Nutty Professors

Hal Foster

• Quick Studies: The Best of ‘Lingua Franca’ edited by Alexander Star
  Farrar, Straus, 514 pp, US $18.00, September 2002, ISBN 0 374 52863 2

The cultural strategy of the Reaganite Right was prepared as early as 1976 by Daniel Bell inCultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Blame the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s – rebellious students, civil rights agitators, wild-eyed feminists – for the grievous decline in public morality, cultural literacy, educational standards and everything else that has gone to hell: blame them and not, say, the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The Culture Wars proper – the assault on multicultural education and identity politics, on feminist gains and gay rights – followed in the 1980s; and as they raged on into the 1990s, it made tactical sense for the Right to train some guns on liberal campuses, for where else (besides Hollywood) were those damn subversives so concentrated now?

It was then that the Culture Wars narrowed to the Political Correctness Battles, with attacks launched on campus codes regarding affirmative action, sexual harassment and hate speech, as well as on curricular challenges to the Western Canon (this is how ‘theory’ was first typed as a diabolical agent). Clearly many radicals had hung around the universities, infiltrated the ranks of the professoriat and proceeded to poison the minds of the young. The academy was overrun by these ‘tenured radicals’ (as Roger Kimball put it in his 1990 book), engaged in the promulgation of an ‘illiberal education’ (Dinesh D’Souza in 1991), dedicated to ‘the closing of the American mind’ (Allan Bloom in 1987). The sense of embattlement is palpable in a recent anthology of articles from the New Criterion, whose editor, Hilton Kramer, gazes back on the founding of the magazine in 1982:

The ‘long march through the institutions’ that had been promised by the radicals of the 1960s was nearing its completion. In the universities, in our leading arts institutions, in the media, in federal and state agencies concerned with funding the arts and humanities, and in most private foundations, the legacy of 1960s radicalism – now wearing the mask of a benevolent bureaucratic liberalism – was everywhere apparent. Dissent from this left-liberal orthodoxy was virtually nonexistent.

Though almost funny in its near paranoia (the 1950s were back, with academics and administrators in the role of the Communists), this vision was dead serious, and many progressives were foolish in taking it lightly at the time, or looking to common sense to dispel it – in part because common sense itself was also at stake. These crusaders had more than alarmist titles to brandish: they had the political firepower – not only old warhorses like Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan, but new stalwarts such as William Bennett, head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and then Secretary of Education under Reagan, who worked to abolish both agencies, and Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick and head of the NEH under George I, who wanted to absolve American history from any critique whatsoever. (When I’ve seen these two on TV again lately, I’ve wanted to cry out, like the kids in the horror film Poltergeist, ‘They’re back!’ Can Newt Gingrich, another failed professor ripe with academic ressentiment, be far behind?)

The intimidation factor was enormous, as was the media saturation, and soon enough it seemed to be open season – not only on the floor of Congress but in newspapers across the country – on ‘revisionist historians’ and ‘nihilistic deconstructionists’, post-colonial critics and queer theorists. Very different schools of thinkers were lumped together and attacked – as subversive, obscurantist and, weirdly enough, lazy to boot. The new resentments against intellectuals drew on an old suspicion that runs deep in American culture – that intellectual work is not work at all. The Clinton Administration provided little cover here – its cultural politics were populist – and even institutions once considered friendly to intellectuals, such as the New York Times, mocked the humanities, as with its annual listings of far-fetched titles from Modern Language Association meetings. (It rarely focused on the infinitely more dangerous obfuscations of language perpetrated by the State and Defense departments.) One common take on the American academic came to be that while some scientists might have beautiful minds, most humanists are nutty professors, and some (to borrow a phrase from the character assassination of Anita Hill) are a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.

Two decades ago Edward Said argued that the function of the humanist was ‘to assure a harmless place for “the humanities” or culture or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over the curriculum was at a peak, John Guillory added that debates about literary and artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were by Federal grants and corporate connections to the sciences. Moreover, in the wake of the ‘new economy’, pundits began to wonder what the humanities had to offer at all (unless they retooled and became ‘digitally literate’): lesser than marginal, they might, it seemed, be declared obsolete. After Bennington, a flagship liberal arts college, moved to abolish tenure in 1994, many academics looked nervously to the business success of the online version of the University of Phoenix as a sign of things to come.

Yet the situation had its ironies. The political attacks on the progressive wing of the humanities and the financial troubles of liberal arts colleges gave each a public profile they had not enjoyed for a long time; contemporary art experienced a similar boost with controversies over NEA funding of edgy artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Might the arts and the humanities be more efficacious than we thought, if not as dangerous as they thought? The increased attention also prompted several shootings-in-the-foot, as some young academics flaunted the new provocateur image of the humanities professor and some over-eager artists fell into a clumsy pas de deux with Helms and friends (You want obscenity? We’ll give you obscenity!). And for the most part this new prominence brought with it dismissive stereotypes: too often contemporary art came to be associated with scandal, hype and the waste of taxpayers’ money, and the new humanities with a toeing of the PC line (when teaching was done at all).

Lingua Franca (1990-2001) was an American magazine of academic life during this stretch of time when professors in the humanities got some attention but no respect. According to its final editor, Alexander Star, who assembled this anthology of articles, its audience was comprised of academics, ‘quasi-academics’ who worked in university presses, libraries and think-tanks, and ‘non-academics’ interested in the ‘unseemly things’ of these other two groups. You have to wonder about this last party – the dirty laundry of eggheads, editors and librarians is some kind of acquired taste – and maybe that was part of the problem: despite the large professoriat in the States, circulation never topped 15,000. Though high by the standards of academic journals, this number could not match that achieved by magazines like Harper’s or the New Republic, and LF fell through the cracks in the ‘reactionary Fall’ of 2001.

‘Whatever one makes of the term “public intellectuals”, LF was a journal for and about the species,’ Star declares here, and his collection offers helpful accounts of influential thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Benedict Anderson and the radical-turned-Neo-Conservative historian Eugene Genovese, as well as thoughtful reviews of significant debates, such as the contested legacy of Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould v. sociobiology), the stake of revisionist histories of the 1960s and the role of race in the formulation of law. But at times one feels that LF cut a deal with its readers: if you listen to our stories about their work, we won’t disturb your image of academics and intellectuals too much; and often the profiles fit the stereotypes already in circulation – the trendy star and the innocuous pedant, the narcissistic provocateur and the political naif, the pop-obsessed (the example here is Slavoj Žižek) and the pop-challenged (Roger Scruton). Such indeed is the ‘lingua franca’ of egghead representation today, and this contract with readers is reaffirmed on the cover: ‘Dedicated to the proposition that academia can compete for interest with Hollywood and Washington, Lingua Franca explained the most significant ideas of the last decade – and told some of its least likely stories.’ You can’t begrudge the pitch; the problem is that the explaining of the significant ideas is not only enlivened but also compromised by the telling of the unlikely stories, the ‘unseemly things’. Too often the sub rosa message is that the academy is a hoot, at times interesting, even instructive, but mostly in its risible errors.

The action of the book is concentrated near the beginning. The first section is entitled ‘The Reaction to Theory’, and ‘reaction’ is right, for most of the articles here concern the backlash against theory, which they reinforce more than question. There is a 1996 critique of Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), an egregious instance of his claim that simulated images have overtaken real events. Lately, Baudrillard has made his own bashing relatively easy; nevertheless, this dismissal not only ignores his best work but also makes him the worst representative of Postmodernism tout court – which this collection is too ready to render synonymous with epistemological nihilism, moral relativism and extreme subjectivism. The image of a wanton Postmodernism appears again in a critique of the historian of science Donna Haraway, who is also judged by one essay alone, her ‘Teddy Bear Patriarchy’ (1984), an analysis of the imperialist ideology inscribed in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Here cultural studies stands condemned as too quick to reduce social practices to an ‘ensemble of texts’. Judith Butler is addressed not through her work at all but via a student fanzine that fantasises racily about queer theorists. As Butler protested in a letter, ‘Lingua Franca re-engages that anti-intellectual aggression whereby scholars are reduced to occasions for salacious conjecture.’ Žižek is profiled sympathetically, but he, too, is exposed as one more Postmodernist oblivious to reality: ‘For me life exists only insofar as I can theorise it.’ It’s a joke, of course, but many readers will nod as they smile. Moreover, the description of his ‘non-stop pastiche of Hegelian philosophy, Marxist dialectics and Lacanian jargon’ folds his work into another stereotype of theory – that it is so much cut-and-paste soup. In the final article in this section the political scientist James Miller asks ‘Is Bad Writing Necessary?’ This is essentially a comparison of Orwell and Adorno as models of criticism, and you can guess who wins. But in fact no one does: the opposition serves neither, since the intellectual difficulty of Adorno is associated with linguistic obfuscation, which Orwell is wheeled in to associate with totalitarian deception – an obfuscation that Orwell himself might well have denounced.

There are two pieces in ‘The Reaction to Theory’ that will make some readers think: ‘With friends like these who needs Neo-Conservatives?’ One is a 1996 mea culpa by Frank Lentricchia, ‘the Dirty Harry of literary theory’ (the cover again), who here castigates the kind of ideology critique that he once championed. The piece fits the genre of the academic confessional (a subgenre of the memoir once cornered by his English Department at Duke University), and has all the counter-investment of a conversion story as well (in this regard it recalls the obsessional renunciation of psychoanalysis by Frederick Crews). But the real killer is the first article, which is by Alan Sokal, the physicist who wrote a parody of ‘Postmodern science studies’ entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, which the unsuspecting editors of the cultural studies journal Social Text published as the real thing in 1996; Sokal then went public with the hoax inLF. No doubt his chastening of extreme forms of ‘epistemic relativism’ is warranted, but Sokal couldn’t let his own joke alone, and here his equation of Postmodernism with nihilism and subjectivism is not only smug but presumptive – the very charges he levels against it. Sokal is also less than reflective about his own criteria: if an argument doesn’t fit his positivist version of ‘evidence and logic’, he deems it crap, which is to suggest that he treats Postmodern science studies no better, and not much differently, than it is said to treat science.

