The pushing of the military program involved adoption of the values as well as the techniques of a business civilization. In order to persuade their opponents of the validity of their conclusions, the military had to adopt the premises of their opponents’ thinking. The defense of the regular services in terms of their nonmilitary benefits to society, which Leonard Wood had argued in the prewar years, was continued and elaborated upon. The Navy was extolled in terms of its contributions to industry and science, above and beyond its role as the country’s first line of defense. The Navy, its Secretary declared in 1921, is “engaged continuously in useful and humanitarian enterprises.” Two years later it was claimed that the Navy’s work in humanitarian causes justified its existence even if it never fired another shot. The Army was praised for its contributions to “national development of resources, science, and manhood.” By educating officers and men in civilian skills, it “blended defensive readiness with industrial and civic aid.” There should be no reticence in pointing out the “economic value of the Army’s peacetime accomplishments.” The summer training camps were, in true Wood style, defended on the grounds of their contributions to national unity, and the Regular Army was declared to be one of “the greatest agencies in the nation in the teaching of good citizenship.”15
The most extreme instances of the military denying themselves, and advocating a military program for nonmilitary reasons, were in their postwar campaign for universal military training. As the prospects of congressional approval for such a plan rapidly receded after 1920, the arguments advanced in its favor became more and more removed from military requirements. In the end, the officers were advancing UMT as more or less the universal panacea for all the social ills which beset America. It would strengthen national unity, promote the amalgamation of ethnic groups, and encourage democracy and tolerance. It would be physically beneficial and would virtually eliminate illiteracy in the United States. Far from injuring industry or retarding the development of occupational skills, it would have just the reverse effects. The Army would discharge its recruits with a basic training in law, commerce, transport, engineering, or any one of a number of other technical fields. Most important were the moral benefits to be derived from universal training. At the same time that it was quite rapidly espousing the values of a commercial civilization, the officer corps could still retain some elements of the old sense of the moral superiority of the military to the business way of life. Loyalty, patriotism, honor, discipline, fairness, a respect for law could be inculcated in the youth of the nation through military training. In short, the officers proved conclusively the need of universal service for every reason except military ones.16
The Army’s new activities also involved it in political controversy with pacifist, religious, and educational organizations. Refusing to take the officers’ arguments at their face value, these groups viewed the ROTC program, the summer camps, and the proposed UMT plans as schemes for the militarization of society which could lead only to war. Civilian memories of the horrors of the French trenches and the natural repugnance against instructing teenagers in the gory techniques of bayonet wielding were capitalized upon in the antimilitary propaganda. The services responded by denouncing the motives and activities of the peace groups. The epithet “pacifist” had been coined just prior to World War I to describe the opponents of the Neo-Hamiltonian preparedness program. It was now widely employed by the military officers to describe anyone who criticized military objectives. In contrast to their prewar perspective of themselves as an outcast minority, the officers now sought to portray themselves as representative of all true Americans and as one hundred per cent patriotic. Their opponents, on the other hand, were visualized as a small, conspiratorial, subversive clique, either insidiously plotting to undermine American institutions or unconsciously serving as the tools of those who did have this as their goal. The officers participated fully in the national denunciation of Reds and Bolsheviks which swept the country in the early twenties, and they did not hesitate to go further and to link their pacifist opponents with the Red Menace. While conceding that some of the pacifists might just be sentimentalists with an unreasoned opposition to war or taxpayers with a desire to reduce military expenditures, they tended to view the core of pacifists as political radicals who opposed military training with the ultimate aim of destroying the Army and Navy and overthrowing the government.17 The services reflected the true will of the American people; their opponents were the political outcasts.
It was only slowly that the officers were disabused of this illusion. By the end of the decade, however, it had become impossible for them to maintain their identification with the community. The opposition to military ideals and the military program which was so strong within the government could no longer be blamed upon misinformation or the failure of Congress to reflect accurately the sentiment of the country. Nor could the mounting opposition to the military intrusion into education be viewed as only the work of a conspiratorial minority. Army expenditures were reduced far below that level which the officers believed necessary to carry out the purposes of the National Defense Act. The postwar reaction against navalism had reduced appropriations and produced the Washington arms conference. The localized recruiting campaign had failed to produce significant results. Military training in the secondary schools was coming under increasing attack and was being discontinued in some areas. Bills in Congress proposed to abolish the compulsory aspects of ROTC. It was manifestly obvious that “a wave of feeling against military training in our schools and colleges seems to be spreading over this country.” When the new Chief of Staff, General Summerall, in 1926 sought to arouse public support for larger defense appropriations, he was abruptly silenced by the President, an action which served to point up the fact that the new freedom of officers to participate in public discussion was limited to supporting established military policies. More fundamental was the resurgence of antagonism against West Point, and the criticism of the purposes and methods of the military academy. “There is a stiff prejudice in civil life against the West Pointer,” complained the cadet yearbook of 1927. Another officer diagnosed the existence of “a current epidemic, militariphobia.” All the varied antimilitary prejudices came to the fore. Those of pioneer stock disliked the Army because it was the antithesis of rugged individualism. Recent immigrants disliked the Army because of its Old World aristocratic associations. Labor disliked the Army because of its strike duty. And business? “The composite American business mind,” wrote one naval officer, signalizing the return to the orthodox military view of commerce, “values present advantage above future security and can see no profit in national insurance in times of peace.” Underlying all was American distrust of government and the belief that the military along with the civil branches of the public service were inherently inefficient and largely unnecessary. It was time as one officer bluntly put it, to “face the facts.”18 The military effort to bridge the gap to society had been a failure. The triumphs of antimilitarism were not due to Bolshevism, but to the natural apathy of the American people, their inherent dislike for war, their linking of the military with war, and their faith in a future of peaceful progress. The Neo-Hamiltonian compromise was impossible in the postwar world. The opposition was not a few pacifists and radicals. It was America itself. Rejected again, there was nothing for the military to do but to retreat back to their prewar isolation and find interest and satisfaction in the mundane duties of their profession.*
* Neo-Hamiltonianism reemerged briefly in 1940 and 1941 when Grenville Clark, Stimson, Robert P. Patterson, Elihu Root, Jr., and others in the Roosevelt-Root-Wood tradition played a major role in stimulating American rearmament and in securing the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1940.
