An Imperial Diadem: America in World War Two, World War Two in History

By Mark David Ledbetter

Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, An Imperial Diadem challenges the dominant historical narratives about that war, a war which saved the institutions but buried the ideals of the Enlightenment. Now, three generations worth of accelerating change have brought us to a historical disruption point of the kind that rewrites the past to capture the future. In the battle for the future, might a classical liberal understanding of the war help revive the Enlightenment's forgotten ideals? Might it provide lessons for our times? That is the intention and hope of this book.

 

Mark David Ledbetter is the author of the four volume work America's Forgotten History. Volume five is projected for publication in 2022

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark David Ledbetter
• Release date: Aug 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393098676

Mark David Ledbetter

In 2016, Mark Ledbetter returned to America after a forty year sojourn in Japan, raising a family and keeping an eye on America with both the knowledge of an insider and the eyes of an outsider, capping his career with three years as a visiting professor of linguistics at Hosei University in Tokyo. He arrived back in the United States in October of 2016, just in time to witness a political earthquake, one of those historical episodes rife with potential and danger, which give life, and sometimes death, to the story of a nation. Either way, he intends to monitor the process, doing what he can in his small way to save the Great American Experiment. He has written extensively on both linguistics and history, publishing in both English and Japanese.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE: ROOSEVELT’S CRUSADE

Alibertarian history is a history opposed to offensive war. A constitutional history is a history opposed to entangling alliances that suck America into offensive war. For America, the Second World War was, in effect, an offensive war in support of entangling alliances. However, don’t we have to concede that, even assuming America contradicted its libertarian and constitutional ideals by entering the war, wasn’t it fortunate that it did? If it had not, wouldn’t that have been the end of everything? Wouldn’t a murderous and fascist dark age have swept over the world?

That is certainly a possibility. And that possibility argues strongly that, in this case, it was fortunate beyond words that America ignored any philosophical qualms and entered the war. This volume accepts the plausibility of that logic. Therefore, it will in no way make the case that America should not have entered the war. But it will ask that the reader keep three things in mind.

First, winning the war was not an unambiguous victory for the good and the right. To the contrary, it condemned half the globe to half a century of a murderous and communist dark age. That, horrible as it was, would have been much better than, say, a fascist dark age that encircled the globe and lasted for centuries. On the other hand, without America’s entry, Nazis and Communists might have fought each other to the point of exhaustion and collapse. In fact, Senator Harry Truman and others advocated – sometimes seriously, sometimes facetiously – that we encourage precisely that outcome by supporting with our superlative industrial capacity whichever side was losing, switching sides as need be, until Nazis and Communists had extinguished each other.

We’ll never know how things would have gone had America not entered the war. But we do know now, eighty years later, that things are looking pretty good. It’s hard and possibly foolish to argue against the war that preceded that success, and the argument will not be made here. However, it is not an impossible argument to make.

Second, World War Two was not a clearly delineated event. That is to say, it was not a single book in the multivolume story of history but rather a single chapter in a longer book which I have called The Thirty Year Event and some historians have called The Second Thirty Years War. The final chapter of The Thirty Year Event covers the years 1939 to 1945 but the entire book runs from 1914 to 1945. If we are going to examine the success of libertarian and constitutional values in the context of war, we can’t consider only World War Two. We have to consider it in the context of the entire thirty year period. If we do that, a strong case can be made that America should have stuck with libertarian and constitutional antiwar values. That is, a strong case can be made that America’s original European intervention in 1918 not only facilitated the rise of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, and even Japanese militarists and Mao, but insured the more horrible second iteration of the Great War now known as World War Two. Taken in that context, America’s intervention in 1941 might have been an unavoidable cleaning up of its mistaken intervention in 1918, not an argument for America policing the world. It was interventionists addressing the massive problems left by interventionists, not a case for further interventionism.

Third, America’s success in the Second World War does not preclude us from looking at the damage to the American Experiment and Enlightenment principles inflicted by its participation in the war.

