MacArthur

Introduction

Douglas MacArthur’s tenure as West Point’s superintendent was a tempestuous one.  Many historians have framed it as MacArthur’s futile struggle against traditionalism and reaction, with MacArthur’s efforts at reform being thwarted by a resistant and backward-looking Academic Board. Others depict his changes as ahead of their time that, although temporarily derailed by the board and a close-minded faculty, eventually triumphed in the decades ahead.  In this short paper, I do not intend to contradict these interpretations, nor do I offer my own assessment of how effect MacArthur was in ensconcing his pre-commissioning model at the academy. Instead, I merely aim to provide another perspective on MacArthur’s time as superintendent. I suggest that although MacArthur was keen for change—change based primarily on the lessons he and the Army learned from their experiences in World War I—he was equally committed to maintaining the elements that had served the Academy so well over the years. MacArthur’s challenge as the superintendent was instituting change while maintaining the essential elements of the Academy’s success.

MacArthur Takes Command

Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur became the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy on June 12, 1919.  With his appointment, West Point entered upon a period of profound if temporary change.[1]  He received his charge from General Peyton March, the Army’s Chief of Staff, who told MacArthur that West Point was “in a state of disorder and confusion” and directed him to "revitalize and revamp the Academy."[2] This, MacArthur knew, wasn’t going to be an easy task. West Point had been severely disrupted by the World War.  Army authorities had cut the program from four years to six months, reduced the rigor of the curriculum, and diluted admissions standards. Academic screening for the cadet class that entered in November 1918 was practically nil.[3]  The Military Academy, Lance Betros wrote, became “a glorified training camp for officers,” heavy on tactics and light on academics.[4]   By the time MacArthur arrived on the scene, the entire student body consisted of what was tantamount to two relatively small “freshman” classes.[5]  There was a post-war consensus among senior Army leaders that West Point would return to being an undergraduate institution, but the exact form of what that return would entail had to be worked out. Peyton March believed that the Academy could return to being an academic institution but, in a bow to a cost-conscious Congress, adopt a three-year vice four-year format and focus on producing competent junior officers.   

To complicate matters, MacArthur had to battle a faculty and an administrative system that resisted the type of alterations he championed.  MacArthur’s experiences in World War I convinced him that instruction at the Military Academy embraced obsolete methods of education and leadership.[6] He believed that the Academy’s Academic Board was reactionary and provincial.  MacArthur complained that members of the board "have become set and smug. They deliver the same schedule year after year with the blessed unction that they have reached the zenith of education.’’[7]

War, the superintendent believed, had become more complex and had grown beyond the dimensions that could be fought by standing armies alone. Modern war called for the mobilization and participation of entire societies and nations. The men who lead armies must necessarily be qualitatively different from their predecessors.[8] MacArthur attempted to achieve this transformation through a series of educational and military reforms that many at the time regarded as earth-shaking.[9]

Convinced by his experience in France that wars requiring national mobilization and involving the citizen soldier demanded a new type of leadership, he sought a program of academic, physical, and military training that would match his ideas.[10]  This new program, MacArthur declared, had to produce a type of officer that possessed “an intimate understanding of the mechanics of human feelings, a comprehensive grasp of world and national affairs, and a liberalization of conception which amounts to a change in his psychology of command.”[11] The Military Academy, in other words, had to produce an officer that could teach, lead, and inspire the modern citizen to become an effective officer or soldier. Hazing and the discipline of the Prussian had no place in his vision of officer education. Moreover, and this is important to note, he had to instigate this transition without sacrificing the spirit that had traditionally animated West Point.[12]

There were, MacArthur understood, certain bedrock elements that the Academy had to retain.  Indeed, these elements remained key to West Point’s future—elements that had withstood the test of time and couldn’t be compromised.  Hence, there were conservative aspects to MacArthur’s attempted revamping of the Academy.  The superintendent aimed to jettison the dysfunctional elements of the West Point tradition but keep its foundations. MacArthur’s reform initiatives will be discussed first.

Liberalization

The move toward a “new atmosphere of liberalization” was a key part of MacArthur’s program.  Hazing was one element that had to go. A victim of hazing himself, MacArthur aimed to eradicate this from the Corps of Cadets. But hazing was only a symptom of a larger problem. The Academy, in the superintendent’s view, clung to a rigid, top-down disciplinary system that arguably had a place in a small, regular army concerned primarily with policing the border, maintaining order on the frontier, and effecting internal improvements.  But in the new age of mass, industrialized warfare and the citizen soldier, this system was woefully inadequate.  Thus, the superintendent aimed to enable Academy graduates to deal with the contemporary world by eliminating provincialism, substituting subjective for objective discipline, and progressively increasing cadet responsibility. This latter effort was intended to develop initiative and instill force of character in cadets to replace what he termed the “automatic performance of stereotyped functions.” He also hoped to expand the intellectual horizons of cadets by broadening the curriculum to encompass modern pedagogical methods and more courses in the social sciences and humanities.  At the same time, MacArthur intended to update the military training program and bring West Point into a new and closer relationship with the Army at large.[13]

