AMERITOPIA

The Unmaking of America

By MARK R. LEVIN

Copyright 2012 by Simon & Schuster

Introduction

            . . .

            . . . for years President Ronald Reagan cautioned that “[f]reedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia . Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

PART I

ON UTOPIANISM

CHAPTER ONE

­­­­­________________________________

THE TYRANNY OF UTOPIA

         TYRANNY, BROADLY DEFINED, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism1 is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 3). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Utopianism is irrational in theory and practice, for it ignores or attempts to control the planned and unplanned complexity of the individual, his nature, and mankind generally. It ignores, rejects, or perverts the teachings and knowledge that have come before—that is, man’s historical, cultural, and social experience and development. Indeed, utopianism seeks to break what the hugely influential eighteenth-century British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke argued was the societal continuum “between those who are living and those who are dead and those who are to be born.” . . . Utopianism substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all. Yet there is nothing new in deception disguised as hope and nothing original in abstraction framed as progress. A heavenly society is said to be within reach if only the individual surrenders more of his liberty and being for the general good, meaning the good as prescribed by the state. If he refuses, he will be tormented and ultimately coerced into compliance, for conformity is essential. . . .

            Especially threatening, therefore, are the industrious, independent, and successful, for they demonstrate what is actually possible under current societal conditions—achievement, happiness, and fulfillment—thereby contradicting and endangering the utopian campaign against what was or is. They must be either co-opted and turned into useful contributors to or advocates for the state, or neutralized through sabotage or other means. . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 4-5). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Utopianism also attempts to shape and dominate the individual by doing two things at once: it strips the individual of his uniqueness, making him indistinguishable from the multitudes that form what is commonly referred to as “the masses,” but it simultaneously assigns him a group identity based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, etc., to highlight differences within the masses. It then exacerbates old rivalries and disputes or it incites new ones. This way it can speak to the well-being of “the people” as a whole while dividing them against themselves,

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 6-7). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Utopianism also finds a receptive audience among the society’s disenchanted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame their surroundings, “the system,” and others. They are lured by the false hopes and promises of utopian transformation. . . Moreover, disparaging and diminishing the successful and accomplished becomes an essential tactic. No one should be better than anyone else, regardless of the merits or value of his contributions. By exploiting human frailties, frustrations, jealousies, and inequities, a sense of meaning and self-worth is created in the malcontent’s otherwise unhappy and directionless life.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 7-8). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Equality, as understood by the American Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law. Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect. . . . It usually takes the form of material “rights” delivered to the individual by the state. . .

            . . . The utopian pursuit, however, commands the imposition of a purported design and structure atop society by a central authority to arrest the evolution of the individual and society.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 8-10). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Utopianism’s equality is intolerant of diversity, uniqueness, debate, etc., for utopianism’s purpose requires a singular focus. There can be no competing voices or causes slowing or obstructing society’s long and righteous march. Utopianism relies on deceit, propaganda, dependence, intimidation, and force. In its more aggressive state, as the malignancy of the enterprise becomes more painful and its impossibility more obvious, it incites violence inasmuch as avenues for free expression and civil dissent are cut off. Violence becomes the individual’s primary recourse and the state’s primary response. Ultimately, the only way out is the state’s termination.

            In utopia, rule by masterminds is both necessary and necessarily primitive, for it excludes so much that is known to man and about man. The mastermind is driven by his own boundless conceit and delusional aspirations, which he self-identifies as a noble calling. He alone is uniquely qualified to carry out this mission. He is, in his own mind, a savior of mankind, if only man will bend to his will. Such can be the addiction of power. It can be an irrationally egoistic and absurdly frivolous passion that engulfs even sensible people. In this, the mastermind suffers from a psychosis of sorts and endeavors to substitute his own ambitions for the individual ambitions of millions of people.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 11-12). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. . . . When the law is used in this way, the few plunder the many (e.g., public-sector unions), the many plunder the few (e.g., the progressive income tax), and everyone plunders everyone (e.g., universal health care), making utopia unsustainable and ultimately inhumane.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 14-15). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . the mastermind relies on uniform standards born of insufficient knowledge and information, which are crafted from his own predilections, values, stereotypes, experiences, idiosyncrasies, desires, prejudices and, of course, fantasy. The imposition of these standards may, in the short term, benefit some or perhaps many. But over time, the misery and corrosiveness from their full effects spread through the whole of society.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 15). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . The individual is inconsequential as a person and useful only as an insignificant part of an agglomeration of insignificant parts. He is a worker, part of a mass; nothing more, nothing less. His existence is soulless. Absolute obedience is the highest virtue. After all, only an army of drones is capable of building a rainbow to paradise.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 16). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . James Madison wrote, “But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 18). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . For the mastermind, the Constitution’s words are as undeserving of respect as the rest of history. They will be used to muddle and disarrange, not inform and clarify. Moreover, the Constitution’s authors, ratifiers, and present-day proponents will be dismissed as throwbacks. To follow them will be to renounce modernity and progress. And yet to follow the mastermind is to renounce the American founding and heritage.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 19). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Utopianism is not new. It has been repackaged countless times—since Plato and before. It is as old as tyranny itself. In democracies, its practitioners legislate without end. In America, law is piled upon law in contravention and contradiction of the governing law—the Constitution. But there are no actual masterminds who, upon election or appointment, are magically imbued with godlike qualities. There are pretenders with power, lots of power. When they are not rebelling they are dictating, but the ultimate objective is always the same—control over the individual in order to control society. They are adamantly committed to their abstraction and their accumulation of authority to pursue it, to devastating effect. . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 22). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

CHAPTER TWO

­­­­­________________________________

PLATO’S REPUBLIC AND THE PERFECT SOCIETY

PLATO WAS NOT THE first but he was among the most prominent of the earliest philosophers to develop a utopian state model. Plato’s Republic was written in approximately 380 BCE. Applying his notions of a just society, Plato claimed to construct an “ideal city” through a fictional dialogue between Socrates and others. In fact, what he created is a totalitarian state. Although there has been much discussion among scholars throughout the centuries about Plato’s intent in writing the Republic, his most prominent critic was none other than his onetime student, Aristotle. Nonetheless, the Republic’s influence on subsequent philosophers and societies is clear. . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 23). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

             In the Republic, Plato is openly hostile to individualism, which he believes destructive of the collective good of the Ideal City. Although Plato is clearly exploring a wide range of human characteristics, including knowledge, education, family relations, etc., he does so not to embrace human nature, but to shape and order it. In so many ways, he drains the individual’s lifeblood of free will and self-interest.

            Yet, as Karl Popper, a critic of Plato and the Republic, wrote, “This individualism, united with altruism, has become the basis of western civilization. It is the central doctrine of Christianity (‘love your neighbor,’ say the Scriptures, not ‘love your tribe’); and it is the core of all ethical doctrines which have grown from our civilization and stimulated it.… There is no other thought which has been so powerful in the moral development of man. Plato was right when he saw in this doctrine the enemy of his caste state; and he hated it more than any other of the ‘subversive’ doctrines of his time.”

            Plato’s caste system assigns roles and duties to people as if they are not people at all, based on his own preconceptions and prejudices. In this way, the individual loses his identity and can be directed toward the City’s best interests. Ultimately, therefore, it is the rulers for which the City exists. . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 34). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            One profound lesson Plato teaches, albeit not by design, is that Plato himself, considered by many the greatest of all philosophers, could not construct the perfect society. He sought to avoid the disintegration of society and the onset of tyranny, but his solution was a totalitarian City destructive of human nature. Regrettably, Plato provided a philosophical and intellectual brew for a utopian society that would influence tyrannies for centuries to come.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 36). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

CHAPTER THREE

­­­­­________________________________

THOMAS MORE’S UTOPIA AND -POWERFUL STATE

Hobbes argued that men are equal in is identical to every other house and no one owns the home or farm on which they live. There is, in fact, no such thing as private property of any kind on Utopia.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 42). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . in Utopia, money is considered the source of much evil. For that reason no one is paid for their labor in currency, which is banned from the island. Gold, silver, and other precious metals have no value. Instead, they are used in chamber pots and other items used for the less than savory personal tasks in daily life.“ [A]ll the desire of money with the use thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots! For who knoweth not that fraud, theft, ravin, brawling, quarreling, babbling, strife, chiding, contention, murder, treason, poisoning, which by daily punishments are rather revenged than refrained, do die when money dieth? And also that fear, grief, care, labors, and watchings do perish even the very same moment that money perisheth? Yea, poverty itself, which only seemed to lack money, if money were gone, it also would decrease and vanish away.”

                    . . . Meals are taken communally at appointed times in a great hall in each neighborhood. There are also strict requirements about where the men, women, and children sit. It is legal for an individual to eat the occasional fruit or vegetable from the gardens that are grown in the backyards of every home.

            People all wear identical clothing and it is against the law to affect adornments of any kind. “For their garments, which throughout all the island be of one fashion … and this one continueth for evermore unchanged, seemly and comely to the eye, no let to the moving and wielding of the body, also fit both for winter and summer—as for these garments (I say) every family maketh their own”. The only exceptions are at festivals, where everyone but the priests wear white.

            Since there is no private property on the island, and no currency for domestic use, every health-care service is free. Four hospitals are strategically located outside each city. They are great structures, lavishly appointed and extremely well equipped. “For in the circuit of the city … they have four hospitals, so big, so wide, so ample, and so large, that they may seem four little towns.… These hospitals be so well appointed, and with all things necessary to health so furnished … there is no sick person in all the city that had not rather lie there than at home in his own house.” However, death is not feared but celebrated among Utopians. People who die have an opportunity to meet their maker. Therefore, individuals who suffer from incurable diseases or fatal conditions, and who are no longer of use to the society in general, are encouraged to commit suicide to ease their pain and alleviate the burden they represent to island civilization. “They that be thus persuaded finish their lives willingly, either with hunger, or else die in their sleep without any feeling of death”.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 42-45). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . In Utopia, the individual is not trusted to care for himself. His highest value is that of an insipid worker compliantly obeying orders. His personality must be reengineered. His own desires and happiness, therefore, are made indistinguishable from those of every other individual. More controls the individual and his environment, which extends to the most basic aspects of life.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 47). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

CHAPTER FOUR

­­­­­________________________________

THOMAS HOBBE’S LEVIATHAN AND THE ALL-POWERFUL STATE

Hobbes argued that men are equal in the sense that all individuals strive for survival. Even a strong man can be compromised by a confederation of physically or mentally weaker men. “Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the differences between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he”. The problem is when “any two men [of equal hopes] desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end, which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only, endeavour to destroy or subdue one another”. Anarchy ensues as men cannot secure themselves from the collective force of other men and men can also seek to exercise power over other men. Thus, men have no pleasure but, instead, grief. “So that in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: first, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.” 

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 52-53). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Hobbes, like Plato and More, strips the individual of human qualities that contribute to the essence of life—motivation, inquisitiveness, competition, exploration, inventiveness, accomplishment, etc. . . .

            Hobbes also contends there cannot be morality or what he calls moral virtue—justice, gratitude, modesty, equity, mercy, etc.—in the state of nature, where man is in a constant state of war.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 65-66). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            From Leviathan springs not a virtuous government protective of the civil society but a totalitarian regime. As in Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia, in Leviathan Hobbes rejects self-government because, he believes, the individual and man generally cannot be trusted to govern themselves. Hobbes designs another inhuman utopian structure that devours the individual.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 66). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

CHAPTER FIVE

­­­­­________________________________

KARL MARX’S COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE

COMMUNIST MANIFESTO was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 on behalf of the Communist League (although the final draft was Marx’s).

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 67). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Moreover [according to Marx and Engels], the family structure grew out of bourgeois material needs and must be dissolved for the good of the greater community. “Abolition of the family! . . . 

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 70). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . Marx’s rallying cry—“Workers of the world, unite!”

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 70). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . Missing from The Communist Manifesto’s flawed arguments are the inalienable rights of the individual. Man is dehumanized and his actual identity is lost in the communist utopia. If he is “wealthy,” such as a landowner, business owner, or landlord, he is part of an evil group, whether he is evil or not. If he does not divest himself of his wealth, it will be confiscated from him, by force if necessary. If he is “not wealthy” or a laborer, he is part of a good group, whether he is good or not. Only the latter group survives. The individual’s fate is sealed by a fiction based largely on an economic classification assigned to him by political philosophers and, in the end, a workers’ paradise that is said to be inevitable.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 79-80). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . The Republic, Utopia, and Leviathan are top-down tyrannies, with wisdom concentrated among a handful of rulers—the omnipotent philosopher-king, the Prince, and the Sovereign, respectively; Marx and Engels describe their communist utopia as a bottom-up economic liberation movement in which “the people” become the rulers as a requisite to the state withering away. The Republic, Utopia, and Leviathan are not only grandiose ideals, but their authors also describe in mind-numbing detail the mechanics of their societies; . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 80). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            In all four utopias, the individual and his family are subservient to the state. Society, however, would be a far better place if only man would change his nature to accommodate the utopian ideal. Since, left to his own devices, man will not oblige, he must be made to do so. Yet out of this same riffraff, the masterminds are born—both the revolutionaries and the rulers. They rise above “the masses” for, unlike the rest, they are self-evidently altruistic, prudent, virtuous, and wise. Whether or not they know how to run their own lives, they know how to run the lives of others. Of course, the entire enterprise is immoral if not deranged.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 80-81). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . the whole of society suffers at the masterminds’ hands, for in its purest form, communism demands a radical egalitarianism best described as an absolute equality of social conditions and an exactness of burdens and benefits. The entire society must be brought down to its lowest level. Individual sovereignty must be wrung from the human character; everyone becomes a slave to the state and there is no escape for anyone, including the vaunted and fabled proletarian. In every instance, communism requires the establishment of a police state, some more violent than others, because this utopia, like the others described earlier, is not only undesirable but impossible—and its pursuit is merciless and relentless.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 81). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 

PART II

ON AMERICANISM

CHAPTER SIX

­­­­­________________________________

JOHN LOCKE AND THE NATURE OF MAN

JOHN LOCKE, WHO LIVED from 1632 to 1704, had an enormous influence on the American founding and, consequently, American society. As will become clear, he did not seek ways to destroy the sovereignty of the individual; he sought to understand and cultivate it. . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 85). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            For Locke, the individual has value, dignity, and significance. Rather than advance a dogma in search of a fantasy, Locke believed that the individual’s mind was worth exploring. As if lecturing the utopians, Locke wrote, “When we know our own Strength, we shall the better know what to undertake with hopes of Success: . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 86). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Unlike Hobbes, Locke observed that men generally get along with each other in the state of nature, for their own sake and the sake of the community, although it is certainly not perfect. A state of war exists in the state of nature only when one individual violates the laws of nature—that is, the inalienable rights of another. “In transgressing the law of Nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of men for their mutual security, and so he becomes dangerous to mankind.…”

            Locke makes the case for a civil and consensual government with just laws impartially enforced and in which the liberty and rights of the individual are respected, thereby rejecting the utopian centralized model where the philosopher-king, prince, sovereign, or “temporary” despot rules over “the masses” and shapes the individual against his will. Locke wrote, “The Natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of Nature for his rule. The liberty of man in society is to be under no legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth, nor under the domination of any will, restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact according to the trust put in it.…

            For Locke, labor represents initiative, productivity, and enterprise, which are imperative to not only the survival of the individual but also his well-being and success. “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labor does, as it were, enclose it from the common.… God, when He gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labor, and the penury of his condition required it of him. God and his reason commanded him to subdue the earth—i.e., improve it for the benefit of life and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labor. He that, in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled, and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had not title to, nor could without injury take from him.”. . .

            Locke also reproves the apathetic, lethargic, and envious against interfering with and making demands on the conscientious and hardworking, for they have not contributed to their own well-being or that of society. . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp.90-94). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Locke emphasized that the right to acquire and retain property is inextricably linked to man’s liberty. In the state of nature, the individual is justified in enforcing that right against transgressors. “Man being born … with a title to perfect freedom and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of Nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property—that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offense deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it.…”       Government is established, with the consent of the members of society, to protect the individual’s liberty and the order of society, in particular property rights, through just and predictable laws and their impartial enforcement. “Those who are united into one body, and have a common established law and judicature to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies between them and punish offenders, are in civil society one with another.…”

            But the wrong government—a centralized authority of one or more rulers—is destructive of the individual’s liberty and the civil society. “For he being supposed to have all, both legislative and executive, power in himself alone, there is no judge to be found, no appeal lies open to anyone, who may fairly and indifferently, and with authority decide, and from whence relief and redress may be expected of any injury or inconveniency that may be suffered from him, or by his order.… That whereas, in the ordinary state of Nature, he has a liberty to judge of his right, according to the best of his power to maintain; but whenever his property is invaded by the will and order of his monarch, he has not only no appeal, as those in society ought to have, but, as if he were degraded from the common state of rational creatures, is denied a liberty to judge of, or defend his right, and so is exposed to all the misery and inconveniences that a man can fear from one, who being in the unrestrained state of Nature, is yet corrupted with flattery and armed with power.”. “For he that thinks absolute power purifies men’s blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read but the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary.” . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 97-98). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Locke would undoubtedly consider the modern-day political declarations about “spreading the wealth” or “redistributing the wealth” or “leveling the playing field,” and the government’s application of its statutory, regulatory, and taxing powers to pursue them, as a miscomprehension of man’s nature and an assault on the individual’s inalienable rights and the civil society. . . . The right of all individuals to try to acquire property, and once acquired to secure it, is a right that no man or government can legitimately deny him, and which just governments are instituted to preserve and protect. Although some will become wealthy and some will not—that is, the result will be unequal when comparing individual to individual—the poorest man can become rich and the richest man can become poor depending on how each applies his labor. Furthermore, the protection of private property applies not only to that which exists today, but to that which is earned in the future, thereby encouraging industriousness and the expansion of wealth in successive generations, to the good of the individual and society.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 103-104). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Communism, and its socialist progeny, is tyranny. And it is tyranny without end since equality of economic outcomes is an illusion, requiring constant repression and plundering.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 104). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

CHAPTER SEVEN

­­­­­________________________________

THE INFLUENCE OF LOCKE ON THE FOUNDERS

            Locke is not only underscor[ed] his earlier point about man’s right to resist the illegitimate, arbitrary power of government, particularly relating to his property rights; he is going further—that is, no government, including one established by the consent of the governed, has authority to violate man’s inalienable rights.

            Locke explains that the law of nature exists above all else, and all men are required to obey it, including those who hold public office. “Thus the law of Nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men’s actions, must, as well as their own and other men’s actions, be conformable to the law of Nature, i.e., to the will of God, of which that is a declaration, and the fundamental law of nature being the preservation of mankind, no human sanction can be good, or valid against it.”

            . . . “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 109-110). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

             It is also noteworthy that James Madison—a close Jefferson ally who later worked with Jefferson to create the Democratic-Republican Party, served as Jefferson’s secretary of state, replaced Jefferson as rector of the University of Virginia, and is considered by most the Father of the Constitution—was also significantly influenced by Locke, as were others.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 119). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

So important was Locke to the founding that it is difficult to imagine what kind of nation, if any, the Founders would have established had Locke not lived. The Founders were enlightened and well-educated men who embraced science, reason, experience, tradition, and knowledge. They were men of faith who preached tolerance, morality, and virtue. They used all these qualities and values to draw upon their collective wisdom in organizing the nation around the principles of natural law and natural rights. As such, they appropriated and ratified philosophical arguments espoused by Locke, thereby amalgamating the philosophical with the political. They committed themselves in the founding document, in revolution, and in governance to a respect for human dignity and life through the enshrinement of inalienable individual rights and liberties; to free enterprise and private property rights, where the industrious not only enhance their own lives but contribute to the overall well-being of society; to a representative government of divided authority and limited powers directed at preserving and protecting the individual’s inalienable rights and liberties; and to a just law applied impartially to all individuals.

            Looked at another way, the utopian models of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Marx’s Communist Manifesto could not be more repugnant to America’s philosophical and political foundation. Each of the utopias, in their own way, are models for totalitarian regimes managed by masterminds who rule over men as subjects. The individual exists to serve the state, to be reshaped and molded by the state, and the state exists to serve the masterminds’ cause. There are no inalienable rights, only those liberties and rights conferred on men by the state, should the state decide to confer them at all. The individual’s labor and property belong to the state or are controlled by the state, which determines how best to allocate them, thereby enslaving the individual to the state. There is no impartial law or impartial adjudication of the law, only rule by torment and, if necessary, iron fist to ensure compliance with utopian faith. There is no tolerance for individual self-interest or even self-preservation, for equality in terms of conformity and outcomes is paramount.

            Whereas the utopians start from the premise that the individual must be managed and suppressed by masterminds for the greater good, Locke opposed authoritarianism and sought to uncover the true nature of man and the environment most conducive to his fulfillment and happiness. Having experienced the wrath of monarchy, in Locke the Founders discovered a patron saint.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 122-124). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

CHAPTER EIGHT

­­­­­________________________________

CHARLES DE MONTESQUIEU AND REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT

. . .

            . . . “There are three kinds of government: REPUBLICAN, MONARCHICAL, and DESPOTIC. To discover the nature of each, the idea of them held by the least educated of men is sufficient. I assume three definitions, or rather, three facts: one, republican government is that in which the people as a body, or only a part of the people, have sovereign power; monarchical government is that in which one alone governs, but by fixed and established laws; whereas, in despotic government, one alone, without law and without rule, draws everything along by his will and caprices”

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 127). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

             Yet, despite man’s preference for liberty, most live under tyranny. Montesquieu explained that “despite men’s love of liberty, despite their hatred of violence, most peoples are subjected to this type of government. This is easy to understand. In order to form a moderate government, one must combine powers, regulate them, temper them, make them act; one must give one power a ballast, so to speak, to put it in a position to resist another; this is a masterpiece of legislation that chance rarely produces and prudence is rarely allowed to produce. By contrast, a despotic government leaps to view, so to speak; it is uniform throughout; as only passions are needed to establish it, everyone is good enough for that”.

            It follows that virtue is mostly impossible in a monarchy and nonexistent under despotism, but is crucial to sustain a republican government. “Virtue, in a republic, is a very simple thing: it is love of the republic; it is a feeling and not a result of knowledge; the lowest man in the state, like the first, can have this feeling.” However, virtue alone is not enough. “Despotic government has fear as its principle; and not many laws are needed for timid, ignorant, beaten-down people”, but republican government requires fixed, established laws adopted by the representatives of the people, which create a culture of support for the republic. “Laws must relate to the nature and the principle of the government that is established or that one wants to establish, whether those laws form it as do political laws, or maintain it, as do civil laws”

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 129-130). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

             Montesquieu also fears the destructive consequences of excessive taxation on liberty. He wrote, “These great advantages of liberty have caused the abuse of liberty itself. Because moderate government has produced remarkable results, this moderation has been abandoned; because large taxes have been raised, one has wanted to raise excessive ones; and, disregarding the hand of liberty that gave this present, one has turned to servitude, which refuses everything. Liberty has produced excessive taxes, but the effect of these excessive taxes is to produce servitude in their turn, and the effect of servitude is to produce a decrease in taxes.” Montesquieu argued that in “moderate states” the outright confiscation of property is destructive of the individual. “Confiscations would render the ownership of goods uncertain; . . . considered excessive taxation and the confiscation of private property an assault on equality—that is, the individual’s liberty and rights. Montesquieu’s view of equality, therefore, is consistent with Locke’s.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 130-131). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

             Montesquieu also viewed commerce as essential to the character of republican government. “[T]he spirit of commerce brings with it the spirit of frugality, economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tranquility, order, and rule.…” . . . Commerce also encourages prosperity. “In short, one’s belief that one’s prosperity is more certain in these states makes one undertake everything, and because one believes that what one has acquired is secure, one dares to expose it in order to acquire more; only the means for acquisition are at risk; now, men expect much of their fortune.…” Conversely, despotism begets hardship and poverty. “As for the despotic state, it is useless to talk about it. General rule: in a nation that is in servitude, one works more to preserve than to acquire; in a free nation, one works more to acquire than to preserve”. Montesquieu explained that unlike the poor in republican governments, who in freedom can better their circumstances, in despotic states the poor have no hope. “There are two sorts of poor peoples: some are made so by the harshness of the government, and these people are capable of almost no virtue because their poverty is a part of their servitude; the others are poor only because they have disdained or because they did not know the comforts of life, and these last can do great things because this poverty is a part of their liberty”.

            . . . Alternatively, “Every lazy nation is grave; for those who do not work regard themselves as sovereigns of those who work.”

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 131-133). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

CHAPTER NINE

­­­­­________________________________

THE INFLUENCE OF MONTESQUIEU ON THE FRAMERS

             . . . Although he was not the only authority relied on by the Framers, his reach was momentous. Montesquieu’s dread of despotism, commitment to political liberty, and keen intellect in analyzing both, together with his genius in applying philosophy to the mechanics of politics, were essential guideposts in establishing the Constitution and the American republic.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 158). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

             . . . It is obvious that at every turn, the Constitution’s Framers repudiated by words and actions—as did Montesquieu and Locke—the utopian designs of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, and Hobbes’s Leviathan, all of which had been known to them. Although Marx’s Communist Manifesto would come later, the debates and decisions of the Framers, and the Constitution itself, make abundantly clear that they would have been no more enticed by the dogma of the “workers’ paradise” than by any other form of tyranny disguised as utopia.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 160). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

CHAPTER TEN

­­­­­________________________________

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE WAS a French thinker and philosopher who lived from 1805 to 1859, and was greatly influenced by Montesquieu. He wrote Democracy in America, which actually combines two volumes—the first written in 1835 and the second written in 1840—based on his travels around America. Whereas Locke and Montesquieu, among others, provided the essential intellectual guidance to America’s Founders and Framers, Tocqueville’s insightful observations about democracy, and particularly the American Republic, several decades after its establishment, are prescient predictions about both the strengths of the American character as well as the allure and peril of what I broadly and repeatedly describe as utopianism.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 161). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

PART III

­­­­­________________________________

ON UTOPIANISM AND AMERICANISM

CHAPTER ELEVEN

­­­­­________________________________

POST-CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA

. . .

            . . . When the fifty-five delegates met in Philadelphia in 1787 at what became known as the Constitutional Convention, their purpose was not to transform American society but to preserve and protect it. In Federalist 51, James Madison later explained the decisive task this way: “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 184-185). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            The Framers believed they had done what they could, through the Constitution, to fend off tyranny by the few and the many.

            Still, the Anti-Federalists were not convinced, and ratification of the Constitution in several states was in jeopardy. Madison and others tried to alleviate the objections. In Federalist 39, Madison argued that the federal government had only “certain enumerated” powers and the states retained “residuary and inviolable sovereignty” over all else. In Federalist 45, he asserted that the proposed federal powers were “few and limited” and the power in the states remained “numerous and indefinite.” Nonetheless, Virginia’s George Mason, among many others, insisted that more was needed to contain federal authority and safeguard the states’ plenary power. In order to secure the Constitution’s ratification, the Federalists eventually agreed to introduce a set of amendments in the 1st Congress, which had been widely accepted in advance, further delineating and underscoring the limits of the federal government respecting its potential abuse against the individual and usurpation of the states. They became known as the Bill of Rights.

            Much has changed in America, and for the worse. I am not speaking of the natural change, evolution, and progress that flows from spontaneous interactions among free people, which is mostly desirable, essential, and regular. In fact, it is the disposition of the civil society. It is the reason for advancements and developments in new products, services, technologies, science, medicine, etc., and the source of the nation’s economic vibrancy and prosperity. Contrarily, the underlying factors and values that make possible the civil society, which center on the liberty and rights of the individual, have been and are being devitalized and stifled by utopian masterminds who substitute their preferences, objectives, and decisions—including rewarding their political allies and supporters—for a free people.

            The means by which these utopians amass their power is through the federal government. The federal government has become unmoored from its origins. As a result, America today is not strictly a constitutional republic, because the Constitution has been and continues to be easily altered by a judicial oligarchy that mostly enforces, if not expands, federal power. It is not strictly a representative republic, because so many edicts are produced by a maze of administrative departments that are unknown to the public and detached from its sentiment. It is not strictly a federal republic, because the states that gave the central government life now live at its behest. America is becoming, and in significant ways has become, a post-constitutional, democratic utopia of sorts. It exists behind a Potemkin-like image of constitutional republicanism. Its essential elements and unique features are being ingurgitated by an insatiable federal government that seeks to usurp and displace the civil society.

            Montesquieu warned of government’s threat to civil society unless it follows a moderate course. “May we be left as we are, said a gentleman of [a republican government]. Nature repairs everything”. Tocqueville believed that America had, effect, heeded Montesquieu’s counsel. “Nothing is more striking to a European traveler in the United States than the absence of what we term the government, or the administration.… The administrative power in the United States presents nothing either centralized or hierarchical in its constitution; this accounts for its passing unperceived.…” (I, 70–71) However, that was then. America has been transitioning from a society based on God-given inalienable rights protective of individual and community sovereignty to a centralized, administrative statism that has become a power unto itself. It appears nearly everywhere as a dominant fixture and intrusive force in daily life. If its interventions are with limits, the limits are increasingly difficult to define. The circle of liberty, which was once expansive, and within which the individual was largely unmolested in his manner and pursuits, is shrinking rapidly as less and less area is left for him to live without torment.

            The architects of America’s unmaking are too numerous to list, let alone examine with particularity. However, the most prominent include Woodrow Wilson, who merits at least brief attention.

            In 1908, as president of Princeton University and prior to ascending to the Oval Office in 1913, Wilson authored a treatise titled Constitutional Government in the United States. Yet, Wilson wrote not of the Constitution as is but as he wished it to be—that is, denuded of its carefully crafted limits on the central government.

            Wilson asserted, “No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.” Clearly, Wilson dismissed not only the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ announced purpose for American independence, but the Lockean exposition on natural law, the nature of man, the social compact establishing the civil society, and the essential ingredients of constitutional republicanism (shared broadly by most of the best thinkers of the European Enlightenment). In short, for Wilson, rights are awarded or denied the individual as determined by the government.

            Underscoring this point, Wilson argued, “Government is a part of life, and, with life, it must change, alike in its objects and in its practices; only this principle must remain unaltered,—this principle of liberty, that there must be the freest right and opportunity of adjustment. Political liberty consists in the best practicable adjustment between the power of the government and the privilege of the individual; and the freedom to alter the adjustment is as important as the adjustment itself for the ease and progress of affairs and the contentment of the citizen.”5 Notice Wilson’s use of the word privilege in lieu of inalienable rights when discussing the status of the individual in his utopia, underscoring the malleability of rights at the hands of masterminds.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 186-190). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Wilson argued for obstructing every avenue for preserving or reestablishing constitutional primacy by corrupting the Constitution itself. Having emptied it of its original purpose, the Constitution would become the vessel into which the utopians pour their agenda. The president is to be as powerful as he can, the courts are to rewrite the Constitution at will, and the Congress is to rule over state legislatures without limits. The federal government, therefore, could never be tamed. Its utopian direction could not be effectively altered. The entire American enterprise would be corrupted.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 197-198). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            As president, Roosevelt undertook a wholehearted and thoroughgoing makeover of the nation. No more uneven progress of which he had complained a decade or so earlier. Since I,20 and others, have written extensively about the New Deal’s details, there is no purpose in rehashing them here. However, it is well summed up by Roosevelt’s manifesto—his 1944 State of the Union speech, delivered near the end of his presidency, in which he proposes his Second Bill of Rights.

            Roosevelt told the nation, “This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty. As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

            Here Roosevelt cleverly but deceptively deviated from the Declaration of Independence. Inalienable rights belong to every individual and are not political but God-given and natural. The phrase “inalienable political rights,” as Roosevelt labeled them, is not unlike Wilson’s use of the word privilege, for they both imply the government has the authority to grant or deny the individual “the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Therefore, the individual has no real rights independent of those recognized by the government. . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 200-201). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Locke argued that not only does the individual have the right to preserve his property in the state of nature, but the primary purpose of the commonwealth is to protect his property against transgressors—which is linked inextricably to “his life, liberty, and estate”

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 202-203). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            . . . We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; of every family to a decent home; to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; to a good education.”

            These are not rights. These are tyranny’s disguise. By dominating the individual’s property, the utopian dominates the individual’s labor; by dominating the individual’s labor, he dominates the individual. There is little space between Roosevelt’s premise and the distorted historical views of Marx and Engels.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 203). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            The “living Constitution” is a constitution on its deathbed. . . . One hundred years after the publication of Wilson’s Constitutional Government in the United States and sixty-four years after Roosevelt delivered his Second Bill of Rights speech, presidential candidate Barack Obama declared, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Five days later, he was elected president. The counterrevolution, which is over a century old, proceeds more thoroughly and aggressively today than before.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 208). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

CHAPTER TWELVE

­­­­­________________________________

AMERITOPIA

IT BEARS EMPHASIZING—THE UTOPIAN mastermind seeks control over the individual. The individual is to be governed, not represented. His personal interests are of no interest. They are dismissed as selfish, unjust, and destructive. Societal deconstruction and transformation are not possible if tens of millions of individuals are free to live their lives and pursue their interests without constant torment, coercion, and if necessary, repression. In America, breaking from the past means breaking the individual’s spirit. He must be made to bend to the demands of the masterminds. He must be reshaped to serve the greater good.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 209). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            There are also those who delusively if not enthusiastically surrender their liberty for the mastermind’s false promises of human and societal perfectibility. He hooks them with financial bribes in the form of “entitlements.” And he makes incredible claims about indefectible health, safety, educational, and environmental policies, the success of which is to be measured not in the here and now but in the distant future.

            For these reasons and more, some become fanatics for the cause. They take to the streets and, ironically, demand their own demise as they protest against their own self-determination and for ever more autocracy and authoritarianism. When they vote, they vote to enchain not only their fellow citizens but, unwittingly, themselves. Paradoxically, as the utopia metastasizes and the society ossifies, elections become less relevant. More and more decisions are made by masterminds and their experts, who substitute their self-serving and dogmatic judgments—which are proclaimed righteous and compassionate—for the individual’s self-interests and best interests.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 210-211). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            But from where do the masterminds acquire their superhuman qualities? Are they born with them? Do they materialize upon election or appointment to high office? The truth is that no individual or assemblies of individuals are up to the task of managing society. They never have been and they never will be. They do not know what they do not know. . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 211). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            The Founders would be appalled at the nature of the federal government’s transmutation and the squandering of the American legacy. The federal government has become the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Its size and reach are vast. Its interventions are illimitable. As I am constrained by time, space, and the human condition, it is not possible to set out an all-inclusive examination of the state of things. However, certain examples, both general in nature and common to daily life, should help prove the point to those who remain open to reason and keen on liberty. If further evidence is desired, it abounds everywhere and permeates everyday existence. One need only make the effort to observe it.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 213). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

FEDERAL TAXING, SPENDING, AND DEBT

            Among the ten tenets in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels include “[a] heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” In America, the federal government imposes a staggering burden on a small fraction of taxpayers, as reflected in data released by the Internal Revenue Service for 2008. The top 1 percent of income earners paid 38 percent of personal income taxes while earning 20 percent of pretax income. The top 5 percent of income earners paid 58.7 percent of personal income taxes while earning 34.7 percent of pretax income. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of income earners paid only 2.7 percent of the total tax burden while earning 12.75 percent of the total pretax. In other words, the top 5 percent of income earners paid the majority of the total tax burden and the bottom half of income earners paid almost nothing.

            Gross domestic product (GDP) represents the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States in a given year. In 1930, the federal government spent 3.4 percent of GDP. In 1937 and 1939, in the midst of the Great Depression, federal expenditures consumed 8.6 percent and 10.3 percent of the GDP, respectively. During 1943 and 1944, in the midst of World War II, expenditures were 43.5 percent and 43.6 percent, respectively. In 1948, after the war, the percentage dropped to 11.5 percent. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, federal expenditures as a percentage of GDP hovered between 15 and 17 percent. During the 1970s and 1980s, these numbers ranged between 17 percent and 19 percent. In the 1990s, the percentage varied between 15 percent and 19 percent. By 2000 and 2001, there was a small drop to 14.8 percent in both years. Starting in 2009, the percentage reached 21.1 percent—the highest percentage of federal spending since 1946. And in 2010, federal expenditures jumped to 24 percent of GDP.

            Moreover, at the end of 2008, the federal debt as a percentage of GDP was at 40 percent. In 2010, it jumped to over 60 percent. For 2011, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the federal debt will reach about 70 percent of GDP, the highest level since right after World War II, and it will exceed 100 percent of GDP by 2012. Shortly thereafter, “the growing imbalance between revenues and spending combined with spiraling interest payments, would swiftly push debt to higher and higher levels. . . .”

            Furthermore, the most recent estimate of total unfunded obligations in dollar terms—for which no resources are currently available and will never be available—is $61.6 trillion, or $528,000 per household. This includes $25 trillion in unfunded obligations for Medicare, $21.4 trillion for Social Security, and $9.4 trillion for servicing debt.

REGULATIONS AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE

Congress has established a massive administrative state that serves as an unconstitutional fourth governmental branch and exercises legislative, executive, and judicial powers. It employs an army of more than two million bureaucrats who work for an untold number of departments, agencies, bureaus, divisions, boards, etc. They are highly compensated, with average salary and benefits more than double what employees in the private sector earn. Yet the administrative state operates mostly on autopilot, with minimal oversight by the constitutionally established branches of government. It monitors daily life and attempts to mechanically extinguish risk, dissimilarity, and choice, as well as that which has become routine and acceptable, in pursuit of societal perfection.

            The administrative state issues thousands of regulations and rulings every year, which have the force of law. The Competitive Enterprise Institute reported that the 2010 Federal Register, the official compendium of federal rules, totaled 81,405 pages, a record high. Since 2001, 38,700 final regulations have been promulgated. In 2010 alone, 3,573 rules were enacted by federal agencies. An evaluation by economists Nicole V. Crain and W. Mark Crain determined that private sector regulatory compliance costs amounted to $1.752 trillion in 2008, absorbing 11.9 percent of the total gross domestic product of the nation. Moreover, The Heritage Foundation found that the number of criminal offenses in the United States Code increased from 3,000 in the early 1980s to 4,000 by 2000, to over 4,450 by 2008. But the total number of criminal offenses is actually unknown even to the federal government, which establishes them. “Scores of federal departments and agencies have created so many criminal offenses that the Congressional Research Service (CRS) [the research arm of Congress] . . . admitted that it was unable to even count all of the offenses. The Service’s best estimate? ‘Tens of thousands.’ . . . Congress’s own experts do not have a clear understanding of the size and scope of federal criminalization.”

            However, even an abridged examination of the federal regulatory regime reveals the extent of its tentacles. For example, when constructing a home, federal rules set standards for insulation, gypsum board, treated lumber, windows, pipes, ventilation ducts, flooring, paint, etc. Homebuilders must comply with the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Ace, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. If water on the property meets the Clean Water Act definition of wetland, a permit must be secured by the property owner from the Army Corps of Engineers before the wet area can be filled with dirt. The definition of wetland is broad enough to include land that is not actually a wetland, such as “those areas that are inundated or saturated by surface or groundwater at a frequency and duration sufficient to support, and that under normal circumstances do support, a prevalence of vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil conditions.

            Inside the home, the federal government regulates washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, dishwasher detergents, microwave ovens, toilets, showerheads, heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, freezers, furnace fans and boilers, ceiling fans, dehumidifiers, lightbulbs, certain renovations, fitness equipment, clothing, baby cribs, pacifiers, rattles and toys, marbles, latex balloons, matchbooks, bunk beds, mattresses, mattress pads, televisions, radios, cell phones, iPods and other digital media devices, computer components, video recording devices, speakers, batteries, battery chargers, power supplies, stereo equipment, garage door openers, lawn mowers, lawn darts, pool slides, etc. The federal government also regulates toothpaste, deodorant, dentures, and most things in and around the medicine cabinet.

            Like the home, so much of the automobile is regulated by the federal government. The Heartland Institute reported that federal mandates set standards for “automobiles’ engines, bumpers, headrests, seat belts, door latches, brakes, fuel systems, and windshields” as well as side-door guard beams and energy-absorbing steering columns. Add to this airbags, a centered/rear brake light, and electronic stability control system. Moreover, the Cato Institute reported that Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards require new car fleets to average 35.5 mpg by 2016. For an automobile manufacturer, it means for every 15-mpg model, five models will have to average 50 mpg. The federal government is requiring that by 2025, automobile fleets average 54.5 mpg. Not only will the cost of these new standards be enormous, but CAFE standards have resulted in tens of thousands more deaths and injuries, since they require vehicles to be lighter.

            For years the federal government mandated that automobiles be sold only with labels on their windows that displayed their fuel efficiency levels. Beginning in 2013, all new passenger and trucks will be required to have more extensive window labels describing: emissions smog-forming pollution and carbon dioxide, as well as a 1-10 rating showing how a model’s emission levels compared to other new vehicles; projected annual fuel costs over a five-year period compared to other new vehicles; projected city, highway, and combined miles-per-gallon fuel efficiency performance; a separate estimate of how many gallons will be required to fuel a vehicle for one hundred miles of travel; and labels for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and electric vehicles, comparing pollution levels with gasoline-powered vehicles. The federal government requires that the labels be “useful” and “easy-to-read.”

            The federal government has instituted overlapping review processes and regulations, involving multiple agencies, discouraging the development of the fuel that powers the automobile. Once discovered and processed, the producers or importers of gasoline, diesel fuels, or fuel additives must register their products with the federal government before introducing them into the market. They must ensure that their gasoline is blended with the requisite percentages of specific types of biofuels. They are required to produce seasonal and regional variants. For renewable fuels, they must generate specific identification numbers to track their production and ensure compliance with mandated quotas.

            In addition to the scores of federal regulations respecting the transportation of fuel, the retail gasoline that dispenses the fuel to the consumer is also regulated by the federal government. The “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants: Gasoline Dispensing Facilities” imposes requirements for seals and vapor locks and regulates underground storage tanks. The retailer must also post the automotive fuel rating of all automotive fuel sold to customers. One label must be placed on each face of each dispenser through which automotive fuel is sold. If the retailer does not blend the gasoline with other gasoline, he must post the octane rating of the gasoline consistent with the octane rating certified to him by the dealer. If the gasoline is blended with other gasoline, he must post the rating consistent with his determination of the average, weighted by volume, of the octane ratings certified to him for each gasoline in the blend, or consistent with the lowest octane rating must be shown as a whole or half number equal to or less than the number  equal to or less than the number certified to the retailer or determined by him. If he does not blend alternative liquid fuels, he must post consistent with the automotive fuel rating certified to him. If he blended alternative liquid automotive fuels, he must possess a reasonable basis, consisting of competent and reliable evidence, for the automotive fuel rating he posts for the blend.

            Incidentally, that cinnamon doughnut the gasoline retailer sells in the snack food section of his store is supplied by a bakery that must comply with federal regulations requiring that all pulverizing of sugar or spice grinding be done in accordance with sugar dust limitation standards. Of course, there are all kinds of regulations that apply to virtually all other food items he stocks on his shelves.

            Indeed, not just food, but food labeling and packaging are subject to extensive federal regulation. New mandates require food labels to “disclose net contents, identity of commodity, and name and place of business of the product’s manufacturer, packer, or distributor.” Labels must also include the presence of major food allergens. Certain terms like “low sodium,” reduced fat,” and “high fiber” must meet strict government definitions. The federal government has defined other terms used for nutritional content including “low,” “reduced,” “high,” “free,” “lean,” “extra lean,” “good source,” “less,” and “lite.” If a food is described as “organic” it must meet the federal government’s definition. The food industry will also face new federal rules for “front-of-pack” calorie and nutrition labels and federally recommended nutritional criteria for foods making “dietary guidance” statements. For example, “Eat two cups of fruit a day for good health.” Federal regulations also involve “food contact materials,” including cutlery, dishes, glasses, cups, food processors, containers, etc.

            The administrative state is also foster-parenting the nation’s children. Aiming their regulatory power at such foods as Frosted Flakes, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United States Department of Agriculture, and Federal Trade Commission recently joined forces to propose we “voluntary” nutrition principles for the food industry, including setting limits on sugar, fats, and sodium in food marketed to children. “By the year 2016, all food products within the categories most heavily marketed directly to children should meet two basic nutrition principles. Such foods should be formulated to . . .  make a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet and minimize the content of nutrients that could have a negative impact on health and weight.” The Working Group’s proposals go beyond cereal and would affect snacks, candy, juice, soda, and even food served at restaurants. In addition to restricting the content of food, the Working Group is also entertaining proposals to regulate what can be included in product advertising. Tony the Tiger may be on the chopping block. Congress also passed legislation authorizing the administrative state to regulate nutrition in schools, including determining the amount of calories, fat, and sodium students should consume each day. The regulations may extend to food sold on school grounds during the day, such as pizza and bake sales at fund-raisers for school events, potentially ending those common practices.

            Restaurants have been hectored into accepting the “goals of smaller portions” to “include healthy offerings” in children’s meals. Federal requirements mandate that restaurant chains with at least twenty U.S. locations provide the calorie content of menu items. Chain restaurants are obligated to adhere to a host of requirements pertaining to the listing of food items on their menus, including “[a] statement on the menu or menu board that puts the calorie information in the context of a recommended total daily calorie intake.” Federal regulators are expanding the restaurant requirements to movie theater concessions, which will soon be compelled to disclose the calorie information for popcorn.

            So extensive is the federal government’s purview over food that the total federal budget for regulating nearly all aspects of food, from production to consumption, exceeds the entire country’s net farm income.

            The workplace is subject to a web of federal regulations. Where “public accommodation” is involved, such as a retail store or doctor’s office, there must be ramps, special bathrooms, widened doors, and curb cuts in the sidewalks. Even carpeting is scrutinized to make sure it is accessible. There are rules involving wages, taxes, health benefits, pension benefits, working conditions, environmental conditions, human resources, union elections, financial practices, and record keeping. The vending machine on the premises is regulated. It must have a “sign close to each article of food or selection button disclosing the amount of calories in a clear and conspicuous manner.

            . . . Private interests, including property rights, are of little regard and nearly impossible to safeguard. Moreover, private duty to institute federal regulations are overwhelmed by the coercive powers of the administrative state, including audits, fines, penalties, confiscation of licenses and property, and prosecution. The hugely detrimental effects on human progress—including preventing, sabotaging, and discouraging the development of new lifesaving and life-improving technologies, processes, and products; wealth and job creation; and individual industriousness and self-sufficiency—are fatal to societal vitality.

            There are those who blindly accept if not demand federal intrusion whenever and wherever it is said to improve “health, safety, education, and the environment.” For them, it is enough for the masterminds and their experts to claim their intention to improve man’s condition. These individuals, it seems, are the type of citizens More had in mind in Utopia, where the Prince “will declare how the citizens use themselves one towards another; what is familiar occupying and entertainment there is among the people; and what fashion they use in the distribution of everything.” However, even in  the smothering atmosphere of Leviathan, where liberty is the subject (the citizen) is regulated by the all-powerful sovereign, Hobbes acknowledged its practical limits. “For seeing there is no commonwealth in the world wherein there be rules enough set down for the regulating of all kinds of actions and words of men (as being a thing impossible), it followeth necessarily that in all kinds of actions by the laws preatemitted, men have the liberty of doing what their own reasons shall suggest for the most profitable of themselves. . . .” But do they? It is the endless pursuit of the utopian abstraction that tyrannizes the individual and society. As Charles de Montesquieu observed, “Countries which have been made inhabitable by the industry of men and which need that same industry in order to exist call for moderate government.”

            How did Americans cope before the advent of such a massive and intrusive administrative state? How did we feed, clothe, transport, and house ourselves? How did we make decisions about our health, safety, and well-being, and consumer items large and small? How did we raise our children and educate them, and manage our finances and retirement?

            During his travels in America, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled that “[t]he secondary affairs of society have never been regulated by [the central government’s] authority; and nothing has hitherto betrayed its desire of even interfering in them. . . .” He observed that if such decrees were ordered, the federal government “must entrust the execution of its will to agents over whom it frequently has no control and who it cannot perpetually direct. The townships, municipal bodies, and countries form so many concealed breakwaters. . . .” Yet he foretold democracy’s vulnerability to administrative despotism, although he had hoped America would avoid its infliction because of its unique history and circumstances. “Above this race of men stands an intense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood . . . it every day renders the exercise of free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all his uses of himself. . . . It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. . . .” “Such a power . . .  compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people” who are “reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

            America has become a society in which the people are wise enough to select their own leaders, but too incompetent to choose the right lightbulb.

“ENTITLEMENTS” AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE

            Programs such as Social Security and Medicare serve the utopian purpose, for they create a widespread dependency on a post-constitutional government and its masterminds. These schemes are built on the illusion that the individual has a vested ownership interest in, for example, a pension or insurance program. Through forced taxation, misleadingly referred to as “contributions,” the individual is encouraged to believe that he has, in effect, purchased a pension annuity or health insurance policy, which becomes his personal property. But his tax dollars are actually subsidizing others, and later others will subsidize his retirement and medical care in what is an elaborate and unsustainable undertaking. As such, it falls on future directions, including children and grandchildren yet born, to sort out the financial ruin and societal havoc let loose by the masterminds.

            Roosevelt understood, and intended, that individuals would rely on these misrepresentations and false promises and plan their retirements around them. After all, the hoax goes so far as to require that pay stubs show the funds deducted from every paycheck, which are then tracked by the federal government to presumably fund the individual’s personal retirement and medical benefits. Individuals logically conclude that they have a “right” or “entitlement” to the benefits for which they paid over a lifetime of work. Any attempt to alter the conditions and benefits in this arrangement is seen by the individual as a violation of his property rights and injustice. For the mastermind, it is an exploitable opportunity to ingratiate himself with the “masses” as he positions himself as the defender of those rights. That said, the mastermind frequently alters the arrangement, including to discern, or in bigger ways that are masked with self-serving declarations and cloaked in deceit. But the basic structure must never change, for the utopian must never relinquish control.

            As Roosevelt himself explained when criticized that the Social Security payroll tax was regressive, “Those [Social Security payroll] taxes were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll taxes there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.” By this Roosevelt meant that the utopian pursuit is an undying pursuit.

            In 1966, Social Security Administration official John Carroll put it this way: “It can scarcely be contested that earmarking of payroll taxes . . . reduced resistance to the imposition of taxes on low-income earners, made feasible tax increases at a time when they might not otherwise have been made, and has given trust fund programs a privileged position semi-detached from the remainder of the government. Institutionalists foresaw these advantages as means to graft the new programs into the social fabric.”

            Social Security is the single biggest program in the federal government. In 2010, it paid benefits to almost 54 million individuals.

            . . . in 2010, the CBO estimated that unfunded obligations for Medicare and Social Security are $25 trillion and $12.4 trillion respectively. Both programs are economically unviable.

            . . .

            The economic impossibility of these programs was never a utopian concern. Although cost-cutting, price controls, and benefit denials are instituted haphazardly, there can be no retreat from the overall mission and the centralized control and planning of the masterminds. Instead, further consolidation is nearly always the same answer. Centralized control over health-care decisions in particular has been a utopian priority from the earliest for it maximizes government authority over the individual. In the Republic, only those who were otherwise healthy, but suffered either an injury or seasonal malady, were entitled to medical care. Those who were chronically ill, old, or infirm were of no benefit to the Ideal City and denied treatment. In Utopia, magnificent hospitals were located near each city. “These hospitals be so well appointed, and with all things necessary to health so furnished . . .  there is no sick person in all the city that had not rather lie there than at home in his house.” However, those who suffered from incurable diseases or fatal conditions were urged to kill themselves to alleviate their pain and their burden on society.

            In America, for more than one hundred years, the utopians have insisted on the institution of government-run universal health care, promoting it in egalitarian terms. It was among the “rights” listed in Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights. Every person, he argued, has “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.” In his 1948 State of the Union speech, President Harry Truman asserted, “The gap in our social security structure is the lack of adequate provision for the Nation’s health. . . . I have often and strongly urged that this condition demands a national health program. The heart of the program must be a national system of payment for medical care based on well-tried insurance principles. . . . Our ultimate aim must be a comprehensive insurance system to protect all our people equally against insecurity and ill health.” Proclamations and proposals of this kind have littered the political landscape, and successful legislative efforts have moved America piecemeal in this direction.

            However, in 2009, with Barack Obama as president and a supermajority Democratic Congress, the utopian counterrevolution reached a new pinnacle, for there were no legislative obstacles and few remaining constitutional impediments to stop or even slow its advance. The utopians seized the opportunity they had long craved to centralize and consolidate control over the entire health-care system. Late on March 22, 2010, despite much arm-twisting, deal-making, and secret negotiating, the Democratic-controlled House barely passed the nearly three-thousand-page-long “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (PPACA) by a margin of 219 to 212. As with the initial adoption of Social Security and Medicare, there was no great clamor for the PPACA when it was adopted. Indeed, it was opposed by the public. A few days before passage, Gallup found that “more Americans believe the new legislation will make things worse rather than better for the U.S. as a whole, as well as for them personally,” and its latest poll was “consistent with previous Gallup polls showing a slight negative tilt when Americans are asked if they support the new plan.”

            Most in Congress who voted for the bill had not read it, not only because of its length and complexity, but because the final version had not been made available to them, or the public, until shortly before it was voted on in the House. As intended, its concealment prevented critical scrutiny of its particulars. As then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, just a few weeks prior to the vote, told the Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it. . . .”

            In a letter to his close friend James Madison after the Constitutional Convention adopted the Constitution and sent it to the states for ratification, Thomas Jefferson warned of the diabolical nature of this kind of legislating, which has as its purpose to keep both the diligent representative and the citizen in the dark. He told Madison, “The instability of our laws is really an immense evil. I think it would be well to provide in our constitution that there shall always be a twelvemonth between the ingrossing a gill and passing it: that it should then be offered to its passage without changing a word; and that if circumstances should be thought to require a speedier passage, it should take two thirds of both houses instead of a bare majority.”

            . . .

            Yet the most pernicious aspect of the PPACA has nothing to do with the health care per se. Specifically, the statue dictates that an individual who does not have health insurance but who can afford it must purchase a private health insurance policy, whether he wants to or not, or fact federal fines and penalties. In response to litigation challenging the constitutionality of this “individual mandate,” the Obama administration argues that the mandate is nothing more than Congress exercising its authority under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. However, the Commerce Clause provides, “The Congress shall have Power . . .  To regulate Commerce with Foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” The plain meaning of this language provides no support for the authority of federal government demands. Congress can tax interstate commerce, regulate interstate commerce, and even prohibit certain types of interstate commerce. But there is nothing in the history of the nation, let alone the history of the Constitution and the Commerce Clause, empowering Congress or any part of the federal government to regulate inactivity and compel an individual’s will and interests simply because the individual is living and breathing.

            Should such a specious and brazen contortion of fact and history prevail in the courts as a constitutionally recognized and legally enforceable imperative, the contours of utopian society and the mastermind’s authority would seem unconfined. Thereafter, the individual’s free will ceases to be free or his will. The mastermind’s duping becomes an unnecessary artifice, for the federal government can now flatly dictate the individual’s behavior, and the individual is without lawful recourse. Tyranny, then, will reveal itself, unvarnished and unequivocal, with future governmental trespasses on individual sovereignty both certain and more onerous.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (pp. 213-240). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

EPILOGUE

­­­­­________________________________

            . . . “Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology.”

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 241). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            It is neither prudential nor virtuous to downplay or dismiss the obvious—that America has already transformed into Ameritopia. . . .

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 244). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            Ironically and tragically, it seems that liberty and the constitution established to preserve it are not only essential to the individual’s well-being and happiness, but also an opportunity for the devious to exploit them and connive against them. Man has yet to devise a lasting institutional answer to this puzzle.

Levin, Mark R. (2012-01-17). Ameritopia (p. 246). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

            The essential question is whether, in America, the people’s psychology has been so successfully warped, the individual’s spirit is so thoroughly trounced, and the civil society’s institutions so effectively overwhelmed that revival is possible. Have too many people overcome the constant and relentless influences of ideological indoctrination, economic manipulation, and administrative coerciveness, or have they become hopelessly entangled in and dependent on a ubiquitous federal government? Have the Pavlovian appeals to radical egalitarianism, and the fomenting of jealousy and faction through class warfare and collectivism, conditioned the people to accept or even demand compulsory uniformity as just and righteous? Is it accepted as legitimate and routine that the government has sufficient license to act whenever it claims to do so for the good of the people and against the selfishness of the individual?

            No society is guaranteed perpetual existence. But I have to believe that the American people are not ready for servitude, for if this is our destiny, and the destiny of our children, I cannot conceive that any people, now or in the future, will successfully resist it for long. I have to believe that this generation of Americans will not condemn future generations to centuries of misery and darkness.

            The Tea Party movement is a hopeful sign. Its member come from all walks of life and every corner of the country. These citizens have the spirit and enthusiasm of the Founding Fathers, proclaim the principles of individual liberty and rights in the Declaration, and insist on the federal government’s compliance with the Constitution’s limits. This explains the utopian fury against them. They are astutely aware of the peril of the moment. But there are also the Pollyannas and blissfully indifferent citizens who must be roused and enlisted lest the civil society continue to unravel and eventually dissolve, and the despotism long feared take firm hold.

            Upon taking the oath of office, on January 20, 1981, in his first inaugural address President Ronald Reagan told the American people:

     If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of an to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.

            So, my fellow countrymen, which do we choose—Ameritopia or America?

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

By THOMAS JEFFERSON

Electronically Developed by MobileReference

autobiography

1743 — 1790

With the Declaration of Independence

Congress proceeded . . . to consider the declaration of Independance which had been reported & lain on the table the Friday preceding, and on Monday referred to a commee of the whole. The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many. For this reason those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offence. The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 256-262). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Review and Reform of the Law

. . . The restoration of the rights of conscience relieved the people from taxation for the support of a religion not theirs; . . .

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 687-688). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Governor of Virginia

Soon after my leaving Congress in Sep. ’76, to wit on the last day of that month, I had been appointed, with Dr. Franklin, to go to France, as a Commissioner to negotiate treaties of alliance and commerce with that government. . . .

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 704-706). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

The French Revolution

. . . I was daily dunned by a company who had formerly made a small loan to the U S. the principal of which was now become due; and our bankers in Amsterdam had notified me that the interest on our general debt would be expected in June; that if we failed to pay it, it would be deemed an act of bankruptcy and would effectually destroy the credit of the U S. and all future prospect of obtaining money there; that the loan they had been authorized to open, of which a third only was filled, and now ceased to get forward, and rendered desperate that hope of resource.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1182-1185). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Returning to America [from Paris, France; 1889]

. . . I received a letter from the President, Genl. Washington, by express, covering an appointment to be Secretary of State. I received it with real regret. My wish had been to return to Paris, where I had left my household establishment, as if there myself, and to see the end of the Revolution, which, I then thought would be certainly and happily closed in less than a year. I then meant to return home, to withdraw from Political life, into which I had been impressed by the circumstances of the times, to sink into the bosom of my family and friends, and devote myself to studies more congenial to my mind. In my answer of Dec. 15. I expressed these dispositions candidly to the President, and my preference of a return to Paris; but assured him that if it was believed I could be more useful in the administration of the government, I would sacrifice my own inclinations without hesitation, and repair to that destination; this I left to his decision. I arrived at Monticello on the 23d. of Dec. where I received a second letter from the President, expressing his continued wish that I should take my station there, but leaving me still at liberty to continue in my former office, if I could not reconcile myself to that now proposed. This silenced my reluctance, and I accepted the new appointment. . . .

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1537-1546). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Summary

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801-1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of republicanism in the United States. . . .

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1592-1594). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

. . . Jefferson supported the separation of church and state and was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786).

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1597-1598). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

. . . When President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 he said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House- with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Jefferson has been consistently ranked by scholars as one of the greatest U.S. presidents.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1602-1604). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Education

In 1752, Jefferson began attending a local school run by William Douglas, a Scottish minister. At the age of nine, Jefferson began studying Latin, Greek, and French. In 1757, when he was 14 years old, his father died. Jefferson inherited about 5,000 acres (20 km²) of land and dozens of slaves. He built his home there, which eventually became known as Monticello.

. . .

In 1760 Jefferson entered The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg at the age of 16; he studied there for two years, graduating with highest honors in 1762. At William & Mary, he enrolled in the philosophy school and studied mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy under Professor William Small, who introduced the enthusiastic Jefferson to the writings of the British Empiricists, including John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton (Jefferson called them the “three greatest men the world had ever produced”). He also perfected his French, carried his Greek grammar book wherever he went, practiced the violin, and read Tacitus and Homer. A keen and diligent student, Jefferson displayed an avid curiosity in all fields and, according to the family tradition, frequently studied fifteen hours a day. His closest college friend, John Page of Rosewell, reported that Jefferson “could tear himself away from his dearest friends to fly to his studies.”

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1611-1622). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Life as a lawyer

. . . Jefferson was likely the father of several children with his slave Sally Hemings, with whom he was said to have a long term sexual relationship. (See Jefferson DNA data).

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1635-1637). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Drafting a declaration

Jefferson served as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress beginning in June 1775, soon after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. When Congress began considering a resolution of independence in June 1776, Jefferson was appointed to a five-man committee to prepare a declaration to accompany the resolution. The committee selected Jefferson to write the first draft probably because of his reputation as a writer. The assignment was considered routine; no one at the time thought that it was a major responsibility. Jefferson completed a draft in consultation with other committee members, drawing on his own proposed draft of the Virginia Constitution, George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and other sources.

Jefferson showed his draft to the committee, which made some final revisions, and then presented it to Congress on June 28, 1776. After voting in favor of the resolution of independence on July 2, Congress turned its attention to the declaration. Over several days of debate, Congress made a few changes in wording and deleted nearly a fourth of the text, most notably a passage critical of the slave trade, changes that Jefferson resented. On July 4, 1776, the wording of the Declaration of Independence was approved. The Declaration would eventually become Jefferson’s major claim to fame, and his eloquent preamble became an enduring statement of human rights.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1645-1655). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

State legislator

     While in the state legislature Jefferson proposed a bill to eliminate all crimes punishable to death in Virginia except murder and treason. His effort to reform the death penalty law was defeated by just one vote, and Virginia retained such crimes as rape as punishable to death until the 1960s.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1659-1661). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Governor of Virginia

. . . he later became the founder of the University of Virginia, which was the first university in the United States at which higher education was completely separate from religious doctrine.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1665-1666). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Jefferson’s death

Jefferson died on the Fourth of July, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. He died a few hours before the death of John Adams, his compatriot in their quest for independence, then great political rival, and later friend and correspondent. Adams is often rumored to have referenced Jefferson in his last words, unaware of his passing.

Although he was born into one of the wealthiest families in the United States, Thomas Jefferson was deeply in debt when he died.

Jefferson’s trouble began when his father-in-law died, and he and his brothers-in-law quickly divided the estate before its debts were settled. It made each of them liable for the whole amount due- which turned out to be more than they expected.

Jefferson sold land before the American Revolution to pay off the debts, but by the time he received payment, the paper money was worthless amid the skyrocketing inflation of the war years. Cornwallis ravaged Jefferson’s plantation during the war, and British creditors resumed their collection efforts when the conflict ended. Jefferson was burned again when he co-signed notes for a relative who reneged on debts in the financial Panic of 1819. Only Jefferson’s public stature prevented creditors from seizing Monticello and selling it out from under him during his lifetime.

After his death, his possessions were sold at auction. In 1831, Jefferson’s 552 acres (223 hectares) were sold to James T. Barclay for $7,000- equivalent to $141,181.00 today. Thomas Jefferson is buried on his Monticello estate, in Charlottesville, Virginia. In his will, he left Monticello to the United States to be used as a school for orphans of navy officers. . . .

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1741-1753). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Political Philosophy

His opposition to the Bank of the United States was fierce: “I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” Nevertheless Madison and Congress, seeing the financial chaos caused by the lack of a national bank in the War of 1812, disregarded his advice and created the Second Bank of the United States in 1816.

Jefferson believed that each individual has “certain inalienable rights.” That is, these rights exist with or without government; man cannot create, take, or give them away. It is the right of “liberty” on which Jefferson is most notable for expounding. He defines it by saying “rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” Hence, for Jefferson, though government cannot create a right to liberty, it can indeed violate it. And the limit of an individual’s rightful liberty is not what law says it is but is simply a matter of stopping short of prohibiting other individuals from having the same liberty. A proper government, for Jefferson, is one that not only prohibits individuals in society from infringing on the liberty of other individuals, but also restrains itself from diminishing individual liberty.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1800-1810). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

. . . Jefferson’s dedication to “consent of the governed” was so thorough that he believed that individuals could not be morally bound by the actions of preceding generations. This included debts as well as law. . . .

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1824-1825). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

. . . He also advocated that the national debt should be eliminated. He did not believe that living individuals had a moral obligation to repay the debts of previous generations.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1829-1830). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Views on the carrying of arms

. . . “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms.. disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1837-1839). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Views on the judiciary

Trained as a lawyer, Jefferson was a great writer but never a good speaker or advocate and never comfortable in court. He believed that judges should be technical specialists but should not set policy.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1842-1843). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Religious views

Though his religious views diverged widely from the orthodox Christianity of his day, throughout his life Jefferson was intensely interested in theology, spirituality, and biblical study. His religious commitment is probably best summarized in his own words as he proclaimed that he belonged to a sect with just one member.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1855-1858). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Separating Church and State

. . . in 1786, the Virginia General Assembly passed Jefferson’s Bill for Religious Freedom, which he had first submitted in 1779 and was one of only three accomplishments he put in his own epitaph. The law read:

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

In his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson stated: “Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make half the world fools and half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world…”

Jefferson sought what he called a “wall of separation between Church and State,” which he believed was a principle expressed by the First Amendment. This phrase has been cited several times by the Supreme Court in its interpretation of the Establishment Clause. In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, he wrote:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”

Regarding the choice of some governments to regulate religion and thought, Jefferson stated:

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. “

Deriving from this statement, Jefferson believed that the Government’s relationship with the Church should be indifferent, religion being neither persecuted nor give any special status.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1878-1894). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

While the debate over Jefferson’s understanding over the separation of Church and state is far from being settled, as are his particular religious tenets, his dependence on divine Providence is not nearly as ambiguous. As he stated, in his second inaugural address:

I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with His providence and our riper years with His wisdom and power, and to whose goodness I ask you to join in supplications with me that He will so enlighten the minds of your servants, guide their councils, and prosper their measures that whatsoever they do shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship, and approbation of all nations. “

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1907-1913). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Presidency

. . . “Although Jefferson may have been a Deist at one time, by 1800 he probably was a Unitarian. His private writings from the period reveal a profound regard for Christ’s moral teachings and a deep interest in the gospels and comparative religion.”

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1915-1917). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Sally Hemings controversy

Whether Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings has been the subject of considerable controversy since the 19th century. Most historians now believe that he did have a long-term relationship with her and was the father of her children. He was only in his late 30s when his wife died, but he promised her not to marry again. In his society, it was common for widowers of means to have relationships with enslaved women as companions, as his father-in-law John Wayles did for years with Betty Hemings after his third wife died. Many elite white men denied or hid such relationships, but the mixed-race children born attested to the facts.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 1985-1990). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Monuments and Memorials

April 13, 1943, the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, the Jefferson Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. The interior includes a 19-foot (6m) statue of Jefferson and engravings of passages from his writings. Most prominent are the words which are inscribed around the monument near the roof: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”.

Jefferson, Thomas (2009-01-03). Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson (mobi) (Kindle Locations 2014-2017). MobileReference. Kindle Edition.

Second Edition

by Hugh Brogan

Copyright © Addison Wesley Longman, 1985, 1999

BOOK ONE

The Settlement

The Roots of English Colonization

. . .

Human misfortune on a national or continental scale has been one of the most constant forces behind emigration to America from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 17). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

the London Company founded the first enduring English plantation, on 24 May 1607, on the James river in Virginia. It was small, and already unfortunate, since of the company of 144 that had embarked in three little ships (Susan Constant, Godspeed, Discovery) only 105 had survived the voyage. The place they founded, Jamestown, has long been abandoned.11 But with Jamestown begins the history proper of the people known as Americans.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 18). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Planting of Virginia 1607-76

. . .

Tobacco could be sold at a profit, though the profit might be uncertain, irregular and low. Anyone could grow it. To the unskilled Virginians these two arguments were irresistible. They took the plunge, and soon the first great boom in American history was under way. At one stage even the streets of Jamestown were sown with tobacco; and the zeal to plant more and more greatly encouraged the spread of population up the James river and, in the thirties, up and down the coast, on every inlet between the river Potomac and the Dismal Swamp. This movement was in part caused by the fact that tobacco exhausted the soil in seven years, so that tobacco planters were constantly in search of new lands. This explains also the steady move westward of Virginians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the eventual ruin of Virginia when, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the state had run out of fresh land suitable for cultivation.

. . .

. . . the most important being the system of indentures, by which servants were brought out from England at the planters’ expense, bound to service for a term of years, and then given their freedom and a little land. But indentures proved unsatisfactory: the servants had constantly to be replaced, were frequently disobedient and unreliable, and as frequently ran away and made good their escape.

However, a solution was found, and it may be wondered why it was not found sooner, as Europeans had been buying African slaves since the fifteenth century and carrying them to the Americas since early in the sixteenth. Sir John Hawkins had shipped slaves to the Spanish colonies in the 1560s and found an eager market for them.

. . .

Dutch traders brought Africans to Virginia for the first time in 1619, and more followed, in tiny numbers, over the next few decades. For the first two generations, Africans were treated, it seems, much like other indentured servants, even (in some cases) to the distribution of land to them when their time of service was up.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 27-28). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The turning point came with the first of the great American uprisings, Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676. As leader of the poorer planters, Nathaniel Bacon, a distant relation of the great Francis, seized control of Virginia from the royal Governor, Sir George Berkeley, on the grounds that Berkeley opposed making war on the Susquehanna Indians and seizing their lands. Bacon and his following were true revolutionaries, planning to overturn the political and social structure of the colony, abolish the poll tax, and enlist poor freemen, indentured servants and African slaves in their forces. They burned Jamestown to the ground. But Bacon died of dysentery, and Berkeley then rallied enough strength to suppress the rebellion. To prevent any recurrence of these events, royal authority was placed firmly on the side of the richer settlers; their attempts to grab all the best land in Virginia were endorsed, and Africans were rapidly excluded from the privileges of civil society (if free) or thrust down into hopeless servitude (if slaves). A new gentry emerged, which quickly enriched itself by its effective monopoly of land, labour and political power. The price would be paid, for nearly two centuries, by the slaves. It was a tragic development, but given the combination of tobacco, a hierarchical social structure both in England and her colonies, and the greed of seventeenth-century Englishmen, it was probably inevitable.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 29). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Planting of New England 1604-c. 1675

. . .

. . . Protestantism had a built-in democratic tendency in that it encouraged the literate to search the Scriptures for themselves and act in the light of what they found there.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 31). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Conversion was the moment when God’s grace entered the soul and began the work of its redemption. It was a moment predestined from Creation, as St Paul taught:3 ‘Whom he did predestinate, them he also called;’ it was the moment when Hell’s gates closed: ‘Whom he called, them he also justified;’ the moment when the doors of the Celestial City opened: ‘Whom he justified, them he also glorified.’ It was a moment that enlightened and rejoiced the lives of tens of thousands of plain people. It assured them that although life would continue to daunt them with its problems and temptations, they had only to fight ceaselessly against sin within them and without them, and whatever wounds they took in the battle, victory was sure.

It is easy to mistake the nature of this Puritanism. The word today generally connotes a loveless respectability, a Philistine narrowness, Biblical idolatry or a neurotic hatred of other people’s pleasures. ‘Show me a Puritan,’ said H. L. Mencken, ‘and I’ll show you a son-of-a-bitch.’ But while it would be absurd to deny that a certain censoriousness was present in Puritanism from the start, it would be equally absurd to let the degenerate aspect it wears today conceal the splendours of its prime. Certain of their salvation, the best Puritans were brave, cheerful, intelligent and hard-working. One of their preachers urged them to be ‘merry in the Lord, and yet without lightness; sad and heavy in heart for their own sins, and the abominations of the land, and yet without discouragement or dumpishness’. The quality of Puritan piety is best savoured in The Pilgrim’s Progress. John Bunyan, the old Ironside, knew how to make his simple image – one that had long been dear to Puritans, indeed to all Englishmen: Hakluyt’s continuator called his book Purchas, His Pilgrims5 – of life as a journey and a battle, not only true, but startlingly important. It is easy, reading Bunyan, to feel what immense strength those of his faith derived from their belief that the promises Christ made were literally true. For them, the trumpets were sure to sound on the other side.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 32-33). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . When the Mayflower company contemplated its future after reaching Cape Cod it seemed plain that such a group, far from all the sanctions and blessings of regular English government, could not thrive without an agreed constitution. Accordingly the Saints (remembering the covenant by which they, like all Separatist churches, had established themselves) and the Strangers (that is, the non-Saints) agreed on the Mayflower Compact – signed on 11 November by most of the company’s adult males. In content it was no more than a covenant constituting the signatories a body politic, which would issue and abide by its own laws; but the manner in which it was arrived at was, if not democratic, at least self-governing, like the Separatist churches . . .

The Mayflower Compact was the first of innumerable agreements arrived at by the American people as they founded new settlements. Its example was unconsciously but exactly followed in seventeenth-century New England, in eighteenth-century Kentucky, throughout revolutionary America, and everywhere on the nineteenth-century frontier: in Texas, California, Iowa and Oregon. These agreements enabled generations of settlers to feel that their lives, property and prospects were secure under the rule of law, and they conditioned American political assumptions, so that the leaders of revolutionary Maryland could assert without fear of contradiction that ‘All government of right originates from the people, is founded in compact only.’ All this prepared the way for the greatest compact of all, the Constitution of the United States. The Pilgrims were thus forerunners of even more than was prophesied to them from England in 1623, when their associates wrote: ‘Let it not be grievous unto you that you have been instruments to break the ice for others who come after with less difficulty; the honour shall be yours to the world’s end.’ The Pilgrims had shown what could be done; and others soon profited from their example.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 40-41). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . in 1632 the settlers insisted on the principle of no taxation without representation (though not in those words).

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 45). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Land was plentiful; and, until the looming of the English Civil War dried up the supply of new immigrants, there was, as has been stated,23 an eager market for agrarian products of all kinds. Prices collapsed, it is true, in 1642; but they gradually recovered as New England sailors found markets abroad. Soon the demands of the market made themselves felt again on the farm; and, thus assured of profit, the farmers opened up more and more new land. They could not be kept within range of the towns and the ministers, and their land-hunger made them somewhat unreceptive to exhortations. ‘Outlying places’, said one preacher, ‘were nurseries of ignorance, profaneness and atheism.’ Said another, ‘The first that came over hither for the Gospel could not tell what to do with more land than a small number of acres, yet now men more easily swallow down so many hundreds and are not satisfied.’ A third exclaimed, ‘Sure there were other and better things the People of God came hither for than the best spot of ground, the richest soil.’ No doubt: but the People of God chose to forget it. They chose to live in America, not as members of a close-knit community of piety, but as individualist farmers, each seeking his and his family’s salvation, economically and spiritually, on his own. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 48-49). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . A sense of humiliating failure haunted the ministers at the end of the seventeenth century. New England was no longer the land of the covenant. They could take no comfort in its sublunar achievements: a high, and improving, standard of living for all; a free and stable society; a thriving life of the mind and spirit. Where was Zion?

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 50). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Indians 1492-1920

. . .

Luckily for the intruders, the tribes were commonly happy to fight each other. They had the usual human grievances against their neighbours, and war was a principal occupation among them. Success in war was the leading source of individual prestige. Indeed, before the European arrival, wars seem to have been waged in many cases solely to provide chances for warriors to win this prestige. It was a lethal game, with elaborate rules, and so addicted were most of the Indians to it that in the early eighteenth century the Cherokees could remark, ‘We cannot live without war. Should we make peace with the Tuscaroras, we must immediately look out for some other nation with whom we can engage in our beloved occupation.’ The skill gained in this wilderness conflict proved invaluable for attacking or defending European possessions.

Furthermore, only Indians could provide the commodities of the peltries trade; and there was much money to be made out of them. For as time went on the Indians grew ever more dependent on European goods. By the same token they grew more and more manipulable. Those who controlled the supply of essential articles such as guns controlled their customers. And so the curtain rose on the tragedy of the native peoples of North America.

There had been a long prologue. It is easy to forget, when studying the comparatively gentle rule of Spain north of Mexico (at any rate after the Pueblo revolt), what the conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas had involved. The crimes of the Anglo-Americans pale beside those of Cortès and his successors. Hundreds of thousands of Indians were killed outright; even more were worked slowly and horribly to death as slaves. The fact that European diseases were even more destructive hardly excuses the conquistadores. One Carib Indian, about to be burned to death after a rebellion, refused baptism, though it could take him to heaven, because he feared he would find more Christians there. Genocide is an unpleasant word, but it seems appropriate here. If the North American Indians had known what had happened south of the Rio Grande, they might well have trembled at the future.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 54-55). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Plains culture was the outcome of a meeting between the Indians and the Europeans. The same was true in the dense eastern forest. The horse was less valuable there, but brass kettles replaced earthenware cooking pots, English cloth replaced attire of fur and hide, and, above all, guns replaced bows and arrows. Everywhere the Indians welcomed the coming of European animals and artefacts with joy, and their cultures burst into brief, beautiful flower.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 57). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The social bigotry of the Anglo-Americans, . . . was an affliction to the Indians; but their diseases were more punishing still. General Smallpox, General Cholera, swept the American plains as ruthlessly as their colleagues Janvier and Février did the Russian; and they were aided by measles, dysentery, scarlet fever, venereal disease, influenza and tuberculosis. The Europeans can hardly be blamed for spreading these infections,11 from which, after all, they suffered, if less catastrophically, themselves. Nor should they be condemned en masse for the worst disease of all, alcoholism. Fermented and distilled drinks were unknown to the pre-Columbian Indians, so they had as little resistance to alcoholism as to smallpox, and for some reason, yet to be explained, their social organization was incapable of developing customs by which drinking could be rendered as comparatively innocuous as it is among black and white Americans (not that that is saying very much). From earliest times the white governments saw the danger and made earnest efforts to keep firewater away from the Indians. They were supported by all the wiser heads among the tribes. But these efforts were largely defeated by the mania for booze and by the readiness of too many whites to supply it in the desired, limitless quantity. The English traders found that glass beads, hatchets, hoes, knives, shirts, coats, hats, shoes, stockings, breeches, blankets, thread, scissors, guns, flints, powder, bullets, tobacco, pipes, looking glasses, ostrich plumes, silver medals, yards of silk and bales of cloth (to name only some items of the trade) were often less desired than the means of getting dead drunk. ‘Brandy goes off incomparably well,’ they discovered, and was very easy to supply, particularly if adulterated. Drunk, an Indian was incapable of insisting on proper payment for his goods, and he seemed to be incapable of resisting the chance to get drunk. There were other consequences, however, than ruined Indians. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 58-59). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Indian could no more understand the Europeans’ conception of perpetual personal title than they could understand his conception of none. Nor could he understand the accumulating itch. Why did the People Greedily Grasping for Land want more acres than they needed to grow food on? Why did they build houses that would outlast their occupants? Why were Indians called thieves for helping themselves to what they needed, as they always had? Above all, why, even when he had acquired it honestly, did the white man insist that land he had bought became his exclusively, and for all time? How could he make such a claim? . . .

issue of land cannot be shirked. Although, from one point of view, the mystery of the relations between the English settlers and the North American Indians cannot ever be understood, any more than any other great evil (for why should men oppress each other?), the temptation to which the settlers succumbed is all too plain, and all too familiar. It was the usual temptation to believe that what we want with passion must be right; and that the means of obtaining it cannot be sinful. The passion for landed property, that guarantee of independence, prosperity and prestige, which, as we have seen, uprooted the English and carried them across the Atlantic to Virginia and New England, also carried them and those who came to join them into the practice of atrocious crimes. Land-hunger is too weak a phrase, for hunger can be sated. It were better called land-lust: it was as insatiable as the sea. Like all great desire, it was fertile in rationalizations which satisfied those who felt it, if no one else. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 65). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Thus under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 the 60,000 Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes were moved from the lands they had always occupied, lands which were guaranteed to them on the honour of the United States as pledged in treaty after treaty, to lands far across the Mississippi – lands which in due time were also to be filched from them. Many other Indians, until the very end of the nineteenth century, were to be uprooted. But the Great Removal sticks in the memory because of its scale, and because of the ostentatious bad faith of all concerned, from President Jackson down to Greenwood Leflore, a renegade Choctaw chief, and because of the immense human suffering involved.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 67). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

BOOK TWO

The Old Order and the American Revolution

Thirteen Colonies c. 1675-1763

. . .

. . . Cotton Mather, deplored the appearance on the streets of Boston of beggars, whom ‘our Lord Jesus Christ himself hath expressly forbidden us to countenance’ (it was God’s law that men work, not beg), and lamented that ‘idleness, alas! idleness increases in the town exceedingly; idleness, of which there never came any goodness!’ . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 89). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Cotton Mather, deplored the appearance on the streets of Boston of beggars, whom ‘our Lord Jesus Christ himself hath expressly forbidden us to countenance’ (it was God’s law that men work, not beg), and lamented that ‘idleness, alas! idleness increases in the town exceedingly; idleness, of which there never came any goodness!’ . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 89). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . The Awakening doubtless saved souls, but it split churches; indeed, its emphasis on the importance of individual experience may be said to have democratized American religion. Many men of good sense, good nature or good education disliked its emotionalism and turned to deism, unitarianism or infidelity. Many congregations split into New Light (ranting) and Old Light (respectable) portions; and a gulf opened, which has not yet closed, between the liberal, rationalizing prosperous religion of the town and the fundamentalism of the economically and intellectually backward countryside; and also between the religion of the urban rich and the urban poor. It was an Old Light Presbyterian minister who sniffed that ‘the vulgar everywhere are inclined to enthusiasm’. In Connecticut the dispute spilled over into politics and became a quarrel of secular parties that was still bitter during the Revolutionary period.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 91-92). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . The rum-trade became the only dependable staple, and that in turn depended on importing molasses from the French West Indies, where it was cheaper than in the English, a practice ineffectively forbidden by the Molasses Act of 1733. The merchants of Boston turned smugglers rather than obey the law, but other, heavier blows were in store for them. Britain drifted into war with France in the forties, and Massachusetts bore most of the burden in the colonies. Her sailors were pressed into the Royal Navy; many of her young men were killed; and heavy taxes hampered economic life still more. Worse, it was decided to fall in with the imperial government’s desire to replace the inflationary and unsound paper money then current with a metallic currency; accordingly in 1749 the paper money was called in and coins became the only legal tender. But they were in very short supply, so that there was no money to finance new ventures. As a result, merchants were soon lamenting that ‘trade is quite dead’ and that ‘all trade seems to be stagnated; and little else goes on but drinking’. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 92). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . William Penn (1644–1718) intended ‘a holy experiment’, a state to be run on Quaker lines, as John Winthrop had planned his city on a hill. Like the older dream, the Quaker vision faded. In 1721 a rapidly increasing crime rate induced the Friends to abandon their mild penal code for an extremely stiff one: the crime wave continued to mount. One historian has unkindly remarked that eighteenth-century Quakers preferred the counting-house to the meetinghouse. He might equally well have remarked that they preferred the family farm, for the settlers in Pennsylvania brushed aside, quite as firmly as the New Englanders had done and even more promptly, all attempts to make them live in compact villages, centring their lives on the meeting-house and cultivating their lands co-operatively. They were resolute individualists; and it was to be in large part from their settlements that the tradition of the small farm was eventually to spread into the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, thereby becoming a sacred, because so universal, detail of the American way of life.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 93). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Coming to speak of Pennsylvania, that colony possesses great liberties above all other English colonies, inasmuch as all religious sects are tolerated there. We find there Lutherans, Reformed, Catholics, Quakers, Mennonites or Anabaptists, Herrnhuter or Moravian Brethren, Pietists, Seventh Day Baptists, Dunkers, Presbyterians, Newborn, Freemasons, Separatists, Freethinkers, Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans, Negroes and Indians. The Evangelicals and Reformed, however, are in the majority. But there are many hundred unbaptized souls there that do not even wish to be baptized.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 94). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . By 1760 Philadelphia had a population of 23,750, and was the largest town in the colonies, leading its nearest rival, New York (swelling from wartime profits), by more than 5,000. By 1775 it had nearly doubled, having 40,000 inhabitants, . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 96). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) is, of all great Americans, the one I should most like to dine with in heaven. He was physically unremarkable, though he had a sagacious, twinkling face, a strong, sturdy build, and spectacles. His character was an enchanting blend of simplicity, drollery, shrewdness, energy, intellectual curiosity, benevolence and integrity. Apart from touches of endearing vanity, his only weakness was for women: he confessed that in youth he could not resist them, and in old age he was still an incorrigible flirt. He was middle-class to the core: the prophet of the cult of rising in the world by hard work and honest worth. I can see nothing wrong in this, though others have professed to do so. Franklin had a genius for enjoying life without ever failing in his duty to society and to his conscience. He was a walking paradox: a hedonistic Puritan. Thus his life well illustrates, among other things, an extraordinary transformation that was threatening Puritanism in the eighteenth century.

For though Franklin early became a deist, he was born in Boston of perfectly orthodox parents. They could not afford to keep him at school for more than a year, but ‘I do not remember when I could not read’: he educated himself, with great success, eventually mastering French, Italian, Spanish and Latin, as well as some degree of arithmetic, and reading extensively in everything English that came his way, which, as he was a printer by trade, was a great deal. In due course he became a more than competent natural scientist. At first he worked for his elder brother James in Boston; but young Benjamin grew weary of his apprenticeship and ran away to New York. There was no work for him there, so he found his way to Philadelphia, where, after a few years, he began a rapid rise to great prosperity.

His printing business throve, and by 1748 he was rich enough to retire, young though he was, and do as he pleased – a fact which in itself tells us much about the growth of his chosen city; but it is the extraordinary variety and number of his occupations that best convey the nature of life in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. His most famous ventures, next to his political career, were his experiments with electricity, in the course of which he proved the single nature of the ‘fluid’, demonstrated the identity of lightning and electricity, and with characteristic, and characteristically American, practicality invented the lightning-rod – no small thing this, for American thunderstorms are ferocious and the largely wooden towns of colonial America suffered again and again from devastating fires. Franklin well knew this: he had pioneered a volunteer fire-fighting society at Philadelphia, an example which was widely followed. (This was also characteristically American in that a private group of citizens undertook to do what elsewhere was left to the authorities.) It was as an electrical scientist that he first attained international celebrity and was awarded honorary degrees at St Andrew’s (1759) and Oxford (1762), so that it is only proper to speak of him in later life as Dr Franklin. (He loved the title.) His great reputation at home was founded on his journalism. At this time the power of the newly mature press to influence opinion and conduct was immense, and growing. It threatened to rival, if not to eclipse, that of the pulpit. Like his brother James and most other colonial printers of any importance, Benjamin Franklin, as part of his printing business, ran a newspaper (the Pennsylvania Gazette), most of which consisted of advertisements and reprints from English and colonial papers, but the original part of which he chiefly wrote himself. He also, again following usual practice, published an almanac, under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders. As Poor Richard’s Almanac it soon became immensely popular, selling 10,000 copies annually, and was, says the author, ‘generally read, scarce any neighbourhood in the province being without it’. Franklin peppered it with proverbs, invented d or improved by himself, which passed into the language: ‘Great Talkers, little Doers’; ‘God heals and the doctor takes the fee’; ‘Necessity has no Law: I know some Attorneys of the name’; ‘Neither a fortress nor a maid will hold out long after they begin to parley’; ‘Lost time is never found again’ (one of the Puritan axioms of behaviour). The plain people of America, in need about equally of amusement and good advice, delighted in this sort of thing, and in the author, who encouraged the taste for reading (good business to do so) by founding first a book-club (it arose out of a discussion group called the Junto that he started in Philadelphia) and then an academy which soon grew into the College of Philadelphia (chartered 1755; later the University of Pennsylvania – the first university, as distinct from a college, in America).

Franklin had always been interested in public affairs: his zeal for improving himself and the world around him implied as much. He had a hundred schemes which needed political action: there was one for reforming the night watch, and one for building a public hospital (both succeeded). Inevitably he was drawn into politics, in the first place by the needs of military defence. Pennsylvania had two fundamental problems: the political power of the pacifist Quakers, and that of the Proprietors, the Penn family. Both were restricting the free growth of the colony; the former threatened its life. The Friends relied on God and their treaties with the Indians, so in 1747 French and Spanish vessels were able to enter the Delaware and attack plantations and shipping. Another time they might descend on Philadelphia itself. Franklin proposed a voluntary association, like his fire-fighting one, for the defence of the province. As usual, his scheme was a great success, and after that he was irretrievably set on a public career. In 1748 he entered the Pennsylvanian assembly. His influence and his popularity grew; he formed a political party which in time defeated the Proprietors and incorporated those Quakers who were ready to fight in self-defence (the Indians devastated the frontier in 1756, so the number was large). In 1757 he was sent to England to act as Pennsylvania’s London agent in the attempt finally to crush the Penns. The apprenticeship of a statesman was complete.

All this shows how Pennsylvania was maturing. The process, and the direction in which it was moving, were clear to some contemporaries. So assertive had the assembly grown, even so early as 1707, that the then Governor remarked ‘it plainly appears that the aim is to revise the method of government according to our English Constitution, and establish one more nearly resembling a republic in its stead’. He was defending William Penn’s prerogatives, but the assertiveness was a fact all the same. In 1755 the Deputy-Governor wrote:

They have been most remarkably indulged, both by the Crown and Proprietaries, and are suffered to enjoy powers unknown to any assembly upon the continent, and even such as may render them a very dangerous body hereafter; but not content with privileges granted to them by charter they claim many more and among others an absolute exemption from the force of royal and proprietary instructions.

The Pennsylvanians, like other Americans, were now numerous and strong enough to insist on their own interests; they expressed themselves vigorously through their assembly and began the evolution of the American party system. They were well used to looking after themselves; they were not at all used to paying taxes. In all these respects they were typical of most of their fellow-colonials.

In one respect, however, they were highly atypical. ‘We do not like Negro servants,’ said Franklin firmly (although he allowed advertisements concerning such to appear in the Pennsylvania Gazette). His objection was largely the outcome of European self-interest: he did not want to see the province overrun, as the southern and Caribbean colonies had been, by Africans. He was eventually to take a much higher view of the question. But his original attitude was as characteristically Pennsylvanian as it was untypical of mid-century America in general. Few Philadelphian merchants entered the slave-trade, which was the staple of Newport, Rhode Island, an equally Quaker city. Pennsylvania originally accepted slavery and promulgated a harsh code of regulations to govern it. Free Africans were attacked as ‘idle slothful people… who often prove burthensome to the neighbourhood, and afford ill examples to other negroes’. But from the start there were doubts. The earliest anti-slavery petition came from German town in 1688. Memories of the persecutions they themselves had suffered, and their central doctrine of the Inner Light (God working in the hearts and consciences of men), slowly led the Quakers of Philadelphia to see things as they were. A rise in white immigration, making black labour less necessary, was a great help. The Quakers began to move to the position that no member of the Society of Friends might be a slave-trader. They sent emissaries over to England with the message, which soon found willing hearers. Thus began one of the most important developments in the history of humanity: organized anti-slavery. But it did not achieve maturity or success overnight. In the eighteenth century slavery and the slave-trade were at their height. It is more than time to examine these most tragic of American institutions.

Slavery is a form of service imposed and maintained by force: no more, no less. It treats men as things, as pieces of property. To define it is to condemn it. It violates the Golden Rule. As Abraham Lincoln is said to have replied to a pro-slavery argument, ‘What is this good thing that no man wants for himself?’

So much is clear to us; but it has only become clear during the past 250 years. The historical problem is that of deciding why slavery was abolished, not why it arose, for it seems to have existed continuously since the dawn of history. In some societies it was mild or limited in scope, or eventually died out. The English in England, for example, had lost all the medieval forms of servitude by 1600 at the latest. But they did not hesitate to introduce slavery into their new empire a few years later; and the system of indentured servitude, which paved the way for that of African enslavement, was evolved out of Tudor methods of dealing with the unemployed and beggars which in their harshness resemble the colonial slave codes. In spite of their Christianity and growing civilization, the English were still (myths of Merry England to the contrary) ceaselessly cruel in their social relations.

The old British Empire, like its rivals, was built on slavery. This means not only that the Atlantic slave-trade, centring on the Guinea Coast, was a large part of the world trade which the Empire was designed to capture, but that most of the Empire’s commerce was in the produce of slavery. Sugar was the chief imperial commodity: the sugar plantations of the Caribbean were worked by slaves. Part of the sugar went to England, to enrich the merchants there; part in the form of molasses to New England, to be made into rum. The sugar islands grew very little of their own food, so merchants found ready markets there for the produce of Ireland, Pennsylvania, New York and the New England fisheries. The significance of this trade is unmistakable: as Richard Pares put it, ‘Without it the sugar colonies could not have existed and the North American colonies could not have developed. Exposed to new diseases, overworked and underfed, a slave on a sugar plantation had a life-expectancy of only seven years; this, and the shortage of women (which implied a shortage of children), meant that the planters had to replenish their labour force by regularly importing new slaves, which of course was good business for the slave-traders. The East India Company and the English manufacturers got a share of the profit by producing iron, coarse cloth, beads and other items with which to tempt African traders with victims to sell. This triangular trade was, in fact, the symbol of the Empire. Sicfortis Etruria crevit: the countryside round Bristol soon gleamed with country palaces for the merchants; Glasgow became a great city; Liverpool added to its indirect profits by operating a small slave-market of its own. The guilt of living off the misery and oppression of fellow human beings spread throughout prosperous and virtuous British society. To take two random examples: a slave-based fortune paid for the splendid buildings by Hawksmoor at All Souls College, Oxford; and although Jane Austen made a hostile reference to the slave-trade in Emma, she also made the Bertram family in Mansfield Park largely dependent on a slave-plantation in Antigua for their wealth, apparently unconscious of the evil they were exploiting.

Nor was any part of the North American colonies free of guilt. By 1720 one-sixth of Boston’s population was black. Cotton Mather was once presented with a slave-boy by his grateful parishioners: he turned this to good account by baptizing the boy Onesimus and learning from him the practice of inoculation. Mather spoke up for the religious equality of blacks and advocated their education; but he also urged Africans to give up their foolish ‘fondness for freedom’ and to recognize that they were better off as slaves. In 1760 there were 16,340 blacks in New York, most of them slaves. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the Three Counties throve on their exports to the slave-islands; and the southernmost colonies – Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia – all enjoyed, if that is the word, slave-based agrarian economies. It is still a matter for learned argument what effects the slave-trade had on the various African societies that were touched by it; but there is no dispute about what happened after the slaves were brought to the markets on the coast. After lengthy haggling, often complicated by rivalries among the slavers of different nationalities, some of the victims were bought and taken on board, while the rest were left rotting on shore, waiting for the next customers. The cargo slaves were meanwhile manacled with heavy iron chains in pairs. They were taken below and laid out, we are told by a reformed slaver, in two rows one above the other, on each side of the ship, close to each other, like books upon a shelf. I have known them so close that the shelf would not easily contain one more. And I have known a white man sent down among the men to lay them in these rows to the greatest advantage, so that as little space as possible be lost… And every morning perhaps more instances than one are found of the living and the dead… fastened together.

For the slave-decks were not only hellishly uncomfortable, but also spreading-grounds for the diseases that many of the victims brought aboard with them. Ships sometimes sailed with hundreds on board and arrived having lost two-thirds of their complement, though the usual loss on British ships in the eighteenth century seems to have been more commonly in the region of 10 per cent, and the figure tended to decline, for it was considered prudent to take some measures to preserve the lives of the slaves: they were valuable property. It was usual to bring them up on deck and force them to dance and sing for the sake of their health. Some slavers bought instruments on the coast for the cargo to play; in this way African music was carried to the New World. The songs were usually laments: the slaves did not much enjoy these occasions, nor was it meant that they should. Too great liberality might lead to a successful uprising, and it was always necessary to be on guard against suicide attempts; so a brutal constraint was universal. At last the ship would complete the Atlantic crossing (‘the Middle Passage’) and the slaves would be sold again, again with every additional circumstance of indignity. If they were lucky they were shipped to the North American mainland; if they were not (and it is now thought that only 5 per cent of the total, or approximately 400,000, in the whole history of the trade were carried to British North America) they quickly rotted away in the mines, ranches and plantations of Brazil, Spanish America and the sugar islands.

In this fashion the African population of the colonies grew until just before the Revolution (and for some decades after it). It was, next to the English, the largest ethnic group. The total number of slaves imported to the thirteen colonies or states before 1790 is thought to have been between 250,000 and 300,000 (our information is at present too scanty for greater precision), but very early, outside South Carolina at any rate, the African population began to show a natural increase which by the end of the century was approaching that of the Europeans. By 1775 there were approximately half a million African-Americans, many of whom had first-hand experience of the horrors of the Middle Passage.

A comparison of the birth-rate and death-rate of the North American plantations with those of plantations elsewhere, not to mention a comparison with the death-rate on shipboard, shows that conditions in the thirteen colonies, even in the tobacco- and rice-growing regions, were better than they might have been; but they were horrible enough. The system was one of forced labour and depended on the most brutal sanctions. Witches were not burned to death, but slaves were. So late as 1805 a slave suffered this punishment in North Carolina for poisoning her master, mistress and two other whites; the next year another, a man, was burned in Georgia for killing an overseer. Burning was a punishment that had earlier been fairly common, and it was resorted to on a grand scale in New York in 1740–41, when, in a scare that was the precise equivalent of the Salem witch-hunt, the city convinced itself that it was in imminent danger of being burned to the ground by a horde of popish blacks. Four whites were hanged, fourteen blacks were burned, eighteen were hanged, seventy deported. Everywhere the codes regulating slavery as a social institution authorized the harshest punishments and gave masters a free hand, up to and including the power of life and death, with their slaves. For private regulation, however, the whip was usually deemed sufficient: the diary of William Byrd, a cultivated Virginian gentleman, the colony’s most learned judge, shows him lashing one or more of his ‘servants’ every few weeks. Fearing to put ideas into their chattels’ heads, slave-owners would not let them be taught Christianity (not that the church had often baulked at recognizing the legitimacy of slavery) or be taught to read and write. Slaves were used casually as concubines, so much so that it has been thought that there was more inter-racial mingling in the eighteenth century than at any time since; the feelings of fathers, mothers and children were not respected, families being frequently broken up when the master wanted to sell. Slaves were outside the protection of the common law: even in Pennsylvania they were denied trial by jury. Above all the Africans were employed ruthlessly and incessantly to perform the heavy labour that the Europeans would not. To be a great tobacco planter in Virginia two things were required: plenty of cheap land to replace the acres wasted by soil-exhaustion and soil-erosion, the marks of inefficient agriculture, and cheap labour (otherwise the overheads of running a large plantation would price its product out of the market). Oppression of the Indians provided the first, oppression of the Africans the second. On this foundation a splendid civilization was erected.

Or so it is conventional to state. Certainly it cannot be denied that for a short time Virginia produced numbers of men as remarkable for their character as their intellect. George Washington (1732–99), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and John Marshall (1755–1835) are only the greatest names among them. They were high-spirited, well-educated, rich, intelligent and responsible gentlemen, who broke a kingdom and created a republic. Many of them deeply disapproved of slavery, though few of them could think of anything to do to end it, save emancipating their own slaves in their wills, as Washington did. Meantime they planned to clear the Indian tribes from the lands west of the Appalachians and seize for themselves new fields to exploit through the labour of their bondsmen. They lived in handsome houses on tidal creeks and rivers, exporting tobacco to England, and in return importing the means to lead a civilized life as the English gentry understood it: port, porcelain and mahogany furniture. They sent their sons either to the Inns of Court to acquire a smattering of law and manners, or to Williamsburg, Jamestown’s successor as the capital of Virginia, where they could attend the college of William and Mary (founded in 1693) and later study, as Jefferson did, under the lawyers practising in the town. Their cultural achievements were real. William Byrd had one of the largest libraries in the colonies in his generation, as Jefferson had in his. And Monticello, Jefferson’s great dream house, designed by its owner, remains the most extraordinary building in the United States, as Versailles is in France. It was begun in 1770 and not finished until 1809, and incarnates a lifetime of steadily improving taste and skill. But like Versailles it has a profoundly ambiguous meaning. Jefferson, an architect and interior designer of genius, imposed his vision of the noble life on a Virginian hilltop as completely as the Sun King imposed his on the heaths of the île de France. Posterity does well to admire and cherish both monuments: posterity has not had to pay for them. Yet each glory was made possible only by a deeply oppressive society which ruthlessly exploited the weak. Jefferson, it is true, was a humane slave-master, where Louis XIV was a supremely callous king; but he was the beneficiary of a system which was the negation of humanity. And like the French monarchy, the Virginian system, because of its strength and weakness alike, carried the seeds of its own certain destruction within it.

For the greatest achievement of the Virginian gentry was unquestionably political. It is possible to exaggerate its originality. Gentlemen in England were equally monarchs of the countryside, and every community in the colonies was necessarily self-governing. But there is no denying that in Virginia, more than anywhere else, the theory and practice of American republicanism grew to maturity. The gentlemen of the colony were said to be ‘haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power’. The great planters and their families – Randolphs, Byrds, Harrisons -dominated the region; the lesser planters and white farmers moved obediently in orbit, and the franchise, being restricted to freeholders with at least a hundred unimproved acres (or twenty-five improved, with house), could not place power in dangerous – for example, in black – hands (though some black freemen voted as late as 1723). It was, in short, a highly class-structured society. The gentry expected to be consulted about the organization and politics of their communities; they served conscientiously if, in many cases, reluctantly, on the vestries, commissions of the peace and other institutions by which their hold on church and state was maintained, and treated the voters to rum punch and barbecued beef at election time, to make sure that the right men continued in command (it once cost George Washington £50 to be elected to the House of Burgesses). Officially Anglican, they allowed no bishop to challenge their control of ecclesiastical patronage; although a Crown colony, Virginia was really ruled by its assembly, the House of Burgesses, which, in an epoch when all the colonial assemblies were rising in power and vigour, had no rival for self-assertiveness. The ruling class had in a few decades achieved a position of unchallenged authority and had not yet bred out of its system, by marriage exclusively within a confined circle, the qualities of intelligence, drive and judgement which had brought it to the top. Its commonwealth was as much a model of the aristocratic republic dear to Montesquieu as Boston was a model of the city-state. The great planters were as casually certain of their right to make all important decisions without interference from above or below as they were certain of their benevolence and wisdom. If challenged, they would and eventually did rely on their self-evident maturity and skill to justify their desire to govern themselves and others. And within the aristocratic pale, all was equality, duty and responsibility.

