A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government - Couverture rigide

Wills, Garry

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0684844893 ISBN 13 : 9780684844893

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 1999

Synopsis

Book by Wills Garry

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Chapter One: Minutemen

One of the dramatic developments of the 1990s was the emergence of self-styled militias training for guerrilla war against the federal government. Proudly patriotic, these organizations presented themselves as the true guardians of Jeffersonian values, as heirs to the Revolution's minutemen. It was hard to judge the extent or depth of the movement, but some of the literature it relied on was an apparent inspiration to Timothy McVeigh when he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. His action echoed, in fact, an event in William Pierce's 1978 book, The Turner Diaries, which imagines a war on government beginning with a fertilizer bomb that destroys a federal building.

It may seem absurd for small bands of men to think they can defy a federal government they describe as vast in its power and ruthless in the use of it. But the militias drew on a claim that was routinely accepted in circles less extreme than their own. The Vietcong, they argue, defied the same United States government and bested it by guerrilla "insurgency." This is an analogy that Wayne LaPierre, at the time the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, used in order to argue that gun owners in general could successfully defeat tyrannical measures taken by the government.

The view that the Vietcong prevailed by guerrilla tactics is a belief widespread but fallacious. The conclusions drawn from a panel of military and academic experts have been amply confirmed in later studies: "The North Vietnamese finally won by purely conventional means....In their lengthy battle accounts that followed Hanoi's great military victory, Generals [Vo Nguyen] Giap and [Van Tien] Dung barely mentioned the contribution of local forces." But surprisingly large numbers of people have been tempted, in recent decades, to believe in an almost magic power of "people's war" to prevail against the odds. Colonial populations hoped they could launch revolutions "on the cheap." And their opponents hoped that "counterinsurgency" could also be scaled to smaller challenges. John Kennedy, recoiling from the Eisenhower era's doctrine of "massive retaliation," turned to "flexible response," relying on covert action, "psywar," and Green Beret derring-do. It was the era of small-time operators promising big results, of spooks like John Paul Vann and Edward Lansdale. (Lansdale tried to psych out the enemies in Vietnam by tampering with their astrological predictions.) The militias of the 1990s were inheritors of such illusion.

Renewed interest in the tactics of limited war led some people to recast our history in terms of the fad. Even some professional historians yielded to the rhetorical elation of the period. The military historian Don Higginbotham confessed that he had exaggerated the importance of militias to the Revolution when he succumbed to the excitement of the 1960s, responding to a timely "preoccupation with irregular war." During the bicentennial celebrations of the seventies, William Casey, the future head of the Central Intelligence Agency, toured Revolutionary battlefields and wrote a book that said our forebears won the Revolution, just as the Vietnamese won their struggle, "by irregular, partisan, guerrilla warfare." The misreading of the one war prompted a misreading of the other, and indicates why Casey, when he became the head of the CIA, thought that Oliver North was an appropriate sponsor of guerrilla Contras in Nicaragua. In the early 1960s, John Galvin, who would serve in Vietnam before becoming the commanding general of NATO, wrote The Minute Men, describing the Revolutionary minutemen as an elite rapid response team, just what the Pentagon was dreaming of.

Vietnam-era romanticizing of militias served the 1990s extremists well. No matter how nutty the latter might seem, they had legitimate forebears in our history. Some of the groups even called themselves minutemen. NRA publicist Tanya Metaksa met with militiamen. Congressional officeholders and candidates defended them. Respected law professors argued that the Second Amendment had authorized a "genuine" militia, not the tame National Guard that swears allegiance to the federal government. But Gary Hart, the former senator, argues in his 1998 book, The Minuteman, that the National Guard could be trained to become "citizen guerillas" for our time. The glorification of militias reached such a pitch that Akhil Reed Amar, Southmayd Professor at the Yale Law School, collaborated with a journalist on a book proclaiming that the right to serve in a militia was one of the three most fundamental guarantors of constitutional freedoms. This is not far from Charlton Heston's statement, on behalf of the NRA, that the Second Amendment is the most important part of the Constitution, since it equips people to defend all their other rights with guns.

Even some who do not agree with Heston's assessment of the Second Amendment are willing to accept a rosy depiction of the colonial and Revolutionary militias. They represent, for most of us, a high ideal of citizen response to threats against our liberty. We honor Daniel Chester French's statue The Minute Man at Concord's battlefield in Massachusetts. The rallying of other towns to the defense of Lexington was a great moment in American history. But before we get too carried away by the cult of the militias, we should reflect on claims for them that cannot stand a close inquiry.

