Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944 9781350102583, 9781350106734, 9781350102590

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READING THE POSTWAR FUTURE

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READING THE POSTWAR FUTURE Textual Turning Points from 1944

Edited by Kirrily Freeman and John Munro

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Kirrily Freeman and John Munro, 2020 Kirrily Freeman and John Munro have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: The Cologne cathedral stands tall amidst the ruins of the city after Allied bombings, 1944. World War II (© Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0258-3 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0259-0 eBook: 978-1-3501-0260-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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For Theo and Clara Walker, and for Clara and Roland Maloney, who are the future.

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CONTENTS List of Figures Acknowledgments

ix x

INTRODUCTION Kirrily Freeman

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REPRESENTATIONS 13 Chapter 1 REMASTERING THE SOUNDTRACK OF A CLASH OF TITANS: POLANYI’S THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION AND HAYEK’S THE ROAD TO SERFDOM Radhika Desai

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Chapter 2 DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT: ORIGIN STORIES OF WESTERN MARXISM Michael D’Arcy

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Chapter 3 BRITAIN, EUROPE, AND THE BORDERS OF MARKETS: T. S. ELIOT AND F. A. HAYEK ON POSTWAR INTERNATIONALISM Luke Foster

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DECOLONIZATIONS 77 Chapter 4 “MEET THE NEW EMPIRE, SAME AS THE OLD EMPIRE”: VISIONS AND REALITIES OF FRENCH IMPERIAL POLICY IN 1944 Sarah Frank

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Chapter 5 “VILLAGE LIFE AND HOW TO IMPROVE IT”: TEXTUAL ROUTES OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN THE LATE BRITISH EMPIRE Radhika Natarajan

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Chapter 6 CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY AS A DECOLONIAL TEXT: LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD Ajay Parasram

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RECONSTRUCTIONS 129 Chapter 7 PROJECTING GENDER AND EMOTION IN 1944 JAPAN: YOUNG WOMEN AND AFFECT IN KUROSAWA AKIRA’S THE MOST BEAUTIFUL Chikako Nagayama

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Chapter 8 1944: THE LAUNCH OF THE ALLIED FILM CAMPAIGN FOR CIVILIAN RELIEF Suzanne Langlois

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Chapter 9 CHAMPIONS OF DIGNITY? THE 1944 DEMOCRATIC PARTY PLATFORM Katherine Rye Jewell

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EMANCIPATIONS 179 Chapter 10 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD FROM AFRICAN AMERICA IN 1944: W. E. B. DU BOIS’S “MY EVOLVING PROGRAM FOR NEGRO FREEDOM” Chike Jeffers

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Chapter 11 BACK TO THE FUTURE IN HOWARD FAST’S FREEDOM ROAD Alan M. Wald

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Chapter 12 “SERVE THE PEOPLE”: AN EXEMPLARY CHINESE SOCIALIST TEXT OF 1944



Rebecca E. Karl

CONCLUSION



John Munro

List of Contributors Index

215 231 241 243

FIGURES I.1 7.1 8.1 8.2 12.1

Lee Miller, Ruined street, Saint-Malo, France, 1944. Courtesy Lee Miller Archives2 A promotional photo for Kurosawa Akira, The Most Beautiful (1944). Courtesy Toho 133 Waiting for food. In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA (1944). National Film Board of Canada 147 A displaced family. UNRRA Goes into Action (1945). National Film Board of Canada 155 The Hungarian-made motorcycle “Iron Man Wang [Jinxi]” rode in the Daqing oil fields in the 1960s. “Iron Man Wang” was a Mao-era model worker. The oil tank is inscribed, in Mao’s calligraphy, with the political injunction, “Serve the People.” The motorcycle is on display at the Wang Jinxi Memorial Hall in Daqing. Photo by Maggie Clinton 227

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This volume began as a cross-corridor conversation along the lines of “Have you ever noticed how many influential books were written in 1944?” That conversation developed, over lunch and coffee, between marking and meetings, into a workshop at Saint Mary’s University in October 2017, organized with our friend and colleague Xiaoping Sun. A Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection Grant and support from the SMU History Department, Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, and President’s Office were indispensable for bringing together a number of scholars whose work features in this collection. We would like to thank them all for their early enthusiasm and continued support for the project. We especially thank Xiaoping who, though she was not able to contribute to the present volume, shaped the larger venture in invaluable ways. Kirrily Freeman would like to thank colleagues and students in the History Department at Saint Mary’s University, especially Trisha Turner and Susan Haines who were of great help in organizing the workshop part of this project. Theo, Clara, and Colin Walker are my reason for being, and I’m so grateful for their love and encouragement. John Munro would like to thank the American Studies Program at the University of Tübingen, the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Rostock, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for their generous support. In particular, I would like to thank Katharina Motyl, Astrid Franke, and Gesa Mackenthun for the warm welcome you gave me at your respective institutions as I worked on this volume. For me, this book began in Canada and ended in England, and I would also like to thank my colleagues in the History Departments at Saint Mary’s University and the University of Birmingham for their support. My gratitude is immense to Clara and Roland Maloney for, among other things, distracting me from always thinking about the past by keeping me in the joys of the present. And, as ever, I am grateful for Jacqueline Maloney’s support, patience, and love. In the publication of this volume, we would both like to thank Maddie Holder and Dan Hutchins at Bloomsbury. They have shepherded us swiftly and expertly through the whole process, and we couldn’t have asked for better guiding hands. We are also grateful for the helpful feedback from the anonymous reviewers who took the time to improve this book with their wise suggestions, and to Joseph Gautham for his assistance at the production stage. To the workshop participants, thank you for what was a wonderful set of papers and conversations. To the contributors who joined this project after the workshop, and who took up our request (often out of the blue) to write something new on a short timeline, we are equally thankful.

INTRODUCTION Kirrily Freeman

Lee Miller was the only war correspondent in Saint-Malo in early July 1944. The US army had sent her there by mistake—female reporters were meant to stay well behind the lines—but, sheltering in the rubble of the city still under bombardment, Miller photographed the devastation of Saint-Malo and its population (Figure I.1).1 Martha Gellhorn was likewise not supposed to be in Normandy on D-Day. She had pleaded with American army officials to let her cover the Allied landings for Collier’s magazine, and when they refused, she smuggled herself aboard a hospital ship, hid in a toilet, and disguised herself as a medic. “It is necessary that I report on this,” Gellhorn wrote to the US army: she resented being denied “the right to serve as the eyes for millions of people . . . who are desperately in need of seeing, but cannot see for themselves.”2 Miller and Gellhorn, like so many of their colleagues, were well aware that what they were reporting on was not only the invasion of “fortress Europe,” but the opening of the final phase of the war. The year 1944, and D-Day in particular, occupy a central place in the national memories of the British and North American publics.3 In France, the symbolic weight of the rebirth of the Republic in 1944 has been remarkably resilient despite all of that country’s memory wars and upheavals.4 In the Eastern European borderlands too, 1944 evokes such meaning that a 2015 Estonian film and a 2016 Ukrainian song both carried that simple title.5 Though their subjects were quite different—the film 1944 told the story of Estonian youth caught between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, while the song 1944 treated the deportation of Crimean Tatars by the Soviet Union—in both cases the date itself was sufficient to evoke profound emotion and nationalist (along with anti-Russian) sentiment from mass audiences. The year 1944, then, is clearly a powerful lieu de mémoire.6 While 1944 appears as a major turning point in both memory and retrospect, Reading the Postwar Future demonstrates that it also felt that way at the time. From the Allied landings in Papua New Guinea on January 2—which launched Operation Cartwheel in the South Pacific—to the news from Los Alamos on December 30 that an American atomic bomb would soon be ready for testing, from the formal establishment of Charles de Gaulle’s French Forces of the Interior on February 1 to Heinrich Himmler’s November 24 order that the crematoria at Auschwitz be destroyed in light of the inexorable westward march of the Soviet Red Army, the events of 1944 portended that an end to the conflict, if not imminent, was certainly coming into view. Just how the war would conclude remained subject to

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Reading the Postwar Future

Figure I.1  Lee Miller, Ruined street, Saint-Malo, France, 1944. Courtesy Lee Miller Archives.

speculation, but 1944 brought a growing sense of certainty as to who the ultimate victors would be. Allied progress in 1944—from the west and from the east—suggested not only that a postwar future could now be contemplated but also that it must, imperatively, be planned. The Big Three—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—had been preparing for the liberation of Europe since 1943, but there was a widespread feeling, inspired not least by the lessons of the last war and its aftermath, that the scale of the global crisis—and the geopolitical shifts that would accompany it— required initiatives that were unprecedented in both scope and creativity and that solutions ought not be left solely to the leaders of these three governments alone. At the same time, six or more years of privation, restrictions, fear, and violence had marked people profoundly. This most devastating war in human history had such deeply dislocating effects that it left many yearning for normalcy, but uncertain about how they could emerge from the wreckage. And what wreckage there was. Our cover photo shows the city of Cologne after round-the-clock Allied bombing raids in the fall of 1944, providing a strikingly different perspective from Lee Miller’s photographs of the ruins of Saint-Malo.

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Whereas Miller’s ground-level view of the rubble is intimate in its human scale, the “bomb’s eye” view of Cologne gives us a sweeping panorama of the vastness of destruction, the terrible scale of devastation, as well as the gargantuan task of rebuilding that lay ahead. The myriad postwar challenges the Allies anticipated can be read in both these visual texts, as in the “rubble photography” genre more generally.7 The complete reconstruction of cities and infrastructures and the rehabilitation of communities and institutions, often from the ground up, would be required on a global scale. Because of the magnitude of destruction already evident in 1944, the progression of Allied victories, and the beginning of relief and rehabilitation efforts for defeated and liberated populations—and perhaps despite the year’s place in national memories—histories of the war often fold 1944 into what scholars have termed the “long 1945.”8 The lengthening of the year 1945 to include the latter half of 1944 suggests the symbolic nature of the last year of the war.9 Indeed, as a vast body of scholarship in multiple disciplines testifies, the emblematic importance of 1945 cannot be overstated. It was a rupture, a watershed, an inexorable dividing line: it saw “the end of one world, and the beginning of a new, uncertain one.”10 In the most immediate way, as “Year Zero,” 1945 marked the formal end of the war and the beginning of a postwar era characterized by the aftermath of liberation, defeat, victory, or conquest; by ongoing social and economic crisis and upheaval; by transitional or provisional politics and government; and by the initiation of programs aimed at a return to order. But 1945 brought endings and beginnings of an even greater magnitude.11 We glimpse this in one of the most momentous acts of the twentieth century: the use of the atomic bombs on Japan. Here the endings are vast—the loss of lives, the eradication of cities, the end of the Japanese imperial project—and the beginnings are equally weighty: the birth of the atomic age, the expansion of American hegemony, the stirring of what came to be called the Cold War. Scholars locate in the rupture of 1945 the end of a thirty-year European civil war and the beginning of European integration, the fading of European colonial domination and the beginning of the long process of formal decolonization, the projection of US power on a global scale, and the prelude to a period of “miraculous” rebirth both for Japan and for the Federal Republic of Germany.12 This volume intends neither to displace 1945 as a moment of world-historical importance nor to argue for a longer view that folds the two final years of the war into an undifferentiated continuity, although “the end” of the war was experienced at different moments, according to the particularities of local and national histories (in August 1945 at Potsdam or Nagasaki, but also in August 1944 in Paris, or even in August 1943 in Sicily).13 Nor do we seek to establish 1944 as part of a postwar era that is similarly elastic, where 1944 represents the “proto-postwar” in a period stretching to 1949 (with the establishment of the two Germanies and with Mao’s victory in China), or even further.14 This longer periodization characterizes the global postwar era as a time of entrenchment, where the stakes were high, the crises were legion, and the solutions appeared limited.

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But 1944 had its very own distinct character, as the essays in this collection make clear. Unlike the later period, 1944 was—globally—a moment of comparative openness, of radical potential in which futures were glimpsed, imagined, and even programmatically laid out in ways that were fundamental and far reaching. We suggest that 1944 was even more alive with a sense of possibility than the formal end of the war: it opened futures that by 1945 had been rapidly foreclosed, as practical constraints returned to the fore and remained there. But the many projects proposed in 1944 are marked by a palpable idealism that, if sometimes disconnected from reality, was nevertheless remarkable in its visionary character. In 1944, politicians, intellectuals, artists, and activists across the globe took to mapping out plans for the coming peace. The result was a remarkable profusion of texts that sought to shape the world after the war. They discussed in earnest an astounding range of issues: the role and nature of governments and markets, the relationships between individuals and communities, the importance of expanding education and strengthening family, the fate of empire, the shape of national revitalization, the contributions art and faith could make to social renewal. The outpouring of intellectual, scholarly, and cultural creation in 1944—and the uninhibited way it imagined future possibilities—is notable for what it reveals about that year as an historical moment, for the myriad visions it laid out, and for the fact that the debates it occasioned came to delineate the global politics of the postwar era: debates that continue to shape our own time. This combination of the sheer volume of textual production in 1944, and the visionary quality of so much of it, makes 1944, we believe, an intellectual landmark in twentieth-century history. It reveals the Second World War as a fundamentally important event in intellectual history, and also underscores the critical significance of intellectual history for understanding the war and the postwar era. Taking a broad conception of what constitutes a “text” (monographs, novels, poetry, film, photographs, speeches, pamphlets, essays, policy documents, conference proceedings, even a napkin), Reading the Postwar Future engages a range of intellectual, political, economic, and artistic works produced in 1944. Its twelve chapters are written by emerging scholars, mid-career academics, and authorities in their respective fields who are based in a variety of countries and represent disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Some of the texts are iconic, others are less well known, but the thread that unites them is stronger than one of mere temporal synchrony. They share a common futurity, and a propensity to see in the coming peace a struggle that must be won. For some, planning for the future involved looking to the past. Some looked back to prior wars and earlier reconstructions, others drew lessons from a time when religion played a guiding role in matters of state, when empires were expanding, or when capitalism and liberalism were at their apogee. Some looked to a far more distant time that might nevertheless hold the key to making sense of the present. Others were more utopian than nostalgic. But all of the texts examined here, though anchored in crisis, see the challenge of creating a postwar world not only as immense but as needing above all to be “done right.” As Stars and Stripes told its readers on September 9, 1944, “The future of the world depends on whether you

Introduction

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and I and the folks back home have the wisdom, sincerity and size to do the job right.”15 Rightness, however, was in the eye of the beholder. In bringing together such a diverse set of texts, we have organized the book’s chapters according to four major themes—representation, decolonization, reconstruction, and emancipation—each section with its own brief introduction. As the chapters and texts themselves demonstrate, within these themes are pluralities, which we have sought to emphasize. Divergent understandings of the 1944 present and competing visions of the postwar future vied for position, whether they arose out of political, geographic, social, or racial differences. In putting these texts in conversation with one another, then, we aim to emphasize not only their common elements and unifying themes but also their disparate, and often contradictory, character. “Representations” begins with a chapter by Radhika Desai on Friedrich Hayek’s  The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s  The Great Transformation. Hayek and Polanyi conceived of vastly different postwar threats and possibilities, and Desai argues that Polanyi’s vision, in particular, has not only been widely misunderstood and underappreciated in comparison to Hayek’s but holds insights that are vitally important to the crises of our own time. Michael D’Arcy likewise challenges the prevailingly negative interpretations that see Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as hyperbolically pessimistic and broadly ahistorical. D’Arcy proposes instead that the Marxist critique elaborated in Dialectic of Enlightenment be understood through the book’s engagement with the language of the epic and the novel, which he argues, is “intrinsic to a revised conception of what it means to think historically.” Luke Foster puts Hayek in conversation with T. S. Eliot, who he reads not only as asserting a deep concern with the preservation of Christianity in Britain but as challenging Hayek’s emphasis on market-driven forces. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, for Foster, illustrate “an enduring divide on the right [between] market-friendly and market-skeptical conservatives.” For Desai and D’Arcy, the socialist thought elaborated in The Great Transformation and Dialectic of Enlightenment is revealed as being more sophisticated and pertinent than critics generally acknowledge. For Foster, a look at two of the lodestars of postwar Anglo-American conservatism illustrates some of the challenges launched at neoliberalism from the right. The theme of representation—in all its various meanings signifying to speak or act on behalf of someone, to portray something, or to construct the world and reality semantically—is present in all three papers: all are concerned with questioning which forms of government best address the interests of the individual and society, what such forms of government stand for, and how those interests are best understood. In “Decolonizations,” Sarah Frank discusses a conference convened by Charles de Gaulle at Brazzaville in French Equatorial Africa. Frank proposes that the conference itself be read as a text that outlines de Gaulle’s, and later the French provisional government’s, imperial goals and values. The Brazzaville conference sought to shape more benevolent policies for the French colonies, transforming France’s “civilizing mission” into a modernizing one, which promised colonial

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subjects an improved quality of life without, however, any meaningful concern for or input from colonized peoples themselves. Radhika Natarajan analyzes Frank Lugard Brayne’s tract Winning the Peace (and its republication in pamphlet form as “Village Life and How to Improve It”). Brayne, a British colonial administrator, proposed to transform Indian rural life through the inculcation of an “improvement mindset” that would emphasize thrift, hygiene, and education. Missionaries in East Africa took up Brayne’s ideas and translated them for the African context, linking evangelical Christianity and community development. Ajay Parasram critiques Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, seeing Williams as an unwitting “canary” in the colonial archive, breathing in—perhaps unavoidably—the empiricist fumes of coloniality disguised as objective historical method. All three chapters in this section illustrate Europeans’ commitment to empire and the tenacity of colonial thinking in this period, which David Low, John Lonsdale, and more recently Bekeh Ukelina have identified as a “second colonial occupation.”16 These chapters reveal colonial regimes that, under the guise of progress and liberalization, sought to maintain their own positions in the postwar order and were intent on securing not only control but also the persistence of European values. While people like Williams imagined a future free from colonial occupation, others, like Brayne and the delegates at Brazzaville, looked forward to a postwar world in which European empires would once again lead the way. But Eric Williams would become the leader of an independent Trinidad and Tobago, France would be forced to relinquish its colonial possessions, and Britain would formally withdraw from its empire. Our intention in placing these papers under the rubric of decolonization—rather than, perhaps, “recolonization”—is not to characterize a complex period as simply the threshold of independence, but rather to highlight the fact that, for imperial powers in 1944, it was the fear of decolonization that drove their retrenchment. In the third section—“Reconstructions”—Chikako Nagayama rereads Akira Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful, seeing the film’s emotional reach and determined pursuit of beauty as key to its mobilizing potential, rather than the narrow political and militarist interpretations that tend to dominate critical reception of the film. The theme of beauty, for Nagayama, reconciles two facets of Kurosawa’s oeuvre that have generally been taken as dichotomous—its emphasis on the collective war effort and its portrayal of individuals as complicated, autonomous agents. In Suzanne Langlois’s discussion of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) film In the Wake of Armies, we see that propaganda was not only a nationalist wartime pursuit. Rather, the Allied film campaign, launched in 1944 by UNRRA and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), was nothing less than internationalist propaganda writ large, determined to extend wartime mobilization and sacrifice into peacetime. The US Democratic Party platform of 1944, in Katherine Jewell’s close reading, emphasizes the party’s internationalism, the continued mobilization of the American public to “win the peace” on multiple fronts and, in a crucial moment of transition, launched ideas that would structure American domestic and foreign policy for decades to come. All three papers are concerned with both literal and symbolic rebuilding: of an industrial workforce at a moment of total wartime mobilization in Japan, as well as of a Japanese “spirit”;

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of destroyed communities and displaced families in the rubble of Europe, as well as of the commitment to international cooperation that had defined the Allied war effort; of a US peacetime economy, as well as of a Democratic Party positioned to lead the postwar world. Finally—in “Emancipations”—Chike Jeffers examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” published in Rayford Logan’s storied collection, What the Negro Wants. For Jeffers, Du Bois’s essay is important as an illustration of how African American intellectuals and activists were envisioning a freer future. Jeffers argues that “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom” should be considered one of Du Bois’s most important and insightful reflections on the nature and requirements of anti-racist struggle. Alan Wald’s chapter on Howard Fast’s Freedom Road reads this bestselling novel as “a history of tomorrow.” “Fast published a book in 1944,” Wald argues, that “helped to sculpt the struggle for a world without racism and economic injustice for decades to come.” Fast’s novel addresses pervasive misunderstandings of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era in the United States, and Wald’s essay highlights themes which he sees as having an uncanny resonance with both the Civil Rights and Black Power eras—“mass resistance of African Americans, occupation of forbidden spaces, Black pride as a precondition of unity with whites, armed self-defense, self-determination”—as well as providing lessons for our own time. In the final essay in the collection, Rebecca Karl reads Mao Zedong’s “Serve the People” as “an exemplary socialist text.” Looking beyond the present-day kitschification of this slogan, Karl sees “an entire kind of history”—a prospective and prescriptive socialist history of China that was, at once, “political injunction, social ideal, cultural expectation and economic norm.” The fact that the potential radical openness of “Serve the People” was “closed into a ritualized rhetorical formula” should not obscure its relevance in reorganizing social relations in its time. As Karl states at the conclusion of her chapter, revolution demands a mingling of times. Each of the three chapters in this section deals with the radical potential of texts that looked both backward and forward to revolution. Whether the emancipation in question was of African Americans, of Chinese workers, or of oppressed people more broadly, freedom— these texts make clear—would only be achieved through radical transformation. In any such collection, editors face choices and constraints. In Reading the Postwar Future, we could have organized the papers in other ways, emphasized different themes, and thus guided the conversations that emerge between texts in alternate directions. We could have put even greater emphasis on revolution: Eric Williams and W. E. B. Du Bois, both under FBI surveillance, were—like demobilized colonial soldiers described by Sarah Frank and Radhika Natarajan— taken as threatening to the established order and feared as potential agents of revolt. We could have placed the various Marxisms and socialisms—from Du Bois, Fast, Mao, Polanyi, Horkheimer, and Adorno—in more direct conversation with one another. T. S. Eliot and Frank Lugard Brayne both look nostalgically to an idealized British village with the parish church at its heart, while Du Bois and Howard Fast see not redemption but segregation and racial violence in rural Christian communities. We could have emphasized the affective nationalism of

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Kurosawa and Eliot, alongside the affective socialism of Mao’s “Serve the People.” We could have underlined individual agency in Hayek, Kurosawa, and Williams and also in UNRRA’s approach. Serving a people and a cause is, of course, the key feature of Mao Zedong’s speech, but this theme is also at the heart of Du Bois’s thinking and, in very different ways, of the 1944 Democratic Party platform. Our section on “reconstructions” could very well have included Alan Wald’s essay on Freedom Road, a novel that describes the post-Civil War Reconstruction in the United States through the lens of interwar reconstruction championed by the Popular Front and from the 1944 vantage point of imminent post-Second World War reconstruction. We hope our readers will not feel constrained by the categories we have ultimately chosen, but will on the contrary pursue their own links and connections between texts. Just as 1944 presented myriad possibilities, the texts it produced contain a multitude of interpretations. Readers may also be surprised to see that certain well-known texts from 1944 are missing: Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the Bretton Woods Agreement, or FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights.” Some of these, and other, missing texts are invoked in the collection nevertheless, in chapters, section introductions, or in the conclusion. While Western Marxism and Chinese Marxism are represented in several chapters, Russian and Eastern European perspectives are, unfortunately, not. Women’s voices in the assembled texts are fleeting. We encounter strong female figures, to be sure: the missionary Margaret Wrong, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, the African American leader Mary McLeod Bethune, the anarchofeminist He-Yin Zhen, a defiant Indian housewife, and an army of patriotic young Japanese factory workers. But texts produced by men are the focus in all of the chapters in this collection. For women worldwide, 1944 was a revealingly ambiguous moment. From Saint-Malo, Lee Miller traveled throughout northern France and then to Germany, reporting for Vogue magazine on the difficult legacies of the war, liberation, and defeat. Although Vogue published her photos and reportage and “challenged Vogue readers to see and understand the war differently as women,” Miller’s work was overshadowed by that of male colleagues like Robert Capa.17 Martha Gellhorn’s efforts were undermined not only by the army’s policies toward women but also by her then husband, Ernest Hemmingway, who tried first to steal her accreditation with Collier’s, and then to beat her to the beaches of Normandy.18 So, although 1944 has been interpreted, for example, as “a turning point for women reporting from war zones,” it was certainly not unambiguously so.19 Similarly, 1944 might appear as a turning point for French women, who were granted suffrage that July. But they were enfranchised by de Gaulle because he considered women to be both naturally conservative and easily swayed.20 The outpouring of public violence and humiliation against French women accused of “horizontal collaboration” with German soldiers—the emblematic femmes tondues captured on film by Miller and Capa—was an extreme manifestation of a broader effort to re-masculinize French society and discipline French women in the wake of their wartime independence and recent political emancipation.21 In the USSR, nineteen women soldiers were

Introduction

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named Heroes of the Soviet Union in 1944, twelve posthumously, but surviving Soviet servicewomen came home to a Stalinist cult of motherhood in which female soldiers were viewed with suspicion and contempt.22 Wartime factory floors served as potential spaces of relative freedom for women in the United States, but such gains would be largely reversed by postwar reaction in the McCarthy era, even if strands of liberation politics did span the 1940s and the feminist rebellions of the 1960s and beyond.23 In the colonized world, as we shall see, mothers—like soldiers—were instrumentalized to serve the goals and values of empire. For most women in 1944, existing and expressing oneself on an equal footing with men remained a dream for the future. The year 1944 was no less rich in the visual arts than it was in other forms of intellectual and cultural production, although the visual texts addressed in this collection are limited to photographs and films. But, whether in overtly political pieces like Georg Grosz’s Cain, or Hitler in Hell or in more introspective reflections such as Frida Kahlo’s The Broken Column, visual artists likewise meditated on the future in 1944. We shall conclude our introduction, then, by highlighting two remarkable paintings from that year—Victory Boogie-Woogie by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and The Triumph of Death by the German Jewish artist Felix Nussbaum. Both of these paintings were produced in exile: the Mondrian in the United States and the Nussbaum in hiding in Nazi-occupied Belgium. Furthermore, both were painted by artists who did not live to see 1945, for it is indeed worth remembering that for many people in 1944 the future didn’t come. Victory Boogie-Woogie, which pulses with joyful color expressing the elderly painter’s anticipation of Allied triumph, was never finished.24 The 71-year-old Mondrian died of pneumonia in February 1944. The Triumph of Death—a dark, anguished, foreboding meditation on doom—was Nussbaum’s last painting. He was murdered in Auschwitz in August 1944 at the age of thirty-nine.25 The Triumph of Death reminds us of the ultimate legacy of the war: the loss of those who, like Nussbaum, did not survive to see the peace. With them died innumerable futures.

