DOUGLAS MACARTHUR WAS BORN January 26, 1880, at Fort Dodge, Arkansas, in what is now Little Rock, where his father, a captain in the regular army, was stationed. Like George Marshall and George Patton, MacArthur’s family had immigrated to America from Great Britain, but instead of landing in Virginia the MacArthurs alit in Massachusetts, heart of Yankeedom. Neither did they arrive accompanied by some great chieftain, but a mere widow and her ten-year-old boy Arthur MacArthur I, in 1825, to escape the endless wars and poverty that afflicted all but the upper and royal classes during that period of European development.
It had not always been that way. In the long ago past of the dim Scottish Highlands the boy’s ancestors had been among the wealthy and ferocious MacArtair clan—kilted, dirked, and with their own haunting war cry: “Listen! O Listen!”—masters of all they surveyed along the shores of Loch Awe in the earldom of Garmoran. Until, that is, in 1427, during the reign of King James I, Lain MacArtair, chief of the clan, was summoned to Inverness where he was beheaded by the king for reasons that have vanished in the mists of time.3 Afterward, the MacArtair clan—once said to be a thousand strong—lost its property and migrated to Glasgow where most of its members, being warriors and highland country people, became more or less civilized—but also mired in poverty and despair, and most remained so four hundred years hence.
Thus, in 1825 the newly arrived widow MacArthur took her son to the small settlement of Chicopee Falls, near the city of Springfield in the beautiful Connecticut River Valley. There she remarried, apparently handsomely, because her son was educated at Wesleyan and Amherst colleges, studied law in New York, and was admitted to the bar in 1840.4
In 1844 Arthur MacArthur I married Aurelia Belcher, daughter of a New England manufacturer (whose grandmother Sarah Barney Belcher [1771–1867] became the common ancestor not only of Douglas MacArthur but of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt as well). The following June Aurelia gave birth to a son, Arthur II. Then, for unknown reasons, Arthur I packed up his roots and moved the family way out to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he became a prominent Democrat and in 1855 was elected lieutenant governor of the state. He was forty years old.
Within two months of his inauguration MacArthur I found himself acting as governor of Wisconsin following a voting scandal that caused the newly elected holder of that higher office to resign in disgrace. The political issues of the day—namely the hated Kansas-Nebraska Act†—had nearly upset the peace of Wisconsin, a stronghold of the fledgling Republican Party. Nevertheless, this animosity did not seem to rub off on MacArthur, who in 1857 was elected as a circuit judge and served two terms. In 1870 he was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, which governed the Federal District.5
Living in Washington, Judge MacArthur moved in the highest social and political circles, lecturing on history, law, and many other subjects in the capital’s various clubs and lecture halls, and writing no fewer than ten books between 1875 and 1892 on history, education, law, and linguistics.6
General Douglas MacArthur remembered his grandfather well and spent time with him during these heady Washington days up until his death in 1896, when Douglas was sixteen. From his grandfather, Douglas got the sense that being a MacArthur meant commanding “the respect of important personages at all levels of government and society,” and that he was “obligated to conduct himself with honor, gallantry and magnanimity.” The “family heritage,” according to MacArthur biographer Clayton James, “which [Judge MacArthur] largely created and passed on to Douglas, was one of nobility.”7
He also taught his grandson how to play poker and when he was older Douglas liked to tell the story of the time he was holding four queens and bet “every chip I had,” only to see his grandfather lay down four kings with the admonition: “My dear boy, nothing is sure in this life.”8
WHEN THE CIVIL WAR BROKE OUT IN 1861, Arthur II was fifteen and begging to join the Union Army. Instead his father sent him to military school for a year with a mind to get him into West Point (undoubtedly in the belief that the war would be over by the time he graduated). By that time the family was living in Washington and, armed with letters of recommendation from the Wisconsin governor and escorted by one of the state’s U.S. senators, Arthur—then seventeen—got an audience with the president. Lincoln graciously but regretfully informed the boy that he had used all of his presidential vacancies for West Point until 1863, which prompted the headstrong boy to enlist immediately in the 24th Wisconsin Infantry, a volunteer regiment then being formed in Milwaukee. On August 24, 1862, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and became the regimental adjutant.9
Two months later during the Rebel general Braxton Bragg’s incursion into Kentucky, the Confederates attacked the Federal Army of the Ohio near the town of Perryville. During the fierce and confused battle (which concluded more or less as a draw) young Arthur II was cited for conspicuous gallantry by his division commander, General Philip H. Sheridan, and breveted to the rank of captain.
