 It feels like the Watergate hearings with all these cameras pointed at me. Okay, I'll see. You're the interrogator. Who are you? Sam Rayburn? Is that who that was? Okay, I guess we'll get started here. My topic, the culture of violence in America, myth versus reality, is a part of a book I'm working on, a chapter. And the working title of this book is false virtue, the myth of American exceptionalism. And what this is about is that during and shortly after the American Civil War, the U.S. government is said to have had a treasury of virtue because of what it did in the Civil War and what it did in the years thereafter. And there's a little book by the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, who many of you are probably familiar with. He won, I think, four Pulitzer Prizes. All the King's Men is his most famous novel. It was made into a movie. And he wrote a little book about the legacy of the American Civil War, which is where I got the idea for this title, False Virtue. And I'm going to read you just one thing he said. He said, this treasury of virtue that the U.S. government is said to have had after the Civil War is, quote, the justification for our crusades of 1917 and 1918 and 1941 and 1945 and our diplomacy of righteousness with the slogan of unconditional surrender and universal rehabilitation for others, not for Americans, for others. And then he said, this treasury of virtue is, quote, a plenary indulgence for all sins past, present, and future, end quote. And I think he's exactly right about that. That's what so-called American exceptionalism is. The government claimed that it was so virtuous by its acts that all future acts are virtuous by definition because the people perpetrating the acts are so righteous. They're the most righteous people in the world, in fact. And so the theme of my book is that this is all nonsense, essentially. Chapter after chapter, I'm writing about what the government actually did with all this virtue in the decades after the Civil War and this culture of violence topic is just one short chapter. And what it's about, it starts out with a discussion of some research by some friends of ours, Terry Anderson and P.J. Hill on the American West. And it turns out that the American West, the American frontier, that is, before there was a state in the frontier when the European immigrants just went out there and there were no state governments, no federal government had any authority out there at the time, there was no presence. It was a very peaceful place. Contrary to all those Clint Eastwood movies you've all seen, the Civil Society was a very peaceful place, relatively, certainly more peaceful than American cities today. And here's what Anderson and Hill said. This was an article they published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1979. They said that the West is perceived as a place of great chaos with little respect for property or life. But our research indicates that this was not the case. Property rights were protected and civil order prevailed. Private agencies provided a necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved. Like I said, that's totally the opposite of what you get from the movies. And I think this is an important line of research because historians totally miss this in most of the treatments of the American West. But they miss it by simply assuming that it was a very violent place. And then they write books and articles about the possible causes of all the violence. But they assume as a given that it was violence. And then they always come to this conclusion that this is one author named Joe France. American violence today reflects our frontier heritage. So they blame a lot of the violence in American cities today for this frontier heritage. And it's just a totally false analogy, I think, because it wasn't that violent. But there was another area of violence. I'm going to talk about the real violence. Not the real Lincoln, but the real violence. And so what were these institutions? Anderson and Hill talked about institutions that created this peaceful society. One of them was land clubs. These were organizations established by settlers. And they had their own constitutions. They had to be when they settled the land. They administered land claims. They protected themselves from outsiders. They arbitrated disputes. So they just didn't go into anarchy with the Wild West and gunslingers and everybody shooting each other every day. That's pretty much the image you get when you watch the Western movies. The wagon trains did the same thing. Wagon trains that were miles long with people heading from the East to the West in America. They established their own constitutions also. And usually ostracism or threats of being kicked out were sufficient to discipline the miscreants, the people who were behaving badly. And so it was not necessary to use violence very often with the wagon trains. Mining camps. I was very disappointed when I read about this because some of my favorite movies are about the violence in mining camps. Drunkenness and shootouts and all that. Lee Marvin was one of my favorite actors in that regard. But the mining camps did essentially the same thing. When they established a camp, you had to sign a contract as a member of the mining camp. And these contracts established your property right in a section of land where you would mine for gold or whatever and you would have property rights to any gold found on your land. And these were all enforced by the miners themselves. And simply if you did not abide by the rules of the contract then the rest of the miners would simply declare that your property was fair game for anyone. That anyone could mine on your property. And they could jump your claim as they say. And that was enough of an incentive to pretty much get people to behave and without violence, without violence. And it was pretty well self-enforcing. Cattlemen's associations, cattle ranchers did something similar. They hired private protection agencies to discipline rustling. And in the literature it says that many of them were staffed by