Shadows and Foreshadowing at Nagasaki

Atomic shadows at Nagasaki

        

When U.S. Secretary of War William Howard Taft arrived in Nagasaki Harbor on July 31, 1905, he and the huge imperial retinue about the SS Manchuria were given a rapturous welcome. 

As the ship departed that evening, notes James Bradley in his infuriatingly informative history The Imperial Cruise, Nagasaki's mayor toasted Taft and his party with champagne. The Sumo-sized American functionary then led the throng in a war chant to celebrate Japan's battlefield triumphs over Russian forces in Manchuria:

Japanese emperor -- banzai [may he live ten thousand years]!

Japanese navy -- banzai!

Japanese army -- banzai!

At least some of those who joined in Taft's celebration would be immolated almost exactly 40 years later, some of them memorialized in the "atomic shadows" etched into walls by the nuclear fireball that vaporized them. As they lifted their hands skyward, those Nagasaki residents couldn't have imagined that their government's imperial benefactor would someday annihilate them.

The frenzied reception granted to Taft and his entourage was generated, at least in part, by the celebrity of Alice Roosevelt, Teddy's oldest daughter, a rebellious girl who was something of a pre-electronic media Britney Spears. (One widely circulated photo depicted the First Wild Child wearing a boa constrictor draped around her neck and shoulders.)  But Japan's government, in which Washington had played a key role, was eager to please its imperial patron. 

Teddy Roosevelt, whose geopolitical views were defined by a nearly obsessive preoccupation with what he called "ethnic conquest," had conferred the status of "honorary Aryans" on the Japanese. In diplomatic machinations he kept secret from his cabinet and the Congress, Roosevelt had abetted the rise of Japanese militarism, goading them into their war with Russia over control of Manchuria. 

Harvard-educated Japanese emissary Kentaro Kaneko.

Japan had a role in TR's vision for the Pacific. As long as Japan kept Russia in check, did its part to pry open China to Washington's corporate clients, and didn't make a play for America's overseas colony in the Philippines, it could claim dominion over Korea and Manchuria under the terms of a "Monroe Doctrine for Asia," Roosevelt privately told Baron Kentaro Kaneko, Tokyo's emissary to the United States. 


"Japan is the only nation in Asia that understands the principles and methods of Western civilization," Roosevelt wrote to Kaneko on July 8, 1905. "She has proved that she can assimilate Western civilization, yet not break up her own heritage. All the Asiatic nations are now faced with the urgent necessity of adjusting themselves to the present age. Japan should be their natural leader in that process, and their protector during the transition stage, much as the United States assumed the leadership of the American continent many years ago, and by means of the Monroe Doctrine preserved Latin American nations from European interference, while they were maturing their independence."


Kaneko repeatedly urged Roosevelt to make public his support for a Japan-dominated "Monroe Doctrine for Asia." Teddy unctuously assured the Japanese emissary that while he couldn't do so as president, he would gladly offer public support once he had left office. 

As Bradley points out, if Congress had been aware of Roosevelt's secret dealings, "perhaps a senator would have challenged Roosevelt to think through the consequences of the United States' carving out a chunk of Asia for Japan to nibble on. Perhaps a congressman might have inspired Roosevelt to imagine a Japan that later would chafe at Teddy's leash." 


At the time, however, America's imperial elite was too enthralled by the Japanese victories in Manchuria -- where, as Teddy privately exulted, they were "playing my game" -- to consider what would happen when Japan's imperial ambitions could no longer be restrained by Washington. 


"The victory of the Japanese is a distinct triumph for Christianity," pontificated Reverend Robert MacArthur of New York's Calvary Baptist Church following the Battle of Tsushima. "The new civilization of Japan is largely the result of Christian teaching. A very great proportion of Japan's leading men today, especially those who fight her battles on land and sea, with such skill and valor, profess the Christian faith." 

Japan was emulating "Christian" teaching in the sense that any pious adulterer could claim to be acting on Jimmy Swaggart's example. The Japanese government's duplicitous and aggressive behavior faithfully mimicked that of the ascendant "Christian" power of the age. 

Under McKinley and Roosevelt, the U.S. government offered a detailed tutorial in the ruthless acquisition of territory through aggression, and the pitiless exercise of power to suppress uprisings against imperial rule.  The Philippines provided the classroom, and the Japanese would prove to be eager and observant students. 


