2018 Military History sampler by Cornell University Press

THE CONTROL AGENDA A History of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Matthew J. Ambrose

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ambrose, Matthew J., author. Title: The control agenda : a history of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks / Matthew J. Ambrose. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017028026 (print) | LCCN 2017031400 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501712012 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501709371 (pdf) ISBN 9781501713743 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Strategic Arms Limitation Talks—History. | Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II—History. | Nuclear arms control—United States—History. | Nuclear arms control—Soviet Union—History. | United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. | Soviet Union—Foreign relations—United States. Classification: LCC JZ5665 (ebook) | LCC JZ5665 .A63 2018 (print) | DDC 327.1/747—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028026 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Promise of Control

Arms Control: Context and Precedents

Negotiation: A New Dimension in Strategic Competition

Aftermath and Adaptation: The Origins of SALT II

“In Good Faith”: Carter’s Gambit

“Thinking Out Loud”: The Struggle with Sprawl

107

“Summary—Bleak”: The Unraveling of Detente

145

INF: The Last Gasp of SALT

169

Conclusion: The Consequences of Control

215

Notes Bibliography Index

223 255 261

Introduction

THE PROMISE OF CONTROL

On October 26, 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger found himself in Moscow with a Soviet artillery piece pointed at him. Kissinger had been negotiating with the general secretary of the Communist Party (and de facto leader of the Soviet Union) Leonid Brezhnev and his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko. The subject was arms control: specifically to limit so-called strategic weapons, the largest missiles and bombers that made up the bulk of both countries’ nuclear arsenals. The United States and Soviet Union had signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (known as SALT I) two years earlier but its terms were limited, both in scope and duration. Both parties hoped to negotiate a more comprehensive, permanent, follow-on agreement (commonly referred to as SALT II). By 1974, however, progress on such an agreement had come to a standstill. After Gerald Ford became president, Kissinger hoped to get negotiations back on track. Doing so required meeting with Brezhnev in his country and on his terms. Kissinger was accustomed to dealing with Brezhnev, whose bon vivant demeanor concealed a tough, patient negotiator. But by 1974, Brezhnev’s age of 67 had begun to take a toll on his mental acuity. Though still capable, he would fidget in long meetings, showing off trinkets and tchotchkes; conversations with him tended to meander. On this day, Brezhnev revealed a tabletop-sized artillery piece during the discussion and began to play with it. He claimed that it worked but that he did not know how. He alternated pointing the gun at Kissinger’s aide and at the secretary of state himself. Gromyko, trying to preserve some semblance of decorum, suggested that Brezhnev point the gun at him instead of their 1

INTRODUCTION

guests. Brezhnev ignored him. Instead, he produced a miniature artillery shell and loaded it into the cannon. After a few tugs at the modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lanyard, the hammer dropped. A tense moment followed, but nothing happened and the meeting continued. Ninety minutes later the gun went off with a puff of smoke and a loud bang.1 If Brezhnevâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s antics exasperated Kissinger, he did not show it. Frustration quickly became one of the defining features of the SALT negotiations. Subsequent negotiations did not change this dynamic, which remained true well after Kissinger left office. Brezhnev could easily have been expressing his own frustration and boredom with what was among the most complex and intractable issues of the day. As foreign policy initiatives go, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks seem to stand apart. The negotiations set many precedents for modern arms control, yet most of the terms of the SALT I and II treaties expired after a few years or never went into effect at all. Arsenals with the destructive potential the Soviet Union and United States possessed had never existed before, and attempts to stop a runaway arms race such as this were virtually unprecedented. At times the fate of the entire world seemed to hang in the balance. Though the stakes seemed high, scholars continue to debate just how much the agreements actually changed the nuclear arsenals of each superpower. For these reasons, the SALT agreements rarely receive top billing when scholars review the history of arms control. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START) are better known (and better studied) for the role they played in the end of the Cold War. Given their enduring character and the drastic reductions in arms they brought, the prominence of these treaties seems justified. Their negotiating history is equally memorable, characterized by dramatic summit meetings, negotiating breakthroughs, and supposedly visionary leaders operating within a dynamic international environment. Compared to these events, SALT was a slog. Its negotiations took place during an era of stagnation and relative (though deteriorating) international stability, its pace was often glacial, and the process itself was deeply frustrating, even traumatic, for those involved. The INF and START negotiations and the treaties they produced were very different from SALT, but this was deliberate: many of the negotiators involved bore scars from a decade of fighting over SALT issues. By the time of the 1985 summit meeting between President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, virtually every weapon under discussion had featured in SALT negotiations at some point. Some of these systems were developed explicitly in response to the terms of or trends exposed by the SALT negotiations. Both parties brought with them the ugly political baggage of over

THE PROMISE OF CONTROL

fourteen years of debates over how to shape and control the nuclear balance and which party bore more of the blame for the status quo. An entire generation of policymakers cut their teeth on these debates, arguing in a vocabulary (since faded into obscurity) of “strategic superiority,” “counterforce targeting,” and the “window of vulnerability.” Though the issues at play were often abstract and technical, the SALT negotiations were a human process. Specific individuals shaped the negotiations as much as any technological development. Some, like Kissinger, used the negotiations to navigate between opposing groups: on one side a restive domestic populace that was deeply dissatisfied with the arms race and on the other powerful interest groups committed to the Cold War. Some, like President Jimmy Carter, saw the opportunity to secure a legacy as a peacemaker without imposing compromises that might alienate important constituencies. Others, such as the statesman and longtime negotiator Paul Nitze, saw in the negotiations a vessel for their worst fears of a deteriorating balance of power between East and West. And some, like President Ronald Reagan, saw a deeply flawed process that was likely too compromised to achieve a positive outcome that they would rather break than bend any further. Personalities, political exigencies, and occasional human foibles all exerted profound influences on the process. The SALT negotiations’ most significant legacies developed as a result of the perspectives these individuals brought to bear. The continued engagement of senior government officials with such a recalcitrant issue had significant and wide-ranging effects. The emphasis on achieving and maintaining a balance forced policymakers to think harder than ever before about the development of nuclear weapons and strategies for using them. The political implications of nuclear parity prompted new thinking about the nature of deterrence and alliance politics. The social and political circumstances surrounding the negotiations inevitably affected them as well. The ways policymakers adapted to these conditions in their pursuit of arms control reveals important truths about how they viewed their opponents, their allies, and their domestic rivals. In this way, the experience of SALT—its negotiation, the debates it triggered, and its repercussions—exerted influence beyond the terms and expirations of the agreements themselves. This influence reverberates today. Unfortunately, nuclear issues have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, and the implications for arms control are disturbing. The U.S. Department of State alleges that the Russian Federation has conducted multiple missile tests in violation of the INF Treaty. The process of revealing these allegations has prompted complaints in Congress about the integrity of the compliance-reporting process and accusations that the Department of State has downplayed or concealed noncompliance in order to ensure Russian cooperation

INTRODUCTION

in other areas. When the Obama administration revealed its Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action for dealing with Iran’s illicit nuclear program, widespread debates ensued about whether a better deal was possible, what role the prerogatives of Congress ought to play, and what the consequences of rejecting the plan might be. The politics of each of these issues are rooted in debates over the SALT agreements. The role of congressional oversight, the adequacy of verification regimes, and what to do with an agreement that is widely recognized as flawed all featured regularly in arguments surrounding SALT policies. In these cases, whether they were aware of it or not, politicians and policymakers from all sides were reading from a script first written over forty years ago. The relevance of SALT is unlikely to fade in the future. Today, all but one of the nuclear weapons states that signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons are modernizing their nuclear forces. The arsenals of the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation have attracted significant attention, particularly as their arsenals and declaratory policies have begun to stray from long-held assumptions. The full extent of the U.S. program is yet to be determined but is routinely (and conservatively) estimated to have a life-cycle cost of over $1 trillion. In the face of these changes, long-held policies such as the ban on nuclear testing and the rejection of nuclear first use have come under question. Mutual recriminations between the powers have already begun, but a return to the cycle of bilateral negotiations typified by the SALT and START agreements seems unlikely. The SALT negotiations took place in an era with important parallels to the present. Today, as in the 1970s, U.S. politics are characterized by a concern about the threat of “decline,” a real or perceived diminution in national strength, be it military, moral, or political. Then, as today, an era of U.S. dominance was coming to end and the nation was entering an era characterized by rising great powers and a decrease in relative economic and military power. As in the 1970s, the threat of economic stagnation today looms large. These factors have given the SALT experience a new relevance for dealing with an increasingly inhospitable climate for arms control.

The Means and Ends of SALT From 1969 to 1983, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a continuous set of negotiations over nuclear weapons. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT, lasted until 1979 and produced two finished agreements: SALT I and SALT II. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces negotiation spun off from

THE PROMISE OF CONTROL

SALT in 1980, carrying over a number of secondary issues from SALT II while still conforming to many of SALT’s basic underpinnings. Negotiations grew so routine that they became divorced from whatever agreement they sought to achieve next and were instead seen as a continuous process. In this process, senior policymakers on each side formulated a policy and presented and discussed these positions at formal diplomatic exchanges. These exchanges were punctuated by intermittent summit meetings by heads of state or cabinet officials. As this cycle repeated itself, policymakers primarily thought of their task as tending to the more abstract “SALT process.” Often the entire suite of issues and activities the negotiations encompassed was shortened to the term “SALT.” The agreements the SALT process produced are some of the most significant milestones of the Cold War. SALT I was widely seen as among the signal achievements of Nixon’s policy of détente vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. In contrast, the failure to ratify SALT II marked the death knell of détente and a return to conflict and competition. Through this period and after, the military, political, and diplomatic influence of SALT was profound. In the United States, the development of virtually every major weapons system after 1969 was influenced in some way by the ongoing talks. The incumbent president’s performance on SALT issues became a recurring theme in presidential elections. While negotiating such ambitious and complicated accords stretched the abilities of both governments, the relatively open and decentralized character of the U.S. government presented additional challenges. Negotiating competently required publicly reconciling difficult questions of nuclear strategy, ideology, and popular politics. Even when presidential administrations attempted to keep any prospective agreement narrowly tailored, the scope and complexity of the negotiations inexorably grew. The soaring rhetoric accompanying SALT I helped raise public expectations that stepping back from Armageddon was not only possible but within reach. Elevated public expectations put additional pressure on U.S. negotiators, straining the process further and increasing the costs of failure or delay. Though the public unquestionably helped frame and motivate negotiations over strategic arms, the SALT process was driven by elites. Indeed, it is impossible to divorce the legacies of SALT from the overall policy that gave birth to it: détente. It is a testament to SALT’s thorniness that Henry Kissinger and the other framers of détente originally saw arms control as only a small piece of a larger strategy. Instead, the place of the SALT negotiations in détente grew in importance until they were at the center of that strategy, such that the rejection of SALT II signaled the end of détente itself. The elite character of arms control is what made it so attractive to the architects of détente. Détente had powerful social underpinnings linked to public

INTRODUCTION

concerns, not least of which was the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation. After the domestic upheavals, chaos, and conflicts of the 1960s, leaders across the globe sought to shore up their positions. Student protests in the United States, the Cultural Revolution in China, and the general disorder in Europe of 1968 all contributed to a sense of internal instability among world leaders. In international affairs, the intractability of the Vietnam War, memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the crushing of the Prague Spring all made clear that unlimited competition among the superpowers was unsustainable. If political leaders could not bring some stability to world affairs restive domestic populations might revolt, imposing their own blunt, potentially unfavorable limits on competition. The policy of détente, therefore, was an effort by elite national decision makers to use foreign policy to simultaneously sate and mute the concerns of their respective populaces. National elites used diplomacy to aggrandize their roles, centralize their authority, and satisfy domestic constituencies in order to secure their positions. In nuclear affairs, SALT neatly filled this role. During a period characterized by fractious domestic politics, declining executive power, and an increasingly toxic politics associated with nuclear weapons, arms control became one of the constitutive elements of executive authority. The SALT process became a means to its stated diplomatic ends and to the continuance of investments in nuclear technology and specific deployment policies. In its worst moments, the SALT process became a perverse symbiosis between the Soviet Union and United States in which neither party could sustain unrestrained competition but neither could they abandon the competition entirely for fear of what their domestic constituencies and foreign competitors might impose instead. The negotiating process allowed both governments to carve out the directions they wanted their arsenals to go. The resulting agreements allowed leaders to provide assurances to their own people that these new investments were sanctioned and therefore necessary to maintain the carefully wrought balance. Thus, national elites rendered themselves indispensable while inoculating themselves against domestic backlash from continued nuclear competition. This arrangement, which reinforced leaders’ control over their own domestic political processes while providing a measure of influence over their opponents’, began to resemble a kind of condominium, or joint sovereignty arrangement. While this pattern did not solely define the process, the overtones of domestic condominium left SALT’s ability to achieve results stunted, until a new paradigm of arms control could take its place. The SALT process also accelerated trends in thinking about nuclear strategy, though not necessarily in ways that benefited the process. While previous U.S. administrations had dabbled in nuclear strategy, few had much stomach for its

THE PROMISE OF CONTROL

horrific details. They were content to set out general principles or to substitute budgetary principles for strategy. By inviting high-level decision makers to consider routinely how to construct and preserve a nuclear balance, the SALT process created new avenues by which different nuclear doctrines could earn consideration and become policy. In particular, the structure and principles of the SALT process may have accelerated the trend in the United States toward adopting counterforce doctrines, in stark contrast to the relatively basic model of deterrence that underpinned the earliest SALT efforts. Near the center of these events, exerting considerable influence without ever becoming the defining figure, was Paul Nitze. Nitze was a distinguished figure in the national security world for over twenty years prior to participating in the SALT negotiations. From 1969 onward, Nitze’s story is effectively the story of SALT. Nitze’s relationship with arms control was often fraught and even contradictory. He had qualms from the beginning about aspects of the process. These reservations grew into full-blown opposition. But by the end of the 1980s, after nearly two decades of continuous involvement with the issue, he was widely seen as one of the most respected authorities on the subject, and one of its most prominent advocates. Much like the SALT process, Nitze’s record of influence on SALT was mixed, its dénouement tinged with failure. He was in many ways one of his generation’s most fervent supporters of arms control (under the right circumstances), but he was also one of SALT’s fiercest and most influential critics. Whether working for or against it, Nitze helped shape the SALT process and its legacies more than almost any single individual. His story is therefore essential to understanding the process as a whole.

Verification Verification is one of the most important and unexamined aspects of this process and indeed of the process of diplomacy and state making in general. Used in this context, verification refers to the means by which governments monitor compliance with an arms control agreement, through espionage, transparency measures, or other techniques. Unfortunately, the vast majority of information about the capabilities of governments to conduct these activities was classified (and in many cases still is). Nevertheless, verifying the terms of these agreements was a critical function of the SALT process. By forcing national security elites to confront verification questions routinely, the SALT process required a continuous reassessment of essential, even existential questions. Verification questions were at the root of the epistemology of the national security state, forcing its members to consider what it meant to know anything

INTRODUCTION

about its adversaries and what standard of knowledge was required to define a threat. Attitudes about what could be verified adequately and what needed to be verified were some of the most important fault lines in debates about the nature and utility of the SALT process. As the process grew more complex and dynamic, better verification measures became necessary, but these capabilities remained so highly classified that public debates on the subject were at best highly circumscribed, further influencing how the public perceived the process. Verification issues had dynamic effects on the negotiations. The compliance and monitoring regimes the SALT agreements authorized could only be tested after the highest-profile elements of negotiation, signing, and ratification had occurred. At first these functions occurred outside the public eye, but over time they provided a track record for policy makers to parse or criticize. Eventually arguments over whether previous agreements were verifiable took place in discussions of the merits of new agreements. Ensuring an adequate verification regime on the next agreement then became more difficult, as negotiators had to address existing track records while avoiding opening old wounds left from the compromises of previous agreements. Too often, verification issues are treated as after-the-fact technical concerns or bad-faith objections to new agreements. This view discounts what is often the most controversial aspect of any new arms control agreement. Thus, this book will include developments in verification in the overall narrative of the SALT process.

Note on Nomenclature Astute readers will notice that this book adheres almost exclusively to the NATO reporting names for Soviet weapons, such as the Strategic Rocket Forces. Although the opening of the Soviet archives has revealed the once-secret names for most of these systems, using the NATO names serves several purposes. Most important, the terms offer consistency. Since Soviet negotiators never revealed the internal names for these weapons, the NATO names were the de facto official terms for the purposes of arms control negotiation and were used by both sides. The highly compartmentalized nature of the Soviet system could also sometimes obfuscate the nature of the weapons to which internal labels applied. Sometimes the Soviets gave two names to a single system or labeled new missiles as â&#x20AC;&#x153;upgradesâ&#x20AC;? for essentially political reasons. Because these details were so closely held, however, few members of the Soviet leadership or negotiating teams were aware of these discrepancies. While the internal labels were no doubt important within the Soviet military or design bureaus, the NATO names were both more widely understood by the negotiators and are more accessible to readers.

Objects of War The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement

Edited by Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments xi Introduction. The Things They Carried: War, Mobility, and Material Culture

Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra

Part I. States of Things: The Making of Modern Nation-States and Empires

Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra

1. The Honor of the Trophy: A Prussian Bronze in the Napoleonic Era

Alice Goff

2. Colliding Empires: French Display of Roman Antiquities Expropriated from Postconquest Algeria, 1830–1870

Bonnie Effros

3. Pretty Things, Ugly Histories: Decorating with Persecuted People’s Property in Central Bohemia, 1938–1958

Cathleen M. Giustino

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v iii Conte nts Part II. People and Things: Individual Use of Things in Wartime

107

Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra

4. “Peeled” Bodies, Pillaged Homes: Looting and Material Culture in the American Civil War Era

111

Sarah Jones Weicksel

5. Embodied Violence: A Red Army Soldier’s Journey as Told by Objects

139

Brandon Schechter

6. Small Escapes: Gender, Class, and Material Culture in Great War Internment Camps

164

Iris Rachamimov

7. The Bricolage of Death: Jewish Possessions and the Fashioning of the Prisoner Elite in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1942–1945

189

Noah Benninga

Part III. Afterlives: From Things to Memories

221

Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra

8. Lisa’s Things: Matching Jewish-German and IndianMuslim Traditions

223

Gerdien Jonker

9. Circuitous Journeys: The Migration of Objects and the Trusteeship of Memory

248

Jeffrey Wallen and Aubrey Pomerance

10. Paku Karen Skirt-Cloths (Not) at Home: Forcibly Migrated Burmese Textiles in Refugee Camps and Museums

277

Sandra H. Dudley

Epilogue 309 Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra

Notes on Contributors

319

Index 325

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Introduction The Things They Carried: War, Mobility, and Material Culture Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra

Cell phones, lifejackets, and toys. As over one million refugees fleeing war in Syria struggled to gain a foothold in Europe in the summer and fall of 2015, newspapers, social media feeds, museums, and galleries were awash with photographs depicting the objects carried by refugees as they made life-threatening journeys across land and sea. Documentary photographer Bryan Sokol’s “The Most Important Thing” series shows refugees and items of both sentimental and practical value: a Syrian man with keys to an apartment (which may no longer exist), a little girl with a pair of jeans, a woman and her wheelchair.1 Other objects are described as precious reminders of home or of missing or dead family members. The website of the nongovernmental organization Mercy Corps depicts a seven-year-old boy with a small toy robot. “Muhamad, 7, and his family have lived in Jordan for two years now,” a caption explains. “He’s holding a birthday gift from his grandfather. The robot toy reminds him of his grandfather, ‘who is now in heaven.’”2 Across the centuries, people in flight from war or persecution have carried personal possessions with them, often with great difficulty.3 They

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2 Introduc ti on

Figure I.1. French soldiers behind the lines transforming spent artillery shells into vases during the First World War. Soldiers explained the widespread practice of making “trench art,” as it came to be known, as a way to deal with boredom but also as an expression of a desire to make beauty in the midst of death and destruction. “Artisanat de tranchée poilus au travail guerre de 1914–18,” Wikimedia Commons, private collection, photographer unknown, 1914–18.

and their descendants have gone to considerable lengths to preserve these objects, despite their everyday-ness, because of the value they accrued as they accompanied displaced people on their travels. Aware of the significance of these things, history museums have sought them out, and many are now on display or languishing in the storerooms of immigration and Holocaust museums around the world. Museum visitors on a quest to understand the lives of migrants of earlier generations turn to glass cases housing the dolls, musical instruments, tools, or dish towels that voyaged with them. In parallel, virtually all Holocaust museums display the suitcases, shoes, and eyeglasses that accompanied victims to the camps. Curators also collect the rings, vases, combs, and other things crafted of found materials by soldiers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates.4 These laboriously constructed objects record the resilience and ingenuity of displaced people deprived of the great majority of their possessions.

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The Thin gs Th ey C ar r ied 3 Through the presentation of the banal things that immigrants, refugees, and prisoners carried with them, these exhibits remind us of how people in desperate circumstances rely on familiar things in their efforts to retain memories and maintain a sense of self. In so doing they transform the ordinary into the extraordinary; a vase crafted from a spent artillery shell does not just hold flowers, a spoon made in a concentration camp is not merely something used to eat, and a pen carried across oceans is as important as a memory prompt as an instrument with which to write. In most museums, because they are behind glass—visible, but beyond the reach of the other senses—these objects offer empathy only through sight. A few museums are more ambitious and seek to offer visitors a more fully embodied experience. At the Australian National Maritime Museum, for example, visitors can take a short voyage on the Tu Do (“Freedom”), the restored fishing boat that brought thirty-one refugees fleeing Vietnam to Sydney in 1977.5 During that voyage they not only feel the deck moving beneath their feet but also smell Vietnamese food. Visitors to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York crowd into apartments furnished as they would have been in the 1880s. And some Holocaust museums use various strategies, including asking visitors to take their place in a cattle car or to walk on an unnervingly unstable surface, to provide a more vivid sense of deportation than can be evoked by viewing photographs and texts and objects in cases. Survivors cherish, photographers record, museums preserve and display, and viewers seek out these things because they think that those objects will provide a different kind of knowledge than would a history told in words. The theoretical foundations of that conviction are much debated.6 Although some scholars refuse the distinctions separating material culture, visual culture, and text, many persuasively argue that images, and especially things, that people have touched create a more immediate sense of connection, a stronger emotional response, to their subjects than do texts. Photographs of victims personalize them in a way that a name on a list does not. Seeing the bra painstakingly assembled by an inmate of a concentration camp effectively conveys the intensity of the quest for dignity, modesty, and sexuality in a context designed to destroy all those qualities.7 Feeling the Australian sun on one’s head while crowded onto the small deck of the Tu Do provides the visitor a glimmer of the physical experience of fleeing by sea.

