Forging a Laboring Race by Paul R.D. Lawrie

Author:Paul R.D. Lawrie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: NYU Press

4

Salvaging the Negro

Vocational Rehabilitation and African American Veterans, 1917–1924

“It is extremely difficult for the opposite race to see the colored soldier in a fair and impartial light. The fact is that we are invariably received and treated as a colored man and not as a disabled soldier.”

—Private James Sanford to Dr. J. R. Crossland, Veterans Bureau Negro Advisor, 1921

In August 1922, Buster Sunter, an African American veteran of World War I, informed the Veterans Bureau of alleged mistreatment at his local veterans training center. Previously diagnosed with tuberculosis, Sunter wrote, “I want to let you know that I have not been treated right here, when I take this training I was supposed to have four years here but they have cut my time down to two years . . . they bully me and have me work like I ain’t sick so I want you to look into the matter for me for I am not able to work like that.” The experience of Private Sunter—of officials refusing to treat, or even acknowledge his condition—reveals how ideas of race and disability shaped the policies and practices of rehabilitation in early twentieth-century America. Postwar models of disability were both medical discourses and social constructs, developed by physicians, legislators, administrators, and veterans within the broader networks of labor, gender, citizenship, and race.1 The cultural politics of remaking men for work in the “great industrial army” fused the health of ex-servicemen with that of the republican body politic in explicitly racial terms.2

Modern war brutalized bodies in shockingly new and gruesome ways. The First World War’s human cost was staggering: 8.5 million dead, 20 million wounded, and more than 8 million permanently disabled. Despite being a latecomer to the conflict, the United States lost 116,708 men, with an additional 210,000 classified as wounded or disabled. The disabled came in many forms: mentally ill (victims of “shell shock”), tubercular, syphilitic, blind, deaf, and amputees.3 The mechanized murder of the trenches irrevocably shattered Victorian ideals of heroism and war as a rejuvenating force for white Western masculinity. For Lothrop Stoddard, author of the bestselling work, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), the war was nothing less than “a catastrophe” because its “racial losses were certainly as grave as the material loses.”4 For Stoddard and many of his racialist peers—those who saw race as the prime engine of historical change—the carnage of war and its ensuing economic and physical “waste” did not occur in an ideological vacuum. Historian David Gerber has noted that all soldiering bodies “were endowed with signs and declarations of age, generation, class, ethnicity and race” and within these frameworks, bodies lived, died, and were broken.5

Rehabilitation was a deeply political process that challenged prevailing ideologies and identities of race, gender, and work. But as Gerber reminds us, if “war is the extension of politics by other means, then only by making victims can war achieve its political aims.”6 The issue of rehabilitation ultimately rested on an assessment of the state’s obligation to its veterans.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.