A precedent for a president. Part 1. Because last time went so well
While reading about the deployment ordered by US President Trump of regular force Marines to Los Angeles to support the 4000 federalised National Guard troops already deployed, as so many others will have, I searched for other instances of use of federal regular force troops, as opposed to federalised National Guard troops. There is precedent for use of federalised National Guard troops in Los Angeles, which occurred in 1992 to contain riots following the acquittal of four police officers for the assault of Rodney King. On that occasion, President George H.W. Bush federalised the National Guard two days after it had already been called up by then-Governor Pete Wilson (R).
Post WWII, the first instance in which a regular force unit was deployed on US soil was when President Eisenhower, during the first year of his second term in office ordered the mobilisation of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, 300 miles northeast of Little Rock. Eisenhower, a retired General, promoted to General of the Army (equivalent to Field Marshal) on 20 December 1944 (within a week of the creation of the rank by Congress, but after George Marshall and Douglas MacArthur, each promoted days apart to establish chain of seniority), asked the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, to provide regular troops to enforce the desegregation of a school in Little Rock following the US Supreme Court’s unanimous judgment in Brown et al. v Board of Education of Topeka et al. In May 1954. The ‘et alia’ is important here; the judgment covered cases from multiple states including Kansas (Brown), South Carolina and Virginia, all on appeal and a case from Delaware that was under consideration by the State Supreme Court. None directly involved Arkansas.
Arkansas was one of the first states to act on desegregation following the Brown judgment. Arkansas’s law school had been integrated since 1949, and seven of its eight state universities had desegregated by 1957. Little Rock’s school board had voted unanimously to implement a staged implementation of desegregation, commencing with 80 black students at the Central High School at the beginning of the school year in September. Under fierce resistance from segregationists, that number was whittled down to nine specific students across different grades. On the evening of Labor Day, the day before school term was to begin, the Governor of Arkansas, Orvul Faubus, announced he had ordered the state’s National Guard to surround Little Rock’s Central High School to prevent the students from entering. In response, the school board requested that “no Negro attempt to attend Central or any other white high school until this dilemma is legally resolved.” None did.
However, the following day, the federal district court, replying to the school board’s request for legal instructions, ordered that the desegregation plan be carried out as scheduled.
When the nine black students who had applied to enrol at Central High School attempted to enter the school on September 4, one individually and the other eight as a group, the National Guard prevented them from doing so. By this time, television cameras captured the resulting fracas. The student who turned up separately, a 15-year-old named Elizabeth Eckford, encountered an angry segregationist mob and National Guardsman. The resulting news images captured the attention of both US and international audiences.
Orvul Faubus, who had been raised by socialist parents and received his secondary eduction at a Commowealth College formed by socialists expliticly to train leaders for the US labour movement, was probably a somewhat reluctant anti-integrationist. In his 1954 gubernatorial Democratic election primary campaign against incumbent governor, Francis Cherry, Faubus was forced to defend himself against accusations from his opponent and others that he, too, was a socialist. However, in light of the collapse of and opprobrium towards the hearings of the House Un-American Affairs Committee, led by now-disgraced Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Cherry’s attacks back-fired. Having beaten Cherry in the Democratic primary, Faubus handily beat his opponent, Pratt Remmel, incumbent mayor of Little Rock, in the gubernatorial race although his winning margin (62% to 38%) represented a significantly smaller majority than previous post-War gubernatorial electoral victories, in all of which the winning vote exceeded 80%. However, some believe that this background precipitated his subsequent actions, as he had been cornered, in the primary, on the issue of desegregation of schools and forced to commit to opposing integration of high schools in Arkansas.
In his re-election bid for subsequent term for the 1956 election (Arkansas would not move to a four-year electoral cycle until 1986) he faced a strident opponent in the Democratic primary, State Senator Jim Johnson, leader of the Associated White Citizens’ Council of Arkansas, part of a pan-state organisation set up in across the South opposition to the SCOTUS’s Brown Decision. Although Faubus handily best Johnson, his closest rival contender (68% v 27%) and returned to a 80%-plus win over Republican candidate, Roy Mitchell, some contemporaneous observers have alleged that he made back-room deals during the primary campaign to consolidate the support of wavering conservative segregationists.
After further legal wrangling, On 7 September 1957, a federal district judge denied the Little Rock school board’s petition to for a temporary suspension of integration. Still the National Guard stayed in place.
Media coverage of Faubus’s use of the National Guard to prevent entry of the nine black students to Central High School in Little Rock, less than a mile from the state legislature, was to destined to attract the opprobrium of the Eisenhower administration. Local district member of the US House of Representatives, Brooks Hays brokered a meeting between Faubus and Eisenhower at the Newport Naval Base in Rhode Island, close to where the President was holidaying. Faubus arrived by helicopter around 8:50 am. They met privately for about 20 minutes, then spent the next 90 minutes in discussion with Rep. Hays, White House Staff Chief Sherman Adams, and U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell. By the conclusion of the meeting, Eisenhower understood that Faubus had agreed to alter the mission of the National Guard to allow the nine young students to enter Central High School and to ensure there was no subsequent unrest. Eisenhower issued a press statement to that effect. Whatever Faubus had agreed with Eisenhower, that was not what he did.
On returning to Little Rock, Faubus issued his own statement that did not address Eisenhower’s statement; it did not address the students, nor did it refer to the National Guard. Again, the National Guard maintained its perimeter around the school and prevented the entry of the black students.
On 20 September, the federal district court issued an injunction ordering Faubus to remove the troops from Central High. Faubus withdrew the National Guard but predicted violence in the streets of Little Rock should the nine black students again attempt to enter Central High School. On the following Monday, 23 September, an segregationist mob gathered at the school. While city police prevented the mob from entering the school, four journalists covering the story were attacked and beaten by the crowd.
