Podcast of the Week: Stephen Kinzer discusses TR, Mark Twain, and American Empire

On Tuesday, author Stephen Kinzer appeared on the Tom Woods show to discuss his new book, The True Flag.  This piece takes as its subject the fierce debate on then-nascent American imperialism -- genuine debate in that Kinzer begins with chronicling Congress' 32-day debate on the American acquisition of the Philippines, which started on the same day as the opening session of the American Anti-Imperialist League. The heart of the debate is this: how can a democratic republic formed on the basis of consent by the governed  initiate and persist in policies that involve controlling countries against their will?  Kinzer has written such books as All the Shah's Men: An American Coup, Overthrow, and a look at Turkey as it stands between worlds.   The Anti-Imperialist League's most famous member was Mark Twain (see Weapons of Satire for Twain's anti-imperial writings), though it also included men like Andrew Carnegie and Samuel Gompers.  Kindred books: Bill Kauffman's Ain't My America, and Tom Woods' own anthology, We Who Dared Say No to War. 

Before yesterday, I'd planned to spotlight Econtalk's recent interview on the book Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel. 

Reads to Reels: The Time Machine

Showing up late for a dinner is bad enough, but when a man is the host? Still worse, he stumbles in looking like he’s been run down by a carriage, and with a wild tale of having traveled through time to boot. That’s the start of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine, the story of a scientist-inventor who creates a way to move through the “fourth dimension”, time.   This 1960 dramatization is fairly faithful to the original, though the tenor of the story is delivered differently.  It’s an old enough book that most readers will know the plot: a man is thrown forward in time and discovers the descendants of man, a race of dim but happy Barbie people lolling about and eating fruit by day….and being occasionally dragged underground by hairy industrial Morlocks by night.  After many scenes of wonder and peril, the unnamed Time Traveler escapes to the future, where he watches the sun die before returning home, in dire need of mutton.  Here,  any travel past the age of Eloi and Morlocks is dropped, and “George’s” entire story becomes one about fleeing man’s penchant for fratricidal wars.

Although the  movie’s general theme changes from scientific wonder to bemoaning war, in truth the viewer loses nothing in the dropped scenes or the added message.  Had the original novel been filmed scene for scene, we would have seen at best a rude model of a swollen sun, one that would surely appear dated now. In contrast, the time-lapse videography that so astounds George --  the sight of flowers blooming and folding, of the sun roaring across the sky in seconds – these still have power to amaze, even in an age of Planet-Earth-type visuals.  There is almost some humor in George’s misfortune at the outset: his first forays take him first to England amid the Great War, then World War 2, and then – so help me – the beginning of World War 3.  His arrival among the Eloi is the result of attempting to escape a nuclear bomb, the resulting fallout, and geologic upheaval.  George is a man of H.G. Well’s sensibility, who believed that scientific progress would be not only material, but societal as well, leading to global peace and prosperity. Seeing material progress still plagued by war – and then destroyed by it – makes George an unhappy camper, especially when he sees that humans have become docile vegetables, happy to bake in the sun and then be eaten.  He injects some much-needed spirit  in their little lives to resist the Morlocks, before returning home to fulfill his dinner obligation (a very polite gentleman is George) and then going back for the girl he left behind.

You can almost hear the ST TOS fight music.

There are dated elements, especially the other visual effects: the Morlocks' costumes, Weena's classic fifties hair, and odd shots like the 'recording discs' that are played by being spun like a top.  Altogether, though, it ages tolerably well, and is a delightful, old-fashioned story...quite a nice change of pace from today's 'gritty reboots'.  (Speaking of: Wells fans may like Time After Time, in which H.G. Wells builds his time machine and promptly loses it to Jack the Ripper.  Horrified at the idea of a beast running around in the utopia that will be The Future, Wells pursues him only to arrive in 1979 San Francisco.  Paradise, it ain't.)

There's a fun little joke on one of the props: the machine bears a plate that identifies it as having been manufactured by one H. George Wells. And so it was!

