After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  The adjutants general of the National Guard in all but two states (South Carolina, where the highest Guard officer is elected by the public, and Vermont, where he is chosen by the legislature) are appointed by the current governors. They, like all Guard officers, are meant to meet standards set by the federal government, but as early as 1948 the army’s Director of Personnel and Administration complained that “experience since the war has demonstrated that governors will not accept the decision of a Federal Recognition Board.” National Guard General Walsh himself complained, in 1948, that Governor Earl Long had fired a Louisiana adjutant general because of political pressure from a Plaquemines Parish constituent, Leander Perez. In six states today, the adjutant general of the National Guard is also the Director of Selective Service. National Guard officers sit on almost all draft boards—which is a bit like asking the leaders of the draft-avoiders (or, as friends of the Guard prefer to put it, the “draft-motivated”) to administer the draft impartially. In a recent Congressional Quarterly survey, only twenty-two U.S. senators and representatives actually said they had sons or grandsons in the reserves or the National Guard. But of the 234 draft-eligible sons and grandsons of members of Congress, 118 had received other sorts of deferment since the Vietnam War began. Only twenty-six served at all in Vietnam. None were missing or killed. One—Captain Clarence D. Long III, son of a representative from Maryland—was wounded.

  One hundred and twenty-two U.S. senators and representatives (more than a fifth of the members of Congress) currently hold commissions in the reserves or the National Guard, and an organization of young Guardsmen and reservists, called the Reservists Committee to Stop the War, has filed suit against the secretary of defense on the ground that the Constitution specifically forbids U.S. congressmen from holding “any office” bestowed by, or under the control of, the executive branch of government.

  In “In Pursuit of Equity: Who Serves When Not All Serve?”—a report prepared in 1967 by the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service, under the chairmanship of Burke Marshall—recommendations for draft reform included something on the order of a draft lottery, which we now have, and the abolition of the National Guard as a draft haven, which may follow of itself, in December 1970, when the draft lottery has gone completely into effect. There may then be National Guard problems of an entirely other kind.

  A chronology of domestic duty by National Guard units since World War II reads like a history of the country transposed into a rather special key. In 1945, there were only three call-ups, all local—one for an industrial dispute in Indiana, two for reasons now forgotten, labeled in Guard histories “unknown.” In 1946, there were five call-ups, all for nothing much, three of them “unknown.” Between 1947 and 1950, there were nine, including five “industrial disputes,” one “threat to local sheriff” (Loudon, Tennessee), and, in Puerto Rico, one “uprising against government.” In 1951, there was just one call-up, a “race riot” in Cicero, Illinois. In 1952, there were three: two “prison riots” and a “student riot,” at Columbia, Missouri. In 1953, there was nothing. In 1954 and 1955, two “crises in law enforcement” (Phenix City, Alabama; Gulfport, Mississippi), three “prison riots,” one “industrial dispute,” and (in Whiting, Indiana) a “natural disaster.” In 1956—two years after the Supreme Court decision to integrate the schools—there were three “integration crises” and one memorable “teenage riot” (on the beach, at Daytona, Florida). There were four “civil disturbances” in 1957 (in Benton, Prentiss, Marion, and Simpson Counties, Mississippi), one “industrial dispute” (in Portsmouth, Ohio), and—from September 6 to September 20—the federalization of the National Guard in Little Rock, Arkansas, with which the first phase of the most recent period of the Guard begins.

  In September 1957, Governor Orval E. Faubus called out the Arkansas Guard to prevent the enforcement of school integration. President Eisenhower federalized the state Guard to ensure enforcement and sent in some regular army troops as well. From then on, the Guard was engaged for some years in protecting civil rights, during what Guard archives started calling “racial disturbances,” in the South. In 1958 and 1959, the Guard was called up for eight “racial disturbances” (all of them in Mississippi); also for one “prison riot” and three “industrial disputes.” In 1960, there was just one call-up: the Rhode Island Guard for a “civil disturbance” (jazz festival) at Newport. In 1961, there was one “teenage riot,” one “prison riot,” three “racial disturbances,” and two mysterious “sabotages of microwave stations” (in Utah and New Mexico).

