The Americans were not the last people to consider the utility of forming a political union to survive and win a war. In 1940 Winston Spencer Churchill was just as desperate.

On May 10, 1940, Churchill was made Prime Minister of the United Kingdom by King George VI, not elected, chosen by the king; and that same day Adolf Hitler invaded Western Europe. Sometimes history does look like destiny.

In June, Churchill realized that the best way to defeat Germany was to use the French and British overseas empires to regroup and buy time. Combined, their manpower and resources would have overwhelmed Germany. They needed France to stay in the fight. Especially the French Fleet needed to keep fighting so that Germany would have no chance at sea.

Although both countries had agreed that neither country would agree to a separate peace with Nazi Germany, by the second week of June it was clear that France was facing the total defeat of their European army. On 15 June the French Cabinet voted—against the wishes of Prime Minister Paul Reynaud—to ask Hitler for terms. Reynaud wanted to keep fighting, he knew the government could retreat to Algeria and use its powerful and undefeated navy to keep Germany from crossing the Mediterranean. It was then that Reynaud heard the proposal for union with the British:

June 16, 1940

At this most fateful moment in the history of the modern world the Governments of the United Kingdom and the French Republic make this declaration of indissoluble union and unyielding resolution in their common defence of justice and freedom, against subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves.

The two Governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations but one Franco-British Union. The constitution of the Union will provide for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial, and economic policies. Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain, every British subject will become a citizen of France.

Both countries will share responsibility for the repair of the devastation of war, wherever it occurs in their territories, and the resources of both shall be equally, and as one, applied to that purpose.

During the war there shall be a single war Cabinet, and all the forces of Britain and France, whether on land, sea, or in the air, will be placed under its direction. It will govern from wherever it best can. The two Parliaments will be formally associated.

The nations of the British Empire are already forming new armies. France will keep her available forces in the field, on the sea, and in the air.

The Union appeals to the United States to fortify the economic resources of the Allies and to bring her powerful material aid to the common cause.

The Union will concentrate its whole energy against the power of the enemy no matter where the battle may be. And thus we shall conquer. 1 (emphasis added)

This was not just some scheme hatched by Churchill. In reality, the French administrative wizard Jean Monnet was the mastermind. Monnet was in London as the chairman of the Anglo-French Coordination Committee, setup to integrate the resources of France and Britain for the war effort. Monnet understood organizational communication and how to weld together resources and means to achieve practical political ends. He shared his plan with Churchill, the British cabinet and the newly promoted brigadier general Charles de Gaulle who was also in London. It was Charles de Gaulle who told Prime Minister Reynaud of the proposal. Reynaud and Churchill were agreed, no surrender and union. Instead, Reynaud faced a rebellion in his cabinet led by men like Henri Philippe Bénoni Omer Joseph Pétain. Marshal Pétain and cabinet members including Jean Ybarnégaray rejected the plan with Ybarnégaray saying that he preferred to be a “Nazi province” since he would apparently know what that meant and it was better than joining the British. That attitude and decision would shame them and the French state as Reynaud resigned in protest and Pétain took over, signed the armistice and became the leader of Vichy France. The Fighting Free French were rightly disgusted.

De Gaulle and Monnet would have a sequel, however. De Gaulle would found the current government of France, the Fifth Republic, and Monnet would become—as he was eulogized by The New York Times—”the spiritual father of the European Economic Community.” Western Europe, in particular France, had learned the lesson and Monnet’s vision would eventually become the European Union, but imagine how history would have been different if Britain and France unified in 1940 and defeated the Nazis? Perhaps faced with the clear threat from the West, the Nazis would not have turned East to invade the Soviet Union and initiate the Holocaust. Japan would not have invaded French Indochina and started down the path to Pearl Harbor.

In the 18th century, the Americans faced an easier task of creating a union because they were already countrymen. The vast majority of the free American population was British Americans and most of the other European peoples—like the Germans, New York Dutch, and French Huguenots—had assimilated into Englishness. America was born a nation, but the question of union was a wartime one, in 1777 Virginia—not Delaware—became the first state when it ratified the Articles of Confederation which formally created the “United States of America” in a “perpetual Union.” Article One named the country but Article Three clarified what was being done:

Article III. The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their Liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretense whatever.

Fear and war made the union because the alternative was losing. After winning the War of Independence the Americans faced a choice of union or being vulnerable to imperial powers like Spain or forming a central authority with the powers of sovereignty. Once again, the alternative was unacceptable, so they wrote and ratified the Constitution of 1787. During the Civil War the United States was forced to remember its unfree population, the enslaved Africans, and also the free Africans who were denied equal citizenship. They were left out of the promises of 1776; but in 1862, the alternative was to lose the Union. The rest was history, and America went on to become the most successful republic of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Political Unions and grand alliances are serious things, and countries will make tough decisions when they find the alternative dishonorable and more than they can take. In 1776 King George III made remaining under his rule intolerable for the American Founding Fathers. The lesson is clear; it is unwise to throw away friendly relations with people three-thousand miles away who have depended on you and shed blood beside you on the battlefield. If threatened enough they may just decide to put aside their differences and form unions and alliances designed to wreck your grand strategies. King George and his North American commander Sir William Howe learned the hard way and offered the Continental Congress an armistice and peace talks after France joined the war on the side of the Americans in 1778. It was too late; the Americans were done talking. They had been betrayed by the king they trusted and there was no going back without a fight. The British never expected the Americans would rather fight alongside France, the ancient enemy, than remain under British rule.

Do not create enemies tomorrow where you have friends today because when the choice is submission to betrayal or a difficult survival with dignity, most will not choose to be Vichy.

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During the Great War the Knight King of the Belgians, Albert I of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, retreated with his men. The Germans attacked Liege on August 4, 1914, it fell three days later. The regular Belgium Army of 120,000 men was joined by 65,000 reservists, the militia, and almost 20,000 additional volunteers. The Belgians were pushed back from the frontier, but the army was able to retreat in good order.

The civilian population was told not to resist and to leave the fighting to the armed forces. The German commanders were convinced that the Belgians were lying. On August 15 the Germans captured the town of Dinat in Belgium, defended at the time by the French. A week later the German massacred the town based on the allegation they were hiding guerrillas and saboteurs. King Albert and whole Western world were outraged by the over 600 civilian deaths. Still, he had to keep fighting and retreating. Germany besieged the Belgian forts, the last bastions fell on August 17, and the government abandoned that capital, Brussels, the same day.

Course à la mer and The Battle of Yser

They continued fighting in September, the Germans overran most of Belgium, chasing King Albert’s forces—now joined by their French and British allies—in the “Race to the Sea”, hoping to cut them off from the English Channel and get around the allied flanks. The city Antwerp was besieged on September 28 and fell October 5, though the Germans were learning to be wary of Belgian courage. The Germans pressed their attack, pushing the allies back toward Calais and the Channel Ports. With both sides having arrived on the North Sea coast—the Germans as hunters and the allies as prey— neither could turn the other’s flank. Belgium was out of time and space. Germany now controlled around 95% of the kingdom. From October 16 to Halloween, they fought the Battle of the River Yser. This was the king’s last chance to keep a piece of Belgium free.

Over 60,000 Germans attacked 50,000 Belgians and legion of Frenchmen. The river was only about 60 feet wide, and yet, the army was on the coast. There was a chance. The Belgians lacked heavy artillery, but the British could fix that. The Royal Navy sent three warships to pound the Germans. Then the Belgians opened the floodgates and the North Sea water poured from the sluices, deluging an area a mile wide, slowing the Germans advance. They could not dig trenches and had to stand where they could be fired upon. Still the Germany army pressed on until October 30th when the Belgian plan came to shocking fruition as the land behind the Germans was flooding too! The Germans were stopped with attention refocusing on the ongoing First Battle of Ypres, which Germany now had to win to break through the allied forces. The battle lasted a month with over 100,000 casualties on both sides, wrecking much of the British Army, ending German hopes of a quick victory and making King Albert a hero. He held a bit of his country free from occupation. But what happened next would truly save Belgium. With only 5% of his kingdom under his government’s administration, Albert stayed with his army and held the Yser front, for four years and a month.

The whole of Belgium independence rested with maintaining the army and its separate existence from the British and French forces and their ambitions. King Albert’s policy was that Belgium was at war Germany but only associated with Britain and France by circumstances. As long as he held direct command of the Belgian Army and the Belgium Army was an autonomous force, then Belgium was unconquered. Legitimacy rested with the king and his men. It paid off. In September 1918 he took command of Groupe d'Armées des Flandres consisting of 12 of his own divisions but also 10 British and 6 French divisions. The King of the Belgians drove back 18 German divisions, and pressed the attack until Germany capitulated. He kept his army intact and his kingdom alive. It was a lesson the Americans had learned earlier.

The “Commander-in-Chief, America” attacked the capital of the United States.

Well, the British commander that is.

In the summer of 1777, Member of Parliament for Nottingham, Sir William Howe led the British Army sailing from New York: destination Philadelphia. The British Army’s theater commander-in-chief in the war to suppress the American “states” sought to end the rebellion. A year earlier the colonies had declared independence from King George III and Howe meant to make them pay for their insolence. He would smother their hopes and take their Congress.

At first the American commander-in-chief General George Washington of Virginia, did not know where Howe was headed, and it seemed he might be marching north to join the womanizing playboy General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne who would soon fight two battles at Saratoga against the Americans on September 19 and October 7, finally surrendering on the 17th. (Perhaps his reputation for womanizing is exaggerated, but it makes for a colorful image.)

However, by leaving New York and sailing south into the Chesapeake Bay, Howe effectively left Burgoyne unsupported. This allowed the Americans to concentrate their forces against the British, with the then hero Benedict Arnold beating Burgoyne, who could not coax the mistress of victory to his side.

But in the middle of that fight, on September 26, 1777, Philadelphia fell to the British. Earlier on September 11, General Washington’s 11,000 Continentals were beaten by Howe and his 15,000 strong army. Washington tried to keep his men between the city and the British, which allowed Congress to escape the city. When Howe marched into Philadelphia, the America government was gone. But so was the United States Army. The hope of the revolution rested on the bayonets of the Continental forces.

Taking Philadelphia was symbolic but not very much. The city of brotherly love was not the American center of gravity. Simply put the center of gravity (CoG) is the one big thing that keeps an enemy in the fight. It is the primary source of their power, strength, and balance. The famed Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz defined it as the “hub of all power and movement.” If you destroy or neutralize this hub, the enemy loses their ability to fight effectively, and their will can collapse. For some countries this is their capital, such as Paris tends to be for France.

The colonies had governed themselves separately for over 150 years by this point in their history. Philadelphia as the “capital” was a new thing, and in fact, the “capital” was wherever Congress happened to be. The newly proclaimed independent states retained nearly all political power in their hands and gave very little to their delegates in Congress. There was no real national bureaucracy to speak of in Philadelphia. However, when in when a government’s capacity and legitimacy are pushed to the brink during an emergency, but it remains unbroken and retains the allegiance of the people, its final reservoir of power is the military.

Washington and the army were the American center of gravity. As long as the army survived in Valley Forge, as long as it remained intact, in force, potentially threatening and in the field, then the war continued. The British could take New York, and they did, holding it until the end of the war. It did not matter. They took Charleston in South Carolina. It did not matter. And they took Philadelphia, which they held for 266 days.

What mattered was that Washington, despite the cold and disease, kept the army together as a force whose existence was a persistent subversion of British claims to be the legitimate authority in America. Like Albert of Belgium, George Washington saved his country by existing, by not yielding. The army proved that America was more than a mere experiment, it was a real country. Howe should have helped Burgoyne first; it probably cost the British the war because when the news of the surrender of a whole British Army reach Benjamin Franklin in Paris, it was just the news he needed to get King Louis XVI to join the war on America’s side. If Washington could keep the American forces in the fight, the French Army would join them, and the British would be in real peril. The message from Yser to Yorktown is “Just hold on to hope.” The men of the Continental Army carried American liberty on their cold, shivering shoulders. Just as Albert’s soldiers bore the weight of Belgium from 1914-1918.

