Americans are a paradoxical people: though wary of foreign entanglements, when drawn into hostilities, they are at once strikingly bellicose and peculiarly unmilitary. During the years before the Great War—except for Grand Army of the Republic parades and bursts of patriotism, such as during the war with Spain—Americans troubled themselves little with martial thoughts. A citizen could easily live a lifetime without laying eyes on a soldier of the regular army. Young Ike Eisenhower captured the national mood. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Ike answered without hesitation, Honus Wagner. Baseball greats Wagner, Ty Cobb, and “Christian Gentleman” Christy Mathewson held the thrall of most young American boys in the first decade of the twentieth century, not military heroes. Unlike other boys, Walter Bedell Smith wanted nothing else in life than to become a soldier.
Smith described his boyhood as “normal, middle class, substantial,” but that was only a half-truth. The Smiths were a family of moderate means. Beetle came into the world on 5 October 1895. His father, William Long Smith, worked as a silk buyer for the Pettis Dry Goods Company; the family also owned substantial shares in the firm. Beetle’s mother, Ida Frances Bedell, was the daughter of German immigrants. Her parents emigrated from the Rhine valley, coming to Indianapolis via Cincinnati and Madison, Indiana. The Smiths lived—together with Ida’s parents—in a two-story wood-and-brick frame house at 1713 Ashland Street on the verdant north side of Indianapolis.1
Christened Walter according to the traditional rites of the Catholic Church, from infancy everyone called him Bedell (pronounced BEE-dull). He suffered from an onslaught of infant maladies so serious that family members thought he might die. His anxious mother nursed him back to health, and even after he recovered, she carried him about on a pillow bundled in a thick blanket. Under the watchful ministrations of his protective mother—and subjected to a heavy German diet—baby Beetle grew ruddy and fat. Family members began to call him “Boodle.”2
Family and friends recalled Beetle as a nice, clean-cut boy but with a marked obstinate streak. Other than the chores he performed around the house, Beetle spent his childhood in all manner of outdoor activities. In summer he and his cohorts fished, played sandlot baseball, and roller-skated. Perhaps in anticipation of Indianapolis’s famous Brickyard, they constructed a racetrack in a vacant field, where they staged bicycle races all summer. In winter they played skinny, a variant of hockey.3 Sunday mass featured prominently in the Smith household; Beetle remained a dedicated Catholic his entire life. At Oliver Perry Morton Public School, his third-grade teacher found him a joy to teach. “He was a marvelous reader and a very intelligent child,” she remembered; his advanced reading skills were a product of nightly sessions with his mother.4
Smith remembered, “I always wanted to be an army officer. I never thought of anything else.” His uncle Paul Bedell confirmed this observation: “[Beetle] had been a soldier from the time he was big enough to walk.” A member of the Smith clan had fought in every American war since the Revolution. The family traced their ancestry to Samuel Stanhope Smith, a resident of West Jersey. A propertied family, the Smiths numbered MG Thomas Mufflin—aide-de-camp to George Washington, signatory to the Constitution, and governor of Pennsylvania—among their kinsmen. Smith took pride in his military roots. More immediately, his grandfather had seen action in the Franco-Prussian War. A spiked helmet and a needle-gun offered material substance to his grandfather’s bloodthirsty accounts of fighting the French.5
As further proof of his childhood obsession with militaria, Beetle’s favorite playthings were his assortment of wax, wooden, and metal toy soldiers. He spent hours playing with them, arraying them in battle formations. Whenever the Smiths went visiting, Beetle brought along a cigar box filled with his most prized pieces and quietly sat by himself, orchestrating a make-believe battle. Smith would be a loner and an inveterate collector all his life.6
