United States - World War II - Homefront, Racial Discrimination, United States Army, World War II - Social Aspects, African Americans - Military History, 20th Century American History - World War II, 20th Century American History - Social Aspects - Genera

Interpreter

Name: Interpreter
Author: Alice Yaeger Kaplan
ISBN: 9780226424255

by Alice Yaeger Kaplan

Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Overview

The American Army executed 70 of its own soldiers between 1943 and 1946—almost all of them black, in an army that was overwhelmingly white. Through the French interpreter Louis Guilloux’s eyes, Kaplan narrates two different trials: one of a white officer, one of a black soldier, both accused of murder. Both were court-martialed in the same room, yet the outcomes could not have been more different.

Kaplan’s insight into character and setting creates an indelible portrait of war, race relations, and the dangers of capital punishment.

“A nuanced historical account that resonates with today’s controversies over race and capital punishment.” Publishers Weekly

“American racism could become deadly for black soldiers on the front. The Interpreter reminds us of this sad component of a heroic chapter in American military history.” Los Angeles Times

“With elegance and lucidity, Kaplan revisits these two trials and reveals an appallingly separate and unequal wartime U.S. military justice system.” Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Kaplan has produced a compelling look at the racial disparities as they were played out…She explores both cases in considerable and vivid detail.” Sacramento Bee

Synopsis

No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs as columns of troops paraded down the Champs Élysées. But one of the least-known stories from that era is also one of the ugliest chapters in the history of Jim Crow. In The Interpreter, celebrated author Alice Kaplan recovers this story both as eyewitnesses first saw it, and as it still haunts us today.
The American Army executed 70 of its own soldiers between 1943 and 1946—almost all of them black, in an army that was overwhelmingly white. Through the French interpreter Louis Guilloux’s eyes, Kaplan narrates two different trials: one of a white officer, one of a black soldier, both accused of murder. Both were court-martialed in the same room, yet the outcomes could not have been more different.
Kaplan’s insight into character and setting creates an indelible portrait of war, race relations, and the dangers of capital punishment.

“A nuanced historical account that resonates with today’s controversies over race and capital punishment.” Publishers Weekly

“American racism could become deadly for black soldiers on the front. The Interpreter reminds us of this sad component of a heroic chapter in American military history.” Los Angeles Times

“With elegance and lucidity, Kaplan revisits these two trials and reveals an appallingly separate andunequal wartime U.S. military justice system.” Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Kaplan has produced a compelling look at the racial disparities as they were played out…She explores both cases in considerable and vivid detail.” Sacramento Bee

Publishers Weekly

Less than 9% of American soldiers in Europe during WWII were African-American, but 55 out of 70 soldiers executed for crimes against civilians were black. That's prima facie evidence of racial injustice, but in this absorbing study historian Kaplan (whose The Collaborator won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2001) digs beneath the statistics to explore how judicial bias operated on a practical level. She examines two court-martial cases held in France: James Hendricks, a black private hanged for killing a French farmer, and George Whittington, a white captain acquitted, on grounds of self-defense, of murdering a French commando. Both men apparently did kill their victims--and in Kaplan's view the incidents were the comparable doings of "two trigger-happy drunken soldiers"--but vastly different prejudices and privileges decided the defendants' fates. Hendricks was a truck driver in a segregated army who seemed, Kaplan contends, to embody his all-white jury's assumptions about black criminality, while Whittington was a well-connected officer and a decorated combat hero who was the picture of responsible white manhood. Kaplan supplements her own research with the perceptions of Louis Guilloux, a French intellectual who was an interpreter on both cases and wrote a novel about them. The result is a nuanced historical account that resonates with today's controversies over race and capital punishment (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

About the Author, Alice Yaeger Kaplan

Alice Kaplan is the Lehrman Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature and History at Duke University. She is the author of French Lessons and The Collaborator and the translator of OK, Joe, all published by the University of Chicago Press. Her books have been twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, once for the National Book Award, and she is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Boston Globe

“Impressive…The very precision and extent of her research suggest an author whose dedication to her theme amounts to much more than an intent to document her acquaintance and proper use of archival sources. This is an extraordinary book.”—John Lukacs, Boston Globe

— John Lukacs

Los Angeles Times

“American racism could become deadly for black soldiers on the front. . . . The Interpreter reminds us of this sad component of a heroic chapter in American military history.”

— Michael S. Roth

Minneapolis Star Tribune

“With elegance and lucidity, Kaplan revisits these two trials and reveals an appallingly separate and unequal wartime U.S. military justice system.”

