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Two The Wilson Administration and Black Opinion, 1917–1918 By the beginning of September 1917, several events taken together had convinced the director of the Military Intelligence Branch (MIB), Col. Ralph Van Deman, of the need to recruit experts on what the agency came quickly to call “Negro Subversion.” The vehement protests following the riot at East St. Louis had seemed to fundamentally question black support for the war effort. Then, on August 2, the of¤ce of the counselor of the State Department sent the MIB a Secret Service report reminiscent of those¤led by the BI on German propaganda among African Americans in the¤rst few months of the war. The president of the Harlem Neighborhood Organization was claiming that property worth over $500,000 had recently been bought in Harlem, ostensibly by blacks, but in fact with German money. She identi¤ed two men, including the well-known real estate businessman Philip A. Payton, as having negotiated the purchases for Wall Street brokers Kuhn, Loeb and Company, the ¤nanciers of Ambassador von Bernstorff’s earlier propaganda campaign. German agents in Harlem were also said to be operating from a furniture store at 5th Avenue and 135th Street. The Secret Service reported that around the time America entered the war, blacks in Harlem had feted a “distinguished German,” who had said, “previous to his departure for Mexico, . . . that they owed nothing to the United States Government and contrasted the treatment of the negroes by the whites of this country with the kindness he claimed they would receive if the Germans were in control.” There were further rumors to the effect that “some kind of Mexican plot is being hatched” with the cooperation of blacks.1 This appears to have been the ¤rst report to ¤nd its way into MIB ¤les under the heading “Negro Subversion,” and its State Department origins may have persuaded Van Deman of its special importance, even though it had a distinctly second-hand air about it. A few weeks later, part of the 24th Infantry mutinied, forcing the War Department to explicitly confront the issue of race. Van Deman, who 48 had hitherto been content to let the BI handle the question of AfricanAmerican loyalty, now began to see the combating of “Negro Subversion” as an essential component of military counterintelligence in the United States.2 Shortly before the Houston riot, one of Van Deman’s typically wellconnected recruits, Maj. Herbert Parsons, had begun to make tentative inquiries into the problem of racial tension. A former U.S. congressman from New York (1905–11), Parsons was a leading progressive Republican and had managed Charles Evans Hughes’s presidential campaign in 1916; as such, his transfer from the Signal Corps had been a coup for the MIB. In midAugust , soon after he transferred, he was contacted by Cornell University sociology professor Jeremiah W. Jenks, who, like many patriotic academics, had come to Washington to work for the war effort. Jenks, with whom Parsons was acquainted, had received information about the temper of African Americans from a black former student, Hallie E. Queen, who now taught in the District of Columbia.3 Queen and another woman had been sent by Howard University’s Red Cross Auxiliary to investigate conditions in East St. Louis and distribute funds collected in Washington for those affected by the riot. Afterward, she wrote about the plight of the black community and testi¤ed before the House Rules Committee in favor of Rep. Leonidas C. Dyer’s anti-lynching bill. Parsons met her on August 23 and found her eager to help the government improve African-American morale. Her East St. Louis trip had convinced her that black migration was causing massive problems and that more social work was needed. She recommended that black regiments be sent overseas quickly, to allay fears that they were going to be prevented from participating fully in the war, and she claimed to be on the trail of a German spy in Washington who had ingratiated himself with the black community.4 Parsons sought the views of fellow New York progressive Joel Spingarn, chairman of the board of directors of the NAACP since 1914. Spingarn had just joined the army, and nine months later he would occupy Parsons’s position in the MIB, albeit with a very different agenda. Parsons reported that Queen was “quite fearful of trouble” among blacks and asked Spingarn to consult “responsible colored people in regard to this. . . . Whatever you do, please...

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