The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  White Supremacists—they called themselves such, and proudly—had a higher objective than merely keeping African Americans out of their schools, parks, restaurants, libraries, museums, theaters, swimming pools, doctor’s offices, hospitals, funeral homes, and cemeteries; they didn’t want them anywhere at all, unless they were there to pick crops, carry bags, cook meals, or mop the floor. So when Theodore Roosevelt invited the renowned black educator and leader Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901, in honor of the publication of Washington’s new autobiography Up from Slavery, many whites, especially in the South, took the news rather badly. James K. Vardaman, a future governor of Mississippi, bellowed that, merely by having Washington there, Roosevelt had rendered the White House “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.” Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, getting right to the point, predicted that “the action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.” Roosevelt, a man not easily cowed, never invited another black man to dine at the White House; decades would pass before another president would. In 1913, just days after he took the oath of office, President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order racially segregating all offices and agencies of the federal government. Many black government workers lost their jobs in the process.

  It was a time when racial discrimination thoroughly pervaded American life from Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, when African Americans were incessantly mocked and humiliated not only privately but also on the vaudeville stage, and in Tin Pan Alley, and on every newspaper’s funny pages, and on the packaging of everything from pancake mix to toothpaste. Worse even than all that, though, it was an era of the most horrible interracial violence, all of it happening in only one direction. There were, for one thing, quite a few “race riots”—Irving Berlin might have recognized them as pogroms—in which white mobs rampaged through black neighborhoods and towns, killing and maiming residents and destroying homes and businesses; and there were lynchings. A lot of lynchings. In the twenty years between 1896 (the Plessy decision) and 1916 (Woodrow Wilson’s reelection), 1,830 people were lynched in the United States of America; 1,575 of them were black.

  And it was in that time, and in that America, that 270,000 black men entered the American Expeditionary Forces.

  In 1919, Emmett J. Scott, a former newspaper publisher and personal secretary to the late Booker T. Washington, published Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, the definitive contemporary account of the subject. As Scott recalls early on, it very nearly came to pass that there was no American Negro in the World War. At the start of the conflict, the Regular Army had just four colored regiments, comprising some ten thousand men. (Two of those regiments, the 9th and 10th Cavalry—Buffalo Soldiers, as they were known—served with distinction in Cuba, charging up San Juan Hill alongside Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, although Frederic Remington chose not to include them in his famous painting of that battle.) Ten thousand more were serving with National Guard units, including the 15th New York, the 8th Illinois, the 1st Separate Battalion of the District of Columbia, the 1st Separate Company of Maryland, and so on—many of which had just recently spent time patrolling the Mexican border. That was fine for peacetime; but then, Scott tells us, “at the beginning of the war the War Department apparently was uncertain as to just exactly what attitude it should take with reference to having Negroes enlist. Eager youths of the race volunteered their services, but . . . Negro enlistment was discouraged.” Scott quotes an Associated Press dispatch a few weeks after America entered the war:

  Richmond, Va., April 24—No more Negroes will be accepted for enlistment in the United States Army at present. This was the order received by Major Hardeman, officer in charge of the recruiting station here, from the War Department. “Colored organizations filled,” was the explanation.

  Fortunately, the War Department soon changed its mind, in part because of protests led by some of the country’s most prominent black citizens (including W. E. B. Du Bois, who became America’s highest-profile black leader after Booker T. Washington died in 1915), and in part because military leaders understood that they needed every man they could get. In the end, actually, blacks served in greater numbers proportionate to their population than whites during that war, and were granted fewer draft exemptions.

  Black leaders, for the most part, strongly urged young black men to enlist. Du Bois himself declared: “If this is our country, then this is our war.” Thousands stepped forward, which pleased the War Department, though many in it soon started asking vexing new questions: Should black doughboys serve under white officers, or black? Should they be trained in the South, where most of them were from but where, presumably, a large mass of armed black men might touch off a panic among local whites? Should they even be armed at home, like all other troops, or not issued weapons until they reached France? Or not at all? If they were to be trained at the same camps as whites, what would be an optimal “safe ratio” of white troops to blacks?

  A tremendous amount of energy went into addressing these questions, most of which were never really resolved. General Tasker Bliss, the Army’s chief of staff, favored a plan that would forestall drafting black men as long as possible, give them minimal training at camps close to home once they were drafted, and then ship them right off to France.

