7 Sep 2020

Torpedoed

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction, WWII | 0

The full title of Deborah Heiligman’s latest work of narrative nonfiction–Torpedoed: The True Story of the World War II Sinking of the “Children’s Ship”–has all the elements to attract readers. It promises adventure, a survival story, in a World War II setting with children as the protagonists–and it’s all true! The event was so traumatic, written documentation abounded, even if news reports were censored. For Heiligman, the subject would have been a meatball over the heart of the plate, just begging to be smashed out of the park.

But Deborah Heiligman has too much respect for her work to consider any project “easy.” Besides, the challenges were as manifest as the advantages. How to tell a story with a dozen and more protagonists? How to maintain the tension in a slow-moving disaster, one whose precipitating event is known the from the outset? Most troubling of all, how to handle the fact of death, the loss of so many innocent lives in a book for readers hardly equipped to comprehend the enormity of the tragedy?

While introducing the reader to her many characters, Heiligman attends to the details that bring alive the lost world of wartime Britain. Nine-year-old Jack Keeley had

seen the newsreels before the cartoons at the tuppenny rush, the children’s matinee movie on Saturdays. And he’d noticed the signs of war everywhere: lorries (trucks) with soldiers in the back, their guns pointed skyward, ready to fire on German planes; neighborhood playgrounds dug up and made into air raid shelters. There were also sandbag fortifications here and there, windows crisscrossed with tape to prevent flying glass during the bombing, and sixty-foot-long barrage balloons, raised to force enemy planes to fly around them.

Even later in the narrative, as the seven boys in Lifeboat 12 begin their grinding eight-day ordeal in the North Atlantic, Heiligman uses flashback to lend context and underscore her characters’ youth:

And back at home, before they’d left, they’d had the run of their neighborhoods, as all British kids did back then, playing freely in their yards or even the streets. On days without school, children would be out all day, with an apple and some cookies in their pockets, running about, riding bicycles if they had them, even on major roads. They’d bring their cricket bat and ball and play wherever they could against stumps or stoops, using their coats as wickets. They’d play running and chasing games, like  tag, touch, poison, crusts and crumbs, blind man’s buff, and leapfrog. They’d play with marbles and climb trees.

Heiligman continues for three more paragraph on how the children’s play changed with the Blitz. Bombed out buildings became places to explore. Dogfights overhead became more exciting than newsreels. While helping twenty-first century American children understand the world of wartime British children, Heiligman heightens the stakes of her characters yearning to return home.

Throughout the narrative, Heiligman works to give her a kid’s-eye view of events. She makes thorough use of the source material, much of it held at the Imperial War Museum, as well as of interviews she conducted with survivors or their descendants. She quotes abundantly from the source material and includes remembered words gained from interviews, written without quotation marks. As the children board their liner to Canada, Jack Keeley (again!) “was immediately bowled over by how large the ship was”–Heiligman’s words for his memory–“Years later, he’d realize it wasn’t as large as it looked to a nine-year-old boy. But at this moment, it seemed titanic.” The final descriptor will be a tantalizing touch for almost every one of her readers.

With the children on the ship, Heiligman shows them as kids, running about the deck, exploring the ship, playing games of their own and those devised by their minders. And, seated for meals in the sumptuous dining room, gaping in awe at the luxury around them. For these children, used to strapped family budgets and wartime rationing, the bounty they were served aboard the City of Benares‘s was truly awesome. Especially the ice cream. They scarfed it down with abandon. Then Heiligman brings us up short with a reminder of what awaited: “Those who survived would remember, even decades later, that the loss of all that ice cream felt like a terrible tragedy.”

Sentences such as this one are part of a concerted effort to foreshadow the coming catastrophe. Heiligman will not allow her reader lull herself into thinking this is a suspense story. No, she hammers home, the tragedy is known and understood. You must not be surprised. This is a story about the confluence of attitudes and actions and accidents that lead to good and bad outcomes, often with little rhyme or reason: “Later, after disaster struck, this pocket money would become a huge concern for the boys.” Or: “Before too long, this guilt would come to haunt her–and maybe even save her  life.” And again: “For some it would mean rescue. For others it would mean confusion that led to abandonment.”

Heiligman’s relies on her most skilled writing to convey the feel of experience. She wasn’t there, yet she works to get inside the documentary evidence and the firsthand accounts. Like a poet, she uses rhythm, repetition, and juxtaposition to help convey the reality behind mere sensory description.

In Lifeboat 12, to pass the time and keep up the children’s spirits, they played all the travel games in the repertoire. Including “I Spy”:

What did they spy?
Each other.
The other people on the boat.
Parts of the boat: sail, mast, tiller, handles, a jug of drinking water, tins of bully beef…. At sea there was–the sea. Waves, clouds, spray. A very few sea birds.
The bathroom bucket.
But there was not much to spy that nobody else could. It was too easy to guess.
There was a surplus of what they could not spy:
      • Other life boats from the Benares
      • Lifeboats from any other ship
      • fishing boats
      • cruise ships
      • oilers
      • destroyers
      • sailboats
      • yachts
      • rescuers
      • land
      • Mum
      • Dad
      • little brothers
      • all the people who weren’t in Lifeboat 12
There was so little to see and so much to long for. “I Spy,” it turned out, was no fun, no fun at all.

And how does Heiligman face the solemn duty of “killing off her characters”? A lifeboat is flipped as it is being lowered by the davits, dumping its passengers, grown and not, into storm-tossed waters. How to do justice to the enormity of the loss? Here’s how Heiligman does it:

Violet Grimmond, ten, and Connie, nine, plunged to their deaths. [No euphemism, the hard, stark word.]
And little Joyce Keeley, who had never stopped crying for her mother. [Imagine the excruciating terror of an already inconsolable child; feel the cruelty of it.]
Screams louder than the storm pierced the air. [The piercing shriek of death rising over the howls of an uncaring Nature.]
Ruby Grierson would never finish her film.
Margaret Zeal, the CORB doctor, gone, too. [Adults, their dreams and their talents, were lost, too.]
And Gussie Grimmond. Strong, quirky, strong-willed Gussie. Gone. [The abstraction is made concrete: the inherent value of each child, along with her potentiality…gone.]
Everyone in that lifeboat, gone. Just like that. [No longer part of the story.]

Heiligman is acutely conscious of this as she tells her story of heroes and those who toughed it out and those who just got lucky: the survivors. She also introduces characters who die–so many did–and, in most cases, she was able to tell of their final moments (somehow a consolation to the living, certainly a satisfaction to the reader). But, aware that the great bulk of the dead remain nameless in her narrative, she ends her tale with one who stands in for all those anonymous others.

