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All posts tagged General Pinochet
Urban Impulses: Latin American Photography 1959-2016 @ the Photographers' Gallery
The history of Latin America has fascinated observers as much as it has mystified them. There is something apparently alien about the continent, an exoticism that derives perhaps from it having once been perceived as a 'new world', although there survive monuments and relics of ancient societies whose cultures remain poorly understood by us even today. This elusiveness – hinting simultaneously at a former state of grace and some original corruption – has rendered interpretation of Latin American history peculiarly vulnerable to speculation and myth-making.
(Edwin Williamson in the introduction to his Penguin History of Latin America, 1990 revised 2009)
Urban Impulses
This is an epic exhibition, if not quite in scale, then certainly in scope. Across four rooms and two floors, the Photographers' Gallery is showcasing some 200 works by 73 photographers from all across Latin America.
They use a wide range of techniques and approaches to chronicle every aspect of the continent's violent politics and conflicts, its transition from a predominantly rural to a mostly urban population, its music and fiestas and cultures and traditions, its signs and streetlife, its nightclubs and dancehalls.
Most of the photographers are represented by only one or two images and so as you move from photo to photo, you are presented with a blizzard of names and biographies, not to mention a bewildering variety of countries and decades, which I found it quite challenging to get a handle on.
Cuba in the 1950s was very different from Nicaragua in the 1980s, and different again from Mexico now.
(N.B. In this review the texts in italics are copied from the thorough and very useful free handout which accompanies the exhibition.)
Calle Alameda, Santiago, 1983 by Álvaro Hoppe © Álvaro Hoppe. Courtesy of the artist
The history of Chilean photography over the past thirty years is above all that of a rupture, or a 'tectonic shift' caused by the military coup of 1973. Until that time, democracy had allowed the history of the medium to evolve without major disruption, but what happened in September 1973 created a generation of photographers committed to documenting the urban tragedy that subsequently emerged on the streets of Santiago during the 1970s and 80s.
As I wandered among this cornucopia of images and histories and countries and events, it struck me that there are many ways to group and arrange it – by subject matter, grouping together themes such as politics, street activism, street scenes, commercialisation, religion and, of course, every curators' favourite topics, gender and identity.
Or you could divide them up by technique – grouping together black-and-white photos (most of them are, in fact, in black and white), colour photos, montages, collages, photojournalism, photocopies, and art works made of photos chopped up and attached to canvases. The curators back up the visitor's sense of an impressive diversity of medium and approach:
Here a hybrid iconography emerges where photography exists in tandem with other media of mass circulation such as graphics, photo-copying and print media, often involving the marking, cutting and defacement of images where the notion of appearance and disappearance exist in tandem.
Take this striking artwork which features a collage of commercial adverts cut with urgent news photos, and then treated and painted over.
Equis (1985) by Herbert Rodríguez © Herbert Rodríguez. Courtesy of the artist
Rodriguez denounces the injustices suffered by the populations of the Andean and Amazonian regions, dominated by a process of gradual urbanisation, and, more generally, the exploitation of one part of Peruvian society by another. The approach is experimental, the materials – often salvaged from public spaces – are banal, and the collage technique allows them to be gathered together and reordered in different ways.
Another approach would be to zero in on a handful of the most famous photographers who won international reputations during the period and seek them out first – such greats as Alberto Korda from Cuba who created the iconic images of Che Guevara, or Graciela Iturbide (b.1942) from Mexico, or Sergio Larrain from Chile.
Again you could group the photographers by country because many of the photos are political, in the broadest sense, and require a knowledge of the political history of the country in question, foe xample the military dictatorships in Chile or Argentina.
In fact I realised I needed to stop and remind myself just what countries actually make up 'Latin America'. Upon looking into it I discovered there's a surprising amount of ambiguity about defining and framing the geography.
The term 'Latin America' can be taken to refer solely to 'South America', or to also include the many nations of Central America and the Caribbean. (Cuba always gets included, despite not being in South or Central America.)
Nations of South America by population
We know these nations all have one big thing in common which is that they were colonnised by Spain or Portugal in the 16th century, and administered for centuries as key parts of their empires. So they speak the 'Latin' languages of Spanish and Portuguese, and hence the umbrella term 'Latin' America – as opposed to 'Anglo' America, settled by English speakers in the later 17th and 18th centuries.
Flying low, Mexico City, 1989 by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio © Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. Courtesy of the artist
Mexico is a post-apocalyptic city. It has refused to accept the many declarations of its death. it survived the devastating earthquake of 1985, and has withstood overpopulation and pollution beyond the assumed threshold of human tolerance. The country has attempted to enter the twenty-first century without yet having solved the problems of the sixteenth. – Mexican poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer José Emilio Pacheco Berny
To my surprise there's debate about whether Mexico should be included in Central America, with lots of people, including many Mexicans, considering themselves part of North America. Incorrectly, I have included Mexico in this list of Central American nations.
Nations of Central America by population
(Mexico)
Maybe the curators should have included a map, a big map, to help remind us of the precise location of all these places. (But then I'm biased. I love maps.)
Most of these nations gained their independence in stormy conflicts against the colonial powers in the early 19th century only to find themselves saddled with legacies of huge inequality and grinding rural poverty.
It was the enduring legacy of these inequalities which led to the revolutions, counter-revolutions, and military coups of the twentieth century. I well remember the era of military dictatorships in Argentina (1976-83), Brazil (1964-85), Chile (1973-90), and Paraguay (1954-89). Back in the 1970s we associated Latin America (and Greece and Spain and Portugal) with semi-fascist military dictatorships such as the notorious rule of General Pinochet of Chile. In one sense, then, many of these images fro the 1970s felt nostalgic to me.
Pinochet, 1987 by Fernando Bedoya © Fernando Bedoya. Courtesy of the artist
Fernano Bedoya is a key figure in the artistic activism of Peru and Argentina, involved notably in the latter country in the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group formed by mothers of young men who went missing during the military dictatorship. An irreverent artist, he plays with mass production – photography, screen printing, photocopying – and employs a hybrid iconography strongly influenced by pop culture. Committed to the democratisation of art, he has worked with several artists' collective on participative projects with a distinctly political focus.
The nations of Latin America all have ethnically diverse societies, beginning with the fact that the native peoples of most of the colonised countries lived on, working as serfs or slaves for their European overlords, sometimes interbreeding with them, a racial mix which was then added to by large-scale importation of African slaves from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and then by migration from other, non-Iberian European countries – mostly in the 19th century.
This much most of them have in common. But each of the countries has its own geography and history and ethnic mix and traditions, which are hard to capture in such a variegated display. That's the problem talking about this 'region', it's so big and encompasses such a confusing diversity of peoples and places that it's too easy to fall back on casual stereotypes – machismo, military dictatorships, Che Guevara guerillas, remote villages up the Amazon, the destruction of the rainforest, oh and a collection of cheesy dances that your grandparents used to like – the foxtrot, the tango, the cha-cha-cha.
In fact three or four of the photographers here are represented by pics they've taken of more or less the same scene, namely unglamorous, middle-aged couples from back in the day, dancing in (presumably hot and sweaty) dance halls. It's a recurring topic.
Untitled, from the series Tango (1988) by Paz Errázuriz © Paz Errázuriz. Courtesy of the artist
'The tango image of Paz Errázuriz, without words, music or movement, frozen at one of those key moments when the dance danced by the dancers comes into its own, affirming the authenticity of the representation of a representation.' – Chilean poet, playwright, and novelist Enrique Lihn
In fact all this pondering and wondering how to make sense of the profusion of countries and images and artists which I spent some time trying to group or arrange, has already been partly done by the curators themselves. They have divided the exhibition up into just two big parts (one on each of the two floors across which the show is presented), and titled them Shouts and Pop-ular.
1. Shouts
To quote the curators:
Shouts considers photography's role not only in documenting identities and presences, but also to explore absences: in the face of kidnappings and forced disappearances carried out by authoritarian regimes, photography has been a weapon against silence. Public spaces and the city walls have also played an important role: when pen and paper, laws and rights, courts and judges have failed to obtain justice, the walls of the cities have taken on a life of their own. And photographers have portrayed these walls, covered with the slogans and cries of protest of those demanding political, social, and economic recognition, and reflecting the anger and cynicism, the hopes and frustrations of the cities' residents.
Thus a raft of images depicting street protests, street fighting, street riots, protesters fighting cops. This is one of the rare colour photos in the show.
The Battle of the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, 20 December 2001 by Eduardo Longoni © Eduardo Longoni. Courtesy of the artist
Longoni documented in colour the disturbances that took place in 2001 in response to the economic crisis and the measures taken by the government of Fernando de la Rúa, which limited cash withdrawals from the banks to 250 pesos a week. The Argentinians, with humour and irony, soon found a name for the policy: the corralito (the diminutive form of the Spanish word for 'corraling', which also designates, in popular Argentine Spanish, a tollders' playground.) On 19 December 2001 a state of emergency was announced. On 20 december, early in the evening, President Fernando de la Rúa resigned. The suppression of the disturbances had taken a toll of thirty-eight deaths all over the country, including seven in Buenos Aires.
2. Pop-ular
In Pop-ular, artists' mine the tropes of mass media and their manifestation in public spaces. Since the 1960s, as Latin America has undergone rapid development, advertising images have diversified and multiplied, marked by the rapid transition to a consumer society. The first widespread use of colour photography was in advertising, and the richness of pop culture imagery, often associated with commerce and advertising, marks the visual identity of the Latin American metropolis. Signs, patterns and typographies, often created by self-taught hands, confer on the display windows an almost innocent beauty.
Thus there are quite a few photos depicting the most obvious aspect of a consumer society, shop windows, featuring shop window mannequins, or surreal subversions of them like the shapely, naked, young woman posing amid mannequins by Jorge Vall.
This all feels very retro since, as we know, the era of physical shops is on the decline.
Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski
This is the place to point out that the selection hasn't been made from all the photographs taken by all 73 of these photographers from their entire careers. That would be an epic, maybe impossible, task.
