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...
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