Marx “Men make their history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
Karl Marx
“But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavour toward better understanding.”
Marc Bloch
“We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”
Karl Marx, (1843)
“The ‘great’ national historian Macaulay, vulgarises the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial.”
Leon Trotsky
Michael Braddick is to be commended for writing the first and only biography of the Marxist historian Christopher Hill. Having said that it is a little surprising that the Pabloites at Verso book publishers want Hill to be known as a radical historian rather than a Marxist one. Whether Braddick protested over this is unknown to me but throughout the book he clearly believes Hill was a Marxist from an early age.
The book is professionally written and researched. If Thomas Carlyle looked to clear Oliver Cromwell’s reputation from under a pile of dead dogs Braddick had to do the same with Hill. By any margin this is a significant and ground-breaking book. Although given the statue and importance of Hill, it is still hard to believe this is the first biography of the great man.
As Braddick correctly portrays Hill was a mass of political and social contradictions he was both a Fellow of the British Academy and the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, a paid-up member of the British Communist party and gave lectures at the British Socialist Workers party summer schools on a regular basis.
Braddick had his work cut out in examining and placing Hill in the context of the time. With his fifteen books and dozens of articles, Hill fundamentally changed how we understood the English Revolution and popularised the theory that there was a bourgeois revolution in 1640s England. Hill’s theory came under sustained attack from the Stalinists inside the Communist Party of Great Britain. Hill’s essay The English Revolution of 1640 was the catalyst for a wide-ranging and divisive battle within the groups and beyond. Stalinists which included leading historians inside the group and leading members of the central committee of the Communist party took exception to Hill’s characterisation of the English Revolution as ‘Bourgeois.’ They, therefore, opposed the conception that the 1640s revolution represented major a turning point in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Anyone who sided with Hill’s position was accused of “Hillism.”[1].
Hill influenced how a generation of students and general readers saw the English Revolution. Although his viewpoint that the events of the 1640s constituted a revolution was rejected and attacked by a group of revisionist historians and writers. Undeterred Braddick still believes that general readers and academics still must define their position on the period from his perspective.
Hill’s reluctance to take on the revisionists politically did not stop the Pseudo lefts in the SWP from using Hill to try a launch an unsuccessful struggle against them. The historical revisionism that struck the study of the English Revolution began in earnest in the 1960s. Its central aim was to refute both the Whig and Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution and, in doing so, conceal the true political and class nature of the Revolution. John Rees was a former member of the Socialist Workers. Party (now a member of Counterfire). At the time he was a member of the SWP and like all Pseudo Left organisations, the SWP was extremely reluctant to take to the battlefield against a coterie of revisionist historians. The SWP would sooner wait till it set up a connection with left-leaning historians, such as Hill and Brian Manning and let them do the fighting. To say the results of this policy were mixed was an understatement.
In an article John Rees wrote in 1991, “We have waited some considerable time for Christopher Hill to enter the lists against the revisionist historians of the English Revolution. Of course, Hill has taken the occasional pot-shot at the revisionists in articles and lectures, some of which form the basis for this book. But generally, he seems to have stayed a little aloof, cultivating a disdain which still lingers in this book’s introduction, where he claims, ‘We should not take these fashions too seriously: they go in cycles, and it is no doubt my age that makes me a little sceptical of latter-day “revisionist” historians who try to convince us that there was no revolution in 17th century England, or that if there was it had no long-term causes or consequences.[2]
Before reading any history book one should always take on board the great E H Carr’s maxim “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.”[3] Braddick is not a Marxist historian and is heavily influenced by the French historian Fernand Braudel who championed the idea of the “longue durée.”
As “Simon Jenkins wrote “Michael Braddick is a true Braudelian. He is a historian not of who, what and when but of how and why. From Stonehenge to Brexit and Danegeld to coronavirus, his concern is for the setting of history, its intellectual and physical environment, and “the capacity of British people to use political power to get things done.”[4]
Although Braudel had strengths he also had very deep-seated weaknesses. As the Marxist writer Ann Talbot points out, “If Braudel’s approach to history has its strengths, it also has disadvantages. These relate to two areas-historical change and socio-political history. Braudel was a conservative historian who, although living in a country whose name was synonymous with revolution, was averse to change, particularly sudden changes of a revolutionary character. He attempted to develop a form of socio-economic history that did not rely on Marxist concepts and stressed continuity rather than change.”[5]
Throughout the book Braddick constantly grapples with the conundrum of what was Hill politically. Braddick uses the term Marxist without really examining precisely what that means. Hill was never an orthodox Marxist and was never remotely close to Leon Trotsky or the Trotskyists inside the Fourth international who defended Marxism from its Pabloite and Pseudo Left revisionists. As Ann Talbot writes “The fact that Hill was not among the most politically advanced elements of the party—those who then joined the Fourth International—is a greater tribute to them than it is a criticism of him. His work showed him to be a better historian than he was a political thinker.”
I somehow doubt that Braddick contacted or looked at the work of the Marxists of the World Socialist Website. If he, had he would have found an excellent and thought-provoking essay on Hill by Ann Talbot.
As Ann Talbot asks in her excellent obituary of Christopher Hill, “What any serious reader interested in history or politics wants to know is, when we read Hill’s books, are we reading the work of an apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy or of someone who was genuinely struggling to make a Marxist analysis of an aspect of English history? It must be said that this is a complex question. Not everyone who was attracted to the bureaucratically degenerated Communist Party could be classified with the Webbs. The most gifted and outstanding representatives of the British intellectual elite, whether poets, novelists, scientists, musicians or historians, associated themselves with the Communist Party because the old institutions of church and state had lost their hold over the imaginations of the young while the Soviet Union seemed to embody all that was new, modern and progressive.”[6]
One thing that does surprise me is that a historian of John Rees’s expertise was not invited to write a major review of Braddick’s book. Rees did a review for his political organisation Counterfire.[7] Rees tends to imply in this quote below that Hill and the Communist Party historians Groups adoption of Peoples history and the so-called Marxist-humanist current was a valid part of classical Marxism. He writes:
“Hill’s Marxism was certainly formed originally in the 1930s while he joined the Communist Party. Even then, the historians within the Communist Party were certainly not a pale reproduction of Moscow orthodoxy. In part, they were simply more deeply engaged in the study of their various periods and were producing material in greater depth than could be covered by the generalities of the orthodoxy. This part of the review I have no qualms about. It is this part that I have an opposition to. He continues:
“This was not necessarily a hostile counter position. Generalisations and specific research can often interact in productive ways: generalisation is amended by specific findings, and specific findings altered when placed in a general context. However, that may be, by the time Hill and other members of the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG) left the party in 1957 in the wake of the Russian invasion of Hungary, they were also being shaped by the so-called Marxist-humanist current of that time. This current had deep roots in Marx’s method, in particular the early writings then for the first time becoming widely available. It obviously was adopted, and methodologically defended, by Hill’s friend and comrade Edward Thompson. It was also common coin for Hill, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, Brian Manning, and other former members of the CPHG.”
This so-called Marxist-humanist current produced “Peoples History” As Ann Talbot succinctly puts it “the Communist Party sponsored a form of “People’s History,” which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which supplied a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.” Hil was enough of a Marxist is not completed absorbed by Morton’s Peoples History genre, but he did keep Morton’s national approach to historical questions. And the influence of the popular front politics and national outlook of Stalinism stayed with him most of his career.
Overall Braddick’s book has been met with serious and mostly favourable media responses. One ridiculous and dissenting voice appeared in the form a review entitled A Stalinist chump at Oxford, the Civil War historian who misjudged his own times by Richard Davenport-Hines in the TLS (Times Literary Supplement) He writes:
“Four years ago, Braddick published an ambitious study of political agency, spanning the period from Neolithic to Brexit Britain, entitled A Useful History of Britain: The politics of getting things done. It is a compelling study of people outside ruling institutions mustering their organizational strength, preparing themselves for action and maximizing their collective force to achieve social and material change: every chapter bears Hill’s traces. Braddick’s epigraph for his Useful History – Marc Bloch’s remark that “a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present” – would serve Hill equally. He misjudged the conditions in which he lived the first half of his life, and therefore interpreted the past in terms that could be skewed or incomplete.”[8]
To justify is hack work he enlists other historians to do his dirty work saying “There was formidable criticism of Hill’s method, and especially of his arrangement of research notes by predetermined categories. “Whatever Christopher Hill reads seems to provide him with additional support for views he already holds,” Keith Thomas noted. Briggs judged that his “highly dubious categorization” was essential to his work’s “creative richness.” John Morrill reproached him for neglect of archival sources and original letters. Others objected that he plucked quotations out of context, omitted material that contradicted his arguments and made excessively bold jumps in his conclusions.”
Davenport- Hines’s hack review aside Braddick’s excellent biography not only situates Hill’s life and work in its historical context but looks to rescue Hill for a new generation of readers. As Ann Talbot said “As a historian he stands far above his detractors and his books deserve to be read and reread, and if with a critical eye, it should always be with the knowledge that his limitations and faults as much as his great historical insights and innovations are the product of his time. He may be bettered, but never dismissed, and only bettered by those who have studied him closely.”
[1] Document 12 (1947) the Basis and Character of Tudor Absolutism-Ideology, Absolutism, and the English Revolution: Debates of the British Communist Historians, 1940-1956 (2008) David Parker-Lawrence & Wishart.
Let me begin by agreeing that the origins of large-scale petitioning on political and religious matters can be found in the records of the movement for a Presbyterian settlement for the Church of England in the 1580s. This was the precedent for the later petitioning activities in the early to mid-Stuart period. However, petitioning itself was common at all levels of English and Welsh society on local and other matters by then. Recognising that such appeals were one of the common features of bargaining between the Crown, the Privy Council and other organs of the State and Church at that time is appropriate. Charles I’s critics in the 1620s and again by 1640 utilised such means.
We can see this in the coordinated petitions submitted to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 and later in and after November 1640 when the Long Parliament met. The leaders of the so-called ‘Junto’, men like the 2nd Earl of Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele, the 2nd Lord Brooke, John Pym, Oliver St John and others, understood the importance of exercising pressure on the King and his advisers to secure what they regarded as essential concessions.
Valerie Pearl showed in her 1954 D.Phil. thesis and her 1961 book based on her thesis how these men worked together with their radical allies in the city of London to bring popular demonstrations, charges against recalcitrant proto-Royalists and petitioning to this end. These activities were not necessarily as spontaneous as figures like Brian Manning and Christopher Hill supposed. Take just one example: the M.P.s for London. Cradock and Venn were well known to Warwick and the others from their involvement in the activities of the New England and Massachusetts Bay Companies: Samuel Vassall was one of Warwick’s tenants; Isaac Pennington was, like Warwick, one of the supporters of Samuel Hartlieb’s activities.
