A Patriot's History of the Modern World

Also by Larry Schweikart

Seven Events That Made America America

48 Liberal Lies About American History

A Patriot's History of the United States (with Michael Allen)

What Would the Founders Say?

You Keep Me Hangin' On (with Mark Stein)

Also by Larry Schweikart, Dave Dougherty, and Michael Allen

The Patriot's History Reader

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

American Emergence Amid European Self-Absorption

CHAPTER TWO

Cataclysm

CHAPTER THREE

Seeking Perfection in the Postwar World

CHAPTER FOUR

The Totalitarian Moment

CHAPTER FIVE

The Hounds Unleashed

CHAPTER SIX

Canopy of Freedom

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

I
t was only six o'clock in the morning, but the desert cool was already yielding to solar rays that in a few hours would reach scorching temperatures. Blowing sand swept the face of a young lieutenant in the British 21st Lancers as he and his troops waited patiently behind a wall of khaki for the assault massing at the formation's front. British and Egyptian riflemen stood and kneeled in double ranks, interspersed with Maxim guns and heavy artillery. It was an impressive sight, even for Lieutenant Winston Churchill, who had seen his share of action. Now, in September 1898, he jotted down notes he would use in his moonlighting job as a war correspondent, incomplete as they necessarily were from his vantage point inside the British square and behind the bristle of Enfield rifles.

In the distance, a massive dust cloud drifted his way. But it was no typical desert sandstorm: instead, the first of 80,000 supposedly unstoppable “Ansar” Muslim forces under the command of Abdullah al-Taashi (called “Khalifa” or ruler) poured out of the hills and from the plain in a headlong charge at the Anglo-Egyptian ranks. Once known as “Mahdists” for their allegiance to the dead self-proclaimed “Mahdi” (the “Guided One”) the Ansar warriors were known by a different name by the British: “dervishes,” for their whirling mystic religious dances and their perceived scorn for Western-style firepower. This day destroyed that reputation as torrents of artillery shells, Maxim machine gun bursts, and ordered rifle volleys mowed down the Ansars by the hundreds. None got closer than fifty yards to the British-Egyptian lines. Half of the Muslims were killed almost instantly, the rest circling to regroup. When the Khalifa retreated to re-form his army, General Horatio Herbert Kitchener (later Lord Kitchener) advanced his columns, sending the 21st Lancers and young Churchill forward to clear away stragglers. The 21st rode into an ambush of 2,500 Ansar infantry, yet charged repeatedly until the
Muslim forces ran. By 11:30, after additional futile dervish charges, the Khalifa's forces were shattered and the British celebrated Omdurman—their last magnificent victory of the Age of Imperialism. In just five short years, many of the same units that so easily dispatched an enemy force more than double their size would struggle mightily to defeat smaller Boer forces in South Africa. There, an enemy coming from a European culture not only equipped with modern weapons but also practicing the “Western way of war” would stifle the mighty British Empire for half a decade.

Just eleven years after Omdurman, the torch of world leadership and influence passed from England in another symbolic way. Literally at the other end of the earth from the Sudanese desert—90 degrees North latitude—American Navy Commander Robert E. Peary, his lungs aching from the freezing air, took latitude sightings and, convinced he was at his destination, planted the American flag at the North Pole. His ascension to the most northerly point on earth, despite subsequent controversy about how far north Peary actually went, seemed figuratively to elevate the United States as a nation. At the other end of the globe, British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the Royal Navy would launch his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition the following year. Scott led four others on a quest to attain 90 degrees South—the South Pole—in a race against Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Whereas Amundsen used dog sleds, Scott employed a complex and fatally flawed combination of motorized sleds, dogs, and horses. The motor sledges broke down, and ponies proved a disastrous choice as they ate more than they could pull. Yet Scott was reluctant to kill and eat them along the way. Although Scott and his companions managed to reach the South Pole on January 17, 1912, they found that Amundsen had arrived there five weeks earlier and seized the glory. Worse, as they retreated to their base, Antarctic blizzards plowed into them, trapping the desperate group eleven miles short of a food cache. Scott's food, fuel, and heat ran out as he wrote in his diary, “Last entry. For God's sake look after our people.”
¹
It was an obituary as much for the British Empire as it was for Robert Falcon Scott.

