Lovely War(113)

The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly. For instance, the black American troops in France have, by themselves, given rise to as many complaints for attempted rape as all the rest of the army. . . .*



The slanderous accusations regarding rape were utterly false.

To their credit, when higher French military command learned of the memo, they ordered that it be gathered and burned. At the war’s end, the French Army lavishly honored the contributions of black American servicemen, and the 369th’s in particular.





THE HEROES’ WELCOME


When the war ended in 1918, and black servicemen returned home, their evident pride, self-respect, and confidence infuriated southern white supremacists. Lynchings spiked in 1919. Black Great War veterans were frequent targets, and many more were beaten, threatened, and abused. Some faced violence simply for publicly appearing in uniform.

Conditions did not materially improve for most black Americans who served; for many, the aggressive backlash made things unbearable. But for better and for worse, black servicemen returning from the war were idealistic no more. They came home confident, angry, and determined; ready to organize and demand legal and civic rights. When World War II came along twenty-five years later, a million black soldiers served. Within twenty-five years of the Second World War’s end, the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), and Civil Rights Act of 1968, known as the Fair Housing Act, had passed. Fighting for freedom despite violence and oppression became part of the generational context from which civil rights heroes emerged.

For more on black servicemen during and after the war, I recommend the extraordinary work Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I, by Adriane Lentz-Smith. For a closer look at the Harlem Hellfighters, see A More Unbending Battle: The Harlem Hellfighters’ Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home, by Peter N. Nelson; and Harlem’s Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I, by Stephen L. Harris.

A 1977 documentary film, Men of Bronze: The Black American Heroes of World War I, directed by William Miles, then the official historian of the US 369th, features original footage of the Harlem Hellfighters, along with interviews with Captain Hamilton Fish III and other survivors from the regiment. The murders at Saint-Nazaire of men of the 15th New York National Guard (as they were then called) by marines, followed by retaliatory killing, are described in those interviews.

Many accounts chronicle the ugly reality of how all black Americans, Northern and Southern, were treated by white America during the early part of the twentieth century. I found Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, the autobiography of Richard Wright (also the author of Native Son), to be a riveting account of the chokehold racial hatred had during the war years and the decades that followed.





WOMEN AND WORLD WAR I


The Great War had a reverberating impact on women, particularly in the United Kingdom, where such a large percentage of men were pulled into the service of the war effort. Prior to the war, stringent laws and attitudes kept middle and upper-class British women within constrained, largely domestic spheres. Working-class women were chiefly employed as household servants, earning meager pay. Some women worked in factories, under appalling conditions, with wages they could scarcely live on.

When war broke out in Europe, millions of British men went overseas. Every industry now faced a dire labor crisis: farming, preaching, teaching, clerical work, entertainment, professional athletics, manufacturing, medicine, transportation, and more. Suddenly women were operating trains, driving trucks and ambulances, working in factories, assisting in hospitals, and even performing surgery. Women from every rung of the socioeconomic ladder stepped up to “do their bit.” Wealthy women organized charities and relief organizations for Belgian refugees, for war wounded, for widows and orphans. They opened hospitals and hired women doctors and nurses to staff them. Young women joined the Women’s Land Army and moved to the countryside to grow urgently needed food. The Red Cross employed thousands of nurses and nursing assistants. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) enlisted volunteers and secretaries at relief huts. Countless thousands of women left domestic servitude and took better-paying war production jobs in factories, turning out millions of artillery shells. For an engaging, thoughtful, and at times, hilarious account of how women stepped up to “do their bit” across all aspects of British life, I recommend Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One by Kate Adie.

Much of society was aghast to see women in the workplace, exposed to worldly vices. An anxious traditionalist element of society insisted that this “unnatural” state of affairs was temporary; as soon as the war ended, women would give up their jobs and return to domestic life, yielding jobs to the men. In large measure, this is what happened.

But women’s capacity had been proven, exposing the fallacy in the belief that women were too fragile, emotional, or unintelligent for political life. When the war ended, the British Parliament passed the “Representation of the People Act 1918,” granting suffrage (voting rights) to all men, regardless of property, and to all women over the age of thirty, with minimum property ownership requirements. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted American women the right to vote. In 1928, Parliament extended the Representation of the People Act, granting suffrage to all women over the age of twenty-one, on equal footing with men. (It took the Second World War drawing to a close for France to grant the vote to women in 1944.)