Exercise was the key to curing spinal curvature. That hurdle held him up for another year, but he cleared it then; according to Dr. Pfister, “when the time came for his final physical examination for West Point, Douglas MacArthur was perfection itself. That was in 1899—he was nineteen years old and you never saw a finer specimen of American manhood.” Pfister’s opinion, of course, was purely medical. One of Senator John Lendrum Mitchell’s daughters judged the youth by different standards and found him wanting. MacArthur had been hanging around the senator’s house, vainly trying to win her. He even wrote a poem:
Fair Western girl with life awhirl
Of love and fancy free
’Tis thee I love
All things above
Why wilt thou not love me?16
One reason was that there was a war on, and since his father had forbidden him to enlist, Douglas was not in uniform. The disadvantages of this became painfully clear when young officers, Mitchell’s son Billy among them, came home to Milwaukee on leave. The girls all flocked to them, and the wretched civilian in blazer and flannels skulked in the background like a Standish villain, fingering his straw boater and vowing that this would be the last war in his lifetime which did not find him serving at the front. It was.17
On the glorious afternoon of Tuesday, June 13, 1899, a West Shore Railroad train three hours out of Weehawken paused at West Point to discharge a youth wearing a light gray stetson, and his small, severely dressed mother. The station (it still exists) was a tan brick building with a comical high-pitched roof, absurdly inappropriate to the occasion, but when the MacArthur’ puffed their way on foot up an almost vertical path, passing beneath a stone arch, they found themselves in one of America’s most dramatic natural settings. They were standing on the U.S. Military Academy “plain,” a broad shelf of land overlooking the Hudson which was itself overlooked by towering, thickly forested heights: Anthony’s Nose, Storm King, Brackanack, and Bear mountains. Facing the plain were various buildings and monuments. The superintendent’s mansion gleamed whitely. Gothic walls of gray granite, as grim as those of a penitentiary, enclosed the cadet barracks. Near Trophy Point, where Flirtation Walk (“Flirty”) wended its way downward to the river, on a site occupied today by a parking lot, stood Craney’s Hotel, an antebellum structure of yellow brick with a broad green wooden veranda. Here Mrs. Arthur MacArthur would live for the next four years. Like Franklin Roosevelt at Harvard and Adlai Stevenson at Princeton, Douglas MacArthur would share much of his collegiate experience with an alert mother-in-residence.18
Pinky excepted, Douglas MacArthur’s fellow cadets would have a better opportunity to observe him than anyone else in his lifetime. He was remote even then, but academy life at the turn of the century was extraordinarily intimate. Members of the cadet corps were ordinarily allowed off the post on just two occasions, for Army-Navy football games and the summer furlough at the end of the term year. There was no Christmas leave. If they rode beyond the plain on horseback, they were on their honor not to dismount, and they were not even allowed to carry money. Subaltern Winston Churchill of the Fourth Hussars noted that they were “cloistered almost to a monastic extent.” On his way to observe operations in Cuba, Churchill wrote his brother that Sandhurst graduates would be “horrified” by academy regulations: “The cadets enter from nineteen to twenty-two and stay four years. . . . They are not allowed to smoke . . . . In fact they have far less liberty than any public school boys in our country. . . . Young men of 24 or 25 who would resign their personal liberty to such an extent can never make good citizens or fine soldiers.”19
MacArthur (right rear) as a young man with his family (Arthur III, his wife Mary, their son Douglas; Pinky and Arthur Jr.)
