The American Future

by Simon Schama

  For a while it was what came to be called the “quasi war” but the real thing seemed only a matter of time. In the patriotic furor that gripped the Eastern Seaboard, President Adams, flossy-pated and rotund, swaggered around wearing a sword through his sash like a cross between Mr. Pickwick and Napoleon. For the only time since the opening of the Revolutionary War, Adams heard the thunderous applause of American crowds. For a while the president’s head was turned by the sound of bugles, and he acted accordingly. On the grounds that an immigrant nation preparing for war had better beware of spies and a fifth column, Adams and the Federalists began to take liberties. In 1789 an Alien Act gave the government rights of summary imprisonment and deportation. Naturalization time for citizenship was raised from five to fourteen years (there was more than a streak of xenophobe in Mr. Adams, who never ceased to think of Hamilton as a “foreigner”). A Sedition Act of the same year made it a criminal offense for persons to libel or even attack the United States government and its president. Not least, Adams sent a bill to Congress to finance the raising of a volunteer army. Hard-line Federalists wanted $20,000, and Hamilton $30,000. Congress gave them $10,000. In the same bill provisions were made for the funding of a modest degree of military instruction. Just four teachers were to be sent to educate the cadets already stationed at West Point in the engineering of mines and tunnels and the like. But it was a start.

  Even though all of this came about through the agency of John Adams, whom Hamilton despised as an irascible egotist, he agreed it was necessary for the well-being of the country. Hamilton began to think of the new force as, in some sense, “his” army, and for the good reason that Washington had been persuaded to come out of retirement to command it, for he was the only person who could silence doubts about the army’s political neutrality. But Hamilton had also managed to become Washington’s second in command, which, given the great man’s advanced years and uncertain health, meant that Hamilton was the general-in-waiting. Hamilton’s fertile brain now began to quick march. Legions, divisions, uniforms, drills—all were set down on paper and sent to the secretary of war, McHenry. In short order, Hamilton also devised a complete curriculum for the cadets of West Point: four years, half of which would be spent in common at a “Fundamental School” (heavy on the mechanical sciences, but also with a healthy dose of history and geography) and the remainder in whichever military subdivision the cadet would be destined for: cavalry, infantry, artillery, or engineers. He had in mind around 200 cadets taught by six directors and eighteen faculty. Most important of all, officers already on active service would be required to rotate through the academy.

  None of this materialized in the way Hamilton had imagined. The belated warrior Adams suddenly turned nervous about taking on a war with France. It may be that the spectacle of Hamiltonian men-in-arms springing from the field like the harvest of Jason’s dragon’s teeth gave him pause. At the other end of the world, Horatio Nelson’s annihilation of the French Navy at Aboukir Bay at the mouth of the Nile on 1 August 1798, and Bonaparte’s subsequent abandonment of his army in Egypt, followed by the coup d’état that made him first consul, evidently made an Atlantic war less of a priority. He was already facing a renewed attack from the coalition monarchies. With the threat of a French war dissipating, so did the need for Hamilton’s new army. Washington’s death in December 1799 put an end to it altogether. What remained, though, in early 1800, was the plan for the academy approved of by Adams, as he had always been an enthusiast of the idea. Congress, however, was less happy. There were noises about its undemocratic potential from the anti-Federalists. And for Thomas Jefferson, the whole idea smelled of Hamiltonian Caesarism.

