the services
the difficult and important task of designating racial categories into
which men could be assigned. As late as April 1949 the Army and the
Air Force listed a number of specific racial categories, one of which
had to be chosen by the applicant or recruiter--the regulation left
the point unclear--to identify the applicant's race. The regulation
listed "white, Negro, Indian (referring to American Indian only),
Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Hawaiian, Filipino, Chinese, East
Indian, etc.," and specifically included mulattoes and "others of
negroid race or extraction" in the Negro category, leaving other men
of mixed race to be entered under their predominant race.[15-3]

[Footnote 15-3: SR 615-105-1 (AFR 39-9), 15 Apr 49.]

The regulation was obviously subject to controversy, and in the wake
of the President's equality order it is not surprising that some
group--a group of Spanish-speaking Americans from southern California,
as it turned out--would raise the issue. Specifically, they objected
to a practice of Army and Air Force recruiters, who often scratched
out "white" and inserted "Mexican" in the applications of
Spanish-speaking volunteers. These young men wanted to be integrated
into every phase of community life, Congressman Chet Holifield told
the Secretary of Defense, and he passed on a warning from his
California constituents that "any attempt to forestall this ambition
by treating them as a group apart is extremely repellent to them and
gives rise to demoralization and hostility."[15-4] If the Department
of Defense considered racial information essential, Holifield
continued, why not make the determination in a less objectionable
manner? He suggested a series of questions concerning the birthplace
of the applicant's parents and the language spoken in his home as
innocuous possibilities.

[Footnote 15-4: Ltr, Holifield to SecDef, 10 Aug 49,
SD 291.2 Negroes.]

Secretary Johnson sent the congressman's complaint to the Personnel
Policy Board, which, ignoring the larger considerations posed by
Holifield, concentrated on simplifying the department's racial
categories to five--Caucasian, Negroid, Mongolian, Indian (American),
and Malayan--and making their use uniform throughout the services. The
board also adopted the use of inoffensive questions to help determine
the applicant's proper race category. Obviously, the board could not
abandon racial