Ain't My America

Ain't My America:  The Long and Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle Class Antimperialism
©  2008 Bill Kauffman
304 pages

"You can have your hometown, or you can have the empire. You can't have both."

You don't have to be a punk kid to rage against war. In fact, for most of American history, waging war in foreign quarters was considered radical -- not protesting it. The student war protesters of the 1970s were johnny-come latelys compared to the steady  and historic denunciation of imperial adventures from more established quarters. Bill Kauffman's Ain't My America revisits a score of personalities -- politicians, poets, proles and potentates -- reviewing their stands against expansion, and warmongering from 1812 to the present, and concludes with a few arguments of his own. All the while he argues for a return to a homelier vision of America, a vision shared by this diverse multitude. The resulting narrative is a saucy challenge to today's conservatives, a reminder of a tradition which has been forgotten...and forgotten rather quickly.

The American Republic was a new thing, an experiment, and for its first century of life its citizens well appreciated the fragility of it. They saw in every legislative novelty a peril to what had been created by the transformation of colonies into a Republic, whether that was Jefferson's extralegal acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, or Madison's war and those which followed.   What unites the multitude of men here -- the speech-making politicians, the biting wits and mournful ballads of writers and poets -- is fear for the life of that Republic, imperiled by the prospect of expansion and war.  Campaigns of glory and idealism, so dear to the hearts of presidents like Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson, threatened to corrupt a nation committed to harmony and peaceful discourse with all nations,into yet another state fallen from grace, forever  brawling with its neighbors in the Old World fashion.  America enjoys a providential situation, safeguarded from foreign invasion by ocean, with a continent bounding in resources. What need have we of wandering into other people's wars?  The only fights are those we go abroad and pick.. The greater danger is that the American dream will be destroyed by the demands of war itself, through the centralization of authority, the militarization of society.  The American constitution was written in part to check dreams of militarism, like the precautions against the power of a standing army.

The evidence bears their fears out. What have been the fruits of participating in foreign wars?  A president whose title of Commander in Chief expects to apply to all Americans, not simply those in the armed services;  the wastage of million of lives, and incalculable resources;  the intrusion of the central government into every aspect of American lives.  Many aspects of the Empire in which we live were born during wartime: the income tax, for instance, conscription, and automatic withholding. Some wartime abuses heal over time, like the archfiend Wilson's loyalty campaigns. Imagine the hypocrisy of a man who runs for office on the slogan that he kept us out of the war, who then has war declared and imprisons people for so much as applauding an anti-war speech!  War makes the nation itself a hypocrite, as it did in the late 19th century when the United States stretched its imperial wings over Cuba and the Phillipines, inciting a fight with Spain and pretending to be fighting for another people's liberation, and then waging war against those people when they declined acceptance into the "Empire of Liberty".  War's ravages have been worse diplomatically: a region like the middle east, which once admired the United States as an amicable partner far different than the imperial English and Russians, now boils over with loathing for it.  Every excursion, martial or secretively effected -- seems to lead to more, and the corruption of the military-industrial complex waxes worse and worse.

These are not leftist criticisms; the Democratic party is no less the Party of War than modern Republicans, and indeed presidents like Wilson, Truman, and Johnson have been responsible for as much if not more overseas mischief than their 'rivals'. These are the criticisms of prudent men who had studied history, who absorbed its lessons into their very bones, and knew the United States was not so exceptional that it could defy the rule of human nature.  Most of the criticism Kauffman collects focuses on war as a corrosive force, turning a Republic into an Empire, but in an additional section Kauffman throws his own punches.  The bulwark of conservatism is defense of the family, which the military state destroys -- not merely by keeping young men abroad for months and years at a time, but by constantly shuffling military families around and denying them roots.  The increase of men in uniform went hand in hand with rising divorce and juvenile delinquency, especially during World War 2.   Denied the opportunity to invest in a local community, the only loyalty that can be mustered up by the family is to an abstraction -- the State.   Imperialism bids the flag go where the Constitution cannot follow -- and, "severed from its staff, [waves] in any vagrant breeze".

