A Roman soul is bent on higher views:
To civilize the rude, unpolished world,
And lay it under the restraint of laws;
To make man mild and sociable to man;
To cultivate the wild licentious savage
With wisdom, discipline, and liberal arts—
The embellishments of life; virtues like these
Make human nature shine, reform the soul,
And break our fierce barbarians into men.45
Addison was exhorting the British to have “a Roman soul.” The British who colonized North America did not have to look far beyond their front doors—the American frontier was well east of the Allegheny Mountains—to find “a rude unpolished world” replete with “wild licentious” savages. Addison, however, was connecting Britain’s imperial impulse with the Enlightenment’s mission of bringing universal values to the four corners of the world. And when the United States became an independent power, it had elements of Cato in its temperament. It fell to the man who in 1825 would become the sixth president to try to express the limits of those elements. In 1821, on the nation’s forty-sixth Independence Day, John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, delivered one of the most lucid and measured statements of America’s stance toward the world:
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.46
This is a policy most twenty-first-century Americans would like to be able to live by, a policy they wish they could have in a world that they wish made it prudent. In 1821, it was the proper policy for a nation with only modest military capabilities, a nation protected by the existence of two weak and placid neighbors and two broad oceans traversed only by wind-powered ships, a nation preoccupied with the unfinished business of western expansion. Two centuries on, however, the challenge of American statecraft is, and for at least eight decades has been, to make prudent departures from Adams’ ideal. Prudence, however, often has been scarce.
Any new republic, wrote Machiavelli, must decide whether to expand her dominion by power, like Rome, or to be like Venice, located “in some strong place” that protects it as it goes about its business, which for Venice was business. During America’s first century, geography enabled it to be Venetian—in a strong place, practicing commerce. But even then there was an itch to be Roman, too—but with a difference. America would seek, in Jefferson’s words, an “empire of liberty,” but without becoming imperial.47 In October 1915, however, The New Republic, which then was the house organ of American progressivism, was feeling left out of the world’s drama: “That calm moral grandeur in which we revelled a year ago, when it seemed as if we were destined to be the arbiter of nations, is no more.… Instead of the thankfulness that we are providentially escaping the storm, one finds on every hand the sense that we are missing something.”48 In 1915, Europe was engulfed in war, and the United States was a bystander. Progressivism, of which The New Republic was an exponent, was brimful of confidence of the sort that characterized the first great progressive, Theodore Roosevelt, who liked nothing less than being a bystander.
The first of TR’s many intellectual passions was Darwin, whose influence grew not only in natural science but in social thought, including the social sciences and politics. That influence was ubiquitous. It immediately disturbed humanity’s peace of mind. It was neither the first nor the last such disturbance by an idea, but it was the most profoundly unsettling. Not, however, to TR, who found it inspiring. Nature, as deciphered by Darwin, is constant competition resulting in the survival of the fittest. In the late nineteenth century, it seemed natural to have an analogous understanding of politics in nations and between nations: The natural dynamic of human societies is the conquest of territories by, and the rise to dominance of, the fittest races. And for progressives at the turn of the twentieth century, the complexity of the world, like the complexity of rapidly urbanizing and industrializing American society, was a reason not for caution but for ambition, for rolling up government’s sleeves and getting on with big projects.
“More and more, the increasing interdependence and complexity of international, political and economic relations render it incumbent on all civilized and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the world.” So wrote the former police commissioner of New York City, TR.49 In June 1896, probably before Roosevelt had heard of San Juan Hill, the Washington Post wrote: “A new consciousness seems to have come upon us—the consciousness of strength—and with it a new appetite, the yearning to show our strength.… Ambition, interest, land hunger, pride, the mere joy of fighting, whatever it may be, we are animated by a new sensation. We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle. It means an Imperial policy, the Republic, renascent, taking her place with the armed nations.” Albert J. Beveridge, historian (biographer of John Marshall and Abraham Lincoln) and US senator from Indiana, was a progressive leader who wanted to export progress to retrograde peoples and nations: “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master-organizers of the world.” God, of whose intentions the Hoosier senator was confident, selected “the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world.”50
When former president Grover Cleveland spoke of “the fatal un-American idea of imperialism,” he placed himself among those whom Theodore Roosevelt dismissed as “men of a bygone age.”51 While the Boer War was raging in South Africa, Mark Twain, then sixty-five and an opponent of the war, found himself back stage at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where he was to introduce a speech by an Englishman who ardently supported the war. When twenty-six-year-old Winston Churchill asked Twain to autograph a Twain book that Churchill had brought to the event, Twain inscribed it: “To do good is noble; to teach others to do good is nobler, and no trouble.”52 Theodore Roosevelt was on Churchill’s side. Roosevelt was an assertive individualist who considered the individualism of others an impediment to the social cohesion required for national greatness. Preaching what he called “warrior republicanism,” he envisioned virtue emerging from the subordination of individuals to—the immersion of them in—the nation’s strenuous collective exertions.53 William Graham Sumner, the Yale social scientist and classic liberal, detested the Spanish-American War because he thought that by making the United States resemble empire-building European nations, the war refuted American exceptionalism. Theodore Roosevelt read in McClure’s magazine Rudyard Kipling’s poem urging America to “take up the White Man’s burden,” starting with the Filipinos, whom Kipling described as
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
“Rather poor poetry,” wrote TR, by then New York’s governor, “but good sense from the expansion standpoint.” By the time, several decades later, the United States had set down the burden of guerilla war in the Philippines, Kipling’s words had been shown to be better poetry than foreign policy.54
America has fought eight significant wars since the battleship Maine blew up (by accident, it now seems probable) in Havana harbor in 1898. This explosion showered sparks on the dry tinder of American nationalism and detonated the “splendid little war” that made a
president of the Rough Rider of San Juan Hill.55 One of George H. W. Bush’s first gestures as president was to put TR’s portrait in the Cabinet Room, in the place where Bush’s predecessor had put a portrait of Coolidge. Victory over Spain led to fourteen years of counterinsurgency combat in the Philippines. There also was an intervention in China during the Boxer Rebellion, and Black Jack Pershing’s Mexican Expedition. All told, some Americans have been involved in combat in more than half of the 121 years since the Maine’s keel settled into Havana’s harbor mud.
