Origins of American Bellicosity
This article, Blood Brothers, The Dual Origins of American Bellicosity, by Stephen Peter Rosen (2009), was linked on another thread. The author's thesis is:
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The United States will remain an unusually warlike nation in the years to come, and the reason is that we are in fact an unusually warlike people, despite having become wealthier and more multi-ethnic over the years. Our warlike nature resides in the lingering influence of the early environment and demography of British North America, subsequently reinforced by the impact of the War for Independence, the Civil War and World War II. My argument is that the United States had two near-simultaneous foundings, one by Scots-Irish people ready to fight when challenged, and one by Puritans ready to use force when legally authorized. The founding experiences of the Frontier and the Revolution mingled the distinct but mutually reinforcing predispositions of these two groups, producing an American national culture united in the idea that being an American citizen meant being ready to fight and die in its wars. What divided these two groups, and divides them still, was not the question of whether to fight, but of when.
It strikes me that the many (all ?) here at SWC, interested in US military history, might have more than one critique of the author's argument - as well as multiple agreements and disagreements with specific points of that argument.
If so, this is an opportunity to weigh in on topics which continually show up in more current-oriented threads.
Steve's right, we're mongrels...
Which is but one reason many Europeans have an ill concealed disdain for us. ;)
Steve Blair:
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The whole "Scots-Irish" thing is, IMO, really overdone. It MIGHT be there if you really want to reach for it, but I honestly don't think that anything Rosen is talking about is especially "unique" to Americans. If anything I might take the position that our reputed bellicosity has its roots in the (possibly perceived) existence of outside threats to the existence of the nation and from emulating the example of the British in many ways.
I'm inclined to disagree on the extent of the Scotch Irish infusion for the reasons I outline below. My personal; view is that there is a streak of American bellicosity and that it is the result of a number of things and the Scotch Irish influence is only one and not that critical. I think you're correct in that much of it hinges on outside threats -- or even the perception of them -- and that is a British inheritance. As are the Scotch Irish...
JMM:
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Except for the religious differences, it is hard to see that much difference in how the Scots-Irish and Famine Irish reacted to challenges.
The Scotch Irish and Irish reactions to challenges are similar but there are two major differences. The Scotch Irish don't forget and forgive, the Irish do. One but not the only formative difference was religion, Presbyterianism is not for the faint of heart...
Another was that while the Irish were mistreated by the British, the Scotch Irish were mistreated by the British and the Irish, had been frequently betrayed by both and when they came to America, quickly found that they were despised by the Puritans, the Anglican, and the Catholics (or those Welsh Methodists...) -- so they, used to fighting, moved to the border lands and away from the coasts to get land of their own and if that meant fighting Indians, so be it. Thus New Hampshire, western PA , VA and the Carolinas got settled and these folks continued to move west as the nation looked that way. They kept fighting Indians and other American as well as each other -- but any fight between them was put on hold if anyone even looked as though they might interfere or take advantage of the fight to do something.
The Irish and Germans, as Steve said, joined the Army in large numbers -- the Scotch Irish did not; fighting was fun, not work and people telling you what to do reminded them of the British and those snooty Anglicans -- but oh, by the way, give a War -- they'd appear. The Revolution was fought by large quantities of Scotch Irish, each subsequent war has seen a little less obvious participation as other ethnicities proliferated. But they're still out there and some, like me also have some German (thus it didn't offend me to say zu befehl, Hauptman), some English, Welsh and pure catholic Irish. Since I tend to overreact to minor and even inadvertent slights, condescension, provocation or insults, I would suspect the Scotch Irish quotient to be quite high even if I didn't know it was the predominant blood line on both sides. Point is that the mixing makes us what we are -- but that Scotch Irish distrust of "others" (ANY others...), expectation of perfidy and adherence to Family ('my people') pervades us all. The Scotch Irish in early America were noted for their wanton ways -- loud, rowdy and very tough girls, and the genre itself for the huge numbers of kids they had and their willingness, unlike the Catholic Irish and Lutheran or Catholic Germans (much less those Anglicans) to hop in bed with or marry outside the clan or sept (they used both, septs belonged to Clans. Some of the MacGregors are a sept of MacGregor of MacGregor, others of Clan Campbell). ;)
Oh, and those Europeans -- they also think we're loud, rowdy and excessively tough...
Not really unusually so at all, in fact we're not vey warlike
nor do we do war all that well. We produce a lot of neat stuff...
The Europeans were for centuries more bellicose than we were or are today -- we simply seem more bellicose to them (and to our Europhiles and our own intelligentsia) in comparison to Europe today.
That is not empirically verifiable -- I'm suspicion of most things that are -- but I have run it by few people and 99% agree (actually, all seven agreed but my wife is never gonna give me 100% on anything).
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Agree with Steve & Ken ....
on the German-American contribution to the US military. How could I forget the portrait of GEN Eisenhower on the wall of the German-American family we lived above during WWII and the early 50s - and his portrait as President which replaced it.
I'm gratified to learn that the Munster Irish have the gift of forgetting and forgiving - a trait clearly exemplified by one of those Virginian Anglican Irish, whose mild character is amply illustrated by the attached .pdf file.
It's been over 40 years since Jim Mitchell (Ulster Presbyterian) and I concluded, over appropriate beverages and multiple sessions of his Clancy Bros collection, that all Irish, North and South, are the same regardless of their "damned religions". We still think that way (last time we talked, a few weeks ago).
I have to admit our's is a minority view - and liable to shelling from both sides. Our favorite was the "Old Orange Flute" because it showed the dumbness on both sides of the supposed issue.
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In the county Tyrone, in the town of Dungannon
Where many a ruction myself had a hand in
Bob Williamson he lived, a weaver by trade
And all of us thought him the stout orange blade. ....