Owen Rowe was Warwick’s brother-in-law from 1625 to 1645. Warwick had important connections with seamen and shipbuilders in London stretching back to the mid-1610s and onwards to the end of 1648. The Providence Island Company’s financial affairs throw a revealing light on the connections of these peers and gentlemen with mercantile figures before 1640 and, indeed, in later ventures after the start of the Civil War.
I ought to add that ascribing the term ‘revisionist’ to John Rees creates a problem since this is the description usually applied to those historians who, from 1976, undermined and replaced the older Whig and Marxist explanations for the events of the 1640s. Perhaps, I may be allowed to add the heretical thought that the English Revolution or the Great Rebellion (or, as I prefer to call it, this ‘grand soulevement’) took place against the background of a significant improvement in the position of the larger landowners since 1600, as W.R.Emerson argued and which, were I a Marxist, might explain why these conflicts began and why the post-1649 settlements failed and the Restoration took place.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people’s lives.”
Sarah Wynn-Williams
“move fast and break things”
Mark Zuckerberg
I must insist upon the masses, and their integrity as a whole. I have great faith in the masses. The noble character of mechanics and farmers—their curiosity, good temper, and open-handedness—the whole composite make. Significant alike in their apathy, and the promptness of their love—I know they are sublime. Before we despair we have to count them in—after we count them in we won’t despair.
Walt Whitman- Democracy
“ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”
WSWS Editorial Board Statement
To a certain extent, you can see why Meta, formerly Facebook would want to ban this book and gag the author from publicizing it. Both actions by Meta failed and backfired spectacularly as the book has sold in the millions.
Careless People is an interesting if limited expose of Facebook. An organization that has been called pretty accurately a ‘diabolical cult’. Wynn-William spent seven years at Facebook and her 400-page book is a pretty damning indictment. The first thing that strikes one about the leading players on Facebook is the stunning level of hypocrisy and duplicity. Williams cites Facebook’s number two Sheryl Kara Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.
Sandberg casts herself as a feminist icon however the reality is a little different. Her advice to pregnant working women – “Don’t leave before you leave” – meaning that the mother should work herself to death just before the baby is born. As one reviewer said, “It doesn’t occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism.” Wynn-Williams, among others, was also bizarrely invited by Sandberg to sleep in her bed presumably to have sexual relations.
Having said that before Sandberg treated her like a piece of crap Wynn-Williams exhibited a large degree of political naivety and outright fawning over Sandberg and Facebook in general writing “Until this moment, it had never occurred to me to see Sheryl as a celebrity or be awestruck by her… But now I can see how she’s sprinkling some of her stardust, whatever that magical quality is that she has that makes you forget to focus on the substance of the meeting at hand and instead wonder what it is she’s doing differently that makes her better than you.”[1]
The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness.” As a useful analogy for the “Careless People” at Facebook, it only takes one so far. While Zuckerberg and his cohorts were indeed amoral, stupid, reckless and devoid of any principles they were representatives of an oligarch that has now captured the White House in America and is launching attack after attack on the working class. Significant protests against Trump’s attacks on immigrants and escalating deportation operations have erupted across the United States. Student leader Momodou Taal has been targeted by the Trump administration who have tried to have him deported for speaking out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
As Robert Reich correctly states “Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry. All three of these men were in the first row at Trump’s inauguration. They, and other billionaires, have now exposed themselves for what they are. They are the oligarchy. They continue to siphon off the wealth of the nation. They are supporting a tyrant who is promising them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks that will make them even richer. They are destroying democracy so they won’t have to worry about “parasites” (as Musk calls people who depend on government assistance) demanding anything more from them. When billionaires take control of our communication channels, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for their billionaire babble”.[2]
Or to put it more precisely as a statement by WSWS Editorial Board does “ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”.[3]
This type of wealth is becoming increasingly incompatible with Walt Whitman’s beloved idea of Democracy. But this political and economic situation largely passes Wynn-Williams by. She is completely indifferent to the assault by Oligarch Zuckerberg’s Facebook on the Socialist movement. The orthodox Marxists of the WSWS.Org have faced the brunt of Facebook’s wrath and censorship. What is not mentioned in Wynn Williams’s book is that Facebook was and still is engaged in an escalating campaign of internet censorship targeting the socialist left. Entire Facebook pages were taken down, and individual accounts were permanently disabled, without any explanation given or recourse allowed.
Facebook began its systematic censorship of the WSWS.Org after the January 6th 2021 attempted coup by Trump and his supporters. As Kevin Reed points out “It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accounts—including the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the US—by Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy”[4]
Wynn Williams’s book is a well-written but somewhat limited insight into the lives of Facebook Oligarchs. For a far more precise and revolutionary insight into the rise of the oligarchs one should purchase a copy of the newly released book from Mehring books.com entitled The Election of Donald Trump: The insurrection of the oligarchy.
(This is a loosely edited transcript of the above book event. This transcript was done by Christopher Thompson. I include in this publication some comments made by Thompson.)
Houseman’s Thanks everyone for joining today. Thanks for giving up your Saturday night. We are joined today by Michael Braddock, who is the author of a new biography of Christopher Hill, which is out now from Verso. Braddick has written many books before, including a biography of John Lilburn, Common Freedom of the People. God’s fury, England’s fire. Most recently, a useful history of Britain, the Politics of Getting Things Done. What drove his work? What motivated? And also, I suppose, what motivated you to write his biography? Thanks.
Braddick: Can I just say thanks so much to you for your interest in Hill and for giving up your Saturday night to come and hear about him? So Chris Hill was born in 1912 in York, son of a very prosperous solicitor, and brought up a believing and devout Methodist with the extreme principled view that you should have serious thoughts about the world, and you should act on them to make the world a better place. And that was one of his first important intellectual inheritances, I think, because he lost his faith in the thirties, but he retained that seriousness about living an examined life, leading a life that was serious about how the world could be better and trying to act on that. Although he did spend a lot of time pondering how he could act helpfully in the world.
He lost his faith and gained his Marxism in a process that’s not very clear. But he became a convinced Marxist while an undergraduate at Oxford, and he graduated in 1934. Should know that. But didn’t join the communist party immediately. He had reservations about the communist party strategy.
He went to the Soviet Union between 1934-36 and came back convinced that he should join the communist party, partly because of what he’d seen in the Soviet Union and partly because the CBGB had changed its political strategy in a way that made it an easier party home for him. He remained a member of the CPGB for nearly twenty years. He left in nineteen fifty-six, fifty-seven. Prompted not by the invasion of Hungary, but by the refusal of the party to allow free internal discussion of the invasion of Hungary. It was he who left on the point of inner party democracy.
And the second part of that was that he didn’t think the party had allowed them to discuss the implications of Khrushchev’s secret speech, which had been made in secret but published by the CIA quite widely. Both of which made him think that the communists had been misled by the party, had been misinformed by the party, and that the daily work of the party’s paper had deliberately suppressed information that was critical of the Stalinist line. So I laid it at that point because he was an intellectual Marxist and a communist, but he was a communist only for those twenty years. And it was a political strategy that he took up in ’36, and he dropped it in ’57. And it’s a distinction that isn’t much honoured in liberal commentary on Hill.
He’s routinely referred to interchangeably as a communist or a Marxist, but his membership of the party was a strategy. And understanding why he took it on and left it is important for understanding his politics. By the time he left the party in ’57, he’d been a fellow of Oxford College. He went to Balliol in 1931 and left in 1978. Not a standard Marxist career.
He had two years in Cardiff in the late 1930s. He had four years, I think, of military service. But he was in Balliol for his whole life. Down to ’56 and ’57, he’d been doing a lot of work for the party, a lot of publication for the party and party, for explaining Marxism, setting out what a Marxist history might look like. And also, I’m sorry, write or I’m sorry, writing apologies for Stalinist, Russia and Stalinist policies.
Out of the party, he then pursued a freer career, I think, an intellectually freer career to pursue the implications of his intellectual Marxism. Having dropped the political strategy of the CBGB, he was freer to explore the implications of Marxism for his understanding of the world. And there, I got very interested in the relationship between the British left and the British past, and how, at each phase of his writing career, you can see him in dialogue with the contemporary world, trying to understand the past for the present that would equip us better for the future. And in the forties and fifties, that was mainly about the state and reform of the state and political economy. In the early sixties, it was about science and progress, how progressive ideas, but particularly scientific ideas, could be set free.
That’s a lot to unpack there, but he did think of politically progressive ideas as scientific in the same way that an understanding of the natural world could be scientific. So he had a view of, you know, scientific progress in the early sixties. Sixties. In the late sixties, he was master of writing, letters to the undergraduates to explain why they couldn’t have a condom machine in the college, while writing the world turned upside down, this glorious celebration of personal freedom and personal liberation. So in the late sixties, he was very interested in the possibilities of personal liberation from a Marxist perspective.
And then in the eighties, he wrote about the experience of defeat as the shadow of Thatcherism came to lie over the aspirations he’d been pursuing really for a whole political career. He began to write about seventeenth-century radicals and their experience in the Restoration. What is it like when the world turns against you, and what do you do about your ideals, and how do you nurture them and keep them alive for better times? So, it’s an interesting life in several ways. And there is that paradox I kind of alluded to, the difficulty of reconciling a life as a fairly, you know, well, as a very assiduous Oxford Tutor, undistinguishable, really, in his practice from his liberal colleagues in Oxford.
Braddick: He behaved as an Oxford Tutor was expected to do. And then as a master of a college, balancing and representing all the interests in a relatively conservative institution. And doing all that while pursuing this radical career in writing. And one final thought about life is, as I said at the very start, he became a convinced Marxist, also carrying from his Methodism a view that you should act on your beliefs to improve the world. And the way he thought he could do that was by writing.
Writing was for him a way of improving the world, equipping people with a different past to give them a different sense of the present and a different idea about the possibilities of the future. That’s what he thought he could contribute to the improvement of society. And he wrote to the communist party leadership, I think, in 1949, saying, I know this is a smallish backwater of activity, but it’s the one where I can make a difference. And he juxtaposed it directly with what he’d done leafleting at the factory gate, campaigning and by-elections and so on. But he felt that, as a posh guy with a posh Oxford accent, what he could do for the movement was to develop a radical past on which people could draw in thinking about the present and charting a radical future.
You’ve kind of mentioned that, you know, to suppose about what drew him to history in the English past, but why, particularly, was the English Revolution? What was it about the English Revolution that appealed to him? And how did his, you know, how did his kind of communism and his Marxism affect how he viewed that particular struggle, particularly in that early period? Yeah. So I think it was taken for granted at the time, and he used the term, ironically, that England was the top nation until the First World War.
