Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America. Bill Kauffman

importance to this country.”

      Hamilton’s arch-foe, Thomas Jefferson, had opposed such an academy on the grounds that it was “unauthorized by the Constitution.” As was so often the case, President Jefferson disagreed with citizen Jefferson, and in March 1802, he signed into law the legislation creating the United States Military Academy. The USMA was a ramshackle affair for fifteen years. In 1812, the corps consisted of a single cadet, for Jeffersonians led by Secretary of War William Eustis stinted the Academy on grounds of parsimony in government and a belief in the citizen militia as opposed to the dreaded standing army.

      A humorless New England martinet named Sylvanus Thayer, the thirty-third cadet to be graduated from West Point, saved the Academy when he was appointed Superintendent in 1817. Thayer instituted summer encampments, which persist to this day, as well as daily grading, the ranking of cadets, and rules so strict as to invite disbelief, if not open rebellion: Cadets were not permitted to read novels, play musical instruments, possess cooking utensils, or send unauthorized letters to loved ones. Thayer also turned West Point into the best engineering and science school in the country—and, in ways not much acknowledged anymore, fundamentally altered the Academy’s mission.

      For as Stephen Ambrose wrote in Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, “Graduates of the Academy would not even be expected to remain in the Army, where there probably would be no room for them in any case, but they were expected upon their return to civil life to join the local militia company and direct its training and, in war, its fighting.” Thus the Academy was intended to reinforce the militia system and not become the heart and mind of that entity the Founders feared above all others: the standing army. Yet by 1838 Congress had imposed an obligation of four years’ service on graduating cadets, and it has fluctuated thereabouts ever since.

      There was an engaging casualness to West Point in its infancy. Twelve-year-old boys were appointed cadets, as were married men who left the grounds at night on conjugal visits. Suffused with the spirit of ’76, men took no guff from officers if they believed them to be scoundrels or bullies. Sylvanus Thayer insisted that “Gentlemen must learn it is only their province to listen and obey,” but typical was the cheeky cadet who cut off a Thayer adjuration with the remark, “Major Thayer, when I want your advice I’ll ask you for it!”

      Abolition of the Academy was a live issue in the 1830s and 1840s. (Congressman Davy Crockett called it “not only aristocratic, but a downright invasion of the rights of the citizen, and a violation of the civil compact called ‘the Constitution.’”) But the Mexican War saved its bacon, as several graduates performed with distinction.

      Although three-quarters of the West Point grads who fought in the Civil War wore the Union blue, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was of the class of 1828, and the Confederate generalship was dominated by products of this school for soldiers. Senate Republicans took up where Crockett had left off: Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan demanded abolition of this viper’s nest that had produced more traitors “within the last fifty years than all the institutions of learning and education that have existed since Judas Iscariot’s time.” Moreover, Northern West Point generals like George McClellan (1846) seemed shy of carnage; one Republican politician charged that the Union army was riddled with “scores of luke warm, half secession [West Point] officers in command who cannot bear to strike a vigorous blow lest it hurt their rebel friends or jeopardize the precious protectors of slavery.” (Bloodthirsty politicos chastising military men for their caution is not uncommon; recall Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s immortal—immoral?—question to General Colin Powell: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”)

      The bitterness of Union veterans over their treatment by haughty West Pointers made the Academy’s very existence an issue until the last of the vets had died off. (“What’s the meanest kind of dog?” went a joke told by Civil War soliders. “A Pointer.” “What’s the meanest kind of Pointer?” “A West Pointer.”) Illinois Senator John Logan, Republican candidate for vice president in 1884, wrote The Volunteer Soldier of America, a defense of “citizen-soldiers” against the “hostility of West Point,” which exists “to crush . . . the volunteer and his aspirations for recognition.” (Try to imagine a major political figure today calling for the abolition of West Point. This sacred cow took about a century to raise.)