What If Czarevitch Alexei Had Not Had Hemophilia?

Like many other people who have been fascinated by the tragic story of Czar Nicolas II of Russia and his family, I first encountered it by reading the beautifully written book Nicolas and Alexandra, by Robert K. Massie (one of the best popular history writers in the business). The tale of the decline and fall of the Russian Empire infuses the pages of the book. It is a deep, rich, and fascinating story, one of those historical tales that seems more like a work of epic fiction than a telling of truth. I strongly recommend the book to everyone.

The tragedy of Czar Nicolas II lay not only in his own character flaws - his indecisiveness, his lack of confidence, his dependence on others - but also on the sad tale of his son, Alexei, who was supposed to have been his heir. Czarevitch Alexei suffered from hemophilia, the genetic disorder that prevents the normal clotting of blood and hence can cause a sufferer to bleed to death from injuries that might be trivial to most people. Alexei's hemophilia was the cause of a series of events that contributed to the fall of the Russian Empire, the outcome of the First World War, the rise of the Soviet Union, and much of the history of the world for the remainder of the 20th Century.

Let me briefly recount the sad story from the beginning. Czar Nicolas II took the Russian throne in 1896 upon the death of his father, Czar Alexander III. He was the head of the Romanov dynasty, which had ruled the vast Russian Empire since the enthronement of Czar Michael I in 1613. Among the Romanov rulers were Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, both of whom had massively expanded Russian territory and power, making it one of the great powers of the world. When Nicolas II became Czar, the Russian Empire was the largest nation on the planet and one of the most powerful. Of the great powers, it was the only one which essentially remained an absolute monarchy.

The reign of Czar Nicholas II did not begin well. At celebrations marking the coronation at Khodynka Field in Moscow, a stampede took place and, in the resulting panic, more than a thousand people were trampled to death. This was not an auspicious beginning and unfortunately things only got worse. In 1904-05 a disastrous war was fought against Japan in the east, culminating in the destruction of the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima Strait. Revolution broke out in 1905, with a general strike paralyzing the country and elements of the military mutinying. The Czar was forced to make concessions, resulting in the creation of a legislative assembly called the Duma, the issuance of the October Manifesto, and the appointment of Sergei Witte as Prime Minister. All of this ostensibly put Russia on the path towards being a constitutional rather than an absolute monarchy.

Through all this turmoil, Nicolas II took comfort in his family. He was deeply in love with his wife Alexandra and was a devoted father to his four daughters and his one son, Czarevitch Alexei. All the hopes of the Romanov dynasty were placed in Alexei, who had been born in 1904. It soon became clear, however, that something was seriously wrong with the child and within a short time the Czar's doctors had diagnosed hemophilia. Alexei had inherited the genetic disorder from his mother, who had inherited it from her mother Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, who had in turn inherited it from her mother, Queen Victoria. Nicolas and Alexandra were horrified and put an extensive series of procedures in place to prevent Alexei from hurting himself, since even a minor injury might prove life-threatening. The hopes for the future of the Romanov dynasty and the Russian Empire now seemed to rest on the slender thread of a single boy who might be killed by something as minor as a bruise.

In the fall of 1912, Alexei bumped himself badly while jumping into a rowboat and the hemophilia flared up badly. The situation appeared so grave that the little young was given the last sacraments and his parents prepared themselves for his death. It was at this point that the cryptic, sinister, and thoroughly corrosive influence of Rasputin entered the royal family's life in a major way,

Rasputin is one of those historical figures who seems to step out of a work of fiction into reality. In his case, the fictional work would surely be a Gothic horror novel. Near as can be pieced together, he was born in the 1860s in a small Siberian town. He was known in his youth as a thief and a troublemaker, so much so that the local priests would pay him money to keep him from disturbing Sunday church services. Later on, he claimed to receive visions from God and made a name for himself as a wandering holy man and religious teacher, though he was never recognized as a monk of cleric by any legitimate religious authority. He spent years moving back and forth between various Russian villages, using his mastery of charlatanism to deceive the gullible and live off what he could swindle from them.

Strange holy men of this type were strangely popular in Russia during this period. Word of Rasputin's alleged powers eventually reached Anna Vyrubova, a personal friend of Czarina Alexandra, who in turn introduced her to the Czarina herself. A strange chain of events had brought the peasant charlatan into the company of the autocratic ruling family of Russia.

Rasputin settled in St. Petersburg, where he soon became a favorite among fashionable members of the noble elite, who trotted him out at parties as if he was some sort of mascot. He soon became far more than a joke, however, as his reputation as a mystic spread rapidly through the influential circles of high Russian society. Women, in particular, found Rasputin fascinating and he was said to have bedded numerous aristocratic ladies, despite his own repulsive physical appearance. Rasputin practiced a strange form of personal theology, which required him to sin intensively before he could be properly purged of sin. In particular, his sinful sexual nature required him to have sex with as many beautiful women as possible. An interesting theology, to say the least.

Rasputin soon developed a powerful influence over the Czar and Czarina, for it seemed that he was the only one who could calm Alexei during the Czarevitch's frequent painful battles with his condition and Czarina Alexandra in particular quickly became absolutely devoted to Rapustin, willing to defend him from all critics. When the 1912 accident happened and it seemed all but certain that Alexei was about to die, Rasputin sent the Imperial family a telegram simply saying that Alexei would not die and that the doctors should not bother him. The Czarevitch then began what seemed to be a miraculous recovery. It seems that this coincidence helped persuade both Nicholas and Alexandra that Rasputin was indeed a miracle worker and, moreover, the only person who could help Alexei.

Rasputin, an uneducated and illiterate man who was obviously half-crazed, now wielded enormous influence over the Imperial family that ruled Russia. At the same time, aristocratic society in St. Petersburg began to turn against Rasputin, tired of his antics and jealous of the power he now held. He continued to have some supporters, however, consisting mostly among people wishing to flatter him as a means of gaining the ear of the Czar. Rasputin began lobbying with Nicholas and Alexandra on behalf of his friends and against the interests of his enemies, to the detriment of the nation. The Russian people, from whom the Imperial family had been largely isolated since the 1905 Revolution, were mystified as to why the Czar and Czarina took counsel from a man like Rasputin while the country seemed to be careening from one crisis to the next. Critically, Alexandra was prompted by Rasputin to pressure her husband into resisting any and all moves in the direction of constitutional reform, for the mystic perhaps sensed that anything less than an absolute autocracy in Russia would mean the end of his own influence.

In the midst of all this, the diplomatic crisis over the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in the summer of 1914 exploded into the catastrophe of the First World War. The Russian Empire soon found itself at war with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, a conflict for which it was distinctly unprepared. Its armies, while enormous, were poorly armed and poorly equipped. A few generals demonstrated significant talent, such as Aleksei Brusilov and Nikolai Yudenich, but most Russian commanders were distinctly mediocre. The Russian soldiers fought with their traditional stubbornness and tenacity, but suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of the Central Powers.

In this unprecedented crisis, Russia needed a leader the caliber of Peter the Great. Instead, it had Nicholas II, who might be properly known as Nicholas the Easily Manipulated. Rasputin began making suggestions about war policy and personnel, advice which Nicholas often heeded. It seems clear that Rasputin had a much stronger hold on the mind of Alexandra than he did on the mind of the Czar himself, but since Nicholas could never bear to go against the wishes of his wife, it amounted to the same thing.

The most critical, and disastrous, bit of advice that Rasputin gave the Imperial family was that Czar Nicholas himself should take direct command of the Russian armies. This he did in September of 1915. As far as military matters were concerned, this mattered scarcely as all, since Nicholas left actual operations to his chief-of-staff, General Michael Alexeiev, and limited his activities to the ceremonial activities expected of a monarch, such as grand inspections. But the Czar made his home at the front, away from St. Petersburg, placing the Czarina in effective control of the government. Since the Czarina was utterly under the spell of Rasputin, the illiterate charlatan was now, for all practical purposes, in control of the Russian government.

It was soon common knowledge that Rasputin was in charge, with predictable results. If a mother wanted a military exemption for her son, she went to Rasputin. If a contractor wanted a deal to sell the Russian army substandard artillery shells at twice the going rate, he went to Rasputin. If a civil servant wanted a promotion, he went to Rasputin. Because Rasputin's whispers into the ear of the Czarina helped advance the careers of whomever was willing to pay him the most, money from bribes flowed into Rasputin's pockets and financed his increasingly bizarre and wild lifestyle, which apparently included frequent sexual orgies and other associated debaucheries. He also began pestering the Czarina with military advice for her husband, which she dutifully sent on in letter after letter.

