To Raise and Discipline an Army by Joshua Kastenberg

Author:Joshua Kastenberg [Kastenberg, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781609092139
Google: mq68DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-04-15T01:11:01+00:00

THE JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL’S OFFICE, CONGRESS, AND NEUROLOGY

Prior to the war, insanity was accepted as a defense to criminal conduct in courts-martial, and in some instances, soldiers who became delusional were allowed to retire or were hospitalized in federal and state hospitals. In 1859 Congressman Daniel Sickles, who was later to achieve notoriety as a Union general, was acquitted of murder on the basis of temporary insanity. At the time of his trial in a New York civil court, Sickles had no connection to the army, but within three years of his trial, he commanded a corps in the Army of the Potomac as a major general. Perhaps because his defense counsel was future secretary of war Edward Stanton, the War Department later recognized insanity as a bona fide medical condition. In 1884 the War Department permitted General Ranald MacKenzie, a Civil War veteran and famed Indian fighter, to retire from the army after he became delusional. Until World War I, the legal test for determining insanity was based on proving that the accused soldier suffered from “an irresistible impulse” to commit an offense and that the accused soldier could not comprehend the wrongness of his acts. Although insanity was an accepted defense against criminal liability, soldiers who claimed insanity were usually unsuccessful in avoiding a conviction and imprisonment.

Crowder, Ansell, and the judge advocates assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s Office were attuned to advances in psychiatry, and with the addition of judge advocates who came into the army after serving as state judges, federal prosecutors, or professors of law, the Judge Advocate General’s Office accepted that the rigors of modern warfare would cause a fraction of the soldiers sent into battle to become unable to function. They also collectively realized that congressional oversight over military discipline might be at its most vigorous in the army’s treatment of persons suffering from “shell-shock” or other warfare-caused neurosis. In 1917 Crowder informed Baker that from a military law standpoint, there were no impediments to placing psychiatrists throughout the American Expeditionary Forces in positions commensurate with the status of surgeons. He also added that the courts-martial of soldiers determined to be unfit for duty without the protection of a psychiatric diagnosis would undermine Congress’s confidence in the fairness of courts-martial.36

In 1914 Congressman Andrew R. Brodbeck asked Secretary of War Garrison to move a Private Lisle Crabtree from the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, DC, to a Pennsylvania state hospital so that his mother could attend to him. Crabtree’s offenses were serious. A court-martial convicted him of murder and assault and sentenced him to life in prison after he shot two officers at Fort Leavenworth and killed his commanding officer “without provocation.” Crowder responded to Garrison that a medical investigation determined Crabtree was sane at the time of the offenses, but in prison he had become dangerously delusional and would commit a violent offense if he gained his liberty. Moreover, after reviewing Pennsylvania’s state laws, Crowder concluded that the state hospital was

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