feelings about the war. Yet, while Americans are divided over whether the war should have been fought in the first place, or over its conduct, people on all sides profess to be completely united in support of our troops. And, in any case, Americans have rarely been as unified on the home front as we would like to believe.

Most of us are aware of how the Vietnam War led to the largest protest movement in our history, the alienation of many Americans from their national heritage, and recriminations that were still going strong through the 2004 elections. But the history of dissent and division in wartime goes all the way back to the Revolution. No less an authority than John Adams estimated that a third of colonial Americans stayed loyal to the Crown, and some even raised their own militias to fight alongside royal troops. British offers of freedom drew black slaves, who fought fiercely and courageously against our independence.

The War of 1812 witnessed a serious secession movement among the New England states, whose lucrative foreign trade was all but snuffed out. Abraham Lincoln and Henry David Thoreau, among many others, spoke out against the Mexican-American War, considering it no better than a cynical land grab designed mostly to facilitate the spread of slavery. The Civil War was an internecine conflict, of course, but, even within the Union, there was furious dissent over what the war was being fought to achieve and whether it should have been fought at all. This division led to mass arrests, the suspension of habeas corpus, and widespread charges of treason leveled against anti-war Copperheads. In New York City, dissatisfaction with the war, and especially how it was being run, spilled over into the worst riot in our national history.

Americans as diverse as Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie vehemently opposed our bloody quelling of the Filipino insurgency that followed the Spanish-American War, a struggle all but unmentioned in our history books, although it too lasted for more than three years. Our entry into World War I sparked opposition from a small but influential bloc within Congress, including the senators Robert M. La Follette, George Norris, and James K. Vardaman, and the feminist congresswoman Jeannette Rankin. The socialist congressman Victor Berger was actually ousted from the House for his outspoken opposition to the war. More than 10,000 Americans were charged with dodging the draft, and, under Woodrow Wilson’s pernicious 1917 Espionage Ac, thousands more were arrested and jailed for daring to disparage the war. (The conflict also brought on some of the very worst judicial writing by the Supreme Court immortal Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who made his famous argument that publishing a pamphlet against our involvement was the equivalent of crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater.)

“Workers struck in record numbers in 1917,” writes the historian Nell Irvin Painter in her unflinching history Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919, and whole unions, such as the International Workers of

the World, opposed the war. Vigilantes used this opposition as an excuse to lynch labor leaders, and even transported 1200 striking laborers from Arizona to the New Mexico desert by rail and left them there. The wartime influx of black workers into new urban areas—and traditionally white industrial jobs—led to white-on-black riots from Chester, Pennsylvania, to East St. Louis, Illinois, where some estimates put the number of black men, women, and children slaughtered by the mobs as high as 200.

Even World War II saw considerable turmoil on the home front—the zoot suit riots in Los Angeles; major disturbances in Detroit and New York; constant conflicts throughout the country as African-Americans took jobs in previously all-white plants; running fights between black troops based in the South and local law enforcement officers. The term "juvenile delinquent" first came into common parlance when fathers went off to war, while mothers went off to work.

Yet all these conflicts, terrible as they often were, may be considered the growth spasms of a vigorous democracy. Even the fissures that Vietnam opened in our society, with all the bad feelings they emanated for years to come, can be seen as an enduring lesson in liberty: When the government ran an undeclared and immoral war, the people did not support, they put an end to it. In that war at home, there was honor on both sides; early during our escalation in Indochina, there were even mass rallies held in favor of the war.

Wrongheaded as those might now seem to have been, I prefer them to our current state of civic disengagement. The most disappointing realization about the war in Iraq is how little we care, how precious few demonstrators there are on either side of the issue. Just as the war exists for most of us on television, so we have subcontracted out our civic feeling to the angry rhetoric of so many ranting heads. We do not serve, we do not pay, we do not watch, and we do not object. Imagine how this might have worked in World War II. No matter how this war comes out, we have already lost.