Chapter 12: (p. 291) (1)

The President Intervenes

On 26 July 1948 President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, calling on the armed forces to provide equal treatment and opportunity for black servicemen. This act has variously been described as an example of presidential initiative, the capstone of the Truman civil rights program, and the climax of the struggle for racial equality in the armed forces. But in some ways the order was simply a practical response to a presidential dilemma.

The President's order was related to the advent of the cold war. Developments in the Middle East and Europe testified to the ambitions of the Soviet Union, and many Americans feared the spread of communism throughout the world, a threat more ominous with the erosion of American military strength since World War II. In March 1947 Truman enunciated a new foreign policy calling for the containment of Soviet expansion and pledging economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey. A year later he asked Congress to adopt the Marshall Plan for economic aid to Europe, authorize military training, and enact a new selective service law to maintain the armed forces at expanded levels. That same month his principal military advisers met at Key West, Florida, to discuss new military roles and missions for the armed forces, grapple with paralyzing divisions among the services, and re-form the military establishment into a genuinely unified whole.[12-1] As if to underscore the urgency of these measures, the Soviet Union began in April 1948 to harass Allied troops in Berlin, an action that would develop into a full-scale blockade by June.

[Footnote 12-1: On the development of cold war roles
and missions for the services, see Timothy W.
Stanley, _American Defense and National Security_
(Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1956), Chapter
VIII.]

Integration of the armed forces hardly loomed large on the international scene, but if the problem of race appeared insignificant to military planners, the sheer number of Negroes in the armed forces gave them new prominence in national defense. Because of postwar racial quotas, particularly in the Army and Air Force, black servicemen now constituted a significant segment of the service population, and consequently their abilities and well-being had a direct bearing on the nation's cold war defenses. The black community represented 10 percent of the country's manpower, and this also influenced defense planning. Black threats to boycott the segregated armed forces could not be ignored, and civil rights demands had to be considered in developing laws relating to selective service and universal training. Nor could the administration overlook the fact that the United States had become a leading protagonist in a cold war in which the sympathies of the undeveloped and mostly colored world would soon assume a special importance. Inasmuch as integration of the services had become an almost universal demand of the black (p. 292) community, integration became, willy-nilly, an important defense issue.

A second stimulus to improvement of the black serviceman's position was the Truman administration's strong civil rights program, which gave executive sanction to a national movement started some years before. The civil rights movement was the product of many factors, including the federal government's increased sense of responsibility for the welfare of all its citizens, a sense that had grown out of the New Deal and a world war which expanded horizons and increased economic power for much of the black population. The Supreme Court had recently accelerated this movement by broadening its interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the black community itself greater participation in elections and new techniques in community action were eroding discriminatory traditions and practices in many communities.

The civil rights movement had in fact progressed by 1948 to a stage at which it was politically attractive for a Democratic president to assume a vigorous civil rights stance. The urban black vote had become a major goal of Truman's election campaign, and he was being pressed repeatedly by his advisers to demonstrate his support for black interests. A presidential order on armed forces integration logically followed because the services, conspicuous practitioners of segregation and patently susceptible to unilateral action on the part of the Chief Executive, were obvious and necessary targets in the black voters' campaign for civil rights.

Finally, the integration order resulted in part from the move toward service unification and the emergence of James V. Forrestal as Secretary of Defense. Despite misgivings over centralized control of the nation's defense establishment and overconcentration of power in the hands of a Secretary of Defense, Forrestal soon discovered that certain problems rising out of common service experiences naturally converged on the office of the secretary. Both by philosophy and temperament he was disposed to avoid a clash with the services over integration. He remained sensitive to their interests and rights, and he frankly doubted the efficacy of social change through executive fiat. Yet Forrestal was not impervious to the aspirations of the civil rights activists; guided by a humane interest in racial equality, he made integration a departmental goal. His technique for achieving integration, however, proved inadequate in the face of strong service opposition, and finally the President, acting on the basis of these seemingly unrelated motives, had to issue the executive order to strengthen the defense secretary's hand.

_The Truman Administration and Civil Rights_

Executive and legislative interest in the civil rights of black Americans reached a level in 1948 unmatched since Reconstruction. The President himself was the catalyst. By creating a presidential committee on civil rights and developing a legislative program based on its findings, Truman brought the black minority into the political arena and committed the federal government to a program of social legislation that it has continued to support ever since. Little in (p. 293) the President's background suggested he would sponsor basic social changes. He was a son of the middle border, from a family firmly dedicated to the Confederate cause. His appreciation of black aspirations was hardly sophisticated, as he revealed to a black audience in 1940: "I wish to make it clear that I am not appealing for social equality of the Negro. The Negro himself knows better than that, and the highest types of Negro leaders say quite frankly they prefer the society of their own people. Negroes want justice, not social relations."[12-2]

[Footnote 12-2: Jonathan Daniels, _The Man of
Independence_ (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1950), p.
338. The quotation is from a speech before the
National Colored Democratic Convention, Chicago,
reprinted in the _Congressional Record_, 76th
Cong., 3d sess., vol. 86, 5 Aug 1940, Appendix, pp.
5367-69.]

Nor did his attitude change drastically in later years. In 1961, seven years after the Supreme Court's vital school integration decision, Truman was calling the Freedom Riders "meddlesome intruders who should stay at home and attend to their own business." His suggestion to proprietors of lunch counters undergoing sit-ins was to kick out unwelcome customers.[12-3] But if he failed to appreciate the scope of black demands, Truman nevertheless demonstrated as early as 1940 an acute awareness of the connection between civil rights for blacks and civil liberties for all Americans:

In giving Negroes the rights which are theirs we are only acting
in accord with our own ideals of a true democracy. If any class
or race can be permanently set apart from, or pushed down below
the rest in political and civil rights, so may any other class or
race when it shall incur the displeasure of its more powerful
associates, and we may say farewell to the principles on which we
count our safety.[12-4]

[Footnote 12-3: Quoted in James Peck, _Freedom Ride_
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), pp. 154-55.]

