The English Revolution Re-Examined in a New Book: Spoiler Alert! The Religious Hate was Real

Oliver Cromwell with the head of Charles I

In a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine, Adam Gopnik reviews a new book about the English Revolution. The article was is excellent. I am sharing it here for those who are not subscribers.   

Amid the pageantry (and the horrible family intrigue) of the approaching coronation, much will be said about the endurance of the British monarchy through the centuries, and perhaps less about how the first King Charles ended his reign: by having his head chopped off in public while the people cheered or gasped. The first modern revolution, the English one that began in the sixteen-forties, which replaced a monarchy with a republican commonwealth, is not exactly at the forefront of our minds.

Think of the American Revolution and you see pop-gun battles and a diorama of eloquent patriots and outwitted redcoats; think of the French Revolution and you see the guillotine and the tricoteuses, but also the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Think of the English Revolution that preceded both by more than a century and you get a confusion of angry Puritans in round hats and likable Cavaliers in feathered ones. Even a debate about nomenclature haunts it: should the struggles, which really spilled over many decades, be called a revolution at all, or were they, rather, a set of civil wars?

According to the “Whig” interpretation of history—as it is called, in tribute to the Victorian historians who believed in it—ours is a windup world, regularly ticking forward, that was always going to favor the emergence of a constitutional monarchy, becoming ever more limited in power as the people grew in education and capacity. And so the core seventeenth-century conflict was a constitutional one, between monarchical absolutism and parliamentary democracy, with the real advance marked by the Glorious Revolution, and the arrival of limited monarchy, in 1688. For the great Marxist historians of the postwar era, most notably Christopher Hill, the main action had to be parsed in class terms: a feudal class in decline, a bourgeois class in ascent—and, amid the tectonic grindings between the two, the heartening, if evanescent, appearance of genuine social radicals. Then came the more empirically minded revisionists, conservative at least as historians, who minimized ideology and saw the civil wars as arising from the inevitable structural difficulties faced by a ruler with too many kingdoms to subdue and too little money to do it with.

The point of Jonathan Healey’s new book, “The Blazing World” (Knopf), is to acknowledge all the complexities of the episode but still to see it as a real revolution of political thought—to recapture a lost moment when a radically democratic commonwealth seemed possible. Such an account, as Healey recognizes, confronts formidable difficulties. For one thing, any neat sorting of radical revolutionaries and conservative loyalists comes apart on closer examination: many of the leading revolutionaries of Oliver Cromwell’s “New Model” Army were highborn; many of the loyalists were common folk who wanted to be free to have a drink on Sunday, celebrate Christmas, and listen to a fiddler in a pub. (All things eventually restricted by the Puritans in power.)

Something like this is always true. Revolutions are won by coalitions and only then seized by fanatics. There were plenty of blue bloods on the sansculottes side of the French one, at least at the beginning, and the American Revolution joined abolitionists with slaveholders. One of the most modern aspects of the English Revolution was Cromwell’s campaign against the Irish Catholics after his ascent to power; estimates of the body count vary wildly, but it is among the first organized genocides on record, resembling the Young Turks’ war against the Armenians. Irish loyalists, forced to take refuge in churches, were burned alive inside them.

Healey, a history don at Oxford, scants none of these things. A New Model social historian, he writes with pace and fire and an unusually sharp sense of character and humor. At one emotional pole, he introduces us to the visionary yet perpetually choleric radical John Lilburne, about whom it was said, in a formula that would apply to many of his spiritual heirs, that “if there were none living but himself John would be against Lilburne, and Lilburne against John.” At the opposite pole, Healey draws from obscurity the mild-mannered polemicist William Walwyn, who wrote pamphlets with such exquisitely delicate titles as “A Whisper in the Ear of Mr Thomas Edward” and “Some Considerations Tending to the Undeceiving of Those, Whose Judgements Are Misinformed.”

For Hill, the clashes of weird seventeenth-century religious beliefs were mere scrapings of butter on the toast of class conflict. If people argue over religion, it is because religion is an extension of power; the squabbles about pulpits are really squabbles about politics. Against this once pervasive view, Healey declares flatly, “The Civil War wasn’t a class struggle. It was a clash of ideologies, as often as not between members of the same class.” Admiring the insurgents, Healey rejects the notion that they were little elves of economic necessity. Their ideas preceded and shaped the way that they perceived their class interests. Indeed, like the “phlegmatic” and “choleric” humors of medieval medicine, “the bourgeoisie” can seem a uselessly encompassing category, including merchants, bankers, preachers, soldiers, professionals, and scientists. Its members were passionate contestants on both sides of the fight, and on some sides no scholar has yet dreamed of.

