Fighting for Rights: Military Service and the Politics of Citizenship

Conclusion

Conclusion With the intense passions of the Civil War swiftly receding, and with numerous voices calling for sectional reconciliation and for equal honor to be bestowed on both sides’ soldiers, Frederick Douglass was livid. Just six years after the war’s conclusion, in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he protested that he was “no minister of malice,” but he nonetheless swore “may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that . . . bloody conflict,” between “those who struck at the nation ’s life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.” But Douglass, engaged in a battle over the meaning of the Civil War, was fighting for a truly lost cause. Many years later, he bemoaned his fellow citizens’ short memories: “We see colored citizens shot down and driven from the ballot box, and forget the services rendered by the colored troops in the late war for the Union.”1 Douglass’s feelings of abandonment after the Civil War, of sacrifice freely made and inadequately rewarded, were familiar to African American leaders before and after him. Whenever the United States has been threatened, blacks have come forward to bear arms on the nation’s behalf, often in the belief that, in the war’s wake, their claims for full and equal rights could not be denied. But, more often than not, they have come away disappointed. Were they foolish to think that any sense of obligation could override Americans’ deep-seated racism and fear of black economic competition?Although black leaders might have been overoptimistic and certainly made their share of errors, they were neither stupid nor naive. In the past, minority groups have often framed their rights claims as the just deserts for their collective sacrifice, and they have at times thereby compelled state leaders to acknowledge the justice of their demands . The preceding two chapters have shown, in accord with the theoretical framework, how and when the armed forces’ racial policies did (and did not) shape the pattern of black mobilization in the twentieth century and why black efforts to exchange military service for first-class citizenship have been frustrated. The deeply exclusionary policies of the U.S. armed forces during World War I and the interwar period were disillusioning to a generation of African Americans that had placed nearly all their eggs in the basket of military service . When the extent of discrimination within the wartime armed forces became clear, when the military returned to its prewar ways after the Armistice, and when black veterans found their postwar world unchanged if not more vicious, blacks became the model of “separationist quiescence.” With the exception of that relatively rare breed, the New Negro, most retreated to their own world and failed to press their case. Their distress at the same time underpinned the popularity of Marcus Garvey. During World War II and after, the situation of African Americans in the armed forces improved, but they were again discouraged by the confrontation with discrimination in uniform, their overrepresentation in support units, and the postwar turn toward the prewar norm. Nevertheless, in the immediate postwar years, blacks mobilized for integration—a surprising outcome from the perspective of the analytical framework; in this case, a host of other factors overwhelmed the exclusionary manpower-policy signal. Finally, the desegregation of the armed forces, ordered in 1948 and implemented several years later, had little impact on black politics for reasons highlighted by the theoretical apparatus. Desegregation was politically costly for Truman, but the country’s political structure undercut the clarity and credibility of the signal. When the civil rights movement burst on the scene in the late 1950s, military desegregation had little to do with it. What about African American efforts to deploy the rhetoric of military sacri fice and just rewards to their political advantage? While the Druze benefited from Israel’s relatively narrow republican citizenship discourse, African Americans were not so lucky. After World War I, race was as central to U.S. citizenship discourse as was republicanism, bequeathing rhetorical possibilities to white politicians and allowing them to ignore black claims-making. After World War II, sensing the ascendancy of liberalism and learning from their earlier failures, blacks rarely played on their willingness to brave the bullets and instead became cold war liberals. While this move wrung some concessions from decision makers, the...