Origins of American Bellicosity

[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...

[Icebreaker]

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).

[Dayuhan]

Let me give a specific example. It has been proven that a higher percentage of the American population suffers from hyperactivity then other countries.

I'd be very curious to see the data and the points of origin of the data on this one... I think it's pretty generally recognized that the US medical community is much quicker to diagnose mental "disorders" or the like than those of many countries. Is this a difference in actual incidence or a difference of diagnostic criteria?

I recall some discussions of ADD/ADHD in an International School setting... among the Western parents these are common household terms; among the Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean parents there was mystification: they had never even heard of them. Is this a genetic difference or a difference between the emphasis different cultures place on training in self-control and discipline in the home? It wouldn't surprise me to discover that many who are diagnosed as hyperactive in the US might in another culture simply be considered a bit difficult.

[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.

[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.