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Conscription and the Color Line: Rawls, Race and Vietnam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2021

Brandon M. Terry*
Affiliation:
Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: bterry@fas.harvard.edu

Abstract

This article revisits one of John Rawls's rare forays into activist politics, his proposal presented to the Harvard faculty, calling for a denunciation of the “2-S” system of student deferments from conscription. In little-studied archival papers, Rawls argued that the draft both exposed “background” structural racial injustice and constituted a burdening of black Americans that violated the norms of fair cooperation. Rather than obscuring racial injustice and focusing exclusively on economic inequality, as Charles Mills has claimed, Rawls rejected the ascendant conservative views that naturalized black poverty or else attributed it to cultural pathologies in black families. Thus Rawls found nothing illicit in taking the position of a disadvantaged racial group as a relevant comparison when applying his ideal theory to nonideal circumstances. However, I contend in this article that Rawls's account of political philosophy as an attempt to find a consensus may be similarly ideological, leading him to displace the reality of conflict through begging descriptions, expressivist formulations, and historical romanticism.

Type
Forum: The Historical Rawls
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 “Letter from a Black Soldier,” Black Panther 2/6 (1968), 7.

2 “Docket for Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Meeting, Tuesday, December 6, 1968,” Folder 2, Box 24, John Rawls Papers (HUM 48), Harvard University Archives (henceforth Rawls Papers). Hereafter referred to as Faculty Resolution 1.

3 Cf. John Rawls, “Talk II May 1968: Grounds for Conscientious Refusal,” Folder 2, Box 24; and “Outlines: Introductory Remarks on 2nd Resolution [1967],” Folder 3, Box 24, Rawls Papers.

4 Faculty Resolution 1.

5 “Faculty Shelves Draft Resolution after Hour and Half,” Harvard Crimson, 11 Jan. 1967, at www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/1/11/faculty-shelves-draft-resolution-after-debating.

6 See, for example, Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (New York, 2007), 19; and Eric Alterman, “Rawls and Us,” The Nation, 5 Dec. 2002, at www.thenation.com/article/rawls-and-us. The exception to this cursory treatment is Katrina Forrester's comprehensive In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, 2019), esp. Chs. 2, 3.

7 See Pogge, John Rawls, 19–20. See “Outlines: Introductory Remarks on 2nd Resolution.”

8 For the canonical statement of these principles see John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, revised edn (hereafter Rawls, TJ) (Cambridge MA, 1999), 266.

9 Christopher Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, 1993), 18. As Appy notes, however, as many as half of those who “voluntarily enlisted” were motivated by draft pressure, attempting to better the timing, branch, or location of their service. Ibid., 28.

10 Arthur Egendorf, Charles Kadushin, Robert S. Laufer, George Rothbart, and Lee Sloan, Legacies of Vietnam: Comparative Adjustments of Veterans and Their Peers (Washington, DC, 1981), 99, 105.

11 Ibid., 105

12 Appy, Working-Class War, 25

13 Ibid., 35

14 Wolfe, Audra J., Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (Baltimore, 2013)Google Scholar.

15 Quoted in Appy, Working-Class War, 35. Also see “Student Deferment Urged,” Science News-Letter 58/20 (1950), 306.

16 The “Channeling” statement was procured and publicized by the American Friends Service Committee as part of their antiwar activism. “Channeling,” reprinted Dec. 1967, Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, at www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/1451/14511002028.pdf.

17 Faculty Resolution 1. Also see Rawls, TJ, 333–5.

18 Faculty Resolution 1.

19 See Rawls, John, “On My Religion,” in Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, ed. Nagel, Thomas (Cambridge MA, 2009), 259–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See, for example, Pogge, John Rawls, 19–20.

21 Mills, Charles W., “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 47/S1 (2009), 161–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 161, original emphasis.

22 Ibid.

23 Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (New York, 2017), esp. Chs. 5, 8–9. Ideal theory, in Rawls's gloss, is an approach to moral and political philosophy that aims to develop or discern the principles (e.g. of justice) which would characterize and govern a “well-ordered” society. To do so, it constructs an abstract, idealized picture of society that assumes “strict compliance,” where nearly all persons and institutions adhere to principles of justice. Through the exercise of developing a “realistically utopian” conception of society with a “perfectly just basic structure,” we might discover compelling and reliable standards by which to judge the failures of existing, nonideal, institutions. Ideal theory should therefore “clarify the goal of reform and … identify which wrongs are more grievous and hence more urgent to correct.” John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 13; and Rawls, TJ, 7–8, 215–16.

24 Tommie Shelby, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 10–14.

25 Rawls considers these latter cases as so self-evidently wrong that he makes them exemplars in his expositions of reflective equilibrium. For example, Rawls, TJ, 17.

26 Elsewhere I write at length about Rawls's understanding of the civil rights movement and uses of Martin Luther King Jr, but in what follows here I focus on Rawls's arguments against the racial injustice of the Vietnam-era draft. “Rawls, Race, and Romance: A Critique of Civil Rights Exemplarity” (manuscript on file with author).

