Barbara W. Tuchman: The First Salute. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Originally published in the Washington Times, October 10, 1988.

 

Underneath it all—beneath her success as a popular historian, beneath her liberalism à la mode, even beneath her status as a woman who established herself as a scholar before feminism came along to help—Barbara W. Tuchman is rather an old-fashioned woman, and very much an old-fashioned scholar. Sufficiently ‘left’ to steady the tremulous consciences of haut bourgeois philanthropists, never ‘left’ enough to offend at table—with less independence, she might have been Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

One can do worse than to be old-fashioned. Mrs. Tuchman still practices narrative history—not history ‘from below,’ not feminist history, not ‘postmodernist’ history, not any of the inferior sorts of history that forget the plot in search of Significance. Mrs. Tuchman does her research, tells her story, and stops before page 350.

She tells how the United States won the independence declared in July 1776. “The first salute” means the cannon salute received that November by the American ship Andrew Doria as it sailed into harbor at St. Eustatius in the Dutch West Indies, delivering a copy of the Declaration to Governor Johannes de Graaf. His was the first foreign government to recognize American independence, thereby recognizing a new kind of sovereignty, one based upon the consent of the governed. Governor de Graaf himself declared his intellectual if not political independence that day, as The Hague did not officially recognize the new nation.

De Graaf simply followed his own and his island’s interests. “The richest port in the Caribbean,” the St. Eustatius Dutch cared not so much for political liberty as for commerce, and thereby served liberty anyway. Edmund Burke said that the “proprietors” of St. Eustatius “had, in the spirit of commerce, made it an emporium for all the world.” Other Englishmen took a less indulgent line. With understandable sourness, Sir Joseph Yorke, ambassador to the Netherlands, complained that “the Americans would have had to abandon their revolution if they had not been aided by Dutch greed.”

While Dutch trading interests favored the Americans, the oligarchs at The Hague opposed them, ineffectually. The Dutch genius for commerce had no political counterpart; a maze of governmental subdivisions defeated any attempt at forceful action. The spiritedness of the people declined. America’s ambassador there, John Adams, said, “They seem afraid of every thing.” A series of military defeats at British hands (including the loss of St. Eustatius in 1781) eventually caused the dissolution of the Dutch Republic some twenty years later. The American Founders saw how commerce and republican liberty needed each other, and how both needed effective military defense, if they were to endure.

France made the error opposite to the Dutch error: It had republican politics without the spirit of commerce. The French never supplemented their military and political genius with much commercial genius. They were nonetheless rich, owing to their conquests. Tuchman describes the military and financial assistance (motivated no more by the love of liberty than were the Dutch of St. Eustatius) that made the Revolution successful.

Mrs. Tuchman devotes much of the book to accounts of naval and land battles. On these, she is well-informed, and also quite funny. This is not feminist history, but it is feminine history, animated by distaste for masculine combativeness coupled with a perfect contempt for men who fight badly. She deplores military men generally but falls in love with one in particular: the British admiral, Sir George Brydges Rodney, “a man of unforgiving character and vigorous action” who conquered St. Eustatius and plundered it, showing particular hostility toward Jewish residents, whom he robbed and then exiled.

And yet, and yet: Sir George “was frankly beautiful,” with a “youthful appearance and seductive face,” “a strong sensual mouth,” and (the lady is undone, her prose with her) a “stunning head.” Sir George makes Mrs. Tuchman quite the schoolgirl again, and one can only feel relief that she lives at safe remove from this British bad boy.

In moments of less transport, and as the book goes on, Mrs. Tuchman evokes other ages of woman. In her middle-aged moods, she has some catty fun at the expense of barbarities persisting into the Age of Enlightenment—particularly the British Admiralty’s forty-year delay in stocking lime juice aboard ships, after learning that citrus prevents scurvy. Across the centuries, she briskly proposes reforms in ship design and sailor hygiene. That time-tested English attribute, complacency, finds no quiet pub safe from Mrs. Tuchman’s improving ire.

