by David A. Bell

Last week I posted a query here about the historical rates of participation by American elites in the armed forces. I was interested in whether the decrease in participation rates since the 1950s was the sign of a novel and distressing decline in patriotic engagement by these elites--yet another example, perhaps, of the corrosive effects of modern liberalism--or more of a return to a historical norm. I received several helpful e-mails from colleagues, both at my physical university and this virtual one--thanks to all. I still can't claim to have a very thorough command of the subject, but it does seem as if my intuition was correct. Historically, in large part simply because of the small size of the peacetime American armed forces, our social elites--and especially Northeastern elites--had very little involvement in the armed forces. This changed in moments of national emergency such as the Civil War and World War I, but then quickly reverted to type. World War II, which was followed by the start of the cold war, Korea, and then Vietnam, led to an exceptionally long period of elite involvement, but it ended in the early '70s. In sum, it's unfair to excoriate these elites--journalists, academics, members of Congress, etc.--for their "failure" to send their sons and daughters into uniform. If President Bush had treated the "War on Terrorism" as a national emergency in the manner of earlier ones--if he had called for real sacrifice and mobilization--then we would have had a real test, and seen if this generation was different. But he didn't. So we have a continuation of the long-standing American pattern of having a disproportionately poor, rural, Southern and Western part of the population do the fighting and dying for the rest of us.