Ain't My America rebuts foreign excursion as it champions the local.  Kauffman's America is a republic of front porches, a collection of intimate communities united by a common dream, but loyal firstly to their neighbors.  Kauffman's America is the town, the countryside where we grew up, the places that nurture and support us -- the places that gain our affection and love through time, as do our homes.  In the Republic, men and women are sustained by the connections, finding meaning in the work they do for and with their neighbors. Kauffman's America ain't the Empire. In the Empire, meaning is searched for from without --  embarking on crusades to "fight" terror or "make the world safe for democracy", each person and each community's character subsumed by the collective. It's a criticism not far from Chris Hedges' observation that "war is a force that gives us meaning".

All this history and scathing commentary is rendered in Bill Kauffman's singular style. If Wendell Berry's defense of the local is rendered in a grandfatherly fashion, in tones of warm comfort, Kauffman is more of a slightly rebellious uncle, the kind who is willing to stay up past three a.m. rattling off colorful stories. There is much color to be hand in Kauffman's vocabulary, not necessarily profanity. Kauffman is a colorful character himself, who describes himself as the lovechild of Dorothy Day and Henry David Thoreau, a wild spirit with the blood of Crazy Horse and Zora Neal Hurston in his veins. His expressions are his own, energetic and archaic, like  "fossicking about in tramontane sinkholes". He threatens the reader with his own poetry, and in a section hailing Grover Cleveland as the 19th century's sole classical liberal, begins "let us now praise corpulent men".  The book rebounds with an affectionate wit, often barbed. After recounting the life of a Congressional solon named Hoar, who a contemporary thought would be celebrated in statuary for standing against imperialism, Kauffman notes "Alas, the statues are all dedicated to Har's homonyms."

What a piece of work is Kauffman, and an eye-opening piece of work this is! Kauffman's style and championing of the little way  give him considerable appeal both in what he says and his delivery thereof.  He is funny and rebuking,  a man of no party and wholly genuine.  Ain't my America succeeds as a reminder of what the American experiment was -- is -- at its best, and as a scattering of  birdshot fired at our aviary of warhawks on the Potomac.




Related:

• We Who Dared Say No to War, ed. Murray Polner and Tom Woods. Even more sweeping, this collects anti-war speeches, essays, and songs throughout the Republic's history.  It covers more anti-war motives than Kauffman's  localism. 
• Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialistic Writings,  Mark Twain
• Look Homeward, America: in Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front Porch Anarchists,Bill Kauffman

We Who Dared Say No to War

We Who Dared Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now
© 2008 Murray Polner, Tom Woods
368 pages

The image of anti-war protesters in America is of the left, especially the student left, haranguing the government for overseas debacles, bloodbaths like Vietnam and Iraq that seem to rival the Trojan War in their length. As We Who Dared Say No to War demonstrates, however,  bipartisan public outcry against government bellicosity has been around since the creation of the Republic.  The joint work of a progressive and a libertarian,  this anthology of anti-war literature demonstrates that war is the enemy of us all, destroying lives and turning governments into monsters.

I'd planned to buy this work years ago purely on the face of it, especially given its unlikely neighbors: Howard Zinn and Russell Kirk, both of whom are represented here. Aside from some more famous names, like President Eisenhower , most of the contributors are nigh-anonymous, largely forgotten by history. Their motivations for opposing war are diverse, but of this collection there are two predominant objections, moral and constitutional.  Arguments opposing the war from the perspective of Christian pacifism pepper the work, from an early piece written to the Confederate president maintaining that Christians cannot be forced to fight a war against God's commands, to the Berrigan brothers (both Catholic priests) who raised a righteous ruckus during Vietnam, at one point sneaking into a courthouse to burn draft documentation.  Another well-represented motive is Constitutional corruption; both authors decrying the fact that the president has forced the country into war despite the fact that this is Congress's purview, and those warning that wars are the lethal enemy of democracy and republican government, reliably leading to a worship of the State and the severe curtailing of liberties both civil and political.  Political objections to war run the gamut, from conservatives like Robert Taft denouncing it a menace to public health, to conservatives in the person of Eugene Debs pointing out that wars are invariably fought by a subject class who gain nothing from it but families destroyed and survivors haunted by the horrors of the battlefield.

