When is the Past History

I recently finished reading The English and Their History by Robert Tombs. If you are interested in English history it is well worth a look, but it does, I think, go wrong by going too far. By which I mean that by taking his narrative to 2014, in a history book published in 2015, Tombs has gone beyond what I would consider ‘history’.

Now, I think we would agree that while the paragraph above was typed in the past that action or the thought behind it is not history. It is something like a present-past. And I would argue that when the subject is a people and a nation, history, as a distinct mode of thought and inquiry ends and journalism begins well before we get to two years ago.

Walter Bagehot argued that it took a generation to evaluate a reform. If anything, I’d say Bagehot was an optimist. If we consider what is currently going on in our colleges—dominated as they are by sixties activists and influences-- it strikes me that we can, at best, only make a tentative statement about that decade. Nor is the historian considering that period likely to have anything like the detachment that one would wish for as it is still too ‘present’.

I don’t have an answer or even know if the above is on the right track. But in reading Tombs’ history I noted a certain arc. To start there wasn’t enough material or enough complexity in the activity to make it fully engrossing, the book got better as both those conditions became less of an issue, but then at some point it starts to decline again as the present starts to take over and what is truly ‘historical’ in the past begins to recede.

Book Review-The Edwardian Crisis; Britain 1901 - 10

"By the early 1900s the two major parties were in danger of fragmenting under the weight of internal and external pressures."
It could be argued that a proper political education is at least as much a historical as a doctrinal one. The distance of time affords a more dispassionate, no dog in the hunt, perspective. For modern conservatives the beginning of the twentieth century is of interest because a) it seems to be the period in which the realized ideal of a limited state came to an end, and b) it was an unusually tumultuous period politically. In short, from the perspective of 2015, the question of what happened naturally arises.


David Powell's The Edwardian Crisis is framed as a reconsideration of George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England (a book recently cited by the columnist Michael Barone) but it stands easily on its own. Whereas Dangerfield's account of the period reads like a flamboyant prosecutor's brief, Powell's has the feel of a judge's summary. The Edwardian Crisis also covers more ground in a 173 pages than Dangerfield does in 363.

Before delving into the specifics of the four 'crises' Powell considers the Victorian legacy and the issue of poverty. The economic success of the former "generated rising expectations about the level of future comfort" which were later thwarted when price inflation outstripped wage increases. The awareness of poverty increased at the same time via reports and sociological studies resulting in tentative reform measures which in turn generated a "administrative tradition of reform...with civil servants and Whitehall experts working behind-the-scenes." Poverty, for Powell, is the focal point for the subsequent 'crises'.

The crisis events for Dangerfield and Powell are 1) a constitutional crisis over the boundaries between Parliament and the House of Lords, 2) suffragism, 3) labor unrest, and 4) Irish Home Rule. The first was arguably the most consequential, affecting the others, while the last was probably the most dangerous.

The constitutional dispute came about when the Lords, in contradistinction to the tradition of not touching finance bills, struck down the 1909 "Peoples" budget. While Dangerfield presents this as the Unionist/Conservative dominated Lords outrageously thwarting the Liberal Party's budget, Powell is typically more measured. Powell notes that "the 1909 budget was the hinge upon which the social reform programme of the New Liberalism turned. It established the principle of using the budget as a means of raising finance for new areas of state spending, and of redistributing wealth". And he observes that by the later, agreed to, understanding the 1909 budget would not have been considered a finance measure.

The resolution of the constitutional crisis after two elections and an agreement that the House of Lords could delay, but not stop parliamentary measures passed unchanged three times, opened the way for the suffragism and Home Rule disputes, by eliminating the Lords as a blocking agent, and in the latter case making the Liberal Party dependent on the Irish Nationalists. It is in regard to the labor crisis that Dangerfield's account is superior in that he focuses on strikes, labor unrest, and the rise of national unions across occupations in the form of the Triple Alliance, whereas Powell spends roughly half his pages on the Labour Party. Surely it is the potential of a consolidated, general strike that presented the greater legal and societal challenge. But this is to quibble, and Powell in each chapter's summation is masterful in bringing up the multi-dimensions and cross-currents at play in each of the disputes for all those involved.

So why read a book about events 100 years ago in a different country who's findings the author admits are "necessarily equivocal". First, it's just a good read, which ought to be enough. Second, there is scarcely a page which is absent something that will be strikingly familiar to the current observer of American politics, foremost the sense of political actors being forced to resolve issues without any good options available. And finally, there is perhaps the cautionary idea of how vulnerable a political system is when the participants play the game without any restraint. Who was it that observed that "history may not repeat, but it rhymes"?