Bradick: And the understanding that was to understand the first bourgeois state, the state that had the first bourgeois revolution, the first industrial revolution, the first urbanized mass society. So it wasn’t a sort of little Englander patriotism that made him concentrate on England. It was thought that it was the first bourgeois society, and understanding how the first bourgeois society evolved and came about and became supported by, you know, all the structures that support a bourgeois society. You were learning something important for the history of the whole globe. And so he spent a lot of time arguing that the seventeenth-century crisis in England was a bourgeois revolution, and a precursor to the better-known bourgeois revolution in France.
And that was one of his major academic concerns was to establish the view that we should view the seventeenth-century crisis as a bourgeois revolution. Why did he do that’s one set of one kind of answer to your question, but another one is that his departure from Methodism was associated with a strong view that bourgeois culture was experiencing its death throes. And, if you wanted to understand what would come next, you needed to understand the birth of bourgeois culture. And he understood that not just as the institutions of economy and society, but also the way that bourgeois culture shapes the family, shapes the transmission of property, gives us, social roles that are necessary to sustain the structures of a bourgeois life and how those bourgeois expectations of us as individuals are ultimately really constraining. They’re inventions of the human mind, but we experience them as cages.
And he felt a deep sense of personal alienation in the 1930s. So there are these various ways in which you wanted to understand the origins of bourgeois alienation from ourselves, bourgeois structures, the behaviour of bourgeois states only fifteen, twenty years after the war to end all wars were about to pitch, obviously, on route to yet another one that would be even more destructive and awful. And it was the madness of bourgeois civilization in the thirties and its dissatisfactions that made him interested in the origin interested in the origins of bourgeois society, and he thought they lay in England in the seventeenth century. So it mustn’t be a kind of narrow patriotism. It’s a real thought that, for this for that question, England was the place to study.
That, you know, if you’re looking at the kind of origins of the bourgeois British state, British society, that’s very different from what I think most people, if they’ve approached Hill. They’ve approached the world, and the world has turned upside down. Here’s a kind of great book on, from the late sixties. Is that right? Seventy-two.
Seventy and, you know, which looks at the kind of bubbling undercurrents of radicalism, religious, political, social, yeah. In that revolutionary moment, you know, the moment that kind of bourgeois England emerges, there’s also this kind of undercurrent. You know, what drew him to that? And, you know, what were the conclusions that he drew from it? Did that change his view of the revolution generally or of the kind of that period?
Braddick: Well, it so here’s a problem for the biographer. He never said. And when he did, I’m fairly sure that he weeded out his papers. I think I know that he weeded out his papers and didn’t want people like me, you know, poring over them after he’d gone. So there’s a difficulty in actually answering the question, but the the reconstruction I do in the book is to say that he had always been interested in personal liberation and alienation and his Marxism was ultimately a humanist Marxism about how a fairer society would set us free as individuals to flourish in ways that are healthier than are demanded by a bourgeois society.
So I think that had been his concern from very early on, but he didn’t get around to writing it because he got sidetracked into explaining the origins of the bourgeois revolution in England, which I think was not in retrospect where his interest lay, but it was critical to his heart the whole architecture of his life that there was a bourgeois revolution. And so, World Turned Upside Down is now his most-read book, but in the eighties, probably his most influential book. Well, no. This isn’t quite true, but as influential in the eighties was a book called The Century of Revolution, published in 1961, which set out the case for the bourgeois revolution in the whole cultural sense. So, I think he turned he turned to, and the world turned upside down.
And in the early seventies, he was commissioned to write that book. There are there was an enterprising publisher behind it. But I think it allowed him to say something that had been on his mind, really, for forty years. And another interesting point in writing the biography rather than just the history of his work is that in those years, that was the high point of student rebellion in Oxford. And he was in his day job having to deal with radical figures including Alex Callinicos who, Edward Heath visited the college, and Callinicos and Simon Sedgwick Gell were now allowed to say, I think, I’m being recorded, Allegedly, allegedly, two people went into the common room where Ted Heath was going to be entertained and wrote fuck Heath on the wall, you know.
And they were sent down and so on. So, he was dealing with this and occupations and rent strikes. So, radicalism in Oxford was pale back in Paris with Exeter and Essex, and certainly LSE and pale by comparison to Paris. But still, as the head of the college, he had to deal with this. And, it’s very interesting that in his day job, he was kinda holding the line for college respectability and saying you really mustn’t say rude words about the prime minister while he was writing The World Turned Upside Down.
And literally, there was a fantastic exchange over the condom machine that the students had installed without the permission of the senior members of the college. And the senior members then said, You’ve got to take it out because it’s an offense to our moral sensibilities. And anyway, you can buy condoms in Norwich now, it’s not very far to travel. And the students took it. And anyway, it had to be, they said we can take it down, but the London Rubber Company can’t come and collect it for a while.
And they said, right. We’ll take it, and it will go in the dean’s room until the London Rubber Company can collect it. And Dean and Hill had to represent all this with a straight face, saying, you know, it’s a moral offense to some members of the college to have a condom machine. They’re available elsewhere. And on the other hand, he’s writing the world turned upside down, which is all about this tremendous effusion of sexual and other forms of personal liberation.
And, it was dramatized on the South Bank by Keith Dewhurst as an, you know, example of radical theatre and theatre that could change the world. And it was put on by a company that was famous for living a, you know, a liberated life and, allegedly. And so Hill was completely in favour of all this liberation. Although I think he thought, you know, some student politics were a bit, you know, tokenistic and gestural politics rather than substantial politics. But basically, he was behind it all.
But in his day job, he was having to maintain the respectable front. And I think it’s critical to his personality that he did it. He felt, I, you know, I have this duty. This is my role. This is my job.
It’s not me. It’s the job I have to do. But really, there’s a me off stage that’s interested in all this liberation stuff. Yeah. Sorry.
Very long rambling. No. No. That was fascinating. I think, you know, I think it’s a testament also to the book itself.
So your chapter on Balliol. I didn’t think I’d be so interested in the internal politics of Balliol, your college, but it Yeah. You know, it is kind of fascinating and shows a lot about Hill as a person as well as a writer. I think you get from that. I also wanted to ask about, you know, he left the communist party in ’57.
Braddick: Yeah. Not with some of the others, EP Thompson, Raphael Samuel, and others who left the year before, directly after or around the events of Hungary. This was about inner party democracy. It was a year later at the special congress, right, in ’57, that he left. I was quite in quite involved, right, with the congress held internally at the communist party about the question of democracy.
Right? But before that, he was very involved with the communist party historians’ group. Yeah. I want to ask about you know, this is an incredible collection of historians who shaped the study and the writing of history in mid-century Britain. Ralph O Samuel, EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, and Yeah. Chris Piel and others, and many others. You know, what was it about the communist party that, you know, first of all, kind of nurtured or allowed these historians, right? But what also what did their what did those historians get from both the group of historians around the communist party, or the communist party itself?
Braddick: Yeah.
The party had turned in the late thirties to a kind of Popular Front strategy that they should build a progressive alliance for change and abandon a kind of class-based conflict. And the only way to achieve change was through class conflict. And what it allowed us to do was build a progressive alliance alongside the core revolutionary ambition. And it trended towards a ref a reformist ambition. And that made it easier for intellectuals.
And so in the late thirties, Margot Heinemann has a very nice chapter on this. The communist party developed a culture strategy, radio, TV in the post-war period, drama, art, visual art, literature, and history to try to build a progressive consciousness and to give people resources to develop a progressive consciousness. And so there is a relatively free hand then for writers and artists to pursue their creative individualism within the service of the party. It was a very creative moment, and some great writing and great history came out of it. And so there’s a cultural committee, and then the culture committee had us, effectively a subcommittee, the historians group.
And the historians group was set up with two aims in mind. One was that AL Morton had written a classic history of the people’s history of England, and it was being revised. And the party wanted to give him advice on how to revise it. And the second thing was that Hill had written in 1940 a kind of manifesto for his view of a bourgeois revolution that had caused controversy about whether it was properly Marxist or not. And so the second focus was to discuss whether Hill’s account of the bourgeois revolution was properly Marxist. And it sounds, you know, terribly sort of restrictive thing, you know, as if the dogma is going to be imposed. But actually, it was an open question about how Marxists should think about the bourgeois revolution and how Marxists should think about sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century England. And it attracted a generation of people who were turned off by an extremely conservative university curriculum and school curriculum that was the story of kings and queens and the doings of great men and, had a kind of liberal continuity to it, that nothing ever unpleasant had happened in Britain, and no change had ever required any unpleasantness. And, we’re not like the foreigners. So there was this attempt to recover a kind of radical history of the British past and the way that ordinary people had shaped the conditions of their lives and how understanding the radicalism of ordinary people would help you understand the British past, but it also give the radicalism of ordinary people a present and a future.
So there was a kind of progressive ambition behind it. But it was quite an open-ended, quite open. And the key thing for the party, I don’t know if you were going to ask me about this, the party regarded such issues through the lens of democratic centralism. The idea being that you had a democratic discussion until a line was reached, and then the line became the line, and you fell in line with the party line. And on all these issues, rigorous debate was thought necessary so that the party could develop a line.
So that lots of people misunderstand, I think, the role of the party here. They think the party was commissioning a history from these people. But actually, the party was trying to foster a debate about Marxists that would lead to a line that the party could then adopt. And democratic centralism was exactly the issue in ’57. And, you know, we’ll talk about that later, I suppose.
But in the early post-war period, it was giving these people a lot of freedom to think about how they might reconfigure an understanding of the British past. But they were very concerned that it should meet academic standards. It wasn’t simply party-political history. It was that it should be rigorous history, better than liberal history, living by academic standards more rigorously than liberal history, and thus be better history and give a good basis on which Marxists could think about the present and the future.
You’ve kind of alluded already to his influence, particularly in the kind of sixties and seventies, right? You know, he was you know, there were plays put on of his history books, you know, his books were taught widely across the curriculum. I think at a kind of level, looked at, you know, the three universities were kind of the defining or one of the defining kinds of interpretations of the English revolution at the time. And what was that like for him to be, you know, he was a very private man. He was very kind, you know, he was, you say quite shy, quiet, you know, he wasn’t, very false. What was it like for him to have been this?
And, also, I suppose, what was it like culturally to have this kind of, you know, the dominant narrative of this pivotal moment in history to be one that was explicitly a Marxist reading?
Braddick: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think he was extremely private and modest, and I think he felt he was putting himself at the service of his readers. You know?
