The Long Gray Line

The Long Gray Line – what do you envision when yo hear that phrase. If you are not familiar with our great military academies, it is probably something a piece of lead makes on a piece of paper, right? Well let the heroes in Robert Freer’s article below set you straight on just how important this line is to your freedom.

By Robert E. Freer, Jr., President of The Free Enterprise Foundation

John Adams was the first president to visit our then nascent professional military to extol its role in our Republic. Though echoed often over the two centuries since we first graduated a class at West Point, none have been more direct in noting our nation’s dependence on our Long Gray Line to maintain our freedom. It is not just the skill at arms of our military that makes them so important; President Adams noted that Republics are designed for a moral people:

We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other. For two centuries now President Adam’s utterance has been our central guiding truth, and for two centuries presidents have often traveled to West Point in the spring when the new class of graduates is poised to leave the long gray line for the khaki of active duty. They come not only to pay tribute to the United States’ military, but also to absorb some inspiration from that place and from the Corps. It is not only for their military skill and courage that we need our armed forces but for the example of their lives lived for a greater purpose than themselves.

Late in his life, President Eisenhower noted that his time at West Point had transformed him. When he donned the uniform, ever after, the expression “The United States of America”… [meant] something different than it had ever before. “From [thereon] it would be the republic I was serving, not myself,” he said.

The backbone of the “religious and moral people” referred to by John Adams is constantly renewed, constantly extended at West Point. Each year a new class takes its place at the end of that Long Gray Line, and each year a new class of young officers graduates to take its place both as guardian and beacon of the liberty so dearly paid for by those who came before.

West Point’s two centuries of unbroken production of our nation’s military leaders has been supplemented by The Virginia Military Institute, The Citadel and then in 1845 by The U.S. Naval Academy. Perhaps with the Citadel and VMI, we have come closer to Adam’s ideal in that these institutions produce leaders of principle not just military professionals. Though schooled in the arts of war, their graduates predominantly have in peace time selected to return to the service of their communities, often rising to positions of civic leadership won with honest effort based on their leadership skills and moral fiber.

Soon after this is published, Charleston’s own heralded Long Gray Line will receive its newest class of “knobs,” its 164th. You can be sure it will be scoured, lathered with polish and buffed for four years to a high gloss ready to join either the military or the company down the street and to provide leadership to either.

As we celebrate this new reaffirmation of the eternal values upon which this nation has endured—and must continue to cherish in order to endure—let us recall the most eloquent summation of what this service means. I offer this quote as a reminder to the community and a welcome to the newest members of our Long Gray Line. If they will be guided by this excerpt from a speech by General Douglas Macarthur at West Point in 1962 upon his selection to receive the Silvanus Thayer Award for a lifetime of service epitomizing, “Duty, Honor, Country”, I feel sure of their successful time at The Citadel. I feel sure as well that our community will continue to thrive and benefit from the values they enshrine.

“Duty Honor Country”, began General Douglas Macarthur in his final address to the Corps of Cadets at West Point, “those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you want to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

“These are some of the things they [these words] do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

“They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

“They give you a temperate will, a quality of imagination, vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman…

“The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are wrong…

“You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the Nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds.

“The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, and Country….”

General Macarthur ends,…“The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished—tone and tints. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll.

“In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, and the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, and Country.

“Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps. I bid you farewell.”

Welcome Knobs! You are undertaking life’s most worthy challenge to become men and women of principle. May you grasp the baton resolutely that is passed to you by The Long Gray Line that has gone before and carry it and us through your leadership to a brighter tomorrow.

Copyright © 2007 by Robert E. Freer, Jr. All rights reserved

About the author: Robert E. Freer, Jr. is President of The Free Enterprise Foundation. He is a Visiting Professor, at The Citadel and elected in 2005 to be their first John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence. A regular contributor to the Mercury, He can be reached by E-mail at The Citadel . Copies of his earlier columns can be found The Free Enterprise Foundation.

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