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By Root 2160 0

good target-shooter, progressives claimed, a soldier must be deliberate and logical; he must be able to function on his own and not rely on the orders of his superiors; he must not follow the dull herd’s instinct but work together with his teammates; he must be fully aware of the scientific calculations involved in gauging wind speed, adjusting for elevation, and determining range. He must, in short, be a modern can-do man capable of independent thought and not beholden to military tradition. Whereas in times of yore, mused Colonel Henry Closson, the military was expected “to teach one man how to handle many” as part of its top-down emphasis on the chain of command, these days its task was “to teach every man to handle himself.”75 The army was to be of one.

The modern fighting soldier, progressives thought, should resemble his self-sustaining Colonial and Revolutionary forebear, the American frontier rifleman who felled his foes with a single shot. “In an Indian fight,” opined one, “the best marksman is the strongest man. Victory is not for the man of muscle, but the result of the quick eye and cool nerve of the fine shot.”76 One exponent went so far as to assert that “rapid firing is in itself evil.”77 They now called his form of prowess the “new courage” to distinguish it from the inferior, dated martial virtues—men’s instinctive emotions, brute force, and valorous ferocity tightly harnessed by officers and unleashed at the enemy—revered by the diehards.

This debate between progressives and diehards over shooting theory had profound public reverberations. At a time when the harsh ethos (and lavish rewards) of industrialized capitalism was reflected in the garish, cruel glow of the Gilded Age, Americans were beginning to wonder if all was right with their Great Republic. Walt Whitman perfectly enunciated those fears when, after seeing three men “of respectable personal presence . . . plodding along, their eyes cast down, spying for scraps, rags, bones,” he worried that “our republican experiment, notwithstanding all its surface-successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure.”78

That hardy national sense of “all pulling together” in the common cause was dissipating, Americans could not help feeling, and was being replaced by atomization, overconsumption, and greed during the boom times, and by poverty, torpor, and violence during the busts. The American “character” was disappearing before their very eyes, a victim of mass immigration, uncertainty, and financial panics.

Perhaps, to reinvigorate the republic, applying the ideals and values of the military to the wider society might pay dividends. William Church certainly believed so. Inspired by the first army-navy football game of December 1, 1890—in which the midshipmen’s quarterback called out his plays in nautical language (“clear deck for action”) and his opposite used army expressions (“right front into double line”)—he and other progressives encouraged college students to take up football chiefly “for its influence in developing the qualities especially required in an officer of the army or navy—qualities which it is at the same time well for every young man to cultivate.” Progressive officers felt that football was war; one alleged that the game required the same “tactical and strategical combinations for the accomplishment of the desired end.”79

From the diehard point of view, football had rules, just as the firing range at Creedmoor had rules, but the same could not be said for the scalp-littered battlefields of Dakota where, if any football was going to be played, it would be more like The Longest Yard than Knute Rockne, All American. Yet they too believed in the virtues of the game, if only because they found its violence and roughhousing a salutary method of unleashing the innate “savage” in men. Battering the defense into submission or sacking the quarterback was more their style.

But as Shakespeare warned, if one let slip the dogs of war, havoc would unfold. War dogs, even as they sank their fangs into the enemy, had to be kept on a tight leash—or they might