[Footnote 12-4: Quoted in Daniels, _Man of
Independence_, pp. 339-40.]

He would repeat these sentiments to other gatherings, including the assembled delegates of the NAACP's 1946 convention.[12-5] The President's civil rights program would be based, then, on a practical concern for the rights of the majority. Neither his social philosophy nor his political use of black demands should detract from his achievements in the field of civil rights.

[Footnote 12-5: Msg, HST to NAACP Convention, 29 Jun
47, _Public Papers of the President, 1947_
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1963), pp.
311-13.]

It was probably just as well that Truman adopted a pragmatic approach to civil rights, for there was little social legislation a reform president could hope to get through the postwar Congresses. Dominated by a conservative coalition that included the Dixiecrats, a group of sometimes racially reactionary southerners, Congress showed little interest in civil rights. The creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, the one piece of legislation directly affecting Negroes and the only current test of congressional intent in civil rights, was floundering on Capitol Hill. Truman conspicuously supported the fair employment measure, but did little else specifically in the first year after the war to advance civil rights. Instead he seemed content to carry on with the New Deal approach to the problem: improve the social condition of all Americans and the condition of the minorities will also improve. In this vein his first domestic program concentrated on national projects for housing, health, and veterans' benefits.

The conversion of Harry Truman into a forceful civil rights (p. 294) advocate seems to have come about, at least partially, from his exposure to what he later called the "anti-minority" incidents visited on black servicemen and civilians in 1946.[12-6] Although the lynchings, property destruction, and assaults never matched the racial violence that followed World War I, they were enough to convince many civil rights leaders that the pattern of racial strife was being repeated. Some of these men, along with a group of labor executives and clergymen, formed a National Emergency Committee Against Mob Violence to warn the American public against the dangers of racial intolerance. A delegation from this committee, with Walter White as spokesman, met with the President on 19 September 1946 to demand government action. White described the scene:

The President sat quietly, elbows resting on the arms of his
chair and his fingers interlocked against his stomach as he
listened with a grim face to the story of the lynchings.... When
I finished, the President exclaimed in his flat, midwestern
accent, "My God! I had no idea it was as terrible as that! We've
got to do something!"[12-7]

[Footnote 12-6: Harry S. Truman, _Memoirs_ (New York:
Doubleday, 1958), II:180-81; White, _A Man Called
White_, pp. 330-31. Truman's concept of civil
rights is analyzed in considerable detail in Donald
R. McCoy and Richard T. Ruetten, _Quest and
Response: Minority Rights and the Truman
Administration_ (Lawrence, Kansas: University of
Kansas Press, 1973), Chapter III.]

[Footnote 12-7: White, _A Man Called White_, pp.
330-31.]

But the Truman administration had nearly exhausted the usual remedies open to it. The Attorney General had investigated the lynchings and Klan activities and the President had spoken out strongly and repeatedly against mob violence but without clear and pertinent civil rights legislation presidential exhortations and investigations counted for very little. Civil rights leaders like White understood this, and, given the mood of Congress, they were resigned to the lack of legislative support. Nevertheless, it was in this context that the President decided to create a committee to investigate and report on the status of civil rights in America.

The concept of a federal civil rights group had been circulating in the executive branch for some time. After the Detroit race riot in 1943, presidential assistant Jonathan Daniels had organized a committee to deal with racial troubles. Proposals to create a national organization to reduce racial tensions were advanced later in the war, principally by Saul K. Padover, a minority specialist in the Interior Department, and David K. Niles of the White House staff. Little came of the committee idea, however, because Roosevelt was convinced that any steps associated with integration would prove divisive and were unwise during wartime.[12-8] With the war over and a different political climate prevailing, Niles, now senior White House adviser on minority affairs, proposed the formation of a committee not only to investigate racial violence but also to explore the entire subject of civil rights.

[Footnote 12-8: Intervs, Nichols with Oscar Ewing,
former federal security administrator and senior
presidential adviser, and Jonathan Daniels, 1954,
in Nichols Collection, CMH; see also McCoy and
Ruetten, _Quest and Response_, p. 49.]

Walter White and his friends greeted the idea with some skepticism. They had come demanding action, but were met instead with another promise of a committee and the probability of interminable (p. 295) congressional debate and unproductive hearings.[12-9] But this time, for several reasons, it would be different. In the first place the civil rights leaders underestimated the sincerity of Truman's reaction to the racial violence. He had quickly agreed to create Niles's committee by executive order to save it from possible pigeonholing at the hands of a hostile Congress. He had also given the group, called the President's Committee on Civil Rights, a broad directive "to determine whether and in what respect current law enforcement measures and the authority and means possessed by Federal, State, and local governments may be strengthened and improved to safeguard the civil rights of the people."[12-10] The civil rights leaders also failed to gauge the effect Republican victories in the 1946 congressional elections would have on the administration. Finding it necessary to court the Negro and other minorities and hoping to confound congressional opposition, the administration sought a strong civil rights program to put before the Eightieth Congress. Thus, the committee's recommendations would get respectful attention in the White House. Finally, neither the civil rights leaders nor the President could have foreseen the effectiveness of the committee members. Serving under Charles E. Wilson, president of the General Electric Company, the group included among its fifteen members distinguished church leaders, public service lawyers, the presidents of Dartmouth College and the University of North Carolina, and prominent labor executives. The committee had two black members, Sadie T. M. Alexander, a lawyer from Philadelphia, and Channing H. Tobias, director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. Its members not only prepared a comprehensive survey of the condition of civil rights in America but also presented to the President on 29 October 1947 a far-reaching series of recommendations, in effect a program for corrective action that would serve as a bench mark for civil rights progress for many years.[12-11]

[Footnote 12-9: White, _A Man Called White_, pp.
330-31.]

