History Rhymes / ‘Proud Tower’ 2

Review by Bill Doughty––

More than a hundred years ago the United States was a divided government: The House of Representatives balance was 168 to 160, with Republicans holding a “wafer thin” lead. In the Senate, Democrats, mostly from the South, obstructed legislation that allowed “Negroes” to participate in politics. President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, was elected despite losing the popular vote. Ultranationalism was on the rise.

Harrison, according to author Barbara W. Tuchman, “sat on that unstable throne so oddly carpentered by the electoral college system.” Tuchman takes a deep dive into American and European history in her eye-opening book “The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914” (MacMillan, 1966).

We read about a number of fascinating characters, including then-Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, Republican Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed, U.S. Labor Leader Samuel Gompers, British Admiral Sir John Fisher, and French Socialist leader Jean Jaurés. She also touches on the lives, work and impact of other characters, including U.S. Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, who was “friendly and easygoing” but less effective than Assistant Secretary Theodore Roosevelt; Harvard President William Eliot, who, like Reed, opposed expanding the Navy and even opposed a standing army; and irascible British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, who personified centuries of patriarchy.

Tuchman describes the “cigar and paunch” nobility that ruled Britain as “particularly literate, self-consciously clever and endlessly self-admiring.” Men with land ruled and grew more wealthy; “ladies came down to breakfast in hats and at afternoon tea reigned in elaborate tea gowns.”

The beginning of the 20th century was a time of cataclysmic change as technology helped accelerate imperialist impulses. In the United States, Congress debated westward global expansion and annexation of Hawaii, called for by Mahan.

We get amazing descriptions of the characters involved. For example, Speaker of the House Reed:

“A physical giant, six feet three inches tall, weighing almost three hundred pounds and dressed completely in black, ‘out of whose collar rose an enormous clean-shaven baby face like a Casaba melon flowering from a fat black stalk…’ Speaking in a slow drawl, he delighted to drop cool pearls of sarcasm into the most heated rhetoric and to watch the resulting fizzle with the bland gravity of a New England Buddha.”

Reed

Speaker Reed, of Maine, a veteran of the Civil War, was personally opposed to expansion in the Pacific, but he eventually allowed a vote in Congress. The vote was 209 to 91, “with practically unanimous Republican support.” Opposition to building up the Navy and expanding into the Pacific was swept away by the Spanish-American War.

Reed dealt with issues familiar to us today such as ensuring a representative government, achieving a quorum, opposing the silent filibuster, combatting tyranny, and confronting contested elections in January. Reed’s friend Mark Twain supposedly said, “History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.”

At the turn of the century, opposition to ruling classes grew stronger. People protested gross inequality, poor working conditions, and politicians who prevented others, including women, from voting. Tuchman shows how Victorianism began to die but how Anarchists, Socialists, and Ultra-nationalists came to life. The “chronic war between the Church and the republic” continued to be fought for control of education, personal freedom, and collective civil rights.

In post-Napoleon, post-revolution France, “the nation was at odds with itself,” exemplified with the Dreyfus Affair, involving a Jewish military man and accusations of espionage. “The sudden and malign bloom of anti-Semitism in France was part of a wider outbreak,” Tuchman writes.

Tuchman’s foreword to “The Proud Tower” is a testament to humility; she admits the limitations of her undertaking in covering a period of history so selectively. The same can be said about this review; for this Navy Reads blog, I try to choose books and themes that would be most interesting to military readers, history buffs, and critical thinkers.

As always, reading the entire book offers greater depth, context, and knowledge.

Whiteman

I rescued this book from a used book store in Hawaii, and –– like every other Barbara Tuchman book, especially her landmark "The Guns of August" published 60 years ago –– it did not disappoint. 

The copy I found, by the way, once belonged to an Air Force major (“from the library of …”) who, himself, had salvaged it after it had been discarded by Whiteman Air Force Base library in Missouri.

Somehow the book's origin gives it more relevance. Whiteman AFB’s namesake is 2nd Lt. George Whiteman, who was killed in the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Oahu on Dec. 7, 1941. Of course, Pearl Harbor is now home to the Battleship Missouri Museum.

History rhymes.

Mahan the Realist / ‘Proud Tower’ 1

Review by Bill Doughty––

In “The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914,” (MacMillan, 1966) author Barbara W. Tuchman describes U.S. Navy Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan as “a quiet, tight-lipped naval officer with one of the most forceful minds of this time.” Tuchman paints her description of Mahan this way:

“Well over six feet tall, wiry, thin and erect, he had a long, narrow face with narrowly placed pale-blue eyes, a long, straight, knifelike nose, a Sandy mustache blending into a closely trimmed beard over an insignificant chin. All the power of the face was in the upper part, in the eyes and domed skull and the intellectual bumps over the eyebrows … He had little sense of humor, a high moral tone … So precise were his scruples that when living on naval property at the War College he would not allow his children to use the government pencils.”