Healey insists, in short, that what seventeenth-century people seemed to be arguing about is what they were arguing about. When members of the influential Fifth Monarchist sect announced that Charles’s death was a signal of the Apocalypse, they really meant it: they thought the Lord was coming, not the middle classes. With the eclectic, wide-angle vision of the new social history, Healey shows that ideas and attitudes, rhetoric and revelations, rising from the ground up, can drive social transformation. Ripples on the periphery of our historical vision can be as important as the big waves at the center of it. The mummery of signatures and petitions and pamphlets which laid the ground for conflict is as important as troops and battlefield terrain. In the spirit of E. P. Thompson, Healey allows members of the “lunatic fringe” to speak for themselves; the Levellers, the Ranters, and the Diggers—radicals who cried out in eerily prescient ways for democracy and equality—are in many ways the heroes of the story, though not victorious ones.

But so are people who do not fit neatly into tales of a rising merchant class and revanchist feudalists. Women, shunted to the side in earlier histories of the era, play an important role in this one. We learn of how neatly monarchy recruited misogyny, with the Royalist propaganda issuing, Rush Limbaugh style, derisive lists of the names of imaginary women radicals, more frightening because so feminine: “Agnes Anabaptist, Kate Catabaptist . . . Penelope Punk, Merald Makebate.” The title of Healey’s book is itself taken from a woman writer, Margaret Cavendish, whose astonishing tale “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World” was a piece of visionary science fiction that summed up the dreams and disasters of the century. Healey even reports on what might be a same-sex couple among the radicals: the preacher Thomas Webbe took one John Organ for his “man-wife.”

What happened in the English Revolution, or civil wars, took an exhaustingly long time to unfold, and its subplots were as numerous as the bits of the Shakespeare history play the wise director cuts. Where the French Revolution proceeds in neat, systematic French parcels—Revolution, Terror, Directorate, Empire, etc.—the English one is a mess, exhausting to untangle and not always edifying once you have done so. There’s a Short Parliament, a Long Parliament, and a Rump Parliament to distinguish, and, just as one begins to make sense of the English squabbles, the dour Scots intervene to further muddy the story.

In essence, though, what happened was that the Stuart monarchy, which, after the death of Elizabeth, had come to power in the person of the first King James, of Bible-version fame, got caught in a kind of permanent political cul-de-sac. When James died, in 1625, he left his kingdom to his none too bright son Charles. Parliament was then, as now, divided into Houses of Lords and Commons, with the first representing the aristocracy and the other the gentry and the common people. The Commons, though more or less elected, by uneven means, served essentially at the King’s pleasure, being summoned and dismissed at his will.

Parliament did, however, have the critical role of raising taxes, and, since the Stuarts were both war-hungry and wildly incompetent, they needed cash and credit to fight their battles, mainly against rebellions in Scotland and Ireland, with one disastrous expedition into France. Although the Commons as yet knew no neat party divides, it was, in the nature of the times, dominated by Protestants who often had a starkly Puritan and always an anti-papist cast, and who suspected, probably wrongly, that Charles intended to take the country Catholic. All of this was happening in a time of crazy sectarian religious division, when, as the Venetian Ambassador dryly remarked, there were in London “as many religions as there were persons.” Healey tells us that there were “reports of naked Adamites, of Anabaptists and Brownists, even Muslims and ‘Bacchanalian’ pagans.”

In the midst of all that ferment, mistrust and ill will naturally grew between court and Parliament, and between dissident factions within the houses of Parliament. In January, 1642, the King entered Parliament and tried to arrest a handful of its more obnoxious members; tensions escalated, and Parliament passed the Militia Ordinance, awarding itself the right to raise its own fighting force, which—a significant part of the story—it was able to do with what must have seemed to the Royalists frightening ease, drawing as it could on the foundation of the London civic militia. The King, meanwhile, raised a conscript army of his own, which was ill-supplied and, Healey says, “beset with disorder and mutiny.” By August, the King had officially declared war on Parliament, and by October the first battle began. A series of inconclusive wins and losses ensued over the next couple of years.

The situation shifted when, in February, 1645, Parliament consolidated the New Model Army, eventually under the double command of the aristocratic Thomas Fairfax, about whom, one woman friend admitted, “there are various opinions about his intellect,” and the grim country Protestant Oliver Cromwell, about whose firm intellect opinions varied not. Ideologically committed, like Napoleon’s armies a century later, and far better disciplined than its Royalist counterparts, at least during battle (they tended to save their atrocities for the after-victory party), the New Model Army was a formidable and modern force. Healey, emphasizing throughout how fluid and unpredictable class lines were, makes it clear that the caste lines of manners were more marked. Though Cromwell was suspicious of the egalitarian democrats within his coalition—the so-called Levellers—he still declared, “I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman.”

