The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (1890-1920)
Karp, Walter
THE POLITICS OF WAR: THE STORY OF TWO WARS WHICH ALTERED FOREVER THE POLITICAL LIFE OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC (1890-1920) Walter Karp / Harper & Row / $15.00 John Lewis Gaddis One of the functions...
...Interest in PAWEWTHs corresponds roughly to the extent of our Current Malaise (CM), and since there is plenty of that around now, those in search of PAWEWTHs have their work cut out for them...
...Karp has also made a major contribution to our understanding of the political process...
...Karp offers us no solutions-it's obviously too late for that...
...What of the Alien and Sedition Acts, they will cry, or "54-40 or Fight," or Seward's 1861 memorandum to Lincoln proposing war with Spain, France, and if necessary also Britain, Russia, Canada, Mexico, and the Central American republics as a means of diverting attention from certain internal difficulties...
...Crities, of course, will fuss...
...He has identified a new, remote, and hitherto unsuspected PAWEWTH that still casts its baleful shadow down the corridors of time: the McKinley Tariff of 1890...
...Pogo was wrong-he (or she) isn't...
...Or the Mugwumps who abandoned Blaine in 1884...
...Garp, who shortly before his untimely demise observed that "imagining something is better than remembering something...
...Karp's judgments are nothing if not clear-cut...
...Both men, it seems, presented to the world an exterior totally at variance with their internal conspiratorial designs...
...The country has not been the same since: Wilson's Presidency marked the "defeat and final obliteration" of the "last great popular struggle in America to maintain a genuinely free republic- a republic free of oligarchy, monopoly, and private power...
...Or the dispassionate "log cabin and hard cider" campaign of 1840...
...He has also shed dramatic new light on the personalities of McKinley and Wilson...
...Here is an analysis that moves beyond current theories about democratic deadlocks, imperial presidencies, narcissism, leadership, and crises of confidence...
...Which at least keeps them off the streets, no small thing these days...
...Some recently discovered PAWEWTHs include the publication of Keynes' General Theory, Joe McCarthy's dinner with Father Walsh at the Colony, John Foster Dulles' determination to economize on dam-building in Egypt, Nixon's decision to see Patton, and the Carter inauguration...
...Wilson was, if anything, more deceptive: Behind that pious and self-righteous facade lurked "a hunger for glory so exclusively self-regarding, so indifferent to the concerns of others, that it would lead him to betray in turn the national movement for reform, the great body of the American people, the fundamental liberties of the American Republic, and in the end the hopes of a war-torn world...
...Consider the Causal Chain (CC): The Republicans' devotion to protectionism, expressed in that fateful act, cost them heavily in the congressional elections that year, forcing them to embrace overseas expansion as a vote-getting device with which to rebuild party fortunes...
...There followed a curious lull under Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, but then that closet Machiavellian, that reactionary in reformer's clothing, Woodrow Wilson, appeared on the scene, determined to drag the United States into World War I in order to sabotage progressivism at home...
...We would all have been better off, he implies, if that distant PAWEWTH, the McKinley Tariff, had never forced the "despotism of professional politicians" to strengthen its stranglehold on the American body politic...
...Hence, it was hardly surprising when the now-President McKinley (of the odious tariff) seized the occasion of a Cuban revolt against Spain to propel the United States into a brief but fruitful conflict, the juiciest plum from which was the Philippines...
...By the time the GOP had regained the Presidency in 1897, then, both parties had learned the advantages of activism abroad as a distraction from difficulties at home...
...We can also profit from the insight of another, more recent literary sage, T.S...
...This has confused most historians, but not Karp: "Like the buncombe artist who cranked the handle that operated the 'Wizard' of Oz, so McKinley now cranked the handle of'destiny,' set in motion the 'march of events,' and manipulated the 'hand' of the 'Almighty,' which was no more than an empty glove...
...The trouble with PAWEWTHs is that they creep up unsuspectingly: By the time they've pounced it's too late to do anything but call in the historians for a post mortem...
...THE POLITICS OF WAR: THE STORY OF TWO WARS WHICH ALTERED FOREVER THE POLITICAL LIFE OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC (1890-1920) Walter Karp / Harper & Row / $15.00 John Lewis Gaddis One of the functions of history is to identify Points After Which Everything Went To Hell (PAWEWTHs, in the acronymic shorthand of the profession...
...But these are quibbles: Karp has obviously found a Grand Underlying Theme (GUT) in American history not perceived by more conventional academic historians, who can't see the forest for their footnotes...
...Or the Liberal Republicans who defected from Grant in 1872...
...Of course, the "devious, crafty, and subtle" McKinley revealed his imperial schemes to no one, even at the time of his death, but that only makes Karp's success in fathoming them all the more remarkable...
...But Walter Karp, in his new book, The Politics of War (not to be confused with an identically-titled volume by Gabriel Kolko some years back), torpedoes that -complacent reasoning...
...This is why Benjamin Harrison almost went to war with Chile over the deaths of two American sailors in a Valparaiso saloon...
...They will also find startling Karp's claim that "passionate attachment to party" had been "little known before the Civil War," but that after that conflict "the American electorate had been, for a generation, a predictable and readily managed body of voters...
...Until now, a kind of statute of limitations has applied to PAWEWTHs: Those 50 years old or more have been regarded as relatively innocuous-fit subjects for regretful head-shaking at sessions of the American Historical Association, but not the kind of thing we ought to lie awake nights worrying about...
...But one can find consolation in his implied rejection of the searing indictment once rendered by the marsupial sage of the Okefenokee: "We have met the enemy, and he is us...
...Where, they will ask, does this leave that nonpartisan advocate of reason and calm, Andrew Jackson...
...With breathtaking simplicity it gets at the heart of the matter: the cynical and malign tyranny of political parties over the harmonious, enlightened, tolerant, progressive, and selfless basic instincts of the American people...
...Four years later, Grover Cleveland, alarmed by free silver pressures within the Democratic Party, took a leaf from the Republicans' book by threatening war with Great Britain over Venezuela...
...They will express wonderment at the author's assertion that prior to 1890 foreign policy was not regularly exploited for domestic political advantage...
Vol. 12 • November 1979 • No. 11
