Special Editorial / Defend America Now
No one today outside the Kremlin --and possibly not there either-knows where Soviet forces will strike next. An attack on Pakistan, in al-: leged support of an oppressed separatist...
...Imagine spending money on drink when you could be investing in factories...
...Only the severely handicapped among our young men should be excused from military training...
...On the other, his quantitative data, admittedly incomplete and unsubstantiated, indicate that Americans' drinking was not out of line from Western Europeans...
...And washing down with liquor was usually the best choice: Most available water was not quite of Perrier quality...
...Not only every one of the swarm of McGovernites who currently infest the State and Defense Departments and National Security Council must be dismissed, but also such top policy makers as State's chief Soviet "exp e r t , " Marshall Shulman, still mouthing the witless Henry Wallace platitudes of 1948, and Secretary Vance as well, who, for all his basic decency and patriotism, has never understood the implacable nature of our Russian adversaries...
...But while water originally supported the popularity of liquor, Rorabaugh found that it eventually contributed to a reduction in alcohol consumption...
...And that is precisely what we are presently incapable of doing with any hope of success, including an allout nuclear exchange, which would be a far greater catastrophe to the United States than to the Soviet Union, given the USSR's much wider dispersion of population and production facilities and its incomparable civil defense system...
...A demonstration of willingness on the part of the American people to pay the price of national security will impress Soviet analysts as nothing else can that this is truly a national determination...
...It is their present confidence that the United States would not risk annihilation for the sake of Pakistan or Yugoslavia or Iran--or, for that matter, Western Europe...
...Prior to 1840 Americans drank almost no beer, but they more than compensated for its absence with whiskey, rum, brandy, and cider--the hard stuff...
...Paul expressed the same priority in his epistles to Philemon and the Galatians...
...F i r s t , we must reinstitute the draft --and this time on a no-exemption basis...
...Grain embargoes, withholding licenses for the sale of high-technology goods, and boycotting the Moscow Olympics are all very well, but to the tough-minded men in the Kremlin they can only indicate pique, not resolve...
...They ate fruit, cabbage, and onions in season, but the basic meal was "hog and hominy" washed down with whiskey or hard cider...
...To properly equip our forces, we should increase our defense spending to 6 percent of the GNP (we now spend under 5 percent, while the Soviets spend over 12), which would provide approximately 22 billion dollars more for defense in FY 1981 than the amount proposed in the President's new budget...
...Fourth, the bill for this massive rearmament program must be paid through new taxes, not deficit financing...
...The main thing is that there should always be pressure, unceasing constant pressure, toward the desired goal...
...Now he claims to have had his eyes opened, but unless he is willing--as President Franklin Roosevelt was in 1940, an election year--to invest every shred of prestige, power, and passion he has in the effort to restore America's defenses along the lines we have proposed here, he most assuredly will have presided over the Finlandization of the world, or the nuclear destruction of the United States...
...After all, you need a catchy title if you are going to sell in a popular market...
...Alone among post-World War II administrations the Carterites have ignored the truths that George Kennan spelled out in his famous "X" article of 1947, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct...
...Any one of these Soviet moves would constitute a devastating blow to Western security interests, leaving us no reasonable option but to go to war...
...Which is why W.J...
...The Independence movement had been nurtured in the taverns, and drinking came to be thought of as a symbol of liberation and equality...
...Indeed, it may have been significantly lower...
...The fact of the matter is that two decades of progressively lower military expenditures by this country in the interest of a "reordering of priorities" has left us with a defense establishment unable to defend our vital security anywhere outside the Western hemisphere...
...When considering the fact that Christian temperance reformers were often abolitionists as well, Rorabaugh notes that the reformers believed "temperance to be the more crucial reform . . . . a slave had only lost control of his body, a drunkard lost mastery of his soul...
...and it must be clear to the Russians that the time to throw down the gauntlet is now, before an alarmed West can bring its heavv economic superiority to bear in a redressing of the military balance...
...Americans depended on booze to provide the most exciting part of their diet...
...And (alternately) what cold-hearted materialists those capitalists were...
...Rorabaugh wrote what eventually became The Alcoholic Republic, a study of drinking by Americans between 1790 and 1830...