Unhappily for the gentry, aristocracy was, in the eighteenth century, showing signs of obsolescence. The most important slogan of the age was that of the ambitious, intelligent, educated young bourgeois: ‘careers open to talent’. All the traditional justifications of aristocratic rule proved useless when challenged, in one nation after another, by men who desired and were able to take and wield power, whether intellectual, economic or political. It is true that all was not plain sailing for these new men. In England they had a hard time of it until the 1832 Reform Act, and later. In France it took three revolutions to displace the nobility. All the same, their monopoly of power was doomed, and nowhere more than in America. There, the urban gentry was by definition raw, bourgeois and arriviste, like the towns themselves; and even the tobacco aristocrats were new men. Their power and position were too recently gained, by methods too imitable, and were too completely undermined by economic failure, to create a permanent noble caste like those which held up progress in France and Germany. The tobacco barons were soon supplanted, in true American fashion, by men as energetic and as newly rich as their own grandfathers had been. Even their political practices worked against them, as a Pennsylvanian writer pointed out in 1776, saying that ‘a poor man has rarely the honour of speaking to a gentleman on any terms, and never with familiarity but for a few weeks before the election… Blessed state that brings all so nearly on a level! In a word, electioneering and aristocratical pride are incompatible.’ Finally, in order to defend their power from a challenge from above and abroad – from Britain and the British King – they had been obliged to become self-conscious and explicit republicans; they had found it necessary, as will be shown in the following chapters, to justify rebellion by appealing to the rights of man. Extreme emergency had produced an extreme remedy, one which was a powerful example to others besides gentlemen. It proved impossible to keep the slaves from English, Christianity and literacy for ever; soon they found friends whose consciences were newly awakened to the implications of their religious and political principles (many of the latter having been learned from the Virginians); and in due course it was discovered that the rights of man were seditious. They undermined George Washington’s Virginia as thoroughly as they had undermined George III’s empire, and the leadership of the South passed, disastrously, to South Carolina, where men were still growing rich by slavery and were not ashamed to admit the force on which their political and social system rested. Men were still living who remembered Jefferson when, in 1861, a war broke out between those who adhered to his principles and those who adhered to his practice. Thus the Virginian formula was exposed as self-contradictory.

Nor was that all. It cannot be denied that Virginia was based on slavery; equally, it was based on race-prejudice. From the beginning of the trade slavery and racism had gone together. It is impossible to say that either came first. The Portuguese, in carrying the slave-trade into the Atlantic, were merely extending a practice which had been continuous in the Mediterranean since the remotest antiquity. And in all epochs men of one creed, class, race or state have tended to despise, hate and fear men of alien identities. Few societies, furthermore, have been more parochial, self-satisfied, greedy and cruel than Europe in the age of the discoveries. So the fate of the Africans was as certain and unpleasant as that of the Red Indians with whom it was linked. They were to be enslaved, put to menial tasks and despised, as the masters have always despised the mastered. As time went on the neat reasoning that the African was enslaved because he was inferior, and was inferior because he was a slave, came to be supported by other, equally mischievous, if not always mutually consistent, syllogisms. Slavery was a punishment for the Fall of Man and therefore part of the natural order, not to be tampered with. The slave-trade conferred a benefit on the African, since it removed him from the sin and heathenism of the Dark Continent. The same African was a savage who could not be Christianized, and because he was not a Christian had no rights. Being black, heathen and enslaved the African was different, and therefore wrong, for to be European, and especially English, was to be right; to be heathen and enslaved was clearly to be inferior to a free Christian; since all Africans were black, heathen and enslaved perhaps their colour was inferior too. Indeed it quite clearly was, because black was the colour of night, of evil, of the curse of Ham (imposed on him for looking at his father Noah drunk and naked); and it was well known that black men preferred white women to their own, just as apes (it was alleged) preferred black women to mates of their own species. Possibly the black man was not human at all, but a lesser creature, a link in the Great Chain of Being between humanity and the apes. After all, he lived, and was first encountered by the European, in the same part of the world as the chimpanzee (known at that time as the orang-outang) . . . an immense farrago of evil nonsense slowly multiplied as men, otherwise of good conscience, found that they had to justify the continuing wrong they were inflicting on their fellow-men; and fear of rebellion or other retribution, fear inspired by guilt and the occasional violent expression of black resentment, made hatred inevitable and increased the will to justify the root of all evil. The result was the deeply entrenched, pathological enmity between the races which is the ugliest and oldest problem of American society; an enmity to which the light of Virginia, Mr Jefferson, gave revealing expression in those parts of his book on his native land, Notes on Virginia, where he expatiated at length on the ugliness of Africans. It makes one look with a sceptical eye on his rhetoric, his architecture and the wooden plough he invented, and prefer, to his rustic paradise, cities such as Boston and Philadelphia where hope for the future was really being born.

Rural America, the ideal to which the Virginians were religiously committed, was never, even in the eighteenth century, the thing of absolute joy that they depicted. Social mobility – the means of rising from one class to another – was far greater in colonial America than in Europe, but it was greater in the towns than in the country. In some areas there was substantial social and political equality between the farmers, but these were the poorer regions. The richer areas showed sharp and rigid class divisions. But (a big but) geographical mobility – the chance to move west to virgin land and start a new, more prosperous career – offered hope to agrarian Americans on the make. The future lay that way for many. Before the Peace of Paris the French began to lay out a town where the rivers Missouri, Mississippi and Illinois meet; though it was to be under Spanish sovereignty for the next forty years, St Louis from its beginning attracted English-speaking traders and settlers. To the north-east, at the Forks of the Ohio, after the defeat of Pontiac, another wilderness town, Pittsburgh, began to grow up on the site of former Fort Pitt (or Duquesne). This westward movement soon created problems of the highest policy for the imperial government.

Meanwhile the great planters of Virginia were falling deeper and deeper into debt to London and Scottish merchants: the world price of tobacco was collapsing and the soil of Virginia was becoming exhausted. Planters in South Carolina, while more prosperous, lived for the few months in the year when they could flee from the dangers of yellow fever and slave rebellion on their rice and indigo plantations to Charles Town or, better still, to the cool breezes of Newport, Rhode Island, just then beginning its long career as the rich man’s playground.

The back-country, from Georgia to Maine, struggled against Indians, agrarian inefficiency, indebtedness and remoteness, already displaying a provincialism and a hatred for more prosperous Easterners (‘city slickers’) which were to scar American society until well into the twentieth century. Even Dr Franklin, who in 1764 nobly defended the rights of some Indians against a mob of rural lynchers (‘the Paxton Boys’), succumbed sufficiently to bucolic prejudice to worry about the incoming tide of Germans as well as that of Africans, fearing that the English settlers and their culture would be lost, and persuading himself that Swedes and Finns were darker than, and therefore inferior to, the English.

Almost every province had territorial claims that were unrealistic but not to be relinquished, and hence quarrelled with its neighbours over boundaries. The war between debtor and creditor interests which was to figure for so long in American history was beginning, and taking its standard form of a dispute about paper money. Maryland, driven by economic necessity, had imported 20,000 transported convicts, as indentured servants, to the dismay of adjacent colonies. A sense of common interest, if not of common nationhood, was slowly, almost surreptitiously growing, but even in the face of the greatest emergency the colonies had yet known, the war with France, was not strong enough to sustain Franklin’s 1754 Albany Plan for colonial union. The peace, it was hoped, would bring renewed prosperity with it, as war had brought vigour and self-confidence; but everywhere there were discontents and grievances which very little would enflame. Rapid growth had made the colonies strong, and therefore potentially dangerous. They were not the sleeping dogs of Sir Robert Walpole’s favourite phrase: they were sleeping dragons.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 105-109). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Waking of the Revolution 1759-66

. . .

On 22 March 1765 the Stamp Act became law, and the American Revolution began.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 116). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Act had been passed after the most energetic, intelligent, earnest and loyal protests and remonstrances from the colonies. ‘The boldness of the minister amazes our people,’ wrote a New Yorker. ‘This single stroke has lost Great Britain the affection of all her colonies.’ The blow to American confidence in British wisdom, justice and goodwill was indeed very heavy if not mortal; and the subsequent discovery that resistance could prevent the Act’s operation gave the colonists a heady sense of their own strength.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 117). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

By the New Year, then, the imperial government was confronted with an acute problem. The Stamp Act had been effectively nullified, to use a term with a long future.23 Except in Georgia, and there not for long, no stamps had been distributed; the Sons of Liberty in the various colonies (for the name had spread with the agitation) had effectively superseded the regular administrations; life was otherwise proceeding in its normal, unstamped channels;24 and there was simply not force enough available to compel obedience to the law.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 132). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Road to Ruin 1766-75

. . .

. . . Samuel Adams (1722–1803). He has been called the last of the Puritans. He might just as well be called the first of the politicians, or even the first democrat. He must be given more than a cursory comment.

He had a genuine vocation for politics, which was just as well, since he was incompetent at everything else. His father, a successful man of business, having seen his son reject both the ministry and the law as professions, lent him £1,000 to make a start in trade. Sam lent half of it to a friend, and was never repaid; the rest somehow vanished. On his parents’ death he inherited cash, real estate and a thriving brewery: ten years later he was again penniless. Elected tax-collector for Boston, he turned what was usually a lucrative post into a liability, ending up some £8,000 down in his account and more than suspected of being legally, if not morally, an embezzler. It was only by political manipulation that he kept himself out of jail. The causes of this string of failures are easy to find. Adams neglected business for politics; he was helplessly improvident and muddle-headed where money was concerned; above all, he was far too fond of making friends, far too unwilling to make himself unpleasant, either in exacting what was due to him or what was due to Boston, to be a successful tradesman, let alone an effective tax-gatherer. His second cousin John Adams reinforces the impression of excessive amiability by describing Sam as a man ‘of refined policy, steadfast integrity, exquisite humanity, genteel erudition, obliging, engaging manners’. No doubt there is exaggeration here: John Adams saw men, for good or ill, as he wanted them to be, and Sam was his ally as well as his cousin; but the description fits very well with what else we know of the elder Adams.

He was in everything extremely old-fashioned. He was a strict Calvinist in religion and made a cult of the founders of New England; he never had much time for the rising generation and was conservative even in dress (he wore a three-cornered hat to his dying day). . . .

. . .

He was a fluent and ingenious journalist, who knew, whether as chief contributor to the Boston Gazette or clerk to the House of Representatives, exactly how to draft articles, speeches or official papers in such a way as to further his ends. Even more impressive was his command of the other arts of democratic politics. Like many a later enthusiast of the Left, he had been born to his trade: his father, also an active politician, had secured his early admission to the Caucus Club of Boston, which, besides bequeathing its name to a long progeny of political organizations,1 was the original ‘smoke-filled room’ where, over tobacco and strong drink, the leaders of the Boston opposition fixed the business, especially the elections to office, that would come before the next town-meeting. It was through the Caucus Club that Sam Adams became, first, clerk of the market, then town scavenger and finally, as we have seen, tax-collector. It was at the club that he learned the arts of getting along with people (for which his pliability gave him a natural aptitude), arts which he could practise further in the taverns, where, his cousin John once remarked, ‘if you set the evening, you will find the house full of people drinking drams, flip, toddy, carousing, swearing, but especially plotting with the landlord to get him, at the next town meeting, an election either for selectman or representative…’. Something of a bigot, Sam Adams was nevertheless prepared to overlook any religious or moral failing in allies, or potential allies, if they voted right. Sam was ready to haunt taverns because, as John said, in taverns ‘bastards, and legislators, are frequently begotten’. It was there that he acquired the reputation of being the friend and spokesman of the meaner sort, for whom he had a genuine respect. He was not a Freemason, liking only those societies in which he was the ruling spirit; but he exploited his musical talents to found a musical society through which he could convert more Bostonians to his school of patriotism. He was not much of an orator or administrator: he left that side of the game to others. But his influence spread through the town by means which every subsequent generation of politicians would have recognized: he was building up a machine.

It was this activity which, perhaps, led him to the misjudgement that was to have so profound an influence on the course of American history.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 138-139). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

On 21 October the Massachusetts correspondence committee called for common action by all the colonies against the Company. Boston town-meeting (assembling unofficially) passed anti-Tea Act resolutions on 5 November. The first tea-ship arrived on 28 November, and the next day the town heard the first suggestion that her cargo should be dumped in the harbour. There followed nearly three weeks of bitter contention. Under the laws of trade the tea could not be sent back to England, as Sam Adams wanted, without a clearance from the Governor, and that clearance Hutchinson refused to give, since the re-exportation duty had not been paid and he would not let himself be forced into acquiescing in Adams’s scheme. Besides, he thought he had the upper hand: if the duty had not been paid by 17 December, the tea could legally be seized by the customs, landed and sold. At length, on 16 December, at a mass-meeting in Faneuil Hall, John Rowe, one of Sam Adams’s associates, asked pointedly, ‘Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?’ In the first gloom of a winter evening, after candles were lit, news came in that Hutchinson was still adamant, and cries for ‘A mob! A mob!’ went up. Adams came forward and announced that ‘This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.’ It was a signal, taken up with a war-whoop in the gallery, which in turn was answered from the door by a band of men roughly disguised as Indians. ‘Boston harbour a teapot tonight!’ they shouted, and a huge crowd rushed down to the waterfront, the ‘Indians’ in the lead. The harbour was now bathed in bright moonlight. The three tea-ships were boarded, the 342 or so tea-chests were hauled on deck and broken open, and the tea was poured into the dark waters, nearly choking them (it was low tide). No other damage was done, and the Tea Party ended with a triumphal march through Boston to fife and drum.

. . .

The news flew through the colonies, rousing and uniting patriot Americans and establishing the unquestioned leadership of Massachusetts. Further resistance to the Tea Act was greatly encouraged. Ten days later Philadelphia returned its tea-ships to England; tea was landed at Charles Town but not distributed; on 9 March 1774 Boston destroyed thirty more chests; on 22 April New York city also had a tea party.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 159-160). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

By that time the gap between war and peace was vanishing. Gage had long been virtually besieged in Boston, while the countryside hummed with drilling militiamen and military stores were piled up. The money for these activities had been voted by a Massachusetts provincial congress, which had in effect completely superseded the old General Court. Soon similar revolutionary governments would seize control in the other colonies, as the royal Governors fled to the safety of His Majesty’s ships and the conservatives prepared to defend themselves as best they might against the all-conquering patriots. But first General Gage, spurred on by a letter from the American Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, reluctantly set out to challenge the insurgent farmers. On the night of 18 April 1775 he sent what he hoped would be a secret expedition to seize or destroy a military store at Concord, twenty miles or so by road from Boston. The radicals in Boston found out; night-riders hurried ahead to warn the people that ‘the British are coming!’ At the village of Lexington, therefore, the 700 British infantrymen found in the morning a line of seventy-five volunteers, or Minute Men as they were called, drawn up to resist them. A shot rang out – fired by which side is unknown – and in a moment the redcoats had opened fire and driven the Minute Men from the field: eight had been killed, ten wounded. The British then re-formed and went on to Concord. But they accomplished nothing there, for the stores had been removed or hidden before they arrived and they were successfully attacked at the North Bridge by a force of local militiamen (the ‘embattled farmers’ of Emerson’s poem16 who ‘fired a shot heard round the world’). The long march back to Boston was a nightmare. British casualties were heavy… So began the War of the American Revolution. It was characteristic of the way in which the British Empire had slid into ruin that the last step was taken because a minister in London thought he knew better than the man on the spot.

The war spread rapidly, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it flared up simultaneously in many places. In Virginia the British managed to seize the colonial store of gunpowder at Williamsburg. This was more than offset by the fall of Fort Ticonderoga to the rebels on 10 May, which opened the road to Canada. On the same day the Second Continental Congress met.

It had several decisions immediately forced upon it. Since war had come, it had to be organized, and it was of the highest importance that all the colonies should have a stake in the conflict. Already there were volunteers from beyond New England in the force that, following Lexington and Concord, had sprung up outside Boston. The Congress took this force under its wing and voted to raise more troops. The command of the army was a question that had to be settled. It should go, Congress felt, to a Southerner, for the sake of American unity – a decision which greatly disappointed John Hancock. George Washington was the inevitable choice. He came from the right colony, and what was known about his military experience suggested that he had at least as much capacity as anyone else at the Congress – not that that was saying very much. He thought himself unfit for the post and took it only as a duty: he told Patrick Henry, with tears in his eyes, that ‘From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.’ He was wrong, of course. No greater stroke of good luck ever befell America than the availability of that remarkable man at that crucial juncture, except the availability, eighty-five years later, of Abraham Lincoln. Washington’s entry on the stage opened a new act in the history of the Revolution.

An old era ended symbolically some months later. As late as the debate on the Intolerable Acts the country gentlemen of England sitting in Parliament were deluding themselves that, if they supported the government, funds would be extracted from America that would avert the need for a threatened rise in the land-tax. They were appalled by the succeeding turn of events. Then, in the autumn of 1775, the Americans invaded Canada, thus turning, it seemed, their defensive war into an offensive one. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 165-166). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The War of the Revolution 1775-83

. . .

. . . In January 1776, a recent immigrant from England, Tom Paine, had published a pamphlet, Common Sense, that sold 120,000 copies. It anticipated many of the themes of United States history, and put the case for independence in savagely brilliant language. . .

. . .

Government, said Paine, was at best a concession to man’s fallen state, ‘a mode made necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world’. Where was the true King of America? ‘I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Great Britain.’ This sort of thing seemed excellent teaching to the Calvinist ministers of New England, already denounced by the Tories as a ‘black-coated regiment’ of rebels, for they had happily sunk their innumerable doctrinal quarrels to unite in the patriot cause against the British and their bishops. They read out Common Sense from their pulpits. Washington

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 173). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Early in June a committee was set up to carry out one of Tom Paine’s suggestions, by drafting a declaration of independence in succession to the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, compiled by Dickinson and promulgated exactly a year earlier. The members were: Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania); John Adams (Massachusetts); Roger Sherman (Connecticut); Robert R. Livingston (New York); and Thomas Jefferson (Virginia). Of the three accomplished penmen on the committee, Franklin was laid up with gout, Adams came from New England, which was lying low in Congress at the moment so as not to alarm less revolutionary regions, and Jefferson came from the most populous and important state. To him, then, fell the task of composition. It could not have fallen to better hands. Superficially Jefferson looked like an untidy farmer. He was tall, red-haired, careless in his dress and a lover of the outdoors (next to George Washington he was reckoned to be the best horseman in Virginia). Under this commonplace exterior was the most passionately inquiring mind ever to be born in America; a mind of dazzlingly diverse talents, among them a gift for writing transparently lucid and attractive prose; a mind on fire with republican enthusiasm. He was a child of the European Enlightenment as well as of aristocratic Virginia; he had learned in a good law office how to make a case; best of all, he had been pondering and testing all the arguments for at least two years. By the end of June he had a draft ready for his colleagues. On 2 July Congress approved the decisive resolutions, previously framed and presented by Richard Henry Lee on behalf of Virginia, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved. That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign alliances. That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation. Two days later, that is on 4 July, Congress voted its approval of Mr Jefferson’s document.

. . .

Instead, it remains an inspiration to all democrats today, and especially to Americans. That is because Jefferson, by a process like that which engenders poetry, was able to distil in his preamble, as eloquence, centuries of historical experience.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…

These splendid assertions were indeed self-evident to the revolutionaries – to all Americans: how could they doubt them? They expressed attitudes which everything in their experience as settlers had tended to stimulate and reinforce. Side by side, their grandfathers had set up new polities; their fathers, and then they themselves, had enjoyed the consequent responsibilities and rewards of self-government. Side by side, Americans had tamed a wilderness, or begun to, practically experiencing the fact that on the frontier all men (and women too) had equal needs and (said the Puritans) souls equally precious and equally in need of salvation, whether religious or economic (depending on whether one agreed with the minister or the fishermen of Marblehead). The marvellous abundance of their new world had proved in the most satisfactory manner that everyone could be prosperous, and therefore that everyone had a right so to be. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 174-176). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

For the preamble, in the name of the people, denies that the strong may legitimately oppress the weak; and asserts that all men and women, whatever their age, condition or origins, shall not be cheated of their birthright into misery; that this theme, of human freedom and dignity, is what politics is about. As this message was heard, it seemed to many Europeans – perhaps especially to the French – that there was a new star in the West to steer by. It seemed as if John Adams’s favourite prophetic dream would come true. ‘I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,’ said he, ‘as the opening of a grand scene and design of Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.’ This soon became the universal faith of the Revolution.

Ever since 1776 Americans have returned to rekindle their patriotic self-dedication at the flame of the Declaration. For it answers a question which was to trouble the new nation throughout its history: what is America about? History and geography had forestalled any such question for most of the other peoples of the world; but the immensity of the nearly empty continent, and the break with the past which every settling family had made, posed it acutely for the Americans and would necessarily do so at least until all the wilderness was conquered. The problem of political institutions and of a national identity could hardly wait until then. America needed a blueprint, and by luck the long processes of her colonial history, which had already made so many inexorable decisions, fathered one on the genius of Thomas Jefferson. ‘All men are created equal… life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ These words have never ceased to sound in America; as one historian has said, ‘The history of American democracy is a gradual realization, too slow for some and too rapid for others, of the implications of the Declaration of Independence.’12 The future to which they pointed was not all bright. It contained chains, cannon-fire, fiery crosses and the sign of a clenched fist as well as the Bill of Rights and the New Deal; but for weal or woe, the Declaration had shown the way. No wonder the Fourth of July is still a high festival.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 177-178). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . By December 1776, it seemed all too likely that the British would celebrate the New Year in Philadelphia, while the continental soldiers, their time expired, left their commander and went home. The New Jersey Loyalists came out to celebrate and collaborate with the victor – rather too soon, for at Christmas Washington turned, and in two lightning attacks across the Delaware river defeated the royal forces at Trenton and Princeton. In terms of the numbers engaged these battles were tiny; but, as at Boston, their strategic effect was important. They saved Pennsylvania for the time being and cleared most of New Jersey. Patriot morale, which had been very low, made a rapid recovery. Washington could live to fight in the spring (supposing only that his freezing, tatterdemalion army survived that long). He had won precious time and prestige for America: time for an alliance to ripen, prestige to clinch it.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 180). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Cornwallis proved to be another Burgoyne. He began well, but in his quest for the decisive victory over Nathanael Greene he allowed the Americans to lure him further and further north, losing men and supplies all the way. Finally he realized that he could neither retreat nor go forward in face of the resistance he was meeting, so he dug in where he was, at Yorktown in Virginia (a few miles from Jamestown and Williamsburg), and waited to be rescued by the Royal Navy.

Washington saw that this was the sort of opportunity that only comes once. His army had long been stationary in the North, pinning down the British in New York. Now was the time for it to move, if only because of the increasing war-weariness of the Americans and the desperate financial straits of the French, who had nevertheless sent him an army of some 6,700 regulars under the Comte de Rochambeau. A French naval squadron under Admiral de Grasse was at sea. Washington had been trying to concentrate all these forces for an attack on New York; but now he saw a chance, probably a last chance, for a decisive victory over the British. British carelessness had given the allies temporary naval superiority in Virginian waters: De Grasse was able to seal off Chesapeake Bay, thus putting himself between Cornwallis and his relief. Washington and Rochambeau marched briskly south. Before Cornwallis quite knew what was happening to him he was trapped. The inexorable work of an eighteenth-century siege went forward; and at last Cornwallis gave in. On 17 October 1781 – four years exactly since Burgoyne’ s misadventure – he asked for terms. Two days later he surrendered unconditionally. Legend has it that as he and his soldiers marched out, prisoners, their regimental bands played ‘The World Turned Upside Down’.

Rightly, if so, for Yorktown was a decisive victory, though Washington could not at first believe it. It did the French little good (a few months later Admiral Rodney drubbed De Grasse in the Battle of the Saints); but it settled the question of American independence. The news provoked the House of Commons to mutiny at last. ‘Oh God! It is all over,’ said poor Lord North. His government fell, and a Whig ministry led by Rockingham, and after his death by Shelburne, lasted just long enough to negotiate a new Treaty of Paris (3 September 1783).

This treaty gave the United States excellent terms (far better than France and Spain were to get), for which the American negotiators (Franklin, John Adams, John Jay) deserved most of the credit. Not only did the British recognize American independence and make peace, and grant valuable concessions to American fishermen in Canadian waters; they conceded most generous boundaries to the new republic. Up to a point, this only confirmed what was already clear on the ground. In a series of desperate campaigns against the British and the Indians, the Americans had already made good their claim to the trans-Appalachian West. Still, the British controlled large areas there, in the Great Lakes region, and their Indian allies were still unbroken; but they had no stomach for continuing the struggle and formally recognized northern and western frontiers for the United States on the Lakes and the Mississippi. America thus became the legally undisputed mistress of an immense territory. Next to independence itself it was the most notable gain from the War of the Revolution.

At last General Washington was able to unbuckle his sword. He had had to repudiate a proposal that he make a bid for kingship, and to suppress a threatened mutiny over pay, which he did with a personal appeal to his officers. (‘Gentlemen, you must pardon me,’ he said, putting on his spectacles to read his manuscript. ‘I have grown grey in your service and now find myself going blind.’ That did the trick.) Sadly, he saw his cherished veterans going off to their homes like a ‘set of beggars’, still unpaid, though a body of mutinous soldiers had actually besieged the ungrateful Congress in State House at Philadelphia. Joyously, in November 1783, he entered New York as the British evacuated it; and in that city, on 4 December, he bade formal farewell to his officers, shaking each one by the hand, before he set off to the longed-for repose of Mount Vernon. Poor man: he was not to enjoy it for very long.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 184-185). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Peace and the Constitution 1783-9

. . .

. . . The convention’s deliberations were secret, and were not published in any form for twenty years afterwards; this meant that there was no temptation to play to the gallery. There was comparatively little loss of temper, and no discourtesy.

What above all helped the business along was the fact that these were revolutionaries who wanted their revolution to succeed forever. Their basic agreement on the meaning and purpose of the American Revolution was complete; they were all nationalists and republicans, and most of them were on the way to becoming democrats. They could debate practicalities so incessantly because they shared the same principles. There was no ideological rift, no left, right and centre. In fact it is extremely difficult to settle who was conservative and who progressive at the convention: everyone seemed to be both. They all dreaded ‘anarchy and confusion’ (another recurrent phrase), which would result if the Articles were not reformed . . .

But their agreement was not perfect, which was also all to the good. They represented the variousness of America, as well as her unity; probably each of them had to sacrifice some cherished belief or proposal before agreement was possible. For the convention was wiser than any one of its members, since no one member could know the American people and the American continent as well as the whole did. . . . What finally emerged, after nearly four months’ debate, stood a very good chance of being acceptable to the people, for it had been thoroughly tested in argument by men who were truly their representatives. If one single explanation of the durability of the Constitution is needed, this is it.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 196-197). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

So everyone was pleased, and the anti-Federalists pledged themselves to do what they could to make the new frame of government a success. The dying Congress fixed the dates of the first elections; the electoral college, voting for the first time in February 1789, unanimously chose George Washington to be the first President; and on 30 April he took the oath of office in New York, after a journey from Mount Vernon which was turned by the enthusiastic citizens into one long carnival.

Nobody supposed that the Constitution was a perfect document; and nobody today, one Civil War and twenty-six amendments later, will argue that it was. But it has in practice worked exceedingly well. Some of the reasons have already been given, but the list must be completed; and the influence of the Constitution in shaping American history has been so profound that a plain statement of its structure and shaping principles is the very least that it deserves, even if it makes a long chapter longer. The degree of one’s understanding of the Constitution is to a large extent the degree of one’s understanding of the United States.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 204). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . A big country, whether measured by area or population – and the United States was going to be big on both counts – needs a central government, but if it is to be either free or efficient, let alone both, that central government cannot make all, or even most political and administrative decisions. Power, a great deal of power, must be left with regional and local governments. This principle of decentralization can go too far, as the history of the United States has demonstrated all too often, but then so can the principle of centralization. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 208). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . the first and second characteristics of the Constitution are its essential democracy and the horizontal separation of powers between the federal and state governments. The third, and perhaps the most conspicuous characteristic, is the vertical separation of powers: Executive, Legislative, Judiciary – or, Presidency, Congress, Courts. This principle was, as we have seen, one of the first matters agreed by the convention.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 209). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . The Presidency, for example, the embodiment of the executive in one man, was invented partly for the reasons given, and partly because, in George Washington, the ideal President happened to exist. Had Washington died suddenly in the middle of the convention Wilson might have got his way and the United States have acquired a three- or four-man executive, like the five-member Directory in Revolutionary France. The convention had enormous difficulty in settling how to elect the President, and fixed on a method of indirect election, through an electoral college chosen by the voters, only after every other expedient had been considered at length. In the event the electoral college became a mere rubber-stamp for the people’s choice; and so this purely practical expedient could become the towering symbol without which no American can imagine his country. Thanks to the first, very distinguished men who occupied the Presidency (Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison); thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s insistence on the overriding authority of his mandate from the voters; thanks to the Civil War and the martyrdom of Abraham Lincoln; thanks to the rabble-rousing of Theodore Roosevelt, the crusading zeal of Woodrow Wilson and, above all, the dynamic leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, the President is now a popularly elected monarch; even the scandals of a Grant, a Nixon or a Clinton cannot strip the office of the mystique that has slowly accrued to it since 1789. There are only two really sacred things in America: one is the flag, the other is the White House. Nothing about this state of affairs would have gratified the Founding Fathers, who had no intention of setting up a monarch of any kind. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 209-210). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

If the Founding Fathers did not anticipate the spectacular development of the Presidency and pooh-poohed the warnings of those who feared the worst, they did provide institutions to keep it in check. ‘Checks and balances’ was a notion particularly associated with John Adams and his book; but it very well expressed the universal assumption. Power was too tempting to fallen man; the exercise of power must never be free from question, debate, exposure, possible defeat. Indeed, it was too likely that any exercise of power would lead to evil: quite as much as Lord Acton did the Fathers believe that ‘power tends to corrupt’. So they piled check on balance, balance on check, until they arrived at what Richard Hofstadter so felicitously termed ‘a harmonious system of mutual frustration’. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 210). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The principle of checks and balances thus continues to flower; it continues to give us good reason to honour the men of the American Revolution; in a way, it defines what is politically best and most promising in the United States; what it means to be American.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 214). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

BOOK THREE

The Age of Equality

The Planting of the West

. . .

. . . The Bible retained all its old authority and fascination for these poor and anxious people, but they saw no harm in looking for additional revelations. Perhaps they needed religious reassurance all the more because they were uprooting themselves. At any rate, the years of the great exodus from New England were also the years of a new wave of religious enthusiasm. The flames of penitence and conversion, lit by urgent and dramatic preaching, flared over upstate New York 7 so often in these years that it became known as the Burned-Over District; not that the religious revival stayed within those bounds. It burned over into western Pennsylvania and into Ohio. It exploded in the South-West, touched off in part by a Presbyterian minister from Pennsylvania, James McGready: it was his example which led in 1801 to the first of the great camp-meetings, at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, where ten to twenty thousand people gathered for days at a time, to be stimulated by a team of preachers into religious delirium – everything from visions of heaven to barking like a dog. In Tennessee a minister was brave enough to call General Jackson to repent and be saved (the invitation was declined). The wave passed over the seaboard, north and south. In short, the phenomenon which had dismayed the respectable sixty or seventy years earlier was now renewed. To distinguish it from the Great Awakening it is known as the Great Revival.

In the Burned-Over District it produced a willingness to take up novel creeds that far outstripped the interest in Methodism and Presbyterian-ism of the earlier period. Joseph Dylks of Ohio proclaimed himself the Messiah and promised to found a holy city at Philadelphia. One of his followers discovered that Jesus Christ was a woman. Another prophet proposed to save the world by walking the streets of New York with a sword and a seven-foot ruler. John Chapman of Massachusetts (c. 1775–1847) took up the faith according to Emanuel S wedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish visionary. He hit on a highly original manner of diffusing it. He went off to the Old North-West and bought up odd corners of land, never more than an acre or two, here and there, which he planted with appleseeds and apple-slips. When his little orchards matured, he sold them; bought more land and more seeds; and, with what was left of the profits from these transactions, obtained and distributed Swedenborgian tracts. He did not have much success in converting his countrymen; but his gentle selflessness (spending nothing on himself, he went about in rags, with a tin dish for a hat) and, above all, his orchards won every heart on the frontier. It was so pleasant, after hacking your way through the wilderness, to arrive at your holding, where you expected nothing but back-breaking toil, to find well-grown apple-trees waiting for you. As a result, Chapman is immortal: his original name forgotten, he is known to every American child as the forest demi-god, Johnny Appleseed.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 231-232). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . [Brigham] Young soon accepted the fact that the Saints would not get to the Great Basin in 1846. It would be as much as he could do to get them from the Mississippi to the Missouri. So his advance party was set to establishing a transit camp, Winter Quarters, near the site of the present city of Omaha, Nebraska, on the western bank of the Missouri. It was really a town, carefully laid out according to the Mormon passion for town-planning, with streets, mills, wells. The houses were not much – mostly mere huts; but they were better than nothing, though the mortality rate during the winter of 1846 – 7 continued to be appalling.

. . .

He was in many ways an unattractive character. He had an instinct for power, for the surest means of getting it, wielding it and cutting down rivals with it. Smith communed with God and His angels, but Young was more concerned with economic advantage, especially in his later years. He was also bloodthirsty in a peculiar, vicarious way. He often preached sermons that were naked incitements to violence; he was capable of dropping hints, much subtler than Henry IIs, when he wanted someone put out of the way. The result was a long series of murders, which he sometimes deplored, but could not talk about without a sort of gloating. Unpleasant; yet it must be allowed that even in Deseret the Mormons continued to suffer from the ferocious aggression of their fellow-Americans. . .

. . .

. . . Brigham Young’s power as Prophet, Seer, Revelator, Trustee-in-Trust and, for four years, Governor of Utah Territory (appointed by President Fillmore) and the informal power he wielded over executive, legislature and judiciary resembled that of a big city boss, or of Huey Long in Louisiana in the 1930s. Even his use of violence, of which the most disgraceful episode was the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, when a party of Mormons commanded by one of Young’s closest henchmen slaughtered 120 Gentile men, women and children . . . theirs. Brigham Young saw which side his bread was buttered. He welcomed Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty and made no secret of his opinion that slavery was just what the Negro deserved. . . . Abraham Lincoln might as well have said of polygamy what he did of slavery, that if it was not wrong, nothing was wrong.

. . . And the federal government was implacably anti-polygamist. So the choice before the Saints was again to be submission or flight. Young succeeded in postponing the moment of choice, but after his death it was laid down: abandon polygamy or suffer the consequences. In 1890 the church repudiated the practice; six years later Utah at last became a state of the Union. The struggle to preserve plural marriage had very nearly wrecked the church, and had come near to destroying its wealth; but at least Mormon women could now enjoy the rights which their sisters elsewhere had already begun to win for themselves; though still, in remote country places, polygamy persists.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 240-245). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

William Frederick Cody was born on the Iowa bank of the Mississippi on 26 February 1846, a hundred miles or so north of the place where the Mormons were crossing from Nauvoo. His father was a pioneer from Ohio who in 1852 moved with his family to Missouri. Frontier violence there had taken a new turn, getting caught up in the rapidly developing conflict between the free and slave states. Isaac Cody was a Free Soiler, opposed to any new westward extension of slavery. As such he was stabbed, and eventually harried to death in 1857, leaving his eleven-year-old son to be the family’s breadwinner. Young Will was precociously ready for the job. He could already ride and shoot competently; in the years to come, as he grew, so did his skills. He was a child of the West, haunted by the legend of the great mountain men, Kit Carson and Jim Bridger; by tales of Indians and wagon-trains. He was never to lose this boyish enthusiasm: it was to be the secret of his immense success. Inevitably, he was drawn along the Plains trails.

. . . Cody would herd a number of buffalo to a point conveniently near the workers’ camp, then, galloping alongside on Brigham, would bring them down as quickly and economically as possible: he is reported to have regularly killed eleven buffalo with twelve bullets as they stampeded. It was better than a circus to watch. In the seventeen months that he worked for the railroads he killed 4,280 buffalo, and thus earned the sobriquet ‘Buffalo Bill’ under which he became immortal.

He worked as the chief army scout for a few years more. He served during the Sitting Bull campaign in 1876, and immediately after the Battle of the Little Big Horn won a duel with an Indian called Yellow Hand. ‘First scalp for Custer!’ he cried, brandishing the dead chief’s war-bonnet before fitting action to words. In spite of this bloodthirsty episode Buffalo Bill’s attitude to the Indians was always intelligent and (in peacetime) friendly. The Indians liked him, and he defended them against calumny. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 245-246). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . The farming frontier was spreading steadily across the plains, while the mining frontier annexed the hills (it was a gold rush in the Black Hills of South Dakota which had touched off the Sitting Bull war). The railroad and the telegraph were stretching across the land, cutting up the great buffalo range; and the buffalo themselves were being slaughtered with staggering thoroughness, not for food or even for sport, but to destroy the basis of the Indian way of life. Soon the Indians would be forced onto reservations, and the last few buffalo would be preserved in zoos, while cows and sheep usurped their pasture and cowboys drove the longhorns on the trails from Texas to the railheads at Abilene or Kansas City, whence they could be shipped to the stockyards at Chicago for slaughter. The life had its own high romance, and its own hard-working, underpaid reality; but it was not the life for Buffalo Bill. News of his prowess as a hunter and warrior had reached the East some years before. There, urban Americans were entranced by the same magic of the West as had allured young Will Cody. They devoured cheap novels about cowboys and Indians, many of which featured Buffalo Bill as the hero. Rich men found their way by the transcontinental railroad to the West, where their hero in person taught them how to hunt buffalo so long as any were left. Crude melodramas about Bill began to be staged. On a visit to the East, Cody saw one of these shows and saw also that he could make a lot of money by appearing in them himself, as himself. So with a few Western cronies he toured the cities for several years in a preposterous farrago called Scouts of the Plains, in which he slaughtered hundreds of Indians with every bullet, while simultaneously courting, as a tender swain, a tender-hearted lassie. He was vastly successful everywhere, but when his sister saw the play he rebuffed her congratulations: ‘Oh Nellie, don’t say anything about it. If heaven will forgive me this foolishness, I promise to quit it for ever when this season is over.’ He enjoyed appearing on the stage, he found, and making and spending large sums of money; but he yearned for something better than tawdry exploitation. At length he saw his way. He would present an open-air show from the real West: the dreams of town-boys, fed by dime novels, would now be satisfied by something better. And the world which he had lived in and loved would have a last moment of glory. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a runaway success for fifteen years or more. It made millions, and it played not only in America but in Europe: Queen Victoria loved it, and everywhere crowds flocked to see it. It was really a circus, but like none that had ever existed before. It was crammed with legendary goodies: buffalo, bucking broncos, Indian scouts, and Indians: among others, both Red Cloud and Sitting Bull made appearances in the show. There were: Annie Oakley, the best shot in America; living representations of Custer’s last stand and a cattle round-up; an attack by outlaws on the Deadwood Stage Coach; a train of prairie schooners; Indian dances; and above all, Buffalo Bill himself. . . . Looking at Buffalo Bill in his buckskin coat with his ready gun and admiring his matchless horsemanship, customers could feel that they had seen the West in action. He stood not only for his own career but for the whole romance of winning a continent. He had seen and done what Easterners could only dream of, and when they cheered him they were acknowledging not only his personality and performance, but something larger and more impalpable: something that would be a part of the meaning of America for ever.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 246-247). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Development of Democracy 1789-1841

. . .

The War of 1812 was one of the most unnecessary in history, and reflects as little credit on Britain as any she has ever fought. . . .

The war lasted for two years and a half and was not very satisfactory for either side. Canada was not taken, but nor was the United States successfully invaded: British expeditions were checked on the Great Lakes, at Baltimore and, by Andrew Jackson, at New Orleans. The British had much the best of things at sea, but the Americans, with next to no navy, won several creditable victories (as in the celebrated duel between the frigates USS Constitution and HMS Guerrière, in 1812) and raided the British merchant marine very profitably. Both sides occasionally disgraced themselves. The British mounted a series of destructive raids on coastal towns and villages, which only inflamed the patriotic anger of their civilian victims. The Americans lynched one general of the Revolutionary War and crippled another (Light Horse Harry Lee, the father of Robert E. Lee) because they were opposed to the present struggle. The British captured Washington and burned its public buildings down (not its private ones): when the Presidential Mansion was restored, it was painted white, and has been known as the White House ever since. General William Henry Harrison broke the power of Tecumseh and the Indians of the North-West at the battles of Tippecanoe (1811) and Thames river (1813), while General Jackson did the same for the Indians of the South.

. . .

England had at last learned that war with the United States was almost invariably not worthwhile.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 253-255). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

This is the famous Monroe Doctrine. Canning thought it a piece of impertinence, for the United States was far too weak to enforce it against any determined challenge from a great power; it was the Royal Navy which, for good British reasons (the preservation of global primacy, and of ascendancy in the markets of the New World), would for the rest of the century stand between North and South America and any aggressors; but it was nevertheless an effective warning to Great Britain that another war might follow if any serious attempt was made to extend the British Empire over, for example, the Isthmus of Panama; a warning that acted as an effective deterrent. The Doctrine also contained, in germ, the aspiration of the United States to wield its own hegemony over the New World – an aspiration that would in due course ripen into action.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 255-256). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

He [Hamilton] never pretended to be a democrat: he thought democracy, which put power in the hands of the unenlightened multitude, was a disease. Human nature, in his opinion, was basically selfish, and talk of republican virtue was so much cant. ‘Ambition and avarice’ were the most reliable pillars of the state. None of the prophets of disinterestedness would be satisfied with a mess of porridge, even a double helping, when they might get a decent salary for their services. No, the art of government was to curb and guide men’s greedy appetites into useful courses, so that, as the Scottish economist Adam Smith proposed, private vice could be public gain. Hamilton was a prophet of capitalism and passionately believed that a political and economic system dominated by capitalists would in the end produce the greatest happiness for all.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 258). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . All alike turned to the professional politicians for assistance in winning their ends; and the politicians were very willing to co-operate. For they had noticed that elected offices carried salaries with them; so did appointive ones; judicious exertions could, by these means, keep an honest man solvent for the length of his natural life (for dishonest men, it was soon to emerge, the opportunities were even more glorious). All that was required was to make promises to the voters and then find means either of keeping those promises, or of seeming to do so; or to teach the voters that the art of compromise (with reality and one’s opponents) is the essence of adult politics; or, if all else failed, of persuading them that the promises were broken because of the corrupt and treasonable activity of the opposition. In return, loyal partisans would sustain a man in office, where he could earn a good wage and where he could obtain additional rewards by handing out such jobs as postmaster or government clerk to the deserving. Underlings proved they were deserving by contributing part of their salaries to the war chests of the politicians.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 265). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Slavery and its Consequences 1800-1861

. . .

. . . In Cincinnati Airs Stowe was moved to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of which the most famous episode is the escape of the slave Eliza across the ice of the frozen Ohio river, pursued (in the stage version, which was even more popular than the novel) by bloodhounds. North and South, the Whig party began to break up.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 300). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Democratic convention met in April i860 and was a disaster. By a horrible fatality it was held in Charleston, the very capital of secessionist feeling, where they still remembered the Nullification Crisis. It was not a city where Northern and Western Democrats could feel happy: nor did they. Led by Yancey, the Southerners refused to hear of the nomination of Douglas: the Northerners would not abandon him. They had nothing to gain by doing so: a pro-slavery candidate could not carry any state outside the South. The Democratic cause had been weakenened by the Buchanan administration’s record of incompetence and corruption: only Douglas might save it. The inducement to earn general contempt by sacrificing their principles was therefore small. Equally, the fire-eaters saw no reason to budge. Eventually the convention broke up. One fragment reassembled at Baltimore and nominated Douglas as the official Democratic candidate. The fire-eaters nominated John Breckinridge of Kentucky, Vice-President of the United States, who could almost pass for a moderate. The real Southern moderates, mostly remnants of the Whig party, rejected both names and nominated Bell of Tennessee, on a Constitutional Union ticket.

The Southern and Democratic vote being hopelessly split, the Republicans, without effort on their part, had the game in their hands. Their convention met in the rising metropolis of the North-West, Chicago. This proved fortunate for the local candidate. The nomination had been expected to go to Seward, but he was regarded as dangerously extreme on the slavery question and too sympathetic to Catholics and immigrants. The party managers were determined to do nothing to alienate any nervous person who had a vote. Accordingly they turned to the tall man with the high voice, in the shiny, rumpled black suit: Abraham Lincoln. He had made fewer enemies than Seward. He came from a key section, the North-West, and a key state, Illinois. In his debates with Douglas, and in various orations since, he had shown himself to be intelligent and eloquent; he was known to be honest (a nice contrast to the Buchananites); he could be built up as a popular candidate because he had been born in a log-cabin and had chopped wood for a living when young. No one suspected that he was a great man. To a professional, the only impressive thing about him was that somehow, in spite of losing two Senatorial elections, he had kept his dominant position in the Whig and Republican parties of Illinois. With judicious negotiations behind the scenes by his agents and uproarious clamour from the public galleries, which had been carefully packed with the local boy’s supporters, the trick was done. ‘The Railsplitter’ was to be the next President of the United States.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 310-311). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . In December [1861], South Carolina formally seceded from the United States, to be followed at once by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. These states next sent delegates to Montgomery, Alabama, to found a new inter-state government. Theoretically each seceding state could have become an independent country; but it seemed wiser to federate, as it has seemed wise to those earlier Founding Fathers of 1776: in adopting this course the Southerners showed how, in spite of everything, they were still intensely American.

. . .

These events struck the North flat with amazement. The Union of the American States was such a profound commitment; the pride in the achievements of the American Revolution was so enormous; the belief in the promises of liberty, equality and property if America held together was so deep, that it seemed impossible that American citizens could really mean to destroy what the President-elect called ‘the last, best hope of Earth’. The Republicans had never believed that the threat to secede was serious: they had dismissed it as an electioneering trick. Even after the event they could not quite take it in, and hoped against hope, indeed against reason, that the Unionist majority in the South would reassert itself as it had in the past. But now there was no Union majority in the South.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 311-312). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Manassas Junction, on a ridge above the little river of Bull Run in northern Virginia.3 The ladies and gentlemen of Washington flocked out with picnic baskets to see the fun. For a time it was a question of who would run away first (the militia had improved very little, if at all, since George Washington’s day), but the rebels gradually steadied. One of their commanders encouraged his troops by pointing to the next section of the line: ‘Look at Jackson’s men, standing like a stone wall!’ – and thus a hero got his name. McDowell was not helped by the decision of the Pennsylvania militia to leave just before the battle: they had signed on for ninety days, and their time was up. Gradually it became clear that the North had been checked. Then, for no good reason (but it was so very hot and the experience was so very new) panic seized the Union troops. Instead of retiring a few miles in good order, which was all that veterans would have found necessary, they fled in abandoned terror all the way back to the bridges across the Potomac, which were soon choked by a roaring, hysterical mob. Had the Southern army been capable of swift movement, Washington could have been captured; as it was, Virginia was suddenly clear of federal troops, except for outposts on the southern bank of the Potomac. Several of the picnickers, failing to run away in time, fell into the hands of the Confederates.

This staggering blow began to sober the North. Lincoln, having got something like the measure of the problem, determined for the time being to ignore importunate back-seat drivers. He sent for General George B. McClellan (1826 – 85), who had just cleared the mountains of western Virginia of Confederates, and gave him a free hand to train what was now to be called the Army of the Potomac. General Scott retired, and more volunteers poured into Washington. Later on that winter Lincoln got rid of his Secretary of War, a machine politician from Pennsylvania who was more interested in the patronage of his office than in enabling the Army of the Potomac to fight effectively, and replaced him with Edwin Stanton, who soon showed himself to be one of the most valuable members of the Cabinet.

If it was beginning to dawn on the North that the war was going to be much longer and more disagreeable than had been expected, no such illumination seems to have benefited the South. To be sure, the Confederacy was confronted with a hard predicament. Its war aim was simple: to win from the North an acknowledgement of its independence. It had neither the power nor the wish to destroy the government of the United States (other than by seceding from it), nor did it have any designs on its territory. The difficulty was in choosing means to reach the goal. One route, much favoured beforehand, was that of ‘King Cotton’. It was supposed that if Lancashire and its mills could not get any cotton, the British economy would totter, and to avoid a fall the British government would be forced to intervene, to recognize and guarantee the Confederacy, even at the price of war with the Union. So even before the Northern blockade could bite, an embargo was placed on the export of cotton in 1862. Lancashire began to feel the pinch, but its sufferings did little damage to British prosperity and never brought the British government anywhere near the point of intervention. In the end only Robert E. Lee’s idea, of unrelenting brilliant battle, with the object of breaking the Northern will to go on fighting, offered any hope; but in the winter of 1861 – 2 the South did not adopt it. Instead she rested on her laurels, unwisely content already to have dealt the North a stinging rebuke.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 322). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Nothing more happened until the spring, when the war began at last to move into its major phase. As a preliminary the South tried to break the blockade with an ironclad vessel, the Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimac, a wooden ship that had fallen into rebel hands when the naval yard at Norfolk, Va., was captured). Virginia did great damage to federal shipping in Hampton Roads; but the next day, in the nick of time, the first Northern ironclad, the newly completed Monitor, appeared to give battle. The two strange monsters battered at each other for five hours, doing comparatively little damage; but in the end Virginia crept back to harbour and did not re-emerge. It was a momentous day in naval history, for it made the whole world’s wooden fleets obsolete and set off a frantic hurry of shipbuilding and iron-cladding in Europe, and especially in Britain. Its chief consequence in the Civil War was that the federal government hastened on the production of more Monitors, so that the blockade was never broken. The South built four more ironclads, but lacked the industrial resources to do more; and none of them fought as successfully as had Virginia.

In the same spring of 1862 great events were happening in the West. In February an obscure West Point graduate, Brigadier-General Ulysses Simpson Grant (1822-85), thrust his forces up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and captured Forts Henry and Donelson, which were the strategic keys to the state of Tennessee. The Confederates were forced to evacuate it, and Grant pursued them across the state almost into Mississippi. But on 6 April they counter-attacked at Shiloh and nearly drove Grant and his army into the Tennessee river: only the arrival of reinforcements, and perhaps the death in battle of the Southern commander, Albert Sidney Johnston, saved the North. On 7 April it was Grant’s turn to attack, and the Confederates had to withdraw into Mississippi. The casualties on both sides had been enormous (13,000 Northerners lost, 10,000 Southerners) in this, the first of the great butcheries which were to characterize the war; but in the end the Union held its ground, and the Confederacy had to reckon with having lost a great chunk of its territory. Soon afterwards a Union army and Union gunboats consolidated the gains of Shiloh and reconquered the Mississippi valley as far south as Memphis. And on 24 April Commodore David Farragut (1801 – 70) took New Orleans in one bold stroke: a feat, it will be remembered, that had been beyond the British.

After that nothing went right for the North for a long, long time.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 325-326). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Emancipation Proclamation was, in the strictest possible sense of the word, revolutionary. If the policy it announced was carried through, an emancipation revolution, launched in answer to the planters’ revolution, would fundamentally remake Southern society on a new principle. The Union cause would indeed become what Lincoln always claimed it was, the cause of democracy, of freedom, of equality; and all threat to the identity and sovereignty of the United States would be over. The work of the earlier Revolution would be completed. No wonder, if (as Lincoln now believed) it was God’s will.

. . .

. . . On the afternoon of New Year’s Day, 1863, Lincoln signed the final Emancipation Proclamation, confident that he could make it stick. At first his hand trembled so much that he had difficulty in writing. He had a superstitious pang, and then remembered that he had been shaking hands all morning with the crowd that had poured into the White House, according to custom, to wish him Happy New Year. He laughed, pulled himself together and wrote his name firmly.

In Boston two great public meetings were waiting for the news – one, mainly white, at the Music Hall, the other, mainly black, at Tremont Temple. When the news came by telegraph Frederick Douglass led the singing at the Temple; at the Music Hall the crowd shouted for Mrs Stowe, and before them all she bowed and wept for joy. The abolitionist crusade was vindicated, and the work of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was achieved. An elderly planter in Kentucky thought the same. He called his slaves together, read out the Proclamation and told them that though it did not formally apply to them, he was sure their freedom was at hand, and advised them to make ready for it. In Washington a crowd of both races gathered outside the White House to cheer the President. The blacks said that if he would ‘come out of that palace’ they would hug him to death; that it was a time of times; that nothing like it would ever be seen again in this life.

Lincoln had done his duty; now the black people did theirs. They deserted the plantations in larger numbers than ever, at considerable risk, greatly weakening the Confederate military effort. The armies of the Union were correspondingly strengthened. Slaves and contrabands proved to be invaluable spies, guides and foragers for the advancing Northerners. Behind the Confederate lines the slaves eagerly succoured Union prisoners of war as best they could and helped them to escape in hundreds. ‘If such kindness does not make one an abolitionist, he must have a heart of stone,’ said one of these grateful fugitives, and another dedicated the book he wrote about his adventures ‘to the Real Chivalry of the South’ – the blacks who had helped him and the others. Nor was that all. Whether as soldiers or hired labourers, Negroes laid miles and miles of military roads; dug innumerable rifle-pits, raised forts, felled forests. They built bridges, drained marshes, filled sandbags, unloaded vessels, threw up entrenchments, dragged cannon to the front. They humped cotton bales abandoned by Southern planters down to the Mississippi levees, where they could be shipped to Union headquarters – demeaning work, since it seemed like a reversion to slavery. They stood on guard duty for endless tedious hours. And more and more they were allowed to fight. The first black regiment to be raised, the 54th Massachusetts, was nearly wiped out in a valiant but unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner, the key to the seaward defences of Charleston, in 1863. The New York Times called this battle the blacks’ Bunker Hill, for though they lost the fight, it proved their commitment to the Union cause and their excellent quality as soldiers. The black garrison of Fort Pillow on the Mississippi was actually wiped out in the following year, by Southern soldiers who would not accept their surrender – an infamous action which excited widespread passionate condemnation in the North. The Battle of Milliken’s Bend (1863) was won by black troops, who later figured in large numbers and with conspicuous gallantry in Grant’s great Virginian campaign and in the Battle of Nashville. By the end, Negroes had furnished 178,975 soldiers, organized in 166 regiments, to the Union army – one-eighth of its entire strength. They had provided a quarter of the sailors in the Union navy. They had successfully insisted on being treated, iri the all-important matter of pay, as the equals of white soldiers, and had convinced Northern opinion that they deserved it. They had won fourteen Congressional Medals of Honour, the highest military decoration. In the end the Emancipation Proclamation had justified all the hopes placed on it.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 331-333). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Fourscore and seven years ago [he began] our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate–we can not consecrate — we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 337-338). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Sherman continued to display his mastery of war. He outwitted his opponents (Johnston and Beauregard were only two of the generals now gathered against him) as well as outfighting them; he bypassed Charleston, which fell all the same, and seized the state capital, Columbia, on 17 February 1865. That night half the town burned to the ground, in fires that were lit accidentally-on-purpose by drunken, vengeful Northern soldiers (Sherman got the blame, though it was quite untrue that, as alleged, he had ordered the arson). As spring began the army turned towards North Carolina and Virginia, to rendezvous with Grant at Richmond.

Before it got there, however, the war was over.

On 31 March Grant launched his long-prepared offensive against Lee’s lines at Petersburg.6 Lee was now so weakened that he could offer no effective resistance. By this time even his devoted soldiers were despairing. There were so few of them left, and under Grant’s inexorable pressure of men and guns they had to stretch their lines ever thinner. They were dressed in rags, barefoot, underfed and dangerously short of ammunition. And what was there left to fight for? The Cause was petering out in bitter squabbles between the political leaders, each blaming anyone but himself for the débâcle. It was, said the soldiers, ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight’. It had taken them a long time to realize it; and the rich men had already lost not only the war, but the thing for which they had launched it. In the North, thanks in large part to strong pressure by the administration, Congress had finally passed the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery for ever, and sent it to the states for ratification. In the South, Jefferson Davis, as a last desperate measure to raise new manpower, had induced the Confederate Congress to give freedom to any slave who enlisted in the army. Slavery was dead, and the Confederacy almost so. And now Sheridan turned Lee’s flank, while Grant destroyed his centre. On 2 April Richmond had to be evacuated. Jefferson Davis and the government fled south-west; Lee began a desperate march to the west, hoping to get beyond the Federal pursuit so that he could turn south and link up with Joe Johnston.

The President of the states so soon to be re-united was waiting for the finish behind the federal lines. He could not quite believe that he was witnessing it. Only a month earlier, as he took the oath of office for the second time, he had seemed oppressed with the idea that all might still be far from over.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

Now it seemed that the Lord had at last relented. Peace was at hand, slavery was dead, a Freedmen’s Bureau had just been set up to help the former bondsmen, and the Union was about to be restored. To realize all this, and to demonstrate it too, Lincoln went to visit fallen Richmond on 4 April. He landed at the waterside almost unattended, and was instantly recognized and surrounded by a huge, happy crowd of rejoicing blacks, anxious to hail the Messiah come to free his children from their bondage. . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 343-344). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

It was a long time before Lincoln was able to walk through the crowd to the Confederate White House and sit in Jefferson Davis’s chair. When he went back to his ship he was escorted by a troop of black cavalry. Perhaps by then he and all the people of Richmond believed in the great victory.

Meanwhile Robert E. Lee was finding it impossible to stage an organized retreat. So complete was the collapse of the Confederacy that supplies could not be got to the soldiers: some went four days without rations. Desertions multiplied: for months now they had been so numerous that he had not been able to spare troops to bring back the runaways. Now men simply fell out on the road west. Grant’s pursuing army found something new: rifles abandoned at the roadside.

Grant was behind; Sheridan, in front. One more battle might be glorious, but would end in annihilation. Instead of ordering a useless sacrifice, Lee decided to surrender. On 9 April 1865 he met Grant at Appomattox Court House, a country crossroads in the forest, and handed over his sword.

It was one of the great symbolic moments of American history. Grant, to his annoyance and subsequent embarrassment, by accident had no clean uniform to put on; so it was in his usual scruffy attire that he received Lee, resplendent in grey coat and soft leather. They quickly agreed on terms. Lee did not want a guerrilla resistance, which would have poisoned the American future indefinitely. Grant wanted to ease the return of the rebels to citizenship as much as possible. The Southern soldiers were to lay down their arms and disperse to their homes; Lee’s request that they might keep their horses to help in the spring ploughing was acceded to, and Grant (living up to his name) gave them an issue of rations. Above all, he gave his word that all the members of that army, from Lee downwards, would be left alone by federal authority so long as they kept to the terms of their parole. Grant knew that he was acting as the President would wish. Nothing must be done to add to the bitterness of defeat; all means must be tried to reconcile the Southerners to being Americans again.

A few weeks more, and Joe Johnston and everyone else had surrendered. The last hostilities of the war, curiously, took place in the North Pacific, where Union and Confederate fishing vessels fought each other until at last the great news reached them. By July the Civil War was entirely over. Roughly 359,000 Union soldiers, 258,000 Confederates, had died either on the battlefield or in military hospitals, which means that it was and is the bloodiest war in American history in terms of absolute numbers as well as in the proportion of casualties to the population. It left indelible traces on the American consciousness. It is very understandable that the soldiers of both sides hurried home and tried to put it behind them. The Union army held a great victory parade in Washington before dispersing. Jefferson Davis began an irksome captivity in Fort Monroe. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 344-345). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Recontstruction 1865-77

. . .

On the evening of Good Friday, 1865 (14 April), four years after Fort Sumter fell and barely a week after Appomattox, Lincoln went to the theatre. He had invited Grant to go with him, but the General said that he had to return to the army (his real reason for refusing was that his wife had quarrelled with Mrs Lincoln). The play was a favourite comedy of the time, Our American Cousin, so attractive that the bodyguard slipped away from the door of the President’s box to watch it himself. The opportunity was seized by John Wilkes Booth, an indifferent actor and a Southern sympathizer, half-crazed with vanity, who for weeks had been organizing a murderous conspiracy. He entered the box, shot Lincoln through the head and jumped down to the stage. One of the spurs that he was foolishly wearing caught in the decorative bunting, so that he fell in such a way as to break his left leg, but he still had sufficient strength and self-control to yell out ‘Sic semper tyrannisl’ 1 before making his escape through the wings and the stage door of the theatre. At the same time one of his associates attacked Seward, who was at home recuperating in bed from a carriage accident. The Secretary of State suffered serious injuries, but eventually recovered. The President was taken to a little house across the street from the theatre, where he lingered unconscious for some hours. Death came at 7.22 in the morning of 15 April. Stanton, watching at his bedside, set the seal on his passing: ‘Now he belongs to the ages,’ he said.

There was an explosion of grief and rage in the North. Lincoln was given the greatest funeral in the history of the United States. Booth was hunted down and killed while resisting arrest. His fellow-assassins were caught, tried and sentenced – in most cases, to death. Nothing could repair the loss. It was not just that Lincoln was a good and great man. His talents had seldom been needed more. The problems of peace would have perplexed even him; his successor was to make them much worse. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 346-347). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Douglass had always believed that ‘once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, US; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States’. It seemed self-evident to many by 1865. Lincoln had said as much in his last public speech. Now was the time to make good that citizenship throughout the country.

Such was the view of the victorious North. Otherwise, she asked little of the South. The debts incurred by the Confederacy and the individual seceding states must be repudiated, of course, and Jefferson Davis was kept in prison for two years; but he was not hanged,

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 348). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . The South might have been defeated in war, but her resources for racial oppression were by no means exhausted.

This response, which gradually crystallized during the late summer and autumn of 1865, had two principal expressions.

One was violent. Very soon the freedmen and their friends found themselves attacked and threatened; but the climax did not come for a year or two, although the Ku Klux Klan was actually founded at Pulaski, Tennessee, on Christmas Eve, 1865. Even so, the struggle between Congress and President over the future of the South from the start took place against a background of brutal conflict. The low points, no doubt, were the race riots in Memphis at the end of April 1866, when forty-six blacks were killed, and the massacre of 30 July in the same year at New Orleans, when approximately forty people were killed and 160 wounded (mostly blacks) by the police force, acting under the orders of the city’s mayor. (Ten policemen were ‘wounded slightly’.) But every day there were lesser incidents: a man shot, or a woman strung up by her thumbs.

The South’s second weapon was not lawlessness, but the law. No sooner were the Johnsonian legislatures elected than they began to pass the so-called ‘Black Codes’: statutes which, far from conferring on the freedmen the right to vote, denied them all but the most rudimentary civil rights and liberties. Provisions varied somewhat from state to state, but on the whole it is true to say that the codes, while at last recognizing the legality of black marriages (though not to white persons), while conferring on blacks the right to sue and be sued in the courts, even to testify against whites, and the right to hold property, and while recognizing their right to be paid wages, in every other respect tried to maintain the slavery laws. For instance, freedmen were required to hire themselves out by the year, and were denied the right either to strike or to leave their employment. Slavery was thus to become an annually renewed institution. Any black found unemployed or travelling without an employer’s sanction would be arrested, fined for vagrancy and turned over to whatever white employer desired his services. (Immediately after the end of the war the former slaves had exercised one of the unfamiliar privileges of freedom by leaving the plantations in droves, chiefly, no doubt, to seek out relations and friends from whom they had been separated by the internal slave-trade, but also from sheer joy at being able to travel and from curiosity to see the world.) Schooling was one of the most passionately cherished ambitions of the ex-slaves, yet no provisions were made for black education. The Louisiana code went into considerable detail about the free labourer’s life, quite in the style of slavery times:

Bad work shall not be allowed. Failing to obey reasonable orders, neglect of duty, and leaving home without permission will be deemed disobedience; impudence, swearing, or indecent language to or in the presence of the employer, his family, or agent, or quarrelling and fighting with one another, shall be deemed disobedience. For any disobedience a fine of one dollar shall be imposed.

The Mississippi code imposed swingeing fines on anyone wicked enough to entice a labourer away from his contracted employer with promises of better pay or conditions. All codes forbade freedmen the use of weapons of any kind. So much for the Northern crusade for human equality. As a leading Northern liberal, Carl Schurz, remarked, the codes embodied the idea that although individual whites could no longer have property in individual blacks, ‘the blacks at large belong to the whites at large’.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 351-353). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

It was soon realized that the failure of the impeachment was the best thing that could have happened, for there was not a shred of evidence that Johnson had engaged in the ‘Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanours’ which the Constitution lays down as grounds for impeachment.6 Had Johnson been ejected, it would have been for nakedly political reasons, and the whole basis of the Constitutional system would have been overthrown:

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 356). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Northerners were now much more concerned to hate the Irish and the other European immigrants flooding in upon them, rather than the blacks, of whom they saw few; but still, there was no love of the black to make it impossible to forget his injuries. In fact one of the reasons why the North saw so few blacks was that they were not allowed to compete for good Northern jobs. They were excluded from the rising labour unions, and so from the factories, except as strike-breakers recruited by the factory-owners, which did not increase their popularity. By the mid-seventies, in short, the African-American was seen, at best, as a bore and a nuisance. There was no political risk for anyone in abandoning him.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 363-364). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Ku Klux Klan began as one of those jolly secret societies of which so many Americans at all times have been so fond (even the Union League had its ritual of secret signs and passwords). ‘Ku Klux’ is a fanciful corruption of the Greek kuklos, or drinking-bowl, which indicates both that the founders were men of some education and that their purposes were not very sinister. Perhaps at first it only seemed a good joke to dress up in white hoods and sheets and ride about the country at night frightening the freedmen. But the Klan changed its spots very rapidly. By 1867 its brutal techniques were well known and were coming into wide use in the South; and its objects were clear. It wanted to restore Democratic control of the Southern states by preventing blacks from voting; it wanted to drive them from such landholdings as they had been able to acquire and occupy; it wanted further to intimidate them so that they would never again make any attempt to assert themselves. The Klan was measurably successful in all three respects.

For five years its members rode out in their robes and masks, whipping, burning, murdering or making lurid threats to do so. The Klan, and similar organizations such as the Knights of the White Camelia which sprang up in its wake, was in some respects rather like a guerrilla movement or the Provisional IRA: not only in its hit-and-run tactics, but in the fact that citizens were unwilling or afraid to collaborate with the authorities in suppressing it; but it knew better than to attack the army of occupation, official buildings or the institutions of government. It left the Northern schoolteachers who had come south to instruct the ex-slaves to the cold shoulders of the Confederate women; unless the teacher happened to be male, in which case he might be beaten up or otherwise made to feel unwelcome: ‘Dear Bro:’ (wrote one of them), ‘We are in trouble. Five men disguised in a Satanic garb, on the night of the 26th inst, dragged me from my bed and bore me roughly in double quick time 1½ miles to a thicket, whipped me unmercifully and left me to die. They demanded of me that I should cease “teaching niggers” and leave in ten days, or be treated worse… I am not able to sit up yet. I shall never recover from all my injuries…’. . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 367). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

By 1873 the Klan had ceased to ride: other methods were found for ‘redeeming’ the South from the Republicans and their allies. But its work long survived it. . . . Liberals, moderates and conservatives from then on could always be outflanked if they showed any disposition to co-operate with the blacks: the tradition of the Klan could be invoked, none would dare to denounce it and a few good lynchings would restore the status quo. In this way the frontier and Revolutionary tradition of the people’s justice was finally perverted.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 368). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . By 1900 white supremacy had developed such a complex and formidable social system that the chief African-American leader of the day, Booker T. Washington, gained his reputation by forcefully advising his people to exploit it by accepting it. He reasoned that African-Americans could make no political progress until they had made economic progress; that they could be said to make economic progress only in so far as they gained control of their own economic lives; and that the only way they could do this was with the help, or at any rate the acquiescence, of the white power structure. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 371-372). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

BOOK FOUR

The Age of Gold

Congressional Government and its Critics 1869-96

. . .

Never before or since has the Presidency counted for so little as it did in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Undistinguished Presidents followed one another (Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison and again Cleveland) without making much of a mark. The hero of Vicksburg and Appomattox was at a loss in the White House. It was never shown that he himself was dishonest, but members of his family certainly took every possible advantage of his position to enrich themselves, and members of his administration, at every level, including his private secretary, were thoroughly corrupt. The most noticeable thing about Grant’s successor, President Hayes (apart from the circumstances of his election), was that his wife, ‘Lemonade Lucy’, refused to serve any alcoholic drinks in the White House. The most noticeable thing about President Garfield was that he was shot by Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed office-seeker. His Vice-President and successor, Chester A. Arthur, a veteran spoilsman, pleasantly surprised everyone by his dignified performance as President, but that was all. And so it went on for more than twenty years.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 407-408). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . The operation of laying railroads across America was on a vastly larger scale than anything ever attempted in Europe: no one could say when, if ever, it would show a profit. To succeed in the task, or at any rate to get a guarantee against failure, the capitalists needed the assistance of Congress. And if, to get adequate land grants, it proved necessary to bribe Congressmen, why not? The Congressmen and Senators themselves had seen to it that bribery was the only way of doing business with them. Frequently they would introduce bills so bothersome to business that they would be offered handsome sums to withdraw them. The money would be accepted, since obtaining it was the only point of the enterprise, and the bill would be dropped. This technique was known as ‘the Strike’. Others would call it extortion. Naturally the politicians did not take a severe view of themselves. Their patriotism was indisputable; many Congressmen had fought in the Civil War or had played their part as war Governors, Senators or Congressmen. If not exactly godly men, they were at least thorough Protestants. They believed in the glorious future of their country, and said so at every opportunity. They had never pretended to be disinterested; they were in politics to make a living and, if possible, get rich: it was the American way, and only while such benefits seemed likely would enough able recruits be found to fill the innumerable posts which the federal system created. Above all they were loyal to their parties and the principles which these stood for. . . .

It was just this genial acceptance of human weakness and greed which alienated the Mugwumps. They were one of the first groups of citizens to make their dissent matter. They were named by their opponents, who could not take seriously fine-drawn ladies and gentlemen who believed that politics, in America at any rate, ought to be something nobler than the arts of shabby compromise and raiding the public purse. The typical Mugwump was a member in good standing of the middle class, a citizen of the old Anglo-American stock, and (except in New York, where opposition to Tammany Hall cut across party divisions) a Republican: probably one of the former Liberal Republicans, who opposed Grant’s re-election in 1872, possibly a former abolitionist, although the abolitionist temperament was usually too radical to be satisfied with any form of conventional politics, and after the death of slavery found, in many cases, new causes, either in the rising labour movement, . . . or in that for women’s suffrage. . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 411-412). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The true Mugwump never learned the obvious lesson from such stories: that somehow or other the poorer classes must be provided for, if only because they had votes. Political bosses might be, and often were, cold-hearted, coarse, narrow, greedy men, with no undue respect for the law; but they did have the priceless virtue of looking after their own people. ‘I think that there’s got to be in every ward a guy that any bloke can go to when he’s in trouble and get help – not justice and the law, but help, no matter what he’s done.’3 Such was the philosophy of the bosses. Their whole influence depended on their helpfulness and reliability. If they made promises they kept them (which is partly why so many notorious scoundrels were known as ‘Honest John’ or ‘Honest Bill’) and in return they could depend on carrying a large and faithful following to the polls. To the beauty of all this the Mugwumps were blind; which explains why Plunkitt called them ‘morning glories’: they never discovered a means of keeping their followers true until the afternoon, even though they occasionally swept state or city elections after especially noisome scandals came to light. They never posed a serious threat to the practical politicians at any level, nation, state or city; and though their desertion helped to defeat the Republican Presidential candidate, James G. Blaine, in 1884 (‘Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine! The continental liar from the state of Maine…!’) he owed his narrow defeat at least as much to the indiscretion of a clerical supporter, who announced to all the world, in the candidate’s unprotesting presence, that the Democrats were the party of ‘Rum, Romanism and Rebellion!’. Nothing could have been better calculated to rally the opposition, and the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, was elected President by a majority of 29,000 votes. Blaine was unlucky, and did not, perhaps, fully deserve the constant obloquy that was heaped on him by Democrats, party rivals and political cartoonists; but his defeat gave every good Mugwump deep satisfaction, which was just as well, for Mugwumpery never did so well again.

Yet it would be a mistake simply to dismiss the Mugwumps as a parcel of snobs. Their criticism of late-nineteenth-century politics was based on unrealistic moral absolutes; but so is the Bill of Rights. They were, in fact, the spokesmen of the American conscience in their time; and given the intensity of the politics of conscience in America – the tradition of the Puritans, the tradition of the Revolution, the tradition of the abolitionists and the Union cause, all fused with American nationalism into the self-righteous belief that the United States was the ‘last, best hope of earth’, as Abraham Lincoln had called it in his high-priest vein – it is not surprising that the Mugwumps, if they had little power, had a great deal of influence. President Cleveland, for example, a slow, solid, honest man who came to the White House without much in the way of a programme, gradually adopted many of the Mugwumps’ pet notions, identifying himself with such principles as further civil service reform and economy in government; and over the years he made himself the rallying-point of all those Democrats in New York state who were opposed to Tammany. Another Mugwump victory was the widespread, and eventually universal, adoption of the secret or ‘Australian’ ballot, which thirty-three states had introduced by 1892. Previously polling-stations had all too often, and not only in Philadelphia, been scenes of the most flagrant violence and bribery; the secret ballot forced the machines to be more discreet in their operations and overall greatly increased the purity of elections. Finally, Mugwumpery was to benefit from the fact that this was the great creative era of American education. A system of free public schools was spreading across the country, where children were taught to idolize the stars and stripes and other tenets of good citizenship; old universities, such as Harvard and Princeton, were being reformed, new, innovative ones (such as Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore) were being founded; in all of them the young were taught Mugwump principles, a blend of idealism, nationalism, middle-class morality and personal ambition that was to leave its deep mark on the next epoch of American history. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 413-414). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . At the beginning of the twentieth century the Southern states spent more than twice as much money per head on the education of white children as they did on that of blacks. (The precise proportion was $4.92 to $2.21.) The courts were carefully uninterested in such information, and the phrase ‘the equal protection of the laws’ in the Fourteenth Amendment was reduced almost to meaninglessness.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 415). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Treated with ever-increasing rigour in the South, thrust into menial work in the North and, which was worse, treated as if they were invisible – their deprivation a problem which their white fellow-citizens refused to notice – the Negroes turned in on themselves. They followed Booker T. Washington. Their churches throve. And once more a solace was found in music. The spirituals were giving birth to the blues; in the bars and brothels of New Orleans and other Southern cities the movement was beginning that would soon give the world ragtime and jazz.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 415). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . So conferences and conventions were held during 1891 and 1892, culminating in the great convention at Omaha, Nebraska, in July 1892, . . .

The Omaha platform remains an impressive document even today.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (Pp. 426-427). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Democrats convened at Chicago sure of nothing but that Cleveland and all his works must be repudiated (as a result there was a secession of gold-bugs). The platform, written largely by Altgeld, reads for the most part like a re-orchestration of the Omaha platform. The Populists, or rather Populism, had captured the Democratic party. The victory was confirmed when William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska (1860–1925) was nominated for the Presidency.

Bryan was the perfection of an American type. His undeniable abilities were always endangered, and eventually swamped, by his conditioning. A son of the West, he believed with equal passion in America and in the Bible, as interpreted by the most literal-minded Protestants. America stood for the prospect of human betterment; the Bible promised that the prospect would be realized. In his old age he would make himself pitifully ridiculous by launching a campaign against Darwinism, believing that Darwin contradicted Christ and that without a supernatural assurance human hopes could not be fulfilled. ‘Evolution, by denying the need or possibility of spiritual regeneration, discourages all reforms, for reform is always based upon the regeneration of the individual.’ So he ended as the counsel for the prosecution in the celebrated ‘monkey trial’ of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, when a young schoolmaster was prosecuted for teaching Darwinism, in breach of an anti-evolutionist state law. But there was a greater consistency between the old Bryan and the young than the sophisticated realized. All his life he spoke for the plain people of rural America, now holding up the prospect of reform, now rebuking the backsliding times, as occasion demanded. In 1896 he captivated the Democratic convention with a speech that was both heavily Biblical in language and the purest distillation of Western silver Populism . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 431-432). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The importance of this speech, with its declaration of holy war against the rich and mighty, and its invocation of the sacred names of Jefferson and Jackson, was that, together with Bryan’s subsequent campaign, it recommitted the Democratic party to its original principles. There would still be rich, conservative Democrats in the decades to come, even conservative Democratic Presidential candidates, but just as Hanna had bound the Republicans to the wealthy, so Bryan had bound the Democrats once more to the poor and weak – an action that was to keep his party out of power for sixteen years, but in the end proved to be of immense benefit to it. And it should not be forgotten that it was Populism, as well as the silver agitation, that made this departure not merely possible, but almost inevitable.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 432-433). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Irresponsibility 1921-33

. . .

. . . The Model T was the best-selling automobile until 1926, but Ford’s methods were being copied and surpassed by his competitors, above all by the giant General Motors, which did not subscribe to the great man’s celebrated dictum, ‘You can have any colour you like, so long as it’s black,’ or to any other of his conservative business attitudes. GM’s innovations lay rather in the fields of organization and marketing than in technology, where Henry Ford’s strength lay; but it was precisely in those fields that the crucial advances were now to be made, so, willy-nilly, the Ford company had to emulate General Motors if it wanted to remain one of the industry’s leaders. In 1927 Tin Lizzie was retired, and after fourteen months of mysterious preparation her successor, the Model A, was unveiled to the world and became for a year America’s best-selling car. But in the gap the newly formed Chrysler Corporation had seen and seized an opportunity to launch its own cheap, popular model, the Plymouth, with huge success. Those two years, in short, saw the emergence of the motor industry in the form it has since retained: at the top the great monopolistic corporations, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler; at a respectful distance, a cluster of much smaller firms, competing for what was left of the market after the monopolies had finished with it.

This was no bad prospect in the twenties, for the market seemed to be infinitely buoyant. The assembly line made cars wonderfully cheap; wages rose fairly steadily from 1917 onwards, registering a gain, in real terms, of 26 per cent between 1920 and 1929; credit was available on the cheapest terms (Ford and GM did all they could to encourage sales by setting up organizations whose sole purpose was to facilitate hire-purchase – or instalment buying, as it is called in America); the irresistible appeal of the car to the consumer, which needs no explanation, did the rest. The result was a multifarious transformation of American life which is not over yet. The economic impact alone was striking enough. The mass market for cars pushed the auto-makers into the front line of American businesses. By 1929 the industry was the largest in the country, employing nearly half a million workers, and Detroit was America’s fourth largest city. US Steel, the prewar giant of the corporations, was hopelessly dwarfed by the Big Three. The demand for petroleum products made the oil companies ever larger, more profitable and more powerful. Demand for the materials which went to the making of automobiles – steel, glass, rubber, paint, for instance – soared, stimulating these industries too, and stimulating rapid technological innovation, for the car itself was changing yearly. It needed good roads to drive on: road-builders and the producers of concrete profited. A whole new profession, that of car-dealer (whether of used or new vehicles), sprang up. And still the sales rose. In 1920,1,905,500 cars were produced; in 1929, 4,455,100 – a figure not to be surpassed until 1949. By 1929, 26,704,800 automobiles, trucks and buses were in registered ownership. It was reckoned proudly that the whole population of the United States could, in theory, be fitted at one moment into existing motor-vehicles.

Yet perhaps the social results were even more impressive than the economic and, in the long run, more important. The car began to break down the ancient sharp division between town and country. The movement perhaps began with the prosperous urban middle class, anxious for a holiday from New York: they were delighted to discover the rest of their country. After one lengthy motor journey a gentleman with the wonderfully pretentious name of Frederic F. Van De Water reported that ‘we had lived on Manhattan Island so long that we had come to consider all America suspicious, hostile, abrupt, insolent… New York and all it signifies, while geographically of the nation, are no more intrinsically America than a monocle is part of the optic system.’ He and people like him began a movement that would eventually cover America with motels and wayside restaurants serving drinks, hot meals and Howard Johnson’s celebrated multiplicity of ice creams. But the cheap car enabled the working class also to travel, for pleasure, or in search of work. Even poor rural people, it turned out, could own cars, and when they did so many of them used the freedom thus attained to depart – to the West, or to the cities; and thus one more of the great migrations of American history began. Even more important, perhaps, was the impact of the car on daily life. It came into use for all sorts of short trips – to work or to the shops – which had previously been made by trolley-car or urban railway. It made a whole new pattern of living possible: vast suburbs began to spread over the land, to the great profit of the building industry. No longer did you have to live in comparatively cramped quarters near the railroad station. Nor did you have to take your annual holiday at one of the traditional, crowded resorts near home. Instead you could speed over the hills and far away, where planners like Robert Moses of New York state had prepared parks and beaches for you: a new function for government. Even Congress, though in its most conservative years, was ready to take a hand: under the Federal Highway Act of 1921 federal funds paid for 50 per cent of the new trunk highways.

The carefree motorist, in short, was not only the symbol of the twenties: he was its central driving force. For ill as well as good: he brought traffic jams as well as mobility, and as early as 1925, 25,000 people were killed by cars in one year – 17,500 of them pedestrians.

There were yet other ways in which the consumer stimulated American industry to new feats: the popularity of the cinema, for instance, produced a whole new giant business as Hollywood took wing; radio was a magic word for gamblers on the stock market; the demand for alcohol was actually increased by prohibition and put millions of dollars into the pockets of bootleggers, rum-runners and outright gangsters (most notably, Al Capone of Chicago); and the very rich lived in a whirl of parties, yachts, furs and cosmetics (at least according to the legend fostered by Scott Fitzgerald in the decade’s representative novel, The Great Gatsby). The near-absolute exclusion of European goods acted as a short-term boost to American industry. It is no wonder that Mr Mellon presided over an epoch of prosperity or that he got the credit for creating it. People are naturally inclined to be generous when times are good.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 493-495). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . It is no wonder that Americans everywhere are insisting that their land no longer shall offer free and unrestricted asylum to the rest of the world… The United States is our land. If it was not the land of our fathers, at least it may be, and it should be, the land of our children. We intend to maintain it so.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 497). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Calvin Coolidge was a man of flinty personal integrity. Furthermore he advertised himself brilliantly without appearing to do so. At the time of Harding’s death he was holidaying at his father’s farm in Vermont, where he had been born and raised. The news that he was now President reached him with some difficulty, as the house was twelve miles from the nearest telegraph station. When a messenger at last arrived, in the middle of the night, Coolidge got up, dressed, and was sworn in by his father, a Notary Public, in the living room, by the light of an oil-lamp. Never was old-fashioned Yankee austerity, Yankee thrift, Yankee character, more conspicuously displayed; never (from the point of view of party managers) more usefully. Coolidge began as he meant to go on.

. . . Coolidge was not only a quietist by temperament and conviction, but a traditional Republican of the truest stripe. He venerated wealth and Andrew Mellon. As President, he thought it was his duty to mind the store while the Republicans ran the country as they saw fit. He intervened in the economic process only to veto the proposals of more active men in Congress.

. . .

Meanwhile the years of ‘Coolidge Prosperity’ rolled onwards. It was a happy, hopeful epoch, and in retrospect it is sadly clear that it would not have taken very much wisdom to realize its promise. The most controversial aspect of American life at the time was undoubtedly prohibition. The great experiment had got into dreadful difficulties almost at once. Congress never made funds available to pay for an adequate number of enforcement officers: wisely, because the number would have had to be astronomical. As a result the temptation was irresistible to smuggle booze into the United States by land and sea; to manufacture it in the privacy of one’s own cellar; to run speakeasies (illegal saloons) where it could be sold at extortionate prices, or bootlegging businesses (criminal grocers) which brought it and the same extortionate prices to the private citizen’s doorstep. It was all especially tempting to the thriving mobs of New York and Chicago. Professional, organized crime, in fact, grew so profitable, thanks to the Eighteenth Amendment, that it has been big business ever since: when prohibition ended it took up illegal gambling, drug-smuggling, prostitution and general extortion instead. The price of official righteousness comes high. In the case of prohibition, $2,000,000,000 worth of business was simply transferred from brewers and bar-keepers to bootleggers and gangsters, who worked in close co-operation with the policemen and politicians they corrupted. Blackmail, protection rackets and gangland murders became all too common, and no one was punished. In New York city, out of 6,902 cases involving breaches of the Volstead Act (the law, passed in 1919, which was supposed to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment), 6,074 were dismissed for ‘insufficient evidence’ and 400 were never even tried. Out of 514 persons arrested in gambling raids in 1926 and 1927 only five were held for trial.

. . .

Yet enough voters were doing well in 1928 to make Coolidge’s re-election a certainty if he wanted it. He did not. ‘I do not choose to run,’ he said, with characteristic precision, and when it became certain that he meant it the Republicans turned inevitably to the third giant of the Harding Cabinet.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 500-504). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Even in the palmy days of Coolidge prosperity there were over 600 bank failures a year: in other words, every year an appreciable portion of America’s earnings and savings went down the drain. Nor were there effective means for ensuring that bankers or stockbrokers were honest. All too many of them were not; and all too many were idiots.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 507). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . The flood of dollars had been drying up before the crash, diverted as it was to the home market and the stock exchanges; now it was reduced to less than a trickle, and before very long the economies which it had floated were wrecked. This development took more than a year to make itself fully felt, however; meantime Congress pushed the economic thought (if that is the word) of the twenties to its ultimate absurdity: during 1930 a new American tariff, the Smoot-Hawley, was promulgated. It carried protection to heights even beyond those of the Fordney-McCumber tariff. Presumably the rationale was that since American industry had (allegedly) needed protection in the days of its strength, it needed still more now that it was weak. But the schedule of duties was not compiled in any systematic or scientific way. Instead there was the usual brawl of logrollers in Congress as Republicans and Democrats, Senators and Congressmen, farm representatives and spokesmen for industrial states, competed and bargained and engineered to help the special interests they favoured; just as if the times were normal. The White House was quite unable to influence the process. A thousand economists signed a petition begging the President to veto the tariff bill; instead he signed it into law – perhaps the most unaccountable action of Hoover’s career, for it was read as a confession that he had entirely lost control of economic policy. It signalled to everyone with money to use or lose that there was no hope of rational and effective leadership from the United States. It was the rejection of the Versailles Treaty all over again. The nations turned in despair to each save herself. As the economists had expected, the Smoot-Hawley tariff was the last blow to world trade. America’s trading partners12 instantly raised tariff barriers against her, in revenge and self-protection; now there could be no hope of re-stimulating American production by foreign demand, for their governments would not allow the foreigners to buy American. Nor could there be any question of re-stimulating foreign production by American demand. World commodity prices continued their headlong descent, to the great injury of primary producers such as Australia, Brazil, Argentina – and the growers of wheat and cotton in the United States. . . .  The bankruptcy of American foreign policy was thus fully exhibited for the first, but not the last, time.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 512-513). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Private charity soon began to run out of funds. By 1932 the Red Cross could grant only 75 cents a week to each impoverished family. Public authorities were helpless, for the greatest need was in the cities, and the cities, so long the object of rural suspicion, were prevented by law from tackling the problem of relief by such measures as fresh taxation or public works without the consent of the state governments; and it was long before that consent was forthcoming. . . . So the unemployed were left largely to their own devices: whether selling apples on the sidewalks (but there was a glut of apples as well as of sellers), or offering to shine shoes, or, in the case of hundreds of thousands of adolescents, taking to the roads and railroads as tramps.

. . .  If Hoover, as it seemed, could not give work to the people, let him give them bread.

He refused to do anything of the kind. There were horrible ironies here. None of those who knew him best doubted his compassion. He was toiling desperately, eighteen hours a day, to mend matters: greying, putting on weight, his hands trembling, his voice hoarse, his eyes red with exhaustion.

. . .  Yet Hoover, who had first earned his great reputation by organizing the feeding of the starving children of wartime Europe, now set his face against Americans who, if they were not yet starving, in all too many cases soon might be. Hoover had not grown inhumane. But he had always been an ideologist, who believed in what he called American individualism: in the social arrangements which had made it possible for a poor Iowa farm boy to become, first, a millionaire by his own efforts, and then President of the United States. The system which had made such an achievement possible must not be tampered with in any circumstances; it must be vigorously defended, whether against monopoly capitalists (Hoover retained many of the attitudes of a pre-war Progressive) or the Kaiser’s armies, or the Bolsheviks, or, now, the economically and politically ignorant who wanted the state to take on responsibilities which, in the American system, belonged exclusively to the individual. He was being asked to abandon the convictions of a lifetime, and he could not do it. In that he showed his unfitness for his position (as had George III). ‘Time makes ancient good uncouth.’ What America needed was a leader who could accept this truth. Hoover could not. He clung to what, until then, most men had deemed to be the essence of America. Even the agonies of the Depression could not shake him: if the will was there, organized private charity could deal with them, as he himself had dealt with the agonies of Belgium. If the state made itself responsible for seeing that men had work, food, shelter – made the direct pursuit of happiness its business – then everything that made the United States unique and glorious would be betrayed. The mission of the federal government was to get the productive machine operating again without destroying the moral fibre of the citizens.

. . . The shanty towns that sprang up round the great cities, where impoverished families sought shelter, were known as ‘Hoovervilles’. The newspapers they slept beneath were ‘Hoover blankets’. He was seen as stony, unimaginative, hard-hearted, inert. These impressions were reinforced by the affair of the Bonus Marchers. These were unemployed First World War veterans, who had been promised ‘bonus’ payments in 1945, cash presents to see them through their old age; now they demanded payment in advance, since old age could hardly be worse than what was already happening to them; and they marched on Washington to demand their due. Hoover hid in his office and refused their petition, seeing it as no more than an unusually spectacular raid on the Treasury. Eventually he ordered the army to disperse them from the little Hooverville they had established not far from the White House. The army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, a flamboyant egoist on a white horse, made a bad affair worse by driving off the veterans with tanks, guns and tear-gas, giving them no chance to leave quietly. The public was revolted by the business, and if Hoover had not already lost the coming election, he did so then.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 515-517). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

BOOK FIVE

The Superpower

The Era of Franklin Roosevelt 1933-8

. . .

. . . A cherished dream of the liberals during the twenties, especially of the veteran old Progressive Senator George Norris of Nebraska, had been the scheme to use the federally owned dams at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee river to generate cheap electrical power for the people of the Tennessee Valley. This project had been bitterly opposed by the electricity companies, and conservatives in Congress had tried to sell off the dams (which had been built to generate power for the production of nitrate for explosives during the First World War) to private concerns. Norris had been able to stop that, and now his dream came true. The Tennessee Valley Act set up the Tennessee Valley Authority as the first publicly owned electricity organization in the country. It was rank socialism, but no one seemed to care: the TV A created thousands of jobs as it built more dams and constructed power-lines; as a secondary activity it trained the farmers of the Valley in conservationist agricultural techniques; and its electricity not only began to reach hundreds of thousands of poor homes which would otherwise have had to do without refrigerators, electric stoves and electric light, but tempted industrialists to set up plants in what until then had been one of the most under-industrialized regions of the country.

. . .

. . . Never before had there been such an orgy of law-making, never before had so bold an attempt been made to adjust the country to new times. But the work was only beginning. The pace of that first spring was never again to be equalled, but a great transformation was under way. The demands made on the American people were not to slacken significantly until the eve of the Second World War. For the men and women round Roosevelt (Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor, was the first woman to become a Cabinet officer) were not content to pass emergency measures and then let the federal government sink back into the dignified indolence of the late nineteenth century. The Coolidge era was over for ever. Former Wilsonians, former Progressives, they each had one or more long-cherished reforms to push, now that they had the power and now that the temper of the country was so obviously propitious. They saw their opportunity, as Boss Plunkitt would have said, and they took it. They were no morning glories, but able, experienced, hard-driving professionals.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 526-527). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . From early 1934 onwards the alienation of the old business community – the magnates of New York, Philadelphia and Chicago (businessmen further west were less upset) – grew deep and bitter, until the rich alluded to the President only as ‘that man in the White House’. At the same time Roosevelt slowly learned to abandon his aspirations and to come out as the champion of the people against the ‘economic royalists’. By 1936 the lines were sharply drawn – more sharply, perhaps, than in any other election in American history – and the Republicans, identified as the party of Wall Street, were swept to what seemed to be eternal oblivion.

. . . On 4 July 1933 Roosevelt rejected his emissaries’ attempts to achieve some sort of stabilization of the world currencies, on the grounds that this might interfere with his efforts to tempt businessmen to reinvest by pushing up prices in the United States. In the narrowest terms of economic advantage, he had a case; but he overlooked America’s obligation, as the world’s leading industrial and financial power – a power, furthermore, which was largely to blame for the catastrophe – to do something to help the weaker trading nations; and he was totally blind to the consideration that this was a chance – the last, as it turned out – for a significant measure of international cooperation to rescue the world economy and thus avert the new world war which, as we have seen, was already beginning to grow out of the Depression. The most disturbing comment on his action was made by Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazis’ financier: he praised Roosevelt for being an economic nationalist like Hitler and Mussolini. By 1934 Roosevelt had begun to see that he had gone too far, and pushed a Trade Agreements Act through Congress, which enabled him to revise tariffs freely. A major source of domestic political strife was thus at last removed, but otherwise the Act led to very little. The New Deal never developed a coherent trade policy, and in that respect one of the chief causes of the Depression remained virtually untouched.

. . . A handful of more radical temperaments – many of them university graduates – were allured by the possibility of total political transformation, and drifted into the Communist party, or towards the Trotskyites. Probably the majority of Americans believed that the all-important task was that of getting work again; they showed themselves willing to try almost any panacea that was offered as an end to unemployment, and they judged politicians strictly by the state of the labour market; except for the farmers, who judged them by their traditional criteria – agricultural prices, the state of farm mortgages, the farm standard of living and the independence or otherwise of the small farmer. Clearly the President could not hope to satisfy all these groups all the time; but Roosevelt’s political genius was displayed in the brilliance by which he kept so many on his side for so long.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 528-529). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . The proceeds of a special tax on processing (canning meat, milling grain and so on) were used to compensate generously farmers who agreed to plough up their cotton crops, or restrict their acreage of wheat planting or slaughter their baby pigs. Ten million acres of cotton that might have made shirts and dresses were dug under; six million piglets were murdered prematurely, and although some of the meat was used by the government to supplement the diet of the urban unemployed, nine-tenths of it was inedible. There was an immense outcry from the public. Wallace was disgusted. ‘To hear them talk,’ he said, ‘you would have thought that pigs were raised for pets.’ Nevertheless the public had a point, as Wallace well knew. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 537). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . in 1934 and 1935 came dust-storms. The Great Plains had entered the dry phase of the climatic cycle once more; there was a prolonged drought; exhausted and neglected by the greedy methods of traditional farming, the soil of western Kansas, Oklahoma, the Texan panhandle and eastern Colorado blew away on the gales. Eventually it darkened the skies over Washington, DC, stained the winter snows of New England red and fell upon ships 300 miles out on the Atlantic. Tens of thousands of farming families were ruined and took their hopeless way west, pathetic caricatures of the pioneers, to charity camps in California. The price of farm products began to rise, falteringly at first, from their low point in 1932, and had nearly doubled by 1937; and those farmers who weathered the storms began to prosper again, assisted by a flood of new programmes out of Washington – conservation programmes, electrification programmes, resettlement programmes. A divided Supreme Court, in one of the worst decisions in its history, struck down the original Agricultural Act in January 1936 (US v. Butler et al.), but the essential parts were quickly re-enacted (it was election year) under the guise of a soil conservation law, and in 1938 the farm programme was put on a permanent footing by a new AAA. Washington, having literally set its hand to the plough, would not look back.

This became the secret of the farmers’ strength. During the decades of neglect they had been, though still so large a part of the population, not voiceless, but ineffective in national politics. Now they could always be sure of a hearing, and a respectful one too, for neither the White House nor a Democratic Congress, in which Senators and Representatives from the cotton South held dominating positions, was going to alienate so large a block of citizens (roughly 25 per cent of the population) by withdrawing favours to which they had got used. Especially not since the activities of the AAA taught the farmers, far better than the Populists had ever managed, how to unite and organize. Under the AAA it was the farmers, meeting and voting, who decided how many acres should be taken out of production every year and supervised each other to make sure that the reduction actually occurred. All the other programmes were administered in the same manner. By the end of the thirties the farmers were no longer the desperate clients of Washington: they gave terms to the bureaucracy. Once more vast surpluses built up (in federally paid-for granaries); only now they threatened not the farmer, but the national government, with financial disaster. Henry Wallace was landed with the responsibility; he was nearly at his wits’ end as to how to discharge it when he was elevated to the Vice-Presidency, and then war, which brought an insatiable need for all supplies, came to the rescue, and the American surplus began to reach the starving world at last.

The fact that the New Deal was less in command of events than it seemed was well illustrated by another aspect of the farm programmes. The farmers who took the lead in the administration of the AAA were not the worst-hit victims of the Depression: not the sharecroppers of the South, the tenants of the Middle West, the hired hands everywhere, the illiterate, the black, the ignorant, the smallholders trying to live off pocket-handkerchief holdings, owners of exhausted land, or young men and women forced to stay on the land because there was no work in the cities.13 Apart from every other obstacle in their way they were often too ill-fed to have enough energy to stand up for themselves in meetings at the end of a hard day’s work. So the big commercial farmers and, in the South, the landlords carried all before them, greatly helped by the fact that AAA subsidies were paid, as it were, to acres, not individuals: the bigger the farm, therefore, the more money the farmer received from the government. With abundant collusion from within Congress and the Department of Agriculture they strengthened their position more ruthlessly and determinedly than big business did under NRA, and with far more permanent success. The reforming followers of Tugwell within the administration, the organizations of poorer farmers outside it, made no great headway against them; and the ebb of the Depression diminished such sense of social solidarity as had been induced in 1932. In short, the renewed prosperity benefited the strong farmer; the weak suffered much as before; and after 1941 (when the factory boom of the Second World War opened up the job market again) the movement from the land to the cities resumed. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 538-539). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . in the summer of 1935 Roosevelt again demonstrated his political mastery (which had seemed to be waning after the Supreme Court’s action in destroying the NRA) by launching a second Hundred Days of ‘must’ legislation, the Social Security Act (which had been making a slow progress through Congress since January) was the heart of it. Riddled with anomalies and exceptions, this act was nevertheless the foundation stone of the future. . . . It was financed entirely, and from the economic point of view unwisely, by contributions: by taxes levied on the employers and by deductions from the wages of the employed. This was to have some harmful results in the near future, but Roosevelt was clear about the political importance of the arrangement. ‘We put those payroll contributions there,’ he said, ‘so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security programme.’18 There was to be no retreat to Hooverism; and later administrations would take care of some of the weaknesses of the original act. (So they did: the system was extended, under Truman and Eisenhower, to another twenty million workers; Lyndon Johnson augmented it with a system of medical insurance.)

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 541). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Wearing his hat as head of P W A, Ickes did the lion’s share of the building, while Hopkins did the boondoggling. This derisive, unfair, but convenient term came into use among the enemies of the New Deal to describe make-work jobs – the example always used was leaf-raking – for which ‘reliefers’ (another term of the time which has happily lapsed) were paid wages. Actually, this reflected Hopkins’s perfectly sound principle that the souls of the reliefers must be saved as well as their bodies. Proud and individualistic Americans found going on the dole a horribly humiliating experience. It involved a means test; it was a confession of failure; once it was accepted it tended (many thought) to become narcotic: its recipients lost the will, the hope to seek work again. . . .  Acting on the excellent principle that ‘they’ve got to eat just like other people’, he made work for writers and artists, which is why so many American post-offices are now adorned with rather awful mural paintings,

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 542). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . all the other New Deal agencies discovered, to their delight, that the RFC with its revolving fund (for its investments brought in substantial dividends) was a bottomless source of cash which was always on tap and did not have to be filtered through Congress. Congress might have objected to this state of affairs – it was supposed to control the purse-strings, after all – except that Jesse Jones was always very helpful in financing projects for particular Senators and Congressmen in their states and districts. No wonder that the RFC became FDR’s favourite political instrument; no wonder it outlasted all the other New Deal agencies (it was not dismantled until 1953). In retrospect its importance lies less in the size of the power it wielded over the American economy, great though that was, than in the new role in which it displayed the federal government – a role which had been foreshadowed in the First World War; but now it was peacetime. The RFC was the new governor of the economic machine, and the master of the RFC was the President of the United States.

Roosevelt’s re-election in 1936 was the most certain thing since George Washington’s. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 544). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . At the election Roosevelt carried every state except Maine and Vermont; he got 27,751,612 popular votes, while his opponent, Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas, got 16,681,913 votes – a respectable testimony to the stubbornness of American party loyalties, but not much more. For the fourth election running the Democrats increased their numbers in Congress; for the first time since 1894 there were fewer than a hundred Republican Congressmen; and there were only sixteen Republican Senators.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 545). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

In the rashest moment of his career he decided to attack the Supreme Court first of all his enemies. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 546). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . the whole thrust of New Deal policy was directed against the political philosophy which the Court majority held sacred. Mr Justice Sutherland, for one, was not impressed by arguments that an economic crisis demanded a reinterpretation of the Constitution: he had lived through economic crises before. The Constitution must be preserved and respected in bad times as in good.