Throughout the blurred action, sharp profiles of personality do emerge. Ronald Hutton’s marvellous “The Making of Oliver Cromwell” (Yale) sees the Revolution in convincingly personal terms, with the King and Cromwell as opposed in character as they were in political belief. Reading lives of both Charles and Cromwell, one can only recall Alice’s sound verdict on the Walrus and the Carpenter: that they were both very unpleasant characters. Charles was, the worst thing for an autocrat, both impulsive and inefficient, and incapable of seeing reality until it was literally at his throat. Cromwell was cruel, self-righteous, and bloodthirsty.

Yet one is immediately struck by the asymmetry between the two. Cromwell was a man of talents who rose to power, first military and then political, through the exercise of those talents; Charles was a king born to a king. It is still astounding to consider, in reading the history of the civil wars, that so much energy had to be invested in analyzing the character of someone whose character had nothing to do with his position. But though dynastic succession has been largely overruled in modern politics, it still holds in the realm of business. And so we spend time thinking about the differences, say, between George Steinbrenner and his son Hal, and what that means for the fate of the Yankees, with the same nervous equanimity that seventeenth-century people had when thinking about the traits and limitations of an obviously dim-witted Royal Family.

Although Cromwell emerges from every biography as a very unlikable man, he was wholly devoted to his idea of God and oddly magnetic in his ability to become the focus of everyone’s attention. In times of war, we seek out the figure who embodies the virtues of the cause and ascribe to him not only his share of the credit but everybody else’s, too. Fairfax tended to be left out of the London reports. He fought the better battles but made the wrong sounds. That sentence of Cromwell’s about the plain captain is a great one, and summed up the spirit of the time. Indeed, the historical figure Cromwell most resembles is Trotsky, who similarly mixed great force of character with instinctive skill at military arrangements against more highly trained but less motivated royal forces. Cromwell clearly had a genius for leadership, and also, at a time when religious convictions were omnipresent and all-important, for assembling a coalition that was open even to the more extreme figures of the dissident side. Without explicitly endorsing any of their positions, Cromwell happily accepted their support, and his ability to create and sustain a broad alliance of Puritan ideologies was as central to his achievement as his cool head with cavalry.

Hutton and Healey, in the spirit of the historians Robert Darnton and Simon Schama—recognizing propaganda as primary, not merely attendant, to the making of a revolution—bring out the role that the London explosion of print played in Cromwell’s triumph. By 1641, Healey explains, “London had emerged as the epicentre of a radically altered landscape of news . . . forged on backstreet presses, sold on street corners and read aloud in smoky alehouses.” This may be surprising; we associate the rise of the pamphlet and the newspaper with a later era, the Enlightenment. But just as, once speed-of-light communication is possible, it doesn’t hugely matter if its vehicle is telegraphy or e-mail, so, too, once movable type was available, the power of the press to report and propagandize didn’t depend on whether it was produced single sheet by single sheet or in a thousand newspapers at once.

At last, at the Battle of Naseby, in June, 1645, the well-ordered Parliamentary forces won a pivotal victory over the royal forces. Accident and happenstance aided the supporters of Parliament, but Cromwell does seem to have been, like Napoleon, notably shrewd and self-disciplined, keeping his reserves in reserve and throwing them into battle only at the decisive moment. By the following year, Charles I had been captured. As with Louis XVI, a century later, Charles was offered a perfectly good deal by his captors—basically, to accept a form of constitutional monarchy that would still give him a predominant role—but left it on the table. Charles tried to escape and reimpose his reign, enlisting Scottish support, and, during the so-called Second Civil War, the bloodletting continued.

In many previous histories of the time, the battles and Cromwell’s subsequent rise to power were the pivotal moments, with the war pushing a newly created “middling class” toward the forefront. For Healey, as for the historians of the left, the key moment of the story occurs instead in Putney, in the fall of 1647, in a battle of words and wills that could easily have gone a very different way. It was there that the General Council of the New Model Army convened what Healey calls “one of the most remarkable meetings in the whole of English history,” in which “soldiers and civilians argued about the future of the constitution, the nature of sovereignty and the right to vote.” The implicit case for universal male suffrage was well received. “Every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government,” Thomas Rainsborough, one of the radical captains, said. By the end of a day of deliberation, it was agreed that the vote should be extended to all men other than servants and paupers on relief. The Agitators, who were in effect the shop stewards of the New Model Army, stuck into their hatbands ribbons that read “England’s freedom and soldier’s rights.” Very much in the manner of the British soldiers of the Second World War who voted in the first Labour government, they equated soldiery and equality.

