American History Hit - What Made America? The Professional Military

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Today's United States of America boasts one of the largest and most expensive militaries in the world. But this wasn't always a guarantee.In this episode, we're hearing how the professional military was created despite it's existence being at odds with the Republican ideals the nation was founded on.Don is joined by friend of the podcast, Cecily Zander. Cecily is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wyoming and author of “The Army under Fire: Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era” and “Abraham Lincoln and the American West".Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The story of America and its impact on the world is not just told from capitals, Congresses, or command tents.

It is told from the ground and the boots on it. From wet leather sinking into Canadian mud in 1812. From bare feet bleeding in Mexico. And soaked red at Antietam. From jungle rot in the Philippines, frozen socks in Korea, mud in Vietnam, desert sand in Iraq, and dust-choked mountain trees. in Afghanistan. The American Republic has changed beyond recognition since its birth.

The weapons have evolved from smooth war muskets to drones and satellites. The boots themselves have changed beyond recognition. But the same person stands in them, a young American carrying a rifle. So how did this become such a key element in American history? Let's find out. Greetings, hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Don Wildman. Wildman, and today we're bringing you a special celebratory episode. As the United States approaches

its 250th anniversary of independence and the declaration that declared it to the world, we thought it fitting to ask a few of our favorite voices from past episodes to return. To come back and share what, in their opinion, are some of the most inspiring and compelling stories of the founding era, the moments, the people, the turning points, most revealing and defining in the making of this great nation. Joining me today is one of our stalwart guides. Professor Cecily Xander, so recently transferred to the University of Wyoming. Cecily, you made it through your first Rocky Mountain winter. That's right. We didn't have much of a winter until now, unfortunately, but we'll take it when we can get it. So happy to be here,

Don, thanks so much. As we speak, we are a number of weeks out from July 4th. What's been your general impression of the anniversary so far? I think people are really excited. What I've been most heartened by lots of my colleagues out here in the kind of American West, which is not typically a part of the country that's considered part of the national 250 story. It's not part of the founding story. We got there quite a bit later. Thomas Jefferson tried to get us there as soon as he could, but it took a while. People here are really excited in Wyoming and Colorado and the Dakotas. And that's really great. I like the kind of feeling of national unity that the 250th is bringing about. I remember it well from being a 13 or 14 year old. I can't remember of in the 19th. 1976 bicentennial, which was a big deal where I was in Philadelphia. So here we go again. Now, as I say, we asked you and a few other guests to think about their defining 250 tales. What's yours? What does this

anniversary mean for you? Yeah. So as a historian of the sort of 19th century United States and a historian of the United States military and particularly the U.S. Army, obviously that's a big part of the revolutionary story. It's a big part of the story of the 250th anniversary. But it's a story that I think would actually surprise a lot of listeners to sort of really understand in depth, which is to say that even though the United States of America today boasts of having one of the largest militaries in the world, certainly one of the most expensive militaries in the world, in the era of George Washington and the era of the founding, that was certainly not a guarantee. And the story of sort of the rise of America's professional army is one of going from really a

position of total disdain on the part of their civilian colleagues to the kind of story of support and exultation that we see today in the modern period. It's important to keep in mind the backdrop of all of this revolutionary period is the leaving behind of tyranny, the resistance against tyranny. And for that era, for those people of that time, tyranny was seen in the red coat uniforms of the British who were living in their homes, literally, in Boston and so forth. And so that's an important fact. And so that's an important factor to keep in mind as we then move into the founding, into the, you know, the early Republic times, how people felt about the military in that time. Of course, central to all of this is George

Washington, who had already been quite a military man before the revolution in the French and Indian war, we call it. But he spent much of the American Revolution not only fighting the British, but also the American belief in the Congress itself that a professional standing army was incompatible with Republican identity. Yeah. And I think there's a. There's a. I think there's a few important threads to kind of pull on here when it comes to Washington. Washington was a trained British soldier. There's no getting around that. He had the military experience of the Redcoat officers that he would spend the entirety of the American Revolution fighting against. And he also had the experience of being a colonial soldier, a soldier on the frontier of what was then

the British nation, what would soon become the American nation, a general or an officer who had to rely on militia to get the job done. And it turned out in Washington's experience over that period of the French and Indian War in the era before the revolution, militia are not terribly reliable. On paper, militia are a great idea. You get civilian support. These are American Cincinnatuses or Cincinnati. I don't know how we would pluralize it, but that great Roman soldier who had, when called from his fields, put down his plow and picked up a sword and then happily returned home to farm again. This is kind of the American ideal. Washington comes to represent this in really important ways, but we also have to remember that Washington was a trained soldier,

and he was fighting to have trained soldiers under his command. And so in the early years of the revolution, when he's not getting the results he needs, when he's losing New York, when he's being put kind of back on his heels across the Delaware, he's trying to come up with a reason for these soldiers to want to fight. And a reason he really ends up deciding on is that they need real training. They need real experience of soldiers.

