Clay arrived. The army sent a number of engineers to help with the occupation. Like many soldiers, he could see the troubles affecting the rest of Germany. He, too, drew an important lesson from his experience. “I did see the inflation,” he recalled later. “I did see the difficulties under which the new German [Weimar] government was attempting to establish itself.”54 As much as any American, he saw how economic chaos undermined the good intentions of democratic reforms.
* * *
By 1920, the Philippines had become a mostly autonomous, albeit legally anomalous, “quasi-sovereign.”55 The insurrection had ceased, and Congress had granted the Filipinos an elective national legislature. More than 90 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, and the national legislature held wide latitude in determining domestic policy. However, the government remained headed by an American governor-general who acted as executive and could veto any act of the national legislature. While he had to gain the consent of the Philippine legislature for his own initiatives, he ultimately answered to the American president, who had appointed him. The arrangement had force because the United States maintained a garrison on the islands that reported to the governor-general.56
In 1922, the army ordered MacArthur to the Philippines as part of the garrison. His former boss Leonard Wood greeted him upon arrival (President Warren Harding had appointed Wood as governor-general the prior year). The Filipinos had “done fairly well with self-government,” Wood reported, but widespread graft and corruption had led to a doubling of government expenses with no improvement in public services. The courts had become “clogged,” small pox and cholera outbreaks had killed nearly sixty thousand Filipinos, and the Philippine government had used tax revenue to prop up a national bank that had gone bankrupt. Wood came to the Philippines to “clean things up.”57 For their part, many Filipinos had grown weary of Wood’s “supervision.” In an effort to get around him, they continually sent delegations directly to the U.S. asking for immediate independence. Harding stood by his governor-general, but it irritated Wood to no end.58 To appease the Filipinos, Wood put MacArthur to work, heading campaigns to vaccinate livestock, organize a local ROTC, and chase away jungle bandits.59
While MacArthur labored in the Philippines, Eisenhower and Clay also gained experience in America’s external state—mostly in Panama. Efforts to build a canal there had begun in 1850, when American and British negotiators agreed (in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty) not to compete with each other in constructing a passageway between the oceans. Of course, in 1850 neither country had the resources or technical know-how to compete anyway. But by the turn of the century the U.S. position had changed. President Theodore Roosevelt pressed for an American effort to create the canal, which led to the Hay—Bunau-Varilla Treaty between the United States and Panama. The treaty committed the United States to defending the independence of Panama and, in turn, granted the United States in perpetuity control of a zone stretching five miles to either side of a canal to be constructed by the Americans. The “United States would possess and exercise” governance of this area as “if it were the sovereign of the territory … to the entire exclusion of the exercise by the Republic of Panama of any such sovereign rights, power or authority.”60 Congress followed ratification of the treaty with an act that vested in the president all “military, civil, and judicial powers as well as the power to make all rules and regulations necessary for the government of the” new territory, which Roosevelt delegated to the military.61 The Canal Zone became, like the Philippines, a part of the country’s external state, functioning in that space between flag and Constitution, administered through the military.62
For Eisenhower and Clay, their service in the Canal Zone turned out to be life changing because each found in Panama a mentor who finally gave him the intellectual challenge he had missed at West Point. For Eisenhower, this man was General Fox Conner, who had already concluded in the early 1920s that a second world war lay near on the horizon. On his own, Conner decided to mentor the younger generation of officers to face the next world war, focusing on three in particular: George Marshall, George Patton, and Eisenhower.63 “In the last war we fought for an ideal.… This time we shall be fighting for our very lives,” he told Eisenhower. “I believe that Germany and Japan will combine against us, and Russia may be with them.” The Allies would include “an ebbing empire [Britain] and a republic in the last stages of a mortal illness [France].”64 By virtue of his position on General Pershing’s general staff in World War I, Conner could observe the dysfunctional command that existed between the French, British, and Americans. “When we go into [the next] war it will be in company with allies,” yet Conner stressed that there must be an “individual and single responsibility” at the top.65
Conner had an extensive library, and Eisenhower read his way through it, covering the works of Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, and (most important) the brilliant military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Eisenhower and Conner then talked over the meaning of these works as they spent hours on horseback mapping the terrain, hacking through the jungle, or cutting roads. In retrospect, Eisenhower called it his “graduate school” in “military affairs and the humanities.”66
Clay’s experience in Panama was equally influential. “I really found myself in Panama,” he later recalled. “[It] was an important assignment and you worked at being a soldier.” He served under an engineer named “Goff” Caples, who (like Fox Conner) was well-read and liked talking. “He was truly an independent thinker,” said Clay, particularly on questions having to do with “ethnic and political movements … a special tutor.”67 Clay obtained his first command in Panama, a group of soldiers he rated as the best in his military career.68
Clay and Eisenhower worked to do many of the same things in Panama that MacArthur did in the Philippines. They surveyed jungle, built barracks, cut roads, trained junior officers, and generally did the things that today might be called “development.” They also showed the kind of skill and intelligence that allowed them to quickly climb the army’s ranks.
In December of 1927, MacArthur learned that Henry Stimson, the former secretary of war, would replace Leonard Wood as governor-general of the Philippines. Stimson had returned to private life when Woodrow Wilson became president in 1912. When the U.S. entered World War I, he hoped for a military appointment based on his prior service. Wilson refused. So Stimson enlisted, quickly rising to the rank of colonel in the artillery. After the war he again returned to practicing law. But the decline of Leonard Wood’s health in 1927 led President Calvin Coolidge to seek a replacement and he asked Stimson to accept the governor-generalship. Stimson had just turned sixty, but decided to accept despite his age.69
Unlike Wood, Stimson harbored fewer racial judgments about the Filipinos. He felt that they deserved independence. But in a hostile world, surrounded by hungry empires, they could not survive long if that independence came too soon. “The Philippines are protected from foreign submersion,” Stimson wrote, “solely by … [the] military power of the United States.” For a lasting independence, the Filipinos needed a national military capable of defending that independence, and institutionally speaking, this seemed far away. Japan, in particular, seemed eager to gobble up the islands.70
More worrisome, the long-term success of the Philippines depended on the development of the internal institutions necessary to maintain democracy. Here, the islands seemed quite unprepared to stand on their own. The country needed a strong press, civic organizations, and established political parties. The national legislature had the form of democracy, but none of the social or civil infrastructure that would help it flourish.
In a move that characterized military government in the future, Stimson saw the solution to all problems in economic development. “There has been very little accumulation of capital [in the islands],” complained Stimson, “One result of this is that the revenues possible from taxation at present are quite insufficient … for military and diplomatic purposes.” More to the point, the lack of industrialization meant “no middle class or bourgeoisie
