President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are continuing their war “wokeness” in the military. On Oct. 28, Trump bragged to Navy personnel aboard the U.S.S. George Washington that the military was no longer “politically correct.” Hegseth, the man charged with making this happen, made his views clear about what the task entailed during a Sept. 30 address at Marine Corps Base Quantico. “An entire generation of generals and admirals were told that they must parrot the insane fallacy that, quote, ‘our diversity is our strength,’” he mocked.
“For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniformed leaders for the wrong reasons, based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.… We became the woke department, but not anymore,” he vowed. Trump and Hegseth appear to see the past as a time when the military trained manly warriors who won the country’s wars—before “wokeness” upended this model. They’ve resurrected the moniker the “War Department” for the Department of Defense to hark back to those earlier days.
Yet there is a crucial flaw in this thinking: It’s predicated upon a common misunderstanding of American military history. The standard narrative credits President Harry Truman with desegregating the military by executive order in 1948. In reality, however, desegregation began years earlier. It was initiated by the War Department, under Secretary Henry Stimson and the army’s Chief of Staff George Marshall, both of whom Hegseth admires. This timeline means that the ultimate “woke” move helped contribute to America’s proudest military victory.
In the summer of 1940, the rapid defeat of Western European armies by Hitler’s forces prompted a campaign to initiate the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. This push, however, ran into vocal opposition from people like the eminent pastor of Riverside Church Harry Emerson Fosdick and President Franklin Roosevelt’s recently ousted Secretary of War Harry Woodring. They charged it was un-American, anti-democratic, and totalitarian, and they insisted the U.S. should have an all-volunteer force.
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To overcome this opposition, proponents of the draft made equal opportunity to serve the guiding principle of the war mobilization effort. Testifying before Congress, Grenville Clark, the shadow statesman spearheading the draft drive, proclaimed, “We assert that nothing is more democratic or consistent with the American way of life than for everyone to share the risks and obligations of military service when the country needs men.”
In early September, Congress passed the draft act, and Roosevelt, who had initially been wary of the controversial bill, readily signed it into law. In his signing statement, the President appropriated the arguments put forward by the bill’s champions. Adopting a universal draft as a peacetime measure had “broadened and enriched” the fundamental concept of citizenship, Roosevelt stated. The bill introduced a companion to “the clear democratic ideals of equal rights, equal privileges and equal opportunities” — the “duties, obligations and responsibilities of equal service.” To fit with the idea that citizenship demanded service from all Americans, members of the military were dubbed “citizen-soldiers.”
The War Department drafted a seven-point equal service policy to implement these ideas. The first point set a race quota, promising that the strength of Black personnel would be “maintained on the general basis of proportion of the negro population of the country” (about 10%). The second pledged the creation of Black organizations in every branch of the service, combatant as well as non-combatant. The equal service policy did, however, include one major concession to segregationists: a pledge “not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.”
On Oct. 16, 1940, over 16 million men registered for the first draft lottery, including 1.75 million Black Americans, more than expected. African American leaders balked, though, when they learned that calls for Black selectees would be delayed. The Army claimed there was a shortage of facilities and that they needed to create new units. Critics believed the real aim was to circumvent the racial quotas that the president had promised.
The reality was more complex than the critics understood: Elected officials had foisted the draft on the military, and Congress had yet to appropriate the funds for the influx of conscripted personnel. That meant scrambling to construct scores of new facilities. And thanks to the concession to segregationists, Black citizen-soldiers required their own set of facilities: everything from barracks and mess halls to swimming pools and off-base U.S.O. clubs.
Over the next two years, this cumbersome arrangement proved increasingly untenable. The military maintained Jim Crow not only in the deep South but coast to coast, including at large bases where Black citizen-soldiers were concentrated, such as Fort Huachuca, Ariz. The need for separate facilities ran headlong into the overwhelming demand for building materials to advance the war effort. By 1942, the need was so great that military leaders stopped approving construction unless they deemed it essential.
With racial tensions rising, the Army’s inspector general issued a directive that at posts, camps, and stations where the garrison was predominantly African American and officers were of more than one race, the configuration and use of recreation facilities was to be “left to the discretion of local commanders.”
In March 1943, an order from the adjutant general’s office superseded this directive. It dictated that at camps, posts, and stations with garrisons of two or more races, recreational facilities, including theaters and post exchanges, were not to be designated for any particular race. The policy was also applied to all Air Corps stations with a demand for rigid adherence so that “equitable treatment” would be “given to all” and “special treatment to none.” Another desegregation order was issued the next month for transportation on Army bases and to and from defense plants.
Even before issuing the first order, the Army was aware of resistance to desegregation from white personnel. When asked in a May 1942 survey if service clubs should be fully shared, less than 1% of Southern troops and 5% of Northern ones said yes. Pervasive disregard for the orders to integrate facilities fueled violent race rebellions across the country in the summer of 1943.
Marshall responded with an ultimatum to all commanding generals: enforce military discipline or be removed. Insufficient recreational and transportation facilities were identified as significant contributors to rebellion. Accordingly, the adjutant general followed Marshall’s warning with an order making local commanders and other officers directly responsible for making sure that there was “no discrimination based on color, race, or creed” in transportation on bases or at war plants.
The army’s top brass recognized that it couldn’t afford distractions from the war effort. And while they may have only constituted 10% of American forces, Black citizen-soldiers were proving themselves indispensable, both at home and abroad. Marshall understood that their contributions would be crucial to ensuring victory.
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Never was this more evident than after the Normandy invasion in June 1944. Thousands of trucks driven mainly by Black GIs ran day and night at tremendous peril to keep communication lines open and troops supplied in the race to Berlin. And they didn’t just supply white troops. During the brutal winter that followed, Allied casualties mounted at such an unsustainable clip that European Theater headquarters put out a call for Black volunteers to serve in white rifle companies at the front. Thousands responded.
Army researchers closely followed the experiment. A “control group” of white enlisted men serving in non-integrated units remained opposed to the intermingling of Black and white combat platoons. The white officers in the 24 companies overseeing the volunteer platoons were also initially skeptical. Yet after witnessing the volunteers in combat, the vast majority of these commanders reported that they had performed as well as white combat soldiers under fire. Black riflemen performed so well, in fact, that almost 90% of white non-commissioned officers thought the experiment should continue.
The Army’s World War II experiment was a watershed event. The research it conducted undercut decades of arguments against the integration of Black citizen-soldiers, and against desegregation more broadly. The research was used to support Truman’s 1948 executive order and the integration of the armed forces in the Korean War. Reverberating out into U.S. society even further, it became part of the rationale for the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, desegregating public schools.
This history shows that the narrative proffered by Hegseth and Trump of a fierce military that won war after war only to succumb to “wokeness” is false. In reality, military integration and the equal opportunity to serve helped the U.S. score its biggest victory—a victory demonstrating that, far from a hindrance, the country’s diversity was and remains its strength. Abandoning this war-tested principle promises not to build a stronger and more effective military. Rather, it could well do the opposite.
Ed Gitre is a history professor at Virginia Tech and director of The American Soldier in World War II. He is currently writing a book on the battle over desegregation in World War II.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
