Will Morrisey Reviews

George Washington Plunkitt: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics. As told to William L. Riordan. Cleveland: Compass Circle, 2019.

 

This review written in remembrance of my late colleague, Dr. Mickey Craig, who loved this book.

 

Founded in 1786, the Society of St. Tammany began as a social club with Jeffersonian-republican leanings. ‘Tammany’ was a saint in no church, but he seems to have been a man of good will. As chief of the Lenni-Lenape Indians, he enabled William Penn’s Quakers to establish their peaceful colony along the Delaware River, eventually earning the title “Patron Saint of America.” The Manhattan Tammanyites played along with the story, giving Indian titles to their officers, calling their chief the “Grand Sachem.” As the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties coalesced, Tammany became increasingly organized, recruiting immigrants, especially the Irish, into its ranks, lured by city jobs and happy with the social services Tammany provided. In 1828, President Jackson promised to give Tammany Hall control of federal patronage in Manhattan. Tammany’s candidate for mayor, Fernando Wood, was elected in 1854, and this began Tammany’s 100-year dominance of city politics. A few years later, William M. Tweed took control of the organization.

Tweed quickly won notoriety as one of the biggest crooks ever to enter New York politics. Manhattan was an independent city throughout his reign, as the five boroughs didn’t consolidate until 1898. Stacking the county with his fellow thieves, he embezzled millions and built a real estate empire. It wasn’t until the 1870s that New Yorkers decided that enough was enough; he died in prison. Tweed and his ‘ring,’ as it was called by its critics, consisted of (nominal) Protestants; the fall of Grand Sachem “Boss” Tweed enabled Catholics to take over the organization, which remained corrupt but on a less gargantuan scale. By 1902, Tammany’s boss was Charles Francis Murphy, who worked to clean up the organization’s image without necessarily eliminating some of its sharp business practices, such as ballot-stuffing and patronage. Patronage was the key to Tammany’s success, with the promise of jobs keeping the boys well organized and disciplined. Civil service reformers, Tammany’s worst enemies, claimed that staffing government offices with tenured, professional administrators would eliminate or at least minimize corruption, saving the taxpayers millions wasted on graft. Even less plausibly, reformers also claimed that such a professional bureaucracy would be more democratic because any qualified person could win a job by scoring well on a civil service test, rather than depending upon the favor of the rough-edged Tammany oligarchs. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but that is another story. 

Born in 1842, George Washington Plunkitt flourished as Tammany’s leader of the 15th Assembly District before and especially during Murphy’s tenure. In his long career, he served New York, Tammany, and himself as a state senator, a state assemblyman, a New York County Supervisor and Alderman, and as a Police Magistrate. He chaired Tammany’s Elections Committee, always trusted to produce votes for the candidates. By the time he was interviewed by New York Evening Post reporter William L. Riordan, he held no formal office, having eased into the role of Murphy’s trusted advisor; Murphy supplied the book with a brief “tribute” to his ally, whom he lauded as “a straight organization man,” always “faithful and reliable,” a speaker of plain, home truths. In their own way, both men were reformers, if not (Heaven forfend) civil service reformers. They were men who recognized that the old-style political organization needed to sober up a bit in order to survive. 

To prove that he has done so, Plunkitt makes a careful distinction. There is “dishonest” graft: blackmail, outright thievery of public funds as practiced by Tweed and his gang. But there is also “honest graft,” adroitly summarized in Plunkitt’s mot, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em”—a thought he wanted to be engraved on his tombstone. The opportunities he saw were, for the most part, real estate investments based on what we now call ‘inside information,’ as when he knew that the city intended to establish a park or to build a road and would need a certain parcel of land to make the project viable. He would purchase said property from the unwitting owner, then sell it to the city at a fine profit. “Shouldn’t I enjoy the profit of my foresight?” he asks, rhetorically. All the auditors “can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft”—a practice “that’s never goin’ to hurt Tammany with the people” because “every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn’t isn’t likely to be popular.” Surely, Tammany leaders never need to sully themselves with dishonest graft “when there is so much honest graft lyin’ around when they are in power.” No, indeed: “I don’t own a dishonest dollar.” If the reformers want to deprecate this as “the spoils system,” well, “all right, Tammany is for the spoils system.” Manhattan under the Tammany spoils system really is, as the song would later put it, an Isle of Joy, “a sort of Garden of Eden, from a political point of view,” an “orchard full of beautiful apple trees,” their fruits read to be plucked by an honest and attentive soul. Just don’t touch that “Penal Code Tree.” It is “Poison.” 

Having established that fundamental principle, Plunkitt explains how a young man may become a true statesman, not a meddlesome reformer. “Some young men think they can learn how to be successful in politics from books, and they cram their heads with all sorts of college rot.” Such “book-worms” may “do some good in a certain way, but they don’t count in politics.” On the contrary, a college education handicaps them. Nor will the study of oratory do them much good. “We’ve got some orators in Tammany Hall, but they’re chiefly ornamental.” We trot them out for ceremonial occasions, but otherwise “they don’t count when business is doin’ at Tammany Hall,” since “the men who rule have practiced keepin’ their tongues still, not exercisin’ them.”

The problem is, “You can’t study human nature in books.” You’ll need to unlearn whatever you learned, or thought you learned, in those things, “and unlearnin’ takes a lot of time.” “To learn real human nature you have to go among the people, see them and be seen,” find out “what they like and what they don’t like, what they are strong at and what they are weak in.” Then and only then will you be able “by approachin’ at the right side.” If I hear of “a young feller that’s proud of his voice,” I ask him to join the Tammany Glee Club.” When “he comes and sings…he’s a follower of Plunkitt for life.” Same thing with some kid who can play baseball; we have a spot on our baseball club roster just waiting for him. “You’ll find him workin’ for my ticket at the polls next election day.” They see their opportunities and they take them, courtesy of Mr. Plunkitt and Tammany Hall. What’s not to like? As for “the high-toned fellers, the fellers that go through college,” such a young man is “the daintiest morsel of the lot, and he don’t often escape me.” I just let him take that fool Civil Service exam and, once he flunks it, he finds his way back to Tammany Hall and joins up.

