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Book Review
| "Investigate Everything": Federal Efforts to Compel Black Loyalty during World War I. By Theodore Kornweibel Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. xii, 323 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-253-34009-8.)
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| Theodore Kornweibel Jr.'s thoroughly researched monograph might also have been subtitled "Much ado about nothing." Kornweibel shows that the standard operating procedure for federal agents investigating African American "disloyalty" during World War I was to assume that German agents were behind every expression of discontent, from that of sophisticated journalists such as A. Philip Randolph to obscure laundresses venting frustration at fussy white customers. While the actions of the federal investigators read like a Keystone Cops comedy, the effects on blacks who fell into their clutches was sometimes tragic. |
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Kornweibel also posits a related and thought-provoking second argument. He sees little African American patriotism during the war and much passive resistance to wartime appeals for sacrifice. Starting with the simple but often overlooked fact that a big majority of black people remained in the rural South, with little access to information from the outside world, he suggests that most black people were only dimly aware of the issues of the war. Those who were better informed saw it as a dispute among white people in which they had no personal stake. While government statistics showed a higher induction rate for African Americans, this was because racist draft boards were deaf to black pleas for exemption. More telling was the much higher desertion among black draftees who failed to report for service. |
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The core of this impressive volume lies in the mountain of anecdotal evidence that Kornweibel unearthed in Bureau of Investigation and Military Intelligence case files. Federal agents did "investigate everything," as the title proclaims, and just about always came up with nothing in the way of German agitation among black Americans, who, it turns out, had their own reasons to be agitated. Federal agents checked out thousands of tips generated by suspicious whites, many of them members of the American Protective League, a volunteer vigilante group that investigated draft evaders. While white "slackers" might be forcibly enlisted, black men might first go to prison. George Johnson of Liberty, Texas, spent eleven months in jail, essentially for not knowing how old he was, and a Richmond, Virginia, man spent two months on the chain gang for a similar "offense." |
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Very little of Kornweibel's research covers familiar ground. For example, we learn of the treatment accorded the Church of God in Christ, a black pacifist denomination whose members did not comply with the draft. The group's leader, Charles H. Mason, was arrested on trumped-up charges and wrongly smeared as being pro-German, but a grand jury refused to indict him. Individual church members were hounded relentlessly. |
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For pure comedy nothing beats the case of the Dutch anthropologist Herman Moens, whose real passion in life seems to have been photographing naked black women, with the intent of disproving racist social science. His foreign citizenship, strange accent, and fraternization with blacks brought suspicion of German sympathy upon him. Soon enough the federal agents brought charges of pornography against him, generating a case that split Washington's black community. As Kornweibel points out, white rapists of black women in the South were rarely if ever punished. |
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The most sympathetic figure to emerge in these pages is the military intelligence officer Walter Loving, an African American. Genuinely concerned with the morale of black troops, Loving followed the real story: racist actions by white officers and soldiers toward the men at military camps around the country. These included miserable conditions at some camps, racist treatment off base that went unaddressed, beatings by white gangs, insulting language by officers, and a host of other real offenses. Loving reported it all to his superiors, but they were focused on nonexistent German propaganda. They never listened, and they continued to "investigate everything." |
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| Mark Robert Schneider
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| Weymouth, Massachusetts |
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