Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
We all know the stereotypical saga of American history.Lexington. Concord. Bunker Hill. Despair at Valley Forge, relieved bytriumph at Trenton. Final victory at Yorktown. 1812: plucky Americanfrontiersmen and naval heroes battle Britain to an uphill victory.Civil War: discouraging early defeats. Desperate victory atGettysburg. The Confederacy cut in two at Vicksburg. Sherman's marchto the sea. Appomattox.
Then comes World War I. Europe's totalitarian states figureAmericans are too soft and isolationist to get involved, but theymiscalculate. Germany and Japan make the same mistake in World WarII, thinking the Western democracies are too soft and decadent tomake effective opponents. Guess they didn't read American history.
Somewhere along the line, our enemies did read Americanhistory, and learned what most Americans don't (or don't want to) realize: most of ourwars could very easily have been lost, and were fought not just againstexternal enemies, but at least as much against internal dissension.
The Revolutionary War was as much a civil war as a revolution,with the populace about evenly split among revolutionists,pro-British Loyalists, and neutrals. The famous low point of the warat Valley Forge in 1777 was about as low as military morale can get.Anyone who visits Valley Forge today, an easy half hour drive from Philadelphia, might well wonder why theBritish didn't simply march out from nearby Philadelphia and put anend to the whole business. Partly, armies in those days just didn'tfight in the winter, for good reasons. Take away the modern highways,and the terrain between Philadelphia and Valley Forge isn't an easyhike. It would have been a slow slog in snow and mud, difficult ifnot impossible for wagons and artillery to traverse. The columnswould have been vulnerable to snipers, Washington would certainly nothave been taken by surprise, and he might well have been able toattack and defeat a British force. On the other hand, why not juststay in winter quarters in Philadelphia, warm and well fed, and letthe cold and poor American logistics do their work?
General William Howe, the British commander in Philadelphia, hadother reasons to stay put. With him in Philadelphia was his mistressElizabeth Loring. In typical upper class British fashion, herLoyalist husband took it like a gentleman, and that lucrativeappointment he got in return didn't hurt in the least. Howe wasn't abad general, or a bad person, by any means, but has been ratherroughly handled by historians for his weak strategic sense. Ms. Loring has never been officially recognized for her role in Americanmilitary history. Get all cold, muddy and wet chasing rebels in the snow, or stay warm and snuggly in Philadelphia? Doesn't take a Clausewitz or a Sun Tsu to figure this one out.
Oh by the way, moonbat types who oppose participation inmulti-national operations because Americans have historically “neverbeen commanded by furriners” ought to consider the case ofFrederick William Rudolph Gerald Augustus von Steuben, Baron vonSteuben, a Prussian officer (we think, at least that's what he claimed) with a somewhat checkered career whowhipped the troops at Valley Forge into a real army. For every lifehe saved by teaching effective tactics, he probably saved at least another byinsisting on good field sanitation, stuff like putting the latrines downstream from the drinking water points. This was a century before germs were discovered, but experienced soldiers knew what worked.
One of the strangest sidelights of the war was the Spanish invasion of Michigan. No, I am not making this up. In 1781, the Louisiana Territory belonged to Spain (when we bought it in 1803, it had only been French a short time) and there was a small Spanish garrison in St. Louis. When the British vacated the Northwest Territory, the Spanish sent a detachment up to occupy a British fort in southwestern Michigan. They probably hoped to stake a claim to part of the Northwest Territory. We and the British simply said "Is this for real? Get out of here."
Oh, we were also supposed to get Bermuda. There's a very good reason why we didn't. We forgot to ask. You snooze, you lose. There are people killing each other today over territorial claims a lot more far fetched and a lot more ancient than this.
One of my more peculiar claims to fame is that I was present whenthe War of 1812 ended. It was on a field trip stop at Natural Bridge,Virginia in 1970, and along the trail beneath the bridge is a cavethat was mined for saltpeter during the War of 1812. A Britishstudent asked me what the War of 1812 was. My first impulse was tosay "But Britain was involved in it," but then I hadan epiphany. I realized that the British were dealing with Napoleonat the time, and from their perspective, the War of 1812 was anutterly insignificant series of skirmishes fought on the other sideof the world. It was a powerful lesson in looking for alternativeperspectives and hidden angles on things.