Roosevelt did not disagree with this truism; but he did not take the same view of what the Constitution was as the aged judges did, and he grew more and more restive with the principle, indiscreetly laid down by Charles Evans Hughes in his youth, that the Constitution was what the judges say it is. Black Monday was bad enough; but it was followed by the disastrous session of 1936, when in succession the Court invalidated the AAA; an Act regulating prices and working conditions in coal-mining; and a New York state law setting a minimum wage for women workers. Significantly, none of these decisions was unanimous: it seemed that six old men were wantonly intent on carving the heart out of a political programme overwhelmingly supported by the people of the United States. Even the Wagner Act and the new Agriculture Act seemed to be in danger. In the circumstances it is not surprising that the President decided to safeguard the New Deal against judicial counter-revolution before bringing forward anymore new proposals.

His mistake was not to consult Congressional Democratic leaders first (indeed, he consulted nobody worth mentioning). He should have known better. . . . Tampering with the Constitution is the sin of witchcraft in American life; any President (or for that matter any judge, or any member of Congress) who can be plausibly accused of the offence may expect to find his support melting mysteriously away from day to day. And Roosevelt was blatantly trying to tamper with the Constitution by packing the Court: the plan he suddenly unveiled on 5 February 1937 proposed the appointment of extra Justices up to the number of six, if those Justices over the age of seventy did not ‘voluntarily’ retire. . . .

. . .

The resultant battle dragged on until the autumn. It was made ludicrous at an early stage, when the Supreme Court reversed itself by approving the Wagner Act. . . . There the dispute should have ended, but Roosevelt was grimly determined on victory and struggled on until it became clear that Congress was never going to support him. He then had to acknowledge the first and most devastating defeat of his Presidency.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 546-548). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . the new social security taxes were anyway taking large amounts of purchasing power out of the market. The result should have been foreseen: the industrial recovery was cut off suddenly, factories once more began to close and the number of unemployed leaped upwards. By Christmas two million more workers had lost their jobs.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 548). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Roosevelt grew more and more annoyed, and eventually, in the summer of 1938, decided to try to purge the Democratic party of mutineers. He toured the country, asking Democratic voters in that year’s primary elections to reject such enemies as Senator George of Georgia or Senator ‘Cotton Ed’ Smith of South Carolina. But he had not prepared the ground sufficiently, and it is always hazardous for a President to intervene in local battles, as was proved when George and Smith were triumphantly re-nominated; and to make matters worse, in the autumn election the Republican party, profiting from the recession, staged an effective comeback, taking eight Senate seats and no less than eighty-one House seats from the Democrats. The latter still had a majority in both houses, as Roosevelt took some comfort in pointing out, but their liberal wing had been seriously weakened. Congress was now dominated by conservatives, all too many of whom believed, or professed to believe, that Roosevelt was aiming at a dictatorship, which made it their bounden duty to resist everything he proposed. In two years’ time, they fondly supposed, he would retire, and with any luck a conservative would succeed him – either one of the new Republican stars or a right-wing Democrat. The disasters of the past eighteen months had left their mark on the administration. . . .

Radicals could mourn; but their works remained, enormous and irreversible. Later critics have blamed the New Deal for not going further, faster: it is always so easy to demand the impossible, and so tempting to play down the importance of starting something. . . . He thus enabled the American government to assume the responsibility of safeguarding the welfare of the American people in a sense far more radical than that envisaged by the Founding Fathers, . . . As a side-effect of all of this, the federal bureaucracy grew.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 549-550). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Reluctant Giant 1933-45

. . .

. . . He [FDR] pushed the so-called Lend-Lease Act through Congress in the first months of 1941. It would be wrong to beggar Britain while aiding her, he explained; he wanted to ‘get away from the dollar sign’ (he remembered the damage that war-debts had done to Anglo-American relations after 1920); he intended to say to Britain, ‘We will give you the guns and ships that you need, provided that when the war is over you will return to us in kind the guns and ships that we have loaned you;’ in a press conference he compared the idea to lending a neighbour a garden hose to put out a fire. It was a pious fraud: the hose was never likely to be returned. The important thing about the Lend-Lease Act was that it authorized the President to give what military aid he liked to whom he liked ‘in the interest of national defence’. A few months earlier he had set up an Office of Production Management to shift American industry from peacetime production to military production as much as was necessary. These two actions were even more significant than they seemed at the time. They not only conferred enormous new economic and political power on the Presidency; they began the transformation of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘great, peaceful people’ into the world’s first superpower, with all that that entailed. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 560). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

So war was more or less inevitable, and on 7 December 1941, thanks to the brilliance of their cryptographers in cracking Axis codes, the Americans were able to decipher and read the Japanese government’s latest orders to its envoys in Washington before the envoys themselves could do so. These orders showed that something was going to happen immediately. All the signs were that the Japanese were preparing an attack to the south; the army and navy staff, unconvinced by General MacArthur’s belief that he could successfully defend his command, the Philippines, thought that the enemy would strike first there; accordingly the Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, flashed a warning to MacArthur. But as a matter of routine, the warning, that the Japanese were planning some sort of surprise attack at 1 p.m., Washington time, was also sent to other American forces, such as the ships of the Pacific Fleet in their base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

A farcical series of accidents now supervened. December the seventh was a Sunday, when (as the Japanese well knew) by long tradition the American services in peacetime took life easily, so much so that their telegraphic network closed down for the day and even General Marshall could not reactivate it in time. The warning could not be telephoned, as that might reveal to the Japanese that their code had been broken. In the circumstances it was thought best to send the message by the commercial network, Western Union. Unfortunately, although Marshall’s telegram reached Honolulu with twenty-seven minutes to spare, the only means of getting it to naval headquarters was by entrusting it to a messenger boy on a bicycle. He did not prove speedy enough.

Other warnings had been ignored or misinterpreted. A Japanese midget submarine had been detected and sunk near the entrance to Pearl Harbor at quarter to seven that morning; nobody realized what she portended. Temporary radar stations had been installed at the base, and two keen young soldiers were practising on one of them. At two minutes past seven they detected aircraft approaching from the north and reported accordingly to their superior officer; unfortunately he assumed that they were American planes and did nothing (unless the legend is true that he arrested the soldiers for playing with radar sets out of hours). Everyone else at Pearl Harbor was in a weekend mood. Edgar Rice Burroughs (the creator of Tarzan), who had for some time been worried about the general lack of preparedness, was taking the air outside his house on a height in Honolulu from which he could see the tranquil ships of the Pacific fleet drawn up in shining rows. At 7.55 he was pleased to note the beginning of what he took to be a spectacularly realistic battle practice.

For Yamamoto had successfully gathered his forces to a point in the empty, un-isled seas of the north Pacific, 275 miles or so from Pearl Harbor. Torpedo bombers, dive bombers, high-level bombers, fighters – 360 planes in all – left the decks of his carriers, stormed down over Oahu and for nearly two hours hammered the arrogant Anglo-Saxons. Three battleships were sunk (West Virginia, Arizona, California), one capsized (Oklahoma), others were severely damaged, and many smaller craft were either damaged or sunk; 120 planes were destroyed;3 2,403 Americans (mostly sailors) were killed. The Japanese lost only twenty-nine planes and three midget submarines. At a quarter to three the messenger boy, who had sensibly kept out of the way during the battle, delivered his telegram. At 3.45 p.m., six hours after the Japanese force had withdrawn, the general commanding in Oahu ordered a blackout.

President Roosevelt called it all ‘a day that will live in infamy’, and so it is remembered. It was also one of history’s most spectacular misjudgements. In the first place, the Japanese hit the wrong targets. Most of the ships could be and were made serviceable again; had the bombers attacked the oil tanks and other onshore facilities, the effect of their raid might have been felt much longer. Second, although the aircraft carrier was already known to be the key to naval success in modern warfare, Yamamoto had attacked Pearl Harbor and a moment when all the carriers of the Pacific fleet were absent. Third, the fleet posed no immediate threat to Japan: it could have done nothing to impede her simultaneous swoop upon the Philippines, Singapore and the East Indies, and might as well have been left alone, if only to save supplies. Fourth and finally, nothing, not even the attack on Fort Sumter, has ever aroused the American people to wrath like this episode. The isolationism and pacifism of so many, the hesitations of so many more, were swept aside by this unprovoked attack of an aggressor power (for the Americans stuck stubbornly to the view that they had done nothing wrong in opposing Japanese incursions into Manchuria and China). ‘Lick the hell out of them,’ advised one isolationist Senator. He spoke for the country. America First dissolved overnight. It became the settled purpose of the mightiest nation in the world to destroy the Japanese Empire root, trunk, branch and twig. Three days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler, after some last-minute hesitation, honoured his promise to his ally by declaring war on the United States, thus clearing the last obstacle from Roosevelt’s way. ‘We are going to win,’ said the President in a Fireside Chat, ‘and we are going to win the peace that follows.’ The new crusade to make the world safe for democracy could now officially be launched.

. . .

The war achieved what the New Deal had so falteringly attempted. The need to produce ships, planes, tanks, guns, bullets and bombs did what the need to rescue the unemployed could not. Roosevelt announced that the time for ‘Doctor New Deal’ was over; now it was the time for ‘Doctor Win-the-War’; but the distinction was largely false. For the war brought its own new deal – a deal based on very different values and calculations from the peacetime one, but perhaps all the more effective for that. The democratic, capitalist nation of abundance suddenly began to show what it could do when put to it, and surprised even itself.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 564-566). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . The evolution of the federal government was sharply accelerated. The alphabet agencies of the New Deal were superseded or outnumbered by the bodies brought into being by the war: for example, the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board; the War Production Board; the War Manpower Commission; the National War Labor Board; the Office of Defense, Health and Welfare; the Office of Price Administration; the Office of Production Management; the War Shipping Administration; the Office of War Mobilization; the Office of Scientific Research and Development; the Federal Public Housing Authority; the Office of Defense Transportation; the War Food Administration. The RFC took on a new importance as it played a central part in organizing American finance and industry for war purposes through such subordinate bodies as the War Insurance Corporation, the Defense Plant Corporation, the Defense Supplies Corporation and the Rubber Reserve Corporation. Of course a great many of these agencies would be abolished after 1945; but meantime they broke down resistance to ‘big government’ in many quarters (especially conservative ones) which the New Deal had never been able to reach, at any rate since the collapse of the NRA.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 568-569). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

After the war, he [FDR] thought, responsibility for the happiness of the world would lie with those he called ‘the Four Policemen’ – the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and China. . . . And he never wavered in his belief that agreement and co-operation between the Four Policemen were essential.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 575). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Roosevelt liked to think that he was a more realistic statesman than Wilson, but the gulf between aspirations and actuality in his Four Freedoms speech is larger than anything in Wilson’s utterances. Thus he promised ‘a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world. This is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation…’ While his words raised hopes, his actions ensured their disappointment. It followed, also, that he could not teach the Americans the realpolitik he was practising: it would have shocked them too much. It might even have revived isolationism, for the Four Policemen arrangement was strikingly like an entangling alliance. Many Americans might have objected to a proposal that they should constantly patrol and discipline the wayward globe. So Roosevelt kept his own counsel and spoke of the association with Britain and the Soviet Union as a league of right-minded, democratic peoples. This, too, was unfortunate. Not only was it a travesty of the already notorious facts about Stalinism, it initiated the tradition by which Presidents in the next few decades came to think that foreign policy is too serious a matter to entrust to the people – hence a long story of deception and disaster.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 576-577). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Stalin, a monster of practised treachery, who had killed so many of his closest associates and therefore lived in an atmosphere of perpetual suspicion and fear, was quite incapable of believing that the leaders of the West meant to act honourably by him. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 579). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . on the twelfth [1945], Franklin Roosevelt suddenly died. The shock to the world was immense. Signs of his collapsing health had been visible since before the 1944 election, but few had realized what they portended, and nobody expected his disappearance so soon. American soldiers in China wept like children. . . . on the twelfth, Franklin Roosevelt suddenly died. The shock to the world was immense. Signs of his collapsing health had been visible since before the 1944 election, but few had realized what they portended, and nobody expected his disappearance so soon. American soldiers in China wept like children.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 581). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Cold War Abroad and at Home 1945-61

. . .

By 1948 what became known as the Cold War dominated diplomacy.1 Thenceforward all countries made their calculations, whether economic, military or political, from the basic assumption that the USA and the USSR were now enemies and might at any moment start to fight.

That the two superpowers (as they would come to be called) did not turn to battle for the solution of their difficulties is perhaps the most encouraging fact of modern times. . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 584). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Republicans had not recaptured Congress to play second fiddle to the Democrats. On the contrary, they acted at times as if they hoped to undo the entire New Deal. Led by their narrow-minded paladin, Senator Taft, they pushed through the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution, which disqualified any candidate from being elected President more than twice. In view of subsequent abuses of Presidential power this revival of the two-term tradition looks a great deal wiser than it did at the time, when Truman denounced it, quite accurately, as a deliberate slur on the memory of Franklin Roosevelt (no one could doubt Truman’s disinterestedness, for the amendment did not apply to him). An even more important achievement was the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, a law which sharply curtailed the freedom of action, and thus the industrial power, of the labour unions. It outlawed strikes by government employees, for example, banned the closed shop and made the unions responsible for breaches of contract. It required union leaders to swear they were not communists. Above all, it revived the labour injunction by empowering the President to suspend or forbid by court injunction any strike for up to eighty days, the so-called ‘cooling-off period’, while an agreed solution was sought to whatever problem had arisen. . . . At least the unions were at one in denouncing Taft-Hartley. But they have never got it repealed . . .

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 594-595). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

President Truman saw an opportunity. Running for election in his own right in 1948 he largely ignored the Republican candidate, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York (except that occasionally he abused him, to happy cries of ‘Give’ em hell, Harry!’ – once, monstrously, as a fascist). Instead he spent his time attacking the ‘do-nothing’ Congress. The experts all agreed that the President had no chance of victory, but he fought a doughty campaign. It was the most purely enjoyable contest of recent times. The candidates were well-matched, and however desperate the state of international relations (the Russians blockaded Berlin in June, which brought on the successful Berlin airlift in retaliation) it was, to the ordinary citizen, the least crisis-laden Presidential year since 1928. It was also the last campaign of the sort which had been traditional since the days of William Jennings Bryan. The conventions were televised, but there were too few households with sets for the new medium to have much effect on the outcome. Truman reached the voters by criss-crossing the country in a train, ‘whistle-stopping’ in the style of Theodore Roosevelt. Never again! His pugnacity, his good humour, his partisan loyalty and, perhaps, the fact that everyone has a weakness for the underdog (and Dewey was said to look like ‘the little man on the wedding-cake’) explain the outcome: Truman confounded the experts and defeated Dewey comfortably. He defeated Congress too: the Democrats regained control. In January 1949 he was inaugurated for his first full term, promising a ‘Fair Deal’ to the American people.

The ‘Fair Deal’ was a continuation and extension of the New Deal, meant to please those groups – workers, blacks, farmers – whose votes had carried the day for the President. Some of it got through Congress: the minimum legal wage was raised, the benefits of Social Security were extended to ten million more people, a vast programme of slum clearance and federally supported public housing was launched. . . . Some of it did not: proposals for universal medical insurance, a new system of farm subsidies, an anti-lynching law and a Fair Employment Practices bill. Events soon overwhelmed Truman’s liberal programme. The 1948 election had not really suited the times.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 595-596). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . On 9 February 1950 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin (1909-57) announced to the world in a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had in his hand a list of the numerous communists ‘known to the Secretary of State’ who were still working and making policy in the State Department. And so the great witch-hunt was launched.

The villain of the piece was of an all too familiar type. True, the most notorious demagogues had always previously come from the South, with the exception of the Nazi-sympathizing Father Coughlin, and he was never an office-holder; but McCarthy was otherwise clearly of their kidney” And there has always been something demagogic about even mainstream American politics. If a deliberate attempt to stir up the crowd by character assassination and cries of conspiracy are characteristic of demagogy, then neither Sam Adams, nor Thomas Jefferson, nor Alexander Hamilton, nor Andrew Jackson, and certainly not their associates, were guiltless. They each committed these sins, though they did not make them the sole substance of their politics. Demagogy was a potent force in the 1930s, and but for the success of Franklin Roosevelt might have become really dangerous. The opportunity had if anything grown in the years since then. Previous demagogues had had little solid appeal outside their own states or sections; but twenty years of modern government, modern problems and modern population movements had made the Americans much more homogeneous than ever before, greatly increased the importance of the national government and national politics and, in such devices as radio and television, created a national audience. Thanks to aircraft, a politician in quest of that audience could move about the country far more rapidly and easily. Nationwide magazines like Time and Life, and the emergence of the syndicated columnist, whose articles would be printed in tens or hundreds of newspapers across the country, had even done something to break down the intense traditional localism of the American press. All this represented opportunity to a demagogue; all he needed as well was an issue; and of those there were plenty in 1950, when the people were bitter and bewildered, not just because of the pace of change in the past two decades but because of the horrible way in which the longed-for post-Hitler peace had turned into the Cold War and then become the prelude to yet another hot war.

None of these reflections exonerate McCarthy. He did enormous damage to his country, both abroad and at home, not all of which has even yet been repaired. He was not, it must be repeated, the only scoundrel to take advantage of public nervousness to drum up a Red scare for his own ends. But he was incomparably the most able. Not that he was a cold calculator; rather, his genius (for that it undoubtedly was) lay in a certain hot, instinctive cunning which told him how to win power, headlines and a passionately loyal following by manipulating the worst impulses and most entire weaknesses of his fellow-countrymen. He was a liar on a truly amazing scale, telling so many lies, so often, and in such a tangled fashion that Hercules himself could not have completed their refutation, for new falsehoods sprouted faster than old ones could be rebutted. In early life he lost all respect for the pieties and hypocrisies that governed most American politicians and voters, and was therefore able to see quite clearly that the penalties for defying these shibboleths were small, the possible rewards enormous. He lied his way into his first public office, that of circuit judge in Wisconsin; in 1946 he lied his way into the Senate, partly by accusing his opponent in the Republican primary, Robert La Follette Jr, of being corrupt, and partly by insisting that ‘Congress needs a tail gunner’ – namely McCarthy, who, apart from sitting in a tail gunner’s seat when a passenger, on a few occasions, on a military plane in the Pacific during the Second World War, spent his service behind a desk, de-briefing pilots. Never mind: he passed himself off as a wounded war-hero (having injured his leg when falling downstairs, drunk, on a troopship) and won the election. Once in the Senate he pursued his favourite interests, chiefly boozing and gambling, and financed them by taking bribes from corporations that had business in Washington: to use the slang phrase, he was a boodler. He was a palpably unsatisfactory Senator, and by 1950 there were signs that the people of Wisconsin might retire him. He badly needed an issue, and in a rash moment, which they soon greatly regretted, some Catholic acquaintances suggested that he denounce the communist menace. They were thinking of the international crisis, but McCarthy knew better. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘The government is full of Communists. We can hammer away at them.’

McCarthy knew nothing about communism or the State Department, but he did know that mud sticks, especially if you throw a lot of it. It is doubtful that he ever thought he was doing much harm. He spent his days largely in the company of petty crooks and swindlers, and having no scruples, no respect for law and no concern for reputation (otherwise he would hardly have swaggered so conspicuously as a foul-mouthed, drunken, mendacious brute) probably could not believe that others might have different attitudes, or genuinely suffer if they were traduced. As for the point that his conduct undermined democratic processes at home and fanned hostility to the United States abroad (where many liberals felt that Uncle Sam had at last torn off his disguise: as Richard Rovere says, ‘he was the first American ever to be actively hated and feared by foreigners in large numbers’, he ignored it completely. For him it was enough that he had secured his re-election, that money flowed in from anti-communist enthusiasts that he could spend as he pleased, and that he could keep the entire political establishment of the United States in perpetual uproar. He had fun.

His impact on central government is what distinguishes him from the other heroes of the second Red Scare. While HUAC hounded private individuals McCarthy took on the State Department, the army and the Presidency itself. To their eternal shame he was encouraged by his colleagues in the Republican party, now desperate for power. Senator Taft was the son of a Chief Justice of the United States: yet he advised McCarthy, ‘If one case doesn’t work, try another.’ Baser, stupider men in the Senate joined in the cry. First the Truman and then the Eisenhower administration trembled before him; and the press let itself be used as his megaphone. It was as squalid an episode as any in American history.

It bred threefold evil. Least important was the effect on foreign opinion. McCarthyism was of course a marvellous gift to Soviet propagandists. They had long done their best to discredit the United States, abusing it ceaselessly in clichés all their own, such as ‘boogie-woogie gangsters’ (my favourite). Now the persecution of communists and fellow-travellers and plain citizens of the United States who were neither could easily be trumpeted so that the willing could forget the continuing atrocities of Stalinism. Since 1917 there had been Europeans who resented American power, wealth and leadership; McCarthyism gave them a respectable excuse for expressing their hostility. Less cynical or dishonest elements simply found their doubts confirmed. They disliked the Cold War, did not blame Russia for it exclusively and disliked some of its consequences: the building-up of Germany again (and soon, her rearmament) and the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. They began to doubt if the country of McCarthy was a safe guardian of nuclear weapons. In this way the seeds of what became a mighty paradox were sown: as the youth of Europe became more and more Americanized, in dress, speech, music, literature, outlook and even in eating habits, it turned away, or thought it did, from American leadership in politics and ideology.

However, in the long run this alienation had surprisingly little impact on events. Much more important was the effect of the great fear on American citizens themselves. Their lives were devastated for four years, and even after the acute phase passed, in 1954–5, there was a long aftermath of uncertainty, anxiety and occasional oppression. Journalists, diplomats, authors, actors (HUAC particularly enjoyed investigating Hollywood, for it thus generated a unique amount of publicity), trades unionists, scientists, scholars were called before Congressional committees and forced to testify against themselves. McCarthy tried to get membership of the Communist party made a crime; he failed, but to be on the safe side many witnesses refused to answer questions, invoking their right under the Fifth Amendment not to bear witness against themselves. This did little good: ‘taking the Fifth’ was interpreted as an admission of guilt, and was often followed by the loss of one’s job. Not taking the Fifth did not work either, because the committees would not accept a witness’s refusal to tell tales. Many a victim who professed himself or herself willing to talk about their own past, but not about that of other people, ended up in jail for contempt of Congress. A similar fate met those who tried to protect themselves by pleading the First Amendment, supposed to guarantee the rights of free speech and free political activity: they too went to prison for contempt as the courts refused to help. A sort of panic spread through American life. Suspect individuals were blacklisted – that is, diligent private groups denounced them as unfit for employment, at any rate in the jobs they were trained for – and then sacked. In this way many actors fell on hard times. A firm which refused to be bullied into dismissing its employees might be blacklisted itself; a university might find itself cut off from the lucrative government research contracts that were becoming an important part of academic life. So, at any rate, it was feared. Consequently many organizations called in alleged security experts whose function it was to smell out ‘subversives’. These experts were as unsavoury a gang of informers as was ever let loose upon the innocent; sometimes their expertise arose from the fact that they had once been communists or communist agents themselves; now they earned a living by denouncing their former associates and anyone else they disapproved of. Sometimes they were former employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who had fallen out with the Director, J. Edgar Hoover. Sometimes they were simple confidence tricksters. Anyway they did enormous harm, since employers were far too ready to leave it to them to say who was or was not worthy of trust. A grey fog of timid conformity settled over American middle-class life. And New York city dismissed a public washroom attendant for past membership of the Communist party. No doubt, if he had continued in employment, he would have corrupted his customers with Soviet soap or Communist lavatory paper.

But the American people, though susceptible to panic, come to their senses eventually. The great fear, like the Red Scare, eventually sank into the past, with all its injustice and suffering. What was not so easy to get over was its impact on the government. This was the third and worst, because longest-lasting, consequence of McCarthyism.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 598-601). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

On the domestic front Eisenhower did not do so well. He would not act boldly and openly against Joe McCarthy, explaining privately that ‘I just will not – I refuse – to get into the gutter with that guy.’ This left McCarthy free to intensify his persecution of the State Department and to launch a new campaign against the army; luckily for Eisenhower this last enterprise backfired completely, so that in December 1954 the majority of the Senate at last felt brave enough to vote for a motion condemning ‘the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr McCarthy’ for bringing the Senate ‘into dishonour and disrepute’. After that Joe’s unique power as a national bully was at an end.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 611). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The poor of the South, black and white, discovered that higher wages for less work were now available to them, thanks to Uncle Sam; and they were soon ready to think that these good things ought to be available to them on principle.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 619). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The geographical and occupational mobility of American society is so great as sometimes to dazzle and deceive the eye. The educated American middle class does, to a surprising degree, live according to the enlightened ideology of the Founding Fathers and the benevolent ethics of conventional Christianity. Its individual members can be as stupid and selfish as anyone else, but the class as a whole tries to live up to its formal belief in the equality of human rights and the importance of maintaining an open society. The unlimited prosperity of the post-war period and the swelling birth-rate of the forties and fifties greatly increased the size of this class; it was highly active and vocal both politically and culturally; it was from its ranks that the blacks drew their chief white allies; it was this class which helped the black cause financially; and it was the ideology of this class which the leading black organizations made their own, for ‘equality of opportunity’ was exactly what they wanted.

There was a certain irony in this convergence of the most and the least prosperous Americans; but it was observed without amusement by the bulk of Northern whites. These looked on the commitment of the middle class to equality as fraudulent, for they were well aware that there was very little equality of opportunity between the children of the richer suburbs and the children of the poorer; between the professional and the manual working classes; between the graduates of Harvard University and those who had not even got to high school. To this lower middle class (to call it working class or proletarian would badly distort the truth about American conditions) the point of America had never been equality, or even opportunity; it had been security. These descendants of the Irish, Italians and Slavs knew that their parents and grandparents had come to the United States mostly to escape intolerable conditions at home, and that they had succeeded largely through group solidarity, which had rapidly, but not without great effort, won them ascendancy in certain jobs and certain neighbourhoods: one thinks of the traditional Irish dominance in police forces and fire brigades, and the proliferation of ‘Little Italies’, ‘Little Germanies’, and so on. Talented individuals might and did escape from their tribes of origin into the larger world, but for most the satisfying thing about American city life was that each ethnic group had its niche, in which all its members could nest. The melting-pot, beyond a certain point (the acquisition of citizenship, the adoption of the English language), did not melt, or did so only very slowly.8 It was extremely important to these groups that their monopolistic hold on certain jobs and neighbourhoods, which guaranteed their identity, should be maintained. In Gary, Indiana, for example, there was a hereditary caste of steelworkers, most reluctant to make room for black newcomers, though by the end of the sixties Gary had a black mayor. In nearby Chicago, Irish and Polish neighbourhoods stubbornly clung to their homogeneity, though they were surrounded by areas of equally solid black occupancy. And everywhere there was the need to protect a family’s chief investment, its dwelling. When a black tried to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, his prospective neighbour observed, ‘Probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.’

None of this might have mattered very much if the American city had retained its economic vitality. Instead, for reasons already given, it was beginning to decay at its core, and the arrival of numberless unemployed blacks, who were in many cases unemployable (either because the job market was closed to them or because the demand for unskilled labour was shrinking fast), simply accelerated the decay. Furthermore, the inner city was already under deeply destructive pressure from various quarters. It was being torn down in all directions to make room for motorways, or to enable real-estate developers to make fortunes by putting up more and more gigantic office-blocks or, bitter irony, so that huge areas of monstrously ugly, dispiriting public housing could be erected with subsidies from the federal government paid under the Housing Act of 1949. Ethnic neighbourhoods began to seem like islands under siege by the tide, or like fortresses isolated from each other by an invading army. If the enemy were allowed to encroach, the neighbourhood shops and small industrial concerns, which gave employment to many and satisfaction to all, would be the first to go. Then the private houses would be demolished, in larger or smaller numbers; those inhabitants who could would move out, hoping to reconstitute their lives elsewhere; and the blacks (or, in New York, the Puerto Ricans) would begin to move in, which would in turn be the signal for the final desperate scramble outwards to the suburbs. The blacks would not inherit a going concern, as the Italians had once inherited the Lower East Side of New York from the Irish, and they from the Yankees. Instead they would fall heir to a vast area of decaying housing, with decaying services and no prospects except of indefinite reliance on welfare. They were not even safe from direct economic exploitation, for many slum landlords continued to exact high rents while doing the absolute minimum of maintenance for their properties. No wonder that crime figures mounted rapidly, or that one of the most usual crimes was now arson. By the mid-seventies large areas of such places as the South Bronx in New York had, literally, been burnt out, and were being allowed to decay into wilderness once more: a wilderness disfigured by the rusting wrecks of cars, the blackened skeletons of shops, schools and houses, and acre upon acre of cracking concrete slabs.

Against conditions such as these the civil rights movement was largely helpless. Its achievements were of inestimable advantage to the black middle class: the number of blacks in professional occupations doubled between 1960 and 1974, and their place in society was increasingly unchallenged. But most blacks were not middle-class; indeed about half of them lived on, or below, or near, the poverty-line, the line below which, statisticians reckoned, their income was inadequate for the necessities of life. It proved exceedingly difficult to find effective means of helping them, though Lyndon Johnson talked of a war on poverty, and A. Philip Randolph proposed a ‘Negro Marshall Plan’, which would have involved the expenditure of $10,000,000,000 a year for ten years: but even the liberal Congress of the mid-sixties balked at the idea of expenditure on anything like this scale for such a cause (though at the same time it was voting much larger sums for the war in Vietnam) and after the election of Richard Nixon to the Presidency in 1968 it was clearly vain to hope for anything of the kind. Indeed, one of Nixon’s advisers tactlessly suggested that the time had come to practise a little ‘benign neglect’ of black problems. This outraged the black community, but outrage alone was not going to change anything.

The dilemma was most cruelly exposed in the last years of Martin Luther King. With the passage of the Voting Rights Act the first phase in ‘the Second Reconstruction’ was virtually complete: in political and legal terms blacks now were, or would soon become, formally equal to whites. But their social and economic deprivations were as bad as ever, and it was clearly incumbent on the leaders of ‘the Movement’ to launch a second phase which would tackle the horrors of black life in the North. At first King tried to apply the Gandhian tactics which had proved so successful in the South, but they did not work. For one thing he had decided that the war in Vietnam was mopping up economic resources that should have been used to improve conditions at home; that it was killing a disproportionate number of black Americans; that it was hideously cruel; and that it might lead to world war. These considerations impelled the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize to denounce the war repeatedly; but in so doing he alienated the administration which was waging it. Lyndon Johnson was a vindictive man who never liked or trusted Martin King; he never again gave more than token countenance and protection to the activities of the SCLC. What this meant became painfully clear when, in 1966, King took his organization to Chicago and launched a series of marches through the all-white suburbs of that city, hoping to bring down the structure of de facto housing segregation there, for he reasoned that if the blacks could break out of the ghetto they might find decent jobs, houses and schools waiting for them. His concrete aim was to shame the city of Chicago into living up to its own open-housing ordinances, its own regulations which required, for example, that all rented property should be repainted once a year. He did manage to get a surprising number of concessions out of the city administration, and a large number of paper promises. But the spirit of willing compliance, essential for real progress, was lacking. Richard J. Daley, the mayor, was the last of the great city bosses. He was under no pressure from Washington to work with King. He knew that the black movement itself was splitting, as the younger activists turned away from King and non-violence to the phantasms of ‘Black Power’ and war on whitey – phantasms which blended all too well into the criminal violence in which the days of all too many young blacks were passed. He felt that his own political power in Chicago was challenged, and in any case he could hardly make concessions to the blacks when the whites on whom he depended politically were showing such bitter hostility to the marchers. The climax came when 200 marchers through the suburb of Cicero (Al Capone’s former lordship) were met with an incessant rain of bottles and stones: the inhabitants of Cicero, mostly Polish-Americans, saw the black demonstrators as embodiments and precursors of all the forces which were threatening their way of life: but for the protection of the police, and the National Guard, there would certainly have been killings. King withdrew from Chicago, to carry on the struggle elsewhere; then, on 4 April 1968, he was assassinated by yet another of the wretched, half-insane murderers who were so tragically common at that time.

King was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, by a Southern white, James Earl Ray, who was driven on by the racial tensions which had poisoned Southern life for so long; so it can be said that he was martyred in the cause to which he had brought such great gifts and victories. His death – the death of a devoted, wise and eloquent man, who had a sure grasp of the essentials of the tragedy of his times, and who still had much to give his people, white as well as black – was a fearful loss. When the news of the murder hit the nation, 125 cities rose in an unparalleled outbreak of rage, grief and protest. It took 70,000 troops to suppress the rebellion; once more the people of the ghettoes fought, looted and burned; in particular they erupted across Washington, doing immense damage both to the city and to race relations. It was not a commemoration which King would have appreciated, nor did it do anybody any good, although Lyndon Johnson, with characteristic adroitness, used Martin Luther King’s death to push the Open Housing Act through Congress, as he had used Jack Kennedy’s to push through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Riot, arson and looting are poor substitutes for a decent standard of living. This was soon so universally accepted that the poor black population began to sink back into apathy, even while the black middle class increased in numbers, prosperity and status.

The next ten years brought no more dramatic gains. It began to seem as if the Second Reconstruction had ended, like the first, with no more than partial success; it began to be feared that yet another century might run before a Third Reconstruction would at last give African-Americans everything in the way of hope and happiness to which they were as much entitled as their more fortunate white fellow-citizens. It was not very surprising that at the Howard University commencement ceremonies in 1978 Thurgood Marshall, once the leading counsel for NAACP, who had led for the plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education and then became the first black Justice of the Supreme Court, commented in the grimmest terms on African-American prospects:

Be careful of the people who say, ‘You’ve got it made. Take it easy. You don’t need any more help.’ Today we have reached the point where people say, ‘You’ve come a long way.’ But so have other people come a long way. Has the gap been getting smaller? No. It’s getting bigger. People say we’re better off today. Better off than what?… Don’t listen to that myth that [inequality] can be solved… or that it has already been solved. Take it from me, it has not been solved.

Poverty and racism: America’s most urgent business was still unfinished.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 640-644). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

The Crisis of the New Order 1963-74

. . .

On top of all this, American casualties rose rapidly. By the end of Johnson’s Presidency 222,351 servicemen had been either killed or wounded. It is not surprising that the war soon became even more unpopular than the Korean War had been. Other factors intensified the anger and disillusionment that would have been felt in any case. Lyndon Johnson had timed his war unluckily. For one thing, the television age was now full-fledged, and the screens were filled with images of horror. Americans were shown the devastation of the country, the sufferings of the people, the sufferings of their own soldiers. Furthermore, there was no censorship of news dispatches. Perhaps, had the war started suddenly, a censorship could have been imposed, as during the Second World War and Korea, though circumstances were so different that I must doubt it; as it was, the war crept up on America, and by the time the troops got there in force the reporters were already well established. Most of them were ready to take the administration’s view of the conflict, but an increasing number were not; and it was these last who gradually came to dominate the presentation of the news, both in print and on television (by contrast, a gung-ho movie, The Green Berets, starring John Wayne, was a dismal flop). The impact of all this reportage, both inside and outside America, was devastating, and the reaction of other nations, especially in Europe, reinforced it. Never had the United States been so universally condemned. It was not just a matter of the usual Leftist hostility. Many old and tried friends of America were appalled by what they saw; and even those who supported Johnson’s aims were amazed at his blunders over means. The constant stress on the point that unless the United States stood firm in Vietnam its allies would lose faith in it was misguided: before very long the allied governments were asking how they could trust a country that was so reckless, so unreasonable, so incompetent; dared they retain their links to one that was so unpopular?

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 656-657). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

It is easy to be unkind about youth in the sixties. At one moment to be twenty-three and an admirer of the Rolling Stones (a popular team of musicians) was, it seemed, sufficient guarantee of private wisdom and public virtue. Certainly there was something maddening, to their elders, in these ignorant, provincial, conceited young people, who from the gilded shelter of universities which their parents’ money had bought for them and in many cases built for them (never had the colleges and universities of America raised funds more successfully than during the fifties and early sixties) looked out with absolute intolerance on the modern world and condemned it as unclean. Some of them turned out to be quite as unpleasant and as stupid as what they condemned, like the young zealots in Greenwich Village who blew up themselves and their house while making bombs for blowing up other people. It was nevertheless a great mistake (one which many committed) to dismiss them all as no more than middle-class hooligans.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 657). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . Ford lost some goodwill by formally pardoning Nixon, for it seemed to many that the ex-President was getting off a great deal too lightly. Nixon did not help matters by trying to get possession of the celebrated tapes: a special act of Congress had to be passed to thwart him. But it is likely that Ford did the right thing; without the pardon the aftermath of Watergate would probably have been as long-drawn-out and painful as the crisis itself.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 667-668). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

A World Restored? 1977-89

. . .

. . . Carter’s finest hour came in 1978 when he holed up in the presidential retreat, Camp David in the hills of Maryland, and talked the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, into making the agreements which soon led to peace between their countries. It was an extraordinary feat, testifying to Carter’s intelligence, persistence, honest purpose and goodwill.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 674). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . foreign policy issues are seldom the central ones in American elections. Inflation was much more damaging to the governing party. Everyone agreed that it ought to be tackled, but there was no consensus on what caused it and what would cure it. Liberals wanted government action to push down prices, conservatives wanted to put a ceiling on wages. New economic theorists abounded, agreeing on nothing except the worthlessness of John Maynard Keynes: monetarists wanted to do something about the money-supply, supply-siders wanted to cut back government regulation and expenditure. Workers, particularly those on the West Coast, who watched an immigration rate rising towards the half-million annual mark,6 began to fear for their jobs and their high wages. Most ominously of all, from a politician’s point of view, inflation was inexorably pushing citizens into higher and higher tax-brackets, since neither the state nor the federal bureaucracies could move fast enough to correct this ‘bracket creep’. In 1978, in California (where everything started nowadays) a great tax-revolt began. In an age of inflation it was inevitable that the price of real estate should go up. The state of California largely financed itself out of property taxes (since the federal government pre-empted income tax) and accordingly, as many citizens got richer on paper, their tax bills got larger in real life (but at any one moment most of them were not going to realize their notional capital gains by selling their residences, and those who did had to buy replacements, also at inflated prices). So in a referendum Proposition 13 was passed, by a two-to-one margin, which, among other things, cut property taxes by 57 per cent and ordained that in future the state legislature might only increase taxes if it could muster a two-thirds majority. The idea swept the country: it was like the anti-Stamp movement all over again. Property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes were all slashed, and voices were raised to demand that the federal government do likewise, if necessary by constitutional amendment. The state governments lost billions in revenue, and had to cut back expenditure. It was a bad moment for the Democrats, who had been the big-spending party since Franklin Roosevelt became President.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (pp. 674-675). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

. . . in 1973, in the Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court found that restrictive state laws against abortion were unconstitutional.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 678). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

Carter’s presidency must be reckoned a failure. His successes were few, and not always worth the political price he paid for them. As an outsider he saw clearly certain changes that he wished to bring about in the way that Washington did things, but he did not understand the system well enough to go the best way about achieving this. But his central failure was political. He wanted to move the Democratic party to the right, and could not understand, let alone respect, those many Democrats who resisted the idea: ‘My main political problem was with the so-called liberal wing of the Democratic party,’ he complained in 1981; but without those liberals he would have fared far worse than he did. He had a tin ear for the music of American politics. ‘I have no new dream to set forth today,’ he remarked in his inaugural address, and it was all too true. His message was not what the American people wanted to hear. Their native optimism was fundamentally intact, in spite of the Vietnam years; they did not want to be told that ‘we cannot afford to live beyond our means’. They preferred to think that the march to the Big Rock-Candy Mountain could be resumed at once, and their new leader had promised that it would be, just as soon as the dismal Democrats were out of office.

Brogan, Hugh (2001-03-29). The Penguin History of the United States of America (p. 683). ePenguin. Kindle Edition.

THE LAST BEST HOPE

VOLUME II:

FROM a WORLD at WAR

To the TRIUMPH of FREEDOM

1914-1989

by William J. Bennett

Chapter One

AMERICA AND THE GREAT WAR

(1914-1921)

“TOO PROUD TO FIGHT”

[As World War I began to accelerate,] President Woodrow Wilson immediately declared America’s neutrality. Reacting to the stories of the “rape of Belgium,” Wilson said, “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments.” The stance was very popular with Americans. Even the normally bellicose TR said it would be “folly to jump into the war.”

Besides, President Wilson was having trouble enough with Mexico. The problem was the murderous Victoriano Huerta, who had come to power by assassinating Mexico’s president and vice president. Wilson refused to extend diplomatic recognition to this blood-soaked man and instead worked for his ouster. When some American sailors on shore leave were harassed by Mexican authorities, U.S. Admiral Henry Mayo demanded an apology and a proper salute to the American flag. Huerta offered to apologize and salute the American flag if the Mexican flag was rendered similar honors. This was refused.

Tensions mounted.

To prevent Huerta from rearming, Wilson ordered the seizure of the port of Veracruz. Even Mexican democrats rejected Wilson’s humiliating actions. Huerta was soon forced to leave the country, but Mexico descended into chaos. Rivals fought for power: Emiliano Zapata, who represented Indians; Pancho Villa, a bandit, and General Venustiano Carranza.

Wilson justified his interventions in Mexico and other Caribbean states by saying he would “teach the Latin Americans to elect good men.” Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was, as usual, mystified: “I just can’t understand why those people are fighting their brothers.” Seeking a way, any way, out of the Mexican mess, Wilson agreed to arbitration by Latin America’s “ABC” Powers: Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.”

All eyes turned back to Europe, however, when a German submarine sank the British luxury liner Lusitania on 7 May 1915 off Kinsale, Ireland. The U-boat (unterseeboot) attack claimed more than twelve hundred noncombatants as the great four-stack vessel sank in just eighteen minutes. Of these, 126 were American citizens who ignored the warning notices the German embassy had placed in newspapers in New York and several other U.S. cities.

The Lusitania was carrying munitions, which made her a legitimate target for destruction in German eyes. They had the letter of the law on their side. Even so, Americans felt a shock of horror as survivors described the babies who cried piteously as their wicker basket cradles sank slowly beneath the waves. Americans were further repelled by the German reaction to the sinking. There, editorials boasted of a “joyful pride in our navy,” schoolchildren were given the day off in celebration, and a Munich citizen even had a commemorative medallion struck to honor the submariners who had done this act. A pro-British American living in London seized upon the medal and had three thousand copies of it made. These circulated throughout the U.S. and the British Empire as evidence of German inhumanity.

President Wilson quickly responded to the outrage and the demands for war with Germany. “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” he said, echoing his previous sentiments about staying out of the war. Such indifference shocked the former presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, both Republicans. Wilson’s statement left them appalled. They both called for war. TR’s cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, agreed with their outrage. But as Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, FDR was a loyal Democrat. He could not go public with his disagreement with the president of his own party.

Instead of preparing for war, Wilson sent Germany a diplomatic note. When this produced no discernible reply, the next month Wilson sent a second, sterner note.

Wilson’s second note provoked Secretary of State Bryan. At a Cabinet meeting, Bryan charged those present angrily: “You people are not neutral. You are taking sides.” Bryan wanted Wilson to condemn the British as well for their blockade of Germany. When Wilson refused, Bryan quit. Blockades were fully legal under international law, a minor point the pacifist secretary of state apparently had never bothered to learn. Bryan’s resignation caused a domestic political crisis for the president.

Not all of Bryan’s fellow evangelicals agreed with him. Rev. Bill Sunday, the most prominent preacher in the country, called the German sinking of the Lusitania “Damnable! Damnable! Absolutely hellish!” Another called it “a colossal sin against God and . . . premeditated murder!”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13172-13212). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Americans were horrified by the slaughter in the trenches in France. Not only had the Germans initiated the submarine warfare against passenger ships, but they were the first to introduce poison gas. Hundreds of miles of the beautiful French and Belgian countryside were reduced to a hellish moonscape, a “no man’s land” where rats fattened on corpses. The Germans use their powerful artillery to batter quaint towns and villages into rubble. “Big Bertha” was a forty-three-ton monster howitzer produced by the Krupp company and incongruously named for Gustav Krupp’s wife. It fired a 2,200-pound shell more than nine miles.

The Germans rained death from the air. Their hydrogen filled dirigibles—called zeppelins after German Court Zeppelin—dropped bombs on civilians in London. In all this, the kaiser’s High Command consciously pursued a policy of schrecklichkeit (“fruitfulness”) to terrify their enemies.

Wilson addressed the war in Europe in another controversy of speech in 1916 in which he calls for “peace without victory” and offered to mediate. Germany’s earned the offer. Once again, Republicans and other supporters of the allies were deeply affronted.

Wilson’s reelection prospects brightened somewhat when the Germans offered the Sussex Pledge in May of 1916. This event followed an attack by a U-boat on the unharmed French Channel steamer Sussex in which 50 people including Americans, were killed. In this agreement, the Germans pledged not to attack merchant vessels unless they were carrying war contraband and unless they are passengers and crewmembers had first been allowed to get into their lifeboats.

Wilson was renominated in 1916, but with the Republicans’ divisions papered over, it appeared he would be a one-term president. TR urged his Bull Moose progressives to get behind the Republicans for the sake of national unity. GOP prospects look good; no Democrat had been reelected since Andrew Jackson.

The Republicans backed Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Despite the fact that the tall, bearded Hughes had once been governor of New York, however, he proved to be an inept campaigner.

Wilson’s campaign stressed the theme “He Kept Us Out Of War.” Privately, Wilson worried that “any little German lieutenant” could put us into the war and the president could not stop it. Wilson knew that relatively low-ranking submarine commanders held vastly destructive power in their hands. Any one of them could create an international incident by killing more noncombatants. What if, for example, a U-boat skipper had sunk an American liner off the shores of the president’s home state of New Jersey? But publicly, Wilson was content to campaign as the peace candidate. Democrats took out full-page ads in the newspapers attacking both Hughes and Theodore Roosevelt:

You are Working;

—Not Fighting Alive and Happy;

—Not Cannon Fodder!

Wilson and Peace with Honor?

Or Hughes with Roosevelt and War?

When the British harshly put down the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland, Irish-Americans were outraged. Hanging many of the romantic Irish patriots was bad enough, but the British also hanged Sir Roger Casement, a man famous for his humanitarian work in Africa. Casement was, however, directly implicated in gun-running from a German freighter off Connie Tralee. The British made their cause odious in the eyes of many Irish Americans by releasing Casement’s diaries that showed he had engaged in homosexual acts with young Africans. Irish nationalists to this day believe the British forged the so-called Black Diaries.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13264-13296). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The Allies had been bled white by the war in France. Britain alone lost 20,000 men and 40,000 wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. By early 1917, the Allies were near financial collapse. To win the war, the Germans needed to avoid antagonizing America.

This the reckless kaiser could not do. Early in February, he gave into his admirals and announced the results in of unrestricted submarine warfare. The Germans had begun to discount the American reaction to this. Because they had repeatedly provoked America and had faced no serious consequences, they haughtily assumed that America would not fight. Or, if America thought, it would not achieve much.

“They will not even come, because our summaries will sink them,” Admiral Capelle promised Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, in January 1917. Pridefully, he continued: thus America from a military point of view means nothing, and again nothing, and for the third time [I say] nothing!”

This contempt was not only an example of the German militaries bloody-mindedness, it was also a reflection of President Wilson’s policies and his choice of key personnel. Wilson had no military experience. He was certainly well respected as a scholar, but he had no deep knowledge of American diplomacy and warfare. Worse, with the sole exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson surrounded himself with advisers similarly unqualified. He hadn’t consciously chosen pacifists as Secretary of State (William Jennings Bryan) and secretary of the Navy (Josephus Daniels). His attorney general (A. Mitchell Palmer) was a noted Quaker, a Christian sect founded on pacifism. Even his Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, and probably, was a pacifist. German diplomats stationed in Washington could not have failed to point to these incredible facts in their reports to Berlin.

As if unrestricted submarine warfare were not provocation enough, German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann sent a secret cable to his ambassador in Mexico. The infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposed that Mexico and Japan should be approached to align with Germany to make war on the United States. In return for their support, the Mexicans would be given in large parts of the American southwest that the United States had seized during the Mexican war.

The Hearst Yellow Press—bitterly opposed to war with Germany—cried foul. It was all a trick of British propaganda, they charged. George Viereck was the editor of the largest German language newspaper in the United States—Vaterland (“Fatherland”). Viereck bluntly called the Zimmermann Telegram “a brazen forgery planted by British agents.” Actually, it was Viereck and Hearst’s Berlin correspondent who were paid German agents.

Viereck was right about one thing: the British were involved. British agents had intercepted the Zimmermann Telegram—and they were at pains to keep the fact from becoming known. At first blush, this seems counterintuitive. After all, if the telegram were made known, it would provoke America to war. But it wasn’t that simple. Why? President Wilson had foolishly allowed the Germans to use of facial U.S. diplomatic cables because he wanted to let them discuss peace proposals without British interference. Unknown to Wilson, the British not only tapped the German cables but the American ones, too. Silverfish it was British intelligence that his agents could intercept, decode, and translate German cables faster than the Germans themselves could. Americans were shocked by the Zimmermann telegram. But they would have been unwilling to go to war if they had known that the British had uncovered it. They would have suspected a forgery by British intelligence—just as Hearst’s men claimed—and that would have effectively The United States out of the war.

But then, incredibly, Foreign Minister Zimmermann admitted that the telegram was his!

This may have been the greatest diplomatic blunder in history.

Overnight, the American Midwest changed its view of the faraway conflict in Europe. The Omaha World Herald wrote, “the issue shares from Germany against Great Britain to Germany against the United States.” Other Midwestern papers, including the influential German press, dropped their neutrality.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. The older Lodge had been two yards friend and political mentor for decades. If Wilson would not fight now, TR wrote “I’ll skin him alive.”

ROOSEVELT TO FRANCE?

Once the lonely decision for war was taken in the White House, Woodrow Wilson’s famous gift for oratory did not desert him.

Wisely, he told a joint session of Congress on 2 April 1917: “We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feelings towards them but one of sympathy and friendship.” We were fighting, he said, because “the world must be made safe for democracy.”

[The] right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free… the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood… for the principles that gave her birth… god helping her, she can do no other.

During this somber Washington Holy Week, the Senate supported the president by a vote of 82 to 6. The House passed the declaration of war against Germany in the small hours of the morning of Good Friday, by a vote of 373 to 50. Most of the fifty states against war were cast by Congressman from the heavily German-American Midwest. One of these votes was memorably cast by the only female member of Congress, Representative Jeannette Rankin, a Republican from Montana.

Most Americans embraced America’s moral cause with eagerness. Irish American composer George M. Cohan soon wrote the lifting song that became the theme of America’s first major war:

“Over the air, over there!

Send the word, send the word, over there!

That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, the drums rum-tumming ev’rywhere!

So prepare, say a prayer, send the word, send the word to beware!

Will be over, were coming over,

And we won’t be back ’til it’s over Over There!”

Not only was Tin Pan Alley—as America’s music publishing industry was then known—fully behind the war effort, millions of Americans subscribed to Liberty Loans. These were government bonds issued to help fund the war.

Theodore Roosevelt desperately wanted to get into the action. He wanted to be an American Lafayette. TR swallowed his pride and went to see Wilson and the White House. He bagged the president, actually pleaded, for permission to raise a company of volunteers to join the fight in France. Momentarily moved, the president wavered. He told his trusted aide, Joseph Tomulty, that TR was “a great big boy…. There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling. You can’t resist the man.”

The two men who sat across from each other, the president of the United States in his bitter rival, the former president, could not have been more different in background, temperament, or outlook. Theodore Roosevelt was the descent of the rich and powerful New York Dutch family. He had overcome a frail body and childhood asthma to build a powerful persona. He became America’s darling as a cowboy in the Dakotas, and as the night-stalking, reforming police commissioner in his native New York City. He was the boisterous leader of the Rough Riders, his Calvary Regiment of volunteers. They were Ivy League swells and Western cowpokes, drawn to the doors by personal attachment to the charismatic TR as much as they were to the thrill of combat in Cuba. Roosevelt rose unexpectedly to the presidency when an assassin failed the modest and quiet William McKinley, the last veteran of the Civil War to sit in the executive mansion. Pausing but a short month to mourn, “Teddy” renamed the president’s home the White House and took the country by storm. This youngest of all presidents was a dynamo. He “jawbone” mine owners and miners’ union leaders until they agreed to and a devastating strike. He busted Trusts, wielded a Big Stick in diplomacy, and “made the dirt fly” to dig a canal through Panama. He won a Nobel Prize for Peace for bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War, but he sent his Great White Fleet around the world as a warning to increasingly contentious imperial powers: Don’t Tread on Me.

All that was in the past.

Now, on 7 April 1917, just one day after President Wilson had signed Congress’s joint declaration of war against Germany, the Theodore Roosevelt who sat across the desk on a spring day was a shadow of the man he had been.

He was still suffering the effects of his 1914 expedition through the Brazilian rain forest to trace the uncharted waters of the River of Doubt. TR and his son Kermit had dashed off on the expedition almost on a dare. He had to go, he told doubtful friends: “It was my last chance to be a boy.” Teddy left so hurriedly he couldn’t even select enough reading matter. He did manage to bring Thomas More’s Utopia, the plays of Sophocles, two volumes of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the works of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. When he rammed through these, often consuming them in a dugout canoe were sitting under mosquito netting on a rotting log, the former president seized upon Kermit’s book of French poetry. “For French verse father never cared. He said it didn’t sing sufficiently. ‘The Song of Roland’ was the one exception he granted,” his son recounted.

The expedition soon became a nightmare. “I don’t believe [Roosevelt] can live through the night,” wrote the seasoned Explorer George Cherrie in his diary, as TR raved in a delirious fever. At one point, TR was so weakened by infection and starvation that he actually told Kermit to push on and leave him to die. Miraculously, he survived the man eating piranhas, the poisonous snakes, the malarial mosquitoes, and the intense heat. He made it home, but barely. Roosevelt limped badly. He lost fifty-five pounds in the rain forest, and his clothes hung on him. He never fully regained his youthful vigor. To honor him, the Brazilian government renamed the one thousand-mile extent of the River of Doubt the Rio Roosevelt.

How could President Woodrow Wilson find common ground with his visitor? Wilson had been raised in modest circumstances in the South, the son of a Presbyterian minister. From his earliest days, he was a man of words, not a man of action. He did not play baseball, but he wrote editorials for the student newspaper, The Princetonian, on how the captain of the baseball team should be selected. He urged more attention to oratory, the power of rhetoric to persuade. As a Princeton undergraduate, he complained about “an excess of visible skin in the gymnasium.” What would the mature Wilson have thought of TR’s famous “point-to-point walks” as president? During some of these, Roosevelt and his companions (senior military officers, foreign diplomats) would strip to the buff to wade through rushing streams.

Whereas Roosevelt once boasted he was proud he had not “a single drop of English blood,” Wilson revered the Great Commoner, Prime Minister William E. Gladstone. Like Hamilton before him, he publicly advocated revamping the U.S. constitutional system to make it more likely British model.

But now it was Teddy Roosevelt who was pleading for a chance to get into the action. He felt that history was passing him by. He may even have sensed his own mortality. Roosevelt did not care, he said, if the war killed him: “if I should die tomorrow, I would be quite content to have as my epitaph, and my only epitaph, ‘Roosevelt to France.’”

France’s premier Georges Clemenceau was clamoring for TR. He told Wilson that the presence of Roosevelt in the trenches would do wonders for the morale of the battered French soldiers who had been fighting there for three years. “Send them Roosevelt,” he pleaded.

Wilson did not commit himself during the last White House meeting. At one point, even the faithful Tumulty thought the president might give in to Roosevelt’s appeal. Skillfully changing the subject, Wilson asked Roosevelt for his help in getting conscription legislation through Congress. Americans had never liked the draft. Since TR had been loudly demanding such legislation for years, however, he could hardly refuse now.

In the end, Wilson rejected TR’s plea. The army brass remembered TR’s brashness in Cuba and wanted no part of him and France. Also, this criminal war of attrition was to be no daring dash up San Juan Hill. TR wasted by tropical diseases contracted from his South American trip; he was in no condition to fight in the trenches.

Roosevelt took it the only way he knew how—hard. Wilson’s refusal to let him fight only deepened the former president’s hostility toward the man he thought had sole unworthily occupied the White House. Bitterly, he lashed out to Kansas editor William Allen White, a progressive Republican: “The Washington people … would rather make this a paper war . . .  but if not that they want to make it a Democratic war.” TR nonetheless had the satisfaction of seeing all four of his sons bravely volunteer. Even his son-in-law, a physician, and his daughter, a nurse, faced danger in frontline medical units.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13310-13425). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

OVER THERE!

Very quickly, the Americans proved the Germans wrong about their submarine weapon. FDR moved energetically to supply the U.S. Navy with 110-foot anti-submarine vessels while Navy Admiral William S. Sims soon organized a convoy system that overcame the U-boat threat. Because of FDR and Sims’s efforts, only 637 of the more than 2 million American soldiers were lost to U-boat attacks crossing over to France.

American intervention came not a moment too soon for the Allies. Britain suffered the highest loss of time each two submarines in two world wars in April 1917.

General John J. Pershing was given command of the American Expeditionary Force. He made an early decision that Americans would fight under a unified command. He rejected the debilitated Allies appeals to let American troops fill gaps in their depleted ranks. He was a resolute and determined leader. The previous year, Pershing had been called upon to quell some trouble with Mexico after outlaw Pancho Villa crossed into New Mexico and murdered 17 Americans at Columbus. Wilson sent General Pershing leader three hundred miles into Mexico. The Villa only narrowly escaped and blackjack” Pershing’s reputation was made in the “Punitive Expedition.”

Americans thrilled to stories of heroism from U.S. forces. Flying in French biplanes, the Lafayette Escadrille distinguished itself in the air. Lieutenant Eddie Redenbacher became America’s first air “Ace” by shooting down twenty-six German planes. American infantrymen called “doughboys” captured French hearts, too. Colonel Charles Stanton followed the French at a Fourth of July ceremony in Paris. At the tomb of Marquis de Lafayette, Stanton stepped forward, saluted smartly, and said, “Lafayette, nous voici!” (“Lafayette, we are here!”)

U.S. Marines went into action against battle-hardened German troops who soon learned to fear the Leathernecks. They called our Marines teufelhunden—devil dogs. When Allied generals called for a temporary withdrawal, Marine Captain Lloyd Williams groused: “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!”

It took time for U.S. industry to be converted to a wartime economy. The military was woefully ill-equipped. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker even bragged about it: “I delight in the fact that when we entered this war we were not, like our adversary, prepared for it, and inviting it. Accustomed to peace, we were not ready.” As a result, Americans flew in French built Nieuports, shot British rifles, and fired French 75 mm artillery almost until the end of the war.

The Allies gained major support with the arrival of the Americans, but would soon lose their Eastern partner. The tsar was overthrown in March 1917 by a democratic uprising against his long and unenlightened rule.

The provisional Russian government led by Alexander Kerensky vowed to stay in the war, which opened an opportunity for Vladimir Lenin, the exiled leader of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks claimed to be the majority of Russia’s revolutionary Communists. The German High Command, eager to knock Russia out of the war, placed Lenin and several top Bolshevik exiles on the famous “Sealed Train” and sent them to Petrograd, the capitol of exhausted Russia. Lenin promised “peace, land, and bread” to the starving, war-a weary Russian peasants and workers. To the Germans he pledged to pull Russia out of the war. Winston Churchill described it is foolhardy German move as “injecting a leg bacillus” into the Russian state.

By November 1917, when Lenin seized control of the Russian government in the Bolsheviks’ Red October revolution, the Germans looked forward to transferring a full fifty divisions of seasoned veterans to the Western front. Lenin put the democratic government of Alexander Kerensky to fight, plunging Russia into communist dictatorship for a full seventy-four years. London and soon signed a separate peace with Germany, permitting scores of battle-hardened divisions to join the German ranks in France.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13426-13473). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The country got used to “weightless Mondays” and “meatless Tuesdays.” All the while, Hoover urged us to “clean our plates” and government posters reminded us that “Food Will Win the War.”

Has many progressives had warned, the war are unleashed a virulent hatred of all things German areas Bono was the respect for German inattentive genius-like Dr. Roentgen’s X-ray machine and the Diesel engine. Mozart and Beethoven were shunned, stupidly. Sauerkraut was renamed “Liberty Cabbage.”

Even worse things were to come. German language books were thrown out of Outlook libraries, and a number of Midwestern states even made it unlawful to teach schoolchildren in the German language. The Sedition Act made it any interference with the war effort a crime. More than fifteen hundred  people were arrested. Perennial Socialist  candidate for president Eugene V. Debs was tried, convicted, and sent to prison. Whipped up anti-German sentiment unleashed a wave of suspicion as neighbors spying on neighbors. It was an opportunity, as Samuel Eliot Morison put it, for “frustrated older women of both sexes” to indulge their fantasies.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13478-13488). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Thousands of American homes received the dreaded telegram from the war Department that fall. One of those homes was Sagamore Hill, on long island. There, former President and Mrs. Roosevelt learned that their youngest son, Quentin, had been shot down behind German lines in France. Quentin, always the prankster in the White House, had pursued the Germans in the skies with more zeal than skill. Quentin made “repeated attacks” on seven German aircraft, their press agency reported. The Germans, to their credit, buried the twenty-year-old with full military honors. But somewhere a German got hold of a photograph of the dead Quentin and quickly printed thousands of ghoulish postcards. One of these even made its way back to Sagamore Hill. Shaken, but unbowed, TR compared to his son to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, telling reporters, “Those alone are fit to live who do not fear to die.” With similar bravery, Clinton’s mother, Edith Roosevelt, said, “You cannot raise your sons to be equal and expect them to act like sparrows.”

The German propagandists who circulated that picture may not have realized what he was doing. Word soon spread in the German trenches. There, soldiers who had taken in human punishment for four long years marveled that the sons of an American president could face danger-as they did. They knew only too well that all six sons of Kaiser Wilhelm II were in the German army-and all were safely embedded in staff jobs. Now, for the first time in the war, unrest spread through the German ranks.

The red flag of revolution was first raised in the German High Seas Fleet as sailors mutinied. the fleet had been in port at Kiel ever since the climactic Battle of Jutland in 1916. Unfair, the British Royal Navy had fought [a] great sea battle of dreadnoughts.

Although the British lost more ships and more men at Jutland, the kaiser lost his nerve. His fleet was his pride and joy. Paralyzed by fear, he kept his High Seas Fleet in port for more than two years—far from any action. But sailors idle are sailors primed for trouble.

The German people and their armed forces expected a quick victory after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. They had been assured that they would win before the Americans could tip the balance in France. But the failure of the German army’s “Big Push” in France filled the ranks with despair. Fresh American troops seemed numberless. The Yanks prove themselves again and again during the Meuse-Argonne  offensive. When French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, broke the Germans’ Hindenburg Line on 1 October 1918, even the German High Command knew it was all over.

When the liberal Prince Max, the new German civilian leader, reached out for an armistice, he communicated directly with President Wilson. He wanted a piece based on the Fourteen [P]oints. Without consulting his allies, Wilson responded that the kaiser must be overthrown before an armistice could be arranged. But when the German military and civilian leaders pressed Wilhelm to abdicate, he resisted. “I wouldn’t dream of abandoning the throne because of a few hundred Jews and 8000 workers,” he told Prince Max. Soon, however, the kaiser was forced into exile. He fled for refuge in Holland.

With rumors of the eminent and of the war flying around the world, Wilson returned to the American people had appealed up for their support in the Congressional elections of 1918. He asked them to return Democrats to control of Congress. He addressed a message to America’s of voters asking them to show their backing of “my leadership” and to “sustain me with undivided minds.”

Wilson was surely right that the international situation required strong American leadership. He was also right that he needed to show both the Germans and the Allied leaders that he had strong backing among the American people. Still, such self-interested in partisan emphasis was a disastrous misstep on his part. The Republicans had actually supported Wilson’s war policies more wholeheartedly than Democrats had.

TLR campaign hard for Republicans in the midterm elections of 1918. “[E]very Republican vote was another nail in the kaiser’s coffin,” he said. When the votes were counted, the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress. Republicans returned it 240 members of the House to the Democrats’ 190. In the Senate, which was now elected by popular vote and not by state legislatures, the Republicans gained six seats to lead the Democrats by a narrow 49 to 47

TR had openly opposed Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The only satisfactory basis for peace, he said, was the “unconditional surrender” of Germany and “absolute loyalty to France and England in the peace negotiations.” Was Roosevelt committing sedition here? The voters of the United States did not seem to think so.

Roosevelt wrote to French Premier Clemenceau and to Britain’s foreign minister, Lord Balfour. He reminded these leaders that under a parliamentary system such as theirs, Wilson would have been voted out of office. “He demanded a vote of confidence. The people have voted a want of confidence,” TR wrote. Roosevelt was right about this. As a private American citizen, however, TR was guilty of gross impropriety in addressing foreign leaders this way.

TR spoke up for black Americans in uniform. He wanted civil rights for all, he said, as he demanded recognition for “the honors one and the services rendered” by America’s black doughboys. Wilson has refused to allow black Americans to fight alongside our white soldiers in France. He detached them from the American expeditionary force and put them under direct French command.

Soon, the Germans set up a republic, which then sued for armistice. Marshall Foch forced the Germans to accept harsh conditions for an end to the fighting. The agreement was signed in Foch’s railway car packed Compiegne, France.

The war ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—November 1918. Captain Harry S. Truman was serving in an artillery battery of the Missouri National Guard. He fired his last round at 10:45 a.m. that day. Finally, after four long years of the worst mass killing in human history, the guns fell silent. An estimated 10 million had died in the Great War. Then, at last, it was “all quiet on the Western front.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13516-13568). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

On the German side, Corporal Adolf Hitler received the news in a military hospital; he had been temporarily blinded by poison gas. He cried bitter tears. For his courage under fire, Corporal Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class. He was recommended for this unusually high honor by Captain Hugo Guttman, a Jew.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Location 13571). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Hitler writing later in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), pointed to the involvement of some prominent Jewish Communists in these events. He complained that the bloody repression of the Communists was not nearly bloody enough. He wanted to see poison gas used for “the extermination of that pestilence.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Location 13580). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

WILSON IN PARIS

[As soon as the war ended,] Wilson was determined to go to France for a great peace conference. He would confer with the leaders of the victorious Allies to craft a treaty that would officially end of the war. Wilson spurned calls for him to stay home. The president of the United States had never left the country before an extended period. The Paris peace conference promised to last four months. Was it even constitutional for the American president to absent himself? Some offered friendly advice. Journalist Frank Kabul was a strong Wilson supporter. From Paris, he wrote, “The moment the president sits at the counsel table with these prime ministers and foreign secretaries, he has lost all the power that comes from distance and detachment. Instead of remaining the great arbiter of human freedom, he becomes merely a negotiator dealing with other negotiators.” Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, also urged him not to go. He could let subordinates to detailed negotiating and take the high ground knoll, Wilson objected. He had to go personally to head the American negotiating team.

. . .

Arriving in France, Wilson was invited to visit the battlefields over which so much blood had been shed. Seeing this as an attempt to manipulate him through emotion, Wilson turned down the invitation. When they heard of this, the nearly one million American doughboys were deeply disappointed. Now, with the end of military combat on the Western front, came an even more deadly killer—influenza. The Great pandemic of 1918-1919 swept across Europe and America and from there, around the world. Between fifty and one hundred million died in a span of mere months. Unlike previous experience with plagues this so-called Spanish influenza seemed to carry off the young and the fit. In a recent work on the pandemic, John M. Barry notes that “it killed more people in twenty-four weeks then AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more people in a year than the Black death of the Middle Ages killed in a century.” The disease was especially devastating to soldiers. More than half of the US casualties in World War I were attributable to influenza, not German bullets or gas. Barry also maintains that it was influenza, not a stroke, that laid President Wilson and Lowell at a critical point in the Paris peace negotiations. Moreover, Barry contends that Wilson’s judgment was affected by the disease.

Early in 1919, the American delegation in Paris received stunning news from home. Theodore Roosevelt had died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill. TR had seen it coming. He told his son-in-law Dick Derby, “We have warmed both hands before the fire of life.” Roosevelt’s son, Archie, cabled to his brothers in uniform around the world: “The old lion is dead.” No further explanation was necessary. Following the funeral party to the graveside in the January cold at oyster Bay was Theodore is great and good friend, the ever forgiving William Howard Taft. Once again, Taft wept for his lost friend.

The nation and much of the world mourned the death of the Rough Rider. The normally frosty New Englander, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, had been TR’s colleague and friend for more than three decades. He was older than TR, and he choked up as he concluded his eulogy to Roosevelt. To Lodge, TR was “Valiant-for-Truth,” the admired character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. When he “passed over, all the trumpets on the other side sounded,” Lodge said.

In Paris, Wilson realized that death had taken his most formidable adversary. TR had been Wilson’s bitter, too often hateful enemy, but the president charitably (and wisely) issued a public statement praising one of America’s most beloved presidents.

. . .

When President Wilson sat down with Britain’s Prime Minister Lloyd George and France’s Premier Georges Clemenceau, the Big Three were soon joined by Italy’s Premier Vittorio Orlando. It soon became clear, however, that the Allied leaders did not stand in awe of the American president. These seasoned, wary politicians had come to Paris to claim the fruits of victory.

. . .

Because of her historically low birth rate, France had only one-half the eighteen-year-olds eligible for military service that Germany had every year. In addition, France lacked its neighbors natural resource base and produced barely one-tenth the steel that Germany produced. France could never be safe unless steps were taken to disarm and weaken Germany. Clemenceau, the Tiger of France, had little or no interest in Wilson’s idealistic visions. Britain had the twenty-two-mile English Channel for protection. Now all that the German fleet was to be handed over to Britain, it was thought that England had little to fear. America had 3000 miles of ocean between her and German revenge. France had only 50 kilometers as a buffer in the Rhineland. Clemenceau demanded “the equivalent on land” of the protection Britain and the United States enjoyed at sea.

. . .

Clemenceau said he agreed with Wilson that all men are brothers, but they are brothers “like Cain and Abel.” He hammered incessantly at the need for security. Even over lunch, he humorously pointed to the chicken elegantly displayed. “Why is the chicken on this plate? Because it did not have the force to resist us. And a good thing, too!”

Clemenceau was not the only person put off by Wilson’s high-minded vagaries. Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes spoke of his frustration. He acknowledged the critical role of the U.S. forces. That contribution did entitle President Wilson to a deus ex machina to rescue Europe and dictate peace terms, he said. Australia had lost more men proportionately; the Allies had sacrificed more lives and money. Hughes hoped Britain and France would stand firm and defend their interests. Besides, he said, Wilson really could not even speak for the United States.

. . .

Wilson’s vision was sometimes compelling but too often vague. Theodore Roosevelt had believed that his son Quentin and all the brave American soldiers had “saved the soul of the world from German militarism.” TR wanted an unconditional surrender of Germany to break the pride and will of the German militarists. He wanted the kaiser and his military clique punished. Roosevelt thought a peace based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points—which he derided as “fourteen scraps of paper”—would mean unconditional surrender, but for the United States, not Germany. Surely, this last point was hyperbole. But it is no exaggeration to say that Roosevelt’s concept of a league of nations—one that began with Britain and France and that did not threaten the cornerstone of American sovereignty, the Monroe Doctrine—was the more realistic of the two men’s postwar visions. But Roosevelt, alas, was dead, and it was the elected President Woodrow Wilson who had the constitutional authority to conduct the Paris negotiations.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13652-13723). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“A WAR TO END ALL WARS”

[Back in America,] his opponents were not merely mistaken, they were disloyal, Wilson was saying. They did not simply oppose him, they opposed God. And if his prescription for peace was not followed without even mild reservations, another war would come and millions of Americans would die.

Wilson was emotionally overwrought and physically spent when he came to Pueblo, Colorado, three weeks into his speaking tour. There, on 25 September 1919, President Wilson suffered a severe nervous collapse. The remainder of the speaking tour was cancelled as, with drawn shades, the presidential train speeded east toward Washington.

Days later, in the White House,—Wilson suffered a massive stroke. His speech and motor skills were seriously impaired. Then, and for many long months afterward, Mrs. Wilson, Dr. Grayson, and the ever-loyal Joseph Tumulty conspired to keep the nature and extent of the president’s debilitating illness concealed from a worried, anxious American public. Wilson held no cabinet meetings for the next critical eight months. The vice president of the United States did not meet with him. Mrs. Wilson barred him from the president’s sickroom. Mrs. Wilson screened all official documents and limited access to the president to a trusted few. And these few had but minutes to speak to the desperately ill chief executive.

Secretary Lansing, as the senior cabinet member, was rebuked when he suggested the time had come to invoke the Constitution. Lansing wanted the vice president to assume power, at least temporarily, because of the president’s disability. When Wilson learned that the secretary of state had been meeting with the cabinet in an attempt to keep the government functioning, Wilson fired him.

Desperate for American participation in the peace, Britain sent the highly respected Sir Edward Grey to plead with the president to accept some reservations. Both Britain and France were prepared to approve reservations to the treaty if that was the only way U.S. membership in the League could be secured. Mrs. Wilson refused to admit him to the White House.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13821-13838). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

As the country prepared for the election of 1920, President Wilson was increasingly disconnected from reality. He dismissed his experienced, efficient aide, Joseph Tumulty, and never saw him again. Incapable of serving out a second term, Wilson absurdly expected the Democratic Party to nominate him for an unprecedented third term. Democrats instead nominated Governor James M. Cox of Ohio and Wilson’s own assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt. . . .

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Location 13868). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The Republicans gained an historic victory in 1920. Harding received 16,152,200 popular votes and 404 electoral votes to 9,147,353 popular votes and 127 electoral votes for the Democratic ticket. President Wilson was shattered: “They have disgraced us in the eyes of the world.”

So it had come to his. Estranged from the leaders of the opposition and of his own party, his closest advisers, and his friends, Woodrow Wilson now turned on the American people themselves. It was a sad end for the men who wished to “make the world safe for democracy.” He retired to a house on S Street in Washington, D.C. There, he spent his last few years occasionally writing short articles and receiving only a few visitors selected by Mrs. Wilson. . . .

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13880-13885). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

When Wilson died in 1924, Joseph Tumulty had to beg for an invitation to the funeral. Barred from attending, Colonel Edward M. House stood in a cold rain outside Madison Square Garden to listen to the ceremony on a loudspeaker. On Embassy Row in Washington, the German flag was the only one not lowered. It was the flag of the Weimar Republic, a free and democratic Germany.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13888-13892). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

America faced the horror of world war with courage and determination. Its armed forces and financial strength saved the Allies when they were at the point of defeat. They stopped the kaiser from imposing the rule of a haughty military clique on the free peoples of Europe.

No man was more responsible for plunging the world into World War I than Kaiser Wilhelm II. He and his small circle of military accomplices were guilty of the crimes of war. They sought it. They contemptuously regarded century-old treaties as “mere scraps of paper.” They deliberately pursued a policy they called schrechlichheit—frightfulness. They introduced gas warfare, unrestricted submarine warfare, and aerial bombardment of civilians.

But the German people were not guilty. In his best moments, Woodrow Wilson recognized this. However, his paralysis led to paralysis at the heart of the great American republic. Wilson called for a war “to make the world safe for democracy.” He had a duty at least to make democracies like France and Britain safe. His failure was as much a failure of character as anything else.

. . .

When the Germans had sought peace in late 1918, they appealed directly to Wilson, not to his allies. He pressed them to get rid of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Hohenzollern dynasty. They did. He demanded they establish a liberal, democratic republic. They set up the Weimar Republic. They met all his conditions. And still he handed them over to the unmerciful French. Small wonder nearly all German politicians would later describe the Treaty of Versailles as “the stab in the back.”

At home, Wilson alienated the Republicans utterly. He could not cooperate with the “bitter enders,” those senators who opposed everything he had done. He allowed his personal distaste for the powerful Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to doom any effort at collaboration. Lodge was not a bitter ender. He proposed only “mild reservations” to the Treaty of Versailles. Those mild reservations required Wilson to compromise only on two points—that Congress’s consent would be required before committing U.S. troops to foreign wars and that the new League of Nations would respect the Monroe doctrine, the cornerstone of American foreign policy for a century. This Wilson militantly refuse to do.

He refused to compromise with Mild Reservationists even when his Senate Democratic leader pleaded with him to do so and save the Treaty. He refused again when the French and the British interceded, saying they would accept the Treaty of Versailles even with the reservations.

Wilson was the first Ph. D. in the White House. His doctorate was in political science. His specialty was the American constitutional system. Under that Constitution, he had to know all, the president is required to accept the “advice and consent” of the Senate in order to ratify any treaty. How much stronger was the case for such cooperation after the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution that provided for direct popular election of senators. This long-sought goal of Progressives like Wilson was achieved barely a month after Wilson’s own inauguration as president in 1913. Instead, Wilson spurred this people’s Senate and publicly accused its majority of aiding the enemy and “betraying” American troops.

Wilson’s inflexibility and disdain for others’ judgment gained him the hostility of his allies in Paris. (Wilson pedantically declined even to call Britain and France allies. Instead, he said that the United States was only an associated power.) Britain’s Lloyd George and France’s Clemenceau clashed with him. Italy’s Orlando was so upset he left the Paris Peace conference. The Japanese, deeply offended by the rejection of their racial equality resolution, also withdrew from the conference table.

Wilson defied his Republican opponents at home, deliberately antagonizing Senator Lodge and TR. Wilson knew he could not deal with the bitter-ender opponents who reveled in the name irreconcilables, but he also refused to work with the much more moderate Republicans: former President William Howard Taft, the GOP’s 1916 nominee Charles Evans Hughes, and TR’s former secretary of state, the widely respected Elihu Root. All three of these gentlemen were put off by Wilson’s intransigence.

By Wilson’s collaboration with the French and British and turning a German appeal for an armistice into an unconditional surrender, the free, liberal and democratic Weimar Republic that Wilson had demanded as a negotiating partner was delegitimized in the eyes of the German people (Hitler would call the signers of the Armistice “the November Criminals”).

Wilson appealed to the American people for support in November 1918, but when they rejected him, he became increasingly intractable and reclusive. Following his September 1919 stroke, he shut himself up in the White House. His wife and his doctor controlled all access to him. They kept out the vice president of the United States, key cabinet members, and senators. Even imported foreign emissaries like Britain’s Reverend Sir Edward Grey were denied entry to the president’s office. Wilson became estranged from his most loyal associates, men like Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Colonel House, and even the ever faithful Joe Tumulty.

Rather than yield on any disputed point, the partially paralyzed Wilson watched movie reruns of his triumphal visits to London, Paris, and Rome. The films—which had been made by Army signal Corps—were screened on a sheet in the East Room. The flickering images of cheering millions became the embattled leaders reality. The hollow tapping of these suddenly old man’s cane as he shuffled down the White House corridor symbolize the once powerful leader’s impotence.

Wilson resisted the entreaties of his closest political and personal friends. He summarily rejected the pleas of Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, the Democrats’ leader in the U.S. Senate. Hitchcock pleaded in vain for some concession to the mild reservationists. Had Wilson had Lincoln’s selfless qualities, or Washington’s ability to forgive, he might have been an architect of peace. As it was, no man was more responsible for losing the peace than Woodrow Wilson. That was his tragedy—and ours.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 13897-13945). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Two

THE BOOM AND THE BUST

(1921-1933)

THE ROARING TWENTIES

When America sent two million soldiers to France in 1918, high idealism was the order of the day. Americans repeated the verse: “Forget us, God, if we forget, / The sacred sword of Lafayette.” Lafayette’s sword and many other sacred things took a beating in the brutal trench life of barbed wire, poison gas, rats, and incessant artillery bombardment. America lost forty-eight thousand young men in a short, intense period of violent combat. Another fifty thousand soldiers died from the Spanish influenza epidemic that claimed millions of lives worldwide.

As soon as the armistice ending World War I was signed, however, a different call went up among the troops of the American Expeditionary Force:

We drove the Boche across the Rhine

The Kaiser from his throne

O Lafayette, we’ve paid the debt.

For Christ’s sake, send us home.

The hardened, cynical swagger in that doggerel speaks to the disillusionment millions of Americans felt about our first massive intervention in a foreign war.

The 1920s would regard such jaded sentiments as realism. Unwilling to sacrifice for what President Harding called “nostrums,” many Americans, especially the young, believed Uncle Sam had been played for Uncle Sap. No one wanted to be taken for a sucker. Americans jumped in their “Tin Lizzies” and headed out for the open road. Jazz music was just one example of the new freedom that was a far cry from Woodrow Wilson’s ideals. The proliferation of hip flasks and “bathtub gin” bespoke the attitude of millions to the new restrictions on the sale and manufacture of alcohol under Prohibition.

A new freedom could be seen in art, music, architecture, and everyday fashion. Women had succeeded in claiming the right to vote. The half-century crusade of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton finally achieved the suffragettes’ goal with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919. These women prevailed by rejecting the tactics of radicals within their movement. Those militant crusaders who paraded outside the White House with “Kaiser Wilson” banners protesting the president’s opposition to a federal suffrage amendment had not helped their cause.

In the Roaring Twenties, however, “flappers” bobbed their hair and wore dresses that came just below the knee—scandalous for the time. This frivolous form of “liberation” would have stunned many of the sober, thoughtful earlier reformers who thought women’s votes would mean a purification of politics. Since the 1830s, big city political machines had been a raucous caucus, based largely in the saloons. Women’s voting and Prohibition were twin reform efforts and all that. As we shall see, the post-World War I amendments certainly brought change but change in unanticipated ways. No one captured the spirit of the age better than the irreverent, brassy newspaper columnist H.L. Mencken, who plied his trade at the American Mercury and the Baltimore Sun. His biting wit, and mordant style made him “the God of the undergraduates.” After the failure of Wilson’s crusades, Americans were ripe for a writer who reveled in the role of intellectual enfant terrible.

Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices and common decencies stands out as brilliantly as he worked on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, or commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and wake morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.

Mencken skewered respected institutions with merciless abandon. The country held president Warren Gamaliel Harding in high regard—or had been taught that it ought to. Not Mencken. Just days after Harding’s grandiloquent Inaugural Address, Mencken went after the president’s “Gamalielese” with all the sadistic pleasure of a small boy pulling the wings off of a butterfly;

On the question of the logical content of Dr. Harding’s harangue that of last Friday, I do not presume to have views…. But when it comes to the style of the great man’s discourse, I can speak with … somewhat more competence, for I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English. Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two, and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark system . . . of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

In this assessment Mencken did not defer to the editors of the New York Times. The “Gray Lady” Adams said the president’s style was “excellent.” “It looks presidential,” the Times said. “In the President’s misty language the great majority [of Americans] see reflection of their own indeterminate thoughts.”

Mencken shot back: “In other words, bosh is the right medicine for boobs.” It was not new for a writer to say the president was a jerk. It was somewhat novel for a popular writer, to say to people or jerks. But Mencken got rich, calling his fellow Americans, the great booboisie.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14017-14066). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

A HARLEM RENAISSANCE

. . . New York’s Harlem—named for the Dutch city of Haarlem—had been almost all white in 1900. By 1925, black people were flocking in. It was here that the NAACP established its headquarters and published its important journal, The Crisis. Under the leadership of James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP boldly proclaimed its purpose:

[N]othing mower or less than to claim for the Negro, and equality under the fundamental law of the United States; to proclaim that democracy stultified itself when it barred men from its benefits solely on the basis of race and color.

Politically, the atmosphere of Haarlem gave black Americans freedom to speak, to write, to organize, to march. A photo of an early demonstration there shows young black men, smartly turned out in well-tailored suits and fashionable straw hats, bearing a banner with the famous words of the Declaration of Independence: WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF EVIDENT … THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL. Below these words was a legend that read: IF OF AFRICAN DESCENT, TEAR OFF THIS COVER.

Because of their concentration and numbers, black Americans could assert themselves freely, without fear in Harlem. The result was a literary, musical, and social “Renaissance.” Johnson admired the new self-confidence of the emerging black middle class. “The Negro’s situation in Harlem is without precedent in all his history in New York. Never before has he been so securely anchored, never before has he owned the land, never before has he been so well established in community life.”

Young New Yorkers, including white members of the so-called Smart Set, delighted in Harlem’s cultural attractions. Jazz music and the blues—thoroughly unique and vital contributions of black Americans to the wider culture—thrilled these sophisticates. In 1922, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington began a five-year run at Harlem’s Cotton Club. There, as the bandleader, he played to all-white audiences. Over the years, he performed such jazz classics as “Take the A Train,” “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.” The “A” Train, as savvy New Yorkers knew, was the subway line that led from midtown Manhattan to Harlem.

Zora Neale Hurston came from a poor Alabama sharecropper’s family to graduate from Columbia University’s Barnard College in 1928. She became an internationally respected writer, notably for the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and concentrated especially on black folklore from her native South. She was fully aware of injustice, but she looked steadfastly to the future. “No, I won’t weep at the world,” she said, “I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

“I don’t study the black man,” said poet Langston Hughes, “I feel him.” Hughes faced the challenges that came inevitably to black writers seeking to carve out literary careers in the years of the Harlem Renaissance. “After all the deceptions and disappointments, there was always the undertow of black music with its rhythms that never betray you, its strength like the bait of the human heart.” In this way, the freedom of black music reinforced the yearning for freedom of black writers. And they, in turn, gave poetic expression to the soul of their community.

No small part of Haarlem’s attraction was the more relaxed enforcement of Prohibition laws north of 125th Street. “Speakeasy” was the name given to after-hours clubs where society “swells” could go if they were “sent by Joe.”

To many black Southerners, the life and lower of Haarlem backend like the Northstar. To reach it, some for sharecroppers fled their fields under cover of darkness. At some railroad stations, black farm workers were met by gains of young white clubs who forcibly turned them back to their fields. To check this terror, James Weldon Johnson persuaded a Republican congressman from Missouri, L.C. Dyer, to introduce the nation’s first federal anti-lynching law. The Dyer bill passed the House of Representatives, but it was defeated when white Southern Democrats filibustered it to death in the Senate.

In Washington, D.C., Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover signed an order banning racial segregation in his department. Hoover’s action placed pressure on the other federal government agencies to overturn the Wilson administration’s unfair policies on equal employment opportunity in the nation’s capitol. Soon, Washington would become another Mecca for black Americans seeking work and dignity.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14153-14188). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

NORMALCY

Taft was the only American to serve under both titles of president and chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14153-14188). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

. . . Harding himself once confessed in a speech, his father had told him: “It’s a good thing you weren’t born a girl. You’d be in a family way all the time. You can’t say ‘no.’”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14153-14188). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The president then did what so many embattled presidents before and since have done: he took a long trip west. His escape route even took him north to Alaska. But he couldn’t outrun his troubles. They caught up with him on his return swing when he collapsed and died 2 August 1923. The country knew little of what Washington insiders had begun to suspect, so Harding was deeply and sincerely mourned. “Harding was not a bad man,” said Alice Roosevelt Longworth. “He was just a slob.” That has been the history’s verdict, too.

The new president who was sworn in at 2:45 a.m. on 3 August 1923 could not have presented a stronger contrast with the man he succeeded. When word of Harding’s death reached him, Calvin Coolidge was the visiting his boyhood home in rural Plymouth Notch, Vermont. He took the presidential polls by the light of a kerosene lamp. His father, a local justice of the peace, swore him in. It was an image of flinty integrity that Americans would claim to—and soon.

The country smiled when it heard how Calvin Jr. got word that his father had become president. The teenager reported for work at a western Massachusetts tobacco farm where he had a summer job. The farmer told him that his father had been inaugurated in the dead of night. The boy took the report without comment, then asked, “which shed do you want me to work today?” Amazed, the farmer said that if his father had been named president of the United States, he surely wouldn’t be working twelve hour days in a tobacco field. “You what if your father were my father,” responded the young Calvin. A chip off the old block!

President Coolidge was famously reticent. His nickname, “Silent Cal,” and dear to him to millions. Americans delighted in stories of their new chief executive. When a young debutante approached Coolidge, one story had it, she gushed that she’d bet her friends she could get him to say more than two words. “You lose,” Coolidge is reported to have replied. TR’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, typically, was less impressed. She said Coolidge looked as if he had been “waiting on a pickle.”

As the roof fell in on the Harding scandals, the new president moved adroitly to distance himself from them. When Attorney General Daugherty balked at providing Congress with documents for an inquiry, Coolidge might have invoked executive privilege to shield him. Instead, he sacked the tarnished Harding appointee.

Prohibition was placing a great stress on law enforcement in the country. When it was passed during the war, it had seemed a great reform, and patriotic to boot. After all, many of the breweries had distinctively German names, among them Anheuser Busch, Piels, and Pabst. But by the time Coolidge assumed leadership, Prohibition agents had grown overtly corrupt. In New York City, these agents were arriving for work in chauffeured limousines. The chief of the unit resolved to clean the house. He called a meeting of all his agents. Gathering them around the table in the federal building, Dan Chapin instructed them all to put their hands on the table. “Every son of a bitch wearing a diamond ring is fired!” he said.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14237-14262). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Margaret Sanger, a public health nurse who challenged laws against distributing birth control information, embraced eugenics. Sanger founded Planned Parenthood, ostensibly to encourage poor immigrants and other Americans to limit the number of children they bore. “As an advocate of birth control,” she said, “I wish . . . to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ admittedly the greatest menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. . . . ” She also spoke out in favor of immigration restrictions. Slowly the incoming tide of “unfit” was good policy as far as she was concerned; she did not want to pollute “the stamina of the race.” Soon, she would advocate a national plan to “give dysgenic groups [people alleged to have bad genes] in our population a choice of segregation or sterilization.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14276-14283). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

In the 20s, Americans had a love affair with the automobile. Henry Ford made Detroit into the of the nation’s auto industry. He introduced advanced techniques of assembly line production. Although Florida employees were not permitted to sit, to talk, or even to whistle while they worked, they could earn as much as $5 a day—considered a very good wage in 1924. Ford himself became fabulously wealthy. He was probably worth $10 billion in 2004 dollars.

In many ways, Henry Ford was an enlightened entrepreneur. By 1926, he had ten thousand black Americans in his workforce. In the Ford Motor Corporation, black employees could rise into management. Florida also opened his plant doors to workers with disabilities. His assembly line methods enabled blind men, amputees, and others to perform a single, important task. In this, he affirmed the human dignity of thousands.

But Henry Ford had a dark side; his tolerance did not extend to the Jewish community in particular. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, regularly published a violently anti-Semitic articles. So offensive were his attacks on the Jews that President Harding and fellow industrialist Thomas Edison had begged him to knock it off. The Independent reprinted the notorious invention of the tsarist secret police called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This work, long exposed as a forgery, charged there was an international conspiracy of powerful Jews to rule the world. “The International Jew: the World’s Problem” was the lead article in the Independent that echoed the themes of the discredited Protocols.

In 1922, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times visited the Munich headquarters of the new political faction, the National Socialist German Workers Party. Soon, they would be known by the German abbreviation for National Socialist—Nazis.  The leader of the party was called der Führer. A decorated veteran of the Great War, young Adolf Hitler had a large portrait of Henry Ford in his office. Outside, there was a table stacked high with the German translations of Ford’s book The International Jew.

Hitler expressed his admiration for another influential American, Leon Whitney. Whitney was the president of the American Eugenics Society. The führer requested a copy of The Passing of the Great Race, written by a leading member of the American Eugenics Society, Madison Grant. Hitler lavished praise on the block, calling it his “Bible.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14276-14283). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“KEEP COOL WITH COOLIDGE”

Humorist Will Rogers referred to the theory that cutting taxes for higher earners and businesses was a “trickle down” policy, a term that has stuck over the years.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Location 14395). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The state legislature of Tennessee pondered the often-frightening world conjured up by such events as the Leopold and Loeb trial. The lawmakers saw in the atheistic philosophies of such intellectuals as Charles Darwin, Frederick Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud cause for alarm.

Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead” was widely quoted and mostly misunderstood. Actually, Nietzsche meant that people’s belief in God had died. Shocked by such ideas, fearful Tennessee lawmakers found themselves agreeing with Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose Iva Karamazov said that if God is dead, then everything is permitted. The lawmakers shouldered that cask of making sure that not everything was permitted in Tennessee. The solution was simple and direct. They passed a law banning the teaching of Darwinism or any creed that held that man was descended from a “lower” form of life.

A new group called the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) saw in this law an excellent opportunity to score ideological points against what they regarded as intellectually backward Christian fundamentalism. The ACLU took out ads in various newspapers and young John T. Scopes responded. The Dayton, Tennessee, science teacher indicated his willingness to test the law. In 1925, he was charged with breaking the new law, and the summer Scopes trial gripped the attention of the entire country. The famous Clarence Darrow guaranteed national focus for the case when he took up the defense.

William Jennings Bryan was eager to serve with the prosecution. Brian was not a Tennessean, he had never made his living practicing law, and he had no knowledge of the scientific arguments likely to be at the core of the trial. But Brian earned a good living lecturing and writing articles. Besides, the former Secretary of State and the Democratic Party’s three-time nominee for president of the United States loved the spotlight.

Ryan succeeded in one important trial maneuver. He gained a favorable ruling from the judge that if Darrow brought in a scientific experts to test in defense of Scopes, these experts would be subject to cross-examination. The ACLU’s cocounsel, Arthur Garfield Hays, was distressed. “Cross examination would have shown that the scientist, while religious man—for we chose only that kind—still did not believe in the virgin birth [of Jesus] and other miracles.” Hays knew the testimony of such skeptics would undermine the ACLU’s brought her agenda for American education. Hays later wrote that the ACLU needed the backing of millions of Christians who believed in the basic doctrinal positions of their churches. He did not want the radicalism of the ACLU to be publicly exposed by placing doubting scientists on the witness stand.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14401-14422). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“THE LONE EAGLE”

Another self-confident young aviator was determined to make his mark. Young Charles A. Lindbergh did not like to hustle. He didn’t like having to ask businessmen and bankers for money. The twenty-four-year-old college dropout was an unlikely figure in the 1920s. He didn’t smoke or drink. He avoided that the girls who hung around the flight line. He set high standards for himself—even setting up categories of perfection as Benjamin Franklin had done: Alertness, Altruism, Balance, Brevity, all the way through Unselfishness and Zeal.

A more unrepresentative figure for the “lost generation” could hardly be imagined. But Lindbergh, son of the Minnesota congressman, did have one characteristic that he shared with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby: he had been high for the Main Chance. He knew how to get what he wanted.

Worldwide fame awaited the man who could fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean. Not only fame, but Fortune: the $25,000 Orteig Prize led men to risk their lives. Navy commander Richard Byrd, the famous pilots who first flew over the North Pole, had crashed in April 1927 in his large tri-motor plane, America. Byrd, only slightly injured, was followed two weeks later by two other Navy pilots who died in the crash of their trimotor.

The price could be won by a flight in either direction so two French pilots started at Paris, flying westward to New York on 9 May. When the great Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli were reported off the New England coast, Lindbergh’s heart sank. Crowds were already cheering in the Paris. Suddenly, the plane carrying Nungesser and Coli went missing.

As Lindbergh watched his single engine model plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, being prepared for takeoff, the drizzling rain and deeply rugged muddy ground combined with the recent deaths of Nungesser and Coli to create a somber, not a celebratory scene. “It’s more like a funeral procession in the beginning of a flight to Paris,” Lindberg thought. He had stripped the plane to the barest necessities. Everything not essential had to give way to fuel. The lanky aviator took only five sandwiches for the trip. Asked if this would be a knock, he answered laconically: “If I get to Paris, I won’t need anymore. If I don’t get to Paris I won’t need anymore, either.”

On the morning of 20 May 1927, Lindbergh took off from long island’s Roosevelt Field. The fuel-heavy plane missed a tractor by only ten feet, telephone wires by barely twenty as it struggled to get airborne. The country held its breath. Will Rogers did not attempt humor:

A . . . slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before. He is being prayed for to every kind of supreme being that ever had a following. If he has lost it will be the most universally regretted loss we ever had.

Except he was not lost. And he wasn’t really alone. Harold Anderson of the New York Sun wrote one of the most widely circulated newspaper columns of the era, “Lindbergh flies alone”:

Alone? Is he alone at whose side rides Courage, with Skill within the cockpit and Faith upon the left? Does solitude surround the brave when Adventure leads the way and Ambition reads the dials? Is there no company with him for whom the error is cleft by Daring and the darkness is made light by Emprise.

Delirious crowds of Frenchmen swept onto Le Bourget airdrome in Paris when Lindbergh landed, following a flight of thirty-three hours and thirty-nine minutes. In an age fascinated by technical details, it was pointed out that the engine of The Spirit of St. Louis had to fire 14,472,000 times—without a skip or a miss—to cover the 3,735 miles from New York to Paris.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh became the greatest hero of the age. He was worshiped in Paris. He received a hero’s welcome at a ticker tape parade down Broadway in New York. He became such a celebrity that he could no longer send his shirts out to be laundered. They would be cut up for souvenirs. Nor could he write a check. His signature was worth more than the amount on the slip. Flying around the United States afterword Lindbergh was feted everywhere. At one dinner, George Gershwin played his famous Rhapsody in Blue for the young man, only to stop midway to ask about the dangers of the flight. Lindberg put his money in the experienced hands of the House of Morgan. There he met Dwight Morrow, soon to become President Coolidge is ambassador to Mexico.

Prohibition had strained America’s relations with both our continental neighbors. Rumrunners moved across the northern and southern borders. American gangster’s bribed customs officials on both sides of the border.

In the case of Mexico, however, the most troublesome seizures did not involve cases of gin. Mexican government seizures of U.S. Petroleum companies’ assets brought the countries close to war. President Coolidge sent Dwight Morrow to Mexico City to negotiate. Skeptical Mexicans said Morrow was just a scout for the Marines. But Morrow skillfully dealt with Mexico’s various factions. He wanted to have Lindbergh invited officially to visit Mexico City

Lindbergh had a keen eye for publicity. He said he would fly their nonstop from Washington, D.C.  Morrow was unwilling to risk his famous young friend, but Lindbergh said, “You get me the invitation, and I’ll take care of the flying.” When the man the press dubbed “the Lone Eagle” flew into Mexico City, the people went wild with joy. Thousands had slept on the runway to get a glimpse of the hero. Many prayed as Lindbergh, who had lost his bearings, arrived more than two hours late. “Viva Lindbergh!” They cried. Mrs. Morrow thought they might tear the young aviator’s clothes off in their excitement. It was, and remains, the greatest moment in U.S.-Mexican relations. President Coolidge deserves the credit for the cagey appointment of Dwight Morrow. We have only to contrast this diplomacy with Woodrow Wilson’s South-of-the-Border bungling to appreciate Coolidge’s achievement.

While on vacation in Mexico, “Lucky Lindy” met the young woman who was to become his wife. Anne Morrow was Ambassador Morrow’s sensitive, intelligent, and beautiful daughter.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14462-14513). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

PEACE AND PROSPERITY

In Germany, the liberal Weimar Republic struggled to maintain democracy in the face of challenges from the Communists and the Nazis. From his exile in Holland, Kaiser Wilhelm gave interviews blaming the Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I. His Dutch home at Doorn became a center of agitation against the Weimar Republic. There, he received three thousand letters on his seventh birthday (27 January 1928) calling for his restoration. The letters contained hundreds of thousands of signatures from supporters in Germany. Bitterly, he told intimates that the Jews had engineered his abdication. They must be rooted out, he snarled. And that means? Wilhelm’s ominous answer was blunt and savage: “Das best wäre Gas!” (“The best way would be Gas!”)

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14534-14510). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

If freedom was threatened in the Weimar Germany, the Bolsheviks had completely extinguished it in Soviet Russia. In the struggle for power that followed Lenin’s death in 1924, Josef Stalin emerged victorious. Stalin played various factions of the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union off against one another. Although Communist parties throughout the world ritually denounced anti-Semitism, Stalin maneuvered successfully against his opponents among the old Bolsheviks. First Trotsky, later Kamenev and Zinoviev would be snared. Thoughtful observers might have noticed that Stalin’s “enemies” were principally Jews.

Stalin’s successful attacks on his enemies left him a free hand to bring the Ukraine under his thumb. He blamed the famine that his own policies had caused on greedy kulaks. Kulak meant fist; it was a term the Communists used to describe peasants whose only skill and hard work had brought them success in this “bread-basket.” Russian novelist Vladimir Tendrayakov would describe the fate of the kulaks after their land was expropriated by the Communists:

In The Station Square Ukrainian kulaks expropriated and exiled from their homeland, laid down and died. One got used to seeing the dead there in the morning, and the hospital’s stable- boy Abram, would come along with his cart and piles of corpses in.

Not everyone died. Many wondered along the dusty, sordid alleyways, dragging dropsied legs, elephantine and bloodlessly blue, and plucked at every passer-by, begging with dog-like eyes.

While most Americans knew nothing of the six or seven million who were intentionally starved to death in the Ukraine, one American dead—Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times. He would win a Pulitzer Prize for his sympathetic coverage of Josef Stalin. He chose not to report on the brutal famine. Apparently not all the news was fit to print.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14541-14556). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

In America, the love affair for mobile proceeded apace. General Motors did not try to compete with Ford through lower prices but by giving the consumers more car for their money. The Chevrolet came with a self-starter feature that vastly increased the popularity of driving, especially among women.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Location 14556). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

On the silver screen, 1927 saw the first “talkie” produced. Al Jolson starred as The Jazz Singer. The plot centered on the son of a Jewish cantor who uses his great voice to make a fortune as a popular singer. His parents grieve because they think he has prostituted his God-given talents. Most Americans were thrilled when Al Jolson spoke his signature line: “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” But black Americans could not have been flattered by the fact that Jolson’s jazz singer was performed in blackface.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14559-14563). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Coolidge was at the height of his popularity in the summer of 1927. Vacationing in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the president held one of his regular not-for-attribution press conferences. As the reporters filed into a high school gym, Coolidge handed each one a slip of paper on which was typed a curt message: “I do not choose to run for president in nineteen twenty-eight.” Brief, blunt, direct. It was Coolidge’s style.

