Lattimore, N.C., R.F.D. #1
Apr. 29, 1917

Gov. T. W. Bickett,
Executive Mansion,
Raleigh, N.C.,-

Dear Gov. Bickett:-

This is to tender my services at the present grave crisis as a private in defence of Old Glory. The call of my country is the voice of God; and as you have had applicants for one thousand commissions, -mostly from Shelby,- I follow the example of Bryan¹, the most eloquent apostle and exponent of Democracy and by odds our most patriotic citizen.

I am sixty, have a family, am a farmer and teacher; and you met me at Piedmont. I have made no lurid war speeches; in fact was with Bryan and Kitchin;-and am still with them. Both will be in the bloody trenches of France while certain men now taunting quiet men with being “slackers”, cowards”, traitors and other epithets; will be snug in a bomb-proof. Billy Sunday, who has not yet enlisted; is very severe and justly so,- on a man hiding behind the skirt of a woman; and I feel the same way toward one who rails from the cassock of the clergy. If any other man of my age, attainments and previous condition of servitude makes the offer I have made, please proclaim his name from the housetops. An ounce of enlistment is worth a ton of talk; and we have too many replicas of “Theodore the Unspeakable.” If everybody wears stripes and shoulder-straps, who will be with Bryan and me in the trenches?

“They led us down to Cypress Swamp, where land was low and mucky,
There stood John Bull in martial pomp, but here stood old Kentucky.
Old Packenham had made his brags if he in fight were lucky,
He’d have the gals and cotton bags in spite of old Kentucky.”

Now you will remember me. I told you age and occupation; and I am five feet ten,- and stripped for the ring, weigh two hundred. I have been waiting for some very belicose spielers from Shelby to enlist; but Bryan is my only chance for a war-comrade in the gory trenches; for Shelby expects to furnish ten major generals, twenty brigadiers, fifty colonels, one hundred majors, and five hundred captains. So, you see that Bryan, “Brer Claude” and I will be the only privates; and like Lee, Jackson, Grant, Sherman, Washington, Napoleon and Caesar, we are all family men. You remember David was required to bring very tangible proof of one hundred slain philistines, and he delivered the goods; and as the demand was made by his father-in-law, he evidently had a wife or two. If you and war authorities think I am too old for cannon fodder, I shall bend my energies to making mother earth respond to skill and industry; but you see I am not a coward, traitor nor slacker.

Yours truly:-

M. L. White

1. Most likely a reference to William Jennings Bryan, the US Secretary of State during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. He was a proponent of neutrality before US involvement in World War I.