Not around here much lately, I know. The beginning of the school year, a lingering summer project, and really depressing public occurrences have all played their roles. Today, however, let me share something I found in an old newspaper — I look at those sometimes — that fits into a theme I have worked into Common-Place before:  the central and often-overlooked place of Indian affairs in the politics and policy of the Founding era.

The item comes from the New Year’s Day, 1794, issue of Greenleaf’s New York Journal, that city’s most important Democratic-Republican paper. It gives an account of the fighting strength of all the Native American peoples that the U.S. government knew anything about at the time. The tribal names do not quite match up with the ones in use today, and it would difficult to assess the accuracy of the numbers, but the proportions are fairly eye-popping. The unnamed officials thought they were facing more than 58,000 Indian warriors at a time when (according to a message from War Secretary Henry Knox), there were less than 4,000 troops in the whole U.S. army!  I guess it is no wonder a frontier military build-up (and Indian war) was the biggest project of Washington’s administration, besides the public finance system that paid for it.

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Now playing: The Whigs – Give ‘Em All A Big Fat Lip

The “teabagging” movement (the one that involves throwing teabags at things in the name of liberty, or something) reminds me of something I have often thought before when encountering modern right-wing “libertarianism” or “constitutionalism.” Though I never feel sure whether they are misguidedly sincere or mischievous or delusive in their observations and proposals, what such libertarians constantly seem to gravitate to are early American solutions (usually misunderstood or decontextualized) to modern problems that were actually much worse before the government institutions that libertarians dislike were created. Here is today’s example, which I learned of from Josh Marshall at TPM, applying some of his colonial history know-how. As you will see below, former presidential candidate and Republican congressman Ron Paul has proposed that a good small-government solution to Somali piracy would be to reestablish privateering, the practice of authorizing private shipowners to arm their vessels and play pirate against enemy ships:

Josh has many good points about the obvious problems with this proposal, and he also makes the interesting historical observation that privateering was “a classic stage of under-developed state power in which we may not have the capacity to have a fully built out Navy but we can subcontract the harassment and capture of enemy shipping and commerce by setting up privateers to do the job for them.” I see what Josh means, but it should also be noted that in the 18th century even powers with plenty of naval capacity (like the British Empire) engaged in privateering. It was just part of the tool kit of international politics, as we might say today, along with press gangs, mercenaries, dynastic marriages, and other unsavory practices.

Privateering was a form of economic warfare, a way of turning part of your civilian economy into a weapon that could be used against your enemy’s civilian economy and the underpinnings of his military machine. The practice, and the attitudes behind it, were part of what made the high seas a far more dangerous and chaotic place 200 years ago than they are now. The waters off Somalia may be somewhat hazardous to ply at the moment, or at least expensive for shipping companies, but generally the odds of modern ships being intentionally sunk, or being forced to land and be sold or scrapped in an unfriendly port, or having their crews taken captive (and possibly sold into slavery), or having their men pressed into service on a foreign ship at gunpoint are far, far less than they were. The creation of powerful modern navies and the worldwide revulsion against German U-Boat attacks on civilian craft during the 20th-century world wars seem to have made commercial shipping safer than it has ever been. The very fact that maritime dangers are a kind of amusing novelty for the U.S. and European media speaks volumes.

Privateering was also an example of the kind of legally sanctioned injustice and predation that was once standard operating procedure for almost all governments, especially in times of war. When the British and French fought their imperial wars in the 18th century, they not only issued letters of marque and reprisal against each other’s civilian ships, but each also encouraged their Native American allies to join the land-based conflict in the American colonies. Usually this amounted to authorizing the kinds of actions we call “asymmetric warfare” or “terrorism” when they are practiced against the U.S. military in Iraq or Afghanistan. The frontier equivalent of roadside bombs and RPGs was raids against isolated settlements and ambushes of hunting parties and lightly defended supply trains. Scalp bounties were commonly paid for each enemy the Indians killed, and distinctions between soldiers and civilians could not really be made based on that one little piece. Some settlers may have had it coming in some ways, but innocents were extensively harmed in these conflicts, on both sides, often by design or tacit design emanating from the high ranks of government. To say the least, governments of the privateering era placed very little stress on the sanctity of individual autonomy and private property, a la Ron Paul, despite their greater willingness to deploy private initiative in the service of their goals.

The fact that creating some modern institutions, paid for by a few taxes, actually made life, liberty, and property considerably safer for citizens of the developed countries seems to be completely lost on most of our modern “libertarians” and conservative thinkers.

