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CHAPTER 1
COLD WAR and MORAL CRUSADES
The years immediately following World War II saw a tremendous upwelling of hope in the world and initiated a period in which change once again seemed achievable. After fifteen years of Depression and war, Americans took to the tasks of bettering their own economic health and future and at the same time preventing the Communist powers, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China, from expanding their influence and territory in ways that would push the United States into a third world war. The Cold War battles against Communism waged by the United States ranged from funding and operating the Marshall Plan — the generous economic recovery program for Europe undertaken in large measure to halt the leftward drift of nations severely damaged by World War II — to the shooting war on the Korean Peninsula. Even Eleanor Roosevelt, whom President Harry S. Truman called "the first lady of the world" for her championing of civil rights, women's rights, and dignity for oppressed peoples, wrote that "in this period, we have wanted above all else to keep the world from falling into Communist hands."
Americans also began to focus on the need to look for solutions to some of the ills of society that had been festering for decades, prime among them ridding the United States of segregation and helping subject peoples abroad to obtain their freedom. Anti-Communism interfered with these objectives, deflecting the drive against segregation at home while placing America internationally on the side of the colonial powers because they were our anti-Communist allies in Europe.
Just as most white Americans still acted toward the black 10 percent of the U.S. population, then called "Negroes," as though they were "invisible" (to borrow the term from novelist Ralph Ellison), most whites similarly gave little thought to Africa, referred to as "the dark continent" not only because its 200 million people were dark-skinned but also because it was so unknown.
Battles were raging throughout Africa, but most Americans, white and black, had little knowledge of them and no sense of why they should feel connected to them. In Algeria, rebels threatened French control. In the Gold Coast, American-educated Kwame Nkrumah and his party were agitating for independence from Great Britain. In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, educated in the USSR as well as in America, was calling for an end to whites-only rule. In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) was pressing for full citizenship for blacks. Many of these conflicts were painted for Americans as Cold War battles — the South African governmentand the U.S. government charged that the ANC was Communist-influenced — but that label obscured what was actually going on. For these clashes, one and all, featured African nationalists struggling against their British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial rulers.
Because the colonial powers were our allies in NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the U.S. government was constrained from being too sympathetic to African independence movements in which blacks were attempting to throw off the shackles of white rule. Furthermore, institutionalized racism was the way of life in the American South, as was de facto segregation in the North. "Anyone who has worked in the international field," Mrs. Roosevelt wrote, "knows well that our failure in race relations ... and our open discrimination against various groups, injures our leadership in the world. It is the one point which can be attacked and to which the representatives of the United States have no answer."
In 1947, when the President's Committee on Civil Rights attempted to address discrimination forthrightly by declaring that our national goal was "the elimination of segregation based on race, color, creed, or national origin from American life," to be achieved by outlawing attempts to base voting rights on race, enacting a federal law against lynching, and ending segregation in education and in employment, it felt the need to do so by wrapping these goals in the mantle of protecting the United States' moral position in the world:
Throughout the Pacific, Latin America, Africa, the Near, Middle, and Far East, the treatment which our Negroes receive is taken as a reflection of our attitude toward all dark-skinned peoples [and this] plays into the hands of Communist propagandists. ... The United States is not so strong, the final triumph of the democratic ideal is not so inevitable that we can ignore what the world thinks of our record.
Reactionaries in Congress, Southern Democrats and their Republican allies, blocked the report's most important proposal, the establishment of a Fair Employment Practices Commission, which might have helped African-Americans gain more meaningful employment. Truman integrated the armed forces with a stroke of his pen in 1948, but Washington, D.C., still remained a segregated city. Soviet propaganda seized on the many incidents of overt racism in the United States as providing reason for other countries to reject American military, economic, and moral leadership.
Given this set of circumstances, how was a small group of Kenyans and Americans able to successfully challenge these obstacles and take actions that benefited an entire generation in East Africa, as well as race relations in the United States?
The short answer is that empathy for independence movements lies deep in the American grain. George Washington declared that he felt "irresistibly excited whenever in any country I see an oppressed people unfurl the banner of freedom." The notion that Americans should applaud and support attempts to overthrow oppressive governments, whether tyrannies or colonial regimes, had continued unabated in the twentieth century.