So I explained the business about the British interfering withAmerican ships and impressing seamen. The British student came toattention and said, in his best British manner, "Well, on behalfof Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the British Admiralty, I mosthumbly apologize." And here you thought it ended at the Treatyof Ghent.
This whole thing was a mistake on steroids. With the Napoleonic Wars going on, both Britain and France saw American ships trading with the other side as fair game. Our first response was to declare an trade embargo, a move bitterly hated by New England shipping interests. In fact, during the war, members of the Federalist Party convened in Hartford, Connecticut and discussed secession. Meanwhile, the British had actually decided to curtail their interference with American trade, but it was too little and too late to avert war. Our invasion of Canada failed and the British burned Washington (but where are they now that we really need them?) And the last battle was fought after the peace treaty was signed. If you think we could have come out of this with our independence intact unless Britain hadn't been bogged down everywhere around the globe, raise your hand.
Out of this mess came a surprising amount of good. Britain recognized the utility of having an English speaking ally in America, one that had to pay its own bills, since the taxation to pay for American defense hadn't worked out all that smoothly. We pretty much promised to keep hands off Canada, and the Great Lakes were demilitarized. With a few hiccups along the way, the demilitarized boundary stretched all the way across the continent. The British delegate to the peace conference expressed the hope that the treaty would be the last peace treaty between the U.S. and Great Britain. It was.
The popular spin on this conflict portrays it as a naked land grabby the powerful United States at the expense of a helpless Mexico.The issue was over the U.S. annexation of Texas, which had secededfrom Mexico almost a decade earlier because the enlightened PresidentSanta Anna proposed to abolish slavery. (Actually slavery had beenabolished in Mexico in 1824, though the ban was not enforced, andSanta Ana's misrule had provoked revolts in San Luis Potosí,Querétaro, Durango, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Jalisco andZacatecas as well as Texas, Yucatan formed an independent republic,and the states of Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipasattempted to join together and form their own independent country. Santa Anaallowed his troops free rein to rape, pillage and massacre in thecity of Zacatecas, and split the state of Zacatecas in two inretaliation for its revolt. But, hey, those are mere details.)
The slavery issue was at best marginal. Santa Anna had lost control of American immigration and hoped to use the abolition of slavery in Texas as a deterrent.
This was actually a much fairer fight than the spin-masters wouldhave us believe. The ugliest part of it was that war hawks in bothcountries won out over moderates who were trying to avoid a conflict.True, the U.S., with about 20 million people, was about three timeslarger than Mexico, but true to our still warm founding idealism, ourarmed forces were little more than a band and a color guard. When thewar started, Mexico's army was at least three times larger than theU.S. Army. And thanks to Santa Anna's enlightened record on humanrights, they had a lot more combat experience in suppressing revolts.True, the larger manpower pool in the U.S. eventually made up thedisparity, but early on the U.S. had only a thin screen of forcesalong the border, with poorly organized logistics and abysmal tropical hygiene. If the Mexicanshad organized quickly and struck decisively, they could well havewon. Mariano Parades y Arrillaga, who assumed the presidency ofMexico shortly before the war began, expected to regain Texas andspoke of capturing New Orleans and Mobile as well. Some of that talkmay have been bluster, along the lines of Saddam Hussein's "mother of all battles," but it doesn't sound like the speech ofsomeone forced into a desperate defense. However, none of this prevented the war from being widely seen as unjust, even by leading officers in the Army.
Some people wonder how much better off Mexico might be if it hadn't lost a third of its area in 1848. Perhaps. Or would California look like Baja California, Arizona like Sonora, New Mexico like Chihuahua and Texas like Coahuila?
For openers, this was a civil war, meaning by definition alot of people wanted the U.S. to lose.