[Footnote 12-10: Executive Order 9808, 5 Dec 46.]

[Footnote 12-11: In addition to Chairman Wilson, the
following people served on the committee: Sadie T.
M. Alexander, James B. Carey, John S. Dickey,
Morris L. Ernst, Roland B. Gittelsohn, Frank P.
Graham, Francis J. Haas, Charles Luckman, Francis
P. Matthews, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., Henry Knox
Sherrill, Boris Shishkin, Dorothy Tilly, and
Channing Tobias.]

The group recommended the concentration of civil rights work in the Department of Justice, the establishment of a permanent civil rights commission, a federal antilynching act, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, and legislation to correct discrimination in voting and naturalization laws. It also examined the state of (p. 296) civil rights in the armed forces and incidentally publicized the long-ignored survey of black infantry platoons that had fought in Europe in 1945.[12-12] It concluded:

The injustice of calling men to fight for freedom while
subjecting them to humiliating discrimination within the fighting
forces is at once apparent. Furthermore, by preventing entire
groups from making their maximum contribution to the national
defense, we weaken our defense to that extent and impose heavier
burdens on the remainder of the population.[12-13]

[Footnote 12-12: Parts of the survey of attitudes of
participants in the World War II integration of
platoons were included in remarks by Congresswoman
Helen G. Douglas, published in the _Congressional
Record_, 79th Cong., 2d sess., 1 Feb 1946,
Appendix, pp. 432-443.]

[Footnote 12-13: _To Secure These Rights_, p. 162.]

The committee called for sweeping change in the armed forces, recommending that Congress enact legislation, followed by appropriate administrative action, to end all discrimination and segregation in the services. Concluding that the recent service unification provided a timely opportunity for revision of existing policies and practices, the committee proposed a specific ban on discrimination and segregation in all phases of recruitment, assignment, and training, including selection for service schools and academies, as well as in mess halls, quarters, recreational facilities, and post exchanges. It also wanted commissions and promotions awarded on merit alone and asked for new laws to protect servicemen from discrimination in communities adjacent to military bases.[12-14] The committee wanted the President to look beyond the integration of people working and living on military bases, and it introduced a concept that would gain considerable support in a future administration. The armed forces, it declared, _should_ be used as an instrument of social change. World War II had demonstrated that the services were a laboratory in which citizens could be educated on a broad range of social and political issues, and the administration was neglecting an effective technique for teaching the public the advantages of providing equal treatment and opportunity for all citizens.[12-15]

[Footnote 12-14: Ibid., pp. 162-63.]

[Footnote 12-15: Ibid., p. 47.]

President Truman deleted the recommendations on civil rights in the services when he transmitted the committee's recommendations to Congress in the form of a special message on 2 February 1948. Arguing that the services' race practices were matters of executive interest and pointing to recent progress toward better race relations in the armed forces, the President told Congress that he had already instructed the Secretary of Defense to take steps to eliminate remaining instances of discrimination in the services as rapidly as possible. He also promised that the personnel policies and practices of all the services would be made uniform.[12-16]

[Footnote 12-16: Truman, Special Message to the
Congress on Civil Rights, 2 Feb 48, _Public Papers
of the President, 1948_, pp. 121-26.]

To press for civil rights legislation for the armed forces or even to mention segregation was politically imprudent. Truman had two pieces of military legislation to get through Congress: a new draft law and a provision for universal military training. These he considered (p. 297) too vital to the nation's defense to risk grounding on the shoals of racial controversy. For the time being at least, integration of the armed forces would have to be played down, and any civil rights progress in the Department of Defense would have to depend on the persuasiveness of James Forrestal.

_Civil Rights and the Department of Defense_

The basic postwar reorganization of the National Military Establishment, the National Security Act of 1947, created the Office of the Secretary of Defense, a separate Department of the Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council. It also reconstituted the War Department as the Department of the Army and gave legal recognition as a permanent agency to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The principle of military unification that underlay the reorganization plan was muted in the legislation that finally emerged from Congress. Although the Secretary of Defense was given authority to establish general policies and to exercise general direction (p. 298) and control of the services, the services themselves retained a large measure of autonomy in their internal administration and individual service secretaries retained cabinet rank. In effect, the act created a secretary without a department, a reorganization that largely reflected the viewpoint of the Navy. The Army had fought for a much greater degree of unification, which would not be achieved until the passage of the National Security Act amendments of 1949. This legislation redesignated the unified department the Department of Defense, strengthened the powers of the Secretary of Defense, and provided for uniform budgetary procedures. Although the services were to be "separately administered," their respective secretaries henceforward headed "military departments" without cabinet status.

The first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, was a man of exceptional administrative talents, yet even before taking office he expressed strong reservations on the wisdom of a unified military department. As early as 30 July 1945, at breakfast with President Truman during the Potsdam Conference, Forrestal questioned whether any one man "was good enough to run the combined Army, Navy, and Air Departments." What kind of men could the president get in peacetime, he asked, to be under secretaries of War, Navy, and Air if they were subordinate to a single defense secretary?[12-17] Speaking to Lester Granger that same year on the power of the Secretary of the Navy to order the Marine Corps to accept Negroes, Forrestal expressed uncertainty about a cabinet officer's place in the scheme of things. "Some people think the Secretary is god-almighty, but he's just a god-damn civilian."[12-18] Even after his appointment as defense secretary doubts lingered: "My chief misgivings about unification derived from my fear that there would be a tendency toward overconcentration and reliance on one man or one-group direction. In other words, too much central control."[12-19]

[Footnote 12-17: Quoted in Walter Millis, ed., _The
Forrestal Diaries_ (New York: Viking Press, 1951),
p. 88.]

[Footnote 12-18: Quoted by Granger in the interview he
gave Nichols in 1954.]

[Footnote 12-19: Quoted in Millis, _Forrestal
Diaries_, p. 301.]

