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To understand the full context of the U.S. executions of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi Jr. (see part 1), it is necessary to first do a broad survey of American history.
We begin with the Constitution, the document that brought the federal government into existence. That document set forth the powers that the federal government would be permitted to exercise. If a power wasn’t enumerated, the federal government wasn’t authorized to exercise it.
Why did the Framers deem it necessary to limit the powers of federal officials to those enumerated in the Constitution? It was because the American people didn’t trust governmental officials with unlimited power. They believed that the biggest threat to people’s freedom and well-being lay with their own government. If the Constitution had purported to bring into existence a federal government of unlimited powers, it would never have been approved by our American ancestors and, presumably, we would still be operating under the Articles of Confederation, which provided for a federal government of very weak powers.
To ensure that federal officials got the point, the American people enacted the Bill of Rights, which expressly and specifically restricted the powers of federal officials to infringe on fundamental rights and which protected long-established procedural rights and guarantees. The First Amendment, for example, protected freedom of speech from federal infringement. The Second Amendment protected the right of the people to keep and bear arms, mainly to ensure that people retained the means by which to resist tyranny at the hands of the federal government. The Fifth Amendment prohibited federal officials from depriving people of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
Notwithstanding the nation’s acceptance of slavery, it is impossible to overstate the exceptional nature of America’s governmental system from the inception of the republic continuing through the 1800s, especially compared to the United States of the 20th and 21st centuries. Suffice it to say that for more than a century, the federal government had no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, drug laws, immigration controls, foreign aid, central bank, fiat money, or income taxation, and few governmental controls over economic activity.
Early sentiments
That wasn’t the only exceptional aspect of American society. Bearing a deep antipathy toward standing armies, our American ancestors ardently opposed the idea that the United States should have an enormous permanent military force and overseas empire of military bases as part of its governmental structure. Looking back through history and through their own experience as English subjects, our ancestors understood that the primary means by which governments deprive their own citizens of life, liberty, and property was the military forces at their disposal.
Consider the following sentiments of early Americans:
James Madison: “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence [against] foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending have enslaved the people.”
Patrick Henry: “A standing army we shall have, also, to execute the execrable commands of tyranny; and how are you to punish them? Will you order them to be punished? Who shall obey these orders? Will your mace-bearer be a match for a disciplined regiment?”
Henry St. George Tucker on Blackstone’s 1768 Commentaries on the Laws of England: “Whenever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color of pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”
Virginia Convention in 1788: “[That] standing armies, in times of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power.”
Pennsylvania Convention: “[As] standing armies in times of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up.”
U.S. State Department website: “Wrenching memories of the Old World lingered in the 13 original colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, giving rise to deep opposition to the maintenance of a standing army in time of peace. All too often the standing armies of Europe were regarded as, at best, a rationale for imposing high taxes, and, at worst, a means to control the civilian population and extort its wealth.”
Opposition to a welfare-warfare state wasn’t the only thing that distinguished our American ancestors. They also opposed involvement in foreign wars, specifically those in Europe and Asia. The best statement of the noninterventionist philosophy that characterized our American ancestors is found in the address that John Quincy Adams delivered to Congress on the Fourth of July, 1821, in which he stated in part,
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 to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
In his speech, Adams also observed that if America were ever to abandon her noninterventionist and anti-imperialist philosophy, the “fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her spirit.”
Thus, notwithstanding the cataclysm of the Civil War, the ongoing expansion of the United States westward toward the Pacific Ocean under “Manifest Destiny,” and the war against Mexico in 1846, overall the American republic from the inception of the nation in the late 1700s through the end of the 1800s, was guided by antipathy toward standing armies, militarism, empire, and foreign interventionism.
The change
That all changed in 1898, when the United States went to war against Spain in the Spanish-American War, a war that is generally recognized as America’s fateful turn toward empire and imperialism. See, for example, William Graham Sumner’s great essay, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain” and “American Foreign Policy — The Turning Point, 1898–1919” by Ralph Raico.
The supposed aim of America’s war against Spain was to liberate Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from the Spanish Empire. What it did instead was subject those countries to direct control of the U.S. government rather than giving them their independence.
Thus began what can only be described as a never-ending political obsession among federal officials with U.S. control over Cuba, a phenomenon that would ultimately play an indirect role in the executions of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi in Chile in 1973.