Notes 1 See Imperial War Museum, “Lee Miller’s Second World War,” June 25, 2018, Available online: https​://ww​w.iwm​.org.​uk/hi​story​/lee-​mille​rs-se​cond-​world​-war;​ Lorraine Sim, “A Different War Landscape: Lee Miller’s War Photography and the Ethics of Seeing,” Modernist Cultures 4, no. 1–2 (October 2010): 48–66; Marianne Amar, “Les guerres intimes de Lee Miller,” Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire 20 (2004), Available online: http:​// jou​rnals​.open​editi​on.or​g/cli​o/139​6 2 Lyse Doucet, “The Women Reporters Determined to Cover World War Two,” BBC Magazine, June 5, 2014, Available online: https​://ww​w.bbc​.com/​news/​magaz​ine-2​ 76778​89; Caroline Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn: A Life (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). 3 See also, for example, Michael Dolski, Sam Edwards, and John Buckley, eds., D-Day in History and Memory: The Normandy Landings in International Remembrance and Commemoration (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2014).

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4 Sudhir Hazareesingh, In the Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of De Gaulle (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Richard J. Golsan, “The Legacy of World War II in France: Mapping the Discourse of Memory,” in The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, ed. Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 5 On the early twenty-first-century resonance of 1944 in Estonia, see, for example, James V. Wertsch, “Collective Memory and Narrative Templates,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 75, no. 1 (spring 2008): 133–56. On the song, which won the Eurovision song contest in 2016, see Jordana L. Cashman, “The Cultural Politics of Eurovision: A Case Study of Ukraine’s Invasion in 2014 against their Eurovision Win in 2016,” The European Union Center of California, Claremont-UC Conference on the European Union, 2017, Available online: https​://sc​holar​ship.​clare​mont.​edu/u​rceu/​ vol20​17/is​s1/6/​ 6 This influential concept was coined by Pierre Nora. See Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992) and Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998). 7 For the perspective of the US Army in France, see Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 83–84. As Dagmar Barnouw argues in her study of Allied and German photography from 1945, Allied expectations had a profound impact on German culture and the politics of the Federal Republic. Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). Scholarship on rubble photography and rubble film in the German context tends to focus on themes of mourning, responsibility, and the forging of memory. See, for example, Wilfred Wilms, “Rubble without a Cause: The Air War in Postwar Film,” in German Postwar Films, ed. W. Wilms and W. Rasch (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 27–44; Steven Hoelscher, “‘Dresden, a Camera Accuses’: Rubble Photography and the Politics of Memory in a Divided Germany,” History of Photography 36, no. 3 (2012); Anne Fuchs, After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present (Berlin: Springer, 2011); David Crew, Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017). 8 See Peter J. Taylor, Britain and the Cold War: 1945 as Geopolitical Transition (London: Bloomsbury, 1990). 9 A notable exception, however, is in French historiography where 1945 is folded into a “long liberation” or “sortie de guerre” whose emblematic year is 1944 but lasts until 1947. See Andrew Knapp, ed., The Uncertain Foundation: France at the Liberation, 1944-47 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Recent scholarship on France also emphasizes the Fourth Republic (1946–1958) as the “epicenter of extraordinary changes in France.” Rosemary Wakeman, “The Fourth Republic,” in The French Republic: History, Values, Debates, ed. Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 73–82. Michael Kelly, to cite one example, sees this as a period not just of reconstruction, but reinvention and reimagining. Michael Kelly, The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 10 Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (London: Penguin, 2013), cover.

Introduction

11

11 See Buruma, Year Zero and Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005). 12 Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945 (New York: Verso, 2016); Mary Fulbrook, Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945-1973 (London: Routledge, 2009); David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Mikiso Hane, Eastern Phoenix: Japan since 1945 (London: Routledge, 1996); Hanna Schissler, ed., The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 13 See Jay Winik’s recent bestseller, for example, which argues that 1944 saved democracies and changed history. Jay Winick, 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016). Gregor Dallas argues in his book 1945 that August 1944 in fact represents “the moment that would determine the shape of post-war Europe.” Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War that Never Ended (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), xvii. 14 Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments, 19451957 (London: Routledge, 1998). 15 Roberts, What Soldiers Do, 84. 16 John Lonsdale and Anthony Low, “Introduction: The Second Colonial Occupation,” in The Oxford History of East Africa, vol. III, ed. D. A. Low and Alison Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976); Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina, The Second Colonial Occupation: Development Planning, Agriculture, and the Legacies of British Rule in Nigeria (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017). 17 Claire Gorrara, “Fashion and the femmes tondues: Lee Miller, Vogue and representing Liberation France,” French Cultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2018): 330–44. 18 Gellhorn set foot in Normandy before Hemmingway, to her delight. 19 Doucet, “The Women reporters.” 20 Kelly, The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France, 106–26. 21 Fabrice Virgili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France, trans. John Flower (London: Bloomsbury, 2002); Claire Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France, 1944-1968 (London: Routledge, 1994); Roberts, What Soldiers Do. 22 Barbara Alpern Engel, “The Womanly Face of War: Soviet Women Remember World War II,” in Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted with or without Consent, ed. Nicole Ann Dombrowski (London: Routledge, 2004). 23 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 24 Harry Cooper argues that, “in Victory Boogie-Woogie, Mondrian linked his own imminent end with that of painting, which made the picture both ecstatic and tragic. . . . For a teleologist [like Mondrian] the end is everything.” Harry Cooper, “Mondrian, Hegel, Boogie,” October, 84 (Spring 1998): 138. 25 Karl Georg Easter, ed., Felix Nussbaum: Art Defamed, Art in Exile, Art in Resistance, trans. Eileen Martin (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1997).

12

REPRESENTATIONS

It was an important year for Marxism, and for representations of the state. On the war’s most fateful front, Kursk, Smolensk, and Kiev were all in the Red Army’s rearview mirror before 1943 was over, and 1944 would see the Third Reich cede further swaths of territory as Communism advanced westward. In terms of intellectual history, Marxism also mattered in important debates about the role of the state in capitalist societies. Karl Marx had himself, of course, already made some influential remarks on the issue, and while he had more to say about the state-capital relation than the Communist Manifesto’s often-quoted formulation that “the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” it was clear to him that business subordinated the state.1 The Great Transformation, published in 1944 by another Karl, also spoke to this topic. Polanyi’s model was largely in keeping with Marx’s, but the notion of a “double movement” marked Polanyi’s analysis as distinct. Societies, Transformation argued, were pulled at once toward as well as away from governmental protection in the face of the social dislocation that accompanied capitalism’s ascendancy.2 Amid this ongoing tension, owning-class interests determine what the state does, but popular pressure also wrenches it toward some form of ameliorative regulation. For Polanyi, the state is more than just backer to the bourgeoisie. Friedrich Hayek’s departure from Marx, meanwhile, was of a more diametrical nature. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argued that amid the creeping tendency toward planning, the state did not take capital’s interests sufficiently to heart. “The state,” after all, “should confine itself to establishing rules applying to general types of situations and should allow the individuals freedom in everything which depends on the circumstances of time and place, because only the individuals concerned in each instance can fully know these circumstances and adapt their actions to them.”3 This did not mean, as Hayek pointed out, that the state’s role under capitalism was to be a passive one, but rather that government authority at national and international levels should ensure the rights and mobility of capital without bending to democratic demands that might infringe upon the prerogatives of business. Hayek did not pine for some mythical, self-regulating market; he wanted to see trade more fully facilitated by government.4 Polanyi and Hayek, then, viewed the state quite differently in terms of what it did and should do, and both of their interpretations, as Radhika Desai’s chapter explores, unfolded under Marx’s long shadow and would have a considerable impact on 1944’s future. Given that Hayek’s arguments so neatly fit the interests of the economically powerful within capitalism, it is not difficult to surmise whose ideas had the greater impact,

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Reading the Postwar Future

but Desai’s opening essay reframes what we might think we already know about Serfdom and Transformation, as well as subsequent commentaries on them. In Serfdom’s opening pages, Hayek also made the point that the “interpretation of the developments in Germany and Italy about to be proffered in this book is very different from that given by most foreign observers and by the majority of exiles from those countries.”5 It’s not clear exactly who he has in mind here, but Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer certainly do fit the description. And they were, of course, influenced by Marx. Cultural critic Stuart Jeffries has summarized their Dialectic of Enlightenment as having “underlined the Frankfurt School’s abandonment of its previous commitments to Marxism, as well as its collapse into despair.”6 In the second chapter of this section, Michael D’Arcy offers an alternative reading, one that concerns itself less with the supposed pessimism of the work than with its interest in the language of the novel and the epic. Like Hayek, Adorno and Horkheimer were trying to come to terms with the role of the state under postliberal capitalism, where laissez-faire was no longer a policy option. In any case, their argument, that with “the extension of the bourgeois commodity economy, the dark horizon of myth is illumined by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose cold rays the seed of the new barbarism grows to fruition,” did indeed put forward a very different interpretation from anything Hayek had on offer.7 Finally, as Luke Foster’s chapter shows, not all of Hayek’s critics came at him from the left. T. S. Eliot had less concern for Hayek’s liberal individual than for a conservative vision of mutual social obligation mediated through a Christian European order. Defending aristocratic hierarchy and religious values, Eliot championed an English commitment to the nation, one derived through a connectedness to the nation’s history. In short, “History is now and England.”8 With this set of concerns, we have traveled some distance from the Marxist perspectives that the first two chapters in this section explore. But all of the thinkers under discussion here are linked by their interest in the state in capitalist societies, and by their Eurocentrism. Looking back, with hindsight enhanced by twenty-first-century analyses of capitalism’s racial, gendered, and colonial dimensions, not to mention the ways that Europe’s twentieth century was shaped by its entanglement with empire and decolonization, things look different now.9 But it would be difficult to argue that Polanyi, Hayek, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Eliot were other than authoritative rivals whose ideas have done much to shape the world since 1944.

Notes 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 5. Also see Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (1846; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972), 187; Marx, Capital: Volume 3 (1894; New York: Penguin, 1981), 568. 2 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001), 138–39.

Representations

15

3 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 83–84. 4 In Quinn Slobodian’s perceptive formulation, Hayek and his like-minded colleagues sought an “encasement of the market” that would protect the economic order in favor of capital. See Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 16. 5 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 10. 6 Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (New York: Verso, 2016), 236. 7 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; New York: Continuum, 1998), 32. 8 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1943), ll. 233–8. 9 Among wide, interdisciplinary literatures on capitalism, the state, and their intersections, see Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Sara Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Peter James Hudson, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy, “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities,” Social Text 36, 2, no. 135 (2018): 1–18. On interrelated European and imperial history in the twentieth century, see Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Elizabeth Buettner, Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Christienna Fryar, Nicole Jackson, and Kennetta Hammond Perry, “Windrush and Britain’s Long History of Racialized Belonging,” Black Perspectives, July 31, 2018, Available online: https​://ww​w.aai​hs.or​g/win​drush​-and-​brita​ ins-l​ong-h​istor​y-of-​racia​lized​-belo​nging​/

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CChapter 1 REMASTERING THE SOUNDTRACK OF A CLASH OF TITANS: POLANYI’S THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION AND HAYEK’S THE ROAD TO SERFDOM Radhika Desai

As the end of the Second World War hove into view around 1943, the British intellectual scene lit up with discussion about how to reshape British society after the war. A broad agreement that governments must cure social ills and guard against any relapse into depression conditions had been strengthened by the war, with its national government, planning, rationing, “fair shares” and “equal sacrifices,” and the feeling that there could be “no excuse anymore for unemployment, slums and underfeeding.”1 However, this consensus was rooted in the rise of welfarism and social imperialism that challenged the verities of the reigning liberalism in economic policy well before the First World War and the rise of a decidedly leftof-center Depression-era “middle opinion” that encompassed not only liberals like Keynes but also many conservative politicians.2 Given this broad agreement, the discussion was pragmatic and policy-oriented. However, the two works before us are altogether more ambitious theoretically and politically, concerning themselves with nothing less than the fate of liberal civilization after the disasters of war and fascism. Friedrich August von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom sought to turn the ship of British society, and Western societies generally, from continuing in a broadly socialist direction, warning that a new serfdom lay ahead. The problem was not planning as such—“everybody who is not a complete fatalist is a planner”—but centralized planning: the “central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan.”3 It abolished the competitive market and its price mechanism, which is “the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority,” one which “register[s] all the relevant changes in circumstances and . . . provide[s] a reliable guide for the individual’s actions.”4 Socialism would replace this mechanism, which had produced Western prosperity and all that was most valuable in modern liberal Western civilization, with the authoritative allocation of work and its rewards. The dangers of doing this, Hayek argued, had become clear in recent decades when socialism proved little more than the staging ground for fascism. Against the prevailing view that socialism and fascism were

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Reading the Postwar Future

historical opposites, Hayek was making arguably the first attempt to align the two, foreshadowing Cold War discourse. If Hayek sought to dial the historical clock back, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation argued that history had ratcheted beyond the point where this was possible. It began by announcing dramatically that “Nineteenth century [liberal] civilization has collapsed.”5 Its ideal, the “self-regulating market system,” had been utopian not because market mechanisms were faulty—Polanyi and Hayek agreed on their workings—but because they were extended beyond their due. Resistance had taken the opposed forms of fascism and socialism and had replaced the liberal world with a world of “crustacean nations”, in which “the economic system ceases to lay down the law to society.”6 Liberal civilization could no longer be reconstructed; attempts to do so could only reopen the door to fascism. The task before humankind was to move forward to a new socialism, one that appealed to all of society and was aware of the difficulties of “freedom in a complex society,” of balancing individual freedom with “the reality of society.” The two Austrian émigrés had won their intellectual and political spurs in Vienna. Universal franchise after the Great War put a reforming socialdemocratic-conservative coalition briefly in charge of the first Austrian Republic, while in Vienna, a decade of social democratic government begat “Red Vienna,” with its social housing, social services, and public health care, all financed out of progressive taxation. While a dazzling galaxy of socialists, Marxists, and others, including Polanyi, gloried in this marvelous experiment, conservatives and liberals, including Hayek and his Austrian School of economics, began honing a new case for capitalism. A key moment in the confrontation of the two sides was the socialist calculation debate over the balance between in-kind planning of labor, material, and products and the spontaneous coordination of productive activities produced by markets. When Hayek and Polanyi emigrated to England (Hayek in 1931 to take up a Chair at the London School of Economics at the invitation of professor Lionel Robbins who wished to counter John Maynard Keynes’s leftleaning influence and Polanyi in 1933 in flight from fascism), they brought with them these political and intellectual legacies—of Red Vienna, of the socialist calculation debate, and of the distinct continental experience of capitalism— though with opposite political charges. There is no evidence that either The Road to Serfdom or The Great Transformation shaped the course of immediate postwar history. In England, the conservative manifesto was considered “a sober re-statement of the new wartime consensus,” and Hayekian arguments figured only in the campaigns of some diehard antisocialists.7 Thanks to the efforts of influential supporters, The Road to Serfdom, in an abridged Reader’s Digest version, enjoyed considerable popular success in the United States, and Hayek followed it up with an extensive lecture tour. The Great Transformation had even less immediate impact, selling only about 1,700 copies in its first two years. Only decades later would The Road to Serfdom make Hayek the intellectual guru of the neoliberal new right whose ascendance over the last four decades has so transformed Western societies, while The Great Transformation



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19

would be rediscovered by the left as a potential weapon against this ascendant neoliberalism. However, Polanyi’s potential influence remains substantially unrealized, and Hayek’s position retains the upper hand. Even on the left, many argue that Hayek has much to teach, particularly about the dangers of centralized planning, while Polanyi is reduced to an anti-Marxist apostle of social democracy.8 Their common neoclassical misunderstanding of the price mechanism goes undetected, redounding to the benefit of Hayek to whose position it is central, and to the detriment of Polanyi who nevertheless remained a critic of its political implications. Finally, the very conceptual building blocks of The Great Transformation—the idea of fictitious commodities and the double movement—remain ill-understood, and their debt to classical political economy and Marx, unrecognized. Little wonder that the seventieth anniversary of this pair of works was marked by comparative commentaries that only amplified the distortions in our reception of these two thinkers and their 1944 works.9 Thanks to these misrepresentations, we miss most of the drama of this historically momentous clash of titans, one political, the other intellectual. The clash of steel on steel is muted. Hayek and The Road to Serfdom are amplified beyond their due, their clumsy moves, so often missing their mark, obscured. On the other hand, the truly heroic fight put up by Polanyi and The Great Transformation, their unerring aim, and skillful cut and thrust are muffled and discordant. This paper seeks to remaster the soundtrack of this clash by removing these distortions. They arise from a failure to appreciate that the Marginalist revolution that produced neoclassical economics severed our relationship with classical political economy, setting economic understanding on a radically new and inferior basis. Whereas Hayek stood squarely in the new, inferior tradition, Polanyi’s relationship to it was more complex and critical and it spurred him to extend the case for socialism onto new terrain by developing the implications of an important truth of classical political economy—that land, labor, and money were not commodities—in a way that was possible only in that liminal phase when the transition from the classical to the neoclassical was yet in progress. Such a remastering is no mere academic exercise today, when a malingering capitalism once again forms the terrain on which the right is mobilizing menacingly large masses. It is essential to return to this battle and recover the left position in it if we are to summon the intellectual and political resources for the response on which the future of humankind once again depends. Below we first discuss the intellectual break represented by neoclassical economics and go on to underline the gravity of the historical moment that occasioned the works at hand and discuss how they related to it. We then outline the arguments of the two works. The penultimate section reflects on the distortions of our reception of them. The chapter concludes with an assessment of their respective influences and argues that, while most agree that politically Hayek has the better of Polanyi, the battle is not over yet and that Polanyi, with his more profound insights into the character and problems of capitalism, must win if humankind is to have a future.

