General Douglas MacArthur's Tactical Support for FDR's New Deal

One of the most interesting facts to emerge from Mark Perry's fine new autobiography of General Douglas MacArthur (The Most Dangerous Man in America - The Making of Douglas MacArthur, Basic Books, 2014) is that the conservative Republican General propped up FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) as a way of maintaining the structure of the US Army's officer corps.

General Douglas MacArthur

As a way of putting young men to work during the depths of the great depression, FDR's New Dealers conjured up the CCC as a scheme for enlisting them to perform a variety of public work in the nation's forests and open lands.

They would be housed in camps and paid for their efforts.

The enabling legislation for this was passed by Congress in April 1933 but the roll out shortly thereafter was almost as big a bomb as Obama's registry for Obamacare.

Only 100,000 young men signed up during the first two months. (p.8)

Consequently, the New Deal liberals called on the War Department and the Army Chief of Staff, Douglas MacArthur, to straighten out the mess.

CCC workers in Florida

The left-wingers in FDR's administration had been pushing for ever deeper cuts in US military spending, even to the point of discharging members of the rather small officer corps (this at the time when Adolf Hitler was assuming power in Germany and the Japanese Imperialists were occupying China.)

MacArthur jumped at the chance to manage the CCC. Despite his philosophic contempt for FDR's socialist measures, he saw this as a chance to keep his officers employed and active, until the day that their skills would be required on the battlefield.

In less than a month, MacArthur implemented a program to supply and transport 275,000 new CCC recruits. His officer corps conducted the logistics and training for this little army of conservation workers.

MacArthur rightly viewed his officers as the "seed corn" of national defense. A seed corn, which the shortsighted New Deal leftists had been prepared to consume.(p.9)

Roosevelt's budget planners, grudgingly conceded MacArthur's success with the CCC and refrained from further cutting of the army officer corps, because such cuts would mean cutting their beloved CCC social engineering scheme.

MacArthur's young aide, Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower, was among the first to comprehend the significance of MacArthur's tactical support for the New Deal CCC and acknowledge its brilliance:

"Gen. MacA. finally won the most important phases in his fight against drastic cutting of National Defense," Eisenhower wrote in June 1933, "We will lose no officers or men (at least at this time)and this concession was won because of the great numbers we are using on the Civilian Conservation Corps work and Gen. MacA's skill and determination in the fight." (p.10)

So with war clouds emerging from the European and Asian horizons, the left-wing New Dealer's schemes to gut the American military were thwarted by the perspicacious General Douglas MacArthur.

Ironically, at the time, FDR's New Dealer's were disparaging MacArthur as a "war monger," and tried to cut the military budget at every turn.

After the December 7, 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and Adolf Hitler's subsequent December 11th declaration of war on the USA, in solidarity with his axis ally, these same lefty New Dealers, would criticize MacArthur for a lack of military preparedness (pps. 16-19)

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Mark Perry's New Biography of General Douglas MacArthur

The recently released biography of General Douglas MacArthur by popular historian, Mark Perry (The Most Dangerous Man in America - The Making of Douglas MacArthur, 380 pps., Basic Books, 2014) is wonderfully insightful, but also troubling for two reasons.

First, in his afterword, Perry cites an "informal internet poll" that ranked MacArthur the worst American commander ever. Even Benedict Arnold came in only 2nd.

Aside from the shaky value of the cited source, it's possibly a troubling sign of the all-pervasive leftist orthodoxy that has been exerting a stranglehold on American higher education.

That the brilliant architect of the lifesaving WWII "Operation Cartwheel" in the Southwest Pacific, the liberation of the Philippines and the masterstroke Korean War, Inchon invasion, should be considered anything other than the greatest American military commander of  the second half of our nation's existence, would be laughable if it weren't so terribly dangerous.

One can only think that neo-Marxists in academia are still smarting over MacArthur's authoritative and unilateral expulsion of Stalin's subversive Red Army operatives from occupied Japan in 1946.

Second, the book is also a bit troubling for its non-germaine, obviously commercially-driven title.

"The Most Dangerous Man in America" as a description of Douglas MacArthur, was an utterance made by Franklin D. Roosevelt at an informal luncheon in 1932.

The then Democrat presidential nominee was expressing his fear that MacArthur, a celebrated World War I officer, US Army Chief of Staff and well-connected Republican might be the only American on the political landscape able to thwart his electoral ambitions.

MacArthur (L) and FDR (C) had
a love-hate working relationship

The title really has little to do with the autobiographical nature of Perry's wonderfully lucid book. One can only surmise that one of the marketing geniuses at Basic Books figured it was a catchy title that would help books fly off bookstore shelves or Amazon on-line book sites.

This account of MacArthur's life basically takes us from the 1930s prelude to World War II through the September 2, 1945 unconditional surrender of the Imperial Japanese to MacArthur aboard the USS Missouri.

It's by no means as comprehensive as William Manchester's celebrated 1978 biography, American Caesar, which takes us in great detail from the great General's birth in Milwaukee in 1880 to his 1964 death at West Point.

Consequently, it stops short of several of the signal events in MacArthur's life - his role as Supreme Commander of the occupying forces in Japan (where he, in fact, wrote the Constitution under which Japan still operates), his brilliant Inchon invasion, which saved South Korea from communism and his 1964 deathbed warning to President Lyndon Johnson to avoid a land war in Viet Nam.

But as a riveting account of the intricacies of the Army-Navy rivalries that both plagued and strengthened the US war effort in the Pacific, Perry's account is unrivalled.

And the detailed account of the ambivalent love-hate working relationship between FDR and MacArthur, most of which is derived from first hand accounts of those who were there, is unavailable anywhere else.

In today's toxic Obamaite climate, American exceptionalism is constantly under assault from the elementary school to the university post-graduate level by the thinly-veiled neo-Marxist doctrines of multiculturalism, diversity and critical race theory.

Mark Perry's "The Most Dangerous Man in America - The Making of Douglas MacArthur," is a very welcome antidote to that and a reminder of American exceptionalism as embodied in one of our greatest American heroes.