The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (2013, Margaret MacMillan)

Margaret MacMillan's The War That Ended Peace was among the many books written for the centennial of the First World War, trying to explain how Europe's different superpowers backed into the world's most destructive conflict (up to that point) without fully intending to. MacMillan's book has most of the same strengths as her earlier work on the Paris Peace Conference: an eye for sharp character sketches and an ability to convey broader political-diplomatic context with finesse. The book's sharpest passages lie in her assessment of Europe's prewar statesman, from the bellicose military leadership of Britain and France who foresaw war as inevitable, to the hopelessly reactionary Tsar Nicholas and his court, to Germany's erratic Kaiser Wilhelm, whom she portrays with some sympathy as a well-meaning monarch whose personality flaws unwittingly antagonized his fellow statesmen. MacMillan dutifully recounts the escalating crises, imperial rivalries and power clashes that led to war, culminating in the "damn thing in the Balkans" that exploded the powder keg in 1914. It's here that the book starts to lose interest; MacMillan presents these events fluently enough, but her analyses and dramatization adds nothing to earlier works by Barbara Tuchman (The Proud Tower), Robert K. Massie (Dreadnought) and others, which explore them with more color and insight. From the crop of contemporaries, War That Ended Peace is easily bested by Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, which has a more controversial thesis (blaming the war principally on Serbia, with some unwitting assistance from a belligerent Kaiser) than MacMillan's rehash of the "collective responsibility" thesis which long dominated popular discourse on the Great War's origins, but is increasingly debatable. Thus MacMillan's book is readable and conversant in its subject matter, but at nearly 700 pages of text one wonders about the need to revisit this well-worn topic, if she has very little new to say.

Rating: 3/5

Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

 

Rachel Maddow's new book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism reminds us of the struggles waged against American far right groups in the '30s and '40s. Long neglected by historians, this topic has received significant attention in recent years due to its obvious timeliness, with books like Charles Gallagher's Nazis of Copley Square and Steven J. Ross's Hitler in Los Angeles exploring specific groups and movements of Nazi sympathizers and their disturbing parallels to the alt-right. Maddow (building on her podcast) ties these stories together into an engaging narrative, introducing (or reintroducing) readers to the creeps, crooks and would-be dictators who sought to emulate Hitler. Some of these movements are relatively well-known, like the Nazi-backed German-American Bund, racist "Radio Priest" Father Charles Coughlin, and Charles Lindbergh's America First movement. Others, however, are so bizarre: William Dudley Pelley's wacko Silver Shirts, a combination political movement-religious cult that preached spiritual enlightenment through extermination of Jews; George Deatheridge, a professional Southern bigot who orchestrated an elaborate plot to overthrow the American government in the late '30s; George Van Horn Moseley, a high-ranking Army General who ranted about Jewish conspiracies and toyed with becoming America's Fuhrer; Lawrence James, the Nazi intellectual who proved to be a Black man "passing" as a white fascist . Where historians often tend to dismiss or downplay these groups, Maddow makes clear that, if often ineffectual in practice, their ideology and intentions were extremely serious, plotting massacres of Jews, mass poisoning of celebrities and plotting against the government. She also demonstrates that a shocking number of isolationist congressmen, including well-known figures Burton K. Wheeler and Hamilton Fish, were actively fed Nazi propaganda by German agent George Sylvester Viereck (who besides his fascist activities, Maddow tells us, authored "the first gay vampire novel in history"). Maddow demonstrates how a team of unlikely heroes, from journalists Eric Sevareid and Arthur Derounian to Los Angeles businessman Leon Lewis and prosecutor O. John Rogge, worked to expose and foil their efforts, to general ridicule and indifference. A circuslike Sedition Trial of key fascist leaders in 1944 fizzled out when the Judge died during the trial; afterwards, the Justice Department buried Rogge's report, allowing the indicted to escape justice. Maddow's book is well-researched and fluently written, though her snarky, conversational style (referring to one pro-Nazi businessman as a "gazillionaire" or wondering if James would make a killing on Substack today) might grate on some readers. Still, Maddow's to be commended for re-introducing this subject to a wider audience; hopefully, readers will take the appropriate lessons from her work.

Rating: 4/5

Note: I wrote a series of articles on this general subject in 2018, which can be read here. 