Beryl Myatt was one of seventy-seven CORB children who died. Like so many of the others, we don’t know much about her. We don’t know about her days on the ship, or how she died. We cannot tell her whole story. But we know she was beloved.

Heiligman proceeds to give the few details we do know in the book’s final four-and-a-half paragraphs, giving the final word to the CORB (Children’s Overseas Reception Board) representative in her letter to Beryl’s grieving parents: “You will have to think of the whole seas as little Beryl’s grave. She belongs to a very gallant company of people whose grave is the sea.”

Source: Heiligman, Deborah. Torpedoed: The True Story of the World War II Sinking of the Children’s Ship. New York: Henry Holt, 2019.

28 Aug 2020

Guerrilla Wife

by | posted in: WWII, WWII: Pacific Theater | 0

Guerra = “war” in Spanish.

Guerrilla = “little war.”

In English, guerilla more often means a fighter in one of those little wars. Louise Spencer’s husband, an engineer for an American mining company in the Philippines, became guerilla fighter. That’s how Louise became a “guerilla wife.” Like the farmer and the farmer’s wife, I thought. Why does she have to be defined by him? Isn’t she a farmer, too? Isn’t she on the same team, involved in the same business?

Oh, it’s a knotty issue. Or perhaps not at all.

Spencer’s book is not really about guerilla resistance to Japanese occupation of the Philippines from 1942 to 1945. It is more about civilian resistance–the refusal of a group of American expatriates to turn themselves in to the occupiers. It is a classic survival story with the added element of a wartime setting. The title, Guerrilla Wife, with its hints of military resistance to the hated Japanese, could only have helped to sell books.

Americans had been a colonial power in the Philippines for over fifty years when the Pacific War began. That was The USA’s first offense against the Japanese Empire. A rising economic and military power, Japan thought Asia should be left for Asians. Japan wanted–needed if she was to keep growing as an industrial power–colonies of her own. But the United States, French, Dutch, and English had already taken all the resource-rich countries of Southeast Asia. This, as much as anything, was the reason for the start of the Pacific War in December 1941. On the same day that the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor (though on the other side of the International Date Line it is fixed as December 8 rather than 7), its forces struck in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaya.

The Philippines is a nation of a dozen large islands, 2,000 inhabited islands, and 7,000 islands in all. It is hard to defend. But it is also hard to occupy and control, maybe impossible.

On December 8, 1941, Louise Spencer is an engineer’s wife. Her husband, whom she calls Spence, works at the American mining company on the island of Masbate. She is Canadian. The news of Pearl Harbor and air raids on Manila comes in over the radio. Everything changes and, at the same time, very little changes. Life goes on, and the Americans of Masbate expect the U.S. army, navy, and air forces will beat back the attack.

But, no. American resistance crumbles. The Japanese reach their island. And Louise and Spence flee to the hills. Then they hire a sailboat to the next island, Panay, and live comfortably for a while before, again, fleeing into the hills. In her book, Louise describes the decision they face: “We could flee and live the life of fugitives, or we could stay here and let the Japs put us into a concentration camp.” While many Americans choose capture, the Spencers and others do not.

Until now, Louise has been a somewhat pampered engineer’s wife. (That expression again!). Now she has to learn to do what women of a lower class have been doing all their lives. Such as laundry. “This was hard work,” she says. “I didn’t have the expert knack of a Filipina lavandera, and made even harder work of it than necessary.” Though other women do the cooking in their forest encampment, she does all the other chores in food preparation and calls herself a “scullery maid.” Later in her twenty-three-month ordeal, she has the resourcefulness to make peanut butter by grinding peanuts in a meat grinder. She is quite pleased with herself–but even more pleased with the peanut butter!

She, and the other Americans used to middle class comforts, learn to live with forest critters and other inconveniences that go under the category of “ew-gross!” They don’t worry any more if about consuming bugs with their food: “There were literally billions of ants. We laughed to think of how finicky we had been not long ago, refusing food that had an ant on it and such nonsense as that.” They no longer think of intestinal worms as a problem of the mountain people, the Bukidnons.  “Now we all knew we had them , and there was nothing that could be done about it. Sometimes we even joked about it.” While fleeing through a swampy area, their group of fugitives become riddled with leeches on  their legs and elsewhere. Louise hardly bats an eye, but flicks them off occasionally with the blade of a knife.

Louise and a group of American fugitives set up camp in a forested valley they called Hopevale, population twenty-two. But this number is misleading. Spence and a few other men are often away scouting and doing whatever they do with the guerrilla resistance. And more than a few “boys,” servants, live among them, too. Pilo, sixteen-years-old at the start of their adventure, is the Spencers’ “boy.” Louise thinks him a “treasure.” He does “everything in such a happy, gay spirit.”

The fact is: the American fugitives could not have survived without assistance from Filipinos. Much of the assistance they paid for, but not all. Much was given out of kindness and, perhaps, even a sense of loyalty. As the Americans escape farther into the hills, away from the approaching Japanese, they always find someone willing to put them up for a night or three. When they need huts for themselves, the local mountain people build them for the Americans. The Bukidnons have the know-how, and the Americans do not. These people neither begrudge the inconvenience nor shy away from the very real risk they are taking. If caught helping Americans, the Japanese will make them pay with their lives. Indeed, before the story ends, some do.

The Americans employ “cargadores,” porters, to carry their belongings when they head into the hills and almost every other time they are forced to flee for safer ground. When Louise’s friend, Laverne, gives birth to a baby girl, a strong young cargador carries her baby in a sling across his chest as they hike into the hills.

The Americans have money, and they can pay for the goods and services they need, as long as the Filipinos are willing to trade. Even after their money runs low, Spence collects monthly pay as a captain in the guerillas. It is not government-issued money. It is printed by the guerillas. But it is accepted by all Filipinos who oppose the Japanese invasion. “Of course,” Louise writes, “if we had come to the end of our money the Filipinos would not have let us starve.” Then she adds, “But we were glad we could pay our way. Americans had always paid their way in the islands, and we still had our pride, even if little else.”

Yes, pride.

As humans and colonials, the Americans surely brought with them a sense of American superiority. Yet Louise Spencer rarely gives a glimpse of obvious prejudice. There is just one incident in which her feelings of pride–American pride–erupts. Over and over, she hears the same expression from the locals: “You suffer so, your sacrifice is very great!” It is an expression of sympathy that yet carries a hint of “I-told-you-so” superiority, as in “You Americans are not so mighty, after all.” Over its many repetitions, Louise thinks little of the remark. If anything, she thinks her sacrifice not so very great at all. But one time, at least, a sensitive nerve is set off. Louise explodes, “Well, then, I do not suffer, nor do you! We are getting along and will continue to get along until General MacArthur returns with his army!” America’s honor was being questioned, and she would stand up to defend it.