The true greatness of America is not yielding to despair. Grit and the determination to go on against fear and tyranny built the American republic. In 1914 little Belgium had a king who understood that the first victory in war begins with the determination to fight. 250 years ago, the Father of our Country taught us that lesson from day one. Do not forget that if you love your country, you must first choose to hope when you want to despair. And then go get the job done.

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Thank you again for your support, it is humbling. A couple of times this year you made Outside the Academy trend on Substack and my subscriber count has almost tripled. This all started when a friend of mine suggested that I start a blog on the Second World War —initially called History Wars—and build a platform where I shared my research and takes on that conflict that normally are discussed at academic conferences. He was right and more and more people are joining every week. He convinced me because I have long felt that too much good information, and dare I say, lessons, simply do not filter down to the general public. Part of it has to do with the way academia rewards certain output, which tends to be directed toward other academics. But I believe history has practical benefits for how we think about contemporary issues, especially problem-solving and communication.

Outside the Academy expanded from History Wars to include three regular free essays - Message Mondays focuses on culture and philosophy, World War Wednesdays, aka Hellfighters, covers both World Wars, and Fire Hot Takes Fridays looks at current events from a historian's perspective. I also write paid subscriber exclusives and other features exclusive to paid subscribers—and soon a podcast for which I am arranging my recording space as I am typing this essay—and your support allows me to take time to produce this content. Again, thank you.

If you have subscribed for a while, you know this, but for the new subscribers I am a Virginian which means I grew up surrounded by American Revolutionary History. Civil War history too, but I really love the Revolutionary Era and you may have heard that for Americans a very important year starts tomorrow.

Independent America turns 250! 1776-2026.

This coming year, future posts on the First and Second World Wars will weave in Revolutionary history and principles and how the global conflicts between 1914-1945 challenged and reaffirmed the American Creed. I want to end by re-sharing my reflections on visiting Normandy for the first time in June and why I have confidence in Gen-Z. For Team America 2026 is a rebuilding year.

Happy New Year!

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The Government of His Britannic Majesty, George V, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, sent its might, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), to the European mainland. By December 1914 on battlefields from France to Poland and the Balkans, hundreds of thousands of soldiers had already died. “Over by Christmas” they said, why do men say such things? It is needless chatter when the price was to be paid in young men’s lives.

Unlike the secular French Republic, the UK is officially a Christian state. Back then the Anglican Church remained strong in the hearts of the English and even those who were not members of the Church of England or especially devout retained a healthy reverence for the traditions and celebrations of the faith. Christmas was a holy day. In the West at least. In 1914, the Russian Empire was still on the Julian calendar, which was 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, so there was no truce on the Eastern Front as for Germans it was December 25th, but for the warriors of the Tsar, it was only the 12th of December.

Likewise the soldiers of France had seen their territory overrun by the Kaiser’s swift advance, as Teutonic soldiers swept across the Belgian frontier to threaten France from the north. Beneath le Tricolore, few could rest easy, nor would they accept a pause.

Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes !

Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons !
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons!1 (The French National Anthem)

So the truce that has captured the imagination was largely one of the British Empire and the forces of the German Realm. Junior British officers tended to be natural leaders, men of the old aristocracy and well-off commoners. They took the initiative, no commands came down from headquarters, the decision to “Live and Let Live” was the policy of the officers in the field. They gave out the word on Christmas Eve not to fire unless fired upon. The Germans took note along the front, and on the morning of Christmas Day, they showed themselves, waving at the British lines that were sometimes less than 100 yards away. The message was klar: “if you won’t, we won’t.”

The British-controlled area of the front was about 30 miles long and most of that line observed this completely unauthorized and unofficial truce with the Germans. A foreign soldier serving in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment complained that his comrades had no German honor because they greeted the British as Christian soldiers instead of shooting them dead, his name was Adolf Hitler. No one listened to him, if only that remained true forever after.

They continued their soldierly camaraderie with an enemy who also understood both duty and honor. They played soccer, exchanged gifts, and joined one another in burying their dead and honoring their fellows who did not make it to Christmas. Some kept the truce going until Boxing Day, December 26, others went back to fighting, and some also kept the truce going until New Year’s. If the soldiers could pause for Christmas, why could not the politicians and crowned heads? At this point it was clear that the war had not gone the way any of them had predicted. Boxing Day originated as a day when servants, tradespeople, and the poor received gifts from the wealthy, and one theory is that the name came from the boxes the gifts were placed in. In 1914 too many of the elite, in their pride, gave their working class soldiers the gift of man-sized boxes into which they could repose their mortal remains. But on Christmas, officers led their men in a celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace. Their leaders should have heeded the message.

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Last week’s essay

Last week I looked at World War Two and its impact on alternative history fiction, and I thought I should follow up. Culturally, the Second World War contributed a lot to the speculative genre that includes science fiction and fantasy.

The war gave us the horrors of the atomic age, but also the wonders of what could be done with nuclear energy. Combined with the Vergeltungswaffen, or “Vengeance Weapons,” the V1 and V2 rockets of Wernher von Braun, the future was both bleak and hopeful depending on how you wanted to look at it. And this inspired the next generation of science fiction writers. Would science lead to strange new worlds, or end life as we know it on this one?

I enjoy science fiction, and how it sparks the imagination and combines art with intellectual prowess. Inventions we take for granted often first appeared in sci-fi shows and films. I am also curious about the analysis of the field. The genre is commonly split into two categories: hard science fiction and soft science fiction. A similar division of hard versus soft has been applied to fantasy as well. Although the hard/soft dichotomy is debated, I’ll use it in my discourse today.

Hard Science Fiction emphasizes what is known about contemporary scientific plausibility and logically extrapolates from that to imagined developments. This, of course, alters with each generation. Put another way, the works we call hard sci-fi are rooted in existing scientific principles, as they were known to the author when they wrote the story. The imagined tech is used as a basis to create stories that can explore how life and society could unfold given the changes the technical differences cause. Authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Kim Stanley Robinson meticulously integrated scientific knowledge into their narratives, making the science itself a central element of the story; while the first two look at science triumphantly, Robinson tends to write works that make one ponder the social and political consequences of developments like climate change. But in all three cases, the extrapolations are plausible from the standpoint of when they were written.

With Soft Science Fiction, I prefer the definitions in Brave New Words: the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction edited by Jeff Prucher. Essentially it defines soft science fiction as a genre that focuses mainly on imagined advances in the social and behavioral sciences or one that uses true scientific principles only loosely, with the scientific details playing a minor role compared with the characters, societies, and themes in the story. Some stories like Star Trek are considered soft science fiction, along with Star Wars, and there are critics and scholars who would also apply the term science-fantasy to both stories. And this has advantages, and I consider Star Trek to be among the best American tales ever imagined, capable of confronting serious political and social matters as exemplified by the complexity of the Deep Space Nine series.

As regards these definitions, as they say, your mileage may vary. Some find the designation of “soft” offensive. However, there is also the argument the hard/soft divide seems to work well for fantasy when you consider world-building. It is an aesthetic distinction. There is The Lord of the Rings and the other Middle-earth stories by J.R.R. Tolkien with his detailed invented languages, geography and rich history; clearly works of hard world-building. And then there is something like Conan the Barbarian where the fictional world is very thin and yet still provides the vibrant tableau for the story.

But what about alternative history? Should we look at speculative historical fiction the way we sometimes categorize science fiction? What would be the dividing line? I would put Churchill’s counterfactual history in the soft category, but let me explain why. I think that a Hard alternative history rigorously extrapolates from a plausible point of divergence (POD) while respecting historical constraints. Whereas Soft alternative history uses historical settings as backdrop, an evocative tableau, for other concerns—theme, character, allegory—without rigorous attention to causation, often bypassing it. And yet I think most works I have read fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between Hard and Soft. But not all works of fiction dealing with past events count as alt-history and so must be distinguished from Historical Fiction.

Works like George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman or Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Rifles utilize historical verisimilitude or “lifelikeness” to place fictional protagonists within the established timeline. You read them as though you are going through the real history alongside the protagonist, not that history is changing with their adventures.

Back to alt-history as I wrote last week, alt-history can be useful for exploring questions that are left unanswered by actual events. And then there is another reason, just as important: if you love history, alternative history can be great fun, the best authors are a pleasure for the reader of leisure. Harry Turtledove’s Videssos Cycle, however, is fantasy; it utilizes his professional training as a Byzantine historian to create a historical analog world, rather than reimagining our own timeline. Nevertheless, the alt-history genre contains elements of fantasy and wonder to explore.

The first season of the Amazon show was amazing in exploring the uncomfortable comfort of many Americans in a Nazi ruled world. And yet, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle never really explains how the Axis powers actually won World War II or developed atomic weapons. They just did, and the omission is fine because the POD is the assassination of the new American president, FDR in 1933. Dick is interested in ideas about inner truth, and fascism’s psychological impact, not military plausibility or the mechanics of the war. It won the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, so he did something right.

An example of a hard alt-history regarding plausibility and world building would be Harry Turtledove’s Agent of Byzantium, where the point of departure is a single event that changes global history: imagine if Muhammad had converted to Eastern Christianity, became a Christian saint and Islam never developed. Because Turtledove holds a doctorate in Byzantine history he is able to carefully trace how this change would affect technology, politics, and culture over centuries, especially how it would involve the survival of the Persian Empire as a rival to Rome.

One that fits what I think is the middle point on the continuum is Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series which —bear with me a moment— reinterprets the Napoleonic wars with dragons. Let’s just say that her idea gave me much less heartburn than Ridley Scott’s movie.1 Novik is a great writer who may be a bit soft on the historical implications of her world, but she is hard on nautical matters and dragon combat. But her story is really about how a society involving dragons would evolve to deal with the problems of the Napoleonic era from the British perspective. It is her strong characters—knocked around by historical events and systems—and their reactions that drive the story; they feel like flesh and blood individuals inhabiting a world where humanity’s ability to work with dragons determines the fate of empires. By comparison, Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms is a curious Napoleonic novel that is soft on historical causation while also subverting causation as a narrative driver. This works because her point is to examine interpersonal relationships within a world where the French Empire was victorious.

Science fiction and the great what ifs posed by the World Wars, have combined to give us intriguing literature that can be both escape and intellectual exercises. Both hard and soft alt-history can be done well, and, whichever method the author chooses, there is the chance to contribute to the historian’s imagination and provoke fruitful discussion and new questions to ask of the past and present. And hinge movements in world history, like Trafalgar, the 1862 campaign, and what if Japan followed up their attack on Pearl Harbor with an invasion and occupation of Hawai’i, will continue to inspire writers. Or, what if Britain and France were led by men with chests and they called Hitler out in 1938 over the Sudetenland?

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Today I will keep this short as it is still finals time and I have papers to grade.

Of all the quixotic pastimes, asking “what if” is perhaps the one most associated with history. Perhaps the first serious work in the genre is Tirant lo Blanc, a Catalan epic written by Joanot Martorell and Martí Joan de Galba. It is an adventure story that is most famous for the main character Tirant the White, a Breton knight who goes on a quest to save Constantinople in 1453 and stop the Ottoman conquest. It was written in 1490, before Columbus sailed the ocean blue two years later. What might have been if Constantinople had held out is a topic that 20th-century writers would return to.

Speculation can be for romantic regret, like the loss of a great imperial legacy; it could be simple literary enjoyment; or it can seek to make a point about the present by playing with the past.

In 1930, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill wrote a short satire titled “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” A perfect title for a cheeky, funny short story. In it, Churchill opens with a bang where his narrator remarks on how great things were for Kaiser Wilhelm II in the alternative 1930 and how it might not have been so grand if old Robert E. Lee had not won Gettysburg and split the United States into two separate countries.