After Washington wrested the Philippines from Spain, Admiral George Dewey (whose assault on the decrepit Spanish fleet -- ancient wooden vessels tied up in rows in Manila Bay -- wasn't much different from the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor) sent a pair of emissaries to compile a report on the Filipino civic culture. Under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, hailed as the "George Washington" of the Philippines during the war with Spain, the Filipinos had developed all of the institutions of representative government, and were firmly committed to the rule of law.


The report commissioned by Dewey was quickly buried by the War Department. After all, the prevailing doctrine held that the inhabitants of the Philippines -- like other non-Anglo-Saxon peoples -- weren't fit for self-government, and wouldn't be ready until after at least a few generations of benevolent, paternalistic rule by their racial superiors. 

This meant, Admiral Dewey would later write, that the U.S. Government would have to "establish our authority by force against the very people whom we sought to benefit." After learning of the victory of Teddy Roosevelt -- an apostle of imposing Anglo-Saxon "authority" by force -- in the 1900 presidential election, Private Robert Austill, who was serving in the Philippines, paraphrased Dewey's conclusion in terms that were both earthier and more candid: "The people of the United States want us to kill all the men, f**k all the women, and raise up a new race in these Islands." 


It was the islands Washington coveted as an outpost for the projection of military power into Asia. The Filipinos were an encumbrance.

“We do not want the Filipinos,” declared the San Francisco Argonaut in 1898. “We want the Philippines. The islands are enormously rich, but unfortunately they are infested with Filipinos. There are many millions there and, it is to be feared, their extinction will be slow.”

Fortunately, the Filipinos are not extinct, despite the U.S. Government's devoted efforts. In a 41-month period from 1898 to1902, roughly 20,000 Filipino guerrillas were killed. At least ten times that number of civilians were slaughtered as well. Some chroniclers estimate that more than two million Filipinos were liberated of their mortal cares during America's lethal application of muscular Christianity in the islands.

"The United States later fought World War II over a period of fifty-six months with approximately four hundred thousand American deaths," observes Bradley, who has written two acclaimed books about the Pacific War (Flags of our Fathers and Flyboys).  "So Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, with their mechanized weaponry, killed about the same per month -- seventy-two hundred -- as American civilizers did in the Philippines." 

Call this an "imperial baptism": US "ministering angels" at work.

Among the benefits of Christian culture the American Army shared with the Filipinos was the ancient ritual called the "water cure."




During World War II, American P.O.W.s were subjected to waterboarding by Japanese interrogators who, as convicted war criminals, experienced the long drop to the end of a hangman's rope. 

Decades earlier, American soldiers sent to "pacify" and "civilize" the archipelago -- “We come as ministering angels, not as despots,” warbled Senator Knute Nelson in praise of that noble venture -- would chant a marching cadence called "The Water Cure" in happy anticipation of their ministry:


Hurray, hurrah. We bring the Jubilee.
Hurray, Hurrah. The flag that makes him free.
Shove in the nozzle deep and let him taste of liberty.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!


We've come across the bounding main to kindly spread around
Sweet liberty whenever there are rebels to be found.
So hurry with the syringe boys. We've got him down and bound.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!...


Oh pump it up in him till he swells like a toy balloon.
The fool pretends that liberty is not a precious boon.
But we'll contrive to make him see the beauty of it soon.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!



Grover Flint, a first lieutenant in the 35th Infantry who served in the Philippines for a year and a half, later described how America's Ministering Angels used the "water cure" to fill Filipinos to the brim with liquid liberty:


"He [the victim] is simply held down, and then water is poured into his face, down his throat and nose from a jar, and that is kept up until the man gives some sign of giving in or becoming unconscious, and when he becomes unconscious he is simply rolled aside and he is allowed to come to.... His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but he can not drown." 

"Let him taste of liberty!"

Such treatment was appropriate, insisted Gen. Frederick Funston, whose troops -- with his knowledge and support -- executed helpless POWs, tortured civilians, massacred non-combatants, and raped countless women. 

The Filipinos, explained this exponent of pagan barbarism, are "an illiterate, semi-savage people, who are waging war, not against tyranny, but against Anglo-Saxon order and decency."