Good or bad, right or wrong, World War Two, for America, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s war. He wanted it. He conspired to get it. And once he had it, he executed it.

Conspired to get it?

George Victor, a psychotherapist who I would reclassify as a psychohistorian of the first order, makes a compelling case that American presidents, along with all powerful political leaders, have to be conspiratorial Machiavellians. The nature of the job requires it. In fact, I’d speculate that all complicated jobs that involve power flowing through webs of human relationships require it. Without a conspiratorial manipulation of the webs, the structure collapses, though this is less true with an emergent, decentralized, ecological, bottom-up structure of the kind that organizes free markets, English common law, human language, and the cycles of nature. The requirement that a president be conspiratorial would be especially true for one who aims to accomplish great things; and conversely, less true for one merely administrating that long dead thing – an emergent, decentralized, ecological, bottom-up thing – a small and super limited government of the type established by the Constitution

Every few years, historians, with an admirable consistency, rate Franklin Delano Roosevelt one of the top three American presidents, along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Washington was a special case, being charged as he was with the job of creating a presidency from that minimalist instruction manual we call the Constitution. But Lincoln and Roosevelt were master conspirators intending to do great things, even had they not gotten sidetracked by war. Lincoln intended to implement the vision of his hero, Henry Clay, something Clay called the American System, by which high tariffs would give a strong government the wherewithal to build infrastructure from which would emerge a magnificent flowering of industry and culture – and, of course, he intended to stop the spread of slavery into the territories. Franklin Roosevelt also intended a radical remaking of America through government, but according to the more modern theories laid down by progressive ideology.

Since doing great things requires big government, and since big government requires conspiracy, the successful politicians of doing great things through big government are master conspirators. More often than not, in world history, the doing of great things involves winning great wars. That was not exactly true in the case of America. Yes, Lincoln and Roosevelt fell into war, but that was not the great thing they had in mind. In the American context, doing great things has usually meant remaking America through government for the good of the people. The master politicians – that is, master conspirators – Lincoln and Roosevelt used their superlative abilities, including their conspiratorial skill, to prosecute war. But that, again, was only because they each fell into a war that, initially, neither wanted.

Since the New Deal, there’s been an overwhelming output of pro-Roosevelt histories and university courses, and a small but significant output of anti-Roosevelt histories. Roosevelt, in other words, is still controversial enough that you have to be pro, in which case you are blind to his conspiracies and conspiratorial nature, or anti, in which case conspiracies and his conspiratorial nature dominate all you see. George Victor, however, is something else. He writes as a pro-Roosevelt historian who, because of his deeper understanding of how human motivations and human systems work, recognizes the genius of Roosevelt’s conspiratorial/Machiavellian nature even as he appreciates Roosevelt’s accomplishments.

The parts of this book that veer towards conspiracy theory owe a lot to George Victor’s The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable. Psychoanalyst Victor, who understands the motivations of historians as much as he understands the motivations of politicians, has read voluminously of the historians for background, but draws his unorthodox opinions not from them but from official military histories of the United States and other nations. Those, he explains, compared to histories by civilians ... are freer of moral judgment. And more importantly, U.S. Army and Navy historians had access to secret records. He also relied on memoirs by people who worked closely with Roosevelt. In doing so, he finds a marvelous web of conspiracies of the type that Roosevelt-haters glory in revealing. Yes, he documents convincingly how Roosevelt tricked America into war. But, by his lights, that makes Roosevelt a Machiavellian hero who saved the world and its civilization from, as hypothesized above, centuries of a possible fascist dark age if America had not entered the war.

Much of the credit for uncovering the grand conspiracy also goes to a clear anti-Roosevelt partisan, Thomas Fleming, and his The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II, featured in this author’s Globocop: How America Sold Its Soul and Lost Its Way. Fleming has also read voluminously, but draws his unorthodox conclusions from an equally voluminous reading of original documents and newspaper accounts from the time, framed by an antiwar, classical liberal-leaning political philosophy.