[Let the record show that these positive thoughts on the modern state were thunk, and written, immediately after sending off a couple of rather large checks to relevant taxing authorities. So you know I am not thinking with my wallet.]

I started to write a post labelling President Obama’s promise to cut the deficit in half as the first careless utterance of his term, and not a very good idea even if it could be done. Then I listened to the speech tonight and twigged to what he has in mind. Or at least I think I have.

I am sure there will be some self-defeating, triangulatory budget cuts coming down the pike, but it seems clear from the speech that what Obama plans is a form of what they used to call the Peace Dividend, the conversion of now-superfluous defense spending to other more useful purposes. So, a good chunk of Obama’s savings will come from winding down our commitment in Iraq and “not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use.” This target was linked with several other examples of pork-barrel spending for GOP-leaning constituencies, such as ending “direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them.” Amen! Munitions (my preferred more accurate retro term over “defense”) and agriculture have long been two areas in which vast sums of public money have spent to boost the  profits of people who immediately turn around and give some of it back to politicians who promise to get the government off their backs. The Projectionist Right, you might call them, wards of the state who can’t stop complaining about it.

The really clever and yet doubly praiseworthy bit had to do with the changes in government accounting practices Obama plans to implement:

Finally, because we’re also suffering from a deficit of trust, I am committed to restoring a sense of honesty and accountability to our budget. That is why this budget looks ahead ten years and accounts for spending that was left out under the old rules – and for the first time, that includes the full cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price.

An incredible and increasing proportion of the government’s spending on “national security” has been hidden since the beginning of the Cold War, especially in the Reagan and Bush years. Obviously minmizing these figures made it easier to make the typical GOP arguments for transferring money from domestic social programs to their favored constituencies, under the pretense that the federal budget was bloated with wasteful “welfare” programs while Baby Pentagon went begging for a new set of aircraft carriers. Obama’s more honest accounting will shock people with just how much of our national wealth we have been flushing down the defense establishment all these years. By revising the Bush era deficits vastly upward, it will also make this cutting the deficit in half promise considerably more achievable.

Call it a potential case of doing well politically by doing something really good for the cause of honest government. That is high praise in my book.

Imagine a Democratic presidential candidate who was a veteran and had an incident like the following in his past. That’s right, you can’t, because he would never have been nominated, at least not in this century. (Amy Greenberg reminds us in the current issue of Common-Place that pro-slavery Democrat Franklin Pierce was haunted by charges of military cowardice, and poor horsemanship, but still managed to survive politically, perhaps because southern honor-baiters liked PIerce’s doughface attitude toward the South.) Poor John Kerry just threw his medals back and testified about war experiences, but McCain “talked” to the enemy, and pretty avidly, it seems.

Make-Believe Maverick : Rolling Stone
There is no question that McCain suffered hideously in North Vietnam. His ejection over a lake in downtown Hanoi broke his knee and both his arms. During his capture, he was bayoneted in the ankle and the groin, and had his shoulder smashed by a rifle butt. His tormentors dragged McCain’s broken body to a cell and seemed content to let him expire from his injuries. For the next two years, there were few days that he was not in agony.

But the subsequent tale of McCain’s mistreatment — and the transformation it is alleged to have produced — are both deeply flawed. The Code of Conduct that governed POWs was incredibly rigid; few soldiers lived up to its dictate that they “give no information . . . which might be harmful to my comrades.” Under the code, POWs are bound to give only their name, rank, date of birth and service number — and to make no “statements disloyal to my country.”

Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital,” he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. “I had to tell them,” he insisted to Dramesi, “or I would have died in bed.”

Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain’s service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot’s behavior as heroic — “he wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. “This business of my country before my life?” Dramesi says. “Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he’d be dead.”

Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the “crown prince,” they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. “It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral’s son,” he writes, “and I knew that my father’s identity was directly related to my survival.” But during the course of his medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report — picked up by The New York Times — in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was “moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated.” He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.

You can see why McCain is sensitive on topic of publicly suggesting that a war is not going well: one of his first-ever public quotes came from a North Vietnamese press release!

Actually what the double-standard regarding military valor shows is that “symbolic politics” in these cases is often not symbolic at all. The real issue is support of a military-based U.S. foreign policy, not anybody’s actual military service. Any service record that is used to cut against that policy is going to be ignored or trashed, as John Kerry discovered. Still, the extent of the whitewash that McCain’s military service has been given is pretty amazing.

