A Patriot's History of the Modern World (75 page)

My interest in history began at the age of ten, when my brother Ralph gave me a book of biographies of famous persons to read. It stated that Alexander the Great had set civilization back one thousand years while Karl Marx was a great economic and political thinker. Even then, in 1950, I recognized spurious propaganda when I read it and began regularly checking books out of the Denver Public Library to read further. The next Christmas my parents gave me
Life's Picture History of
World War II,
followed in 1953 with Douglas Southall Freeman's three-volume work,
Lee's Lieutenants,
and Walter Goerlitz's
History of the German
General Staff
in 1954. That was supplemented by
Statesmen of the Lost Cause
from J. Howard Marshall, Jr.'s later wife, Bettye Bohanon. In short, I was hooked on history at an early age and never took a college history course. Many of my parents' friends and acquaintances took part in stimulating further reading on my part, and their names are too numerous to mention.

In El Paso, where I lived for more than twenty years and was a professor of business–computer science, a close friend, Gary Thompson, guided me through dark times and encouraged me to produce several novels, which I made no serious effort to publish. More recently another friend has loomed large, Shirley Wunderlich. Following the death of her husband in January 2011, she has spent many hours reading my work and offering suggestions and corrections. She deserves my special thanks and appreciation.

For the past ten years the continual requests for historical and political tracts from conservatives here in northern Arkansas have proven especially stimulating. The bedrock people who are the backbone of our country but scorned by our elites have an abiding thirst for historical knowledge and are the pond in which I swim. Hardly a day goes by in which I am not asked some serious historical question or to provide background for some current political issue.

Last, one rarely learns anything from someone whose opinion is the same as his own, and I am privileged to live in a rural environment where the meaning of life is not a question for sociologists, but is found in the Bible. After cutting fifty bull calves and turning them into steers, one gains a different perspective on life.

—Dave Dougherty

Introduction

1.
Leonard Huxley, ed.,
Scott's Last Expedition: Vols. I and II
(London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1913), 1:595.

2.
Alex Cairncross and Barry Eichengreen,
Sterling in Decline
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell Pub. Ltd, 1983).

3.
Barack Obama News Conference, April 4, 2009, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=85959&st=american+exceptionalism&st1=#axzz1Tn2f9R8i.

4.
Guillaume Thomas François Raynal,
Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Établissements et du Commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes
, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1770), quoted in Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia
, David Walstreicher, ed. (New York: Bedford, St. Martin's, 2002), 125.

5.
Personal interviews by David Dougherty, 1963–65. See also R. A. C. Parker,
Chamberlain and Appeasement
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 44, to see Neville Chamberlain's opinion of the United States: “We have the misfortune to be dealing with a nation of cads.” Parker also states, referring to 1935: “Enlightened, progressively minded British citizens felt a sense of duty to the world. This went…with a long-established sense of British power and influence…. It still seemed natural to believe that London could and should organize the world” (ibid., 25).

6.
Donald Smythe,
Pershing, General of the
Armies
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 267.

7.
Niall Ferguson,
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
(New York: Penguin, 2006), xli.

8.
Paul Johnson,
Modern Times: A History of the World from the Twenties to the Nineties
, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 160.

Chapter 1: American Emergence Amid European Self-Absorption

1.
Ronald Spector,
Admiral of the New Empire: the Life and Career of George Dewey
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974).

2.
John Barrett,
Admiral George Dewey
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1899), 14–15.

3.
David M. Potter,
The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861
, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976), 198.

4.
“De Lome Letter,” http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/De_L%C3%B4me_Letter.

5.
Henry J. Hendrix,
Theodore Roosevelt's Naval Diplomacy: The United States Navy and the Birth of the American Century
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009); William Henry Harbaugh,
Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), 95; William R. Braisted,
The
United States Navy in the Pacific, 1897–1909
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958). According to Braisted, Roosevelt “was perhaps more responsible than any other individual…for the shaping of the Navy into an effective instrument of war and diplomacy.”

6.
“Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1898,” http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/spanam/sn98-13.htm.

7.
Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,”
The Geographical Journal
, 23, April 1904, 421–37.

8.
Peter Krass,
Carnegie
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 259; Robert Seager, “Ten Years Before Mahan: The Unofficial Case for the New Navy, 1880–1890,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
, 60, December 1953, 491–512.

9.
See Burton Folsom, Jr.,
The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America
(Herndon, VA: Young America's Foundation, 1991), 75.

10.
Barrett,
Admiral George Dewey
, 59, 66.

11.
Sylvia L. Hilton and Steve J. S. Ickringill, eds.,
European Perceptions of the Spanish-American War of 1898
(Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1999), 12; J. Fred Rippy, “The European Powers and the Spanish-American War,”
James Sprunt Historical Studies
, 19, 1927, 22–52.

12.
Hilton and Ickringill,
European Perceptions of the Spanish-American War
, 16.

13.
Lester B. Shippee, “Germany and the Spanish-American War,”
American Historical Review
, 30, July 1925, 754–77; Terrell D. Gottschall, “Germany and the Spanish-American War: A Case Study of Navalism and Imperialism,” Ph.D. dissertation, Washington State University, 1981.

14.
Louis M. Sears, “French Opinion of the Spanish American War,”
Hispanic American Historical Review
, 7, 1927, 25–44; James Louis Whitehead,
“French Reaction to American Imperialism, 1895–1908,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1943; John L. Offner, “The United States and France: Ending the Spanish-American War,”
Diplomatic History
, 7, Winter 1983, 1–21.

