If one visits the fabled city of Venice, the Doge's Palace is perhaps the first stop on the tour. It is a marvel of architectural beauty and enormous historical significance. The Republic of Venice was one of the most successful states in the history of the Western world, a small city that turned itself into an economic powerhouse and a military giant that dominated the Mediterranean Sea for centuries. It was from the Doge's Palace that the elected leader of the republic governed in immense majesty the sprawling thalassocracy that was the Venetian Empire.
Within the Doge's Palace is an immense chamber called the Sala del Maggior Consilgio, the Hall of the Great Council. It was here that the nobles who ruled the city gathered together to discuss matters of state. The artwork that lines the walls is just as impressive today as it was centuries ago. Among the paintings are dozens of portraits of the men who held the office of Doge over the lifespan of the Republic.
One frame stands out from the rest, however, that of Marino Faliero, who was Doge for just seven months in late 1354 and early 1355. In his frame, there is no portrait at all, only a covering of black paint depicted as dark cloth. You see, while serving as Doge, Faliero had tried to overthrow the Venetian government and set himself up as sole ruler of the city. His attempted coup had been thwarted and Faliero had paid for his unspeakable crime with his life. Not wishing to honor him with a portrait, yet unwilling to let the memory of his treason be forgotten, the Venetians symbolically covered his face with a death shroud.
One day, I expect, our attitude towards President Donald Trump will be much the same.
I don't know how the Trump years will come to an end. Perhaps he will last long enough for the enraged and energized American people to kick him out of office in 2020. Perhaps he will resign in disgrace, or simply after becoming bored with the whole thing. I personally consider it more likely than not that he will be impeached and tossed in prison for gross corruption. One way or another, however, the Trump years will eventually come to an end.
I am an optimist, but I am also a realist. On the day on which I type this blog entry, it seems more likely than not that the administration of Donald Trump is going to be a disastrous train wreck the magnitude of which will defy any attempt at description. It is quite clear to all but the self-deluded that he has no real interest in working on behalf of the American people and is interested only in making a huge amount of money for himself, his family, and his friends. His Cabinet picks consist of billionaires uninterested in public service or ignorant clowns with no idea what they're doing. Beyond that, Trump is clearly under the influence, if not the complete control, of a foreign government hostile to the United States. What damage he will do between now and the day he leaves office is, of course, yet to be seen. When it is all over, however, I fully expect that we will no longer be debating whether James Buchanan or Warren Harding was the worst president in American history, as that question will have been answered in the most decisive manner.
And when he's gone, Americans should give Donald Trump the same treatment the Venetians gave to Marino Faliero and do our best to bloat out his memory. It is an insult and an outrage that the office held by such men as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts will be tainted by the presence of such an odious and sickening human being as Donald Trump, so the institution of the American presidency will need to be cleansed like a house that has suffered a flea infestation. The navy should never commission a rowboat, let alone a major warship, named the USS Trump. If Disney puts together an animatronic version of Trump in the Hall of Presidents in the Magic Kingdom, it should remove it and throw it away. The National Park Service shouldn't bother preserving a Donald Trump Birthplace. Indeed, I'd favor following the lead of the Austrian government and demolishing the place were it not for the fact that it's a hospital. Perhaps we could instead demolish the Trump Tower, which, architecturally speaking, is a gauche and ignoble piece of crap anyway.
I'm quite certain that Americans are going to want to forget that Donald Trump even existed by the time he leaves the White House. While I see the point of this, I disagree, and for an important reason. What has happened is the fault of the entire American people and we need to learn from this grave mistake in order to take the necessary steps to make sure that nothing remotely like it ever happens again.
The first thing that must happen is comprehensive election reform. I've written about that on this blog a good deal. To my mind, the three most urgently needed reforms are the abolition of gerrymandering, the implementation of ranked choice voting, and the doing away with the Electoral College. Beyond that, it is crucial that voting be made as simple and easy as possible for all citizens, so that even the suspicion of voter suppression never taint elections again. I believe that Election Day should be a national holiday. In short, we need to ensure that our democracy is vibrant, that light is shone on the voting process in order to banish the cynicism that has understandably set it.
The second thing that must happen is we, as citizens, must hold our media accountable for the role it played in this fiasco. Slaves to their ratings, the media devoted vastly more attention to Donald Trump than it did to all the other candidates in the Republican primary combined. Those people who tried to have serious discussions about public policy were ignored in favor of the histrionics of a reality television star. The result was a surge in the popularity of a man who should properly have been dismissed as a clown trying to get attention. Absent any sense of civic virtue or journalistic integrity, the media largely created the monster of Donald Trump. In the future, the American people must hold the media to account.
Education will be key to the recovery from the Trump years. For far too long, we have allowed our education system, once the envy of the world, to degenerate into little more than a glorified job training program. Serious instruction in civics, which prepares students to become active and informed citizens able to participate in self-government, has all but vanished. The decline of civics in education is, I believe, one of the key contributing factors to the mess our nation now finds itself in. After the Soviet launch of Sputnik, fearing a massive gap in the scientific expertise with the Russians, the federal government passed the National Defense Education Act to provide emergency funding for science education. In the aftermath of Trump, something along the same lines will be necessary in terms of civics.
But if we're really honest with ourselves, what has happened is not just the fault of a flawed electoral system or a biased media or our troubled education system. It's the shared fault of the entire American people and each of us as individuals. Whatever else he is, Donald Trump is a manifestation of much of modern American society, such as its dismissal of decency and virtue, its gaudiness and its disdain of intellectualism, its celebration of wealth before honor and its willingness to tolerate bigotry and perversity. There is a dark emptiness where a strong and vibrant national soul once existed. All of us contributed to this either through our own actions or through not speaking out against it.
If anything good is to come out of the disaster that will be the Trump years, it will be that American society will be so shaken and perhaps even wrecked that we can start afresh once it's over. It will be like building a new house on the same lot after your original home had burned down. If we can refashion our election system, or media, our schools, and ourselves, we can perhaps come through the tunnel to the light again as a better nation. Trump can be relegated to the same historical oblivion inhabited by the likes of Marino Faliero and the rest of us - liberals and conservatives, men and women, people of all races, religious, sexual orientations, or whatever else - can get on with forming a more perfect union out of this great republic.
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Sunday, January 8, 2017
The Unsavory Side of Alexander Hamilton
Founding Fathers have fluctuating reputations. For a long time, Jefferson stood supreme in the people's estimation, but the 1990s saw the beginning of a decline that has yet to be reversed. Similar trends apply to Washington, if to a lesser degree. Franklin is sometimes seen as a brilliant scientist and statesman, and sometimes as a somewhat lecherous and creepy old man, if always good with a quip. Madison has long been ignored but seems to be experiencing something of a renaissance, perhaps in response to perceived challenges to the Bill of Rights. In the first decade of the 21st Century, the long-dismissed John Adams finally got his due with a series of brilliant biographies, including the bestseller by David McCullough, and a wonderful miniseries biopic by HBO.
However, there is no doubt that the current decade belongs to Alexander Hamilton. Ron Chernow's outstanding biography of the first Secretary of the Treasury topped the bestseller lists. Now, in a rare convergence of popular culture and history, the wildly successful hip-hop Broadway phenomena Hamilton, created by the incomparable impresario Lin-Manuel Miranda, has taken the country by storm, becoming one of the most popular stage musicals in history and winning every award in sight. Even my New Yorker cousin Angie, who professes to disdain Broadway, has gone to see it twice. A ill-timed proposal to replace Hamilton's face on the $10 bill was squashed as easily as a pea under a sledgehammer. If I randomly stopped a person on the street and asked them to name a Founding Father other than George Washington, I would guess the most common answer right now would be Alexander Hamilton.
I don't mind this in and of itself, for there is no doubt that Alexander Hamilton deserves to be remembered. From the lowest of lowly origins, he rose to the top through sheer brilliance and determination. He played a crucial role in the formation of the United States of America and certainly deserves to rank with the top-tier of the Founding Fathers alongside Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Adams. His role as George Washington's primary staff officer in the Continental Army is, if anything, underappreciated; it's not too much to say that he played as key a role in the Revolutionary War as George Marshall played in the Second World War. If Hamilton's contribution at the Constitutional Convention itself was minimal, it probably never would have been convened and the Constitution might not have been ratified but for his efforts. As the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton created America's financial system effectively out of thin air, setting the stage for the economic future of the republic. On the stage of American history, Alexander Hamilton is rightfully regarding as a giant.
And yet, I have never warmed to the man. I can't. While I acknowledge his genius and ability, and respect his contributions, there are simply too many unsavory aspects to Hamilton for me to fully embrace him as a hero of this country. In the midst of all the adulation currently falling onto Hamilton's shoulders, I think it's worth taking a step back and consider the less attractive aspects to the man.
Alexander Hamilton was an elitist. The way he saw it, society was divided into the "rich and well born" on one side and everybody else on the other side, and it was the former who should govern the latter. Democracy and egalitarianism were foreign to Hamilton's thinking and he clearly held the idea of popular sovereignty, one of the foundations of American political thought, in contempt. The faith that Jefferson and Madison placed in the ordinary American people was, to Hamilton, nothing but unrealistic utopianism. This point of view was shared by many of the Founding Fathers, of course, but few were as fervent in their disdain of democracy as was Hamilton. He, for one, should have known better, given his personal background as a poor, illegitimate immigrant from a Caribbean backwater.
The proposals that Hamilton made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were little short of terrifying. In a speech lasting several hours on June 18, in which he stated that a monarchical executive would be preferable but, as he knew no one would agree, he favored a President who served for life and also believed that members of the Senate should serve for life as well. He stated the following day that the individual states should simply be abolished and all power vested in the federal government. This disdain of the idea of federalism, another of the central tenants of American political thought, is rarely mentioned by those who want to hold Hamilton up as an American hero. Had Hamilton's proposals become part of the Constitution, much that makes America good and unique would have been lost.
Hamilton appears to have been a man of sterling integrity in financial matters and never used his position as Secretary of the Treasury for his own personal advantage. That didn't stop him, however, from allowing his friends and supporters to game the system he was constructing in order to make money at the expense of others. While the creditworthiness of the United States was being restored by Hamilton's measures, small numbers of well-connected people got rich by tricking veterans and war widows into selling the governments bonds they had purchased during the war for a fraction of their value. Hamilton knew that this was going on. He could have spoken out against it. But he didn't.
The most troubling aspects of Alexander Hamilton's political career took place during the so-called Quasi-War with France during the Adams administration, when Hamilton had retired from government service to resume his law practice in New York City. Although the undeclared war was entirely a naval conflict and there was never a serious threat of a French invasion, the so-called "High Federalists" pushed the Adams administration into creating a powerful standing army, in stark contrast to republican principles that abhorred such military establishments. They also passed a series of tax measures to fund this unnecessary force. Why did they do this? Because Hamilton told them to. Even out of government, he was giving marching orders to the High Federalists, including the members of the President's Cabinet. Perhaps at no other time in American history did someone exercise so much political power from behind the scenes. It all has a dark and sinister whiff about it.
Not only did Hamilton did the Federalists to create a large standing army and then appoint the aging and retired George Washington to command it, but he got himself appointed Inspector General. Since Washington was too old to act as anything other but a symbolic leader, Hamilton was essentially given command of the entire army. He envisioned leading this army on a campaign of conquest against Spanish colonies in North America should outright war break out with France, using the justification that Spain was the ally of France. In other words, Hamilton wanted to use the financial and manpower resources of the United States for his own personal quest for glory. He wanted to make himself into an American Bonaparte.
