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Stumpage Reports
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Friday, February 14, 2003 :::
Give Peace A Chance
I've been following the buildup to war with Iraq with mixture of anger and sadness. I was ready to post an hysterical screed against the Bush administration yesterday but decided not to, I was feeling so negative already I didn't want to add to it. On occasion I'm an out-and-out CNN junkie, but I've barely been able to watch the news for more than five minutes this week. Lots of Arthur and Clifford the Big Red Dog these past afternoons.
So, rather than ranting about George Bush, the headlong rush to an unjust war, John Ashcroft, the shredding of the Bill of Rights, etc here's a little history lesson, something you can always count on from this blog. I've heard people wonder why we can't have war again like World War II where the whole country was behind the war. WWII was actually an exception. Of course there were pacifists and conscientious objectors against WWII. All other U.S. wars featured large, vocal, sometimes in the majority, groups of anti-war protestors.
American Revolution (1775 - 1783) Hard figures are hard to come by, but many historians estimate over 50% of the people living in America were against the Revolution. Americans fought Americans with a ferocity unequaled by the Civil War, including torture and massacres. This was particularly bad in North and South Carolina.
The War of 1812 (1812 - 1815) Another unpopular war. As a result of the effect on the New England shipping business, Connecticut and some other states of the region convened a convention in Hartford in 1814 to consider, among other things, secession. News of the Treaty of Ghent short circuited their plans and to this day no one knows if they would have gone through with it.
The Mexican War (1846 - 1848) Many people saw this war for the imperialistic land grab that it was. Henry David Thoreau penned his famous essay Civil Disobedience while in jail for refusing to pay his taxes to support the war. In 1848 Abraham Lincoln, serving in the House of Represenatives, made his famous "bloody spot" speech, exhorting President Polk to show the exact spot where the Mexicans first spilled American blood. This speech helped to kill Lincoln's political career for awhile.
The Civil War (1861 - 1865) Major draft riots in New York in 1863. Lincoln suspended habeus corpus and threw anti-war newspapermen and politicians in jail without trial or indictments. If Sherman had not captured Atlanta in the fall of 1864, there is a good chance George McCellan could have been elected president on the Democratic peace platform. Many people consider low southern moral at home contributed as much to the south's loss as their battlefield defeats.
World War I (1917 - 1918) As early as 1915, during America's period of nuetrality, groups such as the American Union against Militarism formed to challenge Woodrow Wilson's growing war budget. Many socialists, the most famous was Eugene Debs, protested America's involvement in the European struggle. Wilson won reelection in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of the War," then declared war against Germany six months later.
To be honest, I can't find anything right now on anti-war movements during the Korean War, I'm sure that wasn't a very popular war though. I don't think I need to instruct anyone on anti-war sentiment during the Vietnam War.
So all these anti-war protestors are keeping alive an American tradition that was around before there was an America.
Quote of the Day:
The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man [Lincoln's emphasis] should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.
--- Abraham Lincoln to William Herndon, February 15, 1848.
::: posted by tom at 10:52 PM
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