The Unpopular History of the United States by Uncle Sam Himself

Front matter

THE UNPOPULAR HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

THE

UNPOPULAR HISTORY

Foreword

FOREWORD

This is not a piece of literature, but merely the straightforward heart-to-heart talk of one American with other Americans. In the ultimate we all love the truth, and dare to face it. This is the truth as believed, and now acted upon by the best minds in our country.

It was prepared in Washington City when our capital was one of the most picturesque and busy in the world. Khaki lads line the streets; officers come and go upon their silent errands. Distinguished commissions from our allies hold daily conference with American officials, welding our joint resources, and warning us against their errors.

Thousands of private citizens—able, self-sacrificing, patriotic men—have flocked to Washington, placing their talents at the nation's disposal. They are not glory seekers. Few of their names are known. They only ask to serve; and they do serve—efficiently.

The net effect produced upon me—and this is what I want to tell you—is that things are being done, excellently well done. From our manifold insufficiencies we have learned.

This is intended not as a slur, but as a spur for us to do what the United States can surely do, when once our people become aroused. The United States needs our best, humanity needs it; nor shall we be weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Harris Dickson.

Washington, D. C.,

July 4th, 1917.

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

For three years the world has been talking about war. So has Uncle Sam. Everybody listens. So do I. Yet, while listening with both ears, I fail to comprehend. I know absolutely nothing of military science. Do you?

Highly specialized officers have explained to me the object of certain mass formations, problems of range and parabola, and remaining velocities. All of which goes right over my head. War news and technical discussions produce little or no effect upon me except that of helpless horror. And that is how the average American feels, although dimly realizing that the life or death of his country, and of world-wide republican institutions, hang in the balance. The average American is eager and anxious to know, so he can do something, and do it well.

Our Uncle Sam, being a plain-spoken and practical person, admits that he generally makes a muss of soldiering, and has set his head to find out why. Uncle Sam has been lying awake at nights ruminating over the salty facts. Having learned better, he does better. He is doing much better now, and means to get ahead of the best before he plows this furrow to the end. Uncle Sam can accomplish whatever he tries, and, believe me, he is trying.

But he needs help, help from you and help from me, from every loyal citizen in the United States. Therefore Uncle Sam desires that all of us should consider what has gone wrong in the past, so that we may avoid the same blunders in the future. Just now we have the errors of our allies to warn us, and no legislator with mule sense should set his foot in a hole when there is a sign board standing right before his nose to point it out.

The average American does not understand war. This present affair is so prodigious that it passes beyond his mental jurisdiction. As for myself, martial science must be reduced to words of one syllable, or I don’t get it.

It goes against the grain to accept statements that we hate to believe, facts that jostle us out of pet notions which are the pride and heritage of every school boy. Patriotic speakers are constantly declaiming “Paul Revere,” “Ring Out for Liberty,” and “Barbara Frietchie,” but never disturb the fakes and the fabrications.

I was a grown man, thirty years old, struggling to hoe off my beard with a safety razor, before it dawned upon me that the military history of my country had not been one long unbroken series of Star Spangled victories. Like all other school boys I had been fed up on 4th of July orations. I believed in fairies, in Jack the Giant Killer, in the Boys of ’76. I almost believed that a lone and gray-haired farmer with a fife, and a bloody rag around his head, flanked by two small drummer boys, had chased the British army from off our sacred continent. I half-way believed that. Did you?

The truth is that Uncle Sam has abandoned the precarious system of volunteer militia, which was born with this republic, and adopted the essentially democratic principle that national defense is the paramount duty of every citizen. Defense of the republic—like taxes and jury duty—constitutes an obligation that cannot be laid upon the backs of a few willing horses who would be ridden to death. All must serve their turn; each must do his bit.

This fair and equal method has been put in operation. It is working well, so well that we Americans, without too greatly shocking our national pride, can now turn back to the discards and discuss the reasons.

