Culture, War, and the Military

Culture, War, and the Military. Critiquing Clausewitz's aphorism that war is the continuation of politics by other means, John Keegan argues to the contrary in A History of Warfare (1993) that “war embraces much more than politics … it is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself.” This applies to the American experience no less than it does to Keegan's examples in the Cossack steppes or the Himalayan foothills.

Exactly how has American culture shaped and defined American military institutions and the ways that Americans have waged war? Was there significant “feedback”—moments when the nature of those institutions or that warfare affected or altered the culture in significant ways? Defining the “culture” of a place as vast and differentiated as the United States at any period, let alone for over three centuries, is a daunting task; but some generalizations are clearly more warranted than others.

By the mid‐nineteenth century, both Americans themselves and a number of insightful European visitors appeared to agree that American culture could be described by the use of such terms as individualism, egalitarianism, “get‐aheadism,” a respect for “rights” and “liberties,” a diverse religiosity, much local boosterism, and a tendency to join private associations of one sort or another. With the exception of the last two, these characteristics were not consistent with military service. Hence it is not surprising that President Andrew Jackson's secretary of war, John Eaton, complained in his annual report for 1830 of his department's inability to recruit even the modest number of soldiers the Congress had authorized. “A country possessing 12 millions of people ought surely to be able at all times” to find and enlist 6,000 acceptable recruits “obtained upon principles of fair contract,” he wrote. “If this can not be effected then will it be better to rely on some other mode of defense, rather than resort to the expedient of obtaining a discontented and besotted soldiery.”

Secretary Eaton did not have compulsory military service in mind. American culture has been averse to the drafting of young men (let alone young women) for most of our past. “Draughts stretch the strings of government too violently to be adopted,” Edmund Randolph told his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, May 1787, a view echoed by Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, in 1863 when he wrote to War Secretary Edwin Stanton: “Drafting is an anomaly in a free State; it oppresses the masses.” Like imprisonment for debt, it had no place in “our system of political economy.” A limited draft was imposed by Congress in that year, to be sure, but it was designed to force individuals and communities to protect themselves against compulsory service with self‐insurance schemes to purchase substitutes or pay commutation fees, like those that had come into being in the British Isles in 1757 and the 1790s when draft laws were passed by Parliament.

Opposition to the draft was pronounced in areas where “the party of personal liberty” (the Democratic Party) was strong. “If citizens do not choose to preserve the government, what right has the government to compel them to do so against their will?” asked D. A. Mahony, an Indiana Democrat and journalist. In Pennsylvania, the three Democrats who constituted the majority of the Supreme Court of that state simply declared the federal draft law unconstitutional, though after the by‐election in November 1863, one Democratic member was replaced by a Republican, and the new Republican majority reconsidered the case and declared the act to be within constitutional bounds.

John Chambers's To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (1987) provides an account of the draft and resistance of Americans to drafts throughout the years before 1917 and the difficulties that advocates of Selective Service faced in 1917, 1940, and in the Vietnam War. By 1973, this relatively brief venture in compulsion had ended.

Secretary Eaton's problem was somewhat different: He was not in charge of a draft; he was simply in charge of a regular army, and that was bad enough. American culture in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries celebrated wartime volunteers, not regulars. Most self‐respecting young men would not stoop to the low pay, regimented life, isolation, and boredom of the regulars unless they found themselves in the direst of straits. Moreover, the regulars were the “standing army” that the majority culture had feared and reviled since at least the mid‐eighteenth century—a force that flourished at society's expense in a land where yeomen, tradesmen, and artisan volunteers were expected to defend their own freedoms with their own lives and honor.

But to say that compulsory service was anathema and that the regular army was not a popular occupational choice or a revered institution for much of our history is not to say that American culture rejected military service. There has always been a small pacifist subculture in America, and many other, nonpacifist youth have been indifferent to the call of fife and drum. But a substantial fraction of young American men have responded to the allure of what the editor of Youth's Companion called “the war‐spirit.” A. A. Livermore referred in 1850 to “the wooden sword, and the tin drum of boyhood,” to “the training and the annual muster” of the militia and the volunteer companies, to “the red uniform and the white plume, and the prancing steed,” to “the ballads of Robin Hood, and the stories of Napoleon, and the ‘Tales of the Crusaders,’” to “the example of the father and the consent of the mother,” to “the blood of youth, and the pride of manhood, and stories of revolutionary sires,” the “love of excitement” and “the bubble of glory.” “By one and all,” he wrote, “the heart of the community is educated for war, from the cradle to the coffin.”

