The War Myth in
United States History
By C. H. HAMLIN
_Atlantic Christian College_
_With Introduction by_
CHARLES F. DOLE
THE VANGUARD PRESS
NEW YORK
_Copyright, 1927, by_
VANGUARD PRESS, INC.
VANGUARD PRINTINGS
_Fifth Printing_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To my brother,_
ASKEW H. HAMLIN
_A life full of promise cut short
in early manhood_
CONTENTS
_Chapter_
Introduction
I. Patriotism and Peace
II. The Revolutionary War
III. The War of 1812
IV. The War With Mexico
V. The Civil War
VI. The War With Spain
VII. The World War
THE WAR MYTH IN UNITED STATES HISTORY
INTRODUCTION
Professor Hamlin's book seems to me not merely interesting but
extremely important. No man who cares for the story of his country
can afford to neglect it.
The plan of the work is suggested by the title;--the time has come to
ask soberly regarding every war in which the United States has been
engaged from the beginning, whether it had to be, and if it had to
be, why? We want to know frankly if our wars have brought us glory.
It is already easy to see that the wars of other nations, and
especially of those who have fought against us, have entailed upon
them shame, cruel measures, oppression of the poor, suppression of
liberties, violation of law, destruction of wealth and immeasurable
futility. But we were told that our wars had been different; our
wars had been sacred; our sovereignty "could do no wrong." Had we
not solemnly thanked God for his help in winning every one of our
wars?
The great World War has brought mankind to a new and surprising
conclusion such as probably never before prevailed at the end of a
war. Leading people in all nations are at one in the conclusion,
that no thoughtful person in any country which entered the war knew
of any adequate reason why his government should spend the blood of
its people. As Mr. Lloyd George has said: "No one intended the war,
but we all 'staggered and stumbled' into it." It came upon the world
like an epidemic of mania. It is evident also that its coming was
directly related to the prevailing fashion of "preparedness" for war
and to the fears and suspiciousness that everywhere attended this
preparedness. It had been the barbarous expectation for ages that
war must come every once in so often, as a plague comes. Was not the
world full of barbarous people, and therefore of barbarous nations?
Professor Hamlin boldly carries over all the wars of our own United
States into the broad generalization which includes the wars of other
nations. They all belong together among the old world evils, like
slavery or witchcraft, which it is our business to clear away from
the earth. We apologize for them no longer. We propose not to
expect them nor prepare at tremendous expense to suffer and die when
they come; we propose rather through simple, humane and rational
measures to provide never to endure them again.
Professor Hamlin accordingly takes up in a rapid survey and analysis
each one of the six major wars through which the larger part of our
total national expenditures have been devoured. He proceeds, like a
skilful surgeon, without passion or partisanship, with a trace of
sympathy for all groups and parties, in so far as all were alike
victims of misunderstanding, ignorance of the facts, and hereditary
prejudices and delusions. Save for the great common human
characteristics which gleam out among all peoples and on both sides
in times of calamity--the patience, the heroism, the self-sacrifice,
the exceptional acts of magnanimity--he finds nothing whatever holy
in a single one of our national wars, but rather the manifestation of
every mean, cruel and cowardly trait which has ever debased human
nature.
He can discover in the case of no one of these wars any evidence that
the body of the people or an intelligently informed majority in it,
or even the government, had taken pains to assure themselves either
of the justice or the necessity of going to war, or that their
leaders were ever able to assign a just and sufficient reason and
purpose compelling them to resort to war. Thus he brings to light,
what every one ought by this time to know, that the Revolutionary
War, far from being undertaken by the will of a free citizenry, was
actually forced upon the American people by a small minority in the
teeth of the earnest opposition of a highly respectable percentage of
thoughtful citizens, while another large part of the colonists was
quite indifferent to the issue. Professor Hamlin also makes clear
that in all our wars, exactly as in those we usually reprobate, our
people were presently found practising the same injustices,
indignities, lying defamations, detestable acts of revenge, outrages
on innocent women and children, upon the fears of which we had
hastily assumed excuse for ourselves in rushing into war.
In all our wars we have boasted of our American ardor for liberty.
Professor Hamlin's book shows how every great war requires the most
terrible form of slavery, namely conscription, in which the
individual is stripped of the normal use of his conscience and
judgment. In order to drive men to submit to this degradation the
government itself, even in the hands of its "best" men, must resort
to the employment of unscrupulous lying, reckless propaganda in abuse
of the enemy, and the suppression of truth, of free speech and
open-mindedness--in short, to a debauch of miseducation, and a
general corruption of the whole population. Once in war, it never
will do to let good be known of the enemy! War counts upon the
plentiful outpouring of passion and hatred.
The churches also are pressed in war-time to undertake the defense of
doing evil that good may come, and to strain their arguments over the
verge of hypocrisy in making the worse appear the better reason. So
altogether, "hell is let loose." The worst of it is that the lower
passions, once let loose, do not willingly return under control, but
remain to haunt the earth.
