Search for a mission: A study of Marine Corps institutional survival and professionalization, 1880-1898.

摘要

This study is an attempt to examine how the Marine officers of the last decade of the 19th century accommodated to the sudden challenges in organization and mission that the modern era posed. It examines the development of military professionalism in the Marine officer corps of the period and depicts its close interconnection with military reform, institutional and personal self-interest, and the political partronage system. Moreover using the concept of professional jurisdiction, and its linkage between the profession and its work, and to other professions, the study focuses on the Marine officer relationship to the Navy.;The question then became how did the Marine fit into the naval service? In a sense, the period under consideration from 1880-1898 was a search among some Marine officers and Navy officers to find and define this role. Mostly, it was a time of missed connections. Although both realized that this function would have to fit into the new naval technology, the Marine reformers viewed the secondary battery mission on board the new armored warships and some aspect of coastal defense as the special domain of the Marine. Naval strategists, on their part, were looking for some means to project force ashore as well as to protect the vulnerable advance bases of the fleet. While after the Spanish-American War, Marine guards would continue to serve aboard naval vessels, it would be the expeditionary and advance base missions that would provide the professional jurisdiction for the Marine officer and ensure both his professional and institutional survival.;The Marine officer participated in, effected, and was affected by the society and forces around him. This included the basic search for structure that characterized much of American life during the last decades of the nineteenth century. As seen, this search for structure took place in a confused arena where the old forms continued to have full play, and competed with the new. The new professionalism coexisted with partisan politics, competing interest groups, personal and institutional self-interest, advancing technology, and an America beginning to look outward.