When the Confederates fired the opening rounds of the Civil War on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861, the U.S. Marine Corps comprised 46 officers and 1,755 enlisted men; by 1916, the year before the United States declared war on Germany, those slim numbers had increased only to 348 and 10,253.

Such a small organization accommodated a variety of eccentrics, any number of whom provided grist for either the accolades or complaints of congressional watchdogs or members of the Fourth Estate in search of a newsworthy story. Scrutiny of personnel records and application of the rigid tenets of political correctness may provide cause to wonder just how such an obstreperous lot managed to play such a prominent role in the shaping of the American Empire.

War crimes, or violations of the normal laws of land warfare, rarely have been politically correct. Three such instances involved Old-Corps Marines. The celebrated case of Major Littleton Waller Tazwell Waller remains the best known. On 28 September 1901, a group of Filipinos on the island of Samar wiped out a company of the 9th Infantry at Balangiga. In response, the military governor of the Philippines ordered the formation of a suitable force under Army Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith to seek retribution. Caught in the spirit of the moment, the admiral commanding the Asiatic Fleet offered to provide a battalion of Marines.

The colonel commanding at Cavite selected Major Waller, one of the Corps’ most spirited and pugnacious officers, to lead the 15 officers and 300 enlisted men. Smith’s instructions to Waller left no doubt as to the severity expected during the punitive campaign: “The more you kill and burn, the more it will please me.” Stunned, Waller asked “Hell Roaring Jake” Smith just what constituted a Filipino insurgent targeted for elimination and received the grave reply that “any Filipino male over age ten” satisfied that criteria.

Waller and his Marines accomplished their mission, burning villages and shooting Filipinos. Then, Waller split his small force to map potential telegraph routes across the dense interior of southern Samar. Waller, 4 of his own officers, 50 enlisted Marines, a lieutenant and a handful of soldiers from the 7th Infantry, 2 native scouts, and 33 native bearers struck out across Samar. As conditions worsened, and the force dwindled—by then, 11 of the Americans had died along the jungle trail—Waller grew increasingly convinced that the Filipino bearers were bordering on mutiny. After one of them attempted to strike an officer with a bolo, Waller ordered 11 of the Filipinos executed.

Already under intense criticism for its harsh colonial policy in its newfound possession, the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt looked askance at the incident. Returning to Cavite, Waller found himself facing a court-martial, convened hastily to put the matter to rest. Fortunately for the combative campaigner, another Marine had witnessed Smith’s exhortation, and the court found Waller not guilty.¹

Almost two decades later, the worst Leatherneck atrocity of the colonial infantry era failed to rise to public scrutiny outside the Department of the Navy. In early fall 1918, the brigade commander in Santo Domingo brought charges against Captain Charles F. Merkel. The German-born former enlisted Marine—known by the nom de guerre “Tiger of Seybo” for a predilection to burn down the homes of restless natives—was charged with cutting off a prisoner’s ear, then slicing his chest and pouring salt into the wound.

Worse, Merkel then ordered the luckless Dominican confined for three days without food, water, or medical attention. Had the matter gone to trial by court-martial, the alleged war crime might have tarnished further the performance of Leathernecks in their role as a colonial constabulary. But Merkel set the matter aside himself with the simple expedient of his own suicide, supposedly with a pistol containing a single bullet provided by some of his fellow officers in hopes of saving the Marine Corps from embarrassment.²

The specter of war crimes committed by the Marines of the Old Corps emerged again in the Caribbean barely a year later. In 1919, Major General Commandant George Barnett expressed shock after reading a defense counsel’s allegation that “indiscriminate killing of natives [in Haiti] by Marines” was commonplace. Barnett followed his review of the transcript of the court-martial by ordering an official investigation and then sending a “confidential and personal” letter to the commander of the brigade in Haiti, Colonel John H. Russell, expressing his consternation.

Within a year, however, criticism of Yankee military intervention in the western half of Hispaniola increased markedly. A journalist returned from Haiti to report that “1 have heard [U.S. Marines in Haiti] talk of ‘bumping off gooks’ as if it were a variety of sport like duck hunting.”

