The Soldier and the State

by Samuel P Huntington

  The principal positive impetus to the Military Enlightenment came from Southern conservatism. Southerners dominated the serious thought and discussion of military aifairs. Military periodicals flourished during the 1830’s and 1840’s as they had never done before and as they were not to do again until the 1890’s. The Military and Naval Magazine was published from 1833 to 1836, the Army and Navy Chronicle from 1835 to 1844, and the Military Magazine from 1839 to 1842. Preeminent among the journals interested in military affairs, however, was the great magazine of the South, the Southern Literary Messenger. The Messenger consistently devoted extensive attention to military and naval matters. By 1844 it had “become a sort of organ of the United States Army and Navy” — the closest thing the country had to an army and navy journal.29 The two outstanding military writers and thinkers of the Enlightenment, Mahan and Maury, were both Virginians; Maury went South in the Civil War and Mahan was sorely tempted to do so. Southern interest in the study of the military art was also manifest in the creation of local military schools. Virginia Military Institute was established in 1839, the Citadel and the Arsenal set up in South Carolina in 1842, Kentucky Military Institute in 1845. By 1860, every Southern state, except Florida and Texas, had its own state-supported military academy patterned on the models of West Point and VMI. With the notable exceptions of VMI and the Citadel, most of the Southern schools, like the military journals, did not survive the Civil War. Nonetheless while they existed, they gave the South a unique sectional system of military education which was absent in the north and west.

  The most notable critic of the preprofessional institutions of the American Navy during the Enlightenment period was Matthew Fontaine Maury. His views on naval organization and education, expressed in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger and the Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser, reflected a truly professional concept of the officer’s function. Like Calhoun, he recognized a sharp distinction between the training required for officers and men. The latter could be recruited in a day from the merchant marine. Officers, on the other hand, “must undergo a peculiar system of previous training, that involves no inconsiderable expense, and requires a period of several years to complete the course.” Naval officership should be accorded dignity and training comparable to those of the legal and medical professions. The emergence of professional standards required the differentiation of a greater number of professional ranks in the naval hierarchy. A regularized system of appointment and promotion by merit was needed. Naval officers should receive the “benefit of a professional education” which would be “broad, solid, and comprehensive,” and which would combine literary and technical instruction. Maury also deplored the lack of professional writing in the Navy.30

  The most outstanding military thinker of these years was Dennis Hart Mahan. Appointed Professor of Civil and Military Engineering at West Point in 1832, Mahan insisted that the words “and of the Art of War” be added to his title. Teaching at the Academy until his death in 1871, Mahan was the author of technical works on engineering and professional works on strategy, teacher and inspirer of the military leaders of the Civil War and of the postwar generation that was to make military professionalism a reality in the United States, and father of the Navy’s most distinguished writer and publicist. In his Notes on the Composition of Armies and Strategy and his Advanced Guard, Out Post, and Detachment Service of Troops which were used as texts at the Academy from 1841 until the Civil War, Dennis Hart expressed a thoroughly professional military outlook. As his son correctly observed: “The spirit of the profession was strong in him.” He was a Virginian at heart with “strict and lofty military ideals.”31

  Mahan’s greatest contribution to American military professionalism was, in all probability, his stress upon the lessons to be learned from history. Without “historical knowledge of the rise and progress” of the military art, he argued, it is impossible to get even “tolerably clear elementary notions” beyond “those furnished by the mere technical language . . . . It is in military history that we are to look for the source of all military science.” His emphasis on military history led Mahan to abandon the prevailing distinction between strategy and tactics in terms of the scale of operations. He came to see that strategy, involving fundamental, invariable principles, embodied what was permanent in military science, while tactics concerned what was temporary. History was essential to a mastery of strategy, but it had no relevance to tactics. The line which distinguishes the one from the other is “that which separates the science from the art.” This scientific component, Mahan declared, distinguished the warfare of his day from the military art of previous eras. Only after the breakdown of the feudal order was it possible to “raise the profession of arms to its proper level, in which mind and its achievements have the first rank, and brute force combined with mere mechanical skill a very subordinate one.” Only study and experience alone produce the successful general, he argued, protesting the prevailing Jacksonian view: “Let no man be so rash as to suppose that, in donning a general’s uniform, he is forthwith competent to perform a general’s function; as reasonably might he assume that in putting on the robes of a judge he was ready to decide any point of law.” Mahan also defined the relation of the military profession to war and the distinction between the military spirit and the bellicose spirit. The trouble with the United States as a country was that “we are perhaps the least military, though not behind the foremost as a warlike one.” The object of war was always to “gain an advantageous peace,” which can only be achieved by applying superior forces at the decisive point.