His love for the military prompted more than collecting miniatures. A martinet even then, “Boodle” Smith organized and drilled his neighborhood pals. Broomsticks substituted for muskets and hobbyhorses for cavalry. Under the tireless gaze of their captain, the troops marched and countermarched until they achieved Potsdam perfection. A member of the troop, Humphrey Harrington, recalled that Smith occasionally surrendered the commander’s baton, but never for very long. Facing a periodic mutiny when the neighborhood boys refused to muster—Beetle preferred drilling to sports—he dragooned his younger brother George into performing the drill. If George escaped, Beetle marched alone. Residents of Ashland Street frequently watched—and probably shook their heads—as the Smith boy goose-stepped down the sidewalk, a broomstick slung over his shoulder. “Military matters were about all that he as a boy ever had on his mind,” remembered another friend.7
When Beetle commandeered a vacant firehouse as his headquarters and indoor parade ground, he went too far. Fearing trouble with the authorities, his father purchased a ramshackle streetcar from the city and placed it in the backyard. Ida Smith protested—she took great pleasure from the beautiful roses in her carefully tended flower beds—but the eyesore stayed. The Smiths’ backyard thereafter acted as the neighborhood gathering spot for the Ashland Avenue Irregulars. “Boodle” no longer sufficed as a nickname, yielding to the more appropriate sobriquet “Brigadier.”8
One summer it came to Beetle’s attention that an officer of the regular army was visiting relatives in the neighborhood. Determined to see this wonder with his own eyes, Smith stationed himself on the stoop. Harrington remembered Beetle spending the entire duration of the young lieutenant’s stay sitting on the porch “worshipping his hero.” Family members felt this episode inspired Smith to join the army at the first opportunity. His hero turned out to be Hugh Drum, a future lieutenant general and very nearly army chief of staff.9
Then his parents decided to transfer Beetle to Catholic school. Leaving his friends at PS 29 proved difficult; unsociable Beetle did not make friends easily. “Brigadier” Smith had already demonstrated the need to control his external environment. In grade school and among his neighborhood circle, Beetle felt compelled to exert his authority. If he did not make the rules, he did not play. If he could not excel in some task, he withdrew. His safe little world abruptly changed when he went to the large parochial school. At Saints Peter and Paul School he found himself, in a popular phrase of the day, a small grape in a big vineyard. He liked nothing about the change.
His friends began to drift away. For a while, the Old Guard continued to meet infrequently in the backyard clubhouse. In a failed attempt to preserve the Irregulars, Beetle inaugurated a new initiation rite: the recruit had to smoke a Sub Rosa cigar down to the nub. The real problem stemmed from the onset of adolescence. The other boys developed different pursuits; they played sports and started showing curiosity in girls—neither of which attracted Beetle. Nor would they bend to his hectoring.10
In compensation, Smith started projecting a “tough guy” image. A friend characterized Beetle as “a fighter at heart … really a scrapper.” His career as a pugilist started early. At age seven he spent a couple of weeks with his uncle Paul Bedell. As the new kid on the block, he soon faced the challenge of a neighborhood mug three years his senior. After taking the first punch, Beetle waded into his assailant with both fists flailing. Soon the other boy retreated into his yard and remained there for the rest of Smith’s stay. A pattern emerged. Never looking for a fight, Beetle never backed down. “He would warn him to ‘stop or I’ll take a poke at you,’ and if the bully didn’t stop he usually got that poke.” Smith must have been good with his hands because he won a boxing tournament at officer training camp in 1917.11