The next section, ‘The Tribulations of the Academic Life’, is made up mostly of cautionary tales about intellectuals who step beyond their academic discipline or conventional propriety, or both, and get busted for it. There is an account of the pedagogical provocations of feminist theorist Jane Gallop, which led to sexual harassment charges from two female graduate students in 1992 (they were not upheld), and a 1998 post-mortem of a case involving a young sociologist named Adam Weisberger, who asked his students to analyse their families, only to be accused of invasion of privacy (he was run out of his college, and went straight to law school). Another telling story concerns the after-trial tribulations of Martha Nussbaum, who, as an expert witness in the 1993 Colorado Amendment 2 Case involving gay rights, appeared to fudge the meaning of a Greek word for anal intercourse as well as the attitude of Plato and other ancients to it. Sympathetic to Nussbaum, the article stresses the discrepancies between legal discourse and humanistic inquiry, but also asks edgily whether scholars should ‘sacrifice their intellectual standards when they enter the public arena’. Such is the tacit moral of this section: trouble awaits the academic who crosses the lines between personal and professional or professional and public, and interdisciplinary work is fraught with dangers. But the book produces a double-bind: on the one hand, it implicitly calls for public intellectuals who can cross over in these ways; on the other hand, it mostly chastises those who do so for practising without a licence in other fields.

Another double-bind concerning the great gap between the public and the intellectual hits closer to home. ‘Refusing the terms of this stand-off,’ Star writes, ‘LF sought to occupy the no man’s land between the tabloid and the treatise.’ Yet its main way of doing this was to mix tabloid and treatise, to highlight academics caught with their pants down. This does not offer a real alternative to the often prurient treatment of intellectuals in the Arts and Ideas sections of major newspapers (again I think especially of the New York Times). Some journalist critics further bias the public against the intellectual in order to consolidate their own space as cultural arbiters, usually through a dissing of the academic as personally outrageous or professionally jargonistic or both (there is little or no allowance for the periodic necessity of technical language, let alone of difficult thought).

Taken as a status report on the academic intellectual in American culture today, Quick Studiessuggests that public faith in the university as a place of meritocratic advancement has been damaged, and that the PC Battles have been lost by the Left. (Someday the story will have to be told of how the Right seized this term of Left self-critique as a club to beat the Left up with.) Postmodernism emerges as an idea taken over by its own caricature – an equation with nihilism and subjectivism that allows journalists such as Edward Rothstein of the New York Times to lambast Pomo as somehow preparing the ground for terrorism. The old New Yorkercartoon – ‘Oh, you’re a terrorist! Thank God, I thought you said you were a theorist!’ – needs to be revised, but only slightly.

Alternative evidence suggests different conclusions. The isolation of the intellectual might be due less to the solipsism of the scholar than the distraction of the public and the diminishment of the public sphere. On this score the academy might serve, in some small measure, as a public sphere in exile, and from this perspective the public intellectual might seem less moribund than reborn, especially in the case of scholars from racial minorities (black intellectuals such as Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West are not considered in Quick Studies, and post-colonial theorists such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak are mostly dismissed). Finally, the PC Battles were indeed lost by the Left, but some of the Culture Wars were won, or at least fought to a stalemate. Despite current backlashes there is more tolerance – social and cultural, even legal and institutional – of multicultural identities and sexual differences. On the academic front, however, ‘theory’ remains a bugbear. In my experience the people who use this reified term for ritual abuse rarely know what they mean by it (it conjures up some nasty mix of bizarre method, extreme politics and cult practice); the Neo-Con dismissal of critical studies has become a reflex, so much ‘common sense’ where many people might well think otherwise.

There is an old saying, sometimes credited to a California politician under Governor Reagan, that ‘the reason academic politics are so vicious is that the stakes are so small.’ Read in part against the grain, Quick Studies suggests that the politics might often be nasty, but the stakes are not always trivial.

Vol. 25 No. 9 · 8 May 2003

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Goodbye Columbus

Eric Hobsbawm writes about 1492 and its cultural consequences in Europe

A few weeks ago, in Mexico, I was asked to sign a protest against Christopher Columbus, on behalf of the original native populations of the American continents and islands, or rather, of their descendants. I understand the feelings which inspire such gestures, and have some sympathy with them, although it seems to me that the only object of protesting against something that happened half a millennium ago is to get a little publicity for a cause of 1992 rather than 1492. The consequences of Columbus’s voyages and those of his successors cannot be reversed. The sufferings imposed on indigenous Americans and imported Africans, whether by deliberate human action or as the unintended consequences of conquest and exploitation, are undeniable and cannot be cancelled in retrospect. That the impact of conquest and exploitation on these populations was catastrophic, and not only during the first hundred and fifty years of European conquest, must not be denied or overlooked either. Nevertheless, we cannot cancel history, but only remember or forget or invent it. Everyone who lives in the Americas today, whether descended from the Aboriginal population or from voluntary or involuntary settlers, has been shaped by the five hundred years that have passed since Columbus sailed. But so has everyone in the Old World, though in ways of which we are rarely conscious.

That both sides were transformed was and is masked, in the first instance, by the very fact of conquest and overwhelmingly superior power. It was only on the periphery of settlement, and usually after the initial assertion of European power, that Europeans and native Americans met one another on anything like equal terms: an equality reinforced, on the northern and southern frontiers, for one or two centuries, by the ‘horse revolution’ which made the plains Indians of the North American deserts and prairies, and of the southern cone, into formidable cavalry raiders. Here and on the Amazonian jungle frontiers, as well as in a scattering of maroon settlements beyond the slave plantations, we find long-lasting resistance to conquest and colonisation – and only here. The settled American civilisations, especially in central America, succumbed rapidly. Under these circumstances we cannot realistically speak of a ‘clash’ of cultures, given the virtually total dominance of one side.

This dominance was reinforced by the combination of Christianity and barbarian conquest, which, as Edward Gibbon observed in the case of the Roman Empire, is a very effective destroyer of cultures. With all due respect to Las Casas and to the moral scruples of the Spanish crown, with all admiration for the Jesuits’ protection of the Indians, we must never forget that the object of the conquest was the destruction of a heathen culture and the substitution for it of the true faith. As in Cordoba, so in Mexico, we see the conquerors tearing down the fabric of one kind of holy place to build churches on their sites. This initial destruction was so systematic that – in spite of some belated attempts at rescue – only three of the written Maya codices are still extant, and their characters have been only incompletely deciphered. In fact, we can read the records of pre-Columbian civilisations far less than ancient hieroglyphics and cunieform tablets. The art and artefacts of these civilisations found their way to Europe, admired by experts like Albrecht Dürer for their technical workmanship and beauty, but, so far as we can tell, without becoming the subject of serious artistic interest until the 20th century. Several of its most important monuments, which have become major centres of global tourism, such as the Maya sites and Machu Picchu, were not even known or recovered until then.

In short, whatever the conquerors and settlers hoped to get from the New World, they did not expect to learn much from its inhabitants that would be of value in the Old. The most interesting and instructive thing about it was its very novelty: the discovery of other human societies, unknown and unmediated by history, literature or oral tradition; the discovery of territories with a geological and climatic structure unlike any in Europe, and with an overwhelmingly strange and rich but quite unfamiliar flora and fauna – in some areas it seemed a paradise before the fall. This confrontation with novelty was for long the American impact on European culture. It has been argued that this is what precipitated the European concept of the ideal society or Utopia. I need not remind you that the discoverer of Utopia in Thomas More’s book was supposed to have been a Portuguese by birth who had sailed with Amerigo Vespucci to New Castile, but stayed behind when Vespucci returned, to explore the New World further. Equally, and perhaps more important, was the novelty of the Americas as a stimulus to rethinking our scientific world-picture. After all, in the 19th century, it was the experience of South America which led both Charles Darwin and Russell Wallace to formulate the theory of evolution. Darwin himself said so in the very first sentences of The Origin of Species.

In the field of politics, institutions and high culture, it is safe to say, Europeans did not think they had anything to learn from the New World until the age of North American independence. Its institutions were derived from those of the Old World. Its culture and arts were remote provincial versions of metropolitan models. Politically, all this changed dramatically with the revolt of the American colonies, for after that the New World became the model of political innovation in an age of incomplete or unsuccessful metropolitan revolution. It was a continent of republics in a world of monarchies, and the USA was the pioneer political democracy. Still, even in politics the Old World did not quite lose its hegemony. The French Revolution was a more universal model than the revolution of the American colonies, and even in Latin America the Tricolour was the dominant model for national flags. However, the New World remained a dependency of the Old, in intellectual life and in the arts, and few wealthy or educated Americans denied this until the end of the 19th century.

The mass of the American populations, native, slave or settler, if they knew anything about Europe at all, knew that they were not living in an inferior version of the metropolis. Creoles or settlers were perhaps the first conscious ‘Americans’, and it is clear to us that, with numerically small exceptions, the indigenous and mestizo populations lived in a syncretic culture that fused European and autochthonous elements. The settler/Creole version of this New World culture combined with the indigenous versions in varying degree. At one extreme we find regions of heavy European settlement – urban or rural – and comparatively thin indigenous population, regions which colonists could treat virtually as empty land, from which the aborigines could simply be eliminated. For practical purposes, the native Americans in the USA were to leave no significant traces on US culture, after their initial contact with the early colonists, except as something which stood outside it. At the other extreme we find small settler or pioneer populations on pioneer frontiers or in indigenous milieus, who might be heavily ‘nativised’. In the special case of Paraguay and the adjoining areas of what is now Brazil and Argentina, a native language, Guarani, actually became the main medium of communication among local white settlers, but this was quite exceptional. Again, as one might suppose, European intellectual and cultural influence rose as one proceeded from the less to the more educated, and was at its lowest among the illiterate. Nevertheless, most inhabitants of the Western hemisphere, before the era of mass emigration from Europe to North and the southern cone of South America, lived in something like a syncretic New World culture which fused elements from both worlds.

The impact the Americas have made on the culture of the Old World has been specifically that of this New World culture. Here we must distinguish between the impact of Latin and Caribbean America and that of North America, especially the USA, for two reasons. That of the USA has been enormously magnified by the transformation of that country into the greatest industrial economy of the 20th century and the model of wealth and technological progress, and later by its transformation into a superpower. Almost everything that comes from there has had a major ‘demonstration effect’ and is likely to be imitated. If we want to assess the strength of this effect, we have only to compare US influence with that of Canada in both Britain and France. Canada is, after all, one of the seven most powerful economies in the world. Unlike the USA, or both Britain and France, Canada remains culturally provincial, though interesting things and people occasionally emerge from it. Again, since the late 18th century, the USA has been a political model for the rest of the world, though not, as it happens, a model much imitated. Initially there was nothing specifically American about this model, except the fact that ideas common to progressive intellectuals everywhere in Europe first led to political transformation across the Atlantic. Later, once again, the growing strength of the USA reinforced its impact. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a phenomenon of world interest, but the contemporary Cardenas era in Mexico was seen as having only regional interest. The situation is similar in the more strictly cultural field. Everyone in the world knows about the cowboys of the old US West. The Mexican vaqueros from whom their costumes, their equipment and even their vocabulary are derived are not world-famous. No doubt if Hollywood had been situated in a Mexican rather than a Yankee Los Angeles, the epics of the Wild West would have paid more attention to Latin America.

