April 15, 2007
Andrew Roberts IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:30 PM EST I haven’t read Roberts’s book either, so I’m in very good company. But I wonder if Andrew Roberts wasn’t somewhat constrained by the fact that his book is explicitly a sequel to Winston Churchill’s four-volume work of the same name that stopped in 1900. To be sure he must have found Churchill’s worldview congenial or he wouldn’t have taken on the task, but he is a tough act to follow, after all. I imagine that Johann Hari and Caroline Elkins have no use for Churchill any more than they do for Roberts, of course, his having saved the world and won a Nobel Prize for literature hardly compensating for his imperialist and capitalist views. Like campus hooligans, these sort of truly and unnecessarily personally nasty reviews always seems to come from the left. Maybe Ann Coulter has written some book reviews I haven’t read, however. I agree with Fredric Smoler that it is easy, especially with a book of this length and breadth, to compile a list of mistakes that should have been caught in manuscript. I just got an e-mail from a reader of one of my books pointing out, very politely, a stupid mistake on my part (I know, I really do, that radios don’t have electric motors in them). But—maybe I’m getting old—it seems to me that editors and copyeditors just don’t seem to try to catch them anymore. Spelling and punctuation gets fixed, but if the author writes that the sun rose in the west, well, that, it seems, is not their department anymore.
April 15, 2007
Andrew Roberts III Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:55 PM EST I enjoyed reading Fred Smoler’s response to The New Republic’s article on Andrew Roberts. His point about Hari’s personal attack on Roberts’s family origins is particularly well taken. I’m not sure “what sort of person abuses anyone for metaphorically stinking of the frying oil,” but I’m certain it’s not a person I’d like to spend much time with. Mr. Smoler takes issue with a few comments in my previous post on the subject and suggests that Johann Hari is not necessarily the reliable critic I take him to be. I’m not as acquainted with Hari’s work as Mr. Smoler apparently is, so I’ll defer to his experience. I’m not entirely comfortable, though, with the suggestion that Hari, a former Iraq war supporter, is “trying to cleanse himself of charges of initial thought crimes by burnishing his anti-imperialist credentials.” If Hari’s aim was to exonerate himself in the eyes of liberals, he’d have been rather foolish to take to the pages of The New Republic, the nominal editor of which, Martin Peretz, is about as reviled on the left as Dick Cheney. As Mr. Smoler correctly guesses, I have joined him in the practice of writing about Andrew Roberts without fully reading his latest work. I have glanced at A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, but I have not read it in its entirety. To be perfectly honest, I’m not particularly eager to do so. Hari’s review might be rather mean-spirited, but, as I previously wrote, that doesn’t mean its criticisms can be dismissed out of hand. For example, a “recurring theme in Roberts’s work,” according to Hari, is “that nationalist sentiments can be successfully crushed with massive violence.” With the example of the Amritsar massacre in hand, Hari argues that this is a very simpleminded view of the way violence works, highlighting how “Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru—men who had been constitutionalists with some residual loyalty to the Empire—abandoned their position following Amritsar, reasoning that, if the British were going to gun down women and children, there was no point in taking the reformist route.” This is a persuasive argument that there’s a certain degree of myopia in Roberts’s approach to history. Not having read Roberts’s book, I won’t say that it’s worthless. But having read Hari’s review, with its bits of compelling criticism, like this one, I think I’ll spend my reading hours elsewhere, perhaps on works that deal with empire in a more intellectually challenging way. Fred Smoler writes that “if you compare the British Empire to almost any of the others—to the Aztecs, the Romanovs, the Persian or Chinese empires (in both cases, up to the present day), the Belgians, and so on down the line, I think the Brits are flattered by the comparison.” I’d agree with this statement, but I’d also say, and I imagine Mr. Smoler would agree, that such comparisons are not always the most instructive ways of getting at truth. Yes, one might say, the Communist government under Castro seems bad, but consider the alternatives of Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and present-day North Korea. True, but it seems that one might be missing a more nuanced point. I’m not tripping over myself to jump on board with Caroline Elkins, but I generally prefer works of history that are challenging, subtle, and humble in their scholarly approach. For that, I guess I’ll have to eschew both Andrew Roberts and Johann Hari.