Today there was an incendiary post by M.J. Rosenberg at TPM Cafe called “Bragging War Heroes.” The post got quite tough with the McCain campaign’s heavy reliance on their candidate’s POW experience, in the acceptance speech and before. Rosenberg made some claims about past war heroes and their comparatively modest political use of their military backgrounds that are devastating, if true (to paraphrase my old graduate adviser). I would be interested to know what other historians think:

You would never know it from the media coverage, but John McCain is not one of America’s greatest war heroes. He is a former POW who survived, heroically. He deserves to be honored for that heroism.

But one thing distinguishes McCain from other war heroes, the kind whose heroism changes history rather than their life stories.

America’s two greatest war heroes were Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower. Grant saved the union. And Ike saved civilization.

And neither one ever bragged about their experience. (Can you imagine Ike smacking down Adlai Stevenson by saying that while Adlai ran a nice medium-sized state, he was the Supreme Allied Commander who ran D-Day, defeated Hitler, and liberated Europe?).

Impossible. Like Grant, Eisenhower did not brag.

Actually, modesty about military accomplishments is typical of war heroes and not just here. In Israel, it is unheard of for great military leaders to brag about their service.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak was the most decorated soldier in Israel’s history (he was a commando who, among other amazing feats, dressed as a woman — with a handful of soldiers — invaded a terrorist stronghold in Beirut, killed the terrorists, and then fled to a waiting dinghy and headed home). Yitzhak Rabin led the IDF in its Six Day War victory. Ariel Sharon saved Israel from destruction in 1973 when he snuck up behind the Egyptian army and encircled them in the Sinai.

None of these guys talked about it. McCain does. Continuously. His lack of modesty — about something war heroes tend to be modest about — does not become him.

Now it might well be true that Grant and Eisenhower were this reticent about using their military careers, but if so their modesty stands apart from a long pre-existing tradition. Perhaps President-Generals Washington, Jackson, Harrison, and Taylor did not personally make speeches about their war experiences, as far as I am aware, but the people who campaigned for them had no such compunctions, to say nothing of their lower-ranking successors Frank Pierce and Teddy Roosevelt. In the middle of the 19th century, bragging about war heroism was practically the default strategy of American presidential politics. There were campaign biographies galore, but probably more important were my true love (historical evidence division), the campaign songs. It was “The Hunters of Kentucky,” promoting Andrew Jackson’s role in the Battle of New Orleans, that really launched the trend:

I s’pose you’ve read it in the prints, how Packenham attempted
To make old Hickory Jackson wince, but soon his schemes repented;
For we with rifles ready cocked, thought such occasion lucky,
And soon around the general flocked the hunters of Kentucky.

You’ve heard, I s’pose, how New Orleans is famed for wealth and beauty
There’s girls of every hue, it seems, from snowy white to sooty.
So Packenham he made his brags, if he in fight was lucky,
He’d have their girls and cotton bags in spite of old Kentucky.

But Jackson he was wide awake, and wasn’t scared at trifles,
For well he knew what aim we take with our Kentucky rifles;
So he led us down to Cyprus swamp, the ground was low and mucky,
There stood John Bull in martial pomp, and here was old Kentucky.

A bank was raised to hide our breast, not that we thought of dying,
But then we always like to rest unless the game is flying;
Behind it stood our little force, none wished it to be greater,
For every man was half a horse and half an alligator.

Jackson won two terms against non-military opponents partly on the strength of such epic bragging. But his opponents were not to be outdone, unseating Jackson’s hand-picked successor in 1840 with an elderly veteran named William Henry Harrison. The Whigs’ campaign songs boasted even more broadly and folksily about Old Tippecanoe’s triumphs during the War of 1812 than Jackson’s had. Everybody knows “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” but there were many more, like “The Buckeye Song“:

In the end, I have to demur from M.J. Rosenberg’s broader interpretation of past American political practice. What is more unique and distinctively modern about John McCain’s politicization of his wartime service is the McCain story’s emphasis on suffering and endurance in the midst of military failure. There is a personal triumph there, to be sure, and a spiritual and psychological success. But surely there is a tremendous difference between the war record of a long-term POW in a losing cause and success as a field commander in a winning one. One might be said to make a bit more sense as a qualification for Commander-in-Chief than the other. Truly it took our modern therapeutic culture, in which people routinely publicize their past personal traumas as badges of honor and the subjects of best-selling books, to turn McCain’s sort of war heroism into a recommendation for high national office. [Probably the closest previous example at the presidential level would be the carefully retailed legend of JFK and PT-109. Even there, the war was won even if the boat was sunk.]