expert gunmen, sharp shooters. And I would think that the mere knowledge that there were sharp shooters around would deter rustling, cattle rustling. And it apparently did. So it wasn't violent. And these expert gunmen did not become criminal gangs like some have predicted would occur with private law enforcement. Some of them were criminals but it wasn't a real big problem. So in short, these are the institutions that Anderson and Hill demonstrated were very well thought out and worked very well. And it's not just Anderson and Hill. There are other writers that I cite that have found the same thing. There's a relatively peaceful place. But Anderson and Hill, they leave it there. That's the end of their story. And the second section in my paper is on what I call the real cause of violence in the American West. There was a culture of violence in the American frontier. It wasn't in the civil society. It was primarily the U.S. government's war on the plains Indians that did create a spectacular culture of violence in the American West. And you have to understand a few things. I want to quote an economist named Jennifer Roback who was an old friend of mine. And she wrote an article in 1992 about the relationship between the Europeans and the Indians in terms of land settlement. And she said this, she generally acknowledged that the Indians retained possessory rights to their lands. More importantly, the English recognized the advantage of being on friendly terms with the Indians. And I'll get this. This is a shocking statement. Trade with the Indians, especially the fur trade, was profitable but war was costly. Who would ever have thought that it would be the interests of people to trade to their mutual benefit rather than engage in war? And of course there's nothing more costly than war, ever. And by the 20th century, about 800 million dollars had been paid for Indian lands. So there was a lot of cooperation between the European immigrants and the Indians over land. And there was a sense of property rights being exchanged over the land. That all changed during and then after the American Civil War. Just two months after the American Civil War was ended. It ended essentially in April of 1865. And by July of 1865, the famous General Sherman was given command of what was called the Military District of the Missouri. The U.S. government put the United States into military districts. There were no longer states for a while. Everything was a military district. And the whole country essentially was divided into military occupation districts for a while. And Sherman's job was to commence a campaign of extermination against the Plains Indians. And he's very clear about why he was given this job. He stated in his memoirs that his job was to clear the way for the government subsidized transcontinental railroads. So it was essentially a form of veiled corporate welfare for the railroad corporations, which were part of the financial backbone of the Republican Party at the time. Abraham Lincoln, after all, was a counsel for the Illinois Central Railroad. And so they were... it was a political payback, essentially. A man named Grenville Dodge was the chief engineer of the transcontinental railroads. He was a friend of Lincoln's. And during the war, he was given the task of clearing the Indians out of the way to commence the building of the railroad. The transcontinental railroad, subsidized by the U.S. government, was commenced in 1862, right, in the middle of the Civil War. And Murray Rothbard wrote about this, and he said this, in this way, conscripted Union troops and hapless taxpayers were coerced into socializing the costs of constructing and operating the Union Pacific. So it was essentially a way of socializing the cost of building the railroad. And I've written elsewhere about the great James J. Hill, who was a man from the state of Minnesota who built a privately funded transcontinental railroad without any government aid, even land grants. And he paid the Indians for rights away with livestock, grain, whatever they could trade for, money. But because he was a private enterprise, the government enterprises just called in the Army to kill all the Indians. And quite a few whites as well who stood in the way of the railroads. And that's what Murray Rothbard was talking about. And so as soon as they began this, after the war had ended, Grenville Dodge, Abraham Lincoln's old buddy, his old friend, proposed making slaves of the Indians. And he said this, quote, with the Army furnishing a guard to make the Indians work and keep them from running away, that was Grenville Dodge. And he said, though, to kill them instead. So immediately after the Civil War, two months later, here's Grenville Dodge proposing creating a new class of slaves, the Indians, and using U.S. government troops as the overseers to build the railroads. They didn't do that, though, as I said. They decided that it'd be more economical, I guess, to just kill all the Indians. So that's what they did. The President of the United States at the time was Ulysses Grant. And he appointed his friend Sherman as the commanding general. And he, in turn, appointed another general, Philip Sheridan, to be in charge of the extermination of the Indians. And one of the biographers, Michael Feldman, said this, Thus the great triumvirate of the Union's Civil War effort formulated in an active military Indian policy until reaching by the 1880s what Sherman sometimes referred to as the final solution to the Indian problem. That kind of has a ring to it, doesn't it? The final solution to the Indian. That came from William Tecumseh Sherman. And what did this involve? It involved, I'm quoting Michael Feldman, again the biographer of Sherman, killing the hostile Indians and segregating their popularized survivors in remote places. These men applied their shared ruthlessness, born of their civil war experiences against the people all three despised. Sherman's overall policy was never accommodation and compromise, but vigorous war against the Indians. They were a less-than-human and savage race. So all the same generals, all