At past FPRI history institutes I have praised and thanked the teachers in attendance because I likened them to front-line soldiers in the war to prove the ignorance of America’s youth is not invincible. Our subject this weekend makes that simile especially apt, so in my capacity as a college professor and my capacity as a high school parent, I salute your heroic calling.
My task is to offer some general remarks on how to think about war and the military in the broad sweep of American history—remarks I hope will be heuristic but also provocative. Indeed, my first provocation is to open the conference by recalling a certain notorious film clip, General George Patton’s famous speech to the Third Army, as delivered by George C. Scott in Patton (1970):
Men, all this stuff you’ve heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. ALL REAL Americans, love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball players, the toughest boxers… Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in Hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war.
I Googled that speech and learned how thoroughly Hollywood bowdlerized it. The real address contains scarcely a sentence without an obscenity or bloody oath. Of course, Patton was trying to encourage—literally instill courage in—nervous young men about to storm Hitler’s West Wall. So the sentiments he expressed were more suited to a football locker room pep talk than a Fourth of July oration.
Nevertheless, Patton had a point when he cried, “Americans love to fight, traditionally.” Indeed, the popular author Geoffrey Perret even titled his American history A Country Made By War (1989). And if that is so, then Americans simply must affirm their military and their wars because without them the great nation we inhabit today would not exist. The United States was born in an armed revolution. The Union was saved in a great Civil War. The nation realized its Manifest Destiny and achieved unprecedented world power largely through war. Perhaps Americans are not more belligerent than other great nations, but they are certainly not less belligerent. In its brief 230-year history the U.S. has waged at least a dozen major wars and scores of minor conflicts on the frontier and overseas. The U.S. today spends more on defense than the next six Great Powers combined, and stations armed forces of some variety in over a hundred countries. The United States is a militant republic, the American Creed a fighting faith, and our politics and foreign policy have been driven, as often as not, by the fact or fear of war. Moreover, we teachers cannot even describe the main social, economic, and cultural trends in American history without frequent reference to war and the military. One need only name the abolition of slavery, establishment of the income tax, triumph of women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights movement, and the youth rebellion of the 1960s to suggest how great transformations have been partly driven by war. The only comparable influence in U.S. history, I think, has been evangelical religion.
Whether or not Americans really romance war, at least when they like their odds and deem the fruits of victory worth the risk, they certainly love to study it. At Penn the courses in military and diplomatic history attract up to ten times more students than social or cultural history. Cable TV’s History Channel obsesses on World War II and the Civil War to the exclusion of almost everything else. Best-selling histories are disproportionately concerned with wars and war leaders: witness the four new biographies of Ulysses S. Grant over the past few years. Blockb
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