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Reading the Postwar Future

From classical political economy to neoclassical economics After the mid-nineteenth-century highpoint of liberal capitalism, the confrontation between capital and labor scaled new heights. European working classes organized parties and the Second International, winning ever more seats in parliaments, and, in the early twentieth century, they followed up the Russian Revolution with a spate of near-revolutionary outbreaks—Germany’s November Revolution, Italy’s Bienno Rosso, the Hungarian Revolution and Red Vienna, and even forming and participating in governments thereafter. On the other side, capitalist classes themselves had grown in number and size and were forming modern political parties designed to attract allies. While these historical developments described a single continuous arc, they induced a sharp break in intellectual history. Since capitalism’s beginnings and in tandem with its development, classical political economy had sought to understand it as a historically new form of social organization whose aim was value production. Value, as the classical political economists understood it, was objective, the product of labor under capitalism, whose expansion was the latter’s sole and driving aim. Value governed capital, gravity-like, to determine its crisis-prone movements. Until Marx, however, classical political economy’s thinking about value did not yet cohere. Though Adam Smith could demonstrate that value arose from labor when it was the dominant element of production, he could not figure out how value could also arise from labor when land had to be rented or capital employed. It took Marx to show that capital and (improved) land also derived their value from labor and only transferred it to the new product, while labor added new value. David Ricardo, the last great bourgeois representative of the tradition, wrestled with a related problem: if there is a normal rate of profit and value is created by labor, how does the same amount of capital, deployed in different proportions on capital and labor, yield different rates of profit? Only Marx could cut through Ricardo’s tortured cogitations to his brilliantly simple answer: the rate of profit is not always uniform. The law of value, operating through competition, operates on necessarily unequal profit rates to equalize them over time.10 Not only did Marx radicalize political economy by resolving its antinomies, by the mid- and late nineteenth century there were also strong currents of Ricardian socialism powered by the conviction that the origin of value lay in labor. Capitalism could no longer afford an intellectual tradition, no matter how insightful, that emboldened workers increasingly organizing and making social and political demands and gravitating to Marx. A new way of looking at capitalist society was needed. Neoclassical economics and its Austrian current Three thinkers—Carl Menger in Austria, Leon Walras in France, and Stanley Jevons in Britain—working independently, furnished that new analysis by launching the Marginalist revolution of the 1870s. The resulting neoclassical economics had to



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be radically different from classical political economy, and was.11 Whereas for classical political economy, value was objective, for neoclassical economics it arose from individual subjective evaluations of the desirability or utility of an object; whereas the former focused on production, the latter focused on market exchange and consumption; whereas the former understood capitalism as a historically specific form of social and productive organization, the latter eternalized and naturalized capitalism much as what Marx berated as ‘vulgar economics’ had done. These fundamental shifts of substance accompanied two structural ones. Whereas classical political economy sought to understand capitalism and its dynamics as a whole, neoclassical economics carved out the “economy” as its object of study. Max Weber sanctified the resulting division of social scientific labor by arguing that modern society had autonomous spheres of activity defined by specific forms of human action and studied by autonomous disciplines. Of course, Weber cared chiefly about the autonomy of the economy, and neoclassical economics has protected capitalism against social demands for political intervention by insisting this autonomy be inviolate. The economy was, moreover, the sphere of instrumentally rational action.12 On the one hand, while other disciplines like sociology may resist the tendency to extend it to “their” sphere of society, they do so at the price of accepting that noneconomic actions are also nonrational, while on the other, no substantively rational discussion of the goals of society was possible, ruling out socialism. While it is fashionable to lament the division of social scientific labor and endorse largely eclectic inter- and multi-disciplinarity, few notice that by far the greatest loss suffered by the Western intellectual tradition with these shifts was classical political economy’s historical mode of thinking.13 This was the second structural shift. It also meant that, paradoxically, whereas classical political economy was focused on attempting to uncover, to use Marx’s memorable expression, the “law of motion of capitalism” as a historically specific mode of production, neoclassical economics approached “the economy” as a system for the provision of human needs, as a transhistorical reality. Just how wrong this approach could be about capitalism is perhaps best seen in the case of its theoretical core—price theory—which was designed to gainsay classical political economy’s conviction that labor was the source of value and prices reflected values in the form of “costs of production” brought down by competition to the level determined by “socially necessary labor.” Neoclassical price theory took the view that supply (reflecting relative scarcity) and demand (reflecting the sum of individual subjective utilities) determined the prices at which markets clear. However, as Marx showed, supply and demand are no more than handmaidens of the law of value: in a competitive market, they move the value of commodities up or down to their socially necessary level precisely because when prices were bid higher or lower than that level, there was a supply response by competing producers. If neoclassical price theory was already inadequate to a competitive market, by the time the Marginalist revolution occurred, the rise of monopoly and administered prices had, if anything, rendered it even less relevant, as the institutionalists pointed out at the time.14

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Reading the Postwar Future

Oddly, precisely by conceiving the economy as a transhistorical reality, neoclassical economics provided the ground for socialist economics. The socialist calculation debate opened with Enrico Barone arguing in 1908 that a planned socialist economy could be organized by replacing market prices with equations derived from a system of Walrasian equilibrium. Oskar Lange developed this into responsive planning and “shadow prices,” and AC Pigou into his welfare economics. The socialist calculation debate entered a new, more urgent, phase after the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Otto Neurath, taking planned war economies as his model, proposed “the development of an administrative economy and in-kind planning as well as the creation of an economic plan” in which “production, consumption, export, import and stock-keeping must be recorded quantitatively in their mutual relations.”15 Austrian economics, the branch of neoclassical economics deriving from Carl Menger to which Hayek belonged, not only became the most right-wing branch of neoclassical economics; it did so by positioning itself against these neoclassical attempts to model socialist planning. Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises declared nonmonetary, planned economies impossible: though money was not a neutral measure of price, it made “economic calculation” possible as a common yardstick to take the measure of inevitably changing information. Socialist societies could only “flounder in the ocean of possible and conceivable economic combinations without the compass of economic calculation.”16 Aware that making claims about free markets achieving equilibrium, as Walrasian neoclassical economics did, only highlighted capitalism’s vulnerability, the Austrians scrupulously refrained from making them, arguing not that markets produce the best outcomes but only that none better could be expected. By so lowering the bar, they sought to make their defense of capitalism more ironclad: Persistent Austrian suspicion of the general equilibrium outlook was .  .  . not unfounded. The affinity between an absolute theoretical formalism and relative political radicalism may have derived, in various ways, from what might be called the subversive potential of perfectionism: on the one hand, the postulate of perfect competition could well lead to reflection on the gap between ideal and reality, with critical consequences for actual market processes; on the other, the assumption of perfect knowledge might on the same grounds prompt an interest in central planning, as a more logical embodiment of it than in decentralized markets.17

Polanyi intervened in the socialist calculation debate to reject both the Neurath and Mises alternatives. How he did so requires, however, that we understand his thinking and its relation to classical political economy and neoclassical economics. Polanyi and post-neoclassical socialism One might have expected neoclassical economics to be resisted by Marxists, and some did, but not enough, dealing a body blow to Marxism which has not been widely recognized, let alone addressed.18 As more and more neoclassically trained



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economists arrived at Marxism, all their original training having set them at odds with its theory, method, and problematic, they shaped a new “Marxist economics,” qualitatively different from anything in Marx, before the century closed.19 Marxist economics remains to this day preoccupied with trying to fit Marx’s analysis, which stood squarely, if critically, in the tradition of classical political economy, into the alien and antithetical theoretical and methodological tradition of neoclassical economics.20 This being impossible, those attempting it could only end up rejecting key parts of Marx’s work, claiming, for instance, that there is no consumption problem, that the rate of profit does not fall, and that Marx’s analysis of capitalism suffers from a “transformation problem” since it cannot “transform” prices into values (here mistaking Ricardos’s problem, described above, for Marx’s and entirely missing the point that the relation between values and prices is set by the dynamics of value production and that their deviation from each other is a necessary part of those dynamics). In our own time, generation after generation of “Marxist economists” has made its living saying Marx was wrong. The emergence of such a “Marxist economics” contributed to hardening positivist and economistic influences that made for the “Marxism of the Second International,” a degeneration that determined Marxism’s fate generally.21 In this form, to intellectuals of Polanyi’s generation, Marx and Marxism appeared (as Polanyi put it) “dogmatic,” economic determinist, and “state socialist.”22 This meant that, while Polanyi was deeply attracted to Marx as a thinker, he rejected Marx’s analysis of value and exploitation. Revisionist Marxists such as Eduard Bernstein and the Fabians, to whom Polanyi was fairly close in a certain phase of his life, reinforced Polanyi’s rejection of classical political economy’s and Marx’s account of value, beginning with “Locke’s false start on the labor origins of value” and the ruling neoclassical preference for subjective utility as the explanatory basis of price, and to accept the neoclassical notion of supply and demand determining the prices at which markets cleared.23 Polanyi’s intervention in the socialist calculation debate, therefore, rejected both Neurath-style nonmonetary in-kind planning and Mises’s view that planning was impossible. Polanyi conceived of planning in functionalist terms inspired by English guild socialism “in which the function of the trade unions should not be restricted to wage bargaining; rather, the unions should organize production after all the means of production had been transferred to the state.”24 Socialism should aim at once at increasing productivity and extending social rights, and socialist calculation was to aid in its achievement. In a capitalist society productivity fell short of the maximum achievable level (cyclical crises halted production, and monopolies slowed it down) and the importance of public goods was not completely realized. By contrast, a socialistic economy was able to guarantee maximum productivity and equal distribution through the correct computation of costs. The computation could be performed neither by an administrative economy (Neurath’s model), because prices must be expressed in monetary form, nor by a liberal system (Mises’s one), where prices were formed in an unregulated free market where the waste and the

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Reading the Postwar Future under-utilization of resources were frequent. Costs could be correctly computed jointly by the local political authority (the Kommune) and the productive associations.25

Though the distorted Marxism that prevailed at his time led Polanyi to distance himself from it, given that he, like Marx and other substantivist thinkers, rejected the separation of an “economic” sphere from other social spheres, this conception of socialism was hardly alien to Marx.26 Moreover, Polanyi’s rejection of Marx’s notions of value and exploitation only drove Polanyi to develop other aspects of Marx’s critical understanding of capitalism. The idea that capitalism was an unnatural construct, foisted relatively recently on human societies and reliant upon “disembedding” markets which had hitherto been “embedded” in society, and that land, labor, and money were fictitious commodities, served Polanyi as the principal lever for his critique of capitalism or market society (terms he used interchangeably). Though Polanyi’s critique of capitalism is usually considered utterly distinct from Marx’s, not only is its radicalism and thoroughness comparable to Marx’s, it could only arise in that transitional moment between the apex of classical political economy that was Marx’s oeuvre and the rise of Marginalist neoclassical economics, and from a thinker who, despite accepting parts of the latter, remained deeply connected to the former. Although Polanyi is considered to have originated the concept of fictitious commodities, as Gareth Dale has pointed out, it could be traced back at least to Ferdinand Tönnies. When neoclassical economics was still new and, seemingly, entirely different from the classical tradition, many intellectuals like Tönnies looked askance at the latecomer discipline. Marx was Tönnies’s intellectual lodestar, and his classic Community and Society accepts that labor is the source of value, that value is an objective measure based on socially necessary labor embodied in commodities, and, of course, that the capitalist arrangements that produce these phenomena are historically specific. The signature theme of Tönnies’s best-known work distinguished capitalist society from all hitherto existing societies in ways faithful to Marx. For Tönnies, the separation of people and their communities from the land, itself a product of a long history, lays the basis of the unnatural commodification of labor and land without which no hoard of money, however great, could become value capable of being valorized further as capital.27 Most remarkably perhaps, Tönnies defended Marx against the spurious accusation of the emerging Marxist economics—of being unable to reconcile average profits with the notion of value and therefore solve the infamous “transformation problem”—on the basis of a remarkably accurate understanding of Marx’s analysis.28 In Community and Society, Tönnies speaks of land, labor, and money as being fictitious commodities. However, he deploys the concept so casually that it must have been widely known and used at the time. After all, classical political economy never regarded the three, though they were bought and sold in capitalism, as ordinary commodities: they were not produced for sale (in the case of land, not produced at all); they did not have production costs; their prices were determined through social not market relations; and their supply could not be changed in the



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short run.29 This last point was critical: the supply response, increasing or decreasing supply in response to changing demand conditions, was critical if competition was to press down prices to their socially necessary or value level. This was not possible in the case of the three commodities. Confronted with the neoclassical tendency to consider them commodities and to insist on the purely market determination of their prices like any commodity, it was only a matter of time before classically trained thinkers labeled them special or fictitious commodities at best. This is just what Polanyi was doing: Labor, land and money are obviously not commodities. . . . Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by Man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance. None of them is produced for sale. The commodity description of labor, land and money is entirely fictitious.30

Incidentally, one paradoxical implication of this is that the neoclassical theory of prices, in which only supply and demand determine them, was applicable precisely to fictitious commodities (and assets of a certain fixity of supply more generally), rather than true commodities. Though Marx concentrated on the exploitative and contradictory dynamics of value production, they were built on the non-commodity reality of land, labor, and money while Polanyi, though he accepted the neoclassical account of value for real commodities, mounted his critique of capitalism on the same basis as Marx.

The historical stakes The background to throw our two texts into most prominent relief can be confined neither to the Second World War, though it formed the immediate context, nor to the “Twenty Years’ Crisis” which preceded it, even though Hayek and Polanyi developed and defined their positions during those decades.31 It is, rather, the greater “Thirty Years’ Crisis” of 1914 to 1945, encompassing the two world wars and the Great Depression, that placed the future of capitalism and imperialism in doubt amid an unprecedented empowerment of working and colonized peoples.32 Framing it thus also draws our attention to the developments—domestic and international—that culminated in war and crisis. Buildup to crisis The geopolitical economy of these developments—combining national and international developments in a single frame—can be outlined as follows: with the state-directed “combined” development of a bevy of new industrializers, chiefly the

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United States, Japan, and Germany, Britain lost her historic dominance over the world market amid the Second Industrial Revolution.33 This era—characterized as it was by the production of producers’ (as opposed to consumers’) goods, high capital requirements, and consequent increasing prominence of finance and industrial concentration on an unprecedented scale along with cartelization, trustification, and a rising role for governments in economic regulation (whether in the form of tariffs, the setting up of central banks, or social reform)—constituted the world’s first multipolar moment. In contemporary circumstances where weak states and stateless territories could still be had, on the international level, the “expansion of England” became competitive imperialism as the new industrial powers of their time sought the same advantages from colonies as Britain and the older industrial powers. These developments, combined with increasingly well-organized and politically assertive working classes and the first stirrings of nationalism in many colonies, framed the politics of the age. While competitive imperialism could take peaceful forms, as in the Berlin conference of 1885 at which European powers carved up Africa, the possibility of general European war emerged around the turn of the century. The dominant currents of opinion in the world that went to war in 1914 remained, however, oblivious to these developments: on the eve of that cataclysm, liberalism remained the dominant article of faith, and few suspected that such a great war was imminent. Norman Agnell’s The Great Illusion, which took the liberal equation of capitalism and peace to new heights, had been a runaway success, having gone through many editions since its original 1909 publication. The 1913 edition had been particularly popular. Critical observers with their ear closer to the historical ground could, however, hear the drums of war that had started beating more than a decade before 1914. These less sanguine observers— whether Marxists like Hilferding, Luxemburg, Bukharin, and Lenin, or social liberals like Hobson—saw clearly that competitive imperialism was heightening international tensions and could lead to war. This largely Marxist understanding of the imperial origins of the First World War (and by extension the Thirty Years’ Crisis) has long been contested. The Fischer thesis of German war guilt held that the German government planned the war as part of its bid for world power, while other historians refused any theoretical or structural perspective to occupy themselves with an allegedly a- or pre-theoretical preoccupation with the minutiae of historical events.34 Both perspectives also viewed the Great War as a European event: imperialism was no part of their picture. In recent years, however, Christopher Clark’s major study amounts to an endorsement of the structural position by taking the opposed path: a most intricate study of the details of the events that led up to it. According to Clark, “The outbreak of the war was a tragedy, not a crime” and “the Germans were not the only imperialists.”35 Once it broke out, the First World War was experienced as a great rupture: it was at once a crisis of liberalism, rationalism, peace, and progress. For New Liberal LT Hobhouse, classical liberalism died with the outbreak of war, and the world not only seemed different but became different on August 4. . . . It turned out in sober truth a different world from that which we knew, a world in



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which force had a greater part to play than we have allowed, a world in which the ultimate social securities were gone, in which we seemed to see all of a sudden through a thin crust of civilization the seething forces of barbaric lust for power and indifference to life.36

Given the magnitude of the calamity it represented, the outbreak of war forced the recognition that underlying realities had been changing for decades. And the war itself only seemed to accelerate the changes. Authoritarian and imperial governments now became reliant on working class and colonial support. Conscription and planning sharpened the “Liberal dilemma”: “Liberal methods could only be vindicated by military victory; yet victory seemed unattainable without abandoning Liberal methods.”37 If all this were not bad enough, the Russian Revolution that broke out amid war now pointed to a future beyond capitalism. The crisis according to Hayek and Polanyi If, in The Road to Serfdom, this multifaceted drama which brought the world to 1944 is reduced to the development of a penchant for socialism among intellectuals, it is simply because that, for Hayek and the Austrians, was the content of the crisis. To align their concerns with those that moved the masses, Hayek argued that socialist proclivities led to fascism and Nazism and would constitute the veritable road to serfdom if allowed to continue. In making this argument, Hayek bowed to the dominance of socialist opinion by repeatedly stressing that he believed that socialists were motivated by laudable idealism and by dedicating The Road to Serfdom to “Socialists of all countries.” The resulting argument presents socialism as little more than a variant of “the road to hell” being “paved with good intentions.” Hayek’s disingenuousness is hard to ignore as he takes back furtively with the other hand what he has given ostentatiously with the first: socialists were at least immature if not greedy, or preying upon human greed. They attacked liberalism “precisely because its success surpassed man’s wildest dreams” of providing “the working man . . . a degree of material comfort, security and personal independence” hitherto unimaginable and this success only boosted the desire for more “and the principles which had made this progress possible . . . came to be regarded more as obstacles to speedier progress impatiently to be brushed away.”38 Socialists had also engaged in a special sleight of hand: though actually authoritarian (Hayek exploits all the resources of anti-socialism including de Tocqueville), they began posing as friends of freedom by giving it a new meaning of “economic freedom” which only socialism could deliver.39 This thin historical account is the most a fundamentally ahistorical thinker can concede to history: “The intellectual history of the last sixty or eighty years is indeed a perfect illustration of the truth that in social evolution nothing is inevitable but thinking makes it so.” Hayek’s more or less static argument about certain alleged dynamics of modern society could not form a greater contrast with the fundamentally historical account of The Great Transformation, essentially the

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tragedy of capitalism driven forward by its contradictions. Where Marx, seeking to resolve the antimonies of classical political economy discovered these in the dynamics of value production, which led, for instance, to the paucity of demand or the tendency of profits to decline, Polanyi, as we have seen, located them in the treatment of land, labor, and money as commodities. As is well known, Polanyi argued that societies could not withstand the commodity treatment of these three elements and so, as markets spread and subjected the three elements to commodification, affected social forces—workers, landlords, farmers or peasants, businesses, and managers of economies, all of whom relied on the productive and monetary organization of society—reacted spontaneously to protect these elements from the actions of the markets. This “double movement” drove the evolution of capitalist societies from its beginnings until its violent crisis. Polanyi’s nuanced, sensitive, and complex account of the movements for social protection also complements and enlivens the aforementioned theories of imperialism. While each of them emphasized aspects of the complex economic developments of the time—the rise of monopoly, the more prominent roles of finance, or the nationalization of economies—all agreed that states had become weightier actors in economic life. To this element, Polanyi added vivid color. Movements for social protection—environmental and tariff protection for the produce of the land, the regulation of wages and working conditions, the rise of social reform and central banking to protect the national productive apparatus from the harsh winds of the gold standard, and the whole host of financial and economic regulations—led to the rise of “crustacean nations,” nations with hard borders. Just how necessary they had become, Polanyi argued in a reflection that went beyond any of the Marxist theories of imperialism in considering the fate of colonized nations, became clear in their fate: countries rejected free trade and, where possible, competed to acquire “overseas and exotic markets,” because the alternative was “unspeakable suffering” in the “exotic and semicolonial regions” where markets were “imposed on a helpless people in the absence of protective measures.” What made countries act in this manner was simply the fear of consequences similar to those which the powerless peoples were unable to avert. The difference was merely that while the tropical population of the wretched colony was thrown into utter misery and degradation, often to the point of physical extinction, the Western country’s refusal was induced by the danger of a smaller peril but still sufficiently real to be avoided at almost all cost.40

The negative demonstration effect of the colonies reinforced the struggle of nations to avoid this fate at all costs. Hence “crustacean nations”, whose survival into the twentieth century improved the prospects of socialism. Among the movements for social protection, those relating to money were historically more momentous. Not only was “the institutional separation of the political and economic spheres .  .  . necessarily incomplete” when it came



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to money, preventing completely commodified money, central banking was at once the institution that commodified money (as far as it could be) and the institution of social protection against its consequences: “Central banking reduced the automatism of the gold standard to a mere pretense.” Only such consistent adherents of the gold standard as von Mises advocated the abolition of central banking, and “his advice, had it been heeded, would have transformed national economies into a heap of ruins.”41 Moreover, only the commodification of money, and social protection against it, had taken the form of an international institution, namely the gold standard. It represented at once the acme of the institution of the self-regulated market, and its limit. When it collapsed, and could not be restored, it represented the collapse of nineteenth-century civilization whose defining quality had been the double movement between advancing markets and the response of social protection. Continuity in the long crisis Placing The Road to Serfdom and The Great Transformation against the background of the Thirty Years’ Crisis also calls attention to the unity of the period constituted by the failure of the variety of attempts to resolve the crisis. Internationally, the Great War may have ended with the defeat of Germany, but writing German guilt into Versailles and demanding reparations—themselves prompted by the US insistence on the repayment of war debt—constituted the continuation of competitive imperialism.42 Domestically, capitalist classes and their representatives exerted all the power they could summon to restore the world that had collapsed: the gold standard along with free movement of capital and goods, empires, and a world before socialism and nationalism. Of course these efforts would be in vain: the decades before 1914 had undermined them all in a gradual if inexorable process that the war had vastly accelerated. Nevertheless, efforts to restore the old world consumed the “Conservative Twenties,” though the “Revolutionary Thirties” witnessed some acceptance of new realities.43 The recognition of those new realities remained hesitant and grudging: in the Anglo-American homelands of liberalism, the New Deal constituted its horizon, while it took stronger and rival forms on the continent with Russian planned industrialization as well as fascism and Nazism. John Maynard Keynes was arguably the most clear-eyed observer of the times. From his elevated vantage point among the policy makers of an empire that would suffer a drastic cutting down to size, he not only warned against “the economic consequences of the peace” and the reparations at Versailles in particular, he also campaigned against the restoration of the gold standard both because Britain had become incapable of administering it and because of the cost it imposed on working people.44 A few years later, he would proclaim “the end of laissezfaire.”45 While Keynes was showing why things could not go on as before, his focus remained on practical and policy matters. If Keynes’s voice was a lone one in the 1920s, by the 1930s, more and more people had to admit that the clock could not be put back. The crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression. Britain finally gave up trying to restore the gold

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standard. Roosevelt experimented with the New Deal though its weakness and brevity failed to end the Depression. Planned economies such as Germany’s under fascist rule and the USSR under Stalin boomed. Nationalist pressures for decolonization could no longer be denied. Last but not least, Keynes’s General Theory proposed a critique of capitalism that was comparable in its radicalism to Marx’s.46 In tandem with his realization of a weakening British industry and impending decolonization, Keynes began to beat that path toward envisaging a post-imperialist world of national economies that formed the basis of his original proposals at Bretton Woods, centered on a radical alternative to the gold standard in the form of a multilaterally created currency for the payments of central bank imbalances, and an International Clearing Union that would administer it in ways that preserved the national character economies had undeniably acquired. In this context, voices for socialism, or some very radical modification of capitalism, grew louder while those who would defend capitalism were thin on the ground. However, lack of numbers was generously made up for by the resources which businesses and their foundations and organizations put at the disposal of the intellectuals committed to, if not re-creating the pre-1914 world, at least ensuring that the shift away from it stopped as far short of socialism as possible.47 This amplified the otherwise none-too-strong voice of the right in what became, as Allied victory came into view by 1944, a veritable battle for the future of humanity: would it be capitalist or socialist? Beyond the crisis It was no secret to contemporaries that the Second World War was the outcome of the unfinished business of the First. The feeling that things must be better managed after the conclusion of the Second World War than they had been after the First, that the Second World War was a “second chance,” was widely expressed across the political spectrum, whether by US intellectuals and policy makers hoping to manage a more effective US dominion than had been achieved after the First World War, by nationalist movements fighting for independence, or by those seeking to reorganize world governance after the failure of the League of Nations.48 No wonder the stakes of reconstruction after the Second World War were immense. It was not just a matter of picking up the pieces after a war, however extensive and destructive, but one of reestablishing civilization on a new basis. Hayek referred to “the present crisis of our civilization,” while the famous opening sentence of The Great Transformation proclaimed, “Nineteenth Century Civilization has collapsed.”49 The historically grounded Polanyi framed his narrative critically around the failure to put the clock back in the “Conservative Twenties” and was fully aware of the stakes in reconstruction, famously thrusting a hastily finished manuscript of The Great Transformation into the publisher’s hands to be back in England for the coming end of the war and the expected political contest over reconstruction. And even Hayek referred to how winning the war “will only give us [by which he meant Britain] another opportunity to face the basic problems and to find a way of averting the fate which has overtaken kindred civilizations.”50



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It should be clear by now that even before the war, the principle of laissez-faire had been breached from every conceivable angle, affecting trade, investment, labor, and capital. On this terrain, Hayek and the Austrian School faced the task of reestablishing a measure of freedom for capital without which it could no longer exist. Polanyi’s challenge was considerably different. Certainly it was not to propose socialism de novo: plenty of proposals and designs existed, as diverse as the left had become since 1914. Rather, his challenge was to refute the Austrian argument. As an intellectual who knew the nature of the beast better than practically anyone else— having engaged with it in the socialist calculation debate and beyond since the days of Red Vienna, and having followed the arguments of Hayek and his ilk—Polanyi brought the talents not only of a socialist but an independent one, unconnected with any major socialist party but broadly sympathetic to the cause. So how did The Road to Serfdom and The Great Transformation propose to approach reconstruction?

