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Defining America
6/28/04
Our exceptional innocence
By Michael Kazin
Are Americans exceptional when they go to war? A century ago,
the nation was shocked to learn that U.S. troops had committed
atrocious acts in their struggle against independence fighters in the
Philippines. Soldiers tortured native prisoners by almost drowning
them and hanging them up by their thumbs. In retaliation for a deadly
ambush on the island of Samar, Gen. Jacob H. Smith ordered his men
to kill any Filipino over the age of 10 and to leave the island
“a howling wilderness.”
For months, high officials in Teddy Roosevelt’s administration
suppressed the military report that described these deeds. When the
truth finally came out in 1902, Congress held hearings, and many people
called for the secretary of war to resign. Mark Twain wrote, “We have
debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world.”
Ugly as they are, the infamous photos from Abu Ghraib prison reveal
nothing quite so brutal as “the water cure,” much less a command to
slaughter children. But most Americans have reacted to the images
from Baghdad the same way that Twain and most of his fellow citizens
did to those outrages in the Philippines: as a sad betrayal of our
national values.
Yet over the past century, the bloodiest in human history,
Americans have conducted themselves in war much like the leaders
and peoples of other powerful nations. At the end of World War II,
the United States used firebombs and atomic bombs to kill hundreds of
thousands of Japanese civilians, even though their government was near
surrender. In North Korea, our Air Force decimated the countryside,
driving millions of people into underground caverns for the duration
of the war. In Vietnam, revelations about the gruesome massacre at
My Lai in 1968 did nothing to stop carpet-bombing or the widespread
use of pesticides. In Haiti and the Philippines, some U.S. occupation
troops molested and murdered local inhabitants.
Such acts differed only in degree, not kind, from the British bombing
of Dresden during World War II, the French war against the Algerian
independence movement, and the Soviet Army’s rape of thousands of
German women after the fall of Berlin. The only truly “exceptional”
nations have been the few that went one terrible step further and tried
to wipe out an entire people. Fortunately, the Turks did not succeed
in annihilating the Armenians, nor did the Germans murder every Jew.
Right and duty. What does set the United States apart is that so
many of its citizens believe in its moral superiority. The conviction
began with the nation itself. “We fight not to enslave, but to set a
country free,” wrote Tom Paine during the Revolutionary War, “and to
make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.” That an immigrant
like Paine was such an eloquent exceptionalist testifies to the power
of the creed itself. Americanism is a faith designed to apply to all
humanity. In their innocence, millions of Americans believe it is
both their right and their duty to spread that faith around the world.
Such naivete can lead to disaster, as it did in Vietnam and may again
in Iraq. But it can also give the United States an advantage over other
lands. Most Americans expect their soldiers and leaders to live up
to their stated ideals. General Smith was court-martialed, convicted,
and dismissed from the Army, although few Filipinos actually died as
a result of his hideous order. My Lai led to several court-martials
and a murder conviction. And this spring, a large majority of the
public disagreed with conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James
Inhofe who made light of the torture at Abu Ghraib. In contrast, it
has taken four decades after France left Algeria for the whole truth
about the atrocities of that colonizer to be revealed. Cynicism can
be as blind as innocence.
Yet American tradition, with its strong Christian roots, often
condemns the individual sin without necessarily demanding that the
evil policy be changed. By the time Congress investigated the outrages
in the Philippines, the United States had defeated the rebels and
was busy converting “our little brown brothers” to American ways. By
the 1904 election campaign, the atrocities were no longer an issue,
and Theodore Roosevelt won the presidency in a landslide. We will
soon learn whether, a century later, voters will deliver a more
exceptional verdict.