Spencer gives almost no window into the work of the guerilla whose wife she is. She hardly seems interested, which is just as well because Spence does not tell her anything, anyway. The one time she mentions it, she says the guerrillas were successful in “psychological warfare.” With few weapons and little ammunition, they nevertheless carry out ambushes that make it “impossible for [the Japanese] to organize their famous co-prosperity sphere on the island.” That’s as much window into the “guerrilla” part of her book as the reader is allowed.

Once in their two years in hiding, Spence and Louise, husband and wife, take a kind of vacation together. They spend a few days on the coast, where they “swam and splashed and played tag like two children.” As they sit on the beach, soaking in sun and sea air, watching the sun set, the couple feels a kind of freedom they have not felt in months. “We had not realized how shut in we had felt in the forest until now, when we could watch the sun going down far and free across the water.” As the reader, I felt happy for them.

A few pages later, though, I was surprised at the strength of a disagreement that arose between them. Louise says she is committed to stick with her friend Laverne, even if her pregnancy prevents her from escaping. Spence pulls husbandly rank: “Well, I have my plans, and you’ll go with me.” I was shocked but pleased that Louise did not roll over. Ignoring Spence’s decrees, Louise makes up her own mind: “I was completely resolved that I would stick with Laverne. We should see.” In the end, Louise sticks by her friend, though it didn’t seem to require defying her husband.

Her friendship with Laverne is a truly special one. In perhaps the most memorable scene in the whole book, she and her friend create birthday cake in primitive conditions and transport it by banca river boat to another friend downstream. The boat capsizes, and Louise struggles to rescue the floating cake. In the end, she must settle with saving herself. Laverne does the same. One of the banqueros, boatmen, retrieves the cake, “now more of a pudding” than a cake. If you think the friends bemoaned the loss of their cake, you would be wrong. On the river bank, soaked to the skin, they howl in laughter. “We stood there on the shore getting the giggles–Laverne and I were always getting the giggles together, it seemed–over our stupid accident.”

Laverne delivers a baby boy in January 1944. It is touch-and-go for a while, but mother and baby pull through. In February, Louise finds out that she is pregnant, too. And in March word arrives that an American submarine will come to carry them away to Australia. As the date approaches for the rendezvous, Louise begins to allow herself to imagine freedom: “We would not regret leaving this kind of life, if we really were to leave it now. We had probably learned a lot, and maybe  the experience had done some of us good, but the thought of being disappointed now, of having to return again to the hills, made our blood run cold.” Seeing the Pilo’s sadness at the news does bring a twinge of regret, perhaps mixed with guilt at abandoning their loyal servant.

In the sub, Louise and Laverne are offered coffee and cream by “an American Negro.” At first, Louise cannot think what the cream could possibly be for and refuses. Then she reconsiders: Why, yes, she would like some, after all. Served a meal of American-style bread, cheese, meat, pickles, potato salad, rolls, and mustard: “We exclaimed over it like children, and ate until not a crumb was left.

Source: Spencer, Louise Reid. Guerrilla Wife. Chicago: People’s Book Club, 1945.

Images:

“Bukidnon–Historical Photos,” Environmental Science for Social Change, (2020) https://essc.org.ph/content/view/704/1/.

“Submarine Warfare Played Major Role in World War II Victory,” U.S. Department of Defense (March 16, 2020) https://www.defense.gov/Explore/Features/Story/Article/2114035/submarine-warfare-played-major-role-in-world-war-ii-victory/

 

20 Aug 2020

Context Matters: Why I Read Broadly

by | posted in: Eddie Rickenbacker, WWII, WWII: Pacific Theater | 0

The Many Lives of Eddie Rickenbacker is coming out in two months. Just last month I completed and approved the final changes to the manuscript. Near the end of the process I panicked about this sentence: “[Rickenbacker] visited the island of Guadalcanal where he witnessed the hellish conditions under which Americans soldiers fought.” Did he really get a flight to the island? Not even COMSOPAC Robert Ghormley, whose job it was to oversee the Guadalcanal operation, made the trip (though his replacement, Halsey, and his boss, Nimitz, did). For four months, thousands of Marines had been living on the edge of extermination; harassed by daily air raids, nightly naval bombardments, and artillery fire from the jungle any time of day. These men had been beaten down by tropical disease, insufficient calories, interrupted sleep, and a hopeless sense of abandonment.

I knew all this because I had been reading about the Pacific War throughout the entire editing process. I understood the timeline. Rickenbacker arrived on Guadalcanal in early-mid December, soon after the Japanese threat had been checked. I knew that, but it was easy to allow the mid-November date of his rescue (it took a month to recover from his ordeal) to creep into my mind as I read my own words for the penultimate time. That’s why I decided to check if he really did get to Guadalcanal.

I found the “hellholes of the Pacific” quote on the bottom of page 445 of Lewis’s biography. There it said he had visited Espiritu Santo, the Navy’s operational base, and spoke with soldiers coming out from the island. I had been wrong! I reread the passages several times to be sure. Alas, if I had only turned the page, I would have seen that he did indeed fly to Guadalcanal the next day, December 10. Both the date and the island’s name are highlighted at the top of the page. The two lengthy paragraphs that follow have no highlighting, but are full of details of Rickenbacker’s impressions of Guadalcanal, all of interest to me now. Rickenbacker met commander General Sandy Patch who was, as it happened, in just his first full day in charge. His Second Marine Corps Regiment had relieved the First Marines just the day before.

So I was right in the first instance and wrong in the second. Thankfully, the revised sentence that will be in the published book is not wrong factually, but is incomplete and would have been better left in the original. This little lead was going to be about the importance of knowing context, about how I hadn’t known much about Guadalcanal or the geography of the Southwest Pacific and almost made a mistake as a result. Instead, it is more about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. And the unreliability of human brains, mine in particular.

But let’s let the original premise stand: broader contextual understanding is necessary for the understanding of more narrow events or narratives. It is necessary to prevent inaccuracies from creeping into your text (though perhaps not sufficient if your cognitive style is one of panicky jumpiness). As I have read about events in the Pacific War in recent months, I automatically made connections with the Rickenbacker story to help me better understand it. The connections and understandings traveled in both directions, of course. What follows is a reflection on what I discovered.

