A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  Certainly, even the best European units, poorly deployed or ineptly led, could be overwhelmed, and ultimately overwhelming numbers could prevail. Yet Europeans, who take perverse satisfaction in romanticizing their few defeats, have overplayed such debacles as Isandlwana, where 1,800 British troops (including 850 Natal Kaffirs) were overwhelmed by Zulus, or Balaclava, where the Light Brigade charged emplaced cannons on horseback. These glorious defeats have often been depicted in works of art. Charge of the Light Brigade, by the painter Richard Caton Woodville, immortalized the “Noble six hundred” men of the 17th Lancers as most of them rode to their deaths at Balaclava. And the only memorable painting of Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman is one celebrating the charge of the 21st Lancers—a near disaster.

  While stirring, paintings and heroic poems such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous 1854 verse “The Charge of the Light Brigade” failed to capture the reality of Western warfare that was evidenced at Omdurman, or at the final obliteration of the Muslim forces at the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat in November 1899. There, relatively equal British/Egyptian and Mahdist forces squared off; only three British troops were killed while Mahdist warriors suffered 1,000 casualties, mostly to Maxim machine guns, and another 3,000 were captured.68 Osman Digna, the last of the Mahdist rebels, was captured the following year. By then, the British were already hip-deep in the Second Boer War, which, for all its illumination about the carnage enabled by mass firepower and long-range artillery, obscured the utter dominance the European style of war demonstrated over those using any other combat formula.

  What the Age of Imperialism showed was that Europeans and Americans could easily subdue native peoples because their firepower was augmented and vastly enhanced by a culture of fighting that emphasized volunteer and well-trained armies that prized individual initiative to the benefit of the unit. Those traits came from the Western system of individual rights, free expression (including about tactics and strategy), and civilian control of the military. In American conquests, a common-law structure gave everyone a stake in the survival and expansion of the society—a factor sadly absent in most conquered countries and tribes, even after the colonizing powers left. A similar shallow approach afflicted those countries, including Mexico (another civil-law country), that had won independence from Spain during the nineteenth century. They failed to develop the political and cultural structures necessary for a free people to thrive. Survive they could, but prosper? Not with the primitive Old World economic systems they adopted.

  Western military tactics could not be easily grafted onto African, Asian, or Islamic societies, making it more difficult for them to compete with the West by simply picking up Western arms. Merely introducing free markets did not prove a solution either unless the societies wanted to embrace open trade and less regulation—indeed, to adopt the entirety of Western culture, which they were often loath to do. The problem was, whether in rifles or railroads, the non-Western world had not constructed the scaffolding of private property rights crystallized into title deeds and paper certificates of ownership that already had catapulted the United States ahead of the rest of the world. It took until the late twentieth century for a Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, to realize that Latin American nations (and by implication, the decolonized states of Africa and Asia) were poor not because they had no wealth, but because the wealth they had could not be leveraged through loans and collateral inherent in titles and deeds. Moreover, the absence of a paper trail of deeds and titles that could be cited in court cast the entire process of making, buying, and selling into a giant vat of corrupt molasses, slowing everything down by years, exhausting owner and worker alike. Applied on a state level, the effects were a grinding poverty at worst and a lethargic economy at best.

  In fact it was production, itself the result of creative juices and investment, that vaulted the Western world into military dominance. Marxists and those steeped in the leftist drivel of “Eurocentric oppression” and imperialism answer that it is inherent in capitalist nations to expand, and to an extent, they would be correct. Yet the Zulus and Mahdists (for entirely less noble reasons) themselves wanted to expand, as seen in their conquests of Sudan and South Africa, but they did not go farther nor could they defeat the Europeans. Why? One answer is that by the late 1900s, only the West could make mistakes and still recover. Capitalism provided a culture of instant replacement, yes, even for soldiers lost in combat. When troops were lost, more soldiers could immediately take their place in a rifle line, operate a Maxim gun, or shovel coal into furnaces that powered the Olympia and similar ships. Virtually no native army, anywhere, could or did recover from a debacle such as the Americans suffered at Little Bighorn or the British at Isandlwana, but the U.S. Army and the British Empire hurled new forces into the field in each case within months and achieved victory in their campaigns. Western capitalist structures, and the systems of free citizens voting themselves into wars, provided a nearly bottomless pit of manpower and machines, even for nations with relatively small populations like England. Because of this technology multiplier, and the resilience of the economies, Great Britain at one point in the nineteenth century ruled more than one third of the globe with a regular army smaller than that which the United States sent into Iraq in 2003.

