The Golden Thirteen
Page 12
He asked Owen Dodson, a seaman second class who had graduated from the Yale School of Drama, to produce plays about famous African Americans, naval histories, and wartime allies, in an effort to boost morale. Dodson, already acclaimed for several of his works including a production of Pygmalion, would later become one of the most celebrated African American poets and playwrights in the nation, and his contributions at Camp Robert Smalls were generally hailed.60
But many black men bristled at Armstrong’s efforts to promote black culture.
He commissioned a new marching song composed specifically for black enlistees: “They look like men, they act like men; I think they will be great men of war.” Some from the South believed the song represented progress, while many from the North refused to sing along, rejecting the notion that they were “like men.” How ridiculous they thought. We aren’t “like men.” We are men.61
Armstrong also required black enlistees to recite a creed on the advancement of their race and had them sing spirituals on Sunday evenings.
Nelson attributed this to a stereotype “that the Negroes are an exceptionally musical people who are proud of singing the ‘American folk music’ known as spirituals.”
Here, too, perception depended in part on geography, for many from the South saw nothing objectionable about singing together. In fact, many enjoyed the break from military discipline and routine and celebrated the camaraderie.
“If you want to hear something, you ought to hear the whole camp singing spirituals,” Wayman Elmer Hathcock, who had a doctorate in music and was a professor at Horace Brown College in Atlanta, told a reporter. “When several thousand voices swell the chorus of some sad, sweet spiritual, that is really something.”62
But those from Northern areas, many of whom had never heard folk music before, resented the implications. For them, the spiritual was a reminder of slavery.63
Armstrong believed black men were better suited than whites for vocational training and that black sailors required special treatment and freedom from white competition.64 He tolerated no overt racism but also felt it was unfair to expect too much from black men. Ely’s 1925 report had said that with “unkind treatment” black men “can become stubborn, sullen and unruly.” Armstrong refused to let those serving under him punish black enlistees the way they would white sailors.
Some of the officers who worked under Armstrong reported that this leniency led to fights and stabbings inside Camp Robert Smalls, but company commanders who took discipline cases to Armstrong “got the worst of it.” That left officers to take matters into their own hands, which usually meant bringing an unruly recruit into a room and, with no witnesses, beating him.
Lieutenant (junior grade) Donald O. Van Ness, one of the four officers who worked under Armstrong, had his own ideas about discipline. There was a black sailor in camp who was a boxer, a sparring partner of the heavyweight champion Joe Louis. Van Ness asked him to set up a boxing academy and teach recruits how to spar. He told members of his companies that they should settle their arguments with words but if they needed to fight they should do it in the ring. Any man reported to pull a knife was sent for boxing instructions with the understanding that he’d be beaten and bloodied so badly in the ring by Louis’s sparring partner he’d think twice before pulling a knife again.
“It didn’t eliminate knife-pulling, but it made it drop down considerably, because nobody wanted to get in the ring with this fellow,” Van Ness later said.65
Armstrong did eventually create the “slacker squad,” which involved hard labor. Men on that squad slept on the deck and worked twenty hours a day, doing the toughest, dirtiest jobs. When there was no work to be done, they did jump squats.66
Among the far less serious infractions that Van Ness and his fellow white officers contended with was the use of marijuana, but it was of such low quality and its effect so mild that the discipline office didn’t bother much about it.67
Another problem was venereal disease. Van Ness placed boxes of prophylactics in the barracks, which led to complaints that he was encouraging immorality. For Van Ness, the venereal disease, the marijuana, the poor hygiene, the propensity for fights all justified segregation. It was for their own good, he thought. Even decades later, Van Ness rationalized segregated camps by arguing that black men needed to be taught to take a shower, to keep clean and neat.
“I know from actual experience that they were not the type that would do all the things that they were supposed to do, and if they were mixed with the whites, it would only prove that the whites were right, that they were not up to the caliber that the Navy wants,” he said.
Of course, many white men came from places where they lacked soap and hot water and had terrible hygiene habits, but Van Ness reasoned that “whites can understand some other white who doesn’t come up to par, but it would be very easy for them to grab on and make a stereotype out of all blacks, because, as a matter of fact, there were a higher percentage of blacks who didn’t keep clean and didn’t do the things that whites generally do in everyday living.”68
These allowances aside, the training of black men proved less troublesome than feared, and the enlistees proved more capable than the Navy brass had imagined. Instead of realizing that racist assumptions about black ability were misguided, the Navy’s senior staff believed that Armstrong, who would soon be promoted, must be a superior leader, an alchemist of some sort who had spun gold from an assumed worthless commodity.
Once the first class graduated basic training, Lieutenant Commander Armstrong shared his successes with the white world.