Patriotic school histories teach us that we have been victorious in all our wars. Millions of intelligent men accept these statements, stand convinced of our natural prowess, and see no cause for changing a method under which we have apparently achieved success. But the present war has overturned all theories, established new standards, and the triumph of yesterday becomes the inevitable failure of to-day. To provide against the possibility of failure Uncle Sam now pursues the most businesslike plan of organizing and employing his enormous potential strength. Things are being done, in Washington and throughout the country, competently done, to build an army from the bottom up, and of magnificent material. They are doing what has never been done before, training forty thousand officers—forty thousand youngsters who throw into their work every faculty of nerve and brain and sinew that they possess. Whatever men may accomplish, that accomplishment will be theirs; of that the nation can rest assured. Yet the bulk of our people, no matter how wise and patriotic, are uneducated in military details. The grim facts of our blunders may startle you as they startled me. You may be incredulous, just as I refused to believe. Bear this in mind: No statement is herein made except upon authority of Brevet Major-General Emory Upton, as contained in his “Military Policy of the United States.” These are no hostile slanders to be resented and refuted, but are expressly endorsed by our own government, and furnish the most potent reasons for casting aside the volunteer system so prolific of disaster.

Each detail might be verified by page references to General Upton’s work, but it is considered better not to confuse and complicate so brief a synopsis.

For the purpose of further informing the people as to this radical change of their military system, Uncle Sam has given me his reasons in language so simple and direct that even you and I may understand.

Chapter 1

I

UNCLE SAM GETS STARTED

Now, my son—Uncle Sam rolled up his sleeves and started—sit down and plug away on that typewriter while I talk. Make your machine rattle the same as chickens picking corn off a tin roof. I'm a right tolerable long-winded windmill, and sizzling with things that must be got out of my system.

The woods are full of folks—and the cities, too—full of good folks who don't realize that we are having a war, a strictly business war that will spare no home in the land. They must realize it, and realize it right now. I’ve got a job for every man, woman and child in America, a job to be learned and done—efficiently.

They don’t see it yet. They have got the notion that nobody dares tackle them, that we are some punkins in a scrap, and can whip both sets of allies in our spare time, say, between breakfast and dinner, which makes a fellow strut and feel good, but lays him liable to a jolt.

Our folks have been thinking it was not necessary for us to do anything, and of course Congress trailed along behind. That is why nothing had been done up to a year ago. But the people are waking up, and putting alarm clocks under Congress. Mind you I am not blaming anybody in particular. I am just saying what’s what.

Our people don’t know because they have not been told at all, or been told wrong, and that’s the main trouble. School books teach our children that we have won all of our wars, just as easy as falling off a log, and if a foreign army invaded America, grandfather would reach around, get his scythe blade, and clean ’em up.

One time I knew a justice of the peace to be elected on the platform that he could take a lightning bug, on the end of a corn cob, and bluff the machine-made armies of Europe into the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe he could. But machine-made armies won’t fight with corn cobs and lightning bugs. Rules have changed.

Plenty of grown men believe that still. It is part of public opinion, and helps to shape the policy of this nation.

Some of these days I am going to jump on those “popular school histories” and put them out of business. Publishers print ’em to make money, and folks won’t pay good money for medicine that tastes bad. Just call this the “Unpopular History,” and maybe we can’t give it away. But I want to tell the truth to every fifteen-year-old boy in the United States, want to make every member of Congress read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it.

Listen, my son, listen to a plain talk, straight from the shoulder.

We Americans love bunk. I know what I am talking about. We do love bunk. We just nationally eat it up—a stuff that’s not too bright or good for Yankee nature’s daily food. Of all the bunk that we are fed upon, none is grabbed more greedily than the 4th of July oration about our fighting citizenship, and a rush to arms. We are the fighting citizenship; we are the patriotic rushers. We are the original patentees, progenitors, and extemporaneous guardians of freedom! We are it!

