The nation’s military service academies have become a central battleground in the new Trump administration’s “war on woke.” At the confirmation hearing for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) warned, “It now appears they are a breeding ground for leftist activists and champions of DEI and Critical [Race] Theory.”
Hegseth pledged to tackle the problem by getting rid of the civilian professors from “left-wing, woke universities” who “try to push that into service academies” and replace them with battle-hardened, uniformed officers. President Trump may be going even further: On Feb. 10, he dismissed the Board of Visitors for all four service academies to combat their infiltration by “Woke Leftist Ideologues.” Trump then pledged on his Truth Social platform to: “Make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN.”
Each side in this debate accuses the other of dragging the country’s revered service academies into culture wars and political debate. But the truth is, our service academies have been a part of such battles since their very inception. For more than two centuries, the service academies have been both pawns and prizes in evolving cultural and political fights.
George Washington recommended establishing a military academy as early as 1783. Theoretically, it should’ve been an easy win. During the Revolutionary War, Washington’s Continental Army had depended on the good graces of foreign officers like the Prussian Baron von Steuben, who instilled order and discipline in the ragtag forces at Valley Forge, and Tadeusz Kościuszko a Polish engineer who designed the fortifications at West Point, among other places. It seemed obvious that if the U.S. wanted to maintain its new independence, it would need to educate its officers in the art and science of war.
But the establishment of a U.S. military academy became politically divisive, tied up for decades by competing visions for the nation.
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The initial debate pitted the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, against the Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson. The Federalists dreamed of a commercial colossus rivaling the empires of Europe, whereas the Republicans imagined a simple, agrarian republic of yeoman farmers defended by citizen militias, with no need for a federal military academy. When General Washington became President Washington, he tried to prevent the emergence of parties by bringing both factions into his administration, making both Jefferson and Hamilton cabinet secretaries. But this effectively gave both men a veto over major initiatives, and no proposal for a military academy made it out of cabinet debates.
Two days before his death in 1799, Washington was still writing wistfully about the need for an academy.
But Jefferson quickly shifted gears when he became president in 1801, suggesting that his objection was not to a military academy per se, but rather to putting such a powerful institution at the disposal of elitist Federalists like Hamilton. A year later, he signed into law the Military Peace Establishment Act of 1802, which finally created the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
But despite Republicans dominating politics over the next three decades, the nature and purpose of the new academy remained unresolved. Republican purists wanted a simple, technical training school that kept the costs low and, more importantly, kept the officer corps from evolving into an aristocracy. Many other Republicans, however, were expansionists, who had a continent to conquer. Further, they were proponents of Enlightenment science and education, with no vehicle for advancing those aims other than the Academy.
This factional dispute almost proved fatal in West Point’s early years. As the Chief of Engineers, Jonathan Williams was, by law, Superintendent of the Academy, and he envisioned “a great national establishment to… rival any in Europe.” But his duties mostly kept him away from West Point, and day-to-day leadership fell to Alden Partridge, who preferred to run things more like a drill sergeant. If the Army wasn’t sure how to run the Academy, neither was the government—in 1811, the Secretary of War ordered most of the cadets away for service elsewhere in the Army, effectively shutting it down for a year and a half.
It seemed Williams’ vision won out when, in 1817, President James Monroe appointed Sylvanus Thayer as Superintendent. Thayer inaugurated a set of reforms that established West Point as the nation’s premier scientific and engineering school and secured himself a legacy as the “Father of the Military Academy.” But Partridge was so committed to his rival vision for the Academy that the path for this progress had to be cleared by dragging him away from West Point under arrest.
Further, while Thayer’s firm hand eliminated one set of factional disputes, he envisioned the science and engineering program at West Point as serving strictly military ends. This vision created a new set of problems, because he took over the academy just as the Republican Party split into factions. The “National Republicans” led by John Quincy Adams wanted to grow the nation’s infrastructure. They needed civil engineers to build roads, canals, and railways to promote the national economy and support westward expansion. West Point was the only school that could provide them, but Thayer resisted any changes to the curriculum.
Finally, in 1824, a frustrated Congress passed the General Survey Act, which authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to support internal improvements. The law left Thayer with little choice but to green light the development of the nation’s first civil engineering program.
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The General Survey Act also gave now-President Adams and his administration broad authority to dole out federal money in very targeted ways. West Point graduates led many of these internal improvement projects. Many took private pay, in addition to their military salaries, then cashed in on their taxpayer-funded education by leaving the Army for more lucrative civilian employment. This smelled of corruption, and it fueled the rise of Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Republican (eventually just Democratic) Party, as the National Republicans became the Whig Party.
The Academy became an easy target for Jackson, the self-taught, populist hero of the Battle of New Orleans. After he defeated Adams in 1828, Jackson actively antagonized Thayer by repeatedly reinstating cadets Thayer had expelled for disciplinary infractions, including for pro-Jackson political demonstrations. Partridge resurfaced to join congressional Democrats like Davy Crockett who called for abolishing West Point altogether.
Thayer resigned in frustration, but the Academy survived. Having made his political point, Jackson stopped meddling and instead deferred to Thayer’s successors in their disciplinary decisions.
In the Romantic era that followed, there were so many demands for additions to the Academy’s curriculum—history, literature, rhetoric—that the course of study was expanded to five years to accommodate them all, before the Civil War forced a return to the four-year program. This pattern continued through secession and Civil War, Reconstruction, the 20th century Civil Rights Movement, the other rights revolutions that made the academies more diverse, and through to the present day. A growing U.S. military also created the need for additional service academies to train officers for the Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard.
Neither woke progressivism nor MAGA populism are terms that would be familiar to Hamilton, Jefferson, Partridge, Thayer, or Jackson. But the underlying debate would resonate with all of them.
Today, cadets and midshipmen at the academies study theories of civil-military relations that emphasize the apolitical nature of military service and a strict separation of military institutions from partisan concerns. Yet, this goal has never fully matched the reality of military education. Because the U.S. is a democracy, the military—including our military academies—have never been fully insulated from the political and cultural concerns of the day. And, in fact, they are obligated to respond to the needs of the nation, as determined by the citizens at the polls.
The principal concern, voiced by both sides in every era, is that the service academies continue to produce leaders who can defend the nation in times of war. The challenge for the current leaders of all of the academies will be—as it was for their predecessors—to stay focused on that mission amid the political noise.
Ryan Shaw is a professor of practice in history and strategy at Arizona State University. A retired Army officer, he previously taught U.S. history at West Point.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