Even more frightening was Hamilton's proposal (stated in a letter to Theodore Sedgwick on February 2, 1799) that the army march into Virginia, where Jefferson and Madison were coordinating opposition to Federalist policies, and "put Virginia to the test of resistance." As far as I know, Alexander Hamilton is the only man among America's Founding Fathers who suggested using military force to crack down on domestic political opposition. Had Hamilton's plan been implemented, America would have been transformed from a republic into a military dictatorship. The dreams expressed by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would have vanished.
When Jefferson won the presidential election of 1800, Hamilton proposed to New York Governor John Jay a legislative measure of questionable constitutionality which would have taken the electoral votes of New York away from Jefferson. This was despite the fact that Jefferson had clearly won the popular vote in New York. John Jay, to his credit and despite the fact that he was a staunch Federalist, refused to have anything to do with Hamilton's scheme. This being said, it is to Hamilton's credit that he eventually threw his support behind Jefferson in the great standoff between Jefferson and Aaron Burr when the Electoral College ended in a tie, thereby ensuring that Jefferson rather than Burr would become President.
As I said at the start of this blog entry, Hamilton was an extraordinary man who made a number of key contributions to the United States of America. But while we rightly remember him and honor him for the good that he did, we cannot lose sight of his highly flawed nature. He was an elitist who opposed democracy, popular sovereignty, and federalism. And he was not above using military force and extra-constitutional measures to defeat his political opponents.
None of the Founding Fathers were saints. We have rightly taken many of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson above all, to task for failing to address the question of slavery. Similarly, Alexander Hamilton needs to be taken to task for his authoritarianism and elitism, which very nearly derailed the American experiment before it had barely had a chance to begin.
However, there is no doubt that the current decade belongs to Alexander Hamilton. Ron Chernow's outstanding biography of the first Secretary of the Treasury topped the bestseller lists. Now, in a rare convergence of popular culture and history, the wildly successful hip-hop Broadway phenomena Hamilton, created by the incomparable impresario Lin-Manuel Miranda, has taken the country by storm, becoming one of the most popular stage musicals in history and winning every award in sight. Even my New Yorker cousin Angie, who professes to disdain Broadway, has gone to see it twice. A ill-timed proposal to replace Hamilton's face on the $10 bill was squashed as easily as a pea under a sledgehammer. If I randomly stopped a person on the street and asked them to name a Founding Father other than George Washington, I would guess the most common answer right now would be Alexander Hamilton.
I don't mind this in and of itself, for there is no doubt that Alexander Hamilton deserves to be remembered. From the lowest of lowly origins, he rose to the top through sheer brilliance and determination. He played a crucial role in the formation of the United States of America and certainly deserves to rank with the top-tier of the Founding Fathers alongside Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Adams. His role as George Washington's primary staff officer in the Continental Army is, if anything, underappreciated; it's not too much to say that he played as key a role in the Revolutionary War as George Marshall played in the Second World War. If Hamilton's contribution at the Constitutional Convention itself was minimal, it probably never would have been convened and the Constitution might not have been ratified but for his efforts. As the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton created America's financial system effectively out of thin air, setting the stage for the economic future of the republic. On the stage of American history, Alexander Hamilton is rightfully regarding as a giant.
And yet, I have never warmed to the man. I can't. While I acknowledge his genius and ability, and respect his contributions, there are simply too many unsavory aspects to Hamilton for me to fully embrace him as a hero of this country. In the midst of all the adulation currently falling onto Hamilton's shoulders, I think it's worth taking a step back and consider the less attractive aspects to the man.
Alexander Hamilton was an elitist. The way he saw it, society was divided into the "rich and well born" on one side and everybody else on the other side, and it was the former who should govern the latter. Democracy and egalitarianism were foreign to Hamilton's thinking and he clearly held the idea of popular sovereignty, one of the foundations of American political thought, in contempt. The faith that Jefferson and Madison placed in the ordinary American people was, to Hamilton, nothing but unrealistic utopianism. This point of view was shared by many of the Founding Fathers, of course, but few were as fervent in their disdain of democracy as was Hamilton. He, for one, should have known better, given his personal background as a poor, illegitimate immigrant from a Caribbean backwater.
The proposals that Hamilton made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were little short of terrifying. In a speech lasting several hours on June 18, in which he stated that a monarchical executive would be preferable but, as he knew no one would agree, he favored a President who served for life and also believed that members of the Senate should serve for life as well. He stated the following day that the individual states should simply be abolished and all power vested in the federal government. This disdain of the idea of federalism, another of the central tenants of American political thought, is rarely mentioned by those who want to hold Hamilton up as an American hero. Had Hamilton's proposals become part of the Constitution, much that makes America good and unique would have been lost.
Hamilton appears to have been a man of sterling integrity in financial matters and never used his position as Secretary of the Treasury for his own personal advantage. That didn't stop him, however, from allowing his friends and supporters to game the system he was constructing in order to make money at the expense of others. While the creditworthiness of the United States was being restored by Hamilton's measures, small numbers of well-connected people got rich by tricking veterans and war widows into selling the governments bonds they had purchased during the war for a fraction of their value. Hamilton knew that this was going on. He could have spoken out against it. But he didn't.
The most troubling aspects of Alexander Hamilton's political career took place during the so-called Quasi-War with France during the Adams administration, when Hamilton had retired from government service to resume his law practice in New York City. Although the undeclared war was entirely a naval conflict and there was never a serious threat of a French invasion, the so-called "High Federalists" pushed the Adams administration into creating a powerful standing army, in stark contrast to republican principles that abhorred such military establishments. They also passed a series of tax measures to fund this unnecessary force. Why did they do this? Because Hamilton told them to. Even out of government, he was giving marching orders to the High Federalists, including the members of the President's Cabinet. Perhaps at no other time in American history did someone exercise so much political power from behind the scenes. It all has a dark and sinister whiff about it.
Not only did Hamilton did the Federalists to create a large standing army and then appoint the aging and retired George Washington to command it, but he got himself appointed Inspector General. Since Washington was too old to act as anything other but a symbolic leader, Hamilton was essentially given command of the entire army. He envisioned leading this army on a campaign of conquest against Spanish colonies in North America should outright war break out with France, using the justification that Spain was the ally of France. In other words, Hamilton wanted to use the financial and manpower resources of the United States for his own personal quest for glory. He wanted to make himself into an American Bonaparte.
Even more frightening was Hamilton's proposal (stated in a letter to Theodore Sedgwick on February 2, 1799) that the army march into Virginia, where Jefferson and Madison were coordinating opposition to Federalist policies, and "put Virginia to the test of resistance." As far as I know, Alexander Hamilton is the only man among America's Founding Fathers who suggested using military force to crack down on domestic political opposition. Had Hamilton's plan been implemented, America would have been transformed from a republic into a military dictatorship. The dreams expressed by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would have vanished.
When Jefferson won the presidential election of 1800, Hamilton proposed to New York Governor John Jay a legislative measure of questionable constitutionality which would have taken the electoral votes of New York away from Jefferson. This was despite the fact that Jefferson had clearly won the popular vote in New York. John Jay, to his credit and despite the fact that he was a staunch Federalist, refused to have anything to do with Hamilton's scheme. This being said, it is to Hamilton's credit that he eventually threw his support behind Jefferson in the great standoff between Jefferson and Aaron Burr when the Electoral College ended in a tie, thereby ensuring that Jefferson rather than Burr would become President.
As I said at the start of this blog entry, Hamilton was an extraordinary man who made a number of key contributions to the United States of America. But while we rightly remember him and honor him for the good that he did, we cannot lose sight of his highly flawed nature. He was an elitist who opposed democracy, popular sovereignty, and federalism. And he was not above using military force and extra-constitutional measures to defeat his political opponents.
None of the Founding Fathers were saints. We have rightly taken many of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson above all, to task for failing to address the question of slavery. Similarly, Alexander Hamilton needs to be taken to task for his authoritarianism and elitism, which very nearly derailed the American experiment before it had barely had a chance to begin.
Sunday, January 1, 2017
A Writer's New Year's Resolutions
At 1:09 PM on Saturday, December 19, 2016, I typed "The End" at the bottom of the last page of the epilogue of my novel House of the Proud.
Strictly speaking, it's not finished. There will be months of editing and probably a fair chunk of rewriting. Dull work like formatting the pages and designing the cover remains to be done. My wonderful sister, who illustrated the covers of the first two books - the novel Shattered Nation and the novella Blessed are the Peacemakers - has to get to work on the artwork for the cover of this one, though she and I have already settled on what the picture will be. In my mind, I am hoping for the book to be on sale on May 1.
For all that, I couldn't help but feel a great sense of accomplishment at the moment when I brought the narrative story to an end. The story of the characters was wrapped up, old questions answered and new ones raised, and a few selected hints dropped regarding the future course of the Shattered Nation alternate timeline, which I intend to explore in future books. I think the novel finished rather well, though I would be the last to suggest that my writing is perfect. The moment I typed "The End", I popped open a bottle of champagne for a much-deserved celebration.
It's been a long process. I started serious writing on House of the Proud in March of 2014, more than two-and-a-half years ago. I endured one terrible bout of writer's block during the winter of 2014-15, during which I made no progress on the book or any other writing project, but once that was overcome I wrote quite steadily until the book was finished. I would have preferred to finish it earlier and was mindful of the many messages I received from readers asking me when it would be ready, but I think I'm being quite honest when I say that I finished it as quickly as I could.
I learned a lot about how I write while penning this book. I discovered, for example, that I cannot write very well at night. I also found that I don't write very well when I have a long, open-ended amount of time. Almost all of House of the Proud was written between five o'clock and six thirty in the morning, while the rest of the Brooks house was asleep. I would drag myself out of bed around four fifty-five, turn on the coffee machine, spent a few minutes catching up on the daily news, and then begin writing. I would then write continually until my alarm went off at six thirty, signalling the need for me to get ready to go to work, or until my daughter Evelyn emerged from her room and asked me to play with her.
When I set out to write the sequel to Shattered Nation, I intended for it to be considerably shorter than my first novel, which came in at a whopping eight hundred pages. Indeed, the sheer length of Shattered Nation was one of the most common complaints I received about the book. Unfortunately, despite my best intentions, House of the Proud turned out to be a bit of a monster as well. On good old Microsoft Word, it came out to seven hundred and eighteen pages. Editing and formatting will chop this down a bit, but it's obvious that this book is going to be another really long one.
Shattered Nation was a military and political thriller, dealing with battles between great armies around Atlanta and the presidential election taking place in the United States at the same time. House of the Proud will be rather different. While there will be more than a few battles (the details of which I won't share here, as I don't want to reveal any spoilers), the plot is more politically focused than was the case with Shattered Nation, dealing with the first presidential election in an independent Confederacy. It will also be more international, with some of the plot taking place in Britain, France, and Canada and with one of the main characters, Colonel Garnet Wolseley, being British rather than American. Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the effort and will be working hard to finish up all the details so that House of the Proud can be released for sale.
As I do this, however, I find my mind already turning to future writing projects. This will be a big decision. I have other novels set in the Shattered Nation timeline already sketched out in detail. Two of these are set in 1864 and reveal what was happening in other theaters of the war during the events of Shattered Nation. A Consuming Fire is set in the Shenandoah Valley and Storm Over Sumter is set in and around Charleston (hints of the events of these novels can be found in the other books). I have three further sequels planned, set respectively in 1899, in the mid-1920s, and in the mid-1960s, with the 1899 book fairly well outlined already. I also may write a novella of the same length as Blessed are the Peacemakers, whose plot can be determined from my preliminary title, Lincoln in Europe. I also have considered writing a book of short stories set in the Shattered Nation alternate history.