“It is unfortunate that the Navy has never gotten to know the Negro before, for the Negro has many qualities, which the Navy prizes,” he told the Chicago Daily Tribune. “They work hard, take their training conscientiously and are very patriotic. There is still an immense reservoir of high caliber Navy material in the Negroes of America.”69
By the summer of 1942, the recruiting challenges that had so concerned Jacobs were subsiding. Armstrong would soon take over Camp Lawrence and Camp Moffett, two camps near Robert Smalls in the northwest corner of Great Lakes, to accommodate the growing number of black enlistees.70
“What we’re doing here is bending every effort to make these boys as good as any fighting men the US Navy has,” Armstrong told Time magazine in August. “The country doesn’t yet know what a fine new source of fighting men the Navy has.”
The Time feature may have been a puff piece, pure military propaganda, but, still, it was running in a national magazine and heralding black enlistees in a Navy that, only months before, had furiously tried to keep them out.
Now the nation was reading that black recruits were so eager to prove themselves that they would race through the commando course three times and ask for more. The officer in charge added a hundred-yard sprint to try to tire them out.
He could not.
“The Negroes take to the training with gusto,” the article said. “They carry their shoulders square, their heads up. They have reason to: they have their own racial tradition in the Navy, their own heroes of previous wars. They drill pridefully, rhythmically, marching up & down the parade ground chanting their own songs, composed by a Negro musician, second class.”71
Jesse Arbor entered the Navy on September 11, about one month after the Time feature appeared. He had done so a bit grudgingly, for he had not wanted to give up his life in Chicago. But the draft was calling, and Arbor feared he’d be taken into the Army if he didn’t join the Navy first. His uncles had fought in the trenches on the Western Front during World War I and had brought back horrific tales of suffering and death. His three older brothers, already in the Army, also warned him against joining.
“Go anywhere you can go other than this place,” they told him.72
Arbor went to the Navy recruiting station on Plymouth Court in Chicago to enlist. He entered Great Lakes during one of the station’s busiest times, one of 12,241 black and white men to arrive that week, a record.7
3
Like so many others, Arbor struggled to acclimate. He was accustomed to a certain lifestyle, owing to his work at Kuppenheimer and his position as his own boss. The Thom McAn shoes Arbor wore for his flat feet fit so well but were not exactly military grade.74 His new shoes were too small. They had thick soles that caused blisters and made his feet swell.
Arbor knew what to do. He sat down with his pocketknife and cut the shoes to his liking.
The next morning, during muster, a black chief petty officer confronted Arbor.
“What’s the matter with your shoes there, Mac?”
“Sir, they hurt my feet.”
“You’re in the Navy now, boy,” the chief petty officer said. “Didn’t anybody send for you; you volunteered. When you’re in the Navy, you do what you’re told, when you’re told and how you’re told.”
The petty officer walked closer to Arbor and jabbed a finger into his chest.
“Now get out of that line,” he screamed.
The petty officer marched Arbor and his ill-fitting shoes one mile, from Camp Robert Smalls to the main side, grabbed a new pair of shoes, and flung them at the stunned sailor.
Arbor walked all the way back to the barracks, climbed into his hammock, and cried, wondering what he had gotten himself into.
His lot improved when he befriended Arthur Collins, an eighteen-year-old from Kansas City whom everyone called Duck. Collins had had ROTC training, so the Navy routine didn’t bother him much, but he was very small—one hundred pounds soaking wet—and some of the older boys in the barracks picked on him.
Collins offered Arbor, the big strong football player, a deal.
“I’m going to make a man out of you,” Collins said. “But you’re going to have to keep those boys from whipping me tomorrow.”
“Good deal,” Arbor said.
Arbor had been struggling with the marching drills and Collins offered to help.
The pair snuck into the head after everyone was asleep and practiced.
Left, right, left, right.
Arbor was a fast study.75 After a week of three-hour sessions in the head, he knew how to march and how to call cadence. Soon, he was apprentice company commander.
Arbor had been at Great Lakes only one week when President Roosevelt’s special train pulled into the station. It arrived at 4 a.m. on a drizzly September morning. Great Lakes was the second stop of what was to be a two-week inspection tour of factories and camps.
The weather had turned cool and wet, and the president and his entourage remained on the train to sleep a few more hours before beginning the official inspection. The president disembarked at 9:35 a.m. and was helped into a convertible, which moved slowly away from the train station and across Morrow Road.
The president paused at 9:50 a.m. to view the USS Wolverine, at anchor nearby in Lake Michigan. This was formerly the Seeandbee, a very large side paddle-wheel lake steamer that had been taken over by the Navy and converted to an aircraft carrier training ship on which new pilots could practice takeoffs and landings.
Tied up nearby the Wolverine was Henry Ford’s yacht, which the Navy had also taken. Now, it was the USS Truant. Some twenty men at a time would take her out on Lake Michigan to learn the finer points of Navy etiquette, man-overboard procedures, emergency steering, use of the compass, and nautical nomenclature.76
The president saw the hospital and the service and training buildings and then passed the detention camp. A company of recruits marched by, heartily singing “Here Comes the Navy” to the tune of “Beer Barrel Polka.”