With the economy booming, William Smith took a financial risk in 1908; he left the Pettis Company and became a partner in the New York Store. The new venture struggled from the beginning. Under mounting stress, William’s health deteriorated. With her husband incapacitated, Ida Frances assumed much of his role as purchaser. Her widowed sister moved in and assumed many of the maternal domestic duties. Now the household numbered seven. The family struggled to maintain its middle-class standing in the face of diminished income. Despite tuition costs, Beetle’s parents insisted he remain in private school. By summer 1909 the family found itself in genuine economic straits, struggling to pay the bills. To help with the finances, Beetle, not yet fourteen, went to work part-time as a laborer in the National Motor Car Company. Respectable wives from “normal substantial middle class” families did not work in the first decade of the twentieth century; nor did thirteen-year-old middle-class boys toil in automobile factories.12
Beetle spent his first thirteen years in a warm, secure home. His family’s suddenly reduced circumstances came as a rude shock. He now shouldered adult responsibilities while still just a boy. This boyhood trauma shattered Beetle’s dependence on others but instilled in him the lessons of loyalty and self-reliance. Fidelity to family came first, but Smith paid a price. Relatives remember a sudden and dramatic shift in Beetle’s personality. His once lively—if sardonic—sense of humor gave way to a surly moodiness. His aunt remembered that Beetle “never talked unless he had something to say.”13 Estranged from his boyhood friends, exhausted from working and keeping up with school work, and with scant opportunity for recreation, Beetle retreated into himself. He spent what precious little spare time he had alone, sometimes in his room reading military books and popular boys’ fiction, but mostly devoted to his new passion for fishing. One friend thought Smith withdrew because “pranks of the Halloween variety” no longer amused him; the real reason was he never had the time or inclination to indulge in normal adolescent pursuits.14
Shortly after starting at the car factory, Beetle faced another daunting complication: high school. With his family no longer able to sustain tuition costs, Beetle returned to the public school system. He applied and was admitted to Indianapolis’s newest and best high school, the Industrial Manual Training School. Indianapolis numbered among the fastest-growing cities in the United States, fueled by its rapidly expanding transportation sector—railroads and motorcars.15 The demand for skilled technicians, coupled with civic pride, propelled the creation of a technical secondary school. The jewel of the Indianapolis public school system, the Industrial Manual Training High School opened its doors in 1895. Funded largely by Indianapolis’s many German community organizations—the Freethinkers Society and the Turnverein in particular—the school’s inspiration derived from the model of Germany’s technical high schools (Fachhochshulen). Other major cities—Chicago and Philadelphia most notably—boasted older technical secondary schools, but Indianapolis, with some justification, claimed that it was “the most thoroughly equipped institution of its kind in this country.”16 The challenging curriculum balanced classic academic subjects—literature, history, English composition, and two and a half years of Latin—with mathematics, the sciences, and vocational industrial courses, both technical and practical.
Beetle performed well in his first year, 1909–1910. He received mostly Bs and, except for gym (with its heavy dose of gymnastics), had a near-spotless attendance record. In 1911 he took on a second job, working as a soda jerk for $6 a week in a drugstore at the corner of College and 16th Street, a busy intersection a couple of blocks from his house.17 His grades slipped, along with his attendance. Given the demands on his time and energies, Smith now viewed high school as a necessary evil. Although he told nobody, he figured that if he could pull off a little subterfuge, school would enjoy even less priority when he turned sixteen and became eligible to join the Indiana National Guard.18
Beetle Smith harbored visions of going to West Point, but harsh reality killed that pipe dream. “My folks didn’t have the money or political connections,” Smith remembered. At age sixteen his career path appeared set, and he was not the least bit cheered by the prospect. Still he longed for a military career. If the regular army lay beyond his immediate reach, only age stood between him and the second-best thing, the National Guard.
