The week before he was due to arrive at the institute, Marshall was stricken with typhoid fever, and he was forced to show up a week after the other cadets. It was tough enough for the first-year students, and Marshall’s sickly pallor and Northern accent drew unwanted attention from his seniors. He was called “Yankee rat” and “Pug” for his relatively snub-nosed appearance. “Rat” Marshall filled his days with undesirable chores, cleaning toilets a good deal. In his memory of the period, it did not occur to him to rebel or resent the treatment. “I think I was more philosophical about this sort of thing than a great many boys. It was part of the business, and the only thing to do was accept it as best you could.”9
In one hazing ritual early in his rat tenure, Marshall was forced to squat naked over a bayonet that had been jammed into a hole in the floor. The ordeal was called “sitting on infinity,” and it was a rite of passage. While a crowd of upperclassmen looked on, he strained to keep himself from collapsing onto the point. Finally he could take it no longer and fell. He did not fall straight down, but to one side, so he emerged with a deep but mendable wound to his right rear. Hazing that brutal was against regulations, even by the standards of the day, and the upperclassmen rushed him to the medical center, fearing what he might say. But Marshall did not report his tormentors, and he immediately won the regard of the corps for his staunch silence. One of his ex-classmates said, “By the time that episode was over nobody cared about his accent. He could have talked double Dutch and they’d have accepted it. He was in.”10
Marshall still did not excel academically at VMI. But he excelled at drilling, neatness, organization, precision, self-control, and leadership. He mastered the aesthetic of discipline, having the correct posture, erect carriage, crisp salute, direct gaze, well-pressed clothing, and the way of carrying the body that is an outward manifestation of inner self-control. During one football game in his first or second year he badly tore a ligament in his right arm but refused to report the injury to a doctor. It would heal on its own (over the next two years).”11A day in the life of a VMI cadet is marked by the succession of saluting one does to one’s superiors, and since Marshall could not lift his right arm above his elbow without pain, it must have been two years of discomfort.
This starchy formality is not in vogue today. We carry ourselves in ways that are more natural and relaxed. We worry about appearing artificial. But those in Marshall’s military world were more likely to believe that great individuals are made, not born, and that they are made through training. Change happens from the outside in. It is through the exercise of drill that a person becomes self-regulating. It is through the expression of courtesy that a person becomes polite. It is through the resistance to fear that a person develops courage. It is through the control of facial expressions that one becomes sober. The act precedes the virtue.
The point of all this was to separate instant emotion from action, to reduce the power of temporary feelings. A person might feel fear, but he would not act on it. A person might desire sweets, but would be able to repress the urge to eat them. The stoic ideal holds that an emotion should be distrusted more often than trusted. Emotion robs you of agency, so distrust desire. Distrust anger, and even sadness and grief. Regard these things as one might regard fire: useful when tightly controlled, but a ravaging force when left unchecked.
People in this mold try to control emotion with the constant firebreaks of decorum. Hence all those strict Victorian manners. They policed emotional expression in order to reduce their vulnerability. Hence the elaborate formal way of addressing each other. People in this mold—and all his life, Marshall was one of them—were deliberately austere and undramatic. Marshall scorned the theatricality of a Napoleon or a Hitler or even the histrionic display of two generals who would work with him, Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton.
“By means not always subtle,” one of Marshall’s biographers wrote, “the man whose mettle was fit for tempering grew from control to self-control, until in the end he imposed by his own desire those restraints upon himself which he could hardly brook when he first encountered them.”12
Marshall was not funny or emotionally vibrant or self-reflective. He refused to keep a diary, because he thought the exercise might cause him to focus too much on himself and his own reputation, or on how others might view him in the future. Diary keeping, he told Robert E. Lee’s biographer Douglas Southall Freeman in 1942, might unconsciously cause “self-deception or hesitation in reaching decisions” when, in war, he needed to focus objectively on “the business of victory.”13 Marshall never got around to writing his autobiography. The Saturday Evening Post once offered him more than $1 million to tell his story, but he turned it down. He did not want to embarrass himself or any of the other generals.14
The whole object of VMI training was to teach Marshall how to exercise controlled power. The idea was that power exaggerates the dispositions—making a rude person ruder and a controlling person more controlling. The higher you go in life, the fewer people there are to offer honest feedback or restrain your unpleasant traits. So it is best to learn those habits of self-restraint, including emotional self-restraint, at an early age. “What I learned at VMI was self-control, discipline, so that it was ground in,” he would recall later.
In his last year at VMI, Marshall was named first captain, the Institute’s highest rank. He completed his four years without a single demerit. He developed the austere commanding presence that would forever mark his personality. He excelled at anything to do with soldiering and was the unquestioned leader of his class.
A letter of recommendation from John Wise, the president of VMI, praised Marshall’s accomplishment in the unique tone of the schooclass="underline" Marshall was “one of the fittest pieces of food for gunpowder turned out by this mill for many years.”15
At an astonishingly early age, Marshall had constructed the sort of ordered mind that military men and women have generally admired. “That person then, whoever it may be,” Cicero wrote in Tusculan Disputations, “whose mind is quiet through consistency and self-control, who finds contentment in himself, who neither breaks down in adversity nor crumbles in fright, nor burns with any thirsty need nor dissolves into wild and futile excitement, that person is the wise one we are seeking, and that person is happy.”
The Service
There is always an interesting moment in the lives of successful people when they first learn how to work. For Marshall, that moment came at VMI.
To get an appointment to the U.S. Army, he needed political support. He went to Washington and showed up at the White House without an appointment. He worked his way up to the second floor, where one of the ushers told him it was impossible for him just to burst in and see the president. But Marshall sneaked into the Oval Office with a larger group, and after they left, he stated his case to President McKinley. Whether McKinley intervened is unclear, but in 1901, Marshall was permitted to take the army entrance exam, and in 1902 he received his commission.
Like Eisenhower, Marshall was a late bloomer. He worked professionally, he served other men, but he did not rise spectacularly. He was such a valuable aide, his superiors sometimes held him back from getting his own command. “Lt. Col. Marshall’s special fitness is staff work,” one general wrote. “I doubt that in this, whether it be teaching or practice, he has any equal in the army today.”16 He was such a genius at the dull, background work of military life, especially logistics, that he was not pushed forward to the fighting edge. By age thirty-nine, at the end of his service in World War I, he was still only a temporary lieutenant colonel, surpassed by younger men who had held combat commands. He suffered grievously with each disappointment.