What made these youth inaccessible to Secretary Eaton or many other secretaries of war was that they preferred to do their soldiering in local, volunteer companies. Whether we look to the “covenanted” militia units of seventeenth‐century New England, the volunteers of the French and Indian War or the War, for Independence, the antebellum drill companies in both North and South, the volunteers of the Civil War and Spanish‐American War, or the National Guard and reserve units that dotted the twentieth‐century urban and suburban landscape, the process was essentially the same: Surprisingly large percentages of young men have been prepared to don uniforms and shoulder arms, often for little or no pay, under commanders and in settings of their choosing throughout the course of American history. Before the advent of public high schools and colleges, before football cheers and fraternities, there were volunteer military companies with fancy drill teams and cadence chants that served a similar social purpose for those in their late teens and early twenties, as Marcus Cunliffe's Soldiers and Civilians (1969) has shown.

When units like these joined the colors upon the outbreak of war, their contractarian and egalitarian nature puzzled and annoyed many regular army officers, whether the town militias during King Philip's War in 1675–76, the volunteer companies of the French and Indian War and War for Independence, or the volunteer units from midwestern towns during the Spanish‐American War. The story of the captain of one such group during the American Revolution who appeared before a quartermaster seeking pay and provisions may be apocryphal, but it rings true: “How many men do you command?” the quartermaster asked. “I command no one,” the captain replied. “I am commanded by eighty.”

When the regular army secured its own local volunteers (the Army Reserves) in the twentieth century and gained greater supervisory and regulatory control from the Congress over the nonregular local volunteers (the National Guard units), sparks sometimes flew. Later, in 1961, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara mobilized some 148,000 reservists during a Cold War crisis concerning Berlin. After several weeks of garrison service, many of these reservists became restless, organized mass rallies calling for their own demobilization, and generally behaved in ways the regulars regarded as mutinous. Reservists had formed important parts of American mobilizations for the Korean War in 1950, but after these incidents in 1961, there would be fewer reservists in the next major mobilization, for Vietnam.

The modern, regular‐led military responded relatively effectively to several mandates designed to address problems of racism, sexism, and drug use imported by recruits, draftees, and officers alike. The racial integration of the services beginning in the early 1950s successfully confounded critics of that measure who incorrectly predicted that white soldiers would never accept black soldiers as equals; later, in the 1960s, the McNamara Pentagon effectively saw to the integration of housing in southern communities where military bases were located as the price of obtaining military customers for rental units and realty. Simultaneously, the services, responding to changes taking place in the greater business culture, shifted their leadership style from coercion to “persuasion”—a process that accelerated after the Selective Service System was made moribund in 1973 and the All‐Volunteer Force became the order of the day. It was one thing to require young men to shave their heads and “do as I say” in the days of the draft; it was quite another to expect that of badly needed electronics technicians in an all‐volunteer army, navy, or air force.

In The American Way of War (1973), Russell Weigley argues that since the Civil War, American strategic planners have consistently promoted an “American way of war,” one that relied on firepower and massive use of force. This emphasis on the “annihilation” of enemy strength is to be distinguished from the hit‐and‐run “attrition” strategy practiced by American forces during the American Revolution, when the nation's new leaders lacked the financial and bureaucratic resources to fight in any other fashion, and when its military leaders were comfortable with a Cincinnatus‐like “maneuver” strategy. The leaders who rose to the fore while America industrialized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were committed to the use of men and machines in massive direct attack to achieve “victory,” and they grew increasingly impatient with wars of maneuver and negotiation designed to achieve acceptable political outcomes short of the complete destruction of the enemy's will. The strategic bombing raids during World War II on cities in Germany and Japan produced what W. Darrell Gertch calls a “mutation in American values” as attacks upon population centers became less and less remarkable.

But no sooner had the day of “total” war arrived than it began to lose its appeal for American policymakers. Once intercontinental bombers became operational in the late 1940s, to be followed in short order by intercontinental ballistic missiles, and once the Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them on American targets, a century and a half of “free security” (provided by the combined British and American fleets and some 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean) came to an end, and America entered a forty‐year era of Cold War apprehension. Some would insist on the “rollback” of Soviet power in proper “annihilation” fashion; others on its “containment” in more limited fashion.

Thus when Gen. Douglas MacArthur was dismissed in 1951 by President Harry S. Truman, and MacArthur's strategy of “no substitute for victory” gave way to the “attrition” and limited warfare policies of his successor, Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, it took some time for Congress and the general public to accept the verdict. The problem would resurface in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and the humanitarian and peacekeeping missions in Somalia and Bosnia. Has the greater American culture adopted itself to the new peace‐keeping strategy as thoroughly as the leadership of the U.S. military has?