No, this selection has been made from the large, but finite, collection of Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski, who collected original prints throughout the period in question.
Maybe this explains why, when I tried to link to some of these images, I couldn't find any of them on the internet. Maybe they are very tightly controlled – although I did find plenty of other images by many of these photographers. As usual an exhibition like this makes a good starting point to go off on explorations of your own. But the fact that this is a selection from a selection explains some things.
Fifteenth Birthday Party in Ciudad Neza, Mexico City, Mixtecos Norte/Sur series (1989) by Eniac Martínez © Eniac Martínez. Courtesy of the artist
Produced for the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the series Mixtecos Norte/Sur consists of photographs taken in Oaxaca and along the US-Mexico border. 'It is the story of Mixtec indigenous people who leave their increasingly unproductive lands in the state of Oaxaca to enter the industrialised world of the United States.' A girl's fifteenth birthday party is a cultural milestone, not only in Mexico but all over Latin America. It involves a highly codified celebration, often accompanied by a religious ceremony, at which friends and relatives are given a lavish demonstration of the host's generosity.
Alongside the street scenes and riots and cops and sex workers there was also a stream of images various different photographers had taken of the eerie beauty of details of Latino urban architecture – the pattern of cobbles in the street, or stripped posters on peeling walls.
Several photographers had captured the distinctive patters of tiles or brickwork to be found in local buildings, some of which harked back, maybe, to ancient Mayan or pre-Colombian sensibilities. For example, the attractive suite of photos by Pablo López Luz entitled Neo Inca.
Neo Inca LVIII, Pisac, Perú, 2016 by Pablo López Luz © Pablo López Luz. Courtesy of the artist
In the localities near Andean tourist destinations, Pablo López Luz photographs the doorways and facades of buildings and houses, adorned with the stucco relief work of Inca walls. The visual repertory drawn up in this way reflects the local taste for Inca motifs and shows how these have been grafted onto the urban context and brought up to date.
So who exactly are the 73 photographers represented here? I'm glad you asked:
Carlos Aguirre (b.1948, Mexico)
Luiz Alphonsus (b.1948, Brazil)
Édgar Álvarez (b.1947, Colombia)
Yolanda Andrade (b.1950, Mexico)
Jaime Ardila (b.1942, Colombia)
Ever Astudillo (1948-2015, Colombia)
Álvaro Barrios (b. 1945, Colombia)
Juan Enrique Bedoya (b.1966, Peru)
Fernando Bedoya (1952, Peru)
Enrique Bostelmann (1939-2003, Mexico)
Bill Caro (b.1949, Peru)
Anselmo Carrera (1950-2016, Peru)
Jesús Reyes Cordero (b.1956, Mexico)
Armando Cristeto (b.1957, Mexico)
François Dolmetsch (b.1940, UK/Colombia)
Felipe Ehrenberg (1943-2017, Mexico)
Virginia Errázuriz (b.1941, Chile)
Paz Errázuriz (b.1944, Chile)
María Elvira Escallón (b.1954, Colombia)
José Alberto Figueroa (b.1946, Cuba)
Fernell Franco (1942-2006, Colombia)
RenéFreire (b.1952, Mexico)
Carlos Gallardo (b.1954, Chile)
Héctor García (1923-2012, Mexico)
Paolo Gasparini (b.1934, Venezuela)
Lourdes Grobet (b.1940, Mexico)
Billy Hare (b.1946, Peru)
Alejandro Hoppe (b.1961, Chile)
Alvaro Hoppe (b.1956, Chile)
Helen Hughes (b.1948, USA-Chile)
Graciela Iturbide (b.1942, Mexico)
Beatriz Jaramillo (b.1955, Colombia)
Mario García Joya (nee Mayito, b.1938, Cuba)
Alberto Korda (1928-2001, Cuba)
Sergio Larrain (1931-2012, Chile)
Adriana Lestido (b.1955, Argentina)
Diego Levy (b.1973, Argentina)
Eduardo Longoni (b.1959, Argentina)
Marcos López (b.1958, Argentina)
Héctor López (b.1955, Chile)
Pablo López Luz (b.1979, Mexico)
Ayrton de Magalhães (1954-2017, Brazil)
Eniac Martínez (b.1959, Mexico)
Agustín Martínez Castro (1950-1992, Mexico)
Sebastián Mejía (b.1982, Colombia)
Ernesto Molina (b.1952, Mexico)
Luis Molina-Pantin (b.1969, Venezuela)
Pablo Ortiz Monasterio (b.1952, Mexico)
Mario Cravo Neto (1947-2009, Brazil)
Viki Ospina (b.1948, Colombia)
Adolfo Patiño (1954-2005, Mexico)
Claudio Pérez (b.1957, Chile)
Ataúlfo Pérez Aznar (b.1955, Argentina)
Jaime Razuri (b.1956, Peru)
Santiago Rebolledo (b.1951, Colombia)
Miguel Rio Branco (b.1946, Brazil)
Herbert Rodríguez (b.1959, Peru)
Miguel Ángel Rojas (b.1946, Colombia)
Jesús Ruiz Durand (b.1940, Peru)
Osvaldo Salerno (b.1952, Paraguay)
Francisco Smythe (1952-1998, Chile)
Carlos Somonte (b.1956, Mexico)
Milagros de la Torre (b.1965, Peru)
Nicolás Torres (b.1957, Peru)
Juan Travnik (b.1950, Argentina)
Sergio Trujillo (b.1947, Colombia)
Jorge Vall (b.1949, Venezuela)
Pedro Valtierra (b.1955, Mexico)
JoséLuis Venegas (b.1944, Mexico)
Leonora Vicuña (b.1952, Chile)
Jaime Villaseca (b.1949, Chile)
Enrique Zamudio (b.1955, Chile)
Helen Zout (b.1957, Argentina)
Facundo de Zuviría (b.1954, Argentina)
And where would any exhibition of modern photography be without images of transvestites and transgender sex workers?
From 10 to 11 p.m., Mexico City (1985) by Agustín Martínez Castro © Agustín Martínez Castro Estate. Courtesy of the artist's estate
In the photographs of Agustín Martínez Castro, the city is embodied in the anonymous inhabitants of its nights. The photographer is one o the most sensitive and profound chroniclers of the world of transvestism. Far removed from all sense of visual pathos, Martínez Castro offers an dmirable photo essay on private life, understood as a realm of intimacy, which is celebrated here, and on the stripping away of that intimacy, which is denounced. – Art historian, curator, and editor Roberto Tejada
If I'm honest, I didn't like many of the photos in this exhibition. There are lots of them, and I suppose there's lots of variety, but somehow I found the sheer number, and the hopping from one country to another, and from one decade to another, diluted and lessened their impact.
Hardly any of them have the standout lyricism and compositional genius of the thirteen prints by Manuel Álvarez Bravo which are currently on display down in the basement of the same building. Each one of those took my breath away.
And after reading and rereading the handout which includes almost every photo in the show, I realised that I was bored. There's certainly an impressive range of technical diversity – many collages and montages and artistic treatments of photographic images, incorporating them into multi-media artworks. And ten or fifteen of the images did really stand out.
But almost all of these photos are images taken on the street. They almost all have a scrappy, hand-held quality. There isn't a single one composed in a studio, and not a single one of a landscape, to give two types of photo which are completely absent. It's shabby, urban sprawl everywhere you look.
Rough street people in rundown looking slums and dodgy neighbourhoods. Scary street punks, one or two convicts in prison. And plenty of scenes of cops and soldiers policing the street, and riots, and people getting beaten up. Grim-faced soldiers. Grim-faced dictators. Grim-faced revolutionaries. Grim-faced prostitutes. Grim-faced hoodlums, tearful mothers protesting against the disappearance of their sons, photomontages commemorating people killed in riots, tattooed gang members.
Untitled (Aquileo Valtierra González), Prisoners series, Mexico (1997) by Carlos Somonte © Carlos Somonte. Courtesy of the artist
Again I was reminded that the whole exhibition is taken from the private collection of Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski. In other words – far from being a representative survey of all Latin American photography, this is a selection from a selection. A personal selection. A personal view of the politics and history of this continent and this era.
After a while it dawned on me that what was oppressing me was there was no joy or happiness in any of the photos. Surely someone, somewhere, in all these 20 or so countries, in the long period between 1959 and 2016, surely someone, somewhere, smiled. Maybe even laughed. Looked at the blue sky, the river, the trees and the exotic flowers in the botanical garden, and was happy? Is Copacabana beach not in Latin America? And hundreds of sun-kissed Caribbean beaches? Have there been no tourists in Latin America, no beaches and parties?
Not in these photos. Not in this exhibition. Glum and grim and earnest and embattled everywhere you look.
The exhibition is curated by María Wills and Alexis Fabry.
The exhibition is divided between two rooms on floor 3 of the Photographers' Gallery, and two rooms on the floor below. I visited about noon on a Wednesday. On one floor there were four teenage girl visitors. On the floor below there was just one middle-aged woman. That was it.
Shame. This exhibition deserves more visitors than that.