No, real politics is a business, and to go into business you need “marketable commodities.” In the politics business, votes are the commodities you need. “Do as I did”: “Get a followin’.” If you have even one man who will vote the way you do, “through thick and thin,” then you can go to your district leader and say let him know that. Be assured, he will welcome you warmly into the organization. But if you tell him “I took first prize at college in Aristotle; I can recite all Shakespeare forwards and backwards”; I know science; “I’m the real thing in the way of silver-tongued orators,” well, “he’ll probably say: ‘I guess you are not to blame for your misfortunes, but we have no use for you here.'” You’ve got nothing marketable to sell. As for me, I started in politics at the age of twelve, making “myself useful around the district headquarters” and working “at all the polls on election day.” “Show me a boy that hustles for the organization on election day, and I’ll show you a comin’ statesman.” 

Once in the organization, once a proven vote-getter for the organization, your best marketable commodities are charity for the poor and jobs for everyone else. If there’s a fire, I’m there, along with my election district captains, “as soon as the fire engines.” “If a family is burned out, I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation.” I just go ahead and find them a place to stay, buy clothes for them, and generally “fix them up till they get things runnin’ again.” When you know human nature, you know that “the poor are the most grateful people in the world, and, let me tell you, they have more friends in their neighborhoods than the rich have in theirs.” One might say that Tammany embodied a branch of the Democratic Party that had adapted itself to a democratic regime, the one wherein the majority rules.

Speaking of gratitude, “There’s no crime so mean”—none so much contra naturum, if you will—than “ingratitude in politics.” Sorry to say, “but every great statesman from the beginning of the world” has been up against it: “Caesar had his Brutus; that king of Shakespeare’s—Leary, I think you call him” (probably Irish, then)—suffered grievously when he saw “his own daughters go back on him.” I myself, Plunkitt, have endured such betrayals. “It’s a real proof that a man is great when he meets with political ingratitude”; “great men have a tender, trustin’ nature,” and “so have I”—well, “outside the contractin’ and real estate business.” Nonetheless, the natural order prevails in the end. “The ingrate in politics never lasts long.” He takes without giving, and that breeds distrust. As one Tammany boss, Richard Croker, was fond of saying, “Tellin’ the truth and stickin’ to his friends [is] the political leader’s stock in trade,” and he lived according to that precept. As a result, “every man in the organization trusted him.” The same is true of today’s boss, Charles F. Murphy, who “has always stood by his friends even when it looked like he would be downed for doin’ so.” Now, fortunately, Irish Catholics now run Tammany, not those Protestant Tweedites. “The Irish, above all people in the world, hates a traitor,” having had the experience of those Irish Protestant Orangemen back on the Auld Sod, conniving with the English to rule their Catholic brethren. “The Irish was born to rule, and they’re the honestest people in the world.” No Irishman would steal the roof off an almshouse. Not at all, although “he might get the city authorities to put on a new one and get the contract for it himself, and buy the old roof at a bargain—but that’s honest graft,” that’s “goin’ about the thing like a gentleman,” and there’s “more money in it than in tearin’ down an old roof and cartin’ it to the junkman’s—more money and no penal code.” This is why the Irishman “is grateful to the country and the city that gave him protection and prosperity when he was driven by oppression from the Emerald Isle.” And as for their benefactor, George Washington Plunkitt, “I made my pile in politics, but, at the same time, I served the organization and got more big improvements for New York City than any other livin’ man,” all while avoiding arrest by doing nothing illegal. 

But the prime marketable commodity a Tammany leader has on offer is jobs with the city. As long as “the leader hustles around and gets all the jobs possible for his constituents,” no ingratitude is likely, and none deserved. He has “a sort of contract” with his constituents, a social contract, to use that high-toned language you need to unlearn from college. His constituents put him into office; now he is morally obligated to make sure “that this district gets all the jobs that comm’ to it.” If he does that, “he shows himself in all ways a true statesman,” and “his followers are bound in honor to uphold him, just as they’re bound to uphold the Constitution of the United States.” On the other hand, if he only works for himself or “shows no talent for scenting out jobs or ain’t got the nerve to demand and get his share of the good things that are going,” then his followers “may be absolved from their allegiance and they may up and swat him without bein’ put down as political ingrates,” as surely as the American colonists whacked their English oppressors back in the day, just the way the poor Irish wished they could have done and fled to America, where we do things right.

Sometimes you hear of inter-party strife, Democrats versus Republicans. Not in little old New York City, at least when it counts. Sure, “we differ on tariffs and currencies and all them things, but we agree on the main proposition that when a man works in politics, he should get something out of it.” And so, if Tammany loses an election, not to worry. It simply turns to the Republicans, who know they can get jobs from Tammany when the electoral results turn against them. “When we win I won’t let any deservin’ Republican in my neighborhood suffer from hunger or thirst, although, of course, I look out for my own people first.” You might say that’s right out of Aristotle: politics is ruling and being ruled, in turn. To which Mr. Plunkitt adds, ‘and get something in return.’

There’s no question, a true statesman needs, as Aristotle recommends in the Nicomachean Ethics, to adapt himself to circumstances. “Tammany Hall is a great big machine, with every part adjusted delicate to do its own particular work,” with leaders chosen to fit each voting district. In his own district, Mr. Plunkitt “don’t try to show off my grammar, or talk about the Constitution, or how many volts there is in electricity or make it appear in any way that I am better educated than they are,” although, by his own testimony, he has at least heard of Aristotle and Shakespeare and King Leary or whatever his name was. “Shakespeare was all right in his way, but he didn’t know anything about Fifteenth District politics.” On the other hand, when Mr. Plunkitt “get[s] into the silk-stockin’ part of the district, I can talk grammar and all that with the best of them,” having gone to school “three winters when I was a boy,” learning “a lot of fancy stuff that I keep for occasions.” Yes, “I’ve got to be several sorts of a man in a single day,” but always “one sort of man” in “one respect: I stick to my friends high and low, do them a good turn whenever I get a chance, and hunt up all the jobs going for my constituents,” there being no “man in New York who’s got such a scent for political jobs as I have.” To those who heed his hard-won prudential wisdom, he advises, “Puttin’ on style don’t pay in politics. The people won’t stand for it.” So, “be simple.” “Live like your neighbors even if you have the means to live better. Make the poorest man in your district feel that he is you equal, or even a bit superior to you.” 