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4 Introduc ti on Whether or not one accepts the particular pedagogic capacity of material culture, the fact that refugees, exiles, soldiers, and prisoners went to extraordinary lengths to bring, make, find, and preserve all kinds of things is evidence of their significance to them. It is, we argue, because people need things that they have made, and make, these efforts to acquire and keep them.8 Even in times of peace and tranquility, people’s need for objects is not limited to the obvious uses: protection from heat and cold, physical comfort, cooking and eating. They need them for many of the activities that are unrelated to physical survival but that define humanness, including writing, making music and art, working, and communicating.9 People also need things to store memories, to experience pleasure, and to feel in touch with God.10 As the case of the Syrian refugees with which we opened vividly exemplifies, the meaning of things to individuals is often magnified or transformed entirely in the context of war and displacement. War brings with it the destruction of the stuff of identity, of belonging, and of memory: homes, clothing, and landscapes. Wars also destroy the tools needed for productivity and creativity. Loss of pots and pans brings not only hunger in its wake but also the capacity to nurture. And how could one pray if one’s rosary, tefillin, or copy of the Koran were no longer at hand? The rescued remnants take on new meanings when they are all that is left of a formerly much larger array of the stuff of everyday life. Not only have individuals whose lives have been interrupted and displaced by war invested heavily in things but so, too, have governments and armies. For as long as rulers have raided enemy territories, they have destroyed and stolen the things valued by those they have conquered.11 When the goal has been domination but not annihilation, only those objects understood to threaten the new form of rule were destroyed as new ones, designed to facilitate governance and compliance, were imposed.12 Attempts to eradicate entire peoples have resulted in more drastic assaults on the material world, including efforts to wipe out the material culture— and more broadly, the civilization—of those peoples at the same time.13 Finally, those engaging not in genocide but in revolutionary efforts to completely transform political or religious systems have also had recourse to material destruction, particularly iconoclasm, to make room for a new iconic regime.14

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The Thin gs Th ey C ar r ied 5

Figure I.2. Portraits of the tsars of Russia (including Nicholas II, Alexander II, and Alexander III), which were torn from the walls during the Russian Revolution, 1917. Photo by Three Lions, Wikimedia Commons.

Although both individuals and institutions have assumed that things can be counted on to serve them obediently, many scholars would argue that this is not, in fact, the case. As a consequence of their very materiality, things may counter human will: Statues are accidentally decapitated in transit; wood that has great longevity at home deteriorates quickly in the climate of its site of captivity; and the weight of architectural fragments sinks the ships tasked with carrying them. The thingness of things not only renders them fragile, however, but also makes them impossible to control.15 The European clothing imposed on a colonized people, intended to shape their minds and bodies to obedience instead, sometimes, inspired revolt. Lead, a source of great beauty when transformed into crystal, poisons those who drink from it. Things, in other words, act in the world; they are not fully subject to human intent. They do not have agency or will but they can be recalcitrant. This is, then, a book about the displacement of people and things in times of war, in Europe and its former colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We have focused on Europe in this broad sense because war

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6 Introduc ti on and forced mobility transformed the demography and material culture of Europe and its colonies so dramatically in the modern era. Europe is therefore rich territory for exploring the use of things in moments of extreme violence. The diverse experiences examined in this book also begin to illuminate differences and similarities in relationships between humans and objects across time and space. In each of the distinct cases discussed in this book, individuals, institutions, and states attempt to use things to cope, in one way or another, with the violence done to people and their material environment. And, in virtually all the chapters, the things do not quite behave, do not do exactly what is asked of them. Including a wide geographic range within these limits allows us to show that this relation among war, mobility, and things was not limited to the German or Czech lands, France, or Russia, nor to continental regimes; the chapters featuring Algeria, the United States, India, and Burma demonstrate the relevance of this relation well beyond European shores. At the same time, we can perceive some key differences across time and space, between the kinds of loot most valued by Civil War soldiers and the men and women who fought in the Soviet army during World War II; between the ability of nineteenth and twentieth century states to carry out the mass expropriation and transfer of cultural property. We can also readily distinguish among the objects produced in an officer’s POW camp during the First World War, a concentration camp during the Second World War, and a refugee camp in the 1990s. We have focused on the modern period because although armies and states have long plundered, and those fleeing war have always attempted to carry valued objects with them, several developments in the modern era transformed the relation among people, things, mobility, and violence. The emergence of mass politics intensified pressure on states and governments to legitimize themselves and build emotional attachments through things. The development of mechanized warfare and mass armies enhanced the ability of states to move, transform, or destroy material objects. The expansion of consumerism profoundly altered the social and cultural meaning of objects to both individuals and states. Finally, the birth of the modern museum reconfigured relationships between objects and individual and collective memory. Forced mobility and material culture have been inextricably intertwined throughout modern history: Each has powerful analytic (and even

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The Thin gs Th ey C ar r ied 7 causal) significance for the other. We cannot truly understand the dynamics and consequences of war without considering the centrality of material culture to violent conquest, the unmaking and making of empires and nation-states, and the construction of social and cultural identities. Material culture offers, furthermore, a particularly rich and unique form of access to the emotional and social dimensions of war and forced displacement. Crucially, these sources offer insight into the emotional lives and experiences of individuals who did not leave textual records. We also cannot fully comprehend the history of material culture without analyzing the ways in which war and forced migration have reshaped and resignified the things that surround us. Looking at material culture in violent contexts enables and forces reflection about what happens to things when their “normal” life cycles are disrupted. We learn much about the meanings things carry, the identities they generate, how they are physically transformed and repurposed, sometimes in very startling ways. Because the concern here is to explain how institutions and people have used things and how those things have pushed back, we have left the task of determining what counts as a relevant/meaningful object to our historical actors (rather than defining the boundaries a priori). That has produced a very wide range of goods including but not limited to: sculpture, architectural fragments, fine furniture, paintings, uniforms and other clothing, silverware and porcelain, rifles, medals, watches, bicycles, table linen and hand towels, cookbooks, pianos, doctors’ instruments, and school satchels. The source base for this volume is necessarily as rich and varied as the topics addressed. Several authors (Jonker, Dudley, Wallen, Pomerance) examine things themselves, many of which traveled great distances under extreme conditions before landing in the hands of a scholar. Others (Effros, Schechter, Rachamimov, Benninga) focus more on visual and textual sources including drawings, photographs, reports, diaries, memoirs, and written testimony. Still others (Goff, Giustino, Weicksel) draw equally on material, visual, and textual evidence. As this range of objects and sources indicate, our project requires bringing into dialogue several distinct modes of thinking and bodies of scholarship. Vast interdisciplinary literatures address the dynamics of modern warfare, expropriation, and restitution.16 And yet how people use things, and how things resist being used, has only rarely entered the purview of military historians or those who specialize in the history of

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8 Introduc ti on forced mobility.17 Curators in ethnographic and art museums have been forced in recent decades to address the violent histories that brought objects into their collections, but those discussions have been little noticed by those who work on war, migration, or material culture.18 We argue that bringing these fields together sheds unique light on at least four significant and interrelated aspects of war, forced mobility, and material culture: state expropriation/reappropriation; wartime mobilities of people and things; immobilized people and redeployed things; and the afterlives of things. The book seeks to elucidate both how states, soldiers, civilians, prisoners, refugees, and museums have put things to work and how the things’ materiality has limited the use that those human forces can make of them. The first section of the book focuses on how states have attempted to mobilize the things they acquired in war. The success of those efforts was variable: States are not, in fact, unified actors and have not always acted coherently; the citizens of those states have not always been grateful recipients of the pillaged goods; and the things themselves have resisted their redeployment. In the second section we shift our attention from a focus on the state to individuals. Included here are soldiers, colonists, freed people and “contraband,” civilians, refugees, prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates. What binds these diverse categories is that they all found themselves displaced, or in intimate contact with things displaced, by violence, most often by war. Bringing them into a common frame sheds light on the importance people attribute to things in moments when relations among humans are at their most fraught and fragile. The final section addresses the afterlives of things, what happens to them in the calm following the storm. Here we are especially preoccupied with memory-work done by objects, whether in the context of individual and familial histories or in museums.

States of Things: The Making of Modern Nation-States and Empires The expansion and construction of empires and new nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often entailed the violent transformation of the material world as much as political institutions. Millions were

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The Thin gs Th ey C ar r ied 9 displaced or bound to new polities in the aftermath of wars that moved both frontiers over people and people over frontiers. Building on an earlier revolutionary tradition born with the Puritan forces in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century and developed by American and French revolutionaries, material culture became central to the legitimation of new states and to the imagination and consolidation of communities within them.19 For those displaced by war, meanwhile, objects served as bridges between old and new homes and communities as well as transmitters of memory. Overseas empires systematically attempted to use material culture to maintain national identities abroad, to “pacify” and govern colonized populations, and to sustain and embody their “civilizing” projects. In French North America, for example, clothing shaped the way that French rulers understood racial categories. An ongoing perception that one could become French by adopting French modes of dress challenged the simultaneous transition from a fluid to a more rigid and immutable conception of race.20 Imperial regimes also sought to influence the form of cities, mosques, and synagogues as well as alter religiously marked dress. The most famous of these conflicts, ongoing into the present day, pivots on the issue of women’s dress. In parallel, Belgian, French, German, and British authorities were committed to providing “proper” domestic space and European clothing modified for warmer climates in their empires. These imperial powers also aimed to regulate and control which indigenous populations would be allowed access to which elements of European domesticity and clothing. In all of these examples, material culture was essential to the construction and maintenance of particular norms of gender, sexuality, class, and race in the context of imperial hierarchies.21 Material culture was also central to the cultivation of imperial loyalties in Europe’s multinational empires. Here, the goal was not to create a homogeneous national culture but to unite a linguistically, religiously, and nationally diverse population across vast stretches of land. The writer Joseph Roth recalled, for example, how the multilingual Habsburg Empire was united in part by a common and recognizable material culture: “Everywhere the gendarmes wore the same cap with a feather or the same mud-colored helmet with a golden knob and the gleaming double eagle of the Habsburgs; everywhere the doors of the Imperial tobacco monopoly’s shops were painted with black and yellow

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1 0 Introduc ti on diagonal stripes. . . . Everywhere were to be found the same coffeehouses, with their smoky vaulted ceilings and their dark alcoves.”22 Those strategies were reprised by the Soviet and East German regimes, which set statues of communist leaders on the pedestals where kings and nobles had stood and razed royal palaces to make room for palaces of the people. Habsburg successor states and post-Socialist states in Eastern and Central Europe demolished statues, renamed streets, and remade domestic interiors in the process of creating post-Habsburg and post-Socialist regimes. Some went so far as to rebuild some of those destroyed sites of monarchical rule. The politicization of material culture subsequently took on new life in anticolonial movements and in the construction of postcolonial or post imperial states and nation-states. From George Washington’s homespun, to Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement through Mobutu’s Abacost, the eradication of imperial everyday materiality and its replacement by “authentic” forms was viewed as essential to the political viability of the new nations.23 All of these modern states strove to encourage certain patterns of consumption, certain uses of everyday material culture, in order to facilitate governance. They also, however, saw the potential in the fine arts and antiquities, potential that was fundamentally altered by the advent of the modern public art museum in the late eighteenth century.24 In premodern times, victorious Vikings and crusaders returned home with trophies and items of religious significance; kings seized neighboring castles; jewels, furs, and works of art traded hands with the rise and fall of states and became emblems of political and military power. In the modern period, objects stolen or appropriated through warfare assumed new symbolic meanings and purposes. More than mere booty that served to enrich rulers or populations, such loot could now represent a victory over a hated national enemy, sustain particular nationalist historical narratives, consolidate expanding empires, or signify a revolution or regime change.25 Technological developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allowed for the transfer of ever more monumental spoils of war; Egyptian, Greek, and Roman statues, architectural fragments, and obelisks were brought to inscribe imperial power into the cityscape of European capitals. Conquering armies encountered highly valued cultural artifacts— Greek, Roman, Latin American, African, and Asian but also Mayan and Aztec. Resources were devoted to the transportation of what might be

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The Thin gs Th ey C ar r ied 1 1 termed the “trophies of war”—sculptures, architectural fragments, musical instruments, and everyday things seized by conquering armies. This booty became the foundation of the collections of the great museums of Europe and North America, either appropriated as part of a national, imperial, or western civilization or exoticized as an ethnographic find. European museums founded on pillaged goods came to face new challenges in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These museums often still hide or obscure the violence that undergird their collections. Here their goal is not to understand the experience of migration or violence but rather to celebrate or, alternately, normalize the power of the state or empire. Even after decades of claims by African, Latin American, or European states and Native American Nations for the return of the cultural goods taken from their territory, most of those things remain in the museums of the victors. In those museums they are mobilized in the service of a different historical narrative than the one they would tell were they to be repatriated.26 Neither the continental nor overseas imperial wars of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries were intentionally genocidal. Correspondingly, for example, although there was much theft when Egypt lay under British control, the occupying regime did not destroy the area’s monumental heritage, and the same was true of the Ottoman period in Greek history. That changed in the twentieth century, with important ramifications for the meaning of things in wartime. In the ethnic cleansing that became prevalent in the twentieth century, expropriation facilitated the eradication of entire populations. The case of the Nazi regime is the most familiar example. The gradual theft of the possessions that made Jews part of the national culture—dwellings and their contents, radios, clothing, the tools needed to practice their trades and professions—was the first step of their dehumanization and ultimate annihilation. Even those who were able to flee were forced to leave behind homes and businesses as well as furniture, artwork, clothing, and jewelry. Those goods stolen from Jews and occupied territories were stacked up in warehouses and distributed to bombed-out Germans, serving as both a reward for political complicity and a mark of belonging in the racially defined national community.27 This expropriation and annihilation inevitably left ghosts behind. Historians have recently analyzed the cultural, political, and social significance of former Jewish spaces in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust. They have

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1 2 Introduc ti on focused specifically on material culture, such as former Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, to better understand the “presence of the absence” of Jews in postwar Eastern Europe.28 Jews were far from the only victims; Nazi leaders and ideologues justified their conquest and resettlement of Eastern Europe with narratives that linked Slavic racial inferiority and cultural backwardness to the neglect of material (often domestic) spaces and land.29 The objects left behind were plundered by neighbors, redistributed by government authorities, or reinterpreted as a form of national patrimony. In the postwar period this process was, in some sense, reversed. As twelve million Germans fled or were expelled from Eastern Europe, their belongings, homes, businesses, and villages were expropriated, evacuated, and resettled. The city of Breslau/Wrocław was transformed from a “German” to a “Polish” space after World War II, for example. This entailed cleansing the city not only of its German inhabitants but also of their material traces: renaming neighborhoods, landmarks, and streets; demolishing “German” statues; and removing gravestones with German names. Scholars have examined the role of material culture (like religious icons and ruins) in the construction of the Iron Curtain between West Germany and Czechoslovakia after World War II and in the formation of expellee communities in postwar West Germany.30 In the postwar world, material culture, including homes, furniture, cultural artifacts, and the built environment, was central to the politics of retribution, reconstruction, and restitution.

People and Things in Wartime: Soldiers, Civilians, and Prisoners Mass conscription and mechanized warfare changed the very nature of war and the place of both people and things in it. The second section of the volume moves from state to individual relationships to things. It is impossible to separate the individual use of things from the goals and ideologies of the states that set armies in motion or expelled unwanted minorities. And yet, states were not able to fully control how individuals used and appropriated objects, nor did objects always conform to the uses intended for them. Warfare, displacement, and incarceration meanwhile

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Incidental Archaeologists French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa

Bonnie Effros

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Effros, Bonnie, 1965– author. Title: Incidental archaeologists : French officers and the rediscovery of Roman North Africa / Bonnie Effros. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017048068 (print) | LCCN 2017051402 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501718533 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501718540 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501702105 | ISBN 9781501702105 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Archaeology—Political aspects—Algeria— History—19th century. | Archaeology—Political aspects— France—History—19th century. | Archaeology and state— France—History—19th century. | France—Armed Forces— Algeria—Operations other than war—History—19th century. | Algeria—Antiquities, Roman. | Algeria—History—1830–1962. Classification: LCC CC101.A4 (ebook) | LCC CC101.A4 E34 2018 (print) | DDC 965/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048068 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Contents

Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations and Note on Spellings Introduction: War and the Destruction of Antiquities in the Former Ottoman Empire

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xvii

1. K nowing and Controlling: Early Archaeological Exploration in the Algerian Colony

2. E nvisioning the Future: French Generalsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Use of Ancient Rome in the 1840s

3. The View from Ancient Lambaesis

125

4. Institutionalizing Algerian Archaeology

168

5. Cartography and Field Archaeology during the Second Empire

211

Epilogue: Classical Archaeology in Algeria after 1870

248

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x Conte nts Notes 261 Bibliography 323 Index 355

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Introduction

War and the Destruction of Antiquities in the Former Ottoman Empire

With reports of the obliteration of ancient archaeological sites in Syria and northern Iraq by Daesh regularly on the front page of the news, many in the West have reacted with disbelief and outrage to the fundamentalist theater of destruction.1 They have blamed the pillage, looting, and purposeful demolition of monuments for destabilizing the moral economy that underlies the conservation of World Heritage sites.2 Yet many commentators have neglected to mention that for more than a century Europeans argued that these antiquities, and the monuments of which they were a part, had little or no value to the Arab inhabitants of the lands from which they were purchased, stolen, received as gifts, or taken by force.3 European imperial powers alleged the indifference or hostility of Indigenous peoples toward ancient remains and therefore invoked archaeological claims to assert their right not only to procure or â&#x20AC;&#x153;protectâ&#x20AC;? artifacts but also to impinge on the jurisdiction of foreign powers, in this case the Sublime Porte.4 Indeed, Ottoman authorities sought to curb this wholesale European appropriation, and in some cases theft, of antiquities from various parts of the empire as yet one more feature of European

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2 Introduc ti on intransigence with regard to its territorial sovereignty.5 Legislation passed in the 1870s and 1880s not only attempted to ban the export of ancient remains but also established antiquities museums in Istanbul and Tunis. Both measures enjoyed only limited success.6 After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim and Christian populations in the Middle East and North Africa continued to pay a high price for Western claims to the ancient patrimony located on their lands.7 The nearly two-hundred-year struggle over the rightful place of ancient monuments located in the former Ottoman Empire context is fundamental to understanding Daesh’s recent destruction of classical remains. Although their rhetoric for the annihilation of these remains has included references to their pagan origins, most of the Roman monuments under attack did not share the anthropomorphic features central, for instance, to the Taliban’s iconoclastic justification of the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001.8 Roman architectural remains instead constitute potent symbols of European imperial power in ancient just as in modern times. The annihilation of these symbols of Western civilization has become a powerful tool by which Daesh rejects Western hegemony and conveys its rejection of de facto Western claims (via international bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO]) to the universal value of these sites for humankind.9 In fact, the designation of World Heritage status may even have made some Syrian monuments more desirable targets of the wrath of Daesh.10 Efforts to save ancient monuments from destruction through exportation or replace them digitally, undertakings benefitting primarily Western audiences who have funded them, have contributed to the onesidedness of the conservation narrative.11 By rejecting Western narratives of the foundation of civilization and claims to the benefits of cultural internationalism and “encyclopedic museums” made by institutions such as the British Museum, the Louvre, the Getty Museum, and the Pergamon Museum, fundamentalist actors in the Middle East have staked a claim to a new world order, one just as, if not more, destructive than the last.12 Although the case of the active annihilation by Daesh of classical monuments, as at Palmyra and ancient monuments at Nineveh, is extreme, the negative perception of Roman and other pre-Islamic monuments that underlies its ideology is far from unique in the Middle East and North

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War and the De structio n o f A n tiq u ities 3 Africa. The ambivalent legacy of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeology has shaped the selective reception of classical and biblical-era remains in modern Israel and Egypt,13 just as it has affected conservation policy in the post-colonial Maghreb, where suspicion of French narratives of history has led to the near erasure of events that do not fit with postcolonial discourse.14 In the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, the perception that Arabs and Berbers have little connection to the classical past (an argument first made by colonial authorities in the time of the French conquest) has contributed no doubt to the present shortfall of resources available for the preservation of ancient Roman sites.15 In Tunisia, like Algeria, despite the peaceful symbiosis between the living populations and ancient remains for more than a millennium before the arrival of the French, the convergence of European archaeological research with colonial domination has left bitter memories among the Arab and Berber populations.16 The legacy of Tunisians’ complex relationship to ancient monuments has continued to be negotiated since the revolution in 2011.17 It undoubtedly also contributed to terrorists’ choice of the Bardo Museum in Tunis as the site of an attack in March 2015 that left twenty-two dead.18 These recent examples underline the intimate connection between the modern destruction of classical antiquities and the persistent legacy of European colonial and postcolonial violence to both the people and objects found in North Africa and the Middle East. Although in the past thirty years, the bloody history of the French conquest of Algeria (1830) has been studied with an increasingly critical eye and its connections to the archaeology of the Maghreb has been firmly established, the main focus of these publications, with few exceptions, has been on the period of the creation following 1871, when research in the Maghreb was first institutionalized under the colonial administration of the Third Republic.19 By contrast, significantly less attention has been granted to the more poorly documented and frequently idiosyncratic contributions of the largely selfappointed imperial officer-archaeologists who explored ancient remains during the period from 1830 to 1870. These men, in an emergent and still amateur field, laid the groundwork for the more formal archaeological and anthropological investigations that began in the last third of the nineteenth century, when the decontextualization and commodification of archaeological objects became a dominant trope and opened the door to

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4 Introduc ti on the more formal instrumentalization of archaeological ethics in the twentieth century.20 In an effort to fill this important lacuna, in this book I address the largely unmanaged explorations of military (and a few civilian) archaeological enthusiasts in the context of the ongoing French onslaught on the former Ottoman regencies of al-Jazā’er and Constantine. Not only did their wartime explorations shape the mission and narrative of classical archaeology in North Africa for decades to come with a near exclusive focus on military remains, but the ideological implications of officers’ claims to and appropriation or destruction of the unique historical heritage of ancient monuments also had a more direct impact on military strategy than heretofore expressed in the context of the tradition of imperial collecting. In an exceedingly violent and destructive colonial war that included a retributive massacre against the civilian population of the city of Blida (southwest of Algiers) in November 1830, an attack on the El-Ouffia tribe that nearly eliminated its entire membership in April 1832, and French military and economic policies that resulted in the loss of more than a third of the Indigenous population by the late 1860s, these military officers’ activities underlay the conquest and pacification of what would become the French colony of Algeria.21 As becomes clear in the chapters that follow, their involvement in archaeology, which may have been at times haphazard and often lacked the approval of their commanding officers, nonetheless had immediate utility in military strategy and tactics. As military officers, their archaeological activities differed in significant ways from traditional orientalist research and altered irrevocably the European antiquities rush from which many of their methods derived.22

