The question was whether future Secretaries of War would support the bureaus or the rationalist reformers seeking to modernize the Army along the lines of industry. The President or Congress could undercut the Chief of Staff's position, but it was the Secretary in the first instance who would have to decide what position to take.

Mr. Root resigned as Secretary of War on 31 January 1904 with his work unfinished. His successor, William Howard Taft, lacked the inclination and ability to make the new dispensation stick in the face of bureau opposition. He was distressed at having to referee disputes between the Chief of Staff and the bureau chiefs, particularly Maj. Gen. Fred C. Ainsworth, the new Military Secretary and subsequently The Adjutant General. "The Military Secretary in many respects is the right hand of the Chief of Staff," Taft vainly pleaded, "and they must be in harmony, or else life for the Secretaries and all others in the Department becomes intolerable. Let us have peace, gentlemen.” 16

Under the influence of Ainsworth, Taft abandoned Mr. Root's alliance with the Chief of Staff for the traditional Secretary-bureau chief alliance. Convinced the Chief of Staff and General Staff were too involved in administrative details, he restricted the General Staff's activities in April 1906 to purely "military" matters. On "civil" affairs the bureau chiefs were to report directly to the Secretary. It was Taft's belief that the Chief of Staff was Chief of the General Staff only and served in a purely advisory capacity.

At about the same time President Theodore Roosevelt designated the Military Secretary (later The Adjutant General) as Acting Secretary of War in the absence of the Secretary or Assistant Secretary. Taft was frequently absent for long periods on political junkets, leaving Ainsworth in charge. The Chief of Staff thus became subordinate to The Adjutant General instead of the reverse as Mr. Root had intended and as the law clearly stated.17

All this changed when Henry L. Stimson, a law partner and

1o Mable E. Deutrich, Struggle for Supremacy: The Career of General Fred C.

Ainsworth (Washington: The Public Affairs Press, 1962), p. 99.

17 (1) Ibid., pp. 96-107. (2) Nelson, National Security and the General Staff, pp. 102-31. (3) Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939), vol. I, pp. 256-357.

protégé of Mr. Root's, became Secretary of War on 22 May 1911. Taking up where Root had left off, he reasserted the principle of executive control and embarked on an ambitious program to rationalize the Army's organization from the top down along sound military and business lines. He re-formed Mr. Root's alliance with the Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, who thought along the same lines.

General Wood, the Army's first effective Chief of Staff, had been in office a year when Stimson became Secretary. He was a brilliant administrator with a much broader background in managing large-scale, multipurpose organizations than his predecessors or immediate successors. He could distinguish between the important and the unimportant. Wood could make prompt decisions. He knew how to select competent subordinates, and he freely delegated authority to them. He abolished the "committee system" within the General Staff, eliminating one source of delay. Wherever possible he sought to streamline departmental procedures in the interests of greater efficiency. He also made enemies, especially in Congress. 18

18 (1) Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947, 1948), p. 33. (2) Report of the Chief of Staff, in Annual Report of the War Department, 1911, pp. 142-48. (3) General Johnson Hagood, The Services of Supply (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927), pp. 20-22. (4) Nelson, National Security and the General Staff, pp. 132-37. (5) Miller, Background for 20th Century Training, 1899-1917, p. 79.

The Stimson-Wood reorganization called for consolidating the scattered Army into four divisions with uniform training programs, supplemented by the National Guard and an Army Reserve directly under the Army's control. To provide adequate control over the new Army General Wood reorganized the General Staff into Mobile Army, Coast Artillery, War College, and later Militia Affairs Divisions. The Mobile Army Division, the heart of the Stimson-Wood reorganization, was further broken down into Infantry, Cavalry, Field Artillery, and Miscellaneous sections. When Mr. Stimson left office he was able to send a short five-line telegram to mobilize one of the new divisions along the Texas border. Under the “traditional" system, he asserted, he would have had to scrabble together an improvised task force, sending out fifty to sixty telegrams in the process. 19

In their reforms Stimson and Wood were simply applying principles employed by contemporary industrial managers in rationalizing and integrating previously fragmented, large-scale organizations. These coincided, as mentioned earlier, with the desire of professional soldiers for unity of command over the department. They were handicapped because, unlike their industrial counterparts, they had little control over funds, the ultimate weapon in industrial reorganization, and they required Congressional action for most of their program.