The "decency" of which Funston spoke so piously was famously displayed in a village called LaNog, the entire population of which was murdered on the orders of Captain Fred McDonald -- except for a single comely mestizo woman who was gang-raped by McDonald's officers and then turned over to the enlisted men for similar treatment. 


A particularly vigorous display of "Anglo-Saxon decency" took place in March 1906, when the Army mowed down roughly 1,000 Muslim men, women, and children who had taken refuge in the crater of an inert volcano.


"I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag," Roosevelt wrote, without a whisper of irony,  in a congratulatory cable to the commander. 

"A brilliant feat of arms": The Moro Massacre.

Mark Twain, who lent his gifted pen to the service of the anti-imperialist cause, pointed out that penning six hundred "helpless and weaponless" Filipinos "in a hole like rats in a trap" and then gunning them down at leisure  over a 36-hour period "from a safe position on the heights above" could hardly qualify as a brilliant feat of arms. This would have been true "even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets."


On the home front, Roosevelt and his comrades relentlessly de-humanized the Filipinos -- or, as they were commonly called, "Pacific Negroes."  

The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair would be a propaganda triumph for Roosevelt. Hundreds of thousands flocked to exhibits promoting America's imperial thrust into Asia, and depicting Filipinos (as well as Chinese and "uncivilized," non-westernized Japanese) as evolutionary throwbacks in need of Washington's stern but enlightened rule. Millions received this indoctrination second-hand through press coverage.


"As a keepsake souvenir to take home to the kids, fairgoers could purchase an `Album of Philippine Types,'" recalls Bradley. "Each Filipino type was represented by two photographs that looked like mug shots, which they were -- Roosevelt's scientists had searched Bilibid Prison in Manila to find `typical' Pacific Negroes. Fairgoers viewed more than one thousand photographs depicting a Philippines populated by robbers, murderers, and rapists."


Filipinos conscripted into America's imperial military were among the troops who marched past Roosevelt's reviewing stand during his second inaugural in March 1905. TR was heard commenting that these assimilated "Pacific Negroes" were "rejoicing in their shackles."

I wonder if Japan's short-lived conquest of the Philippines produced similar expressions of self-satisfaction from its imperial ruling class. 

I also find myself wondering how many of the Americans who perished in the Bataan Death March had been given a copy of the Roosevelt administration's "Album of Philippine Types" as children in order to advance their education regarding their duty to promote "Anglo-Saxon civilization" at bayonet point. 

And I detect nearly toxic levels of irony in the fact that at least some of the Americans who would later perish in the Pacific War saw the World's Fair exhibit celebrating the achievements of the "Japanese Empire" -- Washington's sub-contractor in "civilizing" Northern Asia.

Monument to 26 Christians martyred in Nagasaki during the 16th Century.

"In 1905, when he green-lit Japanese expansion, Roosevelt was forty-six years old and Baron Kaneko was fifty-two," notes Bradley. "Roosevelt would be dead fifteen years later, while Kaneko would live to hear Franklin Roosevelt condemn Japan for doing what Theodore Roosevelt had recommended." 


Kaneko died on May 16, 1942, just weeks before the Battle of Midway effectively ended Japan's dream of dominating the Pacific. 

To his credit, Kaneko exercised whatever influence he could muster to encourage peaceful relations between Japan and the United States; he opposed war with America as late as 1941. Had he lived three years longer Kaneko may have witnessed the aftermath of the August 9, 1945 atomic assault on Nagasaki, where just a generation earlier the skies were rent by American-led war chants in praise of the Imperial Japanese military. 


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Fool's Gold

In the year of the famine, When starvation and Black Death raged across the land, There were many driven by the Hunger To set sail for the Americas;

In search of a new life, and a new hope -- Oh, but there were some that couldn't cope; And they spent their lives in search of Fool's Gold.

Philip Parris Lynott, of blessed memory.

Go dtuga Dia suaimhneas da anam*



As they staggered from the ships that had carried them across the Atlantic, many of the Irishmen driven to America by the Famine were immediately accosted by recruiters trolling for warm bodies to fill federal uniforms.

The "Irish Achilles": Legendary warrior Cu Chulain, also known as the "Hound of Ulster."



