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2 The Ethnic Army All of us Holy Joes are switch hitters. —Battleground, directed by William Wellman (MGM, 1949) The U.S. Army came from American society. Its individual members harbored the same prejudices as any other Americans. In fact, many prominent military men were worse than the average American when it came to ethnic and religious tolerance. On the surface, there was no real reason to expect that the army would be the great engine of change. Yet during World War II, it was the army that brought together Americans and taught them to get along. How such a seemingly hidebound institution made such a notable achievement needs explaining. The army had long experience dealing with diversity. From the beginning of the Republic, Americans distrusted and disliked standing armies. As a result, the country maintained during times of peace a tiny army, relegated to uncomfortable and mostly boring coastal defense and frontier service. America’s best and brightest avoided soldiering as a career, and the enlisted men came from the lowest ranks of society, ranks in the United States that traditionally included many immigrants. As early as the 1840s and 1850s, Irish (mostly Catholic) and German immigrants made up somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of the army’s ranks.1 Such immigrants played a major part in the drastic expansion of the Civil War army in the North. At its peak in 1865, the Union army numbered more than 1 million men. All told, nearly 2.7 million men served in the Union army during the course of the war. Of these, hundreds of thousands were immigrants or their children —again primarily Irish and German but also various Scandinavian groups. Many of these men served in their own ethnic regiments, but the majority of Germans and Irish and other groups served in regiments with no ties to ethnicity, and they enlisted and fought for all the same diverse reasons as any other American soldiers.2 The Ethnic Army 48 Once again the army saw its numbers drastically reduced for peacetime —by 1871 the total strength of the regular army dropped below thirty thousand, where it stayed until 1898. Even before Reconstruction came to its conclusion, the old American distrust for standing armies returned. Though the country consistently elected veterans of the war to high political offices, soldiering once again became a career to be avoided.3 Despite efforts to improve recruiting, the army remained undermanned, and again men from the lower levels of American society filled the ranks, including immigrants.4 By the mid-1870s, half of all of the enlisted men in the army came from outside the United States, and as before the war, these men mostly hailed from Ireland, Germany, and Great Britain.5 Then the so-called new immigration brought new names and faces to American shores, and they began to join the army in search of a stable career. Among foreign-born soldiers, the Irish, Germans, English, and Canadians dominated, but they began to be joined in increasing numbers by Russians, Swedes, Danes, Poles, Austrians, and Hungarians .6 The enthusiastic response to war with Spain in 1898 greatly accelerated the army’s recruitment of more native-born, English-speaking Americans , but foreign-born men still made up 14 or 15 percent of the new recruits after the war.7 That basic ratio would continue until World War I, only with decreasing proportions of Irish and English recruits relative to Germans, Russians, Austrians, Hungarians, and Italians.8 Overall, some 12 percent of the army in this era were foreign born, mostly German, Irish, and, increasingly , Russians.9 The expansion of World War I meant that immigrants—not counting their children or grandchildren—made up approximately one-fifth of the U.S. Army.10 Through all of these years, the army was the most diverse institution in American life. The question for the army was how to handle that diversity. The army’s leaders were men of American society, subject to the same prejudices and biases as everyone else. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—many of them New Englanders and almost all of them native born—made up almost the entirety of the officer corps.11 In 1890, one such officer weighed the pros and cons of Irish, English, German, and native troops and concluded that the “pluck, intelligence, and self-reliance inherent in the Anglo-Saxon are the qualities which, properly handled, must make the best soldier for the modern army.”12 By the...

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