Category Archives: History

A Dirge or a Song of Celebration

The final paragraph of Andrew Roberts’ 2007 book, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, reads as follows: “It is in the nature of human affairs that, in the words of the hymn, ‘Earth’s proud empires pass away’, and so too one day will the long hegemony of the English-speaking peoples. When they finally come to render up the report of their global stewardship to History, there will be much of which to boast. Only when another power—such as China—holds global sway, will the human race come to mourn the passing of this most decent, honest, generous, fair-minded and self sacrificing imperium.”

In fact, Roberts’ book is intended to convey the idea that the ascendancy and influence of the English–speaking peoples (primarily Great Britain and the USA) over the last quarter millennium has brought a great boon to the world in the form of liberal democracy, free market capitalism, the rule of law, individual liberty, the defeat of totalitarianism (OK, Nazism and Communism are buried, but the last manifestation in the form of Islamic radicalism has yet to be tamed), life-saving scientific and medical discoveries, and a sort of pax englishana that has brought more peace and prosperity to more corners of the Earth than could have been imagined.

The book is an unabashed recitation of the achievements of the Brits and Yanks during the twentieth century. In line with the title of his book, Roberts also points out that, with the exception of Ireland, all the other English-speaking nations of the world—namely, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and even the tiny nations of the British West Indies—have made salutary contributions to the epic ventures pursued by England and America. Naturally, he asks what is it about the English-speaking peoples of the world that has allowed them to defeat their mortal enemies, create enormous wealth, advance the arts, science and engineering to great heights, and to manage growth (both in size and diversity) of their populations in such a way as to create multi-cultural, yet harmonious and dynamic societies? Roberts’ answers are not totally transparent or definitive, but he does offer several thought-provoking possibilities:

  • A single-minded pursuit of mastery of the sea and air;
  • Laissez-faire capitalism—invented by the Dutch, but adopted and perfected to a high degree by the sea-faring English-speaking peoples;
  • The cultivation of spirituality among the people and the promotion of virtue and morality according to commonly accepted spiritual guidelines;
  • Trust in people and their entrepreneurial skills with a concomitant program to limit the size and power of government;
  • Military prowess and innovation, and a patent ruthlessness in deploying same;
  • Understanding the role of prestige in world affairs, and protecting that of the English-speaking peoples.

With those as backdrop, Roberts presents an episodic description of the main ideas, movements, catastrophes and triumphs, and heroes and villains that strode the world stage during the twentieth century—always with a focus on the role played by the English-speaking peoples. He is careful not to ignore their warts and failures. In particular, he highlights: the too long fight to end segregation in America; the plunge into a centrally managed economy, following the 1929 Stock Market crash, which only intensified and prolonged the Depression; the mismanaged peace following World War I; military calamities such as Gallipoli, Pearl Harbor, and of course 9/11; the tendency to rely on appeasement (of Nazis in the 1930s, of Communists in the 1970s and of Islamists in the 1990s); the occasional failure to live up to our own ideals (e.g., the incarceration of innocent Japanese-American citizens during World War II); and the also occasional failure to maintain the unity of the English-speaking peoples (e.g., in the Suez crisis in 1956).

Despite these failures, the power, global influence and supremacy of Great Britain, and then the USA only grew during the twentieth century. Roberts postulates that at the inception of the century, this was not foreordained. Other powers, such as Germany, France and Russia could have grabbed the mantle of leadership. Well, despite the fact that two of the three tried to do so, they fell short and in the end, the century belonged to the English-speaking peoples. Moreover, according to Roberts, that this occurred was a blessing for mankind—the English-speaking peoples have been in the main, a force for good around the globe.

Since its publication, the book has come under scathing attack from the Left. Here is a representative example from amazon.com: ‘The [sic] is, unfortunately, a long history of some of these talented writers getting wrapped up into the politics of others and for the most part getting it wrong. There is a surplus of such writers who became expatriate parts of the neo-con revolution that catapulted conservatives into power—and brought such shame and disgrace to the United States with torture, incompetence and block-headed stupidity. Mr. Roberts may be stupid or flip or just careless. This book is unworthy to be associated with a title connected to Winston Churchill, who knew how to write and how to use facts, even if he did on occasion spin them to his advantage.’