The European Antiquities Rush What were the origins of what Suzanne Marchand has characterized as the “antiquities rush”? Among European states, she points to the unregulated and competitive amassing of ancient monuments and artifacts by Napoleonic armies that raided Egypt and Rome at the turn of the nineteenth century.23 The popularity of such enterprises at home helped normalize and legitimize this form of rapacious looting and collecting of antiquities.24 During Napoleon I’s Egyptian campaign and those that

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War and the De structio n o f A n tiq u ities 5 followed, prized monuments were wrenched from their original environs for transport to imperial museums in France, Great Britain, and elsewhere in Western Europe.25 While alleging his intention to transform Egypt into a modern country, moreover, Napoleon directed French forces under his command not just to gather antiquities but also to document historical and geographical information for the metropole.26 Indeed, his abbreviated campaign in Egypt coupled collecting with a new model of cartographic and scientific exploration directed at imperial military objectives. In the course of this “muscular” venture in North Africa, scholars such as Vivant Denon did not simply expropriate antiquities in the manner of wartime booty.27 More important in the long term was how they used these “scientific” activities to promote the primacy of French culture and values.28 Edward Said has noted that Napoleon’s military-scientific mission brought about structural change, normalizing “foreign conquest within the cultural orbit of European existence.”29 The medium by which Denon conveyed this information was lithography, a technology that he avidly promoted from 1809 due to the superior quality of the new process for multiplying art and text (despite its potential dangers for the Napoleonic regime from those who wished to disseminate opposing ideas).30 The remarkably successful series collectively known as the Description de l’Égypte (1809–1829) not only popularized an idealized vision of ancient Egypt but also helped substantiate and circulate claims of French military and scientific prowess.31 Although the authors of the lavishly illustrated expedition volumes of the Napoleonic mission gave great attention to antiquities, however, they largely turned their back on the modern inhabitants of the region (except to castigate them for allegedly damaging these same monuments). In the French missions that followed Napoleon I’s venture to Egypt, particularly those to the Peloponnese and Algeria in the 1820s and late 1830s, respectively, military-scientific expeditions were honed as an instrument of imperial domination.32 The garb of European military officers had become the de facto costume and vernacular for European scholarly exploration and subsequent expropriation. Symptoms of this change may be seen in the French and British search for the mythical city of Timbuctoo in this period, when explorers wore military uniforms as opposed to dressing in the less obtrusive fashion that had been the custom of European travelers to Africa and the Middle East in the eighteenth century.33

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6 Introduc ti on Despite the disastrous end of Napoleon’s military campaign in Egypt, this landmark undertaking made the ancient past an integral feature of broadly defined scientific research, which in turn supported subsequent French efforts to identify, claim, order, and govern the patrimonial resources of the lands their forces dominated, conquered, or occupied. In the case of Egypt in the following decades, during and after the reign of Muhammad ‘Ali (Mehmed ‘Ali in Ottoman Turkish), scientific exploration was coupled with large-scale French projects such as the construction of the Suez Canal and British interest in commercial agricultural crops such as cotton. Mid-nineteenth-century excavations in Egypt took advantage of broad changes in labor practices that the European presence had helped usher in, namely the transition from corvée to largely unskilled wage labor.34 There the search for antiquities (and later archaeological research) was thereby entangled in a complex matrix of developments linked to European intervention in the Egyptian economy.35 As noted by Bruce Trigger, the practice of “imperial archaeology” allowed states to extract archaeological resources from other parts of the world and use them to exert political dominance.36 To be certain, archaeological exploration in the early nineteenth century was an unsophisticated affair: it consisted mostly of disengaging stone structures and inscriptions from surrounding debris with little attention to context or stratigraphy. This approach was the result of archaeological science remaining largely subservient to the narrative of classical texts and inscriptions, which were the primary subjects of study.37 French colonial activities in the decades that followed Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, and particularly in the context of the French occupation of the Maghreb, gave epigraphical and archaeological study, among other disciplines, significant impetus because they provided the raw materials needed to benefit cartographic studies and military planning.38 The type of material collected focused on items that directly or indirectly supported the goal of imperial dominance and thus reflected metropolitan values and needs rather than those of the regions’ Indigenous residents.39 We should therefore not be surprised that the antiquities and monuments “discovered” in the Mediterranean basin acquired symbolism specifically linked to Western knowledge and offered historical justification for European control over subject populations.

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War and the De structio n o f A n tiq u ities 7

French Military and Archaeological Intervention in al-Jazā’er In 1827, French military intervention in the Maghreb began with a naval blockade of Algiers following the French consul’s refusal to address Hussein Dey’s demand that France pay the 8 million francs still owed to two Jewish merchant families for wheat that had been supplied to French revolutionaries between 1793 and 1798.40 The consequent embargo, which created an economic crisis in the south of France, only worsened the political challenges faced by the Bourbon regime. In July 1830, on the pretext of combatting piracy and Christian slavery on the Barbary Coast, Charles X authorized the naval bombardment and invasion of the Regency of alJazā’er. Although the successful French landing at Sidi Ferruch (Arabic [A.]: Sidi Fredj), 30 kilometers to the west of Algiers, was also intended to bolster the French king’s rapidly waning popularity, the French monarch was forced to abdicate within weeks of the landing and was replaced by his cousin Louis-Philippe.41

Figure 1. The departure of the Ottoman Dey Hussein from Algiers in 1830. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des estampes et de la photographie.

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8 Introduc ti on In the initial assault, the landing of thirty-seven thousand armed soldiers quickly led to the dissolution and exile of the Ottoman administration, which had for centuries operated with significant autonomy from Istanbul.42 During the early years of the July Monarchy, Louis-Philippe was forced to deal with the consequences of the poorly thought-out North African incursion into a territory occupied at that time by somewhere between three and five million inhabitants.43 Although Louis-Philippe’s reign was not otherwise shaped by ambitious military ventures, his eighteen-year reign saw the rapid expansion of the armée d’Afrique (as the French army in North Africa was known) to nearly three times its initial size by the early 1840s.44 Many of the military officers who led the costly campaign were graduates of the École polytechnique, and as disciples of social reformers such as Prosper Enfantin, they thought of themselves as bringing about the enlightenment and material improvement of the colonial territory (and, thereby, metropolitan France) through scientific and technological innovation.45 But their idealism ran contrary the realities of a brutal military campaign, and they seemed, at least initially, wholly impervious to the consequences of the damage they wrought against the Indigenous population. Despite assurances that the French would respect the religion and property rights of the region’s mainly Muslim inhabitants, the armée d’Afrique quickly resorted to using deadly measures against civilian residents.46 As I discuss in chapter 1, from the start of the invasion, French forces confiscated homes, land, and places of worship from Arab and Kabyle (as the French called the Berbers) inhabitants.47 They indiscriminately massacred any who resisted French authority in the former Regency, a nominal Ottoman possession on the fringes of the empire.48 In 1831 and 1832, the destruction of numerous buildings in the city center, including mosques, had already begun. Colonial authorities alleged that these measures were necessary to create an assembly place for the armée d’Afrique and convey in physical terms the imposition of a new order on the former Ottoman Regency of al-Jazā’er.49 The French GovernmentGeneral, which was quickly assembled for the purpose of ruling the conquered territory, oversaw what the French christened “Algeria” by 1838. Although there was an exception made for enclaves of European-majority populations, which from the mid-1840s were governed by civilian authorities, the military regime administered the expanding territory under French authority until the establishment of the Third Republic in 1871.

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War and the De structio n o f A n tiq u ities 9 From the early years of this four-decade period of violent military rule, a substantial number of French officers stationed in the colony elected to engage in archaeological research on ancient sites they encountered during their campaigns. Because Roman monumental remains were among the most visible, and certainly the most familiar to officers steeped in classical military history, French officer-archaeologists in Algeria tended to devote their attention almost exclusively to this period rather than more recent epochs (or more ancient ones, whether prehistoric or Punic). For the most part, moreover, these efforts were self-directed rather than initiated at the command of metropolitan or military authorities. Their undertakings mainly involved identifying and drawing monuments, transcribing inscriptions, creating topographical maps with reference to ancient remains, and digging for the purpose of dislodging monuments hidden from full view so that they might be displayed. When they engaged with Roman monuments, officers personally identified with the conquerors who had built them in the second, third, and fourth centuries. This connection allowed them to justify a particularly brutal modern campaign by finding parallels in the ancient past.50 The kinship that officers felt with the ancient Roman legions also allowed them to distance themselves from the Arab population of the region, whom they dismissed as comparative newcomers whose arrival dated to the seventh century. In contrast to Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, the Ministry of War did not initially organize a scholarly expedition to Algeria, despite calls for

Figure 2. Some of the locations central to French archaeological exploration in mid-nineteenth-century Algeria.

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1 0 Introduc ti on them to do so by the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. As I discuss in chapter 1, metropolitan officials did so only belatedly and hesitantly nearly ten years after the invasion, when a group of civilians and military officers vetted by the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres and the minister of war were permitted at last to launch a modest program for scientific exploration in the region. Begun in 1839, the project ended abruptly in 1842, when participants were ordered to depart from North Africa due to concerns for their safety.51 Performed largely by or under the protection of the officers of the armée d’Afrique, their research, which included archaeological exploration, offered tacit if not enthusiastic ideological and practical support for the French imperial military operations of which it formed a part. Like a spider web or a root system, as vividly characterized by Margarita Díaz-Andreu, colonial discourse became not just an intrinsic part of administrative practice but also of contemporary academic research.52 The legacy of French colonialism in Algeria is still the subject of debate in contemporary French politics.53 Nevertheless, imperial scientific exploration explicitly supported a regime that had few contemporary parallels in terms of its brutality.54 In a discourse formed of European military chauvinism, a Saint-Simonian vision of modernization, and “irrefutable” scientific rationale, the disciplines of classical history, epigraphy, numismatics, and archaeology helped cement claims for the historical connections between the ancient Roman and modern French conquerors of the region. The French hailed themselves as a new Rome with authority over a defeated Africa, as commemorated in a nineteenth-century medallion celebrating French prowess. Together with ethnographic surveys and interviews of the Indigenous population conducted by the Bureaux arabes (Office of Arab Affairs) from the 1860s onward, archaeological exploration also supported administrators’ claims of continuity between the ancient Maures, subject peoples to the ancient Romans, and the contemporary Kabyles of Algeria.55 The result, to which classical studies were an essential contributor, formed a narrative that helped the French legitimize their claim that their rule would bring the benefits of civilization to the Arab and Kabyle populations of the Maghreb.56 Ignoring the admonition of the second-century Algerian native son Apuleius that comportment and the values by which one lived were more

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War and the De struc tio n o f A n tiq u ities 1 1

Figure 3. Medallion commemorating Charles V’s conquest of Algiers in July 1830. The imagery incorporates a pastiche of iconographic elements borrowed from ancient Roman coinage. Marianne wears Minerva’s helmet as Roma and sits atop a defeated lion, an emblem of North Africa from as early as Punic times. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de monnaies, medailles et antiques.

important than one’s place of birth, the French imposed a rigid new order on the conquered territory and its largely illiterate population.57 French authorities claimed that both the Arabs and Kabyles—especially the former, whom they characterized as more fanatical—had not evolved over time but had instead remained mired in a primitive stage of development. As noted by Homi Bhabha, French colonialism depended on “the concept

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1 2 Introduc ti on of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness.”58 It also had little room to accommodate “permanent outsiders.”59 By contrast, the French viewed themselves as having passed through this stage centuries earlier when they were under Roman rule. They therefore promoted the idea that French intervention in the Maghreb would allow the Maures to return to their former glory.60 Nevertheless, the outcome of colonization, as Aimé Césaire has argued, is not the alleged civilizing of the colonized but the dehumanization of the colonizers.61 The colonial-historical perspective that reigned in French circles allowed many authorities to deny responsibility for their failed experiments in social engineering. To name one, in the late 1860s, when hundreds of thousands of Algerian Muslims died from largely humaninduced famine, in addition to plague, typhus, and cholera epidemics, advocates of colonial expansion suggested that the poor outcome for the Indigenous residents was not the result of French policies. Rather than accept responsibility for the dire consequences of colonial practices implemented by first French military and then civilian officials in Algeria, these advocates alleged that natural selection was eliminating populations that were biologically and culturally inferior.62

Diplomatic Exploration of the Maghreb In actual fact, the exploration and expropriation of Algerian antiquities during the first forty years of French military intervention in Algeria were exceptional; they marked a significant rupture with how European antiquaries had treated the Maghreb historically, because the region had not previously been understood to hold the material remains of the ancient European past. Indeed, compared to the long-standing French, German, and British activity in Ottoman Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor, and regions further to the east, the Maghreb was a relative backwater for the harvest of antiquities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.63 This neglect stemmed in part from a widespread preference, well into the late 1870s, for Hellenic models of civilization and culture over what many British characterized as the degeneracy of Roman imperialism.64 The oversight of North African antiquities also had much to do with a balance of power in which European travelers were still relatively vulnerable in the

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Brothers in Arms Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1979 Andrew Mertha

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2014 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2014 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging–in–Publication Data Mertha, Andrew, 1965– author. Brothers in arms : Chinese aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 / Andrew Mertha. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5265-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Technical assistance, Chinese—Cambodia. 2. Military assistance, Chinese— Cambodia. 3. Cambodia—Foreign relations—China. 4. China— Foreign relations—Cambodia. 5. Cambodia—Politics and government—1975–1979. I. Title. DS554.58.C65M47 2014 338.91'51059609047—dc23 2013036443 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments A Note on Transliteration

ix xi xv

China’s Relations with Democratic Kampuchea

The Khmer Rouge Bureaucracy

The Bureaucratic Structure of Chinese Overseas Assistance

DK Pushback and Military Institutional Integrity

The Failure of the Kampong Som Petroleum Refinery Project

China’s Development of Democratic Kampuchean Trade

119

What Is Past Is Present

132

Notes Glossary Index

145 163 171

vii

1 CHINA’S RELATIONS WITH DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA

The greatest friend of the Kampuchean people is the People’s Republic of China, and none other. The People’s Republic of China is the large and reliable rear fallback base of the Kampuchean and world revolutions. —Kaev Meah, veteran Cambodian Revolutionary, September 30, 19761

The Chinese government never took part in or intervened into the politics of Democratic Kampuchea. —Zhang Jinfeng, Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia, January 22, 20102

When people mention the Khmer Rouge, many might be reminded of the support China once gave it. This is a problem that cannot be avoided. No matter whether China wants it or not, as China’s relationships with Cambodia and Southeast Asia grow closer, people will allude to that history. —Ding Gang, September 27, 20123

A particularly haunting Vietnam War–era photograph, taken by the Japanese photojournalist Taizo Ichinose, who would himself perish behind enemy lines in 1973, shows the road leading to Angkor Thom, the twelfth-century epicenter of Cambodian civilization that today is a bustling tourist site.4 The road is covered in detritus from the forest and is devoid of any trace of people—but for a human spinal cord mixed in with the debris (fig. 1.1).5 There is nothing romantic about the image: this jungle evokes Carthage, not Walden. It is as ugly and grotesque an image of a rural setting as can be imagined, one that also perfectly captures the atmospherics of Hobbes’s state of nature—the absence of any governing apparatus whatsoever. It is a snapshot of anarchy. People tend, not unreasonably, to regard Cambodia’s rule by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)—commonly known as the Khmer Rouge—from 1975 to 1979 as one in which the only thing that distinguished the country from such anarchy was its sophisticated killing apparatus.6 This is not quite right. The

CHAPTER 1

FIGURE 1.1. The road to Angkor Thom showing a human spine among the debris. Photo by Taizo Ichinose.

CPK-led regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) is rightly understood, first and foremost, as a regime that killed a vast number of its own citizens and horribly brutalized those it did not murder outright. But it does not necessarily follow that, if we peel away its extensive security apparatus, DK resembled a countrysized extension of Taizo’s terrible image. That is, DK was not defined by the negative space of anarchy. It was a state. It was a totalitarian state. It was often a poorly run totalitarian state. It was a state that excelled at fear, death, and hubris far better than anything else. But it was a state defined by a distinctive network of organizations and institutions, not the absence of them. There is also a historic context to this image that hints at the role of China in the narrative to follow. At the time this photo was taken, not far away at Mount Kulen, the deposed Cambodian monarch Norodom Sihanouk was meeting with the CPK leadership in the latter’s jungle headquarters, a rendezvous that had been insisted upon by the government of China. Sihanouk headed a coalition government (Gouvernement Royal d’Union Nationale du Kampuchéa, or GRUNK) brokered by Beijing that, in just three years, saw the transformation of the CPK from a junior partner with a few dozen rifles in 1970 to the coalition’s dominant power. China had been involved in every aspect and at each stage of the CPK rise to power. From 1970 to 1975, Beijing provided GRUNK with an annual budget of US$2 million as well as office space and living quarters at the Friendship Hotel in northwestern Beijing, while Sihanouk himself took up residence at the former French Embassy. Even the Chinese mission to Phnom Penh was physically

CHINA’S RELATIONS WITH DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA

relocated to Beijing, where the Chinese ambassador to Cambodia, Kang Maozhao, carried out his functions as if he were on Cambodian soil.7 Beijing continued to provide arms, clothing, and food and even printed banknotes for use upon the CPK’s assumption of power. And as relations between the Cambodian and Vietnamese communists began to sour, China’s support for the CPK insurgency correspondingly increased. After April 17, 1975, when victorious CPK soldiers marched into Phnom Penh and other cities throughout the country, the world of many Cambodians was turned upside down: cities were emptied of their residents, who were forcibly relocated to the countryside; markets disappeared; money was abolished (the banknotes printed in China were mothballed); officials of the ancien régime were liquidated; and China’s influence was radically altered. Up to that point, Beijing had been both willing and able to graft its strategic interests onto the political evolution of the CPK. After 1975, China’s apparent willingness to continue doing so never wavered; its ability to do so, however, decreased significantly. To put it somewhat inelegantly, China embraced a sucker’s payoff in a Faustian bargain: it justifiably received international condemnation for maintaining the viability of the CPK regime while receiving precious little tangible benefit from its Cambodian allies. And this provides the central question of this book: why was a powerful state like China unable to influence its far weaker and ostensibly dependent client state? Or, to put it in policy terms: exactly what did Chinese development aid buy? In today’s world, as the topic of Chinese foreign assistance grows in importance, the answers matter. The conventional wisdom holds that a rapidly-developing China is currently behind a new wave of economic colonialization, facilitated and nurtured by Chinese foreign aid and assistance. This has raised alarm bells both in these “colonies” themselves8 and in the policy circles of Washington, D.C., which saw an emerging consensus that such foreign policy behavior is a manifestation of China’s inexorably rising power on the international stage.9 This is not inconsistent with the received wisdom on Sino-DK relations. One conventional view is that the relationship was a product of a shared revolutionary outlook and a natural affinity based on the similarities of experiences in the two regimes’ paths to power. It argues that DK leader Pol Pot was himself greatly influenced by events in China, some of which—particularly the opening salvos of the Cultural Revolution in 1965—he witnessed firsthand, and by his friendship with Chinese radicals like the mysterious and amoral radical Kang Sheng, whose own training in the USSR during Stalin’s Great Purge fashioned him into China’s Lavrentiy Beria.10 Another approach, based on Realpolitik, posits that Beijing’s relations with Phnom Penh were a function of regional geopolitics, a product of the Sino-Soviet

CHAPTER 1

split, Hanoi’s increasing dependence on Moscow, and the race between Vietnam and China for U.S. diplomatic recognition.11 Aside from the sterilizing effect this has on some fundamental normative issues regarding collaboration with the DK regime, this level of analysis tells us little about the actual mechanics of the relationship. Such an approach cannot account for variation in the success or failure of individual assistance projects. The two lines of argument share the assumption that Beijing, as a regional and a nuclear power, was able to influence a small, poor overwhelmingly premodern (indeed, medieval) agricultural state of seven million. They do not—cannot— account for China’s failure to exploit this asymmetrical relationship. As a result, we are left with an empirical and historical fact bereft of explanation or context. Still another approach, this one ideational, can be found in Sophie Richardson’s China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which centers on Chinese motivations, that is, the “five principles” themselves—mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, nonaggression, noninterference in the internal affairs of others, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.12 Although Richardson makes a persuasive case for Beijing’s subordination of some of its own interests to the larger contours governing the relationship, her analysis is not engineered to evaluate China’s concrete gains from the relationship. By contrast, the argument in this book will show that in the deeply uneven bilateral relationship, on the policy front at least, it was in fact China that ended up as the subordinate party. Before explaining why this was so, it may be useful to show that the political history of China’s relationship with Democratic Kampuchea confirms that the expected outcome—a relationship in which Beijing dictated critical strategic terms to Phnom Penh—never came to pass.