The native pugnacity of the Celts is legendary (it's been said that all Irish ballads are about some combination of fighting, drinking, and dying), and more than a few of the Patriot heroes of our War for Independence were sons of Eire. So there was little reason to doubt that Irish recruits would acquit themselves well on the battlefield, assuming that they were well trained and motivated by a worthy cause.


Neither of those conditions was met in Washington's war on Mexico, a vulgar exercise in naked imperial greed that provoked Henry David Thoreau's immortal tax protest and prompted a defiant campaign against the conflict by a freshman Whig Congressman from Illinois. That Whig, a chap named Lincoln, would be denied a second term when his own party refused to re-nominate him -- and he would ultimately have a rather dramatic change of heart regarding the morality of aggressive war.


The Irish who enlisted in the US Army offered their blood on behalf of a country they had not yet come to know, and a government that had done nothing to earn their allegiance. Most of them were simply desperate for work of any kind, and the soldier's wage of $7 a month was sufficient to keep their loved ones from succumbing to hunger, a predator with which they were quite familiar.


Then, as now, the Jingo press was indecently eager to shed foreign blood, but didn't know quite what to make of the un-assimilated foreigners flooding into the army. Historian Anne-Marie O'Connor recalls: "The US anti-immigrant press of the time caricatured the Irish with simian features, portraying them as unintelligent and drunk and charging that they were seditiously loyal to the Pope."


Attitudes of that sort coalesced within the Army as well. Irish recruits often found themselves on the receiving end of various kinds of abuse. In anticipation of the conflict with Mexico, most of the Irish were quickly southbound to the border, and it was common for those who attended Mass to be accused of "consorting with the enemy" -- since the Catholic Irish were seen as having a natural affinity with the Catholic Mexicans.


After President Polk and General Taylor succeeded in provoking the war, many of the Irish recruits were outraged by the cruelties inflicted on priests and nuns. General Taylor blithely admitted on one occasion that "there is scarcely a form of crime that has not been reported to me as committed by them [the troops under his command]."

US Troops lay siege to Monterrey.


Those atrocities, coupled with the commonplace bigotry and injustice they experienced, had the effect of watering down the allegiance of the Irish troops -- and that allegiance was already a pretty thin broth.


These men had seen their homeland ravaged by a catastrophe created, in large measure, through British mercantilism. As Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute points out, those who fled the Potato Famine were the victims of "conquest, theft, bondage, protectionism, government welfare, public works, and inflation." Those beguiled into enlisting found themselves being used as cannon fodder in a war against people for whom they bore no natural grudge, and with whom they had much in common.


Nothing but Fool's Gold could be found at the end of that particular rainbow. Accordingly, many of the Irish recruits sloughed off their supposed obligations to the US government and chose to enlist instead with the Mexicans who were fighting on their own soil against an invading foreign army.


The banner of the "San Patricios" Battalion -- Irish expatriates who fought on behalf of Mexico against the invading US Army.


Was this desertion, or treason? No: It was a species of secession. Neither honor nor morality dictated that Irishmen should take up arms against Mexicans on behalf of Washington, D.C. Accordingly, hundreds of Irishmen simply repaired to a banner -- a shamrock green flag (hand-embroidered by the nuns of San Luis Potosi) bearing a Celtic harp and the legend Erin go bragh (Ireland Forever) and a cause -- the defense of their fellow Catholics -- that actually commanded their loyalty.


The most notable of the "Red Guards" -- as they were called by the Mexicans because of the red hair and sunburned complexions that typified the displaced Irishmen -- was John Riley of Galway, who could have been called a "premature Wetback-in-reverse": Denied the opportunity to attend Mass, Riley swam across the Rio Grande to Mexico, fleeing Washington's jurisdiction in search of religious freedom. Other Irish refugees followed him, and Riley was eventually appointed captain of the 200-member "San Patricios" Battalion (taken from the Spanish name for St. Patrick), which would go on to fight five major engagements against the US Army.


Ah, but this is an Irish story, so you know it must have ended badly.


The August 1847 battle at Churubusco -- appropriately, a town named for an Aztec war god -- was the bloodiest engagement of the war. The San Patricios fought with doomed courage, losing more than half their number in combat with nearly all the rest falling into the hands of the enemy -- their former employer, the US Army.


Drumhead military tribunals quickly sentenced most of the San Patricios to hang as "deserters." John Riley -- by that time a Brevet Major -- was one of the few spared the noose, receiving instead fifty lashes of the whip and being branded with a two-inch letter "D." This was an ironically suitable punishment, inflicted as it was by an Army serving the political interests of the chattel slave lobby.