The Russian Orthodox Church and most members of the nobility were horrified by Rasputin's activities and repeatedly told the Czar that the man was dangerous and not to be trusted. Nicholas simply ignored their warnings, unwilling to go against the wishes of his wife and perhaps falling more under Rasputin's spell himself. The man seemed untouchable. During an excursion to a restaurant in 1915, Rasputin became extremely drunk and began to loudly brag about his sexual exploits, hinting that he was the lover of the Czarina herself. He then exposed himself and waved his genitals around at the other patrons of the restaurant, causing a massive panic and a dash for the exits. The police finally arrived and arrested Rasputin, whose insulting words about the Romanov family would have gotten anyone else packed off to prison, if not worse. But shortly after his arrest, a message from the Czar arrived, ordering his release.

Government ministers and military officers who cared about the future of the Russian nation were, unsurprisingly, appalled at the extent of Rasputin's influence and its disastrous consequences. They soon found themselves being removed from their positions and replaced with inept sycophants who got their posts through flattering the charlatan. The Russian government fell into chaos, as unqualified men with no interest in actually doing the job were placed in charge of a tottering empire just as it was fighting the most terrible war the world had ever known.

As 1916 wore on, things went from bad to worse for Russia. The success of the Brusilov Offensive in the summer proved only temporary. The competent Minister of War, Alexei Polivanov, under whose leadership the logistics and staff work of the Russian Army had begun to improve, was removed from his position at the insistence of Rasputin and replaced with one of the charlatan's flunkies. Government began to collapse within the country even as the army became increasingly unable to function. Morale among the troops fell sharply and people in the cities and on the farms began openly denouncing the Romanov family. It was even suggested the Czarina Alexandra was a German agent, bent on destroying the country from within.

In December of 1916, Rasputin was assassinated by a conspiracy of noblemen led by Felix Yusupov. It wasn't easy, for the man had to be poisoned, shot, stabbed, beaten, and then simultaneously frozen and drowned in the Neva River before he died. By then, sadly, it was too late. The Russian government had been inefficient and corrupt before the war; Rasputin's activities had damaged it beyond all possibility of repair. Nicholas II, confused and demoralized himself, utterly lacked the ability or confidence to restore the situation. He continued to refuse to appoint competent ministers to critical government positions. Throughout the country, food shortages increased. At the front, the soldiers were being asked to go into battle with pathetically little in terms of weapons or equipment.

In February, revolution broke out in the streets of St. Petersburg, the Russian people having finally become unwilling to endure further leadership by the Romanovs. True to form, the Czar showed no backbone and quickly abdicated the throne. Russia fell into complete and utter chaos and different factions vied with one another to fill the power vacuum. The Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky took control and attempted to continue the war against the Germans, but was itself overthrown a few months later by the Bolsheviks, who made a humiliating peace with them. The Imperial family was taken into custody by the Bolsheviks and later executed. The long-suffering Russian people had to endure a long and bloody civil war, which ended with the Bolsheviks in full control of the country. Ahead of Russia was the nightmarish experience of Stalinism.

It is worth asking whether anything like this would have happened had not little Alexei simply not inherited the gene that caused hemophilia. The son of a female carrying the gene causing hemophilia in the X-chromosome has a fifty percent chance of inheriting the gene in question, so when Alexei was conceived he was just as likely to avoid the condition as not. Had the boy not suffered from hemophilia, Rasputin would never have come to the attention of the Romanov family, since it was his apparent ability to relieve the Czarivitch's pain (which might have been entirely due to chance) that allowed the Siberian charlatan to enter the family's good graces in the first place. Take away the hemophilia of Alexei, which was due entirely to an unfortunate case of genetic chance, and Rasputin is essentially removed from the scene of history.

Russia entered the First World War with a number of problems that prevented it from fully developing its war economy or organizing a truly efficient military force. These problems would still have existed had Rasputin never entered the scene. But his corrosive influence exacerbated those problems enormously and played a crucial role in Russia's collapse in 1917. Had Rasputin never become more than a wandering mystic, the Russian government might have gone through the war with ministers who actually knew their jobs and wanted to perform them to the best of their ability, and an army whose commanders were confident in the civilian leadership and whose soldiers were properly armed and equipped.

It should be pointed out that, even facing the severe limitations and disadvantages caused largely by Rasputin's meddling, the Russian armies fought against the Central Powers for three long years. They did not fare well against the Germans, but they did well enough against the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks. Indeed, before the revolution of 1917 caused the Russian army to disintegrate, the Russians had all but knocked Austria-Hungary out of the war and had soundly trounced the Turks in on the Caucasus Front. Had they been properly led and equipped, confident that the country was behind them, they would have done considerably better. This does not necessarily mean that they would have defeated the Germans, which they probably lacked the ability to do even under the best circumstances, but had not done better than they actually did, the Germans would not have been able to deploy their forces so freely on the Western Front and the subsidiary fronts to the south.

If Russia had performed better in the war between 1915 and 1917, it's entirely possible that Germany and the rest of the Central Powers would have been defeated and forced to the peace table a year or more earlier than was the case historically. Aside from the millions of lives this would have saved, it would also have had enormous geopolitical ramifications, especially if it resulted in an Allied victory that did not involve intervene by the United States. There would have been no breaking of the American isolationist tradition and no League of Nations, with its false promise of a peaceful, internationalist world. The long-term impact on Trans-Atlantic relations can hardly be underestimated.

Germany actually won the First World War on the Eastern Front, then went on to loss it on the Western Front. This fact played into the sinister "stab in the back" conspiracy theory in postwar Germany, which blamed the German defeat on Jews and communists. Had Russia remained a full partner with the rest of the Allies and played a significant role in Germany's defeat, it would mean that the loss of war would have been crystal clear to every German and the "stab in the back" notion would have had much less traction. It is at least possible that the rise of fascism within Germany could have been prevented in such a scenario.

Within Russia itself, without Rasputin, the Romanov monarchy might have survived. Indeed, victory in the war against the Germans might have increased its prestige among the people. Throughout the reign of Nicholas II, political and social changes in the country were quickly accelerating, especially after the 1905 Revolution. Might the Duma have slowly increased its power over the course of the 20th Century, becoming to Russia what Parliament had slowly become in England, with Russia evolving into a genuine constitutional monarchy? Or would the Romanovs have insisted on staying true to the autocratic ways of their ancestors? It's impossible to know, but considering the frenetic nightmare of the Russian Civil War, the bloodstained rule of Stalin, the long shadow of Communism, and the present autocratic regime of Vladimir Putin, I think I'm on safe ground in saying that things would have been better than they actually turned out to be.

Whatever would have happened, without the hemophilia of Alexei, Rasputin would never have been able to inadvertently pave the way for the rise of the Soviet Union. This, in turn, means that communism would never have been a credible political and economic force in the 20th Century world but would have remained a fringe belief held only by extremists. Communism earned its place alongside fascism as one of the most sinister political ideologies to have ever plagued the world. When thinking of the terrible human cost exacted by communism in Russia, China and the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the course of the 20th Century, one cannot help but sigh at what might have been had that single gene in the embryo of Alexis Romanov been different.

To conclude, though, perhaps it's fitting to consider the little boy himself. Alexei Romanov was, by all accounts, a friendly and affectionate little fellow, who liked to play pranks on dinner guests and was very sensitive to the feelings of others. One wonders what he might have been like had he been able to grow to adulthood. In the end, it was the heartless Bolsheviks who killed Alexei, though the hemophilia would likely have done the poor boy in well before his time.

For just a moment, allow yourself to imagine a Russian Empire in the mid-20th Century, with Czar Alexander IV on the throne in St. Petersburg, the Duma debating new legislation and an independent court system passing judgement on the actions of the monarch and the legislature. Europe is at peace. No one in this world has ever heard of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, who died in obscurity. The words "fascism" and "communism" are greeted with uncomprehending frowns.

And it might have been, but for a single genetic trait in one very unfortunate boy.

Reflections On a Bowl of Black Eyed Peas

Recently, I sat down with my wife and two daughters to a nice dinner around the kitchen table. Amelia, all of four months old, can't eat the food the rest of us are eating but we bring her to the table anyway. Evelyn, a precocious girl of three-and-a-half years, would prefer to simply stuff her face and then run back to her room to continue playing with her princess dolls, but her mother and I put our feet down and make her stay in her chair so that we can eat together as a family. We plan on continuing to eat dinner together as a family until the day the youngest daughter leaves the house.