And if you give them that, if you give them some professionalization, If you make them a real army and not just a sort of band of militia, they're probably going to achieve better results. And so that's what Washington is really fighting for. So much of this time is about precedent and references and history for these guys, especially neoclassical references. Was there a time when a country existed ideally with just militias and no professional army? Not really. And the sort of only example that the founding fathers could regularly return to, well, there were a couple. They could think about Oliver Cromwell and their own British example.

not terribly great. That was a soldier who had used his sort of rag-tag army to overthrow a government. But what they're really thinking about is ancient Rome. And ancient Rome, this sort of shining example of democracy in the era of the Roman Republic. What undoes the Roman Republic? It's the armies of Pompey and Caesar, these professional soldiers who come and kind of dismantle takeover, use military force and military power to end these sort of great democratic experiments. And so the only, the only reference the founders have is that militia are not a threat in that way because they are temporary soldiers. They are not regular professional soldiers. And so the big argument is not necessarily that militia are better, but that they are less threatening in terms of historical examples than

the professional military tends to be. I have never underscored that so clearly as you are doing, which is that that pivot point for Rome is from that Republican army or those forces under the Republican rule versus the dictatorship that happens. And so it is perceived that the army that ISIS take for granted, I think of Rome as that charging army, that organized thing. But in fact, there was two different areas, of course, to Rome. And we're relating to the second of those, you know, the later part of those under Caesar and all the Julius Caesar and all that. Two quotes from two important founders. I'll just read them. James Madison, June 1787, The means of defense against foreign danger have always been the instruments of tyranny at home.

Among the Romans, it was a standing maxim to excite a war wherever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending have enslaved the people. My goodness, I mean, it doesn't get more black and white than that, right? Yeah. I mean, they're essentially relating sort of professional military power and the threat that they pose to slavery, which is something that these founders knew and understood intimately, right? They knew what the institutions of slavery looked like. Second quote, and then we'll have something important to say.

Samuel Adams 1776. This is more than 10 years before the Madison quote there. Professional Army, quote, always dangerous to the liberties of people. He just was short and sweet about this. Adams argued that soldiers would feel separated from the general populace. You can't have everybody behind the flag if everybody's split up that way, huh? Exactly, and that's why the professional army, sort of if we think forward into the Civil War period, we're going to have a Union Army that will eventually enlist 2.1 million men.

Only 50,000 of those will be professional soldiers. There'll be about 1,500 officers who come from the professional ranks. And you will see time and time again in the letters of Civil War soldier volunteers. They talk about their West Point trained or sort of professional military academy trained officers as aristocrats. They say they don't really understand democracy anymore, right? They've lived in functions in these systems that have purposely kept them apart from the American people. And they observe a chain of command that sort of goods or Democratic Americans really fundamentally resist. They don't want to be ordered around. They don't want to be told what to do. And yet these martinettes, right, these aristocrats, these professional officers are different in every way from an ordinary kind of patriotic American. Yes, it's almost like a little feudalism within the government. You know, we're going to have our dukes and our generals. And that puts them apart as a sort of aristocracy, doesn't it?