Not that this comes as news, but the unbelievable callousness that Dick Cheney exudes in this ABC interview is really something to behold. The slug under the video on the ABC page says it all: “Cheney on U.S. Troops: They Volunteered.” I guess this is the true soul of the “will theory of contracts” that is the essence of the GOP plutocrat philosophy: no matter how much we lied about what you were getting into, no matter how little choice you actually had about signing on, or no matter how much and how often we change the terms of your service, if you signed on a dotted line somewhere, we own you body and soul until you die or we decide to dump you.

On a more historical note, it was never more clear what the “volunteer military” really means to Cheney and like-minded neo-imperialists: mercenaries, about whose welfare they care no more than the British would have about the Hessian troops they bought back in the day. Probably less, since the Hessians were actually hired from another state/monarch who might have to answered to a some point, a problem that Cheney obviously does not regard himself as having with the American people. Others may have better analogies.

Here’s a musical version of this post.

One of the features I have planned for this blog is a series of items highlighting issues from the Early Republic that have come back or never gone away.

One of those issues is the drive to concentrate as much control as possible over the nation’s armed forces in the federal government and its military leadership. A perennial sticking point in this drive has been what used to be called the state militias, known in modern times (speaking broadly) as the Reserves and the National Guard. As both military officers and civilian officials, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were famously dissatisfied with their dependence on poorly trained and equipped militia troops, questioning the citizen-soldiers’ ability to stand and fight against regular troops, and, just as importantly, doubting their reliability when called upon to apply force to their fellow citizens in times of domestic unrest.

During the French war scare of the late 1790s, the Federalist Congress authorized President John Adams to call out 80,000 militiamen and create a 10,000-man Provisional Army in case of a declaration of war or foreign invasion. Nothing was ever done with this authority except the appointment of a few officers. Instead, Adams, Hamilton, and other Federalists struggled to create (with different agendas) a sizable Additional Army that, along with volunteer units who paid for themselves, would be usable “at the President’s discretion” whether there was a war or invasion or not. [The clearest explanation I have ever found of these matters is: William J. Murphy Jr., "John Adams: The Politics of the Additional Army, 1798-1800," New England Quarterly 52 (1979): 234-249.]

Admittedly I found the story several weeks ago, but I find it interesting, more than two centuries later, when Reserve and National Guard units have been deployed overseas for years at a time, and on regular basis, that the Pentagon feels that it still does not have enough control of state troops and also wants a greater role in policing what I guess we now have to call the “homeland.”

Pentagon control over Reserves, Guard proposed
By Philip Dine
POST-DISPATCH WASHINGTON BUREAU
Friday, Feb. 01 2008

WASHINGTON — More than six years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the nation’s plans for meeting the threats to the homeland are so thin they could be written “on the back of an envelope,” the chairman of a national military commission said Thursday.While the country has detailed contingency options for military action overseas, the capacity for responding to a terrorist attack or natural disaster within the United States is dangerously low, retired Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, chairman of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, said Thursday.

“You couldn’t move a Girl Scout unit” with the amount of planning federal officials are doing for domestic contingencies, he said, likening it to a disorganized “sandlot game.”

“You cannot do that in dealing with weapons of mass destruction,” Punaro said.

Among the shortfalls are a lack of equipment for the National Guard, with Missouri and Illinois particularly hard hit in some categories, according to the commission’s report released Thursday.

The panel called for a drastic overhaul of the military structure that would put the National Guard and Reserves under the direct control of the Army and Air Force and essentially integrate the nation’s “citizen-soldiers” into the military structure. The plan would include integrated training, pay, promotions, medical care and retirement — and improved resources and equipment.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon would be put in charge of homeland security, which would be carried out by the Guard and Reserves.

Those changes are necessary both to meet homeland security shortfalls and to allow the over-extended military to focus on overseas missions, commissioners said. Many can be implemented by the Pentagon while some require legislation by Congress.

The Guard’s current status made sense during the Cold War when it was “designed as a reserve force to be dusted off once in a lifetime,” but no longer when reservists are being used as a wing of the military, Punaro said. The current problems are heightened by the personnel limitations of an all-volunteer military, he said.

The commission, which was authorized by Congress, found that the only other alternative for dealing with a stretched-thin military — increasing the size of the active-duty component — is prohibitively expensive.

Adding the 600,000 active-duty soldiers that would be required for current needs would cost more than a trillion dollars, Punaro said. Beyond that, the military couldn’t recruit enough people to meet that target, he said.

Not only are there enough reserve forces to take over homeland security, they are highly skilled and are already in the states and cities, he said.