American Caesar Page 8

  Wearing a first captain’s gold stripes, he served as the superintendent’s representative, inspected the mess hall daily, and “drove the corps” to barracks with sharp, ringing commands each evening. He was, Cocheu said, first captain “in fact as well as in name.” When the mess-hall waiters went on strike just before the noon meal one day, cavalrymen from the academy stables were drafted to take their place. The result was chaos. Colonel Charles G. Treat, the commandant of cadets, implored the corps to be cooperative and patient until new waiters could be hired. Then MacArthur spoke. “He did not ask the corps to do anything,” Cocheu recalled. “He told them, in plain words, just what they would do. And they did it. Colonel Treat had pleaded; MacArthur commanded.”34

  MacArthur as a West Point plebe, 1899, with his mother

  The octagonal tower room he occupied as first captain—No. 1123 in the 120-year-old first-division barracks—may still be seen at West Point. It is equipped with a fireplace, and in his day a cadet leaning on the sill could clearly see a vigorous lady in black satin emerging from Craney’s, impatient for her daily rendezvous. She was proud of him now, though there had been a few bad moments along the way. In his third year on the plain, MacArthur’s passion for baseball had threatened his academic standing. Sep Johnson would later remember him as a “top-hole baseball player,” but this is untrue. He was still a weak hitter and was barely adequate in right field. Yet he loved to play. “Dauntless Doug,” as the other cadets called him, in the straight-arrow way they had then, was, the team captain remembered a half-century later, “a heady ball player. He was far from brilliant, but somehow he could manage to get on first. He’d outfox the pitcher, draw a base on balls . . . or outrun a bunt—and there he’d be on first.”35

  The high point of his athletic career came in Annapolis on Saturday, May 18, 1901. It was the first baseball game ever played between Army and Navy, and when Dauntless Doug came to bat, the midshipmen, who had been reading all about General MacArthur in the Philippines, sang:

  Are you the Governor General or a hobo?

  Who is the boss of this show?

  Is it you or Emilio Aguinaldo? 36

  To their delight, he struck out. The next time up, he fouled out. But the third time he drew a walk. Later in the inning a cadet named John Hen-singled him home with what proved to be the decisive run; Army won, 4 to 3. MacArthur gave up baseball in his last year so he could hit the books harder, but he did manage the football team that fall. And all his life he would be fiercely proud of his varsity “A.” Aged seventy, he wore it on his bathrobe the night before the Inchon landing. When it became frayed during his retirement at the Waldorf Towers, a delegation of cadets rode down from the Point to present him with a new one, and high-school athletes being wooed by the academy in his twilight years would be invited to the Waldorf, where the five-star general would tell them how fine it would be if they, too, became dauntless Black Knights of the Hudson.37

  Despite his attainments, he appears to have been neither prig nor martinet. The corps was transported to Washington for McKinley’s second inaugural, and MacArthur bunked with Sep Johnson on the top floor of the old Ebbet House. The night before the parade, while Douglas was out, Sep staged the battle scene from Macbeth for some friends and wound up pinning his roommate’s tarbucket to the door with a cadet saber. MacArthur said nothing; he wore the shako, hole and all. Another time he found Sep and his cronies shooting craps in a men’s room during a cadet hop. As first captain he could have put them on report. Instead he murmured, “I see you fellows prefer boning to dancing,” and strolled out.38

  MacArthur (second row, far right) with other members of the West Point baseball team

  MacArthur (in cadet uniform) as manager of the West Point football team

  MacArthur as a West Point second classman, 1902

  MacArthur in a dramatic West Point cadet pose

  More than once MacArthur himself flouted academy rules, and not just because he lacked a pass to Craney’s. When Superintendent Albert L. Mills permitted the corps to attend a New York horse show, Douglas and two classmates slipped away to Rector’s on Broadway, greeted “Diamond Jim” Brady, and downed three martinis apiece. “And then,” he recalled late in life, “we swanked out to a burlesque show. We loved it!” Marty Maher always believed, though he couldn’t prove it, that MacArthur was the brains behind a celebrated West Point prank: after taps one night an ingenious group of cadets rolled the reveille gun across the plain and hoisted it to the roof of the West Academic Building. A detachment of men working with block and tackle took the better part of a week to lower the cannon, and the culprits were never discovered. During MacArthur’s yearling year his name was mentioned in an inquiry into another reveille gun antic. On the night of April 16, 1901, several members of the corps moved the cannon to the superintendent’s lawn and pointed the muzzle at the front door. Nothing was proved against Douglas and he escaped discipline.39

