A G.I. Bride

My mother was a GI Bride. It probably is the act that most defined her life, a life which illustrates the effects of historical processes on 'little people', those whose absence from archives makes comprehending the past so difficult for historians. The briefest summary of her life shows how none of us can live free of the past, no matter how much we might think it is possible.

She was born in Portsmouth, on England's south coast, in 1927. The year and place establish that she would be exposed to two of the most critical events of the twentieth century, the Great Depression and the Second World War. But being born in England meant that she would be among the relatively privileged of the world, even if her parents were not among the elite of English society. She had the opportunities of a better education, better health care and access to the earning potential of work in one of the world's most advanced economies. The reasons why Britain could make all this available to her rested on the course of events over some three hundred years of history, from the reign of Charles I until my mother's own time. During this, Britain had risen from a Western European power into the greatest of Great Powers, with an empire that encompassed all of South Asia, much of Africa and included a degree of economic dominance of the South American economy. This power and wealth provided a job to her father, who made a career serving in the Royal Navy, that insulated the family to some extent from the effects of the Great Depression.

Her life would be changed utterly by the Second World War, like so many. She was very bitter about this, although would rarely talk about it. Once she commented that the Germans had robbed her of her adolescence, which itself was a concept that really only took shape for people of her social situation in the aftermath of the First World War. By the time of the war she was living in Fareham, a town along the Solent coast between Portsmouth and Southampton. There was some bombing of Fareham, although it was not 'blitzed' as heavily as Portsmouth. It seems she was bright enough to attend some kind of tertiary education, but the patriarchal mentality of that time meant that she left school at sixteen and went to work as a kind of office dogsbody in a Southampton hotel. It was in Southampton that she met he future husband, a G.I. who worked at the hospital at Netley. The war itself made possible this meeting.

After the war, she crossed the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary to live with her husband in Detroit, Michigan. We rarely think of the Second World War as a time of great migrations, but displaced persons and G.I. or wartime Brides were part of a notable transference of people from one part of the world to another. The United States made special legislation, the War Brides Act, to cope with this situation. In Detroit, she found an industrial city that had continued its tremendous twentieth-century expansion during the war. Younger people today may have difficulty in understanding just how well-off one could be living in Detroit after the Second World War. Union jobs in factories associated with the car industry made the workers of Detroit enviable — if they had seniority. They could afford houses, cars and appliances that their parents could only have dreamt of during the straitened days of the Depression. Layoffs and long-term strikes, however, created difficult times, and contributed to my mother's tremendous sense of thrift. By the 1960s, however, my father had built up sufficient seniority that we were eventually able to afford a trip to England, during which my mother met her parents again for the first time since 1945, almost twenty-five years.

My mother was disturbed by the notorious racial tension in Detroit. She always expressed antipathy towards the very notion of 'white flight'. She also had a few telling observations about how jobs at J.L Hudson's downtown department store were segregated. There was little that an individual could do in the face of institutional prejudice except to treat the people one met on their merits. She did, however, believe strongly in education as the means by which people should equip themselves to overcome any disadvantages, and that meant a degree of assimilation to the dominant social mores. The 1950s and 1960s were the final years of the WASP Ascendancy, that time from the Gilded Age until 'The Sixties' during which the American elite was a caste rooted in the northeast who lived somewhat as 'offshore Europeans', aping either the luxuries of the pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy or the lifestyle of a British landed gentry. She raised her children to use this caste as a yardstick.

Her children all succeeded in the tertiary education that she missed out on. They benefited from the expansion of higher education that resulted in part from the G.I. Bill, but also from other Federal government initiatives that ensured students from humble backgrounds could acquire higher education without putting themselves into severe debt. I would think that this was the achievement of which she was most proud, because it would not have been possible without her help in making us self-disciplined, literary and mathematical. Nonetheless, it would not have been possible without a social policy that sought to ensure that capable students could benefit from inexpensive higher education. Currently, the Anglosphere drifts towards a system of higher education that burdens young people with debts while being stingy in the supply of good-paying jobs to equip the students to pay off those debts.

During the early 1980s, my mother returned to England for a time and lived in London. However, the birth of her eldest grandchild in 1983 transformed a temporary visit into a permanent one. In this she finally experienced the suburbanisation of America, as her Detroit home that she finally left in 1980 was within the city limits of Detroit. Subsequent to 1983 she lived in low-density neighbourhoods in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, in the city of Davenport, Iowa, and in the area of Kalamazoo, Michigan. This urban sprawl produced unprepossesing strip malls and big-box stores, while housing tended to be inaccessible by public transport (although not in the case of Davenport, where she lived by a bus stop). She never learned to drive, so in the absence of buses she was reliant on my brother to travel .

At the end, medical and pharmaceutical technology ensured my mother outlived her own mother by about four years. She suffered from colon cancer a few years ago, which was successfully treated, but a mystifying incident in the autumn of 2012, when she had a faint, took a heavier toll on her health. She wasn't quite housebound after that, but her mobility was sharply restricted as she became too weak to walk for too long. Tumours began to squeeze her œsophagus shut in the winter of this year, although a cough that seems to have been associated with lung cancer suggests trouble there, too. In May she decided she only wished to undergo palliative care, and lived out her life in a hospice until she died in the early hours of 20 June, last Friday. Despite having lived in the United States for almost her entire adult life, she remained British in her official citizenship, never having taken out American nationality. However, having been offered the chance to have her remains transported home, she declined. As the wife of a veteran, she was allowed to be interred in a nearby military cemetery. The last act of her life remained literally linked to the title of this post.

The point of this very long blog entry is to illustrate how a single life can be used to structure a history course. Simply by highlighting these broad historical themes, one can see how our lives are not matters of individual choice, but are subject to historical conditions over which we have no control, starting at the very moment of birth. Think of a eleven-week course constructed around this life, including some topics I haven't covered in this little essay:

1) Britain's empire in the twentieth century.

2) The Great Depression

3) The Second World War

4) Migration in Britain and the United States

5) Racism and the Urban Question

6) From urban to suburban in North America

7) The rise and fall of mass tertiary education

8) Women's role in peace and war, 1930 to 2010

9) 'Live Long and Prosper': medicine during the Postwar Era

10) From cinema to downloads, a history of modern entertainments

11) The strange rise and impending decline of the Anglosphere

History at its inception was a narrative art, and largely bounded by large events, just like a human life.

Britannia Christianae gentis?

The question of Britain's status as a Christian has erupted (probably too strong a word) this Eastertide. Let's quickly go over the chronology.

First, the prime minister, David Cameron, had an article published in The Church Times asserting a Christian identity for the United Kingdom with the words ' we should be more confident about our status as a Christian country'.

A few days later, a letter from a group of dogmatic secularists was published in The Daily Telegraph proclaiming instead 'We are a plural society with citizens with a range of perspectives and a largely non-religious society. To constantly claim otherwise fosters alienation and division in our society.'

