Sovereign Soldiers. Grant Madsen
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authority came through his role as commander in chief, and, thus, it extended only through the military. A civilian authority (such as Taft possessed) required an “organic act” (an act of congress creating or establishing a territory of the United States).22 Taft, a jurist and aspirant to the Supreme Court (he became chief justice in 1921), could hardly stand hearing MacArthur lecture him in areas where he saw himself as expert, even if MacArthur had a point.
The question of authority grew more complicated when it came to mundane tasks. If, for example, Taft ordered the construction of a sewer (a task that seemed civilian in nature), he needed help from the Army Corps of Engineers. To whom should an officer in the corps report, MacArthur or Taft? As it turned out, some of the nastiest fights between Taft and Arthur MacArthur turned on exactly these kinds of questions.23
In 1902, Congress resolved the question in the Philippine Organic Act, which “approved, ratified, and confirmed” Taft’s position as civil governor. At the same time, it declared that “inhabitants of the Philippine Islands … shall be deemed and held to be citizens of the Philippine Islands” and that this citizenship entitled them “to the protection of the United States,” but not American citizenship. The Act guaranteed for Filipinos the rights contained in the U.S. Constitution. It also provided for the creation of a Philippine republic able to pass its own laws, enter into treaties, and mint its own currency. However, it limited this power by declaring that “all laws passed by the Government of the Philippine Islands shall be reported to Congress, which hereby reserves the power and authority to annul the same.”24
While the law clarified Taft’s power in the Philippines, it muddied the relationship of the United States to its new territories. Ultimately, the Supreme Court tried to resolve the legal status of America’s new colonial possessions (including Puerto Rico and Guam) in the Insular Cases (so called because “insular” served as a synonym for “islands”). The Supreme Court explained that the new territories were “not a foreign country” since they were “subject to the sovereignty of” and “owned by the United States.” However, they were “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” since they “had not been incorporated into the United States” as new states and were instead “merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”25 And therein lay the nature of the confusion: whether out of racism, or fear of upsetting the domestic political balance, or whatever else, no branch of the federal government contemplated the eventual incorporation of the new possessions into the constitutional design of the country.26 At the same time, the federal government did not create an institutional framework that looked like the kind of imperial ministries developed by the British, French, and other European powers. Indeed, in an era in which progressive Americans borrowed so many ideas from Europe, no broad effort emerged to administer the new American possessions through a ministry modeled on European precedents.27 Instead, the Philippines remained in a state of semi-independence, codified in 1916 by the Jones Act, which dramatically expanded self-government and promised Filipinos that “tutelage” would eventually come to an end, while nevertheless insisting that the time had yet to come.
In a general sense, the complications that resulted from annexing the Philippines left a bad taste in the mouth of future policy makers. “If Old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed the Spanish fleet,” McKinley once observed to a friend, “what a lot of trouble that would have saved us!”28 Indeed, after the Spanish-American War the United Stated did not attempt to duplicate the outcome of that war and colonize on a semipermanent basis new territory. Yet it has frequently ventured abroad and conquered foes under a wide variety of circumstances. After 1900, these forays took the army to Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Europe; and with each foray, territory outside the United States came under the sovereignty of the United States without becoming a part of the United States. Elihu Root, secretary of war under William McKinley, and later Theodore Roosevelt, famously described the relationship this way: “As near as I can make out, the Constitution follows the flag, but doesn’t quite catch up with it.”29 Precisely because the country refused to create a distinct and lasting bureaucracy dedicated to governing new territories as part of an American empire, the task of governing the space between flag and Constitution fell to the military. As a result, after the Spanish-American War the United States army began to grow governing capacities almost in spite of itself, out of sheer necessity.
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If the federal government spent little time thinking about how to govern territories outside the boundaries of the U.S., it is fair to say that army leaders spent just as little time contemplating the way the army had started to expand its governing capacities into an external state. Military leaders saw counterinsurgency operations (including what today is called “nationbuilding”) as an aberration, as something unlikely to be repeated and unnecessary to future missions. As the army intervened in Latin America, West Point added a course in Spanish but little else to note this new experience in modern warfare. The army’s new War College focused on “catching up” to European powers and preparing the American army for set-piece battles against the Great Power armies. It did not plan to repeat the experience of military government.30
In fairness, the army had a great deal of “catching up” to do. The Spanish-American War had revealed this fact. While John Hay, secretary of state in 1898, called it a “splendid little war … favored by that Fortune that loves the brave,” and while the Spanish-American War lasted only one summer and resulted in a total victory for the United States, the war hardly cast the army in a favorable light.31 In reviewing the conduct of the war afterward, congressional investigators realized that the military’s command structure had been deeply disorganized and unprepared. Victory had, indeed, come through “fortune” more than American military know-how.32 Theodore Roosevelt, a firsthand witness to the disorganization, wanted a “thorough shaking up” of the War Department even before becoming president, largely to streamline the army’s command structure.33 Once in the presidency, he turned to his war secretary Elihu Root to create a centralized military leadership in a single general staff responsible for strategic planning and military preparedness (largely on the model of the Prussian military).34 At the same time, Root spearheaded reforms to revamp education for all levels of the military. He created the Army War College and worked to coordinate its offerings with the service academies and the growing number of state colleges that emerged after the Morrill Land-Grant College Act (1862). That act required colleges to offer military training as part of their curriculum, and Root wanted to standardize the curriculum to train future officers.35
While much more can be said about the process by which the army professionalized at the turn of the century, for our purposes, the events that followed the Spanish-America War emphasize the fact that Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lucius Clay entered military service at a time when the army itself undertook a broad transition in its capabilities and focus. In fits and starts over the next two decades it transformed from a small frontier garrison to a global projection of American power that included nation building efforts outside American borders. Thus, the careers of all three men were swept along by these broader currents of institutional change, and their ability to anticipate and lead that change in turn advanced their careers.
The oldest of the three, MacArthur entered West Point in June 1899, just as his father began to serve as military governor in the Philippines. His entry seemed predestined by the fact that his father had already become an army legend whose legacy he struggled to match. Eisenhower entered West Point in 1911 almost entirely through personal ambition. His family had little money or fame. Clay, the youngest of the three, entered West Point in 1914. He gained admittance as a political legacy: his father, Alexander Clay, had been elected to the United States Senate as a Democrat from Georgia three times before dying suddenly in 1910.
MacArthur was the best student of the three, finishing first in his class.36 Clay had a chance to match that record, finishing first in several subjects (including English and history); however, he finished 128th in “conduct” out of about 150 plebes. Seven weeks before graduation he stood only four demerits short of expulsion. “The discipline at West Point was mainly petty,” he said, “I thought it was foolish.”37 It showed. Eisenhower, in contrast to the other two, finished