Arthur Ekirch on American
Militarism
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
by Ralph
Raico
In 1783 the treaty ending hostilities between Great Britain and its
rebellious colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America was
signed in Paris. For their part the English proclaimed that, "His
Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New
Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations …
" -- there followed the rest of the thirteen colonies -- "to be
free sovereign and independent states," with the British Crown
relinquishing all claims to "the same and every part
thereof."
Amazingly, a collection of artisans, merchants, and mostly farmers had
defied one of the great military machines of Europe, and the greatest
empire, and won. It was a triumph that gladdened the hearts of lovers of
liberty and republican government the world over.
Today, this United States, now definitively in the singular, is itself
the world's greatest military machine and sole imperial power. How did
this happen? In The Civilian and the Military: A History of the
American Antimilitarist Tradition,[1] Arthur A.
Ekirch traces this portentous transformation to 1972 (counting his
preface).
Murray Rothbard called Ekirch's work "brilliant," and praised
it as "an example of a revisionist outlook on all three great wars
of the twentieth century." Robert Higgs, in his foreword to the
Independent Institute's edition of Ekirch's
The Decline of American Liberalism, provides a summary of the
life and productive academic career of Arthur Ekirch. He notes that
Ekirch registered as a conscientious objector in the Second World War but
was nonetheless sentenced to work without pay as a logger and later in a
school for the mentally retarded, experiences that did not endear the
American state to the feisty scholar.
Militarism can be defined as the permeation of civil society by military
institutions, influences, and values.
As Ekirch sketches it, the Anglo-American heritage of explicit
antimilitarism began to be formed in 17th-century England, especially
with the Levellers and resistance to a standing army.
This tradition continued among the British settlers of what became the
United States. It is evident in the attitudes of the leaders of the
American Revolution. James Madison, for instance, stated:
- Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be
dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War
is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies,
and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many
under the domination of the few.
The connection between antimilitarism and nonintervention in the
affairs of foreign nations what its crafty opponents have succeeded in
labeling "isolationism" -- was often marked among the
rebellious colonials. Ekirch points out that "an important argument
for independence had been that it would free the American people from
involvement in the wars of Europe and from the necessity of helping to
support a British army." The radical republican position was put
boldly by Jefferson: "I am for free commerce with all nations;
political connection with none; and little or no diplomatic
establishment."
But during their presidencies, Jefferson and especially Madison reneged
on their noninterventionist and antiwar position. The war hawks in their
party clamored for confrontation with England, hoping to acquire Canada.
Though this proved impossible, Madison's War of 1812 was considered a
success. A military spirit was awakened, shown in the popular adulation
of war heroes and military displays at Fourth of July parades.
As war with Mexico drew near, Daniel Webster criticized the maneuvers of
President James Polk. His words were to be the key to America's future
wars, from the provisioning of Fort Sumter on: "What is the value of
this constitutional provision [granting Congress the sole power to
declare war] if the President on his own authority may make such military
movements as must bring on war?" Easy victory over Mexico, however,
further fueled the military spirit.
If the Jeffersonians can be accused of surrendering their principles,
what are we to say of some of the celebrated antistatists of the 19th and
early 20th centuries? Henry David Thoreau, whose conscience rebelled at
the US war against Mexico, became an enthusiast for the "just
war" against the slave states. He revered John Brown, referring to
him as a Christ upon the cross when Brown tried to raise a servile
rebellion among the millions of slaves of the South, a move
"credited" with helping start the Civil War. That awful
bloodletting cost 620,000 lives.
Charles Sumner, famous classical liberal and free trader, wrote in his
1845 work, The True Grandeur of Nations, "Can there be in our age
any peace that is not honorable, any war that is not dishonorable?"
But he also found an honorable war in the attack on the South.
Later, Benjamin
Tucker, individualist anarchist, was a cheerleader for the
Entente's war
with Germany. For his part, the anarchist
Peter Kropotkin urged Russia on to war with the
Central
Powers in 1914. Poor Kropotkin was bewildered by the way it turned
out, a Bolshevik tyranny worse than anything ever experienced before. The
war itself cost many millions of lives, the worst bloodbath in European
history to that time.
The point is that these individualists were no
Bastiats or
Herbert Spencers. None could resist the pull of a just war. None
understood the insight of
Randolph Bourne whom Ekirch calls one of the few who "stood
firm" in the first crusade against Germany -- that "war is the
health of the state."
During the Civil War the United States "was placed under what, for
all practical purposes, amounted to a military dictatorship."
Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, shut down newspapers
critical of his policies, and held thousands as political prisoners. His
conscription law led to draft riots, particularly in New York City, but a
precedent had been set.
Union veterans formed the Grand Army of the Republic, demanding pensions
and preference in government jobs. The US Army continued to justify its
jobs by its taxpayer-funded backing of the railroad barons in the West
and the campaigns to exterminate the Plains Indians. Military training
and "education" proliferated in schools and colleges.
In the 1880s and '90s, navalism surged ahead, with industries, steel
above all, promoting their own vested interests. The tradition of a navy
solely for the coastal defense of the country -- as old as the republic
-- was abandoned.
There were critics of the new militarism, E.L. Godkin of The Nation and
William Graham Sumner, whose essay, The Conquest of the United States by
Spain (1898), against the war on the Philippines has inspired
anti-imperialists ever since. (His great essay is now
available online.)