...Those alternatives are the truest measure of how far we have descended from the pinnacle of military supremacy in the last 15 years...
...and stream water was often at least one-quarter mud...
...Expansionary industrialism seduced the American innocents away from ex34 ]'HE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1080...
...Apparently our forefathers took their drinking seriously...
...As a practical matter, once the gauntlet is thrown we are lost...
...We must either bow politically or go down in ruins militarily...
...Weren't those early 19th-century Americans a bunch of sots...
...The notion that inebriation interferes with worship of and rational commitment to God is not seriously considered in Rorabaugh's analysis of the clergy's role in temperance advocacy...
...Manufacturing output tripled during the 30-year period from 1810 to 1840, while the consumption of alcohol dropped by nearly two-thirds between 1830 and 1845...
...As matters now stand, we will have to wait until 1989 for the security then promised by Carter's Rube Goldberg-basing of the MX missile...
...Today, it is difficult for us to understand that attempt, for while we retain the belief in materialism, we find it difficult to comprehend nineteenth century revivalism fully...
...Hemingway couldn't do it, Faulkner couldn't do it, and they weren't trying to satisfy thesis requirements for a graduate degree in history...
...Washington, D.C., had no public wells because the citizenry refused to pay the higher taxes necessary to finance construction...
...The services today are desperately undersupplied in virtually every category of their weapons inventory, from tanks and naval vessels down to artillery and rifle ammunition...
...How terrible everything was...
...And let us not forget that Soviet troops are within striking range of the Iranian oil fields...
...After all, the author states, "devotion to religion" is " a highly charged emotionalism...
...Although by the late 1700s there was growing skepticism regarding the contribution of liquor to good health, most people continued to treat illness with whiskey...
...Rorabaugh learned that during the early years of the Republic the consumption pattern was different...
...Temperance organizations apparently founded on Christian doctrine were actually, Rorabaugh suggests, devices to restore the authority of the clergy and to ease the anxieties of a laity which had given up drinking because of painful hangovers...
...That is the legacy of two decades of---for all practical purposes-unilateral disarmament...
...people drink whiskey and beer...
...But even if Rorabaugh can find no personal God to be reckoned with, he can spot a devil: expansionary industrialism...
...The scandal of college deferments must never be repeated in a democratic society...
...Intervention in Yugoslavia, by invitation of pro-Moscow elements in the aftermath of President Tito's death, is another...
...What then motivates them to offer us the sort of challenge that might impel us to resort to nuclear war...
...An attack on Pakistan, in al-: leged support of an oppressed separatist minority, is one possibility...
...Rorabaugh's research shows that their annual intake of alcohol between 1770 and 1830 was one and a half times what ours has been since 1960...
...Though they would undoubtedly sustain a lower level of destruction in such a war, that is still only a comparative measure...
...Fifth, the President must clean house in his own administration...
...Happens every time...
...the lowest conceivable amount of damage they would surely suffer would set their society back by decades...
...In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies...
...This he sees as the evil reality of economic development...
...forces in Europe have only enough ammunition for 36 hours of combat...
...On the one hand, Rorabaugh cites European visitors' observations of Americans' drinking habits which suggest that the latter imbibed more heavily...
...The author finds this preference to be "grotesque" and "absurd...
...Traditionally, liquor had been considered to be a "good creature of God...
...And that confidence could be shaken if, and only if, the United States moves at once to a program of rearmament unprecedented in our post-Korean history...
...During the early 1800s an expanding system of canals enabled Western farmers to ship raw corn to Eastern markets, and many Eastern farmers, unable to match the yields achieved on Western fields, turned to processing and manufacturing for regional and national markets now open to them as a result of the ne, w waterways...
...his thesis advisor suggested that title when Rorabaugh decided to convert his work into a book...
...Jimmy Carter of course thought he knew better--until last month...
...Add to this a demonstration (in Moscow's eyes) of pusillanimity on the part of our present leaders unmatched by anything since Munich...
...It is clear that Moscow is positioning itself, militarily and politically, to do just that...
...Today Americans drink ten times as much beer as whiskey...
