Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (17 page)

Supervision was minute. Officers in the Tactical Department were no more nor less than spies, forever looking for offenses to mark in their books. Custer was cited on page after page: late for parade, talking on parade, face unshaven, hair unkempt, equipment dirty, uniform disordered (he lay down on the floor to study in order to keep the press in his uniform, but it did little good—then and later, Custer’s clothes were sloppy), shoes unpolished, slackness in drill, failure to salute a superior, sitting down on sentry duty, room out of order, gambling in quarters, tobacco smoke in quarters, late for class, and so on.
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Demerits meant punishment tours—marching back and forth, in full uniform and carrying a rifle, on weekends. Custer later said he spent sixty-six Saturdays marching post to pay for his transgressions, four hours at a time, without speaking to anyone.
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But here, as usual, he was in control of the situation, for he had made the choice. Pulling a prank in class meant four hours on the parade ground marching, but it also meant getting a laugh from his fellow cadets, so he willingly paid the price. In one letter home, after describing the hardships he was undergoing because of all the extra marching, Custer commented: “Everything is fine. It’s just the way I like it.”
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Custer, like every cadet, was required to march to and from chapel,
where he was supposed to sit in an erect posture on a hard wooden bench and listen to a two-hour sermon from the Episcopalian chaplain—the Army having decided that the Episcopalian faith was the ideal one for an officer and a gentleman. Custer may have wondered why attendance was required, for as one cadet put it, “all excesses are without our reach and in fact we are everywhere so hemmed in that it is almost as difficult to sin here as it is to do well in the world at large.”
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Custer had no privacy and precious few comforts, even in his room, which, like those of all other cadets, was always open and could be inspected at any time by one of the Tactical Department officers. He learned to do without luxuries; his furniture consisted of an iron bedstead, a table, a straight-backed chair, a lamp, a mirror, a mattress and blanket, and a washstand. That was all that was allowed—any additional items would be confiscated and earn him demerits. His uniform was ill-fitting and always constraining. The shoes were heavy and clumsy, the pantaloons too tight, while the coat, with its three rows of eight yellow brass bullet buttons in front, inspired a cadet verse:

Your coat is made, you button it, give one spasmodic cough, And do not draw another breath until you take it off!

The crowning adornment was a bell-crowned black leather cap, seven inches high, with a polished leather visor and an eight-inch black plume. It weighed five pounds and, as Cadet John Pope put it, “hurt my head extremely.” Superintendent Robert E. Lee confessed in 1852 that the hat caused “headaches and dizziness.”
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All the hardships of West Point life paled beside the food. The authorities did their best to keep it as cheap, unappetizing, and unnourishing as possible. The menu was short and to the point: boiled potatoes, boiled meat or fish, boiled pudding, bread, and coffee. One cadet reported that although he became accustomed to the sight, and even the smell, of the boiled fish, in four years he had never been able to eat it.
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Cadets supplemented the diet with impromptu meals cooked over the small fireplaces in their rooms; Custer once stole a rooster from an officer’s chicken coop and presided over such a feast.
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He also received demerits when cooking utensils were discovered hidden in his fireplace.

That Custer survived four years of such a prisonlike existence was testimony to his determination and ambition and to the Academy’s ability to persuade its cadets that what it had to offer was worth
the cost Day after day, in small ways and large, the faculty and staff told the cadets that they were the best, the cream of the crop, members of the elite “long gray line.” There were constant references to graduates who had reached high positions in both civil and military life, daily reminders that the cadets would soon be the first line of defense of the nation.
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Civilians were objects of contempt, enlisted men beneath any notice at all. When Cadet Oliver O. Howard paid a visit to an old friend who was serving as a sergeant in a company of troops stationed at West Point, he was roundly criticized by his fellow cadets and by the officers, one of whom called him in and said, “You must remember that it will be for your own advantage to separate yourself from your friend while he is in the unfortunate position of an enlisted man.”
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In some ways the Corps of Cadets was as elite as the authorities were always telling Custer and his comrades that it was. Because of the method of congressional selection, the cadets tended to come from families of importance in the congressional district, for it did a politician little good to select a boy whose parents could not help him in the next election. Custer was an exception to this general rule, but sons of some of America’s leading families regularly appeared to take the oath as a cadet. In 1858 the Corps contained a Washington from Virginia, a Buchanan from Pennsylvania, a Breck-inridge from Kentucky, a Huger and a Mordecai from South Carolina, a Du Pont from Delaware, and a Hasbrouck and a Vanderbilt from New York.
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For a boy like Custer, without a distinguished family background, wealth, or political position to push him ahead, West Point was an ideal place for social climbing and general advancement. Custer found himself on a plane of total equality with the Vanderbilts or the Du Ponts. Cadets, rich or poor, had no money to spend. They never saw their pay of $30 per month, which went to the commissary for mirrors, razors, clothes, and other essentials. They were forbidden to receive money from home; for two years Cadet Henry A. Du Pont could not leave the post because he was in debt at the commissary.
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Since there were no fraternities nor indeed any social organizations of any type, cadets divided themselves along the lines of their barracks, squads, and class assignments, not according to background or wealth. And because all the cadets shared the same hardships and all were told that together they constituted an elite, they tended to set themselves off as a group against the civilian world, rather than dividing internally. Western boys quickly learned formal table manners under the watchful eyes of the authorities, so that at dress balls
or at dinners Custer could mix easily with the sons and daughters of the American elite.