Once more, Professor Hamlin shows how in each case after a war the
whole horrible storm flattens out into waste, corruption and
futility. The World War is the most colossal demonstration of this
condition. If a people thought they knew what they were fighting
for, they failed to get it; the victor proves often at last to be the
vanquished. It is curious now in looking back to the Civil War to
note that the reason which chiefly persuaded "good" and chivalrous
souls to engage in it was to put an end to slavery. This at best was
dealing in the wrong way with evil, that is, overcoming it with evil,
as was abundantly proved after the war. But Mr. Lincoln would not
admit that we were at war against slavery! We were at war, as the
government held, to put down secession, whereas we had begun the
national union by a war of secession; our government would have liked
at the time of the war of 1812 to get Canada by secession or capture;
we fought with Mexico to secure the results of the secession of
Texas; we refused in 1898 to accept a peaceful method to separate
Cuba from Spain but insisted upon fighting to effect the separation;
and we still keep armed forces in the Philippine Islands against the
protest of the inhabitants. Mr. Roosevelt was quick to postulate the
right of secession in the case of Panama. As to the Great War, our
President Wilson's proclamation in favor of the natural right of
small nations to secede has become one of the slogans of mankind! As
has been often remarked: "This is a queer world." Professor Hamlin's
little book is at least an easy _reductio ad absurdum_ for war.
CHARLES F. DOLE.
Southwest Harbor, Me.,
August, 1926.
CHAPTER I
PATRIOTISM AND PEACE
For the first one hundred and thirty-five years of the history of
this republic the total expenditure of the federal treasury was
approximately $66,000,000,000. Of this total expenditure
approximately $56,000,000,000 was for warfare. From 1775 to 1923 the
United States Army was engaged in no conflicts comprising about 8,600
battles and a casualty list of approximately 1,280,000 men. (See
Ganoe, History of U. S. Army, page 490.) Of course most of these
conflicts were minor. This study will include only the six major
wars in which we have been participants.
A most common fallacy in the study of history is the blind acceptance
of that which has happened as inevitable in the course of events.
This is a form of collective fatalism. It reduces history to a study
of the dead past with no message for today. This view is the very
opposite of democracy. Democracy assumes that the group has control
over its actions and that they are not the result of a blind
fatalism. To look upon past events as inevitable makes man the
victim of forces over which he can have no control. It makes man a
slave. This fatalism is incompatible with democracy. The democrat
must study history not to discover the forces of fate but to discover
more perfect rules of human conduct. Primarily, the study of the
past should be to throw light on the present and future, so that we
might profit by the wisdom and the mistakes of the past. But to do
this we can not accept collective fatalism as our attitude toward
history.
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the study of history
was a study of the Greeks and the Romans. It was a study of the
ancients only. Early in the nineteenth century, with the rise of
nationalism especially intensified by the French Revolution, all
nations began introducing the study of their national history in
their elementary schools. The object of this was to teach
patriotism. Examine their meaning of patriotism and you find it
meant the support of the king on the throne. All texts and
instruction exalted the nation to show its superiority to others.
Patriotism meant national propaganda. With the rise of democracy
patriotism began to shift to mean the support of the
group,--pro-group rather than pro-king. This was the cause and the
result of the national mind set. Patriotism became international
hatred, measured in terms of military service. This attitude toward
history caused the teaching and writing of history to be largely
national propaganda, by interpreting all the wars of a nation as
defensive with the opponent always the offensive nation.
The greatest difference between the present peace movement and
previous ones is that now among many of those who study the problem
the offensive-defensive relationship in warfare is being not only
questioned but rejected. All nations picture their side as
defensive. Previous peace movements accepted this attitude.
Accordingly, when a conflict arose, these opponents of war usually
yielded to the pressure because they thought their nation was being
attacked by an aggressor. But a careful study of history does not
warrant such an idea. The effective element of the present peace
movement is based chiefly on the fact that there is no nation of
"sole guilt" in any war once the facts are studied carefully. The
following study is an attempt to show that in our wars there has not
been the "sole innocence" of the United States as opposed to the
"sole guilt" of our opponents. _That its wars are defensive against
an offensive enemy, is the war myth of every country_. This national
bias makes it easy for the military party to predominate and to
precipitate war. Yet warfare is not popular if measured in terms of
voluntary support of the citizenship in time of war. It was hard for
the colonies to induce as many as 250,000 men to join the
Revolutionary forces out of a total population of over 3,000,000, and
only a part of the 250,000 were enlisted at any one time. In the
Civil War both sides were forced to use the draft, or the war would
have collapsed. No major war of modern times could have been fought
without the draft. This would be enough to show that warfare is not
popular if judged by actual voluntary support on the field of battle.
One often hears that warfare is a manifestation of human nature and
will be eliminated only through a long evolutionary process. But the
same thing has been said of slavery, duelling, witchcraft, and many
other evils now eliminated. Warfare is not dependent upon human
nature, but upon the human point of view, and this point of view can
be altered by education,--education which is honest, which can sift
the true from the false, which does not close its eyes to the
powerful role played by economic and social forces in the wars of the
nation.
Whether there was another way out in these conflicts, whether the
results aimed at were achieved, whether the ruin and destruction
which went hand in hand with these conflicts could ever be balanced
by material acquisitions,--these are questions the reader must decide
for himself. This book simply lays the facts before him.