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (2023, Timothy Egan)

Timothy Egan's A Fever in the Heartland illuminates the tawdry life and times of D.C. Stephenson, the leader of Indiana's Ku Klux Klan chapter in the 1920s. Egan provides a cliff notes sketch of the Klan's original iteration during Reconstruction, and its resurgence in the post-WWI United States, before moving onto his main story: how the Klan took over an entire state for much of the '20s. Stephenson, an unusually gifted conman, sold millions of Indianans on the idea that cloaked vigilantes were needed to rescue the United States from decadence, immigration and cultural rot. Thus the Second Klan openly paraded around the Hoosier State, denouncing subversive politics, African-Americans, Catholic and Jewish immigrants and the related scourges of alcohol, feminism and sexual liberation, initiating vigilante attacks on anyone deemed subversive towards Stephenson's order while winning loyalty of political figures throughout the State, and eventually the country. Not that Stephenson himself adhered to his principles: behind the scenes he was a cheat, a bigamist, an alcoholic who brutalized his romantic paramours. Stephenson's downfall came about not through his repulsive politics, which were common enough for his time, but through his rape, abduction and murder of Madge Oberhalzer, a headstrong modern woman who spurned Stephenson's advances and was brutalized in turn. Egan perhaps glories too much in the seamier side of his story, but astutely observes that Stephenson's support grew not in spite but because of his hypocrisy; too strong or shameless to be held to his own principles, he exercised a degree of naked power ("I am the law" was his Judge Dredd-esque boast) which, for many, foretold the strong man. Fortunately, rape and murder was too gruesome for 1920s Americans to countenance; Stephenson received a long prison sentence and while the national Klan disowned him, coverage of the trial was enough to destroy their power. Not a definitive account of its subject, but a good narrative reminding us (as if modern Americans need reminding) that the seeds of hate and appeal of strongman rule are perennial in our politics.

Rating: 4/5

Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970, Garry Wills)

A classic work of political science, Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistes remains an insightful look at the rise of the 37th President and the environment which enabled his rise to power. Wills alternates coverage of the 1968 presidential campaign with a broader analysis of the United States, riven by Vietnam, racial tension and cynical politicians increasingly willing to take advantage of these divisions. Wills views Nixon as "the Last Liberal" in American politics, not in our modern sense but as a self-made man who achieved success working through the System. Thus, he became a spokesman for Americans angry that success no longer seemed assured for them. For all the musings about Nixon's lack of authenticity, on this level at least he was fundamentally sincere; he found his insecurities mirrored in that of many Americans, enabling to rise from his political grave, win election and preside over one of the country's most tumultuous periods. "Every campaign" from his Red-baiting Congressional days to the presidency "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." And while Nixon laid no claim to the radicalism of the New Left and eschewed the coarser rhetoric of the Wallace-Bircher Far Right, he persuaded tens of millions of voters that "those in power" - Lyndon Johnson's Democratic Party, their allies in the media, judiciary and classroom, the minority interest groups they supposedly coddled and fawned over - were not just wrong, but un-American enemies to be ostracized and destroyed. 

Written in 1970, Nixon Agonistes is, to be sure, a difficult book to recommend to nonexperts. Wills jumps between topics almost at random, following only the loosest thematic structure. Readers will find amusing, and valuable his portraits of that year's political figures - Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, the monstrous George Wallace and asinine Spiro Agnew. He's also quite astute showing that Nixon's "Silent Majority" was motivated by a sense of displacement, viewing liberal expansions of minority rights as infringing upon theirs; Lyndon Johnson's Great Society fostered an impression, justified or not, that middle class Americans no longer mattered to "the Establishment" - a resentment that Nixon brilliantly exploited. He also shows why Kennedy-Johnson liberals failed to anticipate the era's radical movement; Black Power, student activists and others felt that the "soft intolerance" of Democratic rulers dismissed their causes as unworthy of concern, thus driving them to increasingly extreme courses of action. Thus '60s liberalism, however idealistic its intention, failed to truly address systemic issues while alienating Americans unpersuaded of the need for drastic change. And Wills  notes that liberal writers like Arthur Schlesinger were happy to praise in Kennedy and Johnson traits (reliance on charisma and image, strident anticommunist rhetoric, a desire for sweeping presidential power) that they decried as monstrous in Nixon and other Republicans. 

Perhaps Wills' biggest failing, besides the book's rambling and orotund prose style, is that his central premise sometimes contradicts the actual text. Certainly, Wills relies on a nebulous definition of "liberalism" that few modern readers will recognize, since clearly he doesn't mean to suggest Nixon is a liberal in the sense that Kennedy, Johnson or Gene McCarthy were liberals. One can agree with his views on the shortcomings of Great Society liberalism while also wondering how Nixon himself embodied the same worldview (after all, most of the progressive initiatives Nixon supported were largely opportunistic or cynical - certainly not sharing LBJ's views about the power of government). Even so, he's astute in recognizing Nixon's achievement: persuading white, middle-class voters that, however troubled minority groups and the disadvantaged might be, their own grievances (some real, others imagined) and everyday frustrations were worse. That's remained the Republican Party's underlying appeal, in increasingly strident form; and Wills, writing before Watergate and Reagan's rise to the White House, when Donald Trump was a minor figure in New York real estate, recognizes the lasting power of this message.

Rating: 4/5