Abe Lincoln, the folksy rail splitterand country lawyer, could be hard as nails when the situation calledfor it, and it most certainly did at the start of the war. Not onlywas secessionist Virginia right across the Potomac, but Maryland wasalso a slave state and pro-Confederate sympathy was strong there aswell. Troops marching through Baltimore were attacked by mobs withfatalities on both sides. If Maryland seceded then Washington wassurrounded. Lincoln moved quickly to ensure that the Union retainedcontrol of Maryland, at one point threatening to burn Baltimore tothe ground if Maryland attempted to secede. Things got almost as nasty in Indiana later in the war, where a Confederate conspiracy called the Northwest Conspiracy threatened to put pro-Confederate governments in power in Indiana and Illinois, and the government responded by creating a near dictatorship in Indiana.
The war teetered on the brink offailure for most of its duration. Once the early enthusiasm wascrushed at Bull Run, public dissatisfaction began to increase. Thelong string of ineffective and indecisive commanders and the repeatedfailures to gain decisive victory began to drain popular support. By1864, Lincoln faced a very real threat that the pro-peace Democraticparty, with General George B. McClellan as its candidate, would winand enter into a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy. Onlyafter Sherman captured Atlanta and showed that the momentum wasdecisively on the Union side could Lincoln breathe a little easier.
The United States sat out the first three years of the war. Eventhe sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania in 1915, with theloss of 128 American lives (two thirds of the Americans on board)wasn't enough to overcome isolationist sentiment (though it cameclose). Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 by boasting he hadkept the U.S. out of the war. Actual American involvement lasted ayear and a half, from April, 1917 to November, 1918, and large scaleAmerican combat operations really did not get started until thesummer of 1918. American troops shifted the battlefield balance ofpower still further against an already severely weakened Germany, butdespite American patriotic sentiment expressed in songs like “OverThere,” and European expressions of gratitude, many Europeanmilitary leaders regarded American forces as poorly organized andtrained, and less effective than European armies. And the UnitedStates refused to join the League of Nations.
Anyone who thinks the American public would have stuck out theentire length of the war, raise your hand. Especially if you thinkwe'd have taken the kinds of casualties the British and French did.
The smartest thing any country did during the war was Mexico'sdismissal of a German offer of a military alliance. According to theproposal, if the United States entered the war, Mexico would attackthe southwestern U.S. and regain the territory lost in the MexicanWar (then only 70 years in the past). Mexico studied the proposal and decided against it. Germany would be unable to provide enoughassistance, and even if Mexico did reconquer the Southwest, it would be unable to rule the large American population. The initial U.S. response to the offer was for many to dismiss the offer as a hoax intended to draw the U.S. into war against Germany (because there is a perennial faction that always believes America has no real enemies). Even if Mexicohad prevailed militarily and Germany had won or at least forced adraw, American sentiment would have been Pearl Harbor many timesover. Germany is safely on the other side of the Atlantic, but Mexico would still have to share a border with us. Mexico remained neutral.
Between the wars, America dabbled in a social experiment by prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages. After the experiment failed spectacularly and made folk heroes of the likes of Al Capone, Prohibition was repealed.
Now this wasn't some ill-considered rider tacked onto a budget bill, or something passed in panic in response to a sudden crisis. No, this was a Constitutional amendment. Not only did it require a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, but then it had to be ratified by three-fourths of the states. In 1917, when the Eighteenth Amendment was passed, that was thirty six states, and it took over a year. It would only have taken thirteen states to block passage (only one state, Rhode Island, rejected the amendment). As events would soon prove, a large fraction of the American public really didn't want prohibition, so why wasn't there any effective opposition?
One big reason was that Prohibitionists had staked out the moral high ground and were in a position to label their opponents as soft on drunkenness and all its concomitant social ills. And they had put together a utopian fantasy linking alcohol with vice, crime, slums, and inefficiency in the workplace (that last point assured buy-in from industrialists). A more cynical reason is that Americans didn't really want Prohibition for everybody, merely the riff-raff. As long as the "responsible" elements of society could get alcohol, who cared if the "lower" classes couldn't? (Modern example: compare the penalties for powder and crack cocaine.) Anyway, when the Great Depression blew away the fantasy that Prohibition would usher in a utopia, public support for Prohibition evaporated, and the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933.
