Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine [[6e édition mise à jour]. ed.] 9782017025771, 2017025771

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A N G L A I S ❋ CIVILISATION

LeS grANdeS dATeS de

L’hIStoIre AmérIcAINe P ierre L agayette

5e édiTiON REVUE ET aUGMENTéE

Professeur émérite à l’université Paris-Sorbonne-Paris-IV

Pierre Lagayette est professeur émérite à l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. Il est docteur de l’Université de Californie, où il a enseigné ainsi qu’à l’Université du Texas et l’Université du Tennessee. Parmi les nombreux ouvrages qu’il a publiés sur la littérature et la civilisation américaines, on retiendra : Les États-Unis contemporains (édition révisée), Paris, Bréal (2002, 2009). L’Empire de l’exécutif (1933-2006) : la présidence américaine de F. Roosevelt à G.W. Bush (dir. de publication), Paris, Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, coll. « Americana », 2007. Histoire de la littérature américaine, Paris, Hachette, coll. « Les Fondamentaux », 2001. L’Ouest américain, réalités et mythes. Paris, Ellipses, 1997. Civilisation américaine : documents constitutionnels (en collaboration). Paris, Ellipses, 1995. Figures libres, figures imposées : l’explication de texte en anglais (fiction). Paris, Hachette, HU Anglais Littérature (en collaboration avec H. Auffret-Boucé, A. Bleikasten, Y. Carlet, M. D. Garnier, F. MacPhail, S. Marret, M.-Ch. Pauwels, S. Pignot, C. Rihoit) 1993. Californie (Collection : Histoire régionale des États-Unis, Vol. 1). Nancy, Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1989. État & Pouvoirs dans le Pacifique français : schémas d’évolution. (en collaboration avec Paul de Deckker). Paris, L’Harmattan, 1987. Lettres de Tahiti, 1892-1916 : Correspondance personnelle de Tati Salmon et Henry Adams. Paris, Éditions du Pacifique, 1980.

Illustration de couverture : Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) plans his campagne during the American Civil War (gouache on paper) © Getty images, collection The Bridgeman Art Library, photographie Peter Jackson. Couverture : Guylaine Moi Maquette intérieure : Joël Dingé Réalisation : PAON © HACHETTE LIVRE 1993, 2001, 2007, 2010, 2013, 43, quai de Grenelle, 75905 Paris Cedex 15.

www.hachette-education.com ISBN : 978-2-01-140139-7

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Avant-propos Le titre même de cet ouvrage résume à la fois le pouvoir et le dilemme de l’historien : le pouvoir, c’est celui d’organiser le passé à travers des dates marquantes, d’imposer un ordre et une forme au chaos du temps insaisissable, à l’entrecroisement confus de vies innombrables. Le dilemme c’est de choisir entre l’instant et la durée, entre l’anecdote et le grand souffle, entre la tyrannie de la circonstance et l’exaltation des cycles séculaires, voire millénaires. Je tente ici, modestement, d’exercer ce pouvoir et de résorber ce dilemme. Pour certains, les dates historiques n’auront jamais que l’intérêt fonctionnel de l’aide-mémoire ; pour ma part, je préfère les considérer comme les affleurements visibles, manifestes, des modifications, autrement impalpables, subies au cours des âges par les sociétés et les civilisations. Dans une histoire de type narratif, comme celle qu’on trouvera dans ces pages, les dates constituent une signalisation indispensable, dirigeant le regard vers des événements essentiels dont il revient justement à l’historien d’affirmer l’importance. L’histoire des États-Unis se prête admirablement au formalisme de l’« événement historique » : le passé national, conçu bien souvent comme une succession de ruptures, de charnières, de « fins » et de « commencements », s’accommode fort bien de l’intensité symbolique dégagée par certaines dates, auxquelles s’attache l’idée (si chère aux Américains) de renouveau et de progrès. Aussi ai-je voulu que les dix-huit dates présentées ici n’apparaissent pas comme des faits isolés, feux de paille dans la nuit du temps, mais comme des jalons au bord d’une piste sans fin, dont chacun indiquerait le chemin parcouru et la direction à suivre. Ainsi, chaque chapitre permet non seulement d’examiner les circonstances d’un événement particulier, mais de les replacer dans un contexte dont elles sont, même lorsqu’elles signalent une rupture, indissociables, et d’en envisager les conséquences, à court terme ou à plus longue échéance. Autrement dit, ces « grandes dates » se présentent comme témoins des grandes phases ou des grands courants dons se constitue l’histoire américaine. Chaque chapitre comporte aussi des informations à caractère didactique — notices biographiques, mots-clé, concepts, documents, cartes — ainsi qu’une notice complémentaire, intitulée « Focus », destinée à aborder l’événement en question sous un angle différent. La synthèse finale, en français, fournira des repères sûrs à ceux qu’un texte intégralement rédigé en langue étrangère, pourrait, parfois, dérouter. Si j’ai réussi mon entreprise, le lecteur aura dix-huit raisons de penser que l’histoire des États-Unis lui offre, à travers crises et apothéoses, un remarquable exemple de continuité et d’homogénéité. Cette réussite espérée devra, en tout cas, beaucoup à un petit groupe d’amis et de proches qui n’ont ménagé ni leur peine ni leurs encouragements pour que ce livre finisse par exister. Mes remerciements, aussi vifs et amicaux soient-ils, à Michel Viel, John Atherton, Claudine Madec, ne donneront jamais la vraie mesure de leur aide et de leur soutien. Marie-Paule, Sophie, Jérôme et Fabrice savent bien le rôle insigne qu’ils ont joué dans l’accomplissement de ce projet.





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Table of contents Avant-propos





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The Mayflower: December 16, 1620 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 The Stamp Act: March 22, 1765 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 The Declaration of Independence: July 4, 1776 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 The Constitution of the United States: September 17, 1787 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 The Louisiana Purchase: May 2, 1803 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Andrew Jackson President: March 4, 1829 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 The Gold Rush: January 24, 1848 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Abraham Lincoln Assassinated: April 14, 1865 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 The Pacific Railroad: May 10, 1869 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 The Sherman Antitrust Act: July 2, 1890 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Theodore Roosevelt President: September 15, 1901 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 The Great Crash: October 24, 1929

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

Hiroshima: August 6, 1945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 The Cuban Missile Crisis: October 22–28, 1962 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Richard Nixon Resigns: August 8, 1974 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Victory in The Gulf: February 27, 1991 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 A day of infamy: September 11, 2001 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 A Black President in the White House: January 20, 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Appendixes Map of the United States Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 States of the Union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 List of Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240



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6 Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

DECEMBER 16, 1620

THE MAYFLOWER BACKGROUND

T

he 115 years between Christopher Columbus’s landing at San Salvador (Bahamas), October 12, 1492, and the advent of British colonial settlement in North America at Jamestown, Virginia, May 14, 1607, are a long and painful story of blundering geography, mishandled conquest and undiscriminating violence. On the “New” World western Europe focused its dreams of adventure, its greed and its proselytizing – three impulses as old as mankind but still capable of luring the wise and the fool alike to the farthest end of the earth. The 16th century was Spanish, at least until 1588 when Sir Francis Drake’s flotilla put a halt to the exploits of La Armada Del Rey and to Philip II’s dreams of world hegemony. Even though Spain had set a lasting foot in America, this was seen as only a temporary, if lucrative, stage towards the Indies. Failure by Narvaez, Coronado, De Soto, and their likes to find the Straits of Anian and the treasures of Cibola soon averted Spanish attention from the northern part of the continent. Into this huge vacuum left by Spain in the exploration of the New World rushed the English, the French and the Dutch. The early expeditions of John Cabot, in 1497 and 1498, and his discovery of Newfoundland had paved the way for England’s colonial implantation on the Atlantic coast. Improvements in navigation, increasing commercial needs and nationalist policies did the rest. Under Elizabeth I, conquest of far-off lands assumed a systematic turn which told of English world-wide ambitions, both in trade and in politics. The Queen pledged her own money to send Francis Drake, Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh across the Atlantic. In 1585

Synthèse en français L’aventure du Mayflower 16

KEYWORD Puritanism 9

PEOPLE J. Smith W. Bradford J. Winthrop R. Williams

8 11 14 15

DOCUMENT The Mayflower Compact 10

FOCUS The Native Americans 12

Opposite: Landing of Pilgrims at Plymouth, December 1620. (Lithograph by Nathaniel Currier) December 16, 1620 – The Mayflower

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John SMITH 1580–1631 A typical 17th century adventurer, whose life is known mostly through extravagant accounts and pamphlets, “Captain” John Smith first served as a mercenary for the Dutch in central Europe and Turkey before becoming interested in the Virginia Company project. Though only 26, he was made military leader of the Jamestown expedition. His explorations and contacts with the local Indians ensured the Virginia colony’s survival and his reputed marriage with Powhatan “princess” Pocahontas appeared to establish a lasting peace between the settlers and the natives. A highly controversial figure, part hero, part ruffian, Smith saw his authority increasingly challenged in the colony and, following gunpowder wounds for which he was sent home to England in 1609, he was ousted from the Virginia Company. He later was employed as explorer by some London traders who sent him to investigate the coast north of Virginia, which he named “New England”. Having failed to bring them back the riches they expected, he was dismissed and turned to drawing maps and writing his reminiscences. He was given occasional exploratory missions in the next years, but the Puritans haughtily turned down his offer of help when they planned their 1620 Mayflower voyage. He then faded out of colonial history, leaving behind a few volumes of personal recollections of dubious reliability.

8 Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

and 1587 the latter twice tried to establish an English colony on Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast. Both experiments failed miserably; only the name “Virginia”, that Raleigh had coined to honour his Queen (Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen), remained to designate the entire eastern coast of North America. James I, the Stuart King who succeeded Elizabeth, never discouraged colonization, but never made it a priority either. Roanoke had been an expensive error that no one except a few daring and greedy individuals would emulate. Yet in 1606 two groups of merchants, from London and Plymouth, formed two joint-stock companies for which they obtained a royal charter. The object of these Virginia Companies was to establish trading posts – and eventually settlements – along the eastern coast, between what are now Maine and North Carolina. From now on, the English colonization of North America would be largely a matter of individual initiative, private funding, and financial self-interest. And the home country, as usual, would reap the fruit of the adventurer’s efforts. Jamestown was the first trading and military post ever founded by Englishmen on continental America. The colonists that disembarked from the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery in May 1607 with Captain John Smith in the lead, were unaware of the excruciating trials this inhospitable land held in store for them: starvation, disease and Indians combined to carry off half their number in half a year. The survival of what would later be known as “London’s Plantation in the Southern Part of Virginia” during the next fifteen years, was due to a variety of Providential interventions that were named Lord De la Warr, Pocahontas, John Rolfe and tobacco (see, pp.12–13). The second Virginia Company, funded by Plymouth traders, also tried to land colonists in Maine in 1607, but a harsh winter, inadequate equipment and unfriendly Indians aborted the experiment and the party of colonists sailed home the following spring. Economically and socially, these early attempts could hardly be a “pull” factor for prospective emigrants. Yet this was a period of land-hunger in England, and many a peasant, yeoman or unemployed craftsman was lured by the promise of free land held out in the trade companies’ pamphlets. More importantly, the urge to leave found renewed support in the mounting intolerance of the Anglican Church; the decisive “push” factor towards America was religious.

KEYWORD

PURITANISM As a doctrine, Puritanism was an emanation of the Protestant movement (as represented by the Church of England) that sought to simplify or “purify” the creeds and rituals that the Reformation had already challenged. More practically, Puritanism, also involved a decrease in the influence and authority of the church hierarchy. One can see here the hand of Martin Luther, whose views on civil and church power permanently influenced the organization of the theocratic colonies of New England.

• “unconditional election”: redemption was reserved to those predestined to receive it; and God’s spirit would work “in the souls of the elect and of them alone” ;

Jean Calvin, the Geneva theologian, also left his mark on Puritanism, turning it into a rigid system of thought which, paradoxically, had no room for intellectual toleration even though the Puritans of America had themselves been the victims of religious intolerance at home.

• “perseverance of the Saints”: the elect must relentlessly strive to further God’s works in this world and to overcome the consequences of man’s original depravity.

The emigrated Puritans in Holland set out their doctrine on the occasion of a 1619 ecclesiastical council; its five main points can be taken as the fundamental tenets of Puritanism: • “original depravity”: man’s original sin had destroyed forever his chance of earning grace by his sole personal powers;

• “irresistible grace” and “limited atonement”: God’s gift of grace to the elect cannot be questioned or refused. Through Christ the Redeemer, God offers a “New Covenant” to mankind, which must be accepted. Yet atonement for sins cannot be extended beyond the “happy few” whom God has chosen to be saved;

In the hands of zealots, Puritanism could easily, and did sometimes, turn into a stern, rigorous doctrine that favored bigotry and superstition, and initiated unfortunate social tensions and persecutions (the Salem witch hunts). In the hands of a more balanced and humanist clergy, Puritanism would encourage frugality, discipline, effort and a desire for improvement. Besides, material success could be the sign of God’s grace and thus became compatible with a virtuous lifestyle.

Anglicanism, which had begun with Henry VIII in private apostasy ended up as a powerful political tool in the hands of Elizabeth I. England, though, would need another century to come to viable terms with the Reformation of Luther and Calvin. One Revolution and five Stuarts later England seemed at last comfortable in her Protestant faith. In the meantime, those who dared question the authority of Church and State were relentlessly persecuted. Not only Catholics, scorned as corrupt, retrograde Papists, but also those who escaped forward into radical dissent, and especially Calvinist protesters, known as “Puritans” for their condemnation of the lingering – and, in their eyes, impure – penchant for pomp and ceremony within the Anglican Church. These radicals soon posed a threat to the political and social order in England, if only because their arch-individualism led them to denounce all forms of authority, including the King’s. Exile was, for them, but a mild penalty.

December 16, 1620 – The Mayflower

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CIRCUMSTANCES

The Mayflower Compact In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord, King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, etc. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one of another, convenant1 and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid2; And by Virtue hereof3 to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet4 and convenient for the General good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience. In Witness whereof5 we have hereunto6 subscribed our names at Cape Cod the eleventh of November, in the reign of our Sovereign Lord, King James of England, France and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini, 1620. 1. agree 2. previously mentioned 3. of this 4. appropriate 5. of which 6. to this document

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Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

C

aptain John Smith was not yet forty, but an experienced navigator and colonist when some London merchants, impressed by his handling of the Virginia colony, sent him in 1615 to explore the northern part of the coast, beyond the river Henry Hudson had symbolically appropriated for the Dutch in 1609. The expedition yielded poor economic results but Smith sensed the potential advantages of settling in the area and presented the case in his A Description of New England: Or the Observations and Discoveries of Captain John Smith, published in 1616. The account attracted the attention of a small group of Puritan Separatists, the “Pilgrims”, who had, like so many religious dissenters all over Europe, fled to Leiden in the Netherlands in 1608. America, and the prospect of having a place of their own where they could live and worship as they pleased, were all too tempting. In 1617, they resolved to move their community overseas and accordingly approached the Plymouth-based Northern Virginia Company. In a thinly disguised move to thwart Dutch commercial ambitions in the region, the Company accepted to finance the Pilgrims’ voyage to “New England” in return for their promise to develop lands that, so far, had remained unprofitable. The sale of their modest properties in Holland, plus a near-usury loan from London merchant Thomas Weston, provided the Pilgrims with the necessary travel funds.

In Southampton, they joined a group of non-Separatists, also hired by Weston to work in the colony and waited long weeks for departure. They finally boarded the Mayflower September 16, 1620 in Plymouth; but by sailing in autumn, the ship ran the risk of heading into bad weather off the American coast. The 180-ton, 90-foot long vessel could barely withstand severe storms of the kind it encountered when nearing the New World. The 149 people on board prayed for safe passage to the Hudson River area, their expected destination. But after 64 days at sea, strong winds and heavy swell swept them off their route and they drifted northward, towards Cape Cod. The terrifying shoals forbade any landing, so they rounded the Cape and took shelter in what is now Provincetown harbor. This was on November 11, 1620. A month later, December 16, the Mayflower moored near Plymouth Rock, on the other side of Cape Cod Bay, and the Pilgrims started building huts on the shore: the first Puritan colony in America was born.

Since the settlement was located far from the land for which they had secured a patent, its legal status had to be redefined – which was the object of a covenant signed on November 11 by the 41 adult males on board (exclusive of servants) while the ship was still rocking off Cape Cod, a covenant known as the Mayflower Compact. The historical canon has conveniently treated the document as an early instance of the colonists’ capacity for self-government. But of course such founders of political science as Locke and Montesquieu were yet to be born. In fact, besides the need for legal recognition, the Compact fulfilled two other requirements. First, it sealed the common fate of the two groups of would-be colonists who had boarded the Mayflower: the original Pilgrims – they called themselves the “Saints” – among whom were many of the great figures of early New England history, John Carver, William Brewster, William Bradford, and Edward Winslow; and the non-Puritan settlers – also known as “strangers” – whom loan-shark Thomas Weston had forcibly paired up with the Pilgrims. The latter having clearly announced their intention of separating from the Separatists once on shore, the Pilgrims hastily drafted an agreement to form “a civil body politic” to which all the undersigners promised “due submission and obedience”. A further advantage of this covenant was to give the “Saints” an opportunity to establish their independence and freedom from all hierarchies, secular or clerical. The colony suffered distressingly over the winter: malnutrition and disease played their all too familiar havoc and only half of the colonists ever saw mayflowers the next spring. Yet when their ship sailed back to England in early April 1621, none of the surviving Pilgrims was on board. They kept close to Plymouth Rock, shot game, fished and planted corn, set up a congregation without a pastor (theirs had remained in Leiden), befriended the Indians and celebrated their alliance late in October with a week-long feast now commemorated by Thanksgiving Day. But, more importantly, the survival of this settlement forstered the hopes of freedom for persecuted Puritans in Europe and dimly confirmed their conviction that they were a chosen people.

William BRADFORD 1590–1657 Young William Bradford joined the Puritans’ “separatist” movement shortly after the Hampton Court conference (1604) and fled with the most radical first to Amsterdam, then to Leiden. Having assumed, with William Brewster, Edward Winslow and Miles Standish, the leadership of the Mayflower expedition, he was elected governor of the Plymouth Colony in 1621 and served as chief magistrate almost uninterruptedly until his death. Throughout his long official career, Bradford sought to maintain unity among the Plymouth Puritans and constantly used the stern doctrine inherited from Calvin as a cement for his community. Charity, hard work and temperance were exalted and the sense of being a chosen people carefully preserved. The colony was always treated as a congregation of highly responsible individuals, and would remain virtually independent from all hierarchies for 65 years, until James II arbitrarily annexed it to his “miniempire”, the Dominion of New England, in 1686. Besides being an able politician, Bradford was a gifted chronicler of his age: his Of Plymouth Plantation is an invaluable source for knowledge of all aspects of the Pilgrims’ life in New England.

CONSEQUENCES

T

he Mayflower episode has been endowed with more symbolic weight than any other event in the colonizing of North America, save perhaps for Columbus’s discovery. The actual settling of New England and of the Eastern coast spans almost a century and



December 16, 1620 – The Mayflower

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FOCUS

THE NATIVE AMERICANS Sir Walter Raleigh’s first exchanges with Secotan Indians in North Carolina, around 1590, were a prelude to three centuries of intercourse between red and white men in North America, variously apprehended as model acculturation or damning genocide. One undeniable fact is that Indians proved to be essential to the survival of the early European settlers, for which they were rewarded with a wide array of torments ranging from displacement policies to wars of attrition. Americans, however, were comforted by the recognition that their treatment of natives had never reached the Spaniards’ hysterical savagery and lust. The respective interests of white settlers and local Indians were unfortunately antagonistic and their ways of life mutually exclusive. If plain hunger brought them together at one point, it was landhunger that irremediably ruined their relations. Trade and barter, added to natural curiosity and sometimes to philanthropy, momentarily kept up the illusion of peaceful coexistence. But in Virginia and in Massachusetts mercantile schemes and population increase turned the original idyll into a bloody nightmare. The Jamestown colony pulled through despite the harshness of the 1607–1608 winter, thanks to the supplies brought to them by local Powhatan Indians. Captain John Smith had earlier befriended and married, Indian-style, the chief’s own daughter, Pocahontas. He would explain, in his 1616 A General Historie of Virginia, that she had saved his life when he had been taken as a prisoner to her father’s camp. The girl was merely a child when this happened but her intelligence, open-mindedness and political skill maintained peace for a full decade. She converted to Christianity and in 1614 married a prominent colonist, John Rolfe, whose major contribution to colonial history is to have crossed West Indian tobacco with local Virginia seeds. The economic boom he thereby engineered was to save the colony from premature collapse. Pocahontas died in 1617 in 12

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

distant England, while on a trip there with her husband. She has survived as a somewhat mythic figure, a symbol and a proof that Indians could become “civilized”. This romance of the New World had a darker side: the success of tobacco signalled the end of the peaceful status quo between Indians and settlers. More land was needed to meet European demand and converting the Indians’ precious cornfields to tobacco was, for white colonists, easier than clearing forests. Repeated encroachments on their land infuriated the Powhatans. With the death of Pocahontas and her father the last guarantees of peace evaporated. In March 1622, the Powhatans’ new chief Opechancanough launched a series of raids on Jamestown and other settlements that wiped out a third of the white population. The retaliation campaign measured up to the economic interests involved and lasted almost twenty years. When the curtain dropped on this tragedy, most of the coastal tribes of Virginia had been exterminated. Further north, the Puritans had a similar, though less romantic, experience with Algonquin Indians. The white man’s arrival had been heralded by his diseases – notably smallpox – brought from the South, and already a scourge among the coastal tribes of North America. But the Wampanoags, established in the Cape Cod area, had further cause to know the manners and mind of European newcomers. One of them, named Squanto, had been kidnapped by a European trader in 1615 and brought to England where he had learned the language. As a sort of special adviser to the grand sachem Massasoit he strove to help the Pilgrims through their first winter. He kept them from starvation with grain supplies, taught them how to plant maize, and led them through the wilderness to the best fishing streams. The colonists’ first harvest, in 1621, reduced the likelihood of future famines and, with the Wampanoags, they gave thanks to God for His

mercies. Squanto, William Bradford insisted later in his Of Plymouth Plantation, was “a spetiall instrument sent by God for their [the Pilgrims’] good beyond their expectation.” As a mediator between natives and settlers, as a guide, a pilot and a teacher, Squanto became essential to the colony. His death in 1622, coming almost at the time of the Virginia massacre, ushered New England into a new era of misunderstandings, tensions, then conflicts, with local Indians. Greed for land and proselytism caused their usual damage. Soon eventually Indians would have to protect their customs and their means of subsistance. On the other hand, the basic incompatibility between the natives’ way of life and that of the newcomers has been repeatedly stressed. Much of it obviously owed to different conceptions of the social order, but the gap between white and Indian communities was also widened by the Puritan Congregationalists’ missionary zeal. Trade advantages and conversion were offered in the same package deal, which served to create an in-between caste of natives, outrageously exploited by the white man and fiercely despised by their kin. These “Praying Indians”, whose number never exceeded 2,500 in the New England colonies, were instrumental mainly in helping settlers organize their defense against the most bellicose tribes. During the Indian war known as “King Philip’s War”, which broke out in June 1675 in the Plymouth colony, they advised the colonists on the proper strategy to adopt against the rampaging Wampanoags. Sachem Metacom, the Wampanoags’ chief since 1662, had come to resent the English presence to the point of plotting a war of extermination. He persuaded the Naragansetts and their chief, Canonchet, then the Nipmucks, to join him. Casualties in this bloody war

were not limited to the battlefield: not only did the colonists themselves lose their own “civilized” manners, torturing, mutilating and even scalping their Indian enemies; the war also signalled the failure of the patient evangelical work of Puritan ministers such as John Eliot, John Cotton, Richard Bourne and Thomas Mayhew. Not that the “Praying Indians” reverted to their heathen practices, but they were suspected of forming a sort of “fifth column” in white society, and were accordingly interned for three years on Deer Island, in Massachusetts Bay. They survived on shellfish, but the wound this painful episode opened in the mutual trust between Indians and Whites would never fully heal. After 1678, New England Indians were reputed pacified, but their long agony that was to end two hundred years later at the burial ground of Wounded Knee had already begun.

John Smith saved by Pocahontas. (18th century lithograph)

December 16, 1620 – The Mayflower

13

John WINTHROP 1587?–1649 When he sailed to America with his family on the Arbella in 1630, as leader of a group of Puritans heading for New England, John Winthrop was a man of relatively high position in Suffolk with a manor (Groton) he had inherited from his father, and a legal practice in London. As a Puritan himself, he had become interested in the opening of new colonies in America for the “dissenters”, and he soon was offered the governorship of a territory incorporated by King Charles I under the Company of the Massachusetts Bay. He, and the hundreds of colonists that joined him in the voyage to New England, intended to found a permanent settlement there instead of a mere mercantile trading-post. For that reason, the Company, its charter, assembly and administration were officially transferred to America, making the new settlement a self-governing one and Winthrop a governor with unusual powers. He tried to be a guide for his community, and appealed to their sense of morality and responsibility in the famous formula, “We shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.” An aristocrat by birth, he had no faith in democracy which he found “the meanest and worst form of government” and naturally resisted popular pressure in politics. Despite opposition from ambitious leaders like Thomas Dudley, John Cotton or Henry Vane, and a few unfortunate decisions (like his severe handling of Anne Hutchinson’s Antinomian controversy in 1637), he was constantly re-elected to high office, as governor or deputy-governor, till his death.

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somewhat dwarfs the Pilgrims’ experiment. Yet, none of those who later crossed the seas to come to America could escape confrontation with the Mayflower symbol of freedom, selfdetermination, moral strength and exceptional destiny. In that sense, the Plymouth colony stands as a blueprint for all further colonization and assumes a unique role in the shaping of the future American nation. Most of the new settlements were truly testing grounds for principles and systems that had never been fully developed anywhere in Europe. Puritans, in particular, harassed by Charles I and Archbishop Laud, had never had a chance to establish at home the kind of human and religious community their faith called for. Yet, in 1629, a group of influential Puritans secured a royal charter for a new colony, which they planned to manage through a new commercial company, called The Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England. A Cambridge-educated attorney of forty, John Winthrop, was entrusted with the governorship of both the company and the colony. Word of mouth and pamphlets advertised the new venture so successfully that within a year more than 1000 Puritans had sailed to Massachusetts. Five more years and their numbers had increased tenfold. The New England colony met with an unexpected, yet hardwon success which has acquired symbolic overweight in the American historical canon: this New Canaan, this “City upon a Hill” as Winthrop called it, became an incarnation of God’s design, a providential land that had been saved for an elect people, for a chosen race. No close historical scrutiny, or revision, ever managed to shake the deeply ingrained belief that the glorious future of America was inscribed in this New England experiment. As a story of origins, the settlement of Massachusetts would later serve to support nationalist rhetoric and jingoistic ideology. America was “exceptional” in part because the settlement of New England had been divinely ordained. Conceived by Winthrop as an improvement over Anglican Virginia which, he thought, had fallen into “great and fundamental errors,” Puritan Massachusetts and the neighboring colonies nonetheless remained, for long decades, on the brink of collapse. Religious intolerance, economic and political inequality undermined social relations and threatened whatever progress the colonists had up to then achieved. From dissenters, the Puritans had turned into rulers and themselves soon came to resent non-conformity. They practiced the kind of political and religious exclusion that had sent

them into exile, and thus fostered the first westward thrusts in American colonial history. The founding of Connecticut by Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone and John Haynes in 1636 was the consequence of political dissent. That of Rhode Island by Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton and Anne Hutchinson, at almost the same time, originated in religious banishment. Such splits, however, were as many setbacks for autocratic rule and each new colony improved on the others’ practice of self-government – soon of “democracy”. Pennsylvania, for example, founded in 1681 by William Penn as a Quaker haven, became a model of colonial success largely because the founders had learnt from previous experiments, and mistakes. Seventeenth-century America was a mosaic of various colonial experiences. The differing development of Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island or Pennsylvania reflects such variety. Free men and women, indentured servants, convicts and African slaves, educated gentlemen and illiterates, apostates and believers – all faced a common challenge, that of surviving in a new and hostile environment. And, as fitted the Calvinist ethos, the way each one would stand the ordeal, was divine business. Moreover, if England had no head start over the French and the Dutch, she was quicker to understand the tremendous advantages of supporting systematic colonization of the New World. So that when the 18th century opened, about 300,000 people were already living in the English colonies, or “provinces” of North America, and intended to stay.

CAPE ANN

Groton Salem Concord

MASSACHUSETTS BAY

Gloucester

Medford

Boston

DEER ISLAND

Worcester

CAPE COD Plymouth Hartford

CONNECTICUT New Haven

Providence

PLYMOUTH

Roger WILLIAMS 1603–1683 Born in London and educated at Cambridge, he abandoned a promising legal career to become an Anglican minister in 1629. He arrived in Massachusetts in 1631 and became a teacher in the Salem parish. There, he voiced his highly controversial and very liberal views on Church and government, antagonizing the Puritan hierarchy who found his Separatism even more radical than theirs. By advocating religious freedom, a greater autonomy from the Church of England than was practiced in the Bay Colony, and a repeal of the royal charter which, he thought, encroached on man’s natural right to choose his own system of government, Williams exposed himself to harsh retaliation. He was banished from Salem in 1635 and made his way to Rhode Island where, a year later, he founded Providence. For his new colony, the Providence Plantations, where he could put into practice his – then revolutionary – principles of a separation of Church and State, popular sovereignty and universal religious tolerance, he finally obtained a charter in 1644 (under Cromwell), later confirmed by King Charles II (1663). Williams spent the rest of his life trying to maintain good relations with the Indians, among whom – a rare fact in those days – he had briefly lived, and to reaffirm, in a number of pamphlets, his philosophical beliefs.

Provincetown CAPE COD BAY

RHODE ISLAND Newport MARTHA’S VINEYARD

NANTUCKET

LONG ISLAND

Early New England Colonies



December 16, 1620 – The Mayflower

15

L’AVENTURE DU MAYFLOWER Le navire qui, le 11 novembre 1620, mouillait au large des redoutables écueils de Cape Cod (Massachusetts), portait un nom de fleur qui évoquait le renouveau et l’espérance du printemps. Le Mayflower, un trois-mâts de 180 tonneaux, transportait 149 passagers dont l’aventure est demeurée aussi exemplaire dans l’histoire du continent américain que la découverte de Christophe Colomb. Plus d’un siècle s’était écoulé depuis la venue du capitaine Génois et la colonisation de l’Amérique du Nord tardait à s’accomplir. Les Espagnols, las des échecs successifs de leurs explorations vers le nord, qui ne parvenaient à localiser ni les détroits d’Anian, ni les trésors de Cibola, se consacrèrent à leurs possessions méridionales, laissant ainsi le champ libre aux autres puissances Européennes. Les Français, les Hollandais et les Anglais – ces derniers surtout après leur victoire de 1588 sur l’Armada de Philippe II – partirent à la conquête du nouveau continent. John Cabot, puis Jacques Cartier et, plus tard, Francis Drake, Humphrey Gilbert et Walter Raleigh, tous rêvaient d’acquérir ces terres lointaines pour la gloire et la fortune de leurs commanditaires royaux. Raleigh avait, par deux fois (en 1585 et 1587) tenté d’établir un comptoir commercial sur une île de l’actuelle Caroline du Nord, Roanoke, mais à grands frais et sans grand succès. L’expérience française de Port Royal, en Nouvelle-Écosse, n’était guère plus brillante. La fièvre mercantile des commerçants anglais l’emporta toutefois sur la prudence royale. Jacques I er autorisa en 1606 la formation de deux compagnies coloniales – London & Plymouth Virginia Companies – auxquelles est due l’implantation définitive des Anglais sur la terre d’Amérique. Le premier établissement de Virginie, Jamestown, fut fondé en 1607 et, malgré des 16

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

vicissitudes sans nombre, parvint, grâce surtout à son gouverneur le capitaine John Smith, à perdurer. L’intérêt commercial qui poussait les Anglais vers l’inconnu, à la conquête de nouveaux territoires, se doubla bientôt d’un désir d’exil beaucoup plus impérieux, imputable cette fois aux persécutions religieuses. L’Église Anglicane, qu’Henry VIII avait instaurée davantage par dépit et par défi que par conviction profonde, admettait mal la contestation, et ce d’autant moins que pouvoir politique et pouvoir religieux s’y confondaient et que quiconque menaçait l’un menaçait aussi l’autre. Pourchasser les radicaux, en particulier Calvinistes, devint donc, pour la Couronne et pour Cantorbéry, une œuvre de salubrité politique et morale. Les puritains, héritiers de l’austère église genevoise de Jean Calvin, durent d’abord chercher refuge en Hollande. Lorsqu’en 1617 il leur fut proposé d’aller vivre selon leur croyance sur une terre nouvelle, ces séparatistes puritains, appelés plus tard Pères pèlerins, n’hésitèrent pas longtemps. Seul le financement du voyage posait problème : la vente de leurs avoirs et des prêts usuraires de marchands londoniens permirent aux pèlerins d’embarquer sur le navire de l’exode et de l’espoir, le Mayflower, le 16 septembre 1620. Ils étaient 102 à tenter l’aventure sous l’autorité d’ardents jeunes gens tels que William Bradford ou Edward Winslow. Les premiers signes de l’adversité se présentèrent sous forme d’une tempête, au large des côtes américaines. Il faudrait mériter sa terre promise. La plantation qui leur avait été, à grand peine, concédée par le gouverneur de Virginie, sir Edwin Sandys, se trouvait non loin de l’embouchure de l’Hudson. Mais les vents détournèrent le Mayflower de sa destination. Drossés 200 km au nord de l’Hudson, les pèlerins durent

constater la caducité de leur concession territoriale. Et afin de donner valeur légale à toute appropriation de terres qu’ils pourraient faire sur la côte, ils établirent un document, le Mayflower Compact (voir p. 4), signé par tous les adultes du bord qui s’engageaient ainsi à former un gouvernement civil communautaire, pour le bien de tous. On a voulu voir dans ce contrat la manifestation précoce d’une pensée autonomiste et libertaire qui devait, bien plus tard, mener les colonies américaines à l’indépendance. Il s’agissait pourtant, avant tout, de resserrer les liens du groupe afin d’en garantir la survie dans un milieu mal connu et hostile. Les nouveaux colons débarquèrent à Plymouth le 16 décembre ; mais ni l’hiver de 1620, ni les maladies ne les épargnèrent. Le printemps venu, il n’en restait que la moitié ; sans l’aide des Indiens Wampanoags ils auraient sans doute tous succombé. Conseillés par l’Indien Squanto, qui parlait leur langue, les pèlerins plantèrent du maïs ; et pas un des survivants n’aurait abandonné sa récolte. Lorsque le Mayflower appareilla pour l’Angleterre au début d’avril 1621, il n’y ramenait aucun émigrant déçu. Vint le temps des moissons, et avec lui la conviction que la colonie de Plymouth ne connaîtrait pas le sort de Roanoke. Les puritains avaient à présent une terre où ils pourraient suivre, sans contraintes, les enseignements de leur foi. Les dissidents européens, sans cesse harcelés par l’Église officielle, eurent de plus en plus recours à l’émigration. Si bien que dans les décennies qui suivirent, quatre autres colonies puritaines virent le jour en NouvelleAngleterre. La plus importante fut sans doute celle de Massachusetts Bay, fondée par John Winthrop en 1630 et considérée par les puritains comme une nouvelle canaan. Ils la voyaient comme le fondement d’une société plus juste, plus libre, plus tolérante, en un mot

plus parfaite. Dieu, disait Winthrop, avait châtié toutes les autres Églises – pour leur impureté – et réservé l’Amérique à ceux qu’il entendait sauver du désastre universel. Cette conviction d’être un peuple élu, béni par la providence, s’incrusterait définitivement dans l’esprit américain. Tout, pourtant, n’allait pas pour le mieux dans ces colonies de la première heure : la survie quotidienne n’était pas garantie, les Indiens étaient souvent imprévisibles et l’apprentissage du gouvernement s’avérait périlleux. Nombreux furent les puritains d’Amérique qui pratiquèrent l’intolérance dont ils avaient eux-mêmes été victimes en Europe. Et les premiers mouvements vers l’Ouest, celui de Thomas Hooker vers le Connecticut ou celui de Roger Williams vers le Rhode Island, résultèrent de dissensions idéologiques. Seule la colonie quaker de William Penn, établie en 1681, sut éviter les pièges du rigorisme moral et politique. Sa réussite durable découlait de la pratique inconditionnelle de la tolérance religieuse (Penn, comme Roger Williams, respectait même les croyances indiennes) et d’un système de gouvernement où l’aristocratie (à travers un Conseil provincial) et le peuple (représenté dans un assemblée législative) partageaient le pouvoir. L’expérience pionnière du Mayflower trouvait ici un prolongement lointain mais heureux. L’Angleterre fut en tout cas, de toutes les puissances européennes, celle qui perçut le mieux les avantages potentiels d’une colonisation en Amérique du Nord. Et lorsque s’ouvrit le xviii e siècle, les provinces anglaises du Nouveau Monde comptaient déjà près de 300 000 âmes.

December 16, 1620 – The Mayflower

17

18

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

MARCH 22, 1765

THE STAMP ACT BACKGROUND

W

hile the development of the British colonies of America was due chiefly to the courage and toil of settlers, England’s policy of overseas expansion payed little heed to the American colonists’ interests. Royal charters and land grants were never disinterested expressions of the King’s benevolence or philanthropy. The Crown had its own social and economic priorities; the colonies were to serve as mere sources of revenue, convenient exiles for undesirable subjects, or handy gifts for faithful friends. New Hampshire and Maine, then New York, Maryland and the Carolinas had been proprietary colonies, established with a view to providing fair returns to their favored owners. The other colonies, from Massachusetts Bay to Pennsylvania, had required huge investments (£200,000 for New England alone, in its early years) which no financier could accept to lose. The colonies were thus part of a mercantile scheme that subtly blended patriotic and economic motives, and ultimately sought to create a vast and permanent market for English goods beyond the Atlantic.

Synthèse en français Londres taxe les colonies 28

KEYWORDS Mercantilism 23 The Colonial Trade 25

PEOPLE George III G. Grenville P. Henry

20 21 22

FOCUS The Sons of Liberty

26

In addition, foreign policy issues bore heavily on royal decisions concerning America. The Spanish and French presence on the continent represented enough of a challenge and a threat to stimulate English pride and prompt England to protect its North American possessions. Gradually, private and national interests combined to make America the spearhead of England’s great imperial dream. To materialize English claims in the New World, however, required the elimination of competing imperialists, Spain and France, which was done at the close of the Seven Years’ War, in 1763. The Peace of Paris, signed in February of that year,

Opposite: The Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770. (Engraving by Paul Revere)



March 22, 1765 – The Stamp Act 19

GEORGE III 1738-1820 Proclaimed King at the age of 22, George III reigned sixty long years, half of which were tainted with madness. He was the eldest son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, George II’s son, and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. His father and grandfather were constantly at odds so that young George was driven closer to his mother, who remained a constant adviser through much of his reign. Born and educated in England, George was the first of the Hanoverian kings to be truly “native” and speak good English. As a result, he felt he should govern directly instead of relying on powerful Whigs, like his predecessors. He set out, therefore, to recover some of the political authority that the Crown had recently lost at the hands of Parliament. Ministers would come and go swiftly, as political opportunity, patronage or whim would command: Chatham, Newcastle, Bute, Grenville, North, Rockingham, Pitt the Younger, etc. But the King remained and was the one to initiate policies: he guided the decisions concerning America and supported Parliament when its authority over the colonies was threatened. George III was a true conservative who would not tolerate threats to the integrity of the colonial Empire. The loss of America was thus a great blow to him; he seriously considered abdication in the last years of the Revolutionary War (1782 and 1783). A few years later (1788) the first signs of mental illness appeared; although the King apparently recovered, there were relapses in 1801 and 1804 and, from 1810 on, he was mostly confined within his palace, a demented monarch who was granted only brief periods of respite.

20

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marked the end of French ambitions in America: Canada and the trans-Appalachian region came under English control. Spain ceded the Floridas and, in the South-West, was relegated beyond the Mississippi, which left ample room for further settlement. These visible territorial gains were offset by graver political and economic difficulties, partly inherent in all imperial growth, partly due to the specific conditions of American colonization. England’s political hold on her “Provinces” of America had loosened as the practice of self-government developed. Each of the colonies had a popularly elected assembly and even though governors still took their orders from London, most political decisions stemmed from local concerns. Sporadic and awkward attempts by the Crown to impose authoritarian rule failed: Charles II and James II did try to restore some measure of imperial control by establishing a “Dominion of New England” (1684–89) which gathered the northern colonies under a single rule – that of Governor Andros. But the “Glorious Revolution” that put William and Mary on the throne allowed Americans to revert to their self-governing habits. The political status quo might have lasted indefinitely, so uncoercive had become, in Georgian England, such instruments of imperial administration as Governors, the Privy Council or the Board of Trade. Yet, again, economic concerns finally put an end to an era otherwise known, in political history, as one of “salutary neglect”. English Tories felt it was high time to remind all colonies of their initial vocation, i.e. to provide abundant and cheap supplies for English manufactures, and handsome revenues for English traders. Mercantilist legislation, like the Navigation Acts of the 1650s which regulated colonial commerce, had never been strictly enforced, but nevertheless hampered the Americans’ capacity to develop their own agriculture and industry. Employment, prices, and the standard of living in the colonies depended on decisions taken in London, by a Parliament where no colonial representative had a seat, and in conformity with exploitive doctrines that deliberately ignored the reality of colonial growth in America. British merchants manipulated the House of Commons into voting a network of Acts that, if enforced, might prove deadly for the colonial economy. The highly protective Woolen Act (1699), Hat Act (1732), Molasses Act (1733), Iron Act (1750), and Sugar Act (1763) penalized most of the colonies and turned reasonable American traders into wild smugglers. But worse, the restrictions imposed through taxation on West Indian sugar imports, signalled

the end of a larger triangular trade between America, the Caribbeans and western Europe that had provided oxygen to American commerce in the previous half-century. Two aggravating circumstances were added to the strain on AngloAmerican relations by the Seven Years’ War: first its cost, well over the £100 million mark, which led Chancellor of the Exchequer George Grenville to demand that the Americans pay their share of their own defense. Second, the colonists were barred from the trans-Appalachian territories, recently secured by the Peace of Paris, and over which the Crown intended to exert full control. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, prohibiting any settlement west of the Appalachians turned land scarcity in the east into a major social and economic issue and exacerbated the inequalities between landowners and tenants, between rich and poor.

CIRCUMSTANCES

T

he Navigation Acts had been aimed primarily at regulating trade, not at raising money. But the British national debt after 1763, due in great part to costly military operations in America, led to a drastic policy change. Lord Grenville and the governing Tories devised means to extract revenues from the Americans. The Sugar Act had been an obvious transition from regulation to taxation. The Stamp Act of 1765 inaugurated a new form of control by imposing a tax on legal documents to be paid in sterling pounds, with stamps purchased from the British treasury. The law covered a wide range of items, some of which could hardly be called “official”; if one had to pay for legal papers connected with licenses, diplomas, deeds, or appointments, one also had to pay a tax on cards (one shilling a pack), dice (ten shillings a pair) newspapers (half-pence a sheet) and almanacs (four pence a copy). No injustice, strictly speaking, was being imposed on the colonists: similar fiscal measures existed in England and the West Indies and were considered part of everyday life. So that the Stamp Act might have appeared more as a compensatory than as a retaliatory measure. The Grenville ministry, however, played their hand in a very awkward fashion. First, Admiralty courts (i.e. military jurisdictions) were made responsible for the legal enforcement of the Act, which gave an unintended dictatorial turn to the collection of money. The prospect of facing military judges for failing to pay a tax on his newspaper hardly comforted the American colonist in

George GRENVILLE 1712-1770 The Grenvilles were a prominent Whig family serving the Hanoverian kings, and more particularly George III. By the mideighteenth century, the government of Britain had become a battleground for ambitious politicians, who went in and out of office with the King’s blessing and – at times – help. Such was the case of Grenville, Rockingham, Newcastle, Pitt and their peers. Born in Buckinghamshire, which he would later represent in Parliament, Grenville had gone through Eton College and Oxford before joining his elder brother, Lord Temple, then Lord of the Admiralty, in the political arena. Grenville served in the same capacity under Pelham in 1744, then during the next twenty years was to occupy different key posts in government, such as Lord of the Treasury, Treasurer of the Navy, Chancellor of the Exchequer and, finally, Prime Minister in 1763. His early career had followed the ups and downs of William Pitt’s fortunes, but he eventually distanced himself from the Earl of Chatham and accepted to stay when George III dismissed Pitt in 1761 and replaced him with Lord Bute. A good accountant of the state’s money, Grenville was shocked by the expenses of the Seven Years’ War and intended to have the American colonies pay – at least partly – for their own defense. But his ministry was soon shattered by American resistance to the Stamp Act and the domestic turmoil over the prosecution of political agitator John Wilkes. Grenville had to go after only two years in power and was replaced by Rockingham (1765). He never came back in office.

March 22, 1765 – The Stamp Act 21

Patrick HENRY 1736-1799 Born in Virginia, Henry was the son of a county surveyor and judge of Scottish ancestry. Despite his poor standing at school and, later, his lack of success in business, he decided to try his hand at law and managed to be admitted to the bar in 1760. Very soon he became publicly known in Virginia for his opposition to English arbitrary rule over colonial affairs. In 1763, he criticized the “Two-Penny Act” by which the London Parliament stipulated that ministers should receive salaries equivalent to 17,000 pounds of tobacco a year, but at 2 pence a pound instead of the regular market price of 6 pence. His famous speech, “The Parson’s Cause”, brought him immediate celebrity throughout Virginia. When elected member of the Virginia legislature in 1765, Henry led the resistance against British laws, especially against the Stamp Act. His subsequent career was that of a typical Patriot and radical: he was an early member of the Sons of Liberty and of the Virginia Committee of Correspondence, a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses. A long-time defender of state rights, he would even oppose ratification of the Constitution in his home state in 1788.

his submission to the British Crown. Second, the Stamp Act was combined with two other measures that affected the Americans’ daily life and business: the Quartering Acts (1765 and 1766), requiring the colonies to provide barracks or other dwellings for British troops, and the Currency Act (1764), which prohibited the issuance of legal tender by the colonies. Americans suddenly suspected that the army and the tax-collectors were working towards the same repressive ends. And they almost instantly perceived the direct taxation imposed by the Stamp Act as an arbitrary assault on self-government. Should colonial finances be left in the hands of the aggressively rapacious, and unrepresentative, London Parliament? To what degree were the American colonies to be subordinated to British imperial decisions? – burning questions that already betrayed the people’s uneasiness with colonial rule. The answers were no less summary and unequivocal: violent rejection, rhetorical at first, then spreading rapidly to the streets. From mid-April 1765, when the law was first proclaimed in the colonies, to March 1766, when it was repealed, public demonstrations conveyed the Americans’ sense of outrage. The Virginia colonial assembly, electrified by Patrick Henry’s fiery speeches against the Act, voted resolutions in May 1765 that asserted the colonists’ exclusive right to tax themselves – a position later summed up by the slogan “no taxation without representation”. Other assemblies followed Virginia’s lead, and Massachusetts even called for a Colonial Congress to convene in October with a view to defeating the manoeuvers of the English Parliament. Meanwhile, citizens – organized into activist groups such as the “Sons of Liberty” led by Samuel Adams – expeditiously took matters into their hands (see pp. 26–27). Stamps and stamped paper were burned and tax-collectors physically intimidated. Rampaging mobs of otherwise respectable citizens bullied English officials and everyone connected with the enforcement of the shameful law. In Boston, New York, Charleston, and Newport, they burned effigies and wrecked houses and offices; in Boston they set the lieutenant governor’s house on fire. But nowhere was any bloodshed reported, a remarkable instance of self-restraint due, in part, to the tight control exerted over the mobs by the Sons of Liberty. A Stamp Act Congress gathered in New York, October 7 to 25, 1765 and sent petitions to the King and Parliament. The Grenville ministry had fallen in August and the colonists’ pleas reached his

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KEYWORD

MERCANTILISM An earlier stage of capitalist development, mercantilism appeared in the wake of the great explorations and was based on ever increasing exchanges of goods between nations. In fact, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries European nations behaved like individual merchants, seeking profits and wealth through all forms of commerce. Mercantilist policies, originally initiated by traders and financiers, eventually came into the hands of the state, as the centralizing authority of crowned heads was reinforced and stable governments were established. Serving the national interest through trade required (i) that commercial activities be protected from competition, and (ii) that new sources of raw materials as well as new markets be secured as basis for continual growth. The first objective was met through the implementation of strict rules of trade. English merchants, in particular, pushed for protective tariffs against foreign products, and exclusive rights of navigation for English trading companies (e.g., the Navigation Acts, see p. 14). The interests of the American settlements, however, were not included in this strategy.

To increase sources of wealth, the founding of colonies was greatly encouraged. Yet, in the mercantilist doctrine, colonies would be developed and exploited for the exclusive benefit of the colonizing country. England was quick to exploit its American provinces as suppliers of materials lacking or more expensive at home, and as markets for manufactures. The trade balance was thus always favorable to England and, the Americans repeatedly complained, drained money away from the colonies; the latter never had sufficient funds to carry on business, pay their debts or finance their expansion. Besides, restrictions on navigation thwarted America’s attempts to develop trade with foreign countries, a situation that further strained colonial relations. To a great extent, England’s troubles with the American settlements stemmed from the home country’s strict observance of mercantilist principles combined with the colonists’ growing feeling that they were being treated as instruments of English prosperity and not as responsible men in charge of their own welfare.

Whig successor, Rockingham. No one in London seemed sensitive to the Americans’ arguments, except for the City merchants who were worried about the threat to their trade interests in North America. The Stamp Act had triggered boycotts of importations to the colonies that were likely to cause more damage than the Act could ever offset. So, Parliament reluctantly consented to repeal the measure on March 18, 1766.

CONSEQUENCES But Parliament still refused to compromise: while repealing the Stamp Act, it simultaneously voted the Declaratory Act which denied the colonies any right whatsoever to legislate for themselves. Yet the whole episode should have been politically instructive: for the first time unanimity had been achieved in the usually individualistic colonies over a single issue. A congress had convened, common resolutions had been signed and coordinated action organized by the Sons of Liberty. Repealing also the Revenue Act of 1764 and adjusting the Navigation Acts to the colonies’ economy would have been a wise political move. But politics in

March 22, 1765 – The Stamp Act 23

Georgian England, poisoned as they were by the constant feuding between Whigs and Tories, shifted unpredictably and left little room for foresight or consistency.

Colonial Trade Routes

Charles Townshend, the next Chancellor of the Exchequer (who owed his nickname “Champagne Charlie” to the fact that he was slightly tipsy when, on May 8, 1767, he announced further tax legislation for America in the House of Commons) thought he had found a loophole in the colonists’ argumentation against taxes. Since they objected to revenue taxes but not to commercial taxes, money would henceforth be levied through customs duties. And if the list of taxed items were long enough, no boycott or nonimportation movement could hold, as America did need English products. The Townshend Acts were sound logic, but demonstrated a total ignorance of the American situation. Most Britons still thought of the New World as wilderness and those distant settlers of an inhospitable land as turbulent children that needed to be taught manners and discipline. And most would have missed the patriotic symbolism of the Liberty Tree that stood near Boston Common, of liberty caps, or the liberty song made popular by the Sons of Liberty. What they would have taken for low-grade propaganda or ignorant fetishism served, as John Adams later observed, to “impregnate” the people “with the sentiments of liberty” and to carry them to independence – and cost England an empire.

Glasgow London

NORTH AMERICA

Bristol

1 Slaves, molasses spices 2 Fish, grain, lumber, flour, livestock

EUROPE

goods ctured Manufa

Boston New York Philadelphia Charleston 2 1

e, furs, riacsh, iron t tobacco, Naval storelse, oil, lumber, po indigo, wha ods r go it me u s fru n es, Co s s a l mo ar, Sug

Lisbon Cadiz

AFRICA WEST INDIES

SOUTH AMERICA

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Rum

Gold , slave s Triangular trade

KEYWORD

THE COLONIAL TRADE Though the term “triangular trade” refers in particular to the importation of African slaves into the American colonies via the Caribbean islands, in the 17th and 18th centuries, almost all of the New World trade in that period involved the three main geographical areas: western Europe (mostly England and France), the West Indies and the North American settlements. Mercantilist regulations aimed at establishing a pattern of exclusive mutual exchanges between England and her colonies. This two-way relationship, which provided a fine outlet for American tobacco, rice or indigo, nevertheless stifled the colonial economy, and Americans had to look for alternative markets to earn the income that would cover their imports of English manufactures. France and southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, Italy) welcomed many of the American products – fish, flour, meat, lumber and rum, essentially. In addition to these, grain surpluses and livestock from Connecticut or Rhode Island easily found their way to the Caribbean islands, where they were exchanged for molasses and spices. Due to mercantilist restrictions, most of the European products needed in North America had to transit either through England or, more often, through the West Indies. With the growth of American colonial agriculture and industry, in the 18th century, naval and trade restrictions quickly evolved from dissuasion to disablement. Their very stringency invited disobedience; Americans turned to smuggling in defiance of colonial discipline. Interestingly enough, the rum that was shipped off to England from Americans distilleries was made from molasses bought in the Caribbeans in violation of the Molasses Act of 1733. And the Gaspee incident, in which a customs cutter was burned by American patriots in 1772, was a direct result of England’s ever increasing harassment of smugglers. Yet the bulk of colonial trade was carried out legally, on British and American vessels – the latter, numbering over 1,000, were used chiefly for coastal trade. By the time the Townshend laws were enacted, the exchanges between England and her colonies had developed to an extent that made interdependence a daily reality but independence a legitimate aspiration for Americans. With what they produced, the colonies would have substantially increased their revenues in a system of

free trade. In raw figures, 100 million pounds of tobacco (worth about 60 million present-day dollars) left Maryland and Virginia, annually, to be sold in Europe; 84 million pounds of rice left the rice-growing colonies, with South Carolina in the lead; the latter also exported around 600,000 pounds of indigo each year. Naval equipment, sails, ropes, plus pitch, tar, resin and turpentine, also provided valuable exports. England was even glad that John Winthrop once set up an iron foundry in Lynn, Massachusetts: American pig iron, in the 18th century, was cheap and abundant. By the 1770s, colonial foundries spewed out 15% of the world iron, but also sparked mixed feelings in England, where prospects of industrial competition were feared. Due to lack of technology and investment capacity, the colonies, on the other hand, had to import great quantities of finished products, paper, glass, hardware, woolens, furniture, books, housing equipment, etc. – items that England would be all too ready to tax or restrict in response to American unruliness. The development of the English colonies of America, particularly the southern ones, required a constant and abundant supply of cheap labor. Needs were such that European immigration alone could not meet them. Black workers were therefore brought over from West Africa, Mozambique and Madagascar in growing numbers in the last decades of the 17th century and, by 1720, they outnumbered white indentured servants in the plantation colonies. The value of this African labor increased with the years as planters realized the enormous economic advantages of servitude. First considered as “servants for life”, African workers soon became true slaves, ordinary “chattel property” that could be bought and sold like any other economic goods, and freely imported. Regular trade routes and specialized trading companies (like the Royal African Company of London which, for a long time, enjoyed a full monopoly on the slave trade to the West Indies) were established; all American ports from Boston to Charleston were, in varying degrees, involved in the importation of black slaves. It is estimated that in the 100 years that preceded Independence some 300,000 Africans landed on North American soil to be, for the most part, channelled into southern plantations. March 22, 1765 – The Stamp Act 25

FOCUS

THE SONS OF LIBERTY A typical example of the 18th century propagandist and revolutionary, Samuel Adams did not carve a place for himself in history as one of the Founding Fathers (though he signed the Declaration of Independence) nor as an outstanding polemicist, like Thomas Paine, but as leader of a resistance organization known as the Sons of Liberty At the start, this was no structured movement, with a set doctrine. Born in 1765, it was a spontaneous, popular protest against the Stamp Act and the restrictions it imposed. And its mobs included merchants, artisans and shopkeepers – estimable middle-class citizens little accustomed to street violence. Local groups emerged in most of the American seaports, with common motives and objectives which Samuel Adams was clever enough to channel, and with a desire for quick action which the Sons gladly exploited and coordinated. Americanophile British statesman Isaac Barré gave them the evocative name they needed as a rallying sign. The Sons of Liberty resorted to radical measures

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against the Stamp Act, hustling officials and burning the stocks of paper subject to tax, as a prelude to more systematic resistance. Their determination did not decrease with the repeal of the Stamp Act. Boycotts and nonimportation of British goods soon answered the outrages of the Townshend Acts of 1767. Fresh

Samuel Adams (1722-1803). Leader of the Sons of Liberty.

British troops were sent to America to ensure proper enforcement of the new laws. The Massachusetts and New York assemblies were dismissed and the Sons of Liberty again rallied their forces. Riots broke out in New York in January 1770 where British troops had cut down a “liberty pole” – one of the emblems of the movement. One citizen was killed. Two months later the Boston Sons attacked the local garrison and left three dead in the skirmish described, in a rhetorical flourish, as “The Boston Massacre” (see p. 18). The “Fifth of March” became Martyr’s Day until the Fourth of July supplanted it. Tensions abated for a while. England stuck to her uncompromising policy of total control of America, as once bluntly summarized by William Pitt: “This is the mother country, they are the children; they must obey, and we prescribe.” And Americans came close to learning to cope with heavy taxes and duties. The Sons of Liberty knew better. Adams, who lamented America’s slow, insidious relapse into bondage, looked for spectacular actions. And within a year, the Sons had managed to wound British pride by raiding two of England’s most cherished possessions: her Navy and her tea. First, they burned the customs cutter Gaspee which had run aground near Providence, Rhode Island, on June 9, 1772. English threats to bring the culprits (if found) to trial before a London court led to the creation of Committees of Correspondence in each colony to protect the Americans’ basic rights. Almost a year later, in May 1773, Parliament voted the Tea Act which gave a monopoly to the East India Company for the importation of English tea to the colonies, with a right to select its middlemen in American ports.



Faced with another threat to their freedom, American smugglers and traders readily turned to the Sons of Liberty. This decision was dynamite for AngloAmerican relations, and the Sons provided the fuse. In New York and Philadelphia, tea ships were sent back to England before unloading; in Annapolis, a whole cargo was burned by patriots. On December 16, 1773, Samuel Adams and a wealthy free trader named John Hancock, sent a few Patriots (disguised as Mohawk Indians) on board the tea-ships anchored in Boston harbor. Within minutes £10,000 worth of tea had been dumped into the sea. That “Boston Tea Party” was the Sons of Liberty’s last staged show. After Britain’s furious reprisals – the “Intolerable Acts” – defense of American interests was to be transferred to the First Continental Congress.

March 22, 1765 – The Stamp Act 27

LONDRES TAXE LES COLONIES La formation de l’empire colonial britannique doit davantage à la cupidité qu’à la curiosité, à l’orgueil qu’à l’altruisme. Les colons d’Amérique ne pouvaient donc échapper au système d’expansion et d’exploitation que soutenaient de tout leur poids économique et financier les marchands anglais. Pour ces derniers, comme pour la Couronne, toute colonie d’outre-mer devait servir deux objectifs principaux : procurer à la mère-patrie des matières premières abondantes et peu coûteuses, et constituer un marché nouveau pour les produits manufacturés de la métropole. Le roi pouvait aussi, à l’occasion, les offrir en récompense à de fidèles serviteurs ; ces colonies de rapport – le New Hampshire, le Maine, New York, ou le Maryland, par exemple – devaient, à l’origine, assurer la fortune de leurs heureux propriétaires.

28

d’un siècle, furent réactivées, freinant l’essor du commerce américain avec les Antilles. D’autres lois plus récentes réglementaient les exportations ou taxaient certains produits d’importation essentiels, menaçant ainsi de ruiner l’économie locale. Ensuite, la Proclamation de 1763 interdisait aux Américains toute expansion territoriale à l’ouest des Appalaches. Réduire ainsi l’accès à des terres nouvelles vouait les colonies à un lent étouffement. Enfin, les dépenses de guerre devaient être amorties. Lord Grenville, grand argentier de Sa Majesté Georges III, insista pour que les Américains non seulement payent leur quote-part, mais assurent désormais le financement de leur propre défense. Ce fut l’objet du Stamp Act (1765).

Les desseins mercantiles de l’Angleterre étaient évidemment indissociables d’une politique extérieure ambitieuse où l’Amérique joua bientôt un rôle primordial. Des guerres sporadiques, tout au long des xvii e et e xviii  siècles, attestent l’importance de l’enjeu et la volonté anglaise d’éliminer la concurrence française ou espagnole en Amérique du Nord. Ceci fut enfin accompli à l’issue de la guerre de Sept Ans. Le traité de Paris (février 1763) sonnait le glas des prétentions de la France outre-Atlantique : celleci abandonnait le Canada et les forts militaires établis au-delà des Appalaches. Quant à l’Espagne, elle évacuait la Floride et se retirait à l’ouest du Mississippi.

La loi inaugurait un nouveau mode de pression, fiscal cette fois, sur les colonies. Droits de douane et impôts indirects se doublaient à présent d’une taxe sur le papier légal payable en timbres fiscaux et touchant aussi bien les patentes et les testaments que les journaux ou les jeux de cartes ! L’application de la loi était confiée à l’administration maritime et les infractions étaient passibles de la justice militaire ; ce décret semblait donc porter la marque du despotisme anglais. La réaction fut aussi prompte que violente ; le Stamp Act fit l’unanimité contre lui, de Virginie où les discours de Patrick Henry enflammèrent la population, jusqu’au Massachusetts où s’élabora le mouvement de résistance des « Fils de la Liberté ».

De sérieuses tensions entre Londres et ses colonies vinrent pourtant ternir cette victoire. Elles avaient trois origines principales : d’abord les entraves à la liberté du commerce imposées par le système impérial. Les vieilles lois de Navigation, en sommeil depuis près

Les actions d’éclat se multiplièrent : ici, un défilé, là un bûcher où s’amoncelaient timbres, papier timbré et, parfois, une effigie de l’oppresseur anglais. Les percepteurs et autres valets de la Couronne, rudoyés par la foule, trouvèrent salut dans la fuite ou refuge dans

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

les garnisons locales. L’armée, toutefois, se garda bien d’intervenir directement. Suite aux « résolutions » prises en mai 1765 par la Virginie, qui récusaient toute taxation votée à Londres, le Massachusetts appela les autres colonies à organiser une conférence coloniale sur le Stamp Act pour exiger l’abrogation de la loi. Réunis du 7 au 25 octobre 1765 à New York, les délégués de neuf colonies décidèrent d’adresser une supplique en ce sens au roi Georges III et au Parlement. La pétition resta lettre morte et l’indignation des colons ne fit que s’amplifier. Le boycottage des produits anglais, lancé un an auparavant par le Connecticut, s’était étendu à l’ensemble des provinces américaines ; et le slogan « pas de députés, pas d’impôts », à l’adresse du parlement de Londres où ne siégeait pas le moindre américain, servait d’étendard à la révolte. Mais il s’agissait là non pas de réclamer une représentation adéquate à la Chambre des communes (le seul nombre des délégués américains les auraient réduits à l’impuissance perpétuelle), mais d’affirmer implicitement le droit des Américains à fixer eux-mêmes les termes de leur fiscalité.

colonies de l’Empire toute capacité à légiférer de manière autonome. Entre whigs et tories, la surenchère allait bon train : mettre au pas ces colons récalcitrants devint un sujet de débat partisan tandis qu’on perdait un peu de vue les données socio-économiques du problème. Le chancelier de l’Échiquier Charles Townshend crut avoir trouvé la solution : puisque l’Amérique rejetait toute loi fiscale mais s’accomodait des lois commerciales, on prélèverait simplement davantage de droits de douane. Les lois « Townshend », votées en juin 1767, taxaient la plupart des produits de première nécessité que devaient importer les colonies. Boycottages et manifestations redoublèrent ; la mobilisation populaire qu’avait suscité le Stamp Act porta ses fruits. L’Amérique y avait trouvé son premier motif d’unité et avait montré à des Anglais fort surpris que ces « enfants », tels que le grand William Pitt les décrivait, avaient grandi et qu’ils aspiraient à une liberté que l’Empire ne pourrait pas leur accorder sans rupture ni violence.

Financièrement, le Stamp Act n’eut pas les résultats escomptés mais, à Londres, ses éclaboussures politiques n’épargnèrent personne. Le Premier ministre Grenville dut s’effacer en août 1765 pour laisser la place au marquis de Rockingham, lequel, avec l’aide du Roi et l’appui de la Cité de Londres, parvint à persuader le Parlement d’annuler la loi en mars 1766. En fait, on reculait pour mieux sauter, car l’annulation s’accompagnait d’une nouvelle loi, le Declaratory Act, qui ôtait aux

The Seal of the British monarchy March 22, 1765 – The Stamp Act 29

The signers of the Declaration New Hampshire Josiah Bartlett William Whipple Matthew Thornton Rhode Island Stephen Hopkins William Ellery New York William Floyd Philip Livingston Francis Lewis Lewis Morris Pennsylvania Robert Morris Benjamin Rush Benjamin Franklin John Morton George Clymer James Smith George Taylor James Wilson Georges Ross 30

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

Maryland Samuel Chase William Paca Thomas Stone Charles Carroll, of Carrollton Massachusetts Bay Samuel Adams John Adams John Hancock Robert Treat Paine Elbridge Gerry Connecticut Roger Sherman Samuel Huntington William Williams Oliver Wolcott Lyman Hall New Jersey Richard Stockton John Witherspoon Francis Hopkinson John Hart Abraham Clark

Delaware Caesar Rodney George Read Thomas Mc Kean Virginia George Wythe Richard Henry Lee Thomas Jefferson Benjamin Harrison Thomas Nelson, Jr. Francis Lightfoot Lee Carter Braxton North Carolina William Hooper Joseph Hewes John Penn Georgia Button Gwinnett George Walton South Carolina Edward Rutledge Thomas Heyward, Jr. Thomas Lynch, Jr. Arthur Middleton

JULY 4, 1776

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE BACKGROUND

E

ngland’s reaction to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 was a series of retaliatory Acts, passed by Parliament between March and June 1774, and which Americans found so unduly constraining and vexatious that they immediately called them “Intolerable”. The scope and terms of these new coercive Acts indicated that the mother-country was determined to force the colonists to submit. Reactions to the laws suggested that the colonies were ready to go a long way to claim their share of power and their right to self-government. The Acts (Boston Port Act, Government and Administration of Justice Act, Quartering Act) ranged from an effective closing down of Boston Harbor to an extension of military occupation in New England by quartering soldiers in private homes, and increased the authority of royal officials by removing many of the prerogatives of popular assemblies. By selectively punishing Boston and Massachusetts, Parliament hoped both to dampen resistance in the other colonies and to isolate the most intractable radicals. The effect was the opposite: indignation spread all over America, carefully fueled in each colony by resistance groups, such as the Committees of Correspondence. A Virginia resolution, voted on May 24, 1774, denounced Britain’s alleged “hostile invasion”. A united front was formed against the Acts leading to the summoning of the First Continental Congress, which met in Philadelphia, on September 5, 1774. While debates dragged on between the 55 delegates, a copy of the Suffolk Resolves, drafted in Massachusetts on September 9, reached Philadelphia. The Congress quickly endorsed their provisions, i.e. declaring the “Intolerable



Synthèse en français Naissance des États-Unis 40

KEYWORD The Loyalists

35

PEOPLE B. Franklin P. Revere Th. Paine G. Washington

32 33 34 37

DOCUMENTS The Declaration of Independence (excerpts) 36 The Signers (list) 30

FOCUS France and the War of Independence 38 Opposite: The Signing of the Declaration of Independence. (Painting by John Trumbull, 1819)

July 4, 1776 – The Declaration of Independence 31

Benjamin FRANKLIN 1706-1790 Born in a lower middle-class family in Boston (his father made soap and candles), Benjamin Franklin started as an apprentice in his brother James’s printshop, and read widely between chores. At 17, he moved to Philadelphia, then worked for a printer, traveled to London, and finally acquired his own press, on which he printed The Pennsylvania Gazette, a newspaper that, together with his Poor Richard’s Almanack (a book of maxims, proverbs and humorous stories), would bring him wealth. Having achieved personal success on the basis of self-instruction (he taught himself mathematics, Greek, Latin and several languages), frugality and industry – virtues that he was to exalt in his writings – he could safely turn to non-profitable activities – philanthropy, sciences, and politics. A typical product of the Enlightenment, Franklin had a tremendous variety of interests in life, but to his many activities, he applied the same characteristically American pragmatic spirit. Ingeniosity, invention, practicality and shrewdness were his trademarks, whether when working on lightning with kites, negotiating peace with the British in Paris, or acting the old sage who gave precious advice to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. “Doctor” Franklin also had the privilege of being the most widelyknown American figure of his times on the international scene.

Acts” unconstitutional, setting up an armed militia in Massachusetts and organizing a general boycott of English goods. In response to American solidarity Lord North’s government chose to escalate military pressure and found in General Gage, Governor of Massachusetts, a zealous agent. After intensive debate in Parliament and last-minute attempts to coax Benjamin Franklin (then in London) into compromise, another Act, the New England Restraining Act, was passed to cut the northern colonies off from the rest of America, and the rest of the world, by freezing their commerce and strangling their fisheries (they were banned from the rich fishing banks of Newfoundland). Yet even before news of this additional punishment, adopted on March 30, 1775, reached America, a fretful General Gage had engaged hostilities with the Massachusetts militia at Lexington. Anxious to keep local rebellion in check, he sent a force of 700 men to Lexington to arrest Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Paul Revere, in one of the most cherished feats of the American Revolution, rode in the night of April 18 to 19, 1775 from Boston to Lexington and warned the Patriots of the redcoats’ plans. In the morning Adams and Hancock were gone, but militiamen had stayed to protect their escape. In the skirmish that followed, eight Americans were killed, the first true casualties of a war that would last eight long years. British troops next proceeded to Concord to destroy Patriot ammunitions, then marched back to Boston under sporadic fire from the American militia. Before the redcoats reached their fort, Patriot snipers had killed about 250 of them. Their death became a symbol: it announced that there was no turning back to safety, that coexistence without violence was no longer possible, that the now barricaded British had begun to look like strangers in a foreign land.

CIRCUMSTANCES

I

n its closing days in October 1774, the First Continental Congress had resolved that another congress should convene in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, if England remained deaf to the colonies’ grievances. This Second Continental Congress was to be the Congress of Independence, though crossing the Rubicon was, for most of its members, an excruciating experience. The “Spirit of `76” and the exultation of liberty were preceded by moments of intense wavering, skepticism and fear that delayed important decisions for months. A few of the prominent Whig delegates, among whom the most active was undoubtedly John Adams, tried

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to shake off the general apathy in Congress as calls for assistance from the citizens of Massachusetts came pouring in. In mid-June, Adams introduced a motion to turn the Boston militia into a “Continental Army”, with Colonel George Washington in command. Yet conservatives, led by a Quaker representative from Pennsylvania, John Dickinson, were anxious to keep the door of compromise open to Lord North’s government and persistently looked to King George III as final arbiter of the conflict. A year before independence was proclaimed, at a time when military operations were under way and open, violent, rebellion was already taking its toll of human lives, the Continental Congress was still feverishly drafting justifications for its defiance of British rule. Colonel Ethan Allen had, May 10, raided Fort Ticonderoga in Canada, and taken over its supply of ammunitions. June 17, the New England militia braved well-trained redcoats for the control of Bunker Hill outside Boston. Though they fell short of taking the hill, Americans disabled half of the British troops in the battle and afterwards noisily celebrated their “moral” victory. Meanwhile Congress was desperately working towards reconciliation and, in early July, tried to drive a wedge between King George and his government by appealing directly to his higher authority. Both the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms” (July 6) and the “Olive Branch Petition” (July 8) were the Americans’ last tokens of filial submission. Within a year, they would declare their independence. What turned the tide? First, the King’s stubborn rejection of all American petitions and his foolish support of Parliament’s repressive policy. Then the offending use by England of German mercenaries against American Patriots. And, above all, Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet, Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, and by far the year’s best-seller with 120,000 copies sold. Paine’s electrifying words worked wonders on the Americans’ psyche, turning dutiful sons into remorseless parricides. Independence and republican rule now seemed to them the only way out. Congress acted at first as a repository for the colonies’ separate claims to selfrule – South Carolina’s in March 1776, North Carolina’s and Rhode Island’s in April, Massachusetts’ and Virginia’s in May. Prodded by delegates from Virginia, Congress adopted a resolution on May 15, recommending that the colonies “establish independent state governments”. Three weeks later, June 7, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee submitted to Congress a “Resolution for Independence”,

Paul REVERE 1735-1818

A Boston craftsman and businessman, who owned a bell and cannon foundry on the city’s north side, but also an occasional silversmith and engraver, Paul Revere joined the Sons of Liberty soon after the Stamp Act and became an active propagandist for the patriot cause, working for the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence. His prints, stigmatizing British violence (see p. 26), were widely distributed. He later took part in the Boston Tea Party and became an official courier for the Committee. He thus was one of the three messengers sent by the Boston Committee of Safety to Concord and Lexington with a warning to patriot leaders that British troops were on their way to arrest them. His horseback ride on the night of April 18 to April 19, 1775 was immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” (Tales of the Wayside Inn, 1863, 1874), that made him a folk hero, while the two other couriers, Samuel Prescott and William Dawes, fell into oblivion.

July 4, 1776 – The Declaration of Independence 33

Thomas PAINE 1737-1809 An Englishman by birth, Paine came to America in 1774 as one of Benjamin Franklin’s protégés. Self-taught and smart, as was Franklin himself, Paine had, since the age of 13, led a rather unstable life, working briefly at odd jobs (including in his father’s corset factory) and ending up as exciseman (tax collector) – in which office he proved enough of a troublemaker to deserve dismissal. This, along with the failure of two marriages and Franklin’s insistence, led this “ingenious, worthy young man” – as the Doctor described him in his letters of introduction – to emigrate to America. He settled in Philadelphia, and started as a journalist with the Pennsylvania Magazine. Yet, his reputation as pamphleteer, was sealed with the publication, January 10, 1776, of Common Sense, a short yet powerful exhortation to the American colonists to declare independence from Britain. An immediate best-seller, Common Sense came exactly at the right time to break the Americans’ psychological reluctance to a separation from the British Crown. Rewarded for serving the American cause with several public offices, Paine was too restless to keep them long and sailed back to England in 1787. On the publication of The Rights of Man (1791– 92), a pamphlet against hereditary monarchy, he was charged with treason and fled to France. There, he criticized the Revolution and was imprisoned. A last-minute rescue by American Ambassador James Monroe allowed him to sail back safely to the United States. He died a lonely man in New Rochelle, New York, a few years later.

