Listener Calls

This is a transcript of an earlier broadcast of this episode; there may be slight changes in wording in the rebroadcast.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf, 18th Century History Guy.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers, your 19th Century History Guy.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh, History Guy of the 20th Century. We’re talking today about war veterans in American history. Some of you have already sent in your questions and comments on the topic. And we’ve invited you to join us on the phone.

PETER: First up, we have Curtis calling in from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Curtis, welcome to the show.

CURTIS: Thank you very much. I’m just wondering if there is evidence out there that shows that when black veterans returned from World War I or II that they became more civic minded and/or politically active?

BRIAN: Yeah. Curtis, that’s a great question. You’re asking did African Americans get more involved, more engaged when they came back from war. And the answer is an emphatic yes. Now, you probably know that during World War II, blacks finally were allowed to fight and especially that active-duty service in the military certainly encouraged blacks to feel great things would happen after the war. And in fact, a lot of historians feel that the very origins of the modern Civil Rights Movement came out of rising expectations on the part of African Americans for what they might realize when they returned home from the war.

PETER: Brian, your answer is really interesting to me because World War II seems to be a lot different from World War I. And maybe you could talk about why it was that World War I did not create the kind of mobilization that could lead to lasting social and political change for African Americans.

BRIAN: Yeah. I’m going to bounce that to Ed, because it’s a southern kind of thing I think.

ED: Well, I feel a lot of pressure here. But I think that your point is correct. It’s not that the language of aspiration and of pride and responsibility was absent. W.E.B. Du Bois reluctantly supported World War I precisely because he thought it would have the kind of consequence that World War II ultimately had.

BRIAN: So what happened? What went wrong?

ED: Well, several things went wrong. First of all, black soldiers and sailors were not given the opportunity to be on the front lines in World War I the same way they were in World War II very intentionally, because white Southerners, in particular, also agreed that the war could be a turning point in black Americans’ lives and sought to prevent it. And they segregated the camps. They segregated the units and tried, certainly in the South, to downplay the actual accomplishments of black Americans.

The other thing that happened, of course, is that when the war ended, World War I, a giant backlash against all kinds of expectations, so there were anti-labor acts, anti-immigrant acts. It was a great way of trying to contain the social consequences of World War I. And I think partly containing the aspirations of black Americans was one part of that. So lots of different parts to it.

BRIAN: And Curtis, I’m going to add one more layer here, which is a factor that really put the African American effort over the top after World War II, not that anything happened quickly as you know, a factor that was crucial was the nature of the enemy we were fighting– Adolf Hitler– so that all Americans, including Southerners, were faced with this great paradox after World War II. Well, wait a second. If racialist ideologies enforced by the state are what we just fought and died for, white and black, what do we make of these Jim Crow laws in the South? So the nature of the enemy is really important here too.

CURTIS: Well, I’m just wondering, because we know that the Jim Crow didn’t topple in 1945 after the armistice was signed. How were they able to reconcile this struggle to save the world for democracy and this insistence that blacks stay in their place?

ED: Well, ironically, white Southerners laid claim to the threat of another war as one more reason to delay the fulfillment of black freedom, which was the Cold War. And of course, what they would say is, well, yeah, I see your point. But we have much bigger problems right now than your freedom. We’ve got to stick together and not rock the boat to fight the Russians and the Chinese.

You think about back in the Civil Rights Movement. The most effective charge that white Southerners would make, at least each other– and they certainly tried it to the rest of the country– was these are Commies who are coming in, outside agitators who are disrupting America, who, if your remember, just saved the world and is going to have to save it again. So it’s ironic that they used communism to say that we simply can’t fulfill what we began in World War II.

PETER: Curtis, great call. Hope to hear from you again.

CURTIS: OK. Thank you so much for the excellent answers.

ED: Thank you very much.

PETER: Bye, bye.

BOBBY WALLACE: Once we got out there in the Pacific, we landed at Espiritu Santo. And we joined the Marines there. And we fought with them. We handled the ammo and everything.

PETER: This is World War II Navy veteran, Bobby Wallace, in an interview for the Library of Congress Veterans’ History Project. He says that even though blacks were allowed to fight alongside whites, prejudice was alive and well in the military. And his fellow sailors didn’t mince words.