When Filipinos came to the realization that the U.S. government intended to use its victory over Spain to substitute its control over the Philippines, they initiated a violent revolt against the United States. In the process of brutally suppressing the revolt, which took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, U.S. forces engaged in the form of torture that today we call waterboarding.
America’s insistence on imperialist control of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War led to the death or capture some 40 years later of more than 70,000 American troops there soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
The dark aftermath of the Spanish-American War was an ominous confirmation of the warning that John Quincy Adams had issued almost 80 years before about what would happen to America if she were ever to abandon her noninterventionist and anti-imperialist philosophy.
The full turn toward militarism and interventionism occurred with America’s entry into World War I, a war that was supposed to end all war and to make the world “safe for democracy.” Instead, America’s intervention into that war converted the U.S. government into a brutal dictatress here at home, one that jailed people who questioned America’s entry into the war, spied on Americans, engendered extreme prejudice against Americans of German descent, infringed on free speech and freedom of assembly, violated civil liberties, and forced American men, through conscription, to fight in a foreign war thousands of miles away against a nation that had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. America’s entry into World War I was a classic case of foreign interventionism, a type of foreign policy that our American ancestors had ardently opposed for the United States.
America’s entry into World War I accomplished nothing constructive, and more than 100,000 American men died for nothing. Needless to say, the war did not end war or make the world safe for democracy — World War II broke out only 20 years later.
Even worse, U.S. intervention into World War I, which brought about the defeat of Germany, actually gave rise to the conditions that brought Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to power. In the absence of the U.S. intervention, the warring parties, all of whom were worn out after years of deadly and destructive warfare, would have probably been forced to reach a negotiated peace. Instead, Germany’s defeat, brought about by the U.S. intervention, led to the vindictive provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, including a war-guilt clause that pinned the full responsibility for World War I on Germany, imposed heavy reparations on Germany, and created the Danzig Corridor, which cut Germany in two. Hitler later seized on those terms to garner support among German voters for his rise to power.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that when the war clouds began forming once again in Europe in the 1930s, the American people wanted no part of another European conflict. Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans were overwhelmingly opposed to entry into World War II. That’s what the America First Committee was all about. Even Franklin Roosevelt acted as if he felt the same way, as reflected by the promise he made to the American people during his 1940 presidential campaign — “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
Roosevelt, however, was lying. In fact, he was doing everything he could to secure America’s entry into the war. Knowing that he could never secure a congressional declaration of war, as Wilson did to enter World War I and which the Constitution requires before the president can wage war, Roosevelt embarked on a secret campaign to provoke the Germans into attacking the United States, so that he could ask Congress for a declaration of war under principles of self-defense. When that didn’t work, Roosevelt turned his attention to the Pacific with the aim of employing the same strategy against the Japanese. That’s what the oil embargo against Japan, the freezing of Japanese bank accounts, and the humiliating demands that Roosevelt made on Japanese officials were all about — to provoke Japan into “firing the first shot,” which would then provide him with a “back door” to the European war.
On December 7, 1941, Roosevelt’s scheme succeeded. The United States was, once again, embroiled in a foreign war, one that would prove even more deadly and destructive than World War I. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, virtually all opposition to America’s entry into World War II disintegrated.
One of the fascinating aspects of World War II was the U.S. government’s partnership with the Soviet Union, which had been ruled by a communist regime since World War I. Interventionists have long maintained that the U.S. partnership with the Soviet communists was necessary to defeat Nazi Germany.
Actually, however, it wasn’t. It would have been entirely possible for the United States and Britain to fight Germany on the western front independently of the war that was taking place between Germany and the Soviet Union on the eastern front.
In fact, after the Soviets turned back Germany’s invasion of Russia, the United States could have attempted to negotiate a separate peace with Germany, one that, say, permitted Hitler and his henchmen to live out their lives in South America, while permitting Germany to have a Western-style democracy and Eastern European countries to have free and independent regimes.
Roosevelt would have nothing to do with that idea and instead demanded unconditional surrender of the German regime. He didn’t want to be perceived as double-crossing America’s communist ally by entering into a separate peace with Germany. So, at the Yalta Conference held in August 1945, he effectively relinquished control over Eastern Europe to America’s communist partner, the Soviet Union. It was a decision that would have momentous consequences, consequences that would fundamentally alter America’s way of life in the postwar era and set forces into motion that would ultimately lead to the U.S. executions of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi in Chile.
This article was originally published in the November 2014 edition of Future of Freedom.
