About 25 years ago, my eldest son introduced me to T. R. Fehrenbach’s history of the Korean War, This Kind of War. First published in 1963 with several subsequent editions, This Kind of War is considered a military history classic and, to me at least, it is not only a page turner but a sobering look at one of the Cold War hot spots whose shadows and fires drift over and singe many to this day.
I was so intrigued and challenged by the book that when a Mexican colleague insisted that the United States had stolen half of Mexico and blamed that theft for her problems, one thing I did was to see whether Fehrenbach had written anything about the US-Mexico war.
To my delight he not only had, but he had included it in a magisterial history of Texas, Lone Star, published in 1968 with an updated edition in 2000.
This was the best two-for-one I had seen in a very long time.
I have several books on the history of Texas, all have their strengths and weaknesses but none are as comprehensive and sympathetic while also objective as Lone Star. Fehrenbach writes with a masculine, unapologetic and straightforward prose so lacking in much modern literature. Even where I might quibble with him, I cannot help but respect him.
And I certainly learned much from him.
Having grown up in Venezuela, hearing about our “theft” of Mexican land was not an out-of-the-ordinary sort of thing. The Zeitgeist in much of Latin American intellectual circles inclines towards victimology: we are poor and it’s your fault or we were stumped in our development because you stole land or resources from us, ad infinitum.
If Lew Kuan Yew had taken that victimhood approach, we would have never heard of Singapore other than it was an island with no resources that was left to rot by the British and the Malays.
(I am glad to note that many Latin Americans do not buy the above propaganda. I am reading an excellent book by three South American scholars who forcefully refute the canards so beloved by the intellectual class, epitomized by Eduardo Galeano’s Las venas abiertas de América Latina [The Open Veins Of Latin America]. Galeano describes the southern continent as if it were a body being autopsied and fed on by the imperialist Gringos. The three scholars intelligently yet hilariously refute Galeano in their Manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano (Manual Of The Perfect Latin American Idiot).
But, looking on the 19th Century theft of Mexican land motif, we need to consider their times and not judge them by our times. In this, Fehrenbach — and others — are most helpful, as the following extracts from Lone Star attest:
Texas and the South fell into the very trap Sam Houston repeatedly warned against: the answering of Northern sectionalism with a responding parochialism. Andrew Jackson, Houston, Benton, and the whole group loosely known as “Jacksonians” and Jacksonian Democrats, of course had their own political views; they were Westerners, suspicious of Eastern ways. But above all they had a mystical view of the growth of the United States — a country grown so great that even fools could not completely destroy it.
Their concept of national greatness had more to do with land and people than specific programs or forms of government. The Jacksonians as a group had no particular love for Negro slavery; many of them saw it as a national curse. The charge that the acquisition of Texas and California was part of a plot to extend slavery, apparently believed in the North, was specious. The Jacksonian view of the United States coud accept that institution, or accept its disappearance. It was a concept that saw the nation itself as greater than its passing economic or political phases, which had to be worked out internally from time to time.
The Jacksonians succeeded before they disappeared. It was left to James Polk to cap the dream.
Oddly, though Polk gained the United States more territory than any President before or since and made the nation finally strategically secure, he has never been given rank in the American pantheon of heroes. Apparently, there were several reasons: Polk, an able man, was always overshadowed by Jackson, whose man in the truest sense he always was. In the White House he carried out concepts and plans already conceived. And Polk seems to have had no real interest in the presidency, beyond the winning of the American West; he was not likely to catch the imagination of later generations who increasingly saw the White House in different terms.
There is no evidence that Polk wanted a war with Mexico for its own sake. He did want Texas and California and was willing to fight, if necessary, to get them. Part of this dream grew out of a natural desire for more territory, but the strategical vision must never be overlooked. The Rio Grande was, especially in those years, a formidable river, and it gave the United States a clearly defined southern boundary, which the Nueces could not do. The expansion to the western ocean prevented any other powerful nation from securing an enclave there, and it left the United States as the dominant power upon the North American continent. The frequently discussed “manifest destiny” — no nation ever had a true “manifest destiny” — was merely a popularization of these logical strategic goals.
We are accustomed to hearing that phrase as a facile explanation of our seemingly impossible expansion during Polk’s one term in office — over 1,200,000 square miles: Texas, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming. But, as Fehrenbach points out: this was no poetic “destiny” impelling us westward. This was a cold, clear-eyed recognition of our strategic security needs and the determination to address it.
When we sing “from sea to shining sea” or think of our country as extending “from coast to coast”, we are silently acknowledging the man who made it so.
The war with Mexico was kindled when Mexican troops fired on American soldiers north of the Rio Grande, killing several. Polk successfully asked Congress to declare war. It is important to note that prior to hostilities, the United States sought to negotiate terms amicably with Mexico; however, Mexico rejected the negotiations and even declared their sovereignty over Texas itself, almost a decade after her independence and now in process of admittance to the Union.
As Fehrenbach writes, “Mexico had almost assured conflict by making it clear that the United States was inheriting the Texan struggle with the Mexican nation. If the United States … annexed Texas, a part of the dowry … had to be the Texas-Mexico quarrel. The more unfortunate Whig propaganda in the United States, that the conflict grew out of a Southern plot to extend slavery to the Pacific, not only tended to reinforce Mexican innocence but convinced millions of Americans as well….”
In early 1962, the late Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, in impromptu comments made during a trip to Indonesia, said that our country could not be proud of the war with Mexico. As can be imagined, his comments were not well-received by Texans, nor by many Americans, who back then were better versed on the war than most are today.
The late Texas senator, John Tower perhaps had the best response when he said that the Attorney General possessed “glaring ignorance”.
Nevertheless, comments and commentary such as those uttered in Indonesia have become all-too-common today and they find fertile ground in historically deficient recent generations who have been conditioned to despise our country and its history. Not to mention adding comfort to unlearned, commonly repeated propaganda south of the border.
Polk’s administration genuinely sought dialogue but was rebuffed at every turn and when war erupted an objective reading of the realities on the ground back then would find it justified.
It is difficult for us today, having known and grown up in a relatively secure continent-wide country, to see the very real issues in the mid 19th Century: we were validly concerned for our security, having a recently declared and unstable revolutionary republic to our south and west — one that France invaded a few years later and which we helped Mexico defeat (but we are not pilloried for that interference!).
And having England to our north and west to also deal with, when we were a very young country still.
Polk led the war with Mexico, culminating with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, while also successfully negotiating the Oregon Treaty with England, resolving our issues with no bloodshed there.
By the end of his term we were basically the land mass most of us grew up taking for granted.