Dynamic Interaction in Sino-DK Relations For decades China had supported the Vietnamese communists against the French and then against the United States, but as the fraternal socialist ties between the two countries gave way to traditional mistrust spawned from centuries of Vietnamese armed resistance to Chinese regional hegemony, Beijing’s suspicions of Hanoi mounted. A few years earlier, in 1969, Beijing’s relations with Moscow had reached their nadir, when Chinese and Soviet troops stopped just short of limited war along their isolated border in Siberia. By 1975, the prospect of China being boxed in to the north by the USSR and to the South by Moscow’s ally Vietnam was becoming increasingly troubling to China’s leaders. The establishment of DK in 1975 was an opportunity for China to mitigate the effects of

CHINA’S RELATIONS WITH DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA

a Soviet-Vietnamese axis. The CPK’s growing hostilities against Vietnam, also borne of centuries of ethnic tensions that often erupted into gruesome violence, ensured Phnom Penh’s distance from Hanoi and Moscow. The United States, suffering at the time from “Indochina fatigue” after what had been the longest war in its history, largely stayed clear of the fray. Within days of the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, Chinese aid in the form of food and technical assistance started arriving.13 A string of official visits began as well. On April 24, Xie Wenqing, a reporter from the international desk of the New China News Agency (Xinhua) arrived in the Cambodian capital. Four days after that, DK Foreign Minister Ieng Sary returned from China, where he had been living on and off since 1971, accompanied by Shen Jian, deputy director of the CCP International Liaison Department and Beijing’s point man on Democratic Kampuchea.14 On June 21, on a secret visit to China to secure military and nonmilitary development aid, Cambodian leader Pol Pot himself met with Mao Zedong.15 At the time, Mao’s commitment of one billion dollars was the largest aid pledge in the history of the PRC.16 In August, a delegation from the PRC Ministry of Defense visited Cambodia to survey DK military needs, followed by a visit by Wang Shangrong, deputy chief of staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), in October.17 At the same time, DK began the first wave of political purges, a campaign to liquidate the old exploiting classes—monks, urban bourgeois, intellectuals, and officials of the Khmer Republic. This development was startling enough for ailing, cancer-stricken Zhou Enlai to warn visiting DK officials Khieu Samphan and Ieng Thirith that they should avoid making the same mistakes of immoderation that China had made in the not-so-distant past. Flush with victory, his guests are reported to have smiled at him condescendingly.18 A thornier issue was how to handle Sihanouk. The prince, whom many of Cambodia’s peasants regarded as a living god, had done more than any other individual to legitimize the CPK. Ousted by the March 1970 coup that established the Khmer Republic, the mercurial Sihanouk embraced his former enemies, the Khmer Rouge.19 After returning to Cambodia in 1975 from a world tour promoting the new regime and finding himself unhappy as a figurehead, Sihanouk sought to retire. Although the top DK leadership was happy to sideline the prince, whom they referred to as “a runt of a tiger bereft of claws or teeth [with] only his own impending death to look forward to,” they feared alienating Beijing.20 From the mid-1960s onward, Sihanouk had enjoyed a particularly good relationship with China’s top leaders, including Mao, Zhou, and Liu Shaoqi. He even provided a unique “model” for Chinese leaders to cultivate among the nonaligned developing world: a left-leaning royal sympathetic to China.21 During a hasty set of meetings from March 11 to 13, 1976, the DK leadership

CHAPTER 1

accepted Sihanouk’s resignation while severing any contacts between the prince and visiting foreign delegations, particularly from China; this affected such dignitaries as Zhou Enlai’s widow, Deng Yingchao, whose request to meet with Sihanouk on a January 1978 visit was denied. In April 1976, radical leftist Zhang Chunqiao made a secret visit to Cambodia. One top DK Foreign Ministry official said he would not have known about the visit if he had not noticed some children making a welcoming banner for Zhang (as this was a CCP-to-CPK visit, it is not surprising that the Foreign Ministry was kept in the dark). Zhang’s purposes in visiting were to demonstrate the Gang of Four’s support for Democratic Kampuchea and to assess the situation in the country.22 Meanwhile, following a lull in early 1976, aid picked up again, including plans to build a secret weapons factory just outside Phnom Penh.23 According to a 1976 DK report, China had committed to shipping one thousand tons of military hardware to DK, including tanks and other military vehicles, ammunition, communications equipment, and other materiel.24 Accompanying this rise in imports was a shift toward domestic economic development through the adoption of a Four Year Plan (1977–1980) along with a new wave of purges, this time focusing on political malfeasance within the regime, particularly but by no means exclusively the cadres of the Northwest Zone. Once again, Beijing chose not to notice. Did the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 and the arrest of the powerful leftist faction by Mao’s more moderate successor Hua Guofeng one month later provide China with some potential leverage to compel the DK leaders to show a little restraint? Legal scholar John Ciorciari believes so. Pol Pot demonstrated his pragmatic streak when he denounced the “counter-revolutionary Gang of Four anti-Party clique” and demonstrated his support for Hua’s actions.25 But Beijing, refraining from exploiting its leverage, did not discontinue its unconditional aid. On December 10, 1976, a delegation of Chinese journalists led by Mu Qing, deputy chief of Xinhua, visited the country, meeting with the soon-to-be purged Minister of Propaganda, Hu Nim. Two weeks later, from December 24, 1976, to January 2, 1977, a delegation from the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations led by Fan Yi met with DK economic czar Vorn Vet.26 China did, however, succeed in getting Pol Pot to abandon his tendency toward excessive secrecy and introducing him to the wider world in a lavish high-profile trip to China in September and October 1977. DK Foreign Ministry officials and staff went without sleep for two days and two nights to prepare for the trip, drafting Pol Pot’s speech on the declaration of the existence of the CPK. As a former Foreign Ministry official put it, “Before that, it was only Angkar”— the term denotes a faceless, omnipotent “Organization”—before adding that it was high time for a publicity tour of this type.27 It was the first time that people, including members of his immediate family, recognized Pol Pot as the former

CHINA’S RELATIONS WITH DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA

schoolteacher Saloth Sar. And it was also the first instance that the DK regime volunteered publicly—more than two years after coming to power—that it was led by the CPK. DK’s malleability on this issue was a response to China’s support of DK against Vietnam. The Peking Review described the bilateral relationship for the first time as “unbreakable.”28 A DK official who accompanied Pol Pot throughout his trip to China recalls that when the Chinese leaders criticized Pol Pot, he would smile and demonstrate that he was taking it all in. Deng Xiaoping in particular was critical of the CPK for emptying its cities and for not feeding its people adequately. Pol Pot would then inform his staff of what the Chinese had said, pointedly without any instructions about how to act on it. To the Cambodians, the message was clear: continue as if the Chinese had said nothing.29 But the domestic politics of the two states were not completely independent from one another. Perhaps no single individual in China better symbolized the concept of “self-reliance” than the head of the famous Dazhai model commune, Chen Yonggui. Chen’s extended visit to Cambodia in December 1977 underscored the legitimacy of the CPK’s own rhetoric of self-sufficient development. His trip was also meant to shore up evidence to strengthen his position at home and was apparently perceived by the Khmer Rouge leadership as a last, best, and, ultimately, unsuccessful chance to help strengthen the waning leftist line in China that was threatened by the (re)emergence of Deng Xiaoping and the reform coalition. Pol Pot himself hosted Chen and personally took him all over Cambodia, where the Chinese official met with a constellation of DK officials, including zone leaders like Ke Pauk, So Phim, and Ta Mok; military commanders like Meas Mut and Thuch Rin; and a number of local DK cadres. On December 13, he went to Takeo, where he was received by General Sombot, Mok’s brother-in-law. While there, the embodiment of Dazhai visited the Leay Bo model commune, which boasted nine thousand families over four thousand hectares.30 At the same time, refugee accounts of the terror inside Cambodia were becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. These were ridiculed by DK leaders—with less and less credibility. Internal political purges continued in DK; in 1977 and 1978 the Eastern Zone bordering Vietnam became the focus, leading to the death of Zone Secretary So Phim, which severely weakened DK’s ability to fight Hanoi. Yet even while Phnom Penh undermined its own military capabilities, it ratcheted up its rhetoric and military activity against the Vietnamese. This was happening just as China was seeking to mend its fences with the outside world after two decades of bellicose rhetoric and autarkic policies. As before, Chinese appeals for moderation were rebuffed. At the same time Chinese aid-based delegations increased, which resulted in mixed signals to the DK leadership.31 In October 1977, a delegation headed by Qi Duichao, vice

CHAPTER 1

director in the Ministry of Communications (jiaotong bu), visited Phnom Penh to examine ways to rebuild the railway, particularly the Phnom Penh–Kampong Som and Phnom Penh–Poipet lines.32 And on December 24, 1977, a delegation from the Ministry of Foreign Trade arrived to discuss bilateral commerce. The steady stream of Chinese visits continued into 1978. On March 4, Communication Committee Chairman and railway worker representative Mei Prang33 received a delegation from the Chinese Ministry of Railways and the newly formed China Machinery Import-Export Corporation. In late July, Pol Pot organized a banquet at the Royal Palace for more than a hundred Chinese technicians working in DK. One Chinese technician recalled that during the banquet, he told Pol Pot of the state of progress at the petroleum refinery at Kampong Som, emphasizing the problems of worker shortages. Not long thereafter, a new group of laborers were sent over to help with the work.34 From November 4 to 8, Wang Dongxing, Ju Qiuli, Hu Yaobang, and Shen Jian of the CCP International Liaison Department toured the country, visiting the Tha-1 (traditional medicine) and Tha-4 (modern medicine) factories and concluding with a trip to Angkor Wat. Exactly a month later, another Ministry of Foreign Trade delegation, led by Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade Chen Jie, visited Kampong Chhnang and Battambang.35

FIGURE 1.2. Chinese Delegation with diplomatic corps and technical experts, PRC Embassy in Phnom Penh, November 1978. Note in the middle of the first row (from left) Hu Yaobang, Yu Qiuli, and Wang Dongxing. Shen Jian is fifth from the right in the first row. Photograph in the author’s possession.

CHINA’S RELATIONS WITH DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA

During a trip by Nuon Chea, DK’s Number Two, to China from September 2 to 18, 1978, emerging Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping warned him that Phnom Penh must be less provocative toward Vietnam, but China nevertheless continued to send military and nonmilitary aid to DK in increasing numbers throughout this period.36 China did draw the line at providing troops on Cambodian soil to deter the Vietnamese, despite frequent urgent pleas from Phnom Penh. When the Vietnamese army invaded in the closing days of 1978, Beijing continued its support of DK to the point of waging a short war against Vietnam in early 1979. After both sides claimed victory in an unprecedented war between two socialist countries, Hanoi would continue to be distracted by the CPK insurgency during Vietnam’s decade-long occupation of Cambodia.

The Argument Even before the collapse of its client state—the result of a Vietnamese invasion that Phnom Penh had instigated and that Beijing had repeatedly and unsuccessfully warned its DK allies to avoid—China’s provision of vast quantities of cadres, guns, and money had bought precious little. I argue that this outcome was due to bureaucratic fragmentation in China combined with an institutional matrix in Cambodia either strong enough to resist Chinese demands or too weak to act on them. Along the three main dimensions of foreign aid—military, trade, and infrastructure—Chinese assistance was able to shape DK policy in ways favorable to Beijing in trade and commerce only. The other two areas saw at best modest returns for China, albeit for completely opposing reasons. In the case of military assistance, Chinese influence was curtailed because of the strength of DK military institutions, despite the asymmetries of power between the two countries. In the case of infrastructure development, Chinese investment brought even smaller returns because of the fragmentation of the Chinese bureaucracies and their inability to engage their Cambodian counterparts, all of which resulted in complete project failure. In both China and Cambodia, then, the limits on Chinese influence on DK politics and policy were a function of bureaucratic-institutional integrity. Moreover, the Chinese and Cambodian Leninist systems were so different that it was very difficult, if not impossible, for either side to understand the other sufficiently and to exploit that knowledge. Again, the exception is commerce, which remained largely separate from DK domestic politics and which China shaped into an institution that behaved more like a Chinese than a DK organization. Some might dismiss this argument as not particularly counterintuitive; one should expect, goes this line of reasoning, that the key to understanding outcomes is the interface between the bureaucratic politics of the two countries

ARMED WITH EXPERTISE The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War Joy Rohde

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Published in association with the University of Virginiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Miller Center of Public Affairs

Copyright © 2013 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2013 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rohde, Joy, 1977– author. Armed with expertise : the militarization of American social research during the Cold War / Joy Rohde. pages cm. — (American institutions and society) “Published in association with the University of Virgina’s Miller Center of Public Affairs.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4967-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Social sciences—Research—United States—History—20th century. 2. Sociology, Military—Research—United States—History—20th century. 3. Social sciences and state—United States—History—20th century. 4. Cold War—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. H62.5.U5R64 2013 300.72'073—dc23 2013010654 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Hearts, Minds, and Militarization

Creating the Gray Area: Scholars, Soldiers, and National Security

A Democracy of Experts: Knowledge and Politics in the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

Deeper Shades of Gray: Ambition and Deception in Project Camelot

From Democratic Experts to â&#x20AC;&#x153;Automatic Cold Warriorsâ&#x20AC;?: Dismantling the Gray Area in the Vietnam Era

Fade to Black: The Enduring Warfare State

116

Epilogue: Militarization without End?

148

Notes Bibliography Index

157 189 207

Introduction

HEARTS, MINDS, AND MILITARIZATION

In 2007, a handful of American social scientists arrived in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were armed with conventional military weapons, but more significantly, they possessed an arsenal of cultural knowledge. Embedded in army brigades, their job was to bridge the military’s culture gap. They provided commanders with information about the battlefield’s “human terrain”— military parlance for the beliefs, values, grievances, and social structures of the populations living in war zones. These civilian social scientists were part of the Human Terrain System (HTS), the army’s new, controversial counterinsurgency weapon. HTS was designed to make the Iraq and Afghanistan wars less violent and the American military effort more successful. With social scientists behind the front lines in the War on Terror, the American military might at last discover, in the words of the HTS training manual, “the reasons why the population is doing what it is doing and thereby [provide] non-lethal options to the commander and his staff.”1 In the short term, HTS’s designers anticipated that the system would improve the military’s understanding of the complex local environments in which counterinsurgent forces fought. But HTS was not intended to be a mere wartime project. Its architects argued that over the long term it could “anthropologize” the military. If soldiers could see the world through the eyes of the people affected by U.S. military actions, they might come to rely less on combat and more on social, economic, and political development. The Human Terrain System, its advocates hoped, would make the War on Terror less warlike; it would demilitarize the military, creating “a kinder, gentler counter-insurgency.”2 1

INTRODUCTION

But HTS quickly attracted criticism from social scientists who argued that it encouraged an inappropriate, even unethical, collaboration between researchers and the military, used scholarship as a cover for gathering military intelligence, and repackaged violence as humanitarianism. After all, critics pointed out, HTS scientists often wore military uniforms and carried weapons. Lacking transportation of their own, they gathered their data while accompanying soldiers on patrol. And their duties included identifying important local leaders and dissidents—information that the military could use for lethal targeting.3 HTS’s critics not only indicted the system for militarizing social science. They also argued that it was part of a quasi-governmental network of private defense contractors and corporations that, since 9/11, reaped billions of dollars in profits. HTS’s creators and the majority of its staff hailed from the world of private defense contracting. Anthropologist Montgomery McFate, a veteran of RAND and the Office of Naval Research, helped design the program while working at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit civilian contract research institute that has worked exclusively for the government since the Defense Department created it in 1956.4 According to one count, as many as thirty-five other defense firms were engaged in research and development efforts related to the War on Terror’s human terrain. Global defense giant BAE Systems held a five-year, $380 million contract with the army to recruit HTS team members.5 The army hired the multibillion-dollar defense consulting agency Booz Allen Hamilton to train new Human Terrain System researchers. And the massive defense research and contracting firms MITRE and CACI held multimillion-dollar contracts for developing the software that would manage the growing HTS database.6 Until 2009, all the social scientists deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well the HTS program director, were external contractors. Even a congressionally mandated review of the HTS system was performed by a private contractor.7 To its critics, HTS’s ties to the private sector validated their suspicion that, by relying heavily on contractors for research and services, the Pentagon was creating a privatized warfare state where national security strategy—and war fighting itself—was being outsourced to profit-seeking institutions run by militarized experts. In the decade after the 9/11 attacks, Pentagon contracts for weapons, military services, and intellectual expertise more than doubled. In the past, private firms had offered support services to deployed military personnel. But in the age of the War on Terror, firms increasingly provided services directly linked to warfare. Private contractors assisted with strategic and combat planning, gathered and assessed intelligence, and even interrogated POWs.8 It seemed to critics that the Pentagon was destroying the democracy it was supposed to protect. By outsourcing vital intellectual expertise and paying a

HEARTS, MINDS, AND MILITARIZATION

premium for it, the government seemed to be eroding its own intellectual capacity, crippling the public sector. Furthermore, both the public and the government seemed to lack the oversight capabilities necessary to manage the contract state. Because private corporations were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, the extent and nature of the military’s relationship with contractors was opaque to Congress, the courts, and the public. Critics from academia, law, and public policy argued that contracting undermined the democratic norms of transparency and accountability, while allowing the private sector to shape national security policy. Most dangerously, they charged, by ceding so much responsibility to contractors, the Pentagon was creating a powerful private sector that might become invested in perpetuating war for its own profit.9 Yet neither the contract state, nor the experts that populated it, nor even the criticisms directed at it were new to the War on Terror. Decades earlier, national security concerns drew the United States and its social scientists into areas long peripheral to military and diplomatic policy. Those efforts, and their unexpected consequences, are the subject of this book. The original targets of American counterinsurgency programs were communist guerrillas, not Islamist terrorists. As new nations emerged from decaying empires—thirty-seven former colonies declared independence by the end of the 1950s—Soviet political and ideological expansion appeared almost as threatening to the United States as the specter of nuclear war. In the minds of American policymakers, military men, and many social scientists, the political instability and economic deprivation that haunted the developing nations were powerful incubators for communist revolution. As one counterinsurgency expert argued, to win the ideological battle, “the first essential is knowledge—knowledge about the enemy himself.”10 In the Cold War, as never before, the attitudes, beliefs, and frustrations of the inhabitants of the geopolitical periphery mattered in Washington. And, as never before, the military required scholarly research and advice to understand, manage, and influence the men and women of the developing world. With the future of the free world in the balance, the Pentagon and social scientists joined forces to open a new front in the Cold War. As researchers set out to win the hearts and minds of the third world, social science, like so much else in the Cold War, became tangled up with the interests of American national security. Like the hard sciences before it, social research became implicated in militarization, the process historian Laura McEnaney describes as “the gradual encroachment of military ideas, values, and structures into the civilian domain.”11 Americans—scholars and soldiers included—embraced militarization with ambivalence. They were devoted to protecting American national security against what they perceived as an unscrupulous, often invisible, and aggressively expansionist enemy. But they were fearful of creating what Harold Lasswell

INTRODUCTION

famously termed the garrison state—a centralized, secretive, dictatorial behemoth that dominated political, intellectual, and even private life in the name of national security.12 Americans faced a quandary: in the Cold War, militarization might be necessary to protect democracy, but it also threatened to destroy it. And so they struggled to reap the benefits of militarization while mitigating its negative consequences. They did so, in part, by turning to civilian experts. The fusion of social science and national security reached its acme in the Special Operations Research Office (SORO), a multidisciplinary research institute created by the army in 1956. SORO was the brainchild of the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare, the section of the army responsible for all aspects of psychological, political, and guerrilla warfare. The military designed SORO to be a hybrid institution that would seamlessly meld social scientific expertise with the operational concerns of army officers. While most of the Pentagon’s Cold War research focused on the physical matériel of war, SORO’s work centered on ideas and doctrine. Seeking to manage global politics and usher in gradual, stable change toward an American-led world order, SORO’s researchers produced classified area studies handbooks that pithily described the inhabitants, military forces, and national psychologies of communist-threatened countries. They marshaled empirical evidence to test popular theories that disaffected intellectuals and poor peasants might be to blame for violent revolution. They probed the organization of communist underground movements in Greece, Vietnam, and Guatemala. And they used cutting-edge social psychology to design new psychological warfare and propaganda programs for dozens of nations.13 Decades before Human Terrain System experts promised to humanize the military with their cultural knowledge, SORO’s researchers promised the same. They dedicated themselves to helping the Cold War military pursue a new, less militaristic mission: “the establishment of a community of stable nations, where political change occurs peacefully.”14 SORO embodied the faith, common in the early years of the Cold War, that intellectuals could scientifically guide geopolitics. It also reflected the hope that experts could form a bulwark against militarization; victory in the Cold War could come from technical expertise, not military engagement, thus proving the ultimately pacific nature of the United States.15 Although created by the army, SORO was a legally private institute staffed and managed by American University in Washington, D.C. In fact, it was only one of a number of quasi-independent Pentagon-funded research institutes born during the early Cold War. The practice of contracting with academic institutions for scientific research had developed in World War II, when civilian scientists and engineers working on contract with the federal government

HEARTS, MINDS, AND MILITARIZATION

delivered the technologies—atomic bombs, radar, and solid state electronics— that helped the Allies win the war. As the Cold War replaced the world war, the Pentagon extended its funding. In the decade after the armistice, the military funded more research than any other federal agency.16 A significant amount of military research took place on university campuses, in university labs, and in Pentagon-created, nominally independent research institutes. Social science attracted the Pentagon’s support later than the physical sciences, and it followed their model. The military’s social experts worked in settings ranging from academic institutes that relied only partially on government contracts, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for International Studies, to think tanks such as RAND that, like SORO, were created by the military but were legally autonomous. They also worked in an expanding sector of for-profit research agencies such as Human Sciences Research Incorporated and Psychological Research Associates.17 According to one count, twenty-one private research institutes concerned with the political problems of the Cold War conflict were created between 1950 and 1960 alone. By 1967, the capital city boasted over three hundred private research and development institutes, many which employed social scientists.18 In the 1950s, contract research institutes seemed a promising means of containing the potentially dangerous consequences of Cold War militarization. Because these institutes were organizationally separate from the military, their designers and staffs hoped they could protect their scholarship from becoming too heavily marked by the imprint of the national security state. They even had the potential, it seemed, to demilitarize the military, diffusing the Cold War conflict by focusing on the human side of the battle for democracy. Even further, policymakers hoped that private experts working on contract could provide the Pentagon with much-needed knowledge without adding to the size and power of the state itself. Contracting was not only a response to militarization; it was shaped by the long-standing American wariness of the state. By privatizing research, Americans sought to bring expertise to bear on national security without fostering an expert-directed, centrally planned state.19 Contracting seemed to protect American democracy. Yet, fifteen years later, those same experts and their research institutes increasingly appeared to be a stark embodiment of the perils of militarization and technocracy: secrecy, corruption, centralization of state power, waste, and coercion. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned as much in his oft quoted, largely unheeded farewell address of early 1961. By the late 1960s, as Americans attempted to come to terms with the costly brutality of the Vietnam War, his admonitions about the military-industrial complex and its “scientific-technological

INTRODUCTION

elite” gained traction.20 Critics charged that the military and its experts had created a “warfare state” where scholars and scientists thrived by producing militaristic, often classified knowledge, that undemocratically shaped federal policy and wasted untold millions. Once hailed as protectors of democracy, experts now appeared a profound threat to it.21 These critiques would have significant but unexpected consequences. Critics sought to tame the militarization of knowledge by dismantling SORO and other nodes in the military-industrial-academic complex. But even more important, they hoped to tame the militarization of American government institutions and policy. Instead, and through no fault of their own, their actions would leave the government even more dependent on the institutions of the warfare state that would survive the end of the Cold War and thrive in the War on Terror. By tracing the optimistic rise, anguished fall, and unexpected rebirth of Pentagon-sponsored social research, this book examines the ways that Americans embraced, challenged, and adapted to political and intellectual militarization. For those who believed that the government’s social research was a neutral, reliable foundation for decision making, and that expertise mitigated militarization, science was a crucial component of democratic statecraft. But for those who believed that power and politics were embedded in military-funded social knowledge, SORO’s social scientists were little more than reactionary defenders of the status quo—militarism, exploitation, and international hubris. Yet militarized knowledge and institutions proved to be remarkably flexible. Some academic social researchers, convinced that their expertise was militaristic and antidemocratic, withdrew from national security research and returned to the ivory tower in the early 1970s. But militarized expertise lived on in a growing number of nonacademic nonprofit and for-profit research and consulting agencies. The conflict over Cold War social research was at its core a battle over both the role of experts in American democracy and the acceptable limits of militarization. The Pentagon’s social researchers in the 1950s and 1960s claimed to represent the best interests of their nation and the developing world at a time when both expertise and militarization were under debate. This was no mere academic dispute. It touched the heart of questions about democracy in an era of immense anxiety about national security. And so the attack on military-funded social research moved beyond the confines of disciplinary communities into Congress, the White House, and American embassies around the world. These contests played out in venues public and private, civilian and military, academic and popular. But they reverberated most loudly in hybrid institutions

HEARTS, MINDS, AND MILITARIZATION

like SORO. SORO was perched within an ill-defined gray area between academia and the national security state. The gray area was the front line in the intellectual and political battles over the militarization of national security expertise. Research in the gray area never conformed to the scientific ideal of pure, objective inquiry directed at the discovery of universal truths. The requirements of national security influenced the direction of study, challenging researchers to protect their intellectual autonomy from what many scholars considered to be the polluting effects of external influence. Security classification collided with scholarly openness. Patronage and political urgency clashed with scientific detachment. Because SOROâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research dealt directly with political mattersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;from the causes of social revolution to the mechanisms of persuasion and social controlâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;its objectivity was all the more suspect to academics and the public. In the gray area, researchers struggled to reconcile their scholarly commitment to the production of disinterested knowledge with their professional accountability to the military, their own ambivalence about militarization, and their dedication to both American democratic values and containment. It was in the hazy gray area, not in the more rarefied air of elite academia, that the problems of expertise, democracy, and national security became acute. The denizens of the gray area were not elite intellectuals. Unlike better-known social scientists of the era who commented on the relationship between scholarship and the national security state from the safety of universities, they grappled with it daily in word and deed. To understand the complex problems of militarization, expertise, and democracy, this book looks to the men and women who sought to resolve them. The protagonists of my narrative are men and women who have been the focus of hostility and rebuke. It is easy to censure the people who performed contract research into foreign areas for the national security state. Their work often lent scholarly legitimacy to ill-conceived U.S. military interventions abroad that resulted in staggering losses of life. This book is not a defense of or an apology for the intellectuals who participated in SORO and similar projects. But it does take seriously their understanding of the Cold War threat and the ways in which they believed their expertise might alleviate it. Cold War social scientists were actors who sat in the middle of a vexing network of scholarship and state power during what they perceived to be a profoundly perilous historical moment. Their views illuminate persistent tensions in the application of expertise to a democratic state that itself owes its size and shape, in large part, to national security anxieties. My goal in understanding the perspectives of the men and women who served the national security state is not to defend their political, ethical, or intellectual choices. Rather, the beliefs and careers of

INTRODUCTION

SOROâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s researchers underscore the changing contours of epistemological values and ethical commitments in American scholarship, and the changing convictions about the relationship between expert knowledge and democracy in the Cold War. To peel back the fables by which we have understood this period is to encounter a set of problems that remain central to American governance and intellectual life. The history of SORO is a story of the evolving contest over the relationship between democracy, national security, and expertise in recent U.S. history.

