World War II in the Pacific was often an improvisational war for the US in the early years, before US war industries came fully on line and the US buried Japan under a wave of ships and planes to seize control of the air and the sea. Before that took place, the US had to fight cagily and make do. No better example of this spirit of improvisation can be found than the PBY Catalina night bomber squadrons that wreaked havoc on Japanese shipping in daring nighttime raids.
The PBY Catalina flying boat, was an amphibious plane and the workhorse plane for the US in the Pacific. Used for everything from anti-submarine patrols, to air-sea rescue and cargo transport, its most unusual incarnation was as a night bomber against Japanese shipping.
Equipped with magnetic anomaly detectors, normally used to detect submarines in anti-submarine patrols, and painted flat black, PBY Catalina 5As and 6As squadrons began to attack Japanese supply convoys at night. Their attacks proved quite effective, the Black Cats sinking 112, 700 tons of Japanese merchant shipping between August 1943-January 1944, damaging another 40,000 tons and damaged 10 Japanese warships. (more…)
(Originally published at The American Catholic. I assume that the History mavens of Almost Chosen People will find it interesting.)
A strange fascination for World War II in the Pacific overtakes many Catholic blogs in early August each year, so in line with that I throw out this question: should Hirohito have been tried as a war criminal? The video clip above is from the movie Emperor (2012) which depicts a fictional account of an American attempt to determine the extent of Hirohito’s involvement in the launching of Japan’s war of conquest which would claim over thirty million lives.
MacArthur had little doubt of Hirohito’s war guilt, but he also had little doubt that Hirohito’s cooperation was necessary for a peaceful occupation of Japan. Hirohito thus served as a figure head while MacArthur, the Yankee Shogun, remade Japan. This picture tells us all we need to know about the relationship between the two men:
MacArthur encountered considerable resistance to his decision not to prosecute Hirohito. Belief in Hirohito’s war guilt was an article of faith in America and in the other nations that had fought Japan. MacArthur played along with the fable promoted by the Japanese government that Hirohito had always been a man of peace, who was powerless in the face of the militarists who ran Japan. This myth, well bald-faced lie would be a more accurate description, was surprisingly successful. The first major scholarly attack on it was by David Bergamini’s 1200 page Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, published in 1971. Read a review of it here. (more…)
In the aftermath of American victory in the Revolutionary War, times were tough in the new nation. In Massachusetts farmers faced financial ruin as merchants, concerned with the inflation, were demanding repayment of debts in hard currency which was in short supply. Governor John Hancock attempted to set an example by not demanding that his debtors pay him in hard currency, and he refused to authorize prosecution of those who failed to pay their taxes to the State. This was to no avail as more farmers began to lose their farms through foreclosure. That most of these farmers had fought in the Revolution made their plight more poignant, and also suggested that they would not stand idle as they were reduced to poverty.
Violence broke out after James Bowdoin, champion of the merchants, was elected Governor of the Bay State. On August 29, 1786 a rebellion broke out when a well organized force prevented the court from sitting in Northampton. Daniel Shays who had served in the Continental Army as a Captain, and who had receive a sword of honor from Lafayette that he had to sell to help pay his debts, participated in the Northampton action. His name became attached to the Rebellion, but he staunchly denied that he was one of the leaders of the movement.
The Massachusetts government now confronted the quandary of attempting to assert its authority when the only armed force at its disposal were militia levies and much of the militia sympathized with the rebels. The Federal government of the Articles of Confederation was deaf to appeals for aid, having no armed forces in any case to aid Massachusetts in putting down the Rebellion.
The solution was a 3000 man militia force under former Continental Major General Benjamin Lincoln. The force was paid for by 125 merchants who contributed 6000 pounds. With this force, Lincoln crushed the Rebellion in February 1787. Casualties were minor, five killed, a few dozen wounded, but the impact of the Rebellion was profound in convincing many of the leaders in the United States of the necessity of revising the weak Articles of Confederation and forming a stronger Federal government. Shays Rebellion had given rise to outbursts throughout New England, and although they had been quickly quashed, the alarm they raised reached Mount Vernon.
