William Harding Carter and the American Army: A Soldier's Story (review)

Some officers win fame on the battlefield; others secure their reputations in the less glamorous but no less important arena of military policy and organization. William Harding Carter, a man who devoted much of his long career to bureaucratic reform in the army, belongs to that second category. Born in Tennessee in 1851, he gained admission to West Point in 1868 and graduated in 1873, a dedicated but not exemplary student. He spent much of the next twenty-five years serving in the cavalry at various Western garrisons. Although he experienced his share of adventure, including winning a Medal of Honor in August 1881 for saving a wounded soldier during an Apache ambush at Cibicu Creek, Arizona, he became frustrated at the slow rate of promotion and the lack of professional education in the frontier army, the scant opportunities to train at the company level and above, and the woefully inefficient supply system. These problems awakened in Carter a spirit of reform that would stay powerfully with him for the rest of his life.

Attracted to the ideas of Emory Upton, who called for sweeping changes in the post–Civil War army, Carter began to a write articles for professional military journals espousing his own thoughts on reform. He got a chance to put those ideas into effect in 1897 when he reported to the War Department as an assistant adjutant general. A few years later, he became a close working partner and ally of the new Secretary of War, Elihu Root, who shared his Uptonian vision of designing a modern army. Root supported Carter in his successful quest to overhaul the old Army bureau system by creating a General Staff Corps to centralize army staff and planning efforts and a separate War College to further the military education of senior officers. While Machoian acknowledges that Carter did not conceptualize his objectives and achieve his goals single-handedly, he asserts that "it was his painstaking efforts that translated professionalist ideals into coherent executive and legislative acts" (p. 138). Carter's later years, unfortunately, were filled with frustration. He clashed with the army chief of staff, Gen. Leonard Wood, while serving as assistant chief of staff between 1910 and 1912, fretted at the poor state of army preparedness and the militia system, and ended up being too old to command a division in the A.E.F. when the United States entered World War I. Even so, Machoian argues that Carter should be remembered as an important "transitional leader" who was not only a "bona fide hero of the Old Army" but also an important Progressive-era military intellectual who helped build "the foundation for a New Army" (p. 291).

The author writes in a clear prose style that is accessible to students and historians alike. The book, which features thorough and useful endnotes, will appeal most to those who are examining the transition period between the Old Army and the New and to those who have a particular interest in the Root reforms.