  The influence of Mahan’s teachings may be seen in the work of his most intellectually distinguished pupil, H. Wager Halleck, “Old Brains,” graduated from the Academy in 1839. Although not a Southerner, Halleck absorbed completely the conservative military outlook. His Elements of Military Art and Science, published in 1846, was the most sophisticated volume written by an American military man prior to the Civil War. In it and in his 1845 report to Congress on national defense, Halleck presented a virtually complete expression of the professional military ethic in all its particulars. Halleck was the most outspoken defender of military institutions against their Jacksonian critics, pleading eloquently for “a body of men who shall devote themselves to the cultivation of military science” and the substitution of Prussian methods of education and advancement for the twin evils of politics and seniority. “If we deem professional instruction requisite for the care of our individual property and health,” he inquired, “shall we require less for guarding the honor and safety of our country, the reputation of our arms, and the lives of our citizens?”32 It was a question which the officers of the Enlightenment might raise but which their countrymen did not choose to answer.

  9

  The Creation of the American Military Profession

  THE DOMINANCE OF BUSINESS PACIFISM: INDUSTRIALISM VERSUS MILITARISM

  The Southern defeat in 1865 permitted the United States to achieve an exceptional degree of ideological homogeneity in the following decades. For the first time in the history of western society the interests of the capitalist were merged with the interests of the populace. The ideals and philosophy of business liberalism, individualism, the Horatio Alger creed, became the ideals and philosophy of the nation, accepted and adhered to by all significant groups in American society. Even those such as the Populists who challenged the rule of big business did so in the name of the business ethic of free enterprise. The approach of this ethic to military affairs was surprisingly coherent and articulate. It was, indeed, in some respects the only explicit theory of civil-military relations produced by American liberalism. The fundamental outlines of this theory, which may be called “business pacifism,” were accepted by the leading thinkers of the period and permeated deeply into the popular mind.

  Among the expounders of business pacifism, Herbert Spencer stood in unchallenged preëminence. Not only did he state the theory in its most systematic form, but he also wielded t
remendous influence over both popular and critical thought. Although an Englishman, his doctrines had greater vogue in the United States than in his home country. He became an intellectual fad which persisted for two generations and which penetrated into the most unintellectual strata of society. Also widely popular in the 1870’s and 1880’s was an American, John Fiske, whose Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy presented the Spencerian theory of civil-military relations in more elementary form. Later, about the turn of the century, William Graham Sumner of Yale became the leading exponent of the business ideology. Second only to Spencer in his influence on the intellectual currents of the age, Sumner’s thought represented a readjustment of business pacifist theory in the light of the new conditions of the twentieth century. Finally, while Spencer, Fiske, and Sumner might be the competing intellectual high priests of business pacifism, there was no challenging Andrew Carnegie’s role as its leading lay prophet. The most spectacular millionaire of the age, the embodiment of the Horatio Alger rags to riches legend, the Scottish-born industrialist was also one of the most tireless, conscientious, and generous supporters of the organized peace movement. Describing himself as a “disciple” of Spencer, Carnegie was in a sense the culmination of a long tradition of American business interest in pacifism which stretched back to Benjamin Franklin.1

  Business pacifism had three important sources. First, and most important, was the religious moralism associated with the Puritan version of the Protestant ethic. War, of course, was evil, because it involved killing. But the worship of work and the stress on the moral value of economic productivity led this ethic to condemn militarism even more particularly because it was wasteful. War itself was actively destructive of economic wealth. Military forces in peace were passively destructive, pure consumers, parasites living off the fruit of other men’s labors. Second, classical economic liberalism and utilitarianism contributed to business pacifism an optimistic belief in human nature, reason, and progress. International free trade by multiplying contacts among nations and creating mutual interests would eventually render war unthinkable. The spirit of Cobden and Bright had a firm hold on the mind of the American businessman, however much he might demand a specific exception for his products. “Trade does not follow the flag in our day,” said Carnegie, “it scents the lowest price current. There is no patriotism in exchanges.” The third source of business pacifism was the most surprising and most immediate: the Social Darwinism which dominated the intellectual world of the last third of the nineteenth century. On the surface, the application of the survival of the fittest thesis to human society should result in the acceptance and glorification of conflict and war as essential to human progress. In an entirely different intellectual climate such as prevailed in Germany, Social Darwinism was indeed developed along these lines by Bernhardi and others. In England and America, however, the bellicose version of Social Darwinism found less support, although it did contribute to the end-of-the-century rationale of imperialism. Its prevailing form was highly pacifist. The “struggle” of Darwinian theory was redefined to mean economic competition, and the “fittest” who were to survive were identified with the most productively efficient. In previous eras, the struggle for survival had meant the struggle for the most power. Now it meant the struggle for the best price.

