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Photo Diary: Fort Des Moines National Monument, Iowa [1]

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Date: 2022-08-17

In 1917, the US Army opened its first Officer Training School for African-American soldiers in an old cavalry fort in Des Moines, Iowa.

For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently in Iowa.

When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, it had virtually no military force to speak of, and was completely unprepared. In an attempt to build an army in a hurry, hundreds of thousands of men were rapidly drafted and sent to makeshift camps for basic military training. And many thousands of these drafted men were African-Americans.

During the Civil War, the Union Army had formed entire regiments of African-American troops, most of which were recently-freed slaves who wanted to fight against the Confederacy. These regiments were referred to as “United States Colored Troops”.

By the time of the First World War, however, racial attitudes in the US had hardened. Jim Crow segregation laws governed the entire South, and the armed forces were segregated as well. Nearly all African-American soldiers were serving in separate units under white officers and were assigned to menial duties with the Supply Services, as cooks, transport drivers or dock workers.

This provoked political pressure from civil rights groups like the recently-formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who began pressing President Woodrow Wilson to provide better opportunities for African-American soldiers. Wilson was a supporter of segregation, but he did not want race issues to interfere with the American war effort, so he agreed to a limited “experiment”, in which the Army would open a single Officer Training School for African-American troops—but this would be limited to to 250 existing noncommissioned officers from the Army’s segregated units and to only 1,000 civilian Black men who had already demonstrated their “intellectual and leadership abilities” by graduating college. Since colleges and universities were virtually all segregated at this time, this meant mostly graduates from historically-Black schools like Howard University in Washington DC or Tuskegee in Alabama.

Howard University offered to host the Army school on its campus, but the Wilson Administration was afraid that this was too close to the Washington DC press and would cause bad publicity if, as Wilson feared, the experiment failed, and so the Officer Training School was opened in far-away Fort Des Moines, Iowa, in a mostly-empty cavalry camp that had been established back in 1901. It became known as the Fort Des Moines Provisional Army Officer Training School. The first class of trainees arrived in May 1917.

One of the officers at the camp was Colonel Charles Young, who had already graduated from West Point and had been a “Buffalo Soldier” with the US 10th Cavalry during the Indian Wars. As the most experienced African-American officer in the Army, it was presumed that he would be placed in command of the training program. But this was not to be. Despite the high-sounding speeches it made to the new officer candidates, most of the Army’s command did not really believe that African-Americans were intellectually or physically “fit” to be in positions of command. So Colonel Young was involuntarily discharged from the Army for “high blood pressure”, and was replaced by a politically-connected white officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ballou. (In protest, Colonel Young rode his horse all the way from Iowa to Washington DC to demonstrate his physical fitness, to no avail.)

Not surprisingly, Ballou also had little regard for the abilities of African-American officer candidates, and he in turn earned little respect from his trainees. Anti-Black racial attitudes indeed permeated much of the Army, and African-American draftees found themselves segregated into separate units, always with white officers, and often treated as little better than draft animals. At Army training camps in Houston and St Louis, mutinies broke out among African-American enlisted men to protest their treatment, and several people were killed. To prevent trouble at Camp Des Moines, Ballou organized what he called a “White Sparrow Patriotic Ceremony”, in which the Black officer candidates would march in formation and sing patriotic songs.

The officer training course had originally been set for 90 days. By September 1917, however, the Army decided to extend the training another 30 days. This provoked outrage from many of the officer candidates, who concluded that the Army was just delaying things and really didn’t want to commission them as officers. Some 600 trainees resigned and left the Army in protest.

Finally on October 15 the remaining 639 African-American trainees received their officer commissions and were assigned to various units in other Army camps around the country. There were 106 captains, 329 first lieutenants and 204 second lieutenants. By June 1918 most of the African-American units had been unified into the 92nd Infantry Division, the first of the Army’s segregated fighting units. It was commanded by now-Major General Charles Ballou, and while the Fort Des Moines graduates officered the lower ranks, the upper command was all white. During their entire time of service, the 92nd was assigned to separate areas within each Army camp that it was sent to.

Upon arriving at the trenches, the 92nd was immediately sent into the frontlines, being assigned to work with various divisions of the French Army. Since France had no segregation laws, for most of the Black troops their experiences with the French were the first time they had ever been accepted as equals. The US Army, meanwhile, would continue to segregate them throughout the war. It wasn’t until the Meuse-Argonne campaign in November 1918—as the war was coming to an end—that the African-Americans were promoted to leadership positions and replaced higher-ranking white officers within the division.

After World War One ended in 1918, Fort Des Moines continued as a training camp through the Second World War and Vietnam, and part of it was used as a training area for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACs). In 2008 the camp became inactive. Part of the land was given to the city and is now the Blank Park Zoo.

The Fort Des Moines Museum and Education Center is now a National Historic Landmark.

Some photos from a visit. Alas, the museum is only open for a few hours one day a week, and on the day I visited it happened to be closed for maintenance work. But I was still able to walk around outside and get some photos.

The museum is located inside this building on the Fort’s grounds

A statue honoring those who have served at the Fort

A wall with the names of the first graduating Officer Training class of 1917

Some of the names

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/17/2115390/-Photo-Diary-Fort-Des-Moines-National-Monument-Iowa

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