War as a Public Good
Understanding the logic of previous eras
One challenge to doing research across historical eras is coming to grips with the unspoken assumptions—the foundations of thought in earlier eras.
This compounds the usual task of trying to understand our own time. Anyone who thinks about the ways different groups perceive what is happening right now will quickly understand that shared assumptions are elusive, obscured deliberately or unconsciously. What do contemporary Democrats and Republicans take for granted about world politics? What are the foundations of contemporary “Western” thought? What unites the Global North and South—not, to be sure, in terms of action but in terms of shared frames of reference?
There are answers to those questions, but they are hard to identify. As a result, it is always easier to make assumptions about what is shared than to test them, since testing usually reveals that the assumptions are wrong. And those are the informed guesses of a participant in the world; when one examines earlier eras, one is on much less sure ground, as all the knowledge one has about previous eras has to be won through explicit study rather than picked up from being in the world. It’s the difference between learning how to tip in an American restaurant by growing up in the United States and studying the custom in a classroom somewhere else. There’s always something more to learn, something critical that’s missing.
So it is with trying to understand the 19th century of the United States and how Americans viewed foreign policy. So much is different. Americans of the era didn’t assume global leadership, and isolation was, more or less, the order of the day—more or less because Americans continually expanded into other countries, founded other countries, took over other countries, and upset the global economic order almost without noticing it. And “isolation” is a funny word for a people who were far more open to immigration and to social meddling than they would later pretend to be—what were all those missionaries doing abroad, if not engaging in international relations?
Perhaps most telling, of course, is how different the assumed role of the U.S. military was. Americans today simply assume their military strength is a constant reference for the world, and you can hardly watch an evening of primetime television or a selection of top movies without encountering the strength of the U.S. military as a fundamental constant of the U.S. mental universe. In the nineteenth century, aside from a couple of wars that were mostly unremarked in civilized countries, the U.S. military was a pipsqueak, and certainly not the tool of power projection it would later be. When the U.S. decided to begin building modern steel warships in the 1880s, the resulting ABCD ships (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and auxiliary Dolphin) had modern engines—and, at Congress’s insistence, effing sails.
What did these people think about war? Well, a great many of them were uninterested in military might, and there were few organized interest groups bent on promoting military interests. (There were some.) As a result, I think, those who wanted the United States to play a more traditional great-power role went—forgive the demotic phrase—a little crazy. And so it is with Stephen Luce, a U.S. Navy admiral and leader of the U.S. Naval War College.
In 1891, Luce published an essay in the North American Review arguing for the many benefits of war. “War,” Luce argued, “is the malady of nations; the disease is terrible while it lasts, but purifying in its results. It tries a nation and chastens it, as sickness or adversity tries and chastens the individual. There is a wisdom that comes only of suffering, whether to the family or to the aggregation of families—the nation. Man is perfected through suffering.”
War, for lack of a better word, is good.
Why is it good? Because war provides for “the forming of national character, the shaping of a people’s destiny, and the spreading of civilization.” War is a spur to greatness and a crucible of accomplishments. You know what’s bad, Luce argues? Peace and prosperity: “As adversity and opposition toughen the mental and moral fibre and temper the spirit of man, so riches and easily-acquired success enervate the strongest character and unfit it for protracted effort. It is the same with nations." Luxury, he writes, “becomes more destructive than the sword.”
Most of the essay is standard Western civ triumphalist stuff, in which Luce is careful to say that he’s not arguing that war is good or anything but in which war is plainly cast as playing a salutary role. Bit by bit, it becomes clear that Luce thinks that history has been unfolding according to a plan, or at least developing toward an apex, in which cycles of discipline and decline lead to progressively higher development. He has no sense of perspective: the overthrow of the Persian Empire, the rise of Rome, and the fusing of “the Dane and Saxon, Angle and Norman, on the soil of Britain” all occupy the same scale. So, too, are the measures of “civilization” manifold, be they the spread of democracy, the growth of industry, or the advent of Christianity—Rome, for instance, is justified as a force that “served to propagate the work of Greece and the work of Judea”; you may have heard of the Judeo-Christian-Roman synthesis, which all parties agreed at the time.