So, if I'm looking for weak spots to exploit in a campaign against America, note to self: Americans lacked the moral courage to reject a bad law that they really opposed, then, having allowed a bad law to pass, they lacked the integrity to obey it. That could prove useful to know. Many of America's military opponents have made the mistake of thinking of American resolve as hollow, but very often, it is hollow.
Although informed politicians in Washington realized from theoutset that Nazi Germany was a global threat, and many ordinaryAmericans shared the opinion strongly enough to join the British and Canadianarmed forces even before the U.S. entered the war, it really took Pearl Harbor to galvanize Americanpublic opinion. There's a persistent conspiracy theory that FranklinRoosevelt knew an attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent but allowed itto happen. If so, all I can say is it was one of the best decisionsin American history. Everything I've seen about American response toworld problems convinces me that if it hadn't been for Pearl Harbor,Americans would have let the situation deteriorate until the war was unwinnable, at least on any terms we would regard as acceptable.
Unfair to the Americans killed at Pearl Harbor? Yes, but let's lay the responsibility where it really belongs, on the military in Hawaii. It was their job to defend Hawaii and detect any incoming attack. Given the deteriorating situation in the Pacific, their failure to engage in adequate surveillance was just plain criminal. In 1999 the historical revisionists in Congress passed a resolution exonerating Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the Navy and Army commanders. Said one Senator, "They were denied vital intelligence that was available in Washington." Strom Thurmond, with his razor sharp grasp of reality, called Kimmel and Short "the two final victims of Pearl Harbor." That might be believable if the Navy had shaken off its H.M.S. Pinafore mentality and not insisted that it, and it alone, was responsible for coastal defense. But the Navy had fought for years against the Army using aircraft at sea in any kind of operation impinging on the Navy's prerogatives. (Was there ever a more racist, aristocratic, class and status-conscious, utterly useless military organization than the pre World War II U.S. Navy?) In Kimmel's memoir, he states "neither General Short nor I had any clear perception of the fact that the Roosevelt Administration was pursuing a course of action that made war with Japan inevitable." What? He didn't know that we had cut off shipments of strategic materials to Japan? This is a Navy admiral, for heaven's sake.
Kimmel's own craven, self-serving memoir contains enough damning information to put him in front of a firing squad in any other military establishment. On November 27, 1941, the Chief of Naval Operations sent the following dispatch:
This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.
How much more warning do you need? Apparently Kimmel needed someone to color him a picture, because he wrote:
The so-called "war warning" dispatch of November 27 did not warn the Pacific Fleet of an attack in the Hawaiian area. It did not state expressly or by implication that an attack in the Hawaiian area was imminent or probable. It did not repeal or modify the advice previously given me by the Navy Department that no move against Pearl Harbor was imminent or planned by Japan.
In these circumstances no reasonable man in my position would consider that the "war warning" was intended to suggest the likelihood of an attack in the Hawaiian area.
He's in charge of defending Hawaii, the only significant land mass between Japan and California, and gets a message warning of possible hostile action. Where exactly did he think the message was warning of an attack? Tierra del Fuego? Madagascar? Maybe Hawaii wasn't specifically mentioned, but the difference between getting a medal and being cashiered in disgrace is often initiative. Kimmel could have shaken off the Navy's hostility toward Army aviation and encouraged the Army to conduct long range air patrols. But he didn't. Let's see, here. The situation in the Pacific is turning sour. You have the biggest potential threat to Japan's operations. You've even proposed basing the fleet in California to make it less vulnerable to attack. What part of "We are a prime target" couldn't Kimmel and Short figure out?
