The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur Read Online Free PDF

have been struck by this, for being employed didn’t make someone a good citizen any more than being unemployed made someone a bad one. The point of the CCC was not to provide citizenship training, but jobs. Even so, Roosevelt responded that he would have the photograph framed and hung in the White House. But this nod from Roosevelt did not ease MacArthur’s worries, and in the same month that he extolled the virtuesof the CCC to the White House, he began to distance himself from personal oversight of the program, turning its management over to its director, Robert Fechner, and to Louis Howe. Then, in early 1934, he directed that the army replace its officers working as CCC trainers with officers of the Organized Reserve.
    Even then, the army’s withdrawal from CCC oversight was halfhearted, for the CCC was not only keeping the army’s officer corps intact, but also keeping army officers
busy
. So when Roosevelt suggested that CCC recruits be offered an educational program, MacArthur made certain that the army had a hand in setting its curriculum. While MacArthur hoped that in overseeing “the outlines of instruction, teaching procedure, and the type of teaching material” used in CCC camps he could head off the promotion of doctrines that (he believed) were undermining the country, his action broadened the army’s exposure to young men who, in less than a decade, it would be leading in battle. As it turned out, the CCC’s educational component was a success: nearly forty thousand of its recruits learned to read and write as a result of it.
    As time went on, the army officer corps’ discomfort with the CCC disappeared, particularly after serving officers came in contact with recruits. The experience of then Lieutenant Colonel George Marshall is instructive. At the outset of the army’s management of the program, in June 1932, Marshall was put in charge of nineteen CCC camps in District F of the army’s IV Corps area, which put to work tens of thousands of young men in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. What Marshall saw of the recruits dismayed him; unkempt and disheveled, the early recruits had been without work for so long they arrived at the camps with their eyes on the ground. From the moment he saw them, Marshall later said, he “ate, breathed and digested the many CCC problems.” The first challenge army officers had was to supply the young men with shoes, but the second was to give them self-respect. Marshall instructed his officers, now assigned as CCC “camp commanders,” to be upbeat but above all to put their recruits to work. “I’ll be out to see you soon,” he told one of his officers, “and if I find you doing something, I will help you, but if I find you doing nothing, only God will help you.” Years later, in looking back at his CCC experience, Marshall said that the army’s management of the CCC program provided “the bestantidote for mental stagnation that an Army officer in my position can have,” adding that it was “the most instructive service I have ever had, and the most interesting.”
    But while army officers eventually set aside their discomfort with the program, a number of influential political voices did not, and the army’s role in the program remained controversial. The CCC’s promotional campaign inadvertently fed the controversy: Some of its most widely publicized photographs showed young men marching, shovels over their shoulders, to do battle with the underbrush. “Such work camps fit into the psychology of a Fascist, not a Socialist, state,” prominent Socialist leader Norman Thomas intoned. For conservatives, the lesson seemed as obvious. The photographs of regimented young men working in the wilderness was suggestive of what was happening in Bolshevik Russia, with its five-year plans and programs of forced collectivization. Marshall didn’t help the cause when he described the CCC program as “the greatest social experiment outside of Russia” to a local