Colonel Arthur MacArthur, Jr., Douglas MacArthur’s father, at the end of the Civil War
We picture him living in a two-room flat-roofed adobe house with a bare, hard, clay floor, a single square window, a bed, and a table fashioned from a plank. Candlelight provides the only illumination after dark. By day the sun is merciless; only the commanding officer’s quarters has a roofed porch. Across the parade ground enlisted men live in a long row of one-story barracks. There are frequent inspections, and periodic marches with a fifer and a snare drummer at the head of the dusty column. Occasionally a rider brings mail, or troopers stop to check their buckles, straps, canteens, and Krag rifles, but the chief event each day is retreat. It is unimpressive. On larger posts officers wear epaulets and swords; field musics are colorful in white pantaloons, buckskin gloves, and dress-blue tunics; a huge brass howitzer serves as the sunset gun. Here there is a lone trumpeter and a twelve-pounder mounted on a worn gun carriage. The gun is fired, all hands salute, the flag glides down. Then darkness and the long hours until taps.
How does he fill them? He drinks—they all drink, far too much, and pay the price at reveille. He also eats a great deal. Provisions are plentiful. During these years a hundred million buffalo are slaughtered on the plains, and there is never any absence of cold biscuit, cold bacon, and canned apricots. Arthur puts on weight. (He also grows a mustache; by the end of the century, when he adds a pince-nez, he will bear an uncanny resemblance to young Theodore Roosevelt.) If officers’ wives are present, they may coax the men into doing imitations or organize community sings—“In the Evening by the Moonlight” and “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” are favorites—or a game of tableaux vivants, in which players imitate the poses in statuary groups, such as The Soldier’s Return and The Wounded Scout, made by John Rogers, who has duplicated them in plaster by the thousands. A sergeant proficient in card tricks may be summoned. Most of the time, however, members of the garrison are thrown back on their own resources, which in Arthur’s case turn out to be considerable. He is not creative, like Major General Lew Wallace in Santa Fe, who spends these years writing The Fair God, Ben Hur, and The Prince of India, but he is a great reader of other men’s books, and sends for them by the trunkful. It is not light fare. An efficiency report filed in the Adjutant General’s Office the year after the closing of the frontier will note that MacArthur has pursued “investigations in political economy,” inquiries into “the colonial and revolutionary period of American history,” a “comparison of the American and English constitutions,” and an “extensive investigation into the civilization and institutions of China,” together with studies of the works of Gibbon, Macaulay, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Henry Carey, Walter Bagehot, Thomas Leslie, and William Jevons. That spring he will receive a Doctor of Laws degree from the National Law School in Washington, and the fact that Judge MacArthur held an influential position as regent of the school cannot obscure the son’s extraordinary achievements in self-education despite the most discouraging handicaps.23
Both the range of his knowledge and the isolation of his years on the frontier are important to an understanding of Arthur’s immense influence on his children. Douglas eventually inherited over four thousand books from his father. From him and them he acquired a remarkable vocabulary, a mastery of Victorian prose, a love of neo-Augustan rhetoric, and a ready grasp of theory. What was lacking was any direct contact with the central events of the time. An army officer’s life in the Southwest was monastic. For example, apart from a brief tour of strikebreaking duty Arthur knew nothing of the world of Gould, Fisk, the Pullman strike, the Haymarket massacre, Coxey’s Army, and Standard Oil. He even lacked any direct experience with the technological revolution whose gadgets were transforming the everyday life of Americans elsewhere: Elisha Otis’s elevator, George Pullman’s sleeping cars, George Westinghouse’s air brakes, Albert Pope’s bicycle, George Eastman’s Kodak, Bentley and Knight’s electric streetcars, Christopher Sholes’s typewriter, Thomas Edison’s incandescent lamp. In their place was an insular environment whose most familiar symbols were the post compound, the overland stage, the Texas Rangers, the buckboard, the Chisholm Trail. So rarefied an atmosphere intensified the significance of ideals, which were more important to most nineteenth-century Americans than they are today anyhow, and which, for the MacArthur boys, became dominant, even overwhelming. From their father they learned consecration to duty. Their mother, an Episcopalian, taught them devotion. Both parents believed in absolute triumph over all obstacles, a concept which was more realistic then than now.24