The reporter’s material inflamed the African American community and their liberal supporters, and his charge that many Marines in Haiti were “ignorant and brutal” gained currency. In the closing days of the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, the allegation became a cause célèbre during the presidential election of 1920.

As presidential hopeful Warren G. Harding continued to arouse crowds with the statement that “the Marines in Haiti, for the most part, are ignorant and brutal,” the Secretary of the Navy ordered Barnett to submit a written report. Tire canny former Commandant included a copy of his “letter of caution” to Russell in the report, but the usually introspective Josephus Daniels failed to note the inflammatory correspondence.

An intrepid journalist spotted Barnett’s letter, however. Republican rhetoric heated up quickly following publication of the new material, and Harding thundered moralistically that “thousands of Haitians have been killed by American Marines.”³

While charges of Marine misconduct slipped quietly into the dustbin of history, the allegations underscored the difficulties involved in the Corps’ new role as a naval constabulary for the American Century. Yankee altruism may have generated warm and fuzzy feelings for government 0 officials and at least a portion of the body politic, but the uniformed instruments of U.S. foreign policy often demonstrated a lack of enthusiasm.

Increasingly, Marines grew to loathe the tours overseas in harsh tropical climates—usually two to two-and-one-half years—and the frustrations of dealing with less-than-appreciative native populations.

Lieutenant Colonel Earl H. “Pete” Ellis sputtered that Waller “had only done what others had done—except that he failed to kill them all—if he had done the latter, who would have told the tale? Whatever you do; do thoroughly!” Racial and ethnic slurs appeared frequently in Ellis’s personal correspondence thereafter during his two tours in the Philippines and a later posting to the Dominican Republic.

An essay that Ellis penned offering his personal prescription for colonial infantry duties was considered so offensive, i.e., politically incorrect, that the Secretary of the Navy refused to approve its publication.

Another veteran tropical campaigner of the era, Frederick M. “Fritz” Wise, did manage to provide a cynical postscript in print: “There was no question that some rough stuff had been pulled in Haiti since the first American occupation. There was no question that some of it had been justified . . . Haiti had been brought to peace by men fighting and living amid conditions that people back home could never picture.”¹

Although a variety of problems buffeted the Marine Corps in this era, nothing plagued the Commandant and his senior officers quite so much as their enlisted force. The Rudyard Kipling of the Old Corps, John Thomason, described the other ranks of the era in hagiographic if not politically incorrect prose.

He noted that most smoked or chewed rank cigars, drank most anything containing alcohol—even preferring hair tonic over post-exchange beer, which was described simply as “horse piss.” They swore with a studied and colored persistency, and acted as if no life existed outside their own.

But Thomason softened his characterization of these unhealthy lifestyles, possibly immoral traits, and anti-intellectual perspectives by noting that the Marines of the era understood their weapons and how best to employ them. If they did not know every Leatherneck by name, they at least knew every officer by name and reputation.

Scrutiny of records for that period suggests an enlisted force plagued with faults that would make today’s social engineers in the Pentagon wince with righteous indignation. The Old Corps recorded a scandalous desertion rate. Low pay, excessive hours of tedious guard duty, poor food, life in unsanitary barracks, and sleeping on straw-filled mattress ticks contributed to the problem.

It was a dismal existence. After a night of heavy drinking in a saloon or horizontal refreshment in a bordello near their barracks, many Marines found it easy to remain absent-without-leave (AWOL). Successive Commandants argued, mostly unsuccessfully, for increases in funds and manpower to alleviate the situation. Secretaries of the Navy, Presidents, and Congress usually turned a deaf ear to the entreaties.

A sample from the records of the era’s enlisted force suggests the difficult, almost Herculean, problems faced by senior Marine Corps officers:⁵

★ Christopher Nugent enlisted in 1858, sewed on his corporal’s stripes two years later, then deserted but was apprehended and reduced to private. He re-enlisted in 1862, was promoted to corporal the next day and sergeant the following month, but deserted again in 1865 and never returned to the Corps.

★ John Morris enlisted in 1880 and served in the USS Lancaster for less than two years before deserting.

★ Daniel Campbell enlisted in 1896. Before his discharge in 1901, he had amassed seven offenses for drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and absences without leave.