But the few critics could not prevail against the powerful cabal of
Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt,
which represented a turning point on the road to empire.
Mahan was not much of a naval commander (his ships tended to collide),
but he was a superb propagandist for navalism. His work on The Influence
of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 was seized upon by navalists in
Germany, Japan, France, and elsewhere. It fueled the arms race that led
to the First World War, proving to be no great blessing to
mankind.
In the Senate, Lodge pushed for war with Spain and the takeover of the
Philippines, later for war with Germany, and following that war, for a
vindictive peace treaty that would keep the Germans down for the
foreseeable future. Throughout, Lodge pressed for a navy second to none,
demanded by America's new empire. The Navy League, funded by big
business, helped the cause along.
Heaven only knows what Theodore Roosevelt is doing on that endlessly
reproduced iconic monument on Mount Rushmore, right alongside Jefferson.
Roosevelt despised Jefferson as a weakling, and Jefferson would have
despised him as a warmonger. The great historian
Charles Beard
wrote truly of "Teddy" that he was probably the only major
figure in American history "who thought that war in itself was a
good thing."
Included in the cabal was Elihu Root, secretary of war and then of state
under TR, who advocated "the creation of a military spirit among the
youth of the country."
The acquisition of the Philippines cast the United States into the arena
of contending imperialisms in the Far East, including especially Japan's.
Antiwar congressmen exposed the links between the drive for a great
ocean-going navy and the munitions industry, to no avail.
Ekirch is perhaps too lenient on Woodrow Wilson. Already, Wilson's note
to Germany following the sinking of the Lusitania, in which he reiterated
the US position, that Germany would be held to a "strict
accountability" for the deaths of any Americans at sea from U-boats,
even when traveling on armed belligerent merchant ships carrying military
munitions through war zones, set the United States on a collision course
for war. Here Walter Karp's The Politics of War presents a more reliable
account.
During the war, the Espionage and Sedition Acts were used to curb
dissent. The Creel Committee on Public Information propagandized for war
to a hitherto unprecedented extent. The mass media incited public opinion
against the demonized enemy as would become standard to our own
day.
Historical revisionism flourished as the archives of major powers were
opened up, forced by the Bolsheviks' unlocking of the Russian archives.
True accounts of the machinations by which the European powers and then
the United States entered the war led to the brief flourishing of antiwar
sentiment after 1918.
In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in as president. This genial master
of deception was not only a fanatic for naval expansion but also harbored
grandiose plans for reordering the world. The geopolitical situation of
the 1930s in Europe and the Far East gave Roosevelt ample opportunity for
overseas meddling. The formally opposition party in 1940 nominated for
president Wendell Willkie, as much of an interventionist as FDR. The
greatest antiwar movement in history, the
America
First Committee, boasted 800,000 members, but it quickly folded when
Roosevelt got the war he wanted, at Pearl Harbor.
In the Second World War America embraced militarism wholeheartedly. It
has never looked back.
The worst violation of civil liberties was the rounding up and
imprisonment of some 80,000 Japanese citizens and 40,000 resident
Japanese aliens (not eligible for citizenship because born in Japan).
Emblematic of the hysteria generated by this most just of just wars, the
US Supreme Court upheld their incarceration. Renowned liberals Hugo
Black, Felix Frankfurter, and William Douglas joined the majority.
California Attorney-General Earl Warren was a passionate advocate for
incarceration.
Following the war, "the atmosphere of perpetual crisis and war
hysteria" engendered by Washington never let up. Harry Truman
initiated what Ekirch rightly calls "the aggressive American foreign
policy of the Cold War." Dozens of entangling alliances were formed,
committing the nation to defending the existing international order
against any who would challenge it. A new enemy intent on world-conquest
was conjured up in the form of the Soviet Union and international
communism. This conflict included two "hot wars" and entailed
vast, continuing military budgets, now to pay for ever-more deadly
nuclear weapons as well. It lasted over 40 years and cost civil society
trillions of dollars.
As Ekirch presciently foresaw, even a peaceful resolution of the Cold War
was not "sufficient to release the American people from the power of
the Pentagon and its corporate allies." Incursions of the armed
forces occurred in Yugoslavia, the Philippines, Somalia, and
elsewhere.
Now the United States is involved in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan, soon perhaps also in Iran.
Today there is no conscription, which caused too many problems for the
militarists in the Vietnam years. But the American empire bestrides the
globe. The United States has over 700 military bases overseas, plus some
dozen naval task forces patrolling the oceans, with a multitude of space
satellites feeding information to the forces below. Every year its
"defense" (i.e., military) budget is nearly equal to those of
all other countries combined. Does anyone doubt that for America there
are more wars, many more wars, in the offing?
As the great social scientist
Joseph
Schumpeter wrote of the military in imperialist states, "Created
by the wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it
required."
Ralph Raico, Professor Emeritus in European history at Buffalo State
College is a senior
fellow of the Mises Institute. He is a specialist on the history of
liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between
war and the rise of the state. He is the author of
The Place
of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord
Acton. You can study the history of civilization under his guidance
here:
MP3-CD and
Audio Tape.
Notes
[1] Ralph
Myles, Colorado Springs, 1972.
http://mises.org/daily/5375/Arthur-Ekirch-on-American-Militarism
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