Nevertheless, to me—and I believe to most Americans—the fact that America has been a force for good (far more often than the reverse) is totally self-evident. Alas, it appears that a substantial number of American people disagree. I think this is unprecedented in our nation’s history. From its beginnings, most Americans shared President Reagan’s vision of America as a ‘shining city on a hill,’ that we had reinvented the world with our concepts of a federal republic, individual liberty, limited government, freedom and justice for the people and that our exportation of our political and economic ideas and practices has brought great progress and joy to those portions of the globe that saw the value of our ways. Not any longer—at least not for the segment of the population I hinted at above. The last assertion would definitely have been false a hundred years ago, and probably similarly false fifty years ago. Not any more. What happened during this period to cause a large number of American citizens to lose faith in the role, even in the ‘mission’ of the United States of America? Such discontent with our society’s role in the world, even in the nature of the society itself is a calamity for our country. How did it come about?

I believe the answer is found in two monumental transformations that occurred in the US—the first during the first half of the twentieth century, the second in the latter half. In my recent book, ‘Liberal Hearts and Conservative Brains,’ I argue that America, from its founding through the end of the nineteenth century, was a fundamentally conservative society. There was a broad consensus about the limited role of government in the lives of the people, a deep reverence for the traditional culture, and an acceptance that the rules laid down by our founding fathers were to govern us for the indefinite future. (For more on this argument, see Chapter 5 in the aforementioned book, which can be found online at http://home.comcast.net/~ronlipsman/excerpts.html). The first major cracks in the consensus occurred early in the twentieth century under the leadership of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, aided and abetted by various muckrakers and ‘social reformers’ like John Dewey. In short, for the first time, the country questioned its fundamentals: the federal system of government, the WASP culture, but especially laissez-faire capitalism. Many of the new ideas and attitudes on these subjects were imported from Europe with the massive waves of immigration that swept our shores on both sides of the turn of the twentieth century. Some of the manifestations of the revolutionary work of these reformers included: anti-trust legislation and two Constitutional amendments that legalized a federal income tax and converted the election of Senators from the State legislatures to popular vote. The concurrent movement toward a collectivist government and a centrally directed (if not planned) economy accelerated greatly under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and, arguably even more rapidly, under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Though the changes wrought in American society were profound, the ‘reformers’ are not yet satisfied. They seek to take America further down the road toward a European-style socialist society, but they have been held in check to a tremendous extent by a conservative counter-revolution over the last quarter century.

The second transformation is, I believe, in some sense a consequence of the first. If one accepts that American society is not a beacon or model for the rest of the world, then what right do we have to hold ourselves up as an example to be admired and copied? Indeed, at mid century, the Left seized on the USA’s shortcomings—some legitimate, some merely perceived—and broadcast them forcefully to the nation and the world. They harped on: slavery and segregation, maltreatment of American Indians, discrimination against women and minorities, colonialism in the Philippines and Latin America, internment of Japanese-American citizens, the fire bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the great disparity in wealth between the country’s richest and poorest citizens, industrial pollution, corporate greed, mindless patriotism, urban crime, uptight religiously-dictated morals, and maybe ring-around-the-tub too. Their alienation came to a fever pitch in their opposition to what they viewed as an immoral war in Vietnam. In fact, the Left’s stance on the Vietnam War was a major harbinger of the attitude, which still stands today, that in fact the United States of America is definitely not a force for good in the world. So small wonder that copious calumny has been heaped upon poor Mr. Roberts for his ill-conceived and manifestly wrong thesis.

When those who have lost faith in America look at the bulleted list of reasons (third paragraph above) for why the USA and the English-speaking peoples have led the world, they are appalled by and dismissive of all (except perhaps the first). Next January, when Obama is President and a huge left-wing majority has captured control of Congress, they will set out to remake America according to their vision for the country: socialist, highly secular, demilitarized and pacifist, guided by a malleable Constitution, no better or worse than any other of the world’s nations, a realization of some sort of utopian ‘brotherhood of man.’ Roberts’s book is a celebration of America’s achievements as he sees them during the twentieth century. I wonder what his great-grandchild will write a hundred years hence about America’s role in the twenty first century. I fear it will be a dirge instead of a song of celebration.