One might, of course, argue that in some ways the USA represents a civilisation, an economy, a polity more completely ‘new world’ than any other in the Americas, because it made a more complete break with the institutions of the Old World than did any other set of European transatlantic colonies. It is certainly the case that even today visiting Europeans find the USA in many respects a stranger society, and one whose mores are harder to understand, than those of the Latin American countries. In some ways the rise of the USA to its position as the world’s super-economy and superpower owes much to its situation in the New World – for instance, to its potential for transcontinental territorial expansion – but I would not wish to exaggerate the importance of such factors. If the rise of the USA is to be explained by its being a new country in a new world, then what about the rise of Japan?

I do not want to speak primarily about the repercussions of the USA on Europe, however, even though when most of us think of American influence in Europe, this is what we have in mind. I want rather to consider those cultural repercussions of America as a whole which owe nothing of significance to the size, wealth and power of their countries of origin. To take the extreme case of Ruben Dario in literature, his importance in the history of modern Spanish poetry is as great as the importance of his country, Nicaragua, in the early 20th century, was negligible.

If we consider the balance of European and New World elements in our culture, an interesting contrast between élite or high culture and popular culture becomes apparent. In the field of high culture, the balance still favoured the Old World until the late 20th century, in spite of the enormous prestige, resources and creative energy of the USA. The Americas are still net importers of talent and ideas, and nowhere more so than in the USA, even in the area of its greatest intellectual triumph, scientific research. In the rest of the Americas, the continued hegemony of the Old World continues among intellectuals, though particular mother countries have learned that their cultural superiority to their former colonies has disappeared.

Nevertheless, even in the fields of high culture, the Old World has increasingly taken notice of the New, though officially with some delay. The Nobel Prize did not begin to go to North American writers until 1930, or to Latin American ones in any numbers until after the late Sixties. Still, US literature has been accepted as a serious and independent component of world literature for at least a hundred and fifty years. Latin American writing had difficulty in making an impact outside the Iberian language zone, but it made its major breakthrough in the second half of the present century, and it is today in some ways more influential internationally than that of the USA. No doubt this was due largely to the Cuban revolution, which, small as it was by international standards, was the first home-grown Latin American event since the execution of Maximilian to be seen as a global event. In its time, the far greater Mexican revolution was overshadowed by events in Russia, even though it also achieved a significant cultural breakthrough with Mexican revolutionary painting – the first globally-recognised Modernist image-making originating in the Americas. Revolution has, in fact, been the secret weapon of Latin American high culture abroad, encouraged by the fashion for revolutionary tourism in that part of the world since 1959, particularly among intellectuals who found Spanish and Portuguese a lot easier to learn than Arabic or South-East Asian languages. Moreover, until today, the hopes of revolution have survived better here than in any other part of the world, and so has the positive image of revolution, as in Mexico. Latin America is the last bastion of the Left in the world. For this reason its literature has so far escaped the worst consequences of the privatisation of the imagination. But for how long?

Compared to the mixed fortunes of American high cultures, however, American popular cultures, from the middle or, at the latest, the end of the 19th century, have shown a remarkable power to penetrate the Old World. Once again, this has been the characteristic achievement of a mixed culture – in this instance, a Euro-American culture vitalised by African elements. Both North American, Caribbean and South American dances and popular music conquered Europe from the first years of the 20th century and have continued their advance from tango, maxixe and ragtime to the present. The mass popular music of industrial society comes essentially from the Western hemisphere today, whereas the transatlantic music of high culture, from the Colon in Buenos Aires to the Lincoln Centre in New York, remains dependent on Europe. Let us not dismiss these cultural repercussions of the New World. Popular culture is the universal culture of our century. It is shared by all of us, including the most uncompromisingly intellectual. High culture belongs to minorities, and sometimes very small ones. In saying this, I am not making a judgment of value. On the other hand, I am implying a ‘clash of cultures’. And indeed, if there is a genuine clash of cultures between the New World and the Old, it is here: between a New World whose main strength and dynamic force is popular and an Old World whose cultural impact on the New has overwhelmingly been through élites and rulers.

This contrast leads me to my main content ion. By far the most significant way in which the discovery of the New World has affected the Old is through an almost entirely anonymous process of mass conquest initiated from the West. The major contribution of the Americas to the Old World has been to distribute across the globe a cornucopia of wild and cultivated products, mainly plants, without which the modern world as we know it would not be conceivable. You may say that this has nothing to do with culture. But what we cultivate and eat, especially if it is a new kind of foodstuff quite unfamiliar to our way of life, or even an entirely new form of consumption, must influence, and may even transform, not merely our consumption but the way we live in other respects. Consider only the basic foodstuffs. Four of the seven most important agricultural crops in the world today are of American origin: potatoes, maize, manioc and sweet potato. (The other three are wheat, barley and rice.) The classic work on ‘the history and social influence of the potato’ was written by Redcliffe Salaman as long ago as 1949. Arturo Warman’s La historia de un bastardo: maiz y capitalismo was published in 1988. Both these excellent works demonstrate how far beyond mere food the social history of these crops takes us. But what about those products of the New World which were not simply substitutes for things already consumed in the Old World but opened new dimensions, new social styles? Chocolate, tobacco, cocaine? Or which have come to form the crucial elements of such novelties as chewing-gum, or Coca-Cola (even if it has lost its original cocaine component), the tonic in gin and tonic? What about the significant additions to the world’s medical pharmacopoeia, such as quinine, for long the only drug capable of controlling malaria? What about the sunflowers which Rembrandt and Van Gogh were to paint, the peanuts without which modern Western sociability is incomplete – not to mention their more practical use as major sources of vegetable oils.

What I am arguing is that the adoption of new products, or even, in traditional peasant societies, the change from one basic food to another, is far more than a mere shift in consumer choice. Potatoes and maize could feed far more people per unit of the cultivated area than earlier crops. We know what happened when rapidly expanding populations became dependent on such a single crop – the history of Ireland is a tragic example. But who will say that the potato-based transformation in Ireland, and the great famine that followed, and the massive haemorrhage of population which that country has suffered ever since, did not entail cultural repercussions, not to mention political ones, on both sides of the Atlantic? Without Pizarro it could not have happened. Everything about the use of tobacco, which was unknown outside the Americas before the conquest, has cultural implications, as I did not need to tell anyone in Seville, where I have just been discussing these matters, and where Carmen met Don José in the celebrated Real Farica de Tabacos. Everything about the use of tobacco is linked to human emotions, ideas, hopes and fears: from the last cigarette offered to the condemned man before execution to the smoker automatically reaching for a cigarette after sexual intercourse; even the campaign to eliminate smoking, which is rather more successful in the Anglo-Saxon countries than elsewhere, tells us more about late 20th-century beliefs concerning how life should be lived than about the medical effects of nicotine. We are, in short, talking about products of the New World which were unknown and indeed unknowable before the conquest of the Americas, but which have since transformed the Old World profoundly and unpredictably, and still continue to do so. And I may add that in this respect the Old World owes more to the New than the Americas owe to Europe.

The point I wish to stress is that these products were not simply ‘discovered’ by the Europeans, still less deliberately searched for, in the way that the Conquistadors searched for silver and gold. They were products known, collected and systematically cultivated and processed by the indigenous societies. Conquistadors and settlers learned how to prepare and use them from these local societies. Indeed, if the settlers had not let themselves be taught by the natives, they would have found it difficult, perhaps impossible, to survive. To this day the great symbolic festival of the USA, Thanksgiving, records a debt of the first colonists to the Indians, which subsequent white civilisation repaid by driving them out. Thanksgiving is celebrated by a meal that consists essentially of the New World foods which the colonists learned to live on from the Indians: culminating, as we all know, in the turkey.

My argument is that the true nature and significance of the meeting of cultures inaugurated when Columbus landed on his first Caribbean island cannot be understood in terms of conventional history alone. If we ask, what did Europe get from the conquest of the New World? the obvious answer is an expansion of some countries on the western side of that continent, through imperial rule, through wealth extracted from the labour of Indians and Africans, and through the settlement of migrants and colonists from the countries of Europe. The Americas were the first regions outside Europe in which empires were overthrown by European soldiers, and where European colonists established new Castiles, new Portugals and, later, new Englands. For a thousand years before 1492, conquest and settlement had gone the other way: from Asia and Africa into Europe. That is why it is historically significant that the date of Columbus’s discovery of America is also the date of the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain: all three are symbols of this reversal. 1492 marks the beginning of Eurocentric world history, of the conviction that a few Western and Central European countries were destined to conquer and rule the globe, of Euromegalomania.

Yet all this is past history. Spain, Portugal, Britain, France and the rest have long ceased to rule the Americas. They have themselves declined from world powers, even from ‘great powers’ in the European context, to states which, by themselves, exercise no particular influence, but are important only collectively through the European Community. At most, Spain and Britain benefit from the fact that their languages have, thanks to their past conquests in the Americas, become world languages. The countries of the Americas have long ceased to be transatlantic extensions of Spain, Portugal and England, even for the local élites. The era of the ‘expansion of Europe’, a subject on which history students were still proudly examined in my youth, is over.

But other direct consequences of the conquest and settlement of the Americas are still with us. They do not belong to famous men, or governments. And yet they have transformed the fabric of European life for good. And indeed, that of other continents also. When the cultural, social and economic history of the modern world is written in realistic terms, the conquest of Southern Europe by maize, of Northern and Eastern Europe by the potato, and of both by tobacco and more recently Coca-Cola, will appear more prominently than the gold and silver for the sake of which the Americas were subjected.

Letters

Vol. 14 No. 17 · 10 September 1992

From Stuart Pierson

I am puzzled by Eric Hobsbawm’s one-sided or undialectic treatment of borrowings west to east (LRB, 9 July). Surely the most important or ‘major’ contribution of the new world to the old was the fertility and extent of its soil, on which could be grown crops (maybe originating in the old world – does this include Africa?) like sugar, coffee and cotton. These, cultivated on latifundia and plantations by slave or peon labour, transformed European civilisation.