Forrestal's philosophy of management reinforced the limitations placed on the Secretary of Defense by the National Security Act. He sought a middle way in which the efficiency of a unified system could be obtained without sacrificing what he considered to be the real advantages of service autonomy. Thus, he supported a 1945 report of the defense study group under Ferdinand Eberstadt that argued for a "coordinated" rather than a "unitary" defense establishment.[12-20] Practical experience modified his fears somewhat, and by October 1948, convinced he needed greater power to control the defense establishment, Forrestal urged that the language of the National Security Act, which limited the Secretary of Defense to "general" authority only over the military departments, be amended to eliminate the word _general_. Yet he always retained his basic distrust of (p. 299) dictation, preferring to understand and adjust rather than to conclude and order.[12-21]

[Footnote 12-20: Ibid., pp. 117, 147. Timothy Stanley
describes the Eberstadt report as the Navy's
"constructive alternative" to unification. See
Stanley's _American Defense and National Security_,
p. 75; see also Hewes, _From Root to McNamara_, pp.
276-77. For a detailed analysis of defense
unification, see Lawrence Legere, Jr., "Unification
of the Armed Forces," Chapter VI, in CMH.]

[Footnote 12-21: Millis, _Forrestal Diaries_, pp. 301,
497.]

Nowhere was Forrestal's philosophy of government more evident than in his approach to the problem of integration. His office would be concerned with equal opportunity, he promised Walter White soon after his elevation to the new post, but "the job of Secretary of Defense," he warned, "is one which will have to develop in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary manner." Further dashing hopes of sudden reform, Forrestal added that specific racial problems, as distinct from general policy matters, would remain the province of the individual services.[12-22] He retained this attitude throughout his tenure. He considered the President's instructions to end remaining instances of discrimination in the services "in accord with my own conception of my responsibilities under unification," and he was in wholehearted agreement with a presidential wish that the National Military Establishment work out the answer to its racial problems through administrative action. He wanted to see a "more nearly uniform approach to interracial problems by the three Services," but experience had demonstrated, he believed, that racial problems could not be solved simply by publishing an executive order or passing a law. Racial progress would come from education. Such had been his observation in the wartime Navy, and he was ready to promise that "even greater progress will be made in the future." But, he added, "progress must be made administratively and should not be put into effect by fiat."[12-23]

[Footnote 12-22: Ltr, Forrestal to White, 21 Oct 47,
Day file, Forrestal Papers, Princeton University
Library.]

[Footnote 12-23: Remarks by James Forrestal at Dinner
Meeting of the National Urban League, 12 Feb 48,
copy in Misc file, Forrestal Papers; see also Ltr,
Forrestal to John N. Brown, 27 Oct 47, Day file,
ibid.]

Executive fiat was just what some of Forrestal's advisers wanted. For example, his executive assistant, John H. Ohly, his civilian aide, James C. Evans,[12-24] and Truman Gibson urged the secretary to consider establishing an interservice committee along the lines of the old McCloy committee to prepare a uniform racial policy that he could apply to all the services. They wanted the committee to examine past and current practices as well as the recent reports of the President's Advisory Commission on Universal Training and the Committee on Civil Rights and to make specific recommendations for carrying out and policing department policy. Truman Gibson went to the heart of the matter: the formulation of such an interservice committee would signal to the black community better than anything else the defense establishment's determination to change the racial situation. More and more, he warned, the discrepancies among the services' racial practices were attracting public attention. Most important to the administration was the fact that these discrepancies were strengthening opposition to universal military training and the draft.[12-25]

[Footnote 12-24: In addition to his duties as Civilian
Aide to the Secretary of the Army, Evans was made
aide to the Secretary of Defense on 29 October
1947. (See Memo, SecDef for SA et al., 29 Oct 47,
D70-1-5, files of Historian, OSD.) Evans was
subsequently appointed "civilian assistant" to the
Secretary of Defense by Secretary Louis Johnson on
28 Apr 49. (See NME Press Release, 17-49-A.)]

[Footnote 12-25: Ltr, Gibson to Ohly, 25 Nov 47,
D54-1-3, Sec Def files.]

Gibson was no doubt referring to A. Philip Randolph, president (p. 300) of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and organizer of the 1940 March on Washington Movement, who had spoken out against the pending legislation. Randolph was particularly concerned that the bill did not prohibit segregation, and he quoted a member of the Advisory Commission on Universal Training who admitted that the bill ignored the racial issue because "the South might oppose UMT if Negroes were included." Drafting eighteen-year olds into a segregated Army was a threat to black progress, Randolph charged, because enforced segregation made it difficult to break down other forms of discrimination. Convinced that the Pentagon was trying to bypass the segregation issue, Randolph and Grant Reynolds, a black clergyman and New York politician, formed a Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training. They planned to submit a proposal to the President and Congress for drafting a nondiscrimination measure for the armed forces, and they were prepared to back up this demand with a march on Washington--no empty gesture in an election year. Randolph had impressive backing from black leaders, among them Dr. Channing H. Tobias of the Civil Rights Committee, George S. Schuyler, columnist of the Pittsburgh _Courier_, L. D. Reddick, curator of the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library, and Joe Louis.[12-26]

[Footnote 12-26: New York Times, November 23, 1947;
_Herald Tribune_, November 23, 1947. See also L. D.
Reddick, "The Negro Policy of the American Army
Since World War II," _Journal of Negro History_ 38
(April 1953):194-215.]

Black spokesmen were particularly incensed by the attitude of the Secretary of the Army and his staff. Walter White pointed out that these officials continued to justify segregated units on the grounds that segregation was--he quoted them--"in the interest of national defense." White went to special pains to refute the Army's contention that segregation was necessary because the Army had to conform to local laws and customs. "How," he asked Secretary Forrestal,

can the imposition of segregation upon northern states having
clear-cut laws and policies in opposition to such practices be
justified by the Army?...

