Circa1865

One of the most significant developments of the 1964 presidential election was the virtually solid anti-conservative stand of black voters across the South, which resulted in the defeat of Barry Goldwater. In 1968, the GOP ended their brief friendship with white conservative Southerners and actively pursued black voters with civil rights promises and entitlement programs.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Goldwater, Rebel Pennants

“When Senator Barry Goldwater brought his Presidential campaign to east Tennessee in September, 1964, he spoke from the Knoxville-Maryville airport, in the solid Republican county of Blount. It is Parson Brownlow’s home country; at a rural cemetery a few miles away a headstone proclaims the death of a local patriot, “murdered by Confederates.”

When Senator Goldwater spoke, however, the Confederates were out in much greater force than one hundred years before. A large Confederate flag dominated the platform, and smaller Rebel pennants were waved throughout the crowd.

Here was a candidate who spoke of States’ rights . . . The first signs [of Southerners sensing they had allies] became evident when there was outspoken opposition to the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights law in other sections of the country besides the South. Governor George Wallace of Alabama made impressive showings in Democratic presidential primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland. Stirred by the scent of victory, the Mississippi legislature financed a national lobby against the bill.

Racial violence flared in a dozen points in the North and reached the riot stage in [New York’s] Harlem. At the San Francisco convention all the South watched as the forces of Senator Goldwater, who had voted against the civil rights law, turned aside disorganized elements which attempted vainly to moderate the Republican platform.

The final Goldwater campaign effort was a television spectacular beamed over the old Confederacy from Columbia, South Carolina. Fabled movie stars from California came to join old-line Southern politicians being retreaded as Republicans. Across the old Dixiecrat belt the elixir worked.

Georgia was added to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Mississippians who had voted 90 percent for Strom Thurmond in 1948, now voted with him 87 percent as Goldwater Republicans.

Mississippi gave Goldwater a larger percentage of its vote than any of the 44 States carried by Johnson gave the President, but even majorities like this failed to give the Republicans the majority of the popular vote in the South as a whole. The electoral vote, of course, went two to one for Johnson.

Negro votes made the difference between Johnson and Goldwater in Virginia, Florida, Arkansas, Tennessee, and possibly North Carolina. They also supplied the winning margin in several House and Senate contests in these same States. For the first time, Democrats in these areas are fully realizing the advantage of such an asset, and the local Republicans who deliberately set their course against soliciting Negro support now recognize the nature of the price they paid to prove themselves better [States’ rights advocates] than the Dixiecrats.

(Look Away From Dixie, Frank E. Smith, LSU Press, 1965, pp. 71-74)

The Republican Party was the primary obstacle confronting the peaceful Christian charity which would eventually end slavery. Had the latter occurred, the Union would have been saved peacefully and no Northern citizens and editors would have been imprisoned in American bastilles for opposing Jacobin Republican hegemony and corruption. “Smiler” Colfax, Grant’s vice-president, was brought down by the Credit Mobilier scandals which bribed high government officials with cash and stocks; he was replaced as vice president in 1872 with another corrupt Republican, Henry Wilson.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Myth of Saving the Union

Letter of acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination, National Union Republican party, 29 May, 1868:

“The debt of gratitude [my acceptance] acknowledges to the brave men who saved the Union from destruction, the frank approval of amnesty based on repentance and loyalty, the demand for the most thorough economy and honesty in government, the sympathy of the party of liberty with all throughout the world who long for the liberty we here enjoy, and the recognition of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, are worthy of the [Republican party] on whose banners they are to be written in the coming contest.

Its past record cannot be blotted out or forgotten. If there had been no Republican party, Slavery would to-day cast its baneful shadow over the Republic. If there had been no Republican party, the free press and free speech would be unknown from the Potomac to the Rio Grande as ten years ago. If the Republican party could have been stricken from existence when the banner of rebellion was unfurled, and when the response of “no coercion” was heard in the North, we would have no nation to-day.

But for the Republican party daring to risk the odium of tax and draft laws our flag could not be kept flying on the field until the long-hoped for victory came. Without the Republican party the Civil Rights bill – the guarantee of equality under the law to the humble and the defenceless, as well as to the strong – would not be to-day upon our national statute book.

With such inspiration from the past, the example of the founders of the Republic, who called the victorious General of the Republic to preside over the land his triumphs had saved from its enemies, I cannot doubt that our labors with be crowned with success.”