the general Custer, Hancock, Sherman, Sheridan, Grant, they were all involved immediately in the eradication of the Plains Indians after the war for the benefit of the railroad corporations, primarily, and for the same people. Sherman's motivation is kind of interesting. He thought of the Indians in the same way as he thought of Southerners during the Civil War. And also, here's one thing that he said about the Indians. He said, the Indians give a fair illustration of the fate of the Negroes if they are released from the control of the whites. So there was this idea that there was a savage race that dehumanized the Plains Indians as much as possible. And because, of course, that's always what happens whenever any government isn't planning on exterminating anybody, they have to demonize first. And so there was a huge campaign of demonization by Sherman and Sheridan and the rest. And they actually called for what they called a racial cleansing of the land of the Indians. And Sherman and Sheridan are famously attached to the old saying, the only good Indian is a dead Indian. That's another charming part of American history. I think my friend, Bob Higgs, read a recent article on lewrockwall.com entitled Great Moments in American Statesmanship. And they included statements like this in there from all sorts of American politicians. And to give you an idea of what went on, there were more than a thousand attacks on Indian villages. This went on from 1865 to 1890. And typically they would attack an Indian village with women and children in it. And they would do most of it in the winter months when the families would all be together. Where the men were not out hunting as much as they would be in the warmer weather. And they also waged a war of extermination on the American buffalo. Because the buffalo, the animal, was the chief source of protein meat for the Indians. They used it for the hides for clothing. They even used the sinews for fish hooks. They used every part of the buffalo. And so it was official U.S. government policy to exterminate the buffalo because they thought that would starve out the Indians if nothing else. And so the so-called tragedy of the commons is not the only reason why the American buffalo almost became extinct. It was also official government policy to bring hundreds and hundreds of hunters out there to shoot literally 100, 200, 300 buffalo a day for as long as you could stand and then shoot the buffalo. And it said that the Great Plains just had the stench of dead rotting carcasses for years and years because of this. General Sheridan himself said this about the killing of the buffalo. He said, when some Texans asked him if he couldn't do something to stop this extermination of these animals. And he said, let them kill, skin and sell the buffalo until the buffalo is exterminated as it is the only way to bring a lasting peace and allow civilization to advance. That was his thinking. And I'll give you just one example of the sort of thing that went on in these attacks on Indian villages. There's a famous massacre known as the Sand Creek Massacre. The Indians were Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian tribes and they had made peace with the U.S. government. And the U.S. government told them, just fly our flag and we will know you are friendly and we will leave you alone. And they had a formal treaty, a formal agreement to live in peace on the Sand Creek in the southeastern Colorado. But some of the U.S. Army had different plans. It apparently stood somewhat in the way of the railroad line. And there was an army colonel named John Shivington. And he invaded this village. And it's described in a book called Crimson Perry, the Indian Wars by a man named S.L.A. Marshall. And S.L.A. Marshall was the U.S. government's official historian of the European Theater of War in World War II. He wrote 30 books on American military tactics. And this is quite a knowledgeable man about American military tactics. And he wrote about this, and I'll give you just one description. He says, Shivington's troops when they attacked this village, they began a full day given over to bloodlust, orgastic mutilation, rape and destruction with Shivington looking on and approving upon returning to Denver, Denver, Colorado, he and his soldiers demonstrated around the city waving their trophies, scalps, more than 100 drying scalps. They were acclaimed as conquering heroes. And there's another famous book called Bury My Heart That Wounded Knee by D. Brown. D. Brown is sort of the preeminent historian of the American West. And he wrote about, he died, he died a few years ago. He wrote about the Sand Creek Massacre. And he said this, and this is based on military records, the records they were taken by the U.S. Army of what happened. And he said, when the troops came up to the squads, the women, the women ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know that they were squads and begged for mercy. But the soldiers shot them all. There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children. The squads offered no resistance. Everyone was scalped. And so that was Shivington. And the orders that Sheridan gave to the troops were to kill or hang all the warriors. But in implementing this order to kill or hang all the warriors, the Army decided it would be too difficult in a battle, in an ongoing battle, to distinguish between the warriors and the non-warriors. And so they just killed everybody. It was too difficult to pick out who's a woman, who's a child. They just killed everybody. And SLA Marshall, the man who wrote 30 books on American military history, he called Sheridan's order to Custer. Custer was carrying a lot of this out. Quote, the most brutal orders ever published to American troops. And this is from a man who wrote 30 books on American military history. And one of the more charming aspects of all this is that the famous Custer, George Armstrong Custer, during every battle when they were attacking these villages in this way, he brought a band with them. As soon as they would leave their fort, they would bring a band, a