The CCC’s impact on Marshall was even more significant and enduring. From his Eighth Infantry Regiment headquarters at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, a large base on Sullivan’s Island near Charleston, Marshall found himself the administrator of an enormous labor project involving 25,000 young men flooding 17 work camps across the southern United States. Marshall threw himself into the CCC assignment with great enthusiasm. As he was facing a shortage of officers, his wife, Katherine Tupper Marshall, volunteered to help. As she encountered these young Americans, she was appalled by the all-too-visible effects of the Great Depression on them and the price they were paying for it. The men were underfed, and sores and skin rashes were the norm. The general condition of their teeth was appalling. They fought for food, even when there was an abundance of it, and they snarled at one another like packs of feral dogs. Fully half of the men being processed were illiterate.29
During this period, George Marshall praised the CCC, saying it was “the greatest social experiment outside of Russia.” He pointed out in a letter to a friend that he was “struggling to force [the recruits’] education, academic or vocational, to the point where they will be on the road to really useful citizenship by the time they return to their homes.” Marshall saw his role in rebuilding these men’s lives as helping to rebuild the country, noting that he considered the corps “a splendid experience for the War Department and the Army.”30
Marshall was unforgiving when it came to officers who complained about their CCC duties. A major came into Marshall’s office to announce that he was resigning. “I’ve put twelve years in the Army,” he said. “I’m a graduate of West Point. I’m not going to come down here and deal with a whole lot of bums. Half-dead Southern crackers, that’s what they are!”
“Major, I’m sorry you feel like that,” Marshall responded. “But I’ll tell you this—you can’t resign quick enough to suit me. It suits me fine! Now get out of here!”31
Conversely, the officers who assumed leadership roles in the CCC under Marshall were often singled out for praise and ultimately promotion. When a national award was offered to the best camp in the country, Major Alex Starke’s camp at Sumter, South Carolina, was named the winner. Starke later became a brigadier general during the Tunisian campaign in 1942.32
Marshall was also cognizant of the problems of his own soldiers, whose incomes had been slashed by the new administration, and he did much to alleviate their distress. “In order that the men could manage to feed their families on their small pay, my husband personally supervised the building of chicken yards, vegetable gardens, and hog pens,” Katherine Marshall remembered. “He started a lunch pail system whereby the men could get a good hot dinner, cooked up at the mess to take home to their families at a very small cost.”33
But the stress on the Regular Army went beyond hot meals. In April 1934, after leaving his southern post, Marshall wrote to a commander in the Illinois National Guard outlining the extent of the stress created by the CCC assignment coupled with Roosevelt’s pay cuts: “Officers and men were suddenly scattered in 1,400 Camps throughout the United States, under the necessity of maintaining their families in one place and themselves in another. The wives and children of married soldiers were often without funds for food and rent.” Marshall then pointed out that because of the pay cuts many soldiers struggled to keep up with a $10 a month allotment sent home to their parents, while the CCC man was able to send home a monthly allotment of between $25 and $40 depending on the circumstances back home. He then went on to compare the two situations: “While the soldier had no choice of post or duty. The CCC recruit was free to terminate his connection with the government at any time, and he could not be worked more than six hours a day. The regular soldier in the CCC camp was usually on duty twelve hours a day.” Marshall concluded, “Despite the inequalities and injustice of this arrangement, the regular soldiers gave their earnest and most efficient services to make the CCC the success it has been.”34
William Frye, Marshall’s earliest biographer, believed that despite this situation Marshall refused to resent these recruits for the disparity in pay and chose to see them “as the bewildered victims of a depression which had broken them financially and shaken their spirits,” adding that “they received from him the same sympathetic interest and close attention he gave to his troops.”35
Marshall’s greatest impact, however, was on the CCC recruits themselves, whom he taught to work together. He gave them a sense of discipline. “Most of all,” his wife later commented, “he gave those boys back their self-respect. That was the first time those boys came to realize they weren’t just nothing, that they were supposed to measure up to something.”
Colonel Laurence Halstead, acting chief of the infantry, wrote to Marshall in May to comment on the Army’s role in developing the CCC: “This work is onerous and probably distasteful to the Army as it is not exactly military work but I feel that it is the salvation of the Army. In fact, it is my opinion that the Army is the only Governmental agency that was able to handle this proposition. I have noticed a cessation of talk of reducing the Army by four thousand officers since we started in on the conservation work.”36
When a French Navy cruiser, D’Entrecastaux, paid a courtesy call to Charleston, near Fort Moultrie, in mid-September 1933, Marshall entertained the officers and crew at a nearby CCC camp, which he dedicated as Camp Lafayette in honor of their visit. The Marquis de Lafayette, Marshall pointed out, had first landed near the site some 150 years earlier. The dedication was accepted by the French consul in the name of the Republic of France. After the band from Fort Moultrie played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “La Marseillaise,” the French officers and men were fed CCC fare at the camp, and the CCC recruits led the sailors from the ship on a tour of the facilities.37
The dedication at Camp Lafayette, which made headlines and was described in magazine features in France, illustrated the point that under Marshall’s tutelage, the camps were points of pride and patriotism rather than objects of pity. During the same month that Marshall staged the events at Camp Lafayette, he was promoted to the rank of colonel.
As it became clear that Marshall’s service to the CCC was both a triumph for the Army and the CCC, MacArthur began to see Marshall as a threat—“an enemy conspiring against him,” in the words of William Manchester in American Caesar—and sidelined him by taking him out of a command role and making him an instructor in the Illinois National Guard, based in Chicago.38 Marshall wrote to MacArthur begging to remain with his regiment, insisting that another instructor’s job—away from his troops—would be fatal to his future in the Army. MacArthur chose not to respond, and the Marshalls headed north. One of his biographers, William Frye, termed the assignment “a savage blow” to Marshall. Later, Katherine Marshall recalled their early days in Chicago, describing her husband’s “grey, drawn look which I had never seen before and is seldom seen since.”39
Despite his initial dislike of the Illinois assignment, work with National Guard units gave Marshall exposure to men who saw themselves as civilians first and soldiers second as well as experience dealing with politicians—both uncommon connections for officers at this time. Unlike many officers, Marshall did not see the men of the National Guard as second-rate, and he worked hard to improve Reserve facilities and training and made good use of Reserve officers.
Marshall still wanted a full military command, complete with CCC responsibilities. Finally, in August 1936, after MacArthur had resigned as chief of staff, Marshall got his wish when the new chief, Malin Craig, assigned him to be commander of the Vancouver Barracks in Vancouver, Washington. While there, Marshall supervised 27 CCC camps in the Pacific Northwest. His assignment, from new secretary of war Woodring, said: “A large part of your time will be taken up with CCC inspections and activities . . . The success of that movement depends upon constant inspections and holding up standards.”40
When Marshall arrived in the Northwest, he was in command of camps populated with young