It surfaced, memorably, in the Atlantic Charter, drawn up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August 1941. Roosevelt knew that there had been independence movements in Africa during the 1930s, engendered in part by starvation and shortages due to the worldwide Depression, but that they had fizzled out. Having in mind these independence struggles, as well as the seizure of many previously sovereign nations by the Nazis and Imperial Japan, Roosevelt attempted to insert a bold promise into the Atlantic Charter. Along with a pledge by both powers to seek no territorial gains from the ongoing world war (which the United States had not yet entered), Roosevelt wanted to obligate all colonial powers to free their colonies, in part to force the USSR to allow free elections in its captive Baltic and Balkan nations. Churchill objected to this pledge since Great Britain had no intention of relinquishing its colonies, which comprised the Indian subcontinent, parts of the Middle East, Malaysia, and large swaths of Africa. He was able to compel a more bland promise, for the United States and Great Britain to respect peoples' inherent right to self-determination.
But when World War II was in its final stages, at an Allied meeting in Tehran in April 1945, a day after the death of Roosevelt, Churchill vehemently stated that the United Kingdom would not be bound by the Atlantic Charter's principles. Nonetheless African, Asian, and Indian nationalists took sustenance from its self-determination tenet, shortly to be reinforced in the charter of the United Nations; they drew upon these documents' moral certification of the right of all peoples to self-government to assert their own right to self-rule. In 1947 India and Pakistan gained independence from Great Britain, a positive example for other colonial peoples.
Truman tried to reach out to aspiring Third World countries through the Point Four Program. Blocked in Congress for a year and then underfunded, it was further resisted by State Department bureaucrats intent on having the United States concentrate on assisting European and Asian allies. Despite these roadblocks, Truman later wrote, Point Four became "a symbol of hope to those nations which were being fed Communist propaganda that the free nations were incapable of providing a decent standard of living for the millions of people in the underdeveloped areas of the earth. ... Point Four provided the strongest antidote to Communism that has so far been put into practice."
But it didn't do very much for independence-minded Africans. Overly cautious, Point Four sent American technological expertise only to already-independent Iran, Paraguay, Liberia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and India. Areas still under colonial rule received only token help. Moreover, as the Cold War heated up on the Korean Peninsula — and in the United States, in Senator Joseph McCarthy's hunt for Communists — the vast majority of the American people focused on those matters.
A few Americans looked beyond anti-Communism, focusing on matters of social justice at home and abroad. If they were just a handful, they had the satisfaction of occupying the moral high ground, their zeal for social equality embracing not only the cause of civil rights in the United States but also the cause of anticolonialism in Africa. Asked today what stirred them to work so hard for African independence, they cannot point to a lone motivating incident or cause, but there was one time period during which they began to focus their energies on Africa — during 1952 and 1953, when two localized problems on the continent burst their boundaries and were featured on the world stage: the putting down of antiapartheid protests in South Africa, and the similar repression of the Mau Mau "uprising" in Kenya.
A two-races system had long been in operation in South Africa, but the 1948 election of a rightist, autocratic, white supremacist, Christians-only government codified apartheid into law and exacerbated it. South African blacks were declared not to be citizens of South Africa, only of one of ten tribal homelands within South Africa's borders. Their education, medical care, movement around the country, and ability to work for pay were more severely restricted than before. Mixed marriages were prohibited, identity cards with racial categories were issued, and the Communist Party was declared illegal, along with all political parties whose aims were in sympathy with the Communists. This last legislation was used to try to dismantle the African National Congress, which the government accused of having ties to the Communists. ANC leaders Walter Sisulu and his protégé Nelson Mandela determined to resist apartheid by a nonviolent "Programme of Action" that included strikes, boycotts, and protests.
George M. Houser, an American minister long in the forefront ofpacifism and of antisegregation efforts in the United States, began an organization to support the ANC in its nonviolent campaign. Houser was no armchair moralist. Son of Methodist missionaries in the Philippines, he had attended college in California and spent a year in China before becoming a minister, a pacifist, and a socialist. His claim of conscientious-objector status during World War II had resulted in his imprisonment for a year. "The Social Gospel, putting the Christian ethic into practice on the social scene, was the credo that moved me," he later wrote. "I was a pacifist as well as a supporter of organized labor and all the efforts to challenge racial discrimination and segregation." Emerging from prison, he joined the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, which led him to become a founder of CORE (the Committee of Racial Equality); he and other CORE members went on "freedom rides" with African-Americans and whites in the South in 1947, a full generation before that tactic crested in the 1960s. However, Houser writes, until the close of the 1940s, "my knowledge and concern about Africa was minuscule," although he did find it "easy and natural" to transfer his social justice concerns and preference for nonviolent protest into support for the ANC's Gandhian campaign of resistance.
