was not surprising that civil
rights organizations and their supporters in Congress demanded a
change in policy.

[Footnote 3-3: There were exceptions to this
generalization. The Navy had 43 black men with
ratings in the general service in December 1941:
the 6 regulars from the 1920's, 23 others returned
from retirement, and 14 members of the Fleet
Reserve. See U.S. Navy, Bureau of Naval Personnel,
"The Negro in the Navy in World War II" (1947)
(hereafter "BuPers Hist"), p. 1. This study is part
of the bureau's unpublished multivolume
administrative history of World War II. A copy is
on file in the bureau's Technical Library. The work
is particularly valuable for its references to
documents that no longer exist.]

_Development of a Wartime Policy_ (p. 059)

At first the new secretary, Frank Knox, and the Navy's professional
leaders resisted demands for a change. Together with Secretary of War
Stimson, Knox had joined the cabinet in July 1940 when Roosevelt was
attempting to defuse a foreign policy debate that threatened to
explode during the presidential campaign.[3-4] For a major cabinet
officer, Knox's powers were severely circumscribed. He had little
knowledge of naval affairs, and the President, himself once an
Assistant Secretary of the Navy, often went over his head to deal
directly with the naval bureaus on shipbuilding programs and manpower
problems as well as the disposition of the fleet. But Knox was a
personable man and a forceful speaker, and he was particularly useful
to the President in congressional liaison and public relations.
Roosevelt preferred to work through the secretary in dealing with the
delicate question of black participation in the Navy. Knox himself was
fortunate in his immediate official family. James V. Forrestal became
under secretary in August 1940; during the next year Ralph A. Bard, a
Chicago investment banker, joined the department as assistant
secretary, and Adlai E. Stevenson became special assistant.

[Footnote 3-4: One of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough
Riders, a World War I field artillery officer, and
later publisher of the Chicago _Daily News_, K