Fraternal Twins: Racism and Isolationism

University of Georgia Professor John H. Morrow Jr. is the 2019 Pritzger Winner of the Lifetime Award for Military History

First African American winner of Pritzker Prize for Military Writing pulls no punches in acceptance speech

These remarks were delivered by Professor Morrow in Chicago, IL on Nov. 2, 2019 upon the speaker’s receipt of the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Military Writing, awarded annually for lifetime achievement in the field of military history. Professor Morrow is the first African American to receive this honor, which carries with it an award of $100,000.

By John H. Morrow, Jr. 

It’s a pleasure to be with you all tonight. I thank the Pritzker Museum and Library, Col. Pritzker personally, CEO Rob Havers and the staff who have worked so hard to make this evening a reality, and my family, colleagues and friends who have traveled from around the country to be here. I am grateful to them, and to the members of the committee who selected me for this wonderful honor.

I wish to discuss America’s rise to great power status over the span of the two world wars. I will concentrate on two intertwined topics—racism and isolationism. Please keep in mind that military service should be the fundamental proof of a people’s right to full and equal citizenship, and that black Americans have fought in every war the colonies and the United States waged.

In 1914 the United States was a rapidly growing country of some 100 million people. A small group of wealthy industrialists dominated politics and government, while millions lived in dire poverty on the land and in the cities. As historian Neil Wynn stated succinctly, “class conflict, poverty, squalor, disease, and suffering persisted everywhere.”

And rampant racism. Ninety percent of ten million black Americans lived in the segregated, or Jim Crow, South. White southerners conceived of America as “the white man’s nation”—an ironic definition from a region that had built its society and economy on the backs of enslaved black people. They firmly believed African Americans had no rights that a white person had to respect, so they denied black Americans the freedom and right to vote by law that black soldiers had helped win during the Civil War. To maintain black subjugation and reinforce white supremacy after Reconstruction, white southerners resorted to a reign of terror of lynching. Race trumped rights across America, to the extent that the Pacific northwest states forbade Negroes from living within their boundaries.

The most successful American regiment of the war — measured in length of time in the trenches, and German failure to take any prisoners or ground from it — was the [Black] 369th Regiment

The First World War intruded on these staunchly isolationist United States. American eugenicists considered the war “the most appalling catastrophe that ever befell mankind,” because it was inflicting irreplaceable losses of “genetically superior” white people. In the popular book of 1916, The Passing of the Great Race, American eugenicist Madison Grant advocated racial cleansing to eliminate “inferior” races and “inferior” segments of all races through forced sterilization and selective breeding.  Grant focused on African Americans and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, yet he warned that “inferior” white southerners—Georgians, Alabamians, and Mississippians—presaged the downfall of the white race in the United States. What an ironic note—that Grant lumped immigrants, blacks, and white southerners together as “inferiors.”

We supplied our allies with loans, munitions, and, most crucially, military manpower, which included Americans of all races. A half million black Americans migrated north to relative freedom and jobs from 1915 through 1919. White Southern politicians opposed allowing black men to fight in Europe, for fear that, in shedding blood for their country, African Americans could rightfully claim full and equal citizenship, and then they might return and overthrow segregation. Consequently, most black soldiers served in the Services of Supply behind the lines during the war.

The American Expeditionary Forces did include one black division, the 92nd, which established a creditable record when it arrived at the front late in the war, despite the inadequate training and the demeaning lies to which its southern superior officers subjected the men. Yet four black infantry regiments which formed a provisional division that existed in name only—the 93rd— excelled in 1918. The most successful American regiment of the war—measured in length of time in the trenches, and German failure to take any prisoners or ground from it—was the 369th Regiment, the former 15th New York National Guard. Three other black regiments, including the 370th, the former 8th Illinois National Guard, fought well—in the French Army in 1918.

Yet an army war college report of 1925 completely ignored the actual performance of black soldiers in combat—it omitted the 369th entirely—and proclaimed them cowardly, inferior in initiative and intellect. White southerners succeeded in making the demobilized, peacetime army as lily white as possible, and the military, like American society at large, made no progress in race relations in the interwar era.

Worse still, white Americans waged racial terrorism throughout northern and midwestern cities in the Red Terror of 1919, culminating in the Tulsa massacre of 1921, in a concerted effort to subjugate black Americans. White mobs, including policemen and national guardsmen, invaded black neighborhoods, murdering, looting, and burning black businesses to the ground. The lynching, even of black soldiers returning South in their uniforms, to demonstrate that their service to the country meant nothing, continued.