 

My first “Aha!” moment came as I was reading Ian Toll’s The Conquering Tide. The section started blandly enough with a description of Nimitz’s “gentleman-of-the-old-school” composure, despite the desperate situation in the late summer of 1942. Would the Navy hold Guadalcanal, or would it turn into a second Bataan? Nimitz decided to travel four thousand miles to meet with his commanders in New Caledonia. (His plane refueled uneventfully at Canton, I noted.) It is not until the end of Toll’s five-page account of the conference that the significance struck home. Here was the genesis of Rickenbacker’s mission to MacArthur in October 1942!

MacArthur didn’t deign to attend the meeting in Nouméa. (His presence in Brisbane was in dispensable, he explained in his refusal. His biographer, Walter Borneman, believed that MacArthur repeatedly shunned such conferences throughout the war, sending his aide-de-camp Richard Sutherland in his stead, in order to maintain his stature. Among all those 4-star generals and admirals he would be just one among equals. [Borneman 325] Army Air Force chief Hap Arnold was there, the same Arnold who enlisted Rickenbacker to boost pilot morale earlier in the year. As one of the most outspoken chiefs for the Europe-First policy first adopted in 1941, even before Pearl Harbor, Arnold ruffled a lot of feathers in Nouméa. Among commanders in the Pacific, engaged in an existential battle with a determined foe, Arnold must have come across as tone-deaf. He then traveled on to Australia to meet with his supreme commander. There he clashed directly with MacArthur, who felt no compunctions about speaking  his mind. Arnold said he was “incredulous” at MacArthur’s insubordination. He explained that the general, like all commanders, should be “indoctrinated with the idea that there is a United States plan–An Allied plan–for winning the war, and all must conform to it.” [Toll 2015, 128-129]

I realized at that moment that Arnold would have brought his incredulity–simmering during the long plane ride across the Pacific–back to the States in early October. He would have given Secretary of War Stimson an earful of complaints, and Stimson, who would become exasperated with MacArthur only later in the war, would have mollified Arnold with an assurance of direct action. Together they might have hit upon Rickenbacker as their man. The ace and Eastern Air Lines president had served Arnold in the spring and was just then returning to the States after serving Stimson on a tour of inspection in the U.K. Stimson would send Rickenbacker east to put MacArthur in his place. Borneman speculated with some confidence that the secret message Rickenbacker learned by heart “was a sharp reprimand, demanding that MacArthur cease his personal publicity campaign, stop complaining about the Joint Chiefs and the resources allocated to his theater, and stop waging war against the United States Navy.” [Borneman 257]

Thus did the overworked, still-pained Rickenbacker get sent on a mission that would lead to a twenty-three-day ordeal in a raft in the Pacific.

Biographer W. David Lewis thought Rickenbacker “the ideal emissary for Stimson.” His “civilian status, self-assurance, unwillingness to take anyone’s guff insured that MacArthur’s exalted rank and imperious manner would not overawe him.” [Lewis 415] In fact, both were outspoken anti-communists and anti-New Dealers. Both spoke out forcefully for the need for American defensive preparations. Yet, while Rickenbacker was an aviation booster, MacArthur remained an aviation skeptic. During the court-martial of Brigadier General Billy Mitchell in 1925, MacArthur had sat in judgment of the internal critic, and Rickenbacker had spoken as witness for the defense.

Three weeks after his rescue, having put on twenty of the fifty-four pounds he had lost during the ordeal, Rickenbacker insisted on completing his mission. MacArthur greeted him warmly in Port Moresby, something he did not do for everyone who visited. But none of those had undergone a grueling ordeal at sea to get there. And, besides, MacArthur had become an enthusiastic convert to air power. “You know, Eddie,” he admitted, “I probably did the American Air Forces more harm than any man living when I was chief of staff by refusing to believe in the airplane as a war weapon, and I am doing everything I can to make amends for that great mistake.” [Lewis 444] This was as self-deprecating a statement as has been documented coming from the famously vain general. MacArthur welcomed Rickenbacker and heard his message, but, Borneman says, “there is little, if any, evidence that MacArthur moderated his ways.” [Borneman 257]

The still somewhat emaciated Rickenbacker continued on to Espiritu Santo and Guadalcanal. The “hollow-eyed, exhausted and emaciated young men…had grown frightfully old in four months’ time,” Rickenbacker wrote. [Lewis 446] He witnessed first-hand what would soon be called the thousand-yard stare. Rusting hulls of Japanese landing craft littered the island’s coast; mangled aircraft lined the runways of Henderson Field.  Rain, mud, and mosquitoes made sleep impossible. The privations of Villeneuve and Rembercourt would have seemed trivial in comparison. By way of conclusion, I wrote in my book, “This experience, coming on the heels of his three-week ordeal, changed Rickenbacker and his approach to the war. No more would he defend a military system that was anything less than meticulous, exacting, in its preparations. No more would he temper his words or worry if he ‘stepped on tender toes.'”

I have since read widely enough in the Pacific War to appreciate the significance of Guadalcanal in the nation’s history, the war’s history, and Rickenbacker’s life story. James Hornfischer, in Neptune’s Inferno, quotes Hap Arnold summing up his trip of September 1942: “It looked to me as if everybody on the South Pacific front had a bad case of the jitters”–from the COMSOPAC on down. Vice-Admiral Ghormley whined, “The Government is not backing us up down here with what we need, why, I don’t know,” and “This is a shoestring operation, we haven’t got enough of anything. We’re just hanging on by our teeth.” [Hornfischer 129, 202] (Nimitz picked up on the complaint and used humor to blunt its sting, referring to the invasion as Operation SHOESTRING, in jest.)

The rank-and-file Marine on the island echoed Ghormley’s desperation. Lieutenant Commander John Lawrence described the sense of abandonment his fellow Marines felt: “It was the hopelessness, the feeling that nobody gave a curse whether we lived or died.” [Hornfischer 195] By the time Rickenbacker reached Guadalcanal in December 1942 the desperation had abated. Indeed, a fresh division had just arrived to garrison the island. Yet, I imagine he picked up more than a little resentfulness from those on their way out. Born again from his Pacific ordeal, Rickenbacker’s mindset would have been fertile ground for their message of abandonment by their government. Rickenbacker the prophet was ready to evangelize.

He said he was not afraid to “step on tender toes.” I wrote next, “He criticized the nation’s war effort publicly and did step on toes— even those of President Franklin Roosevelt.” With this in my manuscript, my ears pricked up distinctly when, a few weeks ago while listening to a podcast on the Depression, I heard Roosevelt speak those very words: “In the working out of a great national program that seeks the primary good of the greater number, it is true that the toes of some people are being stepped on and are going to be stepped on. But these toes belong to the comparative few who seek to retain or to gain position or riches or both by some shortcut that is harmful to the greater good.” [“Lives of the Great Depression,” Throughline, July 23, 2020.] Was Rickenbacker using Roosevelt’s words back at him?  The thought is intriguing, even if unlikely.

