In the weeks following Lily’s death, George Marshall returned each night alone to the big house on the grounds of the War College. There were reminders of her in almost every room. Marshall continued to grieve—he wore a black armband for months—but it was not in his nature to be depressed. Nor did he descend into self-pity. He was, however, growing restless, so anxious to escape his sedentary existence in the War College classrooms and the places that reminded him of Lily’s last days that he thought he “would explode.”1
Marshall had promised General Pershing that he would “find a way,” and he did. Taking advantage of his contacts throughout the army hierarchy he made it known that he desired a new assignment outside of Washington, one that would challenge him intellectually and physically. It didn’t take long for the army to come through for one of its own. In Marshall’s letter of October 26, 1927, to Lily’s Aunt Lottie, he informed her of a “violent change in my affairs,” namely that he had just been appointed assistant commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, a sprawling 97,000-acre army base located along the Chattahoochee River on the western edge of Georgia, a few miles from the city of Columbus.2
Given his reputation and connections, Marshall had a range of more attractive-sounding options. Why did he choose Fort Benning, down south among the yellow pines and cotton fields of rural Georgia? The short answer: the job description. It was this that appealed to Marshall’s ambition and called on his strengths. As assistant commandant, Marshall would be in charge of the Academic Department of the Infantry School, the “university” for the army’s company-grade infantry officers, and the “graduate degree” programs for senior officers as well as the officers of the National Guard and reserve. He would have a virtual free hand in selecting the instructors and designing the curriculum for teaching small-unit tactics, tank and air support, and battlefield mobility, an opportunity to experiment with new ideas for preparing the officers who would lead the nation in the next war that he had been thinking about ever since the last war. Marshall was convinced that the existing curriculum was antiquated, having witnessed situations in France and in China where highly intelligent officers wasted hours—and lives—writing out detailed orders in the midst of battle, as they had been trained to do, instead of reacting quickly with oral commands. Recalling one of those instances that he had observed in China in 1926, Marshall wrote to a friend, “I then and there formed an intense desire to get my hands on Benning.”3
Accompanied by his sister Marie, Marshall drove south through Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee to Fort Benning, his first exposure to the Georgia countryside and the Deep South. By late 1927, the Georgia economy, heavily dependent on the state’s cotton crops and textile mills, was already in a deep depression, well before the 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Overproduction, man-made fabrics, technology, and foreign competition had caused cotton prices to plummet. In the mid-1920s, the effects of the boll weevil and a three-year drought drove legions of white farmers into sharecropping and low-paying jobs in the cotton mills. African Americans, who had been working the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers since Reconstruction, were barely subsisting. Tens of thousands were forced off the land entirely, compelled to seek menial jobs in towns or migrate to cities in the North. From Virginia on down through Georgia, lynchings and legally sanctioned “whites only” signs spawned hate and fear between the races. It was an open secret that Georgia state legislators and the executive branch, including Clifford Walker, the outgoing governor, were members of or closely aligned with the Ku Klux Klan, which was chartered in Georgia in 1915.
Economic and racial issues seemed far from Marshall’s mind when he and Marie arrived at Fort Benning around the 10th of November. In a letter to Aunt Lottie on the 13th, his only observation was that the roads across Georgia “were not so good.” In fact, a guidebook written during the Depression characterized the road system in Georgia as “a travesty.”4 The letter included Marshall’s sketch of the renovated 1850 farmhouse, magnolias, and gardens on the old Bussey Plantation that he would occupy at Benning (“the most attractive I have had”) and noted that he was fortunate to have “inherited a fine colored orderly” and a “good cook,” plus a “fine Cadillac car and driver that goes with the job.”5
Marshall’s intention from the moment he drove through the gates at Fort Benning was to revamp the curriculum and the techniques of teaching. However, to head off knee-jerk opposition and passive resistance, he began gradually, starting with the formation of a committee to assess and rethink the entire program of instruction. Without issuing edicts or orders, Marshall led but did not force the committee’s deliberations and recommendations. His leadership emanated from lessons he learned in the Great War, his infrequent but carefully chosen suggestions, and his commanding presence. Slowly a consensus around a few guiding principles emerged. The next war would be a war of movement—offensive maneuver—supported by tanks and airplanes. Because in war the unexpected was to be expected, officers must be free to innovate and improvise, to use their imagination and think on their feet. Methods for teaching infantry tactics should be so simple “that the citizen officer of good common sense can readily grasp the idea.” Above all, counseled Marshall, “speed of thought,” and “speed of action,” will be “essential to success.”6
These principles were fed into the bloodstream of Benning. Instructors were not allowed to lecture from written texts or extensive notes. If they could not teach with spontaneity, they knew they would be replaced. Classes in tactics were moved outside and into the field. Students practiced leadership by taking turns commanding elements of the all-white 29th Infantry, described by Marshall as a “war-strength regiment” of some 3,500 men who were headquartered at Fort Benning.7 In addition, Marshall arranged for a tank battalion to be attached to Benning and for demonstrations of air support by a squadron from nearby Maxwell Field. Class sizes were reduced so that every student could be given hands-on experience. To mimic the fog and confusion of war, accurate maps were banned. Training exercises took place at night in unfamiliar terrain at random places throughout Benning’s 152 square miles. Student officers were confronted with surprises and adversity. They were encouraged to come up with creative and unorthodox solutions, to fearlessly disagree with their superiors. School solutions were verboten.