In William Sanders' alternative history story Billy Mitchell'sOvert Act, General Billy Mitchell, instead of defying hissuperiors and being court-martialed, kept his mouth shut and bidedhis time. He became convinced the U.S. would eventually go to war withJapan and immersed himself in the study of Japanese language,history, and culture. As tensions mounted in the Pacific, Mitchellcontrived to get assigned to Hawaii, where he ruthlessly drilled hisArmy Air Corps squadrons. When his proposal to conduct long-range airpatrols was rebuffed, he conducted long range "training flights"instead. Early in December, 1941, the subterfuge paid off. A flightspotted the Japanese fleet. While the brass in Hawaii dithered,Mitchell acted without authority and launched an attack. The fleetwas shattered. Mitchell's plane, fatally damaged, smashed into thecarrier Kaga, kamikaze style.
With no doubt that Japan was readying an attack, Rooseveltdeclared war. But since the U.S. had struck first, there was nonational unity to the war effort. The losing campaign in thePhilippines sapped American will. Protest marches against the warbegan, "Hell no, I won't go" graffiti appeared on walls.Roosevelt announced he would not run for re-election and died shortlyafter the election. Thomas E. Dewey was elected and concluded anarmistice with Japan. The American public by this time was so souredon involvement in Asia that the Communists overran all of Asia. Couldwe have lost World War II, or at least failed to win it? Not a doubtin my mind.
There was probably never any serious doubt of the outcome inEurope. Germany had taken on too many enemies, one of whom could turnan area larger than Europe into a vast armaments factory out of rangeof any attack. Had D-Day failed or Hitler won in the West, many historians feel theoutcome would probably not have been Nazi control of Europe, butRussian. Once Germany was bled white, there would be nothing to stopthe Russians.
Ironically, the one thing that might have weakened the Western wareffort in Europe the most, is the one thing that historical critics ofthe war effort have wanted most to see: denunciation of the Holocaustby the Vatican or Washington. One could easily see anti-Semites andisolationists of all sorts seizing on such denunciations as evidencethat the war really had been orchestrated by the Jews. We couldenvision isolationists saying it was good to fight to save Britainand France, but why were we fighting for the Jews? The Ku Klux Klanhad held joint rallies with Nazi sympathizers before the war; wecould imagine them creeping out of hiding, planting seeds of doubtand later moving on to more overt opposition. Fomenting racialconflict within the U.S. armed forces might have been a productiveGerman strategy, too. With American troops less sure of their purposeand less sure of the level of support back home, we might picture thecampaign in North Africa being more hesitant and more costly,possibly enough to sap American commitment.
Germany's last hurrah, at the Battle of the Bulge, wasn't so muchan attempt at victory as an attempt to recapture the port of Antwerpand possibly leverage a negotiated settlement in the West, freeingGerman resources for combat against the Soviet Union. Even if theplan had succeeded in every detail, it would probably not havechanged the outcome because Germany was clearly losing on all fronts.But another opponent used the same strategy successfully 23 yearslater.
After Pearl Harbor, the initial American response was to punishJapan, and it was over some resistance that Roosevelt carried out his“Germany First” strategy.
Troops being rotated from the just-finished war in Europeunderstandably felt they had already fought one war and resentedbeing sent to fight in another. But casualty rates in Pacificamphibious operations were several times higher than combat inEurope, and numerous Pacific veterans have gone on record as sayingthey were convinced they were going to die sooner or later if the wardragged on. The term "mutiny" has surfaced - hesitantly tobe sure - on occasion in describing the possible results if the wardid not end when it did.
U.S. planners had settled on a strategy for the invasion of Japan.Operation Olympic would have invaded Kyushu, the southernmost island,in November, 1945. The intent was not to conquer the whole island butmerely the southern third, which would effectively have been turnedinto a vast logistics base and airfield. Operation Coronet would thenattack the Tokyo Plain in March, 1946.
The Japanese could read maps and plan military operations with thebest of them and they identified all the likely landing areas inKyushu. They conceived an ambitious defense plan using regularmilitary and mobilized civilians, known as Ketsu-Go, designedto make the invasion as costly as possible. U.S. planners werebecoming aware of the Japanese preparations, and the high cost ofprevious operations against Japan was well known. Numerous militaryand civilian analysts came up with estimates of American fatalitiesas high as half a million or even a million. A measure of howseriously these numbers were taken is that the Pentagon ordered halfa million Purple Hearts, a stockpile that lasted through Korea andVietnam and beyond. However, by the summer of 1945, the consensusamong U.S. military planners for the success of Olympic had begun tounravel. MacArthur, who never saw a chance for glory he didn't like, was all for it, but the Navy wascoming to the conclusion that it wouldn't work.