Cameron's stance then found support on the BBC Today programme (the most prominent morning national news presentation on the wireless) from the Labour party's Jack Straw. Straw, an avowed Christian, said: 'There has to be a clear understanding that this is the UK and there are a set of values, some of which I would say to the letter writers to the Daily Telegraph are indeed Christian-based, whether they like it or not, which permeate our sense of citizenship'.

Subsequently, the debate rumbles on, with the attorney-general and the British Humanist Association trying to define the grounds of debate. The attorney-general suggested that atheists were 'deluding themselves' over the advance of atheistical views, while the British Humanist Association's chief executive thought that 'in a very diverse society like today's we need to build an inclusive national identity not a narrow on', and that Cameron's original article wasn't really helping.

Britain has an Established Church, which ties its administration tightly to a Christian Heritage. In contrast the United States famously has no established religious structures, and in an official capacity has tended in my lifetime towards a kind of soothing ecumenical attitude of 'with malice towards none', except those with no religion. Despite this, in one of those ironies about life that amuse me greatly, the United States has a flourishing Christian religious culture, with talk of God and churchgoing quite commonplace. My experience in Britain was that religion was very much a private matter, only to be mentioned insofar as it affects other social engagements. Much the same attitude seems to be held here in Canada.

So does Britain have a Christian identity? In this matter, let us turn to the United States, and quote a Supreme Court justice, David Brewer:

I could go on indefinitely, pointing out further illustrations both official and non-official, public and private; such as the annual Thanksgiving proclamations, with their following days of worship and feasting; announcements of days of fasting and prayer; the universal celebration of Christmas; the gathering of millions of our children in Sunday Schools, and the countless volumes of Christian literature, both prose and poetry. But I have said enough to show that Christianity came to this country with the first colonists; has been powerfully identified with its rapid development, colonial and national, and to-day exists as a mighty factor in the life of the republic.

That is from his 1905 book, The United States: A Christian Nation.

Brewer here is pointing out that in practical terms, Christianity is so woven into the practice of the daily life of the United States that the absence of any law establishing a religion is irrelevant. By simple fact of being American, one imbibes a certain amount of Christianity, and it will influence one, for or against, no matter what. Whether that is still true is, I think, open to question, and what the more politicised Christians of today's America are fretting about.

Britain, however, has a modern history of not being particularly religious in practice, despite the fact that the Churches of England and Scotland is a part of the state. Methodism and Ritualism were, in part, responses to an indifference to the Christian message among many. Despite the concerns of the Humanist Association, Britain has got along fairly well in incorporating non-Christians in society without anything like the the Gordon Riots. Indeed, it seems the United Kingdom's main problem in constructing an inclusive national identity has been intra-Christian, as opposed to anti-semitism or hostility towards the Hindu or the Moslem. The British government, despite an official religion, has been quite 'decent' in this matter, historically, and the British political class, with one or two exceptions, has generally eschewed making an issue of 'alien' religions, non-Papal varieties.

If you have read this far, I have to tell you that I am not going to offer an answer to the question of whether the UK is or is not a Christian nation. Without doubt, it has to be included among the states which are culturally Christian, in the way Tunisia or Palestine, once culturally Christian, are not. What this Eastertide debate is about is what meaning will that have for the future. How much does Justice Brewer's description of turn-of-the-twentieth-century America reflect twenty-first century Britain? Or anywhere else in Christendom for that matter?

[I have to apologise for the low rate of posts this month. My mother is unwell, and I have been sitting with her.]

Adam Smith, 'Marxist' (or Karl Marx, 'Smithist')

I was reading an article from The Atlantic that used some of the splendid tools that Google has made available to researchers to trace the beginnings of the word 'liberal', as a word conveying a political philosophy.

In it, I came across the following:

If all nations, Smith says, were to follow “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation,” then they would be like one great cosmopolitan empire, and famines would be prevented.

The Smith referred to is one of the founding figures of what might be called 'Anglosphere Ideology', Adam Smith.

What struck me, though, was the idea of internationalism expressed here. Marx argued that the working class must think globally if it was to carry out its inevitable task of supplanting the capitalism. Smith seems to be arguing the same for the capitalist class to accomplish his liberal agenda.

Think about this for a moment. In 1774, 'nations' and their borders were still somewhat protean concepts compared to what they would become in short order. Most people in Europe (and the Americas), in fact, were loyal to a structure under which nationality was represented by a specific individual. Borders simply marked the limits of this individual's authority, and the point where the authority of another individual reigned. Smith is envisioning a world where the ability of that individual (and the associated administrative structure) to reward and deny on the basis of preference will be severely restricted. 'All that is solid melts into air' indeed.

The capitalists in fact succeeded in subverting their contemporary structures of authority to establish their 'dictatorship' over the way societies are organised. I imagine Marx looking on the world today from the Valhalla of Political Economists rather grimly while at the other end of the banqueting table Adam Smith has a broad smirk of self-satisfaction.

Rich Differences

The Guardian a few days ago had a news story that included a list of the five richest families in Britain. I knew the Duke of Westminster's family had long been the richest in the country, but the appearance of the Cadogan's got me thinking about what different sources of wealth between the richest five British and the richest five American families might tell us about the different historical trajectories followed by the two countries, especially their two economies. While I like to think of them as more alike than different, as an historian it is my job to look for evidence that challenges my view. Sports is a good one. Maybe rich people are, too.

The Cadogans are the oldest family in terms of being rich and influential. They have links to Cromwell's parliamentary army, the Duke of Marlborough (the Churchills) and the Glorious Revolution and service in the Napoleonic Wars. Their wealth rests on London property, inherited after marrying the Sloane heiress in 1717.

The Grosvenors are like the Cadogans in their fortune resting on ownership of parts of London. However, at the time the Cadogans were marrying into London property, the Grosvenors were based in Cheshire. It was the first marquess of Westminster whose development of Belgravia and Pimlico on the edges of Westminster who really founded the family fortune.

There is about a hundred-year gap between the Grosvenors and The Hindujas in terms of launching a family fortune. The Hindujas were originally from Sind, and the business began in Bombay, but they were active in the traditional trade across the Arabian Sea between Persia and Bombay. In 1919, the Hindujas set up in Tehran, and in the 1950s and 1960s Iran became central to their money-making. After the fall of the Shah in 1979, the Hindujas moved their base to London, although most of the business activities remained located in India and the Near East. One can think of the Hinduja wealth as a creation of the trading network shaped by the British Empire. In this sense, the Hindujas are very unlike the Cadogans and Grosvenors.

