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To be American is to forget…

Or, having exhausting every other opportunity to forget, to remember poorly.

In the course of a series of posts on how the United States of America has implemented selected clauses from its constitution…

a well-regulated militia

• “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions”
• “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress”
• “The President shall be Commander in Chief…of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”
• “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress…keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
• “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

…Dmitri Rotov has unearthed some forgotten yet particularly shiny pebbles:

James S. Wadworth

1. The ill-starred military career of James S. Wadworth of New York, an ambitious New York Republican Party politician who Abraham Lincoln dragooned into the Army to neutralize him as a political threat. Wadworth who bungled along like a stereotypical ”political” general but died well in the Wilderness.
   

   John M. Palmer

2. By way of contrast, the distinguished military career of John M. Palmer, political general, friend of Lincoln’s, key supporter in Lincoln’s rise, and post-Civil War governor of Illinois.
   

   Emory Upton

3. The tragic rise, death, failure, and victory of Emory Upton, professional soldier and Civil War prodigy whom William Tecumseh Sherman dispatched overseas to tour foreign military establishments and report back his findings. Upton’s reports, The Armies of Asia and Europe, published after his return, and The Military Policy of the United States, published in 1904, well after Upton’s death in 1881, heavily influenced future U.S. military policy. Upton also wrote Tactics for Non-Military Bodies: Adapted for the Instruction of Political Associations, Police Forces, Fire Organizations, Masonic, Odd-Fellows, and other Civic Societies, a book for which the world is not yet prepared.
   

   James A. Garfield

4. Future president (and political general) James Garfield’s doomed attempt to implement Upton’s central idea: the “expansible army“. Says Rotov: “The expansible army consists of a large regular standing army, men and officers, with a capability of expanding further in crisis. Upton rejected the idea of a small standing army bolstered in war by militias and volunteers.”
   

   Peyton C. March, Sr.

5. The clash between Peyton C. March, the George C. Marshall of World War I, and Colonel John M. Palmer, grandson of John M. Palmer, before the Senate Military Affairs Committee led by Sen. James W. Wadsworth, Jr. (R-NY), grandson of James S. Wadworth.
   

   Willard M. Romney, who cares

6. The curious case of citing the Militia Act of 1792 as a precedent for “Romneycare” and its child “Obamacare”.

James W. Wadworth, Jr.

This post in particular caught my eye:

With March’s “Uptonian” plan off the table, Wadsworth and Palmer began designing their own army. This (after political give and take) became the National Defense Act of 1920. There is a handy summary of what follows in The Second World War: Asia and the Pacific. I excerpt here at length:

Palmer’s ideas were not those of the majority of the Army’s general staff officers, who were disciples of the pensive Emory Upton, the Army’s most influential 19th Century theorist. [...] The staff had updated the “expansible army” of John Calhoun and modernized Upton; but while it had convinced a reluctant chief of staff, Peyton March, to support the plan, it could not sell the program to Congress.

Palmer recommended a citizen-based army, which he felt was far more appropriate for a democracy. In his plan, while the Regular Army would be the vanguard of the ground forces, the National Guard and the Organized Reserves would provide the bulk of the wartime army. Citizen officers would command most of the citizen soldiers. In peacetime, the Regulars would train their associates in the Guard and Reserves. While Palmer also hoped for universal military service [in Swiss-type reserves - DR], this unpalatable position was not acceptable in peacetime.

The old Hamilton-Jefferson controversy between a purely professional and a militia-based defense force had been resolved in favor, once again, of the militia. Palmer had proposed an army in the American tradition. Politically feasible, the proposal was favored and accepted by the Wadsworth Committee. The Army’s official [March] program was discarded because it was too un-American, was so much of the philosophy of the Germanophile, Emory Upton. [...]

All of this looked good on paper, but unfortunately Congress did not provide sufficient funds to implement the National Defense Act [of 1920] fully until 1940.

In other words, the infamously puny and underfunded interwar Regular Army was “half a loaf” – just a slice of the Wadsworth-Palmer plan.

There is a profound lesson in this for military theorists and planners. There is also an odd twist. Palmer lived to see the Act of 1920 funded…

p.s. To read more about the March-Palmer contest, you have to dig into out-of-print works like Toward a Post World War I Military Policy: Peyton C. March vs. John McAuley Palmer.

John J. Pershing

Palmer was a key architect of American strategy. He drafted his first plan for organizing the Army in 1911 under orders from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Army Chief of Staff Dr. Leonard Wood. He played a major role in drafting the plan enacted as the Selective Service Act and operationalized as the American Expeditionary Forces. AEF commander John J. Pershing made Palmer his assistant Chief of Staff over in France. After the war, Palmer played a key role in reorganizing the Army, including the efforts Rotov narrates. At the beginning of World War II, Palmer friend and disciple George C. Marshall recalled Palmer (retired in 1926) to active duty as his special advisor. By the end of the war, as Rotov notes, Palmer was “the oldest American in uniform by the end of WWII” at age 75.

Palmer’s contribution is as fundamental to twentieth century American strategy formation as those of more famous men like Upton, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Billy Mitchell, or George Frost Kennan. Yet he merits little more than a Russell Weigley footnote.

John M. Palmer

I bought a vintage 1945 paperback of Palmer’s America In Arms (it has never been reprinted) to learn more. I’ve read two pages so far.

So far it’s gold:

Prologue

 

What is War?

 

A Diagnosis and a Remedy

 

I

 

The aspects of war involving weapons and modes of transportation have changed at each stage of human development. There is a vast difference between war as it was waged by Alexander the Great and as it is now fought by Rommel and Yamashita. But in its inner essence, war is the same now as was when an unknown conquerer built the first pyramid as a monument to his name and prowess. It is not a separate, isolated form of human activity. It is instead, as the German soldier-philosopher Clausewitz said a century ago, a special violent form of political action.

 

We customarily think that no two things can be more unlike than peaceful international relations and war-like international relations. And so we may be startled when we first grasp the thought that these are simply two phases of the same thing—human politics.

 

This was brought home to us in December, 1941. For years it had been the political program of Japan to dominate China and Southeast Asia and control the Western Pacific. When normal political action in Washington failed to gain our acuquiecense, Japan’s next argument was delivered at Pearl Harbor. Her purpose was still political and precisely what it was before her treacherous surprise attack. The only difference was that she used dive-bombers instead of diplomats.

 

II

 

Even before Clausewitz, George Washington understood that war is simply a phase of politics. Thus when his countrymen called him to establish a new political system, he realized clearly that any complete system must include the machinery for dealing with that special violent phase of international politics known as war. This is the principle thought in his political writings from the close of the Revolution to the end of his life. In the light of his knowledge of war and its great significance in international affairs, his Farewell Address may be summarized as follows:

 

Rely on just dealings with other nations. Seek your legitimate political ends through peaceful negotiation and understanding. But lest some agressor impose the other form of political action known as war upon you, maintain yourselves in a “respectable defensive posture”.

 

If you do this other nations will not be tempted to depart from the normal and peaceful methods of political action in their dealings with you.

 

The non-aggressive military organization proposed by Washington to prevent normal political action from degenerating into the violent form known as war would have tended to preserve peace. But his countrymen ignored his advice for a century and a half. If he had been able to implement the new American republic with effective military institutions suited to a self-governing free people, Japan would never have dared to take a change of venue from the Court of Reason to the Court of Brute Force.

The Disembodied Floating Clausewitz Head approved this message

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Adam Elkus has an important post over at Rethinking Security: America Needs Sound Policy, Not Grand Strategy:

Every few months since 1991, there is a new op-ed calling for a new grand strategy or bemoaning the fact that the US doesn’t have one. I’ve written a few blogs/articles to this tune myself. But it’s time to realize that the problem lies with the very conception of grand strategy itself.

In Foreign Policy, Rosa Brooks argues that the US needs a grand strategy:

Though different scholars and statesmen define “grand strategy” somewhat differently, at its heart, the concept is straightforward: Grand strategy is “the big idea” of foreign and national security policy — the overarching concept that links ends, ways and means, the organizing principle that allows states to purposively plan and prioritize the use of “all instruments of national power,” diplomatic, economic, cultural, and military. A grand strategy can’t be a list of aspirations, wishes, or even a country’s top 10 foreign-policy “priorities.” (When you have 10 priorities, you really have no priorities at all.) Grand strategy is the big idea that guides the tough decisions, helping policymakers figure out which of those top 10 priorities should drop off the list, which aspirations are unrealistic and impossible, and which may seem like good ideas on their own, but actually undermine the nation’s broader goals.

After this definition, Brooks then criticizes the Obama administration for not formulating one, But with such an expansive definition of strategy, is it ever possible to create one? The problem is that Brooks and other grand strategy writers searching for a “big idea” conjoin policy and strategy together.

To recap, policy (a condition or behavior) generates a strategy (an instrumental device) that executes it through operations and tactics. Policy, in turn, is the product of a political process. In my post on victory, I gave a Chinese food-flavored explanation of this in practical terms. Strategy is not supposed to be an “idea”—it is an practical method of getting things done, a purpose-built bridge between politics and raw violence. I will concede that sometimes a policy will require a global strategy to accomplish it—which is what Basil-Liddell Hart originally meant when he used the term “grand strategy” to refer to World War II.

The idea of grand strategy as both policy and strategy is by definition unachievable, and the source of much confusion.  By infusing normative policy elements into strategy, this fusion turns strategy into a manifestation of ideology rather than a technical device for getting things done.  Think, for example, of how debates about regional strategy and even the tactics and operations of COIN, drones, and counterterrorism have become proxies for domestic ideological political battles. This happens, in larger part, because the policy-strategy distinction in American national security circles is extremely weak, as strategy is taken to be politics and politics becomes strategy.

One sure way to detect politics is signs of desperate efforts to call politics something other politics. Though politics is the most elemental of human endeavors, disgust with overt political machinations is one of the most elemental of human emotions:

Who likes a brown noser?

Who likes a squealer?

Who likes the kid who gathers up his toys and goes home when he doesn’t get his way?

Who likes the guy who obviously looks out for number one?

In War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, Peter Turchin cites experiments intended to reveal the ethical composition of any group of humans:

During the 1990s, several economists, most notably Ernst Fehr at the University of Zurich and his colleagues, decided to test the assumptions of rational choice theory experimentally…what these experiments…reveal is that society consists of several types of people. Some of them–perhaps a quarter in experiments with American college students–are self-interested, rational agents – ‘the knaves’. These will never contribute to the common good, and will choose free-riding unless forced to [contribute] by fines imposed upon them. The opposite type, also about a quarter, are the unconditional cooperators, or ‘the saints’. The saints continue to contribute to the common pool and lose money, even when it is obvious to everybody that cooperation has failed (although most of them reduce the amount of their contribution). The largest group (40 to 60 percent in most experiments) are the conditional cooperators, or ‘the moralists’. The preference of the moralists is to contribute to the pot, so that everyone would be better off. However, in the absence of the mechanism to punish noncontributors, free-riding proliferates, the moralists become disgusted by this opportunistic behavior, and withdraw their cooperation. On the other hand, when the punishment option is available, they use it to fine the knaves [even though imposing a fine comes at a cost to them...and] the group [eventually] achieves the cooperative equilibrium at which, paradoxically, the moralists do almost as well as the knaves, because they now rarely (if ever) need to spend money on fining the free-riders.

Disgust with knavery leads saints and moralists to condemn any activity with the faintest whiff of knavery. This automatic disapproval drives saint, knave, and moralist alike to portray their own actions as driven by nothing more than the most saintly or moral of motives, as anything but political. Unfortunately, every human action is political: politics is inevitable. Politics is the division of power, for good or ill, and everyone either wants or needs power:

• Knaves want power or they wouldn’t be knaves.
• Moralists need power to punish knaves.
• Even saints need power to be saintly: a saint without power is a dead saint.

No matter the motive, no matter how saintly, moral, or knavish it is, it needs power to be realized. No power? No nuthin’. This bitter truth makes all human activity inalterably a continuation of political activity.

Politics is all-pervading but everyone conspires to pretend otherwise. The line dividing what is politics from what isn’t is hazy but everyone knows what politics is when they see it: politics is whatever the other guy is doing. Your own attempts to expose the sordid maneuvers of your opponents as mere politics were forced on you, after much reluctance, by motives whose purity stands in stark contrast to their knavish perfidy.

This reciprocal cycle of coverups and uncovering coverups becomes an arms race to generate ever better names for political activities intended to convince saints and moralists that political activities aren’t political activities after all. Relabeling politics as something else, something disinterested, even-handed, and pure, is one ready way to disperse suspicion of knavish motives. These relabelings of politics are particular offenders, acting as universal escape hatches that let their wielders pass off their politics as something other than politics:

• policy
• grand strategy

Policy is portrayed as the objective, virtuous, and expert pursuit of ponies for everyone. Framed this way, policy is politics without the division of power. But politics without the division of power is impossible. “Policy” is a mythical beast. ”Policy making” is mere politicking, trading one favor for another to offset one interest with another, persuading through influence when possible and enforcing compliance with violence when impossible. But this reality reeks of knavery so it must be wrapped in the most virtuous lies imaginable. Hence we see a dramatic proliferation of “policy makers” and “making policy” where we’d normally expect to see politicians and politics. WIth so many policy makers making so much policy, you’d think the good and true would be breaking out all over. But, looking around, we see nobody down here but us dumb humans, horse trading with each other to get incrementally ahead.

“Grand strategy”, like policy, is an attempt to divorce politics from politics through politics, leaving behind a vacuum inhabited only by virtuous technocrats. In reality, they’re both attempts by one political group to escape the power of another political group, hopefully gaining more power for themselves in the process. The formulator of “grand strategy” is often an aspiring political actor who lacks the gifts necessary for political success. So they whine from the sidelines, falling back on a passive-aggressive strategy of victimhood where they denounce expertise in politics as squalid while advocating its replacement with their own (implicitly) more virtuous expertise. They attempt to reframe political questions as technical questions best handled by professional specialists. If a political question can be reframed as a technical question, resolving it is a merely an implementation detail. Such technical minutia should be beneath most politicians. Their attention should be devoted to truly important questions, leaving details to the poor peons.

Political questions delegated to enlightened technocrats and specialists don’t stop being political questions. It only rearranges the deck chairs, increasing the power held by enlightened technocrats and specialists while reducing the power held by their overtly designated political masters. While clarifying, classifying, and codifying may seem to be merely technical questions, every clarification, clarification, and codification is one aspect of what Swen (Sun-tzu) called shr (shih) in his Bingfa (Ping-fa). Ralph Sawyer translated shr into English as “strategic configuration of power”. Defining values is inextricably tied up with the division of power: every human value contains an implicit strategic configuration of existing power intended to bring about a new strategic configuration of new (and more) power alongside its explicit aspiration.

Policy and grand strategy art are merely the continuation of politics with the addition of other layers of obscurity. Using those terms merely continues and adds to their obscurity. Politics cannot be divorced from human existence. Better to bite the bullet and accept the fact that nothing will ever replace politics that is clearly recognized and acknowledged by all participants as being politics.

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I’ve long believed that the U.S. Constitution of 1817 is more important than the U.S. Constitution of 1787. The Constitution of 1787 was only a specification: it had to be implemented to become more than just another piece of parchment. With trial and error, over the thirty years between 1787 and 1817, a constitution founded on hope became a constitution rooted in practice.

Many of those who did the crucial leg work that transformed the hope of 1787 into the reality of 1817 either helped draft the 1787 original or influenced those who drafted it. In 1787, we see them crossing their fingers. In 1817, we see many of the same men only now they are tempered by thirty years of troubled neutrality during the largest war in human history, a brief, disastrous, yet ultimately triumphant second round of war with the British Empire, partisan strife more vicious than any seen thereafter, a serious secession attempt by a disaffected region of the country, and the monumental effort it took to make that whole government of the people and by the people thing work.

Two of the first four presidents of the United States served at the convention: George Washington and James Madison. Two were serving abroad as ambassadors in mid-1787 but influenced the convention through their public and private influence: John Adams through his writings, most importantly his 1776 Thoughts on Government, Massachusetts’ state constitution of 1779, and 1787 A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States against some obnoxious Enlightenment-Era Eurotrash.

Thomas Jefferson helped by not being around to screw it all up.

The Constitution contains this requirement:

Section 3 – State of the Union, Convening Congress

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient…

These yearly State of the Union reports make nice capsule reviews of happenings between 1787 and 1817. For my own amusement, I intend to run through every State of the Union between George Washington’s first State of the Union address made to Congress on January 8, 1790 and James Monroe’s first State of the Union report delivered to Congress on December 12, 1817 as often as time and mood permit. I will freely translate and annotate the reports as I see fit while linking to the original in all of its late eighteenth/early nineteenth century fulsomeness.

When most of us bother to think about the State of the Union address at all today, we tend to think of a televised hour or so of presidential bombast punctuated by scripted partisan applause, celebrity drop-ins, live props, and a cast of thousands. Things were different in days gone by: the 1st Congress that George Washington read his first report to was composed of 22 senators and 59 representatives drawn from the eleven states of the Union and gathered at Federal Hall in New York City. The 15th Congress that James Monroe’s written report was delivered to on December 12, 1817 was composed of 25 senators and 141 representatives drawn from the 19 states of the Union who were gathered at the temporary “Old Brick Capitol” in Washington, D.C. built by local real estate speculators who feared that Congress would move the capital elsewhere after the British burned it (including the original Capitol building) on August 24, 1814.

Washington read his eight reports to Congress in person, an example followed by John Adams. In 1801, Jefferson stopped reading it in person since he considered the practice monarchial. Instead he had his report delivered to and read to Congress by a clerk. Jefferson’s example was followed by all of his successors up to noted war criminal Thomas Woodrow Wilson (the original serpent in Eden) resuscitated Washington’s original practice of delivering the State of the Union to Congress in person.

But that’s another story…

I. First State of the Union, George Washington, January 8, 1790

With great satisfaction, I embrace this opportunity to congratulate you on the favorable prospects of our public affairs. Many present circumstances are eminently auspicious for our national prosperity:

• the recent ratification of the Constitution of the United States by the important state of North Carolina
• the rising credit and respectability of our country
• general and increasing goodwill towards the government of the Union
• the concord, peace, and plenty with which we are blessed

As you resume your deliberations for the greater good, you can only be encouraged when you look back on how well the laws you passed during your last session satisfied the needs of your constituents despite the novelty and difficulty of your work. To further realize their expectations and secure the blessings which Gracious Providence has placed within our reach calls for the cool and deliberate exertion of your patriotism, firmness, and wisdom in the course of the present and important session.

Among the many urgent needs that will engage your attention, the need to provide for the common defense merits particular attention. To be ready for war is one of the most effective ways to preserve peace.

A free people should not only be armed, but trained and disciplined. For this end, a uniform and well-digested plan is a prerequisite. The safety and interest of a free people also require that they promote the kind of manufacturing that will make them independent of other nations in producing essential goods, particularly in military supplies.

Properly establishing an army, which I believe is indispensable, is a task entitled to your most mature consideration. WIth any arrangements that you decide to make about establishing an army, it is important to reconcile the comfortable support of our officers and sailors with the need to conserve our resources.

There was reason to hope that the peaceful measures we adopted towards certain hostile tribes of Indians would relieve the inhabitants of our southern and western frontiers from their depredations. From the information contained in a communication from the Commonwealth of Virginia which I shall lay before you, you will perceive that we ought to be ready to provide protection to those parts of the Union and, if necessary, to punish aggressors.

The interests of the United States demand that our relations with other nations should be facilitated by funds that will allow me to fulfill my duties in that area in the way circumstances may make most conducive to the public good. To this end, compensation for future employees should defined by law according to the nature of the position and enough funds designated for this purpose that we can  defray any expenses we incur in the conduct of foreign affairs.

Various considerations make it expedient that the terms under which foreigners can earn the rights of citizens should be speedily defined by a naturalization law that is uniform throughout the Union.

It is important that we have uniformity in the currency, weights, and measures within the United States. I am persuaded that you will duly attended to this need.

Since it is clear that you should advance our agriculture, commerce, and manufactures by all proper means, I trust I do not have to recommend that you do so. But I must emphasize the need to encourage introduction of new and useful inventions from abroad and exertions of skill and genius that produce inventions at home. I must also emphasize the need to facilitate commerce between distant parts of our country by paying serious attention to our postal service and post roads.

I am sure that you will agree with my opinion that there is nothing that deserves your patronage more than the promotion of science and literature. In every country, knowledge is the surest basis of public happiness. It is particularly essential in a country like ours where the sense of the community makes such an immediate impression on measures of government. Knowledge contributes to the security of a free Constitution in various ways:

• by convincing those entrusted with the public administration that the best support for every valuable goal of government is the educated confidence of the people
• by teaching the people themselves to know and value their own rights so they can discern and protect against invasions of those rights
• to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority and between burdens arising from deliberate neglect of their wants and those that result from the inevitable exigencies of society
• to distinguish between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of licentiousness, cherishing the first while avoiding the last
• to unite a speedy but temperate vigilance against encroachments on their rights with an inviolable respect for the laws.

Whether acquisition of knowledge is best promoted by providing aid to seminaries of learning already established, by instituting a national university, or by any other expedients is worthy of a place in your deliberations.

Gentlemen of the House of Representatives:

At the end of your last session, I noted with pleasure the resolution you passed that expressed your opinion that supporting our public credit is a matter of high importance to our national honor and prosperity. With this sentiment I entirely agree. To my perfect confidence that you will devote your best efforts to make provisions that truly consistent with that end, I add my equal confidence that the other branch of the Legislature will reliably and cheerfully cooperate with you in fulfilling that end. It would be superfluous for me to provide specific inducements for you to protect our public credit when the character and permanent interests of the United States are so obviously and so deeply concerned with its protection and that you have already explicitly sanctioned its protection with your declaration.

Gentlemen of the Senate and House of Representatives:

I have directed the proper officers to lay before you papers and estimates about those affairs that I recommend that you consider and that are necessary to convey to you that information on the state of the Union which it is my duty to provide.

The welfare of our country is the great object to which all of our cares and efforts ought to be directed. I shall derive great satisfaction from cooperating with you in the pleasing though arduous task of ensuring to our fellow-citizens the blessings which they have a right to expect from a free, efficient, and equal government.