Nice introduction

I’ve just started reading Simon Schama’s A History of Britain.  William has won the Battle of Hastings (1066) and become king, but of course everything isn’t settled just yet.  Schama goes through the potential troublemakers:

“‘Eadric the Wild’ of Wales who was said to have married a fairy princess and introduced her to the king—‘Beauty, say hello to Beast, Beast, say hello to Beauty.’”

Golf - a long time ago

From biography of Herbert Asquith (British Prime Minister to be); when Asquith had just left college in 1875 and spent time as a reading member at St. Andrews:

“Even nearer to hand were the links of the Royal and

Ancient St.

Andrews Golfing Society, and Asquith there made his first acquaintance with the only sedentary game which was ever to arouse his interest.  It was a useful acquaintanceship, for although golf was then so little developed that he and his modest-living student companions were able to hire the services of the British Open champion to carry their clubs, the game was to become an almost essential accompaniment to Edwardian politics.  In the heyday of Asquith’s career, there was hardly a politician of note who did not seek his relaxation (and in some cases try to transact a part of his business) upon a golf links.”

Asquith, Roy Jenkins

There's a great picture of him from 1912 just after he's hit a drive in full golfing attire (hat, suit and tie, dress shirt with cuff links no less).  Looks like he favored a baseball grip rather than the vardon.

William Colby, The Man Nobody Knew

I saw The Man Nobody Knew last night at the Siskel Theatre.  The film is a superb documentary on William Colby by his son Carl.  While parachute training for World War II Colby signs up for more hazardous duty and thereby launches his career as a spy and spy master.  Colby goes from operating behind the lines in Norway, to working towards the victory of the Christian Democrats in Italy, to South Vietnam, concluding with being the CIA Director during the last days of the Nixon administration and into the Ford administration.

We are taken through Colby’s life both professionally and personally and learn that there isn’t much of a distinction between the two.  His wife tells of entertaining a couple in Italy and then when they run into them the next night being told by her husband “we don’t know them.”  A family picnic becomes an occasion for a drop.  Well says his son, he didn’t lie; we did go for a picnic.

The key event in Colby’s career is South Vietnam.  It is there that he develops a counter insurgency strategy which was abandoned in favor of a military approach but is later used by the U.S. in Iraq.  Particularly interesting to me was the film’s coverage of the coup against the Diem administration including an embarrassingly bad discussion of the issue in the Kennedy White House with Colby contributing a wonderful neutral non-neutral assessment.  Going through the relative strength of the forces aligned for and against the coup he tells the group that they are even enough “for a good fight.”

Colby finds himself as the Director of Central Intelligence at the conclusion of the war in Vietnam and in the aftermath of Watergate.  It is William Colby that testifies in front of the congressional Church Committee in the most riveting part of the film.  The deeply catholic Colby, perhaps atoning for his own sins, ends up sharing with Congress and the wider public the sins of his agency.  The pressure on the man here is palpable; running a large agency, facing a hostile Congress (seemingly on a daily basis) and press, and without support from the White House who believed he was out of control and sharing way too much.

At the end of The Man Nobody Knew you feel as though you still don’t know the man at all.  Ordinarily that would be an indictment of the film but in this case it only speaks to how thoroughly enigmatic its subject.   Throughout William Colby is tough to get any kind of handle on but then the really big surprises come out and you’re left with only the conclusion that the title is well chosen. 

Beyond that the film is incredibly rich in stories, tidbits, and observations.  It is rare to see a documentary with a strong story line where you come away with the impression that “the plot” is wholly secondary.  Colby’s insights into spying, glimpses into how policy is made at the highest level including a classic exchange between Times Abe Rosenthal and Gerald Ford, and the seemingly endless issues that arise from Colby’s career make for an excellent film and the relief that we weren’t William Colby’s son.

How Columbus got his financing

From Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence:

"The Spanish queen Isabella is rightly credited with sponsoring him [Columbus], but not till she had turned him down several times like all the others...Finally, the queen's private treasurer pointed out that this sailor's request amounted to less than the cost of entertaining a royal visitor and he urged her to give the money."

German invasion of Russia, WWII

Two interesting posts on Operation Barbarossa (note the imbedded link in the first sentence).  I'm not sure why, but I find WWII fascinating, and judging from the History Channel I'm not alone.   http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/270296/operation-barbarous-daniel-foster