|
I
thought the first order was while I was sailing to Korea in 50, but I checked
some 1952 orders that still had racial identification [cau] on them. May just
have been inertia.
On
another subject, the costal picture survey http://www.californiacoastline.org/ has
pictures of the Stilwell Club at Fort Ord, just short of dropping into the
ocean. That was the home of the last 25 cent drunk, and the longest bar in the
world. I hate to see it go.
Inspire 28
Harry Truman ordered the full integration of the
services in 1951.
Bob Dove
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2003 4:32
AM
Subject: Re: Truman and the
Marines
I have been amazed at how many people
have gotten so riled up over anything that Harry Truman might have said
about the Marines. Truman was an equal-opportunity bigot and smear-monger,
even to the point of being an anti-Semit. If one goes to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3059087.stm, there is the report about how old Harry "described Jews as
"very, very selfish . . . They [the Jews] care not
how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered
or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special
treatment," he wrote in 1947.
"Yet when they have power, physical, financial or
political, neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or
mistreatment to the underdog.
"Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference
whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon,
Baptist, he goes haywire.
"I've found very, very few who remember their past
condition when prosperity comes."
All that can be attributed to Truman is that he was
an unabashed bigot, meteoric tempered, never forgave a slight, and wroye
down too many personal thoughts that were best kept unsaid. That being said
from a historian's perspective, I think that there has been far too much
time spent on this thread on what and why this smallish man said about one
of this country's armed services.
Though Truman was not the
onlt former president who was bigoted, FDR even had a plan for the forced
eugenics of the entire Japanese race with south-Pacific islanders to "bread"
out their militant tendencies. But thankfully, this country, and the office
of the presidency is larger than the petty foibles of a few small men. I
would hope that the readers and contributers to this thread are made of the
same stearner metal than to take some small slight as grounds to take some
off-hand remark as a personal offense.
Harold
Stockton
|