April 15, 2007
Andrew Roberts II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:50 AM EST Alex Burns posted on Andrew Roberts, whose new book has yet again been nastily attacked, this time in The New Republic, by Johann Hari, in “a disturbing article.” The article is admittedly disturbing, for it characterizes Roberts as “a man with links to white supremacism, whose book is not a history but an ahistorical catalogue of apologies and justifications for mass murder that even blames the victims of concentration camps for their own deaths.” “Links” is a very vague word, made less persuasive when we eventually learn, from Hari’s own review, that the concentration camps Roberts apologizes for were, rather oddly, the ones used to suppress white supremacists, so I’ll continue to reserve judgment. I again stress that I have not read the book under attack, and I assume Alex Burns has not read it either, only because he does not claim that he has, and there is an irresistible temptation to note that one has read a book under discussion when another party to the conversation acknowledges that he has not. There is nothing wrong with a blogger discussing reviews of a book he has not read—I began this discussion by doing so myself—but it is not always easy to assess such a review’s accuracy. What are some possible clues about the likely worth of Hari’s review? Alex Burns calls Hari’s tone, and Jacob Weisberg’s earlier tone, “fairly derisive.” I would use stronger language, and did: I think the reviews are contemptibly spiteful and consistently venomous. Venomousness is sometimes appropriate, spite less frequently so, but neither quality inspires confidence about judiciousness and fair-mindedness. I have read and sometimes admired Hari in The Independent; he has interestingly complicated politics, but he does occasionally suffer from a passion for the intoxicating pleasures of violent indignation. I’d also speculate that as a former supporter of the Iraq War, not a popular position with Independent readers (or too many other citizens of the Republic of Anglo-American Letters), Hari may be trying to cleanse himself of charges of initial thought crimes by burnishing his anti-imperialist credentials. His use of what he considers authorities does not always inspire confidence. For example, Hari writes that Andrew Roberts has “an agenda that the distinguished Harvard historian Caroline Elkins describes as ‘incredibly dangerous and frightening.’” This distinguished Harvard historian has written a prizewinning but much-contested book, Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. If you know a little about Stalin’s gulag, and a little about the history of Kenya, this title speaks volumes. A comparison might be a hypothetical book called Attica: America’s Auschwitz. Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, reviewed Elkins’s book with great reservations in The Guardian (“Elkins remains rigidly one dimensional in her understanding”), which Guardian aficionados may consider rather like Al Qaeda expressing uneasiness about a want of balance in an anti-Zionist tract. Elkins estimated that the British killed several hundreds of thousands of people while suppressing the Mau Mau; Histories of the Hanged, a celebrated book published around the same time, by David Anderson, estimated that the British executed 1,090. A letter published in The New York Review of Books detailed Elkins’s alleged shortcomings, and another letter by the same writer on the same subject to The London Review of Books made similar points, some of which were generously conceded by the author whose review is being corrected. I note that scholars who write letters to the NYRB and the LRB are rarely if ever Colonel Blimp clones. I’ve read another savage review of Elkins by an African historian, who sounded as if knew what he was talking about, as well as various encomia by people who sounded as if they didn’t. So it is possible that the British published and unpublished statistics on the Mau Mau are infinitely less reliable than Stalin’s published and unpublished statistics on the Ukraine, and if so, Elkins is the most important scholar of our time. But maybe not. Similarly, Hari writes that “Mike Davis of the University of California, Irvine, author of Late Victorian Holocausts, says bluntly: “This is tantamount to Holocaust-denial. His arguments about the Boer concentration camps are similar to the arguments of the Nazi apologists about those camps.” This seems vastly unlikely, not least because the camps were not themselves too similar, and Mike Davis’s title, as well as his argument, should arouse the same uneasiness Elkins’s title does. Are the crimes of the later British Empire usefully compared to the most notorious crimes of Hitler’s empire, or of Stalin’s? As we used to say in the old New Left, to ask this question is to answer it (unless