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the first formal statement that the “United Colonies… of right ought to be free and independent States,” and that “they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown…”. Conservatives postponed debate on the resolution until July 1. Lee’s text was, however, approved July 2, by a vote of 12 to 0 (New York abstaining). Yet, in the meantime, a committee of five had been appointed to prepare an appropriate declaration of independence in case Lee’s resolve was adopted. They were Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston. Jefferson accepted to draft the declaration after Adams had declined the honor. The text that came up for discussion before the Congress on June 28 expanded on Lee’s original and was written in Jefferson’s typically flowery style. A quarter of it – including passages condemning negro slavery – was cut out and the amended version was approved by Congress on July 4, again by a vote of 12 to 0 (New York abstaining once more). Independence was proclaimed on July 8, 1776 when the Declaration was read to a cheering crowd from a wooden stage in the State House yard. Soldiers paraded, bells rang, and bonfires flared. Adams quietly reflected, “the river is passed, and the bridge cut away,” but the war for independence was yet to be won.

CONSEQUENCES

D

eclaring independence was only a partial, if highly symbolic, step towards freedom. About one fifth of the American population still felt some loyalty to King George III and, more significantly, to monarchy. Branded as “Loyalists”, these Americans, despite persecutions, divestitures and exile, went on proclaiming their allegiance to the old – and now crumbling – social and political order of their forbears. Up to 50,000 of them fought in the War of Independence on the wrong side, along with the redcoats. They – and British ideological rigidity – misled the Crown and Parliament into thinking that there could be a return to the old order, that the rebellious colonies could be browbeaten back into the Empire. A conference was organized by British Commander-in-Chief, Sir William Howe, in September 1776. Meeting with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Edward Rutledge in Billop House on Staten Island, he offered pardon to the prodigal children in return for obedience to the Government of Great Britain.

KEYWORD

THE LOYALISTS Many of the American adults who witnessed the separation of the colonies from the mother country had been brought up in times when loyalty to Britain was unquestioned. Supporting, or fighting for independence thus implied some deeper renunciation than the mere rejection of an imperial system. It meant parting with much of one’s own past. For that reason, loyalty to the Crown largely ignored social, political and geographical distinctions. It was a matter of conscience. It is commonly assumed that pro-British “Loyalists” (also mistakenly called “Tories” – for there were Loyalists among the American Whigs, too) formed about 20% of the colonial population. They were to be found in greater than average numbers among wealthy Americans, and in New York City and the southern colonies. During and

immediately after the war, it appears that some 100,000 Loyalists left their country to settle in Canada, England or the West Indies. They were fugitives, whose property was quickly confiscated; such was the case for the Penn family in Pennsylvania, the Baltimores in Maryland, the Fairfaxes in Virginia, and the Delanceys in New York. Due compensation for such prejudice was one major topic of the peace negotiations in Paris in 1782. In return for the recognition of American independence, Benjamin Franklin promised that the government would push for a restoration of Loyalists’ civil rights and property by the states. But the latter delayed compensation as long as they could, or just ignored the federal government’s recommendations, with the result that the Loyalist issue went on poisoning BritishAmerican relations for almost thirty more years.

The Americans’ refusal made armed contest the sole way to ensure final independence. America’s military fortunes turned like a weathercock in the winds of war: failure threatened after Howe had taken Philadelphia in September 1777, but hope immediately returned when the British surrendered at Saratoga in October. Most of the South fell into British hands between December 1778 and the disheartening American defeat at Camden, South Carolina, in August 1780. Advances and retreats followed in quick succession until 10,000 British were trapped into the Virginia port of Yorktown and surrendered after a 30-day siege. By then, the war had become an international affair, with France (see pp. 38–39), Spain, Holland, and a number of other nations sending men, ships or money to support the American cause. Independence was won in the gilded salons of the French court as well as on the battlefield. The Treaty of Alliance with France, negotiated in Paris by American envoys Silas Deane, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee on February 6, 1778 boosted the morale of the Continental Army which the devastating wintering at Valley Forge had sapped. Aware of the disastrous effects such an alliance would have, Lord North’s government launched a belated attempt at reconciliation and sent a party of negotiators – the Carlisle Commission – to Philadelphia in June 1778. The commission’s

Benjamin Franklin by Charles Wilson Peale

July 4, 1776 – The Declaration of Independence 35

THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF THE THIRTEEN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Here are two large excerpts from the final text of the Declaration of Independence unanimously adopted on July 4, 1776 and formally signed by the 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. – Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. […] 36

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[there follows a long list of grievances against the King] In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People. Nor have We been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

proposals, which did not depart from the King’s mulish denial of American independence, were quickly rejected by Congress. But Britain would try again, in the summer of 1781, to negotiate peace without acknowledging American independence – this time through the mediation of the Russian Empress and the Austrian Emperor. And the issue remained in suspense until the final peace negotiations between Britain and America, which opened in Paris in 1782. John Jay, who led the American delegation, made the recognition of independence a prerequisite for the talks. Richard Oswald, the British negotiator obliged. But it took over a year to draft a treaty acceptable to all parties. The text was finally signed September 3, 1783. America was at last officially free, independent, and at peace.

George WASHINGTON 1732-1799 Born on a northern Virginia plantation, Washington began his military career at age 20 on the western frontier of the colony. He fought, bravely though not very successfully, in the French and Indian War (1754–58) under Major General Edward Braddock, then, back in Virginia, he served in the House of Burgesses for nine years. Having settled down in Mount Vernon (he had inherited the estate from his half-brother Lawrence), Colonel Washington became increasingly involved in the patriot cause. He represented Virginia at the First Continental Congress in 1774, where he proposed to pay for and lead a relief expedition to blockaded Boston, if necessary. He trained a militia on his own personal funds and, a year later, June 16, 1775, on the proposal of the Second Continental Congress, accepted the command of the Continental army, with the rank of General. It was John Adams who moved to nominate Washington to the post, describing him as “a Gentleman



whose Skill and Experience as an Officer, whose independent fortune, great Talents and excellent universal Character, would command the Approbation of all America…”

Washington was no exceptional tactician, but he was an outstanding leader of men, capable of inspiring courage and loyalty in the very diverse

groups of non-professional soldiers. His victories at Trenton and Yorktown were based on sound military strategy; but the commander’s greatest achievement was probably to keep his army together through the long, bleak winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge, and maintain the morale of his troops despite despair, idleness and doubt. A determined defender of democratic rule, Washington consistently refused all honors while in charge of the armies. When peace with England had been signed, he soberly – yet tearfully – took leave of his troops in New York City (December 4, 1783) and resigned his commission December 23, at Annapolis. He then retired to Mount Vernon, only to be called back, as the first President of the United States, April 30, 1789. He served two terms, refused a third, and went into permanent retirement in September 1796. He died of pneumonia three years later, December 14, 1799.

July 4, 1776 – The Declaration of Independence 37

FOCUS

FRANCE & THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE Shortly after it gathered in Philadelphia, May 10, 1775, the Second Continental Congress began to investigate ways of forming alliances with foreign powers. The fateful April clashes of Lexington and Concord had made war seem inevitable and independence rightful; yet neither could be won, it seemed, without external help. France, ever since the Treaty of 1763, had been secretly seeking revenge on the British. French Foreign Ministers, first Choiseul and then Vergennes, sought means to undermine British interests in America. A secret agent, Achard de Bonvouloir, was sent to Philadelphia in September 1775 to evaluate the American rebels’ needs and offer French help, just as Congress was setting up special committees to deal with foreign relations. The very official “Committee of Secret Correspondence”, created November 20, 1775, dispatched an envoy to Paris, a Connecticut Yankee named Silas Deane, to obtain military and financial assistance. Deane landed in France in April 1776 and set to work immediately. With no great difficulty he obtained a two-milliondollar loan from Vergennes and enough equipment and arms for 25,000 men, worth about three million pounds sterling. Arms and equipment were to be conveyed on ordinary French merchant vessels, and exchanged for Virginia tobacco. The first of these shipments reached America early in 1777, and halfa-dozen more would follow to help the Americans defeat Burgoyne at Saratoga in October 1777. It was the Saratoga victory which persuaded Vergennes to turn a covert operation into an open political and military alliance. It was high time for France to acknowledge American independence. Every spy story, however, has its suspense, its villains and its scapegoats. Agreements with France were unexpectedly delayed by the discovery of Silas Deane’s embezzling schemes while in Paris and his no less unethical involvement with a few masterspies and eminent traitors (among whom Dr Edward Bancroft, Benjamin Franklin’s own private secretary, 38

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and an amazing double-dealer!) who manipulated him with demonic ease. Deane was recalled by Congress and a new commission sent to Paris early in November 1777, headed this time by reliable officials, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee. The joint commissioners pressed France to recognize the United States of America and sign treaties of alliance and commerce with the new nation. These goals were achieved through two distinct agreements: the first was a Treaty of Amity and Commerce, signed January 7, 1778, in which American independence was officially acknowledged and mutual protection of maritime trade was guaranteed; the second, dated February 6, was a Treaty of Alliance that confirmed France’s direct involvement in the war against Britain. Both countries pledged military cooperation and struck a diplomatic bargain: the United States could have Canada as their fourteenth state provided France could keep her pre-1763 Caribbean islands. The cause of the American colonies had, for some time, inflamed the minds of zealous French officers, anxious to test their strength against their old British rivals. Among those who asked Silas Deane to be placed on American payrolls was the 19-year-old Marquis de La Fayette who, against his family’s advice, left his wife, land and country to join Washington’s army in June 1777. Having gathered a few friends and secretly bought a ship, the Victoire, he landed in Georgetown, South Carolina, with youth and enthusiasm for sole weapons. That was about the time General Howe, in New York, was planning his march on Philadelphia, naively assuming that winning the capital would also win the war. Risen from nonentity to major general in the American Army, La Fayette valiantly fought at Brandywine in September 1777 then wintered at Valley Forge with General Washington. The Franco-American Treaties, finally ratified by Congress in May 1778, promised substantial help at a time Americans most needed it. Yet the first naval operations, led by Admiral D’Estaing, in New England

(Newport) in August 1778, then in Georgia (Savannah) in October 1779, were far from successful. Infantry support came only in the summer of 1780, with 6,700 men under Count Rochambeau. Stranded in Newport, Rhode Island, this expeditionary corps remained relatively inactive for long months as most of the fighting was now concentrated in the South. As the winter of 1780-1781 waned, British troops under Cornwallis moved north from the Carolinas with a view to sweeping clean the midAtlantic area and joining the rest of the army in New York. This master-stroke turned into disaster in Virginia. In the spring the American troops’ morale was revived as a generous Louis XVI sent General Washington six million pounds in gold to pay his army. And military operations took a decisive turn: in Virginia, a light force under La Fayette slowly pushed the British eastward from Richmond towards the sea. S i m u l t a n e o u s l y, Rochambeau and Washington took a momentous decision at Wethersfield, Connecticut (May 21, 1781): they would detour around New York (still in British hands) and march south to corner Cornwallis in eastern Virginia. An impressive French fleet of 24 battleships with 3000 soldiers under De Grasse, recently arrived in the West Indies from Brest, headed for America in July. The naval battle of the Capes, near Chesapeake Bay, September 5, 1781, unexpectedly established allied supremacy on the seas. De Grasse having crushed the British navy,

Cornwallis found all his escape routes held by either American or French forces; trapped in Yorktown, he finally surrendered. This was the high point of Franco-American cooperation. De Grasse withdrew to the West Indies where, less than six months later, he lost most of his fleet to the English in a stinging naval fiasco. French officers took leave; England, wounded as deeply as Lord North’s own pride, was now ready for peace. Vergennes thought that a conference in Paris would favor French interests. But Franklin proved an even more cunning diplomat than the old count; in the final Treay of Peace, America won the lion’s share with western lands that now extended west to the Mississippi, to Canada in the north and to Florida in the south; but France, with only Saint-Pierre-etMiquelon, Tobago, and Senegal to quench her ambition was left with just the crumbs of the loaf.

The Siege of Yorktown. General Washington (right) with Count Rochambeau by his side. (Painting by Couder) July 4, 1776 – The Declaration of Independence 39

NAISSANCE DES ÉTATS-UNIS L’Anglais, réputé stoïque devant l’adversité, perd contenance lorsqu’on s’attaque à deux institutions sacrées : sa Navy, et son thé. Or, en l’espace de dix-huit mois, les Américains, en incendiant le voilier des douanes Gaspee (juin 1772) et en réalisant une immonde variante du précieux breuvage avec l’eau du port de Boston (décembre 1773) avaient démontré leur mépris pour les valeurs fondamentales du monde britannique. Leur punition serait à la mesure du sacrilège. Les lois de représailles votées à Londres entre mars et juin 1774 (Boston Port Act, Government & Administration of Justice Act, Quartering Act) étaient vexatoires et radicales puisqu’elles réduisaient les attributions des assemblées locales, paralysaient le port de Boston, et imposaient le cantonnement de la troupe chez l’habitant. Mais elles s’attaquaient, de façon délibérément sélective, au Massachusetts et à sa ville principale. Londres espérait ainsi faire un exemple, à effet dissuasif pour les autres colonies. C’était sans compter avec la solidarité américaine, soigneusement exaltée par les « Fils de la Liberté » (Sons of Liberty), dont le réseau clandestin s’était bien agrandi depuis 1765. Sous l’impulsion de la Virginie, les colonies opposèrent un front uni à ces « Lois intolérables » et convoquèrent un Congrès (le First Continental Congress) à Philadelphie en Septembre 1774. Les décisions qu’on y prit, le soutien avéré qu’on y apporta aux opprimés du Massachusetts, qui venaient de se doter d’une milice, ouvraient la voie à une rebellion armée. Les Anglais, d’ailleurs, ne s’y trompèrent pas, qui choisirent la pression militaire et les risques d’escalade, sûrs qu’ils étaient de mettre au pas ces colons récalcitrants. Une nouvelle loi répressive, le New England Restraining Act, adoptée le 30 mars 1775, visait à serrer davantage le nœud qui étranglerait la Nouvelle-Angleterre. Mais avant même 40

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qu’on en eût connaissance en Amérique, Gage, le zélé gouverneur du Massachusetts décidait d’en découdre avec les milices rebelles ; les premières balles de la guerre d’Indépendance sifflèrent ainsi le 19 avril 1775, du côté de Lexington, où s’étaient réunis les chefs Patriotes. De ce jour, l’Angleterre prit visage d’assaillant et les tuniques rouges se muèrent en troupes d’occupation. Mais quant à franchir le pas et proclamer l’indépendance, il n’en était pas encore question, sauf dans l’esprit des plus radicaux, tels Samuel Adams ou John Hancock. Sur les berges de leur Rubicon, les révolutionnaires américains hésitèrent longtemps, espérant que le réalisme du parlement londonien, la mansuétude du Roi George III, le souci partagé de la paix civile, éviteraient toute rupture et amèneraient un compromis honorable. Pourtant, dans l’année qui suivit Lexington se succédèrent les actions les plus contradictoires. Le second Congrès continental, réuni depuis mai 1775, offrit un reflet fidèle des hésitations américaines : il décidait la formation d’une Armée Continentale sous la férule du colonel George Washington, mais en même temps expédiait des suppliques au Roi d’Angleterre (dont la fameuse Pétition du rameau d’olivier, du 8 juillet 1775) afin qu’il intercède auprès du Parlement et fasse annuler les lois de coercition. Rien n’y fit. Le succès des rebelles à Fort Ticonderoga, au Canada, et leur demi-victoire à Bunker Hill raidirent la position de Londres. Le Roi, lui, demeura sourd aux prières américaines. Il approuva même l’envoi de féroces mercenaires allemands pour mater la rébellion, et la décision de blocus général du commerce avec les colonies, que prit le Parlement en décembre 1775. Le bon roi George devint ainsi la brute royale de l’opuscule incendiaire, Common Sense, que publia l’écrivain Thomas Paine en janvier 1776.

Propagande pour l’Unité provenant d’un almanach de 1733.

Non seulement on s’en arracha 120 000 exemplaires dans l’année, mais le peuple américain y puisa la force morale et la volonté de lutter jusqu’à ce que soient définitivement conquises l’indépendance et la liberté. Une à une, les colonies déclarèrent leur autonomie : d’abord la Caroline du Sud, en mars 1776, puis la Caroline du Nord et le Rhode Island, en avril, puis le Massachusetts et la Virginie, en mai. Les Virginiens se montrèrent les plus militants au Congrès continental : sous leur impulsion, les dernières résistances à l’indépendance, venues de délégués conservateurs comme le Pennsylvanien John Dickinson, s’effritèrent. Un Comité des Cinq se constitua, dont la tâche était de préparer un texte officiel déclarant l’indépendance de toutes les colonies. Le 2 juillet 1776, une résolution du Virginien Richard Henry Lee établissait le droit des colonies à se séparer de la couronne britannique. Le 4, Thomas Jefferson soumit au Congrès la déclaration qu’il avait rédigée et dont il avait soigneusement pesé les termes ; elle fut approuvée par 12 voix contre 0 (et 1 abstention, New York). Le 8, l’indépendance des États-Unis d’Amérique était officiellement prononcée. La nouvelle se répandit partout comme l’éclair et la liesse fut grande.



Il restait pourtant à concrétiser sur le terrain ce que l’esprit de 76 avait inspiré aux délégués de Philadelphie. La guerre devait encore durer sept ans, sanglante et glorieuse, légendaire et fondatrice, avec ses héros (Paul Revere, George Washington, La Fayette) et ses traîtres (Benedict Arnold), ses sages (Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson) et ses fous (le général trompe-la-mort Anthony Wayne), ses défaites (déroute américaine à Camden, août 1780) et ses triomphes (10 000 Anglais faits prisonniers à Yorktown en octobre 1781). Longtemps, l’Angleterre crut pouvoir ramener au sein de l’Empire les colonies fugitives : un large mouvement loyaliste d’Américains fidèles à George III et à la monarchie l’y encouragea. Même après le Traité d’Alliance signé en février 1778 entre les colonies d’Amérique et la France, Londres tenta d’éviter cette indépendance de fait, qui constituerait un précédent fâcheux pour son Empire : la commission Carlisle, hâtivement dépêchée à Philadelphie par le Premier ministre, Lord North, en juin 1778, devait proposer la paix tout en refusant la scission. Échec. L’Angleterre essaya de nouveau en 1781, par l’entremise de l’empereur d’Autriche et de Catherine II, impératrice de Russie. Revers. Les Américains tenaient à présent leur indépendance sur les rives de la Chesapeake, où convergeaient Washington, Rochambeau et, par la mer, De Grasse. Il y aurait donc bien la paix, mais hors de l’Empire. Les négociations de Paris et le traité qui s’ensuivit, le 3 septembre 1783, confirmeraient la souveraineté américaine sur les anciennes terres coloniales. Les États-Unis devenaient, comme l’affirma Washington en prenant congé de ses troupes au mois de décembre 1783, dignes d’être une nation.

July 4, 1776 – The Declaration of Independence 41

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September 17, 1787

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES BACKGROUND

T

he Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Paris were both only intermediary stages in the process of creating a true nation. What Americans needed most, in fact, was a frame of government that, in times of peace, would bring the former colonies together, just as a common hatred of British rule had united them in wartime. No one failed to see the vital importance of union, yet each of the new states had its own experience of self-government, local interests to serve and diverging views on the settlement of new lands in the west. The greatest challenge of the postrevolutionary war period for the American states was thus how to capitalize on their hard-won freedom, prevent the return of autocracy and iron out domestic differences between them. To build a nation from scratch seemed a far more formidable task than to declare independence in the heat of revolt. America had learned empirically the way to shake off the burden of colonial subjection; but the making of a nation required more than that kind of experience – it required purpose and a sense of destiny. Drafting the Constitution was an appropriate answer to those demands. Scattered attempts had been made, during the War of Independence, to design frames of government based on rather general principles, such as man’s natural equality and right to liberty (as illustrated by the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776) or popular representation and the right to vote (upheld by most of the state constitutions drafted after 1776). Differences remained, however: Virginia, for example, had a bi-cameral legislature which appointed the governor and his council; neighboring Pennsylvania, on the contrary, had a

Synthèse en français La Constitution américaine adoptée 52

KEYWORDS The Bill of Rights Checks & Balances

45 47

PEOPLE J. Adams Th. Jefferson A. Hamilton

44 45 48

DOCUMENT The Thirteen Original States

47

FOCUS The Land Ordinances 50

Opposite: The first Fourth of July at the Old State House in Boston, Massachusetts.

September 17, 1787 – The Constitution of the United States 43

John ADAMS 1735-1826 Born in a family of farmers that had emigrated to Massachusetts in the 17th century, John Adams began his career as a lawyer in Braintree in 1758 and was soon actively defending the colonists’ cause. Elected to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1771, he joined the First Continental Congress in 1774 and helped draft the Declaration of Independence. Appointed to diverse diplomatic posts in the 1780s, he was away from Philadelphia when the Constitution was discussed. Yet his views on government and constitutional theory were constantly on the delegates’ minds. The final text clearly bears the mark of his Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, published in 1787. Back from his London embassy in 1789 he was elected Vice-President and served two terms with George Washington, whom he succeeded in 1797 as second President of the United States. He left office four years later and retired to Quincy, Massachusetts, where he died a very old man. The Adams family included another President, John Quincy; an Ambassador to England, Charles Francis, and two prominent historians, Henry and Brooks.

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unicameral system and no governor; as for Massachusetts, it worked on a compromise between popular rule and oligarchy, having a “low” and a “high” chamber, plus an elected governor with controlling power over the legislature. These promising, yet heterogeneous, attempts at democratic rule now needed to be harmonized if America were to become a true nation. The problem, as most of the contemporary leaders – Adams, Jefferson, Henry, Dickinson – understood, was clearly that of filling the void left by Britain’s withdrawal as centralizing authority. Some balance had to be found between the need for a unifying federal structure and the natural drift of the new states towards autonomy. As early as June 1777, John Dickinson had, upon commission from the Second Continental Congress, submitted a plan for the creation of an American confederation. Adopted in November  1777, these Articles of Confederation did formally establish a union of American states, but were not ratified until March 1781. And when they came into effect they proved rather inadequate: deprived of any executive or judicial powers, even of the power to tax – a fatal flaw in the system which was revealed when war debts had to be honored – the new government was helpless to deal with post-war financial, economic and territorial problems. An unfortunate provision further curtailed the efficacy of the Articles: amendments required unanimous ratification. All of Congress’s several attempts to obtain taxing power therefore failed, in 1781, 1783 and 1784. Fierce commercial competition between states, mostly due to the closing by England of the West Indian trade and by Spain of the Mississippi outlet in New Orleans, threatened to pulverize the fragile Union in 1785-1786. Yet, paradoxically, interstate commerce and competition also served to consolidate the young confederation. Virginia and its neighbors had, at first, clashed over the control of virgin lands to the west in the trans-Appalachian region (see pp. 50–51). The squabble with Maryland, in particular, had delayed ratification of the Articles until 1781. But Virginia had eventually ceded its territorial rights to Congress. Again, in 1785, an agreement between Virginia and Maryland on navigation rights on the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay revived the idea that common economic, commercial and political problems should be approached and solved in common. A first convention met at Mann’s Tavern, Annapolis, Maryland, in September 1786; it gathered delegates from only five of the thirteen states that had been invited; but fervent nationalists, like New York’s Alexander Hamilton and Virginia’s James Madison, emphasized the need for

KEYWORD

THE BILL OF RIGHTS What is today known as the Bill of Rights is composed of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, ratified between September 1789 and December 1791 by eleven states (Massachusetts would wait until 1939!). Its main purpose was to define explicitly certain individual and state rights which had been overlooked in the Constitution. Defining the civil rights of citizens had been common practice in the American colonies, since the “Body of Liberties” voted, at Winthrop’s initiative, in Massachusetts in 1641, or the “General Fundamentals” of the Plymouth Colony. The safeguard of these rights became all the more essential as the English Parliament constantly curtailed them to ensure its control of the colonies. By the time of independence, most Americans were duly protected by local laws against British arbitrary power. One good example of such protection was the “Virginia Declaration of Rights”, drafted by George Mason and adopted in June 1776.

Once the British threat to individual rights had been removed, concern grew over the powers of the federal government. Debates between Federalists and Antifederalists turned on the question of the “tyranny” the central authority could exercize over states and over individual citizens. So that ratification of the Constitution was obtained – notably in Massachusetts, Virginia and New York – only in exchange for the promise that a Bill of Rights would be added to the Constitution. Thus civil liberties were duly guaranteed: citizens were granted the rights of free speech, press and assembly, of free religious practice, and the right to “keep and bear arms” for security purposes. Amendments four to nine protected Americans against all kinds of legal abuses (“unreasonable searches”, self-incrimination, excessive bail, “cruel and unusual punishment”). Significantly, the Tenth amendment shifted to the states all the powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution.

a more sweeping discussion of fundamental issues and resolved to push through Congress their demand for a constitutional convention. The proposal received an unexpected boost from a winter rebellion in Massachusetts – Shays’ Rebellion – which set tax-burdened farmers in violent opposition to the state government. London sneered at such post-independence disorders; Americans were mortified and Congress hastened, on February 21, 1787, to call a Convention for the following May, in Philadelphia.

CIRCUMSTANCES

O

n May 14, Independence Hall, a majestic brick structure that served as the State House of Pennsylvania, rang with the voices of 55 delegates from 12 states (Rhode Island had announced on March 14 that it would not send a delegation). Their official task: to revise the Articles of Confederation, and find an adequate form of government to save the Union. In fact, only a few days after the Convention’s ceremonial opening on May 25, revision turned into abolition: the Articles were officially abandoned and the Convention

Thomas JEFFERSON 1743-1826 Born on a Virginia plantation in a wealthy aristocratic family, Jefferson briefly practiced law there before entering politics. Endowed with literary gifts, he was often called upon to draft documents for the Virginia legislature. Yet his greatest achievement was the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Successively Governor of Virginia (1779-1781) and Ambassador to France (1784-1789), he was abroad, like John Adams, when the Constitution was adopted. On his return to the United States, he joined Washington’s cabinet as Secretary of State. A notorious francophile, Jefferson criticized the Administration for its policy of neutrality in the conflict between France and Britain that started in 1793. This difference of opinion which spread to domestic issues, opened a breach •••

September 17, 1787 – The Constitution of the United States 45

••• between Jefferson and the Federalists (led by Alexander Hamilton) – a breach that was to widen with the years. By 1796, Jefferson had emerged as the true leader of the Democratic-Republican party, which opposed the Federalists particularly on the issue of states’ rights. He was elected President in 1800 and served two terms; after which, following George Washington’s example, he retired to his Monticello estate (near Charlottesville, Virginia) where he spent the last fifteen years of his life. He died on the same day as John Adams, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Those who knew him remembered a simple, kind and wise man, yet one fully determined to launch his country towards peace and prosperity; for that purpose he deliberately looked for political consensus (appealing to Republicans and Federalists alike, in his Inaugural Address); he advocated – and achieved – territorial growth (the Louisiana Purchase) and promoted agriculture (he had faith in “small landholders” whom he considered as the “most precious part of the state”).

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resolved to take daring steps towards an altogether new system of government. A few of the delegates were sworn state-righters, like New York’s Robert Yates or Virginia’s George Mason; others, led by James Madison, believed that a great country needed a powerful national government. The two factions antagonized each other for weeks before any compromise was reached. The birth of the Constitution was a painful business; the intensity of debate grew with the stifling heat of the Philadelphia summer. Tempers flared and verbal guerilla hampered debates. Ben Franklin, the eldest at 81, occasionally stepped in with a sobering speech when crisis threatened. Most of the delegates were young, sometimes even under 30, like South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney; only four were over 60. And two of the most influential figures of the age were missing: Thomas Jefferson, away in Paris, and John Adams, on diplomatic mission in London. General Washington, who presided the Convention, found these troops hardly more manageable than a state militia. Time and again, this Convention has been extravagantly praised for giving birth to a perfect democracy; yet one forgets how many forceps were applied to save the child. Modern marathon negotiations pale before the intellectual exertions of these men who, for fifteen weeks, battled to reconcile opposing conceptions of government. The Virginia Plan, presented by Governor Edmund Randolph, but drafted by Madison, was federalist in spirit and called for a Congress-dominated system, with proportional representation – which privileged the most populous states. The counter-plan, proposed by New Jersey on behalf of all the “small” states, insisted just as strongly on equal representation. It took until July 16, to find an acceptable compromise in the form of a bicameral legislature in which both systems would coexist. Similarly, delegates went through 60 ballots before they agreed on the way to choose the executive. The Virginians had proposed a selection via Congress; New York’s Alexander Hamilton pushed for a lifetime, kinglike, President; as for James Wilson, a Pennsylvania delegate, he advocated election by universal suffrage. The Convention finally compromised on a two-tiered electoral process, with a college of electors acting as a filter for the people’s choices. Towards the end of July, final agreements were also reached on economic issues, notably taxes and tariffs, on which southern states proved extremely touchy. As proposals were agreed upon they were drafted by a five-man Committee of Detail (headed by

KEYWORD

CHECKS AND BALANCES The compromise system of government adopted by the Philadelphia Convention drew naturally on the Articles of Confederation and on the experience of political power acquired by the colonies under British rule. Yet it introduced some original elements as well, so that the Constitution, monolithic and coherent as it seems, may appear as an exceptionally successful blending of old and new ideas, of practice and experiment, of political and philosophical principles borrowed from the long historical record left by western society.

(1776), Adams had already declared that “the judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, as both should be checks upon that.”

If a separation of powers between executive and legislative (as described by John Locke in 1690) was commonplace in colonial governments, the idea of a superior legal authority as means of control over such governments was made irrelevant by the very existence of the King of England.

In the Constitution of 1787, this principle of “checks” was applied so scrupulously that each branch of government could “balance” the others. The President, for example, has more “shared” than “exclusive” powers; and he can be removed (“impeached”) by a joint decision of the House and the Senate – which exercise a judicial power here. Conversely, the President has a right of veto over the legislative decisions of Congress (though the latter may cancel – “override” – that veto by a 2/3 majority vote). As for the Judiciary, its independence is guaranteed, in part, by the fact that Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life by the President with the approval of the Senate.

With independence established, some prominent Americans, especially John Adams, were drawn to Montesquieu’s 1748 vision (L’Esprit des Lois) of a tripartite system with a judicial branch that would serve as safeguard against possible abuses of authority by the other branches. In his pamphlet Thoughts on Government

These are merely examples, illustrating the theory of mutual control within the government of the United States. In practice, proper balance has rarely been achieved between the three branches; yet, at all times, institutional tensions have been kept in check and the system has survived them.

THE THIRTEEN ORIGINAL STATES Population 1780 (estimated) 1790 (1st Census) Connecticut 206,700 238,000 Delaware 45,400 59,000 Georgia 56,100 163,000 Maryland 245,500 320,000 Massachusetts 268,600 379,000 New Hampshire 87,800 142,000 New Jersey 139,600 184,000 New York 210,500 340,000 North Carolina 270,100 394,000 Pennsylvania 327,300 434,000 Rhode Island 52,900 69,000 South Carolina 180,000 249,000 Virginia 538,000 692,000 Total 13 states 2,628,500 3,663,000

Dates of ratification of the constitution January 9, 1788 December 7, 1787 January 2, 1788 April 28, 1788 February 6, 1788 June 21, 1788 December 18, 1787 July 261788 November 21, 1789 December 12, 1787 May 29, 1790 May 23, 1788 June 25, 1788

September 17, 1787 – The Constitution of the United States 47

Alexander HAMILTON 1755-1804

The illegitimate son of a Scottish merchant, Hamilton emerged from obscurity during the Revolutionary War. He was barely twenty when he enrolled in the Continental Army, rising quickly to the rank of aide-de-camp to George Washington. He served afterwards as ReceiverGeneral of Taxes, as member of the Continental Congress (1782-1783) and of the Annapolis Convention (1786); but he played his greatest role at the time of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, as the chief advocate of a strong central authority, superior to the state governments. He wrote several short essays at the time, collected in The Federalist, in which he explained his – and the future Federalist Party’s – views on government. Appointed Secretary of the Treasury in 1789, he sought to develop federal institutions (especially in the banking sector), in order to provide the young republic with sound finances, and to promote industry. He was suspected of favoring the wealthy and conspiring to establish the supremacy of the federal state. He clashed not only with his natural political antagonist, Jefferson, but also, within his own party, with John Adams, ••• 48

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Pennsylvania’s Gouverneur Morris) into 23 propositions that served as groundwork for the final draft of the Constitution. Most of August was spent squabbling over the ratification process. But by September a first version was ready, written by Morris. It was broken up into seven articles (six of which were operative, the seventh concerning the ratification process) describing the powers of the three distinct branches of government – the legislative, the executive, and the judicial, in that order – and establishing a system of mutual controls between them. Yet, the document drew fire from some, who found it too centralizing; part of the New York delegation left Philadelphia in protest. Others had already quit from sheer exhaustion. So that only 42 of the 55 delegates actually voted on the text on September 15, 1787; 39 approved, 3 stubbornly dissented. Jacob Shallus, the Convention’s clerk, was given 40 hours and $30 to copy the 4,440 words of the text on four sheets of vellum. Two days later, September 17, 1787, 39 signatures were appended to this Constitution. And after so much talk, after having written world history, most of these good and thirsty men repaired to the City Tavern.

CONSEQUENCES

L

ocke and Montesquieu, the European political philosophers, and John Adams with his Thoughts on Government and his recently published A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, were sources of inspiration for the Philadelphia delegates. Locke’s view of a predominant legislature, Montesquieu’s defense of the separation of powers within government, and Adams’s artful system of checks and balances, were all blended into the final text of the Constitution. One basic issue, however, had not received proper attention: slavery. Some delegates smelled poison there, others failed to measure its importance. James Madison realized that “the real difference of interests lay not between the large and small but between the Northern and Southern States.” The problems of the slave trade, of navigation controls, of exports and tariffs almost proved fatal to the Convention. Georgia and the Carolinas threatened secession – already – and the compromise that was found was the Convention’s only sign of moral wavering: mention of slave-holding and the slave trade was carefully avoided in the text of the Constitution, to assuage the South. Article I, Section 9 did refer to “the migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall

think proper to admit,” but only to postpone any regulation of such traffic until 1808. As to know whether slaves should be considered as property or people, the Founding Fathers evaded the dilemma and based (property) taxes and (popular) representation in Congress on the number of free citizens “and three-fifths of all other persons except Indians”. This Three-fifths Compromise, like the Missouri Compromise thirty years later, proved inadequate to appease the fears and suspicions of the South, especially as the Constitution was mostly the work of northern Federalists. The question of federalism and of central power would dominate the ratification debate, for the next few months.

••• who hated him enough to forget his manners and call him “the bastard brat of a Scots peddlar.” Though out of office, Hamilton manipulated Adams’s cabinet and did interfere with the President’s actions. Ironically, the mild conspirator met his end in a duel at the hand of a better plotter and dyed-in-the-wool traitor, Vice-President Aaron Burr, on July 11, 1804 at Weehawken, New Jersey.

The ratification of the new Constitution, to be done in each state by a popularly elected convention, was to become effective when 9 of the 13 states had adopted the text – a provision which indicates that some opposition was anticipated. As it turned out, the process became a bitter contest between Federalists and Antifederalists. Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey promptly adopted the text before the year 1787 was over. Georgia, Connecticut and Massachusetts followed in early 1788. Yet, in Western Lands, 1782-1802. March, Rhode Island returned a chilling, though foreseeable, no. The debate between Federalists and Claimed by Great Britain state-righters became sharpest in Virginia and New York, but Alexander VT. BRITISH MAINE 1791 CANADA Hamilton’s and James Madison’s arguments in favor of a strong Union, N.H. published in The Federalist, Franklin’s MASS. NEW YORK Ceded by Mass. 1785 and Washington’s well-publicized CONN. R.I. endorsements of the Constitution, plus Ceded by Conn. 1782 NEW JERSEY PENNSYLVANIA Ceded by the promise to add a Bill of Rights to Conn. 1800 Ceded by M.D. DEL. New York 1782 the Constitution to guarantee personal VIRGINIA freedoms – finally won the two states Ceded by Virginia LOUISIANA over. After New Hampshire, they (Spanish) 1792 Ceded by NORTH CAROLINA became the tenth and eleventh states N. Carolina 1790 to vote ratification. SOUTH Ceded by S. Carolina 1787 CAROLINA

Washington and Adams, the first presidential team (see list, p. 230), had been sworn in for some time before North Carolina and Rhode Island finally decided to join the Union. What Franklin called “the grand machine” could begin to move ahead.

Ceded by Georgia 1802

GEORGIA Western lands ceded by states

Ceded by S. Carolina 1787 Claimed by Spain until 1795

SPANISH FLORIDA

Ceded by Virginia 1784 (Northwest Territory) Disputed territories

September 17, 1787 – The Constitution of the United States 49

FOCUS

THE LAND ORDINANCES One Government, one nation: the Constitution explicitly promised the formation of a “more perfect union” between the states. But a nation is also a land; at that time, the 13 states covered about 365,000 square miles in area mostly east of the Appalachian range. And the Constitution, by creating a new political entity, also implicitly promised an extension of the national territory to the west – something that Americans had impatiently expected for ages and had been denied by Indians or European powers. Seven of the 13 states had, in their original colonial charters, been given rights to land “from sea to sea” and naturally expanded westward as a result. The upper Ohio valley, Kentucky and Tennessee started to be settled even before the War of Independence ended. By the time peace was signed with Britain, 30,000 white settlers were established in Kentucky alone. The remaining six “landless” states faced a much darker future, with little prospect of expansion and a scarcity of land revenues. With Maryland as their main spokesman, they turned fervently nationalist and insisted that all the claimed trans-Appalachian territories be surrendered to the nation, which would then redistribute them. Congress, in 1780, had voted the principle that all lands ceded to the Confederation would be “settled and formed into distinct republican states” due to become later “members of the Federal Union”. In fact, speculators were already at work all over the country; they secretly hoped the Continental Congress would prove more generous than local legislatures in giving land grants. They lobbied intensively in Maryland, and the state went as far as blocking the ratification of the Articles of Confederation until March 1781, i.e. until neighboring Virginia had accepted to cede part of its western lands to Congress. The rest of the Virginia claims, called the Northwest Territory (an expanse of land between the Ohio River, the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, later divided into five states), would be ceded 50

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in 1784, a year after the Treaty of Paris had officially granted the United States all lands to the west, as far as the Mississippi. Within two years, Connecticut, Massachusetts and North Carolina had made similar cessions and Congress found itself in charge of an additional 400,000 square miles of new lands, which more than doubled the nation’s area. Faced with the necessity of quickly securing revenues for the new independent nation and with the pressure of a popular demand for more cultivable land, Congress struggled to strike a middle course in the transfer of lands from the public domain into private hands. It would give priority to land sales, yet do it in an orderly fashion. As a result, three different land laws were passed in 1784, 1785 and 1787 which hardly solved the nation’s immediate financial problems yet nevertheless served as blueprints for future territorial expansion. The Territorial Ordinance of 1784, drafted by Thomas Jefferson just after the Virginia cession, was the first draft of the procedure by which new lands would be organized and turned into States of the Union. It provided for the division of the Virginia claim into ten rectangular territories, each of which could adopt a constitution when peopled by at least 20,000 inhabitants, and then apply for statehood. The ordinance was never enforced, but served as model for future legislation. On 20 May 1785, Congress voted a Land Ordinance which, this time, tackled the problem of the division and sale of public lands. The national debt now approached 100,000 pounds sterling and revenues were badly needed. The law provided that all public lands would be divided into “townships” six miles square, each cut into 36 numbered sections of 640 acres, one mile square. Half of the townships thus created were to be sold undivided – to please potential speculators –, the other half in 640-acre units, to favor small farmers. In each “township”, section no.16 was set aside for the establishment of

public schools. Land was quickly surveyed and auctioned at $1 an acre; but such orderly, bureaucratic distribution of native soil did not appeal to westerners, and anyway most of them lacked the money to buy 640 acres. Faced with poor sales and frantic for revenue, Congress put larger tracts of land for sale. Speculating enterprises like the Ohio Company of Massachusetts offered to buy in bulk only if some guarantees were given as to the political future of such lands. On 13 July 1787, Congress accordingly passed the Northwest Ordinance, an incentive to migration since it guaranteed that the new territories would eventually reach equal status with the original thirteen states. To that effect, the ordinance stipulated that CANADA (British)

Point-au-Fer

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1

7

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10 11 12

18 17 16 15 14 13 19 20 21 22 23 24 30 29 28 27 26 25 31 32 33 34 35 36

Seven Ranges 1785

1 mile

VIRGINIA

NORTH CAROLINA

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Northwest Territory (acquired 1781; organized 1787) British posts after 1783

6 miles

Fort Niagara

rie eE

Symmes’ Purchase 1788 Clark’s Grant 1781 hio O Ohio Co. Grant 1787

LOUISIANA (Spanish)

Lak

A township (36 square miles)

SOUTH CAROLINA GEORGIA

FLORIDA (Spanish)

Half-section (320 acres) 1 mile

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three to five states would be formed out of the “Northwest Territory”; each would be first administered by a Congress-appointed governor, then by a territorial assembly when the population reached 5,000 adult males. When over 60,000 inhabitants, it could apply for statehood, be admitted into the Union and enjoy the same prerogatives as all the other states. This ordinance initiated the formation of an American domestic empire; it stood as a precedent for land government that was to serve throughout the colonization of the West. More importantly, it established the principle of freedom to the extent of banishing slavery from the new states: a sure victory for human rights but also the seed of future conflicts.

Quatersection (160 acres)

One section (1 sq. mile or 640 acres)

Half-quarter section (80 acres) Quater-quater sections (40 acres)

Inalienable property of the Confederation Income reserved for public schoom support

Northwest Ordinance



September 17, 1787 – The Constitution of the United States 51

LA CONSTITUTION AMÉRICAINE ADOPTÉE Débarrassés du joug anglais, les Américains devaient s’employer à créer une véritable nation, c’est-à-dire dépasser les coalitions de circonstance formées durant la guerre de libération et œuvrer à la mise en place d’un système de gouvernement durable et acceptable par tous. L’indépendance et la paix, quoique nécessaires à l’éclosion d’un nouvel État, n’étaient pas suffisantes à en garantir la stabilité et la permanence. Il fallait donc innover, combler le vide politique et administratif consécutif à la rupture avec l’Angleterre, mais aussi prévenir toute tentation anarchiste, tout retour à l’autocratie et toute dissension sérieuse entre les ex-colonies d’Amérique. L’entreprise était périlleuse, car si les Américains, nouvellement indépendants, avaient une certaine expérience de la gestion autonome de leurs biens, ils ignoraient en revanche comment constituer une nation, une et indivisible – comment, en somme, répondre aux défis de l’Histoire en mouvement. Mais, avec cet esprit pionnier et ce pragmatisme qui les caractérise, ils inventèrent une nouvelle forme de gouvernement en rédigeant un document exceptionnel, une loi unique et suprême pour la jeune république et un modèle pour l’Occident : la Constitution des États-Unis. Le rejeton de la Révolution américaine fut beau, cet ordre démocratique sur lequel on n’en finit pas de s’extasier. Mais l’on sait peu combien l’enfantement fut difficile et combien furent âpres ses préliminaires. Le problème majeur, tel que l’appréhendaient les Pères fondateurs de la nation (Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Henry, et plusieurs autres), était d’équilibrer deux 52

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

exigences contradictoires : la nécessité d’une autorité centrale, garante de l’unité nationale, et le penchant naturel de chacune des anciennes colonies à préserver quelque autonomie. Le corollaire était, bien sûr, de fonder un nouveau système de gouvernement sur des principes suffisamment universels pour être unanimement acceptés. En outre, chaque colonie avait eu sa propre expérience du pouvoir, et il importait d’harmoniser les institutions déjà existantes en leur donnant une dimension vraiment nationale. Une première tentative avait abouti, en mars 1781, à l’adoption des Articles de la Confédération, un progrès manifeste vers l’intégration des nouveaux États indépendants. Le gouvernement instauré par ce texte manquait toutefois d’autorité pour faire exécuter les lois et le nouveau Congrès de la Confédération s’avérait impuissant à réduire les différends commerciaux ou territoriaux entre nouveaux états. Certains, comme Alexander Hamilton ou James Madison, réclamèrent donc une révision urgente des Articles. Et la violente rébellion de Shays – une jacquerie sanglante au Massachusetts – durant l’hiver 1786–87, précipita le mouvement. Cinquante-cinq délégués de douze États (le Rhode Island ne daigna pas participer) se retrouvèrent ainsi à Philadelphie le 14 mai 1787 pour donner un cadre plus solide à l’Union américaine. On abandonna très vite l’idée de réviser les Articles et, hardiment, l’on fit du neuf. Deux tendances s’opposèrent immédiatement : ceux qui défendaient les droits des États à préserver leur identité dans la confédération, et ceux

qui pensaient qu’une nation forte devait avoir un gouvernement central fort. Les délégués étaient jeunes et fougueux, pour la plupart ; aussi les débats furent-ils houleux et intenses. Durant plus de quinze semaines on négocia pas à pas pour réaliser un compromis entre les divers courants. On finit par s’entendre sur le rôle prépondérant que jouerait le Congrès dans le nouveau système politique. Du projet fédéraliste des Virginiens, défendu par Edmund Randolph et James Madison, on retint l’idée d’une représentation proportionnelle, qui favorisait les États les plus peuplés. Mais, pour compenser, on accepta aussi la proposition du New Jersey, à savoir une représentation identique en nombre pour chaque État. Le nouveau Congrès, selon ce compromis connu sous le nom de Compromis du Connecticut, comporterait donc deux chambres où coexisteraient les deux systèmes. Le problème de l’exécutif apparut tout aussi épineux. Il ne fallut pas moins de soixante scrutins pour que les délégués s’entendent sur un mode de sélection du président. L’élection au suffrage indirect finalement adoptée était, elle aussi, un compromis entre les tenants du pouvoir populaire, défenseurs des prérogatives du Congrès, et les partisans d’un État fort, dont l’exécutif aurait de larges attributions. Le texte définitif de la Constitution, enfin rédigé par le gouverneur Pennsylvanien Morris début septembre 1787, porte la marque visible de tous les compromis atteints durant l’été. Le principe de la séparation et de l’équilibre des pouvoirs (checks and balances), inspiré de Montesquieu, satisfaisait la plupart des délégués de Philadelphie, et la Constitution fut adoptée le 15 septembre 1787 par 39 voix contre 3. La ratification du texte

par les États fut plus laborieuse : fédéralistes et antifédéralistes menèrent des campagnes aussi vigoureuses que contradictoires et l’issue du scrutin dans les assemblées ou les conventions d’état fut parfois incertaine, et même franchement défavorable dans le Rhode Island. Toutefois, la majorité des deux tiers (neuf ratifications sur treize états) ayant été atteinte dès juillet 1788, on put procéder à la mise en place d’un gouvernement, conformément à l’article 7 de la Constitution. Assortie de dix amendements, ou Charte des Droits (Bill of Rights) calquée sur la Charte de Virginie de 1776, la Constitution américaine à fait preuve d’une longévité exceptionnelle. Sa seule faiblesse fut, à l’instar de la convention qui la créa, de méconnaître totalement le problème de l’esclavage qui devait empoisonner la politique et la société au siècle suivant et menacer les fondements mêmes de la nation.

September 17, 1787 – The Constitution of the United States 53

54

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May 2, 1803

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE BACKGROUND

F

ollowing a brutal Presidential campaign which saw, for the first time in U.S. history, parties and partisan politics play a prominent part. Thomas Jefferson entered, in March 1801, the newly-completed mansion later to be known as the White House. A few weeks before, the House of Representatives, in accordance with the Constitution, had had to choose the President, after an exceptional tie in the electoral college. Thus were brought to culmination months of bitter struggle between two major political factions, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. John Adams, Jefferson’s predecessor and a notorious Federalist, had never been able to secure widespread popular support for himself, as had George Washington; nor was he able to prevent a fatal split among the Federalists between radicals and moderates. This breakup was the price to be paid by parties for coming of age in national politics. Yet it was also a godsend for the opposing Republicans who, by carrying the 1800 election, inaugurated the partisan changes in the Administration that have characterized American politics to this day. There was nothing revolutionary about this shift of power. Jefferson had been Adams’s Vice-President, and the Bostonian and the Virginian had worked together in the higher interests of the nation. They never sought, however, to conceal their divergences. To put it simply Adams, in orthodox Federalist fashion, staunchly supported a strong national government, a central federal authority endowed with the constitutional powers to take decisions on behalf of the states. Jefferson and the Republicans feared a possible return to monarchy through excessive centralization and believed that only a resolute defense of states’ rights could preserve the American



Synthèse en français Jefferson achète la Louisiane 64

KEYWORDS Federalists & Republicans 59 Nullification 59

PLACES The White House 56 Monticello 57

PEOPLE A. Burr M. Lewis W. Clark

60 63 63

FOCUS The Lewis & Clark Expedition 62

Opposite: Lewis & Clark on their way to the West. May 2, 1803 – The Louisiana purchase 55

Washington, D. C., Charles-Pierre L’Enfant’s original plan.

The White House For almost the first ten years of the Republic, the seat of government was in Philadelphia, a big, bustling town of 70,000. Then, in the summer of 1800, the federal government was transferred to its Washington, D.C., location; the new capital, built between two branches of the Potomac River, had been designed by French architect Charles-Pierre L’Enfant. John Adams, who was ending his term, settled with his family in what was then known as the “President’s House”, a rather bulky, neo-classical building that overlooked the river. James Hoban, an Irish contractor, supervised its construction over several years. The overall cost was $230,000. The Adamses left their magnificent Bush Hill mansion in Philadelphia reluctantly. The President’s House was not even completed when they moved in, ••• 56

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Republic. At the instigation of Jefferson and Madison, Virginia and Kentucky even voted resolutions in 1798 against Federalistinspired laws, the Alien and Sedition Acts. These resolutions claimed the right for states to correct abuses of power by federal authority, and to take retaliatory action if necessary (see p. 59). But a politically divided nation was unacceptable for President Jefferson. The well-known formula he used in his Inaugural Address, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists” expressed a laudable concern for consensus. Yet, in private, Jefferson never concealed his relief at having ended Federalist rule and his conviction that he and the Republicans would establish a more perfect and more permanent democracy in America. In his hands, the sprawling federal government imposed by the Federalists was at first trimmed down to essential tasks. One of them, not the least in the President’s eyes, was to represent the nation abroad: “The federal is in truth our foreign government,” Jefferson later wrote, claiming that only foreign affairs could legitimately be “taken from the sovereignty of the separate States.” It soon proved, though, that domestic and foreign problems could no more be dissociated than federal and state prerogatives, and the doctrinal Jefferson who

defended states’ rights eventually turned pragmatic and came to practice executive leadership in unexpectedly Federalist fashion. What led him to display full presidential authority was a sudden worsening of the international situation after 1800.

CIRCUMSTANCES

I

n the Mediterranean, Barbary pirates were intensifying their attacks on American merchant ships and Jefferson had to address the problem immediately upon assuming the Presidency. But this was nothing compared to the dangerous double-dealings of Bonaparte’s shrewd Foreign Minister Talleyrand. With the Treaty of San Ildefonso (October 1, 1800), the latter arranged the retrocession by Spain of Louisiana and the Floridas to France, in exchange for the Duchy of Parma and the crown of Tuscany. These territories, reluctantly abandoned by France in 1763, were to be the spearhead of the First Consul’s new colonial policy in the Americas. The Louisiana/Florida cession remained a secret deal for a full year, and the Spanish did everything they could to delay their evacuation which became effective only in October 1802. Meanwhile, in Santo Domingo, Bonaparte had become entangled in a fateful tropical guerilla war against rebel slaves, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. When native raids and malaria had decimated General Charles



••• during the winter of 1800-1801, and it was cold and damp. Mrs Adams had trouble ensuring proper lighting and heating in that “castle” only the first floor of which was open. At the time, the house was still cream-colored, being built of a Virginia sand-stone that George Washington himself had ordered from the quarry of one of his friends. During the 1812-1814 war, the capital was invaded by the rampaging troops of British General Robert Ross. The President’s House was pillaged and burnt. It was not until 1829-1830, when its northern wing was completed, that the building was given several coats of the white paint that gave it its present name.

Monticello Monticello was a 5,000 acre plantation, about 2 miles from present-day Charlottesville, that Jefferson inherited from his father in 1757, where tobacco, corn, and wheat were grown. He made it his main residence in 1767 and started designing the house to which he would retire 42 years later. He first drew up plans for an Italian-style mansion which, on the crest of a Virginia hill, looked rather eccentric. He would again redesign it in 1789, then in 1796, enlarging the house to 21 rooms, with two upper floors topped by an Italian dome, and add a string of dependencies with stables, servants’ quarters (he owned as many as 75 slaves), carriagehouse, etc. He also carefully selected furniture, which he bought in France or asked famous American cabinet-makers in New York or Philadelphia to make for him. The estate was barely profitable, despite Jefferson’s constant care and improvements. He was often away and dependent on neglectful local overseers. When he retired, in 1809, he looked after the plantation personally but his financial situation was never comfortable. He even had to sell his 6,500 book library to the government; they were to form the nucleus of the Library of Congress. May 2, 1803 – The Louisiana purchase 57

The Louisiana purchase CANADA Lewis

Ft. Clatsop

Ft. Mandan

Snake

Clark

ri R. sou

Pla tte R.

ROC

SPA

LOUISIANA

KY

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Arkansas R

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.

St. Louis

PURCHASE

Santa Fe

MO

iver

Rio

IN

SSE

TA

PO

Red R

UN

Colo rado R.

Mis

i R. sipp

Mi ssis

R.

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SS

San Antonio

NS Lewis and Clark 1804-1805

New Orleans

MEXICO

Lewis and Clark 1805-1806

Leclerc’s expeditionary army, Napoleon had to revise his plans for the New World. Jefferson suspected the existence of a Franco-Spanish bargain as early as May 1801 but only got confirmation at the end of the year. He therefore instructed the American Minister in Paris, Robert Livingston to purchase the Floridas and New Orleans from the French. He emphasized to him in April 1802 that New Orleans, “through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market” could not remain indefinitely in foreign hands. Talleyrand kept Livingston waiting and started plotting again to build that Antilles-Louisiana axis which would be the backbone of the future French colonial empire in America. Probably upon instructions from Paris, the Spanish Intendent in New Orleans, Juan Morales, abruptly canceled in late October 1802 the right of deposit of goods which American traders had been granted under the Pinckney Treaty (1795) with Spain. Immediately pressured on his right and left by Federalists and western Republicans alike, Jefferson moved quickly in accordance with the timeworn si vis pacem para bellum (“if you want peace, prepare for war”) dictum. He despatched Secretary of State James Monroe to Paris with the hope of finally persuading France to sell the Floridas and New 58

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KEYWORDS

FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS Federalism was born of necessity, republicanism of an ideal. In the few years between the Peace of Paris and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the need for a powerful, efficient central government grew more pressing. No greater danger could exist for a union of states, some thought, than a dilution of authority. Drafting a Constitution was itself a definite move towards federalism; but the ratification of the text became a political issue for which Federalists campaigned together for the first time. Those who, like Alexander Hamilton or John Adams, favored a strong government as evidence of a strong nation, fought hard to win massive ratification. And Hamilton’s Federalist Papers not only served to present Federalist positions, but could also be read as a sort of platform for a group that was quickly turning into a party. Both George Washington and John Adams, to varying degrees, may be seen as Federalist Presidents. Yet, in their firm insistence upon the centralization of authority, the Federalists became suspect; significantly, Thomas Jefferson, in his Inaugural Address of March 1801, criticized them for working “for everything which would approach our new government to a monarchy”.

Many Americans, especially in the South, followed Jefferson in his support of “republicanism” as ultimate protection against a possible return of monarchical rule. They feared power would go to the money-makers in the North, to the federal bank created by Alexander Hamilton, to northern industries, in fact to an oligarchy that would not have the people’s interests at heart. In that sense, Jefferson’s party did deserve its name “DemocraticRepublican”. As historian Henry Adams rightly observed: “The republic which Jefferson believed himself to be founding or securing in 1801 was an enlarged Virginia”. Republicans saw the future United States as a nation of small farmers or craftsmen united, under simple and just institutions, to pursue happiness as they saw fit. This view of an ideal society would not stand the tests of time and history. Within twenty years, the DemocraticRepublican party would assimilate most of the Federalists’ principles and form the single “Democratic” party that would send Andrew Jackson to the White House. “Republicans” would later reappear (at first under the name of “Whigs”), but in a totally different context, as supporters of industrialization, business and competitive laissez-faire.

NULLIFICATION In the last decade of the 18th century, the United States found itself close to being drawn into European conflicts. As a means of protection against the growing influx of political refugees from the Old World – many of whom were alleged to be agitators – the Federalist party pushed the Alien & Sedition Acts through Congress (1798). But these were soon turned into instruments of political harassment against the “Republican” opponents. Deliberately mistaking dissent for sedition, the government indicted a few prominent Republicans. Reaction to this threat to free speech and civil liberties was immediate and radical. James Madison in Virginia and Thomas Jefferson in Kentucky persuaded State legislatures



to declare these laws unconstitutional – which they did in 1798 and 1799. The Resolutions they voted clearly illustrate the “compact” or “states’ rights” theory of the Constitution, according to which the states have agreed to delegate only limited powers to the central government. Whenever “powers are assumed which have not been delegated a nullification of the Act is the rightful remedy,” claimed the Kentucky Resolution. Nullification as a measure of denial of federal power, just one step away from secession, was again to be used in 1832, this time by South Carolina, against the protectionist tariffs of 1828 and 1832 that were seen as ruinous for southern agriculture.

May 2, 1803 – The Louisiana purchase 59

Aaron BURR 1756-1836

Orleans for $10 million. Congress appropriated $2 million for that purpose in January 1803. At the same time, he had thousands of Indians removed beyond the Mississippi – as a potential threat to the French – and gave orders for the building of 15 gunboats and the raising of a 80,000-man army to liberate the Lower Mississippi region, if necessary. But tides were already turning against Napoleon: Santo Domingo had now become a vast graveyard for Leclerc himself and 20,000 of his men. War with England, after a lull, was looming close again and Bonaparte could not afford an alliance between England and the United States – an unnatural match for the francophile Jefferson, but one to which he would have readily consented. The First Consul needed money and intended to prevent any English expansion in North America. Better to leave Louisiana entirely in American hands.

One of the strangest figures in American politics, Aaron Burr was a grandson of the preacher Jonathan Edwards and the son of the second president of Princeton University. He had to interrupt law studies at Princeton to join George Washington’s army in 1775. After the War of Independence, he became a lawyer, practiced in New York City, then began a political career that propelled him from the New York state legislature (1784) to the U.S. Senate (1789-1797). He established himself, often by means of intrigue, as one of the leaders of the Democratic-Republican (Jeffersonian) Party, which honored him by nominating him as second candidate (with Jefferson) in the presidential election of 1800. Amazingly, both candidates received an equal number of votes in the electoral college (73) and Burr refused to step down. The final decision rested with the House of Representatives which, after 36 ballots, elected Jefferson. Burr became vice-president. A bitter, vindictive Burr never forgave the Federalist majority in the House for that choice, and focused his hatred on Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton, whom he killed in a duel (July 11, 1804) over a futile disagreement. A man of great ambitions but of no principles (“Great souls care little for small morals,” he liked to say), ••• 60

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Monroe landed in France April 7, 1803. He was to meet Livingston in Paris for a joint negotiation with Talleyrand. Bonaparte, it appears, had already made up his mind and given instructions for a package deal. On April 11, while Monroe was en route from Le Havre, Talleyrand gave Livingston the opening of his life: what would America give for the “whole” of Louisiana? A startled Livingston ventured 20 million francs, which was found too low. The following weeks were spent bargaining over the French price which Monroe found too high. April turned to May and a final takeit-or-leave-it offer was accepted by the two American diplomats who had been toying dangerously with Bonaparte’s temper and pride. The price for Louisiana was sixty million francs (or $11,250,000) to which were added twenty million francs ($3,750,000) representing the debts due by France to American citizens, and now assumed by the federal government. These $15 million did not include the Floridas which France promised to pressure Spain to sell separately to the United States. The treaty was formally signed May 2, 1803 and owed more to Robert Livingston’s tenacity than to Monroe’s intervention. Yet the latter’s political star was beginning to rise while Livingston returned to unjust historical oblivion.

CONSEQUENCES

T

he effects of the Louisiana Purchase were incalculable. Historian Henry Adams claimed that it “ranked in historical importance next to the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the

Constitution.” But several generations would elapse before the full measure of its impact could be taken. Short-term consequences were, if not the most momentous, at least the most revealing. The first was to put the American Constitution to the test of land acquisition: no explicit constitutional provision had been made for the Executive, or the federal government to purchase territory on behalf of the people. Jefferson, who always claimed that the government held no powers except those expressly granted in the Constitution, silenced his convictions and pushed the Louisiana Treaty through Congress for ratification. Napoleon hated to be kept waiting and might change his mind. The final vote was taken in October, and by December 20, 1803, New Orleans had been officially handed over to the Americans; the rest of the territory followed March 9, 1804.

••• Burr began plotting with the British against his own country. He saw himself as an American Bonaparte heading an empire including much of the southern United States and Mexico. His conspiracy failed in 1806; he was tried, but acquitted for lack of evidence. The adventurer died, a quiet octogenarian, on Staten Island, almost thirty years later.

The boundaries of Louisiana were not stipulated in the Treaty; neither Talleyrand nor the American commissioners had, in the end, thought that the nature of this territory, still largely terra incognita, required the fixing of strict limits. The American people would no doubt “make the most of it” as Talleyrand had predicted. Explorations had already been conducted beyond the Mississippi, and the official survey expedition of Lewis and Clark was in preparation at the time of negotiations (see pp. 62–63). Expansionism as national policy stemmed naturally from the Louisiana acquisition. Yet doubling the country’s area in one single stroke had graver political implications: the priority given to western affairs by the President wounded a good number of Easterners. The extremist wing of the Federalist Party talked of the secession of some Atlantic states. Nor were westerners entirely assuaged by the reopening of the Mississippi. Washington was a distant capital and the government seemed too authoritarian to be fully trusted. Playing on western discontent, James Wilkinson, governor of the Louisiana territory, commander of the western army (and a Spanish agent to boot), joined former Vice-President Aaron Burr in a conspiracy to detach Louisiana from the United States, combine it with parts of Mexico and form a new independent nation. Though quickly dismantled by Jefferson, the conspiracy foreshadowed future, more tragic attempts at secession. Along with the Louisiana Purchase itself, it raised fundamental questions about the federal structure, central power and the dangers of expansion. The answers would either consolidate or destroy American democracy.

May 2, 1803 – The Louisiana purchase 61

FOCUS

THE LEWIS & CLARK EXPEDITION Hopes of a Northwest Passage to Asia that would shorten the westbound voyage from Europe by some 7,500 miles had motivated most of the explorations undertaken by France or England in America in the 18th century. Successive discoveries, however, rendered the existence of the legendary Straits of Anian less credible as years went by and the search for an overland route to the west emerged as a priority. Jefferson had expressed interest in a transMississippi exploration as early as 1783, and in 1793 had tried to organize a scientific expedition to the Missouri “and thence westward to the Pacific Ocean”. No doubt the latter project was encouraged by the then recent (1792) discovery of the mouth of the Columbia River by Yankee trader Robert Gray. By the time he had become President, Jefferson had added political designs to his intellectual concerns. England, now launching repeated forays into western Canada, and Spain, which claimed rights to portions of the North-West coast and more territory inland, must be overtaken. The publication, in 1802, of British explorer Alexander McKenzie’s account of his voyages, Through the Continent of North America, demonstrated the urgency of an American investigation of the Missouri-Columbia route. Jefferson spent part of 1802 and 1803 setting up what was presented alternatively as a “scientific” and a “commercial” expedition but which had obvious expansionist objectives. Following the President’s secret message to Congress of January 18, 1803, in which he presented the project, $2,500 were allocated for the future expedition. Jefferson spent much time drafting detailed instructions for his explorers, most of which concerned zoological, botanical and anthropological matters. Having chosen two professional soldiers to lead the expedition, Merriwether Lewis, his own private secretary, and William Clark, younger brother to a Revolutionary hero, Jefferson dispatched his instructions in April 1803. 62

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

When, on July 1, news of the Louisiana Treaty reached America, Lewis and Clark’s mission took on another dimension: the extent of the Purchase must now be assessed and U.S. sovereignty established over the new territories. Survey of the land, mapdrafting and observation of climate were added to the original orders. Yet the major objective remained to ensure a permanent and practical connection between the Missouri and the Pacific coast. Forty-five men on five boats left St. Louis May 14, 1804 after a winter of intense preparation and training. They rowed and sailed their way up the Missouri River. Twenty-three weeks later and 1,600 miles further, they reached the Mandan villages (near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota) and spent the 1804-1805 winter there. A visiting fur-trader, a Frenchman named Toussaint Charbonneau, was hired as interpreter for future exchanges with western Indians: he had married a Shoshone woman, Sacajawea, who later proved to be of invaluable help to the explorers. April 7, 1805, a party of 32 left the camp to resume navigation up the Missouri. In late May they sighted the Rocky Mountains but did not cross the continental divide until August 26. With another winter coming they hurried down the western slopes of the Rockies, with the help of the local Shoshone Indians, Sacajawea’s own people. They canoed down the Clearwater River, the Snake and the Columbia and reached the Pacific Ocean November 7, 1805. In July of 1806, in the course of the return journey (begun in late March – as soon as the weather allowed), the expedition split in two to search for easier passages through the mountains, Lewis to the north of the previous year’s route, Clark to the south. Reunited a month later near the Mandan villages, the explorers were still forty days away from St. Louis, which they reached September 3, 1806 after a twenty-eight-month voyage. Lewis was made Governor of the Louisiana Territory in 1807, but died two years later. Clark

would become Governor of the Missouri Territory, then Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Their expedition had been an immense contribution to the knowledge of the western lands. Their descriptions and maps, which proved to be remarkably accurate, would serve as basis for future explorations. But, more than discovery – the trails they had open across the Rockies were, in fact, hardly passable – their voyage was an American claim to sovereignty over a whole continent, a claim on which half a

century of imperial policies would be founded. Lewis’s death, October 11, 1809 in a Tennessee cabin, while he was journeying from St. Louis to Washington, remains a mystery. Some claim that he was given to bouts of depression and that, wounded by criticism of the official reports of his expedition, he committed suicide. Others, relying on evidence of robbery, maintain that he was murdered. Whatever the truth, the United States surely lost in Lewis its finest explorer.

Merriwether LEWIS 1774-1809

Born in a Virginia family which was closely connected with frontier affairs, Lewis was reared in Georgia by his uncle, Colonel Nicholas Lewis who, himself, had been involved in the Cherokee War of 1776 in that region. As a boy and a young man on the Georgia border, Lewis had many contacts with local Indians, observed their customs, and eventually learned their language. He also became an accomplished hunter. In 1794, he was enrolled in the 15,000 man militia sent

with Indian manners and character.” Lewis’s knowledge of the frontier did prove essential to the success of his expedition to the mouth of the Columbia River. The whole party returned to St. Louis in September He was called back to Washington in 1806 and the two commanders, Lewis 1801 to become the new President’s and Clark, were given a triumphant private secretary. When Jefferson began planning an overland expedition reception in Washington in February to the Pacific, he thought of Lewis as a 1807. As a reward for his possible commander. The young man, accomplishments, Lewis was appointed he told a friend, was “brave, prudent, Governor of the Louisiana Territory, habituated to the woods and familiar with a residence in St Louis, Missouri. to crush a revolt – the “Whisky Rebellion”, in Pennsylvania. He then served almost seven years in various frontier posts.

William CLARK 1770-1838

Born of the oldest Virginia stock, William Clark was chiefly known, until he paired with Lewis on the 1803-1806 expedition, as the younger brother of George Rogers Clark, a hero of the War of Independence whose victories in the West had contributed to protect Washington’s armies from possible flanking attacks by the British and the Indians. His campaigns against British forts in the Ohio valley and in Illinois (he took Kaskaskia and Vincennes in 1778), his successes against the Shawnees and the Loyalists in Ohio

(1782), had made Clark a well-known name in the U.S. Army. William Clark met Lewis while they were both serving under General Anthony Wayne in Ohio. His knowledge of Indians and of military tactics increased during those frontier operations which ended with the Indians’ defeat at Fallen Timbers (1794). Lewis assured President Jefferson that there was “no man on earth with whom [he] should feel equal pleasure in sharing” all the dangers and honors of an exploration. Though Lewis was a captain and Clark only a second

lieutenant, they shared command on an equal footing. Upon return to Washington, Clark was made a general of the militia and an Indian agent in Louisiana. Later, in 1813, he became Governor of the Missouri Territory, then Superintendent of Indian Affairs and Surveyor-General when the territory became the states of Illinois and Missouri. He also held the same posts in the new Territory of Arkansas where he died in September 1838. May 2, 1803 – The Louisiana purchase 63

JEFFERSON ACHÈTE LA LOUISIANE Napoléon Bonaparte avait des ambitions dans le Nouveau Monde. Dès octobre 1800, son ministre Talleyrand avait arraché à l’Espagne la rétrocession de la Louisiane et des Florides, indûment abandonnées par la France en 1763. Tout ce qui, à l’heure des règlements de comptes militaires, pourrait affaiblir l’Angleterre – un empire français d’Amérique, par exemple – était bon à prendre. Mais difficile à conserver, comme le prouva très vite le fiasco de l’expédition Leclerc contre le rebelle Toussaint L’ouverture, à SaintDomingue, durant l’hiver 1802-1803. Sans bases solides dans la Caraïbe, les possessions américaines, en cas de conflit, deviendraient pour la France un fardeau, dispersant au loin des forces que le premier consul entendait à présent concentrer en Europe. Quand s’ouvrit l’année 1803, Napoléon avait déjà résolu de mettre un terme à ses projets américains, mais d’en retirer au moins un gain financier substantiel. À Washington, un nouveau président venait de s’installer dans ce qui serait plus tard la Maison Blanche mais n’était encore qu’un bâtiment de grès jaune, inconfortable et peu séduisant, comme la situation politique de son pensionnaire, Thomas Jefferson, élu en 1800 pour succéder à John Adams. Momentanément repliée sur elle-même pour faciliter la mise en place de ses nouvelles institutions, l’Amérique vivait des heures difficiles : l’affrontement entre factions rivales, fédéralistes et républicaines, avait pris une tournure inquiétante. L’élection de 1800, premier vrai scrutin politique, avait vu se heurter deux doctrines apparemment irréductibles, l’une en faveur d’une centralisation toujours plus forte, l’autre défendant les droits particuliers des États membres de l’union. L’éclatement de la nation demeurait possible sans un exécutif fort. 64

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Et, bien qu’instigateur, en Virginie et au Kentucky, de résolutions quasi-subversives contre des lois fédéralistes (les Alien and Sedition Acts de 1798), Jefferson joua complètement le jeu des institutions. Au pouvoir, il était non seulement le président de tous les Américains, mais le symbole de la nation aux yeux du monde. Ainsi ne pouvait-on dissocier problèmes intérieurs et questions diplomatiques. La confirmation en fut donnée par l’affaire de Louisiane. Les États-Unis avaient, dans la vallée du Mississippi d’énormes intérêts ; le peuplement rapide du versant occidental des Appalaches rendaient cette voie de communication vitale. Lorsqu’il eut vent du traité de San Ildefonso et de la rétrocession de la Louisiane, Jefferson flaira un danger mortel. Afin d’éviter que tout l’Ouest se trouve verrouillé par les Français, il chargea Robert R. Livingston, l’ambassadeur à Paris, d’acheter à la France les Florides et La Nouvelle-Orléans. Cette année 1802 serait décisive. Bien sûr, Talleyrand temporisa; il attendait les résultats de la pacification à Saint-Domingue. Jusqu’au bout, il crut possible l’établissement d’un axe impérial Antilles-Louisiane pour la France. Il suggéra même aux Espagnols, toujours provisoirement présents à La Nouvelle-Orléans, d’annuler le droit d’entrepôt garanti aux Américains dans ce port par le traité Godoy-Pinckney de 1795. Les protestations furent telles, sur la Frontière, que Jefferson se vit condamné à un choix peu attrayant, entre une guerre hasardeuse et contraire à ses sentiments francophiles, et une acquisition qui affecterait un peu plus des finances nationales fragiles. Pourtant, dès janvier 1803, il avait obtenu 2 millions de dollars du Congrès, pour acompte d’un achat

de La Nouvelle-Orléans et des Florides évalué à dix millions. Il envoya son Secrétaire d’État, James Monroe, à Paris pour épauler Livingston et négocier la transaction. Napoléon, à nouveau brouillé avec les Anglais, avait besoin d’argent. Ayant fait une croix sur son grand dessein américain, il avait décidé d’obtenir un bon prix pour des territoires qu’il avait cru stratégiques et qu’il sentait aujourd’hui encombrants. Il ordonna à Talleyrand de proposer un forfait aux Américains pour toute la Louisiane. Après quelques hésitations qui faillirent faire avorter les pourparlers – Bonaparte n’aimait pas attendre – Livingston et Monroe acceptèrent le prix de 60 millions de francs (soit $11 250 000) pour la Louisiane, plus la rémission de la dette française envers les citoyens américains – à peu près 20 millions de francs. L’affaire fut conclue et l’acte de vente signé le 2 mai 1803. L’acquisition de la Louisiane eut des effets inestimables sur l’histoire américaine : l’expédition de Lewis et Clark montrera rapidement l’étendue et la richesse des territoires transférés. À long terme, cet achat devait inspirer toute la politique expansionniste des États-Unis et donner un sens à la future formule de « destinée manifeste ». Pour l’heure, toutefois, Jefferson se trouvait confronté à un vide juridique puisque la Constitution ne prévoyait pas de privilège exécutif pour l’achat de territoires. Le Président soumit donc le Traité de Louisiane à l’approbation du Congrès. Il obtint enfin la ratification en octobre 1803, heureusement avant que Bonaparte perde patience. En décembre La Nouvelle-Orléans devenait américaine, et le reste de la Louisiane en mars 1804.

une domination de droit, sinon de fait sur le continent nord-américain. Mais avec le gigantisme surgirent des dissensions que l’État fédéral aurait bien du mal à contrôler dans les années à venir. Les gens de l’est se mirent à craindre pour leurs privilèges, ceux de l’ouest à faire peu de cas d’un gouvernement de plus en plus lointain, géographiquement et politiquement. James Wilkinson, le premier gouverneur du territoire de Louisiane, et Aaron Burr, l’ancien vice-président, préoccupés par l’équilibre nord-sud, fomentèrent un complot visant à faire de la Louisiane et du Mexique une nation séparée.