The Road to Serfdom The Road to Serfdom directs its animus against the prevailing preference for socialism. It is essentially a negative work. Using all the ingenuity of the intellectually questionable Austrian School and supplementing it with all available prejudices that might help its case, it argues that socialism is the problem and must be avoided at all costs. Socialists, in Hayek’s telling, had persuaded Western civilization to abandon the liberal road by appropriating the theme of freedom and giving it a new meaning: economic freedom. It promised to deliver this new freedom through planning but, contrary to arguments that planning had become inevitable thanks to monopolies or technical change, planning was impossible without dictatorship. Individuals could not have economic security without losing freedom. Though Hayek later became famous for proposing that centralized planning was impossible because it had no equivalent of the market to act as a complex processor of the necessarily partial and limited information of individuals into price signals that regulated demand and supply, in The Road to Serfdom, his arguments remain on moral grounds, suggesting that imposing central planning would require a historically unprecedented, comprehensive and shared code of values. Since such a code is practically impossible, planning would inevitably violate democracy because there would never be agreement on the detailed allocations for production and consumption it would have to make, and would also violate the rule of law because laws could never be sufficiently detailed while remaining generally applicable. The result could only be a totalitarian system aiming to determine the minutiae of the lives of individuals and, this being impossible, would lead to arbitrary and despotic rule, supported by propaganda. Internationally, Hayek set his face against fatal illusions that by substituting negotiations between states or organized groups for competition for markets or for raw materials, international friction would be reduced. This would merely put a contest of force in the place of what

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Reading the Postwar Future can only metaphorically be called the “struggle” of competition, and transfer to powerful and armed states, subject to no superior law, the rivalries which between individuals had been decided without recourse to force. Economic transactions between national bodies . . . [of this sort] . . . must end in clashes of power.51

In their place, Hayek recommended “an international authority which effectively limits the powers of the state over the individual [which] will be one of the best safeguards of peace.”52 And against “muddle-headed talk” about “planning to equalize standards of life” even with those of the “Danube basin and South Eastern Europe” (let alone the colonized millions), he cautioned against hasty and overly extensive federations and recommended instead “close association for those countries which are more similar in their civilization, outlook and standards.”53 This argument is supplemented by another which exploits the widespread revulsion against fascism and Nazism to stigmatize socialism. Hayek famously attributed the rise of fascism to the rise of socialism as an organized movement of the working class and as a vogue among intellectuals. In this connection he spoke of the “kinship between Prussianism and socialism” and argued “it would be a mistake to believe that the specific German rather than the socialist element produced totalitarianism.”54 His essential point was that, while fascism is generally seen as opposed to socialism, it is best seen as its inevitable outgrowth; that both represent an undisciplined desire for more prompted by the historically unprecedented fruits of liberal civilization; that the economic control both would impose leads to totalitarianism; that both rest on the illusory pursuit of economic security; that both lead to restrictions on individual freedom; that the “worst get on top” in both; that both destroy truth; and that neither understands “the economy.” Two other points about The Road to Serfdom may be noted. First, in an age when the virtues of planning were so clear against the backdrop of the anarchy of capitalism and its free market and when the rise of monopoly ensured that the rhetoric of the free market and laissez-faire could only ring hollow, Hayek shifted his argument for capitalism onto the terrain of competition. In fact, he claimed that “nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire.”55 However, contrary to contemporary celebration of the alleged genius of Hayek, this was less a rejection of laissez-faire than a recognition that its essence, which was the freedom of capital and capitalists, had never been served by leaving well alone. The preservation of capitalism needed a clearer demarcation of what government action could and could not do. Hayek gave this the grand title of “planning for competition.”56 Moreover, the operation was hardly original: early twentieth-century US antitrust law was already a, if not the, major signal that the days of “laissez-faire” were over because the rise of giant monopoly corporations had changed the terrain of capitalism forever. Nor was it easy: Hayek struggled to argue that such monopoly was not inevitable, hanging on to shreds of evidence produced by the Temporary National Economic Committee of the US Congress



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when monopoly was robustly in evidence all around, claiming that competition made markets produce the right price signals in a complex economy when monopoly was doing the opposite, and having to concede that, in the short run at least, optimal use of technology may require the suppression of competition.57 Second, with the working-class interest now well entrenched in the political system, Hayek had no hope of the most minimal influence unless he conceded that in Western societies “some minimum of food, shelter and clothing sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work can be assured to everybody,” though he revealed the punitive iron fist under the permissive velvet glove more or less immediately by pointing to “difficult questions” about the precise standard to be assured and “whether those who thus rely on the community should indefinitely enjoy all the same liberties as the rest.”58 History may have forced Hayek to enter the twentieth century, but he clearly hankered after the nineteenth-century world of workhouses when the question of labor came up. Hayek also conceded the principle of social insurance against “sickness or accident” or acts of god, organized by the state though again with the proviso that it should do as little damage to competition as possible.59 Finally, Hayek came to the “supremely important” problem of “general fluctuations of economic activity and the recurrent waves of large-scale unemployment which accompany them.”60 Less than a decade before, the burden of Keynes’s argument had been to refute the neoclassical idea that there was no involuntary unemployment and even an Austrian could no longer write as though Keynes had not written. But Hayek could not gainsay Keynes. Apart from a vague gesture toward the “right kind of planning,” Hayek stuck to hoping that the “ultimate remedy may be found in the field of monetary policy” and warning against the position that “real success can be expected only from the skillful timing of public works undertaken on a very large scale.” This was open to the danger of “making all economic activity progressively more dependent on the direction and volume of government expenditure.”61 He did not, and could not, speak to the unlikelihood, foreseen by Keynes, that the influence of banking policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself to determine an optimum rate of investment. I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment; though this need not exclude all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will co-operate with private initiative.62

The Great Transformation If Hayek’s task was to restate the case for capitalism in new historical circumstances with new, refashioned, intellectual tools devised to eclipse classical political economy, Polanyi’s was to protect socialism’s right flank against Hayek and his ilk. In the process, however, Polanyi produced an epic tragedy of the rise of capitalism,

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imperialism, their crises and catastrophic outcome, undoing key neoclassical or Austrian advances, and making a novel case for socialism, one that was broader than the Marxist one, at least as popularly understood. Polanyi’s argument was historical, and we have already seen the basics of his argument: that the drive to create a “self-regulating market system” inevitably meant extending it to all products and elements of production, including land, labor, and money. The latter three not being commodities but rather elements of life itself, they, as well as society, could not bear their commodification: “To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society.”63 The resulting movement for social protection was, therefore, inevitable and, leading as it did on the one hand to imperialism and international struggles between “crustacean nations” and on the other to the inevitable breakdown of the gold standard because it attempted the impossible, the commodification of entire social structures by commodifying money, Polanyi concluded that “the origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.”64 In making this argument, The Great Transformation goes for the jugular of the Austrian/Hayekian argument against planning and otherwise interfering in the allegedly spontaneous or natural market mechanism. It “hinges on the idea that laissez-faire was a natural development, while subsequent anti-laissez-faire legislation was a result of a purposeful action on the part of the opponents of liberal principles. In these two mutually exclusive interpretations, of the double movement, it is not too much to say, the truth or untruth of the liberal position is involved today.”65 Market society, Polanyi argues, was planned and had to be because the commodification of land, labor, and money was anything but spontaneous. They did not come into being until the middle of the nineteenth century when a trio of measures was passed. Where the Speenhamland system of parish provision for the poor had prevented the full commodification of labor since 1795, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, by eliminating all but the barest and most punitive of social provisions, commodified labor. The Banking Act of 1844—representing the victory of the Ricardian currency school, which sought to make money mimic gold, over the banking school which understood money as a social institution— commodified money. And the repeal of the Corn Laws, which lifted protection for English agriculture and mobilized the land of the rest of the world to feed the British proletariat, commodified land. These acts sprang from economic liberalism, the ruling ideology of the age whose utopia was free markets and which constituted a “social project” that required for its fulfillment not only “an outburst of legislation repealing restrictive regulations, but also an enormous increase in the administrative functions of the state.” Thus “laissez-faire was not a method to achieve a thing, it was a thing to be achieved” by government, “the great agency for achieving happiness.” Paradoxically, therefore, “The introduction of markets, far from doing away with the need for control, regulation, and intervention, enormously increased their range.”66



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Moreover, this paradox was topped by another. While laissez-faire was the product of deliberate state action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way quite simply because they created markets which implied a latent threat to society in some vital aspects of its existence. The competitive labor market hit the bearer of labor power, namely man. International free trade was primarily a threat to the largest industry dependent on nature, namely agriculture. The gold standard imperiled productive organization depending on their functioning on the relative movement of prices. Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.67

Here Polanyi was relying on the conservative jurist, AV Dicey, whose inquiry into the “anti-laissez-faire” or, as he called it, “collectivist” trend in English public opinion since the 1860s . . . [found] no evidence of the existence of such a trend . . . save the acts of legislation themselves. . . . The upshot of his penetrating inquiry was that there had been complete absence of any deliberate intention to extend the functions of the state, or to restrict the freedom of the individual, on the part of those who were directly responsible for the restrictive enactments of the 1870s and 1880s. The legislative spearhead of the countermovement against the selfregulating market as it developed in the half century following 1860 turned out to be spontaneous, undirected by opinion and actuated by a purely pragmatic spirit.68

But Polanyi did more than this. His wider historical narrative superseded the old debate between laissez-faire and planning. The revolt against liberalism was inevitable. The choice was between different forms of planning, whether to preserve capitalism, an option that left the door open to fascistic developments as their inevitable consequence, and an effort to build a socialism that preserved individual freedom as far as possible and inventively explored organizational alternatives for doing so. He also provided an understanding of the economic role of nations of which most of the left remains innocent but without which no advance toward more productive and just societies domestically and a more just and fair world order are possible. Third, his framework of the three fictitious commodities permits an understanding of socialism as a movement not just of the working classes but all who work on the land and in industry and all who have a stake in the overall productive organization of society.

The hiss and the static While the postwar period saw the triumph of center-left arguments over the center-right, the left’s victory was limited, The Great Transformation was forgotten, and Polanyi forced into the relative intellectual obscurity of chiefly anthropological research in the two postwar decades of his life (in good part thanks

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to McCarthyism). Moreover, the Keynesianism that triumphed was one that Joan Robinson, for one, dubbed “bastard Keynesianism,” de-radicalized politically and defanged intellectually through being reduced, in its Samuelsonian version, to macroeconomic monetary and (limited) fiscal demand management. It retained no trace of Keynes’s foresight that there would come a time when these would not suffice and a “somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment”—essentially no different from a form of socialism—would be necessary.69 In this context, neoclassical economics (the target of Keynes’s criticism as much as Polanyi’s) survived, particularly in the field of “micro” economics, and continued to shape the minds of generations of students, ensuring that they remained strangers to the problematics and arguments of classical political economy and would fall under the spell of pre-Keynesian forms of neoclassical economics when they reappeared with the well-funded onslaught of neoliberalism beginning in the 1970s. Such ideas enjoyed a sway over educated minds as never before.70 Without access to any truly radical tradition—with its links to classical political economy and Marxism severed by neoclassical economics and “Marxist economics,” and Keynes’s truly radical analysis by “bastard Keynesianism”—the left has remained unable to challenge the onslaught of neoliberalism over the decades. This failure, not any victory of neoliberalism in the “battle of ideas” as is widely assumed in the still burgeoning literature on its late twentieth-century ascendance and beyond, explains neoliberalism’s continuing dominance. And the failure extends to arguments that the left has something to learn from Hayek. While rejecting “Hayek’s old liberal anti-democratic and elitist views [that] led him to support an institutional pattern which was highly centralized, hierarchical and despotic for most of the people involved in it,” such arguments claim that Hayek is useful in making the case for a socialism or social democracy which is also decentralized and democratic because he “directed attention to the dispersed nature of knowledge, the problems of co-ordination, the appropriate level of planning, the unintended consequences of social action and the importance of spontaneous orders in human affairs.”71 The theoretical advance the left must accept from Hayek, these writers argue, is his “conception of the price system as a discovery procedure,” which forms the basis of his conception of his “regulation and coordination of [individual] economic and social action” resolving the problem of combining the “inherently dispersed and fragmented” knowledge of individuals into some sort of social order.72 However, this argument crumbles because the price system, the nub not only of Hayek’s conceptions but of neoclassical economics across its three schools, simply does not operate as they imagine it does. The recent literature has tended to emphasize theoretical or methodological similarities between Hayek and Polanyi. For Andrea Migone, the two thinkers “represent different strands of a long-standing intellectual tradition that concerned itself with the effects of modernization and economic rationalization on society.” They are both “concerned with socio-institutional responses to the free market,” with Hayek “focused on the limits that an excessive organizational load would put on individual freedom” and Polanyi asking “how societies cope with the incipient economic rationalization that takes center stage in modern market economies,



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disembedding economic relations from their social milieu and enfeebling noneconomic systems of relations.”73 Ola Innset proposes that, notwithstanding “opposite starting points and conclusions, Hayek and Polanyi used similar tools in the form of historical narratives as frames for their arguments, and they both attempted to locate the ‘natural’ in a confusing and complex modern society.”74 And Philip Mirowski complains that the thinkers’ politically opposed followers prevent “serious comparisons.”75 Pointing to such similarities amounts to little more than noting that the two thinkers shared some neoclassical ground without noting that Hayek stood squarely on its far right and Polanyi, who had only one foot planted on it, spoke as a critic of the Austrian School’s arguments against socialism and drew key intellectual resources from classical political economy. Where political differences are noted, it is without nuance or historical context: the two thinkers are “iconic representations of social democratic and neoliberal political theory” or “emblematic of the two modes of organizing capitalist economic relations.”76 Misunderstandings and misinterpretations of Polanyi in particular abound, especially relating to fictitious commodities, the double movement, and to Polanyi’s relation to Marx among academics who cannot imagine thinking about the economy in other than neoclassical terms: Polanyi notoriously [sic] insisted that land, labour, and money were fictitious commodities, hinting that because they were “unnatural,” they were in some sense artificial or illegitimate .  .  . insisting labour and land are not actual commodities because they were not “produced for sale” and, more curiously [sic], he insisted money was not “produced” at all. . . . Apparently, the market can only legitimately deal in the artifactual: things produced through human intentionality to be sold on the market. This weird insistence upon intentionality at the heart of his definitions constitutes Polanyi’s own strangulated appeal to Nature.77

Mirowski’s interpretation, which brims with an intellectual aggression against Polanyi, dismisses both Hayek and Polanyi for making the same esoteric methodological or theoretical mistakes, though Hayek at least is shown to have recovered from them. Mirowski damns Polanyi with faint praise, while Hayek is praised with faint critique. Mirowski’s dismissive treatment of Polanyi contrasts with the kid gloves with which Hayek is treated: his equation of fascism and socialism gets much air time, the sympathies with fascism he shared with his mentor, Ludwig von Mises or his instrumentalization of democracy, none.78 Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain. Nor must we forget that there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies—and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogenous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.79

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Two final problems concern what is not in the recent commemorative literature. First, while eager to show how each thinker’s role, as Mirowski puts it, “was effectively reconstructed by their environment .  .  . or that their reception was largely governed by forces beyond the ken of the public intellectual,” there is next to no discussion of the vast institutional and pecuniary support Hayek and his fellow neoliberals received, nor the contrasting marginalization of Polanyi and left intellectuals like him.80 Perry Anderson’s contrast between the “white emigration” that was attracted to the specifically liberal and empirical intellectual traditions of Britain and the Red Emigration that dispersed elsewhere is part of the background; Hayek was among the Austrians who, with the “the parish pump positivism of inter-bellum Vienna,” was not only attracted to but also reciprocally embraced by the British. Polanyi, while attracted to the equally empiricist and a-theoretical left traditions, shared the fate of left-wing intellectuals who emigrated there. Anderson’s summation of Issac Deutscher’s fate in Britain could well be applied to Polanyi: “Isaac Deutscher, the greatest Marxist historian of his time, . . . was reviled and ignored by the academic world throughout his life. He never secured the smallest university post. British culture accepted and promoted what confirmed its fundamental set: it censored and negated anything which departed from it.”81 Members of the Austrian School of economics were employed and generously supported, first by European and then by Anglo-American capitalist classes and their institutions and foundations in the inter- and postwar periods precisely because they were refashioning the case for capitalism in its darkest hour. Hayek, who was both prominent and typical, began his career at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce studying business cycles (an indication that the crisis-prone dynamic of capitalism could no longer be ignored). The Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations funded his research, and the precursors of the Mont Pelerin Society that Hayek formed in 1946, beginning in the 1920s. Something of the character of the pecuniary nexus is revealed in the following: More proximately, the biggest single funder of the first MPS meeting was the Swiss industrialist and diplomat, Hans Sulzer, who was a member of the council of the ICC’s [International Chamber of Commerce] executive committee in the 1930s and one of its vice presidents after 1945. A main financial supporter of the MPS and later a member—and blacklisted by the British for alleged trade with the Nazis—Sulzer helped try hire Hayek for a chair at the University of Zurich after the war. He was also a member of the Joint Committee of the ICC and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which had sponsored major research by the world’s leading economists (including Mises) on international economic reconstruction in the 1930s.82

Hayek held prestigious university chairs—at the London School of Economics, then at the University of Chicago, and finally at the University of Freiburg. His fate fits perfectly in the larger British and later broadly Western sympathy for counterrevolutionary emigration from Europe. It also forms a near-perfect



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contrast to the practically pariah status to which most left-wing émigré intellectuals were consigned. Polanyi conformed to the pattern. He got only temporary employment in journalism and lecturing for the Workers’ Educational Association in England, while in the United States he could secure only a part time teaching position at Columbia, to which he had to commute from Canada because McCarthyist persecution would not permit his wife, the lifelong Communist Ilona Duczynska, to enter the United States. This contrasting and largely ignored reception forms the essential background against which to judge the “achievements” of coddled neoliberals and the advances of marginalized socialists like Polanyi. Finally, current comparisons between Hayek and Polanyi also fail to relate them to the contemporary conjuncture of capitalist failure and the resulting rise of right-wing, populist, and fascist forces—a conjuncture that can be said to be the handiwork of Hayek and his followers and precisely what Polanyi had warned about.

Conclusion Retold as above, against the intellectual historical background of the shift that the rise of neoclassical economics represented and against the historical background of the Thirty Years’ Crisis, its origin and unfolding, the clash between Hayek and Polanyi is revealed as a clash between two important figures, one important for his intellectual and the other for his political stature. Our remastering leaves little room for specious intellectual comparisons between the two and underlines the critical importance of understanding the politics that divided them. Unless we do so, the rot of neoliberalism, which is already producing fascistic maggots in the body politic, will not be stopped and the hope of building a more just society will recede into the ever more distant future.

Notes 1 Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British politics and the Second World War (London: Cape, 1975), 19. 2 Arthur Marwick, “Middle Opinion in the 1930s: Planning, Progress and Political ‘Agreement,’” English Historical Review 79, no. 311 (April 1964): 285–98. 3 Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1944), 26. 4 Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 27. 5 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957). 6 Polanyi, Great Transformation, 202. 7 Addison, Road to 1945, 265. 8 Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right (London: Blackwell, 1994); Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).

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9 Seventieth anniversary commentaries include Ola Innset, “Markets, Knowledge, and Human Nature: Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi, and Twentieth-Century Debates on Modern Social Order,” European Historical Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2017): 679–700; Andrea Migone, “Embedded Markets: A Dialogue between FA Hayek and Karl Polanyi,” Review of Austrian Economics 24, no. 4 (December 2011): 355–81; Damien Cahill, “Polanyi, Hayek, and Embedded Neoliberalism,” Globalizations (accessed July 26, 2018; DOI 10.1080/14747731.2018.1498171); Gareth Dale, “Our World Was Made by Nature: Constructions of Spontaneous Order,” Globalizations (accessed July 24, 2018: DOI 10.1080/14747731.2018.1498172); Philip Mirowski, “Polanyi vs. Hayek?” Globalizations (accessed July 24, 2018: DOI 10.1080/14747731.2018.1498174); João Rodrigues, “Neoliberalism as a Real Utopia? Karl Polanyi and the Theoretical Practice of FA Hayek,” Globalizations (accessed July 26, 2018: DOI 10.1080/14747731.2018.1498176); Nicola Short, “Market/Society: Mapping Conceptions of Power, Ideology, and Subjectivity in Polanyi, Hayek, Foucault, and Lukács,” Globalizations (accessed July 30, 2018: DOI 10.1080/14747731.2018.1498213). 10 For further elaboration of these developments in intellectual history, see Radhika Desai, “Political Economy,” in Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, eds. Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis, and Imre Szeman (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 11 Nicolai Bukharin, The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (1914; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); Radhika Desai, “The Value of History and the History of Value,” in The Great Meltdown of 2008: Systemic, Conjunctural, or Policy-Created? ed. Turan Subasat (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016), 136–58. 12 Clarke, Marx, Marginalism, 261–65. 13 Desai, “The Value of History.” 14 Tae-Hee Jo, “What If There Are No Conventional Price Mechanisms?” Journal of Economic Issues 50, no. 2 (2016): 327–44. 15 Quoted in Giandomenica Beccio, “The Early Debate on Economic Calculation in Vienna (1919-1925). The Heterodox Point of View: Neurath, Mises, and Polanyi,” Storia del Pensiero Economico 2 (2007): 135. 16 Quoted in Beccio, “Early Debate,” 139. 17 Perry Anderson, English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), 275–76. 18 See Bukharin for one example of early twentieth-century Marxist opposition to neoclassical economics. 19 Radhika Desai, “Consumption Demand in Marx and in the Current Crisis,” Research in Political Economy 26 (2010): 101–41. 20 Radhika Desai, “The First World War: Climax and Crisis of Imperialism,” in The Long End of the First World War. Ruptures, Continuities and Memories, eds. Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Heike Liebau, and Anorthe Wetzel (Frankfurt: Campus, 2018), 17–44; Desai, “Consumption Demand”; Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization, and Empire (London: Pluto, 2013); Desai, “The Value of History.” 21 Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). 22 Polanyi, Great Transformation, x, 151, 10. 23 On Polanyi’s connection to the Fabians, see Dale, “Our World,” 7, 14. For his early rejection of Marx’s theory of value, see Polanyi, Great Transformation, 124.



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24 Beccio, “Early Debate,” 139. 25 Ibid., 140. 26 Conrad M. Arensberg, Harry W. Pearson, and Karl Polanyi, eds., Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). 27 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (London: Vintage, 1989); Desai, “The First World War.” 28 Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (1887; New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 101. 29 Maurice Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 34. 30 Polanyi, Great Transformation, 72. 31 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (1939; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1962). 32 On the “Thirty Years’ Crisis,” see Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (London: Verso, 1981). 33 Desai, Geopolitical Economy. 34 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 560. 35 Clark, Sleepwalkers, 561. 36 Quoted in Clark, Sleepwalkers, 167. 37 Clark, Sleepwalkers, 181. 38 Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 13. 39 Ibid., 19. 40 Polanyi, Great Transformation, 214–15. 41 Ibid., 196, 193. 42 On German war debt repayment, see John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire and the Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919; New York: Prometheus Books, 2004); Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of US World Dominance (1972; London: Pluto Press, 2003). 43 Polanyi, Great Transformation. 44 Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire. 45 Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936; London: Macmillan, 1967). 46 Desai, “Keynes Redux: World Money after the 2008 Crisis,” in Bailouts and Bankruptcies, eds. Wayne Anthony and Julie Guard (Winnipeg: Fernwood Press, 2009); Desai and Alan Freeman, “Keynes and the Crisis: A Case of Mistaken Identity,” Canadian Dimension, July 2009. 47 Kees Van Der Pilj, The Discipline of Western Supremacy: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2014); Slobodian, Globalists. 48 Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967); Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (Spring 1999 [1941]): 159–71; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-colonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 49 Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 8; Polanyi, Great Transformation, 3. 50 Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 9. 51 Ibid., 163–64. 52 Ibid., 175. 53 Ibid., 167, 176.

