In October 1917, the Atlanta Constitution reported, “Thousands Pour into Camp Gordon; Many are Negroes.”Footnote ² The newspaper referred to U.S. Army Cantonment No. 123, or Camp Gordon, Georgia. The U.S. Army established this facility as a boot camp in July 1917 in Chamblee, in De Kalb County, about fourteen miles northeast of Atlanta in the area known as Silver Lake.Footnote ³ It quickly became the largest military training camp in the South.

Soon after Camp Gordon opened its doors, a most unlikely person—the forty-year-old historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877–1934)—joined the base's nonmilitary staff as a volunteer officer for the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). In 1917, Phillips, then teaching at the University of Michigan, was completing a book manuscript that eventually became his acclaimed and influential American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime (1918). Phillips, who had spent most of the World War I years preparing American Negro Slavery for publication, left Ann Arbor for the fall semester, taking a sabbatical to conduct additional research in the South and to add the finishing touches to his book. But Phillips inexplicably changed course, joining the Camp Gordon staff in October 1917.

According to John Herbert Roper, one of Phillips's biographers, the historian emerged during this period “from a Progressive analyst of class struggle to a more astute social analyst.”Footnote ⁴ Historian Paul Lawrie maintains that Progressive Era historians and social scientists such as Phillips considered the “Negro Problem” as determining “the place of the Negro in the nation's industrial past, present, and future. The wartime state transformed African Americans into industrial factors on a national scale for the first time in American history.” Phillips worked at a time when social scientists were shifting their analysis of minority peoples from one based on biology to sociocultural models of race. Resembling other progressives, Phillips adhered to a racial ideology that exhibited an “abiding tension between progression and regression,” a tension “exacerbated by rapid industrialization, migration and war.”Footnote ⁵

This article tests Roper's and Lawrie's arguments by examining Phillips's experiences during World War I, first at Camp Gordon and later briefly as a U.S. Army Military Intelligence officer. These experiences contributed to his understanding of blacks in white-run, regimented organizations and confirmed his understanding of slavery, plantation paternalism, and the management of subject peoples. They also underscore Phillips's obsession with control, management, order—the maintenance of the status quo, whether in the New South or in post-Versailles Europe.

Phillips, a native Georgian, completed his BA and MA at the University of Georgia in 1897 and 1899, respectively, and then ventured north to earn his PhD in William A. Dunning's Columbia University seminar in 1902. Phillips's dissertation, Georgia and State Rights: A Study of the Political History of Georgia from the Revolution to the Civil War, with Particular Regard to Federal Relations, published the same year as his degree, won the American Historical Association's Justin Winsor Prize. Focusing on the period before and after 1840, Phillips emphasized the nexus between national questions and early political factions, later party alignments, in Georgia.Footnote ⁶ Though this work reflected Phillips's Progressive Era Weltanschauung, one emphasizing economic motivation, class conflict, and economically driven intrastate sectionalism, historians continue to benefit from his pathbreaking book. Historian Michael O'Brien considers Phillips's dissertation one of the landmark works in southern political thought from the end of the nineteenth century to World War II.Footnote ⁷

In 1902 Frederick Jackson Turner, who had inspired Phillips to a career as a historian and who had encouraged him to study with Dunning at Columbia, hired him to teach southern history at the University of Wisconsin. Phillips immersed himself in these years in economic data that yielded him an unrivaled understanding of the planter class, especially its financial strengths and weaknesses. In 1905 Achille Loria, the renowned Italian political economist whose writings had influenced Turner's understanding of economic sectionalism, referred to Phillips's “The Economic Cost of Slaveholding in the Eastern Cotton Belt” as “votre savant article.”Footnote ⁸ In this essay Phillips had written that the “great rigid wheel of slavery was so awkward and burdensome that it absorbed the momentum and retarded the movement of the whole machine without rendering any service of great value.”Footnote ⁹ A year later, when assessing the economic history of Georgia's Western and Atlantic Railroad, Phillips noted how “planters, if they acquired any surplus capital at all, were so eager to buy additional land and slaves that they had little money available for corporation investment.”Footnote ¹⁰ In numerous other publications in these years Phillips established his thesis that slavery was an inefficient and unprofitable economic system that tied up planters' scarce capital. He articulated these points in his second book, A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (1908). Phillips's bigger point was that slaveholders retained the “peculiar institution,” in spite of its unprofitability, for reasons of race control. In this period Phillips also published widely, espousing agricultural and educational reforms in Georgia on the Wisconsin model and urging southern libraries and archives to collect systematically the records of their region's past.Footnote ¹¹

From 1909 to 1911 Phillips taught at Tulane University, where he published Plantation and Frontier Documents, 1649–1863, Illustrative of Industrial History in the Colonial and Ante-bellum South (2 vols., 1909). Though undervalued a century later, these volumes have remained the most thorough collection of documents on the Old South in print and are invaluable to scholars.Footnote ¹² While in New Orleans, Phillips also published a series of generally forgotten, but especially insightful, articles on southern economic and political history in The South in the Building of the Nation (13 vols., 1909–1913), the first multivolume history of the region.Footnote ¹³ A team of distinguished scholars, J.A.C. Chandler, Franklin L. Riley, James C. Ballagh, John B. Henneman, Edwin Mims, Thomas E. Watson, Samuel C. Mitchell, Walter Lynwood Fleming, and J. Walker McSpadden, edited the contributions, determined to present southern history “in a scientific spirit, yet to retain in style, subject matter and manner of treatment, that indefensible charm so characteristic of the life, thought and history of our Southern people.”Footnote ¹⁴ Phillips's essays added a historical grounding to what O'Brien suggests was a conscious effort by the editors of The South in the Building of the Nation to define the Old South as both part of and apart from the forward-looking New South.Footnote ¹⁵ This became Phillips's mantra as he established himself as the Progressive Era's foremost historian of the South.

In 1911, a dean at Tulane University, fearful that Phillips might leave for another school, described him as “one of the two or three most brilliant scholars in American history to-day.” With much prescience he cautioned that Phillips's publications “have made him known on both continents. I think it would be a calamity to the University for us to lose him.”Footnote ¹⁶ That year Phillips indeed left New Orleans for a professorship at Michigan. Phillips's departure constituted a major loss for Tulane but a major gain for the University of Michigan.