The day he turned sixteen, Smith took the Inter-City downtown to the National Guard armory and signed the enlistment papers. Because of his youth, he needed his parents’ approval. Dismayed at the notion of “her hopeful” going off to be a soldier, Ida Frances initially refused. Stretching the truth, Beetle told her the Guard unit amounted to little more than a social organization. Appeased, she stalled but finally consented.19
After some typical delays, Beetle swore the oath and entered state service. One can easily imagine his delight when he first donned his uniform. Smith received his posting to Company D, Second Indiana Infantry. Company D also bore the somewhat pretentious designation of the Indianapolis Light Infantry. Beetle did not stretch the truth too far when he told his mother the company was a fashionable gentlemen’s volunteer unit. For the officers, the Light Infantry was a social organization. Other than participating in the funerals of dignitaries and other ceremonial occasions, the Indianapolis Light Infantry usually made the papers for the sporting prowess of its members. In 1895 the company completed the first American military cycling relay, riding from Indianapolis to St. Louis. One of its officers won the first citywide golf tournament. The drill and rifle teams toured the country.20
Hoosiers justifiably boasted of the contributions of Indiana’s volunteer units in American wars. A massive column dedicated to the common soldier and sailor—only fifteen feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty—anchors downtown Indianapolis. Peacetime citizen soldiering never much appealed to Indianans, however. Indiana registered 50,000 on its militia rolls in 1860, less than the Nebraska Territory; in 1910 Indiana stood dead last among the states in per capita enrollment in its National Guard.21 None of that mattered to Private Smith. Even if few others did, Smith took his Guard drills seriously. Always punctual, never absent, and perfectly turned out, Smith succeeded in impressing his company officers. Beetle quickly made corporal, then shortly thereafter sergeant.
With Beetle holding down two jobs and devoting more and more time to the Guard, something had to give—and that was school. Except for Latin, geometry, and physics, Beetle continued to get Bs and Cs. His grades in the technical courses remained above average, but these accounted for only about a quarter of the course load. Surprisingly, he never obtained higher than a C in history, despite his keen interest in the subject. His performance and attendance indicated a growing indifference to academic work.
He took every opportunity to escape school, factory, pharmacy, and the crowded house on Ashland Avenue. During the week he headed for Riverside Park, where he angled in the White River. On weekends Beetle ventured farther afield, either fishing or hunting birds in the fields and forests in the immediate environs of Indianapolis. Always dexterous—his only As in high school came in free and technical drawing—he spent countless hours in the basement fashioning fishing rods he cut himself and designing and crafting trout and bass flies from simple household items. Any extra money he put aside for the purchase of shotguns.
The year 1913 turned out to be a big one in Smith’s life. He graduated from high school, met his future wife, and performed Guard duties that launched his military career. Sometime in 1913 he began dating Mary Eleanor “Nory” Cline. The Clines lived three blocks from the Smiths, but the two families inhabited different social worlds. As Smith later understated, the Clines were “kind of rich.” As a standard of wealth in those days, the Clines owned not one but two touring cars, a Wilton and a Stanley Steamer.22 An extremely attractive and intelligent girl, and a year and a half older than Beetle, Nory attended finishing school and graduated from a private Catholic girls’ academy. Beetle, who had previously shown no interest in the opposite sex, fell madly in love.23 As in all matters, Smith possessed an “all or nothing” attitude. Even though he was punching way above his weight, he decided to woo Nory Cline, whatever the obstacles. And there were many—chiefly Nory’s parents, who thought she deserved a suitor with greater expectations. Undeterred, Beetle and Nory continued to see each other.