historical fantasies can be produced to balance the scales). I shall not spend time here on Davis’s various shortcomings, and I am sure that along with interpretations and judgments I would not share, Andrew Roberts made some factual errors. When writing a book of broad range and sweep, such errors tend to be more rather than less common, and they can be very unfairly heaped up to create impressions of gross incompetence. To get a sense of how factual errors can be compiled into a misleading and odiously malicious attack on a book, I can think of no better example than the notoriously vicious Times Literary Supplement review of Orlando Figes’s splendid Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia; I cannot link to it, but any TLS subscriber and members of most universities can, and should. In Hari’s case, I am uneasy because he takes Davis and Elkins to be authorities worth quoting without caveat, and because I find various other claims in the review to be vastly improbable. (Does Amartya Sen really believe that there has been no substantial famine in the subcontinent since the British left? More than a million died in the 1974–1975 famine in Bangladesh, and I would be very surprised if a man who won a Nobel for his work on famine did not know this.) Did Roberts claim that internment worked in 1970s Northern Ireland, as Hari charges? A friend who has read the book tells me that he does not, instead stating, correctly, that internment worked in southern Ireland, in the 1920s, as a tactic De Valera used to crush the IRA. What evidence exists, in Hari’s review, of good faith, which would make me automatically credit his account over that of a friend of Roberts’? None, I fear, and some to the contrary. With peculiar vulgarity, pettiness, and mendacity, Hari writes that “one of the few things that can silence Roberts is a mention of his origins in the distinctly nonaristocratic merchant classes, with a father who owned a string of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. Much as he longs to be K&C (Kensington and Chelsea), to those he adores, he will always have the whiff of KFC.” This is false, indeed ridiculous, bad sociology, and remarkably unattractive. On the basis of what I have heard mutual friends and acquaintances state in passing, and from what I have looked up, Andrew Roberts, a Fellow of two Royal Societies, is a graduate of Cambridge, where he took a first at Caius; his father, an Oxford man who served as a lieutenant in the Royal Tank Regiment, was heir to a successful family firm now a century old, and Roberts currently resides at a much better address than the one Mr. Hari seems to imply he longs to live at. All of this suggests that Mr. Hari’s nasty and elephantine joke about KFC misses the point made by Lady Bracknell more than a century ago: Mr. Roberts did not rise from the ranks of the aristocracy, he was born to the purple of commerce. Lady Bracknell’s views aside, what sort of person abuses anyone for metaphorically stinking of the frying oil? Is Mr. Roberts a staggering revisionist about the British Empire? Given some current tastes for demonizing the empire, possibly so, but if staggering revisionism is a hanging offense, Elkins and Davis will swing from a much higher gallows. The issue should be whether the revisions are plausible and arrived at with modest competence and an initially open mind. Does Roberts sentimentalize the empire? Could be. Again, I haven’t read the book. The rulers of the British Empire committed many crimes, although rather fewer than did the men who ran most empires, and they also had astonishing achievements to their credit. Marx, of course, knew this. What passes for a left nowadays does not always seem to know this. It is a feeble defense of any regime to note that it is or was less vicious than either Hitler’s or Stalin’s rule, but it is a feeble mind that does not remember that the British Empire stamped out both the custom of burning widows alive and slavery, whereas Hitler, for example, revived both practices. Well, that is hyperbole; most of the widows Hitler burned had been gassed first. Still, if you compare the British empire to almost any of the others—to the Aztecs, the Romanovs, the Persian or Chinese empires (in both cases, up to the present day), the Belgians, and so on down the line, I think the Brits are flattered by the comparison. A large percentage of all the human beings who have ever lived have been born and died in empires, and if you drew a straw of average length and lived and died in an empire, an average life in the later British empire would not be the worst of possible fates. And if we reduce the question to that cruder and narrower comparison, the one in this case implied not by Roberts but by Elkins and Co., is it less mad to exult that Salisbury was better than Hitler and Stalin, or to pretend that he wasn’t?
