Days of Infamy, Ad Nauseum!The
Washington
Times (6/1/01)
informs us that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a team of
people in the State Department preparing his famous speech before
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. Given the growing
evidence that FDR knew well in advance of the Japanese plans, and
that he often had members of his administration culling information
for speeches, often down into the lower echelons of the bureaucracy,
we should not be surprised by this revelation. However,
in the great American historian Mercy Otis Warren’s History
of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution
(1805, Liberty Press edition reprint, 1989), Vol. I, p. 38, one
finds the following, describing the crowd of people gathered on
the docks to observe the British troops disembark that grim October
1st day in Boston in 1768: “...[T]he
troops arrived from Halifax [Nova Scotia]. This was indeed a painful
era. The American war may be dated from this hostile act; a day
which marks with infamy the councils of Great Britain [italics mine].” FDR,
or one of his speech writers, may even have forgotten where he had
read “a day which marks with infamy,” but it is a striking phrase,
and easily modified into “a day that will live in infamy.” In any
event, I find it difficult to believe it was not lifted from Mrs.
Warren’s history. What
matters in retrospect, however, is not only Warren’s magnificent
phrase, but that she used it to describe what was for her, and contemporary
Americans, the real beginning of the American Revolution. Up
to that point the problems in America had been in the nature of
a constitutional quarrel. On that day the British changed it to
what Americans saw as a violation of their fundamental rights; a
standing army on American soil, or as she put it, “A standing army
thus placed in their capital.” And, “The peaceable demeanor of the
people was construed , by the party who had brought this evil on
the city, as a mark of abject submission.” Finally, “In this situation,
no remedy appeared to be left short of an appeal to the sword,...” There
are those among us today, such as the historian Garry Wills, who
contend that the “standing army” question is no longer a relevant
issue, that many Americans didn’t own guns, and that militia don’t
fight well anyway. That is a bunch of rubbish! If Wills and his
ilk are correct, how to account for the fact that the British officers,
defined the fundamental problem as that they were facing “a people
numerous and armed.” And, the militia fought well when it was used
properly, not in situations of conventional 18th century
warfare, but in what was later termed tactics of “people’s war.”
Even in the Revolution, as the Americans acquired artillery, it
was observed that even the best trained “Red Coats” would break
and run under such fire. They would have been damned fools not to
have. Never
mentioned is the way in which the American women were silently helping
to win the war as fully one-third of the 15,000 Hessians went “over
the hill” to marry, usually Pennsylvania “Dutch,” girls (perhaps
the women had something more powerful than guns!), nor the “sea
going” militia (not memorialized by the Minuteman statue) that took
over 1,500 prizes, against which even John Paul Jones heroic, solitary,
traditional sea victory must take a rather secondary place. None
of these realities ever seem to make it into the orthodox military
histories. Yet, certainly the British command was aware of these
events. But
the “Standing Army” question remains with us still, because it is
central to the whole question of Empire, in fact, the “sinews” of
Empire. Today, the American Empire has Standing Armies all over
the planet, and even here at home. No wonder there are protests
here and around the world as well, described by those who attempt
to put them down by the euphemism “terrorist.” In such circumstances,
one man’s terrorist, becomes another man’s patriot. I
wonder what Mercy Otis Warren might write if she were alive today,
and could address the arguments of those who have trivialized the
whole “Standing Army” issue? June 5, 2001 William
Marina [send him
mail]
teaches History at Florida Atlantic University and is an Adjunct
Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He has written extensively
on the American Revolution as a People’s War, and a number of these
articles will be posted soon at his web site: http://www.wmarina.com Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com |