There followed a short but intense period of speculation. Did he really mean it? Did he want to be drafted? Few insiders who had seen the president staring longingly out of the White House window at the tennis courts where Calvin Jr. had played his last game could have been surprised. Others who heard Grace Goodhue Coolidge’s whispered words to her friends (“Poppa says there is a depression coming”) would have been in no doubt of his sincerity. Coolidge may have sensed his own mortality. A distinguished doctor later said of him, “I have rarely known a man to have the type of heart condition such as that from which President Coolidge suffered without himself having had some of the danger signs.” To those who knew the president slapped as many as twelve hours a day, angina may have been an explanation—perhaps even depression.

Whatever his reasons, Calvin Coolidge did his country a service in leaving office with such dignity. After the rigor mortis of Wilson and the flaccidity of Harding, he dignified his office. He was probably the only white man who could wear a full dress Sioux war bonnet and not look ridiculous. The title Kansas editor William Allen White gave to his book on Coolidge neatly summed up this quiet man’s presidency: he was A Puritan in Babylon.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14564-14577). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

One American who did run that year was George Herman Ruth—known to millions of baseball fans as Babe. Babe Ruth in 1927 ran the bases and astounding sixty times to set a home run record that lasted more than thirty years. Little wonder that Yankee Stadium was called “the House that Ruth built.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Location 14578). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Americans also thrilled that year to the exploits on the links of Bobby Jones. Down the Fairway, Jones wrote, “I wish I could say here that a strange thrill shot through my skinny little bosom when I swung at a golf ball for the first time, but it wouldn’t be truthful.” Even so, Robert Tyre Jones began to teach himself to play golf at age six and entered his first professional championship at fourteen. He would come to dominate the game and represent the model of a Southern gentleman and sportsman.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Location 14580). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“TWO CHICKENS IN EVERY POT”

Prohibition was bound to be an issue. Hoover called it “a noble experiment,” but he said he was willing to commission a study to investigate how the experiment was going at that point. Hoover was partial to letting experts decide delicate questions of public policy. The leading Democrat, Al Smith, was notoriously Wet. “Corruption of law enforcement officials, bootlegging, lawlessness are now prevalent throughout this country,” Smith charged, citing the alleged failure of Prohibition.

One poet at the time satirized what would come to be known as the “Wickersham Report”:

Prohibition is an awful flop;

We like it.

It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.

We like it.

It’s left a trail of death and slime,

It don’t prohibit worth a dime,

It’s filled our land with graft and crime;

Nonetheless, we’re for it.

The economy, as always, was a key election issue. Hoover pointed to the Republican record of the 1920s—a 45 percent increase in national income, 3.5 million new homes, 66 percent increase in high school attendance. All of this was true. Then he reached for the rhetorical heights like Icarus reaching for the sun: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before,” he said. “The poorhouse is vanishing. . . . [Given] a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from the nation.”

Hoover was certainly no alone in his optimism. Even the muckraker, Lincoln Steffens, caught the buoyant spirit of the times: “Big business in America is providing what the Socialists held up as their goal: food, shelter and clothing for all. . . .It is a great country this is; as great as Rome.” A Republican writer, probably recruited from a Madison Avenue advertising firm, said the GOP could be relied upon to provide “two chickens in every pot and a car in every garage.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14606-14622). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

CRASH!

During Prohibition, the government struggled to keep up with the bootleggers and rumrunners. Also in 1929, the U.S. Coast Guard chased the speedy rumrunner Black Duck in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. When after the repeated warnings the Black Duck failed to stop, the coast guardsmen opened fire, killing three of four crewmen and seizing five hundred cases of whiskey. In nearby Boston, Thursday crowds were so incensed that they rioted outside Franeuil Hall and beat up a coast guard recruiter.

Still, the government was determined to uphold the rule of law. Special agent Eliot Ness and his “Untouchables” were known for their courage, their resourcefulness, and their unwillingness to take bribes from the Mob. Ness went after Capone’s gang and, by 1931, succeeded in sending Al Capone to prison for income tax evasion.

On Wall Street, the roaring Twenties roared on. No one knew better how to work the system than Boston’s Joseph P. Kennedy. Kennedy once set up a “boiler room” operation in a hotel suite to save the Yellow Cab Company from ruin. He prompted hundreds of telephone calls from around the country to buy and to sell the stock of the company threatened by corporate raiders. All this frenzied interest in buying and selling Yellow Cab stock made it appear the company was a hot commodity. The results so confused the raiders that the stock finally was stabilized.

Millions of people rushed to get into a Bull Market, often buying stock on a “margin” as little as 10 percent of face value, then reselling as a speculative “bubble” was created. In this way, stocks in poorly managed companies could nonetheless be artificially bid up in value. Hundreds of thousands acted on “hot tips” and rushed to invest their money in stocks without having any idea of their real worth. Everyone wanted to “get rich quick.”

Harvard economist William Z. Ripley had warned of the Wild West atmosphere on Wall Street. He colorfully denounced the “honey-fugling, hornswoggling and skullduggery”  of the corporate boardrooms. Ripley’s party-pooping went unheeded.

A warning tremor of hard times came in early October 1929, when the price of wheat plummeted. This would have devastating consequences not only for American farmers in the Midwest but also for Canadians and Australians.

Later in the month the New York Stock Exchange recorded a serious sell-off top taking prices back to their 1927 levels. President Hoover hastened to issue a reassuring statement. The “fundamentals” of American prosperity, he said, were sound.

President Hoover’s message could not have been more ill-timed. On that day, 24 October 1929, the Stock Market collapsed. It would forever be known as “Black Thursday.” A month before, the average price of thirty leading American industrial shares was $380. When trading ended on Black Thursday, it was only $230. Overnight, the investments of millions of American families were virtually wiped out.

Americans were plunged into the worst Depression they had ever known. it was an experience that scared millions. This had always been the Land of Opportunity. And that opportunity was based in no small part on bountiful harvests. Even in the midst of civil war, President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation praised the Almighty for sending us fertile fields and bulging granaries. No more. For millions, these were the “Hungry Years.”

For those Americans who did not put their savings into Wall Street stocks and bonds, and they were legion, the Great Depression was felt in the unemployment figures. In 1929, unemployment had been a very low 3 percent. For 1930, the jobless numbers were not as bad as they had been in the early twenties—9 percent. But in 1931, as the numbers of unemployed rose to eight million, 16  percent of the workforce, the Great Fear stalked the land. Was there no turnaround, no recovery in sight? In 1932, unemployment rose to a full 24 percent—twelve million out of work.

Bank failures also frightened many of the most stable citizens. Trust is essential to enterprise, as Americans back to Alexander Hamilton knew. When hundreds of banks “went under,” the Depression deepened. Work and thrift had always been the basis for American economic strength. Now, both work and thrift seemed to avail Americans little.

President Hoover tried manfully to buck up Americans’ sagging spirits. “Any lack of confidence in . . . the basic strength of business is foolish,” he said in November. “We have now passed the worst,” he declared on 1 May 1930. “May Day,” ironically, is the international distress call. The president was hurt badly in public esteem as it soon became obvious that the corner had not been turned at all. Or, if it had, it led only to harder times. Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller, in a clumsy effort to instill confidence, announced that “the fundamental conditions of the country are sound,” adding that he and his sons were buying stock!

As more and more Americans were thrown out of work, many took to the roads. “Okies” from Oklahoma piled into overburdened trucks to make the passage to Southern California, where there was said to be work. Oklahoma Native Son Will Rogers ruefully joked that America was the first country ever to “drive to the poor house in an automobile.” Many a young man hit the rails, hitching rides on slow-moving freight trains. CBS news correspondent Eric Sevareid would later reflect on his experience of riding the rails. Few seeing the elegant, well-turned out news man could imagine him bedding down in rotting straw.

John Steinbeck would later immortalize the experience of the stricken Joad family in his gritty novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Soup kitchens and shanty towns sprung up around the country. The shanty towns were dubbed “Hoovervilles” in cruel riposte to the president’s invisible view that “prosperity is just around the corner.”

Hoover is our shepherd

We are in want

He maketh us to lie down on the park benches

He leadeth us beside the still factories

With the deepening Depression, Americans looked to the man in the White House for answers. President Hoover continued to maintain as much of a normal routine as he could, hoping thereby to build confidence in recovery. He dined each night at the White House wearing a formal attire. He attended the opening of the baseball season (and had to endure the indignity of being roundly booed by fans in Philadelphia). When a reporter asked Babe Ruth how he could justify earning more than the president of the United States, he replied, “I had a better year than Hoover did.”

In June 1930, Congress left President Hoover with an important decision: whether or not to sign the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill. Herbert Hoover had never been identified with isolationism, nor with a narrow, “beggar thy neighbor” view of America’s economic place in the world. Nonetheless, he signed Smoot-Hawley. It was to prove perhaps his worst mistake. High tariffs on imported goods led immediately to other nations raising their tariffs in retaliation. Thus, at a time when all countries needed to stimulate international trade, they were choking at off.

The disastrous impact was felt almost immediately with our closest neighbor and biggest trading partner, Canada. One thousand economists had appealed to the president to veto this bill, as had the American bankers Association. As a direct result, Canada retaliated against American goods and eighty-seven branches of American factories opened up north of the 49th parallel. This hurt American workers, who lost jobs and the ability to export their manufacturers.

When the Republican-controlled Congress adjourned in July 1930 it was not scheduled to reconvene until December 1931. President Hoover mistrusted Congress. He resisted calls for a Special Session of Congress. He replied to urgent appeals with a stern rejoinder: we cannot legislate ourselves out of a world economic depression.”

The stance was unwise, even stupid. Hoover showed a fundamental lack of confidence in representative government. Since he would not work with a Congress of his own party, the voters of that November gave Democrats a whopping increase of forty-nine seats in the White House for a total of 216. Republicans retained a paper-thin majority of 218. By the time Congress sat again, more than a year after Election Day, even that would be gone.

Scholars to this day debate the causes, extent, and duration of the great depression. Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman calls it the Great Contraction. He writes that it was caused by a disastrous decline in the money supply. He cites the untimely death of Governor Benjamin Strong of the New York Reserve Bank: “Once he was removed from the scene, neither the [Federal Reserve] board nor the other Reserve Banks . . . were prepared to accept the leadership of the New York Bank.” Some scholars maintain that the Depression did not “really end until 1939-1940, when America began to rearm.”

As always, however, people judge largely by what they can see. And in Herbert Hoover, they saw a grim, dour man utterly devoid of humor. Hoover’s very capable Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson said he had to flee a meeting at the White House to “get away from the ever present feeling of gloom that pervades everything connected with the Administration.” Even during World War I, Colonel House had confided to his diary that Hoover, “takes, as usual, a gloomy outlook.”

To many, Hoover seemed callously indifferent to the suffering of the common man. Although this was far from true—Hoover had in fact been a great humanitarian throughout his life—this shy, reserved man was the butt of endless bitter jokes. When an out-of-work men pulled their empty pockets inside-out, they were said to be flying “Hoover flags.” A story circulated that the president had asked Andrew Mellon, his Secretary of the Treasury, for a nickel to call a friend. “Here’s a dime,” the Pittsburgh billionaire purportedly told Hoover, “call all your friends.”

The team of melon and Hoover were singled out for abuse a thousand rhymes and satires:

Oh, Mellon pulled the whistle, boys,

And Hoover rang the bell,

Wall Street gave the signal,

And the country went to hell.

The country did not, in fact, go to “hell.” As bad as the Great Depression was, life expectancy increased and the death rate declined in the decade of the 1930s. Because jobs were scarce, more young people stayed in school and were thereby better prepared when they graduated.

Even the automobile, that symbol of American ingenuity and marketing, was proving to be something of a mixed blessing. In 1931 thirty thousand people died on America’s roads, a tragic toll, and far higher proportionately than the toll in 2006.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14673-14767). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Anti-British sentiment had been a staple of American politics for a century and a half. Millions of Americans hated the very idea of monarchy and aristocracy. Each morning, schoolchildren pledged allegiance to the flag “and to the Republic, for which it stands.” Add to that the belief among many Irish Americans that Britain had oppressed Ireland for centuries. German-Americans hadn’t supported the First World War only when the Zimmerman Telegram revealed Germany’s aggressive designs on the U.S. Southwest. Their disillusionment with what they saw as British hypocrisy was deep and real. After the war, Britain had not given independence to India. And the Versailles Treaty had consigned Germany’s African colonies to Britain and France. “A war to make the world safe for democracy”? No, to millions of Americans it was a war to make the world safe for British and French imperialism.

Americans in 1932 craved distraction from their woes. Soon, the “crime of the century” provided it. On the night of 1 March, little Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., a few months shy of his second birthday, was kidnapped from his parents’ secluded home on their estate near Hopewell, New Jersey. The entire country was transfixed. Schoolchildren across the country were asked to pray for the babies safe return. Boy Scouts and Princeton undergraduates volunteered to search the woods surrounding the Lindberghs’ elegant home. Fearing that they might disturb footprints or other evidence, Colonel Lindbergh turned down the offer.

America’s hero had received a ransom note. There were clear indications from the note’s peculiar phrasing that it was written by an immigrant, probably German.

Dear Sir!

Have 50000$ redy with 2500$ in 20$ bills 1500$ in 10$ bills and 1000$ in 5$ bills. After 2-4 days we will inform you were to deliver the Mony.

We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the polise the child is in gute care.

Indication for all letters are signature and 3 holes.

Immediately, the head of the New Jersey State Police was dispatched to Hopewell to take over the investigation involving the Garden State’s most famous couple. Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf was a thirty-seven year old West pointer who ran the state troopers like a military organization. President Hoover promised all the resources of the federal government to aid in the investigation. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wanted badly to crack the case.

Lindbergh paid the ransom money and pursued many false leads. He even went to the Nelly “boad” (boat) as instructed and a subsequent message from the kidnapper. But in May 1932, the badly decomposed body of the twenty-month-old son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh was found four and half miles from their Hopewell residence. Perhaps the kernel should have accepted the offers of the scouts and the Princeton students.

Colonel Schwarzkopf had located a ladder outside the Lindbergh home. It was cracked. Very likely, the kidnapper had scaled it successfully to enter the second-floor nursery where the child slept. Then, with the babies added weight the ladder collapsed under him. Investigators and coroners theorized that the child had been killed by striking his head against a brick wall as the latter broke. All along, it became clear that the kidnapper had cruelly deceived the Lindbergh’s into thinking they might actually see their little boy again. Soon, Congress passed the Lindbergh Law to make kidnapping a federal crime.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14778-14807). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

When Bloomberg vetoed the bills to pay out early the bonus promised to veterans of World War I, a “bonus Army” descended on Washington in 1932. The president quietly ordered tents and medical units to be made available for members of the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF, a clever play on the name of the U.S. force in WWI, the American Expeditionary Force, AEF). When the communist agitators prodded a small number of men to throw bricks and stones at police, however, Hoover was determined to preserve order in the nation’s capitol.

Hoover ordered the army to quell the riots that were breaking out downtown. Hoover specified that the regular troops should not be armed and that the BEF men were simply to be escorted to their tent camps, or turned over to Metropolitan Police.

General Douglas MacArthur, the army’s chief of staff, took personal command of his troops. He used tanks, tear gas, and soldiers with fixed bayonets to clear the streets of rock-throwing bonus marchers. MacArthur’s aide—Major Dwight D. Eisenhower—was surprised and disappointed to see his chief preparing to storm the bonus marchers’ camps. Major George S. Patton, however, eagerly led U.S. cavalry down Pennsylvania Avenue in what was to prove to be one of the last charges of mounted soldiers. Two of the bonus marchers were killed in the resulting melee. The Washington News was aghast. “What a pitiful spectacle is that of the great American Government, mightiest in the world, chasing unarmed men, women and children with army tanks. . . . If the army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.”

Conditions were so desperate in the election year of 1932 that thousands of prominent writers and intellectuals openly called for communism. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the vastly popular Great Gatsby, yearned to “bring on the revolution.” Other famous writers drawn to Marxist ideas were Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Malcolm Cowley, and Lincoln Steffens. Many of these writers lived and worked in New York City, giving a strong leftist tilt to the state’s intellectual climate, and, in effect, to the nation’s atmosphere as well.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14808-14825). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Three

FDR AND THE NEW DEAL

(1933-1939)

Franklin D. Roosevelt was all at once the most powerful democratic officeholder in a world where democracy itself was increasingly threatened. Roosevelt vastly increase the power of the federal government, but he did so only with the consent of an only-too-willing elected Congress. Roosevelt created a dizzying array of “alphabet soup” agencies—the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Public Works Administration (PWA) to name a few. All of these bureaucracies consumed millions of dollars and committed the government to an ever greater reliance on “tax and spend.” Roosevelt’s opponents feared and even loathed him. They believed he was intent on bringing Socialism to America. To be sure, thousands of Americans advocated communism, openly sympathizing with the Bolshevik experiment then taking place in Soviet Russia. “I have seen the future—and it works,” the muckraker Lincoln Steffens had said of the new Soviet union in 1919. FDR, however, thought he was saving capitalism and democracy. Roosevelt relied on a “brain trust,” many bright young Ivy League graduates, to staff all these new agencies. FDR committed to “bold experimentation,” freely admitting that some of his ideas would not work, but assuring Americans that “the immortal Dante tells us that the sins of the warm hearted and the sins of the cold blooded are waved in different scales.” He implied that his critics were they cold-blooded ones. FDR’s dominance of the Congress in these years, while not complete, was yet so powerful as to shape the country we live in to this day.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 14988-14999). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE HUNDRED DAYS . . . AND AFTER

. . . FDR assured the allegiance of what we today call the “knowledge class” to the Democratic Party. One thing can always be assured: if you take from Peter to pay Paul, you can generally rely on the vote of Paul.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15034-15035). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

While many liberals mistrusted Communists, some considered them simply “liberals in a hurry.” A popular slogan of the day explained away Stalin’s crimes by saying “you can’t make omelets without breaking a few eggs.” Many liberals agreed with veteran muckraker Lincoln Steffens who had visited the new Soviet Union in 1919. Steffens said, “I have seen the future—and it works!” What Stalin was breaking was not eggs, but heads; and there were millions of them, not a few. We now know that the CPUSA was controlled throughout its existence by Moscow.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15062-15066). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

When President Roosevelt took America off the Gold Standard in 1933, he called in gold certificates. These were replaced by greenbacks. The action had fateful consequences for the United States, the world economy, and, especially, for one immigrant carpenter in the Bronx.

Brunel Hauptmann attracted an attendant’s attention when he paid for gasoline with a $100 gold certificate rarely seen in late 1934. The attendant, suspecting counterfeit, wrote down the German immigrant’s license number. Very quickly, police arrested Hauptmann and in that unlikely twist charged him with the kidnapping and death of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.

Hauptmann’s trial in early 1935 in Flemington, New Jersey, quickly became a media circus. H. L. Mencken called it “the biggest story since the Resurrection.” Evidence introduced against him included marked gold certificates that he had stashed away; these were identified as part of Lindbergh’s ransom payment. The wooden slats of the ladder used to enter the Lindbergh home’s nursery were found to match neatly several slats in the carpenter’s garage. When Charles Lindbergh took the witness stand, he showed no emotion. He gave his testimony coolly. Asked if he could identify the voice of the man who spoke to him about delivering the ransom money, Lindbergh fingered Hauptmann. As a measure of the intense public interest in the trial, the New York Times pushed aside President Roosevelt’s State of the Union address to give prime space to “Col. Lindbergh Names Hauptmann as Kidnapper and Taker of Ransom; Cool in 3-Hour Cross-Examination. Turned down on appeal, Hauptmann went to his death still professing his innocence.

While Hauptmann was appealing his conviction, the Lindbergh family continued to endure intense media scrutiny of their every move. Their young son, Jon, was the new focus of kidnap threats. On Monday, 23 December 1935, the New York Times carried this headline: “Lindbergh Family Sails for England to Seek a Safe Secluded Residence; Threats on Son’s Life Force Decision.” Was such a drastic step really necessary? Might some high-profile trials of those who threatened the Lindbergh’s have put a stop to such intolerable harassment? We cannot know. Perhaps no one who has not suffered the traumatic loss of a beloved child to kidnapping can ever say how much threat is too much. Still, the Lindbergh’s voyage into voluntary exile was a telling consequence of American press freedom. Did an irresponsible press create an intolerable madhouse atmosphere?

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15110-15066). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

HITLER’S GAMES: THE BERLIN OLYMPICS

The Nazis regime stressed physical fitness especially for the young. “Your body belongs to your country,” said one fitness book that was required reading in German schools; “You are responsible to your country for your body.” Hitler wanted to show off the athletic prowess of German youth as a model of what national Socialist ideology taught about Aryan superiority.

Tall and statuesque, the green-eyed German Helene Mayer was living in California when the 1936 Olympics were being prepared in Berlin. She had won the gold medal for fencing while representing her native Germany in the 1928 games. Would she compete again now? Because her father was Jewish, under Hitler’s new Nuremberg Laws she was officially designated as a mischling (person of mixed race). Despite the fact that the Jews had had their citizenship revoked by Hitler and were suffering all forms of political, civil, economic, and social persecution in the Nazi state. Helene was still eager to compete under the swastika flag. She soon became immersed in a great political controversy over what some people called “the Hitler Games.”

Predictably, Hitler’s actions were producing deep unease across the Atlantic and many Americans urged a boycott of the games. But Avery Bundage, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, wanted his countrymen to compete in Berlin. He told the pro-Nazi, German American Bund that the Olympics were “a religion with universal appeal, which incorporates all the basic values of other religions, a modern, exciting, virile, dynamic religion.” Brundage opposed any talk of boycott: “Politics must not be brought into sports. I have not heard of anything to indicate discrimination of any race or religion.”

Brundage had not read the signs in hundreds of German towns: Juden unerwuenscht—”Jews Unwelcome.” But thousands of others had read them and could have informed the USOC boss. Nor, apparently, was he aware that Jews had been excluded from all German sports clubs, although everyone else in the world of sports knew about this. Helene Mayer had even been excluded, but Hitler’s government recognized the propaganda value of letting Helene compete for the Vaterland. “Helene is a good German and has nothing to do with the Jews,” cabled the German Consulate in San Francisco to the German Foreign Office in Berlin.

Helene went on to win a silver medal in Berlin. The crowd roared as Helene stood rigidly at attention on the winner’s platform, giving the stiff-armed “Heil Hitler” salute.

Not all Jewish competitors were so fortunate. American athletes Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller were yanked from their race just the day before they were to run—to appease Hitler. Frank Metcalfe and Jesse always would run in their place, their American coach told them. “Coach, I have won my three medals,” Owens protested. “I have won the races I set out to win. I’m tired. I’m beat. Let Marty and Sam run.” Coach Dean Cromwell pointed his finger at Owens and said: “You will do what you are told.” Owens went on to win his fourth gold medal.

Owens’ “sunny demeanor” won him fans and friends wherever he went. German crowds took up a cry of “Oh-vens! Oh-vens!” whenever he appeared to compete. Hitler, already having made up his mind to stop shaking each Olympic medal-winner’s hand, was then asked by an aide if he wanted to make an exception for Jesse. Hitler shouted at him: “Do you really think I will allow myself to be photographed shaking hands with a Negro?” Much has been made of the fact that Hitler would not shake hands with Jesse Owens. But the reality was that Jesse Owens was spared the indignity of having to shake hands with Adolf Hitler.

“No matter how Hitler and other Nazis leaders felt,” writes one author, “the Germans embraced Owens and his incredible performance. Altogether, African-American athletes won almost one-quarter of all the U.S. medals in the games. Their performance brought honor to themselves, their team, and their nation—and were a slap in the face of Hitler’s racist policies.”

When the games opened with much fanfare, two of the surprise guest were American exiles, Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne. The first words that the Lindbergh’s heard in Germany after a short flight from England were “Heil Hitler!” Lindbergh had come to Germany as an official guest of Hitler’s new air force, the Luftwaffe. Anne’s biographer right of the world-famous aviator: “Adolf Hitler was certain that Charles Lindbergh personified [the future of the Third Reich]. His tall frame, his sandy-haired boyishness, his piercing blue eyes, made him the quintessential Aryan. The Nazis could not have constructed a more eloquent embodiment of their vision.”

Lindbergh was especially impressed with the advanced state of German aeronautics. He appreciated the appearance of order and discipline he saw everywhere he went. The German press was not permitted to pester him and his wife. “Lindbergh had found the atmosphere fraternal, the people congenial, the press under control, officials deferential, discipline good, morals pure and morale high,” wrote Tom Jones, a British civil servant close to Prime Minister Baldwin, of Lindbergh’s reaction. “It was a refreshing change . . . from the moral degradation into which he considered the United States had fallen, the apathy and indifference of the British, the decadence of the French.

Jones pointed out that Lindbergh liked what he saw because he never asked to see concentration camps where, already, Jews, Communists, social democrats, Socialists, and any other people whom the regime chose were packed away. A non-disease had opened Dachau in March 1933, just weeks after Hitler came to power. It was the first of many concentration camps that immediately began filling with opponents of the regime. By the end of the year, the Nazis had taken as many as one hundred thousand Germans away to these camps.

As the closing ceremonies signaled the end of a very successful Olympics, the German crowd took up the chant of “Sieg Heli!” (“Victory, hail!”) Germany had won most of the medals. Nazi propagandists had labored to present a positive portrait of the Hitler dictatorship. And they largely succeeded. There was no report of any rudeness directed at any black or Jewish American Olympians. The propagandists’ campaign may have helped by the timely intervention of Max Schmeling, the great German boxer. Schmeling became a “Nordic” hero when he defeated American boxer Joe Louis and June 1936. The “Brown Bomber” was beloved of black Americans, especially. Schmeling was not happy to be made a poster boy for the Nazis’ racial views. Refusing to join the Nazi party, he nonetheless extracted a promise from Hitler that all U.S. athletes would be protected from insult during the Olympics.

Because of the führer’s aggressive war-making, there would not be another Olympic Games until 1948. The artificial spirit of bonhomie propagandists spread around the Games did not last. When Leni Riefenstahl, a film producer much favored by the top Nazis, showed her documentary Olympiade 1936, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was infuriated. Leni’s camera had dwelled admiringly on Jesse Owens’s muscles and a Japanese competitor’s handsome face. His sole clashed with Goebbels’s racial hatred that he banned Riefenstahl’s work for eighteen months.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15181-15240). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“AS MAINE GOES”

When the Republicans nominated Kansas Governor Alf Landon, they spurned former President Hoover and his increasingly strident opposition to everything FDR had done. Delegates do the 1936 Republican Convention wanted to nominate New Hampshire’s popular senator Styles Bridges for vice president. He looked like a sure winner for the number two slot until someone noted that “Landon-Bridges falling down” would be the inevitable response of the opposition. Republicans instead turned to Frank Knox, who had been a Rough Rider with Teddy in Cuba. Most significantly, Republicans endorsed the Social Security act FDR had introduced and Congress had quickly and acted in 1935. They also endorsed the right of labor to organize and certain forms of business regulation. It was not a platform designed to appeal to conservative Republicans, and it didn’t.

The press weighed in. FDR charmed the White House reporters who met regularly for off-the-record “background” briefings. Many of their editors, however, were solidly against Roosevelt. Colonel Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, despised FDR. He instructed his switchboard operators to answer every call with a number of days until the country was freed from Roosevelt’s misrule.

FDR revels in the opposition of big business. He loved to tell the story of the “nice old gentleman” who had fallen into the water while wearing an expensive silk hat. In the story, the gentleman’s friend ran down the pier, jumped into the water, and pulled him out. But the hat floated away on the tide. At first, the old gentleman thanked his friend and praised his courage. Four years later, though, the old gentleman had begun to complain about losing that fine hat! FDR’s telling of the story fit the caricature of the Big Businessman that even then was being popularized by the best-selling board game, Monopoly. People could see the “old gentleman” who are the shiny top hat.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15260-15275). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

REBUILDING AMERICA

Americans also rejoiced in sports in the thirties. Joe Lewis had a return match with Max Schmeling in 1938. This time, Nazi ideology would not brag about another Germanic triumph over the Brown Bomber. Jimmy Carter recalled the reaction of poor black tenant farmers on his father’s rural Georgia peanut farm. Allowed to approach the front porch of the big house by Carter’s house, the Bloc fans listened to the radio report Joel Louis’s pounding victory. They thanked “Mr. Earl” Carter politely and quietly returned to their modest shacks. But from there, Jimmy recounted, he could hear an eruption of shouts of joy and “Bless the Lords” that he remembered all his life.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15525-15529). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

War jitters made Americans feel vulnerable to any kind of threat. On the night before Halloween 1938, the talented young Orson Welles produced a made-for-radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ science-fiction classic, War of the Worlds. The dramatization featured musical offerings interspersed with realistic-sounding, increasingly menacing reports introduced with “we interrupt this broadcast. . . . ” The radio announcer informed listeners that a meteor from the planet Mars had landed near Princeton, New Jersey. Some fifteen hundred people were reported dead. Later, it was they announced that a “cylinder” had screwed itself open and that alien creatures were emerging armed with “death rays.” Panic struck in a number of places, showing us how great was Americans’ faith in the authority of radio as a medium of communication. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater were threatened with millions of lawsuits, none-of which came to anything. The Martian broadcast did have its humorous side, however. One hard-pressed labor wrote to Orson Welles:

When those things landed, I thought the best thing to do was to go away, so I took $3.25 out of my savings and bought a ticket. After I’d gone sixty miles, I heard it was a play. Now I don’t have any money for the shoes I was saving up for. Would you please have someone send me a pair of black shoes, size 9B.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15530-15540). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Four

AMERICA’S RENDEXVOUS WITH DESTINY

(1939-1941)

MAN OF THE YEAR

As 1939 dawned, Time magazine stunned the world by naming Adolf Hitler as its “Man of the Year” for 1938. Editors of the popular newsweekly hastened to remind readers that their selection did not imply approval of the Nazi dictator. As they would say again and again over the decades, the “Man of the Year” (later, “Person of the Year”) designation merely meant that this individual, more than any other, had influenced events for good or evil.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15607-15611). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

. . . One is either a Nazi or a committed Christian,” a rally speaker told the Nazi Students’ League. “We must repudiate the Old and New Testaments, since for us the Nazi idea alone is decisive. For us there is only one example—Adolf Hitler—and no one else.” Tragically, millions of Germans bought this teaching.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15619-15622). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

. . . Ironically, back in the USSR, Stalin proceeded to “purge” thousands of artists and intellectuals. He also had most of his old Bolshevik comrades shot. Stalin was particularly brutal toward the Soviet military. In a two-year period (1936-1938), Stalin ordered 39,157 of his military officers to be shot or imprisoned.

In March 1939, Hitler tore up the agreement he had signed the previous September. It was the paper Prime Minister Chamberlain proudly displayed at his airport news conference, the one with “Herr Hitler’s name on it.” On fifteen March, the Ides of March, Hitler marched into Prague. The stricken Czechs were too stunned to resist. Hitler now made no pretense of “liberating” the Germans. The Czechs were Slavs. “Shamefully abandoned,” as Churchill said of them, they had put their faith in their fellow democracies and had been utterly betrayed. Fascism’s march seemed unstoppable. By April, Franco had prevailed in Spain.

Pressured by members of his ruling Conservative Party, Chamberlain at last responded to Hitler’s aggression by offering assurances to Poland. Britain would back the endangered nation and declare war on Germany if Hitler attacked. But this appearance of spine did not mean that Chamberlain had renounced appeasement. To the contrary, he asked U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy to intervene with President Roosevelt. Chamberlain’s purpose: to get FDR to secretly pressure the Poles to make concessions to Germany! Frustrated, FDR asked his ambassador to “put some iron up Chamberlain’s backside.” Kennedy answered that the British had no iron to fight with.

The following month, FDR delivered the first address ever broadcast on the new invention—television—at the opening of the New York World’s Fair on 30 April 1939. Roosevelt used the occasion to celebrate the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s First Inauguration. He spoke of “the vitality of democracy and of democratic institutions.” “Yes, our wagon is still hitched to a star,” he said. “But it is a star of friendship, a star of progress for mankind, a star of greater happiness and less hardship, a star of international goodwill, and, above all, a star of peace.” With those words, the world’s most famous scientist, Albert Einstein, threw a switch to light up fountains and floodlights. The fair was both visually open.

Two of the most famous fairgoers that year were King George VI and his spirited wife, Queen Elisabeth. They had never expected to sit on England’s ancient thrones. But when Edward VIII abdicated rather than give up his American fiancée, his younger brother resolved to overcome his childhood stammering and do his duty.

FDR planned every detail of this first visit ever made by British monarchs to North America. Snubbing Joe Kennedy in London, the president worked through William C. Bullitt, his ambassador in Paris, to bring off this historic event. FDR saw this visit in many ways as a response to upper-class Americans who considered him a “traitor to his class.” Their attitude was jocularly expressed in the New Yorker cartoon that showed well-heeled theater goers headed off to the movies. They call in to a dinner party of fellow swells: “Come on—we’re going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt.” Now, FDR would play host to the biggest society “catch” in the world—the king and queen. FDR grandly greeted the royal pair at his Hyde Park home. As soon as the royal couple had changed for dinner, FDR appeared with a pitcher of martinis that he had mixed himself. “My mother thinks you should have a cup of tea—she doesn’t approve of cocktails,” the president said. The king replied, “Neither does mine,” as he grabbed the martini. Imagine the horror of the Roosevelt hissers when they learned that FDR and Eleanor had offered the Royals a picnic lunch of hot dogs and beans as Hyde Park!

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15630-15659). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

. . . For millions of Americans democracies of Europe were weak and decadent and the dictatorships were strong and dangerous. Better to stay out of the fray entirely. To the 480,000 members of the German American Bund, this stance seems especially appealing. Fritz Kuhn brazenly led twenty-two thousand members of his pro-Nazi group at a rally in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden. A giant banner held aloft the picture of George Washington, but on the floor bundists wore swastika arm bands and offered the “Heil Hitler” salute. As far as Madison Square Garden events went, it was small. Given New York’s large number of Jews, Catholics, Poles, Eastern Europeans, and black Americans, however, it was an incredibly provocative act.

Charles A. Lindbergh was no bundist. But he was equally determined to keep America out of Europe’s troubles. He joined with others to form The Committee to Defend America First. Lindbergh had returned home from three years of self-imposed exile in Britain. He was at one time the most famous advocate for American isolation and possibly the most controversial: he had visited Hitler’s Germany no less than six times while living in Britain. Lindbergh had even accepted a Nazi medal from Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, the German air force. “If we fight [Germany],” Lindbergh had said, “our countries will only lose their best men. We can gain nothing…. It must not happen.” Like Ambassador Kennedy, Lindbergh had found the Cliveden Set the most congenial of Englishmen. He had urged his English hosts to resist Germany, but to make an alliance with Hitler. At one of Lady Astor’s parties, which included Joe Kennedy and the U.S. Ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, Lindbergh “shocked the life out of everyone by describing Germany’s strength.” Back in the United States, Lindbergh threw himself into opposition to President Roosevelt’s plans.

Meanwhile, others were also trying to influence Roosevelt’s plans. Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner were atomic scientists. They had fled Germany with the rise of the Nazis. Now, in the summer of 1939, they were in America trying to find Albert Einstein. Einstein had taken a summer cottage in Peconic, Long Island, where he enjoyed sailing. Wigner and Szilard, on familiar with American roads (or with American towns), got lost. They confused Patchogue on the South Shore, with Cutchogue, Long Island’s North Fork. Unable to locate high in Stein’s summer cottage, Szilard and Wigner almost gave up. Finally, Szilard leaned out of his car window and asked the little boy, “Say, do you by any chance know where Professor Einstein lives?” The eight-year-old promptly took the émigrés to Einstein’s cottage. There, the scientists quickly persuaded Einstein to send a letter to President Roosevelt.

They almost miscalculated disastrously when they planned to ask Charles Lindbergh to be their courier to carry the Einstein letter to the White House. These politically naïve man did not yet realize that Lindbergh’s sympathies were not at all theirs. Instead, they asked Alexander Sachs, a man friendly to FDR.

The Einstein letter explained to the president that nuclear fission could create a chain reaction that would release vast amounts of heat and radioactivity. A bomb might be created using uranium, Einstein explained. And, he wrote, the Germans were known to be working on atomic fission. Einstein knew all the top German scientists. Until Hitler’s rise to power, he had been a respected member of the German-Swiss intellectual community. As a Jew, however, Einstein could never be accepted in the new Germany Hitler was fashioning.

FDR received Einstein’s letter from scientific gadfly Alexander Sachs. Waving away the complex scientific jargon, FDR told Sachs: “Alex, what you are after is to see the Nazis don’t blow us up.”

“Precisely,” Sachs answered.

With that, FDR summoned General Edwin “Pa” Watson, his trusted appointments secretary. “Pa, this requires action.” With those spare words, the largest secret weapons project in history began—the race to build an atomic bomb.

AMERICA ON THE ROAD TO WAR

The world awoke to a shock on 24 August 1939. News came from Moscow and Berlin of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. After the Munich agreement the previous year, Stalin had decided to protect the USSR and come to an agreement with his declared enemy, Hitler. To ease the transition, Stalin sacked his Jewish foreign minister, Maxim LItvinov, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov. Molotov’s name means “hammer,” and the signing of the Nazi pact struck the Western democracies like a terrible blow. Now, Hitler was free to go to war in the West—free from the worst fear of all German leaders, a two-front war.

Hitler wasted no time. He demanded the Poles give in to all his demands regarding the free city of Danzig (now Gdansk). He wanted access to the Polish Corridor. He had gambled and won before—the Rhineland, anschluss with Austria, the Sudetenland, invading Czechoslovakia. Forget Chamberlain’s assurances. Hitler was convinced that Britain and the decadent democracies would back down yet again.

Warning the democracies against trying to stop him, Hitler threatened to smash their cities and destroy their armies. Most ominously, he said that if “world Jewry” plunged the world into another great war, the Jews of Europe would be annihilated. Britain’s great diplomatic historian, Sir John Wheeler Bennett, did not dismiss Hitler’s words. “Except in cases where he had pledged his word, Hitler always meant what he said,” said Wheeler-Bennett. Hitler’s attack on Poland stunned the free peoples of Europe. After four years of bloody, exhausting fratricide in the trenches of the Great War, they could not imagine that Hitler actually wanted another conflagration.

Hitler had formed an opinion of the Democratic leaders from careful study of their weaknesses and from his face-to-face meeting at Munich in 1938. He could see that quick, decisive action would catch them unawares and unable to respond. Hitler had a genius for quick, decisive action. He showed this as early as 1934 when he descended on a Munich gathering of the Sturmabteilung (SA)—the Brownshirts, who had helped Hitler come to power. He had arrested their leader, Ernst Röhm. Rome was a radical Nazi, a street brawler, and an open homosexual who was a potential threat to Hitler’s own power. Hitler stormed through the halls of the Munich hotel where they met and caught some of the top SA leaders in bed with boys. He had Röhm shot. He used the confusion of “The Night of the Long Knives” to murder as many as 400 opponents of his regime, including some conspicuous conservatives. One of those killed as a warning to others was Erich Klausener, a leader of the Catholic Action group. Hitler struck Röhm and the others on a Saturday night and fondly tactic effective enough to use again. When he marched into the Rhineland in 1936 and into Austria, 12 March 1938, he also chose to act on Saturday nights. Hitler knew how the British statesman loved their weekends at their country estates. He told his associates that “to operate or to act quickly . . . does not come easily to this systematic French court to the ponderous English.”

On 1 September 1939, the armored divisions of Hitler’s Werhmacht crashed across Poland’s borders even as his Luftwaffe bombed military and civilian targets from the air. Hitler’s forces showed no mercy toward hospitals, schools, or churches. He waged a war of terror designed to destroy his enemies will to resist. This is Blitzkreig—lightning war.

Poland lasted just a month. Overrun and overwhelmed, the Polish army fought bravely, often on horseback. German propaganda films emphasized the futility of Polish cavalry charging against Panzer tanks.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15666-15728). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

As the 1930s ended, the movie Gone with the Wind reminded millions of the cost of war in death and destruction. The great Hollywood epic of the Civil War premiered in Atlanta. American matinee idol Clarke Gable starred with two English actors, Leslie Howard and Vivien Leigh.  Two of the movies most memorable performers, however, did not attend. Hattie McDaniel (“Mammy”) and Butterfly McQueen were not invited to the all-white Atlanta premiere.

President Roosevelt faced a major decision in the new year of 1940. If he challenged the “two-term” tradition established by George Washington and lost, his entire record would be tinged with failure. Ulysses S. Grant had tried and failed to win a third term. So had cousin Theodore. But these attempts followed a period of out of office. FDR, if he agreed to be a candidate, would break new ground.

Millions of Americans doubtless agreed with Joe Kennedy, who viewed the war as a disaster. “Democracy as we conceive it in the United States will not exist in England and France after the war,” he warned. His messages home became ever more defeatist.

Britain was fighting only for her Empire, Kennedy charged, and the British didn’t stand “a Chinaman’s chance” of prevailing against Germany in its axis partners. He even went so far as to express his negative opinions at a major embassy dinner. He apparently enjoyed twisting the lion’s tail as he expressed his view that the British would be “thrashed” in the new war.

Kennedy’s all-to-gloomy predictions seemed accurate enough as the spring thaw brought action in Norway. Prime Minister Chamberlain boasted that Britain would beat Hitler to shore up a northern ally, and that “Hitler missed the bus.” This most unwarlike comment from a most unwarlike leader was soon proved spectacularly wrong. Hitler seized Norway almost effortlessly, giving the British a bloody nose and a terrible setback. The House of Commons erupted in stormy recriminations. Chamberlain survived a vote of “no confidence” by a comfortable margin, but the defection of some eighty members of his own Conservative Party showed, in fact, a lack of confidence in his leadership.

Some blamed First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill, for Norway was, after all, in his sphere of responsibility. And Churchill defended prime Minister Chamberlain through the fierce parliamentary debate. So staunchly loyal did Churchill remain to the man he had previously criticized for appeasement that former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, now past eighty but still sharp-tongued, stood to urge Churchill not to allow himself to become “an air-raid shelter” for an obviously failed administration.

In the midst of a political crisis in London, Hitler left Berlin on his private train, code-named America. He struck on 10 May 1940 in the North and West. He invaded neutral Holland and tiny Denmark, crushing those peaceful little kingdoms in hours. His armored divisions, backed by air power, smashed into France. When Britain’s Labor Party leaders said they would not join a coalition government headed by Neville Chamberlain, Chamberlain offered the king his resignation. Now, the choice was between the foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill. Halifax told his best friend, Chamberlain, that he did not think he could lead the House of Commons from his position in the House of Lords. Winston, uncharacteristically, remained silent as his only possible rival took himself out of contention.

When the king called Churchill to Buckingham Palace, Churchill was invited to form a national unity government to include all of Britain’s parties. He would later write of his “profound sense of relief” at that moment:

At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.

As French and British forces in France retreated before the armored German onslaught, Churchill went before the house of commons to offer “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” His aim was simple: victory.

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survived….

To many in Britain then, and in the United States, Churchill’s stirring speeches didn’t stir. He seemed a reactionary man, unacquainted with the realities of modern life. But in his understanding of the mind of Adolf Hitler, it was Churchill who was right and the sophisticates who were wrong. Churchill knew that no negotiation was possible with such a warped and hateful man. He also knew the kind of war Hitler was determined to wage—a total war.

Sumner Welles, FDR’s undersecretary of state, warned that Churchill was only a “third or fourth rate man,” and a “drunken sot” to boot. Joe Kennedy didn’t trust him.

Roosevelt had to face an unprecedented campaign for a third term. He knew Americans were very uneasy about the war in Europe. The Gallup poll that May showed that 51 percent were willing to sell airplanes and other war material to the Allies, but 49 percent were opposed. Americans seemed to sense the danger. Two-thirds of them told Gallup they expected Germany to conquer Europe—and then turn on America. Two-thirds  also thought the United States would eventually go to war against Hitler. Only one in fourteen, however, was willing to declare war on Nazi Germany in 1940, Gallup’s interviewers found.

As France collapsed, however, the British army in France retreated before the onrushing Germans. Within mere weeks, they had fallen back on the French port of Dunkirk. There, with their backs to the English Channel, the entire British force in France was surrounded by triumphant Germans. They would either be driven into the sea, annihilated where they stood, or taken prisoner.

Dunkirk is located just ten kilometers west of the Belgian border, along the English Channel. In a maneuver code-named Operation Dynamo, Britain’s Royal Navy managed the evacuation of some 340,000 soldiers—the balk of the entire British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and many French and allied units, as well. This incredible feat was accomplished between 26 May and 4 June.

American columnist George Will share is an amazing story from the surrounded Allied forces hunkered down on the coast of France and regularly bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe:

[A] British officer on Dunkirk beach sent to London a three-word message: “But if not.” It was instantly recognized as from the Book of Daniel. When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are commanded to worship a golden image or perish, they defiantly reply: “Our God who we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods.”

A young French soldier responded to being surrounded at Dunkirk more prosaically with a humorous prayer: “O Lord, if I ever get out of this, I will learn the English—and how to swim!”

Field Marshal Hermann Goering—the head of the Luftwaffe—had equipped his Stukas with sirens on his airplanes’ wings designed solely to induce terror in their hapless victims. One British infantryman who was pounded by Stukas reported his reactions.

An attack by Stukas cannot be described; it is entirely beyond the comprehension of anyone who has not experienced it. The noise alone strikes such terror that the body becomes paralyzed, the still active mind is convinced that each and every aircraft is coming for you personally.

Hitler held back, not willing to drive his enemies into the sea. Perhaps he thought the sight of defeated troops straggling back to London without their artillery, without their tanks or supplies, would demoralize the British people and bring them to sue for peace. Churchville mustered a huge “mosquito fleet” of warships, ferry boats, fishing boats, pleasure yachts, even rowboats to bring off the “miracle of deliverance “of late May 1940, ever after known simply as Dunkirk.

As he was to do on a number of other occasions, Hitler misjudged his enemy. The site of the soldiers coming home from Dunkirk did not demoralize the British. They were dirty and ragged. Some were missing teeth. Many still had oil over their faces from where they had been plucked out of the sea. Yet, they were cocky. They grinned and gave thumbs-up  signals. They said: “I’m all right, Jack.” The mere sight of them thrilled the people of Britain.

France surrendered three weeks later. On 22 June 1940, the French signed the so-called armistice with Hitler. Hitler, with a dramatic flair, had demanded that the French meet him in the same railway car that had been used when the Germans were defeated less than twenty-two years before!

He came to the clearing at Compiègne, an hour’s drive northeast of Paris. FDR viewed the events in Europe with mounting concern. He spoke at the University of Virginia on 10 June 1940. Without mentioning Mussolini or Italy by name, he said of the Duce‘s unprovoked attack on France “the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.” He criticized those Americans who thought the United States could exist as a “lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force.” Clearly, FDR was talking about Defend America First, Lindbergh’s group dedicated to keeping the United States out of the war.

The stunning series of events of the past weeks clearly reversed the outcome of World War I. On 23 June, Hitler even conducted a pre-dawn tour of the city of Paris. He admired the architectural wonders and vowed to remake Berlin on an even grander scale. Americans saw Hitler’s early morning victory tour in their weekly newsreels and remembered that more than 350,000 young Frenchmen  had died keeping the Germans out of Paris in World War I. This time, there was no “Miracle of the Marne.” For millions of Americans, this only confirmed the futility of “entanglements” in Europe’s affairs.

Other Americans, however, saw Hitler’s dominance of Europe as a mortal threat to the United States. Many were influential Republicans from the Northeast. They tended to be wealthier, more likely to have traveled to Europe, and more likely to have been educated in the elite universities of the Ivy League. By experience and background, these Americans knew that the United States could not survive in a world dominated by Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan. But at this point, they were by no means a majority.

Churchville’s opponent in Britain’s war cabinet was Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary. This quiet, austere aristocrat was unimpressed with Winston’s flowery rhetoric. To this refined man, Churchill’s gravelly voice “ooze[d] with port, Brandy, and the chewed cigar.” Americans who supported Britain, however, warmed to “Winnie’s bulldog persona. They loved his V-for Victory salute, the cigars, the Homburg he always wore. And for this influential group, his 1940 speeches were stirring. Consider such a speech, delivered five days before Hitler toured Paris:

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole theory and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the deaths of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

Amid the dramatic events of the Fall of France, the Republican Party met in Philadelphia in June 1940. They had come to America’s cradle of democracy to reaffirm their party’s commitment to freedom. The two leading candidates for president were Ohio senator Robert A. Taft, son of the former president, and New York’s Thomas E. Dewey. Dewey was young, only thirty-seven. He had made a national reputation as a fearless district attorney fighting the mob or “Murder Incorporate” as it was known to the press. When Dewey announced his intention to run for president, FDR’s trusted advisor, Harold Ickes, jibed that the New Yorker had “thrown his diaper into the ring.”

Taft, on the other hand, lacks both his father’s girth and his warmth. To elect him after FDR, said Franklin’s cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, would be like “drinking a glass of milk after taking a slug of Benzedrine.” The delegates to the convention must have had similar doubts about both leaders. A well-orchestrated national movement of Draft Willkie Clubs had set up a cry for the successful Wall Street utility executive Wendell L. Willkie. When the two leading candidates block each other, a prearranged cry went up from the bowels of the convention hall: “We want Wilkie!” In fact, this popular cry was wired by several communications magnates who had access to their own mass media. Henry Luce published Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. The Cowles family published Look magazine. The owners of the New York Herald Tribune, the Reid family, added their powerful endorsement. They had “pumped” for Willkie as the only who could beat FDR. Republicans were desperate for a winner. Willkie was a big, bluff, outgoing man whose personal charm made him the rival to FDR.

The American constitutional system did not encourage the creation of multi-party “national unity” coalition governments, but Lincoln had named important Democrats to his cabinet during the Civil War. Now, FDR returned the favor. He tapped two influential Republicans: Henry Stimson, Hoover’s secretary of state, became his secretary of war; and Frank Knox, Al Landon’s 1936 running mate, was appointed secretary of the navy.

None of this would have helped if the Republicans had nominated for president a man dedicated to keeping the United States out of the war. Isolationist sentiment in the GOP was strong, very strong. Former President Hoover ridicules the danger that Hitler posed to America: “Every whale that spouts is not a submarine. The 3,000 miles of ocean is still protection. . . .  [To attack us, an enemy] must first pass our Navy. “It can stop anything in sight now.”

The Republicans’ Former Senate majority leader, James E. Watson, spoke for hundreds of GOP grassroots supporters when he scathingly expressed his opposition to Willkie, the former Democrat-turned Republican: “Back home in Indiana we think it’s alright for the town hall or to join the church, but we don’t let her lead the choir on the first night.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15752-15874). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“SAIL ON, O UNION STRONG AND GREAT”

With France’s defeat, Churchill faced the imminent danger of invasion. The French government, headed by premier Paul Reynaud, had promised not to turn its powerful fleet over to the Germans. Reynaud, however, had been forced to resign. He was replaced by Marshall Philippe Pétain. Churchill had dealt with Pétain. He knew the age of the World War I hero could no longer be trusted. Pétain had left his heroism far behind. He was now the loudest French voice for capitulation. If Pétain turned the French fleet over to Hitler—or even if he allowed Hitler’s SS somehow to “capture” the French fleet—Britain’s very life would be threatened.

Churchill ordered his battleships to confront the French Navy at Mers-el-Kebir, off North Africa. The French commanders, under orders from Pétain, refused to come over to the British side. They were given the options of sailing across the Atlantic to French possessions there, joining with neutral America, or even scuttling themselves. When the French captains refused any of the options offered them, Churchill wept. But he ordered his naval commanders to destroy the French fleet. In five minutes of bloody action, one French battle cruiser was driven onto the beach, a cruiser was blown up, and 1200 French sailors were killed. Churchill paid tribute to the “characteristic courage of the French Navy” in the House of Commons. It was typical of him, magnanimous in victory as he always was.

But by his ruthless move, Churchill showed that a sea change had occurred in British policy. Chamberlain’s government had arrested fliers’ lives to shower Germany with—leaflets. Now Church Hill showed that he would even turn on a former ally; Britain would do whatever she had to do to survive. Churchill demonstrated forcefully that the British lion could still have the bared teeth and claws.

“This . . . is London.” That staccato message, recited in a chain-smoker’s baritone, brought the war into American living rooms. CBS’s chief London correspondent, Edward R. Murrow, brought his Yankee accent and his reporter’s eye for detail to the heart of London in the midst of the Blitz.

America listening to the CBS World News Roundup could hear the pompom-pom of London’s anti-aircraft (AA) guns going off. Londoners reacted differently to the sounds of the AA guns. One man said, “You can’t sleep with the guns, but it’s a good sound.” One elderly cleaning woman groused: “Them damn guns, I could kill ‘em.’” “It’s worse than the bloody Jerries,” complained a grandmother soothing a frightened child in the air-raid shelter. Men, in general, liked hearing the guns giving the Germans back “some of their own.” One reported: “The louder it was, the more confidence we had.”

Some professional observers of the British people under the nightly bombardment of the Luftwaffe seemed surprised at their hardiness. Psychoanalysts had predicted mass hysteria—”people would revert to the pram, the womb or the tomb.” Individuals may have cracked, but the people of London, especially the hard-hit East Enders, did not, as the Cockneys say, go “starkers.” It would not be the first time the experts were proven wrong. Still, as the bombs rained down on the just and the unjust alike, and as people generally saw the government-subsidized clergy of the Church of England failing, church attendance fell off. One might have expected to see Anglican priests and nuns leading the way in pulling people out of the bombed-out rubble of their apartments, setting up canteens for the firefighters, etc. This could have been a time for the Church to lead relief efforts for the people undergoing the full rigors of the Blitz. Sadly, it was not.

A government report at the height of the blitz noted that only 1 percent of teens out of school were involved in any kind of church activity compared with 34 percent who went to the movies. It might be said that the church of England, too, was a casualty of the London Blitz.

One Anglican layman, however, rose to the challenge. C.S. Lewis, a Cambridge don, began a series of broadcasts for the BBC. The compelling author of Mere Christianity proved to be a dynamic speaker on “the wireless.” Lewis’s radio presentations were soon brought out in book form as Broadcast Talks. This was a tribute to the importance of Churchill government placed on civilian morale, since paper, as everything else, was strictly rationed. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters were very popular. In this book, a devil celebrates the many possibilities of snaring souls in wartime. He cited the holier-than-thou temptations of the pacifist, but he also showed the dangers of becoming brutally bloody-minded and the sin of “thinking your enemy is worse than he is.” Many of Lewis’s wartime writings continue to be read to this day.

Mass circulation publications like Time, Life, Look, Colliers, and the Saturday Evening Post printed dramatic photographs and written copy detailing every aspect of the war.  The local movie theater ran newsreels of war footage from the front. At the same time that Americans desperately wanted to stay out of Europe’s war, the mass media one in exorbitantly drawing them in. Day after day, Americans sensed that the events overseas could not be kept at bay much longer. The very speed and range of the Nazi juggernaut threatened Americans’ sense of security, of being set apart from European conflicts.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15891-15933). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The Royal Air Force scrambled every day to beat off wave after wave of attacks from Hitler’s Luftwaffe. “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” Churchill said in tribute to the young men who faced death daily. Some of them may well have been among the Oxford University undergraduates who had voted overwhelmingly as recently as 1936 against fighting “for King and Country.” Now, everyone had but one goal: to fling defiance in the teeth of the Hun, to resist with every ounce of human strength the “nozzie [Nazi] beast.”

The Royal Air Force saved Britain from invasion that summer. In June 1940, the operational strength of RAF’s Fighter Command was 1,200 planes. By November, that number had increased to 1,796. The German Air Force’s single-engine aircraft had decreased from 906 at the beginning of the Battle of Britain in June to 673 in November. Why this discrepancy? Many British fighters were shot down, it is true, but many of the planes could be repaired, and surviving pilots would go back into action. Also, British aircraft production was setting records with factories working around the clock. Any planes that were not destroyed landed in British fields, where they could be retrieved. All German planes and pilots knocked out of the skies over southern England were either captured or destroyed.

Churchill laid down concertina wire all along the threatened coast-lands, creating a sharp-barbed obstacle for enemy landings. He planned to light off precious gasoline if the Germans came ashore. Whey would be met with a furious uprising of the whole people, he swore.

Murrow brought it all to Americans listening captive at home. He quoted William Pitt, the famous opponent of Napoleon: “England will save herself by her exertions, and Europe by her example.”

The bombs that fell London killed and maimed thousands of civilians. Murrow broadcasted the sounds of fire engines racing through the night, the sound of flames crackling around St. Paul’s Cathedral, the sound of Cockneys digging through the rubble of the apartment buildings.

The pleasant, shy, young king and his lively wife did not escape. Buckingham Palace was bombed. The prime minister’s office let it be known that the queen was taking shooting lessons with a revolver. Perhaps Eleanor had shown her own pistol at Hyde Park! Resisting pleas from Canada to send the young princesses across the ocean, the queen said: “The Princesses could not leave without me—and I could never leave without the King—and, of course, the King will never leave.

FDR agreed to send Churchill fifty old World War I destroyers. These were desperately needed for convoy escort duty. Britain was wholly dependent on her seaborne lifeline for most of her food and war material and all of her oil.

In return, Britain leased to the United States a number of New World bases for ninety-nine years. Some of these, as in Gander Bay, Newfoundland, and in the British West Indies, served the U.S. Navy for decades. FDR pledged “all aid short of war.” As sympathetic as Americans were to the plight of the British, polls confirmed Americans were determined not to become involved ourselves. Still, FDR boldly proposed Lend-Lease and the first peacetime draft in American history. Lend-Lease was a new policy that allowed Britain to borrow war material for the length of the emergency. Typically, FDR explained his policy in down-to-earth terms. He compared it to lending our “neighbah” a length of garden hose to put out a fire. In other words: We don’t want the money. We just want our hose back when the fire is extinguished.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15942-15970). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

. . . FDR told a Boston audience: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” It was too much. No president could have assured that. No president should have pledged that. That speech would be cited—again and again and again—as evidence of FDR’s duplicity. But FDR did not think he was being dishonest. If America was attacked, he argued with his advisers, then of course the war was no longer a foreign war.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15992-15995). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

On 5 November 1940, there occurred an event which had never occurred before—and likely will never occur again. A president of the United States was reelected to a third consecutive term. Willkie had improved measurably over the previous two Republican candidates. He had won 22,304,755 popular votes (44.8 percent), nearly six million more votes than Landon’s Maine and Vermont, Willkie added Michigan, Indiana, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado.

FDR’s total in the popular vote slipped about 200,000 to 27,243,466 (54.7 percent). But his electoral vote total of 449 from thirty-eight states gave him a commanding, convincing victory. It was a demonstration of popular appeal and political skill never to be equaled.

It had not looked that way early on election night. FDR, normally the most gregarious of campaigners, closeted himself away from everyone at Hyde Park. Grim-faced and sweating, he had waited out the long hours alone until victory was assured. It’s a good thing for the leaders of this great republic to fear the people.

Wendell Willkie had been ridiculed by FDR’s aide, Harold Ickes, as “that damned barefoot boy from Wall Street.” But Willkie had played a crucial role in 1940—and he would continue his service to America. Walter Lippmann said it best:

Second only to the Battle of Britain, the sudden rise and nomination of Willkie was the decisive event, perhaps providential, which made it possible to rally the free world when it was almost conquered. Under any other leadership but his the Republican party in 1940 would have turned its back on Great Britain, causing all who resisted Hitler to feel abandoned.

President Roosevelt closed out the eventful year of 1940 with one of his famous “fireside chats” to the American people. Time magazine reported “The President came in five minutes before the broadcast on a small rubber-tired wheelchair.” He called on America to become “the great arsenal of democracy.” The speech was memorable and politically successful. An arsenal provides vital means of defense, but it does not take part in armed struggle. That was the policy Americans favored.

Isolationists had by no means dropped their efforts when Roosevelt was re-elected. Early in 1941, the Defend America First Committee stepped up its efforts to keep the United States out of war. Although the group clearly attracted what Teddy Roosevelt had referred to as “the lunatic fringe,” it would be a mistake to think that that is the only support America First received. Joe Kennedy Jr., a politically ambitious young Democrat, proudly signed up. So did Sargent Shriver, eventually to be a Democratic nominee for vice president and a candidate for president (and a Kennedy in-law). Kingman Brewster went on to become president of Yale University. Republican Gerald Ford also joined America First, as did Olympic chairman Avery Brundage, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker.

Charles A. Lindbergh reached out to his friend Henry Ford. Lindbergh, as Life magazine pointed out, did not even express a hope that Britain would win. It might be seen as singularly ungrateful to the country that had generously provided him a safe haven in 1935, but veteran diplomat Sir John Wheeler-Bennett thought Lindy was not really anti-British; he had simply concluded that Britain was a “bad bet.” Ford agreed with Lindbergh. He even predicted in Scribner’s magazine in January 1941, that the Germans would win.

Lindbergh’s high profile in America First gained him the attention of one young cartoonist named Theodore Geisel. Geisel lampooned the aviator as “the Lone Ostrich”:

The Lone Eagle had Flown

The Atlantic alone With fortitude and a ham sandwich.

Great courage that took

But he shivered and shook

At the sound of the gruff German landgwich.

Geisel would become familiar to millions of Americans as the inimitable Dr. Seuss. Geisel’s put-down of Lindbergh became public only following the aviator’s death. When President Roosevelt publicly compared Colonel Lindbergh to the Civil War Copperhead Clement Vallandigham, Lindbergh reacted with anger. Unwisely, he resigned his army commission.

It was a fateful move. It would alter Lindbergh’s life. Never again would he have the complete trust of his government or his fellow Americans. Roosevelt’s supporters pointed out that Lindbergh had never resigned as a German Knight of the Eagle. It was a distinction he shared with Henry Ford. But he had thrown back his U.S. Army commission. Defenders of the famed aviator said he had innocently received the Nazi medal and didn’t know what to do with it. Unimpressed, FDR shot back: “I would have known what to do with it!”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 15998-16061). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“SINK THE BISMARCK!”

For a year, Britain stood alone against Hitler. She bore the brunt of his nightly fury. On the night of 10-12 May 1941, Hitler ordered a huge air raid over southern England. In the previous year, 43,000 British civilians had been killed in the Blitz and 139,000 wounded. It was to be the last, terrible strike of hi Luftwaffe against British cities. Hitler was now massing more than three million men, tens of thousands of tanks and armored vehicles on his eastern border. His air force would be needed for the war he was planning against the Soviet Union.

Hitler had supreme confidence in his armies. Hitler’s favorite commander was Erwin Rommel. Hitler made Rommel a field marshal and gave him command of the Afrika Korps. Rommel drove the British back into Egypt. Even his British enemies respected Rommel. The called Rommel “the Desert Fox.” Now, he threatened Britain’s lifeline through the Suez Canal. Australian and New Zealand troops (ANZAC), along with beleaguered British forces, had been withdrawn from Greece to Crete.

In June 1941, Hitler was poised to “kick in the door” to the Soviet Union. Once he did that, he assured his generals, the whole “rotting structure will come down.” Who could challenge him? Ever since his lightning victory over France, Hitler believed in the “star” of his own military genius, and none of his generals dared to question his judgment.

But Hitler had no such confidence at sea. “On land, I am a hero,” he boasted, “[but] at sea I am a coward.” Admiral Erich Raeder was certainly no coward. The head of Hitler’s Kriegsmarine begged Hitler to get his ships into the action; he burned to erase the shame of the High Seas Fleet that scuttled itself rather than go into British captivity at Scapa Flow in 1919.

Hitler was almost glum the day he went aboard the newly launched battleship Bismarck. Hitler could not help noticing that Admiral Gunther Lutjens, who would command the Bismarck, greeted him with the proper salute of the old Imperial German Navy, not with the stiff-armed “Heil Hitler” of the committed Nazis.

Raeder was an avid student of the American admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan and his Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Raeder and Lutjens wanted the German Navy to play an important role in winning the war in the West. They wanted Bismarck to sink the convoys that brought critical supplies to war-ravaged Britain. Those fifty old destroyers Roosevelt had promised Churchill would be powerless against the Bismarck, with its eight 15-inch guns. Admiral Raeder believed in the power of the blue-water navies to determine world dominance. Hitler did not believe the powerful new warship would be effective in destroying Britain’s seaborne lifeline from Canada and America. “U-boats do this things faster and better,” Hitler gloomily told an aide.

Hitler was afraid that the loss of a prize like Bismarck would shatter his aura of invincibility. The day of the battleship was past, he told his top military aide, General Alfred Jodi. When some subordinates suggested that a valuable portrait of the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, be taken off the ship that was named for him, Hitler said sourly: “If anything happens to the ship, the picture might as well be lost too.”

On 21 May 1941, Bismarck and her smaller escort, the Prinz Eugen, steamed briskly out of occupied Norway and into the main shipping lanes, searching for victims. Churchill wired FDR for help. “Should we fail to catch them . . . your Navy should surely be able to mark them down for us. . . . Give us the news and we will finish them off.”

Cruising into the Denmark Strait, Bismarck encountered the HMS Hood. For more than two decades, the Hood had steamed around the world, the symbol of Britain’s mastery of the seas. Now, at a few minutes after dawn on 24 May 1941, the Bismarck fired several quick, lethal salvos at the British battleship. Bismarck’s shells weighed 1,794 pounds each, and her range was 38,700 yards, a distinct advantage over Hood’s 30,000-yard range. The British sailors and their German enemies stared dumbstruck as the Hood burst apart in a huge explosion. The ship sank in just minutes. Of the 1,400 men and boys who served on the Hood, only three men survived. Bismarck’s murderous fire drove off the less prepared HMS Prince of Wales. In London, a grim but resolute Churchill received this laconic message from the HMS Norfolk: “Hood has blown up.” Churchill, awakened for this terrible news, told President Roosevelt’s personal representative, Averell Harriman: “The Hood is sunk, hell of a battle.” The British responded with a torpedo attack from carrier-borne aircraft that damaged Bismarck sufficiently to cause her to abort her mission. But the British then lost contact with Bismarck.

Admiral Lutjens’s “Iron Mask” remained calm, his thoughts impenetrable, but he radioed his superiors at German naval headquarters in Nazi-occupied Paris: “Late in the evening of 24 May I was again detected twice by a USA-flying boat.” More than the American aircraft were tailing Bismarck. The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Modoc spotted the Bismarck looming out of the fog. Soon the British were alerted, and aircraft from the HMS Ark Royal torpedoed Bismarck, striking her rudder on 26 May and effectively crippling her.

Now, like a pack of hounds on a wounded bear, the Royal Navy warships closed in for the kill. Bismarck was trying desperately to get back to France, to the safety of U-boat and Luftwaffe protection. But her crippled rudder caused her to steam in larger and larger circles. On the morning of 27 May 1941, the HMS Rodney and HMS King George V began to pour fire into the dying German monster. Some of Lutjens’s men thought he was a Jonah; now he proved it. He ordered the ship to be scuttled. Of the 2,222 men on board, only 115 were pulled from the frigid Atlantic waters. A submarine alarm forced the British ships to leave the scene of destruction, stranding hundreds of young Germans.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 16063-16114). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Five

LEADING THE GRAND ALLIANCE

(1941-1943)

1941: “A YEAR OF HOLDING OUR BREATH”

. . .

The Soviets’ poor showing against tiny Finland helped convince Hitler that he had only to “kick open the door and the whole rotten structure [of Communism] will come crashing down.” Mechanized warfare had increased the speed of assault forces. With his typically dramatic sense of history, Hitler dubbed his invasion of the Soviet Union Operation Barbarossa, after the famous crusading German emperor of the Middle Ages, Frederick Barbarossa (“Red Beard”). German troops raced toward Moscow and Leningrad, overrunning the cities of Kiev in the Ukraine and Minsk in Byelorussia (now Belarus).

The Red Army had been almost destroyed from within during the 1930s. On Stalin’s orders, thousands of Soviet army and navy officers had been falsely accused of treason, and shot. Now, millions of soldiers of the demoralized Red Army were captured. Most of these men starved to death in Nazi POW camps. Stalin had no use for the few who escaped or were released; these poor men immediately disappeared into Stalin’s Gulag.

The Nazis seemed to be unstoppable. In 1941, Stalin even planned to evacuate Moscow, the Soviet capital. Preparations were made for a hasty departure. Lenin’s mummified body was readied for transport. Advance units of the German Wehrmacht reported seeing the bell towers of the Moscow Kremlin through their field glasses.

Germans besieged Leningrad (now called St. Petersburg). The German stranglehold of Tsar Peter the Great’s beautiful “window on the West” began in 1941 and lasted nine hundred days. Millions of defenders starved to death or fell to disease. In Leningrad alone, more than two million Russians died. This dreadful death toll exceeded the sum of all U.S. and British losses in World War II. Horrible accounts of cannibalism in the streets of the former imperial capital surfaced—but only later. Nonetheless, Stalin never relaxed the terror that alone kept his system alive. His secret police were active throughout the war.

The invaders brought with them Heinrich Himmler’s devilish “SS.” Schutzstaffein translates as “protection squads.” The SS was anything but protective, however. Trained to a peak of fanaticism and soulless barbarism, these black-uniformed young men with skull-and-crossbones on their peaked caps were the epitome of what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had called “the splendid blond beast.”

German cruelty had turned these simple Russian and Ukrainian farmers and workers into dedicated enemies of the invader. Hitler’s savagery drove them back into Stalin’s arms. Once Stalin had recovered from his initial nervous collapse following the 22 June 1941 German invasion, he cunningly appealed to long-suppressed sentiments of patriotism and religion. He relaxed his persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church. Soviet propaganda began to speak not of winning victories for the world Communist revolution, but of defending Mother Russia.

FDR sent his most trusted aide, Harry Hopkins, first to a beleaguered Britain, and then on to Moscow to assess the situation. Desperately ill for much of the war, Hopkins nonetheless was Roosevelt’s eyes and ears. The British were thrilled to see him, sick or not. They were so desperate, said FDR’s advisor Harold Ickes, they would have welcomed Hopkins even if he carried bubonic plague! Hopkins had memorably quoted from the book of Ruth—“Whither thou goest I will go. Thy people shall be my people”—when he dined with Churchill’s cabinet. But his message was just as welcome. The United States would help anyone who resisted the Nazis.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 16276-16307). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

A DAY OF INFAMY

. . .

While Japan sent special emissaries in late 1941 to talk peace with Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington, Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was planning a strike against the U.S. fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu.

On the morning of 7 December 1941, waves of Japanese Zeroes swept in among the verdant hills of Oahu and struck without warning at the Navy ships tied up along the “battleship Row.” “Pearl Harbor was asleep in the morning mist,” Commander Itaya reported as his torpedoes shattered the Sunday calm of the harbor. In little more than one hour, attacking Japanese aircraft had sunk the USS Arizona, the USS Oklahoma, and seriously damaged four other battleships. In all, eighteen U.S. warships were sunk or seriously damaged. One hundred eighty-eight aircraft were destroyed, most of them on the ground at Hickam Army Airfield.

Worst of all, America lost 2,403 killed and suffered 1,178 wounded. Nearly half of the deaths occurred when the Arizona blew up. In the coming days and years, details of the sneak attack would engage and horrify Americans. The doomed men banging on pipes with wrenches in capsized warships wrenched our hearts. But the story of Navy yeoman Durrell Conner aboard the stricken California, engulfed in flames, lifted our spirits. When many of his fellow crewmen jumped overboard, it became impossible to fight the fires. Yeoman Conner hoisted the American flag from the battleship’s stern, and sailors returned to keep her afloat. Don’t give up the ship, indeed!

An entire generation of Americans would remember where they were when they heard the shocking news of Pearl Harbor. Reverend Peter Marshall was the chaplain of the U.S. Senate. He had just preached a sermon at the Naval Academy, “What Is It like to Die?” After the service, the young Scottish immigrant gave a lift in his car to a midshipman, only to do a U-turn and return him to duty when they heard the news on his car radio. Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s name was known only to his many friends, fellow West Pointers, and a few thousand troops in the shrunken U.S. Army. He was sleeping in on this Sunday after weeks of grueling training exercises in the field. Despite orders to let him sleep, he was awakened with the news. He dashed out of his quarters at Fort Sam Houston, in Texas, telling his wife, Mamie, he was going to Washington and did not know when he would return. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican from Massachusetts, learned of the attack as he stopped to get gas. Just as his father had done with President Wilson, young Cabot Lodge now offered President Roosevelt his full support in prosecuting the war. So did the leader of Senate isolationists, Michigan Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg. Vandenberg was pasting press clippings about his fight against U.S. involvement in the war in his scrapbook when word came.

The next day, President Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of Congress. The attack had forged national unity as nothing else could. California Senator Hiram Johnson who had been TR’s running mate on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912, had strongly opposed intervention. Now, he marched into the chamber arm-in-arm with a Democratic colleague and voted for war.

The president approached the speaker’s rostrum, leaning heavily on son Jimmy’s arm:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

Roosevelt wore a somber expression to match the black armband he bore for the fallen. He related the lightning strikes Japanese forces had made the same day against Hong Kong (a British Crown colony) and the U.S. dependencies of Guam, the Philippines, and Wake and Midway Islands. he concluded his call for a declaration of war with these words: “With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounded determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.”

Few Americans realized at the moment how perilous was the condition of America’s Armed Forces. Our army ranked in size below that of Romania. Our Navy had just been dealt a near-fatal blow. Providentially, however, the U.S aircraft carrier fleet was out to see when Pearl Harbor was struck.

We need to consider, if only to dismiss it, the often heard charge that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked and that he kept silent so he could get the United States involved in the Second World War. North Dakota’s Republican senator was interrupted with the news of Pearl Harbor while in the middle of an anti-Roosevelt speech. “It sounds terribly fishy to me,” Nye replied. More guarded was Charles Lindbergh’s reaction; he agreed to cancel a speech for America First. His friend and fellow isolationist General Robert E. Wood said to him: “Well, [Roosevelt] got us in through the back door.” Even if we could believe this of Roosevelt, we would have to believe that Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Knox, both loyal Republicans, colluded with the president.

It is true that U.S. military intelligence believed a Japanese attack was coming somewhere. Because of the massing of Japanese troops, however, they predicted the attack would come to the Southwest of the Japanese home islands. they thought the militarists in Tokyo would head for the Philippines and the British, French, and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia. These then included Burma, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Indonesia. In fact, that is exactly where the bulk of Japanese forces did move—and very quickly. In some of the conspiratorial literature, the conviction that Roosevelt knew can only be supported by the “unconscious suppression of vast congeries of signs pointing in every direction except Pearl Harbor.”

It is also true that we had broken the Japanese codes prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. We knew something was going to happen. The decoded messages yielded only cryptic sentences like this one from Admiral Yamamoto to Admiral Nagumo, the commander of the Japanese task force: “Climb Mount Niitaka.” There was a crisis atmosphere in Washington. This was less true in Pearl Harbor, words seemed unlikely an attack might occur.

This charge, often heard in later years, that Roosevelt knew the attack was coming and kept silent in order to involve us in the war does not withstand careful analysis. If FDR wanted to involve the United States in a war with Japan, he could as easily have achieved his and by alerting the Pacific Fleet to the coming attack. A Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that was beaten off would just as surely have been an act of war, and Americans undoubtedly would have demanded a declaration of war against them. The main reason the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was such a shock is because it was so cunningly irrational. As Samuel Eliot Morison has written: “One may search military history in vain for an operation more fatal to the aggressor.” Almost immediately, the planner of the Pearl Harbor attack realized how fatal that error had been; Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto said: “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and instill in him a terrible resolve.” While America lost some 2,400 on that day of infamy, the conflict begun by Japan’s warlords on 7 December 1941 would eventually cost two million of their own countrymen’s lives.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 16331-16394). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Hitler declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941. It was an act of suicidal folly equaled only by the Japanese decision four days earlier to attack Pearl Harbor.

In 1941, however, it did not look like suicide. Powerful Japanese forces were immediately unleashed on the Philippines. Churchill responded to the Japanese attacks on the Americans and British possessions by declaring war on the Japanese Empire. Churchill had gained not only a powerful ally in the United States but also a dangerous and determined enemy in the Far East where Britain’s colonial empire was ripe for the picking.

Adolf Hitler’s treaty with Japan required him to help his ally only if Japan was attacked. But Japan was the aggressor at Pearl Harbor. Frustrated at not being able to take Moscow in that first, bitterly cold Russian winter, Hitler lashed out at the United States: Roosevelt was controlled by the Jews, he said. Speaking from his headquarters at Rastenburg, in the German state of East Prussia, Hitler explained to an aide why he had declared war on the United States. “[In Japan,] we now have an ally who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.”

FDR had called 7 December 1941 “a date which will live in infamy.” His words were prophetic in another way. On that very day, Hitler began gassing the Jews of Poland. His troops near Chelmno took trucks with 700 Jews and transferred them in groups of eighty to a specially modified van. The fans exhaust had been rerouted into the cargo department. By the time the van reached Chelmno, all eighty Jews inside were dead. It was to be the first, crude attempt at mass murder that would be known as Hitler’s “Final Solution” of the “Jewish problem” in Europe. On this day of infamy, all 700 were killed. In time, 360,000 Jews from 200 surrounding villages—called shtetls—were killed using mobile killing vans.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 16406-16420). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Returning to Washington by train on New Year’s Day 1942, Churchill cosigned with Roosevelt a joint statement of war aims that spoke of the United Nations’ desire to win a complete victory over Germany, Italy, and Japan. It was the first reference in American history to the United Nations as the formal name of the alliance of twenty-six nations that were fighting the Axis powers.

When he saw the newsreels of the two leaders’ press conference, Hitler pronounced FDR “truly mentally ill!” and said the whole event had degenerated into a theatrical performance—“truly Jewish,” he said of it. “The Americans are the dumbest people that one can imagine,” the führer snorted.

Winston tried to needle FDR over the fact that the United States was still backing  the pro-German Vichy regime in France while the British were backing the Free French forces of General Charles de Gaulle. FDR put him off, telling him it was a matter for Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the British ambassador Lord Halifax to work out. Churchill knew this was Roosevelt’s way of making sure nothing would happen. “Hell, Hull, and Halifax,” Churchill responded defiantly.

Later after receiving 60th birthday greetings from Churchill, FDR cabled him: “It’s fun to be in the same decade with you.” The two men were genuinely fond of each other, but they were fighting their own wars for their own objectives. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins reported a different FDR. After the Japanese attack, “he was a changed man,” she said, “a more potent and dedicated personality. The terrible shock of Pearl Harbor, the destruction of his precious ships, the unknown hazards which war might bring to the people . . . acted like a spiritual purge and left him cleaner, simpler, more single-minded.

Despite Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s good humor, the Allies’ situation was grim indeed. Surrendering British and Canadian soldiers would face incredible brutality in Japanese captivity. In the Philippines, U.S. Army and Philippine national forces under General Douglas MacArthur were increasingly isolated on the Island of Bataan. There, Japanese forces under General Homma tightened the noose. From January to April 1942, the situation worsened. Unable to relieve the fortress of Corregidor, President Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to evacuate his family and immediate staff to Australia. The Australians were an important ally. But they were shocked suddenly to find themselves in the path of the Japanese juggernaut. FDR sent MacArthur there to reassure them. As he left the Philippines by Patrol Torpedo (PT) Boat, MacArthur declared, “I shall return.”

American G.I.s felt abandoned. Bombed day and night by the Japanese, they sang a mournful tune:

We’re the Battling Bastards of Bataan

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,

No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,

No pills, no planes or artillery pieces.

When the American surrender finally came in April 1942, horror awaited the U.S. and Filipino POWs. Nearly 78,000 of them—the largest mass surrender in American history—were force marched to a prison camp more than sixty-five miles away. The starving, sick Americans and Filipinos were clubbed, bayoneted, and shot to death if they fell out of the line of march. It has ever after been known as the Bataan Death March. (For his part in ordering the march, Japanese General Homma would later be tried, convicted, and hanged for war crimes.) To lift up American morale after the disastrous defeat in the Philippines, FDR ordered an air raid on Tokyo. Colonel Jimmy Doolittle led sixteen USAAF B-25 bombers from the deck of the USS Hornet. Doolittle’s bomber pilots practiced takeoffs from an airfield lined to the exact dimensions of a carrier deck, but they had never actually taken off from a real carrier pitching and rolling in the always stormy waters of the northern Pacific. Never before or since have bombers been launched from an aircraft carrier. Vice Admiral William F. (“Bull”) Halsey’s task force carried the planes to within five hundred miles of Japan’s home islands. Doolittle’s raid—those famous Thirty Seconds over Tokyo—did little damage to Japan’s war machine. But it did cause the military leaders to “lose face” among the Japanese people.

They now realized they were not immune to air attacks. The Doolittle Raid also electrified Americans. Just four months after Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raid demonstrated that the United States could strike back. Nine of the eighty American flyers died in the raid, some being executed by their vengeful Japanese captors—a clear violation of the Geneva Convention.

The military felt the pressure to do something dramatic. An impatient public and an equally impatient FDR demanded action.

Some Americans gave in to their fears during World War II. Widespread rumors of Japanese-American disloyalty led to panic, especially on the now-vulnerable West Coast. Responding to cries from California’s Republican attorney general Earl Warren among others, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on 19 February 1942. EO 9066 is now generally conceded to be one of FDR’s worst mistakes. It provided for the internment of some 110,000 persons of Japanese descent. These included not only Japanese citizens but also those who were Nisei and Sansei, second- and third-generation Japanese-Americans. Fully 64 percent of these were American citizens. They were sent to internment camps in remote parts of the vast West. In no way can such camps be fairly compared with Nazi death camps or Stalin’s Gulag, but the terrible fact remains that Americans who had done nothing wrong lost their property and, temporarily at least, their liberty because of the hysteria and hatred of their neighbors. It’s an ugly blot on our nation’s conscience.

Fortunately, the heroic combat record of the armies all-Nisei 100th Battalion and Italy did much to bank the flames of prejudice. The 100th was integrated into the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. It was in this unit that Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaiian Nisei, won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Years later, he was sworn in as the first Japanese-American member of Congress. When Speaker Sam Rayburn intoned the usual “raise your right hand,” an awed hush came over the House of Representatives; Congressman, now Senator, Inouye had lost his right arm in service to America.

FDR wasted no time or sympathy on those German-Americans who were suspected of being “fifth columnists.” Or on spies. Two parties of German saboteurs were landed by U-boat on America’s shores. One came ashore in Florida, the other on Long Island, intercepted at first by a young Coast Guardsman, John Cullen, near Amagansett, New York. Seaman Cullen soon alerted his superiors and all the Germans were quickly apprehended. FDR ordered a trial by military tribunal. So ably defended by government attorneys, the German saboteurs were prosecuted by Francis Biddle, Attorney General of the United States. They were convicted as spies. Six members of the group were sentenced to death; two who had turned themselves in received life sentences.

Roosevelt similarly turned a stern face toward Charles A. Lindbergh, whom he suspected of disloyalty. After Pearl Harbor, America First had folded and Lindbergh made it known he wanted to return to the army. Lindbergh was fully willing to fight the non-white Japanese, but he hadn’t changed his mind about the desirability of coming to an agreement with Hitler. FDR was in no mood to negotiate with Lindbergh. Nor would he make any concessions to Lindbergh’s oft-repeated notion that a war by Britain and America against the German Aryans would be suicide for the white race. Roosevelt stonily rejected Lindbergh’s bid for an Air Force commission. “I’ll clip that young man’s wings,” FDR told several senators. And he did. Lindbergh never again enjoyed the public’s trust.

Roosevelt has been criticized for what seems his indicative treatment of a national war hero. But Abraham Lincoln had personally dismissed Major John J. Key from the army in 1862. That young officer admitted to the president that he and other junior officers in General McClellan’s circle did not want to decisively beat the rebels, they preferred a negotiated settlement. Roosevelt’s treatment of Lindbergh was no different.

FDR was sensitive to racial unrest at home. Millions of black Americans were moving north to work in war industries. They faced discrimination in housing and in many daily activities. Race riots threatened national unity at a critical time. In one of the worst of these riots, in 1943, thirty-four people died in Detroit.

Young black men were subject to the draft, but they served in all-black units. In one such unit, the Tuskegee Airmen gained lasting fame in the skies over Germany. President Roosevelt promoted Benjamin O. Davis Sr. as the first black general in the army, a historic breakthrough. The government publicized the boxer Joe Louis’s wry response to racial injustice in America: “There is nothing wrong with this country that Hitler isn’t going to cure.”

Still, there was much wrong with the country. Union leader A. Philip Randolph was determined to use the war emergency to press for greater equality for black Americans. Before the outbreak of the war, Randolph had urged a great March on Washington for justice if the president did not address the issue of hiring discrimination by government defense contractors. FDR responded by creating the fair employment practices commission (FEPC). He had been urged on by Eleanor. Randolph led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. His members were known as “civil rights missionaries on wheels.” Randolph would become a leading figure in the civil rights movement.

“Freedom is never granted,” he said; “it is won.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 16469-). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

A WORLD AT WAR

In World War I, millions in Russia, Europe, and the wider world did not know the names of Lloyd George, Clemenceau, the kaiser, or Woodrow Wilson. They had only a hazy idea of who was fighting or why. As a result of what historian John Lukacs called the duel, however, the names of Hitler and Churchill were known throughout the world.

By 1942, the whole world was at war. For millions, defeat in this war would mean not only a loss of freedom, it would mean annihilation. This was certainly true for the Communist commissars of Soviet Russia. Hitler had issued a “commissar order” that called for the immediate murder of any of these Communist Party officials who fell into German hands. Slavs were endangered as well. Hitler wanted Poland and the Ukraine for lebensraum, or “living space,” for the rapidly expanding population of Germans. Slavery, followed by starvation and sterilization, would be the fate of the Slavs who were in his way.

Of course, Hitler’s “New Order in Europe” threatened Jews most of all. Although Allied intelligence did not know it yet, the 20 January 1942 conference held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee planned the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in Europe.” This solution—a chilling euphemism for a non-existent problem—was to be nothing less than the murder of all eleven million European Jews. The mass shootings of Jews in Russia and the gassings at Chelmno, as constructive as they were, only convince the Nazi high command of the need for “industrial” methods of slaughter if they were to destroy all the Jews in Europe. Thus, at Wannsee, they planned to use rail transport to forcibly relocate all the Jews they could capture. Surrounding populations would be told the Jews were merely being “relocated in the East.” But at remote places like Auschwitz, far from prying eyes, the monstrous mechanism of mass murder would accelerate beyond anything previously known it in human history. It was the beginning of Holocaust. In many of the occupied states of Europe, Hitler would find willing accomplices for his plans. He sought to make all Europe judenrein, a land free of Jews. Hitler had publicly warned of the Jews that if “they” plunged the world into another great war, they would be exterminated. Few in the West imagined he really meant it or thought it.

Hitler spoke to a conference in Berlin, most aimed that anti-Semitism was on the rise throughout the world. In this, he was correct. “In Germany, too, the Jews once laughed at my prophecies. But I don’t know if they are still laughing,” the führer said with malicious sarcasm. Meanwhile, several hundred miles to the east, at a remote Polish bill each, Jews from France, Belgium, and Holland were arriving in cattle cars. Many had died en route. In one group, 957 Jews had arrived from Paris on the morning of 2 September 1942. By that afternoon, 918 had already been gassed.

Hitler welcomed the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—Muslim leader Haj Amin al-Husseini—to Berlin at the outbreak of the war. There, the mufti broadcasted militantly anti-Jewish messages to the Arab world. He had helped the Germans to recruit Muslims in the Balkans—the 13th Waffen SS Handschar Division. These were certainly not Aryans. Thousands of Jews from Palestine joined the British Army in Egypt. They knew too well that if Rommel’s powerful Afrika Corps crossed the Suez Canal, Hitler would call upon the Muslims to rise up and exterminate the half million Jews living precariously under the British mandate in Palestine. A distinguished Jewish educator in Jerusalem pleaded for enlistments: “If the men of Hebrew University do not realize the urgency of this hour, who will?”

FDR and Churchill had agreed on a “Germany First” strategy since both viewed Germany as the greater menace. This decision was to have profound consequences for the course of the war. But agreeing on fighting Germany first did not mean that the two leaders would always agree on strategy. Nor would they find that their alliance with Soviet Russia’s Josef Stalin an easy one.

. . .

Churchill did not agree with Roosevelt about the future of the British Empire. When FDR had the nerve to suggest that Hong Kong be returned to the Chinese and to recommend independence for India, Churchill fired back that maybe an international team of inspection should be sent to the American South! Churchill had traveled widely in the United States and was quite familiar with the practice of segregation. John Maynard Keynes, leading a British delegation on Land-Lease, hated the way American lawyers condescendingly spoke to him. It was all “Cherokee” he said. America was trying “to pick out the eyes of the British Empire,” he said. Keynes’s fellow delegates felt like “the representatives of a vanquished people discussing the economic penalties of defeat.”

FDR was not willing to spend American blood and treasure to shore up what he saw as a collapsing imperial power. He would fight to save the British home islands from Hitler’s ruthless tyranny, but that was all. “Billions for Britain,” FDR was saying, in effect, “not a penny for Empire.”

American schoolchildren of those days were used to seeing maps of the world that had the great, broad bands of red (actually pink) to indicate British dominions. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India (including modern Pakistan), as well as extensive territories in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—all these were tied to the British Crown.

In 1942, it was still true that the “sun never sets on the British Empire.” With the loss of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaya to the Japanese, with India threatened, and with Germany’s Afrika Korps moving eight for the Suez Canal, how much longer would this be true?

It must have seemed ironic indeed to Churchill that he had to battle his English-speaking Ally for the sake of his king. Hitler had pledged not to interfere with the British Empire. Now, here was the great democrat, Roosevelt, demanding self-government for British colonies. Churchill doubtless had FDR in mind when he declared defiantly in Parliament: “I have not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”

America in World War II mobilized in a way never seen before—or since. “Hitler should beware the fury of an aroused democracy,” said U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hitler probably had little understanding of the vast numbers that would soon come against him. With the aid of pre-war military conscription (which had been reauthorized by a single vote in Congress), the United States quickly built up a huge military. Soon, the United States would have over 12 million men and women in uniform—surpassing all other powers, even Russia by a slight margin.

Nation                  Troops Fielded

Britain                   4,680,000

Japan                    6,095,000

Germany                             10,000,000

USSR                     12,300,000

U.S.                                        12,000,364,000

(Source: Stephen Ambrose, World War II.)

These numbers meant that one in eleven Americans was serving in the military (by comparison, in 2007, one in two hundred Americans is on active duty in the military). This incredible mobilization represented a monumental investment for democracy—never before and never since surpassed.

Americans saying along with pro-military songs like the Andrews sisters’ “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy.” Irving Berlin’s plaintive “God Bless America” had lifted hearts when Kate Smith sang it in the darkening years speak for the war. Now, in 1942, Berlin used humor to keep up morale:

this is the Army Mister Jones,

no private rooms or telephones,

you have your breakfast in bed before,

but you won’t have it there anymore.

Millions of young men were swept up in the draft. Few even dreamed of staying out. Conscientious objectors were shunned as “shirkers. “ For many, the experience of military training in boot camp was disorienting. And take this example of the drill instructor’s art: “Yew peepul’re lak a bunch o chickens. Evvy day’s a nyoo day. If you keep screin’ up lak this, ahm gonna Jack Ammonia!” Translation: “You people are like a bunch of chickens. Every day’s a new day. If you keep screwing up like this, I’m going to jack them [demerits] on you!”

On the home front, Americans live with the rationing of many daily necessities. Meat, gasoline, automobile tires, and women’s nylon stockings were but a few of the essentials in short supply. FDR let his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, mount a drive to collect rubber to repurpose for the war. The White House announced that the president’s Scottish Terrier, Fala, would donate his already-been-chewed rubber bones. So enthusiastic was Ickes for his new assignment that he grabbed the rubber doormat outside the president’s office and put it in the trunk of his limousine!

As Americans were exhorted daily to raise their own vegetables in backyard “victory gardens.” They collected used cannons and “tin” foil for reuse. With automobile production converted into tank and aircraft production, Americans could not buy new cars. Many other consumer goods were likewise unobtainable. As the government’s slogan for wartime austerity put it:

Use it up

Wear it out

Make it do

Or do without

Churchill had made the V-for-Victory sign world-famous. Usually, his two-finger peace sign cradled a huge cigar. His “V” was an old English gesture, going all the way back, it is believed, to King Henry V’s miraculous victory at the Battle of Agincourt in France in 1415. There, legend has it, the French had threatened to cut off the English archers’ fingers so they could never again use their lethal longbows. Victorious English soldiers showed off their Vs to prove they still had their fingers—and their ability to fight. Victory gardens, victory loans, everywhere you locked, people were being extorted to victory. Hard-to-read V-mail (victory mail) was accepted as a matter of course. Every letter to and from America’s twelve million men and women in uniform was opened, photocopied, and censored. The addressee got only the photocopy. There was barely a peep of protest at this unprecedented government intrusion.

Less savory examples of the “V” could be decided. V-girls were those young American females who hung around bases and training centers to get picked up by randy G.I.s. Small wonder public health authorities fretted about a very different V—VD, for venereal disease.

In the major cities of the East Coast, a wartime blackout was in effect. New York’s “Great White Way”—the heart of the thriving theater district—went dark. Americans were told that nighttime blackouts were necessary, especially along the eastern seaboard. There, Nazi U-boats had been able to pick off U.S. merchant ships silhouetted by the likes of beach town boardwalks.

Of course, war-weary Americans could always go to the movies. Hollywood threw itself wholeheartedly into the war effort. Movie stars appeared at war-bond rallies encouraging Americans to help finance the war. Tinseltown churned out endless movies designed to bolster morale on the home front. There were several excellent movies, but hundreds of duds. Casablanca and Mrs. Minniver remain classics today. In Desperate Journey, Errol Flynn, Arthur Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan played three American pilots forced down behind enemy lines. It was certainly not a great role for the future president, but it did enable him to joke that he was used to people trying to upstage him. As Reagan himself would say of the producers of some of these clunkers: “They don’t want it good; they wanted Tuesday.”

Ronald Reagan would have felt quite at home in North Platte, Nebraska. The town was a typical Midwest hamlet of 12,000 at the outbreak of the war. But something very special happened there. Beginning on Christmas Day in 1941 and continuing through the end of the war, the column offered itself as the North Platte canteen. There, for 365 days a year from dawn until the last troop train pulled out, volunteers from this remote Great Plains community provided hot coffee, donuts, sandwiches, and sympathy for young soldiers shipping out.

The whole effort started by mistake. Townsmen had heard that Company D of the Nebraska National Guard would be stopping over on its way to the Pacific. Young Miss Rae Wilson wrote to the North Platte Daily Bulletin to describe what happened at the people:

We who met this troop train which arrived about 5 o’clock were expecting Nebraska boys. Naturally, we had candy, cigarettes, etc., but we very willingly gave those things to the Kansas boys. Smiles, tears, and that laughter followed. Appreciation showed on over 300 faces. I say get back of our sons and other mothers sons 100 percent. Let’s do something and do it in a hurry. We can help this way when we can’t help any other way.

What began as a mistake—Kansas National Guardsmen taken for Nebraskans—ended five years later. By war’s end, more than six million G.I.s had been served at the North Platte Canteen.

Millions of Americans were swept into war industries. Many were prevented from leaving jobs in critical fields. When the United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis planned a strike in the coal fields that would cripple war production, FDR threatened to seize the mines and draft the miners. Millions of women entered the workforce for the first time in World War II. “Rosie the Riveter” became a legend. “She’s a WOW,” declared one poster showing an attractive young woman looking up from her assembly line at the imagined picture of her man as he headed into combat. As a Woman Ordinance Worker, she was told, she was freeing a man for the fight.

Women and all other defense workers knew they were not just performing a hard, tall, routine task. They were the sinews of victory. To a stricken world, America’s productive capacity seemed unlimited.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 16550-16663). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC

Shipbuilding was a critical element in the victory of the Allies. The Nazi U-boat menace threatened Britain’s very lifeblood in 1942. If Britain could not be supplied by sea, she would starve and lose the war.

FDR needed a no-nonsense and industrialist to superintend ship building. He tentatively turned to Joseph P. Kennedy. The National Maritime Union—a notoriously pro-Soviet outfit—wired FDR to protest any appointment for Kennedy: FATAL MISTAKE TO APPOINT THIS APOSTLE OF APPEASEMENT TO ANY SHIPPING POSITION. Kennedy, still embittered toward the president, considered the job beneath him and turned it down. This was a classic example of FDR’s management style. He probably expected the petulant Kennedy to turn him down. But having offered Kennedy a job, he could say he had repaid his political debts to the flamboyant Boston politician.

Instead of Joe Kennedy, it would be Henry J. Kaiser who gained lasting fame as the man who built the liberty ships. An astounding 2751 liberty ships were built during World War II. One of these was built in the record time of four days, fifteen and a half hours from the time the keel was laid. As plucky merchant Marine sailors posted ever after: “We could launch ‘em faster than Hitler could sink ‘em.”

It was a brave boast, but it was the Allied seamen, not their ships, that could not be replaced. From 1939, when Britain and Canada entered the war, to 1945, 36,000 Allied sailors were killed in the Atlantic. Almost all of them by U-boats. And an equal number of merchant seamen were killed. Shortly after Hitler declared war on the United States, the East Coast became a hunting ground for Gross Admiral Karl Dönitz’s ingenious U-boat “wolf packs.” By the middle of 1942, the Germans had sunk more Allied tonnage in the Atlantic than the Japanese had done with their more spectacular attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Wake, Guam, and the other U.S., British, and Dutch possessions in Asia. Hitler never allowed more than a dozen U-boats to operate at one time off America’s Eastern seaboard, yet the damage they inflicted was frightening. Naval historian Samuel Eliot Morrison compared the toll of American losses in 1942 to what we would have suffered if Nazi saboteurs had succeeded in destroying a number of our largest munitions works. Dönitz believed that Germany could have won the war with the U-boat alone. Considering the heavy losses the Allies sustained in a relatively short time, he was probably right.

The United States and Britain did not rely, however, merely on the overpowering productivity of their shipyards. The convoy system, destroyer escorts, submarine-destroying inventions like SONAR, (ASDIC to the British, who invented it), patrol seaplanes, and dirigibles equipped for anti-submarine warfare together put an end to the U-boat menace. The U.S. Coast Guard was especially active in anti-submarine warfare in World War II. perhaps the greatest of anti-submarine warriors was Britain’s captain F. J. “Johnnie” Walker. He sank twenty U-boats, implying his own tactic, the “Creeping Attack.” Johnnie Walker gave the Germans no chance to surrender. He would use one ship to locate the U-boat within sonar while he “crept” up on it silently. Then he ordered the depth charges. No submarine ever survived Walker’s hammering blows. Before the war, he had been a boxer. Pity his opponents in the ring.

By May 1943, the “happy time” U-boat sailors fondly remembered off the coast of North Carolina was over. By war’s end, three-fourths of Germany’s 40,000 U-boat sailors had been killed. Little wonder, however, that Churchill feared the U-boats above everything. “The U-boat attack was our worst evil. It would have been wise for the Germans to stake all upon it.”

One American seaman, Leslie Morrison, described his ordeal fifty years after his merchant ship, the SS Deer Lodge, was torpedoed off Durban, South Africa, in February 1943. The German skipper of the U-516 submarine surfaced and asked the survivors in lifeboats their tonnage, their cargo, where they were from, and where they were bound. Morrison, relating the story to his knees, told how the German skipper, Korvetten Kapitan Gerhard Wiebe, then turned his boat around and steamed away. “Wasn’t that horrible? Morris’s niece asked. “Hell, no!” The old sailor laughed. “At least he didn’t shoot us.” Morrison related how the injured man were cared for in the boats as the healthier sailors took turns bailing the boats out and then holding on outside the lifeboats.

U.S. Navy seaman Basil Izzi survived an astonishing eighty-three days on a raft after the SS Zaandam, on which he wasn’t armed guard, was sunk in the South Atlantic in late 1942. There were five men on the raft at the start of the ordeal; only three survived. Izzi described his time to an interviewer:

INTERVIEWER: Did you save any souvenirs from the trip?

IZZI: Yes Sir, I saved the drinking up that we had aboard the raft.

INTERVIEWER: Beside the services for men who died, did you have any religious service on the raft?

IZZI: Yes, before anyone died we used to have services, like every night before we would go to bed. Each man would say his prayers or sometimes one man would say them for the whole party.

INTERVIEWER: Was your family notified that you are missing while you were on the raft?

IZZI: Yes they were notified November 18 that I was missing, and they were notified again February 1st that I was picked up.

INTERVIEWER: What was the name of the rescue ship, do you know?

IZZI: It was a PC boat 576 [U.S. Navy submarine chasers were not named—PC 576 was built in Dravo, Delaware, in 1942], an American boat, a small patrol boat. It was escorting a convoy from Trinidad.

INTERVIEWER: How about your weight?

IZZI: My regular weight is around 145 but when I got picked up by Wade something like eighty-five pounds. Right now I am just a few pounds out of the way [i.e., short of regular weight]. I am going to make a country tour in a few more days and after I finish that, I am going to take about two months leave and then return to the [Naval] hospital here in Bethesada [Maryland].

INTERVIEWER: You are going to talk to war plants?

IZZI, Yes Sir, I am.

Americans working in defense plants regularly heard from heard from heroic young servicemen like Basil Izzi. It was part of the effort to “keep the fires burning.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 16664-16720). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

AMERICA STRIKES BACK

Following the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Navy Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was itching to hit back. The Japanese Imperial Navy had never known defeat.  Each of its warships bore the sixteen-petaled chrysanthemum, the Imperial seal. A clash in May between Japanese carrier-based aircraft and American and Australian naval units became known as the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Japanese were attempting to land troops at Port Moresby, New Guinea. It was the first naval battle in history in which neither fleet sighted the other. Although the Americans lost the USS Lexington, the Japanese were prevented from landing. They withdrew under pounding from carrier-based aircraft.

The Australians and New Zealanders regard this battle as key to securing their freedom for Japanese invasion.

A Japanese attempt to take Midway Island in the North Pacific in June 1942 was turned back. American carriers, which had escaped the attack on Pearl Harbor, launched attacks on their Japanese counterparts.