The book covers every conflict from 1812 'til the present day, if not by name then by association: The War of 1812, the invasion of Mexico, the Civil War,  the Spanish-American war, the world wars, the "Cold War", Vietnam,  and the War on Terror, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan.    Early on, a fair bit of the moral objection is patriotic: authors see in the United States an unstained and free republic, one which has never raised the sword except in its own defense.  Do not reduce us, they plead, to the level of the old world,  constantly invading and advancing the flag of conquest. May the stars and stripes, they pray, remain free of the imperial eagle. Alas for them, between Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines,  under the swagger stick of executives like McKinley and Roosevelt, the great experiment deferred to the familiar path of empire -- and even after a momentary retreat during the Depression, it came back for a vengeance after World War 2, and remains with us today.  Of all the wars covered here, World War 2 is addressed most lightly; one author maintains he's sitting this one out because history seems to indicate the futility of it. How many resources were poured into Europe to defeat the Kaiser in an alleged crusade to make the world safe for democracy, only to release a fouler creature?  We traded Hohenzollern for Hitler;   dispatch him, and what fresh hell do we risk?    There is slight drift from idealism to resignation within the book; the authors are not oblivious to the fact that they were preceded in their arguments by other generations, and eventually one wonders if we're not damned to the same mistake over and over again.  Our enemy, one author writes, is not fascism,  or even materialism, but the beast within man. Til it be tamed with reason -- til, as Plato mused, the love of wisdom commands cities -- we will defeat one enemy only to create another.

This is a work brimming with quotability, with utterly delicious surprises.  We find, for instance, Abraham Lincoln denouncing a war started on suspicious grounds only a decade before he becomes the author of a similar conflict.   Later on, a Democratic presidential candidate,  George McGovern, hails the virtue of paleo-conservative arguments against war and chastises Congressional republicans by quoting Edmund Burke and declaring that the legislative chamber stinks of blood.  Though most of the material is primary sources -- essays, poems, and songs --  Woods and Polner also provide some narrative introduction to each chapter that provides some cohesion and historical analysis -- decrying, for instance,  the rise of liberals eager to wage war in other countries for Wilsonian ends, and the rise of neo-conservatives who abandoning contempt for interventionism and profligate spending to play war across the globe.

Although the subject  here is American anti-war writing, the book commends itself to general reading. The motives and consequences of war affect other nations no less than the United States, a fact born out by the fact that many of the contributors here point to examples in history. The role of war in centralizing power, in corrupting a nation -  enriching defense contractors with the right connections, forcing a disconnect between the morality of home and the  desire of the state -- in turning perfectly friendly people into frenzied madmen -- is a universal human problem, particularly so in that there is no easy fix. Fighting  is second nature to us,  though at the level of state versus state it is virtually indefensible.  Beyond war,  We Who Dared Say No communicates important values;  moral authority and a state that is kept within its limits by the people.   Unfortunately, it is a work that will never lose relevance...at least, not this side of a coronal mass ejection.  While we can never stop the state's wars, we can refuse to participate, awaken others to its obscenities, and sap ever so slightly its power.  This is invigorating and encouraging,  demonstrating that parties that disagree on other subjects can come together to resist  and overcome the beast that is war, and the beast it makes of those who surrender themselves to it.

Related:

• Weapons of Satire, Mark Twain. A collection of Twain's rebuke of American imperalism in the wake of the Spanish-American war.
• Voices of a People's History, ed. Howard Zinn. An anthology of first-hand accounts railing against imperialism among other subjects. 