The Reubens are like the Hindujas, in that they are something of an Imperial legacy. They too started in Bombay, and then made their way to London. The difference is that they did that a lot earlier, with the family arriving in the early 1950s, not long after India's independence. They were traders, and benefited from London's rapid reassertion of its position as the most important global financial centre despite the tremendous debt left from the Second World War, the transformation of the US dollar into the world's reserve currency and the continued decline of Britain's economic position relative to other states. Rich by the 1980s, they did well out of the end of the Cold War, although they are said to have terminated their links with Russian businessmen in the early years of this century.

Mike Ashley is a post-Thatcher creation, and his achievement resembles that of Sainsbury of Victorian Britain (a dynamic period with a few fortunes built by those of humble origins), in that he transformed retail into a fortune. He made his money selling sportswear to Britons and buying up other businesses. His business interests really expanded during the long 1994-2008 economic boom that transformed Britain out of all recognition from the 'sick man of Europe' of the 1970s and 1980s. Ashley's family background is relatively humble, compared to the other four names on the British side of this list.

The Mars family name will be familiar to all Britons via the Mars bar, the British equivalent to America's Milky Way. The founder, Frank Mars, is a bit unusual in this list for having experienced a business failure with his first efforts in 1911. He tried again in the 1920s, and launched a British subsidiary in the depths of depression in 1932.

Fred C. Koch, founder of The Koch family fortune, like the Mars, has ties to Britain. In the 1920s he worked at an oil refinery in Kent, until in 1925 he moved to Wichita, Kansas, to found his oil refining business. Legal troubles in the US ensured that he found markets for his refining process outside the United States, which ended up shaping his political views. Koch Industries was founded in 1940, and later expanded from its core engineering business to become an oil and chemical conglomerate.

The Pritzker family is traditionally associated with the Hyatt hotel chain, although they were not the original owners of the original Hyatt. In fact, the family is from Chicago, and started their ascent to wealth as lawyers and investors. They also made quite a bit from traditional manufacturing through their ownership of what became the Marmon Group. Their accumulation began in earnest in the late 1950s and early 1960s, although the original Pritzker investments date back to the mid-1950s

The Waltons should need little introduction here, as their Wal-Marts are everywhere. The first Wal-Mart opened its doors in 1962.

The Duncans of Houston, Texas, offer the classic Texan story of wealth, based on oil and gas. However, they did not make their money from drilling oil wells, but by ownership of pipelines and storage facilities. They are also among the newer wealthy families. Dan Duncan spent some years working for another company before setting up for himself in 1968.

So can we draw any conclusions from this list of names? Not conclusions, perhaps, but there is one key observation. It is interesting that (with one exception) the American list reflects the post-1945 economic history of the United States, whereas the British list represents three very distinct phases of the kingdom's history. Put together, in the way I like to treat Anglo-America, though, and the really interesting point is that the British list is far more multi-cultural than the American one. And I would have expected that.

Tony Benn's Anglo-American Dimension

Tony Benn has died. When I arrived in Blighty, back in the late 1970s, he was a key figure on the political scene. I was not a fan of his. But it was sort of a knee-jerk response. He wanted to remove the Queen's head from the postage stamp. This is a notion I still find repellent; but with the sale of the Royal Mail, I don't see it as so important any longer.

What the obituaries reminded us was that Benn married an American woman. Caroline Middleton DeCamp met Tony Benn at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1949. She had been Vassar '45 and Cincinnati '48 and went to London to do a Master's degree at UCL, itself a somewhat radical foundation. Mrs Benn had an enduring belief in the principle of 'comprehensive education', the idea that schools should not select their pupils on the basis of ability, but largely by where they reside in relation to the school's buildings. From the obituary I linked above, here is a memory from Clyde Chitty, her colleague in the war against selective schooling:

Caroline saw the British education system with a foreigner's eyes. She hated British divisiveness and elitism, and, when her own children were at Holland Park comprehensive, she wanted the best for them, and for the school - and for that best to be extended to all. Utterly informal, with that American vitality, she was classless. With her, there was none of that "presence", that sense of being with someone important. She could relate to anyone.

Of course, Britons loved to believe that American life was not divisive or elitist, and I hope they know better now.

The comprehensive educational system has certainly done nothing to overturn the divisive and elitist nature of British education. What happens now in Britain is that one selects more on the basis of family income. If one can, one pays a higher price for a house with good schools. Sometimes, it probably makes more sense to buy a cheaper house and spend the money saved on sending your child to some kind of private school. I know from experience that getting one's child into a decent secondary school in London is a highly competitive process, and that people will go to all kinds of lengths, either legitimate or not, to improve their child's chances. And, I'm afraid to say, the same has been true of Canada as well. At the primary level in London, it's a lot easier to find a good school, because they are smaller. The Law of Unintended Consequences works powerfully, and should make us less eager to attempt simple administrative reforms to correct injustice.

Perhaps with the help of his wife, whom Benn confessed to be a source of advice, Benn proved an 'early adopter' of television as a means for politicians to address the voters in a direct way that previously had not been possible. From the late 1970s onwards, he looked to extra-parliamentary politics to act as something of a counterweight to the whipped-in majorities of the House of Commons, and then the loss of legislative authority to external transnational organisations such as the European Commission. In this, Benn may have detected that the 'separation of powers' under a modern Westminster regime really relates to groups outside parliament. Months of pressure by organised campaigning are required, which is beyond the patience of most people. This mixture of technology and grassroots organisation is especially American, going back to the days of the Populists and the Progressives at the turn of the twentieth century. This circumvents the kind of elitist log-rolling that one tends to associate with Tammany-Hall type regimes, but which also captures the older Westminster model on display in Namier's analysis of the eighteenth-century epoch of parliamentary government.

As well as being married to an American, Benn apparently also found some support there during his campaign to renounce his peerage, according to this excellent memoir of him by the member of parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central, Tristram Hunt. This article is worth reading with some care, because one can see in Benn's career a kind of emblematic arc of the decline of national parliaments in a world where trading arrangements between countries has gradually taken authority away from legislators and put it into the hands of judiciaries or quasi-judicial organisations, often of a trans-national character. Benn's sharp shift leftwards in the 1970s can be seen in this light as the moment when he recognised that 'moderation in pursuit of national self-determination', to coin a phrase, was a vice, and it was natural for a man in his political position to shift towards the autarkic 'socialism in one country' of the Alternate Economic Strategy of the Labour left. The AES was to a great extent a throwback to the Labour recipe of the 1945-51 Atlee government, which was remarkably successful on its own terms. It was at this point that Benn found himself on what could be called 'the wrong side of history', at least for the rest of his lifetime. He ended up waging a steady guerrilla campaign against his vision of American foreign policy, ably summarised in The Guardian's obituary.

The Bennite worldview presented a well worked out analysis according to which the IMF, the World Bank and multinational corporations ran the global economy. The European commission and the establishment governed Britain. Spin doctors and pollsters dominated politics. "I did not enter the Labour party … to have our manifesto written by Dr Mori, Dr Gallup and Mr Harris," wrote Benn. The US was an imperial power that had pursued a policy of world domination since the second world war, and that policy was based on a doctrine: "A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world."

