Aufsatz Joseph W. Bendersky Racial Sentinels: Biological Anti-Semitism in the U.S. Army Officer Corps, 1890-1950 The Racial Mentality of an Anglo-Saxon Elite On June 21,1921, twenty U.S. army officers from across Europe gathered at the American Military Attaché Conference in Coblenz, Gèrmany. Among them were the cream of U.S. Military Intelligence (MID), the most highly respected and effective intelligence officers in the army who held strategically important posts across the continent. This distinguished body also included rising stars such as Oscar Solbert, soon to be President Coolidge's military aide, and Warner McCabe, later Chief of MID during the crucial 1930s refugee crisis and years leading up to World War II. Robert Eichelberger and James Ord, later aide to Douglas MacArthur, became promi- nent generals in that war. The Chief of Military Intelligence, General Marlborough Churchill, had traveled from Washington to conduct the major briefing. Although usually not regarded within the sphere of military competence, immigration re- ceived more attention at this conference than any other issue, including military intelligence and administration. The temporary nature (18 months) of the restric- tive racial immigration law Congress passed a few weeks before seriously con- cerned these officers. On their own initiative, they felt duty-bound once again to raise the vital problem of immigration with Congress, since it had »an important bear- ing on the future of our country and our race«. They demanded legislative action to halt eastern European immigration, which constituted a »menace« to American civilization1. Indeed, for years, these same attaches had alerted Washington to this danger, emphasizing the threat arising from Jews in particular. In addition to the political and cultural arguments against Jews, these officers offered one based upon biological anti-Semitism. Jews constituted a »herd« of racial- ly inferior people. This same political biology also led these officers to favor in- creased immigration from their own racial kind. As their report concluded, »Ef- forts should therefore be made to pass legislation to facilitate immigration to the United States from the states of Northwestern Europe and the British Isles, where the Nordic race predominates2.« Both the racial perspectives held by these officers and the political engagement these views stimulated within the officer corps had their origins in the military cul- ture of the late 19eh and early 20th centuries. Within that culture Social Darwinism and scientific racism constituted significant components of the worldview of many 1 »Coblenz Conference of Military Attaches«, June 1921, National Archives College Park, MD (hereafter NACP), RG 165, Military Intelligence Division (hereafter MID), Records of the War Department and Special Staffs, 2580-47 (29), 4-5. 2 Ibid. Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 62 (2003), S. 331-353 © Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Potsdam 332 MGZ 62 (2003) Joseph W. Bendersky officers. This was no mere general prejudice. Their racial views had fairly sophis- ticated intellectual and theoretical foundations and their activities had long-term consequences throughout the first half of the twentieth century. They affected Amer- ican policy on immigration, on refugees from Nazi Germany, and on the fate of Jews during and after the Holocaust. Although traditional religious, cultural, and economic brands of anti-Semitism also influenced officer attitudes and political activities, this article focuses mainly up- on the racial variant, which reveals that even mainstream officers were susceptible to the most extreme form of anti-Semitism. Biological racial anti-Semitism was, in- deed, more virulent and momentous than more traditional types of prejudice against Jews. Traditional anti-Semites perceived Jews as merely religiously and culturally different, and as such their assumed problematic characteristics were susceptible to change through Christianization or cultural assimilation. The entire American »Melt- ing Pot« ideal was premised on the assumption that over generations environmen- tal influences and education could transform ethnically diverse people into an ap- proximation of the higher American types of being. Over time, assimilation would replace detrimental Jewish traits of anti-Christianity, economic avarice, and politi- cal radicalism with laudable Anglo-Saxon values, mentality, and behavior. A bio- logical interpretation of Jews, however, drastically altered the very nature of the so- called »Jewish Question« and its possible solutions. It defined Jewish racial char- acteristics of mind and body as genetically inherited and immutable. What nature and evolution had determined with firmness remained impervious to meaningful change through environmental influences of culture, education, and socialization. Social assimilation and Americanization could only affect Jews superficially, where- as actual crossbreeding with the non-Jewish American majority would be a racial catastrophe by infecting the American gene pool with inferior Jewish traits. Bio- logical fact dictated the exclusion rather than the assimilation of Jews. U.S. military historians have paid very limited attention to the pervasive racial thinking of the army officer corps and completely neglected the army's engage- ment with the »Jewish Question«3. Despite rising expectations over the past decade about the »New Military History«, only a limited number of studies have addressed the interaction of the military with American society and politics4. A recent study of immigrants in the U.S. army during World War I also reveals a continuing re- luctance to break away from traditional institutional approaches and to delve deeply into military culture to examine the mentality of officers that significantly affected their behavior5. And standard U.S. military histories still depict Social Darwinist at- 3 For a critical examination of U.S. military historiography regarding race and Jews see Joseph W. Bendersky, »The Absent Presence: Enduring Images of Jews in United States Military History«, American Jewish History 89 (December 2001): 411-436. 4 John Whiteclay Chambers II, »The New Military History: Myth and Reality«, Journal of Military History 55 (July 1991): 395-406; John A. Lynn, »Clio in Arms: The Role of the Mil- itary Variable in Shaping History«, Journal of Military History 55 (January 1991): 83-95. See also Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton, 1992), 209-226. 5 See Nancy Gentile Ford, Americans All! Foreign-Born Soldiers in World War I (College Sta- tion, TX, 2001). The subject of foreign-born soldiers was a perfect opportunity to exam- ine the mentality of officers regarding race as it affected their expectations and treatment of various ethnic groups. Attention to the substantial amount of available archival and published documentation on the racial thinking of officers would have produced a much different picture than the one offered by Ford. However, she follows a traditional insti- Racial Sentinels 333 titudes among officers as a phenomenon limited to the late-nineteenth century6. They offer no inkling that officers were exposed to racial theory into the late 1930s and that it pervaded their mentality and institutional culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Race is discussed only in the context of prejudice against African-American soldiers, and even these analyses fail to convey an ade- quate appreciation of the theoretical racial framework promoting and justifying racist behavior and policies within the military7. References to Jews are almost non-existent in this military literature, or these works merely note individual acts of prejudice without any suggestion of their wider institutional or historical significance. Nonetheless, documenting biological anti-Semitism among army officers has broader implications for American histo- ry generally and for the study of race and anti-Semitism in the United States in particular. Carl Degler, the prominent historian of Darwinism in America, has ar- gued that »by the 1930s it was about as difficult to locate an American social sci- entist who accepted a racial explanation for human behavior as it had been easy to find one in 19008.« Similarly, other historians held that biological-racial anti-Semi- tism had »virtually disappeared from the American scene« after 19249. The histo- ry of racial education, thinking, and political engagement among army officers casts serious doubts upon such contentions. During the early twentieth century, the officer corps consisted primarily of mid- dle and upper class Anglo-Saxon Protestants, reinforced by others of various north- ern European ancestries. Proud and defensive of what they perceived as their unique ethnic-cultural heritage and system of government, they were a reflection of the dominant sociological group within America of that age. Officers often claimed to be the models and guardians of true Americanism, which they equat- ed with pure Anglo-Saxonism. Although the immigration of millions of eastern and southern Europeans by the early part of the century made the country much more ethnically diverse, the officer corps, with few exceptions, remained a fairly homogeneous group10. With conservative political attitudes and Christian princi- tutional approach and limits herself to a very restricted evidentiary base of certain offi- cial military reports, which she accepts uncritically. Neglecting