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Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Corps eagerly sought out and received new missions and responsibilities, but it rarely ceded any duties once it had acquired them. They began to justify their existence by invoking their institutional traditions, their many martial engagements, and their claim to be the nation's oldest and proudest military institution. Rather than look forward and actively seek out a mission that could secure their existence, late nineteenth-century Marines looked backward and embraced the past. The process by which a maligned group of nineteenth-century naval policemen began to consider themselves to be elite warriors benefited from the active engagement of Marine officers with its historical record as justification for its very being. This work argues that the Corps could and would not settle on a mission and therefore it turned to an image to ensure its institutional survival. Whereas armies and navies can each claim their own domains, marines tend to have more varied missions and ad hoc responsibilities. Usually an institution's mission or missions reveal its functional purpose. A mission can be understood as the tasks and roles-the function, the raison d'etre-assigned to a particular institution that often constitute its justification for existence. As neither a land-based organization like the Army nor an entirely sea-based one like the Navy, the Corps' missions overlapped with both institutions. Most of the Corps' historians have focused more specifically on how the Corps pursued and developed new missions.īut the more important problem was the Corps' peculiar position that resulted in frequent existential crises.

This is epitomized by the play on the Corps' acronym as useless sons made comfortable.ĭespite some recent historiographical developments, there is yet to be a published work that explores how the Corps crafted such powerful myths. It did not yet mean something distinct to be a Marine either to themselves or to the public at large indeed, to be a Marine officer after the Civil War actually had a negative connotation, implying that an officer only filled his position due to social connections. But for more than half of its existence, the Corps' Marines largely self-identified as soldiers. Most Marines just assume that their historical predecessors had similar attitudes, that this kind of rhetoric has always characterized Marines. That wasn't tough enough for him, he said, so he decided to enlist in the Marine Corps.

But for more than half of its existence, the Cor My father often joked that he had been about to be drafted in the Army during the Vietnam War. My father often joked that he had been about to be drafted in the Army during the Vietnam War.