In view of President Truman's recent report to the Congress and
in view of the report of his Committee on Civil Rights condemning
segregation in the Armed Forces, I am at a loss to understand the
reluctance on the part of the Department of Defense to
immediately eliminate all vestiges of discrimination and (p. 301)
segregation in the Armed Forces of this country. As the
foremost defender of democratic principles in international
councils, the United States can ill afford to any longer
discriminate against its Negro citizens in its Armed Forces
solely because they were fortunate or unfortunate enough to be
born Negroes.[12-27]

[Footnote 12-27: Ltr, White to Forrestal, 17 Feb 48,
D54-1-3, SecDef files.]

Forrestal stubbornly resisted the pleas of his advisers and black leaders that he assume a more active role. In the first place he had real doubts concerning his authority to do so. Forrestal was also aware of the consequences an integration campaign would have on Capitol Hill, where he was in the midst of delicate negotiations on defense measures. But most of all the role of crusader did not fit him. "I have gone somewhat slowly," Forrestal had written in late October 1947, "because I believe in the theory of having things to talk about as having been done rather than having to predict them, and ... morale and confidence are easy to destroy but not easy to rebuild. In other words, I want to be sure that any changes we make are changes that accomplish something and not merely for the sake of change."[12-28]

[Footnote 12-28: Ltr, Forrestal to Rear Adm W. B.
Young, 23 Oct 47, quoted in Millis, _Forrestal
Diaries_, p. 334.]

To Forrestal equal opportunity was not a pious platitude, but a practical means of solving the military's racial problems. Equal opportunity was the tactic he had used in the Navy where he had encouraged specialized training for all qualified Negroes. He understood that on shipboard machinists ate and bunked with machinists, firemen with firemen. Inaugurated in the fleet, the practice naturally spread to the shore establishment, and equal opportunity led inevitably to the integration of the general service. Given the opportunity to qualify for all specialties, Negroes--albeit their number was limited to the small group in the general service--quickly gained equal treatment in off-the-job activities. Forrestal intended to apply the same tactic to achieve the same results in the other services.[12-29]

[Footnote 12-29: Interv, Blumenson with Marx Leva,
Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense
(1947-49) and later Assistant Secretary of Defense
(Legal and Legislative Affairs), 4 May 64, CMH
files.]

As in the past, he turned first to Lester Granger, his old friend from the National Urban League. Acting on the recommendation of his special assistant, Marx Leva, Forrestal invited Granger to the Pentagon to discuss the department's racial problems with a view to holding a general conference and symposium on the subject. As usual, Granger was full of ideas, and he and the secretary agreed that Forrestal should create a "critics group," which would discuss "Army and general defense policies in the use of Negro personnel."[12-30] Granger suggested a roster of black and white experts, influential in the black community and representing most shades of opinion, but he would exclude those apt to make political capital out of the issues.

[Footnote 12-30: Handwritten Memo, Leva for Forrestal,
attached to Ltr, White to Forrestal, 17 Feb 48;
Ltr, Leva to Granger, 19 Feb 48; Ltr, Granger to
Forrestal, 2 Mar 48. All in D54-1-3, SecDef files.
The quotation is from the 2 March letter.]

The Leva-Granger conference idea fitted neatly into Forrestal's thinking. It offered the possibility of introducing to the services in a systematic and documented way the complaints of responsible black leaders while instructing those leaders in the manpower problems confronting the postwar armed forces. He hoped the conference (p. 302) would modify traditionalist attitudes toward integration while curbing mounting unrest in the black community. Granger and Forrestal agreed that the conference should be held soon. Although Granger wanted some "good solid white representation" in the group, Forrestal decided instead to invite fifteen black leaders to meet on 26 April in the Pentagon; he alerted the service secretaries, asking them to attend or to designate an assistant to represent them in each case.[12-31]

[Footnote 12-31: Memo, Marx Leva for SA et al., 13 Apr
48; idem for Forrestal, 24 Apr 48; ltr, SecDef to
All Invited, 10 Apr 48. All in D54-1-3, SecDef
files. Those invited were Truman Gibson; Dr.
Channing Tobias; Dr. Sadie T. M. Alexander; Mary
McLeod Bethune; Dr. John W. Davis of West Virginia
State College; Dr. Benjamin E. Mays of Morehouse
College; Dr. Mordecai Johnson of Howard University;
P. B. Young, Jr., of the Norfolk _Journal and
Guide_; Willard Townsend of the United Transport
Service Employees; Rev. John H. Johnson of New
York; Walter White; Hobson E. Reynolds of the
International Order of Elks; Bishop J. W. Gregg of
Kansas City; Loren Miller of Los Angeles; and
Charles Houston of Washington, D.C. Unable to
attend, White sent his assistant Roy Wilkins,
Townsend sent George L. P. Weaver, and Mrs. Bethune
was replaced by Ira F. Lewis of the Pittsburgh
_Courier_.]

Announcement of the conference was upstaged in the press by the activities of some civil rights militants, including those whom Granger sought to exclude from the Forrestal conference because he thought they would make a political issue of the war against segregation. Forrestal first learned of the militants' plans from members of the National Negro Publishers Association, a group of publishers and editors of important black journals who were about to tour European installations as guests of the Army.[12-32] At Granger's suggestion Forrestal had met with the publishers and editors to explain the causes for the delay in desegregating the services. Instead, he found himself listening to an impassioned demand for immediate change. Ira F. Lewis, president of the Pittsburgh _Courier_ and spokesman for the group, told the secretary that the black community did not expect the services to be a laboratory or clearinghouse for processing the social ills of the nation, but it wanted to warn the man responsible for military preparedness that the United States could not afford another war with one-tenth of its population lacking the spirit to fight. The problem of segregation could best be solved by the policymakers. "The colored people of the country have a high regard for you, Mr. Secretary, as a square shooter," Lewis concluded. And from Forrestal they expected action.[12-33]

[Footnote 12-32: Representing eight papers, a cross
section of the influential black press, the
journalists included Ira F. Lewis and William G.
Nunn, Pittsburgh _Courier_; Cliff W. Mackay,
_Afro-American_; Louis Martin and Charles Browning,
Chicago _Defender_; Thomas W. Young and Louis R.
Lautier, Norfolk _Journal and Guide_; Carter
Wesley, Houston _Defender_; Frank L. Stanley,
Louisville _Defender_; Dowdal H. Davis, Kansas City
_Call_; Dan Burley, _Amsterdam News_. See Evans,
list of Publishers and Editors of Negro Newspapers,
Pentagon, 18 Mar 48, copy in CMH.]