For a short story that was originally only ten pages, Churchill makes the gag work as well as one could imagine for a story that has Lee capturing Washington and then unilaterally freeing all the slaves by military diktat, leaving Jefferson Davis and the whole Confederacy no choice but to bow to Lee’s will.

It is hard to read it without laughing.

Churchill is playing with history in an unserious manner in order to make a sly argument that an association of the English-speaking peoples, meaning the British Empire and the USA, would be great for the stability of the world. To do this, he needs the rebel Confederacy to win, then for the UK to back them after winning the battle, but that means slavery has to go away or the UK would be backing slavery, and this allows the defeat of the Union to not be a loss for civilization but simply the fate of nations in a contest of arms. With that done, Churchill can get on with his crazy tale of how the English-speaking peoples worked everything out among themselves and by 1914 are strong enough to tell the continental powers of Europe to knock it off so World War One does not happen.

Churchill’s narrator is a historian in an alternate 1930 who is lecturing us about how small changes can lead to bigger changes, and why the British imperial system is so much better than American liberalism on issues such as race and civil rights.

It is wild to think that Winston Churchill wrote such a thing, and how much authors like Harry Turtledove have basically taken Churchill’s plot way too seriously, to the point that I cannot read the crazy Southern-focused plots without thinking of them as derivative of Churchill.

However, the American Civil War aka the War of the Rebellion, has been a classic playground for the speculative-history genre. “What if Lee had won at Antietam?” is almost a cliché turning point by now. But the twentieth century shocked our imaginations. The Second World War, the war where Churchill was the leader, is now the biggest “what if.” Our bookstores are full of works of non-fiction and fiction that speculate about Churchill and his struggle against Hitler. The runaway success of Amazon’s Man in the High Castle confirmed it. At the time Amazon had a “pilot season” program that let viewers watch various pilot episodes and provide feedback and ratings so Amazon could decide what shows to produce and what to turn down. Man in the High Castle crushed its competitors, while a Civil War series offered at the same time was dismissed by most viewers. It is hard to top the A-bomb, D-Day and Pearl Harbor.

The Second World War touches so much. The rise of China. The Civil Rights Movement. The American Century. The reordering of the Middle East. The Cold War and the Space Race. What if indeed.

In fiction as well as non-fiction, WWII is the champion. Which makes sense because we still question aspects of that war, eighty years after it ended. And yet, sometimes, the questions we ask, the ones that are most interesting, are the ones that history does not provide answers for, and we must engage our imaginations. But also the author as an artist may find that the canvas they need is an alternative world that is real, but altered, and there history can provide scenarios that are more enticing or haunting than pure fantasy can manage: The dark mirrors of our pasts. I think Winston would approve.

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One of the issues impacting the Anglican Communion, German Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church was the rise of the post-Darwinian pseudo-scientific racism or eugenics. The issue was that Christianity has principles that exist whether or not a particular group Christians pays more than lip service to them. The old worn out saying “hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue” is true in so far as the vice recognizes that there is a virtue that it is violating. Ironically hypocrisy is sustainable so long as 1) the forms of adherence to the principle are partially observed, 2) those who practice the hypocrisy are in a hegemonic position of authority in the concerned institution, and 3) any victims of the hypocrisy are not in a position to get a hearing regarding their grievances.

Historic Christianity makes particular claims which can be believed or disbelieved. However, the fact that the claims exist is the critical point. You can judge the religion, or any belief system against its claims. This works for academia where we test and challenge definitions, categories and parameters all the time to see what survives a thorough shaking. But it also works for everyone else who can call out hypocrisy when they see it. Put another way, just because you are comfortable with your hypocrisy does not mean that anyone outside your club has to put up with it. They do not. And, if your institution depends on outsiders’ sufferance or approval to maintain something of importance, like its place in society, then you are vulnerable if your hypocrisy becomes annoying.

But there is another concern, if the desire to maintain the thing that makes you a hypocrite becomes stronger than the desire to outwardly conform, then the organization my morph into something very different from what it was, something potentially hostile to its original ethos and reason for existing.

And yet another concern is that those who prefer the forbidden thing will leave the institution altogether and become fierce and vindictive opponents. The Western Churches faced both scenarios regarding fascism, Nazism, and eugenics, and to a lesser extent Marxism only because Stalinism was less subtle in its attack on Christianity. The time of hypocrisy was running out and the time repudiation was approaching.

This was a major problem for the Anglicans and the groups descended from them like the Methodists, because the Anglican Communion through the British Empire and the American elite was the religious face of classical liberalism. Essentially Nazism was an especially dangerous civilizational opponent that could not coexist with the claims of Christianity even if many of the powerful Western Christians — in the British Empire or the USA — were hypocrites. In the January 1939 State of the Union Address, before the war broke out in Europe in September with Germany’s invasion of Poland, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began his address to Congress by denouncing the “new philosophies” in Europe as a threat to American religion:

“Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate and the Congress:

In Reporting on the state of the nation, I have felt it necessary on previous occasions to advise the Congress of disturbance abroad and of the need of putting our own house in order in the face of storm signals from across the seas. As this Seventy-sixth Congress opens there is need for further warning.

A war which threatened to envelop the world in flames has been averted; but it has become increasingly clear that world peace is not assured.

All about us rage undeclared wars—military and economic. All about us grow more deadly armaments—military and economic. All about us are threats of new aggression military and economic.

Storms from abroad directly challenge three institutions indispensable to Americans, now as always. The first is religion. It is the source of the other two—democracy and international good faith.

Religion, by teaching man his relationship to God, gives the individual a sense of his own dignity and teaches him to respect himself by respecting his neighbors.

Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows.

International good faith, a sister of democracy, springs from the will of civilized nations of men to respect the rights and liberties of other nations of men.

In a modern civilization, all three—religion, democracy and international good faith- complement and support each other.

Where freedom of religion has been attacked, the attack has come from sources opposed to democracy. Where democracy has been overthrown, the spirit of free worship has disappeared. And where religion and democracy have vanished, good faith and reason in international affairs have given way to strident ambition and brute force.

An ordering of society which relegates religion, democracy and good faith among nations to the background can find no place within it for the ideals of the Prince of Peace. The United States rejects such an ordering, and retains its ancient faith.

There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded. The defense of religion, of democracy and of good faith among nations is all the same fight. To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.

We know what might happen to us of the United States if the new philosophies of force were to encompass the other continents and invade our own. We, no more than other nations, can afford to be surrounded by the enemies of our faith and our humanity…”

Yet, as FDR denounced the new foreign ideologies that violated the principles of respecting your neighbor he was the leader of the Democratic Party, that was then and had been since the end of Reconstruction, the party of Southern white supremacy in the Jim Crow states. Hypocritical? Sure. And still he was sincere, and the more he did this, denounced Nazism in civilizational terms, the more Western hypocrisy on racial equality and colonial exploitation was exposed and undermined from within. The World Wars would shakeup the hypocrisy of the Churches and force them to choose to either reform or repudiate their mission.

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After the First World War the Anglican Communion faced a paradox of influence and power. The old Catholic and Orthodox powers of imperial Austria and Russia were broken and in ruins. While much attention has been paid to Catholic social teaching, the reality is that in the early 20th century, the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches were politically at their weakest and most marginalized since the Renaissance. In 1920, the pope had not ruled in Rome for half a century. The Greeks were struggling in their war to liberate Constantinople and would eventually fail to defeat Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who would then establish the Republic of Turkey. Aggressively secular and anti-clerical regimes ruled in France, Russia, Portugal, and Austria. Spain was a wreck and the Papacy maintained icy relations with the Kingdom of Italy that had robbed them of the Eternal City. And in defeated Germany, the Protestant authorities were lost, rudderless without their old attachment to the Protestant princes dethroned in the 1918 Revolution.

But in 1917 George V saved the British Monarchy; he would not suffer the fate of cousins in Europe. The Church of England remained the established church, and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America though outnumbered by Methodists, was the unofficial church of the American establishment with prestige stretching back General George Washington and many of the Founding generation. This arguably made the Anglican Communion, as the church of the British Empire and the American WASP elite, politically the most important Christian confession of the interwar period. Yet their societies faced growing pressures and antagonisms over race, empire, gender, capitalism and disenchantment with traditional sources of legitimacy.

The Anglicans met in the 1920 Lambeth Conference held in London and presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury Randall Thomas Davidson. Davidson was by nature a moderate reformer, collegial and ecumenical and reigning for 25 years, he was the serving Primate of All England since the Reformation. He entered the Church of England as a young man, after being raised a Presbyterian in Scotland, and rose quickly when he came under the wing of Archbishop Archibald Tait, serving as his resident chaplain at Lambeth. There he learned the inner workings of the hierarchy, and by marrying Tait’s daughter Edith Murdoch Tait, he became intimately connected with England’s elite. He moved into the royal court as Dean of Windsor, where he became one of Queen Victoria’s most trusted advisers, remaining a confidant and religious counselor to the Queen’s conscience, and attending her at her death. Her confidence eased his promotion first to the bishopric of Rochester and then to the more prominent see of Winchester, putting him in charge of key dioceses at the heart of English public life. In 1903, he succeeded Frederick Temple as Archbishop of Canterbury becoming a familiar and weighty presence in the House of Lords, speaking regularly on moral and national questions and helping to align the bench of bishops with major constitutional changes. He was also a conciliator, healing rifts between the traditionalist Anglicans and the Anglo-Catholics, bringing the Anglo-Catholics back into obedience with the Church and also emphasizing the need for the Church to follow its own rules. He and many of the other bishops were caught off guard by the war and its consequences. A good man, he understood they faced challenges.

Many young people, disillusioned by their experiences in the First World War and the additional death toll of the Spanish Flu pandemic, rebelled against pre-war conventions and attitudes. They turned against the old rules of respectability, especially around dress, language, and sex. Many thought that since the older generation led the West into the war “Why should their sense of propriety rule?” Young upper and middle-class women reveled in provocative transgression. Defying convention was cool. The “new woman” of the era, the flapper, cut her hair short, wore loose knee-length dresses, smoked and drank in public, and spoke more openly about her desire. Sleeping around became the new conformity in some circles. The war and its immediate aftermath broke the old Western social order. It is not uncommon for scholars to treat the 1920s as the true start of the sexual revolution.

The traditional elites, especially in Britain were not immune to the anxiety. Many great elite families lost sons in the war, the Liberal Party would soon be replaced by the Labour Party as one of the two major parties, alongside the Conservatives. Again the monarchy was saved by the wise decision of the king to modernize by appealing to middle class nationalism, changing the royal dynasty from the very German sounding House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor.

The First World War’s carnage, Leninism, youth disillusionment, eugenics, and Social Darwinism, — latter two gaining ground among the intellectual elite in the Empire and the USA — challenged the classical Christian worldview. The Anglican bishops understood they were facing a time when the foundations of Western civilization were shaking and the exuberance about the end of the Great War masked real anxiety. Meeting at Lambeth Palace from July 5 to August 7, 1920 the bishops attempted to speak authoritatively the to the social, political and economic crises of a world still dominated by politically and militarily by the British Empire and awed by the industrial and economic might of the USA and Wall Street.

The bishops sought to baptize the League of Nations as antidote to future war and a path toward reconciliation with Germany. In Resolutions 1–6, the bishops essentially claimed that world peace required the recognition of Christ’s sovereignty and the application of Christian principles of brotherhood and justice. They called for the early admission of Germany to the League. The bishops also condemned injustices against indigenous peoples, including abuses in land tenure, forced labour, and the liquor and opium trades, and they urged active relief for populations suffering from war and famine in Europe and Asia.