The committee that Houser convened to assist the South African resistance was a who's who of prominent liberals, pacifists, and antisegregationists, including A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Sleeping Car Porters union; Bayard Rustin, a civil rights organizer and establishment gadfly of long standing; Norman Thomas, perennial Socialist candidate for president; James Farmer, cofounder of CORE; Reverend Donald Harrington, activist minister of a Unitarian church in Manhattan; and Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Some CORE board members questioned whether CORE monies and energies should be diverted to an overseas struggle, but the majority thought it a good idea. Soon, what became the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) separated from CORE and thereafter functioned independently.
The big names on the new committee's board were not the ones who became the leaders of the airlifts project. That leadership came from two board members who joined the organization a few years later, William X. Scheinman and Frank Montero. Their aspirations were aided by one of the founding ACOA board members, Peter Weiss, an Austrian-born Holocaust survivor, international intellectual property lawyer, and constitutional rights expert who had done work in Africa as executive director of the International Development Placement Association.
The group's main constituents were those Northern white liberals who contributed regularly to the ACLU and responded to civil rights appeals. The tenor of ACOA was determinedly not too far to the left, because it had become very important for Americans with liberal views to be perceived as patriotic members of what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., identifies as the "non-Communist left." "We were living in the midst of the Joseph McCarthy 'red scare,'" Houser recalled of the time of ACOA's founding. "Although all our supporters were unalterably opposed to McCarthyism, we were not interested in joining forces with the Communists in a united front." Houser could readily empathize with the ANC's problems in fighting the Suppression of Communism Act in South Africa because, he remembered, "We knew that in our own country the red label was sometimes put on our own activities in CORE simply because we actively opposed racism."
For Houser and his associates, supporting the ANC was working against colonialism, or, as it was practiced in South Africa, neocolonialism, the persistence of colonial exploitative practices in a successor regime after independence had been achieved. The ANC's 1952 Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws did raise international consciousness about apartheid, but South Africa arrested many of the campaigners and quickly convicted them. At their sentencing, the magistrate accused the defendants of furthering Communist goals "to break down race barriers and strive for equal rights for all sections of the people." The South African government imprisoned eight thousand people and passed a new Whipping Post Law, under which anyone who received funds for resistance could be publicly whipped.
Houser's alarm that a South African to whom he might send money could be whipped as well as jailed discouraged him from forwarding more donated funds to South Africa, even for church-building activities. Instead, he aimed his support at other African resistance movements, especially those pledged to nonviolence, in territories that had remained more directly under European colonial control. This broadening of the committee's focus allowed it to become known as the American Committee on Africa.
This was when Scheinman joined the cause. Young, tough, idealistic, and — for the moment — wealthy, he was willing to put his money in the service of his ideals. William X. Scheinman, Bill to his friends, was then in his midtwenties. Like Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, he had been a navy skipper of a World War II landing craft, and had once brought down a Japanese airplane with the boat's machine gun. After the war, he attended college for a short spell, then drifted through the Midwest with a group of professional poker players. "Bill was always a gambler," Houser would recall. Scheinman moved to New York, became a publicist for the Count Basie Orchestra, and was very involved in jazz. He supplemented his publicity activities by working as a salesman for an airplane-parts manufacturer; in short order he learned enough about that business to start his own company, Arnav Aircraft Associates, in 1950, on "a shoestring and plenty of nerve," as he later characterized it to a reporter. Arnav had factories in New Jersey and in California, and won government and private aviation-industry contracts for hydraulic fittings for planes and missiles. By the mid-1950s Arnav was a steady $1 million-a-year business. Parlaying his Arnav profits into larger sums by investing in the stock market, Scheinman was on his way to a small fortune; in later years, he would make and lose that fortune several times, and become a market analyst and the author of a bestselling book on investing. He was known as an iconoclast. "Bill always wore an open collar and a loose tie — a messy appearance," his AASF colleague Cora Weiss recalled. "But he always said, 'Why not?' It went with his view of himself as a risk-taker." Scheinman's interest in jazz had led him to a general interest in African-Americans and in race relations, and to a profoundly liberal outlook.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Airlift to America"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Tom Shachtman.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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