I’m, you know, I don’t think he, I don’t think there was much ego involved in being such a big figure for him. I think it was that he, you know, I’m being of help here. And that was important for him because he wanted to be helpful, and he came from a family of Methodist activists in York. Some of whom had been very active in charity. You know, we might think of their activism differently now, but the missionaries and some people wanted to change the world.
So I think it was really important for him to feel useful in the world, and I think he took that seriously, took that responsibility seriously. And I think it was also a tremendous relief because in the early fifties, in particular, well, in the late thirties and then again in the early fifties, communists found it very hard. Communist men party members and Marxists at large found it very hard to get university employment. And several people had jobs and lost them, and it was thought to be political. And Hill was always on their side.
And he said to one confidant in the fifties that he or in the sixties that he only kept his job because Balliol, you know, Balliol just doesn’t care what the outside world thinks. You know, he’s one of our chaps. So, he benefited from Oxford’s privilege, and I think he took all that quite seriously. And at the very end of his career, he worked in the Open University, where lots of former comrades had ended up because they had been pushed out of universities in the fifties. They’d gone into adult education, gone into the Workers’ Education Authority, and that had been the obvious place to recruit people for the OU in the seventies.
And so the CPGB was reunited, really, in the Open University in the eighties. But there were very few. Kiernan wrote to him. Kiernan had a job in Edinburgh, but Kiernan wrote to him saying there’s no point in going for x or y job because, you know and and Rodney Hilton or Hill’s very first article was published under a pseudonym. And Hilton said that was because if you knew this was in ’38. And Hilton said if he’d published this with his name on that would have, you know, it would have been a serious problem for his career.
That’s when he first set out a Marxist interpretation of the seventeenth century. So he was, I think, conscious of his privilege and anxious that he should make that privilege a benefit to other people. And he wrote letters. I can’t remember who it was, but he wrote in defence of someone who’d lost a job. I think it might have been that Arblaster was not given a job at Manchester, having been there for two years.
I think it was Anthony Arblaster. But he anyway, he wrote to him and said no. I remember writing this. I’ll just tell you what he says. He says, it’s outrageous that a heretic should be debarred from doing their job because of their heresy alone.
You know, show me that by being a heretic, I’m doing the job badly, then you’ve got a case. But you cannot dismiss people simply for their heresy. And I think he felt tremendously protected, and he felt a real responsibility to the wider movement, as, you know, the guy in a position. Yeah. He goes in the seventies from that, you know, position of, you know, being at the top of his field.
In the nineteen-eighties, there was a very different reaction to his work. Right? You know, it’s kind of belated in some ways, but it, you know, it’s a fierce reaction. Yeah. You know what happened in that moment and to him in particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so closely with a political moment in Britain.
Braddick: The Thatcherite, yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill incredibly.
Yeah. And it hit here also I I don’t want to talk about me, but I entered the story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book that my elder brother and sister read Hill at A level. I didn’t. And when I went to university in 1981, I was only four years younger three years younger than my elder brother. But when I went in ’81, we were given Hill, as this is the wrong idea.
So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened quickly, in the early Thatcher years. And it’s taken a long time to disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as you know, we hear it still, you know, British universities are centres of progressive heresy, to disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill’s work, which are genuine. So, I think there is a generational effect in history writing.
Each generation does better work than its predecessor, and that is certainly true that Hill, and particularly his economic history, doesn’t cut the mustard anymore, you know, and you wouldn’t do economic history the way Hill did it. So, for a long time, it was difficult to say that sort of thing without being identified with a political program against the kind of history he was trying to promote. So, one aim of the book is to try to disentangle history from politics. And my view is that, you know, if history is simply writing your politics, why do history? Why not just state your political position?
And if history isn’t a test of your politics and isn’t making you think and examine your politics, then there’s no point in doing it. But in the eighties, I talked about the Education Act and the national curriculum and how the battles over that were directed particularly against this progressive history, and people should be taught the greatness of Britain. And, you know, all this nonsense about slavery, we should forget about that and talk about democracy instead. In the national curriculum, the national curriculum was forming people for the next stage. So, it’s exactly the politics that he’d set out to challenge.
And he was at the heart of those political debates, saying, Mrs Thatcher knows nothing about history. You know, this is just, authoritarian state trying to input trying to mark its homework. But at the same time, people who were actually on the left and quite sympathetic to left-wing causes were saying, you know, some of these books don’t work very well, and we should be doing this work differently and a bit better. So, at the time and coming back to what I said to start with in ’81, when I started, I was confronted with this, and I couldn’t unpick what was going on here. Whether I was being told Hill was wrong because I was being taught by Thatcherites, or am I being told that Hill is wrong because you can do this another way better?
And that’s but it it it so that’s sort of a personal way of putting it. But what happened to him in the eighties was that he became conflated with a general attack on leftism and progressivism, the values of the sixties, the world turned upside down, and dismissals of Israel did come from there. But also, from a, you know, academic critique that we should do this differently and better. Yeah. I always find it interesting that Hill was the one who kind of bore the brunt of that.
Yeah. Whereas someone like Hobsbawm, who remained in the party, never you know, there was you know, it was very much kind of still accepted. There still is, I think, in the kind of establishment, yeah. In a different way. Yeah.
Braddick: Yeah. So, I didn’t know. I know I’m going to name drop here. I know Sir Keith Thomas a bit. And I didn’t realize there was a higher honour than being Sir Keith Thomas, but in fact, there is, as being a companion of honour.
And I knew it because Keith Thomas became the companion of honour at the same time that Elton John did. And then Hobsbawm was a companion of honour. You know, it’s the highest thing the establishment can do for you. And I find I do find it hard to judge because one of the things that got him in trouble was that he never although he said to the party, I’m renouncing Stalinism, and I’m not renouncing you because you’re Stalinist, he would give comfort to the capitalist press by saying it to the capitalist press. He would never sell out his former comrades by doing it in public.
So he had this repentance, but it was a quiet repentance. And he was beaten with that through the eighties and nineties. Unrepentant Stalinist, you know. Ferdinand Mount said, having an unrepentant Stalinist as Master of Balliol, you might as well have a recently convicted paedophile. He said that you know.
And he wasn’t an unrepentant Stalinist either. And somehow, Hobsbawm escaped that. Hobsbawm stayed in the party. He was, I don’t know, quite how he did it, except that he’s less concerned with the national story. Yeah.
He’s not in those national curriculum debates. He talks about Europe in his early career, then he’s a global historian. It’s less offensive to an establishment view of the British character, yeah. Then Christopher Hill said, you know, it hasn’t always been, respectful and deferential and, you know, and people haven’t always just abided by the rules of the game that they’re given. And I suppose by undercutting the story of the English revolution, you are implicitly or explicitly even kind of undercutting the story of the British establishment.
Now this is, you know, this is the kind of start of where we are now. There’s something kind of by going directly there, you’re kind of going to the roots of this. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
So this is my kind of interest actually, but the eleven years in the post-Roman history of Britain, where we had a republic, and we call it the interregnum, the period between kings. And it ends in a restoration, although what was restored was nothing like what had been overthrown. So, there’s this meta-narrative that’s just kind of drilled into us by the very naming of the events. And, to undercut that is to undercut the position of the establishment, I think. So, I think he’ll, I mean, he probably couldn’t have complained actually because he wanted to undercut.
He wanted to be a threat to the establishment. He wanted his writing to destabilize these comforting stories. But then in the end, you know, when the boot was firmly on that foot, I mean, he did suffer, I think. So I think, you know, if he kind of suffered that kind of revisionist moment, seems we’re in a different moment now both I mean, politically, may maybe not actually, but intellectually in terms of the study of English revolution, I think we’re in a very different moment now particularly than the eighties and nineties where it was at its kind of peak. Yeah.
And I think that was a factor in you coming to this book now? And also, I suppose, how is and how should we think about Hill’s work today? You know, how is it received in the field, and how should we, as kind of general readers, or how should we approach Hill’s work?
Braddick: Yeah. So, I didn’t know Chris Hill, but I’m no Chris Hill.
Whatever that John f Kennedy quote is. I mean, I wouldn’t compare myself to it at all, but in terms of, you know, importance or influence. But I do want to try to get a post-hill story going about the English revolution because for forty years students have been taught not that, not that, not that, not that. And I sense an appetite among the students I teach, not many nowadays, but for a more constructive, progressive engagement with the seventeenth century and the events of the seventeenth century. So I think there’s a moment coming.
I don’t think I’m not sure I can deliver. I can pose the question, I hope, about what we should say about all this. I am writing a book about the 1650s, and I’m in Oxford. Normally, I suppose.
But, I taught a graduate class in Oxford this year on the Marxist historians, and there’s an appetite among graduate historians. One of the students said to me, we’re the generation of no alternative, you know, and they’re looking back to this generation of progressive thinkers, not just in, history, but, you know, progressive art and they’ve they’re interested in Frankfurt School and how you can have an authentic culture that’s not just, commercial stuff squirted down the Internet at you. And they’re returning to Hill more than the new left, actually, interestingly. But Hill and Hobsbawm, Thompson in particular, are fascinated by it. I realize I’ve written about the wrong Marxist historian.
But there, they’re looking for inspiration not to reproduce and recapture that moment, but for inspiration that might lead them to the birth of a new moment. And I feel we desperately need it, you know. The left hasn’t had a game to put up against the rise of the light. And yeah. So, I think that there’s an appetite for it.
And the English Revolution. Historical consciousness about the English Revolution could be part of that. But I’m afraid I know, it’s beyond me to provide it. I’m afraid. Yeah. But I do hope that, you know, this brings people to heal to the question and prompts people to think about what the new line new hope could be.
I was thinking about this, particularly this kind of political moment and the political moments that you say he was kind of responding in his work to this political moment. My favourite work of Hill’s is the experience of defeat. Yeah. You know, which I think sadly feels very, very kind of relevant again now. You know, it’s about the kind of experience of Milton and other revolutionaries after the Restoration.
You know, what happened to them? I don’t want to ask you necessarily about that, but do you have a favourite work of Hill’s? What is the one that you would know, you want to return to if you still feel the kind of pull?
Braddick: I’ve become so, I would like to say about that, though. He, Bunyan, was really important to Hill very early in life, and it comes from his Methodism.
And there’s a lot of fair talk about in a book in the media, as the war was breaking out. And he wrote love letters daily to a woman from the barracks, and they’re very moving. And they reveal a lot about his views on love, marriage, authenticity, sex, and politics. Because she was a liberal, he kept correcting her politics. Marriage didn’t laugh.
But overshadowing him was the thought that he was going to die. And he reached Bunyan in that moment, too. And the thing in Bunyan he drew on was, he said it then, and he said it again in the eighties. We dare not despair. We betray our ideals.