  He came closest to a premature end of his military career in an incident which had nothing to do with high jinks. To him it was a matter of personal honor; others saw it as a warning that his character might be tragically flawed. Traditionally, cadets who had earned high grades in a course were not required to take the final examination in it. MacArthur had the highest mathematics average on the plain, but his name was posted on the “goat sheet” of those who would have to take a math exam. He stormed off to the home of the instructor, Lieutenant Colonel Wright P. Edgerton, who calmly told him that because illness had prevented him from taking several quizzes, he could not be excused. Fuming, MacArthur returned to his room. Cocheu asked him what he planned to do. Douglas said, “If my name is not off that list by nine in the morning, I’ll resign!” No one could dissuade him, not even his mother. Cocheu was awake all night, but his roommate slept soundly, and at 8:50 A.M. an orderly arrived with word from Edgerton that he would not be expected at the examination after all. The colonel lost face, of course, but he can’t be faulted; later the problem of MacArthur’s unflinching will would confound men more illustrious than he.40

  Evenings the first classmen sang, to the tune of Aura Lee:

  To the ladies who come up in June

  We’ll bid our fond adieu

  Here’s hoping they be married soon

  And join the army, too.

  Army blue! Army blue!

  Hurrah for the army blue!

  We’ll bid farewell to cadet gray

  And don the army blue.

  If Pinky had been unsuccessful during the mathematics incident, she was more effective in shielding Douglas from romance. With his looks, his bearing, and his accomplishments, he inevitably attracted demure glances from the drags invading Craney’s for hops. Typically, one Bess Follansbee of Brooklyn confided to her diary: “I liked him immensely and thought him a splendid dancer. He is tall, slim, dark with a very bright, pleasant manner.” The bolder and more forward girls singled him out. He developed a line. One girl would begin, “Ooh, you’re the son of the general in the Philippines,” and he would reply, “Yes’m, General MacArthur has that proud distinction.” Nevertheless, he had a healthy sexual appetite; he knew Flirty wasn’t just for mothers. In later years he confessed that a tactical officer had once caught him there when Douglas’s limbs were entangled with a girl’s. It was an “awful moment,” he remembered, but the officer merely grinned and said, “Congratulations, Mr. MacArthur.” Cocheu says that MacArthur did not discuss his exploits with him, but later it was rumored that Douglas had set a corps record in 1903 by being affianced to eight girls at the same time. When this was mentioned to him he replied chauvinistically, “I do not recall that I was ever so hotly engaged by the enemy.” However many it was, Pinky took the field on each occasion, breaking off the action. At Craney’s, over tea, she would explain to those who thought themselves betrothed that it was all a mistake, that he was already married to his career. Doubtless there were tears and protests, but Douglas didn’t contradict his mother—yet.41


  On Thursday, June 11, 1903, that year’s class became full-fledged members of “the Long Gray Line”—the procession of academy graduates which had begun with the first class in 1802. “MacArthur!” the adjutant bawled, and the twenty-three-year-old head of the corps, the cadet whose classmates had voted him likeliest to succeed, received his certificate of graduation. He in turn handed it to his father, who had arrived from San Francisco for the occasion, and smiled down at his beaming mother. Then the band trooped the line playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Home, Sweet Home,” and “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”42