His Michigan years, 1911 to 1928, were Phillips's most productive. There he came to dominate first the field of slavery studies; then southern history; and finally to leave his imprint as an interpretive historian who cast his native South as “a land with a unity despite its diversity, with a people having common joys and common sorrows, and, above all, as to the white folk a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man's country.”Footnote ¹⁷ His book-length publications during his tenure at Ann Arbor included the prosaic Life of Robert Toombs (1913) and two monumental volumes: American Negro Slavery and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929). When Phillips changed universities again, in 1929, this time leaving Michigan for Yale University, a colleague remarked that “his pungent personality, his acute criticism and trenchant comment on current events will be greatly missed.” Replacing him would be difficult, Arthur S. Aiton quipped, “as great teachers make a great university, buildings and winning football teams to the contrary.”Footnote ¹⁸

Phillips left no explicit statement of his attitudes toward the World War, though a former Yale colleague, Ralph Henry Gabriel, found Phillips's war work with the YMCA unsurprising. He considered it fully in keeping with Phillips's “near-religious messianic activism.”Footnote ¹⁹ According to Merton L. Dillon, another of his biographers, Phillips generally stayed “aloof” from the saber-rattling and propaganda activity of his colleagues at Ann Arbor and at other universities, preferring to focus instead on his book manuscript in the years before U.S. entry into the war. That said, Dillon observed correctly that Phillips “was as much an Anglophile as any,” having written in 1917, upon election as a fellow in the Royal Historical Society, “Identification with anything authentically British is particularly gratifying.”Footnote ²⁰ As a graduate student at Columbia, Phillips had mastered affecting a British accent to mask his southern linguistic roots.Footnote ²¹

No doubt Phillips, like most of his colleagues at Ann Arbor, supported the war effort enthusiastically and considered volunteering with the YMCA his way of serving his country. His friend and Michigan colleague, the colonialist Claude H. Van Tyne, was an especially vocal and zealous advocate of military preparedness and foe of pro-German and pacifist elements.Footnote ²² After the United States entered the war in April 1917, encouraged by American Historical Review editor J. Franklin Jameson, many historians rushed to contribute to what they considered a moral crusade against the so-called Teutonic militarism of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies. As archivist Waldo Gifford Leland explained, contemporary historians “conceived of themselves as having obligations to the common cause, that should be met collectively, and they set themselves at once to considering the nature of these obligations and the most appropriate ways of satisfying them.”Footnote ²³

Service by historians in the national crisis underscored a tension between the role historians could play in displaying patriotic support of their nation's war aims on the one hand and remaining faithful to the rigors of professional historical scholarship on the other. Once the United States entered the war, historians confronted problems of “national unity, loyalty, service, and academic ethics.” The tension concerned their role as historians or propagandists, professionals or polemicists.Footnote ²⁴ During the war, Phillips's friend and fellow southern historian William E. Dodd and his two mentors, William A. Dunning and Frederick Jackson Turner, served on the National Board for Historical Service (NBHS) advisory committee. The NBHS made the services of historians available to the government, used historical scholarship to marshal patriotism and educational work, and collected and preserved historical materials necessary to document the war effort.Footnote ²⁵

Though the May 1917 Selective Service Act authorized the military draft registration of blacks as well as whites, race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois, and Houston, Texas, delayed the first African Americans from being called up until October.Footnote ²⁶ As historian Edward M. Coffman notes, the U.S. Army desperately needed recruits, regardless of skin color, but African American soldiers in the Great War were “often ignored when not maligned.” White southerners feared the prospect of large numbers of armed blacks stationed in military camps in their region. “They believed that the uneasy and sometime violent status quo which they maintained might not withstand the wartime upheaval,” Coffman remarks. The conscription of blacks, a contributor to the New Republic explained, “brings the South face to face with the necessity of overhauling its scheme of racial relationships.”Footnote ²⁷ Ultimately the army drafted more than 367,000 blacks, 200,000 of whom served overseas. African Americans constituted approximately one of every ten soldiers in the American Expeditionary Force. Around 90 percent of the black doughboys, however, served as stevedores, performing fatigue labor and unloading supplies.Footnote ²⁸ Black recruits assigned to southern camps experienced firsthand what a contemporary observer described as the “recrudescence of [the] South's intolerance,” what a black combat veteran termed “the prejudices, insults and duplicity of his white American ally.”Footnote ²⁹

The army segregated the black troops into separate units from the moment they entered the military training centers. This held special significance in southern cantonments such as Georgia's Camp Gordon. According to Richard Slotkin, “Soldiers training in Jim Crow states would be bound by Jim Crow laws, in camp as well as out.”Footnote ³⁰ Though it assigned no black officers to Camp Gordon, the facility had six black YMCA officers and several black noncommissioned officers. The NAACP's The Crisis reported that 25 percent of the blacks in the camp were illiterate. “Examining and Exemption boards have sent up numbers of colored men who never should have been passed,” its editor, W.E.B. Du Bois, reported.Footnote ³¹

As at other U.S. Army bases during the Great War, black soldiers at Camp Gordon suffered numerous indignities. They received inadequate medical care (failure to receive standard vaccinations for typhoid and physical examinations for tuberculosis, the assignment of soldiers infected with venereal disease to fatigue labor); served under white commissioned officers, not men of their own race; and performed a disproportionate amount of fatigue labor (especially loading and unloading of supplies). According to historian John Dittmer, the army assigned white sergeants experienced in supervising blacks in agricultural work to train blacks at the camp. “The white chain gang boss, then, would be an ideal man to oversee the work of black privates,” he wrote. Dittmer's account of the social conditions of black troops at Camp Gordon, decidedly separate and unequal, differs dramatically from the roseate one Phillips would write. Dittmer's research suggests that the blacks experienced interracial violence and suffered because the army refused to allow Atlanta blacks to provide the soldiers with necessary social services. He noted that they continually received “rebuffs from the . . . white YMCA and Red Cross officers.”Footnote ³²

Camp Gordon officials also segregated more than 4,000 non-English speaking draftees by ethnic groups. Thirty to 40 percent of the facility's recruits were immigrants. Slavs and Italians were assigned to separate companies under the leadership of men who spoke their respective languages. “It may rightly be claimed that such segregation of races into regiments, etc., does not make American citizens,” explained an officer, “and possibly this is true, but we are not in this war to make more American citizens, we are in to win the war.”Footnote ³³ Under what became known as the “Camp Gordon plan,” non-English-speaking soldiers trained, studied the rudiments of English, and socialized together apart from other nationality groups. According to an officer who reported to the New York Times, noncommissioned officers, “who speak their own language and good English, too,” served as instructors. The soldiers had their own movies, books, and sections in the YMCA and Knights of Columbus huts. The Times reported that under the “Camp Gordon plan,” the ethnic regiments rapidly learned English and became excellent and eager soldiers. The troops—“no longer entirely non-English speaking, no longer aliens—will be marching from the camp to the train, to the boat, to the battlefield, conscious of the best traditions of their native lands, and firmly convinced of the justice of the cause of the land of their adoption, fit and eager to fight her battles, and thereby save all humanity from the scourge of a race gone mad with the lust for world conquest.”Footnote ³⁴

