Those Who Have Borne the Battle (10 page)

By the end of the First World War, the navy had a force of more than two hundred thousand. The navy did not move to the wartime draft because volunteers allowed it to meet its goals. Ironically, by the summer of 1918 the army insisted that the navy participate in the draft because it claimed that the navy was getting the “best men” prior to the draft calling them into the army. The navy briefly joined in the draft but not in time to affect the personnel who were serving during the war.
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World War I also proved to be the experience that established the modern Marine Corps with a light infantry role. In training for a possible European war, Commandant George Barnett and Colonel John L.
Lejeune (who later commanded the 2nd Division, a composite of US Marine and Army regiments) prepared marines for operations far from ports and ships. The 4th Marine Brigade was one of the early units sent to France and engaged in extensive training there. Army officers, including General Pershing, were somewhat reluctant to use the marines as front-line infantry, but early in the summer of 1918 marines engaged in heavy fighting at Château-Thierry and suffered casualties at the monthlong battle at Belleau Woods that were greater than the total casualties in the previous history of the Marine Corps. The marines conducted themselves courageously and well in this battle. Press reports described it as a great victory for the marines—which it was, but one in which the army was also involved. Pershing was frustrated over the publicity for the marines, and the tension between the Marine Corps and the US Army became entrenched. The marines had not had to use the draft for their recruiting. Recruiting officers in dress blues and the slogan “First to Fight” earned them more than enough strong and eager applicants.
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As the war ended, Secretary of War Newton Baker and the army chief of staff, General Peyton C. March, proposed establishing a standing army of five hundred thousand men and universal military training for nineteen-year-olds in order for the United States to be prepared to play a role in a changing world. There were many opponents of such a significant enhancement of the army: the National Guard feared a reduction in its new reserve role, and those who opposed any sort of large standing army were apprehensive. The expense of this project was particularly troubling. Americans had a good record of paying for the military costs of wars. There was little disposition to make these a continuing government expenditure.

Historically, wartime governments had resorted to different combinations of taxes and debt to provide revenue for the operations of an expanded military. During the Revolution the central government had no power to tax. Efforts to get the several colonies to cede to it the right to impose a tariff on imports failed. The government printed money, but this had a limited value in the face of inevitable inflation. So the government
issued debt and then under the Constitution received authority to tax and used this revenue to retire the war debt. The new federal government raised tax dollars from the tariff and selective excise taxes, notably on commodities like sugar and distilled spirits.

At the outset of the War of 1812, the Republicans promised to avoid direct taxes to support the war effort. But this commitment was impossible to sustain because tariff revenue declined significantly due to the interruptions in commercial shipping. So the political leadership of the party had to issue debt and impose a set of excise taxes to fund the war and retire the debt. These were interim measures, sufficient to pay for the war but not providing any new approach to government finance. The Mexican War did not require any new revenues due to strong tariff income.

The Civil War would change war funding, just as it changed so many things. In order to finance the war, new comprehensive revenue sources were essential. The US Congress approved a range of taxes. The moral and political issues involved and the bloody fighting made it hard for citizens publicly to decline to sacrifice. This may have made it politically easier to impose the first income tax—and silenced some of the dissent on it.
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Northern manufacturers resisted new taxes during the war, but Congress continued to impose them. It was clear that it would not be possible to issue debt for a prolonged war. Early efforts to tax property were met with major opposition from agricultural regions. In 1862 the Union began taxing income as well as consumption. Congress faced major resistance but juxtaposed taxes with the increase in compulsory military service. It was harder to resist this tax, since there was public discontent already with the provisions that enabled Northerners to escape conscription by hiring substitutes. By 1864 the Union was imposing a 10 percent tax on annual income greater than ten thousand dollars.

In the Confederacy there was a significant resistance to direct taxes. The power to levy these seemed to empower a central government with more confiscatory authority than Southerners wanted to allow. Yet by 1863 it was clear that debt would be insurmountable without new revenue, so the Confederate government imposed taxes on income and profits as well as new taxes on sales and licenses. The government had great difficulty collecting these taxes though. As Confederate Secretary of the
Treasury Christopher Memminger admitted, “The frauds and evasions .  . . are a perpetual drain upon the tax.”
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World War I provided a preview of the debate that would mark contemporary controversies over how to pay for modern international wars. With the old Civil War tax having finally been judged unconstitutional, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1913, empowered the federal government to establish a national income tax. The positive themes of the war to make the world safe for democracy generated great enthusiasm—but with respect to the war's taxes, the enthusiasm was tempered with major resistance. Many tax opponents pushed for greater emphasis on debt through bond issuance. Congressional leaders pushed back at those who they believed were deriving financial benefits from the war.

