A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  In a similar vein, John “Dizzy” Gillespie, a pioneer of bebop jazz, gained 4-F status by sharing these thoughts with his recruitment officer:

  Well, look, at this time, at this stage in my life here in the United States whose foot has been in my ass? The white man’s foot has been in my ass hole buried up to his knee in my ass hole! … Now you’re speaking of the enemy. You’re telling me the German is the enemy. At this point, I can never even remember having met a German. So if you put me out there with a gun in my hand and tell me to shoot at the enemy, I’m liable to create a case of “mistaken identity,” of who I might shoot.

  Virtually announcing their indifference toward citizenship, tens of thousands of black and Mexican American youths adopted the zoot suit style, which many whites considered to be outrageous and lacking proper respectability. The zoot-suiters were called unpatriotic slackers who were more interested in having a good time than in helping the war effort. This was largely true. Since the U.S. War Production Board had declared illegal the use of excess fabric for clothing, the zoot suit’s baggy trouser legs, exaggerated shoulders, and accompanying wide-brim hat were patently unpatriotic. Many of the zoot-suiters were involved in street gangs, all of them were deeply immersed in the swing dance craze, and they were well known as draft dodgers. One zoot-suiter wrote a letter to the police and the draft board that included the following poem:

  Yea, so it be

  I leave this thought with thee

  Do not attempt to fuck with me.

  In early June 1943, local newspapers in Los Angeles played up a story that Mexicans had beaten up a group of Anglo sailors. In response, thousands of marines, sailors, soldiers, and civilians imposed a reign of terror on Mexican American neighborhoods in LA, assaulting zoot-suiters, stripping off their clothes, and cutting their long hair. No one was killed, but more than one hundred people were injured in the violence.

  During the war, much of the racist hatred normally directed at African Americans was diverted toward the Japanese. It became commonplace to talk about the Japanese as a distinctively devious, sadistic, and cold-blooded “race” of people. This anti-Japanese racism, combined with the fact that there were only 127,000 Japanese in the United States at the time, made it relatively easy for the federal government to take action against what it thought was an internal threat to national security. Many in the State Department believed that Japanese living in Hawaii had helped plan the attack on Pearl Harbor and that Japanese in California were conspiring to help an invasion of the West Coast. In February 1942, Roosevelt signed an executive order, called the Civilian Exclusion Order, authorizing the army to place all people of Japanese descent living in the United States—even those born in the United States—in what were called “relocation centers.” Roosevelt then issued another executive order creating the War Relocation Authority to oversee the project. Nearly all Japanese Americans were imprisoned in relocation centers, which were spread out in remote locations across the West.

  Indeed, many Japanese Americans were not loyal to the United States. Just before the war began, more than 10,000 Japanese Americans joined the Japanese Military Servicemen’s League, which paid dues to the Japanese army, and close to 5,000 were members of the Imperial Comradeship Society, which pledged to carry out sabotage against the U.S. The league’s prospectus proclaimed, “whenever the Japanese government begins a military campaign, we Japanese must be united and everyone must do his part.” Meetings of the two groups commenced with the singing of the Japanese national anthem and concluded with declarations of loyalty “for our emperor, our country, our race, our posterity.” At one league meeting in Gardena Valley, near Los Angeles, members were told “to encourage the proudest Japanese national spirit which has ever existed, to fulfill the fundamental principle behind the wholesome mobilization of the Japanese people, to strengthen the powers of resistance against the many hindrances which are to be faced in the future,” and to “assist in financing the war with the utmost effort on the part of both the first and second generation Japanese and whoever is a descendant of the Japanese race. Now is the time to awaken the Japanese national spirit in each and everyone who has the blood of the Japanese race in him. We now appeal to the Japanese in Gardena Valley to rise up at this time.” The combined membership of the two groups comprised more than 12 percent of the total Japanese American population.

  Other Japanese American organizations promoted similar loyalty to the home country. The Society for Defending the Country by Swords was made up of former soldiers in the Japanese military, and the Togo Kai raised money for the Japanese navy. Moreover, the historian John Stephan found that people of Japanese descent living in Hawaii purchased 3 million yen ($900,000, or $12 million in current dollars) worth of Imperial war bonds and gave 1.2 million yen ($350,000, or $4 million in current dollars) to the Japanese National Defense and Soldiers’ Relief Fund between 1937 and 1939. Reportedly, Japanese living in Hawaii contributed more per capita to the National Defense Fund than did people living in Japan at the time. Japanese-language newspapers in California were staunchly pro-Japanese before wartime censors shut them down. A few months before the Pearl Harbor attack, the New World Sun, based in San Francisco, declared that Japanese in California were “ready to respond to the call of the mother country with one mind” and that “our fellow Japanese countrymen must be of one spirit and should endeavor to unite our Japanese societies in this country.” Japanese-language newspapers in Hawaii referred to the Imperial Army as “our army” and to Japanese fighter pilots as “our angry eagles.” Stephan also found that the tone and content of the English sections of Japanese American newspapers were far different than the sections in Japanese: “Treatment of Japan in the English sections was comparatively detached. However, the sections written in Japanese reverberated with [pro-Japan] patriotic rhetoric.” Similarly, inscribed above the altar in Buddhist temples across Hawaii and California was the command “Now let us worship the Emperor every morning.”