[As the first commenter below observes, we shouldn't forget that the Mexican government of the time, whose handiwork was visible at Goliad and the Alamo, was a foul and brutal outfit as well.]


The San Patricios are almost entirely unknown on this side of the Rio Grande (an earnest but indifferently produced 1999 film about them did nothing to rescue their story from undeserved obscurity). The Mexican government, a regime nearly as filthy and despicable as the one ruling us, periodically commemorates the San Patricios, trying to poach the credit for the courage and honor those men displayed on the battlefield.


There were American soldiers -- Robert E. Lee, to cite the most obvious example -- who distinguished themselves for valor and leadership on behalf of an ignoble cause. But the only US soldiers who actually fought for freedom in that entire conflict were the supposedly treasonous Irishmen who shed that uniform and took up arms against Washington's invasion of Mexico.


As someone of Mexican-Irish ancestry (I've occasionally advised people, "Don't make me angry, and don't get me drunk"**), I've long wondered about the natural affinity between people of those two very different countries. Catholicism obviously provides a strong bond, as does the fact that both Mexicans and Irish, from my experience and observations, seem to be prone to a fatalistic outlook on life.


What I find truly inspiring about the San Patricios, however, is the fact that those long-suffering men didn't simply surrender to the inevitable. Survivors of a famine and plague engineered by the Empire that occupied and mis-managed their homeland, disillusioned soldiers of a government that was becoming as rapacious as the one they had fled, they still had enough fight in them to do battle on behalf of what they honestly believed to be right in spite of prohibitive odds and the the long drop to the end of a rope that awaited them if they lost.


Chances are that we'll need more than a little of that indomitable pugnacity ourselves, pretty soon.




Obiter Dicta

Yes, this was supposed to be my St. Patrick's Day installment, but I was too busy panicking yesterday to publish it.

If you haven't done so already, I urge you to read Tom Eddlem's account of his experience as a federal juror -- that is, a "wrinkle" to be ironed out in the cause of "justice," as some tax-fed and promotion-hungry prosecutors pretend to understand it. Tom's piece is exquisitely written and terrifically thought-provoking. After you've read it you'll begin to understand why I consider it to be a blessing to have Tom as a professional associate, and an honor to have him as a friend.


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Dum spiro, pugno!


_______
*"May God grant peace to his soul," in approximate translation.
** The former is good advice, the latter gratuitous, since I'm a teetotaler.

The War Criminal on the Twenty-Dollar Bill

The village was completely unprepared when the siege began. Propelled by an insatiable lust to avenge the recent destruction of a military installation, the attackers chose the small, undefended community as the target of a reprisal raid.

But this wasn’t a battle. It was a slaughter.

Within a few hours, not a living thing was left behind in the village, save only a few troops from the attacking force. The villagers who had weapons faced the larger and better-armed invaders unflinchingly, dying where they stood with their faces to the enemy. “For good measure,” writes one historian, the attackers “shot down women and children until the ground ran vermilion.”

Still, the atavistic appetite for vengeance was not slaked. When it was discovered that 45 people – including women and children – had sought refuge in a cabin, the assailants surrounded the crude little dwelling, set it afire, and both watched and listened as the flames claimed the lives of shrieking, terrified people who cried out to their gods for deliverance.

The following day, after the charred debris of that cabin had cooled, a food cache was found in its basement. The invaders had undertaken a long forced march to reach the village, and their supplies were inadequate to keep the army fed. So from the basement the troops retrieved a large supply of potatoes that had been roasted in the fatty runoff that resulted as their victims were burned to death.

Fortified by their cannibalistic repast, the attackers went on to repeat their exploits at a larger nearby town, this time setting scores of houses ablaze and burning hundreds of civilians. Within a short time they had defeated the main body of their enemy and secured the surrender of their leader, who offered himself for execution as a ransom for the women and children who had been driven into the wild to escape the attackers.