Very truly yours, Schuyler Colfax”

(The Republican Party, 1854-1904, Francis Curtis, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904, page 507)

By the mid-1930s FDR had communist-infiltrated labor unions supplying campaign money through Russian communist Sidney Hillman’s CIO-PAC, the first political action committee — Hillman had been FDR’s labor advisor in New York as governor. FDR’s later running mate, Henry Wallace, helped attract collectivist votes to the Democrat party.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

CPUSA Discovers Hollywood Clout

“The Communist Party [CPUSA] enjoyed great success with “front groups,” organizations they controlled without that control being publicly recognized. One of the major front groups, the League of American Writers, had been an outgrowth of the American Writer’s Congress, an affiliate of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, headquartered in Moscow. During the 1930s, at the height of its success, the League even managed to enlist Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the President of the United States.

The founders of the [Soviet Union] were fascinated with the cinema because they recognized that it allowed limitless alteration of reality, the very goal they that they were attempting to achieve in real life. “Communists must always consider that of all the arts the motion picture is the most important,” said Lenin, who sent cinema trains into the Russian countryside during the 1920s. [Stalin explained in 1936 that] “The cinema is not only a vital agitprop device for the education and political indoctrination of the workers, but also a fluent channel through which to reach the minds and shape the desires of people everywhere.”

In 1926, Sergei Eisenstein, the USSR’s premier cineaste, made Battleship Potemkin, a film about a sailors’ mutiny. The Soviets used the movie as part of their labor-organizing efforts. Joseph Goebbels praised the picture and said it should be the model for Nazi cinema. French actor Yves Montand, who was born to communist Italian parents who fled France from Mussolini’s Fascist regime, said it was the dramatic Potemkin, not the turgid Das Kapital, that stirred his loyalties to Marxism and the USSR.

In 1933, at the nadir of the Depression, impoverished New Yorkers paid $89,931 in four days to see King Kong, at the time a record draw for an indoor attraction. Party cultural officials, eager as Stalin to influence people “everywhere,” duly took notice of Hollywood’s clout . . . and even Stalin enjoyed American gangster movies.

The implications of such influence were staggering to those who were seeking to extend this major movement of their time. Stalin reportedly claimed that he could easily convert the world to communism if he controlled the American movie industry.

“One of the most pressing tasks confronting the Communist Party in the field of Propaganda,” wrote [Communist International] boss Willie Muenzenberg, “is the conquest of this supremely important propaganda unit, until now the monopoly of the ruling class. We must wrest it from them and turn it against them.”

By the mid-1930s the tectonic shifts of history, and certainly the social and political conditions of the time, were all favorable to the Party, which was then moving from triumph to triumph. Hollywood loomed as one of its easier targets.”

(Hollywood Party, How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, Prima Publishing, 1998, pp. 20-21)

Not content with devastating the American South and destroying its political power, the vindictive Radicals in Washington considered the conquered States as mere territories to be ruled by Northern proconsuls. To establish a veneer of democracy, blacks were herded to the polls by the notorious Union League to elect Northern men; the freedmen were instructed to burn the barns and homes of white citizens to keep them from the polls.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Freedmen Intoxicated With the Idea of Power

“It was to The Shrubs, the home of his former classmate, Judge Thomas M. Dawkins of Union [county], that Governor McGrath moved the State Capitol with the officials and archives just before General Sherman reached Columbia. There daily reports were received of the burning of Columbia, the position of Sherman’s and Cheatham’s armies, and finally the surrender of Lee and the flight of Jefferson Davis through Union.

In her diary Mrs. Dawkins wrote: “Young people were hopeful to the last so when soldiers were with us, music, dancing, charades, etc., made many enjoyable evenings never to be forgotten. There was a bon ami, a comradeship born of the situation very fascinating and rare.”

After surrender Mrs. Dawkins wrote, “We had 11 servants in the yard, and many of them were there. I said “I have told you, you are free and of course can leave at any time but would rather you wait and let us settle you comfortably.”

My seamstress Milly was Abraham Dogan’s wife, the carriage driver. He became a member of the Legislature. It was with difficulty we could get them to move out of the yard.

Finally in January 1866 Judge Dawkins hired for them a house and settled them with pig provisions, but poor ignorant creatures, they were intoxicated with the idea of power, and always fond of idleness began to steal and destroy property. Scarcely a night without burning. There was no redress, no law, and the Ku Klux Klan was formed to frighten the Negroes, so sensational superstition — all done to this point – masks, coffins, etc. This was done as patiently as possible for 10 years from 1866 to 1876. Then our hero, General Hampton came forward to help us.”

