by Renata Adler
The National Guard is one of the oldest, most muddled and crisis-ridden lethal forces in our history. At present, it consists of 478,860 men (394,133 of them in the Army National Guard, 84,727 in the Air National Guard), 2,774 local armories, 68 Army Guard airfields, 90 Air Guard flying bases, an annual appropriation slightly in excess of one billion dollars (of which $972,364,000 is paid by the federal government, the rest by the states), several billion dollars’ worth of more or less obsolete federal military equipment, one of the oldest, most effective lobbies (the National Guard Association, founded in 1879) in Washington, and long, not altogether tamper-proof waiting lists—one at every Guard armory in each of the fifty states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. What training Guardsmen actually receive (six months of basic army training, a few drills each year, and two weeks of camp in each of six successive summers) is almost exclusively for war, but of the several hundred occasions on which Guardsmen have been called up since 1945, all but two have been local natural disasters or civil disturbances lasting about a week. National Guardsmen have otherwise remained at home and pursued their civilian careers. Since National Guardsmen are accountable, except in times of declared war or federalization for extreme emergency, not to the federal government but to the governors of their respective states, National Guard units are really State Guard units—a fragmented, fifty-two-part duplicate of the regular army reserve. They are also exempt from the draft.
The National Guard’s history—like its present composition and purpose, if any—is a kind of swamp. Nearly every state Guard unit has its own historian. The only attempt at an exhaustive history of the whole National Guard, The Minute Man in Peace and War, by Major General Jim Dan Hill, of Wisconsin (published in 1964 by the Stackpole Company, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), consists largely of obscure grievances against politicians and journalists, from Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis to “a young political-science teacher in a Midwestern college,” whom the general cannot even bring himself to name, and irate defenses of the Guard against charges of draft-dodging, incompetence, redundancy, favoritism, strikebreaking, snobbery, unpreparedness, patronage, loafing, irresponsibility, boondoggle, cowardice, obsoleteness, and bungling—charges that have evidently been leveled against the Guard throughout its history. The general’s style is everywhere idiosyncratically partisan (“The Guard must have seemed Heaven-sent for the role of a whipping boy riding into the desert astride a dejected scapegoat”). Although his research is probably the best there is, a sentence in his preface may explain a lot: Concerning the bibliographical notes with which each chapter ends, the general writes, “Without exception, they are far from all-inclusive.”
The contemporary National Guard can trace its origins to the Organized Militia of the original thirteen colonies, who, in various units and capacities, defended their own homes, conducted raiding parties against the Indians, and fought the Revolutionary War in Washington’s Continental Army. After the Revolution, to avert the threat to democracy inherent in any professional “standing army” (and with some doubt that the country contained enough paupers to fill such an army), Jefferson hoped that every citizen might be trained to be a soldier, civilian in peace, prepared to defend his country in war. Baron von Steuben, who had been Inspector General of the Revolutionary forces, argued that this was unrealistic, “It would be as sensible and consistent to say every Citizen should be a Sailor.” Washington himself proposed a small, paid regular army to protect the country’s frontiers and also a larger civilian organized militia in each of the several states. In the end, the Constitution embodied all three ideas: an unorganized Enrolled Militia, consisting of all male citizens eligible for military service only in time of war; a small Regular Army of professional soldiers, accountable first and only to the President as Commander-in-Chief; and a state Organized Militia of citizen-soldiers, “reserving to the States, respectively, the Appointment of Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the Discipline prescribed by Congress.” It is this clause in the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 16, commonly known as the Militia Clause) that leaves us, in a nuclear age, with a National Guard.
Since then, especially as the danger of Indians, state insurrections, or land invasions by way of Canada or Mexico becomes remote, there has been a continual dispute about what the Guard is meant to do—and it is possible that the Militia Clause, together with the later misnomer “National Guard,” has somehow maintained throughout our history an uneven, crazy, dangerous collection of state military forces whose purpose is undefinable and which it is impossible either to train for some national purpose or to disband. The misnomer “National Guard” itself dates from a trip Lafayette made to America in 1824. In honor of his visit, a group of New York City peacetime volunteers—young men who had drilled and caroused together quite a bit, designed and bought their own uniforms, elected their own officers, compared horses, paraded, and called themselves the Seventh Regiment—renamed themselves the “National Guards,” after the distinguished Paris corps commanded by Lafayette. In 1832, the regiment dropped the s. In 1862, the Volunteer Militia of all New York State adopted the name. The Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, who considered themselves the original citizen-soldiers of Lexington, resisted the change to the last, but in 1903 the National Guard became the federally recognized (and, for the first time, in part federally subsidized) collection of state militias which it is today.
The Guard’s post-Revolutionary appearances in American history include participation or evasion of some sort in all the country’s wars, including the Mexican, which all the New England states were reluctant to join, and the War of 1812, in which neither Massachusetts nor Connecticut cared to take part. The Guard had its greatest strength in those days, and until the time of the automobile, in the urban centers of the North and East—if only because these areas, being the nation’s most densely populated, could most easily muster units to drill and parade. In 1860, the governor of New York State alone could summon more units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery than the entire regular army of the United States. Since most recruiting in the Civil War was done by the states, it could be argued that most of the Union soldiers (all but the United States Army Regulars) and all the Confederate troops (led by Colonel Jefferson Davis, of the First Mississippi Rifles, as Commander-in-Chief) were organized militia, and that the War Between the States was largely a war between what might now be called units of the National Guard. But North and South had recourse, in the Civil War, to the draft, and it is more characteristic of the Guard’s subsequent anomalous role in our history that New York’s Seventh Regiment (the one for which the whole Guard, after all, was named) spent most of the Civil War at home and distinguished itself mainly by suppressing the bloody Draft Riots of 1863.
The National Guard really enters modern history, in anything like its current form and spirit, in the 1870s and 1880s, as a strikebreaking force. Regiments of organized militia had turned out as early as 1794 to crush the Whiskey Rebellion. Southern states, years before the Civil War, had maintained large militias for fear of slave revolts. New York’s Seventh Regiment had already killed twenty-two and wounded thirty-six in the Astor Place Riot of 1849 (over the relative merits of a proletarian production of Macbeth in the Bowery and a white-tie performance at the Opera House). Militias had been used to suppress industrial disorders in Missouri and Kansas, vigilante groups in California, striking miners in Colorado. But in 1877, with railroad strikes in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis, and, more particularly, with the Pullman Strike and Haymarket Riot of 1886, the National Guard earned a reputation as a business-financed, elitist, repressively antilabor force; and throughout the Depression, until World War II, most unions still banned their members from taking any part in the Guard. It was in the 1880s that the grotesque, turreted redbrick armories were built for Guard cavalry. The Seventh Regiment built its own, the one at Park Avenue and Sixty-sixth, in 1880, and still owns it. Squadron A, an equ
ally upper-class nineteenth-century unit, lost its armory, on Park Avenue and Ninety-fourth, a few years ago and regretfully disbanded, to become just the Squadron A Club, in rented, wood-paneled rooms at the Biltmore Hotel. Businessmen financed the Guard in those years, and wealthy young men joined it, to keep the immigrant laborers orderly, state by state.
A history of New York City’s Squadron A, NYNG (New York National Guard), includes several journals kept by young Guardsmen of the time. There are proud references to Squadron A as “all millionaires” and as being as exclusive as “any club in New York.” There are accounts of breaking a railroad strike in Buffalo in 1892, a trolley strike in Brooklyn in 1895, and a strike at the Croton Dam in 1900. The sort of enemy the Guardsmen thought they were protecting the state against is implied by references to encounters with Italian laborers as “the Italian Wars,” cheerful allusions to Central European workers’ abject fear of horses with men on them, and in a poem written for the unit as late as 1925:
. . . There’s a garment strike on and it’s got to be broke,
So ye lawyers and bankers and salesmen so free,
Turn out—you’re Hussars of the NYNG . . .
