Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

I do not believe in the antislavery of Abraham Lincoln, because he is on the side of this slave power of which I am speaking, that has possession of the federal government. . . . Not only would I arraign Mr. Lincoln . . . for his proslavery character and principles, but when he was a member of the House of Representatives, in 1849, on the tenth day of January, he went through the District of Columbia and consulted the prominent proslavery men and slaveholders of the District, and then went into the House of Representatives and introduced, on his own responsibility, a fugitive-slave law for the District of Columbia.3

Mr. Douglas’s Lincoln is not the man history would have us remember. The same can be said of a truer view of George Washington than the mythological perspective promulgated by Parson Mason Locke Weems but a year after the first president died. He invented the tale of honest George confessing that he chopped down his father’s cherry tree. The story was harmless enough on its own, but in its retelling it became a source for the purification of mass memory, leaving us to believe Washington was nearly a saint, when the truth is much less flattering.4

We hope to correct the folklore behind America’s wartime presidents, in the process acknowledging their many great acts while also exposing the reality of what drove them to action. We will assess what price “We, the people” pay for what James Madison described as the inevitable “ambition, avarice, and vanity” of the nation’s future presidents. In doing so we also hope to highlight how “We, the people” can and should take responsibility for holding presidents to a more virtuous and less militaristic standard. That, indeed, is our ultimate goal. We do not relish challenging the folklore surrounding America’s most distinguished leaders, but only in doing so can we establish the core principle guiding our political analysis: that when politicians are unconstrained, and thus left to their own devices, even the greatest among them forget what is good for the common people in their lust for personal aggrandizement and satisfaction.

The standard telling of the stories of America’s greatest war presidents has certain common, misleading, threads. It is commonplace, for instance, and not altogether wrong, to think that Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and George Washington were reluctant, victorious, and virtuous warriors. Lincoln, we might say, was prophetic in 1858 when he declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Unable to achieve his greatest desire—to preserve the nation undivided and at peace—he reluctantly found himself at the helm of a nation at war against itself. In winning that war, he sought to reunite the country; he ended slavery; he promised “malice toward none” of the vanquished southern states and leaders; and he gave his life for the union he loved.

Perhaps even more reluctant a warrior, George Washington found himself the leader of a great struggle to establish a new form of government, one, as Lincoln would observe four score and seven years later, “of the people, by the people, for the people,” although he personally fostered the belief that he wanted nothing more than to remain at home, tending to his lands and his beloved Mount Vernon. With the greatest humility and trepidation, he accepted the wishes of his countrymen, fighting a war to establish the dignified right of the people of the American colonies to representation as the price government must pay to engage in taxation.

As for Franklin Roosevelt, to borrow Woodrow Wilson’s term for an earlier war, surely he fought to make the world safe for democracy. Hesitantly, seeking nothing more than to keep America at peace, he found himself confronted with a harsh choice. He could keep America aloof from the old world’s troubles at the risk of living in a world that would succumb to the evils of tyrants or finally, reluctantly, he could commit the nation to a war intended to rescue the world from tyranny.

These iconic accounts of turning points in American history relate our essential mythological understanding of the greatest American presidents and the history they created. They are seen as the men who made the American way of life the envy of much of the world. Their story is our American story. These presidents are pushed forward as the exemplars whose tales forge the fundamental historical lessons learned by every American schoolchild, the glue that makes the United States into a melting pot of cultures and history, the foundation of a coherent unity of states. It is indeed the mythology of American history. It is the foundation of “e pluribus unum”—“one out of many.”

Like so much folklore, the tales of America at war contain kernels of truth and yet in crucial ways are fundamentally false. We hope to help set the record of American presidents at war—and at peace—aright. We do so not through ideological critique, partisan bias, or some mistaken sense of malice, and with appreciation for the many extraordinary achievements accomplished by America’s war presidents and with reverence for the idea of making one from many. Rather, we conduct a careful look at history that is stripped of preconceived, inherited ideas of our marble heroes. We assess these figures’ motives and actions within the framework suggested by James Madison, one that applies to virtually all political leaders in all of time and in all places: a framework that focuses attention squarely on their quest for personal power and fame even if it comes at the expense of the average citizen.

This revision is essential if we are to advance beyond a love for the heroics of war to a love for the less heralded but greater heroics of the promotion of peace. The evidence will show, for instance, that Franklin Roosevelt was indeed a reluctant warrior but that his reluctance was not born so much out of a love for peace as it was out of a love for reelection. Likewise, history reveals that it is true that Washington wanted nothing more than to stay at home and tend to his lands; that is, his vast, far-reaching land holdings that made him one of the richest people in all of American history; land holdings whose value—estimated to have been in the billions of dollars by today’s standards—was put at risk by the British government’s policies, starting with King George III’s Proclamation of 1763. The facts will demonstrate that Lincoln would surely have loved peace and unity on his terms, with those terms barely open to any notion of compromise. We will see that he was not hesitant to use rhetoric and to take actions with the knowledge that, through his words and deeds, he was stoking the engine of civil war as a price to be paid to advance his own ambition for high office.

Please do not misread our account as suggesting some special flaw in America’s leaders or its government. Quite to the contrary, we believe the United States, because of the particulars of its national constitution, its federal structure, its separation of powers, and its history of mostly honest national elections,5 is the toughest case in the world history of government for our thesis that politics is about using high office to improve, as James Madison put it, personal “ambition, avarice, vanity, the honourable or venial love of fame” and not about advancing national welfare.6

Making the rest of us well off certainly is not abhorrent to any leader, but taking actions to do so stands far back in line to a ruler’s own personal advancement. Hence, we will carefully dissect how greed drove such founding fathers as Washington to revolution; how a burning personal ambition, coupled with a noble moral inclination, drove Lincoln to promote the division of the Union; and how the quest to stay in power, fostered by personal vanity and a belief in his indispensability, drove FDR to delay the entry of the United States into the World War, in the process making the war longer and deadlier than it needed to be. As we dissect the interests that propelled America’s war presidents, we pause in each chapter to consider what might have been done differently. In doing so we will not ask of any leader to change what he (or increasingly, she) wanted; rather, we identify actions that could have been taken, which would have been consistent with advancing their interests while also producing a less bellicose result for “We, the people.” The final chapter probes the general principles that could foster more successful and also less militaristic policies: those that advance both the well-being of our leaders and of the rest of us. It should be remembered that the case made here would be all the stronger if our attention were turned to less democratic societies, a topic we have tackled elsewhere.7 What is more, the fixes to the problems highlighted here are more easily instituted in the United States or in other mature democracies than in most of the rest of the world. Thus, the greater possibility of improvement in America makes it an ideal subject for our cynical, tough assessment.