One of the principal boasts of the militias' admirers is that they exhibited a democratic inclusiveness. Every free white male of military age had to serve, regardless of class or social standing. That was rarely the case in colonial times. There were many exemptions -- for conscientious objectors (Pennsylvania had no pre-Revolution militia because of its Quaker population), attendance at college, engagement in important business. The socially prominent could usually avoid service if they wanted to, often by paying others to go in their place. (If the militias were truly universal, there would be no "spare" men to be paid for joining.) The military historian John Shy notes that John Adams, just the right age to take up a musket in the French and Indian War of 1756-63 (when all men were supposed to be in the militias), never even considered doing so.

But there is an even more sweeping fact that made universal service impossible throughout the colonies. There was a drastic shortage of guns. This goes against everything we have assumed about our pioneer forebears -- that they vindicated their own liberties with their own arms. But there is overwhelming evidence that a majority of males did not own usable guns. The colonies repeatedly legislated that all men should get or be given guns, and just as repeatedly complained that this had not been accomplished. In the French and Indian War, a contingent of two hundred Virginia militiamen went to the front bearing only eighty muskets, and British officers in Massachusetts, amazed that so few colonials possessed muskets, were even more surprised to find that many had not even fired one. At Lexington and Concord, the opening battles of the Revolution, despite the fact that the Massachusetts militia had spent months desperately trying to arm itself, some contingents showed up at the front unarmed. A captain of the New Hampshire militia reported in 1775 that "not one-half our men have arms," and a militia officer in Virginia said that he had a stand of a thousand guns, but that none of them worked. The New York Committee of Safety refused to send troops to the field because "they have no arms." Thomas Jefferson, Virginia's governor, had to defend his state's militia when, lacking guns, it stole a consignment purchased by the Continental Army; and he consoled one of his commanders with the philosophical reflection that "the subsequent desertions of your militia have taken away the necessity of answering the question how they shall be armed" (J 3.224-27, 640).

If every man had his gun for militia drill, why did so many go off to battle without a musket, not only militiamen, but Continental Army soldiers too? Patrick Henry would later use the dearth of guns as a reason for refusing to ratify the Constitution. The new government promised to arm the militias, but the state of Virginia had been promising to do that for years, and had never done it. How could Virginians expect the federal government to do what they could not do for themselves? Henry told the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788 that "we have learned, by experience, that, necessary as it is to have arms, and though our Assembly has, by a succession of laws for many years, endeavored to have the militia completely armed, it is still far from being the case." In an earlier session of the convention he had asked: "Of what service would militia be to you when, most probably, you will not have a single musket in the state? For as arms are to be provided by Congress, they may or may not furnish them" (R 9.957, 10.1273).

If Congress would not supply arms, what prevented each man from taking down his musket from over the mantel? We have all been taught that the guns were there. But they weren't. In one of the most important (but neglected) studies of the colonial frontier, Michael Bellesiles went through over a thousand probate records covering the years 1763 to 1790 from western sectors of New England and Pennsylvania. Though these were inheritance lists for white males (those most likely to own guns), and though belongings were listed in great detail (down to broken mugs), only 14 percent of the men owned guns, and 53 percent of those guns were broken or unusable.

How can this be? We have always known or assumed that men in the colonial period had to hunt for food. Bellesiles shows that this, too, is a myth. Hunting for food -- with a musket, inaccurate enough when aimed at a man and generally hopeless against a rabbit; or with a rifle whose loading (after each shot) was slow and difficult -- could not be an efficient use of the ordinary person's time. Though most meat consumed was from domestic animals (pigs or cows), the supplementary provisions were best caught with the trapper's or the fisherman's net. People's defense came from their living in communities, with select militias to guard them, using what guns were available. These guns came mainly from Europe, and the typical village's blacksmith was not very good at repairing them. (Much of the smith's time went into forging farm and transportation gear.) Though some guns were made in America, M. L. Brown established that this was "an infant, homespun, widely dispersed, and distinctly disorganized American industry" when the Revolution began. The European source for arms was cut off by British embargo during the Revolution, and was only partially restored when the French entered the fray on the Americans' side.

