Category Archives: labor

by | 27 January 2025 · 6:01 am

Caribbean Slave Traffickers, early 1500s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 42-45:

Slave traffickers prowled the Caribbean in the 1510s and 1520s, greatly expanding Europeans’ geographic knowledge. Juan Ponce de León, the discoverer of Florida—often depicted as a deluded explorer bent on finding the Fountain of Youth—was in fact deeply involved in the early Caribbean slave trade, sponsoring slaving voyages to the Bahamas and opening Florida to the trade. In fact, the royal patent confirming Ponce de León’s discovery of the “island” of Florida allowed him to “wage war and seize disobedient Indians and carry them away for slaves.” Similarly, the Spaniard who first laid claim to the coast of South Carolina, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a man of “great learning and gravity” deferentially addressed as el licenciado, was a prime mover in the slave trade. (The term licenciado refers to someone who holds a university degree, usually a lawyer.) We often think of these men simply as “discoverers,” when in reality considerable overlap existed between discoverers and slavers.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the dispersion of Natives across the Caribbean greatly facilitated the task of capturing and transporting them. Villagers living in small communities on self-contained and exposed islands had little chance to hide from the intruders or to repel unexpected attacks. Slave raiders formed compact groups of around fifty or sixty men. They arrived quietly on their ships; waited until nighttime, “when the Indians were secure in their mats”; and descended on the Natives, setting their thatched huts on fire, killing anyone who resisted, and capturing all others irrespective of age or gender. Once the initial ambush was over, the slavers often had to pursue the Indians who had escaped, unleashing their mastiffs or running the Natives down with their horses. If there were many captives, the slavers took the trouble of building temporary holding pens by the beach, close to where their ships were moored, while horsemen combed the island. The attackers literally carried off entire populations, leaving empty islands in their wake.

The Indians were then loaded on the ships, packed into the space belowdecks. The scene in the hold of a slaving ship was infernal. Lack of air, poor provisioning, and the relentless tropical heat magnified the slaves’ suffering to the highest degree. “The Indians could not move,” wrote a young man from Milan named Girolamo Benzoní, “and there they lay like animals amid their vomits and feces. When the sea was calm and the ship could not move, sometimes there was no water for these poor people. Broken down by the heat, the bad smell, and the discomforts, they died miserably down there.” Unlike the Middle Passage, which required a month of travel, slaving voyages in the Caribbean lasted only a few days. Yet the mortality rates of these short passages surpassed those of transatlantic voyages. Friar Las Casas reported that “it was never the case that a ship carrying three or four hundred people did not have to throw overboard one hundred or one hundred and fifty bodies out of lack of food and water”—making for a mortality rate of twenty-five to fifty percent. Although it is tempting to disregard this claim as another of Las Casas’s exaggerations, sources confirm his mortality estimates. Vázquez de Ayllón’s slaving expeditions were among the most notorious for their poor provisioning and very high mortality rates, which cut deeply into his profits and caused untold human suffering and senseless death.

Spanish slavers did not win every time. In particular, the Natives of the Lesser Antilles were able to fend off raids and occasionally even go on the offensive, surprising lonely ships and Spanish strongholds. In 1513 about one thousand Caribs attacked the Spanish settlements of Puerto Rico, killing many colonists. Ponce de León blundered when he led a retaliatory slaving raid on the island of Guadalupe in 1515, which ended in total disaster: twenty Spaniards were wounded, and five died. The Indians found themselves at a tremendous technological disadvantage. Indian arrowheads made of fish bones could not penetrate the chain mail armor of the Spaniards, and Indian canoes, though they could easily outmaneuver a caravel, had no chance in a long-distance chase. Nevertheless, the Natives were occasionally able to prevail against the Europeans.

In general, however, small crews of European slavers operating from dilapidated ships proved tremendously effective in subduing and capturing Indians across the Caribbean. Slaving licenses issued by crown authorities reveal just how responsive these crews were to market opportunities. The number of licenses grew steadily from 1514 through 1517, the years when the Taínos of Española were no longer available in sufficient numbers to satisfy the Spaniards’ demand for gold. There was a sudden drop in licenses in 1518, followed by an extraordinary spike in 1519. It is not difficult to explain these changes. A smallpox epidemic ravaged the Caribbean archipelago in 1518, curtailing the traffickers’ activities. The following year, slavers worked harder than ever before to replenish the dead or dying Indian workforce of the large Caribbean islands, launching more slaving raids than in all the previous years combined and spreading desolation and death to the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles, and parts of the mainland (see appendix 2). We can only imagine the grim circumstances of the Caribbean islanders who had to endure the alarming epidemic that took the lives of family members and neighbors, causing widespread dislocation and famine and tremendous hardship. And just when the worst seemed to be subsiding, Indian slavers appeared on the horizon, ready to stuff them into the holds of their ships and take them to the goldfields of Española or the pearl banks off the coast of Venezuela. The Bahamas became almost entirely depopulated. Las Casas estimated the number of Lucayos captured at forty thousand, while a slave trafficker put the figure at “only” fifteen thousand. Regardless of the actual number, no Lucayo communities remained in the Bahamas except as bands of refugees. By 1520 armadores like Vázquez de Ayllón were forced to bypass the Bahamian archipelago altogether and venture on to Florida and beyond to find human prey.