Phillips's work at Camp Gordon constituted part of a larger national mobilization effort. The U.S. Army had thirty-six major cantonments designed to train full divisions of 36,000 men each.Footnote ³⁵ These tent and barrack camps were largely completed by the winter of 1917–18. Camp Gordon was one of sixteen temporary military training camps hurriedly established upon America's entrance into World War I. It was ready to occupy troops in five months and became the most substantial training facility in the region. Lockwood, Greene & Company, a major New England architectural firm known for constructing southern textile mills, engineered the base. Having opened its Atlanta office in 1912, Lockwood, Greene planned many New South mills and plants, including Gastonia, North Carolina's immense Loray Mills. U.S. entry into the World War garnered Lockwood, Greene a considerable number of defense contracts in 1917, including the Camp Gordon cantonment near Atlanta; a textile mill for the manufacture of cotton duck into mailbags on the grounds of the Atlanta Penitentiary; and the quartermaster camp at Jacksonville, Florida.Footnote ³⁶

The first recruits, who came from Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee, arrived at Camp Gordon on September 2, 1917. They eventually formed the 82nd Division of the national army, later known as the “All American” division, which fought with distinction in the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives. Phillips held the unit in the highest esteem.Footnote ³⁷ After six weeks of intensive training, the recruits, including northern draftees with immigrant backgrounds and limited literacy, transferred to other divisions.Footnote ³⁸

Camp Gordon was a massive facility; it consisted of 2,400 acres with 1,635 buildings. At the height of its service (August 1918), the base's barracks held 47,489 men; at its lowest point (December 1918), Camp Gordon contained 15,063 soldiers. Its corral space held 7,688 horses and mules. By 1921 the government salvaged and abandoned the base.Footnote ³⁹ By late 1917 Camp Gordon also hosted more than 9,000 black draftees, the largest number of African Americans assigned to any army base in the nation. It inducted black enlistees from every county in Georgia.Footnote ⁴⁰

The YMCA, the agency that hired Phillips, began assigning volunteers to military training camps to bolster soldiers' morale as early as the Spanish-American War.Footnote ⁴¹ As Americans girded for war in 1917 the YMCA's leadership “regarded the welfare of American soldiers as their peculiar and welcome responsibility.” Over 200,000 individuals applied to join YMCA staffs, from which the YMCA recruited 25,926 individuals for service both on the home front and overseas.Footnote ⁴²

The federal Commission on Training Camp Activities officially recognized the YMCA as the government's first “civilian partner in the recreation program” for military recruits.Footnote ⁴³ In training camps, the agency provided entertainment, recreation, education, library services, bible study, and religious services.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nationally the YMCA served sixteen National Guard camps, sixteen National Army camps, and a large number of centers for the training of officers, ambulance men, and aviators. According to an institutional history published soon after the war:

The YMCA organizers realized that “training civilians to become soldiers and to inculcate in them the disciplines, habits, and skills necessary for military efficiency and the winning of the war was the function of the military establishment. But beyond this was a wide range of educational needs, related to the soldier's mental, spiritual and social development which, during a war emergency, could best be served by voluntary social welfare institutions.” To this end, the YMCA offered short-term classes on military bases, cognizant that soldiers moved from base to base and could not undertake prolonged courses of study on popular topics. Collaboration with the American Library Association to provide on-base libraries expanded the potential of in-camp educational programs. Subsequently, the YMCA developed “formal courses on a more systematic basis” in foreign languages, mathematics, geography, and other topics.Footnote ⁴⁶

At Camp Gordon, the YMCA offered troops religious and literacy training, entertainment, library and mail services, and recreational activities, including intramural boxing.Footnote ⁴⁷ Statistics from one month alone, February 1918, show that over 700,000 individuals visited the YMCA hut in Camp Gordon, a sum that suggests “almost the entire population of the camp [visited] every single day. During that time 692,000 letters were written, $58,780 worth of money orders were sold, and 1,850 books were circulated, besides a much larger number of magazines and papers.”Footnote ⁴⁸ A volunteer described the camp as “cosmopolitan . . . in every sense of the word for there were descendants of all tongues and races assembled for a common purpose.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Phillips paid special attention to the large number of black recruits billeted there.

The YMCA volunteers assigned to the post supervised the activities and offered immigrant and African American recruits basic education, including training in French and history. The Atlanta Constitution pointed out that black troops received the same amusements as white soldiers: motion pictures, lectures, quarters, and regimental stunts.Footnote ⁵⁰ The YMCA assigned building number 154 as its hut for black troops, determined to transform it into “as home like as possible for the fellows.” The agency established an elementary education program for the men, providing such basic literacy as teaching the men to sign their names and to write “several words.”Footnote ⁵¹ But the newspaper omitted one significant detail: the YMCA huts were segregated, and segregation in them “was strictly enforced.”Footnote ⁵²

Atlanta University, the renowned African American institution, provided books for the training facility's African American in-camp library, while the city's black newspaper, the Atlanta Independent, conducted a fund drive to supply the black soldiers with newspapers to read. Even before Camp Gordon became operational, members of Atlanta's black community organized a Colored Committee to plan entertainment for African American trainees. The city's black churches invited soldiers to dinner with members of their congregations; and its Social Charity Club, comprised of leading blacks, devoted itself to the uplift of the base's African American recruits. In the spring of 1918, 1,000 black soldiers from Camp Gordon joined 15,000 black Atlantans in a War Savings Stamps drive parade.Footnote ⁵³ Camp Gordon also featured an extensive recreation program for its African American troops. By November 1917 the CTCA had instituted an ambitious athletic program at the cantonment, including baseball, rugby, basketball, volleyball, soccer, quoits, and medicine ball. The Atlanta Cubs, the city's all-black baseball team, opened its 1918 season against a team composed of African American recruits from Camp Gordon.Footnote ⁵⁴