  Virtually all Japanese American children attended Japanese-language schools, where they were taught not only the Japanese language, the making of sushi and origami, and the sport of sumo wrestling, but were also commanded to devote themselves to the Emperor. U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye, who attended one of the schools in Hawaii, recalled the intensely nationalistic teachings of the instructors:

  Day after day, the [Buddhist] priest who taught us ethics and Japanese history hammered away at the divine prerogatives of the Emperor… . He would tilt his menacing crew-cut skull at us and solemnly proclaim, “You must remember that only a trick of fate has brought you so far from your homeland, but there must be no question of your loyalty. When Japan calls, you must know that it is Japanese blood that flows in your veins.”

  Another observer reported that the school day began with the instructor ordering students to “line up in ranks at stiff attention like miniature soldiers. The teacher would then hold up a picture of the emperor or a famous Japanese general or admiral and the students would raise their hands in a salute and shout ‘Banzai.’” Japan’s Department of Education supplied many of the textbooks used in the American Japanese-language schools. One junior high school textbook declared, “We must never forget—not even for a moment—that we are Japanese.” The historian Page Smith calls these schools “in practical fact agencies of Japanese nationalism.” At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, thirty-nine thousand nisei (American-born children of Japanese immigrants) in Hawaii and eighteen thousand in California were enrolled in Japanese-language schools. During the war, several thousand American citizens of Japanese ancestry answered the call, fled the United States, and joined the Imperial Army or Navy.*

  This is not a defense of the internment of Japanese Americans. Nor is it an attempt, made by many conservatives who have publicized this evidence, to support racial profiling and anti-immigration measures. It is, however, part of an argument that America was far less united than we are led to believe.**

  Perhaps the mo
st important battle on the home front was the battle for production, or more precisely, the battle to make workers produce. Tom Brokaw has told us all about Rosie the Riveter, victory gardens, and bond drives, but we hear nothing about the workers in defense plants who went on strike—and were called selfish, unpatriotic, and even traitorous.

  The Office of Price Administration, which had been created during the war to control inflation, and the War Production Board, set strict limits on wages in most industries. Many workers made less per hour than they would have without the controls, since the labor market was so tight. Because of this, but also because of the strict discipline that had been instituted in the war industries, including mandatory overtime, there were more than fourteen thousand strikes involving more than six million workers during the war. Most of these strikes were in defense industries despite the no-strike pledge taken by the leaders of both labor union federations, and because of this, most were “wildcat” strikes in which the unions in the industries denounced the strikes and attempted to punish the strikers. In most cases, the unauthorized walkouts were responses to speedups, mandatory overtime, and disciplinary measures by plant managers. But the strikes were another indication that the willingness to sacrifice for the war effort was not as deep as the government would have liked. Workers who struck in the war industries were denounced for being unpatriotic, for putting their own interests above the interests of the wartime state. Those criticisms were largely true.

  There were also two quite unintended and highly ironic consequences of the war that helped create the greatest renegade generation. First of all, the war was a watershed for gays and lesbians. Millions of gay people in isolated towns moved to cities or bases where they were able to find one another. Gay men who joined the military called it the turning point in their lives, and joining Women’s Auxiliary Corps became well known among lesbians as the thing to do. Many gay men of the “Greatest Generation” have told of having their first sexual experiences in the military. Bob Thompson’s happened on a troop train from San Diego to Madison, Wisconsin. “At the end of some cars,” he remembered, “there were little compartments that would sleep maybe four. I think four of us had the same idea when we got on the train. We just rushed for one of those compartments, and all of us were gay. So it was something at night when we closed that door.”

  A captain in the Navy Surgeon General’s Office reported in August 1942 that “the problem of the homosexual in the Naval Service and what to do with him is ever before us… . It seems likely,” the captain predicted, “that under these circumstances homosexuality may become more widespread in the service as the war progresses.” William Menninger, a psychiatrist who served as chief consultant to the surgeon general of the army, became convinced that the culture of the wartime army rapidly increased homosexual activity. In his study of the role of psychiatry in wartime, published in 1948, Menninger shocked many by characterizing the U.S. military during World War II, in a “technical, psychiatric sense,” as “fundamentally a homosexual society.” The success of any military endeavor, Menninger argued, “depended on the ability of men to get along with, live with, and work with other men, and to accept the almost total exclusion of women from their lives.” To meet these demands, “certain adjustments were required of the ‘normal’” trainee—most importantly the establishment of intimate bonds with other men. “Many men discovered satisfaction in a physical interest in other men, which often surprised them.” And while the culture of the military appeared to be producing homosexual feelings in “normal” men, it was also being flooded with unambiguously homosexual men. Menninger surmised that “for every homosexual who was referred or came to the Medical Department (to be diagnosed and discharged), there were five or ten who never were detected.”