We betray our ideals if we despair. So the one thing we must not do is despair, and it’s struggle which will keep the faith alive and keep the ideals alive. So all that is, I was going to use the word elegiac for that, but it’s very it’s poignant, isn’t it? And it’s about his own experience and so on. But there is at the core of it this thing, okay, young uns, the one thing you mustn’t do is despair.
Yeah. My favourite book, I’ve become very interested in, he actually, this is relevant to his affair with Sheila Grant Duff, who was very conventionally bourgeois and thought that since she was in love with another man as well as Hill, she shouldn’t sleep with Hill. And Hill thought she shouldn’t be hung up on these bourgeois values, and he didn’t mind. So he urged on her the importance of leaving Andrew Marvel’s ode to his coy mistress, you know, with the thought that they were going to die. And, you know, why give in to these bourgeois values?
You know, we must run before the sun. But it made me very interested because he said it was that poetry that first led him to the English Revolution. It’s people living in a society, whose values they feel uncomfortable with. And I like that writing of his. He read at the time he read T.S. Eliot in particular, and Eliot was expressing the sense of personal alienation that you have to live within these bourgeois expectations, and they do violence to who you are. And Hill got very interested in that dynamic in seventeenth-century literature. And so I like the Milton book, because he’s talking about the conflicts that Milton feels, in the society in which he’s required to live and how that does violence to who he is. I don’t know if that’s my time of life, but I’ve been more drawn to that kind of he. he was interested in what’s often said about him is that he’s a determinist and he’s not interested in people, but it’s untrue.
You know, he’s very interested in the experience people have of dislocation from that society. And that’s the writing I’ve become more interested in. I, ironically enough, started my career writing about the state and transformation and so on. And I’ve ended up writing a biography, and it’s similar. Hill got more interested in subjectivity, I think, and the conflicted subjectivities we have as a result of the structures in which we live. So that’s my answer.
Yeah. That’s a great answer. I think you’ve probably been talking enough.
Comment by Christopher Thompson
I have been very puzzled to read the transcript of Michael Braddick’s interview at Housman’s Bookshop in London earlier this month. It was part of the process of promoting the biography composed by Braddick (All Souls College, Oxford) and was, I suspect, given in front of an audience sympathetic to Hill’s beliefs and career. What appears to me to be a problem in the talk is the connection drawn between the appearance of ‘revisionism’ in early to mid-17th-century historiography and the rise of Thatcherism in British political life. The criticisms of Marxist and Whig historiography associated with Conrad Russell, John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe and others came into print in the mid to late 1970s under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
Russell’s essay on Parliamentary politics was published in 1976, as was John Morrill’s book on the Revolt of the Provinces. Kevin Sharpe’s edited volume of essays appeared in 1978. None of them could remotely be described as apostles of Thatcherism. Nor, indeed, could the essays that were to be found in The Journal of British Studies and the Journal of Modern History across the Atlantic in 1976 and 1977, respectively. One of Lawrence Stone’s most distinguished postgraduate pupils at Princeton at that time told me relatively recently that Stone had been unaware – ‘blindsided’ was his word – by developments in the United Kingdom. In Hill’s case, despite the origins of ‘revisionism’ amongst former and current Oxford University-trained historians, he had been completely unaware of the developing reaction against his soft determinism and Marxist preconceptions. Well before the Conservative victory in the 1979 General Election in Britain, Hill and Stone had ceased to make the historiographical weather. Dismissing ‘revisionism’ as a form of antiquarian empiricism, as Stone did, or repeating the analytical claims of the 1960s as Hill tried to do, simply did not work. Both had been sidelined by then.
Housman’s Bookshop interview extract earlier this month.
In the nineteen-eighties, there was a very different reaction to his work. Right? You know, it’s kind of belated in some ways, but it, you know, it’s a fierce reaction. Yeah. You know what happened in that moment and to him in particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so closely with a political moment in Britain.
Braddick: The Thatcherite, Yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill incredibly.
Yeah. And it hit here also I I don’t want to talk about me, but I entered the story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book that my elder brother and sister read Hill at A level. I didn’t. And when I went to university in 1981, I was only four years younger three years younger than my elder brother. But when I went in ’81, we were given Hill, as this is the wrong idea.
So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened quickly, in the early Thatcher years. And it’s taken a long time to disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as you know, we hear it still, you know, British universities are centres of progressive heresy, to disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill’s work, which are genuine. So I think, there is a generational effect in history writing.”
This is an important compilation of stories from unaccompanied Central American teenage refugees who risk death to cross the U.S.–Mexico border. Recounted in short vignettes readers learn about the harrowing journey and treatment meted out to young children seeking a better life for themselves and their family. Juan Pablo Villalobos’s introduction indicates that all these stories are true except when he wrote their story to protect some minors’ identities.
The book is aimed at a 12+ audience. It contains significant allusions to violence, including murder and sexual assault. Which unfortunately adds to the compelling nature of the stories. The book is presented in such a way that it works on many levels.
Most of the children are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Such is the massive scale of the problem that in 2016 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees published a major report called Children on the Run: In one interview with 15-year-old Maritza, from El Salvador, she explained to researchers that “I’m here because I was threatened by the gang. One of them “liked” me. Another gang member told my uncle that he should get me out of there because the guy who liked me was going to do me harm. In El Salvador, they take young girls, rape them and throw them in plastic bags. My uncle told me it wasn’t safe for me to stay there, and that I should go to the U.S.”[1]
Juan Pablo Villalobos called this collection nonfiction because the stories were collected via first-person interviews. The book is based on a series of interviews Villalobos held did in 2016; The Other Side examines Central American migration through the stories of 10 children who made the murderous trip to the U.S. on their own.
Villalobos adds , my literary ambition, if I can admit to that, was to write a book that is about Central American immigration and the migration of unaccompanied minors, but these stories are happening all over the world — in Syria, in the north of Africa, in Europe — and it was my hope that the book should resonate beyond the specific moment and the American and Central American contexts.”
With the Fascist Trump in the White House, the situation will only get worse. Figures released recently by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed that the United States has detained record numbers of unaccompanied minors attempting to cross its southwestern border. In the last few days, various US media have reported, that the Trump White House is imminently planning to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as part of his administration’s ongoing criminal deportation operations.
[1] Children on the Run-www.unhcr.org/us/media/children-run-full-report
“His personal traits and public acts are better known to the American people than are those of any other man of his age. He was a mystery to no man who saw him and heard him. Though high in position, the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence. Though deep, he was transparent; though strong, he was gentle; though decided and pronounced in his convictions, he was tolerant towards those who differed from him and patient under reproaches. Even those who only knew him through his public utterances obtained a tolerably clear idea of his character and personality. The image of the man went out with his words, and those who read them knew him.”
Frederick Douglas
“one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good.”
Karl Marx
“Lincoln’s significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours:
In the January 2020 issue of The Critic, the politician, historian and writer Alan Sked wrote an article entitled Dishonest Abe. To eternal shame and damnation, Sked was given a space in the Times Literary Supplement’s (TLS) recent letters page to again attack Abraham Lincoln. Sked is a right-winger. He was a founding member of UKIP in 1993. He was formerly a member of the Anti-Federalist League and the “Brugge Group”, which regarded the decision of Thatcher’s successor, John Major, to sign up to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 as a betrayal of her legacy. Sked is still a Conservative member.
Sked’s first paragraph in the Critic article sets the tone for the diatribe. He writes:
“Today, Abraham Lincoln remains America’s most popular president, and historians devote enormous efforts to ensuring that his reputation survives unscathed. Yet during his presidency, he was hated by millions, and in 1865, he was assassinated. Even before the Civil War, he was loathed by perhaps a majority of his fellow countrymen, and in the presidential election of 1860, 61 per cent of the electorate voted against him.”[1]
From its tone, it would appear that Sked would like to assassinate Lincoln again. Regardless of how many people voted for or liked him, Lincoln was hell-bent on saving the Union. Whether He wanted war or not Lincoln was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. As Niles Niemuth writes, “During the brutal struggle, Lincoln expressed the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a “new birth of freedom.”[2]
Sked further writes, “Rather than accept him as president, the South seceded from the Union. The Founding Fathers had indicated that secession was entirely legal. Lincoln should have taken the advice of the Supreme Court, but rather than that, he manipulated an attack on Fort Sumter to give him an excuse for war. Lincoln vetoed an attempted constitutional compromise and got his way by illegally organising a military invasion of Virginia. There, his troops were humiliated.”
This paragraph shows not only Sked’s revisionist credentials but is a fabrication of historical events. When the Union commanding officer, Major Robert Anderson of Kentucky, refused to turn the fort over to the Confederacy, the South laid siege to the small federal detachment, refusing to allow supplies. According to Tom Mackaman:
“That Fort Sumter should have been the trigger event for all of this was itself the outcome of an unpredicted chain of events. Located next to Charleston, the citadel of fire-eating, pro-slavery secessionism, Sumter was part of a constellation of lightly guarded federal bases and arsenals scattered across the South and the border states that had become the focal point of preparations for war. In the period before the war, secessionists concentrated on taking, by hook or crook, federal positions. This was the great hope of the South. Its cash crop agriculture was bound to the “workshop of the world,” British industrial capitalism. It did little manufacturing and could produce little of its war material.[3]
Towards the end of his article, and I could be wrong Sked makes the point that I believe no other historian has ever said. Aside from saying that Lincoln had no liking for blacks, he writes :
“The Civil War was fought between two deeply racist societies who differed only over the fate of slavery. After 12 years of Reconstruction following his death, the North and South agreed on a racist political system for the South, which by the end of the century became the Solid South governed by Jim Crow laws. Blacks only began to experience equality after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Lincoln’s role in their long journey to emancipation must be treated with great caution.[4]
It is difficult to find words that adequately express the sense of revulsion produced by the fabrication of history. Leon Trotsky once pointed out that lies about history are meant to conceal real social contradictions.
Sked’s lies are indirectly refuted by Niemuth, who points out, “ While not an open abolitionist, Lincoln’s political record before the Civil War was outstanding, and he had come to be seen years before 1860 as the leading spokesman of the antislavery forces in the United States. The southern slavocracy certainly understood what it meant when he won the presidency, responding to his rise to the White House with secession. To the extent that any individual in history can be credited with playing a decisive role in destroying slavery, it is undoubtedly Lincoln.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to the great Frederick Douglas, who said of Lincoln:
“Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by Abolitionists; he was assailed by slave-holders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war. But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.[5]
Note
In the past I would have sent a copy of this article to the TLS as a form of reply to Sked’s letter in the recent TLS. But as the TLS has never printed a letter or had an article from an orthodox Marxist I do not see the point.
