American History Revised (33 page)
Read American History Revised Online
Authors: Jr. Seymour Morris
Wrote A. J. Liebling, “Theodore Roosevelt had been a dilettante soldier and first-class politician; his son had been a dilettante politician and a first-class soldier.” In 2001 the father also received the Medal of Honor posthumously (for his famous charge up San Juan Hill). Like son, like father.
2000
When Al Gore won the 2000 election popular vote and was trying to get a Florida recount, he said, “What is at stake here is the integrity of our democracy, making sure that the will of the people is expressed.” Several months later, before 9/11, President Bush called for a “Century of Democracy” and the freeing
of “captive nations” from dictatorship. In the subsequent war in Iraq, he justified the U.S. presence as “bringing democracy to the Middle East.”
Lofty language indeed, if only it were true. Since both a Democratic vice president and a Republican president do not seem to know their basic History 101, despite their Ivy League educations, there is a possibility some readers of this book may be equally misinformed.
The United States is not a democracy, never was, and never was intended to be. It is a republic. The Founding Fathers were very explicit about this. Said Alexander Hamilton, “We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship.” Warned Thomas Jefferson (who rarely agreed with Hamilton on anything, but he did here), “The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.”
Jefferson and Hamilton certainly had good theory to go on. According to the historian Carl Vipperman:
Because democracy created the kind of system in which numerical majorities exercised power without taking into account differentiations between groups within the body politic and consequently judged the validity of one measure or another on the assumption that the interests of all citizens were basically the same, Aristotle rejected democracy in favor of a balanced distribution of power among constituent elements of society.
As the current battle between the majority Shiites and the minority Sunnis in Iraq demonstrates, the most difficult part of forming a stable government is protecting the rights of the minority. Dictatorship is rule by one man, democracy is rule by the masses (i.e., the mob). To ensure that the country would not descend into monarchy or mobocracy, the Founding Fathers inserted safeguards against direct election; major checks and balances included a tripartite system of government, the Bill of Rights, and the Electoral College (to give greater weight to the small states). The United States, said Benjamin Franklin, “is a republic, if you can keep it.” Said John Adams, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.”
The French had a revolution, too—just a few years after ours. But unlike the United States, they quickly descended into a reign of terror by the majority Jacobins. In two hundred years since, they have had one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. Not exactly a good track record for a “democracy.”
No one doubts for a moment that the current American effort to spread democracy in the Middle East is a worthwhile goal. But when Afghan president Hamid Karzai said “We are committed to the democratic process in Afghanistan,” one wishes—“prays” may be a better word—that the political pabulum of democracy would not subvert the need for an underlying constitutional republic.
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Alas, independence wasn’t the only topic on people’s minds. From Maine all the way down to Georgia, smallpox was a major scare. In Boston the day before the declaration, the hot topic of gossip was the citywide campaign of inoculation compelling people to deliberately infect themselves with a small dose of smallpox to produce immunity.
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His parents got engaged three days after they met-certainly setting the record for Anglo-American affinity.
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As it turned out, she never did; she died twenty-one years later, a widow.
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He was wrong. It sold 50,000 copies.
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Other candidates, more fitting than Lincoln, would have been Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Polk.
A Warlike Nation, Not a Militarist One
A
major change happened to America after 1950: A powerful nation became intoxicated by its arsenal. Supported by a strong economy, America could afford a military larger than those of the next dozen nations combined. This is an extraordinary feat. Go back to Xenophon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon, and you will not find a parallel. Forget the memorable scene of a thousand Greek ships invading Troy in the 2002 movie, think of the CNN images of the U.S. bombing Baghdad in 1991.
In 1918 and 1945 the United States strove to maintain the minimum force required and no more. How quaint! Nowadays it acts like it must be the world’s policeman. Before invading Iraq in 2003, General Tommy Franks proclaimed that American generals could expect to enjoy “the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods.” Equally ignorant of the gods was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who stated after 9/11, “History starts today.” But already the gods had begun their work, lulling America into the dangerous belief she was Numero Uno and could pull the trigger whenever needed. Back in 1993, UN Ambassador (and later Secretary of State)
Madeleine Albright berated General Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
General Powell was so flummoxed he didn’t know to answer: we can’t use it because of who we are.
Compared to many politicians, most generals who got their training in combat know the horrors of war and the limits of military power. Also as part of their rigorous training, they know their military history and how war runs counter to the American military tradition. Listen to the farewell addresses of two general-presidents: “Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly to Republican liberty,” said George Washington in 1796. Added Dwight Eisenhower in 1961, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Observe also the actions of our third general-president, Ulysses Grant. Known in war as “the butcher,” he approved of Andrew Johnson’s slashing of military budgets at every opportunity, resulting in the largest military downsizing in history, leaving European militarists astounded. When he eventually did become president, with every unemployed Union general banging on his door to resurrect the war machine, Grant still said no.