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Filed under Caribbean, disease, economics, labor, migration, slavery, Spain

by | 26 January 2025 · 6:41 am

Caribbean Gold Rush, c. 1500

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 32-34:

Spanish miners and prospectors flocked to the streams, savannas, and mountains of Cibao. Although flecks of gold could be found all over the region, only certain areas contained enough gold to make extraction profitable. An early colonist, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, tried his hand at gold panning and left the most detailed portrayal of these activities.

Each Spaniard arrived with his cuadrilla, or team of Indians. In most cases, the “miner” was merely a colonist with no knowledge of metals or mining techniques. Once he settled on a place—probably chosen after a mixture of hearsay, intuition, and preliminary digging and sampling—he had his Indians clear a square trench of about eight by eight feet. Sandy beaches along the rivers were ideal, but many alluvial placers were in wooded areas, known as arcabucos, or along hillsides that required the removal of large rocks and trees. Once the Indians completed this preparatory work, they dug the cleared area to a depth of about twice the length of a worker’s palm setting aside the removed sand and earth. They dug with simple tools, even with sticks and their bare hands in the early years. This was strenuous labor, but easier than the next step.

The same “digging” Indians or other members of the cuadrilla transported the piles of dirt to the nearest stream. An average-size trench produced more than six thousand pounds of dirt mixed with the tiniest fragments of gold. The Indians carried this dirt on their bare backs, in loads weighing three to four arrobas, about sixty to ninety pounds. These were very heavy burdens considering the slender build of most of the bearers. The work proceeded ceaselessly all day. Instead of using valuable beasts of burden, the Spaniards compelled Natives to do all the hauling; horses and mules were devoted to the tasks of conquest and pacification. The Indians were even forced to carry their Christian masters in hammocks. As a result, they developed “huge sores on their shoulders and backs as happens with animals made to carry excessive loads,” commented Friar Las Casas, who arrived in Española right at the time of the gold rush, “and this is not to mention the floggings, beatings, thrashings, punches, curses, and countless other vexations and cruelties to which they were routinely subjected and to which no chronicle could ever do justice.”

By the water, a third group of “washing” Indians—usually women, because this work was less physical—received the cargo. Standing in the stream with the water up to her knees, each woman held a large wooden pan called a batea. “She grabs the batea by its two handles,” wrote Oviedo, “and moves it from one side to the other with great skill and art, allowing just enough water to rush in as the earth dissolves and the sand is washed away.” With some luck, after sifting thousands of pounds of earth, the woman would find “whatever God wishes to give in a day”—a few grains of gold—in the bottom of the batea.

Each cuadrilla consisted of at most a few dozen laborers. The smallest had only five: two diggers, two carriers, and one washer. Yet put together, all these teams made Cibao a veritable anthill. In promising areas, the competition was fierce. When a miner struck gold, others immediately flocked there. To prevent rivals from setting up next to him, he would “invite someone whom he wishes to help and chooses as a neighbor” to move in first. Even though Columbus and his family attempted to limit the number of Spaniards going to the gold region, the number of cuadrillas grew steadily in the late 1490s and early 1500s. During the first decade of the sixteenth century, the heyday of gold production in Española, the island may have yielded around two thousand pounds of gold per year. It is possible to imagine an enormous ingot of that weight, but it is much harder to comprehend the madness of some of the Spanish owners—one of whom became notorious for throwing parties in which the saltshakers were full of gold dust—or to grasp the suffering of some three or four thousand able-bodied Indians—perhaps as many as ten thousand—toiling daily in the gold mines of Cibao to make such opulence possible for the colonists.

