Jim Scanlon is a retired American History professor. The following is an edited version of a letter sent to a friend of mine and a reader of this blog. I thought it was an interesting take on Thomas Jefferson and the military.

Thomas Jefferson frequently expressed the view that “The earth belongs to the living and not to the dead.” He believed in pragmatism: what is true is what works. One should not be bound by the precedents of the past. Therefore, as president, his goal was a wide distribution of property and low taxes. He believed that there were no beggars in America, and that Europe had many. The cause of this disparity was the expensive armies and navies of the Old World which sucked up the nations’ wealth.

On this assumption he developed a theory for both navy and army that relied essentially on militias, led by trained officers. West Point (to train them) was established during his first administration. Rather than a full, conventional fleet, he created the much maligned gun boats (very large rowboats with a single cannon mounted at the bow), plus some frigates that were used to attack the Algerian and Tripolitanian pirates (a story full of unbelievable cheese-paring by the Administration. Ed.). The militia system didn’t really work, and a fleet on the cheap didn’t stop the British fleet dominating the American coast or the pirates capturing the whole crew of one American ship, to huge embarrassment.

The United States, nonetheless, flourished when it didn’t have a large army, but showed an astounding ability to create an army out of virtually nothing in a very short period of time (1861, 1917, 1940). The rise of the “military-industrial complex” (Eisenhower) from the 1940s onward likely has slowed economic growth, but “I am not economist enough to know how”.

My comment on the last paragraph: some people made fortunes out of the Second World War, and created huge companies with large workforces. The military-industrial complex formed a lobby that had gotten used to making lots of money, and wanted to go on doing so. Conservatives, the chief supporters of a robust military, are always quoting the Founding Fathers. Perhaps they should be invited to study the views of Thomas Jefferson. The country doesn’t need the current huge, unwieldy military, and would be the richer for it (and less debt-ridden) with it carved down to size. But then, like the Bible, one can always find something in the Constitution to support your view; conversely, one can ignore inconvenient truths.