Interwar white America retreated again into isolation from Europe and reverted to its racist and white supremacist behavior. The 1920s witnessed a resurrected Ku Klux Klan and the concerted efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to instill white supremacist beliefs in southern youth, while funding memorials to certain Confederate generals across the South. The decade also witnessed severe anti-immigrant legislation, although immigrants had contributed fully twenty percent of the AEF’s serving soldiers.

The 1920s gave way to the Great Depression, when the collapse of Wall Street in 1929 quickly spread to the rest of the world. As America retreated further into isolation, our abrupt retraction of loans to Germany caused the German economy to collapse and ultimately paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power. The Hawley-Smoot Tariffs of 1930 exacerbated the Great Depression both here and abroad, which in turn also led to the rise of Japanese militarists who would confront the United States in Asia and the Pacific. 

Within the United States, a substantial Nazi movement arose, replete with brownshirts and Hitler Youth. In September 1940, the America First Committee and movement appeared. Antisemitic and pro-fascist, its 800,000 members campaigned desperately to keep the United States out of a war against Germany at any cost. Little did they know that Hitler ultimately intended to wage a cataclysmic war against America for global hegemony. On December 10, 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, the America First Committee dissolved.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had already begun a mobilization that would make us “the arsenal of democracy” of the most powerful alliance the world has ever seen. The demands of war and the black press’s “Double V Campaign”—victory over racism at home and fascism abroad—forced the U.S armed forces to begin to confront racial prejudice. Two divisions of black soldiers, the 92nd and the 93rd, the latter no longer provisional, fought in Italy and in the Pacific respectively.

The Tuskegee Airmen shot down in flames the claims of white southerners that black men could not pilot aircraft. Black artillerymen and anti-aircraft gunners fought at Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. Black tank and tank destroyer battalions under Gen. George Patton’s command served as armored spearheads for white divisions in 1944-45, thereby belying Patton’s assertions that black men could not be tankers.  In 1945 the army, facing a severe shortage of infantry in northwest Europe, formed more than fifty “fifth Platoons” of some 2,800 black soldiers who volunteered for retraining as infantry to serve as part of white infantry companies. The black soldiers had to surrender their rank to preserve racial hierarchy. The men fought well, the “experiment” succeeded, but the army disbanded the platoons at war’s end as though they had never existed.  Race still trumped rank as it had in World War I; white officers commanded black soldiers, while most white soldiers refused to acknowledge their counterparts of color as equals.

It has taken two World Wars for the United States to begin to confront its fatal flaw — the persistent belief of many white Americans in white supremacy, that America was somehow a “white nation”.

President Harry Truman, appalled by violent postwar incidents against returning black servicemen in the South, desegregated the U.S. armed forces in 1948.  The two world wars ultimately launched the 20th century civil rights movement, as many white Americans admitted the injustice of our pervasive racism and joined their black peers in the effort to rectify it.

In the determination to stabilize the world in general and Europe in particular, the United States initiated the postwar formation of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the European Union. America now understood its integral role in preserving European peace, as the Marshall Plan acknowledged that the promotion of a strong Europe with binding ties to the United States was in the interests of us all then. It remains so now.

It had taken two world wars for the United States to come of age as a great power, an agent of stability in an unstable world, and for it finally to confront its fatal flaw—the persistent belief of many white Americans in white supremacy, that America was somehow a “white nation,” to the exclusion of the many other races that built and fought for this country from its origins, even fighting for the right to fight. In the post-1945 World, our adversaries, particularly the Soviet Union, invariably emphasized that the United States could ill presume to lead a world of peoples of color when it repressed its racial minorities at home.

To those fundamental lessons, won, to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, with the blood, sweat, and tears of two world wars, we essentially adhered for the seventy years after 1945. They remain as valid now as they were before, because the true greatness of America lies in an ideal toward which we have striven spasmodically since World War II—the realization of a nation that acknowledges the equality of all its people. We ignore these lessons at our grave peril. Our future does not lie in a dysfunctional, reactionary, xenophobic, racist, and isolationist past that in fact antedated American greatness. It lies in the necessity of the American educational system to teach a full history of our multi-racial society and the basic functions of a democratic government and in our courage to face an uncertain future together and unafraid. Thank you.

Morrow is Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA.

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