April 13, 2007
Andrew Roberts Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:45 PM EST There’s a disturbing article in today’s web edition of The New Republic. Unfortunately, it’s a subscribers-only feature, but I think it’s worth highlighting all the same. The piece is called “Bush’s Imperial Historian,” and it focuses on the career of Andrew Roberts, whose work Fred Smoler discussed here last month. Like the Jacob Weisberg review that Mr. Smoler disliked, the article is written in a fairly derisive tone. Unlike the Weisberg piece, I think this one raises important, larger criticisms of Roberts’s work. Roberts’s historical worldview, according to the writer, Johann Hari, is deeply compromised by his love of empire and the British aristocratic tradition. As a result, Roberts tends to play it fast and loose with facts when it will allow him to tell a better story. From downplaying the negative consequences of the Amritsar massacre in India to totally ignoring the IRA backlash against British internment policy in Northern Ireland, Roberts is clearly not averse to staggering historical revisionism. Hari, à la Weisberg, crosses the line from criticizing Roberts to mocking him, calling him a “fifth-rate Rudyard Kipling.” His substantive objections to Roberts’s work should still be taken seriously. I’d actually say the same of Weisberg’s original review. I certainly agree with Fred Smoler that Weisberg’s tone is problematic. The points that he makes, and that Mr. Smoler discusses, would have been much more palatable if their common criticism of Roberts, that he is a historian with little patience for nuance, had been stated more directly. Toward the end of Weisberg’s review, there is what seems to me to be a particularly salient criticism of Robert’s work: “Roberts is as sloppy as he is snobbish. . . . The San Francisco earthquake did considerably more than $400,000 in damage. Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in 1941, did not write for Encounter, which began publication in 1953. The Proposition 13 Tax Revolt took place in the 1970s, not the 1980s—an important distinction because it presaged Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Michael Milken was not a ‘takeover arbitrageur,’ whatever that is. Roberts cannot know that there were 500 registered lobbyists in Washington during World War II because lobbyists weren’t forced to register until 1946. Gregg Easterbrook is not the editor of The New Republic. ‘No man gets left behind’ is a line from the film Black Hawk Down, not the motto of the U.S. Army Rangers; their actual motto is ‘Rangers Lead the Way.’” The New Republic commented on the Weisberg piece around the same time as Mr. Smoler, and compared this paragraph to Jamie Lee Curtis’s tirade, directed at Kevin Kline, in A Fish Called Wanda (“Aristotle was not Belgian!”). Cute comparisons aside, though, it’s a very grave failing for a historian to be as untroubled by factual inaccuracy as Roberts evidently is. Even if one ignores his personal failings, such as a shocking association with South Africa’s ultra-rightist Springbok Club, it’s hard to ignore such obvious shortcomings.
April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:45 PM EST Kurt Vonnegut died last night. Gore Vidal asserted that Vonnegut, along with Norman Mailer and Vidal himself, was one of the last living American writers to have served in the Second World War. This is overstated, but it is does seem to be true that Kurt Vonnegut is the only writer to have served in the Second World War who has been read by a lot of my undergraduates. Some of them are assigned him in high school, but a fair number find him on their own. His vision of war, a consistently antiheroic vision, is still alluring to many undergraduates, just as it was when I was an undergraduate in 1969. As it happens, Vonnegut served in my father’s division; two of its infantry regiments, the 422nd and the 423rd, were surrounded at the start of the Battle of the Bulge and surrendered. The third regiment, the 424th, was not surrounded and did not surrender. Vonnegut was very famously a prisoner of war in Dresden when that city was bombed, an experience my undergraduates know about largely because of his novel Slaughterhouse Five. In his autobiography, Vonnegut wrote that “the firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am.” That, too, seems like a probable overstatement. He at least once remarked that “I will say again what I have often said in print and in speeches, that not one Allied soldier was able to advance as much as an inch because of the firebombing of Dresden. Not one prisoner of the Nazis got out of prison a microsecond earlier. Only one person on earth clearly benefited, and I am that person; I got about five dollars for each corpse, not counting my fee tonight.” This is, of course, an absurdity. In 2005 Der Spiegel noted, of Victor Klemperer, that “In all likelihood, the bombing of Dresden saved him from being sent to the Auschwitz gas chambers.” This was also Klemperer’s own opinion: A German Christian of Jewish descent, he almost certainly lived because the bombing disrupted the extermination of that city’s last Jews. Gotz Bergander, who also lived through the bombing and also later wrote about it, observed that “it is true that most Germans no longer believed in victory, but they could not imagine unconditional surrender. The shock of Dresden contributed in a fundamental way to a change of heart. This expressed itself at that time in the words: Better an end to terror than terror without end.” So despite ever-mounting assurances that those who have seen war invariably know that there is nothing worse, not everyone who was bombed in Dresden has come to an identical conclusion on that question. Something similar is true about people who served in the 106th Infantry Division, when they ponder the