On October 31, 1786 in a letter to Henry Lee, George Washington demonstrated how deeply Shays’ Rebellion disturbed him:
Seventy-nine years ago the Marine Corps was preparing to add to its legend with bloody fighting for islands with strange names that soon would become enshrined in American history. Kate Smith, the songstress of the American war effort in World War II, sang the above tribute to the Marines on February 19, 1942 at the start of the War. Interestingly enough she sang the pre-1929 version of the Marines’ Hymn, the version that she, and most of her audience were most familiar with, prior to this sequence from the 1948 Sands of Iwo Jima imprinting the new version on the American psyche: (more…)
The more I study the Founding Fathers, the greater my respect for their wisdom. Such an example was on full display at the Constitutional Convention on August 27, 1787, when George Mason of Virginia got up to speak. Although a slave owner himself, Mason had long recognized what a pernicious evil it was:
This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of British Merchants. The British Govt. constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it. The present question concerns not the importing States alone but the whole Union. The evil of having slaves was experienced during the late war. had slaves been treated as they might have been by the Enemy, they would have proved dangerous instruments in their hands. But their folly dealt by the slaves, as it did by the Tories. He mentioned the dangerous insurrections of the slaves in Greece and Sicily; and the instructions given by Cromwell to the Commissioners sent to Virginia, to arm the servants & slaves, in case other means of obtaining its submission should fail. Maryland & Virginia he said had already prohibited the importation of slaves expressly. North Carolina had done the same in substance. All this would be in vain if South Carolina & Georgia be at liberty to import. The Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands, and will fill that Country with slaves if they can be got through South Carolina & Georgia. Slavery discourages arts & manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigration of Whites, who really enrich & strengthen a Country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgement of heaven upon a country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities. He lamented that some of our Eastern brethren had from a lust of gain embarked in this nefarious traffic. As to the States being in possession of the Right to import, this was the case with many other rights, now to be properly given up. He held it essential in every point of view that the Genl. Govt. should have power to prevent the increase of slavery.(more…)
In spite of his grief over the death of his son Quentin, and his own failing health, Theodore Roosevelt did not retire from public life. On August 26, 1918 he gave a barn-burner of a speech in Springfield, Illinois:
The two great needs of the moment are to insist upon thorough-going and absolute Americanism throughout this land, and to speed up the war; and secondarily to these needs come the needs of beginning even now to make ready, to prepare for the tasks that are to come after the war, the task of preparing so that never again shall war find us helpless, and the task of preparing for the social and industrial problems which this earth-shaking conflict of giants will leave in its ruinous wake.
To insist upon thorough-going, 100 per cent. Americanism among all our people is merely another way. of saying that we insist upon being a nation proud of our national past and confident of our future as the greatest of the nations of mankind: for if we permit our people to be split into a score of different nationalities, each speaking a different language and each paying its real soul homage to some national ideal overseas, we shall not be a nation at all, but merely a polyglot boarding house; and nobody feels much loyalty to a polyglot boarding house or is proud to belong to it. Moreover, there is no such thing as a divided loyalty. Any kind of alloy in the loyalty makes the loyalty completely valueless. At this time the man of German origin who says he is loyal to “Germanism,” to “Deutschtum,” although not to Germany, to ” Deutschland,” is disloyal to America. Germanism is incompatible with Americanism. The slightest loyalty to Germany is disloyalty to the United States. We can tolerate no half-way attitude, no fifty-fifty loyalty. The man must be an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.
If a man is loyal to any other flag, whether a foreign flag or the red flag of anarchy, or the black flag of Germanized socialism, he is disloyal to the American flag; and we must have but one language, the language of the Declaration of Independence, and of Washington’s Farewell Address, and of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Speech, the English language.
We are not internationalists. We are American nationalists. We intend to do justice to all other nations. But in the last four years the professed internationalists like the profound pacifists have played the game of brutal German autocracy, the game of the militaristic and capitalistic tyranny which now absolutely rules the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns. Professional internationalism stands towards patriotism exactly as free love stands toward a clean and honorable and duty-performing family life. And American pacifism has been the tool and ally of German militarism, and has represented, and always will represent, deep disloyalty to our beloved country.