Two months later, on the last day of 1862, Captain Arthur MacArthur II’s army collided again with Bragg at the brutal Battle of Stones River, which produced 25,000 casualties over three days’ fighting and a Union victory. The 24th Wisconsin bore the brunt of the fighting and suffered 40 percent casualties, including every mounted officer except MacArthur, who was again “mentioned in dispatches” for gallantry.
Nearly a year later, on November 25, 1863, Arthur MacArthur II was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading a charge that ultimately drove the Confederate States Army from the heights surrounding Chattanooga, Tennessee, and paved the way for William Tecumseh Sherman to march on Atlanta. Captain MacArthur, Douglas’s father, seized the regimental standard of the 24th Wisconsin and, shouting “On Wisconsin!,” personally planted it on the crest of Missionary Ridge when the Rebel army was repulsed.
MacArthur was promoted to major and given command of the regiment, which he held until the war’s end. He participated in all of the vicious fighting leading to the Battle of Atlanta itself, where he was wounded in the chest and arm, but recovered in time to participate in the slaughter known as the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee. There, five Confederate generals were killed or mortally wounded in the last great Rebel charge of the war. MacArthur led a counterattack that broke the Confederate assault and restored the Union position, but he was shot in the knee, shoulder, and chest, putting him out of action for the rest of the war. Still, it earned him promotion to brevet colonel “for gallant and meritorious services.” He was nineteen years old.
MacArthur began studying law under his father, but he found himself restless for the rough-and-tumble military life and decided to make a career of the army. The end of the war, however, produced a great riff, or discharging, of officers in the U.S. Army, and, despite glowing letters of commendation from politicians and other noteworthy people, the best that Washington would offer MacArthur was a second lieutenant’s commission. A year later, however, he was promoted to captain, but a captain he would remain for the next twenty-three years.
AT LAST IN 1874, after seven years on the Plains battling hostile Indians, the 13th Infantry was posted to New Orleans where the regiment hoped to enjoy the serene pleasantries of Southern civilization. Instead they found themselves involved in propping up a corrupt carpetbagger political machine at the direction of the Grant government in Washington. Distasteful as this task was, Yankee captain Arthur MacArthur II improbably met, fell in love with, and married a Southern belle from Virginia whom he encountered at a masked Mardi Gras ball in the winter of 1875.
She was Mary Pinkney “Pinky” Hardy, the vibrant, strong-willed twenty-two-year-old daughter of an aristocratic FFV‡ planter and cotton merchant from Norfolk whose family had been driven from their home Riveredge by the Union Army at the beginning of the war.§ It was love at first sight.
Even though her three brothers boycotted the wedding—they were VMI graduates and former Confede
rate officers—Arthur and Pinky were married that same spring amidst much pomp and gaiety at Riveredge, a three-story redbrick Federal-style mansion on the Elizabeth River. A child, Arthur III, came the following year and another, Malcolm, in 1878. For each birth Pinky came home to Riveredge.
At first the army seemed to have mercy on Captain MacArthur, assigning him to Washington where he and Pinky were for a time able to enjoy the company of his father, the judge, and the many friends he’d made in high places. But just as they were becoming comfortable, orders sent him back to Louisiana, then to Little Rock, Arkansas. There, in 1880, in a towered old arsenal building converted to married officers’ quarters, Douglas MacArthur was born. He arrived “sooner than expected,” so Pinky was unable to return to Virginia beforehand.10
At this point the army dealt Arthur a low hand, assigning him and Company K of the 13th Infantry to Fort Wingate, one of the most desolate and remote posts in the United States. It was in the northwest corner of the New Mexico Territory, one hundred miles from nowhereǁ between the vast Navajo reservation to the north and the hostile Apache territory to the south that Geronimo controlled.