  The convergence of Protestant morality, classical economics, and Social Darwinism produced a distinctive outlook on military affairs which posited two basic forms of human society: the militant or militaristic type, organized for the primary purpose of war; and the industrial or pacific type, organized for the primary purpose of productive economic activity. Jeffersonian hostility to the military had been largely confined to the limited institution of the standing army as a threat to republican government. Jacksonian hostility had broadened this to opposition to a military caste as the enemy of popular democracy. Business pacifism now expanded it still further so that the conflict was no longer one of institutions or of social groups, but the fundamental struggle of two entirely different ways of life. In its most expanded form, the dichotomy between industrialism and militarism became one aspect of the still broader opposition between economics and politics — the scientific and rational determination of ends and means so as to maximize welfare, versus the arbitrary and irrational actions of governments concerned with their own power and wealth.

  The dichotomy between militarism and industrialism was unchallenged dogma in the intellectual world at the close of the nineteenth century, accepted by all the business pacifist thinkers as well as by others such as Brooks Adams. It was given its most careful delineation by Spencer who found the essential difference between the two societies in the role of the individual. In the militant society, Spencer argued, the individual was “owned by the State” and subordinated to the goal of the preservation of society. The “absence of hostile societies” characteristic of industrialism, however, meant that individual goals took precedence over social goals: “the individuality of each man shall have the fullest play compatible with the like play of other men’s individualities . . .” The militant society was one of compulsory cooperation and status; the industrial society one of voluntary cooperation and contract. The industrial society was characterized by decentralization, representative government, and the limitation of the functions of government by a wide variety of private combinations outside its scope. Industrial societies had a high degree of plasticity and developed close bonds of trade and friendship with adjacent societies. An industrial society fostered in its citizens a spirit of independence, little faith in governments, hostility to arbitrary power, reliance on individual initiative, and a respect for the individuality of others. The militant society contrasted sharply with this loose, productive, peaceful utopia. The purposes of war took precedence over all else; the warriors ruled the state. Authority, subordination, and violence were the watchwords. The state was despotic; power was centralized; and state control extended throughout the activities of society. The militant society was autarchic, minimizing its peaceful contacts with other states and striving for the goal of economic self-sufficiency. The dominant character type in this society was physically vigorous, forceful, courageous, vengeful, violent, relentless, patriotic, obedient. He had implicit faith in his leaders and little ability or aptitude for initiative and enterprise.

  Except for Sumner, who was too much of a realist to think that war could ever be completely abolished, the business pacifists assumed a natural progress from the militant to the industrial society coupled with the gradual elimination of war. For the Jeffersonian, war had been a thing of the present which required a strong military force in being. For the Jacksonians, war was a thing of the future which could be met by the populace springing to arms in an emergency. For the business pacifist, however, war was a thing of the past, rendered obsolete by the march of industrialism. Spencer and Sumner both argued that while war had served useful social purposes in previous eras, its utility was now over. War was ethically wrong, economically ruinous, and incompatible with modern civilization. The “ever-increasing interdependence of human interests,” declared Fiske, “itself both the cause and effect of industrial progress, is ever making warfare less and less endurable.” To Carnegie, international law — “proof of the supreme force of gentleness” — was limiting the ferocity of war, and the international arbitration of disputes was the means of displacing it altogether. Eventually, international courts would replace wars just as municipal courts replaced duels. The business pacifists saw the United States as more advanced on the road to peace than the European nations which continued to maintain large armaments. They contrasted the “American temper” of industrialism with the “war ideals” dominant on the European continent.

  Since war was fundamentally a thing of the past, the business pacifists wanted to eliminate all forms of military institutions and preparations. Armaments were the cause of wars and the military profession a useless and vestigial remnant of a previous irrational age. The standing army and the regular
officer were the natural instruments of aggression. As societies evolved from the militant to the industrial phase, Spencer reasoned, the military profession lost its function, its attractiveness, and its popularity. In the spreading reign of peace, the military arts would wither and die through the lack of interest and support in society. To Carnegie, the military professional was virtually criminal in his denial of conscience, the “Judge within,” in refusing to evaluate the rightness or wrongness of the cause for which he fought. When he admitted the possibility of war, the business pacifist usually thought it could be met through Jacksonian means, Carnegie in particular holding forth the vision of the pacific Anglo-Saxon nations springing to arms en masse if set upon by an aggressor. His fundamental premises, however, required the business pacifist to take a dim view of all forms of military force, including the militia. More the Whig and less the democrat than his liberal predecessors, he was for that reason also less intoxicated with the prospect of the armed people.