Neither Truman nor Stalin are widely considered 19th century political figures.
So it happened in the 20th Century, which was kind of my point, if you had cared to think about it for, say, one second.
Although hardly original, please allow me to add these ideas to this discussion:
Marine basic training has a stonger element of indoctrination than the army’s. This includes taking kids and giving them the belief that as Marines they are superior to the weak, lazy and selfish culture from which they had the opportunity to emerge during boot camp.
The worm in this apple is that they’re proud to serve and if need be lay down thier lives in defense of…a weak, lazy and selfish culture.
From my observations (amphibious navy), as individuals they deal with this dilema in various ways:
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Lose faith and fuck up, seperating from the corps at the end their first enlistment contact if not sooner.
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Recognise some aspects of American culture that are indeed worth defending.
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Turn their backs of American society and see the corps as their true homeland (these are the assholes you have to worry about)
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(my favorite) realize that they weren’t in the greatest of situations to begin with, so the Marines are a great place to blow shit up, get laid, get drunk whenever possible, and all on Uncle Sam’s dime.
Really? Maybe I’m stupid. Maybe you didn’t phrase it well. Either way, the burden is on you to express yourself more clearly.
Yes, because “When did that become true?” is a really difficult piece of prose to comprehend. Of your two choices, I know which way I’m voting.
What tow choices - whend did the maries become known to be "better’ than the army? I’m thinking June 1918. One hundred years earlier they didn’t have any sort of prestige. That slogan “tell it to the marines” was originally a saying among sailors meaning “go tell your BS to someone dumb enough to believe it.”
Between the era when improved naval guns made boarding-party combat rare and the era of amphibious landing, the need for the USMC was in doubt. You can’t deny that a lot of bravery kept them going, but so did a lot of propaganda.
The European navies needed marines, because if they landed regular army troops on foreign shores, they’d make the other European nations jealous. But when they landed marines, the other powers could assume it was just a temporary landing and not a permanent invasion.
Years before the US seriously considered becoming a colonial power, Andrew Jackson thought about disbanding the Marines. Then in 1832 some American whalers were kidnapped and held for ransom byt Maylay pirates. The Marines jumped on that opportunity like a duck on a junebug, and the rescue opperation kept them going until the Civil War.
Cecil’s column on that subject sheds light on the USMC’s obscurity and low pay at the time
Marine officers weren’t specifially trained to act with newspaper headlines in mind, but the independent perogative traditional to naval officers was in their methods. (also, the understanding that the Marines were small and under-funded: an officer had to be aggressive if he wanted to advance, unlike an Army officer who could sit on his ass in the costal artillery for thirty years) They did indeed catch the public’s attention during the US’s “Banana Wars” with officers like Smedley Butler, twice awarded the Medal of Honor. But it could also backfire, such as the incident when Littleton Waller summarily executed his native porters in the Philippines as spies.
What really got the USMC’s propaganda machine in gear was WWI and the Battle of Belleau Wood. Pershing wanted the Marines to stay home and out of his hair, but political pressure was brought to bear and they went along to France. As if accompanied by stenographers, classic USMC quotes came back such as “Retreat, Hell, we just got here,” and “C’mon you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”
By WWII, this attitude was so ingrained that the most famous quote attached to one of the most famous images of the war; the flag-raising on Mt Suribachi, was “This means there will be a Marine Corps for the next 500 years”
So in my opinion, yes, the Marines have an evolved culture of self-promotion. Deservedly so, I supposes, since whenever they fought next to the army they often came out better (such as the Marines’ retreat compared to the US 8th Army’s at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir).
But man, they never let you miss out on it. Having had contact with both services, I did prefer the armys attitude of “shut the fuck up and get the job done.”
I love the Marine ethos. Marine dress is the only military uniform in the world that looks sharper than the Nazi SS. Marines are confident, daring, courageous, and amazingly emotionally mature (a rare few exceptions to the contrary notwithstanding). I’d hire a Marine for my company straight out of service and train him myself before I’d hire a slacker fresh out with a master’s degree. Wouldn’t even need to do an interview. If the creds checked out, that’d be all I would need. I did notice that someone above seems to have confused the Marines with the Army National Guard. If I were the King of Libertaria, all my military services would be fashioned after the Marines (and SEALS). Great guys. Great great guys.