On the plain that June there were 332 cadets, of the soldierly qualities of many of whom Churchill would later be more appreciative. The corps was less than a tenth the size of today’s, but then, as now, their insular world had its own traditions and rites, even its own language. Freshmen were “plebes,” sophomores, “yearlings”; after a junior year as “second classmen” they became “first classmen.” The leader of the entire corps, the first classman who best embodied the military ideal, was the “first captain.” Roommates were “wives.” Dates, who might be accompanied for a stroll on “Flirty,” were “drags.” A demerit was a “quill” because quill pens had once been used to record them; a reprimand which entailed walking post was a “slug.” Catsup was “growly,” milk “cow,” cream “calf,” and molasses “Sammy” because an old officer named Samuel Miles had decided that bread and molasses was a healthy diet for growing boys. A plebe detailed to carve meat was a “gunner”; one pouring coffee was a “coffee corporal.”20
Wearing “tarbuckets” (full-dress hats) and forty-four-buttoned full-dress gray tunics, the corps marched across the plain’s parade ground in breathtaking splendor, white legs swishing together with infinite precision. The landmarks around them included the garden of Thaddeus Kosciusko, Lafayette’s Polish counterpart; the great links of the river boom chain lying on Trophy Point, so vital a stronghold in the Revolutionary War; and the black chapel memorial plate with the gouged-out name—that of Benedict Arnold, who tried to betray the Point to the British. Cadets came to know one another in barracks, under canvas, on horseback, in recitations, under whispering trees, sharing old coconut-shell dippers in wooden buckets by washstands—in thousands of homely contacts every day. Because the corps was small, everyone knew everyone else, and because Douglas MacArthur’s father was a famous general fighting in the Philippines, he was, from his first day as a plebe, scrutinized very carefully.21
What did his fellow cadets see?
Robert E. Wood, who became a first classman that June, said afterward that the older members of the corps “recognized intuitively that MacArthur was born to be a real leader of men.” This may have been hindsight, but there is no doubt that the newcomer was physically prepossessing. Wood thought he was “without doubt the handsomest cadet that ever came into the academy, six-foot tall, and slender, with a fine body and dark flashing eyes.” Hugh S. “Sep” Johnson, a strapping plebe from Oklahoma who would become known to Washington in the 1930s as “Ironpants,” agreed that his classmate was “brilliant, absolutely fearless.” Chauncey L. Fenton would recall him as “a typical westerner” with “a ruddy, out-of-doors complexion.” “Handsome as a prince he was—six feet tall and weighing about 160, with dark hair and a ruddy, outdoors look,” Sergeant Marty Maher of the post garrison would afterward write of MacArthur; “you would know he was a soldier even in his swimming trunks.” A less smitten classmate concluded that he must have been “arrogant from the age of eight.” Various other cadets thought he seemed to be “brave as a lion and smart as hell,” a youth with “a mind like a sponge,” and one who would be “flogged alive without changing his mind” once it had been made up. Two were particularly perceptive. The first said, “To know MacArthur is to love him or to hate him—you can’t just like him.” The second, Robert C. Richardson, wrote: “He had style. There was never a cadet quite like him.”22
Some of these memories were distorted by the prism of time—the new plebe weighed in at 133 pounds, and was five feet, eleven inches tall—but that, too, may be significant: even then, when other arrivals were shrinking under the glares of upperclassmen, Douglas MacArthur appeared to be larger than life. That, his father’s reputation, and his mother’s presence nearby made him a marked man. As a consequence, he was about to be subjected to an ordeal rare even at West Point, and still remembered there with awe.23
“Beast Barracks,” a cadet’s first three weeks on the plain, are his most difficult. Plebes live in tents on Clinton Field, across the parade ground from Trophy Point. There, at the turn of the century, they were subjected to merciless hazing. It was often a dangerous business, and it was unavoidable; any newcomer who refused to cooperate was “called out” and subjected to a bare-knuckle beating by the huskiest prizefighter among the upperclassmen. Over a hundr
ed methods of harassment were employed. Among the most popular were scalding steam baths, “crawling” (being insulted by an upperclassman whose jaw was one inch from the plebe’s nose), “bracing” (standing at rigid attention for long periods of time), “dipping” (push-ups), “eagling” (deep knee bends over broken glass), “hanging from a stretcher” (dangling by the hands from a tent pole), forced feeding, paddling, sliding naked on a splintered board, and running a gauntlet of upperclassmen who tossed buckets of cold water on the plebe.24
MacArthur’s first tormentors were Southern cadets who forced him to recite, while braced, his father’s Civil War record. And again. And again. Next he was required to stand immobile for an hour. “Douglas MacArthur,” Maher tells us, “was still standing like a statue at the end of the sixty minutes.” Then the physical brutality began. According to Wood, he took it with “fortitude and dignity,” but if his spirit was willing, his flesh was not; forced to eagle by three separate groups of upperclassmen, he fainted. Back in his tent, he suffered a convulsion. With his pride, already immense, he was determined that no one know about it. During a lull in his spasms he asked his tentmate, Plebe Frederick H. Cunningham, to put a blanket under his feet so they could not be heard drumming on the floor and a second blanket in his mouth, to muffle his outcries.25
When another plebe died, West Point hazing became a national scandal. Thus MacArthur, while still a cadet, made his first appearance before a congressional committee. Cunningham, who had resigned from the academy in disgust, testified to the convulsion. The victim was then summoned. As in Milwaukee, he was nauseated, and now, as then, his mother was there to advise him. During a recess in the hearings, she sent him a poem by messenger. It ended:
Remember the world will be quick with its blame
If shadow or shame ever darken your name.
