Making Citizen-Soldiers

MAKING CITIZEN-SOLDIERS Exam Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Exam Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College MICHAEL S. NEIBERG Making Citizen-Soldiers ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Exam Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Second printing, 2001 First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Neiberg, Michael. Making citizen-soldiers : ROTC and the ideology of American military service / Michael S. Neiberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-54312-2 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-00715-8 (pbk.) 1. United States. Army. Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. 2. United States. Air Force ROTC. 3. United States. Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps. 4. United States—Armed Forces—Officers—Training of. I. Title. U428.5.N45 2000 355.2Ј232ЈExam071173—dc21 99-044354 Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College To the memory of Ethel Neiberg and Renee Saroff Oliner Exam Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Exam Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Acknowledgments In completing this book I have accumulated debts that I cannot hope to re- pay. The deepest of these debts is to my wife, Barbara, who has had to live with this project almost as long as she has had to live with me. I will be for- ever grateful for her patience and understanding. She also read the manuscript in its entirety. Thanks are also due to our families, Larry, Phyllis, and Elyssa Neiberg, and John, Sue, and Brian Lockley, for their support while I ran around the country. This project began as a doctoral dissertation, and I must acknowledge the debt I owe to those who helped me at Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere. My dissertation committee of John Modell, Peter Karsten (of the University of Pittsburgh), and Edward W. Constant III top this list. Professors Mary Lindemann, Steven Schlossman, and Peter Stearns also served as important informal advisors along the way. The more I talk to graduate students about their experiences, the more grateful I am to these professors for both their intellectual and their personal support. Other friends and colleagues at CMU, including Etan Diamond, Gail Dickey, Dan Holbrook, David Jardini, and Montserrat Martì Miller, gave help and advice (and wonderful Catalan food), for which I am grateful. John Shy at the University of Michi- gan got me started and helped along the way. I must also thank Walter Harrison; Robben Fleming; Richard Jessor; Elvis Stahr; Captain Michael Riordan, USN; William Snyder; Mark Grandstaff; Maggie McCaffery; and Richard Kohn for going above and beyond the call of duty. At my new home, the United States Air Force Academy, I wish to thank Brigadier General Carl Reddel (Ret.); Colonel Mark Wells; Elliott Converse; Lieutenant Colonels Lorry Fenner and Tony Kern; Jeanne Heidler; Major Edward Maldonado,Exam USA; Captain David ArnoldCopy (who read the entire manuscript); Jacob Abadi; and John Jennings. Dennis Showalter of Colo- Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College viii Acknowledgments rado College, a frequent visitor here at USAFA, was kind enough to read the manuscript on short notice, and I am grateful for his comments. I would like to thank the entire history department, but space forbids it. My colleagues there, to a person, have been helpful and supportive of both my teaching and my research efforts. I thank them. I wish I had the space to thank all the archivists and librarians who helped me find the materials that allowed me to write this book. They were all wonderful. In the interest of brevity, let me single out Carnegie Mellon’s Sue Collins, Michigan’s Francis Blouin, the Air Force Historical Research Agency’s Archie DiFanti, and the University of Illinois’s John Straw. Pat Mazumdar of the University of Kansas and Josh Silverman and David Wol- cott, both of Carnegie Mellon, provided research assistance and friendship and read part or all of the manuscript. The United States Army Center of Military History, the Mark C. Stevens Travel Fellowship at the University of Michigan Bentley Library, and the Spencer Foundation all saw enough merit in this study to fund it. Jeff Kehoe at Harvard University Press and two anonymous reviewers helped me to make this a much better book. Jeff’s support of this manuscript made the final revisions a joy instead of a burden. If any errors remain, they are my own. Portions of this work have previously appeared in New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected Papers from the Twelfth Naval History Symposium (Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1997) and Elliott Converse, ed., Forging the Sword (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1998). Since I began this project I have lost two people who were very special to me. I dedicate this book to the memory of Renee Saroff Oliner and Ethel Neiberg. I wish with all my heart that I could be handing you a copy of this book instead of dedicating it to you. Exam Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Contents Introduction 1 1 ROTC and the American Military Tradition 12 2 A Favored Position on Campus: The Military and Higher Education in the Cold War Era, 1950–1964 35 3 The Origins of Postwar Dissatisfaction 60 4 The ROTC Vitalization Act, 1964–1968 84 5 ROTC from Tet to the All-Volunteer Force 112 6 ROTC in the Era of the All-Volunteer Force, 1972–1980 151 7 A New Academic Program: ROTC, 1972–1980 182 Epilogue 202 Abbreviations 205 Notes 207 Primary Sources 251 Index 255 Exam Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Tables 3.1Percentage of officers stating “high career commitment,” by commissioning source, 1961 65 3.2 Standard army curriculum, 1950s 73 4.1 Growth of American higher education, 1960–1964 86 5.1Anti-ROTC incidents reported by AFROTC units, by type and academic year 120 5.2 Results of student and faculty referenda at the University of Colorado and Rutgers University 122 6.1 ROTC enrollments 1968–1975, by service 153 6.2 Net gain or loss of ROTC units by region, 1968–1974 172 6.3 ROTC enrollments 1976–1981, by service 180 7.1Highest degree attained by AFROTC officers, by year assigned 189 7.2 Mean composite SAT scores 197 Exam Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College MAKING CITIZEN-SOLDIERS Exam Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Exam Copy Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens, and make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education. —Thomas Jefferson In the summer of 1996, the University of Connecticut requested that the army reassign the head of its ROTC unit because the colonel “allowed classes to be run like a boot camp.” At first glance, the idea of dismissing a military officer for running a military training program like a boot camp seems para- doxical if not ludicrous. Rather than treat the issue as such, however, the army quickly acceded to the university’s request and transferred the officer. Both parties agreed that the transfer was in the best interest of both the army and the university, because the colonel, according to one University of Connecticut official, “just didn’t realize what a university was like, and he tried to impose a structure on it that just didn’t belong here.”1 That same summer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology officials made strident efforts to defend ROTC in the face of objections from student groups who contended that ROTC, bound by the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue” policy toward homosexuals, violated the nondiscrimination policies of the university. MIT responded in a fashion similar to that of other universities faced with the same controversy. It pledged to keep ROTC, in large part because of “its contribution to the important goal of preparing ‘citizen-soldiers.’” Rather than expel the program, it sought, in the words of the MIT faculty chair, to “remake it in our own image.”2 These cases are contemporary examples of a process of remaking military training (andExam thus the military itself) in the universities’Copy image that has been ongoing since the inception of military training on civilian campuses in the 1 Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2 Making Citizen-Soldiers nineteenth century. Indeed, when seen in historical context, the controversies at Connecticut, MIT, and elsewhere have roots that reach back as far as the eighteenth century, when the fledgling American military inherited its traditions from the English army. These controversies also have more recent precedents in the visible conflicts between universities and the military seen in the 1930s and the Vietnam War era, as well as in the less visible conflicts of the 1950s and 1970s. In this study I examine those roots and the evolu- tion of ROTC training on civilian campuses, from the creation of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in 1916 through the solidification of the current all- volunteer force (AVF) by 1980. I argue that the creation of ROTC just be- fore America’s entry into World War I, the confrontation that characterized ROTC in the 1960s, and the reform of ROTC in the 1970s are all rooted in a deeply held and enduring American belief, shared by educators, politicians, and college students alike, in the importance of populating the military with nonprofessional officers produced outside the traditional military academies.

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