Captain Arthur MacArthur was more austere than Judge MacArthur—he was, in fact, something of a stuffed shirt—but now and then he displayed flashes of wit. As Douglas told the story late in life, his father was serving on a military court in New Orleans when a cotton broker, urgently needing the loan of army transport facilities, attempted to suborn him. The bribe was to be a large sum of cash, which was left on his desk, and a night with an exquisite Southern girl. Wiring Washington the details, Arthur concluded: “I am depositing the money with the Treasury of the United States and request immediate relief from this command. They are getting close to my price.”25
He didn’t capitulate then, but on his next visit to the city he fell in love with Mary Pinkney Hardy, a twenty-two-year-old belle who happened to be the daughter of a Norfolk, Virginia, cotton broker. After eight years in Beau Geste forts, the 13th Infantry had been ordered to New Orleans’s Jackson Barracks to protect carpetbag legislators. The couple met at a Mardi Gras ball, corresponded for a year, and were married in May of 1875 at the bride’s Norfolk home, “Riveredge,” on the Elizabeth River. Two of her brothers, graduates of the Virginia Military Institute who had fought under Lee, refused to attend the ceremony.26
“Pinky” Hardy, as everyone called her, was a strong-minded girl who was going to need all her fortitude in her new life. She had been raised to be a wife, but not an army wife. Physical attractions apart, her most notable accomplishments were proficiency in cotillion dancing, embroidery, watercolor painting, and the decoration of chinaware, none of which was very useful at the various posts to which her husband was assigned. Once they had to trek three hundred miles across New Mexico’s high desert plateau—eight pitilessly hot days and eight bleak nights in army wagons. When Arthur applied for a more comfortable station as a military attache, President Grant, though sympathetic, explained that “there is a sort of morbid sensitiveness on the part of Congress and the press generally against trusting soldiers anywhere except in front of the cannon or musket.” Pinky tried to be at Riveredge for the birth of each infant and was successful with the first two, Arthur III and Malcolm. Childhood and childbearing were often desperate in those days; Malcolm died of measles at the age of five, and her third son arrived early, on January 26, 1880, just as she was packing for Virginia. Thus Douglas MacArthur came to be born on army property at what was then Fort Dodge and is now part of Little Rock, Arkansas, where K Company was stationed at the time. The site was Officers Row, a towered arsenal which had been converted into two-family dwellings. Demonstrating that Norfolk could be just as parochial as any military station, a newspaper in the mother’s hometown reported that the child had arrived “while his parents were away.”27
Pinky MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur’s mother, at the time of her marriage
If Pinky’s later behavior requires justification—and it does—some allowance must be made for the rigors of her early years of marriage. Posts like Forts Wingate and Selden were trying enough for men; for women, and particularly women like her, they were Gethsemanes. Hot, primitive, and diseased in the summer, bitter in the winter, always under the threat of Indian raids, they were unlike anything she had ever imagined for herself and especially for her children. The fact that she stuck it at all is a tribute to her courage and, perhaps, to the strength of social discipline then. Long afterward a woman who knew Pinky then wrote that “in my picture of her there is a lot o
f white muslin dress swishing around and a blaze of white New Mexican sunlight, and in the midst of it this slender, vital creature that I have never forgotten,” but this is surely a romanticized recollection; muslin could not have been always white, and under those conditions vitality eventually ebbed. For ten desperate years she toiled bravely, watching her beauty fade and her skin roughen, yet resembling, as the same friend recalled, “a young falcon” with “her swift poise and the imperious way she held her head.”28