  The War Department, savvy about public relations as it was, knew it might have some issues with the black community; when General Bliss’s proposed plan started leaking out, black leaders took their concerns directly to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, who quickly appointed Emmett Scott to the newly created post of Special Assistant to the Secretary of War, even giving him a five-man staff. The official announcement, carried in a CPI newsletter, reported that Scott would serve as a “confidential advisor in matters affecting the interests of the 10,000,000 Negroes of the United States, and the part they are to play in connection with the present war.” In truth, I suspect, he was supposed to be a lightning rod to insulate Secretary Baker from the anger and dissatisfaction of black leaders. Some, like Du Bois, continued to take their grievances directly to Baker anyway; in December, 1917, Baker assured Du Bois that black troops were being treated no differently than white troops.

  But of course they were. Every facet of black army life, from enlistment to discharge, was kept entirely separate from white army life, and very little of it could be called equal. Housing at black army camps often consisted of tents that lacked heat and even floors. Sometimes there was no housing at all for black troops, who were left to find their own shelter wherever they could, like under trees and in dugouts. Medical care—what there was of it—was subpar, to say the least; black soldiers who presented with serious ailments were often sent away with nothing more than a spoonful of castor oil, and sometimes with simply an admonition to work through the pain. Black soldiers never got nearly as many passes and furloughs as white soldiers did. Often, they got none at all. They rarely had access to in-camp comforts like YMCA huts. There were no accommodations in or near camps for black female visitors from home—wives and mothers—until very late in the war. Even then they were rare.

  African American soldiers were undertrained and underequipped; the first batch of black stevedores sent to France was actually issued blue uniforms left over from the Civil War. They were assigned work deemed “unfit” for white soldiers, and ordered into factories as strikebreakers. They were warned, in the most menacing of terms, to stay far away from French women, not to enter French homes or eat in French cafés. (French citizens, for their part, were asked by American authorities to honor American “cultural sensitivities” by adopting a policy of racial discrimination for the duration of the war.) They were, as a class, labeled—in official reports—as lazy, or simpleminded, or devious, or all three. Contemporary accounts report that they were subjected to an extraordinary amount of
verbal and even physical abuse in camp, just in the course of an ordinary day. When they left camp, they were subject to discrimination and abuse by local merchants, business owners, police officers, and, for good measure, much of the rest of the local white population—even if they were in states, like Kansas, where racial segregation was technically illegal. Their opportunities for advancement were severely limited; because it was considered unthinkable that a black man might issue orders to a white man, relatively few blacks were commissioned as officers, none of them outside combat units. As a matter of policy, none could rise above the rank of captain. In labor battalions, even sergeants had to be white. No situation where soldiers of different races might serve together as equals—never mind a black soldier holding command over a white soldier—was allowed to stand: If two soldiers of different races and identical ranks should happen to find themselves in the same outfit, one of them—almost always the black soldier—was transferred out. Black soldiers who entered the war as officers, from National Guard units, were often demoted, or transferred, or both. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Young of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, the third African American to graduate from West Point and the highest-ranking black officer in US Army history to that point, was discharged for fabricated “health issues” in the spring of 1917 to keep him from being promoted to brigadier general.

  Tin Pan Alley, which had been profitably publishing “coon songs” for decades, now seized on the opportunity to churn out a whole lot of songs on the theme of “Guess Who’s Coming to France?” There was “Mammy’s Chocolate Soldier,” and “Goodbye My Chocolate Soldier Boy,” and “They’ll Be Mighty Proud in Dixie of Their Old Black Joe,” and “When I Gets Out in No Man’s Land (I Can’t Be Bother’d with No Mule),” but for bitter irony, it’s hard to beat Grant Clarke and George W. Meyer’s “You’ll Find Old Dixieland in France,” in which a white traveler, perplexed by Swanee’s sudden emptiness, queries Mammy Gray, who informs him that all the local darkies—including Dancin’ Mose (folks all called him “Tickle Toes”), Old Shimme Sam (famous boy from Alabam’), and every last member of Alexander’s Band—have already left for the trenches. She explains:

  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 in having your rifle taken from you and replaced with a shovel; but if you joined up in part to advance your own case for equality—the equality given to you by the Constitution but taken away from you by lawmakers and judges—then it can be hard to perceive how you are advancing that case by simply doing the same thing abroad that you were doing at home.