Thomas Jefferson (Engraving by Auguste Desnoyers)

Les États-Unis doublaient ainsi, d’un seul coup, leur superficie et assuraient

May 2, 1803 – The Louisiana purchase 65

66

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March 4, 1829

ANDREW JACKSON PRESIDENT BACKGROUND

N

apoleon Bonaparte’s nightmare that England might resume its expansion in North America almost materialized when, in that fateful year 1815, Louisiana came very close to changing hands. While the Emperor was plotting his return from exile in Elba, Britain and the United States reached an agreement to end the pointless war that had opposed them for two and a half years over commercial and navigation rights. They signed the treaty at Ghent on 24 December 1814. Yet before the news of peace reached America the British fleet launched a last attack on New Orleans. This major and final campaign had been planned for some time; London, even as the Ghent negotiations were under way, had secretly ordered reinforcements to be sent to Jamaica where troops were being readied for a Louisiana landing. In the event of victory the British intended to cancel the whole Louisiana Purchase and annex the territory. One man stood in the path of the 12,000-strong British army, with a motley force of 5,000 regulars and militiamen: General Andrew Jackson. His masterful strategy won the battle of New Orleans, January 8, 1815, and kept Louisiana for the United States. But that victory had other, non-diplomatic consequences: the Redcoats’ debacle turned the General into a national hero and reinforced the Americans’ self-respect and pride. Peace envoy Albert Gallatin noted that this Second War of Independence, as it was called, had made Americans “feel and act more as a nation.” To some extent, it put Andrew Jackson on an equal footing with George Washington.

Synthèse en français Andrew Jackson à la Maison Blanche 76

KEYWORDS The Missouri Compromise 69 The Spoils System 71

PEOPLE H. Clay J. Marshall J.C. Calhoun

68 70 74

FOCUS The Trail of Tears: the Removal of the Cherokees 72

Opposite: Cartoon representing Andrew Jackson as a dictator.

March 4, 1829 – Andrew Jackson President 67

Henry CLAY 1777-1852 A Virginian by birth, Henry Clay grew up in a part of Hanover County called the “Slashes” (which would earn him the nickname “The Mill Boy of the Slashes”), then moved to Kentucky when he was twenty. He started there a very promising political career, was elected to Congress and became one of the youngest Speakers of the House of Representatives in 1811. His eloquence, like Calhoun’s, served those who wanted war with Britain in 1812. But Clay was more than just an orator; he had a nationbuilder’s ideas. The “American System” he imagined in the 1820s was a grand compromise between eastern and western interests (then rather antagonistic), aimed at turning the United States into a real competitor for Britain and other European nations. Clay had a taste, and a particular gift for bargaining and working out such compromises. He was to be instrumental in the drafting of the Missouri Compromise of 1820; then, he would find a way out of the Nullification crisis of 1832 and engineer a new tariff in 1833, more acceptable to South Carolinians. Finally, in old age, he was the architect of the famous Compromise of 1850 on slavery and the admission of new states in the West and the Southwest. For these achievements, Clay was hailed as the Great Compromiser or the Great Pacificator.

But “Old Hickory”, as people nicknamed him for his physical and mental toughness, would have to wait another decade before being elected President. His progress to the White House was long and tortuous with a succession of political ambushes which tested his soldier’s skills more surely than the British or the Indians had done. The Indian question was precisely what almost ruined Andrew Jackson’s chances of ever making a political career. As commander of American forces along the border with Spanish Florida, Jackson was instructed in March 1818 to cross over into Spanish territory to punish the Seminole Indians who regularly raided borderline American settlements. The General freely interpreted his orders and not only subdued most of the Seminoles and executed two British agitators who had been exciting the natives against the U.S., but marched all the way to Pensacola and, on May 25, 1818, removed the Spanish Governor. These initiatives did lead Spain to cede Florida to the United States the next year; they also confirmed Jackson as the most popular Tennessean in the country; but in political circles, they spread some doubt as to the General’s reliability and respect for democratic principles. Indeed, Jackson’s failure to win the election against John Quincy Adams in 1824 was largely an expression of political mistrust: Jackson had scored 12 points more than Adams in the popular vote (43% to 31%), but only 6 points more in the electoral college vote (38% to 32%). Neither of the candidates, however, had won a majority and the election had to be decided in the House of Representatives, on a one-State-one-vote basis. Capitol Hill was not New Orleans or Pensacola and Jackson, here, was defeated by superior tacticians. Even though Adams was said to have struck a corrupt alliance with a third candidate, Henry Clay, Jackson was left with no other prospect than another presidential contest, four years later.

CIRCUMSTANCES

A

fter twenty years of international turmoil, the Peace of Ghent inaugurated what, in America, was called an “Era of Good Feelings”. At home, political tensions abated with the collapse of the Federalists, discredited by their anti-war position of 1812, especially in an age of revivified patriotism. Abroad, the United States sought to introduce some diplomatic distance between Europe and America: the “Monroe Doctrine” of 1823 hardly pleased European powers as it established a sort of moral protectorate of

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KEYWORD

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE The Louisiana Purchase had opened to settlement a huge trans-Mississippi region where slavery existed by French law. The southern part of that territory was organized as the State of Louisiana and entered the Union in 1812 as a slave state. The remaining northern and western portions of the Louisiana Purchase were organized as the Missouri Territory (December 1812) and the Arkansas Territory (July 1819). The political balance between North and South was maintained through those years (1803-1819) by admitting alternately slave and free states. When time came (1819) for Missouri to petition for statehood, the question was raised of whether the new state would authorize or ban slaveholding. There were then about 3,000 slaves in the upper Louisiana country, yet most of Missouri lay north of the dividing line between freedom and slavery. The crux of the problem, however, was political representation — i.e. power — in Congress. The more densely populated northern, free states had the upper hand in the House of Representatives (105 votes to 81 for the South) and intended to keep it. Southerners sought to restore a better sectional balance while asserting their rights to expand west of the Mississippi. When the admission bill for Missouri came before the House in February 1819, Representative James Tallmadge (New York) initiated an amendment prohibiting the further

introduction of slaves into the future state. A heated debate followed; each side threatened the other with reprisals, and the decision was postponed until the next congressional session. In December 1819 the people of Maine petitioned for admission to statehood and a proposition was introduced in February 1820 to combine the admission of Maine as a free state with that of Missouri as a slaveholding state. Balance would thus be preserved. An additional amendment by Senator Jesse Thomas (Illinois), however, provided that slavery would be excluded from the Louisiana Purchase north of the line 36° 30?. This compromise bill shuttled for a time between the House and the Senate, until March 3, 1820 when it was finally voted by the House: Maine was admitted as the 23rd state of the Union two weeks later, bringing the count of free states to 12. Missouri came next, in August 1821, and restored perfect equality between free and slaveholding states. As for the 36° 30? dividing line, it seemed to guarantee sectional balance for the future. It gave Americans an illusion of political, social and moral security. The slavery issue was put to rest for about thirty years; yet the conflict would flare up again when other western territories (like Kansas and Nebraska) sought, in turn, to join the Union (see maps p. 97).

the United States over the rest of the American continent, north and south, and denied Europe any right to further involvement in the affairs of the New World. Threats, however, were not to come from the outside. With Federalists adrift, partisan rivalries declined, momentarily, but political debate remained intense, especially over territorial expansion and slavery. The question of turning purchased territories into slave or free states provided a burning issue that, for a brief moment, almost split the nation. The 1820 Missouri Compromise preserved a perfect balance between the number of free and slave states (12 to 12), and saved the Union. But the foundations of the Republic had revealed some ominous fissures throug which the poison of secession slowly began to leak.

March 4, 1829 – Andrew Jackson President 69

John MARSHALL 1755-1835 The Virginia judge was the only Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court to stay at the helm 34 full years (1801-1835), in the strategic period when the nation was taking shape. He was a perfect incarnation of the “checks and balances” system since his tenure of office extended over nine successive administrations and he worked with five different presidents. Throughout his term of office, he claimed a prominent role for the Supreme Court, starting with the first of all powers, that of reviewing the contents of legislation to ascertain their constitutionality (Marbury v. Madison, 1803, and Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, 1816). Marshall’s Court constantly recalled and defended the concept of the Constitution as the “supreme law of the land”, and fought to establish the powers of the federal government. Marshall’s stubborn adherence to his principles led, at times, to clashes with the executive. His antagonism to states’ righter Jefferson, for example, led him to push for the acquittal of Aaron Burr in 1807, much to the President’s dismay. For similar reasons, he would fight Andrew Jackson’s Indian policy of removal of the Cherokee Indians (Worcester v. Georgia, 1832). His last years in office were made harder by Jackson’s appointment of new justices favorable to his own views. Two years after Marshall’s death, the Supreme Court, under Roger B. Taney, had become, at last, fairly manageable by White House standards.

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Similar cracks appeared within the Republican party which, in several states, split up into democratic and conservative factions. Basically they disagreed over issues of state versus federal power, like Jeffersonians and Federalists in the old days. Yet, increasingly, problems of political philosophy yielded to more concrete concerns; except for the Supreme Court where Chief Justice John Marshall still framed opinions in terms of broad concepts and high principles, the nation was busy solving problems of economic growth and daily welfare. Political parties and political life, not ideology, needed some reconstruction. And General Jackson, with his old war record and habit of command, seemed just the man to do it. As soldier he was adulated, especially in the South; as Tennessean and selfmade hero, he was a symbolic figure of democracy that appealed particularly to rough, uneducated, frontiersmen who saw in him the incarnation of an ideal. His victory in the 1828 presidential election clearly showed the people’s rejection of old patterns and, for the first time, the importance of the western states. Jackson carried 14 full states, all in the south and the west, against only 8 to the incumbent President Adams. Only Maine, New York and Maryland split their electoral votes between the two candidates. With a comfortable 68% to 32% victory in the electoral college, Jackson could safely proceed with the “reforms” he had promised throughout his campaign. It turned out, however, that “reforms” were, for Jackson, largely an excuse for the exercise of personal power. Paradoxically, his idea of democracy and popular sovereignty was based on a strong executive. To the extent that his opponents came to call him King Andrew and refer to themselves as Whigs, after those who had fought royal despotism in 17th-century England. He posed as a reformist because the Adams administration had been charged – wrongly – with widespread corruption. Yet, characteristically, he was the one who transformed simple rotation in office into a system of political rewards, known as the “Spoils System”. Dismissal of civil servants and public officers, and their replacement by loyal supporters of the President was for Jackson a way to preserve the homogeneity of his Administration, but it hardly seemed a democratic initiative. In fact, Jackson’s executive policies were inspired by a highly pragmatic approach to problems, and by his own personal prejudices. The General-President never cared much about intellectual inconsistencies. Nor did, it seems, the average American voter who returned him triumphantly to the White House for a second term, in 1832.

KEYWORD

THE SPOILS SYSTEM frontiersman from Tennessee, claimed that public offices had, for too long, been in the hands of New England and Virginia dynasties and that the whole system needed some democratic rehauling.

Accusations of corruption against the Adams Administration, the necessity for reforms and the need to reward supporters, led the new President, Andrew Jackson, to adopt at federal level a system of rotation in office that already existed in most of the northern states. About 10% of the federal jobs became vacant after the previous Administration’s employees had been removed by the new executive. These positions were filled, along exclusively partisan lines, by men entirely devoted to the President and his policies. This generalization of political patronage was admittedly effected to open civil service to a larger category of ordinary American citizens. Jackson, the

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In fact the “spoils system” introduced no geographical or social redistribution of power: the new Jackson appointees differed little from their predecessors. But it strengthened the positions of parties in the American political system, and introduced in the latter, at best, the dynamics of change, renewal and achievement, at worst, the plague of incompetence and corruption.

CREEK 1832

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NORTH CAROLINA SOUTH CAROLINA

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SEMINOLES

Ceded to Indians

Indian Removal, 1830s.



March 4, 1829 – Andrew Jackson President 71

FOCUS

THE TRAIL OF TEARS The Removal of the Cherokees

Ever since his Florida campaign of 1818, Jackson had been known for his violent dislike of Indians, Seminoles and others. His presidency, unfortunately for native Americans, coincided with the beginnings of a massive push westward on the part of white populations. Once peace agreements had been reached with England in the Northwest and West, and with Spain in the South, the only obstacles to American western expansion were the swarming Indian tribes spread almost uninterruptedly from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. To make way for “civilization” they had to be removed. Both Monroe and John Quincy Adams had sought to achieve removal through bona fide treaties, out of genuine – even though paternalistic – concern for their survival. With Jackson, humanitarian concerns easily yielded to greed and duplicity. Responding to demands that he described as popular but which came essentially from planters and speculators, the President resolved to accelerate the relocation of Indian tribes beyond the Mississippi River, in what was known as “Indian Country”. Jefferson had first conceived this segregation policy at the turn of the century, and John Quincy Adams had sealed it with a 1825 decision fixing the Indian frontier along the 95th meridian. A Bureau of Indian Affairs, created in 1824, was expected to supervise the migration of the undesirable tribes. Under Superintendent Thomas L. McKenney, the Bureau was to coutenance all types of exactions against the Indians, from simple bribery to physical intimidation and military coercion. Officially, the government’s policy was to “persuade” the Indian people to sell their land, preferably through treaties. But even treaties would not do justice to the natives. In a 1823 decision, Johnson and Graham Lesse v. William Mclntosh, the Supreme Court had already affirmed the Americans’ rights to appropriate the settled territories, leaving only the usufruct of the land to the Indians. 72

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This denial of Indian sovereignty over their territory naturally helped to legitimize the subsequent deportation of thousands of “redskins”. And the Indians, especially the Old Northwest tribes, were for a time easily deceived into thinking that removal would work well for them. Yet, in the Southeast, the Five Civilized Nations–Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles – provided much tougher resistance. The case of the Cherokees shows perfectly how American democracy may sometimes stumble on its own principles and break its word if not its neck. Taking advantage of his 1814 victory against the Creeks (Horseshoe Bend, Alabama), General Jackson tried to manoeuver the Cherokees of Georgia into signing a treaty that ousted them from their tribal lands but offered an equal amount of western lands in exchange. As a subversive strategy, his plan succeeded: the Cherokees, in 1817, divided over the issue and a number of them (about 6,000) accepted the deal and moved to Arkansas. A majority, though, chose to remain in Georgia, forming a class of homestead planters particularly repulsive to the white community. Not only did the Georgia Cherokees claim an ancestral right to their land, but also they unexpectedly welcomed and assimilated white “civilization”, thus depriving Georgians of their stock arguments against “savages”. A missionary school system had been established on tribal territory after 1800; the Cherokees, thanks to one literate native named Sequoyah and the “syllabary” he invented, switched to a written culture; they learned to read and write, published a newspaper in their native language (the Cherokee Phoenix, first published 21 February 1828); they even emulated the white man’s political system with legislatures, a Supreme Court and, in 1827, a Constitution. By the mid-1820s, the Cherokee nation had reached a level of culture and prosperity unequalled by local white society: they numbered around 14,000 (including half-breeds), with 1,300 slaves, 22,000

head of cattle, 7,600 horses, 46,000 pigs, plus some handicraft and manufacturing equipment. But precisely because they met most of the Americans’ “civilized” standards they threatened the white world more surely than if they had kept their “primitive” status. Georgia bluntly claimed their land in 1828 and offered a treaty with land compensation representing one-sixth of the disputed territory. The Cherokees brought the matter before federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court had to decide on two similar cases in a two-year span: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and the landmark Worcester v. Georgia (1832). Chief justice John Marshall sent mixed signals to the plaintiffs: in the first decision, the Court recognized the legitimacy of Cherokee sovereignty over tribal territory, yet refused to grant them standing in federal courts. The second decision turned the Indians into pawns in a white man’s political debate about the respective powers of the states and the national government. In writing the majority decision, Marshall intended to kill two birds with the same stone: the Court did recognize the Cherokees as a distinct entity within the State of Georgia, but further declared that no Georgia law could apply to Indian territory; only federal laws were applicable. John Marshall drew immediate fire from President Jackson for this Federalist opinion. The latter refused to follow up on the Court’s decision and snapped: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!”. The President then quietly went on implementing the Indian Removal Act that Congress had passed on May 28, 1830, and encouraged Georgians to renew their proposals to the Cherokees. With the help of agents from the Indian Bureau a treaty was finally signed in December 1835 (New Echota Treaty) with a minority of gullible natives that opened wide the door to exile. John Ross, the President of the Cherokee legislature, and a few other native leaders tried to have the infamous agreement rescinded in Congress, but failed.

Not only had the Cherokees been coerced and fooled into leaving their ancestral land, but the splendid unity that had allowed them to defy the white man’s power was gone: a rift – eventually a violent one – opened between radicals, who refused removal, and those who considered American promises as a fair bargain. Yet the blood feud that ensued between the two factions pales in comparison with the organized decimation of the Cherokee nation entailed by its removal to distant Oklahoma after 1838. Out of the 15,000 Cherokees that were forced to trek westward on the 1,500 mile “Trail of Tears” to their new territory, 4,000 died on the way. The survivors, thanks to their remarkable sense of organization and belief in native identity, managed, in the 1840s, to reconstitute in Oklahoma much of their former lifestyle and most of their former institutions.

Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet.

March 4, 1829 – Andrew Jackson President 73

“Trail of Tears” (Painting by Robert Lindneux). The forcible removal of the Cherokees, 1838.

John C. CALHOUN 1782-1850 The Calhouns were moderately wealthy planters of Scotch Irish descent, established in western South Carolina. They believed in education (the family later included a president of the University of Georgia) and sent their son John Caldwell to study at Yale. He graduated in 1804, then became a lawyer in Abbeville, South Carolina. At 26 he entered politics as member of his state’s legislature. Elected representative to Congress in 1811, he served three terms and became known for his bellicose speeches against Britain during the War of 1812. President Monroe ••• 74

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CONSEQUENCES

J

ackson’s personal hatreds and impatience with opposition turned the Jeffersonian champion of states’ rights that he was into a thoroughgoing Federalist. A sweeping tariff law, increasing customs duties on many manufactured goods, mostly to protect industries in New England and the Old Northwest, had been voted in 1828, just before Jackson’s election. General protest, in the rest of the country, against that “Tariff of Abominations” soon turned into a test of wills between southern states – especially Vice-President John C. Calhoun’s South Carolina – and the federal government. When, in November 1832, South Carolina declared the tariff null and void, they offended Jackson’s self-esteem as much as they endangered the sacred Union he had pledged to defend. But his immediate and muscular response to the “South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification” and the explicit threat of secession it contained, was

inspired by the Constitution and reaffirmed the basic rights of the federal government. “Each State,” Jackson stressed in a Proclamation, two weeks later, “cannot possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league but destroys the unity of a nation.” Twenty-eight years hence, answering the same call for secession from the same State, Republican Abraham Lincoln would use strikingly similar words. When the Federalist doctrine seemed to contradict his views, however, Jackson could instantly put it aside and find substitute arguments that suited his interests better. Such was the case when he decided to remove Indians further west (see pp. 71–72), leaving state authorities to deal freely with the local tribes, even refusing to uphold the Supreme Court’s Worcester v. Georgia decision (1832) stipulating that the Indian nation was a distinct community not subject to Georgia’s laws. When it came to economic policies, Jackson again showed an Antifederalist bias. His version of democracy, as applied to economic development, generally favored private and local initiatives over national programs. Business was under-regulated and speculation as lucrative as ever. The only truly federal institution capable of giving some direction to economic growth was the Bank of the United States – a forty-year-old Federalist organism, founded by Alexander Hamilton in the early days of the Republic. Under conservative financier Nicholas Biddle, the Bank had turned into the nation’s largest corporation and controlled most of the capital flow and credit operations in the country. Describing it as a “monster”, a monopoly and an instrument of privilege that should be abolished, President Jackson saw an opportunity there to put his egalitarian views into practice. He played the perfect matador to this unfortunate bull, pledging to finish his opponent off before it could destroy democracy. And the Bank did collapse under Jackson’s slashing attacks in 1833. Credit and money transactions were decentralized to state banks. This move reactivated speculation and opened a series of financial crises that hardly benefited the average American citizen. The major gain of this Bank battle was, in fact, political: it gave an identity to Jacksonian democracy and to the party that supported the President. From now on, Democrats and Whigs (later Republicans) would form the backbone of the American party system and, in a brief lapse of time, bring the United States to political maturity.

••• accordingly appointed him Secretary of War. He then manoeuvered to obtain the vice-presidency in 1824, which he wrongly assumed would propel him to the presidency. His relations with President John Quincy Adams were rather strained; the two men disagreed on almost everything, ideologically and practically. Calhoun was all too glad to join the Democratic-Republicans in their support of Andrew Jackson in 1828. The Jackson-Calhoun ticket won an easy victory. But the two men never got on very well together; serious disagreements soon developed between them, specially on tariffs and state rights. The major split occurred in 1832 over the South Carolina Nullification decision, which Calhoun supported against the President. He had to resign from his vice-presidential post and, save for a brief appointment as Secretary of State in 1844-1845, remained in the Senate for the rest of his life. There, he consistently and eloquently spoke for the rights of southern states and in defense of slavery. He died just as a great debate was held in Congress on the admission of California into the Union as a free State.

March 4, 1829 – Andrew Jackson President 75

ANDREW JACKSON À LA MAISON BLANCHE Le conflit de trois ans qui opposa l’Angleterre aux États-Unis entre 1812 et 1815, la Seconde Guerre d’indépendance pour certains, une querelle commerciale stérile pour d’autres, s’acheva sur la signature du traité de Gand, le 24 décembre 1814, Mais alors même que les émissaires américains (dont John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay et Albert Gallatin) faisaient péniblement progresser les négociations en Belgique, une bataille décisive se jouait en Louisiane. La flotte anglaise avait en effet reçu l’ordre d’occuper La Nouvelle-Orléans et d’annexer le plus de territoire possible dans le sud des États-Unis, avant la conclusion des pourparlers de paix. L’Angleterre réaliserait donc enfin son vieux rêve d’empire américain dont Napoléon Bonaparte l’avait frustrée en cédant la Louisiane à Jefferson. Pourtant, un seul homme à nouveau devait anéantir ces ambitions : à la tête d’un corps hétéroclite de 5 000 miliciens et soldats de métier, le Général Andrew Jackson remporta brillamment la bataille de La Nouvelle-Orléans contre 12 000 Britanniques parfaitement entraînés. En ce 8 janvier 1815 les deux armées n’étaient déjà plus officiellement en guerre, mais l’ignoraient. L’Amérique, elle, y gagnait un héros, le seul qui ait vraiment marqué cette époque morose et accédé, sous le nom de Old Hickory (“vieux noyer”), au statut d’emblème national – au même titre qu’Uncle Sam ou la Star-Spangled Banner, deux autres produits de cette guerre.

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Les états de service du général Jackson n’étaient toutefois pas irréprochables. La manière forte, pour ne pas dire sauvage, qu’il adopta contre les Indiens, les Creeks d’abord au Tennessee et en Alabama, puis les Séminoles en Floride, révélaient un tempérament fougueux peu apprécié à Washington. De plus, en mai 1818, il avait outrepassé ses ordres en Floride, exécuté sommairement deux espions britanniques et expulsé le gouverneur de cette province encore espagnole. Certes, l’opération força l’Espagne à céder la Floride aux États-Unis l’année suivante, mais fit fort mauvaise impression dans les milieux politiques. On s’interrogea sur la probité du général et sa fidélité à l’ordre démocratique. Et quoique immensément populaire, Jackson ne put conquérir en 1824 une présidence à laquelle à la fois les électeurs américains et le collège électoral l’avaient porté. En effet, faute de majorité absolue, l’élection présidentielle se décida à la Chambre des représentants. La réputation de Jackson joua contre lui et on lui préféra le moins imprévisible John Quincy Adams. Jackson dut attendre encore quatre ans pour entrer à la Maison Blanche. Mais son arrivée annonçait des changements salutaires de la politique américaine. Homme de la Frontière, soldat et héros de guerre, Jackson avait une conception autoritaire du pouvoir exécutif – certains finirent par l’appeler le Roi Andrew – mais pour l’Américain ordinaire il était

toujours un symbole vivant de la démocratie. Et le Président sut habilement jouer de cet engouement populaire. Son action se présente ainsi sous la forme d’un ensemble de décisions parfois contradictoires car Jackson ne s’embarrassait ni de principes, ni de doctrines même s’il se posait en réformiste ou en ennemi juré des privilèges. La démocratie jacksonienne emprunte donc peu au dogmatisme des factions politiques traditionnelles ; au contraire, elle colle aux événements et aux transformations de la société américaine avec pour unique souci de préserver les libertés individuelles et l’unité nationale. On vit ainsi ce Jeffersonien convaincu, champion d’une autonomie raisonnée des États, se muer en fédéraliste acharné lorsque les nécessités de sa charge l’exigèrent. La Caroline du Sud en fit l’amère expérience lorsqu’en 1832 elle tenta de s’opposer aux tarifs douaniers votés par le Congrès en 1828, juste avant l’accession de Jackson. Ces tarifs protectionnistes servaient avant tout les intérêts industriels du Nord mais pénalisaient le Sud en renchérissant des produits d’importation essentiels. Quand l’Assemblée de Charleston vota une ordonnance d’annulation contre ces tarifs (alors désignés un peu partout du nom de “Tarifs abominables”) Jackson, sans hésiter, envoya la troupe et exigea soumission. Il étouffa ainsi dans l’œuf une tentative de sécession que cette même Caroline du Sud réitérerait vingthuit ans plus tard, avec encore plus d’ardeur. Ce fédéralisme de circonstance ne s’appliquait ni à la politique indienne (Jackson devait laisser les états libres de pratiquer les stratégies qui leur convenaient le mieux), ni à la politique économique, où le Président s’employa à démanteler les monopoles, y compris la vénérable Bank of the United States, l’un des fleurons du pouvoir fédéral.

L’attaque contre cette banque, créée en 1789 par le fédéraliste Alexander Hamilton, se fit dans le cadre de la croisade contre les privilèges que Jackson avait entreprise au nom de principes égalitariens, louables mais creux. On était, en effet, en droit de douter du respect pour l’égalité affirmé par un homme qui, après avoir tancé le président sortant en 1828 pour la corruption de son équipe, introduisit pour la sienne un système de rétribution automatique (par des promotions ou des emplois) de tous les amis politiques – le fameux Spoils System. Les mauvaises langues dirent même que la haine vouée par Jackson à la banque remontait à de vieux revers de fortune dont le général tenait l’institution pour responsable. La banque fut en réalité un bouc-émissaire et l’occasion rêvée pour Jackson de s’identifier un peu plus, aux yeux des petites gens, à l’idéal démocratique des pères fondateurs. En refusant de signer, en 1833, la charte qui prolongerait la vie de cette banque, Jackson privait le pays d’un organisme financier central, facteur d’équilibre et de confiance, et précipitait l’apparition de spéculations et de crises, nombreuses dans le demi-siècle qui suivit. Mais il modifiait aussi durablement le paysage politique américain où l’effondrement du mouvement fédéraliste, à l’issue de la guerre de 1812-1814, avait laissé un vide béant. Face au parti traditionnaliste et conservateur, appelé whig mais bientôt connu comme républicain, Jackson avait constitué autour de lui un groupe politique attaché aux valeurs du peuple et de la liberté (en particulier du laissez-faire économique), qui se désignait comme démocrate. C’est grâce à cette armature partisane, simple mais solide, que les États-Unis devaient atteindre, dans les deux décennies suivantes, leur pleine maturité politique.

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January 24, 1848

THE GOLD RUSH BACKGROUND

T

he Baltimore Democratic Convention of May 1844 chose a “dark horse” as candidate in the forthcoming presidential elections: hardly anyone, except in Washington, knew James Knox Polk when he was elected, later that year, 11th President of the United States over his brilliant nationalist opponent, Republican Henry Clay. It was the expansionist Democratic platform, more than Polk’s personal appeal, that won the day. A revived feeling of America’s “manifest destiny” swept over the nation, as citizens responded favorably to projects of expanding west to the Pacific and south to the Rio Grande, those grand designs of “re-occupying” Oregon and “reannexing” Texas. The Oregon country had, for more than fifty years, been a target of the greed and speculative inclinations of the great powers, Russia, Spain, England, and the United States. The activities of governmentsponsored trading companies and of enterprising capitalists, like John Jacob Astor, gave ample substance to territorial claims. In 1827, a treaty of joint occupation was signed between England and the U.S. Yet Americans, as President James Monroe had made clear in his celebrated speech of 1823, would tolerate no further colonization of the New World by European nations. The lofty dream of filling out the continent to the Pacific would hence-forth inhabit the American psyche. Not until the 1830s, though, did the dream begin to materialize; in fact, Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company thrived on the Columbia River while the Yankee fur trade declined. The appeal of Oregon waned as well until trappers and mountain men, in the early 1830s, returned from occasional forays into the Far West with dithyrambic tales of splendor and abundance.

Synthèse en français La ruée vers l’or 88

KEYWORDS Expansionism 83 El Dorado 83 Gold-Mining: a Short Glossary 87

PEOPLE J.K. Polk J. Sutter J.C. Fremont M. Twain

80 81 85 86

FOCUS The Bear Flag Revolt 84

Opposite: Gold-Mining with sluice-boxes near Nevada City, 1852. January 24, 1848 – The Gold Rush 79

James Knox POLK 1795-1849

Further accounts by Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries, who had settled in Oregon between 1834 and 1836, set American pioneers on a transcontinental march that no danger, physical hardship or diplomatic quibbling could stop. The financial Panic of 1837 conspired to revive interest in distant western lands, with their prospects of happiness and wealth. “Oregon fever” swept over the Middle West after 1842, sending hundreds of pioneers, in covered wagons, on a perilous journey along the “Oregon Trail” into the lush plains of the lower Columbia. By 1845, about 5,000 “emigrants” had reached Oregon country. Time was ripe to renew American claims to this land, especially as the question of establishing a permanent boundary between Canada and the U.S. in the North West was still pending.

Born in North Carolina, James K. Polk moved with his parents to Tennessee when he was still a child. He later studied law at the University of North Carolina, was admitted to the bar at 25 and practised briefly in Columbia, near Nashville, Tennessee, before entering politics. He served 14 consecutive years in Congress as Democratic Representative of Tennessee. A staunch supporter of Andrew Jackson, he was considered as a leader of the Democratic forces on Capitol Hill and he eventually rose to become Speaker of the House (1835-1839). Having retired from Congress, he was elected Governor of Tennessee and, in 1844, unexpectedly came out of the Baltimore Convention as the Democrats’ presidential candidate. He became the 11th President of the United States in November 1844, having defeated his Whig opponent Henry Clay. As President, Polk was responsible for settling the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain (1846) and launching the war with Mexico that confirmed the annexation of Texas and led to the acquisition of important territory in the south-west and west (New Mexico, ••• 80

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Polk finally settled with the British on the 49th parallel despite the insistence of jingoists, who advocated a border much farther north, along 54° 40’. The agreement was ratified by Congress, June 6, 1846, while the United States was at war with Mexico, officially on the question of Texas but actually with an eye to securing another – and extensive – strip of territory along the Pacific Ocean: California. The reasons for taking over this Spanish land ranged from fear of similar expansionist manoeuvres on England’s part to the need of establishing a permanent strategic and commercial outpost on the Pacific coast. California was no rancher’s frontier, like Texas. Its 800 mile-long coastline had made it a maritime province from the start, a destination both for eastward-bound Manila galleons which, from 1565 to 1815, plied between the Philippines and the Americas, and cape-horners that brought occasional American traders. Among the latter was Swiss-born John Sutter, who landed in San Francisco in 1839; two years later, when the Russians abandoned their colony at Fort Ross, he bought their equipment for his New Helvetia estate, in the Sierras. At that time, overland travelers were few: crossing the Rocky Mountains was a feat that only experienced trappers, like Jedediah Smith or James O. Pattie, could accomplish. Even heaven-inspired Mormons, under Brigham Young’s guidance, wisely stopped halfway across the forbidding range in the Great Salt Lake area, their Promised Land, in 1847. The Rockies took their toll with reckless caravans, like the Donner Party, lost in a blizzard; the surviving members of the expedition reportedly resorted to cannibalism during the winter of 1846–47. But most of the pioneers took the easier routes, the Oregon Trail in the north,

which eventually brought them into northern California, and the newly opened Santa Fe Trail in the south, which ushered them into the Los Angeles area. By 1845 there were about 600 Americans in California, half of whom were farmers from the old western frontier who had crossed most of the continent in search of new fertile lands. Like so many American pioneers, they were strong-willed, independent and obstinate, yet prone to mobbish blindness when threatened, and easily manipulated. Fear of the consequences of the war against Mexico, after May 1846, and the prospect of tough laws against immigration roused Californian Americans to action. The conjunction of the Mexican War and of the presence of secretagent-explorer John C. Fremont in California at the crucial moment turned their revolt against Mexican rule, the “Bear Flag Revolt” (see pp. 84–85), into a fight for self-rule. After the rebels had taken Sonoma, Sacramento, and a few other outposts, they were quickly relayed by the regular army of the United States, which pacified the rest of California. What Jackson and Tyler had failed to obtain when their repeated offers to buy California had been turned down by Mexico, James Polk had secured by force under cover of a military operation to preserve U.S. interests in Texas. In fact, the western campaign of General Stephen W. Kearny had been planned from the start. And Los Angeles fell to American troops in January 1847, a full eight months before Mexico City. Territorial negotiations, following American victory, were conducted by peace commissioner Nicholas Trist, who obtained substantial concessions from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 2, 1848. Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California became American territory. Nothing would now hinder emigration to El Dorado. The momentum thus created would have led to a slow but steady settlement of California, much as the (often coercive) displacement of Indian tribes had done in the Midwest. Yet, a few days before Guadalupe Hidalgo, on January 24, 1848, the discovery of gold sent shock waves throughout the country and the world: the Gold Rush was under way.

CIRCUMSTANCES

O

n the morning of January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall was working on the tailrace of a sawmill John Sutter was constructing on a fork of the American River, near Coloma, 60

••• Arizona, California, Utah, etc.). Because of failing health, he refused to run for another term in 1848. He died in June 1849, soon after the Whig candidate General Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican War, had succeeded him in office.

John (Johann) Augustus SUTTER 1803-1880 A Swiss immigrant, he settled in the Central Valley of California in 1839. His 50,000 acre estate, known as New Helvetia, was located near the junction of the Sacramento and American Rivers and protected by Sutter’s Fort from which the present city of Sacramento grew. By the time gold was discovered on the site of his sawmill in Coloma, he owned about 30,000 head of cattle and employed 1,000 workers. The sudden influx of Forty-Niners, however, proved to be a plague rather than a blessing for the wealthy colonist: he lost many of his workers, who left the farm to go panning in the Sierras. In 1850, starving miners plundered his wheat crop, cattle rustlers stole his livestock, and squatters started settling on his land. He had to sell most of his property around the Fort, to allow for the development of the city. The population of Sacramento doubled in the next ten years. And Sutter, whose legal rights to the land were continuously challenged, in court and in the streets, by greedy newcomers, ended his life a ruined man and a recluse, in Pennsylvania. January 24, 1848 – The Gold Rush 81

Advertising for the California Gold Rush (French engraving, 1848).

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San Diego

IMPERIAL VALLEY

KEYWORDS

EXPANSIONISM A distinction should be made between fact and doctrine: territorial expansion over the North American continent started with colonization and was fueled by continuous immigration. Land acquisition provided living space for a growing population: pioneers settled new territory as they cleared forests and ploughed the earth. Eventually the process of land addition had to be institutionalized: the first example was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Further expansion in the South and the West was achieved through war with Mexico (1846–48) and the Gadsden Purchase (1853). By that time, settling the continent from coast to

coast had become a matter of national policy. James Polk and others maintained that it was America’s “manifest destiny” to fill out its natural borders. Expansionism turned into a doctrinal issue, and when added to President Monroe’s views on the defense of American interests in the New World, justified U.S. military intervention to confirm Texas’s independence or support California’s revolt. Though the United States was reluctant to extend its territory beyond its continental limits, expansionism would survive and later become largely a matter of economic interests and ideology.

EL DORADO This was a fictitious region of America, rich in gold, which Spanish conquistadores imagined as located between the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers. The myth of gold and unwonted riches concealed in the most unreachable places never ceased turning men into adventurers. Before the American “Forty-Niners” yielded to the lure of Californian gold, other Spanish adelantados had tried to verify the legend of Gran Quivira in Colombia and the Seven Cities of Cibola in New Spain. The latter were the object of the exploration of Texas by Panfilo de Narvaez in 1527 and

that of the Grand Canyon and Kansas by Francisco Coronado in 1540. California itself, in a medieval legend, was assumed to be a land close to Paradise, rich in gold and gemstones, and peopled by Amazons. The aura of prosperity and happiness remained attached to this far west region until gold was in fact discovered. Nevada, New South Wales (Australia), or the Klondike (Alaska) would, until the end of the century, also answer man’s lust for adventure and wealth, with diverse results.

miles from his New Helvetia estate (see p. 81). He suddenly came across a golden nuggett that acid tests proved to be fine 22-carat gold. Sutter, who had rented the Coloma land from local Indians, did his best to cover up the find until he could secure title to the property from Governor Mason in Monterey. But somehow the news leaked out: Sutter’s own Mormon workers contacted their San Francisco brethren who immediately set out for Coloma. As they were nearing their destination, they, too, came upon a vein in April of 1848. A month later San Francisco was abuzz over the discovery: there was gold “in them [sic] hills”. Skepticism quickly gave way, yielding to an unprecedented frenzy. From all parts of the state people hastened to the Sierras; gold fever was beginning to infect the minds of fortune-seekers. No sense of order or duty, no discipline could deter the people from pursuing their dream:

January 24, 1848 – The Gold Rush 83

FOCUS

THE BEAR FLAG REVOLT By the time Congress had declared war on Mexico (May 13, 1846) American settlers in California had become restless over measures that Mexicans were rumored to be taking against their property rights and further immigration. Thomas O. Larkin, the American Consul at Monterey, had earlier received a dispatch from the War Department (October 1845) which unequivocally suggested that California should emulate the example of the Texas rebellion Sam Houston had led a decade before: “If the people should desire to unite their destiny with ours,” the text read, “they would be received as brethren.” Meanwhile, John C. Fremont had been sent on his third expedition to the Rockies, officially to discover the best passes from the Great Basin to California. Oral instructions, however, ordered him to make ready for a clash with the Mexicans. And his “scientific” party was unusually martial, with 60 fullyarmed men. In the Great Basin, Fremont’s group was separated in two: one band, led by Joseph Walker and Kit Carson, would cross the Sierras to the south; the other, under Fremont, would take a northern route. The latter reached Fort Sutter early in December and immediately moved south to meet Walker, near San Jose, in mid-February 1846. The whole party made for Monterey for supplies, then started on the journey back. About 30 miles from Monterey, the impetuous military Governor Jose Castro ordered them all out of California. Fremont retreated to the Sacramento Valley then continued on to Oregon where he did some surveying, and waited. On May 6, 1846, a messenger from Washington, Lieutenant Gillespie, caught up with the group and gave Fremont new instructions that, as he later claimed, “absolved [him] from [his] duty as an explorer,” and left him with his “duty as an officer of the American Army with further authoritative knowledge that the Government intended to take California.” 84

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Fremont must have known by then that an entire army, led by Stephen W. Kearny, had left Fort Leavenworth to establish U.S. control over New Mexico and California. Meanwhile, an American naval unit, under the command of Commodore John D. Sloat, left the Mexican port of Mazatlan, June 8, and sailed north towards San Diego and Monterey. As for the American colonists, they were getting ready for violent action. Early on the morning of June 14, 1846 a group of 34 settlers, most of them Americans, led by William B. Ide, occupied the garrison town of Sonoma and took the local Commandant, Vallejo, prisoner. Having fortified the town, they issued a proclamation to the people the next day, to the effect of declaring California an independent republic, and hoisted their new flag: white field and red border, with a Bear and a Star in the middle. The Bear Flag would wave over Sonoma for more than three weeks, while American forces under the command of Commodore Sloat secured Monterey (July 7), then San Francisco, Sonoma and Fort Sutter. Outnumbered, Jose Castro and the Mexicans capitulated. The intervention of American regulars in California signalled the end of the Bear Flag Revolt as such. But a Bear Flag “batallion” subsequently accompanied American troops, under joint command of Fremont and Commodore Robert F. Stockton (Sloat’s successor), in their conquest of Southern California which lasted six months ending with the Cahuenga Capitulation of January 13, 1847. Bearflaggers were then disbanded and went back to their civil occupations. The revolt against Mexican rule once over, fighting for self-government would remain Californians’ primary concern after peace had been signed with Mexico. Throughout 1848 and 1849 the Bear Flag spirit threatened many times to turn protest over the slowness of the “Americanization” of California into a bloody fight. A constitutional convention was called in Monterey in September

John Charles FREMONT 1813-1890 1849; by mid-October the Constitution was drawn up, and was ratified the following month by popular vote. California was ready for statehood (to be granted a year later by the U.S. Congress) with, fittingly enough, the Bear Flag as state flag, later completed by other unique symbols: the golden poppy as state flower, and the quail as state bird.

Born in Georgia of French immigrant stock, Fremont entered the Navy as teacher of mathematics in 1833, then took part in various geological surveys and finally served as lieutenant in the Topographical Corps. His career took a sharp turn in 1841, when he married Jessie Benton, the daughter of powerful Thomas Hart Benton, Senator for Missouri. Strongly recommended by his father-in-law, he obtained command of a government exploring expedition to the Far West in 1842. This was the first of a series of five expeditions, extending to 1853, whose nominal object was to survey the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada and California. The most important of these proved to be the third (1845-46), during which Fremont became involved in the “conquest” of California. With the help of his wife Jessie, he wrote two reports of his expeditions that remained, for a long time, reference guides for would-be emigrants to the West. He later took part in the Gold Rush, when a lode was struck on his Mariposa estate, near Yosemite. Wealth was thus added to his popular appeal and he was elected as one of the first two Senators from the new State of California. A few years later (1856), he won the Republican nomination for President, but lost the election to James Buchanan. An undistinguished general during the Civil War, he subsequently became territorial Governor of Arizona. Most of his wealth, however, was lost in risky business investments and he died in almost complete anonymity.



January 24, 1848 – The Gold Rush 85

Mark TWAIN 1835-1910 Born in Hannibal, Missouri, and successively an apprentice in a printer’s office, a journalist in his brother Orion’s local newspaper, and a pilot on the Mississippi River, Samuel Langhorne Clemens came West at the time of the Civil War. He was then 27 and had briefly served in a Confederate militia. Following his brother, who had been appointed secretary to the Governor of the Nevada territory, he arrived in Carson City late in 1861 and began prospecting for gold and silver in the Esmeralda district, near Aurora. Although his mining ventures rapidly failed, he discovered that he could write sketches and stories that met with considerable success among the pioneer community. He sent some to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise which immediately hired him as reporter. He worked for the newspaper from August 1862 to May 1864 and was read throughout the Comstock Lode, the Sierras, and as far away as San Francisco. In the meantime he adopted a pen name, Mark Twain (borrowed from one of the star writers of the New Orleans Picayune, Isaiah Sellers), left the Sierras and went to work for several San Francisco newspapers. A few more (unsuccessful) attempts at hitting paydirt in Angels Camp, towards the end of 1864, gave Twain material to write his first true short story, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”, later renamed “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”. The writer left California for good in December 1866; he later recorded most of his western adventures in Roughing It (1871).

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soldiers and seamen defected, servants ran away, craftsmen closed shop and farmers mortgaged their farms. By the end of summer, the news had spread throughout the Pacific Northwest and reached Hawaii. By the end of the year boatloads of would-be gold-diggers were leaving Valparaiso, Manila and Sydney. In a few months 10,000 newcomers had made theirs the banks of the American River and of neighboring streams. There was enough gold for them in the placers and had the fever abated then and the erratic rush stopped, most of the miners would eventually have received ample reward for their toil. But in his annual message to Congress of December 5, 1848, President Polk confirmed to the whole nation that gold had been found in California. That was an indirect, yet unassailable, way of justifying both the Mexican War and his western policy, just what was needed to pacify those who had found the Mexican adventure too costly, and the indemnity for acquiring California too high. Polk, however, failed to measure the impact his words would have, not on his fellow politicians, but on his fellow citizens. Within days the contagious excitement of gold had spread throughout the East and the Midwest. Argonauts had a choice of three routes, of unequal length but equally hazardous: one around Cape Horn, for the more patient, which would bring them to San Francisco in a few months – about 16,000 chanced their life in those roaring seas in the year 1849; another through the Isthmus of Panama, much shorter yet so trying that only 6,500 true adventurers chose it; and the overland route that Oregon pioneers had been taking for nearly a decade now. The majority of those who reached California in 1849, the “Forty-Niners”, came the latter way (more than 50,000) starting on their transcontinental journey as soon as winter was over. More gold-miners came from Mexico, western Europe and from as far away as China and Australia. The precarious life that they found in the Sierra foothills hardly disheartened them: they secured whatever tract of land was available along a stream, dug the banks and washed the dirt in a pan (or rocker) for golden nuggets. A system of concessions was established: once a “claim” had been duly registered the miner was entitled to the treasure the ground would yield, provided he keep exploiting the claim continuously. Placer-mining, however, rewarded only a minority of the “Forty-Niners”, for the most part those who had arrived first. For the rest, results proved mostly disappointing, even though gold production never stopped growing until 1852 ($80 million worth extracted that year).

CONSEQUENCES

T

GOLD-MINING A Short Glossary

he shoveling and panning gold-seeker has become a stock image of American history and culture: 80,000 of them had reached California by the end of 1849; 145,000 more would come over the next three years. By that time, California had become the 31st State of the Union and San Francisco, where only 500 lived in pre-Gold Rush days, a swarming city of 35,000 people. But the traditional figure of the miner should not hide other consequences of the discovery of gold in California, which were not simply picturesque.

claim

The first of them was evidently to draw national – and international – attention to the American Far West. Instantly transformed into a modern version of El Dorado, or Cibola, the region would never from this moment on cease to excite the lust of men and quell their prudence. Another “rush” in 1859 would bring a similar crowd of hopeful immigrants to California and Nevada; and the Klondike fever of 1896 was fueled by memories of glorious 49.

cradle or rocker

The second consequence was of a political nature: at a time when mounting factionalism was beginning to make of slavery a national issue, California was used as a pawn in the Congressional battle that opposed Democrats and Whigs. Only at the price of leaving the door opened to slave-holding in the territories of New Mexico and Utah, could a compromise be reached and California finally admitted into the Union as a free State on September 9, 1850, ten months after it had adopted its own constitution (November 13, 1849). A third, more local effect was to displace California’s population from the coast to the interior (despite the impressive growth of San Francisco) and prepare the advent of the Central Valley as the economic heartland of the state. In contrast to other overland migrations, the Gold Rush engendered an urban expansion which the mushrooming of mining towns and the sprawl of cities like San Francisco, Stockton or Sacramento equally illustrate. The influence of the latter grew to the point that it was chosen, instead of the Golden Gate city, as capital of the new state in 1854. On the other hand, the Rush signalled a change of focus in California’s economy; the development of agriculture saved the state from bankruptcy as gold production declined to near-extinction. Twenty years after the Rush, there were more farmers than gold-diggers in California; twenty years more and the State had become the leading agricultural producer in the Union.

a tract of land held by an individual for mining purposes, usually staked out and signalled by a notice. The size of the claims varied according to locality. Failure to work on a claim for ten consecutive days gave any other person a right to “jump” it, i.e. take it away from its owner.

two similar mining implements made of a wooden box with a sieve. Gold-bearing soil was shoveled into the cradle, then washed away by hand or directly by the river stream while the box was shaken (or “rocked”). Heavier gold particles remained at the bottom of the cradle where the miner could retrieve them.

long-tom a wooden trough, up to 12 feet in length and wider at the top than at the end, with a perforated bottom. Dirt was shoveled and water poured at one end of the trough and gold fragments fell through the perforations into boxes placed underneath. A more sophisticated instrument than the pan or the rocker, the long-tom, like its later development, the “sluice box”, was used when panning yielded poor results.

pan or washing-pan a shallow and round metal container (called batea by Mexicans and Spaniards) which miners shook under a stream of river water; dirt and sand were washed away while gold fell to the bottom of the pan.

placer mining the earliest form of gold-mining, which consisted in separating gold particles from the alluvial deposit (placer) – usually gravel or sand – found in a river bed. January 24, 1848 – The Gold Rush 87

LA RUÉE VERS L’OR Le matin du 24 janvier 1848, un ouvrier du nom de James W. Marshall travaillait sur le bief de fuite d’une scierie en construction le long de l’American River, près de Coloma, à une centaine de kilomètres au nord-est de Fort Sutter (aujourd’hui Sacramento). C’était justement pour le compte de John Sutter, colon américain d’origine suisse arrivé en Californie en 1839, qu’il installait là cette scierie, sur des terres indiennes, en bordure des grandes forêts inexploitées au pied de la Sierra Nevada. Marshall découvrit par hasard une pépite que les observations et les tests chimiques révélèrent être de l’or de bon aloi. En dépit de toutes les précautions prises par Sutter pour que l’affaire ne s’ébruite pas, il ne fallut pas trois mois pour que San Francisco soit mise en effervescence grâce, notamment, aux indiscrétions des ouvriers mormons de Sutter. La convoitise ne tarda pas à l’emporter sur le scepticisme initial, chez tous ceux que la rumeur avait atteints. Dès juin 1848, une foule hétéroclite de mineurs improvisés, trappeurs, marins ou soldats déserteurs, domestiques, ouvriers agricoles, fermiers, commerçants, se pressait vers l’American River. Chacun tenta de s’approprier un coin de berge – appelé placer – sur l’un des multiples cours d’eau de la région et, armé de pioche, pelle et batée, commença de filtrer les alluvions. Jusqu’à l’automne, toutefois, le phénomène demeura singulièrement régional. À l’est l’incrédulité l’emportait encore ; la côte pacifique était trop lointaine et ne préoccupait vraiment que les politiciens. À commencer par le président Polk, un démocrate élu en 1844 sur un programme expansionniste qui prévoyait la récupération de l’Oregon (alors sous tutelle conjointe de l’Angleterre et des États-Unis) et l’annexion du Texas. En cette fin de 1848, James K. Polk avait mené à bien l’essentiel de ce programme : il avait eu 88

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recours à la diplomatie pour subtiliser l’Oregon à l’Angleterre, et à la guerre pour arracher le Texas au Mexique. Un traité signé avec Londres le 10 juin 1846 garantissait une frontière durable entre États-Unis et Canada le long du 49e parallèle, laissant du coup l’immense bassin de la Columbia aux seuls Américains. Quant au traité de Guadalupe Hidalgo (2 février 1848), qui mettait fin à la guerre du Mexique, il livrait aux États-Unis le Texas, la Californie et une large portion de territoire dans le sud-ouest contre un dédommagement de 15 millions de dollars, et ce – coïncidences de l’histoire – quelques jours à peine après la découverte de Marshall. Les preuves tangibles de la présence d’or en Californie, apportées dans l’est par de valeureux messagers, finirent par convaincre l’homme de la rue tout en fournissant à l’homme d’État un instrument de propagande inespéré. Le président Polk, dans un message au Congrès le 5 décembre 1848 ouvrit les yeux du monde sur le spectacle chatoyant des pépites californiennes. À partir de ce moment la rumeur devint tumulte et l’on prépara l’invasion des sierras. Il vint des orpailleurs de partout et même des confins de la terre : sud-américains, asiatiques, australiens, européens – tous cédèrent peu à peu à la fièvre de l’or. Les Américains, quant à eux, les fameux Forty-Niners, firent le voyage de Californie soit par le cap Horn, soit par l’isthme de Panama. La plupart, toutefois, se lancèrent à l’assaut du continent dans leurs chariots bâchés – les goélettes des prairies –, empruntant les pistes périlleuses que d’audacieux trappeurs et montagnards avaient, peu auparavant, tracées à travers les Rocheuses. La plus connue, mais aussi la plus longue, était la piste de l’Oregon ; la plus courte, mais aussi la plus hasardeuse, était la piste Walker. Plus de 50 000 émigrants prirent ainsi le chemin du Far West dans la seule année 1849.

Jusqu’à cette fin de décennie, la conquête de l’extrême ouest était demeurée essentiellement une affaire d’aventuriers professionnels, qu’ils fussent commandités par le gouvernement pour ouvrir des passages vers l’occident, ou stimulés par leur seule cupidité. Trappeurs, chasseurs et négociants en peaux formaient le gros de la population locale avant que le pays d’Oregon fasse l’objet d’appétits internationaux. Depuis 1827, l’Angleterre et les États-Unis se partageaient l’occupation de ce territoire mais y avaient des intérêts économiques conflictuels. Il s’ajoutait à cette situation les effets de la doctrine Monroe qui déniait aux puissances européennes tout droit à de nouvelles colonies en Amérique. L’ouverture d’une piste praticable entre le Missouri et la Columbia dans les années 1830, la Panique boursière de 1837, et les perspectives d’une vie plus riante dans les plaines fertiles d’Oregon contribuèrent à hâter le peuplement de la région. Grâce à la fièvre de l’Oregon, il y avait déjà plus de 5 000 Américains sur place en 1845. L’adroit traité anglo-américain de 1846 permit d’ajouter ce territoire au reste des États-Unis continentaux. Mais la politique expansionniste du président Polk avait d’autres desseins : élu d’entre les obscurs en 1844, James K. Polk, ancien gouverneur du Tennessee (patrie de son mentor Andrew Jackson), ne dut de se faire un nom dans l’histoire qu’à sa politique d’annexions territoriales. À l’Oregon, succéda, 12 300 morts plus tard, le Texas, que le général mexicain Antonio de Santa Anna vendit chèrement sur les champs de bataille avant qu’il soit bradé par son gouvernement ; puis la Californie que les révoltés du Bear Flag, avec l’appui d’un agent secret-géomètreaventurier du nom de John Charles Fremont, ravirent aux Mexicains médusés en quelques semaines. Et même si l’armée régulière américaine, envoyée à la rescousse, rencontra

une modeste résistance à Los Angeles, la capitulation de Cahuenga, reçue le 13 janvier 1847 par Fremont lui-même, donnait le signal d’une renonciation globale. Du Rio Colorado au Rio Grande, les États-Unis s’agrandissaient d’un territoire aussi vaste que celui de Louisiane, acheté par Jefferson en 1803. Il fallut trois ans pour que la Californie entre enfin dans l’Union : de vilaines arrière-pensées esclavagistes paralysèrent longtemps au Congrès la procédure d’accès. Encore une fois, la pression populaire fut plus forte : au moment où la Californie devint État, en septembre 1850, sa population avait largement dépassé les 100 000 âmes et devait doubler dans les deux ans à venir. San Francisco était devenue, malgré des incendies répétés, une ville prospère de 35 000 habitants. Soixante mille chercheurs d’or fouillaient la terre et retirèrent 70 tonnes de métal dans l’année; tous vécurent d’espoir mais beaucoup vécurent aussi la désillusion. Cette société hétéroclite rendait à la pauvreté et à l’anonymat tous ceux qui n’avaient pas trouvé le bon filon. Le mineur individuel céda bientôt la place aux associations de mineurs, mieux équipées et financièrement plus solides, puis, à mesure que l’or de surface se raréfiait, aux compagnies minières qui seules purent exploiter l’or en profondeur. Depuis, il y eut d’autres ruées, l’une en 1859 vers le Nevada, une autre en 1896 vers le Klondike, mais celle de 1849 fut unique parce qu’elle permit enfin, d’un seul coup, à l’Amérique de ressentir sa plénitude : « la destinée manifeste » des Américains, celle qui les vouait à occuper et à enrichir de leur présence tout un continent, s’accomplissait. Que le hasard de l’histoire ait conjugué en un même mouvement de croissance la fortuité d’une découverte inattendue et les effets d’une politique guerrière délibérée, en était une preuve suffisante. January 24, 1848 – The Gold Rush 89

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April 14, 1865

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ASSASSINATED Synthèse en français La mort de Lincoln 100

BACKGROUND

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here is a medieval side to the Civil War, to that brutal clash between the dark, evil forces of slavery and the liberating power of abolitionism. The tremendous moral importance of the issue turned the politico-economic contest into a crusade against those heretics of the South who preached political disunion and practised inhuman servitude. The survival of a nation was at stake and, with it, the success of the American democratic experiment. The great secession winter of 1860–61, and the subsequent tragic plunge into war were, as Henry Adams noted, “the first crucial test of our political system.” As in tales of knights and knaves, both the government and the democracy it upheld did survive the trial by fire. But along with the thousands of dead strewn on the fields of battle, from Fort Sumter to Petersburg, the first paladin in this rightful cause lay lifeless in a Washington lodging-house that Saturday of April 1865, an ultimate casualty in the holy war he had waged against secession. Abraham Lincoln knew his fate was irremediably tied to that of the Union ever since he had stepped into national politics with his Senatorial campaign speech in Illinois, 16 June 1858. He spoke, in prophetic tones, of an indivisible nation, of the extinction of slavery, of an upcoming – and even salutary – major crisis. No one then hearing his famous phrase “A house divided against itself cannot stand” could doubt that Lincoln would ever compromise either on the question of national unity or on that of slavery. The latter, he often repeated, was “wrong”, morally and socially, and should be eradicated. This was the kind of argument that carried him to the White House, though with only 39% of the popular vote. Looking at

KEYWORDS Abolitionism 93 The “peculiar institution” 93 A few stereotypes: carpetbaggers, scalawags, redeemers 99

PEOPLE U.S. Grant R.E. Lee J.W. Booth

94 95 98

FOCUS The Dred Scott Case

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Opposite: John Wilkes Booth shoots President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, Washington, D.C.

April 14, 1865 – Abraham Lincoln assassinated 91

the map of election returns for 1860, one already sees the fracture line between the abolitionist, Republican North and the slaveholding, largely Democratic South. When news of Lincoln’s victory reached the South, panic struck white society and the great rebellion was under way even before the President-elect was inaugurated.

Abraham Lincoln photographed in 1865.

South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860, soon followed by Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. Lame-duck President Buchanan, pressured by disunionists within his own administration, did nothing to prevent the drift of other slave states (Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina) towards secession. Lincoln himself did little, during the interregnum, to assuage the planters’ fears of some apocalyptic transformation of their comfortable and prosperous way of life. Even his Inaugural Address of March 4, 1861, though conciliatory in tone, reaffirmed that secession was unacceptable and unjustified under the Constitution. And it gave the South no explicit guarantee that under the Constitution, and in a unified nation, the slaveholders’ rights would be appropriately defended. The President, in fact, went no further than his Oath of Office – i.e. his pledge to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution – prescribed. The lawyer in him resented the idea of a showdown, but extremists and firebrands in the South left him little choice after the attack on Fort Sumter, 12 April 1861. A man of principle, Lincoln remained resolute and inflexible when it came to ensuring the survival and preserving the integrity of the country. The price for this might well be a murderous war (approximately 722,500 deaths, or 2.3% of the total U.S. population), no other superior cause was worth such sacrifice. The President obsessively referred to this single mission, “saving the Union”, to justify his decisions and to silence those who, in the North, dissented from his policies. A small fraction of the Democratic party, especially active in the Midwest (the Peace Democrats or Copperheads) called for a negotiated peace with the South. Lincoln fought such opinions with the same determination he displayed in combatting the Confederacy. He suspended habeas corpus in 1862 and reactivated some laws on sedition and treason. Yet, even as he was curtailing civil liberties Lincoln pushed towards the destruction of slavery through the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

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KEYWORDS

ABOLITIONISM Abolitionist societies had existed in almost every state (including the South) from the end of the 18th century on, and, in 1808, Congress had outlawed slave-trading. Yet abolitionism, as a national movement, did not emerge until the 1830s. Idealists then tended to view the slavery question rather abstractly, turning it into a philosophical dispute over the natural rights of man and the finality of God’s works in this world. Yet the abolitionist crusade that followed quickly assumed a political turn. Those who opposed slavery for being inhuman, like William Lloyd Garrison or Wendell Phillips, accused the government of being morally corrupt and shamefully passive. On the other side, pro-slavery advocates maintained, with John C. Calhoun, that inequality between races was inherent in human nature and that the slavery system was a guarantee of the orderly survival of southern society. For most of the 1830s and 1840s abolitionists were considered as dangerous extremists and social agitators that threatened the carefully crafted political balance between North and South. Moral and physical intimidation did not prevent more people from joining antislavery societies all over the country. The great debate over the extension of slavery in the lands newly acquired from Mexico found abolitionists as militant as ever; they loudly supported the 1846 Wilmot Proviso and its “free soil” doctrine (Congressman David Wilmot of

Pennsylvania had introduced a resolution that planned to ban slavery from the new western territories). But finding they were repeatedly thwarted in their political action, abolitionists sometimes substituted plain violence for invective; the best example was John Brown’s fanatical campaign against slavery in Kansas in 1855-1856. Connecticut-born Brown was a Puritan who fancied himself and his followers to be God’s elect with a mission to eradicate slaveholding on the Frontier. This may involve the occasional eradication of slaveholders or proslavery settlers themselves, as illustrated by Brown’s cold- blooded murder of five of these settlers at Pottawatomie (near Topeka) in May 1856. The abolitionist strife left Kansas “bleeding” and the rest of the country increasingly split on the controversial issue of slavery, over which many shocked and sour politicians were led to adopt ever more dogmatic positions. Indeed, abolitionism eventually served to identify partisan differences: Whigs and Democrats diverged deeply on the anti-slavery issue. The presidential campaign of 1860 and Lincoln’s victory marked the climax of the abolitionist debate. In a sense the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was its conclusion, since all slaves were declared free in the “rebel states” — whose slaveholding practices had, in the first place, fueled the abolitionist controversy. Abolitionism thus became an obsolete doctrine, but the battles to end the economic, political and cultural oppression of Negroes were yet to be fought.

THE “PECULIAR INSTITUTION” The phrase euphemistically refers to slavery and was used chiefly by Southerners to designate the socio-economic system based on the ownership of large agricultural estates and of the necessary number of slaves to work them. Over the years, with the development of cotton culture, the opening of new territories to the west and the growing dependence of the southern economy on traditional agricultural activities, the system became a well-entrenched “institution”, specific to the South. Slavery, as a pillar of one peculiar type of social organization, was tolerated in the United States so long as it did not challenge the national institutions and did not stand in the way of the mainstream ideology of expansion

and progress developed in the North. Official reactions to the slavery system remained extremely ambiguous and reserved, from the time of the Founding Fathers down to the Jacksonian era. It was the South’s economic backwardness and political conservatism, coupled with a few serious slave revolts that called attention to the potential danger of such an “institution”. The principles on which it relied – bondage, terror, exploitation – seemed likely, in the long run, to favor social and political disorders. Indeed, the southerners’ insistence on their exceptionalism (exacerbated by a feeling of Yankee dominance over national politics) turned slavery into a symbolic argument against federalism and encouraged secession. April 14, 1865 – Abraham Lincoln assassinated 93

CIRCUMSTANCES

Ulysses Simpson GRANT 1822-1885 The son of an Ohio farmer, Ulysses S. Grant entered West Point in 1839 but proved so mediocre in his studies that, upon graduation in 1843, he could not even obtain an assignment to the cavalry, as he had wished. So he started as second lieutenant in an infantry unit that fought in Texas, then in Mexico. He was appointed to several posts in different parts of the country but, having taken to drink, he was forced to resign from the army in 1854. After he had, unsuccessfully, tried to make a living as a farmer and subsequently as a clerk in Missouri, he volunteered to fight with the Union troops in April 1861. He quickly rose from colonel to brigadier general, then major general after a series of victories on the western front (Tennessee). His tactics were far from perfect (as the battle of Shiloh demonstrated) and his drinking still a problem, but his capture of Vicksburg (July 1863) was a turning point in the war. A few months later he received command of all of the Union armies and could develop the strategy that led to Lee’s surrender. Grant was briefly President Johnson’s Secretary of State, then Republican candidate for the presidency in 1868. He won easily thanks to the popularity acquired in the Civil War. But the general had little political experience and even though he went through two successive terms, his administration was tainted by several serious financial scandals. Mark Twain derisively called the period “The Gilded Age” and described it as vulgar and corrupt. The President himself appears in H. Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams as rather out of place in the White House, presented as a “preintellectual, archaic” type that “would have seemed so even to the cavedwellers”! 94

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M

ilitary victories more than political domination brought the Republicans, and Lincoln, back into power for a second term in November 1864. General Sherman had captured Atlanta early in September, in an operation so vividly recalled in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, and the Administration’s morale had instantly soared. General Sheridan had also contributed by clearing the Shenandoah Valley in record time at the end of September. A few weeks away from election, it seemed that the Republican ticket, Abe Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, nominated at the Baltimore Convention in July, would coast to victory over the Democratic team formed by the former commander of Union troops, George McClellan, and Senator George H. Pendleton of Ohio. The electoral vote (212 to 21) did reflect overwhelming Republican supremacy; but the results of the popular vote (2,216,000 to 1,808,000), closer than those of 1860, were far less convincing. The myth of gallant combat and Lincoln’s tragic death have tended to obscure the people’s disaffection for the war and for the messianic leader of 1860 as clearly expressed through this ballot. General McClellan, though relieved of his command by Lincoln in November 1862, had been a most competent soldier and a fervent patriot throughout the war. His election score confirmed the Americans’ fondness for military leaders and their frequent assumption – no doubt originating in the fatherly figure of George Washington – that a good general would make a good president. As the year 1865 opened, it appeared that peace was more than ever in the hands of the military. Sherman, after Atlanta, had cut a path of fire and destruction to Savannah, reached in late December 1864. He then proceeded northward through South Carolina to join up with Ulysses S. Grant’s army in Virginia. Almost at the same time, on the western front, General Thomas had thrashed the Confederates in Nashville and started immediately eastward to join Sherman. Together, they cut all lines of supply and most of the avenues of retreat for Robert E. Lee’s rebel armies, still stranded in Virginia and desperately trying to defend Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital. With 54,000 men, nearly surrounded by 115,000 Yankees, Lee had no choice but to capitulate. His dignified surrender at Appomatox, April 9, 1865, marks the end of the South’s glorious ambitions, just as Napoleon’s abdication fifty years earlier had signalled the collapse of a grandiose political dream.

Lincoln’s intransigence triumphed; even in a last-minute peace conference with Confederacy’s Vice-President Stephens in February, he had not yielded one inch of political ground. His obstinacy saved the Union, but killed him. In the deranged mind of his future assassin, he incarnated not democracy but autocratic rule, not clemency but humiliation. After an inspection tour of Grant’s armies and a visit to reconquered Richmond in the first days of April, the President returned to Washington, where he learned of Lee’s surrender. On April 11, he addressed a crowd from a White House window and spoke of peace and reconstruction. Washington put on festive airs as news of the formal laying down of arms reached the capital. On April 14, Lincoln held what would be his last cabinet meeting and, in the evening, went to Ford’s Theater with his wife and two friends, to see a British comedy entitled “Our American Cousin”. As the third act opened, a man entered the unguarded President’s box, fired one shot at Lincoln at point-blank range, leaped onto the stage shouting “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus Ever to Tyrants”, the Virginia motto) and, in the general confusion that followed, made his way out of the theater and escaped on horseback. This was a conspiracy: the assassin’s name was John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer who had enlisted a few other fanatics to kill some of the nation’s highest officials. That night, another conspirator attacked Secretary of State William Seward, and his son Frederick. Both recovered from their wounds, however. Lincoln did not; he died at dawn, April 15, 1865, never having recovered consciousness. Booth, this 19th-century Lee Harvey Oswald, was captured ten days later in Virginia and died (he was either shot or “suicided”) before disclosing the full extent of the conspiracy. Only three accomplices were arrested, summarily tried and hanged.

Robert Edward LEE 1807-1870 Of all military figures engaged in the Civil War, Lee is certainly the one most respected and admired, not because of his military excellence (many of his strategies were faulty) but because he had been a most faithful and dedicated commander, and shown himself so dignified in defeat. Robert E. Lee was born in a good Virginia family, the son of a cavalry officer who had fought in the Revolutionary War and later been a governor of the state. He graduated from West Point in 1829 and embarked on a military career in the Engineers Corps, where he served for seventeen years. He took part in the Mexican War of 1846 and later was appointed superintendent of West Point (1852); he remained three years in the post. But he dreamed of field action and open spaces and asked, in 1855, to be transferred to the 2nd Cavalry Division in Texas.

He came back to Washington just in time to lead the marines force that crushed the Harper’s Ferry “rebellion” in October 1859. When the secession of southern states began in early 1861, Lee was torn between his respect for the Union and his allegiance to his home state. Lincoln offered him the command of the Union armies but he declined and chose his side when Virginia seceded in late April 1861. Yet he remained just one among several field commanders for most of the war. He tried – sometimes successfully – to control the advance of Union troops on the northern front, and won a few f he wasn’t as great as Cesar, he shares the same sort of tomb,” significant victories in the first two years. “ casually remarked Henry Adams when he learnt of Lincoln’s But his foolhardy attempt to invade the death. The comparison, however, ends with the tragedy of north in the spring of 1863 ended up in assasination; Booth was no Brutus and there was no Republic to the Gettysburg disaster. Lee handed in his resignation, which was refused. From restore. The Constitution ensured the continuity of executive power. then on, he merely assisted the As soon as the President succumbed, Vice-President Andrew Confederate army in its slow agony, Johnson was sworn in. He inherited the formidable task of healing through Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and the wounds of war. But he lacked Lincoln’s stature; and, as a Petersburg, to Appomattox, where he Democrat who believed in states’ rights and felt naturally lenient surrendered (April 9, 1865). ••• April 14, 1865 – Abraham Lincoln assassinated 95

CONSEQUENCES

I

FOCUS

THE DRED SCOTT CASE An activity as old as colonization itself, slavery had become essential to the pre-bellum economy of the South, and an integral part of its society. The “peculiar institution”, as it was called, originated in the tremendous need for farm hands that cotton culture required. Large-scale plantations would never have developed without slaves. And southern states owed their prosperity to the plantation system. Indeed, cotton production reached 5.75 million bales (or 2.3 billion pounds) in 1860, with an export value of $191 million or about two-thirds of the total U.S. exports. Yet it appears that cotton as a crop represented less capital value for the southern planters than the slaves themselves. There were about 3,954,000 black slaves in the South on the eve of the Civil War, and they were, in most cases, viewed as a mere commercial commodity, as a source of potential trading profit. Demand for field hands was regularly so high that a prime choice slave that was worth $500 in the 1830s fetched a price of up to $1 800 in 1860. By that time the planters’ investments in slave labor was higher than their investment in land; and the merchant value of slaves in cotton states amounted to 60% of all agricultural assets in the region. One may understand, then, why the institution of slavery was so gallantly defended and fugitive slaves so implacably chased. One may see also what political and economic interests the South had in trying to win over to slavery the new states that were being formed in the West. The balance between free and slave America achieved by the 1820 Missouri Compromise held until 1854, when Congress had to organize the frontier region of Nebraska into territories and Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced his KansasNebraska bill. His proposal to let the people decide whether they wanted slavery or not sent shock waves throughout the whole country. It created more divisions and bitter resentment than any other act in the century. Parties broke up into radical factions, churches fell a prey to zealots, public opinion became 96

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erratic. John Brown and his band of antislavery supporters kindled the fires of violence and fanaticism in Kansas. In the respected Halls of Congress, disagreements were settled with punches and blows. Even the Supreme Court, the ultimate defense against inequality and arbitrariness, failed to address the slavery issue with equanimity. When Abe Lincoln and Stephen Douglas campaigned for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858, the public debates they held focused not so much on slavery itself as on whether it would become a nationwide institution. Both of them referred to a decision taken a year before by the Supreme Court in the landmark Dred Scott v. Sandford case. Dred Scott was a black slave whose owner, Dr. Emerson, an army surgeon, resided in Missouri, a slave-holding state. He first followed his master into Illinois, a free state, then into the Minnesota territory where slavery was also prohibited under the Missouri Compromise. When both master and slave returned to Missouri, Dred Scott sued for his freedom on the basis that he had resided on free soil. The case reached the Supreme Court in early 1857 and was quickly decided. In a 7 to 2 majority decision, made public on March, 6, 1857, the Court denied Dred Scott’s claim for freedom. Chief Justice Robert B. Taney, of Maryland, who wrote the majority opinion explained firstly that black slaves were not citizens of the United States, therefore could not sue in a federal court (a view vehemently criticized by Justice Benjamin Curtis in his dissent); secondly that his temporary residence in Illinois had no legal effect on his status. But, more importantly for the future, the Supreme Court proceeded to invalidate the Missouri Compromise on the grounds that Congress, through legislative action, could not deprive a citizen of his property (here, his slave) without “due process of law” (as explicitly stated in the Fifth Amendment). It was the second time (the first was Marbury v. Madison in 1803) that the Supreme Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional. Once again, it

••• One of the few heroes of history that stand greater in defeat than in victory, Robert E. Lee was equally esteemed by friends and opponents. After the war, he was charged with treason but never tried. He ended his life as president of a small college in Lexington, Virginia, known today as Washington and Lee University.