[Footnote 12-33: Sentiments of the meeting were
summarized in Ltr, Ira F. Lewis to Forrestal, 24
Mar 48; see also Ltr, Granger to Forrestal, 2 Mar
48; both in D54-1-4, SecDef files.]

While black newspapermen were pressing the executive branch, Randolph and his Committee Against Jim Crow were demanding congressional action. Randolph concentrated on one explosive issue, the Army's procurement of troops. The first War Department plans for postwar manpower procurement were predicated on some form of universal military training, a new concept for the United States. The plans immediately came under fire from Negroes because the Army, citing the Gillem Board Report as its authority, had specified that black recruits be trained in segregated units. The Army had also specified that the black units form parts of larger, racially mixed units and would be trained in racially mixed camps.[12-34] The President's (p. 303) Advisory Commission on Universal Training (the Compton Commission), appointed to study the Army's program, strongly objected to the segregation provisions, but to no avail.[12-35] As if to signal its intentions the Army trained an experimental universal military training unit in 1947 at Fort Knox that carefully excluded black volunteers.

[Footnote 12-34: WD Ltr, AGAO-S 353 (28 May 47),
WDGOT-M, 11 Jun 47.]

[Footnote 12-35: _A Program for National Security:
Report of the President's Advisory Commission on
Universal Training, 29 May 1947_ (Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1947), p. 42.]

The showdown between civil rights organizations and the administration over universal military training never materialized. Faced with chronic opposition to the program and the exigencies of the cold war, the administration quietly shelved universal training and concentrated instead on the reestablishment of the selective service system. When black attention naturally shifted to the new draft legislation, Randolph was able to capitalize on the determination of many leaders in the civil rights movement to defeat any draft law that countenanced the Army's racial policy. Appearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on the draft bill, Randolph raised the specter of civil disobedience, pledging

to openly counsel, aid, and abet youth, both white and Negro, to
quarantine any Jim Crow conscription system, whether it bear the
label of universal military training or selective service....

From coast to coast in my travels I shall call upon all Negro
veterans to join this civil disobedience movement and to recruit
their younger brothers in an organized refusal to register and be
drafted....

I shall appeal to the thousands of white youths ... to
demonstrate their solidarity with Negro youth by ignoring the
entire registration and induction machinery....

I shall appeal to the Negro parents to lend their moral support
to their sons, to stand behind them as they march with heads held
high to Federal prisons as a telling demonstration to the world
that Negroes have reached the limit of human endurance, that, in
the words of the spiritual, we will be buried in our graves
before we will be slaves.[12-36]

[Footnote 12-36: Senate, Hearings Before the Committee
on Armed Services, _Universal Military Training_,
80th Cong., 2d sess., 1948, p. 688.]

Randolph argued that hard-won gains in education, job opportunity, and housing would be nullified by federal legislation supporting segregation. How could a Fair Employment Practices Commission, he asked, dare criticize discrimination in industry if the government itself was discriminating against Negroes in the services? "Negroes are just sick and tired of being pushed around," he concluded, "and we just do not propose to take it, and we do not care what happens."[12-37]

[Footnote 12-37: Ibid., p. 689.]

When Senator Wayne Morse warned Randolph that such statements in times of national emergency would leave him open to charges of treason, Randolph replied that by fighting for their rights Negroes were serving the cause of American democracy. Borrowing from the rhetoric of the cold war, he predicted that such was the effect of segregation on the international fight for men's minds that America could never stop communism as long as it was burdened with Jim Crowism. Randolph threw down the gauntlet. "We have to face this thing sooner or (p. 304) later, and we might just as well face it now."[12-38] It was up to the administration and Congress to decide whether his challenge was the beginning of a mass movement or a weightless threat by an extremist group.

[Footnote 12-38: Ibid., pp. 691-94. The quotation is
from page 694.]

The immediate reaction of various spokesmen for the black community supported both possibilities. Also testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Truman Gibson, who was a member of the Compton Commission that had objected to segregation, expressed "shock and dismay" at Randolph's pledge and predicted that Negroes would continue to participate in the country's defense effort.[12-39] For his pains Gibson was branded a "rubber stamp Uncle Tom" by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. The black press, for the most part, applauded Randolph's analysis of the mood of Negroes, but shied away from the threat of civil disobedience. The NAACP and most other civil rights organizations took the same stand, condemning segregation but disavowing civil disobedience.[12-40]

[Footnote 12-39: Ibid., p. 645.]

[Footnote 12-40: The Philadelphia _Inquirer_, April
11, 1948; PM, April 11, 1948. See also McCloy and
Ruetten, _Quest and Response_, pp. 107-08; "Crisis
in the Making: U.S. Negroes Tussle With the Issue,"
_Newsweek_, June 7, 1948, pp. 28-29; L. Bennett,
Jr., _Confrontation Black and White_ (Chicago:
Johnson Press, 1965), pp. 192-94; Grant Reynolds,
"A Triumph for Civil Disturbance," _Nation_ 167
(August 28, 1948):228-29.]

