Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  The hammer fell in the spring of 1879 when, after rejoining her husband in New Orleans, an outbreak of yellow fever sent the Eighteenth Infantry fleeing north, first to Chattanooga (which must have been a grim reunion for the thirty-year-old Arthur) and then to Atlanta (ditto), until finally taking up quarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. Pinky was again pregnant. The plan was to have her bear her third child at Riveredge, but the baby came prematurely on January 26, 1880, while they were still settling in at the Little Rock barracks.

  They named him Douglas. He was scrawny, small, and weak, like most premature babies. Some in her family wondered if he would be strong enough to survive. But Judge MacArthur was delighted. The boy had been born on his sixty-third birthday; Douglas would grow up to be his grandfather’s favorite, although his mother and father were devoted to his brothers, Arthur and Malcolm.

  The way the Norfolk papers covered the birth, as MacArthur later recalled, was “Douglas MacArthur was born on January 26, while his parents were away.”12 He was in some ways a provisional baby, the male backup in case his two elder brothers didn’t survive (of the fourteen Hardy children, only ten had made it to adulthood). In fact, it was Douglas who would outlast and outshine them both, and become an army legend even exceeding his father’s fame—a source of pride, but also ambivalence, for the rest of his life.

  That July, Captain MacArthur was ordered to join Company K at Fort Wingate in New Mexico to help guard workers building the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. Six-month-old Douglas was deemed strong enough to make the journey, so with the baby, four-year-old Arthur III, and nineteen-month-old Malcolm in tow, Pinky and her husband set out in the full heat of summer on a trek across Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, until they reached their destination, one hundred miles northwest from Albuquerque and a lifetime away from anywhere else.

  The post was even worse than Pinky could have imagined. Set high in the Zuni Mountains along the Continental Divide, Wingate baked in summer and froze in winter. Rattlesnakes and Gila monsters haunted the nearby mesas and dry river basins. Their quarters were a small one-story adobe building with a flat dirt roof, with the inside ceiling lined with canvas to keep out the scorpions. The family of five shared two rooms and a kitchen, with a rough wooden floor. Quarters for the enlisted ranks did not even have that. No wonder that in 1881–82, 248 of the 440 enlisted men in the Thirteenth Infantry chose to desert.13

  The same thought must have crossed Pinky’s mind, but she had her delicate hands full nursing two babies and caring for toddler Arthur while her husband focused on camp duties. There were few women at Fort Wingate and even fewer opportunities for socializing, and so it was in the evening at dinner that Pinky must have poured out her frustrations to her husband and urged him over and over to resign his commission and go into business like her father.

  Arthur refused. He loved the army, and performed his duties with a competence and rectitude that impressed every officer who had contact with him.14 He was still convinced that he was destined for higher things. All he needed was the right opportunity, a lucky break, to show what he was meant to do—and take him and the family far away from the mesas, mountains, and the scorpions.

  That break came in the autumn of 1881 following the death of Mary’s mother. Arthur applied for leave to take the family east, and they arrived in Norfolk in early May 1882. Days were spent dividing up the Hardy estate (Arthur and Pinky came away with $40,000, a minor fortune in those days), and then Arthur set off for Washington to visit his father and his new wife at their house on N Street. His father’s range of political contacts had grown to the highest levels of the government and included important figures in both political parties (there was even talk that the judge might be in the running for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court).

  One of those contacts was Ulysses S. Grant, Arthur’s former commander in chief at Missionary Ridge and now a former president. He was delighted to learn that in addition to military history, Captain MacArthur had an interest in Asia and China. As it happened, Grant had just returned from Asia, and he had been deeply impressed by what he had seen.

  The trip had been part of a world tour that Grant and his wife and sons had conducted in 1877, starting in England, where they had met Queen Victoria, and moving on to France, Germany, Russia, and Egypt. Back in the United States, the former president found himself stalked by scandal and accusations of incompetence during his administration. But abroad he was treated as a hero and a celebrity by adoring crowds and awestruck politicians, and so after visiting the Pyramids, Grant had decided to extend their tour for another year and press on to the Far East.

  Ever since Commodore Perry had first sailed into Yokohama Harbor in 1854, Americans had been fascinated and drawn to Asia and the Pacific. “There is the east; there is India,” proclaimed Thomas Hart Benton to an audience in St. Louis, as he pointed due west past the Rockies to California, which Americans of every political stripe saw as the gateway for American commerce and trade in Asia.15

  The dream was that the networks of commerce flowing from the United States would free the East (what Walt Whitman called “venerable priestly Asia”) from the shackles of superstition, tyranny, and poverty—while completing America’s redemptive role as a beacon of freedom in the world.