Marshall soon had his “hands on Benning.” He would slip into the back row of classrooms or step out of the shadows during night exercises to offer his comments. Often he would appear unexpectedly in the midst of a tactical problem and pick out a student to compose an oral order on the spot. Then he would solicit a critique by the others, weighing in with his concluding thoughts. For the instructors, officer-students, and the soldiers of the 29th Infantry, the “spirit of Benning” began to emerge. Marshall made it clear that everything was subject to challenge. Student officers responded, engaging with their instructors as never before, which in turn energized and motivated the instructors. It wasn’t quite an atmosphere of intellectual ferment, but there seemed to be a new seriousness of purpose at Benning, a “noticeable change in the discipline at the school,” as one officer observed.8
The spirit of Benning did not, however, inhabit the 841 all-black soldiers of the storied 24th Infantry Regiment who were also headquartered at Benning. Except for a letter in which he described those soldiers as “a peace strength regiment,” Marshall virtually ignored their existence.9 In fact, the 24th Infantry—whose men had fought with bravery and distinction in the Spanish-American War and the subsequent Philippine insurrection—served as an indentured labor pool at Fort Benning. Many lived in rough wooden shacks in Block 45 east of the stables that they built for themselves, working as ordinary day laborers, constructing roads, barracks, and sports facilities and performing jobs as servants and gardeners for the white officers and their families. African American soldiers risked bodily harm, sometimes even their lives, if they frequented the streets and stores of all-white downtown Columbus and its residential neighborhoods. Blacks who refused or were slow to “move on” were attacked and beaten, sometimes by the white soldiers stationed at Benning.10 Because the 24th Infantry had been involved in bloody race riots while training for the Great War in Texas, the regiment was not sent to fight in France and its access to rifles and ammunition at Benning was tightly controlled.11 While it is possible that Marshall took steps to improve the living and working conditions of these soldiers during his years as assistant commandant, there is no evidence that he did. It is no excuse, of course, but in this regard Marshall’s attitude of indifference toward the black soldiers of the 24th was similar to that of the others who commanded at Benning in the era of Jim Crow and blatant discrimination against all African Americans in the Deep South.12
During Marshall’s four and a half years running the Infantry School at Fort Benning, 50 of his instructors and 150 of his students were destined to become World War II generals. Marshall regarded his hand-picked instructors as “the most brilliant, interesting and thoroughly competent collection of men I have ever been associated with.”13 Among them were: Major Omar Bradley, in charge of weapons instruction, the revered “GI’s General” who would go on to command an army group in France after the Normandy invasion; Lieutenant Colonel “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, whom Marshall brought back from China in 1930 to head the tactical instructors and who would command troops in the China-Burma-India theater and serve as Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff; Captain “Lightning Joe” J. Lawton Collins, who would earn his nickname at Guadalcanal and become a corps commander in Europe; and Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, who would serve as Eisenhower’s “proactive chief of staff,” ambassador to the Soviet Union, and number two to Allen Dulles at the CIA. Marshall’s students included future combat generals such as Matthew Ridgway, Norman Cota, James Van Fleet, Courtney Hodges, Jacob Devers, and Terry de la Mesa Allen. These strong-willed soldiers, as well as dozens of others, all products of the “Benning Revolution,” would be known as “Marshall’s men,” the backbone of the U.S. Army in the next war.
Years later Marshall recalled Benning as “magical,” for it “caught me at my most restless moment, and gave me hundreds of interests, an unlimited field of activity, and all outdoors to play in.”14 No doubt his days and evenings were packed with activity, but he was essentially a lonely, private man. Marshall’s father had died years earlier, he was estranged from his brother, his mother passed away in late October of 1928, and Lily’s mother died the next year. All that remained of his close family was his sister Marie, who lived far north in Pennsylvania. During the summer of 1928, Marshall’s goddaughter Rose visited for several weeks. On their last evening together he confided, “I dread returning to an empty house.”15
On countless nights Marshall rattled around the old house, surrounded by dozens of photographs of Lily. In part to offset his loneliness he was frenetically active during the day. When not managing the Infantry School, he organized and participated in tennis matches, twice-weekly cross-country fox hunts for the officers and their wives, and strenuous point-to-point riding competitions, often at night, for the men. Under Marshall, Benning had a reputation as the “horsiest post in the Army,” although Beetle Smith and Omar Bradley “hated horses.”16 Marshall was known for staging pageants for visiting dignitaries, consisting of imaginative acts to show off the sports activities at Benning rather than a solemn review of marching soldiers. These pageants were quirky but unforgettable additions to the legendary spirit of Benning. Without Lily’s natural warmth and gracious presence, the all too frequent social occasions were awkward for Marshall, and especially for the officers and spouses in attendance. Although normally taciturn, Marshall tended to talk compulsively, trying too hard to engage those around him in an attempt to conceal his loneliness. With an air of confidence and command that permeated his conversation, he sometimes came off as a tiresome know-it-all, a bit of a stuffed shirt.