Urban Impulses: Latin American Photography 1959-2016 continues at the Photographers' Gallery until 6 October 2019
Reviews of other photography exhibitions
TPG New Talent 19 @ the Photographers' Gallery (July 2019)
Manuel Álvarez Bravo @ the Photographers' Gallery (July 2019)
Jessa Fairbrother: Constellations & Coordinates (March 2019)
Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitudes (March 2019)
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2019 @ the Photographers' Gallery (March 2019)
diane arbus: in the beginning (March 2019)
Don McCullin @ Tate Britain (February 2019)
The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2018 @ National Portrait Gallery (December 2018)
Purdah – The Sacred Cloth by Arpita Shah @ Autograph ABP (November 2018)
Liberty / Diaspora by Omar Victor Diop @ Autograph ABP (November 2018)
New East Photo Prize 2018 @ Calvert 22 (November 2018)
Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing @ the Barbican Gallery (August 2018)
Family Values: Polish Photography Now @ Calvert 22 Foundation (June 2018)
I Am Now You – Mother by Marcia Michael @ Autograph ABP (June 2018)
Devotion: A Portrait of Loretta by Franklyn Rodgers @ Autograph ABP (June 2018)
Shirley Baker: Personal Collection @ the Photographers' Gallery (June 2018)
Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive @ the Photographers' Gallery (June 2018)
Tish Murtha: Works 1976 – 1991 @ the Photographers' Gallery (June 2018)
Killed Negatives @ the Whitechapel Gallery (June 2018)
Work in Process @ the Photographers' Gallery (June 2018)
Under Cover: A Secret History Of Cross-Dressers @ the Photographers' Gallery
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 @ the Photographers's Gallery
Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins @ the Barbican (April 2018)
Andreas Gursky @ the Hayward Gallery (April 2018)
Post-Soviet Visions @ Calvert 22 Foundation (March 2018)
Illuminating India @ the Science Museum (February 2018)
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2017 @ the National Portrait Gallery (January 2018)
Syria: A Conflict Explored @ the Imperial War Museum (May 2017)
The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
Malick Sidibé @ Somerset House (January 2017)
Don McCullin (March 2017)
Shaped by War by Don McCullin (2010)
Unreasonable Behaviour by Don McCullin (2015)
Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century @ the V and A (June 2016)
Beard @ Somerset House (March 2015)
Performing for the Camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
Unseen City: Photos by Martin Parr @ Guildhall Art Gallery (March 2016)
Peter Kennard @ Imperial War Museum London (May 2015)
Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s @ the Barbican (November 2012)
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography
Tagged Agustín Martínez Castro, Álvaro Hoppe, Alberto Korda, Alexis Fabry, Aquileo Valtierra González, Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Caribbean, Carlos Somonte, Central America, Che Guevara, Chile, Colombia, colonialism, commercialisation, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Eduardo Longoni, Edwin Williamson, El Salvador, Eniac Martínez, Enrique Lihn, exhibition, Fernando Bedoya, General Pinochet, Graciela Iturbide, Guatemala, Guyana, Herbert Rodríguez, Honduras, iconography, imperialism, Jorge Vall, José Emilio Pacheco Berny, Latin America, Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski, Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, María Wills, Mexico, military coup, Nicaragua, Pablo López Luz, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Panama, Paraguay, Paz Errázuriz, Peru, photocopying, Photographers' Gallery, photography, Politics, Portugal, President Fernando de la Rúa, prints, Roberto Tejada, screen-printing, Sergio Larrain, Shouts, Slavery, South America, Spain, Transgender sex workers, transvestites, Urban Impulses, Urban Impulses: Latin American Photography 1959-2016, Uruguay, Venezuela
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/24/urban-impulses-latin-american-photography-1959-2016-photographers-gallery/
A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 by Steven Hahn (2016)
My thinking about the concept of borderlands has been influenced by a growing body of literature interested in exploring the liminal spaces in which social relations, cultures and claims to sovereign authority make contact, struggle, and reshape one another. (p.525)
This is a long, turgid and demanding book. Plenty of times I nearly gave up reading it in disgust. If you want to find out what happened in America between about 1820 and 1865, read James McPherson's outstanding volume, Battle Cry of Freedom. For the period from 1965 to 1910 I currently can't recommend an alternative, but they must be out there in their hundreds.
Two types of history
There are probably countless 'types' of history book but, for the purposes of this review, they can be narrowed down to two types. One type provides a more or less detailed chronology of events laid out in sequence, with portraits of key players and plenty of backup information such as quotes from relevant documents – government paperwork, constitutions, manifestos, speeches, newspaper articles, diaries, letters – alongside photos, maps, graphics and diagrams explaining social or economic trends, and so on. You are bombarded with information, from which you can pick the main threads and choose the details which most inspire you.
The other type is what you could call meta-history, a type of history book which assumes that the reader is already familiar with the period under discussion – the people, dates and events – and proceeds to ask questions, propose new theories and put forward new interpretations of it.
Since this kind of book assumes that you are already familiar with the key events, people and places of the era, it won't bother with biographical sketches, maps or photos – you know all that already – but will focus solely on laying out new ideas and interpretations.
A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 by Steven Hahn is very much the second type of history. If you want to find out what happened in America between 1830 and 1910, with maps, pictures, diagrams etc – this is not the book for you. There are no maps at all. There are no pictures. There are no diagrams. Sure there's still a lot of information, but what there mostly is, is lots of 'reinterpretations'.
Reinterpretations
In the first paragraph of the introduction Hahn declares his intention to tell 'a familiar story in an unfamiliar way', and the front and back of his book are plastered with quotes from high-end journalists and fellow academics confirming that this is indeed what he has achieved – praising his achievement in 'reconceptualising' and 'rethinking' this crucial period in American history.
'a forthright challenge to old stereotypes'
'subtle and original conceptualisation'
'not a typical chronological survey of American history'
'conceptually challenging'
'breathtakingly original'
'a bold reinterpretation of the American nineteenth century'
'an ambitious rethinking of our history'
What this means in practice is spelled out in the introduction, where Hahn announces that:
Traditional history teaches that the United States started as a nation and turned into an empire. Hahn seeks to prove the reverse: to show that the United States inherited an imperial mindset from imperial Britain, with a weak centre only loosely ruling a far-flung collection of autonomous states, and was only slowly struggling to become 'a nation', until the War of the Rebellion. The war gave the ruling Republican Party unprecedented power to pass a welter of centralising legislation which for the first time made America a 'nation'. In this respect it was comparable to Italy and Germany which only became unified nations at much the same time (the 1860s) and also as a result of wars.
Traditional history teaches that America was divided into a slave-free North and a slave-based South. Hahn insists that slavery was ubiquitous across the nation, with some of the fiercest anti-black violence taking place in New York, and that the principle struggle wasn't between North and South but between the North-East and the Mississippi Valley for control of the new country and, possibly, of the entire hemisphere. A recurring thread of the first half is the way that southern slavers seriously envisaged conquering all of Mexico and Central America and the available Caribbean islands to create a vast slave-owning empire in which the 'slave-free' north-east would be reduced to a geographic stump.
Traditional history teaches that America is an exception to the rest of world history, a shining light on a hill. Recent decades have overthrown that view to show just how deeply involved America was with trade, exploration and slavery back and forth across the Atlantic (this is also the thrust of Alan Taylor's brilliant account of early America, American Colonies). However, Hahn wants to overthrow not only American exceptionalism but even this newer, Atlantic, theory – he wants to shift the focus towards the Pacific, claiming that many key decisions of the period don't make sense unless you realise that politicians of both free and slave states were looking for decisive control of the vast Californian coast in order to push on into Pacific trade with Asia.
Traditional history teaches that there was a civil war in American from 1861 to 1865. Hahn prefers to call this epic conflict 'the War of the Rebellion' – partly because the war was indeed prompted by the rebellion of the slave states, but also in order to place it among a whole host of other 'rebellions' of the period e.g. the Seminole War of the 1840s, the refusal of the Mormons to accept federal power in their state of Utah, the wish of some Texans to remain an independent state, the attempts by southern filibusters (the Yankee name for buccaneering adventurers) to invade Cuba and Nicaragua in defiance of federal law, numerous native American uprisings, and countless small rebellions by black slaves against their masters. Instead of being the era of One Big War, Hahn is trying to rethink the mid-nineteenth century as the era of almost constant 'rebellions', large and small, by southerners, by native Americans, by newly organising workers everywhere, by the Mormons, by women – against the federal government.
Traditional history teaches that capitalism spread across America from its East coast, which was deeply interconnected with the global capitalist economy pioneered by Britain. Hahn seeks to show that there were all kinds of regional resistances to this transformation – the South was committed to a slave economy which limited the growth of markets and industrialisation; the whole mid-West of the country was occupied by native Americans who had completely different values and means of production and exchange from the Europeans; much of newly-settled West preferred small local market economies, virtually barter economies, to the cash-based capitalism of the East.
Probably the biggest single idea in the book is that the Republican triumph in the War of the Rebellion went hand in hand with the triumph of a centralised capitalist nation-state. But the latter part of the book goes on to insist that, even after its apparent triumph, capitalism continued to face a welter of opposition from numerous sources, from the disobedience of the defeated South, from western cowboy economies, through to resistance from highly urbanised Socialist and trade union movements – 'the United States had the most violent labour history of any society in the industrialising world' in the 1880s and 1890s.
Put this succinctly, these are certainly interesting and stimulating ideas. If only they had been developed in an interesting and stimulating way in interesting and stimulating prose which included interesting and stimulating facts.
But too often the 'ideas' dominate at the expense of the evidence and the basic information. Too often Hahn argues the points in prose which is so muddy, and with snippets of information or quotes handled so unpersuasively, or in such an obviously selective, cherry-picking way, that the reader has the permanent sense of missing out on the actual history, while ploughing through the interpretation. Take the new terms he coins:
New Terms
Most people in the world refer to the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865 as the American Civil War. Hahn's attempt to 'reconceptualise' it and refer to it throughout as 'the War of the Rebellion' has a sort of appeal, especially if you can keep in mind the cohort of other rebellions he sees as surrounding it and feeding into it. But put the book down and start talking or writing to anyone else in the world and…they will be deeply puzzled. It will require quite a lot of explanation to convey why you're using a different name from the rest of the world… and all the while you have the strong sense that it will never catch on…
To give another example: America saw rapid economic change in the 1830s and 1840s, as scattered farmsteads and distant agricultural regions began to be connected, first by canals and, in the 1840s, by railways. Raw materials and goods could be traded further than just the local market. Eastern investors became interested in money-making possibilities. Traditionally, this period has been referred to as 'the market revolution'. Characteristically, Hahn prefers to give it a different name, referring throughout to 'market intensification'.
He does this partly because – at this late date – there is, apparently, still widespread disagreement among historians about when the American industrial revolution began: was it the 1830s or 40s or 50s? Something was definitely changing about the scale of agricultural and semi-industrial production from the 1830s onwards – Hahn is suggesting a new term designed to more accurately convey the way existing structures of production and distribution didn't fundamentally change, but became larger in scale and more linked up. More intensified.