Nothing tickles our American vanity so much as being patted on the back for natural born warriors who can lick the world just for pastime. The perspiring 4th of July orator pumps us full of heroic hot air, which pleasingly distends our hides with manhood, and we elect the orator to Congress. He goes to Congress on that platform, and sticks by it— is good politics. Poets sing of triumphant liberty and school books teach of tyrants trembling before the musketry of embattled farmers. Thereupon the spectacled historian comes along to clinch these patriotic fakes with unassailable statistics. All of which is strictly for home consumption. Exported bunk does not pass at par. Soldiers beyond the seas know a darn sight better, and they’ll show us better if we don’t wake up.

Chapter 2

II

UNCLE SAM KEEPS GOING

This bluster and brag about licking the world with both hands tied behind us is the most dangerous sort of bunk. Every chancellery in Europe smiles at it.

Suppose we start at the very beginning. To the forefathers of this republic a standing army typified all the oppression from which they had escaped. Professional soldiers to them represented the pomp of dynasties and the pride of kings, a class apart from, and antagonistic to, the people—a class that marched at the nod of tyrannical monarchs. None of that for us in free America.

We built our military fabric upon an entirely different theory—a small standing army to be used as a nucleus around which the aforesaid fighting citizenship would rally. We believed implicitly in the volunteer. Up to the passage of our present selective draft law, we figured that our ranks would be crowded with youngsters who were craving to fight.

Now we have the selective draft upon our statute books, but no law gets full force and effect unless the people understand and approve. We have changed our entire military system because we had started wrong, and the people ought to know why.

At the beginning we planned that a small body of volunteers should constitute our regular army; the balance, held as a reserve force or militia, remaining under control of the states. Militiamen and officers alike are gen untrained, the officers being popular fellows elected by their comrades and commissioned by the Government.

I am not saying a word against these volunteers, the finest youngsters that ever trod shoe leather, the best fighting material on earth. But no matter how brave and patriotic the individual lad may be, he needs long and skillful training.

This, my son, was the germ of our military policy. It has been tried for more than a hundred years, in assorted wars, foreign, domestic, Indian. Educated military men got their dose of it—by the painful method—and say it is the worst system ever devised. But some way or other we have always managed, by main strength and awkwardness, to scramble out on top, which has made folks think that as a nation we are invincible. My son, the very surest way to get life pummeled out of you is to feel that there’s no use exerting yourself. The other fellow exerts himself, and it is all over but the ambulance.

Did you ever sit out in front of a cross store and hear the boys talk? I mean the boys with whiskers, whittling on a dry-goods box? They are my kind of folks. I was born with them, reared with them. I know what kind of flapjacks his wife makes; know what kind of water he has in his well; I drink out of the same gourd, and know the name of his dog. I deny flatfootedly that there is any better American alive than the Iowa farmer, or the Virginia farmer, or the Texas farmer. I speak his language, I know what he is thinking about, and I wish I could talk to him face to face.

Most of them have got the same idea, not only the boys at the crossroads store, but business men, school teachers, lawyers. Just hang around and listen to what they say: “Look what we did to the British in the Revolution—a plenty.” “How Old Hickory cleaned ’em up at New Orleans.” “Over-ran Mexico before you could say scat.”

“Of course those foreign governments have big armies, but we have individual initiative. Our lads know how to ride and shoot. That’s the thing that counts.”

You hear that kind of talk all over the country—especially about individual initiative.

Your Uncle Samuel used to think that same way, until developments in modern warfare knocked it out of his head. Modern warfare is a question of team work. You can’t accomplish anything nowadays by every fellow pulling his own way. Where would the Giants, or the Phillies, or the Red Sox be without organization? You could put a thousand fine individuals into the diamond, and nine trained players plus team-work, would play rings around them. Soldiers, like baseball teams, can’t get anywhere on an individual basis. That’s another kink that we Americans must get out of our heads—individualism. We are habitually intolerant of restraint. We resent the slightest encroachment upon our personal privilege to do as we please. If the notion strikes us to play at soldiering, very well, soldiers we will play—whenever we get ready and for just as long as it suits us. The average American having volunteered for a few months, frequently carries this idea with him and stops to ask questions, before he obeys an order. Individualism is his most petted possession. He argues that we have been victorious in five foreign wars on this basis of individual initiative, and sees no sense in quitting a good thing. Lots of people talk that way. It’s one of the biggest troubles in this country.