Woodrow Wilson’s detestation of Theodore Roosevelt would have been reciprocated even if Wilson had not selected as his secretary of state a moralizing pacifist, William Jennings Bryan. After doing so, Wilson got busy, turning his improving impulse toward Mexico, where a general, Victoriano Huerta, who was in the pay of British oil interests, had set himself up as dictator. Wilson announced that he would “require Huerta’s retirement” by “such means as may be necessary.” Referring to Mexico as a “distracted republic,” Wilson ordered the US Navy to seize the city of Veracruz to prevent a German merchant ship from landing supplies for Huerta.56 Wilson then offered to intervene on behalf of a revolutionary named Carranza against Huerta, if Carranza would promise to be a gentlemanly revolutionary. Carranza disdained Wilson’s offer and overthrew Huerta on his own. Then a Carranza subordinate persuaded Wilson’s agents that he, the subordinate, was a tamed and decorous revolutionary who deserved Wilson’s support against Carranza. The subordinate was Pancho Villa. The honeymoon was brief. Carranza drove Villa into his native northern Mexico where, in January 1916, Villa, in an attempt to provoke Wilson, rode over into New Mexico and killed nineteen Americans. So, Wilson sent an expedition into Mexico. Before his presidency ended, he had also intervened with troops in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. No wonder the nation voted in 1920 to replace Wilson with a president promising “normalcy.”57 As we shall see, several decades later there was another occasion for consideration of what it means for America to be a normal nation. On the road to that horizon, however, the nation would do some hard learning.
BEFORE AND AFTER THE PROFESSORS’ WAR
Flying over Nebraska in the summer of 1943, an Englishman was struck by the “normality—hundreds of miles of it and not a sight or sound to remind me that this was a country at war.” Then his lunch tray arrived, and inscribed on the pat of butter was an injunction: “Remember Pearl Harbor.”58 The fact that butter was available was striking; even more so was the fact that perhaps people needed to be reminded how the war began. Five years after Pearl Harbor, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Michigan Republican who helped wean his party from isolationism, said the attack “drove most of us to the irresistible conclusion that world peace is indivisible. We learned that the oceans are no longer moats around our ramparts. We learned that mass destruction is a progressive science which defies both time and space.”59 The era of (in Walter Lippmann’s phrase) “effortless security” was over.60 “Progressive science” meant the end of security, as traditionally understood, forever. And we now must hope that in an age of constant regional conflicts, peace can be divisible.
Four days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States and, immediately, photographs of FDR replaced those of Mussolini in many store windows on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. The attack punctuated a dreary dozen years. An eighteen-year-old in 1941 had been six when the stock market collapsed. Suddenly eighteen-year-olds had jobs, some of them dangerous. It is, however, still the case that in terms of the number of fatalities as a proportion of the population, the most lethal war in American history occurred in the seventeenth century: King Philip’s War of 1675–76. Today, without the mass mobilization required for protracted global conflicts, military service has become the experience of a small minority. World War II’s fatalities included 691 Harvard graduates. In Vietnam, the Harvard classes from 1962 through 1972 lost just twelve members. During the forty-three days of Desert Storm in 1991, violence in America killed many more than the 148 US troops killed by hostile action. The United States became a great power through late participation in wars that cost other and earlier participants in those wars much more.