If Rickenbacker had been a gadfly in the twenties and thirties, buzzing on about the need for America to keep pace in the field of aviation, he became a Jeremiah after the Pacific Ordeal, as 1942 turned to 1943. He goaded and browbeat his countrymen to do more for the war effort and to do it gladly. “You…should be grateful for the privilege of offering everything you know how…. For none of us are doing so much that we cannot do more.” [New York Times, January 23, 1943] He earned a reputation for labor baiting, chastising workers for slowdowns and stoppages. He could not understand workers putting their personal needs and those of their families above those of their country. I did discover in my reading that Rickenbacker’s concerns were real. There was not as much domestic unity of purpose as the popular understanding of the Good War leads us to believe.

George Roeder’s The Censored War supplies numerous examples of propaganda promoting the very message Rickenbacker was delivering in more strident tones. One poster of a dead GI was titled, “This Happens Every Three Minutes.” The take-away written below: “Stay on the job and get it over.” Later in the war the Treasury Department produced a film, Two and One-Half Minutes, for viewing in industrial plants engaged in war production (the death rate had picked up speed). It was released to the general public in the final months of the war. Thinking back on his years directing the Office of War Information (OWI), Elmer Davis averred: “There was much more domestic political bitterness in the country than there was in 1917.” [Roeder 33, 36, 122] In this light, my words at the end of chapter 9 take on a slightly different resonance: “Rickenbacker had played his part [in the war], but he was not the unifying hero he had been after the last war. He was a polarizing figure now—loved by some, despised by others.”

Rickenbacker’s tune had changed significantly from the early years of the war, 1939-1940. The last thing he wanted was for his country to get sucked into another total war in Europe. He had seen the destruction of men and property in 1918. He foresaw no virtue in having American boys and girls “regimented into uniforms” and taught to shoulder guns when they should be free to play with marbles, and baseball, and model airplanes. [Broadcasts I, September 26, 1939.] He was recruited to represent America First Committee, but he was never actively involved. He steadfastly preserved his independence: “I represent no person or persons–group or groups….” [Farr 254] And as conditions changed, he changed his mind. On his way out of a four-month stay in the hospital post-Atlanta crash and six months before Pearl Harbor, he told a reporter, leaving no shade of doubt where he stood, “We are in [the war] and we have been in it for a year. …The sooner everyone knows we are in the better it will be. …The sooner we crush Hitler the better.” [New York Times, June 26, 1941.]

Rickenbacker was no pacifist. He advocated a strong military as a deterrent. As an airline executive he proposed a plan for building 50,000 commercial planes for transport so that if the country were drawn into war it could quickly retool them for military purposes. (Using the same reasoning, he emphasized the importance of training of pilots.) Officials in power did not pay enough attention to this sensible idea, despite Rickenbacker’s persistence. I thought of Rickenbacker when I came across a Walter Lippmann column in Life magazine. “This war cannot be won unless we realize why we failed to prevent it,” wrote the great liberal journalist. “We are now paying for and are now repairing the greatest failure of popular government in America.” He sounded a lot like Rickenbacker to me, or perhaps vice versa. The policies of the interwar years, Lippmann said, had moved the country from “a state of perfect security to a state of deadly danger.” [Lippmann, “America’s Great Mistake,” Life, July 21, 1941, 74.]

Rickenbacker lost some of his independence and also his gadfly role when Army Air Forces chief Hap Arnold asked him to give his pilots pep talks. “Put some fire in them,” he said. [Rickenbacker 1967, 272] Morale was low, preparedness had not kept pace, as Rickenbacker had forewarned. Now his job was to be a booster, and he took to the task with energy (as much as he could muster considering the physical ailments that still plagued him post-Atlanta crash). Rickenbacker’s public pronouncements of 1942 clearly show a determination to put a positive spin on AAF preparedness, personnel, and planes.

All the descriptions of American fighters and bombers I have since read accord with Rickenbacker’s assessments. But where Rickenbacker maintained the political tact required of his role, others in the field could speak more candidly. This gem came from a pilot as recorded by journalist Clark Lee: “It’s high damn’ time our plane manufacturers stopped wasting advertising space trying to prove to our people that we have the world’s best planes and started producing them instead.” [Lee 154] But my favorite was uttered earlier in Bataan, the paragon for American unpreparedness. The irony is so artfully spare, it could  have been published in a 1940s version of The Onion: Dear Mr. Roosevelt; our P-40 is full of holes. Please send us a new one.” [Lascher 271]

In his 1967 autobiography, Rickenbacker contended that he promoted Black American pilots in defiance of the policies that kept most Negro cadets grounded. “They are a grand bunch of kids and great pilots,” Rickenbacker has himself arguing. “But something should be done immediately to commission them, they are deserving of it.” [Rickenbacker 1967, 315] This might well have been revisionist history and public relations for a new era. Chicago Defender newspaperman Enoch Waters remembered Rickenbacker–and Charles Lindbergh, too–for actively discouraging Black American from entering aviation. He said they questioned Negroes’ the ability, despite counter-evidence from the likes of Bessie Coleman and Hubert Julian, the Black Eagle. [Waters 202-203] Waters was in a position to know about such things. He helped bring the National Airmen’s Association of America to Chicago’s Harlem Airport. He, along with Willa Brown, Cornelius Coffey, and financial support from Waters’s Defender boss, Robert Abbott, founded the Association and the Coffey School of Aeronautics.

Rickenbacker had put a positive spin on his past, but in an unguarded moment on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, he gave a disturbingly candid response. After observing that his childhood home was “in a colored section now,” he was asked if that bothered him. Captain Eddie responded, “Of course it does. Why wouldn’t it. Get to the point.” [Columbus Citizen-Journal, November 18, 1970.] His words speak for themselves. Heroes are men and women. Look hard enough and they will disappoint you. But, considered another way, their imperfect humanity endears them to us as much as their exceptionality.

 

I was able to write my book without knowing much about the War in the Pacific. His life had only briefly intersected with it, after all. On the other hand, it had a big impact on the final decades of his life. By continuing my research into the Second World War, I made my understanding of Rickenbacker’s life that much more solid. I learned, first of all, the origin of his Pacific mission of 1942, birthed in a meeting between Hap Arnold and Douglas MacArthur just a few weeks before. I learned, too, the reasons General MacArthur merited the message of rebuke that Rickenbacker delivered. Hearsay was replaced by evidence in my mind.

