nt: "To change anything in the Na-a-vy is
like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you
punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you
find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching."[9-4] Many
senior officers resisted equal treatment and opportunity simply
because of their traditional belief that Negroes needed special
treatment and any basic change in their status was fraught with
danger.[9-5]

[Footnote 9-3: Edward M. Coffman, _The Hilt of the
Sword_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1966), p. 245.]

[Footnote 9-4: Quoted in Marriner S. Eccles,
_Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal
Recollections_, ed. Sidney Hyman (New York: Knopf,
1951), p. 336.]

[Footnote 9-5: The influence of tradition on naval
racial practices was raised during the hearings of
the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment
and Opportunity in the Armed Services, 13 January
1949, pages 105-08, 111-12.]

Still, tradition could work two ways, and in the case of the Navy, at
least, the postwar decision to liberalize racial practices can be
traced in part to its sense of tradition. When James Forrestal started
to integrate the general service in 1944, his appeals to his senior
military colleagues, the President, and the public were always couched
in terms of military efficiency. But if military efficiency made the
new policy announced in February 1946 inevitable, military tradition
made partial integration acceptable. Black sailors had served in
significant numbers in an integrated general service during the
nation's first century and a half, and those in the World War II
period who spoke of a traditional Navy ban against Negroes were just
as wrong as those who spoke of a traditional ban on liquor. The same
abstemious secretary who completely outlawed alcohol on warships in
1914 initiated the short-lived restrictions on the service of Negroes
in the Navy.[9-6] Both limited integration and liquor were old
traditions in the American Navy, and the influence of military
tradition made integration of the general service relatively simple.

[Footnote 9-6: SecNav (Josephus Daniels) General
Order 90, 1 Jul 14. Alcohol had