Doris Miller, WWII Hero Sailor
I had an interesting piece queued up for today about Abraham Lincoln. He loved the concept of American Democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people. He hated slavery not because he believed in racial equality. He didn’t. Once freed, he kinda wanted them to, “Go back to where you came from.” But his love for the ideals on which America was founded far outweighed his self-proclaimed White supremacy. I can live with that. But it can wait for another day. Honest Abe - being as dead as he is - isn’t going anywhere.
But this piece on our democracy showed up in my inbox this morning and I’m sharing it with you here because it’s so timely to current events and because it helps me understand and explain my optimism for our future. America’s Thing With Race has always been the mirror that reflects back how we’re doing coping with this thing called democracy.
“On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.
In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.
Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the White officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
That night, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America the following day, and four days later both Italy and Germany declared war on America with these words: “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.
The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.
Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.
The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany's Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.
America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were African American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied Native American men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.
The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.
Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?
Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.
But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including women and people of color as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others. The wedge they use is race.
Those politicians who believe in this anti-democratic ideology have vowed to replace the nonpartisan civil service with loyalists and to weaponize the Department of Justice -originally formed to protect recently freed Black Americans from the racist violence against them that was running rampant - and the military against those they perceive as enemies.
They have promised to incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants, send federal troops into Democratic cities, silence LGBTQ+ Americans, prosecute journalists and their political opponents, and end abortion across the country. They want to put in place an autocracy in which a powerful leader and his chosen loyalists make the rules under which the rest of us must live.
Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch? When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking with it two thirds of the crew, including Miller.
I hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the reactionaries will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.
Even better, it makes people like Doris Miller.”
Heather Cox Richardson
When I was kid I would routinely hear that although American democracy wasn’t perfect, it’s the best form of government ever devised. I had no idea what any of that meant. Being oblivious to America’s Thing With Race at that time in my young life and having even less of an idea of what other governments there were other than the Soviet Union and Chinese Communist governments, I didn’t give it much thought. Things seemed to be going along just fine.
But now we have armchair strongmen wannabees who are laser focused on making America work solely for their benefit. Their primary tool? “To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.” Sound familiar? There’s a lot of hate going around these days. Would anybody actually care who’s using which bathroom if our wannabees weren’t instructing us to? Would we hate Haitians and actually believe they’re eating the neighborhood puppy?
You can fight back. You can. You don’t have to have a bazillion followers on Instagram or whatever in order to be an ‘influencer’. You can be a person of influence by participating in your local community. Rotary Club, Urban Trails Committee, School Board, Book club…your town and county have many, many volunteer positions that need to be filled as does your local, state, and federal public lands. My favorite local organization is Restore The Balance, a relatively new, but influential non-partisan group devoted to rejecting extremist politicians. I live in Colorado, so extremist like Lauren Boebert.
You know where you can’t be influential? Within your own home. Within your own choir. Get out there. Get used to feeling uncomfortable. Stop singing with your choir. After a while you get used to it. Trust me on that one.
Doris Miller was the first Black recipient of the Navy Cross and was nominated for a Medal of Honor.
I loved this offering from Heather. May Doris Millers and every other citizen of this diverse nation do what is necessary to save our nation. May we, may I have the courage to get out there and step out of the safety of singing in our choir.