Disclaimer: my views have nothing to do with the fact that my evil brother (the one who didn’t die) was an Army Drill Sergeant, and brought that shit home to me when I was eleven years old (upon my father’s death).
As a vet who had a terrible time finding a job in the rust belt, I admire Lib’s attitude and wish there’d been more employers like him then (although I can’t say the same for a certain schoolbook depsitory manager 
)
Thanks Sllithy Tove, that was very informative indeed.
A little while ago I heard the audiobook of Lt. Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away. It was interesting, because in my opinion Fick started out as #3, but the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned him into #1. In training, and even somewhat before training, he was a very pro-Spartan, anti-American-culture person, and I couldn’t help but feel considerable antipathy for him. But the minute the balloon went up, the responsibility for 23 men’s lives clearly just hit him like a ton of bricks. All the macho posturing about loving to fight disappears almost at once and he becomes absolutely 100% dedicated to getting the job done with the least amount of risk to his men possible. And the careless, ccavalier, careerist attitude of the higher ranks toward him and his men drove him absolutely bonkers. I’ve rarely heard more bitter criticism of the Marines from a guy who’s an actual combat veteran, not a washout-from-training. (Granted, we only hear his side of the story, but he sounded sincere to me).
I’m not in any position to judge whether the Marines are superior to the Army, but I can say that Fick was trained to a bleeding edge. Some of the things that happened to him in training were scarier than the wars.
I don’t think the Marines’ uniforms are sharper than the SS ones.
First of all, the pants and jacket don’t match (they’re different shades of blue.) Secondly, the cap doesn’t match either the pants or the jacket. They don’t have a leather strap going across the chest, and they wear civilian dress shoes instead of high riding-style boots.
The SS uniforms were color coordinated better, they had the leather strap and high boots which made them look more formal and intimidating, and they had the ingenious color combination of red, white and black on the uniform (the Swastika armband is outstanding from a design perspective.)
This is all my opinion, take it however you want. I think the only American uniforms that come close to the SS are the Rhode Island State Police and the full-dress uniform of the Secret Service. Here is a picture of an old high school teammate of mine (on the left) and his fellow officer, both currently in the Secret Service in Washington, in their full-dress uniform. Damn, those look sharp. (He is a former Marine, by the way.)
I’ll say this much about the Marines: I knew guys in high school who were undisciplined, troublemaking shitheads, went into the Marines, and came out as professional and polite gentlemen with good posture and pride in themselves. I think there’s something to be said for that.
Those Rhode Island State Police uniforms are very similar to the Pennsylvania State Police uniforms.
I agree with everything Slithy Tove wrote. A USMC historian spoke to our Civil War roundtable a few years ago, BTW, and pretty much agreed with what Cecil wrote about the Corps’s Civil War service.
The few Marines and ex-Marines I’ve known have been, without exception, gentlemen, patriots and all-around good guys.
What’s wrong with there being two shades of blue? Or the cover matching the belt? I like the blood scarlet stripe. But maybe you’d like the evening dress, complete with boatcloak, better. 
The two-tone of the dress blues goes back to the 19th century army; the reasoning was that trousers wear out faster than jackets, so the trousers got less dye to save money.
(BTW, the army had blue trousers - Civil War Marines wore the same dark blue shell jacket, but instead of blue sege trousers they wore white trousers. With so many blue trousers in surplus after the war, it was a better buy, so they switched)
Years ago they had dress blue uniforms for winter and dress whites for summer. The dark blue barracks cover was discontinued in the 1950’s, so they wore the white cap year round, dark blue jacket and lighter blue trousers with blood stripes (when you made NCO and the right to wear the stripes, all your buddies kicked you there).
Then at the end of the 1990’s they eliminated the dress whites (which was a damn shame because I’ve seen Marine officers in dress whites standing next to navy officers in theirs, and the navy guys looked like ice cream deliverymen in comparison). Now the Marines wear white trousers with the blue jackets for summer dress, a combination that previously had been ony for embassy and White House Marines.
Why did they lose the Sam Browne belts? Maybe because that strap across your chest gave us sailors something to grab onto when we got into a bar fights.
I think that looks great. Best-looking uniform in the entire U.S. military. I’d almost like them to make that the year-round USMC dress uniform.
Speaking of which… the Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon. Doesn’t get much cooler than this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y90UPLLo6nY&feature=related