Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado

11: "So They Say”: Lieutenant Earl W. Mann’s World War II Colorado Statesman Columns

195 Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you want to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. It is both interesting and enlightening to take note of the acts of various public officials; their reaction to matters affecting their constituency , and their analysis of these issues. Our country is sorely in need of men—not politicians, but men of character whose vision cannot be destructed by the petty occurrences of life.1 This chapter is about race, politics, and war in Colorado. Its principal source material is the series of columns written by Earl W. Mann, the third African American to serve in the Colorado State Legislature, following his election to that body in the fall of 1942.2 These columns—almost 300 in all3 —appeared weekly, with an occasional republication, in The Colorado Statesman between September 1, 1939, and September 2, 1945. The Colorado Statesman is one of Denver’s oldest Black newspapers, founded in 1894 by Joseph D.D. Rivers with the assistance of Edwin H. Hackley. The columns, more illustrative than exhaustive of those available, begin with the German attack on Poland, continue with the beginning of war in Europe, and go on through the Japanese “So They Say”: Lieutenant Earl W. Mann’s World War II Colorado Statesman Columns 11 William M. King 196 “So They Say” signing the “Instruments of Surrender” on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, ending the conflict. Several of Mann’s prewar offerings are included to create context and to establish a baseline against which to relate his later writings with his earlier writings. Around 11 million Americans were in uniform during this period, over 1 million of them African Americans who saw most of their service (except for a few small “test groups” near the end of the war and those serving on U.S. Navy ships) in segregated units, subject to discriminatory treatment from the military and civilian sectors of the society. More often than not, the genesis for a column was an event Mann had witnessed or heard about, an article or book he had read, a letter he received,4 a conversation he had with another person—Black or White—or simply something that struck his fancy and which he wrote about to illustrate and illuminate a larger issue he believed was important. This is particularly the case when the subject of a column, in any of the three periods identified in this chapter, addressed what might be called international or foreign affairs. The second- and third-period columns discussed here have been divided into two groups—those published before the attack on Pearl Harbor that initiated official American involvement in the war and those published thereafter, beginning with “David and Goliath,” which appeared in the Statesman on December 12, 1941. A recurrent theme in the second-period group is Mann’s repeated contention that America’s deep and abiding commitment to the preservation of white supremacy in its treatment of Blacks and other peoples of color was a far greater threat to the continuance of democracy than were Hitler and his counterparts, regardless of what the Axis powers (principally Germany, Japan, and Italy) might do. At the same time, however, he does not hesitate to exploit the excesses of the National Socialists to make the point that their racial policies and practices are different from those of the United States only in their brazenness and mass application, suggesting along the way, in both the prewar and wartime columns, that they might have learned some of their techniques by observing how the United States treated its Negro population. In the third-period columns, Mann’s apparent objective was to illuminate the observations made by Arthur Marwick and Gerald D. Nash, noted later, respecting the strains total war places on extant social institutions and the extra resources that must be brought in to deal with those strains. Further, he writes about what he sees as the consequences that might follow from newly created opportunities that were not there before the onset of the crisis—both for the institutions in question and the people who were called to duty after the war concluded. William M. King 197 Upon reflection, it seems clear that Mann’s intended audience was...