AHC/WI: A Republican President desegregated the Army

Thomas1195

Banned
IOTL, it was President Truman did this.

Your challenge is to have a Republican President do so.

What would be the following political consequences?
 

kernals12

Banned
I've read Calvin Coolidge was pretty forward thinking on civil rights. But he was president when the KKK was at its peak, and quite strong outside the Jim Crow South. To say it wouldn't have gone over well is an understatement.
 

samcster94

Banned
I've read Calvin Coolidge was pretty forward thinking on civil rights. But he was president when the KKK was at its peak, and quite strong outside the Jim Crow South. To say it wouldn't have gone over well is an understatement.
I think making the Depression a mild recession, but somehow, civil rights improves in the 30's-40's like OTL might lead to this.
 
IOTL, it was President Truman did this.

Your challenge is to have a Republican President do so.

What would be the following political consequences?
Truman feels himself beholden to his Southern base, waits until after the 48 election, somehow he loses reelection, Dewey comes in, desegregates the Army.

Challenge done.
 

Driftless

Donor
Keep Wilson out of the White House and race relations make better progress by steps. Perhaps the AEF is less segregated, opening the door. Wilson set the clock back several years.
 
Ironically Harding for all his faults, was very progressive on race relations. “We cannot leave our negro citizens in a state of childhood, forever punished and limited”. April 5 1922, New York world.
 
IOTL, it was President Truman did this.

Your challenge is to have a Republican President do so.

What would be the following political consequences?

Dewey if he had won in 1944. (His winning in 1948 doesn't count because Truman had already issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26 of that year.)

The 1944 Republican platform stated: "We pledge an immediate Congressional inquiry to ascertain the extent to which mistreatment, segregation and discrimination against Negroes who are in our armed forces are impairing morale and efficiency, and the adoption of corrective legislation." http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25835
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Dewey if he had won in 1944. (His winning in 1948 doesn't count because Truman had already issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26 of that year.)

The 1944 Republican platform stated: "We pledge an immediate Congressional inquiry to ascertain the extent to which mistreatment, segregation and discrimination against Negroes who are in our armed forces are impairing morale and efficiency, and the adoption of corrective legislation." http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25835
What would be the political impacts of this? Especially the long-term ones?
 
Ike in ‘48?

(1) A Republican president elected in 1948 is too late because, as I noted earlier in this thread, Truman had already issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26 of that year.

(2) Eisenhower was unlikely to have run at all in 1948, but if he did run it would more likely be as a Democrat if, say, MacArthur won the Republican nomination.

(3) In any event, Eisenhower's testimony before the Senate in April 1948 seemed to show that he had some reservations about desegregating the military: https://books.google.com/books?id=A9ny4Elgxp0C&pg=PA12
 
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Ironically Harding for all his faults, was very progressive on race relations. “We cannot leave our negro citizens in a state of childhood, forever punished and limited”. April 5 1922, New York world.

The Birmingham speech was in some ways progressive--in insisting on impartial voting, standards, equality of economic and educational opportunity, etc.--but explicitly supported social segregation: "Men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. Indeed, it would be helpful to have that word “equality” eliminated from this consideration; to have it accepted on both sides that this is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, and inescapable difference... Racial amalgamation there can not be." He also referred with apparent approval to Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color: "Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s book on The Rising Tide of Color, or, say, the thoughtful review of some recent literature of this question which Mr. F. D. Lugard presented in a recent Edinburg Review, must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts..." The whole address can be found at https://books.google.com/books?id=0RNFAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA3-PA3 In any event, "Formally complying with his campaign promises, Harding did call on Congress to enact anti- lynching legislation and to establish a commission to study American race relations, but his actual efforts on these matters were minimal." https://books.google.com/books?id=gP3DbiRcbPAC&pg=PA119 So he was hardly likely to do something as politically reckless (by the standards of the 1920's) as desegregate the military...
 
Keep Wilson out of the White House and race relations make better progress by steps. Perhaps the AEF is less segregated, opening the door. Wilson set the clock back several years.