This dinner was special, though. The black eyed peas we were eating had not come from a can, nor had they come from the bulk food section. Indeed, they had not come from a grocery store at all. Instead, they had come from a garden that we had planted in our own backyard. All told, the entire "harvest" of peas might have been able to fill up three-quarters of a cup. They tasted fine, though not spectacular. None of that mattered, though. What was exhilarating for us was that, for the first time in our lives, we were eating food that we had grown ourselves.

Being Jeffrey Evan Brooks, I looked to history for an explanation as to why I found this experience so fulfilling. Two epochs of history that I have always found especially attractive are the age of the Roman Republic and the colonial and revolutionary era of American history. Both have deep lessons for us in the 21st Century, when we are watching our individual freedom and our vibrancy as a civilization slowly fade away. In both the Roman Republic and Early America, ordinary people perhaps had a higher level of individual freedom and civic virtue than has ever been the case at other points in history. The fundamental reason for this was that the vast majority of the people were self-sufficient farmers who owned their own land.

In our time, average American citizens depend on a complex network of agribusiness mega-farms, transportation networks, and grocery stores or restaurants to provide them with food. If anything were to happen to disrupt this system, whether intentionally or through an accident, we would suddenly find ourselves without food. We depend on this complex system for our very lives. Self-sufficient farmers in the Roman Republic or Early America didn't have this problem. Owning and cultivating their own land, they could provide themselves with food through their own efforts.

In a 1785 letter to John Jay, Thomas Jefferson had this to say.

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to the country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands. As long therefore as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or anything else.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, the only book he ever wrote, Jefferson expounded on this idea.

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which might otherwise escape from the face of the earth.

In the Jeffersonian vision, America was going to a nation of independent yeoman farmers, who owned and cultivated their own land. Necessities such as furniture and cooking implements would be manufactured on the farms themselves. Luxuries such as the books, musical instruments, and fine wines Jefferson loved so much could be purchased using the profits from the sale of surplus crops. There would be an efficient and locally-run system of public education, and a well-organized militia system would provide for defense. The foundation of it all was the self-sufficiency and civic virtue that Jefferson naturally believed was instilled by the experience of being tied to the land.

The view that Jefferson and many other Founding Fathers held about the virtuous family farmer had been inherited from the Roman Republic. To the Romans before the 1st Century BC, the freeholder who owned and farmed his own land was the ideal citizen. It was the freeholders who filled the ranks of the Roman legions that held off Rome's enemies in the days when the Republic was young and vulnerable, then went on to conquer the whole of Italy. Cato the Elder, a historical figure of whom I have always been quite fond, said that the best compliment a Roman could give another Roman was that he was a good farmer. The poor man who scratched out a living in the slums of the city itself could not be trusted to have the commonweal's interests at heart, for he would not have identified himself with it.

This ideal was personified most clearly in the person of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. A well-respected freeholder, he worked his own farm with his family, served the state as a soldier and senator, and tried to cultivate a life of virtue. In 458 BC, when Rome was threatened by a coalition of its Aequi and Sabine enemies, Cincinnatus was called upon to serve the Republic as dictator, given absolute power for a period of six months. He took command of the army, defeated Rome's enemies, and then quietly went back to his farm and resumed his work. About twenty years later, Cincinnatus was made dictator again to put down a domestic conspiracy that threatened to overthrow the Republic. As before, the moment he had achieved what he had been asked to do, he laid down the mantle of dictator and went back to his plow.

The system of freeholder farms in the Roman Republic gradually dissipated over the centuries. Wars of conquest throughout the Mediterranean, especially those against its great enemy Carthage, brought enormous numbers of slaves into Italy. The wars pulled freeholders away from their farms and into the ranks of the legions for years at a time. Wealthy nobles were able to purchase more and more land, creating enormous agricultural estates called latifundia, worked by slave labor, which easily outproduced the decreasing number of smaller farms. Rome's population swelled as displaced farmers moved into the city in search of work. Much of the political disorder that caused the collapse of the Republic in the 1st Century BC can be attributed to the demise of the small farm and the rise of the latifundia, for it was the discontent of the masses and the decline of civic virtue that swept away what had once been the Republic's foundation.

Was this process all that different than what we have seen in America over the last hundred years, with small family farms vanishing and being replaced with agribusinesses run by large companies and corporations?

The simple civic virtue of the freeholders of the Roman Republic was what the Jeffersonians hoped to see take root in the United States. Although we must acknowledge that the Jeffersonian vision probably never had a chance of being fully realized, we certainly could have done vastly better than we have ended up doing. The seemingly irrevocable decline of the family farm is one of the saddest stories of the last century of our history and only about two percent of Americans are farmers today. Small family farms now account for only about a quarter of American agricultural output. The vast majority of people in our country never set eyes upon the land which produced their food and scarcely give it any thought. The decline of the American farmer is matched by the decline of the food itself. There's more of it than ever, but it's generally processed junk, suffused with chemicals, more created than grown. Today, we are stuffing our faces with fast food, potato chips, frozen pizza, and other stuff that could only marginally be described as food. This has not only contributed an out-of-control obesity epidemic, but has removed the wholesome relationship the American people once had with their food, as if by brain surgery.

I'm as guilty as any American when it comes to lacking a real connection with the land and with the food it produces. What, after all, is a single bowl of home-grown black eyed peas when set against the amount of fast food and frozen pizza I have consumed over the last year? Yet as a symbol, these black eyed peas mean a lot to me. They were sort of a test run for the family and, now that they have been a success, we are cultivating a much more extensive garden. Ideally, we will be slowly increasing the amount of food we produce ourselves, season after season. I'm under no illusions that we can fully free ourselves from the prevalent American system of food production and consumption, but every bite of food that we produce ourselves is a step closer to our personal realization of the Jeffersonian dream.

Many people have figured this out long before I did. Farmers whose land has been in their families for generations continue to tenaciously hold onto it against the odds, while city folk with no previous agricultural experience abandon their urban environments to try their luck on a tractor. Old school farmers' markets are increasingly popular throughout the country. Stores and restaurants proudly declare that they "buy local" in appeals to their customers, creating a genuine communal relationship between the people and they food they consume they consume.

My family may be a little late getting on this bandwagon, but now that we are on we don't intend to get off.

President Should Be Chosen By Direct National Vote

It being a presidential election year, pretty much all that the news media is talking about is the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It's long been a tradition for the news coverage of the campaign to completely ignore any of the genuinely important issues facing the nation and instead focus on nasty personal insults and scandals each side tries to pin on the other. In this regard, the current campaign differs from those of the past only in unprecedented scale of the slime and the unprecedentedly unorthodox campaign style of one of the Republican candidate.

There is one way, however, in which the 2016 election will be no different from those of the past. The winner will be decided by the anachronistic monstrosity that is the Electoral College.

The Electoral College is the 18th Century system worked out by the members of the Constitutional Convention to select the President. As readers of my blog well know, I stand in awe of the men who wrote the Constitution, which I consider perhaps the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of the human race. But that doesn't mean that they were infallible, for they made a number of mistakes while crafting the document. Of all their errors, however, I think the most egregious one which remains uncorrected is the Electoral College, whose undemocratic structure is a blight upon American democracy that must be erased.

Under the Electoral College system, each state receives a number of electoral votes equal to the number of representatives they have in both houses of Congress (since every state has two members of the Senate, this always comes out to the number of representatives they have in the House, plus two). However, because all but two states cast their votes on a winner-take-all basis, the candidate who actually gets the most votes in the nation as a whole does not necessarily win the election, for he or she might win several states by large margins and narrowly lose certain critical states, all of whose electoral votes will go to the other candidate.

We saw this clearly in the 2000 election. Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote handily, getting half a million more votes than Republican George W. Bush. But because of an infinitesimal Bush victory in the state of Florida (itself the dubious result of an intervention by the Supreme Court), Bush received that state's electoral votes, which was just enough to allow him to win the Electoral College and thus to become the President. Whether Al Gore would have been a better President than George W. Bush turned out to be is, of course, open to question, but the fact remains that the candidate who was the clear choice of the American people was not the one who actually ascended to the office.