The democratic spirit was soon put down. Officers, swords drawn, “plucked the papers from the mutineers’ hats,” Healey recounts, and the radicals gave up. Yet the remaining radicalism of the New Model Army had, in the fall of 1648, fateful consequences. The vengeful—or merely egalitarian—energies that had been building since Putney meant that the Army objected to Parliament’s ongoing peace negotiations with Charles. Instead, he was tried for treason, the first time in human memory that this had happened to a monarch, and, in 1649, he was beheaded. In the next few years, Cromwell turned against Parliament, impatient with its slow pace, and eventually staged what was in effect a coup to make himself dictator. “Lord Protector” was the title Cromwell took, and then, in the way of such things, he made himself something very like a king.

Cromwell won; the radicals had lost. The political thought of their time—however passionate—hadn’t yet coalesced around a coherent set of ideas and ideals that could have helped them translate those radical intuitions into a persuasive politics. Philosophies count, and these hadn’t been, so to speak, left to simmer on the Hobbes long enough: “Leviathan” was four years off, and John Locke was only a teen-ager. The time was still recognizably and inherently pre-modern.

Even the word “ideology,” favored by Healey, may be a touch anachronistic. The American and the French Revolutions are both recognizably modern: they are built on assumptions that we still debate today, and left and right, as they were established then, are not so different from left and right today. Whatever obeisance might have been made to the Deity, they were already playing secular politics in a post-religious atmosphere. During the English Revolution, by contrast, the most passionate ideologies at stake were fanatic religious beliefs nurtured through two millennia of Christianity.

Those beliefs, far from being frosting on a cake of competing interests, were the competing interests. The ability of seventeenth-century people to become enraptured, not to say obsessed, with theological differences that seem to us astonishingly minute is the most startling aspect of the story. Despite all attempts to depict these as the mere cosmetic covering of clan loyalties or class interests, those crazy-seeming sectarian disputes were about what they claimed to be about. Men were more likely to face the threat of being ripped open and having their bowels burned in front of their eyes (as happened eventually to the regicides) on behalf of a passionately articulated creed than they were on behalf of an abstract, retrospectively conjured class.

But, then, perhaps every age has minute metaphysical disputes whose profundity only that age can understand. In an inspired study of John Donne, “Super-Infinite,” the scholar Katherine Rundell points out how preoccupied her subject was with the “trans-” prefix—transpose, translate, transubstantiate—because it marked the belief that we are “creatures born transformable.” The arguments over transubstantiation that consumed the period—it would be the cause of the eventual unseating of Charles I’s second son, King James II—echo in our own quarrels about identity and transformation. Weren’t the nonconformist Puritans who exalted a triune godhead simply insisting, in effect, on plural pronouns for the Almighty? The baseline anxiety of human beings so often turns on questions of how transformable we creatures are—on how it is that these meat-and-blood bodies we live within can somehow become the sites of spirit and speculation and grace, by which we include free will. These issues of body and soul, however soluble they may seem in retrospect, are the ones that cause societies to light up and sometimes conflagrate.

History is written by the victors, we’re told. In truth, history is written by the romantics, as stories are won by storytellers. Anyone who can spin lore and chivalry, higher calling and mystic purpose, from the ugliness of warfare can claim the tale, even in defeat. As Ulysses S. Grant knew, no army in history was as badly whipped as Robert E. Lee’s, and yet the Confederates were still, outrageously, winning the history wars as late as the opening night of “Gone with the Wind.” Though the Parliamentarians routed the Cavaliers in the first big war, the Cavaliers wrote the history—and not only because they won the later engagement of the Restoration. It was also because the Cavaliers, for the most part, had the better writers. Aesthetes may lose the local battle; they usually win the historical war. Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector for five years, and then left the country to his hapless son, who was deposed in just one. Healey makes no bones about the truth that, when the Commonwealth failed and Charles II gained the throne, in 1660, for what became a twenty-five-year reign, it opened up a period of an extraordinary English artistic renaissance. “The culture war, that we saw at the start of the century,” he writes, “had been won. Puritanism had been cast out. . . . Merry England was back.”

There was one great poet-propagandist for Cromwell, of course: John Milton, whose “Paradise Lost” can be read as a kind of dreamy explication of Cromwellian dissident themes. But Milton quit on Cromwell early, going silent at his apogee, while Andrew Marvell’s poems in praise of Cromwell are masterpieces of equivocation and irony, with Cromwell praised, the King’s poise in dying admired, and in general a tone of wry hyperbole turning into fatalism before the reader’s eyes. Marvell’s famously conditional apothegm for Cromwell, “If these the times, then this must be the man,” is as backhanded a compliment as any poet has offered a ruler, or any flunky has ever offered a boss.

Healey makes the larger point that, just as the Impressionists rose, in the eighteen-seventies, as a moment of repose after the internecine violence of the Paris Commune, the matchless flowering of English verse and theatre in the wake of the Restoration was as much a sigh of general civic relief as a paroxysm of Royalist pleasure. The destruction of things of beauty by troops under Cromwell’s direction is still shocking to read of. At Peterborough Cathedral, they destroyed ancient stained-glass windows, and in Somerset at least one Parliamentarian ripped apart a Rubens.