To adults not in Marshall’s inner circle, which included all but a few, his manner and appearance in social settings could be off-putting. Except for children, he rarely addressed anyone by his or her first name. Those who told even a remotely off-color joke or story in his presence would be met by silence and a disapproving glare. Since Lily’s death Marshall had lost weight, which was particularly evident in his tight, drawn facial expressions. Shortly after arriving at Benning he gave up alcohol, explaining that it was due to Prohibition. In truth, Colonel Morrison Stayer, one of Marshall’s key instructors who also became his trusted doctor, had convinced him to stop both drinking (usually whiskey) and smoking (he was a heavy smoker for years) because of a thyroid condition that was causing an irregular pulse and may have contributed to his explosive temper. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when army officers and their wives typically imbibed despite Prohibition and smoked to excess, Marshall’s abstinence may have curbed conviviality even if he did not actively discourage them from indulging. Dr. Stayer was unable to control Marshall’s stress-induced facial tic, which spontaneously contracted a corner of his mouth, pulling it into a grimace that was often mistaken for a smile. The spasms originally appeared when Marshall was under particular stress during the Great War and would reappear throughout the rest of his life.
Notwithstanding Marshall’s distinctive traits—some would regard them as strange or eccentric—most who came in contact with him felt that he was completely devoted to his mission and to their welfare. Well out of his earshot, both adults and children often referred to Marshall with affection as “Uncle George.”
As an antidote to his loneliness and to escape from Benning, Marshall often called on his driver to chauffeur him into Columbus for shopping, Episcopal Church services, and luncheon meetings of the Rotary Club of Columbus, which he had been invited to join a few weeks after arriving at Benning.17 In the late 1920s, Columbus was essentially a mill town, located at the fall line of the Chattahoochee River, home to eight textile mills and an ironworks that employed low-paid factory workers. Between 1920 and 1930, its population jumped 28 percent to a total of more than 40,000, about a fifth of which were African Americans, mostly grandchildren of former slaves.18 The black citizens lived north of Macon Avenue, sometimes called “the Macon-Dixon Line.” They had not forgotten that as late as 1921 the mayor and the police chief of Columbus openly acknowledged their connections to the Ku Klux Klan, the racist vigilante organization that had more than 500 members in the city. Nor had they forgotten the lynchings of several blacks by the Klan or its sympathizers in and around Columbus during the previous twenty years, including the highly publicized murder of T. Z. “Teazy” McElhaney. In the summer of 1912, a mob of white citizens brazenly dragged Teazy, a black teenager, out of the courthouse in Columbus, minutes after he was sentenced to “only” three years for accidentally killing his white boyhood friend (the jury found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter), and shot him multiple times. Wives and daughters of many of the most prominent white businessmen in Columbus (including members of Rotary and the daughter of General Henry Benning) were outraged by the murder of McElhaney. They signed and circulated a petition calling for the arrest and trial of the perpetrators.19
At the time Marshall began frequenting Columbus in late 1927, the members of the Rotary Club consisted almost entirely of white Protestant businessmen and professionals, many of them the movers and shakers in Columbus. It was a committee of the club’s leaders that had traveled to Washington in 1919 to convince Congress and the War Department to establish a permanent army base just outside Columbus on the theory that it would help revitalize the city’s economy. They recommended that the post be named after Henry Benning, a Confederate brigadier general from the Columbus area. Since then, there had always been a close relationship between Columbus and the leadership at Fort Benning. Through the men he met at Rotary, Marshall became friends with many married couples his age and quickly fell into the town’s social and sporting circles. One couple he surely met was Savannah-born Julian LaRose Harris and his brilliant wife, Julia Collier Harris. Julian Harris was a fellow member of Rotary. As the firebrand editor of the Columbus Enquirer-Sun, Harris was among the most well-known men in the city. Since the early 1920s, when Harris and his wife moved to Columbus (having lived and worked as journalists in New York and Paris), they used the newspaper’s editorial pages to fight for social progress and equal rights for African Americans in the South. In 1926, their newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for its exposure of the Ku Klux Klan, its stance in favor of antilynching laws, and its advocacy of improved education for blacks. It was the second newspaper in the South to win a Pulitzer for public service and the first ever in Georgia.20
Harris and his wife’s views on racial issues found considerable support among affluent Rotary Club members and others with college educations living in the upscale areas of Columbus (Dinglewood, St. Elmo, Overlook), the same social groups that Marshall was acquainted with and some of the same women who signed the petition protesting the lynching of Teazy McElhaney. There are no documents establishing that Marshall and Harris were friends, but there can be no doubt that Marshall was well aware of the causes Harris and his socially active wife were fighting to advance via their editorials. Through his exposure to the Harrises, along with mutual friends at the Rotary Club and the crowd that he hunted and socialized with, Marshall acquired at least some appreciation of the injustices faced by African Americans in the Deep South. His later attitudes toward the treatment of African American soldiers were shaped by these experiences.
One couple who befriended Marshall was Thomas Charlton Hudson, chairman of the First National Bank of Columbus, and his Philadelphia-born wife, Edith Folwell Hudson. In the late spring of 1929, the Hudsons learned that recently widowed Katherine Boyce Tupper Brown and her teenage daughter from Baltimore would be visiting an old friend who lived nearby. Because the Hudsons had gotten to know Katherine years earlier, they offered to host a dinner party in honor of Katherine and her daughter. In putting together the guest list, Edith, with Tom’s encouragement, suggested that Lieutenant Colonel George Marshall, age forty-eight and single, would be the perfect man to pair with Katherine, who was forty-six and presumably ready to emerge from a year of mourning her deceased husband.