On four occasions in American history (1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000), the candidate who received the largest number of popular votes lost the Electoral College. In other words, in about one out of every fourteen elections, the candidate who receives fewer votes actually becomes President. On five other occasions (1948, 1960, 1968, 1976, and 2004) a shift of a relatively tiny number of voters would have handed the victory to the candidate who would still have lost the popular vote. Those who say that the Electoral College is not a problem because it usually reflects the popular will have not read their history books.

Another major problem with the Electoral College is that it gives an individual voter in a smaller state a disproportionately larger influence on the outcome of the election than an individual voter in a large state. This violates the fundamental one-person-one-vote principle that should be at the heart of any representative republic. For example, Wyoming has about 570,000 and three electoral votes, or one electoral vote per 190,000 people. California, by contrast, has 37,500,000 people and 55 electoral votes, or one electoral vote per 680,000 people or thereabouts. Doing the basic math, we can see that a voter in Wyoming has nearly four times the influence on the outcome of the presidential election as does a voter in California. This goes against the principle of "one-man-one-vote", which is one of the foundations of our republic. It's not fair, it's not democratic, and it shouldn't be tolerated.

These two problems would be sufficient by themselves to justify eliminating the Electoral College. But there are many other problems with it as well. One is that it causes presidential candidates to focus all their attention on a small number of "swing states", which are go conceivably go either way in the election, at the expense of those states which are considered reliably Republican or Democratic. As a result, the powers-that-be pay attention to the things that matter to voters in states like Ohio or Florida, while voters in Texas and New York are out of luck.

Consider this. There are roughly the same number of Cuban-Americans in the United States as Vietnamese-Americans. However, the issues important to the Cuban-American community get huge amounts of political attention, while the issues important to Vietnamese-Americans are largely ignored. Why is this? Well, Cuban-Americans tend to live in Florida, a key swing state, whereas Vietnamese-Americans tend to live in California and Texas, which are not swing states. Neither community is inherently more important than the other, but the Electoral College creates an artificial importance for one over the other.

Even in swing states, attention is disproportionately focused on the larger ones, as they have more electoral votes. A farmer in Iowa (which has six electoral votes) or a convenience store owner in New Hampshire (which has four electoral votes) are not seen as important as a mechanic in Florida (which has twenty-nine electoral votes) or a contractor in Virginia (which has thirteen electoral votes).

The Electoral College also effectively disenfranchises millions of voters in every presidential election. Because nearly all the states use a winner-take-all system to allocate their electoral votes, it means the losing side in any given state may as well have not cast a ballot for president. A Republican in New York or a Democrat in Texas effectively has no say in who is elected President, and this goes against the ideals of a representative republic.

The Electoral College is an outmoded and obsolete piece of constitutional machinery. Whatever justifications the Founders might have had when they wrote the system into the Constitution in 1787 have long since faded away and the system should today be done away with. This could be achieved by a constitutional amendment, which would be very difficult. But because the Constitution allows the individual states to decide for themselves how to allocate electoral votes, it can also be achieved more quickly and with greater ease by individual action by the various state legislatures.

The National Popular Vote movement provides a surprisingly easy way out of this morass. Legislation is being enacted by individual states, whereby their electoral votes shall go to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the outcome in the individual state, with the legislation taking effect as soon as the number of states equivalent to the winning number of electoral votes have enacted identical legislation. Several states have already passed the necessary legislation, and bills are advancing through the legislative process in most of the other states. But progress is painfully slow and needs to accelerate. There's nothing keeping you from picking up your phone right now and calling your state representative's local office to advocate for it, by the way.

The President of the United States should be chosen directly by the people. Every individual citizen should have an equal say in who becomes the chief executive. It doesn't matter whether it is by constitutional amendment or through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, but it needs to happen if America is to live up to its ideals of democracy.

What If the Confederates Had Resorted to Partisan Warfare in 1865?

April of 1865 was the month in which the Confederacy was utterly crushed. The first day of the month saw the Southerners suffer a terrible defeat at the Battle of Five Forks, cutting off the last rail supply lines to the Army of Northern Virginia. The following day, the lines of fortifications protecting Petersburg, which had held off Union forces for more than nine months, were shattered by a series of attacks, forcing the Confederate to abandon their capital at Richmond. There followed a frantic week as the Army of Northern Virginia sought desperately to escape to the west, only to be run down and cornered by the irresistible might of the Army of the Potomac. On April 9, as every student in America is taught on 8th grade, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

Down in North Carolina, dramatic events were also taking place, if at a slower pace. There a hodgepodge Confederate army was still in the field, commanded by Joseph Johnston and consisting of the remnants of the Army of Tennessee and troops pulled from the garrisons of now abandoned ports of Charleston and Wilmington. The Union army under William Tecumseh Sherman was steadily moving north, seeking to link up with Grant in Virginia. Although Johnston's men had given the Yankees a bloody nose on the first day of the Battle of Bentonville the previous month, they had shortly thereafter been forced to retreat when Union reinforcements arrived. As Johnston confessed, he lacked the ability to do anything more than annoy Sherman. On April 26, having learned of Lee's capitulation in Virginia, Johnston surrendered to Sherman.

In the midst of all this, President Jefferson Davis refused to admit that the cause of the Confederacy was lost. Moving out of Richmond with his Cabinet and what remained of the Confederate treasury, he fled to Danville, Virginia, where he released a remarkable statement to the press.

Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free. 

What President Davis was talking about was, in effect, abandoning a conventional military strategy and resorting to partisan warfare, or what we today would usually call guerrilla warfare. It had a history going back to the emergence of civilization, but it was widely understood even in the more dignified 19th Century. The term "guerrilla" comes from the Spanish for "little war" and was popularized by the Spanish partisans fighting against Napoleon during the Peninsular War. Russian partisans had played a key role in thwarting Napoleon's attempt to conquer Russia and Tyrolean insurgents fighting Napoleon in northern Italy had captured the public imagination. Many Southerners could look back on heroes from the Revolutionary era who had battled the British in the Carolinas, such as Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter. Guerrilla fighters might not have had the mystique in the mid-19th Century that they would gain during the Cold War, personified by Che Guevara, but they were a well-established part of the public imagination. Anyone who read Davis's statement knew exactly what he was talking about.

Davis was not the only person who wanted to resort to partisan warfare. E. Porter Alexander, Robert E. Lee's brilliant chief of artillery, approached his commander before the surrender at Appomattox with a dangerous proposal. Rather than capitulate, Alexander argued, they should simply order their men to disperse in small bands and carry on the fight. Other men in the Southern ranks also remained defiant, in spite of all the catastrophes that had befallen the Confederacy in 1865. The possibility of a widespread partisan war was a very real one.

What would a Confederate partisan war have looked like? Certainly it wouldn't have looked pretty. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the men of the Army of Northern Virginia dispersed on April 8, when Lee historically made the decision to surrender to Grant unless they could cut their way out of the trap the next morning. This was also the moment when Porter approached Lee, so it's entirely possible that the great general was thinking the question over. At that point, there were between fifteen and twenty thousand men still with Lee. Had he ordered them to scatter, large numbers of them would have been captured by the Union forces then swarming through the area, especially the large cavalry corps commanded by General Phil Sheridan.

Perhaps half might have escaped, however, either individually or in small groups. Plans might have quickly been laid to meet at designated rendezvous points. Porter himself envisioned the men making their way back to their home states. We would have seen central Virginia flooded with perhaps ten thousand scattered Confederate fighters, but they would have had no ability to supply themselves with food except by taking it from the civilian population. Lee had foreseen this problem and had spoken of it to Porter as a justification for not following his advice. Some civilians would have done their best to help the insurgents, for support for the Confederacy remained strong in many quarters even this late in the conflict. But Virginia had been picked clean by the war and there was little food left to give. Sheridan's vengeful cavalry, experienced in this sort of thing from their fighting in the Shenandoah Valley, would have surely made the ordinary people of Virginia pay dearly for any help they provided to the partisans. It would have been a truly bloody business,

If Lee's army had dispersed rather than surrender, and central Virginia was filled again with the sounds of battle as the partisan bands fought against their Union foes while they desperately sought food, what would Johnston have done? Historically, Johnston surrendered because Lee had surrendered, and the remaining Confederate forces in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi followed suit. If Lee's men were still fighting, albeit now as partisans, we can assume that Johnston would not have surrendered and that his army would have remained intact for at least the time being. Unlike Lee, Johnston did not surrender because his army was trapped and surrounded, but because the war was obviously lost and he was unwilling to see his men die for nothing.