Yet, in Cromwell’s time, certain moral intuitions and principles appeared that haven’t disappeared; things got said that could never be entirely unsaid. Government of the people resides in their own consent to be governed; representative bodies should be in some way representative; whatever rights kings have are neither divine nor absolute; and, not least, religious differences should be settled by uneasy truces, if not outright toleration.

And so there is much to be said for a Whig history after all, if not as a story of inevitably incremental improvements then at least as one of incremental inspirations. The Restoration may have had its glories, but a larger glory belongs to those who groped, for a time, toward something freer and better, and who made us, in particular—Americans, whose Founding Fathers, from Roger Williams to the Quakers, leaped intellectually right out of the English crucible—what we spiritually remain. America, on the brink of its own revolution, was, essentially, London in the sixteen-forties, set free then, and today still blazing. ♦

Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond: Honoring Confederate War Dead without Flags and Racism

Pyramid honoring Confederate dead 

Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Va.

On this Memorial Day Weekend, my 51st as a soldier and veteran, I went to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, with my daughter Lauren. 

The cemetery is in a beautiful location overlooking the James River just where the falls end and the river becomes Navigable.  

The graves in this sprawling 135-acre cemetery opened in 1847. Thousands of people are interred on the rolling hills north of the James River. At the north end of the cemetery on a hillside is Confederate Avenue.  This section of the cemetery includes the pyramid built just after the war to honor the confederate dead and the graves of thousands of confederate soldiers.  

As we approached the pyramid, I was delighted to see no statues of leaders of the rebellion, no confederate flags.  For me, April  12, 1861, and January 6, 2021, are the worst days in American history: worse than December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, because on those days the murderous enemy was an enemy outside the country.

This cemetery quietly honors the service of the thousands and thousands who died for their country without glorifying the cause they fought for.  

An entire section of the cemetery has tombstones with death dates at the beginning of July, 1863. Thousands of Virginians died at Gettysburg, most of all on July 3 when Richmond-born Major General George Pickett led the ill-fated Picketts Charge that sealed the defeat of Confederate Army at the most historic battle of the Civil War.  

Pickett is entombed at the top of the hill in the same area.

We live in a country where confederate flags wave from public buildings and pickup trucks and until recently American military bases were named after confederate leaders.  America failed to erase the confederate cause and symbols from public life after the Civil War.  The result was another hundred years of racist laws in the Jim Crow South.  

Germany did a much better job after World War II. They outlawed Nazi flags and symbols. Students and soldiers in Germany visit Nazi death camps to learn how bad the Nazis were.  

There is a German Military Cemetery in Normandy. More than 20,000 German soldiers are buried there. Each has a simple marker with name, rank and unit.  There is one statue of an ordinary soldier and no flags.  The cemetery honors the service and sacrifice of the soldiers, not the cause. I cried when I visited there in 2017 thinking how different America might have been if the confederate cause was suppressed after the Civil War. 

Soldiers under any flag can do their duty honorably.  My favorite memoir by an ordinary soldier is about a 17-year-old who enlisted in the German Army in 1941 and served the entire war on the Eastern Front.

Just down the hill from Pickett's grave and west of the graves of confederate soldiers is a memorial to the cadets of John Marshall High School. Each of the markers has the names of cadets and their graduation year.  The majority of those named were killed during World War II. Those who lost their lives in other wars have the war noted next to their names.  

Throughout my service in four different enlistments, when I was on active duty, the majority of the soldiers I served with were from southern and inland western states.  In the spring of 1980 when I had just returned from three years as a tank commander in West Germany, I read an article that said almost half of the men graduating from Baylor University that year were in ROTC programs and beginning active service.  Of the 1,400 graduates of Harvard University that year, two were joining the military.  

I was happy to see American flags waving in the cemetery honoring service of soldiers during the past century.  

 

Hannah Arendt Center Summer Social: Preview of Fall Conference on Friendship and Politics

This week I went to the Summer Social at the Hannah Arendt Center on the campus of Bard College.  The campus is set in rolling wooded hills on the east bank of the Hudson River between Albany and New York City. I arrived just after a short downpour so the weather was cool and cloudy. Tables had been set up for dinner outside, but the wet tables meant the event was indoors.

Christine Gonzalez Stanton, 

Executive Director, Hannah Arendt Center

As soon as I entered the large old dwelling that houses the HAC I was greeted by Christine Gonzalez Stanton, Executive Director of the HAC and the kind of enthusiastic person every organization would love to have in charge of operations.  She signed me up for the book raffle and pointed me toward the appetizers and drinks in the kitchen. 