In the autumn of 1885, the first dim shaft of hope penetrated her husband’s professional oblivion. After a routine examination of Fort Selden a departmental inspector reported to his superiors that “Captain MacArthur impresses me as an officer of more than ordinary ability, and very zealous in the performance of duty.” This recognition subsequently brought Company K’s assignment to Fort Leavenworth’s Infantry and Cavalry School, which had decent quarters for officers’ families and even teachers for their children. More important, the school commandant was a major general who had taken official note of the captain’s “great coolness and presence of mind” during the Battle of Murfreesboro twenty-three years earlier. Arthur now had a friend in a high place. In fact, he had two; Judge MacArthur, preparing to retire from the bench, had decided to intervene on behalf of his namesake.29
One evening the captain returned home distraught. Pinky inquired what was wrong, and he replied, “Well, I have just been assigned to lead the discussion at next week’s Lyceum.” Puzzled, she observed that that was an honor and asked what the topic was. “That’s just the trouble,” he answered. “The subject is, ‘The Spirit of the Age: What Is It?’ “ The minutes of the following week’s meeting have not survived, but one spirit of the 1880s was the unabashed use of political pull. Pinky knew it; indeed, she never forgot it, and one reason for her lifelong faith in the fix was its efficiency in rescuing her husband from military obscurity. The judge was quietly soliciting support from his N Street guests during his son’s Leavenworth years, promoting him for assignment either with the inspector general of the army or to a post in the Adjutant General’s Office. Eventually a confidential request for an appraisal of the captain’s abilities reached Leavenworth. The commandant replied that Arthur “is beyond question the most distinguished captain in the army of the United States for gallantry and good conduct. . . . He is a student; is a master of his profession . . . is unexceptional in habit; temperate in all things, yet modest withal.” The judge acquired a copy of this, printed a handout quoting the report, and circulated it among his friends. On July 1, 1889, Arthur was promoted to major and assigned to Washington as assistant adjutant general.30
Arthur Jr., Pinky, and their children, c. 1885
Major Arthur MacArthur, Jr., (far left), and other officers, 1894
Four happy years in the capital followed for the major, Pinky, and the boys, climaxed by a letter to Major MacArthur from the adjutant general which said in part, “I wish to tell you that I regard your assignment . . . a most fortunate circumstance for the office and the army. Every duty assigned to you you have performed thoroughly and conscientiously. Every recommendation you have made has been consistent and without color of prejudice or favor, but solely for the good of the army.” About the only suggestion of the major’s which was vetoed was his request that seventeen-year-old Arthur III be appointed to the U.S. Military Academy, and even that turned out well. West Point rejected him but Annapolis accepted him. The skies were very blue for the family now, and when Arthur was reassigned to the West in the autumn of 1893, he was posted to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, “Fort Sam,” the pleasantest post in the Department of Texas, with maid service for Pinky, a study for the major, and a military academy for thirteen-year-old Douglas, now the only child still with his parents. Three months before the judge’s death he saw his son promoted to lieutenant colonel, and in October 1897 the rising officer was posted to the Department of the Dakotas in Saint Paul, Minnesota. With Arthur III just out of the naval academy and Douglas graduated from preparatory school, Arthur and Pinky’s nest was empty. Now a graying officer of fifty-two, the new half-colonel was ready for a fresh challenge. Thus the outbreak of the Spanish-American War six months later came at a convenient time for him.31
His first thought, once he had restrained his younger son from enlisting impulsively, was that he might regain the rank of full colonel, which he had last held thirty-three years earlier. As it happened, he skipped right over it and became a brigadier general. On June 1, 1898, a telegram arrived from Washington: YOU HAVE BEEN CONFIRMED AND COMMISSION SIGNED BY PRESIDENT SECRETARY WAR DIRECTS YOU REPORT GENERAL MERRITT SAN FRANCISCO FOR DUTY WITH EXPEDITION FOR PHILIPPINES. Arthur read it and reread it, completely baffled. He had expected to lead troops in Cuba. He didn’t even know where the Philippines was. Dewey’s stunning victory in Manila Bay ten thousand miles away, opening hostilities, had seemed almost irrelevant to him. Summoning his orderly, Arthur called for a map.32