Until the World War, MacArthur wrote, conflicts between nations had been fought by comparatively a small fraction of the populations involved. These professional armies were composed largely of elements that required the most rigid methods of training and the severest forms of discipline to weld them into effective weapons for use on the battlefield. Officers were trained to handle an intractable element of the population along definite and simple lines. Early in the World War, it became apparent to both sides that professional armies were incapable of bringing combat to a definite decision.[14] Due to the growth of the modern state and the development of more sophisticated methods of communications, war became an enterprise that involved the efforts of every man, woman, and child in the countries affected. Personnel arrangements had of necessity to be improvised, both at the front and the rear; the magnitude of the effort was so great that individuals had to be utilized with the minimum of training.[15] 

This lack of training was largely offset by the relatively high quality of those engaged. This high quality combined with the great numbers involved made it impossible to apply the old rigid methods that had been so successful when battle lines were not so extensive. Discipline need no longer entail extreme methods. Men generally needed only to be told what to do, rather than to be compelled to obey.[16]

More Cadet Privileges

To broaden the cadets’ perspective, MacArthur introduced a series of controversial measures that granted cadets more freedom and more privileges. The superintendent recalled that some West Pointers on occupation duty in Germany after the war showed little knowledge of any fields beyond the military, yet the administration of the Rhineland required them to deal with a complex of political, economic, social, and psychological issues. The narrowness of the Academy-trained officer was, he felt, directly attributable to West Point’s monastic environment.  They had no opportunity to familiarize themselves with the mores and standards of people in the outside world, so that when they graduated and mingled freely with their fellows, they had no common background of knowledge and awareness. They were thrust out into the world a man in age, but as experienced as a high school boy.[17]

Through a series of liberal reforms, he hoped to attack the traditional isolation and secular monasticism that had sealed cadets off from the larger world.  The superintendent gave cadets a small allowance ($5 a month); granted them six-hour leaves away from the Academy during the academic year and two-day leaves during the summer; established a first-class club (a kind of student center for first classmen or seniors); and permitted the first classmen to have greater interaction with officers.  In addition, MacArthur permitted the three upper classes to elect class officers, arranged for cadets to receive two newspapers daily to keep abreast of world affairs, expanded the program of visiting lecturers, and even allowed cadets to start a small newspaper called The Bray (although he quickly squashed it as soon as its cadet editors became too critical of their sensitive superintendent).[18] 

Curricular Reforms

The war had suggested to many military leaders that the officer’s intellectual perspective had to be broadened.  MacArthur was one of those leaders.  To be sure, the superintendent believed that the Academy’s traditional emphasis upon the technical subjects, and the mental habits of precision, accuracy and mental discipline that these subjects supposedly engendered, must be preserved.[19]  At the same time, however, he also thought that greater stress should be placed on “less technical subjects” that had a more general educational value.  After all, industrialized war required leaders who could integrate a great variety of information that spanned the entire intellectual spectrum. Officers now needed knowledge not only of mathematics and engineering but economics and political science as well.[20] 

[1] William E. Simons, Liberal Education in the Service Academies (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1965), 72.

[2] D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur: 1880-1941, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970), 261; Gary D. Langford, 1919: MacArthur’s Vision of West Point’s Future Warriors (West Point, NY: US Military Academy, 1991), 2; Frazier Hunt, The Untold Story of Douglas MacArthur (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1954), 99.

[3] Hunt, 100.

[4] Lance Betros, Carved from Granite: West Point since 1902 (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2012), 41-42.

[5] US Military Academy, Annual Report of the Superintendent, 1920 (West Point, NY: US Military Academy, 1920), 1.

[6] Betros, Carved from Granite, 41-42.

[7] Langford, 1919, 3.

[8] Ibid., 3.

[9] Ibid., 2.

[10] Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 158.

[11] Simons, Liberal Education in the Service Academies, 72.

[12]  Annual Report of the Superintendent, 1920, 3.

[13] Ibid., 3.

[14] Ibid., 3.

[15] Langford, 1919, 6.

[16] Annual Report of the Superintendent, 1920, 3.

[17] Annual Report of the Superintendent, 1921, 17.

[18] Roger Nye, “The United States Military Academy in an Era of Educational Reform, 1900-1925,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1968, 312; William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur1880-1964 (Toronto and Boston; Little, Brown & Company, 1978), 121.

[19] Alex C. Turner, Douglas MacArthur: Strategic Influences and Military Theories, master’s thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, 2018, 36.

[20]  Annual Report of the Superintendent, 1921, 21.