  “I found that it was quite easy to have sex in the army,” recalled Robert Fleischer. “It was very furtive at first, because even the gay ones were afraid to expose themselves because they didn’t know if you were going to turn them in or not turn them in. And after a while, you knew who was [gay], who wasn’t, who [was] to be trusted, who not. There seemed to be available and interested men all through my basic training.”

  Soon after its establishment in May 1942, the Women’s Army Corps gained a reputation as a hotbed of lesbianism. Increased screening found that many women chose the WAC from motives including “loves a uniform and what it stands for,” “always wanted to be a boy and join the army,” seeks “companionship of girls with similar patriotic desire,” wants the “opportunity to mix with other girls,” and so on. When Pat Bond went to enlist in the WAC, she recalled that the women “looked sort of like all my gym teachers in drag. Stockings, little earrings, her hair slicked back and very daintily done so you couldn’t tell she was a dyke, but I knew!” Bond explained that many “butch” lesbians she knew applied for the WAC “wearing men’s clothes” and despite these women’s masculine appearances, the psychiatrists admitted them. “By God, when I got into basic, I thought I had transferred to hog heaven! … Everybody was going with someone,” Bond remembered, “or had a crush on somebody or was getting ready to go with somebody.”

  Betty Somers, who went through basic training at women marines boot camp at Cherry Point, North Carolina, recalled that she never saw “any particular reaction” to “women being affectionate with each other.” In particular, she remembered, women who volunteered for the motor pool, which provided the transportation of personnel and supplies in trucks and other military vehicles, were likely to be gay. At Somers’s base, the women marines who drove the trucks were “really a sort of up-front, out-and-out lesbian group” with an especially strong softball team.

  So great were authorities’ perceptions of homosexuality in the services that they attempted to channel “abnormal” impulses into behavior conducive to military discipline. Trainees who exhibited “potential homosexual tendencies” could be “deterred from active participation” in gay sex by instructing them to redirect their sexual desires into a “ ‘heteroworship’ type of reaction.” Similarly, WAC officers attempted to channel lesbian tendencies into nonsexual obedience to superiors. A good officer, “by the strength of her influence,” could “bring out in the woman who had previously exhibited homosexual tendencies a definite type of leadership which can then be guided into normal fields of expression, making her a valued member of the corps.”

  One of the more striking but little acknowledged features of military life during World War II was the ubiquitous GI drag show. “From Broadway to Guadalcanal, on the backs of trucks, makeshift platforms, and elegant theater stages,” writes historian Allan Bérubé, “American GIs did put on all-male shows for each other that almost always featured female impersonation routines.” The Army Special Services Headquarters, which provided instructions for soldiers to stage their own entertainment, virtually codified the drag scene that is central to gay culture. The Special Services handbook for the show Hi, Yank! contained more than eight pages of patterns and illustrations for dresses to be worn by male soldiers, including instructions for making a “G.I. showgirl” gown out of an army blanket and a tutu out of a military-issue “T-shirt dyed pink.” Many of the shows put on by soldiers were written by playwrights who were themselves gay and had developed the “camp” style of gay theater. Several army bases saw productions of Private Maxie Reporting, which featured an overtly gay character named “Pfc. Bloomingslip” who “wears a green carnation” and reports to Officer Candidate School because, as he says, “to be an officer would just be too, too queer!” The all-female satiric play The Women, which had become a gay camp classic before the war and would be a staple of gay theater through the 1950s and 1960s, was one of the most popular shows put on by GIs. Life magazine singled out the cross-dressing performers for praise in its review of a production of the play at Lowry Field in Colorado: “Despite their hairy chests, size-16 shoes and bulging biceps, these ‘actresses’ did a good job with the play, present[ing] it as straight comedy… . After the firs
t hour, the audience forgot that ‘the women’ were men, remembered only when they talked about having babies in their bass voices.”

  But the most popular Special Services theatrical production was This Is the Army, which according to Bérubé “became the prototypical World War II soldier show and established the three basic wartime styles of GI drag.” These were the comic “pony ballets” of masculine men dancing and singing in dresses, highly skilled drag performances of songs, and what would become the centerpiece of postwar gay entertainment: impersonations of female celebrities. Reviewing one performance of This Is the Army, the New York Herald Tribune concluded that it “has everything except girls, and the terrible truth is that you don’t miss them.” In 1943 the War Department and Warner Bros. coproduced a film version of the play that featured several major Hollywood stars, including George Murphy, Joan Leslie, Alan Hale, and Ronald Reagan. Bérubé notes that the great influx of women into the military services beginning in 1942 and many attempts to stage male-and-female productions did not reduce the demand among GIs for all-male drag shows.

  Perhaps the most important and lasting consequence of the war for gay culture was the emergence of gay and lesbian bars and clubs in cities near military bases. Were San Francisco not adjacent to Treasure Island Naval Base, Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, and Naval Air Station Alameda, it would not have been the site of so many well-known gay bars, such as Finnochio’s, the Top of the Mark, the Black Cat, the Silver Dollar, the Silver Rail, the Old Crow, Li-Po’s, and the Rickshaw, and would not have become the gay capital of the western United States.