Its ruling under attack from the services, the board made a hasty appeal to authority. Its chief of staff, Vice Adm. John L. McCrea,[15-8] recommended that the Army and Navy consult Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary for specific definitions of the five racial categories. That source, the admiral explained to the Under Secretary of the Navy, listed Polynesian in the Malayan category, and if the Navy decided to add race to its shipping articles, the five categories should be sufficient. The board, he added, had not meant to encourage additional use of racial information. The Navy had always used the old color categories on its shipping articles forms, the ones, incidentally, favored by Evans, and McCrea thought they generally corresponded to the categories developed by the board.[15-9] The admiral also suggested that the Army use the color system to help clarify the board's categories. He offered some generalizations on specific Army questions: "a) Puerto Ricans are officially Caucasian, unless of Indian or Negro birth; b) Filipinos are Malayan; c) Hawaiians are Malayan; d) Latin Americans are Caucasian or Indian; and e) Indian-Negro and White-Negro mixtures should be classified in accordance with the laws of the states of their birth."[15-10] The lessons on definition of race so painfully learned during World War II were ignored. Henceforth race was to be determined by a dictionary, a color scheme, and the legal vagaries found in the race laws of the several states.
The board's rulings, unscientific and open to all sorts of legal complications, could only be stopgap measures, and when on 4 January 1950 the Army again requested clarification of the racial categories, the board quickly responded. Although it continued to defend the use of racial categories, it tried to soften the ruling by stating that an applicant's declaration of race should be accepted, subject to "sufficient justification" from the applicant when his declaration created "reason to doubt." It was 5 April before the board's new chairman, J. Thomas Schneider,[15-11] issued a revised directive to this effect.[15-12]
The board's decision to accept an applicant's declaration was simply a return to the reasonable and practical method the Selective Service had been using for some time. But adopting the vague qualification "sufficient justification" invited further complaints. When the services finally translated the board's directive into a new regulation, the role of the applicant in deciding his racial identity was practically abolished. In the Army and the Air Force, for example, recruiters had to submit all unresolved identity cases to the highest local commander, whose decision, supposedly based on available documentary evidence and answers to the questions first suggested by Congressman Holifield, was final. Further, the Army and the Air Force decided that "no enlistment would be accomplished" until racial identity was decided to the satisfaction of both the applicant and the service.[15-13] The Navy adopted a similar procedure when it placed the board's directive in effect.[15-14] The new regulation promised little comfort for young Americans of racially mixed parentage and even less for the services. Contrary to the intent of the Personnel Policy Board, its directive once again placed the burden of deciding an applicant's race, with the concomitant complaints and potential civil suits, back on the services.
At the time the Army did not see this responsibility as a burden and in its quest for uniformity was willing to assume an even greater share of the decision-making in a potentially explosive issue. On 7 August the Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff, G-1, asked the Personnel Policy Board to include Army induction centers in the directive meant originally for recruiting centers only.[15-15] In effect the Army was offering to assume from Selective Service the task of deciding the race of all draftees. The board obtained the necessary agreement from Maj. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, and Selective Service was thus relieved of an onerous task reluctantly acquired in 1944. On 29 August 1950 The Adjutant General ordered induction stations to begin entering the draftee's race in the records.[15-16]
The considerable staff activity devoted to definitions of race between 1949 and 1951 added very little to racial harmony or the cause of integration. The simplified racial categories and the regulations determining their application continued to irritate members of America's several minority groups. The ink was hardly dry on the new regulation, for example, before the director of the NAACP's Washington bureau was complaining to Secretary of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter that the department's five categories were comparatively meaningless and caused unnecessary humiliation for inductees. He wanted racial entries eliminated.[15-17] Finletter explained that racial designations were not used for assignment or administrative purposes but solely for evaluating the integration program and answering questions from the public. His explanation prompted much discussion within the services and correspondence between them and Clarence Mitchell and Walter White of the NAACP. It culminated in a meeting of the service secretaries with the Secretary of Defense on 16 January 1951 at which Finletter reaffirmed his position.[15-18]
There was some justification for the Defense Department's position. Many of those who found racial designations distasteful also demanded hard statistical proof that members of minority groups were given equal treatment and opportunity,[15-19] and such assurances, of course, demanded racial determinations on the records. Still, not all the reasons for retaining the racial identification entry were so defensible. The Army, for example, had to maintain accurate statistics on the number of Negroes inducted because of its concern with a possible unacceptable rise in their number and the President's promise to reimpose the quota to prevent such an increase. Whatever the reasons, it was obvious that racial statistics had to be kept. It was also obvious that as long as they were kept and continued to matter, the Secretary of Defense would be saddled with the task of deciding in the end which racial tag to attach to each man in the armed forces. It was an unenviable duty, and it could be performed with neither precision nor justice.
Overseas Restrictions
Another problem involving the Secretary of Defense concerned restrictions placed on the use of black servicemen in certain foreign areas. The problem was not new. Making a distinction in cases where American troops were stationed in a country at the request of the United States government, the services excluded black troops from assignment in some Allied countries during and immediately after World War II.[15-20] The Army, for example, barred the assignment of black units to China (the Chinese government did not object to assignment of individual black soldiers up to 15 percent of any unit's strength), and the Navy removed black messmen from stations in Iceland.[15-21] Although these restrictions did not improve the racial image of the services, they were only a minor inconvenience to military officials since Negroes were for the most part segregated and their placement could be controlled easily. The armed forces continued to exclude black servicemen from certain countries into 1949 under what the Personnel Policy Board called "operating agreements (probably not in writing)" with the State Department.[15-22] But the situation changed radically when some of the services started to integrate. Efficient administration then demanded that black servicemen be interchanged freely among the various duty stations. Even in the case of the still segregated Army the exclusion of Negroes from certain commands further complicated the chronic maldistribution of black soldiers throughout the service.
The interservice and departmental aspects of the problem involved Secretary of Defense Johnson. Following promulgation of his directive on racial equality and at the instigation of his Personnel Policy Board and his assistant, Najeeb Halaby, Johnson asked the Secretary of State for a formal expression of views on the use of black troops in a lengthy list of countries.[15-23] Such an expression was clearly necessary, as Air Force spokesmen pointed out. Informed of the consultations, Assistant Secretary Zuckert asked that an interim policy be formulated, so urgent had the problem become in the Air Force where new racial policies and assignments were under way.[15-24]
For his part the Secretary of State had no objection to stationing Negroes in any of the listed countries. In fact, Under Secretary James E. Webb assured Johnson, the State Department welcomed the new Defense Department policy of equal treatment and opportunity as a step toward the achievement of the nation's foreign policy objectives. At the same time Webb admitted that there were certain countries—he listed specifically Iceland, Greenland, Canada, Newfoundland, Bermuda, and British possessions in the Caribbean—where local attitudes might affect the morale of black troops and their relations with the inhabitants. The State Department, therefore, preferred advance warning when the services planned to assign Negroes to these countries so that it might consult the host governments and reduce "possible complications" to a minimum.[15-25]