by John Egerton
In three years of prelude, the people of the United States and their leaders had cultivated a deep hatred of the Nazis and their puppets, the Mussolini-led Fascists—so deep that when Hitler betrayed his promise to Stalin and invaded Russia, the motherland of communism, the anti-red majority in this country swallowed hard and joined forces with the Soviets. As Nazi atrocities mounted against the Jews, the Poles, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, and others, and as Hitler ranted about the purity and superiority of his Aryan nation against the “mongrelized polyglot of Amerika,” this nation took the high road, adding racism and genocide to the moral indictment of its white European enemies.
The Japanese, too, operated from a stance of racial purity and superiority, but unlike the Germans and Italians, they were not white—and so, with a fervor that seems now almost like a parody of the Nazis, we easily matched the Nipponese racism with our own, classifying them as an inferior species of subhumanity barely worthy of our epithets (“yellow midgets,” “monkeys,” “slant-eyes”). This dismissive bias allowed the United States to round up 110,000 Japanese-American citizens in 1942 and confine them in internment camps for the duration of the war. No such loss of freedom was ever inflicted upon Americans of German or Italian heritage.
Two of the ten internment camps were located in the South, on a marshy floodplain in southeast Arkansas, near the Mississippi River. Inside these barbed-wire-encircled, ten-thousand-acre tracts, tar paper barracks with woodstoves and no running water were thrown up to house a total of seventeen thousand men, women, and children. By day, they worked to clear the mosquito-infested land and raise cotton and other crops; at night, they alternately froze and suffocated in the crowded barracks. They were confined there for two to three years, the last of them not being released until four months after the war ended.
White Americans were virtually unanimous in their ranking of the various enemy nations according to race and skin color. It was not Southern reactionaries but moderate and liberal leaders who were largely responsible for the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans. Journalist Walter Lippmann and California Attorney General Earl Warren repeatedly insisted that it was necessary; President Roosevelt ordered it, and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion that justified it legally. (At the same time, we were training and sending into European combat a segregated regiment of Japanese-American soldiers whose valor under fire would be unsurpassed.)
What’s more, U.S. policy kept Japanese prisoners of war confined in the islands of the Pacific, while nearly a quarter-million captured German and Italian soldiers were brought to this country and treated more humanely. Many were sent to the South, where the conditions of their confinement were generally far less harsh than the daily lives of black citizens in the region.
Official U.S. policy declared in writing that “the Japanese race is an enemy race,” and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was later included as a justification for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whether it was the fact of Pearl Harbor or the perception of “an enemy race” of a darker hue that made the Japanese a more despised foe than the Germans was a question that few Americans cared to examine.
When the preliminary hostilities were enveloping Europe and Asia in the late 1930s, the South and the nation were just beginning to climb out of the Great Depression. In the three years it took for the string of explosions to build up to a worldwide conflagration, the people of the United States had plenty of time to discover that war, whatever its horrors, is often good for business—besides being a morale-boosting force for unity and cooperation. What no other energizing power could do—not FDR and the New Deal, not private enterprise, not the prayers of the faithful millions—World War II did for this nation, and especially for the South: It ended, once and for all, the economic, social, and psychological woes of the depression, and set into motion a cultural transformation more sweeping than anything the nation had experienced since the Civil War.
The prewar South was still a peasant society. Barely one out of every six or seven farms had tractors to plow with or electricity to light their houses when the forties began. Half the nation’s farm population lived here—and got by on a fourth of the farm income. They still grew mainly cotton and tobacco, the traditional staples—two inedible crops that required intensive, backbreaking labor and returned a profit to virtually no one who handled a hoe or walked behind a mule. The region’s primary industry was still textile manufacturing—an enterprise dominated by absentee ownership and characterized by hazardous, small-scale, low-wage sweatshops in which white women and girls did most of the work. Double-digit unemployment plagued white men, and the job picture was twice as dismal for blacks.
Population continued to increase as high birth rates more than matched the high rates of death and out-migration. In the eleven Old South states, the 1940 census counted nearly thirty-two million people, more than nine million of them black. Overwhelmingly, though, Southerners were still country people; no city in the region had as many as half a million in population, and only seven had more than a quarter of a million. Florida, the least populous of the eleven states, could claim fewer than two million people. Generally speaking, the Southerner in profile had changed but little in the three generations since the Civil War; compared to Americans in the East, the Midwest, and the West, Southerners in 1940 were still the poorest, the sickest, the worst housed and clothed and fed, the most violent, the least educated, the least skilled, the most lacking in latitude and power.
Such generalizations are almost an insult to the achieving minority. To give them their due, it needs to be said that millions of Southerners, white and black, showed great resourcefulness, courage, and accomplishment during the depression, and at considerable sacrifice succeeded in making life better and more secure for themselves and their families. Even in the depths of poverty, acts of heroism were commonplace; selfless people everywhere stoically shouldered intolerable burdens for others. Countless thousands managed, along with their more fortunate neighbors, not only to survive and endure but to do so with their dignity and pride intact.