Having said this, with all the emphasis at my command, I wish with no less emphasis to say that the equally important other side of Americanism is the imperative duty of treating all men who show that they are in very truth Americans as on an entire equality of right and privilege, with no more regard to their birthplace, or the birthplace of their parents than to their creed. In this crisis, since once our people grew fully awake, the Americans of German blood have in the immense majority of cases shown themselves as absolutely and aggressively and single-minded American as the citizens of any other stock or as the citizens who like most of us are of mixed stock. The German government and the-German newspapers have reluctantly recognized this and they are more bitter against the Americans of German blood than against any other Americans. The leading papers of Germany have contained bitter denunciations of them; and recently in the captured report of a»German Inspector General which spoke of the American prisoners, the General especially dwelt on the fact that the soldiers of foreign parentage felt and behaved precisely like the soldiers of native parentage, and that this applied especially to the soldiers of German parentage. Among the feats of especial gallantry chronicled of our men at the front a full proportion are to be credited to men whose names show that they are in whole or in part of German blood. We Americans all stand shoulder to shoulder in war and in peace; and woe to the men who would try to divide us. No man can serve two masters. No man can serve both the United States and Germany. If he is loyal to one side he must be hostile to the other. If he is a loyal American he must be against Germany and all her works.
For the moment the pacifists and internationalists and pro-Germans dare not be noisy. But let our people beware of them as soon as the peace negotiations begin and from that time onward. They have worked together in the past and they will work together in the future, the pro-Germans furnishing the most powerful and most sinister element of the combination while the pacifists and the internationalists prance in the foreground and furnish the rhetoric. Let our people remember that for the two and a half years before we entered the war the pacifists clamorously insisted that if we kept unprepared we would avoid war. Well, we tried the experiment. We kept completely unprepared. Even after we broke off diplomatic relations with Germany we refused to make the slightest preparation. And nevertheless we drifted into the war. Pacifism and unpreparedness never keep a nation out of war. They invite war; and they insure that if war comes it shall be costly; and long drawn out and bloody. If when the great war broke out four years ago, or even if when the Lusitania was sunk three years and a quarter ago, we had begun with all our energy to prepare, we would very possibly never have had to go to war at all, and if forced to go to war we would have conquered peace ninety days after our entry into the conflict.
Let us remember this when the peace comes. Don’t trust the pacifists; they are the enemies of righteousness. Don’t trust the internationalists; they are the enemies of nationalism and Americanism. Both of these groups appeal to all weaklings, illusionists, materialists, lukewarm Americans and faddists of all the types that vitiate nationalism. Their leaders are plausible, makebelieve humanitarians, who crave a notoriety that flatters their own egotism, who often mislead amiable and well-meaning, but short-sighted persons, who care for their own worthless carcasses too much to go anywhere near the front when fighting comes, but who in times of inert and slothful thinking, when war seems a remote possibility, can gain a reputation by windy schemes which imply not the smallest self-sacrifice or service among those who advocate them, and which therefore appeal to all exponents of intellectual vagary, sentimental instability and eccentricity, and that sham altruism which seeks the cheap glory of words that betray deeds. All these elements combined may, when the people as a whole are not fully awake, betray this country into a course of folly for which when the hour of stern trial comes our bravest men will pay with blood and our bravest women with tears. For those illusionists do not pay with their own bodies for the dreadful errors into which they have led a nation. They strut through their time of triumph in the hours of ease; and when the hours of trial come they scatter instantly and let the nationalists, the old-fashioned patriots, the men and women who believe in the virile fighting virtues, accept the burden and carry the load, meet the dangers and make the sacrifies, and give themselves to and for the country. Nations are made, defended, and preserved, not by the illusionists but by the men and women who practice the homely virtues in time of peace, and who in time of righteous war are ready to die, or to send those they love best to die, for a shining ideal.
When peace comes let us accept any reasonable proposal, whether calling for a league of nations or for any other machinery, which we can in good faith act upon, and which does really offer some chance of lessening the number of future wars and diminishing their area. But let us never forget that any promise that such a league or other piece of machinery will definitely do away with war is either sheer nonsense or rank hypocrisy. When the test comes any strong and brutal nation will treat any such agreement as a scrap of paper, precisely as Germany treated the Hague conventions and the treaties guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, unless well-behaved nations possess both the will and the power to enforce the observance of the agreement. Therefore let us treat any peace treaties and agreements never as substitutes for but merely as supplementary to the duty of preparing our own strength for our own defense. And let us make this duty the duty of all the people, as it should be in a democracy, where universal suffrage should rest on universal service. Let us rest our strength on an army which shall consist not of a special caste, but of the people themselves; on an army produced by the universal obligatory training of all our young men sometime between the ages of 19 and 21.