Modern & Contemporary France

"A highly readable introduction to the underside of Allied/French relations at the Liberation."

— Hilary Footitt

Times Literary Supplement

“Compelling. . . . [Kaplan] manages to weave a human story. . . . The two cases are so very different, however, that the conclusions Kaplan reaches appear somewhat tenuous.”

— Jon Latimer

Boston Globe

Los Angeles Times

“American racism could become deadly for black soldiers on the front. . . . The Interpreter reminds us of this sad component of a heroic chapter in American military history.”

Modern & Contemporary France

"A highly readable introduction to the underside of Allied/French relations at the Liberation."

Times Literary Supplement

“Compelling. . . . [Kaplan] manages to weave a human story. . . . The two cases are so very different, however, that the conclusions Kaplan reaches appear somewhat tenuous.”

Military History

"A fascinating analysis of soldiers, lawyers, commanders, and racial conditions in the Brittany area of France after the Normandy invasion. . . . Kaplan researches and writes well in creating a powerful book."

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Kaplan (romance studies, literature, & history, Duke Univ.; The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach) has written a brilliant account of the trials of two American soldiers accused of murdering French citizens in the waning days of World War II. One of the accused soldiers, a black man named James Hendricks, was sentenced to death, while the other, George Whittington, a white who had been proclaimed a war hero, was acquitted. French political novelist Louis Guilloux served as an interpreter at these trials, and Kaplan draws from Guilloux's diaries as well as from a novel he based upon the trials as important sources for this multifaceted work. Kaplan studies the two cases as symbols of racial prejudice, noting that of the 70 American soldiers executed for such crimes in World War II Europe, 55 were African American, although they made up only 8.5 percent of the armed forces. She also weaves in brief interviews with relatives of Hendricks and of the French man he was convicted of killing. Inventive, moving, and beautifully written, this is a major contribution to investigative history. Highly recommended.-Anthony Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-This elegantly written, solidly researched, articulate history is well suited for students who want to understand the tragedy of America's racial past. In the World War II European Theater, 55 of the 70 American servicemen executed for capital crimes were black-in an army less than 9 percent African American. This racial outrage is Kaplan's theme, and she presents the story through the diaries and novels of Louis Guilloux, a French writer and high intellectual who served as an interpreter for the U.S. army while it crossed France on the way to defeating the German army in its homeland. Guilloux wrote in his diary soon after the hanging of a black private first class (James Hendricks) for murdering a French farmer (the crime should have been deemed "manslaughter," which did not demand execution) and attempting to rape the farmer's wife. Having witnessed racial bias in many trials, Guilloux contrasted Hendricks's inept defense with the polished one of a white captain (George Whittington) who murdered a French underground soldier, yet was acquitted. This moving account belongs in most collections.-Alan Gropman, National Defense University, Washington, DC Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Justice for all? Not in the Jim Crow U.S. Army of WWII, as a French civilian discovered, to his horror. Louis Guilloux, one of France's leading novelists in the 1930s, prided himself on his knowledge of Russian literature, especially that of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The authors' ironic sense of what happens when the law is badly served came to the fore when, as Kaplan (French/Duke Univ.; The Collaborator, 2000) documents, Guilloux was hired as an interpreter for and intermediary between the newly liberated people of Brittany and the Third Army under George S. Patton, who voiced concern for the "increasing number of crimes against French civilians which are being committed within the Army, particularly by service troops." By service troops, Patton meant black GIs attached to quartermaster, ordnance and transportation companies behind the lines, and he warned that some charges, including rape, would carry the death penalty. Only hours after Patton's warning was issued, a black GI named James Hendricks went off after a drinking bout and allegedly killed a French civilian and sexually assaulted the dead man's wife; after a trial in which Guilloux served as interpreter, Hendricks was sentenced to die and was publicly hanged, though his family in North Carolina were told only that he died as a result of misconduct. Guilloux discerned a pattern: "The guilty were always black," he noted, "so much so that even the stupidest of men would have ended up asking himself how it was possible that there be so much crime on one side, and so much virtue on the other." As Kaplan demonstrates, that virtue was illusory: In one case that she closely documents, a white American officer murdered an Austrianattached to Free French forces but was readily acquitted, while black soldiers-including civil-rights martyr Emmett Till's father-were executed for capital crimes, making up 55 of the 70 Americans thus killed in Europe from 1943 to 1946. Kaplan illuminates some abhorrent recent history that the Army would likely prefer to forget.