Like almost all European countries, between 1900 and 1950, England lurched toward socialism, forced into currency devaluations, forgiven its enormous debts by the United States after both world wars, and eagerly accepted American aid through the Marshall Plan. The pound sterling was replaced as the world's reserve currency, as it underwent three devaluations: in 1931, 1949, and 1967.
²

Meanwhile, a new superpower arose across the Atlantic. America's ascent to global dominance was unavoidable after the First World War, but the unrelenting shift in power between the Battle of Omdurman and Peary's polar journey made it apparent even before the Great War that the American eagle would supplant the British lion—at least to non-European observers. Certainly the acquisition of overseas territories by the United States in the Spanish-American War made America a world power in the most literal sense of the word. Beyond that, the nation had matured, grown up, and filled out. The continental United States was complete, and following the explosive economic growth of the Gilded Age, the nation had few superiors in the international market. Even the defeat of Spain in 1898—accomplished with an ill-equipped army (but a modern navy) and a less than full wartime mobilization—caused the Europeans to take notice. If one of their own could be bested so easily, perhaps Uncle Sam had muscles after all.

Yet America's rise to global power came as the nation still struggled with its character, and its vision of its own future. A fierce battle for the type of society the United States would be had partially ended in 1896, when William McKinley won the presidency over the pro-silver faction of William Jennings Bryan. McKinley, running on the gold standard (which stipulated that the only reserve currency of the nation should be gold and should not include silver), had struck a blow for fiscal conservatism. In essence, he insisted that the dollar be “as good as gold.” The gold standard reassured business that it would not be ravaged by rapid price increases in raw materials, and that the value of money would remain stable. The country agreed, much to the chagrin of farmers, who found that large-scale agriculture was making the family farm increasingly obsolete. But there were also inflationists who wanted to use the free silver movement to artificially reward debtor groups; as prices for farm goods rose, for example, farmers would receive more income while their single largest expense—their long-term mortgage on the farm—would remain locked in at lower rates. But McKinley's death in 1901 left Theodore Roosevelt as president, and drastically redirected the government's efforts toward what would later be called “economic justice.”

From that point through the beginning of the next century, the struggle between Progressive liberals in both major parties who wanted redistribution of wealth and more government involvement in all aspects of society and, for want of a better term, “Constitutionalists” who believed that the
individual is responsible for himself and his family, that the political system existed for the people, not for politicians to reshape their constituents like so much clay, would dominate the American political narrative. Often obscured by traditional partisan conflict, the real battle was far deeper, with more profound implications than which party held the White House. This is the first major theme of
A Patriot's History of the Modern World
: which of the two visions of America that existed in 1900 would emerge victorious—the nineteenth-century Progressive worldview, whatever its modern accessories and recasting, or the Constitutional view of government and society. Roosevelt, clearly a Progressive, pushed the United States toward the former; Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan, both Constitutionalists, would attempt to nudge the nation back toward the latter.

A second theme of this work is that the United States is, and has always been, “exceptional” in its founding and national character. That perspective remained common throughout much of the twentieth century, but by 2009, President Barack Obama seemed to lump the United States together with every other nation: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits
believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism
(emphasis ours).”
³
Obama's comment indicated that he lacked even the most basic understanding of what is meant by the term “American exceptionalism.” It is more than the simplistic belief that one's country has its advantages, appealing characteristics, and specific national identity. Nor is it the creature of “biased” Eurocentric or Amerocentric historians. At root, American exceptionalism is the confluence of four factors that collectively do not exist in any other country in the world. Some possess one or two; England possesses three and at one time had all four—but no longer. These are: 1) a heritage of common law; 2) a Christian and predominantly Protestant religious tradition; 3) a free-market economy; and 4) property rights, especially land rights. The common-law heritage held that the law was given to the people (later this was modified to include “by God”) and that the ruler merely enforced the law that everyone observed and understood as divinely inspired. Thus, in common law, authority moved from the people upward, not the other way around, as with “Divine Right” and civil law, in which rights came from the monarch down. America inherited the common-law tradition from England, where it had migrated from Germany, but virtually the rest of the world adopted civil law, with its top-down, autocratic approach. By the mid-twentieth century, even England had started to drift from its common-law moorings. And at no time were
the American-style checks and balances present in the European social democracies. Prime ministers were usually part of the majority party, not an independent chief executive. Moreover, none of the civil-law countries had the same inherent respect for a written constitution so prominent in the U.S. system.