Katherine was initially reluctant to attend the party, but Edith assured her it would be a small affair, consisting of only a few friends and George Marshall, whom she described as a “very interesting man from Fort Benning.” On condition that Tom Hudson—not some “stranger”—would pick her and her daughter up and bring them to the party, Katherine agreed to attend.21
A few days later, Katherine arrived at the Hudsons’ stone house on Dinglewood Drive, today listed in the National Historic Register. In the living room, she recalled seeing Colonel Marshall “standing in front of the fire place—I’ll never forget. And, you know, George had the way of looking, right straight through you—he had these very keen eyes, blue eyes, and he was very straight and very military.” When George declined a cocktail, Katherine remarked, “You’re the first military man I ever met in my life that didn’t drink . . . I knew two in Baltimore and they’re both carried out of everything they go to.” He smiled and laughed. So did she. “I like a cocktail as well as anybody,” replied George, “but I don’t break the laws of the United States.” Maybe it was the way he said it, but Katherine was not put off by Marshall’s “holier than thou” statement, which also happened to be a fib. In fact, as she told her interviewer, “He just fascinated me because he talked so well—I was utterly fascinated.” On his part, George was impressed by her striking presence—the confident way she carried herself—and her voice, the voice of a trained Shakespearean actress, as he would soon learn. The bantering conversation flowed easily through dinner. Katherine’s daughter left early for another party with a couple of the younger guests. George asked, “May I take you home this evening?” Katherine demurred. “Let me take you home,” he insisted, assuring her that he knew exactly where her friend, Mrs. William Blanchard, lived. He helped Katherine into his car, “and he drove and he drove and drove.” They continued to talk. After an hour or so, Katherine shot a knowing glance at Marshall, and said, “You don’t know your way around Columbus yet?” George replied, “Extremely well, or I could not have stayed off the block where Mrs. Blanchard lives.”22
The next day Marshall took charge, dispatching his chauffeur to pick up Katherine and her daughter in Columbus and drive them out to Benning for a horse show and reception. Rather than introducing Katherine to his army colleagues, George kept her to himself, lavishing her with all of his attention. She had never met anyone as worldly and experienced as Marshall, and he had never encountered a woman as glamorous, intelligent, and sophisticated as Katherine. By the end of the afternoon, it was obvious that they were mutually attracted to, if not enamored with, each other. They departed, she to return to Baltimore where her two young boys were in school, with an understanding that they would exchange letters and perhaps see each other again.
Katherine’s story, which she only partially revealed during her initial encounter with Marshall, was most unusual, and no doubt one of the reasons why he was so intrigued with her. She had been born into a family of wealth and writers. The wealth on the Tupper side originated with Ker Boyce (cotton, finance, dry goods) and his son James Boyce (coal, railroads), two of the richest men in the South, and was inherited in part by Katherine’s father, the Reverend Dr. Henry Allen Tupper Jr. On her mother’s side, much of the money allegedly came from Josiah Solomon Pender, a painter and poet who owned a fleet of ships that ran the Union blockade to and from Beaufort, North Carolina, and Bermuda during the Civil War. Katherine’s father, by trade an itinerant Baptist preacher who took no salary, preferred to travel the world and write books about Latin America, mission work, and democracy. Her grandfather, H. A. Tupper Sr., spoke upward of ten languages; a “very cultured man,” recalled Katherine, and “a writer in a way,” though he did not write books.23 Her sister, Allene, wrote several plays, including The Creaking Chair, which starred Tallulah Bankhead in a 1924 production, and her younger brother, Tristram, was a prolific author of fiction and short stories as well as a screenwriter.
Most likely because her grandfather had been a trustee, Katherine and her sister attended Hollins Institute (now Hollins University), an all-women’s two-year college in Roanoke, Virginia, founded in 1842.24 Beginning in her early teens Katherine had performed in plays and pageants, but it was at Hollins that she developed a passion for acting on the stage. After graduating at age twenty in 1902, she returned to her family’s home in Manhattan at 26 Gramercy Park, where her father was pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Instead of traveling in Europe or seeking a husband, Katherine courted her father’s disapproval by enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the premier (and only) performing arts school in the country, then situated in Carnegie Hall. For two years she focused solely on acting. “I did not care about anything else in the world,” she later recalled, “a stage struck person I was!”25 At graduation she was awarded the leading part in Mrs. Dane’s Defence, the story of a “woman with a past,” opening at the Empire Theater on Broadway.
Katherine attracted the attention of David Belasco, the leading writer, director, and theatrical producer in America, known as the “Bishop of Broadway” because he dressed in black like a priest. Belasco offered her a role in one of his plays. Her father put his foot down, compelling her to sign a paper saying she would not appear onstage. During the early twentieth century it was considered disgraceful for a young woman from a good family to become a stage actress. Although prostitutes and their customers were no longer as prevalent in the dark upper tiers and back rows of theaters as they were in prior years, the old associations lingered. Acting was still regarded as an immoral profession. The Christian clergy, particularly the Catholics, spoke out about the depravity of the theater and of the men and especially the women who worked for a living onstage. Henry Tupper was proud of Katherine’s talent and success, but he could not risk his reputation as a prominent Baptist minister, lecturer, and writer.