Yet Benn's effective criticism of the Eden government during the 1956 Suez Crisis served American interests, and also that American world domination he has condemned since the 1970s. This fiftieth anniversary summary of the crisis' signficance in world affairs, from The Independent, captures how Britain's ability to act in its interests could be undone where it contradicted the interests of its closest ally. Quite possibly the Americans did the British a favour, in the long-term, in 1956. Probably Benn would have seen it that way at the time. This thirty-year-old article from the always-excellent History Today suggests that this view was wrong, and that the interests of both Britain and America might have been better served by a policy more supportive of Britain's anti-nationalisation stance. Remember, the current woes in Egypt stem from the actions of the descendants of that same clique of officers that have been in charge since Nasser led them there.

The irony of Benn's career is that the forces he supported at its beginning, those working towards the so-called democratisation/Americanisation of Britain, have been exactly the same forces he found destroying Britain's political and economic independence in its middle and at its end. We always think we can pick and choose from the menu, but history proves this is rarely the case. The framework that the United States has erected in the latter half of the twentieth century is remarkably similar to that put up by Victorian Britain, which occupied a near-identical role as global economic arbiter. We may swear allegiance to different things (the Queen, still on some postage stamps, on one hand; a flag on the other), but our cultural outlook — which includes the foundations of property law and its effect on the organisation of the economy and trade — remains identical.

UPDATE: One more thing: in doing the reading for this post, I came across a reference to the title that Mrs Benn suggested for Labour's 1964 election manifesto. She proposed 'The New Britain', which worked its way into the final title. Eight years earlier, Adlai Stevenson ran for president under the slogan 'The New America', possibly based on a memo of Arthur Schlesinger's. Of course, it's probably just coincidence.

Seeger, Dylan, Summer — The Sixties Reconsidered

Ask someone 'when were the Sixties?', and you'll likely get a standard answer that begins with some relationship to the Kennedy administration (1961-3), and probably ends with the assassinations of 1968 or the Altamont Free Concert (1969) or possibly, for those of 'the Big Sixties' school, with some economic event from the early 1970s such as the ending of convertibility to gold of the US dollar in 1971 or the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. There is also a 'Short Sixties' school which runs from 1964 or 1965 up to either of those end points I mentioned. Of course, the fundamental problem with using decades to define eras is that it becomes difficult to fit some events in, as the annexation of several years of the 1970s of the 'Big Sixties' school shows above. (And the pre-Kennedy 1960s have to go somewhere, so they are absorbed by the 1950s.) Also, one could argue that 'the Sixties' take place at different times in different countries. Those with experience of British television of the 1980s may remember how, in the great puppet show that was Spitting Image, Mikhail Gorbachev's reformist administration in the Soviet Union during the 1980s was presented as the arrival of the Swinging 1960s to brighten the Kremlin. I have been pondering the recent passing of Pete Seeger, and what his career might tell us about how historians can structure a narrative of cultural history that preserves a formulation such as 'the Sixties'. While some of Seeger's personal beliefs found expression in the social changes that the United States and other countries underwent in the early 1960s, with the proverbial 20/20 hindsight it becomes harder to show this in the later 1960s. Originally, my dissertation was to be on 'the meaning of Disco'. I have some very clear-cut ideas about that 1970s fad that would be bound to be controversial, but in thinking about how to write on the subject, I concluded that the kind of narrow focus that a PhD dissertation takes wouldn't really help me express them at all. I did, however, conlcude that the personification of 'the meaning of Disco' was Donna Summer. So this blog post is going to outline a proposal of how we might do better to use the careers of celebrated individuals rather than momentous events to capture historical phases. Seeger, Bob Dylan and Summer represent a trio around which one could establish a better understanding of The Sixties. Furthermore, their careers demonstrate how trying to confine the term too tightly to 1961-70 distorts our understanding of exactly how our modern world, which is very mch a creation of The Sixties, came to be. A bullet point summary would go something like • Pete Seeger represents a cultural outlook shaped by a largely in the decade before the Second World War, and the anti-fascist struggle. Its emphasis on a collective struggle against injustice, on an anti-commercial cultural strategy and on making moral compromises with communism generally and the Soviet Union particularly, capture some of the strands that carry on well into the 1960s, especially in the context of the struggle for Civil Rights and against the American war in Vietnam. The folk-music revival that thrived between 1958 and 1965 was associated with a left-wing political outlook that seems a transitional phase between the Old Left of Seeger and the New Left that coalesced around the Port Huron Statement. • Bob Dylan captures a very different cultural mood, one shaped by Democrat party thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger Jr, who in a couple of privately circulated essays among the so-called 'Finletter Group'. Schlesinger believed that two trends were at work in the aftermath of the 1952 election. In one, people were more interested in the quality as opposed to the 'quantity' of life, as material wants were less immediate than they had been in the 1930s and during the war. 'Quality' issues emphasise spiritual fulfillment, a key theme of Dylan's songs. Schlesinger's other theme arose towards the end of the 1950s, when he called for more 'heroic' political leadership. Emphasising the potential contribution of individual in contrast to group action, Schlesinger's theme again finds an echo in some of Dylan's — but also in the Port Huron Statement. Dylan's career is interrupted by the 1966 motorcycle accident, which could be seen as a good career move. Music moved in a very different direction after the accident, and he was spared the risk of seeming 'out of touch'. • Donna Summer captures what really distinguishes the the 1970s from the 1960s, which is the increasing influence of the foreign on American society. The economic crises that followed from 1968 onwards, culminating in the first Oil Crisis of 1973, were largely driven by foreign interests that demanded some crucial adjustment to American domestic policy. Summer returned from Europe bringing a very European sensibility to American culture. Grand Funk Railroad's 'We're an American Band' becomes a key emblem of the mood of the early 1970s, and the fact that it does nothing to divert the coming flood of Disco is telling. Looked at like this, The Sixties almost vanish altogether. We are left with a very short core period, roughly 1964 through 1967 — basically the height of early Dylan. Alternatively, the 1960s embrace an overlap running into the 1970s, and it rather changes the emphases one should use offer in considering the socio-political content of the 1960s. It also drags into The Sixties the early 1970s 'Limits to Growth' themes. These offer a basis to both the neo-liberal economics of the Thatcher-Reagan era and the Green politics that emerged in the late 1980s. While these questions might seem a bit recondite to most people, they are crucial to what I call 'the Public Understanding of History'. A film like The Wild Angels might seem a world away from Silent Running or The Cowboys, but I'm not so sure, and I think I can prove it.

