Militarization and the American Century

War, the United States and the World since 1941

David Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350102248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Taking American mobilization in WWII as its departure point, this book offers a concise but comprehensive introduction to the history of militarization in the United States since 1940. Exploring the ways in which war and the preparation for war have shaped and affected the United States during 'The American Century', Fitzgerald demonstrates how militarization has moulded relations between the US and the rest of the world. Providing a timely synthesis of key scholarship in a rapidly developing field, this book shows how national security concerns have affected issues as diverse as the development of the welfare state, infrastructure spending, gender relations and notions of citizenship. It also examines the way in which war is treated in the American imagination; how it has been depicted throughout this era, why its consequences have been made largely invisible and how Americans have often considered themselves to be reluctant warriors. In integrating domestic histories with international and transnational topics such as the American 'empire of bases' and the experience of American service personnel overseas, the author outlines the ways in which American militarization had, and still has, global consequences. Of interest to scholars, researchers and students of military history, war studies, US foreign relations and policy, this book addresses a burgeoning and dynamic field from which parallels and comparisons can be drawn for the modern day.

1 Liberal empire and the paradoxes of war: Militarization before 1941

In the spring of 1898, Americans were gripped by enthusiasm for war. In the wake of the sinking of the USS Maine in February, the public clamoured for revenge against Spain, whose agents had purportedly sabotaged the ship as it lay at anchor. As the McKinley administration equivocated over its response, public pressure mounted, and an angry crowd burned President William McKinley’s effigy in Colorado.¹ When McKinley finally asked Congress for authorization to send troops to Cuba in early April, Congress swiftly gave its assent and then declared war on Spain. Since the regular Army only had a strength of 28,100, the next order of business was to raise volunteers for the war.² McKinley first called for 75,000 volunteers, then 125,000, then 200,000; ultimately, over a million Americans responded.³ We can get some sense of the depth of the zeal for conflict by looking at the range of people who offered to raise troops for the War Department. Impresario William F. Cody, popularly known as ‘Buffalo Bill’, published an article in the New York World entitled ‘How I Could Drive Spaniards from Cuba with Thirty Thousand Indian Braves’, while Frank James, brother of the outlaw Jesse James, offered to raise a company of cowboys. Publisher William Randolph Hearst proposed assembling a regiment of professional boxers and baseball players who ‘would overawe any Spanish regiment by their mere appearance’.⁴

While none of these more outlandish proposals were accepted, the ranks were swelled by large numbers of volunteers. Most famously, assistant secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt and Army colonel (and veteran of frontier campaigns) Leonard Wood formed the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, which took the nickname of ‘Rough Riders’ from Cody’s travelling Western show, ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World’.⁵ The make-up of the regiment reflected the breadth of popular enthusiasm for war, as it included veterans, Ivy League athletes, Texas Rangers and Native Americans. As historian David Blight observes, this enthusiasm for war was widespread on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.⁶ The former Confederate General Joseph Wheeler, now a member of the House of Representatives, was granted a commission as a Major General by McKinley and commanded a Division in Cuba, while news of the first war death, a Naval ensign from North Carolina named Worth Bagley, united a north and south still steeped in the bitterness of civil war and Reconstruction. The New York Tribune declared that ‘the South furnishes the first sacrifice of this war. There is no North and no South after that … we are all Worth Bagley’s countrymen.’⁷ The mobilization for war, then, marked a moment where reconciliation between North and South was almost complete.

