CHARLES F. DOLE.
Southwest Harbor, Me.,
August, 1926.
CHAPTER I
PATRIOTISM AND PEACE
For the first one hundred and thirty-five years of the history of this republic the total expenditure of the federal treasury was approximately $66,000,000,000. Of this total expenditure approximately $56,000,000,000 was for warfare. From 1775 to 1923 the United States Army was engaged in no conflicts comprising about 8,600 battles and a casualty list of approximately 1,280,000 men. (See Ganoe, History of U. S. Army, page 490.) Of course most of these conflicts were minor. This study will include only the six major wars in which we have been participants.
A most common fallacy in the study of history is the blind acceptance of that which has happened as inevitable in the course of events. This is a form of collective fatalism. It reduces history to a study of the dead past with no message for today. This view is the very opposite of democracy. Democracy assumes that the group has control over its actions and that they are not the result of a blind fatalism. To look upon past events as inevitable makes man the victim of forces over which he can have no control. It makes man a slave. This fatalism is incompatible with democracy. The democrat must study history not to discover the forces of fate but to discover more perfect rules of human conduct. Primarily, the study of the past should be to throw light on the present and future, so that we might profit by the wisdom and the mistakes of the past. But to do this we can not accept collective fatalism as our attitude toward history.
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the study of history was a study of the Greeks and the Romans. It was a study of the ancients only. Early in the nineteenth century, with the rise of nationalism especially intensified by the French Revolution, all nations began introducing the study of their national history in their elementary schools. The object of this was to teach patriotism. Examine their meaning of patriotism and you find it meant the support of the king on the throne. All texts and instruction exalted the nation to show its superiority to others. Patriotism meant national propaganda. With the rise of democracy patriotism began to shift to mean the support of the group,—pro-group rather than pro-king. This was the cause and the result of the national mind set. Patriotism became international hatred, measured in terms of military service. This attitude toward history caused the teaching and writing of history to be largely national propaganda, by interpreting all the wars of a nation as defensive with the opponent always the offensive nation.
The greatest difference between the present peace movement and previous ones is that now among many of those who study the problem the offensive-defensive relationship in warfare is being not only questioned but rejected. All nations picture their side as defensive. Previous peace movements accepted this attitude. Accordingly, when a conflict arose, these opponents of war usually yielded to the pressure because they thought their nation was being attacked by an aggressor. But a careful study of history does not warrant such an idea. The effective element of the present peace movement is based chiefly on the fact that there is no nation of "sole guilt" in any war once the facts are studied carefully. The following study is an attempt to show that in our wars there has not been the "sole innocence" of the United States as opposed to the "sole guilt" of our opponents. That its wars are defensive against an offensive enemy, is the war myth of every country. This national bias makes it easy for the military party to predominate and to precipitate war. Yet warfare is not popular if measured in terms of voluntary support of the citizenship in time of war. It was hard for the colonies to induce as many as 250,000 men to join the Revolutionary forces out of a total population of over 3,000,000, and only a part of the 250,000 were enlisted at any one time. In the Civil War both sides were forced to use the draft, or the war would have collapsed. No major war of modern times could have been fought without the draft. This would be enough to show that warfare is not popular if judged by actual voluntary support on the field of battle.
One often hears that warfare is a manifestation of human nature and will be eliminated only through a long evolutionary process. But the same thing has been said of slavery, duelling, witchcraft, and many other evils now eliminated. Warfare is not dependent upon human nature, but upon the human point of view, and this point of view can be altered by education,—education which is honest, which can sift the true from the false, which does not close its eyes to the powerful role played by economic and social forces in the wars of the nation.
Whether there was another way out in these conflicts, whether the results aimed at were achieved, whether the ruin and destruction which went hand in hand with these conflicts could ever be balanced by material acquisitions,—these are questions the reader must decide for himself. This book simply lays the facts before him.