Mark Olden’s book Murder in Notting Hill is a well-researched and crafted investigation into the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959. Unsurprisingly, the killer was never caught despite being well-known in the area. Olden outs the killer in the book, saying, “After I began investigating the case in 2005, I learned that the killer’s identity was “the worst kept secret in Notting Hill”. Three people identified Digby to me as the man who struck the fatal blow. Two of them had been questioned by the police about the murder; the third was Digby’s stepdaughter, Susie Read. Breagan, who insisted he was innocent, told me that when the police detained him, he was placed in a cell next to Digby, where he was able to iron out a discrepancy in their stories – after which the police released them both.”
Cochrane’s murder is one of the first recorded racially motivated murders in the UK. Olden is an excellent journalist and, among other things worked at the BBC. While there, he worked on the BBC programme Who Killed My Brother? Broadcast in 2006, Which examined the Cochrane Murder. Much of the book is influenced by that programme.
While working at the BBC, he gained access to material that a layperson could only dream of. Olden supplemented his research with a significant number of interviews. Many of the people interviewed were speaking publically for the first time. They give a real sense of what it was like to live in Notting Hill in 1959.
As part of his research for the book, Olden spent significant time at the National Archive in Kew, London. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found out that the Labour government and police were more interested in suppressing political opposition to the fascists and containing the riots in London and Nottingham than solving a murder.
Olden points out that there are remarkable similarities between the way that Kelso’s death was investigated and the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. On April 22, 1993, 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence and Duwayne Brooks were attacked by five racist white youths in Eltham, southeast London. Stephen was stabbed to death. It was only in 2012 that two men were convicted of Lawrence’s murder after a long and bitter campaign by his parents. It was only a small measure of justice. Cochrane never did get justice. His murder remains unsolved to this day.
During his time at the National Archives in London, it would be fair to say that Olden would have been astonished to find that the National Archives authorities would thwart his attempts to establish the truth behind the Cochrane murder by refusing to release papers about the murder until 2044/54 on spurious grounds it ‘could put at risk certain law-enforcement matters, including preventing or detecting crime, arresting or prosecuting offenders and the proper administration of justice’. It was all the more galling because the man named by Olden as the probable murderer was dead, but still, a state-led cover-up was in place.
Only after a bitter and long campaign by members of Cochrane’s surviving family and their lawyers did the Metropolitan police permit the National Archives to release the files that were originally to be opened in 2054. Even a cursory look at the new files showed that this was a premeditated murder by outright fascists. It would be naïve to think that after all this time, the police will bring the family justice that can only be achieved by the mobilisation of the one force that can achieve justice, and that is the working class black and white.
While Olden’s book cannot be faulted as a piece of journalism, Olden has no explanation as to what social, economic and political conditions gave rise to the growth of Fascism in London and Nottingham at the time and also how the fascists could be opposed and defeated. The only class that could have opposed the racists and fascists was the working class. However, Olden believes that the white working class was either passive or racist.
But as Cliff Slaughter explains so well in his article Race Riots: the Socialist Answer,[1]“So long as we look only at the surface of social life, so long as we try to deal with each question separately as it arises, we shall continue to find ourselves bewildered by events like the race riots. But they are no nine days’ wonder. Every worker in the country must clearly understand this. Only if we can trace the social roots of racial conflict shall we be able to weed them out and, with them, those who profit from it. The starting point for the working class must be unity and solidarity against the employers and their political representatives—in the first place, the Tory Party. All the problems the working class now faces—growing unemployment, the housing shortage, rent increases, the rising cost of living, attacks on wages and working conditions, and, above all, the threat of an H-bomb war—can be solved only by the unity and determined action of the working class. It is no accident that the steady growth of unemployment over the last year has been accompanied by an insidiously growing campaign around the slogan ‘Keep Britain-White’.
Slaughter goes on to explain the nature of fascism: “Fascism is a movement financed by big business which seeks support from the ‘middle classes’ and the most backward workers. Fascism’s real aim is to provide a mass basis for the smashing of workers’ organisations by a State machine which permits no democratic rights and rules with the whip and the torture chamber. To succeed, fascism must detach from the working class discontented elements who can be persuaded that something other than big business is their real enemy. This is why the fascists have recently returned to one of their favourite themes—racialism. Fascists were prominent in the Notting Hill riots and will cash in wherever they can on anti-coloured feelings. They will try to create a mob ready to use violence and to attack any scapegoat rather than the workers’ real enemy.”
Murder in Notting Hill is a good book. As a piece of investigative journalism, it is second to none. On the question of fascism, workers and youth need to look elsewhere to understand its rise and how to defeat it. As the great Marxist revolutionary and writer Leon Trotsky wrote, “Fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”[2]
[1] Race Riots: the Socialist Answer, Labour Review, Vol. 3 No. 5, December 1958, pages 134-137.
[2] Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record upon which history will judge us tomorrow.”
Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson
“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
“War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars, and all decent people.”—Ben Ferencz
The leader by will of the people differs from the leader by will of God in that the former is compelled to clear the road for himself or, at any rate, to assist the conjuncture of events in discovering him. Nevertheless, the leader is always a relation between people, the individual supply to meet the collective demand. The controversy over Hitler’s personality becomes the sharper the more the secret of his success is sought in himself. In the meantime, another political figure would be difficult to find that is, in the same measure, the focus of anonymous historical forces. Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.
Leon Trotsky- What Is National Socialism? (June 1933)
This is an interesting and well-researched book on the writers who covered the Nuremburg Trials of leading Nazis after the Second World War. The magnitude of the trials drew in journalists and writers from all over the world. Writers John Dos Passos, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner, William Shirer, and future German politicians such as Willy Brandt all observed the trials. The title of the writers’ castle was because the journalists were housed in the Schloss Faber-Castell castle in Stein, a nearby town.
Neumahr is a German author and literary agent, and his book is less about the crimes of the Nazis but more about the writer’s reaction to the crimes of the Nazis. As Neumahr points out in the book, not all journalists or writers cover themselves with glory. Even a cursory glance at their reports of the trials shows that some resorted to outright lying and presented less-than-objective accounts of the proceedings. Alfred Döblin, the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, offered a first-hand account of the courtroom he never went to.
Others brought their ideological baggage with them, which showed in their articles. Erika Mann was the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann. Because of the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews, (she was considered a Jew by the Nazis) she held an abiding hatred of the Nazis, which coloured her writings on the trial. The French Stalinist writer Elsa Triolet wrote many misleading and downright false reports to support her belief that the Anglo-American judges and lawyers were pro-Nazi.
Neumahr’s approach is “biographical and kaleidoscopic”. Given the highly political nature of the trial, it is a little strange that NeuMahr rarely delves into the politics of prosecutions or the writers that covered it, which is a big weakness in the book. As Bill Niven points out, “In most cases, he is as much, if not more, preoccupied with the lives of his chosen protagonists before, during and after their time at the Faber-Castell castle than he is with their actual journalistic response to the military tribunal. Neumahr is especially interested in all the social goings-on at the castle, whose guests – despite the separation of male and female quarters and, eventually, of Soviet reporters from all others – enjoyed a high level of fraternisation. Neumahr follows the various relationships of his protagonists. Erika Mann moved into the castle with her partner and fellow reporter Betty Knox (whom she referred to as her ‘beloved lunatic’) despite the press camp being run by the American military, for whom homosexuality was a punishable crime. Rebecca West and Francis Biddle, a US judge at Nuremberg, had an affair. As Neumahr tells it, this was something of a relief for both parties: ‘Like Biddle, the fifty-three-year-old West was sexually frustrated’, he writes, because ‘she hadn’t had sex with her husband in years.’ In his chapter on Gellhorn, we learn about her tempestuous relationship with Ernest Hemingway, while the chapter on the Prix Goncourt-winning Russian-French writer Elsa Triolet – who stayed in Nuremberg’s Grand Hotel and not the castle – focuses heavily on her relationship with the poet Louis Aragon.”[1]
The book’s strongest part is how Neumahr relates to how many writers and journalists were morally tarnished by political bias or other prejudices. This applies to author Eric Kästner[2]. One of my favourite childhood books was Emil and the Detectives. Despite having his books burnt by the Nazis in 1933, Kastner made a career for himself under the Nazis.
According to his Wikipedia page, “ The Gestapo interrogated Kästner several times, the national writers’ guild expelled him, and the Nazis burned his books as “contrary to the German spirit” during the book burnings of 10 May 1933, instigated by Joseph Goebbels. Kästner witnessed the event in person and later wrote about it. He was denied membership in the new Nazi-controlled national writers’ guild, Reichsverband deutscher Schriftsteller (RDS), because of what its officials called the “culturally Bolshevist attitude in his writings before 1933. During the Third Reich, Kästner published apolitical novels such as Drei Männer im Schnee (Three Men in the Snow) (1934) in Switzerland. In 1942, he received a special exemption to write the screenplay for Münchhausen, using the pseudonym Berthold Bürger. The film was a prestige project by Ufa Studios to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of its establishment, an enterprise backed by Goebbels.
In 1944, Kästner’s home in Berlin was destroyed during a bombing raid. In early 1945, he and others pretended that they had to travel to the rural community of Mayrhofen in Tyrol for location shooting for a (non-existent) film, Das falsche Gesicht (The Wrong Face). The actual purpose of the journey was to avoid the final Soviet assault on Berlin. Kästner had also received a warning that the SS planned to kill him and other Nazi opponents before the arrival of the Soviets.[8] He was in Mayrhofen when the war ended. He wrote about this period in a diary published in 1961 under the title Notabene 45. Another edition, closer to Kästner’s original notes, was published in 2006 under the title Das Blaue Buch (The Blue Book).”[3]
Neumahr’s intention was never to write about the political nature or the duplicity of those prosecuting the Nazis. As Bill Hunter points “During this ten months, while the prosecutors of Britain, France, America and the Soviet Union, listed the sickening crimes of Nazism, world events showed the hypocrisy of the prosecuting Allies. Even while the aggressions of the Nazis were being recounted. British imperialism was maintaining a regime of terror and oppression in Greece, suppressing the colonial peoples struggling for freedom, and strafing Indonesian villages.The British prosecutor prated about justice. Meanwhile, Dr Kiesselbach, according to Tribune 6 September a declared opponent of de-Nazification was placed by British imperialism in charge of the German “Central Office of Justice”.
