[Peace-discuss] The excellent Bill Kauffman

[C. G. Estabrook]

The book in question is much better than the review, which omits, e.g., 
Kauffman's interesting discussion of the effect of US militarism on families. 
--CGE]

	America’s Anti-Militarist Heritage
	by George C. Leef, Posted May 25, 2009
	"Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar
	Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism"
	by Bill Kauffman (Metropolitan Books, 2008)

Americans don’t have much historical memory anymore. That isn’t just because of 
the dumbing down of the educational system and the fact that most young people 
read very little on their own. It’s because most of what little they do hear 
about our history is colored by statist theology.

But if you talk to some older Americans — people in their 70s and 80s — you will 
encounter a few who know some important things. First, they know that there was 
widespread opposition to the wars the United States fought in the 20th century; 
and second, they know that most of the opposition to war came from the “Right.” 
That is, “liberals” were the ones champing at the bit to send American forces 
into combat and “conservatives” were the ones saying, “Let’s just mind our own 
business.”

Bill Kauffman’s book Ain’t My America is intended to drive that point home. His 
subtitle lets the reader know where he’s going — the long, noble history of 
anti-war conservatism and middle-American anti-imperialism. This isn’t just a 
dry and pedantic bit of historiography, though. Kauffman writes with an angry 
edge because he’s sick and tired of the politicians — left, right, and center — 
who just can’t resist the calls for sending American troops into combat all 
around the globe. He wants to kindle the embers of an old fire — the deep 
conviction among Americans on the political Right that keeping America’s 
national nose out of foreign wars is morally and politically the intelligent 
policy. Americans shouldn’t start wars. They shouldn’t participate in those 
already begun. They should just mind their own business! That should be the 
stance of the “Right” even more than of the “Left.”

When Americans read about their history, they learn the results of the numerous 
wars they’ve been in, but almost never is any space devoted to the decisions to 
get into them. Wars don’t just break out spontaneously. Government officials 
have to act, but what of those, in and out of government, who didn’t want to get 
involved? Only if you look deeply will you find anything about the people who 
opposed America’s wars. Kauffman has done exactly that. In Ain’t My America, he 
shows that there was opposition to every one of America’s foreign wars, mostly 
from small-town, freedom-loving folks whose chief demand of the government was 
that it respect their rights.

The War of 1812

Although I daresay that I know a good deal more about American history than most 
people, I was surprised by many of the facts Kauffman presents. I had not known 
that Daniel Webster was an opponent of the War of 1812. The great orator said at 
the time,

     Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of 
the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life 
itself, not when the safety of their country and its liberties may demand the 
sacrifice, but whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government 
may require it?

Ah — an early understanding of the truth that politicians usually seek war for 
their own advantage.

The Mexican War

The Mexican War of 1846-48 was sought by President James K. Polk, who fabricated 
a border incident to serve as the justification of hostilities — just as Hitler 
did with the Poles in 1939. Many Americans, however, saw right through his 
deception and bellicose rhetoric. A little-known member of Congress named 
Abraham Lincoln was one. Another was Rep. Alexander Stephens of Georgia (later 
the vice president of the Confederacy), who said, “Fields of blood and carnage 
may make men brave and heroic, but seldom tend to make nations either good, 
virtuous, or great.” Lincoln, Stephens, and many others saw the Mexican War as 
simple aggression by the United States and wanted no part of it.

After the bloodbath of the Civil War, the United States stayed out of foreign 
conflicts until late in the 19th century. Hawaii was annexed in 1898. While the 
takeover was bloodless, former president Grover Cleveland said that he was 
“ashamed of the whole affair.”

The Spanish-American War

Far worse was the Spanish-American War. Whatever might have caused the sinking 
of the battleship Maine in Havana’s harbor, the McKinley administration 
instantly seized on it as a casus belli and the country was at war before any 
opposition could form. After the end of the hostilities, a group of capitalists 
who wanted peace rather than an empire formed the Anti-Imperialist League. One 
of them, George Boutwell, criticized U.S. involvement in the Philippines, where 
American troops were fighting nationalist guerillas:

     Is it wise and just for us, as a nation, to make war for the seizure and 
governance of distant lands, occupied by millions of inhabitants who are alien 
to us in every aspect of life except that we are together members of the same 
human family?

A great amount of death and suffering would have been avoided if the United 
States had stayed out of the Philippines, but the expansionists were firmly in 
charge in Washington. The Anti-Imperialist League was drowned out with 
jingoistic slogans.

At this point, we meet one of Kauffman’s heroes, Sen. George F. Hoar of 
Massachusetts, a crusty Republican who wanted to keep out of foreign military 
adventures. Writing in 1902 about America’s Philippine involvement, Hoar said 
bitterly,

     We crushed the only republic in Asia. We made war on the only Christian 
people in the East. We vulgarized the American flag. We inflicted torture on 
unarmed men to extort confessions. We put children to death. We established 
reconcentration camps. We baffled the aspirations of a people for liberty.