A bit off the mark - and probably more applicable to why Northern Ireland has been bellicose.
Sounds like he was Irish no question.
But it also sounds as though he was willing to forget and forgive to an extent as after the original challenge he left it alone.
Until, that is, a certain Scotch Irish gentleman intruded:
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General Mason did not accept (McCarty's challenge), being a Senator of the United States, but after his term had expired, while riding on a stage to Fredericksburg with General Andrew Jackson, the subject of the challenge came up, when Jackson told Mason that his refusal to accept was an injury to his standing and as he was no longer in office he should now challenge McCarty.
Mason being devious, got McCarty to rechallenge him by taking advantage of of the Celt mercurial temperment. :wry:
Single Barrel shotguns at four paces. Different...
Americans are a self-selected group
Americans are a “self-selected” group. By that I mean that the people that came here (Irish, English, Scots-Irish, German….) were a little bit different then their countrymen. To l eave home and cross an ocean to a continent unexplored and full of dangers requires a certain mindset (or level of mental illness).
Let me give a specific example. It has been proven that a higher percentage of the American population suffers from hyperactivity then other countries. Psychologists believe that originally the genetic pre-disposition for hyperactivity was fairly evenly spread throughout the human race. But think about it – you have two bothers living somewhere in Europe. One is hyperactive and one is not - which is more likely to immigrate to the New World. The hyperactive one would more likely move to America. Here he is more likely to meet a woman who is hyperactive and to pass down that trait to his children.
Who would be more likely to leave England, Ireland or Germany a mild mellow guy he gets a long with people, or the kind of guy who could get into a fight a church? The wild and wooly frontier would appeal more to him then to the more socialized fellow. Over time both “nature” and “nurture” brought out the more aggressive nature in people.
This is not to say anything bad. Aggression is a survival positive characteristic in many situations (if not carried to extreme). Also, I realize that many people who came here to America did not do so willingly (Africans brought as slaves, the Irish whose only other choice was starve).
Determinism and the Democratic Peace
This entire article smacks of determinism. To argue that issues at the founding of the United States, and the cultures involved therein have any bearing at all on today's policies requires some sort of mechanism whereby such issues are perpetuated to today. The closest that Rosen comes to that is "Child rearing" techniques of the Scotch-Irish and the Protestants. However, I am pretty sure that outside of a few groups which may still be around, those techniques died out decades if not centuries ago. Sans such techniques, the only explanation for why todays Scots Irish or people of "Puritan" extraction would in any way resemble those of past descent is some sort of genetic/cultural determinism.
The question then remains, insofar as Scots Irish and Puritans are not unique to the US(Canada, Great Britain, Australia?), why then is such a culture unique to the US. Of course, the answer is, that the US is not particularly bellicose, and our wars are almost always less popular at the time that they are being fought than they are remembered. One example given by Rosen is the Mexican American war, which was actually tremendously unpopular, and opposed broadly by the opposition Republicans, led in part by Abraham Lincoln. I remember reading in Gallup polls that support for WWII in Dec 1941 was about 60%, after Pearl Harbor!
It is interesting that Rosen would bring up John Mearsheimer in support of his argument, insofar as anyone who has read The Tragedy of Great Power Politics could tell you that according to Mearsheimer, culture has nothing to do with bellicosity, one way or the other. As a structural realist, Mearsheimer argues that structure is what creates bellicosity. Therefore, the real tragedy is not that the U.S. cannot be content with its safety behind borders, but that because of the security dilemma no Great Power can ever be content to simply rest within its borders. The reason that Europe was bellicose in the past, and is now not so, is not that they have received some cultural enlightenment but because they are no longer great powers.
In the end, Rosen seems like he is trying to argue against the theory of Democratic Peace, but he picks only one explanation of it. I am simpathetic to his intuition. Nevertheless, he has no mechanism, nor justification past genetics to believe that even if the premises which he sets forward as occuring at the founding are true continue to today. Moreover, he never shows, and I think that there is a great deal of question whether there is reason to believe that the U.S. is more bellicose at all. Attacking only the cultural explanation of the democratic peace with another cultural explanation boils down to claiming that there is no such thing as the democratic peace. Unfortunately, that argument has been had over and over again, in much better publications, and ceased to be interesting a long time ago.
Abstratc demographic and linguistic comments
1. The Gaelic word for Irish is "Scotti."
2. Thus the use of the term, not matter what meaning some would want to attribute to it, of Scot-Irish linguistically is Irish-Irish!
3. Our colonial and revolutionary era ancestors were of all faiths, not just one or another. A Mr. Levy, who is buried in downtown Boston, MA in perhaps the oldest city cemtery...I have visited the site of Mr. Levy's grave...was a Colonial era Jew who gave and gave until he died a pauper, having given his great fortune to helping start and save during the Revolutionary War today's America.
4. In Colonial Virginia the British leaning Episcopalians persecuted and placed a religious tax on the Baptists.
5. In later years, the Baptists who relocated into Utah fought a huge range war with the Mormons, in which a total of 50,000 of both denominations were killed, not just wounded, killed, in the 1840s into the 1850s in Utah.
6. To me, and I am an old History major with a minor in Political Science from undergrad days (at the second oldest chair in history in the US...College of A&S, University of Alabama...oldest chair in history being at Harvard U.) we are a polygot nation of growing religous diversity. Frictions, ethnic and religious of the past were overcome, and that will be the case today in the US by the time our next generation or two comes into being.
In summary, bellicoisity being demographically and religiously defined seems off the wall to me. Real world domestic and foreign affairs are a simplier and truer course to study. War is still the oldest and main means of waging foreign policy by all nations.