Court-Martial by Chris Bray

Author:Chris Bray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

PART THREE

POWER AND PLURALISM

World War I

to 9/11

The twentieth century was the era of the institution, centered on the long materialization of the bureaucratic spirit and the creation of vast systems of control. Historians of the century have described the social vision of “high modernism,” a rage for systematized order that could be devastating to ordinary people. In America’s twentieth-century armed forces, though, the debate over the rational production of modern order also produced successful arguments for a more balanced justice. Modernization wasn’t an inevitable process in which the individual was always ground down by the metastasization of institutional force. For one thing, people attempting to modernize and rationalize military law had to figure out what it meant to do that. They had to make an explicit argument, in public, and debate their premises. The result was a system of justice that became less arbitrary, more clear in its operation, and more restrained in its application of power.

But the road to that new balance and restraint passed through a wilderness of great pain and violence. Over the course of thirty-five years in the middle of the century, American military justice produced giant show trials, a mass execution carried out in secret, towering acts of racial injustice, routine cruelty, and a set of procedural rules that finally made courts-martial so much more fair for defendants that the scope of the change can hardly be exaggerated. During those three and a half decades, military law and courts changed far more significantly than they had in the previous 140 years. In effect, World War II closed the eighteenth century in the system of American military justice. When we look closely at the things real people actually did to other real people, the evidence points us in many directions at once, creating a story defined by paradox and complexity.

The high modern project was contested from below as it was debated within itself. The objects of bureaucratic order remained all of the things that state planners didn’t want them to be; the pluralism of the human world declined its orders to neaten up into straight lines. High modernity fragmented internally, but it shattered against the demands of an insistent humanity. “All areas of military life—training, leadership, combat, discipline, race relations—became battlegrounds where citizen-soldiers and army officials vied for the upper hand,” writes historian Jennifer Keene in a history of World War I. Those officials would be quite surprised to find themselves vying for the upper hand; they had assumed that they just had it, because they were the officials. Total war and vast institutional mass bore downward on human lives; human lives shoved upward, fighting for human dignity and the joyful mess of its own hierarchy-destroying spontaneous order.

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