Chapter 3

III

THE FICTION OF INVINCIBLE MILITIA

I am going to tell you some facts that will make you think. I don’t care a hang what you think—to begin with. I don’t care what any American thinks, if he will only think at all. I’ve got a pig-headed faith that Americans are going to think right before they get done thinking.

Our tradition of the invincible militia and the victorious Minutemen had its birth at Bunker Hill. Frenzied orators, fiery poets and solemn school books have repeatedly assured us that a few dozen stalwart plowboys routed the redcoat army with a loss of about 1,054 men. This temporary success led to a practically unbroken series of disasters. The enthusiasm of Bunker Hill crystallized into a complacent state of public mind, and one and forty years of equally complacent military laws. From that day forward our national existence has depended upon a handful of regulars and a hope—a hope that, at the sound of Freedom’s bugle trump, vast num- bers of conquering citizens would rush to arms.

Revolutionary leaders framed their plans upon this rush, and, my son, the recruits didn’t rush. That’s the truth about it. If you don’t believe me, just ask George Washington, who made quite a considerable reputation in his neighborhood for telling the truth. At the opening of the Revolution Washington thought just like the balance of us, that patriots would flock to the banners of freedom and hurl the tyrant’s minions from our shores. But the flocking and the hurling went on mighty slow.

Some way or other the New England Minutemen contrived to get in the first lick, striking the British at Lexington and Concord Bridge. Those wrathy farmers chased the redcoats for more than twenty miles. Picking them off like robins from behind trees and stone walls, they killed and wounded 223 soldiers, with a loss to themselves of 88 men. That’s what started us down the wrong road; it looked too easy.

Three days later, April 22, 1775, the Congress of Massachusetts resolved that an army of 30,000 men was necessary for defense of the Colony, and attempted to raise at once thirteen thousand six hundred by voluntary enlistments of men who had got a taste of victory and ached to finish the job.

Right here and now I want to call your attention to the vicious practice which Massachusetts then adopted of giving a Captain’s commission to any one who could enroll a company of 59 men, and making a Colonel of the first politician who could get together ten such companies. This system has been employed, without exception, at the beginning of all our wars. You can easily see how that works; a hail-fellow-well-met is put in command. The hustling life insurance agent probably becomes Captain. The shrewd political boss gets a Colonel’s commission, while the educated officer, who is not a good mixer, is elected to stay at home. And do you know, my son, that we have never got away from that system?

The victors of Concord and Lexington assembled near Boston without organization, and only by courtesy recognizing a common commander. Old Israel Putnam had gumption enough to protect his men behind rail breastworks, saying: “These Americans are never afraid for their heads: they only think of their legs. Shelter their legs and they will fight forever.”

And they did fight; they put up a powerful hot scrap on a powerful hot day, June 17, beating off three assaults by British regulars, who lost more than a thousand men.

Congress immediately authorized the enlistment of 20,370 men for service in the neighborhood of Boston. They apprehended great trouble in keeping the patriot ranks thinned down to that meager stand. The first shot at Concord Bridge had rung around the world, according to an optimistic poet. Colonial martyrs lay dead. Redcoats went tramping across the land, and the colonists were supposed to be ablaze with indignation. Yet, at the end of a month, only 966 volunteers had presented themselves. That was not much of a rush. My son, you ought to have seen how beautifully they restrained their enthusiasm. Their rush was most deliberate and decorous.

