DIVIDED WE STAND: The Unpopularity of U.S. Wars

As to the mode of terminating the war and securing peace, the President is wandering and indefinite. First, it is to be done by a more vigorous prosecution of the war in the vital parts of the enemy's country; after talking himself tired on this point, the President tells us that with a people divided by contending factions, we may fail to obtain a satisfactory peace.

ARKANSAS' Senator William Fulbright sounding off against L.B.J.? Not by more than a century. It is Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln speaking during the Mexican War. To Lincoln, that war was both "unnecessary and unconstitutional," and his vehement protests were repeated by scores of other prominent critics. Lincoln's argument echoed an attitude that is as old as American history. For Americans have always looked upon war as an evil to be avoided whenever possible. Thus in 1846 there were those who wholly disapproved of the hostilities against Mexico--just as today there are those who wholly disagree with the U.S. stand in Viet Nam. With the exception of World War II, every war in U.S. history has stirred the uninhibited opposition of a sizable segment of the population. Even the Revolutionary War, which made a nation out of 13 colonies, was flatly opposed by a large number of American settlers.

War of Independence

The struggle that spawned the U.S. was, in fact, as much a civil war as anything else. As late as the spring of 1776, delegates from six of the 13 colonies came to the Continental Congress under instructions to vote against separation from Britain. Merchants, officeholders, landowners, cobblers, farmers--Tory Americans by the tens of thousands were hostile to the rebels. Virtually the entire Anglican clergy of the middle and northern states were solidly behind the British King. In New York City, Philadelphia, and parts of the Carolinas and Georgia, the loyalists outnumbered the patriots.

Some Tories were recklessly outspoken in their opposition to independence. "Damn the rebels!" cried one Massachusetts Tory. "I wish they were all scalped; damn the Congress to hell." Like a latter-day emissary to Hanoi, a Pennsylvania Tory named Samuel Shoemaker made his way to Windsor Castle and emerged after an interview to proclaim the kind of admiration for George III that occasional U.S. visitors have felt for Ho Chi Minh: "I wished some of my violent countrymen could have such an opportunity. They would be convinced that George III has not one grain of tyranny in his composition. A man of his fine feelings, so good a husband, so kind a father cannot be a tyrant."

Loyalists supplied the redcoats with food when George Washington's men were desperately hungry; they circulated counterfeit Continental currency to weaken the rebel economy, and they distributed handbills urging wavering patriots to switch to the British side. Some 50,000 actually took up arms and joined British regiments. In 1780, when Washington's troop roster numbered a mere 9,000, there were 8,000 Americans fighting in redcoat units.

Dissent, to be sure, did not go unpunished. A popular saying of the day held that "a Tory is a thing whose head is in England and its body in America, and its neck ought to be stretched." Schoolmasters, physicians and merchants whose only offense was their adherence to Tory principles were all harassed; some were tarred and feathered, others found their homes and property confiscated. Some 100,000 American loyalists fled to Britain or other exile havens. As one group of them departed, General Washington dryly noted that "one or two have done what a great number ought to have done long ago--committed suicide."

War of 1812

But even after the British were defeated, there were still tens of thousands of British sympathizers left along the Eastern Seaboard. And they were still around three decades later when the U.S. indignantly went to war to put an end to Britain's interference with U.S. trade with France, to stop the British navy from kidnaping American sailors and forcing them to serve in the war against Napoleon.

From the very start of the War of 1812, New Englanders made clear that they would have nothing to do with it. They were overwhelmingly hostile to the Southern and Western leaders anxious to retaliate against Britain by marching on Canada. New Englanders not only refused to subscribe heavily to President Madison's war loans, but they invested freely in Britain. They were attracted by the war slogan "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights"--only they forgot about the sailors and concentrated on trade. Thousands of tons of provisions that Britain needed to support Wellington's army were shipped by American merchants in American bottoms from American ports.

A White House visitor during the war described President Madison as looking "miserably shattered and woebegone; his mind is full of the New England sedition." With the British assault on Washington, Madison and his wife were forced to flee the burning capital--an ignominious departure that his political enemies looked upon as the just deserts of his political folly.

