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War and the American Presidency by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Surprises Prominent historian Arthur M. Schlesinger explores in a new book, War and the American Presidency, what’s consistent and different about the conflict in Iraq and prior American ventures. War and the American Presidency will provide supporting arguments for those opposed to the war in Iraq, and will be dismissed by those who believe that the Bush administration has been correct in its actions. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter 4, “Patriotism and Dissent in Wartime,” pp. 69-82: War, as we have seen, nourishes the imperial presidency. The suspension of criticism and dissent is acceptable when the life of the nation is under mortal threat. And we are surely under mortal threat these days from international terrorism. Many Americans now feel a personal vulnerability they have never felt before. The Second World War was a far more menacing conflict with far more dangerous foes, but Americans behind the lines were not in any sort of danger as they went about their daily business. They think they are today “Two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” reports the Pew Research Center, “fully three-quarters of Americans saw the world as a more dangerous place than a decade ago.” Terrorism, striking from the shadows, gives a new and frightening dimension to life—a dimension intensified by Washington’s color-coded exploitation of the politics of fear. In this unprecedented national mood of personal vulnerability the idea spreads that, when deadly danger threatens, the time has come for patriotic Americans to cease debate and rally round the flag, giving the president total support as the single voice of a united nation. “What have we elected him for,” observes James Bowman in Hilton Kramer’s right-wing New Criterion (October 2002), “if we are to act as if we expected our views to be treated as being of equal weight with his?” All this raises a couple of questions—questions that history might help us answer. The first question is whether a democratic people has a moral obligation to terminate dissent when the nation is at war. And the second question is whether, as a factual matter, our ancestors abstained from dissent when their governments took them into war. These two questions presuppose a third: What is the true nature of patriotism anyway? Of course, America was born in dissent. “We have been told that it is unpatriotic to criticize public action,” said Woodrow Wilson. “Well, if it is, then there is a deep disgrace resting upon the origins of this nation.This nation originated in the sharpest sort of criticism of public policy. . . . We have forgotten the very principle of our origin if we have forgotten how to object, how to resist, how to agitate, how to pull down and build up.” Nor does going to war change the originating principle (though in Wilson’s case, it lamentably did). Going to war does not abrogate the freedoms of conscience, thought, and speech. “The Constitution of the United States,” the Supreme Court declared in ex parte Milligan, “is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace.” War does not nullify the Bill of Rights. Even when the republic faces mortal dangers, the First Amendment is still in the Constitution. When I think of the American flag, I think of Flag Day in 1943. On that day June 14, in the midst of a great and terrible war, the Supreme Court clarified the meaning of the flag as a symbol of patriotism. To achieve this clarification, the Court had to overrule itself. In 1940, before the United States entered the Second World War, the Court had upheld compulsory flag salutes and compulsory pledges of allegiance for students in public schools. “National unity” the Court declared in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, “is the basis of national security” On that ground, a Pennsylvania school board had a perfect right to expel kids who refused to recite the pledge of allegiance and refused to salute the flag. The Gobitis children were guilty even though as Jehovah’s Witnesses they were brought up to believe that the flag salute and the pledge of allegiance violated the Second Commandment. The Gobitis decision led to widespread persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Mobs of self-appointed “patriots” harassed Witnesses, beat them up, and punished one unfortunate fellow by castration. Then, three years later, in the case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Supreme Court reversed Gobitis, by a 6—3 vote. This time the Court held that laws compelling students in public schools to salute the flag and to recite the pledge of allegiance were unconstitutional. The Court spoke through Justice Robert H. Jackson, next to Oliver Wendell Holmes the best writer on the Court in the twentieth century Jackson rested the decision on the First Amendment. Saluting the flag and pledging allegiance, Jackson said, were forms of speech. To require people to do these things violated their constitutional right to freedom of speech. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” Justice Jackson said, “it is that no official, high or petty can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” This decision, as noted, was handed down on Flag Day 1943. Young Americans were fighting and dying for the American flag on many fronts around the planet. But the high Court’s veto of compulsory flag salutes and compulsory pledges of allegiance was generally applauded. Most Americans in 1943 thought the decision was a pretty good statement of what we were fighting for. The flag thus incorporates the First Amendment. But today, in another national emergency, officials seek to narrow the meaning of the flag, to identify the flag with the president and his war. At the time of the Barnette case, the attorney general for the United States, Francis Biddle, was a strong civil libertarian. Sixty years later, a religious zealot occupies Biddle’s office. Let us not surrender the flag to Attorney General Ashcroft. As Woodrow Wilson said, there is much history written upon the folds of the American flag. “If you will teach the children what the flag stands for, I am willing that they should go on both knees to it. But they will get up with opinions of their own; they will not get up with the opinions which happen to be the opinions of those who are instructing them. They will get up critical.” People who protest the war against Iraq have as much right to rally round the flag as hyperpatriots cheering on the war. The role of dissent in the run-up to war is crucial in a democracy Of all the decisions a free people must face, questions of war and peace are the most solemn. Before sending young Americans to kill and die in foreign lands, a democracy has a sacred obligation to permit full and searching discussion of the issues at