Each is more important than any plant Hobsbawm mentions except maybe potatoes. But of course no plant or product really transforms anything by itself. Alcohol was distilled, and named, in Islam, then banned for non-medical use – fairly effectively too, compared with the daft experiment earned out in the US between 1919 and 1934. Whatever their origin, all these substances entered culture areas where they were endorsed and desired or not, and subsequently gone after or not. What the soils of the American South, the Caribbean islands and the South American foothills gave to Europeans was the opportunity to satisfy the desire for sweets; and for coffee, and for a variety of clothes (don’t forget the connection noted by Mintz in Sweetness and Power between the calories in sugar and the energy workpeople of the Industria) Revolution needed to spin and weave cotton – a connection which should reach a little further back to include the salt cod that New-foundlanders made to feed the slaves that grew the cane). These interrelations make it impossible to sustain any unidirectional currents of ‘contiibution’ from one part of the world to another. What counted all along the chain was not this plant, or fish, or ‘product’, but the abundance and fertility which allowed Europeans to gratify and profit from their already existing wishes.

Stuart Pierson
Memorial University of Newfoundland

Vol. 14 No. 19 · 8 October 1992

From Gerald Noonan

I trust that the rest of Eric Hobsbawm’s interesting historical sweeps and comparisons (LRB, 9 July) are better anchored than his reference to Canada’s lack of effect upon the Old World: a way of stressing the salient example of the USA’s influence, in writing about the cultural consequences of 1492. Canada has always been outnumbered ten to one, didn’t have its own 18th or 19th centuries, and reached official ‘independence’ only in 1931 (by the Statute of Westminster – some place over there, isn’t it?). Canada is only now cobbling together its own constitution (patriated from Britain ten years ago), which, by the way, will grant the ‘inherent right of self-government’ to native (pre-Columbus) peoples – quite a distinct process from that of the USA. Could you ask Eric Hobsbawm to check back for comparison in two hundred and fifty years?

At another extreme altogether is his overlooking of what are surely the three most influential products of the New World: the car, the airplane, the telephone (credit Canada for a part in that one) – overlooked probably, intriguingly, because of their ubiquitous social presence. It is all very well to make us aware that ‘four of the seven most important agricultural crops in the world today are of American origin: potatoes, maize, manioc and sweet potato.’ But can you imagine a world where you couldn’t phone out to the chip shop and get home delivery? I mean, is that civilised, or what?

Gerald Noonan
Wilfrid Laurier University,

==

Contra Mundum

Edward Said

• Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm
  Joseph, 627 pp, £20.00, October 1994, ISBN 0 7181 3307 2

A powerful and unsettling book, Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes brings to a close the series of historical studies he began in 1962 with The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, and followed in 1975 and 1987 respectively with The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 andThe Age of Empire, 1875-1914. It is difficult to imagine that anyone other than Hobsbawm could have approached – much less achieved – the consistently high level of these volumes: taken together, they represent one of the summits of historical writing in the postwar period. Hobsbawm is cool where others are hot and noisy; he is ironic and dispassionate where others would have been either angry or heedless; he is discriminatingly observant and subtle where on the same ground other historians would have resorted to clichés or to totalistic system. Perhaps the most compelling thing about Hobsbawm’s achievement in these four books is the poise he maintains throughout. Neither too innocent nor too knowing and cynical, he restores one’s faith in the idea of rational investigation; and in a prose that is as supple and sure as the gait of a brilliant middle-distance runner, he traces the emergence, consolidation, triumph and eclipse of modernity itself – in particular, the amazing persistence of capitalism (its apologists, practitioners, theoreticians and opponents) within it.

The four books also record the growth of a world consciousness, both in Hobsbawm himself and in the history he writes. In the 1780s, for example, the inhabited world was known to Europeans only patchily; by the time he gets to the rise of empire a century later, Hobsbawm’s subject is Europe’s discovery of the rest of the world. Yet the growth of the historian’s mind, so to speak, never reduces itself to tiresome self-contemplation. On the contrary, Hobsbawm’s solutions to the problems of his own epistemology become part of his quest for knowledge. This emergent global consciousness is at its most memorable in the opening of The Age of Empire, where he records the peregrinations of his mother and father – one from Vienna, the other from Britain, both originally from Eastern Europe – and their arrival in Alexandria, which while prosperous, cosmopolitan and recently occupied by Britain, ‘also, of course, contained the Arabs’. His parents met and married there; Alexandria became Eric’s birthplace. This accident of his birth suggests to Hobsbawm that Europe alone can no longer be his subject, any more than his audience can only be academic colleagues. He writes ‘for all who wish to understand the world and who believe history is important for this purpose’, but he does not minimise the fact that as he approaches the present he must deal with that ‘fuzzy’ period he calls ‘the twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalised record open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one’s own life’.

There is considerable overlap between history and memory in Age of Extremes. The period at hand is now Hobsbawm’s own lifetime. Although he says that this composite of the public and the private can be understood as the ‘Short 20th Century’ in world-historical terms, the result is necessarily an account that rests on ‘curiously uneven foundations’. The historian is now less a guide than a ‘participant observer’, one who does not, indeed cannot, fully command the historiography of our century. Yet Hobsbawm’s disarming admissions of fallibility – he speaks candidly of his ignorance, avowedly controversial views, ‘casual and patchy’ knowledge – do not at all disable Age of Extremes, which, as many reviewers have already noted, is a redoubtable work, full of its author’s characteristic combination of grandeur and irony, as well as of his wide-ranging scope and insight.

What gives it special appeal is that Hobsbawm himself appears intermittently, a bit player in his own epic. We see him as a 15-year-old with his sister on a winter afternoon in Berlin on the day that Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. Next he is a partisan in the Spanish Civil War. He is present in Moscow in 1957, ‘shocked’ to see that the embalmed Stalin was ‘so tiny and yet so all-powerful’. He is part of ‘the attentive and unquestioning multitudes’ who listen to Fidel Castro for hours on end. He is a deathbed witness to Oskar Lange’s final days, as the celebrated socialist economist confesses that he cannot find an answer to the question: ‘Was there an alternative to the indiscriminate, brutal, basically unplanned rush forward of the first Five-Year-Plan?’ At exactly the time that Crick and Watson were doing their breakthrough work on DNA’s structure, Hobsbawm was a Cambridge fellow, ‘simply unaware’ of the importance of what the two men were up to – and in any case ‘they saw no point in telling us’ about it.

These very occasional glimpses of Hobsbawm the participant lend a special credibility to his account of changes that took place between 1914 and the Nineties. One, of course, is that by about 1950 ours had become the most murderous century of all time; this prompts the conclusion that as the century advanced there was ‘a marked regression in standards’ once considered ‘normal’. Torture, murder, genocide have been officially condoned. To complicate matters, our world is now no longer Eurocentric (even though wealth and power remain essentially Western): the globe is a single unit, a fact already the subject of numerous studies by so-called world system theorists, economists and historians. But the most drastic transformation of all, Hobsbawm writes, has been ‘the disintegration of the old patterns of social relationships and with it, incidentally, the snapping of the links between generations, that is to say, between past and present’. This gives historians a peculiar relevance since what they do impedes, if it does not altogether prevent, the destruction of the past. Their ‘business is to remember what others forget’. Hence, Hobsbawm says, ‘my object is to understand and explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together.’

Three massive blocks constitute his design for this job. Part One, ‘The Age of Catastrophes’, covers the period from World War One through the Second World War to ‘the end of empires’ – i.e. the immediate post-war period. Part Two is slightly longer, and is (perhaps ironically) entitled ‘The Golden Age’. It starts with the Cold War, moves through the social, cultural and economic revolutions of the Sixties through to the Eighties, glances at the emergence of the Third World, and culminates in a brisk discussion of ‘real socialism’. Part Three, ‘The Landslide’, traces the collapse of most things – the world economy, socialism, the artistic avant garde – as the story limps to a not particularly cheering conclusion, waiting for the millennium surrounded by poverty and ‘consumer egoism’, all-powerful media, a decline of state power, a rise in ethnic hatred, and an almost total lack of vision. An exhausting and somewhat joyless segment of the trip, this, with Hobsbawm still admirably adroit and rational despite all the catastrophes and declines.

He is at his best identifying and then drawing conclusions from major political and economic trends in the metropolitan West: the rise of socialism and Fascism, life under bureaucratic socialism and advanced capitalism, the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. No one has more chillingly recited the costs of total war and repression than Hobsbawm, and few chroniclers of great power politics have seen them in their folly and waste with a steelier gaze than he. For him the central story of the century is the battle for the hearts and minds of Europeans and (principally North) Americans. He sees the double paradox of capitalism given life by socialism, and of Fascism as belonging not ‘to an oriental feudalism with an imperial national mission’ but ‘to the era of democracy and the common man’. A moment later, as if cautioning against the too rigorous application of his own observation, he remarks that, whereas European Fascism destroyed labour movements, the Latin American fascist élites ‘they inspired created them’; and as anti-Fascism in Europe led to the left, so, too, did anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia incline to the Western Left, ‘nursery of anti-imperialist theory’.

He is magnificent in charting the progress and indeed the lived texture of socialism, not as theory according to Hegel, Marx, Lukács or Gramsci, but as a practice dedicated to ‘universal emancipation, the construction of a better alternative to capitalist society’. And it needs pointing out, as he does a moment later, that the devotion and self-sacrifice of individual militants is what kept the thing going, not just the lies and repression of brutally stodgy bureaucracies. ‘A Russia even more firmly anchored in the past’ is how Hobsbawm (unflinchingly) judges ‘real socialism’ as practised by the Bolsheviks, with ‘an undergrowth of smaller and larger bureaucrats, on average even less educated and qualified than before’. (There isn’t enough said, however, about the disappointment later generated in the same committed people, many of whom were mystified by the sudden cancellation of the whole enterprise and the abject and ugly concession to ‘free market’ doctrines that followed.) Hobsbawm’s sharp-eyed and demystifying account of the Cold War is similarly trenchant; he writes very effectively of its irrational and gloating lurches, its mindless squandering of resources, its impoverishing rhetoric and ideological corruption, in the US especially.