Mahan embraced his moment in time and was a driving force in turning the growing power of the United States toward expansion. He told others he could prove he was not anti-semitic: “That Jesus Christ was a Jew,” he said, “covers his race for me.”

Tuchman writes that among history’s many turning points at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, was “the last armed conflict between Indians and whites” at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. (Although not detailed in Tuchman’s book, the “conflict” was, in fact, an atrocity –– the massacre of 300 Lakota men, women and children by the U.S. Army in 1890.)

The massacre was a turning point for the United States. “In that year [then] Captain A.T. Mahan, president of the Naval War College, announced in the Atlantic Monthly, ‘Whether they will or no, Americans must now begin to look outward.’”

Mahan saw the Pacific as America’s destiny. Expansion westward, he thought, must continue in the name of Manifest Destiny –– what Rudyard Kipling would call “the White Man’s Burden.”

“The immediate issue was Annexation of Hawaii. A naval coaling base at Pearl Harbor had been acquired in 1887, but the main impulse for annexation of the Islands came from American property interests which were dominated by Judge Dole and the sugar trust. With the support of the United States Marines they engineered a revolt against the native Hawaiian government in January 1893…”

In “The Proud Tower” Tuchman describes the political challenges and opportunities involved in Hawaii becoming a territory of the United States.

It was a time of tumult and war for the U.S. military in Cuba, the Philippines, and China. War continued to flair between other countries, as well.

Japan’s victory over China in 1895 –– not to mention Japan’s success in the Russo-Japanese War several years later –– reinforced Mahan’s published opinions about America’s continued need to look outward to defend its interests in a dangerous world through power. That power could only be achieved with a strong navy, which was “moribund” at the time, according to Tuchman. 

With strong support from Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt and allies in the U.S. Congress, it wouldn’t be long before shipbuilding in the United States was revitalized.

Meanwhile, Mahan’s classic “The Influence of Seapower on History” “had an effect that was epochal on world history,” according to Tuchman. The book was a favorite of Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany, and was high on the reading list for naval officers in Japan. She notes that another remarkable book published in that period also influenced the course of history: Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of the Species.”

Darwin’s conclusions about the animal kingdom were twisted to apply to human society so that Darwinism “acquired a moral imperative,” Tuchman writes. “Darwin’s indirect effects reached apotheosis in Captain Mahan. It’s no coincidence that science’s rise in the late 1800s came at the same time as the waning of the influence of religion. People needed to believe in something, Tuchman said, and that something was either nationalism, socialism, or anarchy –– or some combination of the above.

The world also experienced a revolution in art around the turn of the century. Picasso and Braque created expressionist Cubism. Richard Strauss experimented with formless new music with Also Spruce Zarathustra. The title of Tuchman’s book comes from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, “The City in the Sea,”* written in the mid-1800s. By the first decade of the 1900s, playwrights, composers, painters, and writers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, tinkered with ideas that both reflected society and influencing it.

Mahan, a stubborn realist, continued to be a firm believer in the necessity of war and the right of a nation, at least his nation, to expand its interests through belligerence, even at the expense of others.

Mahan was chosen as a key U.S. representative at the Hague Convention of 1899 in the Netherlands. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia called leading nations to the convention to try to curb a global arms race. Mahan’s “rectitude and assuredness” led to his rejection to proposals to limit the calibre of guns and other restrictions. He even voted against limiting use of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons such as “asphyxiating gas.”

Barbara Tuchman

It’s ironic (thinking of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine) to consider that it was Russia that proposed the Hague talks in 1899 and later in 1907. The Hague Conventions wanted to prevent or at least lessen the impacts of war through limitations in armaments, adoption of laws of war, and acceptance of rules of arbitration. To Russian thinkers, the thought was that war had become “impossible except at the price of suicide,” as stated in the six-volume “The Future or War,” published by Ivan Bloch, who believed “Limited war was no longer possible.”

Despite any meager agreements between nations, the “Great War” came to the world as Anarchists, Socialists, Ultra-Nationalists, and anti-Socialists prevailed in their assassinations, bomb-throwing, and revanchism in the second decade of the 20th century, culminating with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Jean Jaurés.

Tuchman laments the loss of the Old World and “much that has since been lost.” Touching on the imagery in Poe’s maritime-themed “The City in the Sea,” Tuchman writes, “Illusions and enthusiasm slowly sank beneath a sea of massive disillusionment.”

“For the price it paid, humanity’s gain was a painful view of its own limitations.”