Memories of War Visiting Battlegrounds and Boneﬁelds in the Early American Republic

THOMAS A. CHAMBERS

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2012 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2012 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chambers, Thomas A. Memories of war : visiting battlegrounds and bonefields in the early American republic / Thomas A. Chambers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4867-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. United States—History, Military—18th century. 2. United States—History, Military—19th century. 3. Battlefields—United States—History—18th century. 4. Battlefields—United States— History—19th century. 5. Cemeteries—United States—History— 19th century. 6. Heritage tourism—United States—History—19th century. 7. Memorialization—United States—History—19th century. 8. Collective memory—United States—History— 19th century. I. Title. E181.C49 2012 355.00973—dc23 2012013902 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction: The Changing Nature of Battlefield Tourism and Commemoration Accidental Tourists: The Bonefields of Braddockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Defeat and Ticonderoga Forsaken Graves: The Emergence of Memory on the Northern Tour Retrieved Relics and New Monuments: Lafayette in Yorktown Memory without Tourism: Traces of the Southern Campaigns American Antiquities Are So Rare: Remembering the War of 1812 on the Niagara Frontier The Value of Union: Antebellum Commemoration and the Coming of the Civil War Notes Index

vii ix

1 17 36 65 99 127 159 185 221

Introduction The Changing Nature of Battleﬁeld Tourism and Commemoration

The Yorktown monument cornerstone-laying ceremony on October 18, 1881, the battle’s centennial, had been a long time coming. Two years before the commemoration of that final battle, the New York Times asked, “What permanent memorial can be founded at Yorktown to record for future ages the historic glories of the spot?”1 For nearly a century, Americans had not been able to provide an answer to this question, at least in the form of a significant monument on the Yorktown battlefield. Throughout the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Yorktown remained a sleepy, undistinguished port on the York River. Its Revolutionary War history was inscribed in textbooks but was not legible on the landscape. During the Revolutionary War’s centennial, the New York Times noted, “trivial engagements and even melancholy Indian massacres have furnished forth agreeable and successful celebrations,” but the American victory at Yorktown, a far more significant event that heralded the war’s conclusion, “has thus far been left without any fit memorial.” Congress’s century-old promise to erect a suitable marker remained unfulfi lled. But with France, the thirteen colonies’ ally during the Revolution, ready to celebrate that old alliance by donating a “colossal figure” in New York Harbor, “surely national gratitude

I n t roduc t ion

should be eager to put on record afresh” American appreciation of French assistance at Yorktown, “the brightest example of the effects of this alliance.”2 Congress answered the call of newspaper editors and the American public, capping a half dozen years of centennial monument building across the nation with a bill to erect a fitting tribute to the Franco-American alliance at Yorktown. With the 1881 cornerstone laying and official completion in 1884, the United States had at long last commemorated one of its most significant battlefields.3 The Yorktown Centennial Association, formed by local citizens in 1879, made every effort to ensure a grand celebration of the monument’s erection and the battle’s anniversary. The association held preliminary events in 1879 and 1880, and the governor of Virginia led his fellow governors of the thirteen founding states in persuading Congress to sanction and fund a centennial event and monument. Congress passed a bill, which President James A. Garfield signed on June 7, 1880, appropriating $100,000 for a monument and $20,000 “for the purpose of defraying the expenses incurred in said Centennial celebration.”4 This was no small feat, as Congress had been reluctant to fund monuments in the past. During the nation’s centennial, though, Congress suddenly expressed interest in funding “monuments on all sorts of battle-fields where a hundred years have elapsed” without any formal commemoration. Congress preferred to “go no further than State or local patriotism would go”; Yorktown’s successful local organization provided “an exception” where Congress supported a monument.5 The president and Senate soon appointed a committee of thirteen men to plan the event and select a monument design. With just over a year remaining before the centennial, they scrambled to make ready for the commemoration. The committee quickly selected a four-sided column honoring the victory and the Franco-American alliance. A much larger group representing Congress and “each of the Colonial States” planned the actual centennial event. They invited representatives from every state in the Union, militia groups and U.S. military units, naval vessels, descendants of the European officers who had fought with the Americans at Yorktown (including the Marquis de Lafayette, the Comte de Rochambeau and Baron von Steuben), Masons and Knights Templar, state and national politicians, and the general public to a nine-day festival honoring the great victory. It seemed that everyone would be there.6

C h a ng i ng Nat u r e o f Bat t l e f i e l d Tou r i s m

The festivities began on October 13, 1881, with gala balls, speeches, fireworks, a regatta, and religious services for members of civic associations and militia units in attendance. The national ceremonies commenced on October 18, with President Chester A. Arthur—just in office a few weeks, after Garfield’s death—attending the cornerstone-laying ceremony. Arthur’s steamboat approached the wharf below Yorktown village and received a military salute. A marching band escorted his party to the reviewing stand, where the crowd greeted him with cheers. The Reverend Robert Nelson, “grandson of Governor Nelson, who commanded the Virginia militia at Yorktown,” delivered the opening prayer. Virginia governor Frederick W. M. Holliday followed Nelson and lauded “the fulfi llment of the Republic’s promise” to build a monument on “the spot where we are now gathered.” He concluded his discourse on Yorktown’s history by declaring, “So may the principles this Monument is intended to represent not fall from the memory of men!” The Masons in attendance performed the cornerstone ceremony, and a host of dignitaries expounded on the event’s significance. “The scene,” wrote a Richmond newspaper, “was an inspiring one.”7 The United States, one hundred years after the British surrender at Yorktown, had properly commemorated that momentous event. Hitherto, Yorktown had not been completely without attention; parades and speeches had occurred before, including Lafayette’s 1824 visit to the battlefield. Yet it took more than a half century after Lafayette’s visit until a major monument stood at Yorktown. Even in 1881, accomplishing the feat required significant effort and revealed many shortcomings in battlefield tourism and commemoration and the changing nature of that endeavor over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In confronting history at battlefields like Yorktown where the Revolution was fought, Americans performed memory in a manner that was less about the distinctly nationalistic concerns emphasized by politicians such as those gathered at Yorktown in 1881 than it was about the transatlantic trend of picturesque scenery and sentiment that pervaded early nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Battlefield tourism did not fully develop until fifty years after the Declaration of Independence. In its formative years attention to battlefields grew alongside the “Northern Tour” and an American fascination with landscape. Early tourists to battlefields formed their own emotional, patriotic memories based on Romantic ideals of the picturesque, melancholy,

I n t roduc t ion

and nostalgia, as well as a generic Revolutionary War history. Their battlefield visits and responses to those sites occurred within a larger context of shared cultural assumptions. Americans maintained an ambivalent relationship with the past; most possessed only partial knowledge of their nation’s history, and sought to keep it that way. They had been performing nationalism at July Fourth parades and political rallies throughout the early republic and antebellum periods, but tourism to distant battlefields was far different from listening to Daniel Webster speak at Bunker Hill or hearing Edward Everett drone on for several hours recounting the militia movements of April 19, 1775, on Lexington Green.8 These and other speeches made near urban centers to dedicate what few monuments existed struck on political and military themes and lacked the melancholy responses tourists experienced at barren battlefield sites often situated in magnificent landscapes. By the time the larger American public focused on battlefield commemoration, in the 1850s, this Romantic impulse had faded and memories of war were subsumed by sectional politics. Before that moment, however, people did visit battlefields, and in growing numbers. Their visits slowly made these battlefields into “sacred places,” but this early sacralization was barely interested in politics and was ill-fitted with the patriotic purposes to which these sites would eventually be put.9

Getting to Battlefields The nation’s inefficient transportation system and insufficient accommodations hindered visits to battlefields. Even as late as the Yorktown centennial, for instance, just reaching the battlefield proved difficult. The Yorktown Centennial Association promised “hourly ferry service” between nearby cities and Yorktown aboard “some of the handsomest excursion steamers” imported from New York.10 The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad planned to extend its line from Richmond all the way to Yorktown, with four trains running each day. But the railroad “failed to make its connection” by the commemoration’s first day, and as a result the crowds proved much smaller than promoters had expected.11 Those who did attend the centennial balked at the “absence of suitable accommodations.”12 Since Yorktown lacked lodging for more than a few dozen people, the committee laid out tent cantonments on the

C h a ng i ng Nat u r e o f Bat t l e f i e l d Tou r i s m

plain adjacent to town. Military academy cadets and regular army units managed to establish their camps, but the militia, “working men, clerks and merchants,” lacked the skills and discipline to pitch tents and situate latrines.13 More prestigious visitors, like the French delegation and American politicians, were to be housed in a hastily constructed hotel or in two historic buildings dating to the Revolution that required renovation “from cellar to garret.”14 Organizers failed to make these accommodations ready, and instead “barns and old buildings” had been “arranged with bunks.” Barges moored in Yorktown’s harbor served as floating hotels, “with the upper deck crowded with cots.”15 The Yorktown Centennial Committee blamed Congress for the crude accommodations, since its $20,000 appropriation was “wholly inadequate to meet the requirements of a celebration which will be commensurate with the historical significance of the event and the present grandeur of our country.”16 Yet even the nation’s parsimony could not dampen the celebration’s patriotic enthusiasm. America’s “patriotic ancestors . . . only asked or secured the earth for a couch and the heavens for a covering.” If Washington had spent much of the war sleeping not in a house but in a tent, at the centennial patriotic and appreciative Americans could sleep for a few uncomfortable nights under canvas.17 This temporary fervor made events such as Yorktown’s centennial and monument dedication a success, but could not and did not sustain battlefield tourism and commemoration over the long run. Americans had to be able to get to battlefields before they could memorialize them. Little had changed in Yorktown and on the Virginia Peninsula more generally between 1781 and 1881. During the decades after the Revolutionary War, the slow rise of tourism in the United States hindered attempts to commemorate Revolutionary War battlefields. Across the nation, travel proved hard, and lodging was difficult to find. Few Americans caught the traveling bug during the eighteenth century, in large part because of the colonies’ and young nation’s limited transportation infrastructure. The era’s best-known traveler, Dr. Alexander Hamilton (no relation to the Federalist politician), encountered a mere seven bridges but crossed fi fty-five ferries on his four-month journey in 1744 from Virginia to Maine.18 Without advanced roadways, bridges, guidebooks, or maps, eighteenth-century travelers generally stuck to major cities along the eastern seaboard. At their most adventurous, they might venture roughly 150 miles up the Hudson River, a tidal estuary

I n t roduc t ion

navigable by oceangoing ships as far north as Albany. The hills and mountains of the Appalachian west remained inaccessible to all but the most intrepid, and the lands there were largely unvisited except by yeoman farmers pushing west and claiming the land. No matter the state of the roads, most travel served business purposes or sought to connect friends and family separated by distance. The idea of traveling merely to see something new or be somewhere different was not current in early America. The letter of introduction, not todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fodorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s or Lonely Planet guidebooks, helped travelers fi nd their way, and those letters tended to lead them to familiar cities and towns, where they could lodge with people they, or a friend, knew. During the early republic era only an elite few, mostly those wealthy enough to enjoy leisure time and morally flexible enough to view touring as something other than sinful sloth, ventured more than a few dozen miles from their homes. These nascent tourists concerned themselves with scenery, health, or commingling with their social equals at seaside resorts such as Newport, regional mineral springs such as Ballston Spa, or cosmopolitan cities including Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York. The political and military history of the republic was not their concern. No matter their interests, the number of tourists remained small, and tourism constituted a minor part of American life and culture during the late eighteenth century.19 Before battlefield tourism could become a significant part of American tourism or culture, an impetus to visit such places needed to develop. That pull factor came from the landscapes around battlefields.

The Grand Tour and the Romantic Landscape During the 1790s relative peace and prosperity established conditions that made travel more possible than it had been previously. Gradually, infrastructure such as roads, bridges, regular ferry and steamboat service, better-built carriages that softened the often bone-jarring rideâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;all these developments led to faster, more convenient travel, although getting around was by no means easy or luxurious. The commercial impetus to transmit information and goods as quickly and cheaply as possible moved such internal improvements along.20

C h a ng i ng Nat u r e o f Bat t l e f i e l d Tou r i s m

Hotels and resorts began to appear along these routes, and almost every crossroads town that boasted a bubbling rock hoped to become a mineral springs resort attracting regional tourists. By the 1820s prominent resorts such as Saratoga Springs, New York, and White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, emerged as destinations of choice for the national tourist class. Visiting a mineral spring resort offered Americans a justification to travel—they did so for health, not amusement. Southern planters claimed they needed to escape to the Blue Ridge Mountains in order to avoid the summer fevers that ravaged the tidewater region, and Northern urbanites insisted that the heat was unbearable inside their town houses but was much less taxing on the Hudson River. Even if health was merely an excuse to dine, fl irt, and dance, the search for physical well-being provided a necessary foundation for travel in a nation anxious about leisure.21 During the early nineteenth century, tourism developed to the point where the purpose of traveling was “to see and be seen, to chat, laugh and dance, and to throw each his pebble on the giant heap of the general enjoyment.”22 As Washington Irving declared, people traveled “to exhibit their equipages and wardrobes, and to excite the admiration, or what is much more satisfactory, the envy of their fashionable competitors.”23 The further development of canals, turnpikes, and railroads as reliable transportation during the 1820s and 1830s, at least in the Northern states, connected American farms, towns, factories, and ports in increasingly regional networks of trade and travel. Tourists took full advantage of these new networks, and the “travel system” grew so quickly that guidebooks appeared, catering specifically to the tourist trade. Any traveler could now identify the quickest routes, best lodgings, and most fashionable destinations for the price of a pocket-size volume. Travel expanded to the point that by 1828 “all ages and sexes are to be found on the wing, in perpetual motion from place to place.”24 By the 1820s the standard tour route allowed tourists to sail up the Hudson River from New York City, gaze at the Catskill Mountains just at a remove from the river’s west shore, visit Saratoga Springs and Lake George, and then head west along the newly opened Erie Canal, to gawk in wonder at Niagara Falls. After reaching this westernmost point, travelers followed Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River to historic Montreal and Quebec. They returned home either via the St. Lawrence to Lake Champlain (reached by a brief overland trip

I n t roduc t ion Principal Northern Tour Route St.

BRITIS H NO RTH AMERIC A

R ce ren w a

Montreal

N MA INE

LAKE HURON

MICH. TERR.

Fort Niagara Niagara Falls

Ticonderoga/ Lake George

LAKE ONTARIO

VT.

N.H.

Erie Canal NEW YORK Hudson R.

LAKE ERIE

P ENNS YLVANIA

Albany

MASS.

Boston

CONN.

New York

OHIO Philadelphia

N.J.

MD. AT LA N T I C O CE A N

DEL. VIRGINIA

0 0

100 100

200 mi 200

300 km

NORTH CAROLINA

Map 1. The Northern Tour.

from Montreal to the Richelieu River) and then descended the Hudson River to New York City, or traveled overland to the Connecticut River Valley, New Hampshireâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s White Mountains, and fi nally to Boston. They frequently commented on bad hotels and atrocious food, cramped canal boats or lake sloops, boomtowns and rustic locals, and the general challenges of travel in an age of poor roads and improvised accommodations. But travelers had defined routes to follow and reliable (if not always pleasant) accommodations and food along the way. In and through their travels, Americans sought to imitate the European Grand Tour, a rite of passage for young British aristocrats who

C h a ng i ng Nat u r e o f Bat t l e f i e l d Tou r i s m

visited ancient ruins, painters’ studios, and homes of their fellow nobles before returning home to assume responsible roles in society. As part of their gaining worldly experience, these travelers sought emotional responses to landscape and history. A model for this activity was Edward Gibbon, who, while in Rome in 1764, felt that he could “neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal City.”25 Such reactions to landscapes and historic places evolved into the tradition of English landscape painting and picturesque tourism during the late eighteenth century, as articulated by William Gilpin’s influential 1792 “Essay on Picturesque Travel.” Gilpin moved beyond the dichotomy between the sublime and the beautiful that Edmund Burke had articulated earlier in the century, wherein raw nature produced terror in those who viewed it, and reverence for God’s power. In contrast, beauty, Burke stated, was characterized by smoothness and less threatening landscapes, such as a sloping garden, which produced joy and pleasure. Gilpin amended Burke and described an intermediate landscape that possessed both the roughness of nature and the calmness of man-made scenery. Viewing and sketching such scenery became commonplace in late-Georgian Britain, as people pursued “the love of novelty” in finding new landscapes. They also looked to landscapes for evidence of the unchanging essence of Great Britain in a time of profound technological and social upheaval. Scenes untouched by the modern—be it roads and bridges or smokestacks and factories—prompted emotional responses to what the country had lost, mixed with pride in what it had gained. In defi ning landscape in this way, Great Britain’s cultural elite redeemed nature from social change, imagining a past of untrammeled and unchanged scenery. The reality that very few such landscapes existed made the yearning for them all the stronger. A key motivation in viewing the picturesque, then, was to expand one’s capacity to express longings for the vanished past and to signify one’s membership in a broader, exclusive cultural group. Gilpin asked his readers, “Is there a greater ornamental landscape, than the ruins of a castle?” and they responded enthusiastically by searching for such scenes.26 Experiencing picturesque scenery became an American cultural trend a bit later, by the 1820s. The few Americans who had crossed the Atlantic before that decade to complete the Grand Tour returned with an appreciation for European cultural standards, and they considered

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British ways superior to all others. Just as the British had been and were using picturesque tourism to articulate their nation’s vanished golden age and national character, Americans just returned from Europe began cultivating an American Grand Tour as a symbol of their nation’s cultural maturity.27 But American scenery was quite different from English gardens or meadows, much less the cathedrals and ancient ruins that drew British travelers to Italy or Paris. The United States’ wild and undiscovered—at least by tourists—landscapes offered the opportunity to sketch new scenes and to construct new narratives.28 Because it lacked Europe’s ancient ruins and cultivated scenery, the nation’s relative youth became an asset. Its unspoiled landscapes could actually hold more meaning than Europe’s ancient places. The English-born painter Thomas Cole seized upon this “distinctive” aspect of American scenery as its main attraction. “Nature has shed over this land beauty and magnificence, and although the character of its scenery may differ from the old world’s, yet inferiority must not therefore be inferred,” Cole wrote in his influential 1835 “Essay on American Scenery.” America’s wild and unsettled scenery provoked more than reflections upon a specific castle’s legend or an associated poem. Surrounded by untrammeled mountains and ancient forests, “the consequent associations are of God, the Creator; they are his undefi led works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.” Cole added that America’s sights “are not destitute of historical and legendary associations; the great struggle for freedom has sanctified many a spot.” American scenery struck the perfect balance between historical associations and unspoiled wilderness; it provided a source of national pride while simultaneously conforming to British ideals of the picturesque.29 Cole’s earliest work sparked the rise of the Hudson River School of landscape painting and scenic tours of the Hudson River Valley and nearby Catskill Mountains during the same years that writers such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper searched for national meaning in the vanishing wilderness and the history of the United States. In subsequent decades Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne expanded this ideology to emphasize individual experiences and nostalgia for a simpler past.30 Like earlier British conceptions of the relationship between nature and industrialization, American painters and authors looked to the imagined past for useful national myths. The Transcendentalist and Romantic movements lauded the