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took an essentially political decision. It had, in the past, refused to review the Missouri Compromise, for jurisdictional reasons. This time it intervened in the ideological debate and, in effect, denied Congress the power to exclude slavery from any state or territory. Free States, Slave States, 1820-1854. Abraham Lincoln saw clearly the dangers of this pernicious The Missouri Compromise, 1820 decision when he BRITISH CANADA said, a few tL Mis ake MAINE s months later: VERMONT “We shall lie NEW HAMPSHIRE UNORGANIZED MASSACHUSETTS Mis MICHIGAN TERRITORY down pleasantly, NEW YORK RHODE ISLAND TERRITORY 1818-1834 CONNECTICUT dreaming that OREGON COUNTRY PENNSYLVANIA NEW JERSEY (U.S. and Great Britain) ILLINOIS IND. OHIO the people of DELAWARE admitted admitted MARYLAND 1818 1816 Missouri are on VIRGINIA MISSOURI KENTUCKY the verge of admitted 1823 N. CAROLINA Missouri Compromise Line 36°30’ TENNESSEE making their ARKANSAS TERRITORY S. CAROLINA 1819-1824 State free; and MISSISSIPPI SPANISH admitted ALABAMA GEORGIA we shall awake LOUISIANA 1877 TERRITORY admitted to the reality 1818 Free states and territories FLORIDA instead, that the Slave states and territories Supreme Court Free territory by has made Illinois Missouri Compromise Slave territory by a slave State.” Missouri Compromise What the nation The United States in 1854 awoke to, in fact, CANADA WASHINGTON was war. TERRITORY ri R. sou

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April 14, 1865 – Abraham Lincoln assassinated 97

John Wilkes BOOTH 1838-1865 President Lincoln’s assassin was the son of Junius Brutus Booth, a dashing British actor with a psychiatric record who had emigrated to the United States in 1821. His brother, Edwin Thomas Booth, was also an actor, with a predilection for Shakespearian roles, who founded and presided over the Players Club in Manhattan. The two brothers frequently appeared on the New York stage in preCivil War years, starring chiefly in Shakespeare’s tragedies (Othello, Hamlet, Julius Caesar…); Booth’s exclamation after firing on the President in Ford’s Theater, 14 April 1865, (“Sic semper tyrannis”) is a direct allusion to Cesar’s assassination by Brutus’s own hand. A recently recovered manuscript, written by Booth in December 1860, a few days after South Carolina seceded from the Union, reveals a fanatic who harbored sympathies for secessionists and a deep hatred of Abolitionism. Indeed, it appears that Booth joined the Virginia state militia that helped capture John Brown and his anti-slavery terrorists at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. That the national crisis, and the war, affected Booth’s mental balance can hardly be doubted. He may, in fact, have identified with some of the theatrical assassins he had impersonated on stage. His deed done, he fled Washington and rode south towards Richmond. He wandered about northern Virginia for two weeks. In the last days of April, he took refuge in a barn near Bowling Green but was discovered. Whether he was then shot while trying to escape, or committed suicide has, so far, been a matter of speculation.

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towards the South, Johnson was bound to clash with an increasingly conservative Congress dominated by radical Republicans. The latter formed a majority at mid-term elections in 1866 and bitterly opposed the President to the point of seeking impeachment against him in May 1868. Meanwhile Lincoln’s vision of post-war America suffered at the hands of narrow-minded, and often unscrupulous politicians. He had dreamed of a nation of equals under the law, but Congress saw only a victorious North and a defeated South. Slavery was indeed abolished but no legislation really guaranteed the rights of freed Negroes. Confederate states were to be readmitted into the Union, but what political price should they pay for their foolhardy rebellion? Lincoln had leniently advocated a 10% solution in his Proclamation of December 8, 1863: if one tenth of the voters in the 1860 election pledged allegiance to the Union and set up governments favorable to the abolishment of slavery, the Union would welcome them back – which was the case for Tennessee, Arkansas, Virginia and Louisiana, which accepted the plan early in 1864. Yet, in July of that year, a vindictive Congress responded to the President’s intitiative with the Wade-Davis Bill, which now required that 50% of the white male voters pledge allegiance before a state could be readmitted. Lincoln pocket-vetoed the measure, and it was never revived. But with Lincoln gone, the South became an easy target for radicals in Congress: the Fourteenth Amendment of June 1866 (for all its positive provisions) barred proven former rebels from public office and implicitly made the southern states’ representation in Congress depend on the extent to which they granted Blacks the right to vote. As for the Reconstruction Act of March 1867, it divided the South into military districts and imposed martial law. Reconstruction, at that point, looked like correctional treatment. Nor were southern Blacks in a better position to take advantage of Lincoln’s lifelong devotion to social and racial justice. So-called “Black Codes” had mushroomed in the South to counter the official abolition of slavery imposed by means of the Thirteenth Amendment of December 1865. President Johnson was in favor of a loose federal control over the former Confederacy and failed to obtain guarantees from these states as to the future status of Blacks in southern society. Not until the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 would “race, color, and previous condition of servitude” be eliminated as argument against black people’s political rights.

KEYWORDS

A FEW STEREOTYPES Lincoln was assassinated before he could, as he intended, “bind up the nation’s wounds” and implement the “Reconstruction” plans he had devised for the South. Accepting former “rebel” states back into the Union was no easy task; the emotional damage caused by the war appeared even more serious than its physical and institutional destructions. Lingering hatreds and resentment played against reconciliation, especially among politicians. Others sought to take advantage of the ruined economy of the South to make quick and easy profits. At that time, there appeared a few familiar character types, that illustrate the antagonisms, and the vices, of the age. By “carpetbaggers”, Southerners designated newcomers from the North, who spread over the former Confederate states and entered politics or civil service there. They were mostly Republican; quite a few of them were adventurers seeking new business opportunities. A few managed to seize control of local governments and establish “carpetbag regimes” that, in places, stayed in power for almost a decade. Like a new breed of – inglorious – pioneers, carpetbaggers were usually depicted as getting off a coach or a train with all their belongings stuffed into luggage made of carpeting material; hence their name. “Scalawags” were white Southerners, as disreputable as “carpetbaggers” in the popular mind, since they accepted to cooperate with the victorious Yankees, to join the Republican party and belatedly espouse its views on emancipation. Some of them did believe in equality between the former slaves and white men, and went as far as to work for the much-criticized “Freedmen’s Bureau”.

At the other end of the political spectrum stood the “redeemers”, white conservatives who took power in some southern states when federal troops were removed. They were wolves in sheep’s clothing who introduced themselves as moderates and vowed to work towards economic revival by attracting northern investors; in fact they aimed at “redeeming” the South from “black republicanism” and did not hesitate to rely on the recentlyorganized Ku-Klux-Klan to further their aims. And they were quite successful since, by 1876, they controlled all southern legislatures except Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina.

The man with the carpet bag, a Thomas Nast cartoon (1872).

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LA MORT DE LINCOLN L’homme qui agonisait dans un garni de la 10 e rue, à Washington, le soir du 14 avril 1865, s’appelait Abraham Lincoln. Tombé sous la balle d’un illuminé, esclavagiste notoire, John Wilkes Booth, il avait été transporté là, inconscient, depuis sa loge du Ford’s Theatre, tout proche, où il assistait paisiblement à une représentation de Our American Cousin. Le Président des États-Unis, celui que, malgré les circonstances douloureuses de son mandat, les Américains admirent le plus avec George Washington, s’éteignit sans avoir repris connaissance au petit jour, le lendemain. « Il appartient maintenant à l’éternité », dira alors Edwin Stanton, son secrétaire à la Guerre. Victime suprême d’une guerre fratricide qu’il n’avait pas voulue mais dont il n’avait pas hésité à assumer le poids, Lincoln ne verrait donc pas l’aboutissement de tous ses efforts : une nation complètement réunifiée, à nouveau puissante et résolue. Comme épilogue à la guerre de Sécession, cet assassinat symbolise bien la tragédie de tout un peuple, écartelé entre deux destins aussi funestes qu’analogues : la mort ou la désunion.

Cette guerre eut, dès l’abord, une allure de conte gothique, illustrant le combat des chevaliers de l’abolitionnisme contre les forces obscures de l’esclavage, ce « bienfait », disait Booth lui-même, parmi les plus grands que Dieu ait octroyé à une nation privilégiée. L’enjeu en était la survie du modèle démocratique américain. Lincoln avait mesuré les risques très tôt, dès sa campagne sénatoriale d’Illinois en 1858. Il avait bien expliqué à ses électeurs qu’une famille désunie ne peut survivre. Et il savait que son sort était irrémédiablement lié à celui de cette grande famille de citoyens qu’il croyait devoir sauver du désastre. 100

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Son intransigeance vis-à vis de l’institution particulière, l’esclavage, qu’il tenait pour moralement et socialement malsain, lui ouvrit les portes de la Maison Blanche en 1860, mais referma celles de la réconciliation car le Sud savait déjà que le nouveau président ne renoncerait jamais au programme abolitionniste pour lequel on l’avait élu – en fait une majorité d’États Yankee. Aussi la grande rébellion des sudistes commença-t-elle avant même la passation de pouvoirs entre son prédécesseur Buchanan et lui. La Caroline du Sud, la première, fit sécession le 20 décembre 1860, rapidement imitée par le Mississippi, la Floride, l’Alabama, la Georgie, la Louisiane et le Texas. Huit autres états rejoindront la nouvelle Confédération après que Lincoln eut prêté serment. Dès lors, avec une opiniâtreté sans failles, le Président se dévoua entièrement à la tâche qu’il s’était assignée : sauver l’Union et, ce faisant, débarrasser l’Amérique du fléau de l’esclavage. Aucun sacrifice ne fut épargné – le conflit armé coûta cher en vies humaines, 722 500 morts en quatre ans – et l’on fit taire les pacifistes (Lincoln alla même jusqu’à suspendre l’Habeas Corpus et rétablir les lois anti-sédition, en 1862) car seule la guerre garantirait aux esclaves la liberté. La victoire militaire finit par se dessiner en 1864. Les généraux Grant, Sherman et Sheridan y contribuèrent brillamment et rendirent possible la douteuse réélection de Lincoln. Las de la guerre, le peuple lui témoigna une confiance moins nette qu’en 1860 ; mais la mort proche du héros et la légende qui s’est bâtie autour d’elle ont occulté ce jugement des urnes. Les premiers mois de 1865 virent la débâcle des armées rebelles : Sherman, après avoir brûlé Atlanta en décembre 1864, fonça vers le nord pour faire la jonction avec Grant en Virginie. Thomas, victorieux dans le Tennessee,

marcha vers l’est afin de rejoindre Sherman. Leur avance coupait le ravitaillement et la retraite de Robert E. Lee, pris en tenaille dans Richmond. La menace d’encerclement de ses 54 000 hommes le poussa à quitter la capitale confédérée ; puis, rapidement, il fut conduit à la sage mais déchirante capitulation d’Appomatox, le 9 avril 1865. Le triomphe de Lincoln, qui était aussi celui de la ténacité et d’une morale politique sans concessions, fut de courte durée. Début avril, il inspecta les troupes de Grant en Virginie et visita Richmond libérée. De retour à Washington, il apprit la reddition de Lee et se mit aussitôt à discuter de l’après-guerre et de la reconstruction du Sud avec son gouvernement. Au soir du 14 avril, il se détendait en famille au théâtre lorsque l’exalté Booth fit feu sur lui. Le complot des fanatiques confédérés fit deux autres victimes, le secrétaire d’État Seward et son fils ; mais ils survécurent. Tous les conspirateurs ne furent pas arrêtés.

aient juré fidélité à l’Union. Le XIV e Amendement de juin 1866 et la loi de Reconstruction de mars 1867 complétèrent un dispositif qui avait tous les traits d’une rétorsion légale. Lincoln, vivant, aurait sans nul doute empêché ces abus ; de même qu’il aurait évité que se multiplient les Codes noirs, lois scélérates votées dans le Sud pour annuler les effets du XIII e Amendement et de l’abolition de l’esclavage. L’œuvre de Lincoln, entre les mains d’Andrew Johnson, manqua de se changer en bombe à retardement et de détruire, par la procédure d’impeachment de mai 1868, l’institution présidentielle elle-même. C’eût été là le deuxième assassinat d’« Honest Abe », l’intègre Abraham Lincoln.

« La gloire de Napoléon, de César ou de Washington n’est que rayon de lune, comparée au soleil de Lincoln », disait Léon Tolstoï. Mais il est vrai que l’Amérique cessa d’exister, un instant, lorsque ce soleil s’éteignit. La machine constitutionnelle ne laissa cependant pas se prolonger la vacance du pouvoir. Le vice-président démocrate Andrew Johnson prit en mains l’exécutif et s’employa à panser les plaies de la guerre. Démocrate dans la tradition Jeffersonienne et naturellement enclin au pardon, Johnson devait se heurter violemment à un Congrès républicain dominé par des Yankees revanchards et cupides. Ces derniers s’appliquèrent surtout à punir le Sud de sa sécession. Les anciens états rebelles ne furent réintégrés que selon les dispositions mortifiantes de la loi Wade-Davis de 1864, c’est-à-dire après que 50% des électeurs blancs

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May 10, 1869

THE PACIFIC RAILROAD BACKGROUND

T

he industrial revolution was inevitably also a revolution in transportation. The steam engine that played such a key part in the factory soon served to power the ships and trains that carried the products of manufactures to more and more distant markets. The technology of iron and steel and the use of coal allowed railroads to develop faster than any other means of transport in the 19th century. From the time the Stockton & Darlington Railroad line was built in northeastern England in September 1825, the railroad and the factory systems expanded at the same pace and, along the way, became two major symbols of industrial capitalism. Railroads caught on immediately in the United States. In Maryland, the Baltimore & Ohio (known as the B & O ) began operating on 13 miles of track in May 1830. Simultaneously, in South Carolina, the Charleston & Savannah was opening a 6-mile line, to be expanded to 136 miles within three years. The B & O was literally a “rail-road” with specially adjusted stagecoaches, drawn by horses, running on wooden rail tracks. Soon, more resistant iron rails came into use and cars improved in shape, size, stability and comfort. Progress on engines was equally remarkable: New Jersey factories started pouring out locomotives in increasing numbers as new lines were opened throughout the eastern part of the country. If, at the end of 1830 there were only 23 miles of railroad track in the United States, mileage had soared up to 2,818 miles by 1840, 9,021 miles by 1850 and 30,626 miles a decade later. Technological innovations did play a significant part in this irresistible ascent of railroads. Yet the latter was part of a wider movement that included capitalist growth, political rivalries and

Synthèse en français La première voie ferrée transcontinentale 112

KEYWORDS The Great American Desert 107 Pioneers 107

PEOPLE L. Stanford W.F. Cody G.A. Custer

104 109 110

FOCUS The Frontier

108

Opposite: The Union Pacific and Central Pacific teams meet at Promontory Point, Utah. May 10, 1869 – The Pacific Railroad 103

Leland STANFORD 1824-1893

Originally from New York State, Leland Stanford did not establish himself in California until 1852. He had been practicing law for some time in Wisconsin when his office burned down and he decided to join his brothers, who owned a flourishing wholesale business in Sacramento. For a time, he ran a store and dug for gold in El Dorado and Placer counties, occasionally serving as Justice of the Peace. He made a lucky strike in 1855 and earned an estimated $400,000 which he invested in a grocery business in Sacramento. He launched a political career in 1857 and won the governorship of California for the Republican party in 1861. His interest in railroads dated back to the times his father worked on the Mohawk & Hudson (America’s first railroad), but was revived by his meeting with Theodore Judah. He became a partner in the Central Pacific Railroad and, when his term as governor expired (1863), president of the company. As businessman and railroad manager, he worked to expand the operations of the company, purchased other competing railroads and later formed a holding, the Southern Pacific Company (1885), ••• 104

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social pressures. In many respects, the story of American railroads is emblematic of national history in a century of economic success and compulsive territorial expansion. Railroaders were model capitalists and the strongest supporters of American industry, and the tracks they laid across the land served to unite a nation severed by distance and political discord. Also, the rapidity with which the railroad network covered the whole continent is a tribute to the highly effective combination of private and collective interests that turned the United States into an economic world leader before 1900. The first railroad lines were built to compete with turnpike roads and canals (especially the Erie Canal, opened in 1825, which gave New York an envied, but temporary, supremacy in domestic trade). But as tracks fingered their way farther and farther to the West, over the Alleghenies and into the Plains, they pushed the frontier forward (see pp. 108–109) and, eventually, paved the way for settlement. As Frederick Jackson Turner put it, “the railroads pioneered the way for pioneers.” It was not until the late 1840s, however, that transcontinental projects began to attract the attention of engineers, investors and politicians. Merchants and venture capitalists, like Asa Whitney or P.P.F. DeGrand, submitted plans to Congress in 1848 and 1849 that might have shortly resulted in construction. Indeed no one, after the Mexican War, the annexation of California, and the Gold Rush, could deny the importance of a railroad line across the whole continent. But sectional controversies over the choice of a route to the Pacific killed all proposals: Northerners privileged a connection between the Great Lakes and Oregon or, alternatively, California. Southerners actively supported a New-Orleans-San Diego link; in 1853 Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, arranged the Gadsden Purchase (the lower tip of Arizona and New Mexico was bought from Mexicans) to provide better terrain for this line. Kansas-Nebraska and the slavery question eclipsed the issue after 1854, until a young engineer, Theodore Judah, who had just built California’s first railroad in the Sacramento Valley, published, in January 1857, a well-documented pamphlet entitled A Practical Plan for Building the Pacific Railroad, in which he detailed his plan for a line that would connect California with Iowa, through the Sierras, the Nevada desert, Salt Lake City, Wyoming and the Nebraska plains. Few people were inclined to back up the project, except four California businessmen (later known as the “Big Four”), Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford and Charles

Crocker. They not only founded, with Judah, the Central Pacific Railroad Company (incorporated June 28, 1861), but lobbied extensively in Washington for railroad legislation. President Lincoln was favorable to the idea of transcontinental connections; and by that time, the Civil War had made a northern route the only possible choice.

••• which controlled a near-monopoly of transports in the West. His political career, interrupted in 1863, was resumed in 1885 when he was elected Senator from California. By then, his fortune ran into the millions of dollars and he owned the largest vineyard in the state plus a large ranch in Palo Alto with race-horse stables. Part of that land was used in 1891 to open Leland Stanford Junior University.

Congress then acted promptly on a bill that became the first Pacific Railroad Act on July 2, 1862. The act created the Union Pacific Railroad Company, designating it as the eastern arm of the Pacific Railroad, with the already incorporated Central Pacific as its western arm. And to help finance the project, the companies were awarded five sections of public land on either side of the line, i.e. 6,400 acres per mile of track laid.

C AN A D A

Seattle

Duluth

Cœur d’Alene Portland

Virginia City

St. Paul

Black Hills

Silver City

Laramie Promontory Point Virginia City Salt Lake City San Francisco

Milwaukee

Chicago

Omaha St. Joseph

Denver

Kansas City

Cripple Creek

Santa Fe

Los Angeles

Silver City

Yuma Tucson

Fort Worth

El Paso

Dallas

Tombstone MEXICO Great Northern Chicago, Milwaukee & St. paul

New Orleans Kansas Pacific

Northern Pacific

Atlantic & pacific, Atchison, Topeka & Santa fe

Oregon Short Line

Texas & Pacific

Central Pacific & Union Pacific

Southern Pacific

Gold

Silver

Transcontinental Railroads, 1860-1910.



May 10, 1869 – The Pacific Railroad 105

CIRCUMSTANCES

T

he Union Pacific was not incorporated until late October 1863, 15 months after its creation. Its elected president was a respected soldier-businessman, General John A. Dix. Yet, the true boss was Vice-President Thomas C. Durant, a doctor by training, a railroad promoter by choice and a swindler by instinct, who would later become a living symbol of business corruption. Funds were scarce and construction was delayed; by the spring of 1865, a full 18 months after the groundbreaking ceremonies in Omaha (December 2, 1863), the Union Pacific still had not laid one inch of track. In the interim, the Central Pacific had started work on the western end, under supervision of chief engineer Charlie Crocker. Nevertheless, money was hard to find, competitors proposed alternative lines through Nevada, legal actions were threatened and press campaigns developed in California while, in the meantime, the labor shortage became dramatic. All these vicissitudes combined almost crushed the Big Four. However, a second Pacific Railroad Act, signed by Lincoln July 2, 1864, gave greater financial facilities to the transcontinental builders. And Chinese “coolies” were brought to work on the line; by the end of 1865, there would be 7,000 of them on the Central Pacific payroll, at $31 a month (equivalent of $445 today). The “Celestials”, as they were called, were of invaluable help in the Sierras where hard and dangerous work awaited the Central Pacific. Topography did not allow both companies to move ahead at the same speed. While, in the east, Union Pacific workers under Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge were advancing easily through the Nebraska Plains, Central Pacific teams were dealing with steep grades, bridges and tunnels in the California mountains. Within the next two years the former would lay 540 miles of track while the latter struggled to construct 117 miles of roadbed over almost impassable terrain. And yet, in the spring of 1866, it was Huntington, for the Big Four, who lobbied in Washington to remove the mileage limit imposed on his company (the Central Pacific was, by law, authorized to build only up to 150 miles beyond the California border into Nevada), turning construction into a race in which the Central Pacific seemed desperately disadvantaged. On May 9, 1868, a full year before junction, Union Pacific crews were in Laramie, Wyoming (mile 572), while Central Pacific workers painfully emerged from the Sierras and reached Reno (mile 154).

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KEYWORDS

THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT One major purpose of transcontinental railroads was to bridge the gap between East and West across a vast expanse of land popularly known as “The Great American Desert.” The latter phrase was first coined by Zebulon Pike who, in 1807, explored the western and south-western plains beyond the Mississippi. He found there a vast prairie, little water and no trees, a territory he compared to the “great sandy deserts of Africa”, inhospitable to human life and therefore improper for settlement. The vision was confirmed by other explorers, particularly Major Stephen Long who led an expedition into the southern Rocky Mountains in 1820. He came back positively convinced that the plains were, he wrote, “an unfit residence for any but a nomad population,” and, worse, “an insuperable obstacle in the way of settling the country.” The legend of the “Great American Desert” was thus born; and maps in geography textbooks represented this huge uninhabitable area between – roughly – the Mississipi and the Rockies as a literal desert adorned with

camels and dunes. Over the next twenty years the idea of a line (close to the 95th meridian) beyond which white settlement should be prohibited slowed down western expansion. As more western trails were used and frontier people proved that life on semi-arid land was possible, the perception of the Great American Desert changed. An easterner (Samuel Parker), traveling through the Plains in 1835, noted that “no country could be more inviting to the farmer,” and prophesied: “The time will come, and probably is not far distant, when this country will be covered with a dense population.” After 1840, the notion of “desert” – meaning strictly a no man’s land – evolved; it was restricted, first to parts of the Great Basin in Utah, then to a few remote, truly arid areas in the extreme southwest. Later in the century the word desert had acquired such pejorative connotations as to be almost entirely banished from the westerners’ vocabulary.

PIONEERS Etymologically the word “pioneer” refers to those who went west, “ahead of” the others; it therefore describes different American types related, at one time or another, to the history of the frontier, and it is also suggestive of the traditional values and the virtues shared by all these people–optimism, self-reliance, courage, a sense of equality, ingenuity, etc. The emigrants who tried their luck in the West, in what Henry Nash Smith called the “vacant continent beyond the frontier”, plunging into the unknown, suffering innumerable hardships and reaping, in general, little profit – all these men and women who pushed the frontier constantly westward, shared the common fate of pioneers. Walt Whitman saw them as a “race” and wrote a memorable poem (“Pioneers! O Pioneers!”) to celebrate their



experience (“Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,/Pioneers! O Pioneers!”). A great majority of these emigrants were farmers, attracted by the prospect of more fertile lands: homesteaders who bought a small lot from the government, sodbusters who ventured into the Plains, even squatters who seized the land before it was granted or sold to them. Yet one should also consider cattlemen as true pioneers, not only when, seeking better pastures, they pushed their herds into unknown territory, but also when they opened long trails to move cattle hundreds of miles away to bring them to market. To them and to railroad builders we owe the continuity of the pioneer spirit in America from the age of farming to the age of industry.

May 10, 1869 – The Pacific Railroad 107

FOCUS

THE FRONTIER The word “frontier” was incorporated into the historical canon by Frederick Jackson Turner in his now famous paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” read before the American Historical Association in Chicago, July 12, 1893. From this moment no one, whether he adhered to Turner’s views or challenged them, could ever contemplate national history in the same way. Turner celebrated the passing of an age – that of western expansion – but at the same time, by dealing with the frontier in terms of symbol and ideology, he opened an unlimited field for future historical investigation and interpretation. Literally, the frontier was defined as a “line” up to which population had reached a density of at least two persons per square mile. This statistical convention allowed the Bureau of the Census to announce the end of the “frontier” in 1890. The invisible line had disappeared! Or, rather, the frontier as evidence of territorial growth became a metaphor suggesting the irresistible progress of a nation and the excellence of its democratic ideals. Turned into an abstraction, the frontier was – and still is – regularly revived and renovated each time Americans need to be reminded of their capacity to meet challenges and rise above hard times. In 1934, Henry A. Wallace proposed a “new frontier” which a new breed of pioneers would conquer, “whose hearts are aflame with the extraordinary beauty of the scientific, artistic and spiritual wealth now before us.” Similarly, in 1960, John  F.  Kennedy’s Inaugural Address described “a new frontier of uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.” As the epitome of American history, the frontier is a particularly complex topic and anyone trying to embrace it sooner or later falls into reductionism or over-simplification. One feature, however, runs through the epic of the frontier like a leitmotiv: novelty. As boundary of the unknown, the frontier not 108

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only moved constantly, but met the Americans’ needs for discovery, adventure, renewal and, above all, self-assertion. For such reasons the original frontier might well be placed on the Atlantic shores, where the first colonists landed. Beyond the scanty coastal settlements lay an unknown expanse of forests, a “wilderness” full of demonic dangers for some, of the promise of happiness for others. It took little time, though, to over-come mystic fears and move into virgin land. The urge to “go west” was inherent in American colonization, but settlement did not proceed smoothly. There existed natural boundaries which delayed human penetration into the continent: the “fall line” on eastern rivers, where rapids stopped navigation; the Appalachian range; the Mississippi; and “The Great American Desert”, further west, with its arid plains and forbidding Rocky Mountains beyond. Frontier advance also depended on more conventional, man-made boundaries: the military defense lines established by other pretenders to a North American empire: France, Spain and, after American Independence, Great Britain. Frontier history is thus closely connected with diplomacy. Some international agreements determined patterns of frontier settlement: the Treaties of Paris (1763 and 1783), Jay’s Treaty (1794), Pinckney’s Treaty (1795), the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Oregon Treaty (1846) and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). Frontier advance went through three successive historical periods: the Eastern phase, from 1620 to the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Midwestern phase, from 1786 to the end of the Mexican War in 1848, the Far Western phase, from 1849 to the Oklahoma rush of 1889. The most significant of them is the third because all frontier types, from trapper and scout to cattle baron and railroad tycoon, were involved in the settlement of the Far West. Prairie sodbusters, fortyniners, buffalo-hunters, Indian fighters, Chinese

William Frederick CODY 1846-1917 railroad workers, cowboys, millionaire businessmen – have all become stock characters in frontier history. Their origins and experiences were extremely diversified; yet it seems they finally blended into one type, the “frontiersman”, whose features are often regarded as quintessentially American: he was thought to be adventurous, courageous, individualistic, self-reliant and egalitarian. As a place where civilization met wilderness, the frontier certainly required an unusual capacity for adaptation and surivival, as well as an unshakable faith in the future. It could bring out the best in men, but also often revealed the worst. Seen from a more critical angle, the frontier is not so much a glorious testimony to the making of a nation as a shameful proof of civilized man’s inclination to violence and destruction. Revisionist historians have stressed, for example, the damage done to nature and the organized elimination of native Indian tribes as a reminder that even the most triumphant myths have their dark side.

A native of Iowa, W. F. Cody came west at the time of the Colorado gold fever, in 1859. He hardly knew how to read and write, having gone to work at an early age upon his father’s death. He was briefly employed by the freight firm Russell, Majors & Wadell in Kansas, then rode for the Pony Express just before the Civil War. He then served as a scout for the Union army on the western frontier and in operations against the Indians. After the war he worked for the Kansas Pacific railroad, in charge of supplying buffalo meat for construction teams. His remarkable performance in the job earned him the nickname “Buffalo Bill” that he kept the rest of his life. He went on to scout for the army, on and off, between 1868 and 1876; he took a prominent part in the Sioux War of 1876. At the same time, Cody produced plays in which he also acted and worked on a ranch he had purchased with a friend in Nebraska. In 1883, he created his famous “Wild West Exhibition”, a show that would play until 1916 and go on tour throughout the United States and England as well. In 1894, he received an extensive land grant from the state of Wyoming, in the Big Horn Basin, where he established a ranch. In the last years of his life he shared his time between ranching and show business.

William Frederick (“Buffalo Bill”) Cody photographed as an Indian Scout.



May 10, 1869 – The Pacific Railroad 109

George Armstrong CUSTER 1839-1876 No student of the history of the West can afford to overlook Colonel Custer, if only because of the controversial nature of his character and actions. Custer (Küster) was of German stock: his greatgrandfather had been one of those hated Hessian mercenaries the British had recruited to crush the American revolution in 1776. He was born in Ohio, where his father had a farm and a blacksmith’s shop. At eighteen, Custer entered West Point and graduated just as the Civil War broke out. He served rather brilliantly in the Union army and came to the attention of General Sheridan, thanks to whom he quickly rose (within the year 1864) to the rank of colonel. After the war, he was sent to organize the 7th Cavalry at Fort Riley, Kansas. From 1867 to 1870, he took part in several campaigns against Indians in the area. Then he and his regiment were dispatched to North Dakota and, in late 1873 he was given command of Fort Lincoln, near Bismarck. From there, he launched his fateful expedition against the Sioux and Cheyennes, in June 1876. His objective was the Indian village of Little Big Horn, where the Indians were to hold their annual Sun Dance. He reached the area June 25 with his 655 men, and made two fatal mistakes: first, he grossly underestimated Indian forces (they numbered between 2,500 and 4,000) and then split his regiment in three for an encircling movement. But it was the Sioux who surrounded his party of 225 soldiers; all died on a rise later known as Custer Hill in southern Montana.

As construction progressed, public support and financial help increased – which was hardly a compensation for the distress of working in the Nevada desert or enduring the deadly Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho raids in Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado. Plain Indians depended upon the buffalo for their way of life and resented both the presence of the railroads on their hunting grounds and the slaughtering of their herds by white scouts (like William F. Cody) paid to supply meat for the railroad work gangs. Indian raids and blind U.S. Army retaliations (like Colonel Chivington’s 1864 massacre of a whole Cheyenne village at Sand Creek, Colorado) led to heightened violence and insecurity along the railroad lines. For most of 1866 and 1867 the two railroad companies suffered repeated attacks from the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche tribes through whose territories they were laying tracks. Progress was slowed; and the Union Pacific was almost brought to a halt. Yet, in 1868, reinforced army protection allowed work to resume on a more regular basis. In the course of the year, the Union Pacific laid 425 miles of track, coming into view of the Great Salt Lake by the year’s end; while the Central Pacific had laid 363 miles of new track and reached the western Utah border. Winter weather delayed work, but in April 1869, company executives agreed on Promontory Point, on the northern shore of the Great Salt Lake (690 miles from Sacramento and 1086 miles from Omaha) as the junction site of the two lines. President Grant immediately endorsed the proposal. It was high time: in the field, engineers and crews were racing towards each other, having resumed work at full speed. Each side claimed it could break the Union Pacific record of 73/4 miles of track laid in one day. Charlie Crocker did break that record on April 27, with 10 miles and 56 feet of track laid. Two weeks later, May 10, the Golden Spike, one with a gold nuggett on top, was hammered in by Leland Stanford and Thomas Durant at 12:30 p.m. A wire connecting the spike to a Western Union telegraph, flashed the news throughout the country. A long and joyous celebration followed, on the spot and in major U.S. cities. Five days later, the first regular service was inaugurated which put Sacramento only five days away from Omaha. That was twice as fast – and far safer – than the famous Pony Express service.

CONSEQUENCES

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or the completion of this transcontinental line, the Union Pacific had expended about $80 million, including bribes and gratuities

that, understandably, did not appear in account books. Company records for the Central Pacific could never be found: twenty years later, a federal investigating commission came up with an unverified estimate of $36 million spent on the Sacramento-Ogden link. No one knows for sure what profits the Big Four made on this venture. But they must have been handsome since they started to build a railroad empire that, by the end of the century, covered most of the Far West, with extensions into the Southwest and as far as New Orleans. They controlled land transportation as well as river and maritime traffic in California. This all-powerful trust, later known by the name the novelist Frank Norris gave it – the “Octopus” – survived all the legal suits filed against it until 1910. Railroading became one of the most lucrative business activities of the post-Civil War period. After the Union Pacific-Central Pacific plan was adopted, other transcontinental lines were chartered by Congress: the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (between eastern Kansas and Los Angeles) in 1863, the Northern Pacific (between Duluth, on Lake Superior, and Portland, Oregon) in 1864, then the Southern Pacific (from New Orleans to Los Angeles and San Francisco) in 1871 and the Great Northern (between Duluth and Tacoma, Washington) in 1878. These railroads changed the patterns of transport over the country: canals, river navigation and turnpike roads declined as trains began to provide fast connections to faraway destinations. Just as canals had earlier been the lifeblood of the Midwest, railroads would become vital to the Far West, encouraging migration, providing outlets for local products and access to more of the nation’s natural resources. By the time the frontier was declared closed in 1890, the railroad network covered some 160,000 miles. Railroad companies came under severe criticism for their abuses, corrupt practices and arrogance. Their owners, in fact, simply made the best of a system which exalted and rewarded such vices. Railroads signalled the end of an ideal, that of an agrarian America; with them the nation would engage in large-scale industrialism. And the gap between rich and poor would grow ever wider. But Promontory Point, for a brief moment, had provided Americans with something that neither the Constitution nor four years of Civil War had fully given them: the sense of being one nation. As if to exorcise the fears of future divisions, an inscription was engraved on the Golden Spike. It read: “May God continue the unity of our country as this railroad unites the two great oceans of the world.”

The Pony Express Though particularly short-lived (even by Frontier standards), the Pony Express has remained one of the most romantic adventures in Far West history. Created in 1860 by William H. Russell (founder of the freighting firm Russell, Majors’ & Waddell), it was intended to demonstrate the superiority of the central overland route through the Rockies over the San Antonio - San Diego route then operated by rival firm Butterfield Overland Mail, and win over the government mail contract lately granted to Butterfield. The Pony Express was a fast horse relay system, with 190 stations 10 to 12 miles apart, where riders changed mounts. The 1,966-mile route started from St Joseph, Missouri, followed the Oregon Trail for a while, then veered south to Salt Lake City and, through Carson City and Placerville, reached its terminus at Sacramento. The service, inaugurated on April 3, 1860, was weekly at first, then semi-weekly; the full trip took an average of ten days, each rider running 50 to 75 miles before transferring his saddlebag to the next relayer. The Pony Express riders – all very young men – were among the best in the West (William F. Cody was one of them, for a brief period), and they showed remarkable dedication in delivering the mail as punctually as was humanly possible. Unfortunately, the Pony Express was made instantly obsolete by the completion of the first transcontinental telegraph line, on October 24, 1861. Having invested half a million dollars and suffered a net loss of $200,000 in the venture, Russell, Major & Waddell finally sold their operation to a free-wheeling promoter named Ben Holladay. By the end of the Civil War, however, most of the stagecoach and mail delivery business in the West (including Ben Holladay’s) had been concentrated into the hands of Wells, Fargo & Company. May 10, 1869 – The Pacific Railroad 111

LA PREMIÈRE VOIE FERRÉE TRANSCONTINENTALE Septembre 1825 vit les débuts du chemin de fer commercial en Angleterre. C’était l’aube de l’aventure exceptionnelle du rail, dont les plus belles pages seraient écrites en Amérique du Nord. Car les avantages de ce nouveau mode de transport n’échappèrent pas à des Américains soucieux d’améliorer les communications dans un pays en pleine croissance. Il s’écoule à peine quarante ans entre les premiers balbutiements côtiers du chemin de fer en Caroline du Sud ou au Maryland, en 1830, et la première liaison transcontinentale, inaugurée en Utah au printemps 1869. Quarante années de progrès technique et de développement des lignes qui vont à la fois susciter et soutenir l’essor industriel des États-Unis. L’histoire des chemins de fer est, en effet, indissociable d’un mouvement plus vaste, qui englobe la mise en place d’une économie capitaliste, les rivalités politiques entre nord, sud et ouest, et l’incessante croissance territoriale du pays, le long de la Frontière – donc, tous les grands traits de l’histoire nationale américaine au xix e siècle. On pourrait même dire qu’elle en est une image impressionnante puisque le train permit non seulement de révolutionner les transports mais, en rendant obsolètes les pistes ou les liaisons fluviales, de transformer le mode de colonisation du territoire et, à terme, la société américaine toute entière. Pour que les chemins de fer deviennent ces vrais pionniers que voyait en eux Frederick Jackson Turner, il fallait un projet transcontinental. Des propositions, jugées alors fantaisistes, furent faites au Congrès dès la fin des années 1840. Bien sûr, la ruée vers l’or de Californie relança l’intérêt d’une liaison ferroviaire Est-Ouest ; mais la rivalité croissante entre élus sudistes et nordistes paralysait Washington et empêcha toute 112

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décision sur le tracé possible d’une ligne transcontinentale. Jusqu’en 1857, où un jeune ingénieur, ardent et compétent Theodore Judah, publia un fascicule intitulé Propositions pratiques pour la construction du chemin de fer du Pacifique. « Judah le cinglé », comme on l’appelait, avait déjà construit une ligne vertigineuse jusqu’aux chutes du Niagara, ainsi que le premier chemin de fer de Californie. La Sierra Nevada et les Rocheuses ne l’impressionnaient nullement ; et son projet, quoique techniquement audacieux, semblait réalisable. Il attira l’attention – et les capitaux – de quatre négociants californiens, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford et Charles Crocker. Cette fameuse « bande des quatre » fonda la Central Pacific Railroad Company en juin 1861 et s’activa au Congrès pour favoriser son projet de ligne transcontinentale. Une première loi sur le Chemin de fer du Pacifique fut votée le 2 juillet 1862; elle créait la Union Pacific Railroad Company, chargée avec la Central Pacific d’ouvrir une ligne entre Omaha (Nebraska) et Sacramento. La construction elle-même a des allures de légende ; les équipes des deux compagnies, sous la férule d’ingénieurs enthousiastes et téméraires, se mesurèrent comme en un tournoi. Ce fut à celui qui avancerait le plus vite vers l’autre puisque, partis des deux bouts de la ligne, chaque groupe posait les rails en sens contraire pour se rejoindre à mi-chemin… ou presque. Le gouvernement fédéral avait octroyé de tels avantages aux compagnies (notamment 2 500 ha de terres gratuites pour chaque mille de voie posée) qu’elles avaient intérêt à progresser le plus vite possible. Dans les premiers temps, toutefois, les fonds manquèrent pour l’une et l’autre compagnie. Dix-huit mois après la pose symbolique du

premier rail à Omaha, en décembre 1863, la Union Pacific n’avait toujours pas installé le moindre centimètre de voie. Du côté de la Central Pacific californienne, la bande des quatre avait vidé ses poches ; des procès, des campagnes de dénigrement dans la presse, des projets concurrents et une sérieuse carence de main d’œuvre, menaçaient dangereusement toute l’affaire. Une seconde loi sur le Chemin de fer du Pacifique, plus généreuse et plus libérale, fut heureusement votée en juillet 1864 et le travail sérieux put enfin commencer avec l’aide d’immigrants chinois, importés pour la circonstance. La topographie favorisa d’abord la Union Pacific ; ses équipes, emmenées par l’ingénieur Grenville Dodge, fonçaient à travers les plaines du Nebraska au moment même où leurs concurrentes, dirigées par Charlie Crocker, se battaient contre les sierras californiennes à coups de tunnels et de viaducs. En deux ans, d’ailleurs, la Central Pacific n’avança que de 188 km, alors que la Union Pacific était déjà à 869 km d’Omaha. Cette dernière devait conserver jusqu’au bout cet avantage kilométrique, malgré des attaques indiennes dans le Wyoming et une fin de parcours techniquement délicate, dans les Rocheuses. Les Californiens, quant à eux, sortirent victorieux des Sierras en mai 1868 (les équipes adverses se trouvaient alors du côté de Laramie, Wyoming) et purent refaire une partie de leur retard dans le désert du Nevada. Obsédés par la performance, les ingénieurs se firent parieurs et se lancèrent des défis homériques : le plus fou était celui du record de pose de voie en vingt-quatre heures. Charlie Crocker le battit le 27 avril 1869, avec un peu plus de 16 km dans la journée !

Thomas Durant pour la Union Pacific, enfoncèrent la dernière broche, surmontée d’une pépite d’or. Reliée à un télégraphe, celle-ci transmit instantanément la bonne nouvelle dans tout le pays, et l’on fêta l’événement. L’exploitation commerciale de cette ligne, qui mettait Sacramento à cinq jours d’Omaha, commença aussitôt. Les sommes investies dans cette aventure étaient énormes : les livres de compte de la Union Pacific révélèrent des dépenses (hors gratifications) de l’ordre de 80 millions de dollars; ceux de la Central Pacific ne furent jamais retrouvés. Mais les quatre fondateurs durent encaisser de sérieux bénéfices puisqu’en trente ans, ils parvinrent à établir un quasi-monopole des transports dans l’Ouest, la célèbre « pieuvre » dénoncée par le romancier Frank Norris. En un demi-siècle, le réseau ferré américain avait été multiplié par soixante, atteignant près de 335 000 km en 1890, lorsqu’on prononça la Frontière définitivement close. Il y avait alors quatre autres lignes transcontinentales en service. Non seulement elles ouvrirent l’Ouest à davantage d’immigrants, donnèrent accès à de plus vastes marchés et favorisèrent l’exploitation de ressources naturelles lointaines ; mais elles œuvrèrent, symboliquement d’abord, pratiquement ensuite, à l’unification d’un pays longtemps déchiré par les sequelles de la guerre de Sécession.

Quinze jours plus tard, le 10 mai, la jonction eut lieu à Promontory Point, non loin d’Ogden, Utah. Leland Stanford, pour la Central Pacific,

May 10, 1869 – The Pacific Railroad 113

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July 2, 1890

THE SHERMAN ANTITRUST ACT BACKGROUND

I

n the three decades following the Civil War, the United States experienced an economic expansion without equal in the history of the western world. The Industrial Revolution found an ideal terrain in America and flowered like a monster plant; by the end of the century, the United States had displaced Great Britain as the world’s economic leader. American industries in 1890 were turning out an amazing number of manufactured products, with an overall annual value of $11.5 billion, or five times what it had been in Civil War days. Productivity, investments, profits, capital gains – wherever one turned, indicators registered record levels. America had, in no time, become the “workshop of the world” that England used to be, a businessman’s paradise and a laboratory for capitalist experiments. For a long time, the western business world would breathe, sigh or hiccup in tempo with the American giant. Because of its tremendous success, the United States became a model; but the attendant excesses and failures were as many warnings to other civilized countries about the risks of uncontrolled industrial development. This industrial “miracle” had been made possible by a conjunction of exceptional factors that no other nation would ever know: massive exploitation of mineral resources (coal, iron, copper, oil, etc.); rapid growth of population, due especially to immigration, with the number of residents doubling between 1870 and 1900 (38.5 to 76.2 million); technological innovations (over 500,000 patents registered between the Civil War and 1900) that introduced new products or improved on existing production methods; postCivil War capital flow that made money easily available for new

Synthèse en français L’État contre les trusts 124

KEYWORDS The self-made man Social Darwinism

119 119

PEOPLE A. Carnegie S. Gompers

116 117

DOCUMENT The Sherman Act

123

FOCUS Populism 120

Opposite: A steel foundry in Pennsylvania, 1892. July 2, 1890 – The Sherman Antitrust Act 115

Andrew CARNEGIE 1835-1919

business ventures or for the expansion of manufacturing operations; a network of improved communications, especially railroads (there were 208,152 miles of track laid by 1890), which turned the nation into one vast consumer market. Businessmen, in this period, were anything but idle; they organized large-scale production, started using more sophisticated machines, perfected working methods, introduced new ideas in management. Their immediate goal was success, money and expansion. They started a capitalist race for profits that soon became so desperate that it spun out of control. Strangely enough, American businessmen disregarded foreign markets for a long time. They were only concerned with domestic consumption which, they anticipated, would keep on expanding with the opening of the West and a growing population. Besides, in politics, the governing Republicans (they remained in power almost uninterruptedly for fifty years, from 1860 to 1912) stubbornly held on to their traditional protectionist policies and supported high tariffs that hampered foreign trade.

No one serves as a better illustration of the myth of success than industrialist Andrew Carnegie. The son of a poor weaver, Carnegie grew up in Scotland. Hard times forced the family to emigrate to America in 1848. They settled in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, where the young boy worked in the same cotton factory as his father. For several years, he devoted most of his spare time to reading and acquired a rather extensive culture although he had received little schooling; in that sense also he was a true self-made man. Carnegie worked at various jobs for telegraph companies and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Then, during the Civil War, he was asked to organize the transport of Union troops. At that time, he came to realize the importance of the iron industry, so he resigned from the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1865 and founded the Keystone Bridge Company. His business activities never stopped expanding after that. In the early 1870s, he took several trips to Europe, met Sir Henry Bessemer (an engineer who had 116

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The result was that overproduction appeared during the 1870s, as supply began to exceed domestic demand. A sort of blind logic pushed industrialists towards fiercer competition as each one tried to displace, or eliminate all rivals in a closed field. Mass production led to a steady and dramatic fall in prices: the wholesale price index dropped from 193 to 82 between 1864 and 1890. And businessmen started to build up defenses against lower sales and dwindling profits: the movement began with simple collusion, but eventually led to wholesale consolidation. Within a decade, the 1880s, businessmen turned America into what philosopher John Dewey called “The United States Inc.” – a gigantic arena for contending corporations. Severe competition struck the railroads first, in the late 1860s. Price wars and illegal practices reached a peak after transcontinental connections had been established. In the West, there was no one to serve as guardian of the public interest because of the relatively primitive state of social and political organization; railroaders were free to impose their own laws. Elsewhere, they played on the division of power between federal and state governments. Railroads posed a critical problem that no existing legislation could address: that of interstate relations. The creation of large corporations would soon make it an even more complex and pressing issue for the central government, but years of corruption, inefficiency, political

patronage and factionalism had paralysed Congressional lawmakers. Competition worked like a selective process and recalled the Darwinian theory of evolution in which survival depended on the capacity to adjust. Those individuals who survived the tests of competition to become the leaders of American industry and the wealthiest men in the nation, believed in a kind of natural selection in business. “The fortunes of railroad companies are determined by the law of the survival of the fittest,” once declared the famous railroad tycoon James J. Hill. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie concurred by claiming that the law of competition was biologically founded, and that while it might “sometimes be hard for the individual,” it was “best for the race.”

CIRCUMSTANCES

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aradoxically, all of these “captains of industry” plotted the end of competition and worked frantically towards monopoly. And the elimination of weaker rivals was no natural law; it was manmade, chiefly the result of a movement of consolidation that began after 1873 and gained momentum in the 1880s and 1890s in complete diregard of the working classes. Originally, as the word suggests, consolidation was a gesture of defense; in time and with the rapid growth of “consolidated” entreprises, it became a deadly weapon. Its earliest form was the “pool”, a loose agreement between corporations to fix prices and control supply. Being informal and often transitory, pools were limited to very specific sectors or products: salt, gunpowder, whiskey, steel-rails, etc. They remained in fashion until the late 1870s and episodically reappeared in the next two decades. For more reliable and lasting combinations, businessmen turned to a form of merger, the “trust”, with which oil czar John D. Rockefeller experimented in Ohio in 1882. Designed to protect his Standard Oil Company of Ohio from that state’s antimonopoly laws, the trust structure integrated a number of affiliated companies at the top: stockholders surrendered their securities and voting rights to a “board of trustees” – in this case presided over by Rockefeller – who managed the new corporation. The Standard Oil trust proved trend-setting. It was quickly followed by similar operations in other industrial sectors: distilleries, canneries;



recently invented a new, inexpensive process of making steel from pig iron) in England and decided to develop the steel industry in America. His company led the way in making the United States the world’s leading producer of steel by the end of the century. It was also a model of organization: Carnegie knew how to select and manage men. When he sold out his Carnegie Company to J. P. Morgan’s trust, the United States Steel Corporation, annual profits had reached $40 million. Characteristically, the man who, in youth, had recognized the importance of knowledge and culture, devoted a great part of his fortune to funding public libraries and educational institutions. He also tried, in articles and books, to publicize his philanthropic ideas, maintaining that the rich had a responsibility to ensure “the improvement of mankind”.

Samuel GOMPERS 1850-1924 Much like Carnegie, Samuel Gompers was a man of action and a self-made man. He was born in London where his father, recently emigrated from Holland, was a cigar-maker. An apprentice at ten, he soon followed his family to New York City (1863). They lived in the Jewish district on the East Side, where he and his father started a cigar-making business. Early on, Gompers joined the trade union and participated in workmen’s debates. He read Karl Marx in the early 1870s and gradually became convinced that improvement of the workers’ conditions lay in the hands of labor itself. He started to organize the cigarmakers after 1877 and, although the results ••• July 2, 1890 – The Sherman Antitrust Act 117

••• of their concerted actions were scant, this union became a model for others. In 1881, he set up the “Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States of America and Canada” which, five years later, became the American Federation of Labor. From 1886 to his death, in 1924, he remained, almost uninterruptedly, at the head of the American labor movement. A very shrewd observer of history and human nature, Gompers knew the weaknesses of labor in a capitalist system and, resisting the temptation of radicalism, focused exclusively on issues which could gather consensus among the working classes: better wages, more leisure, more freedom. He was a reformist at heart rather than a revolutionary and was largely responsible for establishing the A.F.L. as a counterforce in the American economy. By the sheer weight of number and the reasonable character of its demands, his federation managed to bargain on an equal footing with the biggest corporations and to become a major force in the world of business.

copper, aluminum, sugar, etc.; and also in banking, with J.P. Morgan’s well-known group. Before the end of the decade, fifteen such trusts had been formed. By that time, criticism against consolidation, and the excessive power of trusts, had grown into a public clamor that the government could no longer ignore. Like most popular protests (see pp. 120– 121), this outcry was undiscriminating; its targets were the trust and “Big Business”, but these were just convenient catchwords. Hardly anyone really knew what they meant. Yet the railroads had gone too far speculating on land, manipulating securities, playing with fares and terrorizing not only their own competitors, but farmers, traders and local communities. Congress was persuaded to move, and voted the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 – a law that, unfortunately, remained largely symbolic for lack of active political and judicial follow through. Then the new Republican Congress opened the 1890 session with a debate on trusts and monopolies. From it emerged the first truly anticombination law, named after Ohio Senator John Sherman. Often criticized for being plainly ineffective, this Sherman Antitrust Act was nevertheless a significant step forward in the fight against abusive business practices. It showed at least that legislators were ready to side – however prudently – with the people against Big Business. And labor unions saw a glimmer of hope in an Act which, it seemed, sought to curb the power and arrogance of industrial corporations. In its opening section, the Act outlawed “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.” Section 2 declared illegal monopolies or attempts to monopolize and conspiracies. The last section identified “corporations and associations” as “persons”, giving them the rights and duties of ordinary American citizens, as described in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1868). One major misconception about this act concerns its aims: its primary target was commonly thought to be business concentration. In fact, the latter almost entirely escaped federal control, which had been repeatedly curtailed by Supreme Court decisions, throughout the 1880s. Over the decade, the Court had consistently defended state prerogatives and spoken against government interventionism. As a result, some states, like New Jersey or Delaware, voted very permissive laws by which all sorts of combinations, including

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KEYWORDS

THE SELF-MADE MAN The self-made man is a legendary hero in America. He not only incarnates the virtues of American democracy, which allows individuals to “improve”, to advance, to rise, more readily than in the stratified, aristocratic Old World. He also represents the apotheosis of a moral and social order that rewards hard work, self-help and merit with fame, power and, more significantly, with wealth. The self-made man is a pure product of a materialistic society that measured success in terms of money and fortune. No wonder, then, that he became a living symbol of the “land of opportunity” in its days of greatest industrial development. Successful businessmen served as role models for the younger generations: men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and P. T. Barnum enjoyed telling of their own experience and how they had fought the handicap of lower-class origins to make their way to the top. They even authored books on the subject: The Gospel of Wealth

(Carnegie), How I Made Millions (Barnum), etc., thus propagating the myth of irresistible ascent implied by such stock phrases as “from rags to riches”, “from bell-boy to president” and their variants. The most striking image of the self-made man, however, was shaped by Horatio Alger, who wrote an impressive number of juvenile novels on the theme (especially the “Ragged Dick” series). His heroes always displayed the traditional virtues of middle-class America-industry, economy, integrity, piety-which made success appear even more easily attainable to the masses. Yet money seemed to make the wealthy arrogant and insensitive and, though they claimed to be instruments of progress, they hardly ever lightened the poor man’s burden. With time, social mobility turned more uncertain. The cult of success and of the self-made man was briefly revived in the 1920s, after a twenty-year eclipse, but it did not survive the 1929 crisis.

SOCIAL DARWINISM Inseparable from the cult of success, social Darwinism was a doctrine developed in the United States by sociologist William Graham Summer, who popularized the ideas of British philosopher Herbert Spencer, himself an unconditional admirer of Darwin. The temptation was great indeed, among social scientists, to extrapolate Darwin’s conclusions on the evolution of living organisms to other disciplines. To what extent could such concepts as “natural selection”, “struggle for existence”, “survival of the fittest”, be applied to human societies, to human cultures and civilizations? Could social and economic progress be explained as the result of “natural” processes? Spencer’s and Sumner’s adaptations of Darwinian theories were found to match the conservative ideas of the American



moneyed class. In their view, natural laws prevailed in the social and economic worlds: the selection was made between the fit and unfit, according to their inherent qualities and merits, through competition. Those who were fittest were rewarded with success; the others were bound to disappear. And there was no reason to disturb the competitive mechanism by attempting social reform. Social Darwinism was, in brief, a secular philosophy of survival whose workings recalled the Calvinist doctrine of grace. It served to justify the achievements and the wealth of an elite and to promote the perpetuation of laissez-faire and competition in the business world. Until those who thought themselves fittest were themselves threatened with extinction.

July 2, 1890 – The Sherman Antitrust Act 119

FOCUS

POPULISM There had been unmistakable signs of decline in American agriculture since the Civil War. Farmers had become the victims of a fast-changing and industrializing society. They lost much of their independence as land fell into the hands of speculators and/or corporations (like the railroad companies); many of them became landless tenants or “hired men” and the number of “absentee owners” – businessmen from cities who bought land for profit, not for subsistence – dramatically rose. Farmers saw their freedom also threatened by increasing debts: land that the Homestead Act of 1862 had offered at $1.25 an acre, could reach ten times that price in the hands of speculators. Machinery was essential but expensive, and farmers borrowed extensively to procure the proper equipment. To make matters worse, agricultural prices, which had been gently sliding down in the 1870s because of mechanization and excessive supply, took a plunge after 1880, as competitive products from the Ukraine, Argentina, Australia and South Africa became available on the world market. A bushel of wheat, sold for $2.50 in 1866, was only worth $.65 in 1884 and still depreciated over the next decade ($.56 in 1894). Farmers perceived the extent of the economic changes that had taken place since the Civil War and began to voice their discontent loudly, especially against the railroads. Their first protest movement in the early 1870s, the Patrons of Husbandry (also known as the Grangers) forced some agricultural states in the Midwest to control railroad rates. These so-called Granger Laws were confirmed by the Supreme Court in the famous Munn v. Illinois case (1877) which justified government regulation over private companies (like the railroads) when these were “affected with a public interest”. The farmers’ victory was short-lived; railroad lobbyists and friendly legislators actively worked against Granger Laws. Corruption was so widespread 120

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in state administrations that it seemed to farmers that the only way to defend their interest was through direct political action. The early 1880s saw the creation of Farmers’ Alliances in many mid-western and southern states; their aim was to influence elections and legislation. They appeared on the national scene at mid-term congressional elections, in 1890, contributing to the election of nine Representatives and two Senators from the West. In the South, Alliances, working with the Democratic Party, also claimed credit for the election of no less than 40 Congressmen. The farmers’ protest, however, was chiefly a western movement where popular support was widespread enough to justify the creation of a third national party. The western Alliances accordingly gathered 1,500 delegates at a convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, in May 1891; there, a People’s Party-or Populist Party – was formed. It was decided that another convention, to meet in Omaha, Nebraska, the following year, would select candidates for the coming presidential election. Therefore, 1892 was the year when farmer radicalism achieved national recognition through the adoption on July 4 (a date with symbolic overtones) of an electoral platform, drafted by Minnesota Utopian socialist Ignatius Donnelly, and the choice of Civil War veteran General James B. Weaver, of Iowa, for President. Candidate Weaver scored poorly (only 22 electoral votes) in the election in which Grover Cleveland beat Benjamin Harrison, but the Populist platform itself did have some impact on public opinion. It expressed the discontent not only of farmers but of all working classes. It demanded government ownership of railroads and telegraph and drastic remedies against falling prices. The Populists’ proposals to combat deflation were the increase of the money supply by the printing of paper money and the unlimited coinage of silver currency. In other words, an extension of the Silver Purchase Act of

1890, by which the government had agreed to buy 4.5 million ounces of silver each month to coin additional dollars. The Populists thus felt cheated when Democratic President Cleveland, whom they thought was sympathetic to their cause, persuaded Congress to repeal the Silver Purchase Act in August 1893. A financial panic and the dangerously low level of gold reserves had motivated the President’s decision. But it also renewed Populist protest, which now focused on the currency problem. Gold, or silver, or both, as currency standard? The question was to dominate national politics for the next few years and set “bi-metallists” against “free silverites”. The debate was central to the 1896 presidential campaign, which focused on economic and social issues. The Populists dominated the Democratic convention and managed to impose their candidate, a former Nebraska Congressman and charismatic speaker, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan brought eloquence, fervor and compassion to the campaign: he spoke for the people: the exploited, the working masses and the rural poor. Had not Big Business and the Eastern conservatives deliberately ruined his campaign, he might have posed a serious challenge to his opponent. Presented as a dangerous western radical, Bryan failed to win most of the populous states in the East and lost the election to Republican William McKinley. Bryan’s failure was like a swan song for the Populists. Many of their proposals (but not the silver standard) would eventually find their way into the successive platforms of the Progressive movement, in the next fifteen years. Agrarian America was gone; but its democratic heritage would not be lost in the age of industry.

William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925). The Boy orator of the Platte.



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mergers and holdings, were encouraged. The federal government was left with regulating only price-fixing agreements – in other words cartels and pools –, the only malpractices likely to affect interstate commerce. This, indeed, was to drastically reduce the range of the Sherman Act in the following years.

CONSEQUENCES

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n terms of strict antitrust action, the law was grossly inadequate, and was poorly enforced. Violations were punishable by a maximum fine of $5,000 and/or imprisonment for up to one year. Such sanctions were hardly dissuasive for industrial moguls who dealt in millions of dollars. And the courts, at least in the decade following the Act, hardly ever applied criminal penalties in the antitrust cases they had to decide. Fifteen cases were tried between 1890 and 1899 (10 civil and 5 criminal) yet no fines or prison sentences were imposed. Worse, the Supreme Court ruled against the government in the famous sugar trust case (U.S. v. E. C. Knight & Co., 1895) brought by the Department of Justice against the American Sugar Refining Company for the acquisition of E. C. Knight stock with a view to monopolizing the sugar refining industry. The takeover was found to be an effort to control manufacture, not commerce; the “restraint of trade” clause of the Sherman Act was therefore not considered applicable. The conservative Court, under Chief Justice Melville Fuller, proceeded to note that the Act contained no explicit provision against the acquisition of corporate stock. The immediate result was a tidal wave of mergers in the period 1897-1904 and the development of a new form of combination – the holding company – a complex structure in which one company purchases over 50% of the stock of other firms to gain a majority control over them. A more subtle form of combination than the trusts, the holdings were already legal in New Jersey and New York; after 1895 they would be legalized in Delaware and Maine as well. In the nine years to come, 5,300 industrial firms came under the control of 318 new trusts and holdings, with a combined capital of $7.5 billion. On one hand, the Sherman Act managed to eliminate most of the cartels and pools that existed in 1890. Agreements or contracts between competitors did tend to become less frequent in the 1890s. But Big Business had already adopted the fusion of firms as its preferred form of concentration; the resulting conglomerates had

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such weight and power that the political world trembled. The time had come in Washington to initiate more radical action.

SHERMAN ACT (51st Congress, 1st Session)

Sec. 1 [Contract, Combination or Conspiracy in Restraint of Interstate or Foreign Commerce Illegal; Penalty] Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal. […] Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor1, and, on conviction thereof2, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $5,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court. Sec. 2 [To Monopolize, Attempt to Monopolize, Combine or Conspire a Misdemeanor; Penalty] Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $5,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court. Sec. 3 [Contract, Combination or Conspiracy in Territories or District of Columbia Illegal; Penalty] Every contract, combination in form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce in any Territory of the United States or of the District of Columbia, or in restraint of trade or commerce between any such Territory and another, or between any such Territory or Territories and any State or States or the District of Columbia, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared illegal. Every person who shall make any such contract or engage in any such combination or conspiracy, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $5,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court. Sec. 4 [Equity Cases: Jurisdiction and procedure]

of this act; and it shall be the duty of the several district attorneys of the United States, in their respective districts, under the direction of the Attorney-General, to institute proceedings in equity4 to prevent and restrain such violations.[…] Sec. 6 [Forfeiture of Property in Transit] Any property owned under any contract or by any combination, or pursuant to any conspiracy (and being the subject thereof) mentioned in section one of this act, and being in the course of transportation from one State to another, or to a foreign country, shall be forfeited to the United States, and may be seized and condemned by like5 proceedings as those provided by law for the forfeiture, seizure, and condemnation of property imported into the United States contrary to law. Sec. 7 [Treble Damage Suits] Any person who shall be injured in his business or property by any other person or corporation by reason of anything forbidden or declared to be unlawful by this act, may sue therefore in any district court of the United States in the district in which the defendant resides or is found, without respect to the amount in controversy, and shall recover three-fold the damages by him sustained, and the costs of suit6, including a reasonable attorney’s fee. Sec. 8 [Definitions] The word “person,” or “persons,” wherever used in this act, shall be deemed to include corporations and associations existing under or authorized by the laws of either the United States, the laws of any of the Territories, the laws of any State, or the laws of any foreign country. 1 minor crime 2 of that 3 amended in 1911: jurisdiction was transferred to district courts 4 equity cases are tried without jury and appeal to the judges’ “equitable” evaluation of complaints 5 similar 6 legal expenses

The several circuit courts3 of the United States are hereby invested with jurisdiction to prevent and restrain violations

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L’ÉTAT CONTRE LES TRUSTS Petit Poucet de l’économie face à l’ogre britannique au début du xix e siècle, les États-Unis, lorsque ce dernier s’achève, sont devenus la première puissance industrielle mondiale. La révolution technologique, les chemins de fer, la croissance du territoire et de la population, la richesse des ressources naturelles, le flot continu de l’immigration – tout conspira, en particulier après la guerre de Sécession, à l’extravagante mutation économique des États-Unis. Détentrice de tous les records, dynamique et innovatrice, l’industrie américaine s’imposa rapidement comme un nouvel atelier du monde, remplaçant l’Angleterre déclinante, et prit un essor qui paraissait irrésistible. Les hommes d’affaires, les industriels, les financiers misèrent sur une croissance soutenue et, pensait-on, illimitée. La formidable machine capitaliste était en marche ; dans une ambiance où prévalaient la poursuite du succès, l’optimisme et l’appât du gain on se mit à voir grand et l’on se lança dans la production de masse sans trop se soucier de la demande. Dans ce pays qui croissait constamment on ne pouvait qu’anticiper une consommation en hausse perpétuelle. La course aux parts de marchés s’amplifia durant les années 1870, encouragée par la reconstruction du Sud et par une concurrence que soutenaient les républicains, alors au pouvoir, et adeptes bien connus du laissez-faire. Ces mêmes républicains (qui resteront au pouvoir, sauf deux courtes éclipses, jusqu’à la Grande Depression) pratiquaient aussi le protectionnisme et, en ralentissant ainsi les échanges avec l’étranger, laissèrent les industriels américains tributaires 124

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du marché intérieur. Celui-ci, hélas moins actif que prévu, permit à la surproduction de s’installer, d’abord insidieusement, puis au grand jour. Les prix de gros chutèrent ainsi de moitié entre 1864 et 1890. La concurrence redoubla, chacun essayant par tous les moyens, légaux ou illégaux, de déstabiliser ses adversaires, de leur prendre des clients et de survivre dans une espèce de champ clos où, selon les lois darwiniennes appliquées à la société, seuls les plus aptes subsisteraient. Dans cette lutte sans merci, les chemins de fer montrèrent l’exemple : les guerres de tarifs, les pratiques frauduleuses, l’intimidation, faisaient partie des armes utilisées par les rois du rail, et nul, surtout dans l’Ouest, ne songeait à les leur confisquer. Partisans farouches d’une sélection par l’élimination des plus faibles, les grands barons d’industrie rêvaient tous, en fait, d’un univers sans concurrence, et ils s’employèrent à établir des situations de monopole partout où ils le purent. Aussi les années 1880 virent-elles l’avènement d’un grand courant de concentrations d’entreprises qui prit de multiples formes, au gré de l’imagination novatrice des bâtisseurs d’empires. La forme la plus primitive en était le pool, un accord occulte entre compagnies sur les prix ou les parts de marché qui permettait de contrôler la concurrence sauvage sur certains produits ou dans certains secteurs particuliers. Jugé trop inefficace, le pool fut rapidement remplacé par le trust, une formule plus complexe essayée avec succès par John D. Rockefeller pour sa Standard Oil of Ohio en 1882, qui consistait à couronner plusieurs compagnies d’un exécutif unique,

le Conseil des Trustees, ainsi nommé parce que les actionnaires confiaient (to trust) à ces dirigeants la gestion de leurs portefeuilles et leurs droits de vote. Cette formule s’avéra si commode qu’une quinzaine de ces trusts avaient été formés avant 1890. La puissance concentrée dans ces structures nouvelles fit peur. La brutalité et la fatuité des grands industriels, leur mépris des lois et de la morale finit par attirer sur eux la colère du Congrès. Un premier pas fut franchi en 1887, avec l’ Interstate Commerce Act, une tentative de réglementation hélas peu probante. Le Sherman Antitrust Act, voté en 1890, se voulait, lui, plus coercitif. Il visait, en effet, spécifiquement les trusts et les monopoles ; mais il s’attaquait à leurs activités commerciales (les seules relevant de l’autorité fédérale) et non à leur structure même qui, elle, bénéficiait de législations particulières à chaque État.

encore plus subtile et complexe que le trust et qui, en une décennie, permit de réduire 5 300 entreprises industrielles à 318 nouveaux holdings et trusts, au capital cumulé de 7,5 milliards de dollars. À ce stade, le grand capitalisme américain cessa d’être une simple force économique et se mit à nourrir de vrais desseins politiques. La confrontation avec l’autorité de l’État était inévitable ; la véritable histoire des grandes corporations ne faisait que commencer. Et l’on s’aperçut très vite que le Sherman Act en avait été, simplement, l’avant-propos.

Aussi certains États libéraux, comme le New Jersey ou le Delaware, continuèrent-ils à favoriser la formation chez eux de trusts d’envergure nationale, voire internationale. Jouant habilement de ce hiatus entre autorité d’état et autorité fédérale, les businessmen américains poursuivirent sans trop de mal leur mouvement de concentration, aidés en cela par une Cour Suprême conservatrice, toute acquise aux thèses de la libre entreprise et du grand capital. Le fameux arrêt de 1895 rendu en faveur du trust du sucre (U.S. v. E. C. Knight & Co.) non seulement rendait presque caduc le Sherman Act mais, étrangement, encourageait les entreprises à acquérir des participations chez leurs concurrents – au besoin plus de 50 % afin d’en prendre le contrôle. Ainsi naquit la pratique du holding, forme de concentration

July 2, 1890 – The Sherman Antitrust Act 125

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September 15, 1901

THEODORE ROOSEVELT PRESIDENT BACKGROUND

I

n retrospect, the 1890s were a truly extraordinary decade. It opened on a depression that spread throughout the nation, except the industrial Northeast, and affected almost every sector of the economy except for a few great capitalists. Yet, by the turn of the century, the United States again enjoyed prosperity and power, had become a feared or respected nation abroad and a world economic leader. Much of this reversal was due to the particular combination of business and political interests that was achieved after 1896 and the election of a Republican President, William McKinley. McKinley’s inauguration marked the beginning of the greatest movement of consolidation in American business. A financial boom followed, which breathed new life into the major economic sectors of the nation. These were the “golden years” of trusts and holdings, a successful period characterized by close ties – almost collusion – between the President, his party and Big Business. The victory of 1896 signalled what historian Henry Adams rather gloomily called “the final surrender of the country to capitalism.” Behind this great comeback of captains of industry and wealthy bankers lay one man, Mark Hanna, the prototype of the businessman turned politician. This coal and iron tycoon from Ohio came to politics rather late in life, but rose quickly from local party boss to national leader of the Republican Party. He mastered the party machine perfectly and knew how to round up the votes on important occasions; in addition, he could, if necessary, win over the entire business community to his cause. Indeed, it was he who “manufactured” McKinley’s 1896 success, which earned him the



Synthèse en français Théodore Roosevelt accède à la présidence 136

KEYWORDS Big Stick Policy 131 Muckrakers 131

PEOPLE M.A. Hanna J.M. Hay

128 133

DOCUMENT The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine

135

FOCUS The Spanish-American War 132

Opposite: Theodore Roosevelt in his home library at Oyster Bay, New York, 1902.

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Marcus Alonzo HANNA 1837-1904 The son of Scotch-Irish immigrants established in Ohio, Marcus Hanna took over the family grocery business from his father in 1862, after having been expelled from Western Reserve College in Cleveland. He served very briefly in the Civil War and returned to Ohio in the fall of 1864. He then became a junior partner in the iron and coal trade firm of Rhodes & Co., after his marriage to Daniel Rhodes’s daughter. He expanded the company and eventually changed its name to M.A. Hanna & Co., in 1885. By that time, he was one of the foremost businessmen in Cleveland, the owner of a newspaper and of an Opera House. He then decided to plunge into politics, not to seek elective office himself, but to manage the Republican Party machine in Ohio and launch candidates of his own. One of his best “creations”, and a long-time protégé, was William McKinley, an Ohio Congressman, whom he actively endorsed as candidate for the governorship in 1892. He managed McKinley’s reelection as governor in 1894 and pushed hard for his nomination as presidential candidate at the Republican convention in St. Louis (June 1896). He spared no effort and no expense in the following campaign, which sent McKinley to the White House and earned Hanna the nickname of “President-Maker”. He went on to chair the Republican National Committee, raised money for the party and made generous contributions himself. Political enemies tried to discredit him and charges of bribery were occasionally brought against him. But it seems he was basically a loyal and honest servant of his party and a pragmatic businessman who encouraged labor unions and collective bargaining in his own companies. His only defect was to be too ••• 128

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appropriate title of “President Maker”. His opponents also called him “Dollar Mark”, to suggest his involvement with money men. William Jennings Bryan was defeated in the presidential race for 1896, and the social problems that had been debated during the campaign were not the order of the day. America was now again busy making profits and creating wealth; the worker and the farmer still protested but were too poor to be heard. The rich thought of growth, of expansion and so did the McKinley Administration; optimism and restlessness were soon translated into aggressive foreign policy moves that sought to establish the United States as an imperialist power. The war of 1898 against Spain (see pp. 132–133), in the Caribbean and the Philippines, gave Americans a small colonial empire, complemented by the annexation of Hawaii (1898) and the partition of the Samoas (1899). Even though the U.S. would not become the colonial power some expansionists at home strongly supported, these overseas adventures left a lasting mark upon domestic politics, if only by bringing into the limelight Theodore Roosevelt, an Assistant Secretary of the Navy who had given up his job to fight in Cuba. He came back a national hero when the exploits of the cavalry unit, the “Rough Riders”, he had led into combat were reported home. He was almost immediately elected Governor of New York, in November 1898, a post in which he experienced at first hand the tremendous power of the Republican Party machine in New York; of its boss, Thomas Platt; and of the network of business connections they controlled. Roosevelt had to run a prudent middle course between the Republican ideology of capitalist progress and his own intimate convictions that reforms and social relief were greatly needed. His term as Governor thus saw him by turns submissive to party policies and rebellious against the invasion of politics by private interests. The multiplication and expansion of trusts had clearly become a threat. Besides, problems of class divisions and sectionalism, temporarily obscured by foreign wars and patriotic struggles, had not been solved. Governor Roosevelt clashed several times with his own party’s leaders in New York, over financial scandals and the independence of public service from the influence of private corporations. These incidents made his reelection in New York highly improbable, for party bosses now considered him “unsafe”. Yet, his popularity still ran so high that the Republicans could not eliminate him from the political scene. The

only solution was to “shelve” him by offering him the Vice-Presidency on McKinley’s ticket for the 1900 election. And the Republican pair defeated Bryan again, by 292 electoral votes to 155.

CIRCUMSTANCES

••• conservative (his opponents said reactionary) in an age of reform and his only mistake to have grossly misjudged Theodore Roosevelt’s capacities as statesman. He died before he could prove himself a better candidate than T.R. in the 1904 presidential contest.

I

t was already common knowledge then that the Vice-Presidency was a kind of political grave. Little has changed since, no doubt because the system itself excludes any possibility of joint leadership and turns the post into what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., called “a resting-place for mediocrities”. Indeed too many Vice-Presidents have been lost from public sight the moment they took the job. Woodrow Wilson’s Vice-President, Tom Marshall, liked to tell the story of two brothers: one went to sea, the other was elected VicePresident, nothing was heard of either again. Theodore Roosevelt fell into the trap and heard the door bang behind him. In the early months, he complained that he had even less influence now on the McKinley Administration than when he was governor. This was an exasperating interlude, during which Roosevelt could measure the extent of vice-presidential powerlessness and wish the post had been abolished altogether. In fact, as President Wilson later pointed out, the importance of the Vice-President lies in the order of succession and “in the fact that he may cease to be (italic added) Vice President.” Such a prospect escaped Mark Hanna and the Republican party bosses when they devised their plan to drive Roosevelt into what they assumed would be a dead-end. That McKinley, who was a robust, sedate 58-year old veteran of politics would die by the hand of an assassin on September 14, 1901, came as a stunning shock to the nation. And doubly so to Mark Hanna who saw the patient work of a lifetime cancelled in one day; he was seen crying at the President’s deathbed. On September 6, McKinley had gone to open the PanAmerican Exposition in Buffalo, New York. While he was extending a welcome to some visitors, an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, fired two shots into the President’s body at point-blank range. One bullet perforated his stomach and a fatal infection developed. McKinley remained in hopeless condition for a week, then died. “To murder him was a gross absurdity that makes me despair of anarchy,” commented Henry Adams, adding that it was Hanna who should have been killed. But, as “stupendous” to him as it probably was for Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt was now President. The latter had received the news while mountaineering in the Adirondacks; he



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rushed to Buffalo and was sworn in as 26th President of the United States on September 15, 1901, the day after McKinley died, and six weeks short of his own 43rd birthday.

