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 ’ servicemen left for the combat theaters of World War II, few anticipated how profound an impact this experience would have on their lives. By the war’s end, however, many of Georgia’s veterans felt sure they knew exactly what their military service had meant. The extreme personal sacrifice made by Doyle Combs, a black veteran, fueled a deep determination to seize the political rights that he had just fought in a Jim Crow army to defend.“I went in combat , and I lost a portion of my body for this country,” Combs declared,“when I didn’t have no right to fight whatsoever cause I didn’t have no rights in the United States of America, as a black man.”Thus,“I was going to vote regardless [of] what it take.” Putting his life on the line—literally—to defend the American way of life earned Combs the right to at least some measure of political freedom when he returned.1 For white veteran John Sammons Bell, survival itself created a civic and political obligation he could not ignore. After making it through the horrific invasion of Guadalcanal in 1942, Bell and his buddies made a pledge as the next deadly phase of island-hopping operations against the Japanese loomed:“everyone of those four soldiers said when we get back home,” Bell explained,“we are going to do our best to make America a better America.”This simple pledge became a serious covenant. None of Bell’s comrades made it home alive. As a result , Bell explained at a local Georgia political rally in 1946,“I feel it a bounden 1: Introduction World War II Veterans and the Politics of Postwar Change in Georgia duty to carry on their fight for good government.”Veterans such as himself, Bell explained,“are determined to continue in peace to fight for the things we fought for in war.”2 On American and overseas military bases, in combat units, engineering battalions , and quartermaster depots, and in both the Pacific and European theaters , southern veterans such as Doyle Combs and John Sammons Bell found their sense of manhood and citizenship magnified by meeting the challenges of military service and war.3 Fulfilling this duty heightened veterans’sense of themselves —of who they were and where they fit into postwar political life. In putting a premium on the role of men as citizens—as soldiers performing the highest of civic duties—the war tended to strengthen the historic connection between male identity and political rights.4 Thus, both black and white veterans believed that they had earned the right to participate in determining the state’s future. That veterans of both races registered the war’s impact in such similar fashion made for a particularly volatile postwar climate. The Jim Crow South wove political , racial, and gender identities tightly together, making the question of expanded civic participation a highly racialized one.5 The structures and institutions that constituted southern political tradition, such as all-white primaries, literacy tests, and poll taxes, sustained the notion that only certain white men were fit to rule. Indeed, southern Democratic conservatives had maintained their domination of state and regional political life for so long by posing any other model of “majority rule” as threatening to pollute the sanctity of the domestic sphere, and white women, with racial amalgamation .6 The war generated postwar political turmoil by destabilizing the political , gender, and racial identities of both black and white veterans. To returning black veterans, the political and racial manhood they derived from their war experiences mandated that they resist Jim Crow “normalcy” and lead the drive to develop a black political voice. To reactionary white veterans, black activism itself threatened their own notion that white men enjoyed the exclusive entitlement to rule. They reacted accordingly, interpreting black voting as the harbinger of a racial assault on white womanhood and domestic security. In strengthening,rather than undermining,these complex connections between military service and citizenship, the war produced a politics of change fraught with contradiction. If black veterans wanted racial equality, progressive white veterans prioritized majority rule over desegregation. If white union veterans wanted an organized voice on the shop floor with the political influence to match it, white pro-modernization veterans believed that the importance of recruiting new industry to the state precluded unionization. Nonetheless, Georgia’s black and white veterans did share a deep conviction 4 :  [3.133.12.172] Project MUSE (2024...

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