Mexican War

Madison became a laughingstock, but after all, his war was a failure. In 1846, President James K. Polk suffered similar humiliation, even though he could claim victory in the end. Egged on by land-hungry Southern planters, he looked for reasons to attack Mexico, in the process pushed the American frontier to the Pacific Ocean. While it raged, Folk's war was the most unpopular in U.S. history.

Throughout most of the country, the prevailing mood was bitterly against the war. Kentucky's Henry Clay, who had fanned the flames of war three decades earlier, now found himself on the side of peace. Said he: "This is no war of defense, but one of unnecessary and offensive aggression." Daniel Webster suggested Folk's impeachment for involving the U.S. in war without congressional consent. It was, Webster insisted, "a war of pretexts"--a pretext that Mexico had invaded U.S. territory, a pretext that Mexico had declined to receive a U.S. emissary, a pretext that Mexico had refused to pay just U.S. claims.

In Congress, Abe Lincoln proposed the famous "Spot Resolution," demanding that the Administration specify the exact spot on which Mexico had, in the words of Folk's war message, "shed American blood upon the American soil." Lincoln, like many other Americans, suspected that U.S. troops had provoked the incident inside Mexico. The war was particularly unpopular among U.S. intellectuals. Henry Thoreau spent a night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay his state poll tax. Next day, he returned to Walden Pond to write his famous essay on Civil Disobedience. Ralph Waldo Emerson warned that "the U.S. will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us."

Civil War

In 1861, Abraham Lincoln--so recently a peace partisan himself--ironically was plagued by peace movements that all but destroyed the militancy of his cause. Northern foes of the war, contemptuously labeled "Copperheads" after the snake that strikes without warning, held a mass meeting in the President's own hometown of Springfield, Ill. They resolved that "a further offensive prosecution of this war tends to subvert the Constitution and the Government." Secret societies were formed on both sides. Southerners who called themselves "Heroes of America" gave clandestine support to the Union; Northerners organized as "Knights of the Golden Circle" recruited troops for the Confederacy and distributed arms to Lincoln's foes. The Northern press was widely critical. The Laconia, N.H. Democrat went so far as to urge that Lincoln and the Constitution be discarded, and that the Democratic Northern states combine with the Southern "rather than have the country divided and ruined to carry out the self-righteous nigger abstractions of a set of ignorant and hypocritical fanatics."

In Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, Copperheads were so active that in 1863 one military commander in the area, General Ambrose E. Burnside, issued a general order: "The habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy will no longer be tolerated. It must be distinctly understood that treason, expressed or implied, will not be tolerated in this department." Ohio's Congressman Clement Vallandigham remained defiant. In a speech addressed to "King Lincoln," he cried: "Defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchers: these are your trophies! In vain the people gave you treasure and the soldier yielded up his life. The war for the Union is a most bloody and costly failure. What has been our success? Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer." Vallandigham was arrested, tried and convicted of disloyalty. The authorities were ready to imprison him when Lincoln intervened and softened the sentence to deportation to the South. With habeas corpus suspended, thousands of other dissenters were arrested.

The draft was Lincoln's biggest headache. In June 1863, after instructions were issued for enrollment of all men between 20 and 45, armed opposition arose in four of the seven Midwest states. In Kentucky, a guard was needed to protect draft officials; in Cleveland, a mob went beyond tearing up draft cards--it destroyed the box from which draftees' names were chosen. When the first names were drawn in New York City, a general uprising followed. Police Superintendent John Kennedy tried in vain to calm the rioters. The mob, reported one witness, "beat him, dragged him through the streets by his head, pitched him into a horsepond, rolled him into mud gutters, dragged him through piles of filth indescribable." Soldiers, police, militia and naval forces were required to quell the draft riots. Meade's army was so weakened by disappointing recruitment and withdrawals for guard duty in New York and other Northern cities, it was unable to resume the initiative after the Battle of Gettysburg.