Cuba fell in July 1898, and on August 4 Brigadier General MacArthur led forty-eight hundred volunteers ashore at Cavite, south of Manila. They were the spearhead of an eleven-thousand-man expeditionary force commanded by Major General Wesley Merritt, which, with their allies, Filipino rebels commanded by Emilio Aguinaldo, immediately invested the capital. When the Spanish captain-general capitulated nine days later—U.S. casualties had been thirteen killed and fifty-seven wounded—Merritt praised the “outstanding” work of the striking force and the “gallantry and excellent judgment” of its brigadier. He then named Arthur provost marshal general and military governor of Manila, an appointment which was received with vast pride by the MacArthur family, including Ensign Arthur III, who had fought on the gunboat Vixen at Santiago and who was now stationed on a warship off Luzon.33
Manila’s new governor’s first act was to proclaim that “this city, its inhabitants, its churches and religious worship, and its private property of all descriptions are placed under the special safeguard of the faith and honor of the American army.” That excluded Filipino forces, and intentionally so. American commanders had discovered that they were fighting a strange war, in which allies were potential enemies and enemies were semiallies. The Spaniards, succumbing to defeatism, merely wanted to get out with minimal bloodshed. The captain-general’s surrender terms had stipulated that the Americans would prevent the rebels from entering the city until their former colonial masters had departed. Aguinaldo seethed, and though MacArthur sent him a plea for patience, it was coldly received.34
By now the insurrectos were quickly occupying forts and cities elsewhere in the archipelago as the Spaniards fled. A Spanish general was slain while evacuating his troops from Zamboanga; Dewey’s gunboats intervened to prevent further slaughter. When Spain and the United States signed a peace treaty in Paris on December 10, 1898, Aguinaldo began mobilizing against the new gringos, whom he no longer regarded as liberators. MacArthur was now begging his new commanding officer, Major General Ewell S. Otis, to be forbearing, but Otis insisted that nothing could be discussed until the insurgents had laid down their arms. The stage was set for a new, gorier war between the “goddamns,” as GIs of that era called themselves, and the “gugus,” their word for natives, a precursor of “gooks.”35
On February 4, 1899, the Filipinos attacked Manila. MacArthur, now a major general, threw them back. As a field commander he proved exemplary, defeating the rebels in a dozen vicious campaigns and personally leading his men at the front, where he escaped death by a hairbreadth several times. By early spring he had swept the insurrectos from the southern half of the central Luzon plain and become a newspaper hero at home. That summer Aguinaldo holed up in Tarlac. Moving in concert with other Americans who landed at Lingayen Gulf, MacArthur took that stronghold in November and signaled Otis in Manila that “the so-called Filipino republic is destroyed.” He recommended amnesty to all rebels and thirty pesos to each who turned in his rifle. Again Otis ignored his suggestion, and Aguinaldo withdrew into a peninsula calle
d Bataan.36
Otis was unpopular, indecisive, and so comfortable in Manila that he refused to leave it for field inspections. Once, receiving vague instructions from him, MacArthur flung down his campaign hat and yelled, “Otis is a locomotive bottom-side up, with the wheels revolving at full speed!” MacArthur himself was not without his critics—Colonel Enoch H. Crowder, his aide, later said, “Arthur MacArthur was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen, until I met his son”—but his bravery under fire, his mastery of the assault tactics he had learned under Sherman, and his brilliant maneuver of advancing by echelon, first from one flank and then from the other, won him the admiration of his junior officers. That, and his generosity with promotions and decorations, meant that many members of the rising generation of army leaders were in his debt and would be sympathetic to his son’s aspirations when they became general officers. On Luzon at the turn of the century they included Lieutenants Peyton C. March, Charles P. Summerall, and Frederick Funston, and Captain John J. Pershing. A Signal Corps lieutenant in whom Arthur took special interest was “Billy” Mitchell of Milwaukee, whose father, John Lendrum Mitchell, then a U.S. senator, had served beside him in the 24th Wisconsin.37