Johnston might have retreated to the southwest, away from both Sherman and Grant, but had he done so, Sherman would have launched a vigorous pursuit and probably run him down in a North Carolinian version of the Appomattox Campaign. Besides, his army was already melting away from desertion. So, for the purposes of our little thought experiment, let's assume that Johnston's orders his men to scatter into partisan bands around April 15. North Carolina would have turned into the same bloodbath that would have been sweeping Virginia at the same time. Thousands of starving men, no longer under any unified command structure, would have been moving to and fro, alternately fighting or trying to avoid the Union forces which would have been trying to track them down.

There were still Confederate forces in the field under the command of General Richard Taylor in southern Alabama and Mississippi, as well as small garrisons in Georgia and Florida. Word of the partisan fighting would have reached them by the time Union forces arrived to gobble them up. We can assume that many of them would have surrendered, or simply thrown away their uniforms and gone home, but many of them might also have elected to take to the woods and join the partisan effort. What would have happened in the strategically irrelevant Trans-Mississippi, where the Confederate remained in a fairly stable position, is anybody's guess, although it should be pointed out the Governor Pendleton Murrah of Texas wanted to continue resistance against the Union even after he learned of Lee's surrender.

Would the Confederates have been able to maintain any kind of organized command structure? It's difficult to say. I find it very unlikely that Jefferson Davis, hiding out in the swamps of Florida or the mountains of northern Georgia, would have been capable of exercising any real control over his remaining forces even if he had avoided capture. Had he achieved his objective of reaching the Trans-Mississippi and found momentary safety there, he could still have exercised no real control over the Confederate partisan bands east of the river. At best, he would occasionally have been able to smuggle out messages encouraging further resistance, rather like Saddam Hussein did between the fall of Baghdad and his capture in December of 2003. Lee and Johnston were good soldiers, but getting on in years and exhausted by four years of toil. Would they have had the endurance to be guerrilla commanders? It's doubtful. I would expect both of them to either give themselves up or wait to be captured and spend the remainder of the conflict in honorable imprisonment.

On a more local scale, however, the situation changes. The Boers maintained a roughly organized partisan effort against the British, when, following the defeat of their conventional armies, their troops scattered into small, fast-moving partisan units known as "commandos" (from which we get the modern name of soldiers in the special forces). The Americans in the southern colonies were able to do so after the destruction of their conventional armies at Charleston and Camden in 1780. Moreover, in Wade Hampton and Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederacy had outstanding cavalry commanders who would surely have made equally outstanding partisan leaders.

If the Confederate had turned to partisan warfare on a massive scale after the spring of 1865, what would have been the reaction from the Union high command? After four years of war, these were men hardened to the strength of iron and granite. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and George Thomas were not going to be in the mood for forgiveness. The war had become much harsher in 1864-65 than it had been before, as hundreds of burned out farms in Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina could attest, to say nothing of the smoldering ruins of Atlanta, Columbia and Richmond. Any civilians who actively aided the partisans could be certain that vengeful Union cavalry would soon descend upon their homes and leave them in flames. The Union still had effectively unlimited resources of manpower and material, and the collapse of Confederate authority would have allowed them to recruit untold thousands of freed slaves as well, making their army even stronger.

More importantly, there was an alternative government to vie for the loyalties of the people. Under President Lincoln's "Ten Percent Plan", a state could be brought back into the Union with a functioning government as soon as ten percent of the number of people who voted in the state in the 1860 election had sworn loyalty to the Union, with generous pardons extended to all but very high-ranking Confederate political or military officials. By the time we are suggesting the Confederate armies might have dispersed into partisan bands, there were already functioning Unionist governments in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. As the Union army gained control of the cities and towns, with Confederate partisans consigned to the forests and hills, similar administrations would have soon become operational in other states as well.

With Confederate partisans simultaneously trying to fight Union occupation forces and keep themselves fed and supplied, the loyalties of the people would soon become torn between the Confederate "bitter-enders" (to use a phrase from the Boer War) and the emerging Unionist governments. Knowing that Union forces would burn them out if they helped the partisans, and that the partisans might loot them of their food no matter what they did, there would be an inevitable shift towards the Union side, After all, even a temporarily effective partisan campaign would have provided no real chance for an ultimate victory against the Union and this would have been obvious to all concerned.

Throughout the remainder of 1865, we would see scattered Confederate partisan bands battling against Union forces trying to run them all to ground. But history shows that a partisan campaign can only persist in an environment where the partisans enjoy the support of the civilian population. The Southern people had had enough of war, which was aptly demonstrated by the steadily increasing rate of desertion from the Confederate armies during the months before November of 1864 (when Lincoln's reelection ended any realistic chance for a Confederate victory) and April of 1865. Combine with the certainty of terrible retribution, we can be sure that the exhausted civilian population would not have been inclined to support the partisans very much.

An already ugly situation might have been made even worse if Confederate partisans had decided to direct their attention towards Southerners who swore loyalty to the newly established Unionist administrations. Given the now unorganized nature of the Southern partisans, it would have been impossible to prevent all groups from engaging in retaliation against Unionist Southerners, even if what remained of the Confederate leadership had been inclined to restrain them. The result would have been a civil war within the Civil War. This actually happened in East Tennessee and other places historically, but it would have been vastly worse and on a wider scale in the scenario we are describing. We might even have seen former Confederate troops who had surrendered being mobilized by the Union governments to fight against their former comrades.

This, then, would have been the South in the summer and fall of 1865 had the Confederates decided to resort to large-scale partisan warfare rather than give up the fight. Tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers would be at loose across the country, fighting as partisans. Some of these bands might be loosely organized on a local level by leaders such as Nathan Bedford Forrest or Wade Hampton, but communication would be extremely difficult and it's likely that most of the groups would not be under any effective command at all. Without any system of logistics to supply themselves, the partisans would have had to turn to looting to obtain food. Within a short time, there would be very little distinction between the Confederate partisan bands and simple outlaws. Any civilians would supported the partisans would have been burned out of their homes and many of them would have turned against their fellow Southerners in desperate bids for safety and peace. Thousands of more men would have died in a cause that had already perished. Historically, the South took decades to recover from the American Civil War, but in this scenario, the wounds inflicted upon Southern society would have been infinitely worse.

That this nightmare did not come to pass can be attributed above all to three men: Robert E. Lee, Joseph Johnston, and John C. Breckinridge. Lee and Johnston refused to give orders that would have scattered their men into partisan bands. Being Virginia gentlemen of the old school, they had no wish to engage in a guerrilla conflict, especially one they had no chance of winning. Both army commanders cared deeply about their men, and neither was going to be willing to have them killed to no purpose.

On April 20, a paroled General Lee wrote Jefferson Davis a letter, though the President could not have received it before he was captured a month later. In it, Lee states the following:

From what I have seen and learned, I believe an army cannot be organized or supported in Virginia, and as far as I know the condition of affairs, the country east of the Mississippi is morally and physically unable to maintain the contest unaided with any hope of success. A partisan war may be continued, and hostilities protracted, causing individual suffering and the devastation of the country, but I see no prospect by that means of achieving a separate independence. It is for Your Excellency to decide, should you agree with me in opinion, what is proper to be done. To save useless effusion of blood, I would recommend measures be taken for suspension of hostilities and the restoration of peace.

Lee was always very tactful and careful when communicating with Davis. Reading between the lines, it is clear that Lee was doing two things. First, he was trying to make it clear that a partisan war would achieve nothing but add to the suffering of the Southern people. Second, he was leaving a footnote in history to absolve himself of any responsibility in the event that Davis was foolish enough to attempt a partisan war.

Johnston didn't have to write to Davis, for he got a chance to say pretty much the same thing to the President's face. The commander of the Army of Tennessee was probably the last man Davis wanted to see, for they had been bitter personal enemies for years, perhaps as far back as their West Point days in the 1820s, Johnston told Davis plainly that the war was over, that there was no point in continuing resistance, and that attempting a partisan war would simply bring more death and devastation to the people of the South. When Davis equivocated on whether he should allow Johnston to negotiate a surrender of his army, Johnston went ahead and did so without the President authorization.

Breckinridge served as the Confederate Secretary of War in the waning days of the Confederacy, having assumed the position in January of 1865. He recognized immediately that the South no longer had any chance of victory and took it upon himself to guide events towards as easy and honorable a conclusion of hostilities as possible. As he said to Davis, "This has been a magnificent epic. In God's name, let it not terminate in a farce." Yet Breckinridge remained faithfully by Davis's side through the hopeless, grim flight to the south, keeping the cavalry escort that protected the President together, and all the while doing his best to persuade Davis that the war was well and truly lost.