Mellowing in later chapters, she offers readers some grandmotherly aphorisms. Even “the best laid plans,” she advises us, will “disintegrate… if human agency proves deficient.” “Pessimism is a primary source of passivity.” And “revolutions produce other men, not new men.” She frets over Sir George’s gout; they are growing old together.

You know how the story comes out, the Americans winning and all. It’s worth reading, nonetheless, for humor intended and not, and for the substantial work that went into writing it. Mrs. Tuchman remains an honest, professional popularizer of history who does her share of original research, and if you can’t stand her quirks then you just don’t like women enough.

James Monroe: The People the Sovereigns. Cumberland: James River Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, October 26, 1988.

 

“Other republics have failed,” James Monroe writes. Their governments were defective; their societies could not sustain liberty. “Do like causes exist here?” Occasionally, there is justice in accident; Monroe never finished the book he started in 1830, in answer to that question.

“The last voice of the Revolutionary generation,” as Russell Kirk calls Monroe in a graceful introduction, may have fallen silent too soon, but what we still can hear means more than any random hundred books on the American founding published by political ‘scientists’ in our generation, and more than any thousand speeches by the strutting popinjays who style themselves ‘public servants’ or ‘journalists.’ An experienced, thoughtful statesman who personally witnessed not only the American but the French revolution, Monroe understands the theory and practice of republicanism, its prospects and dangers.

Monroe loves political liberty with a fervor most Americans now associate mostly with recent refugees from tyranny. In effect, he was one, having served in the Revolutionary War against the British Empire during one of its especially rigorous attempts at centralizing power in London. “Our Revolution forms the most important epoch in the history of mankind,” for “it has introduced a system of new governments better calculated to secure to the people the blessings of liberty, and under circumstances more favorable to success, than any which the world ever knew before.” The regime of liberty “promises to promote… essentially the happiness of mankind,” hitherto made miserable by tyrannies of the one, the few, and the many.

“In treating of government, we must treat of man.” Monroe understands human nature as James Madison did: good enough to deserve liberty, bad enough to abuse it if men’s passions are not channeled by sound institutions and by protected property rights, not restrained by the enlightened intellect and morality that cultivate a spirit of independence. Both good government and a civilized society are indispensable to republican regimes.

A well-ordered republic entrusts sovereignty to the people, government to their elected representatives. Monroe argues strongly that popular sovereignty must remain distinct and complementary. Regimes that give direct governmental powers to the people as a whole—’participatory democracy,’ as the old New Left called it—result in “every species of abuse” and the “certain overthrow” of the government and of popular sovereignty itself.

Conversely, a government that does not separate executive, legislative, and judicial powers will abuse popular sovereignty and return the people to despotism. This holds even for an elected body in which all powers are concentrated; “the result, if not so prompt, will, nevertheless, be equally fatal.” In a rare instance of naivete and absence of foresight, Monroe anticipates no judicial usurpation, fearing only the legislative and executive branches. In The Federalist, Publius calls the judiciary “the least dangerous branch,” and Monroe carries the thought a bit too far.

Monroe served as the American representative to France in the aftermath of Robespierre’s reign of terror. “The government was in effect united with the sovereignty in the people, and all power, legislative, executive, and judicial, concentrated in them.” The moderates who followed Robespierre might have succeeded, had not the military leaders who defended the French Republic from foreign attack won uncritical popular approbation. Napoleon rose, and the Republic fell, a victim to its lack of separation between popular sovereignty and government on the one hand, and separation of governmental powers on the other.

Monroe carefully contrasts the American republic with the ancient mixed regimes, also called republics—part monarchic, part aristocratic, part democratic—described by Aristotle, and also with the modern mixed regimes prescribed by Locke and Montesquieu. He faults Aristotle for failing to show how civic virtue can find institutional expression; virtue alone he regards as a “visionary basis” for government. Aristotle’s own attention to ruling forms or institutions more than suggests that he know that; his greater emphasis on virtue may instead reflect the prevalence of poleis or city-states in his part of the ancient world—small places where citizens knew one another and could keep an eye on their neighbors. Modern states are too big for so much of that. They still need virtues to survive, but they can depend upon them less.