It's such a brilliant idea to put this in the context of 250 because you see, we will say by the end of this, I'm sure, the growth of this idea throughout the entirety of the history of the United States, 250 years. And what a completely different idea we have now of the military when in fact it's bigger than ever, of course. You know, and we celebrate that. We think that's a sign of our freedom, not of our tyranny. It's a very interesting irony, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There was so much sort of assiduous care taken by the founders as they took in everything

they did and thought about to really define what this army would be and to keep it purposely as small as it could possibly be to still be functional. And they come to find out in the war of 1812, they'd gone slightly too small. They needed a slightly bigger professional army to make that war. more viable. They still managed to pull it off, but the militia again kind of failed on the job. And that's where you start to get new conversations about this issue. But it affects every sort of military story of the American 19th century and well into the 20th century. I mean, there was so little caretaken about what the army was doing or what they were up to at the turn of the 20th century

that many soldiers went to Cuba and the Spanish American wore wearing wool uniforms from the civil war. The Army simply had made new uniforms in the interim. Interesting. And then it was such a quick war anyway. We had lots of surplus. Turned about the Army Navy store. I want to back up to the revolutionary period and talk about what happened in Boston, which was really so much the precedent for so much that comes after. And it's important it even shows up later in the documents. Standing armies using civilian housing as a quarter. You know, this was what happened. They moved in. They occupied Boston. Talk about leaving a deep impression. Yeah, and, you know, I think sometimes we can encounter documents like the Bill of Rights to the Constitution and think that they were just sort of happenstance.

There's a reason that the First Amendments in the Constitution deal with military issues. I mean, it seems to us sort of silly that the Quartering Act or the provision against quartering troops in civilian homes is, you know, like the third thing that the founding fathers cared about when they wrote the new Constitution, but it shouldn't be surprising at all. It was galling to them, right? It was exactly. this example of what standing armies do is they take advantage and they push people around. Had the British Army evolved to a point where it was such a negative. I mean, they've got their own history of this, right? This is a new practice at this point of moving in or not? I'm sure that they had done it sort of in their sort of colonial endeavors in places like Ireland as well. But I think in the new world, right, they just don't have as much infrastructure here in the United States. So I think it's just trying to make do. But it really comes about, because in the aftermath of all of those,

what the colonists referred to as intolerable acts and the resistance that the colonists put forth to all those new taxes and things, the British sent more troops than they had ever quartered or had here in the new world. And I think it was more of an exigency there. But it still was really important to the colonists. Their reputation was made with the seven years war,

with the French and Indian War. I mean, the colonials concluded that the ranks of British redcoats were filled with coarse drunkards. I mean, the behavior amongst, in this rather small world of colonial America back in the 1750s had a big impact. I mean, the British crown, this is a huge engine, of course, for so much of this history and so many of the attitudes amongst Americans. The British crown had borrowed massively to finance the Seven Wars. It doubles the British debt.

And by the late 1760s, half of British tax revenue went to pay interest on this loan. So I'm talking about that entire era, not only creating the engine for the controversies and the taxation, and so forth that happened, but also this attitude towards the British, which is really a seed planted at that point. Yeah. And the colonists saying over and over again, we're paying for this army, this British army that sort of is unable to do us any good. And I think especially when we think about the seven years war and military issues, that proclamation line of 1763 is so important. This line that the British government draws right at the Appalachian Mountains and it says, colonists, please don't go west of this line because we can't protect you.

can't give you any security. And the colonists are saying, then why are we paying all these taxes on this army that's just sitting here on our coasts and doing nothing to protect us? Why can't they help facilitate our movement west? That's where we want to go. And so again, I think you're pointing to that precise kind of problem that the colonists hate the British Army, this professional army, and they're going to come to be very suspicious of their own professional army in turn. Washington's experience as a citizen, as a soldier, as the future leader, his wartime experience is so microcosmic of all of this, right? In that he knows right away, this is a war that can't be fought with this rag-tag army. It's got to be professionalized.

He brings in foreign Europeans to work on this with him and drill them and so forth. He creates this group, the order that's necessary. And that, in the end, has a lot to do with the ability to fight this war, so to the French and all of our. of it. But the idea of a professional standing army is central to this idea. And his lessons that are learned from that have to be logged, right? He registers this as the future leader, as the future president. Yeah, he does. And he's really pushing during his presidency for that to be sort of formalized, for there to be a kind of professional army that exists. He doesn't really care about its size, but he says, like, we have a lot of knowledge here. We have people with

experience. Let's try to keep them kind of in the ranks. Let's try to keep them kind of functional. And after several defeats in what was called the old Northwest, St. Clair and Parmar and others, the Continental Congress finally agrees. And Washington gets by the end of his presidency this kind of small professional force, the origin point for the United States Army, which is called Wayne's Legion. And they spend most of their time in what is now Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, kind of helping pave the way for American expansion into that part of the country. And three years after Washington's death, in 1802, Thomas Jefferson, who was really no fan of professional armies, he was very much an anti-Washingtonian in this sense, does decide to found West Point.