You do know that one reason some prominent African Americans like Du Bois supported Wilson in 1912 was precisely because of the attitude shown by TR and Taft toward blacks in the military in the Brownsville affair? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville_affair
 

Driftless

Donor
You do know that one reason some prominent African Americans like Du Bois supported Wilson in 1912 was precisely because of the attitude shown by TR and Taft toward blacks in the military in the Brownsville affair? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville_affair

Certainly, to their subsequent dismay, on discovering Wilson's true measure of inherent racism.
Wilson and Race Relations: Wikipedia
Several historians have spotlighted consistent examples in the public record of Wilson's overtly racist policies and political appointments, such as segregationists he placed in his cabinet.[275][276][277][278][279] According to scholars, Wilson believed that slavery was wrong on economic labor grounds, rather than for moral reasons.[279] They also argue that he idealized the slavery system in the South, viewing masters as patient with "indolent" (lazy) slaves.[279] In terms of Reconstruction, Wilson held the common southern view that the South was demoralized by Northern carpetbaggers and that overreach on the part of the Radical Republicans justified extreme measures to reassert Democratic national and state governments
While president of Princeton University, Wilson had discouraged blacks from applying for admission, preferring to keep the peace among white students and alumni.[283] Wilson's History of the American People (1901) dismissed lynchings committed by the Ku Klux Klan of the late 1860s as a lawless reaction to a lawless period. The President defended them, writing that "[the Klan] began to attempt by intimidation what they were not allowed to attempt by the ballot or by any ordered course of public action".[284]

Wilson's War Department drafted hundreds of thousands of blacks into the army, giving them equal pay with whites, but in accord with military policy from the Civil War through the Second World War, kept them in all-black units with white officers, and kept the great majority out of combat.[285] When a delegation of blacks protested the discriminatory actions, Wilson told them "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen." In 1918, W. E. B. Du Bois—a leader of the NAACP who had campaigned for Wilson believing he was a "liberal southerner"—was offered an Army commission in charge of dealing with race relations; DuBois accepted, but he failed his Army physical and did not serve.[286][287] By 1916, Du Bois opposed Wilson, charging that his first term had seen "the worst attempt at Jim Crow legislation and discrimination in civil service that [blacks] had experienced since the Civil War."
During Wilson's term, segregation was ordered in the Washington offices of the Navy, the Treasury, and the Postmaster General, and photographs became required for all new federal job applicants. After black leaders pressed him, President Wilson explained he was trying to "reduce friction," and that he "sincerely believe[d] it to be in their interest."[292] Under Wilson, racial segregation was quickly implemented at the Post Office Department, and many African-American employees were downgraded and even fired

Wilson and Rail Mail Service
The presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) marked a particularly difficult period for race relations in the RMS. Discrimination was a problem prior to President Wilson but found a huge public forum during his presidency. The era of Wilsonian Progressivism was tainted by segregation and discrimination against the African American community. Federal segregation marked a huge set-back for Black workers in the Post Office Department, which at that time was the largest employer of African Americans in the federal government.

The first year of Wilson’s administration was a significant moment in government-sanctioned discrimination and federal segregation. Under Wilson, segregation was introduced into the Federal Government.

Basically, Wilson's otherwise somewhat progressive social views did not extend to other races, but rather his bigotry more overt and aggressive than the common thread of racism of the era. Champ Clark, who was Wilson's closest Democratic rival in the 1912 election, was certainly no racial progressive, but his actions don't appear as overt from what I've read.
 
Certainly, to their subsequent dismay, on discovering Wilson's true measure of inherent racism.

I wasn't defending Wilson. My point was that the thing that led people like DuBois to support Wilson--which DuBois admitted was a risk--was that people like Taft and TR seemed just as unsatisfactory on racial issues.

IMO racial desegregation of the armed forces during World War I would have been politically unthinkable under any president. We should not forget that in 1912 TR supported a lily-white Progressive Party in the South (though he was willing to accept African Americans into the Progressive Party in the North). Moreover, "Under William Howard Taft the tendency of the Roosevelt administration to minimize Negro appointments in the South was made overt policy. Taft unequivocally came out against such appointments as dangerous to racial tranquility: 'There is no constitutional right in anyone to hold office. The question is one of fitness. A one-legged man would hardly be selected for a mail carrier, and although we would deplore his misfortune, nevertheless we would not seek to neutralize it by giving him a place that he could not fill.' Inasmuch as appointment of Negroes to prominent positions in the South would create antagonism that would hamper their effectiveness, Taft chose to regard Negroes as not fit for such offices and avoided their selection. https://books.google.com/books?id=0NsvJT9e83YC&pg=PT33 Moreover "During President William Howard Taft's administration, racial segregation was established in the Census Bureau", thus setting a precedent for Wilson's extending segregation to the Treasury Department, the Post Office, etc. https://books.google.com/books?id=9aYoeozswVAC&pg=PA104 Again, the point is not to defend Wilson, but to show the extent to which even Republicans, whatever their personal feelings, yielded to the white South on segregation.
 
