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Finding “pax plantation” at Camp Gordon, Georgia: Historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and World War I1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2014
Abstract
This article examines the World War I service of the University of Michigan historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877–1934). Phillips worked first with black recruits as a volunteer officer for the Young Men's Christian Association at Camp Gordon, Georgia, and later as a U.S. Army Military Intelligence officer in Washington, DC. In these years, Phillips ranked as America's foremost authority on the antebellum South generally and of African American slavery in particular. In 1918 he published his landmark American Negro Slavery. While on leave from Ann Arbor, Phillips taught English and French, planned educational and recreational programs, and supervised the management and construction of buildings at Camp Gordon's segregated facilities. Phillips's daily interactions with black troops in the cantonment reaffirmed—at least as he saw it—his conclusions that North American slavery had been a relatively benign institution, his belief in the virtues of plantation paternalism and in the management of subject peoples by educated whites, and his attitude that contemporary race relations were generally harmonious. Phillips's observations of African American recruits validated his conviction that blacks benefited most from white-run, regimented organizations and strengthened his belief in economic assimilation and social segregation. His military intelligence work confirmed Phillips's overall commitment to conservative change, whether in foreign or race relations.
- Type
- Essays
- Information
- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 564 - 599
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2014
Footnotes
1
The author presented an earlier version of this article as the Julia Flisch Lecture at Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, Georgia, on April 4, 2012. Ryan Bean, Amanda Binder, Catherine Bishir, Bill Bragg, Ann Davis, James J. Harris, Jim Hogue, Michelle Michael, Mike Musick, Tim Nenninger, Craig Pascoe, Richard Peuser, Lois Stickell, Alyssa Tidwell, Mitchell Yockelson, and Andrew Zimmerman assisted the author with his research. Two anonymous readers generously provided suggestions for the article's improvement.
References
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62 Ibid.
63 “English to be Taught to Foreigners in Camp,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 23, 1917, 9. On Souby, see “Flour Barrels and Spring Suites,” The Outlook, May 2, 1917, 34; and “A History of the Economics and Finance Department at Middle Tennessee State University,” p. 1, frank.mtsu.edu/ ~ econfin/documents/history.pdf (accessed June 24, 2011).
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66 Phillips to Claude H. Van Tyne, Nov. 4, 1917, Claude H. Van Tyne Papers, Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
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93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid.
101 Ulrich B. Phillips to George J. Baldwin, May 2, 1903, Phillips Papers.
102 Separation Order, Feb. 10, 1919, Army OMPF Files.
103 Philip Alexander Bruce to Ulrich B. Philips, Mar. 11, 1919, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips Papers (MS 397), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
104 Roper, John Herbert, U. B. Phillips: A Southern Mind (Macon, GA, 1984)Google Scholar, 111.
105 Four photographic images Phillips captured of Camp Gordon include photographs of men, possibly recruits, standing along a train at Camp Gordon (# 44302); black civilians, possibly recruits, lined up outside a camp structure (# 44303); soldiers in a Camp Gordon courtyard near barracks (# 44304); and men, possibly recruits, walking from a train at Camp Gordon (# 44305). These images are available at Yale University Library's Manuscripts and Archives Digital Image Database: http://images.library.yale.edu/madid/showThumb.aspx?qs=76&qm=15&q=ulrich+phillips (accessed June 5, 2012). On Phillips and photography of African Americans and the built environment, see Patricia Bellis Bixel and John David Smith, Seeing the New South: Race and Place in the Photographs of Ulrich B. Phillips (Columbia, SC, 2013).
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108 Ibid.
109 Ibid., [ii‒iii].
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115 Ibid., 113.
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118 Roper, “Introduction to the ROSE Edition,” xxvii.