For the section on America’s surreptitious and illegal war in the North Atlantic before Pearl Harbor, we’ll draw on both Victor and Fleming, but also on Navy Lieutenant Commander Douglas Norton. Norton, another pro-Roosevelt historian, published a long article called The Open Secret: The U.S. Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic April-December 1941 in Volume 26 of The Naval War College Review in 1974.

And finally, for the story of the USS Lanikai, I relied on a 1973 article from American Heritage Magazine, Volume 24, Issue 6 by Admiral Kemp Tolley titled "The Strange Mission of the Lanikai". It’s a fascinating and fun little story. I recommend checking it out online since it will be touched on only briefly here.

But how did America’s government evolve away from the small thing intended by the Constitution? How did an executive intended to be primarily a simple administrator divorced from much need for conspiracy become the head of a conspiratorial mega state inclined to go to war for the good of the world?

CHAPTER TWO: TWO ROADS TO WAR

The American Constitution established a government based on classical liberal principles antithetical to foreign wars or military interventions. Though far from perfect, the story of America’s first 120 years of foreign policy fits that liberal impulse fairly well.

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, both the Great Rule from George Washington’s Farewell Address and the Declaration of Independence were treated almost as founding documents, auxiliaries to the Constitution. Unlike the Constitution, neither had formal legal status but both had a moral status, forged in the fires of ideas and circumstances that elevated them to near equivalency with the Constitution. The Constitution proper, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Great Rule framed a kind of civic scripture somewhat akin to their essential antecedent, the more amorphous English constitution established not on a precise date nor built on a specific legal document, but on centuries of history, tradition, and common law. It was historian Pauline Maier who insightfully named the Declaration of Independence the American Scripture, even if she didn’t totally approve of that worshipful attitude. The Great Rule, too, was American scripture until the heresy of 1898. That year marked the dividing line, the start of a reformation which, over the course of the next five decades, facilitated the change of American scripture from one thing into something much different.

Until the heresy of 1898 and then subsequent reformation of Americanism, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Great Rule were the political pillars of an American civic religion dedicated to inalienable rights, to a far flung dispersal and strict limitation of political power, to liberty, and to self-reliance. The reformation, though, required a new America, one devoted to a powerful centralized government with rights, liberty, and self-reliance sublimated to the dictates of expert authoritarian guidance from the vast powers and bureaucracies at the center, concerned with creating, from the top, not a more perfect union but a more perfect society. America’s Forgotten History gives credence to the Original American Church over the Reformed American Church. America’s participation in the Second World War will be considered with as little dogma as possible, but from that originalist point of view.

George Washington exemplified and solidified the still unsettled American Creed when he stunned the nation and the world by stepping away from the pinnacle of power after two terms in office. He explained his descent from power in his Farewell Address, a project conceived and written with the help of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. One part of the Farewell Address, called the Great Rule, espoused free trade with whoever was willing, but military defense only of America.

The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. . . . It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

Each word was carefully considered. Alliances were not forbidden since future conditions were unpredictable, but they must be temporary, as limited and short as possible. Thomas Jefferson, in his Inaugural Address, confirmed the Great Rule in Jeffersonian cadences.

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none.

As a teenager, John Quincy Adams was in Paris at the time of the world-changing diplomatic events which would confirm his new republic to the world as the light of the future. His budding out-of-the-ordinary intellect earned him nightly instruction around the dinner table in the full range of arts and philosophy from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and his own father, John Adams. Three some decades later, as America’s greatest Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams would find a way for America to sustain the Great Rules’s philosophy of non-alignment and self-defense until the tail end of the century. He explained the essence in his Fourth of July Address of 1821:

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. [Were she to involve herself in foreign wars, even for the cause of freedom], she might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.

In 1941, four decades into the project to rewrite the Constitution according to progressive principles, Congress enacted the lend-lease program to supply the Allied powers with matériel to fight the war, thus entangling America for the second time that century in a European conflagration of unfathomable horror. Senator Arthur