W.E.B Du Bois, "Returning Soldiers," The Crisis, XVIII (May, 1919)
We are returning from war! The Crisis and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle. For bleeding
France and what she means and has meant and will mean to us and humanity and against the threat of German race
arrogance, we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood; for America and her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope;
for the dominant southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington, we fought in bitter resignation. For the America that
represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality and devilish insult—for this, in the hateful upturning
and mixing of things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight also.
But today we return! We return from the slavery of uniform which the world's madness demanded us to don to the
freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This
country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.
It lynches.
And lynching is barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human history. Yet for fifty years we
have lynched two Negroes a week, and we have kept this up right through the war.
It disfranchises its own citizens.
Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.
The land that disfranchises its citizens and calls itself a democracy lies and knows it lies.
It encourages ignorance.
It has never really tried to educate the Negro. A dominant minority does not want Negroes educated. It wants servants,
dogs, whores and monkeys. And when this land allows a reactionary group by its stolen political power to force as many
black folk into these categories as it possibly can, it cries in contemptible hypocrisy: "They threaten us with degeneracy;
they cannot be educated."
It steals from us.
It organizes industry to cheat us. It cheats us out of our land; it cheats us out of our labor. It confiscates our savings. It
reduces our wages. It raises our rent. It steals our profit. It taxes us without representation. It keeps us consistently and
universally poor, and then feeds us on charity and derides our poverty.
It insults us.
It has organized a nation-wide and latterly a world-wide propaganda of deliberate and continuous insult and defamation of
black blood wherever found. It decrees that it shall not be possible in travel nor residence, work nor play, education nor
instruction for a black man to exist without tacit or open acknowledgment of his inferiority to the dirtiest white dog. And
it looks upon any attempt to question or even discuss this dogma as arrogance, unwarranted assumption and treason.
This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought! But it is our
fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would
fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every
ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.
We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.
Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of
America, or know the reason why.
232
AMERICA AND THE GREAT WAR
21.6. A. MITCHELL PALMER, EXCERPTS FROM
"THE CASE AGAINST THE REDS: (1920)
Following Germany's defeat in November 1918, much of the hostility directed toward alleged pro
German Americans was redirected against radical labor organizers and others accused of being
agents of the Bolshevik, or communist, regime in Russia. Attorney General A Mitchell Palmer pub
lished this article in 1920 to justify his order to arrest and deport thousands of resident aliens and
naturalized citizens in the so-called Palmer Raids of 1919-1920. Note his appeal to anti-Semitism
by referring to Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky by his original name, Leon Bronstein, and mentioning
that he once lived in New York City's Lower East Side, a Jewish neighborhood.
Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping
over every American institution of law and order a year
ago. It was eating its way into the homes of the American
workmen, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were
licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry
of the school bell, crawling into the sacred comers of
American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with
libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.
Robbery, not war, is the ideal of communism. This
has been demonstrated in Russia, Germany, and in
America. As a foe, the anarchist is fearless of his own life,
for his creed is a fanaticism that admits no respect of
any other creed. Obviously it is the creed of any criminal
mind, which reasons always from motives impossible to
clean thought. Crime is the degenerate factor in society.
The whole mass of evidence, accumulated from
all parts of the country, was scrupulously scanned, not
merely for the written or spoken differences of viewpoint
as to the Government of the United States, but, in spite
of these things, to see if the hostile declarations might
not be sincere in their announced motive to improve
our social order. There was no hope of such a thing.
By stealing, murder and lies, Bolshevism has looted
Russia not only ofits material strength but of its moral
force. A small clique of outcasts from the East Side of
New York has attempted this, with what success we
Source: A. Mitchell Palmer, ''The Case Against the 'Reds:" Forum 63 (1920): 173-85.
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