stake. There is no obligation to bow down before an imperial presidency. The views of the American people should indeed have equal weight with those of the fellow they send to the White House. Nor does the congressional authorization of the war change the situation. As Theodore Roosevelt—no greater hyperpatriot, he—said in 1918 during the First World War, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” During the Second World War, within a fortnight after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought us into the war, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio took the same line. Senator Taft, a perennial candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was an influential and much-revered Republican leader. “I believe,” Taft said, there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government. . . . Too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think it will give some comfort to the enemy. . . . If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and it will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur. Bob Taft was everlastingly right. Presidents are never infallible. They will not benefit from the cessation of dissent. They may even pick up a good idea or two from dissenters. There is little more insolent than public officials, like Mr. Bush’s attorney general, who seek to silence dissent. “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty my message is this,” Attorney General Ashcroft says. “Your tactics only aid terrorists—for they erode national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies.” I commend Senator Taft’s wise words to the attorney general, whose try at outlawing debate is in the deepest sense Un-American. As for the second question, the factual question, the historical record shows that our ancestors have never abstained from dissent in wartime. Even in the American Revolution, one third of the colonists, according to John Adams, opposed the drive toward independence. At the end of the 1790s, the infant republic found itself engaged in an undeclared naval war with France. There was considerable opposition to taking arms against an ally without whom the colonists would have been hard put to win the Revolution. John Adams was by then president. He was by no means a warmonger, as many members of the Federalist Party were. Still, he was irritated by mass protests against his policies. His wife, Abigail, called for the suppression of “wicked and base, violent and calumniating abuse . . . levelled against the government.” President Adams obediently favored repression, and on July 14, 1798, he signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Federalists would have been better advised to call them the Patriot Acts, but in 1798 conservatives were innocent of the fine art of public relations. The Sedition Act was expressly aimed at critics of the Adams administration, outlawing “false, scandalous and malicious” statements with intent to bring the president and the government into “contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them . . . the hatred of the good people of the United States.” Alexander Hamilton to his credit opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts, but George Washington approved them. Seventeen people were indicted under the Sedition Act, and ten were found guilty of intent to defame the president and the national government. Even a congressman, Matthew Lyon of Vermont, was convicted of writing disrespectfully about President Adams. The congressman was fined $1,000— a considerable sum in those days, probably close to $50,000 in the debased currency of the twenty-first century—and was sentenced to four months in jail. His Vermont constituents defiantly reelected him while he was still in prison, thereby serving two terms at once. In a state of panic, we often commit excesses in the name of patriotism. Then we hate ourselves in the morning. In 1840, Congress repaid Matthew Lyon’s fine to his heirs. No one, not even Attorney General Ashcroft, dares defend the Alien and Sedition Acts today A dozen years later came the War of 1812, called by the historian Samuel Eliot Morison “the most unpopular war that this country has ever waged, not even excepting the Vietnam conflict.” President Madison’s request for a declaration of war against Great Britain narrowly passed the Senate by 19 to 13 votes and the House of Representatives by 70 to 49.Those votes showed trouble ahead. After war was declared, Governor Caleb Strong of Massachusetts proclaimed a public fast to atone for a needless war “against the nation from which we are descended.” Most New England governors joined Governor Strong in refusing presidential requests for state militia to reinforce the tiny federal army. “Mr. Madison’s war” converted the Federalist Party, heretofore the proud champion of a strong central government, into a states’ rights party with a nullificationist wing. John Quincy Adams even thought that the anti-war Hartford convention was a secessionist conspiracy aimed at a separate peace with Britain. The Mexican War was almost as unpopular. There was fierce opposition to the declaration of war. “People of the United States!” cried the famous editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, “Your rulers are precipitating you into a fathomless abyss of crime and calamity! . . . Awake and arrest the work of butchery ere it shall be too late to preserve your souls from the guilt of wholesale slaughter!” The Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution declaring that the war, “so hateful in its objects, so wanton, unjust and unconstitutional in its origin and character, must be regarded as a war against freedom, against justice, against the Union.” Thoreau wrote his plea for “The Duty of Civil Disobedience,” and James Russell Lowell condemned the war in his long satiric poem Biglow Papers. “The United States will conquer Mexico,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” (Karl Marx, on the other hand, defended the war, asking sarcastically whether “it was such a misfortune that glorious California has been wrenched from the lazy Mexicans.”) In the midterm elections of 1846, the administration of James K. Polk lost thirty-five seats and control of the House of Representatives. The new House passed a resolution declaring that the Mexican War had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” Talk about giving aid and comfort to the enemy! A few days later a young congressman from the state of Illinois attacked the presidential case for the war as “from beginning to end the sheerest deception.” He described President Polk as “running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down.” That young congressman was named Abraham Lincoln. His letter to his law partner back in Illinois, quoted in chapter 2, pointed out the constitutional and practical flaws in what we today call the Bush Doctrine. Thirteen years