All the while, Breckinridge used his moral authority, and the now hazy legitimacy he held as the Secretary of War of a disintegrating government, to help Confederate soldiers surrender and go home. He assisted Johnston in his negotiations with Sherman and pushed other Confederate government officials and military officers to pressure Davis to cease resistance. As Davis seemed close to losing his grip on reality after the fall of Richmond, everyone turned to Breckinridge for guidance. To everyone, he gave the same message. The war was over. Surrender to the Yankees. Peace with honor is preferably to fighting to the death. In the end, Breckinridge's efforts probably prevented thousands of men who might otherwise have vanished into the woods and hills from doing so.

All Americans should give thanks to Lee, Johnston, and Breckinridge for helping to prevent the nightmare vision of a Confederate guerrilla war from becoming a reality. The American Civil War was the most traumatic experience our nation has ever gone through, yet it would have been even worse had Davis been able to persuade even a sizable fraction of his army to fight on as partisans. Whatever you think of these three men, they do deserve the gratitude of all Americans for preventing this nightmare from becoming a reality.

An Ordinary Day in the First World War

One hundred years ago today, September 18, 1916, was a fairly typical day during the First World War. Lots of things were going on around the world.

In France, around the fortress city of Verdun, one of history's longest and nightmarish battles was still ongoing. Between February and July, a titanic German offensive against the French Army there had been repelled by the narrowest of margins and only at a terrible cost in human life. The land surrounding Verdun had been turned into a surreal quagmire of mud churned up by unprecedented amounts of artillery fire. Chemical weapons had been used on a massive scale, including the first employment of diphosgene gas by the Germans, against which the gas masks of the French troops were initially ineffective. Now, the French army was preparing a major counter offensive to retake the lost ground, which was seen as a matter of national honor. The attack would open the following month and, by December, drive the Germans back to the positions from which they had launched their initial attacks nearly a year earlier. Over the course of the Battle of Verdun, in a space of ground roughly the size of a typical American county, about 300,000 men had been killed on both sides, and hundreds of thousands more had been wounded. The front lines ended pretty much where they had begun.

To the north and west, another ferocious battle was raging along the lines near the Somme River. Back on the first day of July, the British army had launched a mighty offensive designed to smash through the German lines and win the war. It had not gone according to plan. The first day of the attack proved to be the most disastrous day in British military history, with 60,000 casualties (including 20,000 dead) being suffered for minimal gains. The attacks continued for months, extending to September 18 and beyond, but the British eventually gained only about seven miles of ground. Over the course of the battle, the British lost more than 400,000 men and the French, who supported the attack, had lost about 200,000. The Germans lost about 500,000 men in repulsing the attacks.

On the Eastern Front, the Russians had mounted a great offensive against the Austro-Hungarians back in June, under the command of their best general, Aleksei Brusilov. At first the attack had achieved great success, taking the Austro-Hungarians by surprise and punching a huge hole in the front. The Eastern Front had always been more fluid than the Western Front and the Russians made some impressive territorial gains in the first days, taking thousands of enemy prisoners. In this sense, the Brusilov Offensive represented the greatest Russian victory of the First World War. But as the weeks past, Russian momentum had slowed down, the Austro-Hungarians had recovered, and heavy German reinforcements had arrived. The offensive was eventually brought to a halt. All told, the Russians lost about half a million men, the Germans about 350,000 thousand, and the Austro-Hungarian a whopping 900,000.

The initial success of the Brusilov Offensive had persuaded Romania, which had remained neutral up to that point, to join the war on the side of the Allies. Being a bit on the greedy side, they hoped to seize territory held by Austria-Hungary which was largely peopled by Romanians. Their initial attacks into Habsburg territory succeeded in gaining some territory. On September 18, however, the Germans under the command of Erich von Falkenhayn launched a major counter offensive, effectively coordinating German, Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Turkish forces. By the end of 1917, Romania had been crushed and its army had suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Meanwhile, down in the Alps, the Italians were busy banging away at their Austro-Hungarian enemies in an endless series of battles along the Isonzo River. The mountainous terrain was tailor-made for the defense, with soldiers being asked to launch attacks in an almost vertical direction. The Italian commander, Luigi Cadorna, might be a candidate for the title of most incompetent general of all time and he simply flung his divisions against the Austro-Hungarian positions again and again, resulting in nothing but heavy casualties. He blamed his troops rather than his own lack of imagination for the successive defeats, dealing out incredibly harsh punishments. The Sixth Battle of the Isonzo had been fought the previous month, resulting in minimal gains and heavy casualties. On this date a hundred years ago, the Seventh Battle of Isonzo was coming to an end, having resulting in no gains and heavy casualties. The following month, the Eighth Battle of Isonzo would be fought. You won't be surprised to learn that it resulted in no gains and heavy casualties.

In northern Greece, fighting raged along what was known as the Salonika Front. An Allied army consisting of French, British, and Serbian troops faced off against the Bulgarians and a few German units, each side attacking and defending in turn, rather like partners at a dance. Bizarrely, Greece was officially neutral in the war and nobody seemed to know why the Salonika Front even existed. Though the fighting there was not as intense or costly as the battles raging on other fronts, thousands of men still died along its lines.

Battle raged in subsidiary theaters of the war this day in 1916 as well. Russian and Turkish troops clawed away at one another in the Caucasus Mountains, which each side advancing and retreating in turn. In the Sinai Peninsula, the forces of the British Empire faced off against a Turkish army reinforced by German machine gun teams and Austrian artillery; having successfully defended the town of Romani, the British would soon go over to the offensive. In Mesopotamia, having suffered a humiliating defeat at Al-Kut earlier in the year, the British were reorganizing their forces and preparing for a major offensive when the weather turned favorable. In German East Africa, the intrepid German commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a master of mobile warfare, continued to run rings around the British forces sent against him, though this would change the following year. In the North Sea, the Grand Fleet of the British and the High Seas Fleet of the Germans, having fought the enormous, costly, and utterly inconclusive Battle of Jutland a few months earlier, continued to eye each other warily. In the air, German zeppelins were periodically bombing London and Paris, a prelude to the much more destructive bombing campaigns that would take place in the next war, but in this conflict something that didn't achieve anything aside from killing a couple hundred civilians for absolutely no purpose.

This, then, was the state of the war on the completely ordinary day of September 18, 1916, exactly one hundred years ago. In France, the British and French slugged it out with the Germans, with both sides suffering massive losses at Verdun and the Somme. The Brusilov Offensive by the Russians on the Eastern Front had spent itself, having gained some ground at heavy cost, while dealing massive casualties against the Austro-Hungarians. Romania was about to be crushed. The Italians continued attack along the Isonzo, suffering massive losses for little or no gain. And fighting on the "minor" fronts continued to cost the lives of many thousands of men.

It might fairly be asked by a rational person what all of this fighting was about. The answer is a very sad one. It was about nothing.

The war, of course, had started because a Habsburg archduke got shot by a Serbian nationalist. The Austrians thought this would be a good chance to knock the Serbians down a peg or two and so provoked a war over it. The Russians, fearful of looking weak, decided that they had to back up the Serbians. The Germans, through foolishness or inattention, decided to back the Austrians. The logic of entangling alliances then brought in the British and French and the war was on. As it progressed, other powers jumped into the fight out a greedy desire for territory: Japan on the Allied side, then the Turks on the German side, then the Italians on the Allied side, then the Bulgarians on the German side, then the Romanians on the Allied side, and so on and so forth.

The First World War was the worst of all possible wars, because it was caused by human vanity and human stupidity. There was no great ideological or religious issue at stake. It was about nothing. The men who bravely fought and died in the First World War fought and died for nothing. There have been many useless and unnecessary wars in history, but the First World War was surely the largest and most bloody such conflict. The Second World War had to be fought, because Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan represented truly evil forces which were trying to subjugate the world and had to be defeated. The aggressors in the First World War were not evil so much as stupid.

A mother in 1942 or 1943 who received one of the dreaded telegrams informing her that her son had been killed fighting against the Germans might eventually, in the fullness of time, have been able to have console herself in the knowledge that he had died fighting against a truly monstrous evil. A mother receiving a similar telegram received on September 18, 1916, would never have such comfort, for the First World War was an entirely unnecessary and stupid war.