For the victorious commander of the terror campaign, these assaults were simply a down-payment on a more ambitious project, one that would require the expulsion of tribal enemies from their lands, and the extermination of those who didn’t leave. Carrying out the policy he envisioned would eventually claim the lives of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

This story could have been set in Darfur, took place in Alabama, amid the “Red Sticks” Creek uprising in 1813.*

The first incident described above, the Tallussahatchee Massacre, was intended as a reprisal for a devastating Creek attack on Ft. Mims, a slapdash installation that was the product of shoddy workmanship and strategic ineptitude.

The Creeks, roiled the revanchist “Red Sticks” movement, were brutal in their attack on Ft. Mims, an engagement they considered necessary to turn back encroaching settlers. Savage as that attack was, it was a "battle," not a "massacre" (as it's commonly called): The fort was a military installation, after all. Though atrocities were committed during the assault, at least some of the Creeks took care to spare non-combatants. One of them, a warrior named Sanota, placed his life at considerable risk to Vicey Cornells and seven of her children, whom he fed and cared for until he could take them to a white settlement.

Of course, there was no reciprocal sense of restraint on the part of those who attacked Tallussahatchee, a target that was chosen specifically because it was defenseless. The next morning, as the militiamen digested the grisly meal described above, their commander gleefully promised that they would “repeat Tallussahatchee” in their next engagement. This was too much for at least some of the men to bear, and they rebelled. Somehow, their commander was able to maintain discipline long enough to carry out the second massacre.

As many of you already know, the architect of these atrocities is the figure who stares out at us from the twenty dollar bill, his craggy features seeming to radiate benevolence. To the Creeks, Choctaw, and others who were the firs subjects of his “Indian Removal” program, Jackson was known variously as Jacksa Chula Harho (“Jackson Old and Fierce”), “Sharp Knife,” and, simply, The Devil.

Among the backwoodsmen who rallied to fight the Red Sticks under Jackson was a Tennessean named Davy Crockett. I’d like to think that Crockett was among those who tried to desert Jackson’s army following Tallussahatchee, and that disgust over Jackson’s acts of undisguised mass murder helped turn Crockett into a foe of “Old Hickory,” but I can’t demonstrate from available records that this was the case.

Red Eagle, the chief who offered himself on behalf of his people in a conference with Jackson at Horseshoe Bend, had been born William Weatherford. His father was an American settler in Georgia, his mother a woman of mixed Scottish/French/Creek ancestry. His brother John had chosen to follow the Euro-American path. As is so often the case in such episodes from our history, Red Eagle displayed greater valor, boldness, and compassion than that demonstrated by the forces of “Christian” civilization.

"Old Hickory" meets with Red Eagle (aka William Weatherford): In defense of his homeland, the Creek war chief (who shared Jackson's Scottish ancestry on his mother's side) offered himself for execution in exchange for mercy toward the women and children of his tribe. That offer tells us something about the savagery of Jackson's campaign against the Creeks.

Andrew Jackson was a man of many worthy accomplishments. He was certainly right about the evil represented by the Bank of the United States. He was also an individual of considerable personal courage. This doesn’t change the fact that he was a war criminal who presided over one of history’s larger atrocities: The “Trail of Tears” and beginning of continent-wide dispossession of the Indians.

The term “Jacksonian” is often wedded to various kinds of populism, as well as the attendant spoils system. But the term, as we shall see anon, has recently come to be used to describe a certain type of authoritarian pseudo-populism that supports both foreign war and the kind of dictatorial presidential leadership that is produced by war.

The fruits of the "Jacksonian" worldview: Iraqis comb the rubble of their homes in search of the remains of their families.

Many conservatives – such as myself, back when I considered that label an adequate description of my convictions – have applauded President Jackson’s defiant, dismissive reaction to a Supreme Court decision he disdained: “That’s Mr. Marshall’s ruling. Now, let’s see him enforce it.” For me, that utterance lost its luster when I learned its context.

Rather than being a principled reaction to judicial activism, Jackson was expressing his dictatorial arrogance in setting at naught the Supreme Court’s finding that the federal government actually had to recognize the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation within its own territory, as well as the legal, moral, and constitutional obligation to honor treaties.

That 1832 ruling (Worcester v. Georgia), followed a previous decision (Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia) in which Justice Marshall expressed tremendous sympathy for the besieged Indians, while pleading lack of jurisdiction to uphold their plea for a protective injunction. In Worcester, a group of Christian missionaries living on Cherokee land defied a Georgia law requiring whites to obtain a license in order to live on Indian lands. The Court upheld that claim, pointing out that states had no jurisdiction within Indian lands.