The strikers are gathered in Washington Square,
Their war cry “Oi, oi Gewalt” pierces the air . . .
There are also candid accounts of “promiscuous shooting at phantoms” in the Croton Strike (on the way to which the unit’s commander was thrown from his horse and broke his leg); pointless racing about, firing of blanks, and cries of “You’re dead!” at the Guard Manassas Maneuvers, in 1904; mothers perennially sending caviar and foie gras to their sons on duty; a Guardsman who, in one pistol drill, accidentally blew a hole in the ceiling and, in the next, blew a hole through the floor of the armory; endless showy parades through New York to accompany such visitors as the Duke of Veragua, the Infanta Eulalia, and the Chinese Viceroy, Li Hung Chang; constant explosions, during strike duty, of shells that had fallen from the belts of sleeping Guardsmen into their straw bedding; and accidents, fires, and equipment mix-ups on every maneuver of every kind through the years. In 1939, the year the squadron’s history was published, Squadron A of the New York National Guard was arguing passionately that the imminent World War II, despite tanks and other machines, would prove the absolute indispensability of cavalrymen on real horses for the national defense.
In years when there were no wars and there was no strike duty, Guard units tended to languish in their armories, and, even in rural areas, to become social clubs, like the Kiwanis or Elks. They liked to march and to rise in rank, but their preparedness for the two world wars, when they did break out, was problematical. Had it not been for the strength of its lobby in Washington, the Guard might, on several occasions, have been abolished altogether. In The National Guard in Politics, a study of “one of the most successful pressure groups in a system noted for the advantages that it gives pressure groups,” Martha Derthick, an associate professor of political science at Boston College, says that the major goals of the National Guard lobby in Washington have always been two: federal support of the Guard (regular army pay for Guard drills, federal military equipment, federal money for armories, federal recognition of Guard officers), along with freedom from federal control—that is, state appointment of officers, state control of units, state standards for training, and, in case of war, federal mobilization of state Guard units intact.
In order to gain these federal concessions and subsidies while maintaining states’ rights (in the early 1900s, southern and midwestern states’-rights congressmen had become the main supporters of the Guard, the northeastern states having more or less lost interest in it), the National Guard had to argue that it was the nation’s principal military reserve force. The National Defense Act of 1916 gave it that status. Guard divisions were renamed and officially renumbered, divisions 26 to 75 inclusive, and sent off to World War I—with mixed results. Some Guard units were preserved intact, with their own state patronage-appointed officers. Many of those officers soon had to be replaced for sheer incompetence. Some Guard units were used as “depot divisions,” just to supply replacements for casualties among regular army division volunteers and draftees. Out of leftover Guard units from several states, the army created the symbolic, “overarching” interstate Forty-second (Rainbow) Division, in which Douglas MacArthur served as brigade commander in France. The Rainbow has since become the division that left with Colonel Pellicio for Camp Drum.
After World War I, the Guard, except for its lobby (led by a Guard officer who was also chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association), languished again—until the Depression, when drill pay earned by Guardsmen became a new source of patronage for governors, and of bitterness for men on relief who could not get appointed to the Guard. In World War II, the Guard’s performance once again was controversial and mixed. The December 1941 issue of Fortune said that the National Guard, untrained and unprepared as it was, could not be reorganized, because it had become “a political hornet’s nest.” Other branches of the military, in any case, were not impressed with it. When New York’s Twenty-seventh Division of the Guard, for example, was put under marine command at Saipan, Marine Lieutenant General H.M. Smith found that while his own units advanced about ten miles each day, the Guard division, composed mainly of New York politicians and their friends and relatives, invariably stayed put. The marines would have to drop back each night to maintain a line. Finally, General Smith replaced every single officer of the Twenty-seventh—creating a terrific scandal back home in New York. An entire Guard division from the Midwest, on the other hand, was wiped out at Corregidor, and New Mexico Guard tank units at Bataan were annihilated, leaving towns in the states from which they came bereft of their entire populations of young men. To avoid a recurrence of these regional disasters, and to circumvent the ineptitude of Guard officers, Guard divisions were broken up. Of eighteen National Guard division commanders at the beginning of World War II, only two retained command at the end. One general of the regular army began calling the National Guard Bureau itself “an organizational monstrosity.” In 1944 Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, commanding general of the army ground forces, said, “The training experience of this headquarters for nearly four years has its most important lesson in the inadequacy of the National Guard in practically every essential . . . . One of the great lessons of the present war is that the National Guard, as organized before the war, contributed nothing to national defense.”