What is clear, however, is Luce’s faith in war: “war has made possible the slow, but certain, development of the great law of human progress, and of the principles of democracy.” And from that it holds that for the United States to claim the mandate of heaven it is time for the United States to be able to make war—not least because “human affairs are directed by a power above and beyond this world, for the ultimate good of his race”.
This mentality is, by this point, utterly foreign to me. My academic training has geared me to see war as, in an important respect, just a failure of bargaining—and a rare failure at that. It’s also prepped me to perceive war largely in terms of costs, with the gainers being relative at best. The evidence on whether war has any particular advantage in spurring innovation is also a little mixed—perhaps it accelerates some innovations but retards others. And if I were to write in a journal article that war results from the machinations of Yahweh, well, I’d publish in some pretty obscure places.
Luce, it should be said, can’t be taken as representative of Americans of the era; he is an exceptional case even within the militarist camp. It’s also clear from reading his work how academic the case for war is, even in Luce’s telling; he had seen some action in the Civil War as the skipper of a monitor, but this is very far from being at, say, Antietam, or even an anonymous skirmish in some Tennessee valley slick with guts and tears.
Nevertheless, at a fundamental level, Luce is making an argument you’d be a little hard pressed to find in analogous venues today (the North American Review was a serious, leading journal of the time). War, for Luce, is a public good. It is not costly in the long run—it is beneficial. War creates more than it destroys, and nurtures more than it kills. Go too long without war—and especially without making war on a superior foe—and you will end up weakened, effete: “China, to-day, presents a picture of what the modern world would have been without war,” Luce argues. (It is in such sentences that we immediately discern that China, despite existing in the same world as “modern” Europe, is, to Luce, not really part of the modern world—the same year, but not the same era.)
This is a loony position. It is also self-contradictory. Later, Luce argues that one of the benefits of practicing war is creating what we would now term a credible deterrent: “The mere presence of the American army on our southern frontier in 1866 was sufficient to cause the collapse of Louis Napoleon’s scheme for a Mexican empire.” But if war is good, why should its avoidance—even through investment in the military—be desirable?
There is, perhaps, something to be said about war as a way of strengthening the sinews of the state and thereby enhancing the ability of human societies to carry out other large scale projects. This would be a position close to what scholars like Charles Tilly have argued—war made the state and the state made war, and all that. It would still not be quite what Luce is arguing here, though, since his interest is in proving that all of this was desirable for some abstract, even theological notion of progress (a very 19th century muscular Christianity in which endless human sacrifice is necessary for the glory of God).
The real twist, however, is that Luce doesn’t view the wars for expansion across North America as wars. Indians (Native Americans) do not make an appearance, and nor do the U.S. wars against the many Indian nations of the West or elsewhere. Nor, for that matter, do any losers of wars seem to benefit from their loss. War, for Luce, is a story of progress because it is a story of displacement—of evolution. To lose a war is to tautologically affirm that one must have deserved to lose; to wage war against a weaker foe may be necessary but it is not, really, “war”. What Luce is spoiling for is war against other White countries—national self-improvement through carnage.
This, in particular, reflects a vision of race and nationalism that has mostly (mostly) gone out of style today, but it is a shared mental background that I think would have been essential to the essay being published. Without the notion that only a few handful of countries count, and that the essence of international relations is not the state or a government but rather races and civilizations, none of what Luce has written would make sense. And if you add the presupposition that the identity of the superior race is already known, rather than to be decided in a contest whose outcome is random, then the argument is persuasive—well, not persuasive so much as stating a self-evident truth.
Going back in time to understand others’ arguments means going back not just to a different country but to an entirely different set of concerns. Even when we are talking about something that should be transhistorical—war, the national interest, and so on—the mental scaffolding and meanings around that is radically different. And although some simplifications or abstractions or quantifications may explain parts of what is going on here, accepting what is being described on its own terms means accepting the difficulty of understanding what the hell is going on over there.