In 1899 the great
libertarian scholar William Graham Scholar of Yale University delivered a
speech in which he warned that the Spanish-American War was a crossing-the-Rubicon
event in the nation’s history that had finally transformed the nation from a
constitutional republic to an empire. Empire was what the Pilgrims
escaped from, and the American Revolution was fought against, for in an
empire the average citizen is viewed by his rulers as nothing more than a tax
slave and cannon fodder. Americans would soon become, he warned,
exactly what their country was founded to oppose.
The speech was entitled
“The Conquest of the United States by Spain” to denote the fact that the
Spanish-American war, an imperialistic war of conquest, was no different from
the types of aggressive wars that the old empires of Europe had been waging
for
centuries. Having devoted his adult life to scholarly pursuits in the field
of political economy (among others), William Graham Sumner was prescient in
his predictions about what America would become once it embarked on the road
to empire. Among his observations were the following:
The
Spanish-American War, like future American wars of imperialism, was
“justified” by a string of “sensational assertions” that are easily proven to
be untrue. Spain never threatened any American “interests,” and would have been
the last to have an incentive to sabotage the Battleship Maine, the calamity that
stoked war fever and got the masses (“Boobus Americanus in H.L. Mencken’s words) behind the short
“war.” Scholars like Sumner may have easily seen through the
government’s lies, but not the rationally-ignorant masses.
“Where is the
statesmanship”
in lying and manipulating the public into an aggressive war, Sumner asked
rhetorically. This of course had become the new definition of
“statesmanship” ever since Lincoln manipulated the Northern-state-public into
acquiescing in his waging of total war on their fellow American citizens in
the Southern states so that the “duties and imposts” could be collected
there, as he promised in his first inaugural address. To this day,
Republican Party propaganda mills like the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College
pretend to offer courses of study in “statesmanship” of the sort that was
mocked and ridiculed by Sumner.
If
“self-government” for people of the Spanish empire was the ostensible purpose
of the war, why was the American public not involved in any way in instigating
the war?,
asked Sumner. There was not even an opinion poll taken, he pointed
out. This point echoes the words of Randolph Bourne in his famous essay, “War is the Health of the State,” in which he
pointed out that the public never has anything to do with the preparations
for war. It is always a dozen or so connivers and schemers in the executive
branch of government, hidden even from elected members of congresses
and parliaments, who plot and plan for wars.
Was the war merely
a public school civics class writ large? Sumner also mocked the idea
promoted by the war party that Americans are merely interested in teaching
Filipinos about democracy and self-government, and then we will leave.
Sumner did not believe that “we” would ever leave the Philippines. We
are still there today.
The struggle for
world domination (imperialism) is destructive of democracy. Although American military
interventionism was being sold to Boobus Americanus as a means of spreading democracy, Sumner
pointed out that such tactics had led Spain into monarchy and bankruptcy, but
such facts were simply ignored by the American war party.
Why do Americans believe they have a “civilizing mission,” Sumner asked. The answer to
this rhetorical question lies in the deification of Abe Lincoln by the
Republican Party, which in effect was the entire federal government, in the
previous thirty-five years. Lincoln’s deification led to the deification
of the presidency in general, and to the federal government as well. As
Robert Penn Warren
wrote in his outstanding book, The Legacy of the Civil War, the Republican Party in the
post-war years claimed to possess a “treasury of virtue” that supposedly
justified anything and everything the government did anywhere on earth by
virtue of the fact that it was the American government that was doing
it. This is what “justified” American entry into World War I, for
instance, wrote Robert Penn Warren. It was given the obnoxious name
“American exceptionalism.” Sumner noted the absurdity
of employing Lincoln’s “all men are created equal” rhetoric from the
Gettysburg Address to argue that it is somehow “liberating” for people of
other countries to be governed by us.
William Graham Sumner
warned that “a matter of mind” that views other peoples as “less human” than
you would lead to “cruelty and tyranny” by the American government, as was
the case with all other governments in history that ruled over empires.