CONSEQUENCES

T.

R.”, or “Teddy”, as he was familiarly called, was the youngest President so far, a man that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., described as “a rather ordinary intellect, with extraordinary gifts, a shrewd and… pretty unscrupulous politician.” This sketchy, rather unkind, portrait fails to do justice to Theodore Roosevelt’s exceptional magnetism, a popular appeal that none of his recent predecessors had enjoyed and that few would in the future.

“

An expert at publicizing his actions, constantly posing as a reformer, promoter of progress and defender of the public good, the President launched a series of moves that would earn him his lasting reputation as a “trust-buster” at home and as a “global policeman”, ready to use his “Big Stick”, abroad. His first success against those “malefactors of great wealth” that practically held the government hostage was the dismantling of J.P. Morgan’s and James J. Hill’s railroad holding, the Northern Securities Company, in March 1904 – an achievement widely advertised in the press. Roosevelt would also launch judicial action against two other great trusts, the Standard Oil of New Jersey and the American Tobacco Company. Yet these were largely symbolic victories, designed to impress public opinion and reestablish the pre-eminence of government (over business) in public affairs. In terms of strict “trust-busting”, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s successor, would be much more pugnacious and efficacious. The same concern for supremacy also inspired Roosevelt’s foreign policy; this time, the object was America’s supremacy in the western hemisphere and among western nations. The image of the daring “Rough Rider”, acquired in the Cuban war, served him well; it suited his energetic diplomacy and reinforced the U.S. position as guardian of order on the American continent (North and South) and as umpire in foreign conflicts. Two of his most notable achievements were his mediation in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and his support of the anti-Colombian revolt in Panama (1903), which led to U.S.- guaranteed independence in the Isthmus, and made possible the construction of the vital Canal (1904-1914). The latter case was merely one example of how Roosevelt intended 130

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KEYWORDS

BIG STICK POLICY The expression was applied mainly to Theodore Roosevelt’s diplomatic, and military, action in the Caribbean area during his first term. The president intended to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, extend the United States’ domination over the American continent and raise his country to the rank of world power. Much of Roosevelt’s aggressive foreign policy in Central America and the West Indies was meant to foil Germany’s increasing, and unsettling, presence in the region. It seems that Roosevelt wished to match the Kaiser’s imperialism with his own. The president told an audience at the 1901 Minnesota State Fair: “There is a homely adage that runs `speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far,’” and this is exactly what he did, first in the boundary dispute between Canada and the U.S. over Alaska, in 1903; then in the Panamanian revolution of November 1903, when the U.S. Navy helped rebels in their fight for independence against Colombia. And, once again, in 1904, when the United States took control of the Dominican Republic. Though Roosevelt was extensively criticized at home (especially in Congress) for “cowboy” diplomacy, repeatedly caricatured with big stick in hand, and abused as the “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” of American politics or as “Tsar Rooseveltoff” (Henry Adams), he managed to establish himself as a world leader on the international scene, capable of mediating between belligerent powers, as in the Russo-Japanese War (he organized the Portsmouth Conference that ended the conflict in 1905) or in the Moroccan crisis (he convened the Algeciras Peace Conference in 1906).

MUCKRAKERS It was Theodore Roosevelt who borrowed the term from a passage in Pilgrim’s Progress in which John Bunyan refers to the “man with the muckrake, the man who could look no way but downward with the muckrake in his hands…”. Roosevelt used it for the first time in a speech to the Gridiron Club, Washington D.C., in March 1906, and in a rather unflattering fashion. The president denounced the muckrakers’ exposure of corruption in administration and

business as an exercise dangerous for public peace and as a detonator of social unrest. For it was true that the “muckraking” movement had gained momentum and power since the appearance of the first sensational newspaper articles and books about the evils of capitalism and Big Business. Subsequent publications were not the usual protest papers, or empty propaganda: they were carefully documented studies, presenting undeniable evidence that great fortunes had been built on unethical practices. Among the pioneers in the field was Henry Demarest Lloyd with his Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894) that focused on the workings of the Standard Oil trust. A decade later, Ida M. Tarbell, in her History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), supplied even more damning proof that the Rockefeller fortune had been built on intrigue and conspiracy. Sensational newspapers, such as the World, Hearst’s New York Morning Journal, and McClure’s, started printing series of incendiary articles on political corruption and its impact on public affairs. In the fall of 1902, Lincoln Steffens, then editor of McClure’s began publishing a series of six articles on the corruption of municipal governments, later gathered into one volume, The Shame of the Cities (1904). In these articles, a pessimistic Steffens saw an essential moral weakness in America that needed urgent treatment. And the muckrakers’ primary purpose (in which they did succeed, finally) was to bring mass attention to such problems. Their attacks were as unsettling as Roosevelt indicated, but, in the long run, hygienic for American democracy. September 15, 1901 – Theodore Roosevelt president 131

FOCUS

THE SPANISH - AMERICAN WAR April 25 – December 10, 1898

“We are a conquering race…,” said an Indiana politician in 1896, “We must obey our blood and occupy new markets, and if necessary new lands.” This expansionist view indicated America’s renewed interest in the Monroe Doctrine in the 1890s. Following the end of the continental frontier, it seemed reasonable to look for new opportunities overseas. Besides, American economic interests had to be protected in the New World – notably in Central and Latin America, where U.S. investments had developed remarkably since the Civil War. The Monroe Doctrine was therefore reactivated as a guarantee of American prosperity and security in the region. Twice, in the years preceding the Cuban crisis, the United States had shown its determination to follow the principles edicted by Monroe: once in 1891 in Chile, and again in 1895 in Venezuela. In both instances, war was barely avoided and the world realized that interventionism was becoming a keystone of American foreign policy. “Our great demand is expansion,” Secretary of State James G. Blaine had stated in 1890; “the United States is practically sovereign on this continent,” threateningly added his successor Richard Olney in his famous 1895 letter to British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. Others concurred, including Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan who, in his 1890 study The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, dreamed of an American empire on the Roman model and pleaded for a strong Navy. Indeed, nothing much had been done since the Civil War to restore U.S. maritime power; after 1890, however, great improvements would be made which, in a little more than a decade, hoisted the U.S. Navy to 3rd rank in the world. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, one of Theodore Roosevelt’s closest friends, also believed in American sea-power, and pointed out, in a Forum magazine article of March 1895, that the U.S. needed a naval station in the Caribbeans. The best location, he 132

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claimed, was Cuba. That island had been in constant turmoil for over twenty years but a major revolt against Spanish rule flared up in 1895 when a drop in sugar exports (in fact mostly due to American protectionism) generated a serious crisis in the Cuban economy. Washington proceeded to hold Spain responsible for the protection of U.S. lives and properties on the island and, at the same time, publicly called for a greater autonomy of Cuba. But Madrid ignored American warnings, sent troops to crush the rebellion, and placed prisoners in concentration camps, which increased anti-Spanish sentiment in the U.S. The press and some radical interventionists demanded war. President McKinley at first resisted, and so did the business community, whose main priority was to restore prosperity at home. Two events, however, occurring in February 1898, precipitated American involvement in Cuba. First, a letter from the Spanish minister to Washington, Dupuy de Lôme, to a Cuban friend was intercepted in New York and published in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Morning Journal, a sensational, pro-war, newspaper, on February 8. In that private letter, the diplomat strongly criticized President McKinley, whom he called a “politicastro” (petty politician), and found him weak and eager to please public opinion. The indecorous minister had to resign, and tension with Spain suddenly grew. Then, a week later, February 15, the battleship Maine, which McKinley had ordered to be moored in Havana harbor to protect American residents in Cuba, was blown up by a mine. Young Republicans in Congress, the press and segments of public opinion screamed for war, using “Remember the Maine!” as a battle-cry. McKinley reluctantly gave in to their demands. After he had sent a series of ultimatums to Madrid in the last week of March, he was faced with Spain’s blunt refusal to negotiate Cuban independence under U.S. auspices.

John Milton HAY 1838-1905

He appeared extremely irresolute as to what course should be taken: he sent a message to Congress on April 11, in which he gave four good reasons for American “forcible intervention” in Cuba, yet, at the same time, he warned Congress that Spain had just ordered a cease-fire with the rebels “in order to prepare and facilitate peace.” Left to decide, Congress moved quickly to recognize Cuban independence, which led Spain to declare war on April 24. What Secretary of State John Hay called the “splendid little war” lasted only 25 days, if one only considers the military operations in Cuba, from June 22, when the first detachments of U.S. troops landed on Cuban soil, to July 15, when the city of Santiago surrendered. But the first Spanish-American confrontation took place much earlier, in the Philippine Islands: on the night of April 30 - May 1, Commodore George Dewey’s Asiatic squadron entered Manila Bay and disabled the entire Spanish fleet moored at Cavite navy yard. Upon news of Dewey’s “victory”, Americans went on more eagerly with their war preparations. Theodore Roosevelt, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, even resigned his cabinet post on May 6 to become a lieutenant colonel in the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry (later known as the “Rough Riders”). Meanwhile, a Spanish fleet under Admiral Cervera, which had left the Cape Verde Islands in late April, was heading westward. Rumors that the ships could raid the U.S. coast sent a wave of panic along the entire Atlantic seaboard, from Virginia to New England. Actually, they were heading for Santiago, which they reached on May 19. Twelve American vessels, commanded by Admiral Sampson, almost immediately established a naval blockade of Santiago. Then an expeditionary force, under General William R. Shafter was transferred from Tampa, Florida to the Cuban coast on June 17. The voyage,

John Hay was a man of the frontier, who grew up and was educated in Warsaw, Illinois. He enrolled at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1855 and returned to his western hometown for three years, with a view to becoming a poet or a man of letters. Instead, he entered his uncle’s law office in Springfield, where he was a neighbor of Abraham Lincoln. He became the latter’s private secretary and followed him to Washington in 1860. He was extraordinarily impressed by the president as his 10-volume hagiography, Abraham Lincoln: A History, published in 1890, clearly shows. He acquired a useful experience at the White House, but never felt fully at home in the political world. His career, however, took a radical turn in 1865: he entered the diplomatic service and served successively as Secretary to the American legation in Paris (1865– 67), Chargé d’Affaires in Vienna (1867– 68), then again Secretary in Madrid (1868–70). On his return home, he tried his hand at journalism, working for a time for the New York Tribune, then for Century Magazine. For about twenty years, he remained on the fringe of politics, accepting posts ••• September 15, 1901 – Theodore Roosevelt president 133

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on dilapidated transports, lasted over five days; U.S. which became effective in 1900. In the Pacific theater, troops landed east of Santiago on June 22 and, a the Filipinos resisted American occupation as they week later, proceeded to encircle the city. They met had Spanish rule. A three-year pacification war was strong resistance from the Spaniards whom they necessary to restore order, and the establishment of outnumbered 10 to 1. The battles of San Juan and El a territorial government in 1901 facilitated the Caney were bloody ones, but opened the way to transition towards independence. Santiago, which was duly besieged. On July 3, the Spanish fleet tried to force the blockade but was entirely destroyed. Two weeks later, Santiago surrendered. Spain asked for peace and, on August 12, signed a preliminary agreement that provided for an armistice and imposed McKinley’s peace terms: complete evacuation of Cuba, cession of Puerto Rico and one island in the Marianas, and U.S. occupation of Manila. Formal peace talks opened in Paris, on October 1, 1898, and led to a treaty signed on December 10, and ratified by the U.S. Senate on February 6, 1899. Spain permanently abandoned sovereignty over Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam, and sold the Philippine Islands to the U.S. for $20 million. In six months, Americans had secured a small overseas empire at little cost (only 385 soldiers had died in battle, though 2,061 more died of illness in the islands). And some prominent men had acquired Spanish-American War: The Caribbean, 1898. heroic stature (Teddy El Caney Roosevelt, for example, Santiago San Juan Santiago Tampa by leading the charge Harbor Hill SPANISH of his cavalry unit up FLEET U.S. Siboney Daiquiri BLOCKADE San Juan Hill). But U.S. BA FORCES H McKinley had no U.S. FLEET intention of annexing Key West U.S Cuba or colonizing the U.S.S. MAINE .A RM SUNK. FEB. 1898 Y S Havana Philippines; with the Teller Amendment, ATLANTIC OCEAN CUB U.S . FL A EET passed in Congress with the war resolution, U.S. FLEET Santiago U. the U.S. had declared S. B PUERTO LOC HAITI KADE RICO against the annexation DOMINICAN CARIBBEAN SEA REPUBLIC of Cuba. Americans H FL JAMAICA EE thus merely supervised T( CER VERA ) the preparations for Cuban independence, RID

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to further American interests in the area through the use of what he called “an international police power” – an attitude that went well beyond the old Monroe Doctrine, and would shape the U.S. interventionist policy in the Caribbeans, and in Central and Latin America for the rest of the century. Roosevelt’s “accidental” presidency signalled some major changes in American politics that could hardly have been predicted a few years before, even by the most clairvoyant of strategists. The most visible transformation concerned the use of executive power: this “madman” Roosevelt – as his enemies saw him –, prematurely buried in the vice-presidential vault, had turned the President’s office into a command post from which he issued orders to the whole nation (and to other nations as well), including to Congress whose role declined greatly (especially in the shaping of foreign policy) during his seven-and-a-half-year reign. Besides, with the “Square Deal” reform program he offered to the American people a series of priorities – ranging from the regulation of commerce to the conservation of natural ressources – which were fundamentally his own, and which reinforced the position of the President as leader, policy-maker, and “steward” of the people. All presidential programs in the future, from Wilson’s “New Freedom” to Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” to Kennedy’s “New Frontier” to Johnson’s “Great Society” were inspired by a conception of executive dominance, initiative and service to the American citizen that Theodore Roosevelt had himself introduced and applied.

••• in the State Department, then resigning to go back to journalism. Finally, President McKinley asked him to be Ambassador to Great Britain in 1897, and, a year later, called him back to be Secretary of State. He settled the status of Cuba and the Philippines in negotiations with Spain and developed the wellknown “Open Door Policy” in China, a policy based on the great powers’ agreement to respect their mutual trading rights with the Celestial Empire. He joined his efforts with European powers to oppose the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and prevent the partition of China. He also tried to settle the Alaska boundary question with Britain. But when Roosevelt became President, he took many foreign policy matters out of Hay’s hands and the Secretary of State’s influence decreased considerably. His health broke down early in 1905 and he died in July in his New Hampshire country home.

THE ROOSEVELT COROLLARY TO THE MONROE DOCTRINE (Excerpts from President Theodore Roosevelt’s Message to Congress, December 6, 1904) “It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. […] Chronic wrong-doing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such

wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which […] Cuba has shown since our troops left the island [1902], and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end. […] We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.” September 15, 1901 – Theodore Roosevelt president 135

THÉODORE ROOSEVELT ACCÈDE À LA PRÉSIDENCE La défaite, aux élections présidentielles de 1896, du candidat démocrate et populiste William Jennings Bryan, marquait un retour de l’Amérique au culte de l’argent et de la prospérité insouciante. Après des années noires de dépression économique, d’agitation paysanne, de révoltes ouvrières, la mystique capitaliste reprenait ses droits et l’on brandissait à nouveau sous les yeux incrédules du peuple, un temps résigné au marasme économique, l’évangile de la richesse et les panacées du laissez-faire. Avec l’arrivée à la Maison Blanche du républicain McKinley, le monde des affaires et celui de la politique célébraient aussi une complicité flagrante, qui autorisait la fusion des intérêts privés et publics. Prônée par les uns, mais redoutée par d’autres – tel Henry Adams, qui voyait dans le scrutin de 1896 l’ultime reddition du pays aux capitalistes – cette véritable collusion entre l’exécutif, le parti majoritaire et les businessmen annonçait un renouveau économique et politique imprévisible quelques années auparavant. Pur produit de la machine politique républicaine, fabriqué et lancé par un cacique du parti nommé Mark Hanna (un magnat du charbon originaire de l’Ohio), le président McKinley devait s’attacher à favoriser la croissance et la concentration d’entreprises afin de rétablir l’abondance. Stimulée par l’optimisme des milieux d’affaires, l’Amérique alla jusqu’à poursuivre une politique étrangère résolument expansionniste, dans les Caraïbes et dans le Pacifique. Elle s’y heurta notamment à l’Espagne, à laquelle elle arracha Cuba, Porto Rico et les Philippines, après une courte guerre (avril-décembre 1898). Le sous-secrétaire à la Marine, Theodore Roosevelt, s’illustra si bien dans ce conflit, 136

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à la tête d’une régiment de cavalerie – les Rough Riders – haut en couleurs mais efficace, qu’il en revint auréolé de gloire. Le nouveau héros national fut instantanément récompensé en étant élu gouverneur de l’État de New York (Novembre 1898), puis en rejoignant McKinley lors de l’élection de 1900, comme candidat à la vice-présidence. Le tandem remporta un brillant succès sur les démocrates emmenés par Bryan. Depuis l’époque du XII e Amendement (1804), le rôle joué par le vice-président dans la vie politique nationale n’avait cessé de décliner. Le poste, note Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., devint la « villégiature des médiocres ». Roosevelt le savait bien, qui déclarait lorsqu’on lui proposa le poste que c’était « un tremplin vers l’oubli ». Il souhaitera d’ailleurs, plus tard, sans l’obtenir, son abolition pure et simple. Issu d’une vieille famille patricienne de New York, Theodore Roosevelt dérangeait les barons du parti, notamment Mark Hanna, par ses prises de position réformistes, suspectes parce qu’elles semblaient contester les bienfaits du capitalisme industriel. Roosevelt méprisait les parvenus et supportait mal l’emprise des businessmen sur la politique. Le pousser dans l’impasse de la vice-présidence le rendrait, pensait-on, inoffensif. Tel aurait été le cas si McKinley avait vécu. Mais, le 14 septembre 1901, Hanna et ses acolytes apprirent à leur dépens que le principal atout d’un vice-président, c’est son pouvoir de succession. Le 6 septembre, McKinley s’était rendu à Buffalo pour inaugurer l’Exposition panaméricaine. Parmi les visiteurs qu’il avait tenu à accueillir en personne, s’était glissé un anarchiste du nom

de Leon Czolgosz ; celui-ci fit feu sur le Président à bout portant. Gravement blessé à l’abdomen, McKinley aurait pu survivre si une infection pernicieuse n’avait eu, finalement, raison de lui après huit jours de souffrances. Rappelé d’urgence alors qu’il excursionnait dans les Adirondacks, Roosevelt prêta serment au lendemain du décès, le 15 septembre 1901. Il devenait, à presque quarante-trois ans, le 26 e – et le plus jeune – président des États-Unis. Fédéraliste dans l’âme, Roosevelt avait trop rongé son frein pour ne pas vouloir pleinement assumer le pouvoir exécutif, dans toute sa dimension constitutionnelle – et au-delà si nécessaire. Jouant habilement de son extrême popularité, le Président sut se défaire, avec discrétion mais fermeté, de l’emprise intolérable que le parti avait exercée sur son prédécesseur. Aux yeux de ses concitoyens, il apparut rapidement comme un réformateur, capable de tenir tête aux plus grands industriels ou banquiers (ceux qu’il vilipendait en les décrivant comme de richissimes malfaiteurs), et comme un fougueux diplomate, capable d’imposer la suprématie américaine dans l’hémisphère occidental, fidèle au souvenir du cavalier héroïque de San Juan Hill. Cette double image de briseur de trusts et de gendarme du monde est, à vrai dire, excessive, mais elle fut soigneusement entretenue par Roosevelt lui-même, qui ne manqua jamais l’occasion d’actions spectaculaires, aux États-Unis comme à l’étranger.

1904. Il recommença avec la Standard Oil of New Jersey et l’American Tobacco Company. Mais Roosevelt ne condamnait pas la grande entreprise ; il se battait avant tout pour le principe de suprématie du pouvoir politique. À cet égard, son successeur, William Howard Taft, fera un briseur de trusts bien plus virulent. De même, si sa médiation dans la guerre Russo-Japonaise de 1904-1905 lui octroie une stature internationale, sa diplomatie est avant tout centrée sur le continent américain et les Caraïbes. Son fameux corollaire à la doctrine Monroe justifie l’interventionnisme des États-Unis dans les régions limitrophes ou d’intérêt primordial pour la sécurité nationale. Il ouvre la voie à une forme d’impérialisme politique, surtout économique, sur l’Amérique centrale et l’Amérique du Sud, qui a inspiré, jusqu’a ce jour, toute la géostratégie des États-Unis dans ces régions. Ainsi la présidence accidentelle de Théodore Roosevelt s’avère-t-elle annoncer des changements profonds : dans la société américaine, où l’on va chercher à corriger les excès du capitalisme sauvage (et la plupart des futurs programmes présidentiels de réformes sociales s’inspireront du Square Deal de Theodore Roosevelt) ; dans la vie politique, avec l’effacement progressif du Congrès devant le pouvoir exécutif ; sur le plan international, enfin, où les États-Unis s’assurent, dans l’hémisphère occidental, une zone d’influence qui ne leur sera plus guère contestée dans le demi-siècle à venir.

Ainsi donna-t-il le plus grand retentissement possible aux poursuites judiciaires que son Administration entama contre la holding ferroviaire de J. P. Morgan and James J. Hill, la Northern Securities Company, en mars

September 15, 1901 – Theodore Roosevelt president 137

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October 24, 1929

THE GREAT CRASH BACKGROUND

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orld War I had been the last stage of an economic and social cycle characterized by unprecedented industrial growth and a reformist, “Progressive”, movement that intended to correct the excesses of free entreprise. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson had, it seemed, managed to restore the primacy of government and public welfare over Big Business and special interests. The exceptional circumstances of the war had allowed the federal government to assume extensive powers, but this was felt by most Americans to be just an interlude. With the war and its intense economic effort over, the United States was on its way back to “normalcy”. Yet hardly anyone knew what the word implied – not even President Harding who used it as campaign slogan in 1920. Few suspected, in fact, that the return to “normalcy” might prove so painful and risky.

Synthèse en français Le jeudi noir 148

KEYWORDS Rugged individualism 141 Brain-trust 145 Conservation 145

PEOPLE W.R. Hearst H.C. Hoover F.D. Roosevelt

140 142 144

FOCUS The Hundred Days

146

There was pain in the immediate postwar period as an overheated economy tried to adjust to peacetime conditions. Unemployment ran high (up to 12%) as production declined and returning soldiers stepped into the job market. Inflation, rampant until 1918, when war-related demand exceeded supply, soared to 77% in 1919 and 105% in 1920. Americans suffered a decrease in buying power just as post-war exuberance was inciting them to spend more. The many resulting protests assumed a rather incoherent turn; Americans closed the door on social reform and Progressivism but reopened the gates of xenophobia and racial tensions and put the blame on liberals, Bolsheviks and anarchists alike for socioeconomic hardships. Voters massively returned the Republicans to power in 1920 on the promise that prosperity was around the corner. The 1920s,

Opposite: The New York Stock Exchange in Wall Street, on “Black Thursday”. October 24, 1929 – The Great Crash 139

Hearst estate and castle at San Simeon, California.

William Randolph HEARST 1863-1951 A legendary figure in the press world (made famous by Orson Welles’s portrait in Citizen Kane), William Randolph Hearst was born in a wealthy San Francisco family, received a rich boy’s education, with private tutors, and went to Harvard, where he discovered an interest for newspapers and printing. At twenty-four, Hearst took over his father’s newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, and imposed a new editorial policy based on three notions: talent, sensation and independence. The Examiner took off and became a powerful force in local politics; one of its most famous crusades was against the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1895–96. Then Hearst tried his luck in New York City, with the Journal. The formula he had used in California worked here also: sensational news, cheap emotions, ••• 140

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optimistically called the “New Era” by some, would be a decade as decidedly conservative as the previous one had been reformist. With Warren Harding in the White House, Big Business once again had an opportunity to dominate the world of politics. The presence, in Harding’s team, of millionaire mining engineer Herbert Hoover (a future President) as Secretary of Commerce, and of aluminum tycoon Andrew W. Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury, guaranteed that the “Gospel of Wealth” would be revived and business interests promoted – at all costs. Clocks were set back almost fifty years as President Harding’s Ohio friends, those he had imprudently brought into the Cabinet, like Harry M. Daugherty (Attorney General), Albert B. Fall (Secretary of the Interior) and Will H. Hays (Postmaster General), disgraced themselves and the Administration in a series of oil and real estate scandals. Shadows of Ulysses S. Grant and the Gilded Age hovered over Washington. Prosperity did return, however, and economic success would, in the following years, become an obsessive public issue, brilliantly summarized by President Calvin Coolidge in his 1925 statement that, “The business of America is business.” What the President said conveyed what everyone saw, a swarming capitalist world of rampant competition, mass production and burgeoning consumerism. Never had the United States appeared so potentially

KEYWORD

RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM The expression was repeatedly used by Herbert Hoover in American Individualism (1922), a book in which he argued that the great principle of equality of opportunity – one of the founding tenets of the nation – still allowed every American citizen “to take that position in the community to which his intelligence, character, ability and ambition entitle him.” Indeed in advocating this vigorous individualism, Hoover was only recalling the original Protestant ethic of hard work and personal achievement that moved the pioneers; and reviving the myth of progress and success already contained in the “self-made man” rhetoric.

millionaire in his thirties and became President of the United States. Heir to the 19th-century school of business liberalism, Hoover believed in laissez-faire and distrusted state intervention, which could be fatal to the famous entrepreneurial spirit of Americans. In his apology for individualism, Hoover wrote that all that the government could guarantee to its citizens was “liberty, justice, intellectual welfare, equality of opportunity, and stimulation to service.” The rest was a matter of personal initiative and of self-reliance. The 1929 crisis proved such a view dramatically wrong.

The son of a poor lowa blacksmith, he was himself a living example of the successful individual, that turned

wealthy, so dynamic, and so carefree. It all seemed “rosy and romantic”, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald of that “Jazz Age” he so vividly depicted in his stories. But progress was no fiction for a majority of Americans. Once the post-war recession had waned, production of consumer goods accelerated sharply: industrial output doubled between 1922 and 1929 and the Gross National Product, which stood at $70.3 billion at the end of 1921, jumped to $104.4 billion in 1929. In the same period the Dow Jones Industrial Average would act as a marker of economic euphoria – if not hysteria – starting from a timid 63.90 in the fall 1921 to reach a sky-high 381.17 in the fall of 1929. Moreover you did not have to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal to be aware of the widespread economic boom: the average per capita income increased 37% over the decade ($522 to $716), and the American worker received nearly twice the salary of his British counterpart, and three times that of a French wage-earner. The American consumer could choose between an ever-expanding range of products, from automobiles to refrigerators, to radio sets, washing machines, and telephones – all designed to improve his daily life. Productivity, served by countless technical innovations, ran high and mass production became the rule. Demand, encouraged by advertising and easy credit, was expected to rise indefinitely.

••• overexploitation of events. His enemies called it “yellow journalism”. Hearst used his newspapers to campaign for war with Spain in 1898, then was elected to the House as a Democrat from New York in 1902. His political career was brief (six years) and not very successful. He returned to publishing: by World War I he already owned a press empire. He tried to work behind the scenes in politics, blending muckraking and personal vendettas; the results were, at times, shameful. Having made a fortune on his own and in addition inherited his parents’ money, he started building an elaborate castle in 1919, on the family estate in San Simeon, California, which he filled with splendid collections of art works and antiques. His press empire, however, suffered dramatically during the Depression years and never fully recovered.

October 24, 1929 – The Great Crash 141

Herbert Clark HOOVER 1874-1964 Hoover’s reputation as President, though recently upgraded by revisionist historians, still suffers from the curse of “Black Thursday”. Yet, his career, both as businessman and politician, is exemplary. He was born in West Branch, Iowa, where his father was a blacksmith. An orphan at 8, he moved to his uncle’s home in Oregon, entered Stanford University at 17 and earned an engineering degree there. He was then hired by an international mining company and, until World War I, managed mines on all five continents. Having worked for relief agencies in London and Belgium, he was appointed U.S. Food Administrator in 1917, and Chairman of the Allied Food Council in 1918. President Harding chose him as Secretary of Commerce, and Hoover was to keep the post under President Coolidge as well. He proved to be a very efficient administrator and, though a Republican, initiated policies in favor of labor (concerning working hours and child labor, for instance). His election as President in 1928 was not closely contested, but he inherited an unsound economic situation and did not move to improve it. Unable to fight the depression, blamed for all the nation’s problems, he lost to F. D. Roosevelt in 1932 and temporarily faded out of national politics. After the war, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower called him back to take advantage of his organizational skills. He headed two “commissions” that made useful recommendations on government organization (1949 and 1955).

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Yet as early as 1925 there were unmistakable signs of a possible disaster ahead. There were, in fact, two economies running in parallel: one successful, dynamic and profitable; the other flawed and stagnating. Overall unemployment remained high throughout the decade, between 5% and 13% (an estimation, since official records were not kept at the time). Farmers suffered from stagnant or falling prices; many could not repay their debts and brought down rural banks in their fall. Increasingly, salaries failed to keep pace with production and it became urgent, after 1925, to maintain demand (therefore avoiding overproduction) through a laxist credit policy. In the course of this period, Americans took an unexpected liking for the Stock Exchange. Wall Street had been on the rise, steadily, since 1922, and the temptation to make quick profits in buying and selling stock was further stimulated by the federal policy of low interest rates practiced from August 1927 on. With a prime rate down from 4% to 3.5%, and credit cheaper in consequence, stock speculation went wild. The value of securities, artificially pushed up by speculators, soon lost touch with the real world. If and when skeptics were to question the reliability of stocks, Wall Street would face major trouble. Indeed, what happened on October 24, 1929 in Wall Street nearly wiped out capitalism and deserves the name it was given: the Great Crash.

CIRCUMSTANCES

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o other event in American history, save perhaps for Lincoln’s assassination and Pearl Harbor, came as such a shock to the nation. In Lincoln’s case, however, a substitute president was immediately available; when the smoke cleared over Pearl Harbor, the armed forces prepared to retaliate; on that Thursday of October 1929, aptly called “Black Thursday”, a whole system for which no ready-made replacement existed began to crumble. This explains why the situation was met by officials with such incredulity and such obstinate passivity. Laissez-faire capitalism was a phoenix that had outlived all crises and panics in the past; this could not be the end of it. And Herbert Hoover, now in his first year in office, had erected government inaction into a philosophy. His campaign speeches had amply demonstrated his belief in capitalist orthodoxy, in the virtues of economic individualism (he called it “rugged individualism”) as opposed to state paternalism or socialism, and his faith in the role of government as “umpire” not as player. In his eyes, the American

system was destined to triumph if confidence and optimism remained firmly planted in American hearts.

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Sept.: 216

200 Index 100 1926

Confidence was badly shaken on Wednesday, October 23, when 2.6 million shares were sold in the closing hour on the New York Stock Exchange and the Dow Jones took an ominous plunge of 21 points. The next day, “Black Thursday” October 24, a generalized movement of sales sent even the strongest stocks down; within three hours a stronghold such as U.S. Steel (already down to 205 from its all-time high of 261 in September) had lost 15 points. Minor stocks followed as a fretful crowd gathered outside the exchange building, anxiously expecting news. To stem the tide, a group of bankers, representing the National City Bank of New York, J.P. Morgan & Co., the Chase National, Guaranty Trust, Bankers Trust and First National, put together a common support fund estimated at $240 million. Their intervention saved the day; but a record 12.9 million shares had been traded, a sign that market fever was rising. The worst was yet to come – four days later: “Black Tuesday,” October 29, opened on a panic movement of sales – 3 million shares sold in the first thirty minutes – and no bankers’ trick could stop the slide. Shutting down the exchange was a radical solution that directors rejected and, by day’s end, 16.4 million shares had been sold and industrial stocks had lost an additional 43 points. Two weeks later, November 13, stocks had sunk to their lowest that year, 50% down from September. $30 billion worth of stocks had evaporated. A.T.& T., General Electric, Radio Corporation of America, Sears, Roebuck, U.S. Steel – all took a severe beating, and no one really knew how to handle the situation. Secretary of the Treasury Mellon recommended self-healing: the crisis would run its course and the economy recover by itself. Hoover, however, aware of the psychological impact of the collapse, tried to sound unconcerned and reassuring. To restore optimism – if not prosperity – he maintained that business was “on a sound basis”, that any lack of confidence in its strength was “foolish”. In the face of visible disaster, the incredulous Hoover was the one to offer the best example of foolishness. Like the mad captain of a sinking manof-war, he kept singing the praises of torpedoes! Hoover’s public attitude as well as his initiatives to combat the crisis proved inadequate. But the President should not too readily be turned into a scapegoat: he was held hostage by a laissez-faire system that worked on the false assumptions of endless growth and the efficacy of selfcorrecting mechanisms in times of trouble. The idea of a directive

150 Nov.: 145 Dec.: 110 Janv.: 102

100

May: 93

Dec.: 102

july:84

50 June: 34 0

1926

1928

1930

1932

1934

1936

New York Stock Prices, 1926-1936

Variations of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average (DJI) December 1928 - December 1929 (Monthly averages) Dec. 31, 1928 Jan., 1929 February March April May June

300.00 317.41 317.41 308.85 319.29 297.41 333.79

July August September October November Dec. 31, 1929

47.70 380.33 343.45 273.51 238.95 248.48

Change from 1928 = Minus 51.52 Record high, September 3: 381.17 Record low, November 13: 198.69

Prices of specified commodities (selected months, 1929-33)

corn cotton rubber sugar wheat wool 1929 June Sept. Dec. 1930 March June Sept. Dec. 1931 March June Sept. Dec. 1932 March June Sept. Dec.

18.04 20.56 3.52 1.50 91.9 17.62 20.19 3.98 1.37 78.0 16.64 16.06 3.71 1.32 74.5 79.0 91.7 64.9

14.74 13.21 10.15 9.16

15.25 12.38 8.19 8.94

3.43 1.15 3.28 1.05 3.14 .87 3.29 .77

98 92 91 86

57.5 53.8 43.2 34.5

10.15 8.42 5.83 5.78

7.13 6.38 5.00 4.63

3.28 3.32 3.41 3.14

.76 .76 .71 .74

80 85 77 72

32.2 29.4 28.0 18.8

6.44 4.99 7.40 5.72

3.31 2.69 3.88 3.25

2.76 2.72 3.16 2.83

.72 .64 .59 .49

69 54 63 55

Source: Commodity Yearbook, 1939, New York, 1939.

October 24, 1929 – The Great Crash 143

Franklin Delano ROOSEVELT 1882-1945 Born in Hyde Park, New Jersey, in a patrician family whose ancestry reached back to the original 17th century Van Rosenvelts of New Amsterdam (later New York), Franklin D. Roosevelt received an education reserved to the élite, at Groton School, first, then at Harvard College and at Columbia Law School. One of his cousins, Theodore, was at the time President of the United States. Roosevelt was admitted to the New York State bar in 1907 but he felt less attracted to the practice of law than to politics. His first elective position was as state senator for New York (1910). In the next decade he would rise to prominence within the Democratic Party, campaign for Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and serve as Assistant Secretary to the Navy through the War and after the Peace of Versailles. This first phase in his political career ended in a crash in 1920 when he ran as Vice-Presidential candidate on the same ticket with James M. Cox. The Democrats’ defeat was so humiliating that, for a time, Roosevelt retired to his Hyde Park estate and shunned public life. A further tragedy struck him in August 1921 when an attack of poliomyelitis left him paralyzed from the waist down. It took him three years of very painful efforts to walk again, on crutches, and four more to walk with a cane. But his determination and iron will had prevailed over invalidism, and he was soon back into national politics. He barely lost to Hoover in the presidential elections of 1928, but was elected Governor of New York that same year, and served two successive terms. With a Republican legislature against him he could hardly push all the social programs he had planned. Elected president in November 1932, he was ••• 144

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government was an anathema. Thus Hoover tended to appeal first to voluntary cooperation on the part of Big Business and to traditional capitalist remedies for crisis – more investment, more contracts, and more of that “one good old word – work”, as he put it.

CONSEQUENCES

B

ut the deepening depression of 1930-1931 was a new type of crisis which conventional medicines could not cure. The Stock Market continued the free fall that would stop only in July 1932 when the Dow Jones reached its lowest, 41.22, down almost 90% from the peak of September 1929 (381.17). Banks were among the first to feel the impact of this financial fiasco: 3,600 of them, big and small, went bankrupt in the next twenty-four months. The most notorious of failures was that of the Bank of the United States, on December 11, 1930. Despite promises by the major industrialists, production declined; the Administration’s highly protectionist trade policy (incorporated in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of June 1930) contributed to a general constriction of markets. At home, prices, salaries and employment did not long resist the pressures of recession. Farm prices showed the way: a bushel of wheat that sold for $1.37 before the Crash, was worth $0.49 in early 1932; similarly, cotton went down 66%, corn 60%, tobacco 57%, wool 53%. Businessmen did keep their word to maintain wages until the fall of 1931, but the slowdown of production provoked almost immediate, and massive, layoffs. Unemployment soared from 3.2% to 9% of the labor force in less than a year and neared the 25% mark in 1933. By then, hundreds of thousands of jobless people had flocked to cities where they formed a new underclass living on private charity and community relief. Voters returned a majority of Democrats to the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections of 1930, and almost did the same for the Senate. The political message was clear: the country expected more innovative measures. Hoover belatedly answered with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, created in January 1932 to grant extensive federal loans to ailing industries, banks, farms and commercial agencies. With this initiative, the Hoover Presidency managed to avoid total failure and opened the way to another type of capitalism and to another way of governing a nation. Further innovations (see pp. 146–147) were left to Hoover’s triumphant successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

KEYWORDS

BRAIN TRUST Although he was a born leader accustomed to taking the final decisions himself, Franklin Roosevelt liked to work with a team – in fact with two teams. One was the official Cabinet, whose members he had carefully chosen for their competence and their political experience. The other was a group of close advisers, many of whom had already worked for Roosevelt when he was Governor of New York, and on whose expertise the president often relied. There were academics among these “brain-trusters”, such as Raymond Moley, a Progressive from Ohio who taught public law at Columbia University, or Rexford Guy Tugwell, a professor of economics at the same institution, who would later head the Resettlement Administration, or Adolf Berle, Jr., another economist. Roosevelt also brought Harry L. Hopkins with him to Washington; Hopkins, a social worker by training, had organized relief operations for the state of New York, under Governor Roosevelt.

Accordingly, the President would put him in charge of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in 1933. Other young collaborators, Thomas Corcoran, Benjamin Cohen, Donald Richberg, Samuel Rosenman, were assigned various policy-drafting tasks. Among the few “elders” in the group were experienced politicians, like Bernard M. Baruch, whom President Wilson had named Chairman of the War Industries Board in 1918 and who had remained a prominent public figure among Democrats in the 1920s. Roosevelt also used an old friend, Congressman Sam Rayburn from Texas, an influential Democrat who lobbied intensively to get New Deal legislation through Congress. A kind of competition existed between these men and the official Cabinet, a rivalry which Franklin Roosevelt used to stimulate his Administration and develop the best program of reforms.

CONSERVATION The word was first coined in the mid-1870s, at the time the American Forestry Association was created, and later (about 1908) taken up as a slogan by Theodore Roosevelt and the head of the Forest Service Gifford Pinchot. Americans were then beginning to realize that the abundance of land and natural resources that had so far favored national expansion was threatened. Diminishing timber reserves and receding virgin lands required a drastic reversal of public policies towards nature and the environment. Efforts should be made to conserve resources, not to waste them. Acting on the ideas developed by the first protectors of nature, John Muir, John Wesley Powell and Frederick Law Olmsted, the federal government sought to preserve not only forests, but beautiful scenic sites throughout the country: that was the purpose of the National Park Service, organized in 1916. Yet conservation had to go beyond the preservation of wilderness areas or the opening of recreational facilities.



President Taft set up a Bureau of Mines to protect the nation’s mineral resources. The public land holdings were extended. But no one went as far in conservation measures as Franklin Roosevelt with the New Deal. Conservation had, by then, become one of his Administration’s favorite issues and conservation projects abounded, especially as they helped solve several problems at once. The Civilian Conservation Corps, for example, set up on March 31, 1933, helped reduce unemployment by giving men outdoor jobs in national parks or in reforestration projects. But the most comprehensive conservation program assuredly was the Tennessee Valley Authority (T.V.A.) of 18 May, 1933. This rehabilitation project not only dealt with natural calamities in the valley, like floods and erosion, it also provided for improving navigation on the river, for economic and social renewal in the valley and for the development of agriculture. Conservation, in this case, became everybody’s business and a moral obligation for all; the project did help Americans build up a more rational popular response to the environment.

October 24, 1929 – The Great Crash 145

FOCUS

THE HUNDRED DAYS Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Inauguration speech, March 4, 1933, sounded like a declaration of war: he identified the enemy – economic depression – and advocated immediate action. His tone was that of a commander-in-chief seeking to restore the morale of his troops. The new president’s aim, he later admitted, had been “to banish, so far as possible, the fear of the present and of the future which held the American people and the American spirit in its grasp.” Roosevelt’s leadership galvanized the whole American nation and his name would remain bound to a program of reforms which, during the presidential campaign of 1932, he had called the “New Deal”. Like Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” and Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” before, this program was intended primarily to correct the excesses of the capitalist system. Yet it was also expected to prove that, despite recent hazards, the American democratic experiment was still viable. Roosevelt’s 57.3% majority election seemed to reflect widespread approval of his platform; given the high rate of absenteeism, however, only 33% of American voters had given him a mandate to act. But the President lost no time. He knew some shock therapy was needed to revive confidence and dynamism. The first “Hundred Days” of the New Deal, from March 5 to June 16, 1933, showed how Roosevelt intended to use those “broad executive powers” he had called for on the day of Inauguration. He manoeuvred Congress into voting a dozen major laws that, in the long run, brought about an important transformation of American society. With determination and persuasion as his main weapons, he managed to change the course of American capitalism without the tragic trial of a revolution. With the help of his “Brain Trust” – a shadow cabinet of faithful experts and advisers – he prepared a comprehensive economic and social strategy to be pushed through Congress in the coming weeks. This “Hundred Days” legislation addressed four kinds of 146

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

problems, all of them emergencies: the collapse of the financial structure, unemployment, the agricultural crisis, and the decline of industrial production. Although specific measures were to be taken, none of these problems could be treated independently from the others. He first proceeded to reorganize the banking system, disrupted by some 5,000 bank failures since 1929, with the Emergency Banking Act (March 9) and the Glass-Steagall Banking Act (June 16), then to regulate Stock Exchange activities with the Truthin-Securities Act (May 27). As for the protection of the currency and the treatment of deflation, the President persuaded Congress to ratify abandonment of the gold standard (June 5) – a measure later complemented by a 41% devaluation of the dollar (January 1934). All New Deal initiatives, directly or indirectly, aimed at putting as many as possible of the 12 million jobless Americans back to work. Immediate federal relief was first organized with the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (March 31), followed by the job-oriented Federal Emergency Relief Act (May 12). Then the Administration turned to the plight of American farmers, beset by debts, overproduction and low prices: the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act (both May 12) and, a month later, the Farm Credit Act (June 16) provided a sound basis for recovery. But the most experimental project – and also the New Deal’s greatest success – was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA, May 18) which served as a lasting model of integrated social, industrial and conservation programs. Known worldwide, the TVA perfectly illustrated Roosevelt’s belief in a “community of interests” between government and the private sector. In industry, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA, June 16), probably the New Deal’s most ambitious policy, sought to combine two usually irreconcilable principles: state control and private

initiative. Industrialists were to accept “codes”, which eliminated unfair competition by establishing production quotas and minimum prices. Labor unions, collective bargaining, minimum wages, and the prohibition of child labor were similarly “codified”. In addition, the NIRA created a new agency, the Public Works Administration (PWA), which would fight unemployment through a number of huge public construction projects. Within three months, then, the New Deal had taken shape, although it did lack visible coherence, with reforms launched in all directions and at times difficult to harmonize. Despite the poverty of immediate results, presidential initiatives received wide public support and began to change Americans’ approach to business and economic matters. The Hundred Days represented a test of the Administration’s credibility; but, more importantly, they signalled a sharp turn away from Hoover’s selfish, unproductive, “rugged individualism”, towards what Roosevelt had, in a 1932 campaign speech, called “enlightened administration”.

••• to serve three full terms, leading America through the Great Depression and the World War. He was only a few months in his fourth term (an unprecedented event in U.S. political history) when a cerebral hemorrhage took him off on April 12, 1945 – a premature death, probably hastened by the accumulated strain during the war years. Four weeks later, May 7, Germany surrendered.

Franklin Roosevelt speaking to the nation on the radio,



October 24, 1929 – The Great Crash 147

LE JEUDI NOIR Les lendemains de la Grande Guerre, malgré la victoire, furent douloureux. Le retour à une économie de paix après la surchauffe industrielle due à l’effort militaire, occasionna bien des tensions sur l’emploi ou sur les prix. L’inflation devait même atteindre jusqu’à 105 % en 1920 et le chômage 12 %, niveaux inimaginables au pays de l’abondance. Chacun souhaitait ardemment un retour à la normale, mais pas nécessairement selon les orientations d’avant guerre. En fait, les premières élections qui suivirent le conflit montrèrent que le réformisme, le progressisme des Roosevelt, Taft ou Wilson, avait fait long feu ; les républicains firent main basse sur l’exécutif et le législatif, en promettant un regain prochain de la prospérité nationale. Une ère nouvelle s’ouvrait donc, dont les traits évoquaient étrangement un passé que l’on croyait révolu, celui du grand capitalisme conquérant, cherchant, comme trente ans auparavant, à circonvenir le pouvoir politique et à dicter ses lois à tout un peuple.

des consommateurs – encouragés, d’ailleurs, à acheter plus par une politique de crédit facile et bon marché.

Les fantômes des Barons voleurs (Robber Barons), le souvenir des scandales et des corruptions d’antan, vinrent hanter à nouveau Washington. Mais, c’est vrai, la prospérité réapparut et le culte du succès fit des adeptes toujours plus nombreux. L’économie américaine afficha un optimisme et un dynamisme justifiés. Les chiffres le confirment : entre 1922 et 1929, le PNB s’accrut de 50 %, pour atteindre 104,4 milliards de dollars juste avant la crise. À Wall Street, l’indice Dow-Jones devait, dans la même période, grimper d’un modeste 63,90 à 381,17.

Par ailleurs, la politique d’argent facile encouragea la spéculation sur les marchés boursiers. L’investissement en actions est, par principe, favorable à l’expansion économique ; mais lorsqu’il se transforme en boursicotage incohérent, pratiqué par un large public, cupide, mal informé et indifférent à l’avenir économique du pays, il peut s’avérer désastreux. Les spéculateurs, petits et grands, reçurent pourtant l’appui implicite du gouvernement en août 1927, lorsque le taux de base de la Réserve fédérale fut ramené de 4 % à 3,5 %, rendant le crédit encore moins cher. À partir de là, les valeurs boursières se mirent à évoluer indépendamment de la performance économique, se hissant jusqu’à des sommets dont elles ne pourraient redescendre qu’en catastrophe.

Les industriels comptaient sur une demande croissante et la tonicité du marché, où se lançaient sans cesse de nouveaux produits, semblait confirmer les bonnes intentions 148

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

Mais, après 1925, l’optimisme et l’insouciance devaient conduire à une dangereuse euphorie. Les premiers signes d’une catastrophe possible apparurent, en effet, vers le milieu de la décennie, mais on ne voulut pas en tenir compte. Il s’avérait que les États-Unis avaient une économie à deux vitesses : d’un côté, des secteurs dynamiques et largement bénéficiaires, profitant à une élite d’industriels ou de financiers bien en cour à Washington; de l’autre, une cohorte de petits entrepreneurs, de travailleurs de l’industrie ou de l’agriculture, touchés par l’endettement, la chute des prix et des salaires, ou par le chômage. Les difficultés connues par ces derniers finirent par se répercuter sur leurs créanciers et, en particulier, par fragiliser le système bancaire.

Le jeudi noir, 24 octobre 1929, n’était pas une surprise totale ; certains experts avaient averti du danger mais, dans la béatitude ambiante, étaient passés pour des oiseaux de malheur. Après tout, le président Hoover lui-même témoignait la confiance la plus totale dans un système qui lui paraissait entretenir le bien-être général. Il préconisait une attitude tout à fait conventionnelle pour un républicain, celle d’un laissez-faire bon teint qui défendait l’individualisme et la libre entreprise et concevait l’État comme arbitre, non comme défenseur d’hypothétiques opprimés. Cette philosophie avait la vie dure, car, au plus fort de la crise elle-même, Hoover refusera l’évidence de l’échec et du drame. Pourtant les signes de la dégringolade étaient flagrants : en trois semaines, suite à la panique des 24 et 29 octobre, l’indice industriel Dow-Jones avait perdu 50 % par rapport à son niveau le plus haut de septembre (381,17). Toutes les valeurs étaient en chute libre, y compris les valeurs-refuge comme

US Steel, General Electric ou AT&T. Un fonds d’amortissement de 240 millions de dollars constitué à la hâte par les plus grandes banques américaines le 24 octobre, pour soutenir le marché, n’avait servi à rien. Toute une économie s’engloutissait dans un vortex impressionnant sans que Hoover et son administration ne tentent d’intervenir, sauf par discours apaisants et mesures conjoncturelles dépourvues d’effets. Les incantations du Président, assurant, au plus profond de la crise, que tout allait vite rentrer dans l’ordre, le rigorisme de son secrétaire au Trésor, le milliardaire Andrew Mellon, persuadé qu’une fois encore le système capitaliste panserait tout seul ses propres plaies, permirent une désagrégation presque totale de l’appareil

économique. La panique se fit récession, puis dépression, au fur et à mesure que les pertes enregistrées à la fois par les entreprises et par les particuliers ralentissaient la production et la demande. Les faillites de banques (3 600 dans l’année qui suivit le krach), la chute vertigineuse des prix agricoles, et la politique protectionniste rétrograde du gouvernement achevèrent de transformer l’avarie en naufrage. Jusqu’en 1933, déflation, banqueroutes et, surtout, chômage, contredirent l’image d’une Amérique prospère que les républicains avaient tenté d’imposer. Les élections partielles de 1930 désignèrent une majorité démocrate à la Chambre des représentants ; il s’en fallut de peu que le Sénat bascule aussi. Les dernières initiatives de Hoover (notamment la création d’un organisme de prêts fédéraux d’urgence, la Reconstruction Finance Corporation) étaient trop tardives pour rendre aux républicains la confiance des électeurs. En mars 1933, le démocrate Franklin Roosevelt entrait à la Maison Blanche.

October 24, 1929 – The Great Crash 149

150

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

August 6, 1945

HIROSHIMA BACKGROUND

S

ince the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (see p. 158), December 7, 1941, anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States had grown into a sort of racial hatred, as ugly as that which had earlier been directed against the Indians. President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 of February 19, 1942, that organized the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans into 10 “relocation centers” in the West, was taken in response to public fears of a Japanese “fifth column” of saboteurs ready to strike on U.S. soil. For patriots, the Pearl Harbor disaster was a bleeding wound long to heal, just like the Alamo or Little Big Horn. But the xenophobic hysteria that followed was due in equal measure to fifty years of mounting hostility against the yellow race, especially on the West Coast (see, for example, the federal Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882, 1892 and 1902, and California’s Alien Land Law of 1913, aimed against Japanese farmers). By 1940, “Japs” had become “yellow monkeys”, “rats” or “ringtails”, and even innocent, industrious Japanese-American citizens became the victims of a sudden campaign of calumny, based on the most fantastic rumors. Jingoism and irrational behavior among civilians, was matched by an angry determination, among the military, to avenge the strategic disaster in Hawaii. The Chiefs of Staff’s reaction was of the “Remember the Alamo!” type. No sacrifice of lives would be too great to atone for their initial negligence. Not only would the reconquest of the Pacific cost dearly in human lives and material, but it would take 174,000 Japanese dead in the scorched rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make up for the 2,433 U.S. soldiers killed in the treacherous bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Synthèse en français Bombe atomique sur Hiroshima 160

KEYWORDS Isolationism 153 Superpowers 153

PEOPLE H.S. Truman D. MacArthur

152 156

DOCUMENT War relocation centers 157

FOCUS Pearl Harbor

158

Opposite: Hiroshima after the blast. August 6, 1945 – Hiroshima 151

Harry S. TRUMAN 1884-1972

A Missouri Democrat with a reputation for honesty and managerial qualities, Harry Truman might never have become President. Not only was his accession due to Franklin Roosevelt’s premature death, April 12, 1945; his nomination as VicePresident at the Chicago Democratic Convention (in preference to Henry Wallace) had been a last-minute affair. He was then sixty. The former farmboy and haberdasher had come a long way from his Kansas City shop to Washington. After World War I he had entered politics timidly, through a local election for judge. He remained a judge until 1934, when he ran for the Senate and was elected. He was a strong supporter of the New Deal and of Roosevelt’s foreign policy; his loyalty to the President probably played in his favor when he was nominated on the Democratic ticket in 1944. The war, and post-war, world was one which required foreign policy expertise and Truman had little. History has never entirely forgiven him for having ordered the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Besides, he tended to rely on his Secretaries of State, James Byrnes, George Marshall and Dean ••• 152

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

On that fateful, sunny day in Oahu, General Tojo’s bold gamble that Japan could strike those “soft” Americans so decisively that they would never recover, proved to be the war’s biggest blunder. Not only did it wake America up from its quiet isolationist siesta, and, within 24 hours, spur Franklin Roosevelt to launch an all-out war in the Pacific, but it started an unprecedented military effort in which the whole nation was enrolled. Japan soon learnt that it had misjudged American pride and determination. Strategically speaking, the U.S. could not allow the Japanese empire to extend over most of Asia; but in terms of strict military power, it lacked the capacity to control the wide area over which Japanese troops had been deployed. Within six months, the Japanese had occupied the Philippines, most of the Indochinese Peninsula, Singapore, Indonesia, the Micronesian Islands, and were pushing towards Australia. A masterfully organized counterattack early in the summer of 1942 ended up in two welladvertised American victories, in the Coral Sea (May 4–8) and Midway (June 4–6). The tide was turning. Over the next three years, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, U.S. Marines would “hop” from one Pacific island to the next, reconquering each of them in an orgy of almost mythic heroism later popularized by Hollywood grade B movies. But Japan was far from losing the war. When, in early 1945, the new President, Harry Truman, was confronted with different options to terminate the conflict with Japan, one of them was a new experimental weapon secretly developed by American scientists since 1942 and known as the atomic bomb. Using the preliminary work of such physicists as Einstein, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi, experts within the Office of Scientific Research and Development (created by Roosevelt in May 1942) worked three full years on the weapon. A first nuclear chain-reaction was set off on December 2, 1942 in a University of Chicago laboratory. But researchers were only halfway to possible military applications. This was the object of the top-secret “Manhattan Project” for which a production facility was built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and a special laboratory set up in the New Mexico desert, near Los Alamos. In the latter facility, nuclear physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer and his team worked against time – and against Germany which, U.S. intelligence indicated, had also mastered nuclear fission.

KEYWORDS

ISOLATIONISM The Monroe Doctrine had established a clear division between the European and American spheres of influence and made it clear that the United States would not take part “in the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves”. Woodrow Wilson, in 1917, had struggled to preserve U.S. neutrality in what many felt was a European war, but he had finally yielded to external pressures. Opposition to his League of Nations at home in 1919 also demonstrated that, even in victory, public opinion was not reconciled to the idea of seeing – in the words of California Senator Hiram Johnson – “American boys policing Europe and quelling riots in every nation’s backyard.” Isolationist sentiment remained very strong throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Senator Nye’s 1935 report on the causes of American involvement in World War I concluded that

bankers and arms dealers had pushed the U.S. into the conflict; and soon afterwards, isolationists managed to have a very restrictive Neutrality Act passed by Congress. After 1937, however, after the “China incident” (the attack by Japanese planes on a U.S. gunboat in the Yangtze River) and Munich, Franklin Roosevelt had to strike a very delicate middle course between maintaining U.S. noninvolvement in Europe and Asia and checking Japanese and German territorial expansionism. Pacifists and isolationists remained active to the end (i.e. December 1941); they formed a group called “America First” which, from the summer of 1940 on, lobbied intensively in Congress. And it was only the combined pressure of Britain, of American “internationalists” like Henry Luce, and of events on the battlefield, that finally broke U.S. resistance to involvement.

SUPERPOWERS The conferences at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam had seen three powers emerge (the Big Three) that were likely to play a dominant role in the post-war world: the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain. The division of Europe into two main spheres of influence, one for western allies, the other for the Soviets, was representative of a wider, more or less tacit, division of the whole world into two ideological empires – capitalist and communist – that could hardly coexist without tensions. Americans tried to impose a peaceful modus vivendi thanks to international organizations, such as those which had been set up at Bretton Woods (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank) or at Dumbarton Oaks (the United Nations), but the long-lasting partition between “East” and “West” was confirmed as Stalin repeatedly rejected all proposals of cooperation. Each of the two



halves of the world must have a leader, and the Big Three soon became only two. The United States ranked, economically and militarily, as the first world-power; but the Soviet Union, with its vast territory, huge population and strong Red Army, provided an impressive counterweight. When the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in September 1949, four years after the Americans (July 1945), the world suddenly realized that its fate would now rest in the hands of two superpowers, equipped with an ever-growing nuclear arsenal, capable of policing each other and the rest of the planet by threatening annihilation. This vision was confirmed by experts in the report of 1950 known as NSC-68 (National Security Council Paper no. 68), which acknowledged the existence of two “superpowers” competing to impose “absolute authority over the rest of the world,” and recommended massive military spending.

August 6, 1945 – Hiroshima 153

••• Acheson. With them he developed the famous Truman Doctrine, a promise of worldwide American involvement to defend freedom, which ushered in the Cold War. Truman was confronted with other major challenges: the Berlin blockade, the Korean War and General MacArthur’s insubordination, all of which he handled with great skill. Yet his popularity was low, compared to Roosevelt’s, and his “Fair Deal” – a socio-economic program intended to succeed the New Deal – received scant support and yielded poor results. His election as president in 1948 had come as a surprise; in 1952, he did not seek reelection.

CIRCUMSTANCES

A

full-scale prototype of the A-bomb was completed in early July 1945, as President Truman was preparing the coming Potsdam Conference where, he thought, he would lay the foundations of a new world order with Stalin and Churchill. Hitler was gone and the American Marines had just conquered the Bonin Islands and Okinawa. They were a stone’s throw from Japan. But the Japanese had turned their island into a fortress, making enemy invasion virtually impossible, and they stubbornly resisted American peace proposals. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had in mind to invade Manchuria and help the West in its final campaign against the Mikado’s empire, in the hope of getting a piece of the Japanese cake. News of the first nuclear test in Alamogordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945, reached Truman at Potsdam. The coincidence suggests that the president hoped to use the bomb as a means to pressure the Soviets during the conference. Stalin, however, stood his ground as usual but obliged the West by joining the U.S. and Great Britain in their ultimatum to Japan on July 26, 1945. The Allies demanded unconditional surrender, threatening “prompt and utter destruction” in case of refusal. The Americans were already bringing wholesale destruction to the heart of Japan; since March, they had been launching systematic carpet-bombing raids on Japanese cities, including Tokyo, with heavy civilian casualties. Yet, much of the Japanese Air Force was still operational and fanatic resistance could extend the war indefinitely. A full-scale invasion of Japan, even if successful, would take a heavy toll of American lives. Final solutions to the Japanese problem were few. But by the time the Allies’ last ultimatum reached Japan, Harry Truman had already made up his mind. The only two available A-bombs had already been transferred to Tinian, a small island in the Marianas, about 2,400 Km south of Japan. On July 25, the day before the ultimatum was issued, the president gave instructions to have the bomb dropped on Japan after August 3rd, if Japan had not surrendered. No word of submission came from Tokyo. On August 6, 1945, at 9:15 a.m., a B-29 Superfortress, codenamed “Enola Gay”, with Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets in command and Major Thomas Ferebee as bomber, sent a single bomb, “Little

154

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KAMCHATKA PEN. (U.S.S.R.)

4-19 45

MANCHURIA

Nanking Chungking

Shanghai

Ledo INDIA

Rangoon

GUAM 1944

MARSHALL ISLANDS

A

TR

MA

TO F JA PANE SE CONT

I NDIAN

TIMOR

NEW GUINEA

ROL

Port Moresby

AUSTRALIA

IC

O

C

TARAWA 1943

EQUATOR

GILBERT SOLOMON ISLANDS ISLANDS GUADALCANAL 1943

CORAL SEA 1942

OCE AN

IF

OAHU

N

CAROLINE ISLANDS

SARAWAK BORNEO

SU LIM I

C

SAIPAN

PHILIPPINES LEYTE GULF 1944

DUTCH EAST INDIES JAVA SEA JAVA

Pearl Harbour 1941

A

MALAYA Singapore

A

E

BRITISH NORTH BORNEO BRITISH BRUNEI

P

WAKE

MARIANA ISLANDS

PHILIPPINE SEA 1944

Major battle

MIDWAY 1942 HAWAIIAN ISLANDS

BONIN ISLANDS IWO JIMA OKINAWA 1945 1945

Hong Kong

THAILAND FRENCH Manila INDOCHINA

JAPAN Tokyo

Nagasaki 1945

FORMOSA

BURMA

Major Allied air offensives

LIMIT O

CHINA

Areas controlled by Japan, 1942 Major Allied advances

F JAPAN

Peking KOREA Hiroshima 1945

S LAND

ESE CON TROL

SAKALIN

MONGOLIA

ALEUTIAN IS

KU RIL ISL AN DS

RUSSI ANS 194

SOVIET UNION

NEW HEBRIDES

FIJI ISLANDS

NEW CALEDONIA

Boy”, through the stratosphere over Hiroshima. Within 60 seconds from the time of the explosion, 60% of the city was destroyed and over 100,000 people were killed by the blast. Many more suffered severe burns and more insidious diseases from radiation. Three days later, a plutonium bomb, “Fat Man”, was dropped from the B-29 “Great Artiste” under the command of Major Charles W. Sweeney; the target was Nagasaki, a strategic naval base. The toll on that Thursday, August 9: 74,000 dead. Russia had, just 24 hours earlier, declared war on Japan. Yet the Japanese military would have gone on fighting; at a stormy cabinet meeting in Tokyo, the following morning, the Emperor’s wisdom barely prevailed. But by afternoon, the decision to surrender was conveyed to the Allies.

The war in the Pacific, 1942-1945.

CONSEQUENCES

J

apan accepted the terms of the Potsdam declaration, on the condition that the imperial institution be preserved – which Truman accepted. Capitulation was signed on board USS Missouri, in Tokyo Bay, September 2. General Douglas MacArthur, who had masterminded the American victory in the Pacific, was there to preside over the formalities, and representatives of Australia,

August 6, 1945 – Hiroshima 155

Douglas MACARTHUR 1880-1964 With Patton and Eisenhower, MacArthur was one of the great American military heroes of World War II. The Arkansas general was born in a family where public service and high achievement were the rule: there were judges, governors, and officers among his forebears. After four years (1899-1903) at West Point, he thus naturally took up a career in the military. A brilliant and combative leader of men, MacArthur landed on the French front a colonel in October 1917; fourteen months later, he was a Division Commander with many decorations and citations. Home from Europe, he became Superintendent of West Point and, within a few years, turned it into the world’s top military school. He became Army Chief of Staff in 1930 and established a public reputation as a fierce militarist. In fact, MacArthur feared the rapid military buildup in which Germany and Japan were engaged; the fear was confirmed in 1941. MacArthur organized the American military response to the Japanese invasion in the Pacific, and managed to force the Japanese to retreat to homeground in three years. Having received Japan’s surrender, he accepted to administer the country (1945-50), imposed sweeping political, social and economic reforms, and the adoption of a constitutional system which, nonetheless, left the Emperor in place. MacArthur was much less successful in Korea, when put in charge of the United Nations Command (July 1950) to defend South Korea against the Communist armies of the North. He clashed with the Chinese forces – and with President Truman, who wanted to avoid an extension of the conflict. He lost on both fronts. He had first to retreat beyond the 38th parallel; then he was fired by Truman in April 1951. Though his ••• 156

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Canada, China, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Russia attended. Emperor Hirohito said he assumed full responsibility for his country’s military foolhardiness. This gesture was not the product of forced humility on the Emperor’s part. He was well aware that a new era was opening for Japan, and that his role would never be the same. In anticipation of major changes, he renounced his divine status in 1946, thus easing Japan’s shift to western-style democracy in U.S. hands. For Americans intended to impose their rule in that part of the world. One immediate effect of Hiroshima was to outflank the Soviets in the conquest of the Far East. The U.S. was now in a position to take over the occupation of Japan on its own, to the exclusion of the Soviet Union. The reconstruction of Japan was thus left to the Americans; but their massive military presence throughout the Pacific was no guarantee of a lasting hegemony in the region. The “loss” of China to the Communists in 1949 and Mao Tse-Tung’s alliance with Stalin in February 1950 somewhat reduced the benefits derived from victory in the Pacific. Danger was further increased by the Soviet Union’s first nuclear test in August 1949, revealed by President Truman on September 22, 1949. And for the next twenty-five years – and through two more wars (Korea and Vietnam) – the United States would have to struggle to maintain a dominant position in South East Asia with the self-assigned mission of preserving freedom and democracy where they had once been threatened by Japanese imperialism and were now challenged by communism. Hiroshima, it appears, opened the era of nuclear diplomacy – one which assumed that international supremacy should be achieved through a massive military build-up and the production of more atomic weapons. That was the essence of NSC-68, a National Security Council paper adopted by President Truman in April 1950, which outlined an aggressive foreign policy to counter possible Soviet ambitions to conquer the world. In January, Truman had already ordered the construction of an even more deadly weapon, the thermonuclear, or H (for hydrogen), bomb. The arms race between Americans and Soviets had just begun and the balance of terror which their incredible arsenals created would influence international politics during the next forty years. Meanwhile, Japan was being reorganized under dashing Commander Douglas MacArthur. U.S. occupation forces took complete charge,

from the hanging of war criminals to the redistribution of land and the adoption of a new Constitution. More importantly, Japan became a demilitarized country, with a skeleton “self-defense” force, so almost totally dependent on the United States for protection. A peace treaty was finally signed in San Francisco on September 8, 1951, ending the American military occupation of Japan (the U.S. only kept a few strategic installations like the Okinawa base) and guaranteed its independence. Then, on the ruins of war, Japan and the United States jointly initiated one of the most fantastic economic booms in history. Whoever has visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki has more than one reason to believe in the “Japanese miracle”.

••• return to the U.S. resembled a Roman general’s triumph, he never quite recovered from the blow and held no public office afterwards.

Assembly Centers, 1942 Center (1942) Washington Puyallup

Maximum pop.

Dates occupied

7,390

Apr. 28–Sept. 12

Oregon Portland

3,676

May 02–Sept. 10

Arizona Mayer

245

May 07–June 02

2,451 4,739 7,816 4,571 3,661 3,586 4,508 4,792 5,120 4,978 8,719 5,434 9,837

May 08–June 29 May 06–June 26 Apr. 28–Oct. 13 May 10–Oct. 17 Apr. 30–Aug. 12 Apr. 27–July 04 May 06–Sept. 15 May 07–July 23 May 06–Oct. 30 Apr. 10–Sept. 04 Mar. 27–Oct. 27 May 07–Aug. 24 Mar. 21–June 02

California Marysville Sacramento Tanforan Stockton Turlock Salinas Merced Pinedale Fresno Tulare Santa Anita Pomona Manzanar1

1. Transferred to Wartime Relocation Administration for use as relocation camp. Source: Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1982).

Wartime relocation camps Camps Maximum pop. Gila River, Arizona 13,348 Granada, Colorado 7,318 Heart Mountain, Wyoming 10,767 Jerome, Arkansas 8,497 Manzanar, California 10,046 Minidoka, Idaho 9,397 Poston, Arizona 17,814 Rohwer, Arkansas 8,475 Topaz, Utah 8,130 Tule Lake, California 18,789

Dates opened & closed Jul. 20, 1942–Nov. 10, 1945 Aug. 24, 1942–Oct. 15, 1945 Aug. 12, 1942–Nov. 10, 1945 Oct. 06, 1942–June 30, 1944 June 01, 1942–Nov. 21, 1945 Aug. 10, 1942–Oct. 28, 1945 May 08, 1942–Nov. 28, 1945 Sept. 18, 1942–Nov. 30, 1945 Sept. 11, 1942–Oct. 31, 1945 May 27, 1942–Mar. 20, 1946

Source: Roger Daniels et al., eds., Japanese Americans from Relocation to Redress. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986.



War relocation centers Following President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 of February 19, 1942, a Wartime Relocation Administration, headed by Milton Eisenhower, was set up to organize the removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast and to resettle them in other communities in the western part of the United States. Local resistance to this initial plan led the WRA to choose the more radical solution of internment and isolation. The Japanese-Americans were first gathered in 16 Assembly Centers located in California, Arizona, Oregon and Washington (see left) that went into operation in late March 1942 and remained open until October. Then these civilians were dispatched to ten “relocation centers”, which were, in fact, heavily guarded internment camps. August 6, 1945 – Hiroshima 157

FOCUS

PEARL HARBOR The time read 12:28 p.m. on the Senate clock that Monday, December 8, 1941, when Franklin Roosevelt entered the hall to address a joint session of Congress. In his speech, the president gravely announced his decision to declare war on Japan and ask for Congressional approval: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a day which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.” What Roosevelt called “the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan” had just turned the Hawaiian naval base of Pearl Harbor into a junkyard of sunk or burning ships. The Senate voted unanimously for war; in the House, the notorious pacifist Jeanette Rankin of Montana was the only Representative to cast a dissenting vote. But that morning, the fate of World War II was sealed. After two years of wavering isolationist policies, the United States at last joined Great Britain and the Soviet Union in their fight against the Axis powers. Churchill felt relieved; so did Secretary of War Harry Stimson, who viewed Pearl Harbor as a necessary shock treatment, a crisis that “would unite all our people.” In retrospect, the tragedy of Pearl Harbor seems such a unique combination of mishaps and blunders that it should never have occurred. Though minutely planned, months in advance, by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the attack on Pearl Harbor could have gone wrong at any stage. But, like so many military triumphs, Japan’s success was a matter of faith and self-confidence; on the contrary, the Americans’ defeat was due to carelessness and lack of foresight. They relied on routine surveillance when exceptional measures should have been taken to protect the 86 ships mooring in Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7. Luckily, none of their aircraft carriers were there: the Lexington was at sea near Midway, the Enterprise with a task force on the way back from delivering planes to Wake Island, and the Saratoga in dock for repairs in California. But eight major 158

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

battleships, among the finest in the U.S. Pacific Fleet, were at anchor around Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Bay: the Maryland, West Virginia, Tennessee, California, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Oklahoma. All were sunk or severely damaged by the Japanese. In addition, three cruisers, three destroyers, one mine-layer, one target ship, and two frigates capsized or were disabled. Had the Americans been more on the alert, both militarily and psychologically, they might have avoided a major disaster. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, had established three levels of alert on naval bases. So unlikely did a Japanese operation then appear that Pearl Harbor had been put on the third level – the lowest – in the first days of December. Yet there had been ominous signs of coming conflict as early as November 26, when Secretary of State Cordell Hull rejected Tokyo’s request that the U.S. end their oil embargo against Japan. Washington demanded that the Japanese first withdraw from China and Indochina, where they had landed in the summer. Following this rejection, Japan was expected to open hostilities shortly against the U.S.. But where? The War Department issued a warning that was dispatched to all American outposts in the Pacific (including Hawaii) on November 27. The U.S. did not know that the Japanese fleet under Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, was already heading towards Hawaii from the North, with instructions to turn back in case of last-minute agreement with the U.S. – an option that Tokyo carefully avoided. In fact, on December 2, a secret message relayed the Emperor’s decision to the fleet: “Climb Mount Niitaka,” which meant: “Attack!” The target was Pearl Harbor; the mission, to eliminate U.S. sea-power in the Pacific; the time for attack, December 7, 7:50 a.m. Hawaiian time (1:20 p.m. in Washington). Japan’s ambassador was also secretly instructed to deliver a warning to the U.S., at precisely 1:00 p.m. that same day, that

negotiations were considered terminated. American intelligence officers who, in the previous months, had cracked Japan’s diplomatic code (the “Purple Code”), deciphered the ambassador’s instructions hours before the attack. But they could not get hold of Chief of Staff George Marshall, who was out horseback riding. When finally informed, Marshall sent a warning to Pearl Harbor: but curiously, this message was sent by commercial radio, through the Western Union, and reached Hawaii far too late. Two other advance signals of attack were misinterpreted or disregarded: first, the presence in Pearl Bay of a Japanese mini-submarine, early on the morning of December 7. It was eventually sunk by the Americans; but the latter did not suspect that the sub was one of a party of five which had managed to slip through the torpedo-nets blocking the entrance of the harbor. Within hours, the subs would shoot American ships like sitting ducks. A little after 7:00 a.m., Privates Lockard and Elliott, two radar operators, spotted a large fleet of aircraft on their screen and reported it to their superior, Lieutenant Kermit Tyler. But the latter simply assumed they were American planes. Less than fifteen minutes later, the first 183 Japanese bombers were diving on the harbor. The destruction of the naval base was completed in three successive waves that lasted from 7:50 to 9:45. Taken entirely by surprise, American sailors first thought it was a drill. The Navy’s command center had to send a radio message: “Air raid, Pearl Harbor, this is no drill.” The time was 7:58. Most of the ships were hit before they could react. Antiaircraft protection was highly inadequate: ammunition was lacking. And on the four island airfields, Hickam, Wheeler, Kaneohe and Ewa, about 90% of the parked planes were destroyed by the Japanese pilots.

The heroic reaction of some American sailors and airmen could not save the day. Human and material losses were so high on the American side (about 3,600 casualties, plus 18 surface warships and 347 planes lost) that Pearl Harbor ranks among the worst disasters in U.S. military history. Japanese losses, by comparison, were minimal. Yet, within a month, three of the disabled battleships were repaired and back in battle. Save for the Arizona, all the capsized battleships were rescued, along with a few other vessels. A year later, the Pacific Fleet had become a formidable warmachine that started the reconquest of territories lost to Japan. The Lexington and the Enterprise task forces tried, but failed, to locate the withdrawing Japanese armada, which was safely back home by December 22. As for Americans, they suddenly awoke to the terrifying idea that they were not safe on their own soil. They began seeing Japanese saboteurs and “subversives” everywhere. Their suspicions were to lead to the internment of innocent JapaneseAmericans – a dark prefiguration of the McCarthyist hysteria. Only massive rearmament and a series of shining victories in the Pacific would gradually succeed in loosening the hypnotic grip of the Pearl Harbor nightmare on the American nation.

