Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

5. World War I1 and ' 'Americanization"
World War I1 marks a definite point at which national
movements of the oppressed within the U.S. Empire
were thrown back, and the growing hegemony of neocolonial
politics firmly established. At home this neocolonialism
took the well-prepared form of "Ammericanization"
- of offering and forcing the colonially
oppressed to assume supposed "citizenship" in the U.S.
Empire in place of national liberation. Of course, while the
"Americanization" of the European immigrants during
the World War I period meant that they voluntarily
became settlers and Euro-Amerikans, the "Americanization"
of the colonially oppressed meant involuntary confinement
as supposed "minorities" camped on the edges
of settler society. This was the ultimate in Civil Rights.
The global war and the U.S. Empire's expansion
moved in a new stage in colonial relations. On the one
hand, the liberal Roosevelt Administration had gone out
of its way to try to convince Third-World peoples that the
New Deal was their "friend" and protector. This was done
in a manner by now very familiar to us.
New Deal Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes
was an aggressive patron of Civil Rights. Ickes was, in
fact, the former President of the Chicago NAACP
chapter. He and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, the President's
wife, arranged for Afrikan intellectuals and professionals
to get Federal appointments. The practices of the "lynchbelt
South" were sympathetically deplored. In the urban
North welfare programs were opened up for Afrikans, and
by 1934 some 52% - a majority - of the Afrikan refugee
population in the North were on relief. (52) This act was
smoothly performed. Pollster Samuel Lube11 described
how it looked to many petit-bourgeois Afrikans who supported
the New Deal:
"To the younger Negroes the WPA and relief
mean not only material aid but a guaranty that no longer
must they work at any salary given them, that they are entitled
- they emphasize the word - to a living wage.
Through the WPA, Harlem's Negroes have had opened to
them white-collar opportunities which before had been
shut, such as the music and art and writers' projects.
Negroes, too, remember that Mrs. Roosevelt visited
Harlem personally, that President Roosevelt has appointed
more Negroes to administrative positions.. .than any President
before him. Each time Roosevelt makes such an appointment,
the Amsterdam News, Harlem's leading
newspaper, headlines it in 72-point type. Every young
Negro gets a vicarious thrill thinking, 'There may be a
chance up there for me.' " (53)
While the liberal Roosevelt Administration kept
up a steady propaganda campaign throughout the 1930s
and early 1940s, claiming to be "the best friend Negroes
ever had," the period was a time of savage attacks to destabilize
the Afrikan Nation. There was a conspicuous deindustrialization
of Afrikan employment, as they were
pushed out of the main imperialist economy.
For awhile it appeared on the surface as though
Two vigorous ladies acted as
F.D. R.'s deputies in Negro affairs-
Mary McLeod Bethune, a forthright
educator who served in the "Black
Cabinet," and Elcanor Roosevelt
Afrikans were simply victims of the Depression, suffering
a heightened version of the commonly-shared joblessness.
But by 1940 the voices of DuBois and others who pointed
out a genocidal pattern were proven right. In 1940 and
1941 the Depression finally broke. The war in Europe in
1939 had brought new orders for steel, munitions, ships,
trucks and other industrial products. Factories were adding
shifts for the first time in years, and Euro-Amerikan
unemployment was going down rapidly throughout the last
half of 1940 and in 1941.
Afrikans were barred from the new production,
however. Their industrial employment was going down as
more and more new jobs opened up. Corporation after
corporation issued public statements that their new plants
would be 100% Euro-Amerikan. Led by Colt Firearms,
Consolidated Aircraft, Chrysler Corporation, North
American Aviation and similar industrial giants, Corporate
Amerika openly was saying that patriotism required
keeping Afrikans out. Imperialism itself well recognized
the boundary between oppressor and oppressed nations.
After the war began the Anaconda Company's wire and
steel division in New York ordered a bar on hiring laborers
from enemy countries - "'No Italians, Germans, or
Negros. "(54) Colonial Afrikans were untrustworthy from
the viewpoint of imperialism.
The U.S. Government itself reflected this
genocidal program once we go past the White House's propaganda
campaign. Between October 1940 and April 1941,
the Afrikan percentage of those placed in factory jobs by
the U.S. Employment Service dropped by over half, from
a mere 5.4% down to only 2.5%. (55) The U.S. Navy in-
119 stituted a new policy in its shipyards wherein all "Negro"