In 1883 tragedy struck the MacArthur family when Malcolm, age five, died of measles and was buried at Riveredge. But army life in the Southwest went on as usual. The posts were rude and rugged, even for the men, while for the women such as Pinky MacArthur they were “Gethsemanes” of heat and dust and cold and dust, interspersed by storms, flash floods, rattlesnakes, scorpions, even Gila monsters—and always the eternal dust. Rainbows were rare.11
The following year, Company K was assigned to an even more godforsaken outpost, tiny Fort Selden on the Mexican border, a 300-mile journey by wagon and foot. Douglas, then age four, wrote in later life that he specifically recalled marching next to the company first sergeant, Peter Ripley, at the head of the column during the monthlong trek toward the Rio Grande.
The far-flung Fort Selden became the MacArthurs’ home for the next three years while Company K chased after the elusive Geronimo and his band of Chiricahua Apache, which had gone off the reservation and onto the warpath. It was the army’s duty to protect workmen on the Southern Pacific Railroad, the stage express, and various small settlements in the area. The garrison of the fort comprised Captain MacArthur and his executive officer, an assistant surgeon, and forty-six enlisted men who lived in one-story flat-roofed, dirt-floored adobe shelters.
Young Douglas adored it, and later he wrote that the first sound he remembered hearing was the post bugle. “It was here I learned to ride and shoot before I could read and write,” he said afterward, “indeed almost before I could walk and talk.” Yes indeed, Douglas MacArthur grew up in the last of the Old West, where once a band of bold and unhappy Apache warriors showered the fort with flaming arrows before riding off into the night.
One day he and his older brother, Arthur III, were out on their spotted Navajo ponies when away in the shimmering desert there appeared a strange-looking creature that proved to be, of all things, a camel. They stopped and gaped as the swaying camel trotted toward them, until it pulled up a few yards away, bared its teeth, and snorted. It was amazing and somewhat frightening to Douglas that real camels were so much bigger and more alarming than picture camels, but he stood his ground and yelled at the beast loud as he could until it turned and clattered off, swaying into the desert whence it came.a Later when the incident was reported to the senior MacArthur, Douglas having informed his father that he hadn’t been afraid, the reply stuck with him the rest of his days: “Naturally, son. You’re a MacArthur.”12
About this time Pinky began the rudiments of an education that included, “above all else,” MacArthur remembered, “a sense of obligation. We were to do what was right no matter what the personal sacrifice might be. Our country was always to come first. Two things we must never do—never lie, never tattle.”13
In 1886, because of MacArthur’s noteworthy leadership, Company K was selected to be stationed at the new Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to help train army officers. There, Douglas entered first grade in public school and was exposed for the first time to a regular academic discipline, at which he fared poorly according to his own account.
As the final decade of the nineteenth century approached, Arthur MacArthur II was in his twenty-third year as an army captain when he was finally blessed with a stroke of luck. General Alexander McCook—the old Indian fighter in whose command Arthur had served at the battles of Perryville and Stones River—was commandant of the Infantry and Cavalry School and gave Arthur a glowing recommendation for promotion to major in the Adjutant Generals Department in Washington, D.C. McCook’s endorsement said of Arthur MacArthur, among other things, “He is beyond doubt the most distinguished captain in the Army of the United States.” The appointment was soon forthcoming.
As Douglas put it afterward, when the family arrived in Washington it “was my first glimpse at that whirlpool of glitter and pomp,” and he likewise got a taste, albeit from overhearing adult conversations, of the political, social, and financial intrigues infecting the American capital city. He also had time to spend with his grandfather, the first Arthur MacArthur, who was the epitome of Washington’s “glitter and pomp,” and for the next five years he attended a public school on Massachusetts Avenue where his grades remained “average.”14
In 1893 Arthur was posted to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, a move that produced an epiphany of sorts for young Douglas, the reluctant scholar. He was enrolled for high school in the West Texas Military Academy that was run by an Episcopal bishop who was also rector of the post chapel. Suddenly Douglas found his horizons expanding with “a desire to know, a seeking for the reasons why, a search for the truth.”