I have followed the development of the Air Forces and their planes during 1942-1944, as American military aviation gradually superseded its Japanese counterpart. Especially in the Philippines in late 1941 I saw how right Rickenbacker had been in clamoring for preparedness.

I learned that Rickenbacker’s jeremiads against labor during the war, while largely tone deaf, were not unfounded. There were real concerns about production capacity and civilian Americans pulling their weight. However, I still wonder if he didn’t retain more of the pessimistic outlook absorbed during his visit to Guadalcanal than was warranted. A form of availability bias took hold, nourished by a convert’s religious fervor.

Perhaps most of all I have learned enough to appreciate Rickenbacker’s comments on fighter pilot aviation in this second iteration of world war. “Air fighting over the Pacific is just about the hardest kind of fighting there is,” he wrote in his Pacific Ordeal memoir, Seven Came Through: ten-to-twelve hours at a stretch under nerve-wracking strain. “It wasn’t that way on the western front twenty-five years ago. A pilot went out to battle like a knight. He was pampered and rested; his every whim was indulged. I can remember patrol after patrol in which I never saw an enemy plane.” [Rickenbacker 1943, 89] Times had changed and so had combat aviation. Rickenbacker had the perspicacity and the humility to recognize it.

Sources

Borneman, Walter R. MacArthur at War: World War II in the Pacific. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

Farr, Finis.  Rickenbacker’s Luck: An American Life.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979.

Garrett, Betty. “‘Capt. Eddie’ Admits Time Was Better Flyer.” Columbus Citizen-Journal. November 18, 1970.

Hornfischer, James D. Neptune’s Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal, New York: Random House, 2011.

Lascher, Bill. Eve of a Hundred Midnights. New York: William Morrow, 2016.

Lee Clark. They Call it Pacific. New York, Viking Press, 1943.

Lewis, W. David. Eddie Rickenbacker: an American hero in the twentieth century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Rickenbacker, Captain Edward V. Seven Came Through: Rickenbacker’s Full Story. Garden City: Double Day, Doran and Company, Inc., 1943.

Rickenbacker, Edward V. “Keep Us Out of the War,” September 26, 1939, Broadcasts I.

Rickenbacker, Edward V. Rickenbacker. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.

“Rickenbacker, 4 Months in Hospital, Back; He Will Resume His Airline Post on Monday,” New York Times, June 26, 1941, 24.

“Rickenbacker Sets Detroit Goals in Blunt Talk to War Workers, New York Times, January 23, 1943, 8.

Roeder, George F. The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Toll, Ian W. The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944. New York, W. W. Norton &Company, 2015.

Tregaskis, Richard. Guadalcanal Diary. New York: Random House,  1943.

Waters, Enoch P. American Diary: A Personal History of the Black Press. Chicago: Path Press, Inc., 1987.

31 May 2020

Enoch Waters’ “American Diary”

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

Enoch Waters called his memoir American Diary. I admit to being confused by the title. I had chosen it mainly as a source of war reporting from the Pacific, especially from an African American correspondent for The Chicago Defender. I expected the “diary” part to meet my needs, but “American”? It seemed so general, so generic. I started in, vaguely dubious.

Waters explained on the first page of his foreword that the book is not so much a diary of his life as a diary of the Black Press in the United States. (The subtitle, A Personal History of the Black Press, should have made this clear but was obscured on the cover.) Apparently, the working title of his book had been Diary of a Race. Why not Diary of the Black Press? In the end, a “diary” of a whole race was still too limiting. Waters expanded it to include the entire country. “The diary of blacks is really a neglected part of the diary of America. Hence, American Diary.” [xx]

It crossed my mind that Waters might be trying too hard. He might be forcing a concept on his work that it could not bear. Perhaps so, yet the title was not, in fact, false advertising. Waters’ intention to write an American story is manifest throughout. He makes his case for equal rights and full citizenship rest firmly on a foundation of black contribution to American society. His “diary” is equal parts personal memoir and history of black journalism in America. Where those two parts intersect, Waters’ reporting on events from the 1930s to the 1970s, the American story comes most alive.

Waters, both the author and the subject of the book, emerges as a determined reformer yet who refuses to be made radical. It’s not so much that he acquiesces to gradualism. It’s that he wants black equality within the American nation as it otherwise is. He seeks the equality of blacks, free from discrimination, in civil society, not a wholesale overturning of society itself. Some of today’s multi-cultural warriors might disdain his outlook as essentially conservative, yet, they would be a mistake to overlook his commitment to change. There is, first, the simmering-yet-controlled anger that pervades almost every page his narrative. And, too, there is the positive change he helped bring about. As reporter for The Defender, Waters gave his people pride and hope on a daily basis.

 

The title of his first chapter, “Childhood: Days of Play/Years of Learning,” promises straight memoir. Yet we learn early on that it will be in the best, confessional tradition of Augustine and Rousseau. Though the young Enoch grows up surrounded by sisters, he knows nothing of their different anatomy until the day his friend asks Susie to show them her “pussy.” After giving them a chase into the woods, she obliges. (Flat on her back, skirt hiked up, panties pulled down.) She even demonstrates how she pees, upon request. The scene brings back a tangible feel of childhood, even for those of us who never had the benefit of such a vivid demonstration (and few of us did!).

Waters’ family was solidly middle class. At least, as solidly as was possible for a black family in Philadelphia in the 1920s. Waters’ father was a train porter, bringing home a steady wage. His family never knew poverty. Yet Waters makes clear that Enoch, Sr.’s career as a redcap was “not because he chose to be one, but because he was denied the opportunity to be what he wanted to be.” [3] Waters understands that his own success as a journalist was built on the back of his father’s less glamorous labor (whose work was infinitely preferable to large swaths of his peers). Waters understands that he is one of few Negroes born in the early twentieth century who enjoyed the opportunity to “be what they wanted to be.”

Waters says he benefited from growing up in an integrated neighborhood. Yet he documents how, at every new stage of his life, he confronted limits imposed by racial prejudice and discrimination. His best childhood friendship with a neighborhood Jewish boy, does not survive the transition to adolescence. His father finagles Waters’ admission to the best (all male) public high school in the city, only to be denied participation in every school activity, including, most frustratingly, the school newspaper.

As luck would have it, he gets a kind of internship with the Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s only Negro newspaper. Actually, luck had nothing to do with it. Waters learned years later–and we learn a hundred pages later–that his own father had secretly arranged with the publisher to hire his son for a job that didn’t exist. Enoch, Sr. paid the publisher who turned around and paid it back to the son as (minimum) wages. Enoch, Jr. earned his father’s money and a boon for his paper by creating a popular column on high school news and views.