Thus Mrs. Dawkins, born in England, an imported schoolteacher from the North, married to a member of the aristocracy in Union [county], spoke to future generations through her diary of the tensions and problems of a tragic episode in American history.”

(Plantation Heritage in Upcountry, South Carolina, Kenneth and Blanche Marsh, Biltmore Press, 1965, page 107)

In 1876, the anti-Catholic Senator James G. Blaine of Maine introduced an amendment to the Constitution that would prevent States from establishing an official religion, especially Catholicism. Blaine regularly expressed hatred toward the South and was notorious for his “bloody shirt” tirades in Congress. His proposed amendment failed to muster sufficient votes after a Senator from Kentucky explained free government to Blaine.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Not Knowing What Free Government Was

“[Proposed] Article XVI:  No STATE shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under any State.”

Mr. Randolph, of New Jersey said: “The amendment proposed by the Judiciary Committee is an altogether different affair from that the people have asked for or the press discussed. It opens, if adopted, many grave questions . . . I can take no part in any such legislation, save to attempt to prevent it.”

Mr. Kernan, of New York said:  “I ask the attention of Senators to the leading principle or idea which the wise men who framed the Constitution of the United States followed in framing it. The framers . . . believed . . . that it was wiser and better that the people of the several States should reserve to themselves and exercise all those powers of government which related to home rights, if I may use that term, to the internal affairs of the State, to the regulating of domestic relations . . . in a word, that the people of each State should have the exclusive power to manage their local and internal affairs as they thought best for their own happiness and prosperity.

I think all experience shows how wise this was and is. I will answer frankly that I believe that the matter of educating children may be wisely left to the people of each State.  [This amendment] in my judgment, instead of allaying strife and dissention, it will increase them and bring evil to our schools, to our institutions, and to the people of our country.

Mr. Whyte, of Maryland said: “[T]he first amendment to the Constitution prevents the establishment of religion by congressional enactment; it prohibits the interference of Congress with the free exercise thereof, and leaves the whole power for the propagation of [religion] with the States exclusively . . .”

Mr. Stevenson, of Kentucky said: “While I impugn no man’s motives here, a religious discussion, appealing to passions which do not in my judgment belong to a deliberative body . . . seems to be out of taste, and to be accompanied by no practical good.  Friend as he was of religious freedom, [Jefferson] would never have consented that the States which brought the Constitution into existence, upon whose sovereignty this instrument rests . . . should be degraded and that the government of the United States, a government of limited authority, a mere agent of the States with proscribed powers, should undertake to take possession of their schools and of their religion; and had the speech of the honorable Senator . . . been uttered before Mr. Jefferson, he would have told him that he did not know what free government was.

No sir; this power is not in the Federal Government. Kentucky does not want New England and other States to dictate to her what her schools shall be or what her taxes shall be, and least of all what her religion shall be . . . But when you undertake to bring to the Federal Government the power of making the States hewers of wood and drawers of water you destroy the whole foundation-stone upon which this government was reared and upon which only it can be preserved.”

(Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia, 1876, US Congress, D. Appleton & Company, 1881, pp.176-180)

Ample evidence suggests that exterminating Southerners and repopulating their lands with New Englanders was desired by abolitionist radicals like Eli Thayer and Parson Brownlow. The latter wanted Negro troops under Ben Butler to drive Southern men, women and children into the Gulf of Mexico to clear the way for those loyal to Lincoln’s government to settle on confiscated Southern lands.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Destruction, Confiscation and Genocide

“For many [Southern] manufacturers, the personal and financial losses of the Civil War were truly overwhelming. At Roswell, Georgia, [Northern-born] Barrington King found upon his return from refugeeing farther South, away from Sherman’s destructive swath across that State, that “going towards the creek to see the destruction of our fine mills, all destroyed, the loss of two sons, another wounded, & one with a broken wrist, all caused by the late unnatural war, made me sad indeed.”

Duncan Murchison, the former proprietor of the Little River factory in Fayetteville, North Carolina, lamented, “the fortunes of war have snatched away nearly the whole of my property – my cotton factory, store house, ware-houses, turpentine distillery, with all the stock on hand, were burned by Genl Sherman’s army, and my grain, provisions and stock taken by the two contending armies.”