Like mother, like son, is saying so true
The world will judge largely of mother by you. . . .
Be sure it will say, when its verdict you’ve won
She reaps as she sowed: “This man is her son!”26
Then she reminded him in a postscript: “Never lie, never tattle.” And he didn’t. It is not true, as he wrote in his memoirs, that he named no names, but all those he identified had either confessed their guilt or resigned from the Point. And his aplomb, the New York Times reported, “startled” the committee members. At one point he fenced deftly with Congressman Edmund H. Driggs of New York:
DRIGGS: Did you expect when you came to West Point to be treated in this manner?
MACARTHUR: Not exactly in that manner; no, sir.
DRIGGS: Did you not consider it cruel at that time?
MACARTHUR: I was perhaps surprised to some extent.
DRIGGS: I wish you would answer my question; did you or did you not consider it cruel at that time?
MACARTHUR: I would like to have you define cruel.
DRIGGS: All right, sir. Disposed to inflict suffering; indifference in the presence of suffering; hard-hearted; inflicting pain mentally or suffering; causing suffering.
MACARTHUR: I should say perhaps it was cruel, then.
DRIGGS: You have qualified your answer. Was it or was it not cruel?
MACARTHUR: Yes, sir.27
MacArthur’s conduct in Beast Barracks won him what was then called “a bootlick” from the whole corps—approval of his poise and courage. It also inspired a remarkable gesture from a first classman, Arthur P. S. Hyde, who later became an Episcopalian minister. At Clinton Field Hyde had been impressed by what he called MacArthur’s “attention to duty and his manifestation to make good as a cadet.” In Hyde’s words, “I therefore invited him to live with me. The invitation naturally came to him as a surprise.” To Hyde’s amusement, MacArthur “asked for time to run over to the hotel to ask his mother about my invitation.” In thirty minutes the plebe was back; Pinky had given her permission, and her son would spend his first year as Hyde’s wife.28
This gave him a leg up on his classmates. Hyde, a senior lieutenant of the class of 00, was entitled to a third-floor tower room in the old first-division barracks, with a splendid view of the parade ground. But the great thing about rooming with a first classman was that his light needn’t be out until 11:00 P.M. Taps for other plebes was 10:00 P.M. Thus he could study an extra hour. Rising before reveille he added another hour, and some nights, according to Marty Maher, he “covered his windows with blankets and studied until dawn.” Maher said he “often wondered if he could ever become as great as his father, and he told me that if hard work had anything to do with it, he had a chance.” Hyde, too, would recall that his wife “often” spoke of Arthur MacArthur “with affection and pride” and felt a filial duty to become the general’s “worthy successor.”29
In this he received almost daily encouragement from his mother, whose ambitions for him had been doubled by the discovery that a fellow guest at the hotel was Mrs. Frederic N. Grant, the mother of Plebe Ulysses S. Grant III. The two women were excessively polite to each other—cynical employees of Craney’s called their saccharine exchanges “hair-pullings”—but neither cadet had any illusions about the white knuckles under those velvet gloves. Douglas’s usual time with Pinky was the half hour before supper. In good weather they would stroll down Flirty while she interrogated him on the day’s events. Rainy evenings she would take him into the hotel, and if his report pleased her, she would reward him with fruit, usually oranges. Craney’s was a risky rendezvous; it was off limits to cadets without special passes, which he didn’t always have. As a veteran of life on frontier posts, however, Pinky was resourceful. Once she was entertaining Douglas and George W. Cocheu, one of his later roommates, when word arrived that an officer was headed their way. Gathering her skirts, she led the boys to the basement, whence, according to Cocheu, they escaped “by crawling out through the coal chute.”30