Katherine was relentless. She persuaded her father to allow her and her sister Allene to study abroad in London. While Allene would learn to paint by painting, Katherine gave her father the impression that while she would “study” acting, she would refrain from appearing onstage. Reverend Tupper accompanied his daughters on the ship to England and found a flat for them on Torrington Square in London that belonged to two older Scottish ladies who promised to act as chaperones. He agreed to pay the rent and his daughters’ living expenses. Suspecting that Katherine had a broad interpretation of the word “study,” Tupper said he would end her allowance if she appeared onstage. As soon as he departed for New York she dropped her surname, in part to protect the reverend’s reputation. Employing her middle name, Boyce, she began networking. It didn’t take “Katherine Boyce” long to obtain an audience with Frank Benson, founder of a repertory company of actors and actresses known as the Bensonian Company that toured the cities and towns of Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia. Frank Benson and his Bensonians had achieved fame for reviving many of the Shakespeare plays that had not been produced for generations. He managed the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Festivals between 1886 and the Great War.
Once Katherine explained her background and training to Benson, he invited her to audition. She performed lines of the dying Camille, the young woman “kept” by her various lovers in the play adapted from a novel by Alexandre Dumas. “He sat there and looked at me for a long time,” remembered Katherine. Then he said, “You know you’ll have to study English,” meaning that she would have to expunge her Yankee accent. Aside from her accent, Benson believed she had real promise. Agreeing to take her into his “school” that traveled with his company, he cautioned her that it would take time and hard work, but if her English improved sufficiently, she would be fed “parts, bits as you can do them” onstage. Benson assured her that his English teacher, Monsieur Burton of the Comédie-Française, would give her his “special attention for the next three months.”26 Regarding the cost of the school, Katherine frankly explained that when her father found out she was appearing onstage he would cut off her allowance. Benson thought it over and agreed to take her on for nothing.
Katherine joined the Bensonians on the road at York. Since they would be living on a single allowance, Allene agreed to set aside her painting lessons and travel with her. Katherine remembered their first night, “an awful place” with one small bed and a chair. Allene started to cry, accusing her sister of having “gone crazy.” Katherine pointed out the window to the York cathedral. “You see that tower?” she said. “I’m going to get there.” 27
And she did. Monsieur Burton, whom she came to loathe, worked her “nearly to death . . . until three o’clock in the morning.” Katherine’s first speaking part was the voice of the ghost in Hamlet. She had to climb up a ladder behind the scenery and throw her voice “very distinctly.” In another early role, her task was to catch Lady Benson gracefully “when she fell in Macbeth.” Katherine received her first big break when one of the company’s actresses left to get married. After a successful tryout in front of Benson, the two sisters spent the next season “all over Ireland” where Katherine played leading roles in three comedies—She Stoops to Conquer, The Rivals, and The School for Scandal—and five Shakespeare plays, including Rosalind in As You Like It.28 Benson was pleased and asked her to return to England for a third season. At the time, Katherine was the only American in the company. One of Benson’s actors, Clarence Derwent, wrote that she was a “very pretty young girl,” one of the most “popular” members of the company. He remembered Katherine for her “sparkling brilliance as a conversationalist,” a talent that caused Benson to “take a special interest in her progress.”29
Everything pointed toward a bright future on the English stage for Katherine. When Benson offered her a seven-year contract she did not hesitate to sign. She looked forward to being the first American to play at the festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. She had “cut loose” from America and expected she would never return.30
The bottom fell out in Glasgow. One night as Katherine took the stage she felt a “terrible pain” in her shoulder that radiated down through her side. She tried to play through it, but soon the stage managers had to bring down the curtain. She rested for a few days and traveled with the company to Newcastle upon Tyne, where she was to play Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, an easy part that would allow her to sit down much of the time. Again, the unbearable pain returned. Katherine was taken directly from the theater to a nearby sanatorium where she stayed for almost three months. The doctors diagnosed her as suffering from “tuberculosis of the kidney.”31 Her condition did not improve. She had no choice but to leave the company and return home.
Katherine’s doctor in New York, and probably her father as well, insisted that she be examined by Dr. Howard Atwood Kelly in Baltimore, the nation’s foremost gynecologist and one of the four professors of medicine who founded Johns Hopkins Hospital.32 Dr. Kelly debunked the TB diagnosis. Believing Katherine was “just completely exhausted,” he advised her to rest at the Tuppers’ summer home, the Overlook Mountain House, a 300-room hotel and resort high in the Catskill Mountains of New York near Woodstock that her father purchased in 1906 (the ruins of Mountain House can be seen today). Katherine arrived in the early spring before the tourists ascended and lived with the year-round caretaker and his wife. From Overlook Mountain’s 3,000-foot elevation Katherine took in breathtaking views of the Hudson River. The physical pain and discomfort subsided, but it would take years before she got over the disappointment of having to leave England.
Throughout the year or two of Katherine’s recuperation, an “oil man” from the West Coast courted her sister Allene. Their wedding took place at Mountain House on September 16, 1908. Among the groomsmen was Clifton Stevenson Brown, a young man whom Katherine and Allene had known as teenagers in Baltimore. At a party that week Clifton confessed his love to Katherine and asked her to marry him. She turned him down, saying she was not ready for marriage and planned to return to the stage. About a year later, Katherine received a letter from Victor Mapes, a director who had opened a theater in Chicago, asking her to take a leading role in one of his new plays—Aren’t You and Belinda Engaged? Accompanied by Allene, whose marriage already was falling apart, and her brother Tristram, Katherine moved to Chicago to resume her career.