Just as they appealed for peace between the nations, they also issued an “Appeal to All Christian People,” to acknowledged all baptized Christians as members of Christ’s universal Church and called for visible unity. The bishops confessed Anglican complicity in Christian division and proposed a reunited catholic Church based on Scripture, the Nicene Creed, the sacraments of Baptism and Communion, and a ministry with apostolic authority, specifically the historic office of bishop. The subsequent resolutions authorized individual Anglican provinces to pursue ecumenism locally.

The issue of race was particularly sticky. The Empire was run on the principle of white rule, and the USA was a segregated society with its more extreme Jim Crow version ruling the Southern states. Nevertheless, bishops decided that the witness of the Communion required clarity.

Resolution 7

The Conference records its protest against the colour prejudice among the different races of the world, which not only hinders intercourse, but gravely imperils the peace of the future.

This was linked to mission through Resolutions 32–42; 7, 35, 41, 78. the Conference bishops affirmed the goal of building “self-governing, self-supporting, and self-extending Churches” and urged that “outside control” be withdrawn “at the earliest moment.” Yet these reforming aspirations collided with imperial reality: the resolutions maintained that missionary dioceses must remain under provincial oversight until “largely self-supporting,” and bishops retained authority over liturgical adaptation. The contradiction deepened in the resolutions addressing race directly. Resolution 7 condemned “colour prejudice among the different races” as hindering intercourse and imperiling future peace. Yet, Resolution 35 —in the category of “missional problems” — acknowledged the practical difficulty of racial integration due to local conditions:

Resolution 35

The territorial episcopate has been the normal development in the Catholic Church, but we recognise that difference of race and language sometimes requires that provision should be made in a province for freedom of development of races side by side; the solution in each case must be left with the province, but we are clear that that ideal of the one Church should never be obscured.

Money was and remains an issue with the expenses of the Communion often being covered by the wealthier European dominated provinces who have been tempted to use their position to influence and sometimes bully the member churches in the post-colonial world. Like the liberal democracies they struggle to make deeds match words, but the bishops were clearer that the failure was hypocrisy and therefore sinful because it was contrary to the idea of one Church united under Christ. And how could mission prosper long term on the principle that one group of sinners was born superior and closer to God than another group of sinners?

Women and Modernity Resolutions 46-54

The question of women’s roles exposed deep divisions within Anglican leadership about how far modernization should proceed. The Conference declared women should be admitted to church councils “on equal terms” with laymen, with implementation timing left to local synods. It called for formal restoration of the women’s diaconate throughout the Anglican Communion as “the one and only order of the ministry which has the stamp of apostolic approval” for women. The diaconate was defined as:

Resolution 49

The office of deaconess is primarily a ministry of succour, bodily and spiritual, especially to women, and should follow the lines of the primitive rather than of the modern diaconate of men. It should be understood that the deaconess dedicates herself to a life-long service, but that no vow or implied promise of celibacy should be required as necessary for admission to the order. Nevertheless, deaconesses who desire to do so may legitimately pledge themselves either as members of a community, or as individuals, to a celibate life.

Critically, they debated the nature of the deaconess, with a vote of For 117 and Against 81 on the idea that a deaconess could assist with baptism. Again this clearly heralded the tensions and debates that remain over the role of women as potential members of the clergy and whether or not traditional sex and gender roles are part of God’s order or merely a human social conditions that can be reformed or removed.

When it came to Resolutions 66-72 focused on “Marriage and Sexual Morality” modern readers may be shocked that the concerns of 1920 sound like they could have been written in 2020, which again to my point, modern political narratives often present the past as a kind of conservative ideal that does not match the document reality of the early 20th century. The Conference proclaimed lifelong chastity before and after marriage as “the unchangeable Christian standard” and affirmed marriage as “a life-long and indissoluble union...of one man with one woman.” However, it permitted national/regional churches to recognize the Gospel of Matthew’s exception of adultery as allowing the wronged spouse to seek divorce.

However, while they acknowledged that secular governments may not always adhere to the Christian standard in law for marriage and divorce, the Church was called to bear witness to its own principles and that chastity applied to men equally as it did to women. Resolution 68 reads like a Roman Catholic ruling as it issued “an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception” and condemned teaching that encouraged “sexual union as an end in itself,” upholding procreation and “deliberate and thoughtful self-control” as governing principles. They argued that such innovations were threats to the “race” which reemphasized the Anglican principle that there was really only one “race” the human race. Also surprising is how the Conference confidently spoke on the subject the Church’s need to work to rescue the victims of STDs and human trafficking calling this in Resolution 72 “protecting the weak and raising the fallen.”

The last resolution spoke against the exploitation of labor in both domestic capitalism and the empires of both Britain and the USA.

Resolution 73

We desire to emphasize our conviction that the pursuit of mere self-interest, whether individual or corporate, will never bring healing to the wounds of society. This conviction is at once exemplified and reinforced by what has happened in and since the war. Nor is this less true when that self- interest is equipped with every advantage of science and education. Our only hope lies in reverent allegiance to the person of Christ, whose law is the law of love, in acceptance of his principles, and reliance on his power.

And furthermore

Resolution 76

In obedience to Christ’s teaching as to covetousness and self-seeking, the Conference calls upon all members of his Church to be foremost both by personal action and sacrifice in maintaining the superiority of the claims of human life to those of property. To this end it would emphasize the duty which is laid upon all Christians of setting human values above dividends and profits in their conduct of business, of avoiding extravagance and waste, and of upholding a high standard of honour and thoroughness in work. In a word, they must set an example in subordinating the claim for rights to the call of duty.

With final resolution reading:

Resolution 80

If the Church is to witness without reproach for justice and brotherhood in the world, it must show itself serious and insistent in reforming abuses within its own organisation, and in promoting brotherhood among its own members. Further, if Christian witness is to be fully effective it must be borne by nothing short of the whole body of Christian people.

The Anglican Communion attempted to speak with authority at the moment when all over the Western world, traditional authority was being challenged. Communists, Fascists, Nazis, social Darwinian capitalists, racial imperialists, segregationists, eugenicists, and rebellious youth were all pulling at the threads that bound the Christian order of old Europe, already unraveling due to the Great War. The contradictions of the church of the British Empire preaching for peace and the end of racial discrimination should not prompt smugness. On the contrary, they reveal something important about the Anglo-American elite’s struggle with modernity.

The bishops did not retreat into reactionary politics, nor did they transform into revolutionary prophets. They did something different, and harder under the circumstances: they sought to double down on the actual principles of their faith and the past and their own failures to live up to them. Intellectually I can see how this morality could lead eventually to a sort of FDR like liberal-conservatism; Franklin Roosevelt was an Anglican after all. However, whether this would have an impact depended on the laity—the ordinary folks in the pews who had the personal responsibility to respond to the call and seek to reform their own lives, their families, and then their communities. Or they could join the rest of the West and become quiet, small-time transgressives.

This became just one of the struggles for social order in the period before the Second World War, a struggle for modernity that would take the USA, the UK, the British Dominions, as well as Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, and France down divergent paths toward the 1930s.

I might have to write a follow up essay to this one as it is getting late but I have more to say about the social and intellectual debates in the English Speaking World after the Great War. I may update this one after Thanksgiving. Thanks for reading.

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Sometimes historical coincidences just fits the moment.

Virgil was the Roman poet who gave the empire its most durable story about itself — other than the one about the she wolf — he was from northern Italy and rose to become the unofficial laureate of the Emperor Augustus’s new order. Virgil’s Aeneid is Rome’s great origin story, an epic about a defeated refugee who wanders the Mediterranean with his people and having been told they are destined to take dominion. It links tales of love, war, prophecy, and a political myth justifying the rule of the Romans. You find both claims about the grandeur of empire but also the sheer human wreckage left in it wake at its foundation. Western literature keeps returning to this poem. From Dante to Milton to modern Hollywood storytellers Virgil’s story keeps inspiring because it set the template for the phoenix like rise story arc of going from vanquished to hero. Would there be J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elendil the Tall without Virgil’s Aeneas? The story is a rise, but that required a fall first. As the 1920s came to an end, the USA was in the middle of an economic fall like none it had experienced before, and out it would rise a New Deal movement that would also lead the USA in the war to come.

Change came in 1930. Since 1864 the GOP was the de facto ruling party of the American republic. Abraham Lincoln had saved the Union and was assassinated for his heroics, plunging the country, almost leaderless into the turmoil and lost opportunity of early Reconstruction. The association of the Democratic Party with the South, slavery and rebellion made the GOP the natural party of the majority of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the North and West, and among the freed African Americans population. Even after the imposition of Jim Crow and disenfranchisement throughout the South, the domination of the GOP elsewhere was enough to ensure domination of Congress of the control of the White House for all except for 16 years between 1869 and 1933, and with the Democrats only reelecting a president to a consecutive term only once, with Wilson in 1916. The crack in the GOP’s power began in the middle of the Depression.

The stock market crash of 1929 was only a year old when the 1930 midterms rolled around. Hoover’s Republicans were defending a comfortable majority in the 71st Congress, with 53 Senators to the Democrats 43, and a total domination of the House with 265 seats to the Democrats mere 166. But this was not a time for comfort, concern was in order.

Hoover the engineer could not engineer the economy to perform and come out of what was by the fall of 1930 clearly a slump. On Halloween, less than a week until the November 4 elections, he did not have much to say to the press. But just the day before he had setup the President’s Emergency Committee for Employment (PECE). But on the 31st, he was giving his last White House press conference before the voters went to the polls, so it was the time when the leader of the GOP should have made his pitch to stick with the party that had made the US into a superpower. Instead he gave underwhelming remarks, almost as if he did not want to bother with the business of being a politician:

I have no public statement to make today.

There are some things in the background of Government relations to unemployment that might interest you, just for your own information in making up for Colonel [Arthur] Woods’ Committee--help to piece out.

The public works contracts outstanding on the first of October in the Federal Government amounted to $938,416,000, of which $370,660,000 is incomplete. In other words, these contracts are about two-thirds completed.

Question from the Press. Mr. President, does that mean contracts let ?

THE PRESIDENT. Actually let, yes.

This is not quite a full statement of the public works of the Government because there is quite an amount of works being carried on departmentally, but it is impossible to estimate it in terms of contracts. It includes public works contracted, and also includes the ships being built under loans from the Shipping Board, and includes the Navy construction-the war vessel construction. It does not, unfortunately, include the aircraft contracts, which we have not been able to get in time. Roughly, the work current would amount, if it were translated into contracts, of all items, roughly about a billion dollars. That will be considerably increased before the first of January. It takes time to prepare for contract work or for construction. It is necessary, of course, in the public buildings to agree on a site, which is not always easy, and to acquire the sites before even designs can be made for Government buildings. It requires from 6 to 8 months to get the designs and specifications completed before contracts can be let. A vast amount of preparation has been going on in the last 6 or 8 months so that contracts will be considerably enlarged between now and the first of January.

I have also looked up the number of Government employees. If we take all Government employees, such as the Civil Service, enlisted men in the Army and Navy, the people who are working on contract public works, but not including people manufacturing supplies purchased by the Government, it amounted, on January 1, to 990,000, and on October 1 to 1,033,000. This does not, as I have said, include people working upon supplies. With the additional contracts that will be let that will be somewhat increased by the first of January.

Question from the Press. What was that last date Mr. President?

THE PRESIDENT. October 1. It shows an increase of about 43,000 during the period from January 1 to October 1.

In fairness Hoover was not a politician by nature, but he is being too subtle here. He refused to issue a “formal” statement but then almost as an aside he feeds the press numbers to defend his record, insisting that roughly a billion dollars in Federal public works and shipbuilding was already in motion, that these contracts would increase. And that Federal employment had already risen by about 43,000 since January; the overall effect was to present the creation of the PECE not as a break with past policy but as one more piece in the technocratic program of his work in associating the federal governments limited efforts with private business initiatives, rather than openly conceding the need for a new, more aggressive model of federal relief. But this performance would not fire up the American people or create much of a splash on the front pages. There was no big roll out of the initiative, or a hard sell of what exactly Colonel Woods was going do immediately and after the election.