Babb: "They Gave the Crowd Plenty Fun"

The National Archives has been posting podcasts of its events (really lectures) it holds to its site for some time. The quality of these is mixed. In some cases, the lecturer relies too much on the PowerPoint-style display for what is effectively a radio broadcast. Others are just a description of the contents of various files that might be of interest to researchers. But some are genuinely excellent. In the latter category I place 'They Gave the Crowd Plenty Fun', presented by Colin Babb.
Although this podcast focuses on West Indian cricket, it really is about the immigrant experience, as seen through the perspective of the sports fan. When I did my major field in Race, Imperialism, Slavery, one of the two topics that drew my greatest interest was the relationship between race and immigration. Sometimes immigration has nothing to do with race. Sometimes race has almost everything to do with immigration. Most usually they overlap in ways that it is the historian's job to explain. (The Irishman in the lower-left corner has rather simian features.) It is a fascinating subject, especially if one avoids bringing to it attitudes strongly influenced by today's debate over immigration and sticks closely to the the perspectives of immigrant and host.
Babb's lecture does a good job, for the sensitive listener, of seeing the dilemma confronting the immigrant. In my view, if people could avoid immigrating, they would. People try to identify with collectivities, and can find it hard to leave parental ones behind. Babb describes himself as a 'British-born Caribbean'. Indeed, the very concept of 'the West Indies' makes more sense from Britain than in the Americas. He points out that his parents were, in fact, from different countries, and that it was their presence in Britain that united them. According to Babb, people from Guyana are seen as 'South American' from the perspective of the islanders of the West Indies. When he went back to the Caribbean on childhood holidays, he was treated as somehow not quite West Indian, while in Britain he was certainly seen as a non-Briton, a 'West Indian'.
In fact, if one reads about the history of immigration, talks to immigrants, or actually does a bit of immigrating oneself, one finds such situations commonplace. The immigrant, and more particularly the child of immigrants, is regarded with a degree of 'suspicion' both in the source region and in their host region. It is an awkward role that one is forced into, and is most obviously expressed in those sporting events based on countries.
I don't want to spoil the lecture, because I think it would be worth your while to have a listen, so I won't give away any more of its content. Let's just say that I found the lecture really raised a great deal of sadness in my mind that the legacy of the British Empire may now finally be dying, reflecting the gentle aging into retirement of that 'post-imperial' generation which includes Babb and myself. Also, that it is interesting how the pattern of assimilation of 'West Indians' in Britain reflects Britain's particular history on race. In the 1960s, the 1970s, and into the Thatcher years, and even today, thinking about the British experience of race and racism often seems a sort of caricature of the American one. But Britain's history of race relations is different — pace the late Stuart Hall, less toxic — and the assimilation of the West Indians reflects that. NB — I cut my finger recently, rather badly, harming my abiity to type. Posts will be erratic for a bit.

War's 'Dead Chaps', Literature and Religion

A while ago I caught the end of the second episode of Frank Faulk's documentary on the CBC (link to part one only) about C.S. Lewis and the Inklings. I've now heard the entire thing (I'm nothing if not a procrastinator), and I really recommend it to anyone interested in the kind of influences that have been at work on thought in twentieth century Britain. Despite being an irreligious society with a state church, in contrast to the Americans' religious society with no established church, religion had a lot of influence on British literary culture between the end of the First World War and about the time I was born. Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and, most importantly in these times, J.R.R. Tolkien all were deeply affected by Christian faith, and mostly a Catholic version of it. But, I think, there is another influence at work here, and that is two of them experienced the First World War immediately, and the other two through a kind of lacuna. Waugh, I think, expressed that lacuna best in Brideshead Revisited (p236 in my decrepit, well-read Penguin Edition):

We went to a number of nightclubs. In two years Mulcaster seemed to have attained his simple ambition of being known and liked in such places. At the last of them he and I were kindled by a great flame of patriotism.
'You and I,' he said, 'were too young to fight in the war. Other chaps fought, millions of them dead. Not us. We'll show them. We'll show the dead chaps we can fight, too.'

For those who survive a war, a common feeling is that they were no better than those who did not, and possibly in some way inferior. But, if Mulcaster's sentiments reflect something Waugh was familiar with, for some of those who just missed a war, there appears to be a nagging sense of inadequacy, a failure to arrive in time that was somehow a personal betrayal of those who died or were killed. In this context, does a quest for meaning lead one to religion?
But, again, there might be even more influences at play. Faulk highlights that Lewis' conversion from atheism to religion had something to do with perceiving a lack of imagination on the part of unbelief, which was somehow related to the emphasis of Enlightenment thought on reason and fact. While we often hear of the terrible crimes perpetrated by believers in Crusades, Inquisitions and Imperialisms, the Enlightenment's responsibility for Racism, Eugenics and the kind of depersonalisation of working people that occurred during the rise of Capitalism are less often commented on. I think blame for each of these can be assigned to reason's antipathy towards 'fancy', a word of various flavours that is extremely useful in this context. 'Fancy' helps us to transform mere numbers of people, or measures of their production, into individuals.
The paradox is that, for the Lewis presented in Faulk's two-part documentary, the actual truth of God's Plan for our Salvation is potentially irrelevant. While we are alive humility and charity ought to make us good people, but after we are dead we won't really matter any more to the survivors, except as an influential memory. And that is exactly the impact of 'the dead chaps' on Boy Mulcaster in Waugh's novel.

The Conservative Dilemma

I have been reading Jay Cost off and on for something like a decade. He started out as something of a conservative antipode to Nate Silver, baseball sabermetrician turned political rune-reader. Cost has been very astute when it comes to interpreting the message contained in polls, although late in election cycles one might need to remember his bias. He has been writing at The Weekly Standard for quite a few years now, and recently published an article about immigration reform in the United States that contained the following paragraph:

Conservatives are pro-business because they believe that, in general, business is good for everybody. If business presents a plan that hurts a significant swath of the country for its own advantage—such as the Senate bill—conservatives should oppose it. Indeed, they should do so loudly and forthrightly, for their biggest electoral liability is the widespread conviction that the GOP stands with big business instead of with the average person.

This got me to thinking about that conviction, and flavours of 'conservatism' throughout the Anglosphere.

Looking at conservative politics over about four hundred years of Anglospheric history, one can see that for the longest time conservatism was identified with preserving the institutional framework of a state, and particular the social capital of individuals who ran those institutions. Then, starting in the nineteenth century, and with the rise of the battle between management and labour under industrial capitalism, conservatism gradually acquires a pro-business wing. This is most clearly seen in the Republican party in the United States, and takes a lot longer to occur in the more specifically 'Anglo' parts of the sphere.

Cost, in this article, is seriously challenging the broadly accepted interpretation of what the GOP, as a conservative party, is historically. He is harking back to the Federalist tradition in the United States, and to what I would consider the core Tory values in Britain and the Commonwealth. In this paternalistic formation, business is an ally, but not to be trusted, because it is destructive of social capital among the elite. (As Marx and Engels put it, 'all that is solid melts into air'.) There are times when the elite remembers how its authority is rooted in the feudal principle that it has a contract with its subjects to protect their life and property from foreign enemies. Both Tories and Federalists see The State itself as an organic entity, where Jeffersonians and libertarians see it more as a parasitic cabal. During much of my lifetime, the latter interpretation has been favoured by conservatives, which thus cemented the partnership between Tories and GOP and big business. But big business, as Schumpeter recognised and Friedman largely shrugged his shoulders over, seeks a kind of privatised socialist corporatism.

