In at least one aspect, this was true even during the war: The U.S. armed forces were racially segregated. The only all-Black unit assigned to storm the beaches on the morning of June 6, 1944, was the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion. One of its medics, 21-year-old Cpl. Waverly B. Woodson Jr., was wounded by German shrapnel as he landed around 9 a.m. Bleeding and in pain, he set up a medical aid station and spent 30 hours treating the Allied wounded, almost all of them White, before collapsing and being taken to a hospital ship.
Woodson survived the war, returned to a nation where he was a second-class citizen, and died in 2005. This week — finally — he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest honor.
The system of racial separation and oppression known as Jim Crow was hardly the only chasm that divided Americans. The country was still struggling to recover from the Great Depression, and partisan factions were bitterly fighting over the New Deal policies that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had enacted.
Roosevelt lost political capital in 1937 when he tried, and failed, to pack the Supreme Court, which had been an impediment to his sweeping reforms. The following year, he angered a wing of his own party by supporting progressive Democrats over more-conservative incumbents in congressional primary contests.
And when FDR broke with tradition in 1940 and ran for a third term in the White House, critics howled that he was trying to make himself into a dictator like Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler. The rhetoric was as angry and apocalyptic as anything we are hearing in 2024.
Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, who was seeking the Republican presidential nomination, said there was “more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle in Washington than there will ever be from any activities of the communists or Nazi bunds.” Wendell Willkie, the relative moderate who won the GOP nomination, also railed against “our very rapid drift toward totalitarianism,” charging that “every major economic policy of the New Deal” was pushing the nation toward socialism. For the historical record: Capitalism survived.
When war erupted in Europe, Roosevelt knew the United States would eventually be drawn in. He saw that the country was woefully unprepared. He had inherited an army with only 175,000 ill-equipped, inadequately trained soldiers on active duty — mere cannon fodder, potentially, for the fearsome German war machine.
But isolationists resisted Roosevelt’s efforts to ready the U.S. military and help Britain hold out against the threat of a Nazi invasion. The original MAGA movement expressed its nativism, racism and antisemitism plainly, rather than in coded euphemisms. The flagship pressure group working against Roosevelt was called the America First Committee — a name that might prove Karl Marx was right when he said history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.
Famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, the chief spokesman for America First, went so far as to argue that the United States should take the side of Germany, joining the Nazis in racial solidarity against “Asiatic intruders” — by which he meant Russians and Jews. Isolationism had significant mainstream support, including in the business community, whose collective diary, the Wall Street Journal, argued in a 1940 editorial that “our job today is not to stop Hitler.”
Roosevelt foresaw, however, that stopping Hitler would indeed be our job. He took a huge political gamble during the heated 1940 election campaign, when he pushed Congress to authorize the nation’s first peacetime military draft. He got what he wanted — both the legislation and the third term.
A year later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor sent isolationism back into the deepest recesses of our national id — until recently — and gave Americans a common purpose, leading to the bravery, sacrifice and triumph that Biden and other world leaders commemorated Thursday.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is inconceivable that global war can again be the forge that welds the nation together. This reality means that somehow we must tolerate our divisions as we try to ameliorate them, incrementally, through our barely functional political process. The American graves on the bluff above Omaha Beach admonish us to summon the necessary valor.
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