E-raamat: How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918

Noting that in the early decades of the branch’s existence, being a US Marine did not mean something distinct, the author examines developments in the Marine Corps' identity and image during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to ensure its existence and separate it from the Army and Navy. She describes the process by which naval policemen began to consider themselves elite warriors by engaging with the Marine Corps' historical record as justification for their branch’s existence by invoking institutional traditions, martial engagements, and claiming to be the nation's oldest and proudest military institution. She discusses the Corps' ambivalent relationship with the Navy throughout the 19th century; how the Spanish-American War resolved some of the Corps' challenges by providing it with more opportunities to receive public approval and increase internal identification; its early publicity experiments, including new recruiting practices and work with commercial advertising agencies; the aggressive methods it used to obtain recruits as it sought to ensure that every household knew what it meant to be a Marine, namely a superior, elite soldier capable of any task; the continuing battle over identity between the Navy and the Marine Corps; how the Corps sought to bond recruits to the institution during training; and the bureau's efforts to hypermasculinize its institutional culture. Annotation ©2020 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

For more than half of its existence, members of the Marine Corps largely self-identified as soldiers. It did not yet mean something distinct to be a Marine, either to themselves or to the public at large. As neither a land-based organization like the Army nor an entirely sea-based one like the Navy, the Corps' missions overlapped with both institutions.



This work argues that the Marine Corps could not and would not settle on a mission, and therefore it turned to an image to ensure its institutional survival. The process by which a maligned group of nineteenth-century naval policemen began to consider themselves to be elite warriors benefited from the active engagement of Marine officers with the Corps' historical record as justification for its very being. Rather than look forward and actively seek out a mission that could secure their existence, late nineteenth-century Marines looked backward and embraced the past. They began to justify their existence by invoking their institutional traditions, their many martial engagements, and their claim to be the nation's oldest and proudest military institution. This led them to celebrate themselves as superior to soldiers and sailors. Although there are countless works on this hallowed fighting force, How the Few Became the Proud is the first to explore how the Marine Corps crafted such powerful myths.

This work argues that the Marine Corps could not and would not settle on a mission, and therefore it turned to an image to ensure its institutional survival.