  And that, I believe, was the real reason so many whites were opposed to having blacks fight in the trenches. Yes, a man with a rifle has power, authority, dignity; but a man who uses that rifle to fight—for you—also has pride. You owe him your gratitude. And he knows it. And when this man comes back home again after putting his life at risk to defend your freedom, perhaps he’ll be satisfied to just return to the way things were before. But perhaps not.

  In the end, only 20 percent of all African American troops sent to France in World War I were used as fighting men. There were two colored combat divisions in the AEF, the 92nd and the 93rd, although the latter was not a true division in terms of strength. Every other combat division the Army sent to France in that war consisted of infantry regiments and artillery, but the 93rd had no artillery component of its own; there was a great deal of debate at the time over whether or not black men possessed the intelligence to man artillery. To this day, the 93rd bears the qualifying descriptor “provisional” in history books because it was always under normal divisional strength. It was the first of the two colored infantry divisions to head Over There, although, unlike most white divisions, its troops did not ship across, or even train, as a division. It contained one regiment, the 371st, of draftees; the other three comprised black National Guard outfits that were already in existence before the war started. The first of these to go across was the 15th New York. It had been sent to train in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but after tensions arose between the soldiers and the local white population, the Army quickly shuttled the 15th NYNG to France, where they were renamed the 369th United States Infantry Regiment. They were shipped out so quickly, in fact, that when they arrived overseas, no one knew what to do with them, and for several months they were used as a labor unit. The rest of the division came across gradually, until, in April 1918, the 93rd was deemed complete (if “provisional”). And then something really strange happened: General Pershing gave them to the French.

  Pershing, you may recall, put both his reputation and his popularity at great risk—at least among his British and French counterparts—with his adamant refusal to allow his divisions to be broken up and distributed, piecemeal, to foreign armies, where they would serve under foreign commanders who might deploy them wherever and however they pleased. For some reason, though, at one point he did promise the French one division; and when the 93rd was consolidated, he recognized an opportunity to simultaneously fulfill that promise and deal with the tricky question of what to do with this lone colored outfit. He seized it.

  The British, who had helped train some newly arrived white American soldiers, didn’t seem to care for the colored troops any more than the Americans did, and refused to help train them. The French, though, were happy to have them. For one thing, many of their coloni
al troops were sub-Saharan Africans; they knew that the Germans feared them terribly, particularly the Senegalese, who were reputed to collect German ears as souvenirs. But the French were also somewhat more color-blind, at that time, than the Americans and British. Not that the French were free of vile bigotry, mind you—a quick visit with Lieutenant Colonel Dreyfus at Chemin des Dames would disabuse you of that silly notion. But many French only halfheartedly honored the Americans’ request to enforce racial segregation in their shops, cafés, and nightclubs, and many more ignored it entirely. And their military understood, as the saying goes, that one body can stop a bullet as well as the next. It was their country, after all, that had been turned into one enormous battlefield. So the French Army welcomed them—and immediately split them up again, scattering the four regiments among three different divisions.

  The French gave them French gear (including overcoats with many pockets—much more useful, if confusing at first, than the American version), French Lebel rifles (which were inferior to American Springfields and Enfields; the Americans traded them for captured German Mausers whenever they could get away with it), and distinctive French “Adrian” helmets, which quickly became the symbol of the division. They took to each other, too, especially the 369th—nicknamed the “Harlem Hellfighters”—which had a particularly distinguished rec-­ ord: 191 days at the front; approximately 1,500 casualties; some 170 men awarded the Croix de Guerre; and a regimental Croix de Guerre, awarded for the Hellfighters’ role in wresting the strategic town of Sechault from the Germans. The 369th also produced the country’s first black World War I heroes, Sergeant Henry Johnson and Private Needham Roberts, who, while out on patrol on the night of May 14, 1918, ran into a German raiding party of more than two dozen men. Roberts was badly wounded, but when the Germans tried to drag him away, he and Johnson fought them off using everything they had—rifle, bayonet, grenades, and even a bolo knife. They managed to kill four Germans and wound a number of others before the rest ran off. The French awarded Johnson the Croix de Guerre with Star and Gold Palm; he was the first American to win such an honor in that war. His own government would later award him the Distinguished Service Cross.