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beauty and power of America’s wild scenery as evidence of the nation’s unspoiled origins, while simultaneously asserting the republic’s ability to conquer and improve nature. Americans hastened to view their nation’s wild and historic places. When they arrived at the Catskill Mountains, Niagara Falls, or an abandoned fort or battlefield, they responding emotionally. The Romantic impulse toward nostalgic reflections on landscape and history allowed tourists to express their membership in a cultural elite conversant in the vocabulary of the picturesque but also interested in their nation’s origins and unique character. The new American Grand Tour was, by virtue of being closer to home, more affordable and achievable for more Americans and appealed to Americans casting about for ways to appreciate the wonders of the continent. Visiting America’s natural wonders and historic sites served nationalistic as well as cultural purposes; the nation’s scenery revealed America’s “errand into the wilderness” far better than did the scenery and castles of Europe.31 At historic sites such as Fort Ticonderoga, a ruined eighteenthcentury lakeside fort and battlefield in northern New York State, visitors reveled in the chance to walk historic ground and to touch the fort’s stone walls, viewing the ruins’ “scenes of desolation” as positive attributes.32 Vines tangled around earthen embankments, stone doorways leading into roofless rooms, and walls toppling to the ground piece by piece evoked “a very romantic appearance.”33 As Benjamin Silliman noted in 1819, “This scene is very fine, and the whole outline of the spot—the mountains near, and the mountains at a distance—the shores—the bay—and the ruins, all unite to make a very grand landscape.” He felt “that I was beholding a striking emblem of the mutability of power, and of the fluctuations of empire.”34 Visiting old battlefields along the Northern Tour enabled tourists to express their cultural sophistication, national identity, and emotional nuance, in order to engage larger questions about the nation’s creation and its meaning. Battlefields like Ticonderoga perfectly suited the imperatives of the emerging American culture, because, as The Picturesque Tourist guidebook said, such sites were “varied in scenery, and deeply interesting in historical incidents.”35 Tourism to picturesque historic sites proved so popular that the leading guidebook, Theodore Dwight’s The Northern Traveller, went through six editions between 1825 and 1841. From one edition to the

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next, Dwight gradually added more information on visiting battlefields located along the route.36 The steady development of transportation routes, hastened by the expansion of railroads in the 1840s and 1850s across the northeastern United States, eased travel to the point that by 1858 a traveler “on my way home from the coal regions of central Pennsylvania” could hop off the train at “the Wyoming depot to view the ground” of the 1778 battle and its monument, before catching the next scheduled train and reaching his destination on time. While the traveler was reading inscriptions on the obelisk, “the shrill sound of the whistle” announced “that the train was approaching; so I left in haste, arrived at the depot in time to get comfortably seated, and was swiftly borne from the beautiful valley of Wyoming.”37 The commercialization of leisure occurred almost simultaneously with the evolution of memory at many but not all battlefields, with history provided as a whistle-stop attraction for American travelers.38

Memory and Place Once Americans arrived at battlefields, they sought meaning in these “sacred places.” Politicians and cultural arbiters attempted to shape how Americans remembered battlefields by organizing formal ceremonies and making serious speeches, but with limited success. In the era of picturesque tourism and emotional responses to landscape, encountering place mattered more than the words uttered by a famous orator. That changed during the antebellum era, when attempts to memorialize the Revolutionary War to advance sectional political identity coincided with increased tourist visits to abandoned battlefields. During this brief period “official” memory merged with battlefield tourism.39 Once Americans realized the result of such politicized memory—a bloody Civil War— they retreated from embracing formal commemorations for a time. Twenty years after Confederate troops fortified Yorktown, Americans gathered to dedicate a monument to the 1781 battle. “Dead earnest” Masons presided with their usual pomp and circumstance, but their “patriotic and chaste sentiments” enervated the Yorktown centennial. As an aged Mason presided over the ceremony, “alluding to one after the other of [his] Biblical friends,” the crowd grew impatient. “The seats were half deserted, but the President and his Cabinet

War Tourism Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage

Bertram M. Gordon

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright ÂŠ 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <CIP to come> Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Contents Preface Introduction: Tourism, Aesthetics, and War 1.The Emergence of France as a Tourist Icon in the Belle Ă&#x2030;poque 2. Two 1940 Locales as Sites and Symbols: The Maginot Line and the CompiĂ¨gne Railway Car Chapter 3. French Tourism in their Occupied Country 4. German Tourism in Occupied France 1940-1944 5. The Liberation - 1944: Normandy and Paris 6. Tourism and the War: Free French and Resistance Sites - Vichy and Its Discontents 7. Tourism, War, and Memory in France since the War Conclusion: Aftermath and the Question of Appropriate Remembrance: French Tourism and Its Self-images of the Second World War to the Present Notes Index

Introduction – Tourism, Aesthetics, and War Accompanying the victorious German army into Paris in June 1940, American correspondent William L. Shirer observed: Most of the German troops act like naïve tourists, and this has proved a pleasant surprise to the Parisians. It seems funny, but every German soldier carries a camera. I saw them by the thousands today, photographing NotreDame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides. Thousands of German soldiers congregate all day long at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where the flame still burns under the Arc. They bare their blond heads and stand there gazing.1 Tourism during the Second World War in France was was not limited to victorious soldiers, whether Germans from 1940 through 1944 or Allied afterward. With three-fifths of France occupied after June 1940, hotels requisitioned for military use by the Germans, and gasoline and food in short supply, conditions seemed hardly propitious for tourism but it did not cease. The Michelin guidebook for the Auvergne region in 1942 advised its readers to visit the region by train, bus, bicycle, or even on foot.2 A spirit of "life goes on," or quest for normalcy typified the 400,000 French pensioners with paid vacations who found lodgings in 2,000 hotels recommended by a hotel service in August 1942. 3 Postwar heritage tourism, or tourisme de mémoire [memory tourism] later transformed places such as the village of Arromanches-les-Bains, a spa prior to the Second World War into a site of memory along the Normandy landing beaches in the years since.4 This present study is set in the context of my continuing interest in the history of the French collaboration with Nazi Germany during the occupation that dates back to the political rhetoric of the late 1960s when, to paraphrase the words of Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra, everyone was someone else's "fascist."5 During the 1970s, I interviewed some thirty to forty former French supporters of Nazi Germany for Collaborationism in France during the Second World War, which was published in 1980.6 These interviews included two meetings with Marc Augier, who wrote about travel in the French periodicals Sciences et Voyages, Paris Soir, the Revue Camping, and the Revue du Ski during the 1930s. 7 Augier's romanticized vision of touring led him to skiing trips to Scandinavia in the late 1930s and the "adventure" of participating with the German forces in the war against Soviet Russia during the early 1940s. During the Occupation years, he helped create the pro-German Jeunesses de l'Europe Nouvelle, which by late 1941 was organizing camping expeditions to Germany. Augier described its first openair Franco-German camping expedition, to last throughout the next winter, in the pro-German language of the day. "Whether it rains or snows," he wrote, "our

leisure activities will be the leisure activities of conquest as we wish to train tough and joyous men."8 He cited the painter Marcel Gromaire's comment in 1937 to the effect that "the leisure of the future will be that of conquest or decadence."9 My focus on tourism as related to the war, however, resulted from a chance discovery in the BibliothĂ¨que nationale [National Library, now the BibliothĂ¨que nationale de France or BNF] in France in 1996. While working on an unrelated research project in the annex of the old library in Versailles, I came across a collection of Der Deutsche Wegleiter [The German Guide], also known as Wohin in Paris? [Where in Paris?], a bi-weekly German-language tourist guide to France published during the Occupation. Produced by local people in France, the Wegleiter opened another vista into the dimensions of wartime collaboration. It was described in a 2013 French translation of some of its articles as a combination of Pariscope and the Guides bleus, combining humorous anecdotal stories, similar to the American Saturday Evening Post of the era together with the tourist information that might be found in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Where magazines.10 Perhaps because the Wegleiter was published in German, or more likely, that tourism as a subject was considered unworthy of academic research, there was virtually no literature about it. It became the beginning of my exploration of first German tourism in occupied France, followed by the French tourism industry during the war, and subsequently by wartime memory tourism since. 11 As the history of wartime France was debated during the last decade of the 20th and into the 21st century it became clear that the dimension of tourism was missing and that its study could help elucidate the cultural values behind victors and vanquished both before and after 1945. Too often, the history of tourism in the 20th century is depicted as stopping in 1939 only to resume again after 1945.12 There was, of course, an attenuation of tourism and its related industries during the war, but they persisted, even if altered and restricted, and planning for postwar tourism continued as well. Sites and circuits linked to the memory of the battles, the concentration camps, the Resistance and the collaboration became pillars of postwar tourism in France. Postwar memory tourism became highly commercialized and many in the tourism industry recognized it, contributing to making France one of the largest receivers of international tourists in the world. France during the Second World War The history of France during the Second World War, with its dramatic moments of Adolf Hitler touring Paris in June 1940, D-Day and the Liberation of France beginning in Normandy in June 1944, and the failure of the Germans to destroy Paris in August 1944, has been told and retold many times. With Germany defeated in 1918, Alsace-Lorraine returned, and an even more extensive empire than before, France had become the dominant power on the European

continent. By 1940, this had all changed. Political discord at home, restlessness in the empire, and a resurgent Germany posed challenges that led to renewed war in 1939. The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 was followed by the German conquest of Poland and then a protracted period of relative inaction, known in France as the Drôle de Guerre, or phony war, on the western front as the French remained behind their defensive fortifications along the Maginot Line and the Germans waited for an opportune moment to attack. In May 1940 German forces crossed into the Netherlands and Belgium and using coordinated air and tank attacks to pierce the French lines, broke through leading to what became a series of defeats of the French. One and a half million French soldiers were taken prisoner by the Germans.13 Paris was declared an open city, meaning that it would not be defended on 10 June, the day on which Italy also declared war against France. Four days later German forces entered an undefended Paris. As the government headed south, to avoid contact with the victorious German forces, Premier Paul Reynaud resigned on 16 June and was succeeded by Marshal Philippe Pétain, remembered for having led the successful defense of Verdun against a German onslaught during the First World War in 1916. Portrayed popularly as a humane military leader who with concessions to the soldiers had successfully suppressed military mutinies among the French ranks in the following year, Pétain had become an immensely popular figure in interwar France. While some in the government urged a flight to French North Africa and continuation of the war from there and General Charles de Gaulle fled to continue the war in London, Pétain, to whom many looked as a savior in a time of crisis, insisted on remaining in France. On 22 June, his government signed an armistice with the Germans, which at Hitler’s insistence took place in Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s railway car in a clearing near the town of Compiègne in the Rethondes forest in northeastern France, the site of the 1918 armistice that ended World War I. Two days later, the new French government signed an armistice with the Italians. The June armistice divided France into a German occupied zone in the north and west and an unoccupied or "free" zone in the center and southeast. In addition, a zone in the north was administered by the German military command in Belgium and Germany annexed Alsace and Lorraine. An Italian occupied zone was established along the French-Italian border in the southeast. The divisions intensified the difficulties of travel at a time of growing material shortages. Roughly two-fifths of France remained unoccupied after June 1940 but conditions there seemed hardly more propitious for tourism than in the occupied zone. Having fled Paris, the government moved to the spa resort town of Vichy, where Pétain transformed the parliamentary French Republic into the French State [État Français], an authoritarian government committed to accommodation with what many anticipated to be a permanent European "New Order" under

Nazi leadership.14 In addition to lining up with the new Axis Europe, the new government at Vichy had a domestic agenda focused on an authoritarian state and what were perceived as traditional values, encapsulated in the formula “Labor, Family, Fatherland,” replacing “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” 15 Its National Revolution promoted a return to the soil and a promotion of the peasants and their lifestyles, which would have its own tourism implications for rural France. As Julian Jackson wrote, quoting Marc Bloch, “Vichy was turning France into a ‘vast antiquarian museum.’”16 The shortages that followed the 1940 defeat grew worse as the war went on and German exactions increased. The June 1940 armistice required the French government to pay occupation costs of twenty million Reichsmarks per day. As Shannon L. Fogg notes, some 2.4 metric tons of wheat, 891,000 metric tons of meat, and 1.4 million hectoliters of milk were transferred from France to Germany. 17 A rationing system, introduced by the Vichy government in September 1940, went as low as 900 calories per day for some categories of adults by the latter stages of the Occupation. The result was barter and a black market as many struggled to secure enough to eat.18 Rationing of gasoline was severe. As of 1 May 1941, the monthly allowance was half of what it had been the previous March and one-fourth of that of June 1940, when France was already at war.19 By early October a law authorized the internment of foreign Jews and police raids began in May 1941. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought the Communists into the Resistance, creating a tension that would later be perceptible in postwar monuments and memory. Vichy’s anti-Jewish policies culminated on 16-17 July 1942 when some 13,152 foreign-born Jews or Jews of foreign origin were herded into a bicycle racing stadium, the Vélodrôme d'Hiver, including 4,115 children, and kept in miserable circumstances. Most were deported and never returned. This and similar events described by historian Rosemary Wakeman as "scenes of hideous repression," during the German occupation were the "real public spectacles."20 Late 1942 through early 1943 marked a turning point in the war as the British stopped a German advance at El Alamein in Egypt, the Americans thwarted a Japanese raid and destroyed much of the Imperial air force at Midway, and the Soviets stopped the Germans at Stalingrad. On 8 November 1942 AngloAmerican forces landed in French Algeria and began a military campaign that by spring 1943 resulted in the liberation of all North Africa from Axis rule. German forces responded by occupying the southern two-fifths of France that had been the “free zone” and on 1 March 1943, the demarcation line separating the two zones was removed. French authorities took over the monitoring of people transiting between the two zones and more normal postal service was resumed. Following the Italian capitulation to the Allies in September 1943, the Germans

occupied the Italian zone in France, giving them effective control over the Côte d'Azur. There, as three years earlier in Paris, the Germans commandeered hotels, including those in Nice previously used by the Italians to shelter Jews from France and elsewhere in Europe. Corsica, occupied by the Italians in November 1942, was liberated in October 1943.21 By early 1944, the Vichy government had become virtually a fascist state with its paramilitary organizations waging open warfare in collaboration with the Germans against the increasingly well-organized Resistance. Vichy forces fought the Resistance and hunted Jews, Communists, and Freemasons in a FrancoFrench civil war, while Resistance activists assassinated those accused of collaboration with Vichy and the Germans. Marshal Pétain's visit to Paris in following an Allied bombing raid in April, the invasion of Normandy in June, and the liberation of Paris in August were all significant events witnessed by many who were conscious that they were witnessing notable historical change. Even if many of these observers did not travel very far and did not travel in organized groups, they were the curious or, in the words of the 19th century writer Hippolyte Taine, “sedentary tourists [who] look at the mountains from their windows.” 22 They viewed the spectacles with a curiosity similar to the imaginary that is at the heart of tourism. In this sense, the success of the Normandy invasion made Vichyites and collaborators the objects of tourist curiosity, evident, for example, in the crowds that watched shorn women "collabos" paraded through the streets after the Liberation. Tourism and its Continuities in Wartime France Organized tourism and personal vacation travel continued as well despite the very substantial privations of war and occupation during the early 1940s as some of the French continued to take holidays and go on tour while others planned for a postwar reprise. French tourism planners worked assiduously during the war to prepare for what they hoped would be a better future, no matter who the victor. The occupying German forces organized tens of thousands of tours in Paris and elsewhere in France for their personnel, building on an already established tourist imaginary of France or, in Noel B. Salazar’s description of the tourist imaginary, a set of “ideological, political, and socio-cultural stereotypes and clichés,” as a primary destination to be seen and, in some ways, admired.23 Although French tourism history has been written about at length, less well studied in its history is the place that the Second World War holds, possibly having spared Paris and the rest of the country extensive destruction both in 1940 when the Germans marched through following their victory and again when they were expelled in 1944. Accordingly, this book is a look into a different, and seldom addressed, aspect of war in general, and the Second World War in particular, specifically its

interactions with the world of tourism in France both during and since the war.24 France, a country with a long history of attraction for tourism and currently the world's leader in international tourist visits, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization [UNWTO], played a dramatic, if anguished, role, succumbing to German Blitzkrieg in 1940 and as the scene of the Allied onslaught against the Reich in 1944. Tourism bestowed meaning upon wartime events, helping contemporary and retrospective visitors contextualize the war into preexisting modes of understanding gained earlier in peacetime. In many ways, even if attenuated during wartime, tourism and the continuation of vacations provided a sense of normalcy to French people’s lives, helping them survive and comprehend their wartime privations. German tourism in occupied France helped solidify a feeling of cultural supremacy in being able to appreciate the French sites while claiming the superiority of the homeland, reflecting the power imbalances between victors and vanquished. Postwar battlefield, heritage, and memorial tourism helped many in France and elsewhere make sense of their struggles and in a sense their very survival. The relationship of tourism and war is a large field inviting exploration on many different levels. Tourism imaginaries and on occasion tourism trajectories undoubtedly played a role in the activities, dreams, and aspirations of the "ordinary" Germans, described by Christopher Browning and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, in their studies of complicity in the Holocaust. This concept was rooted in Hannah Arendt's description of Adolf Eichmann and the "banality of evil."25 These were the many people, who in Arendt’s words “were terribly and terrifyingly normal.” 26 If, as Goldhagen suggests, an elimininationist program directed against Jews had become “common-sense” for large numbers of Germans by the time of the Second World War, it is likely that tourism images had also become part of the common-sense for them as well and that these sets of images helped normalize the war and the behavior of which Goldhagen wrote. Such mental juxtapositions may help explain why war is possible, why it starts, how it continues, and some of the effects it has afterward. Tourism and its images, in other words, especially in regard to France in 1939, had become so widely embedded in Western cultural values that they helped integrate the experience of war into the worldview of those who fought, suffered, and even exulted, during and after the war. It was no accident that one of the victorious Hitler’s first actions after defeating France in June 1940 was to tour Paris, ostentatiously expressing the altered power relationships of the time. It is unlikely that it will ever be known to what degree, if any, the image of France as a tourism icon by the time of the Second World War may have helped save it from the fate of Poland, for example. Germans from Hitler down took pride in their having spared French tourist sites in 1940. Whether tourist imagery of Paris helped spare it, despite Hitler’s order to destroy the city in August 1944,

has been debated but even here much of the postwar discourse has pivoted around the Paris tourism imaginary. Warsaw needed to be largely rebuilt after the war. Paris emerged relatively intact. Normandy suffered considerable damage during the spring and summer of 1944 but battlefield tourism since then has contributed to its economy and its cultural cachet. A seemingly unlikely mix: tourism, war, and France combined tell a story that is the subject of this book. Despite the extensive literature on cultural tourism and on warfare and its history, there has been relatively little study of the inter-relationships between the two. Magazines for enthusiasts, such as After the Battle, published in Britain, are devoted to the retrospective description of battlefield sites. A Dutch website with listings of battlefields and other war monuments throughout Europe, "WW2Museums.com," an initiative of STIWOT (Stichting Informatie Wereldoorlog Twee [Foundation for Information on World War II]), states: "WW2Museums.com is the place to plan your own battlefield tour along WW2 museums, monuments, cemeteries and other sights of interest in and outside Europe. Through WW2Museums.com you will be introduced to WW2 sights of interest that still can be visited today!"27 The slaughter of millions of people, combatants and non-combatants, and notably the willful genocide of the Holocaust that have marked the discourse relating to the war, may be expected to continue to do so into the foreseeable future and, most probably, beyond. At first, the linking of the grave issues of war and genocide with the more pleasure-oriented and, some might argue, the seemingly more mundane or banal phenomenon of tourism might be surprising. In his Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord called tourism “the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”28 It is generally considered a pleasurable pastime, associated with vacations and the kinds of activities that people choose to enjoy when they are not compelled by economic necessity to work. In 1986, Dean MacCannell differentiated between spectacles and sights, staged in different ways, the former more bounded in time and the latter, as the Eiffel Tower, more temporally transcendent.29 Both may become tourism sites, drawing the curious from near and far, exemplified in the crowds drawn to the streets of Paris to watch General de Gaulle’s parade down the Champs-Élysées following the Liberation in August 1944. The “tourist gaze,” to use John Urry’s term, was not a function of distance traveled. Writing about "tourism, holiday-making and travel" in 1990, Urry commented "On the face of it there could not be a more trivial subject for a book." He then explained that studying the tourist gaze could also offer insights into other aspects of human behavior.30 In their earlier study of

research themes related to tourism, Richard Butler and Geoffrey Wall also noted that its history could be studied "for the light which the knowledge of tourism can throw on other aspects of life."31 The increased tourism documented by the UNWTO together with the growing awareness among students of human behavior that the study of tourism, as Butler, Wall, and Urry suggested, does help shine light on social and cultural development in general and has led to increased attention to the subject.32 In broad terms, war-related tourism occurs in two forms, different in their own ways but also linked. On one hand there is battlefield tourism, or tourisme de mémoire in which people visit past scenes of battle or other types of memorials and monuments to past wars. The second form of war-related tourism, less well studied, is that of people who went on vacations, travels, and tours during wartime, or watched battles as they unfolded. This form of tourism took place as thousands of German civilian and military personnel were given tours of occupied France during the Second World War. The Second World War in France is a striking case of both postwar and wartime linkages of tourism and war. Battlefield tourism plays a major economic role in Normandy. Young German soldiers touring in occupied France may have become conditioned to tourism as a leisure activity, contributing to the expectations and imaginaries that underlay the tourism takeoff in Germany and elsewhere after the war.33 Tourism as Curiosity and Commodity In a book titled Le Tourisme, Marc Boyer, a French historian of tourism, suggested that the most difficult task in writing about tourism was defining the term. International agencies, he wrote, used the word in different ways and the specific countries of Europe also employed varying definitions in assessing their tourist industries. The term had developed in early modern England at the time of the Grand Tour. By the end of the 19th century it had spread into nearly all the European languages, including German, which retained “Fremdenverkehr” [literally, commerce or traffic among strangers or foreigners] but also had adopted the word "tourismus." For statistical purposes, the League of Nations in 1937 defined “tourist” as “anyone who, traveling for his pleasure, leaves his usual place of residence for more than twenty-four hours and less than a year; trips of less than twenty-four hours being excursions.”34 In 1993, the UNWTO based its statistical studies of tourism on the following definition: Tourism comprises the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business or other purposes.35

A distinction, however, must be made between a narrower definition of the tourism industry, in which tourism has become a commodity and often a means of political control, as argued by Theodor Adorno, among others, and the act of touring or tourism.36 The latter, however manipulated by those in the industry, still channels a basic curiosity about the world. In its broader sense, tourism is curiosity in motion, or the practical application of aesthetic judgments. Whether in physically mobile or "armchair" and now internet tourism, people focus on their conceptions of the beautiful or the interesting, framed, and at times manipulated as Adorno suggests, in their cultural contexts of time and place. The tourism industry may incorporate power, evidenced for example, in the organized tours of occupied France provided to the victorious German soldiers by Nazi authorities after their victory of 1940. Underlying all tourism, however, is curiosity and wonder. Urry popularized the term "tourist gaze," for a sense of the looking in wonder that, he noted, has a long history in reference to the ways in which people encounter, assimilate, and understand ideas, material objects, and other people as they move around the world, observing and studying. 37 More recent scholars of tourism culture, including Rachid Amirou, Nelson Graburn, and Salazar, have focused on "tourism imaginaries," in Amirou's words, the "totality of images and evocations tied to tourism," to the present. The tourism imaginary, he wrote, is extensive, embracing conceptualizations of “explorations, travels, pilgrimages, vacations, leisure, adventure, relationships to space, nomadism, wandering, and discovery, among others.”38 As Salazar states: "It is hard to think of tourism without imaginaries or ‘fantasies’—the original Greek word for imagination, often used nowadays to denote more playful imaginaries related to things that are improbable or impossible."39 Based on the Latin notion of curiositas, tourism was deemed a reason to travel by the mid-14th century. Petrarch wrote, “I know that in men’s minds resides an innate longing to see new places.” 40 More recently, Mike Robinson, a British specialist in tourism research wrote: "If one strips away much of the hardware of tourism and travel we find that the human imagination is at its core."41 Tourist destinations, real and imagined, represent the aesthetic values present in a given culture at a specific time. Indeed, the cultural construction of tourist imaginaries, the values and images associated with the desire to visit, has become a significant field of academic inquiry. 42 The phenomena of tourism and the tourist imagination in Second World War France are products of the longer history of tourism and the aesthetic sensibilities with which it has been intertwined at least since the earliest humans began to wander around the world, gazing with curiosity at what they saw. In the words of one study of the relationship of tourism with aesthetics, “how we interpret what we see as tourists cannot be divorced from our own ideological underpinnings.”43

In 1751, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced the term “aesthetics,” which he called the “criticism of taste,” and established this field as a distinct area of philosophical inquiry.44 Baumgarten’s popularization of the term “aesthetics” coincided with the development of a vocabulary of tourism from the late 17th through the early 19th centuries in several European languages.45 In its larger sense, tourism with its gaze and its imaginary encompasses “seeing,” at least metaphorically, in addition to curiosity and esthetics. Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, “vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, ‘exterior,’ foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, [his italics] are ‘simultaneity.’46 Walter Benjamin suggested the relationship between seeing in this sense and tourism in his unfinished Arcades Project, in which he used the image of the flaneur, or stroller in the 19th century arcades of Paris to lead him into an investigation of the social imaginary of modernity.47 To Benjamin tourism meant a show “where everything is done for money,” although ironically, while he may have been describing the tourism industry, his own preoccupation with the flaneur reflected the more deep-seated tourist gaze or image.48 Discussing Urry’s “tourist gaze,” Kevin Meethan emphasized “the visual aspects of sightseeing as a fundamental and defining aspect of tourism” constituting “key elements in the tourist system.”49 In his book, The Art of Travel, Alain de Bottin, citing the 18th century French writer Xavier De Maistre, discusses “receptivity” as the main component of “a travelling mind-set,” with the focus on curiosity and seeing, rather than distance covered in touring. 50 Tourism as curiosity and seeing relates directly to France during the Second World War. How many people may have looked out over the Normandy beaches with a touristic curiosity similar to what Benjamin had in mind as the Allies arrived in June 1944 will never be known. A tourist, after all, need not travel far and of Paris it has been said that one may be a tourist in one's own city, as was Benjamin.