The dull Latin and Greek he’d learned in grade school now became pathways to the classics that George Patton so fervently craved. He studied Homer and Virgil and translated the Iliad and Aeneid, which described “the nerve-tingling battlefields of the great captains.” He now saw the Bible in an entirely different light; the Old Testament became an epic story of wars and noble leaders, of plagues and floods and heroes and persecutors. His marks shot up and academic honors and medals came his way. He played sports—first team in football and baseball and the school’s tennis champion. “My four years there were undoubtedly the happiest of my life,” he would write seventy years later.
His father, now promoted to lieutenant colonel, was posted to the Department of the Dakotas in Minnesota, but the family made its headquarters in Milwaukee, which remained home. West Point, of course, became the natural, almost unspoken, goal for Douglas. When a competitive examination was announced for a vacancy in Milwaukee congressman Theobald Otjen’s district, he began preparing, tutored by the principal of a local high school. In the spring of 1898 he passed the exam with flying colors; of thirteen applicants, he scored highest by far—with a 99.3 average to the next man’s 77.9.
MEANWHILE, BIG THINGS WERE AFOOT for Lieutenant Colonel Arthur MacArthur II—bigger than he ever imagined. In 1898 war was declared with Spain and MacArthur was made a brigadier general and given a brigade of forty-eight hundred men, which he expected to take to Cuba to fight. Instead, at the last minute, orders came to move the brigade to San Francisco and then board ship for the Philippines where the Spanish fleet had been sunk in the Battle of Manila Bay. The Spanish army was nevertheless persisting in holding on to what had been a Spanish possession for the past 350 years. Arthur had to send for a map for he didn’t even know where the Philippines were.15
They arrived into a strange war in which the Spanish army was fighting an insurrection led by Emilio Aguinaldo, whose 60,000 to 80,000 Filipino rebels joined sides with the 11,000-man U.S. forces to eject the Spanish from the islands once and for all. When that was accomplished, however, Aguinaldo turned on the Americans, who had promised the Filipinos self-government, but only after a “period of adjustment” to ready them for democracy. Brigadier General Arthur MacArthur II pleaded wi
th his superiors to make concessions to the rebels, but the American commander insisted that they must first lay down their arms.
In February 1899 Aguinaldo attacked Manila, but Douglas’s father, now a fifty-three-year-old major general, repelled them in a dozen savage battles that he personally commanded at the front. He narrowly escaped death several times. The fighting continued while more and more U.S. troops were thrown into the fray, until there were no fewer than 150,000 American soldiers in the Philippines fighting the guerrillas.
In May of 1900 MacArthur was put in command of the Philippines Territory with the title of military governor. Even as the fighting went on MacArthur began a civil action campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Filipino people: he built schools and hospitals, dug wells and improved roads and harbors; he rewrote the cruel Spanish laws and inserted the right of habeas corpus into the legal code. Strict penalties were enforced on American soldiers who abused the Filipinos, and even when Aguinaldo was at last captured, MacArthur took him into the Malacañang Palace, or governor’s mansion, and befriended him to the extent that Aguinaldo told his people to lay down their arms.b
Despite this, the killing did not stop as pockets of guerrillas continued to attack Americans all over the two thousand inhabited Philippine Islands. In exasperation, President William McKinley sent out a “U.S. Philippine Commission” to deal with the problem, which was causing him political headaches. Heading the commission was the colossal 325-pound William Howard Taft, an Ohio judge whose motto, “The Philippines for the Filipinos,” did not square with Major General MacArthur’s belief that the territory was not yet ready for self-government. Taft and MacArthur soon clashed and the relationship became so icy that Taft complained that the only time he stopped sweating in the Philippines was when he shook hands with his major general.16