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The author seeks to explain the creation of a modern American Army in a country hostile to centralised military power. The effect of various European nations on the US military are examined. The central theme, however, is how a small number of influential figures impressed with US business borrowed management techniques from national corporations to modernise the army. It is argued these military reforms represented a wider influence in the progressive era which sought to utilise management techniques developed by US business to improve government.
Gen. Leonard Wood?s meteoric career was no fluke. The ambitious Wood (1860?1927), serving as an army physician, strategically took on tasks and assignments that led him from the pursuit of Geronimo in the deserts of the Southwest (for which he won the Medal of Honor) to chief of staff of the U.S. Army and almost to the presidency of the United States. During his rise to high office, the darker side of Wood?s personality became legend. Able administrator and sincere patriot, Wood, together with friend Theodore Roosevelt, organized the famous ?Rough Riders? during the Spanish-American War. Unfortunately, Wood possessed a consuming and obsessive ambition, as well as the willingness to advance his own interests over the ruin of others and in the face of political disapproval. Despite personal rivalries and feuds, Wood earned national prominence with his successes as a colonial administrator in Cuba and the Philippines, yet he was denied the two things he wanted most: an active role in the fighting of World War I and the presidency of the United States. ø Armed Progressive, a critical study of Wood?s quest for power and his tremendous achievements, helps us to understand this pivotal figure who played such a dominant role at the turn of the century. Jack C. Lane provides historical insight and political assessment and captures the essence of this capable, ambitious, proud, bigoted, and self-righteous man.
The author seeks to explain the creation of a modern American Army in a country hostile to centralised military power. The effect of various European nations on the US military are examined. The central theme, however, is how a small number of influential figures impressed with US business borrowed management techniques from national corporations to modernise the army. It is argued these military reforms represented a wider influence in the progressive era which sought to utilise management techniques developed by US business to improve government.
"The era, from the turn of the century to the beginning of World War I, saw an American attitude shift toward structure, social duty, and middle class manly values. The federal government sponsored military education in schools, held military tournamentsi
Best known for leading the construction of the Panama Canal, George W. Goethals (1858–1928) also played a key role in the decades-long reform that transformed the American military from a frontier constabulary to the expeditionary force of an ascendant world power. George W. Goethals and the Army is at once the first full account of Goethals’s life and military career in ninety years and an in-depth analysis of the process that defined his generation’s military service—the evolution of the US Army during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. George W. Goethals was a lieutenant and a captain during the post-Reconstruction years of debate about reform and the future of the army. He was a major when the most significant reforms were created, and he helped with their implementation. As a major general during World War I, he directed a significant part of the army’s adaptation, resolving crises in the mobilization effort caused largely by years of internal resistance to reform. Following Goethals’s career and analyzing reform from his unique perspective, military historian Rory McGovern effectively shifts the focus away from the intent and toward the reality of reform—revealing the importance of the interaction between society, institutional structures, and institutional culture in the process. In this analysis, Goethals’s experiences, military thought, managerial philosophy, conceptions of professionalism, and attitude about training and development provide a framework for understanding the army’s institutional culture and his generation’s relative ambivalence about reform. In its portrait of an officer whose career bridged the distance between military generations, George W. Goethals and the Army also offers a compelling and complex interpretation of American military reform during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era—and valuable insight into the larger dynamics of institutional change that are as relevant today as they were a century ago.
The Progressive Era, marked by a desire for economic, political, and social reform, ended for most Americans with the ugly reality and devastation of World War I. Yet for Army Air Service officers, the carnage and waste witnessed on the western front only served to spark a new progressive movementto reform war by relying on destructive technology as the instrument of change. InBeneficial BombingMark Clodfelter describes how American airmen, horrified by World War I's trench warfare, turned to the progressive ideas of efficiency and economy in an effort to reform war itself, with the heavy bomber as their solution to limiting the bloodshed. They were convinced that the airplane, used as a bombing platform, offered the means to make wars less lethal than conflicts waged by armies or navies. Clodfelter examines the progressive idealism that led to the creation of the U.S. Air Force and its doctrine that the finite destruction of precision bombing would end wars more quickly and with less suffering foreachbelligerent. What is more, his work shows how these progressive ideas emerged intact after World War II to become the foundation of modern U.S. Air Force doctrine. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, including critical documents unavailable to previous researchers, Clodfelter presents the most complete analysis ever of the doctrinal development underpinning current U.S. Air Force notions about strategic bombing.
"The military preparedness movement ... began as an outgrowth of the Progressive Era when a small group of dedicated officers and civilian administrators attempted to reform America's small and obsolescent military establishment and bring the armed services closer to the center of American life. In the Edwardian years of peace and domestic reform, this effort had limited success. But the onset of World War I in Europe, shattering the confidence of a generation, gave the proponents of defense a chance"--Introduction