Historian Nancy K. Bristow notes that instead of coordinating Camp Gordon's educational, recreational, and social programs with Atlanta's blacks, CTCA administrators established an all-white Committee on Colored Cooperation. The white committee, however, never met. According to Harry H. Pace, secretary of the Colored Committee, “Whenever an attempt was made by the Colored Committee to do something which they believed to be in line with their wishes it was blotted and eventually stopped. The result is that nothing has been done for Colored Soldiers at Camp Gordon who came into the city of Atlanta.” And although the CTCA successfully established recreational programs within Camp Gordon for blacks, it fell short of harnessing the support of Atlanta's black community, alienating it instead. In October 1917, for example, whites excluded Camp Gordon's black soldiers, along with Atlanta's African American community, from a major patriotic parade. The Atlanta Independent charged that the black troops “were snubbed and treated like scullions. . . . They were not wanted—actions spoke louder than words.” According to Bristow, at Camp Gordon, “as in countless other training camp communities, the CTCA's acceptance of segregated recreation resulted in a desperate shortage of recreational opportunities for African American soldiers.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Phillips, a close student of class and especially race relations in the Old and New Souths, thus encountered a racial tinderbox at Camp Gordon. The presence of such a large contingent of armed African Americans captured the attention of white Atlantans. Local whites considered the assignment of blacks to Camp Gordon most worrisome, fearing mutiny and rebellion by armed blacks akin to the Houston race riot of August 1917, which resulted in the hanging of nineteen black soldiers and the sentencing of forty-one others to life imprisonment.Footnote ⁵⁶

Colonel Hunter B. Nelson commanded Camp Gordon's contingent of black recruits. A Tennessean, he graduated from West Point third from last in his class in 1893 and had served with black troops for seventeen years.Footnote ⁵⁷ “I am not uneasy about making soldiers out of them,” Nelson told a reporter in 1917, “nor am I nervous about having trouble with them.” The reporter described Nelson as a patient yet determined officer: “He has seen active service and gives one the impression that he knows the game and knows just what he is driving at as he handles raw material.”Footnote ⁵⁸ White Atlantans, however, no doubt were “nervous about having trouble with” black recruits and found it reassuring that Colonel Nelson had experience in handling “raw material.”

The Constitution commented that fortunately Camp Gordon's commanders “are men who know how to deal with this problem. They are stern disciplinarians, most of them southern men, and with their proven abilities and their past experiences, these officers can be depended upon to protect the peace.” Beyond this, the newspaper assured its readers that only black recruits from Georgia would receive training there. “They will, in other words, be at home.” The editor went on to admonish readers that it was essential “that all must be just to the negro recruits. Police and citizens alike must treat them justly. With firm men and experienced disciplinarians in charge, the situation will be kept well in hand and no trouble will be experienced. And the negroes must themselves feel that they are on trial today as never before in history. If they make good their covenant with their government they will deserve and receive credit. If they do not, they will bring opprobrium on their whole race.”Footnote ⁵⁹

A black clergyman, the Reverend D. W. Cannon, educational secretary and general missionary of the Baptist Convention of Georgia, responded to the Constitution's editorial, reminding readers that many whites found offensive the idea of black men in uniform “and, of course, when trouble [between the races] arises the papers and the police give the negro the worst of it, regardless of the conditions under which the trouble arose.” While Cannon agreed that their military experiences at Camp Gordon would test the black recruits, he assured readers “our boys will deport themselves as becometh soldiers going out to do and die for the Stars and Stripes.” That said, he urged the Constitution's editor to admonish whites “that these soldiers are human and know when they are treated right and feel as keenly as anybody else an unnecessary insult.” It was in the best interest of whites to treat the black troops fairly, Cannon continued, because “in some crisis across the sea, these same black boys who they fear and the wisdom of whose presence they question, may eventually have to save the shattered remnants of some company of their own white sons who may have fallen into some trap set by the wily and resourceful Germans.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Despite the Reverend Cannon's words, the presence of so many black soldiers at a southern military base continued to preoccupy whites. In November 1917 the Constitution ran a long feature story designed to convince white Atlantans that they had little to fear from Camp Gordon's African American troops. Isma Dooly, a young reporter for the Constitution, drew on the well-worn trope of the South's loyal slaves during the Civil War: “Many of the men [at Camp Gordon] were the grandsons of those negroes who had protected the defenseless and innocent on the plantations and in the small communities during the war of the confederacy.” She went on to compliment the military for assigning southern white officers to the black units, “for the white southern men—especially the man who is serving his country—knows how to lead these dependent ones.”Footnote ⁶¹

Dooly also praised the “colored” YMCA for its educational and humanitarian work among the black troops. She quoted J. B. Watson, a black field secretary of the YMCA, who described the recruits as a diverse group, including virtually every white stereotype of contemporary blacks: “I suppose they are an average set of Georgia negroes from every point of view, if you can get an average out of four thousand. They are from the city and country. The musician, the artisan and the college man are all there, and also the crap-shooter and the booze-fighter. The cotton and corn growers from south Georgia mix freely with the butlers, the chauffeur and hotel men from the cities; but they all look alike in khaki.” Dooly ended her story on an upbeat note. Despite reservations by blacks and whites about the experiment of training blacks in the South's camps, it appeared to her that military service generally was an uplifting experience for the blacks: physically, mentally, and morally.Footnote ⁶² And, according to Dooly, this experience resulted at least in part from the training that the YMCA provided on military bases such as Camp Gordon.

Economist Armand M. Souby of Middle Tennessee State Normal School (later Middle Tennessee State University) performed the duties of Camp Gordon's educational director.Footnote ⁶³ Phillips joined Souby at Camp Gordon, serving as the YMCA's associate secretary (and later educational director); he also taught English and French. The Constitution welcomed Phillips back to Georgia as a native son, lauding him as a “Famous Educator,” an expert on “the history and traditions of the negro race.” Phillips, the paper reported,

Though largely removed from his research and writing, Phillips nonetheless found the work with recruits stimulating and rewarding.Footnote ⁶⁵ In November 1917 he informed his Michigan colleague Claude H. Van Tyne, “This camp work is the most inspiring thing I have ever experienced.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In addition to teaching and planning programs, Phillips supervised construction and maintenance of the camp's YMCA buildings. “It would do you good to sit on the side lines and see me hustle,” he joked. “Do I find time for educational and other human work? Yes, in crevices. Shall I be able to read proofs on my ‘Slavery,’ when they shortly begin to come? Damifino. Shall I get to bed tonight? Maybe, if I stop this letter right here.”Footnote ⁶⁷

In December 1917, Phillips assumed responsibility for educational programs while Souby directed the entertainment and social programs. The educational offerings were extensive, including classes in English, German, French, and history. The camp offered entertainment most nights. The Constitution described Camp Gordon as “a soldier city” with more than 30,000 men, about one-third of whom were immigrants, hence the importance of presenting classes in English and, in terms of entertainment, the significance of “offering something different and something snappy and attractive every night.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Phillips reported to Dean J. R. Effinger at Michigan that his duties at Camp Gordon included serving as

The Constitution reported a scene at Camp Gordon's train station, describing Phillips as “a tall, ruddy-faced man [who] brought postal cards and stamps to a mob of eager, apprehensive troopers after the clerk had closed the office; dramatically he delivered himself of the last cards as the train pulled from Atlanta heading to the coast and shipment to war.”Footnote ⁷⁰

In January 1918 Souby left Camp Gordon to become social director for the YMCA's activities in the Southeast, smoothing the way for Phillips to become educational director in title as well as in fact. Phillips also ran a training school for persons who sought to work on YMCA educational programs.Footnote ⁷¹ Phillips provided additional glimpses into the diverse range of his war work at Camp Gordon in a New Year's letter to the Michigan Alumnus:

Despite his diverse and hectic duties at Camp Gordon, while in Georgia, Phillips continued his historical work, determined to track down plantation records “when affairs permit” during his southern sojourn.Footnote ⁷³ In April 1918 he delivered an informal talk on “The Plantation Product of Men” at the Georgia Historical Association's annual meeting in Atlanta.Footnote ⁷⁴ Claiming that his duties as educational director prevented him from presenting a formal paper, Phillips spoke without notes.Footnote ⁷⁵ Significantly, he drew upon his experiences with black troops at Camp Gordon in his encomium of the Old South's planter elite and their world.

In his Georgia Historical Association talk, Phillips described the plantation as important in southern history as much for being “the factory system applied to agriculture” as for imparting a distinctive “imprint upon the South,” what he considered “a philosophy which we must pass on in our turn.” Phillips identified a nexus between social conditions in a World War I-era Georgia army base and those that existed under plantation slavery. For example, he said that a senior officer admonished a newly minted officer not to believe what his soldiers said, but rather to rely on their noncommissioned officers who, like slave foremen of old, understood their charges. “At Camp Gordon it is a pleasure to be with the negroes,” Phillips explained, “for they are, for the most part, plantation negroes, and it is easy to manage them. Those who know the type, know when and where to count on it, and when otherwise.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Phillips then summarized his arguments about the social role of the plantation and the planters—themes that had their roots in his previous essays and soon would appear full blown in American Negro Slavery.

Phillips defined the plantation broadly: as an agricultural workplace, as a homestead, and as a training school. He credited planters with playing several roles for their slaves and for their communities: as magistrates, as administrators and, drawing on a Progressive Era analogy, as settlement workers in modern cities. “They served as patterns of life as well as preceptors in the training of a backward people,” Phillips explained. Phillips waxed nostalgic for the sense of “neighborliness” present on the plantation but absent in twentieth-century America. Unlike what he termed “the curse of modern industrialism,” plantation agriculture provided care and supervision of the workforce from sunup to sunset. The planters' economic self-interest—they owned the factors of production—motivated them as owners and managers to care for their workers. Planters and plantation mistresses generally created a sense of “intimacy and cordiality” between themselves and their slaves.Footnote ⁷⁷

Phillips observed the same comradeship between whites and blacks at Camp Gordon as had existed between masters and their slaves. In camp, he explained, “white and black enlisted men from the same county meet in warm friendliness. The cordiality between the two elements dates from plantation times.” Those prone to “view the old Southern regime from afar off with a theorist's eye are likely to think it was an agency of race alienation.” But no, Phillips insisted, “the grouping of persons of the two races in the intimate relationship of possession tended strongly to counteract that antipathy which all races feel toward each other.” “The possession was not wholly of the slave by the master,” he explained, “but also of the master by the slave.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Five decades later historian Eugene D. Genovese identified this interpretation as Phillips's theory of plantation paternalism.Footnote ⁷⁹

Phillips considered plantation life an apt analogy for the military. Like soldiers, the slaves worked in squads trained by discipline and routine. He credited the plantation regime with producing “types of men and women, white and black, that are distinctive in the world.” Phillips insisted that the plantation “made for strength of character and readiness to meet emergencies, for patience and tact, for large mindedness, gentility, and self-control.” He yearned for those traditions, elements too often lost “in the whirl of modern life.” Yet Phillips saw evidence around him—at Camp Gordon and elsewhere in the New South—that the positive qualities of “the old regime” were being fostered, allowing the South to “remain in long future times as wholesome, constructive, and strong as she has been in the past.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Phillips's informal paper before the Georgia Historical Association thus served as a trial run of sorts for the preface of his American Negro Slavery that he drafted while serving with black troops at Camp Gordon.

In November 1918, after having performed “et ceteras” at Camp Gordon for more than a year, Phillips moved in yet another unlikely direction: he received a commission as captain in the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Division (MID), Army General Staff, Washington, DC.Footnote ⁸¹ This was an unusual move because Phillips had no previous military experience and, because of his wife and two children, his Selective Service Local Board had classified him as 2-A, a deferred status for men with dependents.Footnote ⁸²

Phillips joined the MID in its infancy and at a moment when the army was expanding its operations and making it more efficient, centralized, coordinated, and professional. Not only was the U.S. Army unprepared for war in 1917, but it lacked an intelligence branch capable of collecting and interpreting information when World War I began three years earlier. Not until the war drew to an end in 1918 did the United States possess a well-organized, efficient intelligence agency. A major step forward occurred in May 1917 when military intelligence, formerly deep within the General Staff organization, became a semi-independent section, then an autonomous branch in February 1918 and, finally, a division equal to the other three General Staff divisions in August 1918.Footnote ⁸³ This section grew quickly, from three officers in April 1917 to 282 officers in November 1918. In August 1918 the Army's military intelligence changed to the MID, General Staff, under Colonel (later Brigadier General) Marlborough Churchill, with the responsibility of assessing the military and economic conditions of foreign countries.Footnote ⁸⁴

The army modeled its military intelligence service on Britain's, with two foci. Positive intelligence referred to the full range of collection methods employed by a foreign intelligence agency. Negative intelligence applied to counterespionage measures taken to uncover and suppress internal enemy activity. The MID had very few Regular Army officers but more than 200 newly commissioned officers, who in turn identified and recruited others. This policy reflected the preference of Woodrow Wilson's administration to sidestep the State Department in favor of academics in terms of supplying intelligence information and shaping foreign policy, itself a continuation of Wilson's New Freedom policy of using “experts”—political and social scientists—to implement progressive reform and to oversee government planning.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Positive Branch in which Phillips served focused on economic, military, political, and social conditions abroad. It responded to questions from the General Staff on short notice about any part of the world. The branch concerned itself with future developments, not the past, and concentrated on Germany and Austria-Hungary. Its goal was to provide a flow of information from across the world necessary to make correct strategic decisions.Footnote ⁸⁶

