Joe Leyendecker was the premier illustrator of his day, but many feel that this little-known recruiting poster of a rifleman and a field music was not up to his high standard. From the glistening tips of their spit-shined shoes to the crown of their bellboy caps, they were indubitably Marines. But, with their stiff stances and thousand-yard stares, they looked more like first cousins to the little man on the wedding cake than like fighting men. In this static illustration, the Marine Mystique—that aura of mystery and reverence the country has conferred on its Corps in this century—seems to have eluded the artist.
In 1915, an epochal year in the evolution of the recruiting poster, Howard Chandler Christy created his saucy “If You Want to Fight ...” poster, forerunner (by three years) to his “Gee, I Wish I Were a Man . . .” Navy poster.
This was the year, too, that the Corps seemed poised to capture the hearts and minds of America’s people This feisty little hybrid— “soldier and sailor, too”—had cut its teeth in the fighting tops of our Revolutionary War and War of 1812 sailing warships, invaded the Halls of Montezuma during the Mexican War, marked time through the Civil War, and acquitted itself well in Teddy Roosevelt’s “Splendid Little War” with Spain in 1898. Marines fought in the Philippine Insurrection of 1898-1901. They occupied Wake and Guam in the Pacific after the Spanish-Ameri- can War and, in this hemisphere, Santo Domingo (1905-1907), Nicaragua (1912), Mexico (1914), and Haiti (1915). They intervened in Panama (1901) and in Cuba (1906 and 1912).
But who were these tough mugs who, an admiring journalist wrote, “held their socks up with thumbtacks”? American bluejackets suggested they might be “sailors with their brains knocked out.” The doughboys thought, “Marines have to click their heels together several times in the morning to get their brains started.”
Recruiting poster artists struggled through two wars to capture in ink and paint the spirit that makes a Marine a Marine. In the early days of World War I, the artists were almost universally wrong as, all-thumbs, they tried to come to grips with the Marine Mystique. The Marines were shown as bookworms, or as deadeye defenders of our ships from German dirigibles, or, wrongest of all, as the performers of amphibious landings somewhere in Europe.
Some Marines did read. But they were more interested in making history than reading about it.
Before the guns went quiet on the Western Front, however, recruiting poster artists began to see Marines as artist James Montgomery Flagg saw them. Too old for wartime service, Flagg made no secret of his affection for the Marines. His was the pitch pipe that set the tone and, thereafter, a host of artists joined the chorus of praise for the Corps. The most popular image became that of the Marine about to spring into action with a flag fluttering—often incongruously—in the background.
But not all artists copied the bold-brushstroke “guts and glory” theme exemplified by Flagg. Some perpetuated the Leyendecker image with sterile, silk screen renderings of recruiters superimposed over flags.
Compare the glad-handing Flagg Marine on the following page with the Teutonic toy soldiers of Joe Leyendecker on the opening page of this article. Leyendecker’s two Marines seem aloof, conceited, pompous, contemptuous, and almost comic—all the things the Marines’ critics say they are. From Flagg’s hand flowed a different image: a confident, free-spirited patriot who was prepared to fight hard and, if necessary, die well for his country.
Was Flagg or Leyendecker closer to the mark?
Will the real Marine please stand up? All of us would like, once and for all, to unravel the riddle of the Marine Mystique.
Artist James Montgomery Flagg’s genial Gyrene looked like an Eagle Scout offering to help an old lady at a crosswalk—until you noticed that he was armed and probably dangerous. Lesser artists than Flagg picked up his smiling Marine’s challenge—“Want Action? Join the U. S. Marine Corps”—and in their action-packed posters only the helmets and small arms distinguished the Leathernecks who were “First to Fight” at Belleau Wood in 1918 from those who were “First to Fight Back” at Guadalcanal in 1942.
The hated trenches of World War I gave way to the foxholes of World War II, but the same 48-star flag inspired Marines in both wars. Still, the U. S. Army, in far greater numbers and in far wider locales, fought under that flag in and out of foxholes, too. Why, then, was it the Marine—not the soldier, sailor, or airman—who was most venerated by his civilian brethren? Or, put another way, what is this Marine Mystique anyway?