While the courtroom resounded with castigations of Nazi oppression and racial discrimination, American imperialist suppression was active in the Philippines, and lynch law was rampant in the Southern States.The prosecutors denounced the occupation methods of the Nazis. Yet, even while the French prosecutor mouthed phrases of indignation, the agents of French imperialism were torturing the natives of Indo-China and burning their villages.The miseries of slave labour under the Nazis were related to the court at the same time as 10 million Germans were uprooted and wandered homeless as a result of the wholesale expulsion policy of the Soviet bureaucracy. In the face of world events during the trial, who can deny that at Nuremberg, the pot called the kettle black, blackening itself still further even while doing so?[4]
To compliment my Article on Elijah Wald’s book I have published this interview which first appeared on WSWS.org
Elijah Wald (born 1959) is a musician, journalist and music historian. He is the author of a number of books, including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (2005), How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (2009), The Blues: A Very Short Introduction (2010) and Jelly Roll Blues–Censored Songs & Hidden Histories (2024). Elijah Wald His Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (2015) is the work on which the recent film about Bob Dylan’s early days in music, A Complete Unknown (James Mangold), is loosely based. Wald also co-authored folk singer and musician Dave Van Ronk’s posthumously published memoir, Dave Van Ronk: The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2005). We spoke in January in a video call. * * * * * David Walsh: For the benefit of our readers, could you give us a sense of your own background and how you came to be interested in music, or play music, or listen to music? Elijah Wald: Sure. I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which doesn’t hurt, particularly for the kind of music we’re talking about. The first concert I remember seeing in my life was a children’s concert when I was five years old by Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band. That world was all around me. I was probably eight years old and saw Pete Seeger with the crew of the Sloop Clearwater. For me, it just was like, “Okay, that looks like more fun than what any of the other grownups were doing, I want to do that.” That was the plan. I read Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory. I was going to be a rambling hobo folk singer. That was that, and basically that was how I planned my life for the next 20-plus years. I was lucky. I had a half-brother who played guitar. He was painfully shy about it, I never heard him play, but I did have his records. He had the complete country blues fan’s record collection circa 1965 or so. So I grew up on that as well. I had an uncle who had gone to school with [critic] Ralph Gleason and could get me free records from Fantasy Records, so I had a couple of things with Dave Van Ronk on them. I saw that Van Ronk was going to be playing in Boston. My mom took me to the concert, I think I was 13, and I was absolutely blown away. A week or so later, a young woman who was over at our house turned out to be a close friend of Dave’s, and she took me to meet him next time he played in Boston. I learned that he gave guitar lessons, and when it got time to go to college, I decided to go to New York University for one year so I could take guitar lessons from Dave Van Ronk—and then I would drop out and be a rambling folk singer, and that’s what I did. I actually went off to Europe where it was easier to be a rambling hobo folk singer than in the US. For the next 12 years basically, I went back and forth trying to make a living that way, and eventually started doing a little bit of writing for the Boston Globe. The years went by, and with every passing year, I was making more money from the writing and it was becoming clearer that I was not going to be able to make a living just playing music. I continued and continue to do both, but the writing eventually treated me better than the music did economically. I made a living full-time as a writer. I did some teaching, like a lot of writers. Basically, writing was the main income and the Bob Dylan book [Dylan Goes Electric!] is a perfect example. First time around, that book paid for two years of my life, second time with the movie, that paid for another two years of my life. That’s not normally how my books work, but that’s how Dylan books work. That’s why I did a Dylan book. I did not expect a movie, but I did the Dylan book specifically because my previous book had not sold well, and I needed to do a book that was going to sell. DW: Has it sold, besides being made into a movie? EW: Oh, yeah. How well the book sold to the public is another question. But it sold to a publisher instantly for three times as much as I’ve ever gotten for any of my other books. Dylan books, despite the fact that there are so many of them, are an easy sell. I think it’s because of the way the economics of the book industry work. Essentially, women are book buyers, and physical books—and this originally came out strictly as hardcover—are things people buy as gift items. Every white woman in America over the age of 40 knows a man who is a Dylan nut. This didn’t occur to me until I was going around doing signings and women kept coming up, buying the book and asking me to sign it to a male name. DW: Nonetheless, whatever its origins, you obviously took the assignment seriously because it’s an interesting, complicated book. EW: It’s actually a funny story. I got into that book because I’d written a book called How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll [2011], which is a history of popular music from 1890 to 1970 with a catchy title, so people will pick it up. But in February 2014, the 50th anniversary of the Beatles arriving in the US, some reporters who didn’t have any better ideas or who’d run out of other angles, were calling me up for Beatles stories. I thought, is there a 50th anniversary coming up that I could jump on? I thought of Dylan going electric in Newport. I figured, that’s been written about so much, I could just pull together a book. I’ll only have six months or so, but it’s all out there. I could just pull something together quick and dirty. Dylan Goes Electric! (2015) Then I started looking into it and realized that everything I had gone in thinking I knew was wildly oversimplified or simply wrong. It ended up being a very, very busy six months. It is a complicated story, and he’s not the only complicated person involved. I had originally imagined doing a sort of background of the folk scene, and then Dylan arrives, but I realized it would work better as a narrative if I made Pete Seeger stand for the entire folk scene, which he reasonably was in that moment. As of 1960, whatever you meant by the folk scene, you meant some kind of Pete Seeger music. And that, for me, became the heart of the project, because I think the way a lot of people see that story is Pete was the open, simple guy, and in comes this complicated, difficult guy who’s Bob Dylan—and there was no one on earth more complicated than Pete Seeger. So it became the whole story of these two very complicated, very guarded, I think very shy, and in their separate ways, extraordinarily talented and influential figures, who came together and split apart. DW: When did you become aware of Bob Dylan? EW: Ha. I can tell you almost exactly. My father brought back Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits [1967]. My father [scientist George Wald] was a professor, very active in the anti-war movement and very interested in being in tune with his students. So he picked up Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits because he wanted to know who this guy was. I had this little four-speed record player up in my room, but my parents wouldn’t let me play their LPs on it. But I inherited my grandparents’ 78 albums, and therefore my records were the basic Jewish Communist record collection circa 1944. So I had the Almanac Singers, the Union Boys, Leadbelly, Josh White, Paul Robeson and the Spanish Civil War songs and the Red Army Chorus. I didn’t much like the Red Army Chorus, but all the rest of those I listened to assiduously. I may be the youngest person on the planet who was a Woody Guthrie nut before I heard Bob Dylan. In any case, my father brought home the Greatest Hits, and he put on “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” I said, he’s a terrible singer. My father said, but he sounds like Woody Guthrie. I said, he doesn’t sound anything like Woody Guthrie, which by that time in his career was true. So that’s when I first heard Dylan. Like a lot of people, sort of like the people who booed when he went electric at Newport, I got over that first reaction and was a hardcore fan certainly within weeks, if not within days. DW: What were the myths or unresolved questions you wanted to address, or that you came across, in writing your Dylan book? EW: There were a couple of key things I didn’t understand. The central thing was I went in like everybody else thinking about Dylan as a songwriter, and it rather quickly struck me that the story of Dylan going electric at Newport in 1965 is not at all about songwriting. That’s a story about Dylan as a musician and performer. Everybody traces Dylan in terms of the background that leads to his becoming a songwriter, and how he develops as a songwriter. If you simply put that aside and try to trace his musical evolution, it’s a very, very different picture. He starts out playing in a rock ‘n’ roll band in high school, he gets into folk music, specifically through black folk singers. I know a number of black musicians who got into folk music following Harry Belafonte, Odetta and Leon Bibb. That was not an unusual path for any young black singer who reached folk music at all, the few who did in that moment. But I know of no other white performer who came in by that route. The story is that Dylan showed up in New York because of Woody Guthrie. That’s partly true, but not because he wanted to play like Woody Guthrie or write like Woody Guthrie. The key Woody Guthrie addiction for him, as it was for me, was reading Bound for Glory and wanting to be Woody Guthrie. Being Woody Guthrie was a completely different exercise. In the earliest interview with Dylan, when someone, in fact, Izzy Young [of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village], described him as playing folk music, Dylan said, I don’t even know what that means. I play old jazz tunes, pop 40 stuff, cowboy songs. People have to call it something, so they call it folk music. He meant that. He was being Woody Guthrie, who likewise played whatever was on the jukebox and old blues songs. And, yes, Dylan also wrote some stuff, and he rather quickly met up with Dave Van Ronk, and blues really became what he did. The first album [Bob Dylan, 1962] is heavily blues-influenced, but the second album that never got issued, which he was recording before he made the left turn into The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan [1963] was a blues album, part acoustic, part electric. If you think about the fact that he was recording electric blues back in ‘61-62, that completely changes the story of his finally making that music three or four years later. Bob Dylan (1962) He basically made a brief left turn into writing the sort of songs that Albert Grossman could hand to Peter, Paul and Mary and get top 40 hits. But most of us came to him via Peter, Paul and Mary and Blowin’ in the Wind [1962] and thought of him as the guy who writes those pretty folk songs, and he never was that guy, except for two years in the middle there. DW: Van Ronk thought of himself as a jazz musician. Why did the music suddenly become channeled through this genre called folk music? EW: First of all, because it was happening. Second of all, because you didn’t have to hold a band together. You could just go out there by yourself with a guitar. Whatever kind of music you play, the money is lousy if you’re a relative unknown. Be it Van Ronk with jazz, where you would need to be probably five or six guys, or Dylan with rock ‘n’ roll, where you would need four or five guys, the money would be exactly the same as if you went out there by yourself with an acoustic guitar. So just economically, there were huge advantages to the folk scene. DW: But why was the folk scene going? That’s the question. EW: Largely, actually for the same reason, because it was cheap. Part of the answer is there are a bunch of different folk scenes. The world of the Tarriers, the Kingston Trio and all of that was happening because pop music had hit an impasse. You had, on the one hand, characters like Frank Sinatra essentially still doing the music of the 1940s. On the other hand, you had rock, which was dumb teenage music. If you were a college student in this environment and wanted your sound, basically your options were modern jazz, the baroque “early music” revival, which was happening in the same world, or folk music. Most people didn’t choose between them. Typically, if you went into a college dorm at that point, someone who had a Kingston Trio album was likely to also have some Bach or [Alfred] Deller Consort, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck definitely. Dave Brubeck and the Kingston Trio were in the same record collection. The way people think about genre is completely wrong. What we’re talking here is class. This is the middle class intelligentsia listening to Brubeck and the Kingston Trio. The left were the intellectuals, the intellectuals were listening to folk music. After the McCarthy era knocks out the first round of folkies, it doesn’t