Ambrose Bierce Quotes
NON-COMBATANT, n. A dead Quaker.
Bierce, Ambrose. The Devil's Dictionary. The Neale Publishing Company, 1911, p. 230.
This was a precursor of the total war views of William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War half a century later.
In the play the two characters are a Russian and American disarmament negotiator:
This appears to be the first American utterance of a longstanding doctrine of foreign policy.
This article was published under the name of “A Lover Of Peace” but is generally attributed to Paine. He was publishing in Pennsylvania which had a large Quaker, pacifist population and Paine was urging them to consider being armed.
Theodore Roosevelt was the Presidential nominee. Johnson was a leader of some members of Congress some of whom were extreme isolationists and some of whom were Nazi sympathizers and Hitler admirers. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor later that year, Germany, fulfilling its treaty with Japan, declared war on America, Johnson’s group no longer mattered. Before WWII most Republicans were opposed to Defense Spending and accused the Democrats of being war hawks. After WWII, they flip flopped and became more hawkish than the Democrats who they accused of being soft on defense for years thereafter. See {631380} for President Roosevelt’s different view.
This was Ford in the middle of his career. As he got older, he changed radically. He was later one of the biggest supporters and admirers of Adolf Hitler and his aggressive militarism.
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War veteran. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has been described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature"; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.