  As a second lieutenant he preferred assignment to the cavalry, but because of his record on the plain he automatically went into the Corps of Engineers, where advancement was more rapid. It didn’t really matter; he would have risen anyhow, and whatever the branch, he would have been professionally unprepared for the twentieth century’s wars. He had never fired a machine gun. He knew nothing of barbwire, tanks, or amphibious warfare. All West Point had given him was a lodestar, the academy motto: “Duty, Honor, Country.” Nevertheless he regarded that as a great deal. To Cadet C. F. Severson he had confided that “next to my family, I love West Point,” and that he would always try to live up to the standards of the MacArthur’ and the Long Gray Line. Severson himself took a less romantic view of his friend. To classmates he noted that on the subject of the first captain the corps appeared to be divided into two groups: those who resented MacArthur’ high opinion of himself and those who felt that modesty, for so gifted a man, would be hypocrisy. That division would persist into another generation, eventually splitting the American nation in a historic schism.43

  It is difficult to think of Douglas MacArthur as a shavetail, and in fact he was not an ordinary one. In his early twenties he was already haughty, dashing, fearless, and consumed by the ambitions bequeathed him by his parents. Significantly, he spent his first two months as an army officer in San Francisco with his father, now on the political skids, and his mother. For a while Lieutenant MacArthur amused himself by stalking an escaped military prisoner, “a burly fellow armed with a scythe,” as he later described him, whose “hiding place was easy to locate . . . I had him covered before he had a chance to make a move. When I turned him over to the guard, he just spat at me and snarled, ‘You damn West Pointers!’ “ Already he possessed a sense of theater.44

  Most of his time in San Francisco was spent catching up with a world from whose evolutions he had been shielded during his four claustral years on the Hudson. Some grasp of the mood of 1903 is important to an understanding of MacArthur, for part of it would always be with him, a gauge by which he would measure later events. In some respects it was a year of technological harbingers, witnessing the appearance of the first feature movie, The Great Train Robbery; of Arthur D. Little’s rayon, the first synthetic fabric; of the first wireless transmission, between Old Point Comfort and Cape Charles, Virginia; of the Panama Canal; and, that December, of the Wrights’ historic fifty-nine-second flight over the wastes of Kitty Hawk. Elsewhere there were signs of stirring social consciences—the disclosures of the muckrakers were appearing in Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, Everybody’s, McClure’s, and the American. Ida M. Tarbell published her exposure of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens was writing The Shame of the Cities, and David Graham Phillips was researching The Treason of the Senate.45

  All these doubtless contributed to the liberal, progressive side of MacArthur, which would flower during his viceregal reformation of Japan in the late 1940s, but there was much more to 1903 than that. Culturally the country remained gyved to the horsey, sentimental nineteenth century. Theodore Dreiser’s brother Paul, composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal, “ was approaching the crest of his popularity. That was also the year of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Small boys wore celluloid picture buttons of military heroes, warships, flags, and jingoistic mottoes. In the hammocks and deck chairs which were as symbolic of the time as mandolins and cigar-store Indians, literate Americans that summer were reading Kipling’s Just So Stories, George Barr McCutcheon’s Brewster’s Millions, Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s Lady Rose’s Daughter, and Harold Bell Wright’s That Printer of Udells. Well-to-do women read a great deal, partly because there was little else for them to do except play tennis or practice the two-step and the waltz. If they were unmarried, chaperons or maids escorted them everywhere. If widowed, they wore weeds for a year. If married, they sailed about in whalebone corsets, corset covers, chemises, drawers, shirtwaists, petticoats, and two-piece dresses, the whole ensemble topped by a hat featuring a dead bird of brilliant plumage. Pinky MacArthur was thus encumbered in all seasons—even during her tour of tropical Asia.46

