The Best of America

The New Center: A Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari

Happy Independence Day to our US readers, as well to our international readers who cherish the American experiment. My newsletter usually hits your inboxes on Wednesdays, but I wanted to save this one for today’s holiday. It’s the story of Elbridge Colby. No, not the Trump administration Pentagon strategist and Strategy of Denial author: I profile him in the latest issue of The New Statesman. For Fourth of July, I’d like to tell you about Colby’s great-grandfather, after whom he is named.

Elbridge Colby was born in 1891, the scion of a blue-blood Massachusetts family. Breaking with his folks’ Puritan tradition, he converted to Catholicism and married an Irish Catholic girl named Mary Margaret Egan, settling in Minneapolis, where Colby taught English literature at the University of Minnesota. When World War I broke out, he volunteered with the Red Cross in Serbia. Once the United States declared war, he joined the Army and was dispatched, to his chagrin, to Panama instead of the European front. Postwar, he finished his doctorate and rejoined the Army as an officer. Colby’s military career was looking brilliant—until he damaged it with a single act of great moral courage: publishing a column in The Nation that denounced the racist impunity that was all too prevalent in the American South at the time.

On Sept. 1, 1925, a lumberyard nightwatchman shot and killed an African-American soldier for failing to step off a sidewalk to make way for him in Americus, Ga., not far from Fort Benning. As Colby recounted the facts in his Nation column, the nightwatchman and his family:

came down a street through the Negro section of the town, past a crowd of Negroes congregated in front of a dance hall; as far as can be discovered they were not molested or accosted in any way. About an hour later, the family of three walked up the street, on a sidewalk eight feet 10 inches wide. On the curb, with his back to the sidewalk, talking to another colored soldier of the same regiment, stood Private Smith, known as one of the best-dressed and best-behaved men in the 24th Infantry; he was wearing the uniform of the United States Army. The night watchman, named E. J. Fulbright, kicked him from behind in that part of the anatomy usually employed for seating purposes, kicked him into the road, and exclaimed: ‘Get off the sidewalk.’ The sidewalk, you will recall, was eight feet 10 inches wide. The kicker declares that he soldier turned and said: ‘Who’s going to make me?’ Six other witnesses declared that Smith said nothing. In any event, Smith was unarmed. He made no threatening gesture. And yet night watchman Fulbright drew a drew a gun and shot the soldier dead on the spot.

Fulbright was indicted, Colby noted, but not jailed pending trial. At his murder trial, the defense argued that “any Southern gentleman would have done the same as did the kindly family man named Fulbright.” Moreover, Colby wrote, “great stress was laid on the fact that this was ‘Northern n—r’ hailing from Montclair, New Jersey.” When Pvt. Smith’s commanding officers showed up to watch the proceedings, they, too, were abused by the public as “those damned Northern officers.”

Fulbright was acquitted. Colby raged against this outcome: “The verdict? Is there any question that an attack upon a Negro soldier would result in such a court and in such community and in such a State-in anything but an acquittal?”

By all accounts, Elbridge Colby’s exercise of his conscience and his First Amendment rights derailed his rise through the Army ranks. Yet who can deny that men like him—including his son, William Colby, a New Dealer who worked for the National Labor Relations Board in the 1940s before becoming CIA director in the 1970s—represent all that is best and most honorable in the American inheritance?

Happy Fourth!