Opinions

While it is clear from the journals of individual Lyceums that the program varied greatly from post to post, determining the exact feelings of commanding officers is somewhat more difficult. These officers discussed the program mainly in official correspondence, a venue which imposed a certain limitation on their ability to speak freely as their words were intended primarily for superior officers who, in many cases, had directly ordered the establishment and execution of the Lyceum program. Clearly, the issue at this post lay less in the specific challenges provided by local conditions and more with the value and emphasis that the individual commanding officer placed on the program.Still varying levels of support are possible to detect both in the less-guarded words of some officers and, occasionally, by their actions. One clear cut example occurred at Fort Ebert, Alaska, where in 1902 the commanding officer reported that “before my arrival at the post there were no meetings of the Lyceum and a letter had been sent by the former commanding officer requesting the two officers on duty here be excused from this duty on account of having no books.” Yet the newly arrived commander was able to find sufficient books, discovering one in the Company library and borrowing another from a civilian, and begin holding regular meetings of the Lyceum.[1]Report of the Officers’ Lyceum at Fort Ebert, Alaska for February 1902, February 28th, 1902, Record Group 393, Entry 732, NARA, Washington, D.C. Clearly, the issue at this post lay less in the specific challenges provided by local conditions and more with the value and emphasis that the individual commanding officer placed on the program.

Negative

Officers other than this unnamed previous commander also found fault with the program. Writing in 1901, the commander of Fort Walla Walla, an artillery captain, closed his report on the post Lyceum he oversaw by stating that “I recommend that the writing of essays as part of the lyceum work be dispensed with as the time that would be so spent may be used to better advantage in teaching officers and men their practical duties.”[2]Commanding Officer Submits scheme of lyceum instruction, Fort Walla Walla, November 20th, 1901, Record Group 393, Entry 732, NARA, Washington, D.C. While willing to conduct the Lyceum as ordered (his report noted that the Lyceum would meet for an hour twice a week in the evening), this officer saw no value in the writing of essays, perhaps the most intellectual and progressive element of the Lyceum, and preferred his officers to attend to their “practical duties.” His report leaves little doubt as to where he fell on the spectrum of theoretical education versus “war teaches war.”

Negative feelings for the Lyceum were not limited to senior officers and post commanders. Perry L. Miles was a junior lieutenant during the 1890s who went on to command a regiment in World War I with a final rank of Brigadier General. Miles served as the secretary of his post Lyceum, but in his memoirs Miles recalled the Lyceum program with somewhat of a distinct lack of appreciation.

The only officers’s [sic] schools of the times were in a short winter course, which we at Vancouver Barracks attended at the Officers Club once a week in the evenings. It was called the Lyceum. Each officer had to prepare a paper with a subject of his own choosing to be read to the other assembled officers at scheduled times. Since I felt that a young 2nd lieutenant could not teach soldiering to all the officers of the garrison, several of whom had been in the Civil War, I remember some of these papers were received as very good essays but I don’t believe they had much bearing on improving my ability to command a platoon or company of infantry in campaign.[3]Perry L. Miles, Fallen Leaves: Memoirs of an Old Soldier (Berkeley, CA: Wuerth Publishing Company, 1961), 3.

This junior officer did not appreciate the time he spent writing essays and sitting in the Lyceum, and most likely he spoke for a sizable group of his peers who did not believe in the practicality of theoretical, peacetime, professional education.

Positive

Other officers, however, felt differently. While Perry Miles and others felt that the Lyceum wasted time, there were other officers and commanders who believed in the value of military education in general and the Lyceum program in specific, and took action to make the most of the program despite of the challenges facing its execution. As noted above, Captain W. S. McBroom, the new commander of Fort Ebert, worked to establish the Lyceum at that post in the face of conditions that his predecessor had used as an excuse to completely ignore the conduct of the Lyceum. While McBroom showed his

7th Infantry at Fort Ebert, circa 1900

appreciation for the Lyceum in his extraordinary efforts to establish and conduct meetings in the face of significant obstacles, Major W. B. Kennedy, the commanding officer of Boise Barracks, Idaho, provided a written endorsement of the program and his hope for its effects. Writing to his department commander in 1893, Kennedy declared in ringing tones, if with uncertain grammar, that:

The attention given by officers has been very good, the interest taken in the work looking to proficiency has been very thorough. The essays read have been well prepared papers showing studious methods and thought. The effect of the Lyceum work on the young officers of the Army is in the direction of habits of study, reading, and investigating, all of which tends to develop a more thorough knowledge and greater adaptability for the work in their respective positions. All in all the Lyceum is working out good results in the Army at large and which the distant future will show more particularly than the present.[4]Letter from the Commanding Officer of Boise Barracks, ID to the Assistant Adjutant General, Dept. of the Columbia, May 1st, 1893, Record Group 393, Entry 732, NARA, Washington, D.C.

In this evaluation of his post’s Lyceum program, Major Kennedy went beyond merely summarizing the conduct of his young officers’ Lyceum work to evaluate the program’s effect on the Army as a whole. In this evaluation he was extremely positive, more importantly though, Kennedy foresaw that the best effects of the Lyceum would not be in the present but in the “distant future” as these young officers were being prepared for the positions of higher command and greater responsibility they would hold later in their careers, or in some cases the greater demands of wartime service that they would face in a mere five years. Additionally, while perhaps it was not what Kennedy was referring to, part of the results “the distant future will show more particularly” were not the skills of the individual officers thus trained, but the culmination of the reforms the Lyceums had both represented and encouraged.