Defeat

Defeat. Until the 1970s, Americans did not think much about defeat. U.S. military leaders usually defined war aims in terms of total victory, and the civilian culture they defended assumed that God guided the nation's fate and ensured its success. With a profound innocence, Americans denied those defeats that did occur and assumed their invincibility.

This sense of innocence and invincibility had deep roots in American history. During the Revolutionary War, the American revolutionaries met with defeat and in many ways failed to live up to their own ideals. Led by the Continental army, Americans still won their independence. Once they did, they gave little credit to the army or to French aid, rarely dwelt on their defeats, but instead portrayed their victory as testimony to their own and the nation's virtue. The War of 1812 offered a greater challenge to Americans' mythmaking powers. The military met frequent defeat in battle and the outcome of the war could at best be labeled a draw. Nevertheless, Americans came to remember this war too as a victory.

In the century and a half that followed, the United States sometimes endured defeat on the battlefield, but won its wars. In the Mexican, Civil, Indian, and Spanish‐American Wars, the United States achieved the near‐total victories its strategists sought. This persistent success deepened Americans' faith in their innocence, invincibility, and special favor in God's sight. After World War I, some Americans, disillusioned by the peace as well as by the war, questioned whether U.S. intervention had been wise; but World War II, with its total, if hard‐earned, victory over foes Americans found evil, reaffirmed their conviction of invincibility and virtue. In the two decades that followed, the United States's sense of its power and rectitude never seemed surer.

Writing in the midst of this collective sense of American innocence, the historian C. Vann Woodward challenged it by pointing to the history of the American South. Unlike other Americans, Woodward argued, white Southerners had experienced military defeat. The loss of the Civil War, along with poverty, guilt, and other frustrations, could have created a unique southern identity, one that would have offered an important corrective to the sense of innocence and invincibility that dominated American culture as a whole. Many southern intellectuals embraced Woodward's view and maintained that southern culture had been chastened, yet ennobled, by defeat. Other historians questioned such assumptions. They found that white Southerners interpreted the loss of the war as a sign of God's favor, blamed defeat on factors outside of their control, and celebrated the heroism, nobility, and fighting ability of Confederates. Defeat did not force them to reexamine old myths and assumptions; rather, like other Americans, Southerners celebrated a glorious, military achievement. And in the Spanish‐American War, they demonstrated their continued faith in American invincibility and inevitable victory. They did as well, as Woodward himself noted, in their involvement in and support for the Vietnam War.

American defeat in Vietnam, though, forced Americans, North and South, to confront their assumptions of invincibility. A few Americans, including some political leaders, at times claimed that the United States had never really been defeated on the field of battle. But this time the mythmaking seemed to fail; most Americans accepted the reality of what they saw as America's first defeat in war. Others, especially those in the military, searched for the cause of this defeat. Some blamed it on antiwar protesters or the press; others questioned American strategy or pointed to mistakes made by the military. Almost all agreed that the absence of a national consensus in favor of the war and the policy of phased escalation contributed to America's failure.

The latter lesson of defeat, the importance of delivering massive amounts of force at the beginning of the war, clearly shaped military strategy in the United States's next “major” military confrontation, the Persian Gulf War. The military employed overwhelming airpower and as many soldiers as had served in Vietnam at its height to win the war in days. In the wake of the victory, some talked of having buried the ghosts of Vietnam, by which they apparently meant not just America's post‐Vietnam hesitancy to use military force abroad but also doubts about American innocence and invincibility as well. Whether the Gulf War has revived those myths remains to be seen, as does just how profoundly defeat in Vietnam has affected American attitudes toward war and its sense of providential blessing.
[See also War: American Way of War; Vietnam War: Changing Interpretations; Victory.]

Bibliography

C. Vann Woodward , The Burden of Southern History, 1960; 3rd rev. ed. 1993.
Russell F. Weigley , The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, 1973.
Charles Royster , A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783, 1979.
Gaines M. Foster , Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913, 1987.
Gaines M. Foster , Coming to Terms with Defeat: Post‐Vietnam America and the Post–Civil War South, Virginia Quarterly Review, 66 (Winter 1990), pp. 17–35.

Gaines M. Foster