In World War I, the United States suffered 116,516 war-related deaths, totaling one-tenth of 1 percent of its population. Great Britain lost one-thirtieth of 1 percent of its population between seven a.m. and seven p.m. on July 1, 1916, at the Somme, where a four-month battle cost Britain 100,000 dead. In the four years of war, Britain lost three-quarters of 1 percent of its population. France lost 5 percent. In World War II, US war-related deaths totaled one-quarter of 1 percent, and the United States suffered four civilian deaths from home-front bombing. (A Japanese balloon bomb launched from a submarine blew up an Oregon picnic.) The USSR lost at least 8 percent of its population. During World War II, more than seven million soldiers took part in the Battle of Moscow, which lasted six months and churned over territory the size of France. The Soviet Union lost more soldiers in this battle—926,000—than the United Kingdom lost in World War I, more than the combined British and American deaths in World War II. Four million men fought at Stalingrad in 1943, two million at Kursk in 1943, three and a half million in the Battle for Berlin in 1945. Two thirds of the estimated 26 million Soviet military and civilian dead have no known graves.61 NATO was created in 1949 to counter the Soviet Union, but in nearly fifty-three years the only invasion of a NATO member’s territory occurred in the South Atlantic, when Argentina attacked the Falkland Islands. The Korean War, which began in 1950, severely strained the American public’s tradition of deference toward the foreign policy elite. This self-renewing group served the executive branch and believed, not without reason, in itself and was trusted by a deferential public. The Korean War undermined public support of President Truman and made Secretary Dean Acheson, symbol of the traditional foreign policy elite, a subject of bitter controversy. The war was ended by a president whose single memorable election promise was “I will go to Korea,” which meant: I will end the war.62
One lesson of this long story is that an internationalist foreign policy has been possible only when Americans have subordinated their natural isolationism—meaning their disposition to think as little as possible about the rest of the world—to their tradition of deference to the foreign policy elite. Vietnam, however, destroyed that tradition. Vietnam was less a presidential war than a professors’ war. It was too clever by half, with carefully calibrated violence—remember the “escalation ladder”?—sending “signals” to an uncomprehending enemy. David Halberstam used the title of his best-seller about Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, to express the self-image of the professors, soldier-scholars, systems analysts, and others who presided over the escalation in Vietnam. More interesting than the Halberstam book is the fact that the phrase “the best and the brightest” has entered the nation’s political lexicon as a piece of all-purpose sarcasm to express disdain not just for the “Kennedy-Johnson intellectuals” who Halberstam detested, but for elites in general.63 Since then, the very idea of a foreign policy elite has been suspect.
In the United States, the general suspicion of elites ended deference toward an unnatural internationalism, and contributed to the rebirth of the nation’s natural isolationism. Human beings, in Tuscany or Tennessee, are “natural” isolationists in that they sensibly do not want their sons or treasure conscripted and won’t put up with it unless their government is persuasive or coercive. The United States for many years thought it had started fresh, that it was immaculately conceived, born without sin, and protected by God’s oceans from unregenerate nations. America could dispense with the world because the world had served its purpose, which was to be prologue to America.
This attitude was caricatured, but captured, too, by a novelist from the American heartland: “Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. W
hat Ole Jensen the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea…”64 Sinclair Lewis published Main Street in 1920, the last sad year of government by one of Princeton’s “best and brightest,” Professor Wilson. For twenty years after that, Americans reverted to the trait that James Bryce had detected in his 1888 The American Commonwealth: “The only one principle to which people have learnt to cling in foreign policy is that the less they have of it the better.”65 This is why, after the brief intoxication of involvement in World War I, and the long hangover of disappointment with the aftermath, America attempted a twenty-year holiday from history. On September 1, 1939, the day Germany attacked Poland, eighteen nations had armies larger than America’s, which had only forty tanks on that day, when George C. Marshall became army chief of staff. Less than four months before Pearl Harbor, Congress came within one vote of virtually disbanding the army: The House voted 203–202 to extend conscription. The way World War II began for the United States, and the successful mobilization of economic muscle to win it, left the nation brimming with confidence. Events would take care of that.
Hell, said Hobbes, is truth seen too late. American foreign policy since the beginning of the Vietnam War has repeatedly been hellish. Campaigning in 1960 to become President Dwight Eisenhower’s successor, Senator John Kennedy described Ike’s remarkably peaceful and generally prosperous tenure as “eight years of drugged and fitful sleep.”66 Under Kennedy, the next few years—the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, increased US involvement in Vietnam—would be more stimulating. They also would make lethargy, or at least a lack of dash and élan, attractive. In November 1963, the Kennedy Administration was complicit in the coup that accomplished regime change (and murdered President Diem), sealing the US immersion in Vietnam’s agony. In April 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, who had entered Washington politics when the city was dominated by the New Dealer who produced the Tennessee Valley Authority, promised to transform South Vietnam’s Mekong River into a marvel that would “provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA.”67 There were two problems with this promise. The TVA was not built in the middle of a raging civil war. And war in Vietnam was not about food or water or electric power. It was about nationalism and sharply different ideas of what Vietnam’s regime should be. “This nation,” said President Lyndon Johnson of the United States, “is mighty enough, its society is healthy enough, its people are strong enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the world while still building a Great Society here at home.”68 Our productivity could and would overwhelm problems. So, when the military contemplated building a physical barrier between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, it purchased “five million steel fence posts and enough barbed wire to circle the globe twice.”69
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