27 Such critics were also, invariably, opponents of the war itself as unjust, but this essay focuses primarily on concerns about the draft.

28 Malcolm X, “See for Yourself, Listen for Yourself, Think for Yourself” (1965), in Malcolm X Talks to Young People: Speeches in the U.S., Britain, and Africa, ed. Steve Clark, 2nd edn (New York, 2002), 77–116, at 96.

29 Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA, 1981), Ch. 12.

30 See “S.N.C.C. Statement on Vietnam” (1966), at https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/policy-statements/vietnam. A major impetus for the statement was the murder of Sammy Younge Jr, a SNCC activist and veteran who was slain in a dispute over the use of a “white”-designated bathroom at a service station in Tuskegee, Alabama.

31 Stokely Carmichael, “Berkeley Speech (October 1966),” in Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (New York, 1971), 53.

32 Martin Luther King Jr, “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam,” in King, “In a Single Garment of Destiny”: A Global Vision of Justice, ed. Lewis V. Baldwin (Boston, 2012), 150–64.

33 Appy, Working-Class War, 19–20; Lisa Hsiao, “Project 100,000: The Great Society's Answer to Military Manpower Needs in Vietnam,” Vietnam Generation 1/2 (1989), 14–37, at 23. This proportion evened out during the war in part due to concerted efforts of military advisers in light of criticisms from King and other activists.

34 Martin Luther King Jr, “A Time to Break Silence,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr, ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco, 1986), 231–44, at 233. Also see Brandon M. Terry, “The Casualties of War: Taking Up King's Fight against Militarism,” The Plough 16 (2018), 56–65.

35 Mills, “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls,” 161.

36 John Rawls, “An Outline of the 2-S Question,” Folder 2, Box 24, Rawls Papers, 2–3.

37 John Rawls, “Notes on the Draft,” Folder 2, Box 24, Rawls Papers, 2.

38 Rawls, “An Outline of the 2-S Question,” 3.

39 United States President's Task Force on Manpower Conservation, One-Third of a Nation: A Report on Young Men Found Unqualified for Military Service (Washington, DC, 1964).

40 Hsiao, “Project 100,000,” 26.

41 Ibid.

42 United States National Advisory Commission on Selective Service, In Pursuit of Equity: Who Serves When Not All Serve? Report of the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service (Washington, DC, 1967), 22.

43 Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, eds., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy: A Trans-action Social Science and Public Policy Report (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 86, available at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihan-report-an-annotated-edition/404632.

44 Appy, Working-Class War, 19–21.

45 John Rawls, “Questions Re the 2-S Resolution (suggestions only) [1966],” Folder 2, Box 24, Rawls Papers, 2.

46 Ibid.

47 Rawls, TJ, 6. For the issue of the family and the basic structure see Sophie Smith, “Okin, Rawls and the Politics of Political Philosophy,” unpublished MS.

48 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 10.

49 Ibid., 63, 91–2.

50 See, for example, Pamela Barnhouse Walters, “Educational Access and the State: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities in Racial Inequality in American Education,” Sociology of Education 74/extra issue (2001), 35–49; and Noliwe M. Rooks, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (New York, 2017).

51 On the relationship between economic history, attitudes toward education, and racial domination see Gerald D. Jaynes, “Reconstruction: The Foundations of Economic Citizenship,” in Lawrence D. Bobo, Lisa Crooms-Robinson, Linda Darling-Hammond, Michael C. Dawson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gerald Jaynes, and Claude Steele, eds., The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship, 1865–Present (New York, 2012), 286–96. For an important study of efforts to fight racist injustice in American schooling see Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Cambridge, MA, 2021)

52 “Re: 2-S + Rank List: Draft,” Folder 2, Box 24, Rawls Papers, 3.

53 “Proposal for a Military Recruitment Policy,” Folder 2, Box 24, Rawls Papers, 7.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., Rawls's persistent suggestion of a “last-surviving-sons” exemption from the draft as possibly legitimate, I think, shows how deeply his unreflective patriarchal conceptions of the family go. Nor does Rawls broach the subject of expanding women's eligibility for the draft outside a small nursing provision.

56 This definition of racial exploitation is structured to permit a number of plausible conceptions of the broader exploitation concept, especially Ruth J. Sample, Exploitation: What It Is and Why It's Wrong (Lanham, MD, 2003); Tommie Shelby, “Parasites, Pimps, and Capitalists: A Naturalistic Conception of Exploitation,” Social Theory and Practice 28/3 (2002), 381–418; Nicholas Vrousalis, “Exploitation, Vulnerability, and Social Domination,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 41/2 (2013), 131–57; Matt Zwolinski, “Structural Exploitation,” Social Philosophy and Policy 29/1 (2012), 154–79; Robert Mayer, “What's Wrong with Exploitation?”, Journal of Applied Philosophy 24/2 (2007), 137–50.