Miraculously, an air squadron that was headed the wrong way spotted the wake of a Japanese destroyer. They turned ninety degrees and followed the destroyer all the way back to the carrier task force. There, the U.S. Navy torpedo bombers caught Admiral Nagumo’s carriers while they were preparing to receive their own planes. The Japanese decks were covered with bombs and snaking hoses for aviation fuel. When the Americans struck, Nagumo suffered a catastrophe. The carriers that had carried out the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor—Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu, and Soryu—were sent to the bottom. Americans were thrilled to deal the Japanese such a stinging defeat, just six months after Pearl Harbor. What Doolittle’s Raid did in spirit, the Battle of Midway did in reality. The Miracle at Midway punctured the myth of Japanese invincibility. Midway was not won without suffering, however. The USS Yorktown was sunk. And out of forty-one planes launched by Admiral Spruance against the enemy, only six returned.

Britain also enjoyed a singular victory later in 1942. Churchill was desperate to stop the “Desert Fox.” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Rommel’s Afrika Korps had pushed the British back to within just sixty miles of the Suez Canal. Not only was the canal vulnerable, and with it Britain’s vital oil supply from the Persian Gulf, but so, too, was Britain’s Mandate in Palestine. Jews the world over shuddered as Rommel’s panzer tanks sped ever closer to Jerusalem.

To stop the charismatic Desert Fox, Churchill chose the equally colorful Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. “Monty” and his “Desert Rats” of Britain’s 8th Army defeated Rommel at El Alamein in November 1942. Britain was overjoyed. Over his wife Clementine’s “violent” objections, Churchill ordered that church bells that had been silent since 1 September 1939 should now ring out all over Britain to mark the victory. Churchill said it was not the end. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the beginning.” It was.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Jews were targeted for physical annihilation under the Final Solution. Christians were to be terrorized into submission, according to documents compiled by Gen. William Donovan of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Donovan assembled evidence of Hitler’s plan to destroy Christian churches and organizations. “Under the pretext that the Churches themselves were interfering in political and state matters, [the Nazis] would deprive the Churches, step by step, of all opportunity to affect German public life.” As writer Charles A. Donovan notes: Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were “at war with God.”

El Alamein was followed immediately by Operation Touch. The joint U.S.-British invasion of French North Africa was commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The victory at El Alamein helped persuade Vichy French authorities quickly to end their resistance to the Allied invasion. After some initial combat—in which 1,400 Americans and 700 French troops were killed—French authorities in North Africa sought a cease-fire. Although Operation Torch was hugely successful for the Allies in North Africa, it led to Hitler’s retaliation by occupying all of Metropolitan France. From this point on, there would not even be the fiction that the government set up by the ancient Marshal Pétain at the little resort village of Vichy was anything but a puppet of their Nazi masters. This had disastrous consequences for millions of Frenchmen and, especially, for thousands of French Jews as Vichy complied with German demands for French slave laborers and forced the French to cooperate with the Nazis in rounding up the Jews.

Now, France would be completely at the mercy of Germany’s secret police, the Gestapo. Hundreds of thousands of young French men and women would be swept up and transported across the border as forced laborers in the Third Reich. French Jews were hunted down—often in collaboration with Vichy police—and shipped off to German death camps.

Churchill had formed his Secret Operations Executive (SOE) with instructions to “set Europe ablaze.” He wanted to disrupt and challenge Hitler’s rule of the continent. Free Czech agents, trained by SOE, succeeded in May 1942, in killing Deputy Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. He had been the one who had organized the Wannsee Conference to organize the systematic genocide of the Jews. Nazi retribution was terrible. Hitler ordered the entire Czech village of Lidic to be razed and all its males inhabitants shot. The women were sent to a concentration camp, and the children were abducted for inclusion in Himmler’s notorious lebensborn human-breeding program.

To bolster Allied morale, Eleanor Roosevelt visited Britain late in 1942. Clementine Churchill wrote to FDR on the amazing impact of the First Lady’s tours on the young servicewomen in the British military—and of the way she handled reporters: “I was struck by the ease, friendliness and dignity with which she talked with the reporters, and by the esteem and affection with which they evidently regarded her.

“Clemmie” later reported that Eleanor and Winston “had a slight difference of opinion” about Spain over dinner. Clementine was on hand to mediate differences, but she gave the president’s outspoken wife little hint of her own deeply held views. In the end, Winston realized he had to stay on Eleanor’s good side. He wooed her with his old-fashioned charm. “You have certainly left golden footprints behind you,” he wrote as Eleanor departed England.

President Roosevelt flew seventeen thousand miles for another secret summit conference with Churchill at Casablanca in French Morocco in early 1943. The president flew aboard a commercial Boeing 314 clipper—a “flying boat.” He thus became the first president to fly while in office. Americans were thrilled by the danger and mystery of his dramatic wartime flight.

Allied prospects had suddenly brightened. American soldiers, sailors, and Marines were in the final stages of taking Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands. Despite heavy casualties, including 1,752 dead, the Americans showed that the die-hard Japanese could be beaten, even in the steamy jungles of the South Pacific. By contrast, in sub-zero cold, a major German army was surrounded at Stalingrad.

Among other things, FDR hoped to force his choice of General Henri-Honoré Giraud on the Free French. The president disliked and mistrusted the tall, uncooperative, self-anointed leader of the Free French, General Charles de Gaulle. When Churchill humorously said de Gaulle thought he was Joan of Arc, FDR tried to arrange a “shotgun wedding” of the two French leaders. In this, he failed. De Gaulle soon outmaneuvered Giraud in the labyrinth of French exile politics.

The most important result of the Casablanca summit was the demand for “Unconditional Surrender.” Although the words do not appear in Allies’ joint communiqué, suggesting that Churchill might have been less than enthusiastic, FDR understood that the American people had to have an easily understood war aim. Roosevelt has been criticized for this demand. Critics say he lengthened the war and undercut anti-Nazi elements within Germany and thus cost American lives. Roosevelt knew, however, that Americans were bitterly disillusioned after World War I. He agreed with Cousin Theodore, and not with Wilson, on this point. He had to reassure the American people that no “deal” would be struck with the Nazis. Churchill later softened the Allies’ demand by saying: “We are no extirpators of nations, or butchers of peoples. . . . We remain bound by our customs and our nature.” The Allies would treat defeated Germany with humanity.

Churchill suffered from pneumonia at the Casablanca summit conference. When he recovered, he ordered a picnic at a rugged retreat in the famed Atlas Mountains. Typically, he scampered down a steep gorge and tried to clamber up the biggest boulder. “Clemmie said nothing,” reported a friend. Lady Diana Cooper, “but watched him like a lenient mother who does not want to spoil her child’s fun nor yet his daring.” Later, Lady Diana spoke to Clemmie about what they would do when the war was over. “I never think of after the war,” Clemmie said calmly. “You see, I think Winston will die when it’s over. . . . We’re putting all we have into this war, and it will take all we have.”

When on 30 January 1943, Hitler promoted General Friedrich von Paulus to field marshal, he reminded his commander at besieged Stalingrad that no German field marshal had ever been captured. Temperatures in Russia that winter had plunged to minus 30° C (-22° F). Starving Wehrmacht soldiers had to eat their horses. They even dug up dead horses to stew their bones. Over and over, the Soviets broadcast to the German troops: Stalingrad—Massengrab (“Stalingrad—Mass Grave”). Von Paulus surrendered his new field marshal’s baton on 31 January. With him, ninety thousand German soldiers, sick, cold, and hungry, passed through “the gates of Hell” into Stalin’s slave-labor camps. They were all that was left of an army of a quarter million. Fewer than five thousand of these men would ever see their homes again. The invading Germans had shown no mercy to the Russians. Now, they received none.

Back in Germany, state radio played dirges for days. The Nazi propaganda machine could not conceal the magnitude of the disaster and for once did not try. The brittle steel of the German schwerpunkt—spear tip—had broken. Hitler had determined to take Stalingrad no because of its intrinsic military value, but because of it symbolic name. For that very reason, Stalin was determined to hold it.

The city on the Volga River was little more than rubble when the Germans finally surrendered. Today, its significance is seen as the high-water mark of the German floodtide. From this point, the Germans beat a long, lugubrious but orderly retreat, harassed and pursued every step of the way by the Red Army and by thousands of partisans. And as always, the Russians had on their side their great commander whom not even Stalin could intimidate—General Winter. Churchill enjoyed taunting Hitler. As he told the British people:

Then Hitler made his second grand blunder. He forgot about the Winter. There is a Winter, you know, in Russia. For a good many months the temperature is apt to fall very low. There is snow; there is frost and all that.

Hitler forgot about this Russian Winter. He must have been very loosely educated. We all heard about it at school, but he forgot it. I have never made such a bad mistake as that.

This, barely three months after El Alamein, truly was the beginning of the end. The vaunted Nazi war machine was now seen by all to be vulnerable and headed for defeat. That did not mean, however, that the dying cobra had lost its deadly bite.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower—soon known as Ike to millions—followed up his North Africa success with an invasion of Sicily. Americans had gone along reluctantly with Churchill’s vision for striking the “soft underbelly” of Hitler’s Europe and knocking Italy out of the war. Italy did fall, but Hitler’s legions soon occupied most of the Italian peninsula. There was nothing soft about Field Marshal Kesselring or his battle-hardened German troops. The fighting up Italy’s rocky spine was brutal and bloody. Fortunately, Rome was declared an open city, so the Eternal City and its architectural treasures were spared. Not so Monte Cassino—which was demolished by Allied bombardment. The Allies stiff-armed protests from Pope Pius XII, believing the Germans had taken refuge in and around the historic monastery.

The Allies regarded the lives of their troops as more sacred than even the greatest of monuments. When the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini collapsed, II Duce—the leader—was taken prisoner. Hitler sent his commandos on a daring and successful mission to rescue him from his captors. Hitler proved loyal to his ally and mentor until the end.

Franklin Roosevelt lost no opportunity to remind Americans that freedom itself was at stake in the war they were fighting. On 13 April 1943, the bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson’s birth, FDR spoke at the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Today, in the midst of a great war for freedom, we dedicate a shrine to freedom. . . .

[Jefferson] faced the fact that men who will not fight for liberty can lose it. We, too, have faced that fact. . . .

He lived in a world in which freedom of mind were battles still to be fought through—not principles already accepted of all men. We, too, have lived in such a world. . . .

He loved peace and loved liberty—yet on more than one occasion he was forced to choose between them. We, too, have been compelled to make that choice. . . .

The Declaration of Independence and the very purposes of the American Revolution itself, while seeking freedoms, called for the abandonment of privileges. . . .

Thomas Jefferson believed, as we believe, in Man. He believed, as we believe, that men are capable of their own government, and that no king, no tyrant, no dictator can govern for them as well as they can govern for themselves.

He believed, as we believe, in certain inalienable rights. He, as we, saw those principles and freedoms challenged. He fought for them, as we fight for them. . . .

The words which we have chosen for this Memorial speak Jefferson’s noblest and most urgent meaning; and we are proud indeed to understand it and share it:

“I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Roosevelt understood that Jefferson, “an Apostle of Freedom,” had seen man’s inalienable rights as a gift of the Creator. This was the belief that FDR knew was threatened by the worldwide rise of Fascism and Japanese militarism.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 16722-16844). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Six

AMERICA VICTORIOUS

(1943-1945)

“Now we shall win the war!”“Now we shall win the war!” So yelled a Soviet diplomat when he heard the list of American and British war material that would be delivered in 1941 to the beleaguered USSR. The vast productivity of the democracies was central to the Allied victory in World War II. But production alone could not have prevailed. “They said the Americans would never come,” a Japanese admiral stated ruefully after the war.” [They told us the Americans] would not fight in the jungle, that they were not the kind of people who could stand warfare,” he recalled. Hitler should have known better. After all, he was a corporal on the Western Front in World War I. He had seen what an impact the Americans had on the tide of the battle. But he, too, thought Americans would not fight. Following the strategy of Germany first, the United States put fully 85 percent of its men and material into the fight against Hitler. Napoleon had compared the material with the moral—and concluded that moral factors in war were ten times as important. General Marshal, ever the wise man, thought the U.S.-British Alliance was the key to victory. Bismarck understood the importance of that relationship—something the kaiser and the führer never did. Josef Stalin would ever attribute his victory in The Great Patriotic War to the Marxist “correlation of forces.” He had asked sarcastically, “How many divisions has the Pope?” Churchill surely knew how important it was to field well-equipped divisions, trained and willing to fight. Yet, knowing all this, Churchill still said it was Providence that brought the Allies to Victory. Who are we to disagree?

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 16912-16924). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

OVERLORD

President Roosevelt employed every aspect of his powerful office to advance the American war effort. He was photographed personally decorating brave young warriors with the Congressional Medal of Honor. One of the more interesting of these was Lieutenant Commander Edward “Butch” O’Hare. This young naval aviator had led his squadron against Japanese bombers that were headed for his carrier, the USS Lexington. Butch shot down four enemy bombers in five minutes, risking his life and earning the nation’s highest award for heroism. After a U.S. tour speaking at war-bond rallies, O’Hare returned to the South Pacific where he was to die during the famous “Marianas Turkey Shoot” in 1944, possibly a victim of friendly fire. After the war, Chicago’s O’Hare Airport was named to honor this intrepid young Naval Academy graduate.

Soon, Butch O’Hare would be joined by other genuine heroes like army lieutenant Audie Murphy and Marine Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone. Their stories are worth retelling here. “On January 26, 1945, near Holtzwihr, France, Murphy’s Company B was attacked by six [German] tanks and waves of infantry. Second Lieutenant Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to prepare positions in the woods, while he remained forward at his command post to direct the artillery. One of his company’s tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Lieutenant Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer and trained its machine gun on the enemy, killing dozens and causing their infantry attack to waver. He held his position for more than an hour, received a leg wound, but continued the fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack which forced the enemy to withdraw.” Sergeant Basilone’s record is similarly amazing: “Basilone was awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II for holding 3,000 Japanese soldiers at bay for 72 hours at Guadalcanal with only 15 men, 12 of whom died. Following this act of heroism, he was sent to the States to promote War Bonds. He later requested return to his unit to ‘be with my boys.’ Basilone was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross and Purple Heart for destroying a Japanese bun emplacement at Iwo Jima. He was killed there during a shelling attack.”

The government made sure that verified stories of sacrifice like those of the five Sullivan brothers were widely circulated. The Sullivans, all young sailors, were lost on the USS Juneau. Also nationally known was the inspiring story of the Four Chaplains—Reverend George Fox, a Methodist minister; Rabbi Alexander Goode; the Reverend Clark Poling, a Dutch Reform minister; and Father John Washington, a Catholic priest. These brave clergymen gave up their life jackets to young soldiers and crewmen aboard the USS Dorchester as the overcrowded troop transport went down in the frigid waters off Greenland, the victim of a Nazi U-boat.

Still, Europe writhed under the Nazi yoke of oppression. Opposition movements sprang up all over the continent. Resistance activity increased when German defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad proved that Hitler’s legions were not invincible. Underground fighters listened to clandestine broadcasts of the BBC from London. The opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony symbolized three dots and a dash (● ● ● —), the international Morse Code for the letter V. And “V” stood for Victory. One of the most dramatic incidents of resistance came on the eve of Yom Kippur, in late September 1943. Informed that Hitler planned to deport all of Denmark’s Jews to the Czech ghetto of Theresienstadt, a German diplomat named Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz passed the word to Danish authorities. They, in turn, organized a seaborne exodus to carry more than seven thousand Danish Jews across the Skaggerak, the narrow body of water separating occupied Denmark from neutral Sweden. The oft-repeated story that Denmark’s King Christian X wore a yellow Star of David is not true, but that does not detract from the heroic story of brotherhood.

FDR undertook another arduous journey in November 1943. He agreed to meet Churchill and Stalin in Tehran, the capital of Iran, for the first summit meeting of what was soon dubbed “The Big Three.” Stalin feared to leave the USSR always mistrustful, always seeing betrayal lurking everywhere. FDR turned down Churchill’s invitation to stay at the British Embassy. He didn’t want it to appear that the democracies were “ganging up” on Stalin. The U.S. Embassy was too far out of the city, so FDR accepted Stalin’s invitation to use an entire house within the Soviet Embassy compound. Stalin told Roosevelt he had intelligence that the Germans would attempt to kidnap the American president. Later, FDR’s roving ambassador, Averell Harriman, said he doubted the plot. Instead, he thought Stalin wanted the American president to stay in quarters that had already been bugged by this secret police, the NKVD.

Roosevelt turned down a meeting request by Churchill and met first, instead, with Stalin. When the Big Three finally gathered, it became clear that Stalin shared Roosevelts disdain for de Gaulle and the French because France had collapsed so quickly in 1940. Stalin had an additional reason to dismiss de Gaulle. A vibrant, non-Communist France would impede his plans for a postwar European settlement. De Gaulle was an obstacle to the Soviets’ plan of domination. FDR seemed to go out of his way to tease Churchill in Stalin’s presence. Harry Hopkins noted that Stalin was elegantly dressed in a field marshal’s uniform, that he smoked his pipe and doodled—constantly drawing wolves—and that he spoke in a barely audible whisper.

The main business was a commitment by the United States and Britain to open a “second front” in Western Europe. Stalin continually returned to the theme that the Red Army was doing all the fighting against the Nazis. In terms of numbers of troops engaged, this was largely true. He said he would be willing to break his neutrality toward Japan (the USSR was alone among the United Nations in not being at war with Japan), but he would only be able to come into the war in the Pacific after the Germans had been defeated. Roosevelt was satisfied with this. Even then, General MacArthur was brilliantly “island-hopping” in the Pacific, bringing the war closer to the Japanese home islands every day. When FDR and Churchill committed early in 1944 to “Overlord,” the planned invasion of France, the mistrustful Stalin demanded to know the identity of the Allies’ Supreme Commander: “What is his name?”

Stalin would know soon enough. On his long way home from Tehran, FDR met with General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Tunis, North Africa. Almost casually, the president leaned over and said, “Well, Ike, you are going to command Overlord.” Not all of FDR’s commanders relished the president’s breezy informality. When he tried to call the dignified staff of the army by his first name, the very able General George C. Marshall visibly recoiled. “[H]e called me ‘George’—I don’t think he ever did again.”

Everyone revered General Marshal. Churchill called him “the noblest Roman of them all.” It was said of him that even if he entered the Washington office in civilian clothes, the young newsboys might not know who he was, but they would know for what he was.

Far from being put off by General Marshall’s cool reserve, FDR trusted him and kept promoting him. Marshall far outranked Ike and could have had the command of Overlord simply by asking for it. Still, he told the president he would serve wherever the commander in chief needed him. FDR moved decisively to name Ike to command Overlord, telling Marshall, “I didn’t feel I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.”

Churchill feared the cross-Channel invasion would fail. “We might be giving the enemy the opportunity to concentrate . . . an overwhelming force against us and to inflict on us a military disaster greater than . . . Dunkirk. Such a disaster would result in the resuscitation of Hitler and the Nazi regime.” He spoke darkly of “the tide running red” with the blood of young American, British, and Canadian soldiers. He was remembering, too, the disaster at a French channel port in the summer of 1942. There, the Dieppe raid undertaken by a mostly Canadian force of 4,963 commandos had left 3,367 dead. Stalin never had to concern himself about public opinion. He simply shot his opponents. But Churchill and Roosevelt depended on the support of free people.

Ike had to contend with troubles in England. General George Patton, who began the war as Ike’s senior but who was now his difficult subordinate, had given a speech to a local English group in which he said the British and the Americans would together rule the world after the war. Moscow fumed and congressmen back home flamed. Newspapers demanded that Patton be fired. Ike let Patton stew for a week before telling him he could stay.

When I gave him the verdict, tears streamed down his face and he tried to assure me of his gratitude. He gave me his promise that thereafter he would be a model of discretion and in a gesture of almost little-boy contriteness, he put his head on my shoulder as he said it.

This caused his helmet to fall off—the gleaming helmet I sometimes thought he wore while in bed. As it rolled across the room I had the rather odd feeling that I was in the middle of a ridiculous situation. . . . I prayed that no one would come in and see the scene and that there were no news cameras at the window.

“OK, let’s go!” That was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s order when his staff meteorologist gave him a brief break in the stormy weather that had forced a twenty-four-hour postponement of D-Day. General Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force—abbreviated as SCAEF. Ike had even prepared a statement to be issued in the event the invaders were thrown back into the chilly waters of the English Channel. In it, he took complete responsibility for the failure of Overlord. Fortunately, that statement was never issued.

Ike commanded a larger invasion force than the world had ever seen. Ike had assembled 150,000 men, 1,500 tanks, 5,300 ships, and 12,000 aircraft.

The Allies had gone to elaborate lengths to disguise their intended target—the beaches of Normandy. They created a false impression among the Germans that they would invade France at Calais—the closest point from Dover on the English side. Allied intelligence shuddered when, by pure coincidence, the word Overlord appeared in a crossword puzzle so beloved of the English newspaper readers. More seriously, Ike withheld his invasion plans from General de Gaulle and the Free French until mere hours before launch.

As Supreme Commander, Ike could give orders to millions—but not to Churchill or FDR. When the prime minister insisted on joining the invasion fleet on D-Day, Ike tried to dissuade him. Ike admired the cigar-chomping, sixty-nine-year-old leader’s courage, but he didn’t want him interfering. And he didn’t want to bear the responsibility of Churchill were killed.           Failing to dent Winston’s resolve, Ike appealed to King George VI. Only when the king told Winston that he would join him on the beaches was the irrepressible Churchill finely repressed.

Ike proclaimed the expedition “a great crusade.” He issued a General Order telling his men, “The eyes of the world are upon you.” And so they were.

As army rangers scaled the cliffs at Pointe-du-Hoc on Omaha Beach, a toehold on the European continent had been seized. On the night of 6 June 1944, after what many called “the longest day,” President Roosevelt asked the nation to join him in prayer:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead the straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

The will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard.

For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried by night and by day, without rest—until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them. Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

And for us at home—fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas—whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them—help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

The cost of freedom was indeed great. Of the 75,215 British and Canadian troops who landed on D-Day, 4,300 became casualties. The losses suffered by Americans were even greater. The United States suffered 6,000 casualties among the 57,500 troops who stormed the beaches. President Roosevelt’s prayer also went out for his own relatives. His cousin, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was on the beach. When told that he had landed at the wrong point on Utah Beach, the son of the President Theodore Roosevelt gamely said, “No, we’ll start the war from right here.” General Roosevelt had come ashore with his son, the only father-and-son team to land that day. Exhausted by his exertions, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was dead of a heart attack three weeks later.

The seemingly impregnable Fortress Europa that had been strengthened substantially by Field Marshal Rommel could not be held. Rommel knew that the only way to defeat the Allied invasion was to beat it on the beaches. But he could not persuade Hitler that the invasion was actually coming in Normandy. Hitler persisted in believing that the main invasion force would come at Calais. General George S. Patton headed up Operation Fortitude for precisely that purpose—to deceive Hitler. And it worked.

Soon, the Allied Expeditionary Force met stiff resistance in the hedgerow country of Normandy. These thousand-year-old obstructions were a thick undergrowth of tree roots and hedges that could hardly be bulldozed by attacking tanks. Sometime six to eight feet high, they formed a perfect defensive works for the retreating Germans. The leading city in Normandy, Caen, was supposed to be taken on D-Day +3; it was not liberated until D-Day +31. Allied soldiers took thousands of Germans prisoner but also lost many to the Germans. When word of the murder of Canadian POWs by SS troops spread, it fired the Allies’ anger.

Americans were gratified by the response of the Norman peasants. One story of the loss of an American “fly-boy” speaks across the decades. Ten days after D-Day, Lieutenant Conrad J Netting III went into action against a German truck convoy. Lieutenant Netting and his wife were expecting their first child back in the States. He even put his unborn son’s name on the nose of his plane, a P-51 Mustang. He dove down on the convoy in his “Con Jon IV,” but the fighter failed to pull out of a steep dive. What happened next was related years later in a letter from a French villager: “My grandfather ran with some neighbors to the cemetery, just by the place of the crash to help the pilot, but unfortunately it was too late. . . . My grandfather [the village cabinetmaker] made the casket and took care of your father. . . . On his grave was a mountain of flowers.” In the village of Saint Michel, a plaque today commemorates the brave young American’s sacrifice: “Lt. NETTING CONRAD J., 8th U.S. Air Force No 0694174. Mort pour la liberté le 10.6.1944.” He died, as did all our brave, for liberty.

Under Eisenhower’s overall command, British field marshal Montgomery struck out across occupied Holland for Germany in an attempt to shorten the war. Operation Market Garden showed the prowess of British and American elite paratroopers in late September 1944, the U.S. 82nd Airborne took the bridges leading to Nijmegen but suffered heavy losses. German “88s” (88 millimeter artillery pieces) devastated the Allied ranks that marched, exposed, on the high, narrow roads. These were the only paths through the flooded Dutch fields. The U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions suffered greatly in the operation, as did elite British and Polish airborne units. The campaign proved to be “a bridge too far,” as advisers had warned the brilliant but impetuous Field Marshal Montgomery. This bitter experience of American soldiers fighting and dying under a foreign commander continues to this day to underscore the demand that America’s armed forces be led by Americans only.

. . .

On 20 July 1944, as German troops were retreating from Russia and fighting a losing battle in Normandy, a German office attended a meeting at the Wolfs schanze—the Wolf’s Lair. It was Hitler’s secret headquarters in East Prussia, near the Russian border. The officer was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. He was everything Hitler hated—a devout Catholic, an aristocrat, and a man of moral scruple. Stauffenberg had asked his bishop if it was permissible to kill a tyrant. Told that it was licit, Stauffenberg left a bomb in a briefcase under the table at the Wolf’s Lair and left the führer’s staff conference, supposedly to take a phone call. A huge explosion destroyed the building, killed several generals, and left Hitler wounded—but not dead. The widespread plot on Hitler’s life soon fell apart. Stauffenberg quickly faced a firing squad. Hitler’s revenge was terrible. He ordered Himmler’s SS to arrest thousands of actual or suspected conspirators—including all family members. Thousands simply disappeared into nacht und nebel (“night and fog”). Show trials were staged to humiliate elderly generals and aristocrats. The victims were hanged from meat hooks, dying of slow stagnation. Hitler had their deaths filmed. Afterward, his health was shattered, and his arm shook uncontrollably, but his death grip on Germany continued.

Once the Allies were ashore in Normandy, the overwhelming power of America’s economic strength began to be felt by the Germans. One of their area commanders expressed his sense of futility to his superiors. It took courage to commit these words to paper in a Wehrmacht shadowed by Himmler’s SS. He might have been arrested and shot for “defeatism”:

I cannot understand these Americans. Each night we know that we have cut them to pieces, inflicted heavy casualties, mowed down their transport. But in the morning, we are suddenly faced with fresh battalions, with complete replacements of men, machies, food, tools, and weapons. This happens day after day.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 16926-17105). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“THE SUN GOES DOWN ON MORE SUFFERING . . . “

The railroad trains filled with Jews bound for the extermination camp at Auschwitz accelerated their pace as even the most fanatical Nazis must have seen the war was lost. Many Jews died of suffocation en route. The terrified survivors who emerged from the packed freight cars were marched through the gates of Auschwitz. Guards beat stragglers with truncheons or sicced dogs on them. Above the entrance gate was a sign that said ARBEIT MACHT FREI (“work makes you free”). It was just another of the Nazi regime’s lies. Millions entered those gates never to return.

The sad history of the world is replete with mass murder, sporadic persecutions, massacres, outbreaks of hatred, even genocide. Most of these, like the anti-Semitic pogroms of Tsarist Russia, were deadly outbursts of short duration. Hitler’s Final Solution, however, was a systematic nightmare that applied the techniques of the factory assembly line to the project of mass murder. Hitler’s willing accomplices calculated the value of the gold they could extract from the teeth of their victims. Vast gas chambers were supplied with deadly Zyklon B by seemingly legitimate German firms like I.G. Farben. Huge crematoria were constructed to dispose of the remains.

When word began to trickle out of Eastern Europe, it was sometimes brought by men who had risked their lives to document the Final Solution taking place shrouded by the fog of war. After FDR met one of these brave young men, a Polish soldier named Jan Kozielewski (Karski), the president thought the Pole’s story should be heard by important American Jewish leaders. But when Karski gave his eyewitness account to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the jurist bluntly told the young man: “I am unable to believe you.” Shocked, Frankfurter’s good friend, the Polish ambassador, replied: “Felix, you cannot tell this man to his face that he is lying.” That was not it. Frankfurter said with a helpless gesture of his arms as if he was trying to wave the horrible news away: “Mr. Ambassador, I did not say this young man is lying. I said that I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.” We know that even prisoners in Auschwitz itself, people who could see the smokestacks belching flame and smoke, could not believe it.

What in human history had prepared anyone to believe it?

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17107-17123). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Britain came under renewed German attack in the summer of 1944. By this time, the vaunted Luftwaffe was almost destroyed. The few German planes that could get into the air were limited to a few minutes of flying by the shortage of fuel. Too late, Hitler introduced the world’s first jet fighter aircraft. The Messerschmitt ME-262 could have turned the tide of the war had it been employed one year earlier. Now Hitler unleashed his new Vengeance weapons, the V-1 and V-2 rockets. Launched from a site in Germany called Peenemunde, thousands of these deadly weapons landed on London, Southampton, Portsmouth, and Manchester. The vast majority of the 3,500 rockets that escaped being shot down landed on London, causing great devastation and killing 6,184 people.

During this fateful summer of 1944, the Allies began to get reliable word on Auschwitz. Allied bombers that had flown resupply missions over Warsaw were bringing back photographs of the death camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Churchill favored bombing the railroad junction that led to Auschwitz. He told his foreign minister, Anthony Eden, “This is probably the greatest and most horrible single crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.” Churchill called for action. “Invoke my name,” he told Eden.

FDR spoke out publicly against the Holocaust and did not hide his contempt for Hitler:

In one of the blackest crimes in all history . . . the wholesale, systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour. . . . None who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished [a clear warning of postwar tribunals]. All who knowingly take part in the deportation of the Jews to their death in Poland or Norwegians and French to their death in Germany are equally guilty with the executioner himself. . . . Hitler is committing these crimes against humanity in the name of the German people.

Roosevelt and Churchill were moved to outrage, but FDR had to consider Stalin’s reaction. What would the grim Soviet dictator think about a joint Anglo-American action in Poland? Stalin was increasingly viewing Poland as a Soviet sphere of influence. Would Stalin be moved by humanitarian concerns? Not likely.

And the American response was snarled in red tape. Samuel Rosenman, a Roosevelt speechwriter, worried that identifying the president too prominently with the plight of the Jews risked inflaming anti-Semitic outbursts in the United States. FDR’s advisors were stung by vile epithets—such as calling Roosevelt’s New Deal the “Jew Deal.”

One of the chief obstacles to Allied action was Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who repeatedly shelved urgent appeals to intervene. “[E]ven if practicable,” McCloy wrote, clearly indication his belief that intervention was not, [it] might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.” It is hard to imagine what could be worse that hundreds of railroad trains packed with innocent human beings hurtling toward their doom at Auschwitz. McCloy was in many ways an outstanding public servant; he served administrations of both parties in positions of increasing responsibility well into the 1970s. But he bears a heavy burden of responsibility for having repeatedly blocked an urgent attempt to disrupt the clickety-clack of mass murder.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17157-17183). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

FDR thought his demand for unconditional surrender was the surest way to end the mass murder of the Jews. After all, he may well have reasoned, Hitler did not want to murder only the Jews of Poland; he wanted to murder all the Jews. If he broke out into Palestine or counter-attacked in Russia or, worse, if he developed an atomic bomb to place on one of his V-2 rockets, the death toll could be even greater. To many, it seemed the quickest way to kill a snake was to go for the head. Hitler was the head.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17188-17191). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

FDR’s maneuverings with relation to the vice presidency in 1944 did nothing to improve his reputation for straight talk (or rather the lack thereof). He seemed curiously passive and indirect. When he wrote a letter of endorsement for Vice President Henry Wallace, he said he would vote for the very liberal Iowan if he were a convention delegate. Then, in a move that damned Wallace with faint praise, he said, “Obviously, the Convention will do the deciding,” adding that he did not want to seem to be dictating to the delegates. So, while never technically disparaging the loyal Wallace, FDR’s lukewarm backing actually helped those who wanted to throw the dreamy Wallace overboard.

The cabal that dumped Wallace was a group of mostly Irish-Catholic big-city political bosses. The “plotters” included Democratic National Chairman Bob Hannegan, New York’s Ed Flynn, Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago, party treasurer Edwin Pauley, and Postmaster General Frank Walker. Also in on the scheme were the president’s military aide, General “Pa” Watson, and White House press secretary Steve Early.

The cabal did not know (but would not have been surprised to learn) that Wallace was a serious security risk. As vice president, Wallace had confided highly secret information to his brother-in-law, Dr. Charles Bruggmann. Bruggmann was the Swiss envoy in Washington. Bruggmann and Switzerland may have been neutral, but the Swiss Foreign Ministry in Bern had been penetrated by the Nazis. Bruggmann sent regular, detailed messages home based on the information that Henry Wallace was giving him. His dispatches covered such supersensitive matters as the Churchill Roosevelt summit aboard the USS Augusta in 1941 and the actual damage reports from Pearl Harbor. Bruggmann’s messages were intercepted and showed up in Berlin in mere days—and in Tokyo shortly after that. Henry Wallace was perhaps the best example of the World War II slogan: Loose lips sink ships.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17201-17216). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

FDR thought highly of Truman. As a senator, Truman had been a loyal New Dealer and had run the select committee on war production with crisp efficiency. Finally, FDR wrote a letter saying either Harry Truman of the liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas would be acceptable to him. Then, almost as an afterthought, he told the plotters to “clear it with Sidney.”

Sidney Hillman was a textile union president and the organizer of the powerful new political action committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Hillman turned his thumbs down on Jimmy Byrnes. Labor liked Vice President Wallace, Hillman told Harry Truman over breakfast: “[Labor has] a second choice, and I’m looking at him.”

There was something else that gave their machinations a special urgency: FDR was clearly dying. Those who saw him face to face were shocked at how rapidly he had declined. Journalist David Brinkley would later write that in person FDR looked gray. There was no color in his sunken cheeks of his lips. In those days of black-and-white newsreels and Time magazine covers, FDR’s deathly pallor was not so obvious.

When Bob Hannegan brought Harry to his suite in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel, he called the president on the phone. FDR was in San Diego, inspecting the naval base there. The president’s familiar rich tenor voice boomed out in the hotel room. “Bob, have you got that guy lined up on the Vice Presidency?” Truman resisted running for vice president himself when he’d given his word to nominate Jimmy Byrnes. He knew Roosevelt was desperately ill, and he didn’t want to be President of the United States.

Hannegan’s rough answer may have been intended to shake loose the reluctant Truman. “No,” he growled into the receiver, as he looked directly at Harry. “He is the contrariest g—d— mule from Missouri I ever deal with.” FDR fairly shouted back, “Well, you tell the Senator if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of the war, that’s his responsibility!” With that, Roosevelt slammed down the phone. Harry’s reaction, reportedly, was very human. “Oh s—!”  he explained.

It was done. Truman’s resistance wilted in the face of the president’s displeasure and the pressure of the politicians. Jimmy Byrnes, embittered, left Chicago for home. Kentucky’s Alben Barkley, a Senate backer of the popular Byrnes, told a reporter he wanted to tear up the nominating speech he’d written for FDR’s fourth bid for the White House and chuck the whole thing. He soon thought better of it.

Nothing shows FDR’s maddening quality of deviousness better than this important episode. And if Roosevelt could drive even his strongest political allies to distraction, imagine the reaction of his foes.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17221-17243). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Following the Pacific conference FDR decided to visit a military hospital in Hawaii. He asked to be taken to the wards where the young amputees were. Ordinarily, Roosevelt took care not to be seen being wheeled about in his wheelchair. This time, however, he had himself pushed, slowly, deliberately past the bedsides of the wounded men. “He insisted on going past each individual bed. He wanted to display himself and his useless legs to those boys who would have to face the same bitterness,” reported FDR’s aide, Sam Rosenman. Rosenman marveled that “this man who had risen from a bed of helplessness ultimately to become President of the United States and leader of the free world was living proof of what the human spirit could do.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17249-17254). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Roosevelt could not bring together all the elements of his coalition, however. The irascible Joe Kennedy, threatening to endorse Dewey, met with FDR in the White House in late October. Bluntly, he told the president his advisers were disserving him. “They have surrounded you with Jews and Communists, “Kennedy said angrily. Later, he complained to Harry Truman about Roosevelt: “That cripple . . .  killed my son Joe.” In fact, Joe Kennedy Jr. had volunteered for the dangerous mission of flying over the English Channel in a plane loaded with explosives. The death of Joe Jr. would mean that all of Joe Kennedy’s ambitions would come to rest on his surviving twenty-seven-year-old son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

On Election Day, Roosevelt triumphed a fourth time. He won 25,602,505 popular votes (53.3 percent) and 432 electoral votes to Dewey’s 22,006,278 popular votes (45.8 percent) and 99 electoral votes. Roosevelt’s military chiefs may have been grateful to Dewey for not revealing Magic, but the old contender was not appreciative: “I still think he’s a son of a bitch,” Roosevelt said of his last opponent.

Freedom triumphed when the United States held national elections in the midst of World War II. No longer were people thinking that dictatorships were more efficient and clearly the wave of the future. Italy was out of the war, Germany and Japan were on the defensive, and the democracies were on the rise. The democracies plus the Soviet Union, that is. Few could deny that the Red Army was playing a major role in bringing down Hitler. And few could argue that Stalin was a democrat. “When are you going to stop killing people?” asked the audacious Lady Astor of the Soviet dictator at a Kremlin dinner. She was Britain’s first woman member of Parliament, and it took courage to ask Stalin that question in his own den. His Communist comrades froze, but Stalin simply pulled on his pipe and mildly replied, “When it is no longer necessary.” Democracy,” as Churchill said, “is based on the idea that it is better to count heads than to bash them.” It is not an idea Stalin the head basher ever understood.

Roosevelt was reelected and France was largely liberated by late 1944. The German rocket ranges at Peenemunde were overrun. It seemed that only “mopping up”       was required to cross the River Rhine and end the war in Europe. When Allied troops advanced to Hitler’s Siegfried Line, Germany lay open to invasion. Churchill visited the supposedly impregnable defensive position. He winked at the men—military and civilian journalists—who had accompanied him. Then he led them all in urinating on Hitler’s famous line!

If Americans thought that the war in Europe was over, Hitler did not. He secretly planned a major counteroffensive against the Western Allies. In fact, he stripped his Eastern divisions, fatally weakening his defensive against the onrushing Red Army.

Hitler’s Ardennes campaign began 16 December 1944. Taking advantage of the heavy snow and low visibility, German Panzer tanks came crashing through the forests. Americans were taken by surprise. The Battle of the Bulge, as it quickly became known, was the Germans’ last thrust in the West. The second day of the battle, eighty American POWs were murdered in cold blood outside the Belgian town of Malmédy. This Malmédy Massacre was the bloody work of the SS.

The Americans suffered greatly at the Bulge, and not merely from German Panzers. The merciless winter claimed casualties of its own. Night fell by 4:45 p.m. in these northerly latitudes. Even Americans from the Dakotas found the cold numbing. “Riding in a jeep through the Ardennes,” recalled Colonel Ralph Ingersoll, “I wore woolen underwear, a woolen uniform, armored force combat overalls, a sweater, an armored field jacket with elastic cuffs, a muffler, a heavily lined trenchcoat, two pairs of heavy woolen socks, and combat boots with galoshes over them—and I can never remember being warm.” Thousands came down with frostbite and “trench foot,” a deadly disease that came from having the foot exposed to dampness for long periods. G.I.s typically hung their wet socks around their necks to provide a spare pair that would be warm and dry.

The tough, battle-hardened U.S. 101st Airborne Division had landed on D-Day. Now, it was surrounded by advancing Germans in the little Belgian town of Bastogne. But when the German commander demanded surrender, the leader of the 101st, General Anthony McAuliffe, replied eloquently, “Nuts!”

Ike ordered General Patton to disengage and head north to relieve Bastogne. By Christmas Eve, the cloud cover lifted. Eisenhower was able to bring to bear his overwhelming air power. That night, two thousand Allied aircraft attacked thirty-one German targets, destroying them. Along with the critical shortage of fuel and the spirited American counteroffensive, the German drive was soon blunted. The Germans suffered more than a hundred thousand casualties in the Battle of the Bulge.

America’s victory in the Battle of the Bulge was a tribute to Eisenhower’s cool courage, Patton’s dash, and McAuliffe’s defiance. Most of all, it was a tribute to the soldiers of democracy. The Americans’ resourcefulness under the severest conditions of battle and weather was completely underestimated by Hitler and his generals.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17307-17348). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

DEMOCRACY: “THE MUSTARD ON THE HOT DOG”

. . .

Poland was the great issue. Stalin promised “a strong, free, independent and democratic Poland.” The difficulty was how Stalin defined democracy. It surely was not the “mustard on the hot dog.” As Stalin had said, it doesn’t matter who casts the votes; what matters is who counts them. Wouldn’t the pope be upset if atheist Communist rule were imposed on Catholic Poles? Stalin had a real answer: “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17391-17395). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

There is little doubt that FDR’s attempt to forge a personal relationship with Stalin was—as conservative scholar Robert Nisbet has called it—“a failed courtship.” Franklin Roosevelt seemed to have little appreciation of the radical threat posed by aggressive, subversive, Communism. There is good reason to think that Roosevelt himself recognized this courtship as failed.  Two weeks before his death, FDR exclaimed in anguish, “[Stalin] has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta!”

Critics rightly point to the presence of Yalta of Alger Hiss, a Soviet agent. Hiss was a top State Department official, an FDR appointee, who would travel to Moscow after Yalta and secretly receive the Order of the Red Star. And he was not the only one. Lawrence Duggan of the State Department and Harry Dexter White, Morgenthau’s deputy of Treasury, were also Soviet agents.

The shocking reality is that the government of the United States was dangerously penetrated by Soviet agents. To many at the time, however, this was no more sinister than the presence of many British sympathizers in high federal office.

The Soviet people were widely admired for the stubborn, brave resistance to the Nazi invaders. Stalin was seen as a stern, avuncular figure, a Russian authoritarian, but not as the ruthless, homicidal monster subsequent historical research has proved him to be. Americans had sympathy for the twenty million lives lost in the Soviet Union’s “Great Patriotic War.” They never saw the millions of returning Soviet POWs who were sent directly to the Gulag. If this seems insane to us, it must be remembered that these prisoners of the Nazis knew how unprepared Stalin had been for war and how much better everyone in Europe lived that the people of the Soviet Union. To Stalin, anyone who was captured was a traitor. He made no attempt to gain the release of any of the millions of Russian captives. He even let his own son, Yakov, die in a German POW camp rather than exchange him for the German field marsh von Paulus.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17415-17430). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Although the summit conferences focused primarily on the European Theater, as the war against Germany was called, the tens of thousands of casualties in the Pacific guaranteed American interest in the war against Japan. Young Lieutenant (Junior Grade) John F. Kennedy found his Patrol Torpedo boat (PT-109) cut in half one dark night by a Japanese destroyer. Kennedy swam to a nearby island, pulling a wounded crewman with him and leading the others to safety. He was decorate for valor.

Another lieutenant (Junior Grade), George H. W. Bush, had dropped out of Yale to become the youngest naval aviator in history. When his plane was shot down near Chichi Jima, his two crewmen were lost. Bush frantically paddled his life raft away from the Japanese-held island. He desperately wanted to avoid capture by the savage Japanese who were known to behead downed American fliers and consume their flesh. Soon, Bush was relieved to see the submarine USS Skate surfacing to rescue him. The suicidal resistance of the Japanese and the widely circulated stories of atrocities from our prisoners of war liberated in the Philippines made a deep, deep impression on millions of Americans.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17445-17453). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

HARRY TRUMAN:

“THE MOON, THE STARS, AND ALL THE PLANETS”

Still exhausted from his strenuous journey to Yalta and back, FDR went to Warm Springs, Georgia, for some rest in the balmy April breezes. There, Lucy Rutherford brought the painter Elisabeth Shoumatoff to do a portrait of the president. Rutherford had been Franklin’s mistress nearly thirty years before. As a condition of Eleanor’s agreeing not to divorce him, FDR had promised never to see Lucy again. But here, lonely and sick, he had asked his daughter Anna to invite Lucy back. FDR needed companionship; he needed a warm, accepting friend. Eleanor, with her constant causes, projects, and endless petitioning for the less fortunate, wore Franklin out.

On the morning of 12 April 1945, while sitting for the portrait, President Roosevelt put his finger to his temple, saying, “I have a terrific headache.” With that, he collapsed and died. Eleanor immediately learned of Lucy’s presence, but the country knew nothing of it. Eleanor coldly dismissed her daughter, whom she knew had helped her father arrange for Lucy’s visit. In time, though, Anna and Eleanor were reconciled. And Eleanor later even exchanged forgiving letters with Lucy.

The country was shocked by the president’s death. For millions, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been the only president they had ever known. As he had wished, the funeral ceremonies were very simple. His casket was carried by horse-drawn caisson through Washington, D.C., and thence by train to Hyde Park, New York. America heard the news late on that Thursday afternoon. By Sunday, he had been buried. Four hundred thousand watched tearfully as the funeral caisson passed by. At the moment of interment, West Point cadets fired a rifle salute from the gravesite. Planes waited on runways, trains came to a halt, and all of American observed two minutes of silence. Local newspapers carried a simple death notice just as they did for hometown boys. “Roosevelt, Franklin D., Commander-in-Chief, died at Warm Springs, Georgia.” Even many Republicans who had called him “That Man” for years stilled their criticism. The famed editor of the Emporia Gazette, Kansan William Allen White, spoke for many of these when he wrote of FDR. “We who hate your gaudy guts salute you.” The country was united in grief.

The war could not wait. Aboard the USS Tirante, an American submarine cruising through mine-infested waters south of Japanese-occupied Korea, Lieutenant Commander George Street hunted down enemy cargo ships. Street had to take his sub into the harbor on the surface, since it was too shallow to dive. At four in the morning of 14 April 1945, Street hit a huge ammunition ship with his torpedoes. “A tremendous, beautiful explosion,” Street reported, “a great mushroom of white blinding flame shot 2,000 feet into the air. . . .  [At first, it was silent, but then] a tremendous roar flattened our ears against our heads.” But the huge explosion exposed the Tirante “like a snowman in a coal pit.” Instead of beating a hasty retreat, however, Street turned and coolly picked off two enemy warships, frigates of the Mikura class that were bearing down on his vulnerable little boat. Street and his crewmen had heard the news of President Roosevelt’s death as they entered the enemy harbor. His message back to Pacific submarine command read tersely” “That’s three for Franklin . . .  sank ammunition ship and two escorts.” “Jesus Christ and General Jackson!” Those were Harry Truman’s first words upon hearing of Roosevelt’s death. He had been having an after-session drink in the Capitol Hill office of the gruff, blunt Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn of Texas. He hurried out of the Speaker’s office, brushing past Texas Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson as he headed for the White House. Here, he was quickly sworn it as the thirty-third President of the United States. Later, when President Truman met with the press for the first time, he said, “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. . . . [W]hen they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the Moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

Reaction in Britain was one of shock and dismay.  Harold Nicolson, a veteran diplomat, confided to his diary: “I feel deeply for Winston, and this afternoon it was evident from his manner that it was a real body-blow. Under that bloody American Constitution they must now put up with the Vice President who was actually chosen because he was a colorless and harmless man. He may, as Coolidge did, turn out to be a person of character. But I have not heard any man say one good word in his favor.

Churchill decided at the last minute not to fly to Washington. Instead, he offered this handsome tribute to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the House of Commons.

He died in harness, and we may well say in battle harness, like his soldiers, sailors and airmen, who side by side with ours are carrying on their task to the end all over the world. What an enviable death was his. He had brought his country through the worst of its perils and the heaviest of its toils. Victory had cast its sure and steady beam upon him. . . . He was the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old.

Not so in Moscow. Stalin ordered all the red flags to be fringed in black, but he instructed his agents to make an appeal to FDR’s son, Elliott. Stalin wanted his own doctors to examine the dead president’s body. He was convinced that “Churchill and his gang” had poisoned FDR! As the man who had come to power by killing all his opponents, it seemed only logical.

Nor was there any mourning in Berlin. Deep underground, in the perpetual night of the Führerbunker, Hitler received the news from a Jubilant Goebbels: ”Mein Führer, it was written in the stars! Roosevelt is dead!” Hitler, who believed in astrology, said it was the long-awaited turnabout in Germany’s fortunes. Roosevelt’s death was just like the death of the Russian empress that miraculously saved Hitler’s hero, Frederick the Great, from defeat. “Fate has removed the greatest war criminal of all time,” Hitler said of FDR’s death.

Coming from him, it was high praise indeed.

Hitler’s stars, it turns out, were anything but lucky. Two weeks after Roosevelt’s death, the Red Army was closing in on Berlin. Ten thousand Soviet artillery pieces let loose an incredible barrage, reducing the historic capital to rubble.

As the ground shook above him, Hitler received news on 28 April that his mentor and friend, Benito Mussolini, had been captured. Italian partisans quickly tried II Duce and shot him and his mistress along with several of his henchmen. Then they strung up their bodies heels first in a Milan gas station. Hitler was horrified and resolved never to be taken alive. He quickly married Eva Braun, his dim-witted mistress. Then, on 30 April 1945, he poisoned his favorite Alsatian dog, Blondi, and he and Eva committed suicide. Goebbels and his wife first killed their six little children by lethal injection and then joined Hitler in death.

The SS burned the bodies in the courtyard of the ruined Reich Chancellery. The grandiose Reich Chancellery, built by Hitler to overawe terrified visitors, was to have lasted a Thousand Years. It lasted barely twelve. The next day, 1 May, amid the stench of burning flesh, Red Army soldiers raised the Soviet hammer-and-sickle banner atop the remains of the Chancellery building. They were just in time to celebrate the international workers’ holiday.

The hunt now began for fleeing Nazi leaders. Many were rounded up, but SS leader Heinrich Himmler was able to bite down on a cyanide capsule while in British captivity.

Determination to bring to trial all the leaders of the Third Reich stiffened as Nazi death camps were overrun and their thousands of surviving victims were liberated. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Ravensbruck, Dachau, Mauthausen—all became household words for savagery in April 1945. General Eisenhower forced enemy POWs to bury the piles of bodies that were stacked like cordwood at all the death camps in the American sector. He ordered German prisoners to watch newsreel documentation of the Holocaust. He further ordered army photographers to record everything to guard against future efforts by some in the West to deny the Holocaust ever happened. I visited every nook and cranny of the camp,” said Eisenhower, stunned by the barbarity of it all, “because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify firsthand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief . . .  that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.”

President Truman pledged to carry out Franklin Roosevelt’s policies. Unconditional surrender was the first among these. Within a week, German resistance collapsed. Gross Admiral Karl Dönitz, whom Hitler had designated as his successor, authorized the surrender of all German forces. On 7 May, Supreme Commander Eisenhower received the unconditional surrender of all German forces in the French city of Reims. Received was the carefully chosen word that described Ike’s victory. So furious was the general at what he had seen in the concentration camps that he refused personally to attend the surrender ceremonies, designating a subordinate to meet the defeated Germans.

The next day, 8 May, was Harry Truman’s sixty-first birthday. To the world, though, it was V-E Day—Victory in Europe Day. In London, with hundreds of thousands gathered in Trafalgar Square, Winston Churchill appeared with the king, the queen, and Princess Elizabeth on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Throughout the West, the peoples of the Allied and Liberated countries celebrated the end of the greatest threat to freedom the world had ever known. In Moscow, a thousand-gun salute was fired off on 9 May to celebrate victory in “the Great Patriotic War.”

The following month, Eisenhower would be given the keys to the city of London. His acceptance of the honor was the first major public speech of his life. Characteristically, in his Guildhall Speech of 1945, he stressed his own roots in the American Midwest. In doing so, he spoke volumes about the kind of country that had sent him there. It was Ike’s New World that had “stepped forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old,” as Churchill always knew it would:

Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in blood of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.

Conceivably a commander may have been professionally superior. He may have given everything of his heart and mind to meet the spiritual and physical needs of his comrades. He may have written a chapter that will glow forever in the pages of military history.

Still, even such a man—if he existed—would sadly face the facts that his honors cannot hide in his memories the crosses marking the resting places of the dead. They cannot sooth the anguish of the widow of the orphan whose husband or father will not return.

The only attitude in which a commander may with satisfaction receive the tributes of his friends in the humble acknowledgement that no matter how unworthy he may be, his position is the symbol of great human forces that have labored arduously and successfully for a righteous cause. Unless he feels this symbolism and this rightness in what he has tried to do, then he is disregardful of courage, fortitude and devotion of the vast multitudes he has been honored to command. If all Allied men and women that have served with me in this war can only know that it is they whom this august body is really honoring today, then indeed I will be content.

The feeling of humility cannot erase of course my great pride in being tendered the freedom of London. I am not a native of this land. I come from the very heart of America. In the superficial aspects by which we ordinarily recognize family relationships, the town where I was born and the one where I was reared are separated from this great city. Abilene, Kansas and Denison, Texas, would together equal the size, possibly one five-hundredth of a part of great London.

By your standards these towns are young, without your aged traditions that carry the roots of London back into the uncertainties of unrecorded history. To those people I am proud to belong.

Despite all the celebrations, however, all was not rosy with the wartime coalition. Passing through Washington en route to the opening of the San Francisco organizational meeting of the United Nations, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov—“the Hammer”—stopped by the White House to meet the new president. When Truman expressed concern that the Soviets were not keeping their agreements in Poland, Molotov interrupted. He said the Poles were acting against the Red Army. Truman cut him off, telling him to inform Marshal Stalin that the United States expected the Soviets to keep their agreements. Molotov, offended, replied he’d never been talked to that way. “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that,” Truman said sharply. Molotov normally was a man of pasty complexion. It was called the Kremlin pallor. Now, he looked ashen. It wasn’t a cold war—not yet—but there was a chill wind blowing through the corridors of power.

One of the first things Truman learned on becoming president was about the Manhattan Project. During his Senate days, Truman had repeatedly bumped up against the top secret project to develop an atomic bomb. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew it was big. Now, twelve days after “the Moon, the stars, and all the planets had landed” on him, the new president received his first full-length briefing on the atomic bomb was about to change everything. So, too, was the apparent willingness of the Soviets to tear up the agreements Stalin had solemnly inked at Yalta.

Truman agreed to go to Potsdam for another Big Three summit. With Roosevelt gone, it was important for the new president to establish his own relationship with Churchill and Stalin. Potsdam was a relatively undamaged, fashionable suburb of Berlin. It was behind the Soviet lines. Once again, Stalin would take pains to surround the Allied leaders with spies.

If Truman’s clash with Molotov signaled a sudden chill in U.S.-Soviet relations, Truman was soon to break with FDR’s most devoted personal friend and most loyal cabinet member. Henry Morgenthau, as secretary of the treasury, wanted to go to Potsdam to give new life to his Morgenthau Plan for the postwar treatment of Germany.

Not only did Truman not want Morgenthau or his Morgenthau Plan in Potsdam, he didn’t want him in Washington, either. With Roosevelt’s death, the line of succession to the presidency went from Truman to Secretary of State James Byrnes and then to Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau. Since Truman and Byrnes were both traveling to Europe on the same ship, the USS Augusta, an accident at sea could result in the United States having another jolting change of administration in just months. Truman saw grave danger if an unelected president, a leader committed to a most controversial plan to reduce Germany to a primitive state, came to power in this way. Truman was so insistent that he demanded Morgenthau’s resignation before the presidential party boarded the ship for Europe.  Truman’s crony, Fred Vinson, had his bags removed from the Augusta and found himself confirmed by the Senate and sworn in as the new secretary of the treasury in mere hours. It is hard to imagine a clumsier handling of a cabinet shift. Truman was certainly off to a rocky start. Henry Morgenthau surely was shabbily treated.

Despite hi handedness in dealing with Morgenthau, however, Truman was probably right in his judgment. The Morgenthau Plan for the permanent reduction of Germany could only have played into Soviet hands. If he had ever become president, Henry Morgenthau might have been fatally compromised when it was finally revealed that his trusted aide Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet agent. In the end, even Morgenthau had to admit there was “no question that White was working for the Russians.”

, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17446-17585). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE FLAG OF FREEDOM

On the brink of victory, Americans could be confident that their arms and their material had tipped the balance of the war. All the Allied peoples had performed amazing feats of labor and devotion. Their soldiers, sailors, and airmen had performed incredible acts of heroism and sacrifice. For all that, America was the indispensable country. America made all the difference. Alistair Cooke was then a young correspondent in the United States, working for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). In the foreword to Cooke’s World War II memoir, we see in dramatic terms the American contribution to victory:

The Allies would not have won the war in the West and the other war in the East without the way of the American people, with amazing speed, created an arsenal no coalition of nations could come close to matching. Britain trebled [tripled] its war output between 1940 and 1943, a ratio surpassing both Germany and Russia, who doubled theirs, though Japan excelled with a fourfold increase. And America? America stepped up its war output by a staggering twenty-five times. Instance, in 1942 a Liberty cargo ship of British design required 200 days to launch. Henry Kaiser, the dam builder from Spokane, had never before built a ship or airplane or handled steel, but he experimented with prefabrication and cut the time to 40 days. For his next trick he finished the John Fitch 24 hours after laying the keel. Without the fleets of Kaiser’s ships carrying supplies, Britain would no doubt have starved.

At Potsdam, attention centered on what to do about defeated Germany. Stalin was determined to loot the Soviet sector—soon to be known as East Germany. The Red Army had been allowed, even encouraged, to rape its way across Germany. Some two million German women—everyone from eight-year- old girls to eighty-eight-year-old nuns—were raped in the final assault on Germany. As many as 130,000 German women were raped in the capture of Berlin; 10,000 of these committed suicide.

The Soviet secret police interrogated one German woman in East Prussia, Emma Korn, who related her experiences as the Red Army swept into East Prussia:

Frontline troops . . . entered the town. They came into the cellar where we were hiding and pointed their weapons at me and the other two women, and ordered us into the yard. In the yard, twelve soldiers in turn raped me. Other soldiers did the same to my two neighbors. The following night six drunken [Soviet] soldiers broke into our cellar and raped us in front of the children. On 5 February, three soldiers came, and on 6 February eight drunken soldiers also raped and beat us.

Days later, Emma Korn and her companions could see no way out of their misery. They slit the children’s wrists and then their own, but failed to kill themselves.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was then a thirty-four-year-old captain in the artillery in the Red Army. As his comrades looted jewels, gold and silver, and, of course, alcohol, he raced for an engineer’s office to grab the famous Koh-I-Noor pencils he coveted, the only decent pencil this budding writer had ever held. He, too, committed rape in East Prussia. His crime was committed with the nod of the head, not with a pistol, but it was rape nonetheless. Amazingly, Solzhenitsyn confessed his sins in the eight-thousand-line poem Prussian Nights, which he composed as he trudged off to captivity in the Gulag. Stalin’s secret police had caught the young officer making reference in a letter to the Soviet dictator as “the plowman” for plowing under millions of young Russian boys.

When the victorious Big Three allied leaders met a Potsdam, President Truman assumed his duties with brisk efficiency. Prime Minister Churchill had arrived with his partner in the wartime coalition, Deputy Prime Minister Clement Atlee. Churchill’s Conservative Party and Atlee’s Labour Party had just met in an election contest. The votes had been cast, but it took weeks for the “soldier vote” to be counted from across the world. Few expected Churchill to lose.

Churchill had a sudden premonition. On 25 July 1945, he told of a dream he’d had. “I dreamed my life was over. I saw—it was very vivid—my body under a white sheet on a table in an empty room. I recognized by bare feet projecting from under the sheet. It was very life-like. . . . Perhaps this is the end.

It was not the end, not the end of Churchill’s life nor of his remarkable political career. Still, it must have felt like that. The world was stunned by the Labour Party’s landslide victory. Clementine, Churchill’s loving and ambitious wife, tried to soothe him. “It may well be a blessing in disguise,” she told him, “At the moment,” Churchill said glumly, “it seems to be very effectively disguised.”

Churchill’s replacement by Atlee left Stalin with two less experienced summit partners. But Truman had just received a coded message that let him know that the world’s first atomic test had gone off perfectly at Alamogordo, New Mexico. One thing Truman knew he had to do at Potsdam if he was to have any hope of holding the wartime Alliance together: he must tell Stalin about the atomic bomb.

At the end of the session in which all sides had bickered, Truman casually approached Marshal Stalin. In a conversational tone, he told Stalin that the United States had developed a very powerful new weapon. Stalin did not react, at least visibly. “All he said was he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use’ of it against the Japanese,” Truman later remarked.

Of course, Stalin already knew. Klaus Fuchs, a German-born refugee from Hitler’s Germany, was a keenly intelligent nuclear scientist. He was a British subject who had been assigned to work on the Manhattan Project with the Americans. He was also a dedicated Communist and Soviet spy. The Manhattan Project had probably been compromised from the beginning.

Another physicist, Ted Hall, was also spying for the USSR. Hall told one of his Soviet handlers of a conversation he’d had with another scientist at the Los Alamos nuclear lab in New Mexico. The scientist told Hall he was angered that the United States and Britain were not sharing atomic bomb-making know-how with their brave Soviet allies. The scientist said he’d be willing to do it himself if offered the occasion. Hall vociferously agreed with colleague. Hall told him he had already begun collaborating with the Soviets. This indiscreet remark apparently scared the left-leaning scientist away, and he thereafter avoided Ted Hall. But he did not report him to the FBI. The Soviets code-named their successful effort to penetrate the Manhattan Project Enormoz—enormous—and the consequences of their espionage were indeed enormous.

As the Potsdam conference concluded, the Allies issued another call for Japan to surrender unconditionally. The Soviets did not take part in this call, since they were not at yet at war with Japan.

There was never any thought that the atomic bomb would not be used. It was not then seen as a weapon of a different order. Citizens had become accustomed to the terrible “thousand bomber raids” over Hamburg and Tokyo in which hundreds of thousands died. The fire-bombing of beautiful, ancient Dresden had raised a cry of alarm in some quarters. Churchill, viewing films of the attacks, bolted from his chair: “Are we beasts?” he cried out in anguish. But he did not order a cessation of the bombing.

The indiscriminate German bombing of London and Coventry, Warsaw and Rotterdam, had hardened the hearts of the Allies toward the Germans. Similarly, stories of Japanese atrocities in Southeast Asia and the Philippines fired a vengeful mood among Americans.

The devastating American losses at Iwo Jima and Okinawa steeled American resolve to do whatever was necessary to force the Japanese to surrender. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured an incredible scene of six American servicemen raising the Stars and Stripes above Iwo Jima. While Americans thrilled at the raising of the flag over Mount Suribachi buy five marines and a navy corpsman, the casualties lists sobered millions. The campaign took nearly three times as long as planned—thirty-six days. And it cost 5,931 marines killed and 17,372 wounded.

The assault on Okinawa was even worse. Wave upon wave of kamikaze planes—1,900 in all—cost 4,900 American sailors their lives. Wounded sailors numbered 4,824. U.S. Marine casualties were heavier—7,613 dead and 31,807 wounded. Further, 763 aircraft were lost. The invasion of Okinawa occurred on 1 April 1945. It was not finally secured until 22 June, three of the bloodiest months of the entire war.

When the Japanese military leaders stubbornly held out against the entire civilized world, Truman ordered the use of the atomic bomb. Given the events of that spring, it is hard to imagine any other president coming to any other decision. Truman feared that as many as 300,000 Americans could die in an invasion of the Japanese home islands.  The mass suicide attacks at Okinawa, the continuing unwillingness of the Japanese military to consider surrender, and the death each month of as many as 100,000 Allied prisoners of the need to drop the atomic bomb.

On 6 August 1945, a USAAF bomber dropped a single atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Colonel Paul Tibbets piloted the B-29 and named it for his mother, Enola Gay. The powerful aircraft was able to record the event and escape horror to return safely to base. Because the bomb was untried, there was a serious danger the atomic blast might consume the aircraft and crew as well as its intended target. To guard against this happening, the bomb’s descent was slowed by a parachute. The bomb resulted in 140,000 deaths. When the Japanese  still had not surrendered, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. An estimated 73,884 people were killed instantly. An additional 74,909 were horribly injured, alerting the world to the continuing nightmare of radiation poisoning.

Keeping his word this time, Stalin declared war on Japan. Speaking on nationwide radio for the first time, the Japanese emperor Hirohito called upon his people to “endure the unendurable” and surrender. It was 14 August 1945. In all the Allied countries, the people burst forth in an outpouring of unrestrained joy known as V-J Day—Victory over Japan Day.

On 2 September 1945, the USS Missouri entered Tokyo Bay. There, the representatives of the Allies received the Japanese emissaries. Nothing was done to humiliate the Japanese signatories to the Instrument of Surrender. General Douglas MacArthur made sure of that. “Let us pray that peace may now be restored to the world, and that God will preserve it always.”

It as not just peace that was secured in Tokyo Bay. Freedom was victorious. People all over the world had seen the democracies bounce back from the depths of defeatism and decadence in the late 1930s. Isolationism in the United States and appeasement in Britain and France were discredited. Democracy had won the war. The Great Republic of the United States had indeed become the “arsenal of democracy.” American productivity overwhelmed Japanese and German industry.

To the war-weary peoples of the world, the lessons of the war should have settled forever the question of whether free people can also summon the will and the courage to defend themselves. It was the United States and Britain that held out. The United States and Britain defended the ideals of democracy to a watching world.

Even one of the most painful incidents of the war afforded an important lesson.

Winston Churchill was deeply hurt to be so unceremoniously kicked out of office by the British voters. In time, though, Churchill’s famous wit would return. When King George VI offered to make him a Knight of the Garter, he replied impishly: “I can hardly accept the Order of the Garter from the King after the people have given me the Order of the Boot.”

The important thing is that the people were free to give their leaders the boot. This is what freedom is all about. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt. It is the dent in the high hat. And it is the sovereign right of the people to say who will rule over them. It was a message Americans broadcast to a watchful world. The star-spangled banner those marines and that corpsman raised above Mount Suribachi was not just a victorious battle ensign. It was the flag of freedom.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17587-17685). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Seven

TRUMAN DEFENDS THE FREE WORLD

(1945-1953)

. . . Communists, some thought, were just “liberals in a hurry.” . . .

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Location 17763). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“A COLD WAR BEGINS”

When peace finally came in September 1945, American’s joy was mixed with exhaustion. The United States had been at war since 8 December 1941, he major allies even longer. Britain had been fighting for her survival since 3 September 1939. The nations of the British Empire and Commonwealth—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa—had stood alongside. England in the war against Hitler and the Japanese imperialists. The Soviet Union had struggled for its very existence since 22 June 1941 when Hitler unleashed a merciless blitzkrieg against his ally, Stalin. Stalin’s blunder—trusting Hitler’s word—would cost twenty million lives in the USSR. The United Nations was the formal title given to the wartime alliance against Hitlerism. Led by the United States, twenty-six nations pledged themselves on 1 January 1942 to fight against Hitler’s Germany and not to sign a separate peace with the Nazis. Pressed by Roosevelt, forty-seven nations would eventually declare war against the man Winston Churchill liked to call the “nozzy beast.”

America in World War II had become indeed what FDR named us—the arsenal of democracy. Just as General Montgomery Meigs had provided the Union armies of the Civil War with overwhelming advantages in supply, so did General Lucius D. Clay during World War II. Clay was the grandson of Confederate soldiers and a descendent of the Great Composer, Henry Clay. General Clay was responsible for the astonishing output of 88,000 tanks, two million trucks, and 178,000 artillery pieces.

To put twelve million men and women in uniform and send millions of fighting men overseas required an unprecedented mobilization at home. The military draft conscripted healthy young men. Their places on the assembly lines were taken by millions of young women. America could accept such a massive disruption of normal life because the country was united after Pearl Harbor. Almost all Americans believed the survival of the United States and our freedoms were at stake. Rationing, wage and price controls, and war censorship of the press (and of soldiers’ and sailors’ letters home) were restrictions on American freedom that most accepted without grumbling. Thousands of Americans found themselves “frozen” in critical war-related industries, unable to leave their jobs to hunt for better pay.

With the peace in 1945 came irresistible pressures. American boys in uniform who sang “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me” strained to get back under that apple tree. Their mothers and fathers, their wives and girlfriends wanted them home. Just as a warship’s crew cannot be held to “General Quarters” without relaxing, the American people demanded a stand down from the rigors of war mobilization. No democratic government could have ignored these pressures. Demobilization became the urgent task of the Truman administration.

In these years of an uneasy peace, however, Americans would come to accept a leadership role in the postwar world. The defense of freedom at home, most Americans believed, required a worldwide network of alliances. America’s new prominence as the world leader for freedom focused a brilliant and sometimes unflattering spotlight on American institutions and practices. Racial segregation clashed with the ideal of Americans as defenders of human dignity. It was hard to celebrate the great victory over Hitler’s vicious racism and then allow millions of Americans to be degraded by public water fountains labeled WHITE and COLORED. The widespread denial of the right to equal public accommodations and basic civil rights like voting and holding office seemed closer to Hitler’s Nuremberg Code than to the ideals of the Founders and Abraham Lincoln. Repeatedly during this period, American presidents would point to the watching world in their appeals to Americans to live up to their highest ideals on civil rights.

Progress on civil rights, ironically, was both delayed and then, finally, accelerated by the pressures of a new, worldwide struggle with Communism. Americans in the wake of World War II were split in their views of their wartime ally, Josef Stalin. To many liberals, Stalin represented the brave Soviet people. He was tough, they granted, and his methods were not our methods. But he had to be tough to survive in a world endangered by Fascists and their sympathizers in the West. Besides, they believed, Stalin’s Communist system represented something hopeful for the world. Soviet propaganda regularly denounced racism and anti-Semitism. Few Americans had any knowledge of racism and anti-Semitism in the USSR.

American conservatives had never been comfortable with the wartime alliance of convenience with Soviet Russia. In the months immediately following V-E Day, Americans whose parents had come from Poland and Eastern Europe began to cry out against Stalin’s iron grip on the “old countries.” Throughout the Catholic Church in America, hers were regularly offered for the co-religionists whose freedom of worship was increasingly endangered in Eastern Europe.

President Truman struggled to maintain friendly relations with the Soviets, even as his rapid withdrawal of troops from Europe daily lessened his influence. Against conservatives’ advice, he ordered U.S. troops to withdraw from advanced positions they had seized in the closing days of the war. Truman would honor FDR’s wartime agreements and hope that the Soviets would honor theirs.

Stalin gave a speech in Moscow’s Bolshoi theater in February 1946 that signaled a return of the old ways. Almost matter-of-factly, Stalin rehearsed the themes he had often echoed in the prewar years: capitalism was inevitably imperialist, imperialism led to war, as the Soviet Union had to rearm to avoid being encircled and overwhelmed. There are indications as well that Truman’s straightforwardness and telling Stalin about the atom bomb in Potsdam may have prompted Stalin to be more, not less, truculent. Stalin may have concluded that only a tough and unyielding stance would convince the West he could not be intimidated by the American monopoly on the bomb.

In March 1946 Truman invited former Prime Minister Winston Churchill to speak at a small liberal arts college in the president’s home state of Missouri. Westminster College was proud to host the most famous man in the world—and happy to see Harry, too. Churchill and the president rode by special train from Washington to the college town of Fulton. They had plenty of time to discuss the speech. The day-and-a-half train ride.

Churchill called his address “The Sinews of Peace.” As he had promised, Truman introduced the distinguished visitor. Churchill, then seventy-one, seemed to have lost none of his intellectual or physical vigor. He drew out his theme, appealing to what he called the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States in the defense of liberty. With a bow to his hosts, he said these ideals “found their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.” Together, these English language documents constituted, he said, “the title deeds of freedom.”

There was much for Americans to ponder in Churchill’s brilliant and profound speech, that few would ever read it in its entirety. That is because Churchill chose that moment to rivet the attention of the world by his use of a single arresting phrase:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities . . . lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere , and all are subject . . . to an increasing major of control from Moscow.

The reaction to Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech came like a thunder clap in a calm summer sky. Moscow was enraged, denouncing Churchill as a warmonger. Back home in Britain, the Labour government faced rebellion among its more left-wing “back bench” members. In the United States, the speech was attacked by liberals and conservatives. How dare this foreigner propose a permanent alliance between Britain and the United States, critics howled. Liberals were incensed that that old imperialist Churchill was trying to stir up yet another world conflict. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, leader of the “progressives,” was especially upset. Few actually read what Churchill said. He called for no military or even diplomatic action to “roll back” the Iron Curtain. Instead, he urged the Western democracies to maintain their military and economic strength—and then to negotiate a better settlement with the Soviets. Instead of war, Churchill wanted peace through strength. Soon, people began to speak of the “free world,” to distinguished Democratic countries (and even some non-communist autocratic states) from the vast regions behind the Iron Curtain.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17771-17837). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The Grand Alliance of World War II still had work to do in 1946. Even as Churchill warned of an Iron Curtain, Soviet military judges sat alongside American, British, and French jurists in the German city of Nuremberg. The city had been the scene of Hitler’s monster Nazi party rallies in the 1930s. It was also infamous because of the Nuremberg Code, which had deprived Germany’s Jews of their citizenship and had prescribed the death penalty for a Jew having sexual relations with an Aryan. Truman wanted the International Military Tribunal to try the leading Nazis. You wanted a full airing of the evidence is the German leaders so that no one could ever say, “Oh, it never happened—just a lot of propaganda—a pack of lies.”

During the war, Stalin had brusquely said the whole thing could be handled more easily simply by taking fifty thousand top German Nazi leaders and military officers out and shooting them. FDR responded, in a weak joke, that maybe “Uncle Joe” was too harsh and that only forty-nine thousand should be shot. Churchill was outraged: “The British Parliament and probably will never tolerate mass executions.” Stalin persisted. “The Soviets must be under no illusion on this point,” Churchill said, becoming more vehement. He dramatically stalked out of the Tehran conference room, saying, “I would rather be taken out into the garden here and now and shot myself than to sully my own and my country’s honor by such infamy.”

Truman selected Justice Robert H. Jackson, FDR’s former attorney general and then a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, to lead the U.S prosecution team at Nuremberg. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) was not without critics in the United States. Senator Robert A. Taft, leader of the isolationist bloc, said the proceedings smacked of a “spirit of vengeance” and said, “The hanging of the eleven men will be a plot on America which we shall longer regret.” Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone privately even complained about “Jackson’s high-grade lynching party.”

The Nuremberg Trials were no lynching. Overwhelming evidence was presented on the guilt of the accused Nazis. Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels had avoided trial by committing suicide. But Hermann Goering, Rudolph Hess, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Generals Keitel and Jodl, Admirals Raeder and Dönitz, and Albert Speer were among the twenty-four key defendants who were confronted by irrefutable evidence of their crimes. Each of the defendants was afforded legal counsel. Each was permitted to summon witnesses to refute the charges against him. In the end, the Nuremberg Trials established an important precedent: that “following orders” was no defense against charges of mass murder, genocide, and gross violations of human rights.

At home, November 1946 meant a political shakeup. “Had enough?” was the Republican slogan in the off-year elections. Americans were impatient that the most rapid demobilization and world history was not more rapid still. As wartime price controls eased, inflation shot up. Even ground beef became too expensive for the average American dinner table. With the spike in consumer prices came wage demands from labor. 1946 saw the most strides in American history.

President Truman’s very high approval ratings during the euphonic days of victory over Germany and Japan took a tumble. His broad Missouri twang and flat delivery were compared unfavorably with FDR’s elegant phrasing and patrician Hudson River accent. Normally tolerant folks who philosophically said “to error is human” now became your double and repeated the current slam: “to err is Truman.” Republicans rode the sky of voter dissatisfaction into a strong victory and both houses of Congress. In California, Republicans elected a young Richard Nixon to the House. Bucking the GOP trend, though, was Massachusetts Democrat John F. Kennedy, a decorated war hero. The unelected Truman was widely dismissed as a single-termer. Now, he would face an 80th Congress dominated by his political opponents.

His opponents underestimated the resourceful Missourian, however. Truman was a fierce political fighter, but no blind partisan. He invited former President Herbert Hoover to the White House; the much vilified Republican hurried to an Oval Office meeting. When Harry asked him to undertake a survey of world food resources, Hoover bolted and ran from the office without saying a word. Shocked by the Californian’s rudeness, Truman turned angrily to his agriculture secretary for an explanation: “Don’t you realize, Mister President, the man couldn’t answer? There were tears in his eyes.” Composing himself, Hoover quickly phoned Harry to accept the assignment. He apologized for his sudden flight, saying, “Mr. President, since 1932 no one has asked me to do anything for my country. You are the first one.” It was simple human gestures like this that won Harry the tribute from Dean Acheson: “The Captain with a Mighty Heart.”

Truman was decisive. The presidency is supremely the institution where decisions are made. Truman even had a sign placed on his desk: “The Buck Stops Here.” FDR made decisions, too, but he was famously even maddeningly indirect. Many of FDR’s most important decisions were non-decisions; that is, he deliberately strung out the process of decision-making so that his desired and was achieved by the exhaustion of all other alternatives. FDR’s style of leadership struck the orderly, methodical Acheson as “chaotic.” Few could deny, however, that it Roosevelt at the center of every circle.

Truman never saw a problem he didn’t tackle, or a hornets’ nest he didn’t whack. For example, when General de Gaulle was too slow in removing French troops from the American Occupation Zone of Germany, Truman bluntly told him to get out or risk an immediate cut off of U.S. aid. The prickly de Gaulle got out. Too many Americans, FDR seemed to have been born in the White House; he wore the presidency has naturally as he wore his stylish navy boat cloak. Truman, it was sad, was like having your next-door neighbor as president.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17849-17895). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

. . . The Truman Doctrine pledged the United States to give financial aid to those countries struggling to resist subversion by antidemocratic forces.

Truman’s “get tough with Russia” policy split the Roosevelt coalition. The “Progressives”—a group that included Communists, a much larger number of fellow travelers and millions of sincere peace advocates—blamed the Cold War on Truman. But we know that Stalin had his own review of East-West relations. While he was not the reckless warmonger that Hitler was, Stalin by no means wanted peace with the West. His foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov—”the Hammer”—was a man Churchill described as having the “smile of a Siberian winter.” Molotov candidly described his bosses attitude: “Stalin looked at it this way: World War I rested one country from capitalist slavery [the USSR]. World War II has created a socialist system [the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe]; and the third will finish off imperialism forever.” So long as Stalin—or anyone else in the Soviet Union—saw security as the “zero-sum game” in which the USSR could only be secure by threatening or destroying potential adversaries, the Cold War was unavoidable.

Truman showed remarkable humility in adopting the policy of his secretary of state, George C. Marshall. Truman had admired the five-star general for years. Even as a senator, Truman had called Marshall the “greatest living American.” When Marshall delivered the commencement address at Harvard in 1947, he called for U.S. aid to stricken Europe. Only if America helped rebuild their shattered economies, Marshall said, could democracy be restored. Truman embraced the policy wholeheartedly. To prevent Republican opposition to him from blocking the necessary good work, he immediately dubbed the program “The Marshall Plan.” Secretary of Marshall had extended the offer of not only to the nations of Western Europe, but he also generously held out a helping hand to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, too. Stalin rejected the extended hand—and forced his satellites to refuse it as well. Nonetheless, the Marshall plan was, and remains, one of the greatest achievements of the Truman administration. If it was not “the most unsordid act in history”—Churchill had reserved that title for Land-Lease—it was surely the second most unsordid act in history.

While Truman tried, with some success, to frame a bipartisan foreign-policy, he continued to appeal to liberals for support of his domestic initiatives. The G.I. Bill of Rights enabled millions to go to college, buy homes, and start farms and businesses. It was an unprecedented government effort to assist returning veterans. Truman even worked with the conservative Senator Robert Taft—”Mr. Republican”—on public housing bills designed to relieve the postwar shortage.

Republicans soon responded to labor troubles, however, bypassing the Taft-Hartley Bill, one of the most important pieces of labor legislation in American history. Taft was very concerned about communist penetration of labor unions. So were labor leader[s] Walter Reuther and Minneapolis Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey. They were unwilling, however, to endorse Taft’s harsh medicine. Truman had little choice but to veto the Taft-Hartley Bill.

Congress—with many Democrats joining the majority Republicans—soon overrode Truman’s veto. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 banned the closed shop, a requirement that only union members could be hired. It mandated an eight and eighty-day “cooling off” period if a threatened strike would affect health or safety nationwide. The law made it illegal to donate union dues to political candidates. It also required union officers to affirm under oath that they were not communist. When Taft-Hartley became law, it placed a permanent check on the growth of unions in America.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17905-17932). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

RED STARS IN HOLLYWOOD

The collapse of the wartime alliance with the Soviets depressed and disappointed millions of Americans who have high hopes for postwar cooperation for peace. No group of Americans was more dismayed by the turn of events than the Hollywood film community. During the war, no one had been more enthusiastic to win a victory than Hollywood producers, directors, and stars. It’s not surprising why. Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany had horrified liberals everywhere. His violent anti-Semitism was clear to thoughtful people. When the Communist Party’s chief Hollywood recruiter, Otto Katz, came calling, doors opened before him. “Columbus discovered America,” Katz would say, “but I discovered Hollywood.” With “Uncle Joe” Stalin as a wartime ally of America and Britain, recruitment and for the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in Tinsel Town was not difficult. Many Hollywood people were specially drawn to the Communist party’s open condemnation of anti-Semitism and racial bias. Thus, there was great and anxiety when French Communist party boss Jacques Duclos publicly declared that there was a Cold War between the United States and USSR. Duclos was an obedient servant of the Kremlin. This new clash would test the loyalties of thousands of Americans.

Olivia de Havilland was known to millions of moviegoers worldwide as the beloved “Melanie” in the huge 1939 movie hit, Gone With the Wind. (Even Hitler had watched the movie—and liked it.” Miss de Havilland tossed away the pro-Soviet part of a speech she was scheduled to give in Seattle in June 1946. It had been written for her by Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Instead, she delivered new lines written for her by James Roosevelt, an anti-Communist liberal and son of the late president. De Havilland’s tough speech was denounced by Hollywood’s left wing. When a young actor, Ronald of Reagan, spoke up in defense of Olivia de Havilland’s right to express her own ideas, Reagan was denounced as “fastest scum.” Soon, Reagan, de Havilland, and other stars left the Communist-dominated Hollywood Independent Citizen’s Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, known as HICCASP.

“Kill him! Kill him!” That was the cry of strikers on 27 September 1946 outside the MGM film Studios in Culver City, California. They had just knocked down Deputy Dean Stafford with a bottle after he’d become separated from other police sent in to keep the strikers from using a violence. The strikers were being egged on by the head of the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU),  Herb Sorrell. Sorrell was a Communist Party member who had founded the large union. The CSU was a collection of support staff—cartoonists, office workers, and skilled filmworkers. These jobs were vital to the industry, but they combined low pay, long hours, and no glamour. Sorrell flew above the fray—literally. He shouted orders to his union members on the picket lines as he flew over the MGM Studios in his private plane. Although Sorrell had clearly incited the violence, the Communist newspaper People’s Daily World ran lurid headlines such as “Blood Flows As Cops Club Picketing Vets.”

The cops did use their clubs, but Sorrell had made sure there would be violence for the cameras. The Communist skillfully wrapped themselves and their cause in the honor of returning World War II veterans.

Sorrell didn’t apologize for the violence he had spurred on. As the CSU strike dragged on and got worse, Sorrell confronted members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), demanding that the highly paid movie stars support the members of his union who are just scraping by. Sorrell told Ronald Reagan, then president of the screen actors Guild, that “when it ends up, there’ll be only one man running labor in Hollywood, and that man will be me.” He refused to accept any responsibility for the violence he had sparked. “We can no more control our members then [SAG] can keep your members from committing rape.”

In November 1946 the Republicans had just swept control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928, and all of organized labor feared the worst. Labor convened an emergency meeting in Chicago. At this session of the American Federation of Labor, many actors came together to appeal to the AFL to reject Sorrell and his CSU violence.

The SAG group, included some of Hollywood’s biggest names — Eddy Arnold, Gene Kelly, Robert Montgomery, George Murphy, Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Jane Wyman. Sorrell was unimpressed. At a contentious meeting in the Knickerbocker Hotel, the Communist union boss yelled at Gene Kelly, once a good friend of his. Then Ronald Reagan stood up to Sorrell. “Herb, as far as I’m concerned, you have shown here tonight that you intend it to welsh on your statement of two nights ago . . . you do not want peace in the motion picture industry!” The labor union members and the actors who heard him cheered lustily. It was a dramatic clash, and it marked Reagan for leadership.

The fight over Communism in Hollywood didn’t end then. It went on for many years and continues to roil the film industry to this day. Communist and ex-Communists battled over the Hollywood “blacklist”—a list of writers who could not find work because of their ties to Moscow. It was, in fact, Communists themselves who first introduced the practice of blacklisting. Edward Dmytryk was a talented movie director and a Communist. He was walking across the studio lot at RKO pictures in 1945 when he mentioned to a producer friend, Adrian Scott, an interesting new book, Darkness at Noon. Scott, also a Communist, shushed Dymtryk, telling him party members were not allowed to read anything written by Arthur Koestler. Koestler was a disillusioned Communist, and his works lampooned the Soviet dictator. The Hungarian-born Koestler used Stalin’s real name—Dzhugashvili—to satirize the heavily laden jargon of Communist writing: Dzhugashvilese. (As it happened, it took Hollywood a full ten years to make a film of Koestler’s powerful book—1955. By that time, Stalin was dead and many of the “blacklisted” Hollywood Communists were writing again.)

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17939-17988). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

HA TIKVA—THE HOPE OF ISRAEL

With tensions rising in Eastern Europe, suddenly Americans and Jews throughout the world looked to the middle east for a stunning development. On 14 May 1948 a new state was born an ancient people restored to their land: Israel. The Jewish state had been authorized by the United Nations and created by Zionist — a movement of mainly European and American Jews who sought nationwide for the millions of Children of Israel who had been exiled for 2000 years in the Diaspora.

When David Ben-Gurion, the new prime minister, announced the birth of Israel, he presented their Declaration of Independence. As with the American document, the Israeli document offered to a candid world the reasons for the new nation’s being: “Here are [the Jews'] spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained it to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.”

Truman had overcome the strenuous objections of the man he admired most in the world—Secretary of State Marshall. During a face-to-face meeting in the Oval Office, Marshall warned the president that recognizing Israel would endanger U.S. objectives in the middle east. Resisting Communist infiltration and that critical region would be harder if we antagonized fifty million Arabs, the State Department feared. Truman’s secretary of state told him he would vote against him for president if he recognized the State of Israel. This must have pained Truman deeply. Still, Harry was a shrewd Kansas City politician, too. He knew that millions of Jewish voters in America’s cities would be especially relieved and grateful. Truman was in a tough contest with the progressive Henry Wallace for the support of this traditionally liberal, very democratic group of voters.

Truman also listened to the earnest pleas of Eddie Jacobson, his partner in his first, failed haberdashery store in Kansas City. Jacobson brought Chaim Weizmann—who would become Israel’s first president—to see his old friend. This time, Truman overrode General Marshall’s objections.

Psalm 137 was one of Truman’s favorites. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” Truman as a U.S. senator had given strong support to the World War I-era Balfour Declaration of the British Government. That 1917 document had promised the Jews a “national homeland in Palestine.” Now in 1948 Truman felt it was time that that promise was honored. He extended the United States’ official recognition in eleven minutes after Ben-Gurion’s announcement. America was the first nation in the world to recognize Israel as a de facto state.

Truman had been influenced by a higher authority—the Bible. Very simply, Truman came to believe that after the Holocaust, the Jews “deserved a home.” It was a view he shared with most Americans of the time. U.S. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter was a man normally not given to emotional outbursts. He wrote to Chaim Weizmann: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; happily, you can now say that. . . .” Truman’s announcement came and not a minute too soon. As soon as Israel declared her independence, she was invaded by five Arab neighbors. She was soon fighting for her very life.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17905-18017). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE BERLIN AIRLIFT OF 1948

The postwar settlement in Germany had created two rival systems. Western Germany, occupied by U.S., British, and French troops, comprised more than two thirds of Germany’s territory and population. This zone was free and was quickly rebuilding a vibrant economy. Eastern Germany was a grim, totalitarian police state wholly under Stalin’s heavy thumb. The Soviets had looted their occupation zone. There was little recovery in the vast, gray, dreary realm. Hitler’s capitol of Berlin was also divided. East Berlin with Soviet. West Berlin was free. But West Berlin was precariously located 110 miles inside Communist East Germany.

On 24 June 1948, Stalin applied the screws to West Berlin. He initiated a blockade by cutting off all rail and road traffic to the surrounded Free City of Berlin. Stalin was not known to be the poker player that Truman was. But he nonetheless found a way to force Truman to “put up or shut up.” Here was Stalin’s clever challenge to Truman’s famous decisiveness. Would Harry forces way into the city, using tanks or bulldozers to knock down Soviet barriers? This would guarantee World War III, less than three years after the most terrible war in human history. Or would he surrender two and a half million West Berliners to communist aggression and thus show the world America’s powerlessness to defend freedom abroad? General Clay was Truman’s military governor in Germany. He reported that he had food stocks for only thirty-six days; coal reserves would last only forty-five days. Clay said Stalin’s move was one of the most ruthless efforts in modern times to use mass starvation for political coercion.”

Truman decided. He would not have war or surrender. He refused to accept either of Stalin’s forced choices. Instead, he brought the incredible power of America to bear on this most dangerous of post war crises. Truman immediately ordered that that West Berlin would be supplied by air. Harry would go the extra mile to keep freedom alive in its most exposed outpost.

Thus began the Berlin airlift. Over the next nine months, the United States and Britain conducted 277,804 flights into Templehof Airport carrying a total of 2,325,809 tons of supplies into the besieged city, more than a ton for every man woman and child. So successful was the airlift that rations for each Berliner actually rose. Nearly one hundred U.S. and British servicemen lost their lives keeping Berliners free. Just three years later, American and British bombers had been pounding Berlin to rubble. Now, U.S. C-47 cargo planes were dropping candy by parachute to little German children, who scrambled to retrieve it. As a result of the Berlin airlift and the heroic struggle of the West Berliners, the free sectors of that great city were transformed in western highs from a citadel of Nazism to a courageous outpost of freedom.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 17808-18040). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“GIVE ‘EM HELL, HARRY!”

. . .

Harry battled through the Midwest aboard his campaign train. He had to borrow money to keep the train chugging ahead. Truman denounced the Republican Majority on Capitol Hill as the “do nothing eightieth Congress.” Senator Taft complained that the president was denouncing Congress at every “whistle stop” in the West. And even that statement came back to haunt the luckless Republicans. It was said to show their contempt for the people in small towns. In a fight for his political life, Truman threw away prepared texts. He was a flat speaker with a text, anyway. From the back of his train, Truman rose to the occasion. “Give ‘em Hell, Harry!” Yelled delighted listeners in the partisan crowds he addressed with increasing vigor. Truman’s train, the Ferdinand Magellan, became the command center of the American government. Harry travels and unprecedented 21,928 miles in that whistle stop campaign of 1948. Just as bluntly as he attacked Republicans, Harry scalded “Wallace and his Communists.” In fact, Wallace’s campaign was dominated by Communists who secretly took their orders from Moscow.

The last minute hustle paid off. “Dewey defeats Truman” read the headlines in the early edition of the Chicago Tribune. It remains one of the greatest embarrassments in the history of journalism. Harry’s grinning picture as he holds the Tribune up for the crowd’s delight is one of the classic American political photographs.

Truman pulled off a victory few but him had predicted. Hubert Humphrey’s strategy proved correct. A huge turnout of black voters and liberal supporters of civil rights had given Truman the edge. Even with Governor Earl Warren on his ticket, Dewey was unable to carry the important state of California. Friends of Israel proved grateful for Truman’s timely help. And organized labor was thrilled by Harry’s veto of the Taft-Hartley law. That veto won for Truman the strong support of Ronald Reagan and most of the non-Communist Hollywood Left. Pictures of Harry playing the piano while actors Lauren Bacall draped herself glamorously on top of the instrument symbolized Truman’s populist appeal.

The creation of Americans for Democratic action (ADA), led by a leading liberals like Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and a theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, enabled Roosevelt Democrats to stand strong for labor and civil rights, while resisting the siren song of Communism. For a quarter-century after word, the ADA was to be an important leadership group for the anti-Communist left in America.

Truman’s Fair Deal program was largely blocked by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. One of his major agenda items was Medicare, not enacted for another twenty years. Generally, Truman was too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the conservatives. Still, his inspired leadership in foreign policy and his frenetic, aggressive campaign style enabled him to defy all pollsters and pundits and score a knockout.

Truman won 24,179,346 popular votes (49.8 percent) and 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 21,991,291 (45.1 percent) and 189 electoral votes. Former Vice President Wallace won 1,157,326 popular votes (2.4 percent) and no electoral votes. The Dixiecrats’ challenge won 1,176,125 popular votes (2.4 percent) and 39 electoral votes from the Deep South.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 18118-18144). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE KOREAN CONFLICT

Ninety thousand North Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel into South Korea on 25 June 1950. Truman, stung by charges his administration had “lost” China to the Communists, knew he had to resist this naked aggression. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was then in charge of the occupation of Japan as what some called a “Star-Spangled Mikado [Emperor].” MacArthur advised Truman to send U.S. air cover from Japan to help the retreating forces of the Republic of Korea (ROK).

. . .

The North Korean invasion had shocked the world. The newly created Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) failed seriously in not detecting the buildup of “Red” tanks and infantry north of the 38th Parallel. ROK forces retreated pell-mell. American troops performed badly. Poorly trained and equipped, soft from easy occupation duty in Japan, some of our soldiers allowed themselves to be overrun and taken prisoner. Within weeks, the Red had encircled American and ROK forces in a narrow band around the South Korean port city of Pusan. MacArthur was determined to break out of this “Pusan Perimeter.”

. . .

When MacArthur met Truman at Wake Island (the scene of bitter fighting in World War II) on 14 October 1950, UN forces had thrown the Reds back and were advancing toward the North Korea-China border on the Yalu River. MacArthur assured President Truman at Wake Island that there was “very little chance” of a massive intervention by Communist Chinese forces.

But two hundred thousand Communist Chinese “volunteers” defied MacArthur’s prediction and stormed across the frozen Yalu River. Americans were shocked and dispirited. US Marines caught by the sudden invasion took heavy casualties at the Chosin Resevoir as they “attacked in a different direction.” It was Korea’s coldest winter in a century. The “Frozen Chosin” was the name the Marine “band of Brothers” took for themselves. Samuel Eliot Morison calls Marine General Oliver Smith’s “fighting retreat” from the Chosin Reservoir “one of the most glorious in the annals of that gallant corps, recalling  Xenophon’s retreat of the immortal 10,000 to the sea.” In less flowery terms, the “grunts” on the ground called the long retreat “bugging out.” Nonetheless, their courage and discipline under the harshest conditions should earn undying praise.

MacArthur wanted to carry the war north of the Yalu River, bombing the bridges and the staging areas inside Mainland China. Britain and France vetoed this idea. Britain was fighting a communist insurgency in Malaysia; France, likewise, was bogged down by babbling Communist in Indo-China.

Truman remembered George F. Kennan’s “Long telegram” (his lengthy and influential cable of 5,363 words). Containment was the policy it recommended. Containment meant holding free territory and not yielding it up to the Communists. It did not mean using force to liberate territories already under Communist control. Now that Stalin, too, had the atomic bomb, that strategy might bring a nuclear World War III.

. . .

The imperious MacArthur wanted to threaten the Chinese with the atomic bomb if they did not agree to negotiate a peace in Korea. General MacArthur then committed the act that led to his summary dismissal. He released a “military appraisal” that explained why he had to carry the war to the north. He went further, writing to the Republican leader in the House of Representatives to show why his, MacArthur’s view, and not Truman’s, was the correct one. “There was no substitute for victory,” was MacArthur’s ringing declaration.

Truman immediately fired MacArthur. It did not matter to many that Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall and Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley—also five-star generals—recommended this course of action for rank insubordination. Truman had to endure a firestorm of protest and abuse. California Senator Richard Nixon called for MacArthur’s immediate reinstatement, and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, a notorious boozer, accused the commander in chief of sacking MacArthur while he, Truman, was drunk!

McCarthy had gained sudden prominence the year before when he told a Republican audience in Wheeling, West Virginia: “I have in my hand [a list of] . . . cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist party” in the State Department. The exact number McCarthy used remains controversial to this day. Thus was born “McCarthyism.” McCarthy addressed a real problem: disloyal elements within the US government. But his approach to this real problem was to cause untold grief to the country he claimed to love.

Apparently, no one at the GOP meeting thought to call McCarthy’s bluff by yelling out: “Read the names.”

“Old soldiers never die,” General MacArthur told a joint meeting of Congress; “they just fade away.” It was an emotional moment. American soldiers were dying in frigid Korea. One of our greatest generals told us that the president and his team were not trying to win. And some strident voices were saying that that was because they didn’t want to win, that they were influenced by Soviet agents. Small wonder that Truman’s approval ratings sank to in the story to Lowell of twenty-three percent!

Yet, we now can tell that it is precisely in such moments that a president’s strength of character is tested. However brilliant and insightful MacArthur was, this country could never tolerate a military commander going over the head of the civilian authority. George Washington wouldn’t do that. George McClellan didn’t do that. It can never be allowed.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 18306-18346). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE MAN FROM INDEPENDENCE

. . .

Harry Truman prized his reputation for “Plain Speaking” honesty. Once, when a Washington Post music critic panned the president’s daughter’s singing, Harry Truman responded as an outraged, protective father.  Harry immediately wrote the offending critic a letter, saying, “You’re an eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.” He even threatened him. When I meet you, he wrote, “you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!” Then, in typical Truman fashion, he affixed his own three-cent stamp to the envelope. He wouldn’t abuse his presidential franking privilege when threatening a columnist with a punch in the nose!

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 18380-18384). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

When Harry Truman returned with his devoted wife, Bess, to their home in Independence, Missouri, he prepared for life as a former president. There was no pension in the 1950s. There were few opportunities for him. But he returned uncomplaining to the community that had nurtured him. Asked by a television reporter what was the first thing he did on returning to the family home, Harry, plain-spoken as ever, said, “I took the grips [suitcases] up into the attic.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 18405-18407). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Eight

EISENHOWER AND HAPPY DAYS

(1953-1961)

“I LIKE IKE”

. . .

When Eisenhower resigned and returned home from Paris, he finally spoke out on political issues. He was opposed to Big Government, he said, to high taxes, inflation, and the “Kremlin menace.” Clearly, he was a Republican.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 18486-18488). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE KREMLIN’S LONG SHADOW

. . .

Just weeks after his inauguration, President Eisenhower received stunning news. On 5 March 1953, the Kremlin announced the death of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. It is not clear even today exactly how Stalin died. Did Nikita Khrushchev prevent the dictator from receiving medical attention? Or had Stalin’s latest purge, part of the so-called Jewish Doctor’s Plot, deprived him of care because all doctors were terrified to go near him? Natan Sharansky, today in Israeli Cabinet member, recalled his father sending him off to a  Moscow kindergarten that morning with stern instructions: When the other children cry, you cry. When they write poems to praise Stalin, you write them, too. Never reveal the joy that seized the hearts of millions of Soviet Jews in their crowded apartments. Even as he died, Stalin was preparing a new purge of highly placed Soviet Jews.

Outside the grim walls of the Kremlin, however, little of this was known. Here at home, Eisenhower was presented with a horrible decision on becoming president. Would he allow the execution of convicted atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to proceed, or would he grant executive clemency?

It had been the Truman administration that prosecuted the Rosenbergs. Judge Irving Kaufman, who presided at their trial, was a Democratic appointee, not a Republican.

Time magazine reported the verdict in its 16 April 1951 issue. In sentencing them to death, Judge Kaufman had sternly told the Rosenbergs:

Plain, deliberate, contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed. I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb ,,, has already caused the communist aggression in Korea … and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.

World figures like Pope Pius XII and Albert Einstein appealed to the new president for clemency. Leftists around the world soon accused Eisenhower of anti-Semitism. International communism raised a view and cry against Ike personally. Communist novelist Howard Fast wrote that the “stale smell of fascism” was detected around a Eisenhower by “the Jewish masses of our country.”

This was an obscene charge against the man who had forced German civilians to walk through liberated Nazi death camps and who had ordered army filmmakers to record it for prosperity the irrefutable evidence of the Holocaust. Ike maintained a dignified silence as the convicted spies went to their deaths in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York.

President Eisenhower was able to announce the cease-fire in Korea on 27 July 1953. This uneasy truce has lasted until the present day. The Korean War killed 36,000 Americans, 600,000 Chinese and some 2,000,000 North and South Koreans. The De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea along the thirty-eighth parallel remains one of the most volatile borders on earth.

In this Cold War atmosphere of real treason, rumored treason, and fear of espionage, Senator Joseph McCarthy had risen to power and prominence. Campaigning in McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin, Eisenhower failed to defend his friend and sponsor, General Marshall, from McCarthy’s vicious attacks. Eisenhower privately told associates he refused “to get into a pissing contest with that skunk.” Eisenhower knew that McCarthy—like all demagogues—thrives on publicity. It was like oxygen to a fire. Eisenhower said, “I really believe that nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of troublemaking as to ignore him. This he cannot stand.” He sent to the Senate the nomination of Charles “Chip” Bohlen as his ambassador to the Soviet Union. It was an indirect challenge to McCarthy and McCarthy’s cohorts. Bohlen added been FDR’s interpreter at Yalta. Ike’s action proved he was determined to be his own man and to have his own men around him—whether McCarthy liked it or not.