I must admit, however, that after so many years of hard work, I wouldn't mind taking some time off from Shattered Nation. I have long had a strong desire to write stories set during the American Revolution. I actually wrote out a detailed outline and an entire chapter of an alternate history novel involving Benedict Arnold's treason. I abandoned it after a month or so, however, as I disliked where the story was leading and I felt like I was taking too much influence from the AMC television Turn (which is excellent and which I highly recommend, by the way). If I do write American Revolution novels, they will probably be straight-up historical fiction rather than alternate history, perhaps because I simply have a hard time imagining a world in which the United States didn't exist.
I have outlined an alternate history novel centered around the Second World War and set in 1942, as well as one dealing with the political chaos in the late Roman Republic. I look forward to writing these in the future, particularly as I have long desired to write Winston Churchill and Cato the Younger as characters. I also have considered writing a novel set in the remnants of the United States following a 1983 nuclear exchange, though whenever I do any research work for that project I become incredibly depressed. I have also done a little bit of preliminary work for an alternate history story centered around the idea of the Aztec Empire surviving the Spanish conquest.
So what will be next? A Consuming Fire? One of the chronological sequels to Shattered Nation? Turning to the American Revolution or something else? It will take a little while to figure it out and I may try to stick my irons into different fires and see what lights up. In any case, as I start to say goodbye to one book and say hello to a new one, it's refreshing to think that I have a lot of literary options.
It being New Year's Day, I've made some of the standard resolutions about getting in better shape, eating a more healthy diet, and so forth. But I've also made a few very specific resolutions related to my writing. First, I will get House of the Proud on sale as soon as possible. Second, I will settle on what writing project I shall embark upon next. And third, I will get get to work on it and start the writing adventure all over again.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Strictly speaking, it's not finished. There will be months of editing and probably a fair chunk of rewriting. Dull work like formatting the pages and designing the cover remains to be done. My wonderful sister, who illustrated the covers of the first two books - the novel Shattered Nation and the novella Blessed are the Peacemakers - has to get to work on the artwork for the cover of this one, though she and I have already settled on what the picture will be. In my mind, I am hoping for the book to be on sale on May 1.
For all that, I couldn't help but feel a great sense of accomplishment at the moment when I brought the narrative story to an end. The story of the characters was wrapped up, old questions answered and new ones raised, and a few selected hints dropped regarding the future course of the Shattered Nation alternate timeline, which I intend to explore in future books. I think the novel finished rather well, though I would be the last to suggest that my writing is perfect. The moment I typed "The End", I popped open a bottle of champagne for a much-deserved celebration.
It's been a long process. I started serious writing on House of the Proud in March of 2014, more than two-and-a-half years ago. I endured one terrible bout of writer's block during the winter of 2014-15, during which I made no progress on the book or any other writing project, but once that was overcome I wrote quite steadily until the book was finished. I would have preferred to finish it earlier and was mindful of the many messages I received from readers asking me when it would be ready, but I think I'm being quite honest when I say that I finished it as quickly as I could.
I learned a lot about how I write while penning this book. I discovered, for example, that I cannot write very well at night. I also found that I don't write very well when I have a long, open-ended amount of time. Almost all of House of the Proud was written between five o'clock and six thirty in the morning, while the rest of the Brooks house was asleep. I would drag myself out of bed around four fifty-five, turn on the coffee machine, spent a few minutes catching up on the daily news, and then begin writing. I would then write continually until my alarm went off at six thirty, signalling the need for me to get ready to go to work, or until my daughter Evelyn emerged from her room and asked me to play with her.
When I set out to write the sequel to Shattered Nation, I intended for it to be considerably shorter than my first novel, which came in at a whopping eight hundred pages. Indeed, the sheer length of Shattered Nation was one of the most common complaints I received about the book. Unfortunately, despite my best intentions, House of the Proud turned out to be a bit of a monster as well. On good old Microsoft Word, it came out to seven hundred and eighteen pages. Editing and formatting will chop this down a bit, but it's obvious that this book is going to be another really long one.
Shattered Nation was a military and political thriller, dealing with battles between great armies around Atlanta and the presidential election taking place in the United States at the same time. House of the Proud will be rather different. While there will be more than a few battles (the details of which I won't share here, as I don't want to reveal any spoilers), the plot is more politically focused than was the case with Shattered Nation, dealing with the first presidential election in an independent Confederacy. It will also be more international, with some of the plot taking place in Britain, France, and Canada and with one of the main characters, Colonel Garnet Wolseley, being British rather than American. Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the effort and will be working hard to finish up all the details so that House of the Proud can be released for sale.
As I do this, however, I find my mind already turning to future writing projects. This will be a big decision. I have other novels set in the Shattered Nation timeline already sketched out in detail. Two of these are set in 1864 and reveal what was happening in other theaters of the war during the events of Shattered Nation. A Consuming Fire is set in the Shenandoah Valley and Storm Over Sumter is set in and around Charleston (hints of the events of these novels can be found in the other books). I have three further sequels planned, set respectively in 1899, in the mid-1920s, and in the mid-1960s, with the 1899 book fairly well outlined already. I also may write a novella of the same length as Blessed are the Peacemakers, whose plot can be determined from my preliminary title, Lincoln in Europe. I also have considered writing a book of short stories set in the Shattered Nation alternate history.
I must admit, however, that after so many years of hard work, I wouldn't mind taking some time off from Shattered Nation. I have long had a strong desire to write stories set during the American Revolution. I actually wrote out a detailed outline and an entire chapter of an alternate history novel involving Benedict Arnold's treason. I abandoned it after a month or so, however, as I disliked where the story was leading and I felt like I was taking too much influence from the AMC television Turn (which is excellent and which I highly recommend, by the way). If I do write American Revolution novels, they will probably be straight-up historical fiction rather than alternate history, perhaps because I simply have a hard time imagining a world in which the United States didn't exist.
I have outlined an alternate history novel centered around the Second World War and set in 1942, as well as one dealing with the political chaos in the late Roman Republic. I look forward to writing these in the future, particularly as I have long desired to write Winston Churchill and Cato the Younger as characters. I also have considered writing a novel set in the remnants of the United States following a 1983 nuclear exchange, though whenever I do any research work for that project I become incredibly depressed. I have also done a little bit of preliminary work for an alternate history story centered around the idea of the Aztec Empire surviving the Spanish conquest.
So what will be next? A Consuming Fire? One of the chronological sequels to Shattered Nation? Turning to the American Revolution or something else? It will take a little while to figure it out and I may try to stick my irons into different fires and see what lights up. In any case, as I start to say goodbye to one book and say hello to a new one, it's refreshing to think that I have a lot of literary options.
It being New Year's Day, I've made some of the standard resolutions about getting in better shape, eating a more healthy diet, and so forth. But I've also made a few very specific resolutions related to my writing. First, I will get House of the Proud on sale as soon as possible. Second, I will settle on what writing project I shall embark upon next. And third, I will get get to work on it and start the writing adventure all over again.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Merry Christmas
I'm not going to post a full-length blog post today. It's Christmas Day, after all, and I am going to be spending it with my family. But I didn't like the idea of breaking my once-a-week rule for this blog, so let me just say that I hope you have a lovely holiday and take time to reflect on the deeper meanings of what Christmas is all about.
I'll simply leave you with a quote from Charles Dickens:
Merry Christmas, everyone.
I'll simply leave you with a quote from Charles Dickens:
Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and everyone around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture in our bright young eyes, complete.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Declarations of War
Last Wednesday was the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The following day, logically enough, was the 75th anniversary of the American declaration of war against Japan, which was approved unanimously in the Senate and with only a single dissenting vote in the House of Representatives (cast by Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin, a strict pacifist). The vote came after one of the most recognizable moments in American history: the "day of infamy" speech of President Franklin Roosevelt. Within the space of twenty-four hours, a previously isolationist United States had been forced by history onto the global stage, from which it has never since withdrawn.
The Founding Fathers lived in an age when kings and emperors still ruled most of the world. Such men were natural seekers of glory and generally cared little for whatever suffering might be inflicted on others as a result. Only a few decades before their time, Louis XIV of France had sought to immortalize his reign through martial achievements and during their lives Frederick the Great of Prussia had done the same. Moreover, being products of an education largely centered on classical history, the Founders could look to the past and see examples such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. It was a concession to common sense, therefore, that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention gave the power to declare war to Congress rather than the President. To place such a momentous decision in the hands of a single individual was simply too dangerous.
Indeed, an argument can be made that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted to prevent a permanent standing army from ever being created. Article One, Section Eight, specifies that the Congress has the power to "raise and support armies" and to "provide and maintain a navy". Why this wording? Why didn't the delegates say "provide and maintain an army and navy"? It seems pretty clear to me that the Founders intended the navy to be a permanent force, but only expected armies to be raised in time of war. During peacetime, the state militias were expected to provide whatever military force would be necessary. After all, having a powerful standing army would not only be expensive, but might provide the President with an irresistible temptation to foreign military involvement either for the sake of personal glory or to distract the people from domestic political problems.
The question of whether Congress or the President should have the final say on questions of peace or war has been on my mind lately and not just because of the anniversary of our entry into the Second World War. President-Elect Donald Trump will take office next month and he is a man famous for shooting from the hip and making decisions based on gut instinct rather than long consideration. He has also expressed support for military actions that are clearly illegal, such as torturing prisoners and killing the innocent family members of terrorists. Some have suggested that the military would refuse to follow such orders if President Trump were to give them, which would make for quite the dilemma for a military officer. Frankly, the very fact that we have to ask the question at all is deeply troubling. Upon entering office, will President Trump respect the constitutional fact that Congress, and not the President, is the part of government which has the power to declare war? Based on his past statements, I would have to assume he won't.
This question is about far more than President Trump, however. It's about the presidency in general, no matter which individual happens to be sitting in the Oval Office. Since the Second World War, our country has quietly allowed the presidency to assert far greater authority in the sphere of war and peace than was envisioned by the Founding Fathers. In 1973, after the disaster of the Vietnam War, Congress attempted to reassert its war declaration authority with the War Powers Resolution. Unfortunately, this simply made an already bad problem even worse. It specified that the President must obtain congressional authorization for any military action that lasts for more than sixty days. This implies, obviously, that the President does not need congressional authorization for a military operation of a shorter duration. An airstrike lasts a matter of minutes, so does the President have the constitutional right to order an airstrike against any country he wants, for whatever reason he wants? Can he order a Tomahawk missile strike against a restaurant in Paris if he didn't like their soup?
This becomes all the more frightening when we consider the possible use of nuclear weapons. If Congress has abdicated its war declaration responsibility to the President so completely, what constitutional barriers are in place to prevent the President from ordering a nuclear strike on his own volition? If the President has a gut feeling, absent any real evidence, that China is about to launch a nuclear attack on us, can he unilaterally order a preemptive nuclear strike? Under operational procedures, the Secretary of Defense must confirm any launch order from the President, but this is only to confirm the validity of the order and does not technically give the Secretary of Defense the power to block the order itself.
In 1973, an Air Force major named Harold Hering, who was attached to one of the units operating Minuteman ICBMs with nuclear warheads, asked his superiors whether he would have to follow orders to launch his missiles if he suspected that the President was "deranged, disordered or. . . damagingly intoxicated" or showed some other sign of not being in possession of his faculties. For the simple act of asking this question, Major Hering was discharged from the Air Force.