Waters does not glorify his introduction to the black press. The Tribune‘s offices and plant were dishearteningly seedy as he arrived for work that first day. His assigned desk–such as it was–“was one of the most abused pieces of furniture I had ever seen. It was so battered that it might have been in continuous existence since the days when Frederick Douglass was publishing The North Star in 1858, and it might have been second hand then.” [42] The editorial staff were hardly more inspiring: The Tribune‘s “was not a fast paced operation. In fact, the atmosphere was very casual and informal. The men worked in spurts to the accompaniment of banter and conversation consisting mostly of comments on the copy that flowed across their desks. The mail and telephone produced most of the news.” [44] He acknowledges the paper’s practice of printing as many names of community members as possible, a blatant attempt to flatter potential customers into purchases.  He reveals reporters accepting money from community members to put their names, or pictures, in the paper.

This is the confessional style pervading the other half of his memoir. Waters’ “diary” of the black press is unblinkingly honest. No rose-tinted glasses. Waters is a realist, neither (especially) a booster nor a critic of the institution he served for four decades. “Paid news” was a fact of life for a business living so close to the edge of financial solvency, whose advertising revenue among both black and white businesses was limited, whose market was not fully literate and tended to pass the product around to friends and neighbors. And yet, Waters allows that it was at the Tribune he came to see Negro newspapers as “the heartbeat of the community.” [52] The reporters did more than gather information and write stories. They shared their knowledge with community members who came to them in crisis, as if they were providers of social service agency.

After a chapter on his Hampton days, in which he reported on school clubs and sports teams, and two on the history of the black press from its inception to the twentieth century, Waters focuses his gaze on Chicago, “A  Tainted Heaven, But Still a Haven.” [68] He exposes equal amounts of taint and haven. Waters goes inside the so-called policy (gambling) racket in an attempt to understand the Negros at its heart. He is discouraged to find these racketeers spending money ostentatiously, as fast as they can take it in. Was this what their forebears dreamed of in emancipation? Waters passes no judgments. He decides their profligate behaviors “were involuntary efforts to compensate for the low esteem in which Negroes were regarded. With money to do so, the policy barons wanted the Negroes, if not the whites, to know they existed, that they had achieved some measure of success and that they were somebody.” [79]

Later, assigned to the crime beat, Waters was shocked to discover “Negroes had so little regard for the lives and property of other Negroes” [320]–until a friend of his, a beat cop, set him straight. The sergeant asked Waters to think like a small-change punk criminal. “Would you go to a white neighborhood, unfamiliar to you and where your presence would arouse suspicion and where all the cops are white, even if you had the money to get there?” [321] It wasn’t meant as a rhetorical question. Waters got the picture. White criminals didn’t go into black neighborhoods for much the same reasons. A journalist conducts his education in public, and Waters is not afraid to revisit the progress of his own in his memoir.

Nor does he balk at examining the seamier side of black American life. His thoroughness, both in coverage and in his efforts at understanding, serves a rhetorical purpose. It makes his case for full civil rights for all that much stronger, that much more urgent.

This, after all, was his and the black press’s overriding mission during these middle decades of the twentieth century. “The pursuit of that goal was total and took precedence over all else,” writes Waters. “More accurately, [black newspapers] were organs of personal, and usually, militant expression rather than newspapers as we know them today. They were heavy on opinion and short on news that was not related to the mission.” [135] Today, we might laugh–or scream back at the page–after reading that black newspapers “didn’t conform, at the time, to the stark, unbiased reporting that was the guiding principle of white journalism.” Waters tells us that “black newspapers were criticized as propaganda sheets…and they were in a sense.” [267] Yet we would do well to take Waters at his word. His concern is not how well white journalism did or didn’t live up to the ideal of “objectivity.” His interest is in the black press, whose mission was avowedly one of advocacy as well as of journalism. As the managing editor at The Defender told his staff after they had reported a particularly good day on the civil rights front, “Keep this up and you’ll put the Defender out of business.” Then he added, “Don’t worry, that’s a long way off….” [295]

Waters pushed himself throughout his career to widen his view and to expand his understanding. (“A black journalist reporting news of a black community for a black newspaper is likely to develop a narrowed perspective of life in America without being conscious of it.” [320]) In 1942, and again after the war, he made a tour of the South: thirty-eight states, fifty-seven communities, thirty military installations in a total of twenty-eight months on the road. The people he met in his travels were as interested in his view from the Promised Land of Chicago as he was of theirs. They plied him with questions, which made them all the more open to his own questions of them. His stories in the two chapters covering these months make some of the most compelling of the entire book.

The Southside Chicagoan in the Jim Crow South reads like a kind of “innocence abroad.” Waters describes having to carry toilet tissue in his briefcase to use in basement bathrooms that were never cleaned. He recounts his dependence on the kindness of Negro contacts to put him up for the night, and all the benefits (home-cooked meals) and drawbacks (curtailed nighttime typing sessions) that entailed. He details the difficulty of carrying out his work when transportation and telephones were difficult to come by, and access white domains nearly impossible.

Yet the Negro population is more than willing to assist a reporter from the hallowed Defender. The people he meets provide rich material for his series of articles and for his two chapters on this period. The profile of Henry Taylor stands out. Henry works in the local, white-owned barbershop, opening to close, sweeping up hair, racking magazines, and generally performing every odd job that needs to be done. At the end of each day, after boarding a bus and alighting in the colored section of town, Henry became Mr. Taylor. “A miraculous transformation from boy to man occurred in the twenty minutes it took to reach his destination.” [347] For those of us who weren’t there, especially those of who aren’t black, this story–whose plot thickens: read the book!–tells us more about what it meant to black in the South than any scholarly monograph could.

Henry Taylor may have been exceptional, but he wasn’t an exception. “At this time, no Negro could be taken at face value,” Waters explains. “Often the stereotypical southern darkey, smiling, respectful, and unlearned was a dedicated and active foe of white dominance” when among his own kind in the black part of town. [329] Enoch Waters’ reporting, related in his memoir for a new generation of readers, gives substance to racism of that time.

As promised (American Diary), Waters considers the effect of these racial attitudes and practices on whites, too. He concludes, “Whites didn’t understand the little worlds they dominated. They knew they were in charge, but they did not realize they were not as superior as they assumed. While they successfully depressed blacks, they were not progressing. As measured against whites from other regions of the nation, they, too, were inferior in all respects.” [337] It was a theme he sounded in his 1943 reporting, that I found by scanning through ProQuest historical newspapers. In an article from the very end of his tours, Waters portrayed the South as a giant Gulliver, strapped down by Lilliputian strands, never considering that “he has the strength to free himself.” [Waters, The Chicago Defender, May 8, 1943, 13.]

