In at least one respect, this remained true during the war: The U.S. military was racially segregated. The only black units assigned to storm the beaches on the morning of June 6, 1944, were the 320th Air Defence Battalion. One of its medics, 21-year-old Corporal Waverly B. Woodson Jr., was wounded by German shrapnel as they landed about 9 a.m. Bleeding and in pain, he set up a medical station and treated the Allied wounded, most of whom were white, for 30 hours before collapsing and being taken to a hospital ship.
Woodson survived the war, returned to the country where he was a second-class citizen, and died in 2005. Earlier this week, he was finally posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest honor.
The system of racial segregation and oppression known as Jim Crow laws was not the only divide that divided Americans: the country was still struggling to recover from the Great Depression, and bitter partisan fighting was raging over President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.
Roosevelt lost political capital in 1937 when he tried unsuccessfully to staff the Supreme Court, which had stood in the way of his sweeping reforms, and the following year he angered a faction of his own party by supporting progressive Democrats over conservative incumbents in congressional primaries.
And when President Roosevelt broke with tradition and ran for a third term in the White House in 1940, critics charged that he was trying to become a dictator like Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler. The rhetoric was as angry and apocalyptic as anything we will hear in 2024.
Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said that “the danger of totalitarian ideas infiltrating from the New Deal camp in Washington is greater than that from the activities of the Communists or the Nazi Bund.” Wendell Willkie, a relative moderate who won the Republican nomination, also charged that “every major economic policy of the New Deal” was pushing the nation toward socialism and decried the “rapid trend toward totalitarianism.” The record of history shows that capitalism survived.
When war broke out in Europe, Roosevelt realized the United States would eventually be drawn into it. He realized the United States was woefully underprepared. He inherited an army with only 175,000 active duty soldiers who were ill-equipped, ill-trained, and likely to become mere cannon fodder for the formidable German military might.
But isolationists resisted President Roosevelt’s efforts to prepare the US military and aid Britain against the threat of Nazi aggression. The early MAGA movement explicitly expressed its nativism, racism, and anti-Semitism, rather than implicit euphemisms. The flagship pressure group opposed to President Roosevelt was called the America First Committee. This name may prove Karl Marx right when he said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.
The famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, a leading spokesman for America First, went so far as to argue that America should side with Germany and join the Nazis in racial solidarity against the “Asiatic invaders” – Russians and Jews, as Lindbergh called them. Isolationism had considerable mainstream support, including in the business world, whose syndicated journal, the Wall Street Journal, argued in a 1940 editorial that “our job today is not to stop Hitler.”
But Roosevelt foresaw that stopping Hitler was exactly our job, and he took a big political gamble during the fierce 1940 election campaign to lobby Congress to authorize the nation’s first peacetime conscription. And he got what he wanted: a bill and a third term.
A year later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reawakened the isolationism that until recently lay in the deepest recesses of our national identity, giving Americans a common purpose and leading to the courage, sacrifice and triumph that Biden and other world leaders commemorated Thursday.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seems unlikely that a world war will ever again bring nations together. This reality means we must somehow accept division while striving for incremental improvement through a political process that is barely working. The American graves on the cliffs above Omaha Beach warn us to muster the courage we need.
