I cannot too entirely repudiate any casual word of mine reflecting the tone which once was so traditional in the navy that it might be called professional, — that “political questions belong rather to the statesman than to the military man.” I find these words in my old lectures, but I very soon learned better, from my best military friend, Jomini; and I believe that no printed book of mine endorses the opinion that external politics are of no professional concern to military men.3
In going beyond professionalism, Mahan became an excellent target for those within the officer corps who fell short of professionalism. Both the requirements of writing as a career and the content of what he was writing tended to separate him from the rest of the officer corps. In 1892, when his turn for sea duty came up, he attempted to avoid it by promising to retire after completing forty years of service in 1896 if he were permitted to remain on shore. He, in his own words, “by this time had decided that authorship had for me greater attractions than following up my profession, and promised a fuller and more successful old age.” He would have retired immediately if that had been possible. Despite the efforts of Roosevelt and Lodge to keep him on shore, the naval bureaucracy was indifferent to his literary success — “It is not the business of a naval officer to write books,” declared the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation — and Mahan was sent to sea. This thoroughly irked him.
I am enduring, not living [he wrote one friend]; and have the painful consciousness that I am expending much labor in doing what I have indifferently, while debarred from doing what I have shown particular capacity for. It is not a pleasant feeling — especially when accompanied with the knowledge that the headstrong folly of my youth started me in a profession which, to say the least, was not the one for which I have the best endowments . . . I have become exceedingly interested in professional literary work, and have now a fair promise of success in it.
Given this attitude, it is not surprising that his superior officer declared in a fitness report that Mahan’s “interests are entirely outside the Service for which, I am satisfied, he cares but little and is therefore not a good officer.”4 After this last tour of sea duty, Mahan did retire in 1896 and thereafter only served on active duty during the Spanish-American War and on a few other temporary occasions.
Mahan’s theories thus reflected the civilian intellectual currents of his time as well as the developing naval professional outlook. The change in his activities from professional work to popular writing coincided with the change in his thinking from professional realism to the defense of expansion and violence. To support his position, he called in Christian doctrine, Social Darwinism, utilitarianism, and nationalism. He elaborated upon the civilian doctrines of manifest destiny. Mahan was truly “a child of his age, an age of budding imperialism.”5 In his magazine articles, he consciously appealed to the sentiments for expansion stirring in the American populace. As he himself said, his writings traced “not my development, but the progress of national awakening from 1890 to 1897.” His function was that of popularizer and articulator of the political sentiments of the day. Mahan’s doctrines were in many respects more widely accepted by the American public than by the American Navy. His immediate influence upon his fellow officers did not equal that of the more professionally inclined Luce and Sims.6 Separated from his profession, Mahan rode the swelling tide of imperialist sentiment in the 1890’s. He was acclaimed at home and honored abroad. His books were best sellers, his articles widely read and quoted. He was the premier spokesman of the new doctrines, the confidant and adviser to Lodge, Roosevelt, and the other Neo-Hamiltonian political leaders of the day. In shifting his base from the naval profession to public opinion, however, he had gained temporary strength at the expense of permanent support. Inevitably, after the turn of the century, the reaction against Neo-Hamiltonianism and imperialism set in. Popular opinion swung back toward liberalism, isolation, pacifism, and indifference to preparedness and the responsibilities of national greatness. His books no longer commanded the audience which they once did. Mahan vigorously criticized The Great Illusion, but it was Norman Angell rather than he who was now the best seller. In his autobiography published in 1907, the sense of separation from the public was as manifest as the sense of separation from the profession. The American people, Mahan regretted, were unmilitary, and they viewed the military spirit as “the obtrusion of an alien temperament.” His warnings as to the dangers from Germany and the needs of naval preparedness fell on deaf ears. The American people, he declared in 1912, “are singularly oblivious of the close relation between peace and preparation.” In 1913 he admitted that his “vogue was largely over.”7 The next year he died.
LEONARD WOOD. Leonard Wood had fewer initial connections with military professionalism than did Mahan. Graduating from Harvard Medical School, he became an Army surgeon and for several years saw service in the final Indian campaigns in the southwest. Ordered to Washington in Cleveland’s administration as surgeon to the President, he stayed on with McKinley. When the Spanish War broke out, he joined with Theodore Roosevelt in organizing the Rough Riders. Wood came out of the war a major general of Volunteers and served as military governor of Cuba from 1899 to 1902. McKinley also promoted him from captain in the Medical Corps to brigadier general in the Regular Army. Subsequently, Roosevelt made him a major general and sent him out to be military governor in the Philippines. Returning in 1908, he served as commander of the eastern department of the Army and as Chief of Staff from 1910 to 1914.