Like any other rush, the gold rush of Española was chaotic and destructive. “Take the most advantage, because you do not know how long it will last” was a saying that circulated among the early miners. This bit of wisdom applied not only to the amount of gold one could extract but also to the number of Indians one could command. Columbus’s initial proposals for enslavement fit perfectly with the labor needs. The first slaves working in the mines were islanders who had rebelled during the 1490s and whom the Spaniards had defeated and captured. The end of these rebellions, coupled with Queen Isabella’s insistence that the Indians were free, threw a monkey wrench into his plans and brought to the fore the problem of keeping the mines supplied with workers.

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by | 19 January 2025 · 6:00 am

Spanish Shipboard Life, 1564

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 103-105:

Life aboard the ships followed new rhythms and obvious improvements over Navidad. The mosquitos and other insects vanished almost instantly (though not the fleas and lice), and the ocean breeze provided effective relief from the heat. The expeditionaries also gained immediate access to foods that had been denied to them before. Each soldier received a daily ration of one pound of hardtack and either a pound of meat or half a pound of dried fish along with fava beans or chickpeas. Doled out in three square meals a day, this was more than enough. Every Sunday afternoon, some cheese was added to the ration for variety. The liquids on offer were also generous: three pints of water per day along with wine, enough not only to keep hydrated but also to soak and soften the hardtack. Commander Legazpi had said nothing to the four ship captains about the distribution of spirits, but we know that the crew members would never have consented to crossing the Pacific without this indispensable tonic for the body and mind. Indeed, alcohol was an important tool, deployed especially during storms to steel the mariners’ resolve and “warm their stomachs.”

These rations were tangible improvements. Yet the negatives far outweighed the positives, beginning with the cramped conditions. To understand the sailors’ circumstances in a way that makes sense to us, we must imagine a good-sized urban apartment occupied by about one hundred strangers. A single toilet—but no shower or sink—would have to do for everyone, along with a very rudimentary kitchen and no furniture other than sea chests (wooden boxes) scattered all over the deck and below and serving as chairs and tables as needed. Two or three times a day, pages brought out platters of food into which everyone stuck their fingers liberally to get the best pieces of meat or servings of chickpeas. At night, everyone but the most privileged had to find a reasonably level surface to sleep on—always too close to others—and try to get some rest in spite of the noises, odors, and constant movement. Spending merely a week in these conditions would have been taxing, yet the expeditionaries had to endure this for months.

Aboard the ships, there was strict regimentation. Everybody “without skipping anyone if not for illness” was assigned daily to a four-hour shift. This could occur at any time of the day or night, with the worst shifts having evocative names like “drowsiness,” or modorra (from midnight to four), “dawn,” or alva (from four to eight), and so on. The time was measured carefully with multiple hourglasses, or ampolletas, that had to be turned without fail every thirty minutes, and the assigned tasks ranged from moving barrels and serving as lookouts to pumping out the awful-smelling water that always collected at the bottom of the ship. Those on shift could also be ordered to perform navigational duties like hoisting and trimming sails, not only because the crew was spread too thin but also “to get everybody trained and accustomed to such work in case of necessity.” The remaining twenty hours of the day were far more leisurely. With so much time to kill, the expeditionaries were tempted to play cards or engage in other games of chance, betting their daily rations, clothes, and weapons. Of course, all of this was strictly prohibited, as was invoking the name of God in vain or using profanity, a constant occurrence among seamen. Any of these infractions could lead to punishments ranging from public shaming and withholding of one’s daily ration to imprisonment and torture for repeat offenders.

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Filed under food, labor, migration, military, Pacific, Philippines, religion, Spain

by | 9 January 2025 · 4:26 am

Assessing AJA Loyalties, 1941

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 75-76:

At his new post with the 11th District Intelligence Office in California, Cmdr. Kenneth Ringle sees a larger lesson being lost among the hysteria. The real espionage threat doesn’t come from the Japanese population but the Japanese Consulate.

Ringle comes to this conclusion after intense study. He spends his time away from the ONI’s 11th District headquarters, instead working by himself out of a small office in the San Pedro YMCA. His self-separation is telling. Instead of chasing spies, he’s spent his time in California gauging the actual threat posed by the Japanese population.

He’s focused his loyalty study among the vegetable farmers and tuna fishermen before moving on to businessmen. Over the course of his investigation, Ringle’s built a network of informants within the targeted community, particularly among members of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). He finds that Japanese militarists had tried to send over visitors and fake immigrants to rile the Japanese American community. He knows this because those loyal to the JACL report them.

Ringle’s time in California has validated what he found in Hawaii. He reports officially in 1941 that “better than 90 percent of the Nisei and 75 percent of the original immigrants are completely loyal to the United States.”