  Economics and Empires

  For England, the economic and strategic necessity of holding on to its colonies was apparent, and worth the cost (although studies have shown, overall, that the British invested far more in the colonies than they took out).69 Despite the Zulu Wars (1879), the Second Afghan War (1878–81), the Egyptian/Sudanese Expeditions (1883), another Zulu rebellion (1887), the Third Ashanti War (1893–95), the Fourth Ashanti War (1895–96), the wars against the Mahdi (1893–99), the Ugandan Mutiny (1897–1901), the Ekumeku Resistance in Nigeria (1883–1914), two Boer Wars (1880–81 and 1899–1902), the Anglo-Pathan War (1897–98), and the “Mad Mullah” jihad in Ethiopia (1899–1905), in which the British emerged victorious everywhere but Afghanistan, there was little departure from the orthodoxy that the Empire was necessary to England’s well-being. At its peak, the British Empire covered 13 million square miles and ruled over about 23 percent of the earth’s surface (contrasting sharply with the United States, which controlled approximately 6.5 percent of the land surface and 5 percent of the population by the 1990s). The very fact that England could mount so many expeditions, in widespread provinces around the world, and emerge victorious in nearly all of them was less impressive than the fact that, for the most part, British civilians barely noticed. Only when the reports of an Isandlwana made headlines did anyone remember there was any conflict at all. British newspapers were more concerned with unrest in Ireland, which eventually staged its own mini-rebellion during Easter Week, 1916.

  England’s rising standard of living (the number of registered paupers fell to fewer than 100,000 in 1900 out of a population of more than 38 million people), her amelioration of class conflicts through a century’s worth of reforms, the dwindling power of the House of Lords, and the steadying influence of the monarchy minimized social upheaval in England itself.70 The Lords had made themselves even more irrelevant by their continued opposition to Irish Home Rule, which they rejected twice. Ireland’s Easter Rising was crushed in a week, and most of the ringleaders hanged, although in the long run rebels under the Sinn Fein banner gained substantial support from the executions. Some have viewed the Easter Rising as the first true socialist revolution in Europe, but most rebels rejected any explanation of their intentions, save creating an independent nation of Ireland. Possibly the illegitimate son of a Jewish father, Éamon de Valera, the most prominent of the Rising’s leaders, was born in New York in 1882 and was taken to Ireland three years later, where he benefited from a solid education resulting in a scholarship to Blackrock College. Appointed to a mathematics position at Rockwell College, he worked at a number of university positions over the next few years. Active in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, he helped plan the Rising. When it collapsed, V
alera’s American citizenship likely saved him from the gallows, as England wanted the United States to enter the Great War and did not want to alienate Americans by executing one of her citizens. At any rate, continued problems with Ireland further pushed England away from an American-style true bicameral legislature of balanced powers and fully into the European mode. And the English system took on all the more importance with London’s dominance in international finance.

  Although a few European cities still vied for preeminence with London, neither Amsterdam nor Paris had both the financial and transportation hubs to dominate the world stage. Steam and railway lines were now joined by the age of telegraphy and transoceanic cables, linking Hamburg and Berlin with Vienna, New York, and Istanbul. Britain and the United States also benefited in this new transportation/communication nexus from the global gold standard, formalized in 1896 by McKinley’s election. With the firm commitment to the gold standard undergirding a relatively unregulated banking system and a burgeoning industrial base, the United States caught up to England, and New York threatened to surpass London as the world’s money center.

