Chapter III

.]

[Footnote 12-7: White, _A Man Called White_, pp. 330-31.]

But the Truman administration had nearly exhausted the usual remedies open to it. The Attorney General had investigated the lynchings and Klan activities and the President had spoken out strongly and repeatedly against mob violence but without clear and pertinent civil rights legislation presidential exhortations and investigations counted for very little. Civil rights leaders like White understood this, and, given the mood of Congress, they were resigned to the lack of legislative support. Nevertheless, it was in this context that the President decided to create a committee to investigate and report on the status of civil rights in America.

The concept of a federal civil rights group had been circulating in the executive branch for some time. After the Detroit race riot in 1943, presidential assistant Jonathan Daniels had organized a committee to deal with racial troubles. Proposals to create a national organization to reduce racial tensions were advanced later in the war, principally by Saul K. Padover, a minority specialist in the Interior Department, and David K. Niles of the White House staff. Little came of the committee idea, however, because Roosevelt was convinced that any steps associated with integration would prove divisive and were unwise during wartime.[12-8] With the war over and a different political climate prevailing, Niles, now senior White House adviser on minority affairs, proposed the formation of a committee not only to investigate racial violence but also to explore the entire subject of civil rights.

[Footnote 12-8: Intervs, Nichols with Oscar Ewing, former federal security administrator and senior presidential adviser, and Jonathan Daniels, 1954, in Nichols Collection, CMH; see also McCoy and Ruetten, _Quest and Response_, p. 49.]

Walter White and his friends greeted the idea with some skepticism. They had come demanding action, but were met instead with another promise of a committee and the probability of interminable (p. 295) congressional debate and unproductive hearings.[12-9] But this time, for several reasons, it would be different. In the first place the civil rights leaders underestimated the sincerity of Truman's reaction to the racial violence. He had quickly agreed to create Niles's committee by executive order to save it from possible pigeonholing at the hands of a hostile Congress. He had also given the group, called the President's Committee on Civil Rights, a broad directive "to determine whether and in what respect current law enforcement measures and the authority and means possessed by Federal, State, and local governments may be strengthened and improved to safeguard the civil rights of the people."[12-10] The civil rights leaders also failed to gauge the effect Republican victories in the 1946 congressional elections would have on the administration. Finding it necessary to court the Negro and other minorities and hoping to confound congressional opposition, the administration sought a strong civil rights program to put before the Eightieth Congress. Thus, the committee's recommendations would get respectful attention in the White House. Finally, neither the civil rights leaders nor the President could have foreseen the effectiveness of the committee members. Serving under Charles E. Wilson, president of the General Electric Company, the group included among its fifteen members distinguished church leaders, public service lawyers, the presidents of Dartmouth College and the University of North Carolina, and prominent labor executives. The committee had two black members, Sadie T. M. Alexander, a lawyer from Philadelphia, and Channing H. Tobias, director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. Its members not only prepared a comprehensive survey of the condition of civil rights in America but also presented to the President on 29 October 1947 a far-reaching series of recommendations, in effect a program for corrective action that would serve as a bench mark for civil rights progress for many years.[12-11]

[Footnote 12-9: White, _A Man Called White_, pp. 330-31.]

[Footnote 12-10: Executive Order 9808, 5 Dec 46.]

[Footnote 12-11: In addition to Chairman Wilson, the following people served on the committee: Sadie T. M. Alexander, James B. Carey, John S. Dickey, Morris L. Ernst, Roland B. Gittelsohn, Frank P. Graham, Francis J. Haas, Charles Luckman, Francis P. Matthews, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., Henry Knox Sherrill, Boris Shishkin, Dorothy Tilly, and Channing Tobias.]

[Illustration: WALTER WHITE.]

The group recommended the concentration of civil rights work in the Department of Justice, the establishment of a permanent civil rights commission, a federal antilynching act, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, and legislation to correct discrimination in voting and naturalization laws. It also examined the state of (p. 296) civil rights in the armed forces and incidentally publicized the long-ignored survey of black infantry platoons that had fought in Europe in 1945.[12-12] It concluded:

The injustice of calling men to fight for freedom while subjecting them to humiliating discrimination within the fighting forces is at once apparent. Furthermore, by preventing entire groups from making their maximum contribution to the national defense, we weaken our defense to that extent and impose heavier burdens on the remainder of the population.[12-13]

[Footnote 12-12: Parts of the survey of attitudes of

## participants in the World War II integration of

platoons were included in remarks by Congresswoman Helen G. Douglas, published in the _Congressional Record_, 79th Cong., 2d sess., 1 Feb 1946, Appendix, pp. 432-443.]

[Footnote 12-13: _To Secure These Rights_, p. 162.]