The USS Virginia in flames after the Japanese attack. August 6, 1945 – Hiroshima 159

BOMBE ATOMIQUE SUR HIROSHIMA L’attaque-surprise sur Pearl Harbor, en décembre 1941, avait porté à son paroxysme un sentiment anti-japonais parfaitement irrationnel mais aussi violent que la haine des Indiens autrefois. La crainte d’une cinquième colonne de saboteurs infiltrés sur le territoire américain et le mépris déjà ancien pour les asiatiques, conduisirent à de regrettables excès, tel cet internement arbitraire de 120 000 Japonais de la côte ouest (y compris ceux qui possédaient la nationalité américaine) dans ce qui ressemblait à des camps de prisonniers, sur ordre présidentiel signé par Roosevelt lui-même le 19 février 1942. Au-delà de ces vexations inutiles et des phobies populaires, il y avait une revanche à prendre sur la retentissante défaite de Pearl Harbor ; et tout un océan à protéger de l’impérialisme conquérant du Japon. Le déferlement qui avait conduit les Japonais de Micronésie jusqu’aux confins de l’Inde, et obligé MacArthur à se réfugier momentanément en Australie devait être stoppé ; c’était une nécessité stratégique. Après les coûteuses victoires de la mer de Corail et de Midway, au printemps 1942, les Américains reprirent, une à une, en trois ans d’âpres combats, les positions japonaises dans le Pacifique. Mais ils n’avaient pas gagné la guerre. Fortement armés, repliés dans leur île-citadelle, les Japonais, galvanisés par un gouvernement militariste, défiaient toujours le monde libre. Lorsque le successeur de Roosevelt, Harry Truman, envisagea de mettre un terme aux hostilités en Asie, au début de 1945, une option nouvelle et terrifiante lui fut offerte : l’utilisation d’une arme de destruction 160

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

dernier cri, d’une puissance inimaginable, la bombe atomique. Dès le mois de mai 1942, Roosevelt avait créé le Bureau de Recherche et de Développement Scientifiques

(Office of Scientific Research & Development, OSRD), dont la principale activité fut l’expérimentation sur la fission nucléaire. Le célèbre Projet Manhattan qui lui fut confié visait à mettre au point de possibles applications militaires. Un laboratoire secret, dirigé par J. Robert Oppenheimer fut donc établi dans le désert du Nouveau-Mexique, à Los Alamos ; on y construisit le premier prototype de bombe A, dont les essais commencèrent le 16 juillet 1945, alors que Truman se trouvait à Potsdam. C’est là que se confirma le partage de l’Allemagne, et que fut scellé par Staline, Attlee et Truman le sort du Japon. Déjà vainqueurs en Mandchourie, d’où ils venaient d’expulser les Japonais, les Soviétiques avaient intérêt à soutenir la position américaine envers le Japon. Ils signèrent donc l’ultimatum du 26 juillet 1945, par lequel les Alliés exigeaient du Mikado une reddition sans conditions. Malgré les bombardements américains massifs qui, depuis mars 1945, semaient la ruine dans leurs villes, les Japonais tenaient bon et rien, à ce moment, ne laissait prévoir une issue rapide au conflit. Et l’invasion du Japon paraissait exclue. C’est donc, dira-t-il plus tard, pour éviter de longues et meurtrières batailles, que Truman eut recours à son arme secrète. Les deux exemplaires disponibles de la bombe atomique avaient déjà été transportés sur l’île de Saipan et, avant même l’envoi de l’ultimatum, le 25 juillet, la Maison Blanche avait ordonné le lâcher des bombes si le Japon ne se rendait pas avant le 3 août.

La fin de non recevoir de Tokyo déclencha l’apocalypse ; le 6 août à 9 h 15 du matin, la Superforteresse Enola Gay, pilotée par le Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets, bombardait Hiroshima. En quelques secondes, la ville cessa d’exister ; trois jours plus tard, un autre bombardier, Great Artiste, dirigé par le Commandant Charles W. Sweeney, répétait l’opération sur Nagasaki. Les deux bombes avaient fait, instantanément, près de 200 000 morts.

l’Amérique perdit son monopole atomique (l’URSS testa sa première bombe A le 22 septembre 1949), dans l’ère de la course folle aux armements. À l’impérialisme japonais succéda, dans la région, le danger constant d’une infiltration communiste. Et l’endiguement du communisme devait rester la priorité de la politique américaine en Asie pendant près de trente ans avec, pour menace répétée, le risque de massacres nucléaires comme en avait connu le Japon.

Le lendemain, 10 août 1945, le Japon se rendait ; c’était une décision personnelle – et irréversible – de l’empereur Hiro-Hito, prise contre l’avis de son gouvernement. L’Empereur devait d’ailleurs venir signer lui-même l’acte de capitulation sur le croiseur Missouri, ancré dans la baie de Tokyo, le 2 septembre. Entouré de représentants des principales puissances belligérentes, le général MacArthur, le vainqueur des Philippines, le stratège de la reconquête, était là pour accepter la reddition. C’est lui qui, avec une remarquable patience, devait assurer la transformation et la reconstruction du Japon. Lui aussi, l’artisan du traité de paix, signé à San Francisco le 8 septembre 1951, qui entérinait la démilitarisation du Japon, garantissait aux États-Unis l’implantation permanente de plusieurs bases stratégiques, et jetait les bases d’une coopération économique fructueuse. Le fameux miracle japonais doit évidemment beaucoup à l’aide généreuse des Américains, dont on peut se demander d’ailleurs si elle n’est pas une forme d’expiation pour l’horreur d’Hiroshima et de Nagasaki. De ce jour, le monde est entré dans l’ère de la diplomatie nucléaire et, lorsque

August 6, 1945 – Hiroshima 161

162

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

October 22-28, 1962

THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS BACKGROUND

L

atin America, in the 1950s, had become a highly explosive area, because of social and political tensions; extreme poverty, a huge disparity between rich and poor, dictatorial governments and curtailed freedoms had created a situation which was ripe for violent, revolutionary change. Many of the problems these countries faced were blamed on American banks and corporations which, through investments and exchanges, appeared to control the Latin American economies. Washington wrongly assumed that keeping army-supported regimes in the region would stifle protest against the U.S. and prevent major upheavals. The policy worked for a while, until a Cuban lawyer named Fidel Castro challenged it by staging a coup against the twenty-year-old dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista, on July 26, 1953. Castro failed; he ended up in jail, where he spent the next two years, then went into exile to Mexico. Having reconstituted a revolutionary group (The Twenty-Sixth of July Movement) he returned to the island shortly thereafter and tried again to overthrow Batista. Popular support brought him success and on January 1, 1959 he entered Havana with his guerilleros. Castro proceeded to turn Cuba into a Marxist-Leninist enclave in the New World, collectivizing the land, seizing foreign assets and placing industries under state control. Within a year, Castro had become a serious threat to U.S. hegemony in the western hemisphere, as the Monroe Doctrine had established it. In March 1960, President Eisenhower instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to secretly organize Castro’s removal.

Synthèse en français États-Unis/Cuba : La crise 170

KEYWORDS Containment 165 Brinkmanship 165

PEOPLE J.F. Kennedy M.L. King, Jr. J.F. Dulles

164 167 168

FOCUS The Civil Rights March 166

Opposite: A spy-plane photograph of Soviet missiles at San Cristobal, Cuba.

October 22-28, 1962 – The Cuban missile crisis 163

John Fitzgerald KENNEDY 1917-1963 The figure of the young, dynamic President is well-known. His mandate was brief (Januar 20, 1961 to November 22, 1963, or 1,036 days) but he left an impressive trace in the American collective memory, almost equal to Lincoln’s. The second of nine children of Joseph Kennedy, a millionaire and former ambassador to Great Britain, Kennedy received a traditional Bostonian education at Harvard (1936-1940) where he studied economics and political science. In 1941 he was barred from army service because of a back injury, but got into the Navy as an ensign. On August 2, 1943, the PT (patrol torpedo) boat he commanded was sunk by the Japanese and he barely escaped death. After the war he ran successfully for Congress in Massachusetts (1946), then was elected to the Senate in 1952, where he sat on the Foreign Relations Committee and became one of the chamber’s leading figures. At the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, the party turned to him for its presidential candidate. The campaign against Republican Richard Nixon was a tough one; for the first time, the candidates made extensive use of television broadcasts and advertising. They held four public debates on TV which probably tipped the scale in Kennedy’s favor. His margin of success was slight in the popular vote (118,550 votes out of 68.3 million), more noticeable in the electoral college (303 to 219), yet his popularity at the time of his election was far below the level he enjoyed after his death – which would seem to suggest, in terms of his overall record that the progress he made on the civil rights issue, on assistance to ••• 164

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

Over the summer, American retaliations against Cuba were escalated, with an embargo on trade, while it became increasingly clear that Cuba was falling within the Soviet sphere of influence. Shortly before he finished his second term, Eisenhower finally cut off diplomatic relations with Havana. His succéssor, John Kennedy, inherited a dramatically unstable world, with relations between the two superpowers strained by years of cold war, threats of nuclear destruction, and aggressive foreign policies. As he indicated in his Inaugural Address, the world was weary of tensions; and he requested “that both sides begin anew the quest for peace.” Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, interpreted this as weakness and undertook to further test American determination and its continued adherence to the containment doctrine, in Europe and in Cuba. Berlin had become a hot spot again after Khrushchev’s 1958 ultimatum for the removal of western troops stationed there. And the U-2 spy plane affair of May 5, 1960 ruined the promising Soviet-American summit held in Paris a few days later. John Kennedy’s political instincts drove him towards coexistence rather than towards the Cold War. Yet West Berlin remained a thorn in Soviet flesh which another summit in Vienna between Kennedy and Khrushchev, in June 1961, could not remove. Two months later, the “Wall” brought East and West back to the worst days of the Cold War. An additional shadow hovered over Vienna: the failed attempt by a group of C.I.A.-trained counter-revolutionaries to land in Cuba and overthrow Castro. The invading commandos were easily destroyed by Castro’s forces in the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, but the fear of an American invasion would now overwhelm the Cuban leader and reinforce his calls to Moscow for energetic protection.

CIRCUMSTANCES

K

hrushchev was indeed anxious to strengthen this outpost of communism in America. In his analysis, Cuba was too close to the U.S., and too vulnerable to be permanently safe. On the other hand, in terms of strategic balance, the Americans had girded the U.S.S.R. with a string of military bases, from Western Europe to Turkey to the Pacific, while the Soviets had none that were equally close to U.S. territory. Late in 1961, a member of the Politburo proposed placing missile units in Cuba. The plan seemed a logical upgrading of Soviet military aid to Cuba, which had sharply increased after the Bay of Pigs.

KEYWORDS

CONTAINMENT Originally a policy aimed at controlling British presence and expansion on the North American continent (just after the 1812-1814 war), “containment” was revived in February 1946 by George F. Kennan, then chargé d’affaires in Moscow. In the telegram he sent to the State Department, he gave his views on Soviet foreign policy, and reflected on the communists’ aggressive attitude towards the West. He urged that they “be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” He recommended the display, even the use, of military power to prevent the Soviets from expanding their sphere of influence.

A year later, “containment” became loosely identified with the so-called “Truman doctrine”, when the President publicly pledged American assistance to “free peoples” threatened by “totalitarian regimes” and immediately extended $400 million in emergency aid to Greece and Turkey, then confronted with a possible leftist coup d’etat. From then on, “containment” would underlie much of the United States’ foreign policy, inspire Americans to promote regional defense pacts, like NATO or SEATO, and involve them in foreign conflicts, in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle-East.

BRINKMANSHIP Containment, as a doctrine, sounded reasonable as long as the United States possessed the military means to intimidate potential enemies. In the early 1950s, Americans enjoyed a marked superiority over the Soviets in terms of quantity and sophistication of conventional weapons, and in terms of nuclear weapons as well. In case of conflict, the United States could rely on a tremendous power of destruction. This capacity led Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to develop a new theory of containment, which relied on the notion of “massive retaliation”, or the threat of using nuclear weapons and of setting off world-scale destruction. Dulles also called the method “brinkmanship”, and

described it as a willingness to “take chances in war… The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art… If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost…” Brinkmanship yielded mixed results, positive in Korea and Formosa, but negative in Indochina. It was, however, too rigid and too manichean for an increasingly diversified world. It worked best in conflicts directly involving the two superpowers. In case of regional wars, more flexible responses were needed. This would not be achieved until the 1960s.

In August 1962, 42 missiles, with one-megaton warheads, were shipped to Cuba and installed above-ground, time being too short to build silos. Russians and Cubans agreed that the operation must be kept secret until completed, and then widely advertised to deter an American invasion. A U-2 plane, however, photographed several missile sites on October 14, 1962 and the crisis erupted.

••• the Third World (Peace Corps, Alliance for Progress), and in restoring U.S. military standing and world power (as the Cuban crisis showed), fully compensated for the fateful increase of American presence in Vietnam that he called for in 1961.

President Kennedy immediately appointed a task force of a dozen officials, the Executive Committee (or “Ex Comm”), headed by his brother Robert, to supply advice and strategy. The situation required quick action but there was some disagreement even within the Ex Comm as to the nature and level of the American response. A nuclear strike was ruled out. Some, like Dean Acheson, General

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FOCUS

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MARCH Washington, D. C., August 28, 1963

Ending racial discrimination should have been – as was the trip to the moon – the conquest of another major “frontier” of humanity. But at the very moment when a whole nation held its breath as Neil Armstrong set his foot on lunar dust, the black and white communities were still battling over the problems of integration and minority rights. Three men were expected to lead America on the path to greater racial equality: John Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, Jr.. All three died prematurely at the hands of assassins. When King was shot in Memphis in April 1968, he had been one of the major figures of the civil rights movement for more than ten years. Since 1956 when, through a non-violent boycott, he managed to end segregation on the city bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, the Baptist reverend had multiplied innovative, militant initiatives to impose racial equality, notably through the campaigns mounted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which he founded in 1957. Together with other Black associations – the old NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the National Urban League, the more recent Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Non-violent Coordination Committee (SNCC, pronounced SNICK)–his SCLC emphasized nonviolent, but spectacular, forms of mass-protest which, King believed, would call widespread attention to the intolerable condition of Negroes in the South. Despite the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Topeka (1954) against racial discrimination in schools, segregationists were still extremely powerful in southern states and peaceful mass demonstrations appeared to King and other Black leaders as the only effective strategy to break their supremacy. Silent “sitins” were organized wherever segregation was the rule; “freedom riders” quietly but deliberately challenged separate seating on the interstate transit system between cities in 166

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North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. In the latter state the case of a Black student, James Meredith, who wanted to enroll at the University of Mississippi, brought violence to Oxford; federal marshalls had to be sent there in late September 1962 to protect Meredith and the black civil rights protesters who supported him. Non-violent demonstrations seemed to become inadequate as white retaliation and repression turned harsher. Marchers were either attacked by mobs of white segregationists while the police passively looked on, or beaten and dispersed by local anti-riot units. But Martin Luther King and his civil rights movement had learned from Gandhi that passive determination may prove a more formidable agent than brute force. In the spring of 1963, the aptlynamed Bull Connor, Chief of Police in Birmingham, Alabama, acting with the blessing of archsegregationist Governor George Wallace, sent in his dogs to attack a protest march led by King himself. Widespread public outrage at such unnecessary violence led civil rights leaders to assume that, at this stage, one big spectacular demonstration would do more for their cause than a hundred small ones. The Kennedy Administration was now fully committed to pushing civil rights legislation through Congress; in June the White House sent a bill to the House that addressed the major discrimination issues. In support of the bill, and to demonstrate the extent of black consensus over civil rights, a huge crowd of some 200,000 marchers (including about 40,000 whites) gathered in Washington, D.C., on August 28, covering the entire Mall that extends from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. With so many people, the march, scheduled for 11:30 a.m., resembled a mass-meeting. Songs were sung in front of the Lincoln Memorial, by folk and gospel stars such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, PeterPaul-and-Mary and Mahalia Jackson. Speaker John Lewis, leader of the SNCC, presented the demands of

Martin Luther KING, JR. 1929-1968

the black community, repeatedly intoning the main slogan of the march, “NOW!”, written on the demonstrators’ placards and signs: “We demand equal rights, NOW!”, “We march for integrated schools, NOW!” and so on. Yet, the day’s leading and most respected orator was Martin Luther King, Jr. who delivered one of the most celebrated speeches in American history. An outstanding preacher, as his many previous public performances had shown, King managed to share with a cheering and fascinated crowd a glorious dream that he laid claim to in the name of the entire black race. “The Negro,” he said, “lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity and finds himself an exile in his own land.” He spoke at length against exclusion, inequality and modern forms of slavery. When he was through with his prepared speech, King launched into an improvised, inspired, harangue: “I have a dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’ (…) I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood (…) I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character (…) I have a dream today.” It was the climax of the march, which then ended as peacefully as it had begun; there were no postdemonstration riots for opponents of the civil rights movement to blame on the organizers. It was an emotional, dignified event, and it had a true impact on the conscience of millions of Americans who, so far, had ignored or disregarded racial problems.



King was a man with a mission. He made the defense of human rights and racial equality his lifelong task, and died for it in circumstances that, still today, remain as unclear as those of Kennedy’s assassination. The son of a Baptist minister, and later a Baptist pastor himself, King grew up in Atlanta, where racial discrimination was constant and unrestrained. A very bright student in high school, he could have been an outstanding lawyer or surgeon; but he chose the ministry instead and, with a Ph.D. in theology from Boston University, he started serving as a pastor in Montgomery, Alabama. He was barely twenty-five years old. The city attracted nation-wide attention in late 1955 for the organized boycott of its segregated bus system. King became the leader of this non-violent movement. He always insisted that injustice should be met with love, not violence. The successful Montgomery boycott was followed by others, and also by sit-ins organized by King’s newly-formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957) and its offspring the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960). Determined to push for new civil rights legislation, King multiplied marches and mass demonstrations; neither police brutality nor arrests or imprisonment could stop him. Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Washington, D.C., were as many proofs that the movement towards racial equality was gaining momentum – which the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) confirmed. King then turned to the urban ghettos of the North and to the poor of America; he was preparing a major campaign, the Poor People’s Campaign, with another march on Washington to call national ••• October 22-28, 1962 – The Cuban missile crisis 167

••• attention to the problem, when, on April 4, 1968, while on a trip to Memphis, Tennessee, he was shot to death by a former convict, James Earl Ray.

John Foster DULLES 1888-1959

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Dulles was born in a family where clergymen and diplomats abounded. He was educated at Princeton, the Sorbonne and George Washington University, where he studied law. He joined the New York legal firm Sullivan & Cromwell in 1912, specializing in international law. Exempted from service in the war because of bad eyesight, he served as counsel to the commission that, in 1919, handled the problem of war reparations in Versailles. On his return to New York, he resumed his activities with Sullivan & Cromwell, this time as a partner. A staunch Republican, Dulles was critical of the New Deal but remained opposed to American intervention in World War II until Pearl Harbor. During and after the war, he became increasingly involved in foreign policy: in particular, he helped ••• 168

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Maxwell Taylor, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, advocated air raids on the lauching sites. Others, following Robert Kennedy, suggested a more gradual approach, with a total naval blockade as an initial display of force. The President went on television on the evening of October 22, to announce a naval “quarantine” of Cuba and to demand the removal of Soviet missiles. NATO allies and the Organization of American States, that Washington had duly consulted, all backed the American decision. From then on, Khrushchev and Castro would run different courses; the Cuban leader, obsessed by the likelihood of invasion, called for a pre-emptive strike against the United States. Khrushchev had never intended to use the missiles offensively; his move was pure Cold War strategy, the deadly catand-mouse game played by Foster Dulles in the 1950s and derisively called by some “brinkmanship”. Having inflicted what he considered a wound on American pride and taught the U.S. a lesson, he was now ready to back down. To Kennedy’s message, forwarded October 23 by Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin. Khrushchev answered October 26 that he would remove the missiles if the United States ended their blockade and promised never to invade Cuba. While the Ex Comm were debating that first letter, the next morning, a second one arrived with an additional condition: the removal of American Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Months before, the President had already ordered these obsolete weapons to be withdrawn from Turkey; but to go public on the issue at this point would look like giving in to Soviet pressure and displaying weakness to the world. A refusal, on the other hand, might mean war. Kennedy, on his brother’s advice, decided to ignore Khrushchev’s second message and accept the terms of the first deal. The next day, October 28, Moscow announced that the Cuban missile sites would be fully dismantled. Castro was sour but Kennedy relieved - as was the rest of the world. As for Khrushchev, despite his adroit handling of the situation, he came under severe criticism at home for giving way to American demands. In exactly two years, he would be gone from power. Yet, as he later claimed in his memoirs, his purpose in Cuba had not been to start a war but rather to “inspire terror” among arrogant capitalists. He found Castro too “hotheaded” and “inexperienced” and for the most part left him out of the negotiations with Washington.

CONSEQUENCES

T

he crisis gave the United States an opportunity to evaluate its capacity for adequate response in case of a major threat. And it appeared that American striking power (especially in terms of inter-continental ballistic missiles) was far superior to that of the Soviet Union. The final compromise over Cuba was perceived by the Soviet military as a stinging fiasco, and they launched a crash program to develop their arsenal, both nuclear and conventional. The Cuban affair can be said to have given a new dimension to the arms race between the two superpowers.

••• draft the peace treaty with Japan in 1950. He also prepared candidate Eisenhower’s foreign policy platform in 1952, and was rewarded by an appointment as Secretary of State in 1953. He stayed with President Eisenhower until almost the end, resigning only in April 1959, crushed by cancer.

The Cuban crisis also revealed to the western world the extent of the superpowers’ dominance. Washington’s European allies were entirely left out of the final negotiations with the Soviets. Although initially consulted on the advisability of a naval blockade of Cuba, they were later merely “informed” of U.S.- Soviet agreements, while the world narrowly avoided a nuclear holocaust. Some independent-minded European leaders, like De Gaulle, already biased against American hegemony, resented Kennedy’s conception of allied defense. France denied the U.S. a right to control France’s defense policies; it accordingly built its own nuclear forces and eventually left NATO. At home, Kennedy, who had already been blamed for the Bay of Pigs setback, was again criticized for compromising with the Soviet Union. Among the many conspiracy theories of Kennedy’s assassination, a certain number featuring Cuban connections have appeared over the years, one involving the CIA, eager to avenge Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs “betrayal”, another evoking a joint CastroMafia plot to eliminate the president. Whatever the truth (probably not to be known until the official files are made public in 2029, or at an earlier date if the Congress so decides), the Cuban affair left Americans shocked and suspicious. Khrushchev had succeeded at least in undermining their sense of security.

Cartoonist Herbert Block’s view of Brinkmanship, 1956.

Ever since those days when the two superpowers were brought to the edge of a third world war, Cuba seems to have lived outside time. Soviet aid has constantly declined and the corps of 42,000 “advisers” of 1962 has, in thirty years, shrunk to about 7,500. But the ageing leader Fidel Castro is still the same uncompromising communist, determined to keep his country faithful to the MarxistLeninist orthodoxy despite world changes. Now that Panama, Nicaragua and El Salvador no longer pose a threat to U.S. security, Cuba is for Americans the only sore spot left on the geopolitical map of the region.

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ÉTATS-UNIS–CUBA : LA CRISE Depuis bien longtemps déjà, l’Amérique jetait une ombre de grand voisin capitaliste, protecteur mais intéressé, sur toute la région des Caraïbes en général, et sur Cuba en particulier. Les intérêts miniers et agricoles que les États-Unis y possédaient, la mainmise américaine sur l’industrie sucrière locale, après l’indépendance de 1898, avaient conféré à Cuba (comme à Porto Rico ou aux républiques bananières d’Amérique centrale) une importance stratégique dans la politique étrangère de Washington. L’impératif principal du Département d’État avait toujours été de soutenir, ou d’installer dans la région des régimes pro-américains de préférence, des dictatures si nécessaire. Celle de Fulgencio Batista, un obscur sergent au pouvoir à La Havane depuis 1934 (avec la bénédiction de Franklin Roosevelt), avait créé dans l’île des tensions politiques et sociales auxquelles le jeune Fidel Castro voulut mettre fin en 1953, en essayant de renverser le gouvernement. Ce coup d’État avorta, mais Castro renouvela la tentative fin 1958 et s’installa au pouvoir en janvier 1959.

Marxiste-léniniste convaincu, Castro entreprit une vaste réforme agraire, et nationalisa les industries, y compris celles contrôlées par des compagnies américaines. Écharde douloureuse dans la chair de la doctrine Monroe, le régime communiste de Castro contestait l’hégémonie américaine dans l’hémisphère occidental, et présentait des risques évidents de contagion. On formenta donc son élimination. La CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) fut chargée d’une opération de commando qui, jointe à l’embargo commercial décidé par le président Eisenhower à l’été 1960, mettrait un terme à l’aventure marxiste à Cuba. 170

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Le débarquement raté de la baie des Cochons, en avril 1961 ne servit qu’a renforcer l’obstination de Castro ; il aggrava aussi les relations américano-soviétiques, déjà empoisonnées par l’affaire de l’avion-espion U-2, de mai 1960. Peu après s’y ajouterait la construction du mur de Berlin (août 1961). La Guerre froide prenait un tour sinistre, malgré les apaisements proposés par le nouveau président, John Kennedy. Les tensions en Allemagne n’étaient qu’un symptôme. La Russie de Khrouchtchev, stratégiquement menacée par les bases américaines d’Europe occidentale, de Turquie ou d’Extrême-Orient, cherchait à porter le danger au seuil du territoire des États-Unis. « Nous ne faisions qu’imiter les méthodes de nos adversaires », dit Khrouchtchev dans ses récents mémoires. Sous couvert de stratégie dissuasive, l’URSS expédia 42 missiles nucléaires à Cuba en août 1962, afin de protéger l’île d’une invasion américaine. Installés en surface par manque de temps pour bâtir des silos, les missiles furent aisément repérés par des avions de reconnaissance américains. Des preuves tangibles, sous forme de clichés photographiques, furent ramenées par un U-2 le 14 octobre 1962. Pas de doute : un fort contingent de missiles, déjà installés ou en cours d’assemblage, pointaient leurs ogives vers les grandes villes américaines, dans un rayon de 3 000 kilomètres. Le président Kennedy réunit aussitôt une cellule de crise (l’Executive Committee), dirigée par son frère Robert et chargée d’élaborer une tactique de riposte. On s’accorda pour écarter l’option nucléaire, mais le débat fut rude entre ceux qui, comme le secrétaire d’État Dean Rusk, souhaitaient

une opération aérienne immédiate sur les sites de lancement et ceux qui suivaient Robert Kennedy pour préconiser des représailles plus progressives, qui débuteraient par un blocus naval. Le 22 octobre, le Président annonça à la télévision la mise en quarantaine de Cuba, c’est-à-dire son isolement maritime intégral. Il exigeait, en outre, le retrait immédiat des missiles soviétiques et menaçait Moscou de représailles généralisées en cas d’attaque. Et les forces aériennes américaines furent placées en état d’alerte permanent. Castro, rongé par la peur de l’invasion, militait vigoureusement pour une attaque nucléaire préventive ; Khrouchtchev dut tempérer ses ardeurs. D’autant plus que les alliés de l’OTAN et de l’OEA soutinrent immédiatement l’action américaine. Stratège accompli de la Guerre froide et maître du marchandage, Khrouchtchev connaissait parfaitement les limites de la provocation. Lorsqu’il eut pris connaissance des exigences américaines, le 23 octobre, il proposa le 26 de retirer les missiles contre une promesse de non-agression envers Cuba. Le lendemain, il y ajouta la nécessité pour les États-Unis d’enlever leurs propres missiles de Turquie. Pour ne pas sembler céder ni perdre la face, John Kennedy accepta secrètement la deuxième condition (l’enlèvement des fusées Jupiter de Turquie était déjà prévu depuis longtemps) mais, officiellement, négocia sur la base des offres soviétiques du 26.

disparut de la scène politique deux ans plus tard ; Fidel Castro, lui, s’y trouve encore aujourd’hui, résolu à défendre l’un des ultimes bastions du communisme moribond. La crise eut des conséquences occultes sur les équilibres militaires à venir : la supériorité nucléaire américaine apparut au grand jour et força l’Armée rouge à reconsidérer ses stratégies. La reculade de Cuba provoqua chez les Soviétiques une réaction de fierté dangereuse : on se mit à activer tous les programmes de réarmement, conventionnel et nucléaire. La course folle aux armements entre les deux super-puissances était bel et bien lancée. Elle durerait une décennie entière. Il devint également flagrant que l’ordre militaire et diplomatique mondial passerait désormais invariablement par les décisions des deux grands, États-Unis et URSS. Certains alliés occidentaux se plaignirent amèrement de n’avoir jamais été consultés, alors qu’on se trouvait au bord de la guerre atomique. La France, effet pervers ou effet au miroir de la doctrine Monroe, refusa même aux Américains le droit de contrôler sa défense. Elle finit même par se retirer de l’OTAN, préférant assurer isolément sa propre défense et sa propre dissuasion nucléaire.

Deux jours après, Moscou annonçait le démantèlement de ses bases de missiles à Cuba, au grand dam de Castro mais au grand soulagement du reste du monde. Durant toute cette crise, le dirigeant cubain avait dévoilé un manque de souplesse que le rusé Khrouchtchev mit au compte de l’inexpérience. En fait, le paysan de Koursk

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172

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August 8, 1974

RICHARD NIXON RESIGNS BACKGROUND

R

ichard Nixon’s election as 37th President of the United States in November 1968 was something of a political miracle, not only because he won the popular vote by the narrowest of margins – 0.7% – over his opponent, Democrat Hubert Humphrey, but because after having served eight years as Eisenhower’s VicePresident, and having lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960, he was considered as politically “dead” – a judgement apparently confirmed by his failure to win the governorship of California, his home state, in 1962. Yet the lawyer from Yorba Linda knew better: he considered the Vice-Presidency as a perfect “on-the-job training” for higher duties and kept alive his tremendous political ambitions. But his lifelong dream of power would soon be engulfed in a storm of foreign and domestic dramas and lead to an unprecedented fall. It would seem that historical forces conspired to bring about his public demise – movements that he tried to control with exceptional political flair; yet his taste for occult manoeuvres and unsavory backstage action finally got the better of sound political judgement and sealed his fate. The erosion of Nixon’s popularity started only in his second term and coincided with a general decline of American hegemony in the world. And yet, his victory over George McGovern in 1972 had been termed a landslide, and rightly so since he reaped 520 electoral votes, leaving only 17 to his opponent. Only Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan did better in this century. Nixon’s success was in part America’s emotional response to the peace talks that were currently being held with the Vietnamese, but it was also due to a wide variety of other factors, as complex as the

Synthèse en français Nixon victime du Watergate 182

KEYWORDS S.A.L.T. 175 Impeachment 181

PEOPLE H.A. Kissinger C. Bernstein B. Woodward

174 180 180

FOCUS Cease-fire in Vietnam

178

Opposite: President Nixon announcing his resignation. August 8, 1974 – Richard Nixon resigns 173

Henry Alfred KISSINGER born 1923

Born of Jewish parents in Furth, Germany, Heinz (later Henry) Kissinger moved to England in 1938 with his family to escape the Nazis, then to New York City. During the war, he served in U.S. Army Intelligence, then enrolled at Harvard where he received a Ph.D. in 1954. Deeply interested in foreign policy and international relations, he became an expert in the field, working as a consultant both for the government and for private institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In the meantime, he was also teaching at Harvard. A trip he took to Vietnam in the late 1960s convinced him that there was no military solution to the war. As head of the National Security Council under Nixon – a privileged position that gave him more authority than the Secretaries of State and Defense taken together – Kissinger worked with a view to maintaining, or restoring, détente with the Soviet Union whenever possible. The keys to his foreign policy method were patience and secrecy. Secret contacts with the Chinese allowed the U.S. to resume diplomatic ••• 174

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President’s own motives. Nixon was a clever and calculating politician (he had been known as “Tricky Dick” in political circles for twenty years), ready to reconcile extremes and blend antagonistic views for tactical purposes, if it served his own interests. He worked, for instance, to promote the social advancement of Blacks and, at the same time, appealed to southern whites coming out against school busing programs. Similarly, he tried to reconcile his adherence, as a true Republican, to the laissez-faire credo with expanded government intervention in the realm of prices and wages. Controls, established on a “temporary” basis in August 1971, were still in force two years later, when the Watergate scandal broke out. Americans had no reason to blame Nixon for inconsistencies that were in great part due to circumstances. They usually appreciate pragmatic Presidents. And nowhere did Nixon show himself more pragmatic than on foreign policy issues: his handling of the Vietnam war (see pp. 178-179), his attitude towards China, his support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, his firm commitment to détente and disarmament (as conveyed by the SALT I agreements of May 1972) all reveal a deft, non-dogmatic Nixon, an expert manoeuverer. So expert, in fact, that he relied on a very limited number of advisers and aides, and developed an exaggerated liking for secret talks and private deals. With his diplomatic alter ego Henry Kissinger (head of the National Security Council, then Secretary of State in 1973), he elaborated the policies by which he sought to shape the world, but in so doing totally ignored Congress and its prerogatives. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted that “the Imperial Presidency reached its culmination under Nixon”, and called this ultimate stage the “plebiscitary presidency” – a stage that by-passes the “checks and balances” system and gives exceptional importance to the Executive’s initiatives. The true origins of the Watergate affair are to be found in a hypertrophied Presidency.

CIRCUMSTANCES

B

y 1970 some aspects of Nixon’s policies (foreign and domestic) had begun to meet severe criticism. He was obliged to deal with a Democratic majority in Congress; besides, his handling of the Vietnam war and his extension of military operations into Cambodia and Laos led to massive protests among American

KEYWORD

S.A.L.T. Ever since the drafting of NSC-68 (see Superpowers, p. 153) the U.S. and the Soviet Union had launched an arms race that had, over the years, become extremely costly and, given each country’s capacity for “overkill”, strategically absurd. Dulles’s “massive retaliation” policy had been followed by McNamara’s “flexible response”, which entailed a diversification of weapons, ever more innovative and sophisticated. The 1960s saw the emergence of a whole range of new missiles, offensive and preventive, with inscrutable names like ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile), ABM (anti-ballistic missile), or MIRV (multiple independent re-entry vehicles). By 1967 Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had, at last, realized that the arms race was in face a treadmill that ought to be checked, if not stopped. Proposals were made to the Soviets for specific negotiations on ABMs. The talks, called SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitations Talks) were concluded in Moscow in May 1972 with the signing by Richard Nixon and Leonid

Brezhnev of a treaty that limited the number of ICBMs and the number of ABMs on each side. Missiles with multiple warheads (MIRVs) were, however, left out of the treaty, which was an oblique way of letting the arms race go on. The treaty also contained a declaration of principle in favor of peaceful co-existence which seemed to announce better days for the world. In his report to Congress on the Moscow summit, Nixon hopefully concluded: “We are making progress toward a world in which leaders of nations will settle their differences by negotiation, not by force, and in which they learn to live with their differences so that their sons will not have to die for those differences.” Two more informal agreements on arms limitations were to be signed, both called SALT II, one by Gerald Ford in 1975 and the other by Jimmy Carter in 1979. Further reductions were contained in the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) Treaty, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in December 1987.

students in May 1970. No doubt this encouraged him to wrap his decisions in greater secrecy. He was further drawn to covert actions – in the name of national security, he later claimed – by the publication of the Pentagon Papers, by the New York Times, in the summer of 1971. The classified documents, surreptitiously leaked to the press, showed how the U.S. had become involved in Vietnam and how the American people had been deliberately misinformed by public officials. Suspicion set in; the President wanted to know the origins of the leak. Wiretapping was expanded and reached into the White House itself. The Administration turned paranoïd over the whole matter and, as early as 1971, allowed a special corps of “plumbers” to be set up at the White House, with the help of the CIA. The ultimate purpose of this unit was to allow the President to remain in full control of his policies and decisions, which, in time of war, seemed consistent with the interests of the nation. The obvious danger was that such spying schemes could, even in the hands of a President, be diverted from their original national security objectives,

••• relations with Beijing after Nixon’s famous visit, in February 1972. Secret and patient negotiations were necessary, between Kissinger and the North Vietnamese, before the January 1973 cease-fire was signed. His patience was again put to test in the Middle East, after the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Kissinger, as Secretary of State, then developed his trademark “shuttle diplomacy” trying to strike an acceptable compromise between Syrian and Egyptian territorial demands and Israel’s security. In his dealings with the Soviet Union, Kissinger practised a policy of international “balance of powers”, with extraordinary skill. His concept of “linkage”, half bartering, half extortion, which linked U.S. concessions to equivalent concessions on the part of the Soviets, had largely positive results. The two superpowers, in five years ••• August 8, 1974 – Richard Nixon resigns 175

••• (1972-1977), moved resolutely into the post-Cold War era, a step due chiefly to Kissinger’s flexibility and pragmatism in foreign policy. Kissinger was praised, even rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize (1973), for his international achievements; yet, he was also bitterly criticized for his acquiescence in the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi, his possible involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and his rather clumsy handling of the India-Pakistan war. His success, however, in framing a coherent and effective American foreign policy, has won recognition, even among his most vociferous critics.

especially if the chief executive became obsessed with powerlessness, failure, and public criticism. On June 17, 1972, a team of five “plumbers” broke into the Watergate office complex, in Washington, D.C., where the Democratic National Committee headquarters were located. Arrested before they had wiretapped the offices, these men, upon inquiry, proved to be connected with the Committee for the Reelection of the President (CREEP), a partisan organization founded by the President himself in March 1971 and headed by former Attorney General John Mitchell. Nixon’s initial reaction was to cover up the whole story and try to keep the Administration scandal-free. But what the White House press secretary Ron Ziegler once called “a third-rate burglary” suddenly assumed national importance when Washington Post journalist-investigators Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (see p. 180) suggested that orders for the break-in had come from the White House, a supposition that one of the “burglars” confirmed in March 1973 before the Senate Investigating Commission headed by Sam Ervin. From then on, the affair was to move from one painful revelation to another, with an amazed public eagerly expecting the next coup de theatre. Three of Nixon’s closest aides, Robert Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Dean, resigned on April 30, together with Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. It was by then widely assumed that the White House had conspired to obstruct justice in the Watergate case. The Senate “Ervin Commission” heard from a witness, July 16, that the President had made a practice of taping all of his private conversations. But Nixon refused to surrender the tapes until November 26, after they had been duly “edited” by the White House. The blanks in the edited version, eighteen minutes in all, worried Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox whom Nixon himself had appointed in a desperate gesture to appear “clean”. Asking insistently for the missing fragments cost Cox his job: he was fired October 20, and Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned the same day in a gesture of protest. The week before, Vice-President Spiro Agnew had given up his office after being charged with tax evasion. The Executive ship was slowly sinking and Nixon’s days were numbered. Leon Jaworski, named by Nixon to succeed Prosecutor Cox, also asked for the excised portions of the tapes. He eventually obtained a Supreme Court order, on July 24, 1974 (an 8-0 decision), demanding that the President release all of the 64 tapes connected with the Watergate case. In the meantime the Democrat-dominated Congress had amplified its own campaign against the Administration: in June

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it had moved to prevent any further bombings of Cambodia, and the White House complied in August. In October 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which curbed the President’s power to send troops abroad without congressional approval. Nixon vetoed the bill, but his veto was overridden on November 7. Congress’s last blow was the impeachment procedure launched by the House in early May 1974. The House Judiciary Committee, after two months of hearings, recommended three articles of impeachment against Nixon, one for obstruction of justice, another for abuses of power, a third for ignoring subpoenas (concerning in particular the release of the tapes). All three were voted by the committee between July 27 and July 30, 1974. Nixon finally released the full tapes on August 5; then, on the evening of August 8, he announced his resignation. The next day, he flew back to his San Clemente estate in California. He would never return to public life to his death, in April 1994.

Front-page news of the Watergate, from beginning to end.



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FOCUS

CEASE-FIRE IN VIETNAM January 23, 1973

Despite an outcome that fell short of victory in Korea, the United States was committed to preventing any extension of communism in Southeast Asia. For that purpose, after France had been ousted from Indochina, and Vietnam divided into two zones along the 17th parallel, Washington began sending military advisers in February 1955, to support the pro-western regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. By the time John Kennedy was elected, $1 billion had been devoted to standing firm against communist expansionism in Vietnam, yet with little result. Kennedy increased aid to the incompetent, and obviously corrupt, Diem regime, sending an additional 500 U.S. advisers in April 1961. Various reports to the President, however, indicated that only direct U.S. military presence could prevent the progress of communists in South Vietnam. Americans could not afford to “lose” Vietnam the way they had “lost” China to Mao a decade before. As Lyndon Johnson would later say in answer to the question “Why are we in South Vietnam?”, “We are there because we have a promise to keep,” referring to the 1954 American pledge “to help South Vietnam defend its independence.” Kennedy thus took the fatal step of sending U.S. military personnel to Indochina; by the time of his death there were more than 16,000 of them in South Vietnam. Military commitment increased tremendously over the next five years; it seemed the U.S. had not fully learned the lesson of the disastrous French campaigns in Indochina. Knowledge of the terrain and guerilla harassment prevailed over the most sophisticated weapons and the latest warfare tactics. Kennedy appears to have realized he had stepped into a trap; he prophetically noted, in September 1963, that the people of South Vietnam should fight “their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” Less than a decade later, Richard Nixon would conduct a policy of “Vietnamization” of the conflict, based on a similar analysis. In the meantime, the number of U.S. troops engaged in South Vietnam had risen to 543,000 and 178

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the cost of what really had to be called a “war” stood at $30 billion a year when Lyndon Johnson left the White House. Johnson had been naïve enough to assume that military escalation was the suitable answer of a great superpower to the challenges posed by communist guerillas in Asia. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed by Congress on August 7, 1964, in response to alleged North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. warships, had given the President full power to treat the Indochina question in his own way. Johnson had little choice but to succeed in Vietnam; failure would be considered as weakness, which would be exploited by Russia or China. On the domestic scene, failure might jeopardize the “Great Society” program, Johnson’s lifetime project. He therefore committed more troops and shipped more material to Vietnam. But his strategy backfired: American technological warfare, massive destruction and bombings turned the communist guerillas into martyrs. And as the cost of war rose, the Great Society starved for funds. In addition, a protest movement against the war, part of a wider challenge to the Establishment, developed in 1967–68. The gap between the supporters of war, the “hawks”, and the defenders of peace, the “doves”, widened as massive bombings of North Vietnam were organized in the second half of the year 1967. Washington claimed the war was being won, but official optimism was contradicted by the communist Tet (New Year) offensive in January 1968. The attack was countered but losses were high and the U.S. suddenly realized that there was no military solution to the war. On March 31, Johnson announced a halt in bombings of North Vietnam and stated that he would not seek reelection. Richard Nixon inherited a rotten, but not entirely desperate, situation. The U.S. still could choose between several options, victory excepted. Nixon made it clear in his Inaugural Address of January 20, 1969 that there was no “greater honor in history” than to become a “peacemaker”. So peace he would make, but on his own terms. He undertook the

“Vietnamization” of the war, by gradually removing ground troops, speeding up the training of the South Vietnamese army and intensifying the bombings of North Vietnam and Cambodia. Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger was conducting secret talks with the communists in Paris. “Vietnamization” did not work. Invasions of Cambodia and Laos, in April 1970 and February 1971 respectively, failed and the Vietcong could now infiltrate South Vietnam from all sides. Nixon sought a more oblique solution by going to Beijing in February 1972; this gesture towards China was historic but of little help in Vietnam. Even the spectacular lastminute bombings of Hanoi, after Nixon’s reelection of November 1972, looked like the last roars of a dying lion. A cease-fire was finally signed on January 23, 1973. By then, antiwar sentiment in America was running high; and the popular protest movement that had developed in 1970-71 had now reached into Congress itself. The House and the Senate prohibited further bombings in Indochina as of July 1, 1973. A few months later, Congress passed the War Powers Act that increased legislative control over the President’s handling of an armed conflict. Nixon’s powers were also being severely eroded by the current Watergate scandal. He resigned in August 1974, leaving a weak government in Saigon, headed by President Nguyen Van Thieu. The latter fell, however, with the final communist offensive of March 1975. And communist troops entered Saigon April 30, 1975 as the last U.S. Marine helicopters were taking off from the roofs of the American Embassy.

Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho (right) at the time of their secret Peace Talks at Gif-sur-Yvette near Paris, November 1972.

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CONSEQUENCES

Carl BERNSTEIN born 1944 Carl Bernstein entered the journalistic profession with a law degree from Boston University, yet started as simple reporter, first for the Washington Star, then for the Elizabeth (New Jersey) Daily Journal. He joined the Washington Post in 1966 and soon began to write investigative pieces for the paper. When the Watergate break-in, on June 17, 1972, was first heard of, he immediately teamed up with Bob Woodward and they both worked nonstop on the story until every implication of the affair had been established. They used secret “tips” they received from a FBI informer, code-named “Deep Throat”, who later proved to be the Bureau’s Associate Director, Mark Felt. The whole story of reporting on the Watergate scandal is told in two bestselling books Bernstein co-authored with Bob Woodward, All the President’s Men (1974) and The Final Days (1976). Bernstein left the Post in 1976 to work for ABC News. He has since been an occasional contributor to Time, USA Today, The New Republic and Vanity Fair.

Bob WOODWARD born 1943 A native of Illinois, Woodward was educated at Yale, which he left in 1965 with a Bachelor’s degree to enter the U.S. Navy. He served five years then was hired by the Montgomery County (Maryland) Sentinel. In 1971 he joined the Washington Post staff as an investigative reporter. He quickly proved to be an outstanding newsman. His major assignment was the Water-gate break-in, on which he worked relentlessly with Carl Bernstein for a year and a half. ••• 180

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o succeed Spiro Agnew in October 1973, Nixon had chosen the House Minority Leader, a faithful and affable Republican from Michigan, Gerald R. Ford. Ford was the first to reach the Presidency by appointment in American history. On September 8, 1974, four weeks after he had taken the Oath of Office, he extended “a full, free and absolute pardon” to Richard Nixon. The move was courageous, for President Ford took an immediate plunge in public opinion polls and was suspected of having struck a deal with a crook. But it had the advantage of diverting attention away from the Watergate scandal, which now appeared as a closed chapter, even though innumerable court actions were brought against Richard Nixon, long after pardon had been granted. In his memoirs, the ex-President estimated that he had personally spent $1.8 million in legal fees just to defend himself in suits filed against him in the course of sixteen years. In retrospect, Nixon reflected that Watergate had been “one part wrongdoing, one part blundering and one part political vendetta by my enemies.” The formula summarizes both the nature and the consequences of the scandal. The evidence of wrongdoing increased suspicions as to the morality of American statesmen; and the screening of candidates for higher posts would from then on rely to a greater extent on investigation of their ethics, their respect for moral precepts, and their lifestyle. In the 1980s, the degree of attention given to the intimate details of public figures’ behavior was to give a farcical turn to the elective and appointment process. Blundering, added to wrongdoing, also cast shadows on the presidential office itself; Watergate greatly weakened the executive power and opened what might be called an era of Congressional dominance in American politics. That supremacy of the legislative was short-lived, though, and was abruptly brought to an end by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Domestic problems of such magnitude also tarnished America’s image in the world and contributed to the decline the United States experienced on the world scene for the rest of the decade. In referring to a “vendetta” scheme, Nixon not only attempted to appear as the victim of a political conspiracy; he also hinted that the press and the media, in exposing the case in such a sensational manner, had offered deadly weapons to his political enemies.

KEYWORD

IMPEACHMENT The power of impeachment is explicitly given to Congress in the Constitution:

Sec.2) and the Senate, which has the “sole power to try all impeachments” (Art.I, Sec.3).

“The President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” (Art.II, Sec.4)

In practice, the House determines the charges to be brought against a President (these “articles of impeachment” are drawn up in the form of recommendations by the House Judiciary Committee), votes them and brings the case for trial before the Senate which serves here as a kind of higher court.

Within the system of “checks and balances,” this judicial power of Congress is fundamental: it shows how distrustful of presidential authority the Founding Fathers were. They gave the legislative a prerogative the British Parliament was never granted: the power to remove the Executive. Note, however, that possible justifications for impeachment were few and extremely serious. Hence the infrequency of the procedure, implemented only twice in 200 years (in 1868 against Andrew Johnson, and in 1974 against Richard Nixon). Responsibility for impeachment is divided between the House, which has the “sole power of impeachment” (Art.I,

The process, as is often true of judicial procedures, is rather slow and leaves plenty of time for reflection or negotiation. Yet, in February 1868, the process went all the way to the Senate: Andrew Johnson was brought to trial and, by a narrow one-vote margin (seven Republican senators had voted “not guilty”), was acquitted. In late July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommended three articles of impeachment; but these were never voted on by the House at large: the procedure came to an end with the President’s resignation.

When he invoked “executive privilege” to refuse the release of the Watergate tapes, Richard Nixon was, in a sense, fighting for institutional privacy the way ordinary citizens struggle to preserve their private lives from invasions of the press. He lost in the courts (see the Supreme Court decision United States v. Nixon, 1974), he lost in the eyes of public opinion, and his failure dramatically altered the level of fairness and responsibility of the media. In more recent years, public figures like Gary Hart (one of the contenders to the Democratic nomination in the 1988 presidential election), Justice Clarence Thomas (nominated for the Supreme Court by President Bush in July 1991) and Bill Clinton himself (who had, in February 1992, to answer allegations of an extramarital affair with a cabaret singer, Gennifer Flowers) have, each in his own way, suffered from these lowered standards. Whether the entire nation or just partisan cliques stand to gain by this exploitation of First Amendment freedom is yet to be proved.

••• He was the one who obtained insider’s information on the covert operation (dutifully channelled to him by the famous “Deep Throat” during secret meetings at dawn in a parking garage). Woodward also distinguished himself in May 1972 by revealing the identity of the man who shot Alabama Governor George Wallace virtually as soon as the FBI had uncovered it. A writer as well as a journalist, Bob Woodward has authored a dozen best-selling books besides those he signed with Carl Bernstein (see above), of which four (Bush at War, Plan of Attack, State of Denial and The War Within) deal with post-9/11 America. Since the Watergate, Woodward has stayed with the Post, first as national editor, then as assistant managing editor, now as associate editor. August 8, 1974 – Richard Nixon resigns 181

NIXON VICTIME DU WATERGATE Lorsqu’en novembre 1968 Richard Milhous Nixon fut élu 37 e président des États-Unis, il opérait un retour politique aussi brillant qu’Andrew Jackson cent quarante ans auparavant. Depuis son échec de 1962 à l’élection au poste de gouverneur de Californie (deuxième défaite majeure après celle des présidentielles de 1960), et malgré les huit années passées aux côtés de Dwight Eisenhower comme vice-président, Nixon paraissait politiquement condamné. Pourtant, son appétit du pouvoir, son acharnement, sa patience et son habileté finirent par l’emporter. Certes, il ne battait le démocrate Hubert Humphrey que de 510 314 voix, mais sa réussite incarnait bien le rêve américain, celui du petit avocat de Whittier, Californie, devenu président à la seule force de son ambition personnelle. Aussi, après le Watergate, Nixon entraînera-t-il dans sa chute bien plus que les lois de la morale politique et de l’intégrité présidentielle ; c’est une certaine vision de l’Amérique hégémonique et vertueuse qui s’effondre avec lui, pour longtemps. L’effritement de sa popularité se manifesta surtout lors de son second mandat, malgré une réélection triomphale en 1972. Des incohérences apparurent dans sa politique, intérieure et extérieure, qui n’étaient pas toutes dues au pragmatisme d’un président confronté à des problèmes sans cesse plus complexes. Les motivations profondes de Nixon n’étaient pas claires ; il semblait poussé davantage par d’étroits calculs politiciens que par le souci du bien public. On se mit à le surnommer « Richard le Roublard » (Tricky Dick), tant il affectionnait les tractations occultes et les combinaisons savantes. 182

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Cette prédilection pour le secret politique devait avoir des résultats positifs en politique étrangère, notamment pour mettre un terme à la guerre du Vietnam ou pour rétablir des relations avec la Chine. Mais elle signifiait aussi un mépris du public, et surtout du Congrès où la majorité démocrate, élue dès 1970, commençait à réagir. Convaincu de la suprématie de l’exécutif, lassé des résistances du Congrès, Nixon gouvernait dans l’isolement et la discrétion, entouré d’un petit groupe de fidèles conseillers. La république impériale, pourtant, vivait ses derniers jours. La publication, à l’été 1971, des Dossiers du Pentagone par le New York Times sema le doute et la suspicion dans toute l’administration républicaine. Pour colmater les fuites, on intensifia les écoutes téléphoniques. La CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) se prêta au jeu de l’espionnage national ; un corps de plombiers-poseurs de micros fut même créé, à l’initiative de la Maison Blanche. Seul le vénérable FBI de J. Edgar Hoover semblait insensible à ce soudain accès de paranoïa politique. Mais Hoover mourut le 2 mai 1972, laissant la grande machine policière exposée aux convoitises de la présidence. Il est d’ailleurs avéré que l’indicateur qui fournit aux journalistes du Washington Post, Bob Woodward et Carl Bernstein, toutes leurs informations sur l’affaire Watergate, était un responsable du FBI désireux de préserver la maison contre les manœuvres du pouvoir. Le 17 juin 1972, en effet, une équipe de cinq « plombiers » s’introduisit dans l’immeuble du Watergate, à Washington, où le parti démocrate avait installé son Comité national. Surpris et arrêtés, les cinq hommes s’avérèrent appartenir au Comité pour la réélection

du président, dirigé par l’ancien ministre de la Justice John Mitchell. Nixon eût préféré esquiver le scandale ; mais les révélations du Washington Post impliquaient directement la Maison Blanche. La suite est un imbroglio politico-juridicopolicier, sans équivalent dans l’histoire américaine depuis la conspiration d’Aaron Burr. L’enquête fit d’abord tomber des conseillers proches de Nixon, Robert Haldeman, John Ehrlichman et John Dean, le 30 avril 1973. Puis l’on apprit, en juillet, que le Président enregistrait sur bandes toutes ses conversations. Le procureur Archibald Cox, nommé par Nixon lui-même pour faire toute la lumière requise, exigea les bandes relatives à l’affaire. Il fut limogé le 20 octobre et remplacé par Leon Jaworski, lequel voulut obtenir les mêmes bandes. La Maison Blanche finit par obtempérer le 26 novembre, non sans avoir effacé 18 minutes de bavardage compromettant. Sommé de restituer les parties manquantes, Nixon résista, invoquant le privilège de l’exécutif et la sécurité nationale. Mais une décision de la Cour suprême, le 24 juillet 1974, eut raison de ces atermoiements. Le Président savait désormais ses jour comptés ; d’autant plus que depuis le mois de mai, une procédure d’impeachment contre lui était engagée au Congrès. Le vote préliminaire eut lieu du 27 au 30 ; une semaine plus tard, Nixon livrait enfin les bandes originales, où éclatait sa culpabilité. Le 8 août, il démissionnait ; le 9, il s’envolait pour son domaine de San Clemente.

afin de tourner rapidement la page scandaleuse du Watergate. À la réflexion, Nixon estimait que cette affaire avait été « un tiers malversation, un tiers maladresse, et un tiers vendetta de la part de [ses] ennemis ». En voilà, bien résumés, les caractères et les effets. De la malversation, le public retint une suspicion légitime à l’égard des hommes politiques, dont la moralité n’a cessé, depuis, d’être minutieusement examinée (parfois à l’excès). La maladresse, ajoutée au vice, contribua à jeter le discrédit sur la fonction présidentielle et à l’affaiblir. Quant au motif de vengeance, bien que rarement absent de l’arène politique, il peut, en ce cas particulier, avoir hâté la chute de Richard Nixon et, par presse interposée, avoir aussi hâté la décadence de l’homme public modèle, personnage respecté malgré ses imperfections. Les déchaînements abusifs des medias contre Gary Hart ou Clarence Thomas, récemment, fleurent effectivement davantage la vindicte que l’information. La classe politique américaine n’a donc pas entièrement fini de payer la rançon du Watergate.

Son successeur, Gerald R. Ford, qu’il avait lui-même choisi comme vice-président pour remplacer Spiro Agnew, démissionnaire, en octobre 1973, ne tarda pas à user de son droit constitutionnel de pardon,

August 8, 1974 – Richard Nixon resigns 183

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February 27, 1991

VICTORY IN THE GULF BACKGROUND

T

hree unexpected, yet major, changes in world politics shaped George Bush’s presidential term: German reunification, the end of communism and the Gulf War. They made the year 1990 truly exceptional in 20th century history and surely prefigure further transformations that are today still impossible to gauge. Yet only one of these events involved America directly: that was the liberation of Kuwait from its Iraqi invaders – the “Desert Storm” operation. The final showdown between Iraq and a coalition of 48 states in the burning sands of the Middle-East was a sort of apotheosis in American foreign policy – an ideal opportunity to, at last, restore the United States to a position of leadership in a dangerous world. Yet the Middle-East had mostly spelled failure for Americans in the fore-going years, whether in Teheran, with its hostage crisis of 1979-81, or in Beirut, with the terrorist attack on Marine headquarters in October 1983. That area had become the focal point of too many influences and contradictory interests; the situation there was too volatile and unpredictable to allow for any coherent American strategy. Yesterday’s friends could be at war today and the most ferocious rivals could unexpectedly fall into each other’s arms for no apparent reason. Besides, Soviet policy in the area remained ambiguous until 1985, and Israeli military initiatives against Palestinians (such as the invasion of southern Lebanon in June 1982) tended to undermine American positions in the Arab world. On the other hand, the “Reagan Doctrine”, that called for the active support of “freedom fighters” against Communism, could hardly apply here. The U.S. had picked the wrong target, as Reagan

Synthèse en français Le Koweit libéré 194

KEYWORDS R. Reagan G. Bush N. Schwartzkopf

186 187 192

FOCUS High Tech War

190

Opposite: General Norman Schwartzkopf’s homecoming in Tampa, Florida, May 5, 1991. February 27, 1991 – Victory in the Gulf 185

Ronald Wilson REAGAN 1911-2004 That a former B-grade movie actor like Ronald Reagan should make his way to the White House tells of the enduring vitality of the success myth in the U.S., and the fascination of Americans for outwardly appealing personalities. Indeed, Reagan was an unusually popular president, for all his blunders and failings. Born and educated in Illinois, Ronald Wilson Reagan went through college in Peoria and began working as a sports commentator in neighboring lowa in the early 1930s. His movie career did not begin until 1937 with a short role in Love Is on the Air. Then, over a period of twenty-eight years, he was to appear in 55 different movies. Yet, he was also active, within the film industry, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, which he headed for thirteen consecutive years (1947-1960). Originally a Democrat, Reagan grew critical of government regulation and switched to the Republican Party in 1962; two years later, he actively campaigned for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Because of his ties to the business community in California and of his favorable public image, the party asked him to run for governor in 1966. He served two successive terms. While in the state Capitol he tried out some of the policies he would later apply nation-wide: budget cuts, lower taxes, and reduced public funds for education and welfare. From the time he left his post as governor, in 1974, Reagan became a potential candidate for the presidency. He narrowly lost the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford in 1976 but easily won the 1980 election (with a margin of 440 electoral votes), ••• 186

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realized shortly after he had been reelected: despite its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet Union had no intention of increasing its involvement in the Middle East. The real danger was Moslem fundamentalism and the terrorist tactics of regimes that defied international law such as Syria or Lybia. Iran, formerly “an island of stability” – as President Carter put it – under the Shah, had become an instrument of chaos, not only through its support of terrorist actions including the hijacking of planes and the kidnapping of western hostages, but through its merciless war with Iraq, begun in September 1980. American priorities remained Israel’s security and the continuity of oil supply, particularly through the Persian Gulf. Carter had warned, in his State of the Union message of 1980, that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region” would be “repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” At the time, Carter feared Soviet expansionism, as preached by Leonid Brezhnev; but history proved him wrong. A full decade later, George Bush would act on the same principle; yet, this time, the expansionist aggressor was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a wolf in sheep’s clothing that the U.S. had rather reluctantly backed in its fratricidal war with Iran, on the basis of a common interest in the containment of islamic fundamentalism. With his obsession to fulfill what he called “our mission”, which was “to nourish and defend freedom and democracy, and to communicate these ideals everywhere we can…”, Ronald Reagan had identified Iran as the enemy (although he traded arms for hostages with Teheran’s abhorred regime) and encouraged Iraq to rearm massively. On paper, the Iraqi army was said to rank fourth in the world at the end of the 1980s. At the same time, Reagan up-graded American involvement in the area when, in 1987, he ordered the U.S. fleet to escort Kuwaiti oil tankers through the Persian Gulf to protect them from Iranian gunboats. Ironically enough, two of Iraq’s tiny neighbors, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates sided with dictator Saddam Hussein against Teheran’s Ayatollahs, contributing close to $20 billion to Iraq’s war effort. When the two exhausted belligerents signed a cease-fire in August 1988, Iraq grew concerned over the state of its treasury. In fact the country was $70 billion in debt and badly needed revenue to cover the costs of the war with Iran and of rearmament; and the country’s major source of revenue was petroleum. Hussein therefore adopted a radical position among oil-producing countries,

clamoring for price increases at each O.P.E.C. (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) meeting. Worse, it charged its former ally Kuwait with cheating on production quotas, therefore overproducing and keeping world oil prices low. Indeed, in the first half of 1990, the market price of OPEC oil had declined from $20.50 per barrel to $13.60. By July 1990, Hussein’s speeches had turned disquietingly aggressive; besides, he had transferred two Iraqi infantry divisions, totalling 30,000 men (or 10,000 more than the entire Kuwaiti army) to the border with Kuwait. No one then seemed to recall that Iraq had for many years laid claim to Kuwaiti territory. Once part of the Basra province in southern Iraq, Kuwait had been granted independence by the British in 1961. In that year, and twice again (in 1973 and 1976), Baghdad had attempted to reconquer the 6,880 square miles of desert that held more than twice Iraq’s oil reserves. What Saddam Hussein needed was simply a pretext for invasion. On July 17 and 18, he started mentioning an international, U.S.-led conspiracy to depress oil prices and accused Kuwait of joining the “imperialist-Zionist” plan. At a last meeting in Geneva, July 27, O.P.E.C. countries agreed to an oil price increase to $21 per barrel. Yet bilateral talks between Iraq and Kuwait over oil and border disputes were abruptly broken off August 1. The next morning, Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait and, within hours, controlled the whole country.

CIRCUMSTANCES

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resident Bush reacted with unusual speed, denouncing Iraq’s move as “naked aggression” and immediately asking the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on the invader. A comprehensive embargo was voted August 6, or only four days after Iraqi troops had crossed the border. That same day the decision was taken, with Saudi Arabia’s approval, to deploy a defensive U.S. force along its border with Iraq. More significantly, George Bush managed to gather an international coalition against Iraq, taking full advantage of the new U.S.-Soviet détente, and persuading the rest of the world (except Cuba and Yemen, which consistently abstained in all Security Council votes) that such aggressions, and violations of national integrity, could not be permitted in a world devoted to freedom and democracy under American leadership.



••• less because of the appeal of his program than because of Jimmy Carter’s self-defeating pòlicies. Inflation had soared, the American economy was stagnating, the country had lost confidence and self-respect. In the space of two terms, Reagan rebuilt the nation’s morale – and military power – but at the cost of huge budget and trade deficits and widening the gap between rich and poor. He retired to his California home in 1989, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994, and slowly faded away from public life. He died at age 93 and received a full state funeral in Washington, D.C. on June 11, 2004.

George Herbert Walker BUSH born 1924 The son of a Senator from Connecticut, who was also a banker, George Bush graduated from Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachusetts), a select private school, in 1942 and immediately joined the Navy. In September 1944, he had a narrow escape in the Pacific after he was shot down in combat while flying his bomber over the island of Chichi Jima. For this, he was awarded the DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross). After the war he entered Yale University and graduated with a degree in economics in 1948. He then moved to Texas, made a fortune in the oil business and tried his hand at politics in 1964. He won a seat in the House in 1966, which he kept until 1970. Having strongly supported Nixon in his 1968 campaign, he was rewarded with an appointment as Ambassador to the United Nations (1970). He served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee in the troubled years of Watergate, then as Ambassador to Beijing (1974) and Director of the CIA (1975-77). ••• February 27, 1991 – Victory in the Gulf 187

••• When he ran for the Republican nomination in the 1980 presidential elections, he found Reagan in his way. The primary campaign was a rough one; Reagan finally won the nomination and Bush was chosen as his running-mate only because Gerald Ford had refused the vice-presidency. Together, they easily defeated the Democratic Carter-Mondale ticket. Despite initial differences with Reagan on some policies, Bush remained particularly loyal to his President. As a result, in 1988, Reagan, in turn, strongly supported Bush’s bid for the presidency. With Dan Quayle on his ticket, Bush defeated the Democrats Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen 426 to 112, and by a margin of over 7 million popular votes.

Having enacted his own version of the Anschluss, Hussein might well have turned into an Arab Hitler with extravagant territorial hungers. Operation “Desert Shield”, aimed at protecting Saudi Arabia, drew on support from traditional allies, like Great Britain, France, Germany, Turkey and Canada, but also from more distant nations like Pakistan, Japan, Australia, and, unexpectedly, the Soviet Union. Eventual military operations would thus appear less a “western-imperialist-Zionist” scheme against Islam than a rightful crusade against arbitrary rule and against breaches of international law. Subtly blending Kennedy’s approach to America’s world responsibility for freedom (as contained in his 1961 Inaugural Address) with Teddy Roosevelt’s concept of U.S. police power, Bush never reduced military pressure on Hussein’s regime, while still leaving the door open for negotiations. By November 1990, there were 210,000 U.S. troops deployed in the area, by far the most important American military commitment abroad since Vietnam; to these were added 87,000 allied troops. All were under the command of newly appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. Sanctions seemed powerless to force the Iraqis out of Kuwait. On November 29, Resolution no. 678 of the U.N. called for the United States and its allies to “use all necessary means” to liberate Kuwait if Iraq did not withdraw by January 15. When the deadline was reached, all attempts to find a diplomatic solution had failed; and Saddam Hussein repeated to the world that Kuwait would forever be part of Iraq. In the meantime the region had been turned into a giant battlefield, with 430,000 U.S. and 245,000 allied soldiers surrounding an Iraqi force that reportedly numbered 605,000. Two days before the deadline, President Bush chose the hour for the final confrontation, named “Operation Desert Storm”: January 17, 2:30 a.m., Baghdad time. The war went through two main phases: the first was an air blitz that surpassed in magnitude anything the U.S. had tried before, even in Vietnam. Over 20,000 fighter and bomber sorties were launched in less than ten days, most of them from bases in Saudi Arabia and from six aircraft carriers cruising in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The objective was not only to disable Iraq’s air force and isolate the occupation army in Kuwait, but also to destroy Iraqi missile sites and prevent the use of chemical weapons. Western technology (see pp. 190–191) achieved what Colin Powell called “tactical surprise”: cruise missiles, “invisible” F-117A Stealth

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Showdown between Uncle Sam and Saddam Hussein. Note the sarcastic parallel between the USPanama and Iraq-Kuwait relations.

fighters, “smart” bombs and satellite surveillance achieved the expected results, i.e. widespread destruction and a display of U.S. and allied force that psychologically undermined the Iraqi army’s morale. The second phase was launched Saturday, February 23, at 8 p.m., Baghdad time. It was a massive ground assault, coordinated by General Norman Schwartzkopf, that lasted 100 hours in all and brought allied troops into Kuwait City in less than four days. Marine divisions pierced through the fortified lines the Iraqis had built along the Kuwait southern border. In Saudi Arabia, 120 miles to the west, British, French and American armored and infantry divisions raced through the Iraqi desert, meeting little resistance. In a large, sweeping movement, they drove into Kuwait from the north, crushing Saddam Hussein’s elite “Republican Guard” which did not put up much of a fight. By Wednesday noon, February 27, U.S. and allied troops had entered Kuwait City. The Iraqi army had been so thoroughly defeated that nothing stood between the most advanced

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FOCUS

HIGH TECH WAR “Desert Storm” ranks among the quickest and most successful war operations in the 20th century, given the size of the combat area and of the opposing armies (by “K-day”, January 15, 1991, over one million troops were deployed in the Gulf region). It will remain in the books as a remarkable example of modern warfare, involving the use of a wide range of highly sophisticated weapons and the application of a rather conventional strategy. First, an air campaign destroyed much of the Iraqi armored forces, artillery, and communications systems. Then a carefully prepared ground offensive achieved, in less than five days, a complete encirclement of Iraqi troops, massed and entrenched along the Iraq-Kuwait border. This brilliant, though hardly innovative, strategy which also included diversions (a fake amphibious landing by Marines on the Kuwait coast) and secret troop movements through the Saudi Arabian desert, would never have succeeded without support from an arsenal of high-tech weapons that, for the first time, were put to the test of real-life combat. They gave the coalition a decisive advantage over Iraq, if only by completely upsetting all the accepted standards of warfare. Among the most spectacularly successful weapons was the F117A “Stealth” bomber, reputed undetectable by enemy radar, yet never previously tested in actual combat. Twenty-seven of them were involved in the Gulf conflict; their mission was to bomb communications centers and fixed missile sites in Iraq. These, and other, bombers practiced what the military called “precision bombing”, using a new generation of guided munitions: heavy, “smart”, bombs that were locked on their targets by lasers, or by infrared or TV cameras. They were aimed mostly at military facilities but Allied forces also used them in their raids on Baghdad in early February. Missiles, whether they be cruise missiles, like the Tomahawks, or interceptor missiles, like the Patriots, are also equipped with advanced electronic guidance systems which make them unusually accurate (even 190

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though Patriots were criticized, after the war, for “missing” a few Iraqi Scud missiles, especially those launched against Israel after January 17). None of these deadly accurate weapons would really have been effective without the information made available by an extremely dense surveillance system, essentially composed of satellites. The Gulf War made extensive use of a space technology to which, obviously, Iraq had no possible access. No less than 25 orbiting satellites – most of them secretely launched for the Pentagon in the past decade – constantly spied on Iraqi troops, strategic sites, communications and missiles, and relayed data to the Allied Central Command in the Gulf. Some of them, 12,000 miles above the earth, provided navigation data for moving troops; others spied on enemy military maneuvers and located strategic installations, taking sharp-resolution photographs, even at nighttime or through clouds. Huge parabolic antennas, in stationary orbit over the Equator, monitored enemy communications. And some of the top-secret satellites, originally part of Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense system, were used to instantly detect Iraqi missiles, once launched; their infrared telescopes surveyed the Iraqi territory every 12 seconds and could relay information directly to Patriot anti-missile batteries, in case of attack. Many of the “surprise tactics” adopted by the coalition commanders, relied on the capacity to strike anywhere at any time, undetected. Two sets of hightech devices, never experimented on such a scale, were used in this war. First, some allied aircraft were equipped with electronic systems which confused enemy radars and rendered air defenses ineffective. Others were outfitted with night-vision equipment, mostly special eye-glasses that amplified light for the pilots, or infrared camera systems which gave clear pictures of targets up to six miles away, even in the darkest conditions. Pilots could thus fly at very low altitudes and evade enemy radars. Infantry and armored units later used the same light-

amplification devices when they rushed through the Saudi Arabian desert in the deep of night in the opening hours of the massive ground offensive. One last key to the success of allied operations was a superior coordination. Deprived of satellite or air reconnaissance, the Iraqis could never “see” what was really happening on the battlefield; with their communications systems badly damaged, they could never properly transmit the necessary orders. On the American side, the command-and-control network relied heavily on computers and electronics. All information was centralized in a commanding center in Riyadh, operations were planned there, and orders dispatched to field commanders by satellite, microwave or coded telephone lines. For better coordination, both central and individual commands were supplied with a variety of computers and programs to treat the enormous amount of data involved in controlling about 3,000 air missions a day or the joint movements of 18 ground divisions from eight different countries.

One result of this “high-tech war” was to confirm the assumption (a Pentagon favorite) that you can fight superior numbers with superior technology and win. In that respect, the Gulf War proved to be an anti-Vietnam and restored American self-confidence all the more. The low number of casualties (less than 700 allied soldiers killed or wounded) also reassured Americans by demonstrating that well-handled technology could minimize the risks of being a world leader in the defense of freedom. Some skeptics nevertheless pointed out that despite the sophisticated weaponry used by the Allies casualties had been reported from so-called “friendly fire” – i.e. simple human errors; and opponents to the conflict complained about the media presentation of military operations which emphasized their “clean” side. Yet, for a moment, Americans were the heroes of a videogame war which exorcised their frustrations and their guilt but hardly contributed to bringing peace to the Middle East – a fortiori to the world.

The F117-A Stealth Bomber.



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H. Norman SCHWARTZKOPF

American troops (poised on the banks of the River Euphrates, north of Basra) and Baghdad.

born 1934

But President Bush found that all the military objectives had been met; Kuwait was liberated and he could call for a cease-fire, to begin February 28, at 8:00 a.m. This voluntary restraint on the President’s part allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power in Baghdad, though under close supervision by the United Nations Security Council. The cease-fire resolution voted by the U.N. on April 3, 1991, and accepted by Iraq three days later, provided for the destruction of all of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missiles and nuclear material, to be controlled by an international corps of special inspectors.

A four-star army General who retired from the military in September 1991, Norman Schwartzkopf achieved world-wide fame as the inspired strategist and leader of Allied forces in the 1991 Gulf War. He was at the time compared with such illustrious predecessors as Alexander the Great, Dwight Eisenhower or Douglas MacArthur. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, Norman Schwartzkopf was educated at Bordentown Military Institute before going to West Point. His engagement in a military career was encouraged by his father, H. Norman Sr., himself a former West Pointer who, during and after World War II, served as military adviser in Teheran. Schwartzkopf stayed briefly with his father in Iran and never forgot that early introduction to Middle East manners and politics. After graduating from West Point in 1956, Schwartzkopf served in Vietnam, first as a paratrooper, then as commander of an infantry division. He was wounded in action and three times won a Silver Star for heroic conduct. An experienced field officer, he was designated deputy commander of the U.S. invasion of Granada in 1983. He took over the Central Command (one of the U.S. Army Defense Commands that covers the North of Africa and part of the Middle East) at the end of 1988 and began designing a plan for U.S. military intervention in case of a major conflict in the area. He masterminded the huge Desert Storm ground operations that followed the air campaign, including an amphibiouslanding deception plan that caused the Iraqis to think the main attack would come from the Gulf and allowed the Allied armored divisions in the west to travel 200 miles into Iraq in two days. ••• 192

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American and allied losses were remarkably light, considering the amplitude of the assault against Iraq. 389 Americans were reported killed and 357 wounded; among allied forces, the figures were respectively 77 and 830. That represented a mere 5% of the lowest number of expected casualties in the Pentagon’s prewar estimations. Also, the coalition lost only 36 planes in 80,000 sorties, a figure that reveals the extent of American and European air supremacy.