So in 1802, just shortly after Washington's death, they do in New York, where Washington had spent so much of the war trying to establish an American foothold, right, get that place back. West Point associated also, of course, with the most famous traitor in American military history, that is Benedict Arnold. So sometimes professional soldiers do go bad. Go wrong. Oh, my goodness, do they ever? It's such an interesting idea. I want to get this in a few minutes because it really underscores everything we're talking about. There was an emerging new world order going on at this moment.

I mean, Americans are so focused as we rightfully should be on the revolution, on this founding period, especially in this year. but the fact is there was an enormous amount of dynamics coming from the other side of Atlantic in a whole new way. I'm going to hold on that for a moment, but this is why you're bringing this up as a subject of 250 is so fitting because it exposes this entirety of the world and all the dynamics that are in play, not just what's happening here on our continent. Militias in the buildup of war, it was very difficult to raise them. I mean, that's the other thing is the mechanics of recruitment, which we today sort of take for granted, still a problem in our country really didn't exist in those days. You totally depended on the states to send people. There was no central mechanism, was there? No, not at all. And Washington confronts this early on in his presidency with a little bit of chaos going out on in Western Pennsylvania. There's a sort of

rebellion of farmers in Western Pennsylvania who don't want to pay tax on the whiskey that they're either legally or illegally making. You know, it's not important. The point is they're upset that the government wants to tax them and they're rebelling. They're sort of attacking government property, forts, things like that. And Washington as the president of the United States, with no real army under his command, even though he is commander in chief, is asking other states, this is in the era of the Articles of Confederation, please send me troops so that I can go deal with this crisis. And Massachusetts says, I don't care what's going on in Pennsylvania. I'm not sending you men. That's not in my interest, right there's not a sense yet that these individual states are part of one country and that's another

problem you get with the militia right there they're militiamen from Massachusetts and they have no interest in helping Pennsylvania and so Washington's in this crisis he needs a mechanism to be able to call out the militia as commander-in-chief and he needs to to know who's in charge of it because for a good bit of that rebellion in western Pennsylvania Washington thinks he's actually going to have to ride out there on a horse as president of the United States and command this militia force and everybody's telling him that's ridiculous, that's absurd, but there was so little guidance that he had no ability to kind of enforce federal power. And so the army will ultimately become, I think over the course of the 19th century, we think of wars like the U.S.-Mexico War and like the civil war, these sort of

more conventional European-style conflicts, but actually for the most part, what the professional army that comes out of the Constitution, that comes out of the establishment of West Point is going to be, is an army that on the frontier, tries to install and then enforce sort of American federal order. They're really the arm of federalism on the frontier. And so that's how Washington originally sees them. And it's really nice because what Washington and then his successors can also say is that there are no threat to the east.

If we keep them out here in the West, if we keep them out here serving on the frontier, they're not going to march on Washington. They're not going to try to take over the government, right? They're doing this job here. They're doing a diplomatic job when it comes to dealing with Native. nations when it comes to pushing up the Spanish and the French and other claims to these territories. That's the best job they can do. That's what the professional armies for. It's right. It's to establish a sort of bulkhead of American authority in a new area. He wasn't alone in

thinking about this. Of course, you have Alexander Hamilton writing about this in the Federalist papers, specifically 23, I think, but 26 for sure. He, I'll quote, the idea of restraining the legislative authority in regard to the common defense considered. He makes a defense of the Constitution's provisions allowing the legislature to raise and fund a standing army in times of peace, even. It's better to risk the abuse of that confidence than to embarrass the government and endanger of public safety. So all this thinking is going on in terms of the military, as you are pointing out, as we are creating the ideals behind this country and, you know, the give and take in that process, because you've got to sacrifice something to get another thing.

So if you want to save country, as Alexander Hamilton is doing, you've got to fund it. You got to manage it from the central place. And I think another thing we sort of lose perspective on in 2026 is that Alexander Hamilton and the federalists when they were envisioning how this army would work, it was, it's slotted in just as every other issue did in the founding period into the separation of powers. Because what you said right there, right, is that the president is commander in chief. Yes. Okay, he has the sort of chief military authority in the country, but he can't just ask for an army.