meaning of their experience. A couple of years ago I attended a reunion of a fair number of the survivors of that division. I formed the impression that people who had been taken prisoner were perhaps more likely to express an unheroic and ironical view of war than were those who had been given, by a stroke of fortune, the chance to fight. But this distinction can be overdrawn. Many of the former POWs occasionally exhibited a heroic view of the Second World War, and none of the survivors of the 424th infantry to whom I listened were bereft of some antiheroic and ironical tones. On the other hand, there were some sorts of things I only heard the survivors of the 424th say. Poring over a vast wall map of the eastern edge of the Ardennes, two of them remembered something done by their regiment’s L Company, in which neither of them had served. In the first days of the battle, marked almost entirely by defeat and retreat, that company had at one point defended a position bravely but stupidly attacked by German infantry. There was some terse and incomprehensible conversation about the ground, fields of fire, how L Company had deployed, and where it had set up its machine guns. Then, with cold satisfaction, one of them reminisced that L Company had “stacked ’em up like cordwood.” We are often told that this is the sort of thing said only by people who have never seen war. Thinking back on it, though, I have never heard such a thing said by anyone who had not himself done it, or something very like. In a phrase Vonnegut made famous, so it goes.
April 12, 2007
Professors Gone Wild Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:55 PM EST Some weeks ago there was a discussion on this blog about the political inclinations of the American academy. Sparked by an article by Michael Barone, the discussion got pretty contentious. Reflecting on that debate, and on some new developments since then, I’m struck by a point that I wish I’d made at the time. One of the problems with Michael Barone’s portrait of the American academy, which might have been useful to consider back in March, is the academy’s supposed homogeneity. As Barone depicts American universities, one might think that they are relatively unanimous in their political leanings, and that left-wing professors form a more or less united front against traditional Anglo-American values. This is obviously not the case. I am sure Barone would gladly acknowledge this, though, and my point in raising this observation is not to celebrate the intellectual heterogeneity of the American university system. The news that inspired this observation is certainly not worth celebrating. Indeed, the larger observation that I’m motivated to make is that American academics cannot possibly be directing their full energies into radicalizing our nation’s youth, since much of that potential energy is occupied in personal, internecine academic feuds. One such feud is covered in today’s New York Times. “If the longstanding fight between two professors, Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein, was under the jurisdiction of family court a judge could issue restraining orders and forbid inflammatory statements,” Patricia Cohen’s article begins. “But, alas, this nasty and zealously pursued feud is taking place in scholarly precincts, so each protagonist is continuing his campaign, unhampered, to destroy the other’s professional reputation and career.” As previously reported by the Harvard Crimson, Professor Finkelstein’s bid for tenure at DePaul University has run into trouble, as DePaul College’s dean defied a faculty recommendation and decided to oppose Finkelstein’s appointment. According to Finkelstein, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz has waged a campaign to oppose his promotion. Dershowitz has essentially admitted to doing so. The Times article contains more detailed information about the history of the feud between these two men, and about the specific controversy surrounding Finkelstein’s tenure review. At the heart of the matter is a long series of exchanges over Israel policy and anti-Semitism, in which Dershowitz has tended to take a staunchly pro-Israel position, and Finkelstein has accused Dershowitz of dissembling in order to advance his political agenda. The striking thing about this feud is just how little it has to do with real scholarship, and the extent to which it must distract these professors from more serious academic work. Each of these men has apparently poured hours of energy into producing personal attacks on the other (“The 10 Stupidest Things Finkelstein Has Said,” for example, or “Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?”), and posting them on their respective Internet sites. Regardless of which man’s perspective one prefers, it’s hard not to see such sniping as childish. Criticizing Finkelstein’s work, Dershowitz told The New York Times: “There’s no scholarship there.” Actually, this criticism could characterize the entire Dershowitz-Finkelstein controversy. In cases like this, academics seem to act less like “tenured radicals” than like tenured children. It would be tremendously unfair to take the Dershowitz-Finkelstein controversy as a typical one, or as one that effectively depicts the state of academia. Most academics that I’ve encountered have been serious, conscientious, private people. From the facts of this case, though, it doesn’t seem unjust to conclude that some of America’s most politically outspoken professors are more concerned with lambasting each other than with brainwashing college students. If Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein spent a little less time attacking their personal adversaries, and a little more time teaching and writing, it might not allay Mr. Barone’s distrust. But it would surely be better for their students, their colleagues, and the country.