It's an interesting idea but it's quite subtle and I felt a) it requires more evidence and information to really back it up than he provides, and b) I don't, in the end, really care that much what it's called: I'd just like to have understood it better.
Show or Tell
You could also think of think of the two types of history book I referred to earlier as ones which show, and ones which tell. James M. McPherson's brilliant account of the civil war shows. He gives you all the facts, and the people, and quotes extensively from a wide range of sources. There are numerous maps, especially of all the key civil war battles, there are photographs which give you a strong feel for the era, there are diagrams and above all there are really extensive quotations from letters, speeches, articles and so on, so that you can read about the issues in the words of the people who were debating and arguing them.
As a result, McPherson's account is rich and varied and highly memorable. You remember the people and what they did and said and achieved. As you follow his intricate account of the war, complete with maps and detailed descriptions of each battle, you get a real sense of what was at stake and how contingent human affairs are.
Hahn tells
By contrast, Hahn tells you what happened, with no reference to maps, no graphs or photographs, with minimum quotations. For example, he doesn't give a single account of a civil war battle, and certainly no maps of them. All the evidence is subsumed to the need to make his case and put forward his theories.
But the risk of writing history in such a theory-heavy way is that your account might end up being more about yourself and your theories, than about the 'history'; that you spend ages asking academic type questions…
What was the character of American governance? On what axes did American politics turn? How far did slavery's reach extend, and what was its relation to American economic and political growth? How did the intensifying conflict over slavery turn into civil warfare, and in what ways did civil warfare transform the country? How integral was political violence and conquest to American development? How were relations of class, race and gender constructed, and what did they contribute to the dynamics of change? When did American industrialisation commence, and how rapidly did it unfold? How should we view popular radicalism of the late nineteenth century and its relationship to Progressivism? At what point could the United States be regarded as an empire, and how was empire constituted? (p.2)
… in order to devote the rest of the book to answering them in a similarly abstract, academic kind of way.
To give an example of the triumph of theory over detail, Hahn is heavily into modern identity politics and goes out of his way to discuss the history of women and of people of colour using the latest up-to-date sociological jargon.
Thus Hahn tells us that the nineteenth century family was a 'patriarchal institution' ruled by the 'patriarchal father' or the 'patriarchal husband'. He explains that 19th century American society was profoundly 'gendered' (a favourite word of his), a society in which people have defined themselves by 'gender stereotypes', where people carried out 'gendered divisions of labour', according to 'gendered norms' and 'gender conventions' and 'gender exclusions'. The more aggressive leaders of the era, such as presidents Andrew Jackson and Theodor Roosevelt, are both accused of 'masculinism'.
Similarly, Hahn loses no opportunity to tell us the big news that Southern slaveowners and their newspapers and politicians often expressed 'racist ideas' and 'racist conventions' and 'racist stereotypes' in 'racist' language.
The thing is – this is not really news. It is not that useful to be told that 19th century American society was sexist and racist. The use of the latest terminology can't hide the fact that this is pretty obvious stuff. Not only that, but it is deeply uninformative stuff.
Instead of giving specific, useful and memorable examples of the kind of behaviour he is deploring, there tend to be pages of the same, generalising, identity politics jargon.
Part of his attempt to overturn 'received opinion' is to attack the notion that slaves were the passive recipients of aid and help from well-meaning white abolitionists. Wherever he can, Hahn goes out of his way to show that it was the blacks themselves who organised resistance to slave-hunters, set up communications networks, who were aware of the political implications of the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion, who organised themselves into groups to flee their southern masters and make for the Union front line then, later, after the war, continued the struggle for equality, organised themselves into networks and groups at local and regional level, and won significant political and administrative posts across the South, before, eventually, an anti-black backlash set in during the 1870s.
In a similar spirit (that marginalised people weren't passive victims but strong independent people with their own agency who have all-too-often been written out of the story but whose voices he is now going to bravely present) Hahn refers a number of times to women organising as much political activity as they were then allowed to do, taking on domestic and cultural responsibilities, organising a Women's Convention in 1848, campaigning for women's suffrage throughout the later part of the century, fighting for admission to teaching and the professions, and so on.
Well and good, and interesting, in outline – but the way Hahn tells these stories is highly generalised, draped in politically correct phraseology, rather than illuminated by specific stories or incidents which really bring them to life.
McPherson shows
By contrast, McPherson shows us these forces in action. He devotes pages to giving the names and stories of specific women who helped transform the perception of women's abilities. These include the passages he devotes to the role of nurses during the war, and as workers in key industries depleted of men because of the draft.
I was fascinated by his description of the way that, in the pre-war period, the movement of women from being cottage industry producers to the heads of nuclear households in which the male now went out to earn a wage, represented a big step up in power and autonomy for women. Interesting, because so counter-intuitive.
McPherson shows the important role of women in the 1840s in creating a new market for consumer goods, which made America a pioneer in all sorts of household conveniences for the next century or more.
McPherson devotes a passage to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the bestselling novel of the 19th century, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
I was struck by McPherson's account of how women, in the 1830s and 40s began their dominance of the teaching profession, which has never gone away (in 2017 77% of teachers in the USA were female). The conference to launch the women's rights movement which Hahn gives one brief mention, McPherson devotes three pages to, with accounts of the women who organised it, and the debates it held (pp. 33-36).
Later on, McPherson has a section about medicine and nursing during the war where, in a nutshell, certain strong-willed women followed the example of Florence Nightingale and set up nursing homes and went into the field as nurses. These women nurses and organisers impressed the male medical establishment, the army and the politicians so much that it made many men revise their opinion of women's toughness. Notable pioneers included Clara Barton and Mary-Anne Bickerdyke (p.483) and Elizabeth Blackwell who, in 1849, became the first American woman to earn an MD.
The same went for factories and agriculture, especially in the North, where women were called in to replace men drafted into the army, and permanently expanded cultural norms about what women were capable of. (pp.477-489)
All this is in the McPherson. You can see how it is all immediately more interesting, more enlightening, and more useful knowledge than any number of references to 'gender stereotypes', 'gendered divisions of labour', 'gendered norms', 'gender conventions' and 'gender exclusions'.
And if you are a feminist or interested in what women did during this period, it is far more useful and empowering to be given specific names and events and stories, which you can then go and research further yourself, than bland generalisations. Being given the name and career of Mary-Anne Bickerdyke is more useful than being given another paragraph about 'gender conventions'.
Other problems with the book
1. Poor style
Hahn's prose style is awful. Pages go by full of anthropological and sociological jargon and utterly bereft of a single fact or name. Take this excerpt:
Although patrons expected favours and services from their office-holding clients, they had their own needs as well. Their power and prestige were enhanced by – often required – collections of followers who could offer loyalty, votes, skills, and readiness to intimidate foes, but all this came at the price of the rewards patrons had to make available: protection, work, credit, loans, assistance in times of trouble. (p.63)
Of what organised society is this not true? It could be describing power relations in ancient Rome, or Shogun Japan, or among the Aztecs.
Orotund Hahn's core style is orotund American academese which combines:
preferring pompous to simple words
identity politics jargon
Pompous locutions Favourite words include 'deem' instead of 'think', and 'avail' instead of 'take advantage of' or just 'use'. Hahn is particularly fond of 'contested spaces': America in the 19th century was thronged with 'contested spaces' and 'contested narratives' and 'contested meanings'. All sorts of social forces 'roil' or are 'roiled'. When he quotes speeches the speakers are always said to 'intone' the words. People never do something as a result of an event or development; he always say 'thereby' some great change took place.
Hahn has a habit of starting a sentence, then having second thoughts and inserting a long parenthesis before going on to finish the sentence – often combining two contradictory thoughts or ideas in one sentence, which forces you to stop and mentally disentangle them.
Cliché Given his bang up-to-date usage of latest PC jargon, it is a surprise that Hahn combines this with a fondness for really crass clichés. For example, early on tells us that General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna initially supported the setting up of a monarchy in Mexico, then:
in a veritable flash, he sided with the liberals and constitutionalists
'In a veritable flash'. a) That's not very impressive English and b) it's rather poor as historical explanation. Instead of serious analysis of Santa Anna's motives for this (apparently sudden) change of mind, he is treated like a character in a fairy story. Hahn's sense of human psychology is often disappointingly shallow. On the same page we are told that:
Santa Anna was haughty, temperamental, and guided chiefly by personal ambitions for power and adulation.
A political leader guided by a personal ambition for power. Fancy that. On page 24:
Napoleon, in his audacity, planned to reverse the wheels of history.
On page 29, President Andrew Jackson (who served for two terms, 1829 to 1837, and I think is seen as a bogeyman by liberals because he aggressively opened up the West to expansion by the slave states and capitalists, though it's difficult to tell from Hahn's book) is quoted in order to demonstrate the amorality of his expansionist vision:
'I assure you,' he boasted to the secretary of war, his imperial hunger not yet satisfied, 'Cuba will be ours in a day.'
'His imperial hunger not yet satisfied'. He sounds like a character in a fairy tale. Instead of stopping to convincingly explain to the reader why Jackson was such a Bad Bad Wolf, Hahn writes sentences like this about him:
In 1828, in an election that empowered white settlers west of the Appalachians and especially in the South, Andrew Jackson won the presidency, and the bell of doom began to toll.
Ah, 'the bell of doom'. That well-known tool of historical analysis. What is he talking about?
The spread of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s prompted pro-slavery counter-attacks on black churches or schools:
as the fires of hatred were fanned to a searing heat. (p.61)
Ah, the fires of hatred. Half a dozen times 'the writing is on the wall' for this or that person or movement. Indians, or blacks, or women, or strikers 'throw themselves into the fight against' the army or Southern racism or the patriarchy or capitalism. Oppositions 'dig in their heels' against governments.
