The Worth of War (20 page)

In protracted conflicts, the hardships, casualties, and dislocations suffered by citizen soldiers and their families can inflame antiwar sentiment and escalate the formation of political opposition to continued fighting. Resistance to military conscription often becomes a major focus of these efforts. The Civil War draft was bitterly resisted in many parts of the North and ignited major riots in New York and other cities in 1863.
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The New York riot lasted four days before it was finally quelled by police and military authorities. So serious was the threat of continuing civil disorder that more than ten thousand soldiers were detached from the Army of the Potomac to garrison New York in the riot's wake.
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Opposition to the draft and growing popular weariness of the war very nearly led to Lincoln's defeat in the 1864 presidential election. Draft resistance was a major problem during the First World War, when socialist organizers urged draft-age men to refuse induction, and thousands of men were arrested for failing to register with their draft boards.
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During the Vietnam War, liberal foes of American intervention in Indo-China encouraged draft resistance and made conscription a major political issue.
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Even World War II, a conflict that had overwhelming popular support, saw limited but vocal draft resistance.
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Finally, even after the cessation of hostilities, former critics of the war, including even some veterans, search out political vehicles through which to express their alienation while other Americans who served in the military organize to trumpet their patriotism and to seek recognition for their sacrifices. Thus, many individuals initially
politicized by their opposition to the Vietnam War became active in the left-liberal “New Politics” movement of the 1970s.
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New Politics supporters dominated the Democratic Party convention in 1972 and secured the party's presidential nomination for liberal South Dakota Senator George McGovern. In subsequent years, New Politics activists played important roles in the consumer, environmental, feminist, and other “postmaterial” political movements.
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In a similar vein, many American war veterans joined organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) after the Civil War or the American Legion after the two world wars. These organizations became significant actors in American politics, pressing not only for such matters as the extensive system of veterans' pensions and benefits made available after the Civil War and World War I, and under the post–World War II GI Bill, but for broader political goals as well. The GAR was a powerful force in Republican Party politics in the late nineteenth century, while the American Legion became an important conservative pressure group during the twentieth century.

These wartime and postwar mobilizations of new political forces, in turn, created new opportunities for political entrepreneurship on the part of sympathetic or even merely ambitious members of Congress. Occasionally during the war, but most often in the peacetime aftermath of military conflicts, groups in the Congress have endeavored to reach out to the movements energized by the war. Members of Congress have espoused these groups' causes, advocated their views, and appealed to their solidary concerns and material interests—in the case of veterans, for example, joining and associating themselves with veterans' groups and activities and providing pensions, bonuses, and other benefits. In these ways, groups in the Congress have been able to link themselves to energetic new political forces which, for their part, now have a stake in supporting congressional power
vis-à-vis
the executive branch. These alliances with new political forces often allowed postwar congresses to accomplish what the nation's foreign foes could not—take on and defeat the president.

In the wake of the Mexican War, a number of northern congressional
Democrats, including such New York “Barnburners” as David Wilmot, Preston King, and John A. Dix, turned against the national administration.
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These members of Congress aligned themselves with the antislavery forces that had mobilized throughout the North in opposition to the attack on Mexico and subsequent American territorial expansion. This strengthened antislavery coalition became the basis for the Free Soil party and, later, for the creation of the Republican Party. Antislavery forces in Congress harassed and weakened the Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan administrations. Though Pierce was able to secure the enactment of the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska act, repealing the Missouri Compromise, in an attempt to appease both sides in the slavery controversy, the end result was to irrevocably divide the Democratic Party.

During the concluding years of the Buchanan administration, the new Republican Party controlled the House of Representatives. Republicans asserted that the power of the presidency should be curbed and established a special committee under the leadership of Representative John Covode of Pennsylvania to investigate the general topic of improper presidential efforts to influence congressional deliberations. The Covode committee charged President Buchanan with using bribes and other unsavory tactics to secure the enactment of legislation he favored and recommended ways of reducing presidential influence in the legislative process.
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In a similar vein, in the aftermath of the Civil War, members of Congress opposed to President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policies relied heavily upon the political support of the most important Union Army veteran's organization, the Grand Army of the Republic. At its peak, the GAR enrolled nearly a half-million members along with hundreds of thousands of their family members in its auxiliary organizations. The GAR supported the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the president opposed, and generally favored the radical Republicans' harsh policies toward the defeated South rather than the conciliatory program espoused by Johnson. Radical Republicans relied upon GAR grassroots support against Johnson's efforts to influence the outcome of the 1866 congressional elections. Subsequently,
in 1867, Johnson attempted to oust Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, in defiance of the new Tenure of Office Act, which required congressional approval for the dismissal of cabinet officers. Many Republican radicals were convinced that Johnson's action was a prelude to some form of coup d'état and asked the GAR to march a detachment of Union veterans to Washington to protect the Congress. House Speaker Schuyler Colfax reported that explosives had been stolen in New York and were being brought to Washington to blow up the capitol. The GAR prepared, unnecessarily as it turned out, to march on Washington at a moment's notice.
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To emphasize the importance of the alliance between the president's congressional foes and the GAR, during the impeachment proceedings against President Johnson, the GAR's national commander, Congressman John Logan of Illinois, served as one of the House impeachment managers.