Fast-forward to post–World War II. “Democracies,” said General George Marshall when he was secretary of state, “cannot fight a Seven Years’ War.” Certainly, democracies cannot fight insurgencies where rules of decency and controlled firepower are irrelevant, and especially in places halfway around the world, as the British found in 1776. Forgotten in all of today’s talk about American military power is one salient fact: America has not had a decisive victory since 1945. Even then, there’s a question whether we really “won.” Says one historian:
Because the purpose of war is not merely to defeat the enemy, but to ensure a better and more lasting peace, the war of 1939–1945 ended in tragic failure. The Allies had won not a war but an annihilation. They had over-succeeded. Unconditional surrender had ignored the political truth that today’s enemy is often tomorrow’s ally. Utterly wrecked and discredited, Germany and Japan could not be immediately enlisted against Russia the moment Stalin began to make his moves to west and east.
Richard Armitage to the contrary, history did not start in 2001, it started in 1776. And it began in the most basic way possible.
“Where’s the money?” General George Washington was beside himself. To get
enough soldiers to serve in his army, he wanted his soldiers to sign up for the duration of the war, however long it lasted. Congress, fearful of standing armies and living under the fantasy that the war would be over after one or two campaigns, restricted the term of a soldier’s enlistment to one year. Washington knew Congress was pipe-dreaming. To make matters worse, Congress failed to provide the funds necessary to keep his soldiers fully fed and armed. Many a departing soldier was stealing a musket to take home, meaning that there was no musket for his replacement. “Money was useful in the common affairs of life,” he told the wealthy John Hancock, “but in war it was essential.”
Wars are expensive—very expensive. Anyone who thinks our military history is not significant only has to look at the history of our national debt. Says Harvard Business School professor Thomas McCraw, “The size of the national debt in the United States has almost always been a function of war, including the Cold War.” We all know how Lyndon Johnson’s strategy of “guns and butter” resulted in the high inflation of the 1970s, and how Ronald Reagan’s military buildup—again without the tax revenues to pay for it—contributed to enormous government deficits. Less well known is our much more costly war (in real terms): the American Revolution. The year 1790 found America burdened with a horrendous debt load:
| Government debt | $75 million |
| Government annual income | $5 million |
| Government debt/income ratio | 15:1 |
| Debt per citizen | $25 |
Twenty-five dollars today sounds like a pittance, but for many people in an agrarian, cashless society at the time it could represent a year’s income. Paying off $75 million turned out to be an enormous task: from 1791 to 1797, interest payments on this debt accounted for more than 50 percent of all government expenditures. The $75 million exceeded the total expenditures of the United States government during its first twenty years of existence, from 1790 to 1810. Then when the young nation finally started to get its financial act together, it went to war again with its former adversary—and accomplished little more than to rack up another debt.
Whether we got our money’s worth is another matter. While hardly anyone questions the need for the United States to enter World War I or World War II, the Civil War suggests otherwise. In 1850, as the war drums over slavery started to pound ominously in the distance, there emerged the possibility of compensation. It was suggested that the best way to persuade Southern plantation owners to release their slaves would be to compensate them. Thirty-five percent of the entire
capital in the South was tied up in slaves, and their total value was $2 billion—equivalent to ten times the entire federal budget. Such an amount, alas, was considered so enormous as to be out of the question. Yet it would have been a lot cheaper than what happened ten years later. Several years after the Civil War, a special commission was formed to look at precisely this question. The U.S. Special Commissioner of the Revenue concluded in 1869 that the war cost was “three times as much as the slavery property of the country was ever worth.”
America is a nation born of war, a tradition it has upheld—and paid for—for more than two hundred years. Yet America is not a militarist nation. Indeed, one of the most puzzling aspects about America for foreigners to understand is America’s long-standing lack of bellicosity.
At no time was this more true than after the Civil War. After three and a half years of internal fighting, the United States had the world’s largest standing army and certainly the most fearsome: more than a million battle-tested men, supported by a giant munitions industry. Everyone in Europe expected the United States to pick a bone and start a fight with either France or Britain—France for its adventures in neighboring Mexico, Britain for its semiofficial support of the Confederacy. At a time when European nations were embarking upon imperialist scrambles for pieces of Asia and Africa, surely the United States would do the same.