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This post is an annual Committee of Public Safety Christmas tradition. From Wikipedia c. 2008:

Before

The metamorphosis of Saint Nicholas into the more commercially lucrative Santa Claus, which took several centuries in Europe and America, has recently been re-enacted in the saint’s home town: the city of Demre. This modern Turkish town is built near the ruins of ancient Myra. As St. Nicholas is a very popular Orthodox saint, the city attracts many Russian tourists. A solemn bronze statue of the Saint by the Russian sculptor Gregory Pototsky, donated by the Russian government in 2000, was given a prominent place on the square in front of the medieval church of St. Nicholas. In 2005, mayor Suleyman Topcu had the statue replaced by a red-suited plastic Santa Claus statue, because he wanted the central statue to be more recognizable to visitors from all over the world. Protests from the Russian government against this action were successful only to the extent that the Russian statue was returned, without its original high pedestal, to a corner near the church.

After

Alas, poor Russia. So far from God, so close to the North Pole.

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Trees:

Not by speeches and votes of the majority, are the great questions of the time decided — that was the error of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood.

Forest:

There are members of the National Association – of this association that has achieved a reputation owing to the justness of its demands – highly esteemed members who have stated that all standing armies are superfluous. Well, what if a public assembly had this view! Would not a government have to reject this?! – There was talk about the “sobriety” of the Prussian people. Yes, the great independence of the individual makes it difficult in Prussia to govern with the constitution (or to consolidate the constitution?); in France things are different, there this individual independence is lacking. A constitutional crisis would not be disgraceful, but honorable instead. – Furthermore, we are perhaps too “well-educated” to support a constitution; we are too critical; the ability to assess government measures and records of the public assembly is too common; in the country there are a lot of Catiline characters who have a great interest in upheavals. This may sound paradoxical, but everything proves how hard constitutional life is in Prussia. – Furthermore, one is too sensitive about the government’s mistakes; as if it were enough to say “this and that [cabinet] minister made mistakes,["] as if one wasn’t adversely affected oneself. Public opinion changes, the press is not [the same as] public opinion; one knows how the press is written; members of parliament have a higher duty, to lead opinion, to stand above it. We are too hot-blooded, we have a preference for putting on armor that is too big for our small body; and now we’re actually supposed to utilize it. Germany is not looking to Prussia’s liberalism, but to its power; Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden may indulge liberalism, and yet no one will assign them Prussia’s role; Prussia has to coalesce and concentrate its power for the opportune moment, which has already been missed several times; Prussia’s borders according to the Vienna Treaties [of 1814-15] are not favorable for a healthy, vital state; it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided – that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood.

Pop history sees the trees of “blood and iron” but misses the forest surrounding it: loss aversion.  This mental bias intensifies man’s fear of loss, making it a stronger motivator for action than any hope for gain. Since the brain is a narrative computer that discovers truth by linking the most of vivid facts together through the most vivid of events, loss aversion often shows up in the form of negative fables. While positive fables link together facts with events to show how x + y + z = gain, negative fables gloomily argue that x + y + z = loss.

History, a game where the many try force square facts into round fables, often channels loss aversion as “no more” complexs.

Consider:

• No more Lehmans
• No more Iraqs
• No more Afghanistans
• No more September 11ths
• No more Srebrenicas
• No more Rwandas
• No more Vietnams

Is every stand that anyone takes in private or public life is only a thin veneer stretched over a no more complex? If so, history is little more than one no more after another. Otto von Bismarck’s own history, a history that let him to bait the (classical) liberals of the Prussian parliament with provocative talk of “blood and iron”, was strongly motivated by one “no more”: no more Olmützs.

The “punctuation” of Olmutz was a treaty signed between Austria and Prussia on November 29, 1850:

The reason for the treaty was a conflict between Prussia and Austria over  leadership of the German states. The German Confederation, dominated by Austria, had been dissolved in the Revolutions of 1848. It was partially succeeded by the Frankfurt Assembly. After the Frankfurt Assembly failed, in early 1850 Prussia  had proposed the Erfurt Union, a Prussia-led federation of most German states.

A conflict between the Electoral Prince of Hesse-Kassel and his subjects let Austrian chancellor Felix Schwarzenberg isolate Prussia. Austrian and allied armies advanced into Hesse-Kassel. On November 8, 1850, the Prussian army had come close to war with Bavaria (an ally of Austria). But Prussia decided to give in because Nicholas I of Russia had taken the Austria side in October 1850. By signing the treaty, Prussia gave up its claim to leadership of the German states. At the same time the German Confederation was restored. Prussia submitted to Austria leadership of the confederation, agreed to demobilize; agreed to partake in the intervention of the German Diet in Hesse and Holstein; and renounced any resumption of her union policy (abandoning the idea of the Erfurt Union).

To many Prussians, punctuation at Olmütz became humiliation at Olmütz, one more Prussian grievance to add to the large mound that Prussia had built up since it was demolished by Buonaparte in 1806. Prussia, always the most geographically illogical of European Great Powers, emerged from Buonaparte’s wars as the weakest European Great Power. After the Congress of Vienna, Prussia found itself with less of neighboring Saxony than it wanted but also found itself (dubiously compensated) with the distant territories of Westphalia and the northern Rhineland in what is now western Germany. This “award” of distant and backward territories (including the Ruhr, a rural backwater) violated 150 years of Prussian precedent: earlier Prussian rulers had struggled to consolidate their widely dispersed lands into a geographically contiguous bloc. Now Prussia was separated from its new territory by hundreds of miles of other, potentially hostile, German states. It was weak and Austria could bully Prussia anytime it felt like it.

The Prussian desire to free their kingdom from Austrian hegemony led to a furtive flirtation with (classical) liberal German nationalists during the “German Spring” of 1848. However, powerful factions within Prussia were more afraid of losing power to a rising (classical) liberal middle class than kowtowing to Austria. They energetically conspired to counter (classical) liberalism inside Prussia and outside in the German states. Their efforts included dispatching a younger conservative upstart, known for his outrageousness, to gum up the workings of the new unified (and (classically) liberal) German Parliament meeting at Frankfurt from the inside. So Otto von Bismarck arrived in Frankfurt, witnessed the attempt to unify Germany on a (classically) liberal foundation collapse despite many fine “speeches and majority resolutions”, and added “no more Frankfurts” to his personal no more complex.

Bismarck was among those who felt intensely humiliated by the Prussian capitulation at Olmütz. His conflict with Austrian ambassador Count Friedrich Thun und Hohenstein in the restored German Diet as they waged a duel of snub and counter-snub personalized the sting of the Prussian surrender. Twelve years passed. When Bismarck made his infamous “called shot” to Disraeli in June 1862, three months before he became minister-president of Prussia:

I shall soon be compelled to undertake the conduct of the Prussian government. My first care will be to re-organise the army, with or without, the help of the Landtag … As soon as the army shall have been brought into such a condition as to inspire respect, I shall seize the first best pretext to declare war against Austria, dissolve the German Diet, subdue the minor states and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership. I have come here to say this to the Queen’s ministers.

What Bismarck was really saying was:

• No more Viennas
• No more Frankfurts
• No more Olmützs

Bismarck’s resolution that his no mores would be no more made him the Cavour of Germany. But his platoon of no mores led to legions of new no mores.

Defense analyst Adam Elkus frequently cites Jamais Cascio’s notion of “legacy futures“:

Reading a talk given by science fiction author Ken Macleod, I came across this bit:

I used the term ‘legacy code’ in one of my novels, and Farah Mendlesohn, a science-fiction critic who read it thought it was a term I had made up, and she promptly adapted it for critical use as ‘legacy text’. Legacy text is all the other science fiction stories that influence the story you’re trying to write, and that generally clutter up your head even if you never read, let along write, the stuff. Most of us have default images of the future that come from Star Trek or 2001 or 1984 or Dr Who or disaster movies or computer games. These in turn interact with the tendency to project trends straightforwardly into the future.

What immediately struck me is that we all have this kind of cognitive “legacy code” in our thinking about the future, not just science fiction writers, and it comes from more than just pop-culture media. We get legacy futures in business from old strategies and plans, legacy futures in politics from old budgets and forecasts, and legacy futures in environmentalism from earlier bits of analysis. Legacy futures are rarely still useful, but have so thoroughly colonized our minds that even new scenarios and futures models may end up making explicit or implicit references to them.

In some respects, the jet pack is the canonical legacy future, especially given how the formulation (originally from Calvin & Hobbes, I believe), of “where’s my jet pack?” has become a widely-used phrase representing disappointment with the future instantiated in the present…

Just like legacy code makes life difficult for programmers, legacy futures can make life difficult for futures thinkers. Not only do we have to describe a plausibly surreal future that fits with current thinking, we have to figure out how to deal with the leftover visions of the future that still colonize our minds…

A similar, and more powerful, hold can control the human mind: legacy pasts. The past of today is not the past of fifty years ago. Inconveniently, it’s not even the past of ten years ago. The Norman conquest of 1066 today is not the Norman conquest of 1066 of 1966, the Norman conquest of 1066 of 1866, the Norman conquest of 1066 of 1166, or the Norman conquest of 1066 of 1067. All the yesterdays between 1066 and 2011 changed 1066 and 2011, one looking by backwards, one by looking forwards. History is fluid that way. But some history is less fluid than other history. This musty history is a complex of legacy pasts. And the lack of fluidity in no more complexes is extreme even for legacy pasts.

World War I was a duel between legacy pasts. Germany acted on legacy pasts that made up a “more more” complex, launching an aggressive strike through Belgium to create “more” Sedans and “more” 1870s (and Alfred von Schlieffen’s thirst for “more” Cannaes). France nursed  legacy pasts that made up its no more complexes: it wanted no more 1870s and no more Sedans so they aggressively threw themselves at German artillery and machine guns. Britain had a  legacy past cast as “no more Phillip IIs Louis XIVs Buonapartes” that led it to war under the banner of “no more Kaiser Bills”. Russia wanted no more 1453s, no more 1878s, and no more 1908s.

The United States entered the war with its own set of no mores. John Milton Cooper relates this anecdote about noted war criminal Thomas Woodrow Wilson:

As he rode up in the White House elevator on the night of April 2, 1917, after delivering his war address to Congress, Woodrow Wilson reportedly remarked to his young cousin, “Fitz, thank God for Abraham Lincoln.”, Fitz Woodrow, a grandson of Wilson’s uncle Jimmy, later recalled asking why he had said that and got the answer, “I won’t make the mistakes he did.” Wilson did not explain to Fitz what mistakes he thought Lincoln had made…

Cooper searched Wilson’s papers, including Wilson’s own writings about Lincoln, but hasn’t been able to divine what Lincoln mistakes Wilson was trying to avoid or if he succeeded in avoiding them. The possibilities are endless because of Wilson’s own legacy past as a Southerner who lived most of his adult life among Northerners:

Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia on December 28, 1856, the third of four children of Reverend Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson (1822–1903) and Jessie Janet Woodrow (1826–1888). His ancestry was Scottish and Scots-Irish. His paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland (now Northern Ireland), in 1807. His mother was born in Carlisle, Cumberland, England, the daughter of Rev. Dr. Thomas Woodrow, born in Paisley, Scotland and Marion Williamson from Glasgow…

Wilson’s father was originally from Steubenville, Ohio, where his grandfather published a newspaper, The Western Herald and Gazette, that was pro-tariff and anti-slavery. Wilson’s parents moved south in 1851 and identified with the Confederacy. His father defended slavery, owned slaves, and set up a Sunday school for them. They cared for wounded Confederate soldiers at their church. Wilson’s father also briefly served as a chaplain to the Confederate Army. Woodrow Wilson’s earliest memory, from the age of three, was of hearing that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. Wilson would forever recall standing for a moment at Robert E. Lee’s side and looking up into his face.

Wilson’s father was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States after it split from northern Presbyterians in 1861. Joseph R. Wilson served as the first permanent clerk of the Southern church’s General Assembly, was Stated Clerk from 1865–1898 and was Moderator of the PCUS General Assembly in 1879. Wilson spent the majority of his childhood, up to age 14, in Augusta, Georgia, where his father was minister of the First Presbyterian Church.

Wilson studied at home under his father’s guidance and took classes in a small school in Augusta. During Reconstruction, Wilson lived in Columbia, South Carolina, the state capital, from 1870–1874, where his father was professor at the Columbia Theological Seminary.

Wilson attended Davidson College in North Carolina for the 1873–1874 school year. After medical ailments kept him from returning for a second year, he transferred to Princeton as a freshman when his father took a teaching position at the university.

Wilson’s complex no more complex might be a rat’s nest of native childhood sentiment fighting adult academic indoctrination. But, since Lincoln was the last president who’d fought a major war, it was logical for Wilson look back on Lincoln for more mores and no mores. But he did that through the lens of the legacy pasts that coalesced in his own mind and the minds of other Americans in the 52 years since the end of the Civil War.

Whatever the nature of Wilson’s personal complex of no mores, he set out to produce no more war, no more balances of power, no more authoritarianism, and no more evil on Earth. The result of his no mores was more war motivated by leaders who wanted No More Versailleses. Hitler wanted no more Versailleses to institutionalize German defeat, humiliation, and dismemberment. Mussolini wanted no more Versailleses to remind him of Italy’s 1919 wimpiness. The Japanese establishment wanted no more Versailleses to remind them that Europeans still looked down on them and denied them a place under the sun. Jyang Jyeshr wanted no more Versailleses that would acquiesce to the dismemberment of China by gwei lau. Stalin wanted no more Versailleses that would erect a cordon sanitaire around the great proletarian revolution. Churchill wanted no Versailles that left Germany a window to rise again. Roosevelt wanted no more Versailles that would let Germany doubt it had been defeated because the forces of good on the international stage lacked muscle.

World War II’s legacy pasts fathered our current crop of legacy pasts. All legacy pasts forever oscillate  between absolute truth and obsolete fiction. “No more Vietnams” will be countered by “No more Munichs”. “No more Iraqs” meet “No more Rwandas”. “No more Lehmans” face off against “No more stagflation”. “No more COIN” runs into “No more Fulda Gaps”. Humans create legacy pasts that support their personal agendas, making history a continuation of politics with the addition of other, more intensively indexed, footnotes.

Legacy pasts empower. Legacy pasts imprison. Legacy pasts may be more factual than truthful. They may be more truthful than factual. The Prussian military historian Carl von Clausewitz recommended immersive study  of narrow slices of history in excruciating detail to counter the human mind’s thirst for magically transmuting messy history into orderly checklists. Clausewitz argued that only a disciplined cultivation of unconscious and intuitive empathy that placed you alongside real people trapped in real moments when their future (and your past) was still new and hadn’t hardened into iron fable could compensate for the insistent pull that legacy pasts and no more complexes have over the mind. History may be a fable agreed upon but there’s no cure for history but history.

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Before

During

After

Fable

In statecraft, there are:

• truths: Oahu is an island.
• assumptions: Oahu is an island. Pearl Harbor is a good anchorage for naval vessels.
• theories: Oahu is an island. Pearl Harbor is a good anchorage for naval vessels. A fleet based at Pearl Harbor can attack into the western Pacific or block attacks into the eastern Pacific.
• hypotheses: Oahu is an island. Pearl Harbor is a good anchorage for naval vessels. A fleet based at Pearl Harbor can attack into the western Pacific or block attacks into the eastern Pacific. Moving the U.S. Pacific fleet to Pearl Harbor leaves it close enough to deter Japan but far enough away to be safe from Japanese attacks.
• guesses: Oahu is an island. Pearl Harbor is a good anchorage for naval vessels. A fleet based at Pearl Harbor can attack into the western Pacific or block attacks into the eastern Pacific. Moving the U.S. Pacific fleet to Pearl Harbor leaves it close enough to deter Japanese aggression but far enough away to be safe from Japanese attack. The Japanese lack the will or power to attack Pearl Harbor with carrier based planes.

These are all exercises in faith. Eventually, they all end up reduced to fable. But each flavor of faith or fable differs from other flavors in the rigor of ritualized attention it demands, the fallout when it is followed or ignored, and the lessons it aspires to teach its true believers. The biggest risk run by statecraft is mistaking one kind of faith or fable for another and acting on that mistaken belief. Acting on a guess you have mistake for truth when the truth is that it is only a guess creates a mismatch between hard truth and hazy guess. It’s the impact of these mismatch that separate the harmful from the harmless and the tolerable from the inevitably fatal.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb proposed two distinct spheres of human experience in The Black Swan:

• Mediocristan: the realm of truths, safe assumptions, verifiable theories, reasonable hypotheses, and best guesses
• Extremistan: the realm of absent truths, unsafe assumptions, fantasies slumming as theories, crazed hypotheses, and wild guesses

The titular black swan is the kind of event that separates Mediocristan from Extremistan:

1. The black swan is disproportionately consequential.
2. The black swan cannot be predicted.
3. The black swan inevitably acquires a tight bodyguard of assumptions, theories, hypothesis, and guesses disguised as truths.

A black swan, contrary to its usual portrayal, is not always bad. In Taleb’s writings, black swans are neither intrinsically good or bad. A black swan is what you make of it. It can be a boon or disaster depending on its interplay with the residue of assumptions, theories, hypothesis, and guesses it collides with. The right residue of faith and fable can turn a black swan into progress. The wrong residue of accumulated mental debris can allow a black swan to set off a chain of cascading woe.

Yesterday, December 7, 2011, a day that is living in infamy, was the seventieth anniversary of the Japanese air raids on Pearl Harbor. One question, as usual, is automatically asked as scheduled: could the attack on Pearl Harbor be stopped? Each fable about Pearl Harbor strives to answer this annual question. Each fable differs in its particulars but their story lines clump together around a few premises:

• Americans were innocent victims of Japanese treachery
• Americans pushed Japan into war with a series of provocative sanctions but didn’t realize that the blowback included a Japanese attack
• Americans expected Japanese attacks but though they’d be focused on seizing British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia and not American targets
• Americans expected a Japanese attack but thought it would fall on our forces in the Philippines or elsewhere in the western Pacific
• The Roosevelt Administration knew there was an attack on Pearl Harbor but expected American forces in Hawaii to repel it
• The Roosevelt Administration knew there was an attack on Pearl Harbor and deliberately sabotaged efforts to defend the base from Japanese attack

This focus on prevention is an assumption. These fables assume that the right warning to Japan, the Roosevelt Administration, Admiral Kimmel, General Short, or Superman would have prevented the tragedy. This is the purpose of the moral of their fable, elevating its slant on events and its conclusions to truth, assumption, theory, hypothesis, or (when honest) guess.

This longing for prophecy misses the point: the black swan came. The attack on Pearl Harbor sucked American and Japanese alike into the vortex of war in its full primeval fury, wild contingency, and brutal instrumentality. There were no more angels of prevention in the whirlwind. Theory and hypothesis went out the window, leaving behind the hard truths of bombs, bullets, and torpedoes, the misplaced assumptions of peacetime training, and the frantic guessing of frightened boys in metal boxes left to feed flammable petroleum and explosive powder.

Whether the right warnings would have made a difference at Pearl Harbor is unknowable. There were many balls up in the air. The Japanese had never performed a carrier launched aerial attack on a naval base. The Americans had never defended a fleet at its moorings from an aerial attack. If American fighters had been in the air, the Pacific Fleet had gone to sea, or the U.S. Navy been at battle stations, the Japanese attack force might have suffered higher casualties, killed fewer Americans, and sunk fewer ship. The Japanese plan assumed higher losses in men and material that the attacking force suffered so the lopsided outcome in their favor was a pleasant (but unnerving) surprise.

Surprise didn’t kill 2,402 Americans, sink four American battleships and two destroyers, and destroy 188 aircraft on the ground. The Japanese did and it was the poor American response that let them do it. The dysfunctional American effort is only partly explained by shock. American defenses were poorly organized and fatally split between an Army and Navy more at war with each other than the Japanese. The U.S. national security establishment, from Washington to Pearl Harbor to Manila ,was still running at peacetime tempo despite a world running at war speed. Japanese Navy fliers had recent combat experience in and around Chinese waters. The U.S. Army had experienced fliers to counter them but they were away training in and around Chinese airspace. It was the accumulation of small differences like these that disproportionately rewarded Japanese attackers and disproportionately punished American defenders.

So Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his war. FDR had wanted a provocation. FDR had actively conspired to trigger a provocation. However, it’s unlikely that he conspired to trigger this provocation. This provocation inflicted significant damage on FDR’s beloved Navy, the very instrument he needed to intact to win the war he wanted to fight. FDR’s preferred outcome would have been a Japanese (or, better yet, Germans) sneak attack on Mom, Home, and Apple Pie. An attack on Mom, Home, and Apple Pie would have been a massive symbolic blow but it would’ve left America’s core war fighting power untouched.

The critical decision in the care and feeding of a black swan is what you do afterward. This is where faith and fable meet contingency: statecraft sees opportunity or peril in a black swan through the lenses of the truths, assumptions, theories, hypotheses, and guesses that it brings to the scene of the crash. Many of the actions that leaders in this warring states period took were based on the faiths and fables they took away from their fighting the last war.