Wrong usage Not only does he use surprisingly banal clichés, but Hahn is continually verging in the edge of 'malapropism', defined as: 'the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with an amusing effect'. Here is a paragraph of Hahn which seems to me to combine cliché with phrases where he's using words with slightly the wrong meaning.
Nearly one quarter of Santa Anna's troops fell at the Alamo… and the slaughters he authorised there and at Goliad touched a raw nerve of vengeance among those left to keep the Texas rebellion alive. Believing that he verged on total victory, Santa Anna planned a multi-pronged attack on Houston and divided his army to carry it out. But the winds of fortune (in this case a captured courier) enabled Houston to learn of Santa Anna's moves… (p.41)
'He verged on total victory' – can a person verge on anything? I thought only nouns could 'verge on' something, like the example given in an online dictionary: 'a country on the verge of destruction'. Maybe this is correct American usage, but it sounds to me like an example of malapropism, something which sounds almost correct but is somehow, subtly, comically, wrong.
Elsewhere I was brought up short when I read that:
The militant posture on the Oregon question helped the democrats and their candidate, James P. Polk from Tennessee… eke out a tight election. (p.122)
The dictionary definition of 'eke out' is 'to make (a living) or support (existence) laboriously'. Can it be applied to narrowly winning an election?
As for 'the winds of fortune' in the Santa Anna paragraph, that is just an awful cliché, isn't it? Surely any historian – any writer – who uses phrases like 'the winds of fortune' or 'the wheels of history' or 'the bell of doom' or 'the fires of hatred' to explain anything, can't be taken completely seriously.
2. Glossing over key events
Whereas McPherson dedicates a section of his book to a particular event, explains what led up to it, explains who the people were, gives extensive quotes explaining what they thought or planned to do, and then gives thorough descriptions of what happened – Hahn more often than not asks a sociological or anthropological question and then answers his own question at great length, only incorporating the subset of facts, events, people or quotes which suit his argument.
With the result that the book gives a very strong feeling that is it skipping over and omitting whole chunks of history because they don't suit his agenda.
To give an example, early on in the book there are a couple of fleeting references to 'the Alamo'. They come in the context of his discussion of the independence of Texas. Texas was initially a vast state or department of Mexico: the Mexicans invited or allowed American settlers to settle bits of it. Eventually these settlers decided they wanted to declare it a white American state. They were strongly encouraged by slave plantation owners in the Deep South who hoped they could export slavery to Texas.
Now this aim was itself only part of the wider 'imperial' aims of Southern slave owners who, in the 1830s and 1840s, envisioned creating a vast slave empire which stretched through Texas to the whole of California in the West, which would reach out to conquer Cuba for America, and which also would take control of some, or all, of Central America.
In this context, some notable American cowboys and adventurers took control of the Alamo and, when a Mexican army surrounded it, insisted on holding out till it was finally taken and everyone killed. From a macro perspective it was just one of the numerous clashes between American rebels and Mexican army from the period.
The point of explaining all this is that I know that The Alamo is part of American frontier legend. I know there's an expression: 'Remember the Alamo!' I know a big Hollywood movie was made about it starring John Wayne. I hoped that, by reading this book, I would discover just why it's so important in American folk mythology, what happened, who Jim Boone and the other 'heroes' of the Alamo were, and so on. I'm perfectly prepared to have the whole Hollywood 'myth' of the Alamo debunked, and to learn all kinds of squalid or disillusioning things about it, but I wanted to know more.
Not in this book I didn't. I didn't even get the debunking option. Instead Hahn more or less ignores 'the Alamo' because his focus in that particular chapter is on 'reconceptualising' that part of American history in terms of his broad meta-theme – the imperial fantasies of the southern slave-owners.
To find out more about the Alamo, I had to look it up online. Just like I ended up googling 'the Comancheria', 'the Indian Wars', the 'robber barons' and 'Reconstruction'.
The entire era from the 1870s to about 1900 in America is often referred to as 'the Gilded Age' (because really rich Americans began to ape the houses and lifestyles of aristocratic Europe) but Hahn uses this phrase only once, in passing, only at the very end of the book, and doesn't explain it. So once again I had to go off to the internet to really learn about the period.
Reading the book for information is an intensely frustrating experience.
3. No maps
The history of the United States in the 19th century is the story of its relentless geographical expansion – westwards across the continent, taking whatever territory it could by force, seizing Florida from Spain, seizing Texas and California from Mexico (in the 1846 Mexico War), doing its damnedest to conquer Canada but being held at bay by the British (in the war of 1812) – attempting to conquer islands in the Caribbean such as Cuba (in the 1850s), and stretching the long arm of its empire across the Pacific to seize little Hawaii in the 1870s, even creating a short-lived American regime in Nicaragua (in 1856-7).
To understand any of this at all – to see what was at stake, where places were, the route of invasions, the site of battles and so on – you need maps, lots of maps, but – THIS BOOK HAS NO MAPS.
Whoever took the decision not to commission clear, relevant, modern maps deeply damaged the usefulness of this book. In just the first fifty pages, Hahn describes the extent of Commanche land, the shape of 1830s Mexico, discusses the status of East and West Florida, describes the debates about the precise territory included in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, follows the march of Mexican General Santa Anna to locations in East Texas. WITH NO MAPS.
So, in order to understand any of these discussions, and any of the hundreds of discussions of geographical issues, places, conflicts packed throughout the book – you need to have an Atlas handy or, better still, read the book with a laptop or tablet next to you, so you can Google the maps of where he's talking about.
In fact, on page 33 I discovered that the book does contain maps, but that they are poor-quality reproductions of contemporary nineteenth-century maps which are, for all intents and purposes, impossible to read. Take this example, 'A Map of North America by Palairet', which doesn't even give you a date. The print is so tiny you can't make out a single place name except ATLANTIC OCEAN.
Map of North America by J. Palairet
I'm not often moved to get on a high horse about anything, but this is disgraceful. This volume is part of Penguin's multi-volume history of the United States. It was published in 2016. It's meant at some level to be a definitive history of the period. The decision not to commission a single clear modern map, and not to use any contemporary photographs, or diagrams or graphs, is inexcusable.
Here's another example, Bacon's Military Map of America from 1862, showing America's ports and fortifications. Can you read any of the place names? No. Can you see any of the ports and fortifications? No. Is this map of any use whatsoever? No. It's a token gesture, and almost an insulting one at that.
Bacon's Military Map of America, 1862
Part two 1865-1910
I've read several accounts of the civil war but know next to nothing about the period which followed it. That's why I bought this book and I certainly learned a lot, though all the time having to struggle through a) Hahn's unfriendly prose style b) with the constant feeling that I wasn't being told the full story of events but only what Hahn wanted to tell me in order to make his points with and c) without any maps, diagrams of photographs to refer to.
The key points of the period which I took away are:
The administrative centralisation begun during the War of the Rebellion continued at accelerating pace for the rest of the century and into the 20th century, though not without all kinds of opposition.
'Reconstruction' is the name given to the period immediately following the War of the Rebellion, when the North tried to rebuild the South in its own image. Abraham Lincoln was shot on 15 April 1865. He was succeeded by vice-president Andrew Johnson who, unlike Lincoln and the Republican party which had dominated the Congress and Senate during the war, was a Democrat. For a fatal year Johnson was fantastically lenient to Southern soldiers and leaders, letting them return home with their weapons, and return to their former positions of power. Congress, however, saw that the Southerners were simply reinstituting their racist rule over the blacks and so superseded Johnson, implementing a new, more military phase of Reconstruction, by sending the chief Northern generals to administer the South under what amounted to martial law. Thus there are two periods: Presidential Reconstruction 1865-67, and Congressional Reconstruction 1867 to 77.
Some of the colonels and generals who had risen to prominence in the War of the Rebellion were sent West to quell risings by native Indians, for example the Sioux Rebellion of 1862. There then followed about 20 years in which the U.S. government and army broke every agreement with the Indians, harried and pursued them, bribed and bullied them onto ever-shrinking 'reservations'. Some administrators and military men openly stating that they aimed to 'exterminate' the Indians. (General Sheridan called for a 'campaign of annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction', p.379). It is ironic that Americans in the 20th century were so quick to criticise the British Empire and its colonial grip over native peoples, given that America did its damnedest to exterminate its own native peoples.
Describing what happened in the South from 1865 to 1910 is long and complex. But basically, there was ten years or so of Reconstruction, when the Republican government freed the slaves, gave them the vote, and tried to encourage their integration into economic life. This period ended around 1876 as the Republican Party lost its radical edge and became increasingly associated with northern capitalism. More to the point, the U.S. Army was withdrawn and the southern, racist Democrat party took over. They quickly began passing a whole raft of laws which brought about institutionalised 'Segregation'. For example, during Reconstruction the number of black voters was huge, 80% or more of all adult black men, with the result that an astonishing number of local officials, judges and even governors were black. With the revival of the Democrats into the 1880s, all the southern states, starting with Mississippi in 1890, passed voter registration laws requiring voters to demonstrate specified levels of literacy, live in fixed abodes or even pay a small fee ($2) – with the result that voter levels fell to something like 5%! (pp.470-473).
This was one of the biggest things I learned from the book. Realising that it wasn't slavery, or the Reconstruction period – it was this backlash during the 1870s and 1880s which instituted the Jim Crow legislation, the official segregation, the systemic impoverishment of black people, which was to last until the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s.
This is quite mind-boggling, a massive stain right the way through American history. It made me rethink my attitude towards slavery: I've read numerous books about slavery, seen movies and TV series about slavery, stood in front of statues against slavery, visited exhibitions about slavery.
But reading these pages made me realise that slavery isn't at all the problem; that slavery is now so distant in time as to be almost irrelevant. It was this institutional racial Segregation, instituted across the Deep South of America, and whose ideology – if not its laws – spread to the North and West, infected all of American life – which is the real issue.
It was the deliberate trapping of black people in the lowliest, poorest-paid jobs, and their systematic exclusion from voting and public life, the division of parks and public places, theatres and toilets and buses into black areas and white areas – this is the thing to understand better because, as far as I can see, it continues to this day, albeit more subtly. #BlackLivesMatter.