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by | 23 December 2024 · 2:48 pm

Naval Base Ulithi Atoll, 1944

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 213-214

Cowpens tied up at Ulithi Atoll on October 29. The atoll was on the far western end of the Caroline Islands, southwest of the Marianas. Vaguely resembling the outline of the Italian peninsula, the string of islets created a 209-square-mile natural harbor spacious enough to host in excess of seven hundred ships, more than enough for the Third Fleet. The atoll was a new acquisition for the US Navy, captured without a fight on September 23. Like Majuro before it, Ulithi had been largely bypassed by the war. Under US control, it became the major American fleet anchorage in the Western Pacific, replacing Majuro and Eniwetok, which were now too far to the east.

By the time Cowpens arrived, there were over one hundred ships in the harbor, including nearly forty from Service Squadron 10, which just that month had arrived from Eniwetok, some 1,400 miles away. The squadron rapidly transformed the idyllic Pacific lagoon into a major logistical base, bringing with it specialized ships for repair, salvage, supply, fueling, and medical assistance. For the Moo’s officers and men, Ulithi’s primary draw was Mog Mog, the small islet that the Navy set aside for recreation. After weeks of unending shipboard life, anything that got them ashore was a welcome break. Although it baked under a fierce tropical sun that varied, in the words of one sailor, from “the infernal to the merely intolerable,” Mog Mog offered the opportunity to relax on the pearl-white sands, swim in the crystal clear tropical lagoon, or play baseball, basketball, or volleyball.

The Moo’s officers and men did not have it to themselves. Most of the ships in the harbor were releasing a third of their complement at a time to go ashore, meaning that as many as fifteen thousand sailors and one thousand officers were on the island on any given day. Arriving on the beach for a four-hour liberty, the sailors were given two cans of warm beer, sometimes Iron City beer from Pittsburgh or Rupert’s from New York City. Naturally, the bluejackets soon developed a barter system so those who wanted could drink their fill, with the sailors trading cash and smokes for others’ ration of beer. Unfortunately, the beer was spiked with formaldehyde to keep it from spoiling in the tropical heat. While this deterred few sailors, overindulgence resulted in what Clem described as a “walloping” hangover.

On the officers’ side of Mog Mog the engineers constructed a series of thatched huts that served as a makeshift O club and recreation area, known as Crowley’s Tavern. The officers sipped beer or whiskey at a yards-long bar constructed of crushed beer cans or enjoyed grilled steaks or a game of horseshoes. After the wear and tear of weeks of flying and the strain of on-again, off-again clashes with Captain Taylor and his staff, Air Group 22 went to Crowley’s to blow off some steam. Several of its fliers returned to the ship drunk and belligerent, and only the quick intervention of the air group’s senior pilots averted a confrontation with the ship’s officers. “Some of the boys went ashore in p.m. almost resulting in trouble aboard at night,” Clem wrote sympathetically the following day. “Not that they can be blamed too much as we are still taking a beating about the last attack. Both Houston and the Canberra [battle cruisers they had helped rescue] are here and so we are supposed to be heroes.”

Captain Taylor’s preferred choice for dealing with Air Group 22 finally caught up with the ship at Ulithi. Bob Price, who commanded VF-25 and then Air Group 25 before surviving eleven days adrift in the Pacific in a life raft, returned aboard the Cowpens on October 30 after more than a month in transit. He made the long journey from Jacksonville to Ulithi by train, ship, and finally by air.

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by | 20 December 2024 · 5:30 am

U.S. Navy Ship “Crossing the Line”

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 109-111:

The Moo’s southbound course put her across the equator for the first time some seventy miles west of Baker Island on January 22, an occasion that the ship marked with a line-crossing ceremony. In this centuries-old tradition, sailors who have never crossed the equator before—known as pollywogs—are initiated into the “Ancient Order of the Deep” by their more experienced colleagues, known as shellbacks. Filled with farcical ritual, harmless pranks, and old-fashioned hazing, the festivities were a welcome distraction from daily routines and worries about the upcoming operation. In the days before the ceremony, the crew had received occasional warnings from the ship’s loudspeaker system: “Beware all you pollywogs!” On the nineteenth they received a legal summons from King Neptune himself, warning the Cowpens was approaching his royal domain:

…

In advance of King Neptune’s arrival, his shellbacks relieved Captain McConnell in a bloodless coup and took command of the ship. The air group’s senior officers were forced to serve lunch in the enlisted men’s mess, while many of the junior officers were assigned meaningless tasks, such as calling the bridge every five minutes to report on temperature. For his part, newly arrived pilot Ed Haley was stationed on the forecastle with a pair of beer bottles for binoculars and ordered to scan the horizon for the Royal Party.