• U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt took away several lessons from his experience during World War I. These were the lessons that led his actions following Pearl Harbor:
  1. The need to preemptively keep a single power from dominating Europe. Thomas Woodrow Wilson intervened against Germany because he feared that the threat of a victorious Germany meant the permanent militarization (“Prussianization” is what Wilson called it) of the United States of America. Wilson’s intervention, for all of its flaws, kept the U.S from Prussianization for another 19 years.
  2. The need to beat Germany (and anyone else) totally into the ground so they’re left with absolutely no illusion that they’d lost the war.
  3. The need for an unconditional postwar settlement that left the defeated no wiggle room to get out from under its treaty obligations.
  4. The need for more robust international security arrangements. FDR wanted the four quarters of the globe patrolled by the “four policemen”: the US, USSR, UK, and China. The facade of this four way division was a more muscular League of Nations 2.0 in the new United Nations. The reality of this four way partition was based on America running China as a puppet, reducing Britain to a compliant poodle shorn of its empire, and mesmerizing the USSR with personal charm.
• For Winston Churchill, Member of Parliament; Lord of the Admiralty; Lieutenant Colonel, 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers; and minister of munitions, Pearl Harbor offered a replay of his experience of 1917-1918. Timely American assistance saved France and Britain from defeat and preserved his precious empire. American entry into World War II would also let Churchill propose countless variations on Gallipoli where American servicemen were repeatedly thrown against the Alps guarding Europe’s “soft underbelly” in the name of outsized British interests that seemed to balloon even as Britain itself shrank.
• For Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler of the Bavarian Army, Pearl Harbor only confirmed the inevitable. Hitler’s strategy sought to create an integrated political and economic unit on the European continent with the power and clout to resist the material resources commanded by the Americans and British. This would prevent a replay of his experience of 1918-1919 when American and British material power forced Germany into armistice followed by an Anglo-American naval blockade in 1919 that starved Germany into signing Versailles. Hitler would first kick away the English-speaking power’s best tool on the continent, Soviet Russia, and then he’d be able to face the maritime military and material might of America and Britain with the full resources of Eurasia at his command. Hitler already thought FDR, president and tool of the center of world Jewry, was at war with him. Pearl Harbor only made the war explicit under international law.
• For evil commie Joseph Stalin, it allowed him to live another day while setting the imperialists against each other, leaving the Communists to exploit the disarray after the war like Lenin did after World War I. Stalin didn’t even need a sealed train since he already had sealed moles in the White House.
• The leadership of the Japanese army saw a rerun of their short but splendid wars in World War I and earlier in the Russo-Japanese War where the shock of quick and surprising victories by little yellow men over large white supermen led to a favorable peace before Japan exhausted its limited resource base. They hoped to bleed the soft Americans white through demoralizing defeats and brutal battles.

The actions these men and millions of others took were based on mental models they’d gleaned from previous experience but the actions they took were taken after the attack, in circumstances and challenges it created. Their past did not allow them to foresee the black swan of Pearl Harbor. But it’s not the black swan that matters. It’s how you care for and feed the opportunities and perils that the black swan unleashes.

In 216 B.C., a Carthaginian army led by Hannibal Barça defeated the Roman Republic at Cannae, reputedly sending over 50,000 Romans to their death in the course of one day:

Following the battle, commander of the Numidian cavalry Maharbal urged Hannibal to seize the opportunity and march immediately on Rome. It is told that the latter’s refusal caused Maharbal’s exclamation: “Truly the Gods have not bestowed all things upon the same person. Thou knowest indeed, Hannibal, how to conquer, but thou knowest not how to make use of your victory.

Whether Pearl Harbor was an American or Japanese victory to make use of remains an unanswered question. Whether FDR or his peers knew how to make good use of the event is ambiguous. The attack itself lasted only a few frantic hours. But the attack Pearl Harbor has been in constant use ever since. As original vintage memories of the attack fade, the black swan of Pearl Harbor wastes away to anonymous gray. Soon there will be no one left to care and feed it. But the faith and fable of Pearl Harbor, glommed from half-truths, lazy assumptions, tenuous theories, fragile hypotheses, and ignorant guesses, goes moralizing on. Any truth in Pearl Harbor’s faiths and fables will only show when the terrors of December once again descend on innocence out of another clear blue morning sky.

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Kapler the Brave

Alexei Kapler was the bravest of men.

How brave?

Put it this way: there are two kinds of brave:

• Brave
• Alexei Kapler brave.

Alexei Kapler was Alexei Kapler brave.

By profession, Kapler was a screenwriter, journalist, director, and actor. By avocation, he was an accomplished womanizer. One night, Kapler, a man of forty years, met a sixteen year old girl at a party. This young woman was intelligent, strong-willed, attractive, and sad. It was the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death. No one seemed to remember. Kapler was happy to listen, comfort, sympathize, and seduce.

Since his new conquest came from a sheltered background, Kapler decided to show her the wild side of life. He lent her forbidden adult books. He took her dancing, took her to see avaunt garde theater, and took her to meet outrageous people at outrageous parties. Kapler was a man of the world, witty, knowledgeable, a skilled raconteur. The young woman was swept off her feet by this urbane sophisticate. There were problems though: Kepler was married. And he was having an affair with a sixteen year old girl.

Hiding the affair from her family was a must. Hiding it from the girl’s father was especially important. Kapler was a smooth enough operator that he might have kept their affair secret from the girl’s father under normal circumstances. Unfortunately for him, this girl’s father had a particularly suspicious temperament. While something like this temperament is not unusual in any father of a sixteen year old girl, this father was different:

He could have phones tapped.

The Dashing Young Supehero

Young Svetlana, for that was her name, was the daughter of one Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. Early in life, instead of becoming a priest like his mother wanted, Ioseb decided he wanted to be a superhero. So he adopted the name “Joe Steel” for his superhero persona. Steel became the local Caucasian Robin Hood, pulling off the largest gold robbery in Russian history. Then he spent the money on “liberating” the Russian people. Later in his career, Steel achieved some prominence as the humble secretary of a prominent Russian political party.

To his American fans, Ioseb was known as kindly Uncle Joe. To the Russians, he was known as Joseph Stalin.

Stalin was shown phone intercepts of calls between Svetlana and Kapler by the ever helpful NKVD. Enraged, he confronted Svetlana, revealing that he knew everything about the affair and demanded that she hand over all of her letters from Kapler. When Sventlana dramatically protested her love for Kapler. Stalin, as Svetlana later wrote in Twenty Letters To A Friend, was not pleased:

“Love!”, shrieked Stalin, “with hatred of the very word” and “for the first time in my life,” slapped [Svetlana] twice across the face.

Simon Sebag Montefiore picks up the story at this point in his book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar:

Stalin gathered up the letters and took them to the dining room where he sat at the table where Churchill had dined—and, ignoring [World War II] altogether, started to read them. He did not appear [at work] that day.

When Svetlana came home from school, Stalin ripped up Kapler’s letters in front of her. As he savagely ridiculed Kapler, Svetlana fled the room in tears. Stalin and his daughter didn’t speak for months afterward. Even then, their relationship never recovered: Kapler had forever damaged the fragile bloodthirsty communist dictator-daughter bond.

Montefiore offers this analysis of the situation:

This is often presented as the height of Stalin’s brutality yet, even today, no parents would be delighted by the seduction (as he thought) of their schoolgirl daughters, especially by a married middle-aged playboy. Yet Stalin was a traditional Georgian steeped in nineteenth-century prudery and to this day, Georgian fathers are likely to resort to their shotguns at the least provocation. “Being a Georgian, he should have shot that ladies’ man,” says [Stalin's nephew] Vladimir Redens. Long after she wrote her memoirs, Svetlana understood that “my father over-reacted”: he thought he was “protecting his daughter from a dirty older man”.

Kapler, not satisfied with the bravery he demonstrated by seducing the teenaged daughter of an evil totalitarian dictator, insisted on boasting about the affair to his friends. However, Alexei Kapler brave demanded more. Montefiore continues:

Dispatched to cover Stalingrad for Pravda, filing his “Letters of Lieutenant L from Stalingrad” in which he daringly paraded his affair with the words: “It’s probably snowing in Moscow. You can see the crenelated wall of the Kremlin from your window.”

So, even before Stalin confronted Svetlana, Kapler found himself staying at the Lubyanka. The Lubyanka has some charming fin de siècle architectural features:

The Lubyanka was originally built in 1898 as the Neo-Baroque headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company, noted for its beautiful parquet floors and pale green walls. Belying its massiveness, the edifice avoids an impression of heroic scale: isolated Palladian and Baroque details, such as the minute pediments over the corner bays and the central loggia, are lost in an endlessly-repeating classicizing palace facade, where three bands of cornices emphasize the horizontal lines. A clock is centered in the uppermost band of the facade.

The Lubyanka is also one of the great scenes of mass murder in history, up there with Auschwitz, the killing fields of Cambodia, Srebrenicia, or the forests of Rwanda. People went inside and never came out. Kapler went inside, found himself convicted of being a “British spy”, and disappeared into the GULAG. That’s the kind of risk you run when you’re Alexei Kapler brave.

Kapler was lucky: he survived Stalin. After his release from the GULAG, Kapler lived to see the age of 75, dying on September 11, 1979.

Svetlana “Lana” Iosifovna Stalin Morozov Zhdanov Alliluyeva Peters died on November 22, 2011 at Richland Center, Wisconsin. She was 85.

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Things weren’t always this way between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Herbert Clark Hoover.

In 1920, Herbert Hoover was the Greatest American of the Twentieth Century™. Between 1914 and 1920, he saved millions of people in Europe and Russia from starvation by leading the greatest humanitarian aid effort in human history. Worldwide acclaim for Hoover’s efforts led many Americans to push to make him president of the United States.

Both parties eagerly courted Hoover as a candidate. The incumbent president, infernal war criminal and Democrat Thomas Woodrow Wilson, supported Hoover’s nomination as his successor. Even the Democratic Party’s eventual vice presidential nominee, Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, encouraged Hoover to run for president as a Democrat, remarking that, among the possible nominees for 1920, “There could not be a finer one”.

But Hoover discovered and embraced his inner Republican in 1920, a Republican year fueled by anger against Wilsonian excess at home and abroad. Though FDR ran an energetic campaign for vice president, one lonely bright spot amid the carnage of Democratic fortunes that year, Hoover and Roosevelt’s destiny’s diverged: Hoover rose to new heights of glory after Harding appointed him Secretary of Commerce (and Hoover appointed himself “the Under Secretary of Everything Else”). His “energy” in office led Coolidge, from whom it was usually impossible to pry two syllables, let alone three, to nickname Hoover “Wonder Boy” (not as a compliment). Meanwhile, Roosevelt contracted a crippling case of Guillain-Barre syndrome from local Boy Scouts that left him unable to move on two feet without the aid of a cane and one of his four muscular sons, leaving his political future in doubt.

But history, always in motion it is. Hoover succeeded Coolidge as president in 1928 only to be murder-murder-death-killed by Great Depression II. Meanwhile, FDR discovered he was America’s finest actor, leading him to try out for and win the lead role in a popular New York show that ran to packed houses from 1929-1932. So, by November 1932, Hoover had gone from Greatest American of the Twentieth Century™ to Dourest American of the Twentieth Century. FDR, outflanking Hoover from the right by accusing him of being a tax and spend big gubmint socialist who wanted to centralize power in Washington, was elected President and was soon well on his way to replacing Hoover as the Greatest American of the Twentieth Century©.

What had been a friendly relationship between Hoover and FDR turned sour, leaving both men despising each other. This happens to every couple who lets James Buchanan come between them. No one ever expects James Buchanan but come he will. FDR was a Democrat because his father James served as secretary to Buchanan, a Democrat, while Buchanan served as minister to Great Britain from 1853 to 1856. So, just as Buchanan came between North and South during his disastrous presidency, a chance social encounter between the worst president in American history and a dashing young man from New York clanged down like an iron curtain between FDR and Hoover.

The bitterness only grew as spiteful act piled on spiteful act. FDR renamed Hoover’s dam. Hoover became a more and more vocal critic of Roosevelt’s mismanagement of Hoover’s economic policies. FDR spent the rest of the 1930s running against Hoover even though Hoover’s name wasn’t on the Republican ticket. As Fascism, Communism, and other flavors of authoritarianism spread across the world, Hoover warned that the New Deal might lead to FDR becoming another Hoover.

When World War II broke out, FDR was pressed to call Hoover back into service. FDR refused, once even protesting that he was not THE LORD: he couldn’t raise “Herbie” from the dead. But FDR went the way of all flesh in April 1945. By 1946, Harry S. Truman, FDR’s successor, had Hoover touring Germany to make recommendations. By 1947, Truman had Hoover reorganizing the Federal government. Afterwards, Hoover and Truman became members of the Former President’s Labor Union, an organization whose lobbying helped win pensions, health insurance, collective bargaining, and other civil rights for former U.S. presidents in 1958. Hoover died in 1964, becoming the third dignitary and second former president to require Black Jack’s services during 1963-1964 state funeral season.

In that light, it’s interesting that only now, almost fifty years after Hoover’s death, that the Hoover Institution has finally gotten around to raising Hoover’s unpublished magnum opus Freedom Betrayed from the dead.

Gerald J. Russello (props to the Isegoria news service) writes:

Hoover wrote it over the decades after losing the 1932 election, but for various reasons was reluctant for most of his life to publish the “magnum opus,” as he called it, and so it has waited quietly in the archives of the Hoover Institution.
 
Hoover represents an older American tradition, one almost eclipsed since the New Deal. Having seen the horrors of war during World War I, he had no interest in seeing American lives lost in another bloody conflict. He was anti-interventionist, even in World War II, and he was keenly aware of the Communist infiltration of the federal government, which he thought more likely given Roosevelt’s left-leaning policies. On the second point, his suspicious largely proved right, as we know from the released Verona cables and other data from Soviet Russia: the Communists indeed were actively recruiting Americans and trying to change American policy, and there were sympathetic ears even in Washington elite circles.
 
The former position is trickier to defend, even now in the age of the Tea Party and Patrick Buchanan. Hoover, in a detailed analysis, argues that America faced no threat from European powers, which should be left to work out problems for themselves. Hoover was no anti-Semite, nor was he indifferent to the fate of the oppressed peoples of Europe or a member of America First. Hoover favored the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which would waive immigration restrictions for German Jews, and raised money to place German-Jewish scholars in American universities. But he represented a tradition, traceable to George Washington, that looks with a skeptical eye at claims for foreign entanglements and calls to become the world’s policeman. He favored letting Germany and Russia exhaust themselves first, as he stated in a public radio address in June 1941 after the Nazi invasion of Russia. His voice was ultimately drowned out by the Pearl Harbor attack, though he collects scrupulous evidence in this volume of some intelligence pointing to such an attack, a question that is still hotly debated.

I agree with what I know of Hoover’s argument that we could have done a better job of letting the Germans and Russians bleed each other dry. However, that was our unstated strategy in the European theater and, to a large extent, we followed it: we traded many a dead Ivan for one living G.I. through clever procrastination. Whether FDR had a swindle for Stalin up his sleeves that he was saving for after the war is unknown. Roosevelt constantly boasted that he never allowed his right hand to know what his left hand was doing. It’s possible that his right hand was moving left while his left hand was moving right. He never told anyone what his scheming brain was cooking up. He left Truman with a lot of tossed balls up in the air.

If we were charitable, we could describe Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s strategy during World War I in the same light: he let the Europeans bleed each other dry for three years only to step in at the last second and get all the poker chips for himself. Whether this was Wilson’s conscious design is doubtful. He exclaimed, “I’m not going to be like Lincoln. I’m going to run this war the right way.”, to the son of an acquaintance but never elaborated what he meant by that statement. But, as things played out, America was one of the few victors of World War I. The British and French accepted the armistice in November 1918 out of fear that growing American leverage over them would become unmanageable if the war went on longer. Wilson accepted the armistice because he wanted to October surprise the Republicans during the November 1918 Congressional elections.

However, Hoover’s book is spot on with the Communists. The problem with the Red Scare of the 1950s was not that it happened but that it didn’t go far enough in purging agents of foreign influence, fellow travelers, and omnipresent fellow travelers from the institutions of the United States.

Freedom Betrayed should be worth picking up, if only to get a fresh look at events that the modern Left considers settled and even fossilized liturgy.

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Courtesy of Isegoria, the correspondence of Geoffrey Boothroyd, 31, English, unmarried, and member of the National Rifle Association, Great Britain, English Twenty Club, National Rifle Association of America (nonresident member), West of Scotland Rifle Club, and Muzzle Loaders Association of Great Britain and Ian Fleming, author, journalist, and birdwatching enthusiast.

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I linked to the Europe from its Origins podcast earlier. It may not be for everyone since it uses a traditional European historical sensibility, big words, and fancy pants furrin’ pronunciation but since the ChicagoBoyz demographic skews older and wiser, it should give everyone something meaty to chew on (I’d put in your teeth first).

There was a problem with the iTunes link. That problem has been largely fixed (episode 10 points at an image but the link should be eventually correct). I’ve updated the links from my original post below the fold:

1. AD 312-390: Constantinian Revolution [download video]

2. AD 350-530: Assimilation of the Germani [download video]

3. AD 500-620: Roman Empire Renewed [download video]

4. AD 500-633: The Graeco-Roman East [download video]

5. AD 630-680: The Islamic Invasions [download video]

6. AD 680-754: Latin Christendom [download video]

7. AD 754-840: Charlemagne [download video]

8. AD 840-990: The Deluge [download video]

9. AD 960-1070: A new civilization [download video]

10. AD 968-1095: The West steps forward [download video]

11. AD 1075-1122: Consensus & Crusade [download video]

12. AD 1100-1200: Cultural Efflorescence [download video]

13. AD 1100s & 1200s: Christian Republic [download video]

14. AD 1147-1204: Christendom Expanding [download video]

15. AD 1204-1238: The Feudal Polity [download video]

16. AD 1238-1291: The Struggle for Order [download video]

17. AD 1200-1350: Cultural Shift [download video]

18. AD 1276-1347: Princely Sovereignty [download video]

19. AD 1347-1396: Division & Disasters [download video]

20. AD 1356-1414: The Great Schism [download video]

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Like other commenters, I was struck by this observation of Lex’s while he related his tale of his initial Occupy Chicago encounter:

My hatred of the Boomers, who have brainwashed and wasted these kids
is boundless. There is nothing wrong with them. They have just never
been taught anything but bullshit. They have been betrayed by their
parents and their teachers. It is very depressing. The country has
been shamefully dumbed down.

Three weeks ago, Thomas S. Monson, the president of my church, observed:

I recently read an article in the New York Times concerning a study which took place during the summer of 2008. A distinguished Notre Dame sociologist led a research team in conducting in-depth interviews with 230 young adults across America. I believe we can safely assume that the results would be similar in most parts of the world.
 
I share with you just a portion of this very telling article:
 
“The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong,
moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, … you
see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do
so.
 
“When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.”
 
The article continues:
 
“The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. ‘It’s personal,’ the respondents typically said. ‘It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?’
 
“Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme [saying]: ‘I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.’
 
Those who conducted the interviews emphasized that the majority of the young people with whom they spoke had “not been given the resources—by schools, institutions [or] families—to cultivate their moral intuitions.”

Pre-modern Chinese scholars thought that calling a thing by its correct name was very important. It was even more important during and after the chaos and violence that rages as one dynasty of rulers fell and another arose. Many of our fellow countrymen sense something is wrong with how things are. They sense that the things that are wrong have names. But they don’t know what to call them. They sense that the names peddled to them by the usual suspects are not the true names of the things that worry them with their wrongness.

So they’re mired in frustration. Some of this frustration is unavoidable. Some things our fellow Americans want are impossible. Others are mutually exclusive. They go together like matches and small children and they can’t be reconciled into a coherent whole.

This detachment from how things really are is inevitable and all too human. But much of the incoherence of their worries is a side-effect of their lack of mental vocabulary to form their sense of wrongness into a concrete program of action. Some of this lack of mental vocabulary is accidental. Some of it has been deliberately cultivated.

I don’t endorse resilient communitarian John Robb and some other observers’ description of the incoherence produced by this lack of mental vocabulary as a feature. John Robb in particular is often spot on in his analysis of emerging developments but his synthesis is frequently iffy, though that just may be my head buzzing with unpurged legacy thought.

If Occupy* adhered to the model preached by fourth generation warfare advocates and further elaborated by Robb as “open source insurgency”, their goals would be concentrated in ideaspace to a coherent program but their actions in meatspace in pursuit of that program would be dispersed. For a hypothetical open source insurgency, a coherent program acts like mission-type orders. These types of orders, called Normaltaktiker by the German officers who developed and sometimes used them, would tell a subordinate officer which hill to seize and why they need to take the hill but not how to take the hill. Details of taking the hill are left to the discretion and initiative of the subordinate. His superiors don’t interfere as long as his discretion and initiative don’t violate the intent of his orders and the overall battle, war, or policy.

In an open source insurgency, supporters know why they need to take the hill but there should be no one who forces them to take the hill by providing a checklist that must be ticked off in order or else. The open source insurgent is supposed to understand the intent of their goals and what actions will advance those goals without violating that intent without supervision from a core cadre. More experienced insurgents may provide how-to manuals for performing certain actions but the role of such guides is purely advisory. This hands-off approach should supposedly allow open source insurgents to launch a series of disconnected, dispersed, and distributed actions intended to build towards realizing their shared goals through the accumulated reactions they trigger. It should require no direct contact with one another or a centralized command and control authority, allowing open source insurgents to remain disconnected, dispersed, and distributed
so they they aren’t a big, fat juicy target for the Powers that Be.

Occupy* seems to be following the opposite pattern. They’re concentrating for action but have widely (and wildly) dispersed goals. They don’t know what all their actions are for because they lack the correct mental names to call out what’s going on.

There are undoubtedly elements within Occupy* that have a concrete agenda whose goal is to co-opt it in pursuit of their own agenda. They know very well what they name the situation as. As Lex observed in his reconnaissance, the usual suspects are already trying. They’re trying to create ”democratic” institutions that will allow them to co-opt the unfocused to support their program through procedural niceties. It seems they have yet to fully succeed.

So far Occupy* is following the classic American political progression of:

1. First you’re accused of being astroturf.
2. Then you’re feared.
3. Then you’re co-opted.
4. Then you’re astroturf.

They say they want a revolution. To have a revolution, you must have a secular social catechism that accumulates the sort of strategic effects that will trigger a fatal split in our current set of societal elites. In the crisis so far, we’ve only seen dusty formulas trotted out by ancient and creaky Boomers yearning to re-fight the glorious battles of youth.

Again.

And again.

Here’s an unintended side-effect of extended human ;ifespans: ideological stasis. To butcher Max Planck: a political notion does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Boomers, given unnaturally long biological life by historical developments they barely comprehend, give unnaturally long life to their foolishly destructive notions. Society may stagnate in some areas while progressing in others with unforeseen effects. This may make the process of sorting out of what’s needed to grapple with our current predicament prolonged, painful, and prone to triggering frustration and outbreaks of corrective violence.