marching band, and they would play an Irish jig called Gary Owens. And so if you can imagine, all this killing going on with a band playing, an Irish jig. And Marshall said, and I'm quoting Marshall, this was Custer's way of gentling war. It made killing more rhythmic. Kind of reminds me of how the Nazis played violin music as they marched Jews into the gas chambers during the Holocaust. And so this was the real culture of violence in America. If there was a culture of violence on the frontier, this is where it came from. It wasn't the civil society at all. So the historians who blamed today's violence on the culture of violence in the frontier, it was the military that created this violence. And military men who were among the most violent. They even recruited ex-slaves who came to be known as the Buffalo soldiers to mass murder Indians, women and children included. And they're celebrated now. Movies made about them. They're monuments all over the place. There's a monument to the Buffalo soldiers about a half a mile from my house in Maryland. But we can think of what they were doing. Why is this something that should be boasted about? As far as what kind of culture was created here, in the paper I quote a World War II combat veteran named Paul Fussell, who's written several books on war. He became a writer after the war. And as far as this culture of war, here's how he describes it. The culture of war is not like the culture of ordinary peacetime life. It is a culture dominated by fear, blood and sadism, by irrational actions and preposterous results. It has more relation to science fiction or to circus theater than to actual life. And that's from a World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific and in Europe saying that. And it echoes what Ludwig von Mises said about war and his great treatise, Human Action. He said this, I'll quote von Mises. What distinguishes men from animals is the insight into the advantages that can be derived from cooperation under the division of labor. Man curbs his innate instinct of aggression in order to cooperate with other human beings. The more he wants to improve his material well-being, the more he must expand the system of the division of labor. Concomitantly he must more and more restrict the sphere in which he resorts to military action. And then he goes on to say that human cooperation under the division of labor in the civil society bursts asunder when citizens turn into warriors. And so that's a clear example of the civil society in the American frontier was motivated by the division of labor, cooperation and business enterprise, farming and agriculture and so forth so that everyone can prosper. Gold mining but the military culture, the war culture, that's the culture of violence and the destruction of human civilization. And at the very end of this I'm going to expand this a little more eventually. I make some comments on this idea of dehumanizing the Indians and how this process, this model of first dehumanizing southerners during the Civil War to justify with big quotation marks the bombing of southern cities and the killing of 50,000 southern civilians during the Civil War. The same model was used in the Indian Wars and continued to be used into the 20th century. For example, when the United States military assisted the Filipinos in getting rid of the Spanish empire, the Filipinos apparently thought, well this is great no more Spanish empire but of course the American empire said no no, you're part of the American empire now. So of course there was a war and under Teddy Roosevelt's reign in his regime and the American government ended up killing some 200,000 Filipinos and here's what President Theodore Roosevelt said about the Filipinos to justify killing 200,000 of them. He said he called them, quote, savages half-breeds, a wild and ignorant people. So you have the president of the United States standing up in public saying this about an entire country of people to justify the killing of them. The same something very similar happened with regard to Germans in World War I. There was the massive anti-German propaganda campaign to justify American entry into World War I. They made movies, posters, everything German was thought to be evil, that German Americans were prisoned and so forth. But I see it as coming from the same model that was developed during the American Civil War and in the war on the Plains Indians and so this is the purpose of this right to talk about this ugly history is one I want to demonstrate I think in this article in the book chapter that this was mostly about money as most things are with regard to government. It was about a veiled subsidy to the railroad corporations and all the associated businesses. As I said, James J. Hill built the great northern transcontinental railroad which was by far the most efficient railroad without any government money and without mass murdering the Indians. It's also very interesting that if Indians were cornered by the U.S. Army they would flee into Canada where they knew they would be safe and Canada built a transcontinental railroad but I don't believe they mass murdered any of the Indians or anybody else who was in their way. I doubt that Queen Victoria would have tolerated such a thing in Canada and so I think this is a unique mindset of the American military establishment in the government in the late 19th century because our neighbors to the north did the same thing they built a transcontinental and it didn't have to happen that way and so this is a part of what they call American exceptionalism. It is exceptional behavior, isn't it? I would agree with that part of it. This sort of behavior but that's how to this day they go about being the bully of the world because of this belief in the treasury of virtue and American exceptionalism if you just read some of the articles by almost any neoconservative you can pick out this sort of language somewhere and I would refer you to Paul Guthrie on that. He's our expert on the neocons out there. He hates them almost as much as I do and my time is about up so thank you very much.