His account of the Golden Age in general, to someone a good part of whose life coincides with it, is satisfying and at times very insightful. The descriptions he gives of the rise and progress of the international student movement and of feminism are sober, if only moderately enthusiastic in tone, particularly when he has to keep reminding us that traditional labour – from steel workers to telephone operators – declined in importance, as did the peasantry, which had all but died by the latter third of the century. And there were strange inversions of history as a result: ‘On city street-corners of Europe small groups of peripatetic Indians from the South American Andes played their melancholy flutes and on the pavements of New York, Paris and Rome black peddlers from West Africa sold trinkets to the natives as the natives’ ancestors had done on their trading voyages to the Dark Continent.’ Or when upper and middle-class youth start to take on the clothes, music and language of the urban poor. Strangely absent from this account, however, is the enormous change in popular attitudes to, as well as modes of partaking in, sexuality that begins in the Sixties; there is a continuity between this period and the next, in which the new sensibility produced by gays and lesbians, and of course the scourge of Aids, are central motifs.

Each of Hobsbawm’s major claims about periods in world history is provocative and, in the best sense, tendentious. Certainly there is something almost poetically inevitable about the last of his three divisions, ‘The Landslide’: ‘the history of the twenty years after 1973,’ he says, ‘is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis.’ What does the slide include? The fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European Communist states; the re-division of the world into rich and poor states; the rise of ethnic hatred and xenophobic nationalism; guerrilla movements both in the ascendancy and in almost bathetic decline; politics as the art of evasion, and politicians as assuagers rather than leaders; the unprecedented importance of the media as a worldwide force; the rule of transnational corporations; the surprising renaissance of the novel, which in places like Russia, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Africa is an exception to the general eclipse of the major traditional aesthetic genres. Interspersed is a particularly gripping (for the layman at least) chapter on the triumphs and changes in modern science. Hobsbawm gives the best short account of how scientific theory and practice traverse the distance between the laboratory and the marketplace, in the process raising fundamental issues about the future of the human race, now clearly undergoing ‘a renaissance of barbarism’.

His conclusion, laced with understandable fatigue and uncertainty, is scarcely less pessimistic. Most of what he has to say about the fin de siècle in his final pages is already perceptible in earlier sections of the book. The general loss of Marxism and of the models for political action developed in the 1890s is balanced by the bankruptcy of counter-alternatives, principal among them a ‘theological faith in an economy in which resources were allocated entirely by the totally unrestricted market, under conditions of unlimited competition’. The worldwide assault on the environment, the population explosion, the collapse of state power and the appearance of fundamentalist mass movements with ‘nothing of relevance to say’ about the modern world, all these show how ‘the fate of humanity in the new millennium would depend on the restoration of public authorities’. It is clear that Hobsbawm sees link hope in a solution that prolongs either the past or the present. Both have proved themselves unworthy models.

A very disquieting book this, not only because its conclusions seem so dispiriting but also because, despite one’s deep admiration for it as a performance, a muffled quality surfaces here and there in its author’s tone, and even at times a sense of self-imposed solemnity that makes it more difficult to read than one would have expected. In part the grandeur of Hobsbawm’s project precludes the kind of buoyancy one finds in the brilliantly eccentric earlier books, like Primitive Rebels or Bandits. For most of the time here he is so measured, responsible, serious that the few disputable judgments and questionable facts that turn up in the book seem disproportionately unsettling. Most of them occur in discussions either of the arts or of non-European politics: that is, in areas which he seems to think are mainly derivative and hence inherently less interesting than in the altogether (to him) more important realms of Western politics and economics. At one point he says with quite unmodulated certainty that ‘the dynamics of the great part of the world’s history in the Short 20th Century are derived, not original.’ He clarifies this by saying something pretty vague about ‘the élites of non-bourgeois societies’ imitating ‘the model pioneered in the West’. The trouble with this, as non-Western historians like the Subaltern Studies group (an influential collective of Indian historians headed by Rangjit Guha, which has been dedicated to the idea that Indian history must be written from the perspective of the real history-makers: the urban masses and the rural poor, not the nationalist élite) have tried to show, is that it leaves out huge gobs of non-élite historical experience which have their own, non-derivative integrity. What about conflicts between nationalist élites and resistant non-élites – in India, China, parts of Africa, the Arab world, Latin America and the Caribbean? Besides, how can one so easily detach the original from the derivative? As Fanon said, ‘the entire Third World went into the making of Europe.’

It is not just Hobsbawm’s occasionally dismissive tone that troubles one but the sense one has of a long-held, quite unexamined decision that in matters non-Western the approved Western authority is to be preferred over less conventional non-Westerners. Hobsbawm registers little awareness that a debate has been raging in Islamic, Chinese, Japanese, African, Indian and Latin American studies about authority and representation in the writing of history. This debate has often relegated not only traditional authorities but even the questions raised by them to (in my opinion) a well-deserved retirement. In his recentNations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990) Hobsbawm expresses an impatience with non-European nationalism which is often quite justified, except that that very impatience also seems to contain a wish not to deal with the political and psychological challenges of that nationalism. I recall with some amusement his characterisation there of ‘Arabian’ anti-imperialist nationalism as ‘the natural high spirits of martial tribes’.

Hobsbawm is therefore peculiarly ill-equipped to deal with the rise and ascendancy of ‘politicised religion’, which is surely not, as he implies, an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. The US and Israel, whose Christians and Jews respectively are in many ways ‘modern’ people, are nonetheless now commanded – or at least deeply affected – by a theologically fervent mentality. The last thing to be said about them, or the Muslims (in the understanding of whose world Hobsbawm is surprisingly banal) is that they ‘have nothing of relevance to say’ about their societies. Barring a few cranks (like the Saudi Arabian cleric who persists in preaching that the world is, and always will be, flat), the contemporary Muslim movements in places like Egypt and Gaza have generally done a better job of providing welfare, health and pedagogical services to an impoverished populace than the government. Christian and Jewish fundamentalists also answer to real needs, real anxieties, real problems, which it will not do to brush aside as irrelevant. This blindspot of Hobsbawm’s is very surprising. With Terence Ranger, he is a pioneer in the study of ‘invented tradition’, those modern formations that are part fantasy, part political exigency, part power-play. Yet even about this subject, clearly related to the new appearance of religious mass enthusiasm, he observes a mysterious silence in Age of Extremes.

The more positive aspect of Hobsbawm’s reticence is that it enables his reader to reflect on the problem of historical experience itself. Age of Extremes is a magisterial overview of 20th-century history. I accentuate the word ‘overview’ because only rarely does Hobsbawm convey what it was (or is) like to belong, say, to an endangered or truly oppressed class, race or minority, to a community of artists, to other embattled participants in and makers (as opposed to observers) of a historical moment. Missing from the panorama Hobsbawm presents is the underlying drive or thrust of a particular era. I assume that this is because he thinks impersonal or large-scale forces are more important, but I wonder whether witnesses, militants, activists, partisans and ordinary people are somehow of less value in the construction of a full-scale history of the 20th century. I don’t know the answer to this, but I tend to trust my own hunch that the view from within, so to speak, needs some reconciling with the overview, some orchestrating and shading.

The absence of these things in turn produces a remarkably jaundiced view of the arts in the 20th century. First, Hobsbawm seems to believe that economics and politics are determining factors for literature, painting and music: certainly he has no truck with the idea (which I myself believe in) that the aesthetic is relatively autonomous, that it is not a superstructural phenomenon. Second, he has an almost caricatural view of Western Modernism, which, as far as he is concerned, has not, since 1914, produced an adequate intellectual self-justification, or anything of note, other than Dadaism and Surrealism. Proust apparently counts for nothing after 1914 and neither do Joyce, Mann, Eliot or Pound. But even if we leave imaginative writers aside – and Hobsbawm’s constricting dating system does not help his case – there is good reason to argue that in the arts and disciplines of interpretation, Modernism plays a considerable role. What is Lukács’sHistory and Class Consciousness or even Auerbach’s Mimesis if not Modernist? Or Adorno and Benjamin? And when it comes to trying to understand the often bewildering efflorescence of Post-Modernism, Hobsbawm is stubbornly unhelpful.

The irony here is that both Modernism and Post-Modernism represent crises of historical consciousness: the former a desperate attempt to reconstruct wholeness out of fragments, the latter a deep-seated wish to be rid of history and all its neuroses. In any case the Short 20th Century is, more strikingly and jarringly than any before it, an age of warring interpretations, of competing ideologies, methods, crises. The disciples of Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, the apologists for culture and counter-culture, for tradition, modernity and consciousness, have filled the air, and indeed space itself, with contestation, diatribe, competing viewpoints; our century has been the age of Newspeak, propaganda, media hype and advertising. One reason for this – as Gramsci, unmentioned by Hobsbawm, was perhaps the first to appreciate – is the enormous growth in the number and importance of intellectuals, or ‘mental workers’ as they are sometimes called. Well over 60 per cent of the GNP in advanced Western societies is now derived from their labour; this has led to what Hobsbawm calls in passing ‘the age of Benetton’, as much the result of advertising and marketing, as of the changed modes of production.

In other words, the 20th century saw, along with the appearance of genocide and total war, a massive transformation of intellectual and cultural terrain. Discussions of narrative moved from the status of story to the hotly debated and fought-over question of the nation and identity. Language, too, was an issue, as was its relationship to reality: its power to make or break facts, to invent whole regions of the world, to essentialise races, continents, cultures. There is therefore something unsatisfyingly unproblematic about Hobsbawm’s decision to try to give us facts, figures and trends shorn not so much of their perspective as of their disputed provenance and making.

Viewed as deliberately standing aside from the interpretative quarrels of the 20th century,Age of Extremes belongs to an earlier, manifestly positivist moment in historiographic practice; its calm, generally unexcited manner takes on an almost elegiac tone as Hobsbawm approaches his melancholy conclusion that history ‘is no help to prophecy’. But as a somewhat younger and far less cautious student of Hobsbawm’s other great work, I would still want to ask whether there aren’t greater resources of hope in history than the appalling record of our century seems to allow, and whether even the large number of lost causes strewn about does not in fact provide some occasion for a stiffening of will and a sharpening of the cold steel of energetic advocacy. The 20th century after all is a great age of resistance, and that has not completely been silenced.