In a way, then, the emphasis which is still given by schools and exhibitions to slavery is misleading. Slavery was abolished 180 years ago in the British Empire and 155 years ago in America. This book made me realise that understanding the philosophy and practice of Racial Segregation is much more important and much more relevant to our ongoing problems today.
Capitalism and its enemies
What feels like the lion's share of the last 100 pages of the book is devoted to the consolidation of capitalism, and its enemies. There are detailed passages describing the rise of the 'corporation', as a new legal and commercial entity, quite different from the companies and partnerships which had preceded it (pp.454-464). I didn't understand the legal and commercial details and will need to study them elsewhere.
Hahn is at pains to describe the way successive federal administrations, although equivocal about the massive cartels and monopolies which came to prominence in the 1890s, nonetheless took them as almost natural agencies which the government could use and work through – as potential extensions of state power. By the 1890s everyone on left and right thought that these huge monopolies (of railways, gold, silver, copper, iron, steel) a) were here for good b) that the reach and effectiveness of these huge transcontinental corporations or agencies could be a model for modern government.
Behind all this is the Rise of the Nation-State, the grand theme Hahn has been tracing since the 1830s. But although the various aspects of its rise is the central development, Hahn's focus is much more about the multitude of forces which resisted the rise of the state, criticised, questioned, critiqued it, from both left and right.
So these last hundred pages devote a lot of time to the confusing multitude of opposition parties which rose up against the, by now, time-honoured duopoly of Republicans and Democrats.
We learn about greenbackism, anti-monopolism, the Populist party, the Progressive Party, the rise of mass trade unions, the Knights of Labour and the first socialist parties – and then descend into the jungle of disagreements and bickering among working class parties – socialist, syndicalist, anarchist, gradualist, evolutionary, revolutionary.
There is a lot about the strikes – kicked off by the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 – which blighted American industry in the 1880s and 1890s, all a revelation to me.
A softer, liberal version of resistance to monopoly capitalism came to be termed the Progressive movement, the idea that progressive politicians should use the levers of the state to combat alcoholism, illiteracy, corruption, infectious disease, prostitution, greed and labour exploitation (p.454). This movement laid the basis of what would later become the American welfare state (such as it is).
Some tried to bring the opposing blocs together. Liberal capitalists formed the National Civic Federation (NCF) in 1900, which brought together chosen representatives of big business and organized labour, as well as consumer advocates, in an attempt to resolve labour disputes and champion moderate reform.
The final pages describe how the whole American imperial mindset was then exported, just at the turn of the century, to Cuba and the Philippines, which America won off Spain as a result of victory in the following Spain's defeat in the 1898 Spanish–American War, along with Guam and Puerto Rico, and also to Hawaii which, after decades of slowly taking over, America completely annexed in 1898.
Hahn shows how the same military leaders who had crushed the Indians were now sent to impose 'civilisation' on the Cubans and Filipinos, and with much the same mindset.
By now we are very familiar with American racist and segregationist thinking and so are not surprised when Hahn quotes racist comments by soldiers and administrators, or the speeches of politicians back in Washington, who thought people from inferior races i.e. the multicultural populations of Cuba, the Philippines and so on – simply weren't capable of governing themselves, and needed the steady hand and civilising influence of the white man.
By the end of this book, I really hated America.
Old for us, new to the Yanks
I can't get over the fact that so much of this seems to be new to the book's reviewers. Back when I was a kid in school in the 1970s, I'm sure we all knew about American slavery. I remember the stir caused by the TV series Roots when it came out in 1977, over 40 years ago. All of us knew about the American Civil War, and maybe even had confederate flags or union caps among the various cowboy and Indian and army costumes we wore when we were ten. When I was a student, a friend of mine bought me Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, the classic 1970 account of how America betrayed, bullied, and massacred its native peoples.
I'm sure all educated people knew about this history and these issues decades ago. The people around me in the Labour Party of the 1970s, the party of Tony Benn and Michael Foot, were very well aware of America's history of imperialism, its origins in brutal slavery which it didn't abolish until the 1860s, how it exterminated its native peoples, reached out to seize islands in the Pacific, in the Caribbean, and to dominate the nations to Central America, before going on to its long history of supporting military dictators, torture and assassination (in my youth these included the Shah of Iran, General Pinochet in Chile, General Franco in Spain, the military Junta in Greece, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and so on.)
In the 1980s I hung around the communist bookshop in Brixton which was absolutely plastered with posters about American racism and the legacy of slavery, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, protests against American imperialism and American multinational corporations and the CIA. Entrenched anti-Americanism was an absolutely basic, entry-level element of left-wing political awareness.
Yet somehow, in these books by Hahn and Alan Taylor, a lot of these things – the brutality of southern slavery, the genocide of the Indians – are presented as if they are new and seismic discoveries.
I think what is happening here is that American academic history writing has finally caught up with how the rest of the world has seen America for generations – a hypocritical bully bragging about 'liberty' while keeping the descendants of the slaves locked up in drug-riddled ghettos, the last native Americans stuck in alcohol-soaked reservations, and propping up dictatorships around the world.
I think part of what's going on in books like Taylor's and Hahn's is that, since the end of the Cold War, American academia has finally become free to portray the brutal realities of American history for what they were – and that, for American readers and students, a lot of this comes as a massive, horrifying shock. But to educated, and especially left-of-centre people throughout the rest of the world – yawn.
So if so much of the content has been so well known for so long, what was it that impressed the reviewers? I think it's the unrelenting consistency with which he does two things:
One is the thorough-going application of a politically correct, identity-politics attitude which says right from the start that he is going to ignore a number of 'famous' events or movements or names (goodbye civil war, hello war of rebellion), in order to give more prominence to the role of native Americans, women and, especially, to blacks, than they have received in 'previous' histories.
But as I've commented above, very often Hahn's widespread use of politically correct terminology like 'patriarchy' and 'gender stereotypes' and 'racism' and 'masculinism' in the passages where he does this, tends (paradoxically) to obscure a lot of these voices, to bury them beneath a shiny sociological jargon which removes specificity – names, places, events and even words – from many of the groups he's supposedly championing. In this simple respect, I've found much older accounts to be far more enlightening.
In fact, it is possible to argue that Hahn and all the other politically correct historians who nowadays use terms like 'patriarchy' and 'gender' and 'people of colour' do so because these terms in fact fend off real acceptance of the blood and horror of those times. These sterile, clinical and detached terms in a way help to drain accounts of the period of their emotion and outrage. You could argue that the language of identity politics, the jargon of sociology and anthropology which recurs throughout the book, despite his explicit intention to bring uncomfortable facts and ignored voices into the light – in fact, through its sheer repetitiveness and its unspecific generalisation – works to neutralise and blunt the impact of a lot of what he's describing.
For example, Hahn gives facts and figures and sociological explanations for the rise of slave fugitives following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. But McPherson, writing thirty one years ago, and without using any jargon, tells the specific story of the slave woman who escaped with her children to the North, but was tracked down. As the slave-hunters, with their dogs and guns, beat on the door of the cabin where she was hiding, this woman cut the throats of her small children so they wouldn't be taken back into slavery, and then tried to cut her own.
You can see which approach leaves you most stunned, horrified and angry at the unspeakable horror of slavery, and it isn't Hahn's.
This is because the second thing going on in the book is what really garnered the praise, and that is Hahn's high-level, intellectual and often bloodless 'rethinking' and 'reconceptualising' of the era in the terms I outlined at the start of the review.
He is interested in suggesting to highly educated readers already familiar with most elements of the period some new ways of thinking about it. Throughout, he downplays the voices of the white politicians who (I'm guessing) dominated earlier narratives, he really downplays the War of the Rebellion (maybe because there are already tens of thousands of other accounts of it), and instead plays up the notion that the increasingly centralised American state faced a whole slew of rebellions from multiples sources, devoting his time to describing and theorising this riot of rebellions.
And so he ignores what I'm assuming is the old-fashioned type of history which celebrated the rise of American freedom and capitalism and wealth and included lots of dazzling images from the 'Gilded Age', and he focuses instead on the wide range of oppositions which the state (and rich monopolists) faced from women, Indians, blacks, alternative political parties, the trade unions, socialists and so on.
But I find it difficult to believe that all previous histories of this period utterly failed to mention the movement for women's suffrage, that there aren't hundreds of books about the Indians, and thousands about Segregation, that nobody noticed the epidemic of strikes in the 1890s, or that numerous commentators at the time (and ever since) haven't criticised America's interventions in Cuba and Hawaii and the Philippines as being as blatantly imperialist as the European Empires her politicians liked to piously denounce.
Maybe some of Hahn's high-level reconceptualising is new and interesting, but to the average educated reader the actual events of this era remain unchanged and the main feature of Hahn's book is that he doesn't tell them as fully or as imaginatively as other versions do.
Don't read this book unless you are already master enough of the period to appreciate Hahn's reconceptualising of it. If you want vivid detail, maps, extensive quotes and a deep understanding of the period from 1820 to 1865, read Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson: so gripping, so packed with information and ideas, that I had to write five separate blog posts about it.
For the period after the Civil War – I have still to find a satisfactory history. Reading this book suggests I may have to track down separate books devoted to specific areas such as the Indian Wars, the Gilded Age with its labour militancy underside, segregation and its long-term consequences, and the imperial conquests at the end of the century.