The Founding Fathers were quite right to invest Congress rather than the President with the power to declare war, for they well understood the danger of granting such authority to a single person. They would be both astonished and horrified to see how the executive branch has gradually accumulated that power to itself over the past few decades, under multiple presidents of both parties. To me, it is terrifying enough to have the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers potentially placed at risk due to the whims of a single person. In an age of nuclear weapons, it's not too much to say that the stakes are raised to the level of the survival of the human race.
Roosevelt was faced with a problem, for he clearly saw that Nazi Germany, and not Imperial Japan, was the greater threat to the United States and to the world in general, yet Germany had not attacked the United States. Hitler solved this problem for Roosevelt in one of the more stupid moves made by a world leader in history when he declared war on the United States, despite not being required to do so by his treaty with Japan. The United States, logically enough, declared war on Germany (and Italy, which made the same mistake) on December 11. Just to make it all a nice packaged deal, the United States declared war on the smaller Axis nations of Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania on June 5, 1942. We never bothered to declare war on Finland, which was sort of a special case.
The American declarations of war during 1941-42 were the most recent occasions that the United States formally declared war on any other nation. It comes as something of a surprise to learn that this took place only four other times in American history: against Britain in 1812, against Mexico in 1846, against Spain in 1898, and against Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1917 (we never bothered to declare war against the other members of the Central Powers, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, during the First World War). During the American Civil War, the Confederate government formally declared war on the United States, but the reverse never happened as it would have required the Union to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate government.
A very important point needs to be made about all of these declarations: they were issued by Congress and not by the President. Article One, Section Eight, of the Constitution specifically states that the power to declare war is held by Congress and not the President. Since 1945, America has fought several major military conflicts, including Korea (1950-1953), Vietnam (1964-1973), the Persian Gulf War (1991), the Afghanistan War (2001-present) and the Iraq War (2003-2011). None of these involved a formal declaration of war, yet only a fool would describe them as anything other than a war. In all cases, Congress passed resolutions giving the President permission to engage in military action, although under dubious circumstances in the cases of both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. What I find troubling is that Congress essentially legislated so as to give to the President the power to decide whether or not to go to war, which certainly violates the spirit, and probably violates the letter, of the Constitution.
Then you have the countless smaller military actions, that might not reach the level of an out-and-out war but which cannot be described as insignificant. The first memory I have of a news event was the destruction of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, during Reagan's ill-fated intervention there. Since then, we have the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the invasion of Panama in 1989, the various interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s, and the intervention in Libya in 2011. Some of these actions were approved by Congress, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, while some were not.
Then you have the countless smaller military actions, that might not reach the level of an out-and-out war but which cannot be described as insignificant. The first memory I have of a news event was the destruction of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, during Reagan's ill-fated intervention there. Since then, we have the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the invasion of Panama in 1989, the various interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s, and the intervention in Libya in 2011. Some of these actions were approved by Congress, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, while some were not.
The Founding Fathers lived in an age when kings and emperors still ruled most of the world. Such men were natural seekers of glory and generally cared little for whatever suffering might be inflicted on others as a result. Only a few decades before their time, Louis XIV of France had sought to immortalize his reign through martial achievements and during their lives Frederick the Great of Prussia had done the same. Moreover, being products of an education largely centered on classical history, the Founders could look to the past and see examples such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. It was a concession to common sense, therefore, that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention gave the power to declare war to Congress rather than the President. To place such a momentous decision in the hands of a single individual was simply too dangerous.
Indeed, an argument can be made that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted to prevent a permanent standing army from ever being created. Article One, Section Eight, specifies that the Congress has the power to "raise and support armies" and to "provide and maintain a navy". Why this wording? Why didn't the delegates say "provide and maintain an army and navy"? It seems pretty clear to me that the Founders intended the navy to be a permanent force, but only expected armies to be raised in time of war. During peacetime, the state militias were expected to provide whatever military force would be necessary. After all, having a powerful standing army would not only be expensive, but might provide the President with an irresistible temptation to foreign military involvement either for the sake of personal glory or to distract the people from domestic political problems.
The question of whether Congress or the President should have the final say on questions of peace or war has been on my mind lately and not just because of the anniversary of our entry into the Second World War. President-Elect Donald Trump will take office next month and he is a man famous for shooting from the hip and making decisions based on gut instinct rather than long consideration. He has also expressed support for military actions that are clearly illegal, such as torturing prisoners and killing the innocent family members of terrorists. Some have suggested that the military would refuse to follow such orders if President Trump were to give them, which would make for quite the dilemma for a military officer. Frankly, the very fact that we have to ask the question at all is deeply troubling. Upon entering office, will President Trump respect the constitutional fact that Congress, and not the President, is the part of government which has the power to declare war? Based on his past statements, I would have to assume he won't.
This question is about far more than President Trump, however. It's about the presidency in general, no matter which individual happens to be sitting in the Oval Office. Since the Second World War, our country has quietly allowed the presidency to assert far greater authority in the sphere of war and peace than was envisioned by the Founding Fathers. In 1973, after the disaster of the Vietnam War, Congress attempted to reassert its war declaration authority with the War Powers Resolution. Unfortunately, this simply made an already bad problem even worse. It specified that the President must obtain congressional authorization for any military action that lasts for more than sixty days. This implies, obviously, that the President does not need congressional authorization for a military operation of a shorter duration. An airstrike lasts a matter of minutes, so does the President have the constitutional right to order an airstrike against any country he wants, for whatever reason he wants? Can he order a Tomahawk missile strike against a restaurant in Paris if he didn't like their soup?
This becomes all the more frightening when we consider the possible use of nuclear weapons. If Congress has abdicated its war declaration responsibility to the President so completely, what constitutional barriers are in place to prevent the President from ordering a nuclear strike on his own volition? If the President has a gut feeling, absent any real evidence, that China is about to launch a nuclear attack on us, can he unilaterally order a preemptive nuclear strike? Under operational procedures, the Secretary of Defense must confirm any launch order from the President, but this is only to confirm the validity of the order and does not technically give the Secretary of Defense the power to block the order itself.
In 1973, an Air Force major named Harold Hering, who was attached to one of the units operating Minuteman ICBMs with nuclear warheads, asked his superiors whether he would have to follow orders to launch his missiles if he suspected that the President was "deranged, disordered or. . . damagingly intoxicated" or showed some other sign of not being in possession of his faculties. For the simple act of asking this question, Major Hering was discharged from the Air Force.
The Founding Fathers were quite right to invest Congress rather than the President with the power to declare war, for they well understood the danger of granting such authority to a single person. They would be both astonished and horrified to see how the executive branch has gradually accumulated that power to itself over the past few decades, under multiple presidents of both parties. To me, it is terrifying enough to have the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers potentially placed at risk due to the whims of a single person. In an age of nuclear weapons, it's not too much to say that the stakes are raised to the level of the survival of the human race.
Sunday, December 4, 2016
The "What Ifs" of Pearl Harbor
Wednesday will mark the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, one of the seminal events in American history. It stands with the fighting at Lexington and Concord, the firing on Fort Sumter, and the 9/11 attacks as an event that marked a sharp dividing line in the course of our nation's story.
The event is so well-documented and so burned into the American psyche that it scarcely needs to be retold here. The Japanese government, dominated by its military, had decided to make a play for imperial domination of East Asia and the Pacific. They had been launched a war of conquest against China a decade earlier, had occupied French Indochina, and were flexing the muscles of their naval power over the American, British, and Dutch possessions to the south. The United States had imposed economic sanctions against Japan, cutting them off from vital imports of oil and various raw materials necessary to continue prosecuting their war in China. Deciding that the direct approach was the best, Japan elected to launch a wide-ranging offensive throughout the Western Pacific, starting with a preemptive strike against the United States Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
Across the distance of time, even a patriotic American like me can acknowledge that the attack was a masterful military operation. It was extremely well-planned and executed, with the two waves of attacking aircraft arriving over their designated targets almost exactly on time. The logistics involved with fueling and provisioning such a large fleet so far from Japanese bases was a considerable achievement. And the fact that the Japanese achieved complete tactical surprise testifies to their ability to maintain operational secrecy.
Flying from six aircraft carriers, roughly three hundred and fifty Japanese aircraft blew the Pacific Fleet to pieces in a matter of hours. Eight battleships were destroyed or rendered inoperable, along with a number of cruisers and destroyers. Nearly two hundred American aircraft were destroyed. More than 2,400 American personnel were killed. From a military standpoint, it was one of the greatest defeats ever suffered by the United States of America.
President Franklin Roosevelt was correct when he called December 7 "a date which will live in infamy." After all, at the moment that the first Japanese bombs and torpedoes were dropped at Pearl Harbor, the United States and Japan were at peace. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was a cowardly, dishonorable act and it has rightly been remembered as such by history.
The United States, of course, took its revenge. Despite the success of its attack and several months of whirlwind victories across the western Pacific Ocean, Japan could never hope to prevail in a war with the United States, whose industrial power utterly outmatched that of the Japanese. Within six months, the Japanese advance had been halted and the Americans, aided by their allies, began to drive their enemies back. The ended with an unconditional Japanese surrender in the summer of 1945, with its cities reduced to smoking ruins by relentless Allied bombings, including the only two instances in which nuclear weapons have been used in warfare.
There has been much discussion of how the events surrounded the attack on Pearl Harbor might have gone differently. Let's a look at some of these scenarios.
1. What if the Pacific Fleet had not been caught by surprise?
As with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor generated intensive self-examination on the part of the Americans to comprehend how such a failure of intelligence had been possible. It was subsequently revealed that there had been many chances to have discovered the coming Japanese attack. American radar picked up in the incoming swarms of Japanese bombers, but it was dismissed by inexperienced and poorly trained operators as friendly aircraft. A Japanese midget submarine was sunk by an American destroyer near Pearl Harbor an hour before the attack, but the base was not put on alert.
These warning signs should have been quickly passed up the chain of command, so that fighters could have been scrambled to intercept the incoming attackers and anti-aircraft defenses of Pearl Harbor could have been manned and ready. Had this happened, the damage inflicted by the Japanese attack would have been considerably lessened and the number of Japanese aircraft shot down would have been substantially greater than was the case historically.
This would have been very good news for the United States, which spent the first few months of the Pacific War reeling from the loss of its battleships. If, say, the USS Arizona or the USS California had not been destroyed, they could have served as the main capital ships of a much more powerful Pacific Fleet, which could conceivably have sortied towards the Philippines to rescue their beleaguered comrades. In any case, considering the enormous time and cost required to drive the Japanese from the territory they gained in the opening months of the war, any improvement in the American situation vis-a-vis the historical reality would mean that Japan would be defeated earlier and at a lower cost in American lives.
On the other hand, if the Americans had obtained knowledge of the attack several days in advance, rather than a few hours, the situation oddly could have turned out worse for them then it historically did. For the Pacific Fleet would clearly have sortied to meet the Japanese on the open sea. The Japanese would have had a numerical advantage and events would prove that, in late 1941, they were simply more skilled and experienced in naval fighting than their American counterparts. It could therefore be expected that the Americans would have the worst of any such encounter.
What would make this situation more dire that the actual attack on Pearl Harbor is the fact that any ship sunk on the high seas would plunge to the bottom of the ocean, rather than the shallow waters of the naval base. Of the eight battleships put out of action in the attack on December 7, six were eventually raised and put back into service. Had the battle been fought on the high seas, any American battleship sunk would be gone for good.
