The services regained control by default. Logically, direction of racial reforms in the services should have fallen to the Secretary of Defense. In the first place, the secretary, other administration officials, and the public alike had begun to use the secretary's office as a clearinghouse for reconciling conflicting demands of the services, as an appellate court reviewing decisions of the service secretaries, and as the natural channel of communication between the services and the White House, Congress, and the public. Many racial problems had become interservice in nature, and only the Office of the Secretary of Defense possessed the administrative machinery to deal with such matters. The Personnel Policy Board or, later, the new Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Personnel might well have become the watchdog recommended by the Fahy Committee to oversee the services' progress toward integration, but neither did.
Certainly the Secretary of Defense had other matters pressing for his attention. Secretary Johnson had become the central character in the budgetary conflicts of Truman's second term, and both he and General George C. Marshall, who succeeded him as secretary on 20 September 1950, were suddenly thrust into leadership of the Korean War. In administrative matters, at least, Marshall had to concentrate on boosting the morale of a department torn by internecine budgetary arguments. Integration did not appear to have the same importance to national security as these weighty matters. More to the point, Johnson and Marshall were not social reformers. Whatever their personal attitudes, they were content to let the services set the pace of racial reform. With one notable exception neither man initiated any of the historic racial changes that took place in the armed forces during the early 1950's.
For the most part those racial issues that did involve the Secretary of Defense centered on the status of the Negro in the armed forces in general and were extraneous to the issue of integration. One of the most persistent status problems was classification by race. First posed during the great World War II draft calls, the question of how to determine a serviceman's race, and indeed the related one of who had the right to make such a determination, remained unanswered five years later. In August 1944 the Selective Service System decided that the definition of a man's race should be left to the man himself. While this solution no doubt pleased racial progressives and certainly simplified the induction process, not to speak of protecting the War Department from a ticklish court review, it still left the services the difficult and important task of designating racial categories into which men could be assigned. As late as April 1949 the Army and the Air Force listed a number of specific racial categories, one of which had to be chosen by the applicant or recruiter—the regulation left the point unclear—to identify the applicant's race. The regulation listed "white, Negro, Indian (referring to American Indian only), Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Hawaiian, Filipino, Chinese, East Indian, etc.," and specifically included mulattoes and "others of negroid race or extraction" in the Negro category, leaving other men of mixed race to be entered under their predominant race.[15-3]
The regulation was obviously subject to controversy, and in the wake of the President's equality order it is not surprising that some group—a group of Spanish-speaking Americans from southern California, as it turned out—would raise the issue. Specifically, they objected to a practice of Army and Air Force recruiters, who often scratched out "white" and inserted "Mexican" in the applications of Spanish-speaking volunteers. These young men wanted to be integrated into every phase of community life, Congressman Chet Holifield told the Secretary of Defense, and he passed on a warning from his California constituents that "any attempt to forestall this ambition by treating them as a group apart is extremely repellent to them and gives rise to demoralization and hostility."[15-4] If the Department of Defense considered racial information essential, Holifield continued, why not make the determination in a less objectionable manner? He suggested a series of questions concerning the birthplace of the applicant's parents and the language spoken in his home as innocuous possibilities.
Secretary Johnson sent the congressman's complaint to the Personnel Policy Board, which, ignoring the larger considerations posed by Holifield, concentrated on simplifying the department's racial categories to five—Caucasian, Negroid, Mongolian, Indian (American), and Malayan—and making their use uniform throughout the services. The board also adopted the use of inoffensive questions to help determine the applicant's proper race category. Obviously, the board could not abandon racial designations because the Army's quota system, still in effect, depended on this information. Less clear, however, was why the board failed to consider the problem of who should make the racial determination. At any rate, its new list of racial categories, approved by the secretary and published on 11 October, immediately drew complaints from members of the department.[15-5]
Navy Corpsman in Korea
attends wounded from the 1st Marine Division, 1950.
The secretary's racial adviser, James C. Evans, saw no need for racial designations on departmental forms, but knowing their removal was unlikely in the near future, he concentrated on trying to change the newly revised categories. He explained to the board, obviously unschooled in the nuance of racial slurs, that the word "Negroid" was offensive to many Negroes. Besides, the board's categories made no sense since Indian (American) and Malayan were not comparable to the other three entries listed. Why not, he suggested, settle for the old black, white, yellow, red, and brown designations?[15-6]
The Navy, too, objected to the board's categories. After consulting a Smithsonian ethnologist, the Under Secretary of the Navy suggested that the board create a sixth category, Polynesian, for use in shipping articles and in forms for reporting casualties. The Army, also troubled by the categories, requested they be defined. The categories were meant to provide a uniform basis for classifying military personnel, The Adjutant General pointed out, but given the variety and complexity of Army forms—he had discovered that the Army was using seven separate forms with racial entries, each with a different procedure for deciding race—uniformity was practically impossible without a careful delineation of each category.[15-7]