April 11, 2007
Google Maps' Hidden Historical Joke Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:25 PM EST An e-mail list I look in on—it is about my favorite author of alternate history—generates a fair amount of traffic on other topics. Today someone posted the interesting fact that if you use Google Maps to chart a driving route from New York City to Paris, you are given careful directions until step 23 or so, at which point, at a pier in Boston, you are told to swim the Atlantic. I tried it, and it turned out to be true. At that point in my Googling I thought this the whole of the joke buried inside the Google Maps machinery, but reading on, I found what looks suspiciously like another. After crawling ashore at Le Havre, you are carefully directed to a local road, then a traffic circle, and after a few more turns you take the exit from the A131/Rouen/Paris/Evreux onto the A13/E05/L'Autoroute de Normandie. After that it’s a bit more driving, then Paris. I am now wondering whether the Google prankster had more history on his mind than I had initially assumed. Translated into a more conventional joke form: How do you get to Paris from New York? Well, first you crawl ashore in Normandy . . .
April 10, 2007
The Titanic and Bruce Ismay Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:45 PM EST I watched the movie Titanic over the weekend. I hadn’t seen it since it first opened 10 years ago, and I was every bit as impressed with it as I had been the first time I saw it. It is a wonderful romance movie, a thrilling adventure movie, and an epic disaster movie (quite as close as I ever care to get to being shipwrecked in the North Atlantic in mid-April, thank you very much). It fully and brilliantly conveyed the horror and pathos and terror of the moment. The ending—as the ship slowly transforms from the dead wreck of the late twentieth century into the living, breathing, glittering creature she had so briefly been in the early twentieth, and as the doomed lovers are reunited forever at the top of the grand staircase—is a please-pass-the-Kleenex moment for the hardest of hearts. And, in a limited way, Titanic is not a bad documentary of what is by far the most famous (if not the most death-ridden) maritime disaster in history. That is understandable, as why would a competent moviemaker fool around with what is already a nearly perfect story? To be sure, the characters so memorably played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are pure fiction, but the world they inhabited is not. The ship was meticulously recreated, many of the minor characters are real and accurately portrayed, and the details of the sinking, as they were understood 10 years ago, are faithfully rendered. (There is new evidence that the ship broke in two from the bottom up, not the top down as shown in the movie.) There were, of course, minor slips. There is a scene involving smoking at lunch, but no one would have smoked in the first-class dining room in 1912. The astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson pointed out that the stars in the sky as DiCaprio and Winslet floated in the dark, wreckage-flecked waters after the ship went down were randomly generated, not those of the real sky. (I confess I didn’t notice that the first time around; I was thinking about how cold that water must have been.) One of the minor characters, in this and in earlier movie versions, is Bruce Ismay. Like many first-class male passengers, he survived and, like them, he would be mostly forgotten today except for one fact: He was the managing director of the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic. He spent two hours helping the ship’s officers load women and children into lifeboats on the ship’s starboard side. As the last lifeboat was ready for launch and there were, according to his testimony, no other passengers in sight, he made a fateful decision. At the crossroads of his life, with a single flicker of his all-too-human heart, he sought to do what all living creatures seek, to stay alive. He stepped into the lifeboat. Thus he survived, but his reputation did not. Because he was popularly regarded as having had a duty to stay with the ship until all the passengers were safe, although he was not part of the ship’s crew, he was savaged by the press, especially in the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. He was the subject of derision by vaudeville comedians. The journalist Ben Hecht (who would later write the play The Front Page) published a doggeral verse about him: The captain stood where a captain should
When the captain’s boat goes down.