Cost is basically arguing that a conservative party fundamentally exits to protect the institutions of the state, and the alliance of these with the state's subjects/citizens. (The Feudal Compact, I call it.) In this, I think he is right, and it is why I have always been unwilling to characterise the Republicans as a conservative party. Conservatives always face a dilemma when the interests of business clash with those of the state's institutions. At least since the 1840s, the business wing has always won out. If this changes, it will be a sign that we are flirting with a new historical epoch.

Cultural Exchange

While Tim Roberts' article on parallels between nineteenth-century Anglo-American relations and twenty-first century Sino-American relations might at first glance seem, at the least, not outrageous, a deeper consideration of what this article is telling us, and what is going on today might make us think about all this a bit differently, especially in a cultural context.

Six of the first fifteen U.S. presidents spent time early in their careers in Britain, educating them about British ways, different from much of China’s ruling elite’s experience of the United States only from afar. Besides this, though, many nouveau riche Chinese people today cross the Pacific and enjoy downloading Desperate Housewives and The Walking Dead, postmodern versions of ambitious Jacksonian Americans’ tours of Britain and reading their Shakespeare and Dickens.

As anyone who has visited Abraham Lincoln's house at Springfield, Illinois, will recall, busts of those two celebrated authors are on prominent display in his sitting room. And so, we think, this Anglo-American cultural relationship is now a thing of the past. Our future rests with cultural exchanges rooted in East Asia, as opposed to finding auduence appeal in the trivia of a 'fossilised' ruling elite. I would beg to differ. The recent marking of the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan's show with a special programme should remind us that this cultural exchange between Americans and the British is a tidal thing, sometimes ebbing and sometimes flowing. At the moment, it is ebbing, but study PBS' weekend schedules carefully before deciding that we have finally reached the point where the 'pivot to Asia' has ensured this enduring cultural link is finally broken. The relationship is not what it was, but it never has been. For example, and sticking with the world of film, think of how many Britons appear in key roles in the cast of Lee Daniels' The Butler — Oyelowo, Pettyfer, Redgrave and Rickman. And who plays the sheriff in The Walking Dead, apparently beloved of the Chinese elite? That Anglo-American link remains strong, even as Britain is no longer the Britain of Americans' imaginations.

Plants to seeds or seeds to plants?

Ira Chernus, who blogs at History News Network, takes a look at the idea that this year sees the fiftieth anniversary of 'The Sixties'. He uses this to make a springboard to a broader notion that historical scholars need to have a clear idea in their head about how to define an era under examination. Chernus points out that for most Americans 1964 wasn't much different to 1963, although the seedlings that would carry the blossoms that characterise 'The Sixties' had sprouted sturdily in 1964. It is simply a matter of, in retrospect, making the connections. Chernus argues that this matter of connections, however, is crucial to historical understanding. He proposes that while from our perspective The Sixties can be seen as plain as day, people at the time were largely unconscious of the change, and that in writing a history of The Sixties, the presence of this consciousness is important. He effectively says that one can't have The Sixties without people knowing they are living in The Sixties. I had already drawn similar conclusions while I was researching my original dissertation topic, and it represents one of the reasons why I turned to a different (although in my mind related) subject. I draw a different conclusion, though, about what this means if historical scholars want to write about a phenomenon that the public broadly understands as 'The Sixties'. The fiftieth anniversary of my 'The Sixties' occurred a few years ago, and my 'The Sixties' ends a little bit after the time Chernus seems to be suggesting they begin. But that's not the big lesson I draw from Chernus' post. For me Chernus is pointing out a fundamental flaw in the way historians can approach their subjects. I first noticed this in relation to John Higham's estimable Strangers in the Land, a book I view nonetheless as deeply flawed. Higham structures his book around the Immigration Act of 1924. This is the end of his story, and he tries to show all the seeds that sprouted to brought Americans to this. I'm not really willing to connect this piece of legislation as closely to the Nativist movements of the mid nineteenth century, one of the plants in Higham's anti-immigrant garden. As a consequence of pondering Higham's work, I question a 'looking back' approach to history. The various historical plants that grew into mid-nineteenth century Nativism did not all lead to the 1924 Immigration Act. In fact, I would argue, very little of mid-nineteenth century Nativism has much to do with later legislation, or even with today's political crisis over immigration, which afflicts the two main pillars of the Anglosphere, Britain and the United States. And, in the light of this, I concluded it is much better to start from the seed, and trace its growth, than to view the blossom, and look down for its roots. For me, a construct such as 'The Sixties', is a useful starting point as a teaching tool, or a marketing device, but historians should undermine the validity of these constructs for the purpose of understanding the past. They belong to the dying age of the weekly newsmagazine.

'British' flags?

I have two other posts that I want to write, but reading this on The Guardian's web site stimulated me to start here. (The other two are also spun from Guardian links, largely because it hasn't retired behind a paywall yet.) Flags generate a lot of emotion, because they are understood as a coded message of community or oppression. The question, from a cultural historian's perspective, is whether they represent The Past, in J H Plumb's interpretation, or whether their tendency to appropriation and use in fashion (google 'union jack underwear' or 'soviet flag fashion' for examples) make them mutable symbols of a common heritage.* In this case, a suggestion to replace New Zealand's traditional 'blue ensign' (a common design for flags of constituent lands of the British Empire) with a silver fern on a black field has been made. On the one side, there is a flag that encapsulates the New Zealand 'past' from the settlement of the New Zealand Wars to the present. On the other, a flag that represents New Zealand's cultural signature to the rest of the world, sporting prowess on the rugby pitch. (Although some of us might be fond of New Zealand wine even moreso.) I guess there are some youngsters out there who might even think it has something to do with a successful video game franchise. Plumb interpreted The Past as a kind of dead hand on the body politic, one that scientific history would lift away to allow a more mature society with no need of a paternalistic elite to evolve naturally. In this he reflected the era in which his book was written, the Swinging Sixties which promised to modernise nineteenth-century British institutions. Of course, Plumb's work has become a tool to be used in another, somewhat different context. In a discussion of Plumb's work on History News Network, one finds the following statements:

Instead of Plumb’s vision, however, we have the ascendancy of a past that is audacious in its confrontation with history. The dogmatic Christian worldview that he believed was discredited by the philosophes and by later scholarly and scientific inquiry is now passed off as being not only determinative for religious believers but also for the nature and destiny of the entire nation....The future envisioned by the founders was not pluralistic, not dynamic, and certainly not complex: it was dogmatically Christian

