Such an attitude is not as traditional as it may seem. In the mid-19th century, as the United States faced war with Mexico, professional soldiers were not seen as patriots or exemplars of anything.

In 1846, when President James Polk began his effort to strong-arm Mexico out of much of its territory, the first instrument at hand was the U.S. regular Army. While its officers were typically from the middle class, rank-and-file soldiers were mostly poor men who joined the Army because it offered food, clothing, and shelter. These men, often immigrants, had found it hard to earn a steady living in the tumultuous, rapidly commercializing cites of the East, and did not have enough money to migrate to the West. They were part of a mobile workforce that moved from hard job to hard job, scrambling to make a living. They lacked the means to settle down and become respectable citizens with families.

The few testimonies they left behind indicate that they joined the Army because they were ragged, hungry, and out of options. Most Americans saw these men as lazy and shiftless people who had willingly given up freedoms they should have prized as Americans by signing five-year Army contracts that subjected them to the kind of harsh physical discipline usually only meted out to slaves.

Most Americans saw service in the regular Army as beneath them. One recruit during that period, George Ballentine, found that civilians in New England saw him and his comrades as “a degraded caste, and seemed to think that there was contamination in the touch of a soldier.” Ballentine heard one civilian comment that the recruits were “a fine set of candidates for the State’s prison.” When another recruit, C.M. Reeves, and his comrades marched through Pittsburgh, street urchins jeered, “Hey, see the dirty soldiers, will you work,” answering “No, I’ll sell my shirt first.”

During the Mexican war, the regular regiments fought hard and well, but the few rank-and-file men who wrote about their experiences did not list patriotism as an important motive. They said that they were motivated by professional pride and their love of their comrades. To their credit, they rarely committed crimes against Mexican civilians.

Illustration depicting the Battle of Cerro Gordo, an important U.S. victory during the Mexican American War. Art courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But the Mexican war would temporarily change the very nature of the American military. The U.S. regular Army was not large enough for the war against Mexico, so when Congress authorized military action it also authorized the government to raise thousands of men organized in volunteer regiments. These men were very different from the regular Army recruits.

As news of the first clashes along the Rio Grande swept through their towns and counties in 1846, thousands of young men listened to patriotic speeches and signed up for regiments from the various states. Their hometowns sent them off with music, speeches, and banquets. These men were wealthier than the regular soldiers, and they viewed their service as an expression of their patriotism and a chance for adventure. The volunteers saw themselves in many ways as the embodiment of Jacksonian democracy, which extended citizenship to all white males and invited them to pursue their dreams by dominating others, especially African Americans, Native Americans, and, now, Mexicans. The volunteers were, like the regulars, often militarily successful, but they had little else in common with them. Professionalism and discipline held little attraction for them, and they often committed crimes against Mexican civilians.

This divide between regulars and volunteers would prove to be a defining one. Regulars and volunteers were both necessary to American military success and suffered hardship, injury, and death. Those who survived often had traumatic memories of battle violence, or of the helplessness they felt as they watched friends die from illness. But regulars and volunteers had very different experiences at the end of the conflict.

When the war ended, the volunteers were greeted as returning heroes, with parades, speeches, barbecues, balls, and banquets. Their fellow Americans celebrated them as citizen-soldiers, the embodiment of American patriotism. Many settled down to start families, and hundreds soon wrote memoirs about their experiences in Mexico.

The regular soldiers were not feted. Most still had not completed their terms of service, and they moved quietly on to new military postings. One of them, Alonzo Sampson, wrote that “there were plenty of us who had no home, strictly speaking.” These men remained, in effect, rootless laborers employed by the government.

America’s disparate treatment of its regular soldiers and the temporary soldiers enlisted for major conflicts continued for many decades. Recruited from the laboring classes, regulars were typically either forgotten or actively despised. In contrast, soldiers recruited or conscripted for temporary service in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I were celebrated as patriots. This divide in society’s attitudes toward regulars and volunteers ended when World War II and the Cold War brought 35 years of continuous conscription. This broader militarization of society helped firmly associate service with patriotic duty, at least for a time.

The Vietnam War ended this pattern—and eventually returned the United States to what had been its historic norm: reliance on a professional military filled with people who may have patriotic motives but also are often motivated by the paucity of economic alternatives.

However, we have not returned to the past in which Americans did not view the professional military as patriotic. Instead, our era has produced a new dissonance, in which we seek to have it both ways. Most of us celebrate the service of our soldiers as they pursue wars that seem to go on forever, but few want their own sons and daughters to put their lives on the line, and most of us avoid sacrificing anything at all. As a result, there is a gulf of separation between most Americans—and especially economically secure Americans—and the relatively small group of people who constitute our all-volunteer, professional, armed forces.

It’s as if we’ve gone back to the regular Army of 1846 or 1876, but without the open contempt.

