baehr_p_richter_m_dictatorship_in_history_and_theory_bonapar

Agricola had now been in command of the large Roman army in Britain for seven years. The Emperor decided he had to be removed. The question was: how to do it? The answer: very delicately. An imperial envoy was sent to Britain with orders to offer Agricola the prestigious imperial province of Syria in exchange for his leaving Britain at his already allotted time, but this “treaty” was to be made only if the envoy found Agricola still in command of the powerful British army.13 The way Tacitus tells it, Agricola, out of patriotism, had already given up his command when the envoy arrived, so he never received another.14 The historian later draws a very painful contrast between Agricola’s previous life of glory and personal independence in Britain, and the utterly quiet life the government forced him to live once back in Rome.15 Yet Tacitus’s final judgment is that Agricola acted honorably in surrendering precisely his condition of independence in Britain (his libertas) in exchange for the obedience (obsequium ac modestia) necessary to preserve the peace of the Empire as a whole.16 In the long history of the Roman Empire, of course, there were many commanders of military provinces who chose differently, who chose the ultimate independence of becoming emperors themselves, rather than facing the difficult transition to obsequium ac modestia. They preferred to imitate Caesar rather than obey him, and they marched on Rome.17

So to repeat: When intellectuals, writers, and statesmen of later ages worried about “Caesarism” in the particular sense of the danger which imperial administrators might pose to a central government, they were basing their fears on a real historical phenomenon. Of course, many of the people I now turn to discuss were themselves the beneficiaries of thorough Classical educations, and so they knew their Roman history very well indeed, which, in turn, perhaps helps explain their fears. This is important, because their fears in fact turned out to be exaggerated.

Here are two examples of fear from the British Empire. It is a fact that the creation of what were essentially imperial provinces ruled by tyrants – the classic examples being Bengal after 1757 and British Africa after the 1880s – caused a continual cultural and political concern in important circles within Britain itself. The concern was twofold: first, the blatant contradiction of the British, a people with a tradition of political freedom, tolerating despotism exercised in their name overseas; second (and more important here), the possibly harmful impact of returning imperial administrators on British political

life. For it was feared that out in the Empire, they had developed a despotic political counterculture harmful to Britain’s freedom-loving traditions.

The first crisis over this phenomenon of empire occurred in the 1770s and 1780s, when men who had made huge fortunes in the new East India Company province of Bengal, primarily by violence, chicanery, and outright theft exercised on the indigenous population, began returning home to Britain. They arrived with unprecedented fortunes in hard cash and, it was feared, with very bad habits. Popular plays such as Samuel Foote’s The Nabob presented the returning imperial administrators as highwaymen, that is, men who had become accustomed to living by armed robbery. Moreover, they were men corrupted both by the sexual lasciviousness and political ruthlessness endemic to India. Thus Sir Matthew Mite, The Nabob’s protagonist (modeled on Sir Robert Clive, founder of British Bengal) has brought home to Dublin with him an actual harem of Indian women, whom he keeps imprisoned by eunuchs. Even worse, however, is that he has learned the habits of bribery in India and ruthlessly spreads his money to undermine the traditional political system, so that he can bribe his way to a seat in Parliament. He acts, we are told, in ways unacceptable “in a country of freedom.” As the character Lady Oldham remarks, “With the wealth of the East, we have imported the worst of its vices.”18

Part of Caesar’s power, too, and his arrogance, had rested on vast wealth amassed in Gaul by utterly ruthless means. Moreover, the anxieties described above appeared not only in the theater, but in Parliamentary action. By 1772–3, Parliament itself was investigating the conduct of the East India Company men in Bengal, yet East India money was simultaneously corrupting that very investigation. It was in this context that Horace Walpole could declare: “What is England now? A sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs . . . A senate [Parliament] sold and despised.” A pamphleteer of this time depicts the returning Bengal administrators as men carrying sacks of diamonds stolen from Indians they have tortured – the beneficiaries of villages, towns, and entire provinces ransacked and destroyed. The author warns that if the Company is not bridled, it will become “subversive of the liberties of Englishmen, and creative of a set of tyrants.”19 Twenty years later, we find Edmund Burke warning Parliament of the same spectre during his impeachment of the powerful, violent, and corrupt Bengal governor Warren Hastings. Not to condemn Hastings would undermine Parliament as

18On the cultural and political significance of Samuel Foote’s play The Nabob (1773), see now L. James,

Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (New York, 1997), 45–7.