CONSEQUENCES

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uch quick and total victory rekindled pride and optimism in American hearts; the taxpayers rejoiced that the war would cost them only $7.1 billion (that is, if all the nations that had promised to contribute respected their pledge); the patriot was delighted to see, in George Bush’s own words, “a new world coming into view,” “a new world order” guaranteed by the United States. A postwar poll recorded Bush’s approval rating at nearly 80%. Yet, in early March 1992, less than a year later, only 40% of Americans approved of their President’s policies – an indication that the “Desert Storm” operation which conferred on George Bush the prestige of a world leader, may have been for him just one big, sweet, political mirage. An impression confirmed by his stinging defeat to Democrat Bill Clinton in November 1992 (168 electors to 370). Some 54 million Americans voters thought the young and unknown Governor from Arkansas would make a better President than the incumbent George Bush, and it appears that recollections of the victory in the Gulf were of little weight in their choice. Domestic issues prevailed, with recession, unemployment, budget deficit, public debt and rampant

poverty ahead of all other concerns in the people’s minds. For this, the conservative and strangely nostalgic George Bush had no readymade answer; with the gigantic raid on Iraq and the retaking of Kuwait he had trodden familiar ground. Operations in the Gulf looked like a sophisticated remake of World War II, complete with a new Hitler, a world military and moral coalition against him, and an irresistible assault of Allied armies for which America would receive raving praise, as in 1944. But Bush’s ideology of grandeur failed to integrate the 1992 facts of American economic and social frailty. And in post-Gulf War days, Americans could better measure the yawning gap between their leader’s dream of world-power and the reality of their own daily plight. Besides, the Gulf War was fought with existing equipment and required no additional industrial effort. As a result, the U.S. economy emerged from the war as sluggish as before. The old recipes of economic recovery had thus failed. Bill Clinton’s victory showed more clearly, in retrospect, how little innovation President Bush had shown, how static and subservient to Ronald Reagan’s national and international options he had remained, while the world around and his own country were changing at great speed; his single term thus appeared as a mere appendix to the “Feelgood” Era inaugurated by Reagan in 1980. And though Bush could rightly claim some credit for victory in the Gulf, the latter could hardly conceal a more general failure of the imagination in his Administration’s policies. Only military leaders seemed to have reaped substantial benefits from their war record, General Schwartzkopf by becoming a best-selling author and General Colin Powell by rising to prominence among the Republican Party leadership.



••• Familiarly known as “the Bear”, for his size (6 ft 3 in., 240 lb) or “Stormin’ Norman”, for his temper, Schwartzkopf managed to win the attention of the media during and after the Gulf War, and emerged as a national hero. He capitalized on this new popularity to write best-selling memoirs, published in 1992 and ingenuously entitled It Doesn’t Take a Hero. He retired from active service shortly after the war and worked for a while as military analyst for NBC. He has been a strong supporter of George W. Bush and John McCain during their presidential campaigns.

President-elect Bill Clinton meets George Bush at the White House, November 1992.

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LE KOWEIT LIBÉRÉ Début juin 1991, le retour au pays des troupes américaines engagées dans la guerre du Golfe fut spectaculaire et délirant. L’opération Welcome Home en disait long sur l’exultation d’un peuple enfin réconcilié avec ses militaires et convaincu d’avoir retrouvé, et étalé au grand jour, la suprématie d’antan. Les 746 morts ou blessés américains du conflit ne pouvaient ternir le tableau d’un triomphe total, grandiose comme le défilé du général Norman Schwartzkopf, commandant-en-chef des forces américaines, dans les rues de New York, sous les ballons, les rubans jaunes et les confettis. Pourtant, le Moyen-Orient n’avait guère, depuis près de vingt ans, réussi aux Américains. Leur influence dans la région, déjà battue en brèche par l’OPEP et les chocs pétroliers de 1973 et 1979, avait fini de se déliter avec l’affaire des otages de l’ambassade à Téhéran (1979-81), puis l’attentat commis contre le QG des marines à Beyrouth (octobre 1983). Habitués à penser en termes de blocs, les Américains s’accommodaient mal de la politique fluctuante du monde arabe où les alliances et les ruptures sont parfois imprévisibles. Difficile d’appliquer ici la doctrine Reagan d’appui américain à des groupes locaux d’opposition armée, comme au Nicaragua. Et les positions ambiguës de l’Union Soviétique, la révolution islamique en Iran et la guerre Iran-Irak (1980– 88) avaient quelque peu brouillé les cartes de la diplomatie américaine au Moyen-Orient, dont les deux priorités demeuraient toutefois la sécurité d’Israël et le libre approvisionnement en pétrole. Pourtant généreusement armé par l’Occident dans sa lutte contre l’Iran intégriste, l’Irak de Saddam Hussein ne parvint pas à gagner sa guerre mais réussit à plonger son économie 194

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dans un endettement dangereux de 70 milliards de dollars. Partisan farouche de la hausse des prix du pétrole (sa principale source de revenus), l’Irak se mit à critiquer violemment ses voisins pour leur surproduction, qui rendait le pétrole moins cher. À partir de juillet 1990, le Koweit devint la cible préférée de Saddam Hussein. Séparé en 1961 de la province irakienne de Basra par les Britanniques, ce petit pays avait déjà fait l’objet de tentatives de récupération, en 1973 et 1976, de la part de l’Irak. Depuis, les litiges frontaliers n’avaient pas manqué. Le dernier en date devait donner à Baghdad le prétexte d’une invasion-éclair, accomplie le 2 août 1990. La réaction américaine fut immédiate. Washington incita le Conseil de sécurité à voter des sanctions – en l’occurrence, un embargo total, voté le 6 août – puis, ayant acquis l’appui de l’URSS et le concours de ses alliés traditionnels, décida l’envoi d’un corps expéditionnaire destiné à protéger l’Arabie Saoudite (d’où le nom de l’opération : Bouclier du désert). Se posant comme défenseur du droit et de l’ordre international, cette coalition rassembla 300 000 hommes le long des frontières de l’Irak et du Koweit puis, le 29 novembre 1990 exigea le retrait irakien des territoires envahis, avant le 15 janvier 1991 (résolution n° 678 des Nations Unies). Deux jours avant que le délai soit expiré, alors que plus d’un million de soldats se trouvaient concentrés dans la région, le président Bush choisit l’heure de l’intervention alliée en cas de refus par l’Irak d’évacuer le Koweit ; l’opération Tempête du désert débuterait le 17 janvier à 2 h 30 du matin, heure locale.

La guerre du Golfe vit deux offensives principales se succéder, à une semaine d’intervalle : d’abord une phase d’opérations aériennes (plus de 20 000 raids en dix jours) destinée à détruire au sol un maximum d’avions irakiens, d’objectifs militaires (centres de transmissions, bases de missiles, etc.) et de moyens de communication (routes, ponts, pistes d’aéroport, etc.). Cette opération-surprise engageait ce qui se fait de mieux en matière de haute technologie militaire, bombardiers furtifs, bombes intelligentes, équipements de vision nocturne, systèmes de surveillance hypersensibles, etc. Au bout de quelques jours, ces destructions systématiques avaient naturellement entamé le moral de l’armée irakienne, mais avaient surtout privé ses unités avancées de soutien logistique adéquat. Le 23 février, à la tombée de la nuit, le général Schwartzkopf lançait la grande offensive terrestre qui, en moins de quatre jours, permettrait aux troupes alliées d’entrer dans Koweit City. Mieux coordonnées et parfaitement renseignées, des unités d’assaut en grande majorité américaines, britanniques et françaises, enfoncèrent les lignes irakiennes (notamment la prestigieuse garde républicaine) au sud, tout en les prenant à revers par un long mouvement tournant à partir du nord-ouest. Le 27 février, le Koweit était considéré comme libéré et le président Bush pouvait annoncer un cessez-le-feu pour le lendemain. La défaite irakienne revêtait de telles proportions qu’il eût été militairement facile de filer sur Baghdad et de déposer Saddam Hussein. Tel ne fut pas le cas. L’objectif de l’intervention alliée étant atteint, le droit international ayant été rétabli, il restait maintenant au Conseil de sécurité à s’assurer que l’Irak ne pourrait plus menacer à nouveau

ses voisins. La résolution votée le 3 avril 1991 aux Nations unies (acceptée par l’Irak le 6), non seulement entérinait le cessez-le-feu, mais contraignait l’Irak à détruire l’ensemble de ses armes chimiques et bactériologiques, ses missiles et tous matériaux pouvant servir à réaliser un armement nucléaire. Le tout sous le contrôle d’inspecteurs des Nations Unies. Les pertes alliées, minimes, et la rapidité de la victoire ont momentanément flatté l’orgueil américain. À nouveau gendarmes du monde, les États-Unis entendaient bien mener le jeu pour établir ce que M. Bush appelle un nouvel ordre mondial. Mais les sondages, très favorables au Président dès la fin des hostilités (avec 80% d’opinions favorables), montraient déjà un scepticisme renaissant en juin 1991 (72%) et viraient au rouge en moins d’un an (40% en mars 1992). Preuve qu’une victoire militaire, aussi prestigieuse soit-elle, ne pouvait faire oublier aux Américains leurs problèmes quotidiens ; et ceux-ci paraissent avoir été bien imprudemment négligés par l’administration Bush. Les élections de novembre 1992 en apportèrent la confirmation en plaçant le démocrate Bill Clinton à la tête de l’État. Le quarante-deuxième président américain fut choisi surtout pour son programme ambitieux de réformes économiques et sociales, pour les promesses qu’il avait faites de s’attaquer résolument aux problèmes du déficit budgétaire, de la protection sociale, de l’insécurité et de la violence urbaine.

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September 11, 2001

A DAY OF INFAMY BACKGROUND

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s the heir to British imperialism in the Middle East, the United States has been looked upon by most Arab countries in the region with feelings ranging from mere suspicion to sheer hatred. The history of Arab-American relations over the past fifty years is studded with tension, occasional crises or wars, engendered, for the most part, by an attempt to reconcile contradictory goals: preservation of the US oil industry interests, containment of Soviet, then Russian, expansion in the area, and the desire to establish a lasting balance of power and democratic order among nations that had been used to constantly assaulting each other over territorial, ethnic or religious issues. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, the Tehran hostage crisis, the shifting (to say the least) stance of the United States during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), the failed intervention in Lebanon (1983) and the first Gulf War were so many signs of the Americans’ incapacity to handle Middle East politics efficiently and durably. The region attracted US interest in the late 1930s, when two major oil companies, Standard Oil of California and Texaco, won their first concession to explore resources and extract oil in Saudi Arabia. Wells mushroomed all over the Persian Gulf, in Bahrain and Kuwait, then in Iraq and Iran. Regional stability, and the protection of a lasting access to Middle Eastern oil, remained a primary concern of American policymakers in the next half-century. Keeping the area in control of friendly, pro-Western Arab regimes also meant the preservation of oil supply to the United States and, therefore, of its world hegemony.

Synthèse en français Jour de terreur 206

KEYWORDS The World Trade Center 201 Guantanamo Bay Naval Base 201 The Vulcans 202 The Patriot Act 203

PEOPLE George W. Bush O. Bin Laden C. Rice H. Karzai D. Rumsfeld S. Hussein

198 200 203 208 208 211

FOCUS Global War on Terror 204

Threats to this carefully established order came not so much from the predictable Soviet expansionism as from the conjunction of Arab nationalism and Muslim fundamentalism, variously expressed through OPEC embargoes, the Iranian Revolution and recurrent

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George Walker BUSH born in 1946

George Walker Bush, the eldest son of the 41st president of the United States, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and moved to Texas in 1949 with his three brothers (Neil, Marvin and John Ellis, nicknamed “Jeb”) and sisters (Dorothy and Robin). His strict education at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, followed by a history major at Yale, was suddenly interrupted by his joining the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, some say as a means to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. After serving six years, he was accepted at Harvard Business School, received an MBA in 1976, and went into the oil business in Texas. Heavy drinking, which started at Harvard, led him to the verge of personal disaster, from which he narrowly escaped thanks to the presence of his wife, Laura, and the discovery of Christian teachings. Towards 1986 he declared himself sober, saved and “bornagain,” with the blessing of the prominent evangelist Billy Graham. As a Methodist, he would henceforth put religion at the center of his life, including his political life which took an unexpectedly favorable turn in 1994. That year, with the help of family ••• 198

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rejections of the existence of Israel by its Arab neighbors. Americans eventually went to war against Iraq in 1991 to try and preserve a favorable status quo in a region where their influence was dangerously waning. Resentment over US arrogance and economic oppression (sanctions against Iran and Iraq, in particular, were perceived as wrongful persecutions of helpless Arab populations) fed an anti-American rhetoric and paved the way to the growth of radical organizations, such as Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda, whose unique goal was to wound American pride and respond to Arab humiliations by extreme violence. PLO activists (Abu Nidal) and the Lebanese Hezbollah had, in the 1980s, targeted US and Israeli interests throughout the world. Islamist extremists also planted a bomb in an underground garage of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, causing the death of six people. But the worst terrorist attacks before 9/11, in which Al-Qaeda was involved, occurred simultaneously in Tanzania and Kenya on August 7, 1998, when the US embassies in Dar-elSalaam and Nairobi were the victims of a car bomb, which killed 225 people and injured over 4,000. If one discounts the April 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City by two antigovernment extremists, US national territory had so far been immune from mass-casualty terrorism.

CIRCUMSTANCES

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t 8:46 a.m. on September 11, about 45 minutes after takeoff, a Boeing 767 plane (American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles) hits the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) on its north side between the 94th and 98th floors. Its 72 tons of gasoline explode into billowing flames, sending smoke and debris all over the neighboring buildings and streets. Thousands of office workers below the impact level start evacuating the tower, while those trapped on the upper floors jump, panic-stricken, to their death or wait for an improbable rescue. Almost simultaneously, another Boeing 767 (United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston to Los Angeles) changes course and heads towards New York City. At 9:02 a.m. it impacts the south side of the South Tower between the 78th and 84th floors, causing disastrous damage to the building and catapulting fragments up to six blocks away. This second attack receives full media coverage as TV cameras are already in the process of filming the burning North Tower. Meanwhile, however, another two planes are being hijacked and directed towards two

symbolic targets. One is American Airlines Flight 77, from Washington to Los Angeles, which leaves Dulles Airport at 8:20 a.m., flies west for half an hour, suddenly makes a 180° turn over Ohio, heads back to Washington and crashes into the western side of the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. The other is United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, reported hijacked at about 9:20 a.m., which changes direction 15 minutes later, presumably heading towards Washington, D.C. It finally crashes near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Evidence seems to indicate passenger resistance to the hijackers, leading to the premature crash of the Boeing 757 whose target is assumed to have been the White House. Meanwhile, President George W. Bush is visiting an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, as part of a promotion tour for his new bill on education. At 9:05 a.m., as he listens to a children’s story, his Chief of Staff warns him of the second WTC hit. The President will wait until the visit is over (a good few minutes) before he finally goes before TV cameras to address the country and vow to track down the perpetrators of this terrorist attack. By the time he reaches Sarasota Airport to board Air Force One, at 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapses, its steel structure having been partly melted by the heat from the explosion. Within 10 seconds the building disappears into a gigantic cloud of debris. The shock is said to have damaged the other buildings around, beginning with the twin North Tower, which in turn collapses at 10:28 a.m. Building 7, close by, which housed insurance companies, banks and a few government agencies, collapses later in the day, after complete evacuation. In the following hours, for security reasons, the President flies from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska before coming back to Washington in the late afternoon. At 8:30 p.m. he speaks to the nation from the Oval Office: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.” Echoing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rhetoric in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, George W. Bush pledges to hunt down the terrorists wherever they may hide and to display to the world the valiance and determination of the United States.

CONSEQUENCES

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s a result of the attacks, 2,973 people died, including 2,750 from the World Trade Center alone, and among them 343 New York City firemen trying to rescue employees trapped in the buildings. Fatalities would have been far higher had the planes hit

••• money, generous Republican donators, and a name that was widely known, he managed to wrest the governorship of Texas from the hands of Democrat Ann Richards. He was reelected by a wide margin (69% of votes) in 1998. His two terms in Austin were marked by an increase in education funding, mostly funneled through religious organizations, a general toughening of law and order with a record 152 executions in the Huntsville prison and the proclamation of June 10 as “Jesus Day” in Texas. Most of his reforms found a positive response in public opinion, which encouraged him to run for President in 2000. His appeal to religious values was pivotal in his campaign and won him many votes among regular churchgoers and, more generally, among security-obsessed mainstream Americans who stood against gun control or environmental constraints and favored less taxes and more jobs. The much disputed result of the Florida vote finally gave George W. Bush the upper hand over Democrat Al Gore in the Electoral College (271 to 266) even though his opponent won more popular votes (500,000) than he did, making him the first “minority” president since Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Like Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, George W. Bush has been able to boost the American people’s morale, especially after the 9/11 attacks, first by holding a very firm stance on international terrorism, then by waging a successful blitzkrieg against Iraq and by capturing Saddam Hussein and several of his henchmen. His popularity, however, declined sharply in the last year of his second term after it was proven that Iraq had stored no weapons of mass destruction and that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would not be won easily. He left office with a record low approval rate of 24% at the time of the 2008 election. September 11, 2001 – A Day of infamy 199

Osama BIN LADEN 1957-2011

One of 55 children of Muhammed Bin Laden, a building contractor who emigrated from Yemen to Saudi Arabia before World War II, Osama B Laden was born in Rihyadh in a rather prosperous Sunni family. He was educated in Jeddah, attended an elite high school, and then studied economics and business at the local King Abdulaziz University. There, he may have come under the influence of some members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamic movement calling for an offensive jihad to remove miscreant governments and re-establish Sharia law throughout the Muslim world. The devout Bin Laden, having inherited the family fortune, established several organizations to funnel arms and money to the mujahideen who resisted the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. In the early 1980s, Bin Laden lived in Peshawar, Pakistan, apparently receiving indiscriminate support from the CIA in order to hasten the pullout of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. His preference for independent action, however, led him to organize his own army of mujahideen in 1986; it was dominated by Arab fighters and commanders and had its own training camps in the eastern Paktia province of Afghanistan. They formed the basis for the Al-Qaeda organization he founded in 1988, conceived as the spearhead of radical Islamic opposition to the ••• 200

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the towers later in the day, as an average of 50,000 people would habitually be on the premises on any working day. Transcontinental flights were obviously selected to perform maximum damage as they still had on board thousands of gallons of kerosene soon after takeoff. All seven buildings of the WTC complex were destroyed or had to be razed. Damage was done to 27 other buildings, a few of which became uninhabitable. 1.8 million tons of rubble had to be removed, once the fire had been completely put out – this took 99 days. The site was not cleaned up until May 2002, when “viewing platforms” were set up for New Yorkers and tourists to observe rehabilitation in progress. The area became known as “Ground Zero,” a term which usually designates either the place where an atomic bomb exploded or the epicentre of an earthquake. It is associated with devastation and major trauma, and appropriately describes the horror felt by Americans during and after the attacks. Television and the printed press dramatized the event to an unprecedented degree, encouraged by distressed public opinion and the martial tone of official declarations. Newspaper headlines spoke of “mass murder,” “acts of war,” “terror,” “nightmare,” “outrage,” “evil,” and “Hell.” A few even echoed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own description of the attack on Pearl Harbor as an “infamy.” That America was “under attack,” and an especially vicious one that might endanger freedom and democracy, left no one in doubt. The question “who did this” came naturally to mind and required expeditious answers. Behind sorrow lay anger. In the early hours following the attacks, the Bush Administration scrambled to find the villains who had commited such a heinous crime. The name of Osama Bin Laden as mastermind behind the attack was aired very quickly. Ever since his escape from US missiles in Afghanistan back in August 1998 he had been the most wanted terrorist suspect in the world. In a message broadcast by Qatari TV channel Al Jazeera on October 7, Bin Laden rejoiced over the punishment that miscreant America had received through the hand of God; however, he did not admit to direct implication in the 9/11 attacks until October 2004. Within hours after the crashes, the FBI had identified all nineteen highjackers who had boarded the four planes and died in the attacks. Other potential terrorists, suspected of planning further bombings, were arrested. Two of them were tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid, the latter for having attempted to bomb a Paris-Miami flight on December 22, 2001, using explosives hidden in his shoes. Another, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, arrested in Pakistan in March

KEYWORDS

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER A symbol of American world supremacy and an icon of the New York City skyline, the monumental twin towers that were destroyed on September 11, 2001 were part of a commercial complex in lower Manhattan which comprised seven buildings and housed hundreds of businesses, government agencies and international trade offices. Soaring high above New York’s downtown financial district, the so-called “Twin Towers” rose to 415 m and 417 m respectively and offered 1.24 million square meters of office space on 110 stories with 198 elevators. The slender rectangular towers were designed by Seattleborn architect Minoru Yamasaki and built on a site that belonged to the Port Authority of New York. The project, initiated in the early 1960s by banker David Rockefeller and backed by his brother Governor Nelson Rockefeller as well as the whole New York business community, took seven years to complete (1966-1973), at a total cost of about $900 million by the time of ribbon-cutting. Over 500 companies occupied office space in the towers.

A first incident that tested the building’s security systems occurred in February 1975, when a fire destroyed most of the 11th floor of the North Tower. Subsequently, fire sprinklers were installed in all the buildings. Then a first terrorist attack shook the foundations of the same North Tower on February 26, 1993 as a truck packed with half a ton of explosives detonated in the underground garage, leaving six people dead and thousands suffering, in varying degrees, from smoke intoxication. The leader of the commando Ramzi Youssef was later (1995) arrested in Pakistan, extradited, tried in New York City and sentenced to life imprisonment. Connections with Al-Qaeda finally surfaced as a result of this bomb attack: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a member of Osama Bin Laden’s movement, confessed in 2007 to being the mastermind behind the whole plot. Five new office towers, designed by architect Sir Norman Foster, will reconstitute the World Trade Center in 2012, the first of which to be completed will be Freedom Tower rising to a height of 1,776 feet (541 m) – a symbolic reference to the date of American Independence.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE Guantanamo Bay lies at the south-eastern tip of the island of Cuba, about 1,000 km from Havana. Perfectly sheltered from tropical storms and isolated from the hinterland by steep hills, it became a much-needed harbor for Spanish settlers in the nineteenth century, then a strategic site during the 1898 Spanish-American war. Once Cuban independence had been secured, a treaty (the CubanAmerican Treaty), signed in February 1903, granted a lease to the United States to use this area exclusively as “coaling or naval stations” for an undetermined length of time. The amount of the lease was originally $2,000 per annum, upgraded to $4,085 in 1934 and never changed since. After 1959, however, the Castro government consistently refused to cash the lease cheques, considering US presence on the island illegal. Castro himself claimed that the naval base was there only “to humiliate Cuba” and was perfectly useless from a military standpoint. The base, despite its lack of strategic importance, has been used symbolically, over the decades, as a token of US control of the whole Caribbean region, especially as this site (45 square miles – roughly the size of Manhattan) is an

enclave in a country with which the US have no diplomatic relations. In the last 25 years, besides the usual naval operations, the base served as a detainment facility for Cuban and Haitian refugees. Following US intervention in Afghanistan, prisoners assumed to be related to the Talibans and Al-Qaeda were incarcerated in a special detention camp on the premises of the base. Since the opening of the camp in January 2002 779 of them have been detained, most of them on no charges, and without ever facing fair court trials. In spite of complaints by Amnesty International and other NGOs, and a 2004 US Supreme Court decision that allowed prisoners to challenge their detention before American tribunals, 169 men are still present in the camp as of June 2012. In November 2008 the newly elected president pledged to close down Guantanamo within two years but administrative, judicial and political (Congress has been resolutely opposed to the closure of the camp) trappings have hampered the final transfer of all inmates to continental US prisons. September 11, 2001 – A Day of infamy 201

••• United States, the non-Muslim world in general, and the pro-American Saudi monarchy.

2003 and held in detention in Guantanamo, is alleged to have organized the whole operation for Al-Qaeda.

After becoming a persona non grata in his homeland, Bin Laden took temporary refuge in Sudan in 1991 where he established new training camps for Al-Qaeda jihadists. The first bombings on the World Trade Center, in February 1993, were probably planned there.

At home, the President asked for expanded powers for military action against terrorism, which he received immediately from Congress thanks to Joint Congressional Resolution 107–40 (September 18, 2001). A National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States was formed in November 2002 to prepare “a full and complete account of the circumstances” of the attacks. Its report, published in August 2004, has come under strong criticism for its lack of impartiality and poor conclusiveness.

In 1996, Sudan yielded to international pressure to expel Bin Laden, who flew to Kabul where he offered his support to the Talibans and befriended their chief Mullah Omar. From then on Bin Laden, and Al-Qaeda, would wage an all-out war against Americans, Jews and their allies, issuing fatwas that made it a sacred duty to hit American interests anywhere on the planet. He thus claimed responsibility for the bombings of Khobar (Saudi Arabia) in June 1996, the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in August 1998, and the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden in October 2000. By that time, Bin Laden had become the most wanted international criminal with a $5 million reward on his head, raised to $25 million after the September 11th attacks. His whereabouts became a matter of speculation: he was reputed to have taken refuge in eastern Afghanistan, then he was reported dead in the US bombings of the Tora Bora mountains in December 2001, yet went on sending audio or video messages from time to time to the Al Jazeera TV channel. He finally reappeared one last time in Pakistan, in 2011, where he had been tracked by US intelligence services. He was killed May 2nd in a military operation ordered by president Obama and led by US Navy special forces in Pakistani territory.

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Internationally, war has been waged by the United States and a coalition of western allies, first on Afghanistan, then on Iraq, where military fatalities are now higher than those of 9/11.

KEYWORD

THE VULCANS Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of liberal intellectuals and politicians gathered to form a think tank and elaborate long-term strategies to transform the world in which the United States had now become the only superpower. It was known as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and, during the Clinton years, paved the way for a return of Republicans to power in 2000. These so-called “neoconservatives” or “neocons” believed the United States should spread democracy throughout the world, assuming that this would be the best rampart against extremism, in particular among Arab nations. To reach this goal, military strength, economic power and the enforcement of national security were advocated. Most of the PNAC leaders found themselves involved in George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, as a team of foreign policy advisors. Under Condoleezza Rice’s leadership they defined the Republican candidate’s positions on world affairs. Most of their foreign policy plans, however, were upset by the events of September 11, 2001 and substituted for President Bush’s more pragmatic and tougher antiterrorist doctrine. Condoleezza Rice, but also Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Richard Armitage, Robert Blackwill, Stephen Hadley, Richard Perle or Donald Rumsfeld, were all experienced officials who had undertaken various roles in the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. They became known as “The Vulcans,” a name intended to honor the colossal statue of the Roman god of fire and metallurgy that dominates Condoleezza Rice’s hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Following George W. Bush’s victory they all were rewarded with key positions in the new Bush administration: Rice and Armitage at the Department of State, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz at the Department of Defense, Hadley and Blackwill at the National Security Council.

KEYWORD

THE PATRIOT ACT An expeditious legislative response to the 9/11 attacks, the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing. Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001”, a.k.a. the Patriot Act, was introduced in Congress on October 23, 2001, passed the House on October 24 and the Senate on October 25 by wide margins, and was finally signed into law by President Bush the very next day. The sense of urgency and the need for immediate security transpires in the lack of debate that accompanied the votes and the lack of significant criticism against the curtailment of civil liberties which the Act commanded. The stated purpose of the law was to fight terrorism at home and abroad. Domestic security was to be ensured through: • increased surveillance procedures, • easing intelligence gathering on terrorism over the US territory, • improving border protection and controlling immigration,

Condoleezza RICE born 1954 The first woman to be appointed National Security Advisor in 2000, and the first African-American woman to serve as Secretary of State during George Bush’s second term, Condoleezza Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of a Presbyterian Minister and a high school teacher. She was early exposed to racial discrimination and grew up in a period when civil rights activists and segregationists violently and heinously collided. To protect his family, Reverend Rice moved to Denver where Condoleezza (whose name is alleged to derive from an erroneous musical notation, con dolcezza, meaning “sweetly”), after studying the piano, eventually went into Political Science and received a PhD in 1981.

• monitoring financial transactions, especially international money laundering activities. All of these provisions implied an aggravated invasion of the private sphere by such agencies as the FBI, whose powers of investigation were widely extended. Searches of homes and businesses could now be secretly conducted, suspected immigrants could be detained indefinitely, telephones could be wiretapped and emails inspected – all without a court order. New controlling procedures were established, among which machine-readable passports and elaborate searches at points of entry into US territory. Arrests under the new law were officially to have reached over 400 but the American Civil Liberties Union, one of its most vocal critics and opponents to the “sneak and peek” practices it authorized, claims only about 10% of these arrests were really related to terrorist threats. Portions of the Patriot Act came up for renewal in March 2006 and Congress was careful then to include several major civil liberties protections in the new law.

She was immediately hired at Stanford University where she had a brilliant academic career culminating with her appointment as Provost in 1993, in charge of the university’s multi-billion dollar budget. As a result she developed many contacts with the business world and later served on many corporate boards, including Chevron, Hewlett Packard, Rand and J. P. Morgan. It was, however, her expertise in Soviet and East European affairs that led her to national politics, first as main advisor on the Soviet Union to George Bush Sr., then as National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush. Her outspoken support of the war in Iraq brought her even closer to President George W. Bush who appointed her as Secretary of State in November 2004 to replace Colin Powell when he resigned.

Confirmation of the position by the Senate was hard-won as many Senators held her uncompromising positions on Iraq and Saddam Hussein against her. She has tried to change the course of US foreign policy by restructuring the State Department and relocating the best diplomats where they were most needed, i.e. in countries where American geopolitical interests must be strongly defended: India, China, Brazil, Indonesia, Lebanon… This new strategy, entitled “Transformational Diplomacy” calls for an updated foreign policy agenda in which regional – not global – solutions should be sought to issues like terrorism, drug trafficking or pandemic diseases. She left the State Department in January 2009 and has gone back to teach political science at Stanford University. September 11, 2001 – A Day of infamy 203

FOCUS

GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR In the weeks that followed the September 11 attacks, the United States vowed to punish the criminals who had brought devastation to American territory and developed a comprehensive plan to dismantle terrorist networks at home and abroad. “We’re a nation at war,” President Bush said to justify the immediate measures that were taken to fight terrorism. Five years later, on the anniversary of the attacks, he repeated: “We’re engaged in a global war against an enemy that threatens all civilized nations. And today the civilized world stands together to defend our freedom; we stand together to defeat the terrorists; and we are working to secure the peace for generations to come.” Clearly, in this global war on terrorism, the United States stands again as a beacon for fundamental human values and as a fortress of freedom. At home, institutional answers to the attacks came quickly: Congress passed a joint resolution (107-40) to authorize the President to use all means, including military, to fight terrorism. On the Executive side, in order to ensure domestic safety, George W. Bush established an Office of Homeland Security at the White House in early October 2001, led by former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. The agenda was to develop a new comprehensive strategy to strengthen protection against terrorist threats or attacks in the United States. The Office made recommendations, and measures to increase the safety of US citizens were taken. In July 2002, the President proposed a National Strategy for Homeland Security and asked Congress to establish a new and single Department of Homeland Security (finally created by an act of Congress of November 25, 2002 with an initial budget of $20 billion), whose primary objectives were to prevent new terrorist attacks on US soil and to reduce the vulnerability of the nation to terrorism. The Department worked to find proper tactics for “detecting, preparing for, preventing, protecting against, responding to, and recovering 204

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from terrorist threats or attacks within the United States,” as its mission statement indicated. On Capitol Hill congressmen were also active: on October 26, 2001 the President signed a bill that had gone through both assemblies at full speed, which became the USA Patriot Act. Fighting terrorism domestically required expanded powers on the part of law enforcement agencies. As a consequence, stricter security standards were imposed on airlines and at borders. Immigrants, suspected of terrorism, could be detained and even deported. Monitoring of financial transactions and communications, even private ones, was increased at the expense, some said, of civil liberties. Among the potential tactics used by terrorists were biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, more generally identified as “weapons of mass destruction.” A week after 9/11, George W. Bush had warned that there would be “a campaign against terrorist activity, a worldwide campaign” and singled out the governments which supported or sheltered terrorist groups. Operation Enduring Freedom, which began October 7, 2001 was part of this global response, spearheaded by the US, with the UN blessing. First, Afghanistan, with its fundamentalist Taliban regime, was targeted as a sanctuary for terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. Heavy bombardments sought to destroy training camps and help capture Al-Qaeda leaders. The operation also involved US troops in the Philippines, to fight against the Islamist separatist group led by Abu Sayyaf (suspected of organizing the Bali car bombing of October 12, 2002), and in the Horn of Africa to conduct counterterrorist controls. By the end of 2001, the Talibans had been ousted from power in Kabul, but Osama Bin Laden’s assumed hideout could not be located. Three years later, October 9, 2004, Afghans elected their first post-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai. Once the Afghanistan campaign had seemingly succeeded, the Bush Administration now turned to

another nation that notoriously supported or sheltered terrorists, Iraq. President Bush, in his State of the Union address of January 2003, designated Saddam Hussein as a dangerous dictator who would eventually need to be removed. Arguments ranged from the Iraqi regime’s ties with terrorist networks to its assumed possession of “weapons of mass destruction,” chemical, biological and nuclear. International suspicions were fueled by Saddam Hussein’s reluctant compliance with UN resolution 687 of April 3, 1991 that mandated all of Iraq’s weapons to be destroyed. “If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm,” George W. Bush warned in his January 2003 address, “for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.” Which was done on March 20, with the help of a scanty coalition of military allies. The

Saddam HUSSEIN 1937-2006 Born in the Sunni community near Tikrit, in southern Iraq, Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid left his family very early in life to go and make a living with his uncle in Bagdad. He dropped out of school in the late 1950s and drifted towards the panArab revolutionary Ba’ath party which was deeply inspired by the harsh nationalism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. This post-colonial era saw the emergence of progressives and socialists in Iraq, and a string of revolutions in the Middle East which weakened the traditional monarchies and confiscated the powers held by an elite of landowners, merchants and tribal chiefs. Saddam Hussein was involved in the coup that overthrew King Faisal in 1958, but quickly turned against one of his own men, General Qassim. Alliances were

war, originally code-named Operation Iraqi Freedom, sought officially to remove Saddam Hussein and preventively destroy all of Iraq’s deadly arsenal. On May 1, on board USS Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf, President Bush announced the end of major combat in Iraq and optimistically declared that, in the battle of Iraq, the United States and its allies had prevailed. Saddam Hussein was finally captured December 13, 2003 and after a long, hectic trial was found guilty of crimes against humanity and hanged December 30, 2006. Meanwhile, keeping civil peace in Iraq proved a formidable challenge for US and allied forces. On Friday, September 22, 2006, for the first time, military deaths from Afghanistan and Iraq (2,974) surpassed those of 9/11, which had triggered the wars.

The Northern Kurds, who are not Arabs, resented his pan-Arabism and threatened secession. Gradually, Saddam Hussein resorted to greater violence in order to maintain his authority. The Islamic Revolution (Shi’ite) in Iran triggered an 8-year war between the two countries that ended in a stalemate and left them economically drained. The invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 was a way of In his capacity as Vice President, and ensuring Iraq’s recovery. because he sought stability in a multiethnic, religiously diverse society, Defeat in the Gulf War, US-induced he proceeded to turn Iraq into a secular embargoes and wholesale sanctions led nation (he later abolished Islamic law), Iraq to the brink of collapse, prompting nationalized the oil industry and Saddam Hussein to intensify domestic modernized the economy. He finally repression and isolating him on the forced out President al-Bakr in 1979 and international scene. assumed total power. However, domestic resistance to his rule would continue over Following the invasion of Iraq in March, the next 20 years, as the Shi’ite majority Saddam Hussein went into hiding, but (60% of the Iraqi population) resented was captured in December 2003, tried in Saddam’s secular policies and received November 2006 and hanged on support from neighboring Iran after 1979. December 30, 2006. shaky and best friends unreliable in those days, and Saddam Hussain played the games of power-shifting with remarkable skill. He not only survived topplings and purges but managed to fight his way to the top of the Ba’ath party and become Vice President of Iraq in 1968 – deputy to Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, but, in reality, the strong man of the country.

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JOUR DE TERREUR Les États-Unis ne sont jamais parvenus à comprendre le Moyen-Orient. Héritiers malgré eux de territoires naguère sous tutelle britannique, rendus particulièrement instables par des conflits ethniques ou religieux et par la présence de l’État d’Israël, les Américains ont d’abord pratiqué dans la région leur propre variété d’hégémonisme économique dont le fleuron était le pétrole. Depuis la fin des années 1930 deux grandes compagnies pétrolières, la Standard Oil of California et Texaco se partageaient les concessions en Arabie Saoudite pour y prospecter et extraire l’or noir. L’exploitation s’étendit rapidement à tout le golfe Persique, des Émirats au Koweit en passant par l’Irak et l’Iran. La protection des intérêts américains passait par une stabilisation durable de la situation politique dans la région, par le maintien d’un équilibre entre les sphères d’influence occidentale et soviétique, d’une part, puis entre des nations belliqueuses toujours prêtes à en découdre les unes avec les autres, ou avec Israël. La présence militaire permanente des Américains et les maladresses répétées de leur diplomatie finirent par attirer sur eux une haine d’autant plus vive qu’elle ne pouvait guère s’exprimer devant la toute-puissance de ces nouveaux impérialistes. Les chocs pétroliers de 1973 et 1979, et la crise des otages à Téhéran, furent les premiers signes d’une contestation de la suprématie américaine. La gestion de la révolution iranienne en 1978, le rôle ambigu joué durant la guerre Iran-Irak (1980-1988), l’intervention désastreuse au Liban (1983) et la première guerre du Golfe (1991) furent autant d’indications que les États-Unis étaient incapables de pratiquer au Moyen-Orient une politique étrangère cohérente et efficace. La menace la plus sérieuse, pourtant, ne viendrait pas de l’influence soviétique dans la région, mais bien plutôt de la conjonction d’un 206

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nouveau nationalisme arabe et d’un fondamentalisme islamique émergent, de plus en plus sensibles après la guerre du Golfe de 1991, laquelle était destinée à préserver un certain statu quo au Moyen-Orient ainsi qu’un libre accès aux ressources pétrolières. Localement, l’influence américaine s’en trouva momentanément renforcée mais les rancunes accumulées depuis un demi-siècle contre l’arrogance des États-Unis, maîtres de l’économie mondiale (les sanctions contre l’Iran et l’Irak, en particulier, furent ressenties comme une inutile persécution de populations civiles arabes sans défense) se muèrent en une haine farouche, relayée par des organisations radicales comme Al-Qaida, le mouvement islamiste d’Oussama Ben Laden. Celles-ci pratiquaient un discours anti-américain véhément qui appelait à venger par la violence les humiliations subies par les musulmans de par le monde. Prenant la suite des activistes de l’OLP, si actifs dans les années 1980, les extrémistes d’Al-Qaida se signalèrent d’abord en attaquant les ambassades des États-Unis en Tanzanie et au Kenya, le 7 août 1998. Si l’on exclut l’attentat au sous-sol du World Trade Center le 26 février 1993, le territoire des États-Unis était jusque-là resté indemne de toute attaque terroriste. Mais le matin du 11 septembre 2001, à 8 h 46 précisément, cette immunité vole en éclats. Un premier avion s’écrase contre la tour nord du World Trade Center, embrasant l’édifice à hauteur du 94e étage et projetant des débris dans tout le voisinage. Le vol Boston-Los Angeles d’American Airlines a été détourné par des kamikazes pour accomplir l’attentat le plus meurtrier de l’histoire. Un quart d’heure plus tard, à 9 h 02, un second avion heurte la tour sud ouvrant une énorme brèche qui sera fatale au bâtiment. Les caméras de télévision, déjà pointées vers les tours, filment l’horreur en direct. Le kérosène produit des volutes de

flammes gigantesques. Sur la tour nord, un trou noir béant laisse échapper un gros panache de fumée sur Manhattan. Deux autres cibles symboliques sont sur la liste des terroristes. À 9 h 37 un autre vol d’American Airlines, parti de Washington, se jette sur l’aile ouest du Pentagone tandis qu’au même moment un Boeing d’United Airlines détourné par d’autres pirates, s’écrase au sol en Pennsylvanie. Sa destination était vraisemblablement la Maison Blanche. Le président George W. Bush est alors en visite dans une école primaire de Sarasota, en Floride. Mis au courant des attentats par son chef de cabinet à 9 h 05, il mettra de longues minutes à réagir, attendant la fin de sa visite pour s’adresser à la nation et promettre de pourchasser sans pitié les responsables de ces attaques. Au moment où il va embarquer sur Air Force One, à l’aéroport de Sarasota, la tour sud s’effondre dans un énorme tourbillon de fumée et de débris. Le choc est si violent qu’il fait trembler l’autre tour et tous les bâtiments alentour. Une demi-heure plus tard la tour nord s’effondre aussi. Plus tard dans la journée, la tour n° 7, peu éloignée, en fera de même après évacuation complète de ses occupants. L’urgence est de mettre le Président à l’abri. Dans la journée son avion accomplit un périple étonnant, d’une base militaire à une autre, de Floride en Louisiane, puis au Nebraska, avant de retourner à Washington en fin d’après-midi. Le soir, à 8h30, il s’adresse au pays depuis le Bureau ovale. Le discours est Rooseveltien  il rappelle les heures noires de Pearl Harbor. « Aujourd’hui », mes chers concitoyens, « notre mode de vie, notre propre liberté ont été attaqués par une succession d’actes terroristes délibérés et meurtriers. » Et le Président de faire serment que les auteurs, où qu’ils puissent se dissimuler, seraient pourchassés et châtiés, montrant ainsi à la

face du monde le courage et la résolution des États-Unis. Les attentats ont fait 2 973 victimes, dont 2 750 pour le seul World Trade Center. Dans les tours, 343 pompiers de New York ont perdu la vie en tentant de secourir les employés coincés dans les étages. Le bilan humain aurait été bien pire si les avions avaient heurté les tours plus tard dans la journée puisqu’en moyenne 50 000 personnes fréquentaient les lieux chaque jour ouvrable. La volonté de détruire et de tuer le plus grand nombre de civils s’affiche dans le choix des avions, pleins de carburant pour leurs vols transatlantiques et détournés peu après leur décollage. Les sept immeubles du complexe ont été détruits ou rasés ; vingt-sept autres ont été endommagés. Le site, nettoyé en huit mois, est devenu un haut lieu touristique de New York. « Ground Zero » témoigne de la terreur et des « actes de guerre » que décrivait la presse au lendemain des attentats. Les auteurs ont été effectivement pourchassés. Rapidement le FBI a identifié les dix-neuf pirates qui avaient détourné les quatre Boeings. D’autres terroristes plus ou moins liés aux attaques ont été arrêtés, Zacarias Moussaoui et Richard Reid (l’homme aux chaussures explosives), puis Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, l’organisateur présumé de l’opération. Quant à Oussama Ben Laden, désigné comme le cerveau des attentats, il a permis aux Américains de châtier les nations complices du terrorisme, à commencer par l’Afghanistan des talibans, puis l’Irak de Saddam Hussein. Aux États-Unis même, le Congrès a immédiatement accordé un pouvoir exceptionnel au Président, par une résolution du 18 septembre 2001, l’autorisant à engager une action militaire globale contre le terrorisme. Cette « guerre mondiale contre la terreur » est toujours en cours. September 11, 2001 – A Day of infamy 207

Hamid KARZAI born 1957

The son of a former speaker of the Afghan parliament, assassinated in 1999, Hamid Karzai was born in Kandahar, the capital of the southern province of Afghanistan, founded by Alexander the Great in 330 BC, and the home to the indigenous Pashtun tribes of Persian descent, who, for a long time, considered themselves as the only true Afghans. An ethnic Pashtun himself, Karzai was brought up in the worship of the last King of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who reigned four decades over the country before being sent into exile by a coup in 1973. The Soviet invasion in 1979 prompted his family to move to Pakistan. From

Donald RUMSFELD born 1932 Donald Henry Rumsfeld was born in Chicago, the son of third-generation German immigrants, and spent his youth in Illinois before attending Princeton University where he majored in political science. He graduated in 1954, was a Navy pilot for the next three years, served as assistant to an Ohio then a Michigan Congressman, before getting himself elected in 1962 to the House of Representatives for Illinois’ 13th district. At 30 years of age, this was the start of a long and promising political career.

there he went to India to take a degree in Following Massoud’s assassination and political science and to France where he the 9/11 attacks, the Northern Alliance studied at the Lille School of Journalism. joined US and international forces to oust the Talibans. Back in his homeland in 1983, he joined the US-backed mujahideen who resisted At the ensuing conference in Bonn he was the Soviets and fought a guerrilla war led chosen by a panel of Afghan leaders as by isolated “commanders” who led small the president of an interim government, groups of “freedom fighters.” From this a decision which was confirmed by the period, Karzai learned how formidable customary assembly, loya jirga, June 19, the task of uniting the country would 2002. The United States called strongly prove. The Pashtuns in the south and for the establishment of democratic west, and the Tajiks in the north and east, institutions in Afghanistan, and the would sink into civil war following the organization of free presidential elections pull-out of Soviet troops in 1989 and the to put an end to this provisional situation. elimination of pro-communist president Karzai, among 22 other candidates, was Najibullah in 1992. They were all finally elected in November 2004 with 55.4% of defeated by religious extremists organized the votes, and officially sworn in on into a well-armed militia, the Talibans, December 7 in Kabul. who captured Kabul in 1996. Karzai, at first, supported the Talibans’ regime and their Pashtun chief, Mollah Omar, with the hope they would end civil chaos in the country. After his father was killed supposedly by a Taliban agent he organized an opposition movement, the Northern Alliance, with the help of the powerful and charismatic Tajik leader “commander” Ahmed Shah Massoud.

Karzai has done his best to reconcile the many groups that form the mosaic of Afghan society and politics, but has been blamed for failing to address widespread corruption and to prevent the resurgence of the neo-Talibans. His re-election for a second term in November 2009 was hectic and controversial and tainted with high suspicions of electoral fraud.

to become, at President Nixon’s invitation, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. He also served as Nixon’s personal adviser and, in 1972, as ambassador to NATO. Unscathed by the Watergate scandal, he returned to Washington to become President Ford’s Chief of Staff, then very briefly, in 1975, Defense Secretary.

developed Tamiflu, the well-known medication against bird flu.

Back from civil service after the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter, Donald Rumsfeld went into the private sector, becoming a CEO in different prominent corporations, such as the pharmaceutical company Searle, the engineering and After being returned three times by voters construction company Bechtel, or the to Capitol Hill, he left Congress in 1969 biotech lab Gilead Sciences, which 208

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In the quarter century he spent in industry Donald Rumsfeld was never far removed from the corridors of power and knew how to reconcile his business and political interests. He was a member of various commissions that were in some way connected with his concerns as a business executive at the time. When he was Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to Iraq in 1983–1984, he seems to have spent more time in discussions over the building of an oil pipeline on behalf of Bechtel Corp. than over the use of chemical weapons in the war that was the raging between Iran and Iraq. While chairing a congressional commission on “Ballistic Missile •••

••• Threat” (1998-1999), which firmly criticized Bill Clinton’s soft diplomacy towards North Korea, he sat on the board of Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) group which sold equipment and services for two North Korean nuclear plants (1998).

meet the threats of the 21st century, George W. Bush appointed him Secretary of Defense in January 2001. In the four years that followed, he came under heavy criticism from those who thought he had mishandled the Iraq war: even the military red tape resented his arrogance, Because of his political expertise and his his lack of consultation, his contempt for promise to reshape the military so as to the rank and file, and his blundering over



a few key issues such as the number of troops on the ground, the management of prisoners, or the maintaining of civil peace in the postwar era. As a result, following the Republicans’ defeat in the mid-term elections of November 2006, Donald Rumsfeld resigned his position to be immediately replaced by former “Intelligence Czar” Robert M. Gates.

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January 20, 2009

A BLACK PRESIDENT IN THE WHITE HOUSE BACKGROUND

W

hen, on February 10, 2007, Illinois Senator Barack Hussein Obama II formally announced his candidacy to the presidency, the United States was confronted with one of the worst economic, social and political crises since the end of World War II. Americans were engaged in what seemed to be an endless war on two fronts, Afghanistan and Iraq, with little hope of a quick disengagement, despite the reassurances to the contrary that regularly came from the White House and the military. Victory in Iraq remained a distant goal while casualties soared (904 in 2007, the worst year of the war) and millions of dollars ($12 billion per month) were poured into the conflict. In Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom became a quagmire where more U.S. combat troops were killed every week (117 in 2007, but 155 in 2008 and 317 in 2009). At home, 66% of Americans disapproved of the war which president George W. Bush launched in October 2002 with, let it be reminded, the large consent of Congress (296/133 in the House, 77/33 in the Senate). Under pressure from public opinion and some political groups, regardless of party lines, the Bush Administration was working on a security agreement with the Iraqis which established a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq’s cities in 2009 and from Iraqi territory by the end of 2011. This was October 2008 and George Bush thus expected to boost the Republican candidate John McCain’s presidential campaign, even though the latter’s personal positions on Iraq appeared definitely hawkish and uncompromising. George Bush was a lame-duck President, who could not run for another term. His unpopularity had reached record heights: 71% of

Synthèse en français Le premier président noir des États-Unis 225

KEYWORDS Wall Street 213 Subprimes 213 Swing States 216 A New Birth of Freedom 216 Afghanistan 216

PEOPLE Hillary Clinton John McCain Joseph Biden Sarah Palin Sonia Sotomayor Edward Kennedy

212 215 218 221 221 222

FOCUS The Health Care Program

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Opposite: Barack Obama takes the presidential oath on the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln in 1861.

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Hillary CLINTON born 1947

She was born Hillary Diane Rodham in a fairly affluent Midwestern Methodist family, October 26, 1947. Her father owned a store and her mother was a housewife taking care of three children (Hillary and two younger boys) in suburban Chicago. The girl was a brilliant student at school, joined the Girl Scouts and the local Methodist youth group. From these days she kept a remarkable devotion to social causes and concern for the collective good. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 and went on to Yale Law School where she met Bill Clinton whom she married in 1975. Her career would henceforth become inextricably linked to that of her husband. She helped him in his aborted bid for a House seat in 1974 and, again, when he was elected governor of Arkansas for the first time in 1978. As an attorney in Little Rock, she worked hard in favor of children and families and was involved in the defense of children’s rights, in educational and health programs. She then co-managed her husband’s presidential campaign and followed him to the White House in 1992. The President asked her to reform the Social Security system and she ••• 212

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Americans disapproved of his handling of the presidency (CNN poll, May, 2008), which was worse than the 67% of Richard Nixon at the time of his resignation or the 66% of Truman in 1952. Mistrust of Bush’s Republican Administration had been building up since May 2003 when the President prematurely announced that ground combat operations in Iraq were over. In fact, resistance to American occupation amplified and the liberators were growingly looked upon as invaders. Weapons of mass destruction, which had legitimized U.S. intervention, proved to be a pure fabrication. In addition to daily violence in Iraq, the mishandling of the hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005 and a series of political scandals in Congress all contributed to throw a dark veil of suspicion over Republican politics, so that the mid-term elections of November 2006 occasioned a veritable “Democratic Revolution”, mirroring the Republican one of 1994, which allowed the Democrats to win the House (233/202) and tie with Republicans in the Senate (49/49). This 110th Congress, with, for the first time, a woman (Nancy Pelosi) as Speaker, formed a formidable political instrument for the Democratic Party to prepare the 2008 presidential election. A new cycle in U.S. politics seemed to be in the offing, with changes as broad and hopes as genuine as those brought by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 or Kennedy in 1960 or Bill Clinton in 1992. Against a backdrop of domestic and international disorders and in the face of a lasting Iraq war, Democrats planned to put an end to a ruthless, unmindful Republican rule, to impress voters as an incarnation of change and compassion and, finally, to win the White House back in the November 2008 elections. The economy had been a major challenge for the past decade, starting with the collapse of the speculative bubble (“dot com” bubble) in the Internet sector in 1998-2000, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks which prompted the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and provide Americans with easy credit. These conditions fueled a real estate boom which itself attracted all kinds of financial institutions that speculated on constantly rising housing prices. When the latter nosedived in 2008, they brought down with them the whole system of mortgages, “subprime contracts” (see “Keywords”) and credit markets, bringing major lenders and the banks that backed them up, to bankruptcy or near breakdown. Federal credit companies, like Fanny Mae or Freddie Mac, had to be refinanced by the U.S. Treasury. Lehman Brothers, a major investment firm, filed for bankruptcy in September 2008 while

KEYWORDS

WALL STREET

In 1624, the Dutch formally founded the town of New Amsterdam as a trading post for the Dutch West India Company on the rocky island the local Lenape Indians called Manna-hata, later to be named Manhattan by Europeans. The colony needed protection from possibly hostile Indians and from wolves : therefore a small fort was built on the southern tip of the island and a wooden palisade in the north in 1628. Over the years the fence turned into a 12-foot tall wall of timber and clay which, by 1685, was designated by surveyors as “Wall Street”. Danger for the Dutch, however, came not from Indians but from the English, who conquered New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed it New York. Harbor activity kept commerce and exchanges lively in Manhattan. In the course of the 18th century brokers and traders were in the habit of meeting and transacting under a sycamore tree, in front of 68 Wall Street and in 1792 an agreement was signed between 24 brokers to form an exclusive association, later formalized in 1817 under the name “New York Stock &

Exchange Board” and today known simply as the New York Stock Exchange.

As the true center of Manhattan’s financial district, and of the capitalist world, “Wall Street” has lived through many dramatic episodes, like the bombing of J.P. Morgan’s bank in September 1920, that left 38 people dead and Americans scared of anarchists and communists, and also crises and major “Panics”, in 1857, 1873, 1893 or 1907. The Great Crash of October 29, 1929 started right here, with a 25% drop of the Stock Exchange in two days and $ 30 billion losses in one week. Thereafter, Wall Street would serve as an accurate barometer of the financial and economic weather on the planet. So that the world held its breath in 1987, 1997 and 2007 when Wall Street slumped as a result of speculations, financial bubbles or other capitalist hazards. The 9/11 attacks left Wall Street wounded but resilient. It is today by far the largest Stock Exchange in the world with the Dow Jones indicator often setting the pace for other stock exchanges in Asia or Europe.

SUBPRIMES

The so-called “subprime mortgage crisis” is a real estate and financial crisis which broke out in the summer of 2007 but had been simmering for several years. Usually consumers can get personal credit based on the value of their patrimonial assets (i.e. their house or apartment). To borrow money they must mortgage their home as guarantee against defaulting on the repayment of their loan. Lending based on real estate value has been widespread in the United States and become a fixture of the credit business. The system worked smoothly as long as the economy favored consumption, interest rates were low and economic growth tempered the risks of excessive lending to unreliable borrowers. It allowed individuals with an already heavy credit load to nevertheless access home ownership, buy a new car or get more credit cards, at higher “subprime” rates – which made them more vulnerable to personal bankruptcy.

The subprimes flourished in the 1990s and more mortgage lenders rushed into this very risky business until a conjunction of factors precipitated the debacle of the whole system: first, the Federal Reserve Board sharply increased its flat rate (on which all credit rates are pegged) from 1% to 5.25% between 2002 and 2006, and credit became more expensive. Those borrowers who had opted for adjustable-rate loans saw their payments increase

dramatically and could not face the costs. Second, housing prices began to fall in 2006 – a 20% slump over 18 months that resulted in many homes becoming worth less than the mortgage loan and credit companies reported increasing losses. Third, to minimize the impact of borrower insolvency and transfer part of their credit risk, banks transformed these loans into attractive securities which were sold on the financial markets, like any other shares, to high-risk investors looking for easy profit. In 2007 the subprime market experienced a meltdown, with an exponential growth of mortgage defaulting that triggered the failure or bankruptcy of over 100 subprime lenders. They brought down with them major national financial corporations like Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac (two federal mortgage companies created in 1938 and 1970 to facilitate home ownership among low-income families), and investment firms or pension funds which had bought on the market these subprime mortgages recycled by banks. They suffered heavy losses that have been estimated at $ 1 trillion for the years 2007-2009. Another tragic consequence was that more people could not repay their loans, lost their houses and became homeless. Estimations for 2008 showed a dramatic increase of mortgage foreclosures (+225% from 2006) to over 3 millions. 8 million more are projected until 2013.

January 20, 2009 – A Black President in the White House 213

••• produced a remarkable report that should have served as basis for a complete rehauling of health care. Congress decided otherwise and buried Clinton’s program in September 1994. Hillary lived through this major setback and the subsequent national storm over the Lewinsky scandal stoically and with great dignity. She kept on standing by her husband even in the worst hours of impeachment, then went on to pursue her own personal career. She moved to New York State and ran there for a Senate seat in 2000. She became the first former First Lady in American history to hold an elective office, winning the election by a large margin (55% to 43% for her Republican opponent). She was re-elected for a second term in 2006. Her record in the Senate shows a mixture of conservative and liberal stances: she voted in favor of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, approved the Iraq War Resolution in 2002, and supported the USA Patriot Act. At the same time, she stood in defense of same sex marriage, of a universal health insurance and of relief for homeowners badly hit by the subprime crisis. On January 20, 2007, she announced her candidacy to the Democratic nomination for the next presidential election. The primaries campaign took a very favourable start, as early polls showed her ahead of all other candidates. In the Fall of 2007, however, tides began to turn as Barack Obama’s message of “change” struck a better chord among Democratic voters than Hillary’s insistence on “experience”. While results of primaries and caucuses showed an almost even split between the two candidates, Obama finally won the race, gaining 1,763 delegates versus only 1,640 for her. Almost immediately after his election, President Obama offered her to become his chief diplomat. She accepted and on January 21, 2009, she was triumphantly confirmed by the Senate as U.S. Secretary of State. 214

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Merrill Lynch was saved in extremis by Bank of America. These failures were symptoms of a larger economic crisis which threatened all the industrial world. At home, however, much of the blame for this disaster was pinned on the Republicans and the economic issue kept on surfacing all along the presidential campaign.

THE ELECTION

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rimaries started very early this time, with the Iowa caucus scheduled on January 3rd, 2008 and “Super Tuesday” (a cluster of 24 States voting for delegates on the same day) moved back from early March to February 5th. Candidates themselves started campaigning almost two years before election: by February 2007, eight Democrats were running for nomination: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, and Tom Vilsack. Yet within a few weeks only three of them remained as frontrunners: Clinton, Edwards and Obama. Republicans were given an even wider choice among twelve candidates, of whom only five soon proved to be serious contenders: Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney who would later run as the Republican candidate in the 2012 election. Among the Democratic contenders two really cut a singular figure: Hillary Clinton, now Senator from New York but known as a former First Lady – the only one ever to run for President. And Barack Obama, the Senator from Illinois (the state Abraham Lincoln also represented), the first African American to enter the race since Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. Contrary to Jackson, however, Obama has mixed origins (his mother was white) was born in Hawaii, lived in Indonesia and has family in Kenya (his father’s home country). This multicultural background was likely to add to his appeal as a 46-year old candidate with an impeccable academic and political record. On the Republican side, the early state primaries failed to designate a favorite: John McCain, however, slowly built up some advantage by carrying a few important or symbolic states, New Hampshire, South Carolina or Florida, and especially Super Tuesday where 41% of the delegates were designated in a single day. After his heavy loss in Florida Giuliani dropped out of the race, soon followed by Romney, Huckabee, and Paul. By June 2008, no doubt was left about McCain’s nomination at the Republican convention in August and he could devote his whole time to prepare the final battle

against his Democratic opponent. Almost to the end, the latter remained unknown: while John Edwards quitted in the last week of January after an extra-marital affair had been exposed and ruined his campaign, Obama and Clinton started an extraordinary hunt for delegates which, for a long time, offered an uncertain outcome. A minimum of 2,117 delegates were needed to secure nomination and, week after week, the tally looked like a tie. Obama won in Iowa and South Carolina, but lost in Florida and Michigan. Super Tuesday produced a kind of deadlock with 847 delegates pledged to Obama and 834 to Clinton. The other February contests turned in Obama’s favor who showed a lead of about 200 delegates. Clinton closed the gap partly in March but in April Obama had won so many primaries that a Clinton comeback seemed impossible. Yet she fought till the last day and conceded her defeat only on June 7, four days after the final primaries had been held in South Dakota and Montana. What made a difference was certainly personality: Obama’s charisma and oratory was an unquestionable asset. Besides, against Clinton’s political “experience” the maverick Senator from Illinois offered a prospect of real “change”, if only because he was a Black candidate. Yet one handicap Clinton could never overcome was the lack of campaign money. Obama used the Internet to get contributions from a myriad of small donors, reaping millions of dollars in the process. By the time primaries were over, Obama had raised $296 million, Clinton $238 million, and McCain “only” $122 million. At the end of the general election, Obama’s fundraising had reached an astonishing $750 million. And the total cost of the election ran into an estimated $2.4 billion, or about twice the amount spent in 2004. In Denver, on August 27, 2008, Barack Obama was officially nominated for President by the Democratic National Convention, with Joe Biden as Vice-President. Republicans did the same for John McCain and Sarah Palin in St Paul, Minnesota, September 3rd, while hurricane Gustav was devastating some of the Gulf of Mexico states. In his acceptance speech and those he delivered during the general election campaign, Obama outlined his priorities if elected: rebuild the financial system, fight unemployment, lower taxes for the middle class, promote educational reforms, achieve energy independence, remove forces from Iraq and impose a universal health coverage. All the tenets of the Democratic philosophy were there with its frontline of government interventionism, equal treatment for all and anti

John MCCAIN born 1936 John Sydney McCain III was born August 29, 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone in a family that included two U.S. Navy admirals. As a boy he led the usual nomadic life reserved for naval officers and attended about 20 different schools including a private boarding school in Alexandria after the McCains had settled in Virginia in 1951. To perpetuate a family tradition he went on to enrol at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis where he often proved undisciplined and troublesome. Upon graduation in 1958 he went into training to become a naval aviator. After completing flight school he was assigned to two major aircraft carriers, USS Intrepid and Enterprise, navigating the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas. He volunteered for combat in 1967 and was assigned to bombing missions over North Vietnam, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star. On October 26, 1967 his life took a tragic turn : his plane was shot down over Hanoi and he was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese. Although he suffered many injuries, he was beaten, refused medical treatment and jailed as a POW (prisoner of war). Somehow, McCain survived solitary confinement (which lasted two years), illness and torture and was eventually released, on March 14, 1973, after five and a half years in North Vietnamese prison camps. He came back with 17 awards and decorations, physically broken but an all-American hero who symbolized the Vietnam veterans’ courage and resilience.

After serving as a training officer and the Navy’s liaison with the U.S. Senate in the 1970s, he retired from the military in 1981 and launched a very successful political career in Arizona, serving first as a two-term Representative for the 1st district, then as Senator in 1986 for four successive terms. Although he ••• January 20, 2009 – A Black President in the White House 215

KEYWORDS

SWING STATES The U.S. electoral system provides that presidents are chosen not by universal suffrage but indirectly by an electoral college currently composed of 538 electors (the sum total of Senators and Representatives) which Article II of the Constitution leaves for each state to select as it pleases. Citizens thus vote for electors who, in turn, will cast their ballot for the specific candidate they have formally pledged to support. Most States apply the “winner-takes-all” method, by which the candidate who receives a majority of popular votes carries all the electors of that state, with three major consequences. One is that presidential candidates will concentrate their efforts on the states with the most electors, like California (55), Texas (34) or New York (31) with the hope of reaching more quickly the absolute majority threshold (270 electors). In 2008 Obama won nine of the 11 states that, alone, could give a candidate a majority, for a total of 222 electors, while McCain took only 49 in Texas and Georgia. Second, candidates usually refrain from wasting time, energy and money campaigning in states that are

traditionally known to be safe for one party. On the other hand, they will treat with greater care those states that, with appropriate campaigning, might reverse their voting habits (hence the term “swing”) and guarantee a definite advantage to the winner. Third, these “swing states” may consequently assume a disproportionate role in tipping the scales one way or the other and even contributing, at times, to the election of a “minority” president. In 2000 not only was George W. Bush elected with only 47.9% of the popular vote but his score was lower than that of his Democratic opponent Al Gore: 48.4%. Because the popular vote has become increasingly irrelevant in this system, candidates now tend to focus their campaign on the electoral college and capturing a few key swing states that might give them a majority of electors. In 2008 between 6 and 12 states were considered uncertain and capable of changing the final result, mainly Virginia, North Carolina and Florida in the East, Ohio and Indiana in the Midwest, and Colorado in the West.

A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM On November 19, 1863, a little over four months after the decisive victory of Union troops over the Confederate army at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, President Lincoln spoke at a dedication ceremony for the National Cemetery that honoured the fallen soldiers of this famous battle. He delivered an address that remained as one of the most fascinating speeches in American presidential history. Not only did he recall the principles of equality that guided American independence but also declared that the ongoing Civil War should bring equally to all Americans both a more perfect national unity and “a new birth of freedom”. The reference to the recent emancipation of black slaves could not be missed. In Lincoln’s own words: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Barack Obama never concealed his admiration for Abraham Lincoln who, like him, started his career in 216

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Illinois. References to Lincoln abound in Obama’s speeches and he insisted on replicating Lincoln’s triumphant trip from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., for his Inauguration. The theme for this ceremony, chosen by California Senator Diane Feinstein, was meant to celebrate both the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth and the ideals of unity and equality reaffirmed in the Gettysburg Address. “It is especially fitting to celebrate the words of Lincoln,” said Senator Feinstein, “as we prepare to inaugurate the first African-American president of the United States.” The new president took his oath of office on the 1861 bible Lincoln had used. And two days before inauguration, President Obama symbolically stood before the Lincoln memorial paying homage to “the man who, in so many ways made this day possible.” The historic election of Barack Obama was sprinkled with a host of slogans, among which the best-known is the “Yes we can” mantra, first used at the time of the New Hampshire primary, January 8, 2008, and chanted in meetings and conventions all through the electoral campaign.

poverty strategies. It seemed the Republican cycle opened with Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 was really over. McCain tried to play the tune of “experience” against Obama’s “change” slogan, yet finally designated an unexperienced Vice-presidential candidate with Sarah Palin. His claims that the U.S. economy was strong proved wrong as weeks went past. And on the questions of war and security he could hardly shake off the patronage of President Bush even though the latter remained very inconspicuous during the campaign. Obama’s grassroots appeal, his aura among minorities and the general support of the medias seemed to erase much of the electoral suspense in the days before November 4th. Once Obama had won critical “swing states” like Ohio or Virginia his victory was sealed. A record 63% of U.S. voters had given him a 52.9% vs. 45.7% edge over McCain and 365 electors against only 173 for McCain. In Congress, Democrats largely improve their results of 2006 with a 257/178 edge over Republicans in the House and a 58/41 margin in the Senate.

••• occupied the seat formerly held by “Mr. Conservative”, Barry Goldwater, McCain refused to represent the Republican Party’s right wing, cutting for himself in Congress, the figure of an independent legislator, a “maverick” undisciplined politician interested in a wide range of issues – Indian Affairs, commerce, campaign financing, Guantanamo detainees, etc. – and capable of working with Democrats on specific problems, like Joe Lieberman on climate issues or Ted Kennedy on immigration. Even though he supported Reagan’s anticommunist and Bush’s antiterrorist positions, McCain remained critical of successive administrations, cultivating a non-partisan, non-ideological image which made him a worthy challenger to George W. Bush in the 2000 primaries and a tough contester against Barack Obama in the 2008 election.

2008 Election Map

WASHINGTON

q

NORTH DAKOTA

3

OREGON

3

MI

5

3

0

5

NEBRASKA

a

9 ARIZONA

0

6

5

q

b

ALASKA

5

WEST VIRGINIA VIRGINIA

e

8

q

6 9

w

MISSISSIPPI

ALABAMA

9

4 7 NEW JERSEY t DELAWARE 3 MARYLAND 0 WASHINGTON, D.C. 3 RHODE ISLAND

NORTH CAROLINA SOUTH CAROLINA

ARKANSAS

6 TEXAS

3

p

INDIANA

TENNESSEE

7

a

OHIO

KENTUCKY

OKLAHOMA NEW MEXICO

q

MISSOURI

KANSAS

MASSACHUSETTS

CONNECTICUT

PENNSYLVANIA

7

COLORADO

CALIFORNIA

x

u

ILLINOIS

Y

NEW YORK

IOWA

41

UTAH

3 4

H

N

3

MAINE

A

WISCONSIN

SOUTH DAKOTA WYOMING

C

IG

0

4

NEVADA

VERMONT

MINNESOTA

IDAHO

7

4

NEW HAMPSHIRE

MONTANA

GEORGIA

t

8

t

LOUISIANA

j FLORIDA HAWAII

4

3 States carried by Obama with the respective numbers of electors 3 States carried by McCain with the respective numbers of electors



January 20, 2009 – A Black President in the White House 217

CONSEQUENCES

Joseph BIDEN born 1942

A native of Pennsylvania, where he was born in 1942, Joseph Robinette (“Joe”) Biden, Jr. spent most of his life in neighboring Delaware where his Irish Roman Catholic family moved in 1953 when he was only 11 years-old. With a law degree from Syracuse University he became a corporate lawyer in Wilmington but soon launched a very successful political career, with a surprise election as Senator for Delaware in 1972 making him, at 30, one of the youngest senators in US history. His life took a tragic turn only a few weeks after being elected, when his wife and daughter were killed and his two sons received critical injuries in a road accident. He considered resignation, was persuaded not to by his Democratic Party friends, and went on to serve 7 terms in the Senate, until January 15, 2009 when he resigned to be sworn in as Vice-President of the United States. In the meantime, he became an influential member of key senatorial committees, like the Judiciary Committee, where he sat from 1981 to 1997 and which he chaired from 1987 until 1995. There, he led debates on two controversial Supreme Court ••• 218

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T

he race issue had been played down all along the campaign but such figures as Lincoln, W.E.B. DuBois, or Martin Luther King stood out as historical references for the battle Barack Obama was engaged in. And now, for the first time in American history, a Black man was elected President of the United States. 95% of African Americans had voted for him and could now share his pride and claim with him, on election night: “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight… change has come to America.” Despite the legitimate euphoria that Obama’s election induced, the President remained sober in the face of the enormous tasks ahead, in his own words “two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.” The nation’s and the world’s expectations were phenomenal: Obama cut the kind of Messianic figure Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy had offered in the past. He was well aware of such hopes and of the urgency of the situation. His Inaugural Address of January 20, 2009, the day he was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, was meant to restore confidence and boost up the morale of Americans. During the campaign Obama had been repeatedly criticized for a lack of definite program; now was the time to address major issues concretely. Echoing Roosevelt in 1933, Obama warned: “the state of the economy calls for action” and he set to work immediately. Except for the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, his government was ready within a week. One of its first tasks was to save the banking and insurance systems, badly shaken by the “subprime” crisis (see “Keywords”). This financial rescue was effected through a $700 billion package extended to banks in early 2009, a sum that was repaid, with interest, a year later. Another priority was employment (6 million jobs had been lost since December 2007) as part of a larger crusade against recession: in February, Congress approved a stimulus plan for the economy that provided a total of $787 billion in tax cuts, in extended unemployment benefits, education and health and in job creation incentives. Public money had to be pumped into key companies like Chrysler and General Motors to save them from total collapse. The loss of jobs was slowed down and economic activity partly restored but the price to pay was a soaring budget deficit (1,4 trillion in 2009) and a spiralling Federal debt which ran over $12 trillion (or 83% of the Gross Domestic Product). Government action was perceived as an aggravation of such ills and angered a wide range of liberals, Republicans of course, but right wing Democrats as well.

Party discipline was also hard to impose when the health care reform came to the floor of Congress. Among the major social issues on Obama’s agenda, the most critical, as well as highly symbolic, was providing health insurance to the 47 million Americans (or 15.8% of the U.S. population) without coverage in 2008 (see “Focus”). In the words of Ted Kennedy, a lifelong advocate of universal health coverage: “What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake is not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.” After months of partisan squabbling and fierce Republican opposition that seemed to kill all hopes of a consensual law, the President finally managed to carry his $950 billion health care plan through Congress, with a narrow single majority vote in the House (220/211, on March 21, 2010), more comfortably in the Senate (56/43, on March 25, 2010). Barack Obama was slightly more successful in his handling of international issues, surfing, for a while, on the wave of his extraordinary prestige and momentary popularity (he entered the

••• nominations, that of Judge Robert Bork in 1987 and that of Judge Clarence Thomas in 1991. He was also instrumental in designing anti-crime and anti-drugs laws, and in particular promoted measures to curb domestic or gender-related violence (Violence Against Women Act, 1994). Biden was also a long-time member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which he chaired from 2001 to 2003. In that quality he acquired great experience in international politics and often offered his personal contribution to crafting détente (with the Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s) and peace (notably in the Balkans in the 1990s). During his career he was tempted twice to join the presidential race: first in 1988 when he ran for nomination against other contenders like Michael Dukakis or Richard Gephardt. He had to  •••

KEYWORD

AFGHANISTAN With an area of 249,984 sq mi – or 647,500 km2 – this South Central Asia Republic is larger than France yet populated by only 28 millions of Afghans. Formerly a kingdom strategically located on the great Silk Road and therefore an easy prey to greedy conquerors from the Greek Alexander the Great to the Mongol Tamerlane, Afghanistan assumed its modern shape by mid-18th century. Yet, during the Victorian era the country was again coveted by both the British and the Russian empires and ended up a quasi-protectorate under British control. Under King Zahir Shah (1933-1973) Afghanistan enjoyed a period of peace and development, in comparative isolation from World War II and, for a time, free from its chronic tribal quarrels. The 1970s, however, inaugurated a period of great turmoil, with a first coup in 1973 that turned the kingdom into a republic and another in 1978 which established a pro-Soviet regime in a country now known as the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The many social reforms and the secular nature of this government prompted a ruthless opposition from islamic fundamen

talist groups and the following invasion of the country by Soviet troops on Christmas Eve 1979. Afghanistan became then a geostrategic priority for the U.S., whose failure in Iran (where the Shah had just been overthrown), dealt a severe blow to American influence in the region. Americans thus lavishly supplied weapons to the local anticommunist Talibans – the best example of Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters” – which contributed not only to Soviet withdrawal in 1989 but also to the resurgence of tribal wars which finally brought the Talibans to power in 1996, when they established an Islamic Emirate in Kabul. Their conservative and violent rule added to intelligence data showing that they harbored terrorist training camps led the U.S. and its allies to engage in a war (Operation Enduring Freedom) right after 9/11, with the help of an anti-Taliban force, the Northern Alliance, led, among others, by Ahmad Massoud. Almost a decade later, progress has been made to introduce a dose of democracy in Afghanistan, but despite a constant upgrading of military forces in the region, the Taliban threats are far from extinguished. January 20, 2009 – A Black President in the White House 219

••• withdraw after petty accusations of tampering with his law school grades! Then in 2008 when difficulties in raising funds again led him to withdraw. He was then offered the vice-presidency by candidate Obama and was announced as his running mate August 22, 2008. Compared to Sarah Palin, Biden led a very quiet vice-presidential campaign. In October 2008 he won the only televised debate organized with Palin, and certainly contributed to bringing more middle-class and blue-collar votes to the Democratic ticket. His work as vicepresident has been remarkable in matters of diplomacy, environment and health care.