General McNair recommended that the Guard be abolished. So did his successor, Lieutenant General Ben Lear. National Guard General Ellard A. Walsh, the adjutant general of Minnesota, who was head of the Guard lobby in 1944, was quick to respond. He spoke of the regular army’s “undiluted and undisguised hate of us” and of “a diabolical attempt to destroy a great citizen force.” He recommended more, newer, and fiercer lobbying. It worked. In 1948, National Guardsmen became, by law, completely exempt from the draft. (The token Guard units that were federalized for service in Korea required seven to nine months to train—as long as regular draftees who had received no training before.) Although the states had traditionally financed their own militias, until the years when the local businessmen started to, the federal government began to pay 97 percent of the cost of the Guard. A Guardsman now receives, for a half day’s drill, the equivalent of a regular army soldier’s full day’s pay. And despite the existence of a regular army reserve, the fiction is still maintained—in Congress, in the Guard, in the Department of Defense—that the National Guard is the first line of reserve for some future war, and that training its men for war is what the Guard ought primarily to do.
There exist, in Guard archives, fairly riveting accounts of more or less recent Guard tactical maneuvers, like 1960’s Operation Big Slam/Puerto Pine (“In this exercise there was a notable ‘first,’ the movement, on short notice, of a National Guard Artillery Battalion from Utah to Puerto Rico, in ‘off season’ for the part-time soldiers, and their speedy inauguration
of a realistic field training program in unaccustomed surroundings”); Exercise Dixie (“The map problem set up for study involved defense of the Southeastern United States against an Aggressor airborne and seaborne attack in the vicinity of Mobile Bay, Alabama. The first phase consisted of the Aggressor successfully invading the Florida Peninsula by airborne and waterborne units, which were met by XII Corps troops. In addition to the invasion of Florida, Aggressor agents worked constantly to upset the civilian population”); and Operation Vikings Thrive in Arctic Cold (“The purpose was for the Minnesota Guardsmen from the 47th ‘Viking’ Infantry Division to learn how to ski and to overcome the handicaps of cold weather”). Air National Guard units (which, since Guardsmen almost immediately after Kitty Hawk could afford their own planes, have often predated regular air force units, and which now consist largely of air force veterans, civilian pilots, and men who just like to fly) are allowed to fly brief cargo missions to Vietnam and elsewhere. One recent Air Guard “combat” mission to Vietnam turned out to be Operation Yuletide—a ferrying over of Christmas presents to servicemen.
Sixty-three percent of young Guardsmen in a recent survey acknowledged that they had “joined the Guard because it offered least interference with your personal plans”; 49 percent that they had joined “because you knew you would be drafted if you did not”; 71 percent that “some individuals you know joined the Guard to avoid service in Vietnam.” Only 19 percent thought that they might reenlist in the Guard when their time was up or that their second lieutenants were capable of combat leadership. Waiting lists for Guard units, since the Vietnam War began, have been so long that they are often closed, and the persistence of professional athletes, movie stars, relatives of politicians and of people with political influence in Guard units (as well as the reminiscences of young men who have recently completed their service in the Guard) yield the impression that the waiting lists are seldom impartially administered. Despite what was meant to be an intensive program for recruitment of blacks after the Detroit riots of 1967, the percentage of blacks in the Army Guard actually went down, from 1.18 percent to 1.15 percent, between 1968 and 1969. The percentage of blacks in the Air National Guard, it is true, went up—from 0.77 to 0.90.