later, Lincoln, now president, faced a war of his own. The Civil War saw acute divisions even in the northern states. The Copperheads—northern men with southern convictions—denounced Lincoln as a dictator and called for negotiated peace with the Confederacy In the midterm election of 1862, the opposition gained thirty-two seats in the House, and Lincoln worried about his prospects for a second term. Ten weeks before the 1864 presidential election, he wrote: “It seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be returned.” Fortunately for the future of the republic, he won and the abolition of slavery was assured, though the opposition polled a sturdy 45 percent of the vote. It is evident that rally-round-the-president when the nation is at war is not especially the American tradition. As history indicates, war presidents have never been exempt from criticism and dissent. The Spanish-American War and particularly the follow-up war against the independence of the newly acquired Philippines provoked biting criticism directed at William McKinley, the Republican president. In the midterm election three months after the smashing American victory over Spain, the Democrats scored impressive gains. As the McKinley administration brutally pursued the war against the Filipinos, criticism intensified. William James, the great philosopher, explained why in the election of 1900 he supported the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan despite his “free silver” advocacy “There are worse things than financial troubles in a Nation’s career,” James said. “To puke up its ancient soul, and the only things that gave it eminence among other nations, in five minutes and without a wink of squeamishness, is worse; and that is what the Republicans would commit us to in the Philippines. Our conduct there has been one protracted infamy towards the Islanders, and one protracted lie towards ourselves.” Let us indeed wave the flag, Mark Twain said, with “the white stripes painted black, and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.” The First World War was preceded by an intense national debate. Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 on the ground that he kept us out of the war. The next year he called on Congress to declare war against Germany; and in the midterm election of 1918, he lost both houses of Congress to the Republican opposition. The Wilson administration responded to criticism by enacting two laws—the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918. The Espionage Act empowered the postmaster general to ban “seditious” matters from the mails, which Wilson’s postmaster general construed as anything questioning the motives of the government. The Sedition Act, as Alan Brinkley writes in The War on Our Freedoms (2003), the Century Foundation’s valuable book on our current predicament, “made it a criminal offense to use ‘any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy,’ or any language that might bring those institutions ‘into contempt, scorn . . . or disrepute.’” Senator Hiram Johnson of California summed it all up: “You shall not criticize anything or anybody in the government any longer or you shall go to jail.” Wilson’s attorney general, the notorious A. Mitchell Palmer, protected the government against an imagined conspiracy concocted by radicals and immigrants. It was in the Palmer raids that the young J. Edgar Hoover got his start. Once again, we hated ourselves in the morning. The reaction to Palmer’s Red Scare led us to the establishment of the American Civil Liberties Union and the judicial reinforcement and expansion of the First Amendment. Though the Second World War was preceded by the angriest national debate in my lifetime—angrier than the debate over communism in the 1940s, angrier than the debate over McCarthyism in the 1950s, angrier than the debate over Vietnam in the 1960s—the civil liberties record during the Second World War was pretty good, with the glaring exception of the internment of Japanese-Americans (which, as noted, Attorney General Francis Biddle opposed). Presidents in wartime remained objects of criticism and dissent. As we saw in chapter 1, Franklin D. Roosevelt lost seats in both houses of Congress eleven months after Pearl Harbor in the midterm election of 1942. The Korean War reduced Harry Truman, despite popular policies like the Marshall Plan, to about 25 percent approval in his last year in office. The Vietnam War drove Lyndon Johnson from the White House in 1968, despite notable achievements in domestic affairs. The year after his victory in the first Gulf War, George Bush the elder was beaten by a little known governor of Arkansas. History thus shows there is nothing sacrosanct about war presidents. Yet there were those in the second Iraq War who promoted the idea that patriotic Americans had a moral obligation to rally round the president. This idea, as we have seen, is valid neither in principle nor in practice. Our history argues against it and demonstrates its flaws and fallacies. But in the post—9/1 1 atmosphere, the idea had a certain appeal. The novel and widespread conviction of personal vulnerability, the unprecedented and widespread fear of attack from the shadows, explained the impulse to seek protection in national unity behind the president. President Bush made a drastic change in the foreign policy of the United States, a change that deserved to be debated on its merits. No national debate preceded the Iraq War of a quality and seriousness that preceded most wars in American history. This represented a failure of the political process. Once again, as after the Alien and Sedition Acts, after the Palmer raids, after the internment of Japanese— and Italian— Americans, we hated ourselves in the morning. Looking back a decade from now, I doubt that most Americans will take much pride in the fate of the 660 Guantánamo Bay “detainees” denied specification of charges, access to counsel, contact with families, and the right to a judicial hearing. I suggested early on that our first two questions—whether a free people is obliged in wartime to shut up and obey their president; and whether our ancestors had in fact done that in the past—presuppose a third question: What is the nature of patriotism anyway? True patriotism, I would propose, consists of living up to a nation’s highest ideals. Carl Schurz, who emigrated from Germany to become a noble figure in nineteenth-century America, defined the true meaning of patriotism when he said: “Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.” Parts of War and the American Presidency reprise the thinking Schlesinger offered in his earlier work, The Imperial Presidency. Readers who think about politics, the separation of powers, and the direction of America, will find much to think about on the pages of War and the American Presidency. Steve Hopkins, October 25, 2004
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