19Ibid., 49.

an upright institution (privately, Burke wrote: “They are all bribed”), and it was upon Parliament that the liberties of Englishmen in good part depended. In addition, tyrannical behavior condoned in India would soon be imported into England, “so let you stand for the ancient laws and liberties of this kingdom; . . . Let you stand the terror of tyrants!”20

No doubt some of this is merely the anxiety of an established landed class in the face of ruthlessly pushy nouveaux riches who had made it big in the overseas provinces. It is fear of loss of traditional place and political influence, as well as sheer snobbery (Horace Walpole is a particular example of the beau monde), disguised as fear for liberty at the hands of “tyrannical” nabobs. Even so, there was a striking practical impact. Hastings himself, it is true, was wrongly acquitted (after an impeachment process lasting nine years). But by means of the cultural and political campaign of the 1770s and 1780s, the East India Company’ s administrative methods, and the Company itself, were brought partially under direct government control. Moreover, a new administrative ethic, stressing stern and incorruptible uprightness and self-restraint as well as firm rejection of all “Indian” ways, was imposed on the old freebooters. The culture of the metropole, in other words, reached out and reasserted itself on its faraway imperial governors, who would no longer be allowed to develop bad habits and a subversive imperial counterculture. Many of the ways in which the British had conducted themselves in India now disappeared – or were actually reversed; it was an enormous cultural revolution, imposed from home. In time, the British administrative class in India, it was said, had become ineffably stodgy and bourgeois, and they were “more British than the British.”21

But not quite all of them. Even as the cultural revolution from home was accelerating, British India produced one last proconsul in the mold of Caesar: Sir Richard Wellesley, Lord Mornington. Starting from the British base in Bengal, Wellesley (the Duke of Wellington’s older brother) masterminded the British military conquest of most of India during his long Governor–Generalship of 1798–1805. He did it mostly against the wishes of the government in London as well as against the wishes of the Board of Directors of the British East India Company. Headstrong, ruthless, and brutal, a man who did not suffer fools gladly, he made vastly important decisions on his own, always in the direction of expansion (“If you do not like it, recall me,” he wrote). He brooked no opposition from his subordinates, and none from the British community in India, upon whom he

20See, e.g., R. Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (Wilmington, 1997), 116–17.

21On the cultural revolution: imposed on imperial administrators in India after 1780, see now James, Raj, 58–60 and 151–72.

imposed total press censorship. The only justification for his conduct was his deep intelligence and total success. Yet Wellesley’s violent methods and character, and even the enormous scale of his success, worked against him once he returned to Britain. People in government distrusted him (for a variety of good reasons), and instead of becoming prime minister, which he expected and felt he deserved, he was plunged into immediate political obscurity.22

Even after the cultural revolution in British style in India, the old political fears about the tyrannical impact of the Indian experience remained. Thus in 1860 Richard Cobden worried that the basic problem had not altered: The habit of total command, necessary to rule in India, was still politically corrupting. “Is it not possible that we may be corrupted at home by the reaction of arbitrary political maxims in the East upon our domestic politics, just as Greece and Rome were demoralized by their contact with Asia?” He meant Asian autocracy. Cobden was quoted with approval in 1902 by the great theorist of imperialism John Hobson, who, however, went much further: The “reflux of this poison” of autocracy from the Empire back into England was not merely possible but inevitable. In the eighteenth century, Hobson said, the danger had taken the form of the threatening returning nabob, coming home with “the gains of corrupt and extortionate officialdom, a domineering demeanor, vulgarly ostentatious, and spreading his corrupting largess to . . . degrade the life of our people.” At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was the more austere but still despotic imperial administrator who was the danger:

As the despotic portion of our Empire has grown in area, a larger and larger number of men, trained in the temper and methods of autocracy . . . whose lives have been those of a superior caste living an artificial life removed from all the healthy restraints of ordinary European society, have returned to our country, bringing back the characters, sentiments, and ideas of this foreign environment. The South and South-west of England is richly sprinkled with these men, many of them wealthy, men openly contemptuous of democracy . . . Everywhere they stand for coercion, and resistance to reform . . . It is a nemesis of Imperialism that the arts and crafts of tyranny, acquired in the unfree empire, should be turned against our liberties at home. [These men] are hostile to the institutions of popular self-government, favoring forms of political tyranny and social authority which are the deadly enemies of liberty and equality.23

22 On Richard Wellesley and his career, see the instructive account in E. Ingram, Commitment to Empire (Oxford, 1981), Chapters IV and V. As Ingram says (118), Wellesley succeeded in doing what Bonaparte failed to do – he created a permanent empire for his country. They had similar personalities.

23 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902), 150–1.

Cobden and Hobson, however, might be dismissed as mere intellectuals and cranks. What are we to think, though, of the concerns expressed by John Morley, a high government official, Secretary of State for India from 1906 to 1910? A reformer of Indian administration and a biographer of Edmund Burke, Morley distrusted the British men on the spot in India, whom he suspected, as one writer says, “were Caesarian in instinct” and prone to regard coercion as the only solution to any political problem. An official once explained to him that the great Indian executive officers did not like or trust lawyers. “I tell you why,” Morley snapped in reply: “It is because they don’t like or trust law: they in their hearts believe before all else in the virtues of will and arbitrary power.”24 In other words, they had been corrupted by imperii consuetudo. The bitter emotion with which these remarks were expressed strongly suggests that Morley was not merely using the accusation of love of tyranny as a political bludgeon here against those who opposed his plan for somewhat increased Indian self-government. He knew his men and believed that the imperial experience was conducive to love of arbitrary command. It was so un-British not to trust in the law; but Morley said his countrymen succumbed to “the virus of authoritarianism” within mere weeks of landing in India. He came to believe that it would have been better for the British soul if Clive had lost at Plassy in 1757.25

Of course, to a great extent the fears of Cobden and Hobson and Morley turned out to be misplaced. Returning imperialists may not have been easily integrated into increasingly democratic Britain. There were eventually organizations such as the Imperial Fascist League of the 1920s headed by Arnold Spencer Leese, a renowned expert on camel diseases, but it never had more than several dozen members. More serious was that one significant social element in Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s was retired Imperial Civil Service officers and general Empire types of all sorts (including, it seems, T. E. Lawrence); Mosley himself was fascinated by Caesar. Retired ICS-types were always a reliable constituency for the right wing of the Conservative Party well into the 1960s. All in all, though, the imperial “internal threat” which seemed so vivid in intellectual and even high administrative circles in 1900–1910 never did develop very far.26

24 On Morley’s severe distrust of the British men on the spot in India because of their addiction to unrestrained power, see James, Raj, 418–19.

25Ibid., 419.

26On the Imperial Fascist League, see R. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York, 1975), 291. The large number of retired ICS officers in Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s: Skidelsky, 320–1. T. E. Lawrence’s links to Mosley: 350 (Lawrence was on his way to meet with a high BUF personality when he suffered his famous fatal motorcycle accident in 1935).

But what if the man returning from long service in the provinces and long disconnection from the home culture was an outstanding military leader with an awe-inspiring reputation and an egotistic, instinctively authoritarian personality? I am speaking now of General of the U.S. Army Douglas MacArthur. There is no doubt that in April 1951, when President Harry Truman finally found the courage to relieve him of his vast command in the Far East, MacArthur represented to many people the classic figure of the returning, threatening Caesarian proconsul; it was fourteen years since he had even set foot on the soil of the United States. Jokes – detailed jokes – circulated privately within the White House that MacArthur would now stage a coup d’etat´ . Only jokes, of course, but jokes like that betray an underlying unease.