Streaming seawater and festooned with seaweed, Neptune and his Royal Court—all of whom bore a suspicious resemblance to several of the Moo’s saltiest chief petty officers—planted themselves on the flight deck and bid the lowly pollywogs to do them homage. A group of Royal Bailiffs rounded up the pollywogs and herded them to the flight deck. Some did not go quietly; Art Daly and some cohorts ambushed several shellbacks in advance of being dragooned, engaging in a bare-fisted skirmish with officer and enlisted alike. There was nearly a large brawl on the fantail between the two groups before a passing officer warned them to knock it off. In another instance, some mutinous pollywogs roughed up a couple of Neptune’s royal cops, and shellback reinforcements restored order by spraying down the melee with fire hoses.

George Terrell described how the pollywogs were rounded up and then led single file up to the flight deck by a group of shellbacks that he called the “Judas Battalion.” Once there, “we were beaten to our knees with blivets by our merciless captors, formed into creeping columns,” and, with further whacks with wooden paddles, encouraged to move forward.” With Captain McConnell watching the proceedings from the bridge with a bemused look upon his face, the pollywogs were force-marched to the Royal Court’s red carpet. This was a target sleeve, a fabric tube thirty inches in diameter and thirty feet long, normally towed behind an airplane as target practice for the ship’s gunners. Unfortunately, the pollywogs were not to walk on it, but crawl through it, and the sleeve had been loaded with stinking garbage and slop from the ship’s galley for the occasion. With further encouragement from the paddles, the pollywogs dove headfirst into the sleeve and crawled through thirty feet of muck. “Do you know how fast you can move on your hands and knees?” wrote Terrell. “Would you believe thirty feet in 15 seconds? Records were set and broken in rapid succession.”

Finally, the pollywogs were introduced to King Neptune and his entourage, bedecked in robes, wigs, and gold-painted cardboard crowns. The most colorful member of the court was the Royal Baby, a fat, balding, half-naked chief petty officer in a diaper and covered in axle grease. Each pollywog was forced to his knees in front of the baby, who took a handful of lubricating grease from a drum at his side and rubbed it all over his sweaty abdomen. Then came the order: “Kiss the baby’s belly!” If the pollywog hesitated, a shellback bailiff delivered a whack to his backside. “I closed my mouth and eyes,” recalled Sam Sommers. “I wish I could have held my nose.” Accepting the kiss as tribute, the Royal Baby haughtily waved on the pollywog, with his paddle-wielding bailiffs making sure he cleared out quickly to make room for the next victim.

The final stop was the Royal Barbers and their merciless clippers. Each pollywog ended up with a highly unconventional buzz cut that left his hair in tatters. “They were real artists,” said Marine George Terrell. “A thousand haircuts to be given and no way were any two going to be alike.” Some sailors emerged with a Mohawk or bird’s nest (bald on top, with a fringe around the bottom), but the barbers also sometimes amused themselves by spelling C-O-W-P-E-N-S or V-I-C-T-O-R-Y on successive heads. Sailor Robert Lee attempted to evade the royal clippers with a preemptive head shaving, but soon found out “it doesn’t pay to be smarter than King Neptune. For punishment I had my head and body smeared with a combination of oil and eggs and had to stand on the bow of the ship for one hour in the sun. Did I have fun taking the oil and eggs off my head and body with cold salt water. I learned my lesson.”

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by | 18 December 2024 · 2:15 am

U.S. Navy in Wartime Honolulu

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 56-57:

Hawaii had occupied a special place in the American popular consciousness since the 1930s. Even during the darkest days of the Depression, as much as half of the US population saw a movie every week, and “Hawaii Hollywood-style” was a staple of the films of the era. A string of blockbusters romanticized it as a tropical paradise with a hula girl under every palm tree. The islands’ exclusiveness also added to their popular mystique. In the prewar era, a Hawaiian vacation was well out of reach of the vast bulk of American society, affordable only for the very affluent.

Once servicemen arrived in Honolulu, it was difficult to reconcile the popular image of the place with reality. Rather than an idyllic paradise, Honolulu was just another crowded Navy town, “full of sunlight and sailors and bad liquor.” Pearl Harbor was a major shipyard, supply center, and way station for the Pacific Fleet, and from 1941 to 1945 more than a million servicemen and defense workers passed through it on their way to or from the war. Sam Sommers commented that with the huge volume of men, equipment, and supplies pouring into Hawaii, “the island could have fought a pretty good war by itself.”