This of course was always the way of empires. Southerners were
demonized to “justify” the mass murder of tens of thousands of civilian
women, children, and old men, and the bombing and burning of entire cities
like Atlanta and Richmond during the “Civil War.” The Plains Indians
were dehumanized as “savages” while the brave men of the U.S. Army murdered
tens of thousands of Indian women and children from 1865 to 1890. Now
it was the Filipinos’ turn. At least 200,000 Filipinos were eventually
murdered by the U.S. government for resisting becoming a part of the American
empire. According to historian Joseph Stromberg, only about 15,000 of
them were actual combatants.
“We must devise a
government” for other peoples is another piece of war propaganda that
Sumner found to be intolerably arrogant and hypocritical. This argument
has been used over and over again by generations of American warmongering and
imperialistic politicians. A recent example would be Obama’s September
25, 2012 speech before the United Nations in which he praised the dead CIA
operative Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack on the American
“embassy” in Benghazi, Libya, after being sent there as Obama’s
“representative.” He was sent there, said Obama, to “craft a vision for
a future” for Libya and Libyans.
The next time you witness
a large American flag covering the entire football field before an NFL game;
or the flyover of fighter jets before a sporting event; or people wearing
American flag shirts and pants while watching the “President’s Cup” golf
tournament (which this year featured a naked female streaker
carrying a large American flag); or listen to drunks at a bar cheering and
shouting “USA! USA!” while watching American bombs dropped on someone in a
foreign country on the bar’s boob tube; or attend a church service decorated
with flags and listen to a sermon that thanks “our heroes” for murdering
people in foreign countries, think of this
comment by William Graham Sumner: “The thirst for glory is an
epidemic which robs people of their judgment, seduces their vanity, cheats
them of their interests, and corrupts their consciences.”
The “essence of
militarism,”
Sumner observed, is to despise constitutions, to sneer at parliaments, and to
look with contempt at civilians. All the neocon talking heads, from
Limbaugh to Hannity and Levin and others, adopted the slogan, “9/11 changed
everything” every time someone like Judge Andrew Napolitano would argue that
the government was acting in contempt of the Constitution with its
warrantless wiretaps, internet and cellphone spying, the PATRIOT Act,
etc. All American presidents have simply ignored Congress, for the most
part, in instigating wars; and of course all politicians at all times (with
one or two exceptions) look with absolute contempt at the average citizen.
Sumner wrote of how the
war party of his day was making the “the times have changed” argument for
war. This was reminiscent of Lincoln’s similar argument that “we must
think anew and act anew,” by which he also meant “to hell with the
Constitution.”
Militarism destroys
capitalist prosperity, Sumner also warned. He observed that all during the late
nineteenth century most Europeans were busy working, investing, starting
businesses, and improving their standards of living peacefully under a
growing capitalist system with little attention being paid to
militarism. Such behavior is absolute poison to the state, however,
which considers it to be a mortal enemy. So when European war parties
began to militarize, Sumner wrote of how government military spending was
crowding out private sector growth so much that European capitalism was being
“arrested, diverted, and crippled.” This is always the effect of the
growth of militarism in particular and of government in general, and in
Sumner’s time America was about to embark on the very same economically-destructive
path as the Europeans had so foolishly done.
How will we know when
we have become like the Old European empires?, Sumner asked. His answer
was that America would become awash in “war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a
grand-government system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish
expenditures, and political jobbery – in a word, imperialism.” This has
been a textbook definition of American society for quite a longtime now, and becoming
more and more so by the day.
“The great foe of
democracy is plutocracy,” Sumner declared, and militarism always fuels plutocracy. It
does so trough “jobbery” (i.e., crony capitalism), diverting the public’s
attention from their real economic problems, large government
expenditures that benefit a few well-connected defense contracting
corporations, and large government expenditures and debt that make the strong
stronger and the weak weaker.” This of course is a precise definition
of how the American warfare/welfare state, funded by the Fed, has so greatly
enriched the “one percenters” at the expense of
almost everyone else, as documented in great detail by David Stockman in his
book, The Great Deformation: The
Corruption of Capitalism in America, and by Hunter Lewis’s Crony Capitalism in
America.
This is also a major theme of my books, The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked; Hamilton’s Curse; and How Capitalism Saved America.
In light of all this, it
is understandable why an acquaintance of mine who is a Yale graduate recently
remarked that of all the paintings and photographs of famous Yale professors
and alumni that adorn the Yale libraries and other buildings on campus, the
image of William Graham Sumner cannot be found.