  Thomas Jefferson had been taken aback by the war crisis and what Adams and Hamilton in their respective ways had made of it. Jefferson had been the agent of the United States in Paris in the early years of the French Revolution and though he had witnessed some of the worst abuses of the Jacobin “Dictatorship of Virtue,” emotionally he had never been able to uncouple the French Revolution from the unfolding history of the dawning age of liberty. It had been the French who had been forced to defend themselves against the monarchs of the coalition powers and who embodied what, in 1793, he told the French envoy to the United States, Edmond Genet: “By nature’s law, man is at peace with man till some aggression is committed which, by the same law, authorises one to destroy another as his enemy.” For Jefferson, that alone explained why France had reluctantly turned into a belligerent state and one in which individual liberties had been regrettably curtailed for the needs of security. Forced to choose between the British and the French, he had no doubts who were liberty’s true enemies. The Anglophilia of the Federalists, especially Hamilton, he thought, was all of a piece with their design to introduce into the United States the strong-armed executive government power against which the Revolutionary War had been fought, making independence a pyrrhic victory. Henry Knox, who had founded an “Order of Cincinnati,” as a hereditary association of ex-officers, Jefferson thought, was introducing a military aristocracy into the country, possibly even a monarchy with a second King George, reigning from Mount Vernon. Constitutionally entitled to be vice president to Adams (though making himself the leader of opposition to his policies), Jefferson thought the usurpation of power represented by the Alien and Sedition Acts augured the death of the free America.

  Jefferson was no naive pacifist. But of all the Founding Fathers he was the most heavily invested in an eighteenth-century philosophical idealism that looked on war as the sport of tyrants. In 1775 he had been entrusted by Congress with articulating a defense of the insurrection, and much of that turned on the British king’s loosing of mercenaries on defenseless American farms and shores. In his draft of the Declaration of Independence George III appeared as a Hanoverian Genghis: “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns and destroyed the lives of our people.” The British monarch and his governing toadies had planned even more heinous stratagems: the arming of Indians and, worst of all for the plantation owner of Monticello, a cynical flirtation with slave rebellion. And unlike Hamilton’s war record, Jefferson had been on the sharp end of its bayonets, forced abruptly to flee Monticello in 1781 when a company of cavalry, attached (of all humiliations!) to a regiment commanded by Benedict Arnold, threatened his home.

  For Jefferson, then, the revolution had been a war to end war, at least in the Americas. Later, in 1812—in the midst of ferocious belligerence in both America and Europe, the year in which Washington and President Madison’s White House were burned by the British—Jefferson looked forward to a day when the Atlantic meridian would be “the line of demarcation between war and peace. On this side…no hostility, the lion and the lamb will lie down together.” He conceded that situations might arise when it might become unavoidable, but American statesmen ought to resort to the arbitration of arms only after every conceivable avenue of diplomacy had been exhausted. If it did become unavoidable, every effort had to be made to moderate its barbarism. Prisoners had to be treated humanely; all thought of torture ruled out; civilian sufferings avoided. Wars ought to be limited in scope and time, for if they were not, they would consume the liberties established by the Constitution. The war fever of 1798–99 had been just such a lesson, for while the Constitution had clearly granted to Congress the authority to declare war and make peace, the Federalists had used their bare majority to usurp to the executive much of that power. For Jefferson this was a dire omen. He could imagine all kinds of trumped-up pretexts for war that would turn America into just another squalid military adventurer with a top-heavy, fiscally indebted government draining away its resources. Was it for such a morally deformed America that patriots had shed their blood?

  The French war crisis had been a close thing. Hamilton’s “new army” and the war college associated with it had been a dagger pointed straight at the heart of republican democracy. The only way to ensure that such sinister follies did not recur was to turn the Federalists and t
heir president, John Adams, out of power and replace them with Democratic Republicans, who could be relied on to avoid elective wars and the whole vampiric apparatus of taxes and debts that went with them. As president, Jefferson would, in fact, fight a war against the Barbary corsair states of the North African Maghreb and send warships to Tripoli and Algiers. But he always believed that action was a defensive response to mortal threats to commercial shipping, America’s lifeline. The aims of the North African war were limited: the liberation of American captives, an action that would make it clear to the beys and sultans that the United States would not be held to ransom by glorified pirates.