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54 Ibid., 6–7. 55 Ibid., 13. 56 Ibid., 13–14. 57 Ibid., 32–39. 58 Ibid., 90. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 91. 62 Keynes, General Theory, xx. 63 Polanyi, Great Transformation, 73. 64 Ibid., 29. 65 Ibid., 141. 66 Ibid., 139. 67 Ibid., 162. 68 Ibid., 141. 69 Desai, “Keynes Redux”; Desai and Freeman, “Keynes and the Crisis.” 70 Mary S. Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford, “American Economics: The Character of the Transformation,” in From Interwar Pluralism to Postwar Neoclassicism, eds. Mary S. Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 1–28. 71 Gamble, Iron Cage, 193, 192. Also see Wainwright, Arguments. 72 Gamble, Iron Cage, 193, 192. 73 Migone, “Embedded Markets,” 357. 74 Innset, “Markets, Knowledge, and Human Nature,” 685. 75 Mirowski, “Polanyi vs. Hayek?” 1. 76 Short, “Market/Society,” 1; Cahill, “Polanyi, Hayek, and Embedded Neoliberalism,” 1. 77 Mirowski, “Polanyi vs. Hayek?” 8. 78 Perry Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (London: Verso, 2005), 3–28. 79 Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 52. 80 Mirowski, “Polanyi vs. Hayek?” 1. 81 Perry Anderson, “Components of the National Culture,” New Left Review, I, no. 50 (July–August 1968): 18, 20. 82 Slobodian, Globalists, 128.

CChapter 2 DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT: ORIGIN STORIES OF WESTERN MARXISM Michael D’Arcy

While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) has been various and divided, few have questioned its seismic importance for the development of Western Marxism. Strangely though, in view both of the recognized importance of this text and the expanding contemporary appreciation of Adorno’s work, Dialectic of Enlightenment has regularly generated negative commentary and critical animosity. Eva Geulen notes that the book’s “hyperbolic excesses have irritated critics since Habermas.”1 Marxist critics have been troubled by the authors’ apparent relinquishment of concrete analysis of the crisis of value and labor in capitalism and by the book’s concurrent turn to anthropologized and ahistorical generalization.2 Commentators have questioned the political position and implications of Dialectic of Enlightenment in other ways. Jeffrey Herf notes the absence of direct discussion of the Second World War in the book and questions the authors’ refusal to distinguish between the Allies and the Axis powers.3 To an extent these various complaints are encapsulated in Jürgen Habermas’s argument that the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment “surrendered themselves to an uninhibited skepticism regarding reason.”4 This conclusion is a more general version of the Marxist criticism alluded to above—the underlying common complaint is that Horkheimer and Adorno lapse into a pessimistic estimation of the possibilities for rethinking enlightenment theory, in particular Marxism and philosophy.5 This sense of historical immobilization, of the impasse of enlightened thought, could be framed in various terms: the loss of critical subjectivity that accompanies the rise of mass culture and more generally what Horkheimer and Adorno call the “administered society” of midcentury capitalism; the perceived failure of political progress predicated on the dynamics of class struggle and revolutionary political movements; or simply thought’s inability to grasp “the totality of the real” in the historical conditions of twentieth-century capitalist modernity.6 Horkheimer and Adorno’s ostensibly pessimistic responses to these developments have been seen as hyperbolic, contributing to a vision of these thinkers as residents in the “Grand Hotel Abyss.”7 There remains, however, a common sense that the immediate postwar period was a moment when faith in enlightenment categories was shaken.

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A more recent statement of this view is manifest, for example, in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s After 1945. Here, skepticism about the prospects of progress and “the subject’s cognitive range” is seen as a hallmark of the postwar period: “The more successfully mankind controlled the planet, the less it seemed to have trusted the knowledge that made this control possible.”8 In view of the critical record sketched above, my purpose in what follows is not to mount a global defense of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but rather to reconstruct certain parameters of the project of this book that are missed in the common criticism that Horkheimer and Adorno relinquish the project of enlightenment and lapse into indeterminate ahistorical generalization. I want to argue that the mutation in Marxist thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, to be properly understood, needs to be seen as intrinsically involved with the particular linguistic turn developed in this text. The revised project of enlightenment it elaborates hinges on a reflection on the language of the epic and the novel and a series of textual operations that are central to this reflection: reporting, description, stylization, parody, and reading. In this way Dialectic of Enlightenment anticipates Adorno’s later thinking about and through the language of the epic and the novel, which plays a fundamental if generally underappreciated role in his work. These textual operations become intrinsic to a revised conception of what it means to think historically, to imagine historical difference and progression, in the wake of the purported ruin of systems of enlightenment thought, after the demise of any margin of critical difference offered by cultural criticism and artistic reflection, after the foundering of the revolutionary aspirations of the European left, and in the midst of ongoing historical catastrophe.

State capitalism and the malady of enlightenment It is widely recognized that the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944 marked a pivotal moment in Western Marxist thought, and in particular a decisive shift to the orienting category of political domination. This text is seen as registering a transition from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to a twentieth-century phase of state capitalism. Developing especially from analyses of Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, and Otto Kirchheimer, the crucial motivating insight here is that the twentieth century witnessed the development of a post-liberal phase of capitalism marked by an expanding role of state intervention in the economy. With the planned economies of “state capitalism,” as exemplified by European fascist states, what had been taken as defining features of capitalism—the market, private property—were displaced by the bureaucratic administration of the state operating in conjunction with various forms of monopoly control (exercised by capital, labor organizations, and governments). With the phenomena of state capitalism, we see a merging of political domination and economic control. The contradiction between the forces and relations of production is no longer operative as a mechanism of social transformation. In the work of Pollock and Horkheimer of the early 1940s, which was foundational for Dialectic of Enlightenment, the

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notion of state capitalism is extended to include the planned economy of the Soviet Union and, with some qualifications, the “democratic state capitalism” of the United States. The underlying commonality in these various manifestations of post-liberal capitalism is the priority of politics, as opposed to that of economics, as the operations of the market are subordinated to the control of ruling cliques. Dialectic of Enlightenment has commonly been read as responding to this perceived context: Marxist analysis centered on the market and private property was no longer seen as adequate for addressing developing modes of social domination. Social critique hinging on intrinsic social contradiction and the dynamics of class conflict gives way. In its place Horkheimer and Adorno developed a new path for Western Marxism, centered on analysis of the underlying mechanisms of social control, domination, and manipulation.9 In Dialectic of Enlightenment the phenomenon of antisemitism became a focal point of this critical enterprise. As intellectuals of Jewish background, Horkheimer and Adorno were understandably acutely sensitive to this history: in a formulation that anticipates Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer in 1940, “It often seems to me as if all that we were used to seeing in terms of the proletariat has today shifted with a terrible intensity on to the Jews.”10 This shift to the issues of (political) domination and antisemitism has been a point of contention. Moishe Postone, to cite one prominent Marxist reading, has argued that Horkheimer’s work, and Critical Theory more generally as it developed from the 1940s, treats “labor” in a historically indeterminate way, as the domination of nature, rather than in terms of the specific form it takes within capitalism. On Postone’s reading, involved here is an inversion of the Marxist privileging of labor. Horkheimer’s work of the 1930s saw labor in traditional Marxist terms, as a component of a dialectic between the forces and relations of production. But once this dialectic is seen to be inoperative, given the development of the phenomenon of state capitalism, the analysis of the Frankfurt School comes to regard labor as one manifestation of the domination of enlightenment. Postone draws the conclusion that this analysis of labor, with its turn to the category of domination, contributes to a pessimistic vision of history and the possibilities of emancipation. The purported pessimism of Dialectic of Enlightenment is thus linked to the authors’ refusal to develop a revised analysis of the historically determinate form of labor in capitalism, and a concurrent lapse into ahistorical generalization.11 It is important to recognize, however, that this turn in Dialectic of Enlightenment— away from the theoretical analysis of political economy—is also motivated by a resistance to received modes of philosophy and political economy. What Postone and other critics see as a turn to dehistoricizing generalization is also a mutation in philosophy and Marxist thought that reflects a critical suspicion of theoretical abstraction. The first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment frames this suspicion of enlightenment systems of thought in terms of a criticism of philosophical idealism: Hegel, the authors tell us, “ultimately succumbed to mythology” because he privileged the totality, the result of the dialectical process.12 Dialectic of Enlightenment is devoted to developing the underlying insight here: supposedly

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demystifying discourses of enlightenment become ossified, thus succumbing to the mystification that they were supposed to supersede. This is the dialectic of enlightenment conceived by Horkheimer and Adorno—the apparent distinction between enlightenment and myth breaks down. Or, as Horkheimer and Adorno state, in a well-known formulation, “Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology.”13 The difficulty of definition here arises not just with the dialectical interpenetration of enlightenment and myth, but also with the sweeping generality of the terms— myth and enlightenment are not confined to specific historical locations but are rather taken to refer to broad aspects of Western thought. Provisionally though, we can understand enlightenment as referring to operations of demythologization, disenchantment, and secularization—operations that traverse Western thought from ancient Greece to the present—while the logic of myth is instantiated in magical practices, religious ritual, and ancient, especially Greek, mythology. The critical thrust of the thesis of the mutual interpenetration of myth and enlightenment extends to both terms. Horkheimer and Adorno argue against the glorification of premodern irrationalism in modern thought—for example, in certain strands of German Lebensphilosophie—not only by calling attention to the domination and barbarism of myth but also by reading it as already betraying features of enlightenment. The corresponding claim, that enlightenment is entangled in myth, names a reduction in human consciousness and autonomy that follows from various interrelated dynamics of modernity: societal rationalization involving specific processes such as the division of labor, the abstraction of modern forms of thought (science, social science) that are increasingly unable to account for the specific properties of their objects of inquiry, the penetration of the value abstraction of the commodity in all aspects of social life. This last point involves a development of Georg Lukács’s arguments in History and Class Consciousness (1923) about the need to recognize the grounding of consciousness and intellectual activity in capitalist social forms (the commodity, capital). In Lukács’s seminal account, not only labor but also the theoretical discourses of political economy are subject to the process of reification.14 Where Lukács reads this process as entailing a limitation of consciousness—the restriction of a contemplative attitude and a corresponding inability to grasp the totality of social life—this point is extended in Dialectic of Enlightenment to address the interpenetration of enlightenment thought with more drastic forms of social domination, in particular authoritarian capitalism and antisemitism. This entanglement of enlightenment and power is suggested from the opening of the book. The authors argue that the authority of “universal concepts” involves a cancellation of qualitative differences, as such differences are submitted to calculation according to “abstract quantities” and “equivalence.” Enlightenment concepts are thus interpenetrated not just with the abstraction of the value form but also with contemporary modes of political domination: “Enlightenment is totalitarian,” Horkheimer and Adorno write in a famously provocative formulation.15 In the chapter of the book devoted to antisemitism, the “objectifying thought” of enlightenment, with its arbitrary impositions and the grasping of

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“subjective purpose,” is seen to involve a tendency to domination, which moves from a violence in thought, in the history of enlightenment rationality, to a violence “done in practice” in the development of fascism.16 But if this account builds on prominent strands of Western Marxism, Horkheimer and Adorno also extend their criticism of enlightenment rationality to include Marxist analysis. Marxist political economy, in other words, is not immune to the dynamics of the dialectic of enlightenment.17 The contemporary limitation of such theoretical discourse is suggested, for the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, by the phenomenon of antisemitism. Horkheimer and Adorno write that the appeal of antisemitism cannot be explained in purely economic terms, as it does not serve the economic interests of “the masses.” Theoretical economic analysis thus meets a point of resistance, a limitation: The form of the mentality, both social and individual, which manifests itself in anti-Semitism, the primeval-historical entrapment from which it is a desperate attempt to escape, remains wholly obscure. If a malady so deeply embedded in civilization is not properly accounted for by knowledge, the individual too, though he be as well intentioned as the victim himself, cannot mitigate it through understanding. The plausibly rational, economic and political explanations and counterarguments—however correct their individual observations—cannot appease it, since rationality itself, through its link to power, is submerged in the same malady.18

The criticism of Marxist theory is muted here but the implication of the argument is clear: the phenomenon of antisemitism manifests an urge to domination, intrinsic to enlightenment, that political economy cannot explain. Moreover, this aspect of enlightenment is sedimented in forms of political economy, including Marxism.19 “Economic and political explanations,” including Marxist analyses, are thus implicated in the rationality-domination dynamics diagnosed in Dialectic of Enlightenment and the purported irrationality of enlightenment. It is according to this analysis that a fundamental rethinking of Marxist thought becomes necessary.

Penelope’s maidservants While Marxist critics of Dialectic of Enlightenment have recognized the ways that the text develops the inner connection between enlightenment and the value form of the commodity, they object to its level of generalization: to extend the examination of enlightenment beyond capitalist society is to relinquish historically grounded analysis and implicitly privilege an historically indeterminate notion of domination.20 Indeed in view of the breathtakingly generalized nature of the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment, it seems hard to resist the conclusion that the authors shun enlightenment abstraction only to revert to another less systematic mode of abstraction. The question raised here then is this: How, if at all, does this text develop a form of thinking that serves as an alternative to

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abstract systems of enlightenment, an alternative, that is, to the mythic regression of enlightenment? To begin to respond to this question, we can look to the conclusion of the Odysseus Excursus of Dialectic of Enlightenment, where such an alternative mode of enlightenment is suggested more explicitly than elsewhere in this text. Here Horkheimer and Adorno address accounts of mutilation and execution in Homer’s The Odyssey, and it seems that the history unfolding at the time of the writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment is alluded to implicitly. Referring to Homer’s narration of the hanging of Penelope’s faithless maidservants, and one line in particular—“For a little while their feet kicked out, but not for long”— Horkheimer and Adorno write, “The exactitude of the description, which already exhibits the coldness of anatomy and vivisection, keeps a record, as in a novel, of the twitching of the subjugated women.”21 Despite the allusion to enlightenment detachment, the passage as a whole evokes a mood of pathos and an attention to the victims and losses of history that recalls Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (1940), a text that was something of a “guiding star” for Horkheimer and Adorno at the time they were writing Dialectic of Enlightenment.22 Moreover, the passage indicates that an alternative mode of enlightenment is being worked out here—that we are at least heading in the direction of what the 1944 preface to the book refers to as “a positive concept of enlightenment which liberates it from its entanglement in blind domination.”23 Referring to the possibility of transcending the barbarism of the “primeval world,” Horkheimer and Adorno write, “Speech itself, language as opposed to mythical song, the possibility of holding fast the past atrocity through memory, is the law of Homeric escape. . . . When speech pauses, the caesura allows the events narrated to be transformed into something long past, and causes to flash up a semblance of freedom.”24 The language here—the terms “standstill,” “caesura,” and “flashing up”—recalls Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image. This notoriously esoteric conception, developed in Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” and his unfinished Passagenwerk, involves a momentary constellation between a location in the past (“what has been”) and what Benjamin calls “the now.” There is doubtless an homage to Benjamin at the conclusion of the Odysseus Excursus, but also a transformation of his thought. Where Benjamin links the dialectical image to revolution and historical awakening, the claims made for Homer in Dialectic of Enlightenment are less dramatic—the momentary appearance of a semblance of freedom, the remembrance of the victims of this story. To a certain extent this account of narrative looks back to Benjamin—in a formulation that anticipates the reading of Homer’s maidservants in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Benjamin speaks approvingly in “On the Concept of History” of “the chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones.”25 But more generally Dialectic of Enlightenment revises Benjamin’s terms by inscribing them within a narrative framework, a move that runs contrary to Benjamin’s conception insofar as he opposes narrative and “the epic element in history” to the dialectical image and the method of the dialectical historian.26 Narrative for Benjamin is associated with the continuity of historicism and an investment in progress, and it is thus opposed to the disruptive revolutionary force of the emergent dialectical image.

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Horkheimer and Adorno, by contrast, are apparently interested in mobilizing aspects of narrative in order to supplement Benjamin’s conception and frame an alternative to the mythic abstraction of enlightenment. The operative terms here, which characterize the operations of narrative, are recording, reporting, and describing. These are operations that Horkheimer and Adorno ascribe to epic discourse, but it is clear that they also have in mind the dynamics of the novel form. In this passage they compare Homer’s description to the work of “the greatest narrative writers of the nineteenth century,” and elsewhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the novel and the epic are virtually identified: Odysseus is compared to a novelistic hero, and the epic is seen as “the counterpart of the novel,” exhibiting “features reminiscent of that genre.”27 If reflection on the language of the novel and the epic thus becomes intrinsic to working out an alternative path for enlightenment, it is important to recognize the specific function of epic and novelistic description. In this reflection on description, language is reoriented to the register of the concrete. This becomes clearer if we consider a later essay of Adorno’s, “Reading Balzac,” also a reflection on novelistic language that hinges on a recognition of the limitations of political economy. Commenting on Balzac’s insights about reified society, Adorno writes, “Reification is more terrifyingly radiant in the freshness of dawn and the glowing colors of new life than the critique of political economy at high noon.” This distinction between the insights of the novel and those of political economy turns on the question of language, as the abstraction of political economy and philosophy gives way to a more concrete form of language in Balzac. Novelistic language thus intervenes in a situation of impasse for political economy: “With the thunderbolt of citation Balzac brought society as totality, something classical philosophical economy and Hegelian philosophy had formulated in theoretical terms, down from the airy realm of ideas to the sphere of sensory evidence.”28 This line of thought—the move to the category of exact description, to a more concrete mode of epic or novelistic language that apparently provides access to “the sphere of sensory evidence”—seems out of character for Adorno. He is known, after all, for his resistance to false immediacy and pseudo-concreteness, in both philosophy and artistic language, and is commonly understood to be an opponent of artistic realism. So how is it that the narrative turn to exactitude of description, and “the sphere of sensory evidence,” avoids the dangers of mystifying false immediacy? The conclusion to the Odysseus Excursus suggests one answer: if Homer’s exactitude of description already involves “the coldness of anatomy and vivisection,” this appears as a version of the linguistic model of the dialectic framed in the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Language here is seen to be divided between image and sign—between representation or likeness, on the one hand, and the abstraction of rational calculation, on the other. This division between language as image and sign is mapped onto the split between poetry and science and seen as grounded in “the division of labor” of capitalist society. Horkheimer and Adorno claim that to rest with this division of labor, on either side of the separation, is to succumb to myth. To remain with language as sign is to fall into the mythical repetition of enlightenment abstraction. And

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yet when art is resigned to being mere representation, it renounces its rational and critical function, falling into the “compliant reproduction” of given reality. Here the category of authentic art becomes a crucial hinge in Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument: “The separation of sign and image is inescapable,” but “only authentic works of art have been able to avoid the mere imitation of what already is.”29 Resisting the ossifying and mythic division of language comes down to the possibility of “authentic art.” But this recourse to the category of authentic art just reframes the problem of the viability of epic discourse as an alternative to the mythic forms of enlightenment, given that Dialectic of Enlightenment insistently proclaims an end of art. In the chapter on the culture industry, the abstract and dominating system of enlightenment is conceived of as a system of culture: the standardized forms and mass production of the culture industry result in works that conform to “formula” and the operations of the culture industry are thus congruent with the totalitarian version of enlightenment diagnosed in chapter one of Dialectic of Enlightenment. The question we come to is this: What, if anything, makes Homeric narration an alternative to the mode of mythic (dominating) enlightenment? We can ask this question in other ways: How do epic and novelistic forms escape the verdict of the end of art? What distinguishes the epic and the novel from myth, or what separates “authentic art” from the brazen domination of administered society and its culture industry? The beginning of the Odysseus Excursus insists on the distinction between epic and myth—situating epic on the side of enlightenment, as a step in the direction of conceptuality, bourgeois subjectivity, and universalizing discourse. But this apparently clear distinction becomes cloudy once we remember the overall thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment: myth and enlightenment are reversible and mutually imbricated. So what is the difference that epic and novelistic narration make?