Spanish-American War

President McKinley had no manpower problems for his war in 1898; volunteers flocked to the colors by the thousands. Wealthy contributers gave yachts, and financed whole regiments to help relieve the beleaguered Cuban revolutionaries after decades of Spanish oppression. No matter that the President, all but one of his Cabinet, and much of the business community opposed a fight with Spain. Wild enthusiasm for war had been whipped up by the "yellow" journalism of the day, particularly by Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's New York Journal. Letters calling for war came in from every part of the country. One angry Senator burst into Assistant Secretary of State William Day's office, brandishing his cane and shouting "By God, don't your President know where the war-declaring power is lodged? Well, tell him, by God, that if he doesn't do something, Congress will declare war in spite of him!"

It was only after the Spanish were defeated and Cuba was free that the conscience of many Americans was disturbed by the unexpected annexation of the Philippines. The Anti-Imperialist League, founded in Boston by such well-known men as Grover Cleveland and Andrew Carnegie, attracted 500,000 protesting members, as U.S. troops found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to put down Philippine Guerrilla Leader Emilio Aguinaldo's liberation movement. "The Administration seeks to extinguish the spirit of 1776 in those islands," declared the league's 1899 platform. "We demand the immediate cessation of this war against liberty." Weeks later, President McKinley won a new term in office in a nation surprised but rather pleased to find itself the possessor of a new land across the sea.

World Wars I & II

There was little thought of prosecuting the anti-imperialist of 1898. But when the first of the 20th century's conflicts with the Germans began, President Woodrow Wilson, for all his liberal political philosophy, found it necessary to approve espionage and sedition laws designed to curb the scattered dissenters who opposed the idea of fighting Germany. Most of the protest was directed against military conscription. But the Socialist Party came out flatly against U.S. participation in the war. In all, some 1,500 dissenters were jailed; among them was Socialist Presidential Candidate Eugene V. Debs, who had praised draft dodgers and subtly tried to spread dissension in the Army.

But Debs and the others caused little stir. The Federal Government's Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, whipped up pro-war sentiment so skillfully that Wilson, who had won re-election on the slogan "He kept us out of war," emerged relatively unscathed by his switch. Even so, he had his share of vocal critics. The rabidly pro-war Theodore Roosevelt damned the President as a "treacherous hypocrite," and pro-German Irish-Americans called him "the best President England ever had." Other enemies heaped scorn on his "messiah complex."

Once the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, World War II saw no such dissent. The last vestiges of isolationism dissolved in the face of enemy attack; by then, the Russo-German pact was an embarrassment of the past, and U.S. Communists were already calling for a fight against Hitler. The American people were united to an extent unique in their history. Japanese-American Nisei were unfairly herded into concentration camps as a precautionary measure, and several dozen pro-Nazis were rounded up, but the total of really dangerous cases never amounted to more than a handful.

Korean War

Nor was there much opposition in 1950 to President Harry Truman's decision to commit U.S. troops in a U.N. police action against the Communists in Korea. War-weariness did not develop until Chinese "volunteers" began streaming south and the fighting became a stalemate. And then politicians made much of the U.S. involvement. As the 1952 election approached, Republican leaders criticized the way the war was being conducted. Declared Senator Robert A. Taft on the Senate floor: "When American boys are being killed by Chinese armies, we might as well have a declared war." House Republican Leader Joseph Martin complained that "if we are not in Korea to win, then this Administration should be indicted for the murder of thousands of American boys." Relieved of his command, Douglas MacArthur came home to rap Truman's policy: "It seems to me to introduce a new concept into military operations--the concept of appeasement, the concept that when you use force, you can limit that force." From a nation increasingly tired of the whole affair, G.O.P. Nominee Dwight Eisenhower drew a grateful response with his pledge to go to Korea personally and "concentrate on the job of ending the war."

Making peace, to be sure, is the proper goal of any President beset by war. But wars are as different as the men who fight them; their origins and their antagonisms vary, and the path to peace is seldom easy to find. Only the voice of the critic can be counted on with assurance--a fact that Lyndon Johnson takes pains to point out to White House visitors these days, along with carefully documented historical references. But democratic tolerance for dissent has never yet impaired the U.S.'s ability to win its wars. "Protest," the President warned Hanoi last week, should not be counted upon "to produce surrender."

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