With six bullet wounds himself, William H. Young of Columbus’s [Georgia] burned Eagle factory also “suffered much and heavily in the recent war by the loss of children and property.”

Ralph Brinkley, who fled the Memphis Wolfe Creek mill upon the entrance of federal troops into Tennessee, wrote the president that he “suffered heavily by the war, and by the loss of two lovely children” and was weighted down with grief and affliction.” The psychological and economic trauma was made more acute by the uncertain political atmosphere in the North.

Eli Thayer, once a confidant of John Brown, wrote [President Andrew] Johnson that Confederate lands should quickly be confiscated and immigrants settled on them. The president at times seemed to endorse treason trials and massive confiscations.

Following the complete occupation of the former Confederacy in the summer of 1865, Secretary of the Treasury McCulloch approved extensive seizures of property that fell under the terms of [the Northern confiscation acts since 1861]. Secretary McCulloch, responsive to Andrew Johnson’s insistence that treason be made odious, ruled that State and locally-owned properties in the South were also alienated and liable for confiscation by virtue of their use in the rebellion.

In North Georgia, [Barrington] King observed, as did others across the South, that many freedmen were “leaving their masters’ plantations, crops ruined, no one to do the work – all flooding to the cities and towns, expecting to be supported by Govt.” Although accommodating to free labor, he believed that “without some law compelling the Negroes to work for wages, there will be trouble in another year, as the poor creatures expose themselves, become sickly & fast dying off.”

Then high mortality rate for freed people in the summer of 1865 convinced King and many managers that blacks could not survive without supervision.”

(Confederate Industry, Manufacturers and Quartermasters in the Civil War, Harold S. Wilson, University of Mississippi Press, 2002, excerpts, pp. 234-237; 252-253)

Often the imperialist views his own expansionist actions as more altruistic than previous imperialists, and even when assisting others in their exploitative operations. It is said that the United States went to war against Japan to protect British, French and Dutch colonial empires, while maintaining that the war was fought against Japanese colonialism – though the Japanese were simply emulating the Europeans.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Unselfish American Imperialism

“At the beginning of 1944 as British and American oilmen, with the backing of their governments, scrambled to win concessions from the Iranian government for its largely uncommitted oil lands . . . but [the Iranian government] came under growing internal pressure from forces opposed to the preponderance of the United States in Iranian affairs.

[In February 1944] Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Saed complained that Americans] refused to hire qualified Iranians, [and] employed too many incompetent Americans . . .

During the first half of 1944 . . . the State Department energetically backed the claims of the American oil company representatives then in Teheran, insisting that the two American firms – Sinclair Oil and Standard Vacuum – do everything possible to obtain the concessions.

Throughout the first third of 1944 Washington’s interest in Iran continued, and the reports of Patrick Hurley, Roosevelt’s special representative in the Middle East, reiterated the future importance of the area. Hurley’s saucy observations appealed to Roosevelt, over whom he exercised a powerful influence, for his categories of explanation and logic, and his frankness, were remarkably like the President’s own impulsive mannerisms.

Hurley associated Britain’s presence in Iran and the Middle East in general with the “principles of imperialism, monopoly, and exploitation. Evoking this belief, he appealed to Roosevelt to work for the “principles of liberty and democracy” by obtaining important oil concessions, maintaining a mission to straighten out Iran’s internal affairs, and breaking the economic hold of the British.

Hurley convinced Roosevelt of Iran’s importance, and in January [1944] the President told [Secretary of State Cordell] Hull: “I was rather thrilled with the idea of using Iran as an example of what we could do by an unselfish American policy.” As usual, Roosevelt left the critical details of implementing such a policy to others, and when the results came back he invariably endorsed them.

In this atmosphere of growing crisis and controversy over American [versus British] power in Iran, the State Department now had to formulate a basic policy on the country consistent with its larger Middle Eastern strategy. In mid-July, Richard ford, the American charge’, stressed the need for “a strong stand here both now and in the future,” one oil and the potential “market for American goods” justified, and the State Department sent its reply at the end of the month for his guidance.

[New Secretary of State Edward] Stettinius wrote . . . “a strong and independent Iran” was now a goal of United States policy [which included oil concessions and air bases].”

[State Department advisor Arthur C.] Millspaugh provided additional fuel [to the Great Power conflict in the Middle East] with an off-the-record interview in an Iranian newspaper suggesting that only the United States could save Iran from Soviet or British infractions of its independence.