Mother Nature intervened. The unsettled weather in spring 1913 produced tornadoes and record rainfall throughout the Midwest. The East Fork of the White River breached its levee on 26 March, flooding large sections of Indianapolis and leaving more than 200 dead. The governor called out the National Guard. Beetle drew the assignment of securing the Washington Street Bridge, the largest viaduct in that part of the city, which had collapsed before the river crested. Hearing that the Guard had deployed at the bridge, Beetle’s uncle investigated, hoping his nephew might be there. In the gathering darkness, Paul Bedell recognized Beetle, waved, and entered the approach to the bridge. Instead of the greeting he expected, he was met with a stern soldierly warning. If he took another step, he was under arrest. Not the least bit amused, Uncle Paul stomped away. Good soldier Smith had executed his duty.24
Whether he liked it or not, schoolboy Smith surrendered to soldier Smith. Beetle missed about a third of his classes during his final semester. His teachers gave him charitable passing grades, but he still fell four credits short of graduating. An enlightened principal, Milo Stuart, recognized that many of his students failed to complete their course work owing to family obligations. Many disadvantaged kids worked to support their families. Beetle would have bristled at the suggestion, but he clearly fell into this category. Although he later claimed to have been “probably one of [the high school’s] most stupid students,” Smith’s senior year academic performance suffered because of his extensive Guard duties. Weighing the circumstances, Stuart awarded Beetle his four credits—in physical education, health, and social studies—for completing National Guard basic training. For whatever reasons, Beetle missed the graduation ceremony and never bothered to collect his diploma.25
With Nory’s parents in mind, Beetle applied for admission to Butler University, but before the university made a decision, he withdrew his application. William’s health had failed completely, and he lapsed into infirmity. Beetle became the primary earner for the family. The aborted attempt to go to college added yet another frustrating failure to a growing list. With no other options, Smith now sought full-time employment.26
He joined the Marion Railroad Company as a die maker. A heavy engineering company, Marion built locomotives and earthmoving equipment—including huge tracked steam shovels—for railway construction. The monthly National Guard musters, two-week summer drills at Camp Morton, stolen time with Nory, and his hobbies provided the few escapes from the long, dreary hours at the factory forge. Nor had Beetle made any headway in convincing the Clines of his worthiness for their daughter’s hand. Like his plan for attending college, Smith’s family responsibilities made marriage virtually impossible.
Not all was bleak. In recognition of Beetle’s outstanding performance during the flood, CPT James Hurt promoted him to first sergeant—no small accomplishment for an eighteen-year-old. Later that autumn Indianapolis again garnered national attention when a strike by the streetcar union turned violent. That year and the preceding one witnessed some of the most bitter labor actions in American history—the most famous in Lawrence, Massachusetts—including a number of violent transit strikes. In Indianapolis the municipal railway, facing a halt of services, hired scab labor. Ugly scenes transpired in front of Union Station when the company fired its union employees and imported toughs from Chicago. When the strikers attacked the train carrying the strikebreakers, much of the police rank and file mutinied. The governor immediately mobilized the National Guard, this time statewide. The strike—which polarized opinion in the city—placed the Guard in a difficult position. Company D, the only unit in the city, immediately deployed. Governor Samuel Ralston quickly brokered a preliminary settlement, having employed the Guard less as a coercive force than as a threat. Again, Smith earned commendations for his service.27
Perhaps a trifle power mad, First Sergeant Smith, deaf to the angry protests of his apathetic enlisted men, relentlessly drilled the company and strictly enforced discipline, intent on making his unit the best in the state. It was Brigadier Smith and the Ashland Avenue Irregulars all over again—except this time, Smith exercised some real authority. Roundly cursed by his men, Smith doggedly persevered. Beetle made the impression he sought on Hurt, but the constant clashes with his men turned the monthly musters and summer encampments into a torment. He later attributed “some of the less attractive characteristics of [his] personality” to this difficult phase of his career.28
Smith always took pride in his label as a “square-wheeled son-of-a-bitch.” He was combative, inarticulate when expressing personal feelings, covetous and resentful of those better off, a secretive loner bordering on antisocial; all these characteristics resonated throughout Smith’s adult life. Later his supporters blamed chronic ulcers for his famously dyspeptic disposition. Those who favored the other interpretation—that Smith was naturally foul-tempered—came closer to the mark. Adolescence—the crucial period of physical, mental, and psychosocial development—shapes character. Individuals acquire a coherent sense of identity; patterns of behavior and attitudes become routinized and predictable. Smith’s family circumstances forged his personality. All of Smith’s distinctive and less attractive adult characteristics were molded during this time, undoubtedly the most miserable period of his life. His early adult years merely reinforced predispositions already laid in adolescence.
