In June 2007, at a seminar at the U.S. Military Academy, I spent a pleasant evening speaking with a young Army captain who was completing his Ph.D. in history at Duke University, working on a topic of great interest to me: the Root reforms of the U.S. Army in the early 20th century, which “professionalized” the service by institutionalizing professional military education and creating a general staff.
That officer was J. P. Clark, and his research has culminated in this magnificent new book, Preparing for War: The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815–1917. In this work, Clark shows us how history ought to be written — not only illuminating the past but providing a useful way to think about the future.
Clark set out to address this question: What were the main drivers of the Root reforms, “arguably the most far-reaching in the history of the U.S. Army”? The scholarship of military transformation offers three broad theories of change: 1) Some external impetus overcomes recalcitrant military conservatism; 2) internal forces, e.g., competition for resources, create change from within; and 3) external shocks, such as defeat or the emergence of new technology, compel change.
Clark argues that although elements of each cause were present during the late 19th century, none by itself can explain the transformation of the U.S. Army during this period. Superficially, the Root case seems to suggest an external cause. A civilian outsider (Secretary of War Elihu Root) took the ideas of an unconventional military thinker (Emory Upton) regarding such issues as professional military education and a general staff and imposed them on a recalcitrant military (embodied by the commanding general, Nelson Miles). But, as Clark shows, the situation was much more complex.
When Clark started to examine the factors underpinning the Root reforms, he attempted to shoehorn the small, pivotal group of reformist officers at the time into the traditional binary taxonomy of “conservatives vs. reformers.” However, he soon came to understand that the real divisions within the officer corps were generational, resulting in confusing cross-currents that could not fit adequately into that binary.
The attitudes of the Root-era reformers were the result of forces at work when they were commissioned. Too young to have served in the Civil War, they were nonetheless profoundly influenced by that conflict:
This generation had not led corps or divisions in pitched battles but companies and batteries patrolling the frontier or guarding the coasts. Torn between dreams of grand campaigns and the reality of leading small, dusty detachments, that generation was further buffeted by the social, cultural, and technological dislocations that marked the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. Like others of the Gilded Age, they were on the cusp of great change but not ready to abandon old notions.
