Medicine: The General Was Neurotic

Dashing, golden-haired George Armstrong Custer, a major general at 24, was a wild daredevil of a soldier and the greatest Indian fighter of his time—according to the history books. Schoolboys are told that the battle to the last man at the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876 was one of the most heroic chapters in U.S. history.

To doctors, Custer’s Last Stand has become a fascinating study in psychoneurosis. Several eminent U.S. medicos have recently been carrying on a lively posthumous psychiatric analysis of General Custer in the medical journals. The discussion began, of all places, in Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics.

Stabbed by Pygmies. Dr. Paul R. Hawley, a major general in World War II, now medical chief of the Veterans Administration, arrives at the question: “Did cholera defeat Custer?” By psychoanalytical deduction, Hawley concludes that Custer’s Last Stand can definitely be traced to a cholera epidemic at Fort Riley on the Kansas River in 1867, nine years before the battle.

Custer’s wife was then at Fort Riley. When Custer, leading an Indian-hunting expedition in the field, heard of the cholera outbreak, he promptly rode off from his cavalry regiment and hastened to the fort. That led to a court-martial and thorough humiliation of the high-strung young officer. His trial brought out other charges. He had once abandoned a detachment of his troops to annihilation by Indians (an unpardonable sin in the Army’s Indian-fighting code). Custer was sentenced to loss of rank and pay for one year. Dr. Hawley’s analysis of the effect on Custer: “The giant had been stabbed in the back by pygmies. His pride had been severely wounded, and the wound festered, leaving an ugly scar. This scar could be made less . . . disfiguring only by repolishing his reputation to a brilliance that would blind the public to the defect.”

Custer’s chance came in the fatal expedition of 1876. Commanding a regiment in one of three columns advancing against an encampment of thousands of Sioux Indians at the Little Big Horn, he was assigned to a scouting expedition. Instead of joining the other columns before attacking, as ordered, Custer decided to redeem himself and win undying glory by putting the Indian horde to rout alone and unaided. Custer’s attack, Dr. Hawley implies, was one of the worst-botched jobs in the annals of Indian warfare. The General split his small force (600 men of the 7th Cavalry) into three parts, failed to reconnoiter the terrain, advanced to attack in broad daylight, was surprised and cut to pieces on a battlefield of narrow gullies where his cavalry was helpless. Many of Custer’s annihilated group of 225 men never fired a shot.

Stolen Spurs. Reviewing Dr. Hawley’s account, Psychiatrist Karl Menninger diagnoses Custer as a psychopath marked by extreme vanity, inhumanity, ruthlessness and a complete lack of loyalty to any friend or cause. Dr. Menninger notes some glaring symptoms of severe neurosis: Custer was noted for gaudy uniforms and bad manners; during the Civil War he stole a pair of spurs given by General Santa Ana to the father of one of his friends who was a Confederate officer; he often exposed his troops to unnecessary danger and slighted their medical care; in his attacks on Indian camps he habitually slaughtered the women & children. Dr. Menninger’s summary: in World War II, Custer, for all his dashing aggressiveness, would have been discharged as a psychoneurotic. Menninger finds it hard to understand why the name of Custer still stands in U.S. history as that of “a great hero.”

Some of history’s most successful generals have been neurotic. But Menninger thinks that a psychoneurotic with stars on his shoulders may be as dangerous to his own side as to the enemy; there were generals in World War II, he says (without naming names), who “destroyed the morale, if not the lives, of thousands of men committed to [their] charge.”