It happened again. The same shooting pains that brought Katherine to her knees in Glasgow returned. As the curtain went down on her third or fourth performance in Chicago, Katherine recalled that she “couldn’t move.” She was carried out of the theater. “[T]hat was the end. They sent me right back up in the mountains.”33
Once more Clifton Brown came up to Mountain House from Baltimore. By that time he was building his law practice, establishing a reputation as an appellate specialist. He renewed his efforts to persuade Katherine to marry him. As Katherine recalled, he said, “You’re throwing your life away, Katherine; you haven’t the strength for that life . . . let me take care of you. You’re not going to live if you keep this thing up.”34 Eventually she relented. They were married by Katherine’s father in a “quiet” ceremony at the Tuppers’ Gramercy Park residence on September 11, 1911.35 Katherine was almost thirty years old. For the next sixteen plus years she and Clifton, living in Baltimore, were, as she remembered, “just as happy as we could be.”36 Thoughts of returning to the stage faded as Katherine, the supportive wife of an increasingly successful and well-regarded lawyer, managed their home on Calvert Street and the lives of their three children, Molly, Clifton Jr., and Allen.
On a warm Saturday evening in the summer of 1928, Mr. and Mrs. Clifton Brown were out on the lawn at their country club, drinks in hand. A friend turned to Clifton and said, as Katherine later recalled, “You better beware of that man, he’s just crazy as a loon.” Clifton responded, “What in the world can he do to me?”37 Katherine knew who they were talking about. Louis Berman, one of Clifton’s clients, had been refusing to pay Clifton’s bill for legal services despite court orders and a judge’s threat earlier that week to put him in jail if he didn’t pay. Berman claimed the $2,500 bill was excessive, even though Clifton had spent years obtaining a judgment in his favor for $37,000. Clifton’s next move was fateful. He sued his client, a step most attorneys view as risky. Bad things often happen when a lawyer sues his or her client. Clifton went to trial to collect his fee and won. Berman brought two appeals and lost.
On the Monday after drinks at the club, June 4, 1928, Katherine called Clifton at his office in downtown Baltimore. She was excited to tell him about her purchase of a second summer cottage on Fire Island. No answer. She called again. No answer, even though Clifton’s secretaries and partners should have been there. The doorbell rang. Two men were at the door. Clifton was dead, gunned down in the hall outside his office door. Katherine’s husband and the father of her three children was gone. That afternoon, a huge headline, along with photos of Clifton and Katherine, announced the murder on the front page of The Baltimore News. Recalling the pain of the two occasions when she had to quit the stage, Katherine thought that once again, “life had stopped for me.”38
The murderer was Louis Berman, Clifton’s client. Berman was convicted of first-degree murder, but avoided the death penalty by claiming insanity. Katherine was moved when Berman’s bereft widow wrote her “the most beautiful letter,” saying her husband was insane, that she knew Katherine had three children and felt deepest sympathy for her.39 For the next twenty years Berman haunted Katherine by repeatedly bringing habeas corpus proceedings in a vain effort to obtain his release from prison.
Katherine was lost. After the murder she spent several sleepless months at Allene’s country house in Connecticut. Knowing she had to get a grip on herself, she decided to go to a place far away where she didn’t know anyone. With Molly, her oldest child, and a New York friend, Katherine booked passage on an ocean liner, having arranged to leave her two boys with friends in Baltimore. They steamed through the Panama Canal to Los Angeles, then sailed on to Hawaii. She leased a cottage for three months on Waikiki Beach. Waikiki brought back her health. On the way back to Baltimore, Katherine received a telegram from Mrs. William “Etta” Blanchard, her Hollins roommate, inviting her to visit Columbus. Without giving it much thought, Katherine accepted. This decision had life-altering consequences, both for her and for George Marshall. It resulted in a relationship that anchored Marshall for the rest of his life.
The letters that passed between George and Katherine after they first met in the spring of 1929 have been lost, or more likely destroyed. George may have broached the subject of marriage, or perhaps even proposed, or he may have waited until they were together again in 1930, when Katherine returned to Columbus to stay with Etta Blanchard.40 As Katherine recalled, she warmed to the prospect of marrying George, provided that each of her boys, who had not met him, gave their consent (Molly, in school in Florence, Italy, was already fond of Marshall). And she warned Marshall that she would not neglect her children for anyone. Katherine decided that the best way to test whether marriage would work was to invite George to spend a month or so with her and the boys during the summer at her place on Fire Island, a slim barrier island off the coast of Long Island. When Katherine told the boys that she had invited Colonel Marshall to visit Fire Island, they suspected that marriage was on her mind and that a stepfather was in the wings. Clifton Jr., age seventeen, had no problem with the idea. Allen, a sensitive and willful fifteen-year-old who was most affected by his father’s sudden death, was at first resistant. According to Katherine, his response to the notion of Marshall joining the family was “I don’t know about that, we are happy enough as we are.” The next morning Allen went to Katherine’s room and told her he had changed his mind and that it was “all right” to ask Marshall to come to Fire Island. Later, he wrote the following letter to Marshall. “I hope you will come to Fire Island. Don’t be nervous, it is OK with me. (Signed) A friend in need is a friend indeed. Allen Brown.”41 Marshall, who probably was somewhat nervous, was touched deeply by Allen’s vulnerability and honesty. As will be seen, he would form an unbreakable bond with Allen. George and Allen would not only be “friends indeed,” he would come to love Allen as though he were his own son, the son he never had.