In the centuries before the advent of “total” war, it was possible for those who served as well as those who remained on what came to be known as “the home front” to find uplifting social and moral lessons in tales from the battlefield of self‐sacrifice and valor. The dying were sometimes reported to have composed themselves in dignity, drawing their hands across their chests; official reports of action were expected to note at least one example of selfless or courageous behavior. Those too old to serve celebrated these feats and victories in poems (such as Herman Melville's On the Photograph of a Corps Commander, 1866) paintings and prints (such as those produced by Currier & Ives during the Civil War), and sculpture (still found today in squares or beside courthouses throughout the land). During the Civil War, as George Fredrickson tells us in The Inner Civil War (1965), a number of New England Brahmins who had been of a Trancendentalist persuasion abandoned that antistatist perspective for the more nationalist patriotism of the Union League clubs once the war began. War and culture were interrelated and sometimes war helped to shape culture.

As the battlefields grew larger and the battles longer in duration and more lethal, in the 1860s, 1918, the 1940s, and thereafter, those Americans who faced death found the experience more daunting than their predecessors, and discovered that their perception of combat as a “testing of mettle,” a rite of passage to full manhood, was hard to maintain, given the impersonal, random nature of the carnage they witnessed all about them. In Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (1987), Gerald Linderman had described this loss of innocence, as have Stanley Cooperman in World War I and the American Novel (1967), Paul Fussell in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989), and Lloyd Lewis in The Tainted War: Culture and Identity in Vietnam War Narratives (1985). Men who entered Vietnam, for example, often did so with a Hollywood‐induced notion of what the war was about, how American forces would fare, and what they could accomplish (what Lewis, quoting veterans, calls a “John Wayne Wet Dream Syndrome”). But they soon acquired what many observers were to style “the thousand yard stare”—a symptom of combat stress that army psychiatrists encountered in each of the wars Americans engaged in throughout the twentieth century. And many of these young men would later experience Post‐Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The horror of war and incompetent leadership would be the theme of many novels produced by veterans of World Wars I and II and Vietnam. The cynicism and anger bubbling up in John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers (1919), e. e. cummings's The Enormous Room (1922), Thomas Boyd's Through the Wheat (1923), William Faulkner's Soldier's Pay (1926), Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory (1935), Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1939), Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951), Joseph Heller's Catch‐22 (1962), Tim O’Brien's Going After Cacciato (1975), and James Webb's Fields of Fire (1978) stand in stark contrast to the more “heroic” war novels written by older nonveterans like Arthur Train (Earthquake, 1918), Edith Wharton (The Marne, 1918), and Willa Cather (One of Ours, 1922). Early Hollywood filmmakers and song writers like George M. Cohan or Irving Berlin celebrated American military efforts and the men who “won’t come back till it's over over there.” They now shared the stage with trench‐bred tunes like Home, Boys, Home, I Don’t Want to Join the Army, antiwar numbers like Country Joe & the Fish's “Fixin’ to Die Rag, and films like Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978), Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), and Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986). This new, more critical perspective on warfare and the American military did not sweep the field or emerge as the dominant paradigm, as it did in some European countries; there was still a place in the hearts and minds of many Americans, for example, for John Wayne's role The Green Berets and Barry Sadler's song The Ballad of the Green Berets as the Vietnam War ground to its bitter end. But the cultural terrain was now a contested one, just as the concept of what constituted “the American way of war” had become contested.

In this new cultural battlefield, a further skirmish was underway by the 1950s: a skirmish over the new masterpieces of the “annihilation” strategy, nuclear weapons. These quickly acquired their champion on the Hollywood scene in Jimmy Stewart's portrayal of an SAC pilot in Strategic Air Command. The alternative view was limned by Peter Sellers's three characters in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, and the contest was joined—a contest fortunately confined to celluloid.
[See also Clausewitz, Carl von; Cold War: Changing Interpretations; Conscription; Disciplinary Views of War: Causes‐of‐War Studies; Pacifism; War: American Way of War.]

Bibliography

S. Kaplan , Rank and Status Among Massachusetts Continental Line Officers, American Historical Review, LVI (1950–51), pp. 318–26.
Edmund Wilson , Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, 1962.
Marcus Cunliffe , Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865, 1968.
W. D. Gertch , The Strategic Air Offensive and the Mutation of American Values, 1937–1945, Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal, XI (1974), pp. 37–50.
Gerald Linderman , The Mirror of War: American Society and the Spanish‐American War, 1974.
Robert Gross , The Minutemen and Their World, 1976.
Peter Karsten , Consent and the American Soldier: Theory versus Reality, Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College, XII (1982), pp. 42–49.
Peter Karsten, ed., The Military in America from Colonial Times to the Present, 1986.
Michael Sherry , The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon, 1987.

Peter Karsten