knock out that association of folk music being what the smart people are listening to. It’s one of the weird facts of life—I mention it in the Dylan book—that the Kingston Trio make their East Coast debut at [Greenwich Village jazz club] the Village Vanguard on a double bill with Thelonious Monk. In Greenwich Village there was another thing happening, which was the Beat coffeehouses with the poets, and in between the poets, they would stick on folk singers, frankly, because like the poets, they would work for virtually nothing. And they were around. By the early 60s, you had a huge audience of people from Omaha and so forth who had seen Bell, Book and Candle [1958 film set in Greenwich Village]. When they came to New York, they wanted to go to a Broadway show, go see the Statue of Liberty, and go down to the Village and see the weirdos. Dobie Gillis [a television situation comedy with a prominent “Beatnik” character] and Bell, Book and Candle. So there was this audience that was being bused in on weekends, and making the coffeehouses a going proposition, and they had to fill the stage with something. So, it’s poets and folk singers. It wasn’t particularly economically viable. Then the Kingston Trio got their hits, and then Albert Grossman had this brilliant idea of Peter, Paul and Mary. If you look at the first Peter, Paul and Mary album [1962], Peter and Paul look like members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, they have exactly the same beards and suits, and they’re standing against the same brick wall, and they have the beautiful blond between them, which is a nice addition. It was simply designed to be the collegiate sound of the moment. Grossman heard Bob Dylan’s songs and he went, “Perfect.” And there’s the package. It’s what the intelligent young English major is listening to. DW: Yes, but it seems to me at a certain point, something else comes up, something else bubbles up. There’s an audience … EW: There’s the civil rights movement. DW: There’s a hunger for something. Peter, Paul and Mary (1962) EW: There was a hunger for something, but that hunger was being sated in a lot of different ways. There was your roommate, if you were unlucky, or the guy next door, if you were slightly luckier, who couldn’t understand why you were listening to that stupid folk garbage, rather than Miles Davis! There were plenty of ways to be smart, right? When Dylan went electric, it gave people permission, in fact, to pull out the records they really enjoyed, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and to feel that that was just as grown up and intelligent, indeed more intelligent. DW: There was the desire obviously of a generation, or part of a generation, for what they perceived to be more authentic, less slick, less palatable and less commercial than Sinatra and Broadway musicals. EW: Pete Seeger clearly was part of that. And let’s remember that Joan Baez is the unbelievable breakthrough in this whole period. Because the Kingston Trio was fun and they had singles on the radio, but Joan Baez never has a hit single if we’re talking that early period, like ’60, ’61, ’62, she has no singles, no radio play. She puts out three albums, and I think if you look at the top one hundred selling albums in 1962, three of them are Joan Baez albums on a classical music label with no singles. Because she is the most uncommercial artist on the planet, and she really was. That’s one of the interesting things, unlike Bob Dylan, who wanted to be a rock star, Joan Baez really, truly was the character that she portrayed. There are many ways to define authenticity, but one is not wanting to be part of the pop music machine. Joan Baez, at every turn, when offered a chance to be part of that machine, refused, and yet became huge. There it gets gendered, because it was much, much more a female audience than a male audience who went with Baez, and also Peter, Paul and Mary. I think the authenticity thing you mention is absolutely real and very powerful, particularly in that moment where a lot of young people are profoundly disaffected with what was going on in the world around them. But there were a lot of ways to be a rebel, disaffected and looking for “the real thing.” You could go with hardcore rock ‘n’ roll. You could go Joan Baez. You could, as I said, go to jazz. You could go back to early music, which was bound up with that same concern for authenticity—no symphonies, no playing Bach on piano, it’s going to be harpsichord. I don’t think there’s any accident to the fact that the same record companies recording young musicians playing folk music authentically on banjos are also putting out Bach played authentically on harpsichord. Be it Vanguard [Records], be it Elektra, be it Folkways. The overlap of early music and the authentic end of the folk scene, I think there’s nothing accidental there at all. DW: I would argue there are relatively universal, objective qualities in music. There’s a reason why people are still listening to Bob Dylan in some cases, or, for that matter, Bach. EW: I don’t know if you actually want to go down this road, but if you do, no, I disagree completely. DW: Okay, well, let’s not then. In your book, you build up a picture of Bob Dylan’s development. I was struck by the fact that in high school, he was a would-be rock and roll musician. It seems that the Woody Guthrie interest came out of nowhere. You suggest that it was more a literary-lifestyle issue than a musical one, linked to his reading Bound for Glory. You point out as well that he was a sponge, that he picked up things enormously quickly, and that was a great strength. He could take on various personas quickly, and with a certain depth and with a certain understanding. It doesn’t seem to me that there was anything necessarily cynical about his radicalization for a few years. It happened to a good many people. He came and went more quickly than many others. EW: I think one thing that one needs to understand is that there are different kinds of radicals. There are people who come in who are willing to do the reading. There are people who come in because they are seeking a community. And there are people who come in because they are angry and want to break stuff, and this seems like a group that’s doing that. I think Dylan comes in, if he’s going to be found in one of those groups, definitely in group three. He comes in as James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause. The rebel part is absolutely real and deep and part of him, but the cause is transitory. Edward Norton and Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown DW: It’s more intuitive and so forth, and you can feel that in his work. EW: To me, the brilliant political Dylan line is from Talkin’ New York. This is from his first album, recorded in late 1961, before he’s gotten political, before the Watts riots or anything like that: A lot of people don’t have much food on their table But they got a lot of forks ’n’ knives And they got to cut something. That’s a level of radicalism, in one sense, that the liberal left found completely unacceptable. In some ways it’s a more extreme radicalism than the civil rights movement, which he had not yet gotten into. That’s real. DW: Yes. It’s not a question of indicting him or wagging a finger, but I do think he lost something later on because he didn’t understand the source of some of his own strengths. I think the comment you have in the book by Seeger from 1967 was interesting: The left tried to lionize him; he reacted violently against this, saying fuck you to them all. He dressed outlandishly, screamed out new songs with electric backing; cynicism came to the foreground. My own sense of it is that he reacted with some legitimacy against the leftist folk music establishment. But I do think he threw the baby out with the bathwater, and that he convinced himself that the source of his music was his own genius. There are always currents that have made you what you are, and by throwing those out the window, to me he became less interesting. He was swept up in a certain radicalism for a few years, and then he decided that was not for him. EW: I think that’s not accurate. It was never that he was swept up in political radicalism. It was about the people around him. For a few years, he was hanging out in a world where all of his friends were engaged in that. It’s not that he had those beliefs for a while, and then he abandoned those beliefs. It’s that he was in that social group for a while, and then he moved to another social group. He always was rebelling against people telling him you’re this or you’re that. Once in a while, he would be with people and he would feel, hey, we’re all against the same stuff. But then he had a tendency to feel, no, I’m trapped here too, and go somewhere else. [Dylan’s girlfriend] Suze Rotolo said there was never a time when he was the sort of person who was burying himself in the newspapers. If you’re hanging out with Dave Van Ronk, your political analysis will be different than if you’re hanging out with the Rolling Stones. It won’t be more rebellious. But the way you’re channeling your rebellion will be completely different. DW: But you make certain choices about the people you hang out with. Look, there’s also the siren song of celebrity, of money. He wanted to be a rock and roll star. In any case, we’re not going to resolve these issues in this conversation. How did your relationship with Dave Van Ronk come about? How was that? EW: Everything I am, I was made by Van Ronk. That’s the brief, simple answer. I went to him when I was 17 years old. I’d already been sitting around with him when I was 15 and 16. My understanding of how the world works, my understanding of how music works, my understanding of how music works in the world, it’s all straight out of Dave. DW: How did he feel about his own career, or success or lack of success, do you think? Dave Van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters (1967) EW: It depended on the year. His overall view was that, given where he started from, he did better than anyone could have ever expected. There was a period in the second half of the 1960s when he saw a lot of less talented people grabbing the brass ring, and he kept grabbing for it and missing, and that was extremely frustrating. By the mid ’70s, he was extremely depressed. Then he pulled out of that and went back to, okay, compared to where I started, given my background, I’ve been able to live a reasonably middle class life without ever having to do a day’s work. Can’t argue with that. DW: Obviously, you can’t choose the circumstances under which you work. EW: He made a number of grabs at the brass ring. They could have worked. They didn’t. DW: I’ve never heard his rock ‘n’ roll music, is it good? EW: Depends what you mean by good. It was not designed to make him a rock star. Was it harmonically complex? Yes. Was some of it a lot of fun? Yes. Did it get the kids dancing? No. Did it make the charts? No. Was it one of his favorite albums till the day he died? Yes. If you held a gun to his head and said, we’re now going to listen to a Dave Van Ronk album from beginning to end, what would you like to hear? It was either going to be the Ragtime Jug Stompers [1964] or the Hudson Dusters [1967]. Because rather than sitting there listening to all his own mistakes and being annoyed, he could listen to all the cool things the other people on the record were doing and like it. DW: Did you ever play with him in public? EW: I never performed on stage with him. I arranged and played one of the tracks on his Bertolt Brecht album [Let No One Deceive You, 1992]. I just was in the right place at the right time. He suggested that I do something which he took for granted that I couldn’t do, and then I did it, so he was stuck. He was going to be recording in Vancouver. I said, hey, anything I could do on the album? He said, I’m going to Edmonton. I’ll be back in two weeks. If you can come up with an arrangement of “A Man is a Man,” I’d love to do that one. He had, I assume, felt like he had dealt with the subject at that point. But as it happened, when he got back in two weeks, I had actually done a pretty nice little arrangement. And so he was stuck. He was without question the best educated human being I have ever spent time with. There was virtually no subject he could not converse intelligently about with an incredible depth of knowledge. He was very realistic about his own skills. He thought he was better than a lot of people around him who were more successful than he was. At times he found that annoying, but he also understood that he was not in the same class as people like Louis Armstrong or Sarah Vaughan, and was not at all bothered. What bothered him was the Peter, Paul and Marys of the world becoming superstars. George Benson becoming a superstar didn’t bother him at all, you know. DW: Did you have anything to do with the making of A Complete Unknown? EW: No, they bought Dylan Goes Electric! and that was it. In fact, it was Dylan’s people who bought the book. They were behind this whole project. I had no idea he’d actually read it, but apparently Dylan read it and liked it. I think that speaks to how much of the book is about Seeger and other things around him, rather than about him. DW: Yes, but I think it’s to his credit. As we know, artists are often very petty about those things. It’s to his credit that he has that degree of objectivity. EW: I’m assuming he liked it because it contextualized things. DW: I don’t agree with everything in the book, and we obviously don’t see eye to eye on certain things. But I think the book presents an honest picture, with all sorts of elements in it, out of which you can draw your own conclusions. It presents intriguing pieces of the picture. EW: I’m a historian, not a critic.
A Trumpet of Sedition 