There was some reason for it. A much decorated frontline war hero in World War I (he rose from major to general in eighteen months of continuous fighting), MacArthur’s amazing insubordination to civilian authority was already apparent in 1932, when, as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, he violently attacked and removed the Bonus March veterans from their campsite east of Washington, D.C., acting, extraordinarily, against the direct orders of President Herbert Hoover, twice repeated to him. He never apologized for it. The bold stroke, the imposition of his will, never looking back, were characteristic of MacArthur’s personality and military philosophy: quite Caesarian (or Napoleonic: MacArthur did not mind being seen copying Bonaparte’s most famous physical gesture as he stood commandingly on the bridges of ships). The president who succeeded Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, put it bluntly: MacArthur was one of the two most dangerous men in America. The other, significantly, was the popular radio fascist Father Charles Coughlin. The combination of authoritarianism and demagoguery is, of course, the meaning of the term “Caesarism” as it has come to be used by most political scientists (though I am employing a more specialized meaning in this chapter). Moreover, FDR’s judgment on the danger MacArthur posed to constitutional government was made in 1933: That is, a full decade before MacArthur’s brilliant and spectacular victories in the Pacific in World War II had made him one of the most famous generals in American history.27

MacArthur’s long years away from the United States in uninterrupted high military command – first as Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, then as Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific, and finally as Supreme

27 On Franklin Roosevelt’s judgment of the danger MacArthur posed to the Constitution, see W. Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 (Boston, 1978), 151–2.

Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP) – did nothing to lessen the fears within the Democratic Party caused by MacArthur’s actions and attitudes. Typical of his disturbing egotism was his proclamation to the Philippine people upon landing in the Philippines in October 1944: “I have returned,” he announced in lordly fashion; “Rally to me!” Not, one notices, to the United States. As governor of Japan between 1945 and 1951, he enjoyed a combination of total military and civilian powers unprecedented for any American Army officer. He used those powers forcefully to reconstruct traditional Japanese society according to his own sense of what was proper and just (including, as it happens, women’s rights, as well as unions for workers): The impact of MacArthur’s reforms, which overthrew centuries of tradition in a matter of months, including what is still called “the MacArthur Constitution,” remains enormous even a half century later. The proconsul intentionally chose to put his headquarters right next to the palace of the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, and it soon was called Dai Ichi (“Number One”). When the Supreme Commander rode in his huge limousine down to Dai Ichi, he was preceded by a corps of motorcycle outriders, a praetorian guard of six-foot tall black soldiers wearing special uniforms with yellow cravats. “I thought he was a king,” one young girl (an American girl) said. It was a pardonable mistake. MacArthur’s young son Arthur MacArthur was treated literally as a prince. A famous photograph popular in Japan showed him standing next to young Crown Prince Akihito, the Emperor’s son; when he took up horseback riding, his mount was a thoroughbred from the Imperial family’s personal stable; when he took up tennis, he was tutored by a Japanese Davis Cup winner; Japanese policemen saluted him wherever he went. I repeat, this was MacArthur’s son, then aged ten. As for MacArthur himself, his naturally authoritarian style combined with his socially progressive reforms to make him both a comfortable and an immensely popular figure with the Japanese people. “You have the feeling,” C. L. Sulzburger wrote in his diary, “that people almost bow down when they mention his name.” This sounds uncomfortably like Caesarism as the term is indeed traditionally used: the sort of thing FDR had feared about MacArthur back in 1933. Charles Willoughby, one of MacArthur’s two major aides, was an open admirer of Franco. Compared to this, MacArthur’s subtle manipulation of the 1946 Philippine presidential elections so that the candidate he personally favored won, well, that was small potatoes.28

28On MacArthur’s proconsulship in Japan, and the autocratic mood there, see Manchester, American Caesar, 459–94. This is not to say that MacArthur did not have to work via broad guidelines set down in Washington; but the fact is that he was given a tremendous amount of free rein. On Willoughby’s

within two weeks he had sent his famous “There is no substitute for victory” letter to President Truman’s Republican enemies. The violent tone of that letter finally forced Truman to remove MacArthur from his vast Far Eastern command, since it was now clear that he was not obeying the central government.29