Reporting myth At the opening of the Odysseus Excursus, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest the distinction between myth and epic in these terms: The Homeric discourse creates a universality of language, if it does not already presuppose it; it disintegrates the hierarchical order of society through the exoteric form of its depiction, even and especially when it glorifies that order. The celebration of the wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of Odysseus is already a nostalgic stylization of what can no longer be celebrated.30

We should understand the “hierarchical order” of myth as a mode of enlightenment, rather than a strict historical designation—given that “with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology”—and so the mythic order here can be taken to refer not only to ancient Greece but also to twentiethcentury versions of mythic hierarchy, such as state capitalism and monopoly

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capitalism. What allows for a difference between epic narration and the mythic mode of enlightenment is the epic’s “stylization” of myth, in other words, an ironic or parodic repetition of myth. Horkheimer and Adorno also deploy the notion of reporting to characterize this scenario of repetition with critical removal from myth: “Myths are precipitated in the different strata of Homer’s subject matter; but at the same time the reporting of them, the unity imposed on the diffuse legends, traces the path of the subject’s flight from the mythical powers.”31 If epic discourse allows for an escape from mythic enlightenment, it does so not by negating myth, but by textual operations that soften the domination of enlightenment: parody, report, description, and stylization. One underlying premise of the move to these narrative operations, as alternatives to negation, is that the negation of enlightenment has not worked out very well—the negation of myth becomes in turn a new form of myth, insofar as enlightenment devolves into new forms of domination, human sacrifice, and intellectual ossification. As Horkheimer and Adorno write at the beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.”32 If the difference that epic makes, what distinguishes it from other forms of enlightenment, comes down to certain textual operations—parody, report, stylization—we can notice that these involve a mode of connection, repetition, and development. Dialectic of Enlightenment thus reimagines historical progression and connection through the textual operations of epic and novelistic narrative, and this, I would argue, serves as an alternative to conceptual synthesis and models of progress involving dialectical negation.33 Certain temporal logics, which traverse the work of Adorno, become intrinsic to this alternative historical mode: Vorgang and Nachspiel, “prelude” and “afterlife.”34 Both terms are obviously relevant to the logic of parody and stylization, as they name temporal modalities intrinsic to the parodic operation of reaching back to a previous form, as well as the parodic practice of using forms in the era of their obsolescence or impossibility, in the time of their afterlife.35 This mutation of enlightenment—to reflect on textual operations of narrative—is also intrinsically involved with a reorientation of the work of enlightenment as a practice of reading. In a parenthetical comment at the end of the Odysseus Excursus, Horkheimer and Adorno state that Homer’s listeners “are really readers.”36 The logic of this comment falls into place once we recognize that interpretation is necessary to recognize the difference between epic and myth, to register the stylization of myth that is supposed to be intrinsic to the epic. The Odysseus Excursus suggests that this reading operation—separating epic from myth, recognizing the stylization involved in epic—is not necessarily obvious or self-evident. Recall that epic disintegrates the order of myth “even and especially when it glorifies that order.” We are dealing here with a doubleness of epic language, an ambiguous repetition, a capacity to say at least two things at once. To say this much implies a mode of readerly detachment, an ability to take some distance from the explicit celebration of mythic domination. It is also to evoke the prototypical cunning linguistic manipulator and hero of this story, Odysseus. Among other things, the Odysseus Excursus is a narrative about the language of enlightenment, and the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment read The Odyssey

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as just such a narrative about language. If the possibility of the epic, which I am reading here as the possibility of art as a distinctive mode of rationality, depends on a doubleness or ambiguity of epic language, Odysseus’s stratagems also hinge on such doubleness. In Book 9 of The Odyssey, as a strategy to escape, when asked his name by the Cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus replies “Udeis”—this word is a short form of his own name, but it can also be translated as “nobody.” Horkheimer and Adorno read this episode as paradigmatic for the self-sacrifice and demystification of enlightenment. Language “begins to pass over into designation,” to the exclusion of representation, likeness, or affinity between language and its referents: “Odysseus discovered in words what in fully developed bourgeois society is called formalism: their perennial ability to designate is bought at the cost of distancing themselves from any particular content which fulfills them.”37 The language of enlightenment is reduced to abstract designation and conventional signification, which suggests that we are dealing with a passage to the language of science, formal logic, the abstract social thought of enlightenment, and more generally the logic of equivalence that rules bourgeois society. Odysseus thus starts to look like a bearer of enlightenment abstraction in its restrictive and dominating form, and indeed the mythic regression of this mode of enlightenment is readily apparent. In keeping with the overall thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Odysseus’s self-assertion is coterminous with regression. Discussing Odysseus’s compulsion to reveal his full name to Polyphemus as he escapes, Horkheimer and Adorno write, “His self-assertion, as in the entire epic, as in all civilization, is self-repudiation. Thereby the self is drawn back into the same compulsive circle of natural connections from which it sought through adaptation to escape.” The passage thus indicates the regression of enlightenment, a point sharpened by its allusion to the fate of the European Jews: Odysseus “bears features of the Jew” and “revenge on the middleman stands not only at the end of bourgeois society but at its beginning.”38 But something else is going in this passage. Horkheimer and Adorno explicitly align Odysseus’s thought with parody and art, which involves the notion of semblance or appearance. The possibility is raised here then that this may be a strategic and only apparent relinquishment of reason, rather than a definitive regression to myth: The man who, for the sake of his own self, calls himself Nobody and manipulates resemblance to the natural state as a means of controlling nature, gives way to hubris. The artful Odysseus cannot do otherwise. .  .  . He not only mocks Polyphemus but reveals to him his true name and origin, as if the primeval world still had such power over Odysseus, who always escaped only by the skin of his teeth, that he would fear to become Nobody again if he did not reestablish his own identity by means of the magical word which rational identity had just superseded. . . . The speech which gets the better of physical strength is unable to curb itself. Its spate accompanies the stream of consciousness, thought itself, like a parody: thought’s unwavering autonomy takes on a moment of manic folly when it enters reality as speech, as if thought and reality were synonymous, whereas the former has power over the latter only through distance.

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Odysseus’s parody, his speech, involves a certain return to “the magical word”— that is, to the logic of mythic forms, according to which the affinity between representations and things has not been extinguished. The name “Odysseus” is imagined to be a “magical word,” tied to its referent (the person Odysseus) in a necessary and singular way. In this regard, the name “Odysseus” is similar to the “specific representation” of magic in which representations and things are conjoined in a relationship of physical contact or fundamental affinity: “Magic implies specific representation. What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of the enemy, is also to befall his person.”39 Odysseus’s comportment might look like a regressive return to myth but the passage also signals that this operation involves a distancing from myth: if Odysseus’s speech “takes on a moment of manic folly,” this suggests a mode of performance, a willed assumption of mythic regression. Read in these terms, Odysseus’s comportment is similar to the epic’s stylization of myth. Thought’s assumption of “manic folly” is analogous to the epic’s reporting of myth. Each case involves a parodic or ironic repetition of mythic forms. The distinction between epic and myth, between enlightenment and barbarism, is suggested in the “as if.” Odysseus’s thought as speech involves the fiction (“as if ”) that thought and reality are synonymous. He is at once able to entertain the possibility of an affinity between word and referent and to maintain a skeptical distance from this possibility. This scenario develops the view of language announced in the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment—the enlightenment separation of language into the functions of abstract designation (sign) and likeness or referential affinity (image). If “authentic art” is the only hope for not hypostatizing the split between these two dimensions of language, it is clear why Odysseus appears under the sign of art: he is able to engage with both aspects of language. The difference between the “artful Odysseus” and the mythic Polyphemus is that Odysseus is able to negotiate the ambiguity of language, which hinges here on its combination of sign and likeness. In this regard, Odysseus is like the epic and its readers, incorporating the logic of myth—the mythic mode of language—but also staking a distance from it, however tenuous. To say this much raises again the problem of reading. Just as the distinction between myth and epic stylization depends on a practice of reading, to tell the difference between regression to myth and Odysseus’s artful parody of myth requires an act of interpretation. Dialectic of Enlightenment at once calls for and suspends an interpretive decision here, given that the final fate of Odysseus (is he himself or nobody, does authentic enlightenment persist or expire in mythic regression?) is left open. If Odysseus “throws himself away, so to speak, in order to win himself,”40 what does this mean? Does he survive or not? Does reason preserve itself or liquidate itself? Dialectic of Enlightenment raises the question but leaves the answer in suspense. This interpretive movement, an ongoing and inconclusive scenario of reading, is also experienced in this passage by Odysseus. When he goes on to reveal his identity to Polyphemus, this attempt to “reestablish his own identity” may be considered as an effort to resolve the ambiguity of his initial speech in which he calls himself “Udeis.” But the first indeterminacy—the undecidability about the survival of autonomous reason, about whether Odysseus is himself or

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“nobody”—is repeated rather than resolved. We can consider Odysseus’s struggles with language as a scenario of reading and its failure—the failure to determine whether “Udeis” should be understood as “nobody” or “Odysseus,” whether the autonomous subject expires or persists—and the linguistic reenactment of this failure. Framed in this way, it looks like the journey of Odysseus lapses into enlightenment skepticism. But this is not quite the case, given that his linguistic struggles develop in the interest of overcoming the abstraction of enlightenment and its language. Odysseus’s attempt to reestablish a necessary connection between the word and its referent, in the name, suggests a mimetic or referential linguistic intention. It would be a mistake to see this simply as a regression to a preenlightenment mode of language, a phase before the abstraction of “designation” and conventional signification. If Odysseus must carry out the referential linguistic intention—“the artful Odysseus cannot do otherwise”—this suggests that we are dealing with an intention that is intrinsic to language, despite the enlightenment reduction of language to conventional designation and signification. Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of language passing into designation would appear to describe a (post)Saussurian view of language in which referents are bracketed, and the relationship of signifier to signified is arbitrary and conventional. But the account of Odysseus suggests that the aspiration for an affinity between word and referent cannot be eliminated from language. This referential intention brings us back to the issue of novelistic and epic description. Homer’s exact description of Penelope’s maidservants can now be understood as analogous to Odysseus’s referential intention. Both cases involve the attempt to overcome the abstraction of enlightenment language and possess a sphere of linguistic immediacy or an affinity between language and its referents. Dialectic of Enlightenment indicates that this attempt is not without its perils, as it involves an ambiguous relinquishment of enlightenment, an apparent regression to “manic folly.” But this movement—propelled by a referential intention that brings thought to the edge of its elimination—is necessary for the very survival of genuine enlightenment. As Horkheimer and Adorno write in “On Epic Naiveté,” a short text they composed in 1943 as part of the composition of Dialectic of Enlightenment, “no narrative can partake of truth if it has not looked into the abyss into which language plunges when it tries to become name and image.”41

Origin stories We are now in a position to return to the argument that Dialectic of Enlightenment lapses into ahistorical generalization, with a concurrent relinquishing of the resources of enlightenment thought. Horkheimer and Adorno describe the distinction between mythic narration and other more abstract forms of enlightenment in these terms: “The scientific calculation of events annuls the account of them which thought had once given in myth. Myth sought to report, to name, to tell of origins—but therefore also to narrate, record, explain. . . . Each ritual

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contains a representation of how things happen and of the specific process which is to be influenced by magic.”42 “Earlier” stages of enlightenment (myth, magic, ritual) contain resources that are lost with scientific calculation and enlightenment abstraction more generally—namely, an ability to address specificity or particularity. Evoked here is a turn to a more concrete form of enlightenment: myth, magic, and ritual offer a representation of a “specific process” or a “specific representation.” This is not to say that Horkheimer and Adorno endorse myth, but they return to it as a way of recovering modes of thought that may serve as a corrective to enlightenment abstraction. And what has been said here about mythic narration is relevant to the presentation of Dialectic of Enlightenment. This text, like mythic narration, is also an origins story, an attempt to narrate, explain, and “tell of origins,” as Horkheimer and Adorno go back to “the earliest known stages of humanity” in order to account for “the primeval-historical entrapment” from which emerges the domination of enlightenment.43 We come finally to the question of what distinguishes this presentation of Dialectic of Enlightenment from mythic thought, and by this latter term I mean both ancient myth and the mythic thought of supposedly advanced enlightenment— positivism, scientific calculation, philosophical idealism, the social sciences. What separates Dialectic of Enlightenment from mythic thought is just what distinguishes epic from myth, a dimension of parody or stylization in the modus operandi of the text. Like Homer’s epic, Dialectic of Enlightenment is a reporting of myth, a reporting of the mythic landscape of mid-twentieth-century capitalism. Horkheimer and Adorno incorporate and imitate mythic modes, but in such a way that a difference is installed between myth and the epic presentation of Dialectic of Enlightenment.44 But to say this much, as with the attempt to distinguish between Homer’s epic and his mythic sources, implies a practice of reading. This practice, for Horkheimer and Adorno, involves a readerly detachment, the ability to recognize and think through the ambiguity of language. Such detachment is intrinsically historical, in that it necessarily involves historical relationship, the ability to read the connection between historically distinct but interpenetrating forms. At the same time, the account of Odysseus suggests that this readerly detachment will lapse into enlightenment abstraction if it does not also involve a naïve referential intention, an aspiration to transcend given forms of thought. It is for this reason that the account of The Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment concludes with the reading of Homer’s faithless maidservants, where the referential intention of enlightenment language is located in the exact description of Homer and nineteenth-century narrative. This concrete language may seem mythic—that is, mystifying, a form of false immediacy—but once inscribed within the dynamics of enlightenment this exact description, the apparent recourse to “the sphere of sensory evidence,” becomes a critical hinge in the very survival of enlightenment. The reconception of enlightenment thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment follows from the claim that intrinsic social contradiction is no longer operative as a driver of historical development, and a corresponding recognition that forms of thought predicated on negation and contradiction have lost their critical purchase.45 The ossification of the Hegelian dialectic that follows from

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the prioritization of the whole finds a historical counterpart in mid-twentiethcentury-administered society, in which social contradictions—between classes, between forces and relations of production—have been superseded by direct, openly irrational modes of social domination and control.46 In this situation, Dialectic of Enlightenment develops the claim that critical social theory needs to mutate in conjunction with the changed landscape of capitalist society. Where received modes of Marxist and Hegelian dialectic may have been appropriate for an ostensibly liberal phase of capitalism, in which social contradictions propel historical development, in the ruins of this historical phase, thought is challenged to develop modes that integrate the manifest irrationality of its social context. I have attempted to describe certain of these modes in my account of various textual operations developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment—report, description, stylization, parody, reading—operations that contribute to this text’s reimagining of what thought might look like in the middle of the twentieth century. While I have framed this intervention as developing in opposition to the abstraction of enlightenment systems of thought, including philosophical idealism and Marxist political economy, it is clear that Adorno, at least, saw this line of thought as a development of, or indeed a last best hope for philosophy. By this I mean what both Hegel and Adorno understood philosophy to mean—philosophy “is its own time comprehended in thoughts (emphasis in original).”47 Here is Adorno’s understanding of the contemporary version of this project: “Philosophy must prove itself the most advanced consciousness—permeated with the potential of what could be different—but also a match for the power of regression, which it can transcend only after having incorporated and comprehended it.”48 In other words, thought may persist not by avoiding the calamities of history but rather by exposing itself to them. There is no obvious answer to the question of how thought can incorporate, comprehend, and transcend regression under the conditions of twentieth-century capitalism, but Dialectic of Enlightenment provides a preliminary report.

Notes 1 Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor After Hegel, trans. James McFarland (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006), 91. 2 See Neil Larsen, “The Idiom of Crisis: On the Historical Immanence of Language in Adorno,” in Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 3 Jeffrey Herf, “Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered,” New German Critique 39, no. 3 (117) (Fall 2012): 87. 4 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 129. 5 Other commentators have argued that Dialectic of Enlightenment pursues a reformed version of the project of enlightenment. See Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

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6 Adorno opens his 1931 lecture “The Actuality of Philosophy” with the assertion that under current conditions thought is unable “to grasp the totality of the real.” Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos 31 (Spring 1977): 120. 7 In his 1962 preface to Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács writes, “A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss.’” Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A HistoricoPhilosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 22. 8 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013), 155. Beyond the European sense of crisis, this is a period of some optimism for subjects from colonized locations. See Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 9 This move can also be seen as following from the example set by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923), a text that extended Marxist thought by attempting to register changes in the nature of capitalism in the twentieth century—in particular, the shift from a liberal phase of nineteenth-century capitalism to twentieth-century bureaucratic, state-centered forms of capitalism. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971). 10 Quoted in Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 185. 11 Moishe Postone, “Critique, State, and Economy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 181–90. 12 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), 18. 13 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 8. 14 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 83–92. Andrew Feenberg emphasizes the link between Lukács’s account of reification and the Frankfurt School’s analysis of authoritarianism. Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), 164–67. 15 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4. 16 Ibid., 159. 17 Martin Jay argues that the work of the Frankfurt School dating from the 1940s “implicitly put Marx in the Enlightenment tradition.” Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 259. 18 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 139. 19 Adorno would also make this point in a 1969 essay, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” Theodor Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? The Fundamental Question of the Present Structure of Society,” in Can One Live After Auschwitz; A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedmann, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 119. 20 See Larsen, “The Idiom of Crisis,” 120–28. 21 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 61. 22 Rolf Wiggershaus uses the term “guiding star” to describe Benjamin’s importance for Horkheimer and Adorno in this period. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its

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23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Reading the Postwar Future History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 310–12. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xviii. Ibid., 61. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4: 19381940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 390. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 474–76. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 35–38. Theodor Adorno, “Reading Balzac,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 122. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 13. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 2. This is not to argue that Adorno abandons the immanent critique of systems of enlightenment thought. Part of the attraction of reflection on novelistic language, for Adorno, is that it remains inscribed within enlightenment conceptuality, even as it thinks through the constitutive limits of such conceptuality. This dimension of Adorno’s reflections on novelistic and epic language is manifest in “On Epic Naiveté.” Adorno, Notes to Literature, 24–29. For a discussion of the role of these terms in the work of Adorno, see Geulen, The End of Art, 90–111. Adorno’s “Trying to Understand Endgame” defines parody as “the use of forms in the era of their impossibility.” Adorno, Notes to Literature, 259. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 62. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 53–54. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 38. Adorno, “On Epic Naiveté,” 27. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6. Ibid., 10, 139. Critics have recognized the performative and parodic dimensions of Dialectic of Enlightenment. See, for example, Geulen, The End of Art, 90–111. Postone argues that the Frankfurt School’s move away from the notion of immanent social contradiction is predicated on an overly restrictive understanding of such contradiction and that the development of neoliberal global capitalism since the 1970s has demonstrated the limitations of the account of state capitalism and the priority of the political it entails. Postone, “Critique, state, and economy,” 169–71, 190. While an adequate response to these arguments is beyond the scope of this chapter, with regard to the second claim, we can note that the reorientation of enlightenment thought developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment allows the authors to address aspects of capitalism that have only become more pronounced, namely primitive accumulation or what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession. See, for example, Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 48–49; and Adorno, “Reading Balzac,” 122–24.

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46 Horkheimer and Adorno indicate that these irrational and dominating aspects of capitalism were present in its liberal phase but were hidden by ideology: “Enlightenment throughout the liberalistic period has always sympathized with social coercion.” Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 9. See also Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” 47 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allan W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21. Adorno cites with approval Hegel’s definition of philosophy in his 1962 essay “Why Still Philosophy?” Theodor Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy?” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 15. 48 Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy?” 16.

CChapter 3 BRITAIN, EUROPE, AND THE BORDERS OF MARKETS: T. S. ELIOT AND F. A. HAYEK ON POSTWAR INTERNATIONALISM1 Luke Foster

In 1944, with Allied victory in sight in Europe, intellectuals of the belligerent powers, even those not known for their concern with practical politics, tried their hands at envisioning the peacetime world the triumphant North Atlantic powers should build. F. A. Hayek, on faculty at the London School of Economics since 1933 and frustrated not to have been offered a post in the British war effort, published an intellectual salvo in 1944, The Road to Serfdom. Stemming in part from Hayek’s close observation of the rise of totalitarian governments across Central and Eastern Europe, The Road to Serfdom was famously addressed to “socialists of all parties.” Hayek argued that overconfidence in central planners and suspicion of an individual’s ability to decide how to allocate his or her own resources were maladies of both the right and the left. He hoped not only to ensure better understanding of the cruel follies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia but also to prevent the rise of command economies in Western Europe after the war. He was explicit that his concern was not merely with domestic policy questions, as it had been in the monetary and fiscal disagreements with Keynes that made up most of his public interventions during the 1930s. Hayek expressed a hope for a new international order on both European and global scales. His call for an international authority without a common economic policy did bear some resemblance to the system of Washington- and Brussels-centered cooperation agreements that would actually emerge from the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 and from the negotiations that founded the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. Thomas Stearns Eliot, Hayek’s elder contemporary in British intellectual life, remains well known as the modernist author of dense, allusive poems like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land,” and Four Quartets. Though it has become commonplace to interpret lines from “The Waste Land” such as “a heap of broken images” as a comment on the desolation of Europe in the wake of the First World War, Eliot did more than express general modernist malaise. He was a cultural critic and political thinker deeply invested in the public questions of his day.2 From the 1922 first publication of The Criterion, the quarterly review of letters and ideas he founded, to his death in 1965, Eliot ranked as an acknowledged



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figure in British and European intellectual life, repeatedly making the case that literature played a role in shaping the life of a culture and thereby creating the pre-political ingredients for a humane order. The name “criterion” itself conveys Eliot’s abiding impulse to define excellence, to prescribe aesthetic judgments that would allow a culture to recognize the hierarchy of goodness and the authority of truth. He consistently argued, against the blasphemous ideologues of Left and Right, that ideas and religion are both anchored in realities that transcend the state. During the Second World War, Eliot held that only a renewed sense of Christian nationhood could preserve Western civilization against Nazi and Soviet barbarism. Such claims pose challenges for the Hayekian ends-neutrality view of political economy, because Eliot insisted that some aspects of human life were sacred and intrinsically valuable. For Eliot not everything could be subject to exchange, and politics occupied a legitimate sphere of its own, distinct from the market. Both collective history and individual biography were largely given, not chosen. And no state fulfilling its most basic duty could be indifferent to the consumption choices of its citizens. In the postwar years, Eliot emphasized nationhood less in his writings and in fact came to policy positions on British cooperation with Europe that paralleled Hayek’s, but his reasoning emphasized the common roots of Europe in classical and Christian ideas. This essay juxtaposes The Road to Serfdom with the Four Quartets, both published in London in 1944, to illuminate Hayek and Eliot’s views of the postwar order.3 Its subject matter thus overlaps in part with Radhika Desai’s essay, but I will also refer to Hayek’s more theoretical work Law, Legislation, and Liberty, written thirty years after The Road to Serfdom, to establish the basis of his position that economic life is a tautological term—there is no life distinct from market exchange. I hope to justify my reading of the Quartets as a meditation on the war and what was to come after by first examining Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (a set of lectures given in March 1939 on the eve of war) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (first published in 1943). These works offer a theoretical vision of politics deeply concerned with the preservation of Christian civilization in Britain. I will conclude by sketching the key areas in which Eliot challenges the intellectual foundations of what has come to be called neoliberalism. Why claim that this pair of texts and thinkers deserves our consideration at the present moment in particular? Arguably the history of the European Union has represented the inverse of Hayek’s vision, an attempt to chart a common economic policy without creating a unified political sovereignty. The Eurozone crisis has thus highlighted the difficulty of pursuing a common monetary policy without a common fiscal policy. As recent left- and right-wing populist movements in Europe and the United States have subjected to intense scrutiny the justice and the prudence of the European Community, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the very ideas underlying postwar internationalism, intellectual historians must pay attention to the original justifications for that order to understand contemporary political economy. Eliot and Hayek both reflect on the role of the nation-state and citizenship in ways that illuminate today’s debates on migration. But in addition to being topical, Eliot and Hayek are representative,

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touchstones of the traditionalist and market-enthusiast strands of postwar AngloAmerican conservative thought, and each have some claim to be heir to Edmund Burke’s legacy. Many of Eliot’s objections to Hayekian thinking thus continue to resonate with those of contemporary market-skeptics on the right who are questioning assumptions commonplace at least since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher took up Hayekianism. Eliot’s arguments illuminate the question of the place of the nation in the world, a question unavoidable in today’s politics. Yet on their preference for an organic order emerging from the wisdom of people making choices on a local scale without a conscious overarching scheme, Eliot and Hayek’s insights find a remarkable convergence. For both of them, this grounds the hope of postwar European cooperation. Both of them were also motivated, in the face of the totalitarian temptation, to defend liberal societies as possessing a positive set of values and convictions, not merely negative ones.4 Hayek exalted trust in individual judgment and local knowledge, whereas Eliot sought to restore consciously Christian premises to British and European order. Both therefore attempted to resolve liberalism’s perennial difficulty with self-assertion. To me that concern alone makes their writings pertinent.