The World War I bond drives, the “Liberty Loan” campaigns, were largely effective. As Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo acknowledged, “We capitalized the profound impulse called patriotism.” Hollywood stars and Boy Scouts assisted in great public programs and rallies to encourage people to buy bonds. Senator Warren Harding called the whole effort “hysterical and unseemly” and an effort to hide and defer the real cost of the war.
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As with the Civil War, conscription was used as an argument that all should join in sacrifice. Congressman James Collier, a Mississippi Democrat, said, “We are going to conscript the dollars necessary to carry on this war. I believe when we send our young men to the front to bear the brunt of battle those who are beyond fighting age and who will not fall within the selective draft should make no complaints when they are called upon to help defray the expenses of the war.” William Borland, a Missouri Democrat, agreed, arguing that the tax “burden ought to fall and will fall upon those members of the community who cannot offer their bodies, their lives, their health, and their strength as a sacrifice for the redemption of their country.” And Republican Edward Little of Kansas said that the government should conscript wealth as well as people: “Let their dollars die for their country too.”
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The 1917 War Revenue Act increased income taxes and imposed a surtax on top, the highest incremental rate going from 13 percent to 50 percent. There was a significant war-profits tax as well. Amid charges of
“socialism,” the taxes did impose the greater burden on the wealthy. As Secretary of Treasury McAdoo said:

The National Defense Act of 1920 authorized an army of nearly 300,000 officers and men, with the National Guard having an explicit role, although one clearly dependent upon the regular army. The legislation did not authorize universal military training. Congress never appropriated money for a force of this size, and for most of the years of the 1920s and 1930s, the army was smaller than 138,000 officers and men, with units undermanned and with supplies and equipment seriously inadequate and outdated. The 1920s and 1930s were years, especially during the Great Depression beginning in 1929, when there was little means or disposition in Congress to address issues such as the development of armor and tanks, new weapons systems, comprehensive airpower, and a modernization and expansion of the fleet, in recognition of the strategic shift to carriers and submarines.

The problems of the army at this time amounted to more than just funding and political support. In fact, one of the obstacles to securing funding was that the army leadership could not agree on goals. Many senior officers in the army were not receptive to new technologies and to new tactical approaches. There were sharp differences of opinion within the army over the role of armor and airpower. This resulted often in stalemate—which meant a reliance on the status quo rather than new strategic thinking.
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In 1938, with the world on the edge of another war, the US Army was eighteenth in size among the armies of the world. It was a relative position that would have been familiar in any of the previous periods of peace in American history. As had been true in this history, it was not necessarily a ranking that resulted in any widespread public concern. One critic of the expansion of the peacetime army following World War I evoked language of the 1780s when he said that any peacetime army of more than nominal size was “uneconomic, undemocratic, and un-American.”
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While few people during this period seemed to agree that the military was un-American or undemocratic, surely during the 1930s there was agreement on at least the economic constraints on military preparedness.

By the 1930s the world was lurching toward another horrible war, one that the United States would not avoid. As the inconceivable became increasingly likely, the issue again would be preparedness. America was far from prepared—but once the war began, it soon would be.

Perhaps by luck and surely by geographic location, the United States had by the 1930s fared well historically with a dominant political view that when wars began, it was time enough to commence any significant mobilization of troops and time enough to appropriate funds for investment in the tools of war. This position had the advantage as well of being fiscally practical.

If the vaunted “citizen soldiers” had at times been reluctant participants and if their role had been often greatly exaggerated, it also was the case that historically the United States had managed to respond to the call of the bugle by organizing military forces as needed and that this seemed sufficient to meet the tasks at hand. Meeting the challenge of mobilization for war then led to the next problem: how does a democratic nation remember those who sacrificed and care for those who served?

 

 

 

 

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N 1799 ANTHONY HASWELL, a feisty Bennington, Vermont, printer, shared his frustration over the treatment of the patriots who fought in the American Revolution:

Not only was this issue troubling the new nation, it was also beginning to find partisan resonance.

In the postwar euphoria, a grateful republic had embraced the Revolutionary War veterans. The embrace was but quick, however, as in those early years the country and its citizens had much else to do. Within a few years, the celebration of the heroic Revolution became an important ritual of national unity. The image that George Washington projected and his biographers embellished, heroic in lifetime and Mosaic in death,
drew in those who served with him. As time passed and as the veterans of the Revolution passed on, the survivors were viewed as even more heroic than they had seemed when they were simply the young neighbors who returned to the business at hand at farms and shops after the war.

As they did in so many areas defining the relationship of the citizen to the state, the revolutionary generation and their immediate descendants wrestled not only with the question of how a democracy should mobilize for war, but also how a democracy should then deal with those who have set aside their civilian lives to engage in democracy's wars. This generation and its immediate successors found some answers that would inform and shape subsequent debate and decisions. By the time of the American Civil War (1861–1865), the country had learned how to form a standing military force for wartime—in this case, two military forces—even as the nation remained innately suspicious of a standing army. Through this process—and perhaps providing a basis to accept this new view of the military—the country also expanded the national narrative to celebrate military accomplishments. The nation's veterans came to personify the heroic, patriotic national memory.

At the beginning of the War of 1812, a new publication for young readers published a story that appealed to a sense of obligation and of gratitude to those who had taken up arms for the Republic. The writer began his tale by describing a chance meeting on the street with a man who was seeking a gift. “I am a poor old soldier! (said a tremulous voice, as I turned the corner of the street,) Your honor cannot, surely pass a poor old soldier!” The author admitted that “an old tattered military coat, and a wooden leg, always softens my heart to pity, and disposes me to acts of benevolence.” The soldier spoke of bitter campaigns, of his body broken, his brother killed, and his wife deserting him during the American Revolution. Then “he turned away, to hide a tear that glistened in spite of all his courage.” The narrator noted that most citizens, even the most selfish, responded to these types of appeals. “I have often been pleased to see a maimed and disabled soldier, begging through our streets, when the liberal hand of charity has been opened to assist him: a smile of approbation, or something (I know not what) has flashed in my face, to see a very miser
relent at his piteous tale, and with a half formed resolution, contribute his farthing.” The story concluded with a plea: