Tag: 20th Century

• The Effect of The Civil Rights Movement on United States Foreign Policy

  On the 17th of May 1954, the United States Supreme Court concluded a landmark case that would bring to the fore a national movement which would last for nearly 15 years. The case, known as ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ ruled for desegregation in schools nationwide, calling on the 14th Amendment in espousing “separate but equal”. Yet, we must question how it is that this specifically national movement had such great international consequence, defining the way the United States (US) conducted itself on the world stage. I argue that the civil rights movement affected US policy towards the newly independent nations within Africa and Asia, and towards the rest of the world positively, in the context of cold war propaganda. I also point to the idea of an internationalist policy resulting from World War 2 which created an internationalist environment for change. However, overall, I identify that it was the nationalist civil rights movement and subsequent backlash which was the greater driver of US foreign policy in this period.

  The internationalist approach to civil rights was influential within the movement itself, within public perception, and on domestic policy, but was not as influential on US foreign policy as the nationalist approach. Martin Luther King placed the civil rights movement squarely in a global context. In texts such as ‘The Ethical Demands for Integration’ it becomes clear that King’s philosophy centred around the concept of a peaceful international understanding that all humans have intrinsic worth, and that changing policy will have negligible effect if you cannot change ‘hearts and minds’. King linked this internationalism with American patriotism when he alluded to Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg’ Speech in his ‘I have a dream’ speech of 1963.

  Indeed, King was ultimately successful in changing those hearts and minds, as his peaceful protest endeared the freedom struggle to the American public. However, leaders such as King, Robert Moses, and Marcus Garvey were not influential in changing US foreign policy, although you can say they were instrumental in assisting it. In the context of the cold war, where the US and the Soviet Union (USSR) were vying for world influence, both countries wanted to be seen as internationalist. Therefore, the internationalists in the civil rights movement were useful in promoting the US image, especially in newly independent nations such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), and in existing nations such as Ethiopia, which were receptive to the idea of a pan-African movement. However, the promotion of figures such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as ‘Jazz Ambassadors’ by the United States Information Agency (USIA), is exemplary of both the country’s desire to be perceived as internationalist and the superficial way it conducted foreign policy to achieve that goal. The assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 has since revealed to historians the validity of claims that the US was not practising its preaching’s in terms of global freedoms. The internationalist civil rights activists were helping the US government maintain a veneer of an internationalist foreign policy without having to implement much change.

  Conversely the nationalist civil rights activists did cause meaningful change in US foreign policy. The reason for this was that, in this movement, the nationalists were a more militant group than the internationalists. Whereas King sought inspiration from those such as Gandhi and the Indian civil rights movement, figures like Malcolm X drew guidance from more violent protests. Malcolm X, as laid out in his 1963 speech ‘Message to the Grassroots’, believed that if change was needed, they would have to take it, using the French (1789), Russian (1917), and American (1776) revolutions as examples. Despite these international influences Malcolm X and others like Elijah Muhammad and the Black Panther Party (BPP) still led a nationalist approach, not seeking cooperation with those other countries, but attempting to mimic them in ethnocentricity. This was intensified by their movement being conflated with communism. Because Soviet propaganda focussed on America not having complete civil rights, some Americans’ response was to say that civil rights were anti-American. Thus, with accusations of being unpatriotic, and their militancy associating themselves with revolution, the militant nationalists had to ensure that they were seen to be patriots. Physical acts of rebellion, such as the 1964 Harlem riots or the 1965 Watts riots, were so influential on US foreign policy because they produced images which would be spun around the world and affect global opinion, all eyes were watching a country in turmoil. Thomas Jackson has shown particularly that the Kennedy administration was very concerned with this image, trying to get protestors “into the courts and out of the streets”. Indeed, it was the case privately, despite the public message, that the administration thought the whole affair “bad for the country”.

  Michael Klarman has discussed the notion that in fact it was not even the nationalist civil rights movement that had the greatest impact on US foreign policy, but was instead the nationalist backlash towards it. This is because this backlash was tied into several other issues including abortion, the death penalty, and same-sex marriages. This gave the impression of more than just rebellion, it was beginning to look like a repeat of the civil war. It was the “everyday racism of any white person”, as Thomas Borstelmann explains, which was the most problematic. Borstelmann explores the legacy of the Jim Crow laws that hung over American life and were called its “Achilles’ heel before the world” by senator Henry Lodge. He highlights also how America’s opposition to European colonisation, justified partially on racial grounds, forced its hand in adopting a more interventionist foreign policy. Feeling it must now enforce that vision of post-war anti-colonialism around the world, America then intervened in areas of proxy war, such as Vietnam, Iran, South Africa, and Guatemala. Additionally, America’s words of equality stated during World War 2 rendered any endorsement, nationally or internationally, of discrimination, contradictory, as Mary L. Dudziak explains in her preeminent work in this field. She also talks, along with Brenda Gayle Plummer in her text, about the key role of the media in foreign policy. Dudziak particularly notes the role of the foreign media, in that civil rights activists may have “manipulated” such sources, knowing the US government would be reading, to be particularly critical of discriminatory practice.

  It is interesting to observe that in many ways the nationalist and internationalist branches of the civil rights movement had the opposite effects on US foreign policy than what they intended. The internationalists were the ones who achieved domestic change by winning over the American public, whereas, the nationalists, by tarnishing the American image, incited a foreign policy that promoted an internationalist agenda.

  Author/Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

  First Published: 09th of September 2017

  Last Modified: 09th of September 2017

  2017.09.09

• History in the making: How the Past is Made

  This article has been created deliberately in tandem with another entitled ‘The Soft Underbelly of Winston Churchill’. Please read that one before you read this one.

  People often express the opinion that they are viewing, or are party to, ‘history in the making’. That they are bearing witness to some momentous occurrence which is inherently ‘history’. Surely though, isn’t everything history? When are we not party to ‘history in the making’? Just because something is significant to you does not make it more history than anything else.

  This is certainly true, but somewhat of a contrarian statement to make, because I am blurring the line between history – as in the sequence of events that happened in the past – and history as in the study of the past and its significance in the present and future. This indistinction in terms is why it is easier to refer instead to the study as historiography and the timeline as history. Therefore, a more accurate statement would be: ‘historiography in the making’.

  Even given this distinction, how do we determine what is worthy enough to be deemed suitable for historiography? What is it that makes something a historical event? Is everything that happened in the past ‘history’? The question here really is whether certain events have an inherent value which makes them ‘history’, or whether it is the witnessing of such an occurrence that makes it history. In other terms, is it the recording of the event which is the history, or the event itself?

  If you say it is in the recording, then, is everything which is recorded history? Thousands of innocuous things are recorded every day; bus ticket sales, facebook feeds, lecture attendance… are these ‘history’? Have they the potential to become it? And if so, when?

  If you say it is an inherent quality to the event itself then you must ask. What if nobody is there to record it? History is only important to humans, it is a humanity after all. If no humans are affected, aware of, or record something, then surely it cannot be history.

  The point of this preamble is to highlight the malleable nature of history and why it can often be all too easy to twist the past into something it was not.

  I wrote the article ‘The Soft Underbelly of Winston Churchill’ with no doubt in my mind that what I was saying was true, that the events I described really happened and that my conclusions were reasonable based on the evidence I provided. I would hope that many people would read that article and agree with me on many points. However, that article is not good historiography, in fact, it is bad historiography. I avoided discussing opposing views, mentioning only the ones I knew I could counter. I was selective in choosing my evidence, and did not provide the reader with any reference to where I took my figures from. Most importantly, though, I set a tone through my language (one that aimed to be sarcastic, derisive, and haughty) which was employed specifically to get the reader to side with me against Churchill. It starts right from the first line where I write ‘Winston Churchill is often cited as one of the ‘great persons’ of history’. Putting ‘great persons’ in quotes already seems dismissive of the concept. Now, this is not a lesson in English literature, but it is incredible to note how only small details implemented by a historian can drastically change a historiography, and thus, history itself.

  ‘History’ as people know it is a construct, and not in a metaphorical sense, in a very real sense. Historians construct history, they choose what to include and how to include it. This is a necessity as otherwise every historiography book would be an exact copy of all others, each including all of history and all drawing the same conclusions from it. The construction process is as essential to historiography as the discovery and recording of the events of the past. Without construction, we can derive no use from our past, we need it to focus on what we deem important and to convey the lessons we want to express.

  An article about Churchill was especially suitable to my point because he is, perhaps, the ultimate constructor, having written the most influential text on the most influential event in history (to contemporary western audiences). There are some events in history that the historians don’t get to first. Events that are so self-evidently important that those involved feel the need to produce their own histories, oftentimes with the intention of attempting to cast themselves in the best light possible. Because after all, a villain in history is a villain for eternity. In the aftermath of the second world war the scramble for history began; leaders, generals, soldiers, everyone knew that if they were to be remembered unfavourably by history in relation to the blood-bath that was the second world war they would surely become such villains. Churchill was keenly aware of this.

  The evident problem with these histories however, is that they are produced by persons who have vested interests in the material and, on top of this, they tend to be mixed in with ideas of nationalism, defensive self-legitimisation, and accusatory spite. What you end up with is a particularly polarizing result. Winston Churchill is clearly not someone who’s history of the second world war should be taken seriously for many of the reasons listed above, and yet, it still is. Published only 3 years after the end of the war, his book is one of the longest works of history ever written, spanning 6 volumes and over 2 million words. It has gone some way to solidifying him as a national hero, and to some extent, a global hero. He is after all the ‘Greatest Briton Ever’. 

  Thus, against his self-aggrandisement I produced an opposite. I hope that this highlights the importance of an historian who understands how to produce an article which is constructed but is not misleading. It is a fine line to walk. Certainly, I myself am not qualified to venture out across it. But at the very least I can see the line and know the consequences of falling from it.

  Author / Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

  First Published: 09th of September 2017

  Last Modified: 22nd of May 2018 (Grammar Corrections)

  2017.09.09

• Churchill’s Soft Underbelly

  This article has been written in tandem with another, entitled: ‘History in the Making: How the Past is Made’. Please read that one after you have read this one.

  Winston Churchill is often cited as one of the ‘great persons’ of history. In 2002, a BBC poll had him voted the ‘Greatest Briton Ever’.  He is remembered colloquially as the man who turned Britain’s darkest hour into its finest; a people’s hero, leading the allied forces to victory with bold and eloquent speeches accompanied by his sharp strategic mind. He is, undoubtedly, placed at the very heart of British patriotism.

  But as many have observed, this is a rather maudlin view of the man. In the general populous there is little inclination towards seeking objectivity when looking at this character. Rather unsurprisingly, the real Winston Churchill would prove quite averse to the character solidified into public consciousness. What is being focussed on in this article will be almost exclusively Churchill’s flaws, hopefully in order to produce some balance toward the history of the man.

  Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on the 30th of November 1874 in Blenheim palace, Oxfordshire. As you will have already surmised by the nature of his birthplace, Winston was born into a life of excess privilege. This wealth came mostly from the ‘Spencer’ section of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, the Spencer family being one of Britain’s most affluent families of the time. Even today, though it has fallen in stature somewhat since then, it is still worth around £111 million pounds.

  Churchill’s parents; Lady Jeanette Randolph Churchill and Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill were introduced to each other on the Isle of Wight by King Edward the seventh and within three days were engaged to be married. He was a tory politician and the son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough and she was an American millionaire.

  Now, being wealthy is not an inherently negative trait, however it does tend to result in a world view somewhat distorted by a lack of, shall we say, difficulty. This can be especially true when you are born to wealth. I would not mention this were not clearly apparent that Winston suffered some of these biases, of which traits will be revealed herein.

  You might expect, that with so many resources behind him the young Winston would excel in his academic studies. Churchill, however, failed miserably at school. Or rather, schools, as he had to be sent to 3 separate private institutions during his youth: St. Georges Ascot, Stoke Brunswick, and Harrow. He carried a very poor academic record at all of them. When Winston entered Harrow, he was the lowest achieving pupil, in the lowest class, in the entire school. He never even made it into the upper school.

  It was a miraculous stroke of luck he even got in at all considering his entrance exam. It is rather long, but here is how he described it:

  “I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question ” I.” After much reflection I put a bracket round it thus “(I).” But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true. Incidentally there arrived from nowhere in particular a blot and several smudges. I gazed for two whole hours at this sad spectacle: and then merciful ushers collected my piece of foolscap with all the others and carried it up to the Headmaster’s table. It was from these slender indications of scholarship that Mr. Welldon drew the conclusion that I was worthy to pass into Harrow. It is very much to his credit. It showed that he was a man capable of looking beneath the surface of things.”

  I wonder whether Mr. Welldon really was as discerning as Churchill claims him to have been. He seems to me to show a complete lack of discernment; admitting a pupil in on no merit whatsoever. I wonder if “capable of looking beneath the surface of things” is perhaps code for Welldon’s ability to understand that Churchill came from such a very respectable and wealthy family that it simply would not do to have someone of that stature not attend Harrow.

  Once into Harrow Winston wasted no time in joining the Harrow rifle corps and, halfway through his studies he left school entirely in 1893 so he could focus on joining the Royal Military College, Sandhurst which he eventually succeeded in after three tries on their entrance exam. He applied to the cavalry rather than the infantry because the required grade was lower and there was no mathematics involved. It is clear to see by this point that Churchill’s interests lay in war, not peace.

  He left Sandhurst in 1894 as a cavalry officer with a payroll of, in today’s equivalent terms, around £36,000 pounds’ annual income. However, he insisted that he needed at least an extra £60,000 a year equivalent income if he was to live a lifestyle ‘appropriate to his position’, which, in the end, his mother mostly paid for.

  In October 1896 Churchill was transferred to British colonial India. Churchill was a fervent imperialist and never supported any of the freedom movements against the British empire, especially in India. He was quite happy to take part in what he described as: “A lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples” in defence of king and country. In 1937, when the secretary of state for India put to Churchill that Britain: “might have some compunction is she felt she was downing the Arabs year after year when they wanted to remain in their own country” Churchill replied thusly:

  “I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done by these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

  He described Mahatma Gandhi as “a seditious middle temple lawyer” and “nauseating to see”. Someone who: “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back”.

  Clearly, Churchill was racist and took pleasure involving himself with colonial atrocities in India. Afterwards he moved to what today we would call Pakistan and then Sudan, getting in his fair share of the murdering of indigenous peoples along the way. He bragged that he had personally killed three “savages”.

  In 1899, he took time off from the army for his first foray into politics with the conservative party, following in his father’s footsteps. He stood twice and lost both of the former conservative seats in Oldham, then deciding to leave politics and heading for South Africa to get involved with the second Boer war. It was of course in south Africa that the British devised the concept of the concentration camp, something more synonymous with Nazi Germany. 32,000 men, women, and children died in these camps and I will let you discover for yourself the horrific conditions within. Needless to say, Churchill described the camps as producing “the minimum of suffering”.

  So, after a job well done, Winston retired from active service in 1900 and went back into politics. But he did not temper his outspoken opinions simply because he was going to be doing work which had national security at stake, if anything they became more pronounced. In 1902, he talked of how as “civilised nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless” and that eventually “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph” over the “barbaric nations”. These are deeply unsettling words today, but they bring you closer to understanding how Hitler was able to get as far as he did unchallenged, when other politicians of the time talked in this manner.

  Now, you might assume that Winston’s opinions are just indicative of the times, that ‘everybody thought that way back then’. This is unfortunately not true, he was seen at the time as the most brutish of the imperialists and particularly right wing. Stanley Baldwin was warned not to appoint him to the cabinet because of his archaic views. His doctor lamented that “Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin” when speaking of other races.

  So, Winston went into the Conservative party in 1900, then decided he preferred the liberal party in 1904. After the liberals came to power in 1905 Churchill was made ‘Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies’. Which effectively meant he was now in charge of those “barbaric peoples” which he displayed such open hate for.

  In 1910, now as home secretary, Winston sent armed soldiers to quell a worker’s protest over wages in the Welsh town of TonyPandy. He also became the very first man to instigate police force against the suffragettes, a day which has become known to gender historians as ‘Black Friday’. In 1911, his police killed 2 civilians in Liverpool who were also on worker’s strike. Another highlight was his attempt in 1911 to pass into legislature the sterilisation of people with “illnesses or deficiencies of the mind”, trying to pass into law his ongoing struggle against the “feeble minded and insane”, who he saw as deteriorating the ‘British stock’.

  Much controversy has been had over Churchill’s direct involvement with the police, which are supposed to be independent of the Government to avoid corruption. In 1911 Churchill ordered rescue workers to deliberately not douse a building that was ablaze, the three criminals the police were after died inside. Churchill of course took the opportunity to have his photographer take pictures of him in front of the inferno. Lord Robert Cecil summed up the prevailing opinion of the times nicely with this: “I do believe that Winston takes no interest in political affairs unless they involve the chance of bloodshed”.

  When the first world war started, Churchill was ‘First Lord of the Admiralty’ and was in command of the infamous seaborne invasion of Gallipoli. You may have heard of this event before as it was one of the most disastrous events of the war for the allies. Over 100,000 volunteers were slaughtered for a pointless cause on the beaches of Gallipoli and it caused a major scandal which eventually forced Churchill to resign and sent him into the political backwaters.

  So, Winston went back to the army in 1915 where he did what most rich people in the army did at the time and took up a command job as a Lieutenant Colonel, nicely away from the front line. The first world war is of course, infamous for the terrible leadership that lead to such an excess in loss of life, and brought about the popular expression of ‘lions led by donkeys’. Of course, the claims that he went in to no man’s land 36 times are true, but only in the area of Ploegsteert Wood, which was an area where units would be sent to retrain and recuperate as there was very little fighting that took place there after 1914.

  By 1919 Churchill was back in government as secretary of state for war and air when the Irish made their bid for home rule. In response, he deployed the ever-controversial ‘Black and Tans’, known for their use of excessive violence. Despite calls to stand them down Churchill repeatedly refused to do so and even advocated use of the air force to quell the Irish rebellion.

  In 1924, he went back to the conservatives as the chancellor of the exchequer and oversaw Britain’s return to the ‘gold standard’. This resulted in deflation, unemployment and led eventually to the general strike of 1926, the only general strike in British history. It was soon repealed.

  It is at this point that we get back to India, which we have discussed somewhat already. Churchill was the founder of the ‘India Defence League’ (IDL) and expressed unrivalled hate towards the Indian people and particularly Mahatma Gandhi. He raged that: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” This hatred killed, the Bengal Famine broke out in 1943 and Churchill not only refused to direct food supplies to the region he forced them to continue exporting rice for the war effort. He even had 170,000 tons of spare wheat lying around that he could have used for the purpose. Australian wheat was sent past the shores of India to Europe where it was left in storage for use after the war. Furthermore, Churchill even blamed the locals for the famine, saying the problem was that they “breed like rabbits”. When the secretary of state for India requested food to combat the famine Churchill replied: “if food is scarce, why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?” At least 3 million people died during the Bengal famine.

  In Kenya, Churchill approved the clearing out of the ‘blackamoors’, claiming that the land should be only for white people. 150,000 were forced at gunpoint into detention camps where horrific torture took place. Including electrocution, whipping, shooting, burning and mutilation. Those who survived never truly recovered. One of the survivors was Hussein Onyango Obama, whose grandson went on to become the president of the United States of America.

