Ever the idealist, Marshall worked hard to remake the lackluster educational system in his CCC district. He remarked to a friend: “I am struggling to force their 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. I have done over my corps of civilian educators, and their methods, until I think we really have something supremely practical.”42
Marshall regarded his two years in Vancouver as among the happiest times of his life, and he lauded the experience as “the best antidote for mental stagnation that an Army officer in my position can have.” He turned the Vancouver Barracks from a decaying mess into one of the most beautiful bases in the western United States. The reenlistment rate by the men in his command was one of the highest in the nation. He later observed: “I found the CCC the most instructive service I ever had, and the most interesting,” adding that, because of the corps, the Army had “very much to learn about simplification and decentralization” during wartime. To General John J. Pershing, Marshall wrote that he regarded the CCC to be “a major mobilization exercise and a splendid experience for the War Department and the Army.” Personally, it was important to Marshall’s own career, as evidence suggests that Marshall first came to Roosevelt’s attention as a leader and staunch supporter of the CCC.43
Unlike other Army officers who saw the men of the CCC as somehow inferior or lacking, Marshall respected them and held them in high regard. “As a whole,” he wrote to an associate a few months after arriving in the Northwest of the men in the CCC, “they are a fine lot, hardworking, studious in following the educational courses we provide, and seeming to develop considerable ambition, along with the necessary energy and resolution.” The letter, which was quoted in its entirety in William Frye’s 1947 biography of Marshall, prompted this comment from Frye on Marshall’s words on the men of the CCC: “His interest in those under his command or supervision [was] as individual human beings, not as units in a table of organization.”44
Marshall, who had made a point of writing letters of recommendation for worthy Corpsmen seeking employment after their CCC time was up, had the favor returned in the form of a cartoon, published in the CCC district newspaper on his departure in 1938, when he was joining the Army general staff in Washington, D.C. The cartoon contained a “Letter of commendation” from the Corpsmen, reading: “Dear Gen. Marshall: We know you always placed our welfare first, signed enrollees of Vancouver CCC district.”45
While both Marshall and Bradley would spend the rest of their lives alluding to their CCC experience, the outspoken conservative MacArthur never mentioned the experience in his memoirs or referred to it in his public speeches. As one MacArthur biographer remarked about the general’s leadership at the CCC, “It was as if it never existed. And yet, he found an odd fulfillment in running the program, as he made clear in a letter to CCC Director Robert Fechner: ‘it is the type of human reconstruction that has appealed to me more than I sometimes admit.’”46
The point that MacArthur was loath to admit but that Marshall, Bradley, and others embraced was that the CCC allowed the Regular Army to achieve in a time of peace something of what it was trained to do in wartime, namely “to mobilize, organize, and administer an army of citizen soldiers.” The officers in charge of the CCC lacked the well-defined coercive power they had with Regular Army troops, so they had to turn to reason and the power of personality to lead the CCC. These skills would later be essential during a mass mobilization for war. Marshall biographer David L. Roll concluded that the CCC experience “buttressed Marshall’s faith in the value and effectiveness of a citizen army.”47
On April 5, 1937, FDR recommended to Congress that the CCC be made a permanent agency of the federal government. On June 28, 1937, Congress passed and the president signed an act extending the CCC for a period of three years, to begin on July 1, 1937. One of the arguments made for the extension was that the Tree Army could become the backbone of a new, expanded Army when it was needed. Two years later, when Germany invaded Poland, Marshall knew the time had come and that expansion would happen sooner rather than later.
After the Second World War, Bradley declared that the CCC had saved the Army and that without it the Army might have seen a massive cut in the officer corps and gone into the war without many important leaders, including himself, Joseph W. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, and many other officers. He added that those three million CCC workers who left their camps to go on active duty went on to “save the world.”48
* It is apparent from their writings that MacArthur and Eisenhower did not like each other. All MacArthur says in his memoir, Reminiscences, about their prewar association was that in confronting the Bonus Army, “I . . . brought with me two officers who later wrote their names on world history, Majors Eisenhower and Patton.”
A “PHONEY” WAR ABROAD AND A MOCK WAR AT HOME
At the time of the invasion of Poland, the United States was fiercely divided. A majority of Americans were firmly isolationist, their stance based on an increasing belief that America’s involvement in World War I had been a terrible error, especially when viewed through the dim prism of the Great Depression. Many Americans were reminded of the old popular song “Don’t Let the Same Bee Sting You Twice.” A poll conducted by George Gallup at the end of 1938 found that 70 percent of American voters thought U.S. involvement in the earlier conflict had been an out-and-out mistake.1
Hating a war in which many of its members had fought, the American Legion was at the heart of the movement trying to push neutrality acts and other isolationist laws through Congress. The rhetoric of the legion was more pacifist than martial, and this attitude became stronger after the Polish surrender, even though one-third of the members of Congress were legionnaires themselves.2
Furthermore, many of the men still occupying beds in Veterans Administration hospitals were draftees from the previous war whose wounds were significant enough to keep them in need of perpetual care. A wounded soldier on the street, including amputees on crutches and victims of gas attacks carrying portable devices they needed to help them breathe, was still a common sight in the United States in 1939.
The most radical isolationists claimed that virtually all of the nation’s current problems stemmed from the Great War. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota went so far as to blame America’s Great Depression on the unbridled economic expansion created by the war.3
The Nazi invasion of Poland had energized congressional isolationists and attracted powerful new celebrity voices. The retired Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner, became an ever-louder voice, declaring that “war is a racket.” This maxim, also the title of his book, was shorthand for his belief that the only victors in any war were banks and large corporations. Butler’s book had been published in 1935, and its message seemed to become louder over time.
On September 15, 1939, Charles Lindbergh delivered a nationwide radio address in which he strongly urged America to remain neutral—to “stand clear” of the squabble in Europe. Lindbergh envisioned a Nazi victory in Europe as a certainty and thought America’s attention should be directed toward Asia and Japan. “These wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder,” he intoned in the passage that seemed to gather the most attention. “There is no Genghis Khan marching against our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to defend our White race against foreign invasion.” Many newspapers