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Before Samuel Morse received his first patent for the electro-magnetic telegraph in 1840, news traveled as quickly as the swiftest horse, boat, or carrier pigeon. Foreign news, printed in foreign newspapers, was collected by agents in rowboats who met ships at Halifax, Boston, and New York. Regional news, which might include election results, presidential messages, or official pronouncements, traveled in a variety of ingenious ways. In 1843, the printers of the Sun waited aboard a steamboat for the text of the governor’s New Year’s message. When it arrived by rail from Albany at Piermont in Rockland County, the printers set up type on the boat as they headed down river to New York City. The next day, the Sun proclaimed: “By the Sun’s Exclusive Express. From Albany Through by Horse and Sleigh in 10 Hours and ½.”

As the telegraph expanded up and down the East Coast in the spring of 1846, Beach saw an opportunity to hasten the arrival of the latest news of the ongoing war with Mexico by combining the pony express, the U.S. mail coach, and the telegraph. The dispatches originated in the Mexican port of Veracruz, crossed the Gulf of Mexico by boat, and landed at Mobile, Alabama, where Beach employed an express rider to beat the mail to Montgomery. There, the news rejoined the mail for the journey to Richmond, the closest telegraph head, and was put on the wire. Beach did not pay his riders unless they gained a 24-hour edge over the mail. His greatest innovation was offering an equal share in the venture to other New York City dailies, his newspaper rivals. Four papers accepted: The Courier and Enquirer, The Journal of Commerce, The Express, and The Herald. With the Sun, they were soon referred to as “the associated press of this city.”

Thus was born the Associated Press, a uniquely American institution, at once a business and a public trust. In structure, it is a not-for-profit cooperative, engaged in gathering with “economy and efficiency an accurate and impartial report of the news” for its newspaper members. Where other countries have established state news agencies to address the costly challenge of gathering and distributing news from near and afar, in America it took ferocious competitors coming together to share the financial and logistical burdens associated with informing the public. Because this effort by newspaper publishers was aimed at reporting on the government’s war against another nation, as opposed to an effort by the government to shape public opinion on its own affairs, the Associated Press has always sought to protect and preserve its independent voice.

At the time he organized the cooperative, Beach doubtless understood that the telegraph would remove some competition and duplication of effort among members. If the telegraph office limited each sender to 15 minutes, why would a newspaper’s agent wait in line to send a common digest of news when the next person was going to be sending the same thing? As the telegraph spread nationwide, AP established arrangements for selling telegraphic news and inviting American newspapers to share the cost of the service. Member newspapers exchanged their own local news with the New York-based organization for news from New York City, from across the nation, and from overseas.

The fortuitous combination of Morse’s telegraph and Beach’s news service transformed the delivery of news in ways that would be hard to overstate. For the first time, strangers living far apart could acquire the same information at the same moment. Editors could collect news as it was breaking rather than rely on previously published reports. The imaginative impact of the telegraph may be gauged by Anthony Trollope, who lamented in his 1854 novel, The Way We Live Now, that because of the telegraph, “newspapers are robbed of all their old interest, and the very soul of intrigue is destroyed.”

Earliest known version of the Associated Press logo, c.1849 to 1857.

During the Civil War, anyone trying to learn the results of a battle or the fate of a loved one would have disputed Trollope’s assertion. Telegraph reports were subject to human error and transmission was erratic, if not interrupted by the war itself. At the same time, the war did draw attention to AP’s standards of objectivity. In testimony before the House Committee on Judiciary on February 5, 1862, Washington agent (as the bureau chief was then called) Lawrence Gobright articulated AP’s ideal of factual and impartial reporting. The committee was investigating how AP had been able to circumvent government censors in wartime, a charge that may have originated with newspapers rankled by AP’s favorable treatment by government officials. When asked by the chairman, “Can you state whether you have been able to send information over the telegraph wires which other correspondents of particular papers have been unable to send,” he replied:

“My business is merely to communicate facts. My instructions do not allow me to make any comments upon the facts which I communicate. My dispatches are sent to papers of all manner of politics, and the editors say that they are able to make their own comments about the facts which are sent to them. I therefore confine myself to what I consider legitimate news… Some special correspondents may write to suit the temper of their own organs, although I try to write without regard to men or politics.”

Translated into modern newsroom vernacular: get it first, but first get it right. In a few unfortunate cases, though, the AP’s dedication to accuracy did give way to haste, as when AP prematurely reported the successful D-Day landings and (years later) the death of Bob Hope, much to the confusion of the Germans and the bemusement of the comedian.

The AP’s “down-the-middle” approach to the news was sometimes anathema to the government’s desire to spin events during the Civil War, but it gave news from the front a much greater reach. A century later, the same straight-news approach managed to offend both Northern and Southern publishers during the Civil Rights era. The archives are filled with the letters of outraged editors demanding AP retract or correct various stories. That AP editors patiently answered each letter in kind is remarkable. That AP continued to witness the violence from Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, and Little Rock is one of its greatest achievements. The bedrock of this kind of journalism is the people’s right to know, the belief that public opinion matters, and that therefore the risks taken to inform the people are worth taking.

As de Tocqueville observed, the only thing more powerful than the press is the people.

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