[lbo-talk] Ellis: Complacency vs. Overreaction in US history

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri Jan 27 21:40:22 PST 2006


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/opinion/28ellis.html

The New York Times

January 28, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

Finding a Place for 9/11 in American History

By JOSEPH J. ELLIS

Amherst, Mass.

IN recent weeks, President Bush and his administration have mounted a

spirited defense of his Iraq policy, the Patriot Act and, especially,

a program to wiretap civilians, often reaching back into American

history for precedents to justify these actions. It is clear that the

president believes that he is acting to protect the security of the

American people. It is equally clear that both his belief and the

executive authority he claims to justify its use derive from the

terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

A myriad of contested questions are obviously at issue here foreign

policy questions about the danger posed by Iraq, constitutional

questions about the proper limits on executive authority, even

political questions about the president's motives in attacking Iraq.

But all of those debates are playing out under the shadow of Sept. 11

and the tremendous changes that it prompted in both foreign and

domestic policy.

Whether or not we can regard Sept. 11 as history, I would like to

raise two historical questions about the terrorist attacks of that

horrific day. My goal is not to offer definitive answers but rather to

invite a serious debate about whether Sept. 11 deserves the historical

significance it has achieved.

My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of

American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations

it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat

to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where

defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the

national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which

threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented

a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most

specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear

annihilation a distinct possibility.

Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it

places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival

of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to

believe so.

My second question is this: What does history tell us about our

earlier responses to traumatic events?

My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping

of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in

1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and

deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of

habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive

arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919,

which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in

the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of

Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the

grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national

security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war

anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in

government, universities and the film industry.

In retrospect, none of these domestic responses to perceived national

security threats looks justifiable. Every history textbook I know

describes them as lamentable, excessive, even embarrassing. Some very

distinguished American presidents, including John Adams, Abraham

Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, succumbed to quite genuine and

widespread popular fears. No historian or biographer has argued that

these were their finest hours.

What Patrick Henry once called "the lamp of experience" needs to be

brought into the shadowy space in which we have all been living since

Sept. 11. My tentative conclusion is that the light it sheds exposes

the ghosts and goblins of our traumatized imaginations. It is

completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date

will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it

defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence

on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have

faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a

greater danger than complacency.

Joseph J. Ellis is a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College and

the author, most recently, of "His Excellency: George Washington."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company



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