The great general dismissed from an unprecedentedly large and long provincial command by a government he despised: MacArthur was now in the position of Caesar in 49 B.C. In August 1950, after interviewing MacArthur, Averill Harriman had assured Truman that the Supreme Commander “was loyal to constitutional authority,” an amazing assurance to have to give concerning an American Army officer. By April 1951, however, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had their doubts: General Omar Bradley wrote to Truman that MacArthur’s conduct was on the verge of destroying civilian control over the military. The president’s political situation was further weakened by charges, backed by MacArthur, that the State Department was filled with appeasers and communists. Truman’s worst fears were realized when the removal of MacArthur set off a firestorm of protest across the country. Truman was burned in effigy and condemned by state legislatures; powerful newspapers called for his impeachment (or claimed he was being drugged by communist spies); the New York Veterans of Foreign Wars passed a resolution to march on Washington. As MacArthur’s plane landed in San Francisco, he was greeted by massive, ecstatic crowds, “the clamor, the outrage against Truman grew greater and greater . . . Nothing had so stirred the political passions of the country since the Civil War.”30

It was a true crisis of legitimacy, the crisis which Roosevelt eighteen years before had predicted MacArthur would eventually cause. The following internal memo from the White House, detailing MacArthur’s arrival in Washington, demonstrates the mood there:

12:30: General MacArthur wades ashore from submarine

12:40: Parade to the Capitol, with General MacArthur riding an elephant

12:47: Beheading of President Truman’s personal military representative (General Vaughn) in the Capitol rotunda

[Note the implications here that MacArthur’s long sojourn in the Far East had turned him into an “Oriental Despot.”]

1:00: MacArthur addresses Congress

29Detailed narratives of these events can be found both in Manchester, American Caesar, 549–647, and in Michael Schaller, Douglas MacArthur: The Far-Eastern General (Oxford, 1989), 181–240.

30On the explosion of public anger against the Truman government for the dismissal of MacArthur, see Manchester, American Caesar, 647–52; Schaller, Douglas MacArthur, 241–2. The quote is from David McCullough, Truman (New York, 1992), 647.

1:30: Congressional storm of applause begins 1:50: Burning of the Constitution

1:55: Lynching of Secretary of State Acheson 2:00: 21 atomic-bomb salute

This vision of a violent military coup is merely gallows humor. But as Michael Schaller (one of the major MacArthur biographers) says, it represents the actual depth of anxieties of destruction at MacArthur’s hands running in the White House.31

Of course, nothing of the sort actually happened. MacArthur came to Washington and gave his speech before Congress, and it was successful, but in part because he ended it with the famous refrain, “Old soldiers . . . just fade away,” which is exactly what Truman wanted MacArthur to do. MacArthur’s testimony before the Senate in May 1952, which Truman feared would destroy his government, was actually a dud. MacArthur’s keynote address to the Republican National Convention in July 1952, which MacArthur hoped would win him the Republican presidential nomination by acclamation, was another dud. Then the General disappears from politics.

“I could see him in his toga, imperiously mounting his chariot,” said his adjutant when MacArthur was Commandant of West Point in the 1920s. However, MacArthur in 1951 was no Caesar and no Franco. Perhaps it was because he was old, seventy-one; Caesar had been twenty years younger when he crossed the Rubicon. Perhaps it was because he had only influence and little personal power or wealth; one should not confuse the New York VFW with Caesar’s armed and trained veterans, and Caesar’s personal wealth by 49 B.C. was about equal to the Roman State Treasury. Perhaps MacArthur’s self-confidence had also been somewhat impaired by the fact that the Chinese had beaten him to a standstill, whereas Caesar had never been defeated in Gaul (or any place else). In other words, MacArthur in 1951, even after all his extraordinary experience of independent decisionmaking in the Far East, still had a sense of limits; Caesar in 49 B.C. had none. Thus, it turned out that MacArthur’s real parallel in Roman history was not Caesar but Scipio Africanus, who, after heroic military successes for Rome in Spain, then against Hannibal, and then in the eastern Mediterranean, was forced into political retirement almost immediately upon returning to Rome.

My point is that important figures in the American government in 1950 and 1951 feared that things might turn out differently. Perhaps they had been reading too much Roman history or reading in the wrong century of

31 For the White House memo, interpreted as revealing actual deep anxieties, see Schaller, Douglas MacArthur, 242.