Rumors of the oil-concession negotiations were also officially confirmed during August as more and more Iranians asked how Americans could be sitting on both sides of the negotiating table. Then everything stopped as the Russians entered the scene. What originally had been an Anglo-American conflict now became a three-way crisis among the major Allies.

American intervention in Iran was an excellent example of how the pursuit of national objectives provoked the redefinition of a regional situation and created the basis for international crises. It was primarily the struggle over oil and the extension of American control over Iranian affairs that caused the Russians to intervene not only for oil, but to establish the principle that affairs along their borders could no longer be determined without regard to Soviet interests and security.

Soviet references to the Iranian crisis in the fall of 1944 were for the most part critical of the growth of American power and influence there and the ability of the United States to define Soviet-Iranian relations. [US Moscow diplomat George] Kennan perceived this immediately, and warned Washington that “The basic motive of recent Soviet action in . . . Iran is probably not the need for the oil itself, but apprehension of potential foreign penetration in that area . . .”

By the end of 1944 the United States had won its struggle to monopolize Saudi Arabian oil concessions, but Britain and Russia had foiled its plan in Iran. Again Washington construed Soviet noncooperation with American objectives as an example of Soviet expansionist tendencies.”

(The Politics of War, The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, Pantheon Books, 1968, pp. 308-310)

The enemies of the American South fought to preserve a fraternal Union which no longer existed, and forced that South under despotic Northern rule with bayonets. The North’s politicians claimed that the Southern States had not left the Union and only had to send its representatives back Washington — and all would be as before. The following is an excerpt from Senator B.H. Hill’s 18 February 1874 address to the Southern Historical Society in Atlanta.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

The South More Cheated than Conquered

“[The] Northern States and people were not satisfied with [slavery abolished throughout the South]. The war being over, our arms surrendered, our government scattered, and our people helpless, they now determined not only to enlarge the issues made by the war and during the war, but they also determined to change those issues and make demands which had not before been made . . . they now made demands which they had, in every form, declared they could have no power or right to make without violating the Constitution they had sworn to support, and destroying the Union they had waged war itself to preserve.

Over and over during the war they proclaimed in every authoritative form to us and to foreign governments, that secession was a nullity, that our States were still in the Union; and that we had only to lay down our arms, and retain all our rights and powers as equal States in the Union.

We laid down our arms, and immediately they insisted our States had lost all their rights and powers in the Union, and while compelled to remain under the control if the Union, we could only do so with such rights and powers as they might accord, and on such terms and conditions they might impose.

Over and over again during the war they, in like authoritative forms, proclaimed that our people had taken up arms in defense of secession under misapprehension of their purposes toward us, and that we only had to lay down our arms and continue to enjoy, in the Union, every right and privilege as before the mistaken act of secession.

We laid down our arms and they declared we were all criminals and traitors, who had forfeited all rights and privilege, and were entitled to neither property, liberty or life, except through their clemency!

Over and over again during the wat they, in like authoritative forms, proclaimed that the seats of our members in Congress were vacant, and we had only to return and occupy them as it was both our right and duty to do.

Our people laid down their arms and sent on their members, and they were met with the startling proposition that we neither had the right to participate in the administration of the Union, nor even to make law or government for our own States!

Addressing this Society in Virginia, during the last summer, Mr. (Jefferson) Davis said: “We were more cheated than conquered into surrender.”

The Northern press denounced this as a slander, and some of our Southern press deprecated the expression as indiscreet! I aver tonight, what history will affirm, that the English language does not contain, and could not form a sentence of equal size which expressed more truth. We were cheated not only by our enemies; but the profuse proclamations of our enemies, before referred to, were taken up and repeated by malcontents in our midst – many of them too, who had done all in their power to hurry our people into secession.

Oh, my friends, we were fearfully, sadly, treacherously, altogether cheated into surrender! If the demands were made, after the war was over, had been frankly avowed while the war was in progress, there would have been no pretexts for our treacherous malcontents; there would have been no division or wearying among our people; there would have been no desertions from our armies, and there would have been no surrender of arms, nor loss of our cause. Never! Never!”