Surprisingly, the GOP held onto the Senate, but they lost eight seats, retaining only a two-seat margin, 48–46, with one third-party senator representing the Farmer–Labor Party; this was their only good fortune. Then, as now, the House had 435 members. The Democrats won 52 new seats, bringing their total to 216. Again, one seat was held by the Farmer–Labor Party. The GOP held on with 217, but there was one vacancy, so the Republicans had exactly half of the 434 sitting members of the House. Then doom set in. The new Congress was not set to meet until December 1931, even though the members’ terms of office began in March 1931. By that time, several members of the House had died in office. Four Republican members were replaced by Democrats, and three of them—Bird Vincent of Michigan (died July), Ernest Robinson Ackerman of New Jersey (died October), and Harry McLeary Wurzbach of Texas (died November)—died early enough for their successors to take office, giving the Democrats an outright majority, with 219 members, when Congress convened.

It was the start of a year of bad luck for the Republicans and the beginning of the end of the old Party of Lincoln.

Perhaps it is an irony that only after the November 1930 election defeat was Hoover’s October message to Anna P. MacVay, the vice president of American Classical League, noting and celebrating the 2,000th birthday of the Roman poet Vergil (Virgil) read at the ceremony held at Carnegie Hall in New York to mark the occasion:

My dear Miss MacVay:

I am heartily in sympathy with American participation in the celebration of the two thousandth birthday of Vergil, whose immortal works have so stimulated the imagination and enriched the cultural life of so many generations. So much of our language and literary are derived directly from the Latin classics that the study of them must ever remain an indispensable part of the training of one of the most valuable types of mind. The youthful struggles to master Vergil’s lines have been forgotten by millions who in maturity recall only that he brought to life and the world about us a new meaning and fresh beauty.

Yours faithfully,

HERBERT HOOVER

Virgil was born October 15, 70 BC and died September 21, 19 BC.

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In 1914 Austria-Hungary went to war against Serbia, then Russia joined in, so Germany joined to counter Russia, then France decided it wanted some, which panicked Germany into doing something stupid and invading Belgium, but to be fair that was only the fourth dumb thing in this war domino effect. Britain joined the war to support France and Belgium and then provoked the Ottomans, who then joined Austria-Hungary and Germany. So four plus Belgium versus the three central and southern European empires. The advantage with the Entente powers but the Central powers had a potential ally in the Kingdom of Italy. Except, Italy really wanted to fight its ally Austria-Hungary a fourth time, after their three wars in the 19th century.

So the Italians stayed out of the war. They had a good legal argument: their alliance with Austria and Germany was defensive and Austria started the war by declaring against Serbia followed by a German declaration against France, while these were clearly responsive moves and arguably defensive, they were technically the initiators so Italy could keep its men in their barracks.

And there they sat. For ten months. Why didn’t they stay there?

Italy was confused.

Since unification the Italians had struggled to define what kind of country they wanted to be. Yes, they agreed on national unification, but little else. They were governed by the 1848 Statuto Albertino, a document issued by King Charles Albert to appease radical and liberal opinion during the European revolutions that year. But the document underwent a series of important changes by 1913.

On its face, the Statuto Albertino created a constitutional, hereditary monarchy in which the King remained very powerful but agreed to rule through “representative” institutions. The Catholic Church was declared the official and only state religion, with other existing forms of worship merely tolerated under law. The King was described as sacred and inviolable. He held the executive power, commanded the armed forces, declared war and made treaties, appointed all state officials, issued regulations to carry out the laws, and alone sanctioned and promulgated legislation. He convened, prorogued, and could dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, and he played a central role in succession and regency. The document also secured a royal civil list, protected the King’s private property, and preserved noble titles and royal orders. But by 1913 the franchise had been extended to almost all men, the ministers of government answered to Parliament and the extra-constitutional office of prime minister was a political reality. And the Italian government was locked in an ideological struggle with the Pope in self-imposed internal exile in the Vatican, which weakened the association of official Catholicism with the Italian state. The “prisoner-the-Vatican,” the pope, did not accept the conquest of Rome by the Italian king, and therefore leaned on Austria as the last Catholic Great Power who actually appeared to reverence the old legacy of the Holy Roman Empire after France became a secular and anticlerical state.

As the franchise expanded, Italian divisions became clearer and harder to ignore. And then the war broke out and Italy smartly took the chance on neutrality. But the voice, the clamor of the street would not stop. It came from the reactionaries and the radicals. Most Italian probably favored staying out of the war, but the two pro-war sides were determined agitators.

The neo-nationalists wanted to “complete” the unification of Italy by attacking Austria-Hungary and seizing the few remaining Italian-speaking territories ruled by the Habsburgs. They also saw the war as a way to rally the blood of Italy to the king and army, reclaiming their support from the socialist and other radicals. And yet, at the same time, many radicals wanted war because they wished to use Italian arms to smash the Habsburg monarchy which they saw as a regressive Catholic state, loyal to the pope, and holding back the tide of the revolutionary empowerment of the working class, and that defeating Austria would also weaken the German Empire and help bring revolution there as well.

This contradiction should have given Italians pause. If your fierce opponents also want a war of choice for the purpose of undermining you, perhaps you should choose peace.

This goes for nations today like the United States. If your opponents want you to enter a conflict, perhaps you should hesitate, and think of why those who do not mean you well, want you to do something.

The British and the French however were thinking about themselves, not the social divisions within Italy. So they reached out and started offering terms for what Italy would get if it attacked Austria-Hungary, a move which would force Austria to pull troops from the Serbian front, and away from the Russian border. Troops the Habsburgs needed right were they where. It was an almost asymmetric negotiation.

The Italian prime minister, Antonio Salandra, reveled in the courting from both sides, and the options afforded by neutrality. He called this sacro egoismo, sacred egoism, an almost religious duty to look out for number one, effectively a mystically rationalized solipsism. (Italians are great with the designer suits and the designer foreign policies. Even writing sacro egoismo feels like the most Italian thing I could type.)

Everyone knew that what the Italian government wanted was the Italian lands in the Dual-Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, which meant that to win Italy to its side, Austria would have to bribe it by surrendering its sovereign territory on the principle of nationalism. But the whole Habsburg empire was based on the principle of legitimate dynastic cosmopolitanism. Austria itself was a German land, not in Germany. So the imperial government in Vienna could only go so far to placate the Italians. They offered Trentino in the north, and only after Germany leaned on the Austrians to make a concession.

Yeah, that was not going to work for Italy when the British and French - who as we know had no qualms about divvying up land belonging to others - offered the Italians Trentino and also South Tirol, Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, and northern Dalmatia. This was not a hard choice for Salandra because he learned that the Russians were making gains against Austria in the East, and the Anglo-French forces were holding their own in the West, and the British Imperial expedition was preparing for an attack that would become the Gallipoli campaign. From Salandra’s position, it looked like Italy was about to miss the chance to claim rewards by joining the winning side. So he signaled his acceptance of the offer from the Entente powers and the Patto di Londra of 1915 was signed in April.

Britain, France, and Russia offered Italy more than it could have hoped. In exchange for joining the war, the Entente promised Italy that it would take from Austria-Hungary Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste, the counties of Gorizia and Gradisca, all of Istria as far as the Quarnero, including Volosca and the islands of Cherso and Lussin and nearby islets), plus most of the Dalmatian coast down to a line south of Cape Planka and a chain of Dalmatian islands from Premuda, Selve, Ulbo, Scherda, Maon, Pago in the north to Meleda in the south, including Sant’ Andrea, Busi, Lissa, Lesina, Curzola, Cazza, Lagosta, Pelagosa, and other small rocks and islets. And even beyond this, Italy was promised full sovereignty over Valona (Vlora) and Saseno in Albania with enough hinterland to defend them, the entire Dodecanese Islands, confirmation of its rights in Libya, and a future “just share” of Ottoman Asia around Adalia, plus possible colonial compensation in Eritrea, Somaliland, and Libya if the Allies enlarged their African empires by seizing German colonies. And Albania was to become a de facto protectorate of the Italians; nobody asked the Albanians.

Effectively, this plan would have given Italy control of lands that had formed some of the first provinces of the Roman Republic, a partial restoration of the old Empire, and the potential to dominate the eastern Mediterranean. However, Salandra should have waited. The Russian-Austrian front stabilized, and Mustafa Kemal stopped the British at Gallipoli, saving the Ottoman capital. The war was not almost over; it was only beginning, and now Italy, rather than having a front row seat, was standing on the sands of the arena with the wild beasts. The war would break the old Catholic empire of Austria, but also leave hundreds of thousands of dead Italians and a nation of disappointed ambitions. There were no more Catholic great powers worthy of the name as Italy was sidelined by the newly empowered Americans under Woodrow Wilson. Italy’s ally Russia was undone by the Bolsheviks who now threatened Europe with Red Revolution. Weakened, humiliated, and partially abandoned by their allies, Italians were turning on one another, again. Many elites feared a revolution from the radical left.

Fear and resentment gripped Italy, and strolled it right into 1920s chaos and the rise Mussolini’s fascist government, the new Italian styled and tailored authoritarianism.

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In 1754, delegates from the northern colonies of Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and the host colony of New York met in Albany to consider how to unite Britain’s North American colonies, support the common defense against rivals such as France and Spain, and secure the frontier. Initially, their idea was not to create a single government, but to prepare for war and, if possible, to create a common framework for better relations with Indigenous peoples. But in this meeting, as in many early American endeavors, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania was ahead of the curve. He proposed a Plan of Union that became the major point of debate.

Franklin proposed a confederation of the colonies:

The full Albany Plan of Union proposed creating one general government for all the British colonies in North America. Each colony would keep its own government for local matters, but a new central government would handle issues they shared. This union would have a President-General chosen and paid by the British Crown and a Grand Council chosen by the colonial assemblies, as the later United States Senate would be before the Seventeenth Amendment. Philadelphia was to be the union capital.

At first, the Grand Council would have 48 members divided among the colonies by population; in this case, Virginia would have had seven. Council members would be elected every three years. After the first three years, the number of seats for each colony could change based on how much money each colony contributed to the common treasury, with a limit of at least two and at most seven seats per colony. The Council would meet at least once a year, pick its own speaker, and would not be kept in session longer than six weeks without consent. Members would be paid for their time and travel. The President-General had to approve all laws the Council passed and was responsible for carrying them out in the name of the Crown.

The union handled shared defense and relations with Native nations. The President-General and Grand Council could make treaties, declare peace or war with Native nations and regulate trade with them, buy land for the Crown, and create new settlements with temporary governments. They could raise troops, build forts, and equip ships to protect coasts and trade, but could only draft men in colonies where the legislature approved a draft of its manpower. To fund this, they could pass laws, collect taxes and duties, appoint general and local treasurers, spend money only by joint order of the President-General and Grand Council, and report the accounts yearly to the colonies. Interestingly, Union laws had to match English law as closely as possible and be sent to the Crown for final approval but if the monarch did not reject them within three years they became permanent. It also foresaw the need for a double majority for quorum to maintain the support of the colonial governments, with majority of delegates representing a majority of the colonies being present to conduct business. And finally it inverted the responsibility over military and civilian appointments:

The Albany Convention approved Franklin’s plan, only for Britain and the colonies to reject it; yet his plan influenced the development of the Continental Congress, the Articles of Confederation, and the ideas he would advocate during the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

A Third British Empire?

Between the World Wars, the British Empire again faced questions of imperial defense, autonomy, and how to keep the colonies—now Dominions—in accord with Britain and the Parliament at Westminster. The Great War significantly influenced the push for dominion autonomy by strengthening national feelings and highlighting the dominions’ contributions. Many felt that their sacrifices on the battlefield entitled them to a greater say over imperial policy. After the war, the dominions demanded and won the right to sign treaties separately and to become members of the League of Nations, signaling their emergence as full-fledged members of the international community. However, losses of Australian and New Zealand troops meant those governments wanted to maintain command and control over their men, even when fighting for the empire. In Canada there was, if anything, more intense pressure for clear equality with London.