2. What the American aircraft carriers had been present at Pearl Harbor on December 7?
While the death and destruction wrecked by the Japanese in their attack was terrible and costly, in truth it could have been much worse. The primary targets of the Japanese attack were the three aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet: the USS Enterprise, the USS Lexington, and the USS Saratoga. Had they been in port, they surely would have been blasted to pieces, as aircraft carriers made easier targets than battleships.
As chance would have it, however, none of three carriers were in Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack. The Enterprise and Lexington were ferrying aircraft to American bases farther west, while the Saratoga was near San Diego. All were so far away that they never were in any danger from the Japanese attack. In the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor, these three carriers would be the only effective force contesting control of the Pacific with the Japanese. They played crucial roles in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May (in which the Lexington was severely damaged and had to be scuttled) and the epic Battle of Midway in June, turning the tide of the war in the Pacific.
Had the carriers been in dock at Pearl Harbor, they would have been destroyed and the American war effort in the Pacific over the next few months would have been much less effective than it was historically. It would have allowed the Japanese to solidify their positions in the Pacific and perhaps extend their conquests (although suggestions that they might have invaded Australia seem too far-fetched to be taken seriously). Historically, the American counter-offensive began at Guadalcanal in August of 1942 with the landings on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Had the American carriers been lost at Pearl Harbor, any American attempt to drive back the Japanese probably would not have been able to begin until sometime in 1943 and would have much more ground the retake.
3. What if the Japanese third wave had been launched?
The attack on Pearl Harbor consisted of two waves of attacking aircraft, both of which had targeted the warships of the Pacific Fleet. It was proposed that a third wave be launched, focusing its attack on the facilities of the Pearl Harbor base itself. These vital machine shops, drydocks, and fuel storage sites later proved crucial not only to repairing the warships that had been damaged in the attack, but maintaining the Pacific Fleet when it fought the Battle of Midway and organized the great counter offensive against the Japanese.
Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, in overall command of the Japanese task force, elected not to launch a third wave. There were several logical reasons for this decision. He did not want to risk having his returning airmen land on the carriers during darkness, something in which the Japanese were not well-practiced. He did not know the location of the American carriers and was afraid that they might be nearby and able to launch a counter strike. Finally, his fuel situation was becoming critical. For all these reasons, Nagumo decided to play it safe and head home without launching a third wave.
Many people on both sides of the conflict, including Admiral Chester Nimitz, later stated that the failure of the Japanese to launch a third wave targeting the port facilities was a crucial mistake. Had the dock facilities been destroyed or several damaged, it might have been a more crushing blow to American operations in the Pacific even than the loss of the warships themselves. At the very least, the later counter offensives would have had to be launched much later, with similar historical results as the hypothetical loss of the carriers.
Conclusion
One thing has to be remembered above all. No matter what changes one could envision in the events surrounding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they would not have affected the ultimate outcome of the war. There was no conceivable way in which Japan would have emerged the victor over the United States in the Pacific War, for the industrial power of America The oft-repeated statement (which is probably apocryphal) of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto that all Japan had achieved at Pearl Harbor was to awaken a sleeping giant was all too true.
The United States had an economy seventeen times larger than that of Japan and its level of industrial production was perhaps seventy or eighty times as large. There was no conceivable way to defeat such odds in the age of industrial warfare. To give an idea of the disparity, consider this. Between 1941 and 1945, the United States produced ten battleships, forty-eight cruisers, and thirty hundred and forty-nine destroyers. Japan, by contrast, produced only two battleships, nine cruisers, and sixty-three destroyers. Counting small escort carriers as well as large fleet carriers, the United States put out one hundred and forty-one carriers of all types, while Japan built only seventeen. Between 1939 and 1945, the United States build more than 324,000 aircraft, while Japan built only 76,000. In the same time frame, the United States built nearly thirty-four million tons of merchant shipping, while Japan achieved a paltry four million.
How on Earth did Japan's war planners expect to have a chance against such long odds? Granted, a large proportion of America's war production was geared towards the defeat of Germany in Europe, but there was more than enough left over to crush Japan into rubble sooner or later.
If the Americans had been alerted to the incoming Japan attack a few hours ahead of time and taken immediate action, the damage to the Pacific Fleet would have been greatly reduced. We could then expect the defeat of Japan to occur considerably earlier than it did historically, perhaps in 1944 or even 1943. This raises a fascinating if troubling question, for the atomic bomb would not have been ready for use by that date. Would the end of the war have seen an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands themselves? If so, the war might have turned out to be both more successful for the Americans, yet also more costly and horrific.
Had the American carriers been in base and destroyed, or had the third wave destroyed the port facilities so vital to the war effort, the Japanese would have enjoyed a much more successful 1942 than they historically did. In such a case, we might expect them to conquer all of New Guinea and more of the islands west of it, and perhaps Midway Island as well. The defensive perimeter envisioned by the Japanese war planners would have been complete and made as strong as possible. The overall war plan of Japan was to create such a strong barrier to an American counter offensive that the United States would have sought some sort of peace agreement rather than endure the cost in lives and treasure required to break it.
By underestimating the political will of the United States and the social cohesion of the American people, the Japanese committed one of the great miscalculations in world history. Even had the attack on Pearl Harbor been more successful than it was historically, the United States still would have built an unstoppable navy and then they would have gone on to win the war. Even if Pearl Harbor had been utterly destroyed and the Americans had had to start from the coast of California, they would have done so and there was nothing Japan could have done about it. The war would have been far longer and far bloodier, but the end result would have been the same.
The moment that the first Japanese plane dropped the first bomb on Pearl Harbor, the fate of Japan was completely and utterly sealed.
The event is so well-documented and so burned into the American psyche that it scarcely needs to be retold here. The Japanese government, dominated by its military, had decided to make a play for imperial domination of East Asia and the Pacific. They had been launched a war of conquest against China a decade earlier, had occupied French Indochina, and were flexing the muscles of their naval power over the American, British, and Dutch possessions to the south. The United States had imposed economic sanctions against Japan, cutting them off from vital imports of oil and various raw materials necessary to continue prosecuting their war in China. Deciding that the direct approach was the best, Japan elected to launch a wide-ranging offensive throughout the Western Pacific, starting with a preemptive strike against the United States Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
Across the distance of time, even a patriotic American like me can acknowledge that the attack was a masterful military operation. It was extremely well-planned and executed, with the two waves of attacking aircraft arriving over their designated targets almost exactly on time. The logistics involved with fueling and provisioning such a large fleet so far from Japanese bases was a considerable achievement. And the fact that the Japanese achieved complete tactical surprise testifies to their ability to maintain operational secrecy.
Flying from six aircraft carriers, roughly three hundred and fifty Japanese aircraft blew the Pacific Fleet to pieces in a matter of hours. Eight battleships were destroyed or rendered inoperable, along with a number of cruisers and destroyers. Nearly two hundred American aircraft were destroyed. More than 2,400 American personnel were killed. From a military standpoint, it was one of the greatest defeats ever suffered by the United States of America.
President Franklin Roosevelt was correct when he called December 7 "a date which will live in infamy." After all, at the moment that the first Japanese bombs and torpedoes were dropped at Pearl Harbor, the United States and Japan were at peace. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was a cowardly, dishonorable act and it has rightly been remembered as such by history.
The United States, of course, took its revenge. Despite the success of its attack and several months of whirlwind victories across the western Pacific Ocean, Japan could never hope to prevail in a war with the United States, whose industrial power utterly outmatched that of the Japanese. Within six months, the Japanese advance had been halted and the Americans, aided by their allies, began to drive their enemies back. The ended with an unconditional Japanese surrender in the summer of 1945, with its cities reduced to smoking ruins by relentless Allied bombings, including the only two instances in which nuclear weapons have been used in warfare.
There has been much discussion of how the events surrounded the attack on Pearl Harbor might have gone differently. Let's a look at some of these scenarios.
1. What if the Pacific Fleet had not been caught by surprise?
As with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor generated intensive self-examination on the part of the Americans to comprehend how such a failure of intelligence had been possible. It was subsequently revealed that there had been many chances to have discovered the coming Japanese attack. American radar picked up in the incoming swarms of Japanese bombers, but it was dismissed by inexperienced and poorly trained operators as friendly aircraft. A Japanese midget submarine was sunk by an American destroyer near Pearl Harbor an hour before the attack, but the base was not put on alert.
These warning signs should have been quickly passed up the chain of command, so that fighters could have been scrambled to intercept the incoming attackers and anti-aircraft defenses of Pearl Harbor could have been manned and ready. Had this happened, the damage inflicted by the Japanese attack would have been considerably lessened and the number of Japanese aircraft shot down would have been substantially greater than was the case historically.
This would have been very good news for the United States, which spent the first few months of the Pacific War reeling from the loss of its battleships. If, say, the USS Arizona or the USS California had not been destroyed, they could have served as the main capital ships of a much more powerful Pacific Fleet, which could conceivably have sortied towards the Philippines to rescue their beleaguered comrades. In any case, considering the enormous time and cost required to drive the Japanese from the territory they gained in the opening months of the war, any improvement in the American situation vis-a-vis the historical reality would mean that Japan would be defeated earlier and at a lower cost in American lives.
On the other hand, if the Americans had obtained knowledge of the attack several days in advance, rather than a few hours, the situation oddly could have turned out worse for them then it historically did. For the Pacific Fleet would clearly have sortied to meet the Japanese on the open sea. The Japanese would have had a numerical advantage and events would prove that, in late 1941, they were simply more skilled and experienced in naval fighting than their American counterparts. It could therefore be expected that the Americans would have the worst of any such encounter.
What would make this situation more dire that the actual attack on Pearl Harbor is the fact that any ship sunk on the high seas would plunge to the bottom of the ocean, rather than the shallow waters of the naval base. Of the eight battleships put out of action in the attack on December 7, six were eventually raised and put back into service. Had the battle been fought on the high seas, any American battleship sunk would be gone for good.
2. What the American aircraft carriers had been present at Pearl Harbor on December 7?
While the death and destruction wrecked by the Japanese in their attack was terrible and costly, in truth it could have been much worse. The primary targets of the Japanese attack were the three aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet: the USS Enterprise, the USS Lexington, and the USS Saratoga. Had they been in port, they surely would have been blasted to pieces, as aircraft carriers made easier targets than battleships.
As chance would have it, however, none of three carriers were in Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack. The Enterprise and Lexington were ferrying aircraft to American bases farther west, while the Saratoga was near San Diego. All were so far away that they never were in any danger from the Japanese attack. In the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor, these three carriers would be the only effective force contesting control of the Pacific with the Japanese. They played crucial roles in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May (in which the Lexington was severely damaged and had to be scuttled) and the epic Battle of Midway in June, turning the tide of the war in the Pacific.
Had the carriers been in dock at Pearl Harbor, they would have been destroyed and the American war effort in the Pacific over the next few months would have been much less effective than it was historically. It would have allowed the Japanese to solidify their positions in the Pacific and perhaps extend their conquests (although suggestions that they might have invaded Australia seem too far-fetched to be taken seriously). Historically, the American counter-offensive began at Guadalcanal in August of 1942 with the landings on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Had the American carriers been lost at Pearl Harbor, any American attempt to drive back the Japanese probably would not have been able to begin until sometime in 1943 and would have much more ground the retake.
