’Early Impressions are Lasting’: Mess Attendants and Their Midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy, 1845–1942

From its founding in 1845, the United States Naval Academy employed African Americans as attendants in the midshipmen’s mess. While midshipmen misused rank to lampoon and exploit their mess attendants, some messmen suffered brutal treatment. In response, Naval Academy leadership used the midshipmen’s interactions with their mess attendants to inculcate the navy’s principle of hierarchy, the cornerstone of the discipline, restraint, and decorum that Annapolis training was designed to imprint upon the fierce concept of traditional honor desired in its graduates. Despite the shame attached to breaking the principle, naval hierarchy, exacerbated by prejudice and regulatory limitations, gave rise to a stark subculture of exploitation and abuse between midshipmen and messmen. That subculture, and the impressions midshipmen formed about their mess attendants at Annapolis, contextualizes the service’s history of racialized retention and the occupational roles available to African Americans, especially as the academy’s white officer-graduates rose to senior leadership in the interwar and World War II navy.