To her indignation, a sculptor choosing a model for a heroic statue of a cadet picked the Grant youth. Afterward the two mothers were seen fawning on each other, and later in the day Pinky and Douglas were observed in a tense colloquy. That was the last triumph of the MacArthur’’ rival, however. At the end of the plebe year young Grant stood second in the class behind Douglas. Grant began to slip as a yearling and would finish the four-year course in sixth place. Meanwhile MacArthur was winning honor after honor. A photograph of mother and son, taken during his plebe year, has survived. Pinky is formidable in black satin and a white lace shirtwaist, her hair piled high in an intricate pompadour. She is staring evenly at the camera; her hands, tense at her sides, suggest that she would be very quick at the draw. Beside her Douglas is wearing a forage cap and an informal dress-gray uniform. He is erect but at ease, with his weight resting casually on his left hip. He holds a scroll. Gazing off toward the Hudson, he appears dutiful, assured, and rather preoccupied—the look of a climber who has conquered one peak and is confidently setting his sights on another.31
There can be no doubt that he conquered the academy. Comparing West Point with civilian colleges and universities is difficult, because the Point did not offer degrees until 1933, and MacArthur was marked in such courses as target practice and horseback riding, which have no equivalents elsewhere. Nevertheless his academic achievements were stunning. In Cocheu’s words, “he did not seem to study hard, but his concentration was intense.” Clearly he was one of the most intelligent youths ever to arrive on the plain. Not only did he finish first in his class of ninety-four cadets; during his four years he earned 2,424.2 points out of a possible maximum of 2,470, or 98.14 percent, a record which has been surpassed only twice since the academy was founded in 1802—by an 1884 graduate with 99.78 and by Robert E. Lee of the class of 1829, with 98.33. MacArthur scored a perfect 100 in law, history, and English. He led his classmates in mathematics, drill regulations, and ordnance and gunnery. His lowest scores were in drawing and military engineering, and they may tell less about his proficiency than about the West Point of his time. Academy barracks at the turn of the century
were ill-heated and ill-lit; because there was nowhere else to put them, cadets spent long winter days in class drawing bridges. MacArthur may have been simply bored.32
Academic accomplishment was one of two ways the academy rated youths. The other was military demeanor. Here again he led ‘03. He had his share of quills, or skins, for such offenses as improper saluting, leaving an improper margin on a math paper, failing to return a library book on time, and, interestingly, “swinging arms excessively and marching to the front at parade.” Twice he was given demerits for being out of uniform. But most of the time, as William A. Ganoe observed, he was “spooned up like a clothing-store dummy, with his red sash just so and his trousers creased to a knife-edge.” When it was his turn to count cadence, he displayed what Ganoe called “an odd quickness of gesture, buoyancy of gait, and cheeriness of disposition”; watching him drill a squad of awkward plebes, the tactical officer of A Company, Captain Edmund A. Blake, said, “There’s the finest drill master I have ever seen.” Each year MacArthur achieved the highest rank available to him—senior corporal as a yearling, senior first sergeant as a second classman, and, as a first classman, the crowning glory: first captain, like Lee and Pershing before him.33