But the owner led when the women fled
For an owner must not drown. Ismay had had a long association with New York City. He had run the line’s New York operations for several years as a young man and had married Julia Florence Schieffelin, from one of the city’s most prominent families. He was a member of one of New York’s most exclusive clubs. But as soon as he finished testifying before the American board of inquiry, he sailed back to Britain. He soon retired from business, resigned from his New York club, and never crossed the Atlantic again, although he lived until 1937 and died a very rich man. One can only wonder how often he relived that one fateful moment, how often he second-guessed the action he took, how often he must have wondered if the cold, cold water would have been preferable to the life his action had made possible, knowing that he had been condemned in the court of history to be scorned forever. And which of us is sure what we would have done had we been in his shoes at that moment?
April 9, 2007
Bataan Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:35 PM EST Jack Kelly’s lead piece on this website today commemorates the sixty-fifth anniversary of the surrender of the American and Philippine troops who had defended the Bataan peninsula. The Japanese notoriously murdered almost 6,000 of those prisoners while moving them 70 miles to a P.O.W. camp. The Bataan death march was a famous atrocity when I was a boy, but its fame has been succeeded by a widespread conviction that the Pacific War was marked by appalling brutality on all sides, its viciousness caused by racism on both sides. This seems at most half-right. Japanese abuse of enemy prisoners may have been intensified by racial feeling, but the Japanese army’s treatment of its own soldiers was also remarkably savage, and it is not clear that Japanese racism was the main spur to Japanese atrocities. American troops were no doubt racist, but there is no evidence that our racism was the first cause of our subsequent behavior toward the Japanese, nor that our racism conditioned us to expect the astonishing barbarities that came our way at the hands of the Japanese. American soldiers were in fact astonished by the murderous sadism the Japanese army displayed toward prisoners, and by its gross breaches of the laws of war against American, British and Australian troops, and civilians. That we were so astonished, after very well-publicized Japanese savagery toward the Chinese, does suggest that we expected to enjoy a racial privilege, but there is no evidence that we did not intend to treat Japanese prisoners as we expected to be ourselves treated. There is no reason to think that subsequent American behavior toward the Japanese was anything other than reactive. For example, it made little if any sense to take prisoners when facing an enemy who made a practice of feigning surrender and then treacherously murdering any Allied soldiers who were successfully deceived. The Japanese army systematically murdered American medical corpsmen and generally behaved with absolute indifference to the laws of war. Allied troops rarely treated the Japanese as horrifically as the Japanese treated their own enemies, although Allied troops did take very few prisoners, and American troops did mutilate enemy dead, after seeing their dead mutilated. When Japanese resistance stopped, in August of 1945, American behavior changed immediately. This was by no means true of Japanese behavior against enemies who had no power to resist them, and the American occupation of Japan was as like Japanese behavior in occupied territory as chalk is like cheese. American aerial attacks on Japanese civilians seem unlikely to have been caused by American racism, for they were not very different from American aerial attacks on German civilians, barring the use of atomic weapons, which were not available before the German surrender (and there is no good evidence that we would have failed to use nuclear weapons against Germany). Some people find it oddly comforting to assert that everyone behaves with equal cruelty in war, but that is a gross libel on armies that have behaved with some or great restraint in war. The attempt to temper the horrors of war, and the behavior of armed men when they have enemies at their mercy, is not made more likely to succeed by claiming that occasional and sometime remarkable successes in those lines of endeavor never happened. The anniversary of the surrender on Bataan should make us reflect on the fact that laws of war are most likely to be observed when restraint is mutual, and that it is almost impossible to observe at least some of them when an adversary treats those laws with systematic (rather than occasional) contempt.
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