57 Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs, 122.

58 Ibid., 125.

59 Ibid., 118.

60 Ibid., 125.

61 Patricia M. Shields, “The Burden of the Draft: The Vietnam Years,” JPMS: Journal of Political and Military Sociology 9/2 (1981), 215–29.

62 On the changing black class dynamics of this period see William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions, 3rd edn (Chicago, 2012), 122–82.

63 “Notes on the Draft (1966),” Folder 2, Box 24, Rawls Papers, 2.

64 Cf. G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge MA, 2008), esp. Ch. 8.

65 Some philosophers stipulate that exploitation must harm. For example, Allen E. Buchanan, Ethics, Efficiency, and the Market (Totowa, 1985), 87. But see Matt Zwolinski, “Dialogue on Price Gouging: Price Gouging, Non-worseness, and Distributive Justice,” Business Ethics Quarterly 19/2 (2009), 295–306.

66 Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited (Boston, 1974), esp. Chs. 3–4, 10–12.

67 Edward Banfield to John Rawls, 1966, Folder 2, Box 24, Rawls Papers.

68 Moynihan, “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” 62.

69 Cf. Appy, Working-Class War, 32–3.

70 Hsiao, “Project 100,000.”

71 Rawls, “A Proposal for a Military Recruitment Policy,” Folder 2, Box 24, Rawls Papers, 8–9, emphasis added. This paper is undated, but likely from 1966.

72 Rawls, TJ, 220.

73 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 47.

74 Rawls, TJ, 477–8.

75 Ibid., 216–17.

76 Faculty Resolution 1. This holds for all compulsory forms of “national service” as well, a view Rawls reiterated in 2001, quoting verbatim from his 1966 critique of draft deferments. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 47.

77 Rawls, “A Proposal for a Military Recruitment Policy,” This provides more evidence for the persuasiveness of Shelby's application of Rawlsian thought to ghetto poverty and cultural reform projects in Dark Ghettos, Ch. 3.

78 Rawls, TJ, 302.

79 Ibid., 312.

80 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 5, 15.

81 Ibid., 91.

82 While certainly speculative, I think it also likely true that (at least as a matter of the good) he endorsed broader efforts in the public sphere to educate the citizenry concerning the history of racial injustice in the United States and support institutions capable of doing such work. I infer this largely Rawls's principled willingness to be the faculty cosponsor (with Stanley Cavell) for the student-drafted motion to establish Afro-American studies at Harvard, a stance that required them to publicly oppose the university president. See Cavell's recollection in Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford, 2010), 508–12.

83 Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (Philadelphia, 2015); and Elizabeth Kai Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA, 2016), Ch. 5.

84 Banfield to Rawls, 1966.

85 The late Martin Kilson, the first tenured black faculty member, was not appointed assistant professor until 1967. See “In Memoriam: Martin L. Kilson, 1931–2019,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 7 May 2019, at www.jbhe.com/2019/05/in-memoriam-martin-kilson-1931-2019.

86 For more contemporary examples of this view see William Julius Wilson, “Race-Neutral Programs and the Democratic Coalition,” American Prospect 1 (1990), 74–81. Also Obama, Barack, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, 1st edn (New York, 2006), 244–8Google Scholar. For a sympathetic critique of this practice in the Obama administration see Terry, Brandon, “Racial Politics after Obama,” Dissent 63/3 (2016), 4754CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Müller, Jan-Werner, “Rawls, Historian: Remarks on the Political Liberalism's ‘Historicism’,” Revue internationale de philosophie 237/3 (2006), 327–39Google Scholar, at 333.

88 Bernard R. Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice, rev. edn (Lanham, 1992), 232–3.

89 John Rawls, “CD [Civil Disobedience] + The Complications of Our Federal System,” Folder 6, Box 7, Rawls Papers, 1.

90 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 1–4.

91 Cavell, Stanley, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago, 1990), 101–26Google Scholar.

92 Cavell, Stanley, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 186Google Scholar.

93 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 110–12.

94 Ibid., 110

95 Ibid., 46.

96 King, “A Time to Break Silence,” 233.

97 Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 67Google Scholar; King, “A Time to Break Silence”; Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, 2013), 102–11.

98 King, “A Time to Break Silence,” 233, 240.

99 King, Martin Luther Jr, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston, MA, 2010), 183Google ScholarPubMed.

100 Ibid., 185.

101 Martin Luther King Jr, “The Trumpet of Conscience” (1967), in King, A Testament of Hope, 634–53, at 646–7.

102 King, Where Do We Go From Here, 58.

103 Ibid., 185–95.

104 McCarthy, Thomas, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (New York, 2009), 3641CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

105 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 91.

106 Ibid., 53.

107 Rana, Aziz, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar.

108 Ibid., 13. On King's own overlap with Cavell see Taylor, Paul C., “Moral Perfectionism,” in Shelby, Tommie and Terry, Brandon M., eds., To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 3557Google Scholar.