INTRODUCTION

THE UNITED STATES ARMY AND THE

BURDENS OF WORLD POWER

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N THE YEARS BETWEEN 1898 and 1917 the
.United States Army assumed the military
responsibilities of a major world power with overseas posses­
sions. By 1906 the Army was settled in its role as colonial
administrator and defender with some fifteen thousand soldiers
serving in the insular possessions. The Army was twice as
large as it had been before 1898: 58,368 officers and men.
Still it was four thousand men short of its authorized strength,
Army life being underpaid and unattractive in comparison
with civilian life.
If better-managed and supplied, the "semicloistered" Army
remained outside the main stream of civil Me.^1 Its expanded
officer corps, becoming more specialized, suffered from branch
parochialism. Service overseas was commonplace and came
too often to suit the family men. Privates, who enlisted for a
minimum of five years, received $15 monthly. Most of the
soldiers were disenfranchised, there being no provisions for
absentee voting. Businesses displayed signs reading "No Uni­
forms Wanted." Rank very much had its privileges as well as
its responsibilities; the line between officers and men was
clearly drawn. It was an Army unwavering in its views on
discipline, spit-and-polish, minute accounting procedures,
small unit tactics, individual marksmanship, and the superi­
ority of its value system over that of American civil society.
The expansion of the Army during the war with Spain and
the fortunes of active service catapulted new men into the
Army's highest ranks. In 1906 only one of the thirty-four
general officers on active service had worn stars before 1898,
and the hardships of tropical service and a presidential