YEARS OF ISOLATION: THE DARK AND THE BRIGHT
The prevalence of business pacifism made the dominant feature of post-1865 civil-military relations the complete, unrelenting hostility of virtually all the American community toward virtually all things military. The military’s source of sympathetic conservatism had gone with the South. The blanket hostility of American society isolated the armed forces politically, intellectually, socially, and even physically from the community which they served. Electionwise the military vote was negligible. Military personnel suffered from many disabilities and restrictions which made it difficult for them to vote when they wanted to, and a number of states denied the franchise to those serving in the Regular Army and Navy.2 Few economic groups had a direct interest in supporting the military. The Army had relatively little need for the products of industry; neither did the Navy before 1881. Even after the construction of an armored, steam navy began in the 1880’s, only a small group of business concerns became regular military suppliers. The isolation of the officer corps was enhanced by the manner in which it was recruited. The mounting effects of the congressional system of appointment to West Point and Annapolis hastened the divorce of the military from the South. Both those entering the officer corps and those reaching its highest ranks in the years after the Civil War were a cross-section of middle-class America.* As the officer corps became the mirror of the nation, it also became isolated from it. Representative of everyone, it was affiliated with no one.
Socially and physically the services tended to be separated from society. Until 1890 the small Army was strung out along the frontier fighting Indians. After its brief but inglorious role in the Spanish-American War, substantial segments were required overseas in Cuba, Hawaii, the Canal Zone, and the Philippines. Both these missions divorced it from a nation which was rapidly becoming urbanized. Before World War I, in the words of one officer, soldiers “lived apart in their tiny secluded garrisons much after the manner of military monks and they rarely came into contact with the mass of our citizens . . .” Naval officers likewise had their life apart, spending a large portion of their careers at foreign stations. “The fact that naval officers are separated so much and so long from each other and from other men,” one of them commented in 1905, “must tend to lack of unity of purpose, and therefore to lack of influence with the public.” Other officers were conscious of their social isolation, highlighted by the absence of military leaders from important social functions, something unheard of in the early days of the country. The United States Army, one officer complained, was virtually “an alien army” existing in “practically complete separation from the lives of the people from which it is drawn.” The military were also divorced from the prevailing tides of intellectual opinion. West Point, for example, gradually lost contact with the rest of American education to which it had made such significant contributions, and went its own way.3
Congressional military policy accurately reflected the philosophy of business pacifism. Army expenditures were steadily lowered from their Civil War peak of over a billion dollars to thirty-five million in 1871. They hovered about that figure for the next quarter century, varying from a high of forty-six million in 1873 to a low of twenty-nine million in 1880. The strength of the Army averaged about twenty-five thousand officers and men. Naval expenditures were normally about twenty million dollars a year until after 1890, and the strength of the Navy and Marine Corps was about eleven thousand officers and men. The shortage of funds made it impossible for the military to experiment and develop new techniques and weapons of warfare. Both services, for example, continued to use smoothbore cannon long after foreign powers had replaced them with rifled cannon. The Army seldom was able to bring together more than a battalion of troops at a time; the Navy lagged behind other powers in ship design and marine ordnance. Despite the advantages of steam propulsion, the Navy after the Civil War went back under canvas, and the desire for economy made it almost a crime for a naval officer to utilize the engines on his ship. By 1880 the United States Navy was an ill-sorted collection of obsolete vessels incapable of functioning together as a fleet. The United States Army was a far-flung Indian chasing frontier police, skilled at that function but quite unsuited and unprepared for any more serious operations. Business pacifism had reduced the military services to rusty decay.
The isolation, rejection, and reduction of the armed services after the Civil War have led historians to mark this as the low point of American military history. They speak of “The Army’s Dark Ages” and the “Period of Naval Stagnation.” These phrases are accurate, however, only with respect to the social influence and political power of the military. They describe only one side of the civil-military equation. The very isolation and rejection which reduced the size of the services and hampered technological advance made these same years the most fertile, creative, and formative in the history of the American armed forces. Sacrificing power and influence, withdrawing into its own hard shell, the officer corps was able and permitted to develop a distinctive military character. The American military profession, its institutions and its ideals, is fundamentally a product of these years. No other period has had such a decisive influence in shaping the course of American military professionalism and the nature of the American military mind. The practical work of professional reform, frustrated while the military were associated with the South in the prewar years, became possible once all ties with civilian society had been broken. Universal hostility permitted what limited support prevented. The foundation of this advance was the absence of any significant threat to national security. The isolation of the military was a prerequisite to professionalization, and peace was a prerequisite to isolation. Paradoxically, the United States could only create a professional military force when it was lacking any immediate use for such a force. The dark ages of military political influence were the golden ages of military professionalism.
The withdrawal of the military from civilian society at the end of the nineteenth century produced the high standards of professional excellence essential to national success in the struggles of the twentieth century. If the officer corps had not been rejected, if the Army and Navy had not been reduced to the bone in the 1870’s and 1880’s, the United States would have had a far more difficult time of it in 1917 and 1942. The military officer who, at the end of the period of isolation, rejoined civilian society in World War I and World War II, was a fundamentally different creature from his ancestor who had withdrawn in the 1860’s. When he left, he was a citizen-soldier, an accepted member of the liberal family. When he returned, he was a stranger in his own household. His membership in the national family was no longer free, easy, and relaxed. The years of isolation had remade him into a professional with values and outlook basically at odds with those of the mass of his countrymen. They had interjected steel into his soul which was missing from that of the community. His return marked the beginning of the real problem of American civil-military relations: the tension between the conservative professional officer and the liberal society. While his professionalism thus created intense problems of psychological and political adjustment, it was nonetheless the salvation of his country externally. The ability of the professional officers and their impressive record in leading the forces and conducting the operations of the two world wars were acquired because of, not despite, their rejection at the end of the nineteenth century.
THE CREATIVE CORE: SHERMAN, UPTON, LUCE
The professionalization of the American military was preeminently the work of a small group of officers in the two generations following the Civil War. The process was begun by Generals William T. Sherman and Emory Upton and by Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce. The immediate form which American professionalism took was largely of their making. Sherman is the best known of the three, but his popular fame rests almost exclusively upon his Civil War exploits. For almost fifteen years from 1869 to 1883, however, he was the Commanding General of the Army, heading that service for a longer period o
f time than any other officer except Winfield Scott. He was the leading military personality for an entire generation of soldiers and civilians from the Civil War until his death in 1891. Unlike Grant, whose record became besmirched and disputed by his entrance into politics, as Sherman predicted it would, Sherman retained his military popularity because he would have nothing to do with politics. As Commanding General, he sparked the professional reform movement. Particularly aware of the importance of military education, he vigorously defended the Artillery School at Fort Monroe which had been reestablished in 1868. The father of the infantry and cavalry school at Fort Leavenworth, Sherman espoused a complete system of military education in which West Point would furnish both the preliminary liberal education required of any professional man and the indoctrination in military values and discipline required of the military man. Advanced schools would then give the officers the specialized knowledge of their profession and prepare them for the higher posts.