A Nation Without Borders The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 on Amazon
Related book reviews
American Revolutions: A Continental History 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor (2016)
The Global Seven Years War by Daniel A. Baugh (2011)
Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence by John Ferling (2007)
The War of 1812 by Carl Benn (2006)
Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild (2005)
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire by Niall Ferguson (2004)
1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World by Frank McLynn (2004)
American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800 by Alan Taylor (2001)
Battle For Empire: The Very First World War by Tom Pocock (1998)
Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (2) by James Walvin (1992)
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (5) by James M. McPherson (1987)
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Posted in America, Books, Feminism, History, War
Tagged #blacklivesmatter, 1830-1910, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars 1830-1910, Abraham Lincoln, Alan Taylor, American Civil War, American Colonies, American Empire, American imperialism, Andrew Jackson, anti-monopolism, Battle Cry of Freedom, British Empire, Chile, CIA, Civil Rights Movement, Clara Barton, Congressional Reconstruction, Cuba, Deep South of America, Elizabeth Blackwell, Ferdinand Marcos, gender conventions, gender exclusions, gender stereotypes, gendered divisions of labour, gendered norms, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, General Franco, General Pinochet, General Sheridan, Gilded Age, Great Railroad Strike, greenbackism, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hawaii, history, Indian Wars, James M. McPherson, Jim Boone, Jim Crow, John Wayne, Knights of Labour, Malcolm X, market intensification, market revolution, Martin Luther King, Mary-Anne Bickerdyke, masculinism, Mexico War, Napoleon, native Americans, Nicaragua, patriarchy, Populist party, Presidential Reconstruction, Progressive Party, Progressivism, Reconstruction, robber barons, Segregation, sexism, Shah of Iran, Slavery, socialism, Spanish–American War, Steven Hahn, The Alamo, The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, Theodor Roosevelt, Uncle Tom's Cabin, War of 1812, War of the Rebellion, women's suffrage
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/10/26/a-nation-without-borders-steven-hahn/
The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis (2005)
Lenin, following Marx, assumed the incompatibility of class interests: because the rich would always exploit the poor, the poor had no choice but to supplant the rich. [President Woodrow] Wilson, following Adam Smith, assumed the opposite: that the pursuit of individual interests would advance everyone's interests, thereby eroding class differences while benefiting both the rich and the poor. These were, therefore, radically different solutions to the problem of achieving social justice within modern industrial societies. At the time the Cold War began it would not have been at all clear which was going to prevail.
(The Cold War, page 89)
Gaddis (b.1941) is a renowned academic expert on the Cold War and has been teaching and writing about it since the 1970s. The preface to this book explains that his students and publishers suggested he write a popular, brief overview of the subject, and this book is the result.
The cover of the Penguin paperback edition promises to give you the lowdown on 'the deals, the spies, the lies, the truth' but this is quite misleading. Along with Len Deighton's description of it as 'gripping', it gives the impression that the book is a rip-roaring narrative of an action-packed era, full of intrigue and human interest.
Cover of the Penguin edition of The Cold War
Academic and theoretical approach
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the book feels very much like a textbook to accompany a university course in international studies. It doesn't give a chronological narrative of the Cold War and certainly has no eyewitness accounts or personal stories of the kind that bring to life, for example, Jim Baggott's history of the atom bomb, Atomic, or Max Hasting's history of the Korean War.
Instead, the book is divided into seven themed chapters and an epilogue which deal at a very academic level with the semi-abstract theories of international affairs and geopolitics.
Nuclear weapons and the theory of war
So, for example, the second chapter, about the atom bomb, certainly covers all the key dates and developments, but is at its core an extended meditation on the German theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz's, famous dictum that war 'is a continuation of political activity by other means' (quoted p.51). The chapter shows how U.S. presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, and their Russian opposite numbers, Stalin and Khrushchev, worked through the implications of this profound insight.
If war only exists to further the interests of the state (as it had done through all recorded history up till 1945) then a war which threatens, in fact which guarantees, the destruction of the very state whose interests it is meant to be furthering, is literally inconceivable.
Truman showed he had already grasped some of this when he removed the decision to deploy atom bombs from the military – who were inclined to think of it as just another weapon, only bigger and better – and made use of the atom bomb the sole decision of the civilian power i.e. the president.
But as the atom bombs of the 1940s were superseded by the hydrogen bombs of the 1950s, it dawned on both sides that a nuclear war would destroy the very states it was meant to protect, with profound consequences for military strategy.
This insight came very close to being ignored during the darkest days of the Korean War, when the massed Chinese army threatened to push the Allies right out of the Korean peninsula and plans were drawn up to drop atom bombs on numerous Chinese cities. Then again, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, American generals were advising president Kennedy to authorise a devastating first strike on the Soviet Union with results not wildly exaggerated in Kubrick's bleak nuclear satire, Dr Stangelove.
And yet both times the civilian authority, in the shape of Presidents Truman and Kennedy, rejected the advice of their military and refused the use of nuclear weapons. Truman signalled to both China and Russia that the Korean War would remain a conventional war limited to Korea only. And Kennedy made significant concessions to the Soviets to defuse the Cuba situation. We aftercomers owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the wisdom and restraint of both these men.
It is by following the ramifications of the new theory of war created by the advent of nuclear weapons, that Gaddis makes sense of a number of Cold War developments. For example, the development of regular meetings to discuss arms limitations which took place between the Cold War antagonists from the Cuban crisis onwards, talks which continued to be fractious opportunities for propaganda but which proved Churchill's dictum that 'jaw jaw is better than war war'.
Capitalism versus communism
If chapter two considered the evolution of new military theory during the war, chapter three covers much the same chronological period but looked at in terms of socio-economic theory, starting with a very basic introduction to theories of Marxism and capitalism, and then seeing how these played out after World War One.
Gaddis deploys a sequence of significant dates from succeeding decades, which tell the story of the decline and fall of communism:
in 1951 all nations were recovering from the devastation of war, the USSR had established communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and a newly communist China was challenging the West's staying power in Korea
in 1961 Nikita Khrushchev visited America and gleefully told his audience that the communist countries would surge ahead in economic production and 'bury' the West
by 1971, as consumerism triumphed in the West, all the communist economies were stagnating and communism in China was accompanied by inconceivable brutality and mass murder
by 1981 life expectancy in the Soviet Union was in decline and Russia was mired in a pointless war in Afghanistan
by 1991 the Soviet Union and all the communist East European regimes had disappeared, while China was abandoning almost all its communist policies, leaving 'communism' to linger on only in the dictatorships of Cuba and North Korea
Capitalism won the Cold War. Marx claimed to have revealed the secrets of history, that the capitalist system was inevitably doomed to collapse because the exploited proletariat would be inevitably grow larger as the ruling capitalist class concentrated all wealth unto itself, making a proletariat revolution inevitable and unstoppable.
In direct contradiction to this, living standards in all capitalist countries for everyone are unrecognisably higher than they were 100 years ago.
Marx predicted that his communist revolution could only happen in advanced industrial countries where the capitalists had accumulated all power and the proletariat forced to rebel. In the event, communist revolutions turned out to be a characteristic of very backward, feudal or peasant countries, namely Russia and China, later Cuba, and then a sorry string of Third World basket cases – Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan. It only ever existed in Eastern Europe because it was imposed by Russia's military dictatorship, and here was thrown off the second that Russia's tyrannical grip was loosened. It was the tragedy of both Russia and China that, in order to make their countries conform to Marx's theories, their leaders undertook policies of forced collectivisation and industrialisation which led to the deaths by starvation or murder of as many as 50 million people, generally the very poorest. Communism promised to liberate the poor. In fact it ended up murdering the poorest of the poor in unprecedented numbers.
Lenin's 1916 tract, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, is an interesting analysis of the history of the European empires up to that date and a contribution to the vast debate over the origins of the First World War. But its key practical suggestion was that capitalist states will always be driven by boundless greed and, therefore, inevitably, unstoppably, must always go to war.
Gaddis shows how Stalin and Mao shared this doctrinaire belief and how it led them to bad miscalculations. Because in direct contradiction to the notion of inevitable inter-capitalist war, American presidents Truman and Eisenhower, both with experience of the Second World War, grasped some important and massive ideas, the central one being that America could no longer be isolationist but needed to create (and lead) a union of capitalist countries, to build up economic and military security, to ensure they never again went to war.
This was a big shift. Throughout the 19th century America concentrated on settling its own lands and building up its economy, happily ignoring developments beyond its borders. Despite President Wilson's achievement in persuading Americans to intervene in the Great War, immediately afterwards they relapsed into isolationism, refusing to join the League of Nations and indifferent to the rise of authoritarian regimes in Russia, Germany and Japan.
After the cataclysm of the Second World War, American policy shifted massively, finding expression in the Truman Doctrine, President Truman's pledge that America would help and support democracies and free peoples around the world to resist communism. To be precise:
'It must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.' (Truman's speech to Congress on 12 March 1947)
The doctrine was prompted by practical intervention ($400 million) to support the anti-communist forces during Greece's Civil war (1945-49), which the Americans felt also had to be balanced by support ($100 million) for Turkey. In both respects the Americans were taking over from aid formerly provided by Britain, now no longer able to afford it. The doctrine's implicit strategy of 'containment' of the USSR, led on to the creation of NATO in 1949 and the Marshall Plan for massive American aid to help the nations of Western Europe rebuild their economies.
Of course it was in America's self-interest to stem the tide of communism, but this doesn't really detract from the scale of the achievement – it was American economic intervention which helped rebuild the economies, and ensured freedom from tyranny, for France, West Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Belgium and Holland (in Europe) and Japan and South Korea in the Far East. Hundreds of millions of people have led lives of freedom and fulfilment because of the decisions of the Truman administration.
The power of weakness
Of course the down side of this vast new expansion of America's overseas commitment was the way it turned into a long and dishonourable tradition of America supporting repellent dictators and right-wing rulers solely because they were the only available anti-communist force.
This lamentable tradition kicked off with America's ambivalent support for Chiang Kai-shek, the semi-fascist Nationalist leader who America supported in China, then the repellent Syngman Rhee in South Korea, through Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, General Pinochet in Chile, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and so on and so on.
This dark side to American post-war foreign policy is well-known, but what's thought-provoking about Gaddis's account is the thesis he hangs his fourth chapter on, a teasing paradox which only slowly emerges – that many of these small, 'dependent' nations ended up able to bend the Superpowers to their will, by threatening to collapse.