The Canadian government was concerned about maintaining binational unity between English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians, which would be threatened if it appeared that Canadians would again be drafted to fight in Britain’s wars. The issue of the draft burden and fighting for Britain had caused the 1917 Conscription Crisis, which frightened the government. Another Conscription Crisis would occur in 1944. Canadian elites wanted to remain in the Empire but not on terms that threatened to split Canada. Earlier, the 1926 Balfour Report, named for Lord Arthur Balfour’s Committee on Inter-Imperial Relations at the Imperial Conference in London, redefined ties between Great Britain and the Dominions: Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and the Irish Free State.

The report declared Britain and the Dominions constitutionally equal and “autonomous communities” that controlled their own domestic and foreign affairs while remaining united by allegiance to the Crown. Accordingly Canada took the lead in appointing its own foreign service, in 1926 appointing its first ambassador to the Untied States —separate from the British Ambassador— Charles Vincent Massey who would later become Governor-General of Canada. These developments were outgrowths of the same pressures that, in 1917, led the British government, under Prime Minister David Lloyd George, to establish the Imperial War Cabinet to direct the war effort and plan for peace, with the dominions’ prime ministers as members.

This came to a head with a formal law: the Statute of Westminster 1931, passed by the British Parliament, which put into full effect the recommendations of Balfour’s committee.

With the new declaration, the role of the monarchy was secured: the Crown connected the autonomous Dominions rather than being bound by decisions of the British Parliament—except in limited judicial matters—and no changes to the style or nature of the monarchy could occur without the unanimous consent of the realms. Additionally, and critically, the British prime minister no longer had any role in directing the monarch on how to interact with governors general and prime ministers in the Dominions. This made them united in a personal union by consent. The British monarch was simultaneously monarch of Australia, but that relationship and its responsibilities were separate from British policy. During the Second World War, King George VI was at war with Germany as king of Great Britain and at peace with Germany as king of Ireland. In this form, the British Empire continues as the Commonwealth of Nations, a critically important international association of 56 member states—one that the United States is eligible to join, and probably should.

In the end the British Empire evolved, two centuries too late, in something like what Franklin had envisioned, with Governor-Generals instead of a President-General. Similar enough for us to wonder about how things could have been different in 1754, or 1776.

Looking back on the events of the previous five decades, in the winter of 1789, Benjamin Franklin noted to himself that if his plan had been adopted the American Revolution would not have been needed.

The British learned this lesson in the 19th and 20th centuries with Canada and the other Dominions. How might history have been different if Parliament had embraced the wisdom of trusting the American colonies with a common authority under the crown? Perhaps Americans would still sing God Save the King and Charles III and the House of Windsor would be welcomed to these shores as princes rather than as foreign curiosities. What might have been if they had heeded Dr. Franklin.

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Around 1894 the United States of America replaced the Great Qing Empire as the world’s largest economy. Most centuries since the fall of Rome had belonged to India or mighty China, but the 20th century would be American. How had American risen so fast is a question as captivating as how had China fallen so low. This story would determine not only the history of China from 1914-1945 but also the current trajectory of the People’s Republic of China, whose legitimacy, comes from their claim to have ended the Century of Humiliation.

Like the 1789 French Revolution, the turmoil came from frustrated lower-tier elites and the army. They were done with a government that could not stand up for China.

The Century of Humiliation

Throughout the nineteenth century, China endured a series of defeats and humiliations that killed the legitimacy of Qing rule. Beginning with the assaults of the British Empire’s drug lords, the Mandate of Heaven was stripped away from the Great Qing Empire. Beginning in the 1830s, the First Opium War opened this long season of decline. Forced to sign unequal treaties, forced to let foreigners poison their people with drugs, China granted Western powers special privileges—expanded trade rights, treaty ports, and the loss of Hong Kong to the UK. These concessions shattered the empire’s sovereignty. Foreigners lived under their own laws on Chinese soil through extraterritoriality. No proud country could accept that, only one for whom pride was a joke.

The economic toll was immense. The British East India Company’s opium monopoly drained silver from the empire and spread addiction with all the dysfunction we know comes from that. Concession zones appeared in major cities, while missionaries, shielded by treaty rights, built schools and hospitals outside imperial control. The duality of Westerners trying to save Chinese souls and the officially Christian government of Great Britain backing the drug lords of the East India Company was not lost on the Chinese. To Chinese nationalists, such foreign enclaves were a state within a state, proof that their nation had been carved apart. When people defend “empire” in these instances I question if they are truly taking the long view or if they are just playing to a political moment that is against down-on-the-West political correctness. I do not think they have a bigger view of the past, rather they are stuck on a narrative. Because of what happened in the 1830s and afterwards, the Chinese elites today have a grudge against the West, especially Britain and to a lesser extent its offspring the United States of America. European peoples often make this mistake regarding non-Europeans, they believe that they are the only ones who can hold grudges. But sin is common to all mankind and non-Europeans can work for revenge like anyone else, and Europeans can receive powerful, painful, payback.

Over the next half-century rebellions, and additional British interventions sapped the strength of China while the island Empire of Japan watched with fear and envy. Japan was afraid that if China continued to weaken the European powers would use it as a staging ground for the conquest and colonization of Japan. The best thing for the Japanese was to assert that they were not China. The First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 struck that blow for Japan. Japan’s victory, punctuated by the destruction of the Chinese fleet at the Yalu River, revealed the Qing dynasty’s rotting decay—corruption, poor training, and technological inferiority. That the humiliation came at the hands of another East Asian nation, once itself closed and deferential to China, made the defeat unbearable. Japan’s triumph emboldened Western powers and ignited new reformist and revolutionary movements against the Dragon throne.

Anxious Societies and Decline

The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 was the Qing dynasty’s last desperate hope to expel foreign power while keeping their throne. Peasant militias rose in fury, and the court, torn between fear and opportunism, lent them covert support. The Boxer Rebellion was named by foreigners after the Chinese secret society called the Yihequan (“Righteous and Harmonious Fists”). Members practiced martial arts like kung fu and wushu and what appear to have been calisthenic rituals, believing these made them invulnerable. Later, the group was renamed Yihetuan (”Righteous and Harmonious Militia”). You can see in its behavior the same manic actions of a people driven to despair and fantasy by desperate problems they cannot face but wish they could. Like the Native American Ghost Dancers of the American West that in the face of white American invasion and conquest, believed that if they remained peaceful and performed a ritual circle dance, the land would return its natural state before European colonization and bury the white settlers under the soil or make them disappear and perhaps raise Indigenous ancestors from the dead. The Chinese Boxers believed their rituals would make them bulletproof. In neither case did it happen. This was similar to how American Evangelical culture struggled to cope with social change and the threats of the Cold War. It was really during the Cold War, that the idea of the Rapture gained popularity. Some argued that God might use the superpowers’ nuclear weapons to bring about the End Times. The threat of nuclear war during the Cold War increased the currency of prophecies about the Rapture whereby the faithful would escape having to confront the coming troubles of the world by being plucked into Heaven. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and the movie Thief in the Night (1973) also contributed to the embrace of the premillennial Rapture scenario by the evangelical movement in the United States. Rather than confront the hard tasks before them, some people have thrown themselves into a delusion of contradictory active-passivity: Ghost Dancing without building a future plan of protection, pursing personal purity to be worthy of Rapture rather than engaging society through civic reform, or believing one is bulletproof and that hand-to-hand martial arts will overcome the need to build a modern military force. Societies that fall prey to these kinds of movements are setting themselves up for failure, because they sap communal energy that could otherwise go into productive efforts to reform and self-strengthen to win the future.

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The years between 1929 and 1931 determined the fate of China. What the nineteenth century had destroyed—sovereignty, dignity, and continuity—the twentieth might have restored. But the chance was lost.

China was torn just before the Second World War. The Chinese like many peoples who abandoned long histories of imperial dynastic rule, struggled to find themselves. Between 1912 and 1919 the Chinese, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian and German empires all fell from their thrones. China however was a big guy in a tough neighborhood, with neighbors who wanted its land and internal factions fighting over the resources and population. From 1926-1931 the trajectory of China was set, and sealed with a fight in 1929, and a mauling by a bear. China had great promise, but the timing was wrong, and its friends were few and far away.

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The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 is often narrated through great power politics and grand military strategies. Many accounts focus on Germany’s Schlieffen Plan and its consequences for British entry into the war, treating Belgium as mere geography—a convenient route for German armies. That framing obscures a fundamental truth: Belgium resisted, because it had a man for a king. A man who showed a last glimmer of the masculine light of the kings of old Europe.

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As the United States approached the first anniversary of the 1929 Stock Market Crash, the president was commemorating other events of a more celebratory kind.

On October 7th 1930 an estimated crowd of 30,000 assembled at the battlefield site in Kings Mountain, South Carolina to hear President Herbert Hoover recount the battle.

He spoke of the Founding generation of Patriots:

My fellow countrymen:

This is a place of inspiring memories. Here less than a thousand men, inspired by the urge of freedom, defeated a superior force entrenched in this strategic position. This small band of patriots turned back a dangerous invasion well designed to separate and dismember the united Colonies. It was a little army and a little battle, but it was of mighty portent. History has done scant justice to its significance, which rightly should place it beside Lexington and Bunker Hill, Trenton and Yorktown, as one of the crucial engagements in our long struggle for independence.

The Battle of Kings Mountain stands out in our national memory not only because of the valor of the men of the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, who trod here 150 years ago, and because of the brilliant leadership of Colonel Campbell, but also because the devotion of those men revived the courage of the despondent Colonies and set a nation upon the road of final triumph in American independence.

No American can review the vast pageant of human progress so mightily contributed to by these men without renewed faith in humanity, new courage, and strengthened resolution…

Hoover used the Battle of Kings Mountain as a moral reference point, arguing that a “little army” and a “little battle” carried outsized national consequence by reviving Patriot courage and helping secure independence. From that example he pivoted to define what he called the American system: self-government under law, constitutional checks and balances, and an “equality of opportunity” rooted in religious faith and sustained by universal education.

Our political system was a revolt from dictatorship, whether by individuals or classes. It was rounded upon the conception that freedom was inalienable, and that liberty and freedom should rest upon law, and that law should spring from the expressed wisdom of the representatives of the majority of the people themselves. This self-government was not in itself a new human ideal, but the Constitution which provided its framework, with the checks and balances which gave it stability, was of marvelous genius…

He contrasted this system with socialism, Bolshevism, anarchy, despotism, and class rule, claiming those philosophies either erased initiative or denied liberty. He warned that America’s gravest dangers were internal—crime, corruption, ballot manipulation, apathy, bureaucratic overreach, and both militarism and pacifism as extremes—and insisted these could be contained if citizens held fast to first principles.

From experiences in many lands I have sometimes compared some of these systems to a race. In the American system, through free and universal education, we train the runners, we strive to give to them an equal start, our Government is the umpire of its fairness. The winner is he who shows the most conscientious training, the greatest ability, the strongest character. Socialism or its violent brother, Bolshevism, would compel all the runners to end the race equally; it would hold the swiftest to the speed of the most backward. Anarchy would provide neither training nor umpire. Despotism or class government picks those who run and also those who win…

He also warned Americans against being overconfident and to beware foreign influence which seek to undermine their liberty and impose alien ideas of control.

It would be foolish for me to stand here and say that our political and social system works perfectly. It does not. The human race is not perfect yet. There are disheartening occurrences every hour of the day. There are always malevolent or selfish forces at work which, unchecked, would destroy the very basis of our American life. These forces of destruction vary from generation to generation; and if we would hand on our great inheritance to our children, we must successfully contend with them.