More important than the institutional developments in which Sherman had a hand was the tone which he set for the Army. His outlook and thought were thoroughly military, and the professional spirit which he manifested permeated throughout the ranks of the officer corps. Earthy, direct, limited, he was the epitome of all the virtues and vices of the professional officer. A man of simple truths rather than of brilliant concepts, he glorified in the unadorned title of “soldier” and wished to be nothing more or nothing less. Disclaiming other interests, causes, motives, his constantly reiterated motto was: “It is enough for the world to know that I am a soldier.” Loyal to the Union, but opposed to abolition and an admirer of the South, he did his duty during the Civil War in the manner of the professional. His single-minded devotion to military ideals led him in the postwar period to object to the use of the Army as a police force — “That should be beneath a soldier’s vocation” — and to assert that the Army must always be “organized and governed on true military principles” so as to preserve in peacetime the “habits and usages of war.” Civilian control was essential to securing this objective. Democratic procedures were out of place in the Army which should be “an animated machine, an instrument in the hands of the Executive for enforcing the law, and maintaining the honor and dignity of the nation.” Sherman was particularly adamant in stressing the divorce of the military from politics. Three of the six Commanding Generals before him had become presidential candidates. With him begins the tradition of political neutrality which, with the sole exception of Leonard Wood, was to be maintained by subsequent Commanding Generals and Chiefs of Staff until after World War II. “Let those who are trained to it keep the office,” he wrote of the Presidency in 1874, “and keep the Army and Navy as free from politics as possible, for emergencies that may arise at any time.” On party politics, “no Army officer should form or express an opinion.” The essential components of the military ethic — hatred of war and avoidance of politics — were succinctly expressed in Sherman’s two most quoted phrases: “War is hell” and “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.”4
The most influential younger officer in the work of Army reform was Emory Upton. Graduating from West Point in 1861, Upton distinguished himself in the Civil War, rising to become a major general of Volunteers. After the war, he prepared a new system of infantry tactics for the Army, served as Commandant of Cadets at West Point from 1870 to 1875, toured the world in 1876 and 1877 inspecting foreign military institutions, and became superintendent of theoretical instruction at Fort Monroe. His two great works, The Armies of Europe and Asia and The Military Policy of the United States, were studies of foreign and American military institutions, clearly expressing the fundamental postulates of the professional military ethic and presenting the case for a wide variety of reforms. Although unfinished at the time of his suicide in 1881 and not published until 1904, The Military Policy of the United States was a powerful plea for a strong regular military force. It was endorsed by Sherman and subsequently became the Bible of the Regular Army in its disputes with the militia advocates. Throughout the 1870’s Upton was in the forefront of the movement for reform. His contemporary, Admiral Luce, was Commandant of Midshipmen at Annapolis between 1865 and 1869, a founder and president of the Naval Institute, and the driving force in the creation of the Naval War College. A tireless proselytizer for naval professionalism, Luce crusaded against politics and technicism, urging naval officers to focus upon their “real business — war.” His views were an almost exact expression of the professional ethic, and he exerted a lasting influence throughout the naval officer corps. As Admiral Fiske once truthfully remarked of Luce, “the United States Navy owes more to him than to any other man who was ever connected with it, directly or indirectly.” Matthew Maury, Benjamin Isherwood, John G. Walker, A. T. Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, all made contributions. But none rivaled that of Luce. His achievement was as simple as it was great: “Luce taught the navy to think.”5
The work of Sherman, Upton, and Luce in the 1870’s and 1880’s was carried on at the turn of the century by a second generation of reformers: Bliss, Wagner, Young, Carter, and others in the Army; Mahan, Taylor, Fiske, Sims, and their associates in the Navy. Just as Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Clausewitz, and Moltke set the tone and direction of the German military tradition, these two generations of reformers determined the nature of the professional strand of American militarism. This creative core was a distinctly military group in three ways. (1) They were largely cut off from contemporary American civilian influence. (2) They derived their ideas and inspiration from the American Military Enlightenment and from foreign military institutions. (3) They transcended service boundaries, transmitting ideas and encouragement back and forth between the two services and developing professional institutions applicable to both Army and Navy.
