The Last of the Doughboys by Richard Rubin

Author:Richard Rubin [Rubin, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Instead of pickin’ melons off the vine,

They’re pickin’ Germans off the Rhine.

And that line actually backs into the tragic and profoundly frustrating truth about the African American in the First World War. For, despite the greatest hopes of W. E. B. Du Bois and others, the black doughboy’s khaki uniform did nothing to shield him from racist stereotyping; and because of that, he was not, for the most part, even allowed to fight the Germans.

There was one final component to General Bliss’s plan for what to do with black men in the AEF, in addition to keeping them out of it for as long as possible, before giving them minimal training and shipping them off to France at the first opportunity: Once they’re in France, he proposed, they should be used, exclusively, in what was then called Services of Supply, or SOS. Have them unload ships, dig latrines, build barracks for white troops, staff white mess halls—anything, really, but man the trenches. Unless it was to dig them, or shore them up.

At that time in America it was generally believed, among white scientists and laymen alike, that a black man’s brain was only about three-quarters the size of a white man’s; now, studies were hastily commissioned that “proved” blacks were inferior to whites in every measure of intelligence. Surely, many said, these simple souls do not, as a group, have the raw material needed for a fighting man. And the one person who might have possessed the power to single-handedly quiet all of this nonsense—General Pershing, who knew from personal experience that black men fought every bit as well as white men—remained largely silent on the question, leaving that matter to the folks back home.

Many whites, of course, used the inferiority argument as a cover for deeper fears. A man with a rifle, after all, has a certain measure of power, authority—of dignity. He also has a weapon. Even if you don’t end up sending him overseas to kill white men, they worried, he might come home with a taste for it. Or at least with a distaste for being kept in his station, which was decidedly beneath theirs. “I know of no greater menace to the South than this,” said James K. Vardaman, by this time a US senator from Mississippi. He didn’t want blacks in the Army at all.

There was, in fact, so much controversy surrounding the use of black troops in the AEF, so much disagreement about how and where to train them and what to do with them afterward, that the Army still didn’t have a set plan or policy in place by the time the war ended. The result was part chaos and part social engineering; white commanders in France often took it upon themselves to convert black infantry regiments into labor battalions. If they didn’t do so expressly to demoralize the troops in question, they probably weren’t terribly disappointed that that’s exactly what happened. Not that there was any lack of honor or utility

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.