C. Vann Woodward: Free Security
Source: C. Vann Woodward, "The Age of Reinterpretation," American Historical Review, LXVI (October 1960), 2-8.
Throughout most of its history the United States has enjoyed a remarkable degree of military security, physical security from hostile attack and invasion. This security was not only remarkably effective, but it was relatively free. Free security was based on nature's gift of three vast bodies of water interposed between this country and any other power that might constitute a serious menace to its safety. There was not only the Atlantic to the east and the Pacific to the west, but a third body of water, considered so impenetrable as to make us virtually unaware of its importance, the Arctic Ocean and its great ice cap to the north. The security thus provided was free in the sense that it was enjoyed as a bounty of nature in place of the elaborate and costly chains of fortifications and even more expensive armies and navies that took a heavy toll of the treasuries of less fortunate countries and placed severe tax burdens upon the backs of their people. The costly navy that policed and defended the Atlantic was manned and paid for by British subjects for more than a century, while Americans enjoyed the added security afforded without added cost to themselves. In 1861 the United States was maintaining the second largest merchant marine in the world without benefit of a battle fleet. At that time there 7,600 men in the United States Navy as compared with more than ten number in the British Navy.
Between the second war with England and the Second World War, States was blessed with a security so complete and so free that it was able virtually to do without an army and for the greater part of the period without a navy as well. Between the world war that ended in 1763 and the world wars of the twentieth century the only major military burdens placed upon the people were occasioned not by foreign threats but by domestic quarrels, the first to establish independence for the American colonies and the second to thwart independence for the southern states. After each of these civil wars, as after all the intervening wars, Americans immediately dismantled their military establishment. They followed the same procedure after every succeeding war, down to World War II, and even after that they carried demobilization to dangerous extremes before reversing the policy.
The end of the era of free security has overtaken Americans so suddenly swiftly that they have not brought themselves to face its practical implications much less its bearing upon their history. Conventional aircraft and jet propulsion had shrunk the time dimensions of the Atlantic and Pacific from weeks the mid-fifties [1950s]. But before military adjustment could be properly made to that revolution, the development of ballistic missiles shrank the two oceans from hours to minutes. In the same period the hitherto impenetrable Arctic Ocean has not only been navigated by atomic-powered submarines under the ice cap, but has been shrunk in time width to dimensions of minutes and seconds by which we now measure the other oceans. The age of security and the age of free security ended almost simultaneously.
The proposition was advanced before a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893 that "the first period of American history," a period of four centuries, was brought to an end by the disappearance of free land. Perhaps it is not premature to suggest that another epoch of American history was closed even more suddenly sixty years later by the disappearance of free security. It may be objected that security was never completely free and that the period when it came nearest to being so did not last very long. But one can reasonably ask as much latitude to speak in comparative and relative terms about free security as the theorists of free land enjoyed in their generalizations. Land was of course never completely free either, and the period when it came nearest to being so only dated from the Homestead Act of 1862, less than three decades before the end of the frontier era. In a comparative sense land may nevertheless be said to have been relatively free for a much longer period. In similar terms security may also be said to have been free until quite recently.
Military expenditures of the federal government have, of course, increased greatly and almost continuously since the last decade of the eighteenth century. Until very recently, however, they have not increased so rapidly as the government's nonmilitary expenditures. During the first century of the Republic's history, save in war years, annual military expenditures rarely came to as much as 1 per cent of the gross national product, returned to that level a few years after the First World War, and remained there until the Great Depression cut production back drastically. In the decade preceding Pearl Harbor, the percentage of federal expenditures devoted to military purposes fell lower than ever before in our history.
Another measure of free security is the small demand that military service has made upon national manpower. Before World War I, apart from actual war periods and their immediate aftermath, it was an extremely rare year in which as many as 1 per cent of the total male population between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine saw military service. Between Reconstruction and the Spanish-American War there was no year in which as many as one-half of 1 per cent served in the armed forces. The handful of men who made up the regular army during the nineteenth century were not employed in patrolling frontiers against foreign invasion, but chiefly in coping with a domestic police problem posed by the Indians. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War the United States Army numbered a few more than sixteen thousand men, and 183 of its 198 companies were spread among twenty-nine posts on the Indian frontier. The remaining fifteen companies were available for "defense" of the Canadian and Atlantic frontiers, and the incipient Confederate frontier. The southern constabulary that patrolled the slaves was organized on military lines, but like the regular army it was concerned with a domestic police problem.
The contrast between free security and security costs of the present era scarcely requires emphasis. Military expenditures in 1957 and the years since have amounted to 10 per cent of the gross national product. By way of comparison, military expenditures in the 1880's were never over four-tenths of 1 per cent. In spite of the vast increase of the gross national product during the last century, military costs have increased far faster and now represent ten to twenty times the percentage of the gross national product they represented in the peace years of the previous century. Not counting payments to veterans, they now account for nearly 70 per cent of the federal budget. The more advanced and improved military machinery paradoxically requires more instead of less manpower, both military and civilian. The Department of Defense and its branches employ more civilian workers now than did the entire federal government before the Great Depression. Indications are that we are only at the beginning instead of the culmination of expansion in costs and manpower for military purposes and that future expenditures will be larger still.
If historians waited until the disappearance of free land to recognize fully the influence of the frontier-and-free-land experience on American history, perhaps the even more sudden and dramatic disappearance of free security will encourage them to recognize the effect of another distinguishing influence upon our national history. I am not prepared to make any claims about the comparative importance of the two themes, nor do I wish to make or inspire any exaggerations of the influence of free security. But if the influence of free land may be considered significant in the shaping of American character and national history, it is possible that the effect of free security might profitably be studied for contributions to the same ends.