Having established the virtues of Tammany Hall politics and politicians, Mr. Plunkitt shares his animadversions against those who would interfere with them: those undemocratic, ignorant underminers of true patriotism, the civil service reformers. Now, as he has shown, Tammany has already reformed itself since the unfortunate days of the dishonest grafter, William M. Tweed. But there is such a thing as going too far.

“Civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age,” the “curse of the nation.” To wrest from elected officials the power of appointing men to administrative offices in the city government violates the principle of “representative government.” “Is it all a fake that this is a government of the people, by the people and for the people?” And “if it isn’t a fake, then why isn’t the people’s voice obeyed and Tammany men put in all the offices?” To place men in office based on their scores on standardized civil service tests causes “the people’s voice” to be “smothered”; “it is the root of all evil in our government.” The menace is clear: “The civil service humbug is underminin’ our institutions and if a halt ain’t called our great republic will tumble down like a Park Avenue house when they were buildin’ the subway, and on its ruins will arise another Russian government.” And if not czarism, then the return of English-like or maybe Frenchified kings, much to the horror of every decent Irishman. Civil service may “gobble up everything, politicians would be on the bum, the republic would fall and soon there would be the cry of ‘Veyey le roi!'” And as for the allegedly democratic reform of primary elections, designed to take the political parties’ nomination power from the Tammany bosses, “it would mean chaos.” Civil service reform would put nominations in the hands of “cart-tail orators and college graduates,” which would be like “takin’ a lot of dry-goods clerks and settin’ them to run express trains on the New York Central Railroad.” “It makes my heart bleed to think of it” especially considering the “magnificent men” (John Kelly, Richard Croker, Charles F. Murphy) who have controlled Democratic Party nominations in New York in recent years. “What names in American history compares with them, except Washington and Lincoln?” Mr. Plunkitt would like to know. “They built up the grand Tammany organization, and the organization built up New York,” with none of the grandstanding seen in primary elections. “The men who put through the primary law are the same crowd that stand for the civil service blight and they have the same objects in view—the destruction of governments by party, the downfall of the constitution and hell generally.” 

Where is their patriotism? The true American patriot wants some quid for his quo. Patriots are made, not born. “How are you goin’ to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to give them when they work for their party?” There’s no use “of workin’ for your country” if “there’s nothin’ in the game.” “But, when a man has a good fat salary, he finds himself hummin’ ‘Hail Columbia,’ all unconscious, and fancies, when he’s ridin’ in a trolley car, that the wheels are always sayin’: ‘Yankee Doodle Came to Town.'” Take me, for example, “When I got my first good job from the city, I bought up all the firecrackers in my district to salute this glorious country” because “I felt proud of bein’ an American.” But when the Fourth of July comes around, what do the reformers do? They “run off to Newport or the Adirondacks to get out of the way of the noise an everything that reminds them of the glorious day.” Not so, Tammany; its constitution requires that members “assemble at the wigwam on the Fourth.” “You ought to attend one of these meetin’s. They’re a liberal education in patriotism.” For “four solid hours,” Tammany Democrats listen to a reading of the Declaration of Independence, speeches by “long-winded orators,” and patriotic songs from the glee club, all the while knowing that champagne and beer awaits them when it’s over. That isn’t just patriotism. It’s heroic asceticism, “the highest kind of patriotism, the patriotism of long sufferin’ and endurance.” Doesn’t that civil service reformer who fought in Spain, Theodore Roosevelt, concern himself when a young man who was blocked from a city job because he couldn’t pass the civil service exam turned around and fought for Spain in Cuba? And then there was the other “young man” who “worked for the ticket and was just overflowin’ with patriotism, but when he was knocked out by the civil service humbug he got to hate his country and became an Anarchist.”

A syllogism is in order, here. “First, this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be hell to pay.” “The republic will go to pieces,” and “then a czar or a sultan will turn up.” 

Therefore, the reformers “are underminin’ the manhood of the nation and makin’ the Declaration of Independence a farce. We need a new Declaration of Independence, independence of the whole fool civil service business.” And maybe independence of New York City from New York State, the latter being run by hayseeds—farmers who want nothing more than to enact civil service laws and to plunder the riches of industrious City residents. They object to New Yorkers, especially corporations headquartered in the city, who contribute to political campaigns for Tammany candidates. “They might as well howl about givin’ contributions to churches. A political organization has to have money for its business as well as a church, and who has more right to put up than the men who get the good things that are goin’?” Tammany “does missionary work like a church,” giving charity to the poor, and those “big expenses” need “to be supported by the faithful.” (And by the way, Tammany leaders are as much teetotalers as any reform-minded Prohibitionist. “I honestly believe that drink is the greatest curse of the day, except of course, civil service.” Those “great leaders of Tammany Hall” above mentioned had not a regular drinker among them. “A drinkin’ man wouldn’t last two weeks as leader of Tammany Hall. Nor can a man manage an assembly district long if he drinks. He’s got to have a clear head all the time.” Mind you, that didn’t prevent Big Tim Sullivan and Little Tim Sullivan from running saloons down in the Bowery. They made money out of liquor by “sellin’ it to other people,” which is “the only way to get good out of liquor”—if not wine out of water, then profits out of beer.

Tammany Hall has reformed itself but to save Americans from the civil service tyranny the whole Democratic Party needs to get back on the straight and narrow. “The trouble is that the party’s been chasin’ after theories and stayin’ up nights readin’ books instead of studyin’ human nature and actin’ accordin’.” These issues about money—the gold standard versus the silver standard—have no practical value because, as Boss Croker aphorized back in 1900, “What’s the use in discussin’ what’s the best kind of money? I’m in favor of all kinds of money—the more the better.” Same thing with imperialism. “You can’t get people excited about the Philippines.” You need something “that will wake the people up, somethin’ that will make it worth while to work for the party.” And that is nothing less than abolitionism—the “abolition of the iniquitous and villainous civil service laws which are destroyin’ all patriotism, ruinin’ the country and takin’ away good jobs from them that earn them.” Solons of democratic republicanism, repeal those laws and “put every civil service reformer in jail”—that’s the right platform plank to stand on. If such reforms were carried through, “we would have government of the people by the people who were elected to govern them,” “the kind of government Lincoln meant.”

