“In seeking to save their institution, Marines of all ranks turned to the burgeoning field of public relations to ensure their branch’s continued existence.”
By Heather Venable
AT THE START of the 20th century, the United States Marines faced an existential crisis. Considered little more than a minor supporting arm of the vast U.S. Navy, the Corps’ very future was in serious doubt in 1908 when President Theodore Roosevelt ordered Marines off Navy’s ships. In fact, Executive Order 969 consigned them mostly to naval station guard duty. The decision threatened to end the Corps’ traditional mission of policing ships and serving in landing parties.
The Marines had been through this before. Even in the middle of the Civil War, Congress considered consolidating the Marines into the Army. After the war, the Corps’ reputation was so terrible that some observers joked that USMC actually stood for “Useless Sons Made Comfortable.”
In essence, it did not yet mean something to be a Marine. In seeking to save their institution, Marines of all ranks turned to the burgeoning field of public relations to ensure their branch’s continued existence, which is how the few became the proud between the Civil War and World War One.
What emerged was a two-pronged strategy. Internally, the Corps sought to foster the deepest allegiance of its Marines. Externally, it worked to convince citizens that Marines embodied the highest form of American manhood, often at the Navy’s expense. Shortly after the Spanish-American War, for example, Capt. R. Dickins prided himself on how his Marines had maintained their bearing in combat at sea despite “occupy[ing] the most exposed position.” In doing so, Dickins implicitly contrasted his purportedly brave and stalwart Marines manning exposed batteries with the allegedly more cowardly positioning of sailors behind protected turrets.[1]
This trend only intensified as the Marine Corps established the Recruiting Publicity Bureau in 1912. Located in New York City in the publishing capital of the U.S.—rather than being co-located with the Corps’ headquarters—the bureau disseminated powerful recruiting posters and favourable articles to thousands of newspapers across the nation multiple times a week. A relatively small institution, it literally flooded American newspapers with details about its past successes, its traditions, and its increasingly vocal claims to being an elite fighting force.
The Corps’ approach to catching the attention of potential recruits while winning the allegiance of ordinary citizens can be seen by comparing and contrasting the Marine Corps and the Navy’s recruiting posters before and during the First World War.
Unlike the Navy, the Corps increasingly embraced martial imagery. For example, the recruiting poster entitled “First to Fight” promised the opportunity not just to see combat, but also to be the first to do so.[2] Implicit in this guarantee was the notion that sailors would not share this opportunity, even though Marines and sailors had fought side-by-side ashore for more than a century.
Another poster of the era celebrated Marines as warriors while showing the Navy in the safer act of firing its guns from a distance in support of Marines.
“Soldiers of the Sea” sought to draw the viewer’s eye to the Marine in the bow of the rowboat, ready and eager to begin fighting even before the ship had touched the shore. He stood confident and assertive, willing to risk his body fearlessly.[3]
If the Corps’ imagery highlighted action, the Navy took a more gentile approach to the business of war, stressing the promise of travel and practical, while typically avoiding explicit depictions of combat.[4] In “Pull Together Men,” for example (SEE BELOW), the ominous red sky vaguely suggests a looming threat.[5] Meanwhile, sailors continue to row, their backs to the unknown threat behind them, as the naval officer attempts to determine the nature of the threat through his binoculars. The poster suggested that sailors just needed to be in unison as a team to succeed, with no sense of a need for immediate action.
Even one of the Navy’s more martial posters produced around this time—unusually showing a sailor with a rifle (SEE ABOVE)—lacked any other indication of combat or the same sense of urgency and assertive action as in the Corps’ posters.[6] A competing poster claiming the Navy to be “the service for fighting men” represents an outlier in the Navy’s mostly pragmatic and refined recruiting efforts.[7]
By America’s entry into the First World War, the Corps had managed to secure a place of importance in the public imagination through its ceaseless efforts at self-promotion as an institution of warriors (SEE BELOW), frequently at the expense of the Navy.
One press release compared the cool and professional departure of Marines for combat in France with sailors playing baseball, explaining that the Marines had “slipped away so quietly that the ball players did not know until afterward that they had missed seeing the departure of . . . 2,700 men bound for the battlefront.”[8] Sailors may have been too busy playing games to see Marines, but no one could miss the splash Marines made in U.S. newspapers. And Americans increasingly expressed their devotion to the Corps, lavishly praising the Marines.
Dedicated to local Marine recruiters in St. Louis, the 1918 song “You Great Big Handsome Marine” epitomized how Marines successfully had discarded their previous reputation as being “useless sons made comfortable” in a few decades.[9]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Heather Venable is the author of How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918. She is an assistant professor at the U.S. Air Command and Staff College where she teaches in the Department of Airpower. Follow her on twitter at @Heather_at_ACTS.
The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not represent the official position of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
[1] Richard S. Collum, History of the United States Marine Corps (Philadelphia: L. R. Hamersly, 1903), 325.
[2] U.S. Marine Corps, “Join the U.S. Marine Corps. Soldiers of the sea!,” www.loc.gov/item/00651850.
[3] US Marine Corps, “Join the US Marine Corps,” https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/00651850/.
[4] For two examples of other posters that avoided combat, see U.S. Navy, “He is getting our country’s signal – are you? Join the Navy,” www.loc.gov/item/00651872/ and Clare A. Briggs, “Why waste your time looking for a job when the Navy will employ you at once,” www.loc.gov/item/00651852/.
[5] U.S. Navy, “Pull Together Men,” www.loc.gov/item/2002699358/.
[6] Clinton Jordan, “I’m doing my duty are you? Your Navy needs you this minute,” www.loc.gov/item/00651855/.
[7] U.S. Navy, “Join the Navy, the service for fighting men,” https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002699393/.
[8] Quoted in Heather Venable, How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique 1874-1918 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2019), xix.
[9] Harold Dixon and I Chapman, You Great Big Handsome Marine (St. Louis: Dixon-Lane Publishing Company, 1918); available online at://www.loc.gov/item/2013562648/.
Unfortunately, the Corps self-promotion and inter-service squabbles led to disasters in World War II, like Peleliu and Iwo Jima:
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b9wUAtDrvQ&w=640&h=360]