Certain traits that Americans generally regard as desirable, such as democracy, individualism, self-reliance, inventiveness, have been attributed in some measure to the frontier-and-free-land experience. It might be that the sunnier side of the national disposition -- the sanguine temperament, the faith in the future, what H. G. Wells once called our "optimistic fatalism" -- is also related to a long era of habituation to military security that was effective, reliable, and virtually free. Optimism presupposes a future that is unusually benign and reliably congenial to man's enterprises. Anxieties about security have kept the growth of optimism within bounds among other peoples, but the relative absence of such anxieties in the past has helped, along with other factors, to make optimism a national philosophy in America. The freedom of American youth from the long period of training in military discipline that left its mark upon the youth of nations where it was a routine requirement could hardly have failed to make some contribution to the distinctiveness of national character.
Free security is related at various points to the development of the American economy. So long as an economy of scarcity prevailed in the land the gross national product was not far above the level of subsistence. While the margin was narrow, the demands of an expensive military establishment could have consumed so large a proportion of the surplus above subsistence as to retard seriously the formation of capital. Relative immunity from the drain, on the other hand, enlarged opportunities for the formation of capital and the increase of productivity. Free security was certainly related to light taxes and a permissive government, a turn had much to do with the development of the famous American living standard.
Not all the historic influences of free security have been so benign. Tocqueville's classic study of the national character attributes to democracy some familiar patterns of military conduct that might be profitably reexamined in the light of the free security thesis. Tocqueville finds, for example, that "the private soldiers remain most like civilians" in a democracy, that they chafe under discipline with "a restless and turbulent spirit," and that they are "ever ready to go back to their homes" when the fighting is over. With regard to the officer corps he observes that "among a democratic people the choicer minds of the nation are gradually away from the military profession, to seek by other paths distinction, power, and especially wealth." He adds that "among democratic nations in time of peace the military profession is held in little honor and indifferently followed. This want of public favor is a heavy discouragement to the army." Tocqueville may be correct in suggesting democracy as one explanation for these attitudes and patterns of behavior, but no explanation of American attitudes is complete that neglects a national disposition to look upon security as a natural right. What a people half consciously comes to regard as a free gift of nature they are with difficulty persuaded to purchase at high cost in treasure, inconvenience, and harsh discipline. To reward with high honors, prestige, and secure status the professional military men who insist upon these sacrifices in time of peace comes hard to such people.
The heritage of free and easy security can also be detected behind the disposition to put living standard, private indulgence, and wasteful luxury ahead of vital security requirements. The same heritage can almost certainly be discerned at work in the tendency to plunge into wars first and prepare for them later. The historic background of security might help to explain, even if it cannot excuse, the irresponsibility of political leaders who make foreign commitments, coin bellicose slogans, and indulge in wild threats and promises without first providing the military means to back them up.
There are other aspects of American history besides demagogic diplomacy and military shortcomings that are not to be fully understood without reference to the history of free security. Among these surely is the American Civil War. The United States is the only major country since Cromwellian England that could afford the doubtful luxury of a full-scale civil war of four years without incurring the evils of foreign intervention and occupation. Had such evils been as much a foregone conclusion as they have been among other nations, it is doubtful that Americans would have proved as willing as they were to fall upon each other's throats.
It is doubtful, also, that Americans could have developed and indulged with the freedom they have their peculiar national attitudes toward power, had it not been for their special immunity from the more urgent and dire demands for the employment of power to assure national security and survival. Having this relative immunity, they were able to devise and experiment with elaborate devices to diffuse and atomize power. They divided it among the states and later among business corporations. They used such devices as checks and balances, separation of powers, and division of powers to deadlock power and to thwart positive action for long periods. The experience probably encouraged the tendency to regard power as bad in itself and any means of restraining or denying it as a positive good.
The national myth that America is an innocent nation in a wicked world is associated to some degree in its origins and perpetuation with the experience of free security. That which other nations had of necessity to seek by the sword and defend by incurring the guilt of using it was obtained by the Americans both freely and innocently, at least in their own eyes. They disavowed the engines and instruments of the power they did not need and proclaimed their innocence for not using them, while at the same time they passed judgment upon other nations for incurring the guilt inevitably associated with power. "We lived for a century," writes Reinhold Niebuhr, "not only in the illusion but in the reality of innocency in our foreign relations. We lacked the power in the first instance to become involved in the guilt of its use." But we sought to maintain the innocence of our national youth after acquiring power that was incompatible with it. We first concealed from ourselves the reality of power in our economic and technological might, but after it became undeniable, and after military strength was added to it, as Niebuhr says, "we sought for a time to preserve innocency by disavowing the responsibilities of power." The urge to return to a free security age of innocence and the flight from responsibility and from the guilt of wielding power may be traced in elaborate efforts to maintain neutrality, in desperate struggles for isolationism and "America First," as well as in the idealistic plans of religious and secular pacifists.
So long as free land was fertile and arable, and so long as security was not only free but strong and effective, it is no wonder that the world seemed to be America's particular oyster. Now that both free land and free security have disappeared, it is not surprising that the American outlook has altered and the prospect has darkened. The contrast with the past was even sharper in the case of free security than in the instance of free land, for the transition was almost immediate from a security that was both free and effective to an attempt at security that was frightfully costly and seemed terrifyingly ineffective. The spell of the long past of free security might help to account for the faltering and bewildered way in which America faced its new perils and its new responsibilities.
C. Vann Woodward, "The Age of Reinterpretation," American Historical Review, LXVI (October 1960), 2-8.
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