Phillips entered the Positive Branch, M.I.-2, the Foreign Intelligence section, as a research specialist under the command of Major Charles F. Mason. This unit collected, collated, and disseminated foreign intelligence and prepared foreign military studies. By November 1918 M.I.-2 constituted the largest section in the Positive Branch. Under Captain Ralston Fleming, M.I.-2's Political Subsection observed postwar conditions worldwide, identified possible military scenarios during the transition from war to peace, and prepared monographs on matters ranging from the future of Europe's various ethnic groups to pacifism and feminism and to Bolshevism and Socialism.Footnote ⁸⁷

Just as Phillips never explained how he received his army commission, his biographers also have sidestepped the question. His YMCA work at Camp Gordon—teaching recruits, arranging extramural activities, supervising construction, the “et ceteras”—certainly did not prepare him for such an assignment. Nevertheless, in August 1918 Phillips eagerly sought an officer's commission. He hoped to serve his country in any capacity, including in the “Intelligence, Personnel and Morale branches and the section for combating venereal diseases, as well as line service.” Phillips informed Assistant Secretary of War Frederick P. Keppel that his work at Camp Gordon had prepared him well for personnel and training responsibilities. He possessed “a ready [reading ?] knowledge and a broken speaking command of French, a rusty [acquaintance with ?] German, and a slight remnant of Italian. My chief worth lies in such disciplined mental alertness and staunchness as I may possess, and in my habit [of ?] constructive study.” In the midst of U.S. war frenzy, Phillips felt obliged to establish his “true Americanism.” He explained: “In spite of my German-appearing first name I am of straight American descent in all traceable lines, with remote British origins. My wife . . . is likewise of unalloyed American ancestry. . . . I am in perfect accord with the nation's war policy.”Footnote ⁸⁸ To support his case, Phillips obtained testimonials from persons, including historian J. Franklin Jameson of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; Joseph Schafer, vice-chair of the NBHS; and John Morris, professor of German at the University of Georgia. Each attested to Phillips's high character and unqualified patriotism.Footnote ⁸⁹

In October 1918, General Churchill, MID's presiding officer, reported that Secretary of War Newton D. Baker had directed that Phillips be commissioned a captain in the MID, assigned to conduct Positive Intelligence in Washington, DC. Churchill added that for three weeks in October Phillips had volunteered for the MID, “and by reason of the efficient manner in which he has performed the duties in this respect, he is considered well qualified for the duty to which it is desired to assign him.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Effective November 1, 1918, Professor Phillips thus became Captain Phillips, U.S. Army. His commission restricted Phillips to “intelligence duties solely, and that at no time will he be released therefrom [sic], and assigned to the command of troops.” Phillips's commission also stated, “Should your services be no longer desired for this duty at any time during the war you will be discharged.”Footnote ⁹¹

A month and one-half later, Captain Phillips filed a report with the office of the Chief of Staff that demonstrated the nature of his new responsibilities. Phillips's “A Study of the Prospects Concerning the Extension of Occupation by the Allies in Germany and Austria-Hungary” exhibited his deep knowledge of the conditions in place at the time of the November 11, 1918, armistice, European military geography, the complexities of Realpolitik in 1914 and in 1918, and his worry over the rise of international socialism.Footnote ⁹²

Concerning Austria-Hungary, Phillips reported that his office, along with that of the British Foreign Office, were woefully uninformed regarding conditions in the former Dual Monarchy. American diplomats therefore would require detailed intelligence before a peace treaty could be negotiated. Phillips predicted that “the situation is likely to be fertile in occasions requiring enlargements of the Allied occupation.” The demise of the Hapsburgs left Austria and Hungary without central authority. “Any imposition in the nature of reparation or indemnity would therefore involve complex difficulties of collection,” Phillips stated. He predicted that the mere act of apportioning the extant public debt would prove problematic.Footnote ⁹³

Phillips recommended that officials first sort out the claims of the various nationality groups in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. “On every frontier of every new state there is extensive intermingling of the racial and linguistic stocks; and each of the states, new and old, aspires to possess every inch of territory to which it may plausibly lay claim.” Phillips identified friction between several nationality groups, including what he termed the Jugo-Slavs and the Italians, the Jugo-Slavs and the Roumanians, and between the Czecho-Slovaks and the Magyars. “Similar crises impend in every other quarter,” he added.Footnote ⁹⁴

The stoppage of trade, especially of food and fuel, complicated matters, Phillips explained. What he described as “German-Austria” was already at odds with its neighbors on three sides composed of Czecho-Slovaks, Magyars, and Jugo-Slavs. Phillips emphasized that Allied military occupation might be required in “every district that was Austria-Hungary,” though he noted that the various ethnic groups kept “the local opponents” divided, “evenly balanced.” “A mere demonstration by the Allies will probably suffice to keep the peace; and an occupation in heavy force will presumably not in any case be necessary.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Phillips devoted more attention in his report to Germany. He identified no threats to social disorder in Bavaria, an analysis that events soon demonstrated to be outrageously wrong. He focused instead on dislocation and radicalism in the North and East. Phillips predicted that it might be necessary during the winter of 1919 for the military to occupy Northwestern Germany as well as Berlin “for police purposes,” and later to occupy a geographic belt from Danzig to Breslau. “After the signature of the peace,” Phillips maintained, “there may be occasion for a general occupation of Germany, to guarantee payments; but in this regard . . . the occupation of a belt from the North Sea to Berlin may suffice.” He identified four contingencies that might occasion increased military presence by the Allies in Germany and then assessed them.Footnote ⁹⁶

First, Phillips considered it highly improbable that Germany's government would take actions leading to a resumption of hostilities. In his opinion, “the German government and the bulk of the German people will doubtless acquiesce in every demand,” no matter how “much they may protest against the severity” of Allied occupation. He acknowledged that prior to the armistice some Germans, rather than surrender, had pledged to die in defense of the Fatherland. But, Phillips explained, this movement died out as quickly as it began. Nevertheless Phillips advised that the Allies occupy Danzig as a means of forestalling a coup by Junkers of Eastern Prussia.Footnote ⁹⁷

Phillips next analyzed the need for possible further occupation of Germany as a means of guaranteeing the payment of reparations and indemnities. While he considered expanded Allied military presence as possibly necessary to secure compensation from the Germans, Phillips judged it a moot question until the actual peace treaty had been signed. “If an occupation for this purpose be made,” he wrote, “it will presumably include the principal seaports as well as the national capital; and it may possibly be extended throughout the country.” Phillips noted that although German public opinion was “conspicuously silent” on the reparations question, the Allies nonetheless were determined to pursue it. “In view of the huge sums which are likely to be required, it is not easy to see how an occupation very considerable in both space and time may be obviated,” Phillips stated.Footnote ⁹⁸