The British writer Rudyard Kipling (one of my favorite authors) is largely known for his jingoistic and patriotic poems and short stories written in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, when the British Empire was at its height. The First World War changed him, especially after his son John was killed fighting against the Germans during the Battle of Loos in September of 1915. I think that a two-line poem he wrote in response to the war, taking the voice of a common soldier, pretty much sums up how we should all feel about the war.

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Ranked Choice Voting Would Improve American Democracy

Back in July, I wrote about the urgent need for reforming the system in which congressional and state legislative districts are drawn. Today, I'd like to write about another reform is our election system that I think is badly needed: the implementation of Ranked Choice Voting. It goes by other names, such as Instant Runoff Voting or Alternative Vote, but in this piece we'll be using the term Ranked Choice Voting, or RCV.

Virtually all elections in the United States, from those in which we choose the President of the United States down to those in which we choose our city council members, are decided by a "winner-take-all" system (called "first-past-the-post" in the United Kingdom and other countries), in which the candidate who receives the largest number of votes wins. Whether the winner actually receives a majority of the vote doesn't matter. In any winner-take-all election with more than two candidates, the winning candidate can actually be a person whom the majority of people voted against.

Consider, for example, the 1992 presidential election, which featured Republican George Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton, and independent Ross Perot. Bush received 37.4% of the vote and Ross Perot received 18.9%. Clinton, the winner, received 43%, considerably more than either of the other two candidates, but considerably less than a majority. It's impossible to know, had Perot not been a candidate, how much the 18.9% of the vote that Perot received would have gone to Bush and how much would have gone to Clinton, but the fact remains that the majority of the American electorate voted against Clinton and yet Clinton became President. This was nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, out of the fifty-seven presidential elections held since the founding of the republic, sixteen have seen the winner take office without having won a majority of the vote.

Winner-take-tall elections limit the choice of a voter to a single choice for a single candidate. Suppose, for example, that a voter in 1992 really wanted Perot to win, but simply couldn't stand Clinton and wanted him to lose. Should he vote for Perot, whom he really wanted to win, or should he vote for Bush, who had a better chance of beating Clinton than Perot did? In other words, can he cast a ballot for the candidate he really likes if it increases the likelihood that the candidate he really dislikes will win the election? This is a conundrum faced by many voters in countless elections in the United States, whether we're choosing the President of the United States or our representative on the local city council, and one I have confronted many times myself.

Ranked Choice Voting differs from winner-take-all elections in that, rather than simply casting a single vote for a single candidate, voters get to rank their favored candidates on a scale, with their first choice ranked as 1, their second choice ranked as 2, and so on. If any candidate wins 50% or more of first choice votes, that candidate wins. If no one does, then the candidate with the lowest number of first choice votes is eliminated and the second choice votes of the voters who choose the eliminated candidate as their first choice are moved into the columns of the other candidates. The process repeated until there a candidate receives more than 50% of the first choice votes.

Imagine a city council election with four candidates, which we'll call A, B, C, and D. First round results are as follows: Candidate A wins 35%, Candidate B wins 30%, Candidate C wins 25%, and Candidate D wins 10%. This means that D is eliminated and his second choice ballots are distributed to the other candidates. Assume that supporters of Candidate D really liked Candidate B, so half of them choose him as their second choice and the remainder were split between Candidate A and Candidate C. This means that the second round results were as follows: Candidate A wins 37.5%, Candidate B wins 35%, and Candidate C wins 27.5%. This means that Candidate C is eliminated and his third choice ballots are distributed between the remaining two candidates. Let's assume that three-fifths of Candidate C backers choose Candidate B as their third choice and two-fifths choose Candidate A. This means that the third results have Candidate A winning 48.5% and Candidate B winning 51.5%. Since Candidate B has secured greater than 50% in this round, he or she is the winner of the election.

Even though Candidate A received more first choice votes than Candidate B, the eventual outcome is more reflective of the actual desires of the electorate than would have been the case in a winner-take-all system. The RCV process sounds complicated, but in the age of computers the result can be known in seconds. As far as the voter himself is concerned, it's as simple as 1-2-3.

The key advantage of RCV is that it eliminates the "spoiler effect" of candidates, which have bedeviled many an American election. Perhaps the best-known example is the role played by Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. Down ballot, there are many examples over the years of Democrats beating Republicans because Libertarian candidates won a share of the vote larger than the Democratic margin of victory. Under RCV, voters are free to vote for their truly preferred candidates without the risk of helping an unfavored candidate win.

The Republicans and Democrats don't like the idea of RCV, because protecting the two-party stranglehold on American politics is one of the few things the two major parties can agree upon. RCV would give much greater influence to marginalized third parties and independent candidates. At the same time, the prospect of obtaining genuine political influence would encourage such players to move away from the radical fringe and adopt a more serious and practical role in the political process. In the United States, the Green Party is something of a joke, whose members spout outlandish ideas and often adhere to conspiracy theories. By contrast, in many European countries where Green parties actually win elections, the Green Party is a genuine political player which participates in government in a responsible and respected manner (albeit supporting policies with which I often disagree).

In short, RCV would inject American democracy with a breath of fresh air, giving the electorate a means of choosing their representatives in a manner that better reflects the true wishes of the people, which is the whole point of a representative democracy. It would also help break the two-party stranglehold over American politics, which has been a powerful means of the establishment to maintain its control over the functions of government, often to the great detriment of the people.

It's also been pointed out that RCV reduces negative campaigning. After all, in a race with more than two candidates, the people seeking office will need to appeal to the supporters of their opponents in the hopes of gaining their secondary votes in the event that no candidate wins a majority in the first round. Studies by Rutgers University have suggested that negative campaigning in municipal elections using RCV were considerably lower than in similar elections using the traditional winner-take-all systems. Living as we do in an age of hyper-negativity as far as politics are concerned, this is a point not to be underrated.

Skeptics would say that RCV is overly complicated and too cumbersome to be used as an election system in the United States. This is manifestly false. The same Rutgers study that found that RCV reduced negative campaigning also found that the considerable majority of voters in RCV elections found the system simple and easy to understand. Moreover, RCV has been used successfully in many parts of the world, most notably in elections to the Australian House of Representatives and to Australian state legislatures. Systems very similar to RCV are in use in Ireland, Malta, and India, and are also used to elect the Mayor Of London. In the United States, RCV has been used for municipal elections in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and other communities. It's been used in primary elections by the Republican Party in Utah and the Democratic Party in Virginia. It's also been used in non-political elections, such as the vote for the Academy Award for Best Picture. In all these cases, RCV has worked just as it is supposed to work.

I consider Ranked Choice Voting to be among the most critical electoral reforms needed in the United States in the early 21st Century. If I had my way, a constitutional amendment would be enacted that simply read, "All elections for public office in the United States of America, on all levels of government, shall be conducted using a system of ranked choice voting." Those few words would go a very long way towards more firmly establishing democracy in this nation and represent a big step forward towards the ultimate realization of our country's potential.

What If The Invasion Of Japan Had Taken Place In 1945?

Yesterday was the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In America, this means we have engaged in our annual tradition of debating whether or not using the bomb was the right thing to do. I've mentioned in the past that I abhor the existence of nuclear weapons and dearly wish that they vanished from the face of the Earth, but I'm not among those who believe that dropping the bomb was the wrong thing to do. What I want to talk about in this piece is the alternative choice that the Allies had to dropping the bomb: an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands.

By mid-1945, the war in Europe was wrapping up as the Americans, British, French, and Soviet armies swept through Germany and closed in on Berlin. However, the war in the Pacific, while running strongly against Japan, appeared likely to continue for a year or more. It had been a long and hard struggle. Following the sweeping and astounding successful Japanese offensive in late 1941 and early 1942, which saw them gain total control over the western half of the Pacific Ocean, the American victory at the Battle of Midway had begun to turn the tide. Through the following two years, in brutal fighting in the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, the Gilbert Islands, and the Mariana Islands, the Americans slowly pushed back the Japanese in a series of island-hopping campaigns. Meanwhile, the British struggled against the Japanese in Burma and the Chinese continued their own efforts to expel the Japanese from their territory.