What has the Great Depression got to do with a Dying Europe?

I just finished reading two excellent books dealing with the two topics in the title: Amity Shlaes new study of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man (HarperCollins, 2007) and Walter Laqueur’s The Last Days of Europe (St. Martin’s Press, 2007). The former contains a close examination of several key players in Roosevelt’s New Deal, what motivated them, what they wanted to achieve, what they actually did, and a penetrating look at the consequences of their actions. The latter presents an objective description of some of the severe problems that plague European society at the beginning of the twenty first century—problems which have been declared insoluble by some writers and which promise to radically transform the continent, perhaps forever. These include: a startling low birth rate accompanied by the explosive growth of a Muslim immigrant community; the failure to assimilate those immigrants; a crumbling welfare system that is exacerbated by the aforementioned demographic trends; barren churches in comparison to crowded mosques; the inability to project military strength; weak labor productivity, which, together with other ominous business indicators, portends a precarious economic future; and the surrender of sovereignty to an unelected, unresponsive and authoritarian European Union.

There are two disparate features that tie the books together in my mind. First, they are both written in a curiously dispassionate style with an extremely limited amount of editorializing, personal opinion and prescriptions for solutions. Both authors state the facts as they see them and largely leave it to the reader draw his own conclusions. The second feature they share is an enormous undercurrent of collectivism, a powerful political and economic force, which, both authors reveal, motivates and animates the main protagonists in both books.

The story of the Great Depression and the consequent New Deal that FDR unleashed to tame it has been etched, indeed burned into the consciousness of any American who was educated in the United States since the 1940s. The story asserts that: the Depression was a phenomenon brought on by the excesses of business, the greed of corporations and the individuals that controlled them, and unsavory practices in the financial industry; the inability of the little or ‘forgotten man’ to deal with the cataclysmic events that overwhelmed him was total; therefore, the need for a counterweight was compelling and that role was naturally assigned to the US Government; in fulfilling that role, the imaginative and heroic programs instituted by the New Deal—which reversed the disastrous policies of Herbert Hoover—conquered the Depression and turned the economy around; and finally, its proven success legitimized the paradigm of the modern welfare state in which the government—through taxation, regulation, borrowing and spending, and jawboning—serves as a powerful check on the excesses of big business and helps to ensure the prosperity of the country, but in a much more fair and equitable fashion than an unrestricted free market could deliver. All of us absorbed these ‘truths’ from our teachers, from the media, and from the politicians—of both parties, until they became self-evident and beyond dispute. There have been some lonely voices crying out over the years that it was all a myth—Milton Friedman comes to mind—but by in large this interpretation of the Great Depression and the New Deal survives virtually unchallenged in the educational and media institutions of the United States.

Ms. Shlaes clearly does not accept this received wisdom. But she undercuts it not via a political polemic, or through the presentation of mountains of contrary data or by citing experts or higher authorities; rather, she offers an in-depth and fascinating portrayal of some of the key players in both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. Through a dispassionate presentation of their professed beliefs and, more importantly, their actions, she leads the reader to some unmistakable conclusions: while it was true that Hoover’s actions were disastrous (e.g., his support of the horrendous Smoot-Hawley tariffs), he in fact engaged in the same kind of interventionist, aggressive regulatory, business-bashing and collectivist schemes that his successor deployed; Roosevelt did not have a firm game plan in mind, instead he made it up as he went along and many of his schemes were mutually contradictory—but a constant throughout his first two terms was an extreme animus for business and businessmen; contrary to the myth it seems highly probable that not only did Roosevelt’s laws, agencies and programs not alleviate the Great Depression—they in fact deepened it and prolonged it; the so-called ‘depression within the depression’ that hit the country in the mid/late 30s was a direct consequence of his policies (e.g., the undistributed profits tax) and is clear proof  that the New Deal prolonged and intensified the economic downturn, rather than rescued our country; and finally, by the end of the thirties, large segments of the public and even members of the administration—inspired by the arguments of people like Wendell Wilkie, who were originally sympathetic but could not ignore the damage the New Deal was doing—turned against the failed policies of the New Deal, leading to a gradual ease up on the regulation, business bashing and collectivist approach. If not for that late 30s ‘course correction’ and if the world had not clearly been descending into a major war, Roosevelt might very well have been defeated in 1940. The point is not made in Ms. Shlaes’ book, but others have asserted that the national emergency of World War II in the 1940s, in which the federal government played a dominant role, institutionalized the phenomenon of massive government intervention in society—a phenomenon whose roots were established in the collectivist policies of the New Deal in the 1930s. By the end of the War, the expansive government that we know today was a permanent fixture, and since then it has gone almost unquestioned that the federal government has a vast role to play in the economic and social life of the American nation.