Even so, there seemed to be no possible way for the region to catch up with the rest of the nation. It had been an economic and social ward of the North since before the Civil War—and along with victory in that tragic clash, the Union had claimed a misguided sense of moral superiority that only made matters worse. Then, through political and social collusion, powerful men in the North had aided and abetted the South in its ever-deepening plunge into inequality by helping the Southern oligarchy to cling to the tattered reins of power. As World War II approached, the decline and fall of the region was complete, its isolation masking such depths of economic deprivation and ignorance as you might expect to find in a lowly Latin American or Asian colony. About half the South’s people in 1940 had not the remotest hope of earning as much as $250 a year, and the sheer weight of that rock of poverty threatened to crush the region and leave it permanently crippled.
And then came the war. Its impact was—and still is—incalculable. Between 1940 and 1945, federal investment in war industries and military installations in the South exceeded $10 billion, and that didn’t include funding of such related projects as public housing, health-care facilities, TVA dams, and aid to schools in communities where the impact of military buildup was greatest. Open and inexpensive land, cheap and available construction labor, and a favorable year-round climate made the region an especially attractive location for training camps and bases, and more than half of the country’s hundred or so such new facilities sprang up here. Camp Blanding, near the little village of Starke, Florida, was a typical example; state officials claimed that it turned Starke virtually overnight into Florida’s fourth largest city. Similar stories could be heard in every state.
Southerners did more than their share to populate the camps, too. They volunteered for duty in such numbers that the Dixie bloc in Congress had to push through a draft law to keep their constituents from filli
ng up the armed forces. A proud military tradition had something to do with that rush to volunteer; even in the modern army and navy, many of the top brass—Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, George S. Patton, Chester Nimitz, Omar Bradley, George C. Marshall—had strong personal or professional ties to the Southern and border states. But the perks of service had a lot to do with it too; steady work with a paycheck and assurance of food, clothing, and shelter seemed like a great and beckoning opportunity to the chronically unemployed multitude. Nearly a third of the eleven million white men and more than two-thirds of the one million black men who served in uniform were from the South—and this in spite of the fact that a higher-than-average number of Southern prospects were rejected because of physical or mental deficiencies. There was also a high percentage of Southerners among the quarter-million women in uniform.
The investment of government and corporate funds in war-related manufacturing had as great an economic and social impact on the South as direct military spending. Textile mills were swamped with orders for tents, uniforms, blankets, duffel bags, parachutes; shipyards from Norfolk to Tampa to Galveston operated around the clock; gas and oil fields, coal mines, and steel mills were in full production; wood products, including paper, were in great demand; munitions, tanks, trucks, and airplanes rolled off the assembly lines at massive facilities such as the aircraft plant at Marietta, Georgia, where 28,000 workers were employed. In the sparsely populated Tennessee hill country near Knoxville, the fenced and guarded city of Oak Ridge sprang up on a sixty-thousand-acre tract between 1942 and the end of the war; close to 100,000 workers and their families were there, not knowing that their collective effort would provide processed uranium for the top-secret atomic-energy project that produced the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Altogether, more than a million new civilian jobs propelled the South to a dizzying and unprecedented level of prosperity. Full employment sent wages and per capita income soaring. Union membership shot up. Savings, home-building, and retail sales rose sharply; shortages and rationing were all that kept the consumption of certain foodstuffs and other goods, such as gas and tires, in check. The demand for farm products increased, too, and prices climbed accordingly, giving farmers the greatest percentage boost in income of any category of workers.
Other transforming forces were at work in agriculture. Farm population in the South decreased by a staggering 3.5 million between 1940 and 1945, with almost half of those leaving the region altogether and the rest moving from farms to Southern towns and cities. Mechanization and improvements in fertilizers and insecticides made it possible for fewer farmers working fewer acres to increase crop yields and magnify income as prices rose. No occupation had been as symbolic of the antebellum South as farming—and none was more profoundly affected by what happened in the 1940s.
Take cotton, for example. The brothers John and Mack Rust, cotton growers and cooperative farm advocates in Texas and Mississippi for nearly four decades—and Socialists to boot—devoted much of their energy and resources to the development of a prototype mechanical cotton picker, but they finally ran out of money and motivating energy in 1942. Two years later, a large Northern corporation, International Harvester, in partnership with Howell Hopson, a Mississippi Delta plantation owner, successfully demonstrated a picking machine that could replace fifty hardworking field hands. Here was a social revolution on wheels: Assembly-line production of picking machines and tractors would hasten the end of the feudal reign of King Cotton, displacing mules and people and eventually making tenant farming and sharecropping virtually obsolete. In 1945 the South would produce almost as much cotton on eighteen million acres as it had harvested in 1925 on forty-five million. Still, lost foreign markets and increased competition from synthetic fibers kept a large surplus of cotton in storage, and prices down.
