Introduction

Left stands for peace, right for war; liberals are pacific, conservatives are bellicose. Or so one might conclude after surveying the dismal landscape of the American Right in the Age of Bush II.

Yet there is a long and honorable (if largely hidden) tradition of antiwar thought and action among the American Right. It stretches from ruffle-shirted Federalists who opposed the War of 1812 and civic-minded mugwump critics of the Spanish-American War on up through the midwestern isolationists who formed the backbone of the pre–World War II America First Committee and the conservative Republicans who voted against U.S. involvement in NATO, the Korean conflict, and Vietnam. And although they are barely audible amid the belligerent clamor of today’s shock-and-awe Right, libertarians and old-fashioned traditionalist conservatives are among the sharpest critics of the Iraq War and the imperial project of the Bush Republicans.

Derided as isolationists—which, as that patriot of the Old Republic Gore Vidal has noted, means simply people who “want no part of foreign wars” and who “want to be allowed to live their own lives without interference from government”1—the antiwar Right has put forth a critique of foreign intervention that is at once gimlet-eyed, idealistic, historically grounded, and dyed deeply in the American grain. Just because Bush, Rush, and Fox are ignorant of history doesn’t mean authentic conservatives have to swallow the profoundly un-American American Empire.

Rooted in the Farewell Address of George Washington, informing such conservative-tinged antiwar movements as the Anti-Imperialist League, which said no to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, finding poignant and prescient expression in the extraordinary valediction in which President Dwight Eisenhower warned his countrymen against the “military-industrial complex,” the conservative case against American Empire and militarism remains forceful and relevant. It is no museum piece, no artifact as inutile as it is quaint. It is plangent, wise, and deserving of revival. But before it can be revived, it must be disinterred.

A note, first, on taxonomy. To label is to libel, or at least to divest the subject of individuating contradictions and qualifications. I have found that the most interesting American political figures cannot be squeezed into the constricted and lifeless pens of liberal or conservative. Nor do I accept the simpleminded division of our lovely and variegated country into red and blue, for to paint Colorado, Kansas, and Alabama requires every color in the spectrum. Right and Left have outlived their usefulness as taxonomic distinctions. They’re closer to prisons from which no thought can escape.

Yet the terms are as ubiquitous as good and evil, and in fact many on the Right do think, Latinately, of their side as dexterous and the Left as sinister. I say it’s time for a little ambidexterity. So my “Right” is capacious enough to include Jeffersonian libertarians and Jefferson-hating Federalists, Senators Robert Taft and George McGovern (yes, yes; give me a chance), dirt-farm southern populists and Beacon Streeters who take hauteur with their tea and jam, cranky Nebraska tax cutters and eccentric Michigan tellers of ghostly tales, little old ladies in tennis shoes marching against the United Nations and free-market economists protesting the draft. My subjects are, in the main, suspicious of state power, crusades, bureaucracy, and a modernity that is armed and dangerous. They are anti-expansion, pro-particularism, and so genuinely “conservative”—that is, cherishing of the verities, of home and hearth and family—as to make them mortal (immortal?) enemies of today’s neoconservatives.

Above all, they have feared empire, whose properties were enumerated well by the doubly pen-named Garet Garrett: novelist, exponent of free enterprise and individualism, and a once-reliable if unspectacular stable horse for the Saturday Evening Post. Writing in 1953, he set down a quintet of imperial requisites.

1.         The executive power of the government shall be dominant.

2.         Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.

3.         Ascendancy of the military mind, to such a point at last that the civilian mind is intimidated.

4.         A system of satellite nations.

5.         A complex of vaunting and fear.2

Between “Constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity,”3 wrote Garrett, who did not burst with confidence that the former would vanquish the latter. He wrote in the final days of the Truman administration. The executive bestrode the U.S. polity. Militarism and the cult of bigness held sway. The blood rivers of Europe had yet to run dry. More than fifty thousand American boys had died—for what?—on the Korean peninsula. Truman had refused to obtain from Congress a formal declaration of war; future presidents would follow suit. The dark night of Cold War was upon us. This was what our forebears had warned against.

Why did these men (and later women) of the “Right” oppose expansion, war, and empire? And, in contemporary America, where have all the followers gone?

From the Republic’s beginning, Americans of conservative temperament have been skeptical of manifest destiny and crusades for democracy. They have agreed with Daniel Webster that “there must be some limit to the extent of our territory, if we are to make our institutions permanent. The Government is very likely to be endangered . . . by a further enlargement of its already vast territorial surface.”4 Is it really worth trading in the Republic for southwestern scrubland? Webster’s point was remade, just as futilely, by the Anti-Imperialist League. It was repeated by those conservatives who supplied virtually the only opposition to the admission of Hawaii and Alaska to the Union. As the Texas Democrat Kenneth M. Regan told the House when he vainly argued against stitching a forty-ninth star on the flag, “I fear for the future of the country if we start taking in areas far from our own shores that we will have to protect with our money, our guns, and our men, instead of staying here and looking after the heritage we were left by George Washington, who told us to beware of any foreign entanglements.”5

Expansion was madness. John Greenleaf Whittier compared its advocates to hashish smokers.

The man of peace, about whose dreams

  The sweet millennial angels cluster,

Tastes the mad weed, and plots and schemes,

  A raving Cuban filibuster!6

George W. Bush, it is rumored, preferred coke to hash, but his utopian vision of an American behemoth splayed across the globe would be, to conservatives of eras past, a hideous nightmare.

Robert Nisbet, the social critic who was among the wisest and most laureled of American conservatives, wrote in his coruscant Conservatism: Dream and Reality (1986): “Of all the misascriptions of the word ‘conservative’ during the last four years, the most amusing, in an historical light, is surely the application of ‘conservative’ to the [budget-busting enthusiasts for great increases in military expenditures]. For in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and of an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two World Wars, in Korea, and in Viet Nam, the leaders of American entry into war were such renowned liberal-progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention.”7

In the two decades since Nisbet’s observation the historical amnesia has descended into a kind of belligerent nescience. Today’s self-identified conservatives loathe, detest, and slander any temerarious soul who speaks for peace. FDR and Truman join Ronald Reagan in the trinity of favorite presidents of the contemporary Right; those atavistic Old Rightists who harbor doubts about U.S. entry into the world wars or our Asian imbroglios (scripted, launched, and propagandized for by liberal Democrats) are dismissed as cranks or worse. Vice President Dick Cheney, lamenting the August 2006 primary defeat of the Scoop Jackson Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman, charged that the Democrats wanted to “retreat behind our oceans”8—which an earlier generation of peace-minded Republicans had considered a virtuous policy consistent with George Washington’s adjuration to avoid entanglements and alliances with foreign nations.

Felix Morley, the Washington Post editorialist who would have been a top foreign-policy official in the Robert Taft administration, wrote in 1959: “Every war in which the United States has engaged since 1815 was waged in the name of democracy. Each has contributed to that centralization of power which tends to destroy that local self-government which is what most Americans have in mind when they acclaim democracy.”9 Alas, Dick Cheney, the draft-dodging hawk, the anti-gay-marriage grandfather of a tribade-baby, is not an irony man.

I will consider the anti-expansionists of the early Republic in the first chapter. My focus in this book, however, is on “conservative” anti-imperialists of the twentieth century—the American Century, as that rootless son of missionaries Henry Luce dubbed it. The men and women whom I shall profile regarded Lucian expansion, conq...