Marshall spent five weeks with Katherine and the two boys at her cottage in the tiny village of Ocean Beach on Fire Island. By the end of his stay she was convinced that the marriage was the right decision for her and her children. Marshall was overjoyed, writing General Pershing that he would be acquiring “a complete family.”42 The couple agreed that the wedding should take place in Katherine’s hometown of Baltimore, not at Benning. Oddly, the wedding ceremony was set for a Wednesday afternoon—October 15, 1930. This was because Marshall had planned two lavish wedding receptions at Fort Benning for more than a hundred of his instructors and students on the next two days.43 Wednesday was a particularly inconvenient day for Clifton Jr. and Allen to be in Baltimore because they were attending boarding school at Woodberry Forest in Virginia. In Marshall’s letter to Pershing asking him to be his best man, Marshall said that things were so “active” at Benning that he would take the train up to Baltimore for the wedding and return with Katherine the same day.44
Writing with considerable understatement, Katherine described her wedding day as “a rather hurried affair.” It certainly could not be called romantic. No invitations were sent, though Katherine had notified a few close friends by telephone and letter. When she and her boys arrived at Emmanuel Episcopal Church at 2:30 p.m., Cathedral Street and the front sidewalk were jammed with a crowd hoping to catch a glimpse of General Pershing. The chapel was full. Katherine’s oldest son, Clifton Jr., walked her down the aisle. At the altar Allene stood next to Katherine as the maid of honor, her only attendant. Pershing, in business attire, posed ramrod straight beside George. The vows were spoken; the ceremony was brief. Outside the church, George in a dark suit looked young and craggy. Katherine was elegant in a fur-trimmed coat and flapper hat. The crowd at the train station waiting for Pershing and the wedding party was huge. Pershing returned north to Washington. The newlyweds, the two boys, and Lily’s brother, Edmund Coles, gathered in the drawing room car to relax and celebrate. As the train rolled south, Clifton Jr. and Allen got off at Orange and Coles departed at Charlotte. George and Katherine spent their wedding night in a Pullman sleeper.
During her first few weeks at Benning, Katherine was bewildered by unwritten army protocol at social events, and overwhelmed by George’s insistence that she join him on jarring eight-mile afternoon horseback rides. She soon became accustomed to her new home, and began to enjoy life with George in the creaky old farmhouse. With Katherine and her teenage children Marshall seemed unusually contented, fitting into family dynamics as a kindly stepfather. The tensions that typically accompany such relationships, particularly at the outset, did not surface. When Molly visited, sometimes with her friends, Marshall played tennis with them and chose to ride with her group, which was fine with Katherine. He particularly enjoyed mentoring Allen, a budding athlete, taking him on hunting and fishing expeditions to the remote areas of the post and encouraging him at football and wrestling. Allen casually began calling Marshall “George,” whereas the two older children always addressed him more formally as “Colonel.” As he was with Lily, George was Katherine’s courtly protector, always solicitous of her “well-being and her health.”45 George and Katherine were entering their fifties, so they probably did not experience the youthful passion of their first marriages. By all indications, however, they were a deeply devoted couple, evidencing a tenderness and respect for each other during their time at Benning and the stressful years thereafter that would test their marriage.
Marshall’s instructors and students hoped that his marriage would have a mellowing effect on the assistant commandant. One biographer concluded that Marshall did in fact become “less driven,” and more of an extrovert.46 Omar Bradley, who worked closely with Marshall as chief of the weapons section at Benning, disagreed, writing that Marshall “remained his same formal, aloof self.” Bradley’s observation is closer to the mark. Because Katherine and her family abated Marshall’s loneliness, Colonel Marshall probably saw less need for engaging in the kind of forced socialization with his subordinate officers and their wives that followed Lily’s death. Bradley confirmed this point, writing that after the marriage, he and his wife “seldom saw the Marshalls socially.”47
On December 31, 1930, Marshall celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a “house full”—Katherine, her two boys, and their friends. He boasted to Pershing that he took Allen on an “eighteen mile wild cat hunt” during the holidays.48 Marshall was at the peak of his intellectual and physical powers. His years at Benning were the most creative and arguably the most significant of his entire career. It was Marshall the innovator who revolutionized the curriculum at the Infantry School, teaching and training the next generation of combat leaders to focus on mobility, simplicity, ingenuity, and experimentation. In his back pocket, or more likely in his head, Marshall kept a “black book” listing the names and noting the traits of hundreds of instructors and students who passed through during his years at the school. Later, Marshall would call upon his black book both to weed out ineffective officers and to select the commanders who would lead America’s citizen army to victory in World War II. He would be the first to admit that he made some serious mistakes. But for the most part the record would show that Marshall’s judgments, formed at Benning, were sound.