Go tell the Boomers that, in the words of Oliver Cromwell and Leo Amery:

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

We should endorse Lex’s efforts to creatively engage with this upsurge. Coalescing movements for change need fresh and vigorous mental ammunition for the struggle. Creative engagement is necessary for building an arsenal for renewed civic vigor as we stumble towards new political formulas for these United States.

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I recently listened to this fascinating podcast: Europe from its Origins. It provides a unique in-depth review of the history of the Dark Continent from 312-1414 (so far).

Joseph Hogarty, the author, takes the unique tack of using contemporary names of historical people and places rather than the received historical name.

For example:

• Constantinius vs. Constantine
• Antiochea vs. Antioch
• Clodovicius vs. Clovis
• Fracia vs. France
• Carolus Martellus vs. Charles Martel
• Carolus Magnus vs. Charlemagne

Hogarty stresses the strong continuity between Rome and post-476 Western Europe (except poor distant Britannia). He argues that the great discontinuity between Western medieval Europe and the Western empire of antiquity was not the Germanic barbarian invasions of c. 400 onward but the Islamic conquest of half of the Roman empire after 633. In following this narrative thread, Hogarty’s work slants away from recent scholarship that portrays the Islamic conquest as a welcome breath of desert tolerance warmly embraced by the Christians of Roman Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Africa. Hogarty argues instead that the Islamic conquest was a bloody usurpation that, uniquely in world history, retribalized every complex urban civilization it touched.

There’s a trace element of disregard for the English but you might miss it since Hogarty has devoted little time to the proto-Anglosphere so far. However, Europe from its Origins is an excellent example of how to produce a podcast with a professional eye. The script is tight and well researched, Hogarty’s voice narration is smooth and professional. His podcast files are encoded in MPEG 4 format since they come with pictures (!). All in all, I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to throw some light on their knowledge of the development of Western European civilization.

Hogarty’s podcast is available through iTunes but the links are currently broken through iTunes or RSS. The site is apparently in the midst of reorganization so I’ve added the direct links to the individual episode pages and files below:

1. AD 312-390: Constantinian Revolution [download video]

2. AD 350-530: Assimilation of the Germani [download video]

3. AD 500-620: Roman Empire Renewed [download video]

4. AD 500-633: The Graeco-Roman East [download video]

5. AD 630-680: The Islamic Invasions [download video]

6. AD 680-754: Latin Christendom [download video]

7. AD 754-840: Charlemagne [download video]

8. AD 840-990: The Deluge [download video]

9. AD 960-1070: A new civilization [download video]

10. AD 968-1095: The West steps forward [download video]

11. AD 1075-1122: Consensus & Crusade [download video]

12. AD 1100-1200: Cultural Efflorescence [download video]

13. AD 1100s & 1200s: Christian Republic [download video]

14. AD 1147-1204: Christendom Expanding [download video]

15. AD 1204-1238: The Feudal Polity [download video]

16. AD 1238-1291: The Struggle for Order [download video]

17. AD 1200-1350: Cultural Shift [download video]

18. AD 1276-1347: Princely Sovereignty [download video]

19. AD 1347-1396: Division & Disasters [download video]

20. AD 1356-1414: The Great Schism [download video]

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The sentiment of Mr. Charles James Napier on multicultural understanding and tolerance:

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.

The sentiment of Mr. Charles James Napier on effective government:

The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed.

The sentiment of Mr. Charles James Napier on how to win friends and influence people:

The human mind is never better disposed to gratitude and attachment than when softened by fear.

The sentiment of Mr. Charles James Napier on colonialism:

So perverse is mankind that every nationality prefers to be misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another.

The sentiment of Mr. Charles James Napier on self-improvement:

Success is like war and like charity in religion, it covers a multitude of sins.

The sentiment of Mr. Charles James Napier on life’s little setbacks:

Honorable retreats are no ways inferior to brave charges, as having less fortune, more of discipline, and as much valor.

Not a sentiment of Mr. Charles James Napier regarding south Pakistani tourism:

Peccavi.

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Lukewarm:

Whatever may be the traditional sympathy of our countrymen as individuals with a people who seem to be struggling for larger autonomy and greater freedom, deepened, as such sympathy naturally must be, in behalf of our neighbors, yet the plain duty of their Government is to observe in good faith the recognized obligations of international relationship. The performance of this duty should not be made more difficult by a disregard on the part of our citizens of the obligations growing out of their allegiance to their country, which should restrain them from violating as individuals the neutrality which the nation of which they are members is bound to observe in its relations to friendly sovereign states. Though neither the warmth of our people’s sympathy with the Cuban insurgents, nor our loss and material damage consequent upon the futile endeavors thus far made to restore peace and order, nor any shock our humane sensibilities may have received from the cruelties which appear to especially characterize this sanguinary and fiercely conducted war, have in the least shaken the determination of the Government to honestly fulfill every international obligation, yet it is to be earnestly hoped on every ground that the devastation of armed conflict may speedily be stayed and order and quiet restored to the distracted island, bringing in their train the activity and thrift of peaceful pursuits.

Warm:

The insurrection in Cuba still continues with all its perplexities. It is difficult to perceive that any progress has thus far been made toward the pacification of the island or that the situation of affairs as depicted in my last annual message has in the least improved. If Spain still holds Havana and the seaports and all the considerable towns, the insurgents still roam at will over at least two-thirds of the inland country. If the determination of Spain to put down the insurrection seems but to strengthen with the lapse of time and is evinced by her unhesitating devotion of largely increased military and naval forces to the task, there is much reason to believe that the insurgents have gained in point of numbers and character and resources and are none the less inflexible in their resolve not to succumb without practically securing the great objects for which they took up arms. If Spain has not yet reestablished her authority, neither have the insurgents yet made good their title to be regarded as an independent state. Indeed, as the contest has gone on the pretense that civil government exists on the island, except so far as Spain is able to maintain it, has been practically abandoned. Spain does keep on foot such a government, more or less imperfectly, in the large towns and their immediate suburbs; but that exception being made, the entire country is either given over to anarchy or is subject to the military occupation of one or the other party. It is reported, indeed, on reliable authority that at the demand of the commander in chief of the insurgent army the putative Cuban government has now given up all attempt to exercise its functions, leaving that government confessedly (what there is the best reason for supposing it always to have been in fact) a government merely on paper.

Were the Spanish armies able to meet their antagonists in the open or in pitched battle, prompt and decisive results might be looked for, and the immense superiority of the Spanish forces in numbers, discipline, and equipment could hardly fail to tell greatly to their advantage. But they are called upon to face a foe that shuns general engagements, that can choose and does choose its own ground, that from the nature of the country is visible or invisible at pleasure, and that fights only from ambuscade and when all the advantages of position and numbers are on its side. In a country where all that is indispensable to life in the way of food, clothing, and shelter is so easily obtainable, especially by those born and bred on the soil, it is obvious that there is hardly a limit to the time during which hostilities of this sort may be prolonged. Meanwhile, as in all cases of protracted civil strife, the passions of the combatants grow more and more inflamed and excesses on both sides become more frequent and more deplorable. They are also participated in by bands of marauders, who, now in the name of one party and now in the name of the other, as may best suit the occasion, harry the country at will and plunder its wretched inhabitants for their own advantage. Such a condition of things would inevitably entail immense destruction of property, even if it were the policy of both parties to prevent it as far as practicable; but while such seemed to be the original policy of the Spanish Government, it has now apparently abandoned it and is acting upon the same theory as the insurgents, namely, that the exigencies of the contest require the wholesale annihilation of property that it may not prove of use and advantage to the enemy.

It is to the same end that, in pursuance of general orders, Spanish garrisons are now being withdrawn from plantations and the rural population required to concentrate itself in the towns. The sure result would seem to be that the industrial value of the island is fast diminishing and that unless there is a speedy and radical change in existing conditions it will soon disappear altogether…

The spectacle of the utter ruin of an adjoining country, by nature one of the most fertile and charming on the globe, would engage the serious attention of the Government and people of the United States in any circumstances. In point of fact, they have a concern with it which is by no means of a wholly sentimental or philanthropic character. It lies so near to us as to be hardly separated from our territory. Our actual pecuniary interest in it is second only to that of the people and Government of Spain…Besides this large pecuniary stake in the fortunes of Cuba, the United States finds itself inextricably involved in the present contest in other ways, both vexatious and costly…

These inevitable entanglements of the United States with the rebellion in Cuba, the large American property interests affected, and considerations of philanthropy and humanity in general have led to a vehement demand in various quarters for some sort of positive intervention on the part of the United States. It was at first proposed that belligerent rights should be accorded to the insurgents—a proposition no longer urged because untimely and in practical operation dearly perilous and injurious to our own interests. It has since been and is now sometimes contended that the independence of the insurgents should be recognized; but imperfect and restricted as the Spanish government of the island may be, no other exists there, unless the will of the military officer in temporary command of a particular district can be dignified as a species of government. It is now also suggested that the United States should buy the island—a suggestion possibly worthy of consideration if there were any evidence of a desire or willingness on the part of Spain to entertain such a proposal. It is urged finally that, all other methods failing, the existing internecine strife in Cuba should be terminated by our intervention, even at the cost of a war between the United States and Spain—a war which its advocates confidently prophesy could neither be large in its proportions nor doubtful in its issue.

The correctness of this forecast need be neither affirmed nor denied. The United States has, nevertheless, a character to maintain as a nation, which plainly dictates that right and not might should be the rule of its conduct. Further, though the United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity, it is in truth the most pacific of powers and desires nothing so much as to live in amity with all the world. Its own ample and diversified domains satisfy all possible longings for territory, preclude all dreams of conquest, and prevent any casting of covetous eyes upon neighboring regions, however attractive. That our conduct toward Spain and her dominions has constituted no exception to this national disposition is made manifest by the course of our Government, not only thus far during the present insurrection, but during the ten years that followed the rising at Yara in 1868. No other great power, it may safely be said, under circumstances of similar perplexity, would have manifested the same restraint and the same patient endurance. It may also be said that this persistent attitude of the United States toward Spain in connection with Cuba unquestionably evinces no slight respect and regard for Spain on the part of the American people. They in truth do not forget her connection with the discovery of the Western Hemisphere, nor do they underestimate the great qualities of the Spanish people nor fail to fully recognize their splendid patriotism and their chivalrous devotion to the national honor.

They view with wonder and admiration the cheerful resolution with which vast bodies of men are sent across thousands of miles of ocean and an enormous debt accumulated that the costly possession of the gem of the Antilles may still hold its place in the Spanish crown. And yet neither the Government nor the people of the United States have shut their eyes to the course of events in Cuba or have failed to realize the existence of conceded grievances which have led to the present revolt from the authority of Spain—grievances recognized by the Queen Regent and by the Cortes, voiced by the most patriotic and enlightened of Spanish statesmen, without regard to party, and demonstrated by reforms proposed by the executive and approved by the legislative branch of the Spanish Government. It is in the assumed temper and disposition of the Spanish Government to remedy these grievances, fortified by indications of influential public opinion in Spain, that this Government has hoped to discover the most promising and effective means of composing the present strife with honor and advantage to Spain and with the achievement of all the reasonable objects of the insurrection.

It would seem that if Spain should offer to Cuba genuine autonomy—a measure of home rule which, while preserving the sovereignty of Spain, would satisfy all rational requirements of her Spanish subjects—there should be no just reason why the pacification of the island might not be effected on that basis. Such a result would appear to be in the true interest of all concerned. It would at once stop the conflict which is now consuming the resources of the island and making it worthless for whichever party may ultimately prevail. It would keep intact the possessions of Spain without touching her honor, which will be consulted rather than impugned by the adequate redress of admitted grievances. It would put the prosperity of the island and the fortunes of its inhabitants within their own control without severing the natural and ancient ties which bind them to the mother country, and would yet enable them to test their capacity for self-government under the most favorable conditions. It has been objected on the one side that Spain should not promise autonomy until her insurgent subjects lay down their arms; on the other side, that promised autonomy, however liberal, is insufficient, because without assurance of the promise being fulfilled.

But the reasonableness of a requirement by Spain of unconditional surrender on the part of the insurgent Cubans before their autonomy is conceded is not altogether apparent. It ignores important features of the situation—the stability two years’ duration has given to the insurrection; the feasibility of its indefinite prolongation in the nature of things, and, as shown by past experience, the utter and imminent ruin of the island unless the present strife is speedily composed; above all, the rank abuses which all parties in Spain, all branches of her Government, and all her leading public men concede to exist and profess a desire to remove. Facing such circumstances, to withhold the proffer of needed reforms until the parties demanding them put themselves at mercy by throwing down their arms has the appearance of neglecting the gravest of perils and inviting suspicion as to the sincerity of any professed willingness to grant reforms. The objection on behalf of the insurgents that promised reforms can not be relied upon must of course be considered, though we have no right to assume and no reason for assuming that anything Spain undertakes to do for the relief of Cuba will not be done according to both the spirit and the letter of the undertaking.

Nevertheless, realizing that suspicions and precautions on the part of the weaker of two combatants are always natural and not always unjustifiable, being sincerely desirous in the interest of both as well as on its own account that the Cuban problem should be solved with the least possible delay, it was intimated by this Government to the Government of Spain some months ago that if a satisfactory measure of home rule were tendered the Cuban insurgents and would be accepted by them upon a guaranty of its execution the United States would endeavor to find a way not objectionable to Spain of furnishing such graranty. While no definite response to this intimation has yet been received from the Spanish Government, it is believed to be not altogether unwelcome, while, as already suggested, no reason is perceived why it should not be approved by the insurgents. Neither party can fail to see the importance of early action, and both must realize that to prolong the present state of things for even a short period will add enormously to the time and labor and expenditure necessary to bring about the industrial recuperation of the island. It is therefore fervently hoped on all grounds that earnest efforts for healing the breach between Spain and the insurgent Cubans upon the lines above indicated may be at once inaugurated and pushed to an immediate and successful issue. The friendly offices of the United States, either in the manner above outlined or in any other way consistent with our Constitution and laws, will always be at the disposal of either party.

Whatever circumstances may arise, our policy and our interests would constrain us to object to the acquisition of the island or an interference with its control by any other power.

It should be added that it can not be reasonably assumed that the hitherto expectant attitude of the United States will be indefinitely maintained. While we are anxious to accord all due respect to the sovereignty of Spain, we can not view the pending conflict in all its features and properly apprehend our inevitably close relations to it and its possible results without considering that by the course of events we may be drawn into such an unusual and unprecedented condition as will fix a limit to our patient waiting for Spain to end the contest, either alone and in her own way or with our friendly cooperation.

When the inability of Spain to deal successfully with the insurrection has become manifest and it is demonstrated that her sovereignty is extinct in Cuba for all purposes of its rightful existence, and when a hopeless struggle for its reestablishment has degenerated into a strife which means nothing more than the useless sacrifice of human life and the utter destruction of the very subject-matter of the conflict, a situation will be presented in which our obligations to the sovereignty of Spain will be superseded by higher obligations, which we can hardly hesitate to recognize and discharge. Deferring the choice of ways and methods until the time for action arrives, we should make them depend upon the precise conditions then existing; and they should not be determined upon without giving careful heed to every consideration involving our honor and interest or the international duty we owe to Spain. Until we face the contingencies suggested or the situation is by other incidents imperatively changed we should continue in the line of conduct heretofore pursued, thus in all circumstances exhibiting our obedience to the requirements of public law and our regard for the duty enjoined upon us by the position we occupy in the family of nations.

A contemplation of emergencies that may arise should plainly lead us to avoid their creation, either through a careless disregard of present duty or even an undue stimulation and ill-timed expression of feeling. But I have deemed it not amiss to remind the Congress that a time may arrive when a correct policy and care for our interests, as well as a regard for the interests of other nations and their citizens, joined by considerations of humanity and a desire to see a rich and fertile country intimately related to us saved from complete devastation, will constrain our Government to such action as will subserve the interests thus involved and at the same time promise to Cuba and its inhabitants an opportunity to enjoy the blessings of peace.

Warmer:

The most important problem with which this Government is now called upon to deal pertaining to its foreign relations concerns its duty toward Spain and the Cuban insurrection. Problems and conditions more or less in common with those now existing have confronted this Government at various times in the past. The story of Cuba for many years has been one of unrest, growing discontent, an effort toward a larger enjoyment of liberty and self-control, of organized resistance to the mother country, of depression after distress and warfare, and of ineffectual settlement to be followed by renewed revolt. For no enduring period since the enfranchisement of the continental possessions of Spain in the Western Continent has the condition of Cuba or the policy of Spain toward Cuba not caused concern to the United States.

The prospect from time to time that the weakness of Spain’s hold upon the island and the political vicissitudes and embarrassments of the home Government might lead to the transfer of Cuba to a continental power called forth between 1823 and 1860 various emphatic declarations of the policy of the United States to permit no disturbance of Cuba’ s connection with Spain unless in the direction of independence or acquisition by us through purchase, nor has there been any change of this declared policy since upon the part of the Government.

The revolution which began in 1868 lasted for ten years despite the strenuous efforts of the successive peninsular governments to suppress it. Then as now the Government of the United States testified its grave concern and offered its aid to put an end to bloodshed in Cuba. The overtures made by General Grant were refused and the war dragged on, entailing great loss of life and treasure and increased injury to American interests, besides throwing enhanced burdens of neutrality upon this Government. In 1878 peace was brought about by the truce of Zanjon, obtained by negotiations between the Spanish commander, Martinez de Campos, and the insurgent leaders.

The present insurrection broke out in February, 1895. It is not my purpose at this time to recall its remarkable increase or to characterize its tenacious resistance against the enormous forces massed against it by Spain. The revolt and the efforts to subdue it carried destruction to every quarter of the island, developing wide proportions and defying the efforts of Spain for its suppression. The civilized code of war has been disregarded, no less so by the Spaniards than by the Cubans.

The existing conditions can not but fill this Government and the American people with the gravest apprehension. There is no desire on the part of our people to profit by the misfortunes of Spain. We have only the desire to see the Cubans prosperous and contented, enjoying that measure of self-control which is the inalienable right of man, protected in their right to reap the benefit of the exhaustless treasures of their country.

The offer made by my predecessor in April, 1896, tendering the friendly offices of this Government, failed. Any mediation on our part was not accepted. In brief, the answer read: “There is no effectual way to pacify Cuba unless it begins with the actual submission of the rebels to the mother country.” Then only could Spain act in the promised direction, of her own motion and after her own plans.

The cruel policy of concentration was initiated February 16, 1896. The productive districts controlled by the Spanish armies were depopulated. The agricultural inhabitants were herded in and about the garrison towns, their lands laid waste and their dwellings destroyed. This policy the late cabinet of Spain justified as a necessary measure of war and as a means of cutting off supplies from the insurgents. It has utterly failed as a war measure. It was not civilized warfare. It was extermination.

Against this abuse of the rights of war I have felt constrained on repeated occasions to enter the firm and earnest protest of this Government…

The instructions given to our new minister to Spain before his departure for his post directed him to impress upon that Government the sincere wish of the United States to lend its aid toward the ending of the war in Cuba by reaching a peaceful and lasting result, just and honorable alike to Spain and to the Cuban people. These instructions recited the character and duration of the contest, the widespread losses it entails, the burdens and restraints it imposes upon us, with constant disturbance of national interests, and the injury resulting from an indefinite continuance of this state of things. It was stated that at this juncture our Government was constrained to seriously inquire if the time was not ripe when Spain of her own volition, moved by her own interests and every sentiment of humanity, should put a stop to this destructive war and make proposals of settlement honorable to herself and just to her Cuban colony. It was urged that as a neighboring nation, with large interests in Cuba, we could be required to wait only a reasonable time for the mother country to establish its authority and restore peace and order within the borders of the island; that we could not contemplate an indefinite period for the accomplishment of this result.

No solution was proposed to which the slightest idea of humiliation to Spain could attach, and, indeed, precise proposals were withheld to avoid embarrassment to that Government. All that was asked or expected was that some safe way might be speedily provided and permanent peace restored. It so chanced that the consideration of this offer, addressed to the same Spanish administration which had declined the tenders of my predecessor, and which for more than two years had poured men and treasure into Cuba in the fruitless effort to suppress the revolt, fell to others. Between the departure of General Woodford, the new envoy, and his arrival in Spain the statesman who had shaped the policy of his country fell by the hand of an assassin, and although the cabinet of the late premier still held office and received from our envoy the proposals he bore, that cabinet gave place within a few days thereafter to a new administration, under the leadership of Sagasta.

The reply to our note was received on the 23d day of October. It is in the direction of a better understanding. It appreciates the friendly purposes of this Government. It admits that our country is deeply affected by the war in Cuba and that its desires for peace are just. It declares that the present Spanish government is bound by every consideration to a change of policy that should satisfy the United States and pacify Cuba within a reasonable time. To this end Spain has decided to put into effect the political reforms heretofore advocated by the present premier, without halting for any consideration in the path which in its judgment leads to peace. The military operations, it is said, will continue, but will be humane and conducted with all regard for private rights, being accompanied by political action leading to the autonomy of Cuba while guarding Spanish sovereignty. This, it is claimed, will result in investing Cuba with a distinct personality, the island to be governed by an executive and by a local council or chamber, reserving to Spain the control of the foreign relations, the army and navy, and the judicial administration. To accomplish this the present government proposes to modify existing legislation by decree, leaving the Spanish Cortes, with the aid of Cuban senators and deputies, to solve the economic problem and properly distribute the existing debt.

In the absence of a declaration of the measures that this Government proposes to take in carrying out its proffer of good offices, it suggests that Spain be left free to conduct military operations and grant political reforms, while the United States for its part shall enforce its neutral obligations and cut off the assistance which it is asserted the insurgents receive from this country. The supposition of an indefinite prolongation of the war is denied. It is asserted that the western provinces are already well-nigh reclaimed, that the planting of cane and tobacco therein has been resumed, and that by force of arms and new and ample reforms very early and complete pacification is hoped for.