“I see a vision. I see the civil service monster lyin’ flat on the ground. I see the Democratic party standin’ over it with foot on its neck and wearin’ the crown of victory. I see Thomas Jefferson,” American Founder and founder of the Democratic Republicans, “looking out from a cloud and sayin’: ‘Give him another sockdologer: finish him.’ And I see millions of men wavin’ their hats and singin’ ‘Glory Hallelujah!'”

 

 

Max Boot: The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

 

Max Boot counts 180 landings U.S. Marine landings between 1800 and 1934, with “the army and navy add[ing] a few small-scale engagements of their own.” In victory or defeat, “most of these campaigns were fought by a relatively small number of professional soldiers pursuing limited objectives with limited means,” sometimes punitive, sometimes protective, sometimes pacifying, sometimes profiteering, and at times a combination of two or more of these objectives. In America’s first century, in its overseas conflicts the United States often worked as “a junior constable” for Britain, “the world’s policeman,” defending “freedom of the seas and open markets in China, Japan, and elsewhere,” occasionally targeting the slave trade. In the next half-century, up to the Second World War, America began to rival Britain for its dominance of the seas, remaining active in Asia but also “establish[ing] itself as a hegemon” in Latin America—as effectively announced by President Theodore Roosevelt, when he issued his “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting a right to foreclose any European intervention in the New World if a country proved delinquent in its debt payments to Old World governments or banks. America made that policy credible in the Spanish-American War, in which it acquired Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, the Philippines, and the Virgin Islands and turned Cuba into an American protectorate. This policy included regime change in Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic during the Wilson Administration. During and after the Second World War, America’s status as the world’s preeminent military power gave it responsibilities throughout the world, typically in opposition to the predominant tyrannies of the time—first, the Axis Powers, then the several Communist regimes, including the members of the Warsaw Pact. The World War was of course no small one, the Cold War no short one, but most of the wars during that time were short and, except for the war in Vietnam, not prolonged.

The first hundred years after the Constitution was ratified saw small overseas wars aimed, typically, at protecting the commercial interests of the new commercial republic. That is, these wars derived primarily from the character of the regime. Boot begins with the Barbary Wars, fought between 1801 and 1805, then again in 1815. The enemies were Morocco, ruled by the Alawite Dynasty, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis, which were largely self-governing entities within the Ottoman Empire. These governments preferred not to tax their merchants, seeking revenues by capturing ships sailing in the Mediterranean, taking the cargo and selling the captives into slavery or ransoming them. Initially, the United States preferred to bribe the Barbary states into leaving its ships alone (John Adams calculated that this was cheaper than building a navy, inasmuch as “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever”). Congress inclined to agree with Adams, but “this policy of appeasement, far from sating the demands of the North African rulers, only whetted their appetite for more.” Thomas Jefferson took the bellicose view, asserting “that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demands from these pirates but the presence of an armed force, and it will be more economical and more honorable to use the same means at once for suppressing the insolencies.” Although Congress refused to declare war, it did authorize the president to “use all necessary force to protect American shipping overseas.” 

Army officer and Consul General to Tunis William Eaton had come to the same conclusion. The pasha had come to power by murdering his predecessor, his older brother; Eaton met with a younger brother of the despot, planning a coup d’état. This made Eaton unwelcome to the Tunisian government, but upon his return to Washington the Jefferson Administration backed his strategy—the “first of many times that an American president would plot to overthrow a foreign government.” As Jefferson explained to his Secretary of State, James Madison, “although it does not accord with the general sentiments of views of the United States to intermeddle in the domestic contests of other countries, it cannot be unfair, in the prosecution of a just war, or the accomplishment of a reasonable peace, to turn to their advantage, the enmity and pretensions of others against a common foe.”

Eaton set up a joint base of operations in Egypt, from which he led an expeditionary force of about 600. They took the city of Derna, only to learn that Jefferson’s special envoy, Tobias Lear, had negotiated a peace treaty with the regnant pasha, who had been alarmed at American battlefield success. “Eaton boiled over with anger at what he viewed as a sellout of his men and America’s allies,” but could do nothing. 

Hostilities resumed in 1815, as Algiers sided with Britain in the War of 1812. This time, Commodore Stephen Decatur won favorable terms from the Barbary states after several successful naval skirmishes. “The naval operations had established an important principle—freedom of the seas—and helped end for all time the threat to commercial shipping from the [Barbary] corsairs,” although the decisive act occurred when France finally took control of Algiers, adding it to its empire in 1830. “Tripoli would not become a threat to international order again until the 1970s,” when it was ruled by the notorious and now late Muammar Gadhafi.

In subsequent decades, “even if the U.S. eschewed overseas colonialism” during the Europeans’ ‘scramble for empire,’ “that hardly means the country was isolationist, as the popular myth has it”; “where commercial interests advanced, armed forces were seldom far behind,” as “the flag usually follows trade, not the other way around.” Indeed, “throughout the nineteenth century, American influence kept expanding abroad, especially in the Pacific and Caribbean.” While the army fought the Indians in North America, the navy and the very small Marine Corps defended the commercial shipping. The composition of the navy was sharply divided between the officers, culled from the gentry class—many of them “imperious, hot-blooded, quick to take offense, and above all brave, sometimes suicidally so”—and the enlisted men—for the most part uneducated and impoverished, “the dregs of the waterfront,” usually foreign-born and non-citizens, fighting alongside black freemen. The enlisted men “would not be missed overmuch if a few died in action.” The Marines acted as guards to protect the aristocrats on the upper deck from an incursion from “the lower deck rabble.” 

Their missions included chasing pirates in the Caribbean in the 1820s and off Sumatra in the early 1830s. Under orders from the Jackson Administration, the navy also bombarded Argentinian forces on the Falkland Islands, where American seal-hunting vessels had been seized. After Congress outlawed slave importation in 1807, the navy played a relatively minor role in assisting the British Royal Navy in its interception of slavers who operated out of west Africa, although the Southerners who often ran the Department of the Navy kept such activities to a minimum. The navy also gave minor assistance to Britain in its successful opening of Chinese ports to trade. “No matter how tiny, the navy had little trouble overawing various pirates and tribesmen with its vastly superior technology and training.” As a result, U. S. exports multiplied more than sixteen-fold between 1789 and 1860. This “empire of the seas,” as Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Henry Seward called it, was not the overseas empire of Britain, and so could be maintained at vastly smaller cost.