Phillips's third point concerned the prospect of local resistance to the transfer of territory by the defeated Central Powers. He felt certain that Germans would resist the loss of territory, especially if the final peace treaty awarded Poland a corridor to the Baltic Sea and equally so if Posen and Silesia also were returned to Poland. “This contingency may arise as soon as the peace negotiations give evidence that these transfers of territory will be required,” Phillips warned. He was more sanguine concerning German responses to the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France and North Schleswig to Denmark. In the former case, Phillips explained, “the French are already in occupation, and in the other case the district concerned will be too vulnerable for local insurgents to have hopes of defending it.” Nevertheless Phillips predicted that “if the cession of the Kiel Canal shall be required, a brief naval and military occupation may be instituted at both ends.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Phillips worried most about the potential for what he termed “internal disorders” in desolated postwar Germany. “The demoralization which now prevails, particularly in North Germany,” he explained, “may increase with the progress of demobilization.” The rise of what Phillips termed “subversive movements”—Bolsheviks who belonged to the Spartacus League—might necessitate armed military intervention in certain regions of Germany. While “radical Socialists” comprised only a tiny fraction of the German populace, Phillips noted that dire social conditions, including famine and desperation, offered fertile ground for agitators who might capitalize upon conflicts between the major political parties and gain power. On the one hand, Phillips observed happily that moderates had captured control of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils across Germany and that Friedrich Ebert (who in 1919 became Germany's first president) had consolidated control over extremists. Even so, Phillips remained concerned that “the advocates of universal subversion” left the “prospect of orderly reconstruction” unsettled. He feared that “any untoward event may give the champions of proletarian dictatorship an opportunity to create serious disorder,” especially in Bremen and Hamburg in the North, in Berlin, and in Dresden and Leipzig in Eastern Germany. Phillips believed that radical Marxists of the Spartacus League welcomed occupation, affording them “an opportunity for the spread of Bolshevism among the Allied troops and thence into the Entente countries.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Though from a twenty-first-century perspective Phillips's military intelligence report seems pedestrian and predictable, from a pre-Treaty of Versailles vantage point it no doubt had value. His observations on possible postwar European occupation suggest, among other things, that Phillips anticipated the First Red Scare of 1919–20, that he possessed a keen knowledge of European geopolitics, and that he had thought about postwar reconstructions in comparative ways. Phillips had grown to manhood in West Georgia, when the bitter memories of Reconstruction in the South remained fresh, and he retained a degree of sectional hostility toward the victorious northerners, especially northern historians. Early in his career, for example, Phillips remarked, “The history of the United States has been written by Boston, and largely written wrong. It must be written anew before it reaches its final form of truth. And for that work, the South must do its part in preparation. New England has already overdone its part.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Without inferring too much from Phillips's one extant military intelligence position paper, that document nonetheless provides insights into how he envisioned postwar European reconstruction. It also underscores his distrust of political extremes—whether socialists, militarists, or monarchists. Above all, Phillips craved well-ordered, functioning societies that moved forward without overturning the status quo.

Despite his enthusiasm for military intelligence, Phillips's work for M.I.-2 ended as abruptly as it had begun. On February 10, 1919, the Army, apparently no longer needing his services, unceremoniously discharged him. Phillips returned to Michigan for the start of the spring 1919 semester.Footnote ¹⁰² By then his new book, American Negro Slavery, already was receiving rave reviews. For example, historian Philip Alexander Bruce judged it “a monument of research, and equally so of fair and discriminating presentation.” Unmindful of later fierce historiographical debates over slavery and Phillips's reputation as a historian, Bruce informed him, “I venture to say that you have said the final word.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Significantly, Phillips had composed the preface to American Negro Slavery during his stint at Camp Gordon. As his talk before the Georgia Historical Association made clear, Phillips's experiences with black troops informed, meshed closely with, and confirmed his interpretations of both slavery and contemporary race relations. He considered his service at Camp Gordon akin to conducting anthropological-sociological field research among Negroes. According to John Herbert Roper, at the army base Phillips “watched his surroundings, this community, with singular fascination.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Phillips even recorded some of what he saw at Camp Gordon in photographs, a medium he considered “modern” and “scientific.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Roper explains, “Blacks were everywhere, cooking, on sanitation detail, in construction, basically performing the indispensable dirty work of running an army machine. Yet, however degrading the work, there remained one fact: everybody in the United States Army must learn to handle firearms; every soldier's basic first training is infantry. So all those smiling, cooperative, obedient, black soldiers had fighting knowledge and many were carrying arms.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Unlike those Atlantans who had expressed reservations about the prospect of armed blacks, Phillips held contrary views. His observations of Camp Gordon's African American troops convinced him that the future course of race relations in the region would be bright if southern white paternalism, like that practiced by the “best” southern slaveholders of old, prevailed. What Phillips saw at the military camp put to rest, at least in his mind, visions of race war in the region.

Phillips's observations of the men of the two races interacting socially (though “of course quartered separately”), he recalled, “reënforced my earlier conviction that Southern racial asperities are mainly superficial, and that the two great elements are fundamentally in accord. That the harmony is not a new thing is evinced by the very tone of the camp.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ That Phillips compared chattel slavery with life in the rigidly segregated U.S. Army suggests that he believed, even a half century after emancipation, that African Americans continued to work best under white management. Like slaves, the black soldiers reportedly excelled at performing rote tasks such as military drill under the discipline of white officers and black noncommissioned officers. According to Phillips, the black men exhibited

Phillips noted approvingly that when relaxing in their barracks (significantly he termed it “the quarter”), the black troops sang “Down by the Riverside.” This “old-time unmartial” spiritual contained the refrain “I ain' go' study war no mo'/I ain' go study war no mo'/Study war no mo'!” Not only did the black soldiers sing but, according to Phillips, they also gambled. He claimed to have heard through a barracks “window the mention of two bits as a wager, and an earnest adjuration of ‘sebben or lebben.’” To these familiar Jim Crow-era white stereotypes of blacks, Phillips added, “The grim realities of war, though a constant theme in the inculcation of discipline is as remote in the thought of these men as is the planet Mars. Yet each of their lieutenants is justly confident that his platoon will follow whithersoever he may lead.” In Phillips's opinion, “It may be that the change of African nature by plantation slavery has been exaggerated. At any rate a generation of freedom has wrought less transformation in the bulk of the blacks than might casually be supposed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Reviewing Phillips's American Negro Slavery, the black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, one of Phillips's most consistent and vocal critics, found astounding that a historian in 1918 considered the mass of African Americans unchanged from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. When Phillips listened to the black troops at Camp Gordon, Du Bois observed, all he heard was “the throwing of dice.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