The American military profession differed from those of most other countries in that it was almost entirely the product of the officers themselves. In Europe professionalism was normally the outcome of social-political currents at work in society at large: the Prussian reformers, for instance, were only doing in the army what Stein and his associates were trying to do for the state as a whole. In the United States, however, military professionalism was strictly self-induced. The civilian contribution was virtually nil. Professionalism was the reaction of an inherently conservative group against a liberal society, rather than the product of a general conservative reform movement within society. The military profession was probably unique among significant social institutions in the United States in the extent to which it was created independent of American society. In these origins lie much of the reason for American hostility to the profession as an essentially alien body. Even within the liberal society, some intellectual and political movements existed upon which the officers might have drawn, such as the beginnings of the science of public administration and the civil service reform movement. But little contact existed between these developments and the military. The officers went their solitary way, accomplishing their work without the support and largely without the knowledge of civilian society. Within the narrow limits permitted them by the civilians, they could do more or less as they wished. The creation of a professional spirit, and even of professional institutions, did not require much in the way of money. So long as the Army was kept down to twenty-five thousand men, Congress let the West Pointers run it in accordance with their own ideas. So long as the number of officers was kept low, Congress approved changes in promotion and retirement plans. Sherman, for instance, carefully avoided Congress in setting up the School of Application at Leavenworth; he did not wish it to be “the subject of legislation.” Subsequently, he repeatedly pointed out that the schools at both Leavenworth and Monroe required no additional funds beyond “ordinary garrison expenses.”6 And Congress, content with this, shrugged its shoulders and let them be.*
The principal American source of the ideas of the professional reformers was the Military Enlightenment of the 1830’s and 1840’s. The intellectu
al grandfather of their work was Dennis Hart Mahan and its father H. Wager Halleck. Sherman, Halleck, and Upton had been students of Mahan; Sherman and Halleck had overlapped at the Academy. All the active figures in the war of reform were graduates of the military or naval academies. From this source flowed the native contributions to the professional reforms. Equally important, however, were what the reformers learned from foreign military institutions. Drawing little help and inspiration from nonmilitary American sources, they turned to non-American military sources. The War of 1870–71 freed the American officers from their reverence for French institutions, and aroused their interest in those of Germany and other countries. Sherman was instrumental in sending Upton on his tour of the world in 1876 and 1877 to inspect foreign military establishments with particular reference to Germany. Upton’s report revealed to American officers for the first time in any comprehensive manner the extent to which the United States lagged behind foreign developments. Upton urged the establishment of advanced military schools, the creation of a general staff corps, a comprehensive system of personnel reports by superiors on their subordinates, the compulsory retirement of officers, and the use of examinations as a prerequisite to promotion and to appointment to the staff corps. He was particularly impressed by the military institutions of India which in their clear-cut system of objective civilian control offered many lessons for the United States. “In no free country,” he declared, “is the subordination of the military to the civil authority more clearly defined than in the politico-military despotism of India.”7 A decade later Tasker Bliss also traveled through England, France, and Germany studying their military schools.
While the American reformers analyzed the experiences of many countries, Germany was their primary focus of attention. Upton himself expressed great admiration for German military institutions: every Prussian general in 1866, he pointed out, was a graduate of the Kriegsakademie, contrasting this with the backward state of military education in the American forces. Sherman thought the German system of military organization “simply perfect.” Wagner echoed these sentiments, extolling the “excellence of the military system of Prussia.” Clausewitz was translated into English in 1873, and American professional military journals devoted great coverage to Prussian affairs.* American officers became fully conscious, indeed overly conscious, of their backwardness in comparison to Germany, and tended to accept German methods as models to be followed without question. By the end of the century American military thinking on organization, stimulated by Spenser Wilkinson’s volume on The Brain of an Army and by the report of the American officer Theodore Schwan, fully accepted the German general staff theory. The German lessons were frequently misinterpreted and misapplied, but the desire to imitate German institutions was an important force in furthering American military professionalism. Naval interest in German militarism lagged somewhat behind that of the Army officers; attention still focused upon Britain as the classic seapower. Undoubtedly influenced by his father’s Gallomania, Alfred Mahan was a warm admirer of Jomini. Nonetheless, by the twentieth century the younger generation of naval officers attempted to espouse German thought on military organization; German methods were introduced at the War College; and Mahan himself eventually was much impressed by Clausewitz.8
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