3. What if the Japanese third wave had been launched?
The attack on Pearl Harbor consisted of two waves of attacking aircraft, both of which had targeted the warships of the Pacific Fleet. It was proposed that a third wave be launched, focusing its attack on the facilities of the Pearl Harbor base itself. These vital machine shops, drydocks, and fuel storage sites later proved crucial not only to repairing the warships that had been damaged in the attack, but maintaining the Pacific Fleet when it fought the Battle of Midway and organized the great counter offensive against the Japanese.
Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, in overall command of the Japanese task force, elected not to launch a third wave. There were several logical reasons for this decision. He did not want to risk having his returning airmen land on the carriers during darkness, something in which the Japanese were not well-practiced. He did not know the location of the American carriers and was afraid that they might be nearby and able to launch a counter strike. Finally, his fuel situation was becoming critical. For all these reasons, Nagumo decided to play it safe and head home without launching a third wave.
Many people on both sides of the conflict, including Admiral Chester Nimitz, later stated that the failure of the Japanese to launch a third wave targeting the port facilities was a crucial mistake. Had the dock facilities been destroyed or several damaged, it might have been a more crushing blow to American operations in the Pacific even than the loss of the warships themselves. At the very least, the later counter offensives would have had to be launched much later, with similar historical results as the hypothetical loss of the carriers.
Conclusion
One thing has to be remembered above all. No matter what changes one could envision in the events surrounding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they would not have affected the ultimate outcome of the war. There was no conceivable way in which Japan would have emerged the victor over the United States in the Pacific War, for the industrial power of America The oft-repeated statement (which is probably apocryphal) of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto that all Japan had achieved at Pearl Harbor was to awaken a sleeping giant was all too true.
The United States had an economy seventeen times larger than that of Japan and its level of industrial production was perhaps seventy or eighty times as large. There was no conceivable way to defeat such odds in the age of industrial warfare. To give an idea of the disparity, consider this. Between 1941 and 1945, the United States produced ten battleships, forty-eight cruisers, and thirty hundred and forty-nine destroyers. Japan, by contrast, produced only two battleships, nine cruisers, and sixty-three destroyers. Counting small escort carriers as well as large fleet carriers, the United States put out one hundred and forty-one carriers of all types, while Japan built only seventeen. Between 1939 and 1945, the United States build more than 324,000 aircraft, while Japan built only 76,000. In the same time frame, the United States built nearly thirty-four million tons of merchant shipping, while Japan achieved a paltry four million.
How on Earth did Japan's war planners expect to have a chance against such long odds? Granted, a large proportion of America's war production was geared towards the defeat of Germany in Europe, but there was more than enough left over to crush Japan into rubble sooner or later.
If the Americans had been alerted to the incoming Japan attack a few hours ahead of time and taken immediate action, the damage to the Pacific Fleet would have been greatly reduced. We could then expect the defeat of Japan to occur considerably earlier than it did historically, perhaps in 1944 or even 1943. This raises a fascinating if troubling question, for the atomic bomb would not have been ready for use by that date. Would the end of the war have seen an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands themselves? If so, the war might have turned out to be both more successful for the Americans, yet also more costly and horrific.
Had the American carriers been in base and destroyed, or had the third wave destroyed the port facilities so vital to the war effort, the Japanese would have enjoyed a much more successful 1942 than they historically did. In such a case, we might expect them to conquer all of New Guinea and more of the islands west of it, and perhaps Midway Island as well. The defensive perimeter envisioned by the Japanese war planners would have been complete and made as strong as possible. The overall war plan of Japan was to create such a strong barrier to an American counter offensive that the United States would have sought some sort of peace agreement rather than endure the cost in lives and treasure required to break it.
By underestimating the political will of the United States and the social cohesion of the American people, the Japanese committed one of the great miscalculations in world history. Even had the attack on Pearl Harbor been more successful than it was historically, the United States still would have built an unstoppable navy and then they would have gone on to win the war. Even if Pearl Harbor had been utterly destroyed and the Americans had had to start from the coast of California, they would have done so and there was nothing Japan could have done about it. The war would have been far longer and far bloodier, but the end result would have been the same.
The moment that the first Japanese plane dropped the first bomb on Pearl Harbor, the fate of Japan was completely and utterly sealed.
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Are We the Roman Republic?
History is fascinating in more ways than one. It is, first and foremost, a rollicking good story, with amazing characters and unbelievable plot twists. It is better drama than the works of the finest novelists and filmmakers, made all the more enthralling by the fact that it is true. Yet history also has important lessons to teach, both to individuals and to entire nations and societies. The Roman historian Livy, whose writings I love deeply, said it best when he wrote the following:
Livy is appropriate to quote here, because the historical story I wish to talk about today is one that he witnessed with his own eyes: the fall of the Roman Republic. And the reason I want to talk about it is because I see surprising and worrying similarities between the collapsing Roman Republic of the 1st Century BC and the United States here in the early 21st Century, many of which have been put on display for all to see in the presidential election that has just concluded in our country.
In the 1st Century BC, the Roman Republic had the outward appearance of the most powerful state in the known world. It had risen to power on the Italian peninsula, despite numerous setbacks, between the 6th and 3rd Centuries BC. In a series of three brutal wars between 264 and 146 BC, Rome had crushed the power of Carthage and taken control of the western Mediterranean. In the decades following the destruction of Carthage, Rome had expanded into the eastern half of the Mediterranean, vanquishing the powerful Hellenistic states, defeating the mighty Pontic Empire, and securing its position as the unrivaled master of the Mediterranean world. Nevertheless, foreign wars continued; it seemed as though the more Rome conquered, the more people Rome had to fight. Even after becoming the world's superpower, a seemingly never-ending series of conflicts continued between Romans and assorted Germans, Gauls, Parthians, and other intractable enemies.
Inwardly, the Republic was becoming rotten to the core. Since the Romans had driven out the last king in 509 BC (according to legend, anyway), it had been governed under a system of laws and precedents that had generally served it well, the underlying principle being that no one individual should ever have enough power to subjugate the state. Two consuls held supreme executive power, but each was able to check the other and they held office for only a single year. A myriad of lower offices - praetors, quaestors, aediles, and the like - performed other duties. Everything was presided over by the Senate, ostensibly composed of the wisest and best citizens, buttressed by centuries of tradition. To check the power of the Senate, the people elected officials known as tribunes who had the power to veto legislation.
By the 1st Century BC, however, this system of government was beginning to break down. The Senate had degenerated from an august body of statesmen into a corrupt hive of ambitious and greedy men. The Roman army, once made up of patriotic citizen soldiers, morphed into a professional force more loyal to its commanders than to the state it served. Self-serving men, albeit men of ability and even genius, came to the fore to establish themselves securely in power. In the 130s BC, the Gracchi brothers, both tribunes of the plebs, sought to undermine the power of the Senate in pursuit of populist aims; both ended up assassinated, establishing deadly violence as a central feature of Roman politics. Then came the long struggle between Marius and Sulla, showing that Roman armies were happy to fight against one another if the reward being offered was sufficient enough. Finally, there was the bitter political and eventually military conflict between Julius Caesar and his enemies, in which Caesar emerged the absolute victor after a series of brilliant military victories. Caesar, as is well-known to every educated person, fell to the assassin's knife in 44 BC, paving the way for the emerge of Augustus as the first Roman Emperor and the final extinguishment of the Roman Republic.
We live in a rather cynical and pessimistic age ourselves, with many Americans feeling that their country is on a steady decline. Polling companies regularly ask people whether they feel the country is on the right track or wrong track; for the last few years, those who feel the country is on the wrong track always significantly outnumber those who feel the opposite. There seems to be a palpable feeling that American is decline, that our institutions are failing, that our global power is fading, and that there is nothing we can do about it. The cynicism and anger that characterized the recent election, and which have now propelled Donald Trump into the White House, are impossible to ignore.
Modern American naysayers often rhetorically compare our nation to the Roman Empire in the 5th Century, when it finally collapsed. In truth, they would do much better to look to the Roman Republic of the 1st Century BC for lessons applicable to our own nation in our own time. Allow me to lay out a few unsettling similarities between the United States in the early 21st Century and the Roman Republic as it existed in the 1st Century BC.
1. Government is gridlocked between two rival political factions, neither of which is concerned with the common good.
In the Late Roman Republic, it was the Optimates or "best men" - people like Cato the Younger, Cicero, and eventually Pompey the Great - and the Populares, those "favoring the people" led by Caesar. Generally speaking (and the membership of these factions was vague and loosely defined), the Optimates believed in aristocratic government by the leading families, ruling through the Senate and holding to traditional values, while the Populares asserted the rights of the common people and believed that the land of the rich should be redistributed among all citizens. The Optimates wanted to maintain the status quo in which the wealthy aristocracy ran the state. The Populares were generally ambitious demagogues who exploited the disenchantment of the common people as a vehicle for their own political advancement.
In our time, it is the Republicans, the so-called "conservative" party, and the Democrats, the so-called "progressive" party. As with the Optimates and Populares, both the Republicans and Democrats claim to have the best interests of the nation at heart, yet each seems interested only in amassing the maximum amount of power and influence for itself and thwarting the ambitions of the opposing party than anything else.
In Early 21st Century America, as was done in the Late Roman Republic, both political factions spend an enormous amount of time and effort creating committees designed to investigate real and imagined crimes committed by the other faction. People on both sides constantly try to haul members of the other faction into court. Both sides seem willing to sacrifice the good of the nation if, by doing so, they can embarrass the opposing party or score political points. Republicans have been perfectly content to shut down the government in petty disputes over the budget and cast blame on . Democrats have been happy to accuse Republicans of bigotry over things as trivial as wedding cakes, friend chicken, and which bathrooms people should use.
Nowhere can one find a sense of setting party loyalty aside from the good of the nation.
2. The electoral system has broken down amid massive corruption.
The integrity of the Roman Republic was based on annual elections. All the tribes of the Roman people gathered together on the Field of Mars and voted for the magistrates of the coming year: consuls, praetors, quaestors, and the like. Before each election, auguries had to be taken by priests, a special unit had to declare that the city was in no danger of attack, and other ceremonies had to be done and precautions taken, for elections in the Roman Republic were a sacred event.
By the 1st Century BC, however, elections in Rome had become a farce. Massive bribery was the rule of the day and whether you won or lost an election depending almost entirely on how much money you had and how willing you were to give it away. Financial supporters provided money to use as bribes in exchange for political favors. After serving as consul or praetor, it was customary to give a senator a "proconsul" or "propraetor" assignment as the governor of a province, during which they would tax the provincials to the limit in order to pay off the debts they had accrued getting elected consul or praetor in the first place. Cato the Younger, a man of ironclad integrity, refused to resort to bribery. It should come as no surprise that his one attempt to win the consulship failed miserably, for his opponents had no compunction against engaging in mass bribery. After all, that was just how things were done.
Are we that different? The voting system is indeed rigged, though not in the way President-Elect Donald Trump spoke about. Even before the disastrous Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010, special interest money was flooding into American political campaigns on an obscene scale. A politician promises to support the special interests, sometimes subtly and sometimes not to subtly, and the lobbyists for that particular interest chalk up the money to fund his election campaign. When the election is over, the office-holder then uses their legislative power to protect and advance the interests of their campaign contributors. Those who see our present system of campaign finance as anything other than bribery on a massive scale are deluding themselves.
Our corrupt campaign finance system is only part of the story, however. The practice of gerrymandering allows office-holders to choose their voters, rather than the other way around, thus making it quite easy for incumbents to remain in office, year after year. Independent candidates or those from third parties are systematically ignored by the media (which is perfectly happy with the status quo) and barred from participating in election debates, which, along with overly rigorous ballot access rules, essentially limits participation only to members of the Republican or Democratic parties. We also have the sickening spectacle of state governments passing laws clearly designed to make it more difficult for people to vote, under the reasonable assumption that fewer people voting works in favor of incumbents.
