The Marshalling Point
"Secretary of State General George C. Marshall Speaks to The House Appropriations Committee" by U.S. National Archives is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
"Morale is a state of mind. It is steadfastness and courage and hope. It is confidence and zeal and loyalty. It is élan, esprit de corps and determination. It is staying power, the spirit which endures to the end — the will to win. With it all things are possible, without it everything else, planning, preparation, production, count for naught."
— George C. Marshall Speech at Trinity College, June 15, 1941 (GCM Papers, 2: 536)
Tune in to any of the Sunday political talk shows, listen to any political podcast, read any of the endless Substacks, columns and blogs dedicated to politics, and it's hard to avoid an obvious conclusion: almost no one is very happy right now.
In fact, a great many Americans are downright angry, whether it be at each other, or themselves, or simply the state of the world. The national vibe is negative. The expression on the national face is a scowl.
Such is always the state of affairs to some degree, of course. It's always both the best of times and the worst of times. Progress and conflict seem to go hand in hand. The faster we're scooting down the road, the more chaotic things seem to get, and the scarier the trip starts to look.
And as we all know, fear and anger go together.
Still, there seems to be something unique about this point in time. Something fundamental. It's as though we've become unmoored from our history and find ourselves in the position of remaking our nation every day. We've lost sight of all the minutes and days and years gone by and focus only on the immediate.
Strange, to be sure, but understandable given our new techno-culture. Everything seems to be immediate. Time has gotten so compressed, it's changed the meaning of timelessness. Too many of us no longer think in terms of eternal values but look instead to what is the most popular (must we all be "influencers"?), or the most lucrative, or whatever just makes us feel good right here, right now.
The flip side of all this immediate gratification is immediate disappointment. It's just a guess, but it's a fair bet a lot of the negativity in the air can be attributed to some people finding themselves on the losing end and not liking it.
The Call of Duty
If that sounds a bit juvenile, it is. In the world of grownups, getting everything you want as soon as you want it and feeling hard done by if you don't get it is exactly what we expect from toddlers. Past a certain age, you start to have responsibilities. And the farther — and higher — you go in life, the greater and graver the burdens become.
Eventually, you get to questions of life and death. At the family level, parents are responsible for the safety and well-being of their children: food, clothing and shelter are the basic necessities parents are morally and legally obligated to provide.
And once the cycle of life has progressed far enough, the burden shifts to children caring for their aging parents (an issue of ever-growing importance in an aging America). In a lot of ways, it's even tougher. But the essential duty is the same: the individual family members taking care of other individual family members.
At the organizational or national level, the picture changes considerably. Now, you're no longer tasked with seeing to the immediate needs of individuals who are dependent on you. Instead, you're making decisions and taking actions which can and will affect the lives of people you will never meet.
At that point, you're exercising leadership. And the only way to do it is to rely on certain core principles and values to guide you. There simply is no way to reliably factor in every possible outcome and calculate every possible permutation.
You need to rely on what has been proven before your turn came — the concepts which time has shown to be the glue which holds the world together:
“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.”
― Winston Churchill
If you're in a position of elected authority in our country, you've received a grant of authority from the people who elected you to represent them. You are duty-bound to exercise that authority in their best interest, not your own. Duty is the strongest string among many attached to your office.
The other strings — the other values in Churchill's list — are the moral obligations which come with the grant of authority. It's not enough to be strong, or powerful, or effective. You must be good and right and decent, too.
Leadership isn't only about getting from one place to another. It's about being one thing rather than another.
And more than anything else, the one thing you need to be as a leader is a good example. It's something the great George C. Marshall understood perhaps better than anyone. He realized the people under his command (which by the final stages of World War II, amounted to millions of American military personnel fighting across the globe) needed to be able to look up to him, and to all the other officers who held the lives of the enlisted troops in their hands.
It's a lesson which has become ingrained in American military thinking. Take a good look at the poster of Marshall on the stage at this ROTC seminar:
"George C. Marshall Awards & Leadership Seminar | 2023" by U.S. Army ROTC is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.