This is for the future. Our immediate duty is to win the war. We must speed up the war to the limit. We must try to finish it at the earliest possible moment, but be resolved to finish it, no matter how long it takes. We must insist on the peace of complete and overwhelming victory. We must remember that a huge army put in the field at one time will accomplish what the same number of men put into the field in driblets can never accomplish. We have a much larger population and much greater natural resources than Germany or than France and England combined. Therefore, by next spring we should have thousands of our own field guns, and scores of thousands of our own airplanes at the front, and an enormous ship tonnage in which to ferry across the ocean so many troops that by April we may have four million trained fighting men at the front, not counting non-combatants and reserves. The age limits for the draft should be greatly increased and the exemptions greatly diminished. All of this, of course, should have been done six months ago — indeed a year ago. But it is not too late now. It is the eleventh hour, but not the twelfth. We must quit making this a ” leisurely war.” Our gallant fighting men at the front have shown the most splendid military qualities, and have won for themselves and for this nation the highest honor. Therefore we who stay at home must back them up by deeds, not merely by applause. They are entitled to such backing; and such backing means great quantities of ships, guns and airplanes, and millions of trained men. It is a good thing, an admirable thing, to back up the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A., and all kindred bodies; to pay taxes cheerfully and buy Liberty bonds and thrift stamps; to save food and grow food, and to work with all our might with head and hand at useful industry. All these things will help the fighting men to win the war. But it is the fighting men at the front who will win the war. Therefore back up the fighting men; and the only way to back them up is to do the things of which I have spoken above.
So much for the vital, the immediate, the imperative needs. They are the needs that must at all hazards be met forthwith. But there are other paramount needs which we must also consider.
This terrible war, with all its dreadful and lamentable accompaniments, may nevertheless do a lasting good to this nation; for it may scourge us out of the wallow of materialism, made only worse by a mawkish or vicious sham sentimentality, into which we were tending to sink. The finest, the bravest, the best of our young men have sprung eagerly forward to face death for the sake of a high ideal; and thereby they have brought home to us the great truth that life consists of more than easy-going pleasure, and more than hard, conscienceless, brutal striving after purely material success; that while we must rightly care for the body and the things of the body, such care leads nowhere unless we also have thought for our own souls and for the souls of our brothers. When these gallant boys, on the golden crest of life, gladly face death for the sake of an ideal, shall not we who stay behind, who have not been found worthy of the grand adventure, shall not we in our turn try to shape our lives so as to make this country the ideal which in our hearts we acknowledge, and the actual workaday business of our world, come a little nearer together, correspond in practice a little more closely? Let us resolve to make this country a better place to live in for these men, and for the women who sent these men to battle and for the children who are to come after them.
When peace comes, and even before peace comes, let us weigh and ponder the mighty spiritual forces called into being by this war and turn them to the social and industrial betterment of this nation. Abraham Lincoln, with his usual homely commonsense and unerring instinct for the truth, made our people remember that the do’lar has its place, an essential place, but that the man stands above the dollar. Of late years we have worshiped the dollar overmuch, and have been snugly content with sleek service to Mammon, heedless of the ominous fact that overdevotion to dollars is almost equally damaging to those who have too many and to those who have too few; for when success is treated as tested and measured, not by the achievement of a self-respecting, hardworking, happy family life, and the performance of duty to oneself and to others with pleasure as a proper accompaniment of the duty; but merely by the mass of dollars amassed — why, the result is that the successful greedy ones develop a mean arrogance, and the unsuccessful greedy ones a mean envy; and envy and arrogance are equally unlovely sides of the same evil shield.
At present the best blood in this country, from all the homes of this country, is being spilled by our sons and brothers for principle and for justice and for humanity and for love of country, because our sons and brothers have placed love of a great cause above the dollar. Let us see that the position is not reversed for a long time to come! The other day I read the statement that there were a hundred thousand undernourished children in New York City. If we had a like number of undernourished soldiers, what a cry would go up! Yet these children are the citizens of the future, and the industrial arm is of just as much importance as the military. We must realize this, and act on our realization, or some day our republic will rock to its foundation.
In achieving this purpose we must be equally on our guard against the American Romanoffs, the reactionaries of industry and politics, and against the American Bolshevists who appeal to the basest passions of envy and class hatred, and who strive for disorder and anarchy. The history of Russia during the last 18 months teaches our country exactly what to avoid. And one of the lessons it teaches is that the most sordid corruptionist may do no more harm to the nation than the conscienceless demagogue or the fanatical and impracticable visionary.