...Second, the President must demand of Congress a supplemental appropriation to the FY 1980 budget large enough to allow us to procure all the mat6riel that can be produced and all the personnel that can be trained on a crash basis...
...The tune Rorabaugh has scored is composed of a recurring malady: Ain't It Awful...
...One suspects that Mr...
...We cannot win a war any time this year against the Soviet Union...
...According to one authoritative report, U.S...
...Accordingly, Rorabaugh insists on comprehending spiritual factors in terms of 20thcentury materialism...
...The new commercial growth inspired an interest among businessmen for more disciplined operations--a discipline incompatible with the on-the-job drinking that had become a standard American practice...
...Karl 0 'Lessker for the Editorial Board contemporaries is less clear...
...This new managerial style fit neatly with the rationalist philosophy that was coming to dominate social thought...
...While the choice is certainly not contemporary, it is essentially Christian: St...
...Drinking water in New York City cured not only thirst but also constipation--"running water" took on a whole new meaning...
...The average Americans generally lived on corn, pork, and liquor...
...Rorabaugh has trouble discussing evangelical Christianity, a problem he acknowledges: " . . . materialism was coupled with spirituality, and young Americans of the 1830s were determined to build a society based on both elements...
...Rorabaugh discusses the social, political, economic, and theological influences of the post-Revolutionary era on drinking...
...C•nce these steps are taken President Carter should declare--and will have a chance to be believed--not only that we are committed to the defense of areas vital to our security but that we will not accept a defeat by conventional arms...
...Can anything be done to prevent it...
...An income tax surcharge of, say, 10 percent would yield something on the order of 16 billion dollars in the remaining eight months of this fiscal year...
...Most menacing of all, an invasion of Iran upon the slightest hint of U.S...
...The writing is still pedantic...
...And no one wants to read some dry old history book-you've got to make it sing...
...The author does not allow this possibility to hinder him from pursuing his point...
...For it is reasonable to assume that the Russians are almost as eager to avoid all-out nuclear war as are we...
...In rural areas wells were scarce...
...Whether early Americans outdrank their European SPECIAL EDITORIAL (continued from page 5) fully to understand the depth of our commitment and the price they would have to pay for disregarding it that they will be moved to step back from the precipice...
...Indeed, so long as we continue most other economic and cultural exchanges, halfway (if that) measures are likely to be perceived as little more than dithering...
...Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power...
...In it he wrote that Soviet political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal...
...He tells us about "alcoholic beverages" and " d i s t i l l e d s p i r i t s . " People d o n ' t drink "alcoholic beverages...
...But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts these philosophically and accommodates itself to them...
...The original thesis wasn't called The Alcoholic Republic...
...Rorabaugh wrote the book with his collar buttoned and his tie knotted in place...
...It was also the best way to prepare that grain for sale in markets over 20 miles away: Whiskey was easier to transport as well as more lucrative than raw corn...
...If that is true it must rank as the worst scandal in American military history...
...Surely it is far enough...
...For it is only when the Soviet leadership comes (continued on page 34) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 5 The drinking of bourbon simply does not translate into words...
...Whiskey made from corn was patriotically American...
...Weren't the clergy such stuffed shirts...
...military action against the crumbling, lunatic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini is a virtual certainty...
...Third, the administration must restore and accelerate development of new strategic weapons systems--the B-1 bomber, the neutron bomb, air- and sea-launched cruise missiles, and the MX intercontinental missile...
...Sixth, the ABM treaty must be abrogated...
...In doing so these rationalists formed a de facto alliance with evangelical Christians in their opposition to hard drinking...
...Our only hope today lies in deterrence+ Not in the fatuous academics' doctrine of nuclear deterrence that Robert McNamara bequeathed to us, but in a demonstration of renewed will so immediate, so unambiguous, and so massive as to persuade Soviet leaders that the cost to them of military victory would be higher than they care to pay...
...Advocates of both found the effects of heavy drinking to be at odds with their own purposes and beliefs, and they argued diligently to persuade the public that temperance was beneficial...
...ABMs promise cheaper and earlier security...
Vol. 13 • March 1980 • No. 3