In this, we see two 'pasts' clashing. There is the unwelcome 'Christian' past that the author objects to, and the supposedly pluralistic vision of the founders. I would suggest that the founders were rather more Christian, and rather less pluralistic, than the author implies in this article. Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color makes a point at the start of highlighting the 1790 naturalisation law that envisages an America of 'free white persons'. Think about that 1790 context: the only substantial reservoir of 'free white persons' who might immigrate to the United States was the overwhelmingly Christian Europe. On the basis of that fact, one could equally argue that the Founders in practical terms envisaged a country with a substantially Christian European outlook. This outlook was changed because Americans, in practising their citizenship, wanted it to be changed. But I would add a further note, which is that while Plumb's vision may not apply in the United States, it is in rude health in the rest of the Anglosphere, because there is no conflict of different The Pasts. And so back to flags. It may be that the New Zealand flag no longer reflects a New Zealand of the future, and the time has come to change it. But before that decision is taken, remember that there were many New Zealanders in two world wars who fought and died under that old flag, and it was that common experience that remains a vital part of New Zealand's past, attaching it to a broader community that shares substantial settlement from the British Isles, some experience of monarchical government and a system of government that drew on Westminster as a model. All of the countries to which this applies have been moving away, since 1973 if not earlier, from a British heritage and towards an Americanised future. The United States was the first to break with the Union Flag as a pattern, and it took almost two hundred years before Canada took a similar step. New Zealand may be next on the cab rank, but as the prime minister points out in the article, is this really such an important issue? Does one really want to go down the American road, where different The Pasts make civic life a miserable arena in which government itself becomes a dirty word and Christian religion a tool of division? _____________ *Of course, the real answer is 'both'.

Russo-Japanese War in Colour

I recognise some of these as black-and-white images. Have these been colourised somehow? The original post does not explain.

Lava me, Domine, ab iniquitate mea?

The messy truth is that a country’s economic specialism is, if not ingrained, then certainly the expression of its particular history, culture and circumstances. It is path-dependent, and hard to change with anything as temporal as public policy. Political maturity lies in recognising that Britain’s specialisms are in services, especially banking, and some sophisticated corners of industry. Its competitive advantages are openness, ease of doing business, world-class universities, the English language and – here is the warning to Westminster’s increasingly hectoring and interfering politicians – a lack of ministerial caprice.

That's from an opinion piece that appeared in the Financial Times last week. What it presents is a properly conservative understanding of public policy. Before more radical groups in the United States hijacked the word 'conservative', it was broadly understood in the English-speaking world as a political stance that recognised change was an inevitable fact of life, but that change could be channelled, rather than dammed. Gradually, as change flows around the landscape, natural erosion alters shapes. Treating change as water, rather than as a shattering earthquake or volcanic eruption, limits the stress on the surrounding built environment. Even so, I find the article imperfect. The fact is, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 challenged the structure into which the British economy had been shaped during an era that began with the rise of the EuroDollar market, and really took off with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. The water-levels were rising, but policymakers in Britain neglected to construct all the requisite barrages and weirs needed to deal with the coming flood.

But, continuing this blog's move away from 'war' and towards culture, the article does suggest that Cultural History is a guide to big issues of public policy. One could argue that the contrasts between the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Roman Church in Ireland go some way towards explaining the different attitudes towards the European Union in those countries. Scotland's presbyterian national church keeps much closer to its European models than England's. The English were less keen to let go completely of elements of the Catholic church and made for themselves a hybrid that foreshadowed the cultural hybridities of the passing Post-Modern Age. This Post-Modern movement of hybrid forms was one that English popular culture stood in the forefront through its musical contributions. The American media are noticing a similar process has been going on within their own country, a process that is highlighting an obsolescent perspective on racial problems, but once again calls into question the nature of a cultural entity called 'America'. (As if Americans could ever escape questions of their essence.)

For historians, the problem is that while History is lived going forwards, History is written looking backwards. In looking at how hip-hop culture is used by non-blacks, it at least superficially resembles the familiar 'appropriations' of White America, going at least as far back as Minstrelsy. Only time will tell if that is indeed the case, but applying the traditional concerns about 'appropriations' may not itself be helpful. It certainly did not readily apply to the white English working class males who gave us 'pop music'. If the old racial system is eroding, there is the potential that a new hybrid is emerging, one that could be more fair to all participants.

And, while Janan Ganesh is quite right to argue that Britain's enduring history of a dominant financial sector is not actually a problem to be fixed, but as a crucial part of the solution, he is wrong to highlight politicians as capricious administrators breaking with British traditions. They are responding to a real demand for changes that may, in fact, be impossible to deliver without creating some kind of 'Church of England' hybrid.

The Great War (BBC)

Just before Christmas, I began working my way through the old BBC documentary television series on the Great War. I finially finished this about a week ago. Whereas today such a series would likely be made with an American production partner, in 1964 the BBC went to the equivalent national broadcasters in Canada (the CBC) and Australia (ABC). Thus the series does its best to include as high as possible a quotient of 'Commonwealth content', and its treatment of the United States is unusually 'off-centre' compared to what audiences of today might expect to see.

The series' producers faced a tremendous challenge, in that they had to fill about seventeen hours of programming with very little filmed material, all of which was silent. They seemed to have used three tricks:

1) Re-use. Time and again we see the same shots of guns bombarding, or troops running out of trenches. Sometimes, the same film will appear three times in forty minutes.

2) The rostrum camera. This ingenious device allows a still photograph to be 'put in motion'.

3) Movies. While I don't know this to be a fact, I'm fairly confident that some of the 'action scenes' were not merely staged for newsreels, but were in fact scenes from silent films. I should double-check this by reading a couple of the scholarly articles written about the series, such as this one.

One particular sequence stood out in my mind, of a column of cavalry who were either going up to the front or coming back, which if memory serves was either in episode thirteen or fourteen. While some action sequences were staged, it seemed likely this one was not, as there are a couple of shell bursts around the column, which continues on, leaving two or three fallen riders and horses. That clip is not reused.

Two episodes struck me as very important in terms of teaching tools. Episode 8, about the British home front, shows the crucial significance of Lloyd George to the war, but also suggested the reason why government intervention in the British economy really became respectable as a political programme. In a crisis, the government can take measures that are, though imperfect, highly effective in setting goals and, in fact, achieving them. Something like this, refined over the years, eventually brought us to the 'Labourist' solution that was finally killed off by Mrs Thatcher (although we didn't know that at the time, and arguably was finally killed off by Neil Kinnock after the 1987 general election).

