Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [196]
The Armenian massacres affronted the founding principles of the United States. Morgenthau was describing his nation’s yearning to become the “virtuous republic,” created from the 1770s with aspirations much higher than mere moneygrubbing materialism. But he knew that this ideal coexisted in the same body politic as the rapacity, acquisitiveness, and brutality that he abhorred. Like the Roman god Janus, his nation had two faces—one sometimes noble and the other always ignoble—and both faces were presented to the world.
The young United States was like no other state that has ever existed in the history of the world. Recent comparisons with other imperiums, ancient and modern, are both futile and misleading.4 But though it is rich and successful today, it is worth recalling that the United States was born out of revolutionary violence and much blood. The grimmer realities of that revolution are remembered less than the fine words about nation and liberty which still resound. Jefferson, of course, knew the brutal facts, but he kept them for private letters rather than his public rhetoric: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”5
This new nation was quick to manufacture its myths and heroes. When the first president, George Washington, died in 1799, Congress’s eulogy began, “To the memory of the Man, first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” It genuinely reflected popular feeling, a sentiment objectified in the enormously popular print by John James Barralet in 1802. This presented a kind of apotheosis, as the First Citizen was borne up to heaven by Time and Immortality.6 Later, in 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the painter Constantino Brumidi decorated the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., with a vast fresco. There, “the first President sits in majesty, flanked on the right by the Goddess of Liberty and on his left by a winged figure of Fame sounding a trumpet and holding a palm frond aloft in a symbol of victory. Thirteen female figures stand in a semi-circle around Washington, representing the thirteen original states. On the outer ring of the canopy, six allegorical groupings surround him, representing classical images of agriculture, arts and sciences, commerce, war, mechanics, and marine.”7
Like all national histories, the American past has always been artfully nipped and tucked to meet the needs of the moment. Underlying that serene surface presented by Brumidi lies what you would expect to find: vain ignorant men, greed, crass stupidity, and vaunting self-interest, much as in other nations. This is the other face of the United States. Yet, unusually among nations, there has also been a serious attempt to think and behave ethically, to honor the nation’s founding myth. Among the long list of American presidents and statesmen, we can find a few who successfully joined reason with realpolitik, showing how power could be exercised without remorse, and also without rancor. While hatred and maledicta were deeply embedded in the new nation, there were those who set their faces against it. This was what Abraham Lincoln meant, in his first inaugural, by “the better angels of our nature.”
These noble beliefs were not held by saints and scholars detached from the realities of life, but by leaders who faced the ultimate political test of war and lesser conflicts. It is easy to be ethical in the abstract, but the United States has in the past produced presidents who succeeded without recourse to the corrupting language