Americans rolled back that empire after the Civil War, preferring to have their manufactures and farm produce shipped under foreign flags. The second half of the century saw a small and futile action intended to open Korea to American trade and nearly twenty expeditions in Central and South America, usually as a response to a revolution that threatened U.S. diplomats and merchants. The year 1885 saw a more serious conflict, when President Cleveland sent troops to Panama in order to defend the Panama Railroad from a local strongman. In general, by the 1880s, the U.S. navy was “a joke” compared to the Europeans, ranking twelfth in the world in number of ships—behind the likes of Turkey (the ‘Sick Man of Europe’) and Sweden. But in 1890, Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, “a work that would define the age.” Mahan urged his fellow countrymen to build a real navy, one that could match the European powers. Theodore Roosevelt built his career in national politics on that, and he had no shortage of allies in Congress. “The result was the first major peacetime arms buildup in the nation’s history, a buildup that gave America a navy capable of sinking the Spanish fleet in 1898.” And, given the steam-powered ships’ need for fuel, America needed to acquire not an overseas empire but secure overseas coaling stations. Many attempts to purchase land for that purpose failed, but the mid-1890s Hawaii had been taken, after American residents overthrew the native ruler, and by 1899 the United States had secured a portion of Samoa in an agreement reached with Britain and Germany. 

Boot marks America’s ascendency to “great power” status by its response to the 1900 Boxer Uprising in China. The so-called Boxers (called that in recognition of their knowledge of martial arts), more properly called the I-ho ch’üan or “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” detested the incursions of modernizing Western influences, which included Christian missionaries. They made the mistake of threatening foreign embassies, attracting the military attention of Britain, the United States, Germany, Russia, and Japan. For their part, the invading forces behaved badly, looting Beijing extensively and, in some cases raping and murdering Chinese women. The Germans were especially ruthless, having been ordered by Kaiser Wilhelm II to act “just as the Huns a thousand years ago” had done. By 1912, the monarchic regime collapsed and China became a republic. America had had cooperated in an important overseas land operation with other major powers for the first time. 

Simultaneously, America fought against guerrillas in the Philippines, where the people were no more delighted with American rule than they had been under the rule of Spain. Americans didn’t actually want to rule the country, preferring to establish a naval base at Manila as a counterpart to the British base at Hong Kong. A base at Manila would deter German and Japanese ambitions there. This policy was opposed by a distinguished group of American anti-imperialists which included former president Cleveland, frequent presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, labor union leader Samuel Gompers, the philosopher William James, the social worker Jane Addams, and Mark Twain. In the war itself, the disorganized and poorly-armed Filipinos were no match for American troops, but disease and heat exhaustion often overmatched the Americans. If Napoleon’s army had foundered against Russia’s ‘General Winter,’ Americans faced ‘General Tropics.’ Nonetheless, Americans rallied behind the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket and the United States Supreme Court’s decision in the Insular Cases, holding that the United States need not grant citizenship to conquered peoples reassured those who feared economic competition from low-wage workers. Colonial governor William Howard Taft and General Arthur McArthur oversaw the construction of schools, vaccination programs, sanitation, and worked to stand Filipinos up for eventual self-government by establishing courts with Filipino judges, and introducing municipal elections. Along with these policies of “attraction,” McArthur did not neglect to pursue military action, called “chastisement,” against the insurgents, some of them harsh—notably, the concentration camps in southern Luzon, where 11,000 Filipinos died of disease and malnutrition. By July 1902, President Roosevelt could declare victory, although the Muslim Moros on the islands of Mindanao and Jolo held out and indeed continue to menace foreigners and non-Muslim Filipinos alike, to this day. In 1907, Filipinos established the first national legislature in Asia; in 1935, the Philippines achieved full control of its domestic policies, and in 1946 it was granted full independence. “Among the institutions bequeathed to the Filipinos by the Americans were public schools, a free press, an independent judiciary, a modern bureaucracy, democratic government, and separation of church and state. Unlike the Dutch in the East Indies, the British in Malaya, or the French in Indochina, the Americans left virtually no legacy of economic exploitation; Congress was so concerned about protecting the Filipinos that it barred large landholdings by American individuals or corporations.” Pacification at the turn of the century had come at the expense of more than 4,200 Americans and 16,000 Filipinos killed, along with 200,000 civilian dead, “victims of disease and famine and the cruelties of both sides.” But the policy of attraction and chastisement worked, the Philippines eventually achieved independence, and America retained its naval base at Manila Bay. One key element of strategy, forgotten by the time America intervened in the war against the Vietnamese Communists, was the practice of placing army garrisons in the countryside, where they could live among the people, reduce civilian assistance to the guerrillas, and become fully familiar with the lay of the land. Boot observes that “the army’s success may be ascribed in some degree to the invaluable experience its top commanders had gained in fighting Indians” in the American West—the “finest irregular warriors in the world.” Twenty-six of the thirty American generals who sought in the Philippines from 1898 to 1902 had previous fought in the Indian Wars. And finally, the U. S. Navy blockaded the Philippines, preventing the insurgents from receiving foreign assistance and from moving men and supplies easily along the extensive coastline. And, it might be added, there was no equivalent of North Vietnam, backed by the equivalent of the Soviet Union.