* These books of 1914–1917 constitute one of the few significant bodies of writings by American civilians and military men on defense issues. The tone of virtually all those favoring preparedness was thoroughly Neo-Hamiltonian. Many were written by close fri
ends of Wood, others were dedicated to him, and to others he contributed introductions. Some of the more notable were Jennings C. Wise, Empire and Armament (New York, 1915); Frederic Louis Huidekoper, The Military Unpreparedness of the United States (New York, 1915); R. M. Johnston, Arms and the Race (New York, 1915); Eric Fisher Wood, The Writing on the Wall (New York, 1916). Theodore Roosevelt was the only figure who overshadowed Leonard Wood in the preparedness campaign.
* Hermann Hagedorn in his highly sympathetic biography of Wood summed up the difference between him and Pershing as follows:
“The conflict between Wood and Pershing went deeper than mere personal antagonism. Their views of what the American army should be differed fundamentally. To Pershing — brought up on the Prussian theorists, Clausewitz, Bernhardi, Treitschke, von der Goltz — the army was a machine, to be used as man, the intelligent, uses any other machine for his own purposes. To Wood, the army was first and foremost, an aggregation of human beings, gallant, lovable, wonderful human beings, who might be made craven or glorious according to the leadership given them. To take them into battle, to make them fight to gain a position, by means of them to win a campaign, was only one of a general’s functions. That was essential; but it was equally important to make these men in his charge true and devoted citizens of the Republic, to give them a vision of their country, to show them what they were fighting for.”
Leonard Wood (New York, 2 vols., 1931), II, 268. Wilson explained his reasons for keeping Wood in the United States in a letter to the Springfield Republican, June 5, 1918:
“In the first place, I am not sending him because Gen. Pershing has said that he does not want him, and in the second place, Gen. Pershing’s disinclination to have Gen. Wood sent over is only too well founded. Wherever Gen. Wood goes there is controversy and conflict of judgment.”
Gen. Peyton C. March, wartime Chief of Staff, had little in common with Pershing except his strict professionalism — and his dislike of Leonard Wood. See March’s The Nation at War (Garden City, N.Y., 1932), pp. 57–68.
* Illustrative of the withdrawal was the changing content of the Army’s foremost professional magazine, the Infantry Journal. In the early twenties, its pages were filled with articles on political issues, Communism, national defense policy, social and economic problems. Since the Army was involved in political controversy, very few articles were critical of that service; instead, the virtues of the military program were extolled. By the late twenties and early thirties, however, politics had disappeared from the Journal. Its content became more strictly professional, and, at the same time, self-criticism of the military, of Army conservatism, organizational defects, technological backwardness, became much more extensive. Sober discussion of technical military problems replaced the earlier exhortations to political action.
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The Constancy of Interwar Civil-Military Relations
BUSINESS-REFORM HOSTILITY AND MILITARY PROFESSIONALISM
The evaporation of Neo-Hamiltonianism in the benignity of the 1920’s reunited the American community in its distaste for military affairs. In part this reflected the renewed dominance of business pacifism during the twenties. It was also manifest, however, in the other strand of the liberal tradition preëminent during the second and fourth decades of the century. Reform liberalism originated in the 1880’s and 1890’s in the guise of populism and swept forward into the twentieth with the muckrakers, the progressive movement, the New Freedom, and, eventually, the New Deal. Many of the ideas of the reformers with respect to military affairs, and certainly the language in which they expressed their ideas, differed considerably from those of the spokesmen of business. Yet the basic substance and the ultimate effects of the reform approach and the business approach were the same. The antimilitarism of reform liberalism complemented the antimilitarism of business liberalism. In this respect there was no fundamental change from Wilson to Harding to Roosevelt. As a result, the manifestations of military professionalism during the interwar period were remarkably static. The ideas and institutions which had been produced during the years of business rejection reflected intense professionalism on the outskirts of society. With the postwar collapse of the Neo-Hamiltonian bridge, civil-military relations resumed this pattern and maintained it throughout the twenties and thirties. The constancy of American military professionalism during the interwar period reflected the underlying constancy of the business and reform approaches to military affairs.