Smith possessed a first-rate intellect; he was analytical and retentive, yet he never performed well academically. His apathy and crowded calendar provide only partial explanations. Education and a social life would have rounded off the sharp edges of that square-wheeled personality, but Smith never took advantage of the educational and social opportunities offered by a place like Manual High. His father’s condition aside, Smith’s dream of attending Butler was just that. He possessed neither the grades for a scholarship nor the money for tuition. All these disappointments deepened his resentment aimed at others who lacked his intelligence but enjoyed greater advantages.
Smith’s core values remained deeply rooted in family and church. On the surface, Smith exhibited solid Middle American middle-class virtues: he respected authority; worked hard; always appeared clean-scrubbed, mannerly, and plainspoken; and believed in God. The two personality traits that especially stood out—conceded by even his harshest critics later in life—were Smith’s unquestioned loyalty and his remarkable capacity for work. These attributes were also formed in his youth. Although bitter about his tribulations, he resigned himself to fulfilling his duty to his family. He held two jobs—three, including the Guard—went to school, and later worked full-time; he performed all these tasks as best he could and never said no, all without a thought for whether he enjoyed his labors. Obviously, he did not, but he never complained. All work and no play made Beetle a dull boy, but it inured in him a powerful work ethic. The period before the Great War was anything but a belle époque for Smith.
War erupted in Europe in summer 1914, but little changed in Indiana, including in the Guard. The episode that succeeded in breathing life into that somnolent body took place along the Mexican border. Interjecting itself into the amorphous political situation in Mexico, the Wilson administration committed a series of blunders that eventually prompted American involvement. With American participation in Europe ever more possible and U.S. intervention in Mexico more probable, Secretary of War Lindley Garrison pushed for the creation of a continental army under federal control. In the face of adamant pro-Guard opposition in the House of Representatives, Wilson killed Garrison’s scheme. Pancho Villa’s raid into New Mexico in March 1916 forced Washington into action. In June, under the provisions of the National Defense Act of 1916, the Wilson administration called for a fourfold expansion of the now federalized National Guard.
On 27 June 1916 elements of the Indiana National Guard mustered into federal service. For Beetle, the Guard’s enlargement and active service in Mexico dangled the likelihood of a commission and perhaps a medal or two. Neither came to Smith. Once again, family circumstances dogged him. Indiana Guard officials perused their rosters and noted that Smith fell into the primary earner category. Orders followed for Smith’s attachment to the headquarters staff. This constituted the bitterest pill of all. After all his travails as first sergeant, he would not go south with the Second Indiana. Almost certainly, the enlisted men quietly celebrated the end of drillmaster Smith’s reign of terror, made all the sweeter because their gung-ho first sergeant would hold down a despised staff job and never leave Indianapolis.
Confederate soldiers called staff officers “yeller dogs.” Staff officers fell far short of the heroic ideal of the American soldier—a stigma that survives in muted form to the present. Chair-bound officers share this deprecatory self-image. Smith was no exception. Worse, administrative chaos attended the National Guard mobilization in Indiana, as elsewhere. Smith ably performed his duties, but his disappointment never slackened.
As events transpired on the Mexican border, Smith need not have fretted. The entire Mexican fiasco demonstrated the United States’ woeful unpreparedness for war. The Punitive Expedition spent nine and a half months in a fruitless effort to bring Villa to account. Except for Pershing, no great reputations emerged from this Mexican business. The Indiana troops got no closer to the border than Llanos Grande, Texas—a temporary encampment in the barren rangeland of Nuences County, a few miles southwest of Corpus Christi.
The signposts on an officer’s road to the top never appear as they seem. Intangibles—character, luck, personal connections—play more determinant roles than performance. Smith’s career proves this law of unintended consequences. Disheartened by missing the deployment to Texas, Smith’s frustrating tenure on the Indiana Guard staff eventually served not as a barrier but as a steppingstone in his military career. Nor could he envision that staff duty—not the honors of combat—would carry him to four stars. None of that was remotely predictable in the opening months of 1917.