In other words, elections in the America of the early 21st Century are as much of a farce as elections were in the Late Roman Republic.
3. Populist rabble-rousers are largely driving the public debate.
In the late Roman Republic, there was a whole cast of ambitious seekers of political office who had been stymied in following the traditional path towards the consulship. Rather than accept defeat, they instead decided to ignore legal and constitutional norms and continue clawing for power and influence.
The most famous of these men was Publius Clodius Pulcher. He was a senator, but was disliked and seen as obnoxious, known mostly for a ridiculous sex scandal involving him dressing as a woman to gain access to a religious ceremony in which only females could participate. Unable to advance in the Senate, he bizarrely had himself adopted by a a younger flunky of his who was a plebian, thereby allowing him to run for the office of tribune of the plebs (only plebians could be tribunes). Once he had secured that office, he continually went over the head of the Senate and had legislation rammed through the popular assemblies, which was technically legal but went against all norms of how politics in the Republic was supposed to work. Clodius used his period of legislative dominance to pass legislation designed to destroy his enemies (Cicero being his primary target) and expand his own power until he was assassinated.
The election of Donald Trump to the office of President of the United States marks the triumph of populism in our own society. So, incidentally, did the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. While there is a vast difference between Trump and Sanders, in that one is a decent human being and the other decidedly is not, their support sprung from similar sources. Populism is the ideology of the disaffected masses, who have real or imagined grievances against the powers-that-be and look for would-be saviors to magically and painlessly solve all of their problems for them.
Trump's supporters said that they were angry about immigration, so Trump has promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico. They were angry about Muslims coming into the United States, so he has promised that he won't let them come in anymore. Whatever the perceived problem, Trump has simply promised to make it go away. He has never laid out any specific policy proposals, much less suggested how he would get such proposals through Congress or how he would pay for them. It is demagoguery at its clearest. I frankly expect him to be remembered by history as the American Clodius.
Supporters of Bernie Sanders hold more nuanced and less confrontational views, but they share with Trump supporters a dissatisfaction with the status quo and a willingness to believe that the problems they care about could be easily fixed if only their leader were placed in power. College education is increasingly expensive? Sanders promised to make it free. The Affordable Care Act isn't working as well as expected? Sanders promised to simply make healthcare free. Whatever the problem, Sanders told his supporters that he would wave a magic wander and the problem would be fixed. While Sanders never sunk to the xenophobia, misogyny, and borderline racism of Trump, in many ways his support stemmed from similar sources.
To fix the problems facing our countries, we need leaders like Cicero, not Clodius. That needs to be remembered next time we go to the polls.
4. There is a huge and increasing gap between the rich and the poor.
By the First Century BC, the old designations of "plebeian" and "patrician" had ceased to have much meaning in everyday life. A senator or wealthy man was just as likely to be one as the other. Yet Roman society was frightfully unequal. Whether they were plebeians or patricians, those who had money and family connections were in control of the government and economy. Those who didn't were expected to be quiet and do what they were told. While an occasional "new man" like Cicero might sometimes make his way up the political ladder in Roman government, it was exceedingly rare. The same small number of powerful families controlled the Senate and had for centuries.
Roman society had not always been like this. In its heyday, it had been largely a society of yeoman farmers. Indeed, no man could serve in the legions unless he met certain property qualifications, the thinking being that property-owners had the most to lose if Rome were ever defeated in war and so would fight harder than mere mercenaries. As its victories brought more and more territory under Roman control, however, most of the land fell under the control of the wealthy, who established enormous estates and worked them with slave labor. Small freeholders could not compete and gradually began losing their land, crowding into Rome and the other cities and being forced to live off the grain dole.
We are seeing something similar today. Powerful multinational corporations are slowly squeezing independently-owned businesses out of existence, while massive agribusiness entities have made traditional family farms a thing of the past. More broadly, the expanding economy disproportionately benefits those who are already immensely rich, with the status of the poor and the middle-class either remaining static or actually declining. Just as so many Romans became dependent on government support through the grain dole, millions of Americans no dependent on government welfare for their survival. It is no surprise to me that economic anxiety is infecting so much of America these days, creating opportunities in which populists like Trump can flourish.
5. The country is locked in foreign wars from which it can't seem to extricate itself.
As I write this, American warplanes are bombing ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria. American soldiers remain deployed in Afghanistan in a conflict that has been going on for a decade-and-a-half. Having withdrawn from Iraq in 2012, our forces are now being slowly drawn back into the country and are playing a crucial role in the ongoing fighting around Mosul. Special forces raids and air strikes are being mounted in Yemen and Libya. Our military is in the midst of increasing its presence in the Pacific to counter the threat of a rising China and in the Baltic region to counter the threat of a resurgent Russia.
In the First Century BC, Rome was also almost constantly at war. Caesar battled the Gauls and invaded Germany and Britain. In the east, Sulla, Pompey the Great and others battled assorted enemies, including the powerful Kingdom of Pontus that briefly threatened Roman power in the region. Wars against recalcitrant tribes seemed to never end in Spain. And mighty individual leaders rose up to challenge Rome. In Gaul, there was the terrifying chieftain Vercingetorix, the only man in the region who could match himself against Julius Caesar. In Pontus, there was the great King Mithridates, a man so ruthless that he ordered the slaughter of eighty thousand Roman citizens in a single day.
There are eerie similarities between these wars of the Roman Republic in the 1st Century BC and America's military activities in the early 21st Century. They were fought far from home, for just as Italy was never threatened by any of Rome's enemies during this period, so is there clearly no possibility for America to be successfully invaded in our own time. Yet taken together they formed a sort of "perpetual war" of the sort that George Orwell warned us about. A never-ending war served as a means of distracting the people from internal problems and helped the rich become even richer. It also slowly drained away the society's resources, like a cut that stubbornly refused to stop bleeding.
6. Old values of civic virtue are disdained.
The Romans during the glory days of the Republic believed deeply in virtus, which we might roughly translate into English as "civic virtue". People were naturally expected to pursue their interests and seek to enrich themselves and their families, but the idea that anyone would do so at the expense of society as a whole was an almost unthinkable concept. When Rome battled the fearsome Samnites and other Italian peoples, or warded off the terrible threats of Pyrrhus or Hannibal, Romans of all ages and classes served in the army and accepted heavy taxation in service of the Republic. Senators served in their various official positions without receiving pay. There was a common understanding that the good of the community required the collective sacrifice of everyone.
There once was a concept of civic virtue in America. Without it, we never would have won the Revolutionary War, held the country together through the fires of civil war, endured the sufferings of the Great Depression, or rid the world of fascism and communism. Yet it seems to have vanished like the smoke of an extinguished campfire. We have become a society in which everyone is quick to take offense at every perceived slight or "microaggression", where we cast our votes based on what will put the most money in our pockets rather than on what is genuinely good for the country, where we waste of time playing video games or consuming vacuous and inane pop culture products as if they were candy.
If 21st Century America is to avoid the fate that befell the Roman Republic in the 1st Century BC, it needs to rediscover the old civic virtue of the past. We need to turn off our televisions and video games and open our books. We need to remember the ideals on which the republic was founded. We need to again place the needs of our nation ahead of our own individual needs. Restoring our old sense of civic virtue is the prerequisite for fixing all of the other problems, for a virtuous people would choose wise leaders rather than run-of-the-mill politicians and casino moguls, would insist on reforming our broken electoral systems and on extracting us from perpetual war, and would insist on a fair economic system which was rigged for no one, in which everyone had an equal chance at prosperity.
Will we be able to do it? I don't know. It's up to the American people. But history has put these lessons before us and we would be foolish not to heed its warnings. The Roman Republic collapsed into the autocracy of the Roman Empire, but the United States of America still has a chance to save itself.
The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see. In that record, you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models and base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.
Livy is appropriate to quote here, because the historical story I wish to talk about today is one that he witnessed with his own eyes: the fall of the Roman Republic. And the reason I want to talk about it is because I see surprising and worrying similarities between the collapsing Roman Republic of the 1st Century BC and the United States here in the early 21st Century, many of which have been put on display for all to see in the presidential election that has just concluded in our country.
In the 1st Century BC, the Roman Republic had the outward appearance of the most powerful state in the known world. It had risen to power on the Italian peninsula, despite numerous setbacks, between the 6th and 3rd Centuries BC. In a series of three brutal wars between 264 and 146 BC, Rome had crushed the power of Carthage and taken control of the western Mediterranean. In the decades following the destruction of Carthage, Rome had expanded into the eastern half of the Mediterranean, vanquishing the powerful Hellenistic states, defeating the mighty Pontic Empire, and securing its position as the unrivaled master of the Mediterranean world. Nevertheless, foreign wars continued; it seemed as though the more Rome conquered, the more people Rome had to fight. Even after becoming the world's superpower, a seemingly never-ending series of conflicts continued between Romans and assorted Germans, Gauls, Parthians, and other intractable enemies.
Inwardly, the Republic was becoming rotten to the core. Since the Romans had driven out the last king in 509 BC (according to legend, anyway), it had been governed under a system of laws and precedents that had generally served it well, the underlying principle being that no one individual should ever have enough power to subjugate the state. Two consuls held supreme executive power, but each was able to check the other and they held office for only a single year. A myriad of lower offices - praetors, quaestors, aediles, and the like - performed other duties. Everything was presided over by the Senate, ostensibly composed of the wisest and best citizens, buttressed by centuries of tradition. To check the power of the Senate, the people elected officials known as tribunes who had the power to veto legislation.
By the 1st Century BC, however, this system of government was beginning to break down. The Senate had degenerated from an august body of statesmen into a corrupt hive of ambitious and greedy men. The Roman army, once made up of patriotic citizen soldiers, morphed into a professional force more loyal to its commanders than to the state it served. Self-serving men, albeit men of ability and even genius, came to the fore to establish themselves securely in power. In the 130s BC, the Gracchi brothers, both tribunes of the plebs, sought to undermine the power of the Senate in pursuit of populist aims; both ended up assassinated, establishing deadly violence as a central feature of Roman politics. Then came the long struggle between Marius and Sulla, showing that Roman armies were happy to fight against one another if the reward being offered was sufficient enough. Finally, there was the bitter political and eventually military conflict between Julius Caesar and his enemies, in which Caesar emerged the absolute victor after a series of brilliant military victories. Caesar, as is well-known to every educated person, fell to the assassin's knife in 44 BC, paving the way for the emerge of Augustus as the first Roman Emperor and the final extinguishment of the Roman Republic.
We live in a rather cynical and pessimistic age ourselves, with many Americans feeling that their country is on a steady decline. Polling companies regularly ask people whether they feel the country is on the right track or wrong track; for the last few years, those who feel the country is on the wrong track always significantly outnumber those who feel the opposite. There seems to be a palpable feeling that American is decline, that our institutions are failing, that our global power is fading, and that there is nothing we can do about it. The cynicism and anger that characterized the recent election, and which have now propelled Donald Trump into the White House, are impossible to ignore.
Modern American naysayers often rhetorically compare our nation to the Roman Empire in the 5th Century, when it finally collapsed. In truth, they would do much better to look to the Roman Republic of the 1st Century BC for lessons applicable to our own nation in our own time. Allow me to lay out a few unsettling similarities between the United States in the early 21st Century and the Roman Republic as it existed in the 1st Century BC.