Thus many of the repellent dictators America found itself supporting were able to say: 'If you don't support me, my regime will collapse and then the communists will take over.' The paradox is that it was often the weakest powers which ended up having the the strongest say over Superpower policy – thus Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist regime was able to summon up American support, as was the equally unpleasant Sygman Rhee in South Korea, because America regarded their states as buffers to communist expansion, which meant the dictators could get away with murder – and still be supported, often reluctantly, by the U.S.
But the same could also go for medium-size allies. In 1950 both France and China very much needed their respective sponsors, America and the Soviet Union. But by 1960 both were more confident of their economic and military power and by the late 1960s both were confident enough to throw off their shackles: General de Gaulle in France notoriously withdrew from NATO and proclaimed France's independence while in fact continuing to benefit from NATO and American protection: France was weak enough to proclaim its independence while, paradoxically, America the superpower had to put up with de Gaulle's behaviour because they needed France to carry on being an ally in Western Europe.
Mao Zedong was in awe of Stalin and relied on his good opinion and logistical support throughout his rise to power in China in 1949 until Stalin's death in 1953. This lingering respect for the USSR lingered on through the 1950s, but China came to despise the weakness of Stalin's successor, Khrushchev, and the feebleness of the USSR's hold over its East European satellites, especially after they rose up in revolt (East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968).
I didn't know that border incidents between China and Russia flared up in 1969 and spread: for a while it looked as if the world's two largest communist powers would go to war – contradicting Lenin's thesis.
This of course presented the West with a great opportunity to divide the two communist behemoths, and Gaddis is favourable to President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for the brave decision they took to visit China, to meet Mao in person and try to develop better trade and cultural links.
The Chinese, surrounded by a menacing Russia to the north, neutral India to the West and the traditional enemy, Japan, to the East, realised there was merit in reaching an understanding with distant America. Nixon realised what an enormous coup it would be to prise apart the two largest communist nations, as well as helping sort out some kind of end to the disastrous war in Vietnam.
By this stage, 25 or so years into the Cold War, the relative simplicity of a bipolar world divided between two superpowers had become considerably more complicated, increasing complexity created by the newly independent nations of the developing or Third World, and the growth of a would-be 'non-aligned' group of nations seeking to avoid entanglement with either side, but cannily playing both superpowers off against each other in order to extract maximum advantage.
These first chapters deal with:
the realisation of the nuclear stalemate and its implications i.e. superpower war is self-defeating
the failure of both capitalism and communism to deliver what they promised
the realisation by 'weak' states that they could use the superpower rivalry to their advantage
Further chapters discuss:
Human rights The rise of the notion of human rights and universal justice, which was increasingly used to hold both superpowers to ever-tighter account. Gaddis looks in detail at the slow growth of official lying and 'deniability' within American foreign policy (epitomised by the growth in espionage carried out by the CIA) which reached its nadir when the systematic lying of President Nixon unravelled after Watergate.
Gaddis compares the discrediting of American policy with the long-term effects of the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968. In a kind of mirror of the Watergate experience, the Soviet repression in Czechoslovakia planted seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of communist rule in the minds of much of the Soviet population and especially among its intellectuals. From the 1970s onwards the Soviets had to cope with home-grown 'dissidents', most notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.
Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev worked hard to secure the 'Helsinki Accords', a contract with the West giving a permanent written guarantee of the security of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. He allowed the declarations of human rights which made up its latter sections to be inserted by the West as a necessary concession, but was appalled when these began to be used by dissidents within Russia to measure the government by.
When a Czech rock band was arrested in 1977 leading intellectuals protested and signed Charter 77, which politely called on the Czech communist government to respect the human rights which were paid lip service in the Czech communist constitution and the Helsinki Accords. And when the first Polish pope, Pope John Paul II, visited his homeland in 1979, he also called on the Polish government to respect human rights as defined in the Helsinki Accords.
Gaddis identifies this emergence of human rights, a realm of authenticity over and above the laws or actions of any actual government, of either West or East, as a major development in the 1970s.
The power of individuals A chapter is devoted to the importance of individuals in history – contrary to Marxist theory which believes in historical inevitabilities driven by the power of the masses. Thus Gaddis gives pen portraits of key players in the final years of communism, namely Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Vaclav Havel and Lech Wałęsa, but above all space is given to the importance of Ronald Reagan.
Gaddis explains that détente, the strategic policy developed by President Nixon and continued by Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and on the Soviet side agreed by Brezhnev, amounted to an acceptance of the status quo, especially the borders in Europe, and thus solidified Russia's grasp in the East. With these borders defined and agreed, both sides could:
a) Settle down to a routine of talks about reducing nuclear weapons (which, by this stage, came in all shapes and sizes and hence the complexity of the Strategic Arms Limitations (SALT)) talks.
b) Sublimate their confrontation into the developing world: hence the stream of local conflicts in far away countries like Ethiopia or Nicaragua, although Gaddis quotes Kremlin advisers confessing that the Soviet leadership often had second thoughts about getting involved in some of these remote conflicts, e.g. in Angola or Somalia, but felt trapped by the logic of being seen to support 'national liberation struggles' wherever they involved self-proclaimed Marxist parties.
At the time it felt as if Soviet communism was successfully funding revolutions and spreading its tentacles around the world; only in retrospect do we see all this as the last gasps of a flailing giant. According to Gaddis, the great political visionary who brought it to its knees was Ronald Reagan!
As someone alive and politically active during the 1980s I know that the great majority of the British people saw Reagan as a bumbling fool, satirised in the Spitting Image TV show in a recurring sketch called 'The President's brain is missing'. To my amazement, in Gaddis's account (and others I've read) he is portrayed as a strategic genius (one of America's 'sharpest grand strategists ever' p.217) who swept aside détente in at least two ways:
a) Reagan thought communism was an aberration, 'a bizarre chapter' (p.223) in human history which was destined to fail. So instead of accepting its potentially endless existence (like Nixon, Ford and Carter) his strategy and speeches were based on the idea that it would inevitably collapse (for example, in his famous speech in Berlin when he called on Mr Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall').
b) Similarly, Reagan rejected the entire twisted logic of mutually assured destruction which had grown up around nuclear weapons: he was the first genuine nuclear abolitionist to inhabit the White House, hence his outrageous offer to Gorbachev at the Iceland summit for both sides to get rid of all their nuclear weapons. And when Gorbachev refused, Reagan announced the development of his Strategic Defence Initiative (nicknamed Star Wars) i.e. the creation of a satellite shield which would shoot down any incoming nuclear missiles attacking the United States, thus rendering Russia's nuclear arsenal obsolete, but also dangerously disturbing the delicate balance of power.
At the time these destabilising words and actions seemed reckless and dangerous, and what Gaddis portrays as the entrenched détente establishment on both sides strongly criticised Reagan. It is only with the enormous benefit of hindsight – the knowledge that the Soviet Union and communism collapsed like a pack of cards in 1989 – that Reagan's approach and all his speeches take on the light not of a mad old man (he was 74 when Gorbachev came to power in 1985) but of a bold visionary.
The steady growth in Reagan's stature is a salutary lesson in how history works, how what we think about a period we've actually lived through can be completely transformed and reinterpreted in the light of later events. How our beginnings have no inkling of our ends. An object lesson in the severe limitations of human understanding.
To summarise: The Cold War is not a straightforward historical account of the era 1945 to 1991 – it is really a series of thought-provoking and stimulating essays on key aspects and themes from the era. Each chapter could easily form the basis of a fascinating discussion or seminar (of the kind that Gaddis has no doubt supervised by the hundred). Thus coverage of specific incidents and events is always secondary to the ideas and theories of geopolitics and international strategic ideas which the period threw up in such abundance, and which are the real focus of the text.
It's a fascinating book full of unexpected insights and new ways of thinking about the recent past.
I was politically active during the 1970s and 1980s, so I remember the later stages of the Cold War vividly. Maybe the biggest single takeaway from this book is that this entire era is now a 'period' with a beginning, a middle and an end, which can be studied as a whole. As it recedes in time it is becoming a simplified artefact, a subject for study by GCSE, A-level and undergraduate students who have no idea what it felt like to live under the ever-present threat of nuclear war and when communism still seemed a viable alternative to consumer capitalism.
Although many of its effects and implications linger on, with every year that passes the Cold War becomes a distant historical epoch, as dry and theoretical as the Fall of the Roman Empire or the Thirty Years War. I try to explain how it felt to be alive in the 1980s to my children and they look at me with blank incomprehension. So this is what it feels like to become history.
The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis was published by Allen Lane in 2005. All quotes and references are to the 2007 Penguin paperback edition.
The Cold War on Amazon
A Brief History of the Spy by Paul Simpson (2013)
Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum (2012)
Atomic by Jim Baggott (2009)
The Korean War by Max Hastings (1987)
by Simon on February 2, 2017 • Permalink
Posted in China, History, Second World War, War
Tagged 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 2005, Adam Smith, Afghanistan, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Angola, atom bomb, Berlin Wall, Brezhnev, capitalism, Charter 77, Chiang Kai-shek, China, CIA, Communism, containment, Cuban Missile Crisis, Czechoslovakia, deniability, dissident, Eastern Europe, Eisenhower, Ethiopia, General de Gaulle, General Pinochet, geopolitics, Gerald Ford, Germany, Greek civil war, Helsinki Accords, Henry Kissinger, history, human rights, Hungary, hydrogen bomb, international affairs, Iraq, Japan, Jim Baggott, Jimmy Carter, John Lewis Gaddis, Kennedy, Khrushchev, Korea, Lech Wałęsa, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Margaret Thatcher, Marx, Mikhael Gorbachev, Ngo Dinh Diem, Nicaragua, Nixon, nuclear weapons, Paul Simpson, Poland, Pope John Paul II, Russia, Saddam Hussein, SALT, Second World War, Somalia, Soviet Union, Stalin, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, Strategic Defence Initiative, Syngman Rhee, the Cold War, the Shah of Iran, the Truman Doctrine, theory of war, Truman, Turkey, USSR, Vaclav Havel, Vietnam, von Clausewitz, Woodrow Wilson
Posted by Simon on February 2, 2017
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/the-cold-war-john-lewis-gaddis/