Guns for both militias and the Continental Army were so scarce that George Washington fills page after page with laments for his inability to get them -- and he meant muskets as well as the even scarcer cannon and artillery. If guns were not omnipresent, then obviously the skill in their use was not widespread either. Why were so many guns broken or unusable in the probate records? It was not only that the blacksmiths in small communities were not gunsmiths. Guns were mainly made of iron at the time, and interior rusting of barrel and parts would take place unless guns were cleaned and maintained. Obviously, not enough people kept them in regular use to prevent this from occurring. Though some mastered the difficult handling of the long rifle, few became truly expert. Brown quotes Benjamin Thompson, a Continental soldier expressing the "common sentiment" about riflemen attached to the army as skirmishers:

Instead of being the best marksmen in the world and picking off every Regular that was to be seen, there is scarcely a regiment in camp but can produce men that can beat them at shooting, and the army is now universally convinced that the continual firing which they kept up by the week and month together has had no other effect than to waste their ammunition and convince the King's troops that they are not really so formidable.

The famed American rifle was not of much use in war, and its wielders, according to historians George Scheer and Hugh Rankin, were "more noisy than useful." They were wielding an instrument never intended for battle:

The rifle used by these "irregulars" was practically unknown to the New Englanders, accustomed to the smooth-bore musket and fowling piece. Long in barrel, small in bore, light in weight, and perfectly balanced, it was the weapon of the professional hunter and woodsman, the man who eschewed every ounce of unnecessary burden and could not afford to waste a single charge. Its barrel was spiral-grooved to give spin to its bullet, and its effective range more than doubled the musket's sixty yards. Its greatest disadvantage was that in order to benefit from its rifling, its bullet had to be fitted so tightly that it had to be forced home with an iron ramrod and a wooden mallet, a slow process. It had other disadvantages for line firing: the weather more easily rendered it useless; it had no bayonet, so that its users could not deliver or stand a charge; and surrounded by the smoke of a battle line, the riflemen could not aim carefully enough to take advantage of their weapon's unbelievable accuracy.

The American army found even less use for pistols than for rifles. British cavalrymen and naval officers carried them as signal guns and for defense against a rebel in their ranks, but they were an ornament that Americans forbore: "Few pistols were domestically produced, for cavalry generally performed a minor role in the Continental Army, operating primarily in the southern campaigns, and preferred the carbine and blunderbuss to the saber and the pistol." Pistols, which gentlemen used for duels, were not handy in combat, since one had to get out one's powder and ball and load the things for each shot. In private life, knives were a quicker and more wieldy weapon, and they accounted for most individual killings in the eighteenth century. Bellesiles shows statistically that not until the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, not until the Colt company's great output and advertising, did gun ownership spread dramatically in America -- and then it never stopped spreading. There was one gun for every ten people in the colonies. Now there is more than one for every man, woman, and child in America, with three for every adult male of the population. Yet this latter situation is justified by appeal to the former.

We must give up, then, the idea that every man in the colonies turned out for militia service bearing his own gun or one supplied him. But other factors prevented the militias from being universal. John Shy, the special master of this subject, says that militia composition differed from state to state and from period to period for a variety of social and economic reasons. It is best to consider the militias in four stages -- before the Revolution, at its beginning, during its course, and at its end.

1. In the first settlements, short on manpower, everyone did everything possible for the common defense -- women, children, slaves, friendly Indians. That condition could recur later, at times of maximum emergency. In response to the British march on Concord, the women of Pepperell township set up militia patrols after their men left town. Blacks warned households that "the Regulars are out." An old woman, "Mother" Batherick, took six unresisting prisoners in the British retreat from Lexington.

But when the pressure of crisis eased, in the colonies before the war, train...

Revue de presse

Michael Beschloss The Washington Post Book World Wills displays once again his relentlessly questioning, subtle, and versatile mind.

Edmund S. Morgan The New York Review of Books A tract for the times...a plea for common sense in allowing government to do good without the paranoid obstructions of the misguided or malevolent.

Taylor Branch The New Yorker Not since Hannah Arendt wrote on revolution and on totalitarian psychology has a scholar of such broad classical training addressed a popular readership on issues of such moment, and with such animating reverence for what Arendt called the public space among citizens.

Curtis Gans The Washington Post A lucid, important, and rigorous defense of government.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 1999
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0684844893
• ISBN 13: 9780684844893
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 352
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible