The Burdens of World Power 5romantics. From the end of the Civil War, the major trend in
the Army's officer corps had been professionalization: the
systematic study of war and the creation of organizational
forms and attitudes best suited for the scientific conduct of
war.^7 The Army's concerted effort to systematize itself for
the most effective application of force contributed to its isola
tion from civil society. While the intellectual, political, and
social elite of late nineteenth century America saw war
as a moral evil, materially wasteful, and an unnatural dis
ruption of human progress, the Army officers viewed it as a
historical fact and a timeless expression of man's nature. To
civilians, the military virtues were anachronistic, military
society authoritarian, and the Army an economic burden. To
soldiers, American society, dominated by materialism, self-
indulgence, and license, was distasteful. Politicians who pan
dered to these values to gain personal power were morally
suspect. The officer corps, due largely to its indoctrination,
defined its major problem to be reconciling the United States
military policy to the whims of the nation's foreign policy-
makers and to the niggardliness of Congress.^8
Years of Trial and Experience
Looking back to the halcyon days in the summer of 1898
when the United States was saving people it barely knew
from Spanish oppression, General Hugh L. Scott remembered
the war as the first time since 1865 that Americans discovered
they had a regular army. He and his fellow officers knew
"our army was organized for peace and not war," but the
Army's low status in the United States was too great to over
come. Instead, inflamed by the news from Cuba, "the people
... took the bit in their teeth and ran away." Although
soldiers were blamed for inciting wars for their own ends,
Scott believed the United States had gone to war with Spain
"without the soldiers exerting the slightest influence toward
that end. It is the people and the politician that make war
and the soldier who makes peace."^9