He applauds Locke and Montesquieu for their basic principles, and for their clear understanding of the separation of powers, but finds little merit in their enthusiasm for the mixed regime of Great Britain. Monroe prefers a government republican in all its branches, contending that elements antagonistic in principle finally will not cohere. Faction ruins ‘mixed’ regimes.

Civic education nearly disappeared from American high schools in the 1960s. Faced with civic illiteracy, the interest of educators has renewed. Written in the plain language of the 1830s, The People the Sovereigns would likely befuddle today’s students and most of their teachers. Nonetheless, an intelligent summary of its contents, written in a style easily understandable now, would serve as an excellent primer in American government—far superior to the drivel distributed in recent years to teachers and students alike ignorant of the purposes and principles of American republicanism.

On November 3, 1988, just before the U. S. presidential election, I debated Dr. Richard Plano, a Professor of Physics at Rutgers University, at the Busch Student Center. The topic was United States policy of nuclear weapons. The debate began with a screening of “Mandate From Main Street: Americans Advise the Next President,” a videotape produced by the Union of concerned Scientists and the Better World Society. The video consisted of a presentation of information about nuclear weapons to a small group of Americans, who discussed the presentation amongst themselves. The strategy was to have the audiences for the video watch and listen to the audience in the video, then to carry on the discussion.
Dr. Plano and I were each given twenty minutes for our opening statements.

 

EMPTY MANDATE

What is the “mandate from Main Street”? According to this film, it has two components:
1. Americans don’t want nuclear war; we find the prospect of violent death distasteful.
2. Americans want to proceed with peace treaties, but with caution.
Polling data suggest that these sentiments have held fairly steady for the last three decades at least. Within this consensus, there are fluctuations: one year we’re passing nuclear ‘freeze’ resolutions, the next year we’re reelecting Ronald Reagan in a landslide. We know what we want; we’re not so sure about what we should do to get it.

Why, then, does the discussion filmed here, make the participants so happy? At the end, they heartily congratulate one another for reaching these utterly unexceptional conclusions. I imagine that many of us who watch them find their enthusiasm contagious.

The answer has nothing to do with the content of the film. Its conclusions are too general to give any useful guidance to a president, and the information offered, such as it is, will mislead anyone who takes it seriously. But the technique here is admirable.

Most films of this sort present their case by offering statistics, some ‘visuals’ designed for maximum emotional impact, and opinions delivered by authority figures. This film goes a step further. It uses these ordinary techniques on an audience that we, the second audience, watch. The ‘group dynamic’ of the audience in the film thus reaches out to involve the audience watching the film. Anyone here who’s interested in marketing or advertising might study this carefully. I don’t know if you can sell cars or laundry detergents this way, but it might be fun to try.

As for the substance of the film, it is weak. I’ve listened twice, now, and unless I’m mistaken, no one in the discussion group ever cites a single fact, with the exception of the former Coast Guardsman who assures everyone that the billions spent for defense actually bought things.

All else is emotions, opinions, and short commonsense arguments. None of the participants really knows anything about the issues.

Let me be more specific. The film commits errors in four categories: history, military strategy, economics, and politics.

In History: The film tries to portray the Reagan Administration as having changed its policies with respect to the Soviets. The producers try to contrast Reagan’s “evil empire” statement with his recantation in Red Square. They ignore the context of the two statements. “Evil empire” was [a phrase in a speech given at] a convention of evangelical Christians. “No longer an evil empire” was during a summit conference, with Gorbachev at his elbow. What do you expect?

Beyond the rhetoric, Reagan’s policy has been completely consistent throughout his two terms. In response to the well-documented decline of American strength in the 1970s, and a steep Soviet buildup, Reagan undertook an American buildup accompanied by several small-scale, rapid military forays—Grenada and Libya—and longer-term efforts in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf. This balance of action and talk has remained consistent for more than seven years.