Commandant John Downes, who ran the Great Lakes facility, made sure to remind the president that during the previous Sunday, there had been thirty-six church services—”simply to show you that we believe the religious side of the training of a recruit is just as important to the welfare of the recruit and the Navy as is the naval training which he otherwise receives.”77
At the urging of the First Lady, the president stopped at Camp Robert Smalls.78 He saw a camp bustling with 4,500 recruits going through basic training. The “gusto” that Time had written about one month before was on full display as black men marched before the president in various formations. Roosevelt also watched the black recruits run the famed commando course, and perform a loading drill using the loading machine, dummy shells, and powder charges.
The men who paraded before Roosevelt that day were marching to a song composed by Wayman Elmer Hathcock, the PhD who taught at Horace Brown College.79 Hathcock composed four songs for the camp, including “Ballad of the Negro Recruit” and “We Are Men of the U.S. Navy,” the song that Roosevelt heard.80 Grace Tully, the president’s secretary, called it a “very stirring marching song,” though it is unknown whether its lyrics made an impression on the president, who was anxious to return to the train. His entire visit to Camp Robert Smalls lasted just eight minutes.81
Of course, not all marching songs were fit for a president’s ears, nor were they all composed by men as distinguished as Hathcock. Marching songs were just as often used to keep men in step and their minds off marching. Some included lyrics such as “Eyes right, assholes tight, ankles to the rear / We are men of the U.S. Navy and we all got gonorrhea.”82
Lieutenant (junior grade) Paul Richmond never asked why he was chosen to be one of the four officers assigned to Camp Robert Smalls. He had no desire to stay in Illinois or to work with boots—of any color. Richmond wanted to be at sea. He was an academy man and had been slated for service on the USS Nevada, a battleship stationed at Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese attacked two weeks before he graduated from Annapolis, torpedoing both the Nevada and his dreams of serving on a ship. Richmond was reassigned to Great Lakes and was told he’d be training new recruits. He reported on January 2, 1942, a fresh-faced naval officer, only weeks out of school, who was suddenly tasked with readying thousands of men for war. His duties also included shore patrol, a common responsibility for junior officers.
Mostly in those first few months he’d patrolled Waukegan, Illinois, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Occasionally, he’d get down to Chicago, though the city had its own shore patrol.
When black men began arriving in the summer, Richmond was assigned to Camp Robert Smalls and, as part of his duties, instructed to patrol the South Side of Chicago.
During his first patrol, Richmond rode the train from Great Lakes to Chicago with a black chief petty officer who promised to show the lieutenant, a twenty-one-year-old white kid from Highland Park, Michigan, the ropes in the black section of town.
“When we get there, I’m going to introduce you to ‘The Man,’“ the chief petty officer said. “‘The Man’ will take care of you.”
It was a little cryptic, but he told Richmond no more.
The Navy needed a white man to patrol black neighborhoods because top officials had given explicit instructions that black men on shore patrols make no effort to discipline white men. If a fight broke out between members of the different races, black shore patrol officers were only allowed to handle black men. The Navy thought it “one of the practical adjustments necessary in accommodating incidents of the Negro program to the existing difficulties in the race situation,” though most black men found it yet another example of enforced inferiority.83
Richmond and the chief petty officer arrived on the South Side and established their patrol, looking into alleys and bars, just making sure the sailors weren’t getting into any trouble.
“Come on, we’ll meet ‘The Man,’“ the chief petty officer told Richmond.
They walked to a busy nightclub called the Cotton Club.
Richmond went inside the dimly lit room, made his way past the crowds, and shuffled toward a back office.
And there was Joe Louis—The Man.
“The lieutenant here is in charge of the shore patrol, and he wants to have things run properly,” the chief said.
“I’ll tell you what, lieutenant,” Louis said. “If you have any trouble, you just come to me. There ain�
��t going to be any trouble.”
And there wasn’t.84
Black men were no more of a disciplinary problem than white men. And the concerns that they lacked innate leadership qualities proved wholly unfounded, Richmond discovered.
He was particularly impressed by a young sailor from Indianapolis named Graham Martin. Renowned for his athletic prowess, Martin had been made athletic petty officer during basic training, leading his company through the drills, calisthenics, and the commando course.
Martin noticed that many of his fellow recruits, especially those from the South, came to Camp Robert Smalls illiterate, and they struggled with the classroom work. The Bluejacket’s Manual is a sailor’s bible and is filled with instruction on policy and procedure, but it all means little to a man who can’t read. Martin and a few others took it upon themselves to teach literacy, offering reading instruction to men in the evening, after a full day of training.85
After he finished basic training in October 1942, Martin, now a petty officer third class, was made subcompany commander. He worked under a white chief petty officer, helping new recruits through training.86 He marched the boots, called cadence, and drilled. He’d run through that obstacle course three or four times a day to show them how it was done.
All the while he continued offering literacy instruction and became an unofficial ombudsman, helping a sailor get leave needed to attend a funeral.87
One Saturday morning, recruits were lined up for inspection and one of the men had a cigarette in his jumper pocket. The chief petty officer, whom Martin shadowed, was furious. He pulled the cigarette out of the recruit’s pocket and pushed it toward Martin.
“Make him eat it,” he ordered.
Martin refused the order.
He had a health minor in college and didn’t think it was safe to eat a cigarette.88