Ms. Schlaes says virtually none of this explicitly. Rather, by letting the movers and shakers of the New Deal, as well as certain private citizens, act and speak for themselves, she makes the conclusions I’ve indicated painfully evident. It is amazingly understated and very subtle, yet crystal clear; quite a feat to bring off.

Much of the same can be said of the book by Mr. Laqueur.  He examines the history, movements and trends over the last generation that have brought to its current perilous state. He highlights: the carnage that Europe inflicted upon itself in two world wars; the determination not to ever subject themselves to a repeat performance; the intention to achieve that goal by creating economic, social and political structures that would guarantee it; the overwhelming impulse to establish a virtually utopian welfare state—very long on social guarantees, very short on hard work, profit, competition and military capabilities.  Furthermore, their idealism led Europeans to divest themselves of their empires and to the desire to do well by their former subjects, including inviting them into their home and asking little from them in the way of good behavior. Mr. Laqueur engages in no screaming about demographic calamities, racial and religious polarization, indigestible minorities, stagnant economies held back by a poor work ethic, burning jealousy of the United States, or appeasement of the Soviet Union followed by an equally appalling appeasement of Islamofascism. There are only cool presentations of facts, attitudes and trends, descriptions of relevant organizations in European minority communities (factually done without obsessing about the fact that many are seditious and traitorous), and a somewhat laudatory explanation of attempts to build a more enlightened and peaceful European society. Once again the understatement is remarkably effective. The reader is left to draw his own conclusions, but the path Mr. Laqueur leads them down doesn’t leave a lot of room for diverse conclusions. The title of the book indicates clearly what Mr. Laqueur sees as Europe’s destination.

Thus we have two books dealing with very different subjects, but very much alike in writing style and in underlying theme. And both are important books for Americans to read. How can we understand where we want to go and how to get there if we misunderstand where we have been? School children are ignorant of the names Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, but they learn a great deal about John Dewey, John Maynard Keynes, Sinclair Lewis and even Karl Marx. The views of the latter crew would be anathema to our founders and if we set our sails according to the charts laid out by these collectivists, we will create a society vastly different from what has been the nature of American society from its inception until the twentieth century. The exhortation toward collectivism and aggressive state power embodied in the ideas of the men who concocted the New Deal and the European Union represent a mortal threat to the nature of the American society that our forefathers created. The lack of respect for individual freedom and liberty also constitute a violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Ms. Schlaes book, in its understated way, makes a powerful case for reexamining the Great Depression and the New Deal. Similarly, Mr. Laqueur’s book should cause the bureaucrats in Brussels and the citizens of the continent to rethink their course of action over the last generation. Much of Europe’s dilemma is due to its collectivist mentality, its utopian philosophies, and its fear of rugged individualism and laissez faire economics. (Its fear and betrayal of its classic Christian religious heritage is playing a role too, but that is not addressed in Mr. Laqueur’s book and I shan’t say more on that here.). These forces are also present in the United States although we have resisted them more effectively than has Europe. For how much longer? If we pay attention to the cliff off of which Europe is about to plunge, and if we correctly assay the philosophy and legacy of the New Deal, then maybe we can avoid Europe’s fate.