Few servicemen said much good about it, however, dubbing it “the rock.” Some of this was just a case of unrealistic expectations, although there were also plenty of legitimate gripes. These included overcrowding by fellow servicemen, high prices, a male-to-female ratio that most men swore was at least several hundred to one, and the seedy industries that sprung up to separate the sailors from their $50-a-month salary. The complaint that there were just too many servicemen was the most common. The men waited in line for everything—restaurant, movie theater, bar, or brothel. The crowds would reach their peak in December 1944, when 137,200 soldiers, sailors, and Marines were ashore, more than half of Honolulu’s 1940 population. The islands had a tradition of hospitality, but many residents felt they had avoided a Japanese invasion only to suffer through a Navy one.

Cowpens had six days at anchor in Pearl Harbor before putting out to sea for exercises, and during that time McConnell released the crew for liberty in rotating shifts. While the officers enjoyed time in the O clubs or playing golf and tennis, some of the sailors went sightseeing, or swam or sunbathed on Waikiki Beach, seeing for the first time that the iconic beach was marred with double lines of barbed wire and patrolled by sentries. Other popular destinations were the USO clubs, the largest being the Army-Navy YMCA in downtown Honolulu. At these clubs, A-list celebrities such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny put on lavish musical variety shows, which interspersed big band music with stand-up or dance routines. The Navy had its recreation center, the Breakers Club, on Waikiki Beach—Artie Shaw and his Navy band made it famous, and up to 4,400 men visited every day.

The Army’s Maluhia Club, at the other end of Waikiki, had the best dance floor on the island. Many soldiers and sailors went there in hopes of meeting women, but the odds were skewed against them. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, the men joked that “never have so many pursued so few, with so much, and obtained so little.” The Maluhia was staffed by a cadre of volunteer USO girls, many of them the daughters of socially prominent Hawaiian families, each accompanied by a watchful chaperone. Perhaps 250 or so were there on any given night to dance with 3,500 or so men. There was no cutting in until the whistle blew, which it did every 2.5 minutes. The female volunteers danced for three or four hours at a stretch just to make sure each of the lonely servicemen got their turn. One such group of patriotic women volunteers called themselves the “Flying Squadron,” and in twelve months from 1942 to 1943 they attended 127 dances with more than sixty thousand men.

The most popular destination for the enlisted men in Honolulu was Hotel Street, the city’s vice district—where they went to get “stewed, screwed, and tattooed.” While the men had arrived looking for the Hawaii they had seen in the movies, on Hotel Street they found the Hawaii later depicted in From Here to Eternity. James Jones’s iconic 1951 novel detailed the intersection between the island’s servicemen and its seedy side, what one scholar of the period called “a small world of rough men and prostitutes, of drinking, gambling, sex, violence, and despair.”

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by | 17 December 2024 · 12:14 pm

U.S. Navy Segregation, 1943

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 27-29:

At the bottom of the ship’s social hierarchy was the ship’s contingent of African American mess attendants, known after 1943 as steward’s mates. The Navy—and the Cowpens—was a microcosm of 1940s America, demonstrating its injustices as well as its virtues. One such injustice was the Navy’s policy on racial integration. Since 1932, African Americans had only been able to serve as enlisted men on Navy combat vessels, and only as steward’s mates, where they were effectively domestic servants. They did a variety of menial tasks, including cooking, waiting on officers’ tables at meals, and doing their cleaning and laundry.

It had not always been this way. The Navy was integrated throughout much of the nineteenth century, and during the Civil War as much as 20 percent of its sailors were Black. But in 1919, [Woodrow Wilson’s] Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels closed the door to any recruitment of African Americans. FDR had served under Daniels as assistant secretary of the Navy, and as president he sought to strike a middle ground between the demands of White segregationists and civil rights activists. Under his watch, the Navy allowed African Americans in only noncombat roles such as messmen, shore workers, dockhands, and in construction battalions, and like the other armed services it remained racially segregated.

It was not until 1944, when James Forrestal became secretary of the Navy, that the service began shifting toward integration. But in the meantime, the Navy came down hard on any resistance to segregation. In the so-called Philadelphia Mutiny of 1940, fifteen African American messmen aboard the cruiser Philadelphia wrote to one of the leading Black newspapers—then a powerful voice in the fight for racial equality—warning other African Americans not to join the Navy, for they were little more than “sea-going bell hops, chambermaids, and dishwashers.” All fifteen were dismissed from the service, which denied them any veterans’ benefits.