President Eisenhower invoked executive privilege to keep McCarthy from going on a “fishing expedition.” Whether it is finishing to “hook” embarrassing details or legitimate legislative oversight is sometimes in the eye of the beholder, but Ike had a growing number of supporters using the tools at their disposal to oppose the senator. Veteran CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow opposed McCarthy on his popular television broadcast See It Now. “We cannot defend freedom by deserting it at home,” he said. The Senate’s only woman, Maine’s Republican Margaret Chase Smith, fearlessly took on McCarthy.

When McCarthy dragged Ike’s beloved army before his committee, the same television cameras that aided McCarthy’s rise would become his undoing. McCarthy tried to “investigate” the promotion of the left-wing dentist at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. (And was the good dentist putting radioactive fillings in the G.I.s’ teeth so the Communists could trace them on the battlefield?) Republican senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont ridiculed McCarthy:

Whole countries are now being taken over by the Communists … the world seems to be mobilizing for the great battle of Armageddon…. [But Senator McCarthy] dons his war paint. He goes into his war dance. He emits war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink dentist.

Roy Cohn and G. David Schine were young staff members on McCarthy’s committee. They had gone on a taxpayer-funded junket through Europe, descending on U.S. Embassies and sniffing out subversive literature in U.S. funded libraries. The president, in a commencement address at Dartmouth, denounced “book burners”—a clear reference to the antics of Cohn and Schine. Unleashed by Ike’s closest advisers, the army let it be known that McCarthy’s attack dog, Roy Cohn, had sought special treatment for his young associate, G. David Schine, when Schine was drafted. Cohn even used his influence to have Private Schine exempted from K.P., the Army disclosed.

McCarthy’s constant badgering of witnesses, his unstable personal conduct, and his general recklessness was his undoing. He interrupted a witness to make sure that some damaging information about a young lawyer was put in the record—and broadcast on national television. The lawyer in question had once belonged to the Communist-backed National Lawyers’ Guild. Now he worked for the same law firm that represented the Army at Army-McCarthy hearings. The army’s attorney, the proper Bostonian Joseph Welch, skewered McCarthy with this famous retort:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

McCarthy supporters were set to go after Ralph Bunche, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. Ike was incensed. He told aides that Bunche was “a superior man, a credit to our country. I just can’t stand by and permit a man like that to be chopped to pieces because of McCarthy feeling.” In the end, Bunche told White House aides he could handle his case alone. Dr. Bunche testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Still, when Ike asked Bunche to come to a quiet White House dinner, the skilled black diplomat gratefully accepted.

Eisenhower always thought McCarthy was more interested in hunting headlines and catching Communists. Eisenhower surely knew the old saw: “Give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself.” He gave McCarthy enough rope in the Army-McCarthy hearings, as he took command of the administration’s efforts to collect McCarthy’s wings.

The rope this time was the coaxial cable of a television camera. Like the mythical Icarus, McCarthy flew high on wings of his own fashioning. Flying too close to the sun—in this case the glare of national publicity—the wax melted and he plummeted to earth.

McCarthy was soon censored by the full Senate by an overwhelming 67-22. The vote was taken  2 December 1954, less than two years after Eisenhower came to office. Behind the scenes, Ike urged Republicans to back the censure motion. It was an outstanding example of what has been called “The Hidden-hand Presidency.”

Three years later, still drinking heavily, Joe McCarthy died. He was, at forty-nine, a burnt-out case. As Michael Barone writes of him, he was “utterly unscrupulous, untethered to any truth, unhampered by any sense of fairness, and undisciplined by any desire to accomplish a concrete goal.” Worst of all, McCarthy besmirched the honorable cause of anti-Communism. He discredited legitimate efforts to counter Soviet subversion of American institutions. From this point on, it would be necessary for disloyal people or groups to yell “McCarthyism” to distract public attention from real problems. For too long, McCarthy had operated with the active cooperation of mainstream Republican politicians like Senator Robert A. Taft and Senator William F. Knowland. He was even defended by the brilliant young William Ave. Buckley Jr. unfortunately, McCarthy’s fall did not serve as a cautionary tale to all Americans. Robert Welch, founder of the fiercely anti-Communist John Birch Society. Became convinced that President Eisenhower was “a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”

This ridiculous charge was made against the man who had written in his memoir, with evident horror, of the Soviet method of clearing a minefield by marching right through it! Marshal Zhukov personally confirmed this method when Ike visited Moscow in 1945. The Soviets’ blatant disregard for human life—like the Nazis’ concentration camps—made a deep impression on the humane Eisenhower.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 18559-18639). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“WE WILL BURY YOU!”

“We will bury you!” shouted the ebullient Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. Khrushchev presented a new challenge to America’s political, military, and diplomatic supremacy. Unlike the cautious, secretive Joseph Stalin who rarely left his Kremlin apartments, it seemed Khrushchev was everywhere. He traveled extensively outside the USSR, especially in the nonaligned countries of Asia and Africa. The “winds of change” that followed the colonization of the British and French empires were blowing strongly in favor of socialism.

Khrushchev exercised a rough, peasant charm and a crude sense of humor. A highly intelligent, shrewd survivor of numberless Kremlin purges and plots, he was a short, roly-poly bald man with prominent warts and a fifty-two inch waistline. But he moved like a thin man. Khrushchev moved vigorously, creating the impression of a Soviet Union leading the way into the future. When Sputnik bleep-bleeped its way across the skies every ninety minutes, Khrushchev pointed to this coup as evidence of Soviet technological superiority. The Soviets, he said, would win the space race.

Americans did not know they were even in a space race. The Soviet satellite program was launched in total secrecy. That contributed to the shock. Again, Jim Hagerty’s response was total openness. America would invite the world to watch the United States launch its own earth satellite. Hagerty was surely right, but this decision had disastrous consequences for American prestige — at least in the short run. As the world looked on, several U.S. rockets blew up on the launch pad. “Kaput-nik” teased your reverent headline writers. A cartoonist showed a golf ball trailing Sputnik into orbit. Maybe the president, and enthusiastic golfer, could put that in orbit! It was an international embarrassment. Senator Kennedy and Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a dissident Republican, began speaking of the “missile gap.” They said the United States had fallen behind the Soviets during Eisenhower’s watch. The charge was untrue.

Ike knew it was untrue. When Khrushchev had shot down hikes “Open Skies” proposal in Geneva in 1955, the president authorized secret flights over the USSR. The high-flying American U-2 jets provided U.S. intelligence with a treasure trove of information. Ike was angry that his political opponents were taking advantage of his enforced silence.

Similarly, the United States had a great advantage in submarines. In 1958, the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, went from the Pacific to the Atlantic under the polar ice cap. (Later Nautilus would surface at the North Pole to claim the prize of centuries.) At last, the Northwest passage had been discovered! Led by the genius of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the United States’ nuclear submarine force provided America and the world with the means of “massive retaliation.” In a dangerous and violent world, Rickover’s “boomers” and attack submarines would provide the “nuclear umbrella” that sheltered America’s freedom.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 18801-18822). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

IKE’S LAST YEARS

. . .

Eisenhower was criticized by many writers of the adversary culture. Smart, “hip” young comedians like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce mercilessly lampooned the fractured syntax and confusing grammar of the old general. Serious social analysts deplored what they saw as stultifying conformity and soulless materialism. John Kenneth Galbraith derided The Affluent Society and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit question: “What price success?” Cars with wraparound chrome and outrageous fins for mom and dad, for Davy Crockett coonskin cap for Junior, and a “hula hoop” for sister—all this represented what some saw as the mindlessness of Eisenhower’s “Happy Days.” Television was denounced as “a vast wasteland” by Federal communications Commissioner Newton Minow, Adlai Stevenson’s law partner. Comedian Fred Allen called television “bubble gum for the eyes.”

But television was not just the well-scrubbed version of family life represented by Ozzie and Harriet. Host Ed Sullivan presented not only Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” but also serious opera arias by Richard Tucker and Leontyne Price, the light wit of Victor Borge, and the artistry of mime Marcel Marceau.” Today, we view the 1950s as television’s “golden era.” Ronald Reagan’s weekly announcement of the high-toned GE Theater surely contributed to television’s popularity—and his.

Those same television sets transmitted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful cries for freedom. In not a few years, those grainy black and white TV news pictures of vicious dogs attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators would help mightily to form the new national consensus for justice and freedom.

Ditto Eisenhower’s beloved highway system. Before Ike, hundreds of American communities really were literally isolated. As soon as those four-lane “interstates” were laid down, however, they could convey buses carrying Freedom Riders to remote towns. The revolutions in communications and transportation that Eisenhower promoted by his policies meant freedom rising. Quietly, Eisenhower filled the benches of the federal judiciary with judges who would fearlessly put an end to racial segregation. Will future generations see those changes, too, as part of the Hidden-hand Presidency?

The late Stephen Ambrose sums up Ike best for us today:

He was so comforting, so grandfatherly, so calm, so sure of himself, so skillful in managing the economy, so experienced in ensuring America’s defenses, so expert in his control of the intelligence community, so knowledgeable about the world’s affairs, so nonpartisan and objective in his above-the-battle posture, so insistent on holding to the middle-of-the-road that he inspired a trust that was as broad and deep as that of any president since George Washington.

Eisenhower himself once responded to a complementary letter from Henry Wallace. FDR’s second vice president had made a number of speeches comparing Ike favorably with George Washington. Flattered, Ike sent this courteous reply: “My sense of pride is all the greater because I’ve never [agreed] with those who so glibly deprecate [Washington's] intellectual qualities. I think too many . . . confuse facility of expression with the wisdom; a love of the limelight with depth of perception. I’ve often felt the deep wish that The Good Lord had endowed me with [Washington's] greatness of mind and spirit.”

Eisenhower’s own assessment of his two terms was typically pithy: “[After Korea], the United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People ask how it happened—by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.” With the major exception of Cuba’s falling prey to a stealth Communist revolution, Ike’s defensive reaction is basically true. To top it all off, millions of Americans who grew up under his wise and good leadership can still say with genuine conviction: I like Ike!

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 18874-18904). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Nine

PASSING THE TORCH

(1961-1969)

“THE NEW FRONTIER”

. . .

Fully 78 percent of U.S. Catholics and 81 percent of American Jews voted for Kennedy.

And a last-minute phone call from the Kennedy campaign to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife had helped tip the balance in the black community for Kennedy. Dr. King had been jailed in Georgia on a minor traffic charge, and the Kennedy’s called to express their concern. Unlike other Protestants, who gave 38 percent of their votes to JFK, black Americans backed him by 70 percent.

On a sunny, frigid January day in 1961, the youngest man ever to be elected president delivered his Inaugural Address. In a world threatened by atheistic Communism, Kennedy reaffirmed his commitment to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence: “[The] rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.” He included a ringing call to service and sacrifice that thrilled millions: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” He concluded with these powerful words: “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19031-19040). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

. . . Informed that there was no way the United States could catch up with the Soviets in space for the next few years, JFK demanded answers from leaders of NASA. “Is there any place we can catch them? What can we do? Can we go around the moon before them? Can we put a man on the Moon before them? The new president’s science advisers told him we could beat the Soviets to the moon. That was all Kennedy needed to hear. We’ll do it, he said.

Instantly, Kennedy redefined the Space Race. From this point on, every Soviet first—the first woman in space, the first spacewalk, the first long-term orbital flight—would be measured against the over arching goal, Have they landed on the moon yet? Kennedy took a long stride toward winning the space race: He moved the finish line!

Soon, Americans would be able to hail their own space heroes, as first Navy Lieutenant Commander Alan B. Shepard and then the Air Force Captain Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom rocketed into space. The heat shield on John Glenn’s Friendship 7 space capsule nearly came off, an event fully recorded and shared with the world via live-action television. The world heaved a sigh of relief and marveled at Glenn’s cool courage as he faced the possibility of a flaming death.

Kennedy’s bold move left the Soviets and his domestic opponents flat-footed.

“Why their hurry to get to the moon?” asked Ike in the Saturday Evening Post.

Still, Republican critics seemingly forgot President Eisenhower’s determination not to militarize space when they condemned JFK for not doing so. And they criticized JFK’s Apollo moon program, as well.

“Why not tell the Soviets: ‘Very well, you have reached the moon, but meanwhile here in America we have been trying, however clumsily, to spread freedom and justice?” That was William F. Buckley Jr.’s response in Readers Digest. Senator Barry Goldwater had initially voted for the Apollo program; now he called it “a waste.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19084-19116). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“GODSPEED, JOHN GLENN”

Marine Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn. Lean and strong, his “high and tight haircut” marked him as the straight arrow that he was. He had met his wife, Annie, in the playpen in New Concord, Ohio. There had never been another girl in the world for him but this dark-eyed beauty. And just as Annie overcame the handicap of a speech impediment, John bested graduates of the nation’s elite service academies. At the press conference where the original Mercury 7 astronauts were announced, Glenn stole the spotlight by speaking out about his religious faith. Even in those more religiously demonstrative times, Glenn’s televised profession of faith appeared to many sophisticates as “uncool.”

He almost got blackballed by his fellow astronauts when he bluntly told them to “keep it zipped.” NASA officials were worried that a sex scandal might ground the famously high-flying jet jocks.

President Kennedy liked the gutsy combat pilot from the Buckeye State. He invited Glenn to the White House a few weeks before his scheduled flight in Friendship 7. It was to be the first U.S. effort to send a man into orbit around the earth. Kennedy had a great deal of his own political prestige riding with the Marine. Kennedy asked Glenn to roll out his charts, models, and maps in the Cabinet Room. He quizzed Glenn for more than an hour on every aspect of the flight. The president was insatiably curious.

Glenn and his fellow Mercury astronauts often evoke strong feelings in Americans. Many yearned to beat the Russians and genuinely loved these brave young men who were willing to risk their lives doing it. Tax attorney Leo DeOrsey was no exception. He had agreed to represent the astronauts with the media pro bono. As John Glenn prepared to rocket into space, it was revealed to his circle of family and friends that he had very little life insurance. DeOrsey told John and Annie Glenn that Lloyds of London had agreed to cover the astronaut for the expected six hours of his maiden flight—for a premium of $16,000! Several days later, however, DeOrsey called back to recommend that they turn down the Lloyds steel. He felt bad about it, he said “I’m not going to bet against you,” DeOrsey told Glenn. Instead, he gave a mutual friend a check for $100,000, made out to Annie Glenn just in case anything should happen to John. Astronaut Scott Carpenter, Glenn’s backup, was obviously moved as the Atlas rockets 367,000 pounds of thrust roared into action for liftoff.

“Godspeed, John Glenn,” Carpenter cried out. Tom O’Malley, the General Dynamic’s Corporation project director, added to his prayer: “May the good Lord ride with you all the way.” Glenn could hear none of this encouragement over the sound of his rocket engines. A heart-stopping moment occurred while Glenn was in orbit when mission control began to suspect that mysterious light “butterflies” Glenn reported meant that the space capsule’s heat shield had deployed too soon. To test it in flight was dangerous, too. When Glenn was instructed to throw the switch, he gingerly complied—after only a slight hesitation. The temperatures outside his capsule rose to 9500° Fahrenheit as he reentered the Earth’s atmosphere, lower, but not much lower, then the surface of the sun! Without the heat shield, Glenn would be incinerated. The world held its breath.

There was a period of radio silence during re-entry. It was anticipated, but now it only increased the tension. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, John Glenn showed the right stuff as his calm, professional voice broke through the static. The heat shield held! Once again, America had fired a shot heard ’round the world.

The destroyer USS Noa picked up John Glenn just minutes after his splashdown in the Atlantic. The country had a new hero. Later, Glenn’s sparred—only verbally—with a visiting Soviet cosmonaut, Gherman Titov.

Titov loudly proclaimed his view that Communist ideology was confirmed when he didn’t see God in space. “The God I believe in isn’t so small that I thought I would run into him just a little bit above the atmosphere,” Glenn responded with quiet dignity. Then he invited Titov and his wife to join him and Annie for an all-American cookout. Glenn’s skills in space exceeded his abilities with the backyard grill. As Al and Louise Shepard and the Titovs arrived in a limousine, John Glenn frantically beat out the flames that threatened to consume the stakes.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19141-19174). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

FREEDOM ON THE MARCH

The fact that Americans were enjoying continuing prosperity during the affluent 1960s made the Kennedy administration seem all the more successful. JFK was generally frustrated in his attempts to get legislation he backed through Congress. He pressed the Democratic controlled Congress to cut taxes. He was the first of his party to embrace the idea that cutting taxes could actually stimulate economic growth and increase government revenues. Kennedy failed to get Medicare approved. This government program to socialize medicine for the elderly had been on the agenda since Teddy Roosevelt’s failed bowl blues effort in 1912.

JFK did succeed in sending thousands of idealistic young Americans around the world in his Peace Corps. His Alianza para Progreso (Alliance for Progress) promised a new overture to America’s long-neglected allies in Latin America.

Jacqueline Kennedy was a vastly popular First Lady. She redecorated the White House and invited leading artists to grace the old mansion. Spanish cellist Pablo Casals offered a concert for peace or cooling reception. French writer André Malraux read. And always, the dashing young president and his lady brought off the ceremonial side of the White House with style and ease. Mrs. Kennedy’s love of culture and refinement added immeasurably to the appeal of this engaging young couple. The public delighted in pictures of young Caroline Kennedy riding her pony, Macaroni, and little John-John (JFK Jr.) peeking out from the knee hole of his dad’s historic desk. The popular Broadway show Camelot captured the imagination of the times. And Kennedy’s new Frontiersmen would not have strenuously objected to any comparison of their young vibrant administration with the mystical Knights of the Round Table. We do know that Kennedy, quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V, often used the phrase “we happy few, we band of brothers.” President Kennedy also introduced the impressive new White House arrival ceremony that we now take for granted. It was another of the Kennedy innovations that set a high cultural tone for the New Frontier presidency. As author John A. Barnes notes:

Before the aviation age, state visitors generally arrived by train and were created by the president or an official delegation at Washington, D. C.’s Union Station. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower usually journeyed to Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington to greet foreign guest. So did Kennedy in the early months of his presidency. But after a visit to London following the Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961, Kennedy discovered how the British Royal family received its guest. Instead of the queen going to the airport, the visitor came from the airport to the Queen at Buckingham palace, there to be formally welcomed. When Kennedy returned to Washington, he sketched out his ideas for an event to be held on the White House lawn, featuring military bands, march-pasts by soldiers are tired in colonial dress, and speeches by the president and his guest. Since that time, what has become known as the State arrival ceremony is a standard feature of Washington life.

The booming economy made conditions seem all the more intolerable for black Americans who were denied equal accommodations in hotels and restaurants, who faced discrimination in jobs and housing, and who were disqualified from voting in wide areas throughout the South. People talked about the “revolution of rising expectations.” The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution had asserted the right of the freedmen to vote, but federal enforcement was woefully lacking. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses were devices routinely employed in the former Confederate states to disenfranchise black voters.

President Kennedy’s administration asked the interstate commerce commission (ICC) to ban segregation at lunch counters and gazed in interstate commerce along the new interstate highways. Freedom riders from the north took buses into the south to claim the right to eat at integrated lunch counters. Some of these buses were firebombed, and the Freedom Riders were beaten. President Kennedy hesitated to endorse the Freedom Riders effort, but he demanded order. And the ICC did ban segregation in interstate commerce.

Dr. King decided to make Birmingham, Alabama, the center of his freedom movement. He called Birmingham “the most thoroughly segregated big city in the United States.” The local, mostly white, Chamber of Commerce was eager to avoid confrontation, but Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Connor vowed resistance. Connor was also Alabama’s Democratic National Committeeman, a man of considerable influence. Rioting broke out in Birmingham that night after Dr. King’s home was hit by a bomb. Bull Connor used fierce police dogs to make sure crowds were kept in check. Television images of Bull Connor’s dogs attacking demonstrators made the city notorious around the world. Alabama’s Democratic Governor, George Wallace, in his 1963 inaugural address, breathed defiance. This was his understanding of freedom:

I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this cradle of the Confederacy . . . that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forbears before us on, time and time again through history. . . . I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

Clearly, Governor Wallace did not consider Birmingham residents and taxpayers like Dr. King and his congregation “his people.”

When Wallace, as he had pledged, “stood in the schoolhouse door” to prevent two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama, President Kennedy had no choice but to send in federal troops. Although he had criticized Eisenhower’s use of federal troops at the time of Little Rock, Kennedy addressed the country on television. He called on every American to “stop and examine his conscience” about these acts of lawlessness.

Kennedy praised the people of the South for their patriotism and service in peace and war, but he was determined to stand for the civil rights of all. And he was under unremitting pressure from Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the Urban League, and A. Philip Randolph of the train car porters’ union. The senior leadership of the civil rights movement expressed their frustration over the slow pace of change. Kennedy had boasted during the campaign that discrimination in housing could be ended “by a stroke of the pen.” Black Americans began sending thousands of fans to the White House.

In Birmingham, though, progress would bring problems. A Nazi Party member jumped onto the stage and attacked Dr. King. King was unhurt, but there was a ceaseless drumbeat of violence directed against him and his nonviolent movement. King had already been stabbed by a deranged black woman, beaten on an airplane flight by an enraged white passenger, and pummeled at a newly integrated hotel in Selma, Alabama. The thirty-three-year-old minister had to live every day as if it would be his last.

The president went on television 11 June 1963 to address the nation on civil rights. His powerful words are worth remembering today.

If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public schools available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him . . . then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and the lady? We face a moral crisis as a country and as a people. . . . A great change is at hand, and our task is to make that revolution peaceful and constructive for all.

In Mississippi, Byron de la Beck with di not wait to hear Kennedy’s appeal for peace and Justice. He shot NAACP leader Medgar Evers as the civil rights leader was returning to his home. Evers bled to death in the driveway of his home, in the presence of his wife and children.

When Dr. King was jailed in Birmingham, he wrote a memorable letter that has ever afterward served as a key text of the civil rights movement. In it, he explained the need for action. “We have waited for more than 340 years for our Constitutional and God-given rights,” he said. “The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’”

Dr. King emphasized that respect for law was essential. He wrote that when he was forced to resist an unjust law as a last resort, he had to be willing to submit to the punishment that was meted out. In this, Dr. King was well within the American tradition—and that the Christian tradition—of civil disobedience. King also coupled his determination to engage in civil disobedience with a firm respect for higher law and lawfulness. As a result, he obediently accepted jail sentences when courts found him in violation of law.

Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill was introduced on 19 June 1963. The Senate’s famous Rule XXII had prevented meaningful action for decades. Rule XXII meant a determined minority of senators could filibuster a bill to death. Kennedy was frustrated at the slow pace of legislation. Senator Hubert Humphrey, the prime sponsor of the Civil Rights Bill, agreed. The Constitution makes no provisions for a cloture rule in the Senate. Under Rule XXI, a bill needed the support of two thirds of the Senators in order to be voted upon. But the Constitution, Humphrey argued, states clearly that only a majority shall be necessary to conduct business. However, the legislative process was about to get a shove.

The long-promised March on Washington was the cherished idea of A. Philip Randolph. He had urged this action for more than twenty years. Earlier, however, FDR had talked him out of it. Now, in 1963, Doctor King joined the national civil rights leadership to urge hundreds of thousands to come to Washington in a blazing August sun. To Randolph’s pioneering vision of a Great March was added Bayard Rustin’s organizational skill. Labor joined in the effort, with George Meany and Walter Reuther of the AFL-CIO giving the March their full endorsement. Hundreds of church leaders and Jewish groups joined in.

President Kennedy’s reaction was guarded. He worried that any disorder in such a huge crowd would be seized upon by Senate opponents of civil rights. He declined to meet with march organizers before the event. He did not want them to present him with any list of demands, and he wanted to keep his distance in case there was a violence. But he held open the possibility of a White House meeting after the March.

Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson introduced Dr. King with the words of an old Negro spiritual:

I’m going to tell my lord when I get home

Just how long you’ve been treating me wrong.

I have been ‘buked and I’ve been scorned

Trying to make this journey all alone!

Most white Americans had never heard the great power of the black preachers of this country. So when Dr. King mounted the podium in front of the massive, brooding statue of Abraham Lincoln, he asked that his children be judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Most of his hearers that day were unprepared for the force and the emotion that King’s biblical cadences could evoke:

I have a dream,… I have a dream today! So let freedom reign…. let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom reign from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside. And when this happens — when we allow freedom to ring from every town and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands and sang in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

So rarely can it be said that speeches change things. Rhetoric or mere rhetoric is the way knowing insiders dismiss the power of public address. But Dr. King’s speech changed things. It changes things still.

And President Kennedy had inspired King and all his brothers. “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free,” Kennedy had told hundreds of thousands in West Berlin, just weeks before the civil rights march on Washington. Kennedy had said, “Ich bin ein Berliner!” I am a Berliner.

If freedom truly were indivisible, as JFK said, why did it make sense to defend freedom in the West Berlin but not to let freedom ring in Birmingham, Alabama? America in the 1960s still had military conscription. If young black men could be drafted and sent to West Berlin or to the De-Militarized Zone separating North and South Korea, how could anyone justify segregation at home? Why should such Americans be denied freedom in their own home towns?

The vast throng, hot, thirsty, and tired, left in a quiet and orderly way. According to most accounts, some 200,000 marchers dispersed, leaving not so much as a piece of litter behind. Hundreds of mass demonstrations would follow in Washington, D.C. hardly a week in close by without some March for this or that area none of them—arguably, not all of them combined—has had the impact that that great 1963 March on Washington had.

President Kennedy obviously delighted by the conduct of the March, welcomed the civil rights leaders to the White House. Raleigh Wilkins praised the president: “You made the difference. You gave us your blessings. It was one of the prime factors and turning it into an orderly protest to help our government rather than against our government.” Wilkins may have had Kennedys behind-the-scenes influence in mind.

When young John Lewis, a fiery civil rights advocate, talked of “burning Jim Crow to the ground nonviolently” and marching through the heart of Dixie the way Sherman did, Washington’s Catholic Archbishop drew the line. Cardinal O’Boyle said if Lewis’s radical rhetoric stayed in his speech, he, O’Boyle, would refuse to offer her the invocation for the March. Cardinal O’Boyle, who firmly backed civil rights, was universally respected. The leaders sat on young Lewis. And the March of Freedom went into history.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19249-19362). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

22 NOVEMBER 1963

President Kennedy’s political prospects looked bright in the fall of 1963.  He expected his Republican opponent in 1964 to be either New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller or Arizona’s conservative senator Barry Goldwater. He dismissed “Rocky” as having no guts; Barry, he thought, had “no brains.” Though confident, he was leaving nothing to chance. Texas Democrats had split in a nasty feud between liberal Senator Ralph Yarborough and conservative Governor John Connally. JFK thought a presidential visit might help mend political fences. He was especially pleased that Jackie would go with him. Normally, the first lady found politics a crush and bore. Texas politics was even more so. But she recognized the importance to her husband of this vital state.

The president and First Lady rode in an open limousine down the main thoroughfare in Dallas, Texas, on a clear November day. Nellie Connally, the governor’s wife, turned around in the car to comment on the large crowds who lined the way, sharing lustily: “You sure can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you today, Mister President,” she said.

Then shots.

They had just passed the Texas Schoolbook Depository. The shots came from behind. “I looked back and saw the president’s hands fly up to his throat. He made no sound, no cry—nothing,” she wrote. “I had a horrifying feeling that the president had not only been shot, but could be dead,” Mrs. Connally later told the Dallas Morning News. “It’s the image of yellow roses and red roses and blood all over the car . . . all over us,” she said. “I’ll never forget it . . . it was so quick and so short, so potent.”

Governor Connally, writing in the “jump” seat, was struck and pitched forward. Another shot destroyed the president’s skull as the limousine blazed ahead, racing for the hospital. Mrs. Kennedy, risking her own life, crawled over the seat and out of the vehicle, to help a Secret Service man get on board.

Kennedy was dead as soon as the second bullet struck him, but doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital tried feverishly to revive him nonetheless.

The nation heard the news within moments. Walter Cronkite, CBS’s veteran anchorman, broke down as he announced the president’s death.

The entire world seemed to stop as the casket containing the president’s body was loaded onto Air Force One—as the presidential jet was now called. Mrs. Kennedy seemed stunned as she entered the plane, her brilliant pink suit still staying with her dead husband’s blood. Lyndon Johnson asked her to stand next to him in the jet’s forward cabin. With the plane still on the runway, he was sworn in as the nation’s thirty-sixth president by federal district court judge Sarah T. Hughes. Judge Hughes was a long time Johnson ally. LBJ had been instrumental in having the Dallas lawyer named to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge.

No one could be sure this was not the beginning of a plot against the government of the United States. Kenny O’Donnell, a passionate Kennedy loyalist, pointed to the new president, seated up front as the Boeing 707 jet took off for Washington. “He’s got what he wants now,” he said in a barely concealed whisper about LBJ. “But we take it back in ’68.” Most Americans, however, were not interested in political comebacks. They wanted to mourn their slain leader.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a young Kennedy appointee in the Labor Department, spoke for most when he said, “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know the world is going to break your heart eventually.” During those four cold, bleak November days, all Americans were Irish.

The assassination and funeral were the first televised event[s] that fused the American people together. The entire baby pools generation would share the memory—just as their parents’ generation had been brought together by the attack on Pearl Harbor and today’s young people by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Millions of American homes had photographs of President Kennedy. Millions bought and saved for their children the commemorative editions of Time, Life, and Newsweek that rolled off the presses.

The accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was quickly apprehended in Dallas. He was himself shot to death by Jack Ruby, the operator of a sleazy Dallas nightclub, as Oswald was being transferred from one prison to another. The fact that Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union, taken a Russian wife, and then returned to the United States to be employed by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a Communist front group, seemed to make no impression on the media of the day. Dallas was blamed, even though Judge Hughes and Mrs. Connally could have testified that they felt no fear from the good people of Dallas. In the years since the assassination, a vast right-wing conspiracy was blamed and countless articles, books, and Hollywood movies.

Conspiracy theories of the Kennedy assassination soon cropped up. President Johnson attempted to put these to rest by appointing chief justice Earl Warren and Republican House conference leader Gerald Ford to head a commission to investigate the killing. A persistent, vocal minority would not be convinced by the Warren commission report, issued the next year. The report said JFK was assassinated by one man—Lee Harvey Oswald—and not by a conspiracy.

Kennedy’s violent death was not “the end of innocence” is often claimed to be. How could it be? But it was a sharp dividing line in our history. Lyndon B. Johnson had many strengths that Kennedy lacked, especially in dealing with a stubborn Congress. But he lacked the Kennedy’s special grace, and he knew it.

One example of Kennedy’s beliefs is revealed in this quote from Abraham Lincoln, written in his own hand, that his faithful secretary Evelyn Lincoln had filed away for him at the time of his shattering encounter with Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961:

I know there is a God — and I see a storm coming;

If he has a place for me, I believe I am ready.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19365-19410). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME”

. . .

On 2 July 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the most far-reaching Civil Rights Act in American history. Invited to the White House for the signing ceremony were Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the Urban League, A. Philip Randolph, and other major leaders of the civil rights movement. Senator Everett Dirksen, Senator Thomas Kuchel of California, and other key Republicans who had given their indispensable support to pass the bill were seated in the front row of distinguished guests.

For the rest of their lives, millions of black and white Americans would remember this day as the moment when the long delayed promise of American freedom at last became real. One of the great tragedies in modern American life is that too many critics who viewed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “only the first step” have diminished the epoch-making achievement of Senator Hubert Humphrey, Senator Everett Dirksen, and their colleagues. It had taken one hundred years to achieve what they achieved that day.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19459-19466). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

A CHOICE, NOT AN ECHO

. . .

Goldwater was the standard bearer for the newly assertive conservative movement. Despite the fact that some young conservative thinkers had doubts about Barry’s intellectual depth, Goldwater’s wildly successful book had won him thousands of eager volunteers. The Conscience of a Conservative sold more than 700,000 copies and went through twelve paintings. This was unheard of for a political book. With characteristic candor, Goldwater would later disavow some parts of his best seller (“Hell, I didn’t write that . . . Bozell did,” he would say in exasperation). This mattered little to the legions of loyal young conservatives who enlisted in Barry’s movement. Against liberal charges he was hopelessly outdated, a relic from an earlier time, very eloquently stated, “The laws of God and of nature have no dateline.” Against Lyndon Johnson, whose standard of achievement was to run up the legislative scoreboard with bills enacted, Goldwater boldly said, “I don’t aim to pass laws, but to repeal them.”

The editorial writers constantly implied that Goldwater was a Fascist. In reality, though, he was a principled champion of freedom. He had been influenced by Friedrich A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and the free-market ideas in the work of Adam Smith. He was, he often said, a Jeffersonian who believed that that government is best that governs least. “Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order,” he wrote.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19482-19494). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” said Goldwater upon accepting the nomination. “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” Goldwater’s most memorable line was a clear dig at Rockefeller and a bold exhortation to his supporters. The words were crafted by young professor Harry Jaffa, and there was nothing in that Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln would not have endorsed, but it was seized upon by the media and cast as a dangerous expression of radicalism.

Governor Rockefeller would go on to endorse Goldwater, but tepidly. Other moderate Republicans, like New York Mayor John V. Lindsay, and New York’s two Republican senators, Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating, declined to do so. At his Gettysburg farm, former president Eisenhower angrily confronted the nominee. “What you’re saying, Barry, is there is nothing wrong . . . in calling me ‘a conscious agent of the Communists.’ Well, by golly, it is wrong. It is utter tommyrot!” It was the first time that Ike showed that the Birchers had gotten under his skin. Only with great difficulty was Goldwater able to persuade the former president that he didn’t mean to endorse that kind of extremism. Eisenhower finally endorsed Goldwater, but without enthusiasm. Privately, Ike shook his head. “You know, before we had this meeting, I thought Goldwater was just stubborn. Now I am convinced that he is just plain dumb.”

Still, Ike, faithful to his adopted party, would make a television spot for Goldwater in which he dismissed charges of bigotry against the rangy Arizonan as “tommyrot.”

Barry Goldwater was an enormously attractive figure. A trim, tanned, athletic Westerner, he could ride in the hunt, love skiing and camping. Goldwater was a capable pilot and had risen to the rank of brigadier general in the Air Force reserve. “In your heart, you know he’s right” was the slogan quickly adopted by his followers. “In your guts, you know he’s nuts,” his liberal critics fired back.

Liberals were especially concerned with what they considered his nuclear saber rattling. As a senator, Goldwater had argued that NATO’s commander should have the power to initiate a nuclear response if the Soviets invaded Western Europe. Goldwater thought we could trust solid men like Eisenhower and General Lauris Norstad with that decision. But the very idea was treated as if it were a radioactive. Goldwater was widely described as recklessly advocating nuclear war. The charge was that he had once joked about “lob[bing] one into the Kremlin men’s room.” This was at a time when leaving Air Force generals like Curtis LeMay talked about “bombing them back to the Stone Age.” Goldwater, a man’s man, was blunt, direct, and a funny. But presidential candidates do not joke about nuclear war, not if they hope to get elected.”

The Johnson team knew exactly how to handle the Goldwater threat. Johnson’s young campaign aide, Bill Moyers, approved what was, and still is, the most vicious television ad in American history. A lovely little girl is shown pulling petals off a daisy, counting “1-2-3. . . . ” Then, a man’s voice reverses the count, “6-5-4. . . ” giving the unmistakable impression of a countdown to a missile launch. Americans had grown very familiar with this rocket launch sequence because of Eisenhower’s decision to broadcast our space program. But the ad showed the little girl dissolve into a picture of a nuclear explosion. Johnson’s voice was heard saying, “We must love one another or die,” suggesting outrageously that Goldwater’s election meant death. “Vote for President Johnson” came the white words on a funeral black screen. “The stakes are too important for you to stay home.” The Johnson campaign ran Moyers’s Daisy ad only once, but in those days before cable and satellite, most American homes had only three or four television channels. Thus, fifty million people saw this classic negative ad. For the rest of the campaign, the networks ran the ad for free as they discussed the issue of nuclear responsibility in the election.

Goldwater met with Johnson in the White House. He agreed not to make an issue of riots in Harlem. He wanted to avoid injecting race into the campaign. When his campaign team produced a film called choice that depicted drunken white teens cavorting naked and young black men rioting, he kept his word and rejected its use. It would inflame race relations, he said.

Johnson showed no such restraint in attacking Goldwater. He chose Hubert Humphrey as his running mate and encourage the Minnesota senator to go with Goldwater with vigor. Humphrey’s point-by-point dissection of the Goldwater voting record demonstrated why senators are so rarely nominated for president. Humphrey treated the delegates at the Democratic National Convention with his litany of the majors supported by both Republicans and Democrats. “But not Senator Goldwater” was Hubert’s refrain, as the delighted delegates took up the response. Humphrey’s attack was hard-hitting and effective, but not out of bounds. Goldwater in joy to his reputation for flinty independence of mind. But is often eccentric voting record made it easy to depict him as an extremist.

Politics ain’t beanbag.

The same could not be said for Fact magazine. “1189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit to be President,” blared the editor’s alarming headline.” They neglected to tell their readers that 12,356 psychiatrists had been questioned, that only 2,417 had responded, that 571 of these had said they couldn’t properly diagnose the senator without ever speaking to him. (After the election, Barry Goldwater sued the Fact for libel and won. The federal court found the article’s so false, so defamatory, so malicious, it awarded Goldwater $75,000 in punitive damages. The US Supreme Court upheld the judgment.)

Goldwater approved one campaign broadcast that was to have vast consequences for American history. When every poll showed Goldwater about to get buried in almost every region, Barry okayed a speech by Californian Ronald Reagan. The popular former actor and television host addressed a nationwide audience with “A Time for Choosing.” The speech was the great success of the campaign. Reagan articulated smoothly, convincingly, and non-threateningly the ideals of freedom, limited government, military strength, anti-communism, and patriotism that Goldwater had tried without success to defend in his speeches. Goldwater’s campaign was cruelly cartooned as a San Francisco cable car crashing down a steep hill: : “A Streetcar Named Disaster.” Reagan’s speech brought a flood of donations to a campaign rapidly running out of money.

More importantly, overnight, it made Reagan the bright hope of the conservative movement. From the date of “the speech,” Ronald Reagan became the de facto head of the conservative movement in America.

Against the caricature of Goldwater as a warmonger, Johnson claimed to be the peace candidate. “These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die,” said Johnson. Noble words to be sure, but there is a reason why one of Johnson’s most loyal aides once called him “Machiavelli in Stetson.” Even as the president and told about peace and love, his men in the Pentagon prepared to initiate the bombing campaign over North Vietnam.

Johnson had rushed through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution when North Vietnamese gunboats attacked two U.S. Destroyers in August 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin. The resolution blamed the North Vietnamese for the clash and authorized the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” He discouraged any extensive debate and demanded immediate action. Only two senators—Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska—voted no.

Vietnam was rarely discussed in the 1964 campaign. Yet it loomed, like Banguo’s ghost at MacBeth’s banquet, behind the seated guests.

Goldwater tried to raise the issue of war and peace. The Democrats, he charged, had led the nation blindly into “Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. . . . American sons and grandsons are being killed by communist bullets and communist bombs. And we have yet to hear a word of truth about why they are dying.” His point was legitimate but by this point in the campaign, no one was listening.

Election night 1964 produced one of the most lopsided landslides in American history. LBJ won 486 electoral votes and 42,825,463 popular votes (60.6 percent) to Goldwater’s fifty-two electoral votes and 27,175,770 popular votes (38.5 percent). Johnson’s popular vote percentage exceeded FDR’s in 1936. He swept all regions except the deep South. Goldwater had urged Republicans to “go hunting where the ducks are” in making an appeal to white Southerners. But he had surrendered the historic areas of GOP strength. Many districts that had been Republican since the party was founded in elected Democrats to Congress in 1964. Johnson’s coattails produced a huge Democratic majority in the 89th Congress.

Johnson critics accused him of wanting every vote and stopping at nothing to gain an overwhelming victory. Surely, Johnson’s vanity was famous. He named his Texas ranch “LBJ” for himself. His wife, Lady Bird, bore the same initials, as did his daughters, Luci Baines and Linda Bird Johnson. Only his pet beagles—whom he yanked out by their ears—escaped the Texan’s brand, they were called Him and Her.

Johnson’s very practical reasons for wanting to bury Barry were very simple: he wanted to break the power of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans who resisted big spending programs. Johnson knew he would need a huge victory in 1964 to make up for expected losses in the South. He had seen the FDR, Truman, and JFK administration is frustrated on Capitol Hill. He had Texas-sized plans for legislation. Only a Texas-sized victory would produce the majority he needed to enact his programs.

Johnson wanted to achieve what FDR had outlined in his 1944 State of the Union address. FDR was his political mentor and hero. Johnson wanted to expand federal programs to give government extensive new powers in housing, education, welfare, and medical care. Nor would that be enough; Johnson knew that great presidents were patrons of culture. Personally, he cared nothing for literature, music, or art, but he believed he could win the support of refined people by trading their artistic interests the way he treated other congressional colleagues’ desires for a new bridge or post office. He was not entirely wrong.

In private, Johnson railed against “all those high-falutin’ Harvards.” At one of Jackie Kennedy’s elegant White House cultural soirées, Johnson was seen in the hall with his foot up on the immaculate wall, paring his fingernails with a pocket knife, bored to death. In fairness, JFK found Jackie’s cultural evenings boring, too.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19498-19606). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

OPERATION HOPE NOT: CHURCHILL’S FUNERAL

Sir Winston Churchill was too frail to attend the White House ceremony in 1963 where President Kennedy signed Public Law 88-6. That Congressional resolution made this half-American British statesmen only the second person in history to be an honorary citizen of the United States. The president said Churchill had “marshaled the English language and send it into battle.” The younger Kennedy openly admired the man his father loathed.

Churchill died on 24 January 1965 at age 90. It was seventy years to the day after his famous father, Lord Randolph Churchill, died. Sir Winston’s death was certainly not unexpected. The British government had been planning Operation Hope Not for twelve years.

America’s government should have been prepared. But we suffered a shocking and  embarrassment when President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not attend the funeral. Johnson’s memoirs do not tell us why. Some have said he listened to State Department protocol types, who may have told him that because Churchill was only a prime minister and not a head of state, it would be inappropriate for Johnson the president to go. Or perhaps Johnson, notoriously thin-skinned, was resentful of the fact that Britain’s prime minister Herald Wilson and the Labor Government were offering no help to Johnson in Vietnam. Johnson proposed to stand instead Chief Justice Earl Warren. Warren was certainly a figure of stature and dignity, but the British were wounded.

This deep wound was salved, however, when Queen Elizabeth II invited former President Dwight D. Eisenhower to London as her personal guest. The Queen had decreed that Churchill should have a state funeral—the first commoner ever so honored. Churchill’s funeral would be an event of high drama, modeled closely on that of the Duke of Wellington, who had saved the British from Napoleon in 1815.

. . .

Inside Westminster Abbey, kings and queens came to pay him homage. They stood silently, reverently, as the choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—Churchill’s favorite. As the casket was carried by RAF flyers down the steps of the Abbey, the BBC broadcast to the world these words of tribute offered by Dwight D. Eisenhower:

At this moment, as our hearts stand at attention, we say our affectionate though said goodbye to the leader to whom the entire body of free men lose so much.

In the coming years, many in countless words will strive to interpret the motives, describe the accomplishments, and extol the virtues of Winston Churchill—soldier, statesman, and citizen that two great countries were proud to claim as their own. Among all the things so written and so spoken, there will ring out through all the centuries one incontestable refrain: here was a champion of freedom.

May God grant that we—and the generations who will remember him—heed the lessons he taught us: in his deeds, in his words, in his life.

May we carry on his work until no nation lies in captivity; no man is denied opportunity for fulfillment.

And now to you Sir Winston—my old friend—farewell!

The British people heard these words from the heart of America—and the wound healed. As Churchill’s flag-draped casket was carried down the River Thames aboard the hydrographic vessel Havengore, it passed the East End of London. This is the dock area that had suffered so heavily under the Nazi blitzkrieg. There, the famously left-wing dock workers did something extraordinary. These men worked the tall cranes that move the cargo in this great world seaport. As if on cue, each of the cranes dipped in somber salute to Winston Churchill. His casket was not transferred to a special train named the Winston Churchill. It was one of the Battle of Britain class of locomotives. Finally, Churchill’s body was laid to rest behind a small church in Bladon, England.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19608-19657-). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“WE SHALL OVERCOME!”

…

Johnson’s election victory the previous November, and the deep South’s choice of Goldwater, only emphasized to Dr. King and his supporters how powerless they were without the vote. A planned march on the state Capitol that Montgomery began in Selma, Alabama, on a cold, blustery Sunday in March. “It’s not just Negroes, but really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome,” King told supporters in Selma. The march was interrupted by a club-swinging, mounted police who barred the way to the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

Other violence broke out as well. A white minister from Boston, James Reeb, was attacked by a mob of white youths for joining in the demonstrations. He died of his wounds. Later, Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife, was gunned down attempting to help young black volunteers register votes.

Dr. King was joined in Selma by hundreds of marchers, including leaders of the AFL-CIO, religious groups, and national civil rights organizations. With three thousand marchers in Selma demanding civil rights, President Johnson went on national television to announce his support for a far-reaching Voting Rights Bill.

When the Voting Rights Bill swept through the 89th Congress, Johnson signed it on 6 August 1965. With his signature, Johnson put an end to the political order that had dominated his native region since Reconstruction. With voting rights enacted into law, segregationist politicians “turned on a dime.” Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, George Wallace, and hundreds of other office seekers dropped their support of racial segregation. As Senator Dirksen would say of his errant colleagues, “When I feel the heat, I see the light.”

Voting rights for black Americans transformed politics. America could stand before the world and assert that we were, indeed, the home of freedom. No longer could Communist and non-aligned delegates at the UN taunt America for hypocrisy.

…

The president greatly expanded welfare. If he had read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s warnings on the crisis in the black family, he apparently paid them no mind. Moynihan warned that the illegitimacy rate among black families—then at 22 percent—posed a serious threat to community stability. But in LBJ’s Great Society, marriage would no longer be the centerpiece of federal family policy. Under Johnson, many federal bureaucrats questioned whether marriage had any significance anyway. A husband, it seemed, could be replaced by a check. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” resulted in billions of dollars going to Appalachian and Inner City projects. Some of these proved worthy, but many were, as their Republican critics called them, “boondoggles.”

Lady Bird Johnson gained great credit for her drive to beautify federal highways. Commercial interests, including billboard advertisers, groused, but Mrs. Johnson’s views prevailed.

LBJ used his vast appointive powers to give positions to consumer advocates. The consumer movement received a huge boost in 1965 following publication of the book Unsafe at Any Speed, a muckraking tract on General Motors’ popular, sporty Corvair automobile. GM executives’ clumsy attempt to discredit author Ralph Nader by prying into his private life and by trying to entice him with prostitutes was catalogued in a New Republic magazine article that gave the consumer activist the name “Saint Ralph.” Johnson also created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He created to Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which in time spawned the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) for television and National Public Radio (NPR). They never created a federal government monopoly on broadcasting—as is so often the case in Europe—but they helped further to institutionalize Johnson-style Big Government liberalism.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19664-19698). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

VIETNAM

So exaggerated was LBJ’s campaign against Barry Goldwater, so extreme was the denunciation of Goldwater as a warmonger, that Johnson left himself little room to serve as a wartime president. He did not have the advantage that Wilson and Roosevelt had—a clear and present danger of enemy attack. Johnson’s reputation for overstatement and for successful wheeling and dealing had helped him when he was giving the famous “treatment” to colleagues on Capitol Hill. It was to prove disastrous in his efforts to persuade Americans. TR called the White House “the Bully Pulpit.” He meant it was primarily a place of moral influence. Harry Truman’s view of the White House was typically peppery: “I set here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have the sense enough to do without my persuading them…. That’s all the powers of the President amount to.”

…

… As important as allies are, however, it is American support that is important whenever Americans are fighting and dying in distant lands. Vice President Humphrey visited Saigon in 1967 to try to explain to President Thieu that the American people were questioning our purposes in Vietnam. “I tried to warn him that [his government] would have to make significant changes if our support was to continue. I said I wasn’t sure our people would accept an indefinite long-term involvement.” Humphrey describes Thieu’s dismissive attitude:

Thieu listened, delicately holding a cigarette, its smoke drifting up and away from him. He broke the pose to flick the ash from his cigarette in a manner that suggested he was also flicking away what I had said.

“No, you will be here for a long time. We are aware of what you say, but we realize that your support will have to continue, and perhaps even increase for the next five or six years….”

The arrogant Thieu seemed to have little understanding that Americans were then drafting nineteen-year-olds from little towns in Minnesota to fight for his freedom. Even then, his government was giving draft deferments to favored young Vietnamese men. Some of them lounged around cafes in Paris discussing the existentialist writings of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. On the other hand, Americans knew little of the often heroic efforts of ARVN soldiers to protect their own country.

When Lyndon Johnson visited American forces in Vietnam, he told our soldiers to pursue victory, to “nail the coonskin to the wall.” Because he could give Americans no overarching reason to fight and sacrifice, Lyndon Johnson himself increasingly became the object of opposition to the war. His coarseness and his tendency to make outrageous displays of his emotions made his critics angrier with his policies. Johnson self-pityingly decried all of this criticism as disdain for him as a Texan.

This was another of Johnson’s self-serving exaggerations. America has had many Texans in public office, courtly men like Wilson’s aide Colonel House, James A. Baker III, Lloyd Bentsen, and John Connally. Longtime Speaker of the House Same Rayburn was hardly courtly, but he always maintained a gruff dignity. None of them would ever have yanked up his shirt to show an unhealed scar from a gall bladder operation as LBJ did. Johnson was disliked for his own qualities and not for anything endemic to Texas. JFK and Ike could turn the air blue with barracks language, but neither man ever slipped once in public. And neither ever made a public spectacle of himself.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19700-19762). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Johnson had campaigned against Goldwater by charging the conservative senator with being reckless. Now, LBJ boasted that he kept such a tight rein on his generals “they can’t bomb an outhouse” in North Vietnam without his approval. The only unbelievable part of that statement is that Johnson would have said “outhouse.” Although Johnson could rightfully say he had not initiated the war, he was unquestionably the one who escalated American involvement in the war. It was Johnson who increased American forces “in country” to more than five hundred thousand. Most of these were draftees.

. . .

Woodrow Wilson had been able to defend his war policies. FDR gave eloquent expression to the need to sacrifice. Truman’s defense of his Korean War policies faltered. Eisenhower had avoided a land war in Asia, or anywhere else. Judging from his World War II statements, he could’ve lead the country in war. JFK excelled in public communication. (“Any spot is tenable if brave men will make it so” was a typical piece of Kennedy eloquence.) But none of them ever encountered the kind of bitter, intense, personal hatred that LBJ did. An example:

Hey! Hey! LBJ!

How many kinds have you killed today?

. . .

. . . Johnson’s policy of graduated escalation seemed to millions of television viewers to be a total and bloody failure.

Tet was planned to take place during a holiday truce. But Tet was a Buddhist holiday, not an American one. Communists in Hué, a city in northern South Vietnam, killed between two thousand and three thousand civilians. Many of these were clubbed to death or buried alive.

Little of this was shown on American television. The city was under Communist control. But when South Vietnam’s police chief, General Loan, shot a Vietcong colonel in the head, the photo was shown around the world. It won a Pulitzer Prize. General Loan seemed the very picture of a brutal tyrant to shoot an unarmed man, a man whose arms were tied behind his back. We now know that Loan knew the man, caught him in the act of terrorizing a Saigon neighborhood, and captured him in civilian clothes. The man Loan shot had just killed a close personal friend of the police chief’s and murdered the friend’s entire family. None of this mattered then to the antiwar protesters.

Antiwar protests grew in breadth and intensity. Demonstrators burned American flags and draft cards. Three Americans, doubtless influenced by the horrific pictures of a protesting Buddhist monk in Saigon, actually burned themselves to death. Communist agitators in the United States urged resistance to government policy. The national antiwar group, the mobilization to end the war (known to activists as “the Mobe”) was taken over by communist followers of the violent ideas of Leon Trotsky.

Writer Susan Sontag said that North Vietnam deserved to be idealized. Actress Jane Fonda went to Hanoi and posed on North Vietnamese antiaircraft guns. This, at a time when American pilots were being shot down, killed, or imprisoned and tortured. American antiwar activists took at face value north Vietnamese claims that they actually fed U.S. prisoners more than they fed their own people “because they are bigger than we are.” Prisoner of war Jeremiah Denton was brought before television cameras. Unable to speak openly, he nonetheless sent a message. It was daring. He blinked his eyes in Morse code, and the message he sent was chilling: “t-o-r-t-u-r-e.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19781-19830). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

1968: ANNUS HORRIBILIS

Johnson announced a national television address for 31 March 1968. The White House said the speech would be a review of U.S. policy in Vietnam. It was—but there was more. At the end, Johnson stunned the world by announcing that he would withdraw from the presidential race. The country was shaken. What did this mean to the troops then fighting in Vietnam? Did it mean Johnson had abandoned the policies that sent them there? Did it mean he had abandoned them?

Hard on the heels of this news came an even more shattering word from Memphis. Though he’d received death threats continually since 1955, Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. never shied from making public appearances. On the night of 3 April 1968 he spoke to a large crowd in a church: “I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long time. . . . But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the promised land! . . . Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” It was his last public address. The following day, Dr. King leaned over the railing at the Lorraine Motel and asked a friend to “sing Precious Lord for me tonight as you’ve never sung it before.” At that moment, he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet.

Robert Kennedy shared the news with a largely black crowd as he campaigned in Indiana. Crying and embracing, the crowd dispersed peacefully after he spoke these words:

So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King …  but more importantly to say a prayer for our country… a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country…. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

Let us dedicate ourselves to … tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

Bobby Kennedy’s words on that mournful occasion touches down to our own day. But across America that night, riots broke out in hundreds of cities and towns. Reminiscent of the New York draft riots of 1863, rioting, looting, and burning continued for days in many cities. Hundreds died as National Guard troops had to be called in to restore order. In Washington, D.C., the Capitol looked like St. Paul’s Cathedral had looked during the London Blitz. Smoke and flames rose up across the country.

America in 1968 felt like a runaway train ride. When Vice President Humphrey declared his candidacy, he spoke of “the politics of joy.” The learned Humphrey was only quoting from John Adams, but was roundly criticized for it. Who could talk about joy in such a year?

And it only got worse.

Early in June, Robert Kennedy battled Gene McCarthy and the California Democratic primary. As Kennedy went down to claim victory in Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel, he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a young Palestinian immigrant who hated Senator Kennedy for his support of Israel. RFK died early the next morning.

With King dead, the Kennedys dead, three hundred a week dying in Vietnam, our cities in flames, many of our campuses in an uproar, inflation rampant, authority itself seemed to be breaking down. The foundations of the Great Republic were tottering. Would there be no end to the horrors of this annus horribilis?

When the 1968 Democratic National Convention met in Chicago, Vice President Humphrey had most of the delegates’ support. Humphrey later reported that his wife and children had been threatened by antiwar protesters. Red paint or, worse, excrement, would be thrown on Muriel Humphrey, the Secret Service warned. No politics of joy here. Protesters were determined to break up the convention. Chicago police were just as determined to prevent that. The Democratic Party was itself bitterly divided, over the war, over the draft, over the crisis in the cities and on campuses, over the nomination of a candidate who had contested no primaries.

Only four years before, Lyndon Johnson had celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday at the Democratic Party’s 1964 National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Then, throaty Carol Channing had sung “Hello, Lyndon” to the tune of “Hello, Dolly.” Now, the repudiated Johnson dared not show his face at his party’s nominating convention.

The riots that occurred in Chicago’s Grant Park and throughout the city were fully televised to the American people. Liberal Connecticut Senator Abe Ribicoff denounced the head-knocking conduct of the Chicago Police as the city’s mayor, Richard J. Daley, yelled obscene abuse from his seat in the middle of the Illinois delegation. Waiting to deliver his acceptance speech, Humphrey was almost overcome by tear gas in his hotel room. Outside, demonstrators chanted “Dump the Hump!” Jerry Rubin, one of the “Chicago Seven” later tried for their activities at the convention, said his group was “guilty as hell.” Rubin added, “We wanted … to make the city react as if it was a police state and force the attention of the whole world on us.”

Antiwar demonstrators claimed to believe in a “New Left.” They wanted a more humane form of socialism. Behind the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovakia’s Alexander Dubcek offered his people “Socialism with a human face.” His “Prague Spring” represented something new in Communist regimes and was highly popular with the Czech people. Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in August, however, putting an end to this experiment in a more liberal Communism. Dubcek and his colleagues were taken to Moscow. There, they were chained to the Kremlin walls and a drunken Leonid Brezhnev came out from a banquet to taunt them. The Czechs were shown no mercies; they were chained until they soiled themselves. The woozy dictator announced to the world his Brezhnev Doctrine. It was his version of containment: What we have, we keep.

The Johnson administration issued a protest but took no action against the Soviets. Eighty civilians were killed as the Soviets extinguished Czech freedom for another generation. Five hundred Soviet tanks and five hundred thousand Warsaw Pact troops crushed the Czech people’s aspirations.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19856-19907). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

To close out this horrible year, Americans at last had an event to bring them together. Ever since the fire onboard that killed three astronauts at Cape Kennedy during a launch pad test in January 1967, it seemed doubtful that America would keep John F. Kennedy’s promise to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

Now, however, in December 1968, there were concerns that the Soviets might try a “figure 8″ flight to circle the moon and claim the prize. It would be a disaster for U.S. at any time, but it would have been especially dispiriting after Americans had endured such year.

President Johnson ordered NASA to go ahead with Apollo 8. Astronauts Frank Boorman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders prepared to be the first human beings to leave Earth’s orbit and head out to the moan. Their wives were told by NASA that their husbands’ chances of it making it back alive were no better than 50-50. They would not land, but their voyage would take them to within 100 miles of the lunar surface, over the Sea of Crises, the Marsh of Sleep, and on to the Sea of Tranquility. Frank Boorman did not ordinarily wear his religion on his sleeve, but he said he was seized by the spiritual impact of being the first human being to see the Earth as God saw it. He and his fellow astronaut’s broadcast to the world from sixty-nine miles above the lunar surface. They had gone where no men had gone before. And they chose to read from Genesis on Christmas Eve.

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, “let there be light,” and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good.

And God divided the light from the darkness.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 19924-19939). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Ten

NIXON’S THE ONE

(1969-1974)

“GIVE A DAMN!”

No sooner had Americans rallied to support the great Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a host of other measures designed to secure equal rights in housing, education, and employment that a number of major cities faced racial rioting. Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark were among the worst of these “urban disorders,” as the dominant media euphemistically called them. Hundreds of lives were lost; millions of dollars of property damage occurred. But the greatest casualty was civility.

No small amount of Richard Nixon’s resurrection in the late 1960s was due to the deteriorating urban scene. Nixon pledged law and order. Liberal editorialists lambasted him as racist, saying law and order were simple code words intended to spark a white “backlash” against the just aspirations of black Americans.

No one personified the hopes of white liberals more than New York City’s tall, elegant, patrician mayor, John Vliet Lindsay. As mayor, Lindsay had done all he could to keep a lid on New York. He walked the streets in shirtsleeves, seeking to cool the seething discontent with the force of his magnetic presence.

It wasn’t all charisma, of course. The Lindsay administration in Gracie Mansion was shoveling money to some very questionable street organizers who assured frightened city officials that they—and they alone—could keep the city from erupting in flames. This process of scaring city bureaucrats was satirized by “new journalist” Tom Wolfe. “Mau-mauing the flak-catchers” was how Wolfe described the breakdown of timid city officials by radical organizers. And Wolfe gave us the term “radical chic” to note the style adopted by Manhattan’s liberal social elite. Leonard Bernstein, the greatly talented director of the New York Philharmonic, was as famous for his embrace of far-left political causes as for his frenzied style with the baton. The fund-raiser he held in his posh apartment for members of the violent Black Panthers was captured forever in Wolfe’s acid-etched writings.

Lindsay was the real power behind the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. President Johnson had given the chairmanship to Illinois Governor Otto Kerner in 1967, but it was Lindsay who pressed members and staff to write a tough, unsparing report. The Kerner Report, as it was called, warned that America was rapidly becoming “two societies—one black, one white—separate and unequal.” For this dire state of affairs, the Commission blamed white racism. The report was widely hailed by the dominant media as “historic.”

Historic it certainly was. It was the first time a presidential commission had decided to blame the majority of the American people for a social condition. In effect, the commission members were trying to elect a new people. To do this, they embraced Lindsay’s Manhattan liberalism. “Give a damn” was their call to end social divisions. Businesses and charities, churches and citizens were dunned to give more in time and money to solve the problems of the nation’s ghettoes.

The Kerner Report received little criticism at the time it was issued. To do so would only have invited charges of racism. Looking back upon it, however, it is clear that it ignored clear signs of progress being made by black Americans in the period from 1940 to 1970—impressive gains in life expectancy (up ten years), home ownership (up 15 percent), incomes (up 150 percent), and white collar jobs (up 17 percent). Also, Lindsay’s prodding of those writing the report left little room to record the experiences of the victims of urban rioting. Thousands of small businesses were driven out of the core of our nation’s cities. These small businesses gave employment and life to the community. Along with churches, they made the community. But allowing violence to drive these stable citizens out, city governments and their collaborators on the national scene were sowing the seeds of poverty, violence, and hopelessness.

To these people, John Lindsay turned a blind eye. Instead, Lindsay adopted the rhetoric of the radical shakedown artists. “If violence occurs in our cities,” he warned when the Democratic Congress sought to scale back on federal aid to the cities, “those in Washington who have almost ignored our pleas for federal help will have to assume their share of responsibility.

As if on cue, a gang of young rioters rampaged through Manhattan a week after Lindsay’s invitation. These members of the Neighborhood Youth Corps broke windows in the historic Woolworth Building, stomped cars, mugged women, and looted street vendors. Urban “unrest” did not stop with mere property damage and roughing up passers-by. As radical words led to ever more radical acts, the city’s police increasingly became targets. The six-foot, five-inch slender mayor was famously at ease with minority citizens, but he flinched in his dealings with members of the city’s other ethnic communities. For Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs he had little affinity.

He agonized over the official telephone calls to widows of slain cops—and not because of his grieving. Widows often believed that their slain husbands had been saying about His Honor and his permissive policies—that they led to more violence on the streets. “Instead of receiving his calls gracefully,” one of the mayor’s aides recalled, “they would rant and fulminate [against Lindsay] because their husbands had been shot in minority neighborhoods. They blamed him for the deaths. He’d come off the phone white-faced and you could see the anguish.” Lindsay pleaded for sympathy: “You haven’t seen a dead cop in a hospital and his widow looking at me as if I’d pulled the trigger.”

When NYPD officers stormed a building in Harlem in April 1972, responding to a bogus call that an officer had been shot, the cops were surrounded by angry members of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. Police had not known that the building was Islam Mosque No. 7, the same place where Malcolm X had preached before he was assassinated by fellow Muslims. Shots were fired at close range in the crowded stairways of the mosque. Patrolman Philip Cardillo went down with a gunshot wound. Harlem’s congressman, Charlie Rangel, and Farrakhan soon arrived. They, along with Lindsay administration officials, shooed white cops away from the scene. Farrakhan and Rangel threatened police with a riot if they stayed. Top police officials—Lindsay’s men—covered up the details of Cardillo’s shooting. Ballistics investigators were barred from the scene, something unprecedented for a crime investigation. When Patrolman Cardillo died of his wounds, Mayor Lindsay and his hand-picked police commissioner avoided the funeral. “I don’t think they dared come,” said Cardillo’s widow. No mayor had ever before refused to attend the funeral of an officer who had died in the line of duty.

The years following the passage of the great Civil Rights Act could have been a golden age for American race relations. But by dismissing this extraordinary achievement of the entire American people, too many opinion leaders convinced ordinary people that they had no concern of the yearning of millions of safe and effective schools and for neighborhoods free from the drug dealers, prostitutes, and petty thugs. By charging decent and law-abiding Americans with racism, by condoning undoubted criminal activities of a few within the minority community, these leaders forfeited the trust and the affection of their natural constituency.

John Lindsay, long retired, charged that in the end, white American’s “didn’t give a damn.” Sadly for Lindsay and tragically for the country. The opportunity for genuine healing was lost. And Lindsay’s fellow New Yorkers fully repaid his contempt for them.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20078-20142). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“THE EAGLE HAS LANDED!”

Between 750,000 and one million people crowded Florida’s Cape Kennedy in the ninety-degree heat of July 1969 to witness the launch of Apollo 11. Foreign journalists joined the throng. “This is the America we love, one so totally different than the one that fights in Vietnam,” wrote a Czech reporter, whose country had the previous summer been overrun by Soviet tanks. Pravda, the official Soviet paper, hailed “these three courageous men.” France-Soir’s special edition of 1.5 million copies sold out while Germany’s Bild Zeitung noted, with proud precision, that seven of the fifty-seven Apollo managers, or 12 percent, were born in Germany.

President Nixon planned to have dinner with the Apollo 11 astronauts the night before their historic flight to the Moon. NASA’s chief physician, Dr. Charles A. Berry, scotched that plan when he told the press that Nixon comes into contact with hundreds of people and might unknowingly communicate a disease to the spacemen. “Totally ridiculous,” was Astronaut Frank Borman’s response to the doctor’s exaggerated concern, but he didn’t call for Berry to be countermanded. Borman thought that if “anyone sneezes on the Moon, they’d put the blame on the President.” Such was the atmosphere of mistrust the Apollo astronauts would leave behind as they departed for man’s first landing on an extraterrestrial body.

Astronaut Mike Collins was orbiting the Moon alone in Columbia. It was Sunday, 20 July 1969. Almost casually, he had said farewell to mission commander Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they detached in the lunar lander, and ungainly craft named Eagle. Armstrong and Aldrin were headed for man’s first landing on the surface of the Moon. Together, Columbia, Eagle, and the three US astronauts composed the Apollo 11 mission.

“You cats take it easy on the lunar surface,” Collins coolly warned his fellow astronauts. “If I hear you huffing and puffing I’m going to start bitching at you.” Within minutes, Armstrong would be struggling to control his spacecraft to avoid a huge crater with its jagged rocks. The rockets that slowed the Eagle’s descent were kicking up huge clouds of dust, obscuring his view. The efforts required to maneuver around dangerous obstacles had consumed precious fuel, leaving Armstrong within one minute of having to abort the man’s first landing on the moon. NASA’s flight director, Gene Kranz, recalls: “There was no response from the crew. They were too busy. I got the feeling they were going for broke. I had this feeling ever since they took over manual control: ‘They are the right ones for the job.’ I crossed myself instead, ‘Please, God.’”

Almost imperceptibly, Armstrong touched down, shutting off his rockets. Without a hint of concern, he reported to the waking world: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

A decade earlier, the elite fraternity of American test pilots had laughed at the astronauts as “spam in a can.” The astronaut’s were compared, not always favorably, with Ham, the chimp that NASA launched into space and returned safely. Here, however, Armstrong proved that he had that most admired, most elusive quality of America’s best test pilots: the right stuff. That night, at Arlington national Cemetery, someone placed a bouquet on John F. Kennedy’s grave with an unsigned note: “Mr. President, the Eagle has landed.”

In Houston, Texas, Armstrong’s fellow astronaut, Charlie Duke, answered Armstrong’s home voice: “Roger, tranquility, you got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.” Duke knew what the world did not: that the Eagle’s Landing on the moon was a close call. Had Armstrong failed to find a level landing site, had the Eagle kills over on its side, he and Buzz Aldrin would have been condemned to die a slow painful death as their oxygen ran out. And that nightmare would have happened in the full view of 600 million people.

The landing on the moon was a victory for the United States of America—and for freedom. President John F. Kennedy had taken up Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s challenge of a space race just eight years earlier. The president redefined the space race by shooting for the Moon. “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it,” he said of the huge Apollo program on the last full day of his life.

A landing on the moon by the Soviets would have had incalculable results. Everything they achieved it was done in secret, with the massive and single-minded redirection of resources that can only be ordered by a ruthless dictatorship. Anyone who dared to question the Soviet space program would hear the knock of the KGB at his door. If the Soviets had won the race to the Moon, millions of people around the world would have concluded that Khrushchev was right: the Soviets had buried the Americans.

The world knew when astronaut Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chafee were killed by a fire on the launch pad in Florida on 27 January 1967. It was supposed to be a routine test, but a spark in the all oxygen command module soon became an inferno. Temperatures rose in seconds to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The world followed the detailed investigation of the disaster that forced an eighteen-month delay in the Apollo program. The entire program had to be redesigned. It was as if the United States had broken a leg eighty yards into hundred-yard dash. Grudgingly, the Soviets admitted that cosmonaut Vladimir M. Komarov had been killed when the first planned Soyuz spacecraft crashed to earth, but they quickly spread the blanket of secrecy over their failure.

…

And when the Soviets moved ahead in the conquest of space, communist atheist ideology would win a great victory. “When man conquers the universe,” Marxist historian Zheya Sveltilova said, “he will learn to believe in himself. People who now believe in God will reject him. Such beliefs won’t be logical or natural. Man will be stronger than God.“

With Armstrong’s safe landing, however, the United States’ victory was assured. As he descended the ladder to the lunar surface, Armstrong called Lee observed: “That’s one small step for man, a giant leap for Mankind.”

Meanwhile, Buzz Aldrin, inside the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), was quietly observing the historical occasion in his own special way. Aldrin had been impressed to read that Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese sherpa who accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary to the peak of Mt. Everest, had cleared away snow to make room for an offering of thanks to his God. Now, Aldrin poured out wine that nearly overran his little cup in the one-sixth g-force of lunar gravity. Holding a wafer, Aldrin read silently from a small card as he celebrated communion with these words from the Book of John:

I am the vine and you are the branches

whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit;

For you can do nothing without me.

In the midst of a long, drawn-out, an inconclusive war in Vietnam, in a nation beset by seemingly near irreparable divisions at home, the landing on the Moon seemed to be the one really big things that went right. Dr. Wernher von Braun had once been the Hitler’s rocket scientist. Now an American citizen, he spoke with confidence of the future: “I think . . . that the Ten Commandments are entirely adequate, without amendments, to cope with all the problems that the Technological Revolution not only has brought up, but will bring up in the future.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20144-20212). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

. . .

In August 1969, on Max Yasgur’s upstate New York dairy farm, 250,000 young people flocked together to hear the leading rock bands and artists of the day. Woodstock was the name of the concert even though that tony town was some fifty miles away. The huge throng reveled in the rain and mud, smoked pot, and cheered every cry of defiance that came up from the stage. Two deaths and two births were recorded at the festival. The artists who performed at Woodstock were a virtual Who’s Who of American rock ‘n’ roll: Joan Baez; The Band; the Jeff Beck Group; Blood, Sweat & Tears; the Paul Butterfield Blues Band; Canned Heat; Joe Cocker; Country Joe and the Fish; Credence Clearwater Revival; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; the Grateful Dead; Arlo Guthrie; Keef Hartley; Richie Havens; Jimi Hendrix; the Incredible String Band; Janis Joplin; Jefferson Airplane; Mountain; Quill; Melanie; Santana; John Sebastian; Sha-Na-Na; Ravi Shankar; Sly and the Family Stone; Bert Sommer; and Sweetwater. Critics dismissed this huge gathering as “rutting in the mud.”

Many “Middle Americans,” those stable and solid folks who paid their taxes and obeyed the laws, had very different tastes in entertainment. They favored Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Hee-Haw, Gomer Pyle USMC, and Bonanza for evening viewing. When they saw the mud-spattered rock fans rejecting bedrock American values, they were put off. Lurid stories of free love and free drugs further alienated the straight from the hip. Yale Law Professor Charles Reich published a dreamy book, The Greening of America. The reviews were rapturous. A cultural revolution was coming, Reich asserted, a new American civilization based on feeling. Reich’s definition of freedom was to cast off all the old sexual and moral restraints. Sobriety and industry were four squares. “If it feels good, do it,” was the cry of the radicals. And their paean to feeling good made millions of Middle Americans feel very bad indeed.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20251-20266). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Another casualty of that drunken summer was the reputation of the surviving Kennedy brother. Senator Edward M. Kennedy had turned down pleas to enter the 1968 presidential race following the assassination death of his older brother, Robert. Now, in 1969, he attended a raucous party on Martha’s vineyard. Five single women and six married men—all of whom had taken part in Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign—came together for a night of barbecue and drinks. Ted Kennedy left the party with young Mary Jo Kopechne, headed for the Edgartown Ferry. In the early hours of 19 July, Kennedy’s car veered off the bridge at Chappaquiddick and sank in the dark waters. Kennedy swam clear but delayed summoning police for ten hours. Kopechne was one of the “Boiler Room Girls” whom had worked on brother Bobby’s presidential campaign. She drowned in Kennedy’s dark blue Oldsmobile.

The news hit on the same day that Neil Armstrong landed the Eagle on the lunar surface, so the world was distracted from the full import of water that happen on Martha’s Vineyard. This “lunar eclipse” prevented a penetrating media analysis of the incident. No probing questions were asked about Kennedy’s unconscionable delay in calling for help, the curious decision of authorities not to perform an autopsy on Kopechne’s body, and the “tread lightly” reaction of local Massachusetts law enforcement. What a contrast with the intense scrutiny that the errant senator, Joe McCarthy, received from Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” broadcast of the previous decade. Clearly, Kennedy benefited from this. His pitiable speech to the people of Massachusetts was drafted for him by the protector of JFK’s legacy, Ted Sorenson. It avoided as many questions as it answered. Kennedy’s conduct at Chappaquiddick would not be extensively examined for another decade, until he ran for president. Even then, much of the questioning would not get to the heart of the matter.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20280-20293). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE SILENT MAJORITY

Richard Nixon never said he had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. That was the charge of one of his critics. Instead, Nixon pledged to bring America out of direct involvement in combat in South Vietnam without allowing the country to fall to Communism. When Nixon took the presidential oath, there were 535,000 young Americans “in country.” This huge force had built up from 16,000 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ followed a policy of gradual escalation devised by Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara.

Facing massive protest demonstrations, Nixon went before the American people in November 1969 to offer his plan for Vietnamization of the war in Southeast Asia. By Vietnamization, Nixon meant that the army of South Vietnam would be required to take up the defense of its own country. The United States would continue to offer air support, naval support, and, of course, a strong financial commitment to keep South Vietnam from falling to the Communist North.

General Douglas MacArthur had spoken for millions of Americans during the Korean War when he said “there is no substitute for victory.” Still, top U.S. policy makers knew that there was always a danger of the “limited war” they were fighting becoming a world war, with the United States pulled into a direct conflict with a nuclear-armed Red China or Soviet Union, or both. It was to avoid this danger that both the Johnson and Nixon administrations sought the limited objective of protecting Southeast Asia.

Nixon spoke of the “silent majority” of Americans who backed his policy of gradual withdrawal from Vietnam. Nixon had ordered the return of twenty-five thousand U.S. troops in June of that year, followed by another thirty-five thousand ordered home in September. The Gallup poll showed that fully seventy-five percent of Americans approved of Nixon’s Vietnamization policy.

That fact did not dissuade antiwar protesters. It seemed only to implicate the American people in what more extreme war resisters saw as the guilt of the U.S. leaders. The radicals wrote of Amerika. By using the German spelling of their country’s name, they sought to tie the United States to the odious Hitler regime. Even the liberal, antiwar columnist David Broder recognized the profoundly antidemocratic spirit of those who organized the mammoth antiwar protests. No longer simply an expression of dissent, an effort to persuade, the giant antiwar demonstrations became in themselves an attempt to impede the carrying out of government policy. “Shut it down!” Cried the youthful rebels as they ringed out the Pentagon and blockaded streets in Washington, D.C. they burned American flags and even used blazing draft cards to light joints.

President Nixon found it hard to understand the youth rebellion that engulfed him. A lonely, humorless man, Nixon could not poke fun at the young protesters. In this, he was utterly unlike California Governor Ronald Reagan. When confronted by angry student rebels at Berkeley, Reagan responded lightheartedly. They warned of a “bloodbath”; Reagan replied that they could start by taking a bath. When they blocked a sidewalk and tried to stare him down, Reagan tiptoed past them with his finger to his lips. “Shhhh,”  he said, as even some of his adversaries broke up laughing. Coming out of a meeting of the California Board of Regents, Reagan faced chanting crowds of students. They suspected, correctly, that he had come to fire their liberal chancellor and hike their tuition. “But we are the future!” They screamed. Reagan, ever smiling, scribbled a sign on a legal pad and held it up to his limousine window: “I’ll sell my bonds.”

Only once, in 1971, did President Nixon attempt to reach out to the protesters who besieged his White House. He went out at dawn to talk to the demonstrators who spent the night on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial. He tried to shoot the breeze with some of them, talking about football, talking about their home towns—anything except why they had come to Washington. Shy and awkward, Nixon tried, but he never could comprehend his foes.

When President Nixon invaded Cambodia in 1970, the antiwar movement howled. It was to them an insane escalation of the war. They charged that Nixon had expanded the war into another sovereign nation. The truth was the opposite. The North Vietnamese had been using Cambodia for years as a staging area for their attacks on South Vietnam. London’s prestigious journal, The Economist, saw straight through the double standard, flagging the fact that the rest of the world made “barely a chirp of protest” about Communists violating Cambodian neutrality. From these Cambodian “sanctuaries,” Communist forces had invaded the South, killing thousands, including many Americans. Nixon told the country that his move was only an incursion, not an invasion—only an effort to “clean out” pockets of enemy activity. American forces would leave as soon as they had achieved their aim.

The same liberal leaders who had thought Kennedy clever for using the word quarantine at the time of the Cuban missile crisis now jumped on Nixon’s use of incursion as evidence of his duplicity. Men who had been silent, or who had muted their criticism of war policy as the Democrat Lyndon Johnson build up a huge force in Vietnam, now felt liberated as U.S. combat deaths rose to 300 a week. They attacked Nixon without restraint. Maine’s Democratic senator, Edmund Muskie, charged that Nixon had decided to “seek a military method of ending this war rather than a negotiated method.” Normally mild-mannered Senator Walter Mondale lashed out at Nixon. “This is not only a tragic escalation, which will broaden the war and increased American casualties,” he said, “but it is an outright admission of the failure of Vietnamization.” Mondale was proven wrong when, following the successful U.S. operation in Cambodia, American casualties actually went down. The incursion enabled Nixon to accelerate U.S. withdrawals from South Vietnam.

But the critics were not interested in facts. They had raised their own and their followers’ passions to a fever pitch. At Kent State University, Governor James Rhodes ordered Ohio National Guardsmen to contain a student uprising against the Cambodian operation. There, jittery young guardsmen fired on a menacing crowd of protesters, killing four. The country was horrified—and deeply divided over the killings at Kent State. Bestselling author James Michener came out the next year with Kent State: What Happened and Why. Michener defended the young guardsmen, whom he said feared for their lives. They were vastly outnumbered by the cursing, screaming, rock-throwing demonstrators. I. F. Stone’s angry rebuttal, The Killings at Kent State: How Murder Went Unpunished, sold like hot-cakes. Despite Stone’s strident charges, however, the legal system and never placed the blame for these students’ tragic deaths on the guardsmen. “Izzy” Stone was later revealed to have met on a regular basis for years with Soviet intelligence agents, with full knowledge that they were Soviet operatives. They even bought his lunches. He was known to the KGB as bliny, or pancake. Today, we might view the killings at Kent State as we view those of the Boston massacre: a terrible and preventable tragedy.

Nixon could rightly claim that most Americans backed his war policy. He viewed the struggle in great power terms. He did not want America to become a pitiful, helpless giant.

In his “Silent Majority” speech, Nixon argued strongly for a new course in Vietnam. But he warned against what he called “a precipitate withdrawal”:

The precipitate withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam would be a disaster not only for South Vietnam but for the United States and for the cause of peace.

For the South Vietnamese, our precipitate withdrawal would inevitably allow the Communists to repeat the massacres which followed their takeover in the North fifteen years before; they then murdered more than 50,000 people, and hundreds of thousands more died in slave labor camps.

We saw a prelude of what would happen in South Vietnam when the Communists entered into the city of Hue last year. During their brief rule there, there was a bloody reign of terror in which 3,000 civilians were clubbed, shot to death, and buried in mass graves.

With the sudden collapse of our support these atrocities of Hue would become the nightmare of the entire nation—and particularly for the million and a half Catholic refugees who fled to South Vietnam when the Communists took over in the North.

For the United States, this first defeat in our nation’s history would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership, not only in Asia but throughout the world.

Three American presidents have recognized the great stakes involved in Vietnam and understood what had to be done

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20295-20366). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

NIXON TO CHINA

. . .

Nowhere was Nixon’s penchant for shocking his opponents and stunning his friends more evident than in his economic policy. Nixon had agreed with conservative economist Milton Friedman that Lyndon Johnson’s ten percent surtax on incomes would be ineffective in wringing inflation out of the economy. By 1971 the problem was spinning out of control. Inflation ate away the savings of the middle class, and it presented a special threat to the reelection of a president who depended on conservative support.

Montana’s Democratic senator, Mike Mansfield, pushed legislation through both congressional houses to allow the president to set up wage and price controls. “The lesson that government price-fixing doesn’t work is never learned,” Nixon responded, forcefully adding, “I will not take this nation down the road of wage and price controls.” They could have bet he would say as much. The plan was geared to embarrass the president, because Mansfield and his fellow Democrats knew that the American people disapproved of Nixon’s free-market economic policies. But the scheme did not work as planned. Nixon walked right into the trap and turned it on his opponents. Surprisingly, he backed the legislation.

Nixon’s turnaround on the issue is due in part to the influence of his dynamic treasury secretary, John B. Connally. Jumping back several years, recalled that Connally was the Democratic governor of Texas who survived the Kennedy assassination. Nixon fell in line with Connally’s recommendations of a wage-price “freeze” and followed his protectionist policies on trade. One writer has likened Connally to “a Texas cowboy in the palace of Versailles, ignorant of who or what established the building, uncaring about what his bullets might destroy.” A fairer criticism would single out not the Texas in Connally, but the Connally in Texas. Most knowledgeable Texans could have told Nixon that wage and price controls are like oil-well fires: easy to start, difficult to end. Not that he would have listened. “We are all Keynesians now,” said Nixon blandly. He seemed not to care that the doctrines of British economist John Maynard Keynes were anathema to his conservative supporters. Keynes had advocated increased government spending in times of economic downturn as a means of “priming the pump” for recovery. Nixon was smugly satisfied that his disapproval ratings on economic issues, which had raged higher than seventy percent, now flipped as shockingly as his own position on the issue. Americans enthusiastically embraced the idea of wage and price controls and gave Nixon more than seventy percent approval for his economic policies in public opinion polls. But while the good feelings helped Nixon in the short-term, it wasn’t long before the economy took a dive.

The American economy in the 1970s suffered from overregulation and underinvestment. The recession of 1973-75 was the worst since the Great Depression, and it would, in time, help to undermine Nixon’s standing with the American people when he faced troubles over Watergate. The bleak prospects convinced millions of Americans that their children’s futures would be poorer, that there would be fewer economic opportunities for the rising generation. All of this created a sour mood in the country, and many took their frustrations on President Nixon.

Nor were China and the economy the only areas where Nixon distressed his most loyal supporters. A presidential commission on pornography predictably recommended dropping most legal restrictions. Though many of the laws remained on the books, enforcement lagged. Soon, the nation was flooded with pornography.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20410-20437). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The Nixon years also saw major gains by the new feminist movement. Both parties now endorsed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. Nixon’s GOP had been supportive of that for generations. When the great Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended by Virginia’s Democratic segregationist congressman, Howard W. Smith, it also banned discrimination on the basis of sex. “Judge” Smith had hoped that outlawing sex discrimination would be a “killer amendment” that would slow down or even derail the civil rights act. It did no such thing. Instead, it provided the basis in law for the new feminism.

In addition to ERA, the new feminists wanted abortion-on-demand. Several state laws were amended to legalize what the statutes of every state had previously deemed manslaughter. Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed a radical law in New York that permitted abortion for any reason up to six months of pregnancy. California Governor Ronald Reagan agonized, but signed a bill to burn permit abortion for the life or health of the mother. In Washington State, voters approved a referendum to legalize abortion. Governor Dan Evans approved the change. Rockefeller, Reagan, and Evans represented a broad spectrum of the Republican Party.

Democrats were split on the abortion issue. Many black and Hispanic leaders opposed it. César Chavez, the Mexican American leader of the California farm workers union strongly asserted his profound religious beliefs against abortion. Rev. Jesse Jackson denounced abortion as “black genocide.” Some elected Democrats also opposed abortion. Missouri’s Senator Thomas Eagleton; Wisconsin’s Senator, William Proxmire; Joseph Califano, a veteran of LBJ’s administration; and, at least at this point in his career, Massachusetts Senator, Edward M. Kennedy, vocally opposed abortion. Democrats also looked to largely-Catholic Big City political machines for support. Thus it was that Democrats had some of the strongest opponents, as well as proponents, for liberalized abortion.

Seeing the growing resistance at the grassroots level to abortion-on-demand, Liberal organizers recommended a strategy of going through the federal courts instead of going to the state legislatures or even directly to the voters. Washington State’s Referendum 20 on abortion had produced a narrow victory—54 percent to 46 percent. Michigan voters had decisively turned down a repeal of the state’s abortion law in 1972 by a vote of 61-39 percent. North Dakota’s rejection of liberalized abortion was even more emphatic: voters there voted it down 77-23 percent.

In New York and other states, efforts were underway to repeal the liberal abortion laws. Abortion advocate Judith Blake noted that nearly 80 percent of Americans opposed on restricted abortion. Blake urged her supporters of abortion-on-demand to go to the U.S. Supreme Court as “the only road to rapid change.” On such a fundamental matter, she argued, democracy could not be trusted. Feminists held that women’s fundamental reproductive rights were no more subject to voter approval and desegregation should depend on majority white electorates in the South. Not just American democracy was challenged by the new feminists. Repealing abortion laws would not satisfy the most extreme elements of a movement that brought no opposition.

Radical writer Shulasmith Firestone said the assault on traditional values must go further. “Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20455-20481). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE ELECTION OF 1972

. . .

McGovern was perhaps an unusual candidate for leader of what came to be called the Peace Movement. McGovern’s earliest public service had been as a twenty-two-year-old bomber pilot in World War II. He commanded respect and affection from the even younger crew members who flew on his B-24 Liberator. . . .

On one of his missions, with several B-24s badly shot up, there were loud complaints and character chatter about those “blasted n______s,” a racist reference to the Tuskegee Airmen whose job it was to protect the slower, more vulnerable bombers. The gripes were quickly cut short when the black squadron commander of the P-51 Mustangs—who had been hovering protectively over them all the while—broke in to say: “Why don’t you all shut up, white boys? We’re all going to take you home.” The Mustangs drove off the German fighters and McGovern’s squadron made it home safely. Ever after, George McGovern would be one of that great generation of World War II veterans who would oppose racial discrimination wherever they saw it. As a congressman and U.S. senator, McGovern would be a strong backer of equal rights for black Americans.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20516-20526). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

McGovern also had to downplay his 1948 support for the communist-duped Henry Wallace. Nixon had loyally backed the Republican Dewey that year (while Ronald Ragan, interestingly, campaigned for Harry Truman.)

Almost as soon as the McGovern-Eagleton campaign started, it ended. When it was revealed that Eagleton had been hospitalized several times for mental depression, McGovern’s campaign managers shuttered. McGovern told a press, friends and the aptly named Black Hills of South Dakota said he backed his running mate “1,000 percent.” McGovern himself was genuinely free of prejudice against those who had suffered mental illness. Then, it was revealed Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy, McGovern acceded to his top aides’  demands that Eagleton be replaced. Because he refused to take a hint, Senator Eagleton was unceremoniously “dumped” from the ticket. One Democratic leader in New York State spoke for many party regulars when he shook his head and muttered, “They dropped the wrong not from the ticket!” Political pros will tolerate many things from their party leaders, but they can’t abide gross incompetence.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20545-20553). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Presidential politics was sidetracked, momentarily, by the Olympic games in Munich, West Germany. It was the Germans’ first chance to host the games since the Hitler Olympics of 1936. The modern, free, and democratic German Federal Republic that Konrad Adenauer had built desperately wanted to show off its tolerance and openness. As a result, it was unwilling to ring the stadium with tightened security. The Germans did not want the world’s television viewers to be confronted by too many armed men. Abou Daoud was a lieutenant of Palestinian terrorist chief Yasser Arafat. Daoud and his Black September kidnappers slipped into the Olympic Village, where they took hostage eleven members of the Israeli team. When an attempt to rescue the hostages failed, Daoud’s black ski-mask-wearing attackers pitched a hand grenade into the room where the Israeli athletes were being held, killing one. The rest perished in their helicopters from gunfire sustained as they were evacuated. The Munich massacre bore somber witness to the rising specter of terrorism employed as an instrument of international policy.

Arafat was generously supplied with funds and weapons by the USSR. Arafat would continue his career of murder throughout the rest of his life. The year after Munich, he approved the killing of American ambassador Cleo Noel, his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and a Belgian diplomat. The three were kidnapped in Sudan’s capitol of Khartoum, taken to a basement, and filled with more than forty bullets each. Arafat’s Black September Palestinian gunmen deliberately fired at point blank range from their victims’ feet to their heads to maximize their painful deaths.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20559-20571). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

McGovern’s opponents within the Democratic Party sneered at him. “Abortion, acid, an amnesty” was the taunting campaign slogan for long at the party’s nominee by other Democrats. They were referring to LSD (acid) and amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers. Within the party, McGovern was dubbed “Magoo,” after the nearsighted cartoon character who was forever stepping on rakes. “Let them hate, so long as they fear,” went the old Roman adage. No one hated McGovern, but neither did they fear him. They mocked him, and that was fatal.

…

On Tuesday, 7 November 1972, McGovern suffered one of the worst defeats in the history of presidential politics. Just eight years after LBJ had Barry Goldwater, the Republican Nixon carried every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. In Massachusetts, as George Will has memorably pointed out, there are more college professors then registered automobiles.

Ever afraid, Nixon had to run up the score. He won 520 electoral votes and 46,740,323 popular votes (60.3 percent) McGovern won a scant 17 electoral votes and 28,901,548 popular votes. Typical of the feckless McGovern campaign operation was the breathless cry of some of his young Ivy League backers in New York State. “McGovern is leading Nixon and the city,” they exalted when a New York Daily News poll showed the South Dakotan edging out next than in Gotham by 52-48 percent. No one had the heart to explain to them that a Democrat had to carry New York City by over 60 percent to be able to offset Republican strength Upstate and on Long Island. The men who do such things, the seasoned old party pros who had nominated winners like FDR, Truman, and JFK, had been unceremoniously shown the gate by the smart young Magoos.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20574-20590). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“I left the office for reasons of health—the people got sick of me.” That amazingly candid and funny line from a former Democratic governor of Michigan is a rarity in politics. Most politicians are convinced they are loved and deserved to be loved. Richard Nixon had no such illusions. He knew that people did not like him.

This basic insecurity led Nixon always to overcompensate. Unsatisfied with the mess Democrats were obviously making of their 1972 campaign, Nixon apparently wanted to “get something” on them. His operatives broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate Hotel. Then, when the relatively low-level team of burglars was caught entering the building on 23 June 1972, Nixon denied any knowledge of the affair. However, the White House tapes make it undeniably clear that he knew of it after the fact, and knew of it long before he ever admitted it to the American people. He lied about it for two full years.

Thus was born the Watergate affair.

. . .

Early in his administration, Nixon installed a new voice-activated audiotape system in the White House. In doing so, he would provide the documentary evidence of his own lawlessness and deceit. Presidents like FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson obviously taped certain telephone conversations, but Nixon’s system could pick up all discussions in the Oval Office.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20575-20607). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Americans in the 1950s were horrified when a small number of “brainwashed” young POWs in Korea turned against their own country. Now, Americans thrilled to stories of “undaunted courage” under the most extreme conditions of torture, starvation, and solitary confinement. Retired Navy Captain Gerry Coffee tells school groups that only his strong Christian faith brought him through this ordeal. Former POWs would later laugh off their suffering. John McCain says “they didn’t put a chocolate on the pillow at the Hanoi Hilton.”Jack Fellowes even jokes about torture: “we weren’t broken by it, but some of us were bent a good bit.”

Americans have come to honor the Vietnam POWs as no previous wars prisoners have been honored. This is, in part, a tribute to their loyalty and endurance. It is also a commentary on the fact that when many question the old verities of duty, honor, country, these members of the U.S. military proved themselves through. They might have felt themselves abandoned by America, but they did not abandon her. They saw other young Americans burning the flag, but they share reached it. They fully merit the accolades a grateful nation has showered upon them.

. . .

As strongly as most Americans identified with the POWs, the reaction of many Americans to actress Jane Fonda’s travels to Hanoi, her posing on a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun, and her confrontational meeting with U.S. POWs exposed a deep and yet unhealed wound in the nation’s soul. Fonda and her fellow travelers were never charged with treason, except in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans.

Meanwhile, Nixon’s critics in Congress and in Europe erupted in denunciation of him as a “mad bomber.” The Democratic leader in the Senate, Mike Mansfield, called it “a Stone Age tactic.” The Swedish government likened Nixon’s 1972 bombing campaign to those of the Nazis. America’s NATO allies offered no help. Media critics charged Nixon with “carpet bombing” civilian targets in North Vietnam. Only later, much later, did honest journalists survey the damage and report. When almost no one was paying attention, Peter Ward of the Baltimore Sun wrote: “Hanoi has certainly been damaged but evidence on the ground disproves charges of indiscriminate bombing.”

The U.S. bombing campaign that worked. The North Vietnamese signed the Paris Accords in January 1973. Kissinger had to press the South Vietnamese government, our reluctant ally, to accept the peace agreement he had hammered out with Le Duc Tho in Paris.

As Nixon prepared for his second inauguration as president, the world marveled at the end of the Vietnam war—or at least, the end of the US involvement in that war. American POWs were released to a spontaneous outburst of joy.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20641-20666). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

ROE V. WADE: “RAW JUDICIAL POWER”

In Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson died of a heart attack on 22 January 1973. He was sixty-four years old. The former president had lived in virtual seclusion since leaving Washington four years earlier, rarely venturing forth from his LBJ Ranch or his presidential library. He did witness the Apollo 11 launch, a project he had so enthusiastically supported.

Johnson’s death, the Paris peace Accords, and the release of the POWs overshadowed what otherwise would’ve been the major news stories of 22 January 1973: the U.S. Supreme Court’s seventy-two ruling in Roe v. Wade. The ruling struck down the abortion laws of all fifty states. It allowed abortion for any reason for the first three months of pregnancy. In the second three months of pregnancy, only restrictions designed to safeguard the mother’s health were permitted. Only in the final three months of pregnancy, said Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun (a Nixon appointee), could the states restrict abortion, so long as the life and the health of the mother were protected.

In a companion case, Doe v. Bolten, decided on the same day, however, Blackmun made clear that the definition of the mother’s health (including mental health) would be so broad as to provide grounds for striking down any law that placed an undue burden on a woman’s choice of abortion. Henceforth, fathers would have no rights, parents of minor girls only very limited rights, and the unborn child no rights at all under the Roe and Doe line of cases. Thus, the procedure that had been a felony in most states for more than a century now became a fundamental constitutional right and duty the new judicial reasoning and lion of cases. Justice Byron R. “Whizzer” White, a JFK appointee, dissented, calling Doe an act of “raw judicial power,” as it took these decisions from the states and in shrine their determination in the Supreme Court’s reasoning.

. . .

The Court’s action would drive a deep wedge between Americans. In its determination to short-circuit democratic processes, the Supreme Court would further undermine Americans’ confidence in the judiciary. In the quarter of a century before Roe, the proportion of Americans who had “great confidence” in the judiciary plunged from 83.4 percent to just 32.6 percent. And Roe was another self-inflicted wound from which the courts have not recovered. Too many people saw the Court over-reaching in its jurisdiction and power with its abortion decisions.

Liberals and feminists hailed the Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade. It was, as Lawrence Lader wrote, “central to everything in life and how we wanted to live it.” Lader was a founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. Mainline Protestants, in general, approved the ruling. Liberal church bodies like the Presbyterian Church USA, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the United Methodists endorsed Roe. Many Jewish groups also supported what they viewed as “reproductive rights.”

Media sources continued to cite poll results that show majorities of Americans favor some form of legalized abortion. And while it is true that majorities respond no when pollsters ask if they favor “overturning” Roe, critics point out that the public never favors overturning anything. The technical term sounds drastic, dangerous. Voters do not employ legal jargon in analyzing public issues. It is equally true that majorities consistently favor significant restrictions on the abortion license, restrictions that Roe and later court rulings have ruled out of bounds. Over the years, since Roe, many Americans have become uncomfortable with the number of abortions that have taken place. (By 2005, more than 40 million abortions have been performed in America.)

Opposition to the Court’s ruling continues to this day. For millions of Americans, the court illegitimately stripped away the on alienable right to life from the unborn and threatened America’s role as a leader of human rights in the world. The national right to life committee rose up to convert opposition into lawful constitutional, legislative, and social action. Major religious groups—including the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Association of Evangelicals, and The Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod)—would rally against the Court’s rulings. Liberal and feminist groups, in turn, would rally in favor of the Court’s rulings—seeing it as a litmus test for their favored brand of constitutional interpretation and as fundamental to the rights of women. Many have boiled it down, simply, this way: those opposed to Roe believes the court should protect a woman’s right to choose an abortion—hence the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” have served to identify people’s positions on the issue of abortion.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20668-20735). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

WATERGATE SPILLS OVER

. . .

Nixon had made no effort to share his 1972 victory with his fellow Republicans. He made no attempt to shape the coming landslide or to give it meaning. Now, he faced a hostile Congress that did not like and did not fear him. Richard Nixon’s political end might actually have come months before he finally resigned. In an effort to appease the pursuing investigators, he released carefully edited transcripts of the White House tapes. These, he argued, would prove him innocent. They proved no such thing. His antagonists sneered at them. The transcripts seriously undermined Nixon’s support in middle America.

When he read the edited transcripts, the Republican Senate leader, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, called them “shabby, disgusting, immoral.” The silent majority that had unswervingly supported Nixon when hundreds of thousands of long-haired demonstrators converged on Washington was appalled by the foul-mouthed Nixon revealed on the transcripts. Hardly a sentence was transcribed without a damning “[expletive deleted].” Nixon had always presented himself to straight Americans as a nice man. He had even prissily confronted JFK in their debates about how Ike had restored decent language to the White House. Now, Nixon was shown to be a base, mean-spirited manipulator and, worse, an inveterate liar. “I am not a crook,” he pathetically told newspaper editors. He might as well have worn a sandwich sign saying I AM A CROOK.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20668-20735). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Eleven

THE YEARS THE LOCUSTS ATE

(1974-1981)

“I’M NOT A LINCOLN, I’M A FORD”

Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office as president just as Richard Nixon’s helicopter was leaving the South Lawn of the White House. “Our long national nightmare is over,” he said to a relieved country. To millions of Americans, Nixon’s forced resignation proved that the system of checks and balances the founders had devised two hundred years before actually worked.

. . .

Ford was eager to put Watergate behind him. Watergate would not be over until he decided what to do about former President Nixon. The Constitution provides that impeachment and removal from office is the greatest penalty that Congress can impose on an errant official. But after removal from office and the immunities of that office, a former president is subject to the same laws against obstruction of justice and subordination of perjury as any other citizen.

…

Ford came into the White House on a wave of public approval. Americans welcomed the plain-speaking Midwesterner with genuine affection. “Jerry” Ford had modestly and truthfully said, “I’m not a Lincoln, I’m a Ford.” Few Americans could say that Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon were basically decent, honorable, trustworthy man. Few Americans doubted that about Jerry Ford.

…

But the honeymoon was brief. When he issued an unconditional pardon for Richard Nixon, he hoped to end the divisions and hatreds of Watergate. Instead he just mired himself in it. His approval rating dropped from 71 percent in August to 50 percent in September. His presidency never fully recovered.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20911-20931). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The Democrats used the Nixon pardon and the worsening economic conditions to gain historic victory in the mid-term elections. The “Watergate babies”—young, smart, aggressively liberal candidates—who composed the new Congress would make substantial changes in America. Ford’s repeated attempts to use his veto were frustrated by Congress’s new assertiveness. Democrats campaigned for a “veto-proof” Congress and got it.

First to feel the impact of the liberal Democratic majority on Capitol Hill were the people of southeast Asia. Without substantial U.S. aid to the non-Communist government in Saigon, South Vietnam could not survive. This was reality, regardless of the guarantees offered by North Vietnam in the Paris Peace Accords of 1973.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20935-20940). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Seeking to rehabilitate himself after Chappaquiddick, Senator Edward (“Ted”) Kennedy had become the most outspoken leader of Liberal opposition to any aid to South Vietnam. His two older brothers, Jack and Bobby, had done much to entangle the United States in South Vietnam. Now, Ted resorted to such devices as refusing even to allow the Pentagon to spend surplus appropriated funds in Vietnam. Following Kennedy’s lead, the new Democratic majority voted to cut off all aid to South Vietnam in March 1975. “Do you want Cambodia to fall?” asked a worried Ford administration official. “Yes,” said liberal Democratic Rep. Don Fraser of Minnesota, “under controlled circumstances to minimize the loss of life.”

Sensing their opportunity with the “peace” Congress in Washington, North Vietnamese army leaders shredded their agreements and invaded the South. In short order, Americans watched while the under-equipped South Vietnamese military fell back before the armored onslaught of regular North Vietnamese army units. For decades, it had been argued that the war in the south was a civil war, that the Viet Kong were “indigenous” forces. Now, the Communists of the North brazenly rolls over their Southern neighbors.

The U.S. Embassy in Saigon—soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the founder of Communist North Vietnam—was surrounded by invaders. The U.S. ambassador and his staff had to be airlifted by helicopter from the embassy roof. The ambassador bore a neatly folded U.S. flag under his arm. 30 April 1975 was the last day of American involvement in Southeast Asia. This was not a day for recriminations,” President Ford said. Ronald Reagan reportedly answered, “What better day?”