Echoing Du Bois, historian Adriane Lentz-Smith recently has charged that Phillips's descriptions of Camp Gordon underscore the degree to which racism blinded him to the progress by African Americans since emancipation and deafened him to the cries of Jim Crow-era blacks for true freedom and justice. As Lentz-Smith observes correctly, “Phillips heard the singing” at Camp Gordon, “but he did not actually listen.” He was unattuned both to why the men sang—the burdens their people had experienced before, during, and after emancipation—and to what they sang. “To truly hear African Americans,” she explains, “Phillips would have had to listen past his prejudices, to understand black people as fully human, and to see black troops as men, not children.” Ignoring their struggles and accomplishments since emancipation, Phillips overlooked how African Americans had grown and changed. “The system of Jim Crow that Phillips had helped to construct had waged war on black citizenship since the late nineteenth century,” Lentz-Smith maintains. To the soldiers, “Down by the Riverside” may have signified a range of emotions, from defiance to despair but, Lentz-Smith adds, “it was never the unthinking, unchanging ‘old-time’ song that Phillips imagined.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Of course both Du Bois was and Lentz-Smith is correct. In 1918 Phillips misread virtually all manifestations of African American agency, cultural expression, manhood, self-assertion, and self-respect. Just as he failed to recognize brutality on the part of masters and resistance on the part of slaves, Phillips's racial bias blinded him to the accomplishments by and the meaning of black military service to the men he engaged with at Camp Gordon. Yet both critics, like most of Phillips's detractors, missed how his engagement with black troops at Camp Gordon, albeit limited and selective, influenced his racial thought, how this experience left him sanguine about race relations in the post-World War I South. While historians rightly denounce Phillips's well-documented condescension, elitism, and racism, he nevertheless was cautiously optimistic for peaceful race and social relations and degrees of assimilation in the post-World War I world.

Though not uncritical of aspects of plantation life, Phillips since 1903 repeatedly had espoused the importance—economically and socially—of organizing black laborers on plantations, rather than on small, independent farms. And Phillips had campaigned on and off for years for the reestablishment of the plantation system as the solution to the South's economic and racial problems. Differentiating between slavery (which he considered an inefficient and archaic labor system) and the plantation (which he judged a modern, efficient locus for organizing agricultural laborers, a blend of the modern factory and the social settlement house), Phillips called for the return of what he termed “patriarchal plantations” and the phasing out of independent Negro-run farms. Such a move, Phillips explained in the Sewanee Review and elsewhere, “is therefore a movement of progress from the stagnation of demoralized industry in the recent past toward a more effective system for the future. Together with the recent growth of cotton factories, it indicates that the South is now becoming more fully alive to the spirit of specialized and systematized industry which is elsewhere prevalent in modern America.”Footnote ¹¹²

Phillips argued that close interracial association between blacks and whites held the key to southern economic progress and racial harmony: “The South has long been held in a false position of hostility to the negro, while in actual truth the conservative thinking, God-fearing element among the Southern people have been and still remain the most substantial, practical, and valuable friends that their black neighbors have ever had.” Whites needed efficient, reliable black labor, Phillips explained, while blacks required the example and precept white tutelage conferred. “The average negro,” Phillips remarked, “has many characteristics of a child, and must be guided and governed, and often guarded against himself, by a sympathetic hand.” Relocating blacks to moderately sized plantations, Phillips concluded, would allow the African American “to take his place in the modern world of specialized and organized industry and yet have the protection from the harsher features of the modern strife, which will be afforded him by the patriarchal character of the system of which he is a part.”Footnote ¹¹³

Roper suggests that Phillips's Camp Gordon experiences confirmed his belief that the plantation model would resolve the problem of racial discord in the New South. It alone would allow for “peaceful coexistence” between the races and remove the temporary racial tensions that resulted from Reconstruction. Roper has incisively pinpointed Phillips's four-part schema of southern race relations: first, “the long decades of antebellum pax plantation”; second, “an interregnum of ‘asperities’” during and after Reconstruction; third, “a present marked by pax Camp Gordon”; fourth, “a future of pax plantation.” Roper added, however, that Phillips's vision for plantation-based racial harmony hinged “on the conservative elite getting its message of back to the farm to the masses, black and white.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Though Phillips had long subscribed to his belief in “pax plantation,” his return “home” to Georgia, 1917–18, and his YMCA military service at Camp Gordon convinced him even more so of its relevance, utility, and wisdom. The black doughboys' dignified, disciplined and, to his mind “managed” behavior at Camp Gordon, confirmed for Phillips the need for white paternalistic racial control in the modern South. “Demonstrations,” Roper maintains, “of decorous black behavior in camp were a special boon for the historian: his own best hopes and dreams were borne into reality by Negro soldiers; now he could bend to the task of proselytizing others.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

As Phillips put his finishing touches on American Negro Slavery and performed his seemingly endless “et ceteras” at Camp Gordon, he drew a parallel between the discipline, organization, and order of army life and what he famously termed “the plantation régime.” “Plantation slavery had in strictly business aspects at least as many drawbacks as it had attractions,” Phillips admitted in his book. “But in the large it was less a business than a life; it made fewer fortunes than it made men.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In his opinion the black troops made good soldiers because their ancestors had been good slaves.

Phillips's military experiences, whether as YMCA volunteer or intelligence officer, led him to resolve “the tension between assimilation and segregation” that Lawrie identified.Footnote ¹¹⁷ They reinforced his attitude toward blacks (or so-called inferior peoples), confirmed his aversion to radical change, and strengthened his belief in the economic assimilation and social segregation of African Americans. His military work validated Phillips's longstanding commitment to racial and class hierarchy, especially the circumscribed place of blacks in American life. His day-to-day work with African Americans reaffirmed—did not challenge—Phillips's almost two decades of research on their life and labor as slaves. Denying the capacity of blacks for marked growth and change, Phillips envisioned no “New Negro” in 1920s America. Instead he looked back longingly to the old Negro of slavery times. For him the experiences of African American recruits at Camp Gordon proved that twentieth-century blacks succeeded best under white management. To Phillips's mind, “the black was a ready ally in a war to save civilization”—both overseas and in the New South.Footnote ¹¹⁸