He has to get Congress's permission. He has to go to the legislature, and they have to decide how much they're willing to pay that army. And there truly was, for most of the 19th century, really up until the mid-20th century, a real commitment to that separation of powers when it came to military authority. It's only in the last really 80 years or so of American history where presidents sort of unilaterally declare police actions or, or, say that they're going to do something, and Congress sort of has to agree in hindsight to this, that we get a kind of change in our perception of the military. But for most of American history, there was that real separation of powers, which allowed for additional security when it came to managing this professional army. World War II will have everything to do with justifying this kind of military we live in before. Prior to that, World War I and prior is these enormous

fault lines through our society having directly to do with the military, how it's raised, how it's funded, how it acts, all of this. And the go-to position, as you're pointing out, was always to, yeah, we don't want the military. Let's let's let that go away again, you know, after a war fought, only to sort of have to rebuild it again and again. I have always looked at that as a practical consideration, whereas you're talking about it more of idealistically, more theoretically as far as how do you govern this country through having a military. It's interesting. This is the question that I referred to. I hinted at before, and I want to ask you this. As I was doing the notes for this interview, it sort of occurred to me. A question I'd never considered before. How geopolitical was George in those days? How much did he see a new era unfolding before him and his fellow Americans? A new scale of global warfare and violence. Higher stakes. I'm thinking, of course, of the Napoleonic Wars, which are coming right around the corner. How much is a guy like George Washington thinking about that? I think he's thinking about it a lot, and I think there's a really good reason for it.

We sometimes forget that George Washington was the first president. I mean, we don't forget, but we forget what that means. And it means that there was no precedent for anything he was doing. And for those who have read the Constitution, and if you haven't, I would suggest reading article to the article of the Constitution that outlines the duties of the president. It's remarkably short. George Washington had essentially six paragraphs to go on. And one of the things that he knew he could do as president, one of the clearest,

sort of sanctions in Article 2 of the Constitution is diplomacy. He has the power to make treaties. He has the power to deal with foreign entities. And so I think Washington's presidency is in many ways defined by his thinking about the United States on a foreign stage. This is a new country. It's just getting its feet under it. It needs to present some kind of military capacity. It's not going to be massive, but Britain and France and Spain have some of the greatest armies and navies in the world. I don't think George Washington is terribly concerned that the United States is going to be invaded by a foreign power. It's a big country. They have points of control. But you can't sort of succeed in this world where these militaries are getting bigger, where wars are becoming

more totalizing, right? The Napoleonic wars are kind of a revolution in this regard. And you can't go into sort of a global conversation without having some semblance of an army. And the American army is always going to be treated as a joke, regardless, they're tiny. They're really insignificant by European standards, but at least it's something. And I think George Washington has a stake in that. I just never thought, I mean, today we hear about cyber war and space force and all these kind of new thinking about the challenges ahead. I just never really thought about George Washington thinking that way, which, of course, he had to do, especially to do with the Navy. I mean, there are things that are obvious and necessary if you're surrounded by oceans. But I never never.

thought about him like staring at a map of the world and saying, oh my goodness, you know, all this stuff is going to go, there's going to be a conflagration over there, which indeed is what happens, you know, from 1820s onward, it goes crazy over there, 1815 on them. How would he overcome this challenge? This continental army, I'm just going over basics here. Lexington and Concord, April 1775, the Continental Army is created with him in command. Congress keeps Washington on a short leash throughout the war. he spends the war struggling. You can see it in the letters. Lobby in Congress for longer enlistments,

better pay, professional training. Finally, von Steuben, I mentioned, shows up at Valley Forge. I don't, how did that happen? Makes the troops suddenly march and get discipline and so forth. There's a few other ones who are not coming to mind. His resignation of his military commission to the Continental Congress in 1783 is everything. When he switches over, but again, this is a general idea. We take it for Granted. What a great guy. No, he knows how important this institution that he was just running is. And for him to leave this go is the ideal of having a federal government that isn't going to be plagued with tyranny, you know, corrupt and so forth. That's how bold that choice is, isn't it? Yeah. And it's again, it's a place where we kind of have to say nobody but Washington.

