Canada and the United States
preted the imagery of damage as in origins inherently,
uniformly, racially conservative and/or racist
Commencing with the late ninetcenth century, Scott
persuasively interprets W, E. B. Du Bois's depictions
of damage as an attempt to appeal to white compassion and pity by portraying the suffering of black
Americans at the hands of white racism. Drawing a
major distinction between theories/depictions of damaged moral character and those of personality damage,
subsequent chapters argue that defined thus in psychological terms, damage imagery was not created or
furthered by either racially liberal or conservative
social scientists during the interwar and segregationist
era.
The second half of the book innovatively contends
that the image of psychological damage actually originated in the racial liberalism of post-World War II
America that was shaped not so much by the Cold War
emphasis on the nation's creed of democracy as by
Amcrican culturc's new "therapcutic ethos." Pointing
to white, middle-class, medicalized definitions of happiness as personal, psychological health, Scott argues
that racially liberal historians and social scientists
emphasized the psychological scarring of black Americans resulting from slavery, segregation, and continuing oppression to appeal to white middle-class compassion and pity. Scott further argues that the experts'
anti-racist, psychiatric utilization of damage imagery
thus underpinned the era's racially liberal policy making, commencing with thc historic, anti-segrcgationist
decision of the Supreme Court in the Brol1'n v. Board of
Education (1954) case and including Daniel Patrick
Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National
Action (1965).
Characterizing the "matriarchal" black family as the
taproot of black "pathology" and the "emasculation"
of black males, the Moynihan Report has often been
interpreted as representing racially conservative
and/or racist perspectives. In contrast. pointing to the
report as fully in concert with the liheral utilization of
damage imagery for anti-racist ends, Scott emphasizes
its justification and legitimation of the Johnson administration's liberal racial policies and welfare statism.
Yet, as he shows, the controversy over the report for
"blaming the victim" discredited and labelled damage
imagery as inherently racist, and the experts turned
instead to emphasizing-and perhaps overemphasizing-black resilience and health.
This book is by no means an attempt to provide a
blanket defense of the damage imagery/portraiture of
black America. On the contrary, the concluding chapter especially eloquently points to its recent resurgence, not only in the writings of those who have
attempted to resurrect scientific racism but also in a
wider utilization of cultural pathology theories to
forward conservative and/or racist agendas.
Today's conceptualizations of America's "black underclass" all too often reflect and promote stereotypes
of welfare-dependent, mother-led families and "criminal" black youth. And as Scott highlights, conservative
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIeW
1339
opponents of the welfare state all too often utilize
theories and images of black Americans as psychologically and culturally pathological that feed and promote racist stereotypes of black inferiority. In accordance with its title, Scott's book suggests that because
pity and contempt may be two sides of the same coin,
racially liberal depictions of African Americans as a
deeply damaged people constitute a double-edged
sword. Certainly this challenging study both reminds
us of the importance of interpreting "social science
knowledge as imagery" (p. xv) and strongly encourages
questioning and challenging of the "experts'" constructions of race.
PATRICIA MORTON
Trent University
SHERIE MERSHON and STEVEN SCHLOSSMAN. Foxholes
and Color Lines: Desegregating the U.S. Armed Forces.
(A RAND Book.) Baltimore: Johns IIopkins University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 393. $34.95.
This book is a work of public history, which is to say,
history written for a client. The original client in this
case was the office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD),
responding to a memorandum sent by President William J. Clinton one week following his inauguration in
January 19l)3, directing the secretary to submit by
mid-July "a draft of an Executive Order ending discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in determining who may serve in the Armed Forces" (p. vii).
OSD in turn contracted with the National Defense
Research Institute of the Rand Corporation to explore
alternatives relevant to developing policies toward
openly homosexual military personnel.
Rand, in examining the subject of homosexuality
and military service from social-scientific, legal, and
historical perspectives, subcontracted with the Center
for History and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University
to investigate historical analogies between the military's treatment of homosexuals and its treatment of
racial minorities, especially blacks. The project was
conducted by Sherie Mershon and Steven Schlossman.
Relying on secondary sources and published documents, they analyzed the military's transition from
racial segregation to formal racial integration between
1l)40 and the mid-1960s.
Mershon and Schlossman examine military desegregation in three phases, stressing policy implementation
and organizational behavior. During the first phase,
from 1940 to the end of World War II, the armed
forces sought to make compulsary racial segregation
more equitable without eliminating it altogether. The
second phase, desegregation itself, extended through
the end of the Korean War and centered on President
Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9981 of July 1948
and "intense" military resistance to it, especially by the
Army and Marines. Phase three extended to 1965 and
covered military efforts to alleviate off-base racial
discrimination.
