Origins of American Bellicosity

[Steve Blair]

you also have to consider that many Americans during the earlier years of the country claimed German ancestry. They made up a good chunk (largest ethnic group after the Irish) of the Regular Army prior to the end of the 19th century, and there was real concern in some quarters about the public willingness to get involved in World War I due to said "German influence." It's also worth noting the impact that the Prussian Army system had on folks like Sherman, Sheridan, and Emory Upton. Most of the regimental reorganization plans that surfaced during the 1880s made at least passing reference to the German "community system" where a regiment would have a home station and conduct its recruiting there. That and the reference to Ohio before the Civil War as "America's Prussia" is certainly interesting...

That said, it's much more likely that the claimed "American character" is really a combination of all these factors...for good and ill. Efforts to ignore that blending, attributing it to one ethnic group or the other, really miss the point. IMO, anyhow.

[Ken White]

Which is but one reason many Europeans have an ill concealed disdain for us.

Steve Blair:

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:

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...

[Dayuhan]

Are Americans "unusually bellicose", in any empirically verifiable sense? By what standard? Relative to whom? Is bellicose action a function of inherent bellicosity, or of capacity?

Europeans may now see Americans as bellicose, but it seems to me that they showed a fair degree of bellicosity themselves in their day.

[Ken White]

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).

[Dayuhan]

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).

European complaints about American "bellicosity" always seem to me reminiscent of a campaign for chastity initiated by a faded whore grown too old to ply the trade... but perhaps that's just me!

[jmm99]

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.

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.

[Ken White]

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:

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.

Single Barrel shotguns at four paces. Different...

[J Wolfsberger]

European complaints about American "bellicosity" always seem to me reminiscent of a campaign for chastity initiated by a faded whore grown too old to ply the trade... but perhaps that's just me!

Win.

[Abu Suleyman]

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.

[Greyhawk]

...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.

My mother tells the story from her memory of her father - a World War ONE battlefield vet, coming home one day in December '41 and telling his sons "you'd better oil up your guns, boys." The four who were old enough did.

Grandpa McDowell once told a too-young-to-appreciate-it (or write it down) me tales of his grandfather who fought (for Ohio) in the Civil War. (But these were not two-fisted tales of glory, in fact they were rather dull to my 12-year old ears.)

He was, however, a Deacon in the local church and one of the quietest men I've ever known. I wouldn't be surprised if those seven words above were all he had to say regarding Pearl Harbor.