A similar pattern of congressional alliances with emergent political forces manifested itself after the two world wars. After World War I, President Wilson's congressional opponents made common cause with German and Irish Americans and postwar isolationists to block American participation in the League of Nations and, thereby, to destroy the Wilson presidency.
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The Germans and Irish had, from the beginning, opposed support for Great Britain in the European conflict but had been silenced by the administration's wartime suppression of dissent. But even many Americans who had supported the war were shocked by the carnage and disillusioned by the results. Now they opposed having “An American army policing the world and quelling riots in all peoples' back yards.”
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Interestingly, the treaty's most vehement foe, Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, was himself a Rooseveltian internationalist who had supported America's entry into the war. Lodge, however, harbored a deep personal hatred for Wilson and was prepared to align himself with isolationists if to do so would thwart the president. Other Republicans had been angered by Wilson's wartime arrogation of power and were now eager to cut the president down to size and, especially, to derail any ambitions Wilson might have to seek a third term.
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After the Second World War, President Truman's congressional foes courted the support of patriotic veterans' groups like the American Legion and the Catholic War Veterans in their investigations of alleged Communist penetration of the executive branch. The American Legion, in particular, organized nation-wide, antisubversive seminars, publicized and enforced blacklists, supported anti-Communist members of Congress like Richard M. Nixon, and lent their political clout to the efforts of HUAC and the McCarthy committee.
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During the late 1960s, groups in Congress aligned themselves with liberal forces that mobilized against the Vietnam War to undermine Lyndon Johnson's presidency in the late 1960s. This “New Politics” alliance remained active in American politics during the following decade and played an important role in the ouster of Richard Nixon. During Johnson's second administration, liberals—who had initially supported the war—turned against it largely because military needs began to divert substantial resources from Great Society social programs to which liberal Democrats were strongly committed. Liberals were joined by some civil rights leaders, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who viewed the war as a diversion of national energy and attention from the nation's effort to end segregation.
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Supported by segments of the national news media, liberal forces began to criticize not only the administration's war policies, but patterns and practices that had become commonplace in the years since World War II: lax Pentagon procurement practices, Pentagon public relations activities, domestic spying by intelligence agencies, and the hiring of former military officers by defense contractors.
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Growing opposition to the war among liberals encouraged some members of Congress, notably Senator J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with such senators as George McGovern, Wayne Morse, and Ernest Gruening to break with the president.
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Fueling the growth of opposition to the war was the fact that increasing numbers of citizen soldiers, including conscripts, were being sent to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia, where they suffered substantial casualties.
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Initially, the system of deferments and
exemptions surrounding military conscription ensured that most of the draftees would be drawn from working-class and minority households—a segment of society not well represented in the political process or in possession of ready access to the media and, hence, vulnerable to wartime exactions. In 1967, however, foes of the war charged that the draft was racist in character because its burden fell so heavily on minority communities.

Stung by these charges, President Johnson set in motion a set of changes in the draft law that limited student and other upper middle class deferments. As critics had hoped, the result was increased opposition to the war from more influential social strata who now saw
their
children placed at risk. Between 1968 and 1970, tens of thousands of young men claimed conscientious objector status or presented dubious medical excuses, while tens of thousands more refused to register or destroyed or returned their draft cards.
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Others clogged the federal courts with challenges to draft orders. Antiwar sentiment among congressional liberals intensified in 1967 and 1968, and Senator Eugene McCarthy launched a bid to deny Johnson the 1968 Democratic nomination. Though he almost certainly would have been renominated despite liberal opposition, Johnson was politically wounded and chose to withdraw from the race. Antiwar Democrats became an important element in the New Politics coalition which, in 1974, forced President Richard Nixon from office in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

After Nixon's resignation, congressional Democrats enacted a number of pieces of legislation designed to curb presidential power. These included the Budget and Impoundment Control Act to enhance congressional power in the budget process, the Ethics in Government Act to facilitate future prosecution of wrongdoing in the executive branch, and the Freedom of Information Act to open the files of executive agencies to congressional and media scrutiny. Congress also strengthened its own investigative arm, the General Accounting Office. Other legislation, such as the War Powers Resolution, specifically struck at presidential war and foreign-policy powers.

Thus, in the wake of the Vietnam War as in a number of other
instances, important groups within Congress were able to take advantage of war-induced political mobilization to do battle with the White House. The importance of war as an incubator of new political forces that could appeal to the Congress helped to place limits on America's martial propensities. On the one hand, military exigencies have frequently allowed chief executives to demand—and have compelled congresses to give—vast new powers to the president. On the other hand, however, the new political forces often brought into being by war have allowed groups in the Congress an opportunity to forge political alliances that then enabled them to lay siege to the White House and retrieve some or all of the power that had been surrendered to the president. Again, as we shall see, some wartime agencies and powers survived by tunneling into the civilian bureaucracy. Nevertheless, this democratic self-corrective can be seen as a vaccine against imperialist overreach developed by “Dr. Madison.”

An echo of this pattern helped bring an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, pressing Presidents Bush and Obama to end the fighting and bring American troops home sooner than they wanted. But, during the fights over these and other American military actions during the past quarter century, it became evident that congressional ability to leash the dogs of war has declined considerably.