15.
Leonid A. Shur, “Russian Volunteers in the Cuban War of National Liberation, 1895–1898,” in R. H. Bartley, ed.,
Soviet Historians on Latin America: Recent Scholarly Contributions
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 221–33.

16.
J. H. McMinn, “The Attitude of the English Press toward the U.S. During the Spanish-American War,” Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1939; Robert G. Neale, “Anglo-American Relations During the Spanish American War: Some Problems,”
Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand
, 6, 1953, 72–84, and his
Great Britain and Untied States Expansion, 1898–1900
(Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966); Geoffrey Seed, “British Reactions to American Imperialism Reflected in Journals of Opinion, 1898–1900,”
Political Science Quarterly
, 73, 1958, 254–72, and his “British Views of American Policy in the Philippines Reflected in Journals of Opinion,”
Journal of American Studies
, 2, 1968, 49–64.

17.
Nico A. Bootsma, “Reactions to the Spanish-American War in the Netherlands,” in Hilton and Ickringill,
European Perceptions of the Spanish-American War
, 35–52.

18.
Bootsma, “Reactions to the Spanish-American War in the Netherlands,” 50.

19.
Francisco Diaz Diaz, “The Spanish American War—One Spaniard's View,” http://www.spanamwar.com/Spanishview.htm.

20.
Sylvia L. Hilton, “The United States Through Spanish Republican Eyes in the Colonial Crisis of 1895–1898,” in Hilton and Ickringill,
European Perceptions of the Spanish-American War
, 53–70 (quotation on 56). Hilton claims the Republican criticism of the war was in reality directed at the Spanish government. But even if one accepts her view that the Republicans' ultimate object of vituperation was Spanish government incompetence, leading to a catastrophe, that hardly elevated their view of the United States. Tortuously, Hilton argued, the Spanish Republicans saw the vindication of
republicanism
in their view that, in a contest between a Republican Spain and a republican United States, Spain would triumph.

21.
Larry Schweikart,
America's Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror
(New York: Sentinel, 2007), 70–71.

22.
Mark W. Kwasny,
Washington's Partisan War, 1775–1783
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), 3.

23.
Edward M. Coffman,
The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898
(New York: Oxford, 1986), 166.

24.
Justin H. Smith,
The War with Mexico
, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 1:105–6.

25.
Ibid., 1:105; London
Times
, July 5, 1845.

26.
Markus M. Hugo, “ ‘Uncle Sam I Cannot Stand, for Spain I Have No Sympathy': An Analysis of Discourse About the Spanish-American War in Imperial Germany, 1898–1899,” in Hilton and Ickringill,
European Perceptions of the Spanish-American War
, 71–93.

27.
Ibid., 87.

28.
Nicole Slupetzky, “Austria and the Spanish-American War,” in ibid., 181–94 (quotation on 183–84).

29.
Hilton, “United States Through Spanish Republican Eyes,” 64.

30.
Ibid.

31.
Ibid., 67.

32.
Slupetzky, “Austria and the Spanish American War,” 184.

33.
Hilton, “United States Through Spanish Republican Eyes,” 64.

34.
Ibid., 65.

35.
Slupetzky, “Austria and the Spanish-American War,” 183.

36.
J. B. Atkins,
The War in Cuba, The Reminiscences of an Englishman with the United States Army
(London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1899), 24–26; Joseph Smith, “British War Correspondents and the Spanish-American War, April–July 1898,” in Hilton and Ickringill,
European Perceptions of the Spanish-American War
, 195–209 (quotation on 198).

37.
Smith, “British War Correspondents,” 198.

38.
George Lynch,
Impressions of a War Correspondent
(London: George Newnes, 1903), 100;
Daily Mail
, May 2, 1898.

39.
C. E. Hands, “Uncle Sam's New Bike,”
Daily Mail,
June 25, 1898.

40.
C. E. Hands, “Seeing the Battle,”
Daily Mail
, August 4, 1898.

41.
Douglas McPherson,
Daily Graphic
, August 18, 1898.

42.
Niall Ferguson,
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
(London: Allan Lane, 2004), 41.

43.
Hilton, “United States Through Spanish Republican Eyes,” 69.

44.
Slupetzky, “Austria and the Spanish-American War,” 193.

45.
Ibid., 69.

46.
Hugo, “ ‘Uncle Sam I Cannot Stand, for Spain I Have No Sympathy,' ” 90. Ludmila N. Popkova, “Russian Press Coverage of American Intervention in the Spanish-American War,” in Hilton and Ickringill,
European Perceptions of the Spanish-American War
, 111–32 (quotation on 126).

47.
Daniela Rossini, “The American Peril: Italian Catholics and the Spanish-American War, 1898,” in Hilton and Ickringill,
European Perceptions of the Spanish-American War
, 167–79 (quotation on 179).

48.
Hugo, “ ‘Uncle Sam I Cannot Stand, for Spain I Have No Sympathy,' ” 89.

49.
Thomas F. O'Brien,
Making the Americas: The United States and Latin
America from the Age of Revolutions to the Era of Globalization
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 71.

50.
See also Jack C. Lane,
Armed Progressive
(Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 71, 86–113.

51.
Max Boot,
The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
(New York: Basic Books, 2003), 132.

52.
O'Brien,
Making the Americas
, 72.

53.
Brian McAllister Linn,
The Philippine War
1
899–1902
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 3.

54.
Ibid., 6.

55.
Graham Cosmas,
An Army
for Empire: The United States Army and the Spanish-American War
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 121.

56.
Ibid., 102.