The intensity of the experience of living four years at West Point was so overwhelming that most cadets formed lifelong friendships there. They drew much closer to each other than most college students of the period, even those who were in the same fraternity. As will be noted below, West Point encouraged the cadets to compete with each other, and they did, but overriding the competition was the strong sense of all the cadets being in the same fix together. Each cadet had the same enemy—the Tactical Department officers and the authorities generally—and the boys came together to protect each other from the spies and the absurd regulations. In the Army, then and now, non-West Point officers referred sneeringly (and jealously) to the “West Point Protective Association,” an unofficial and informal—and entirely effective—organization that saw to it that West Pointers got the rewarding assignments, that covered up West Pointers’ mistakes, and generally insured favored treatment within the Army for an Academy graduate. The WPPA worked because it was based on the common experience of nearly all graduates—as cadets, they had seen themselves as a small embattled group that could survive only by helping each other against the malevolent forces of the authorities.

Custer made excellent contacts while at West Point, contacts with the rich and powerful, with people who could see to it that he got good positions in the military, political, or business worlds—the kind of positions in which a young man couldn’t miss. Being a member of the WPPA almost insured success.

At West Point, Custer and his fellows learned absolute rules. Right was right and wrong was wrong. The cadet honor code emphasized the point. A cadet did not lie, steal, or cheat; he answered all questions fully and truthfully. He was honor bound to report any violation of the regulations that came to his attention. These requirements looked good on paper, and the honor code has long been the most cherished possession of the Corps of Cadets, setting the Corps off from all other college students. But the trouble with the honor code was that no one really lived by it. Obviously Custer did not turn himself in when he violated the regulations, although he was supposed to do so, and neither he nor any other cadet ever reported that someone had sneaked off to a local tavern for a drink or two. West Point pretended that it lived up to an impossibly high moral standard, which in practice meant that the cadets quickly absorbed the most important rule of all: don’t get caught, have a story prepared
if you are caught, and be ready to cover for other cadets when necessary. Cadets may not have lied, stolen, or cheated, but they did quibble — all the time.

At West Point the course of studies was so rigorous that only those with outstanding ability or excellent preparation could stay in the school at all. The Academy thought of itself as the best educational institution in the country, and while it was not that good, it certainly was the toughest. Cadets who had been to other colleges before coming to West Point were amazed at how much they were expected to know and how well they were required to know it. Students back home, one of Custer’s contemporaries wrote, “have not the faintest idea of what hard study is.” “You can not and you dare not slight anything” at West Point, he added, for you may be called on at any time, on any aspect of the course. West Point, he claimed, covered more ground in one month than the ordinary college did in three, and the level of work was higher. Cadet Henry Du Pont found West Point at least twice as difficult as the University of Pennsylvania, which he had attended for a year before coming to the Academy.
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So the cadets learned a great deal and thought of themselves—and endlessly told themselves and were endlessly told by their superiors—that they were the top college students in the country. In fact, however, it was nearly all rote learning, memorization pure and simple. West Point turned out competent civil engineers; because it was almost the only civil engineering school in a country that had an insatiable appetite for building, it served a real function and gave its graduates lifetime job security. If all else failed, they could always make a handsome living as civil engineers.

But there was no intellectual questioning, no real curiosity, no attempt to experiment or discuss difficult issues. Custer had daily assignments, but no time to reflect on them; he had to recite in every class, but was never encouraged (or permitted) to discuss the implications of the subject matter. He was told what he must know and never urged to exercise his imagination or curiosity to seek out new fields of knowledge. West Point assumed that it knew what he had to know to be an effective officer and that his only job was to commit that body of knowledge to memory.

Mathematics was by far the most important subject, both because it was the basis for later study in engineering and because it counted most in making up the academic merit roll. To those who had difficulty with the subject, mathematics became an obsession. One cadet told his father, “I can’t write as good a letter as I used to—as I am always thinking of Math. — I have a nightmare every night almost of
it.—Gigantic X’s and Y’s, +’s and —’s squat on me—and amuse themselves in sticking me with equations, and pounding me on the head.”
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Another cadet put his feelings more succinctly when he inscribed on the flyleaf of his calculus book, “God damn all the mathematics to the lowest depths of hell!!”
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West Point was not unique. The idea that regurgitation of trivial facts constituted an education was common to the pre-Civil War American college, although nowhere did it go as far as it did at West Point. Thus the more they regurgitated the more superior the cadets felt themselves to be.

The daily recitations also helped reinforce the spirit of competition that was so marked a feature of cadet life. If to the outside world the cadets presented a solid front of superiority, within their own class cadets were expected to fight each other for higher rank, based solely on their classroom performance and demerits. The principle of pure competition, the fighting for higher standing and rank, permeated every aspect of Academy life. That it generally made the cadets work harder and produced good results is obvious, but there were other results. “I cannot find as good open hearts among the cadets as among my friends at home,” one cadet said. “There is a species of lurking selfishness hanging around cadets, for in class every man is in a degree jealous of his neighbor, in some greater or less according as the feeling is called forth by circumstances of position.”
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Inasmuch as there was a weekly posting of grades and inasmuch as a man’s career hung on the result, it could hardly have been otherwise. For Custer, however, the competition was not as intense as it was for those at the top of his class, who were fighting each other for final standing as number one or two. He was just trying to get by, so he threatened no one and no one threatened him.

Custer was popular with his fellow cadets, possibly the most popular cadet of the late 1850s. Aside from the negative fact that he threatened no cadet’s class standing, his popularity was based on solid appeal. He was a natural athlete and much admired for it. As Jay Monaghan notes, “He enjoyed athletic stunts, like twisting his legs behind his head or bounding to his feet from a prone position.” Although only average in height and slightly below average in weight, he was the second strongest boy in his class, yet he was easygoing, slow to take offense, and neither violent nor vicious. There is no record of his engaging in any fist fights as a cadet.
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