BOBBY WALLACE: You black SOB and you this and you the other. We gonna see that you don’t go home and all this. Some of those same men when they got hit and a lot of the black sailors or black Marines responded to their needs, those same men looked up with not shock but surprise, maybe, that some of the men that they had called names and looked down on, they were the very ones that put bandages on their wounds and calmed them down when they were out of it.

They done told us we would never amount to nothing. So we had to prove that we were who we said we were. So that’s what made me the man that I am today. No doubt if I hadn’t went through the prejudice and hatred of World War II, I wouldn’t be here today. But because I went through those things, few things I run into now, piece of cake. Can I get a swig of this coffee?

PETER: That’s World War II veteran, Bobby Wallace, from to 2002 interview for the Library of Congress. We’ll link to the entire interview at our website, backstoryradio.org.

ED: If you’re just tuning in, this is BackStory. And we’re talking about the history of American War veterans coming home.

PETER: We’re going to take another call now. And it’s Mary in Phoenix, Arizona. Mary, welcome to the show.

MARY: Thank you. I have a question about World War II veterans. I conducted oral histories with about a dozen of these veterans. And I found that a lot of the white veterans, the men, took advantage of the GI Bill. But it was very common for the women to not use that GI Bill. And also, it seemed like a lot of the minority men did not use it. Can you comment on that?

BRIAN: Yeah, Mary, there’s no question that white men took advantage of the GI Bill disproportionately, even allowing for adjustments as to how many women, for instance, were even eligible for it. The main reason for this is that, like a lot of things in our country, the GI Bill operated indirectly. So let’s take a benefit like the subsidized mortgages under GI. Well, if you were African American and you had served loyally, you probably would have had a lot of trouble getting a bank to give you that same GI loan. You would have had trouble because of the segregated neighborhood that you lived in. And you would have had trouble just for larger reasons of discrimination.

Or let’s take another major GI benefit. Let’s take the education benefits. A lot of schools did not admit African Americans. A lot of African Americans didn’t have enough high school education to even qualify to go to college. Now, I’ve always wondered. I think 3% of the beneficiaries under the GI Bill were women. And I’ve actually always wanted to know more about those women veterans. So I wonder if you could tell us something about the women that you interviewed?

MARY: Well, they were in different branches of the service. There were WACs and WAVES. And I interviewed a WASP. But she wasn’t in the service because they were excluded.

BRIAN: Yeah, Mary, I have a really simplistic question. Now, I married a WASP. But I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about. What’s a WAC and a WAVE and a WASP.

MARY: You’ve heard of the WASPs, haven’t you? They were Women Air Force Service Pilots.

BRIAN: And WACs were?

MARY: In the Army. And WAVES were in the Navy.

BRIAN: So that all makes sense.

MARY: But it seemed like the women did not go to college afterwards, because they married quickly or even during the war. And then they started having babies. But the WAVE that I interviewed did go to college. She had always wanted to. So she used that GI Bill to do that, even though she did get married.

BRIAN: Right. So in the case of the women you interviewed, it was not overt discrimination. And I say overt. But it was more societal pressure about what women were expected to do.

MARY: Yeah, yeah. But I like what you’re saying about the minority men, because restrictive covenants were in place here in Phoenix too and in Arizona. So of course, that would have limited where they could buy. Plus probably a lot of them just thought they had to work. They didn’t have a family history of going to college.

BRIAN: And this has really huge consequences for the kind of society that emerges after World War II, because that package of benefits launched a lot of lower middle class people into the middle class. And it disproportionately served white veterans. And a lot of African Americans, as you point out, a lot of women who might have been launched more independently, were not. How did you get involved in this project?

MARY: I worked at the Arizona Historical Society Museum in Tempe. And we did an exhibit on World War II.

BRIAN: Well, that’s a really, really cool idea.

MARY: Yeah, it was fun. It was really interesting to meet all these people.

ED: Did all of them consider World War II to be the good war?

MARY: The good war. Oh, my word. They considered it to be life-changing. It was probably the most important event in their life or one of the most important. I didn’t hear them call it the good war, because it was hard. But it was a way for them to get away from their little towns, away from their families and their parents, and just see different parts of the world. And it was just a real change for women’s roles to be involved in that war.

PETER: Thanks very much, Mary. We’re glad to hear about your veterans in Phoenix, Arizona.

MARY: All right. Thank you.

BRIAN: Thanks very much. Bye, bye.