In late 1944, the Americans landed in the Philippines and, in a series of bloody land and sea battles, took the islands back from the Japanese. It was at this point that the Japanese resistance reached the level of desperation, exemplified in the appearance of the kamikaze suicide attackers, who intentionally crashed their aircraft into Allied ships. In February of 1945, the Americans landed on Iwo Jima and, two months later, Okinawa. Both battles were characterized by fanatical Japanese resistance and heavy American casualties. Nearly 7,000 Americans died on Iwo Jima and more than 20,000 died on Okinawa. The closer the Americans approached the Japanese Home Islands, the fiercer the Japanese resistance seemed to become. At the same time, American B-29 bombers had begun to operate from airfields in the Mariana Islands, bringing death and destruction to Japanese cities on a previously unimaginable scale.

Before 1945, the battles in the Pacific War had been characterized by slowly increasing American experience in amphibious operations and a gradual refinement in Japanese defensive tactics. By the time Iwo Jima and Okinawa were invaded, the Allied operations were models of efficiency and effectiveness. For their part, the Japanese had given up the practice of defending the beach and instead allowing their enemies to consolidate on the shore and move inland before engaging them, thereby avoiding the worst of American naval bombardment. Both sides were planning on making the best use of their respective advantages in what was expected to be the largest amphibious invasion of all time.

It was going to be called Operation Downfall, a fitting name if ever there was one. It was envisioned as taking place in two phases. The first phase, code-named Operation Olympic, would be the invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main Japanese Home Islands. The intent was to capture the southern third of the island and to destroy the bulk of Japan's remaining military formations. The target date for the operation was November 1, 1945. Airfields would then be constructed on Kyushu to provide air cover for the second phase of Downfall, code-named Operation Coronet. It would be the decisive invasion of the main Japanese island of Honshu east of Tokyo, driving westward to secure the enemy capital. It was expected to be launched on March 1, 1946.

It would be an invasion on a scale that dwarfed even the Normandy campaign. The United States Sixth Army, which had been fighting the Japanese for years, was selected to lead Operation Olympic. It would consist of fifteen divisions, plus assorted attached units. with a total strength of more than 400,000 men. Backing them up would be the enormous naval forces of the Third, Fifth, and Seventh United States Fleets, which together deployed dozens of aircraft carriers and battleships, not to mention hundreds of cruisers and destroyers. The air power intended for the invasion was similarly massive, with tens of thousands of fighter and bomber aircraft being made ready.

Astonishingly, the forces being prepared for Operation Coronet were even larger. Two complete United States armies, the First and the Eighth, were to be involved. All told, thirty-one divisions would land on Honshu, more than twice as many as were going to land on Kyushu. The same immense naval and air power available for Operation Olympic would be available for Operation Coronet, much of it being based on the captured portion of Kyushu.

Not all of the invasion force was to be American. The British Pacific Fleet, one of the largest forces ever assembled by the Royal Navy, would place its battleships and aircraft carriers at the disposal of their American allies. A very large proportion of the aircraft involved would be provided by Australia. Moreover, a Commonwealth Corps consisting of British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand troops would participate in Operation Coronet, although the participation of Indian units had been vetoed by the Americans. It was even proposed that French troops be involved, if only in symbolic numbers.

The Japanese had pieced together exactly what the Allied invasion plan was going to be, expecting an initial invasion of Kyushu followed by a final attack on Honshu. They decided to position most of their remaining forces for a do-or-die defense of Kyushu. Through the spring and summer of 1945, Japanese troops were moved onto Kyushu in enormous numbers. In mid-June, American intelligence estimated that around 350,000 Japanese troops were on Kyushu. In reality, the number was closer to 600,000.

On Iwo Jima and Okinawa, almost all Japanese soldiers had fought to the death rather than be captured, as had been the case in most previous island battles. There was no reason to think that the troops defending Kyushu would behave any differently. Orders issued in preparation for repelling the invasion specified that units were not to retreat, that no soldier was to stop fighting in order to care for a wounded comrade, and that any unarmed soldier should be prepared to take up the arms of a wounded or killed comrade. Indeed, one senior Japanese officer proposed killing all of the infirm and elderly people in Japan so as to free up food for the fighting forces.

Indeed, the Japanese were going to enormous lengths to ensure that the invasion would be as costly for the Allies as possible. Massive production of aircraft intended for kamikaze attacks was underway throughout 1945 and, by summer, around 10,000 were ready. During the fighting for Okinawa, around 2,000 kamikaze sorties had been mounted, which had sunk dozens of American ships, damaged many others, and killed thousands of men. The kamikaze attacks planned for the defense against the invasion of Kyushu would be five times more massive. Despite their best efforts, the Allies had been unable to provide an effective defense against kamikazes. At Okinawa, the Japanese had inflicted roughly 1.76 casualties per kamikaze sortie, but at Kyushu the attacks were likely to be more effective, for the approach would be of a much shorter distance and almost all of it overland, thus giving American air defenses much less time to respond. It seems reasonable to estimate that the casualty ratio would be as high as 2 per sortie, suggesting that the kamikazes would kill around 20,000 soldiers and sailors at sea during the landings. In addition, the Imperial Japanese Navy was preparing huge numbers of manned torpedoes, essentially underwater kamikazes, to attack American and Allies ships and landing craft.

Civilians were being mobilized in the defensive effort on an unprecedented scale. Women were trained to use weapons, from rifles to bamboo spears, and were expected to act as ammunition carriers during the fighting. Fishing and agricultural implements were fashioned into weapons and given to schoolchildren. Considering the behavior of Japanese civilians on Saipan and Okinawa, where many had preferred to commit suicide rather than turn themselves into the Americans, there was ever reason to believe that the coming invasion would be resisted by a civilian population ever bit as dangerous as the opposing army. American intelligence estimated that more than ten million civilians were being given rudimentary weapons training of some sort. If even one percent of them succeeded in causing an American casualty, one hundred thousand American soldiers would be killed or wounded.

Despite the lavish Japanese defensive preparations, there is no way the American invasion of Japan could possibly have failed. The Japanese were on the verge of starvation, under tight blockade, and so short of fuel that they were engaging in such desperate expedients as trying to liquefy plant roots into gas (which failed miserably). The Allies, by contrast, literally had the resources of the entire world to draw upon. Even the Japanese leadership recognized the hopelessness of their situation. Lacking the resources to repulse the invasion, the Japanese hoped only to cause such massive Allied casualties that some sort of negotiated settlement short of an outright surrender might be obtained. The odds of this happening were only slightly above zero, but it was the only hope the Japanese had on which to cling.

While ultimate success was guaranteed, there can be no doubt that any American invasion of Japan would suffer hideous casualties. Estimates of the number of killed or wounded were controversial even before the end of the war and have only become more so over time, especially in relation to the debate over the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So how many casualties might have been sustained?

On Iwo Jima, the American invasion force of 110,000 had suffered roughly 7,000 men killed and 19,000 men wounded. This comes out to 6% of the force killed and 17% wounded, for total casualties of around 23%. On Okinawa, out of roughly 250,000 troops landed on the island, 20,000 were killed (8%) and 55,000 were wounded (22%), for total casualties of 75,000 or 30% of the invasion force. Assuming a similar ratio for Operation Olympic, we can assume about 30,000 dead and 80,000 wounded, for total casualties of 110,000. For Operation Coronet, an operation twice as large, we might assume casualties twice as heavy. Added together, we'd get 90,000 dead and 240,000 wounded, for a casualty total of 330,000.

This assumes, of course, that the invasion force would suffer casualties roughly equivalent to those suffered by the Americans on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Considering the vastly more extensive defensive preparations made for the defense of the Japanese Home Islands, the expected participation of a huge and hostile civilian population, and the fact that the invasion of Japan would last much longer than the campaigns on Iwo Jima or Okinawa, I think it's safe to assume that rate of losses would be much higher. Well-informed observers, including Secretary of War Henry Stimson, estimated that American casualties might run close to a million men. Indeed, so many Purple Heart medals were ordered in anticipation of the expected casualties that the stockpile has never been used up; men wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were presented with Purple Hearts that had been made in 1945.

What if the invasion of Japan had gone forward in 1945? We can be sure that it would have been an American victory and that, when the dust settled, the American flag would be fluttering over the ruins of Tokyo. We can be equally sure that it would have been the most nightmarish battle the world had ever seen. It's entirely possible that more Americans would have died in the invasion of Japan than had fallen in all the battles of the Second World War up to that time. Japanese casualties, military and civilian, would have been vastly larger than the total number who lost their lives in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with millions probably perishing. That being the case, we can only thank God that the invasion never had to take place.