We must take the rule of justice and fair play as our guide in dealing alike with capital and with labor, with the business man and the working man. Our theory should be cooperation among individuals, and control by the government with the purpose of helping the business succeed, but of seeing that the success implies service to the public and a fair division of profits among all concerned. During war time there should be no profiteering, no unusual and abnormal profits; but there must be legitimate profits or the business can not go on, and unless it goes on the public can not be served nor the wage earners receive their wages. If there are no profits we can not raise the taxes necessary to provide money for the war. The workingmen likewise should have their right of collective action, including collective bargaining, insured; and in a very real sense they should be made partners in the business, with a share in the profits and, at least along certain lines, a share in the control; and provision should be made for their honorable security in old age, and for their insurance against disease, accident and involuntary unemployment. There must be the fullest recognition, in honor and in material reward, of the skillful, conscientious, intelligent, hard-working man — I mean a recognition which he will accept as such, not merely a recognition which outsiders think sufficient. But there must be no limiting of production, no limiting of output, and no deadening insistence on reducing the efficiency of the skillful and hardworking to the plane of the shiftless or inefficient.
The foundation of our permanent civilization rests on the farmer; and by farmer I mean not the man who owns land which others till, but the man who himself tills or helps till the ground part of which at least he himself owns. A cardinal feature of our national policy should be the insuring of his rights to this man; and this not only for his sake, but for the sake of all of us.
Normally, he must be the owner of the ground he and his sons and his hired man till; and the hired man must have conditions shaped so that if he is hardworking, thrifty and energetic he shall have the means and the opportunity himself to purchase farming land on which to dwell and to bring up his family. We ought now to formulate, and we ought long ago to have formulated, an American agricultural policy; and the national agricultural department should be completely reorganized and its activities made far more productive than at present, especially in view of the large sum of money now allotted it. Normally, in farming regions, where the land is agricultural land, tenancy should be recognized only as a transitional and temporary phase, and normally the working farmer should himself be the landowner; and legislation to secure this should at once be enacted. In different sections of the country there are different needs, and therefore different methods of meeting the needs will be necessary; nor do I now intend to define them; for the remedies may be cumulative, and may include progressive taxation of land holdings in excess of a quarter section or at most a half section, the rights of tenants to compensation for all improvements or indeed a certain property right to the land itself, and real, not nominal, provision by the government for loaning money to those who need it in order to buy themselves a freehold. There must be improved methods of farm financing with emphasis on the getting and spending more money on the farms that are worth while. The high roads must be developed. Drastic action should be taken to stop the purchase of agricultural land for speculative purchasers; where necessary this should go to the length of giving full title to the occupant for use only, and limiting his power of alienating the land. System of marketing must be developed, so as to do away with the hold-up methods that in so many places still obtain. The producer must get more, and the consumer pay less, than at present; and both these ends can be and have been attained by proper legislation.
We ought to do these and the many other things necessary now, when it is possible to do them without causing too great distress to those in possession of long undisputed privileges which by time have grown to possess much of the character of rights. Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. In this country tenant farming and the individual ownership of extensive tracts of agricultural land are growing at the expense of the homestead holders. Let us take whatever steps — conservative, if possible, radical, if necessary — are needed to remedy the situation; for if left unremedied the result may be something unpleasantly near revolution a half century hence; and in such case the wrongs will be remedied only by action which causes other wrongs to innocent people and works deep demoralization to those benefited; whereas at present by the exercise of forethought and resolution we may escape both kinds of evil.
There are certain things the state can do and must do for the farmer. But most things the farmer can do for himself by association with his fellow farmers, and such independence of unnecessary state action is healthy in itself and is consonant with the rugged self-reliance characteristic of that most typical of American citizen, the American who dwells in the open country and tills the soil with his own hands. There must be cooperation on a large scale among farmers, in marketing their products so as to get them as nearly as possible direct to the consumer, and in purchasing at least all of their needed goods that can be standardized; and gradually in other ways also. Whatever can be done by such cooperation rather than by the state should be done: but where such cooperation proves inadequate to achieve the end, whether in shipping, storing or marketing, the state must itself assume the task.
