Why America's Founding Fathers would not recognise the country they created...

Article by Tom Hercock. Edited by Rose Colville. Additional Research by Kathy Stein. 

American history has often taken a radically different course from the hopes and expectations of the men who wrote the Constitution in 1787. If George Washington or Thomas Jefferson could visit the United States today, they would not recognise what they created, and would probably be horrified at some of its excesses.

The United States today accounts for 41.5% of total world military spending – a staggering $607 billion a year, around seven times the next biggest spender. However, America began life as a nation which abhorred militarism and would certainly not have a large standing army. As one of the sparks for the American Revolution had been the British bringing in professional soldiers to patrol the streets of Boston, it is hardly surprising that many early American leaders (especially Jefferson) mistrusted large professional armies, seeing them as a threat to the republican liberty they had just won. Should the new republic ever be subverted by a tyrant, a permanent national army would be a powerful weapon in his efforts to suppress the people. Instead, they saw the defence of the United States being handled by ‘Minutemen’ – local militia who could be mobilised quickly in an emergency; using weapons they owned themselves, and who would return to civilian life as soon as the trouble had been dealt with. Ironically, today a ‘Minuteman’ is a nuclear missile, perhaps the epitome of modern America’s military might. By contrast, at the Philadelphia Convention of 1789, Elbridge Gerry even suggested stipulating a maximum size of the professional armed forces in the Constitution – no more than two or three thousand. Gerry’s proposal got nowhere, Washington sarcastically suggesting that the Constitution should likewise restrict an enemy’s forces – but it is an good illustration of the mood regarding military power in late eighteenth century America.

Events moved quickly to damage the anti-military principles of America’s founders. With the British navy no longer patrolling United States waters following the War of Independence, American commercial shipping was badly hit by pirates and consequently, the first ships of the permanent United States Navy entered service in 1797. As the nation expanded westwards into Native American territories through the early nineteenth century, the need for a small armed force to defend settlers became clear. However, something close to the ‘Minuteman’ ideal did survive for a long time.

The army expanded massively – almost always through volunteers – in times of crisis such as the Civil War, but it shrank equally dramatically and rapidly once the war was over. At the end of the Civil War in 1865 the Union (Northern) army numbered over one million men; a year later, just 80,000, and further demobilisation would eventually reduce it to a peacetime 27,000. This pattern, of a small professional army added to by civilian volunteers during wars, lasted until 1941 when America entered World War Two. On the eve of war, its standing army was roughly the same size as that of Sweden, yet since then the demands of World War, Cold War and “War on Terror” have kept the professional American military at a size that would have horrified the eighteenth century American. Would any member of the Constitutional Convention have imagined that the permanent U.S. army would ever number 1.4 million, its current size?

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