The Copperhead

The Copperhead
© 1893 Harold Frederic
108 pages

War can destroy a city without the first shell falling on it. Such was nearly the fate of Four Corners, New York, a small farming community in its upper reaches. Far removed from the battlefields of the Civil War, the village nonetheless suffered its injuries.  So far as Abner Beech was concerned, the world consisted of the Four Corners; the South was a distant land, its problems those of its own people. Before the crisis erupted, he was not alone in his sentiment:  most of his neighbors were kindred spirits, one Methodist lunatic excepting. That was Jee Hagadorn, from a long and illustrious line of puritanical scolds. He is, among other things, an Abolitionist, and once the war begins he ascends from the fellow everyone avoids to spearheading the town's support of the war effort. Abner Beech is astonished at how quickly his neighbors become enthusiastic about the prospect of great hordes of young men lining up to kill one another, and scandalized by the impending doom that lays in store for the Constitution in the wake of Abe Lincoln's assumption of war powers, and widespread support of it.   Beginning the book as a pillar of the community, Abner quickly falls from grace to become a pariah, spurned at church and forced by his own contrariness to keep to himself on his own farm.  Matters worsen as his own child marches off to war, wooed by the lunatic warmonger's daughter, and eventually he is subjected to  a torchbearing mob outside his home.  Although the original novel's Beech is not nearly as sympathetic as his dramatized counterpart  in Copperhead (the viewing of which prompted me to read this),  he is nonetheless heroic in both holding on to his principles, and his in being easy to forgive. The story ends on a happy note, indeed far happier than the movie's.  Modern readers will find Beech prickly, but the enduring lesson has not changed regardless. War is a sinister thing, able to turn friends into bitter enemies simply for holding the wrong opinion.

Conscience

Conscience: Two Pacifists, Two Soldiers, One Family
© 2012 Louisa Thomas
336 pages

How does a pious young Presbyterian minister become a six-time candidate for the Socialist party? Such is the story of Conscience,  the story of Norman Thomas and his younger brother Evan, who would go to seminary as conventional Presbyterians and emerge radicals whose faith  found truer expression in political idealism than Christian worship. The promised tension between brothers is wholly overstated, as Conscience concerns Norman and Evan's struggle to find a way to live as authentic Christians in a world of violence and poverty.  Unable to accept religious claims on their face, and deeply unhappy with the response of Christians in general to the problems of the world around them -- platitudes and minor alms for the poor, enthusiastic support for the horror of the Great War -- both grew further from Christianity and more politically radical as the years wore on.  Although both eventually become ardent pacifists,  to the discomfort of their family  and institutions which bore them,  in each political activism takes different forms. Young Evan's zeal took hold early,  his high, strident ideals are so resolute he can make no concessions anywhere, and develops something of a martyrdom complex as a conscientious objector. Norman's own radicalism was slower to ripen; as pastor of a church with a growing family, he sought to effect  change through the political system rather than his brother's active protests.

The piquancy of Conscience is how the brothers came to their respective positions, considering their very conventional background; their family was stolidly middle class and the boys were elevated into the elite Princeton University and its social clubs through their own scholarship.  This was an era of tremendous social and political upheaval, a time in which comfortable politics-as-usual was giving way to demands for action by the populists and progressives.  Louisa Thomas well delivers a sense of the changing spirit of the times, its energy impacting the lives of all who are involved. She draws largely on letters within the family, a feat made easy by merit of her being Norman Thomas's great-granddaughter. She is thus tender to her subjects, though it would be hard not to be considering their commitment to justice and peace; Norman is especially sympathetic, not being quite so much the puritan,  and torn between old loyalties (to his mentor, Woodrow Wilson, who ran on an anti-war campaign and then locked up people like Evan for protesting when he joined in) and new expressions of old values.   Conscience is thus a fascinating look into the souls of two young men during one of the west's darkest moments.