  Women farther down the social scale were drudges. Only one in five had a job—for which she received six to eight dollars a week in exchange for sixty hours in a mill or, in a place of business, as a “typewriter’—but the housewife’s lot was even harder. Household gadgets, as the term is understood today, did not exist. Electricity brightened the lives of only the prosperous; the rest of America was gaslit. Gossiping on the telephone was out; there were only 1,335,911 phones in the country, most of them in offices, public places, and the homes of the well-to-do. No clever soaps assisted the wife tackling her husband’s cuspidor or the family’s painted cast-iron bathtub. And she was lucky if she had a tub to clean. Outside the cities, beyond the reach of water and sewer lines, bathrooms and indoor toilets were luxuries as rare as automobiles, of which, the last census had revealed, there were just 13,824 in the United States. Transportation was provided by railroads, by trolley and cable cars, and, most commonly, by horses. In 1903 horses were as common as internal-combustion engines are today. They pulled surreys, buggies, wagons, sleighs, plows, and, in teams of three, fire engines. Roads were unpaved, and mobility, by later standards, glacial. A five-mile shopping trip was a day’s excursion. To fathom the isolationist mind-set of MacArthur’s generation one must comprehend the parochialism of the America they first knew. For MacArthur, to adjust from that to the command of the first United Nations army was a tremendous hurdle, even for a long lifetime. It is hardly surprising that he didn’t quite clear it.

  Like their wives, the husbands of 1903 put in long hours in fields, shops, and offices. Since their average annual wage was five hundred dollars, and since a tycoon like Andrew Carnegie was making as much as twenty-eight million dollars in a year—without taxes—one might expect to find that a mass was flocking to the banner of Eugene Debs. Nothing of the sort happened. The typical American male was proud of the country’s “self-made men” and “captains of industry”; with pluck and gumption, he believed, his son could wind up like J. P. Morgan, sitting in the mahogany-paneled library of his brownstone mansion at the corner of Manhattan’s Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street, counting his millions. A boy might grow up to hatch a brilliant scheme, like Ellsworth M. Statler of Buffalo, who was planning a hotel in which each room actually had its own private bath. Or he might design a skyscraper rivaling New York’s Ivins Syndicate Building, tallest in the United States, attaining a giddy height of twenty-nine stories. That was the dream, reinforced by Horatio Alger and W. H. McGuffey’s readers. Douglas MacArthur shared it, then and forever after. His glowing tributes to free enterprise, issued a half-century later, make sense only when one remembers that in a romantic cubicle of his heart, in a nostalgic compartment of his mind, it would always be 1903, when GAR veterans led patriotic torchlight parades, when lunch was a quarter and dinner fifty cents and a stein of beer a nickel, when men wore derbies and shaved with straight razors—a set of which his father had given him as a West Point graduation present—and when, in San Francisco, Second Lieutenant Douglas MacArthur boarded the liner Sherman with the 3rd Engineer Battalion for a thirty-eight-day voyage to the land which had broken his father and would be the making of the son: the Philippines.47

  MacArthur as a second lieutenant

  Landing in Ma
nila, MacArthur inspected the old cannon, the stumps of ancient fortifications, and the rusting remains of Spanish ships at the naval base of Cavite. From Cavite he looked across the deep, blue-gray bay to a dark green, tadpole-shaped, volcanic island, the key to Manila’s defenses—Corregidor. Already he had fallen in love with the 7,083-island Philippine archipelago: “the languorous laze that seemed to glamorize even the most routine chores of life, the fun-loving men, the moonbeam delicacy of its lovely women, fastened me with a grip that has never relaxed.”48

  Posted first to the port of Iloilo on Panay and then to Tacloban on Leyte, he supervised the construction of a dock and led patrols. One afternoon he discovered that those who had warned him that not all the men there were fun-loving had been right. Some of the Visayan tribesmen were Yankee haters. That November, scorning their threat, he led a detachment into a jungle, which he knew to be dangerous, to obtain timber for piling and was ambushed by two guerrillas. A bullet tore through the crown of his campaign hat and into a sapling behind him. Drawing his .38 pistol, he shot both ambushers. An Irish sergeant inspected the bodies, saluted the twenty-three-year-old officer, and said: “Begging the lieutenant’s pardon, but all the rest of the lieutenant’s life is pure velvet.” In a letter to his mother MacArthur wrote, much like George Washington before him: “I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound.” Later, however, he admitted that after this baptism of fire he was pale and shaky.49