The 1910 elections returned a Democratic House of Representatives, and the new chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, James Hay of Virginia, was a rural Jeffersonian opposed on principle both to a large standing army and the idea of a General Staff. From 1911 until his retirement from Congress in September 1916, Hay did his best to limit the size and activities of the General Staff with substantial assistance from War Department traditionalists, chiefly General Ainsworth.

19 (1) Report on the Organization of the Land Forces of the United States, Annual Report of the War Department, 1912, pp. 67-153. (2) Report of the Chief of Staff, Annual Report of the War Department, 1911, pp. 135-36. (3) Report of the Secretary of War, 1911, pp. 15–31. (4) Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960), paperback edition, pp. 137-38. (5) Miller, Background for 20th Century Training, 1899-1917, pp. 79–82. (6) Kreidberg and Henry, History of Military Mobilization, p. 181. (7) Stimson Diary, Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1912, pp. 61-69, 115-117, Henry L. Stimson Manuscripts, Yale University.

The principal complaint of the traditionalists was that Wood and the General Staff continually interfered in strictly administrative details. As Wood told Congress some years later what often appeared to be an issue of "mere administrative detail .. was nothing of the kind." Who was to decide, for example, how much ammunition should be carried by each artillery caisson? When the Chiefs of Ordnance and Artillery disagreed, as they often did, the General Staff had to find some means of resolving the dispute. Mr. Root had earlier cited similar disagreements which had become frustrating, timeconsuming daily reality within the War Department. Wood preferred to issue orders rather than engage in protracted discussions.20

The ideological gap between Hay and Stimson and between Ainsworth and Wood, reflected in their opposing views on Army organization, was enormous. In the face of Congressional opposition, Stimson and Wood were forced to accept half a loaf as better than none. In their proposed reorganization of the field army they wished to consolidate Army units scattered about in forty-nine separate posts, many of them no longer

20 (1) Wood's testimony to Congress is cited in John Dickinson, The Building of an Army (New York: The Century Co., 1922), p. 321. (2) For Mr. Root's complaint, see pages 10-11 above.

serving useful military purposes, into eight large posts to facilitate uniform training and mobilization. Congress vetoed this plan. On the other hand, Congress approved the long-standing proposal of Army reformers to consolidate the Quartermaster, Subsistence, and Pay Departments into a single Quartermaster Corps.21

Streamlining the administration of the War Department was one major area in which Stimson and Wood were free to assert firm executive control. It was this program that brought about a direct confrontation between Generals Wood and Ainsworth. Personalities aside, the immediate issue was who should control the administration of the department under the Secretary-the Chief of Staff or The Adjutant General.

Simplifying the department's paper work was a constant problem for the secretaries and the General Staff. President Roosevelt had asserted that departmental administration was an executive function. On 2 June 1905 he appointed a commission headed by Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles Hallam Keep to study and make recommendations on how to improve the "conduct of the executive business of the govern

ment

in the light of the best modern business practices." Among other things he asked particularly that some means be found to cut back the useless proliferation of paper work in the Army and the Navy because "the increase of paper work is a serious menace to the efficiency of fighting officers who are often required by bureaucrats to spend time in making reports which they should spend in increasing the efficiency of the battleships or regiments under them." 22

Congress took no action on the Keep Commission report, but it approved the later appointment by President William Howard Taft of a Committee on Economy and Efficiency under Dr. Frederick A. Cleveland, a leader in the new field of public administration, who wished to rationalize public administration along businesslike lines. The committee concentrated on administrative details. They "counted the number of electric

21 (1) Martha Derthick, The National Guard in Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 33-36. (2) Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, pp. 132-36. (3) Report of the Secretary of War, 1912, pp. 18-23, 155-176. (4) Stimson Diary, pp. 61-64, 87-100.

22

Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), vol. IV, pp. 1201-02.