Hayek on the prospects for international unity The Road to Serfdom is in many ways a plea for the recovery of the principles of nineteenth-century liberalism. Hayek portrayed Germany’s descent into terror and tyranny as stemming from its rejection of this British school of thought: “In no other field has the world yet paid so dearly for the abandonment of the nineteenthcentury liberalism as in the field where the retreat began: in international relations.”5 Many historians of the nineteenth century might dispute the accuracy of this generalization, arguing that such paradigmatically liberal ideals as free trade and freedom of the seas became hegemonic because of the long arm of the Royal Navy, not because of a global or even European consensus on their mutual benefits. At any rate, Hayek hoped that the Allies in victory would learn from the tragic experience of their enemies and reclaim their older convictions: “What the German and Italian who have learned the lesson want above all is protection against the monster state—not grandiose schemes for organization on a colossal scale, but opportunity peacefully and in freedom to build up once more their own little worlds.”6 This language reflects a claim Hayek made throughout his career: that decisions are best taken by those most closely concerned with them, an argument already put forward in his interventions into the socialist calculation debate and that he would most famously express in 1945 in “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” his article on prices as a mechanism for resource allocation. But in the final chapter of The Road to Serfdom, straightforwardly titled “The Prospects of International Order,” Hayek offered a sweeping vision for international politics. He commends a liberal utopian ideal: “The idea of the world at last finding peace through the absorption of the separate states in large federated groups and ultimately perhaps in one single federation, far from being new, was indeed the ideal of almost all the



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liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century.”7 This is essentially another iteration of Kant’s scheme for perpetual peace. To eventually arrive at this ambitious claim, Hayek begins by arguing that attempts to plan production and consumption on a national scale magnify the competition and volatility that are unavoidable in the market into causes of international friction: “Economic transactions between national bodies who are at the same time the supreme judges of their own behavior, who bow to no superior law, and whose representatives cannot be bound by any considerations but the immediate interest of their respective nations, must end in clashes of power.”8 The very insulation of populations from one another behind different borders, creating sharply contrasting living standards, provokes envy and instability. Yet Hayek does see wisdom in keeping politicians as close as possible to their constituents. There is more chance of genuine agreement upon the ends of communal life when fewer individuals are involved, and political power can only be held accountable when wielded at a relatively local level. Hayek reflects, thinking of all the little countries, including his own native Austria, swallowed by Großdeutschland, “It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.”9 He prophesies that one pan-European bureaucracy seeking to rank the interests of every agricultural and industrial sector in Europe and assign priorities for development will generate enormous resentment and nationalistic feeling in member states. Seeking to balance his fear of national consolidation and autarky with his awareness of the perils of erecting a new supra-state, Hayek opts to call for a federation that can restrain aggression and prohibit intrusive economic measures. It is to be a unified political authority without a unitary economic policy: “Without power to direct the different people what they must do, [it] must be able to restrain them from action which will damage others.”10 This maxim is of a piece with Hayek’s larger theory that government coercion should be employed proscriptively, not prescriptively—to restrain infringements on the rights of others, not to dictate goals. How does Hayek’s lofty aim of a federation to defend free trade compare to the familiar and heterogeneous actually implemented structures of postwar internationalism, such as the Bretton Woods monetary agreement, the United Nations, and the European Community? Hayek does point to the experience of the British empire to argue that even ostensibly benevolent efforts at economic development through remote directives come to necessitate comprehensive political control. He levels against the idea of a single global scheme for economic development the charge: “Can there be much doubt that this would mean a more or less conscious endeavor to secure the dominance of the white man, and would rightly be so regarded by all other races?”11 This is as far as Hayek goes on the question of decolonization and the place of the former colonies in the new international system, but he clearly views empire as a mode of governance whose time is passing. Significantly, this warning about racial domination finds its way only into a footnote, and Hayek does not devote more attention to

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empire and its legacy in The Road to Serfdom.12 There he fails to engage with the counterclaim—put forward provocatively in the same year in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation—that liberal market norms are not only not natural but have been disseminated to the world largely through the British empire’s expansion. The links between imperialism and international markets reappear in this volume in Radhika Natarajan and Ajay Parasram’s contributions. But Hayek does hope his global, internationalist vision will first be achieved by cooperation among Europeans. The League of Nations, in his judgment, failed because—in trying to include the whole world—it became crippled by collectiveaction problems and by assuming consensus where none truly existed. Though he keeps the League’s aspiration toward global organization in view, Hayek pragmatically acknowledges, “A degree of cooperation could be achieved between, say, the British Empire and the nations of Western Europe and probably the United States which would not be possible on a world scale . . . [and] will not at first be practicable beyond perhaps even as narrow a region as a part of Western Europe.”13 Though the whole world ought to share liberal ideals, Hayek hopes to build from cultural proximity. This vision is largely recognizable from the perspective of what did happen in the war’s aftermath; as the wartime Western Allies transmuted their military cooperation into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade established a norm against protectionism, the United Nations had some success in controlling military aggression between small powers, and the European Community created a common market in Western Europe. Hayek does foresee that attempts to conduct pan-European economic policy would provoke resentment and conflict in member states. Yet he does not raise the question of migration policy—will the free movement of labor be counted among the barriers to trade that international agreement should eliminate?—or sufficiently acknowledge the extent to which the power of the United States, in many ways the successor state to the British empire around the world, would be needed to guarantee liberal internationalist norms in the face of the very different internationalist ambitions of the Soviet Union.

Hayek’s renewal of liberalism Almost three decades after the publication of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek released his work Law, Legislation and Liberty in three volumes between 1973 and 1979, an attempt to offer a positive account of political economy to build on the critique of central planning that The Road to Serfdom proffered.14 Here Hayek appropriates the term “Great Society” that Lyndon Johnson had associated in American discourse with state-driven redistribution to describe his ideal vision of a liberal society built up through millions of spontaneous exchanges between individuals using the knowledge available to them to pursue their own ends. This order of reciprocity appears chaotic to those who assume a central authority should coerce society toward a common end. Hayek insists that, although it is a market order, for which he coins the term “catallaxy,” to call it an “economy” produces muddled



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thinking. Strictly speaking, an economy is “a complex of activities by which a given set of means is allocated in accordance with a unitary plan among the competing ends according to their relative importance,” which can be true only on the scale of a household or a firm.15 The Great Society promises peace and wealth because neither its means nor its ends are static and predefined. Only the basic rules of property and contract have to be agreed upon. He goes beyond Adam Smith to argue that “we all in fact contribute not only to the satisfaction of needs of which we do not know” but also “sometimes even to the achievement of ends of which we would disapprove.”16 In this sense, there is no distinct economic sphere of life. Every human interaction involves tradeoffs between scarce resources that can be deployed for finite ends. Hayek stresses human finitude throughout his argument, contending that the market is the best instrument possible for contending with the uncertainty inherent in the future. The market’s verdicts are not just in some abstract sense, but they do allow a vast array of human agents to respond to shifting contingency in real time. If the law attempted to intervene to secure greater stability, the result would be overreach and ultimately more disorder. This does entail two consequences that Hayek acknowledges most of his readers will find deeply disquieting. First, “freedom is inseparable from rewards which often have no connection with merit and are therefore felt to be unjust,” because benefits from competition often accrue to those who were simply fortunate enough to see an opportunity first.17 Market forces also lack respect for the past, and they encourage actors to consider only present advantages and future prospects. “The market continually adapts the use of resources to conditions unforeseen and unknown to most people,” so that “bygones are forever bygones.”18 This promises liberation from the weight of the past and its particular attachments. In fact, any attachment, to nation, class, or ethnos is an irrational holdover from the mores of primitive tribal societies. The mutual interdependence of the market order has extended to include the whole world; in fact, it is “the only overall order that comprehends nearly all mankind.”19 The allure of redistribution, which is, according to The Road to Serfdom, the path to totalitarian oppression, stems from “the prevailing moral tradition,” derived from “the end-connected tribal society,” which provokes our discomfort with the market’s order.20 If “economics” is a misnomer and there is no sphere of life distinct from the market, what is the role of the state in Hayek’s system? He puts forth a strikingly Rawlsian criterion for political justice: “We should regard as the most desirable order of society one which we would choose if we knew that our initial position in it would be decided purely by chance.”21 To fulfill this, a minimal state ought to allow the market to adjust as rapidly as possible to changing contingencies, which in the long run will grant to any particular individual maximum opportunity. Here Hayek restates a principle already noted in The Road to Serfdom: the law as proscriptive rather than prescriptive. “Rules of just conduct which are endindependent cannot determine what anyone must do . . . but only what he must not do.”22 Only then can the law avoid reifying any particular moment in time’s distribution of wealth, setting an ideological test for membership in the polity,

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or creating a protected class. With regard to this last concern, Hayek stresses that large bureaucratic states are prone to unduly weigh significant costs to one small group over limited costs dispersed to many individuals. Again evoking a core Smithian claim, Hayek contends that “though the pursuit of the selfish aims of the individual will usually lead him to serve the general interest, the collective actions of organized groups are almost invariably contrary to the general interest.”23 There will be painful costs to building a polity along these lines. The archaic tribal ethic necessarily becomes diluted as it extends to include other human beings on the scale of the modern state. Without mutual belonging and recognition, “an emotional void” opens that leaves modern citizens vulnerable to the seductions of a coercive socialism. Yet the experience of living in the market, which Hayek calls “The Discipline of Abstract Rules” is itself catechetical for citizens.24 Some will learn from it to adopt a philosophical view of the market process as providing for the needs of innumerable strangers and creating a humane, prosperous order. Hayek’s concluding hope for politics on this model is a utopian internationalism which goes further than his comments in The Road to Serfdom: “Only slowly and gradually do those general rules of conduct towards all fellow men come to prevail over the special rules which allowed the individual to harm the stranger if it served the interest of his group,” which offers “the distant hope of a universal order of peace.”25 No principle of justice that does not extend to the whole of humanity can be justified, and living as producers and consumers will eventually teach us this.

Eliot’s social theory Eliot’s idiom—lofty, sparse, and allusive—was not Hayek’s, but he shared the younger man’s sense of urgency in the battle of ideas. In his two wartime works of political theory, The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot articulated a thesis that directly parallels that of The Road to Serfdom. Britain, in the face of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, was in danger of losing her way. Her liberal values, if expressed merely as a negative—the absence of totalitarian control—would not give her people enough courage and conviction to resist these ideological foes and to rebuild a peaceful order. But Eliot turned not to the tradition of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism but to the tradition of Christianity— as mediated through the writings of British conservatives like Benjamin Disraeli and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Famously, he warned that “the term ‘democracy’ . . . does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike—it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”26 Eliot, a convert to the Church of England, argued throughout both of these works that political institutions depended for their success on the virtue of individuals and of the culture those individuals share. Only an established church, he claimed, could foster a unified culture without the imposition of political coercion. Lest these writings seem naive, or mere effusions of religious idealism, we should remember that Eliot gained an intimate knowledge of the financial industry during



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his eight years (1917–25) as an employee of Lloyds Bank in London and early on accepted Keynes’s argument that the 1919 Versailles Treaty, by undermining German economic sovereignty, had jeopardized rather than secured the peace.27 During the depths of the Depression in the 1930s, Eliot explored radical economic ideas and discussed them in The Criterion. He wrote in the January 1932 issue, “Christianity repudiates a position which allows an economic system to be a form of government, i.e., to determine what human desires should or should not be satisfied.”28 This insistence that one task of government is to guide and educate human desires represents a clear departure from Hayek’s axiom that the state must always be ends-neutral vis-à-vis its citizens. The failures of an economic system are always downstream from the moral failings of the human agents within them; while Eliot respected the complexity of economics, he denied that it was a Newtonian, deterministic science. One particular unorthodox theory that Eliot explored in some depth was Social Credit, a distributist attempt to disperse capital into many hands throughout the economy to stimulate demand during the Depression. The Social Creditors’ thesis was that “a freer movement of the national economy was being impeded by a general lack of purchasing power, and this meant that the banks, as issuers of credit, should be reformed; credit or money should be distributed throughout the population according to need, and the consequent rise in spending would stimulate production and investment.”29 Yet, as Kojecky notes, Eliot never agreed fully with this sweeping diagnosis and prescription, and he ceased to regard the Depression-era problems of allocation as the most urgent crisis, turning his attention to the civilizational and ideological challenge looming at the end of the decade. The Idea of a Christian Society sets forth the need to define what Great Britain can claim to stand for that sets her apart from the totalitarian powers. At Munich, the dictators humiliated Daladier and Chamberlain, exposing what Eliot takes to be Britain and France’s lack of conviction in their own principles. Mere liberalism Eliot presents as essentially a hollow creed defined by the coercion it opposes. The enemy powers can move the spirits of their people and provide an overarching vision for national life, but they are essentially pagan, because they identify the State with divine purpose in the world. Unlike the pagan who worships his own soil, the Christian has universal obligations that transcend the nation-state, maintaining “a dual allegiance, to the State and to the Church, to one’s countrymen and to one’s fellow-Christians everywhere” an attitude Eliot presents as the true realization of the highest aspirations of the League of Nations.30 Yet the nation does need Christianity as a public philosophy, to anchor its life and justify its institutions, not as a narrow partisan cause. Eliot means by this an Augustinian philosophy capable of distinguishing between individual believers committed to personal faith and those who merely follow some Christian norms. Eliot employs Thomistic language to clarify that he does not expect holiness from everyone. He hopes rather for “a society in which the natural end of man—virtue and well-being in community—is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end—beatitude—for those who have the eyes to see it.”31 Eliot does not see, as Hayek does, an irresolvable antithesis between freedom and coercion. The family, the parish, and the national church all

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work to foster norms of social order without requiring the state to enforce them: the “way of life of the community would not be imposed by law, would have no sense of outward constraint, and would not be the result merely of the sum of individual belief and understanding.”32 His image is more of village church bells tolling the Angelus than it is of an auto-da-fé. This language of forming, without compelling, individuals to live according to good habits reflects Eliot’s assumption that political life has an educative function. The church’s primary public role is to oversee education, and Christian intellectuals are charged with ennobling the taste and judgment of the nation. The parish system, creating close-knit communities of trust, and the monastic orders, witnessing to otherworldly values, are essential to this neo-medieval project. Since Eliot believes that politics must form citizens to know and love the good, he rejects Hayek’s assumption that the state can be neutral between the competing ends its citizens seek. This leads him to critique the Hayekian view of political economy as an ever-fluctuating compromise: So long .  .  . as we consider finance, industry, trade, agriculture merely as competing interests to be reconciled from time to time as best they may, so long as we consider “education” as a good in itself of which everyone has a right to the utmost, without any ideal of the good life for society or for the individual, we shall move from one uneasy compromise to another. To the quick and simple organization of society for ends, which, being only material and worldly, must be as ephemeral to worldly success, there is only one alternative.33

He stresses that precisely the contingency and flexibility for which Hayek celebrates the market renders it deeply unsatisfying practically and theoretically as a principle of national life. The one alternative is an articulated set of coherent ends that unify and give meaning to political life as we experience it. If that articulation is not to be oppressive, it would have to be Christian. The reasoning here is of a piece with the recurring theme in Eliot of the need for a criterion, a trustworthy standard by which truth may be known and error eschewed. Unlike Hayek and the mainstream of academic economists, Eliot therefore cannot take human preferences as given and celebrate the market’s work in meeting them efficiently. By 1943, when he wrote the series of articles that were published in 1948 as Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, the Allied cause seemed much less desperate, and yet Eliot leveled many of the same critiques against his society, with an eye to postwar rebuilding. To an extent, it reads as a classic Tory defense of traditional elements of the British constitution—the established church and the landed aristocracy. Writing as measures to increase the estate tax, build the welfare state, and reorient elite education toward meritocracy gained support, Eliot attacks the assumptions underlying these reforms (though he insisted that he was not criticizing Attlee’s Labor government in particular—the Conservatives were “susceptible to the same muddled thinking”).34 Kojecky comments that to Eliot “it seemed that if place and power depended on intelligence and achievement alone, there would be a damaging degree of social fragmentation, a lessening of the status



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and cohesion of the family, and a loss of contact with tradition.”35 Culture was the largely unconscious set of practices and customs that constitute the way of life of a people, enshrining their implicit system of values and incarnating their religious assumptions. Families preserve and pass on culture. At its best culture is shaped by intellectual elites oriented to the transcendent vision religion provides. But despite the defense of hierarchy this entails, Eliot echoes Hayek in denying that state coercion or deliberate planning can ever secure the goods that families and freely associating groups achieve without coordination: Culture is the one thing we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake. . . . It is as much, or more, because of what we do piecemeal without understanding or foreseeing the consequences, that the culture of one age differs from its predecessors.36

It is thus a kind of spontaneous, decentralized order. Because true culture stems from actions freely chosen as intrinsically valuable, it depends on leisure time and the liberal education to use it well. Eliot feared that envisioning society commercially, as constituted only by blind networks of exchange, would instrumentalize all goods and foreclose the possibility of transcendence by enjoying something as good in itself. Eliot did hope that this understanding of culture would feed international cooperation, but he placed little faith in bureaucratic attempts to foster it in the postwar institutions, singling out UNESCO as a negative example. “Without a common faith, all efforts towards drawing nations together in culture can produce only an illusion of unity.”37

The poetry of politics Eliot’s political-theoretical writings may seem to lack the thoroughness to defend their more radical assertions, but he was quick to acknowledge that he was primarily a man of letters and that he owed to Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Jacques Maritain, and Christopher Dawson the substance of his political thought. Yet Eliot’s poetic masterpiece the Four Quartets takes up many of these themes in the context of a meditation on the interaction of place, time, and eternity, the secular and the sacred. “Burnt Norton,” the first quartet, was published separately before the outbreak of the Second World War, but the other three quartets, published in 1944, reflect the anxiety of wartime and Eliot’s yearning for a humane order that would endure beyond the conflagration.38 Each quartet takes its name from a very specific place Eliot experienced—“Burnt Norton,” a ruined English country estate, “East Coker,” the site of the church where he would be buried, “The Dry Salvages,” a rock formation off the coast of Massachusetts where he vacationed as a child, and “Little Gidding,” the site of an Anglican monastic community that the Puritan forces destroyed during the English Civil War. This autobiographical quality, combined with “Burnt Norton’s” opening meditation on time and memory

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(“Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present”), has led the Quartets to be read as Eliot’s private quest for religious meaning.39 It certainly is that quest, as well as a Heideggerian grappling with the limitations of language. But, as we have already seen, Eliot believed literature served a public and prophetic function: to descry enduring truths within the flux of our contingent experience. In the second section of “East Coker,” Eliot explicitly links his personal angst to the political crisis. After an allusion to Dante’s loss of his way in middle age and describing his own straying as “twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres [between two wars],” the poet tries to learn to speak again, like the stumbling, untrained new recruits the Allies were flinging at the war effort.40 The language is martial: “Each venture / Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling / Undisciplined squads of emotion.”41 The poet’s success in composing the poem becomes analogous to an Allied victory. The climactic movement of the Quartets begins in “Little Gidding,” when, wandering the streets of London during the Blitz, the poet finds himself in a ghostly, hellish dream world. He wanders, In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin Over the asphalt where no other sound was Between three districts whence the smoke arose.42

Eliot meets an old, estranged teacher in a scene directly parallel to Dante’s encounter with his damned mentor Bruno Latini in Canto XV of The Inferno. The German bomber whose death-dealing brings about the meeting is “the dark dove with the flickering tongue,” a serpentine, Satanic parody of the life-giving Holy Spirit. Eliot’s teacher, possibly W. B. Yeats, warns him that genius and fame fade, leaving the spirit after death unable to rest. The Yeats-ghost offers the advice that spurs Eliot toward the vision of God that concludes the quartet and the Quartets: “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.”43 This purgative, redemptive word emerges from the horror of war. The vision that crowns “Little Gidding” is not just Eliot’s own; it is inescapably a public verdict on the meaning of English nationhood. It is partly a salvo against the liberal dictum that participation in a nation is merely a means to secure the enforcement of property rights and not a good in itself. As the poem builds to its highest vision, Eliot muses, “Love of a country / Begins as attachment to our own field of action / And comes to find that action of little importance / Though never indifferent.”44 Citizens of a polity come to understand themselves and their finitude through grasping the historical process, incarnated in a nation that has given them



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being. Nationhood allows them to surrender selfish attachment without becoming indifferent. Yet the very fact that Eliot pronounces this verdict on patriotism at Little Gidding—a holy place ruined in a war between men who believed that whether the Crown held sway over Parliament and whether the church was to be led by bishops were questions worth killing and dying for, questions that now seem moot to nearly every Englishman but Eliot—is a rebuke to romantic nostalgia. Both cavaliers and roundheads are subsumed into the meaning of English history as Eliot, in prayer, remembers them. The speaker shifts to a first-person plural, stressing the collective nature of his epiphany: We cannot revive old factions We cannot restore old policies Or follow an antique drum. These men, and those who opposed them And those whom they opposed Accept the constitution of silence And are folded in a single party.45

Whereas Hayek grants the past no authority over present decisions, Eliot insists that only in and through history can we reconcile time and eternity, the individual and the collective, the particular and the universal: “A people without history / Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails / On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel / History is now and England.”46 In prayer, in this time and place that to others might seem ephemeral or insignificant, Eliot can give thanks for his country and understand it without divinizing it as a pagan would. The moment is unique, past before it is noticed, and not interchangeable with any other. It is a gift and no asset.

Conclusions I contend that Eliot’s views on political economy pose a set of profound questions to Hayek’s vision of life in the market that remain instructive for both contemporary economic theory and political debate. I have argued that these two far-sighted intellects responded to the crisis of the Second World War in a similar mode, by seeking to justify the free, humane, and unphilosophical habits of British public life against the totalizing worldviews-incarnated-as-States that were Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Whereas Hayek drew on nineteenth-century liberalism (and Liberalism) for his solution, Eliot looked to medieval thought. I want to restrain the reflex to label as merely romantic or nostalgic a man so innovative in poetic form and so conscious of the ironies of history. Eliot’s driving concern was to ground politics in truths that transcended politics (his friend Christopher Dawson expressed that drive in his 1939 Beyond Politics, a work deeply resonant with The Idea of a Christian Society).47 Michael Stevens comments in his article “T. S. Eliot’s Neo-Medieval Economics” that Eliot did not just try to maintain equidistance

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between the Scylla of fascism and the Charybdis of communism: “Rather, the path Eliot points out is one that acts as a transcendent augmentation to this middle ground, a path that admits the realities of the marketplace at the center of human activity, even as it demands that the individual human being, bearing the respect due the imago Dei, be at the center of free economic activity.”48 Eliot understood this as a prophetic task, one that was not only removed from practical politics but perhaps even necessarily ignored by the world. Yet if we continue to read him well into the twenty-first century, what are the enduring questions Eliot teaches us to ask of Hayek and of the postwar order we have inherited? The first set of questions cluster around the role of the nation. Eliot in the Four Quartets does not license chauvinistic pride in the nation, but he does see the nation as a given reality. Membership in a shared history is not a good that could be exchanged with any other. The collective past is no irrelevant externality that would be irrational to factor into our consumer decisions. Eliot, himself an American-turned-Briton, never treated immigration as a straightforward process, because for him it had necessitated a lifelong quest for a new identity. And though Eliot resisted naiveté about the benevolence of state power and punctures the pretensions of planners to create society according to a rational blueprint, he did believe that the nation has authority over individuals and that therefore the state is tasked with teaching its people to seek the good. Eliot allows for a genuinely public institution distinct from the state and lacking the means of physical coercion—the church—which plays an essential role in this pedagogical vision. In practical economic terms, Eliot’s positions would entail a willingness to entertain paternalistic restrictions on consumption, as opposed to Hayek’s value-neutral stance that takes preferences as given. Believing that he can define in some detail what the good life entails, Eliot hopes to orient economic policy thinking explicitly toward promoting and securing it, and away from the indifferent maximization of GDP. Illustrating these assumptions, Eliot participated in a 1957 effort to reform the BBC, arguing that the public broadcaster should strive to elevate the culture of the nation and not pander to the lowest common denominator.49 And whereas Hayek in The Road to Serfdom portrays nation-states as necessary evils and suggests that differences between neighboring populations’ living standards cause conflict, Eliot’s perspective suggests that while capital perhaps can be allowed to flow freely across borders, human labor cannot be regarded as so fungible. Eliot also believed that his otherworldly convictions had immense practical implications for the place of work in human life. In 1952, Eliot wrote a warm introduction for Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture, an extended case for the Aristotelian view that human happiness consists of seeking things good in themselves—supremely the happiness of intellectual contemplation—which was the view on which the traditional distinction between the liberal and servile arts is founded. But Eliot worried with Pieper that modern markets tended to instrumentalize every human experience and thus to reduce even the wealthy to the status of dependent, alienated proletarians. Against the totalizing state, which would also degrade all human life into work for the collective, Pieper plead for “an attempt to extend the character of ‘liberal art’ deep



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down into every human action, even the humblest servile work.”50 He hoped that payments for labor would come to be regarded as more like honoraria than wages and characterized this as both a political and a spiritual goal: “Giving the wageearner the opportunity to save and acquire property, by limiting the power of the state, and by overcoming the inner impoverishment of the individual.”51 Pieper and Eliot would point to public reverence for the Sabbath, a periodic respite from commerce, as an obvious step toward this achievement. Any serious consideration of Eliot’s economic thought runs into the fact that his hope for the goods of leisure and the fulfillment they bring to be diffused throughout the population depends ultimately on the being of an infinite non-rivalrous Good to be an end in Himself. Eliot would say to us that the pain of contemporary globalization and its attendant political crises will overwhelm any people that cannot look to a horizon of eternal, inexhaustible value. And he would probably warn that such a people risks relapsing into the temptation to deify one’s own country. As a final note I should again highlight that Eliot’s practical prescriptions for European and international cooperation actually closely resemble Hayek’s. Kojecky argues that Eliot after the war spoke much less often of the need for Britain to recover its claim to be a Christian nation, because he saw a “change of conditions, which made a world, or European, unity more important than national unity.”52 In 1951, addressing a conference of the Union of Christian Democrats, Eliot said that those assembled must unite “to conserve and nourish the spiritual life of Europe, how to cultivate in each region and amongst those of each race and language, the sense of vocation in relation to each other.”53 More than a decade later in 1962, he wrote in favor of British entry into the European common market, calling on Britons and continental Europeans to collaborate, with the exhortation: “By our combined exertions we have it in our power to restore the health and greatness of our ancient continent.”54 Eliot’s devotion to a common European cultural heritage was enduring throughout his career. In the final Criterion issue in 1939, Eliot described the magazine’s original purpose as having been “to present to English readers . . . the work of important new foreign writers.”55 Yet Eliot thought such unity was not dictated by a calculation about the risks of economic competition between nations. Fundamentally an idealist, he believed political unity was downstream from cultural, intellectual, and religious unity. Unlike Hayek, who founded political order on a contract to disagree about the good, for Eliot politics inescapably depended upon shared convictions about and cultivation of the good life. Just as we can today wonder whether Hayek understood the extent to which the liberal norms he lionized depended upon the imperialism he decried, we can question whether Eliot’s love of “England and history” accounted for the extent to which his England was not merely a nation, but held possessions and responsibilities around the globe. In British diplomacy, the turn toward asserting a common history and culture coincided with a hasty retreat from the empire, with entry into the European common market foreclosing the possibility of free trade agreements with the newly independent Commonwealth nations. In asserting that the juxtaposition of Eliot and Hayek has much to offer those pondering the place of the nation within the global community today, I do not claim that they considered

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the world as a whole with the same depth and subtlety that they devoted to European questions. These two thinkers do illuminate an enduring divide on the right: modern market-friendly and market-skeptical conservatives must consider where their pragmatic positions converge even as their principled ones diverge and which faction rightly conceives of the relationship between ideals and action. And we citizens of the twenty-first century must again face the question of what liberalism’s positive convictions are and who is to articulate them.

