Organized Crime

CHAPTER20 False Virtue: The Politics of Lying About History

In 1961 Life magazine invited the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren (author of All the King’s Men and nineteen other novels) to record his thoughts on the meaning of the American “Civil War” on the centennial of that event. Warren responded with a long essay on “the symbolic value of the war” which was eventually published as a small paperback book entitled The Legacy of the Civil War.

Writing long before the plague of political correctness dominated American society, Warren wrote that in addition to the issue of the extension of slavery into the new territories, in 1861 there was “a tissue of causes” of the war, including the dispute over the constitutionality of secession, “the mounting Southern debt to the North, economic rivalry, Southern fear of encirclement, Northern ambitions, and cultural collisions . . .”

There were myriad economic causes of the war apart from the issue of slavery, Robert Penn Warren believed. “The Morrill tariff of 1861 actually preceded the firing on Fort Sumter, but it was the mark of Republican victory and an omen of what was to come; and no session of Congress in the next four years failed to raise the tariff.”

What Warren was saying was that as soon as the population of the North grew enough to assure congressional dominance over the South, it used that dominance (through a lopsided congressional majority) to plunder the South economically with a protectionist tariff that mostly benefited Northern manufacturers). And this began before Fort Sumter; the ten tariff-rate increases that occurred during the Lincoln administration, which raised the average tariff rate from 15 percent to nearly 50 percent, were a bedrock of Republican Party policy, not war-financing measures. Such rates of taxation would indeed last for another half century of Republican Party political domination, until the income tax was adopted in 1913.

“Even more importantly,” wrote Warren, “came the establishment of a national banking system . . . and the issuing of national greenbacks . . . plus government subsidy [to politically-connected corporations].” “Hamilton’s dream” of a large national debt was also realized, and “this debt meant a new tax relation of the citizen to the Federal government, including the new income tax.” All of this greatly centralized political power in Washington, D.C., which was certainly the effect, if not the primary purpose, of the war.

“Out of the Civil War came the concept of total war,” he wrote, referring to the intentional mass murder of tens of thousands of Southern civilians and the destruction of entire towns and cities along with the plundering of tens of millions of dollars of private property (and he was not referring to “slave property”). Warren mocked Lincoln’s lame attempt to “justify” the mass murder of civilians by quoting his (Lincoln’s) 1862 speech in which he said, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew.” That is, “we” must abandon the moral code of civilized societies, and international law, which prohibits the intentional murder of civilians (mostly women and children) during war. In light of the fact that Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus, mass arrested and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political dissenters without due process, shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers, deported an opposition member of Congress (Clement Vallandigham of Ohio), rigged Northern elections, illegally orchestrated the secession of West Virginia from Virginia, and essentially declared himself dictator, Lincoln’s “think anew” statement also meant that the Constitution itself should be abandoned.

A major theme of The Legacy of the Civil War is that the war supposedly left the North (which monopolized the federal government for the succeeding half century and longer) with “a treasury of virtue.” This, said Warren, is the “psychological heritage” left to the North by the war. “The Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history,” he wrote. “He has in his pocket, not a Papal indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner of the Middle Ages, but an indulgence, a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future.”

Thus, this supposed “treasury of virtue” would fill the U.S. government with extraordinary hubris and would become the all-purpose rationale for its twenty-five year war of genocide against the Plains Indians that was commenced just three months after Appomattox; for the decade-long plundering of Southerners after the war under the laughable rubric of “reconstruction”; for the murder of some 200,000 Filipinos for their opposition to becoming pawns of the U.S. empire after having just gotten rid of the Spanish empire; for entering a European war that was none of our business to supposedly “make the world safe for democracy”; and on and on. All of this was supposedly done in the name of virtue, freedom, and democracy.

This farcical theory of “American exceptionalism” was more accurately described by Robert Penn Warren as “moral narcissism” which is “a poor basis for national policy.” Nevertheless, it was the “justification” for “our crusades of 1917–1918 and 1941–1945 and our diplomacy of righteousness, with the slogan of unconditional surrender and universal spiritual rehabilitation for others” (emphasis added).

Posturing as The Most Moral Humans on Earth requires Americans to forget many facts about their own history—or more precisely, for the government-dominated school system to either eliminate these facts from the curriculum or to distort them beyond recognition. In Warren’s own words:

[I]t is forgotten that the Republican platform of 1860 pledged protection to the institution of slavery where it existed, and that the Republicans were ready, in 1861, to guarantee slavery in the South, as bait for a return to the union. It is forgotten that in July 1861, both houses of Congress, by an almost unanimous vote, affirmed that the war was waged not to interfere with the institutions of any state but only to maintain the Union. It is forgotten that the Emancipation Proclamation . . . was limited and provisional: slavery was to be abolished only in the seceded states and only if they did not return to the Union before the first of next January.

Moreover, it must also be forgotten, Warren wrote, that most Northern states “refused to adopt Negro suffrage” and that Lincoln was as much a white supremacist as any man of his time. “It is forgotten that Lincoln, at Charlestown, Illinois, in 1858, formally affirmed: ‘I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.’”

Only if the true history of Lincoln and his war is whitewashed from the history books can the war be viewed, “according to this doctrine of The Treasury of Virtue, as a consciously undertaken crusade so full of righteousness that there is enough overplus stored in Heaven, like the deeds of the saints, to take care of all small failings and oversights of the descendants of the crusaders, certainly unto the present generation.”

Warren further quoted the historian Samuel Eliot Morison as commenting that one effect of this supposed Treasury of Virtue on his (Morison’s) native New England was that “In the generation to come [after the Civil War] that region would no longer furnish the nation with teachers and men of letters, but with a mongrel breed of politicians” obsessed with “profiteering” through their political connections.

With such overflowing virtue, Americans only need to announce their policy intentions, said Warren, without even contemplating an examination of whether or not the policies did what they were promised to do (make the world safe for democracy, for example). For “the man of righteousness tends to be so sure of his own motives that he does not need to inspect consequences.” Moreover, “the effect of the conviction of virtue is to make us lie automatically and awkwardly . . . and then in trying to justify the lie, lie to ourselves and transmute the lie into a kind of superior truth.”

Robert Penn Warren believed that most Americans were content to believe in all of these lies about their own history that were the work of “the manipulations of propaganda specialists, and their sometimes unhistorical history.” Most Americans “are prepared to see the Civil War as a fountainhead of our power and prestige among the nations.”

The lies have accumulated like snowflakes during a Colorado blizzard, year after year, since Robert Penn Warren wrote those words in 1961. Prestige based on an avalanche of lies is a far more accurate description of American foreign policy in the post Civil War era than is “American exceptionalism,” the mating call of all of the neoconservatives who took over the American foreign policy establishment in the 1980s. It should be no surprise to anyone that every one of these “chickenhawks,” as they are often called (for advocating endless war while never having been in the military themselves, for the most part), is among other things a card-carrying member of the Lincoln cult.