Military desegregation, the authors note, was para-
OCTOBER 1999
1340
Reviews of Books
doxical. Military traditions reinforced social conservatism, including deeply rooted social norms of black
inferiority and fear that racial integration would shatter unit cohesion. Yet military hierarchy and discipline
hastened the transition and in time placed the armed
forces in the vanguard of fundamental change in
American race relations. Mershon and Schlossman
emphasize political processes, including the partisan,
electoral, and interest-group advocacy accompanying
the civil rights movement and the bureaucratic politics
of interservice rivalry and inter-agency disagreements.
They stress the importance of leadership provided at
crucial junctures by key civilians, including black civil
rights leaders, Truman, Secretary of Defense James
Forrestal, and by committees led by Charles Fahy in
the late 1940s, Gerhard Gessell in the early 1960s, and
Adam Yarmolinsky during the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations.
As a work of synthesis, this book breaks no new
ground. As applied history, it is well grounded in the
literature, clearly written, and balanced in its assessments. The authors generally strive for a tone of
social-scientific neutrality. Yet underpinning their
analysis is a presumption that racial segregation was
incorrect policy and that resistance within the military
was rooted in conservative traditions and beliefs that
national policy should attack. In matters of racial
policy, there is little dissent in contemporary American
society that nondiscrimination policies were morally
imperative and also improved armed forces efficiency.
On questions of military discrimination by sex, however, or by sexual orientation, which triggered the
present study, there is far less agreement in contemporary society. Applied history involving such controversial policy questions would be less free to begin
analysis by presuming the correct policy answer.
HUGH DAVIS GRAHAM
Vanderbilt University
DAVID A. J. RICHARDS. Women, Gays, and the Constitution: The Grounds for Feminism and Gay Rights in
Culture and Law. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. 1998. Pp. xiv, 531. Cloth $65.00, paper $22.00.
In this, his latest foray into what he calls American
revolutionary constitutionalism, David A. J. Richards
focuses attention on women and gays. He traces the
common ancestry of their constitutional claim, to the
arguments of the feminists who, in taking to the public
platform to condemn slavery in the antebellum era,
attacked sexism as well. Their broad-ranging condemnation embraced not only chattel slavery but also
"moral slavery," defined as the dehumanization of a
group of persons by denying to the individuals who
compose thc group their ba,ic human rights. Richards
argues that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments should be interpreted as corrective responses to
thc antebellum distortion of the nation's rights-based
constitutional tradition. These amendments, by recapturing and then extending this tradition, provided the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
basis not only for the emancipation of African Americans but also of women, gays, and all others who,
because of their identification with a group, have been
marginalized, silenced, and denied their equal rights as
citizens.
The very success of African Americans and women
in advancing their claims for equal rights has led to a
frustration on the part of many Americans who have
seen such gains as socially disruptive or as an assault
on traditional values. This frustration is evidenced by
the growth of homophobia. The claim of gays for equal
rights is similar to that of the other groups, but with
those other groups now constitutionally insulated from
the prejudices of the democratic majority, that majority has focused its energy on denying to gays the
inalienable rights of conscience, speech, intimate life,
and work. Such rights, Richards insists, are the essence
of liberty in that they empower individuals as moral
beings fully equipped to create their own identities.
When the gay rights movement is not treated as a
whipping boy, its demands are ridiculed. Richards
would remedy this structural injustice by supporting
affirmative action for gays to overcome the socially
compelled privatization of homosexual preference.
Forcing gays to stay "in the closet" he considers
insulting in that it denies such persons the right to live
their private and public lives free from demeaning
restrictions. Richards agrees with the Supreme Court's
recent decision in Romer v. Evans (1996) that struck
down a Colorado attempt to invalidate protective laws
against discrimination on grounds of sexual preference. Such popular campaigns, Richards says, treat
homosexuality as heresy, and the government's "Don't
Ask, Don't Tell" approach to homosexuality in the
military violates free speech. The easy condemnation
of gay marriages, the author continucs, brings to mind
the earlier disparagement of blacks and women for
deviating from the roles assigned to them by the
dominant political and social mythology.
For historians, the most pertinent part of Richards's
book is his useful tracing of the successes and failures
of thc campaign of women for equal rights within the
male-dominated society. Starting with the early feminist abolitionists, the author demonstrates how the
post-Civil War concentration on the suffrage issue
brought with it compromises that repudiated the earlier commitment to inalienable individual rights for all
and set back the quest for equal rights for women until
the 1960s. Richards pays tribute not to the traditional
or institutional interpreters of the Constitution but
rather to dissenting social and political critics who
argued for readings of the fundamental law that
challenged the existing consensus and the stereotypes
it embraced. His heroes are outsiders-from the
Grimke sisters to Walt Whitman to Emma Goldmanwho insistently called attention to the commandments
of the nation's constitutional tradition.
At a time when the rights-based nature of the
nation's constitutional system is under attack because
it supposedly atomizes society and exalts the individual
OCTOBER 1999