Jackson, with the eager support of Congress and Georgia legislators, simply ignored that ruling, and proceeded to enforce laws passed in 1828 that enabled the expropriation and expulsion of the Cherokees to Indian Territory – now known by an anglicized version of the name it was given by the Creeks, Okla Houma (“Red People”).

The spurious laws Jackson and his cronies had created, wrote Justice Marshall in the Cherokee Nation ruling, were designed “to annihilate the Cherokees as a political society and to seize, for the use of Georgia, the lands of the Nation which have been assured to them by the United States in solemn treaties repeatedly made and still in force.”

Marshall continued, in words that both recited and prefigured history:

“A people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy, our arts and our arms, have yielded their lands by successive treaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of the residue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensive territory than is deemed necessary to their comfortable subsistence.”

And now the Cherokees, like many other Indian communities to come after them, were to be deprived of even that inadequate “residue” of their own lands.

Unfortunately, Marshall concluded, both the lack of jurisdiction and the uncontainable ambition of Jackson and his comrades made it impossible to protect the Indians from the rapacity of the federal government. “If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended,” he lamented, “this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.”

In “Old Hickory’s” war of extermination against the Indians we find the definitive expression of what Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations calls the “Jacksonian” temperament, an attitude examined in depth in Read’s book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. “Jacksonians” are one of four dominant schools of thought identified by Mead, the other three being the “Hamiltonian,” “Wilsonian,” and “Jeffersonian” perspectives.

Hamiltonians, by Read’s assessment, pursue a foreign policy rooted in mercantilism – government-backed commercial and industrial expansion. Wilsonians are crusading multilateralists devoted to propagating democracy abroad and building transnational institutions. Jeffersonians are intensely skeptical of an interventionist foreign policy and institutional entanglements. Jacksonians, for their part, are bellicose nationalists who spurn multilateralism and have no use for big gub’mint – except when it’s engaged in what they regard as the worthy and ennobling business of slaughtering foreigners not inclined to take the American yoke.

Not surprisingly, given Mead’s CFR affiliation, he finds something of value in all of these schools of thought – except for the Jeffersonian perspective. Jacksonians may turn up their noses at the institutions the CFR has built with such guileful care, but they make excellent shock troops when it’s time to expand the empire, or to punish restive provinces thereof.

Jacksonians are over-represented in the military, particularly among the ground-pounders. Meanwhile, the Hamiltonians collect dividends on their Halliburton and KBR stock, and the Wilsonians attend posh diplomatic functions and sanctify the bloody business of empire by intoning the proper internationalist incantations.

What makes the Jacksonians so valuable, Mead observes, is their appetite for “eliminationist” warfare, as exemplified in the frontier wars against the Indians: “It was not enough [for Jacksonians] to defeat a tribe in battle; one had to `pacify’ the tribe, to convince it utterly and totally that resistance was and always would be futile and destructive.”

As Professor John Moser of Ashland University points out, the Jacksonian way of war always means “carrying the war to the civilian population” as a way of utterly defeating an enemy – including enemies whose only crime was to defend their own lands against Washington’s designs. This attitude is manifest today whenever conservatives (a better description would be “frenzied nationalists,” or even Lew Rockwell’s coinage, “Red State Fascists”) lament the inadequate savagery of Washington’s war in Iraq, or when such people casually endorse nuclear strikes against Iran or Saudi Arabia.

The cultural influence of contemporary Jacksonians appears to have peaked in 2006. Disillusionment with the Iraq War and with the Dear Leader seems to have encouraged a substantial number of defections from that camp. But we shouldn’t underestimate the potency or resiliency of the Jacksonian element, particularly if they have to spend the next four years steeping in resentment under the presidency of arch-Wilsonian Barack Obama.

Theme-Appropriate Video Extra






(Thanks to Scott Horton.)

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*I first heard the story of the Talussahatche Massacre (not "battle," as some persist in describing it) from Billy Bob Thornton's version of Davy Crockett in the 2004 film The Alamo. At the time I suspected the reference to Jackson's men dining on charnel house potatoes was the depraved invention of a revisionist screenwriter. It isn't. See, for example, Gloria Jahoda's 1975 book Trail of Tears, pages 11-15.



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