REFORM LIBERALISM: THE PRAGMATIC USAGES OF MILITARISM
Reform liberalism was composed of many elements frequently at odds with each other. Yet there was an underlying unity in a general opposition to the interests of “big business” and a general willingness to utilize the government to secure a more equitable distribution of wealth. Superficial diversity and deeper unity were also present in the reform approach to military affairs. On the surface, reform had no consistent and prevailing military policy. Reformers supported and denounced preparedness, conscription, large armies and navies, American intervention in World War I, disarmament, neutrality legislation, the renunciation of war, rearmament in the 1930’s, and aid to the allies in 1940 and 1941. Virtually every major defense issue found equally well-qualified reformers on both sides. Yet this diversity of approach was in itself a product of an underlying similarity. Reformers consistently viewed military institutions and military policy not in their own terms with reference to the purpose of military security, but rather in the reformers’ terms with reference to the purposes of reform. These purposes, whether world-wide in scope or limited to American society, were essentially domestic in nature: they concerned the relations between individuals and states, not the relations among states. Reformers ended up on different sides of defense issues because they had different immediate objectives, or because they analyzed differently the way in which the issues of defense policy were related to the realization of common goals of reform. The military instrumentalism of reform liberalism accounted for both its unity and its diversity.
The antimilitarism of reform differed in tone from the antimilitarism of business. The business approach rejected all aspects of militarism. Convinced that the military were a vestigial holdover from a barbarous past, business made no effort to utilize the military for its own purposes. The reformer was more pragmatic. His opposition to the military lacked the elaborate theoretical rationale of business pacifism. Faced with the beginning of the twentieth-century age of warfare, the reformer could not so readily assume that war and militarism were obsolete. If military institutions were to exist, however, the reformer wanted to bend them to the purposes of reform. Consequently, the reformer consistently opposed only military professionalism which, being designed exclusively for the purposes of military security, necessarily competed with the demands of reform. Whereas business policy was straight extirpation, reform policy was mixed extirpation and transmutation.* In some ways, the reformer’s opposition to the institutions of professional militarism was more bitter than that of the business pacifist. In part, this was the result of his inability to accept the optimistic conclusion that military institutions would die a natural death. Instead, the reformer thought positive steps necessary to eliminate militarism. Like most liberals, the reformer identified the professional military groups with his own worst enemies. “Militarism,” said Harold Stearns, quoting Viscount Morley, is “the point-blank opposite of Liberalism in its fullest and pro-foundest sense, whatever the scale and whatever the disguise.”1 In the reform lexicon, militarism was virtually coextensive with all evil; it was incompatible with the democratic premises of American society.
The reform attack on professional militarism took two general forms. The first was similar in many respects to the business pacifist view from which it was, to a large extent, derived. It looked upon the military profession as backward and primitive. No utilitarian justification existed for the maintenance of exclusively military institutions. While the business pacifists were more or less content to state this a
s a self-evident truth, the reformers went about documenting it in satirical fashion. Military expenditures were sheer waste. The resources devoted to these useless purposes should be used for the reform purposes of improving human welfare. “For in my youth,” Walter Lippmann has written, “we all assumed that the money spent on battleships would better be spent on schoolhouses, and that war was an affair that ‘militarists’ talked about and not something that seriously-minded progressive democrats paid any attention to.”2 Stuart Chase in the 1920’s bemoaned the wasted energies of the million workers which he figured were required to maintain America’s modest peacetime military forces. Lewis Mumford in the following decade defined the army as a “negative producer” of “illth” in Ruskin’s expressive phrase.3 The reformers also emphasized the conflict between military values and the humanitarian values of liberalism. The mores and customs of the military professional were given a devastating analysis with the weapons of Veblenian social unmasking. The futility, inhumanity, and barbarousness of military life were constantly emphasized, and its formal social code jeered at from the vantage point of modern liberal ethics. This aspect of reform criticism set the tone for the sociological analysis of the military which has continued down to the present time. Military standards of honor, obedience, and loyalty were adjudged either hypocritical or positively dangerous. The military officer, a New Republic writer declared, is a “man cherishing an attitude toward life that belongs in the dark ages.” The problem of the relation of military obedience to individual moral responsibility, which bothered Andrew Carnegie, also reappeared in the reformist critique. “Absolute obedience to orders,” wrote Ernest Crosby, the most prolific antimilitarist of the muck-raker period, “involves, of course, the abdication of conscience and reason.” The minutiae of military discipline and the customs of the service defining the social gap between officers and enlisted men likewise furnished ammunition for attacks on the military caste. Such criticisms were particularly prevalent immediately after World War I, reflecting the irritation between professional officer and citizen-soldier in the wartime forces.4 In sum, the reformer viewed military professionalism as economically wasteful, socially useless, and ethically backward.
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