After graduating from Grand River College at 16, he taught at local schools until applying for the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, New York on the advice of his mother, Mary Crowder.

[4] While at Missouri, he obtained a law degree and became a member of the Zeta Phi chapter of Beta Theta Pi.

[2] Upon completion of this detail, Lieutenant Crowder returned to the 8th Cavalry at Fort Yates, Dakota Territory, where he participated in the final campaign against Sitting Bull.

In 1891, upon his promotion to captain he accepted a position as the acting Judge Advocate General of the Department of the Platte in Omaha, Nebraska.

In this capacity, Crowder assisted in the prosecution of the then noteworthy Deming case [1] in 1902, became a member of the general staff, and attained the rank of colonel.

In 1910, he represented the United States at the Fourth Pan American Conference in Buenos Aires and in that capacity made official visits to Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama.

As Provost Marshal of the Army, Crowder led the drafting of the Selective Service Act which was passed by Congress in May 1917.

The specific recommendations he submitted to Congress, most of which were subsequently adopted, included greater safeguards for the accused, changes in the composition and powers of special courts-martial, and the addition of an authority in the President to reverse or alter any court-martial sentence found to have been adjudged erroneously.

In the spring of 1919, at the invitation of Cuban President Menocal, Crowder went to Cuba to advise on revisions to the election laws which he had helped write years earlier.

[10] Nevertheless, Crowder retired from the army on February 14, 1923, and on the same day was appointed the first Ambassador from the United States to Cuba, a post which he held until 1927.

The citation for his Army DSM states the following: The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress, July 9, 1918, takes pleasure in presenting the Army Distinguished Service Medal to Major General Enoch Herbert Crowder, United States Army, for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services to the Government of the United States, in a duty of great responsibility during World War I, as Provost Marshal General in the preparation and operation of the draft laws of the Nation during the war.Perhaps the most apt description of the service to his country by Enoch H. Crowder is contained in the words of the late Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State in the cabinet of President Herbert Hoover and Secretary of War in the cabinets of Presidents William Howard Taft and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said of General Crowder: His record as Judge Advocate General and his later record as Provost Marshal General have constituted a page in the history of our Army upon which we can all look with deep satisfaction and admiration.