  In 1844 Secretary of State Caleb Cushing negotiated a most-favored-nation trading treaty with imperial China. In 1867 the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, in part to serve as a bridge to Asia; a year later America acquired a tiny atoll in the mid-Pacific that it dubbed Midway Island, since it sat midway between California and Japan. And in 1875 Grant himself had negotiated a reciprocity treaty with the independent kingdom of Hawaii, for shipping pineapples grown by American farmers in the islands to the United States.16

  But Grant was also interested in something else. He spelled it out on his visit to China after spending several weeks in India, including touring the Taj Mahal. He told a large audience in Canton, “I am not prepared to justify the treatment the Chinese have received at the hands of the foreigner,” meaning European powers like Britain and Russia. He foresaw a possible future role for the United States in Asia besides trade: that of protecting the nations of the region from outside aggressors as Asia emerged into the modern world.17

  It was a point he returned to when he and his wife sailed into Nagasaki Harbor on June 21, 1879, on the USS Richmond. Japanese naval vessels fired ceremonial twenty-one-gun salutes while other ships circled the harbor waving American flags, as crowds waved from the quays and cliffs and set up bonfires to light their way at night.

  Japan had embarked on its crash program of modernization, the Meiji reforms, eleven years earlier, and Grant was impressed by everything he saw. “The country is beautifully cultivated,” he wrote to a friend. “[T]he scenery is grand, the people, from the highest to the lowest, the most kindly…in the world.”18

  He was particularly impressed by Japan’s new railways and trains, as modern and up-to-date as anything on the Union Pacific line, and at the immense state dinner in his honor on June 23, he spoke to his rapt audience of his vision for the future of both Japan and America.

  “America has great interests in the East. She is your next-door neighbor. She is more affected by the Eastern populations than any other Power,” he told the Japanese, a clear reference to the growing Chinese and Japanese immigrant populations in California and on the American West Coast.

  “We have rejoiced over your progress,” he said. “We have watched you step by step. We have followed the unfolding of your old civilization and its absorbing the new. You have our profound sympathy in that work, and sympathy in the troubles which come with it, and our friendship. I hope it may continue—I hope it may long continue.”19

  The highlight of the visit was Grant’s meeting with Japan’s emperor, the Tenno, on August 10. It was not an entirely ceremonial meeting. While in China, the Chinese emperor’s viceroy, General Li Hung-chang, had asked the former president if he would help negotiate a pe
ace with Japan over some islands that both countries were claiming, the Ryukyus—the principal island of which was a twenty-square-mile rocky promontory called Okinawa. Grant had agreed, and during his meeting he managed to arrange the deal and secure a peace treaty, thus foreshadowing the role that Teddy Roosevelt would play in brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

  By the time he arrived back in San Francisco, Ulysses S. Grant had inaugurated a new era in U.S.-Asian relations. He would be eager to talk about it with the intelligent young army captain who seemed as enthusiastic about Asia as Grant was.

  They spoke together over several days, with Grant describing his impressions of his visits with Chinese and Japanese politicians, and Captain MacArthur intently absorbing every detail. Grant was convinced that something extraordinary was happening, in both China and Japan. A new era in Asia’s relations with the world was under way, and that the United States needed to be part of it.

  “America has much to gain in the East,” Grant was telling listeners. “No nation has greater interests—except America has nothing to gain except what insures them as much benefit as it does us. I’d be ashamed of my country,” Grant emphasized, “if its relations with other nations, especially with these ancient and most interesting empires in the East, were based on any other ideas,” and MacArthur no doubt would have enthusiastically agreed.20

  Then Grant had an idea. Why didn’t MacArthur apply to the War Department to be sent to China as a military attaché? Grant promised he would use what influence he had with the department and with President Chester Arthur to try to get him the post.

  MacArthur was thrilled at the offer. He immediately filled out the paperwork for an application, while also seeking a six-month extension of his leave. By then, he hoped, the War Department would have weighed his case, read Grant’s letters of recommendation (the ex-president wrote several), and he and Pinky and the boys would be bound for the exotic East.

  It did not quite work out that way. First, his request for leave was denied and he was forced to make the 2,000-mile trip in just six days by himself—his wife absolutely refused to go and urged him to quit his commission rather than submit to the humiliation. It was not until October 1882 that he finally was granted leave to return to Norfolk and his family.

  It was there that he put the final touches on what he considered his ace in the hole for securing the post in China. It was a forty-four-page manuscript that Arthur MacArthur had written and typed out himself, titled “Chinese Memorandum.” It was in fact a scholarly tour d’horizon of American foreign policy in Asia, which he had put together with his usual ferocious concentration of energy and focus, the same technique that would mark his son Douglas’s approach to any new or important task. He then sent it on to Grant, who forwarded it to President Arthur.

  By any standard, it is an extraordinary document, especially considering it was written by someone who had never visited Asia. It did, however, reflect an intense reading of Oriental as well as European history, including the history of Russia; and although it antedates Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power Upon History, and future pronouncements by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Albert Beveridge, and Theodore Roosevelt by almost a decade, their basic theme that the future of America lies westward in the Pacific is all there.

  Indeed, ten years before Professor Frederick Jackson Turner published a famous essay prophesying the end of the U.S. frontier, MacArthur (who was actually serving on that frontier) did the same. America’s overland expansion and settlement westward was all but over, MacArthur predicted. The nation would need a new challenge to mobilize its energies and peoples. That challenge, MacArthur announced, was Asia.21

  Two nations in particular, he noted, “are making their way back into the old continent” where the Aryan race began. One was Great Britain, the other Russia.

