In midlife, though, Marshall’s father sold his coal business and invested in a real estate scheme around the Luray Caverns in Virginia, which quickly went bankrupt. He lost all the wealth it had taken him twenty years to acquire. He retreated from the world, spending his time on family genealogy. The family began its descent. Later in life, George Marshall would remember trips to a hotel kitchen, where they would ask for leftover scraps to serve as dog food and the occasional stew. It was “painful and humiliating,” he would later remember, “a black spot on my boyhood.”1
Marshall was not a bright, sparkling boy. When he was nine, his father enrolled him in the local public school. His placement was determined by an interview with the school superintendent, Professor Lee Smith. The man asked him a series of simple questions to gauge Marshall’s intelligence and preparation, but Marshall could not answer them. As his father looked on, he hemmed and hawed, stuttered and squirmed. Later, after he had led the U.S. Army through World War II, served as secretary of state, and won the Nobel Peace Prize, Marshall still remembered that excruciating episode, when he had so publicly failed his father. His father, Marshall recalled, “suffered very severely”2 from the embarrassment.
Marshall lagged academically. He developed a terror of any sort of public presentation, an intense fear of being laughed at by other students, and a painful self-consciousness that inevitably fueled more failure and humiliation. “I did not like school,” he would recall later in life. “The truth is I was not even a poor student. I was simply not a student, and my academic record was a sad affair.”3 He grew mischievous and troublesome. After his sister Marie called him the “dunce of the class,” she found a frog in her bed that night. When visitors he did not approve of came to the house, he dropped water bombs off the roof onto unsuspecting heads. But he was also ingenious. He started a small business transporting groups of girls across a creek on a raft he built himself.4
After elementary school, he wanted to follow his older and favored brother Stuart to the Virginia Military Institute. He would later recall in an interview with his great biographer, Forrest Pogue, his brother’s cruel response:
When I was begging to go to VMI, I overheard Stuart talking to my mother; he was trying to persuade her not to let me go because he thought I would disgrace the family name. Well, that made more of an impression on me than all the instructors, parental pressure or anything else. I decided right then that I was going to wipe his eye. I did finally get ahead of what my brother had done. That was the first time I had ever done that, and it was where I really learned my lesson. The urgency to succeed came from hearing that conversation; it had a psychological effect on my career.5
This is a common trait among modest people who achieve extraordinary success. It’s not that they were particularly brilliant or talented. The average collegiate GPA for a self-made millionaire is somewhere in the low B range. But at some crucial point in their lives, somebody told them they were too stupid to do something and they set out to prove the bastards wrong.
Marshall was not totally without family warmth and support. While his father was perpetually disappointed in his son, his mother rejoiced in him, offering unconditional love and support. She sold the last of her family’s property so he could go away to college, including the lot in Uniontown upon which she had been hoping to build a house of her own.6 Marshall also had learned from his humiliations in school and at home that his rise in the ranks of life would not come from his natural talent. It would come from grinding, the dogged plod, and self-discipline. When Marshall got to VMI (he seems to have been admitted without having to take the entrance exam), he found a way of living and a pattern of discipline exactly to his liking.
He arrived at VMI in 1897 and was instantly drawn to its southern traditions. VMI had a moral culture that brought together several ancient traditions: a chivalric devotion to service and courtesy, a stoic commitment to emotional self-control, and a classical devotion to honor. The school was haunted by the memories of southern chivalry: of the Civil War general Stonewall Jackson, a former professor there; of the 241 cadets, some as young as fifteen, who marched out on May 15, 1864, to turn back a Union force at the Battle of New Market; and by the ghost of the Confederate hero Robert E. Lee, who served as a beau ideal of what a man was supposed to be.
VMI taught Marshall a sense of reverence, the imaginative ability to hold up a hero in his mind to copy in all appropriate ways, to let him serve as a standard by which to judge himself. Not long ago, there was a great move to debunk heroes. Even today, the word “irreverent” is often used as a high compliment. But in the world of Marshall’s youth, there was a greater intent to cultivate a capacity for veneration. The work of the Roman biographer Plutarch is based on the premise that the tales of the excellent can lift the ambitions of the living. Thomas Aquinas argued that in order to lead a good life, it is necessary to focus more on our exemplars than on ourselves, imitating their actions as much as possible. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued, “Moral education is impossible without the habitual vision of greatness.” In 1943, Richard Winn Livingstone wrote, “One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal. We detect in others, and occasionally in ourselves, the want of courage, of industry, of persistence, which leads to defeat. But we do not notice the more subtle and disastrous weakness, that our standards are wrong, that we have never learned what is good.”7
By cultivating the habit of reverence—for ancient heroes, for the elderly, for leaders in one’s own life—teachers were not only offering knowledge of what greatness looks like, they were trying to nurture a talent for admiration. Proper behavior is not just knowing what is right; it is having the motivation to do what is right, an emotion that propels you to do good things.
School days were filled with tales—sometimes false or romanticized tales—of the great paragons of history, Pericles, Augustus, Judah Maccabee, George Washington, Joan of Arc, Dolley Madison. Character, James Davison Hunter has written, does not require religious faith. “But it does require a conviction of a truth made sacred, abiding as an authoritative presence within consciousness and life, reinforced by habits institutionalized within a moral community. Character, therefore, resists expedience; it defies hasty acquisition. This is undoubtedly why Søren Kierkegaard spoke of character as ‘engraved,’ deeply etched.”8
VMI was an academically mediocre institution, and Marshall was not then a good student. But it held up heroes who were regarded as sacred. And the school certainly taught the habits of institutionalized self-discipline. Throughout his adult life, Marshall displayed a strong desire to be as close to flawless in all things as possible. Against the current advice, he absolutely did sweat the “small stuff.”
VMI also taught renunciation, the ability to forgo small pleasures in order to enjoy great ones. VMI was a place where young men from mostly privileged backgrounds went to get toughened up, to renounce the luxuries they might have enjoyed at home and to acquire the hardness they would need to be worthy of the struggle of life. Marshall bought into the ascetic culture and its rigors. First-year students were compelled to sleep with their large dorm windows wide open, so that in winter they might awake covered in snow.