Necessity is the Mother of Camo

When I first heard “it necessarily follows” as a kid, it sounded fishy. It sounds like “it’s necessarily successive.” How can it be cessive and not cessive at the same time?

It turns out the “cede” in “succeed” means “yield,” as in sub cedere: “to yield [the card that was] under [the last one].” And the “cede” in “necessary” means “yield,” too, and the “ne” means “not", so “necessary” is about being unyielding. So the expression looks even more oxymoronic than ever. But it’s not, because the expression is saying that the Fates unyieldingly deal (yield) that next card.

In fact, “it necessarily follows” apparently sums up the Romans’ view of the Fates. The Romans considered Necessity to be the Mother of all the Fates, rather than of Invention, as we do. The Daddy of the Fates skipped.

I’ve been thinking about the Roman Necessity since I attended the unveiling of the new King County logo in the likeness of Martin Luther King Jr., a success in a modern sense of the word. The Necessity in that case is evident in the more than 20 years of political work, involving nudging, dragging, provoking, and the occasional voting here and there, plus the fated presence of the right people on the King County Council, plus the right people to design the new logo, plus the good will of most people involved, and the vanishing will of those not.

But Necessity doesn’t always give you so much warning. Take desegregation, for example.

Mention desegregation to most people born after WWII, and they think of the South. They’d say the first big breakthough was 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. That decision came about in the same way our new logo did: Folks drove straight at it ’til they got there.

But I grew up in the Army and I have a terrific childhood memory, so I clearly recall that the U.S. military, which is a large national and not at all regional institution, needed desegregation and was already desegregating before the Southern schools had to. Not being very political when I was a toddler, I don’t recall how the Necessity played out, so I’ve since looked it up.

Here’s how it went down, courtesy of the Truman Presidential Museum and Library and others. In July 1948, Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which called for “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” Three days later Truman clarified the order, saying, yes (to General Omar Bradley, especially), that means desegregate.

Next, the generals dragged their feet. The Secretary of the Army said, the following month, that segregation had to go, but not immediately. Committees were formed to study how segregation could happen before the continents re-merged. Later, the Secretary admitted to favoring segregation. By December 1949, there was a new Secretary of the Army, but he was still saying we have to go slow.

Then, in April 1950, the Army ended its 10 percent quota of African-American recruitment. That quota had not been an Affirmative Action quota. It served to maintain African-American troop at a steady level to prevent fluctuations. In a segregated system, fluctuations of the segregated minority could create pesky logistical surpluses and shortfalls.

No one, including Truman, thought that the inefficiencies expected to arise from dropping the quota would have any noticeable immediate impact. In fact, until late June there wasn’t a problem. No chaotic fluctuations of Black troop levels, no logistical nightmares.

Then, before dawn, June 25, 1950, so much hell broke loose over the 38th parallel in Korea that Truman thought WWIII was starting. By the end of the next month, the U.S. and South Korean forces were almost driven off the peninsula, and everybody there needed everybody else’s logistical support. By the time the war was a year old, the Army was integrated in Korea and throughout its Asian outposts.

Necessity had arrived in camouflage.