  The gold standard constituted one leg of an economic triad managed and made permanent by the Republicans from 1877 to 1900, with the other two being the tariff and the integration of a national market. During that era, voter participation was high, “political opinion was informed, organized insurgency was common, and people felt that the outcome of elections mattered.”71 Political conventions, even at the state level, were well attended. The state Democratic convention in Mississippi, for example, drew 1,200 delegates in 1895, and in Colorado in 1898, “fusionists” (those Democrats and Populists who wanted to join pro-silver Republicans) literally battled antifusionists in an opera hall, where 150 shots were fired and one man was killed.

  Republicans had carefully balanced the tariff, the least economically essential of the triad, against the more serious establishment of a national set of rules for the market and the necessary, but often painful, gold standard. The tariff, a popular political issue that could be hammered out among constituent districts, was entrusted to Congress, while the courts handled the more difficult rate and regulation issues. As political scientist Richard Bensel noted, “The Constitution did provide a fairly flexible framework within which the Republican party forged its developmental regime, but there is little in the American experience that suggests that a properly designed constitution is all a nation needs to guarantee that democracy and development will be compatible.”72 This truth would be learned anew by European colonies during the decolonization process.

  By 1900, the United States had emerged from a period of robust, even revolutionary, capital and investment expansion, and unparalleled prosperity. Ordinary Americans, and often even poorer Americans, enjoyed a rising standard of living that had already caught up to or passed those of most other developed nations, and the overall magnitude of the abundance in the nation defied perception. “Everything was on a grand scale. A single chicken [on a dinner table] does not exist,” wrote one history of American eating.73 The explosion in prosperity was due in great part to the nature of Republican dominance after the Civil War, and certainly came at a cost. Groups that might have resisted industrialization—whites in the South, farmers, those on the losing end of the tariff debates—were the most disenfranchised and least politically powerful groups in the country. Hence debates were fought out in the West and the industrializing North, where the Republicans dominated. While the West (and parts of the South) rebelled against the gold standard, and while elements in both sections lobbied for regulation of railroads, elevators, and other “public” utilities, the West especially had already benefited (and would benefit still more) from the vast mileage of iron rails increasing the volume—if lowering the price, due to the gold standard—of farm goods.

  Complaints by agrarians were real, the pain they suffered was genuine, but it was also, in context, far less than others were enduring. Prices across the board fell after the Civil War, and study after study has confirmed that the farm sector was hurt the least by these declines. Meanwhile, as industry surged and wages elsewhere rose, consumers had more money than ever to purchase products.74

  Otherwise, the gold standard had been closely managed by the executive branch, both Democrat and Republican. This reinforced the trust in the U.S. government, reassured foreign and domestic investors, and allowed the vast profits from American industrialization to be plowed back into the economy. The gold standard imposed a strict discipline on federal spending that also eliminated uncertainty. It was, as two prominent economists called it, the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” for government finances.75 In June of 1896, J. P. Morgan, in a rare public policy stand, told reporters, “European investors are watching the situation here closely. They will not invest in American securities until they know in what kind of money we propose to pay our debts.”76 The voting public agreed, electing McKinley by a 271–176 electoral college margin and a half million popular vote advantage. Bryan’s defeat reflected a genuine plebiscite over the gold standard as a symbol of a wide range of economic policies, and McKinley’s victory marked a major shift in the margins of support garnered by Republicans.