While we cannot permit any foreign person or agency to undermine our institutions, yet we must look to our own conduct that we do not, by our own failure to uphold and safeguard the true spirit of America, weaken our own institutions and destroy the very forces which upbuild our national greatness. It is in our own house that our real dangers lie, and it is there that we have need to summon our highest wisdom and our highest sense of public service…

He went on to further encourage the American people to oppose vice and corruption but in public and in the original source of government and education, the family home.

We must keep corruptive influences from the Nation and its ideals as we would keep them from our homes. Crime and disobedience of law are the very incarnation of destruction to a system whose basis is law. Both pacifism and militarism court danger from abroad, the one by promoting weakness, the other by promoting arrogance. Failure of many of our citizens to express their opinions at the ballot box is at once their abandonment of the whole basis of self-government…

The Depression had begun but not yet deepened. Hoover extolled the superiority of America over Europe. Europe was always the great competitor of the US and it was normal for Americans to be wary of ideologies imported from the old continent.

Compared with even the most advanced other country in Europe, we shall find an incomparably greater diffusion of material well-being. We have twice the number of homes owned among every thousand people that they have; we consume four times as much electricity and we have seven times as many automobiles; for each thousand people we have more than four times as many telephones and radio sets; our use of food and clothing is far greater; we have proportionately only one-twentieth as many people in the poorhouse or upon public charity…

Finally he closed by saying the Americans had the ability to grow and repair their economy and lift themselves out of their present struggles.

Our problems are the problems of growth. They are not the problems of decay. They are less difficult than those which confronted generations before us. The forces of righteousness and wisdom work as powerfully in our generation as in theirs. The flame of freedom burns as brightly in every American heart. There need be no fear for the future of a Republic that seeks inspiration from the spirit of the men who fought at the Battle of Kings Mountain.

Hoover strikes me as a man like Jimmy Carter, fundamentally decent, and fundamentally cursed with historic circumstances which denied them the opportunity to use their unique talents and gifts for the public good. Not all leaders are suited to all times. Some men who would make great chiefs of state in ordinary times are dooms to fail when times are hard and men are less patient with calm reserve.

Back in August, Hoover had sent the German President a letter marking the ten-year anniversary of the Wiemar Constitution.

August 12, 1930

[Released August 12, 1930. Dated August 11, 1930]

ON THIS anniversary which the people of Germany are celebrating today, I take pleasure in tendering to Your Excellency cordial greetings. I also offer personally the assurances of my own high regard.

HERBERT HOOVER

[His Excellency President von Hindenburg, Berlin, Germany]

Hoover could not know that a month later the Nazis would come in second place in the German parliamentary elections and permanently upend the Wiemar Republic. A month after that in October, he remarked on the anniversary of Black Thursday October 24:

“No special session is necessary to deal with employment. The sense of voluntary organization and community service in the American people has not vanished. The spirit of voluntary service has been strong enough to cope with the problem for the past year, and it will, I am confident, continue in full measure of the need.

“Colonel [Arthur] Woods is receiving most gratifying evidence of this from the Governors, mayors, industrial leaders, and welfare organizations throughout the country.”

Hoover’s voluntary response to the crisis was his “Associative State” an idea that was not a formal policy but rather an approach to governance and economic management. It relied on voluntary cooperation between government and industry, with Washington convening, sharing data, and encouraging common standards and self-regulation instead of passing new laws. The goals were stability and steady growth through less waste, higher productivity, and stronger competitiveness. It included support for public works to spur jobs and improve roads and public buildings, and it backed joint research to speed innovation. In short, it sought a middle ground between laissez-faire and state control by using the strengths of both sectors for broad prosperity. However, Associative State also supported public works projects as a means of stimulating economic activity and providing employment. This included initiatives to improve infrastructure, such as roads and public buildings, which would benefit both the economy and society. And yet, the approach worked best in good times but had limits, since cooperation could drift into cartels when competitors became too cozy and began fixing prices, rigging bids, limiting output, or dividing markets—so they can raise profits. The Great Depression exposed those limits and pushed the government toward direct relief and regulation. Again conditions were not ripe for Hoover. To use the Jefferey Kerr-Ritchie paraphrase of Marx, “men make history but not under conditions of their own choosing.” The conditions were unfavorable to Hoover and Carter whatever else one may think of their ideas.

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Palestine was not conquered from the Arabs, nor did the Israelis conquer it; it was conquered by the British from the Turks. From the iron grip of the Ottoman Empire. In 1914 the Turkish monarch still carried the titles of His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, Padishah of the Ottomans, Khan of Khans, Caliph of the Faithful, Shadow of Allah on Earth, Servant of the Two Holy Sanctuaries, and Sovereign of the Three Continents and Two Seas.

To Europeans, the Ottoman government was known as the Sublime Porte—literally the ‘High Gate’ of Istanbul, where ambassadors and petitioners once passed through massive doors to reach the Grand Vizier, the Sultan’s prime minister. The name evoked majesty and awe, suggesting an empire whose decrees flowed outward from a single fountainhead of authority.

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A popular idea is that the Treaty of Versailles led to the rise of the Nazis. The problem is that nearly every major German party, including those which were pro democracy, spent time attacking, denouncing or attempting to evade the terms of the treaty. Simply put, being anti-Versailles settlement did not make the National Socialist German Workers Party, unique or special.

The explanation seems credible but alone the explanation is not enough. That’s what we call a necessary but not sufficient condition. It is a condition you need to make an outcome possible or plausible but alone does not guarantee it will happen.

Germany in the 1920s had been a country defeated and one in denial that it was beaten on the battlefield. The Weimar Republic was Germany’s first national experiment with liberal style democracy, but it was fragile from the start. The Allies forced Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles, accept blame for the war, and pay crushing reparations. To meet those bills, the government printed money. Lots of money. In 1923, inflation spiraled so badly that middle-class savings vanished overnight.

Poof. Gone in smoke.

This is where we get the idea of people hauling stacks of banknotes to the bakery and still going hungry. Later, American loans gave Germany a pathway for some stability. But that was just redirecting the debt.

Politically, Weimar was as secure as it was going to be. Liberals had to use the power they had. The republic faced enemies from both the far left and the far right. Yet even in the middle of crisis, there was a kind of revolution in German culture. Berlin became a messy laboratory of art, architecture, and theater. Too messy for many.

Conservatives called it decadence, proof that democracy had corrupted national values. The resulting cultural divide mirrored the larger political one: those who saw promise in modernity, and those who longed for a strong hand to restore “order.” But what was meant by modernity was mixed, because for the Communists, Marx —who was German— represented the future of society. Not everyone who opposed Weimar wanted to go back to the old imperial regime. In fact its most fervent enemies were themselves, factions searching for a new German beginning, they were alternative revolutionaries. Like the Nazis. Like the Communists.

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However, due to help from engaged Americans, by the end of the decade, Weimar looked more stable.

In the 1928 federal elections to the German parliament, the Reichstag, the Nazis got only 800K votes and came in 9th place, winning only

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The First World War is often understood as a European conflict that spread globally, but this perspective obscures a fundamental reality: the war was built upon a foundation of European control of global colonial resources and labor established over the previous century. The industrial capacity that made total war possible, the raw materials that sustained it, and the human resources that fought it were drawn from this global imperial system that extended far beyond Europe’s borders. That made the Great War, into a world war.

The empires of the nineteenth century were the second wave of European expansion, after the first phase that began with the Portuguese and Spanish in the 1400s. The first wave largely targeted the Americas, but the second primarily focused on Africa and Asia. Nineteenth-century colonial expansion gave Europe access to greater raw materials, agricultural goods, markets, capital flows, and labor, which combined with new industrial economics, linked the development of the imperial metropole to the colonies. While imperialism was profitable for the elite, the increasingly literate masses were influenced by newspapers that supported imperialism to back overseas expansion as a sign of national greatness. Colonies became a status symbol, proof that a nation mattered as a Great Power.

But this imperial competition was built on more than prestige—it rested on European views of racial hierarchy that shaped how the war was fought. As Europe changed, secular arrogance mixed with scientific racism that ranked peoples with Europeans or “whites” on top. Under the facade of a decaying Christianity, racialized thinking spread; the creed that actually governed was Social Darwinism—flatly incompatible with Christian claims of human equality. The supposed duty to “civilize”—through education, health care, Christianity, and “good government”—functioned as moral cover for a system that denied the very gospel it invoked. Popular European images cast Chinese as cunning, Africans as primitive, and Pacific islanders as big children. These hierarchies determined not only who would be ruled, but who would fight Europe’s war, and where it would be fought. The spread of racism would comeback to haunt Europeans in later generations.

When the Great War came, Europe could draw on this global network—while the colonized populations lived with the upheaval, the classifications, and the contradictions of foreign rule. Finance capitalism funded the new empires. Industrialization and new scientific discoveries made it possible to expand into areas that were previously too difficult to reach, and where in the past European armies did not have the firepower to subdue large African and Asian armies. Steamships moved goods and troops faster. The underwater telegraph carried instructions swiftly from imperial capitals to the colonial administrative centers. Quinine reduced deaths in tropical zones where previously Europeans were extremely vulnerable. Just as Eurasian diseases devastated New World populations, Europeans could be hit just has hard by diseases in other parts of the world because immunity does not play favorites.1 Breech-loading rifles and machine guns delivered firepower in increasingly one-sided conflicts. And then, the power that went out would be reimported into Europe, the violence abroad would feed the violence at home.

Colonized societies were transformed through this mobilization, meaning the importation, or deployment of colonized people into Europe to fight. The first mass contact of the colonized people with the imperial heartlands came through the trenches. African and Indochinese soldiers learned French; soldiers from India learned the king’s English—European languages connected the world through the vocabulary of war. This mobilization of colonial subjects for European warfare made the contradictions at the heart of empire visible. The French and British would be less powerful without their ability to put colonial populations in uniform, but also, their German enemy could also draw away some of their power by targeting the colonies.

The war exposed the tensions that had would only grow after the peace of 1919. European powers celebrated constitutionalism and national independence at home while running unrepresentative regimes abroad. They claimed they fought for freedom and civilization while denying freedom to millions under their rule. The scale of colonial contribution to the European war effort made these contradictions difficult to justify. What would happened if some of the colonized decided that they could actually support the European empires if the Europeans would make them partners and not merely subjects? And, if the empires of capital would not share with the colonials, then perhaps Marx was right about the fundamental contradictions of the system, and maybe those who opposed European exploitation of their homelands would embrace communistic theories as a rejection of European domination. The misbehavior and contradictions of the Europeans supplied the arguments to undermine them, and would later feed into Cold War struggles.

Consequently, mobilizing colonial resources and peoples for a European conflict also revealed to those same peoples how dependent Europe had become on those it claimed were naturally inferior. This was a fraught choice by the great powers because without access to global resources and labor, the Europeans could not have built the wealth that sustained the scale and duration of industrial warfare that characterized the Great War. And without these colonies Europe would be in a much weaker position versus the rising power the United States because American power was based on domestic resources not colonial extraction. The USA could be a superpower without any colonies whereas it was colonial resources that determined the balance of power in favor of the Entente and the lack of those resources placed the Central Powers at a great disadvantage.

France, Britain and Russia, especially, needed their vast territories. Imagine France without Africa, Britain without India or Russia without Siberia. The USA with its 48 states was inherently stronger because America power was American and secured domestically, while European power was imperial and vulnerable to ruptures in those relationships.

But, increased contact with Europe itself, created negative feedback for the imperial regimes. Bringing colonial soldiers to Europe exposed them to regular Europeans—often not so different from poor African and Asian peasants—undermining claims of superiority. Additionally, the “lessons” of European imperial success would later return with devastating effect during the Second World War, when Japan adopted an accelerated version of European-style imperialism, asking: if European colonization was a sign of superiority and advanced culture, should not Japan do the same to Europeans in order to gain their respect?

