathered and literally run out of town by a mob at Walnut Ridge. Their offense was distributing the literature of their sect."
In To Can the Kaiser, Phillip Stephens summed up the war's impact on dissidence in Arkansas. It would "ultimately bring triumph for the progressive drive toward greater national conformity." But it "also exacerbated a divide between those who did and those who did not adhere to that broader vision, be they religious, political, or fiercely independent of any central authority."
The resulting violence and loss of life "that resulted from these ideologies illustrate the powerful fear created by the war. Arkansans were just as fearful of enemies at home as of those abroad."
Jack Schnedler, retired deputy managing editor/Features of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, served as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army in 1967-68.
Editorial on 07/22/2018