Events bypassed the planners. The atomic bombs on Hiroshima andNagasaki were devastating, but it's entirely possible that thedeciding factor was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria at nearly thesame time. Far from being a mere land grab at the expense of aprostrate enemy, the Manchurian invasion was a meticulously plannedattack along multiple axes of advance, and over nearly every type ofterrain an army might encounter. Simultaneously the Soviets madeamphibious landings in Korea, the Kurile Islands, and Sakhalin, andwere planning an invasion of Hokkaido at the same time as, or evenbefore, the U.S. invasion of Kyushu. The arrival of U.S. forces inKorea in September after the Japanese surrender prevented completeSoviet occupation of Korea.
The Japanese government was seriously hoping that a costlyinvasion and prolonged war would sap American morale, and they wereprobably right. If Olympic had failed, the likely outcome would havebeen Soviet occupation of at least northern Japan as well as all ofKorea, and a far more dangerous Cold War. Had the Soviets notthreatened, and Olympic or Coronet failed, as they very well mighthave, the only remaining strategy would have been to starve Japaninto submission. The victims would certainly have included all theAmerican prisoners of war and internees held in Japan. The American public wouldprobably not have stood for a second invasion attempt, and if theJapanese continued to inflict losses on American forces, the publiccould very well have pushed for some kind of truce.
What if Olympic or Coronet had been repulsed with catastrophiclosses? Or perhaps Olympic succeeded but the Japanese conducted asteady war of infiltration and attrition that paralyzed the forces onKyushu? Morale in the armed forces would have sunk to dangerously lowlevels. Probably all the senior commanders would have been sacked;impeachment of the President is not out of the question. Nor is itimpossible that there would have been an ethnic backlash againstAsians in general. Remember, while the real soldiers were off getting shot at, Americans at home courageously targeted Japanese Americans. And we hardly ever hear that one of the strongest supporters of the internment was the then governor of California and future Chief Justice, the sainted Earl Warren.
The world must have looked very promising to the intellectual elite in 1947. Fascism (which many of them had supported as long as it successfully masqueraded as socialism, but let's not go there) had been defeated. A world governing body had come into existence, and the United States had joined it this time. Marxism, the real wave of the future, had been saved and was on the march in China and eastern Europe. The first creakings of the collapse of colonial empires were audible. The U.S. had launched enlightened plans to rebuild Europe and Japan, rebuilding former foes as well as allies. The U.S. had also created a vast program to send veterans to college, although many in the academic upper crust fretted that an influx of poorly trained students would drag academic standards down. (That turned out to be an unfounded fear; the mental discipline and focus instilled by trying not to get killed more than made up for any academic weaknesses on the veterans' transcripts.) With the war over, there would be money for social engineering, art galleries, concerts, museums, oh, all kinds of stuff.
And it all went so horribly wrong. The Americans who had endured lowered standards of living during the Depression, followed by rationing and military service during World War II, had, many of them, experienced sixteen years of privation. Many who had been children when the Depression began found their entry into adulthood delayed until their mid to late twenties. So when they finally did have affluence and economic freedom, they moved out of the cities to the suburbs. They spent that affluence on the consumer goods they had either never had before, or had not had in a very long time. And they tuned their televisions, not to the critically acclaimed dramas of the "Golden Age of Television," but Westerns and sitcoms.
And they had babies. Wow, did they have babies. 70 million of them over 15 years. The gravest mistake the World War II generation made was thinking they could pass the benefits of their experience along to their children. They believed, with the best of intentions, they were doing their children a service by shielding them from deprivation of any kind. They also thought their experiences in the Depression or the war would be meaningful to children who had never experienced anything but affluence and comfort. If we define an aristocracy as a class of people who think that, merely by virtue of being who they are, they are entitled to privileges, the Baby Boom generation is one of the purest aristocracies ever produced.