Cowpens had a contingent of twenty-eight steward’s mates aboard under the supervision of a White officer, but unfortunately no account of their experience survives. The account of one messman on Independence gives us some idea of what their life aboard the Moo might have been like, however. Willie Thomas was an eighteen-year old from Cincinnati, Ohio, who volunteered for the Navy because he saw little opportunity to contribute to the war at home. Willie’s primary responsibility was taking care of the pilots’ ready rooms and officers’ quarters, making sure coffee and donuts were available after every mission. But like many steward’s mates across the Navy, he also volunteered for additional tasks that pushed the boundaries of the racial restrictions that prohibited him from combat duty. When the ship was under attack, he carried clips of 40mm ammunition from the ship’s magazines to its antiaircraft guns so they could maintain a steady rate of fire. Despite working in a system that was biased against him, Willie was upbeat about the relationship of the steward’s mates with the majority-White crew, saying that “we were all on this big ship together.”

While Willie was charitable about the state of race relations aboard, George Terrell thought there was some room for improvement. He wrote in his journal about how shocked he was to encounter overt segregation and racism for the first time. “I was young and impressionable and terribly innocent about these things,” he recalled years after the war. “Many of the older career officers on the ship were natives of the Deep South… they really believed that these black boys were inferior human beings.” Terrell gradually learned that the prejudice was not universal, saying how it was “not shared by all the officers, not even by all the southern officers. And it was certainly less prevalent among the lower ranks.” For example, the enlisted Marines’ berthing compartment was right next to the steward’s mates, and the two groups got to know each other and often socialized. Getting to know each other, Terrell concluded, taught him how “screwed up” segregation really was.

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by | 11 December 2024 · 2:15 pm

Yugoslav Heresies in the 1950s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 563-565:

In 1953, the question of what socialism would be after Stalin was not purely theoretical because Yugoslavia’s Communists had been experimenting with new models since Stalin’s break with them in 1948. The rupture was not about ideology (that is, about how to build socialism or to structure the party): it was about obedience to Stalin personally. Tito and his comrades had enraged the Soviet leader by failing to seek permission, for example, for their policies toward the other Balkan states. For the time being, references to Tito were anathema in the Soviet Bloc; as recently as December 1952, top Czech Communist leaders had gone to the gallows for association with Titoist heresies. But now Stalin’s successors sought peace with Yugoslavia, leading to full restoration of relations by the summer of 1955. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin the following winter in a secret speech, many Hungarian and Polish Communists, as well as workers, thought the Yugoslav way might become their way.

The best-known component of this Yugoslav path to socialism was worker self-management, enshrined in law in 1951. It grew out of a struggle of leading Yugoslav Communists for orientation after their expulsion from the Cominform. Tito had been so tightly bound to the Soviet party that he later recalled the first days of estrangement as a “nightmare.” Yet Yugoslav Communists had no doubt that they were in the right; their victory in the Partisan struggle, with little Soviet help, showed that history was on their side. The question was where the Soviets had gone wrong.

Yugoslav Communists located the causes of the Soviet deviation in the Communist Party itself and its untrammeled power. Tito’s lieutenants Milovan Djilas and Edvard Kardelj reasoned that power in the Soviet Union lay not with workers and peasants but with bureaucrats. For example, managers and not workers controlled Soviet factories. Like capitalists, they determined what men and women on the factory floor produced, and like capitalists, they had the privileges of higher salaries. In effect, exploitation of the working class continued. This was a vital recognition and critique for a political order that claimed to embody emancipation of all human beings. Soviet reality was not socialism but “state capitalism.”

Somehow Soviet leaders had failed to heed Marx’s warnings about “usurpers” who might derail the revolution. Indeed, the very idea of a strong state, as the Soviet one undoubtedly was, had seemed anathema to Marx.

…

Djilas and Kardelj, along with the Slovene Boris Kidrič, reread these lines from Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, and during a chat in a limousine outside their villas in 1949, decided that this vision of workers’ power held a solution to Yugoslavia’s predicament of being a socialist state cut off from the socialist motherland. They suggested it to Tito, and he quickly recognized the promise, exclaiming: “Factories belonging to the workers, something that has never been achieved!”

…

The party elite now took central planning out of its straight jacket and introduced some flexibility, for instance, giving firms tax breaks for better production. Though Yugoslavia was far from being a market economy, it became possible for managers to seek marketplace advantages and make higher profits. At the same time, firms were not required to act according to market rules, and bank credits became available to cushion them against budget shortfalls (that is, noncompetitive performance). After 1953, partly aided by Western credits, the Yugoslav economy—and living standards—improved markedly. One sign of this was growth in personal consumption, which went up by 45.8 percent between 1957 and 1961.