Now don’t get cranky, and suppose that I am throwing rocks at anybody’s venerable New England ancestors. Your own venerable ancestors in Virginia and Georgia did precisely the same thing. What I’m talking about is the bad system.

Chapter 4

IV

THE RUSH THAT NEVER RUSHED

By December 15, 1775, only 5,917 men had enlisted, not quite a third. George Washington didn't like this and spoke his mind: "I am sorry to mention the egregious want of public spirit. Instead of pressing to be engaged in the cause of their country, which I vainly flattered myself would be the case, I find we are likely to be deserted at the most critical time."

There were splendid examples of patriotic unselfisliness. Twelve companies of riflemen reported near Boston, some of them having marched a distance of 800 miles. These were the first troops raised upon authority of the Continental Congress, and were soon recognized as the six best corps in the army. In spite of cold and starvation and suffering they fought throughout the war, and formed the backbone of those gallant troops which finally achieved our independence. But they had eight years’ service, my son, and became veterans.

The Continental Congress, bear in mind, had no authority whatever to raise or pay or equip a single soldier. Congress could merely pass resolutions and appeal to the sovereign states.

Minutemen volunteered, quite a bunch of them. They came in a minute and stayed about a minute. Each day Washington had a different army from the one of yesterday, and generally smaller. Which explains his letter of November 28, 1775:

“After the last of this month our lines will be so weakened that the Minutemen and militia must be called in for their defense. And these, being under no kind of government themselves, will destroy what little subordination I have been laboring to establish.”

Recruiting went slower than cold molasses, and Washington himself is authority for the statement that men were “holding back to see what advantages could be gained, and whether or not they could extort a bounty.” Every school boy will naturally spurn the suggestion that patriots of the Revolution would put up their services at public auction. But nobody has ever written for the school boy a popular history of the bounty system.

That was not the worst of it. Most of those volunteers engaged for short terms only, and were so fidgety to return home, that some of them left camp ahead of time “getting away with their arms and ammunition.”

The Governor to whom Washington wrote these facts expressed his great indignation, adding this illuminating phrase: “The pulse of the New England man beats high for liberty. His engagement in the service he thinks purely voluntary, therefore, when the time for enlistment is out, he thinks himself not holden without further engagement.”

Of course, that is the law, a perfectly legal construction to put upon their contract of employment. Nearly one hundred years later we find a similar instance at the first battle of Bull Run.

School boys do not regard George Washington as a chronic complainer. Yet his letters are full of paragraphs like this: “Nothing can surpass the impatience of the troops to get to their firesides. Nearly three hundred of them arrived a few days ago unable to do any duty. But as soon as I administered that grand specific, a discharge, they instantly acquired health, and rather than be detained a few days to cross Lake George, undertook a march of 200 miles with the greatest alacrity.”

Doesn’t this jar upon your reverential ideals, to picture 300 heroes of the Revolu limping around camp until Washington told them to go home, when they suddenly became able to march the distance from New York to Washington?

In consequence of slow voluntary enlistments, and the promptitude with which the short time recruit hiked himself homeward, it was considered expedient to try the worst possible makeshift—a bounty. The unpalatable truth is that by the middle of 1775, before the glorious Declaration of Independence, it had become necessary to pay men so much money for volunteering, making mercenaries of the first soldiers of this republic. On the 6th day of December, 1775, the Continental Congress passed this resolution:

“That the charge of bounty in the accounts exhibited by the Colony of Rhode Island against the United Colonies be not allowed.”