(Southern Secession and Northern Coercion, the Spitefulness of Reconstruction, Senator Benjamin H. Hill, Society for Biblical and Southern Studies, 2001 (original 1874), pp. 9-11)

North Carolina’s Senator Sam Ervin was a conservative Democrat of the old stripe, and stern advocate of a balanced federal budget. He wisely counseled that Congress had two simple fiscal choices: either to levy taxes sufficient to cover its appropriations, or, reduce appropriations to match federal income.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Foreign Aid and Santa Claus

“The foreign aid program had a benign beginning in the Marshall Plan, which merits the highest praise because it rehabilitated Western Europe in large measure from the economic devastation of the Second World War. As the programs implementing this Plan were nearing final consummation, President [Harry] Truman appointed a Commission headed by Secretary of Commerce Charles P. Sawyer to study foreign aid and make recommendations concerning its future. [This Commission] made a thoughtful report pointing out infirmities inherent in indiscriminate programs of this nature, and suggested the wisdom of terminating foreign aid with the consummation of the Marshall Plan.

Unfortunately, the report was made about the time Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected President, and has been ignored in subsequent times. The United States could have had intelligent and productive foreign aid programs with much less expenditures since that time if it had restricted its aid to truly needy nations, and to the financially insufficient nations . . .

Instead of doing this, the United States has converted itself in large measure into an international Santa Claus, who scatters untold billions of dollars of the patrimony of our people among multitudes of foreign nations, some needy and some otherwise, in the pious hope that American can thereby purchase friends and peace in the international world, and induce some foreign nations to reform their internal affairs in ways pleasing to the dispensers of our largess.

On one occasion, the Administrator of Foreign Aid confessed to a House subcommittee, which had oversight of the matter, that he was unable to inform it at the time the names and numbers of the foreign nations then receiving foreign aid from the United States.

I voted for foreign aid during my first year in the Senate on the theory that it was 51 percent wise and 49 percent foolish. Afterwards, I opposed all foreign aid bills . . . [and] I reminded Senators that every cent our country had expended in financing the foreign aid programs had been obtained by deficit financing. I added:

“If an individual were to borrow money to give it away, his family would institute a lunacy proceeding against him and have a guardian named to manage his affairs on the ground he lacked the mental capacity to perform the task himself. But if an American politician advocates that the United States borrow money by deficit financing and scatter it abroad among potential friends and foes alike, he is likely to be elected President or Senator or Representative, or to be appointed Secretary of State of Administrator of Foreign Aid.”

(Preserving the Constitution, The Autobiography of Sam Ervin, The Michie Company, 1984, pp. 80-81)

The idealistic Woodrow Wilson could be called the father of today’s multicultural hell, while Clemenceau was the product of incessant European intrigue, political alliances, and ruthless postwar retribution against enemies. Both had a hand in the repressive peace crafted at Versailles, and the responsibility for the rise of a German nationalist.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

International Bunglers and Future Wars

“Georges Clemenceau was born in 1841 [and] . . . had journeyed far in those seventy-eight years, from the extreme Left to what was almost the extreme Right, and the old radical barnstormer, anti-clerical, and Dreyfusard was now, as he stood in this room handing the thick book to the German, a personification of national patriotism. The Germans had made him so.

His powers of sarcasm, vituperation and assault were almost without equal in his time, and with these powers he could castigate and finally sweep away the governments which showed any hesitation; for we are in a war to the death, he kept on saying, and we must win. Thus he became Father Victory to millions of French soldiers in 1918 and went into the peace conference with a personal authority none could question. The Tiger – Father of Victory.

Now, as he stood beetling at the Prussian aristocrat, beetling and growling and showing his fangs, the Tiger was so formed or transformed by the events in which he had played a great part that all memory of the international socialist had faded away, leaving a kind of quintessential residue of the purest nationalism.

Moltke, Hindenburg, Ludendorff and the Kaiser Wilhelm II produced this result, willy-nilly, just as the Tiger himself (along with Poincare and others whom he equally disliked) was to assist mightily in the production of Adolf Hitler.

[What] Clemenceau [wanted from the Versailles Treaty was] that Germany could be kept permanently subjugated. What Woodrow Wilson hoped was for something still different. He hoped that the whole world, in all its infinite diversity of races, religions and social organization, could be brought into a parliament of mankind so as to discuss and compose the differences that lead to war.

Wilson was wholly unprepared for the extent and complications of the passionate nationalisms his various groups of principles had fanned into flames. As he had never understood the Mexican Revolution, so he does not seem to have understood the whole exhausting tangle of racial and national repulsions in Central and Southern Europe, to which his own political philosophy had helped give such fierce vitality.”

(This House Against This House (excerpts), Vincent Sheean, Random House, 1945, pp. 7-16)