A transformation took place from a “distributive model” of the early postwar years, whose aim had been to remedy deprivation, to one in which the needs and preferences of consumers guided the production of the country’s enterprises. From the late 1950s, Yugoslavia thus embarked on the path to a “consumer society,” and the Yugoslav economic reforms of 1965 would be the most ambitious market-oriented changes seen anywhere in the Communist world before 1989.

Yet for all the heady experimentation in the economic realm, the Yugoslav way soon gave evidence of its limitations, and oddly, that involved its founding thinker, Milovan Djilas. Marx had been radical in his belief that the state must die under socialism, and so was Djilas. From October 1953 to January 1954, Djilas published articles in the party daily Borba attacking the power of the Yugoslav Communist bureaucracy. His views had evolved…. The more the party succeeded in building socialism, the less it was needed. Yet in reality, the party-state in Yugoslavia was becoming ever more entrenched.

In one of the last articles he was able to publish in socialist Yugoslavia, Djilas doubted whether that country was still in the throes of a “class struggle.” The bourgeoisie had been destroyed. What then was the need for a Communist organization of any kind, no matter what it called itself? Already alarmed, Tito moved to silence his former lieutenant, proclaiming that, yes, there would be a withering of the League, but the process would be protracted, because there were still many class enemies afoot. Djilas himself was evidence of this fact.

Djilas was now removed from the Central Committee and denied permission to publish. But he continued to give interviews with Western journalists, and in 1956, he published a book arguing that the party had become a new class. For the crime of “conducting propaganda hostile to Yugoslavia,” Djilas was sent to prison.

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by | 8 December 2024 · 1:58 pm

Communist Takeover in Prague, 1948

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 535-538:

At the Cominform’s founding, [the Soviet leaders] urged the radical Yugoslav faction to publically humiliate French and Italian Communists for sharing government with imperialist forces, and Czechoslovak Communists understood they were implicated as well. At that time, they were sharing a coalition with Catholics, Czech National Socialists, and Social Democrats, and were gearing for parliamentary elections in 1948. On returning to Prague, Party General Secretary Rudolf Slánský informed his Politburo that the time had come for a decisive act to place the country on a direct path to socialism. That implied a rupture with existing policy: the previous year, party leader Gottwald had still been speaking of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism,” without a dictatorship of the proletariat or violence on the Soviet model.

In February 1948, Czech and Slovak Communists used their huge cadre base and control of the military and police to stage a rapid seizure of power. Though backed by overwhelming force, the coup was bloodless. They took advantage of an embarrassing mistake by the National Socialist and Catholic politicians, who were tiring of the sundry illegalities of their Communist coalition partners. In November 1947, Communist authorities in Prague had staged a purge of the police force. Believing the population would support them, the Catholic and National Socialist ministers resigned in protest on February 21, thinking that the president would now dissolve the government and immediately call for elections. But they miscalculated: the Communists and their Social Democratic allies still had a majority of seats in the government, and simply replaced the ministers who had resigned with politicians of their own choosing. Then they summoned party cells across the country to form “action committees” that would purge every institution in public life.

The leaders got more than they bargained for. Within a few days, mostly young and impatient Communists had ousted directors and managers from newspapers, state administration, sporting clubs, political parties, schools, and cultural institutions such as theaters. Then they began firing people the next level down. The purge was so thorough that party chief Gottwald had to restrain students, who believed that they had advanced into a new stage of history. Charles University was expecting guests from across Europe to celebrate its six-hundredth anniversary, and the young radicals had just unseated the rector, causing several Western universities to withdraw their participation and spoiling the event’s propaganda value. Gottwald got on the phone to the student leader in charge and asked whether he and his comrades were thinking with their heads or “their behinds.” He did not object to the purges that students were carrying out in their own ranks. Opposition leaders were simply arrested, but the rest of the student body was required to appear before “verification commissions,” which expelled more than one-fifth of them. These “class enemies” were usually sent to do heavy labor, often in mines, and thus were erased from Czechoslovak cultural, economic, and political life.

A final stage now occurred in salami tactics. Having sliced off independent peasant, nationalist, and Catholic politicians, the Communists devoured their Social democratic partners whole. This was a regional trend. In the summer and fall of 1948, these more moderate Marxist parties were compelled to form “unity” parties with the Communists. The result in Hungary was the Hungarian Workers Party and in Poland the Polish United Workers Party. In East Germany, the Soviets had forced the merger of Communists and Social Democrats in April 1946, producing the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In all these cases, the joint cadre base of the new party was much larger than when the Communists stood alone; the challenge was now to subject Social Democrats to Leninist discipline. Czechoslovakia’s Communists dispensed with the pretense of a new name, however, and after absorbing the smaller Social Democratic party, they remained the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

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