As soon as I entered the kitchen I met Ken Landauer in person.  We had been in one of the smaller Zoom groups discussing Hannah Arendt's lectures on Kant.  Ken makes zero-waste furniture in a nearby town.  The website of his company FN Furniture lists Ken as "Chairperson" of the business noted for making things to sit on. In person he is even more dryly funny as he is on Zoom.

Ken Landauer in one of his chairs

I have been a member of the HAC for several years and attended three annual conferences in person. Since 2018, I have joined weekly meetings of the Virtual Reading Group of the HAC.  As many as 200 people participate in these 90-minute calls on Friday afternoons year-round with seasonal breaks.  At the the Summer Social and the Annual Conference I have met many people who were only faces on Zoom.  

The VRG format is a 20-30 minute introduction of the reading followed by a discussion. The discussion leader is the Founder and Academic Director of the HAC Roger Berkowitz.  I sometimes stay on line for the discussions, but I always listen to Roger's introductions of the reading.  Here is a short clip of Roger welcoming us to the social:

After the introduction, we walked through the woods up a small hill to the Bard College Cemetery. Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blucher are buried there and have small markers next to each other.  

Hannah Arendt's grave in the Bard College Cemetery. 

We all placed stones on Arendt's grave. As with so many things in Arendt's life and work, her death was controversial. She wanted to be cremated, not a usual practice in 1975 for Jews. Her wishes were carried despite resistance from a relative. Her ashes are interred in the Bard Cemetery.  

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After the walk to the cemetery, we went to the library. Arendt's personal library is in a special collection in the Bard Library.  Four scholars connected to the Bard and the HAC made short presentations about their work.  

Jana Mader, with some of the books 

from Arendt's library.

First was Jana Mader, Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard. She will present at the HAC fall conference on the friendship between Arendt and the poet W.H. Auden.  Arendt credits Auden with teaching her English and helping to edit the works she wrote in English. The poet Robert Lowell was also a friend of Arendt. Mader put books with inscriptions to greetings to her by the poets on display. 

Born in Germany, Mader teaches literature at Bard and is a writer and artist.  She just had a book published that made me wish (again) that I could read German fluently. Her book Natur und Nation cooperatively analyzes 19th century literature inspired by the Hudson River with texts inspired by the Rhine River. In October her curated walks to women's history in New York City will be published, this one in English.

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Next Nicholas Dunn spoke about Hannah Arendt's lectures and writing about Emmauel Kant.  He talked about a conference he is hosting on June 20 with the author of the book Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Ronald Beiner.  

Nicholas Dunn, postdoctoral fellow at HAC

Dunn talked about the way unique Arendt looked at Kant's thought and some of the response to her views.  Dunn is the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. He will also teach courses in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Studies and for the Bard Prison Initiative. 

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Jana Bacevic is a visiting scholar at the HAC. She led a conference at the HAC earlier this month on the Social Life of the Mind.  She explained Arendt's reading of and view of the The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System by Milovan Dilas, a Yugoslav intellectual. As with the Kant volume, Arendt had a unique perspective on Dilas and his work.  Dilas was jailed when the book was published in 1958 because he sent it to western countries for review.  Foreign Affairs magazine published a one-paragraph review of the book in 1958 that said: 

The manuscript of this book was sent abroad for publication and the author is now in prison as a consequence. It is important both for the quality of its thought and for the fact that it is a root-and-branch criticism of Communism, including Titoism, from within the Party itself. Since he was formerly one of the ranking Party leaders in Jugoslavia, his picture of the Communist monopoly of power is particularly telling, and the indictment is made with a typically Montenegrin lack of restraint. 

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Thomas Bartscherer, the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in Humanities, was the final speaker.  He announced that his volume in the series Hannah Arendt--Complete Works. Critical Edition will be published this year. He was so happy about the firm publication date that he had the audience chant a call and response of 

"When?"  
"This year!"

He told us each volume of the critical edition includes images of works in Arendt's library that she used for reference in her works.  Underlines, notes, starred items, are all included in the published book along with the text itself. His volume is on Arendt's The Life of the Mind, her last and uncompleted work. She died on the week she was to begin the third volume on judgement.   

Bartscherer talked about some of the complexities of finding and compiling annotations.  Arendt had five copies of Aristotles Nichomachean Ethics: two in Greek, two in English, one in German. She made notes and underlined passages in all of them, on different passages in each book.

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After the library we went back to the HAC building and ate dinner together, a buffet meal set up in the kitchen.  During the dinner I met more people who read and admire Hannah Arendt.  I am very much looking forward to returning for the conference on Friendship and Politics in the fall and possibly the event on Kants lectures next month.  

Street Numbers Freeze History

 

In Lancaster County, the roads from Lancaster City to the outer boroughs radiate in every direction, a hub and spoke system like the German countryside many residents came from two centuries ago.  To the north is the Lititz Pike, the road to Lititz. To the west is Harrisburg Pike, the road through Mount Joy and Elizabethtown. Between them is the road to Manheim, the Manheim Pike. 