In treating the Pershing and Cruise missile deployments as if they occurred in a vacuum, the film is misleading. In claiming that “Reagan’s popularity plummeted” in 1983, not 1982, the film is wrong—and for a purely polemical reason. [The producers] want to link Reagan’s popularity with arms talks, instead of the economy. And in claiming that Reagan was “playing on the fears” of the American people, the film conveniently ‘forgets that these fears were our response to the very real Soviet military buildup, and to [Soviet] strategic advances through proxies in Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, and Latin America throughout the 1970s.

In terms of military strategy, the film has no substance at all. The participants agree that we have more than “enough” bombs because we can “blow up the world.” This is simply irrelevant. We won’t blow up anything if we can’t deliver warheads on target. Nuclear deterrence rests on the perceived ability to retaliate after your own forces have been attacked. We manufacture a variety of weapons, in large quantities, precisely because we want to have a formidable arsenal left over after an attack—enough so the Soviets won’t attack us in the first place. The film never grasps this elementary point of strategy.

Similarly, the film assumes that more weapons are more dangerous than fewer—wrong again, and for the same reason. Survivable and deliverable weapons are the key to security, not ‘more’ and ‘fewer.’ This is why Reagan can build up [our nuclear arsenal] and negotiate for reductions, simultaneously.

It is on the issue of enforcement of treaties that the film plays its cleverest sleight-of-hand. You’ll recall that one of the participants says he wants to see arms treaties enforced. The narrator responds with a videotape on verification. There are some problems, here. [Former CIA Director] William Colby is a poor choice as an authority on verification, having presided over the CIA at a time when it underestimated Soviet nuclear strength. Even this year when the Soviets revealed the extent of their INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] arsenal, we learned we had underestimated the number of their weapons by 33%.

But the real point is this: To verify a violation is not the same as to respond to it. The man wanted to know what to do after verification. He never got an answer.

In terms of economics, the participants claim we’re “losing ground” and blamed military spending. The facts contradict them. Our GNP is $4 trillion. We generate one-fifth of the world’s wealth. If the Japanese, or the South Koreans, or any other nation is rising faster and now competes, good for them. It’s up to us to compete successfully, and the 6.33% of our GNP we spend on defense, only one-fifth of that on weapons, and less than that on nuclear weapons, poses no real obstacle to that—as our own history proves. In previous decades it has run as high as 12%, and there is no prospect of anything near that, again.

Further, if economic pressures and not the Reagan arms buildup drove the Soviets back to the negotiating table [as the film claimed], why did we get the INF Treaty only after proving we had the political capacity to get Pershing and Cruise missiles deployed in Europe? and why has the military share of the Soviet GNP continued to escalate? It’s now at approximately 17%, up from 12% fifteen years ago.

Despite the seriousness of these historical, strategic, and economic flaws, the film’s greatest deficiency is its superficial conception of politics. On the simplest level, we see this in the silly suggestion that America should somehow “help” Gorbachev by expediting arms treaties. The Soviets have shown that this sort of thing is useless; they were the ones who walked out of the arms talks in 1983, only to accept every one of the American terms on [the] INF [Treaty], only a few years later.

I’ve been involved with negotiations among politicians—nothing on this level, of course, but I know how it’s done. Adversaries don’t “help” each other; they help themselves. Sometimes, what they do is mutually beneficial. If Gorbachev is deposed, it will likely have nothing to do with whether or not he obtains treaties from us. It will be a power grab over which we will have little or no control.

The film’s narrator asks, “What is national security?” The [discussion] group’s answers are, “Economics and the prevention of drug trafficking.” That’s all right as far as it goes, but it misses the political character of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

When Lincoln said the United States was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he wasn’t just playing with words. The United States was founded as the first really practical anti-tyrannical regime.

The Founders wrote the Constitution to insure liberty, not merely by stating those liberties in the Bill of Rights (what good would that do?) but by structuring our government in such a way as to re-channel the ambitions of political men away from tyranny and toward liberty. They did this by separating sovereignty from government.