As he was reporting from the South, Waters was waiting for permission to go overseas as a war correspondent. His application to the government, though held up for political reasons, was finally approved in May, 1943. Waters caught a transport ship to Australia and spent the next thirty months reporting on the Pacific war and its aftermath.

How would he and The Defender report the war? More to the point, how could Negroes more generally support a country that daily denied them full citizenship? Forty years after the fact, Waters attempts to provide an answer:

If America were not our home, what was? We hadn’t come here willingly, but once here we had made contributions to the nations development as great as any other group of Americans. What we gave was far in excess of what we had received. We knew we had gained a proprietary interest in this land and because we knew of no other, we regarded as our home, a home we had to defend with our lives if it came to that. What alternative did we have? [365]

The passage reminded me of an anecdote shared by James Alexander Thom, who asked a Native American Vietnam veteran how he felt about fighting for a country that had displaced, even exterminated, his people. The man replied, “You White people don’t get it. This is my country.” Waters, too, makes a strong case not for black inclusion into a white country, but for the country itself to be conceived properly as black, white, and red, or Native American (his wife was part Cherokee). (Asian Americans, he would argue, have made equally defining contributions to American society and require equal respect and citizenship.)

The most affecting part of his two war chapters comes when Negro GIs challenge The Defender‘s editorial stance on segregation in the armed forces. More specifically, they disputed Waters’ contention in an article they read that blacks be assigned combat roles equal to whites. For these men in the so-called service units, war work was not all that different from what they had done at home: unloading supplies, driving trucks, operating a laundry, painting signs, repairing auto engines, cooking, building roads, burying garbage, hauling water. Yet they were perfectly fine with it. “Why should we volunteer to sacrifice our lives for a Jim Crow country?” one asked Waters. “Have you ever seen how the infantry lives? Then you know they are like nomads, always on the go. Never settling down. Living on the worst rations, dirty and always fearful of being killed or at least shot at. That ain’t for me.” And another: “Let them have the medals. You can’t eat ’em and you can’t buy anything with ’em.” [389-390]

This was uncharted territory for Waters. For the first time, he was having to defend The Defender‘s editorial stance to its own readers. He seems to concede the men’s point at the end of the chapter when he admits that he, too, benefited from the Army’s racial policies. By reporting on Negro service units he received more perks unavailable to other war correspondents: better food, cold beer, clean clothing, more comfortable quarters, and a closer relationship with the GIs. [394]

Occasionally, one has the  impression of  listening in on dialogue between Waters and unseen speakers offstage, the septuagenarian engaging with the next generation of civil rights advocates. Like any respectable old fogey, he aims to show respect while distancing himself from elements of their rhetoric he cannot endorse. “Black is beautiful,” he says, was a misguided slogan that, unintentionally, conveyed arrogance. To make his point, he asks the reader to consider it converted to a proclamation of white beauty. “Black is also beautiful” would have been better achieved its aim of instilling black pride, he says. [227]

Waters also finds arrogance in the vogue among left-leaning members of his community to adopt African names.  Waters sounds touchier than he needs to be at one point in his argument. However, his reasoning overall is perfectly sound: “My surname has a greater significance to me than one that I might select from an alphabetized list of African names I can purchase at a bookstore. My surname not only links me to my forebears, some of whom may have been white, but with my living kinsmen.” Again, the argument is of a piece with his comments, cited above, on the Negro’s loyalties in the Second World War. He doesn’t want to apologize for seeing himself as American. To the contrary, he wants racist whites, racist society, to apologize for denying his claim to equal American citizenship.

In Waters’ heyday as a journalist, both white and black newspapers used “Negro” and “colored” to talk about members of Waters’ community. (Though white papers took longer to capitalize Negro, and The Defender‘s publisher, Robert Abbott, preferred “the Race” whenever he published commentary.) Even the Oklahoma Black Dispatch used Negro rather than Black. Waters, from the perspective of the mid-1980s, avers that he is equally amenable to all the various appellations for his people, though he adds that he is most comfortable with Negro because he is of the period “when it was generally acceptable and in common use.” [228]

The discussion is of special interest to me because I was in college as Waters wrote these words. I was of the period, the late 1970s, when “black” was “generally accepted and in common use.” African American was starting to displace it as the preferred nomenclature in the 1980s. Writing in that decade, Waters works to include the former in his text (I sense him making a conscious effort), and occasionally approximates the latter with “Afro-American,” which is perhaps an earlier form of the expression my generation became comfortable with. I have learned, along with everyone in my generation, to use the more modern term. We have (or haven’t) learned to adopt terms that post-date our coming-of-age: Latinx, cis-gender, etc. But spending time with Enoch Waters underscores the relative puniness of language policing. Waters speaks with more authority on the issues than most of those today who uses the more politically correct terms. Language matters, of course, but a richness and openness of expression matters, too.

The wokest might object to more than his terminology. Black Lives Matter would take him as a reactionary for quibbling with its organization’s name. (Black Lives Matter, Too? Please!) #MeToo would object to his focus on aviatrix Willa Brown as a “shapely young brownskin woman.”[196] (And let’s please ditch the sexist term for aviator while we’re at it.)  Fair enough. Yet crimes of racism, sexism, classism, etc. are negative features and add up to little on their own. Besides, we can add presentism to the list of sins, while we’re at it. Waters had no control over the color of his skin, nor over the year of his birth, nor does anyone else. If I can respect those who from other places, with different cultures and ideas about how the world works–and let’s admit it can be difficult to do so, or else we wouldn’t need to talk about it so much–then surely I can respect people from different times whose formative experiences were so different from mine.

 

Enoch Waters had a radically reformist side, to be expected in a one on the receiving end of so much discrimination and prejudice. He had a temperamentally conservative side, befitting a child of a relatively educated, middle class family and one who pursued a professional career his entire adult life. Why should anyone begrudge him the latter? Aren’t those the opportunities that too many African Americans were denied? Besides, the strength of Waters’ memoir of his life within the black press resides in the synthesis of the two sides. The full humanity of the writer, and of the everyday and exceptional Negroes he wrote about, is palpable for that very reason.

Sources:

Waters, Enoch P. American Diary: A Personal History of the Black Press. Chicago: Path Press, Inc., 1987.

———-, “Color Lines Bind Dixie To Economy Of Poverty,” The Chicago Defender, May 8, 1943, 13.

National Air and Space Museum: https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/dale-l-white-and-chauncey-e-spencer-nasm-9a12445