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from FFF.ORG: The Road to the Permanent Warfare State
A Six Part Series, by Gregory Bresiger

Excerpt from Part 1: America’s traditional foreign policy

Isolationist supporters had spurned empires like those of Britain and France, along with their countless wars. There was another part of this isolationist tradition.

The hostility to empires included a suspicion of large standing armies. That was a libertarian idea. It was based, in part, on the experience of Britain in the English Civil War — which ended in a military dictatorship presided over by Oliver Cromwell — and the later Glorious Revolution of 1688. Standing armies, many Englishmen believed after the Glorious Revolution that drove out James II, inevitably led to domestic tyranny.

That anti-militarist tradition, as transmitted to America through some of the great English philosophers, called for reduced military budgets once a war was over, in order to protect against undue military influence in society. Many of the Founding Fathers supported the anti-militarist tradition, as expressed in the 18th-century writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in The Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters.

Their writings charged that James II’s attachment to a big military had been dangerous. “King James II wanted no Army to help him to preserve the Constitution, nor to reconcile the People to their own Interest: But, as he intended to invade and destroy both, Corruption and a Standing Army could enable him to do it; and (thank God) even his Army failed him,” according to Cato’s Letters.

Trenchard’s and Gordon’s work, which appeared in colonial America, was very popular. Large standing armies, many Americans believed, were inimical to liberty and became one of the causes of the American Revolution. Anti-militarism was an important part of the heritage of liberty of the United States.

George III, American revolutionaries wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”

Those policies resulted in an anti-militarist sentiment in early America that developed into a tradition dominant for a century and that took another century to extinguish. Still, in the 19th century it was strong.

“Has not the experience of the past demonstrated,” warned Rep. William Baker of Kansas late in the 19th century, “that just as you increase the army and the navy of a country you deprive a people to that extent of their liberties?”

Indeed, in his book The Civilian and the Military, Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., quotes Grant administration Interior Secretary Carl Schurz as saying Americans should be proud of not needing a large navy. “This is their distinguishing privilege and it is their true glory,” said Schurz, who had fled his native Germany in 1848 because of its militarism.

America’s often misinterpreted isolationist tradition was also alive in the 20th century, although it was growing weaker. In the 1930s, Sen. William Borah said that in matters of trade the United States “has never” been isolationist. But “in all matters political, in all commitments of any nature ... we have been isolationist.”
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Go here to read the series, starting with Part 1: http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1105d.asp