Ronald Reagan and the Tuskegee Airmen

My column today looks back at Ronald Reagan’s service in the Second World War as part of the First Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, Calif. Here’s another fascinating artifact of that period: Wings for This Man, a film produced near the end of the war, narrated by Reagan, touting the heroism of the Tuskegee Airmen — the all-black squadron that distinguished itself during the war, flying in the Army Air Force when the Army was still racially segregated (as it had been since Woodrow Wilson).

In the film, Reagan praises the airmen for overcoming prejudice: “you can’t judge a man here by the color of his eyes or the shape of his nose; on the flight strip, you judge a man by the way he flies.” This was many years before it was fashionable to acknowledge the role of black servicemen. Speaking at Tuskegee University in 1987, Reagan recalled:

Some of you may be aware that back in 1944, in the midst of that great conflict, I narrated a film about these brave pilots. I can’t tell you how proud I am to be an honorary Tuskegee Airman. And if they hadn’t made me wear this robe, you’d have seen I was wearing the button in my lapel. [Laughter] The skill and courage of these individuals, Chappie James and the Tuskegee Airmen, is part of an heroic tradition, from the Revolutionary War, when some 5,000 black Americans fought gallantly for our country’s independence, to Pearl Harbor, where a black seaman named Dorie Miller was one of the first Americans to bring down an enemy aircraft. Dorie Miller, the Tuskegee Airmen, and others who fought and often paid the supreme sacrifice for their country did so in a segregated military. Their courage and patriotism undoubtedly helped bring an end to this outrage.

Wings for This Man sounds themes that could be found in Reagan’s view of America at any stage of his life, but it is also best understood as reflecting a particular moment in American wartime propaganda, which ended up making a difference at home. Here’s another example, a Frank Capra–produced film for the Navy called The Negro Sailor that is, like Wings for This Man, surprisingly light for its time on patronizing and racial stereotypes:

The Negro Sailor presents the World War II–era Navy as a paradigm of racial egalitarianism, which is not exactly the truth. The Navy was indeed ahead of the Army in terms of racial integration, but it had banned black enlistments entirely from 1919 to 1932 (for the second time in its history; the first ban lasted from 1798 to 1813). The service was hardly well-integrated at the outbreak of war; in the fall of 1941, “in response to pressure from the NAACP and other Black organizations, [Franklin D.] Roosevelt suggested placing Black musical ensembles on battleships to facilitate race relations among the crew.” Segregation in the Navy wasn’t entirely abolished until 1946.

Still, films such as these are important less for the truth of what they presented than for the fact that they were made this way at all. The Second World War lasted much longer for Americans than the First, and mobilized a much larger share of American society. It was not just a war against Japanese and German aggression or for democracy or freedom in general: Americans were reminded repeatedly of the insane “master race” racial doctrines of the Nazis (to say nothing of the pervasive racial-superiority complex of Imperial Japan), and this was contrasted often with the motley assortment of Americans fighting them and the equality of Americans of every race, color, creed, and national and ethnic background. Reagan in Wings for This Man specifically cites black airmen as an answer to Hitler’s propaganda.

There was a good deal of truth to this theme: White Americans, representing over 80 percent of the population, had been the freest and most equal people in the world for over a century and a half by this point, and white ethnic and religious minorities faced much less in the way of bigotry and discrimination by the 1940s than they had two or five decades earlier. But the more Americans talked about equal rights, the more the conspicuously unequal treatment of black Americans in particular stood out. The fact that wartime propaganda downplayed this rather than excusing it was the tribute vice pays to virtue.

Societies, like people, are prone sooner or later to become what they pretend to be. American professions of every man’s freedom from the Declaration of Independence onward helped drive the abolition of slavery in the North and Midwest, and eventually, the growth of a more vigorous abolitionist movement. The propaganda of the Second World War must be understood as a similar spark to the civil-rights movement, and a major reason why that movement, which had made so little headway in the 1920s and 1930s, took off in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Americans who wore the nation’s uniform have always had greater standing to be heard demanding equal rights. Our self-conception as Americans in the late 1940s was saturated with “we’re not like Hitler.” This naturally led to a reckoning with what that really meant.