William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary, the Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), p. 413. 2 Pierre Audiat, Paris pendant la guerre (Paris: Hachette, 1946), pp. 240-241. 3 P. Bouis, “Le bureau de renseignements de l’hôtellerie/Plus de 500.000 Parisiens ont déjà été aiguillés vers d’agréables “séjours de remplacement,” Paris-Midi, 29 August 1942, in AN AJ/40/784, Folder 4. 4 Author’s interview with Frédéric Sommier, Directeur du Musée du Débarquement, Arromanches les Bains, 18 May 2009. 5 Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra, Les fascismes français, 1923-1963 (Paris: Seuil, 1963), p. 9. The historical context of my own study of the Second World War and France is told in 1

my chapter, "The Other Side: Studying the Collaborationists in World War II France," in Manu Braganca and Fransiska Louwagie, eds., Ego-Histories: Historians at Work on World War II France (to be published by Palgrave Macmillan). 6 Collaborationism in France during the Second World War. See also Bertram M. Gordon, ed., Historical Dictionary of World War II France: The Occupation, Vichy and the Resistance, 1938-1946 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998). 7 My two interviews of Marc Augier took place on 4 July 1974 and 19 July 1976, in Paris. His discussion of the periodicals for which he wrote in the 1930s occurred during the latter interview. 8 See Marc Augier, Les jeunes devant l'aventure Européene (Paris: Les Conférences du Groupe “Collaboration,” 1941), p. 20. 9 Ibid., p. 24. 10 For the analogy with the more recent French magazines, see Laurent Lamire, ed., Où sortir à Paris? Le guide du soldat allemand 1940-1944 (Paris: Alma, 2013), p. 9. 11 My original research was the basis for two journal articles: “Ist Gott Französisch? Germans, Tourism, and Occupied France, 1940-1944,” Modern and Contemporary France, NS4:3 (1996), pp. 287-298 and “Warfare and Tourism: Paris in World War II,” Annals of Tourism Research, 25:3 (July 1998), pp. 616-638, and a book chapter, “French Cultural Tourism and the Vichy Problem,” in Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 239-272. 12 Examples for France include Louis-Michel Jocard, Le Tourisme et l'action de l'Etat (Paris: Berger Levrault, 1966); Marc Boyer, Le Tourisme (Paris: Seuil, 1982 [1972]); André Rauch, Vacances en France de 1830 à nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1996); and Catherine Bertho Lavenir, La Roue et le Stylo, Comment nous sommes devenus touristes (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999). All are excellent studies of tourism but all pass over the war years. 13 Gordon, “World War II,” in Bill Marshall, ed., France and the Americas: Culture, History, Politics (Oxford and Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio Press, 2005), III, pp. 1229-1233. 14 Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 131-132. 15 Susan K. Foley, Women in France since 1789 (Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hamphire, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 214. 16 Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 150. 17 Shannon L. Fogg, The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables, and Strangers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 4. See also Sarah Fishman, The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth Century France (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 54. 18 Fogg, The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France, pp. 5-6. In the Loiret, for example, the Services du Contrôle mobile du Ravitaillement Général, the French agency that checked local food supplies, reported in 1942 that almost 30% of the potato crop was sold on the black market, "Note sur la répression du marché noir," annex 2 attached to "Rapport sur la possibilité d'augmenter la commercialisation des produits agricoles," to the Directeur

Régional de la Production Agricole, Clermont-Ferrand, 19 January 1942; AN F10 2184 (Folder: Commercialisation des Produits Agricoles). 19 "Bulletin d'Information," no. 83, 3 July 1941, pp. 3-5; in AN, F/60/1012. Private automobile use was allowed at night in the event of alerts, in which case they were to be used to reach shelters and with their headlights camouflaged, see Police Report, 28 October 1940; Archives de la Préfeture de Police, Paris, APP-220-W-1. 20 Rosemary Wakeman, The Heroic City: Paris 1945-1958 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 22. 21 A formative history of Vichy France, arguing that collaboration with the Germans had been far more extensive than recalled in the immediate postwar government narratives is Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). 22 Referenced from Jean-Didier Urbain, Sur la plage (Paris Petit Bibliothèque Payot, 1996), cited in Jean-Michel Hoerner and Catherine Sicart, The Science of Tourism: An Anglo-French Précis on Tourismology (Baixas: Balzac, 2003), p. 17. The quotation is originally from Hippolyte Taine, Voyage aux Pyrénées (Paris: Hachette, 1872). See “Homo turisticus selon Taine,” Revue de géographie alpine, 79: 4 (1991). p. 40. 23 Noel B. Salazar, “Tourism Imaginaries: A Conceptual Approach,” Annals of Tourism Research, 39: 2 (2012), p. 865. 24 For an earlier foray into this subject, specific to the Germans in occupied Paris, see my article, “Warfare and Tourism: Paris in World War II,” Annals of Tourism Research, 25:3 (July 1998), pp. 616-638. 25 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1977 [1963]), p. 252. See also Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper-Collins, 1992), pp. 159-163 and 188-189; and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 100-101, 248-250, 395, and 401402. 26 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 276. 27 ww2museums.com, STIWOT (Stichting Informatie Wereldoorlog Twee), <http://www.ww2museums.com/article/62/Mus%E9e-M%E9morial-de-la-Bataille-deNormandie.htm>, accessed 17 July 2010 and 7 January 2016. 28 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman et. al., (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977 [original French 1967]), thesis 168; reproduced in <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm>, accessed 3 February 2017. 29 Dean MacCannell, “Sights and Sectacles,” in Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner, eds., Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture, Festschrift for Thomas A. Sebeok on his 65th Birthday (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1986), p. 424. 30 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 2000 [original ed. 1990]), p. 3. 31 Richard Butler and Geoffrey Wall, "Introduction: Themes in Research on the Evolution of Tourism," Annals of Tourism Research, 12:3 (1985), pp. 292-293.

See my article, "Touring the Field,” pp. 135-156. For Germany, see Hasso Spode, Wie die Deutschen "Reiseweltmeister" wurden. Eine Einführung in die Tourismusgeschichte (Erfurt: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Thüringen, 2003). 34 Quoted in Boyer, Le Tourisme, p. 8. 35 The UN Statistical Commission endorsed the UNWTO’s definition in 1993 following an International Government Conference held in Ottawa, Canada in 1991. See “An Introduction to Tourism,” <http://tourism.emu.edu.tr/tyt/concordances/bot/>, accessed 16 July 2008. 36 Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture. Edited and with an introduction by J. M. Bernstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2001 [1991]), p. 189. 37 For the "tourist gaze," see Urry, The Tourist Gaze, pp. 1-2; also Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, "Tourism and the Photographic Eye," in Chris Rojek and John Urry, eds., Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, Routledge, London and New York, 1997, p. 176. 38 Rachid Amirou, L'imaginaire touristique (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2012 [1995]), pp. 25-26. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this text are my own. 39 Salazar, "Tourism Imaginaries: A Conceptual Approach," p. 866. 40 Morris Bishop, Petrarch and his World (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 1963), p. 92. 41 Mike Robinson, "Foreword" in Marina Novelli, ed., Niche Tourism: Contemporary Issues, Trends and Cases (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), p. xix. 42 An example of the academic focus on tourist imaginaries was an international conference, « Imaginaires Touristiques/Tourist Imaginaries », organized in February 2011 by the Tourism Studies Working Group (TSWG), of the University of California, Berkeley; the Interdisciplinary Group of Tourism Studies (EIREST), and the Institute of Advanced Studies and Research on Tourism (IREST), of the University of Paris 1 PantheonSorbonne, in Berkeley, California. For a more recent study addressing this subject, see Noel B. Salazar and Nelson H. H. Graburn, eds., Tourism Imaginaries - Anthropological Approaches (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014). 43 Daniel C. Knudsen, Michelle M. Metro-Roland, and Jillian M. Rickly, “Tourism, aesthetics, and touristic judgment,” Tourism Review International, 19:4 (2015), p. 186. 44 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Theoretische Ästhetik. Die grundlegenden Abschnitte aus der Aesthetica (1750/58), trans. and ed. by Hans Rudolf Schweizer. Lateinisch Deutsch, 2. durchges. Auflage, (Philosophische Bibliothek, Bd. 355). (Hamburg Meiner, 1988). See also Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 1, p. 206. 45 The term “landscapes” appears in English in 1598 and again in 1661. “Tour” shows up in 1643 and 1652, and “romantic” in 1659. “Picturesque” appears in 1703, with its cognates “pittoresco” in Italian in 1708 and “pittoresquement” in French in 1732. In 1780, the word “tourist” appeared in English and in 1816, “touriste” in French. See OED and Trésor de la Langue Française (Paris, Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1971-), passim. 32 33

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in Stephen David Ross, ed., Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 304. 47 Hannah Arendt, “Introduction” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (new York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 21; and Alexander Gelley, “Contexts of the Aesthetic in Walter Benjamin,” MLN (Modern Language Notes), 114:5, Comparative Literature Issue (December, 1999), p. 952. 48 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 27 and 304. 49 Kevin Meethan, Tourism in Global Society, Place, Culture, Consumption (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave, 2001), p. 81. 50 Alain de Bottin, The Art of Travel (New York: Vintage International, 2002), p. 242. See also Cain Samuel Todd, “Nature, Beauty and Tourism,” in John Tribe, ed., Philosophical Issues in Tourism (Bristol, Buffalo, and Toronto: Channel View Publications, 2009), pp. 167-168. 46

The Commanderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dilemma Violence and Restraint in Wartime

Amelia Hoover Green

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Contents List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: Repertoires and Restraint Chapter 1. The Commander’s Dilemma Chapter 2. Setting the Context: The History of El Salvador’s Civil War Chapter 3. Comparing State and FMLN Institutions and Ideologies Chapter 4. FMLN Institutions and Ideologies in Depth Chapter 5. Repertoires of Violence in the Salvadoran Civil War, 1980-1992 Chapter 6. The Commander’s Dilemma Beyond El Salvador Conclusion Appendix Notes Works Cited Index

Introduction Repertoires and restraint Repertoires are learned cultural creations…they emerge from struggle. —Charles Tilly, “Contentious Repertoires in Great Britain, 1758-1834” (1993). Over about three days in December 1981, an elite, American-trained battalion of the Armed Forces of El Salvador murdered approximately 1,000 people in and around the village of El Mozote, in the department of Morazán. Rufina Amaya was one of the only eyewitness survivors to these killings. Her testimony, a version of which was published in 1996 as Luciernagas en El Mozote, describes both the killings and the crimes that accompanied them: “[We] were taken out of the houses and had to lay face down in the street, including children, and [the soldiers] took everything: necklaces, money… [The next morning the soldiers killed some of the men.] These they beheaded and threw into the convent. At noon, they finished killing all the men and went to get girls to take them to the hills [where many were raped]…At five in the afternoon they took me with a group of 22 women. I was the last in line. I was breastfeeding my daughter. They took her from my arms. …The soldiers killed that group of women without realizing that I had hidden, and went to bring another group. About seven o’clock in the evening they finished…” After joking about the “witches” burning in the sacristy, Amaya writes, soldiers looted snacks and drinks from the local store. Amaya crawled away and hid until the soldiers moved on, then took shelter in a cottage near the Rio Sapo. Eight days later, a local family found Amaya as they were bringing corn for storage; by Christmas, rebel forces had begun to inspect El Mozote and the surrounding hamlets, and to bury the dead. American reporters reached the area in early January. Both Raymond Bonner, in the New York Times, and Alma Guillermoprieto, in the Washington Post, interviewed Amaya for their stories about the massacre, which were published January 27, 1982.1 Amaya quickly became the victim of a vicious smear campaign. US and Salvadoran officials, who claimed alternately that no massacre had occurred, or that civilians in northern Morazán were guerrilla sympathizers (Binford 2016, chapter 4; Bonner, 1985; Guillermoprieto, 2007). Yet Amaya lived to see her story vindicated by the Truth Commission at war’s end, played a key role in the exhumation and reburial of victims, and remained in Morazán until her death, in 2007. El Mozote, like My Lai, is now a place synonymous with an atrocity. It has become the best-known episode of violence against civilians during the Salvadoran civil war, and a stand-in for the brutality of state forces. Yet it is not a representative episode: when they killed, Salvadoran forces typically did so in ones and twos, or from a distance. Death squads seized individual victims from their homes and dumped their mutilated bodies at San Salvador’s giant municipal garbage dump;

planes and helicopters dropped bombs that obliterated isolated villages. But nonlethal violence was at least as common: paramilitary security forces detained thousands of civilians, torturing them for information, punishment, and fun. Soldiers stole food, sexually harassed and raped women during operations in villages, and otherwise conducted an indiscriminate and deeply alienating campaign of terror against the civilian population. State violence in El Salvador contrasts starkly with violence against civilians by the opposing guerrilla forces, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, FMLN). Prototypical violence by the FMLN included the targeted assassinations of individuals thought to be collaborating with the government, including a number of mayors (Betancur et al. 1993). Civilian massacres by FMLN cadre were nearly unheard of. Indeed, the most sustained campaign of FMLN murders appears to have occurred when the political-military commander of the paracentral region (the departments of Cabañas, San Vicente, and La Paz), known as Mayo Sibrian, spiraled into paranoia following a period of imprisonment in 1984–85. Between assuming command of the region in 1986 and his execution in 1991, Mayo Sibrian ordered the torture and killing of hundreds of guerrilla fighters and civilian collaborators on charges of infiltration (Galeas and Ayala 2008). Here, too, a common pattern of violence emerges. A witness to the violence (quoted in Galeas and Ayala 2008, loc. 65-71) testified (my translation): “Ethel [Pocasangre Campos, a guerrillera known as “Crucita”] was accused of treason… On the 22nd of September of 1986, at a place in the village of San Bartolo, near a hill, her own guerrilla commanders tied her up and threw her, halfnaked, into the mud. During several hours they tortured her, beating her with a club made of guava wood, while they demanded that she confess and give up her supposed accomplices. After that, she was executed and buried in a common grave, together with fifteen other combatants killed in the same way that day.” Yet, despite the climate of fear created by Mayo Sibrian’s actions, and despite what observers describe as “low morale” among his troops, it seems clear that the violence, while horrific, was also tightly controlled. Unlike the laundry list of state atrocities, there appeared to be little violence against non-aligned civilians. No clear instances of sexual violence, extortion, or theft are discussed, even by the most critical sources; the closest we come is the reference to Crucita’s being “halfnaked” as she faced torture. Across the span of the war, FMLN cadre committed low levels of violence overall, and extremely low levels of sexual violence and property crimes. The story of why and, more importantly, how the FMLN implemented this policy makes up an important part of this volume. A partial contrast to the Salvadoran war can be found in Perú, where Shining Path guerrillas were responsible for a number of brutal retributive massacres. Perhaps the most famous of these occurred in the village of Lucanamarca, where

in 1983 Shining Path cadre murdered over sixty men, women and children, using extraordinarily brutal, personal, performative violence. Antonio Quincho testified to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he returned to his home a few days after the massacre to find victims “…with their hands and feet tied up, the braids cut off the young women, who had been cut with axes, knives, and picks; they had even thrown hot water on them…we found children with their little hands burned, their little faces…they had pulled out the guts of newborn babies and stomped their heads until the brains came out” (my translation from testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Perú, quoted in Volume VII, Chapter 2, section 6, p. 46). The Shining Path’s ideology was ostensibly similar to that of the Salvadoran FMLN, yet Shining Path cadre were responsible for vast and brutal lethal violence—approximately half of all killings during the Peruvian civil war. Much of the violence committed by Shining Path cadre could be described as “overkill”— violence in excess of that required to kill, including performatively gruesome acts such as those described above. Indeed, the Shining Path has been described as a “cult of violence,” in which violence became not only a means to exert control but a purifying force in itself. Yet, in most times and in most areas, Shining Path cadre committed very few acts of sexual violence relative to government forces; in this regard, the Lucanamarca massacre looked very little like El Mozote. The conflicts in El Salvador and Perú featured leftist guerrilla forces fighting large, conventionally oriented state militaries. Post-Cold War conflicts, on the other hand, often pit weak state militaries, no longer propped up by Cold War superpowers, against non-state actors whose political motives may be outweighed by their profit motives (cf. Collier 2000). S.J., a wealthy woman from Bombali District in northern Sierra Leone, was one of thousands caught in brutal fighting between the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the Sierra Leone Army (SLA) in 1999. In a 2003 Human Rights Watch report, she described murder, rape, torture and pillage by RUF combatants (Human Rights Watch 2003, p. 37): “I saw them kill three people and were it not for God, I would have been the fourth. Then they burned thirteen houses and looted all our things. I ran with my four children to the house in the bush where we tend to the cows…[S]even rebels surprised us there...They started stealing what few possessions I had and then [the commanding officer of the unit] said that I should be raped...Four raped me and the last one to rape me...put a knife to my throat and said he was going to kill me but the C.O. said I shouldn't be killed. Then they tied my hands behind me and [the C.O.] burnt me. He scooped up hot charcoal from the fire we had been cooking with and tried to burn my face with it. I struggled and turned my face so he burned my chest instead.” Across the country in Bonthe district, J.K. suffered violence at the hands of Community Defense Forces (CDFs), also known as Kamajors (Human Rights