Henry Kissinger records the response of a pro-American leader of Cambodia. Distraught at the collapse of American will and American allies in southeast Asia, Kissinger offered to rescue Sirik Matak from certain death. Matak’s response, in elegant French, is memorable:

I thank you very sincerely for your letter and your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave [Cambodia] in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would … [abandon] a people which have chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under the sky. [If I die here] I have committed only this mistake of believing you.

When the Communist Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh, they shot Matak in the stomach. Unattended, it took him three days to die.

It would have taken several years longer for masses of Matak’s countrymen to die in a protracted horror known today as Cambodia’s “Killing Fields.” The French leftists who wrote The Black Book of Communism explain the numbers: When the Khmer Rouge’s chief, Pol Pot, ordered all residents of Phnom Penh out into the countryside, it resulted in “400,000 deaths.” The average number of all executions carried out by the Khmer Rouge forces, the Black Book authors find, “hovers around 500,000.” Another 400,000 to 600,000 died in prison. And, of course, there was the hunger and disease that overtook city-dwellers. People were suddenly thrust into the countryside with no provisions made for them, leaving another 700,000 dead.

Nothing in Sirik Matak’s haunting letter proved to be wrong—except perhaps the addressee. He should have sent his letter to Senator Kennedy and Congressman Fraser.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20941-20968). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

President Ford’s ability to help America’s abandoned South Vietnamese allies had been seriously impaired by the congressional leadership. They cut off all funding, and Ford respected Congress’s constitutional power of the purse. Still, that did not stop him from ordering the Navy to rescue as many as 130,000 “boat people,” as storm-tossed refugees from the Communist terror in southeast Asia were known. George McGovern thought they would have been better off staying in their Communist-ruled homeland.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20969-20972). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

. . .  Nikita Khrushchev had permitted Solzhenitsyn to publish his short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. Khrushchev read it and saw only it’s an indictment of Stalin’s gulag (slave labor camps). More perceptive Communists understood that One Day damned Soviet rule, subtly, humorously, on every page. When Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, his decision to allow publication of Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece was counted as one of his “hare-brained schemes.”

By 1974, Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev had lost patience with the courageous Solzhenitsyn. When The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris in late 1973, Brezhnev ordered Solzhenitsyn arrested. In a massive work that eventually encompassed three volumes and half a million words, Solzhenitsyn laid bare Soviet pretensions of humanity. He carefully documented the tens of millions who had lost their lives or their liberty in the slave labor camps of the USSR. These camps began under Lenin, not Stalin, and extended throughout the twelve time zones of the USSR. Some “islands” in the system were no bigger than a phone booth, and one island was bigger than France.

. . .

When the KGB interrogated Solzhenitsyn, they threatened to kill his wife and his three little boys. They could make it look like a simple auto accident. They had plenty of practice at that. Do it! Solzhenitsyn told them defiantly. Nothing would stop him from telling the truth. . . .

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 20975-20989). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

1976: A BICENTENNIAL ELECTION

“My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m runnin’ for President,” said the grinning peanut farmer from Georgia. Carter himself admitted that he was an unlikely candidate for president. He was a one-term governor of a midsized southern state, a Naval Academy graduate who had worked under the tempestuous Admiral Hyman Rickover in the nuclear submarine program, and Carter’s family income was based on the lowly “goober pea.” He was not a lawyer, not a member of Congress, not a Washington, D.C. insider. Instead of these “nots” being demerits, Carter’s shrewdly made them the centerpiece of his outsider campaign for the 1976 Democratic nomination for president….

. . . Key to Carter’s quest was his strong support in the black community. James Earl Carter Jr. would never do in a country that had just seen the trial and conviction of James Earl Ray Jr. for the assassination of the beloved Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Carter emphasized his evangelical Christian faith. For many Americans, their first introduction to a “born-again” Christian would come through the campaign of Jimmy Carter. In many southern states, and in many other states with large rural populations—like Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—Carter’s evangelical tone would strike a responsive chord with millions of voters.

Carter took care to seek out and leading members of the liberal journalistic elite. Who was this “jasper from Georgia,” asked The Baltimore Sun’s Jack Germond dissmissively. Even the hard-boiled Germond, however, could not resist Carter’s thoughtfulness. When Germond’s fourteen-year-old daughter lay dying of leukemia, Carter sent her a gift. He gave her Indian arrowheads he had found on his family’s peanut farm—and a handwritten note asking her to share one with her sister. It was a beautiful gesture.

Based on his outsider status, and his fresh appeal (“I’ll never lie to you”), Carter swept past his primary opponents in the spring of 1976. As he captured the Democratic nomination for president, he even became the first candidate in history to refer publicly to his sexual drive. In an interview with Playboy magazine, something else unprecedented, Carter admitted he had “lusted” in his heart, but said he had never broken his marriage vows.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21000-21025). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Jerry Ford had a blessed diversion from his political woes in the celebration of the nation’s bicentennial. Burdened by the memories of Vietnam and Watergate, the American people saw 4 July 1976 as a chance to celebrate 200 years of freedom and independence. President Ford conducted himself with dignity and good humor at the birthday bash. With ceremonies in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, the president basked in the goodwill of a nation on the man. He told by Centennial celebrants at Independence Hall:

The world is ever conscious of what Americans are doing, for better or for worse, because the United States today remains that most successful realization of humanity’s universal hope. The world may or may not follow, but we lead because our whole history says we must. Liberty is for all men and women as a matter of equal and unalienable right. The establishment of justice and peace abroad will in large measure depend upon the peace and justice we create here in our own country, for we still show the way.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21061-21068). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

With such tactics, Ford beat Reagan for the nomination in 1976—barely. Ford had 1,187 delegates to Reagan’s 1,070. . . .

Despite Ford’s victory, Reagan stole the show when President Ford pleaded with him to come down to the victory stage and address the Republican convention. Ford had dumped Nelson Rockefeller, taken on Senator Bob Dole as a running mate, and made major concessions to the Reagan forces on abortion and détente in the party platform. He needed Reagan’s support. He was then behind Jimmy Carter by as much as thirty points in some polls. Smiling and gracious, the tanned Californians spoke of a letter he had prepared for a time capsule that would be opened for the nation’s Tricentennial in which Reagan was asked to enclose a letter touching on world peace:

Those who would read this letter 100 years from now we’ll know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have will depend on what we do here.

Will they look back with appreciation and say, “Thank God for those people of 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept our world from nuclear destruction?”

And if we fail, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and [they] won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.

Here was a sixty-five-year-old man talking of freedom and its future. He concluded with a stirring call to tell the world that “we [Americans] carry the message they’re waiting for.” Delegates wept openly. Biographer Edmund Morris would later write of Reagan’s “off the cuff” remarks: the power of the speech was extraordinary. And you could just feel throughout the auditorium the palpable sense among the delegates that [they had] nominated the wrong guy.” Reagan consoled his heartbroken followers: “Though I am wounded, I am not slain. I shall arise and fight again.” Indeed, he would.

Ford campaigned vigorously. He traveled the country frenetically and narrowed the margin between himself and Carter in every poll. He was hampered, however, by his poor communication skills. As well, his message was muddled. Was he for the Nixon-Kissinger policies on détente he faithfully implemented for the newer, more assertive Reagan policies his platform endorsed? Ford let the popular Betty speak for him on abortion—and Betty quickly disavowed the parties pro-life platform.

Ford’s delivery of the speech in his hometown of Grand Rapids was described as “flat, as usual.” Even here, the applause was more enthusiastic when he was introduced than when he sat down. His paid advertising on television served him better. A bouncy jingle told viewers they were feeling good about America. The ad showed celebrations from the Bicentennial Fourth. Carter’s increasingly negative portrayal of power politics was held as a criticism of America.

Ford had challenged Carter to a debate when he was far behind in the polls. Now, for the first time in history, a sitting President would debate a challenger on national television. During the second debate, which took place in San Francisco, Ford stumbled. It was not a physical pratfall—the kind that television comic Chevy Chase loved to spoof—but worse. Responding to Carter’s attacks on his foreign-policy, Ford disastrously said “there is not Soviet domination in Eastern Europe and there never will be in a Ford administration.” What? Immediately, Ford’s “handlers” tried to recover from that verbal slip on a banana peel. They emphasize the enduring spirit of the Polish people, the fact that Ford’s administration had suppressed the Soviets to sign the Helsinki Accords on human rights in 1975. All of this was true, but Americans had seen Soviet tanks roll into East Berlin (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968). If that wasn’t Soviet domination, then what was it. There was no recalling that gaffe. Millions of Americans concluded that honorable, good-hearted Jerry Ford was simply not up to the job. Ford was especially hurt in states with large ethnic enclaves of Poles, Hungarians, Balts, and Slavs.

Doubtless the “No Soviet Domination” gaffe damaged Ford’s rising prospects in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin. There, too, Betty Ford’s social liberalism hurts the president with his political base.

Ford famously bore no grudges against the press. But that did not mean he got fair treatment from the members of what has been called the Fourth Estate. A classic example was the New York Daily News headline: FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. This was because President Ford refused to tax the American people to bail the city out from the bankruptcy into which profligate urban politicos had spent it. The annual income of the average American was then (and still is) far less than that of citizens of the Big Apple. A more unfair headline would be hard to imagine.

Carter received 40,830,763 popular votes, a surprisingly narrow 50.1 percent. Carter and his running mate, Minnesota’s liberal senator, Walter “Fritz” Mondale, got 297 electoral votes. This was a sharp falloff for the man who once led the Ford by thirty points in the polls. Florida received 39,147,793 popular votes (48.0 percent) and 240 electoral votes.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21087-21132). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR”

Carter was, in a sense, a member of a distinct minority. He was the first Southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor in 1848. He was more popular with evangelicals than JFK had been, but less popular with Catholics. His strong appeal to black voters masked his relative weakness among Jews.

In his Inaugural Address, President Carter renew America’s commitment to freedom. “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for these societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights,” Carter said. But he also warned against defining freedom in terms of material advances: “We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ that even though our great nation has recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems.”

Following his address Carter surprised and delighted thousands who thronged the inaugural parade route by getting out of his limousine and walking the length of Pennsylvania Avenue. He held hands with first lady Rosalind Carter and their daughter, Amy, as they waved to the crowds. Carter was determined to do away with the elaborate ceremony of the presidency. Like Thomas Jefferson, he wanted to bring the presidency to the people. He dispensed with the playing of “Hail to the Chief” and sold the presidential yacht, the USS Sequoia. Jimmy Carter entered office with the great advantage of nearly 2-1 Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. At least, it would have been a great advantage had Carter not campaigned so assiduously against Washington, D.C. His party, after all, was the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. His was the party of Big Government. Congressional barons were not amused when he called the tax system they had so carefully crafted “a disgrace to the human race.”

Carter was determined to bring the Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill under his leadership. To show he meant business, he had Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan consign House speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill and his family to the farthest reaches of the inaugural banquet. It was a studied insult—and a foolish one, too. Carter made the mistake of telling Tip O’Neill that he had gone over the heads of Georgia’s Legislature when its members blocked his programs as governor. “I can talk to your constituents easier than you can,” Carter said. O’Neill could not believe Carter was comparing the part-time Georgia legislature with the U.S. Congress. “Hell, Mister President, you’re making a big mistake,” Tip told the new chief executive.

The real reason the 1976 election had been so close was the falling away of millions of Carter’s early supporters by election day. That summer, Carter had lead Florida by more than thirty points in most polls. He beat the incumbent in November by barely two percent of the vote (50.1 percent to 48.0 percent).

Many Americans initially drawn to Carter’s high-sounding phrases (“I’ll never lie to you”) soon learned that you had to listen very closely to Carter’s parsing of language. For example, Carter told the voters in the Iowa caucuses in January that he “didn’t like abortion.” He said we needed to eliminate the “need for” abortion. When he formed an administration, however, it became clear that to Carter that meant increasing funding for federally-funded birth control clinics. Grassroots pro-lifers saw this as a dodge. The more birth control was used, they said the more it failed and the more it failed, the more abortions resulted. By 1976, there were more than 1,600,000 abortions each year. Abortion was second only to circumcision as a commonly done procedure. Liberal journalist Elizabeth Drew praised Carter for wrapping a liberal policy stance in conservative rhetoric. Every day Americans, however, rejected such legerdemain as doubletalk: if you don’t like something, you are expected to do something to stop it, or at least limit it.

This Carter proved willing to do. He signed the Hyde amendment when it came to his desk in 1977. Sponsored by Congressman Henry Hyde the amendment forbade federal funding of abortions. Carter attempted to square the circle on abortion: he would oppose any restrictions on the legality of the practice, but he would seek to avoid inflaming abortion opponents by forcing them to pay for it with their tax dollars. Carter found that this position, though sincerely held, would cause a serious rift between him and Democratic Party liberals.

Carter vigorously supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. First lady Rosalynn Carter was especially energetic and pushing the ERA. Conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly denounced the ERA and Mrs. Carter’s role in pressing for it. ERA foes were angered to see a first lady exercising political pressure for an ERA when the American people had not elected her to any office.

Schlafly argued that because ERA was so vague, it could mean anything. What young women continued to be exempt from the draft? Would they be forced into combat? Would mothers lose custody of minor children? Would child support and alimony be stripped away? Would the federal government and the states be forced to subsidize abortion on demand? Would homosexuals demand the right to marry? All of these questions were raised by the open-ended ERA.

Advocates of the ERA scorn and Mrs. Schlafly and her grassroots activists. “Little old ladies in tennis shoes,” was a familiar put-down. “They’re worried about unisex public toilets,” ERA supporters smeared. Well, yes, they were worried about those too.

President Carter addressed the American people on what he called the Energy Crisis. Sitting in front of a fireplace, the president wore a cardigan sweater. He warned that the United States would run out of oil by 1987 and that conservation measures were desperately needed. He called this Energy Crisis “the moral equivalent of war,” urging Americans to get used to an era of limits. Soon, windmills and roof-mounted solar panels would qualify for federal tax breaks. Carter strongly backed the 55-mph speed limit that seriously antagonized Westerners. In the vast open spaces of the American West, a “sagebrush rebellion” was sparked first by Washington, D.C., telling residents of sparsely populated states how fast they could drive.

If Carter’s policies displeased liberals, they seriously upset conservatives. During Carter’s term, groups like Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute spearheaded serious opposition to the Carter administration’s domestic and foreign policies.

Defenders of free-market economics thrilled to the Nobel Prizes awarded to Friedrich A. Hayek (1974) and Milton Friedman (1976). Both of these distinguished scholars showed how socialism not only fails to enrich common people, but also sacrificed their freedom, too. Socialism was just a shabby way station, has Hayek put it, on “the road to serfdom.” As usual, Churchill had gotten right to the nub: “Capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings,” he said, “while socialism is the equal sharing of misery.” Except, in practice, it was never even that.

The continuing “stagflation” (stagnant growth, high unemployment, and high inflation) distressed average Americans. Moreover, Americans were frustrated that after billions of dollars spent in Lynden Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” the percentage of poor people (12.4 percent) remained essentially what it had been in 1965.

The 1970s presented many challenges to Americans’ traditional understanding of freedom. In San Francisco, New York, and other major cities, gay bars and sex clubs defined a new subculture that “pushed the envelope” of promiscuity. Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and a homosexual, spoke to this overpowering sense of entitlement and liberation. “I think that kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn’t survive it. I would die.” To die for became a slang phrase in these times—a rough American translation of Foucault’s nihilism.

Predictably, such notions of liberation provoked a strong backlash. Ronald Reagan had resisted the Briggs Initiative in California, an attempt to run homosexual teachers out of the classroom. But the welter of personal emotions unleashed by the sexual revolution took bizarre turns. San Francisco supervisor Dan White in 1978 murdered Mayor George Moscone and his fellow supervisor, Harvey Milk. Milk was openly gay. Whites use of the absurd “Twinkie defense” spared him the death penalty, but his lighter sentence led to days of nonstop rioting by San Francisco’s Gay protesters.

Looking abroad, resident Carter soon made clear his unwillingness to press the Soviets very hard on human rights. “We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism [emphasis added] that once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear,” Carter told graduates of Notre Dame University in 1977. From the earliest days, Carter’s administration would place pressure on anti-Communist authoritarian regimes while taking a somewhat relaxed view of Soviet expansion in what was now called the third world.

Carter chose Cyrus Vance as secretary of state. Vance told Time magazine in 1978 that President Carter and the Soviet Communist Party boss, Leonid Brezhnev, “share similar dreams and aspirations about the most fundamental issues.” Apparently agreeing with his secretary of state, Carter kissed Brezhnev during their Vienna Summit Meeting. Vance was described by the seasoned New York Democrat Morris Abrams as “the closest thing to a pacifist the U.S. has ever had as secretary of state, with the possible exception of William Jennings Bryan.”

Carter’s view sparked alarm, even by some in his own party. Washington State’s Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson led opposition in the Senate to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II). Jackson was convinced that Soviet cheating made enforcement impossible. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York’s junior senator, accused Carter of “trying to divert our attention from the central political struggle of our time—that between democracy and totalitarian communism.

Jimmy Carter had to work hard to get his Panama Canal Treaty through the Senate in April 1978. Voting for the “giveaway,” as critics called it, were many Republicans, as well as most Democrats. The Republican Senate leader, Howard Baker of Tennessee, would sacrifice his presidential hopes because he inflamed the party’s conservative grassroots over the canal. Nine senators went down to defeat, with opponents attacking them for supporting the giveaway. Reagan had made the Canal giveaway a powerful symbolic issue; his position was supported by most conservatives.

Carter scored his greatest, arguably his only, foreign-policy success with the Camp David Accords of 1978. Carter succeeded in bringing Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, and Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin,  to the presidential retreat at Camp David for long and tiring negotiations on an Israeli pullout from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. (Sadat had dramatically flown to Jerusalem to get the talks started.) He was alarmed at Carter’s insistence that the Soviets be included. Carter yielded on this point, and the Soviets were not invited. Sadat and Begin would win the Nobel Peace Prize for their roles in the Camp David Accords.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21134-21224). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE

By 1979, it was apparent that President Carter was in serious trouble. The “misery index” (derived by adding the unemployment figure and the inflation figure) which he had invented and used against Jerry Ford so effectively now weighed heavily against him. Americans had to resort to “odd and even” days to get gasoline, thanks to the energy crisis. Carter had grown a huge new bureaucracy in the Department of Energy, but he was unable to assure a plentiful supply of gasoline at the pump—where it counts.

Advised by his brilliant young pollster, Pat Caddell, that Americans were seriously alienated, Carter summoned groups of leaders, academics, and journalists to the scene of his great triumph, Camp David. Carter then came down from the mountain, Moses-like, to fire most of his Cabinet officers. He left his inexperienced young White House staffers in place. “Good grief,” said a senior Democratic Congressman, “he’s cut down the tall trees and left the monkeys!” Carter then went on national TV to deliver a major speech. In it, he deplored the “crisis of confidence” across the country that he charged was a “fundamental threat to democracy.”

To most Americans, the president’s performance was profoundly unsettling. Gone was the toothy Carter grin. Gone was the cocky optimism of the nuclear engineer who asked, “Why not the best?” Now, Carter even had to fend off “attack rabbits” while on vacation. Soon his speech became known as the malaise speech. Though Carter never used that word, it stuck.

Jack Germond found the whole episode disturbing—the malaise summit and the malaise speech. Surprisingly, even the feminist Germond was troubled by Rosalynn Carter’s dominant role in these high-level bull sessions. “We all knew that the first lady was a significant influence on the president and, because she was so obviously bright and serious, most of us probably felt comfortable about it. But I was not the only one shaken by the reality of the president’s wife behaving as unofficial equal in these circumstances. On the way back, Joe Kraft, a columnist for the Post, kept shaking his head and muttering about how this was something very different indeed.”

Jimmy Carter and the first lady tried to bring the country together on the growing concern about the family in America. Following the passage by many states of so-called no-fault divorce laws, divorce rates shot up. The out-of-wedlock birthrate continued to rise alarmingly. Contrary to confident predictions, the widespread availability of abortion did not reduce these numbers. The Carter’s genuinely sought to find common ground on these and a host of troubling issues in a series of White House Conferences on the Family. The title of these conferences was soon changed to Families. And therein lies a story.

Steel pressing her campaign against the ERA, Mrs. Phyllis Schlafly put her organizing genius to the task of raising awareness of the implications of that word families. With her legal background, she recognized the White House was on the verge of extending official recognition to a variety of domestic arrangements. She knew that the Census Bureau’s decades-long definition of a family as a group of individuals joined by marriage, birth, or adoption was in jeopardy. She and other conservatives like Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and Dr. James C. Dobson of the evangelical organization, Focus on the Family, rallied supporters. They urged their followers to get involved in the delegate selection process and take part in the substantive issues that would be raised at the local and regional preparatory meetings for White House Conferences. Thus was born what participants call the pro-family movement. Those critical of its goals—which were clearly a defensive reaction to rapid social changes—either dismissed this grassroots movement or labeled it “the religious right.” Soon, perhaps unavoidably, this movement would have an impact on national politics.

The Reverend Jerry Falwell (head of the newly formed grass-roots Moral Majority), Paul Weyrich, and Mrs. Schlafly were responding, in a sense, to the vacuum created on the conservative side of the political spectrum by the media’s decades-long fascination with the radical groups on the left. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),  and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been formed in the sixties to generally positive media reaction. Stokely Carmichael (SNCC), H. Rapp Brown (SNCC and the Black Panthers), and Tom Hayden (SNCC and SDS) often flouted the law. Insatiable, they pushed a list of sharp demands on society. Bobby Seale and Huey Newton were leaders of the Black Panthers, one of the most militant of the left wing groups. The Black Panthers had been implicated in extensive violence and several murders.

The Carter’s did not lack conviction. Jimmy and Rosalynn both rushed to the scene of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant breakdown, calming fears. Still, presidents, if they are wise, do not confess to presiding over a malaise. Carter’s erratic conduct persuaded Senator Ted Kennedy that Carter might be vulnerable after all. The Democratic Party had taken a pounding in the off-year election. To Kennedy’s liberal activist supporters, Carter’s continued leadership would spell disaster for the party in 1980. So Kennedy declared his candidacy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21253-21293). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

On 4 November 1979, swarms of “students” in Tehran, Iran, overran the United States Embassy. They took as hostages all the Americans—diplomats and civilian employees of the embassy, even the Marine guards—fifty-two in all. Not only did the Ayatollah Khomeini not condemn the action, he praised the hostage takers for defying America, that “Great Satan.” Perhaps expecting an early resolution of the crisis, televisions Walter Cronkite began attending each broadcast of the CBS Evening News with a number of days the Americans had been held hostage. Rival ABC News weighed in with Ted Koppel offering a late-night program called America Held Hostage. Now, Jimmy Carter would have a real malaise to contend with.

The Americans held hostage were beaten, tortured, and threatened with death as the days stretched into months. . . .

. . .

When the Soviets saw that Carter would not use force to free the American hostages in Tehran, they were emboldened. Just after Christmas 1979, Soviet agents overthrew and murdered the ruler of Afghanistan. They installed a puppet ruler, Muhammed Najibullah, in Kabul, and he, obediently, invited Soviet troops to enter the country. Carter said he was shocked by the Soviet invasion. His ambassador to the Soviet Union, Malcolm Toon, was shocked that Carter was shocked. “Apparently, he hadn’t been reading the messages I had been sending him,” Toon later said. As the new decade dawned, America faced a more threatening world, and despite some victories, things only seemed to worsen. Americans went wild with joy when the U.S. hockey team beat the favored Soviets at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. “USA! USA!” The crowd’s chant was defiant and proud.

Misjudging the moment, Carter announced a U.S. boycott of the Summer Olympics, scheduled for the following July in Moscow, sports fans were in a blue funk, but America’s highly trained Olympic athletes were devastated. America’s Summer Olympic competitors saw the electrified reaction of the country to the U.S. team’s victories at the Lake Placid Winter games. These conditioned young athletes were all the more determined to bring home the gold — and the honor — for their country. Glenn Mills speaks for many of those 1980 Olympians. He was a member of the U.S. swim team:

The better our winter athletes dead, the harder our own training got. We put in 100,000 meters each week in the pool, we were reminded daily that we, too, had a chance to lift the spirits of our countrymen, just as our hockey players had. We knew the Soviets would be training hard so they could be heroes to their country. We knew we had to beat them. Many of us had relocated—far from friends and families—to intensify our training. Our parents had to tighten their belts financially to keep us competitive; friends our own age had to understand that we couldn’t share the things they were doing. We were doing all we could to make ourselves worthy of America’s confidence in us. And just as we were poised to go to the Olympics, President Carter announced we would not compete. The dreams of all our athletes, the years of preparation, dedication and sacrifice — all were gone in minutes.

Mills speaks without bitterness. He and most of his fellow Olympians have overcome the crushing disappointment of those days, but he says “we would have loved to be able to finish our job.”

Carter also cut off U.S. grain shipments to the USSR, a move that soured American farmers in the Midwest. The Soviets were not hurt by this move, since they could always buy grain from Australia, Canada, and Argentina. Only American farmers in the Midwest felt the brunt of it. Carter had begun his presidency with a walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, as Thomas Jefferson had done. Now, he adopted the worst of Jefferson’s policies. Then, as in 1807, the embargo hurt Americans more than our adversaries.

When Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy in 1979, he was sixty-eight years old. He was the oldest man ever to run for the presidency, but his health seemed buoyant. He kept in shape clearing the thick undergrowth on his California ranch—Rancho Del Cielo. “People who talk about an age of limits are really talking about their own limitations, not America’s,” Reagan said. He didn’t mention Jimmy Carter. He didn’t have to. Reagan didn’t believe in an age of limits or in the limits of age.

Carter learned that he performed better in the polls when he hunkered down in the White House, attending to the crises. He began racking up primary victories against Ted Kennedy, and playing this “Rose Garden Strategy.”

Carter viewed it as a “positive” sign when the U.S. hostages in Tehran were transferred from the students to the direct control of the Iranian Revolutionary Islamic government. Their captivity didn’t end. The threats of summary execution didn’t end. Their danger didn’t end. What could have been positive? “He is beating on an empty drum,” Khomeini mocked. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance took an almost relaxed view: “Most Americans recognize that we cannot alone dictate events. This recognition is not a sign of America’s decline. It is a sign of growing maturity in a complex world.” So the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic revolutionaries could dictate events but the United States of America could not?

Carter finally roused himself to action in April 1980. Finally. For six months, Americans in Tehran had been tortured. Carter ordered a secret rescue mission, but mournfully it failed. Several U.S. helicopters collided. Several American commandos died. Desert One became a symbol of the fecklessness of the Carter administration. Cyrus Vance, outraged at the American resort to force, resigned his office.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21303-21360). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

USA! USA!

Americans demanded an assertion of their country’s interests and honor. The chant that arose spontaneously from the hockey crowds at Lake Placid, New York—”USA! USA! “—Soon spread across the land. Ted Kennedy might have turned Carter out of office had he seized the moment and appealed to his brother Jack’s legacy. But Ted led the “peace” faction in the Democratic Party. Four years earlier, Jimmy Carter had pledged “a government as good as the American people.” Now, the American people demanded a government as strong as they were.

In the 1980 Republican primary in New Hampshire, Ronald Reagan had to make or break his last chance for the White House. George H.W. Bush claimed the “Big Mo” (momentum) after his win in the Iowa caucuses. NBC News reporter Tom Pettit spoke for many in the press corps. “Reagan is dead,” he said after Iowa.

Not quite.

Reagan agreed to debate the front runner George Bush, who wanted only a one-on-one confrontation. When Reagan showed up in Nashua, New Hampshire, with all the other GOP contenders—Senators Howard Baker and Bob Dole, Congressman Phil Crane and John Anderson—Bush balked. He told the debate moderator to cut off Reagan’s microphone. Angered, but controlled, Reagan used his actor’s skills. He “projected” his voice so that it was picked up by the moderator’s mike: “I’m paying for this microphone, Mister Green!” It was Mr. Breen, but who cared? With that forceful gesture, Reagan captured the debate, the New Hampshire primary, and the nomination.

Americans wanted strength. Reagan was strong.

Conservatives flocked to New Hampshire to battle for “the Gipper.” Pro-lifers pledged themselves to him. Grassroots activists were furious with Baker’s support for the Panama Canal giveaway. They rejected Kissinger’s détente. They cheered Reagan’s support for California’s Proposition 13, the beginning of the tax revolt. Ronald Reagan had been the titular leader of the conservative movement ever since he gave that strong speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Nineteen eighty would be Reagan’s moment.

Reagan swept the spring primaries and went to Detroit as the tested leader of the Republicans. With the GOP united behind him, Reagan was almost trapped in the selection of his vice president. A movement on the floor of Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena—fanned by a board media—took up the idea of naming former President Jerry Ford to the ticket for vice president. For Reagan to choose Ford would have been a concession that he really wasn’t up to the job. The “talking heads”—the network television commentators—loved the idea. Walter Cronkite of CBS even described it, alarmingly, as the “co-presidency.” But Reagan’s presidency would not have training wheels. He gracefully sidestepped that booby trap by choosing George Bush as his running mate. The party’s Northeastern wing was mollified by the choice. Happy Republicans would beat Jimmy Carter “like a drum,” vowed party chairman Bill Brock. Brock was a highly organized and combative party leader who helped rebuild the GOP after the debacle of Watergate.

Carter’s Democrats were glum as they gathered in New York. Ted Kennedy’s memorable speech ended with a powerful refrain: THE DREAM WILL NEVER DIE! Kennedy’s eloquence you vote the brave promise of his slain brother’s. He left thousands of delegates in tears.

The only line anyone remembered from Jimmy Carter’s acceptance speech was his mangled tribute to Minnesota’s late Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Carter ringingly referred to him as Hubert Horatio Hornblower, to audible groans.

Now desperate for Ted Kennedy’s endorsement, Carter pursued the bigger man around the convention stage, in search of that elusive “photo op.” It was funny—and embarrassing—how Kennedy always managed to stay a few feet away from the pursuing president.

Carters floor managers had to give in completely to Kennedy’s forces on the Democratic platform. Kennedy called for ever greater government control of key sectors of the economy. It seemed too close to socialism at a time when socialism was clearly strangling the life out of the economies of Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. Only one subject did Jimmy Carter dissent from a very liberal platform that Kennedy delegates demanded of him. Politely but firmly, Carter refused to endorse federal funding of abortion-on-demand.

Walter Cronkite’s nightly tally of the hostages’ days in captivity in Iran had gone over 300 at the beginning of September 1980. Surely he never intended it, but Cronkite’s signoff became a nightly commentary on Carter’s inability to free the hostages.

One of Reagan’s primary challengers, Congressman John Anderson, had moved further and further left over the years. He finally quit the GOP and vowed to run for president as an independent. George Will puckishly noted that Anderson ran only in those primaries where he could win—and he lost there too. But despite his lack of success, for at least one shining moment he became the Great Liberal Hope. In September, he and Reagan squared off in a televised debate. Carter was invited but declined to participate. Told again and again by their opinion leaders that Reagan was stupid and dangerous, liberals eagerly watched the Reagan-Anderson debate.

Jack Germond entertainingly described the typical Anderson voter: “She drives a Volvo. When she attends a League of Women’s Voters (LWV) coffee, she selects a prune Danish on purpose. She thinks wine-and-cheese parties are ‘great fun.’ She doesn’t think Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter are any fun at all.” He was astonished to receive a phone call from a woman who exactly fit his imagined Anderson voter. She informed him that while Anderson had turned in an excellent debate performance, Reagan did not come across as scary. Most of the women in her LWV group were Republicans and they decided to back Reagan. They didn’t want to “waste” their votes.

Anderson’s share in the three-way polls soon collapsed. After he met Ronald Reagan in debate, his support clients from 20 to 7 percent. Anderson could not win—but he could have a massive impact on the election outcome.

Carters managers knew their only chance was to convince voters that Reagan was too dangerous to allow him to have access to nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Carter’s team urged industrialists Armand Hammer to make the case to his Soviet friends for concessions on the Jewish emigration issue. Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbignieuw Brzezinski, signaled to Soviet ambassador Dobrynin that Carter needed their help and would remember it. “[His] message was clear: Moscow should not do anything to diminish Carter’s chances in the election and might even help a bit,” Dobrynin reported in his memoirs. They were looking for the Soviets to bail them out. Hammer, we now know, had laundered money for the Communist Party USA and was a key source for Soviet intelligence agencies.

Carter and Reagan repaired for their single debate — the only time the two major party nominees would share the same stage in the 1980 presidential campaign. The Democrats’ daily charges that Reagan was reckless were having an impact. Unlike all other presidential campaigns, the number of undecided voters was increasing. Voters knew they didn’t want Carter again, but they couldn’t commit to Reagan.

Onstage in Cleveland, Ohio, Carter was tense, unsmiling, Reagan relaxed. Throughout the ninety minutes, Carter tried to rattle Reagan with constant barbs. He described Reagan’s views as disturbing six times. Reagan threw the “misery index” back at Carter. It had been 12.5 in 1976 when Carter jabbed at Ford that “no man with the misery index that high had a right to seek reelection.” On that October night in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s misery index stood at 20! Late in the debate, Carter again tried to provoke Ronald Reagan. The former actor looked bemused. He cocked his head to one side shook it genially, and said: “There you go again.”

The media didn’t get it. Some of the hardened reporters even mocked it. What a weak comeback! But they didn’t understand. It was a devastating riposte. It was the perfect answer. Reagan didn’t say, “There you go again, Jimmy.” That would have been disrespectful to the presidential office. He didn’t say, “There you go again, Mr. President.” That would have elevated Carter’s stature in the viewers’ eyes. Reagan had taken Carter’s hits all night long. He had been called a reckless man and worse. Yet he didn’t lose his dignity or his strength. Millions of Americans concluded that night that he had passed the test of leadership. Reagan’s performance had the biggest impact on American women. They had been undecided. They earnestly wanted to know how this Californian would perform under pressure. “A soft answer turns away wrath,” says the Bible. For Reagan, that wisdom from Proverbs proved literally true.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21362-21431). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Twelve

REAGAN AND REVIVAL

(1981-1989)

1981: A NEW BEGINNING

When Ronald Reagan mounted the inaugural stands on 20 January, he looked out on the vast throng from the west front of the Capitol. It was the first time an inauguration had been held there. It was singularly appropriate that this Californian should look westward.

The U.S. economy was in serious trouble at that moment. “Stagflation” meant high unemployment and punishing interest rates. Americans grumbled as they lined up for rationed gasoline. The Iranian militants had been holding fifty-two of their fellow citizens in cruel captivity for 444 days.

Reagan took the oath” it from Dr. Joseph Warren. Warren is among the least-known of the founding fathers because he was killed at Bunker Hill in 1775. Yet Warren, the president of the Massachusetts Congress, had told his fellow patriots: “Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. . . . On you depends the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important questions upon which rests the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.” Reagan spoke of his confidence that Americans were indeed ready to act worthy of themselves. As he stepped from the Inaugural platform, Reagan signed an Executive Order. With that stroke of his pen, he dismantled the price controls on oil that had stood for a decade. The next day, he went further. He abolished the Council on Wage and Price Stability. The energy crisis that has consumed the Carter presidency ended that day. Americans have never lined up for gasoline since.

At an inaugural luncheon, president Reagan made the momentous announcement: Finally, the American hostages had been freed! He asked former President Carter to fly to Wiesbaden, West Germany, as his personal representative. There, Reagan’s defeated rival would welcome the former hostages to freedom.

Bearing the transition from Carter to the Reagan administration, the Iranians sent feelers to the incoming Reagan team. They might need another six months to release the Americans, they said. Reagan’s Secretary of State-designate was Alexander Haig, former military commander of NATO. Haig’s answer lacked the concision of General McAuliffe’s at Bastogne, but he conveyed the same idea: Nuts! Americans joked, “What is green and glows on January 20? Answer: Iran.” Brave talk. The reality was that the United States combine various concessions—like releasing the Iranian assets President Carter had frozen and giving the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime immunity from lawsuits and international courts—with the newer, harder Reagan line. The Iranians thought it best to end the impasse quickly.

President Reagan soon announced his plan for the largest tax cut in American history. Speaker Tip O’Neill, Democrat from Massachusetts, vowed to block it. Massachusetts’ other powerful liberal, Senator Edward Kennedy, also opposed Reagan’s move. This, despite the fact that his late brother had slashed taxes for business and top earners. “In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy proposed to cut off the top rate to 70 percent from 91 percent,” writes economist Dan Mitchell. “Between 1961 and 1968, as the economy expanded by more than forty-two percent and tax revenues rose by one third, the rich saw their share of the tax burden climb to 15.1 percent from 11.6 percent.”

Reagan defended his economic plan before a labor union audience at the Washington Hilton on 30 March 1981. After the event, he walked into his waiting limousine. Bursting out of a crowd, a deranged young man fired six shots at the president. John Hinckley Jr. previously wounded the president’s Press Secretary, Jim Brady, but it was not immediately clear that the president had been hit. Hinckley also hit a police officer and a secret service agent. Reagan thought he had just broken a rib when his secret service agent shoved him into the limo and jumped on top to shield him with his body. As the president arrived at George Washington University Hospital, he forced a wan smile. Once inside, however, his knees buckled and he was rushed into surgery.

It would be years before Americans learned how close Ronald Reagan came to dying that day, barely two months into his presidency. The assassin’s bullet lodged within just an inch of his heart, and he suffered terrible blood loss. But that night a relieved country laughed as Reagan’s words to First Lady Nancy were quoted on every news broadcast: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” Even at the point of death, the affable trouper could not resist cracking a joke.

Reagan’s sense of humor never lagged. He often repeated Churchill’s witticism: “Nothing is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” When Reagan staffers James A. Baker III, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver came into the recovering Presidents room to assure him everything was running smoothly at the White House, Reagan cracked, “What makes you think I’d be happy to hear that?”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21561-21597). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Reagan rebounded from the assassination attempt and spoke to a joint session of Congress to press his economic recovery plan. He was the first president ever to survive after being shot. “He reacted better,” one writer noted, “to being shot than most politicians do to a bad headline.” “There he stood, Lazarus-like,” said Tip O’Neill’s young aide, Chris Matthews. “He ran his vote total over the top at night.” Americans enthusiastically backed him when he asked for their help. Speaker O’Neill was frustrated when twenty-nine of his Democratic representatives supported the president. Most of those congressmen were Southern “Boll Weevils” from districts where Reagan had run well ahead of the hapless Jimmy Carter. As the old Capitol Hill expression goes, “if they didn’t see the light, they surely felt the heat.” One of these Southerners, Louisiana Senator, John Breaux, even joked that his vote was not for sale—”but it might be for rent.”

Even though Reagan had to wrestle the Democratic Speaker O’Neill for every vote in the House, he never let their competition become a personal or better. When the time came to celebrate Tip O’Neill’s seventieth birthday, Reagan invited him to the White House to apply the soft soap. Toasting the speaker with champagne, the Irish president saluted his very Irish sparring partner:

If I had a ticket to heaven

And you didn’t have one, too

I’d sell mine, Tip

And go to hell with you!

President Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Act—a combination of massive tax cuts and spending cuts—at his Western White House, his Rancho del Cielo. Richard Darman later noted that the symbolism of the heavy fog that rolled in, making it hard for press and invited guest to find their way to the event. “It was a riverboat gamble,” said the Republican’s Senate Leader, Howard Baker of Tennessee.

Congressman Jack Kemp beat the drums for the supply-side economics. The Kemp-Roth bill was based on the simple idea that when taxes are too high, they disparage enterprise and constrict economic activity. Thus, as the supply-side model shows, lowering taxes stimulates economic growth and generates more revenue in the long run. While Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had shown that the theory worked in practice years before, in those early days of the Reagan administration there was bitter disagreement over the theory. Kemp mocked Kansas Republican Senator Bob Dole’s high-tax policies as “root canal” economics, and maverick congressman Newt Gingrich called Dole “the tax collector of the Welfare State.” Dole responded with a story of a bus full of supply-side economists that went over a cliff. “It was a great tragedy,” Dole deadpanned. “Why? Well there were two empty seats on that bus!”

Most politicians didn’t really know who was right, but they did know that while Reagan was sweeping the New Hampshire primary in 1980, their heroic Dole was garnering only 597 votes statewide.

Reagan and concentrated on a few, easily comprehended objectives. Columnist George Will summed up the Reagan agenda: “Government is too big, it taxes too much, and the Soviets are getting away with murder.” Howard Baker noted how Jimmy Carter had never been able to prioritize his legislative goals. He “set up dozens of initiatives and lost his focus.”

In the summer of 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Union (PATCO) went out on strike. Reagan had been proud to claim the support of this union in 1980. He bragged about having been the only union president ever to run for the White House. But now he issued a stern warning: If PATCO members—government employees—violated federal law by walking off the job, he would fire them all. Few people believe that the president would carry out that threat. But he did. It was an incredibly daring move. If even one midair collision had occurred, Reagan’s presidency might have been fatally damaged.

At that time, it was not clear what impact firing PATCO workers would have. There had been 795,000 workers in all fields on strike in 1980; by 1987, that number declined nationally to 174,000. Not only did the reaction to the PATCO strike give Americans a measure of labor peace at home, but many in the chanceries of Europe and in the gremlin watched and marveled that Reagan really meant what he said. Even the KGB noted it. With Reagan, they wrote in a background paper for the Soviet communist leadership, “word and deed are the same.”

President Reagan searched for ways to restore America’s battered prestige and technical preeminence. He seized upon the space shuttle. He chose well. The launching of a space shuttle is clearly one of the most demanding, complicated engineering feats man has ever attempted. . . .

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21607-21645). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

When Libya’s dictator, Muammar Khaddafi, sent several Soviet-made MiG jet fighters to threaten U.S. Navy jets in the international waters of the Gulf of Sidra, Reagan ordered them shot down. Reversing Carter-era policies, Reagan told his military chiefs they could pursue harassing Libyan jets. When asked if they could pursue them into Libyan territory, he responded: “You can follow them into their damn hangers.” His answer was repeated throughout the Pentagon and, indeed, throughout the entire military.

Stories of Reagan’s resolve—coupled with the largest peacetime military buildup in American history—spread through the ranks of the nation’s military like an electric current. Reagan greatly improved military pay. Under Carter, and the years of “the hollow military,” enlisted men and their families had had to resort to food stamps to make ends meet. Now, morale in the military soared.

At least the military had jobs. For nearly ten million unemployed Americans, Reaganomics was proving to be a cruel joke. It seemed Reagan had gambled on tax cuts stimulating the economy, and lost. Inflation was coming down rapidly as Carter’s appointee, Paul Volcker, and the Federal Reserve Board applied a tourniquet to the money supply. Gasoline prices, after an initial spike, were coming down and supply was plentiful. Reagan pledged to “stay the course” and resisted advice to raise taxes again. The loud demands of his opposition on Capitol Hill were to be expected. The contents of the liberal press for Reagan and his policies was palpable. Reagan’s problem was that most members of his own party, even most members of his own administration, counseled retreat. Reagan stubbornly refused.

By 1982, the recession deepened, and Reagan looks like a one-termer. “The stench of failure” was rising above the Reagan White House, wrote the editors of the New York Times with obvious schadenfreude. That German word precisely captures their hand-warming “malicious joy.” Still, Reagan soldiered on. He did what so many embattled presidents do when domestic crises threaten to overwhelm them. He changed the subject—and the scenery. In June, President Reagan became the first U.S. president to address the British House of Commons. Of the 225 Labor Party members, 125 boycotted the historic speech. He was undeterred:

In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union. . . . [T]he march of freedom and democracy . . .  will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.

Many of the British members of Parliament were stunned by Reagan’s toughness—and his mastery. They had been led by U.S. news media to expect something of a dodderer, an elderly and confused man. Reagan in Parliament was in command. And he employed a new style teleprompter which the British had never seen. They thought he had committed the entire speech to memory. One labor party leader, David Owen, was impressed: “Maybe he’ll go down as a much better president than any of us are yet prepared to admit.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21660-21702). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Reagan also had a chance during this trip to meet with Queen Elizabeth II. The president and the queen were both avid riders. Reagan’s men were especially eager to get “visuals” of the president and the queen riding at the royal estate at Windsor. As the two heads of state galloped up a steep hill, however, the queen’s horse let out a long, loud blast of gas.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. President,” the queen said.

Without hesitation, Reagan responded: “It’s alright, Your Majesty; I thought it was the horse.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21703-21707). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

AN EVIL EMPIRE

. . .

Unlike the secular elites of the United States and most of Europe, President Reagan took seriously the role of faith in people’s lives. He strongly believed in God. He spoke out in defense of freedom of religion everywhere. Under Reagan, the United States government’s Voice of America began to broadcast religious programs into the Soviet bloc. Catholic masses from U.S. parishes were beamed into heavily Catholic Poland. Father Viktor Potapov, a Russian Orthodox priest, broadcast his program into Russia. “Religion in Our Lives” was carried to believers in the USSR six times a week in seven languages.

Nor did Reagan doubt the role of faith in Americans’ lives. He met with leaders of the Right to Life Movement on twenty-two January, the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling. Reagan maintained close ties with Reverend Billy Graham, the leading evangelist in the country, and he had an especially close relationship with New York’s Catholic leader, Terence Cardinal Cooke. Cooke, dying of cancer, was often welcomed to the Reagan White House. So was Mother Teresa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who had served the poor of Calcutta for decades. Reagan took care to send many church conventions videotaped messages of support and empathy. It was a way for him to bypass the major television networks whose anchors and reporters arrogated to themselves the role of information “gatekeepers” and deliver his message unfiltered and uncensored.

Reagan’s Office of Public Liaison repeated the drill with business groups and friendly professional associations. Reagan earned the title of Great Communicator because of his skill on television, but his detractors hardly realized the manifold ways he would reach out to Americans through such traditional organizations as the Boy Scouts, 4H, and the future farmers of America.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21703-21707). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“MORNING IN AMERICA”

Reagan never publicly argued for more defense spending; instead he spoke out for “defense second to none.” Recalling the disaster of Carter’s failed “Desert one” attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran, Reagan argued that our servicemen and women needed the best equipment the nation could provide. The maneuver helped Reagan skirt the unpopularity associated with defense spending. He let Cap Weinberger makes the case on Capitol Hill for more money and for specific weapons systems. Reagan stayed with the big picture. As a result, Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block (“Herblock”) pilloried the faithful Weinberger for the inevitable defense cost overruns. Herblock never drew Weinberger without a $600 military toilet seat around his neck.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21911-21915). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Mondale attacked Reagan’s repeated appeals to Christian fundamentalists. The former vice president had said yes to virtually every organized liberal interest group in Washington, but tried to rule the opinions of millions of evangelicals “out of order.”

In an influential essay in Commentary magazine, the Rev. Richard J. Neuhaus defended the right of evangelicals and fundamentalists to argue for their public policy preferences in a liberal democracy. Neuhaus had warned against the attempt to drive religiously derived moral beliefs out of public life in a well-reviewed book, The Naked Public Square. Neuhaus was then a Lutheran minister who had marched with Dr. King for civil rights. His article, “What the Fundamentalists Want,” spelled out their agenda:

The list includes prayer and Bible reading in public schools, a “pro-life” amendment (or some instrument for overruling Roe v. Wade), legal restrictions on pornography, an end to state “harassment” of Christian schools, resistance to feminist and gay-rights legislation, increased defense spending, and terminating social programs that, it is believed, only increase the dependency of the poor.

Neuhaus argued that even if liberals opposed every point on the evangelicals’ agenda, they could not claim that all those issues had been settled by Democratic consensus. It was not illegitimate to raise questions about them. In fact, liberals came increasingly to rely on the unelected judiciary to force compliance with their agenda when they could no longer persuade legislative majorities.

Faith continued to function as a lightning rod bearing the campaign. Mondale raised alarms about Reagan’s alleged reliance on the Bible’s Book of Revelation and the frightening image of a final battle of Armageddon at the end of history. Reagan acknowledged that he had read and did believe in biblical prophecy, but he had not allowed any particular doomsday interpretation to guide his policies toward the Soviet Union.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21925-21940). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

On Election Day, Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale. He racked up the greatest popular vote total in history. Reagan won 54,451,521 popular votes (58.8 percent) to Mondale’s 37,566,334 popular votes (40.5 percent). Reagan won every state except Mondale’s Minnesota, giving him a 525 electoral votes. The former vice president also carried the District of Columbia to yield thirteen electoral votes. Mrs. Ferraro had not helped. Women voters chose the president. Catholic voters, Italian-American voters, New Yorkers, and even the voters of Mrs. Ferraro’s Queens constituency voted for Reagan.

In Washington, D.C., that November day the weather was blustery and gray and the mood was somber. Reagan’s team was not jubilant as they waited for the election returns. They were scared. All the public opinion polls look favorable, but no one can ever be completely sure who will show up at the polling stations or what will motivate them. Voter turnout is everything. Recalling FDR hunkered in Hyde Park during the uncertain election of 1940, the fact bears repeating: In a democracy, it is good for the governors to fear the people.

When the networks reported that the nationwide romp, however, Reagan’s people relaxed. The Republican Party did not share in Reagan’s “lonely landslide.” The “Morning in America” mood deliberately created by the Reagan campaign operation tended to favor incumbents generally, and that was not good for Republicans seeking to oust Democrats in Congress. Reagan had been elected with the support of 24 percent of the Democrats. His fellow Republicans could not match that cross-party appeal. Many of them didn’t even try.

The day after Reagan’s reelection, leading Democrats began a series of illegal sit-in demonstrations outside the Washington embassy of the apartheid government of South Africa. Getting arrested in protest of the racist policies of the Pretoria became a badge of honor among liberal Democrat activists.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 21975-21989). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“WE CAN DO BUSINESS. . .”

. . .

President Reagan knew he would have to meet with Gorbachev, but he was not willing to appear too eager. Aides privately pressed the president to meet. Gorbachev was different from all those other Communist Party hacks, they said. Gorbachev was interested in relaxing the tensions. There was no time to lose. Gorbachev was different. According to stories that circulated in Washington, Reagan responded to all this prodding with typical humor. “I know he’s different. . . . He’s the first Soviet leader who weighs more than his wife!”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 22002-22006). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

. . . Early in the new year [1986], the president was alerted to a tragedy unfolding on national television. In a mere seventy-three seconds, the Space Shuttle Challenger was launched into a chilly blue sky only to explode spectacularly. Seven Challenger astronauts, including the teacher-volunteer Christa McAuliffe, were instantly killed. Their families witnessed in horror from the reviewing stands, and children throughout the nation watched in their classrooms. President Reagan went on national television that night—28 January 1986—to console and comfort a grieving people. He explained to the frightened children that courage is required to face the dangers of space exploration. We honor these brave astronauts and men and women in every field whose daring and personal sacrifice alone make progress possible. Then, he quoted from High Flight, a poem written in honor of World War I aviators: “we will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”

House Speaker Tip O’Neill was moved to tears by the president’s eloquence. “He may not be much of a debater,” O’Neill observed, “but with a prepared text he’s the best public speaker I’ve ever seen. . . . I’m beginning to think that in this respect he dwarfs both Roosevelt and Kennedy.” This was high praise from a fiercely partisan Democratic speaker.

Reagan captured—or perhaps he shaped—a national mood of firm resolve. Public opinion polls recorded that Americans strongly supported continuing the space program, despite the worst disaster in its history. Significantly, despite the drama of a nationally televised explosion of a space shuttle, NASA  remained committed to the policy of openness first mandated by President Eisenhower in 1959.

Nineteen eighty-six marked more joyous events as well, including the centennial celebration of New York’s Statue of Liberty. Reagan had used the upcoming hundredth anniversary of the lady in the harbor to recruit Chrysler Corporation president Lee Iacocca to lead a private fund-raising drive. Reagan hoped to commemorate the event by restoring the worn, storm-stressed statue. A joint French-American team took on the work of restoration, carefully replacing every one of thousands of individually wrought steel support struts. The great symbol of “Liberty Enlightening the World” had been in danger of collapse.

On 3 July 1986, President Reagan invited French President Francois Mitterrand to join him and Mrs. Reagan for the statue’s rededication. It was to be a tribute, as well, to American ideals of liberty. Reagan treated the Socialist Mitterrand with elaborate courtesy—even as he was doing his best to consign socialism “to the ash heap of history.”

Oddly, Reagan was indebted to Mitterrand. The French leader had collaborated with France’s powerful Communist Party in 1981-82. He tried to impose Marxism democratically on the French people. This Gallic effort was widely viewed as the polar opposite of Reagan’s renewed commitment to free enterprise. The success of Reagan’s policies contrasted powerfully with the soon abandoned disaster of Mitterrand’s policies. The failure of this attempt at democratic socialism had deeply impressed the free peoples of Europe and the world.

For the celebration, President Reagan strode the deck of the USS Iowa, a World War II-era battleship retrofitted for service in the nuclear age. In New York’s darkened harbor, he sent a laser beam to the tip of the Statue of Liberty, dramatically signaling the unveiling. With Solidarity alive in Poland, with the Mujahaddin harassing the Soviets in Afghanistan, with Granada liberated and the Nicaraguan Contras pressing the Communist Sandinistas in Central America, Reagan felt confident in saluting “the cause of human freedom” and relighting Lady Liberty’s torch.

With peace and prosperity, Reagan could be forgiven for thinking he had restored America’s rightful place of leadership in the world.

REYKJAVIK: THE CLASH

The Soviet Union was not just going to collapse, said the leading experts on the Kremlin. Former President Richard Nixon had spoken of seeking “hard-headed détente” as the best we could realistically hope for. But Reagan saw things differently.

His critics always accused him of being simplistic. Veteran Washington wise man Clark Clifford called the president “an amiable dunce.” They did not know what Reagan had told Richard Allen a decade earlier. Allen would become Reagan’s national security adviser in the White House. Years before Reagan was elected, he spoke with Allen: “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose.” The problem was that Reagan’s critics mistook clarity for simplicity.

The hastily-called Summit at Reykjavik, Iceland, in late 1986 was Gorbachev’s idea. If Hollywood had searched for a location in which to dramatize visually the East-West clash, it could not have chosen a better one. Iceland was a volcanic island midway between Europe and North America. Instead of green grass, there is a black volcanic ash. Höfdi House is the modest nineteenth-century mansion where two super-power leaders would meet. It is an unadorned, white building with a dark slate roof. Some local residents even the claim that Höfdi House is haunted. The island’s capitol city is surrounded by dark gray crags.

In mid-October the stark Icelandic landscape was almost devoid of color. The scene was dominated by a black-and-white. It wasn’t even like those Hollywood movies that Reagan had starred in, the ones that sharply contrasted good and evil. Those were the films that nauseated the sophisticates. To make the contrast even more compelling, Gorbachev  showed up in his black limousine, wearing a heavy black overcoat and a black snap-brim fedora.  Reagan arrived wearing a light tan raincoat, which on television appeared to be white.

Very quickly, both Summit participants went far beyond the agenda. Gorbachev, we now know, was desperate to end the arms race. Perestroika was not working. The Soviet system was being crushed by the burden of keeping up with the U.S. military buildup.  If he could cut defense spending, Gorbachev could divert desperately needed funds to perestroika and his effort to save the Communist system. “He has a nice smile,” the grim-faced Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko  said of their young champion, “but he has iron teeth.”

Like two poker players, they faced each other across a table. Gorbachev made daring offers to Reagan. Everything that Reagan had offered five years earlier in his Zero Option proposal, he could now have. Reagan suggested that both sides scrap all old fence of missiles within ten years. Gorbachev saw Reagan’s dead and raised him: Why not get rid of all strategic weapons, he asked. It was a breathtaking offer. It went far beyond anything ever proposed, ever even imagined, in the entire history of arms-control negotiations between the United States and USSR. But there was a condition: the United States would have to agree not to continue work on the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Ronald Reagan could have the most successful summit in American history. He could sign the most far-reaching agreement ever with the Soviets. He could return home—just in time before the midterm congressional elections—as the Peacemaker. All he had to do was give up SDI. He could explain to the American people that it had always been his intention to use SDI as “a bargaining chip” and that he had held out for the best agreement the United States had ever won.

He would not do it. He had eerily described the scene fully ten years earlier. In 1976, he told his son Michael that he was not so sorry that he had lost the Republican nomination for president. His only regret was now he would never have the chance to hear out a Soviet ruler’s arms-control demands. These demands would surely have left the three countries at a disadvantage. Then, Reagan said, he would quietly walk around the table and whisper nyet. Here, that scene, exactly as Reagan had described it, was being played out. And as president, Ronald Reagan whispered nyet.

With hopes dashed, but two on smiling leaders left Höfdi House. “I don’t know what else I could have done,” Gorbachev told Reagan through an interpreter as they parted. “You could have said yes,” Reagan answered with uncharacteristic bitterness. At the time, Reykjavik seemed to be a failed summit. In the off-year elections of 1986, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. For the rest of Reagan’s term, he would face an increasingly fractious Congress.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 22086-22152). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

IRAN-CONTRA

Reagan was persuaded that there were “moderates” in Iran. These moderates were jockeying for power in the post-Ayatollah Khomeini regime. They said that they wanted better relations with the United States. But they would be strong-armed out of power unless they could buy weapons. If they were armed, they claimed they could influence the hostage takers in Beirut.

This was the fateful link each between the sale of arms to Iran, the ransoming of hostages in Beirut, and the diversion of profits from the arms sales to support the Nicaraguan Contras.

What is so clear to critics now was not so clear then. Americans have repeatedly joined civilized nations all over the world in negotiating for the release of hostages held in the Middle East. Hostage taking and ransom demands are a highly developed art in the Mideast. As long ago as the eighteenth century, no lesser figures than President Washington and President Adams became involved in paying for the release of American sailors held captive in North Africa. They did it because Europeans did it. Jefferson determined to use force rather than pay ransom. He sent U.S. warships to Marines “to the shores of Tripoli.”

The day before the 1986 midterm elections in the United States, a Beirut newspaper reported that the United States was involved in paying for the release of hostages. Initially, the Reagan White House dismissed the notion as ridiculous. When White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan first informed President Reagan that the profits from arms sales were being diverted to support the Contras, Reagan became pale. “Why would they do that?” He asked, apparently forgetting his orders to Poindexter and North.

Iran-Contra, as the burgeoning scandal was soon known, erupted. Reagan was described in the press as culpable if he was aware—and thus liable to impeachment. Or, if he really did not know what his subordinates were doing, that he was clearly disengaged. The famous Reagan management style was to sketch the broad outlines of policy in clearly communicated terms and then let his subordinates handle the details. This style had been highly successful in the first term. Now, especially with Donald Regan making many of the day-to-day decisions himself, Reagan’s hands-off management style was seen as a failure.

Reagan appointed former Senator John Tower of Texas to investigate Iran-Contra. Admiral Poindexter testified that he had not told the president of the diversion of funds. CIA Director William Casey had played a key role in Reagan’s foreign-policy. Casey was an old hand at intelligence. During World War II, he had served in the OSS. He had followed Churchill’s order to “set Europe ablaze” against Hitler. A genuine patriot, a man of deep religious faith, Casey flew around the world in the 1980s in his unmarked black jet transport. He orchestrated the Reagan administration’s global squeeze on the hard-pressed Soviet Union. Casey doubtless knew a great deal about Iran-Contra, but he suffered a debilitating stroke in November 1986 and died in May 1987. This man who kept the secrets may have taken many of them to his grave. With Casey’s death and Poindexter’s testimony, the possibility of a Reagan impeachment lost steam. Liberals were visibly disappointed. At the height of the media firestorm, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee exulted, “I haven’t had so much fun since Watergate.”

President Reagan suffered a loss of twenty points in his approval rating by the American people. He was dispirited. When he finally agreed to fire Chief of Staff Donald Regan, he did not realize how close he was himself to being deposed. Regan’s departing assistants told staffers for the incoming White House chief of staff, Howard Baker, that Reagan was incapacitated. Baker should be prepared, they said, to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Reagan was too old, too forgetful, too passive to serve in the nuclear age.

On arriving for work, former Senator Baker stationed various staff members at different points in the Cabinet room. Their task was to observe closely how the president interacted with others.

They found Reagan stimulated by the new faces, fully engaged, and with a total grasp of the issues at hand. The president rose to the occasion.

He may never have known he was being measured for a political casket when he gamely refused to die. Senator Baker concluded that he was “fully competent” and the crisis passed when the president went on national television to take responsibility for the Iran-Contra, his approval rating buoyed up once again.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 22168-22202). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

INTO THE SUNSET

Ronald Reagan was by far the oldest president to serve. He had survived a serious assassination attempt, colon cancer, and skin cancer. Politically, he had survived the loss of control of Congress and an international arms-for-hostages scandal that threatened to result in his impeachment. The stock market had crashed dizzily in October 1987, sending shock waves through financial markets, but it soon rebounded. The prestige press emphasized every political embarrassment and hyped such issues as homelessness and income disparity as crises that the administration was unwilling or unable to handle. Still, the economy continued to boom, generating millions of new jobs. Tax revenues doubled on Reagan’s watch—a tribute to the success of supply-side economics. Still his critics didn’t call it Reaganomics.

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to Washington, D.C., in December 1987, the press delighted in showing him wading into lunchtime crowds on the capital’s fashionable Connecticut Avenue. His obvious boyish delight in mixing with Americans on the streets reminded some of the popular movie of the day—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It would have seemed churlish to point out that half a billion people held at bayonet point under Soviet rule had no similar freedom of movement.

So, too, was Reagan determined to break through the “bubble” that protected him and get a real sense of the Russian people. Unexpectedly, in 1988, the president and Mrs. Reagan got out of the their limousine to walk around Moscow’s famed Arbat district. The Russian crowd responded with delight. The Arbat is a district known for its greater commercial and artistic freedom. Very quickly, however, the KGB muscled its way into the friendly crowd, pushing, punching, manhandling the Reagans’ admirers. They kicked and shoved everyone, including American reporters. “Leave them alone, these are Americans,” cried Reagan White House staffer Mark Weinberg. Reagan recorded in his diary that night his reaction to the Soviets’ brutalizing their own people: “Perestroika or not, some things have not changed.”

Despite all the surface bonhomie, Gorbachev was miffed that Reagan persisted in calling him “Mikhail.” If he knew anything about Russian ways, he would have known to call him Mikhail Sergeivich, the Soviet ruler told his friends.

The tensions were broken somewhat when presidential biographer Edmund Morris sat with two Soviet intellectuals at a formal lunch at the Writers House. Felix Kuznetsov, the head of the Gorky Institute, pointed out a reporter behind the velvet rope. “Who is that man . . .  staring at us with such malevolence?” the fearful Soviet asked. “Don’t worry about Sam Donaldson,” Morris replied, explaining that the ABC News reporter was “a thorn in the President’s flesh.” Kuznetsov did not recognize the biblical expression. When it was explained to him, he said the Russian phrase was better. The Russians would call Sam Donaldson “a splinter in the president’s ass,” Kuznetsov said.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 22269-22291). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

If Reagan’s historic achievement was not appreciated by his opponents in the United States, it had many in his own party muttering. The eminent columnist George Will was one of the most highly respected “adults” in the Washington press corps. Will lamented that Reagan had “bought into the arms control chimera.” The longtime conservative activist Howard Philips called the president “a useful idiot.” “Let Reagan be Reagan,” conservative grassroots began to cry.

But Reagan was being Reagan. He had always had a horror of nuclear warfare. He had always said that the United States must negotiate out of strength. He was now putting into practice those eloquent words from John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural address: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

Reagan’s skilful negotiating strategy paid off. Following the Soviets’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, Reagan visited Moscow in late May 1988. While press attention at home was focused overwhelmingly on the upcoming presidential campaign, Reagan pressed on, carrying his appeal for freedom to the heart of the Soviet Empire.

The pressures unleashed by Gorbachev’s perestroika continued to build. The 1986 meltdown of a nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine, had caused thousands of deaths. The Soviet state was shown to be corrupt, inefficient, and heedless of human life. The environmental impact of Communist rule was seen to be nothing less than catastrophic.

Now, Reagan stood in the resplendent St. George’s Hall in the Kremlin. He responded to a formal welcoming speech from Gorbachev. There, amid the gold and crystal and rich tapestries of the Tsars—and among the paintings of the saints—Reagan looked steadily at the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and said, “God bless you.” It was the first time the name of God had been uttered aloud in that place in seventy years. And it was heard by every citizen across twelve time zones of the Soviet Union.

Some of the Communist leaders who heard these words “visibly blanched.” A Soviet diplomat later recalled the moment: “The . . . impregnable edifice of Communist atheism was being assaulted before [our] very eyes.”

Reagan insisted on meeting with Jewish refuseniks. When one of them was denied permission to visit the U.S. Embassy, Reagan told his Soviet hosts he would go to the man’s apartment. Embarrassed, the KGB backed down. Reagan invited hundreds of religious believers to a reception at Spaso House. He stressed the need for religious freedom to be part of any meaningful perestroika.

Invited to address students at Moscow State University, Reagan leaped at the chance to talk to the sons and daughters of the Soviet ruling class—the nomenklatura. He praised “the first breath of freedom” they had seen in this “Moscow Spring.” These knowledgeable young students could not miss his reference. Many of their parents had had their hopes for a relaxation of tyranny in the Eastern bloc dashed when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968. That was the brutal end of the “Prague Spring.”

Now, standing under a huge scowling bust of Lenin, Reagan patiently laid out the case for freedom in the information age. Marx was wrong to see materialism at the center of human existence, he said. The new computer revolution was powered by the silicon chip—whose material basis was the same as the most plentiful substance on earth—sand. In order for a state to compete in the modern world, though, the computer revolution demanded free minds. No state could enjoy progress when every fax machine, every photocopier, every computer hard drive had to be controlled by the secret police.

He returned again and again to the spiritual basis of freedom. To these young people who had been schooled in atheist materialism from kindergarten, he boldly proclaimed:

Even as we explore the most advanced reaches of science, we are returning to the age-old wisdom of our culture, a wisdom contained in the Book of Genesis in the Bible. In the beginning was the spirit, and it was from this spirit that the material abundance of creation issued forth. But progress is not foreordained. The key is freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication.

He ended his address with an appeal to these future leaders of Russia:

We do not know what the conclusion of this journey will be, but we’re hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled. In this Moscow spring, this May 1988, we may be allowed that hope—that freedom, like the fresh green sapling planted over Tolstoi’s grave, will blossom forth at least in the rich fertile soil of your people and culture. We may be allowed to hope that the marvelous sound of a new openness will keep rising though, ringing through, leading to a new world of reconciliation, friendship, and peace.

Thank you all very much an da blagoxlovit vas gospod! God bless you.

As Reagan departed the Soviet Union, he gave the first nationally televised address to the Soviet people. He had been prepped by America’s leading Russian scholar, James Billington. Reagan reached out to the babushkas (grandmothers). These aged women were the true spiritual leaders of Mother Russia, Billington said. Reagan praised them—and blessed them.

There would be no Appomattox, 1865, or Surrender Ceremony on board the USS Missouri, 1945, to mark the end of the Cold War. If we search for the defining moment when the USSR ceased to threaten the life and liberty of the world, it might be seen at Reykjavik. Secretary of State George Schultz thought this was the turning point. So did Mikhail Gorbachev. Although the press in 1986 lamented the “failure” to sign an arms control agreement. Gorbachev noted that it was the time they had engaged in deep discussions on the future of nuclear weapons and the future of the superpower relationship.

But even without tens of thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles, the Soviet Union could still be a deadly menace. The massive preponderance of Soviet troops and tanks was the reason the Western democracies had sought protection under their “nuclear umbrella” from the earliest days of the Cold War. Margaret Thatcher knew this. She worried that Regan and Gorbachev would be carried away by their nuclear-arms-cutting enthusiasms and forget the threat of Soviet conventional armed strength. With her keen sense of history, with her passion for freedom in Europe, she was a true heir of Winston Churchill. There could be no secure peace in which the United States abandoned its truest ally.

If, therefore, we seek that defining moment when the Cold War ended, we might look to New York harbor on 7 December 1988. Mikhail Gorbachev had just delivered his speech to the UN General Assembly. In it, the Soviet ruler announce massive cuts in conventional armed forces in Europe. He would cut his troop strength by 500,000 men, his tanks divisions by a quarter, and his combat aircraft by 500. Now, Mrs. Thatcher could affirm the course of human events.

President Reagan and President-elect George H.W. Bush awaited their Soviet guest on Governors Island, just south of Manhattan Island. Reagan strongly approved of Gorbachev’s speech to the UN that morning. Reagan had always said there was not distrust in the world because there are arms; there are arms because there is distrust. Now, Reagan and his designated successor welcomed the Soviet initiative. To be sure, the need to cut his conventional forces was forced on Gorbachev in no small measure by the internal failings of Communism and by the economic pressure that Reagan had been applying since the day he came to office. Ronald Reagan had planted his flag and now Gorbachev was coming to him.

The worldwide Communist system had made a charnel house of the twentieth century. Fully 100 million people had been killed by Communism. The red flag never brought any of its chained peoples closer to peace, justice, or equality. Gorbachev seemed to understand this—at least at some level. While claiming all along to be a loyal Communist, Gorbachev reveled in the greater freedom he saw in the West. The Soviet rulers had come in the grim succession—Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko. But Gorbachev was different—and not just because, as Reagan joked, he weighed more than his wife. He was the first Soviet ruler with whom we could speak about peace with freedom, peace with safety, peace with justice. He was the Soviet ruler who had not waded through blood in his path to power.

As Mikhail Sergeivich Gorbachev left the United Nations headquarters at Turtle Bay, he would have proceeded south along FDR Drive to South Ferry. His limo swept him past Wall Street, the dynamo of America’s powerful free market economy. There, George Washington had taken the oath of office as the first elected president nearly two centuries before Gorbachev’s arrival. There George Washington had kissed the Bible.

The Communist Party’s general secretary would embark for Governors Island at the ferry terminal, in the shadow of the World Trade Center. As it plowed its way ponderously across the narrow divide that separates Governors Island from Manhattan, the ferry would take just five or six minutes to carry the distinguished Soviet visitor to his meeting with two American presidents. During the short trip, Gorbachev would have a commanding view of New York harbor. He would have time to think about that Lady in the Harbor—Lady Liberty. He would see Ellis Island, where millions had come, yearning to breathe free. Here they found America, the last best hope of earth.

That white, squat, lumbering Coast Guard ferry was the furthest thing we might imagine from the power and pomp of that 1945 surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri. There would be no surrender in the Cold War. But there would be something better. On that chilly day in New York harbor, peace glided into that ferry slip, quietly, almost unannounced, almost unperceived. Not bad, as Reagan would say—not bad at all.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 22086-22152). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Epilogue

A PERSONAL REFLECTION

. . .

As early as 1974, Ronald Reagan was already thinking about our history and our timeless mission. He concluded a major address, then, when Americans were not feeling too good about their country or their institutions, saying,

We are not a sick society. A sick society could not produce the men that set foot on the moon, or who are now circling the earth above us in Skylab. A sick society bereft of morality and courage did not produce the men who went through those years of torture and captivity in Vietnam. Where did we find such men? They are typical of this land as the Founding Fathers were typical. We found them in our streets, in the offices, the shops and the working places of our country and on the farms.

We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, “The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.”

We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 22463-22473). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE LAST BEST HOPE

VOLUME I:

FROM the AGE of DISCOVERY

To a WORLD at WAR

1492-1914

by William J. Bennett

INTRODUCTION

We must remember that America is still a great success story. When we criticize—as criticize we must—we should play the part of what James Madison called a “loving critic.” Former Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it best: “Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies that are free of sin? No, I don’t. Do I think ours is on balance incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do. Have we done obscene things? Yes, we have. How did our people learn about them? They learned about them on television and in the newspapers.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 169-173). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over thirty-five or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 182-187). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter One

WESTWARD THE COURSE

(1492–1607)

COLUMBUS: “THE CHRIST BEARER”

Slavery was an inescapable part of African life. Mansa Musa, a devout Muslim, was the king of Mali (currently part of Niger). He sold fourteen thousand female slaves to finance his journey to Cairo in 1324. The Arabs were always “seizing our people as merchandise,” complained the black king of Bornu (in present-day Nigeria) to the sultan of Egypt in the 1390s. With the extension of Islam into West Africa’s “Gold Coast” came an increasingly vigorous trade in black slaves. The Christian Portuguese emulated this practice. Three hundred years before adoption of the U.S. Constitution, decisions made in Europe and Africa would have great and terrible consequences for a nation as yet unimagined and a people still unnamed.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 240-246). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

On an island he would name La Isla Española—The Spanish Island (or Hispaniola), Columbus found more Indians eager to trade. Importantly, these Indians seemed to have plenty of gold.

So willing, so easily plied with cheap trinkets—like little brass hawk’s bells worth only pennies in Spain—these Indians were vulnerable to the Spaniards in many ways. They could be dominated as slaves and put to work mining gold. What’s more, the native women seemed sexually open. To sailors who had had no contact with the opposite sex for months at a time and who had little fear of venereal disease, the sensual enticements proved irresistible. Syphilis has been traced to this first encounter of Columbus’s men and the aboriginal peoples of the Caribbean. A contemporary of Columbus, Bishop Las Casas, thinks Indians who came back to Barcelona from the first voyage gave the disease to “women of the town,” a euphemism for prostitutes, who then gave it to Spanish soldiers. From there, it spread throughout Europe and the world. The Indians, on the other hand, contracted smallpox and measles from the Spaniards; these diseases devastated populations with no previous exposure and built-up immunity.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 291-300). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

To the modern complaint that Columbus brought slavery to the New World and that the Europeans’ diseases wiped out indigenous peoples, a response is due. Slavery was a pervasive fact of life among the Europeans, but also particularly among the Arabs, the Africans, and the Indians themselves. In Asia, slavery had always existed. It seems hard to credit an attack on Columbus that singles him out for what was then a fairly universal practice. As much as we deplore slavery today, we cannot ignore the moral development of the West from our present vantage point outside the context of history. It was from the very experience of administering a far-flung empire that Spanish scholars began to elaborate universal doctrines of human rights that led, eventually, to the abolition of slavery in the West. A counter-challenge might be offered: Who, in Columbus’s time, did not practice slavery? One might conclude that far from being slavery’s worst practitioners, westerners led the world to end the practice.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 359-366). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The treatment of criminals and heretics at the time gives some idea of the level of public sensibility. In most of the kingdoms of Europe, a convicted traitor would be sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. This process involved hanging the unfortunate man until he was nearly unconscious. Pulled down, the victim would be disemboweled and his entrails burned before him. Finally, his body would then be pulled apart by four horses hitched to his extremities. Heretics fared little better. Burned at the stake, a slow and excruciating process of execution, they could consider themselves blessed if friends had secreted bags of gunpowder beneath their death robes to hasten their tortured end.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 411-416). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE SCRAMBLE FOR EMPIRE

…

Magellan planned to find a strait at the extreme southern tip of South America. But soon, he was in danger. Wintering over on the coast of Argentina, the men began to grumble. Three of his ships mutinied in Port San Julian. He had received word warning him that the Spanish captains, who hated him, planned to kill him. Captains Cartagena, Mendoza, and Quesada accused Magellan of violating royal instructions in taking them so far south. Magellan had told them he would rather die than turn back. He sent his man Espinosa to the Victoria with a message to Captain Mendoza ordering him to cease his defiance and obey orders. Mendoza laughed when he read the letter, which proved a mistake. Espinosa immediately grabbed Mendoza by the beard and stabbed him to death—exactly as Magellan had commanded him. Magellan then subdued another mutinous ship, the Concepcion, with naval gunfire and boarded her, taking Captain Quesada as prisoner. The revolt soon collapsed.

Magellan had Mendoza’s body quartered—gruesomely cut into four parts—and “cried” (exhibited) through the fleet as a warning to everyone against mutiny. Quesada was hanged and Cartagena was spared—for the moment. Soon, however, Captain Cartagena was found to be stirring up new discontent, along with a priest. Magellan had the two men tried and marooned. Abandoned on the shores of Argentina, they would die of exposure, starvation, or Indian attack.  They were last seen “kneeling at the water’s edge, bawling for mercy.”

Pressing on, after the loss of one of his ships, Magellan finally entered “the strait that shall forever bear his name.” In October and November of 1520, Magellan carefully made his way through the hazards of these uncharted waters. Strong currents and sudden storms make it one of the most dangerous passages on earth, even today. The Strait is anything but straight; it is a maze of treacherous waters and dangerous rocks. Magellan’s task was like the threading of a dozen needles. Magellan had to retrace his steps, searching in vain for one of his four remaining ships. He did not know that the San Antonio had headed back to Spain.

His fleet now reduced to three ships, Magellan headed out into the sea he named Pacific. Ahead of him lay open waters. Magellan and his men prayed regularly and well they might. Though they did not realize it, they faced a journey more than twice the distance faced by Columbus. Here, Magellan proved his mettle. Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian member of the crew, kept a detailed journal and wrote of him: “He endured hunger better than all the rest . . . and more accurately than any man in the world, he understood dead reckoning and celestial navigation.”

Pigafetta explained the privations of the voyage to Guam:

We were three months and twenty days without any kind of fresh food. We ate biscuit which was no longer biscuit but powder of biscuit swarming with worms. It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We also ate some ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard to prevent the yard from chafing the shrouds. Rats were sold for one-half ducado [about $1.16 in gold] apiece and even then we could not get them.

The expedition would not have survived at all had Magellan not first hugged the coast of Chile before striking out across the Pacific. Pigafetta realized this: “Had not God and his blessed mother given us so good weather, we would all have died of hunger.”  The trip was three times longer than anyone could have expected. No reliable charts or maps existed.

Finally landing on Guam 6 March 1521, Magellan found his three ships overwhelmed by swarms of natives who, though friendly, carried off much of the cargo of trade. The ships stayed only long enough to resupply and then made for the Spice Islands. Within a week, Magellan had reached the Philippines in the region of Leyte Gulf. The king of Cebu persuaded Magellan that he had converted from Islam to Christianity and sought the aid of the Spaniards in a battle with a neighboring island of Mactan. Magellan’s men pleaded with him not to go, but he felt a duty to aid a fellow Christian. When he came ashore, he left his three ships anchored too far out to give him assistance. He and a small, loyal party, including Pigafetta, were soon overwhelmed by Mactanese warriors using poisoned arrows and scimitars. Magellan covered the retreat of his men but was cut down, pitching facedown in the sand. Pigafetta faithfully recorded:

When they wounded him, he turned back many times to see whether we were all in the boats. Then, seeing him dead, we wounded made the best of our way to the boats, which were already pulling away. But for him, not one of us . . . would have been saved.

Magellan was mourned by Pigafetta as “our mirror, our light, our comfort and our true guide.” But his mission had not ended. Captain Juan Sebastian del Cano took command of the Victoria, abandoning both the Concepcion and the Trinidad. Sailing ever westward, del Cano cleared the Cape of Good Hope, only to face on the homeward leg the imprisonment of nearly half his crew by the Portuguese at the Cape Verde Islands. Limping back into Seville on 8 September 1522, Captain del Cano commanded only eighteen sea-weary men of the Victoria. As they had promised, the men immediately walked barefoot to the cathedral, clad only in long shirts and each one bearing a candle to do penance and to give thanks for their survival. Thus ended, nearly three years after they set sail, the first voyage of circumnavigation of the earth. Spain was unchallenged as the leading sea power of the world. Magellan’s historic voyage coincided with, even as it symbolized, Spain’s new command of the seas. Her ability to exercise control over her American empire depended entirely on admiralty—the ability to control the sea.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 500-546). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The Aztec practice of human sacrifice stunned the conquerors. Each year, thousands of victims would be taken to the top of magnificent pyramids and their hearts would be cut out and offered up to the Aztec gods.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 572-573). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Two

A City Upon a Hill

(1607-1765)

COMING TO AMERICA

…

Then came Captain John Smith. He quickly imposed firm discipline on the colony, discarding the ineffectual sharing system and replacing it with incentives for hard work. He persuaded the colonists to raise maize, which went a long way toward solving the food shortages; acre for acre, Indian corn produces more grain than any other cereal crop. The young and daring Smith was an English patriot: “Why should the brave Spanish soldier brag the sun never sets in the Spanish dominions, but ever shineth on one part or other we have conquered for our king?” Smith was determined to succeed for his king. He favorably negotiated with Chief Powhatan, leader of the Algonquian Indians. In 1608, according to legend, Smith was even saved from death by the chief ’s young daughter, Pocahontas, when he had displeased her father.

Her name means “little wanton,” and it well describes the high-spirited young girl who would frolic, doing cartwheels naked among the stunned soldiers of the English camp at Jamestown. But it wasn’t Smith she fell for. Pocahontas set her cap, or feather, for the Englishman John Rolfe. It was Rolfe whom she married, after she converted to Christianity and was baptized. And it was with Rolfe she sailed off to England. There, she was presented to King James and the Royal Court. When she died there in 1617 and was buried in Gravesend, she was genuinely mourned on both sides of the Atlantic. Captain Smith may have left the best tribute when he said she was “the instrument to [preserve] this colonie from death, famine, and utter confusion.” Even today, we can see the sprightly, highly intelligent girl behind the façade of the Elizabethan lady of fashion, who stares out at us from her stiff official portrait.

When Captain Smith returned to England because of an injury, he was succeeded by less able men. In short order, the Jamestown colony sank into near collapse. It was Rolfe who saved the colony this time—by introducing yet another important New World crop in 1612: tobacco. Reputedly, he introduced a milder tasting variety, Nicotina tobaccum, which he brought in seed form from the West Indies.11 The natives near Virginia cultivated Nicotina rus-tica, a much coarser variety. Rolfe hardly could have pleased the king. James famously hated tobacco. He even wrote a pamphlet titled A Counterblaste to Tobacco, condemning its use: “a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs.” Thus, James became one of history’s first antismoking crusaders. But money is money, and King James’s unyielding opposition appears to have had no impact on the thriving tobacco trade. Within a decade, the Virginia colonists were exporting as much as forty thousand pounds of broadleaf back to England.

Tobacco culture would have a profound influence on the development of Virginia and the South. Younger men and women from the British Isles and Europe were so eager to get a new start in America, they would sign up for a period of five or seven years’ labor as indentured servants in the New World, in return for their passage across the ocean. The vast majority of early settlers in Virginia in the 1600s were white indentured servants. But tobacco requires intensive cultivation. Once their indebtedness was over, these indentured servants were eager to escape the intense heat and the backbreaking labor. The turnover would increase the desire for a more permanent sort of labor—slaves from Africa. In 1671, Sir William Berkeley listed the number of indentured servants as about eight thousand, slaves at two thousand, and freemen at forty-five thousand. Within a few decades, slaves would begin to outnumber the indentured servants from England. This is the heart of the American paradox. Better conditions and greater liberty for indentured servants would come only at the expense of the unoffending Africans.

Tobacco farming would also lead to “land hunger” as the crop seriously depleted the soil. Virginians would constantly be searching for new lands to expand their holdings. This incessant grasping for new lands would be the source of many conflicts with the Indian tribes.

Captain John Smith’s attempts to establish good relations with the tribes were successful at the start. Smith showed a genuine interest in Indian culture, commenting respectfully in his 1616 book, A Description of New England. But these good relations were not to last. Just as the Europeans were divided into fiercely competitive nations, with rivalries between Spain, France, and England being exported to America, so were the Indian tribes set against each other. All too often, attempts to befriend one tribe would be taken as a warlike gesture by that tribe’s Indian enemies.

In 1619, three events occurred that would shape the future of Virginia. (1) English women arrived at Jamestown to begin the transition from mere trading outpost to a genuinely self-sustaining community. (2) Twenty black Africans debarked from a Dutch vessel to begin their people’s long years of “unrequited toil” in America. And, (3) on instructions from the Virginia Company in London, the colonists elected representatives for the first colonial assembly in the New World. The Virginia House of Burgesses met on 30 July 1619. The twenty-two members had been elected by all the free male colonists aged seventeen and older. For its time, this was an extraordinarily democratic procedure. From this point, Virginians would be governed under English common law largely by lawmakers of their own choosing.

The Virginia Company of London’s reforming leaders showed serious concern with the colony’s heavy reliance on tobacco. They encouraged colonists to grow more and varied crops and to begin to diversify local industry. When in 1622, however, Indians attacked a local ironworks, war spread throughout the far-flung colony. More than three hundred settlers—men, women, and children—were slaughtered. This Great Massacre led to the assumption of direct royal control over the colony. The king appointed a royal governor. Still, he did not dissolve the House of Burgesses or even reverse the process of colonial self-government. Even in these first conflicts with the Indian tribes, the English held three distinct advantages. They were politically unified, they had greater numbers, and they were experienced in the use of firearms. Again and again, these advantages would prevail over the Indians’ greater familiarity with the forests and rivers, their warrior culture, and their typical surprise tactic of strike and disappear.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 761-812). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE GREAT MIGRATION

…

Calling their settlement Plymouth, the name Captain John Smith had earlier given it, the Pilgrims proceeded in the spring to plant for a fall harvest. They were helped by an English-speaking Indian, Squanto, who taught them how to plant corn and to catch fish.  Without Squanto’s generous help, all the Pilgrims might have died.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 849-852). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

EXPANDING ENGLISH RULE

…

.. Peter Minuit, on authority from the Dutch West India Company, had bought Manhattan Island from the Canarsie Indians for sixty guilders—the equivalent of $23.70. (This real estate is today worth $60 billion.) …

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 925-926). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

RELIGIOUS AND INTELLECTUAL AWAKENINGS

Against this backdrop of fear and danger came one of the most bizarre and discreditable episodes in American history. In the Massachusetts village of Salem in 1692, a young woman named Tituba, of mixed black and Indian heritage, was accused of witchcraft. Understandably alarmed, she accused several leading members of the village of being in league with the devil. Her words were given more weight because she confessed to being allied to Satan herself. Soon, teenagers were offering “spectral” evidence in court. Far from the kind of evidence acceptable in a modern court of law, it consisted of claims of hostile and ungodly actions by the specters, or spirits, of accused men and women. The authorities accepted the testimony of obviously hysterical teens and condemned some twenty villagers, including a congregational minister, to death by hanging—and, in one case, by pressing with heavy stones.

Compounding the tragedy was the intervention of the great Cotton Mather. Reverend Mather was the leading man of learning and piety in the English colonies. His writings and sermons carried enormous influence. Mather’s writings on science and nature were so highly regarded that he was the first American elected into membership in the Royal Society in London. But in Salem, Cotton Mather argued that spectral evidence should be accepted. Because of his weighty influence, innocent people died.

English colonists in the eighteenth century were a religiously diverse people. While dissenters had been deliberately kept out of Spanish and French colonies, England welcomed many kinds of Protestants—Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, Anglicans—and also increasing numbers of Catholics and Jews in settling their New World colonies.

Following the revered Cotton Mather, the next most important figure in colonial America was Jonathan Edwards. Born in Connecticut in 1703, he was highly educated. He came to believe in a far more demanding, more intense religious experience of conversion of the heart. Most famous for his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which held out the horrors of hellfire for the unrepentant, he nonetheless gave equal emphasis to the transforming power of the love of Christ. When his search for greater conviction in himself and others led him into conflict with his congregational church in 1750, he left prosperous Connecticut for Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In that frontier community, Edwards preached for seven years to the Mohawks and Mohegans. His ministry met with mixed success, but his influential writings became a source of inspiration to thousands. He composed The Nature of True Virtue, Original Sin, and Freedom of the Will—some of the most profound theological works ever written in America. Edwards left Stockbridge to assume the presidency of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, but he died soon afterward of complications from a smallpox inoculation. In addition to Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown trace their origins to the powerful religious movements of this time.

Although Edwards delivered his powerful sermons in a quiet, conversational tone, his preaching is nonetheless seen as one of the first evidences of the religious revival in America known as the Great Awakening. Many Protestant denominations were affected by the fervor of this movement, especially among frontier communities. There, daily life was threatened not only by Indian raids but also by the ravages of disease, wild animals, and crop failures.

While rejected by many of the established religious authorities of the time, the Great Awakening was powerfully expressed in the mass outdoor gatherings that heard the English preacher George Whitefield. In Philadelphia, when the older churches shut their doors to the “enthusiastic” Whitefield, Benjamin Franklin arranged to have a hall built to accommodate the great evangelist. (Later, the hall would serve the University of Pennsylvania, a nonsectarian institution.) Whitefield’s preaching was a marvel—an excited, animated presentation that could be heard by as many as twenty thousand people at a time. Beginning in Philadelphia in 1739, Whitefield continued on to New England in 1740, preaching 130 sermons in 73 days. Soon, his earnest, emotion-filled style of preaching was styled Methodist. The process of cleaving yet another new denomination continued. The Methodist movement began in England within the Anglican Church and was led by reformer John Wesley. In Protestant North America, this process of churches dividing was to prove nearly endless.

But while factions and splits abounded, Whitefield became a strangely unifying figure for the colonies. When high-ranking figures of the “established” Church of England seemed to look down their well-bred noses at his earnest, emotional, powerful preaching style, Whitefield only became more popular in America. At home in England, he was the favorite preacher of coal miners and London roughnecks. But he crossed the Atlantic thirteen times to hold thousands of Americans spellbound. Even Benjamin Franklin, that genial skeptic, was moved. With typical wit, Franklin wrote:

I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver, and he finished so admirably, that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.

Of course, what Whitefield wanted was his hearers’ hearts. A later preacher, the great evangelist Charles Haddon Spurgeon, described the impact of Whitefield’s ministry in America: “He lived. Other men seemed to be only half-alive; but Whitefield was all life, fire, wing, force.”

The GreAwakening was a phenomenon played out over twenty to thirty years throughout America. It was the first truly mass movement in America. Although it was a powerful religious movement and not a political event, its influence was to be felt in the politics of the era. People who had already rejected the authority of powerful clergy tied to the British monarchy were more likely to reject as well the power of royal officials.

Benjamin Franklin had his first contact with Cotton Mather while still an apprentice in his brother James’s Boston print shop. The Franklin brothers in 1721 were waging a strong campaign against smallpox inoculations in the pages of their newspaper, the New England Courant. Ben was only sixteen at the time, but it was an unpromising start for the man who would become the leading scientific mind in America. Cotton Mather was backed by his respected father, Increase Mather. The Mathers denounced the Franklins’ newspaper as a scandal sheet. The Mathers were ultimately successful in persuading their fellow colonists of the effectiveness of inoculation. The learned Cotton had read of the procedure in the journal of the Royal Society of London. Soon, young Ben would run away from his older brother’s harsh apprenticeship, leaving Boston for a freer Philadelphia. Years later, when Ben Franklin returned from Philadelphia for a visit, he met with the aged Cotton Mather. Mather received him cordially, never mentioning the clash over inoculation. As Franklin was leaving, Mather called after him: “Stoop! Stoop!” But it was too late. Franklin bumped his head on a low hanging beam. Mather could not resist a moralizing tale: he told the young Franklin that he had the world before him. “Stoop as you go through it and you will miss many hard thumps.” Franklin never forgot.

Franklin’s success as a Philadelphia printer enabled him to publish his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, beginning in 1729. Four years later, he expanded his output to include Poor Richard’s Almanack. In addition to the usual fare offered to farmers and rural townsmen, Franklin’s witty, worldly advice from Poor Richard gained him a following throughout the colonies. Franklin also actively pursued voluntary associations for the betterment of Philadelphia—including paving, lighting, and cleaning the streets—which helped Franklin’s adopted hometown surpass his native Boston as the leading city in America. Franklin was the organizing spirit behind the volunteer fire company, the lending library, and the fire insurance company. In 1743, the man who never attended university himself helped found the American Philosophical Society, one of the oldest of learned organizations. His was the guidance behind the hospital and the college that was to become the University of Pennsylvania.

Franklin’s success as a businessman gave him the income and the leisure time to pursue his genius for practical invention. In addition to the revolutionary Franklin stove—which brought comfort to millions—he invented swim fins used by today’s scuba divers and experimented with stilling the waves by applying oil. Most remarkable of all were Franklin’s 1749 experiments with electricity. By flying a kite into thunder clouds and letting lightning travel along a wire to a key, Franklin demonstrated that lightning was, in fact, an electrical phenomenon. Ever practical, Franklin devised the lightning rod to safely convey the bolts of electricity to the ground, thus saving innumerable church steeples and public buildings, as well as houses and barns.

Nor did Franklin neglect his role as citizen. He first began attending meetings of the Pennsylvania Assembly to make official records of its proceedings. In time, he was elected to the assembly in his own right, and his fellow legislators looked to him for leadership. The majority moved steadily into opposition to the colony’s proprietors.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1037-1115). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

BRITAIN AND FRANCE: THE FINAL CONFLICT

…

… To gain popular support, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette published his own drawing of a snake cut in parts, labeled “N[ew] E[ngland], N. Y., N.J., P[ennsylvania], D[elaware], M[aryland], V[irginia], N[orth] C[arolina] and S[outh] C[arolina].”Beneath this early political cartoon was printed the legend: “Join or Die.” …

… The governor needed a Virginian to warn the French to leave the disputed territory. He chose a young planter, a lieutenant colonel of militia, from Fairfax County. The twenty-two-year-old George Washington was tall, strong, and able to face the trials of the wilderness because of his years surveying western lands. Reputed to be the best rider in Virginia, young Washington conducted himself as a gentleman and was eager to advance his military career.

Washington set out at the end of October 1753 with a party of six, including his friend Christopher Gist, who would serve as guide. A month out of Virginia, the Washington party met Half King, an emissary from the Iroquois. Half King told Washington he had met up with French forces and had ordered them to leave the Ohio Country. When Washington finally arrived at Fort LeBoeuf, one hundred miles north of the three rivers, he changed from his buckskins to a dress uniform and enjoyed the gracious hospitality of the French garrison. He delivered his governor’s stern message and was met with steely cordiality in response. The French would not leave what they clearly regarded as their own lands, and they would resist anyone, British or Indian, who tried to remove them.

Washington nearly lost his life on his return voyage. First, an Indian guide turned on him and Gist and, without warning, fired a single-shot pistol at Washington. It missed. Then Washington was pitched from his raft into the freezing Allegheny River. He barely escaped drowning and death from hypothermia. Washington published an account of this action that made his name a household word throughout the colonies. People were amazed that he survived. Already, they began to think of him as invincible.

When he reported the French intransigence to Governor Dinwiddie, the governor quickly assembled a military expedition to expel them by force. Washington soon became the leader. Approaching the Ohio River, Washington learned that a French party was moving through the forest. Taking forty men, including Half King and a number of Iroquois, Washington soon overtook the French force. He ordered an attack. When the stunned Frenchmen surrendered, Washington was unable to prevent several of the French party from being massacred by his Indian allies. The French leader, Ensign Jumonville, was tomahawked by Half King, who showed Washington the poor man’s still-warm brains.

The French survivors waved papers at Washington—shouting in their outrage that they were a peaceful diplomatic mission. Why then was the French company moving quietly and stealthily through the forest, just like a war party? When Washington had approached the French Fort LeBoeuf, near Lake Erie, the previous year, hadn’t he come openly, marching in broad daylight with his Indian allies? The French answer could well have been that hostile Indian warriors like Half King would show no mercy to a diplomatic party, however peaceful its intent. The tragic loss of life can now be seen as a terrible misunderstanding.

On the return trip to Virginia, Washington stopped to build a small stockade he named Fort Necessity. Half King, unimpressed, called it “that little thing in the meadow.” It failed to impress the French as well. When a larger force of French and Indians surrounded the fort, Washington had little choice but to surrender. The French commander turned out to be the slaughtered Jumonville’s brother! He forced Washington to sign a document on 4 July 1754, in which Washington confessed to the “assassination” of the emissary Jumonville.

Washington was nonetheless treated as a hero back in Virginia. He wrote to his brother that he “heard the bullets whistle, and believe me there is something charming in the sound.” When King George II (that “snuffy old drone from the German hive”) heard that, he said Washington could not have heard very many bullets if he found them “charming.” The young Virginia colonel’s bold challenge to the French was just what colonists wanted. His name was known throughout the colonies—as indeed it was carried to London and Versailles. The French regarded his actions on the Ohio as a casus belli—cause of war.

When a regular British force of two regiments under General Edward Braddock was assembled in Virginia the next year, it was only natural that Colonel Washington would accompany them to Fort Duquesne. Franklin actively aided Braddock’s force by rounding up supply wagons for the British troops. Although Braddock was very friendly to young Washington, he did not take the Virginia militia seriously. Nor did he take seriously Washington’s warnings about “the Canadian French” and their Indian allies.

Barely a year after Washington’s humiliating surrender of Fort Necessity, Braddock’s large force was ambushed on 9 July 1755, just twelve miles from Fort Duquesne. Washington was barely able to ride, suffering from crippling dysentery, but he rallied when the attack came. General Braddock contemptuously refused Washington’s plea to lead the Virginians in an Indian-style counterattack and soon paid for that mistake with his life.

With five hundred dead, including the commander, it was the worst military defeat the British had ever suffered in North America. Others who were among the defeated ranks that streamed in panic back to Philadelphia included Thomas Gage, who would later command British troops at Bunker Hill; Horatio Gates, the American victor at Saratoga; and Daniel Boone, the pioneer and founder of Kentucky. Franklin would later write that the sight of the defeated British ranks straggling back to Philadelphia—and their abusive treatment of the American farmers on their way—would have a deep impact on colonial sentiment. Once again, though, Washington was regarded as the hero who tried to warn his British superiors and who, when his advice was spurned, was able to bring the survivors safely home. Washington was one of the few officers untouched in the fatal encounter.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1116-1175). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

… George Washington was among the victors in November 1758 as overwhelming numbers began to work against the French. They renamed it Fort Pitt (and it was soon to become known as Pittsburgh).

Tall, lanky, red-haired James Wolfe was the British commander at the siege of Quebec. He occupied the beautiful Isle d’Orleans, just downstream from Quebec City. From there, he put gunners ashore at Pointe Levis to bombard the city. Wolfe, a major general at thirty-two, was fifteen years younger than the aristocratic General Montcalm. Unlike Montcalm, who had to contend with a troublesome and cowardly Governor Rigaud de Vaudreuil, Wolfe enjoyed excellent relations with British Admiral Charles Saunders, who commanded forty-nine vessels.

General Wolfe disguised himself as a common soldier to reconnoiter the fortress city. He wanted to find the ideal place for his troops to mount the Plains of Abraham and assault the town. When, in shock, General Montcalm said he saw the British “where they have no business to be”—advancing toward the unprotected side of the city—he firmly resolved to go out and meet the enemy. Cringing Governor Vaudreuil refused to commit the city garrison, which meant Montcalm would be outnumbered. Bravely, Montcalm met the enemy. General Wolfe, at the moment of victory, was mortally wounded. So, in the same engagement, was Montcalm. It was 13 September 1759. The battle had lasted less than an hour.

With the fall of Quebec City, Americans celebrated up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Within a year, Montreal, too, would fall and 150 years of French rule in North America would end. The French threat would be removed—and with it the Americans’ need for British protection. Benjamin Franklin, by this time living in London as Pennsylvania’s unofficial agent, had high hopes for an Anglo-American empire expanding into the Ohio Country, extending all the way to the Mississippi. Incredibly, Franklin heard rumors that the British peace negotiators might not demand all of Canada in the extended talks in Paris. Guadeloupe, the French island colony in the Caribbean, seemed to some a richer prize. Prime Minister Pitt’s strategy was successful not only in North America but around the world. Britain and Prussia defeated France in Europe. Britain defeated France in India and on the high seas. Under Pitt’s direction, Britain’s power even extended into West Africa. William Pitt was rightly seen as the father of the British Empire. These victories made him extremely popular with the British people. Dr. Samuel Johnson, that great man of letters, reportedly said, “Walpole was a [prime] minister given by the king to the people, but Pitt was a [prime] minister given by the people to the king.” Although the beloved Pitt, “the great Commoner,” enjoyed the support of the people, it was not enough to keep him in King George III’s good graces. He was dismissed as prime minister in 1761 as the king sought men more subservient to his will.

Pitt thought it was a mistake for the British not to press on to a final victory over France. Some influential Britons thought it might be better to keep a French presence in Canada so that the Americans did not unite and demand independence from Great Britain. Franklin had to counter that view. He published a pamphlet in London, The Interest of Great Britain Considered, With Regard to her Colonies, And the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadeloupe. In it, he argued strongly for keeping Canada, for the security it would bring to the English colonies in America.

The treaty that ended the Seven Years War in Europe—called the French and Indian War in America—was titled the Peace of Paris. It was signed in 1763. Pitt thought the Peace of Paris was “too lenient,” and he denounced the ministry’s policy toward the Americans. Gone was New France, but not the rich French-speaking culture that flourishes in Canada to this day. As always, Benjamin Franklin took the long view. In a letter to an English friend after the treaty, he wrote, “No one can rejoice more sincerely than I do on the Reduction of Canada; and this, not merely as I am a Colonist, but as I am a Briton. I have long been of Opinion that the Foundations of the future Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire lie in America.” In saying this, Franklin personified the attitude of the Americans. They were proud of being Britons. They were proud of themselves and what they had accomplished within the British Empire. They expected greater respect and greater autonomy as a result of their exertions during the French and Indian War. They were determined to claim these as their part of the fruits of victory.

With the removal of the French danger, would the colonies now unite in opposition to Britain? Franklin had seen the failure of the Albany Plan of Union. At this point in his career, he sincerely believed in a Grand Union of Britain and America—united by the British Crown. Franklin thought an American union against the Mother Country impossible. Or, nearly so. He did not rule it out completely. The ever-practical Franklin knew that in politics as in the atmosphere, storm clouds could blow up suddenly and unexpectedly. “When I say such an union is impossible, I mean without the most grievous tyranny and oppression.”80 Over the next twenty years, Americans would be faced by a succession of British ministries that engaged in precisely such tyranny and oppression.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1189-1231). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Three

THE GREATEST REVOLUTION

(1765-1783)

STAMPING OUT UNFAIR TAXES

…

Franklin had been in London as a colonial agent since 1759, and although he corresponded regularly with friends in Pennsylvania and other colonies, it took at least six weeks for a letter to go from America to England. Franklin was woefully behind recent developments. While he sternly opposed the new tax, Franklin did not know just how hostile the colonists were toward it. Passed in Parliament with neither representation nor consent, George Grenville, the British chancellor of the exchequer, sought to make the pill more palatable by having Americans do the tax collecting. Franklin went along with the idea and nominated his friend John Hughes for the job in Pennsylvania. Misreading the political pulse at home, neither man realized that the act was so hated that Hughes’s appointment would destroy his political career. It would not take long for everyone on both sides of the Atlantic to judge America’s true feelings about the Stamp Act.