Vol. 17 No. 5 · 9 March 1995 » Edward Said » Contra Mundum
pages 22-23 | 3785 words

Letters

Vol. 17 No. 10 · 25 May 1995

From Gianfranco Corsini

Maybe Edward Said should make up his mind as to whether The Age of Extremes(LRB, 9 March) represents ‘one of the summits of historical writing in the post-war period’ or is only the by-product of ‘an earlier, manifestly positivist moment in historiographic practice’. Since positivism has a very bad reputation (I believe wrongly) among Modernists, Post-Modernists and Post-Marxists, this hardly strikes me as a compliment. Especially when this final statement follows two columns of suggestions on what Hobsbawm has missed, or should have taken into account.

Must we assume, then, that the distinguished British historian is somehow politically incorrect? In his Introduction Eric Hobsbawm reminds us that people of his – and my – generation, who lived and acted through most of the ‘short century’, talk and think ‘like men and women of a particular time and place, involved, in various ways, in its history as actors in its dramas’. He acknowledges that it is difficult to speak to ‘readers who belong to another era … for whom even the Vietnam War is prehistory’.

Of course Edward Said does not belong to this last ‘era’: he stands in the middle. Could it be, though, that he might have been affected by at least some of those ‘religious or ideological confrontations’ of his times ‘which build barricades in the way of the historian’? He tells us that Hobsbawm has made a major effort, considering his personal history, to stay away from the ‘interpretative quarrels’ of his times, so restoring our ‘faith in the idea of rational investigation’. But the ‘aesthetic is relatively autonomous’, and is not ‘a superstructural phenomenon’. Is there ‘aesthetic correctness’ too, then?

I would suggest, to the contrary, that Chapters 6 and 11 of The Age of Extremes give us the most compelling and up-to-date view of the main characteristic of the cultural revolution of our century, which has been the ‘common desire’ to come to terms with reality, making it the ‘century of the common people … dominated by the arts produced by and for them’.

Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci would probably agree. And Sir Leslie Stephen would join them. In his last lectures of 1904 on the 18th century he had already suggested that so-called élite literature might be considered only as ‘a kind of by-product of the whole social activity’, and that its ‘characteristics’ correspond to those of a ‘very small minority of the nation’. According to Stephen, ‘the most important changes’ in the arts of the 18th century were already ‘closely connected with the social changes’ which had ‘entirely altered the limits of the reading class’. Now that the reading class has become an ‘audience’ is this any less true?

Gianfranco Corsini
Rome

==

Divinely Ordained

Jackson Lears

• A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided by Amanda Foreman
  Penguin, 988 pp, £12.99, June 2011, ISBN 978 0 14 104058 5

For generations, the American Civil War has been shrouded in clouds of millennial nationalism. Few events in US history have been as susceptible to providentialist narratives of inevitable moral triumph: stories of an exceptional nation reborn into its modern form, cleansed of its original sin of slavery and ready to shoulder its redemptive responsibilities in the drama of world history. Professional historians, no less than popularisers, have succumbed to this siren song. Even historians on the left, otherwise sceptical of nationalist military crusades, have embraced the dominant narrative of the Civil War. As in the historiography of World War Two, scorched earth tactics – systematic assaults on civilians, uncompromising demands for unconditional surrender – can be justified in the name of a crusade against evil. Few Americans of any ideological persuasion are willing to question the logic of total war when it results in the victory of freedom over slavery (or Fascism).

The problem with this perspective is not that it exaggerates the significance of slavery – no one except a few neo-Confederates questions slavery’s centrality in the conflict – but that it too easily blends with the self-congratulatory complacency of the American civil religion, flattening the complexity of motives and reducing tragedy to melodrama. The quest for historical understanding is engulfed by the condemnation of the obvious wrong. ‘It was his business to inveigh against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy.

A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing slavery, and that the Northern victory – by identifying freedom with the ability to sell one’s labour in the marketplace – reinforced the cultural hegemony of laissez-faire capitalism. This was not to suggest that the South was a pre-capitalist society (as Genovese at first implied): on the contrary, slavery demanded the degradation of human beings into commodities. But it did help to explain why, after the war, most Northerners were willing to leave the freed slaves to the mercy of their former masters – to leave them with ‘nothing but freedom’, in Foner’s phrase. The emphasis on competing ways of organising labour, however partial and problematic, allowed interpretation to reach beyond the boundaries of moralistic uplift.

Uplift had a resurgence with the rise of Reagan, whose smiley-face chauvinism encouraged the proliferation of triumphalist historical narratives. The 1980s saw the return of millennial nationalism to Civil War historiography, both academic and popular, most prominently in the Pulitzer-prize winning synthesis of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) – whose title alone suggested that we were back on familiar terrain – and in the sepia-tinted sentimentality of Ken Burns’s documentary. In McPherson’s influential work, a fixation on racial rather than class relations ensured that there would be no more discomfiting questions about the ambiguities of ‘free labour’. While he acknowledged the role of contingency on the battlefield, there was never any question that he was chronicling an inexorable march of freedom.

Since the 1980s this self-congratulatory mode has remained dominant. With few exceptions (notably Harry Stout’s brilliant ‘moral history’, Upon the Altar of the Nation), popular big-picture accounts of the Civil War continue to create an atmosphere of moral clarity and inevitable progress. To be sure, the historiography of slavery has exploded: dozens of works have detailed the human devastation it wrought, as well as the slaves’ struggles to sustain their own dignity and secure their own liberty. But as one of the leading historians of slavery, Walter Johnson, recently observed, much of the newer scholarship has been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal – a notorious depot in the slave trade. By resisting injustice, Bush announced, ‘the very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.’ Even the traffic in human flesh could serve America’s divinely ordained mission.

Amanda Foreman’s remarkable new book suggests that it takes a foreigner to clear the air of cant. By taking the British perspective, she captures the full complexity of the war: the confused aims and mixed motives of the combatants, the misperceptions of the foreigners whose favour they courted so assiduously. The result is a rich account on a stunningly broad canvas, populated by a fascinating array of characters. Mythic figures (Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Jackson), seen afresh, acquire sharper outlines. Second-tier players have their moment in the limelight: the secretary of state William Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and chilly distance from London society, managing to seem both unformed and overly formal; the Confederate envoy James Mason says ‘chaw’ for ‘chew’, calls himself ‘Jeems’ and offends British officials with his crude racist remarks; the Southern spy Belle Boyd charms influential men with her deft flirtations. Meanwhile a motley British crowd jostles for involvement in the struggle: prodigal sons down on their luck, soldiers in search of adventure, journalists eager for a scoop. And more than a few British subjects, who share the misfortune of being on US premises at the wrong time, find themselves kidnapped into the Union or Confederate army.

The overall effect of A World on Fire is to remind us that the Northern victory was a near thing. The outcome remained in doubt until November 1864, when Lincoln’s re-election reinforced Union success on the battlefield, ensuring that the Federal government would refuse to negotiate peace with the Confederacy. For more than three years, British sympathy for the South had remained strong enough to supply the Confederate navy with ships and the Confederate army with ordnance, as well as to sustain substantial public support for a negotiated peace. Within the United States, Northern support for the war was ambivalent in many areas, especially as war aims widened from preserving the union to ending slavery: a move that strengthened support for the North in Great Britain. Southern opinion was divided as well, but grew more united and more embittered in response to the brutalities of the Northern invasion, which plundered cities, laid waste the countryside and left 50,000 civilians dead.

Federal and Confederate forces alike were plagued by desertions and forced to rely on incompetent, lethargic recruits to fill the mass graves that the generals were preparing for them in Tennessee and Virginia. The carnage was unprecedented as both armies repeatedly marched head on, often uphill, into concentrated fire from entrenched fortifications. By the end of the war, most participants would have no doubt agreed with Henry Morton Stanley (Dr Livingstone’s Stanley), who fought for both sides. ‘Glory,’ he wrote, ‘sickened me with its repulsive aspect, and made me suspect it was a glittering lie.’ But the lie, of course, survived. ‘The real war,’ as Whitman said, ‘will never get into the books.’

Still, A World on Fire does better than most. Foreman captures the confusion, futility and fear that enveloped most soldiers and many civilians as they were swept up in the slaughter. Foreman’s war is not a triumphant march. It is a muddle of misunderstandings and misplaced aspirations, against a background of mass death. So it seemed from across the water. British opinion was divided from the outset. Despite widespread opposition to slavery, support for the South remained strong throughout most of the war, cutting across classes and regions.

The war began early in the morning of 12 April 1861, when Confederate artillery began shelling Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The Federal garrison surrendered after 34 hours of bombardment. The British press, fed up with decades of Yankee bombast, pondered the death of the democratic experiment with ill-concealed satisfaction. ‘Everybody is laughing at us,’ Benjamin Moran, the under-secretary at the US Legation in London, complained. The Saturday Review jeered at Seward, who, ‘though he cannot keep the Federal fort at Charleston, has several times announced his intention of annexing Canada’. In the Economist, Walter Bagehot compared the Confederate secession to the North American colonists’ Declaration of Independence, warning the North against the futility of fighting to keep the South in the union; it would be ‘vindictive, bloody and fruitless’, he said. The first two predictions, at least, were on the mark.

British support for the South stemmed from complex sources: nationalistic rivalry, relief that the brash upstart was receiving his comeuppance, admiration for ‘Southern honour’ and other Confederate pretensions to aristocratic values. Many English aristocrats simply did not like the Northern style, or lack of it. Henry Adams, secretary to his father the ambassador, admitted that both the older and younger generations of American diplomats felt ‘awkward in an English house from a certainty that they were not precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might be told so’. Beyond snobbery lay material concerns, especially the fear that a Northern blockade of Southern ports would cripple the British cotton industry – this led most of Liverpool to back Southern independence. They opposed what they saw as the sacrifice of English labour to the interests of Northern capital. Still, none of this would really have mattered, Foreman suggests, if the British could have believed that this was a war to end slavery. But they couldn’t. So popular opposition to the war persisted, even as a parliamentary majority managed to block formal recognition of the Confederate States of America.

Make the war about slavery, the pro-Northern British urged Lincoln: that would change everything. But Lincoln knew how politically divisive it would be at home to turn the war into an abolitionist cause. As the Economist observed, with only some hyperbole, ‘the great majority of the people in the Northern states detest the coloured population even more than do the Southern whites.’ In October 1861, when General John C. Fremont freed the slaves in the parts of Missouri his troops had occupied, Lincoln publicly repudiated him and the larger goal of abolition. Meanwhile the Confederacy was acquiring some influential allies – among them Gladstone, who was then chancellor of the exchequer and would soon after the war become prime minister.