The immediate amelioration of existing conditions under the new administration of Cuban affairs is predicted, and therewithal the disturbance and all occasion for any change of attitude on the part of the United States. Discussion of the question of the international duties and responsibilities of the United States as Spain understands them is presented, with an apparent disposition to charge us with failure in this regard. This charge is without any basis in fact. It could not have been made if Spain had been cognizant of the constant efforts this Government has made, at the cost of millions and by the employment of the administrative machinery of the nation at command, to perform its full duty according to the law of nations. That it has successfully prevented the departure of a single military expedition or armed vessel from our shores in violation of our laws would seem to be a sufficient answer. But of this aspect of the Spanish note it is not necessary to speak further now. Firm in the conviction of a wholly performed obligation, due response to this charge has been made in diplomatic course.

Throughout all these horrors and dangers to our own peace this Government has never in any way abrogated its sovereign prerogative of reserving to itself the determination of its policy and course according to its own high sense of right and in consonance with the dearest interests and convictions of our own people should the prolongation of the strife so demand.

Of the untried measures there remain only: Recognition of the insurgents as belligerents; recognition of the independence of Cuba; neutral intervention to end the war by imposing a rational compromise between the contestants, and intervention in favor of one or the other party. I speak not of forcible annexation, for that can not be thought of. That, by our code of morality, would be criminal aggression.

Recognition of the belligerency of the Cuban insurgents has often been canvassed as a possible, if not inevitable, step both in regard to the previous ten years’ struggle and during the present war. I am not unmindful that the two Houses of Congress in the spring of 1896 expressed the opinion by concurrent resolution that a condition of public war existed requiring or justifying the recognition of a state of belligerency in Cuba, and during the extra session the Senate voted a joint resolution of like import, which, however, was not brought to a vote in the House of Representatives. In the presence of these significant expressions of the sentiment of the legislative branch it behooves the Executive to soberly consider the conditions under which so important a measure must needs rest for justification. It is to be seriously considered whether the Cuban insurrection possesses beyond dispute the attributes of statehood, which alone can demand the recognition of belligerency in its favor. Possession, in short, of the essential qualifications of sovereignty by the insurgents and the conduct of the war by them according to the received code of war are no less important factors toward the determination of the problem of belligerency than are the influences and consequences of the struggle upon the internal polity of the recognizing state.

The wise utterances of President Grant in his memorable message of December 7, 1875, are signally relevant to the present situation in Cuba, and it may be wholesome now to recall them. At that time a ruinous conflict had for seven years wasted the neighboring island. During all those years an utter disregard of the laws of civilized warfare and of the just demands of humanity, which called forth expressions of condemnation from the nations of Christendom, continued unabated. Desolation and ruin pervaded that productive region, enormously affecting the commerce of all commercial nations, but that of the United States more than any other by reason of proximity and larger trade and intercourse. At that juncture General Grant uttered these words, which now, as then, sum up the elements of the problem:

A recognition of the independence of Cuba being, in my opinion, impracticable and indefensible, the question which next presents itself is that of the recognition of belligerent rights in the parties to the contest.

In a former message to Congress I had occasion to consider this question, and reached the conclusion that the conflict in Cuba, dreadful and devastating as were its incidents, did not rise to the fearful dignity of war. It is possible that the acts of foreign powers, and even acts of Spain herself, of this very nature, might be pointed to in defense of such recognition. But now, as in its past history, the United States should carefully avoid the false lights which might lead it into the mazes of doubtful law and of questionable propriety, and adhere rigidly and sternly to the rule, which has been its guide, of doing only that which is right and honest and of good report. The question of according or of withholding rights of belligerency must be judged in every case in view of the particular attending facts. Unless justified by necessity, it is always, and justly, regarded as an unfriendly act and a gratuitous demonstration of moral support to the rebellion. It is necessary, and it is required, when the interests and rights of another government or of its people are so far affected by a pending civil conflict as to require a definition of its relations to the parties thereto. But this conflict must be one which will be recognized in the sense of international law as war. Belligerence, too, is a fact. The mere existence of contending armed bodies and their occasional conflicts do not constitute war in the sense referred to. Applying to the existing condition of affairs in Cuba the tests recognized by publicists and writers on international law, and which have been observed by nations of dignity, honesty, and power when free from sensitive or selfish and unworthy motives, I fail to find in the insurrection the existence of such a substantial political organization, real, palpable, and manifest to the world, having the forms and capable of the ordinary functions of government toward its own people and to other states, with courts for the administration of justice, with a local habitation, possessing such organization of force, such material, such occupation of territory, as to take the contest out of the category of a mere rebellious insurrection or occasional skirmishes and place it on the terrible footing of war, to which a recognition of belligerency would aim to elevate it. The contest, moreover, is solely on land; the insurrection has not possessed itself of a single seaport whence it may send forth its flag, nor has it any means of communication with foreign powers except through the military lines of its adversaries. No apprehension of any of those sudden and difficult complications which a war upon the ocean is apt to precipitate upon the vessels, both commercial and national, and upon the consular officers of other powers calls for the definition of their relations to the parties to the contest. Considered as a question of expediency, I regard the accordance of belligerent rights still to be as unwise and premature as I regard it to be, at present, indefensible as a measure of right. Such recognition entails upon the country according the rights which flow from it difficult and complicated duties, and requires the exaction from the contending parties of the strict observance of their rights and obligations. It confers the right of search upon the high seas by vessels of both parties; it would subject the carrying of arms and munitions of war, which now may be transported freely and without interruption in the vessels of the United States, to detention and to possible seizure; it would give rise to countless vexatious questions, would release the parent Government from responsibility for acts done by the insurgents, and would invest Spain with the right to exercise the supervision recognized by our treaty of 1795 over our commerce on the high seas, a very large part of which, in its traffic between the Atlantic and the Gulf States and between all of them and the States on the Pacific, passes through the waters which wash the shores of Cuba. The exercise of this supervision could scarce fail to lead, if not to abuses, certainly to collisions perilous to the peaceful relations of the two States. There can be little doubt to what result such supervision would before long draw this nation. It would be unworthy of the United States to inaugurate the possibilities of such result by measures of questionable right or expediency or by any indirection.

Turning to the practical aspects of a recognition of belligerency and reviewing its inconveniences and positive dangers, still further pertinent considerations appear. In the code of nations there is no such thing as a naked recognition of belligerency, unaccompanied by the assumption of international neutrality. Such recognition, without more, will not confer upon either party to a domestic conflict a status not theretofore actually possessed or affect the relation of either party to other states. The act of recognition usually takes the form of a solemn proclamation of neutrality, which recites the de facto condition of belligerency as its motive. It announces a domestic law of neutrality in the declaring state. It assumes the international obligations of a neutral in the presence of a public state of war. It warns all citizens and others within the jurisdiction of the proclaimant that they violate those rigorous obligations at their own peril and can not expect to be shielded from the consequences. The right of visit and search on the seas and seizure of vessels and cargoes and contraband of war and good prize under admiralty law must under international law be admitted as a legitimate consequence of a proclamation of belligerency. While according the equal belligerent rights defined by public law to each party in our ports disfavors would be imposed on both, which, while nominally equal, would weigh heavily in behalf of Spain herself. Possessing a navy and controlling the ports of Cuba, her maritime rights could be asserted not only for the military investment of the island, but up to the margin of our own territorial waters, and a condition of things would exist for which the Cubans within their own domain could not hope to create a parallel, while its creation through aid or sympathy from within our domain would be even more impossible than now, with the additional obligations of international neutrality we would perforce assume.

The enforcement of this enlarged and onerous code of neutrality would only be influential within our own jurisdiction by land and sea and applicable by our own instrumentalities. It could impart to the United States no jurisdiction between Spain and the insurgents. It would give the United States no right of intervention to enforce the conduct of the strife within the paramount authority of Spain according to the international code of war.

For these reasons I regard the recognition of the belligerency of the Cuban insurgents as now unwise, and therefore inadmissible. Should that step hereafter be deemed wise as a measure of right and duty, the Executive will take it.

Intervention upon humanitarian grounds has been frequently suggested and has not failed to receive my most anxious and earnest consideration. But should such a step be now taken, when it is apparent that a hopeful change has supervened in the policy of Spain toward Cuba? A new government has taken office in the mother country. It is pledged in advance to the declaration that all the effort in the world can not suffice to maintain peace in Cuba by the bayonet; that vague promises of reform after subjugation afford no solution of the insular problem; that with a substitution of commanders must come a change of the past system of warfare for one in harmony with a new policy, which shall no longer aim to drive the Cubans to the “horrible alternative of taking to the thicket or succumbing in misery;” that reforms must be instituted in accordance with the needs and circumstances of the time, and that these reforms, while designed to give full autonomy to the colony and to create a virtual entity and self-controlled administration, shall yet conserve and affirm the sovereignty of Spain by a just distribution of powers and burdens upon a basis of mutual interest untainted by methods of selfish expediency.

The first acts of the new government lie in these honorable paths. The policy of cruel rapine and extermination that so long shocked the universal sentiment of humanity has been reversed. Under the new military commander a broad clemency is proffered. Measures have already been set on foot to relieve the horrors of starvation. The power of the Spanish armies, it is asserted, is to be used not to spread ruin and desolation, but to protect the resumption of peaceful agricultural pursuits and productive industries. That past methods are futile to force a peace by subjugation is freely admitted, and that ruin without conciliation must inevitably fail to win for Spain the fidelity of a contented dependency.

Decrees in application of the foreshadowed reforms have already been promulgated. The full text of these decrees has not been received, but as furnished in a telegraphic summary from our minister are: All civil and electoral rights of peninsular Spaniards are, in virtue of existing constitutional authority, forthwith extended to colonial Spaniards. A scheme of autonomy has been proclaimed by decree, to become effective upon ratification by the Cortes. It creates a Cuban parliament, which, with the insular executive, can consider and vote upon all subjects affecting local order and interests, possessing unlimited powers save as to matters of state, war, and the navy, as to which the Governor-General acts by his own authority as the delegate of the central Government. This parliament receives the oath of the Governor-General to preserve faithfully the liberties and privileges of the colony, and to it the colonial secretaries are responsible. It has the right to propose to the central Government, through the Governor-General, modifications of the national charter and to invite new projects of law or executive measures in the interest of the colony.

Besides its local powers, it is competent, first, to regulate electoral registration and procedure and prescribe the qualifications of electors and the manner of exercising suffrage; second, to organize courts of justice with native judges from members of the local bar; third, to frame the insular budget, both as to expenditures and revenues, without limitation of any kind, and to set apart the revenues to meet the Cuban share of the national budget, which latter will be voted by the national Cortes with the assistance of Cuban senators and deputies; fourth, to initiate or take part in the negotiations of the national Government for commercial treaties which may affect Cuban interests; fifth, to accept or reject commercial treaties which the national Government may have concluded without the participation of the Cuban government; sixth, to frame the colonial tariff, acting in accord with the peninsular Government in scheduling articles of mutual commerce between the mother country and the colonies. Before introducing or voting upon a bill the Cuban government or the chambers will lay the project before the central Government and hear its opinion thereon, all the correspondence in such regard being made public. Finally, all conflicts of jurisdiction arising between the different municipal, provincial, and insular assemblies, or between the latter and the insular executive power, and which from their nature may not be referable to the central Government for decision, shall be submitted to the courts.

That the government of Sagasta has entered upon a course from which recession with honor is impossible can hardly be questioned; that in the few weeks it has existed it has made earnest of the sincerity of its professions is undeniable. I shall not impugn its sincerity, nor should impatience be suffered to embarrass it in the task it has undertaken. It is honestly due to Spain and to our friendly relations with Spain that she should be given a reasonable chance to realize her expectations and to prove the asserted efficacy of the new order of things to which she stands irrevocably committed. She has recalled the commander whose brutal orders inflamed the American mind and shocked the civilized world. She has modified the horrible order of concentration and has undertaken to care for the helpless and permit those who desire to resume the cultivation of their fields to do so, and assures them of the protection of the Spanish Government in their lawful occupations. She has just released the Competitor prisoners, heretofore sentenced to death, and who have been the subject of repeated diplomatic correspondence during both this and the preceding Administration.

Not a single American citizen is now in arrest or confinement in Cuba of whom this Government has any knowledge. The near future will demonstrate whether the indispensable condition of a righteous peace, just alike to the Cubans and to Spain as well as equitable to all our interests so intimately involved in the welfare of Cuba, is likely to be attained. If not, the exigency of further and other action by the United States will remain to be taken. When that time comes that action will be determined in the line of indisputable right and duty. It will be faced, without misgiving or hesitancy in the light of the obligation this Government owes to itself, to the people who have confided to it the protection of their interests and honor, and to humanity.

Sure of the right, keeping free from all offense ourselves, actuated only by upright and patriotic considerations, moved neither by passion nor selfishness. the Government will continue its watchful care over the rights and property of American citizens and will abate none of its efforts to bring about by peaceful agencies a peace which shall be honorable and enduring. If it shall hereafter appear to be a duty imposed by our obligations to ourselves, to civilization and humanity to intervene with force, it shall be without fault on our part and only because the necessity for such action will be so clear as to command the support and approval of the civilized world.

Hot:

To the Congress of the United States:

Obedient to that precept of the Constitution which commands the President to give from time to time to the Congress information of the state of the Union and to recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient, it becomes my duty to now address your body with regard to the grave crisis that has arisen in the relations of the United States to Spain by reason of the warfare that for more than three years has raged in the neighboring island of Cuba.

I do so because of the intimate connection of the Cuban question with the state of our own Union and the grave relation the course which it is now incumbent upon the nation to adopt must needs bear to the traditional policy of our Government if it is to accord with the precepts laid down by the founders of the Republic and religiously observed by succeeding Administrations to the present day.

The present revolution is but the successor of other similar insurrections which have occurred in Cuba against the dominion of Spain, extending over a period of nearly half a century, each of which during its progress has subjected the United States to great effort and expense in enforcing its neutrality laws, caused enormous losses to American trade and commerce, caused irritation, annoyance, and disturbance among our citizens, and, by the exercise of cruel, barbarous, and uncivilized practices of warfare, shocked the sensibilities and offended the humane sympathies of our people.

Since the present revolution begin, in February, 1895, this country has been the fertile domain at our threshold ravaged by fire and sword in the course of a struggle unequaled in the history of the island and rarely paralleled as to the numbers of the combatants and the bitterness of the contest by any revolution of modern times where a dependent people striving to be free have been opposed by the power of the sovereign state.

Our people have beheld a once prosperous community reduced to comparative want, its lucrative commerce virtually paralyzed, its exceptional productiveness diminished, its fields laid waste, its mills in ruins, and its people perishing by tens of thousands from hunger and destitution. We have found ourselves constrained, in the observance of that strict neutrality which our laws enjoin and which the law of nations commands, to police our own waters and watch our own seaports in prevention of any unlawful act in aid of the Cubans.

Our trade has suffered, the capital invested by our citizens in Cuba has been largely lost, and the temper and forbearance of our people have been so sorely tried as to beget a perilous unrest among our own citizens, which has inevitably found its expression from time to time in the National Legislature, so that issues wholly external to our own body politic engross attention and stand in the way of that close devotion to domestic advancement that becomes a self-contained commonwealth whose primal maxim has been the avoidance of all foreign entanglements. All this must needs awaken, and has, indeed, aroused, the utmost concern on the part of this Government, as well during my predecessor’s term as in my own.

In April, 1896, the evils from which our country suffered through the Cuban war became so onerous that my predecessor made an effort to bring about a peace through the mediation of this Government in any way that might tend to an honorable adjustment of the contest between Spain and her revolted colony, on the basis of some effective scheme of self- government for Cuba under the flag and sovereignty of Spain. It failed through the refusal of the Spanish government then in power to consider any form or mediation or, indeed, any plan of settlement which did not begin with the actual submission of the insurgents to the mother country, and then only on such terms as Spain herself might see fit to grant. The war continued unabated. The resistance of the insurgents was in no wise diminished.

The efforts of Spain were increased both by the dispatch of fresh levies to Cuba and by the addition to the horrors of the strife of a new and inhuman phase happily unprecedented in the modern history of civilized Christian peoples. The policy of devastation and concentration, inaugurated by the Captain-General’s bando of October 21, 1896, in the Province of Pinar del Rio was thence extended to embrace all of the island to which the power of the Spanish arms was able to reach by occupation or by military operations. The peasantry, including all dwelling in the open agricultural interior, were driven into the garrison towns or isolated places held by the troops.

The raising and movement of provisions of all kinds were interdicted. The fields were laid waste, dwellings unroofed and fired, mills destroyed, and, in short, everything that could desolate the land and render it unfit for human habitation or support was commanded by one or the other of the contending parties and executed by all the powers at their disposal.

By the time the present Administration took office, a year ago, reconcentration (so called) had been made effective over the better part of the four central and western provinces — Santa Clara, Matanzas, Havana, and Pinar del Rio.

The agricultural population to the estimated number of 300,000 or more was herded within the towns and their immediate vicinage, deprived of the means of support, rendered destitute of shelter, left poorly clad, and exposed to the most unsanitary conditions. As the scarcity of food increased with the devastation of the depopulated areas of production, destitution and want became misery and starvation. Month by month the death rate increased in an alarming ratio. By March, 1897, according to conservative estimates from official Spanish sources, the mortality among the reconcentrados from starvation and the diseases thereto incident exceeded 50 per cent of their total number.

No practical relief was accorded to the destitute. The overburdened towns, already suffering from the general dearth, could give no aid. So called “zones of cultivation” established within the immediate areas of effective military control about the cities and fortified camps proved illusory as a remedy for the suffering. The unfortunates, being for the most part women and children, with aged and helpless men, enfeebled by disease and hunger, could not have tilled the soil without tools, seed, or shelter for their own support or for the supply of the cities. Reconcentration, adopted avowedly as a war measure in order to cut off the resources of the insurgents, worked its predestined result. As I said in my message of last December, it was not civilized warfare; it was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.

Meanwhile the military situation in the island had undergone a noticeable change. The extraordinary activity that characterized the second year of the war, when the insurgents invaded even the thitherto unharmed fields of Pinar del Rio and carried havoc and destruction up to the walls of the city of Havana itself, had relapsed into a dogged struggle in the central and eastern provinces. The Spanish arms regained a measure of control in Pinar del Rio and parts of Havana, but, under the existing conditions of the rural country, without immediate improvement of their productive situation. Even thus partially restricted, the revolutionists held their own, and their conquest and submission, put forward by Spain as the essential and sole basis of peace, seemed as far distant as at the outset.

In this state of affairs my Administration found itself confronted with the grave problem of its duty. My message of last December reviewed the situation and narrated the steps taken with a view to relieving its acuteness and opening the way to some form of honorable settlement. The assassination of the prime minister, Canovas, led to a change of government in Spain. The former administration, pledged to subjugation without concession, gave place to that of a more liberal party, committed long in advance to a policy of reform involving the wider principle of home rule for Cuba and Puerto Rico.

The overtures of this Government made through its new envoy, General Woodford, and looking to an immediate and effective amelioration of the condition of the island, although not accepted to the extent of admitted mediation in any shape, were met by assurances that home rule in an advanced phase would be forthwith offered to Cuba, without waiting for the war to end, and that more humane methods should thenceforth prevail in the conduct of hostilities. Coincidentally with these declarations the new government of Spain continued and completed the policy, already begun by its predecessor, of testifying friendly regard for this nation by releasing American citizens held under one charge or another connected with the insurrection, so that by the end of November not a single person entitled in any way to our national protection remained in a Spanish prison.

While these negotiations were in progress the increasing destitution of the unfortunate reconcentrados and the alarming mortality among them claimed earnest attention. The success which had attended the limited measure of relief extended to the suffering American citizens among them by the judicious expenditure through the consular agencies of the money appropriated expressly for their succor by the joint resolution approved May 24, 1897, prompted the humane extension of a similar scheme of aid to the great body of sufferers. A suggestion to this end was acquiesced in by the Spanish authorities.

On the 24th of December last I caused to be issued an appeal to the American people inviting contributions in money or in kind for the succor of the starving sufferers in Cuba, following this on the 8th of January by a similar public announcement of the formation of a central Cuban relief committee, with headquarters in New York City, composed of three. members representing the American National Red Cross and the religious and business elements of the community.

The efforts of that committee have been untiring and have accomplished much. Arrangements for free transportation to Cuba have greatly aided the charitable work. The president of the American Red Cross and representatives of other contributory organizations have generously visited Cuba and cooperated with the consul-general and the local authorities to make effective distribution of the relief collected through the efforts of the central committee. Nearly $200,000 in money and supplies has already reached the sufferers, and more is forthcoming. The supplies are admitted duty free, and transportation to the interior has been arranged, so that the relief, at first necessarily confined to Havana and the larger cities, is now extended through most, if not all, of the towns where suffering exists.

Thousands of lives have already been saved. The necessity for a change in the condition of the reconcentrados is recognized by the Spanish Government. Within a few days past the orders of General Weyler have been revoked. The reconcentrados, it is said, are to be permitted to return to their homes and aided to resume the self-supporting pursuits of peace. Public works have been ordered to give them employment and a sum of $600,000 has been appropriated for their relief.

The war in Cuba is of such a nature that, short of subjugation or extermination, a final military victory for either side seems impracticable. The alternative lies in the physical exhaustion of the one or the other party, or perhaps of both — a condition which in effect ended the ten years’ war by the truce of Zanjon. The prospect of such a protraction and conclusion of the present strife is a contingency hardly to be contemplated with equanimity by the civilized world, and least of all by the United States, affected and injured as we are, deeply and intimately, by its very existence.

Realizing this, it appeared to be my duty, in a spirit of true friendliness, no less to Spain than to the Cubans, who have so much to lose by the prolongation of the struggle, to seek to bring about an immediate termination of the war. To this end I submitted on the 27th ultimo, as a result of much representation and correspondence, through the United States minister at Madrid, propositions to the Spanish Government looking to an armistice until October 1 for the negotiation of peace with the good offices of the President.

In addition I asked the immediate revocation of the order of reconcentration, so as to permit the people to return to their farms and the needy to be relieved with provisions and supplies from the United States, cooperating with the Spanish authorities, so as to afford full relief.