1. Government is gridlocked between two rival political factions, neither of which is concerned with the common good.
In the Late Roman Republic, it was the Optimates or "best men" - people like Cato the Younger, Cicero, and eventually Pompey the Great - and the Populares, those "favoring the people" led by Caesar. Generally speaking (and the membership of these factions was vague and loosely defined), the Optimates believed in aristocratic government by the leading families, ruling through the Senate and holding to traditional values, while the Populares asserted the rights of the common people and believed that the land of the rich should be redistributed among all citizens. The Optimates wanted to maintain the status quo in which the wealthy aristocracy ran the state. The Populares were generally ambitious demagogues who exploited the disenchantment of the common people as a vehicle for their own political advancement.
In our time, it is the Republicans, the so-called "conservative" party, and the Democrats, the so-called "progressive" party. As with the Optimates and Populares, both the Republicans and Democrats claim to have the best interests of the nation at heart, yet each seems interested only in amassing the maximum amount of power and influence for itself and thwarting the ambitions of the opposing party than anything else.
In Early 21st Century America, as was done in the Late Roman Republic, both political factions spend an enormous amount of time and effort creating committees designed to investigate real and imagined crimes committed by the other faction. People on both sides constantly try to haul members of the other faction into court. Both sides seem willing to sacrifice the good of the nation if, by doing so, they can embarrass the opposing party or score political points. Republicans have been perfectly content to shut down the government in petty disputes over the budget and cast blame on . Democrats have been happy to accuse Republicans of bigotry over things as trivial as wedding cakes, friend chicken, and which bathrooms people should use.
Nowhere can one find a sense of setting party loyalty aside from the good of the nation.
2. The electoral system has broken down amid massive corruption.
The integrity of the Roman Republic was based on annual elections. All the tribes of the Roman people gathered together on the Field of Mars and voted for the magistrates of the coming year: consuls, praetors, quaestors, and the like. Before each election, auguries had to be taken by priests, a special unit had to declare that the city was in no danger of attack, and other ceremonies had to be done and precautions taken, for elections in the Roman Republic were a sacred event.
By the 1st Century BC, however, elections in Rome had become a farce. Massive bribery was the rule of the day and whether you won or lost an election depending almost entirely on how much money you had and how willing you were to give it away. Financial supporters provided money to use as bribes in exchange for political favors. After serving as consul or praetor, it was customary to give a senator a "proconsul" or "propraetor" assignment as the governor of a province, during which they would tax the provincials to the limit in order to pay off the debts they had accrued getting elected consul or praetor in the first place. Cato the Younger, a man of ironclad integrity, refused to resort to bribery. It should come as no surprise that his one attempt to win the consulship failed miserably, for his opponents had no compunction against engaging in mass bribery. After all, that was just how things were done.
Are we that different? The voting system is indeed rigged, though not in the way President-Elect Donald Trump spoke about. Even before the disastrous Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010, special interest money was flooding into American political campaigns on an obscene scale. A politician promises to support the special interests, sometimes subtly and sometimes not to subtly, and the lobbyists for that particular interest chalk up the money to fund his election campaign. When the election is over, the office-holder then uses their legislative power to protect and advance the interests of their campaign contributors. Those who see our present system of campaign finance as anything other than bribery on a massive scale are deluding themselves.
Our corrupt campaign finance system is only part of the story, however. The practice of gerrymandering allows office-holders to choose their voters, rather than the other way around, thus making it quite easy for incumbents to remain in office, year after year. Independent candidates or those from third parties are systematically ignored by the media (which is perfectly happy with the status quo) and barred from participating in election debates, which, along with overly rigorous ballot access rules, essentially limits participation only to members of the Republican or Democratic parties. We also have the sickening spectacle of state governments passing laws clearly designed to make it more difficult for people to vote, under the reasonable assumption that fewer people voting works in favor of incumbents.
In other words, elections in the America of the early 21st Century are as much of a farce as elections were in the Late Roman Republic.
3. Populist rabble-rousers are largely driving the public debate.
In the late Roman Republic, there was a whole cast of ambitious seekers of political office who had been stymied in following the traditional path towards the consulship. Rather than accept defeat, they instead decided to ignore legal and constitutional norms and continue clawing for power and influence.
The most famous of these men was Publius Clodius Pulcher. He was a senator, but was disliked and seen as obnoxious, known mostly for a ridiculous sex scandal involving him dressing as a woman to gain access to a religious ceremony in which only females could participate. Unable to advance in the Senate, he bizarrely had himself adopted by a a younger flunky of his who was a plebian, thereby allowing him to run for the office of tribune of the plebs (only plebians could be tribunes). Once he had secured that office, he continually went over the head of the Senate and had legislation rammed through the popular assemblies, which was technically legal but went against all norms of how politics in the Republic was supposed to work. Clodius used his period of legislative dominance to pass legislation designed to destroy his enemies (Cicero being his primary target) and expand his own power until he was assassinated.
The election of Donald Trump to the office of President of the United States marks the triumph of populism in our own society. So, incidentally, did the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. While there is a vast difference between Trump and Sanders, in that one is a decent human being and the other decidedly is not, their support sprung from similar sources. Populism is the ideology of the disaffected masses, who have real or imagined grievances against the powers-that-be and look for would-be saviors to magically and painlessly solve all of their problems for them.
Trump's supporters said that they were angry about immigration, so Trump has promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico. They were angry about Muslims coming into the United States, so he has promised that he won't let them come in anymore. Whatever the perceived problem, Trump has simply promised to make it go away. He has never laid out any specific policy proposals, much less suggested how he would get such proposals through Congress or how he would pay for them. It is demagoguery at its clearest. I frankly expect him to be remembered by history as the American Clodius.
Supporters of Bernie Sanders hold more nuanced and less confrontational views, but they share with Trump supporters a dissatisfaction with the status quo and a willingness to believe that the problems they care about could be easily fixed if only their leader were placed in power. College education is increasingly expensive? Sanders promised to make it free. The Affordable Care Act isn't working as well as expected? Sanders promised to simply make healthcare free. Whatever the problem, Sanders told his supporters that he would wave a magic wander and the problem would be fixed. While Sanders never sunk to the xenophobia, misogyny, and borderline racism of Trump, in many ways his support stemmed from similar sources.
To fix the problems facing our countries, we need leaders like Cicero, not Clodius. That needs to be remembered next time we go to the polls.
4. There is a huge and increasing gap between the rich and the poor.
By the First Century BC, the old designations of "plebeian" and "patrician" had ceased to have much meaning in everyday life. A senator or wealthy man was just as likely to be one as the other. Yet Roman society was frightfully unequal. Whether they were plebeians or patricians, those who had money and family connections were in control of the government and economy. Those who didn't were expected to be quiet and do what they were told. While an occasional "new man" like Cicero might sometimes make his way up the political ladder in Roman government, it was exceedingly rare. The same small number of powerful families controlled the Senate and had for centuries.
Roman society had not always been like this. In its heyday, it had been largely a society of yeoman farmers. Indeed, no man could serve in the legions unless he met certain property qualifications, the thinking being that property-owners had the most to lose if Rome were ever defeated in war and so would fight harder than mere mercenaries. As its victories brought more and more territory under Roman control, however, most of the land fell under the control of the wealthy, who established enormous estates and worked them with slave labor. Small freeholders could not compete and gradually began losing their land, crowding into Rome and the other cities and being forced to live off the grain dole.
We are seeing something similar today. Powerful multinational corporations are slowly squeezing independently-owned businesses out of existence, while massive agribusiness entities have made traditional family farms a thing of the past. More broadly, the expanding economy disproportionately benefits those who are already immensely rich, with the status of the poor and the middle-class either remaining static or actually declining. Just as so many Romans became dependent on government support through the grain dole, millions of Americans no dependent on government welfare for their survival. It is no surprise to me that economic anxiety is infecting so much of America these days, creating opportunities in which populists like Trump can flourish.
5. The country is locked in foreign wars from which it can't seem to extricate itself.
As I write this, American warplanes are bombing ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria. American soldiers remain deployed in Afghanistan in a conflict that has been going on for a decade-and-a-half. Having withdrawn from Iraq in 2012, our forces are now being slowly drawn back into the country and are playing a crucial role in the ongoing fighting around Mosul. Special forces raids and air strikes are being mounted in Yemen and Libya. Our military is in the midst of increasing its presence in the Pacific to counter the threat of a rising China and in the Baltic region to counter the threat of a resurgent Russia.
In the First Century BC, Rome was also almost constantly at war. Caesar battled the Gauls and invaded Germany and Britain. In the east, Sulla, Pompey the Great and others battled assorted enemies, including the powerful Kingdom of Pontus that briefly threatened Roman power in the region. Wars against recalcitrant tribes seemed to never end in Spain. And mighty individual leaders rose up to challenge Rome. In Gaul, there was the terrifying chieftain Vercingetorix, the only man in the region who could match himself against Julius Caesar. In Pontus, there was the great King Mithridates, a man so ruthless that he ordered the slaughter of eighty thousand Roman citizens in a single day.
There are eerie similarities between these wars of the Roman Republic in the 1st Century BC and America's military activities in the early 21st Century. They were fought far from home, for just as Italy was never threatened by any of Rome's enemies during this period, so is there clearly no possibility for America to be successfully invaded in our own time. Yet taken together they formed a sort of "perpetual war" of the sort that George Orwell warned us about. A never-ending war served as a means of distracting the people from internal problems and helped the rich become even richer. It also slowly drained away the society's resources, like a cut that stubbornly refused to stop bleeding.
6. Old values of civic virtue are disdained.
The Romans during the glory days of the Republic believed deeply in virtus, which we might roughly translate into English as "civic virtue". People were naturally expected to pursue their interests and seek to enrich themselves and their families, but the idea that anyone would do so at the expense of society as a whole was an almost unthinkable concept. When Rome battled the fearsome Samnites and other Italian peoples, or warded off the terrible threats of Pyrrhus or Hannibal, Romans of all ages and classes served in the army and accepted heavy taxation in service of the Republic. Senators served in their various official positions without receiving pay. There was a common understanding that the good of the community required the collective sacrifice of everyone.
There once was a concept of civic virtue in America. Without it, we never would have won the Revolutionary War, held the country together through the fires of civil war, endured the sufferings of the Great Depression, or rid the world of fascism and communism. Yet it seems to have vanished like the smoke of an extinguished campfire. We have become a society in which everyone is quick to take offense at every perceived slight or "microaggression", where we cast our votes based on what will put the most money in our pockets rather than on what is genuinely good for the country, where we waste of time playing video games or consuming vacuous and inane pop culture products as if they were candy.
If 21st Century America is to avoid the fate that befell the Roman Republic in the 1st Century BC, it needs to rediscover the old civic virtue of the past. We need to turn off our televisions and video games and open our books. We need to remember the ideals on which the republic was founded. We need to again place the needs of our nation ahead of our own individual needs. Restoring our old sense of civic virtue is the prerequisite for fixing all of the other problems, for a virtuous people would choose wise leaders rather than run-of-the-mill politicians and casino moguls, would insist on reforming our broken electoral systems and on extracting us from perpetual war, and would insist on a fair economic system which was rigged for no one, in which everyone had an equal chance at prosperity.
Will we be able to do it? I don't know. It's up to the American people. But history has put these lessons before us and we would be foolish not to heed its warnings. The Roman Republic collapsed into the autocracy of the Roman Empire, but the United States of America still has a chance to save itself.
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