White House with an approval rating of 78%). He pledged to close the Guantanamo prison camp by January 2010 and announced the end of combat missions in Iraq in August 2010 and a complete withdrawal by the end of 2011. The latter became effective on December 28, 2011. At the same time more US troops (about 30,000) were redeployed in Afghanistan where Talibans remained a major threat, and by 2011 the number of US troops peaked at about 101,000. A progressive withdrawal was organized, however, as part of a plan for all allies to leave Afghanistan in 2014. American leadership was also expected on environmental issues: with China, the United States is the largest polluter on earth. Together, the two countries account for 41% of all carbon dioxide emissions. Obama vowed to address climate changes and free America from “addiction to foreign oil” by developing the renewable energy sector. Yet the poor results yielded by the successive climate summits from Copenhagen (2009) to Durban (2011) have shed doubts on US commitment to a global control of carbon emissions and an extension of the Kyoto Protocol which is due to expire in 2012. As he indicated in his State of the Union address of January 27, 2010, sustainable energy remains one of the President’s top priorities, as do the monumental efforts applied to the development of education, with a $49.7 billion budget in 2011 providing for a complete overhaul of elementary and secondary schools and a significant increase of college aids to the poor – in his own words a necessary investment “in the skills and education of our people.” That Barack Obama inaugurated a new era is unquestionable. But the world he inherited is far more complex than, say, the one Kennedy had to face in 1960 and one should not be blinded by the fact that the President’s approval rating fell below 50% in December 2009, less than a year after his inauguration. Changes will not come easily or quickly. Despite his re-election in November 2012 against Republican Mitt Romney (332 electoral votes to 206) Obama knows that he failed to fulfill all the expectations of the American people and he was quick to exchange his famous slogan of the 2008 campaign, “Yes we can,” for a more hopeful one: “The best is yet to come.” But there is hardly a doubt that because of the natural resilience of American society, and the Americans’ ability to adjust, to innovate and to reform, which remains a formidable instrument of progress, this prediction might come true in Obama’s second term.

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Sarah PALIN

Ketchikan and the island of Gravina, a home for the Ketchikan International Airport and a few dozen people. Even born 1964 though Congress had appropriated She was born Sarah Louise Heath in 1964 in Idaho but spent most of her life money for the project, some saw it as a waste of public funding. Governor in Wasilla, a small town near Anchorage, Alaska, which she left only Palin, after first defending this “Bridge to Nowhere”, as it was dubbed, finally to study at the University of Idaho. decided in September 2008 not to go With a B.Sc. in communication and ahead, although at the same time she journalism she was briefly a sports agreed to the building of the “Gravina reporter for a local TV channel in Island Highway”, a $ 26-million “road Anchorage. Her first steps in politics were taken in Wasilla, where she served to nowhere” that ended on a sandy as town councillor, then as mayor, from shore where the non-existent bridge should have connected. 1996 to 2002. A member of the Republican Party, she won nomination Sarah Palin suddenly achieved to the gubernatorial race in 2006, which international notoriety on August 29, she eventually won by a comfortable 2008 when she was introduced as margin of votes (49% against 41% for Republican nominee John McCain’s her democratic opponent). Her term as surprise running mate. She was the governor was marked by courageous second woman, after Democratic decisions, like the tax on oil companies’ Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, to appear in windfall profits, and more controversial a presidential ticket and, if elected, ones, as when she stopped the projected would have been the first female Viceconstruction of a seemingly useless President of the United States. This bridge, between the small town of perspective drew particular attention to

Sonia SOTOMAYOR

was appointed Assistant D.A. (District Attorney) in Manhattan. The year was born 1954 1979 and her daily case load consisted mostly of “street crimes,” murder, theft, Judge Sonia Sotomayor was born in 1954 in a Catholic Puerto Rican family armed robbery, child abuse or police misconduct. After five years of public who had moved to New York during prosecution she went into private World War II. Her mother was a nurse practice, joining a New York business and her father a factory worker, who died when she was 9. She was raised in law firm (Pavia & Harcourt) that the South Bronx, and educated at a local worked chiefly for major corporations doing international business. Catholic school. Despite an

her life and works, which came under extravagant scrutiny, especially by tabloids. She tried to play on her popular image as a mother of five, (including a mentally retarded child and a pregnant teen-ager), an ordinary “hockey mom” facing the same daily challenges as average Americans. Her poor performance in interviews and debates turned her into a political liability for Republicans. She had her share in their defeat to Barack Obama. On July 3rd, 2009, Palin announced her resignation as governor of Alaska. She subsequently worked as columnist for the TV channel Fox News and made public appearances to support the conservative/libertarian Tea Party Movement which opposes federal power and excessive taxation. Although she strived to remain in the limelight of US politics, she declined to run in the race for the 2012 election and was not even invited to speak at the Tampa Republican convention in August 2012. pressures. She had opportunity to display her remarkable understanding of legal doctrine while hearing over 3,000 cases and writing around 400 opinions. She also taught law at the University of New York and at Columbia.

President Barack Obama turned to her when a replacement was needed for Supreme Court Justice David Souter who announced on May 1st, 2009 that he would go into retirement at the end of unfavourable social environment she June. President Obama announced his In 1992 President George H.W. Bush fought her way up to Princeton with the appointed her to the District Court of choice on May 26th and Judge help of scholarships, where she Southern New York where she stayed 6 Sotomayor, after the usual investigations graduated summa cum laude, then to years as a trial judge, then was picked up and Senate Judicial Committee hearings, Yale Law School where she was in was finally approved by the Senate (68 by President Clinton to join one of the charge of the Yale Law Journal, in 1979, U.S. Courts of Appeals, a position that to 31) on August 6th, 2009, then sworn in th about a decade before Barack Obama could serve as a springboard for a future on August 8 . presided over the Harvard Law Review. Supreme Court nomination. By then She is the third woman ever appointed Sotomayor is a pure product of the Ivy Sonia Sotomayor had carved for herself to the U.S. Supreme Court, the sixth League, with a career consistent with a solid judicial reputation as a defender with a Roman Catholic background, but her remarkable academic achievements. of the rule of law over all kinds of vested also the first Latina to join this highest jurisdiction. No sooner had she left Yale that she interests, political, business or lobby

January 20, 2009 – A Black President in the White House 221

Edward KENNEDY 1932-2009 The youngest of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, Edward “Ted” Kennedy was born in Boston in February 1932 and educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia where he received a law degree in 1959. After a few years of practice as an attorney he was elected Senator of Massachusetts in 1962 to fill the seat left vacant by his brother John now President of the United States. He was then re-elected 8 times to serve 46 years in the U.S. Senate. His political career was spent in the shade of his two brothers John and Robert, whom he succeeded in 1968 as leader of the Kennedy clan. His presidential ambitions, however, were soon thwarted by an automobile accident, on Chappaquiddick island in eastern Massachusetts, when, on July 19, 1969, his overturned car was found in the waters, fallen off a bridge, with a dead body inside, that of Mary Jo Kopechne, one of Ted Kennedy’s assistants. He had driven off the road on the way back from a party and been able to save his life. The girl did not and Kennedy failed to report the “incident” for many hours. Though he received only a suspended sentence for “leaving the scene after causing injury,” his career permanently suffered from this scandal. Ten years later, he lost the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election mainly because the “incident” resurfaced in the primaries. Ted Kennedy nevertheless became a major actor in U.S. political life and left his liberal mark on many key legislations concerning immigration, civil rights, education, disability and health insurance. In the 1990s he

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strongly backed up Bill and Hillary Clinton’s health care plan. When the latter failed he resorted to pushing specific laws through Congress, on mental health, on children’s health insurance, on the extension of Medicare to cover prescription drugs. Health care, as he claimed, had become “the cause of [his] life”. Kennedy, after some initial hesitations, finally endorsed Barack Obama’s nomination in January 2008, pointing to Obama’s incarnation of a new generation of leadership, as his own brother had in 1962. He was present at the Democratic National Convention

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

and, again, at President Obama’s inauguration despite illness (he was fighting brain cancer) and fatigue. He went on with his work in the Senate, throwing in all his political weight to see a universal health care bill through Congress. He died, August 25, 2009 without having witnessed the historical vote of December 24, 2009, when Senators passed their own version of the health care reform bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Act. As a tribute to his late friend, when he cast his yes-vote, 92-year-old Senator Robert C. Byrd announced: “This is for my friend Ted Kennedy. Aye!”

FOCUS

THE HEALTH CARE PROGRAM Universal health care is a concept that was long to penetrate the minds and hearts of American politicians. While it is true that the idea of a national health insurance was introduced by Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive Party in 1912 to imitate the Germans (1884) and the British (1911), legislation in favor of a publiclyfunded health care program was not formally proposed until the New Deal period and the 1933 Social Security Act. Even then, health insurance provisions had to be removed from the original bill as they met with ferocious opposition from medical lobbies and conservative circles. Social and health protection, indeed, are deemed contrary to the philosophy of individualism and self-reliance that stands as the hallmark of American life. Citizens’ freedom requires that they take their own fate – including employment and health – into their own hands. Universal health care has consequently been a major controversial issue and the subject of intense political debate to this very day in the U.S., pitting Democrats against Republicans and defenders of an equal treatment of citizens against critics of what some called “socialized medicine” in the hands of an invasive Federal administration. Little progress was made until the 1960s: Roosevelt, Truman and even Kennedy met with strong congressional resistance. Hospital care was developed but the health insurance system left large loopholes in medical protection, especially among the unemployed and the elderly. Kennedy’s influence, however, and the reformist spirit of the period, allowed President Johnson to impose a comprehensive health care legislation as part of his “Great Society” plan, the 1965 Social Security Act, with two major programs: Medicare, providing coverage for citizens over 65, the blind and the disabled, and Medicaid, offering assistance to low-income families unable to afford private insurances. Today these programs concern about 100 million Americans. Abortion also represented a contentious issue after the Supreme Court, in its Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, had legalized abortion in all 50 states. In periods of Republican rule, particularly in the 1980s and 2000s, Congress moved to exclude abortion costs from federal funding.

Soaring health care expenditures also contributed to slow down insurance reforms until President Bill Clinton made an entirely overhauled Health Plan one of the key issues of his 1992 campaign. Having observed that 37 million Americans had no health insurance and 33 million more lacked adequate coverage, Clinton proposed an American Health Security Act that would allow universal health care for all citizens, for the most part managed and funded by the federal government. The task force created to implement this plan, headed by Hillary Clinton, drew heavy fire from conservative think tanks, medical associations and the health insurance industry. Democrats themselves, who controlled both houses with a comfortable majority, showed serious divisions over the project. The complexity of the 1,000 pages long bill, and the bureaucracy involved by the plan which provided a mandatory insurance system not only prompted criticism in Clinton’s own party but generated a good number of competing plans which blurred the floor debate in the House and the Senate. Introduced in late November 1993 the bill finally “died” in August 1994 for lack of an appropriate compromise between opponents of this “big government” project and partisans of universal health care. One result of this failed reform was the return of a Republican majority in Congress at the mid-term elections of November 1994. President Clinton finally managed to get some health care minor improvements through Congress thanks to a 1996 law which allowed workers to keep coverage if they changed or lost their jobs, and improved the protection of personal health information. In 2003, G.W. Bush signed a law that greatly improved the Medicare patients’ capacity to afford expensive drugs. But the health care issue remained peripheral to his agenda; only the 2008 presidential campaign revived it, and, with it, the impossible challenge of battling an economic crisis, the ever growing number of Americans without coverage (about 46 millions in 2008) and soaring health care costs that topped $2.5 trillion in 2009. Candidate Obama promised that within four years the health care costs for a family of four would be cut down by $2,500 thanks to improvements in prevention January 20, 2009 – A Black President in the White House 223

FOCUS programs or insurance management, thanks also to offering a new federal health plan or private plans marketed through a government exchange. Yet this intrusion of federal red tape in the citizen’s private life was presented by Republicans and conservatives as a fundamental breach of the people’s constitutional freedom and individual rights. In June 2009 President Obama, who kept health care on top of his domestic agenda, asked Congress to speed up work on the issue. Over the summer, several bills were circulated in the Senate, none of which received bipartisan support. In order to avoid long, undue, delays, Democrats sought to secure the 60 votes (3/5 majority) removing the prospect of a Republican filibuster (holding the floor by all possible means to block a bill). The appropriate count was reached, after intense discussions and extravagant bargaining over public insurance and abortion costs, in December 2009. Meanwhile, House Democrats worked on their own health care plan, which made health coverage mandatory and established a new government-run insurance plan. The overall cost of this reform was estimated at around $1 trillion over 10 years, half of which would be met by an income surtax on the highest earners. Despite Republican resistance, the House narrowly approved the plan (220 to 215) on November 7,

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2009. Senators did the same on their own bill, which no longer included a public insurance option on December 24th (60 to 39). Some of the votes were bitterly negotiated, with the promise of a new hospital here, or a limitation on insurance coverage of abortion there. The election of a Republican, Scott Brown, to the seat left vacant in Massachusetts by the death of Ted Kennedy in August 2009 reduced to 59 the Democratic majority in the Senate and reopened the way for an endless Republican filibuster. The only viable alternative was the “reconciliation process” thanks to which an amended version of the Senate bill was examined by the House, blended with the President’s own proposals, made public at the end of February 2010. Some of the most controversial provisions, like a government-run health insurance system which drew heavy fire from the Republicans (and some Democrats as well), were erased and the text came up for a final vote on March 21, 2010 in the House and March 25 in the Senate. The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act was signed into law by Barack Obama on March 30, 2010. It cuts by twothirds the number of people without insurance and brings the nation somewhat closer to the president’s goal of establishing universal health coverage for Americans.

LE PREMIER PRÉSIDENT NOIR DES ÉTATS-UNIS Le 10 février 2007, à Springfield, Illinois, le sénateur Barack Hussein Obama II annonce formellement qu’il est candidat à la présidence des États-Unis. Le pays traverse alors une profonde crise économique, sociale et politique, la plus grave depuis 1945. Les Américains sont engagés dans deux guerres interminables, en Afghanistan et en Irak, et malgré les assurances du contraire émanant de la Maison Blanche ou du Pentagone, une victoire en Irak semble toujours aussi lointaine, comme si le bilan humain (822 soldats américains tués en 2006, 904 en 2007) et les milliards engloutis dans les opérations militaires n’avaient servi à rien. En Afghanistan, l’opération « Liberté immuable » est devenue un bourbier où de plus en plus de combattants américains trouvent la mort. Ces guerres, voulues par George W. Bush et avalisées par un Congrès complaisant en octobre 2002, sont devenues impopulaires puisque 66 % des Américains y sont hostiles au moment d’élire leur nouveau président. Et l’initiative électoraliste de l’administration Bush qui, en octobre 2008, propose aux Irakiens un calendrier de retrait total avant 2012, n’y change rien. George Bush est un président sur le départ, dont 71 % des citoyens critiquent la façon de gouverner – un record absolu. La défiance à son égard grandit depuis le printemps 2003, où Bush a prématurément annoncé la fin des combats en Irak. En fait la résistance à l’occupant américain n’a cessé de croître. Et il s’avère que les « armes de destruction massive » à l’origine du conflit relevaient de la pure invention. Violence quotidienne en Irak, gestion hasardeuse de l’ouragan Katrina, et scandales à répétition au Congrès ont achevé de déconsidérer la politique républicaine aux yeux du public. Si bien que les élections de mi-parcours en novembre 2006 ont occasionné une vraie « révolution démocrate », revanche lointaine sur la victoire

des républicains en 1994, avec une égalité favorable au Sénat (49/49) et une large majorité démocrate à la Chambre (233/202) dont la présidente est, pour la première fois, une femme (Nancy Pelosi). Ce 110e Congrès représente un atout inestimable pour les démocrates dans la campagne présidentielle à venir. Un nouveau cycle se profile promettant des changements et suscitant des espoirs aussi grands qu’à l’époque de Franklin Roosevelt ou de Kennedy. Depuis dix ans, la situation économique est préoccupante : d’abord la « bulle » numérique a explosé en 1998-2000, ruinant bien des investisseurs, puis les attaques du 11 septembre ont agité le spectre de la récession et conduit la Réserve fédérale à une politique de crédit facile pour relancer l’activité. C’est l’immobilier qui en a le plus profité, attirant toutes sortes de spéculateurs séduits par un marché en pleine croissance. Mais lorsque les prix s’effondrent en 2008 ils emportent dans leur chute tout le système du crédit hypothécaire (« subprimes »), de gros organismes de prêt et certaines banques d’investissement. Le Trésor doit renflouer les deux principales sociétés de crédit fédérales, Fanny Mae et Freddie Mac, la célèbre société Lehman Brothers fait faillite en septembre 2008 et un autre grand nom de la finance à Wall Street, Merrill Lynch, est racheté in extremis par Bank of America. Ces symptômes funestes d’une crise mondiale sont naturellement imputés aux gouvernants et les républicains auront bien du mal à se défendre lorsque les questions économiques feront surface pendant la campagne présidentielle. Les primaires débutent avec le caucus d’Iowa le 3 janvier 2008, plus tôt que jamais puisque même le « super mardi » (où 24 États d’un coup élisent leurs délégués) est avancé d’un mois. Il est vrai qu’on connaît les compétiteurs depuis près d’un an. Le tri s’est fait rapidement chez

January 20, 2009 – A Black President in the White House 225

les démocrates : seuls trois candidats restent en lice après quelques semaines, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards et Barack Obama. Clinton, sénatrice de New York, est la seule ancienne « première dame » à briguer la fonction suprême. Obama, lui, marche sur les traces d’Abraham Lincoln en représentant l’Illinois et sur celles de Jesse Jackson, candidat Afroaméricain en 1984 et 1988. Mais, contrairement à Jackson, Obama a des origines multiraciales (sa mère était une fille de l’Iowa, son père un Kényan), il est né à Hawaii et a vécu en Indonésie. Cette diversité est pour lui un atout, comme son âge (46 ans) ou son parcours universitaire et professionnel sans failles. Chez les républicains il reste bientôt cinq candidats sérieux sur les douze déclarés : Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. Mais tous sauf un connaissent des défaites cuisantes lors des primaires et doivent laisser le champ libre à John McCain dès juin 2008. Entre Clinton et Obama la lutte est plus rude et restera longtemps indécise : les primaires de février sont favorables à Obama mais celles de mars plutôt à Clinton et même le « super mardi » ne parvient pas à les départager. Il faudra attendre le début juin pour voir Obama l’emporter finalement. Son charisme, son art oratoire, ses promesses de « changement » ont certes séduit les électeurs démocrates, mais c’est surtout son « trésor » de campagne qui a fait la différence : grâce à une armada de petits donateurs, sollicités via Internet, et de gros mécènes, Obama réussit à collecter 296 millions de dollars pour les primaires, contre « seulement » 238 pour Clinton. L’élection bat tous les records : son coût atteint 2,4 milliards de dollars, soit deux fois plus qu’en 2004, et le gagnant, lui, a réuni, avant le scrutin, pas moins de 750 millions de dollars en contributions. La Convention démocrate de Denver avalise, le 27 août 2008 le duo Barack Obama – Joe 226

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

Biden et les républicains font de même à Saint Paul, le 3 septembre, pour le couple John McCain-Sarah Palin. Les priorités du candidat Obama sont celles d’un bon démocrate, adepte de l’interventionnnisme de l’État : rebâtir le système financier, combattre le chômage, diminuer les impôts pour les classes moyennes, réformer l’école, parvenir à l’indépendance énergétique, retirer les troupes d’Irak et mettre en place une couverture maladie universelle. Ainsi devrait s’achever le cycle républicain ouvert par R. Reagan en 1980 et que McCain incarne encore, ne serait-ce que du fait de son âge (72 ans). Il critique l’inexpérience d’Obama mais choisit lui-même, dans un effort désespéré d’innovation, une novice, Sarah Palin, comme co-listière. Il affirme la solidité de l’économie américaine, alors qu’elle se délite sous ses yeux. Et il tente, sans trop de succès, d’échapper à l’héritage pesant que lui laisse Georges W. Bush en matière de sécurité et de gestion des conflits. En face de lui, Obama reçoit un vaste soutien populaire, celui des minorités et celui des médias. Son charisme est tel que l’élection du 4 novembre est sans grand suspense. Une fois conquis les « États-bascule » (swing states, voir « Keywords ») comme l’Ohio ou la Virginie, sa victoire est assurée. La participation bat des records (63 % des inscrits ont voté) et son succès sur McCain est incontestable (vote populaire : 52,9 % contre 45,7 % ; vote du collège électoral : 365 grands électeurs contre 173). La question raciale n’a été que discrètement évoquée durant la campagne mais les figures tutélaires de Lincoln, DuBois ou Martin Luther King n’ont cessé de planer sur cette élection. Pour la première fois de leur histoire les ÉtatsUnis se donnent un président noir. 95 % des Afro-Américains ont voté pour lui et partagent sa fierté. « Il fut long à venir, » dit-il dans son allocution de victoire, « mais ce soir, le changement a rendez-vous avec l’Amérique ». Dans l’euphorie ambiante, toutefois, il reste

calme, se sachant confronté à d’immenses défis, « deux guerres, une planète en danger et la pire crise financière depuis un siècle ». Les attentes de la nation et du reste du monde sont colossales : Obama fait figure de messie, comme Roosevelt ou Kennedy avant lui. Et dans son discours d’investiture, le 20 janvier 2009, le 44e président des États-Unis s’emploie surtout à rétablir la confiance et redonner espoir aux Américains. Vivement critiqué durant la campagne pour le flou de son programme, Obama prend à présent les problèmes à bras le corps, réclamant avec des accents rooseveltiens « de l’action » pour relever l’économie. Si l’on exclut deux ministères, pourvus plus tardivement, l’ensemble de son gouvernement est en place dans la semaine qui suit. Son premier souci est de sauver le système bancaire et les assureurs durement touchés par la crise du « crédit à haut risque » par l’octroi d’une enveloppe de 700 milliards de dollars – somme d’ailleurs remboursée dans l’année qui suit. Puis il faut s’occuper des emplois, dont 6 millions ont été détruits depuis décembre 2007, pour éviter la récession. En février 2009 le Congrès adopte un plan de relance de 787 milliards pour l’économie, qui combine des allègements fiscaux, plus d’allocations de chômage, une réforme de l’éducation et de la santé et des incitations à l’embauche. Des géants comme Chrysler ou General Motors n’échappent à la faillite que grâce à l’argent public. Des voix s’élèvent, chez les républicains mais aussi à l’aile droite du parti démocrate, pour dénoncer l’envol du déficit budgétaire et le creusement risqué de la dette fédérale. La discipline partisane n’a pas été irréprochable dans le combat pour l’assurance maladie. Au point de mettre en danger la réforme voulue par Obama, à la fois indispensable et hautement symbolique, qui entend procurer une couverture santé décente aux 47 millions d’Américains qui en sont aujourd’hui dépourvus. C’est, comme le soulignait Ted

Kennedy, une question de justice sociale et de morale collective. Après bien des vicissitudes et des chamailleries politiciennes, la loi de réforme a enfin été votée et signée par le Président fin mars 2010. Sur le plan national, Obama profite d’un état de grâce exceptionnel (son taux de popularité à l’investiture était de 78 %) et en use pour conduire une politique étrangère courageuse et innovante : il tend la main à l’Iran, promet de fermer Guantanamo, programme le retrait d’Irak pour la fin 2011, redéploie des troupes en Afghanistan et mène un combat symbolique pour réduire la pollution planétaire. Mais le sommet de Copenhague sur le climat (7-18 décembre 2009) achoppe sur les réticences de la Chine (premier producteur mondial de CO 2 ) et laisse peu d’espoirs pour une suite au protocole de Kyoto, promis à échéance en 2012. Ainsi qu’il l’a indiqué dans son Message sur l’état de l’Union le 27 janvier 2010, les énergies renouvelables demeure une priorité pour le président Obama, au même titre que l’éducation, qui se voit dotée d’un budget (en hausse de 7 %) de près de 50 milliards de dollars afin d’exploiter au mieux les qualités de chaque individu et d’élargir l’accès aux études supérieures, notamment pour les plus pauvres. Que Barack Obama ait ouvert une nouvelle ère dans l’histoire américaine ne fait aucun doute. Mais le monde dont il a hérité est bien plus complexe que celui auquel, par exemple, Kennedy fut confronté en 1960 et les changements ne seront ni aisées ni immédiats. C’est pourquoi il ne faut pas s’attarder sur les sondages qui signalent une chute de la cote de popularité du président sous la barre des 50 % en décembre 2009. La capacité à rebondir des Américains, leur potentiel d’adaptation, leur facilité à innover et à réformer constituent autant d’atouts qui pourraient vérifier le fameux slogan de campagne du candidat Obama en 2008 : « Oui, nous le pouvons ».

January 20, 2009 – A Black President in the White House 227

Map of the United States Today

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Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the United States Elected 1789 1796 1800 1804 1808 1812 1816 1824 1828 1832 1836 1840 1841 1844 1848 1850 1852 1856 1860 1864 1865 1868 1872 1876 1880 1881 1884 1888 1892 1896 1900 1901 1904 1908 1912 1920 1923 1928 1932 1940 1944 1945 1948 1952 1960 1963 1964 1968 1972 1974 1976 1980 1988 1992 2000 2008

President George WASHINGTON John ADAMS Thomas JEFFERSON

Party No of Terms Vice-president (No party) 2 John ADAMS (Federalist) 1 Thomas JEFFERSON (Dem.-Rep.) 2 Aaron BURR George CLINTON James MADISON (Dem.-Rep.) 2 George CLINTON Elbridge GERRY James MONROE (Dem.-Rep.) 2 Daniel D. THOMPKINS John Quincy ADAMS (Dem.-Rep.) 1 John C. CALHOUN Andrew JACKSON (Democratic) 2 John C. CALHOUN Martin VAN BUREN Martin VAN BUREN (Democratic) 1 Richard M. JOHNSON William H. HARRISON (Whig) 1* John TYLER John TYLER (Whig) 1 James K. POLK (Democratic) 1 George M. DALLAS Zachary TAYLOR (Whig) 1* Millard FILLMORE Millard FILLMORE (Whig) 1 Franklin PIERCE (Democratic) 1 William R. KING James BUCHANAN (Democratic) 1 John C. BRECKINRIDGE Abraham LINCOLN (Republican) 2* Hannibal HAMLIN Andrew JOHNSON Andrew JOHNSON (Democratic) Ulysses S. GRANT (Republican) 2 Schuyler COLFAX Henry WILSON Rutherford B. HAYES (Republican) 1 William A. WHEELER James A. GARFIELD (Republican) 1* Chester A. ARTHUR Chester A. ARTHUR (Republican) 1 Grover CLEVELAND (Democratic) 1 Thomas A. HENDRICKS Benjamin HARRISON (Republican) 1 Levi P. MORTON Grover CLEVELAND (Democratic) 1 Adlai E. STEVENSON William McKINLEY (Republican) 2* Garrett A. HOBART Theodore ROOSEVELT Theodore ROOSEVELT (Republican) 2 Charles W. FAIRBANKS William H. TAFT (Republican) 1 James S. SHERMAN Woodrow WILSON (Democratic) 2 Thomas R. MARSHALL Warren G. HARDING (Republican) 1* Calvin COOLIDGE Calvin COOLIDGE (Republican) 2 Charles G. DAWES Herbert C. HOOVER (Republican) 1 Charles CURTIS Franklin D. ROOSEVELT (Democratic) 4* John Nance GARNER Henry A. WALLACE Harry S. TRUMAN Harry S. TRUMAN (Democratic) 2 Alben W. BARKLEY Dwight D. EISENHOWER (Republican) 2 Richard M. NIXON John F. KENNEDY (Democratic) 1* Lyndon B. JOHNSON Lyndon B. JOHNSON (Democratic) 2 Hubert H. HUMPHREY Richard M. NIXON (Republican) 2** Spiro T. AGNEW Gerald R. FORD*** Gerald R. FORD (Republican) 1*** Nelson A. ROCKEFELLER*** James E. CARTER, Jr. (Democratic) 1 Walter F. MONDALE Ronald W. REAGAN (Republican) 2 George H. BUSH George H. BUSH (Republican) 1 Dan QUAYLE William J. CLINTON (Democratic) 2 Albert GORE, Jr George W. BUSH (Republican) 2 Richard CHENEY Barack H. OBAMA (Democratic) 2 Joseph R. BIDEN

* Died in office. ** Resigned from office. *** Non-elected.

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Elected 1789 1796 1800 1804 1808 1812 1816 1824 1828 1832 1836 1840 1844 1848 1852 1856 1860 1864 1868 1872 1876 1880 1884 1888 1892 1896 1900 1904 1908 1912 1920 1924 1928 1932 1940 1944 1948 1952 1960 1964 1968 1972 1974 1976 1980 1988 1992 2000 2008

States of the Union Name ALABAMA ALASKA ARIZONA ARKANSAS CALIFORNIA COLORADO CONNECTICUT DELAWARE D.C. FLORIDA GEORGIA HAWAII IDAHO ILLINOIS INDIANA IOWA KANSAS KENTUCKY LOUISIANA MAINE MARYLAND MASSACHUSETTS MICHIGAN MINNESOTA MISSISSIPPI MISSOURI MONTANA NEBRASKA NEVADA NEW HAMPSHIRE NEW JERSEY NEW MEXICO NEW YORK NORTH CAROLINA NORTH DAKOTA OHIO OKLAHOMA OREGON PENNSYLVANIA RHODE ISLAND SOUTH CAROLINA SOUTH DAKOTA TENNESSEE TEXAS UTAH VERMONT VIRGINIA WASHINGTON WEST VIRGINIA WISCONSIN WYOMING



Capital Montgomery Juneau Phoenix Little Rock Sacramento Denver Hartford Dover Washington Tallahassee Atlanta Honolulu Boise Springfield Indianapolis Des Moines Topeka Frankfort Baton Rouge Augusta Annapolis Boston Lansing St. Paul Jackson Jefferson City Helena Lincoln Carson City Concord Trenton Santa Fe Albany Raleigh Bismarck Columbus Oklahoma City Salem Harrisburg Providence Columbia Pierre Nashville Austin Salt Lake City Montpelier Richmond Olympia Charleston Madison Cheyenne

Entry into Union December 14, 1819 January 3, 1959 February 14, 1912 June 15, 1836 September 9, 1850 August 1, 1876 January 9, 1788 December 7, 1787

Order of Entry 22 49 48 25 31 38 5 1

March 3, 1845 January 2, 1788 August 21, 1959 July 3, 1890 December 3, 1818 December 11, 1816 December 28, 1846 January 29, 1861 June 1, 1792 April 30, 1812 March 15, 1820 April 28, 1788 February 6, 1788 January 26, 1837 May 11, 1858 December 10, 1817 August 10, 1821 November 8, 1889 March 1, 1867 October 31, 1864 June 21, 1788 December 18, 1787 January 6, 1912 July 26, 1788 November 21, 1789 November 2, 1889 March 1, 1803 November 16, 1907 February 14, 1859 December 12, 1787 May 29, 1790 May 23, 1788 November 2, 1889 June 1, 1796 December 29, 1845 January 4, 1896 March 4, 1791 June 25, 1788 November 11, 1889 June 20, 1863 May 29, 1848 July 10, 1890

27 4 50 43 21 19 29 34 15 18 23 7 6 26 32 20 24 41 37 36 9 3 47 11 12 39 17 46 33 2 13 8 40 16 28 45 14 10 42 35 30 44

Population 2000 4,447,000 626,932 5,130,632 2,673,400 33,871,648 4,301,261 3,405,565 783,600 572,059 15,982,378 8,186,453 1,211,537 1,293,953 12,419,293 6,080,485 2,926,324 2,688,418 4,041,769 4,468,976 1,274,923 5,296,486 6,349,097 9,938,444 4,919,479 2,844,658 5,595,211 902,195 1,711,263 1,998,257 1,235,786 8,414,350 1,819,046 18,976,457 8,049,313 642,200 11,353,140 3,450,654 3,421,399 12,281,054 1,048,319 4,012,012 754,844 5,689,283 20,851,820 2,233,169 608,827 7,078,515 5,894,121 1,808,344 5,363,675 493,782

231

Index The italicized page numbers refer to illustrations.

A Abolitionism (See slavery) Abraham Lincoln: 133 A History (J. Hay) ABM (Anti-ballistic missile) 175 Acheson, Dean 154, 165 Adams, Henry Brooks 59, 60, 91, 95, 127, 129 Adams, John 24, 32, 33, 44, 46, 47, 49, 55, 59 and Declaration of Independence, 34 Thoughts on Government, 47, 48 A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United 44, 48 States of America, Adams, John Quincy 68, 70, 75 Adams, Samuel 22, 26, 27, 32 Afghanistan 186 Agnew, Spiro, 176, 180 Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933) 146 Agriculture (United States) 146 Alamogordo, New Mexico, 154 Alger, Horatio 119 Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) 56, 59 Allen, Ethan 33 All the President’s Men (C. Bernstein) 180 American Individualism (H. Hoover) 141 American River, California, 81, 86 Andros, Sir Edmund, 20 Anglican Church, 8, 9, 16 Anian, Straits of, 7, 16, 62 Annapolis, Maryland, 26, 37 Annapolis Convention (See Constitution) Antifederalists 49 Antinomian controversy 14 Appalachian Mountains and Peace of Paris (1763), 19 and Royal Proclamation (1763) 21 and Virginia land claims, 44 and Ordinances of 1784, 1785 and 1787, 50 and Frontier, 108 Appomatox, Virginia, 94, 97 Arkansas Territory 63, 69 Armada, the Invicible, 7, 16 Arnold, Benedict, 41 Articles of Confederation 44, 45, 47, 50

232

Astor, John Jacob 79 Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad Company 111

B Baez, Joan 167 Baghdad 187, 190, 192 Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company 103 Bancroft, Edward 38 Barnum Phineas T. 119 Barre, Isaac 26 Baruch, Bernard M. 145 Basra 187, 192 Batista, Fulgencio 163 Bay of Pigs (1961) 164, 169 Bear Flag Revolt (see California) Beirut 184 Benton, Thomas Hart 85 Berle, Adolf, Jr. 145 Berlin, Germany 164 Bernstein, Carl 176, 180, 181 Biddle, Nicholas 75 Biden, Joseph R., 218-220 “Big Four” 104, 106, 111 “Big Stick” policy (See Roosevelt, Theodore) Bill of Rights (See Constitution) Bin Laden, Osama 200 Birmingham, Alabama 166, 202 “Black Thursday” (See Great Crash) Blaine James G. 132 Bonaparte, Napoleon 57, 60, 67 Bonin Islands 154 Bonvouloir, Julien-Alexandre Achard, de 38 Booth, John Wilkes 90, 95, 98 Bork, Robert 219 “Boston Massacre” 18, 26 Boston Port Act (1774) 31 “Boston Tea Party” 27, 31 Bourne, Richard 13 Bradford, William, 11, 16 11, 13 Of Plymouth Plantation, Bretton Woods Conference (1944) 153 Brewster, William 11 Brezhnev, Leonid 175, 186 “brinkmanship” 165, 168, 169 Brown, John 93, 96, 98 Bryan, William Jennings 121, 128 Buchanan, James 85, 88

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

Buffalo, New York 129, 130 Buffalo Bill (See Cody, William F.) Bunker Hill, battle of (See Independence) Burgoyne, John 38 Burr, Aaron duel with Hamilton 49, 60 conspiracy 61 acquitted 70 Bush, George 181, 187 and Gulf War 185-188 and 1992 election 192-193 Bush, George Walker 198 Bute, Lord 20, 21 Butterfield Overland Mail 111 Bymes, James 154

C Cabot John 7, 16 Cahuenga, Capitulation of, (See California) California early American settlements 80, 81 “Bear Flag Revolt” 81, 84-85 Capitulation of Cahuenga (1847) 84 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) 81, 107 gold discovered (1848) 81-83 Gold Rush 78, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 104 constitution 85, 87 and railroads 104 California Alien Land Law (1913) 151 Calhoun, John C. 74-75, 93 Calvin, Jean 8, 11, 16 Camden, battle of, (See Independence) Canada and Peace of Paris (1763), 19 and Loyalists 35 in Treaty of Alliance (1778) 38 western explorations in 62 border with U.S. 80 dispute over Alaska 131, 135 Canonchet, Chief 13 Cape Cod, Massachusetts 10, 11, 12, 16 Caribbean islands and African slave trade 24 in Treaty of Alliance (1778) 38 and Spanish American War (1898) 128, 135 and “Big Stick” policy 131, 132 Carnegie, Andrew 116, 117, 119

carpetbaggers 99 Carson, Kit 84 Carter, Jimmy 175, 186, 187 Cartier, Jacques 16 Carver, John 11 Castro, Fidel 163, 164, 168, 169 Central Pacific Railroad Company 102, 104-111 Charbonneau, Toussaint 62 Charles II 15, 20 Charleston & Savannah Railroad Company 103 Cherokee Phoenix 72 China “open door” policy, 135 “China incident” 153 and communist revolution 156, 178 and Japanese occupation (World War II) 158 Nixon and 174, 178, 179 Chinese (in the United States) railroad workers, 100, 102 Chinese Exclusion Acts (1882, 1892, 1902); 151 Choiseul, duc de 38 Churchill, Winston 154, 158 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 163, 164, 169, 175 Cibola, Seven Cities of 7, 16, 83, 87 “City upon a Hill” 14 Civilian Conservation Corps 144, 146 Civil Rights March on Washington (1963), 166, 167 Civil Rights Act (1964) 167 Voting Rights Act (1965) 167 Civil War 91, 95, 111, 115 secession of southern stats 92 “copperheads” 92 military operations, (1864) 94 military operations, (1865) 94 and defeat of the South 94 postwar troubles 95, 98 Clark, George Rogers 63 Clark, William 63 Clay, Henry 68, 79, 80 Clearwater River 62 Clemens, Samuel 86 Cleveland, Grover 120, 121 Clinton Hillary Rodham 212, 214, 223 Clinton, William Jefferson 181, 192, 193 election 1992, 193 Cody, William Frederick 109, 110, 111 Cohen, Benjamin 145 Cold War 154, 164



Colonies (English) in America 15, 19–25 colonial trade 24, 25 Columbia River 62, 63, 79, 80 Columbus, Christopher 7, 11, 16 Committee of Secret Correspondence 38 Committees of Correspondence 26, 31 Common Sense (Thomas Paine) 33 Concord, Massachusetts 32, 38 Connecticut founded 15, 17 trade (18th century) 25 ratifies the Constitution 49 and western lands 50 Connor, Bull 166 Constitution (United States) Annapolis Convention (1786), 44, 48 Philadelphia Convention (1787) 32, 45-48 Bill of Rights 45, 49 Virginia Plan 46 New Jersey Plan 46 final draft 48 philosophical sources 48 ratification 49 and land acquisition 61 Lincoln and 92 “containment” 165 Continental Congress First 27, 31, 32, 40 Second 31, 38, 44 Coolidge, Calvin 140, 142 “copperheads” (See Civil War) Coral Sea, battle of the, (1942) 152 Corcoran, Thomas 145 CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) 166 Cornwallis, Charles 39 Coronado, Francisco 7, 83 Cotton, John 13, 14 Cox, Archibald 176 Cox, James M. 144 CREEP (Committee for the Reelection of the President) 176 Crocker, Charles 104, 106, 110 Cromwell, Oliver 15 Cuba 187 in Spanish-American War (1898) 132–134 and marxist revolution 163 and Soviet missiles 162, 165, 167 Currency Act (1764) 22 Curtis, Benjamin 96 Custer, George Armstrong 110 Czolgosz, Leon 129

D Darwinism 117, 119 Davis, Jefferson 104 Dawes, William 33 Dean, John 176 Deane, Silas 36, 38 Declaration of Independence (See Independence) Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (See Independence) Declaratory Act (1766) 23 Deer Island, Massachusetts 13 De Gaulle, Charles 169 De Grand, P.P.F. 104 De la Warr, Lord 8 Delaware 43, 122 Democratic-Republicans, 55, 56, 59, 75 Democrats 80, 87, 93, 94, 145, 176 Description of New England: Or the Observations and Discoveries of Captain 9 John Smith (Smith) “Desert Shield” operation (1991) 188 “Desert Storm” operation (1991) 185, 188, 190, 192 De Soto, Hernando 7 Dewey, George 133 Dewey, John 116 Dickinson, John 33, 44 Diem, Ngo Dinh 178 Discovery 8 Dix, John A. 106 Dobrynin, Anatoli 168 Dodge, Grenville 106 Dominion of New England (1684-1689) 20 Donnelly, Ignatius 120 Donner Party 80 Douglas, Stephen A. 96 Dow Jones industrial average 141, 143, 144 Drake, Sir Francis 7, 16 Dred Scott Case (See Slavery) Dudley, Thomas 14 Dulles, John Foster 165, 168 Dumbarton Oaks Conference (1944) 153 Dupuy de Lôme, Stanislas 132 Durant, Thomas C. 106, 110 Dylan, Bob 167 Index 233

E Economy (United States) industrialization 103-104, 115-117, 122-123 capitalism 116-117 business concentrations 116-117, 122 antitrust legislation 118, 122 “Big Business” and politics 127-128 situation in the 1920s 139-142 stock-market crisis, 1929 (See Great Crash) Education of Henry Adams, 94-95 The (H. Adams) Edwards, John 214 Edwards, Jonathan 60 Ehrlichman, John 176 Einstein, Albert 152 Eisenhower, Dwight 142, 163, 164, 169, 173 El Dorado 81, 83, 87 Eliot, John 13 Elizabeth I 8 El Salvador 169 Emancipation Proclamation (See Slavery) Emergency Banking Act (1933) 146 Emergency Farm Mortgage Act (1933) 146 England Privy Council, 20 Board of Trade 20 Whighs and Tories 20-25 “Enola Gay” 154 Erie Canal 104 Ervin, Sam 176 Estaing, comte d’ 39 “Executive Committee” (1962) 165

F Fanny Mae 213 Farm Credit Act (1933) 146 Farmers’ Alliances 120 “Fat Man” 155 Federal Emergency Relief Act (1933), 144, 146 Federalist, The 49, 59 Federalists 49, 55, 56, 59, 61, 70 Feinstein, Diane 216 Ferebee, Thomas 154 Fermi, Enrico 152 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 141 Florida as Spanish colony, 20 cession to France, 57, 58 in 1812–1814 War, 68

234

Flowers, Gennifer 181 Ford, Gerald R. 175, 180 Ford’s Theater, Washington, D.C. 95 Formosa 165 Fort Ross 80 Fort Sumter, battle of, (1861) 92 Fort Ticonderoga (See Independence) “Forty-niners” 83, 86 Fourteenth Amendment (1868) 98, 118 France and colonial trade (18th century) 24 and Treaty of Alliance (1778) 35 in War of Independence 38-39 and Louisiana cessions 57, 58 Franklin, Benjamin 32, 35, 49 and Declaration of Independence, 34 and Loyalists 35 and alliance with France 37-38 at constitutional convention 46 Freddie Mac 213 Fremont, Jessie 85 Fremont, John Charles 84, 85 Frontier, The 63, 69, 71, 81, 104, 107, 108-109, 111 Fuller, Melville 121 fur trade 79

G Gadsden Purchase (1853) 83, 104 Gage, Thomas 32 Gallatin, Albert 67 Gandhi, Mohandas 166 Garrison, William Lloyd 93 Gaspee 25, 26, 40 George III 20, 33, 34 Georgia and the Constitution 48-49 and Indian question 72,73 Gillbert, Sir Humphrey 7, 16 Gillespie, Archibald 84 Gingrich, Newt 198 Giuliani, Rudolph 214 Glass-Steagall Banking Act (1933) 146 Godspeed 8 Gold Rush (See California) “Golden Spike” 110, 111 Gompers, Samuel 117 Gone With the Wind (M. Mitchell) 94 Gorbachev, Mikhail 175 Gore, Albert 199, 216 Gorton, Samuel 15 Gospel of Wealth, The (A. Carnegie) 119 Government and Administration of Justice Act (1933) 31

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

Grasse, François Joseph Paul, comte de 39 Gray, Robert 62 Grant, Ulysses S. 94, 110, 140 Great American Desert 107, 108 “Great Artiste” 155 Great Crash (1929) “Black Thursday” 142, 143 Hoover Administration 143-144 and Great Depression 144 Great Northern Railroad Company 111 Grenville, George 20, 21 Guadalcanal 152 Guantanamo 201, 220 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964) 178 Gulf War causes, 185-186 Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait 187 air attack on Iraq 188-189 ground attack on Iraq 189 high-tech weapons 190-191 cease fire 192

H Haldeman, Robert 176 Hamilton, Alexander 44, 46, 48, 49, 59, 61, 75 Hancock, John 27, 32 Hanna, Marcus A. 127, 128, 129 Harding, Warren 139, 140, 142 Harper’s Ferry (1859) 95, 98 Harrison, Benjamin 120 Hart, Gary 181 Harte, Bret 86 Hat Act (1732) 20 Hawaii 128, 158 Hay, John 127, 129, 133 Haynes, John 15 Hearst, William R. 131, 132, 140 Henry, Patrick 22, 44 Henry VIII 8, 16 Hill, James J. 117 Hirohito 156 Hiroshima 150, 151, 155, 156, 157 History of the Standard Oil 131 Company (Ida Tarbell) Hitler, Adolf 154, 188, 193 Holladay, Ben 111 Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell 130 Hooker, Thomas 15, 17 Hoover, Herbert 140, 142, 143 and “rugged individualism” 141, 147 and anti-depression policies 144 Hopkins, Harry L. 145 Hopkins, Mark 104 Houston, Sam 84

Howe, Sir William 34, 35, 38 Hudson, Henry 9 Hudson River 10, 17 Hudson’s Bay Company 79 Hull, Cordell 158 Humphrey, Hubert 173 Hundred Days, The (See Roosevelt, F.) Huntington, Collis P. 104, 106 Hussein, Saddam 186-189, 192, 204 Hutchinson, Ann 14-15

I ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) 175 Ide, William, B. 84 impeachment 98, 181 Independence 31-41 political debates 32-34 war action 33-35, 38-39 “Patriots” 33 continental army 33 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (1776) 33 Olive Branch Petition (1776) 33 Declaration of Independence 34, 43, 60 “Loyalists” 34-35 Staten Island Conference 34-35 peace negotiations 35, 37 alliance with France 35, 38-39 winter at Valley Forge 37, 39 Carlisle Commission 37 Treaty of Paris (1783) 39, 43 Battles: Lexington, 32, 39 Bunker Hill 33 Fort Ticonderoga 33 Trenton 37 Saratoga 35, 38 Camden 35 Yorktown 35, 37, 39 Brandywine 39 Chesapeake 39 Indians, American, and New England colonies 12-13 and maize 12 “Praying Indians” 13 King Philip’s War 13 battle of Fallen Timbers (1794) 63 Bureau of Indian Affairs 72 battle of Horseshoe Bend (1814) 72 Indian Removal Act (1830) 71, 73 “Trail of Tears” 73, 74 and advance of Frontier 109 Chivington Massacre (1864) 110 Tribes & Nations: Algonquian 12 Powhatan 12



Wampanoag 12, 13, 17 Secotan 12 Nipmuck 13 Naragansett 13 Mandan 62 Shoshone 62 Seminole 68, 72 Cherokee 70, 72-73 Creek 72 Chocktaw 72 Chickasaw 72 Five Civilized Nations 72 Sioux 110 Cheyenne 110 Arapaho 110 Kiowa 110 Comanche 110 INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) Treaty 175 Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, The (A.T. Mahan) 132 Interstate Commerce Act (1887) 118 Intolerable Acts 27, 31 Iran 186 Iraq 186 Iron Act (1750) 20 Israel 174, 175, 185, 190

J Jackson, Andrew 76 and Democrats 59 “King Andrew” 66 in 1812-1814 war 67 and pacification of Florida 68, 76 in 1824 election 68, 76 elected President 70, 76 and “spoils system” 70, 71, 77 and South Carolina 74 and Indian removal 72-73, 75 and Bank of the U.S. 75, 77 Jackson, Jesse 214 Jackson, Mahalia 167 James I 8, 9 James II 20 Jamestown, Virginia 7, 8, 12, 16 Japan attack on Pearl Harbor (See Pearl Harbor) military expansion in Pacific 152 U.S. bombs on Japan 154, 155 postwar reconstruction 156, 157 U.S.-Japan Peace Treaty 157 Japanese-Americans 151, 157 Jaworski, Leon 176 Jay, John 37 Jay’s Treaty (1794) 108

Jefferson, Thomas 44, 45, 46, 59, 65 and Declaration of Independence 34 and Territorial ordinance (1784) 50 as President 55-61 and the West 62-63 Johnson, Andrew 94, 95, 98, 181 Johnson, Hiram 153 Johnson, Lyndon 135, 175, 178, 179

K Kansas – Nebraska Act (See Slavery) Karzai Hamid 208 Kearney, Stephen W. 81, 84 Kennan, George F. 165 Kennedy, Edward M. 219, 222 Kennedy, John F. 108, 135, 164, 173, 188 and Cuban crisis 164-165, 168-169 and civil rights 166-167 and Vietnam 178 Kennedy, Robert 165, 166, 168 Kentucky early settlement 50 reaction to Alien and Sedition Acts 56, 59 Kimmel, Husband E. 158 King Jr., Martin Luther 166, 167 Kissinger, Henry 174-176, 179 Kleindienst, Richard 176 Klondike Gold Rush (1896) 83, 87 Korean War 154, 156, 165, 178 Krushchev, Nikita 164, 168, 169 Ku-Klux-Klan (See Slavery) Kuwait 186-189, 192, 193 Kuwait City 189

L La Fayette, marquis de, 38, 39 land territorial expansion (18th century) 50-51 Territorial Ordinance (1784) 50 Land Ordinance (1785) 50, 108 “township” 50, 51 territorial expansion (19th century) 79-87 Homestead Act (1862) 120 Laramie, Wyoming 106 Larkin, Thomas O. 84 Leclerc, Charles 58, 60 Lee, Arthur 37, 38 Lee, Richard Henry 33 Lee, Robert E. 94, 95, 97 Lehman Brothers 212 Leiden, Holland 10, 11 Index 235

Lewis, John 167 Lewis, Merriwether 63 Lewis & Clark Expedition 54, 61, 62-63 Lexington, Massachusetts 26, 32 Liberty Tree 24 Library of Congress 57 Liebermann, Joseph 217 Lincoln, Abraham 75, 90, 106, 216 early career 91 elected President 91-92 and Civil War 92-94 assassinated 95 Little Big Hom, battle of 110, 111 “Little Boy” 154 Livingston, Robert 34, 58, 60 Lloyd, Henry Demarest 131 Locke, John 11, 47, 48 Lodge, Henry Cabot 132 London Virginia Company 8, 16 Long, Stephen 107 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 33 Los Angeles, California, Lousiana 81 cession to France, 57 Louisiana Purchase (1803) 46, 58, 60-61, 83, 108 consequences of Purchase 61, 69 and 1812-1814 War 67 Louisiana Treaty (United States, France, 1803) 60, 61 Louis XVI 39 Luce, Henry 153 Luther, Martin 8, 11 Lybia 186

M Madison, James 44, 48, 49, 56, 59 Mahan, Alfred Thayer 132 Maine 8, 19, 69, 122, 132, 133 Mandan (See Indians) Manifest Destiny 79 “Manhattan Project” 152 Mao-Tse-Tung 156, 178 Marianas 154 Marshall, George, 154, 159 Marshall, James W. 81 Marshall, John 70, 73 Marshall, Tom 129 Maryland founded 15, 19 trade (18th century) 25 relations with Virginia 44, 50 and 1828 election 70 Mason, George 45, 46 Mason, Richard 83

236

Massachusetts Suffolk Resolves (1774), 31 independence declarec 32, 33 political system 44 ratifies Constitution 49 and western lands 50 Massachusetts Bay Colony 14, 15, 17, 19 Massassoit, sachem 12 Mayflower 10-11, 14, 16, 17 Mayflower Compact 10, 11, 17 Mayhew, Thomas 13 McArthur, Douglas 154, 155, 156 McCain, John S 211, 215, 217 McClellan, George B. 94 McGovern, George 173 McKenney, Thomas L. 72 McKenzie, Alexander 62 McKinley, William elected President (1896) 121, 127 and Spanish-American War 132, 133, 134 reelected (1900) 129 assassinated (1901) 129 McNamara, Robert S. 175 Medicaid 223 Medicare 223 Mellon, Andrew W. 140, 143 Memphis, Tennessee 166, 168 mercantilism 20, 23 Meredith, James 166 Merrill Lynch 214 Metacom, sachem, 13 Middle East 165, 185, 186, 191 Midway, battle of 152 MIRV (Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle), 175 Mississippi River 20, 44, 50, 60, 61, 62, 72, 107, 108 Missouri Compromise (1820) 49, 68, 69, 96, 97 Missouri River 62, 63 Missouri Territory 62, 69 Mitchell, John 176 Mitchelle, Margaret 94 Mohawk & Hudson Railroad Company 104 Molasses Act (1733) 20, 25 Moley, Raymond 145 Monroe Doctrine 12, 79, 83, 131, 132, 135, 153, 163 Monroe, James 72, 75 Secretary of State 59 and Louisiana Purchase 60 Monterey, California 84, 85 Montesquieu, baron de 11, 47, 48 Montgomery, Alabama 166, 167

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

Monticello, Virginia 46, 57 Morales, Juan 58 Morgan, John Pierpont 118 Mormons 80, 83 Morris, Gouverneur 48 Moscow summit (1972) 181 muckrakers 131 Muir, John 145

N NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) 166 Nagasaki 151, 155, 157 Nagumo, Chuichi 158 Narvaez, Panfilo de 7, 83 National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) 146 National Park Service 145 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) 165, 168, 169 Navigation Acts 20, 21, 23 Nevada 83, 86, 87, 104, 106 New Canaan 14, 17 New Deal (See Roosevelt, Franklin) New Echota Treaty (United States, Cherokees, 1835) 73 New England Restraining Act (1775), 32 Newfoundland 7, 32 New Hampshire 19, 49 New Helvetia (See Sutter, John) New Jersey 49, 122 New Jersey Plan (See Constitution) New Orleans 44, 58, 60, 61, 67, 110, 111 New York, proprietary colony 19 and Stamp Act Congress 22 riots (1770) 26 and Declaration of Independence 34 and War of Independence 39 and Constitution 48 ratifies Constitution 49 and 1828 election 70 and Erie Canal 104 Republican politics in 128 New York Times 175 Nicaragua 169 Nixon, Richard M. 172 elected President (1968), 173 reelected (1972) 173 policies 174-175 and Watergate 174-177, 180-181 and Vietnam 178-179 and China 179 Norris, Frank 111

North, Lord 32, 33, 37 North Carolina founded, 7, 8 independence declared 33 and Constitution 48, 49 and western lands 50 Northern Pacific Railroad Company 111 Northern Securities Company 130 Northern Virginia Company 10 Northwest Ordinance (See land) Northwest Territory 50, 51 NSC – 68 (1950) 153, 156, 175 Nullification (See Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina)

O Octopus, The (F. Norris) 111 Office of Scientific Research and Development (1942) 152 Ohio 50 Ohio Company of Massachusetts 51 Okinawa 152, 154, 157 Oklahoma 73, 108 Oilive Branch Petition (See Independence) Olmsted, Frederick Law 145 Olney, Richard 132 Omaha, Nebraska 106, 110, 120 OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, 187 Opechancanough, chief 12 Operation Eduring Freedom 211 Oppenheimer, Julius Robert 152 Oregon joint occupation (U.S., Great Britain), 79, 80 missionaries in 80 Oregon Trail 80, 86 Oregon Treaty (1846) 108 Oswald, Lee Harvey 95 Oswald, Richard 37 Oxford, Mississippi 166

P Pacific Railroad Acts (See Railroads) Pacific, War in the, (1942-1945) 155 Paine, Thomas, 26, 33, 34 Palin, Sarah 215, 220, 221 Panama 130, 131, 169 Paris summit (1960) 164 Parker, Samuel 107 Patriot missiles 190 Patrons of Husbandry 20 Pattie, James Ohio 80 Peace of Paris (See Treaty of Paris) Pelosi, Nancy 212



Pearl Harbor, Oahu 142, 151, 158-159 Pendleton, George H. 94 Penn, William, 15, 17 Pennsylvania founded 15, 17 development 19 political system 44 ratifies Constitution 49 Pensacola, Florida 68 Pentagon Papers 175 People’s (Populist) Party 120-121 Persian Gulf 186 Peter-Paul-and-Mary 167 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38 Philadelphia Convention (See Constitution) Philip II 7, 16 Philippines Pacific trade with U.S. 80 and Spanish-American War (1898) 128, 133, 134 and Japanese occupation 152 Phillips, Wendell 93 Pike, Zebulon 107 Pilgrims, The 9, 10, 12, 13 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (J. Bunyan) 131 Pinchot, Gifford 145 Pinckney, Charles 46 Pjnckney Treaty (United States, Spain, 1795) 58, 108 Pitt, William, Earl of Chatham 20, 21, 26 Platt, Thomas 128 Plymouth, England 8, 9, 10 Plymouth, Massachusetts 17 Plymouth Colony 14 Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts 11 Plymouth Virginia Company 8, 16 Pocahontas 8, 12, 13 Polk, James K. 80 elected President (1844) 79 and Oregon boundary 80 and western expansion 81, 83 and California gold 86 Pony Express 110, 111 pools 117 Poor Richard’s Almanack (B. Franklin) 32 Populism 120-121 Port-Royal, Nova Scotia 16 Postdam Conference (1945), 153, 154 Pottawatomie, Kansas 93 Powell, Colin 188, 189, 193 Powell, John Wesley 145

Practical Plan for Building the Pacific Railroad, A (Th. Judah) 104 Prescott, Samuel 33 Promontory Point, Utah 102, 110, 111 Providence, Rhode Island 15, 26 Public Works Administration 147 Puritanism 11 Puritans 9-15

Q Quakers Quartering Act (1765, 1766)

15, 33 22, 31

R Railroads early developments, 103-104 transcontinental lines 104-111 Pacific Railroad Act (1862) 105 Second Pacific Railroad Act (1864) and Chinese workers 106, 108 expansion 116 Raleigh, Sir Walter 7, 12, 16 Randolph, Edmund 46, 53 Rankin, Jeanette 158 Ray, James Earl 168 Rayburn, Sam 145 Reagan, Ronald 173, 175, 180, 186, 190, 193 Reagan Doctrine 185 Reconstruction Act (1867) 98 Reconstruction Finance Corporation 144 redeemers 99 Reno, Nevada 106 Republicans 79, 94, 99, 116, 118, 127, 128, 139 (See also Whigs) Revenue Act (1764) 23 Revere, Paul 32, 33 Rhode Island founded, 15, 17 trade (18th century) 25 independence declared 33 and Philadelphia convention (1787) 45 ratifies Constitution 49 Rice Condoleeza 203 Richardson, Elliot 176 Richberg, Donald 145 Rights of Man, The (Th. Paine) 34 Rio Grande River 79 Riyadh 191 Roanoke Island, North Carolina 7, 8, 16, 17 Rochambeau, comte de 39 Rockefeller, John D. 117, 119 Rockingham, Earl of 20, 21, 22 Index 237

Rocky Mountains 62, 80, 107, 108 Rolfe, John 8, 12 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 142, 144, 147, 173 and Brain Trust 145, 146 conservation policies 145 and Hundred Days 146-147 New Deal 135, 146-147 and Japan (1942) 152, 158 and isolationism 153 Roosevelt, Theodore 126, 223 early career, 128 and Rough Riders 128, 130, 133 Vice-President (1900) 129 becomes President 129-130 and trusts 130, 139 and Big Stick policy 130, 131, 188 and Panama 130 and Dominican Republic 131 Square Deal 135, 146 Rosenman, Samuel 145 Ross, John 73 Ross, Robert 57 Rough Riders (See Roosevelt, Theodore) Royal African Company of London 25 Royal Proclamation, of 1763 (See Appalachian Mountains) Rusk, Dean 168 Russel, William H. 111 Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) 130, 131 Rutledge, Edward 34

S Sacajawea 62 Sacramento, California 81, 87, 104, 110 St Louis, Missouri 62, 63 Salem, Massachusetts 11, 15 SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty) 174, 175 SALT II 175 Samoa Islands 128 Sampson, W. T. 134 Sandys, Sir Edwin 16 San Clemente, California 177 San Francisco, California 80, 83, 84, 86 87, 157 San Ildefonso (See Treaties) San Salvador, Bahamas 8 Santa Anna, Antonio de 89 Santo Domingo expedition (1802) 57-58, 59, 60 Saratoga, battle of (See Independence) Saudi Arabia 187, 188, 190, 191 scalawags 99 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. 129, 174 Schwartzkopf, Norman 184, 189, 192

238

SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) 166 Scud missiles 190 SEATO (South East Asia Treaty Organization) 165 Secotan (See Indians) self-made man 119, 141 Seminole (See Indians) Sequoyah 72, 73 Seven Years’ War 19, 21 Seward, William 95 Shafter, William R. 131 Shame of the Cities, The (L. Steffens) 125 Shallus, Jacob 48 Shays Rebellion (1786) 45 Sheridan, Philip 94 Sherman, Roger 34 Sherman, William Tecumseh 94 Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) 118, 122, 123 Shoshone (See Indians) Significance of the Frontier in American History, The (F.J. Turner) 108 Silver Purchase Act (1890) 120, 121 slavery colonial slave trade 24, 25 and Constitution 48-49 “three-fifths” compromise 49 Missouri Compromise (1820) 49, 69, 96, 97 Emancipation Proclamation (1863) 92, 93 abolitionism 91, 93 the “peculiar institution” 93, 96 Kansas Nebraska Act (1854) 96, 97, 104 “Bleeding Kansas” (1855-1856) 93 Dred Scott case 96-97 Wade-Davis Bill (1864) 98 13th Amendment (1865) 98 15th Amendment (1870) 98 “Black Codes” 98 Ku-Klux-Klan 99 Sloat, John D. 84 Smith, Henry Nash 107 Smith, Jedediah 80 Smith, John 8, 10, 12, 13, 16 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930) 144 Snake River 62 SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordination Committee) 166 Social Security Act (1933) 223 Social Security Act (1965) 223 Sonoma, California 81, 84 Sons of Liberty 22, 24, 26-27

Les grandes dates de l’histoire américaine

Sotomayor, Sonia 220 Souter, David 220 South Carolina trade (18th century) 25 independence declared 33 and Constitution 48 and Nullification 59, 68, 75 and railroads 103 Southern Pacific Railroad Company 105, 111, 140 Soviet Union 153, 154, 156, 158, 164- 165, 168-169, 175, 185, 186, 187 Spain in New World, 8 and Peace of Paris (1763) 19-20 in War of Independence 35 and Mississippi trade 44 and Louisiana retrocession 57, 58 and Cuban independence 132-134 Spanish-American War (1898) 132-134 Spencer, Herbert, 119 “spoils system” (See Jackson, Andrew) Squanto 12, 17 Stalin, Josef 153, 154, 156 Stamp Act (1765) 19 Stamp Act Congress 22 Standard Oil Company of Ohio 117 Standish, Miles 10 Stanford, Leland 104, 110 Stanton, Edwin 100 “Star Wars” defense system 190 Staten Island 34, 61 Steffens, Lincoln 131 Stephens, Alexander H. 95 Stimson, Harry 158 Stockton, Robert F. 84 Stockton & Darlington Railroad Company 103 Stone, Samuel 15 Subprimes 212, 213, 218 Sugar Act (1763) 20, 21 Susan Constant 8 Suffolk Resolves (See Massachusetts) Sumner, William Graham 119 Supreme Court (decisions) 70 Marbury v. Madison (1803) 70, 97 Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) 70 Johnson and Graham Lessee 72 v. McIntosh (1823) Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) 73 Worcester v. Georgia (1832) 70, 73, 75 Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) 96 120 Munn v. Illinois (1877) U.S. v. E.C. Knight & Co. (1895) 122

Brown v. Topeka (1954) 166 181 U.S. v. Nixon (1974) 223 Roe v. Wade (1973) Sutter, John 80, 81 New Helvetia estate 80, 83 Coloma Ind, 81, 83 Fort Sutter 81, 84 Sweeney, Charles W. 155 Syria 186 Szilard, Leo 152

T Taft, William Howard 130, 139, 145 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de 57-60, 61 Tallmadge, James 69 Taney, Roger B. 70, 96 Tarbell, Ida M. 131 Taylor, Maxwell 168 Taylor, Zachary 81 Tea Act (1773) 26 Teheran hostage crisis (1979–1981), 185, 186 Teller Amendment (1898) 134 Tennessee Valley Authority (1933) 145, 146 Territorial Ordinance of 1784 (See land) Texas 79, 80, 84 Thanksgiving Day 11 Thieu, Nguyen Van 179 Thomas, Clarence 181, 219 Thomas, George H. 94 Thomas, Jesse 69 Tibbets, Paul W. 154 Ticonderoga (See Fort Ticonderoga) Tinian 154 Tojo, Hideki 152 Tokyo 154, 155 Tomahawk missiles 190 Toussaint L’Ouverture 58 Townshend Acts 24, 25, 26, 29 Townshend, Charles 24, 29 “township” (See land) “Trail of Tears” (See Indians) Treaty of Alliance (France, United States, 1778) 35, 38 Treaty of Amity and Commerce (France, United States, 1778) 38 Treaty of Ghent (United States, Great Britain, 1814) 67, 68 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (United States, Mexico, 1848) 81, 108 Treaty of Paris (France, Great Britain, 1763) 19, 21, 108



Treaty of Paris (United States, Great Britain, 1783) 39, 43, 108 Treaty of Paris (United States, Spain, 1898) 134 Treaty of San Francisco (United States, Japan, 1951) 157 Treaty of San Ildefonso (France, Spain, 1800) 57 triangular trade 20, 24, 25 Trist, Nicholas 13 Truman Doctrine 154, 165 Truman, Harry S. 142, 152 and nuclear research 152 and Hiroshima 154-155 Fair Deal 154 postwar diplomacy 156 trusts 117-118, 122 Truth-in-Securities Act (1933) 146 Tugwell, Rexford Guy 145 Turkey 164, 165, 168 Turner, Frederick Jackson 104, 108 Twain, Mark (See Clemens, Samuel) “Two-Penny Act” (1763) 22 Tyler, Kermit 159

U Union Pacific Railroad Company 102, 105, 106, 110 United Arab Emirates 186 United Nations 187, 188, 192 SA Patriot Act 214 USS Missouri 155 U-2 spy plane 164, 165

V Vallejo, Mariano 84 Vane, Henry 14 Vergennes, comte de 38, 39 Vienna summit (1961) 164 Vietnam War, 156, 165, 173, 174, 177, 178–179, 188, 191 Virginia founded, 7, 14, 15 Convention (1775) 22 trade (18th century) 25 independence declared 33 Bill of Rights 43, 45 political system 43-44 relations with Maryland 44, 50 ratifies Constitution 49 and western lands 44, 50 reaction to Alien and Sedition Acts 56, 59 Virginia Company 8, 10 Virginia Plan (See Constitution)

W Walker, Joseph,

84

Wallace, George, 166 Wallace, Henry A. 108, 152 Wall Street 138, 142, 213 Wampanoag (See Indians) War Powers Act (1973) 177, 179 Wartime Relocation Centers (See Japanese-Americans) Washington, D.C. 56, 166 Washington, George 33, 37, 39, 46, 49, 55, 57, 59, 60, 67 Washington Post 176, 180, 181 Watergate scandal 174, 175, 176–177, 180–181 Wayne, Anthony 41 Wealth Against Commonwealth (H.D. Lloyd) 131 Weaver, James B. 120 Wells, Fargo and Co. 111 West Indies 24, 35, 44 Western United States Great American Desert 107 pioneers 107 the Frontier 108-109 railroads in 110-111 Weston, Thomas 10, 11 Whigs (United States) 32, 59, 70, 75, 87, 93 Whiskey Rebellion (1794) 63 White House 55, 56-57 Whitman, Walt 107 Whitney, Asa 104 Wilkinson, James 61 Williams, Roger 15, 17 Wilmot Proviso (1846) 93 Wilson, James 46 Wilson, Woodrow 129, 135, 139, 144, 145, 146, 153 Winslow, Edward 11, 16 Winthrop, John 14, 17, 25 Woodward, Bob 176, 180, 181 Woolen Act (1699) 20 World War II 17 operations in Pacific 151, 152 atomic bomb 152, 154-155 isolationism 153 postwar superpowers 153 Wyoming 104, 110

Y Yamamoto, Isoroku 158 Yates, Robert 46 Yemen 188 Yom Kippul War (1973) 174, 175 Yorktown, battle of (See Independence) Young, Brigham 80 Ziegler, Ron 176 Index 239

List of Maps 1620 Early New England Colonies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1765 Colonial Trade Routes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1787 Western Lands, 1782–1802 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Northwest Ordinance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1803 The Louisiana Purchase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1829 Indian Removal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1848 California . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1865 Free States, slave States, 1820-1854 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1869 Transcontinental Railroads, 1820-1854 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1901 Spanish-American War: The Caribbean, 1898 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1945 The War in the Pacific, 1942-1945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2008 Election Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The United States Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



15 24 49 51 58 71 82 97 105 134 155 217 228

Crédits 6 : Sipa/ERL ; 13 : Rue des Archives/Mary Evans P. L. ; 18 : Photomonde.com ; 26 : Photomonde.com ; 29 : Corbis/Bettmann ; 30 : Photomonde.com ; 33 : Corbis/Bettmann ; 35 : Photothèque Hachette ; 37 : Photomonde.com ; 39 : Photothèque Hachette ; 41 : Photomonde.com ; 42 : Photomonde.com ; 48 : Photothèque Hachette ; 54 : Photomonde.com ; 56 : Photomonde.com ; 57 : Photomonde.com ; 60 : Bridgeman-Giraudon/Peter Newark’s Pictures ; 65 : Photothèque Hachette ; 66 : Corbis/Bettmann ; 73 : Bridgeman-Giraudon/Peter Newark’s Pictures ; 74 : Bridgeman-Giraudon/Peter Newark’s Pictures ; 75 : Photothèque Hachette ; 76 : Photothèque Hachette ; 78 : California State Library ; 80 : Photothèque Hachette ; 82 : Photothèque Hachette ; 85 : National Archives, Washington ; 90 : Roger-Viollet ; 92 : Photothèque Hachette ; 99 : Corbis/Bettmann ; 102 : Photothèque Hachette ; 104 : Corbis/Bettmann ; 109 : Photomonde.com ; 114 : Photothèque Hachette ; 116 : Corbis/Underwood & Underwood ; 121 : Photothèque Hachette ; 126 : Corbis/Bettmann ; 131 : Photothèque Hachette ; 133 : Photothèque Hachette ; 138 : Photothèque Hachette ; 140 : Corbis/Bettmann ; 147 : Photomonde.com ; 150 : AFP ; 152 : Photomonde.com ; 159 : Photomonde.com ; 162 : Photomonde.com ; 168 : Photomonde.com ; 169 : Simon & Schuster/Herbert Block’s special for Today ; 172 : Sipa/AP ; 174 : Cartoon by David Levine © 1993 Lescher & Lescher ; 177 : Libray Of Congress, Washington ; 179 : Gamma/Laurent ; 184 : Sipa/Tampa Press ; 189 : Droits Réservés ; 191 : US Air Force ; 193 : Getty/Brad Markel ; 196 : Gamma/Tammy Klein ; 198 : Gamma/UPI/R. L. Wollenberg ; 200 : Gamma ; 208 : Gamma/Photonews/Bert Van den Brouke ; 210 : Sipa/Newscom/Matthew Barrick ; 212 : Sipa/AP/Mary Altaffer ; 218 : Gamma/UPI/Alexis Glenn ; 222 : Gamma/UPI/R. L. Wollenberg.

LeS grANdeS dATeS de L’hIStoIre AmérIcAINe Dix-huit dates-chapitres qui ont fait l’histoire américaine

Pour chacune de ces dates : • un exposé principal en anglais, • un éclairage complémentaire en français, • des rubriques d’accompagnement (keywords, figures, people, places), • des cartes et des illustrations, un index et des tableaux récapitulatifs.

Sommaire The Mayflower: December 16, 1620 / The Stamp Act: March 22, 1765 / The declaration of Independance: July 4, 1776 / The Constitution of the United States: September 17, 1787 / The Louisiana Purchase: May 2, 1803 / Andrew Jackson President: March 4, 1829 / The gold rush: January 24, 1848 / Abraham Lincoln Assassinated: April 14, 1865 / The Pacific railroad: May 10, 1869 / The Sherman Antitrust Act: July 2, 1890 / Theodore roosevelt President: September 15, 1901 / The great Crash: October 24, 1929 / Hiroshima: August 6, 1945 / The Cuban Missile Crisis: October 22-28, 1962 / richard Nixon resigns: August 8, 1974 / Victory in the gulf: February 27, 1991 / A day of infamy: September 11, 2001 / A Black President in the white House: January 20, 2009

L’auteur : Pierre Lagayette est professeur émérite à l’université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV).

A N G L A I S ❋ CIVILISATION Public Licence (Anglais, Histoire) LEA et classes préparatoires

Dans la même collection Civilisation des États-Unis (Marie-Christine Pauwels) Civilisation britannique (Peter John, Pierre Lurbe) Civilisation irlandaise (Paul Brennan, Valérie Peyronel) Les grandes dates de l’histoire britannique (Antoine Mioche)

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