Although the administration could take comfort in the relatively mild reaction from conservative blacks, an important element of the black community supported Randolph's stand. A poll of young educated Negroes conducted by the NAACP revealed that 71 percent of those of draft age would support the civil disobedience campaign. So impressive was Randolph's support--the New York _Times_ called it a blunt warning from the black public--that one news journal saw in the campaign the specter of a major national crisis.[12-41] On the other hand, the Washington _Post_ cautioned its readers not to exaggerate the significance of the protest. Randolph's words, the _Post_ declared, were intended "more as moral pressure" for nondiscrimination clauses in pending draft and universal military training legislation than as a serious threat.[12-42]

[Footnote 12-41: New York _Times_, April 1, 1948.]

[Footnote 12-42: Washington _Post_, April 2, 1948.]

Whatever its ultimate influence on national policy, the Randolph civil disobedience pledge had no visible effect on the position of the President or Congress. With a draft bill and a national political convention pending, the President was not about to change his hands-off policy toward the segregation issue in the services. In fact he showed some heat at what he saw as a threat by extremists to exploit an issue he claimed he was doing his best to resolve.[12-43] As for members of Congress, most of those who joined in the debate on the draft bill simply ignored the threatened boycott.

[Footnote 12-43: McCoy and Ruetten, _Quest and
Response_, p. 107.]

In contrast to the militant Randolph, the Negroes who gathered at Secretary Forrestal's invitation for the National Defense Conference on 26 April appeared to be a rather sedate group. But academic honors, business success, and gray hairs were misleading. These eminent educators, clergymen, and civil rights leaders proved just as (p. 305) determined as Randolph and his associates to be rid of segregation and, considering their position in the community, were more likely to influence the administration. That they were their own men quickly became apparent in the stormy course of the Pentagon meeting. They subjected a score of defense officials[12-44] to searching questions, submitted themselves to cross-examination by the press, and agreed to prepare a report for the Secretary of Defense.

[Footnote 12-44: Department of National Defense,
"National Defense Conference on Negro Affairs," 26
Apr 48. This document includes the testimony and
transcript of the news conference that followed.
Officials appearing before the committee included
James Forrestal, Secretary of Defense; Robert P.
Patterson, former Secretary of War; Marx Leva,
Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense;
James Evans, Adviser to the Secretary of Defense;
Kenneth C. Royall, Secretary of the Army; John N.
Brown, Assistant Secretary of the Navy; W. Stuart
Symington, Secretary of the Air Force; and
personnel officials and consultants from each
service.]

While the group refrained from endorsing Randolph's position, it also refrained from criticizing him and strongly supported his thesis that segregation in itself was discrimination. Nor were its views soft-pedaled in the press release issued after the conference. The Secretary of Defense was forced to announce that the black leaders declined to serve as advisers to the National Military Establishment as long as the services continued to practice segregation. The group unanimously recommended that the armed services eliminate segregation and challenged the Army's interpretation of its own policy, insisting that the Army could abolish segregation even within the framework of the Gillem Board recommendations. The members planned no future meetings but adjourned to prepare their report.[12-45]

[Footnote 12-45: NME Press Releases, 26 Apr and 8 Sep
48.]

This adamant stand should not have surprised the Secretary of Defense. Forrestal could appreciate more than most the pressures operating on the group. In the aftermath of the report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights and in the heightened atmosphere caused by the rhetoric of the Randolph campaign, these men were also caught up in the militants' cause. If they were reluctant to attack the services too severely lest they lose their chance to influence the course of racial events in the department, they were equally reluctant to accept the pace of reform dictated by the traditionalists. In the end they chose to side with their more radical colleagues. Thus despite Lester Granger's attempt to soften the blow, the conference designed to bring the opponents together ended with yet another condemnation of Forrestal's gradualism.

Forrestal himself agreed with the goals of the conferees, he told Granger, but at the same time he refused to abandon his approach, insisting that he could not force people into cooperation and mutual respect by issuing a directive. Instead he arranged for Granger to meet with Army leaders to spread the gospel of equal opportunity and ordered a report prepared showing precisely what the Navy did during the late months of the war and "how much of it has stuck--on the question of non-segregation both in messing and barracks." The report, written by Lt. Dennis D. Nelson, was sent to Secretary of the Army Royall along with sixteen photographs picturing blacks and whites (p. 306) being trained together and working side by side.[12-46]

[Footnote 12-46: Memo, Forrestal for Marx Leva, 30 Apr
48; Ltr, Nelson to Leva, 24 May 48; Memo, Leva for
SA, 25 May 48. All in D54-1-3, SecDef files.]

Given the vast size of the Army, it was perfectly feasible to open all training to qualified Negroes and yet continue for years racial practices that had so quickly proved impossible in the Navy's smaller general service. Of course, even in the Army the number of segregated jobs that could be created was limited, and in time Forrestal's tactics might, it could be argued, have succeeded despite the Army's size and the intractability of its leaders. Time, however, was precisely what Forrestal lacked, given the increasing political strength of the civil rights movement.

Sparked by Randolph's stand before the congressional committee, some members of the black community geared up for greater protests. Worse still for an administration facing a critical election, the protest was finding some support in the camps of the President's rivals. Early in May, for example, a group of prominent civil rights activists formed the Commission of Inquiry with the expressed purpose of examining the treatment of black servicemen during World War II. Organized by Randolph and Reynolds, the commission boasted Arthur Garfield Hayes, noted civil libertarian and lawyer, as its counsel. The commission planned to interrogate witnesses and, on the basis of the testimony gathered, issue a report to Congress and the public that would include recommendations on conscription legislation. Various Defense Department officials were invited to testify but only James C. Evans, who acted as department spokesman, accepted. During the (p. 307) inquiry, which Evans estimated was attended by 180 persons, little attention was given to Randolph's civil disobedience pledge, but Evans himself came in for considerable ridicule, and there were headlines aplenty in the black press.[12-47]

[Footnote 12-47: Ltr, Grant Reynolds and Randolph to
Evans, 3 May 48; Memo, Evans for SecDef, 13 May 48,
sub: Commission of Inquiry; both in SecDef files.
See also A. Philip Randolph, Statement Before
Commission of Inquiry, 8 May 48, copy in USAF
Special Files 35, 1948, SecAF files.]