★ Oscar Field enlisted in 1896 and re-enlisted in 1901. During his checkered career, he went from private to corporal and back to private in 1902, and sergeant and orderly sergeant a year later. After seven instances of AWOL and drunkenness, the Marine Corps discharged him for “mania” and as “unfit for duty.”

★ Pomeroy Parker enlisted in 1892 and re-enlisted in 1897. His record of AWOLs and drunkenness resulted in 20 days’ confinement in double irons, but the punishment failed to dissuade his untoward attitude toward military discipline. As Pomeroy’s obstreperous behavior worsened, a court-martial awarded him a dishonorable discharge in 1899.

★ Joseph F. Scott enlisted in 1888, re-enlisting for what appeared as a full-service career. Between 1897 and 1900, his record of frequent AWOLs and drunkenness resulted in just as frequent reductions to private, but he always regained his lost stripes. Caught sleeping on post, probably intoxicated, Scott was ordered by court-martial reduced to private and confined for a year. Within a year of his release from the brig, he had sewn on his corporal’s stripes again; shortly thereafter, Scott left the Marine Corps with a mark of “excellent” for character.

★ Walter S. West enlisted in 1897, earned a stiff sentence from a summary court-martial a year later, and then a bad-conduct discharge in 1899.

★ John M. Adams, a Harvard drop-out from the Class of 1893, enlisted in 1893 and re-enlisted in 1897 and 1906. Adams received a medical discharge two years later. But in 1917, the Army commissioned him in the coastal artillery.

★ James Cooney enlisted in 1889 and re-enlisted successfully to serve until 1903. His record reveals 5 offenses of AWOL, and 15 for drunkenness.

★ Thomas W. Kates enlisted in 1899, deserted in 1903, and never returned to the Corps.

★ Harry C. Adriance enlisted in 1898 and re-enlisted in 1903. A year into his second enlistment, Adriance’s frequent offenses of AWOL and drunkenness resulted in a bad-conduct discharge.

While this litany of scandalous behavior appears not at all unique for a good portion of the Old Corps enlisted Marines, what marks the Leathernecks selected for this sample as unusual is that all of them earned the Medal of Honor.

Various Commandants sought initially to improve the quality of officers as a means to correct the performance and decorum of the Marine Corps. But a consistent and reliable source of new officers, second lieutenants that served satisfactorily and remained in uniform for a full-service career, never materialized despite the entreaties of every Commandant from Archibald Henderson to Charles G. McCawley.

Between 1798 and 1902, a total of 718 men earned commissions. Of that number, 418 failed to remain in uniform until retirement (151 died or were killed in duels, 47 were dismissed or cashiered for a variety of transgressions, and 220 simply resigned to return to whatever pursuit their affluent parents might suggest). The deplorable situation earned the ire of congressional critics and the barbs of journalists, some of whom suggested that “USMC” meant “useless-sons-made-comfortable.”⁶

Hope sprang anew, albeit briefly, during the dog days of summer 1882. As Congress wrestled with the problem of a burgeoning list of Navy officers with too few vacancies in a fleet diminishing in size, it opted to release most of the graduates of the U. S. Naval Academy from a postgraduation obligation of Navy service.

But a caveat to the unpopular legislation allowed the Marine Corps access to the midshipmen no longer needed in the Navy. Young men who had studied for four years in a military environment and then toiled at sea for an additional two years appeared as a suitable remedy for the ills plaguing the officer corps of the smaller of the naval services. But many of the graduates of that era commissioned in the Marine Corps, from 1883 until 1896 (when the Navy began to use every graduate to man a rapidly expanding fleet), adopted mannerisms and lifestyles differing little from the officers that came before them.

Of the 11 midshipmen from the Class of 1881 who entered the Marine Corps, one drowned and another resigned his commission. Of the remaining nine graduates who completed or attempted to complete full-service careers, i.e. serving until age 64, four demonstrated symptoms of alcohol abuse. Charles A. Doyen received a series of unsatisfactory fitness reports for binge-drinking and unauthorized absences from duty. In an incredible act of contrition and penitence, he sent a pledge of abstention for the remainder of his time in uniform to the Commandant of the Marine Corps as an explanation for his unsatisfactory fitness report. Within a few short years, both Doyen and his Naval Academy classmate, James E. Mahoney, earned courts-martial for drunkenness.

Constantine M. Perkins’s erratic behavior, attributed to alcohol abuse, prompted a medical board to declare him temporarily unfit for duty. Another medical board sent Henry C. Haines into premature retirement when his bouts of delirium tremens became so severe that he no longer could perform his duties adequately. While his fondness for distilled spirits never resulted in an unsatisfactory fitness report, Lincoln Karmany was wont to growl “there may be a few good men who don’t drink, but they’ve got to prove it.” The colorful and hard-drinking Karmany earned the ire of the wardroom in the USS Indiana by his constant references to the battleship’s captain, Robley D. “Fighting Bob” Evans, as “Frightened Bob.”⁷

Relations with the opposite sex rarely troubled civilian officials and senior officers within the Department of the Navy. A time-honored expression—“if the Marine Corps wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one”—rang true. Hardly any of the enlisted men were married, and if they were, their wives lived off-post and received no special allowances or remuneration based on their husbands’ occupations.

Because of the frequent postings to sea or overseas, most junior officers eschewed marriage until at least reaching field-grade ranks. The system fostered sexual promiscuity. Medical officers treated the results with professional aplomb and perhaps with a wink and a nod.

When Louie Cukela reported for his physical examination in anticipation of a battlefield commission following his heroism at Belleau Wood in 1918, Navy doctors found him infected with gonorrhea. Three years later, mustering for his physical examination for promotion to first lieutenant, doctors noted that the Marine had contracted syphilis.

The colorful Cukela retired as a major in 1940 after an illustrious career that included numerous awards: the Medal of Honor and the Silver Star; France’s Medaille Militaire, Legion d’Honneur (rank of Chevalier), and three Croix de Guerre; Italy’s Croce al Merito di Guerra; and Yugoslavia’s Commanders’ Cross of the Royal Order of the Crown.

He suffered two wounds, both at the hands of the enemy and not to be confused with injuries sustained in nocturnal trysts with les femmes fatale. But Cukela, like many of the occasionally flawed and politically incorrect Marines of the Old Corps, proved militarily correct when the klaxon of war sounded.⁸

In the Machiavellian scenario involving the selection of a new Commandant of the Marine Corps in late 1913-early 1914, presided over by the aforementioned indefatigable and boring moralist, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, the tenets of political correctness came into play fully to determine the selection of the winning candidate.

A veteran and colorful campaigner, the also aforementioned Littleton W. T. Waller, had the best hand to play with the endorsement of all 31 Democrats in the Senate. But his record of harsh treatment of the Filipino people conflicted sharply with the Wilson administration’s announced policy of a more forward policy toward its far-flung possession and made Waller’s appointment politically incorrect.

The incumbent’s hand-selected successor, Lincoln Kar- many, had turned his wife in for a younger model, a circumstance that enraged genteel naval circles of the era. Secretary Daniels’s pungent diary entry during the deliberations leaves no doubt as to why Karmany lost; “Karnody [Karmany]-divorced.”⁹

Thus, a variety of scenarios involving what a later generation would call political correctness impacted on the Marine Corps. The end of the era of the Old Corps was fraught with irony, as both the reminder of a decade-old incident of harsh colonial repression combined with a fundamentalist, North Carolinian’s concept of morality to deny the Corps’ highest post to two veteran campaigners.

And thus, the ultimate irony appears in Secretary Daniels’s selection of his third choice among the eight colonels of the line on his list. While claiming in his published memoirs to be reluctant to select George Barnett because of the absence of powder burns and tropical sweat stains on his uniforms, Daniels bowed to Republican pressures.

In his slightly more than six years in office, Barnett oversaw the largest increase in personnel numbers between the founding of the Marine Corps and its expansion just prior to World War I. And the Marines of that era, many of whom appeared as manifestations of the politically incorrect Old Corps, won fresh laurels that remained unsurpassed until the amphibious campaigns of World War II in the Pacific.