In the interim, all nine students had entered unnoticed through a side door to the school. Later in the day, as the crowd threatened to break police lines and remove the nine black students violently, the students were removed from the school under heavy police protection. At 3:44 pm, Little Rock mayor, Woodrow Mann, sent a telegram to Eisenhower at the White House, asserting the involvement in what he considered a planned action by protestors of a known associate and “political and social intimate” of Faubus, concluding that Faubus “was at least cognisant of what was going to take place. Wilson pledged the support of the police “to lend such support as you may require.”
That same day, Eisenhower issued Executive Order Executive Order 10730: Providing assistance for the removal of an obstruction of justice within the state of Arkansas
Under that order, Eisenhower invoked Chapter 15 of Title 10 of the United States Code pertaining to authority under the Insurrection Act of 1807, directed the Secretary of Defense to place the entire Alabama National Guard under federal control and authorised him “to use such of the armed forces of the United States as he may deem necessary” to further the enforcement of the injunction issued by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
Concerned from the outset at the dispute and the use of the National Guard for what he had considered to be political purposes, the Army Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor had arranged for crowd-control-related training for units of the 101st Airborne Division stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, 300 miles from Little Rock. As a Maj. General, in 1944, Taylor had assumed command of the 101st Airborne Division just days before the planned Normandy invasion following the sudden death of its former commander. He was with his troops when they variously parachuted and glided in to Normandy as part of Operation Overlord; Taylor was the most senior officer to do so on D-Day.
Taylor responded to President Eisenhower’s executive order by ordering the deployment of the 327th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Airborne Battle Group of the 101st Airborne Division (1000 men) to Little Rock, with all troops placed under the command of Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, the commander of the Arkansas Military District, also based in Little Rock, under US Northern Command based at Fort Hood, Texas. During this assignment, Walker, subsequently a member of the John Birch Society, repeatedly appealed to Eisenhower that use of federal troops to impose integration was against his conscience. Nonetheless, he obeyed.
Under the orders issued by Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson following Eisenhower’s executive order, the troops were not technically federalised (which would have necessitated Congressional oversight), but called to active training duty under federal command. Secretary of the Army, Wilber M. Brucker, rang Gov. Faubus to inform him of the action and, at the same time, sent a telegram to the Governor explaining that President Eisenhower "desires" the personnel of the Arkansas Army and Air National Guard organizations to proceed "forthwith" to points of assembly.
The following day, all 9,873 troops of the Arkansas Army National Guard (ARNG) and Air National Guard (ANG) were ordered to their armouries, and held on base until 10 November 1957. On that date, 8,973 were released from active duty, with the remaining 900 retained on Active Duty until 29 May 1958.
Meanwhile, the 327th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division flew in to protect the students — ‘the Little Rock Nine’ as they had become known.
For the first time after the transformative experience of WWII, civilian law enforcement was entrusted to regular soldiers, a light infantry regiment of the 101st Airborne Division the US Army. What could possibly go wrong?
On that occasion, we were not to find out.
The 327th Infantry Regiment stayed in situ and the Little Rock Nine were escorted, by armed regular soldiers, in to Central High School, which was guarded by combat troops wearing pressed fatigues and carrying rifles with bayonets attached. Despite occasional scuffles, noone was injured.
The following year, to prevent further desegregation, Gov. Faubus instigated state-level legislation that shut down the integrated schools in Little Rock. Requiring a plebiscite of the citizens of Little Rock, the measures won approval by a margin of 3-1. While most white children were allocated places at other schools or privately educated for the year, most black children were absorbed in to existing the existing black school. For those that could not be accommodated, that period is referred to as ‘Little Rock’s lost year’ Thereafter, nonetheless, desgregation continued, although not at the pace required by the Supreme Court. Faubus eventually served six terms as governor, before withdrawing from the 1966 election and completing his term in 1967.
The potential for tragic consequences of deploying the Army in to civilian policing would have to wait a further quarter of a century for its apotheosis. Immortalised in song by no lesser figures than Neil Young, David Crosby. Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, the fatal shootings of four unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio on 7 May 1970 and the wounding of another nine shocked the nation. Coming six months after the revelation of the violation, mutilation and massacre of more than 350 unarmed civilians by American personnel from the 23rd Infantry Division at My Lai and My Khe, the deaths at Kent State at the hand of the Ohio National Guard brought to the fore the fatal impact of American involvement in the Vietnamese civil war and the corrosive impact on the American polity both of the collective loss of innocence of Americans’ self-perception as ‘the good guys’ and of the increasingly insistent reaction against the war by civilians and soldiers alike.
In relation to Little Rock, it is important to remember that regular soldiers were ordered on to the streets by a president who had both commanded in war and governed in military occupation. He knew exactly the risks he was taking and did so only because there were well-founded suspicions that the Arkansas National Guard troops were unreliable for the task required.
Trump, who was exempted from the Vietnam draft due to his infamous ‘bone spurs’ not only has no military experience, not itself a disqualifying quality. More importantly, he used the deployment of Marines and the Marines themselves purely instrumentally and symbolically, to score unneeded and partisan political points against a political opponent, Democratic California Governor and likely future presidential hopeful, Gavin Newsom.
Trump needs, though will hopefully never receive, schooling in the costs of uncertainty and potential unintended consequences of second and subsequent order effects of such actions. His total disregard of risks to the lives of others, including both civilians and service-men & -women speaks volumes about his absence of humility and his recklessness and fecklessness.
All we can hope is that he is lucky — seldom a sound or reliable strategy.
Coming: Precedent for a President, Part 2: Blog Part 2. What are we here for? Or, the strange attractions and strange attractors of a renewed and vibrant political economy