These attacks were being carried out in an atmosphere of heightened political interest in the civil rights of black servicemen. Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive Party's presidential candidate, had for some time been telling his black audiences that the administration was insincere because if it wanted to end segregation it could simply force the resignation of the Secretary of the Army.[12-48] Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican senator from Massachusetts, called on Forrestal to make "a real attempt, well thought out and well organized," to integrate a sizable part of the armed forces with soldiers volunteering for such arrangements. Quoting from General Eisenhower's testimony before the Armed Services Committee, he reminded Forrestal that segregation was not only an undeserved and unjustified humiliation to the Negro, but a potential danger to the national defense effort. In the face of a manpower shortage, it was inexcusable to view segregation simply as a political question, "of concern to a few individuals and to a few men in public life and to be dealt with as adroitly as possible, always with an eye to the largest number of votes."[12-49]

[Footnote 12-48: New York _Times_, February 16, 1948.]

[Footnote 12-49: Ltr, Sen. Henry C. Lodge, Jr.
(Mass.), to SecDef, 19 Apr 48, D54-1-3, SecDef
files.]

Yet as the timing of Senator Lodge's letter suggests, the political implications of the segregation fight were a prime concern of every politician involved, and Forrestal had to act with this fact in mind. The administration considered the Wallace campaign a real but minor threat because of his appeal to black voters in the early months of the campaign.[12-50] The Republican incursion into the civil rights field was more ominous, and Forrestal, having acknowledged Lodge's letter, turned to Lester Granger for help in drafting a detailed reply. It took Granger some time to suggest an approach because he agreed with Lodge on many points but found some of his inferences as unsound as the Army's policy. For instance Lodge approved Eisenhower's comments on segregation, and the only real difference between Eisenhower and the Army staff was that Eisenhower wanted segregation made more efficient by putting smaller all-black units into racially composite organizations. Negroes opposed segregation as an insult to their race and to their manhood. Granger wanted Forrestal to tell Lodge that no group of Negroes mindful of its public standing could take a position other than total opposition to segregation. Having to choose between Randolph's stand and Eisenhower's, Negroes could not endorse Eisenhower. Granger also thought Forrestal would do well to explain to Lodge that he himself favored for the other services the policy followed by the Navy in the name of improving efficiency and morale.[12-51]

[Footnote 12-50: McCoy and Ruetten, _Quest and
Response_, pp. 98-99.]

[Footnote 12-51: Ltr, Granger to Leva, 14 May 48,
D54-1-3, SecDef files.]

A reply along these line was prepared, but Marx Leva persuaded (p. 308) Forrestal not to send it until the selective service bill had safely passed Congress.[12-52] Forrestal was "seriously concerned," he wrote the President on 28 May 1948, about the fate of that legislation. He wanted to express his opposition to an amendment proposed by Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia that would guarantee segregated units for those draftees who wished to serve only with members of their own race. He also wanted to announce his intention of making "further progress" in interracial relations. To that end he had discussed with Special Counsel to the President Clark M. Clifford the creation of an advisory board to recommend specific steps his department could take in the race relations field. Reiterating a long-cherished belief, Forrestal declared that this "difficult problem" could not be solved by issuing an executive order or passing a law, "for progress in this field must be achieved by education, and not by mandate."[12-53] The President agreed to these maneuvers,[12-54] but just three days later Forrestal returned to the subject, passing along to Truman a warning from Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio that both the Russell amendment and one proposed by Senator William Langer of North Dakota to prohibit all segregation were potential roadblocks to passage of the bill.[12-55] In the end Congress rejected both amendments, passing a draft bill without any special racial provisions on 19 June 1948.

[Footnote 12-52: Memo, Leva to Forrestal, 18 May 48,
D54-1-3, SecDef files. Forrestal's response,
suggesting that Lodge meet with Lester Granger to
discuss the matter, was finally sent on 24 Jun 48.
See also Memo, Leva for Forrestal, 22 Jun 48, and
Ltr, SecDef to Sen. Lodge, 24 Jun 48, both in
D51-1-3, SecDef files.]

[Footnote 12-53: Memo, James Forrestal for President,
28 May 48, Secretary's File (PSF), Harry S. Truman
Library.]

[Footnote 12-54: Memo, President for SecDef, 1 Jun 48,
Secretary's File (PSF), Truman Library.]

[Footnote 12-55: Note, SecDef for President, 31 May
48, sub: Conversation With Senator Taft,
Secretary's File (PSF), Truman Library.]

The proposal for an advisory board proved to be Forrestal's last attempt to change the racial practices of the armed forces through gradualism. In the next few weeks the whole problem would be taken out of his hands by a White House grown impatient with his methods. There, in contrast to the comparatively weak position of the Secretary of Defense, who had not yet consolidated his authority, the full force and power of the Commander in Chief would be used to give a dramatic new meaning to equal treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. Given the temper of the times, Forrestal's surrender was inevitable, for a successful reform program had to show measurable improvements, and despite his maneuvers with the civil rights activists, the Congress, and the services, Forrestal had no success worth proclaiming in his first eight months of office.

This lack of progress disappointed civil rights leaders, who had perhaps overestimated the racial reforms made when Forrestal was Secretary of the Navy. It can be argued that as Secretary of Defense Forrestal himself was inclined to overestimate them. Nevertheless, he could demonstrate some systematic improvement in the lot of the black sailor, enough improvement, according to his gradualist philosophy, to assure continued progress. Ironically, considering Forrestal's faith in the efficacy of education and persuasion, whatever can be counted as his success in the Navy was accomplished by the firm authority he and his immediate subordinates exercised during the last months of (p. 309) the war. Yet this authority was precisely what he lacked in his new office, where his power was limited to only a general control over intransigent services that still insisted on their traditional autonomy.