## The Irony of Army Recruiting Use
The specific irony of the Army’s use of Johnson’s image for recruiting materials and victory bonds, in juxtaposition with its failure to document his wounds or awards in his discharge papers, is one of the more striking elements of his story.
The Army in 1918 and 1919 recognized Johnson’s story as useful for public consumption. His image — a Black soldier who had fought with extraordinary courage — served the Army’s public interest in demonstrating the contributions of all Americans to the war effort, in encouraging enlistment, and in promoting the bond purchases that funded the war. The image could be deployed in service of these institutional interests without the institutional commitment to actually recognize what Johnson had done.
This is not a contradictory dynamic in terms of the institutional logic of the period. The Army could use Johnson’s image while simultaneously refusing to fully acknowledge his service, because the image served a different purpose than the acknowledgment would have. The image was for public consumption; the acknowledgment would have required disability compensation, formal decoration, and the administrative action of treating Johnson as the Army’s records should have treated him. The first was costless; the second had specific costs that the institutional racial politics of 1919 were not prepared to bear.
The irony was visible at the time to people who were paying attention. Du Bois and the NAACP were paying attention. The Black press was paying attention. The gap between what the Army said publicly about Black soldiers — their courage, their patriotism, their contributions — and what it did institutionally about those same soldiers was documented in real time by people who had reason to notice it.