  When the second world war began, Winston was appointed the first lord of the admiralty again and set about organizing the Norwegian campaign in which Britain was defeated resoundingly by German forces. A move which, bizarrely, ended up forcing Neville Chamberlain to resign as prime minister despite him not being responsible for the debacle and put Winston into the job of Prime Minister in his place.

  So, Churchill became Prime Minister. There is quite a lot of the war that we could go through but in an effort to retain brevity we will cover just some of the noteworthy actions of the war.

  Throughout the war, Churchill was constantly aware of maintaining the empire which he held so dearly. It can easily be argued that Churchill was fighting on imperialist grounds rather than for any moral reasoning. He was dogged in his want to hold and control the Empire, especially key areas such as the Suez Canal. This is partly why he constantly pushed for the idea of an invasion into Italy through North Africa, claiming it was the ‘soft underbelly’ of the axis. This was on the face of it a not too terrible idea as it was thought that Hitler would not fight over Italy, but when it became clear that he would, and make the allies pay for every inch of ground gained, the Mediterranean theatre quickly became a grinding bloodbath. The soft underbelly, was, in fact, a ‘tough old gut’. Still though, Churchill obsessed over Italy, even though it was clear that it was not working as intended. And he brought the Americans with him, delaying the D-day landings by as much as 3 years, and thus, extending the war.

  He is also held at least partly responsible for the horrific blanket bombing campaigns on German cities, specifically Dresden, these campaigns aimed simply to cripple the people’s morale by destroying and killing as much as possible. There were no targeted strikes and more civilians killed than by the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Immediately after the war Churchill instigated a policy to round up thousands of war orphans and children from deprived families and forcibly ship them to Australia, even, in some cases, if they had relatives willing to look after them. He was voted out of power at the first election, having never actually been voted in in the first place.

  Author / Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

  First Published: 23rd of April 2017

  Last Modified: 19th of September 2017 (Grammar Corrections)

  2017.04.23

• When the Subaltern Spoke

  In the mid-20th century, social history, by which we mean social historiography, saw a major alteration in its focus. It shiftedaway from 19th century Marxist interpretations of a form that concentrated on ‘society’ and the lives of workers who had been underrepresented in favour of a small elite. Its new focus looked instead toward specific historically underrepresented minorities. This approach has been termed neo-Marxism.

  But what caused this shift in focus? I argue, it was the influence of ‘history from below’ which forced social historians to focus on minorities. This is because history from below gave a stage to real individual ‘commoners’, they were no longer one hegemonic group as theorized by academics. This revealed the hypocrisy at the heart of 19th century Marxist historiography, being that it was the top-down, dictatorial version of history it claimed to rebuke, generalising what ‘the people’ believed in.

  Post-imperial subjects were one of the most influential historical minorities to facilitate the rise of ‘history from below’ and thus the wider shift in social history in the mid-20th century. Their sheer numbers being partly why; 145 countries gained independence in the 20th century. Additionally, their collective influence was added to by the proximity of their releases from imperial historiography (a few decades). They spoke loudly and together.

  The popularisation of the term ‘subaltern’ amongst social historians is a testament to the relationship between post-imperial history, history from below, and social history.The term was first coined by Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, in 1926, but only became significant to the world of ‘history from below’ in 1988 when the post-imperialist historian, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revived the term. She defined the subaltern as “persons who are socially, politically and geographically outside the hegemonic power structure”.

  In Spivak’s essay, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ and in her subsequent text; ‘Towards a Critique of Post-Colonial Reason’ she explains that, although the metaphor used is one of minorities ‘without a voice’, a more accurate appraisal would be of ‘a deafened hegemonic ear’. Meaning that minorities had always been expressing their views, they just weren’t being listened to. The importance here is that subalterns have agency in these new histories, they do not simply act at the behest of their oppressors and fade away when not doing so. They are autonomous and can act independently of elites. This is a form inherent to ‘history from below’.

  We can see from this how history from below led to a focus on historical minorities within social history, and Post-imperial history shows us one of the reasons why history from below affected social history in this way.

  Author / Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

  First Published: 05th of April 2017

  Last Modified: 05th of April 2017

  2017.04.05