In the years between the Spanish-American War and World War One, the United States established a true Pax Americana in the New World. “No longer would U.S. sailors and marines land for a few days at a tie to quell a riot” that threatened American lives and property; “now they would stay longer to manage the internal politics of nations.” In Cuba, the American military occupation was brief, with the stipulation that Americans would enjoy long-term leases on naval bases and cede to Americans the right “to intervene at any time to protect life, liberty, and property.” “Havana went along because it had no choice” in becoming an American protectorate. In Panama, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Panama, which regime it had helped Panamanian revolutionaries to install; in return, the new regime granted America sovereignty over the Panama Canal, then under construction, and lands surrounding it. The Canal Zone was potentially vulnerable to foreign attack, but only potentially, since “by 1906 the U.S. Navy was big enough to ensure that no other power would contest control of its own backyard”—second only to Britain, which by now was itself a commercial republic moving into alignment with America against Wilhelmine Germany. Such power was indeed necessary, as German naval officers, commanding a fleet as big as America’s had war plans for “seizing either Puerto Rico or Cuba as a staging area for an attack on the East Coast of the United States.” And of course, during the world war German submarines attacked American shipping in the Atlantic and schemed to ally with Mexico. When the Panamanian tyrant José Santos Zelaya allied with Germany and Japan, hoping to get support for the construction of a rival Central American canal, and schemed to bring the five Central American republics under his rule (he succeeded in overthrowing the government of Honduras), the United States pressured him out of the country in 1909, having found a friendlier replacement. 

During and after the First World War, Haiti became a problem for Washington. Between 1843 and 1915, the island had seen 102 civil wars, coups d’état, and other revolts. Haiti was ruled by a small, educated minority of mulattos; Catholic and French-speaking, “they regarded themselves as a race apart from, and superior to, the Creole-speaking, voodoo-practicing, darker-skinned Haitian masses.” If this ruling class split, one side would select a presidential candidate, give him a payroll supplied by resident German merchants (who controlled 80% of foreign trade), who would then watch as their man recruited soldiers of fortune and bandits, who would march to the capital and seize control, driving the sitting president into exile. Everyone profited: the merchants would be repaid, with interest; the soldiers would be paid for their trouble, in part with the loot they seized on the way to Port-au-Prince; the exiled president would “tak[e] a portion of the treasury with him,” easing the indignity of his ouster. That is, coups served more or less the same function as elections do in less tumultuous regimes. None of this worried Americans.

What made the revolution of July 1915 different was the sitting president’s refusal to leave quietly, as per custom, the subsequent bloodletting (200 members of the mulatto elite were arrested, most of them murdered by the police chief), and the concern that Germany might intervene and establish a naval base from which they could prosecute their war aims and interfere with ship traffic to and from the Panama Canal. The Wilson Administration’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, wrote that the Marines were ordered to seize control of the island “to terminate the appalling conditions of anarchy, savagery, and oppression which had been prevalent in Haiti for decades” and “to forestall any attempt by a foreign power to obtain a foothold on the territory of an American nation.” The policy had nothing to do with ‘Dollar Diplomacy,’ as Leftist writers often allege, because the minor U.S. business interests in Haiti were never threatened. No general rebellion followed the American occupation because American rule was better for Haitians than mulatto rule had been. Boot notes that Napoleon had failed in his attempt to quell the Haitian revolt of 1802 because he “had been trying to reimpose slavery and had fought a campaign of extermination, whereas, by Haitian standards at least, U.S. tactics were restrained and U.S. rule quite mild” and also because the French had not understood how to counter yellow fever, which “decimated” their troops. The Marines withdrew nine years later, with an elected government in place; the Roosevelt Administration ended U.S. political control ten years after that. The occupation had succeeded: it prevented German military occupation, and U.S. administrators oversaw the construction of 1,000 miles of roads, 210 major bridges, nine major airfields, 82 miles of irrigation canals, a substantial telephone network and a network of medical care. Americans did not succeed in “plant[ing] constitutional government” there, finding that “it would not take root.” FDR nonetheless listened to hand-wringing complaints about American ‘imperialism” and began his “Good Neighbor” policy of refusing to intervene, which meant that Haiti was misruled by tyrants for the next thirty years. “The only thing more unsavory than U.S. intervention, it turned out, was U.S. nonintervention.” In 1994, the Clinton Administration ended the FDR policy by sending in the Marines to reinstall a duly elected Haitian president who had been ousted by a coup that that had imposed a tyranny. Since then, Haiti has seen constitutional government.

Also during the First World War, the Wilson Administration undertook an invasion of Mexico. The wealthy Francisco Madero had organized revolutionary forces against the tyrant Porfirio Diaz in 1910; a Durango bandit, whose nom de guerre was Pancho Villa, was recruited to lead his forces. Three years later, Madero was in turn overthrown, replaced by General Victoriano Huerta; U.S. President William Howard Taft backed Huerta but his successor, Woodrow Wilson, did not, deeming it “a government of butchers.” Huerta fled to Spain in 1914. Boot identifies three major forces who rebelled against Huerta: “dispossessed peasants in southern Mexico led by Emiliano Zapata”; middle- and upper-class “progressives,” moderates who wanted to end oligarchic rule and to establish a constitutional republic; and Villa’s forces in northern Mexico, which consisted of “poor farmers, miners, cowboys, and Indians” who wanted land reform. Pancho allied with a “new leader of the revolution, Venustiano Carranza, governor of a northern state, Coahuila and founder of the Constitutionalist Party. Villa defeated the Huerta forces in the state of Chihuahua and ran it himself, expropriating big landowners and giving the proceeds to his followers. He left middle-class property owners unmolested. After Huerta departed, “the revolutionaries fell out among themselves setting the stage for the greatest bloodletting of the entire civil war, with Zapata and Villa allying against Carranza. Villa’s side was crushed. During the struggle, Wilson had ordered an American military intervention on the Constitutionalist side, occupying Veracruz. Wilson, who wanted stability in the country, embargoed arms shipments to the anti-Carrancista forces and “extended de facto recognition to the Carranza government” in October 1915. In response, Villa ordered a series of cross-border raids, most of them in Texas. This provoked Wilson to launch the Punitive Expedition in northern Mexico, with strict orders to the soldiers to refrain from looting; officers paid Mexicans for provisions, much to the amazement of the Mexicans. The Americans failed to capture Villa, succeeding only in temporarily scattering his forces. Eventually, it was the Constitutionalist forces that defeated him, in 1920; he was assassinated by government operatives in 1923. In ten years of civil war, some one million Mexicans had died. General John Pershing’s expeditionary force had gain military experience that proved valuable when the United States fought in the First World War, but while the Veracruz seizure had helped the Constitutionalists, the later Punitive Expedition had accomplished nothing lasting.