Watch 2003, p. 47): “One of the Kamajors called Kinie said that they had been told that my brother was in the village and was planning to attack them. I assured them no one knew where he was. During this argument, the other civilians in village became afraid and fled into the bush. As soon as the Kamajors forced their way into my bedroom, I followed them to check up on what they were doing. Kinie and another Kamajor whose name I did not know pushed me to the ground, tearing off my clothes. I screamed for help but no one came to my rescue. Even my father who was in the house was unable to help me. They both raped me while the others stood around laughing. When they left the village, they looted some goats and chickens. There was no one to report the incident to and I had no money to pay for a hospital visit. I decided to leave everything to the Almighty God.” J.K.’s story is superficially similar to S.J.’s. Indeed, Human Rights Watch published both testimonies as part of a report documenting sexual violence by all parties to the conflict. But it is important to know that sexual violence by Kamajors was relatively rare, while sexual violence by RUF forces was common. While CDF violence was significant, it seldom featured sexual violence, amputation, or the other crimes for which RUF cadre were feared and reviled. Why? Why did Salvadoran troops massacre the village of El Mozote and terrorize the broader civilian population, while its rebel enemies carefully controlled violence against civilians? Consider for a moment the full range of abuses described in the first-hand narratives above. Soldiers steal animals, poison wells, and set fires. They sexually harass women and cut their hair. They rape and torture. They discuss, argue, accuse, joke, drink looted soda pop, and grab chickens on their way out of town. The nitty-gritty details of violence play important roles in eyewitness narratives, and to non-expert readers they have a clear “feel”—regimented or berserk, ritualistic or oddly workmanlike. Yet many or most would be erased from systematic studies of wartime violence. Social scientists often strip away gore and complexity as we search for the ‘logic of violence’ (cf. Kalyvas, 2006). In particular, we often focus on lethal violence, excluding other forms from our analyses and our attention. The stories above are reduced to a list of body counts; stories that include horrific violence other than death are often erased completely. Unfortunately, the simple, compelling theories of (lethal) violence that are social scientists’ stock in trade offer few explanations for the abduction, destruction, detention, disappearance, disfigurement, displacement, sexual violence, slavery, theft and torture that often accompany killings. But the fact remains that, despite an intense narrative and historical focus on death, most victims of atrocities during war survive. Disregard for living victims, I argue, is an analytical problem as much as a moral one. The main question of this book is: why do some combatants and groups commit many types of violence,

seemingly indiscriminately, while others carefully limit the forms or levels of violence they employ? Repertoires of violence Answering this book’s central question requires sustained, systematic attention to the repertoire of violence, which I define as the forms of violence frequently used by an actor, and their relative proportions. By violence, I mean direct physical aggression, either against persons or against immediate necessities such as food or shelter; or specific threats of imminent, direct physical violence. Murder, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, torture, amputation and other physical violence are included, but so—for the purposes of this volume—are looting, livestock killings, and the burning of homes. While I recognize institutional, structural and psychological violence as elements of any repertoire, in this volume I generally focus on direct physical violence. (I understand, of course, that this means my own work is subject to the same concerns about ignoring analytically and morally consequential forms of violence that I raise about other works. My hope is that this book will be the first of many to systematically examine multiple forms of violence in conflict.) While some political scientists have examined repertoires of violence during individual wars (notably James Ron’s [1997] work on the Israeli Defense Forces and Francisco Gutierrez Sanín’s [2004, 2008] work on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), none has theorized repertoires per se, and most (again, with notable exceptions; see Wood 2006, 2009, 2017; Cohen 2013, 2016) have essentially ignored non-lethal violence. Among the most important goals of this book is to consider how, and how systematically, repertoires of violence differ from time to time, place to place, and group to group. As a concept, the repertoire of violence is a direct descendant of Charles Tilly’s (1993) concept of “repertoires of contention,” the definition of which serves as the epigram for this Introduction. Tilly was thinking about the non-electoral ways that people, often organized in movements, push for political goals: boycotts, letter-writing, demonstrations, sit-ins, riots, and so on. I am thinking about the violent acts that armed groups and fighters use (primarily, in this book, against civilians) for any reason or—and this will become important—for no apparent reason at all. But the analogies connecting repertoires in art, repertoires of contention, and repertoires of violence are complicated and incomplete. Tilly himself distinguishes, usefully yet confusingly, between the repertoire of improvisations available to jazz musicians and the tightly defined rotation of a repertory theatrical company. A sixteen-bar solo is a very different endeavor from a decision about Lear versus Godot. Tilly stresses that “repertoires are learned cultural creations…at any point in history, however, they learn only a rather small number of alternative ways to act

collectively” (1993: 264). For Tilly, what is interesting about repertoires of contention is their boundedness. He stresses improvisation, but also learning, deliberation, choice-making and strategy. One thing that sets repertoires of wartime violence apart from repertoires of peacetime contention, I argue, is the extent to which desperation or lack of information can destroy deliberation, choice-making and strategy. Repertoires of violence may change suddenly; changes may diffuse through larger groups quickly, or remain isolated. While repertoires of violence are bounded, they are less constrained by external forces than repertoires of contention. Repertoires of violence may be narrow, encompassing only a few tightly controlled forms of violence, or broad, comprising many forms. An armed group’s repertoire of violence may be uniform across individuals or sub-groups, or nonuniform. Qualitatively, by “broad repertoire of violence” I mean a repertoire of violence in which many different forms of violence are represented, including both forms of violence that often require planning or infrastructure and are often ordered by commanders (killing, torture) and forms of violence that often happen in the absence of orders (sexual violence, looting, extortion). The FMLN, Shining Path and Kamajors used narrow repertoires of violence in most times and places, contrasting with the Salvadoran army, the Peruvian army, and the Revolutionary United Front. I often describe the breadth of a repertoire of violence using one of several rough numerical proxies: the number of forms of violence regularly used (although that measure requires defining “regularly”), the proportion of episodes of violence made up by a particular form of violence (often, as I describe in the next chapter, looting or sexual violence), the proportion of episodes of violence made up by the most common form(s) of violence, or the ratio of lethal to nonlethal violence. I refer to an actor’s violence as restrained when it uses low levels of violence (as measured by total incidents of violence), narrow repertoires of violence (specializing in one or a few types of violence), or both. Often, though, I eschew quantitative measures altogether, simply because accurate measurement of wartime violence is extraordinarily difficult. Where I do use quantitative measures, I use a variety of strategies to create repertoire estimates, and to check these estimates against qualitative and historical understandings. I have argued (and will argue at greater length in chapter one) that repertoires and levels of violence are “analytically separable:” it is fruitful to think of them separately. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge how repertoires and levels of violence affect one another. For example, in El Salvador — the site of much of the research for this book — the overall level of violence against civilians by state forces dropped significantly after Vice President George H.W. Bush (quoted in Apodaca 2006, p. 89) issued a warning to Salvadoran leaders in late 1983: “Providing assistance to you [the Salvadoran state] is not a popular cause in

the United States. Publicity about death squads, great inequalities of income, the killing of American citizens and military setbacks make it a very unpopular proposition in my country…Without actions in these areas there is no point in trying to obtain additional funds for El Salvador, and to be honest, we will not even make the effort, because it will be fruitless.” Much of the drop in the government’s level of violence against civilians occurred because state forces lowered their level of lethal violence—the form of violence that, state leaders knew, most concerned their American patrons. In chapter seven, I find no evidence that levels of other forms of violence changed appreciably in either direction. There are two ways to evaluate this change. We could say that repertoires broadened: as killings declined, non-lethal violence necessarily formed a larger proportion of the overall repertoire. By another measure, the repertoire changed very little: killings declined, but remained a significant part of the state’s repertoire, and consequently the most common forms of violence remained the same. By any measure, the repertoire was, and remained, broad. What can we infer from this pattern? Existing theories don’t provide full explanations. We know that the change in violence was not the result of rational calculation among enlisted people or low-level officers, because the decline occurred rather suddenly across many state forces. We know that it was not a response to changing rebel strategies, which were essentially static during this period. The state’s recruiting pool remained constant; it wasn’t suddenly recruiting people who would torture but not kill. The relative timing of the change vis-a-vis the Bush speech suggests that top Salvadoran leaders responded to threats and incentives from their American patrons, a dynamic more often associated with external sponsorship of rebels (e.g., Salehyan, Siroky and Wood, 2014). But even this doesn’t fully explain the change in some, but not all, forms of violence. How much control did Salvadoran leaders actually exercise over low-level officers and soldiers? The high command may have demanded explicitly that individual units decrease killings but continue other forms of violence. Or it may only have instructed units about killings, leaving lower-level personnel to determine a course of action regarding other forms of violence. Or perhaps the high command demanded limits on all forms of violence, but lower-level personnel couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fully comply. The evidence I present in chapter four suggests that top Salvadoran military leaders lacked both the will and the capacity to control violence against civilians. Orders from the top curtailed killings after late 1983, but the situation with other forms of violence was vastly more complicated. Some violence continued, with commanders’ knowledge, because it was less visible to American patrons than the death squad murders and massacres of 1979-1983. Paramilitary security forces, in particular, maintained a relatively well-organized system of arbitrary detention and

torture in jails and prisons around the country. Within regular army units, on the other hand, much of the continuing violence was opportunistic, committed either in the absence of orders or against them. Why study repertoires? Repertoires are multidimensional; they are difficult to describe succinctly or measure systematically. My colleagues often, and rightly, ask: why add complexity, when we already have enough difficulty understanding variation in single forms of violence? First and most importantly, developing repertoire measures allows the researcher—particularly the quantitative researcher—to examine variation in violence on dimensions other than the number of killings. As Cohen (2016) has persuasively argued, to analyze killings exclusively is to ignore many women victims of violence, because killings are much more likely to target military-age men (cf. Carpenter 2006). Theidon (2004), examining the construction of memory in the highlands of Perú, describes how men steered public meetings toward episodes of slaughter, particularly a case in which a local man was burned alive. In a women-only setting, equally impassioned accounts emerged of soldiers destroying food stores, stealing prized livestock, and disappearing breadwinners. Women also discussed both the heroism and the stigma attached to women who “agreed” to have sex with soldiers in exchange for the freedom of their spouses or other loved ones. For many of Theidon’s respondents, soldiers “shit[ting] in the wheat [stores]” was as threatening a demonstration of impunity as a murder or rape. Considering repertoires helps to retain some fidelity to these experiences and priorities, which have often been swept aside in the dramatic narratives of historical memory or social scientific analysis. Analytically, examining repertoires overturns some common misunderstandings about “violence” that can creep into social-scientific accounts. Until relatively recently, nearly all quantitative research on wartime violence against civilians focused on killings as a stand-in for “violence.” Most scholars would describe this as an attempt to count systematically one war crime that can often be counted; others have more explicitly chosen to measure killing because of its presumed status as the ultimate atrocity—“the absolute violence” (Kalyvas 2006: 20, quoting Sofsky 1998:53). This analytical move assumes, implicitly or explicitly, either that all types of violence have the same cause, or that non-lethal violence is purely anomic and random. Research on sexual violence demonstrates that at least this one category of non-lethal atrocities varies systematically, but not according to the same logics as lethal violence (Cohen, Hoover Green and Wood, 2012). Still, research on sexual violence often considers variation in rape and other sexual assaults in isolation, just as previous works did with lethal violence. As the narratives above suggest, there is often more—and sometimes much more—going on. I don’t think that quantitative scholars of wartime violence actually believe that un-counted, un-analyzed forms of violence are unimportant or purely random. Yet

we have been slow to consider the analytical value of repertoires. Often, in thinking about wartime violence against noncombatants, we place groups on a spectrum from “nonviolent” (or at least, less violent) to “extremely violent.” Table 1.1 adds a dimension for repertoire, resulting in four rough quadrants: low violence and narrow repertoires; high violence and narrow repertoires; low violence and broad repertoires; and high violence and broad repertoires. In all quadrants except the upper left, I have chosen a few groups out of many to highlight. In the upper left, only one group is listed. No literature known to me clearly identifies an armed group that uses low levels of violence with a wide repertoire, but one (unconfirmed) exception to this rule is the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), a Congolese rebel group led by Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo. The MLC entered neighboring Central African Republic to assist in defending against a coup during 2002-03. Amnesty International (2004) noted a pattern of “widespread” rape, looting, and pillage, often at roadblocks near the capital, Bangui. The Amnesty International report, which focused on the experiences of women, documented no killing. However, according to the office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (2007), “Civilians were killed and raped; and homes and stores were looted. The alleged crimes occurred in the context of an armed conflict between the government and rebel forces. This is the first time the Prosecutor is opening an investigation in which allegations of sexual crimes far outnumber alleged killings.” Existing theories of violence explain neither the MLC’s repertoire of violence in CAR nor the general absence of low-violence, wide-repertoire groups. Similarly, I believe would be a mistake to describe violence by Shining Path cadre and the Peruvian army (for example), both clearly high-violence groups, as “similar.” The Peruvian state used a wide repertoire of violence in chaotic, highly variable ways, while the Shining Path employed considerable violence in ways that were usually regimented and ritualistic. Figure 0.1, below, gives a broader view. Here, I plot the relationship between scores on the Political Terror Scale (PTS, x axis) (Wood and Gibney, 2010) and scores on the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict dataset (SVAC, y axis) (Cohen and Nordås, 2014). Both the PTS and the SVAC are yearly indices assigned by coding qualitative reports. The PTS measures the overall level of government repression on a scale of 1 (very low violence) to 5 (widespread terror), focusing on lethal violence, torture and detention. SVAC scores focus exclusively on sexual violence and are measured on a scale from 0 (very few reported cases of sexual violence) to 3 (widespread and/or systematic sexual violence). Figure 0.1 shows the maximum score assigned to each government that was engaged in at least one civil war between 1989 and 2009, inclusive (there are 71 such governments).

Two observations about Figure 0.1 are important, for my purposes. First, the distribution of scores is neither linear, with levels of lethal violence predicting levels of sexual violence, nor random. Second, as with the missing northwest quadrant of table 0.1, there are zero governments whose highest level of sexual violence exceeded their highest overall level of “terror” during this period. Governments that perpetrate high levels of sexual violence with low levels of lethal violence are extraordinarily rare. The reverse situation—high levels of lethal violence with low levels of sexual violence—is relatively common.2 Standard “theories of violence” cannot explain this regularity, because they tend either to view violence as a unitary phenomenon with a single underlying logic, or to assume that non-lethal violence occurs more or less randomly, at least with respect to lethal violence. The pattern here suggests neither of these is the correct explanation— that repertoires of violence vary systematically, but not according to the same logic(s) as either individual forms or overall levels of violence. Existing literature An extensive literature in political science attempts to explain variation in violence against civilians, usually defining or measuring “violence” as lethal violence. A second (newer, smaller) set of findings considers variation in sexual violence, including rape, during wartime. However, while some existing “theories of violence” carry repertoire implications, none adequately explains the types of repertoire variations discussed above. Moreover, few incorporate insights from the large empirical literature on socialization, violence, and trauma. In this section, I outline several key theoretical approaches to violence against civilians in wartime and discuss how each contributes to a systematic study of repertoire variation. Ultimately, though, I believe that the profusion of theories of violence is evidence that we need an alternative approach—namely, a theory of restraint. Scholars have developed and tested several such theories in recent years, but even the concept of “restraint” is a contested one. For example, Stanton (2016: 30) defines restraint as “extremely low levels of violence,” including a “deliberate attempt to limit violence” against civilians. Yet by Stanton’s definition, the FMLN ends up in a non-restraint category: “low-casualty violence” (21). I agree that the FMLN committed low-casualty violence, but I disagree that any intentional (lethal) violence implies non-restraint. Jo (2015) avoids the term “restraint” altogether, investigating instead why some rebel groups comply with international law. She notes that compliance is different from, though related to, non-violence. Operationally, though, “Non-compliance [is] defined as the indiscriminate and entirely avoidable killing of civilians” (24): compliance is avoiding clearly unnecessary lethal violence. In focusing on restraint or restraint-like behaviors, both Stanton and Jo recognize that restraint is not (only) the mirror image of violence. While (dis)incentives for violence “enter the equation” for parties that

use restraint, a decision for restraint often also accounts for other factors, including normative factors such as legitimacy that hold importance beyond concrete shortand medium-term benefits. In Jo’s work, rebels comply when they seek legitimacy; for Stanton, armed groups opt for restraint when they answer to a broad constituency. The fact that restraint, as a positive choice, emerges from a subtly different calculation than does simple absence of violence does not imply that these scholars have rejected the standard set of rationalist assumptions about armed groups and armed conflict. Notably, both Stanton and Jo treat armed groups as rational and unitary, very much in line with the broader literature. In this, they follow an important trajectory in political science, one that rejects a swath of psychological evidence at the individual level in order to reason about the strategies of armed groups as groups, and in particular, rational and unitary groups. Kalyvas (1999), for example, explicitly challenged the commonsensical view of violence against civilians as “wanton and senseless” (i.e., opportunistic, random, or traumainduced); his 2006 volume presents a theory of violence in which unitary groups employ (lethal) violence rationally, with the goal of creating or reinforcing territorial control, ideally by means of selective violence. Kalyvas argues that indiscriminate violence is almost never strategically beneficial and that it should decline over time. His (separate) theory of selective violence predicts that these targeted killings will occur most frequently in areas under “contested control.” Similarly in broad theoretical terms if not in empirical implications, Valentino (2013) views governments’ mass (lethal) violence against civilians as a rational response to civilian support for strong guerrilla groups. Downes (2006, 2008) suggests that state leaders target civilians in “desperate times,” when all else appears to have failed. “Desperation” sounds emotional but is a red herring: Downes’s approach is fundamentally rationalist, with (mass, lethal) violence viewed as a strategy of last resort. It seems plausible to assume, as these authors do, that armed group leaders would at least attempt to employ violence rationally. Yet, in practice, what looks rational may vary considerably from leader to leader. More generally, levels and patterns of violence against civilians vary significantly even where armed groups enjoy complete control for long periods of time. This could be the result of disunity between group leaders. Or, it could result from failures of command and control, i.e., from non-unitary armed groups. While both rationality and unitaryness seem to be plausible guiding assumptions, neither accurately describes how armed groups actually work. Rationalist theories touch only glancingly on repertoire; indeed, it is difficult to imagine how rationalist approaches could survive information about the full, bizarre, and counterproductive picture of wartime violence. One implication of a broadly strategic view of armed groups, though, is that violent acts with greater relative capacity to compel civilian

compliance will be overrepresented. But which type(s) of violence are those, and how would we diagnose “relative capacity to compel?” More fundamentally, I argue in the next chapter, I believe that armed groups are seldom unitary, and often incapable of acting “rationally.” A competing set of theories draws on principal-agent (PA) theory, an approach originating with labor economics that attempts to understand what types of employment contracts maximize worker output, given that workers (in this framework) prefer less work than employers.3 Mitchell’s (2009) volume Agents of Atrocity refers to principal-agent theory in a more heuristic way, assuming that some combatants prefer to “overwork,” rather than shirking as in traditional principalagent models. The resulting “agents of atrocity” are violence-maximizers who commit significant levels of many types of violence. However, Mitchell’s model does little to explain restraint: agents are restrained when principals effectively control them; there is little discussion of what makes for effective control. Weinstein’s (2007) principal-agent model suggests that resources available to insurgent elites at the outset of armed conflict determine the possibilities for “good behavior” (restraint) by insurgent forces. Groups that have access to material resources will offer them as payment to recruits, attracting “bad types” who are more difficult to control and prefer greater violence and broader repertoires. Combatant preferences are fixed: recruits are, and combatants remain, “good” or “bad” types, regardless of variation in training and combat experiences. Weinstein glancingly considers repertoire variation, but makes few systematic predictions. The basic prediction is that armed organizations with access to considerable tangible revenue streams will use broader repertoires of violence than other groups. But this doesn’t satisfyingly explain some cases. For example, Gutierrez Sanín (2008) shows that two groups with similar revenue streams in Colombia (right-wing paramilitaries and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) committed quite different repertoires of violence. In particular, paramilitary organizations committed much more sexual violence. Gutierrez Sanín suggests that the difference lies in the groups’ ideologies. Notably, while most political science literature focuses exclusively on lethal violence against civilians, a significant emerging literature addresses variation in sexual violence during conflict. These scholars tend to focus on institutional and ideational factors as both causes of sexual violence and causes of restraint. For example, Cohen (2016) argues that gang rape during conflict is a form of violent socialization, more common when recruits do not know or trust one another. Both interview evidence from ex-combatants in Sierra Leone and an extensive crossnational quantitative investigation find strong evidence that violent recruitment is associated with increased rape. Wood (2009) focuses on sexual violence as a practice—that is, as a phenomenon that can emerge when armed group leaders neither prohibit nor promote it. Baaz and Stern (2009) rely on ethnographic

interviews with combatants in the Democratic Republic of Congo to show that rape may emerge for multiple reasons in the absence of strong control by group leaders. In my view, what ties these scholars together is the observation that rape is seldom directly addressed by armed group leaders. Indeed, while the study of sexual violence in war emerged in response to cases (such as those of Bosnia or Rwanda) in which sexual violence appears to have been ordered, orders—either for or against—are rare. This raises several important questions for the study of repertoires more broadly. Can we anticipate which types of violence will be ordered, encouraged, ignored or prohibited? When (as is common with non-lethal forms of violence) ignorance among leaders is the order of the day, how do we explain the occasional emergence of restraint? Certainly incentives for restraint are part of the story, as Stanton (2016) and Jo (2015) argue. I am more interested in investigating the very significant variation within the set of groups with incentives to choose restraint. To do so requires turning to evidence from psychology and sociology. Where political violence is concerned, political science seems mostly to have ignored the (admittedly complex and occasionally contrary) findings of social psychology. The first half of chapter one asks how we should take on board empirical findings from psychology in building causal models of political violence and restraint, and so I only mention this vast literature in passing here. Factors shown to increase aggressive and/or violent behavior in experimental social psychology include obedience to violent authorities (Milgram 1974), adoption of a violent social role (Haney, Banks and Zimbardo 1973), dehumanization of an outgroup (Kelman 1973), ego threat (Baumeister, Smart and Boden 1996), masculinity threat (Richardson 2015), diffusion of responsibility (Bandura 1999), fear, anger, uncertainty, and simple habituation. Many or most of these factors are present much of the time during military recruitment, training, and combat; few suggest particular repertoire hypotheses. Social psychology examines the responses of normal humans to social stimuli. A second psychological explanation for violence, which focuses on trauma and pathology, pervades “common sense” understandings of violence against civilians. A narrative in which combatants “lose it” or “go berserk” after witnessing violent deaths underlies much of what we might “know” about wartime violence if our research were done mostly at the movies. And there’s something to it. Jonathan Shay’s well-researched, elegiac account of treating veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, Achilles in Vietnam (1994), examines (as the subtitle puts it) “combat trauma and the undoing of character.” Trauma theories suggest some hypotheses about patterns of violence; for example, soldiers in units with greater casualties should be more likely to commit violence against civilians, as should those with more deployment time. But, again, these theories have little to say about the repertoire of violence. One implicit hypothesis may be that repertoires of violence

become broader with greater trauma exposure; as Shay notes, the “berserk” state is associated with extreme, extra-lethal violence. Finally, the simplest “theory of violence” currently on offer is opportunism— the idea that combatants are violence maximizers who will commit as much violence as they can unless restrained. Mitchell (2009) works from this assumption in analyzing violence more generally, but opportunism has been especially present in prominent works on sexual violence in conflict, beginning with Brownmiller’s seminal Against Our Will (1975). However, as Wood (2006) explains, this line of reasoning over-predicts sexual violence: in several cases, combatants had ready access to civilian populations and could have committed sexual violence without significant repercussions, but did not.4 When we consider the repertoire of violence instead, opportunism theories get a little more interesting: what, we ask, would an opportunistic repertoire of violence look like? That’s a complicated question, which demands strong assumptions about combatant preferences. I discuss my approach to combatant preferences and psychology in the next chapter. The literature surveyed here only scratches the surface. In general, social scientists have found empirical support for an incredible profusion of causal theories to explain violence, operating at every conceivable level of analysis. Many, while mutually exclusive in terms of their theoretical assumptions, are observationally equivalent in many, if not most, situations. A reasonable reader, unacquainted with actual patterns of violence, could reasonably imagine maximal violence wherever war unfolds within reach of civilians. Broadening the scope of the investigation beyond killing makes the problem even more apparent. I have three goals in theorizing about repertoires of violence: first, to “flip the question,” taking violence as given and attempting to explain restraint; second, to rely only on empirically supportable assumptions; and third, to provide explanations for repertoire variation as well as variation in the level of violence.

Bonner wrote, “In some 20 mud brick huts here, this reporter saw the charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams and shattered tiles. There were more along the trail leading through the hills into the village, and at the edge of a nearby cornfield were the remains of 14 young men, women and children.” 2 It is possible that these results are reporting artifacts—e.g., that sexual violence is more likely to be reported when it is accompanied by extreme violence of other types. Based on my readings of both first-person narratives and statistical evidence, however, I believe this graph provides a rough view of real facts on the ground. 3 Gates (2002) provided an initial formalization of the principal-agent model for armed groups; without assuming any particular set of command or combatant preferences over violence, Gates’s model suggests that “distance” (physical, ethnic, ideological, or preferential), makes enforcement of group norms (and command decisions) more costly. 1

Few authors have systematically examined opportunism arguments in the case of lethal violence, since the prediction that all combatants maximize killings, given access, is clearly incorrect.