*The City in the Sea

By Edgar Allan Poe

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

Zelensky the Artist

Review by Bill Doughty––

There are some obvious signs this book was rushed into print to meet the moment in trying to answer key questions. Would Zelensky be able to stay alive to lead his brave country in the fight against Putin’s invasion? Would Ukraine be overrun? Could Russia be stopped?

Rushed as it is, nonetheless this book is an important tool to examine how Zelensky became “Churchill in a T-shirt.” Also, it encapsulates history, context, and personalities to provide context for Putin’s invasion and war against Ukraine.

The book is “Zelensky: The Unlikely Ukranian Hero Who Defied Putin and United the World” by Andrew L. Urban and Chris McLeod, with a foreword by Rebekah Koffler (Regency Publishing, 2022). Urban and McLeod look into the Ukranian President Zelensky’s early life, rise to the presidency, and use of his art as a communicator and performer to become an inspirational leader.

U.S. military readers would benefit from the book’s concise presentation of the history of Ukraine and the demise of the USSR, presented in timelines, statistics, and data.

Readers can appreciate the inclusion of some extras in this book that make it more than just a biography or compilation of statistics and news reports. The authors include historical timelines about Ukraine and the “demise” of the Soviet Union. They present a short chapter on the alliances of Europe, including NATO, the Warsaw Pact, European Union, the Baltic States, and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Urban and McLeod examine NATO and other strategic alliances and show clearly how Putin and Russia have violated the rule of law, spelled out in the Budapest Memorandum, which calls for nations “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”

Using more statistics, the authors examine the disparity between Russian and Ukrainian forces. They show how and perhaps why the Russians paint the “Z” symbol on their tanks and trucks. They explain the make-up of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary paramilitary group, named for the German composer as a nod to one of its organizer’s “passion for the Third Reich.”

President Zelensky aboard USS Ross (DDG-71)

The authors shoot down Putin’s excuses for his invasion of Ukraine, especially the pretext of the need to attack Nazi forces in control of Russia’s neighbor. We are reminded several times in this book that Zelensky is of Jewish heritage. His great grandfather and other family members were murdered in World War II in the Holocaust.

Readers are told of some uncomfortable ties between Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and some Americans of influence; some who have spoken out against U.S. support and involvement include (now former) Representative Madison Cawthorn, Senate Candidate J.D. Vance, and Fox TV anchor Tucker Carlson. 

Urban and McLeod report how in 2020 former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater paramilitary group, “sought to provide military services to the Wagner Group in its operations in Libya and Mozambique.” (Prince is the brother of President Trump’s former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.) In one of the book’s timelines we are reminded of Trump’s call with Zelensky three years ago this month in which he tried to leveraged military support to Ukraine in an attempt to get political dirt on his opponent, leading to Trump’s first impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Such indirect support to Putin’s regime and against Ukraine is counterbalanced by the heavy direct support by Western Allies, especially by President Biden and the United States Congress, in providing weapons and ammunition to Zelensky and Ukraine. As of this book’s publication, the United States had provided $1.38 billion in military aid. But, according to Secretary of State Tony Blinken, as of Oct. 4, 2022 the United States has provided $17.5 billion in U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.

This relatively small book is a snapshot from the opening months of the war. Who knows how history will unfold in the weeks and months to come? What seems clear now is Putin is backed into a corner, and the shadow of nuclear escalation and even Armageddon seems bigger and darker. But, Ukraine is showing much of the world that freedom-loving democracy is worth fighting for.

A map in the opening pages purports to show contested areas in eastern Ukraine overrun by Russia; of course, any map older than a week would be inaccurate. 

With no index, no notes, and plenty of repetition and lack of coherence, this book was obviously rushed into print. Still, the good content outweighs the shortcomings.

The book concludes with a transcription of Zelensky’s inspiring address to the U.S. Congress on March 16, 2022, for which he received standing ovations.

His art as a communicator and motivating leader, reminiscent of Churchill, shines through.

In his remarks, Zelensky spoke passionately about need to protect the people in his country who want to live free and under the rule of law. “Americans,” he said, “in your great history, you have patriots that would allow you to understand Ukranians, understand us now when we need you right now. Remember Pearl Harbor…”

Top photo: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is welcomed aboard USS Ross (DDG-71) by Vice Adm. Gene Black, commander, U.S. Sixth Fleet, and Ross commanding officer Cmdr. John D. John in Odessa, Ukraine, during Exercise Sea Breeze 2021, July 4, 2021. Exercise Sea Breeze is a multinational maritime exercise cohosted by U.S. Sixth Fleet and the Ukrainian Navy in the Black Sea since 1997. Sea Breeze 2021 is designed to enhance interoperability of participating nations and strengthen maritime security and peace within the region. (MC2 Trey Fowler)