 

To the east is the road to New Holland that passes through CDP (Census-Designated Place) of Leola.  I ride the New Holland Pike because it is very flat and has a wide shoulder.  On one of my recent rides, I noticed that the numbers on houses and businesses in Leola switch from West to East at a place almost a mile east of what I would have thought was the center of Leola.

Coming from Lancaster, the street numbers count down from Rutter's Store at 370 W. Main Street to a house at 2 W. Main. Then the numbers go from the Post Office at 10 E Main St. to a home at 509 E. Main St. where the numbers switch to West Main Street in New Holland. The name NewHolland Pike is used on the road from the Lancaster City line to the edge of Leola.

What surprised me was that the numbers in Leola switch from East to West Main Street at Maple Avenue. That location is well past what looks like the center of Leola: the two traffic lights where PA Route 772 intersects with PA 23. 

It turns out that the numbers switch from East to West near the location of the former Glenola Train Station that connected Leola with Lancaster more than a century ago. The Leacock Township Building is also near the place where the numbers switch. So even though the busiest part of Leola is east of the intersection of Main and Maple, the building numbers preserve the history of the time when the train station was the center of Leola.

Five miles east in New Holland, the numbers count down to the center of the borough, but differently. The numbers count down on West Main Street until 101 at the intersection with Roberts Avenue. Then on the east side of the intersection the numbers count up from 104. There are no numbers below 100 on either East or West Main Street in New Holland. But the numbers on the North-South roads, like Roberts Avenue, drop to double or single digits as they approach Main Street. 

Another oddity is that the center of New Holland is all on East Main Street. It's mostly residential on West Main Street with scattered businesses along the road. The central business area starts immediately on East Main Street.  

Road numbering in cities can be logical, but not necessarily.  I grew up in the Boston area, a city with no grid at its center. In Manhattan, the east-west street numbers are at zero at Fifth Avenue and increase to the edges of the long, thin island. But the avenues have numbers that simply increase from south to north. There is no way to to know where 101, 365 or 565 Fifth Avenue is except by memory.   They are the Zara store, the CUNY Graduate Center and the Adidas Flagship Store. 

     

Benetton and the End of Communism and Cigarette Ads

 

At the beginning of the 1980s, the winning cars in Formula 1 racing were billboards for cigarettes and oil companies.  The Marlboro McLaren, John Players Special Lotus, the Gitanes Ligier, dominated the winners circle in Formula 1. 

Then in 1986, Luciano Benetton, a maker of Italian knitwear, bought a team and went to win a driver's title and two manufacturer's championships. 

Benetton also brought his clothing business to communist countries beginning with Hungary in the mid-1980s.  I read about Benetton and the decentralized clothing empire he created. His knitwear was made by women working as independent suppliers. Benetton would decide on the colors at the last minute and be sure his knitwear was in the color of the season.  

I was a fan of the Benetton team for the decade and a half they raced--1986 to 2001.  Benetton surprised the racing world. They were the first clothing maker to sponsor a Formula 1 team and they were a success from the first year: Gerhard Berger won the Mexican Grand Prix in a Benetton the first year the team was in operation. 

Benetton was the first team for Michael Schumacher, one of the greatest driver's of all time.  With success the team sought more sponsorship becoming billboards first for Camel and then for Japanese cigarette maker, Mild Seven.  The team won the driver's title and two manufacturer's titles in 1994 and 1995, but by 1996 Schumacher was at Ferrari and the team was in decline. Renault became the title sponsor for the last two years of Benetton ownership: 2000 and 2001. 

Cigarettes no longer sponsor the cars. The leading sponsors in 2023 are car makers Mercedes, Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin and Ferrari along with Red Bull and Alpha Tauri sports drinks. 

The posters above are in the upstairs hallway of my home along with a print of 1992 World Champion Nigel Mansell in a Williams Renault.  Nigel is the name of my youngest son. But Benetton is still my favorite team.

Pissing Contest: Real and Metaphorical

Between birth and enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, I had two addresses. Both in the town of Stoneham nine miles north of Boston. The first was 48 Hancock Street. The second was 41 Oak Street. My parents lived in the house at 41 Oak Street from 1957 until my mother sold the house in the 1990s more than a decade after my Dad passed away.

My first friend in the "new" neighborhood on Oak Street was a boy named Bobby. He lived two houses away at the corner of Oak Street and Victoria Lane. We were friends, and like most boys fighting is part of friendship.  

Many times in my life I have had metaphorical pissing contests with other kids, co-workers, and soldiers. But only once did I have an actual pissing contest.  Soon after we moved to Oak Street, Bobby and I were playing and something went wrong. Whatever the cause, Bobby and I did not have the side-by-side competition of who can piss farthest, longest, highest. 