The reply of the Spanish cabinet was received on the night of the 31st ultimo. It offered, as the means to bring about peace in Cuba, to confide the preparation thereof to the insular parliament, inasmuch as the concurrence of that body would be necessary to reach a final result, it being, however, understood that the powers reserved by the constitution to the central Government are not lessened or diminished. As the Cuban parliament does not meet until the 4th of May next, the Spanish Government would not object for its part to accept at once a suspension of hostilities if asked for by the insurgents from the general in chief, to whom it would pertain in such case to determine the duration and conditions of the armistice.

The propositions submitted by General Woodford and the reply of the Spanish Government were both in the form of brief memoranda, the texts of which are before me and are substantially in the language above given. The function of the Cuban parliament in the matter of “preparing” peace and the manner of its doing so are not expressed in the Spanish memorandum, but from General Woodford’s explanatory reports of preliminary discussions preceding the final conference it is understood that the Spanish Government stands ready to give the insular congress full powers to settle the terms of peace with the insurgents, whether by direct negotiation or indirectly by means of legislation does not appear.

With this last overture in the direction of immediate peace, and its disappointing reception by Spain, the Executive is brought to the end of his effort.

In my annual message of December last I said:

Of the untried measures there remain only: Recognition of the insurgents as belligerents; recognition of the independence of Cuba; neutral intervention to end the war by imposing a rational compromise between the contestants, and intervention in favor of one or the other party. I speak not of forcible annexation, for that can not be thought of. That, by our code of morality, would be criminal aggression.

Thereupon I reviewed these alternatives in the light of President Grant’s measured words, uttered in 1875, when, after seven years of sanguinary, destructive, and cruel hostilities in Cuba, he reached the conclusion that the recognition of the independence of Cuba was impracticable and indefensible and that the recognition of belligerence was not warranted by the facts according to the tests of public law. I commented especially upon the latter aspect of the question, pointing out the inconveniences and positive dangers of a recognition of belligerence, which, while adding to the already onerous burdens of neutrality within our own jurisdiction, could not in any way extend our influence or effective offices in the territory of hostilities.

Nothing has since occurred to change my view in this regard, and I recognize as fully now as then that the issuance of a proclamation of neutrality, by which process the so-called recognition of belligerents is published, could of itself and unattended by other action accomplish nothing toward the one end for which we labor — the instant pacification of Cuba and the cessation of the misery that afflicts the island.

Turning to the question of recognizing at this time the independence of the present insurgent government in Cuba, we find safe precedents in our history from an early day. They are well summed up in President Jackson’s message to Congress, December 21, 1836, on the subject of the recognition of the independence of Texas. He said:

In all the contest that have arisen out of the revolutions of France, out of the disputes relating to the crowns of Portugal and Spain, out of the revolutionary movements of those Kingdoms, out of the separation of the American possessions of both from the European Governments, and out of the numerous and constantly occurring struggles for dominion in Spanish America, so wisely consistent with out just principles has been the action of our Government that we have under the most critical circumstances avoided all censure and encountered no other evil than that produced by a transient estrangement of good will in those against whom we have been by force of evidence compelled to decide.

It has thus been made known to the world that the uniform policy and practice of the United States is to avoid all interference in disputes which merely relate to the internal government of other nations, and eventually to recognize the authority of the prevailing party, without reference to our particular interests and views or to the merits of the original controversy.

• * * But on this as on every trying occasion safety is to be found in a rigid adherence to principle.

In the contest between Spain and her revolted colonies we stood aloof and waited, not only until the ability of the new States to protect themselves was fully established, but until the danger of their being again subjugated had entirely passed away. Then, and not till then, were they recognized. Such was our course in regard to Mexico herself.

• * * It is true that, with regard to Texas, the civil authority of Mexico has been expelled, its invading army defeated, the chief of the Republic himself captured, and all present power to control the newly organized Government of Texas annihilated within its confines. But,on the other hand, there is, in appearance at least, an immense disparity of physical force on the side of Mexico. The Mexican Republic under another Executive is rallying its forces under a new leader and menacing a fresh invasion to recover its lost dominion.

Upon the issue of this threatened invasion the independence of Texas may be considered as suspended, and were there nothing peculiar in the relative situation of the United States and Texas our acknowledgment of its independence at such a crisis could scarcely be regarded as consistent with that prudent reserve with which we have heretofore held ourselves bound to treat all similar questions.

Thereupon Andrew Jackson proceeded to consider the risk that there might be imputed to the United States motives of selfish interest in view of the former claim on our part to the territory of Texas and of the avowed purpose of the Texans in seeking recognition of independence as an incident to the incorporation of Texas in the Union, concluding thus:

Prudence, therefore, seems to dictate that we should still stand aloof and maintain our present attitude, if not until Mexico itself or one of the great foreign powers shall recognize the independence of the new Government, at least until the lapse of time or the course of events shall have proved beyond cavil or dispute the ability of the people of that country to maintain their separate sovereignty and to uphold the Government constituted by them. Neither of the contending parties can justly complain of this course. By pursuing it we are but carrying out the long-established policy of our Government — a policy which has secured to us respect and influence abroad and inspired confidence at home.

These are the words of the resolute and patriotic Jackson. They are evidence that the United States, in addition to the test imposed by public law as the condition of the recognition of independence by a neutral state (to wit, that the revolted state shall “constitute in fact a body politic, having a government in substance as well as in name, possessed of the elements of stability,” and forming de facto , “if left to itself, a state among the nations, reasonably capable of discharging the duties of a state”), has imposed for its own governance in dealing with cases like these the further condition that recognition of independent statehood is not due to a revolted dependency until the danger of its being again subjugated by the parent state has entirely passed away.

This extreme test was, in fact, applied in the case of Texas. The Congress to whom President Jackson referred the question as one “probably leading to war,” and therefore a proper subject for “a previous understanding with that body by whom war can alone be declared and by whom all the provisions for sustaining its perils must be furnished,” left the matter of the recognition of Texas to the discretion of the Executive, providing merely for the sending of a diplomatic agent when the President should be satisfied that the Republic of Texas had become” an independent state.” It was so recognized by President Van Buren, who commissioned a charge d’affaires March 7, 1837, after Mexico had abandoned an attempt to reconquer the Texan territory, and when there was at the time no bona fide contest going on between the insurgent province and its former sovereign.

I said in my message of December last:

It is to be seriously considered whether the Cuban insurrection possesses beyond dispute the attributes of statehood, which alone can demand the recognition of belligerency in its favor.

The same requirement must certainly be no less seriously considered when the graver issue of recognizing independence is in question, for no less positive test can be applied to the greater act than to the lesser, while, on the other hand, the influences and consequences of the struggle upon the internal policy of the recognizing state, which form important factors when the recognition of belligerency is concerned, are secondary, if not rightly eliminable, factors when the real question is whether the community claiming recognition is or is not independent beyond per- adventure.

Nor from the standpoint of expediency do I think it would be wise or prudent for this Government to recognize at the present time the independence of the so-called Cuban Republic. Such recognition is not necessary in order to enable the United States to intervene and pacify the island. To commit this country now to the recognition of any particular government in Cuba might subject us to embarrassing conditions of international obligation toward the organization so recognized. In case of intervention our conduct would be subject to the approval or disapproval of such government. We would be required to submit to its direction and to assume to it the mere relation of a friendly ally.

When it shall appear hereafter that there is within the island a government capable of performing the duties and discharging the functions of a separate nation, and having as a matter of fact the proper forms and attributes of nationality, such government can be promptly and readily recognized and the relations and interests of the United States with such nation adjusted.

There remain the alternative forms of intervention to end the war, either as an impartial neutral, by imposing a rational compromise between the contestants, or as the active ally of the one party or the other.

As to the first, it is not to be forgotten that during the last few months the relation of the United States has virtually been one of friendly intervention in many ways, each not of itself conclusive, but all tending to the exertion of a potential influence toward an ultimate pacific result, just and honorable to all interests concerned. The spirit of all our acts hitherto has been an earnest, unselfish desire for peace and prosperity in Cuba, untarnished by differences between us and Spain and unstained by the blood of American citizens.

The forcible intervention of the United States as a neutral to stop the war, according to the large dictates of humanity and following many historical precedents where neighboring states have interfered to check the hopeless sacrifices of life by internecine conflicts beyond their borders, is justifiable on rational grounds. It involves, however, hostile constraint upon both the parties to the contest, as well to enforce a truce as to guide the eventual settlement.

The grounds for such intervention may be briefly summarized as follows:

First. In the cause of humanity and to put an end to the barbarities, bloodshed, starvation, and horrible miseries now existing there, and which the parties to the conflict are either unable or unwilling to stop or mitigate. It is no answer to say this is all in another country, belonging to another nation, and is therefore none of our business. It is specially our duty, for it is right at our door.

Second. We owe it to our citizens in Cuba to afford them that protection and indemnity for life and property which no government there can or will afford, and to that end to terminate the conditions that deprive them of legal protection.

Third. The right to intervene may be justified by the very serious injury to the commerce, trade, and business of our people and by the wanton destruction of property and devastation of the island.

Fourth, and which is of the utmost importance. The present condition of affairs in Cuba is a constant menace to our peace and entails upon this Government an enormous expense. With such a conflict waged for years in an island so near us and with which our people have such trade and business relations; when the lives and liberty of our citizens are in constant danger and their property destroyed and themselves ruined; where our trading vessels are liable to seizure and are seized at our very door by war ships of a foreign nation; the expeditions of filibustering that we are powerless to prevent altogether, and the irritating questions and entanglements thus arising — all these and others that I need not mention, with the resulting strained relations, are a constant menace to our peace and compel us to keep on a semi war footing with a nation with which we are at peace.

These elements of danger and disorder already pointed out have been strikingly illustrated by a tragic event which has deeply and justly moved the American people. I have already transmitted to Congress the report of the naval court of inquiry on the destruction of the battle ship Maine in the harbor of Havana during the night of the 15th of February…

In any event, the destruction of the Maine, by whatever exterior cause, is a patent and impressive proof of a state of things in Cuba that is intolerable. That condition is thus shown to be such that the Spanish Government can not assure safety and security to a vessel of the American Navy in the harbor of Havana on a mission of peace, and rightfully there.

Further referring in this connection to recent diplomatic correspondence, a dispatch from our minister to Spain of the 26th ultimo contained the statement that the Spanish minister for foreign affairs assured him positively that Spain will do all that the highest honor and justice require in the matter of the Maine . The reply above referred to, of the 31st ultimo, also contained an expression of the readiness of Spain to submit to an arbitration all the differences which can arise in this matter, which is subsequently explained by the note of the Spanish minister at Washington of the 10th instant, as follows:

As to the question of fact which springs from the diversity of views between the reports of the American and Spanish boards, Spain proposes that the facts be ascertained by an impartial investigation by experts, whose decision Spain accepts in advance.

To this I have made no reply.

President Grant, in 1875, after discussing the phases of the contest as it then appeared and its hopeless and apparent indefinite prolongation, said:

In such event I am of opinion that other nations will be compelled to assume the responsibility which devolves upon them, and to seriously consider the only remaining measures possible — mediation and intervention. Owing, perhaps, to the large expanse of water separating the island from the peninsula, * * * the contending parties appear to have within themselves no depository of common confidence to suggest wisdom when passion and excitement have their sway and to assume the part of peacemaker. In this view in the earlier days of the contest the good offices of the United States as a mediator were tendered in good faith, without any selfish purpose, in the interest of humanity and in sincere friendship for both parties, but were at the time declined by Spain, with the declaration, nevertheless, that at a future time they would be indispensable. No intimation has been received that in the opinion of Spain that time has been reached. And yet the strife continues, with all its dread horrors and all its injuries to the interests of the United States and of other nations. Each party seems quite capable of working great injury and damage to the other, as well as to all the relations and interests dependent on the existence of peace in the island; but they seem incapable of reaching any adjustment, and both have thus far failed of achieving any success whereby one party shall possess and control the island to the exclusion of the other. Under these circumstances the agency of others, either by mediation or by intervention, seems to be the only alternative which must, sooner or later, be invoked for the termination of the strife,

In the last annual message of my immediate predecessor, during the pending struggle, it was said:

When the inability of Spain to deal successfully with the insurrection has become manifest and it is demonstrated that her sovereignty is extinct in Cuba for all purposes of its rightful existence, and when a hopeless struggle for its reestablishment has degenerated into a strife which means nothing more than the useless sacrifice of human life and the utter destruction of the very subject-matter of the conflict, a situation will be presented in which our obligations to the sovereignty of Spain will be superseded by higher obligations, which we can hardly hesitate to recognize and discharge.

In my annual message to Congress December last, speaking to this question, I said:

The near future will demonstrate whether the indispensable condition of a righteous peace, just alike to the Cubans and to Spain, as well as equitable to all our interests so intimately involved in the welfare of Cuba, is likely to be attained. If not, the exigency of further and other action by the United States will remain to be taken. When that time comes, that action will be determined in the line of indisputable right and duty. It will be faced, without misgiving or hesitancy, in the light of the obligation this Government owes to itself, to the people who have confided to it the protection of their interests and honor, and to humanity.

Sure of the right, keeping free from all offense ourselves, actuated only by upright and patriotic considerations, moved neither by passion nor selfishness, the Government will continue its watchful care over the rights and property of American citizens and will abate none of its efforts to bring about by peaceful agencies a peace which shall be honorable and enduring. If it shall hereafter appear to be a duty imposed by our obligations to ourselves, to civilization, and humanity to intervene with force, it shall be without fault on our part and only because the necessity for such action will be so clear as to command the support and approval of the civilized world.

The long trial has proved that the object for which Spain has waged the war can not be attained. The fire of insurrection may flame or may smolder with varying seasons, but it has not been and it is plain that it can not be extinguished by present methods. The only hope of relief and repose from a condition which can no longer be endured is the enforced pacification of Cuba. In the name of humanity, in the name of civilization, in behalf of endangered American interests which give us the right and the duty to speak and to act, the war in Cuba must stop.

In view of these facts and of these considerations I ask the Congress to authorize and empower the President to take measures to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between the Government of Spain and the people of Cuba, and to secure in the island the establishment of a stable government, capable of maintaining order and observing its international obligations, insuring peace and tranquillity and the security of its citizens as well as our own, and to use the military and naval forces of the United States as may be necessary for these purposes.

And in the interest of humanity and to aid in preserving the lives of the starving people of the island I recommend that the distribution of food and supplies be continued and that an appropriation be made out of the public Treasury to supplement the charity of our citizens.

The issue is now with the Congress. It is a solemn responsibility. I have exhausted every effort to relieve the intolerable condition of affairs which is at our doors. Prepared to execute every obligation imposed upon me by the Constitution and the law, I await your action.

Yesterday, and since the preparation of the foregoing message, official information was received by me that the latest decree of the Queen Regent of Spain directs General Blanco, in order to prepare and facilitate peace, to proclaim a suspension of hostilities, the duration and details of which have not yet been communicated to me.

This fact, with every other pertinent consideration, will, I am sure, have your just and careful attention in the solemn deliberations upon which you are about to enter. If this measure attains a successful result, then our aspirations as a Christian, peace-loving people will be realized. If it fails, it will be only another justification for our contemplated action.

The podcast New Books in History recently featured an interview with author Keith Pomakoy about his new book Helping Humanity: American Policy and Genocide Rescue. Capsule summary:

Contra Samantha Power, Pomakoy demonstrates that the United States has been anything but indifferent to the suffering of genocide victims abroad. The U.S. has taken measures to stop genocidal campaigns against Cubans, Armenians, Ukrainians, Jews, Cambodians, Bantus, Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians. These measures were not uniform: they were sometimes military (as in the case of Cuba), sometimes humanitarian (as in the case of the Armenians), and sometimes purely diplomatic (as in the case of the Ukrainians). Neither were they always effective: the U.S. was able to halt the Spanish attack on Cubans, while it was unable to do anything of significance to ameliorate the suffering of the Ukrainians.

After studying the diplomatic correspondence between the Cleveland and McKinley administrations, the majority of which concerned humanitarian concerns, Pomokoy argues that the Spanish-American War should be viewed as foremost a humanitarian intervention with imperialism tacked on rather than a war of empire with a humanitarian facade.

Pomokoy notes that McKinley overruled his military commanders and pushed them to deploy forces to Cuba sooner than they wanted. The army wanted to build up and train suitable forces first while the navy wanted to seize Puerto Rico first. McKinley felt that delay would result in the death of more Cubans than he could tolerate so the result was the slapdash deployment of hordes of untrained American soldiers on Cuban shores and Civil War-style linear human wave attacks on Spanish trench lines as 61-year old former Confederate Lt. Gen. Joseph Wheeler, mustered into the U.S. army as Major General of Volunteers Joseph Wheeler in an act of sectional reconciliation, urged on his blue-uniformed men with the cry, “Let’s go, boys! We’ve got the damn Yankees on the run again!”.

Pomokoy contrasts the effectiveness of the intervention in Cuba with the futility of calls for intervention to stop the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire seventeen years later. The United States could readily plop huge amounts of men and ships against Cuba because it was close.

To stop the genocide against the Armenians, the U.S. would have had to muster several hundred thousand men into arms, mobilized its navy and merchant marine, projected force across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean and either landed troops in Cilicia or forced the Straits to reach Trebizond. Ask the British how easy forcing the Straits would have been. And then the land campaign would have started. And this would have been at a time when the world was at war and the Atlantic and Mediterranean were infested with British, French, Italian, German, and Austro-Hungarian submarines and warships.

Good luck.

And don’t even ask about the stillborn American mandate over Armenia.

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In 1935, French foreign minister Pierre Laval visited Moscow to win greater Soviet support against Hitler’s Germany. During his visit, Laval asked Joseph Stalin to ease up on his rough handling of Soviet Roman Catholics. Laval argued that this public show of toleration toward Soviet Catholics would increase French diplomatic clout with the Vatican and help Laval persuade Pius XI to oppose the rising Nazis threat more fervently.

Stalin dismissed Laval’s request out of hand, snorting sarcastically, “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?”

Stalin may have been surprised when it turned out that at least one Pope commanded enough divisions to make a strong contribution towards fatally undermining Stalin’s own handiwork. Marxist-Leninism, with its emphasis on purely material factors, may have mislead Stalin into discounting the Pope’s divisions of the imagination. Or Stalin was being misleading since he used his own invisible legions of useful idiots, fellow travelers, and fifth columnists to great effect.

But, in this current frantic moment, when the division between imagined and real is in blurry flux, we might find it useful to ask another version of Stalin’s question:

How many divisions does Standard and Poors (S&P) have?

Last Friday, S&P took its services for evaluating the safety and soundness of debt securities to a new level of ambition when it moved its score on the full faith and credit of the United States from AAA down to the next highest notch. S&Ps divisions, another army of influence, were unleashed. They’ve already had an impact, at least on the equally unreal automated software routines that transact 70% of all securities trades in the United States.

Here is the prospect of fiction acting upon fiction to produce reality. The real question you ask when you ask how many divisions S&P has is this: does S&P’s army of the imagination herald a permanent reduction in American power or, in the overall scheme of American history, are S&P’s oracular pronouncements little more than static?

In the past, I’ve used this framework to examine limits on American power:

[w]hile we need to acknowledge the growing limits on American power, we also need to identify the nature of those limits. To help this identification, let’s divide American power into three categories:

• intrinsic power: the total raw power of a political community
• realizable power: the power that a political community can actually use
• elective power: the power that a political community actually chooses to use

Then we can clarify whether the creeping limits on American power are:

• limits on its intrinsic power or
• limits on its realizable power or
• limits on its elective power

These three broad categories:

• separate the clearly impossible from the possible
• separates the merely improbable from the probable
• separates the vaguely voluntary from the involuntary

Intrinsic power is all of the raw power hypothetically available to a political community. It expands and contracts with changes in the extractive power of a community’s social forms, the technological tools they’re built to support, how power is divided within and without a community, the slow but jumpy evolution of human nature, and the play of chance and probability. It is the intrinsic power of a political community that places the outer bounds on what’s completely impossible for it and what is not completely impossible.

For example, Alexander the Great did not have the intrinsic hard power of the F-22 Raptor or the intrinsic soft power of Apple’s iPod at his disposal. Conducting strategic precision airstrikes deep behind Persian lines or wearing down Darius III with the enticements of Macedonian propaganda with full digital playback were not options Alexander had. For him, airstrikes and digital music players were impossible.

Realizable power is the intrinsic power that a political community can actually mobilize. Beatrice Heuser introduced a useful distinction between active and passive culture in her recent book The Evolution of Strategy:

• Active culture is the ephemera of culture that’s readily amenable to human action.
• Passive culture is the deep habits of a community that remain resistant to human action over decades or even centuries.

Constraints on realizable power are largely passive. There is nothing in the intrinsicpower of the United States of America that actively prevents it from invading Iraq, killing every male or female over ten, imposing American culture on the survivors, occupying the entire Tigris-Euphrates watershed for 100 years, and pumping its oil wells dry. There is nothing in the intrinsic power of the United States that actively prevents it from irradiating Afghanistan to kill every living thing within its borders and leaving behind an eerie green glow and calling it peace.

However, the accumulated weight of hundreds of years of cultural conditioning passively remove that decision from being conscious considered by most Americans. The realizable power of the United States could not be mobilized for such an massive act of cross-cultural proselytizing or democide. Though an American invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan in the tradition of Hulagu, Timur, or Nader Shah is not impossible, it is highly improbable.

Elective power is the power a political community voluntarily chooses to use. The United States of America has a national debt for S&P to fret over because it elects to have a national debt. The United States elects to keep a national debt because it finds it convenient for nourishing an investor class. The United States elects to spend money on its strange version of Bismarck’s welfare state because its designed popularity with its beneficiaries largely insulates it from its critics. The United States elects to keep taxes low while spending at an ambitious clip because of the highly contingent collision of a sound bite and its political fallout.

Nothing about its debt constrains the intrinsic power of the United States. While the passive frown against default passed down through America’s English inheritance mitigates against it, nothing about its national debt constrains the realizable power of the United States.

The United States could, at any time, elect to fully or selectively default on its debt. It could do something peculiar like mint a 14 trillion dollar coin to pay off its debt. America’s foreign and domestic creditors lack the intrinsic or realizable power toforce the United States to compensate them for the full face value of their Treasuries. If the U.S. chose to become a deadbeat, it would choose to become a deadbeat with nuclear weapons.