Any such cooperative association should deal with the work that peculiarly affects farmers. Therefore it should most emphatically not be turned into a political party; and a political party which goes into politics as such is just as much a political party even although it chooses to call itself by some name with non-partisan in it. Any party which represents purely a class of our citizens inevitably works mischief. It is just as bad to have public servants who represent nobody but farmers as to have public servants who do not represent farmers. Our public servants are in honor bound to represent all of us, and not merely a few of us; and unless they represent all of us, and work sincerely and wisely for the permanent benefit of all of us, then they do not really and permanently represent any of us. Individually some of us are farmers, others workingmen, others business people, others doctors or lawyers or writers, or clergymen; but in addition we are all of us Americans first and foremost; and in government our common interest as decent citizens comes ahead of the separate interest of any of us. It is wise and it may be necessary that we shall individually belong to any one of various unions or associations or leagues or corporations; but there is one union to which all of us belong and to which our first allegiance is always due, and that union is the United States.
If Roosevelt had lived he almost certainly would have been the Republican nominee for President in 1920 and likely would have won. This speech indicated that the course he would have charted would have been quite different from that followed by Harding and Coolidge. One of the more interesting might have beens in American history.
Frustrated by his failures to cut the railroad lines to Atlanta, Sherman at the end of August 1864 decided to use most of his force to accomplish that goal. On August 25, Sherman marched six of his seven corps out of the siege lines of Atlanta and moved them south east to cut both the rail lines into Atlanta. Hood sent out Hardee with two corps to attempt to stop the Union movement.
By the 28th the Union was in control of a section of West Point & Atlanta Railroad and Sherman’s men were busy destroying it. On the 30th, the Union corps closed in on Jonesborough, held by Hardee. Hardee launched an attack on the Union force on the morning of August 31, that was beaten back after hard fighting. Fearing a direct attack on Atlanta, Hood withdrew Stephen Lee’s corps from Hardee that evening. On September 1, 1864, Sherman attacked the heavily outnumbered Hardee at 4:00 PM. After tenacious fighting by the Confederates, the Union troops took Jonesborough and the last rail line into Atlanta. Atlanta was now untenable for the Confederates to hold.
Here are Sherman’s comments on the movement that led to the fall of Atlanta:
I’m for the poor man — all poor men, black and white, they all gotta have a chance. They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children. ‘Every man a king’ — that’s my slogan.
Huey Long
The great demagogue of American history, Long might have been president if history had been more kind to him and less kind to FDR. Let us postulate that Long was not assassinated in 1935, and that instead of dying in 1945, FDR had died in 1935 during his first term. If Roosevelt had died, his Vice President John Nance Garner of Texas would have taken over. Cactus Jack was a colorful character, but he was also enough of a politician to have realized that he would never get the nomination in 1936. He was too conservative and too Southern. Plenty of Northern liberals would have thrown their hats into the ring, along with Huey Long. Long had already written a book, My First Days in the White House, and he was going to run come what may. Before Roosevelt’s death he erroneously predicted that FDR would lose in 1936, and doubtless he planned to help bring that about, and the death of FDR would have eliminated what he thought was his main obstacle to the White House.
Long would have had on his side his oratorical skills, which were among the best in the nation, a pleasing buffoonish persona hiding a very sharp intellect and his economic radicalism, popular among a public which had lost confidence in capitalism. On the con side his dictatorial rule in Louisiana had earned him many ardent foes around the nation. Would he have gained the nomination? Probably not, but his fight for it would have set him up for a third party run.
Judging how poorly Alf Landon did in 1936, I doubt if the nation was ready for a return to GOP rule. I give Long a decent shot of victory in 1936, judging from the popularity of his Share the Wealth campaign before his assassination. His strongest regions would have been in the South and the West. Pick off a handful of the big industrial states and Long would have achieved his life’s ambition.
