The Lessons of History (Page 2)

The great historian John Hope Franklin passed away this morning at the age of 94. The first African-American department chair at a white institution and the first African-American president of the American Historical Association, Franklin, the author of the seminal From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, was an integral part of the team of scholars who assisted Thurgood Marshall to win Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that outlawed the "separate but equal" doctrine in the nation's public schools. Here we repost a powerful speech by Franklin we published originally at TheNation.com in 2006. It came on the occasion of his receipt of the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Award from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

This so-called citizen army was far from democratic, however. In a country whose population consisted of Europeans, Africans, Asians, Spaniards, and native Americans, the extent of the democratic nature of the citizen army depended on attitudes on the part of the powers that made socio- military policy and had little to do with democracy. For example, black volunteers were rejected by George Washington when they pleaded for an opportunity to serve in the army during the War for Independence; and they were not admitted until the grave military situation drove Washington to seek and accept warriors wherever he could find them. During the Civil War, President Lincoln thanked and sent home the early black volunteers who were anxious to fight for freedom as well as for what they hoped would be their country. Only after the president issued the Emancipation Proclamation and recognized that the free blacks and former slaves could indeed be an asset in the struggle against the Confederacy did he take steps to democratize the army by accepting African Americans into the armed forces.

In the twentieth century this country moved haltingly and spasmodically toward assembling a democratic army; and as it did, the military and civilian leaders gave ground grudgingly. During World War I, the military accepted blacks, and despite their remarkable valor, not one of them received the Medal of Honor, despite their proved bravery under fire and under incredible circumstances. Perhaps that was because the American forces wanted nothing to do with them and assigned them to their French allies. The French, in turn, treated the African American soldiers so well that white Americans, civilians as well as the armed forces, did not welcome them on their return to the United States after the armistice was signed in l9l8.

It was much the same during World War II. Early in l942 I volunteered for the United States Navy following the attack on Pearl Harbor after the United States issued desperate calls for volunteers. After viewing my qualifications the recruiting officer indicated that I had all of the necessary qualifications except color. One wonders what people in other parts of the world - during the Spanish American War, World War I, and World War II - thought of the nature of the democracy that this country was espousing with a jim-crow, all-male military force that was fighting to "save the world for democracy."

There is serious question of how democratic the armed services are today. Its recruits are lured by powerful and persuasive appeals, especially to the very young and the very poor. They are offered every possible lure, ranging from candy and chewing gum to fancy enlistment bonuses for those who require greater persuasion. Meanwhile, by holding the minimum wage to just over five dollars per hour, the military becomes more attractive than the workplace for impoverished and untrained day laborers. It can be argued that the United States is attempting to spread democracy throughout the world through the use of a poor man's army taken from a class that has virtually no voice in policy making in general and surely no voice in the making or execution of military policy. As we all know and as we have witnessed during the conflict in Vietnam, the families of privilege and the families of means could maneuver to keep their sons out of the draft through their connections. Today, as the war drones on in Iraq and Afghanistan, they do not even have to make the attempt. They can sit on Wall Street or connect themselves with the war-time suppliers of goods and services or the oil magnates and make their fortunes while the poor recruits fight to extend so-called democracy throughout the world.

As part of the rise of democracy in the United States, women have fought vigorously and males in a position to yield have somewhat begrudgingly granted them an improved place in the social order. To be sure, women in the United States have been as American as the men and as democratic, if not more so, as the men. Thus, it is not surprising that they have had to fight for equality before the law, equality at the ballot box, and equality in the workplace. Only in recent years have there been women in high places in the government and only more recently in the board rooms of the great American corporations. We comment in the most condescending, if solicitous, manner about the lowly place occupied by women in the Middle East and in certain parts of Southeast Asia. We fail to see the steady rise in the status of women even in those places, to say nothing of Europe and other parts of Asia and the Americas. When we recall the instances in which women have risen to the very top of their governments in Great Britain, Germany, India, the Philippines, and Liberia, we should speak with the greatest humility about spreading democracy throughout the world. After all, the so-called weaker sex in the United States would be skeptical of an American democracy that places ceilings on how high they can go in many areas of American life.

At the end of World War I, many people in various parts of the world, Americans among them, believed that the only hope for establishing and maintaining peace in the world was through an international organization with sufficient authority to enforce international commitments. When some nations balked at the suggestion that the only way to maintain international peace was through a League of Nations in some form, President Woodrow Wilson warned them that if they did not move toward that obvious need, they would make themselves "the most conspicuous and deserved failures in the history of the world." If he persuaded the great powers of the world regarding the truth of his statement, he was unable to persuade his own colleagues and fellow citizens in the United States. Democracy in the world, and indeed, in the United States, might have come sooner had the United States seen fit to join the League of Nations after World War I, but the conservative, nationalist, isolationist element in the United States steadfastly refused to have anything to do with an international organization. A world organization without the United States not only doomed this country to steadfast and stubborn isolation, but the rest of the world to the kind of bickering and misunderstanding that would lead to yet another world conflagration. In the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, the United States was not only isolationist but needlessly aloof from developments in other parts of the world. Consequently, it had no voice of any consequence as the world drifted toward yet another conflagration.

What is remarkable is that as the United States entered the war in l9l7 to save the world for democracy, it moved significantly away from democracy in several important ways. Not only did it reject large numbers of volunteers solely on the basis of color, but it also established policies of racial discrimination that kept the military units significantly segregated and undemocratic while they fought to preserve democracy elsewhere. In the postwar years, segregation persisted almost everywhere, while the raids conducted by Attorney General Palmer, presumably searching for communists and other "traitors" who sought to strip Americans of their freedoms, in turn stripped their victims of every semblance of civil liberty and other rights that presumably they would enjoy in a so-called democracy. These "official acts" by the United States government were insufficient to distract the country from the shameful race riots that broke out, among other places, in Washington, Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, Elaine, Tulsa, and Rosewood.

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