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New book highlights Marshall’s sterling character

5 min read

When Gen. George Patton slapped a battle-scared infantryman in the face, scolding him for cowardice in World War II, he engendered howls of protest from the home folks and a reprimand from his boss, Gen. Eisenhower.

Following a second indiscretion, Gen. Patton’s future service in the war was kicked up the line, to Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall.

“He’s a fair man,” Patton said.

At least that’s the way it’s played in the movie “Patton,” which won the 1970 Academy Award as best picture.

Nearly 30 years later, Marshall dominated the opening scene of another Oscar-winning film, the fictional “Saving Private Ryan,” directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks.

All of which is to say that Marshall has been well served by Hollywood. He’s also been doing pretty well recently on the printed page.

The Uniontown-born -and bred Marshall is featured in David Brooks’ 2015 book about the American character, currently manifested as a kind of whiney self-congratulations: “I’m a victim” meet “U.S.A! U.S.A!”

“The Road To Character” highlights Marshall’s devotion to the Army. Marshall was maybe the ultimate “institutionalist” of the 20th century.

Today, Americans are devoted to expressions of individual self-worth.

High school graduates are told by parents and commencement speakers alike that the road to success and happiness involves self-expression. Be true to yourself, love yourself, the self is supreme.

“I” has become everything while “we” has been put out to pasture.

Marshall, along with others in his generation, believed in the “we” of things. He did not conform to the idea that a “person is born in an open field,” Brooks writes. Instead, “a person is born into a collection of permanent institutions, including the army …”

These institutions, which also consist of government, the church, families and even whole towns, preceded us and will be here long after we are gone. It is our duty, then, to preserve these institutions, passing them on to future generations in tact, and better.

Brooks largely passes over Marshall’s boyhood, though he recollects Marshall’s death-bed hope that his father, who died in 1909 from a stroke at the family apartment in the yellow brick bank building in downtown Uniontown, would have been proud and approving of him.

Brooks might have cited, if he had known about it, Forrest Pogue’s observation that Marshall “learned the American tradition” in Uniontown.

The author could have then conveniently pivoted to a turning point in Marshall’s life. He was still undecided about a career in 1899 when he stood curbside as local soldiers, returning from the war against Spain, were accorded a tumultuous homecoming.

Marshall later told Pogue, his authorized biographer, that this Uniontown parade prompted him to set as his goal a military career following graduation from VMI the following year.

An outwardly unemotional man, Marshall’s natural reserve melted in the face of the overwhelming show of pride demonstrated by the people of Uniontown for the men of Company C, the 10th Pennsylvania Regiment of the state National Guard.

Thereafter, Marshall became attached to the Army in ways that sometimes jeopardized his very career. Though he was just a captain, he stood up to the general commanding U.S. troops in World War I, John “Blackjack” Pershing.

As the Army’s new chief of staff, he contradicted President Franklin Roosevelt, telling FDR that it was flat wrong to believe that airpower alone would bring down Nazi Germany.

In both instances, colleagues congratulated Marshall on his moral courage while assuming he would be drummed out of the service. Instead, his forthrightness won him a level of trust and responsibility that would have been impossible had he remained silent.

Marshall had what Brooks calls “an institutional mindset. … In this mindset, the primary reality is society … a collection of institutions that … transcends generations.”

Brooks traces Marshall’s thought-process to ancient times, back to the Romans and the Greeks, back to “old moral truths (that) do not die.”

But there was also this: Marshall grew up in an age devoted to hero veneration, according to Brooks, in sharp contrast to our own when heroes are more to be torn down than built up.

There existed, in the years of Marshall’s youth, a strong bias in favor of somewhat idealized standards by which a boy might measure himself against behavior that was historic in nature; this explains the adulation accorded the Confederacy’s Robert E. Lee, who was viewed even by Northerners — maybe especially by Northerners – as the embodiment of a manly American personality: courageous, patient, magnanimous, and fair-minded yet ruthless and ferocious in battle.

Lee was a Marshall favorite.

Even as he matured and learned the truth that the world was a nasty business, Marshall remained ramrod straight.

This makes Marshall sound like a choirboy. Not so. The ultimate institutionalist was the ultimate realist. He was a general’s general who kept other generals’ noses to the grindstone in World War II. With daunting new challenges to overcome, we could use a general like Marshall today.

More about that in a future column.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books -“Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.

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