I don't, I don't really know of another person who would have had the foresight, but also just the sort of personal capacity, right? It's hard for people in power to give up power, and Washington did it constantly. He had this sort of confidence. Maybe he knew that everyone else knew that he was really the only person for the job, but for him to make that choice, and I think it's also important. There are moments throughout the war where this professional army gets a little squirly. For those reasons you pointed out, they're not getting paid,

they don't get enough food, right, they're uncomfortable, they're cold. It's especially the pay issue. I mean, there is a minor mutiny in the army toward the end of the war, where the soldiers say they're going to march on Philadelphia. They're going to confront with arms, the Continental Congress. And Washington, basically, this is one of the biggest moments of his real career. He throws himself in front of these men and says, you can't do this. We will lose everything we have worked for if you mutiny in this way.

Just please, please let me advocate, but please don't do this because we will lose everything if you go forward with this mutiny. Newberg, Shea's Rebellion, all kinds of moments when rightfully so. These people are like, are we getting some compensation for what we were, you know, promised or is it coming? And it isn't. And so they're finally forced to march and do all kinds of things that we've had several episodes on this in time. Was the event you were talking about out in Midwest? Was that St. Clair's defeat? Yeah. Can we get a little more detail about that? I'm just curious how this affects them. I'd have re-election. It's been a long time as I heard that term. St. Clair's defeat.

1791 happens in the Northwest Territory, correct? Yeah, it does. And it's a sort of conference. between a small U.S. force and sort of a Native American kind of confederacy. And it's an absolute embarrassment for the Americans. They just get overrun by these native forces. And, you know, it's funny, there are several moments in American history. And they come at these inflection points where sort of someone, whether it's Congress or the president or the American people, have become quite sort of lax or even resentful toward the professional army. I'm thinking of the fight at Fort Federman here in Wyoming after the Civil War, right? That's 1868. The United States Army

has to abandon its entire Bozeman Trail concentration because they get defeated. A U.S. forces massacred at Fort Fetterman. And then, of course, in the aftermath of Reconstruction, when there's so much hatred for the soldiers who had been in the American South, sort of upholding martial law, you get the defeat of George Custer at the Little Bighorn just two weeks before the national 100th anniversary. It hits newspapers in Philadelphia that July. Right. These are moments where on the back of triumph, the American Army has sort of lapsed into this position of really inadequacy, and it can't hold its own. And so someone like Washington, someone like Grant, right, is going to point to these and say, look, I understand you don't want a large

professional army, but we need at least some kind of commitment to training these soldiers, to keeping some men in these ranks as a profession. Otherwise, we're going to see the St. Clairs and the Fettermans and the little big horns time and time again. 900 professional soldiers of the American forces were killed or severely wounded, huge amount of casualties included the men, women, and children that accompanied the expedition. This was a total wipeout. Anybody my age grew up in the Vietnam era, and we all talked about that and lived with that sort of dark cloud until desert storm comes along.

There were many of these situations, of course, through the Civil War, you know, where we questioned our military. like we never do today. And that's what's so interesting about that. How, again, we take for granted, and a lot of this has to do with World War II, how powerful we are, how all ubiquitous we are around the world, et cetera, et cetera. That was not the case. And we need to own that to understand the journey that this country really went on in terms of the military, you know, as central to it all. Yeah, I mean, I think you can see it in certainly the 20th century, you know, when the United States begins to become more involved in these European, wars. I think, I think like a real linchpin moment there is World War I when the Americans show up and the

British Army says, great, we'll just sort of fold you into our infrastructure and we will be in charge of you. And Pershing says, look, I'm here to help, but I'm afraid that's not going to work. The Americans are going to hold their own. And from really that point on, when Pershing asserts that the United States Army is not going to be commanded by any other foreign power, you get the kind of changing of the tide in terms of American kind of military culture. Exactly. I suppose the Pentagon had a lot to do with the building of the Pentagon in terms of the, you know, autonomy of the military and also the checks that were necessary against it, you know, and the identity of military officers not being considered political, the civilian versus military, all that stuff really happens. Again, out of World War II,

is huge amount of growth and expansion is very carefully managed, I must say, I think one of our proudest moments where despite the fact that we saw this new world that needed to be managed with our presence everywhere and huge amounts of spending, there was still great care taken to make it constitutionally fit and to strike the right tone. We're lucky the soldiers who have become presidents are the ones who did. I think the grants, right, and the Eisenhower's who are men in Washington's image, right, that they can, they can truly sort of say, I have all this knowledge, just as Washington did, of diplomacy and world affairs and how. how the military should work. But I am president as a civilian, and I am going to run this country

