Origins of American Bellicosity

[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.

[George L. Singleton]

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.

[Fuchs]

The word "Scoti" is actually Roman and describes tribes from Ireland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoti

The Romans called the tribes in modern Scotland "Picti".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picts

I don't know how the "Scot" thing moved to Scotland, but "Scoti" isn't the same as "Scots" at all. Well, except that both are based on Celtic tribes.



B2topic; I wouldn't dig deeper than at most two generations to find reasons for modern phenomenons.

You may search for a root cause and find it, but that root cause would have become irrelevant if in the meantime another factor had changed the outcome. The lack of such another factor is as important as the root cause.

[Abu Suleyman]

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.

I'm going to assume this is a joke. In the 1840's and 50's there were barely 50k people of any denomination in Utah. In fact, the entire Mormon migration brough about 70k people to what was then known as 'Upper California', and didn't start until 1847. The closest thing I can think of that resembles that was in 1857, and the Utah War, which was between the US Gov't and the local Mormon's. In relative terms it was bloodless, although there was the Mountain Meadows massacre, where over one hundred southerners (mostly from Arkansas) were killed. They may have been Baptist, but they weren't attempting to settle in the Great Basin.

>Fuch's, I couldn't agree more. That is the point I was trying to make.

[George L. Singleton]

My typo error to have written 50,000. The religious wars which did involve Baptists vs. Mormons (I was raised as a Southern Baptist and know the dogma pretty well) was in several states, not just Utah, and ran from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois to and including Utah over a period of years preceding and gain immediately after the US Civil War.

The conglomerate numbers killed on both sides over many years was estimated in putting bits and pieces together at more like 500, not 50,000.

A major goof on my part, and I do apologize!

[George L. Singleton]

I continue to stake my long term historic position that the oldest I can find use of Scoti means and refers to Irish/being Irish/of Ireland.

Thus I use the analogy that "Scot Irish" in linguistics is the same as saying "Irish Irish" when translated.

The geopolitics of Northern Ireland are much later in history and are not considered at all in my older research dating back to Roman times.

I appreciate your comments but disagree to the extent I have just re-explained here. All points of view are welcome, but mine is driven in part by family history...circa 1400 an Irish priest named Gillis, which line my Mother was descended from, was sent to the Highlands.

There as was common in frontier priest postings he married and had 12 children, while continuing to practice his vocation as a Roman Catholic Priest.

My Great Grandfather Donal Gillis was a Cumberland Presbyterian minister in Elba, Alabama. After the Civil War his area had lost so many men in that war that his Presbyterian and a local "hard shell" Baptist Church agreed to merge to have enough people to support one unified church. Donal Gillis won over the Baptist minister in a coin toss, then as the Probate Judge of Coffee Co., Ala. Judge Gillis appointed the ex-Baptist minister he just defeated for the merged church pastorate as his Chief Clerk of the Probate Court!

The earliest accounts of the Scotti are from Roman sources, particularly Ammianus Marcellinus who describes their relentless raids on Roman Britain. The Scotti are confirmed by later sources to be the Gaelic speaking inhabitants of Ireland.

Scoti or Scotti was the generic Latin name used by the Romans to describe those who sailed from Ireland to conduct raids on Roman Britain. It was thus synonymous with the modern term Gaels. It is not believed that any Gaelic groups called themselves Scoti in ancient times, except when referring to themselves in Latin

In the 400s, these raiders established the kingdom of Dál Riata in the Highlands. As this kingdom expanded in size and influence, the name was applied to all its subjects – hence the modern terms Scot, Scottish and Scotland.

The origin of the word Scoti or Scotti is uncertain. Charles Oman derives it from the Gaelic word Scuit (a man cut-off), suggesting that a Scuit was not a general word for the Gael but a band of outcast raiders.[2] In the 19th century Aonghas MacCoinnich of Glasgow proposed that Scoti was derived from the Gaelic word Sgaothaich