A deft history of how the United States built a massive standing army without destroying its own democracy

A study of civil-military relations in any country is part of a study in state formation. The subject is not so much the preoccupation of a historian working on pre-modern states and societies, in which there was no concept of government being based on consent. (Greece at the time of Cleisthenes or Pericles is something we can leave aside.) But if the country being studied is the United States (US), the most powerful nation over the past 100 years or even more, it is bound to be caught up with the affairs of other nations. This is something that The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States, by Kori Schake, has been able to throw light on with deftness.

The book does not take a close look at America’s “colonial experience”. The author will be justified in saying that the question of civil-military relations does not arise in a colonial state. Yet George Washington, the person to whom goes the highest credit in all of the US holding together as a nation and its democracy surviving without a strong internal challenge, was a soldier under the British. The revolutions in France and the US offer a remarkable study in contrast, though the French Revolution had a lot to borrow from the American. None of the major figures in the upheavals of France was a professional soldier. Then of course came a soldier, who gave the impression of taking the revolution forward. But in the process he killed many of the things the revolution had stood for.

There is a story about Washington. When he was a child his father had given him an axe, which he used to cut down a tree. When the incandescent father asked him who had done it, the boy replied: “I can’t tell a lie, father. I did it with the axe you gave me.” Even if this story is apocryphal, the message it sends is all of a piece with what the US thinks of Washington. It was not for nothing that the journalist H L Mencken called him “the first and maybe the last gentleman of the US”. This book bears it out.

It says Washington was “not a brilliant general”. In fact, he was “barely a competent one”. And yet the man commanded respect from people such as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, each of whom was in some way or the other superior to Washington but recognised him as their leader.

“After the revolution the Continental Army dissolved and was furloughed piecemeal; soldiers returned to their communities as the militia model that was both more responsive to local concerns and more comfortable culturally for the US was reasserted.” This significant passage can be read in various ways. One is the way in which the country was carved up. There is the difference between the slave-owning south, which was also cotton-growing, the industrial northeast, and the west, which was the area of free farmers. And how US’ delay in building a standing army led to this carve-up and subsequently to the American Civil War has been the subject of considerable research. What Barrington Moore Jr, has stressed in his classic Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship, American society developed in different directions in the nineteenth century. What was it due to? Though there were centralising tendencies, states too had a strong desire to keep for themselves an element of autonomy. How strong was the US at this time? Not much, and probably this is what led to the Monroe Doctrine, which unfortunately this book does not take up adequately. While it has excelled in describing the relationships among Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, and Philip Sheridan, it stops short of telling the reader why generals behaved well in the time of Lincoln as commander-in-chief (as the President is) and why there was bickering with his successor, Andrew Johnson. The book says major civil-military confrontations occurred during the final years of the Johnson administration. Then, was the smooth functioning entirely due to the personality of Lincoln, as it was in the case of Washington? The book suggests that. “They accepted the commander in chief’s authority even when his suspension habeas corpus was determined to be unconstitutional.” It was in this period after the Civil War that the US did have a standing army. Its creation, the author says, did not exacerbate civil-military relations. “Quite the contrary”, she is of the view. Interestingly, from this period onwards the number of soldiers becoming President became fewer and fewer, and understandably so. The process that the founding fathers had started finally became embedded at this time. However, the book would have done well to examine how rebellions of people such as John Brown (just before the Civil War) and Nat Turner were put down with force, possibly with help from the military. Blacks started being recruited into the army.

At the turn of the century, the American military demanded a greater role in policymaking. With World War I, the country’s isolation came to an end. The standing army was expanded and conscription was introduced. Women began to be hired as nurses. But disputes within the armed forces continued. The conduct of General John Pershing, who led the American forces on the soil of Europe, during the war came under scrutiny.

The years from 1919 to 1939 saw strong anti-war sentiment in American society. In 1928, there was the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, to which the US, along with Germany, Japan, and Britain, were signatories. However, renunciation did not last long, and 10 million Americans served during the Second World War. Military heads had enormous material to contest the political leadership. But they did not do it. Why? “This was due partly to President Franklin Roosevelt’s brilliance as a politician … (this is) perhaps matched only by Washington with the Continental Congress and Lincoln with his late Civil War leadership”. As with Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, so with Truman, who came after Roosevelt. Trouble came. Truman sacked Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War. Since then, there has not been a President, not even John F Kennedy or Dwight Eisenhower, under whom civil-military relations were particularly smooth. Towards the end, the author says: “We must ourselves become more restrained about pulling the military into political and social disputes and allow them to focus more on the work of fighting and winning the nation’s wars.” So there are still wars to be won?!

The book provides details that can be used by a future scholar. It would have been a better work without some structural inadequacies and outright errors. Also, it would have been enriched by similar studies of other countries, of which Britain comes to mind first.

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The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States

By Kori Schake

Polity Press

Pages: 263, Price: ₹2166

The next book that Blueprint will feature: Indian Artillery 1748-1947: Historical Records and Regimental Iconography of Indian Artillery by Ashok Nath