  In 1962 and 1963, there were suddenly three federalizations of the Guard: one each for “integration crises” at the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama, and one after the bombing of the four young girls in a church in Birmingham. These federalizations of the National Guard in the southern states gave the regular army a chance to shake up and reorganize (as in wartime) some of the most patronage-ridden state units in the country. The Guard reforms were much like the changes that southern offices of the FBI underwent, under pressure from the Justice Department, in the same years. The army officer in charge of Guard federalizations and reform was General Creighton W. Abrams, who is now Commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. In 1963, too, there was a call-up of Guard troops by the Washington, D.C., commissioners for what Guard archives call simply a “civil-rights demonstration” in Washington—the one in which Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was heard at the Lincoln Memorial. In September 1963, Governor George Wallace called out the Guard, as Faubus had done six years earlier, to prevent compliance with the law in the school “integration crises” at Birmingham, Mobile, and Tuskegee. President Kennedy federalized the Alabama Guard, and General Abrams shook the Guardsmen up again. In 1964, there wasn’t much. Nineteen sixty-five begins with a federalization of the Alabama Guard, and the addition of some regular army, for the march from Selma to Montgomery; has a little call-up for a “motorcycle riot” in June (at Weirs Beach, New Hampshire); and ushers in another era in August, with the rioting in Watts.

  There followed what might be called the period of the urban disasters—in which, having been for eight years primarily a peacekeeping force, the National Guard was suddenly in the position of killing people. In Watts, 13,393 California Guardsmen were called. Four thousand blacks were arrested, several hundred were hurt, and thirty-four were killed. National Guardsmen do not have the authority to make arrests, but they do carry arms, and, as the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, under Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois (in a report more valuable for its substantive descriptions of events than for its philosophical generalizations), subsequently put it, of those thirty-four dead blacks “several . . . were killed by mistake.” In July 1966, there was the Filmore race riot in Chicago (4,300 Illinois Guardsmen called out, three blacks killed, including a thirteen-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl) and the Hough race riot in Cleveland (2,000 Ohio Guardsmen called out, four blacks killed, and several children injured, as in Chicago, by “stray bullets”). In state after state, Guardsmen were called out to deal with urban looting and rioting—with tanks, guns, and training designed for waging war against an organized, armed foreign enemy. In July 1967, in Newark, 4,400 New Jersey National Guardsmen were called out. The New Jersey adjutant general, James F. Cantwell, was at the time, and still is, president of the National Guard Association. When order was restored, there were twenty-three dead, twenty-one of them blacks, two of them children. Later that month, in Detroit, when 10,253 Michigan Guardsmen were called and then federalized, the disturbance ended with forty-three blacks dead. There began a period of serious deliberation about the Guard. It became as clear as anything about the National Guard ever gets that Guardsmen were performing duties other than those of a “first line of military reserve,” and the possibility arose that in civil disturbances much, if not most, of the tragedy and nearly all of the deaths were attributable to forces called out to restore order. Detroit was a crisis in t
he history of the National Guard.

  Looking back on previous urban riots—the “killed by mistake” of Watts, the “killed by stray bullets” of Filmore and Hough—officials of the departments of Justice and Defense began to find the performance of Guard units, state by state, surreal. Guardsmen were in the habit of arriving by tank or truck, weapons loaded, and shooting out street lamps at night, for protection, then deluding themselves that the sound of their own shots in the dark was “sniper fire.” Since their aim, moreover, was bad, the rounds of ammunition required to dispatch a single street lamp often injured people in apartments blocks away or in cars on other streets. The first person killed by Guardsmen in Newark, for example, was a small boy in a family car being driven home from a restaurant. In Newark, coordination between the local police and the New Jersey Guard was so bad that Director of Police Dominick Spina told the Kerner Commission, “Down in the Springfield Avenue area, in my opinion, Guardsmen were firing upon police and police were firing back at them.”

  Police Director Spina, who was tried and acquitted of charges arising out of alleged Mafia operations two years ago, and who was dismissed from his job on July 1 of this year, emerges, in the Newark riots of 1967, as something of a hero, on the order of High Noon. According to the Kerner Commission:

  On Saturday, July 15, Spina received a report of snipers in a housing project. When he arrived he saw approximately 100 National Guardsmen and police officers crouching behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on the ground around the edge of the courtyard.

  Since everything appeared quiet and it was broad daylight, Spina walked directly down the middle of the street. Nothing happened. As he came to the last building of the complex, he heard a shot. All around him the troopers jumped, believing themselves to be under sniper fire. A moment later a young Guardsman ran from behind a building.

  The Guardsman said that he had fired the shot to scare a man away from a window, that his orders were “to keep everyone away from windows.”

  Spina said he told the soldier: “Do you know what you just did? You have now created a state of hysteria. Every Guardsman up and down this street . . . thinks that somebody just fired a shot and that it is probably a sniper . . . .”

  By this time, four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived, and troopers and policemen were again crouched everywhere, looking for a sniper.

  The Director of Police stayed at the scene for three hours. The only shot he heard was the one fired by the Guardsman.

  Nevertheless, at six o’clock that evening two columns of National Guardsmen and state troopers were directing mass fire at the Hays Housing project in response to what they believed were snipers.

  On the 10th floor, Eloise Spellman, the mother of several children, fell, a bullet through her neck . . . .

  Suddenly, several troopers whirled and began firing in the general direction of spectators. Mrs. Hattie Gainer, a grandmother, sank to the floor.

  A block away Rebecca Brown’s 2-year-old daughter was standing at the window. Mrs. Brown rushed to drag her to safety. As Mrs. Brown was, momentarily, framed in the window, a bullet spun into her back . . . .

  And so on, in Newark. The result of calling in National Guardsmen began to seem, in retrospect, frightened Guardsmen, frightened police, and a toll of babies in distant bassinets, grandmothers in distant kitchens, mothers with their backs to windows, idle spectators, and unarmed citizens of every sort. But Detroit was the worst.

  Governor George Romney, to begin with, was extremely reluctant to issue an official request that the Michigan National Guard be federalized—although local police, supported by the Guard under state control, were exhausted and had been unable to cope with rioting and looting for several days—because federalization of the Guard implies an “insurrection,” which exempts insurance companies from paying damages to holders of insurance policies. Governor Romney repeatedly made urgent, unofficial requests for federal help to Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus R. Vance, who (according to his subsequent report of events in Detroit) felt that he had to reject them on the ground of their unofficial language. Deputy Secretary Vance, Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas (not in his capacity as Supreme Court justice but as friend and political adviser to President Johnson), Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and others were pacing with President Johnson on the White House lawn, discussing their own reluctance to federalize the Guard, or to send in more competent regular army troops, because they preferred to avoid the precedent of a liberal administration’s sending troops to cope with urban rioting, in an action that might be construed as repressive or racist. In response to more urgent requests from Governor Romney, President Johnson sent Deputy Secretary Vance and a team of officials from the departments of Defense and Justice to Detroit, to study the situation and to discuss it with Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh and other local citizens. While legal and philosophical deliberations concerning federalization were going on, the number of incidents in Detroit continued to climb. At 2310 hours on July 24 (about twenty-four hours after Mayor Cavanagh and Governor Romney had first telephoned Attorney General Clark about the emergency), Deputy Secretary Vance recommended to President Johnson that the Michigan National Guard be federalized and put under regular army command. Ten minutes later, the President federalized the Guard, under the command of Army Lieutenant General John L. Throckmorton, and sent in regular army troops as well.

  The Guard’s behavior until the President’s move, and after, was a revelation and a nightmare. Some of the Guardsmen had traveled two hundred miles and been put on duty for thirty hours straight—most of which they spent firing. Guardsmen in Detroit fired off more than 13,326 rounds of ammunition, compared with 201 rounds fired off by the regular army. Some Guard units got lost in the city, and panicked. Two Guardsmen assigned to an intersection on Monday were still there on Friday. Guardsmen kept pulling up in tanks, shooting out streetlights, scaring themselves with the sound, and then blasting out the walls of whole buildings. At four o’clock one morning, a regular army unit went to the rescue of a Guard troop crouched behind a high school, claiming to be pinned down by sniper fire. The army colonel, hearing no shots at all, ordered all lights in an adjoining building turned on. The residents were terrified and unarmed. The Guardsmen had shot out every window. Mistaking a lighted cigarette in one window for a sniper, two Guard tanks drew up and a machine gunner opened fire, nearly severing the arm of a young woman and killing her four-year-old niece.

  General Throckmorton, whose soldiers were doing fine without much shooting, thought tension might be reduced by less firing, and ordered ammunition removed from all weapons. The Guardsmen apparently never received the order. The Kerner Report continues:

  Without any clear authorization or direction, someone opened fire upon the suspected building. A tank rolled up and sprayed the building with .50-caliber tracer bullets. Law enforcement officers rushed into the surrounded building and discovered it empty. “They must be firing one shot and running” was the verdict.

  Julius Dorsey, a black private guard, was trying to defend a market from looting. He fired three shots from his pistol into the air. The police radio reported, “Looters. They have rifles.” Three National Guardsmen arrived and, seeing a distant crowd of fleeing looters, opened fire. They killed Julius Dorsey. The only soldier killed in Detroit in 1967 was Larry Post, a National Guardsman caught in a cross fire between two units of National Guardsmen.

  After Detroit, it became clear that something would have to be done about the National Guard. In most states, Guard units—on the “first line of military reserve” theory—received no riot-control training at all, and in states where they did receive it, it was short and not uniform. There seemed, at the time, to be three basic positions about the Guard. One, that it was inevitably a corrupt, ungovernable mess of untrainable incompetents, and that it should be abolished as a peacekeeping force; local police forces should be better trained, and on those rare occasions when civil disturbanc
es became extreme emergencies, the regular army, which has training and discipline, should be called in. Two, that nothing is perfect, that the Guard had done as well as could be expected, and that people in an area where there is rioting (even if they happen to be in their bathrooms or bassinets), though they may not merit the death penalty exactly, are in some sense “asking for” whatever they get. Three, that the Guard should be buffered with some immediate riot-control training, and that since the regular army soldiers, many of whom were blacks, had done so much better than the Guard, the Guard should immediately recruit as many blacks as possible.

  The history of blacks in the American army and militia is a kind of absurdist tale of its own. The South drafted some slaves, and the North drafted some freedmen for its 150 regiments of blacks in the Civil War. But when the North took Louisiana, a southern black unit was caught in the middle and ultimately became the Union’s Corps d’Afrique. Black militia briefly terrified some southern states in the early years of Reconstruction; then the black units were disbanded and the white southern militias started terrorizing blacks again. In New York City, Colonel William Hayward started a black National Guard regiment, the Fifteenth New York Infantry (Colored), with its own armory in Harlem and tried vainly to get it attached to any American unit in World War I. Finally, the unit simply attached itself to a division in the French Army, and served with considerable distinction throughout the war. In World War II, black divisions were still segregated, and although one of them, the Ninety-second Infantry (Buffalo) Division, took part in the liberation of Italy, most black soldiers were in service or maintenance units. After President Truman desegregated all divisions of the armed services, the black soldier—in Korea and, of course, still more in Vietnam—came militarily into his own. There have been, not surprisingly, hardly any black National Guardsmen since the National Guard began.