  MacArthur then described how in the past forty years Russia had annexed one swath of central Asia after another, until it now stood on the doorstep of imperial China. From the other end of the continent, Britain had advanced across the Indian subcontinent northward to Afghanistan and Nepal. Conventional wisdom had it that either Great Britain or Russia would dominate the future of Asia and particularly China which, despite long years of decadence and decline, was still “the richest Empire existing on the face of the Earth.”

  Arthur MacArthur, however, had a third candidate: America. Indeed, “the United States cannot exist as a commanding and progressive nationality unless we secure and maintain the sovereignty of the Pacific.”22

  It was a bold and daring proposition, one that—from the perspective of America’s relative place in the world and the technologies of 1882—must have seemed beyond ordinary comprehension. But MacArthur saw this American dominance arising not through conquest but through trade. He proposed creation of a vast trans-Pacific commercial network that would open China to American influence and extend that influence beyond the borders of China, including to Japan and the rest of eastern Asia.

  Indeed, MacArthur saw the competition for dominance in not material but ideological terms. There are two, and only two kinds of polities in the world today, he announced—the Empire and the Republic. One was embodied by Russia: ruthless and autocratic, the embodiment of the drive for military power and acquisition of wealth and territory at any cost. The other was reflected by the United States, the modern embodiment of the virtues of self-government and the rule of law, whose expansionist urges sprang from the bottom up rather than imperial diktat. America as the fulfillment of mankind’s democratic impulses rather than its imperial ones, and the embodiment of a future built around commerce more than military might.

  “It seems inevitable that the Empire and the Republic are destined to meet in Asia,” MacArthur wrote. The fate of the world, indeed of freedom, hung in the balance of which principle prevailed.23

  It was as if he could see in a crystal ball his son and his army’s agonies on the Korean peninsula almost seventy years later.

  America certainly had a material stake in expanding its markets into Asia. “The American Republic can never acquire its full complement of riches and power if it permits itself to be excluded from the field of Asiatic commerce,” he wrote. But in Arthur MacArthur’s mind, the issue went beyond commerce and moneymaking. American trade would serve as an opening for “the propagation of American ideas,” including the concepts of republican liberty and human freedom.24

  In the later pages of his “Chinese Memorandum” MacArthur even foresaw a day when California and America’s West Coast would serve as a vast emporium of trade and influence spreading across the Pacific. In the process American trade would serve as a social and economic crucible in which the nations of Asia, including China, that seemed doomed to a state of decline and decadence might suddenly revive.

  “Once let these torpid communities be set in motion,” he predicted, “once mix them again by travel and commerce, and the aspect of things might quickly change. Asia,” he wrote in a sentence that seems to leap gleaming off the page, “may yet be destined to exhibit the greatest of political wonders.”

  Yet if the Russian imperial ideal prevailed, the opposite would happen. The hegemony of Russia would have disastrous consequences both for America’s future in geopolitical and ideological terms and also for the future enlightenment of China and the rest of Asia.

  In short, “self-interest, sound economy, and pure morals, agree in their judgments,” Captain MacArthur opined, “and corroborate each other, and point us to the Orient as the field of our future labors. There we must contend for commercial power, and perhaps combat for political supremacy.”25 That momentous fight, he believed, would begin with China, where “the possibility of a rapid development of an effectual military spirit in the Chinese Empire is, perhaps, as interesting and important as any…that may hereafter affect the civilization of the world.” And he wanted to be part of that interesting and important mission, as military attaché.

  In the end, it did not happen
. Despite former president Grant’s best efforts, MacArthur never got an appointment. In fact, it would be six years before the United States appointed military attachés to any foreign country, and then largely in Europe and Latin America.26

  Yet as a document, MacArthur’s “Chinese Memorandum” is also a personal landmark. From that date the future of the MacArthur family shifted decisively away from America or Europe and toward Asia. For both Arthur MacArthur and his son Douglas, Asia would be the arena in which their careers would take root and where they would earn their greatest laurels as military commanders. And for both father and son, the principles set forth in the 1882 memorandum would continue to influence their vision of America’s role in Asia and what Asia’s bright future could be with America’s help.

  For the present, however, the disappointment of not getting the post was overshadowed by a shattering event that would change the MacArthur family dynamic, and Douglas MacArthur, forever.

  CHAPTER 2

  TURNING POINTS

  Captain MacArthur signed the finished copy of his “Chinese Memorandum” on January 15, 1883. Less than three months later a devastating bout of measles swept through the MacArthur family as they were staying at the Hardy estate at Riveredge, and on April 12 four-and-a-half-year-old Malcolm died.

  The grief-stricken captain, Pinky, and their two surviving boys watched as Malcolm’s little coffin was laid to rest in the Hardy family plot at Cedar Grove Cemetery. For Arthur MacArthur, the boy’s death confirmed him in his steady retreat into the routine of work and duty. He avoided attending social events, stopped playing cards, and maintained a stony silence in the face of his wife’s entreaties that he give up the army and start life over again in the civilian world.1