The Cold War, which ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, was waged for four and a half decades only in the face of sustained and persistent opposition from a substantial segment of the American public. In particular, the need for opposition to Communism was incessantly ridiculed by the American intelligentsia.
The Sexual Revolution of the late 1960's was very revealing of American values. First of all, archaic and rigid sexual mores had been allowed to persist decades after their utility had expired because most Americans were unwilling to speak out against them, just as their parents had been unwilling to denounce Prohibition. When widespread opposition finally did appear, the whole system popped like a soap bubble. A handful of hippies making love at Woodstock could hardly do that; the whole house of cards came down because, like Prohibition, America's moral stance on sex was a hollow shell. As comedian Pat Paulsen said during his mock Presidential campaign in 1968, "Let's get sex out of the schools and back into the motels where it belongs."
Conspiratorial thinking has a long history in America. Before the Civil War the two chief conspiracy fears were slave revolts and Catholic immigration. Many Americans got their first close encounter with Catholicism while being nursed by nuns in Civil War hospitals, and the role of Catholic nuns during the war went a long way toward defusing paranoia about Catholics. Nevertheless, the Ku Klux Klan continued to stir up fears of blacks, Catholics and Jews long after the war. Even in 1928, when Al Smith became the first Catholic major party Presidential candidate, the fringes of society circulated rumors of secret arrangements to allow the Pope to take over America.
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 ushered in a Golden Age of American paranoia. Even before then, leftist political movements inspired suspicion, but after Communism became established in a major nation it became a central focus for conspiracy believers. During the Depression, demagogues blamed economic woes on Jewish financiers as well. Even Catholics, only recently targets of hysteria themselves, listened to the rantings of Father Charles Coughlin, who spoke favorably of Hitler and Mussolini and attacked both capitalism and Communism.
The complexities of World War II must have been painful for conspiracy believers, and there can be no doubt that there was a fairly large pool that thought the U.S. was on the wrong side in World War II, even if they dared not speak openly. But after the war the world crystallized into marvelous simplicity, with the Free World locked in mortal combat with Communism. Like the world after the dinosaurs, wide open for exploitation by whatever could evolve to take advantage of it, the Cold War allowed a wide open evolutionary radiation of nutjobs. On the one hand there were neurotics who escaped reality by denying that Communism had any faults at all. The infamous purge trials of the 1930's were overblown if not outright propaganda. The Katyn massacre of Polish army officers was a myth. The systematic use of terrorism against civilians by Marxist insurgents was either a fabrication, or if true, they deserved it. On the other hand there were psychotics who created an entirely new reality in which Communism was seen in everything that deviated in the slightest from orthodoxy. Two parallel but opposing fantasy worlds had come into being.
On November 22, 1963, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy launched American paranoia onto a completely new level.
At some point, American thinking took a decidedly nasty turn. Roots of conspiracies
The notion that Vietnam was an utterly immoral war has become so deeply entrenched that there is no point in discussing Vietnam. But the Tet offensive of 1968 showed that the German offensive in the Bulge during World War II was a good strategy. Lesson learned if you're willing to fight long enough: Americanscan be ground down, and a well timed counter stroke might just gain final victory. After all, all the attacks during Tet were defeated. But it didn't matter.
The broader lesson is that Americans just do not have the patience to defeat insurgencies. Insurgents are fighting on their own ground. We can give up and go home. They are home. Their only alternatives are to accept a political order they despise, go into exile, or die fighting. The Indian Wars were small scale and supported by nearly everyone in the West. The Philippine Insurrection of the early 1900's encountered a lot of high profile domestic opposition and ended, in large part, with the capture of the rebel leader in 1902. Insurrections can rarely be so cleanly decapitated. And Emilio Aguinaldo had been an honorable opponent. He had tried at first to wage a conventional war, and when he surrendered he kept his word.
If you're a potential enemy, you can learn some very useful lessons from American history.
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