Something had to be done. Washington recognized the failure of the volunteer system and suggested “coercive measures” to fill his regiments. But feeble Congress was afraid to take such a radical step; instead of devis a plan of universal service it tried the more popular scheme of spurring patriotism with cash, and began bidding for men under the bounty system. Up, and up and up the climbing prices went. Four dollars bid! Six dollars and sixty-six cents! Ten dollars bid! By 1778 ruling quotations had reached $20 and 100 acres of land. But the rush did not occur. Something else did occur. Bounties made it impossible to get voluntary recruits, and before the end of 1777 Virginia and Massachusetts both had recourse to the draft—conscription, compulsion, universal service, or whatever you are pleased to call it. The states bidding for men against the Congress caused large numbers to desert and go home to grab the greater bounty. By 1779 the bounty had increased to $200 to any able bodied recruit who would enlist for the war. Then New Jersey offered $250, in addition to the $200, the clothing and land allowed by Congress. The Virginia Council raised the limit to $750, in lieu of all other bounties.

This created great dissatisfaction among the men who had previously enlisted at the cut rate of $4, $6.66, and $10. To keep them in good humor, and in service, Congress granted a back bounty of $100 each.

Under these increasing bounties our armies in the field steadily decreased from 89,661 in 1776 to 29,340 in 1781. During that period we had employed nearly four hundred thousand men. Fewer than 30,000 now remained in the ranks. Desertions became so numerous that early in 1779 it was necessary for Congress to recommend a punishment of fine and whipping, think of it—whipping—for all who should knowingly harbor a deserter.

So much for this Revolutionary rush to arms which didn’t rush. The scramble for men was like the Irishman’s idea of a fox hunt. Seeing the scarlet hunters racing and chasing, and trying to catch the fox, he remarked, “Begod, the dom baste is hell to catch, and ain’t worth a dom after you catch him.”

Chapter 5

V

WHAT THE SHORT-TERM MILITIA DID

It was like pulling hen’s teeth to secure the short-term militiamen. Now we shall see what they accomplished while actually in service. And let me say again, over and over, that I mean to cast no slur upon those individual men; what they did was common to short-term untrained recruits in all countries, at all times, among all peoples.

In 1775 Washington had 17,000 men under his command, 14,500 of whom were fit for duty. The effective redcoats did not exceed 6,500, yet the Father of His Country, with twice their force, dared not hazard an attack. Why? Because Washington was himself a soldier, and knew better. Although having great advantage in quantity he was over-matched in quality. The British were trained and disciplined and organized—a compact force; the Americans scarcely hung together as a mob. Bear in mind, that one group of men may be the lowest of cutthroats and plunderers—yet be soldiers. Another group, inspired by lofty purposes and highest ideals, may be no more than a mob. It is not patriotism—nor courage, but discipline and training, that marks the distinction which Washington so wisely recognized.

On account of short enlistments and the irresistible homeward tendency of recruits, Revolutionary leaders were repeatedly forced to give battle under adverse circumstances—before the terms of their men expired and left them minus an army. This caused the disas at Quebec. Impatient militiamen refused to remain and take the fortress by siege, so the gallant General Montgomery risked a premature assault, lost his own life, had sixty Americans killed, and three or four hundred captured.

During 1775 the Colonies maintained at public expense 37,623 men, a force which from want of supplies and organization spent the year in a state of demoralizing inactivity.

The campaign of 1776 opened under heart-breaking conditions. General Washington had entered the conflict with the buoyant hope that his patriotic countrymen would swell the armies of freedom. On January 14th, he wrote:

“Search the volumes of history and I much question whether a case similar to ours is to be found, namely, to maintain a post against the flower of the British troops for six months together, without powder, and then to have one army disbanded and another to be raised within the same distance of a reënforced enemy. The same desire to retire into the chim corner seized the troops from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts so soon as their time expired, as had wrought upon those of Connecticut, notwithstanding many of them made a tender of their services to continue until the line could be sufficiently strengthened. We are now left with a good deal less than half-raised regiments, and about 5,000 militia, who only stand engaged to the middle of this month, when according to custom they will retire, whether the necessity for their staying be ever so urgent.”

What a sickening picture of the steadfast Washington watching Freedom’s army dwindle away before his very eyes, shifting and changing like the sands of the desert. Believe me, my son. Father was having a batch of trouble with the children.