After the stunning casualties at Antietam, Gladstone and the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, agreed that a humanitarian crisis was at hand in America; Gladstone feared one in Lancashire as well, among the cotton mill workers. He called for an end to the war through arbitration, declaring that the Confederates ‘have made a nation’. Charles Francis Adams shuddered, conceding privately that the South had made themselves seem underdogs and victims and had made ending the war look like a humanitarian cause. The rest of the cabinet voted against Gladstone and Russell’s proposal for a joint foreign intervention (with France and Russia) to end the war, but this episode still suggested how much legitimacy the Confederate cause possessed in the highest circles of the British government.

Part of the Confederates’ appeal was rooted in British revulsion against the sort of spreadeagle Northern nationalism that fostered Seward’s threats to invade Canada. But Seward worked more effectively behind the scenes than his public bloviations suggested. This became apparent during the Trent affair, which nearly led to war between the Union and Great Britain. On 8 November 1861, Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS San Jacintocame alongside the British mail steamer Trent, forcibly boarded her, and removed the Confederate diplomats James Mason and John Slidell, along with their secretaries. Wilkes ‘had the reputation of being a bully and a braggart’, Foreman observes, and ‘had clearly violated international law’ in taking political prisoners by force from a neutral vessel.

But Wilkes became an overnight hero in the American North. Even Lincoln was jubilant, until he realised the gravity of the rift with Great Britain. Lord Lyons, at the British Legation in Washington, declared the seizure of Mason and Slidell ‘a direct insult to the British flag’. The Admiralty issued a worldwide alert, and the War Office drew up strategic plans. London and Liverpool erupted in pro-Confederate demonstrations; street-corner salesmen hawked rebel banners while Adams fretted ineffectually and Moran ground his teeth. In Washington, at a ball for the Portuguese minister, Seward warned Britain against war with the US. ‘We will wrap the whole world in flames!’ he announced. There was ‘no power so remote that she will not feel the fire of our battle and be burned by our conflagration’. He had been drinking again.

Yet Foreman shows that Seward wanted reconciliation, not war. He worked with Lyons behind the scenes, realising that it was politically unpopular but legally necessary to return Mason and Slidell. Seward’s moderation won him the undying enmity of Senator Charles Sumner, the treasury secretary Salmon Chase and the other Radical Republicans in Lincoln’s cabinet. Eventually they forced Seward to offer his resignation, which Lincoln refused. Meanwhile the Confederate envoys did minimal damage to the Union cause. Slidell, the son of a New York candlemaker who fled a scandal involving a pistol fight and reinvented himself as a New Orleans lawyer, cultivated a suavity that went down well in Paris. But the French wouldn’t make a move towards recognition unless Britain led the way. It was Mason’s job to persuade them, and he bungled it. A scion of the Virginia slavocracy, he affected a ‘chomping heartiness’ (in Foreman’s phrase) that didn’t sit well with London society. He consistently overplayed his hand.

Still the South sustained British support, much of it based on the assumption – or, more plausibly, the wish – that they would free their slaves as soon as they won independence. Take the case of Lt Col. Arthur Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards. An opponent of slavery, Fremantle initially supported the North but was repelled by Seward’s early bombast and soon developed a fascination with the rebel cause. He applied for leave of absence to visit the scenes of war in Mississippi and Virginia, and met many Southerners, not one of whom could imagine freeing his slaves under any circumstances. Even so Fremantle concluded: ‘I think that if the Confederate states were left alone, the system would be much modified and amended.’ This belief was so widespread among Southern sympathisers in Britain that when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862 (declaring slaves in the rebel states ‘forever free’ from 1 January 1863), the pro-Confederate Liverpool businessman James Spence was inspired to imagine that the South should issue one, too.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, few British enthusiasts for the South could believe that it was fighting for slavery. So it was easy for them to sanitise the conflict as simply a war for Southern independence, and celebrate the grandeur of its heroes. Robert E. Lee was an Olympian figure, always described as ‘magnificent’ by English visitors, and Stonewall Jackson was a martyr – to what it was not clear. Jackson’s death evoked an outpouring of sympathy and admiration from the entire British population, including fierce opponents of slavery. In their eyes, the South stood for something more than slavery. The region, one British observer noted, was full of contradictions: ‘its people combined genteel manners with ancient barbarism, they were brave in the face of appalling deprivation, and personally charming even when proclaiming their bitterness at their betrayal by their British cousins,’ who still refused to grant them diplomatic recognition.

Then there was the war itself, the effects of which were horrific to behold, even from afar. So British antiwar groups survived and flourished. Spence’s Southern Independence Association combined anti-slavery and pro-secession views, while the Rev. Francis Tremlett joined with the Confederate naval officer and oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury to found the Society for Promoting the Cessation of Hostilities in America, a group with overtly pacifist aims. In August 1864, the British public went wild for a petition demanding an end to the bloodshed – the ‘peace address’ – signing it by the tens of thousands, and in October that year a Confederate Bazaar in Liverpool raised £17,000 for the Confederate army. Support for the South died hard.

This was partly because the North continued to send mixed messages. To be sure, the importance of the Emancipation Proclamation gradually seeped through. Books and pamphlets proliferated, making the case for the North, insisting that the war now had a moral purpose beyond mere nationalism. But the Northerners themselves seemed less and less sure that the struggle was worthwhile. Their opposition to the war persisted and spread, especially as the Union army failed repeatedly on the battlefield and at times dealt clumsily with domestic opposition. On 4 May 1863 General Ambrose Burnside arrested Senator Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, at his house in Dayton. Vallandigham was the leading anti-war Democrat, but he didn’t consider himself a Confederate sympathiser. Burnside charged him with treason and arranged a kangaroo court that found the senator guilty and sentenced him to imprisonment in an army fort. Vallandigham became a hero throughout the Midwest. Lincoln, embarrassed, commuted the sentence to banishment, and Vallandigham fled to Canada, but his popularity underscored the widespread Northern disillusionment with the war.

In July 1863, disillusionment flared into violence, as 50,000 rioters roared through New York City for five days, protesting the inequities of the new military draft (among other provisions, the law allowed men to purchase substitutes for $300). As usual in US history, race displaced class as the governing social category. The rioters focused their rage, as Foreman observes, ‘on the two classes of persons they considered most responsible for the war: negroes and those who defended them’. Fremantle, who had just arrived in New York, ‘saw a negro pursued by the crowd take refuge with the military; he was followed by loud cries of “Down with the bloody nigger! Kill all niggers!” etc.’ Clearly the North was not united in an effort to free the slaves – or even to save the union.

Still Lincoln was determined to see the struggle through to victory. In November 1863, in his Gettysburg Address, he widened his war aims to include ‘a new birth of freedom’. This was not a mere rhetorical flourish. It meant that full emancipation was on the agenda. No wonder black recruits began to flock into the Union army. Whether the white North shared their enthusiasm remained to be seen. Certainly racism was rampant on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, as was weariness with the war. Widespread desertions and failures to meet draft quotas led to the practice of ‘crimping’ for both armies – kidnapping recruits, mostly foreigners, who were shot if they tried to desert. Those who stayed were often determined to avoid a fight if possible. Robert Neve, an Englishman who had joined the Union army, noticed amid the carnage at Chattanooga that ‘several officers and men got sheltered behind the trees, and kept waving their hats and cheering men up to a great degree, not even caring about firing a shot at the enemy.’ As Foreman observes, ‘nothing was ever uniform in battle’ – least of all the conduct of the cannon fodder.

From across the Atlantic, the moral meaning of the war seemed nowhere near as clear as a struggle between freedom and slavery. This was not just a matter of Englishmen being in denial over Southern complicity with human bondage. The confusion and division of Northern war aims also made for a murky moral picture. And so did the emerging Northern strategy of total war – which included a devastating assault on Southern civilians.

As early as May 1862, in New Orleans, Southerners got a taste of what they could expect from a Union military occupation. Benjamin Butler, the commander of the occupying forces and a lawyer in private life, had a well-deserved reputation for military incompetence and political corruption. He immediately set up what Foreman calls a ‘judicial ransom system’: affluent men were arrested on trumped up charges, and released only after bribes were paid by their wives or children. Everything was set up for systematic plunder. ‘Federal officers treated private property in the Crescent City as though it was theirs for the taking,’ Foreman writes. Families were evicted without notice; the next day their houses were ransacked. It is hard to see such practices as part of the march of moral progress.

Like most occupying forces, the Federal garrison in New Orleans faced the unremitting hostility of the subject population – who, with so many men gone to war, were mostly women. ‘They wore Confederate colours,’ Foreman writes, ‘sang songs, hissed, spat, turned their backs and on one famous occasion dumped the contents of a chamberpot on Union soldiers.’ Butler responded with his Woman Order, which stated that ‘hereafter, when any female shall by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.’ The vision of genteel ladies reduced to common prostitutes inflamed the chivalric imagination. Butler could not have more effectively provoked Southern rage and determination to resist the occupiers had he deliberately set out to do so. But the British public, too – including opponents of slavery – were appalled by Butler’s conduct. It undermined Northern claims to high moral purpose and provided another argument for negotiating an end to a barbarous war.

The destruction of civilian society quickly became a key part of the Northern invasion – with the shelling, looting and burning of cities from Vicksburg, Mississippi and Alexandria, Louisiana in the west to Atlanta and Savannah in the east, not to mention innumerable towns and homesteads in between. When he torched Atlanta, General Sherman let his ‘bummers’ loose among the civilian population, telling them to do what they would, short of mass rape and murder. When he set out on his march to the sea from Atlanta, he promised to ‘make Georgia howl!’ and ‘make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms’. By ‘ruin’, he meant everything from homelessness and impoverishment to starvation and death. General Philip Sheridan was equally straightforward about his intentions. ‘The people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war,’ he said, as he turned the Shenandoah Valley into a wasteland of burned fields and ruined homesteads.

Frank Vizetelly was in the neighbourhood, reporting and drawing (as he had been throughout the war) for the Illustrated London News. ‘The sight of emaciated women pleading with soldiers for bread to feed their children led him to accuse Union troops of deliberately causing mass starvation among the civilians,’ Foreman writes. The charge was accurate, and provided British observers with another humanitarian argument for bringing the war to a close. Vizetelly himself embodied another reason for the persistence of pro-Southern sentiments in Britain. The English press, led by the Times, was nearly unanimous in its scepticism towards Northern war aims and its sympathy for the South. This was partly because their reporters on the ground were as likely as not to be Confederate sympathisers. Vizetelly was among the most interesting. He was theIllustrated London News’s star war correspondent and artist, as well the brother of the editor. ‘A big, florid, red-bearded bohemian’, according to Foreman, he loved imitating accents, telling stories, and singing boisterous songs with his mates in the pub. He constantly teetered between depression and mania, and when he wasn’t distracted by the thrill of danger became self-destructive and reckless. Somehow he survived the war.