America was something new: Novus ordo seclorum. The highest secular authority is the people; as the Declaration of Independence says, “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But the people don’t govern directly, as in the old democracies that failed. Instead, they elect representatives to govern during fixed terms.

This principle of consent also governs the economy. We don’t have a ‘command economy,’ as the Soviets do. We have a commercial economy.

Government by consent is a commercial republic.

Contrast this with the Soviet founding, accomplished by Lenin. Lenin explicitly condemned government by consent, and the commercial economy that goes with it:

“Disarmament is the ideal of socialism. There will be no wars in socialist society; consequently, disarmament will be achieved. But whoever expects that socialism will be achieved without a social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence. And in the twentieth century… violence means neither a fist or a club but troops. To put ‘disarmament’ in the programme is tantamount to making the general declaration: We are opposed to the use of arms. There is as little Marxism in this as there would be if we were to say: We are opposed to violence!”

The dictatorship of the proletariat, which is really the dictatorship by the Communist Party over the proletariat, is nothing less than a new form of despotism directly opposed to the new form of liberty founded in America and since then initiated and sustained in many other parts of the world. This is why Soviet propagandists deride the American regime as an example of “bourgeois formalism”: both a commercial economy and a government separated from the people, its powers are divided and balanced within the government. All of this protects consent. The American regime prevents dictatorship, ‘proletarian’ or otherwise.

Where does this leave Gorbachev and his perestroika, his ‘restructuring’ of Soviet society? At this July’s Soviet Communist Party Conference, Gorbachev left no doubt:

“The wish to see the Party still stronger has resounded here most passionately and resolutely. This can only be welcomed, and I think all of us are pleased. As put down in its resolution, the Conference demanded that our Party should in every respect be a Leninist Party not only in content but in its methods.”

The political methods have if anything been more Leniniist than Lenin’s: to merge the party leadership with official state leadership to a degree seen only in another Communist-bloc country—Romania, where it has been a disaster.

The rhetoric is glasnost [openness], but the deed is centralization—more than ever. Perestroika is an attempt to reform centralism, not to abolish it. Consent still has no real place in the politics and economy of command. Liberty is granted as a privilege, not preserved as an unalienable right. There is still no reliable way to re-channel ambition into constructive purposes.

There’s no separation of sovereignty from government. There’s no separation and balance of powers within the government. There’s no genuine rule of law, based upon consent. For all of these reasons, there is no real recognition of, or solid protection for, human rights.

Perestroika has been attempted before. Lenin’s New Economic Policy and Khruschev’s de-Stalinization program are the most memorable examples. These efforts failed. Such efforts have to fail, because they are not radical—they don’t go to the root of the problem.

The great Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov understands this. In today’s Christian Science Monitor, he criticizes proposals for constitutional reform, which make Gorbachev not only the Party chief but the head of government. “As in the past, we are relying on one man,” Sahharov writes. “This is exceptionally dangerous, both for perestroika as a whole, and for Gorbachev personally. Today it will be Gorbachev, tomorrow it can be anyone.”

All of this has direct relevance to “Mandate from Main Street.” Arms treaties cannot get to the root of the political conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Gorbachev himself implies as much. “Our restructuring is demolishing the fear of the Soviet threat, and militarism [he means the military defense of the commercial republics] thereby loses its political justification.” Gorbachev does not say perestroika demolishes the Soviet threat itself, or the military justification of our arms buildup. He suggests that restructuring will affect the political situation, which determines military policy.

As the Oxford University historian Michael Howard has written, “Arms control becomes possible only when the underlying power balance has been mutually agreed.” This comes about only with a political settlement.

Commercial republics don’t fight among themselves. Britain and France, two countries with a long history of mutual hatred, possess nuclear arsenals sufficient to destroy one another. But neither nation worries about this. There is no arms treaty, there. Rather, both are commercial republics, regimes designed to re-channel military and political ambition toward liberty and consent, not violence.

Until the Soviet Union solves that [regime] problem, arms treaties will merely re-channel the conflict from one class of weapons to another. This can be worthwhile in a limited way. But it cannot mean real peace.