Welcome Home, Boys!

Militärische Siegesparaden sind politische Inszenierungen, in denen abstrakte Ideen wie Staat oder Nation verkörpert werden. Am Beispiel amerikanischer Paraden in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts nimmt Sebastian Jobs die beteiligten Akteure und deren Rollen in den Blick. So analysiert er das von zivilen und militärischen Organisatoren vorgesehene Protokoll, aber auch, wie Soldaten und Zuschauer
diese Regeln durch undiszipliniertes Winken oder Lachen durchbrachen und sich die Straße aneigneten. Paraden waren eben nicht nur staatstragende Rituale, sondern auch emotionale Spektakel und damit populärkulturelle Unterhaltung.

"Der Autor wirft einen neuen Blick auf ein altes Phänomen, indem er den performativen Charakter der Paraden zum Gegenstand seiner Untersuchung macht. Durch einen innovativen Ansatz und die ausführliche Analyse eines klar umgrenzten Untersuchungsgegenstandes stellt die Arbeit einen spannenden Beitrag zur Geschichte von Militärparaden dar.", H-Soz-u-Kult, 24.05.2013

Auteur
Sebastian Jobs, Dr. phil., ist zurzeit wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Graduiertenkolleg »Kulturkontakt und Wissenschaftsdiskurs« an der Universität Rostock.

Échantillon de lecture
been rounded up into one regiment to be sent to basic training. There, it was renamed the 369th Infantry Regiment of the 93rd Division of the U.S. Army and, after a short period of training, its black soldiers went to Eu- rope and fought longer than any other American unit. How different this picture was roughly one and a half years later, when the 369th Regiment returned from overseas. On February 17, 1919, the soldiers marched in a victory parade up the same Fifth Avenue from which they had formerly been banned. Led by the unit's commanding officer Colonel William Hayward, the men were the first troops to return to New York from the victorious World War and be welcomed with a parade. The servicemen offered New Yorkers a chance to get a glimpse of American soldiers coming directly from the trenches in Europe. Newspaper reports excitedly described how spectators cheered on the men clad in their khaki uniforms and carrying their original war equipment, consisting of helmets, backpacks and rifles. They marched in concert from 23rd Street in Midtown Manhattan all the way up to 145th Street in Harlem, spearheaded by the unit's flag and the Star-Spangled Banner. Everything had a "touch of real- ism," as the New York Herald pointedly noted. The support for the troops seemed overwhelming. More than two million people welcomed the re- turning soldiers in mainly white Midtown Manhattan, as well as in the black neighborhood of Harlem, where the pageant ended after a seven- mile march. The parade of an African American regiment in Manhattan was considered such a great success that one newspaper even emphatically commented that, on that day, New York "drew no color line." The difference between these two parades is striking: the 3,000 members of the "Old Fifteenth" turned from banned servicemen to celebrated citizen-soldiers; what had started with a shameful backdoor send-off came to an end with a first-class victory parade. "The place of precedence was for the negro, it was his by right," the Evening Post stated rather soberly that same day. But how did this 'sea change' come about? What had changed in between? Or, better, how had the soldiers changed? Moreover, what changed during the victory parade in February 1919? And, finally, what happened to these transformations after the last lockstep had been taken? In order to understand the impact and power of the 369th Regiment's parade, one has to consider the social context of contemporary race-relations and political ideas that provided the background for the parade. "You're in the Army now, you're not behind the plow" Until the late 19th century, African Americans could play only a marginal role within the various armies, so they did not meet a crucial criterion for full American citizenship for a long time. In the 'Western' legal tradition, being a soldier and fighting for one's country is particularly important, because there has always been a nexus between military service and citizen- ship rights. Especially with the rise of the 'Western' democracies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the "citizen-soldier" or the drafted soldier had become a conceptual cornerstone of the nation-state. In this logic, citizens received their civil rights in exchange for the military service they fulfilled for their country. In the United States, this line of thought can be found in numerous legal documents. For instance, the New York State constitution of 1824 abolished the practice of granting voting rights on the basis of property in order to widen the electoral base and extend suffrage to all males with a minimum age of 21 who paid taxes, worked on the road, or had served in a militia. This was extremely relevant to African Americans because they continued for a long time thereafter not to meet the property criteria, nor were they allowed to serve in the army. This systematically excluded them from the body of citizens-in New York and elsewhere in the U.S. Even when they fought in the army, African Americans were denied public recognition for their services. Before World War I, "a place in the parade" was far from being natural for African Americans. African Ameri- can soldiers had fought as early as in the American Revolution and also in the Civil War-notably on both sides. In their eyes, such service brought them a step closer to civil equality. Civil rights activist and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, for example, echoed the connection between soldier- ing and citizenship in a speech in Philadelphia in 1863: "Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters US, let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States." The performative aspect of Douglass's statement is striking. As soon as black men were allowed to wear the uniform of the U.S. Army, once they fought as soldiers of the United States, no one would be able to strip them of their civil rights, he hoped. But his hopes remained unfulfilled. Too great was the fear, especially among white Americans in the South, that African American soldiers could turn violent or, probably even more frightening, would follow Douglass's rationale and insist on their civil rights. So contemporaries were very eager to put an end to these plans. The "colored soldier," warned one Memphis newspaper editor very sharply during the Civil War, "must not permit himself to be betrayed into the assumption that he has changed or benefited his social condition by wearing a blue coat and carrying a gun. If he forgets himself, he will soon be reminded of his delinquency in a convincing manner." Black soldiers did not receive any kind of public recognition for their service, neither during the war nor afterwards. The victory parade after the Civil War in May 1865 featured no African American servicemen. In his 1863 poem, "The Black Regiment" about an African American army unit during the Civil War, poet George Henry Boker captured this situation of unfulfilled hopes in rhyme: "'Though death and hell betide/Let the whole nation see/If we are fit to be/Free in this land; or bound/Down, like the whining hound,--/Bound with red stripes of pain/In our old chains again!'/Oh, what a shout there went/From the black regiment!" On the day the 369th Regiment marched through Manhattan, the New York Herald reprinted this poem, as if the 1919 parade could put an end to a history of black suppression. By 1899, the situation of A…