American Patriots:
The Story of Blacks in the Military From the Revolution to Desert Storm
By Gail Buckley
Random House, 534 pages, $29.95
`As a World War II child, I was indelibly marked with a sense of American history as a home to heroes,” Gail Buckley begins her new book on American blacks in military service. Indeed, the word “heroes” is strewn throughout this book, to the point that it loses specificity and content (If all are heroes, how can heroism be anything special?). In this regard, “American Patriots” is of a piece with the current celebration of “the greatest generation” that fought World War II, even as Buckley challenges mainstream nostalgia by insisting that blacks be among those remembered.
Her breathless prose about “heroism” does not do full justice to the astonishing length and breadth of the black military experience she recounts. That experience was not always conventionally heroic or patriotic, of course, any more than for other social groups: Willingly or not, some black Americans fought for the British during the Revolution, the Confederacy during the Civil War, the Filipinos during the bloody American conquest of their islands at the start of the 20th Century and the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era. This rich history makes “American Patriots” an awkward and simplistic title for a long, untidy book. Buckley, who is a journalist, the daughter of singer Lena Horne and the author of a history of her famous family, is a well-informed, energetic historian, but she introduces a blizzard of names and contextual information that readers may find bewildering.
“American Patriots” is nonetheless valuable for demolishing, perhaps more than Buckley realizes, any comforting notion of inexorable racial progress. No straight historical line ran from exclusion or segregation of blacks in the armed forces during the 18th Century to inclusion and integration in our own time. Blacks served in large numbers and often in integrated settings during the Revolution, Crispus Attucks being only the most famous among many. Overcoming official resistance, they played a decisive role, usually in all-black units, in Union forces during the Civil War, facilitating Northern victory and pushing President Abraham Lincoln toward the Emancipation Proclamation. As buffalo soldiers they later did much of the work of subduing Indians and “settling” the West, appearing prominently in early accounts, photographs and pictures, only to be erased in the 20th Century when Hollywood whitened the Western myth.
In many ways, the worst for blacks in terms of military service came early in the 20th Century, when the color line became most rigid in American life generally. By then, quotas and segregation were more vigorously enforced, the bar to officer status became more absolute (fewer than 10 blacks were commissioned regular Army officers from 1899 to 1948), entry into the service academies became almost impossible (no black officer graduated from West Point from 1889 to 1936) and whites were viciously racist against those blacks who did serve. Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet of 1907 denoted more than the color of the ships: It was, Buckley writes, “the first Navy in American history without black sailors.”
Only the black militancy and desperate white need that came with World War II and the Cold War broke the color line. It was acutely embarrassing for a superpower declaring itself a beacon of liberty and freedom to the world to practice crude racism in its own armed forces, and it wasted a valuable national resource at a time of great need, as leaders like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower slowly came to realize.
Another pattern in this story is the way white leaders, Teddy Roosevelt most notoriously, often praised blacks’ military contributions during war but forgot them soon after, returning to the prewar attitudes that had justified exclusion and discrimination. Buckley is aware of this pattern but unsure what to make of it, other than implicitly attribute it to underlying white racism.
That is surely in part the case, but it might also be useful to question the heartfelt attachment many blacks–and those in other social groups as well–have had to military service as a vehicle for gaining full citizenship. As Buckley quotes the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass from 1863, “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S., let him get an eagle on his buttons, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”
To a degree, that hope has been borne out, but far more slowly and partially than Douglass imagined. Moreover, that hope posits a repeated occurrence of war if the wells of full citizenship are to be kept replenished. And it presumes that those without access to military service–including blacks whose age, disability, sex, sexual orientation or politics exclude them from service–lack a claim on such citizenship. For all these reasons, some modern black leaders, like Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King Jr., resisted and resist linking military service and citizenship. Buckley’s views, on the other hand, resonate with “greatest generation” discourse, which sees military personnel as fuller or better citizens than the rest of us. Given the nation’s history and the one Buckley recounts, this is an understandable view of citizenship, but also a dangerously constricted one.
If no triumphal straight line took this story from the 18th to the 21st Century, where is it now and where may it head? Buckley radiates optimism. Closing with a discussion of Gen. Colin Powell and the Persian Gulf War, she praises the military’s ability “to solve social problems” and sees the 1990s as marking “the historical zenith of the black American military experience.” She ignores obvious tensions in this moment–how Powell, for example, opposed lifting the ban on gays in the military and made common cause with Strom Thurmond on that issue. More than that, she ignores her own long history of progress and reversal. And if the 1990s marked a zenith, how is it, as she earlier complains, that Hollywood often still erases blacks from its historical accounts of war or gives them a token heroism (as with Dorie Miller in the new movie “Pearl Harbor”) that belies the vast numbers and varied roles of black soldiers and sailors?
The adulation of Powell and his era often involves a patriotic self-congratulation about the end of racial problems in the armed forces and, by extension, in American life. That adulation also obscures the complexity of the armed forces’ racial past and the unpredictability of the military’s racial future. Many in the “greatest generation” fought against segregation, but many also fought for it. In 1944, a future senator declared that he would “never submit to fight . . . with a negro by my side” and would rather “die a thousand times” than “see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.” That foe of military integration was Robert Byrd, who, along with Thurmond, still sits in the Senate. Although their racial views may have changed, their presence reminds us that the past is not easily swept aside. One need not be a deep pessimist to wonder whether the “zenith” marked by Powell could be followed by something less benign. Readers of Buckley’s book who look beyond her sunny conclusion will be inspired to prevent such a regrettable outcome.