In the aftermath of the Great War, Wilson joined with allies Britain and France to intervene against the newly formed Soviet Union. Wilson had been buoyed by reports of the March 1917 Russian Revolution against the czarist regime (Russia has “always been in fact democratic at heart,” he exulted, without evidence), then dismayed by the Bolshevik Revolution of November. The Allies were incensed with the separate peace the Bolsheviks signed with Germany, ceding the Baltics, Ukraine, and southern Russia to Germany, enabling the enemy to “transfer a million soldiers to throw against their exhausted amies on the Western Front.” This prompted the British to intervene, sending a small group of Royal Marines to the port city of Murmansk. Wilson hesitated to comply with the British request for reinforcements but finally agreed in order to protect the Czechoslovak Legion, some 70,000 defectors from Austria-Hungary who had volunteered to fight with the Allies when the czarist regime was still in power. Now that the Soviets had taken Russia out of the war, the legionnaires intended to get over to the Western Front; they couldn’t use any of the blockaded western ports, so they began to march across Siberia to Vladivostok on the Pacific, from which port they would sail for France. The Bolsheviks initially approved this mission but, fearing an alliance between the legionnaires and the pro-czarist elements in the Russian army, demanded that they disarm. When the Czechs refused to do so, fighting broke out and “the Allies, including the U.S., felt a moral responsibility to safeguard the legion.” 

The American forces were led by Major General William S. Graves, who “interpreted his vague orders to mean that his men should remain neutral in the Russian Civil War” and “refused to engage in an offensive against the Bolsheviks, or event to confiscate weapons from suspected Communists.” Disgusted by atrocities committed by the anti-Communist “Whites,” he evidently knew nothing of worse atrocities committed by the “Reds.” Meanwhile, another segment of the U.S. Army did fight the Communists, although its efforts were soon curtailed by the characteristically brutal Russian winter. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, President Wilson and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George agreed to withdraw the troops, as “they did not think foreigners could suppress a revolution, even though Britain and American had successfully suppressed revolutions from India to the Philippines.” They assumed, without much warrant, that the Bolsheviks must be enjoying the support of the Russian people. “It did not occur to them that the Communists’ success might be due, as it largely was, to purely military factors—the Reds had better and more unified leadership, more materiel and men, and greater willingness to brutalize the population into acquiescence than the Whites did,” and that, moreover, “although many of the White leaders were hardly democrats, the Reds were imposing upon the Russian people a regime that would make Ivan the Terrible’s look almost benign by comparison.” Despite Winston Churchill’s vehement protestations to the contrary, Lloyd George imagined that “Bolsheviks would not wish to maintain an army, as their creed was fundamentally anti-militarist.” In the United States, the Senate nearly passed a resolution to recall the troops; the Wilson Administration finally gave in, in the early weeks of 1920. Boot estimates that with two or three divisions (i.e., 24,000 to 36,000 troops), the Allies would have tipped the scales against the Bolsheviks, likely saving the millions of lives lost to Communist in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century.

A few years later, the Coolidge and Hoover administrations fought a small war closer to home. Nicaragua was still occupied by a 100-man contingent of Marines. In 1924, a coalition government of Liberal and Conservative party members was elected, only to be overthrown by the Conservative Emiliano Chamorro. The United States didn’t recognize the new regime, and civil war broke out in May 1926. Mexico backed the rebels, while the United States successfully supported the election of Adolfo Diaz, that November. As a U.S.-brokered peace treaty between the new government and the Liberal Party rebels was not accepted by one Liberal commander: Augusto Sandinò, an anti-American nationalist backed by Mexico and the Soviet Union. Sandinò demanded a new election; Washington demurred. Although he accepted Communist support, he was not himself a Communist; he knew what he wanted—American withdrawal from Nicaragua and from Latin America generally—but “he lacked a well-thought-out political agenda” beyond that. The war ended when newly-elected President Roosevelt withdrew American troops in 1933; Sandinò was arrested and executed and the Sandinistas crushed in the following year. Although Communists and their dupes ever after charged the Roosevelt Administration with complicity in these actions, Boot reports that “the evidence does not support this contention.” The coup organized by a former war minister, Anastasio Somoza, who established a tyranny, found his opportunity only after the Marines left. “Dictatorship was indigenous; democracy was a foreign transplant that did not take, in part because America would not stick around long enough to cultivate it.”

Prior to the Second World War, the Marines issued The Small Wars Manual, summarizing lessons learned in such conflicts. The Manual defined the American understanding of small wars as “operations undertaken under executive authority”—that it, without a declaration of war by Congress [1]—wherein “military force is combined with diplomatic pressure in the internal or external affairs of another state whose government is unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.” The army is better adapted to fighting big wars, the Marines for small wars. Big wars aim at “the defeat and destruction of the hostile forces,” but American military forces in small wars aim “to establish and maintain law and order by supporting or replacing the civil government in countries or areas in which the interests of the United States have been placed in jeopardy.” For that reason, “hatred of the enemy,” encouraged during the Great War and soon to be revived during World War II, should be eschewed; “sympathy and kindness should be the keynote to our relationship with the mass of the population,” since the enemy is a much smaller group: either revolutionary insurgents or a bad regime. When undertaking such a war, the military must understand that “in small wars no defined battle front exists and the theater of operations may be the whole length and breadth of the land,” in which soldiers will face enemies who “will suddenly become innocent peasant workers when it suits their fancy and convenience.” They will know the countryside better than Americans do. “It will be difficult and hazardous to wage war successfully under such circumstances”; consequently, the war may be long and the outcome unclear. Perhaps in recognition of these difficulties, in the 1950s President Eisenhower downplayed the use of small wars in countering Communist military threats, preferring to follow a policy of escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons, “an area,” Boot remarks, “in which the U.S. then had a preponderance of power.”