Wood’s views on military and national affairs were expressed in his speeches, writings, and actions after his return to the United States in 1908. Like Mahan’s, his outlook was, to a large extent, that of the military professional. He was instrumental in advocating and instituting professional reforms in the Army.8 Nonetheless, like Mahan, he also ended up the proponent of an unmilitary political Weltanschauung. Wood’s thought revolved about the twin ideas of the responsibility of the citizen for military service and the benefits to the citizen from military service. Unlike the professional military man, Wood saw the Army as the embodiment of the people rather than as “the career of a chosen class.”9 While recognizing the military need of preparedness, he stressed even more the civic need: the desirability of stimulating throughout the country the military, or at least semi-military, virtues of patriotism, responsibility, devotion to duty, and manliness. In 1913 he organized summer training camps for college youths. In 1915 this idea was expanded into the Plattsburg camp for businessmen. At the end of World War I, before his unit was demobilized, Wood turned his division into a university, pushing educational plans for both officers and enlisted men. He wanted to combine military training with a broader education in citizenship and the ideals of national service. Wood justified universal military training by its political, educational, and moral benefits. It would give meaning to citizenship, and it was the logical corollary of universal manhood suffrage. It would reduce crime and improve economic efficiency. It would unite the country, forming a single national spirit transcending sectional, class, and nationality group differences. In a similar vein, Wood defended the Regular Army for its constructive work in engineering, public health, sanitation in Cuba, the Canal Zone, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.10 Wood’s outlook is summarized in the titles of two lectures delivered in 1915: “The Military Obligation of Citizenship” and “The Civil Obligation of the Army.” In stressing the universality of military service, Wood harked back more to Jefferson than to Hamilton, although the imperatives he invoked to plead his case — manliness, duty, responsibility, patriotic ardor — were not those which received primary emphasis in Jefferson’s formulation.
During the decade prior to American entrance into the World War, Wood was a leading figure in the drive for a positive national policy and the increase in America’s armed strength. He played a major role in stimulating the outpouring of preparedness literature which flooded the country.* His support for preparedness went far beyond the policies of the Wilson Administr
ation. His close personal ties with Roosevelt and the other Neo-Hamiltonians linked him with their violent attacks upon what they described as the pacifism and vacillation of Wilson. Wood himself was on occasion in his public speeches highly critical of his Commander in Chief. He was also thoroughly identified with the Republican Party, and in 1915 and 1916 was openly receptive to the idea that he might become its presidential nominee.
Political participation further alienated Wood from the military profession of which he never had been a full-fledged member. Lacking the West Point background, entering the Army as a surgeon, becoming the confidant of Cleveland and McKinley and the intimate friend of Roosevelt, making his military reputation as leader of the thoroughly unprofessional Rough Riders, Wood was viewed with suspicion and jealousy by many within the officer corps. Rejecting the 1899 advice of the War Department that he get out of the Army, he had instead risen to its highest post. Inevitably, the rapid rise of this medical man over the heads of deserving career officers was attributed to political favoritism. His political activities barnstorming about the country between 1908 and 1917 did not sit well with a generation of officers indoctrinated in the Sherman-Upton philosophy of a silent, impartial professional service. Eventually, the officer corps settled up with him. In the first war which they directed in their own fashion, the professionals could find no place for Leonard Wood. Eager though Wood was for military glory, Pershing viewed him as an insubordinate political general and refused to have him in France. He was shunted aside and spent the war directing a training camp on this side of the Atlantic. Although he blamed Wilson and the Democrats for the treatment he received, his real enemies this time were the military professionals he had so long flouted.*
The officer corps evened the score with Wood during the war by denying him combat command. The politicians evened the score after the war by thwarting his second great ambition. Rejected by the military, Wood still hoped to redeem himself in politics. He was a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920. But the convention and the country were tired of the martial spirit. Too much the politician for the military, he was too much the soldier for the politicians. His fellow Republicans wanted normalcy not preparedness, the easy dollar not the strenuous life. Theodore Roosevelt, had he lived, might have been flexible enough to adjust to the new mood; but not Leonard Wood. He was swept aside by the postwar antimilitarism. What place was there for him in an America of commercialism and flapperism, gin mills and jazz, Jimmy Walker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harding and Mencken? The new administration did the best it could for him by sending him out to the Philippines to resume his post as Governor General. He returned briefly to the United States in 1927 to die in a country which hardly remembered him and which had little use for him.
THE ABORTIVE IDENTIFICATION WITH SOCIETY, 1918–1925
After 1918 the military made every effort to continue the wartime identification with American society and to expand the Neo-Hamiltonian link with the American community. Particularly in the Army, the war was viewed as ushering in a new era of civil-military relations. “The ‘splendid isolation’ of the Regular Army,” proclaimed the Infantry Journal, “is a thing of the past.” The Army was to become a participating member of American society. An Army as a special caste apart from the people, said the Secretary of War in 1920, “is relatively useless.” Instead, it must be “in fresh and constant contact with the thoughts and feelings of the civil fireside from which it had come.”11 The hopes of the military largely reflected their belief that the separation of the Army from the populace prior to the war was primarily physical in nature, the result of its being strung out in its frontier garrisons remote from the centers of population, civilization, and commerce. With the end of Indian fighting, the reasons for this isolation were now over. The urge to belong, to be accepted, to identify with the community at large, was the primary goal of the military officers as they stressed the necessity of “getting close to the people.”
The basis for uniting the Army with the people appeared to be laid in the National Defense Act of 1920. This was universally hailed by military spokesmen as inaugurating the new age of civil-military relations. The primary mission of the Regular Army was now held to be the training of civilian components — the National Guard and Organized Reserves. The new ROTC program, an extended and much broader form of the old land grant college plan, made military instruction available in any qualified college or high school. In little over a decade, more than three hundred ROTC units were set up at schools and colleges with about 125,000 students participating in the program which absorbed the energies of about 5 per cent of the Regular Army officers corps. A second link with the civilian population came from the summer training camps for youths, developing out of Leonard Wood’s prewar Plattsburg movement. The first of the new camps opened in 1922 and offered a combination of military and civic instruction to ten thousand young men for a thirty day period. Thirdly, the 1920 Act authorized the detail of regular officers as instructors with the National Guard and reserves. The Army goal was to build a nation-wide organization, so that every community in the country would have representatives of at least one of the Army components, whose views, the Secretary of War hoped, would “be felt among their neighbors until all our people come to appreciate the wisdom of supporting” a strong national defense. Finally, in these immediate postwar years, the Army also made a determined effort to institute localized recruiting, assigning each Regular Army unit to a specific geographical area and hoping in that way to build up popular support and to capitalize upon local pride.12 Not only was the Army as a whole to be reunited with the people, but each regiment was to develop close ties with a particular locality.
This new range of activities inevitably altered the attitudes and behavior patterns which were most highly valued within the military services. The forces must adjust to society. “The character of our Army and Navy,” a naval officer argued, “. . . must reflect the character of the American people — American ideas, ideals, and thoughts.” The new outlook must embody the spirit of Washington’s injunction: “When we assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen.” Officers were told to abandon the appearance of exclusiveness and to develop a “fellow-feeling for all citizens.” In training the citizen-soldier, the officer must rely upon “cooperative spirit” rather than discipline. The prewar practice of boasting about their failure to vote must be dropped. The soldier, like any other citizen, had a duty to exercise his franchise; the abstention of the officer from the polls would be “looked at rather askance by the progressive business man with whom he speaks.” The military must abandon their old dislike of publicity and actively woo public opinion through all the devices and media utilized by any business corporation. All other social groups, even conservative institutions like the churches, had hired publicity men and public relations advisers; it was time for the Army to do likewise. “We must get on our feet at once and adopt business methods to meet business conditions,” it was argued in marked contrast to the prewar military distaste for anything suggestive of business or commercialism. This new approach was formally recognized by the recision of President Wilson’s order banning public discussion of national policy by officers, and by the issuance in 1927 of a new Army regulation declaring that public defense and advocacy of the national military policies was “naturally and logically one of the important duties of the officers of the Army.”13
The instruction of the civilian components in particular required a new type of officer with a new outlook. It was essential, in the words of General MacArthur, that the officer have “an intimate understanding of the mechanics of human feeling, a comprehensive grasp of world and national affairs, and a liberalization of conception which amount to a change in his psychology of command.” The officer on duty with the reserves must be qualified in “salesmanship” as well as the professional skills of a soldier. He must be a “good mixer” as well as a good fighter. Officers detailed to reserve duty were advised to ma
ke friends with the local Chamber of Commerce, to meet influential businessmen, to work closely with the local American Legion post, and to join the Kiwanis or Rotary. In short, they were to blend with middle-class business America. Above all, they were warned “not to be too military.”14
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