Russia became a deadbeat with nuclear weapons in 1998. One a friendlier investment climate was ushered in by Vladimir Putin’s “dictatorship of law”. Russia even went through the ritual act of “paying off its debt”. Dumb money flooded back in. There’s nothing so irrational as a foreign investor looking for yield, as foreign debt buyers enabling of Latin America’s repeated cycles of borrowing, default, forgiveness, and borrowing again reveals.

The United States is not Greece right at this moment. It would have to try really hard to become Greece at any moment. Greece is a Franco-German colony that is unable to resist the demands of its foreign rulers. That’s not true of the United States right now.

S&P’s divisions are only those of the imagination. Their power to conquer Americans exits only inasmuch as Americans elect to give them the power to conquer. If you stop believing in ratings agencies, they fade away, like fairies, Smurfs, or the Matrixsequels.

Government is violence. Government issued currency is a claim against a share of the spoils of current government violence. Government issued debt like bills or bonds are a claim against a share of the spoils of future government violence. As long as the United States of America has the power to wheedle (at best) or coerce (at worst) the spoils of realizable power from the members of its political community, it can’t go bankrupt and it can’t be driven into austerity against its will. If the United States chooses to keep Dr. Bernanke’s magical printing press running, it cannot run out of money. The dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the Federal government’s threat and use of violence.

There is no comparison between a household balance sheet and the “balance sheet” of a truly sovereign political community. If you’re not a ruling dynasty, Mafia family, or family dominated corporate board, your household rarely has the ability to coerce funds from your neighbors. If you can shake down the Joneses next door, congratulations. You have the makings of a sovereign state. Install a printing press in your basement and enjoy the fruits of your own currency.

The balance sheet of the United States is a elective and self-imposed accounting identity, not an external and material check on its power. There is a use for keeping up the rituals and pieties that mask ugly reality. But government is everywhere and always ultimately based on command of the preponderance of violence within a discrete chunk of territory. The consent of the governed is everywhere and always based on the governed’s ability to coerce their rulers, whether by armed resistance or (more realistically) triggering an élite split that leads one faction of a ruling élite to sick its share of a political community’s means of coercion against another faction’s.

The naïve self-proclaimed realist follows the fable of Galileo Galilei in choosing to bow down before the reality of the world and feel its power with his bare outstretched palms. But he differs from Galileo in declaring that power does not move. It remains stationary at the center of the universe of human action.

And yet it does move.

Man, a technologically-mediated monkey whose biological and cultural evolution is both enabled and constrained by the power of his tools, is a changeable creature. His elective power can shift his realizable power and his realizable power can shift intrinsic power. His intrinsic power can fence in his realizable power and and his realizable power can geld his elective power. The line between intrinsic power, realizable power, and elective power is ever shifting, for good and for ill.

The shift can be long, drawn out, and indiscernible. It can be short, sudden, and violently obvious. In case of the first, S&P is a power. In the second instance, S&P is line noise. The emerging world will judge if S&P is a prophet without honor in its own country or piss in the ocean. Ratings downgrades that merely needle the rough beast, its hour come at last, only make its wrath fiercer it as it stumbles towards Bethlehem to be born.

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Last week saw its share of sound and fury. One again, commentators from around the globe, ranging from noted Clausewitzian to unnoted COINdinista, gathered to answer, once and for all, one question: does America conquer through love or through death? (hint: the answer is yes). However, last week saw something more important: substantive and troubling hints of the reemergence of a real threat, a specter that has haunted American defense thinking since 1844: unapologetic magic bulletry.

Quoth the Committee:

Iraq 2003 was the last hurrah of the dotcom era. Echoing a classic “netizen” conceit, Pentagon planners believed that American forces would interpret the Iraqi army as damage and route around them to victory. Intensive “network-centric” warfare would combine data from each network node (soldier) into a grand central clearinghouse that would deliver total information omniscience. Commanders could then move forces to needs, on demand. Any enemy infantryman that sneezed in the night would draw instant, exactly targeted fire that would hermetically package and deliver them to Allah with the best IT driven efficiency that the private sector could provide. Light shows of dizzying precision would capture enemy eyeballs, break their will to resist, and leave Mesopotamia the newest target demographic for Madison Avenue.
 
This thought was the logical endpoint of dotcom mania. Governmental institutions, the military being one such institution, lag behind the private sector in tech mania adoption. Dotcom groupthink hit the military hardest after it had passed its peak of hysteria in the rest of American society.

In its nineties heyday, techno-opiates promised a future where U.S. forces moved freely like network packets across an antiseptic information battlespace. These force “packets” would be effectively omniscient since enemy forces would continue to unheedingly mass Soviet style forces in large formations across flat, treeless, and unpopulated terrain. There the enemy could be anesthetized in detail with precision, with laser-guided fluffy down pillows lulling enemy soldiers gently to sleep. The American military would simply interpret resistance “as damage and route around it“. The result of such thinking was an American military that could deter a large country, destroy a medium-sized country, or occupy a small country.

This policy shift from the mass armies of mid-century America to its smaller and more élite just-in-time replacement assumed a strong ability to accurately see the future. This is understandable: part of any defense plan is building the force you want that lets you do what you want to create the future you want. Unfortunately, the most neglected yet important part of a defense plan is building the force you need to survive what you don’t want to do in a future you don’t want. Building a magic bullet force assumes you’ll always enjoy the luxury of fighting whoever, whatever, wherever, whenever, and however you want, protected by an all-seeing eye so powerful and so pervasive that it provides perfect predictive power. The power of prophecy will free you from the margin of safety supplied by the quantitative outputs of the 20th century with just-in-time margins supplied by the qualitative outputs of the 21st.

If the last decade should have taught Americans anything, it should have taught them that contemporary American can’t predict the future. However, the correct solution (stop treating false prophecy as gospel) has been widely ignored in favor of the wrong solution (bet everything on false prophecy, only this time more aggressively). Just yesterday, we once again saw U.S. financial markets tumble because a significant number of investors had gambled, wrongly, on predictions of higher unemployment being in its last throes. Billions are lost and made based on the illusion that Benjamin S. Bernanke of Washington, D.C. is any better at predicting U.S. economic indicators than John X. Smith of Duluth, Iowa.

In the wars of the 21st century, thousands died and trillions were spent based merely on the authority of prophecy that was little more predictive than the steely glint of Donald Rumsfeld’s bespectacled eyes and the firmness of his jaw. The result was a force that manfully struggled its way to relative operational success despite the obstacles the Pentagon put in its way. The military danced dreadfully close to the edge but escaped operationally unscathed. Strategically, however, the military’s combat forces are depleted by repeat overseas visits, its hospitals are packed with lifelong, and its weaponry has a decade of wear and that will be expensive to replace if it ever is replaced. Such is the fate of a magic bullet force that found itself in wars that were more manpower and resource intensive than anticipated by Pentagon prophets.

The greater risk of a neo-magic bullet force is that it will only serve to reinforce America’s default strategy, a strategy of annoyance. All Strategy falls between two theoretical extremes, annihilation or exhaustion. But a strategy of annihilation, unfortunately, can’t exist outside of works of popular fiction. In practice, all strategies are strategies of exhaustion.

Strategy is the accumulation of favorable events that arise from time to time as the strategist meddles in the fluid balance between the competing poles of the Trinity of passion, contingency, and reason. The rational goal of strategy is accumulating enough positive events before the accumulation of negative events exhausts you. Since the most powerful pole of Clausewitz’s trinity is contingency, a great deal of strategy is focused on constructively twiddling your thumbs until something turns up that bears promise for your melange of wants and needs. You want to keep this thumb twiddling constructive enough to vent your passions so they don’t dangerously accumulate and explosively distort your carefully reasoned plans.

The feebleness of reason, the intensity of passion, and the unknowability of contingency make strategic effort a trial by exhaustion and not a one-time shot with a magic bullet. Reason is sorely tested by exhausting and unpredictable events that creating moral attrition, supplemented as needed with the wear of material attrition. The extended nature of strategies of exhaustion are murder to just-in-time élite forces. Their heir moral and physical endurance lacks the margin of safety that forces built with an eye towards strategic redundancy are equipped with. Man for man, weapon for weapon, blow for blow, the magic bullet force is more prone to falling victim to the murderous arithmetic of war simply because man for man, weapon for weapon, blow for blow, there is less force to go around.

The U.S. system of government is designed around the institutionalized stasis of factional trench warfare. Governmental power derives from the consent of contingency, built on system of representation heavily tilted towards votes cast by catastrophe. Based on the rule of crisis, not of men, the U.S. federal government creaks limply forward only under the lash of perceived calamity. In such an environment, without a crisis (real or manufactured) at hand, strategy leans imperceptibly towards the unhappy medium of a strategy of annoyance. Reasons of state demand that strategically substantive and consequential action be taken from time to time. But the inertia of the system demands that nothing be done within the system to raise an inconvenient stir or distract the American public from its patriotic consumption. This places two constraints on strategically significant action:

1. It must be small enough to escape sustained public awareness.
2. It must be big enough to have real strategic effect.

The result of struggling to square these two incompatible constraints is settling by default on a strategy of annoyance. A strategy of annoyance is big enough to irritate an enemy but not big enough to produce real strategic effect. It produces increased friction for the U.S. from the enemy so irritated without the compensating strategic effects that build toward real strategic gain.

A strategy with a strain of annoyance is a useful part of a wider strategy of exhaustion whether it’s called harrying, harassing, or worrying the enemy. Constant yet unpredictably applied annoyance can enervate an enemy and contribute towards moral and material exhaustion. However, a strategy that ends up being 100% based on annoyance is likely to produce an aroused enemy without the benefits of decisively contributing towards knocking him down, increasing your own moral and material exhaustion.

The life of the late and unlamented Osama bin Laden is one example of the consequences of a strategic vacuüm that limply defaults to annoyance. American efforts were enough to get Bin Laden deported from the relative comforts of the Sudan, making him leave behind his stuff and property, but not enough to leave Bin Laden an unrecognized hump of dismembered viscera dumped on the side of a Khartoum road for the jackals and vultures to feast on. So Osama Bin Laden found himself in backwoods Afghanistan, hanging out with a.

Though his primordial enmity was already tilted against the United States, his escape from the Sudan with his life but not his property greatly annoyed Bin Laden without decisively deterring him. This set off a series of events that eventually led to this tense photo opportunity where the senior officials of the world’s ostensible hegemonic power spent a great deal of time worrying intently about the complications caused by killing a man who, a mere 15 years before, had been a branding manager for the family construction business:

Counter-Annoyance

The assisted death of Bin Laden in Khartoum in 1996 would have been a strategic triumph. The assisted death of Bin Laden in 2011 was a strategic whimper. But the former wouldn’t have happened because the political environment of 1996 ruled out action consequential enough to produce strategic effect. The latter happened because, after Bin Laden inflicted ~40,000 casualties on this nation, the situation in 2011 was downright encouraging towards his assisted departure from this life.

A magic bullet force strongly favors an aimless drift towards a default strategy of annoyance. After all, it’s big enough to make the Madeline Albrights ask “What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”, which means, of course, it will inevitably get used. But it’s too small to produce decisive strategic effect unless your enemy is Mauritius or Belize.

The political economy of our times may favor creation of small professional mercenary regular forces to guard the élite cosmopolitans that huddle in the urban city states/resilient communities envisioned by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, John Robb, or Parag Khanna. The primary role of such forces is guard duty and the occasional punitive raid into the surrounding favelas. If the scope of warfare follows its trend since Waterloo, with a battle line of up to a mile widening to a front that extends from the Atlantic to the Swiss border to a nation at war where civilians are under constant threat of aerial bombardment to a pervasive war of all against all where there is no front and war is everywhere, such forces may become the (organized) norm.

In its weak form, the Efficient Violence Hypothesis (EVH) posits that any human group tends to evolve the social form that will best coerce its members and other groups. In its more fantastic strong form, the EVH posits that a human group is always and instantaneously organized in the way that will best apply violence to its members and other groups while pursuing power, control, and purpose. Whether magic bullet forces are the most effective social form for applying violence to Americans and passersby is unknowable at this point in these forces’ evolution. It may turn out that alternative forms for applying social violence like the mass participatory conscript armies that dominated between the American Civil War and Vietnam and the mass participatory electorates that coalesced to sustain them are obsolescent in today’s political economy as the Mongol hordes or the Greco-Macedonian phalanx.

The general principle remains: Master Sun wisely advised the warring kings of the late Spring and Autumn period to mix orthodox and unorthodox to produce victory. However, he would have never advised them to be all unorthodox all the time. The emphasis on élite formations on the scale envisioned by America’s most enthusiastic magic bulletheads seeks to institutionalize the unorthodox. Master Sun would have scoffed at this long-nosed red-headed Eastern barbarian idiocy. He knew that the unorthodox, when overemployed, ceases to be unorthodox and becomes orthodox.

The oblique order was a bang at Leuthen but a whimper at the first “end of history“. Charles of Lorraine was strategically affected. Buonaparte was only strategically annoyed. The moral of the story is provided by Mr. Clint Eastwood in the Western classic Hang ‘Em High:

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On July 3, 1776, Congressman John Adams of the newly independent State of Massachusetts wrote to his wife Abigail:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

July 2, 1776 was the day that the Second Continental Congress voted to declare the thirteen unoccupied British North American colonies (the Bahamas, Nova Scotia, and Canada had been reoccupied by British troops) independent of British rule. This makes it one of the stronger candidates for America’s independence day. Others include:

• October 19, 1781 – British surrender at Yorktown
• September 3, 1783 – Treaty of Paris recognizing American independence signed
• January 14, 1784 – Congress ratifies the Treaty of Paris
• January 8, 1815 – American victory in the Battle of New Orleans
• June 23, 1865 – last Confederate unit surrenders, ending the War of the Rebellion

Given all of those choices, July 4 it is.

In honor of whichever Independence Day you choose to celebrate this weekend, here’s a reconstruction of how the Declaration of Independence evolved from the first draft by Thomas Jefferson (blue) to the revised draft by the Committee of Five (John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman (red) to the changes made by the Continental Congress as a committee of the whole (bold black) (source). The blue strikeout line indicates words struck out by Congress or the Committee of Five:

A Declaration of the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress assembled. In Congress, July 4,1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America.
 
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for a People to advance from that Subordination, in which they have hitherto remained, one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the Ppowers of the Eearth theequal and independant Station the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Rrespect to the opinions of Mmankind requires that they should declare the Ccauses which impel them to the Change separation.
 
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which that among these are the Preservation of Life, and Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. tThat to secure these Ends rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the Cconsent of the governed; t.—That whenever any Form of gGovernment shall become becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Rright of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Ffoundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Ccauses; and accordingly all Eexperience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to Ssuffer, while Eevils are Ssufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of Aabuses and Uusurpations, begun at a distinguish’d Period and, pursuing invariably the same oObject, evinces a Ddesign to reduce them under absolute Power dDespotism, it is their Rright, it is their Dduty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient Ssufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Nnecessity which constrains them to expunge alter their former systems of government. The history ofhis present Majesty, the present king of Great Britain is a history of unremitting repeated injuries and usurpations, among which no one Fact stands Single or Solitary to contradict the uniform tenor of the rest, all of which havehaving in direct object the Eestablishment of an absolute Ttyranny over these Sstates. To prove this let Ffacts be Ssubmitted to a candid Wworld., for the Truth of which We pledge a Faith, as yet unsullied by falsehood.
 
He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
 
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has neglected utterly to attend to them.
 
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accomodation of large Ddistricts of Ppeople unless those Ppeople would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a Rright inestimable to them, and formidable to Ttyrants only.
 
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public rRecords, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
 
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly and continually,for opposing with manly Ffirmness his Iinvasions on the Rrights of the Ppeople;
 
He has refused, for a long Space of Ttime after such Ddissolutions to cause others to be elected, whereby the lLegislative Ppowers, incapable of aAnnihilation have returned to the People at large for their Eexercise, the sState remaining, in the mean Ttime meantime, exposed to all the Ddangers of Iinvasion from without, and Convulsions within.
 
He has endeavoured to prevent the Ppopulation of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for nNaturalization of fForeigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Mmigrations hither, and raising the Cconditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
 
He has suffered obstructed the Administration of Justice totally to cease in some of these Colonies, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
 
He has made our Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Ttenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their Ssalaries.
 
He has created a Mmultitude of nNew oOffices by a Self-assumed Power, and sent hither swarms of oOfficers to harass our Ppeople, and eat out their Ssubstance.
 
He has kept among us, in Ttimes of Ppeace, Standing Armies and Ships of War without the cConsent of our legislatures..
 
He has affected to render the mMilitary independent of and Superiour superior to the cCivil Ppower.
 
He has combined with others to subject us to a Jjurisdiction foreign to our Cconstitution, and unacknowledged by our Llaws; giving his Assent to their pretended Acts of pretended Legislation:
 
fFor quartering large Bbodies of armed Ttroops among us:
 
fFor protecting them, by a Mmock TryalTtrial from Ppunishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
 
fFor cutting off our Ttrade with all Pparts of the Wworld;
 
fFor imposing Taxes on as without our Consent—fFor depriving Uus in many cases of the Bbenefits of Trial by Jjury;
 
fFor transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
 
fFor abolishing the free sSystem of English Llaws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an aArbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these cColonies:
 
fFor taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable lLaws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Government:
 
fFor suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with Ppower to legislate for us in all Ccases whatsoever.
 
He has abdicated Government here withdrawing his Governors, and by declaring us out of his Allegiance andpProtection, and waging war against us.
 
He has plundered our Sseas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the Lives of our Ppeople.
 
He is at this Ttime transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to completecompleat the Wworks of death, Ddesolation, andTtyranny, already begun with Ccircumstances of Ccruelty and Pperfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nnation.
 
He has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Iinhabitants of our Ffrontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rrule of Wwarfare is an undistinguished Ddestruction of all Aages, Ssexes, and Cconditionsof existence.
 
He has incited treasonable Insurrections of our Fellow Citizens, with the allurement of Forfeiture and Confiscation of our Property.
 
He has constrained othersour fellow citizens taken cCaptive on the high sSeas, to bear arms against their cCountry, to become the executioners of their friends and bBrethren, or to fall themselves by their hHands:
 
He has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable Death, in their Transportation thither. This piratical Warfare, the opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the Warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.
 
He has prostituted his Negative for Suppressing every legislative Attempt to prohibit or to restrain an execrable Commerce, determined to keep open a Market where Men should be bought and sold, and that this assemblage of Horrors might want no Fact of distinguished Die.
 
He is now exciting those very People to rise in Arms among us, and to purchase their Liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the People upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off, former Crimes committed against the Liberties of one People, with Crimes which he urges them to commit against the Lives of another.
 
In every stage of these oOppressions wWe have pPetitioned for rRedress, in the most humble tTerms: oOur repeated Petitions have been answered by repeated Iinjury.
 
A Prince whose Ccharacter is thus marked by every Aact which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Rruler of a People who mean to be free people. future ages will scarce believe, that the Hardiness of one Man, adventured, within the Short Compass of twelve years only, on so many Acts of Tyranny, without a Mask, over a People, fostered and fixed in the Principles of Liberty.
 
Nor have wWe been wanting in Aattentions to our British Bbrethren. We have warned them from Ttime to Ttime of attempts of by their Llegislature to extend a an unwarranted Jjurisdiction over these our States us. We have reminded them of the Ccircumstances of our Eemigration and Ssettlement here no one of which could warrant so strange a Pretension. That these were effected at the expense of our own Blood and Treasure, unassisted by the Wealth or the Strength of Great Britain; that in constituting indeed, our Several Forms of Government, we had adopted one common King, thereby laying a Foundation for Perpetual League and Amity with them; but that Submission to their Parliament, was no Part of our Constitution, nor ever in Idea, if History may be credited; and wWe have appealed to their Nature, native Jjustice and Mmagnanimity and we have conjured them by as well as to the Tties of our common Kkindred to disavow these usurpations which were likely to would inevitably interrupt our Correspondence and Connection connection and correspondance. They too have been deaf to the Vvoice of Jjustice and of Cconsanguinity. and when occasions have been given them by the regular Course of their Laws of removing from their Councils, the Disturbers of our Harmony, they have by their free Election, re-established them in Power. At this very Time too, they are permitting their Chief Magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common Blood, but Scotch and foreign Mercenaries, to invade and deluge us in Blood. These Facts have given the last Stab to agonizing affection, and manly Spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling Brethren. We must endeavour to forget our former Love for them, and to hold them, as we hold the rest of Mankind, enemies in War, in Peace Friends. We might have been a free and a great People together but a Communication of Grandeur and of Freedom it seems is below their Dignity. Be it so, since they will have it: The Road to Happiness and to Glory is open to us too; we will climb it, apart from them We must therefore and acquiesce in the Nnecessity which denounces our eternal Sseparation and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
 
We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress aAssembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these States Colonies, reject and renounce all Allegiance and Subjection to the Kings of Great Britain, and all others, who may hereafter claim by, through, or under them; We utterly dissolve and break off, all political Connection which may have heretofore subsisted between us and the People or Parliament of Great Britain, and finally we do assert solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be fFree and iIndependent States; that they are Absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as fFree and iIndependent States, they shall hereafter have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which independent States may of Right do. —And for the Ssupport of this Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honour Honor.

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I’d like to thank the members of the ChicagoBoyz community for their condolences on my mother’s passing last month. They’re deeply appreciated. I’m comforted by the knowledge that she’s in God’s all-caring hands, that she’s free of mortal cares or sorrows, and that we’ll be reunited forever in God’s good time.

One aspect of my family’s recent experience is worth sharing. It’s a data point of some interest to CB readers for many of the same varied reasons that bring us together here.

My mother suffered three major bouts of breast cancer over the last 16 years. Her cancer was likely triggered, and exacerbated, by the hormone replacement therapy (HRT) she took for five years prior and ten years following her first cancer diagnosis. Recent studies suggest that HRT’s benefits are limited to treating one post-menopausal condition and then only for a limited time. Extended use greatly increases the risk of developing breast cancer. Mom’s 15+ years went well past any red line. She didn’t stop HRT until after the third, ultimately fatal, bout with cancer.

