In April 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany, Kitchin delivered an impassioned speech on the House floor and then voted no.

During the 1890s, Kitchin helped mobilize the Red Shirts, armed groups of militant white supremacists who rode through rural communities dissuading blacks from voting.

At a November 1 rally in Laurinburg, Kitchin was cheered by a crowd of several thousand whites when he proclaimed, "We cannot outnumber the negroes...And so we must either outcheat, outcount or outshoot them."

From 1915 to 1919 he was House majority leader; from this position he opposed the Wilson administration's "Preparedness" crusade, seeking unsuccessfully to hold down the growth in size of the army and navy.

He championed an "excess profits" tax that was steeply progressive over a policy of selling Liberty Bonds that shifted the financial burden of the war onto future generations.