History is written by the winners, but Bill Kauffman has a deep
affection for the losers of American history. "My political heroes
have a cumulative record resembling that of the Washington
Senators," Kauffman said last week at the Cato Institute's Hayek
Auditorium. Or perhaps, he adds, the Washington Generals, those
woebegone foes of the Harlem Globetrotters.
In the new book that he was hawking, Ain't My America: The
Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American
Anti-Imperialism, Kauffman examines the truncated careers and
besmirched reputations of those who opposed America's wars of
expansion and conquest.
Manifest Destiny never manifested itself to such opponents of
expansion as Fisher Ames, a Massachusetts Federalist who denounced
Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase as the acquisition of "a
great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves
and wandering Indians."
That the Constitution gave the president no power to make such
an acquisition was an embarrassment for Jefferson, who had accused
Federalists like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton of coveting
unconstitutional power.
Jefferson got over the embarrassment -- telling his Cabinet "the
less that is said about any constitutional difficulty, the better"
-- but not so his Virginia kinsman John Randolph, who called the
Louisiana Purchase "the greatest curse that ever befell us."
If this expansion by peaceful acquisition offended Randolph, the
War of 1812 horrified him. With some justice, the Virginia
congressman accused the hawks of coveting Canada and declared: "The
Government of the United States was not calculated to wage
offensive foreign wars...and whosoever should embark it in a war of
offence, would put it to a test which it was by no means calculated
to endure."
Randolph's words nearly proved prophetic. The War of 1812 gave
us our National Anthem, but it was also intensely unpopular among
New Englanders, who convened the Hartford Convention in December
1814 and might have sought a separate peace, had not the Treaty of
Ghent ended the war first.
With rare exceptions, American opponents of war and empire seem
doomed to obscurity if not infamy. We sing of "bombs bursting in
air" over Fort McHenry and the belated New Orleans victory of
Andrew Jackson, who went onto the White House and whose face adorns
the $20 bill. There are no songs or memorials to John Randolph, nor
is he commemorated on our currency.
KAUFFMAN LABORS to rescue and reinvigorate the memory of Randolph
and others who sought to guard against the "the insidious wiles of
foreign influence" and "to steer clear of permanent alliances with
any portion of the foreign world." George Washington --
isolationist!
That this policy was counseled by the Father of Our Country in
his 1796 Farewell Address should suffice to make nonintervention a
respectable position, and yet as Kauffman notes, advocates of war
don't hesitate to denounce opponents of war as un-American
traitors.
Such was the case with the America First Committee, which
opposed U.S. entry into World War II. The committee had "a Main
Street Republican base," Kauffman said last week in his
presentation at the Cato Institute. It was " as American as
Geronimo and the Rotary Club" and included such notable figures as
future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and future President
John F. Kennedy.
Yet "the mendacious claims" of the committee's critics have
"curdled into popular myth," Kauffman says, so that its opposition
to war is characterized as pro-Nazi. This smear against the America
Firsters, he says, "set the stage for later libels against anti-war
movements and personages."
"The Good War," as it has been called, led to "an unprecedented
uprooting of our population, the hypertrophying of the American
state, the delivery of half of Europe to Stalin and Soviet
tyranny," Kauffman notes. "Why is this thought to be the best
possible outcome of that bloody lustrum? And why are we essentially
forbidden to ask if there might have been other paths that might
have produced better outcomes?"
Nineteenth century advocates of American empire acquired Hawaii,
which became a state two years before the Honolulu birth of the
current Democratic presidential frontrunner, whom Kauffman derides
as "sort of this placeless Yuppie."
KAUFFMAN IS A devoted fan of "Little America," which resides in
places like his beloved hometown of Batavia, New York -- the kind
of people Sen. Barack Obama famously described as bitterly clinging
to God and guns.
"We don't start the wars," Kauffman says of small-town
Americans. "That's the job of the big city-winners who don't need
religion or guns -- they have Blackberries. But we and our children
fight and die in them, disproportionately."
Kauffman sees rootlessness -- he frequently uses the Latinate
synonym "deracination" -- as both a cause and corollary of American
empire. "We should fear and despise the fury of the deracinated --
the McCains, the Hillarys, the neocon publicists -- people who have
hatreds, but what do they love, other than the wielding of
power?...The launchers of American wars have tended to be displaced
persons, men without homes."
The internationalist viewpoint is alien to Kauffman. "I can't
comprehend, let alone love, the world," he says. "I can only love
or understand my little piece of it -- the street where I live, the
dirt under my feet."
Kauffman acknowledges that most conservatives seem unwilling to
consider a return to the noninterventionist stance of the Old
Right, citing this year's Republican presidential debates.
"Ron Paul at these Republican debates would say, 'Why do we have
troops in 130 countries?' These guys looked at him as if he'd
announced he was from Neptune. They'd snicker and they'd snort," he
says. "I wish there was a more robust debate. Even the calling of
names would be preferable to the deafening silence we have
today."
topics:
Barack Obama, Religion, Constitution, Supreme Court, NATO, Conservatism