The combination of agricultural technology, industrial growth, and the massive military buildup propelled a new wave of Southern farmworkers and unskilled laborers on a one-way journey to the regional and national urban centers where most new job opportunities were concentrated. (One enterprising New Orleans industrialist, Andrew Jackson Higgins, sent buses into the Louisiana countryside to transport many of the twelve thousand people who worked in his sprawling shipyards.) The great migration had major long-term consequences. Sleepy little Southern cities like Mobile, Charleston, and Norfolk were thrown into chaos, overrun by swarms of workers living in shacks, trailer camps, and tent settlements; public services were overwhelmed, crime and vice reached epidemic proportions, race relations worsened. Cities like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta experienced runaway growth that would within two decades or so turn them into genuine national metropolises, with all the best and worst consequences that go along with such explosive transformations.
In the North, people from the mountains of southern Appalachia, most of them white, entered the migrant stream with people from the cotton fields of the Deep South, most of them black. Chicago, the only political jurisdiction in America to elect a black congressman in the first four decades of this century, was finally joined in 1944 by New York when Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was elected from Harlem. The two cities had each had fewer than 100,000 African-American residents in 1900; three-quarters of a century later, they would be the only urban centers in the nation with a million or more blacks.
Racial segregation hindered the American effort to mobilize for war. As before, in World War I, black soldiers were restricted mainly to all-black units commanded by white officers. The marines stayed virtually lily-white. Kitchen duty was the only assignment open to blacks at sea with the navy. (One such sailor, a Texas sharecropper’s son named Dorie Miller, was awarded the Navy Cross after he manned a deck gun during the Pearl Harbor attack and shot down four Japanese planes.)
Blacks who managed to become officers in spite of the restrictions stood out as exceptions to the rule. Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., a District of Columbia–born career soldier with more than forty years of up-through-the-ranks service, was promoted to brigadier general in 1940. His son, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., was a trailblazer like his father: the first black graduate of West Point in the twentieth century (there had been three in the late 1800s, long before Davis finished in 1936). The junior Davis was also the first black soldier to command a military installation (an airfield in Kentucky in 1945), and he too would rise to the rank of general. Not until 1949 did the Naval Academy at Annapolis produce its first black graduate. Most officer-candidate schools within the service branches were quietly desegregated in 1942, but flight training for black pilots remained restricted to a special school set up at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. From it came more than six hundred pilots who flew combat missions over Europe.
By far the largest numbers of black servicemen were in the army, often in segregated noncombat units. The prevailing bias within the military hierarchy was that blacks were collectively unsuited for the stress of battle, and it was only after intense political pressure had been generated by indignant black leaders that a few all-black combat units were finally organized. The white officers under whose command they were placed (Southerners, more often than not, the theory being that experience made them skillful at “handling colored men”) were reluctant leaders at best; many of them openly expressed bitterness and hostility about their assignments. Sometimes, though, Southern whites did turn out to be well suited for this challenge. The respect they subsequently showed for their black troops was both cause and effect for the generally praiseworthy performance the men delivered, whether behind the lines or in the heat of combat.
Harold C. Fleming, an easygoing young Georgian, was one such officer, a white company commander in charge of black soldiers in the Pacific. The “profound experience” sensitized him to racial injustices that he had previously viewed with detachment and little thought. “It did more to change my life,” he said, years later, “than any other experience I’ve ever had.” When he returned to the South in 1947, Fleming went to work in Atlanta at the S
outhern Regional Council, successor to the Commission on Interracial Cooperation; a few years later he would became executive director of the organization.
Harry S. Ashmore, a newspaper reporter in Greenville, South Carolina, before the war, was a lieutenant in a combat division in Europe; there he saw an all-black tank battalion distinguish itself under fire. Race had nothing to do with valor in combat, Ashmore concluded—except perhaps to make minority soldiers all the more determined to excel. “In the battles they fought under our command,” he wrote forty years later, “the black men in those battered old Shermans [tanks] performed as well as any armored troops we saw in action in the bloody campaigns that took us from Normandy to the Ruhr.” Later, as editor of the Arkansas Gazette, Ashmore would win a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials when the crucible of desegregation came to Little Rock.
Segregation dogged all African-Americans in uniform, wherever they went in the war years—within the ranks of their units, in recreation halls and social clubs, on furlough in the towns around their bases, and even in air-raid shelters. One often-repeated story, incredible but not apocryphal, concerned a group of German prisoners who were being escorted from one camp to another in south Georgia by black GI guards; when they stopped at a café to eat, the Germans were allowed to sit at tables inside, but the blacks had to get their food at the back door. The most insufferable indignity, though, may have been the insistence on segregation as it applied to blood transfusions; because this episode was not Southern in origin, it drove home the reality that racial discrimination was a pervasive national problem, an all-American white character flaw.