On its face, his economic program would have been DOA in Congress:
He proposed capping personal fortunes at $50 million and repeated his call to limit annual income to $1 million and inheritances to $5 million. (He also suggested reducing the cap on personal fortunes to $10 million–$15 million per individual, if necessary, and later lowered the cap to $5 million–$8 million in printed materials.) The resulting funds would be used to guarantee every family a basic household grant, or “household estate” as Long called it, of $5,000 and a minimum annual income of $2,000–3,000, or one-third of the average family homestead value and income. Long supplemented his plan with proposals for free college education, with admission based on an IQ test,[10] and vocational training for all able students, veterans’ benefits, federal assistance to farmers, public works projects, greater federal regulation of economic activity, a $30 monthly pension for those over the age of 65, a month’s vacation for every worker, World War I veteran’s adjusted Compensation certificates due in 1945 would be issued immediately, and limiting the work week to thirty hours to boost employment.[10][11] He proposed a $10 billion land reclamation project to end the Dust Bowl. Long promised free medical service and what he called a “war on disease” led by the Mayo brothers.[10] These reforms, Long claimed, would end the Great Depression.[12]
These are all proposals that Long made prior to his death in 1935 and which were widely attacked by economists at the time. However, a President Long would doubtless have used the new power of radio inspired popular opinion to ram through his program. As Governor of Louisiana Long made wide use of patronage, and more unsavory means, to deal with a hostile legislature. It is reasonable to assume that on a national scale he would have adopted the same tactics with Congress. I can imagine him attempting to implement most of his policies by emergency decrees, justified by the Great Depression. The legality of such decrees would have been nil, but in Louisiana Long had shown a penchant for strong arming courts.
With Long as President, it is easy to predict that he would have roused great support and great resistance, and a very divided US would have faced the world as World War II began. Perhaps a nation on the verge of civil war, as Louisiana was at the end of Long’s reign. Better that this alternate history was forestalled from reality by Long’s death in 1935.
MacArthur who was going to be responsible for ruling post war Japan during the occupation, lost no time in telling the Japanese precisely what they must do as he entered Japan to stage manage the formal surrender and take up his role as, in effect, the Yankee Shogun:
August 23, 1945
New York Times.
(1) Weather permitting, air-borne forces accompanying the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers will land at Atsugi Airdrome, in the vicinity of Tokyo, and naval and marine forces will land in the vicinity of Yokosuka Naval Base on Aug. 28, 1945. The instrument of surrender will be signed in the Tokyo area on Aug. 31.
(2) Requirements of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers presented to Japanese representatives at Manila, Philippine Islands, Aug. 20, 1945:
Requirements for entry of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and his accompanying forces.
(1) The Japanese Imperial Government and Japanese Imperial General Headquarters will require execution of the following requirements effective 1800 hours [6 P.M.] Aug. 24, 1945:
(a) Japanese armed forces and civilian aviation authorities will insure that all Japanese military, naval and civil aircraft in Japan remain on ground, on water or aboard ship until further notification of disposition to be made of them.
(b) Japanese or Japanese-controlled military, naval or merchant vessels of all types in Japanese waters will be maintained without damage and will undertake no movement beyond voyages in progress pending instructions of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Vessels at sea will immediately render harmless and throw overboard explosives of all types. Vessels not at sea will immediately remove explosives of all types to safe storage ashore.
(c) Merchant vessels under 100 gross tons engaged in civilian supply activities in Japanese waters are excepted from foregoing instructions. Vessels in Tokyo Bay engaged in evacuation of personnel from Yokosuka Naval Base are also excepted.(more…)
The bloodiest atrocity of the Civil War occurred one hundred and fifty-eight years ago. The Civil War in Kansas and Missouri was war to the knife and the knife to the hilt. “Captain” William C. Quantrill had been a practitioner in the bloody art of raid and counter-raid since 1861. He planned the raid to kill Senator Jim Lane, leader of the Jayhawkers of Kansas, in retaliation for Lane’s plundering of Osceola, Missouri in 1861 during which nine pro-Confederate men had been executed following a drum head courtmartial. The collapse of a house used as a jail for pro-Confederate women in Kansas City, Kansas on August 13, 1863 inflamed Confederate partisans. Four women were killed, including the 15 year old sister of “Bloody Bill” Anderson, Quantrill’s chief lieutenant. Gathering 450 raiders, Quantrill rode into Lawrence at dawn on August 21, 1863.
The raiders embarked upon a four hour orgy of murder and plunder of the unarmed citizenry. Between 185 to 200 men and boys were murdered. The cut off point for boys was the vague standard of whether they could carry a rifle. The youngest boy slain was 12 or 14 years old. No outrages were committed against the women of the town, other than seeing their husbands, brothers and sons, and other male relatives and friends, gunned down before their eyes. Lane, ironically, escaped by running into a cornfield in his nightshirt.
In the aftermath of the raid, General Thomas Ewing, Jr. issued General Order No. 11 ordering the evacuation of Confederate civilians from four Missouri western counties: (more…)
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 