as a civilian. We're fortunate as a nation that those are the men who have stepped forward to sort of take on that role. And these days, that's why it's so much in the news that there are the blurred lines now between, you know, where those checks and balances would have been enacted are now could have blurred. And it's not just the president administration that goes back to Kennedy. These acts that were, these actions of the presidency becoming larger and larger in terms of military power and choices to use it are consistent throughout everything from really World War II and FDR onward. But we, it's a tribute again to those early founders that there was such a baked in feeling that we understood the military. We knew where it was and it wasn't going to cross that line or else we become a whole different kind of country. Yeah, we become that monarchy that they were sort of rebelling against. And, you know, I was just encouraged listeners to go back and look at those founding documents and see how often the army comes up. It's just like it's not something we're trained to look for.

We're trying to look for these soaring ideals, these declarations of liberty and independence. But really, there are also sort of huge complaints and questions about the role that soldiers should play in any nation and especially in this new nation. Are they taught? I've never really asked this of an officer, and I've met a lot of them in my work, and fortunate to do so. They're the kindest people I've ever met and clear on their jobs. That's what's so cool. Is it taught at a place like West Point, these understandings, these hard lines between one form of behavior and another?

They understand the civic place, right? They do, yeah. And I think it's still something that's sort of taken very seriously. You have soldiers throughout the 19th century when Ulysses S. Grant was in the Army, and he proudly says this in his memoirs. He never voted. He didn't think it was his place to vote. His place was to serve, whether it was a Whig or Republican or a Democrat, and his place was not to advise on political matters. He would never have sort of deigned to tell Abraham Lincoln what he should do about the question of slavery. He said, okay, you've emancipated the slaves. I am going to use that to my advantage. I'm going to use that to my advantage. I will take black troops into my army. I will do everything I can to win this war for you. You have now given me these new tools. And so I think soldiers still think along those lines, give me the tools and I'll get the job done.

But I'm not going to tell you how it ought to go because that's not my place, right? Again, their hierarchy, their structure is very clear. I never really thought about Eisenhower's farewell address in these terms either. You know, his warning about the military industrial complex was really cautioning about that line being crossed, wasn't it? He was saying, we can't give this crowd. Now it's more complicated because of the technology and all the necessary stuff for doing all this. Now they're deeply entrenched with each other, military and industrial complex. And now they can take over this whole thing.

But that has its roots again in the proper place. Is it fair to fantasize, I suppose, that there comes a time when the United States goes back to an anti-militaristic stance? Like, looks for a time when we don't have this kind of gigantic army? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what that looks like, you know? I've lived my whole life in a post-Gulf War world. So it's really hard for my generation, which is, you know, a generation that will soon be sort of people who hold positions of power to imagine a world that's any different. We don't really have a concept. We also don't have a Vietnam. I mean, we have this forever war in the Middle East, but it was just something we forgot about. It's not something we were angry about or that seemed like an abject disaster because it was so far on the periphery of our imagination and what was going on. So I don't know. I just don't know if we've reached a level of comfortability with these kind of ongoing, this ongoing presence across the world and what that costs us.

I think we're presently seeing some of what Washington was so worried about when he said goodbye, that sense of entanglements that we can't really fix no matter how powerful we are. We're seeing those limitations everywhere around us now. And where that lands, we never know. But we do know that the military is playing that central role and tipping that balance. In this case, I suppose it was seen to be a fast fix, you know, what we're in right now. And it's never a fast fix. That is the idea of the forever war.

And Washington knew that. He was saying, be careful. It's all part of the consideration of 250 and where we're landing at this important moment. Again, I think back to 200 when I was barely a teen and the days were very difficult in the 1970s, similar in many ways to what we're facing today with polarized divisions. But important differences too. And right in the center of it, all the decisions and choices that led to such a big military power center in our federal government as represented by a big old Pentagon-shaped building.

Wow. One wonders what they'll do with all that office space if they ever get reduced the size of the military. Work from home. Yeah, exactly. Remote. Cecily Xander is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. She joins us most often to discuss her specially in civil war history and the West, having most recently published the Army under fire, the politics of anti-militarism in the Civil War era, a good read from the Louisiana State University Press. Cessley, happy 250th. I hope it finds you well and happy. You too, Don.

Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great.

But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.