The words on the banner were all taken from Marshall's own writing and speeches. They formed the value system he relied upon during his long and distinguished career.
🟩 Core Leadership Values
DUTY
Fulfilling one's responsibilities. Taking responsibility for one's actions.
HONOR
Exhibiting high moral standards, dignity, and distinction.
LOYALTY
Being committed to others, one's group, unit, or nation.
RESPECT
Behaving in a way that shows regard and appreciation for others.
SELFLESSNESS
Placing the needs of others above one's own needs.
INTEGRITY
Adhering to moral principles. Acting honestly.
Marshall exemplified each and every one of these values to the maximum degree. Add in his remarkable intelligence and analytical ability, and you get the perfect package of competence and character.
It might be too much to ask of the current age for someone like him to come along again. After all, he was unusual even for his time, and that was an era of leadership which often rose to the spectacular. FDR saved the country from not one, but two existential threats. Winston Churchill himself may have saved the Free World.
But we can certainly take to heart Marshall's moral perspective. And that brings us back to the quote at the top of this piece.
Morale is Moral
As a young officer, Marshall was sent to France as a member of the staff of the 1st Division of the American Expeditionary Force. The division was somewhat hastily assembled, underequipped, undertrained and struggling to coalesce after their deployment to the Western Front. Both the French and the British were beginning to doubt the contribution they could expect from their new allies.
Gen. Pershing, on an inspection tour, was not pleased. After reviewing the division, he dressed down the commanding officer and his staff for its lack of preparedness and readiness to join the fight. He was, by all accounts, furious.
Marshall — a relatively junior officer — stepped forward as Pershing took a breath and interrupted the tirade. "General," he said, "I think something needs to be said here, and I'm the one to say it." He then went on to catalogue the numerous ways Pershing's own headquarters had failed to support the 1st Division: the equipment which never arrived, the lack of ammunition, the haphazard logistical support, the shortage of experienced officers and NCOs, and a host of other items.
Pershing simply looked at him. Then stormed off. Marshall's friends were sure he was finished — he'd be packed off to the States in no time, his military career over, a shambles.
Instead, equipment and supplies began almost immediately to start flowing in. And by the following spring, Marshall was summoned to join Pershing's staff at AEF headquarters, where he'd remain for the rest of the war as an indispensable planner. After the war, he became Pershing's aide-de-camp, the general's right-hand man during his stint as Army Chief of Staff.
(Pershing would return the favor and serve as Marshall's best man at his wedding in 1927.)
None of this would have been possible had it not been for Marshall's instinctive moral commitment to say and do what was right. Pershing was being unfair; it needed to be addressed. Marshall did the addressing, and in the process gained the respect not only of his peers, but the formidable general he was, for lack of a better word, schooling.
In short, everyone suddenly believed in Marshall, precisely because he made a moral case and gave everyone something to believe in. And he never stopped giving them something to believe in. So, they never stopped believing in him.
And that's what we need now, as we need it all the time: something to believe in. Timeless values. Truth. Integrity. Service. Leaders who are committed to us rather than demanding we be committed to them.
That's our marshalling point.
Addendum
One of the most interesting business thinkers of the first part of the 21st Century is Jim Collins. He's made a career of examining the differences between successful business enterprises and those which have failed.
And his conclusions about leadership may surprise you:
Jim Collins: The X Factor of Truly Great Leadership - Nordic Business Forum 2014
There's probably no need to point out the contrast between the current president's style and the kind of management style Collins is talking about. But there it is.
If you haven't read any of Collins's books, they're worth the time. The lessons he's learned along the way apply to a lot more than just business. He really is one of the great philosophers of cooperative human endeavor.
And without cooperation, we're not getting very far.
You can check him out here: Jim Collins - Books
For our part, we'll continue to stress the endless value of leadership and help to define what it means to all of us, and for all of us, going forward.
We're glad to have you join us.
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Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhiginstitute.org.