The tax was intended to raise revenue in the colonies to cover the huge debts Britain had incurred during the French and Indian War. Grenville believed that taxing the colonies for the expense of their defense was only right and just. After all, the costs of maintaining military defense and civilian administration in the colonies had jumped from £70,000 in 1748 to £350,000 in 1764. Under his Stamp Act, colonists would pay a tax on almost anything written or printed. This would include licenses, contracts, commissions, mortgages, wills, deeds, newspapers, advertisements, calendars, and almanacs—even dice and playing cards.

Passed in February 1765, the act was to go into effect in America on November 1. Details of the act began to appear in colonial newspapers—as yet untaxed—in May. Ominously, those accused of violating the act would not be tried in their own communities by juries of their peers, but taken to far-off Halifax, Nova Scotia, and tried before special Admiralty courts. The reaction was immediate—and hostile.

The Virginia House of Burgesses was sitting in Williamsburg when word came. As young member Patrick Henry took his seat for the first time on 20 May 1765, older, more seasoned members waited for the fiery orator to respond. They did not have to wait long. On May 29, Colonel George Washington was almost surely in his accustomed place. Young Thomas Jefferson, not yet a member of the Burgesses but already a leading graduate of the College of William and Mary, stood in the assembly’s doorway. Everyone listened intently as the new member from Louisa County rose to speak.

Henry introduced a series of five resolutions. He had hastily jotted them down on a blank page of an old law book. The resolutions supported the idea that only the people’s elected representatives could lawfully tax them. The resolutions were mildly phrased and offered little more than what John Locke, the philosopher of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, had written—to general approval. But it was his speech, not his resolutions, that caused a stir. Henry’s words stunned the crowded, hushed legislative hall. “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell,” he said, citing the two most famous cases of rulers whose actions had led to their own deaths, “and George the Third . . .” Members were shocked that a British colonist would name the ruling sovereign in such company. “Treason!” roared the Speaker. “Treason!” echoed some other members. But the famous courtroom advocate neatly avoided their charge by concluding cleverly: “. . . and George the Third may profit from their example.” He then added cockily: “If this be treason, make the most of it!”11 Jefferson would later say that Henry spoke as the Greek poet Homer wrote.

The Burgesses quickly adopted the Virginia Resolves, denouncing the Stamp Act as unconstitutional. They knew their rights as Englishmen. They had studied the Magna Carta and the Petition of Right from the English civil war of the previous century.

In Boston that August, a mob trashed the fine home of Andrew Oliver, a rich but unpopular royal official. Oliver had suffered because a newspaper had erroneously named him as one of those designated to collect the revenue from the stamps. Samuel Adams took the lead in organizing resistance among the Sons of Liberty. A failure at various businesses, this brewery owner showed a real knack for political organization. He pulled together the Sons of Liberty and declared their intention to resist the Stamp Tax “to the last extremity.”

Resistance flared up throughout the colonies. In Charleston, South Carolina, Christopher Gadsden led protests. There, a mob tore up the homes of two “stampmen.” Gadsden said, “There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorkers known on this continent, but all of us Americans.” Annapolis, Maryland, was a scene of destruction as a crowd pulled down a warehouse owned by a tax collector. In New York City, the royal governor’s coach was attacked. Rhode Island stamp protesters hanged tax collectors in effigy. In Newport, their signs accused one collector of being an infamous Jacobite—a charge that meant he was a supporter of the deposed Stuart monarch James II, a Catholic.

Grenville was desperate to raise revenue. He reasoned that the recent war had removed the French from America. With such a threat to their safety and livelihoods gone, it was only fair for Americans now to help pay the costs of the eviction. Most of Parliament agreed.

Undeterred by the hostility of American critics, Grenville directed his secretary, Thomas Whately, to answer the growing number of pamphlets from colonists that argued for the right of Englishmen not to be taxed except by their own representatives. That was true, Whately wrote, but colonists were represented in the British Parliament. Just as most Englishmen could not vote in parliamentary elections, they and their colonial countrymen were virtually represented in the House of Commons by members who considered the needs of the entire empire whenever they debated and voted. Whately was a close friend of Lord Grenville, but his pamphlet (Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies, 1765) gained him no friends in America.

To colonists accustomed to choosing their own legislators, such ideas were nonsense. In New York, where resistance to the Stamp Act burned brightly, the assembly boldly claimed a complete freedom from taxation by Parliament. New York’s merchants unleashed a powerful weapon—a complete boycott of British goods.

Following the lead of Massachusetts’s brilliant James Otis, nine colonies agreed to send delegates to a congress in New York in October 1765. Virginia, whose royal governor had dismissed the House of Burgesses, could send no delegates. New Hampshire, Georgia, and South Carolina were also unrepresented, but Nova Scotia was.20 The Stamp Act Congress met and issued a Declaration of Rights on October 19. Despite their professions of loyalty to the king and to his royal family, the delegates took a firm line against the claims of the Grenville government. They approved Patrick Henry’s resolution that only the colonial legislatures had the right to tax colonists. …

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1274-1332). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Because of the delay in trans-Atlantic travel, the delegates to the Stamp Act Congress did not know that Grenville’s government had already fallen. Grenville had unwisely tried to pare down even the king’s allowance. Wrong move. The king had used those funds to bribe members of Parliament into supporting his policies.

Grenville was nothing if not conscientious. He was said to be the first British minister who actually read the colonial dispatches. His ill-fated attempts to impose fiscal discipline on the colonies prompted the first serious, continent-wide resistance to royal authority. Grenville had ended the policy of a century and a half of what the great parliamentarian Edmund Burke would call “a wise and salutary neglect.”

In the face of such united opposition, the Stamp Tax simply could not be collected. By autumn of 1765, no Americans could be found to serve as “Stampmen.” They all had been co-opted or scared away. The crisis had made thousands of Americans acutely aware of their rights. As John Adams wrote, the people were “more attentive to their liberties, more inquisitive about them, and more determined to defend them.” They were still loyal to the king, however. Even at the height of the crisis, children would dance around Boston’s Liberty Tree with a flag that read, “King, Pitt, and Liberty.” Thus, colonists showed their continued allegiance to the crown, while openly favoring the return to power of William Pitt, the respected wartime prime minister. Sons of Liberty were not willing to break with all royal authority. By adopting that name, colonists showed themselves aware of having been “born free,” and willing to stand up for their rights as Americans and as Englishmen.

Reflecting on the Stamp Act crisis that December, Adams would say 1765 was “the most remarkable year of my life. The enormous engine fabricated by the British Parliament for battering down all the rights and liberties of America . . . has raised through the whole continent a spirit that will be recorded to our honor with all future generations.”

Prior to this, America was governed at only the cost of paper and ink; Americans were “led by a thread,” as Franklin said. Afterward, the stubbornness and stupidity of the British Crown and Parliament made America increasingly ungovernable. John Adams later wrote that “the child independence was born” during the colonists’ legal challenge to the unconstitutional Writs of Assistance. But we might say that was premature. The resistance to the Stamp Tax was continent-wide. It was then that Americans from Maine to Georgia first came together to resist British tyranny.

When, in the spring of 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, the colonies exploded with joy. There were bonfires and fireworks—illuminations in the language of the day. Americans credited the king with this turnabout (even though his dismissal of Grenville hinged on totally different issues). In New York City, the people put up a statue of King George III mounted on a horse. It was happily paid for by public subscription. They did not protest, either, when Parliament passed the Declaratory Act that reasserted its right to legislate for Americans on all matters whatsoever.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1343-1369). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Americans were overjoyed when their friend William Pitt returned to power as the king’s first minister in 1766. But their celebrations proved to be premature. Pitt was ailing, and the dominant personality in his government was Charles Townshend. Townshend understood that Americans objected only to “internal taxes” like the Stamp Tax. Internal taxes were levied on items produced and sold within the colonies. So he decided to lay “external” duties on items imported to America, such as glass, paint, lead, paper, and tea. The Townshend Acts went into effect 1 January 1767. They were supposed to raise as much as £400,000 a year to contribute to the cost of administering the colonies.

Townshend might have been forgiven for his mistake. Franklin, as colonial agent in London, had argued against internal taxes. It was a fair inference by the British ministry that other duties might have been less objectionable. Franklin’s advocacy may be attributed less to a desire to deceive as to the problem of his having been so long away from home. (This shows why even the best of colonial delegates could not successfully have represented their distant constituents, even if they had been admitted to the British Parliament.)

Parliament had also passed the Quartering Act of 1766 that required colonists to provide British soldiers—redcoats as they were soon called—with barracks, bedding, fuel, candles, and even beer, cider, and rum. Americans saw that the great increase in the number of British troops in the colonies—greater than they had seen in wartime—was not being directed to the frontier, where they might have been expected to defend against such dangers as Pontiac had posed. Instead, the redcoats were seen in growing numbers in major colonial cities—especially Boston.

Americans began to suspect that the redcoats were being sent to control them. This suspicion grew when the royal authorities began to issue “Writs of Assistance” to customs officials. These writs were generalized search warrants. They did not have to specify a specific good to be searched for. They allowed the customs officers to break into ships, warehouses, even private homes! The heavy import taxes had encouraged smuggling by colonial merchants; the writs were an attempt to stop their tax evasion. Anytime any royal official merely suspected smuggled goods, he had the power to search. What’s more, Admiralty courts and Boards of Customs commissioners had the power to try those who sought to evade the king’s duties. Americans soon saw that their cherished right to trial by jury was in jeopardy.

John Dickinson spoke for many Americans when he wrote a series of articles in 1767–68, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Dickinson attacked the “excesses and outrages” of the British ministry. He urged his fellow colonists to resist. But he was careful to assert his loyalty to the king and to channel the opposition into “constitutional methods of seeking redress,” such as continued petitions to the government and even resuming the costly nonimportation policy that had proved so successful against the Stamp Tax. Dickinson, who had been an opponent of Franklin in Philadelphia politics, completely rejected the use of force “as much out of the way.” For now, colonists were inclined to follow Dickinson’s lead. But some leaders, such as Washington, were beginning to think that force might be necessary for Americans to preserve their freedom. As early as 1769, Washington was telling his neighbor George Mason that America must arm to resist British tyranny. In saying this, Washington had many reasons, some high-minded; some less so. He was particularly upset about the financial drain he was suffering because of the duties levied on his expensive tastes. But luxury and concern for liberty are not mutually exclusive, and Washington was fully in the tradition of John Locke, who had laid down the philosophical basis for the English constitution. Locke had specified the resort to force—“the appeal to heaven,” as he called it—as the final but legitimate course of action when a ruler refused to listen to reason. The growing restiveness of the Virginia landed gentry—especially influential men like Washington—led the noble Lord Fairfax to return to England. Virginians were increasingly hostile to royal authority. Washington regretted the loss of these dear friends, but he did not change his views.

Boston soon became the center of unrest. In June 1768, the royal governor disbanded the Massachusetts Assembly. Almost at the same time, the sailing sloop called Liberty—owned by the rich and popular merchant John Hancock—was seized by customs officials. They charged Hancock with smuggling Madeira wine and imposed a fine. A city mob soon spilled into the town’s narrow streets and chased the customs officials. They escaped with their lives, but their houses were trashed. Sam Adams made sure that colonists up and down the eastern seaboard were fully informed of the Boston outrages. Adams was able to make excellent use of the efficient colonial postal system that Benjamin Franklin had established. Franklin’s efforts had cut the time for a letter to travel up and down the coast from six weeks to three.

By 1770, tensions were rising between the people of Boston and the British troops whom they saw as occupiers. In March, following a winter of sporadic incidents, a mob of boys and young men began to taunt British soldiers, calling them lobsters and pelting them with trash, oyster shells, and snowballs. With their backs to the royal Customs House, and feeling hemmed in, the frightened soldiers opened fire on the mob. Crispus Attucks, a free black man and a whaler, was one of the first to fall. In all, five colonists were killed in what instantly became known as “the Boston Massacre.”

Realizing the explosive situation he had on hand, Governor Thomas Hutchinson had the Customs House guards arrested on a charge of murder and ordered the rest of the British garrison to return to Castle William, a fort in the harbor.45 Quickly, the colonists had taken up the cry of murder. Boston’s Paul Revere, a silversmith, soon engraved a powerful—but exaggerated—depiction of the killings. In Revere’s rendering, the number of fallen is greater and the redcoats fire a volley on the order of their officer. The truth was much more complicated than that.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, young John Adams, Samuel’s cousin, and his cousin Josiah Quincy, took responsibility for the legal defense of the accused British soldiers. Determined to prove that British soldiers could be fairly tried in an American courtroom, John Adams demonstrated that most of the soldiers fired in self-defense, that no order to fire on the crowd had ever been given, and that the unruly colonials had provoked the soldiers. Adams argued persuasively that hanging the redcoats for murder would disgrace Massachusetts’s name in history. It would be worse than the blot of the Salem witch trials and the hanging of the Quakers.

John Adams made a name for himself when the jury found all but two of the accused not guilty and convicted those two of lesser charges. Their punishment, an odd one, was the branding of their thumbs. Cousin Sam, however, was not dismayed. For the next five years, he and the Sons of Liberty organized mass demonstrations on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1385-1440). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

A TOTAL SEPARATION

After a decade of political upheaval in London and in the colonies, a new ministry was finally installed in Parliament. King George found in Lord North a man after his own mind. In an attempt to reconcile with the colonies, the North administration persuaded Parliament to repeal all of the objectionable Townshend duties except the tax on tea.

While they attempted to bring the colonists to order, Parliament was determined not to recognize Americans’ rights to rule themselves in a union of equals under the same crown. Franklin could see this as he wrote, from London, to James Otis and Samuel Adams: “I think one may clearly see, in the system of customs to be exacted in America, by act of Parliament, the seeds sown of a total disunion of the two countries.” This is significant because Franklin was already referring to America as a different country.

In the spring of 1772, Rhode Islanders had a chance to take out their resentments of British high-handedness. The HMS (“His Majesty’s Ship”) Gaspée had been particularly active as a customs ship in the Narragansett Bay, roughly handling fishermen and small boats. The officers of the Gaspée applied the laws strictly in a region that previously had seen little or no enforcement. When the ship ran aground chasing smugglers, boatloads of Patriots rowed out, surrounded the ship, and forced the crew ashore. Then they gleefully burned to the waterline this symbol of British misrule.

The entire conduct of the royal authorities in America smacked of a lordly disdain for the colonists. All Americans became aware of how they were looked down upon by the English. Yankee was a well-known term of contempt for all Americans. For a time, Americans lived in the hope that it was only certain British ministers who were responsible for tormenting them. They held on to the belief that the king and the British people were in sympathy with them. But Franklin knew better. As early as 1769, he was writing that the British people were “in full cry against America.”

Despite Samuel Adams’s continual agitation, the period of 1771–73 saw a lessening of tensions between colonial subjects and the mother country. Then, without explanation, Lord North committed “a fatal blunder.” He passed through Parliament a Tea Act that would have allowed the nearly bankrupt East India Company to claim a monopoly on tea in the colonies.

Americans instantly recognized that if Britain could monopolize the importation of this important staple, there was no place they might stop. They could strangle American commerce and industry. Once again, resistance to British taxation was continental. It flamed up between Maine and Georgia. In Charleston, ship owners were allowed to unload their tea, but it was kept under guard in a warehouse. Philadelphia and New York refused to allow the tea to be off-loaded at all. Everyone waited for Boston’s reaction.

On 16 December 1773, under cover of darkness, some two thousand Boston men went down to Griffin’s Wharf. There, a smaller party of thirty men disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three vessels and dumped their cargoes of tea into the harbor. “Boston harbor a tea-pot tonight!” cried one of the supporters. Samuel Adams had planned the whole raid with great care. The damage to property was extensive. In today’s terms, the losses to the East India Company would be valued at $1 million. A British admiral, who watched the entire episode from a house near the wharf, called out good naturedly to the “Mohawks”: “Well, boys, you have had a fine pleasant evening for your Indian caper, haven’t you? But mind, you have got to pay the fiddler yet.”

By now, John Adams had cast his lot with his cousin, Sam, and the Patriots. He wrote in his diary: “This destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences . . . that I cannot but consider it as an epoch in history.”

Indeed, Boston would be made to pay the fiddler. Outraged by this act of colonial defiance, King George III appeared the following spring in person before Parliament, demanding harsh reprisal. “We must master them or totally leave them alone,” he said.  Lord North was in full accord with his royal master. He was determined to show the colonies who was boss.

Parliament’s answer in 1774 to floating tea was the speedy passage of five coercive acts. Patriots in America quickly dubbed them the “Intolerable Acts.” The first of these closed the Port of Boston and removed the Customs House. Another act changed Massachusetts’s revered charter, stripping colonists of the right to elect members of the Upper House of their assembly. The Quartering Act allowed royal officials to place soldiers in colonists’ homes at the colonists’ expense. Still another act provided that royal officers indicted for murder while suppressing riots should be tried in London rather than where the offense occurred. This act, despite John Adams’s proof that British soldiers could get a fair trial in America, was a calculated insult.

Finally, Parliament passed the Quebec Act. The new law extended the southern border of Quebec to the Ohio River, thus effectively closing off the Ohio Country to American expansion. It did much more. For the French Canadians, it laid down an enlightened basis for British rule of a conquered people. The Quebecois would be allowed to retain their language, their customs, and continue to worship freely in their ancient Catholic faith. Their system of laws and land tenure would continue essentially as they had been under New France.

To the American colonists, however, this was not tolerance but menace. As Englishmen, they had always feared France as an absolute monarchy, a country where the people enjoyed no liberties. The Catholic Church was seen as a support for that absolutist idea of monarchy. By enlarging the Province of Quebec to border on Virginia and Pennsylvania, the king was saying to them: “I can take away your liberties, too.”That seemed exactly what he was doing to Boston. The great William Pitt had warned Parliament not to treat Americans as “the bastards of England,” but as true sons. From this point on, however, the English government treated the colonists’ cause as illegitimate.

George Washington also reacted sharply to Parliament’s Intolerable Acts. The North ministry was setting up “the most despotic system of tyranny that was ever practiced in a free government,” he charged. He rallied to the plight of his Massachusetts countrymen: “The cause of Boston . . . is the cause of America,” he said.

Back in London, Franklin became the center of a raging controversy. He had received copies of letters written by the royal governor of Massachusetts, letters in which Thomas Hutchinson called for stronger measures against his fellow Americans. The letters had shown Patriot leaders that their royal officials were conspiring against their liberties. British opinion, however, was outraged at the violation of the governor’s privacy. They charged that Franklin, the colonial postmaster, had somehow stolen Governor Hutchinson’s letters.

Doctor Franklin had received that honorary title from St. Andrew’s University in Scotland for his discoveries in electricity. Now, he was summoned on 11 January 1774 to a meeting of the Privy Council. They met in a room notorious for its fierce debate—the Cockpit. There, for more than an hour, the British solicitor general verbally abused Franklin. Impassive throughout the lawyer’s vicious harangue, Franklin remained silent. Alexander Wedderburn had a reputation for slashing sarcasm and personal attacks. He lived up—or down—to that reputation in his snarling assault on the most famous man in the world. He sneeringly called Dr. Franklin “a man of letters,” twisting that admiring title into a slur.

This startling scene could have represented the entire relationship between the British monarchy and the American colonies. It did not matter that Franklin was the world’s most illustrious common man. It did not matter that Franklin had served his colony, several neighbor colonies, and the British Empire with true genius and genuine loyalty. It did not matter that Franklin’s natural son served as New Jersey’s royal governor. Benjamin Franklin had dared to think for himself and had dared to speak his mind. That was enough to earn him the hatred of lesser men.

Unwilling to take the Intolerable Acts lying down, Patriot leaders in the colonies elected delegates to attend the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774. As they assembled, Philadelphia merchants were determined not to get burned again. If there was to be a renewal of the nonimportation, nonexport pledges that had proved so successful at the time of the Stamp Act crisis, Philadelphia’s men of commerce demanded that this time the entire continent must take part. They had lost precious business when Baltimore merchants failed to support previous embargoes. This time, it must be all or nothing.

In this way, a continental union was being forged. The first Continental Congress quickly adopted the radical “Suffolk Resolves” that rider Paul Revere had brought to them from Massachusetts. Those resolves, drafted by the Patriot leader Dr. Joseph Warren, declared the Intolerable Acts null and void. Congress urged Massachusetts to form a free government and, ominously, advised Massachusetts’s citizens to arm themselves.

This last word from Congress was hardly necessary. Colonists in Massachusetts—and every other colony—had developed a militia system from their first days of settlement. Dangers of Spanish coastal raids, French and Indian attacks on the frontiers, fears of slave revolts—all these threats combined to make colonial Americans an armed people.

When Congress adjourned in October 1774, delegates pledged to reassemble the following May if Parliament failed to repeal the Intolerable Acts. Early in 1775,William Pitt arose in Parliament and tried to persuade Parliament to do just that. Now known as Lord Chatham, Pitt tried to make his fellow lords see reason. Franklin was in the gallery as this last attempt at avoiding a clash was made. Once again, Franklin was the target of a speaker’s attack. This time, the dissolute Lord Sandwich pointed him out and claimed, falsely, that no English lord could have written such a thing, that the American was the real author of Chatham’s motion. Chatham bravely responded that he would consider it an honor if he had had the assistance of Dr. Franklin, a man who was esteemed by all of Europe. But he was hooted down. So were others who rose to plead for moderation. The Chatham motion was overwhelmingly rejected.

When the brilliant Edmund Burke rose in the House of Commons on 22 March 1775 to plead for conciliation, the eloquent Irishman warned that America could never be subdued by force. He urged Britons to change their course, to adopt mild measures for dealing with the colonies. For more than a century, American high school students were required to memorize portions of Burke’s magnificent speech. “Great empires and little minds,” he cried, “go ill together.” Burke, too, went unheeded. Thus did the British Parliament arrogantly and stupidly throw away the lifeline that alone could have tied them to their empire in America.

Burke’s eloquence found an answer the very next day in Virginia, 23 March 1775. Patrick Henry appealed to his fellow Virginians to take up arms and stand with imperiled Boston. “I know not what course others may take,” Henry cried, “but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1444-1535). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

‘THE SHOT HEARD ‘ROUND THE WORLD’

In Boston, the British general Thomas Gage had been named royal governor. He was determined not to let colonists arm. On the night of 18 April 1775, he ordered his troops to seize the militia’s military stores at Concord and to arrest Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock.

Hoping to catch the colonists unaware, Gage’s troops moved out of their barracks by night, by boat. But there was a spy under Gage’s roof. The general’s American wife, Margaret, got word to Dr. Warren who passed it on to Paul Revere.

Revere had arranged a signal—two lanterns—to be placed in the tower of Old North Church to let the Patriots know the regulars were moving out. Revere himself was rowed past HMS Somerset, a British warship. The low hanging moon behind Boston’s buildings cast a shadow that concealed Revere’s movements. Once mounted on horseback, Revere and William Dawes managed to evade British patrols and brought the warning to Lexington. There at the home of Reverend Jonas Clarke, where the Patriot leaders were sleeping, Revere was challenged by Sergeant William Munroe. Munroe shushed him for making too much noise. “Noise!” Revere shouted. “You’ll have noise enough before long. The regulars are coming out!” (Revere would only have confused colonists if he had yelled: “The British are coming,” since Massachusetts people still thought of themselves as British.)

At five o’clock the next morning, the Minutemen (so called because they could be ready for military duty in a minute) were drawn up on the village green in Lexington as the British regulars came marching up. Captain Jonas Parker ordered the Minutemen to stand their ground.“Don’t fire unless fired upon,” he said, “but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here!” British Major of Marines John Pitcairn ordered the Americans to lay down their arms. “You damned rebels, disperse!” he cried.

The Americans were beginning to disperse when a shot rang out. In a flash, there were competing volleys that left eight Americans dead in the spring sunlight. Three British soldiers were wounded. In vain, Major Pitcairn had tried to stop his men from shooting.

The British column marched on to Concord, where another force of colonials met them. There the British destroyed militia stores and turned back toward Boston, mission accomplished. The road back became a highway of death, with Minutemen firing from behind walls and trees. Many of the regulars, who had been marching for more than twenty-four hours carrying heavy packs on their backs, fell out, exhausted. By the time they got back to Boston, they had lost 73 dead, 174 wounded, and 26 missing. The Americans suffered 49 dead, 39 wounded, and 5 taken prisoner. These were little more than skirmishes as the world measures warfare, but the American farmers had indeed “fired the shot heard ’round the world.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1536-1559). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

…

… Thomas Paine, whom Franklin had met in London and given letters of recommendation just two years previously, came out with the most influential pamphlet of all: Common Sense. Published in January 1776, and selling for a mere eighteen pence, Common Sense sold more than 150,000 copies. Americans had heard the case for their rights put with great legal expertise and scholarship from men such as John Adams and John Dickinson, but Paine had a flair for colorful writing, and he surely had the common touch. As a recent immigrant from England, his fierce writing against this king—and against all kings—struck a responsive chord. As soon as it came off the presses, New Hampshire delegate Josiah Bartlett noted, Common Sense was “greedily bought up and read by all ranks of people.”

John Adams was probably more influential than any other American in moving Congress, but it was Paine who moved the people. Of all the arguments Paine made, his charges against the king were most devastating. He attacked the pretended “FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE [who] can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul.”

Paine knew the religious beliefs of his readers. He used the Bible to hammer home his points: “[T]he children of Israel in their request for a king urged this plea, ‘that he may judge us, and go out before us and fight our battles.’ But in countries where he is neither a judge nor a general, as in England, a man would be puzzled to know what is his business.” This was amazingly bold. Paine might have been making a personal appeal with this powerful and emotional plea: “O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been haunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. [America] receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

The Americans, recalling how grasping Parliament had been for their taxes, were shocked to see Lord North’s ministry hiring German and Scottish mercenaries to make war on them (although the need to do so betrayed the war’s deep unpopularity in Britain). News that the king would send to America twelve thousand Hessian troops (hired from the German state of Hesse) reached America in May. Every American coffin seemed to bring death, as well, to the idea of reconciliation with England.

In addition to their increasing bitterness caused by British warfare against their colonies, Americans were facing the practical problem that no European state would support them while they were still formally members of the British Empire. They were still rebels. And there was a danger to the French, the Dutch, and the Spanish that the Americans might make peace with the mother country and leave them to fight a vengeful England by themselves. Independence would help Americans gain European recognition and practical help.

Finally, on 7 June 1776, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee introduced before Congress his motion “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free and Independent States.” Congress then named a committee to draft a declaration of causes for independence: John Adams (Massachusetts), Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania), Thomas Jefferson (Virginia), Robert Livingston (New York), and Roger Sherman (Connecticut). Adams was keenly aware that there were four Northerners and only one Southerner on the drafting committee. During the debate in Congress, one reluctant member (probably Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson) argued that the colonies were not yet “ripe” for Independence. He was answered by a Scottish-born member from New Jersey. The colonies were not only ripe, he said with his rich burr, but “in danger-r-r of becoming r-r-rotten for the want of it!” The Reverend John Witherspoon, who was also president of the college we know today as Princeton, spoke for the majority of delegates. The motion for Independence soon carried.

Once again, Adams made a fateful decision. He was desperate to have Virginia’s support. He knew that Virginia led the South. And with Virginia’s help, Massachusetts would never have to stand alone. Again, he opted for a Virginian to take the lead for the sake of national unity. He nominated Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence. …

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1600-1634). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

…

… Jefferson’s “peculiar felicity of expression” (another Adams phrase) gave America a founding document that surpasses any other in the world for beauty, logic, and inspirational power. About the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, there was no debate in Congress. It was what the Founders believed. Jefferson’s immortal words were conventional wisdom of the time. And the words of the Declaration became the greatest, most consequential statement of political philosophy of all time: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1642-1648). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

…

This is America’s political creed in a nutshell. Yes, they meant all men, regardless of race, religion, sex, or riches. They imposed no religious test for adherence to these ideals except belief in a creator God who endows us with our inalienable rights. They defined the purpose of all government. And they laid down the requirement that governments must rule by consent if they were to rule with justice at all. We will return to the philosophy of this Declaration in future chapters. Suffice for now, the Founders did not immediately free the slaves, give votes to their wives, or invite the Indian tribes to sign the Declaration with them. But we must realize that all the greatest advocates for human equality in America—Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Suffragettes, Martin Luther King Jr.—pointed to this passage in the Declaration to give force to their demands for justice.

The philosophical sentiment was near universal, but the practical matter of voting for independence was less so. The final tally was close. Congress had to wait for uninstructed delegates to return to Philadelphia. Caesar Rodney, suffering from asthma and cancer, rode eighty miles from his Delaware home to the sweltering capital on the night of 1 July 1776 in order to break a tie in his state’s delegation and carry the motion for independence.

The men who signed the Declaration knew this was no casual debating society resolution. They acknowledged this as they pledged “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to support independence. When John Hancock summoned the delegates to sign the parchment “fair” copy of the Declaration, he wrote his own signature in large, bold strokes so that King George (legend has it) could read his name without his glasses.

He urged them to make it unanimous. “There must be no pulling different ways,” he said. “We must all hang together.”To that, Franklin, ever the wit, reportedly responded: “Yes, we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Though none of the signers was hanged, seventeen served in the military, and five were captured by the British during the war. Richard Stockton, a New Jersey signer, never recovered from slow torture during captivity and died in 1781.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1665-1681). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

A CONTINENTAL WAR

While Congress made its fateful move, General Washington was facing the danger of entrapment by the British army in New York. It was there that he had the Declaration of Independence read to his troops. There, the famous statue of George III was pulled down and its lead melted into bullets. Washington had been widely acclaimed when the British withdrew from Boston in March, but a string of defeats followed. Boston was to be his last victory for almost a year. Washington knew that no one who did not control the sea could hold waterborne Manhattan Island. Congress did not want to abandon the new nation’s second largest city to the enemy.

Colonel John Glover’s Marblehead men from Massachusetts were sailors and fishermen, more at home on the water than on dry land. The night of 29 August 1776, their seagoing ways would prove vital to the Patriot cause.

The Continental Army had initially held firm under murderous British fire on Long Island, but the redcoats marched through the night, in perfect military order, to take the Americans by surprise. Hessian soldiers took no prisoners. They stabbed the surrendering Americans with their bayonets, the blades of which were seventeen inches long.

Washington knew he had to withdraw from Brooklyn on Long Island and escape with his army to Manhattan. Five British warships were prepared to sail up the East River to block Washington’s retreat, but the wind “miraculously” shifted and the British squadron was unable to come upriver. Then, when Washington ordered Glover’s Marblehead men to man the boats, he evacuated the bulk of the army from Brooklyn. Only a portion of the army was able to escape under the cover of darkness the night of August 29, but then a thick fog rolled in to hide the action as the remainder of the army entered the boats. One Connecticut officer claimed he made eleven crossings of the East River that night. Author David McCullough called that covering fog incredible—an unlikely turn of fate. Believers in Providence called it the Hand of God.

Washington felt the disappointment personally when his men ran before the advancing Hessians and Scots Highlanders. In anguish, he threw his hat to the ground and cried out: “Are these the men with whom I am to defend America?” But he could also point with pride at troops who stood their ground and did their duty, as when 250 Marylanders attacked General Cornwallis’s forces to cover the army’s retreat, risking death or capture. “Good God, what brave fellows I must lose this day,” Washington said. He then gave Maryland troops the name by which the state is known to this day—The Old Line.

The city could not be held. In September, as Washington withdrew to Harlem Heights, the city of New York caught fire. No one knows how it started. Loyalists—called Tories—who supported the Crown naturally blamed the rebels. Angered, British General William Howe seized a young American officer whom he accused of spying for Washington. Nathan Hale, of Connecticut, was about twenty-four. Howe gave him no trial. Hale was in civilian clothes, so he was treated as a spy. Shocking Americans, Howe denied the young man’s last request for a pastor, or even a Bible. As Howe prepared to hang him, the fearless Patriot recited words from the popular play Cato:

How beautiful is death, when earned by virtue!

Who would not be that youth? What pity is it

That we can die but once to serve our country.

The quote has come down to us, in paraphrase, as “I regret I have but one life to give for my country.” The Revolution had its first martyr.

Despite failure of his diplomatic mission to Canada, Benjamin Franklin agreed to go to France in the fall of 1776 to plead the American cause. Franklin embarked on a ship named Reprisal. It was a very rough crossing, with many seasick. It was also dangerous, too, as Franklin was the most recognizable of all the rebels and the British still held mastery of the seas. Even when he disembarked in France, he found himself on a country road where a gang of thieves had only recently murdered a party of twelve travelers. Happily, Franklin entered Paris safely in December 1776.

Throughout that fall, General Howe and his lieutenant, Lord Cornwallis, pushed Washington south through New Jersey. The military position was helped when Benedict Arnold delayed a British thrust down from Canada and Patriots defending Charleston, South Carolina, repelled a British assault. Although Washington had kept his army together and with it the Revolution, retreat was still dispiriting. Throughout New Jersey, farmers were tacking red ribbons to their doors to show sympathy with the king. By December 1776, with enlistments running out for many militia forces, Washington’s Continental Army was dwindling.

At Christmastime, most armies went into winter quarters. Washington had retreated across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, chopping down bridges and taking boats with him. Washington knew that as soon as the river froze solid, Lord Cornwallis’s superior numbers could cross over on the ice. Washington was running out of money and supplies. He appealed to Pennsylvania’s master of finance, Robert Morris, to raise hard cash to pay bonuses to his soldiers. Only when they had been paid did some of his ragged, starving soldiers agree to extend their enlistments into the new year.

So, on Christmas night, in foul weather, General Washington prepared a sudden assault on Trenton, New Jersey. Once again, Washington relied on Colonel John Glover’s seasoned Marblehead, Massachusetts troops. They were all excellent sailors and boat handlers. They had already saved the Continental Army by ferrying it from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Now, Glover’s men carried the entire army—with horses and cannon—across the ice-choked Delaware. The little band of ragged men took the Hessian defenders by surprise. In a short, sharp action, Washington’s men killed the Hessian commander, Colonel Johann Rall, and took nearly a thousand prisoners. Only two Americans were wounded, one of them Lieutenant James Monroe, the future president. Captain Alexander Hamilton’s cannon, whose touch holes had been kept dry on the boat trip over, were used to devastating effect. Another in the boats that night was young John Marshall, the future chief justice of the United States. America in 1776 could have fielded an army of 280,000 men, but that Christmas night, just 2,400 held the fate of a continent in their hands.

Washington’s attack had been a great success. He quickly put into practice the “policy of humanity” that John Adams and others in Congress had urged upon him. Instead of bayoneting the surrendering Hessians—as the Hessians had done to Americans who gave up on Long Island—Washington treated them with compassion. As a result of this enlightened policy, thousands of Hessian Germans would later settle in the back-country of Pennsylvania and Virginia.

American Patriots rejoiced with the retaking of Trenton and were overjoyed when, just two weeks later, Washington followed up his victory with another successful attack on Princeton. In this battle, Washington galloped directly into the smoke of British cannon fire. One of his young aides, Colonel John Fitzgerald, covered his eyes with his hat, certain the commander in chief would be killed. Washington came riding out of the smoke, eyes ablaze with victory. “Thank God your Excellency is safe,” Fitzgerald cried out, offering his hand. Washington grasped it with enthusiasm, perhaps realizing how close to death he had come. “It’s a fine fox chase, my boys,” Washington cried, as his men sent the British defenders of Princeton into headlong retreat.

Independence did not bring French help immediately, at least not openly. But one man was to be a harbinger of things to come. In July 1777, a tall, nineteen-year-old French aristocrat named Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, better known to history as the Marquis de Lafayette, arrived in Philadelphia. Congress was embarrassed when the eager young nobleman—who had already seen plenty of military action—showed up to present his credentials from the American minister in Paris, Silas Deane. They had no money to pay him, members explained, and Deane had exceeded his authority in promising commissions. Lafayette could not return home. He had defied King Louis XVI in sailing to America. Instead, he offered to serve without pay as a volunteer in the ranks. By August, he was riding by Washington’s side as a major general—at age twenty! Lafayette would soon see action in September 1777, at the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania. There, he was wounded as he gallantly led American troops. Although Washington’s forces fought bravely, they lost and the road to Philadelphia lay open to the British.

Washington was hundreds of miles away when America’s greatest military victory was achieved. Americans waited expectantly as Patriot forces faced British General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777. Burgoyne, “Gentleman Johnny” to London society, was a member of Parliament, a playwright, and flamboyant figure. He had bet parliamentary leader Charles James Fox a substantial wager that he would come home from America victorious by Christmas Day 1777. His task was to come down from Canada and link up with General Howe, leading a British force north from New York. But Howe was headed for Philadelphia—trying to catch Washington. Burgoyne let it be known his Indian soldiers had permission to scalp any British deserters. Initially crowned with success, Burgoyne had retaken Fort Ticonderoga and had burned the fine Albany home of American General Philip Schuyler.

But Burgoyne’s army moved too slowly—burdened by a huge baggage train—and he was trapped by the Americans. The sound of turkey gobble calls—Americans signaling each other before the attack—spooked the British troops. Gunfire erupted, and Dan Morgan’s riflemen, who, according to legend, could drop a redcoat a mile away, quickly cut down Burgoyne’s men.

Surrendering his entire force of more than six thousand at Saratoga on 17 October 1777, Burgoyne was amazed by the merciful response he received from General Schuyler. “Is it to me, who have done you so much injury, that you show so much kindness?”

Gentleman Johnny had lost his big wager. Fox, who predicted his friend would return a prisoner on parole, had won. Saratoga was America’s greatest victory to this point. American General Horatio Gates was quick to claim the victor’s laurels, but as before, much of the credit for victory goes to General Benedict Arnold. Although seriously wounded, Arnold had nonetheless rallied American soldiers for action. The French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, would see in Saratoga evidence of the Americans’ ability to outlast the English.

General Washington’s position was not improved as he moved into winter quarters at Valley Forge. With General Howe’s British forces firmly in control of Philadelphia, Washington could only watch and wait. This was the worst winter of the war. Once again, he desperately appealed to Congress for aid. He wrote that you could trace his men’s tracks by the bloody footprints in the snow. When he said his men were naked and starving, that was not an exaggeration. Some Continental soldiers had to borrow pants just to go out to stand watch.

Fortunately, another foreign addition to America’s army arrived on the scene at this moment. A Prussian officer, Baron von Steuben, had met Benjamin Franklin in Paris and was recommended to Congress. Von Steuben, who spoke no English, was a colorful figure who had inflated his credentials—an eighteenth-century résumé padder. Still, he knew the art of drill, and he knew the importance of discipline and training to turn a rabble into a fighting force. Von Steuben began whipping the ragged, dispirited men of Valley Forge into shape. He comically employed an interpreter to translate his French and German curses into English the men could understand. (Every drill instructor in the American military since is a spiritual descendant of the outlandish Prussian.)

General Anthony Wayne, a thirty-two-year-old Pennsylvania surveyor and legislator, needed no translator. He was known for his violent oaths. One lieutenant complained that Wayne had “damned all our souls to hell” when he found no sentry posted outside an American camp. Washington was known to hate profanity, still Washington wisely chose Anthony Wayne to help straighten out the problems of supply. Without “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s raids on Tory farms, the army might have starved.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1682-1780). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE FRENCH ALLIANCE

…

… In the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, Sir John Butler and his Indian allies struck on 4 July 1778, killing hundreds. Farmers were burned at the stake, thrown on beds of burning coals, and held down with pitchforks as their horrified families watched. Virginia sent native son George Rogers Clark to reestablish her claims to the old Northwest Territory across the Ohio River. British Colonel Henry Hamilton, known as “Hair Buyer” because he paid Indians to bring in American scalps, holed up at a fort at Vincennes (in present-day Indiana). According to legend, Clark marched his small force of 130 Americans and French for days through chest-deep waters in midwinter to get at his enemy. Surrounding “Hair Buyer” and marching his men back and forth outside the British encampment, Clark gave the illusion of thousands. Most of Henry Hamilton’s Indians took flight. Then, when Clark captured five Indians with scalps on their belts, he had them tomahawked to death in front of the British fort. Henry Hamilton immediately surrendered. He would later describe the big Virginian, speaking “with rapture of his late achievements while he washed the blood from his hands.”  With this victory and his success at Kaskaskia (near present-day East Saint Louis, Illinois), George Rogers Clark laid the basis for America’s claim to the entire Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota).

Franklin’s diplomatic skills were the key to another great coup for the American cause. Captain John Paul Jones had been living in Virginia when the war broke out. He went to France seeking Dr. Franklin’s help in outfitting ships. He had a bold plan. He wanted to attack the British in their home waters. Jones, born in Scotland, had served on ships from his boyhood. He had even served for a time on slave ships. John Paul Jones’s appearance deceived. Abigail Adams would write of him that he was nothing like the “rough, stout, war-like Roman” she imagined. Instead, he was small, slight, soft-spoken: “I should sooner think of wrapping him up in cotton wool and putting him into my pocket, than sending him to contend with cannon ball,” she wrote.

Mrs. Adams could not have been more wrong. Jones was a fierce combatant. “I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way,” he had written. Jones succeeded in spreading panic along the coast of England and Scotland in 1778, seizing British merchant ships and even raiding seaports. Commanding Ranger, Jones attacked the seaside town of Whitehaven, less than a hundred miles northwest of London. Jones knew the harbor well. He had left England from that very port. His stunning raid sparked fear in London. All at once, the English realized they might be vulnerable in their home islands.

When Franklin persuaded the French to give Jones a ship, Jones gratefully christened her Bonhomme Richard. This was the French translation of Franklin’s famous Poor Richard. Franklin had been upset upon hearing of the British fleet burning Fairfield and Norwalk and other towns along the Connecticut shore. He wanted a reprisal. On 23 September 1779, Commodore Jones overtook a rich Baltic convoy off Flambrough Head, Yorkshire. The fearless British Captain Richard Pearson and his swift, copper-bottomed HMS Serapis shepherded the convoy. Pearson had nailed his blood-red British ensign to his mast that morning as he set out to search for Jones. The other ships in his small squadron soon abandoned Jones, but he brought Bonhomme Richard in close with Serapis. At his first cannon volley, a gun exploded on Jones’s ship, killing many of his own men. Jones’s great skill in maneuver helped him come alongside Serapis, where he used his French Marine musketeers to devastating effect. Bonhomme Richard was on fire, taking on water and likely to sink, when Pearson called out to Jones, asking if he had “struck.” To strike, or haul down your flag, meant you were surrendering. Jones’s reply—that they had done but a little fighting and he was determined to fight on—has come down to us as “I have not yet begun to fight!”

Whether or not he said exactly those words, his actions followed them precisely. For hours the two ships were locked in a deadly embrace, “snug as two logs in a woodpile, guns muzzle to muzzle.” English farmers coming home from their fields watched, awestruck, under a harvest moon as the two ships lit up the night. Both ships called for a temporary ceasefire, sending crews aloft to put out the flames that threatened to engulf them all. Serapis tried to break from the clinch, to use her superior firepower to blast Bonhomme Richard, but Commodore Jones had ordered Sailing Master Stacey to use heavy hawsers to tie the ships securely together. When he heard Master Stacey cursing a blue streak, Jones reminded the salty sailor to watch his language because he might “in the next moment be in eternity.”

Unexpectedly, Jones faced “friendly fire” when the Alliance, commanded by French Captain Pierre Landais, suddenly reappeared. Twice, Landais’s ship raked the Bonhomme Richard with deadly grapeshot. Despite this, Jones finally won a victory of the “tops” as his American and French marksmen high up in the masts completely cleared Serapis’s decks. Jones was able to board and capture the valuable prize. History offers no greater example of courage and determination. Americans—long sneered at as cowards by the British—could ever after answer Bonhomme Richard. Both ships had suffered terribly, nearly 50 percent casualty rates. Bonhomme Richard could not be saved. (What must Alexander Wedderburn, by this time Britain’s attorney general, have thought of his “man of letters” gibe now? Franklin’s Poor Richard had leapt off his pages and spit fire at British arrogance.)

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 1821-1849). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Four

REFLECTION AND CHOICE: FRAMING TO CONSTITUTION

(1783-1789)

A CRITICAL PERIOD

… Fifty thousand spectators had witnessed the stunning achievement of the Montgolfier brothers—Joseph and Étienne—and the beginning of manned flight on 21 November 1783. Franklin had to watch from his carriage, so crippled was he with gout. One of the witnesses turned to Franklin to ask him what practical use it was. The most practical man on earth answered simply: “What is the use of a new-born baby?”

Franklin was rapidly closing out his Paris days, planning to turn over the embassy to the new man Congress had sent over in 1784 to succeed him. When a Parisian asked Thomas Jefferson, the new American minister, if he had come to replace Dr. Franklin, Jefferson replied diplomatically: “No one can replace him. I am only his successor.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2046-2052). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

…

Patrick Henry introduced a bill in 1785 to provide state support for “Teachers of the Christian Religion.”Many people saw it as a step forward for religious tolerance. After all, Virginia had previously required all its citizens to support the Anglican (now Episcopal) church. Under Henry’s bill, government support would be given to a wide variety of Christian sects. James Madison, however, immediately stepped forward with his famous Memorial and Remonstrance. In it, Madison showed how government support for only some churches violated the essential religious liberty of all. Madison showed that allowing the government to set terms for the support of the Christian religion would also permit the same government to control it. …

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2101-2106). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

…

So successful was Madison’s argument that many of the Christian denominations saw the force of his reason and petitioned the Virginia Assembly to vote down the Henry bill. The new consensus broke the logjam of resistance to Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which Madison ably guided through the assembly.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2110-2112). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“THE GREAT LITTLE MADISON”

…

Alexander Hamilton stunned many delegates when he arose to attack both plans. Both plans, he charged, gave too much power to the people. He thought the people were “turbulent and changing” and they “seldom judge or determine right.” Hamilton urged a purely national government, with states having no more authority than counties do in relation to the states. Hamilton argued for giving propertied men a larger share of authority and influence in the new government.

Did Hamilton really believe this? Or was he skillfully laying out a case for a centralized government dominated by wealth that would make Madison’s Virginia Plan look moderate by comparison?

With tensions building, the revered Benjamin Franklin made one of his rare speeches to the convention. He recalled that when the Continental Congress sat in days of great danger, they had asked God’s help in prayer. “Have we forgotten our powerful Friend? Or do we imagine we no longer need its assistance?” Franklin said he had lived a long time—he was the oldest delegate—“And the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable than an empire can rise without his aid?” Franklin concluded, quoting the Bible: “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” We know that the delegates did not follow Franklin’s suggestion to begin their sessions with prayer—they had no funds to hire a clergyman! But they didn’t break up, either, and that answered Franklin’s fervent prayer.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2248-2260). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

…

… the Three-Fifths Compromise was a mere mathematical formula, advanced by Northern delegates, and was never intended as a statement that the Founders thought slaves to be less than fully human. After all, they referred to slaves as persons. Who, after all, wanted slaves counted fully for purposes of representation? Slaveholders. This would artificially increase their representation in the House of Representatives and as well in the electoral college. Also, and this cannot be stressed enough, the Three-Fifths Compromise provided an incentive for states to continue the emancipation process. When a state freed its slaves, it would get increased representation in the House of Representatives. And, because each state’s electoral vote was based on its number of representatives, the state that abolished slavery would also be rewarded in the selection of the president.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2329-2335). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

…

At the last session, Franklin remarked that he had long watched the carving on the back of the presiding officer’s chair. Was it, he asked himself, a rising or a setting sun? With the signing of the Constitution, Franklin said, he was now sure. “I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

When a lady asked him what kind of government he and his fellow delegates had given them, Dr. Franklin replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2378-2382). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE STRUGGLE FOR RATIFICATION

When the delegates left Philadelphia in September 1787, prospects for ratification of the new Constitution were by no means bright. Yes, they had not broken up in bitter disagreement. But of fifty-five who convened in May, only thirty-nine were willing to put their names to the final draft polished and refined by the expert penmanship of Gouverneur Morris.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2383-2386). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

This may be the appropriate place to pause for a moment to discuss further James Madison’s views on religious liberty. Few of the Founders have been so misunderstood. Even as the U.S. Supreme Court in the past sixty years has woefully misunderstood Madison’s ideas, they have been taken up and defended by the Roman Catholic Church in the epochal Vatican II Council. Madison’s beliefs, as reflected in his Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785, his fatherhood of the Constitution of 1787, and his authorship of the Bill of Rights of 1791, deserve to be considered among the greatest of American achievements. Religious liberty, as Madison said, “promised a lustre to our country.”

Madison’s achievement is America’s achievement. As such, it stands as one of world historical importance. As Judge John Noonan has put it: “Free exercise—let us as Americans assert it—is an American invention. How foolish it would be to let a false modesty, a nervous fear of chauvinism, obscure the originality.” Perhaps it was Madison’s very diffidence, his unwillingness to beat his own drum, that has caused us to fail to appreciate the greatness of his achievement. Noonan sees beyond Madison’s modesty to his monumental inspiration:

Modest in all things, including his Christian commitment, James Madison was, so far as I know, the first statesman who, himself a believer, and not knowing any persecution himself, had enough empathy with the victims of persecution to loathe the idea of enforced religious conformity and to work to produce law that would forever end it. It is easy to be tolerant if you don’t believe. To believe and to champion freedom—that is Madison’s accomplishment. Overshadowed by Jefferson, Madison was the better workman. In the phrase “free exercise” that the founder of seventeenth century Maryland had brought to America, Madison found the perfect expression, an expression that in his mind excluded the establishment of a church as well as the enforcing of religious opinion.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2433-2447). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Five

THE NEW REPUBLIC

(1789-1801)

‘THE SACRED FIRE OF LIBERTY’

George Washington stood on the north portico of Mount Vernon, overlooking the majestic Potomac River, on 14 April 1789. There, he received word that the electoral college had met and unanimously chosen him to be the new republic’s first president.

There was no cheering there. Washington knew that the new government was nearly bankrupt. The old government of the Articles of Confederation had quietly and peacefully expired, but deeply in debt. Like many planters, even the wealthy Washington was “cash poor.” He had to borrow money to travel the 250 miles between Mount Vernon and New York City for the inauguration. …

Jubilant crowds greeted his coach in every village and town on his way to the temporary capital in New York City. They shouted themselves hoarse in praise. But Washington was wise. He knew that the popular acclaim might not last. Such an emotional outpouring, he thought, might easily turn “into equally extravagant (though I will fondly hope unmerited) censures.”

Perhaps like the reluctant Moses, Washington often expressed doubts about his abilities to measure up to his appointed tasks. It was just what he had done in 1775 when the Continental Congress unanimously made him commander in chief of the army. Washington also knew that others might come to doubt his abilities. Good graces in politics are more like winds than mountains. Hadn’t he seen some of those who cheered him in Congress conspire only a few years later to replace him? So it would be with those raucous citizens who hailed the conquering hero now.

The great Revolutionary leader had been the model for the presidency. He had presided with dignity, patience, and strength for five long, sultry months while delegates to the Constitutional Convention measured the constitutional fabric to his frame like so many tailors. Despite the delegates’ heated arguments and occasional long-winded speeches, Washington had been an attentive student in the greatest graduate seminar in political science, history, and economics ever conducted on this continent. Not as bookish or brilliant as many, Washington could weigh each speaker’s words against his own rich experience as farmer, surveyor, legislator, military commander, and diplomat. Only Franklin could rival Washington’s breadth of experience. Although he had never been to Europe, or even to Canada, George Washington had traveled more extensively throughout America than all but a few men of his day. If Washington was not prepared, then no one was. That was precisely what many of the world’s most powerful thought; they did not believe any people were capable of self-government, least of all the Americans.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2500-2522). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

On 30 April 1789, before the assembled crowds, George Washington took the presidential oath from Chancellor Robert Livingston. (Yes, Livingston, the Antifederalist, now apparently reconciled to the new government.) Dressed in a homespun American-made brown suit with eagles on the buttons, he placed his hand on the Bible and recited the oath, adding, significantly, four words, repeated by every president since as a matter of tradition if not sincere belief: “So help me God.” Then he kissed the Bible. In his brief inaugural address to members of Congress, he claimed that heaven itself seemed to have ordained that the republican model of government—indeed, “the sacred fire of liberty” itself—had been placed in the hands of the American people. It was, he said, an experiment.

There were no proud boasts, no rah-rah claims of sure success. As an experiment, it might fail.

The odds were certainly not in the Founders’ favor. Washington had listened carefully to the debates of the Constitutional Convention—as most of the members of the new government had. He heard, as they all did, the long and detailed descriptions offered by James Madison and other delegates of the failure of republican governments of the past. The track record was less than reassuring. Every effort would have to be made to see the experiment did not fail; if eternal vigilance was required to guard against tyranny, then eternal diligence was required to secure the success of the new nation.

Washington proceeded with dispatch to organize the executive branch of government. He chose Alexander Hamilton, just thirty-five years old, as his secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton had already served Washington as an aide-de-camp in the army. Washington knew his mercurial temper. He was a serious man with a habit of speaking his mind—bluntly. But the president also knew his young friend was brilliant and tireless. Add to that pair of highly desirable qualities Hamilton’s undying realism, and he was perfect for the bill.

For secretary of state, Washington chose a fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, forty-seven, still serving as ambassador in France. Jefferson would be uncharacteristically tardy in joining the new administration. As attorney general, Washington selected the charismatic but indecisive Edmund Randolph, just a year Hamilton’s senior. This was a generous act on Washington’s part, since Randolph had dithered about signing the Constitution, declined, but then lined up behind Madison at the Virginia ratifying convention. Rounding out the president’s cabinet—although it was not yet called that—was the redoubtable Henry Knox, thirty-nine, now secretary of war. The former bookseller from Boston had served Washington faithfully throughout the war as chief of artillery.

An astute and natural manager, Washington had carefully balanced geographical sections and political points of view in selecting the heads of the executive departments. These were young men of the Revolution—their average age, including Washington himself at fifty-seven, was only forty-two years old. Other leading figures in the new government would be John Adams, fifty-four, the vice president; James Madison, thirty-eight, newly elected to the House of Representatives; and John Jay, forty-four, soon to become the nation’s first chief justice.

The First Congress was to be a very productive one; some even called it a second constitutional convention. But it got off to a very rocky start. Meeting in temporary quarters in New York City, the House and Senate had to flesh out the new government. There were executive departments to be organized, a judiciary to be created, treaties to be considered, and pressing financial business.

And the difficulties didn’t end with policy and procedure. Recently returned from five years as America’s ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s in London, John Adams stumbled in his new role as presiding officer of the Senate. He had faithfully and ably represented his country’s cause abroad, but had also lost touch with many in the new Congress. In a routine discussion of titles for the new president, Adams weighed in, disastrously. He monopolized the debate for a full month, with long and pedantic speeches. Completely missing the tenor of the times, Adams suggested the chief executive should be called “His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties.”

Some Senators were put off by the vice president’s intruding so brusquely into what they saw as their role, debating the nation’s laws and policies. Others were offended by the frankly royalist tone of Adams’s suggestion. Had he spent too much time in a foreign court filled with the bowing and scraping lackeys of the king? When Adams spoke of President Washington’s inaugural address, he called it “his most gracious speech.” Critics were quick to point out that this was precisely the standard form for referring to the King’s Speech from the Throne. What had happened to Honest John Adams? His Rotundity was the snickering title his senatorial colleagues bestowed on poor Vice President Adams behind his back.

One of his sharpest critics, Pennsylvania’s Senator William Maclay, confided to his diary. Whenever he looked at Adams presiding in the chair, “I cannot help thinking of a monkey just put into britches.” Cruel and unfair, to be sure, but Maclay’s serious point on the Senate floor was undoubtedly correct: the Constitution specifically said, “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.” The suggestions for highfalutin titles all violated the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution.

Fortunately, the House of Representatives voted that the chief executive would be called, simply, “Mr. President,” and the Senate concurred. John Adams, the bold Patriot of ’76, was seriously misunderstood and deeply wounded by this affair. He never wished to give hereditary titles to officers of the new republic; he simply thought a dignified title would be some compensation for the times away from family and farm and for the many criticisms public officers had to endure. The incident was politically sticky enough that it caused George Washington to pull away from his vice president. He was advised that Adams’s reputation in Virginia was odious. Virginians were shocked to see Adams the Patriot assume what they saw as monarchical “airs.” The vice president would not be included in discussions of Washington’s official family, a slight that greatly hurt the sensitive Adams.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2525-2573). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

MADISON’S BILL OF RIGHTS

When Congress turned to constitutional matters, they took up the question of amendments—what was to become known as a Bill of Rights. During the battle for ratification, promises were made to Antifederalists that the federal Congress would be open to suggestions for amendment. Madison, who had originally argued that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary because the new government had no power to violate the rights of citizens, now honored his commitment to his Virginia neighbors. As a leading member of the new House of Representatives, Madison became the author of the Bill of Rights. Only ten of the twelve amendments that passed Congress were ratified by the states, but they became justly famous as Americans’ charter of freedom.

To read the first ten amendments, we can read the history of the colonial struggle against British despotism. Freedom of speech, press, and religion were guaranteed by the First Amendment, as well as the right to assemble and to petition for “redress of grievances.” These rights form the core of a free society, and they had been violated in one way or another by British misrule. The Second Amendment—still controversial in our day—meant what it said. Americans remembered that General Howe’s redcoats marched out of Boston to seize the militia’s gunpowder and weapons. An armed people remained a free people because they are the last redoubt against a hostile government’s tyrannical advances. And, just as importantly, an armed people could resist the demands of militarists to regiment society. Americans would be free without ever resorting to the sort of goose-stepping mindlessness of Prussian (not to mention Soviet or North Korean) dictatorial states. The Third Amendment prevented government from stationing, or “quartering,” troops in private homes in peacetime—a major abuse of the British in Boston.

The next five amendments, all relating to judicial procedures, each corresponded to very real British acts of tyranny, many of which are detailed in the Declaration of Independence. Those notorious “Writs of Assistance” were general warrants that allowed British colonial officials to rummage through Americans’ homes, farms, and shops, looking for incriminating evidence. The Fourth Amendment banned them, specifying no “unreasonable searches or seizures.” The Fifth protected Americans from having to testify against themselves or from being tried twice for the same offense. The Sixth Amendment called for a speedy public trial, with the right of the accused to confront witnesses, compel witnesses for the defense to testify, and to have the assistance of counsel. The Seventh Amendment guaranteed the right of trial by jury, while the Eighth outlawed “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The final two amendments were the capstones—the bookends to the preamble’s acknowledgement that the powers of government were delegated by the people. The Ninth Amendment recognized that rights enumerated in the Constitution were not the only rights the people enjoyed, and the Tenth assured that any powers not granted to the federal government or prohibited to the states were retained by the states or by the people.

Madison’s careful drafting and skilled floor management of the Bill of Rights through Congress gives him just title to two great tributes—Father of the Constitution and Father of the Bill of Rights. The Founders deeply admired classical heroes. But no figure of antiquity—no Greek like Pericles or Solon, no Roman like Cicero or Cincinnatus—can claim an equal standing with Madison as lawgiver and champion of liberty. Madison told his fellow members of Congress, who exercised powers he had carefully crafted for them, why a Bill of Rights was necessary: “If we can make the Constitution better in the opinion of those who are opposed to it, without weakening its frame, or abridging its usefulness in the judgment of those who are attached to it, we act the part of wise and liberal men to make such alterations as shall produce the effect.”

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2625-2653). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

A LONG AND DIFFICULT FAREWELL

President Washington had a hard time keeping Congress from declaring war on Britain, but he did send a force under General “Mad Anthony” Wayne to the Northwest. Wayne had earned his colorful nickname during the Revolution. He had, legend has it, responded to Washington’s order to take the strongly held British fort at Stony Point, New York, with the famously warlike cry: “Give the order, sir, and I will lay siege to hell.”

Wayne defeated a threatening alliance of Indians at the Battle of the Fallen Timbers (near present-day Toledo, Ohio), in August 1794, thus erasing earlier humiliating defeats on the frontier. The Indians had been put up to it by the British, as always. General Wayne next year signed the Treaty of Greenville by which America laid claim to the current sites of Detroit and Chicago. Fort Wayne was built on the forks of the Maumee River.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 2938-2945). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Adams received seventy-one electoral votes to Jefferson’s sixty-eight. The Federalists had failed to deliver the votes necessary to elect Thomas Pinckney vice president; therefore under the Constitution as it was then written, Jefferson won the office. Since the Founders had not anticipated the creation of parties, they did not foresee the top two offices being held by men from different parties. It would prove an awkward arrangement for the next four years.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3011-3014). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

WAR, PEACE, AND HONEST JOHN ADAMS

…

… During Washington’s second term, France had lived under Maximilian Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. The guillotine had claimed 16,600 victims nationwide in less than a year (1793–94).  As many as half a million languished in the prisons of the Revolution.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3031-3033). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE REVOLUTION OF 1800          

…

The campaign of 1800 was the first true presidential campaign in American history. Republicans fought Federalists in every state. Few elections since would match this one in the scurrilous attacks made on both candidates. The partisan newspapers called Adams “senile” and denounced him for his pride, vanity, and pig-headedness. This was mild, however, compared to the all-out assault on Thomas Jefferson. The soft-spoken, philosophical Virginian was accused of atheism and of seeking to bring the bloodiest of French revolutionary violence to America’s peaceful shores. “Mad Tom,” “Jacobin,” “apostle of the racetrack and cock-pit” were but some of the gibes of the Federalist press. (The racetrack charge was particularly ridiculous since Mr. Jefferson never frequented them, but the Federalist icon, George Washington, clearly did!)

Jefferson was constantly compared, unfavorably, with Washington. The death in late 1799 of the nation’s first president had plunged the country into deepest mourning. Logic is usually the first casualty in political campaigns. If Jefferson was, in truth, such a notorious radical, how loyal could Washington have been in choosing him as his first secretary of state?

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3126-3135). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Aaron Burr was the grandson of the great colonial preacher and writer Jonathan Edwards. But no one had ever found much holiness in Burr’s career as womanizer, or as a man whose greatest skill seemed to be eluding creditors. He was charming and intelligent, to be sure. But it is no accident we do not study the writings of Aaron Burr. He was all maneuver, all action, all ambition—little else than a gamesman. And the Republicans knew this when they selected him.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3176-3180). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Six

THE JEFFERSONIANS

(1801-1829)

“AN EMPIRE FOR LIBERTY”

…

Jefferson continued to provide guidance by means of his letters. One of the first of these letters has had great influence on church-state relations in America. He had received a letter of congratulations on his election from the Danbury Baptist Association on 30 December 1801. He responded with astonishing speed. On 1 January 1802, President Jefferson wrote a letter that has become one of the most famous he ever wrote. It has also been one of his most misunderstood public acts.

Jefferson thanked the Connecticut Baptists and took the opportunity to explain why he had declined to proclaim days of fasting and thanksgiving. Expressing his “strict constructionist” constitutional beliefs, he explained that the president is only empowered to execute the laws that Congress passes. The people have wisely approved the First Amendment to the Constitution, he wrote. Since the amendment specifically prohibits Congress from passing any law “respecting the establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise thereof,” he believed he had no constitutional authority to proclaim days of fasting and thanksgiving.

We now know that Jefferson had gone further in his first draft of the letter. Proclaiming religious observances had been a standard practice of the British monarchy because the king was the head of the Church of England. Jefferson was striking out once again at his Federalist opponents. But his attorney general persuaded him that many good New England Republicans had always looked to their governors and legislatures to proclaim such important days. In fact, Jefferson had fully supported a national day of fasting and prayer when he was a member of the Continental Congress.

Jefferson then used the phrase that has been associated with him ever since. He wrote there is “a wall of separation between Church & State.” This letter needs to be seen in the context of the still-bubbling controversy over Jefferson’s election in 1800. Federalists and their supporters in many New England pulpits had denounced Jefferson as an atheist and “infidel.” Yale University President Timothy Dwight, a Congregationalist minister, had warned that if the Jeffersonian Republicans were elected, “we might see the Bible cast into a bonfire.” Worse, children would be taught to chant “mockeries against God.” Presbyterian pastor John Mitchell Mason assured his congregation that electing Jefferson would be “a crime never to be forgiven . . . a sin against God.” The Federalist Gazette of the United States had summed up the election as a choice between “God and a Religious President [Adams]” and “Jefferson—AND NO GOD! ”

Jefferson spoke out against such unreasoning hysteria and blatant abuse of religious authority for partisan politicking. “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” penned Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush. He assured Rush he would oppose any attempt to establish one particular form of Christianity in America. This stance made Jefferson highly popular among minority religious groups. In time, it would soon lead to the disestablishment of the Congregational Church in New England—just as Leland had desired.

As the elections of 1802 approached, the Federalist Party of Adams, Hamilton, and Jay grew more desperate. Jefferson had not pulled down church altars, nor seized Bibles, nor had he set up a guillotine on the National Mall. One Federalist leader, Fisher Ames, cried out, “Our country is too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, too democratic for liberty.” Even the energetic Alexander Hamilton seemed to despair. “Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me,” he wrote. Facing political disaster in the upcoming congressional elections, Federalists became even more strident than they had been in 1800. They seized upon a scandalous article written by James T. Callender. Callender charged that President Jefferson had fathered children by one of his Monticello slaves, Sally Hemings.

Jefferson had tried to help Callender with money and jobs, but he should have broken off all contact when the alcoholic Scottish refugee publicized Hamilton’s adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds. Instead, Jefferson’s help began to look like hush money. When Callender turned on him, Jefferson had no one to blame but himself. “The serpent you cherished and warmed,” wrote Abigail Adams to Jefferson, “bit the hand that nourished him.” It was a deserved rebuke.

Callender’s revenge on Jefferson did him little good. He was found the next year face down in the James River in Virginia. He had gotten drunk and drowned.

Jefferson faced a lingering foreign crisis early in his administration. For more than twenty years, he had been urging military action against Arab corsairs on the Barbary coast. These were fast, cheap warships that preyed upon merchant shipping along the northern shore of Africa. Various Arab rulers there would regularly declare war against European countries and then begin seizing their ships and men. The captured crews would be held for ransom or sold in the market as slaves. “Christians are cheap today!” was the auctioneer’s cry.

This practice had been going on for centuries. As many as a million and a quarter Europeans had been enslaved by Muslims operating out of North Africa. When he served as America’s minister to France in the mid-1780s, Jefferson had once confronted an Arab diplomat, demanding to know by what right his country attacked Americans in the Mediterranean:

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners.

Confronted by such obstinacy, Jefferson appealed to John Adams, who was then America’s minister to England. But Adams was unwilling to fight. Jefferson resolved from those early days to fight the Muslim hostage-takers. “We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce. Can we begin it on a more honourable occasions or with a weaker foe?” he wrote to James Madison in 1784. The kidnapping and ransoming of American merchantmen continued for nearly twenty years.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3276-3329). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The Bashaw of Tripoli declared war on the United States in 1801. Jefferson was determined to fight rather than pay tribute. Jefferson sent Commodore Edward Preble in command of the USS Constitution to strengthen America’s naval forces in the Mediterranean Sea. Preble stirred American hearts with his spirited reply to an arrogant British naval captain who had challenged him to identify himself when shrouded in fog.“This is His Britannic Majesty’s ship Donnegal, 84 guns,” the captain hailed, demanding Preble put over a boat and prepare to be searched. “This is the United States ship Constitution, Edward Preble, an American commodore, who will be damned before he sends his boat on board of any vessel. Strike your matches, boys!” Faced with this threat of cannon fire, the Royal Navy captain backed down. Before Preble could arrive, however, the USS Philadelphia went aground off Tripoli harbor. The Bashaw took the crew captive.

Young Navy Lieutenant Stephen Decatur knew that he must not allow the Bashaw to convert the Philadelphia to his own use. He stole into the harbor by night and set the ship ablaze. America’s consul in Tunis, William Eaton, followed this daring exploit. He gathered a motley crew of U.S. Marines, sailors, Greek and Arab mercenaries and their camels. Eaton marched his men five hundred miles across the Libyan desert to take the coastal town of Derna. Three U.S. warships, in a coordinated attack, bombarded the town. From this stunning victory, the Marine hymn takes the line “to the shores of Tripoli” and their officers still wear Mameluke swords shaped like Arab scimitars. Stephen Decatur added to his reputation by offering this famous toast: “Our Country: In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country right or wrong!”

By 1805, the pirates had had enough. Jefferson’s willingness to use force had triumphed in America’s first war on terror in the Middle East.

Another foreign danger loomed in Jefferson’s first term. By means of a secret treaty, France’s conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte had gained control of the vast expanse of North America known as Louisiana. France had given this tract over to Spain forty years before. Now she reclaimed it. Jefferson knew that New Orleans was vital. “There is on the globe one spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy,” he wrote. “It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market.” In 1803, Spain was weak. But France was the greatest military power in the world. Despite his long friendship with France, Jefferson sensed danger. “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans, we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Jefferson knew that only the powerful British fleet could prevent Napoleon from bringing tens of thousands of soldiers to control the Mississippi.

Napoleon might have sent those troops, too, had it not been for the Haitian revolt. Inspired by the French Revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture led a slave uprising on Haiti. A French army sent to put down the rebellion bogged down, with thousands dying of the dreaded yellow fever. Napoleon was planning to renew his war with England. But without an army, without superior naval power, Napoleon knew the British might seize Louisiana at the outbreak of war. Then he would have nothing. Better to sell it to the Americans.

Still, America’s minister in Paris was stunned when Napoleon offered to sell all of Louisiana—which was then a vast territory, much larger than the present-day state that bears its name. Robert Livingston had only been empowered to buy the City of New Orleans—and maybe small portions of Florida. Jefferson sent his good friend James Monroe to aid in the negotiations.

The French told the American that the Louisiana territory would be useless to them without New Orleans. Livingston found it hard to live in Paris under Napoleon’s dictatorship. He was relieved when he was able to deal with Napoleon’s finance minister, Francois Barbé-Marbois, instead of the bribe-taking Talleyrand. Barbé-Marbois was known for his honesty—and for his pro-American spirit. Initially, Barbé-Marbois demanded $25 million, but he soon lowered the price to $15 million.

At home in America, no one knew what Napoleon had in mind. Federalists in Congress attacked the Monroe mission. They wanted President Jefferson to threaten war over New Orleans. Some even wanted Alexander Hamilton to lead an army to capture the Crescent City. Hamilton said there was “not the remotest chance” Napoleon would sell territory for money.

Publicly, Jefferson talked peace. He let it be known that he was restraining the western governors from taking matters into their own hands. Privately, he let his loyal secretary of state, James Madison, talk tough to the French minister. Americans disliked the secrecy with which Napoleon had reclaimed Louisiana, Madison told Louis André Pichon. More to the point, Madison warned Pichon that “France cannot long preserve Louisiana against the United States.”

Few people in Napoleon’s Paris knew what was happening. But his brothers—Joseph and Lucien—opposed the deal. The British had bribed both of them heavily. They confronted their brother while he was in the bathtub. “There will be no debate,” Napoleon yelled. The sale of Louisiana would be arranged by a treaty with the Americans. And that treaty would be “negotiated, ratified and executed by me alone.” With that, the first consul of France threw himself back in the tub and soaked his brothers with perfumed water. As a virtual dictator, Napoleon knew he did not have to consult his “rubber stamp” legislature.

The Americans, fortunately, did not get soaked. When Monroe joined Livingston, he agreed that the offer was simply too good to pass up. Seizing the opportunity, they inked the treaty before Napoleon changed his mind. Monroe had dared to exceed his instructions because he knew Jefferson’s mind. Monroe was Jefferson’s intimate friend and neighbor and Livingston was not.

Thomas Jefferson had the pleasure of announcing the Louisiana Purchase in the President’s House on 4 July 1803. The nation had more than doubled its size. “It is something larger than the whole U.S.,” Jefferson wrote, “probably containing 500 millions of acres, the U.S. containing 434 millions.” He couldn’t resist adding that the purchase would make the new United States sixteen and a half times larger than Great Britain and Ireland. This vast territory had been acquired for $12 million—or about three cents an acre!

Some of the Federalists still griped. “We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much,” groused one. Proving once again how out of touch they were, the editors of Alexander Hamilton’s New York Post condemned the treaty as “the greatest curse that ever befell this country.” Harvard president Josiah Quincy warned, “Thick skinned beasts will crowd Congress Hall, Buffaloes from the head of the Missouri and Alligators from the Red River.”

Jefferson welcomed the treaty, but asked his cabinet to consider whether the acquisition might require a constitutional amendment. Jeffersonians were for strict construction and the Constitution said nothing about land purchases. Madison strongly supported Gallatin’s case that the purchase was covered by the treaty-making power of the president and the Senate. Then came an alarming message from Robert Livingston: Napoleon “appears to wish the thing undone.” Worse, if war broke out any moment between England and France, England could seize New Orleans and permanently block America’s westward expansion.

With Madison at his side at Monticello urging him to jump on it, Jefferson dropped all hesitation. He rushed the treaty to the Senate for ratification. The Senate quickly consented on 20 October 1803, by a vote of twenty-four to seven. Napoleon may never really have had second thoughts. He knew that if the British didn’t take Louisiana from him, the Americans could. With the treaty signed, he could pocket the sixty million francs and prepare for his war. Like the French bantam rooster he was, he crowed in triumph: “Sixty millions for an occupation that will not perhaps last a day! I have given England a rival who, sooner or later, will humble her pride.”

Some embittered Federalists feared that what they called “a Virginia dynasty” of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe could never be beaten. They began to plot secession. But the son of the Federalists’ last president, John Quincy Adams, understood it best. The Louisiana Purchase would be “next in historical importance to the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution,” he said.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3334-3407). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

LEWIS & CLARK: “THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY”

…

The Lewis and Clark Expedition comprised thirty-three individuals. In addition to the captains, there were sergeants and privates—subject to strict military discipline. Then there was the famous French trapper Toussaint Charbonneau; his Shoshone Indian wife, Sacagawea; their infant son (nicknamed “Pomp” by Lewis); and York, the corps’ only black man. York was a slave of William Clark. And Lewis also took “Seaman,” his large Newfoundland dog.

Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis in their fifty-five-foot keelboat in May 1804. They sailed up the Missouri River to Mandan, near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota.58 Pressing on to the “Stony Mountains”—now the Rockies—they made contact with Shoshone tribesmen. Sacagawea was overcome with joy to see her long-lost brother as a chief. This helped greatly to resupply the corps with horses and helpers. Crossing the Bitterroot Mountains in September 1805, Lewis later reported, “We suffered all Cold, Hunger, and Fatigue could impart” during the eleven-day trek.

Add to cold the bitter disappointment Lewis and Clark felt at realizing there was no easy all water route to the Pacific. The dream of centuries died on that trail.

President Jefferson had instructed the captains to take special care to make a favorable impression on the powerful Sioux nation. This proved harder to do when several Sioux warriors seized the boat’s lines and demanded “presents.” Lewis trained the boat’s cannon on the warriors and had his men ready to fire on them when a chief, Black Buffalo, intervened to keep the peace. Black Buffalo then invited the corps to attend the first “scalp dance” ever witnessed by travelers from the East. With some care, Lewis turned down the chief ’s offer of a young woman to share his bed.

After nearly two years of grueling marches and boat voyages, the Corps of Discovery descended the Columbia River to the Pacific. Clark captured the excitement of the corps in this typical journal entry: “Ocian in view! O! the joy.” They built Fort Clatsop on the Pacific shore and wintered over in 1805–06. They had hoped to find an American sailing ship to take them home. The local Indians’ use of phrases like “son-of-a-pitch” told them that American sailors had been in the region. When no ship appeared, Lewis and Clark decided to make the arduous return journey overland.

Once, when a critical decision had to be made, the captains put the measure up for a vote. It was the first referendum held by Americans in which voters included an Indian, a black man, and a woman. Sometimes, the clash of cultures produced humorous results. When an Indian chieftain expressed shock at the one hundred lashes Lewis had meted out to an enlisted man who had fallen asleep on watch, Lewis asked him how he would make an example of a disobedient warrior. He would kill him, the chief said, but he would never beat him. …

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3430-3452). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

PLOTS, TRIALS, AND TREASON

…

Alexander Hamilton was still respected by most Federalists. And Hamilton would have no part of secession. To Massachusetts Federalist Theodore Sedgwick, he wrote that secession would do no good because the real problem was democracy itself. And that “poison” was spreading through every state. Hamilton continued his bitterly anti-Burr campaign, denouncing the man as an unprincipled adventurer. Burr was defeated by Morgan Lewis, another Republican, but one who had the lion’s share of Federalist backing. Burr naturally blamed Hamilton—and demanded satisfaction. In those times, that meant a duel.

Though dueling was illegal in New York and increasingly looked down upon throughout the North, Hamilton felt he could not refuse Burr’s challenge without appearing cowardly. It could not have been an easy decision; Hamilton’s eldest son, Phillip, had been killed in a duel just two and a half years earlier. He said he would reserve his fire. He was resolved to “live innocent” rather than “die guilty” of shedding another man’s blood. Knowing he was very likely to die, Hamilton wrote to his wife the night before he met Burr. She had charitably forgiven him for his affair with Maria Reynolds. Now, hoping to console her, he wrote: “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian.”

Hamilton and Burr were each rowed separately over to the New Jersey side because dueling was not yet illegal in that state. There, on an outcropping in Weehauken, the two men faced each other on the morning of 11 July 1804. True to his word, Hamilton held fire. Burr leveled his pistol and shot Hamilton, his bullet passing through his enemy’s liver, diaphragm, and lodging in his spine. Hamilton knew the wound was mortal. Carried back to New York City by boat, he warned his friends to be careful of a still-loaded pistol. Friends fetched the Episcopal Bishop of New York, Benjamin Moore, to give the dying man communion. At first, the bishop hesitated, so strong was his revulsion at dueling. But when Hamilton pleaded, forgave Burr, and confessed his faith in Christ, Bishop Moore relented.

Hamilton died after thirty hours of pain. His death was widely mourned. Even the Republican press took up the cry. He was the only one of the Founders to die a violent death. Now, he seemed a martyr to national unity. New York City hung out the crepe for Hamilton’s funeral. Ships in the harbor boomed out a final salute. While dueling itself may not have been illegal in New Jersey, Burr was nonetheless indicted for murder in that state and pursued throughout New York—the fugitive vice president.

Fearing for his life, Burr fled to Philadelphia, where he found himself at reasonable enough distance from his troubles to court a lady friend. From there he traveled to South Carolina and then Virginia, where his reception was much warmer. Hamilton had never been popular in the South and dueling was considered the ultimate way to preserve a gentleman’s honor.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3471-3493). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

…

… the Republicans failed to take Vice President Burr into account. His last official act would be to preside over the Chase impeachment trial in the Senate. Rejecting Giles’s matter-of-fact treatment of impeachment, Burr outfitted the Senate in red, green, and blue banners, just like the British House of Lords when it considered impeachment. Burr made it a very formal affair. He denied the old man a chair, treating Justice Chase like a man under indictment. One Federalist newspaper sneered at the spectacle: usually, it said, “the practice in courts of Justice [is] to arraign the murderer before the Judge, but now we behold the Judge arraigned before the murderer.”

Actually, Justice Chase was lucky that Burr was in the chair. Although he had been a signer of the Declaration, Chase’s frequent outbursts on the bench made him obnoxious to many. “Our republican Constitution will sink into mobocracy—the worst of all possible governments,” he had said. Still, by treating the matter with all the formality of a criminal trial, Burr saved Justice Chase from conviction. This is because Chase could not have survived the purely political process Giles had planned. But Justice Chase was found not guilty on any article of impeachment. The impeachment trial ended just days before Burr left office. It was to be Aaron Burr’s last act as a public official.

No sooner had Burr left the vice presidential chair, however, than he began to conspire with the British minister in Washington. Burr was plotting to take the western states and the Louisiana territory out of the Union. He appealed for half a million dollars from the British to help him assemble a force to attack Spanish colonies. In this plot, Burr involved his old friend, General James Wilkinson. Wilkinson was the military governor of the Louisiana Territory. More than that, he had been an agent of a foreign government for twenty years—Agent 13 in the pay of the king of Spain.

Burr swept through the West, hailed as a hero. Dueling presented no problems for these rough-and-ready frontiersmen. Nor would they be put off by a plan to attack the Spaniards. Obviously, Burr would not have told such new friends as General Andrew Jackson that he was plotting with the hated British to destroy the Union. He wisely denied admitting any secessionist intent, as his conspiracy stirred throughout 1805 and 1806. But then, in December 1806, the plot unraveled. General Wilkinson betrayed his fellow plotter and wrote to President Jefferson, informing him of “a deep, dark, wicked, and widespread conspiracy” by Burr to destroy the Union. Jefferson immediately ordered the arrest of his former vice president, and Burr was hauled back to Richmond for trial. The charge would be treason. The penalty: death by hanging.

Richmond was the center of Jefferson’s power base. George Hay was to lead the prosecution. He was a zealous supporter of the president. Hay had once beaten James Callender with a club when Callender had charged Jefferson with having an affair with Sally Hemings.

Jefferson reckoned without one major factor: presiding over this sensational trial would be Jefferson’s cousin, Chief Justice John Marshall. Marshall did not forget that it was Burr who had saved the Federalist judges from Jeffersonian impeachments. Marshall summoned President Jefferson to testify at the trial. Citing the constitutional separation of powers, Jefferson declined. Marshall allowed Burr every protection of the law.

Luther Martin’s long-winded speeches had irritated George Washington at the Constitutional Convention, but he spoke for three full days in defending Burr. Here, he was effective. Marshall’s final instruction to the jury construed treason very narrowly. In order to prove a charge of treason, the accused must not only have conspired, but there must also be two witnesses to some overt act. As a result of this charge to the jury, Burr was “not proved to be guilty . . .” “Marshall has stepped in between Burr and death,” said William Wirt, another prosecutor.

As soon as the acquittal was announced, the Jeffersonians released to the press some of the incriminating documents that John Marshall had refused to admit as evidence. Burr escaped with his neck, but not his reputation. Once again fearing for his life, Burr this time fled to Europe. There, he continued his plotting. He sought money from Napoleon and from Napoleon’s enemies, the British—anyone who might pay him to betray his country. He found no takers. Aaron Burr was a spent force.

Today, we can be grateful for Marshall’s courage. Aaron Burr was surely guilty. But it would have been very dangerous to hang a former vice president of the United States on anything less than overwhelming evidence. As it happened, Burr was politically dead, and that was enough.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3516-3556). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“A SPLENDID MISERY”: JEFFERSON’S LAST YEARS

Thomas Jefferson had described the presidency as “a splendid misery” when he saw the toll it took on George Washington’s health and happiness. That was in 1797.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3567-3568). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

… Jefferson was happy to see his chosen successor elected easily in 1808. Despite the unpopularity of Jefferson’s embargo, James Madison trounced the unfortunate Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney by 122 electoral votes to 47. Madison swept every region except New England and Delaware. After signing the repeal of the failed embargo, Jefferson rode simply to his successor’s inauguration. He had no guard of honor. He hitched his own horse to the hitching post and joined the throng at the ceremony.

“Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power,” he wrote to a friend. We sense that he meant it.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3600-3605). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

“MR. MADISON’S WAR”

…

In 1810, Republicans in Congress responded, incredibly, to the renewed threat by slashing appropriations for the army and navy. Although Thomas Jefferson had approved the creation of West Point in 1802, it remained a Republican belief that a standing army and navy were dangerous and too expensive. They preferred to rely on militia forces and on the woefully inadequate fleet of little gunboats.

The northwest frontier grew restive. An astonishing leader arose among the Indians. Tecumseh was a powerful orator with an even more powerful message: “Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before a summer sun.”

Tecumseh traveled throughout the territory urging the tribes to form a confederation to resist the Americans’ steady pressure. With his brother, known as the Prophet, Tecumseh sternly told the Indians to give up the white man’s ways—and especially to avoid alcohol. Tecumseh had seen how other chiefs had been plied with whiskey during negotiations and had signed away some forty-eight million acres since the 1790s. Carried away by this powerful rhetoric, the Prophet refused to be held back by Tecumseh. Instead, he attacked the American militia at a place called Tippecanoe, in modern-day Indiana.

The Americans, led by General William Henry Harrison, fought off his attackers and claimed the victory on 11 November 1811 that would make him president thirty years later. All recognized Harrison’s cool courage in fending off what was rare for the Indians, a night attack.

Americans on the frontier naturally blamed the British for stirring up the Indians. The elections of 1810 had brought to Congress a powerful new group of young Republicans known as “the War Hawks.” These War Hawks installed Henry Clay of Kentucky as speaker of the House. South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun joined the group that would shape America’s destiny for the next forty years. Older Republicans like Virginia Congressman John Randolph ridiculed the war fever of the new members. He believed that men who had never smelled salt water cared little for “Free Trade and Sailor’s Rights.” Randolph compared his new colleagues to the whippoorwill that calls “but one monotonous tone—Canada! Canada! Canada!” It was true that the frontiersman wanted to take Canada and remove the British threat once and for all. In retirement, Thomas Jefferson even encouraged them, saying the conquest of Canada would be “a mere matter of marching.”

The British government in London withdrew the Orders in Council on 16 June 1812. But the U.S. Congress did not know that and declared war just two days later. Then, in utter defiance of anything resembling sense, Congress adjourned without increasing the navy. Soon, Americans would be stunned by the surrender of General William Hull at Detroit. The British commander in Canada, General Isaac Brock, had threatened Hull with an Indian massacre if he resisted. Then, in Chicago, there occurred another of the horrors that so inflamed the people of the American frontier. A Canadian writer tells the story of what happened when six hundred Pottawatomie Indians overwhelmed the Illinois militia:

At the wagon train, the soldiers’ wives, armed with their husbands’ swords, fight as fiercely as the men. Two are hacked to pieces: a Mrs. Corbin, wife of a private, who has vowed never to be taken prisoner, and . . . Cicely [a black woman, and a slave] who is cut down with her infant son. Within the wagons, where the younger children [of the soldiers] are huddled, there is greater horror. One young Indian slips in and slaughters twelve single-handed, slicing their heads from their bodies in a fury of bloodlust.

Black Bird, a Pottawatomie chieftain, does not keep his word to spare survivors in return for a ransom of one hundred dollars each:

Sergeant Thomas Burns of the militia is killed almost immediately by the squaws. His is a more fortunate fate than that of five of his comrades who are tortured to death that night, their cries breaking the silence over the great lake and sending shivers through the survivors.

Mrs. John Simmons survives the massacre in the wagons. Her husband died in a desperate charge. It is worth recounting her heroic and tragic story in full:

Believing that the Indians delight in tormenting prisoners who show any emotion, this remarkable woman resolves to preserve the life of her six-month-old child by suppressing all outward manifestations of grief, even when she is led past a row of small, mutilated corpses which includes that of her two-year-old boy, David. Faced with this grisly spectacle, she neither blinks an eye nor sheds a tear, nor will she during the long months of her captivity.

Her Indian [captors] set out for Green Bay on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Mrs. Simmons, carrying her baby, trudges the entire distance working as a servant in the evenings, gathering wood and building fires. When the village is at last reached, she is insulted, kicked, and abused. The following day, she is forced to run the gauntlet between a double line of men and women wielding sticks and clubs. Wrapping her infant in a blanket and shielding it in her arms, she races down the long line, emerging bruised and bleeding but with her child unharmed.

She is given over to an Indian “mother,” who feeds her, bathes her wounds, allows her to rest. She needs such sustenance, for a worse ordeal faces her—a long tribal [trek] back around the lake. Somehow, Mrs. Simmons, lightly clad, suffering from cold, fatigue, and malnutrition, manages to carry her child for the entire six hundred miles and survive. She has walked with the Indians from Green Bay back to Chicago, then around the entire eastern shore of the lake to Michilimackinac. But a second even more terrible trek faces her—a three-hundred-mile journey through the snow to Detroit, where the Indians intend to ransom her. Ragged and starving, she exists on roots and acorns found beneath the snows. Her child, now a year old, has grown much heavier. Her own strength is waning. Only the prospect of release sustains her.

. . . . [E]ven after her release, her ordeal is not over. The route to her home is long and hard. By March of 1813 she reaches Fort Meigs on the Maumee [in Ohio]. Here she manages to secure passage on a government wagon [that deposits her] in mid-April, four miles from her father’s farm [near Piqua, Ohio].

Mother and child walk the remaining distance to find that the family, which has . . . given her up for dead, has taken refuge in a blockhouse against Indian marauders. Here, safe at last, she breaks down and for several months cannot contain her tears. In August, she has further reason to weep. Her sister and brother-in-law, working in a nearby flax field, are surprised by Indians, shot, tomahawked, and scalped in front of their four horrified children. Such . . . is the legacy of Tippecanoe and all that proceeded it.

This extended passage helps us understand the intense hostility so many American settlers felt toward the Indians—and toward British officers like Isaac Brock in Canada whom they charged with using the Indians as a terror against them.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3613-3686). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

…

By 1814, America was exposed to invasion on three fronts at once: Niagara-Lake Champlain in the north, New Orleans in the south, and in the Chesapeake Bay. On 11 September 1814, a British fleet on Lake Champlain tried to establish control of the area. They were met by Americans under Captain Thomas McDonough in his flagship, the USS Saratoga. McDonough wound his badly battered ship around while still at anchor and forced the surrender of HMS Confiance and three other British vessels. British Captain George Downie was killed when one of his big guns was hit by one of McDonough’s cannonballs.

McDonough’s great victory caused the British general, Sir George Prevost, to retreat. Thus, McDonough’s ship Saratoga accomplished what the Battle of Saratoga had accomplished for the Americans in 1777. Britain’s northern invasion of the United States was turned back. Americans in the Chesapeake Bay region were not so fortunate. A powerful British fleet raided Maryland’s coastal towns and landed a large force of veteran British soldiers.

Led by General Robert Ross, British regulars met little opposition as they marched toward Washington, D. C. Winning victories at Bladensburg and Upper Marlboro, Maryland, the British force entered Washington on 24 August 1814. American Commodore Joshua Barney with only 400 sailors and 120 Marines bravely held the British off for two hours. But the bulk of American militia forces commanded by the grossly incompetent General William Winder broke and ran. They were put to flight by the new Congreve rockets the British employed. These rockets couldn’t be aimed accurately. Few hit their targets. But despite the harmlessness of most of them, they made a lot of noise and scared the horses—and the militia.

James Madison was doing his best to organize the resistance to the triumphant British forces. He rode out to the front, where he hastily penciled a note to his heroic wife, Dolley, warning her to flee the city. She and Paul Jennings, a fifteen-year-old black youth, cut the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington from its frame so it could be carried off to safety. The government evacuated the capital before the advancing redcoats. Fortunately, Secretary of State James Monroe had ordered Stephen Pleasanton, a clerk, to save such historic documents as George Washington’s commission, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Secured in a canvas sack, they were spirited away in a carriage.

British Marines entered the Executive Mansion unopposed. After eating the dinner that had been prepared for the Madisons, General Ross ordered his men to torch the President’s House. The new Capitol building, too, was burned, as well the Library of Congress.

Dr. William Thornton, a brave local physician, saved the U.S. Patent Office by appealing to the British not to burn the hundreds of inventors’ models. That would be as barbarous, he warned them, as the Turks’ burning of the great Alexandria Library in Egypt.

Nothing could save the offices of a leading newspaper, however. British Admiral George Cockburn had been irritated by the way the National Intelligencer published exaggerated accounts, accusing him of cruelty. When British soldiers smashed the printing presses and threw the little blocks of type out of the window, Cockburn laughingly called out: “Be sure that all the c’s are destroyed so the rascals can’t abuse my name any more!”

Another humorous incident occurred amidst the national shame. The city fathers of Alexandria, Virginia, and Georgetown finally succeeded after two days in tracking down Admiral Cockburn. They wanted to surrender to him even though not a single British soldier had come near their toney towns.

Confident they could continue to rout the poorly led Americans, General Ross and Admiral Cockburn sailed up the Chesapeake to Baltimore. General Ross jauntily told a Maryland farmer in whose house he had breakfasted that he would not return for dinner. “I’ll have supper tonight in Baltimore, or in hell.” He may have gotten his wish. Shortly afterward, two American sharpshooters fired on the advancing British column. One of them hit General Ross, mortally wounding him on 12 September 1814.

Admiral Cockburn continued on toward Baltimore. First, he would have to get past the stout Fort McHenry. Again, he used the fearsome Congreve rockets. But the defenders of Baltimore were made of sterner stuff. The fort held.

During the nights of September 13–14, a young lawyer named Francis Scott Key boarded a British warship. Key was determined to obtain the release of an elderly American doctor who had been caught taking British stragglers prisoner. Key persuaded the British that Dr. Beanes had actually treated his prisoners very humanely. The Americans could not be released, however, while the bombardment of Fort McHenry was in progress. Throughout the night, old Dr. Beanes asked Key if our flag was still there. Thus was born the inspiration for Francis Scott Key’s poem, “The Defense of Fort M’Henry.” The poem, later to become our national anthem as “The Star-Spangled Banner,” lifted American spirits even as Baltimore was spared.

The British invasion force then withdrew to the island of Jamaica to prepare their next assault on America. This time their target would be New Orleans. In the Southwest, Americans had already faced another Indian uprising. Upper Creeks, known as “Red Sticks,” had overwhelmed Fort Mims on 30 August 1813. The fort was located forty miles from present-day Mobile, Alabama. There, the Red Sticks under Chief Red Eagle had massacred nearly 250 settlers. “The children were seized by the legs, and killed by batting their heads against the stockading. The women were scalped, and those who were pregnant were opened while they were still alive and the embryo infants were let out of the womb.” Red Eagle tried to stop these atrocities but could not.

The news of the Fort Mims massacre electrified Tennessee. General Andrew Jackson was on a sickbed, recuperating from wounds he received in a barroom fight with Thomas Hart Benton and Jesse Benton. Despite the loss of blood and the bullet still lodged in his shoulder, the pale, gaunt Jackson got up to lead militia troops against the Creeks. When some of his men panicked and tried to escape duty, Jackson had six of them executed “to encourage the others” and quickly proceeded to defeat the Creeks. Jackson’s tall, lean, ramrod straight stance and his hard, unyielding discipline quickly gained him the nickname “Old Hickory.”The Indians who felt his wrath called him “Sharp Knife.”

The Upper Creeks had been inspired by Tecumseh’s brave resistance. When Jackson killed nine hundred Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, 27 March 1814, he broke the back of the uprising. He ordered the Creeks to meet him at Fort Jackson (present-day Wetumpka, Alabama), where he forced them to cede some twenty-three million acres to the United States. Nearly three-fifths of Alabama and one-fifth of Georgia were obtained by the hard treaty Jackson demanded. “Until this is done, your nation cannot expect happiness or mine security,” Jackson told the assembled Creeks on 10 July 1814.

As President Madison’s diplomatic representatives met their British counterparts for peace talks in Ghent, Belgium, the American position was weak, indeed. The British demanded large parts of Maine, which they then occupied, and the creation of a large Indian buffer state along the Ohio River. America’s John Quincy Adams already had thirty years of experience in diplomacy. And Henry Clay had thirty years of experience playing poker. Both men’s skills were to prove indispensable.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3702-3763). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS

The leader of the British invasion force was the brave young general, Sir Edward Pakenham. General Pakenham was the brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, England’s greatest soldier. Among Sir Edward’s 7,500 redcoats were many veterans of Wellington’s successful campaigns against Napoleon’s troops. The British intended to take the City of New Orleans and as much of Louisiana as possible. These would be valuable bargaining chips in the peace negotiations in Ghent. Pakenham was to encourage the people of Louisiana to secede from the United States and join either the Spanish empire or attach themselves to the British. Some Americans worried that Louisiana, purchased a decade earlier and admitted as a state only in 1812, might be lured away.

As General Jackson prepared to meet the British invaders, he imposed strict martial law on the lively city. This was a very unpopular move. He also had to deal with the famed Baratarian pirates—led by Jean Lafitte. Seemingly loyal to no side but their own, Lafitte’s pirates had turned down a British offer because it was too small. Jackson needed every man he could find to defend the besieged city. Although he had denounced Lafitte and his men as “hellish banditti,” Jackson gave in to the pleas of Edward Livingston and other leaders of New Orleans and accepted Lafitte’s help.

As the British advanced toward New Orleans, they were undetected until 23 December 1814, when they came to the plantation of Major Gabriel Villaré. Villaré had been sitting on his front porch, smoking a cigar and talking to his brother. Suddenly, redcoats came crashing through the dense woods and seized both brothers. Gabriel jumped out an open window. “Catch him or kill him!” yelled the British colonel. Villaré was too fast for them. He jumped over a picket fence and ran into the underbrush. Legend has it he had to kill a favorite dog, “with tears in his eyes,” to keep it from giving him away.

Villaré’s timely warning enabled Jackson to fortify his position in front of the Crescent City. Jackson had his men arrange themselves in front of the Rodriguez Canal, which ran perpendicular to the Mississippi River. With the river on his right and an impassable cypress wood on his left, Jackson’s defensive position was a commanding one. He led an extraordinary group of some five thousand men. He had volunteers from New Orleans, including Creole aristocrats, tradesmen, and manual workers. He had Tennessee and Kentucky militia. Free Negroes formed a key element of his force. Also included were Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italians, and Indians. And, of course, he had the pirates.  It was just the kind of “rabble” the British had been taught to despise. They called the Americans “dirty shirts.”  But high manners and neatly laundered tunics would not save the day.

On Christmas Day 1814, a number of fugitive slaves entered the British lines in front of New Orleans. They would gladly work if they could only achieve their freedom. One of these poor men addressed a British officer in perfect French. He implored them to remove a horrible spiked collar. It had been fastened around his neck as punishment for his attempts at escape. Freeing him from this torture, a British officer sneered at the Americans’ claims. “This [is an] ingenious symbol of a land of liberty,” he said. Still, the British were no liberators for the oppressed slaves of Louisiana. Their agents posted notices throughout the bayou country: YOUR SLAVES SHALL BE PRESERVED TO YOU. They appealed to the formerly French plantation owners to forsake their new American identity.

When the British commenced their attack on the morning of 8 January 1815, General Pakenham ordered a rocket fired off. Jackson’s calm courage inspired his men. “Don’t mind those rockets,” he said, “they are mere toys to amuse children.” Pakenham’s invaders included the famed Ninety-third Highland Regiment, the fierce, kilted Scots. Jackson’s men took dead aim on the advancing redcoats and mowed them down. Described as “more a massacre than a battle,” the redcoats could not overcome the murderously accurate rifle and artillery fire that Jackson poured into them. General Pakenham himself was shot to death, along with several subordinate general officers. The British toll was devastating. In just minutes, they lost 291 dead, 1,262 wounded, and 484 captured or missing. The American toll, incredibly, was just 13 dead, 39 wounded, and 19 missing in action.

It was a bitter blow to British pride. Who could believe the American “dirty shirts” could inflict such a defeat on His Majesty’s best troops? When a Tennessee militiaman demanded the surrender of a wounded invader, the redcoat officer turned around and saw a wild-eyed, unshaven, unwashed American. He was appalled: “What a disgrace for a British officer to have to surrender to a chimney sweep!”

One revealing incident suggests why the Americans were so formidable.

Immediately after the battle, three dead British soldiers’ bodies were taken out of a ditch. Several members of a New Orleans militia company were disputing among themselves about which one had killed the colonel. “If he isn’t hit above the eyebrows,” said a merchant named Withers, “it wasn’t my shot.” Sure enough, the colonel’s body revealed Withers’s shot—a testament to the deadly withering fire of the American line.

Not all the invading troops were so eager to bring the Americans under the English heel, however. Some of the prisoners were Irishmen. Their homeland had risen up unsuccessfully against English rule as recently as 1798. They had not been told they would be fighting Americans when they were loaded onto British ships. Then why had they marched so courageously into the withering American fire, their captors asked them. “And faith were we not obliged, with officers behind sticking and stabbing us with their swords?” replied survivors with typical Gaelic wit.

Jackson did not pursue the retreating British. Nor did he relax his strict military discipline over his men and the now saved city. Soon, however, the British withdrew, never to return. Jackson told the leading Catholic cleric in the city, Abbé Guillaume Dubourg, that the victory was the result of the “signal interposition of heaven.” Few Americans would disagree. The Abbé agreed and asked Jackson to join him in a Te Deum, a Mass of celebration in the cathedral.

Within weeks, news of the great victory came to Washington, D. C. Still depressed over the burning of the capital the previous August, Washingtonians now went wild with joy. “Incredible Victory!” read the headlines. Editors with a more literary bent quoted Shakespeare’s Henry VI: “Advance our waving colors on the walls / Rescued is Orleans from the English wolves.”

Within days of Jackson’s great victory the capital had further reason to rejoice. The Treaty of Ghent had been signed on Christmas Eve 1814. The news had taken almost six weeks to cross the Atlantic. Had there been a cable, the Battle of New Orleans might never have been fought. If Americans had known what this treaty would look like before they had gone to war, few would ever have approved the course. The Treaty of Ghent gave America no gains. The British had yielded not one inch on impressment. But neither had they insisted on territorial concessions.

It settled nothing, and yet it settled everything.

For, with the victory of New Orleans, Americans could be proud of themselves once more. They had taken on the greatest power in the world and survived with their independence intact. Even if they had not conquered Canada, they now had what Theodore Roosevelt would call “a hostage” for Britain’s good behavior. They had a great naval tradition, a beloved new hero, Old Hickory, and a renewed sense of patriotism, as evidenced by “The Star-Spangled Banner.” To this day, America has never enjoyed so stunning and spectacular a military triumph as Jackson gained at New Orleans. And the War of 1812 helped to form a new American consciousness. This American identity was fused in the crucible of battle.

Bennett, William J. (2007). America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I and Volume II (Kindle Locations 3764-3828). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

…

… The cotton gin had been invented in 1793 by Eli Whitney of Connecticut. This device helped make cotton much more profitable. And cotton was the basis of slave agriculture. …

… The southern boundary line of Missouri at 36°