But first, European powers like France would have to manage and police relations between their own people and the colonial soldiers they had deployed to fight the Germans. The methods of managing that system would also strain relations with later allies like the United States after it entered the war. But in 1914, Europe’s problems were the world’s problems.2

L'esprit de l'escalier: I clarified some parts after posting, realizing some areas needed a bit more background. Sorry, I wrote too quickly after a late class. This essay is just the beginning of my exploration of the colonial impact on the Great War.

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The conventional narrative surrounding the League of Nations' failure places primary blame on American isolationism and the United States Senate's refusal to ratify membership. This explanation, while convenient for European powers seeking to deflect responsibility, fundamentally misunderstands both the League's structure and the realities of early 20th-century global power. The League of Nations did not fail because America stayed home—it failed because Britain and France, who possessed unprecedented global reach and resources, chose colonial self-interest over collective security and lacked the moral courage to confront aggression when it mattered most.

By 1920, the British and French Empires together controlled an astounding 32% of the world's land area and governed close to 28% of the global population. The British Empire alone, at its height after the Great War, encompassed 24% of world territory and ruled over 23% of humanity, while France controlled approximately 8% of global landmass and 5% of the world's people. These were not minor players hoping for American leadership—they were the dominant global powers of their age, possessing the military, economic, and administrative capabilities to enforce international law across continents.

Rather than using this unprecedented power to build genuine international cooperation, Britain and France immediately prioritized imperial expansion. The 1920 San Remo Conference revealed their true priorities: carving up the Ottoman Empire's territories not as steps toward independence, but as new imperial possessions disguised as League mandates. France secured control over Syria and Lebanon, while Britain claimed Palestine and Iraq. The Anglo-French oil agreement concluded during the same conference—guaranteeing France 25% of Iraqi oil in exchange for supporting British control over Mosul—exposed the naked economic imperialism driving their decisions.

The mandate system itself became a masterpiece of imperial doublespeak. Theoretically designed to prepare territories for self-governance under League supervision, the mandates functioned as traditional colonies in all but name. Here is how it worked: League of Nations mandates were authorizations granted to member nations by the League to govern former colonies of Germany or the Ottoman Empire. These territories were considered, almost, but just not quite not yet ready to govern themselves after the Great War.

The mandate system was a compromise — a largely rhetorical one —between the Allies who wanted to take the colonies of their defeated enemies, and their war propaganda declaration that the annexation of territory was not a war aim. The mandates were divided into three classes based on their location, political, and economic development, and then assigned to Allied victors.

The three classes were:

• Class A mandates Former Turkish provinces like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. These territories were considered advanced enough for provisional independence but were still subject to Allied administrative control until fully independent. (Out this came the Israeli-Arab conflict.)

• Class B mandates Former German-ruled African colonies like Tanganyika, parts of Togoland and Cameroons, and Ruanda-Urundi. The Allied powers were directly responsible for the administration of these mandates but were subject to certain controls intended to protect the rights of the mandates’ native peoples.

• Class C mandates Various former German-held territories that the assigned Mandatories subsequently administered as integral parts of their territory, such as South West Africa (now Namibia, assigned to South Africa, part of the British Empire), New Guinea (assigned to Australia, part of the British Empire), Western Samoa (now Samoa, assigned to New Zealand, part of the British Empire), the islands north of the Equator in the western Pacific (Japan), and Nauru (Australia, with Britain and New Zealand).

The League’s Permanent Mandates Commission theoretically supervised the exercise of the mandates. In 1946, the UN trusteeship system replaced the mandate system. Focusing on Class A makes this clearer. The Class A mandates of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine were supposedly "advanced enough for provisional independence," yet remained under direct Allied administrative control. The League's Permanent Mandates Commission provided only theoretical oversight, lacking real power to enforce mandate terms or hold mandatory powers accountable. So, Britain and France had created a system expanding their empires under the banner of international cooperation. How will become clear in a moment as the mask slipped early.

When they carved the map up during the San Remo Conference in 1920, Britain and France sliced Ottoman lands into the mandates, not as pathways to self-rule but as new dependencies branded with League approval. France took Syria and Lebanon. Britain took Palestine and Iraq. An Anglo-French oil deal sweetened the arrangement—France would receive a quarter share of Iraqi oil in exchange for accepting British control over Mosul. Call it diplomacy if you like. It was resource extraction with polite paperwork. The League's governing structure reinforced British-French dominance. When the United States declined membership, the League Council—originally designed for five great powers—became dominated by Britain and France, who together with Italy and Japan formed the permanent membership. In essence, the colonizers were supervising themselves, wielding disproportionate influence over an organization theoretically dedicated to collective security and self-determination.

This double game destroyed trust. How could small nations or colonized peoples believe in an international order that preached nonaggression while its stewards expanded their own sway? Many saw the truth at once: the League’s promises of tutelage were a holding pattern for European control, not a road to sovereignty. Moral authority drained out of the project from the start. That was a choice of the French and the British. The mandate system's hypocrisy was evident to colonized peoples who began to challenge, often violently, the claims of their would-be European masters. The only way for the Europeans to make this an “America missing in action” problem would be the expectation that the US would have restrained Britain and France, —by force one assumes —likely not what British and French apologists are advocating for.

The consequences of this moral bankruptcy became clear when the League faced its first serious challenges. Britain and France had the military and economic resources to stop aggression—their combined empires could field massive armies; they still controlled crucial trade routes. If they collaborated, they could have enforced the League of Nations charter, and put Japan, Italy and even Germany in their place.

American absence, while perhaps unfortunate, cannot excuse this failure of leadership. Britain and France made the conscious choice to join the League, accepting the responsibilities of membership while simultaneously undermining its principles through their colonial policies. You cannot claim the benefits of League membership—legitimacy for their mandates and justification for their expanded empires—while rejecting responsibility for making the organization effective. The claim that the League was doomed without the United States mistakes structure for character. Institutions can amplify power; they cannot supply courage. The order was theirs to defend. What they lacked was the political and moral will to treat aggression against others like China and Ethiopia as aggression against themselves or the League system they dominated. They preferred quiet over risk and resistance, imperial gain over collective duty. When the reckoning came, they stood atop an institution they had weakened to point of being irrelevant. The tragedy of the League is not primarily an American story. It cannot be. It is one of European stewardship abused. London and Paris turned an chance for global collective security into a cover for imperial expansion, then found themselves unwilling—or unable—to defend even that compromised system when confronted by rival imperialisms. The verdict of guilt belongs where the power was: in British and French cabinets that possessed the means to make the League work and chose otherwise.

International orders do not collapse simply because outsiders refuse to join. They collapse when insiders trade principle for convenience or greed, and hope that signatures can substitute for resolve. The work of peace is not some mysterious, unknowable thing. It requires hard work and disciplined choices. Integrity and firmness. The League failed where its stewards faltered. Any successor worth the name must do better—choose duty over alibis, enforcement over euphemism, and courage over comfort. The United Nations has work to do.

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In children’s games the rules are simple. Rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper, paper beats rock. In Europe between 1900 and 1914, the game could seem deceptively simple, a dangerously sly arithmétique. If it got going, Austria could beat Serbia, France could thwart Austria, Germany could counter France, Russia could wreck Germany, and the Ottomans could cage Russia. In the diplomatic hand game, however, the French threw more hands.

France set its trap carefully. Having lost Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, Paris spent decades preparing not just for revanche but for surety. By 1890, the French elite understood they could not defeat Germany alone. Their solution was scissors: they had cut Africa in pieces and realized colonized soldiers could later be imported to Europe to fight, and they cut out their hatred of Britain —of the English— and in its place they put paper, layers of treaties, alliances, and ententes that hemmed Germany in. And waited. With Russia in the east, Britain in the west and on the high seas, and Italy wavering but courted, France appeared to have surrounded its enemy with a web with enough potential power to strangle German power. And it had. Diplomatically, it was a triumph. Strategically, it was a self-provocation.

Signed in 1894, the Russian alliance was France’s insurance policy against a German reinsurance policy. Russia, slow-moving but immense, balanced Germany’s industrial might. French financiers backed Russian railways and armaments, knitting their economies together. For Germany, this meant joining the war in the Balkans—even a cause that Austria was justified in pursuing—risked a two-front struggle. For France, it meant confidence.

But the hinge which opened the door to French payback was the Entente Cordiale. The 1904 Cordial Agreement settled colonial disputes in Africa, freeing Britain to focus on the German threat. By 1907, with Russia also reconciled to Britain, the Triple Entente was born but France was the midwife, France was the glue, it was a constellation of agreements orbiting Paris. Britain’s naval supremacy was only partly risked by Germany’s naval buildup, but this only tightened the Anglo-French bond. Here again, French diplomacy closed off Germany’s options. Britain’s commitment to France appeared limited and ambiguous but their cooperation and planning grew closer in the decade leading up to the war.

The cost would be spread over four years of war. France survived the opening blows, but at the price of devastation. The alliances had worked, but they also ensured the escalation. By making the potential conflict into a war they could win, French leaders made it too tempting to pass on the opportunity when it was presented. They should have resisted.

In 1905 the world watched Russia and Japan grind each other down in Manchuria. It was the first Great Power industrial war of the twentieth century, and it should have been a warning to Europe. Instead, its lessons were noted but not absorbed. The Russo-Japanese War revealed what modern armies, armed with new weapons and mass mobilization, could do to each other. It showed the scale of death, the speed of destruction, and the brittleness of empires. Europeans looked on but told themselves they could will themselves to swift victory without the cost. The Battle of Mukden’s casualties alone were two and a half times those at Gettysburg. However, the May 24–26, 1904, Battle of Nanshan should have stopped everyone cold.

At Nanshan the Imperial Japanese Army, 35,000 strong, charged the entrenched defenses of the Imperial Russian Army numbering around 4,000 men. This was not the maneuver warfare of the Emperor Napoleon the Great. The Japanese force outnumbered the Russians almost ten to one, defeated them, and cut off the Port Arthur garrison from Russia’s main forces in Manchuria. However, to earn it, over two days the Japanese attacked a two-mile-long defensive line of Russian mines, barbed wire, and machine guns. The United States studied it and Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur Jr., father of General Douglas MacArthur, sent as an observer to the Russo-Japanese War, gave figures for the furious assault of the Japanese:

At the battle of Nanshan we have from report of Gen. McArthur(sic), the following statement of the expenditure of ammunition, which was given out officially by the Japanese authorities: 1st Division, 667,010,—3d Division, 425,148,—4th Division, 1,110,086.1

With primary fighting on May 26, the three Japanese divisions alone threw almost the equivalent firepower — around 2.2 million rounds — at the Russians as Meade and Lee’s troops combined per-day average at Gettysburg from July 1-3 1863. And for all that this victory cost the Japanese 6,000 casualties to only 1,600 Russians or four-to-one.

Yet with Britain in its pocket, the French pursued a war that would bring this carnage to its eastern frontier. With Britain, France could expand its diplomatic stratagem to the Mediterranean powers. Nevertheless, by 1914 France had arranged the table so that Germany’s every move looked like a losing one. Get stuck on French defenses and bleed, or let Russia and France squeeze you on two fronts, or go through Belgium and bring the British Empire down on you.

Credit where it is due: this was masterful. It was also fatal. France created an atmosphere for itself where war looked winnable and therefore more attractive. But Nanshan was a “win” for the Japanese too, and a European war would involve many more soldiers and longer lines. In a way it is a paradox of success, French diplomacy was brilliant, but brilliance came with the risk of being too clever. It gave France allies. It gave France confidence. And in 1914, it gave France the option of war. France could win the war and wreck itself. It did.

Why this matters: When we’re upset and want payback, a risky path that looks winnable can lure smart people into bad bets—on teams, in policy, and in relationships.

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