As George and Katherine were packing their household belongings in May 1932, preparing to leave Fort Benning for a new assignment, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt was moving into a new cottage at nearby Warm Springs, the resort and farm along the slopes of Georgia’s Pine Mountain that Roosevelt purchased when he was seeking a cure for the polio that had paralyzed him below the waist. Warm Springs had been a vacation spot for wealthy residents of Columbus, many of whom maintained cottages there. Under Roosevelt’s tutelage, it also became a polio rehabilitation center. In the midst of his campaign to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Governor Roosevelt was huddled at Warm Springs with advisers and journalists, working on a speech to be given at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, the last he would deliver before the convention. The Great Depression that had crippled the U.S. economy for more than two years was deepening. Almost 25 percent of the workforce, some thirteen million workers, stood idle. Revolution was in the air. It was at Warm Springs, just forty-five miles up the road from Benning, that Roosevelt and his advisers settled upon the message that would clinch the nomination and win the presidency: the people demand a leader who will take immediate action to defeat the Depression; Governor Roosevelt is that leader; with imagination, confidence, and enthusiasm, he will take drastic actions on the day he becomes president; above all, he will act.
While Marshall steadfastly avoided any involvement in partisan politics, he was a shrewd observer of politicians and the political process. He met Roosevelt for the first time in 1929 when the governor stopped to visit him at Fort Benning.49 There is no evidence concerning his initial impression of Roosevelt or the substance of their conversation, yet there can be little doubt that Marshall was aware of FDR’s subsequent bid for the presidency in the spring of 1932, including his resounding 8-to-1 victory in the Georgia Democratic primary. And he had to have read or heard the frank and widely publicized phrases for which Roosevelt’s Oglethorpe speech of May 22, 1932, is still remembered: “This country . . . demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”50 These words, the heart of Roosevelt’s New Deal, capture the same kind of out-of-the-box thinking that Marshall advocated during his time at Benning.
In the summer of 1932, as George and Katherine were getting settled at Fort Screven on Tybee Island near Savannah, where Marshall assumed command of a battalion of the 8th Infantry Regiment, America’s economy continued to slide into the maw of an unprecedented worldwide depression. In a misguided effort to reduce the deficit, Congress, under president Herbert Hoover, enacted cutbacks in army and navy appropriations, including mandatory furloughs without pay and freezes on promotions and pay raises. At the same time, the world was becoming a much more dangerous place. The earliest hot spot ignited by the global depression was Manchuria in northwest China. There, extremist Japanese army commanders, preparing to transform the region into a food-producing area for Japan’s farmers since the domestic agriculture sector had declined disastrously, blew up a Japanese-controlled railroad near Mukden in September 1931 and blamed it on the Chinese. The incident was used as a pretext by Japan to take over the whole province by force. Preoccupied with the Depression, America’s diplomatic reaction was timid, and the League of Nations refused to impose sanctions on Japan. This weak response encouraged the Japanese government to withdraw from the League and foreshadowed wider aggression by Japan that would spread to the rest of China and the European colonies in East Asia.
In Germany, former corporal Adolf Hitler engineered a political revolution by captivating German voters, especially the country’s six million unemployed, with his message of national redemption. Hitler was a singularly gifted speaker and performer. Between 1928 and 1932, his Nazi Party shocked the German establishment by increasing its share of the vote in the Reichstag (parliament) from 2.6 percent to 37.4 percent. By the end of July 1932, it was by far the largest of a handful of political parties in the Reichstag with 230 seats. Six months later, while Roosevelt was preparing for his presidency, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the president of Germany’s crumbling Weimar Republic, was persuaded by right-wing advisers to ask Hitler to become Reich chancellor (supposedly a coalition cabinet would curb Hitler’s extremism). Few realized it at the time, but this was a momentous political miscalculation that would lead into an abyss of war and genocide. It wasn’t as if Hitler hid his intentions. He had spoken and written of restoring Germany to greatness by casting off the shackles of Versailles, destroying Jews and Bolsheviks, rebuilding the armed forces, and acquiring by force more “living space” for the German people at the expense of Poland and the Soviet Union. But the politicians discounted his stated intentions as overblown rhetoric and they underrated his abilities. After all, Hitler was just a demagogue who had emerged from the lunatic fringe, with no credentials and no experience indicating that he could effectively take over and run the government of Germany, let alone assume dictatorial powers.
Marshall had received firsthand reports in the winter of 1931–32 on the military situation in Germany, including the extent to which German armed forces were (and were not) complying with restrictions on expansion imposed by the Treaty of Versailles and subsequent postwar agreements.51 However, once he left Benning for Fort Screven and subsequent posts he was dependent on the U.S. press, mainly Time magazine, for information about Hitler’s Germany.52 It was not until January 2, 1936, that Colonel Marshall received a detailed assessment from a source in Berlin on the state of Germany’s military under Hitler, who by then had secured total power. In a confidential letter, Major Truman Smith, the military attaché in Berlin and a former Benning instructor, informed Marshall that “the most powerful if not the largest army and air force in Europe is coming into existence under a strict veil of secrecy.” By the fall an army of 600,000 would be trained and ready. Smith correctly predicted “trouble,” but probably not until 1939 when Germany, he wrote, will “expand in Eastern Europe” unless stopped by the “western nations.” Smith further wrote that it wouldn’t surprise him if France and England gave “Germany a free hand to help herself to Russian territory,” in which case it would take an army of three million men to stop her. He concluded by providing Marshall with a description of some of the fifty new weapons, vehicles, and army units that the German army was developing.53
For the first time Marshall had solid information indicating that Hitler was preparing for war. There is no evidence suggesting that Marshall thought Hitler’s aggressive designs would threaten the security of the United States. However, Smith’s letter gave him a sense of what he and those he had taught at Benning might be up against if, for some unfathomable reason, they were drawn once again into a European war.