The second episode I would want to show would be Episode 23, which eventually gets round to covering the effects of the blockade on Germany. Somewhere in a box I have a sample chapter I wrote about the British bombing campaign on Germany during 1940-41, intended to be part of a longer book about Britain in the Second World War. I don't think enough is made of the link between the collapse of the German empire from within in 1918 and the precedent this established for British strategic thinking in 1939-40. I suspect anyone who thought about it in early 1940 believed that an effective bombing campaign would accelerate the process that occurred in Germany during 1914-1918. 'Blitzkrieg' solved the real problem that defeated Germany in 1918, which was that the country ran out of time. Its economy could no longer sustain the war effort.

Rip Van Blogpost

Well, the MA work overwhelmed my blogging, and then I went on to a PhD. The incredible thing is that under the influence of that stimulating course mentioned in the 'Stress Test' post, I ended up moving into cultural history and away from military history. I am approaching the end of the PhD, and so I thought I'd dust off the old blogs and resume posting. Over time, I hope to describe some of the other goings-on that influenced my decisions and studies over past years.

I still keep my hand in a bit about military history, but my main interest is actually on the interactions between the world of business, the world of culture and how social changes transform both. And at the moment my specific interest is in the business of baseball.

However, I have a couple of side issues, too, especially on how the English-speaking world needs to be thought of more as a unity than it has in the past. And I hope to resume exploring this heady mix in posts to come.

Stress Test

I'm finding this M.A. course enjoyable, but a bit overwhelming. There's always something needing to be done, and it's going to get worse before it gets better - rather like the economy, it seems.

To my surprise, I'm finding my US History 1877-1920 seminars and my teaching assistant duties more stimulating than my two war-related courses. I do wonder, though, whether I've reached a high-water-mark on the US stuff. We just did David Montgomery's The Fall of the House of Labor, which is a real monument in many ways. The description of how work was organized in the 1870s and then reorganized at the beginning of the twentieth century opened a whole new perspective on what Marx thought socialism might mean, in contrast with how it came to be implemented. It'll be hard to top that for giving me a new angle on a major influence on my thinking. I don't think St Augustine or Macchiavelli were key figures in this era in American history.

Meanwhile, another Montgomery, the British field marshal of Normandy fame, popped up in another seminar course. In contrast to the stimulating labour history, it seemed more of the same stuff I've been handling for twenty years. It gets repackaged every ten years or so, when someone expands the frontiers of our knowledge by looking at a different level of action. But nothing I've yet seen really retrieves Monty's reputation. (Which is one reason why I left Britain to do a degree - you can't be against Monty and hope to get on in the world of professional military history in Britain.) The soldier on the course rushed to defend the monumental reputation of this horrid, vain man. But his defence seemed more appropriate to a Lloyd George vs the generals argument than armchair strategists + American generals vs a British general. At the end of the day, for me, Monty was his own worst enemy. If he hadn't claimed to be a genius, I probably would regard him as a workmanlike wartime commander.

To sidestep my old hobbyhorse of the Master of Battle, I thought I'd share this, which was on a handout given by Whitney Lackenbauer, who is prof on my War & Society in the 20th Century seminar, where we discussed Montgomery. This is from the week before, when we covered Hong Kong 1941 and Dieppe 1942. It's a single sheet, on which Professor Lackenbauer has written 'Dieppe', and is entitled 'The Lessons Learnt'.

338. Unless the means for the provision of overwhelming close support are available, assaults should be planned to develop round the flanks of a strongly defended locality rather than frontally against it.

Yes, that would do it.

Ottawa, nous avons un problème

The Canadian War Museum has unveiled an excellent set of web pages related to Canada's experience of the First World War. However, there's an absence on this page among the exhibits that begs a question - could they find nothing about opposition to conscription among French speakers?

Dulce et decorum non est

Mannie Gentile, who works at the Antietam battlefield park, assembled a diorama on his lawn depicting events that occurred in the fighting over Bloody Lane on 17 September 1862. He used unpainted toy soldiers, with some very detailed flags, and in between the photos taken at various stages of the project he has inserted excerpts from the Official Records or from other books about the American Civil War.

What struck me about the Official Records excerpts was how they utilize familiar expressions that we would expect to see in an account of a mid-19th-century battle. 'Quick and deadly thunderbolt' and 'men falling thick and fast' sound too much like well practiced rhetoric to me to really convey the nature of the battle. By contrast, the photos of toy soldiers, often taken in close up, are more effective in conveying an absolute chaos. Smoke emerges from lines of riflemen, the dead confront the next wave of living as the battle flows forward. As if in a movie, one moment we catch a shot of a flag, and another of ranks of men surging up against a rail fence. Yet, in the end, we are none the wiser as to what actually happened. The rebel position is flanked and rebel units then flee as the biter is bit. Without maps illustrating different stages of the battle, we are left with an amorphous account of the engagement that gives us some appreciation of what it might have been like to be present as a 'war reporter', but no real understanding of the operational art involved.

This is not to criticize, exactly. I think Mannie Gentile's technique offers a superb alternative to those neat maps. Imagine if what you saw were things like Mannie's photos, and you had to compile something that went into the Official Records. You would more than likely end up using rhetorical devices to fill in the gaps between simple facts. Union soldiers attacked us. We fired at them. They fired at us. They fled. We charged after them.

It's all rather bald and does no credit to the 'honoured dead' or 'glorious dead' as they would become known. For thousands of human beings, life stopped that September day. Their memories perished just as much as their physical bodies. Whatever value they were perceived to have among friends, family and community was lost forever. For any morally sensitive human being who witnessed these individual tragedies, better to commemorate them with purplish prose and a structured account than to give in to some kind of amoral, heartless chaos that sweeps all before it. That can be left to those more distant in time.

Hat tip to Brett Schulte.

Disorganization and American Failure in the War on Terror

For a seminar today, I've had to read an article that appeared in The Historical Journal in 2007, 'The Current State of Military History', by Mark Moyar of the USMC University. Mostly it is a refutation of points made by the British military historian Jeremy Black, in his book Rethinking Military History. However, there's an interesting nugget about the American problems in fighting the war in the Middle East.

Moyar mentions three books (among around a hundred in the article) that cover the Global War on Terrorism.

[Sean] Naylor shows how flawed high-level political guidance, ineffective employment of allied fighter and poor co-ordination among military organizations led to a fiasco.
[Bing] West faults senior US civilian and military leaders for disorganization and ignorance of Iraqi politics and culture.
[Steve] Coll shows...the US effort was hampered by interagency squabbling and lack of strategic direction.

These three summaries may reflect Moyar's interpretations more than the reality, but if not, that's a severe indictment of the American system of waging war in the Middle East. At the highest levels, American leaders don't know what they are doing. At intermediate levels, the managers of American security agencies cannot co-operate. At the lowest levels, the ability to co-ordinate operations with local allies seems to be flawed, although this appears to be the fault of higher-level direction.

The fact that this is not being discussed openly, as far as I can tell, during an election campaign, suggests that nothing will change in the foreseeable future. I pity the parents of America's fighting men and women.

Links to the books:
Steve Coll
Sean Naylor
Bing West