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 men from more than 20 states, including those from as far away as Boston and Providence. He again became fascinated by the potential of the Corpsmen, paying special attention to the educational programs of these camps. “He strove to have the best instructors it was possible to get,” his wife recalled. “He wanted to prepare them as far as possible to take responsible jobs back home.” The welfare of the 10,000 CCC men under his command was paramount. “If the boy’s teeth were in bad condition, woe befell the CCC dentist who extracted when he could have filled!”41
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