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Truman feels himself beholden to his Southern base, waits until after the 48 election, somehow he loses reelection, Dewey comes in, desegregates the Army.

Challenge done.

As an aside here, desegregating the military and supporting the Dem Convention's civil rights plank probably won Truman the election by shifting enough black votes toward the Democrats to win the crucial 3 states of Ohio, California and Illinois that swung the electoral college to Truman. While I don't doubt that Truman was genuinely disturbed by reports of returning black war veterans being mistreated affecting his views on civil rights, Clark Clifford's 1947 memo on strategy for 1948 covered this in some depth with a focus on the importance of the black vote, meaning that Truman's actions were also about calculating politics:

"(d) The Negro. Since 1932 when, after intensive work by President Roosevelt, their leaders swung the Pennsylvania Negro bloc into the Democratic column with the classic remark, "Turn your picture of Abraham Lincoln to the all - we have paid that debt", the northern Negro has voted Democratic (with the exception of 1946 in New York). A theory of many professional politicians is that the northern Negro voter today holds the balance of power it Presidential elections for the simple arithmetical reason that the Negroes not only vote in a bloc but are geographically concentrated in the pivotal, large and closely contested electoral states such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. This theory may or may not be absolutely true, but it is certainly close enough to the truth to be extremely arguable.


In great measure, this explains the assiduous and continuous cultivation of the New York Negro vote by Governor Dewey and his insistence that his controllable legislature pass a state anti-discrimination act. No less an authority than Ed Flynn has said privately that Dewey will take New York from President Truman in 1948 because he controls the Negro and Italian blocs. This explains the strenuous efforts made by Wilkie in the 1940 campaign to get the Negro vote and it, of course, explains the long, continuing solicitude of the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party toward the Negro.


There are several straws, aside from the loyalty of his leaders to Dewey, that the northern Negro is today ready to swing back to his traditional moorings -- the Republican Party. Under the tutelage of Walter White, of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People, and other intelligent, educated and sophisticated leaders, the Negro voter has become a cynical, hardboiled trader. He is just about convinced today that he can better his present economic lot by swinging his vote in a solid bloc to the Republicans. He believes the rising dominance of the Southern conservatives in the Democratic councils of the Congress and of the Party makes it only too clear that he can go no further by supporting the present Administration. Whether his interest lies in a Federal Anti-Poll Tax Statute, in the protection of his civil liberties or in a permanent federal FEPC, he understands clearly that he now has no chance of success with any of these because of the Southern Senators of the Democratic Party.


As well aware of this Democratic chink in the armour as the Negro are the Republican politicians. They make no great secret of their intent try to pass a FEPC Act and anti-poll tax statute in the next Congress. Whether they are successful -- or whether Democratic filibusters will block them -- they can't see how they can lose in such a situation either way. The Negro press, often venal, is already strongly Republican.


To counteract this trend, the Democratic Party can point only to the obvious -- that the really great improvement in the economic lot of the Negro of the North has come in the last sixteen years only because of the sympathy and policies of a Democratic Administration. The trouble is that this has worn a bit thin with the passage of the years. Unless the Administration makes a determined campaign to help the Negro (and everybody else) on the problems of high prices and housing -- and capitalized politically on its efforts -- the Negro vote is already lost. Unless there are now and real efforts (as distinguished from mere political gestures which are today thoroughly understood and strongly resented by sophisticated Negro leaders), the Negro bloc, when, certainly in Illinois and probably in New York Ohio, does hold the balance of power, will go Republican." [emphasis added]

In short, an attempt by Truman to cater to the Southern wing of the party was a ticket to defeat.
 
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