We turned and faced each other for a battle of who could make the other smell worse. We both won, or lost, depending on how it was judged.   

Although my memory of my childhood is very limited, I have some memory of Bobby and I standing next to the tall hedges that separated his yard from the Bishop's house (Mr. and Mrs. Bishop, not a church official) and emptying our bladders toward each other.  

Our mothers were displeased at our need for a change of clothes. We were friends for years after, so the actual pissing contest was not fatal to our friendship. In later life, I found having a metaphorical pissing contest could end a relationship.  Best to avoid both.  

Nothing Ever Dies: Re-Reading a Haunting Book About War and it's Aftermath

I am re-reading the book Nothing Ever Dies because I first enlisted during the war in Vietnam 51 years ago and this book holds a mirror to my service during that war and all the wars I served in and during over the fifty years that followed. 

The notes below are thoughts from reading the first chapters.

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen 

The opening chapter, “Just Memory” begins: “This is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” 

Nguyen then tells us the war known as the Vietnam War in America is American War in Vietnam. This identity crisis is central to the war as perceived by those who lived through and after it in Vietnam and neighboring countries. 

It is one of the truisms of history that the winners write the history. But in the modern world history gets written by everyone with the means to tell their story. America was the clear loser of the wars in Southeast Asia from the mid 1960s to 1975. But America names the war and controls much of the narrative because America is the biggest producer of movies, books and other forms of bringing story to the world: all published in English. 

The stories from Vietnam can never have the distribution of American narrative, especially stories in the Vietnamese language. Language itself is a tool in the hands of those who want to shape war as it happens. Russia is “liberating” Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine. 

The sovereign country of Ukraine is a territory when defined by Russia. Those who are with Russia, like the Christian Nationalist propagandist Tucker Carlson, sided so openly with Russia that his shows were a regular part of Russian state news programming. 

The people of Ukraine describe what happened as an invasion. They describe war crimes committed by Russia. They want freedom. They want peace. They have a compelling message, but Russia is bigger. Someday, the war will end and the two narratives will compete in the world of ideas. 

Before the opening chapter is a short prologue. The first sentence of the Prologue: “I was born in Vietnam but made in America. I count myself among those Vietnamese dismayed by America’s deeds but tempted to believe in its words.” Like so many Americans who lived during the war, I “mistake Vietnam with the war named in its honor.” 

When I enlisted in 1972 near the end of the Vietnam War, I signed up for the education that I did not care about when I graduated just the previous spring. But education, career, learning beckoned after several months of loading trucks and looking at the men beside me doing the same thing I was as at triple my age. 

For me the war meant a chance to get away from home, from the small world of Stoneham to a world I could not imagine. I had not been south of Erie, Pennsylvania, west of Cleveland, Ohio, or ever flown on an airplane. I cannot remember any dread in connection with the Vietnam War. It was a route to freedom. 

The war I saw on TV news was no different than the war movies and serial dramas, showing endless American heroism and victory. The world looks so different now. I served in the military four times, each time getting out I was sure I was done. Then three times, I re-enlisted. During those four enlistments, I served in or during four different wars. 

Until 24 February 2022, I thought I served during three losses, one win. Now the one win, the Cold War, needs an asterisk. The peace we thought would follow the end of the Soviet empire cracked immediately in the Balkans and broke in Ukraine. We watched as oligarchy followed empire in Russia. 

Beginning in 2014 and with open fury in 2022, The Empire Struck Back. 

Reading Nothing Ever Dies it was clear from the first pages that more than four wars shaped the psyche of the kid who so happily signed up in 1972. My Dad was a veteran of World War II. For good and ill, those were the best years of his life—it was clear every time he told and retold his stories from the war. 

My uncle Jack served in the Air Force from 1958 to 1978. He had three full tours flying over southeast Asia in a tanker plane then and F4 Phantom II fighter plane. To say I worshipped them shows how shallow my actual religious practice has been in my life. My regard for them in uniform had none of the skepticism I always felt toward God Himself. Which means in addition to the wars I was in or around, I was haunted by wars before I was alive, wars that happened between my last two enlistments (The Gulf War, Grenada, Somalia, The Balkans) and the wars that formed the backbone of the history of America, Europe, and Israel. 

Nguyen says, “…the most important reason for Americans to remember what they call the Vietnam War, the fact that it was one conflict in a long line of horrific wars that came before it and after it. The war’s identity—and, indeed, any war’s identity—cannot be extricated from the identity of war itself. … because war is not just about the shooting but about the people who make the bullets and deliver the bullets and, perhaps most importantly, pay for the bullets, the distracted citizenry complicit in what [Martin Luther] King calls the “brutal solidarity” of white brother and black.”