  Why, then, with all this aversion to an embryonic military establishment, did Jefferson become the founder of West Point? In his mind it all made perfect sense. By making himself responsible for such a college, he could immunize it from the war lust he associated with the Federalists, making sure that its faculty and officers were trustworthy democrats, sworn to defer to the civilian powers. Instead of becoming the nucleus of an antidemocratic officer caste within the republic, a viper in the bosom of liberty, West Point’s graduates would be something like the opposite: the tutors of citizens-in-arms. Jefferson meant its graduate officers to go forth into the country and prepare and instruct the state militias in matters like artillery and the building of forts, thus obviating the need for a large and menacing professional army. If that made the officers sound more like teachers than soldiers, well, that was also the idea. For Jefferson, West Point was an element in his ambition to educate America for the modern world. That meant less theology and classics and more science and technology. While he was struggling to get his University of Virginia launched and funded, West Point could be created—on a modest scale—as a mini university, equipped to teach mathematics, chemistry, geology, architecture, and, of course, engineering. If a military academy could function as a modern university, it could give its students the kind of education that would equip them for other more civil vocations than the endless, self-generating pursuit of arms. And it would create a cadre of guardians who would stand against any threats to civil freedom.

  That was the West Point Jefferson chartered in 1802. Its congressional funding, and therefore its initial scale, was extremely modest. There would be no Hamiltonian riding around in uniformed swagger. The cadets—all twelve of them—would be dressed in sober gray. They would be strictly tutored and held to the highest standards of academic and technical excellence and drilled in their obligation to honor the Constitution and a civilian commander in chief. In their ranks there would be nurtured no American Napoleons. Jefferson’s appointment as first superintendent was Jonathan Williams, a mathematician whom he had met in Paris when Williams had acted as secretary to Benjamin Franklin. Williams had no military experience whatsoever, and this, for Jefferson, made him the perfect candidate, as West Point was meant to be more of a school and less of a war college. When Superintendent Williams said that “our guiding star is not a little mathematical school but a great national establishment…we must always have it in mind that our officers are to be men of science,” Jefferson could only applaud. What would be the vocation of the “long gray line” of cadets? They would be nation-builders, the engineers of democracy. In the Jeffersonian mind that has always been what the American military has been for!

  3. The Drop Zone Cafe, San Antonio, Texas, 3 March 2008

  “But that’s not what the military’s for,” said the retired general when I asked him if the army could have done more to repair the Iraq it had broken, by delivering a modicum of infrastructure. The odd bridge or two would have been nice. But for years after the statue of Saddam had come down, civil society in Iraq remained smashed up. Only a few hours of electricity had been generated for the cities; less oil was flowing to the refineries and out again toward the city pumps than in the time of the dictator. Roads and city streets were murder alleys; mosques were dangerous on solemn days; hospitals were without basic drugs and often without doctors. Desperately needed professionals had departed en masse for Syria and Jordan, where entire new universities had been created around the exile population. Billions of dollars meant for the reconstruction of Iraq, packed into suitcases, had gone unaccountably AWOL, and no one seemed to think this was a big deal. Newspapers of record registered righteous dismay and then shrugged their shoulders and moved on. Construction companies awarded no-bid contracts had bungled the job after pocketing front-loaded operational budgets. An American government that had begun its administration by declaring it wasn’t in the business of nation-building had embarked on the biggest exercise of all. But after it had taken down the tyranny standing in its way, it turned out to have no clue about how to establish a successor state, being philosophically hostile to public administration. But acting as midwife to a democracy in a place innocent of it was “really not the army’s brief,” repeated the general, flashing me a high-voltage smile and taking a gulp of Sunday morning Mexican coffee.