World War I

World War I was a replay of the Spanish-American War, but on a gigantic scale. 
It was the big-thinking nationalists who insisted on preparing for and 
eventually entering the war by sending American troops to France. While it is 
often said that the business class — usually vilified as “merchants of death” — 
were instrumental in pushing the nation into a war that had no bearing on 
Americans at all, Kauffman shows that many businessmen were against President 
Wilson’s determination to participate in the carnage in Europe. They foresaw 
that war would bring not only death and destruction, but also regimentation and 
high taxes.

Henry Ford was one voice for peace and sanity. Prior to Wilson’s victory over 
the pacifists with the April 1917 declaration of war, he wrote,
For months, the people of the United States have had fear pounded into their 
brains by magazines, newspapers and motion pictures. No enemy has been pointed 
out. All the wild cry for the spending of billions, the piling up of armaments 
and the saddling of the country with a military caste has been based on nothing 
but fiction.

America’s foremost capitalist wasn’t alone in wanting peace. Millions of people 
who liked their government small and saw no glory in war wanted to stay out of 
“Wilson’s War.” (See my review of Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight, by Jeanette 
Keith, in the June 2005 Freedom Daily. The book details the opposition to the 
war in the South.) Of the 50 House members who voted against war, 33 were 
Republicans. Only 16 Democrats went against their messianic president.

Wilson got his war. Americans who spoke out against it were imprisoned. Kauffman 
quotes one South Dakota farmer who got a five-year prison sentence for saying, 
“It was all foolishness to send our boys over there to get killed by the 
thousands, all for the sake of Wall Street.” Not all Wall Streeters wanted the 
war, but most of small town and rural America was opposed. The war was entirely 
the doing of the nation’s political elite, which looked down its collective nose 
at the rubes who couldn’t see that America had to fight to save the world.

World War II

In the late 1930s, with the storm clouds of war again building up over Europe 
and Asia, the same drama was replayed. Conservative, small-town America could 
see that there would be another war and tried to keep the United States out of 
it. Kauffman concentrates especially on the America First Committee. “It was not 
in any way pro-fascist or pro-Nazi, though of course anyone who opposes a war in 
modern America gets tagged as an enemy symp,” he writes. The America Firsters 
believed in the libertarian position that the country should be sufficiently 
armed to repel any attack on it, but stay out of the war unless attacked. Public 
polling in 1940 showed that about 80 percent of the people agreed. Kauffman 
doesn’t go into Roosevelt’s machinations to goad the Japanese into attacking, 
but once the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, war was inevitable. Once again, the 
“just leave us alone” instincts of most Americans were trampled upon.

The Cold War

When World War II was finally over, the big-government internationalists 
couldn’t allow the power they had worked to amass to wither away, so they 
conjured up the Cold War. By that time, much of the American Right had been 
lured into the camp of the bellicose, but a few remained to argue against the 
Truman/Eisenhower policies of confrontation. One was old Herbert Hoover, who 
opposed committing U.S. troops to NATO and declared that Truman had violated the 
Constitution by involving the country in the Korean War without a declaration of 
war by Congress.

Another was Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), who said in a Senate speech in January 
1951, “The principal purpose of the foreign policy of the U.S. is to maintain 
the liberty of our people.” Unfortunately, liberty was far from the minds of 
most of his colleagues.

Less well known than Hoover and Taft is another Kauffman hero, Howard Buffett, 
father of the billionaire investor. Howard Buffett was a member of the House 
from Nebraska in the 1940s and 1950s. He was fervently opposed to militarism, 
foreign aid of all kinds, and anything that went beyond his vision of a 
government that just protected life, liberty, and property. Buffett was 
adamantly opposed to the military draft, which to him was no different from slavery.

With the passing decades, the Right has largely become the pro-war side of the 
political spectrum and the Left now contains most of the anti-war crowd. There 
are some exceptions, of course. Republican congressmen Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and 
John Duncan (R-Tenn.) opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, but most 
Republicans have fallen into the neocon orbit and believe that the solution to 
just about anything the United States doesn’t like around the world is to send 
in American troops. Opposition to military escapades comes mostly from 
“liberals” but not with much effect. (I wish that Kauffman had pointed out that 
the problem with leftist opposition to war is that it’s unprincipled. People who 
favor massive government taxation and control of nearly every other aspect of 
life are not on firm ground when they say, “Let’s not use military force for 
anything but self-defense.”)

What Kauffman hopes to see is a revival of anti-war sentiment among those who 
should be its strongest natural proponents — Americans who want their government 
small, their taxes low, and no soldiers in body bags. Despite all the propaganda 
that wanting to avoid war is cowardly, he is optimistic:

     It may not be too late for the American Right — for Main Street America in 
all its conservative neighborliness, its homely yet life-giving blend of the 
communal and the libertarian — to rediscover the wisdom of its ancestors, who 
understood that empire is the enemy of the small and war is the enemy of the home.

Bill Kauffman has hit the nail right on the head. It shouldn’t be just the far 
Left that says “No” to war. There is a strong history of anti-militarism on the 
Right and it’s time to bring it back to life.


George C. Leef is the director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in 
Raleigh, North Carolina, and book review editor of The Freeman. This article 
originally appeared in the January 2009 edition of Freedom Daily.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0901f.asp