Of the women in her family, my mother was the only one treated with HRT. There’s no prior history of cancer in her family. Grandma died of dementia at age 96. One aunt, just older than Mom, died of the inevitability being 5’5″ while remaining over 350 pounds for forty years straight. Mom’s oldest sister, the oldest of her five siblings, is alive and thriving at age 82 and only ever suffered one mild stroke.

In her third, and terminal, bout with cancer, the cancer’s initial virulence and speed reduced Mom from vigorous sixty-something to frail seventy something in a mere two months. In fact, if not in chronology, she aged ten years in those two months. The cancer hit bone and rotted away a large swath of her pelvis, leaving her reliant on the walker that her own mother hadn’t needed until she was in her early nineties.

Advances in cancer treatment managed to halt the cancer but couldn’t roll it back. This left Mom in a state of chronic terminal cancer, neither well or unwell but in the shadowy in betweens. She required regular chemotherapy to eke out even that quality of life. There was a cancerous lump under her left ear. When it reached a certain size, she knew it was time to go into the oncologist and receive another round of chemo.

Chemotherapy is a debilitating treatment, one of those experiences in life that leaves you wondering if the cure is worse than the disease. This is not surprising:

In August 1943, Roosevelt approved the shipment of chemical munitions containing mustard agent to the Mediterranean theater. On 18 November 1943 the John Harvey, commanded by Captain Elwin F. Knowles, sailed from Oran, Algeria, to Italy, carrying 2,000 M47A1 World War I type mustard gas bombs, each of which held 60-70 lb of sulfur mustard. After stopping for an inspection by an officer of the 7th Chemical Ordnance Company at Augusta, Sicily on 26 November, the John Harvey sailed through the Strait of Otranto to arrive at Bari.

Bari was packed with ships waiting to be unloaded, and the John Harvey had to wait for several days. Captain Knowles wanted to tell the British port commander about his deadly cargo and request it be unloaded as soon as possible, but secrecy prevented him doing so.

On 2 December 1943 German aircraft attacked Bari, killing over 1,000 people, and sinking 17 ships, including the John Harvey, which was destroyed in a huge explosion, causing liquid sulfur mustard to spill into the water and a cloud of sulfur mustard vapor to blow over the city.

628 military victims were hospitalized with mustard gas symptoms, and by the end of the month, 83 of them had died. The number of civilian casualties, thought to have been even greater, could not be accurately gauged since most had left the city to seek shelter with relatives.

This produced a curious side effect:

Two pharmacologists, Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman, were recruited by the United States Department of Defense to investigate potential therapeutic applications of chemical warfare agents. A year into the start of their research a German air raid in Bari, Italy led to the exposure of more than one thousand people to the SS John Harvey’s secret cargo composed of mustard gas bombs. Dr. Stewart Francis Alexander, a Lieutenant Colonel who was an expert in chemical warfare, was subsequently deployed to investigate the aftermath. Autopsies of the victims suggested that profound lymphoid and myeloid suppression had occurred after exposure. In his report Dr. Alexander theorized that since mustard gas all but ceased the division of certain types of Somatic cells whose nature it was to divide fast, it could also potentially be put to use in helping to suppress the division of certain types of cancerous cells.

Using this information, Goodman and Gilman reasoned that this agent could be used to treat lymphoma, since lymphoma is a tumor of lymphoid cells. They first set up an animal model – they established lymphomas in mice and demonstrated they could treat them with mustard agents. Next, in collaboration with a thoracic surgeon, Gustav Linskog, they injected a related agent, mustine (the prototype nitrogen mustard anticancer chemotherapeutic), into a patient with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They observed a dramatic reduction in the patient’s tumour masses. Although this effect lasted only a few weeks, and then had to return for another set of treatment, this was the first step to the realization that cancer could be treated by pharmacological agents.

Chemotherapy agents have made striking advances in the last fifteen years. During Mom’s first bout and second bout with cancer, chemotherapy caused her to lose her hair. During her last bout, this was one side-effect she avoided. However, the other side-effects were still daunting if not as overt. Eventually Mom got tired of this twilight existence, trapped halfway between the pains of this life and the relief of the next and decided she would stop treating her cancer. And so she chose to die.

Here is the aspect I’ll share:

1. If you’re on Medicare and choose to risk death from your terminal cancer rather than undergoing treatment, Medicare will pay for hospice medical care in your home until your passing.
2. It will not pay for treating your cancer if you choose to undergo treatment. Cancer treatment for the elderly is an out of pocket expense.

This is why actuaries don’t get invited to parties. Such a policy is doomed to be personally tragic but actuarially rational.

Mom was well cared for during the three months that passed between her decision to die and her death. The local hospice care provider did stellar service. As a family, we made sure to express our deep appreciation for the caring nurses aides who came out and cared for Mom every day in her obituary and at her service.

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Barbarossa

On June 22, 1941, a day that will live in infamy (everywhere else but America), the Wehrmacht poured over the barely established line of partition between the Hun-dominated Third Reich and the Georgian-dominated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. So began Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history.

It was named for Frederick I Barbarossa, the twelfth century Holy Roman Emperor and Hohenstaufen powerhouse who went east on Crusade only to drown ignominiously in an obscure Anatolian river along the way. After his death, Barbarossa became a sort of Hun Arthur. Hun legend told that Barbarossa hadn’t died in the swirling mountain currents of the Saleph. Instead, Barbarossa was sleeping with his knights in a cave under a mountain in Hun-Land named Kyffhauser. Once the ravens stop circling this mountain, Barbarossa will arise and lead the Hun back to his ancient greatness.

Barbarrosa looking for ravens

Or something.

If the Once and Future Hun ever does arise from his half-slumber and staggers out into the light from under his dank Hun mountain, I’m sure he’ll be dazed by all the American tourists who mistake him for the villain from some movie series based on a theme park rise.

Hitler, with a deep understanding of history gleaned from careful study of Viennese light operettas and the backs of Hun bubble gum cards, probably sought to summon the spirit of the Hun Under the Mountain to make his violation of the oldest strategic cliché in the book seem OK. Though, in the Führer’s defense, the last violation of the “don’t wage a land war in Asia” cliché had been a victory for the Hun over a collapsing Tsarist Russia in 1917-1918.

Halt the Hun

If he was drawing lessons from the European experience in World War I, Hitler should have followed that other cliché, especially àpropos for the Hun: don’t invade Belgium even though that benighted country has historically been Europe’s Scenic Invasion Speedway. Taking just the period since 1800, both Buonapartes, tragedy in 1815 and farce in 1870, Ludendorff in 1918, and Gamelin and Gort in 1940 found their end in Belgian induced complications.

The poor maligned “Maginot” Line would be the butt of less jokes if it’d been built around Belgium instead of along the Franco-Hun border. If the Flemings and Walloons were fenced off, there’d be less standing temptation for the next aspiring trans-European tyrant to go to war so his forces can speed along Belgium’s flat, flat, easy, easy terrain. Hitler should have known that Belgium is a quagmire and its green and smooth as marble fields hide the deadliest form of operational quicksand.

Unbeknownst to Americans, the Eastern Front during World War II was the main event. The Second Russo-Hun War of 1941-1945 swallowed the Hun whole and what emerged afterward was never the same as the pointy-headed militarist Hun of old. The pale imitation Hun of modern times seems more determined to wage wars of aggression against its poor neighbors in the name of Lebensraum for its bank’s balance sheets and not for racial purity. This despite the Hun being a repeat deadbeat and serial debt defaulter of Argentine proportions.

I wouldn’t go so far as this point of view:

The only thing approaching a unifying theme for this cataclysm we call “WW II” is the United States, THE major allied participant in the Pacific (think logistics all you commonwealth coalition guys that are thinking “what about us” as you read this) and the United States becomes the principal partner in the Western alliance which is handling, admittedly only 20-30% of the European War duties against the background of the massive Soviet-[Hun] war. I have written this before but will write it again, we say at CGSC that Overlord was simply a deception operation to support BAGRATION and the destruction of Army Group Center!

This leaves out celebrity military historian John Keegan’s reminder that, out of the four defeats of World War II where the Hun lost 200,000+ casualties or more, two (Tunisia and Normandy) were inflicted by the Western Allies. The accurate characterization of the American infantry as lacking the trained tactical sophistication of his Hun counterpart misses the fact that American artillery and tactical air support was superior to its Hun counterpart. Most Hun slaughtered by American forces, over 70%, were efficiently killed at a distance by superior American firepower.

The 70th anniversary of Barbarossa has more meaning for me this year than years past. My mother was born mere hours before the Hun rolled across the Soviet border. It was still the 21st here but the 22nd had already dawned half a world away in the dark early morning hours of Eastern Europe as 8 million men stirred themselves for the great offensive.

My mother would have been 70 yesterday but she passed away on May 2nd after a long battle with breast cancer, just 1 1/2 months shy. For whatever reason, I never connected the day she was born with Barbarossa until a couple of weeks before her passing as I thought of something to say at her funeral. This despite knowing the date of June 22, 1941 for 3/4s of my life and knowing that the 21st of June was far too late to either buy Mom a gift for her birthday or launch a land war in Asia. The flowers were out, the ground was dry after the spring rainy season, and the campaigning weather was perfect before the hot days of July and August. In the eulogy I gave at her funeral, I was able to use Barbarossa as one bookend of Mom’s life to frame the historical arc of her life.

Chances are 95% percent of the mourners at Mom’s funeral had never heard of Barbarossa and the great noise it produced. Chances are 95% of them didn’t specifically remember Barbarossa afterward. But maybe its vividness in the overall narrative tapestry of her life will help them remember Mom when the 21st of June and campaigning season roll around every year.

It will certainly help me remember.

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Just in time for Father’s Day, this puff piece purports to list the 12 most doting dads in history. Its criteria for measuring paternal dotage are vague but seem to center on dads who educated their daughters when it was historically unfashionable to do so. Charlemagne (#10), Thomas More (#8), and Lt. Col. George Lucas (#7, not the one you’ve heard of) get mad props for being pioneers of women’s rights.

Based on that criteria, I’d add three more doting dads of history to their list:

#0. Henry VIII

Henry VIII

Overlooking the small matter that he had her mother beheaded when she was nearly three years old, leaving her legally illegitimate and no longer a princess, Henry VIII was a doting father to his daughter, the future Elizabeth I. Through her, he became a pioneer of women’s rights. Though frequently absent due to a busy career of making merry, binge-gorging, hammering Papists and Lutherans, and having wives beheaded, Henry ensured that Elizabeth was “the best educated woman of her generation”. Elizabeth received a cutting edge humanist education from her governess Kate Ashley and her tutors William Grindal and Roger Ascham. Ascham wrote:

Yea, I believe, that beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebendary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week.

and

She talks French and Italian as well as English: she has often talked to me readily and well in Latin and moderately so in Greek. When she writes Greek and Latin nothing is more beautiful than her handwriting . . . she read with me almost all Cicero and great part of [Livy]: for she drew all her knowledge of Latin from those two authors. She used to give the morning to the Greek Testament and afterwards read select orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles. To these I added St Cyprian and Melanchthon’s Commonplaces.

This dedication to learning may have been a result of Henry being the second son of Henry VII instead of the firstborn. Henry only became Prince of Wales at age 10 when his older brother Arthur died. Before then, Henry had been educated to become a cleric. Says Wikipedia:

Henry was given a first-rate education from leading tutors, becoming fluent in Latin, French, and Spanish…Henry was an intellectual. The first well-educated English king, he was thoroughly at home in his well-stocked library; he personally annotated many books and wrote and published his own book…He was an accomplished musician, author, and poet; his best known piece of music is “Pastime with Good Company” (“The Kynges Ballade”). He is often reputed to have written “Greensleeves” but probably did not.

Given that Henry’s primary obsession was acquiring a legitimate male heir in order to avoid another bloody civil war like the War of the Roses that had brought his father to the throne, his education of his daughter is striking. He could have passed on this training since he saw them as triggers of civil strife rather than rulers. He could have followed the usual contemporary practice and stopped at teaching his daughter enough sewing, curtsying, and agreeable small talk to successfully peddle them as brides in the European royal meat market.

Elizabeth herself, inasmuch as details have come down to us, idolized her father and modeled her kingship after his looming example.

Whatever feelings she had on Mother’s Day are lost to history.

Elizabeth I

# -1. Aaron Burr, Jr.

Aaron Burr

The lasting impression that Col. Aaron Burr left on his contemporaries was such that Col. Alexander Hamilton allowed his world historical nemesis Thomas Jefferson to become president so that Burr couldn’t become president.

This would be not be the last lasting impression that Col. Burr left on Col. Hamilton.

Burr’s relations with Jefferson were strained enough that Jefferson violated the U.S. Constitution regularly as he attempted to rid himself of his former Vice President. Burr’s overall contribution to the development of U.S. constitutional law is as long as it is unusual:

1. Burr’s possible intrigues to have himself elected president over Jefferson even though he and Jefferson were nominally on the same ticket as president and vice-president led to the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment required that distinct and separate votes be cast for president and vice-president by the presidential electors. Before this, the top two recipients of votes in the Electoral College became president and vice-president. This led to awkward situations like Jefferson being John Adam’s vice-president even though he was the leader of the opposition or Burr having the opportunity to become president even though he was the vice-presidential nominee because he and Jefferson tied in the Electoral College.
2. Burr preserved judicial review of legislative and executive acts by the United States Supreme Court when he fought off Jefferson’s attempts to pack the court. Jefferson and his Congressional henchmen were trying to impeach and remove Washington and Adams appointees from the Federal bench so they could be replaced by politically reliable Jefferson placemen. Burr’s role in presiding as President of the Senate over the Justice Samuel Chase’s impeachment trial through his powerful oratory, his treatment of it as a serious judicial process by manipulating the atmospherics of the Senate, and his dignified conduct heavily contributed to the Senate acquitting Chase even though it had a Republican majority tightly under Jefferson’s iron thumb. Burr’s role was all the more curious because he was a lame-duck vice president and happened to be under indictment by both the states of New York and New Jersey for the murder of Col. Hamilton.
3. After the nebulous Burr Conspiracy in 1805, Jefferson had Burr charged with treason. Burr and his lawyers responded by subpoenaing Jefferson himself for testimony and papers. Jefferson, noted defender of open government and a free press, responded by inventing and invoking “executive privilege”. This merely allowed the presiding judge, Jefferson nemesis John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States, the first of many opportunities to use Burr’s trial to needle his hated cousin Tommy. Marshall owed Burr a favor anyway since he’d have been next on Jefferson’s impeachment express if Justice Chase had be removed from the Supreme Court. Though Jefferson hemmed and hawed and used all of the resources his role as a machine boss gave him, Marshall ultimately used a narrow interpretation of the Constitution’s definition of treason and its requirement for two witnesses to the act to get Burr off with an acquittal.

One unambiguous spot in Burr’s life was his education of his only (legitimate) child Theodosia. Says Wikipedia:

Her education was very closely supervised by her father who stressed mental discipline. This type of tutoring was very rarely given to girls of Theodosia’s generation. In addition to the more conventional subjects such as French, music, and dancing, the young “Theo” began to study arithmetic, Latin, Greek, and English composition. She applied herself to English in the form of letters to Aaron Burr, which were returned to her promptly, with the inclusion of detailed criticism.

When Theodosia was 11, her mother died. After this event her father closely supervised his daughter’s social education. Specifically this included training in an appreciation of the arts and the intangibles of relating to other people. By the age of 14 Theodosia began to serve as hostess at Richmond Hill, Aaron Burr’s stately home…

Burr may have harked back to an earlier age in arranging his daughter’s marriage:

On February 2, 1801 she married Joseph Alston, a wealthy land owner and politician from South Carolina. They honeymooned at Niagara Falls, the first recorded couple to do so. Alston was governor of South Carolina and possessed a large rice plantation. It has been conjectured that there was more than romance involved in this union. Aaron Burr agonized intensely and daily about money matters, particularly as to how he would hold on to the Richmond Hill estate. It is thought that his daughter’s tie to a member of the Southern gentry might relieve him of some of his financial burdens. The marriage to Alston meant that Theodosia would become prominent in South Carolina social circles.

However, the bond between daughter and American supervillain seems to have been strong, with Theodosia standing by her old man as he was tried for treason and petitioning the Madison Administration to allow Burr to return from his European exile. However, the bond was terminated by Theodosia’s mysterious disappearance along with all hands of the good ship Patriot in January of 1812 as it sailed from South Carolina to New York. Burr lived on as a enigmatic but aging shadow over the early Republic until fall 1836.

Theodosia Burr

# -2. Ioseb dzeJughashvili

Ioseb dzeJughashvili

Alexei Kapler was brave.

How brave? Put it this way: there are two kinds of brave: brave and Alexei Kapler brave.

Alexei Kapler was Alexei Kapler brave.

By profession, Kapler was a screenwriter, journalist, director, and actor. By avocation, he was an accomplished womanizer. One night, Kapler, a man of forty years, met a sixteen year old girl at a party. This young woman was intelligent, strong-willed, attractive, and sad. It was the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death and no one seemed to remember. Kapler was happy to listen, comfort, sympathize, and seduce.

His new conquest came from a sheltered background. Kapler decided to show her the wild side of life, lending her forbidden and adult books, taking her to the theater, attending parties, and going dancing. Kapler was a man of the world, witty, knowledgeable, a real raconteur. The young woman was swept off her feet by this urbane sophisticate.

There were problems though. Kepler was married. And having an affair with a sixteen year old girl. Hiding it from her family was a must. The girl’s father would be especially unhappy. Kapler was a smooth enough operator that he might have kept their secret from the girl’s father under normal circumstances. Unfortunately for him, the girl’s father had a particularly suspicious temperament. While this is not unusual in the fathers of most sixteen year old girls, this father was different.

He could have phones tapped.

Kepler’s young lover Svetlana was the daughter of one Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. Early in life, instead of becoming a priest like his mother wanted, Ioseb decided he wanted to be a superhero instead. He adopted the superhero name Joe Steel and proceeded to become a Caucasian Robin Hood. He carried out the largest gold robbery in Russian history and spent the money on liberating the Russian people from themselves. He later went on to achieve prominence as the humble secretary of a prominent Russian political party.

To his American fans, Ioseb was known as kindly Uncle Joe. To his Russian comrades, Ioseb was known as Comrade Joseph Stalin.

After his trembling subordinates finally handed Uncle Joe the phone intercepts of calls between Svetlana and Kapler, Uncle Joe flew into a rage and confronted his daughter. He demanded all of her letters from Kapler, revealing that he knew all about the affair. When Sventlana dramatically protested her love for Kapler, Uncle Joe, as Svetlana later wrote, was not pleased:

“Love!”, shrieked Stalin, “with hatred of the very word” and “for the first time in my life,” slapped [Svetlana] twice across the face.

Simon Sebag Montifiore relates in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar:

Stalin gathered up the letters and took them to the dining room where he sat at the table where Churchill had dined—and, ignoring [World War II] altogether, started to read them. He did not appear [at work] that day.

When Svetlana came home from school, Uncle Joe tore up Kapler’s letters and photos in front of her and proceeded to ridicule Kapler. Svetlana fled the room and they didn’t speak for months afterward. Their relationship never recovered. Kapler had forever damaged the fragile bloodthirsty communist dictator-daughter bond.

Montefiore offered this observation:

This is often presented as the height of Stalin’s brutality yet, even today, no parents would be delighted by the seduction (as he thought) of their schoolgirl daughters, especially by a married middle-aged playboy. Yet Stalin was a traditional Georgian steeped in nineteenth-century prudery and to this day, Georgian fathers are likely to resort to their shotguns at the least provocation. “Being a Georgian, he should have shot that ladies’ man,” says [Stalin's nephew] Vladimir Redens. Long after she wrote her memoirs, Svetlana understood that “my father over-reacted”: he thought he was “protecting his daughter from a dirty older man”.

Kapler, apparently not satisfied with seducing a totalitarian dictator’s daughter, had boasted of the affair in front of his friends. To top it off:

Dispatched to cover Stalingrad for Pravda, filing his “Letters of Lieutenant L from Stalingrad” in which he daringly paraded his affair with the words: “It’s probably snowing in Moscow. You can see the crenallated wall of the Kremlin from your window.”

Even before Uncle Joe confronted Svetlana, Kapler was already staying in the Lubyanka:

The Lubyanka was originally built in 1898 as the Neo-Baroque headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company, noted for its beautiful parquet floors and pale green walls. Belying its massiveness, the edifice avoids an impression of heroic scale: isolated Palladian and Baroque details, such as the minute pediments over the corner bays and the central loggia, are lost in an endlessly-repeating classicizing palace facade, where three bands of cornices emphasize the horizontal lines. A clock is centered in the uppermost band of the facade.

The Lubyanka was also the the headquarters of the then NKVD and later KGB.

People went inside and never came out.

However, Uncle Joe was kinder. Kapler was only convicted of being a “British spy”. Kepler only spent five years in the GULAG before he was released. Kepler only managed to live until 1979.

Such was the risk of being Alexei Kapler brave.

Such was Stalin’s doting fatherly nature. A less caring communist dictator would have had Kepler shot and buried anonymously in a mass grave.

It was less apparent with his sons. Uncle Joe’s oldest son Yakov was captured by the Germans in World War II:

They offered to exchange him for Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered after Stalingrad, but Stalin turned the offer down, stating “You have in your hands not only my son Yakov but millions of my sons. Either you free them all or my son will share their fate.” Afterwards, Yakov is said to have committed suicide, running into an electric fence in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was being held. Yakov had a son Yevgeny, who is recently noted for defending his grandfather’s legacy in Russian courts.

Uncle Joe’s younger son Vasily was more doted upon than Yakov. But there were limits:

Simon Sebag Montefiore, in Young Stalin, recounts an incident remembered by Artyom Sergeev, Stalin’s adopted son. Apparently, Stalin’s natural son, Vasily, was known for exploiting his father’s name at school, and one day, after returning home, his father collared him and insisted he stop it. “But I’m Stalin too,” Vasily said.

“No, you’re not,” replied Stalin. “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me!”

Being the daughter (or son) of an abstraction (or evil incarnate) is not easy.

Svetlana Stalin