  General Alfredo “Freddie” Valenzuela and I were sitting in the favorite brunch haunt of local veterans in San Antonio, Texas, America’s “military city.” The brotherhood was Hispanic: men who’d been born to farmworkers on the borderland, had joined the service as teenagers and, in some cases, risen far and fast. They were tucking into chiquiles—eggs with jalapeño chilies—and in case that wasn’t hot enough, upending the Tabasco to give breakfast a little more excitement. The Bloody Marys, no celery, were on the house. The good-looking, prosperous kids of the vets sat with their families while trying to keep an eye on their own small children roughhousing at the back of the room. Most of the patrons were “Jumpers” from the 82nd Airborne, and the walls of the long shacklike place were papered in photographic memories of bad places they’d dropped into: Anzio, Normandy, Arnhem, the Battle of the Bulge. In most of the old pictures they mug for the camera, arms slung around buddies, wives, or girlfriends. But a few of the jumpers stare dead ahead as though the lens had just challenged their face to a fight and they were waiting to see who would back off first. The place was loaded with tough-guy charm, handsome sunburned men who’d grown old setting their stories out on the tables like decks of cards and staying cheerful when they got trumped. Their tightness was all about where they had come from, the barrios and the pueblos; clawing their way to respect and rank; the unembarrassed pride in having, in the end, got both. Nicknames of greeting and acclaim were shouted over the heads of their wives, as more of the boys stepped through the door—“China Boy!” who sported a swinging gold Christ around his neck, arms above his head, a paratrooper Jesus, had trained Nung people as anti-Vietcong guerrillas; another of the brethren, “Jumpin’ Joe” Rodriguez, had clocked over 6,000 drops as a training instructor and combat trooper. Amid the easy-over cheer, the good-natured General Valenzuela, who had taken on the FARC in Colombia and was therefore unlikely to be a pussycat, was reluctant to get back to the painful matters in hand. But he made it clear that John McCain, who in Vietnam had taken history on the body, was his kind of president. I pressed him on McCain’s incautious aside that if necessary the United States needed to be in Iraq for a century. “Oh,” said Freddie, black eyes merry with inside knowledge of the military man’s cavalier way of putting things, “what he meant is that we can’t just be up and running. A sixty-day exit strategy isn’t going to work.” “So you stay until when, exactly, General?” “Until they’ve got things better under control.” “And how do we know when that day comes along? The army can’t stick around seeing to the generators and the oil wells forever. You said that yourself.” A big cloud briefly darkened the general’s sunny countenance. “We need to withdraw with honor,” he said after a long pause. “We need to rebuild our alliances. It’s tough. It’s tough.” And then, back came the disarming smile.

  The evening before, I’d seen Valenzuela surrounded by comrades at the dress-up veterans’ reunion ball. Mariachi bands serenaded tables of men with prosthetic legs and hooks for hands who nonetheless took their wives off to the dan
ce floor between the London broil and the ice cream dessert. By the cash bar, kids fresh from Afghanistan firefights with the Taliban were being inducted into the fraternity of memory by avuncular survivors of Khe Sanh and the Tet offensive. The guest of honor was General Ricardo Sanchez, one of San Antonio’s own, a poor kid who had made it all the way to command of the forces in Iraq. But what must have seemed like a dream promotion for a three-star general had turned into a nightmare. Iraq couldn’t be fixed. Too many people—Sunni insurgents, Shi’a militias, the Iranians—all had an interest in it staying broken. Worse, it was on Sanchez’s watch that the images of unspeakable sadism of Abu Ghraib reached the world: Lynndie England pulling a naked prisoner along by a dog collar. Since he had signed a memorandum of “acceptable” interrogation techniques (designed to prevent, rather than authorize, torture), it was Sanchez who took the rap for the atrocities. Two years later, after desultory efforts had been made to send him to this post and that, Sanchez figured out he had become an embarrassment and retired, terrible odium hanging over his name. But as far as the jumpers of the 82nd were concerned, he was a brother and a son (even if not of their division), and when he proposed the toast “to the ladies” they clinked glasses and roared back.

  Seeing General Sanchez joshing with the crowd lost me whatever appetite I might have had for the beef and potatoes. I expected his speech to be heavy with regimental camaraderie from which he could segue to disingenuous self-exoneration, leaning on the buddies for understanding. I was right about the appeal to martial honor and wrong about the rest. Notes of surprising disquiet crept into his remarks. No self-serving calls to circle the wagons against the Civilians Who Didn’t Understand the Facts on the Ground were made. Instead there was a call to vote; to pull the lever for whoever they thought could offer the country foresight, wisdom, strength in a hard time. “Send a message,” the general said; but the message was supposed to show, by the sheer numbers who delivered it, that if men in office (especially men in office who had never worn uniform) were sending youngsters to kill and to die, something more was owed the country by way of explaining the precise point of the sacrifice. Intoning "9/11” and “fighting the terrorists there before we have to fight them here” was no longer enough to satisfy the troops, either in the field or at the polling station.