But this policy of escalation simply did not fit all military circumstances, as American strategists failed to see when they planned the war in Vietnam. From 1959 to 1963, American forces helped to defend non-Communist South Vietnam from the Communist regime in the north. These forces were called “advisers,” a term left over from American policy in the aftermath of previous small wars, when the Marines trained and reinforced police forces, emphasizing “internal defense.” “In Vietnam, by contrast, U.S. advisers organized a miniature version of their own armed forces complete with heavy armor, artillery, air force, navy, marines, rangers” in preparation for an invasion from the north, as had been seen in Korea. But instead of fighting such a conventional war, the North Vietnamese supported a guerrilla war. “American advisers did not prepare the South Vietnamese soldiers for this challenge.” Moreover, unlike Korea, the South Vietnamese military was not under the command of American officers. And again unlike Korea, the Johnson Administration refused to attack targets in North Vietnam, notably the capital city of Hanoi, the major harbor of Haiphong, supply routes from China, and the Red River dikes; “U.S. warplanes in the Korean War had destroyed North Korea’s dike system, with devastating results.” The Communists “rightly” regarded the frequent pauses in the limited bombing campaign as “a sign of the Johnson administration’s weakness and irresolution.” Johnson wanted no escalation of the war because he feared Chinese intervention (again, as in Korea), preferring to invest in his domestic ‘War on Poverty.’ And so, the problem was that Americans stuck themselves in between a big-war strategy and a small-war strategy. “Thus the really hard, vital work of keeping the Vietcong out of the South’s population centers was left for the most part to the ill-equipped, ill-trained South Vietnamese militia, who did not even have access to modern rifles.”

No better strategy could have been conceived to hand the advantage to the enemy. Rather than meet American military strength, North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap took up Chairman Mao’s strategy of a “people’s war”; propagandize the peasants in order to establish “a protective belt of sympathizers willing to supply food, recruits, and information”; fight “a protracted guerrilla struggle” aiming in part to kill not just the foreigners but as many pro-American, anti-Communist Vietnamese as possible; and finally, having weakened the enemy, form conventional armies “that, in conjunction with a general popular uprising, will finish off the enemy” and change the regime into a ‘people’s republic.’ The Vietcong—the South Vietnamese Communist guerrillas—needed only minimal supplies from the North, simply taking supplies and manpower from the peasants, whether the peasants were collaborators or not. Although North Vietnamese troops were infiltrating South Vietnam in the mid-1960s, they did not become the preponderant force there until 1968, and even then, they engaged in guerrilla-style “hit-and-run tactics.” 

One Marine commander, Major General Victor H. Krulak, advocated a strategy based on the small-war lessons he had learned from his commanding officers as a young Marine in the 1930s. What he called a “spreading inkblot” strategy would have “expand[ed] American control slowly from the seacoast by pacifying one hamlet after another, as the U.S. had done in the Philippines six decades earlier.” Since eighty percent of South Vietnamese lived in ten percent of the country, the aim would have been to prevent the Vietcong from infiltrating the population centers by providing security for the villagers. There was no point in attempting to search for enemy forces in the jungles, where they could hide successfully, “but if the U.S. could cut them off from the civilian population, they would wither away,” separated from their sources of supply and recruitment. Krulak’s recommendation did not prevail, and while “U.S. soldiers never lost a battle…neither did they manage to pin down enough of the enemy so that a victory meant something.” They were reacting to enemy attacks, attacks launched when the enemy chose to attack. And the American soldiers had no training in counterinsurgency; once ‘in country,’ they learned soon enough, but in the conscript army of that time they were quickly rotated out and replaced by new and inexperienced men. Meanwhile, the famous “hearts and minds” campaign by a variety of nonmilitary American agencies lacked a serious military component. The military side of American operations—called “search-and-destroy”—and the civilian side—called “pacification”—were disjunct. The main exception to this policy was the Combined Action Program, in which Marine rifle squads were paired with South Vietnam Popular Forces militia (“about 30 men from the local community”) who successfully took and held villages, with much lower casualties than the search-and-destroy missions. But at its peak, fewer than 2,500 Marines participated in the program.

In terms of politics, General William Westmoreland did not understand the character of the Communist regime. Both the Soviet Union and Communist China had proved themselves capable of absorbing enormous losses, both in war and in peacetime ‘purges.’ Similarly, “North Vietnam was ruled by a dictatorship impervious to the pressure of popular opinion,” its leaders “tolerat[ing] staggering causalities with equanimity”: 1.1. million dead, 300,000 missing from a population of 20 million. That is, the Vietnamese civil war saw many more times the number of casualties than the Union did in the American civil war. And in Vietnam, American casualties of 58,000—comparable, Boot observes, to the annual number of traffic deaths, at that time—turned Americans against the war. By 1968, North Vietnam’s New Year offensive, violating a truce arranged for the holiday, resulted in 50,000 Communist dead against 2,000 Americans, was reported as a serious American setback in the American news media. President Johnson quickly announced that he would not seek re-election.

At this, the Army generals finally changed toward a pacification strategy, Operation Phoenix, which was highly effective. On the civilian side, South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu ordained land reform, giving farmers legal title to the fields they worked—a powerful incentive against Communist propaganda and a reason to defend local territories against would-be expropriators. After one last failed offensive in March 1972, the Communists came to the bargaining table with the Nixon administration. After the agreement, South Vietnam couldn’t defend itself any more than West Germany could have done after the Second World War or South Korea could have done after that war. In the latter two cases, however, American troops stayed in place. In 1975, Congress cut aid to South Vietnam. The North took that as a signal to strike, this time successfully. 

The lessons American politicians learned from the Vietnam War were, first, to replace conscripts with professional soldiers and, second, to prefer “sanitized, high-tech warfare” to the commitment of ground troops. This tends to miss the point: while Americans of course want no casualties of any kind, their main concern is victory—that soldiers “not die ‘in vain.'” The later interventions in Lebanon and Somalia confirm this. As to regime change, “the American track record of imposing liberal, democratic regimes by force is mixed”: successful in the Philippines, Japan, Germany, and Italy, not so in Russia, Nicaragua, Haiti, or (later) Afghanistan. Boot does not overlook the costs of non-intervention and short-term intervention, notably in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He hopes that the United Nations might sanction international efforts to restore governance in failed states—typically, a wan hope. This notwithstanding, “American should not be afraid to fight ‘the savage wars of peace’ if necessary to enlarge the ’empire of liberty.’ It has done it before.”

 

Note

1. “Declarations of war—voted against Britain in 1812, Mexico in 1846, Spain in 1898, the Central Powers in 1917, the Axis in 1941—were the exception, not the norm” throughout American history.