  From the late 1800s on, attempts by various groups—sharecroppers, silverites, wage laborers, agrarians—to leverage government to extract rents from the fast-growing industrial economy proved futile. While these groups complained, and ultimately nominated Bryan for the 1896 Democratic presidential campaign, they made little headway in seizing others’ wealth until Theodore Roosevelt became president. Southerners could largely be ignored, but the demands of unions and Westerners could not. When the regulatory regime began to constrain railroads and banks—two industries that, for all the caterwauling, benefited farmers enormously—growth in the western United States began to attenuate somewhat. Not one of the top thirteen industrialized counties was in the West, and outside of San Francisco, there were only two other western counties in the top twenty.77 All of them lay along major railroad routes. Likewise, the South was overwhelmingly agricultural, and not surprisingly, just as before the Civil War, most patents were issued in the industrial northern states. But the Old South was hit hardest by Republican “hard money” policies, and the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Virginia ranked at the bottom in economic growth.78 Virtually all of the least-developed counties in the United States lay in what used to be the Confederacy, and multiple generations of southern solidarity with the Democrats were assured. The West, on the other hand, benefited from a rapid transfer of capital through the national bank system, which showed a dense concentration of banks in the frontier/mountain West.79 Complaints that there was “no money in Kansas,” while accurate, obscured the fact that there were plenty of banks in Kansas, but that the money-creation powers of the national banking system were inadequate, especially without a national branch banking system.

  Even restrained by those imperfections, the U.S. capital market linked together Laramie and London, San Francisco and Shanghai, Boston and Berlin, bringing an unprecedented wave of investments into the United States. Not all was monetized—hence the ongoing complaints about the elasticity of money—but it was all used, absorbed into the massive industrial explosion of the late nineteenth century.80 British investors, in particular, had committed heavily to railroads, most notably the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Louisville and Nashville, the Central Pacific, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, and the Union Pacific.

  The railroad networks sprawled across the United States because of a revolution in how businesses were run, and this too involved the banks. Beginning in the 1850s, the size, scale, and scope of railroads exceeded that of the next largest business enterprise by several orders of magnitude. Selling stock as their primary means of raising capital, railroads became ten, twenty, or even fifty times larger than other “big businesses.” With thousands of stockholders, a separation of ownership and management occurred w
hereby professionals were hired to run the companies. Evolutionary change in the railroads toward this “managerial revolution” was made revolutionary by the Panic of 1873, when many leading railroads failed. Large banks took them over, imposing on them an administrative structure that looked like…a bank.81

  Teddy Roosevelt Assaults Business

  As managerial hierarchies spread to other large firms, competition drove down prices; and in an effort to stabilize prices, virtually every sector of large-scale industry experimented with ways to reduce competition. Among the tactics tried and discarded were cartels, pools, and “gentlemen’s agreements.” John D. Rockefeller at Standard Oil had come up with another gimmick, the “trust,” whereby shares of the newly created Standard Oil Trust would be exchanged for an equal number of shares in a company Rockefeller wanted to control or acquire. The targeted refiner, while losing control of his operation, nevertheless retained value (and, indeed, likely increased the value of his company by its affiliation with Standard). Other industries—paint, whiskey, sugar—soon followed, and trusts were demonized as “controlling” Congress, prompting the near-unanimous passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act to rein them in. Instead of reducing the power of big business, however, Sherman increased it by forcing businesses out of inefficient mergers, pools, cartels, trusts, and informal monopolies, and into more efficient vertical combinations. While some could claim Sherman legislated “more competition,” in fact it forced all American—and soon, the world’s—companies to join the managerial revolution.

  Therefore, instead of dealing with a handful of inefficient trusts that struggled to control a portion of the market, the nation was handed by default a system that refined corporate power and turned sluggish, bloated companies into lean, mean enterprises that had to compete with one another. Almost immediately upon assuming office as president, Theodore Roosevelt recognized the power of the new firms, especially if they combined, leading him to sic his Justice Department on the Northern Securities Company for “restraint of trade.” Roosevelt, of course, had been searching for a vehicle to test his view of muscular regulation. Following the E. C. Knight sugar refining case of 1895, in which the Supreme Court said that regulation of a manufactured good was a state responsibility unless it crossed a state line, Roosevelt dispatched his attorney general, Philander C. Knox, to file a suit against the Northern Securities holding company that enfolded the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, and Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroads into a single umbrella company worth nearly half a billion dollars. Yet the holding company had not charged higher rates, and therefore no harms from this monopoly actually existed. Nevertheless, the Court ruled against the combination in light of possible future restriction of commerce, obliterating the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” when it came to the corporation.82