The War Department, with Mr. Taft at the head, in 1907, joined Mr. Roosevelt in his sneering contempt for the soldier’s motive in joining the army. The Report runs:[[229]]
“Under a voluntary system men enlist either to aid their country or to promote their own ends; that is, through self-sacrifice or self-interest.... Self-sacrifice of this sort is patriotism, an emotion necessary to arouse.... To keep it through long periods of peace at a pitch high enough to maintain an army would be impossible.... Self-interest is, therefore, the only cause of enlistment necessary to consider; ...”[[227]]
It thus appears that, in the judgment of the “great secretary,” now President, patriotism is not at all a matter of brains, of reason steadily sustained by logic, but is, on the contrary, a matter of emotion, passion, “brain-storm,” induced with fife and drum and sustained with godlike sky-climbing aspiration to have one’s stomach filled with “butter, milk and molasses, or syrup, at least”—as “dessert.” The two Presidents, the anti-labor injunction judge and the lion-hunting monkey murderer,[[230]] agree that what looks like patriotism in the long-service “regular” is after all simply a matter of getting less than fifty cents a day and “keep.” Of course, such things as this are not mentioned on the Fourth of July nor in campaign speeches when the “great secretary” or his chattering predecessor is courting the ‘brave boys’ for their votes.
(29) When a young man joins the army or the navy he virtually agrees to pocket his pride and submit to a series of insults from his “superior” officers for a term of years. The recruiting officer is to some degree, at least temporarily, a man of pleasant manners, and the callow patriot taking the bait in the recruiting office is treated alluringly. But when the youth signs his name in the books and becomes a soldier patriot, matters take a change. It is a case of being “stuck” or “stung.” For following the hour of his enlistment, humble, prideless submission to strutting, swaggering bosses is the soldier’s portion. From “superior” officers he must meekly accept insults for which, in private life, he would promptly knock a man down. In the service he must bend his neck and take the yoke for years. Here is a sample of the spirit of the haughty airs assumed by the “superiors.”
Mr. Taft, speaking as Secretary of War, February 14, 1908, to the young men at West Point Military School, said:
“The plainest of your duties is to keep your mouths shut and obey orders. As a soldier you must forego the privilege of free speech.... You will meet with injustices, others will get all to which they seem entitled. Your wives will have heart-burnings. Your children will have heart-burnings. In spite of all that you must do your duty, honestly and devotedly.”
Here is a soldier’s letter:[[231]]
“... We are supposed to work eight hours a day, but we get dismissed when the officers see fit to let us go—all for fifty-two cents a day. The negroes working at Panama get more money and are better treated than the enlisted men out here. Our ‘little brown brothers’ are treated better over here. And to cap the climax, over comes a high statesman [Mr. Taft?] and makes a speech to a mob of our ‘little brown brothers’ and tells them not to judge the Americans by the enlisted men, as the enlisted men are composed of the roughest elements in the States....”
President David Starr Jordan (Leland Stanford University) writes of the contemptuous treatment of the men in the ranks by the “superior” officers:[[232]]
“One soldier [in the Philippines] says, ‘If the United States were on fire from end to end, I would never raise my hand to put it out.’ Another would ‘toss in a blanket the officials at Washington, as we toss a cheating corporal.’ Another says in print, referring to the abuse of the soldiers by their superiors in pay: ‘Yes, I knew that war would be hell before I got into it. But I did not know that war would be hell deliberately and fanatically inflicted. I expected to sleep in mud puddles with my head on a stone for a pillow, and go hungry for days on forced marches and away from a base of supplies. But I never dreamed that I would have to sleep in a leaky and exposed shed when there was plenty of good shelter elsewhere, and when thirty officers had fine apartments in which there was room for five hundred men; neither did I expect to be fed on coffee-grounds and foul canned meat for weeks when we were right next to a base of supplies, and when our officers lived on the choice of the commissary’s department.’”