Originally pro-Northern, Vizetelly had a change of heart early in the war, after he socialised with some Southerners in Memphis and saw how wide and deep their commitment to separation was. Unable to believe that the North was determined to end slavery or the South to defend it, he saw the war as a fight for Southern independence and asked: why not just let the Confederacy go? The question hung in the minds of many British observers, planted there by Vizetelly and other pro-Southern journalists but nourished by revulsion at the Northern invasion.

The Confederate army’s foray into the North was another matter. Lee had given strict orders against straggling and looting, and managed to enforce them most of the time. Fremantle was there, and according to Foreman he believed he was witnessing ‘a rare event in military history: an invasion unadorned by mass rape and murder’. Lee’s behaviour was almost comically punctilious: when he noticed some fence rails had been knocked askew, he dismounted and tidied them up himself. His respect for civilian lives and property was real, a remnant of the West Point code he had learned in the days before the war, when men still believed that war had rules. This chivalric ideal, however easily sentimentalised or exaggerated, nevertheless marked a sharp contrast between Lee’s army en route to Gettysburg and the Union invaders anywhere else.

To complicate that contrast, it is worth remembering what Foreman makes clear: Confederate soldiers were perfectly capable of atrocities themselves – particularly towards surrendering black soldiers, whom they routinely shot rather than take prisoner. Confederate guerrilla fighters made few distinctions between soldiers and civilians, and General Jackson might well have become the South’s version of General Sherman, had he had the resources and opportunity. Towards the end of the war, a Confederate terrorist called Jacob Thompson set up a cell in Canada: he and his fellow plotters planned to set New York City ablaze by planting fire bombs in 19 hotels, two theatres and Barnum’s Museum. But they forgot ‘the basic rule of arson’ (that fire needs oxygen), planting the bombs in closed bedrooms and cupboards, where they soon fizzled out. The smoke and fumes created mass panic, but no one died. The intention was mass murder, but the outcome was opera bouffe – a far cry from Sheridan’s ride and Sherman’s march.

In the end, the logic of total war drove all before it. This became most apparent when in December 1864 the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, sent his Congressional ally Duncan Kenner to Britain with a proposal that the South would abolish slavery in exchange for diplomatic recognition. Kenner arrived in London in February 1865, and on 14 March the oafish Mason insisted on delivering the request to Palmerston, who was then prime minister. It was well past the time when any such proposal might have succeeded. By 1865, the US Congress’s approval of the 13th Amendment had made emancipation an official consequence of the war, which the Union armies had already won on the battlefield. The day before Mason met with Palmerston, the Confederate Congress voted to recruit slaves into the Confederate army, recognising (as the Confederate secretary of state, Robert Hunter, put it) that ‘to arm the negroes is to give them freedom.’ The irony was exquisite, not to say tragic. In order to continue fighting for independence, Confederate leaders were ultimately prepared to dismantle the institution they had started the war to defend. The pro-slavery revolution consumed itself.

The dénouement of the war portended the shape of things to come. When the defeated Confederates surrendered their arms and regimental flags in Richmond on 12 April 1865 (three days after Lee surrendered at Appomattox), Foreman writes, ‘the Federal guard stood to attention and presented arms, inspiring the Confederates to do the same – “honor answering honor”, in the words of the attending Federal general, Joseph Chamberlain.’ There is something moving about this ritual of mutual respect between bitter combatants. But there is also something a little troubling about it. The scene prefigures the ways the war would be conventionally commemorated for more than a century to come: an epic struggle between the white North and the white South, resulting in a reborn nation, ready to play its divinely ordained role on the world stage.

Vol. 33 No. 10 · 19 May 2011 » Jackson Lears » Divinely Ordained
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Letters

Vol. 33 No. 11 · 2 June 2011

From Michael Davies

Jackson Lears treats John Bright unfairly (LRB, 19 May). Bright may have been a ‘theatrical orator’ but it’s not true that he ‘couldn’t be bothered with political detail’ or that he only picked easy targets. His opposition to the popular Crimean War led to his vilification in the press, accusations of treachery from other MPs, and the loss of his Manchester seat in 1857.

Michael Davies
Lancaster

Vol. 33 No. 12 · 16 June 2011

From James Oakes

Jackson Lears writes that ‘in October 1861, when General John C. Fremont freed the slaves in the parts of Missouri his troops had occupied, Lincoln publicly repudiated him and the larger goal of abolition’ (LRB, 19 May). Fremont issued his abolition decree in August 1861 not October. It applied only to the slaves of rebels and only in areas over which Fremont had no control. Lincoln sent a private letter urging Fremont to rewrite his order to conform to the Confiscation Act passed by Congress a few weeks earlier. Under instructions implementing that act issued by Lincoln’s War Department on 8 August 1861, all slaves voluntarily entering Union lines in the seceded states were emancipated. Thus in his letter to Fremont, Lincoln was hardly ‘repudiating’ abolition. On the contrary, his order extended emancipation to a loyal state for the first time. Lincoln explicitly told Fremont that he did not disagree with the ‘principle’ on which the general’s edict was issued. Fremont refused to do what Lincoln asked unless directly ordered. Only then did Lincoln publicly require the insubordinate general to rewrite his order. The issue was civilian rule over the military, not emancipation.

James Oakes
New York

Vol. 33 No. 13 · 30 June 2011

From Clifton Hawkins

Jackson Lears asserts that 50,000 civilians were killed during the American Civil War, and that these casualties were deliberately inflicted (LRB, 19 May). The figure originated with James McPherson, who in a footnote in his Battle Cry of Freedomsuggested that ‘a fair estimate of war-related civilian deaths might total 50,000.’ Non-combatant casualties were not inflicted as a result of policy; rather, civilians died from malnutrition, disease and exposure. Two-thirds of the soldiers who died in the Civil War also died from these causes rather than on the battlefield; that some indeterminate number of civilians perished in the same way is not surprising. The US issued emergency rations to hundreds of thousands of Southern civilians, black and white, not only during the war but after it.

Lincoln required ‘unconditional surrender’ only in the sense of demanding the restoration of the Union. Both sides recognised that compromise on this issue was impossible. Lincoln insisted on emancipation only when it became a military necessity, and even at the very end of the war advocated compensating slaveholders.

Despite what Lears and many others claim, the North did not valorise wage labour as an ideal, or even consider it a form of freedom. Lincoln spoke for everyone when he equated freedom with the ownership of productive property. People who remained hired labourers for life did so ‘because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly or singular misfortune’. African Americans were denied land not on the basis of any idealisation of wage labour but because of racism.

Nor was Union policy vengeful or vindictive. The defeated Confederates were treated with unprecedented leniency: they were quickly restored to their full civil and political rights, and admitted to both Houses of Congress. Lincoln’s pledge of ‘malice toward none, with charity for all’ was meant exclusively for the white Southerners, not for their human chattels; one cannot easily compromise between a group of people willing to kill in defence of slavery, and slaves pining for freedom.

When Lears asserts that only a few diehard neo-Confederates claim that the war was over states’ rights rather than slavery, he should mention that tens of millions of white Americans are today proud Confederate loyalists. The Republican Party is dominated by these zealots. The Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has claimed that his state retains the right of secession. And Alabama has just enacted a law requiring that all immigrants carry papers documenting their legal status at all times, thus re-establishing the pass system formerly imposed on slaves and free blacks, which today’s Confederate states would reinstate if they could.

Clifton Hawkins
Berkeley, California

Vol. 33 No. 15 · 28 July 2011

From Jackson Lears

Clifton Hawkins provides me with an opportunity to clarify the ideology of ‘free labour’ that pervaded the North during the American Civil War (Letters, 30 June). Free labour involved more than the opportunity to sell one’s labour or the product of one’s labour; it also implied the promise of accumulating property through hard work, of becoming a self-made man. This ethos of success through striving disdained dependency and exalted individual autonomy. Once slaves became formally free, enfranchised US citizens, it was easy for Northern politicians (and consistent with free labour ideology) to leave them to their own devices. So it was not simply racism, as Hawkins claims, but racism combined with free labour ideology that allowed the North to let white elites reassert their dominance in the South – though the counter-revolution met much resistance from poor blacks and poor whites alike, and in some places took decades to accomplish.

Hawkins argues that the war’s 50,000 civilian casualties ‘were not inflicted as a result of policy; rather, civilians died from malnutrition, disease and exposure.’ In fact, for three years invading Union armies shelled cities, torched farms and laid waste the Southern countryside. They were following orders, and none of the generals ever pretended otherwise. Grant told Sheridan to turn the Shenandoah into a ‘barren waste … so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.’ When your official war aims include cutting off the enemy’s food supply and destroying its capacity to function as an organised society, you are bound to create conditions in which civilians will die from ‘malnutrition, disease and exposure’, not to mention as a result of fires and explosions. Civilian casualties were a direct result of Northern strategy.

This does not mean that the North was more vengeful or murderous than the South. As I suggested, Confederates were as eager as Federals to commit atrocities whenever they had the chance. What it does mean is that the label ‘total war’ still applies to this conflict. It also helps to explain why even many anti-slavery Britons were appalled by the carnage and eager to promote peace. They felt this way in part because they could not believe that the North was truly united behind a war against slavery. There were many reasons for their scepticism, as Amanda Foreman shows in A World on Fire, not least the racism that pervaded Northern society.

This is Foreman’s most significant achievement, at least with respect to contemporary public discourse. She demystifies a myth at the core of American civil religion, the belief that the Civil War was a humanitarian mission to rescue the slaves from bondage. According to the mythic view, which Barack Obama has publicly embraced, American military history can be understood as a series of virtuous crusades. The Civil War has become part of this usable past, one of the most important of many US military operations conducted allegedly in the service of humanity, stretching from the American Revolution to the latest misadventure in Afghanistan. Hawkins is rightly concerned about the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, and other secessionist zealots whose neo-Confederate rhetoric justifies crypto-fascist policies. I addressed a subtler menace: the widespread longing, perhaps more common among sentimental liberals than conservative curmudgeons, to regenerate recalcitrant folk in backward lands – by force if necessary.

Jackson Lears
Ringoes, New Jersey

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