The Spanish-American War also represented an important moment where the United States announced itself as a global military power, defeating a European empire on land and at sea, and operating not only in the Caribbean, where US forces routed the Spanish Army in Cuba and seized Puerto Rico, but also across the Pacific, where a US Navy squadron steamed from Hong Kong, defeated the Spanish fleet in Manilla Bay and then occupied the Philippines (an occupation that would soon descend into a brutal counterinsurgency campaign) and Guam.⁸ Given that the US census bureau had declared the frontier on the continental United States closed in 1890, the events of 1898, which also included the annexation of Hawaii, marked a decisive shift towards a formal overseas empire.⁹

Yet at the same time, many of the patterns from previous wars held. Americans were certainly enthusiastic for war, but it was an amateurish enthusiasm. The regular Army remained small and relatively poorly equipped, and while Americans rushed to volunteer for military service, the vast majority of these volunteers never left the United States. Preparations for war were shambolic, as quartermasters struggled to manage railway timetables and to select debarkation ports, and the Army’s performance in Cuba was not particularly impressive, with much of the American success due to the aid of Cuban rebels.¹⁰ After the fighting had ended, over three quarters of the force was incapacitated by yellow fever, and they had to be quarantined at Montauk Point, New York, on their return to the United States.¹¹ While the Navy’s strong performance in the war was due to sustained investment in the fleet that began in the 1880s, the Army’s struggles were testament to the long-standing American suspicion of standing armies.¹² Both the struggle to transport the Army to Cuba and the offers of privately raised regiments of Indian braves and professional boxers stemmed from a consensus that amateurs could be perfectly capable soldiers and generals and that the vast distances that separated the United States from the European powers provided adequate protection from invasion. This meant that a large and well-equipped force was both a luxury and potential long-term threat to democracy. For the American volunteers of 1898, war was a passing thing, as it had been for previous generations: certainly important, possibly deeply affirming of their manhood, but not something that they need to organize their lives or society around.

The Spanish-American war, then, does not so much represent a sharp break with American tradition, but rather another moment in its transition from a regional to a global actor. As American power grew, the issue of what sort of role military instruments might have in advancing that power remained an open question. This chapter considers the long history of debates over militarization in the United States up to 1941, the moment that this book takes as the truly decisive turning point where both political culture and socio-economic structures changed in a permanent way. It looks at the evolution of the relationship between the US military and broader American society, as well as the experiences of armed Americans both on the frontier and overseas. By tracing debates over war, empire and ‘preparedness’, it shows how the militarization of American society ebbed and flowed from the American Revolution to the 1930s.

In drawing a distinction between militarization prior to and after 1941, the intent here is not to deny the central place of war, expansion and settler colonialism in American history. In The Dominion of War, their sweeping history of five centuries of war in North America, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton rightly critique the tendency of previous generations of historians to approach ‘the imperial dimension of the nation’s history obliquely, treating occurrences of jingoism like the war fevers of 1812, 1846 and 1898 as unfortunate exceptions to the anti-militarist rule of republicanism’.¹³ What the first century and a half of the nation’s history does demonstrate, though, is that American imperial expansion took on a particular cast due to both the ideological visions of the American Revolution and the favourable geography that put vast oceans between Americans and potential threats.¹⁴ This meant that the United States was an expansionist power, but that that expansion largely did not require the nation to orientate itself around the preparation for war. That distinction might have made little difference to those on the receiving end of American violence, but it did matter in that it had an effect on American political culture, the role and status of the military, and the stories that Americans told themselves about war.

The early part of the chapter examines debates about militarism in the early Republic and pre–Civil War era, focusing on how broad scepticism about the value of a standing army and fears of a ‘man on horseback’ in the form of a military leader who would overthrow democracy contended with the need to raise forces to fight on the frontier and the celebration of military heroes such as George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor, all former generals who were elected president.¹⁵ Even as war heroes were elected to high office, military officers never cohered as an influential political class. While the Civil War wrought immense social change and effectively brought about a second American Revolution, it did not r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editor Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Liberal empire and the paradoxes of war: Militarization before 1941
• 2 ‘National security’ and the militarization of statecraft
• 3 Bases, borders and gun belts: The evolution of militarized spaces in the United States and beyond
• 4 Militarized encounters: Armed Americans abroad
• 5 Military service and the meanings of citizenship
• 6 War in the American imagination
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page