The committee called for sweeping change in the armed forces, recommending that Congress enact legislation, followed by appropriate administrative action, to end all discrimination and segregation in the services. Concluding that the recent service unification provided a timely opportunity for revision of existing policies and practices, the committee proposed a specific ban on discrimination and segregation in all phases of recruitment, assignment, and training, including selection for service schools and academies, as well as in mess halls, quarters, recreational facilities, and post exchanges. It also wanted commissions and promotions awarded on merit alone and asked for new laws to protect servicemen from discrimination in communities adjacent to military bases.[12-14] The committee wanted the President to look beyond the integration of people working and living on military bases, and it introduced a concept that would gain considerable support in a future administration. The armed forces, it declared, _should_ be used as an instrument of social change. World War II had demonstrated that the services were a laboratory in which citizens could be educated on a broad range of social and political issues, and the administration was neglecting an effective technique for teaching the public the advantages of providing equal treatment and opportunity for all citizens.[12-15]

[Footnote 12-14: Ibid., pp. 162-63.]

[Footnote 12-15: Ibid., p. 47.]

President Truman deleted the recommendations on civil rights in the services when he transmitted the committee's recommendations to Congress in the form of a special message on 2 February 1948. Arguing that the services' race practices were matters of executive interest and pointing to recent progress toward better race relations in the armed forces, the President told Congress that he had already instructed the Secretary of Defense to take steps to eliminate remaining instances of discrimination in the services as rapidly as possible. He also promised that the personnel policies and practices of all the services would be made uniform.[12-16]

[Footnote 12-16: Truman, Special Message to the Congress on Civil Rights, 2 Feb 48, _Public Papers of the President, 1948_, pp. 121-26.]

To press for civil rights legislation for the armed forces or even to mention segregation was politically imprudent. Truman had two pieces of military legislation to get through Congress: a new draft law and a provision for universal military training. These he considered (p. 297) too vital to the nation's defense to risk grounding on the shoals of racial controversy. For the time being at least, integration of the armed forces would have to be played down, and any civil rights progress in the Department of Defense would have to depend on the persuasiveness of James Forrestal.

[Illustration: TRUMAN'S CIVIL RIGHTS CAMPAIGN _as seen by Washington Star cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman, March 14, 1948_.]

_Civil Rights and the Department of Defense_

The basic postwar reorganization of the National Military Establishment, the National Security Act of 1947, created the Office of the Secretary of Defense, a separate Department of the Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council. It also reconstituted the War Department as the Department of the Army and gave legal recognition as a permanent agency to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The principle of military unification that underlay the reorganization plan was muted in the legislation that finally emerged from Congress. Although the Secretary of Defense was given authority to establish general policies and to exercise general direction (p. 298) and control of the services, the services themselves retained a large measure of autonomy in their internal administration and individual service secretaries retained cabinet rank. In effect, the act created a secretary without a department, a reorganization that largely reflected the viewpoint of the Navy. The Army had fought for a much greater degree of unification, which would not be achieved until the passage of the National Security Act amendments of 1949. This legislation redesignated the unified department the Department of Defense, strengthened the powers of the Secretary of Defense, and provided for uniform budgetary procedures. Although the services were to be "separately administered," their respective secretaries henceforward headed "military departments" without cabinet status.

The first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, was a man of exceptional administrative talents, yet even before taking office he expressed strong reservations on the wisdom of a unified military department. As early as 30 July 1945, at breakfast with President Truman during the Potsdam Conference, Forrestal questioned whether any one man "was good enough to run the combined Army, Navy, and Air Departments." What kind of men could the president get in peacetime, he asked, to be under secretaries of War, Navy, and Air if they were subordinate to a single defense secretary?[12-17] Speaking to Lester Granger that same year on the power of the Secretary of the Navy to order the Marine Corps to accept Negroes, Forrestal expressed uncertainty about a cabinet officer's place in the scheme of things. "Some people think the Secretary is god-almighty, but he's just a god-damn civilian."[12-18] Even after his appointment as defense secretary doubts lingered: "My chief misgivings about unification derived from my fear that there would be a tendency toward overconcentration and reliance on one man or one-group direction. In other words, too much central control."[12-19]

[Footnote 12-17: Quoted in Walter Millis, ed., _The Forrestal Diaries_ (New York: Viking Press, 1951), p. 88.]

[Footnote 12-18: Quoted by Granger in the interview he gave Nichols in 1954.]

[Footnote 12-19: Quoted in Millis, _Forrestal Diaries_, p. 301.]

Forrestal's philosophy of management reinforced the limitations placed on the Secretary of Defense by the National Security Act. He sought a middle way in which the efficiency of a unified system could be obtained without sacrificing what he considered to be the real advantages of service autonomy. Thus, he supported a 1945 report of the defense study group under Ferdinand Eberstadt that argued for a "coordinated" rather than a "unitary" defense establishment.[12-20] Practical experience modified his fears somewhat, and by October 1948, convinced he needed greater power to control the defense establishment, Forrestal urged that the language of the National Security Act, which limited the Secretary of Defense to "general" authority only over the military departments, be amended to eliminate the word _general_. Yet he always retained his basic distrust of (p. 299) dictation, preferring to understand and adjust rather than to conclude and order.[12-21]

[Footnote 12-20: Ibid., pp. 117, 147. Timothy Stanley describes the Eberstadt report as the Navy's "constructive alternative" to unification. See Stanley's _American Defense and National Security_, p. 75; see also Hewes, _From Root to McNamara_, pp. 276-77. For a detailed analysis of defense unification, see Lawrence Legere, Jr., "Unification of the Armed Forces,"