Notes 1 I am indebted to Dr. Richard Strier of the University of Chicago for his Winter 2017 class, “Religious Lyric in England,” to Dr. James Wilson of Villanova University, to Dr. Peter Boettke of George Mason University, and to Dr. Peter Wicks of the Elm Institute for their advice throughout the preparation of this paper. 2 When Eliot’s politics do receive consideration, they are often considered fascist by association because of his friendship with the Mussolini-sympathizer Ezra Pound, who significantly edited early drafts of “The Waste Land.” Closer examination of Eliot’s political writings in the 1920s and 1930s reveals a prescient awareness of the rise of fascism, along with repugnance for its methods and rejection of its theoretical underpinnings. In his capacity as editor of The Criterion, Eliot did occasionally turn from aesthetics and theory to comment on topical matters, condemning the far-right Action Française in France and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. 3 The Four Quartets was first printed in New York in 1943. 4 I have in mind the paradox that has troubled defenders of liberalism at least since Nietzsche: the difficulty of articulating any vision of the human good and the good society that justifies liberalism’s rejection of illiberalism. Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies is another classic postwar treatment of this theme that recurs especially in the thought of Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, who experienced Weimar Germany firsthand. 5 F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 223. 6 Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 221. 7 Ibid., 233. 8 Ibid., 224. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 232. 11 Ibid., 226, fn 5. 12 In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Slobodian argues that Hayek and other postwar German-speaking liberals strove to bind local democracies within overarching norms to facilitate economic transactions. Arguably this effort maintained much of the power and property disparities between Europeans and former colonial subjects through the rhetoric of freedom. Vaughn Rasberry’s Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) chronicles the efforts of African American and African writers to reframe the postwar alternatives to find a form of liberation that entailed accepting neither Soviet domination nor continued Western rule through capitalism.



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13 Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 236. 14 This later work, despite representing a very different epoch of Hayek’s career and thought than The Road to Serfdom, nevertheless maintains helpful continuities which illuminate the assumptions of the earlier text. In particular, the opposition between naturally beneficial liberalism and naturally appealing tribalism is a recurring theme in Hayek. 15 F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty. Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 107. 16 Hayek, Law, 109. 17 Ibid., 120. 18 Ibid., 121. 19 Ibid., 113. 20 Ibid., 110. 21 Ibid., 132. 22 Ibid., 123. 23 Ibid., 138. 24 Ibid., 133. 25 Ibid., 148. 26 T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 63. 27 An observation made by Christopher Ricks, “TS Eliot and the Years of L’Entre Deux Guerres,” Committee on Social Thought, May 11, University of Chicago, with particular reference to Eliot’s 1931 poem “Triumphal March.” 28 Cited in Roger Kojecky, TS Eliot’s Social Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 82. 29 Cited in Kojecky, Social Criticism, 82. 30 Ibid., 55. 31 Ibid., 34. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 63. 34 T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 15. 35 Eliot, Notes, 207. 36 Ibid., 64. 37 Ibid., 82. 38 It seems impossible to avoid reductionism when gleaning political arguments from a poet’s verses. I certainly do not claim that Eliot primarily conceived of the Four Quartets as a political vehicle. The Quartets are, however, political in their quest to offer a vision that transcends politics. 39 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1943), ll. 44–6. 40 Eliot, Quartets, l. 173. 41 Ibid., II, ll. 177–82. 42 Ibid., IV, ll. 78–85. 43 Ibid., IV, ll. 144–46. 44 Ibid., IV, ll. 159–62. 45 Ibid., IV, ll. 185–91. 46 Ibid., IV, ll. 233–38. 47 Christopher Dawson, Beyond Politics (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939). 48 Michael Stevens, “TS Eliot’s Neo-Medieval Economics,” Journal of Markets and Morality 2, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 244.

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49 Kojecky, Social Criticism, 220. 50 Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), 69. 51 Pieper, Leisure, 66–67. 52 Kojecky, Social Criticism, 223. 53 Cited in Kojecky, Social Criticism, 214. 54 Ibid., 212. 55 T. S. Eliot, “Preface,” in The Criterion (Collected Edition), ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1967).

DECOLONIZATIONS

On October 20, 1944, General Douglas MacArthur delivered a speech by radio in the Philippines, as American troops landed to retake the islands. “This is the Voice of Freedom,” MacArthur proclaimed.1 The American general had returned to the Philippines to “restore, upon a foundation of indestructible strength, the liberties of [the] people.” In rallying to him, the people of the Philippines could emerge from the Japanese yoke to “follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory.” Freedom was both an enticement and a reward for supporting the United States in the continuing struggle, in which MacArthur cast himself as the incarnation of liberty and salvation.2 Charles de Gaulle had an ego that rivaled MacArthur’s. At the Brazzaville conference, discussed by Sarah Frank in the first chapter of this section, de Gaulle likewise returns triumphantly to the colonies, bringing freedom with him and proclaiming himself the savior of the French Republic and its empire. Frank’s chapter on the meeting of French colonial administrators at Brazzaville in the first week of February 1944 highlights not only the idealism, hypocrisy, and paternalism but also the contingency of de Gaulle’s colonial enterprise in this period. His remarks at the opening of the conference contain themes he would later reiterate in his iconic August 25, 1944, “Paris Martyred! But Paris Liberated!” speech: French grandeur and eternal French values, with de Gaulle’s uncontested and legitimate guidance, would heal France’s wounds and restore her rightful place in the world.3 This rhetoric, of course, also served to minimize internal divisions and marginalize France’s allies.4 The second chapter in this section, by Radhika Natarajan, transports us from the French to the British empire, from proclamations by a head of state to policies devised by a regional civil servant, in this case Frank Lugard Brayne. Brayne, an Indian civil service administrator in the Punjab, was—like de Gaulle and MacArthur—energetic in mythologizing his own role in bringing civilization and salvation to the “natives” of the colonies. Natarajan details the genesis, impact, and legacy of Brayne’s program for village improvement and rural development set out in an early 1944 work entitled Winning the Peace, and then condensed and republished later in 1944 for African audiences as “Village Life and How to Improve It.” In both documents, as with the Brazzaville conference, we see a marked disjuncture between rhetoric and realities, between proclamations of concern for the well-being of colonized peoples and the development of policies that worked against their interests. “Village Life and How to Improve It,” which transplanted Brayne’s ideas to the African context, also highlights the often neglected role of

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Christian missionary groups in imagining a postwar future. MacArthur, casting himself as a Christ-like figure bringing salvation with his return, was engaging more than a rhetorical device. Christian religious practice and values were a barometer of success in the French “civilizing mission” in the colonies. British missionaries in East Africa saw rural development and village improvement as their natural domain: Christianity was the bedrock upon which the new world order must be built. The last chapter in this section, Ajay Parasram’s essay on Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, likewise emphasizes the strength and persistence of colonial mindsets, even among the educated elite of the colonies. Parasram argues that, although Williams had the intellectual skills and political will to challenge imperial rule, he nevertheless had to grapple with the coloniality of his own training, discipline, and methodology. The racist assumptions that structured his education and defined the archive in which he worked shaped his thinking in ways that were difficult to overcome. Nevertheless, for Williams 1944 presented a moment in which the myth of British benevolence could be challenged, and into which the existence of enslaved Africans of the past, and the agency of their descendants, could be inserted. For Frank and Natarajan, in the French and British contexts respectively, demobilized colonial soldiers emerge as figures of particular importance and concern, their agency creating the potential for instability in general, and revolutionary political agitation in particular. Broader issues about the power of racialized colonial subjects, and the fallacy of imperial benevolence, emerge in Parasram’s reading of Capitalism and Slavery, as does the grip of colonial mentalities over even the most committed proponents of decolonization.

Notes 1 Douglas MacArthur, “I Have Returned”, October 20, 1944. Available online: http:​// www​.hist​orica​lvoic​es.or​g/amv​oices​/view​.php?​type=​audio​&name​=MacA​rthur​%2C+D​ ougla​s 2 Ronald K. Edgerton, “General Douglas MacArthur and the American Military Impact in the Philippines,” Philippine Studies, 25 (1977): 420–40. 3 Charles de Gaulle, “Discours de l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris,” August 25, 1944. Available online: www.charles-de-gaulle.org. 4 Sudhir Hazareesingh, In the Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of De Gaulle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

CChapter 4 “MEET THE NEW EMPIRE, SAME AS THE OLD EMPIRE”: VISIONS AND REALITIES OF FRENCH IMPERIAL POLICY IN 1944 Sarah Frank

Returning to the birthplace of his African resistance, Charles de Gaulle opened a conference to discuss the future of the French empire at Brazzaville on January 31, 1944. While the focus was on French Africa, the conference epitomized French excitement for the future of the empire that 1944 promised to bring. Responding to global shifts in imperialism, this event was designed to strengthen French influence throughout francophone Africa while addressing desires for more local autonomy and support. The Brazzaville conference undertook to “give” Africans their “deserved place” within the larger French empire.1 To do so, working groups examined practical solutions to improving the political integration, economic development, health, and education of indigenous populations. This conference was to be the expression of a new French colonial consciousness, a turning point moving Africa beyond forced labor, conscription, and exploitation and closer to the French way of life. It was also about the future of France: a future that could now be based on an almost certain victory, and not on France’s earlier defeat. In June 1940, after a rapid German invasion, the newly formed État Français, under Philippe Pétain, signed an armistice with Germany and moved the government to the spa-town of Vichy. Charles de Gaulle, in London, called on the French to keep fighting. He became the head of an exile resistance movement, which eventually encompassed most of the French empire. In 1944, with the end of the war looming, de Gaulle and his French Committee of National Liberation, based in Algiers, needed to prove to the Allies that they could and should maintain control over their colonial territories. The empire had long been a symbol of French grandeur, and this conference promised a new future for the French empire based on its critical role during the war. In a variety of ways, 1944 seemed to hold its promise. The D-Day landings were successful. Paris was liberated in August, and a provisional government in place by September. Colonial soldiers participated in the landings in Provence and in the liberation of France. Now that metropolitan France was free from German occupation, the task of rebuilding could begin. December, however, saw a fundamental shift in Franco-imperial relations when recently repatriated

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colonial soldiers in Senegal refused to follow orders until their wages were paid. In response, French officers fired on them in what is now known as the Thiaroye massacre. Fundamentally, the year 1944—bookended by Brazzaville and Thiaroye—was about renegotiating the ties that bound France to its empire, and the empire to France. Unsurprisingly, these ties were not always strong ones. The language of grandeur, and the vulnerabilities it was designed to hide, would have been familiar to citizens and subjects across the French empire. The Third Republic founded on the promise of liberty, equality, and brotherhood expanded French colonial territory to over 4,767,000 square miles. Yet, the population of the French empire comprised colonial subjects without citizenship rights who were subjected to racialized colonial rule far removed from these republican ideals. In the metropole, Third Republic politicians attempted to cultivate an imperial vision and convince the French that their strength came from the empire.2 Popular opinion on the empire remained lukewarm until the First World War brought a quarter-million soldiers and half a million workers from the empire to France, after which empire was seen as an asset.3 Following the French defeat of 1940, the empire returned as a symbol of promise and strength. For the Vichy regime, the empire was the guarantee of a postwar role in the new German-dominated Europe. For the Free French, self-proclaimed defenders of the Republic and its values, the empire would be the launching pad for the liberation of the metropole. France had been looking hesitantly overseas for its future since 1871. The conference at Brazzaville finally acknowledged that other peoples were implicated in and affected by that vision.

The French empire during the Second World War Charles de Gaulle’s decision to hold a widely publicized conference to determine the future of the French empire before the war had ended was, perhaps, surprising. Despite the potential that 1944 held, the French political situation was dire: de Gaulle had been in exile for four years, while in the metropole—which had been fully occupied by Nazi Germany since November 1942—the Vichy regime had descended into full-blooded collaborationism.4 This context of war and exile gave de Gaulle and the Free French the theoretical space to hold a dialogue on how France and Africa might change together after the war. Returning to Brazzaville was both highly symbolic and deeply practical. Algiers, in its size and prominence, may have seemed a more appropriate location for the conference, except that Algeria was administratively part of the metropole, and not a colony. The nuance was important, especially to white settlers. The significant American and British presence across North Africa was another reason to look further afield. Dakar, capital of French West Africa, was also the site of the first Free French military defeat, and so also unsuitable. French Indochina was still under Japanese occupation. Though not among the most prominent cities of the French empire, Brazzaville was emblematic of the Free French struggle for legitimacy and influence. When



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Charles de Gaulle fled to London to continue fighting in the face of defeat, he was relatively unknown. After the Franco-German armistice in June 1940, he was an exiled traitor with no political legitimacy. That changed when Félix Éboué, the Guyanese governor-general of Chad and highest ranking black man in the French colonial administration, declared his support for de Gaulle on August 26, 1940. Cameroon (Douala and Yaoundé) followed on August 27 and Congo-Brazzaville on August 28. Smaller territories in Asia and Oceania followed the declarations of French Equatorial Africa (FEA). De Gaulle’s Free French made Brazzaville their capital. The bravery and loyalty of FEA was mythologized during and after the Second World War, but it was not the colonial territory for which de Gaulle had hoped. With a small population, and at a significant distance from France, FEA was strategically less important than either French North or West Africa. However, its leaders had strong economic and practical reasons to support the Free French rather than the Vichy government. Surrounded by British colonies, the economies of FEA had suffered greatly due to British blockade. While FEA had great potential resources, the necessary infrastructure remained in British and American hands. FEA’s proximity to the British colonies meant de Gaulle’s African territories were simultaneously the key for greater independence from the British and another weight tying him to them.5 Allying with the surrounding British colonies was an attractive alternative to blockade and economic stagnation, especially as the British treasury guaranteed their financial stability and the Free French soldiers’ salaries.6 With the empire divided between Vichy and Free French colonies, indigenous populations faced two Frances, both claiming to be the legitimate colonial power. This placed all French authorities in the unprecedented position of having to ask for, rather than demand, their subjects’ loyalty.7 While both Free French and Vichy rhetoric praised imperial solidarity and loyalty, neither government pursued significant change overseas, until perhaps the Brazzaville conference. Instead, French leaders were cognizant of the shifting geopolitical landscape and sought to present a different image of France to fit their immediate needs. Due to their alliances, the Free French were exposed to changing imperial discourse on an international scale. Vichy, turning inward, emphasized the empire’s size, loyalty, and resources.8 In France, over 85,000 colonial soldiers, captured by the Germans in 1940 and interned across occupied France, became visible symbols of Vichy’s imperial policies and objects of public support and outreach. Pétain’s government publicized large-scale imperial infrastructure projects, designed to inspire and distract French imaginations, to “reanimate the mystique of the Empire builders” and, most importantly, facilitate further French exploitation of the colonies.9 Forced labor had long been a cornerstone of imperial expansion, displacing indigenous populations for backbreaking work in horrific conditions. The Vichy regime, having repudiated the universalist language and ideals of the Third Republic, was relieved of the pressure to overcome tensions between republican values and a continued dependence on forced labor.10 The Free French, on the other hand, felt that tension acutely, publicly criticizing Vichy’s use of forced labor despite themselves employing violent “recruitment” methods, especially in the rubber industry.11 The war effort partially concealed this hypocrisy for many in

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the Allied camp, though the exploitation of African resources and peoples directly contradicted the principles enshrined in French republicanism and in the Atlantic Charter. Though never intended for a colonial audience, calls for liberty and selfdetermination were gaining traction across the globe. Colonized peoples were becoming more vocal about the discrepancies between French imperial rhetoric and the colonial experience. This forced the Free French to carefully consider how they could criticize the Vichy government or the pro-Pétain colonial regimes without implicitly giving Africans the right to criticize white rule.12 The Brazzaville conference was one step toward acknowledging that conditions needed to change.

Brazzaville: An imperial dream From January 30 to February 8, 1944, colonial administrators and leaders from across the French empire gathered to discuss its future. Due to the war, only African territories were represented. Félix Éboué, René Pleven, Henri Laurentie, Félix Gouin, and Pierre Rychmans attended with current and former colonial governors of the French territories in Africa: Pierre Cournarie (Cameroon), Pierre de Saint-Mart and Henri Sautot (Oubangui), Charles Assier de Pompignan (Gabon), Jean-Charles André Capagorry (Moyen Congo), and Jacques Rogué (Chad, Gabon). No African delegates attended, but the governor-general of the Belgian Congo, consular representatives of the Allied powers, and the European population of Brazzaville were invited.13 The Brazzaville conference had three main goals: to reignite confidence in France’s place in the world, to remind the Allies that the empire was French, and to showcase how France planned to cultivate the empire. Ironically, the French required British assistance in transporting the North African delegation to Brazzaville.14 With Allied victory in Europe on the horizon, de Gaulle needed to prepare for France’s future. The conference also served to reassure the French metropole that de Gaulle was not facilitating British encroachment on French territories. As the Free French were dependent on and worked with the British throughout the war, many in France feared that de Gaulle would cede the empire to the British.15 Early British attacks on the empire, and the subsequent Vichy response, strengthened these suspicions. In July 1940, the British sank the French fleet anchored at Mersel-Kébir to prevent Vichy from surrendering it to the Germans: 1,300 men died.16 In September, de Gaulle and the British failed to take Dakar despite bombarding the city for three days. In response, Vichy’s air force bombed Gibraltar. In France, popular support for the empire increased after the attacks and Vichy took advantage of the situation to promote collaboration with Germany as an alternative to British domination with de Gaulle.17 Vichy’s loss of the Levant territories in 1941 and the British invasion of Madagascar in 1942 increased hostility toward Britain and distrust of de Gaulle. As conditions under German occupation worsened and collaboration proved to be repressive and exploitative, popular opinion in the metropole turned slowly away from the Vichy regime. By November 1942, the success of Operation Torch was greeted with restrained excitement by many of those who only a few



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months earlier had been committed to collaboration.18 By 1943, many French had shifted in favor of de Gaulle and the Allies, but French society remained deeply fractured. The future required reconciliation between those who had supported the Vichy regime and those who had joined de Gaulle or the internal resistance. De Gaulle opened the conference with a rousing speech praising France’s republican and civilizing mission which, he argued, opened Africa to the world. Frustrated at being beholden to the Americans and British for supplies, transportation, and funding, de Gaulle used his speech to serve notice that France’s place in the world, and its hold on its empire, would survive Allied victory unscathed.19 Congolese shops had already become a battleground in the propaganda war when those supplied by the American Lend-Lease program prominently displayed photographs of Roosevelt and American planes and ships, while images of de Gaulle or his symbol, the Croix de Lorraine, were notably absent.20 Likewise, North Africa had been bombarded by German propaganda spreading the idea that Muslims could unite to overthrow the imperial yoke, allowing an anti-imperialist Germany to rule North Africa after the war.21 The Brazzaville conference was, then, also a direct response to these competing visions of the postwar world and a way to show indigenous populations that the future would be French and African, rather than American or German. The conference’s goal of creating a plan for the future of the French African territories included raising the standard of living and improving education and health for the “native populations.” Before attending the conference, each delegation responded to a list of questions on its territories’ needs in order to help shape productive conversations. The themes encompassed social issues, political structures, and economic developments. Participants formed committees to discuss spiritual, social, political, economic, and other problems in their territories and to devise solutions. The committee on “native policies” ranged widely from “native” institutions and the status of “notables” to work, the role of Europeans in the African colonies, familial customs, and recruitment.22 It sought to understand, at least superficially, how the diverse linguistic and ethnic groups in the empire lived, and pinpoint where each group fell on the path to French civilization, using qualifiers such as monogamy, Christianity, or use of the French language. These imposed hierarchies determined status from “native” to “notable,” and thus determined access to civic rights and citizenship. The question of economic development was critically important. De Gaulle had experienced firsthand the danger of concentrating industrial production in the metropole. Delegates worked on questions of economic policy, potential for industrialization, and a ten-year plan for public works with the goal of creating independent economic development in the colonies rather than simply continuing existing models of economic exploitation. As such, the Brazzaville conference linked with international and transnational ideological shifts and sought to establish and extend connections between the metropole and the African colonies. Each colony was tasked with studying its own internal, intra-African, imperial, and international communication needs.23 Participants were asked to contribute a vision for trans-African air, land, and sea routes to improve mobility

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and communication. Improved radio, telegram, and telephone networks would supplement increased physical access. While the focus was on bringing French answers to French African problems, some solutions were sought internationally. In tackling the problem of low soil quality, delegates expressed interest in sending a mission to the Soviet Union to study collective farming.24 Two final points of discussion focused on the political and administrative structure of this new French empire. As most of the participants were colonial administrators it was no surprise that the role of colonial governors was discussed at length.25 One aim was to spread French influence throughout colonial territories through this position. The final, perhaps most crucial, question was how to represent the colonies within a new French constitution. France would be inviting colonized peoples to imagine new ways to be associated with the metropole. Delegates at Brazzaville considered several options, from according French citizenship to all those active in local politics to creating an “imperial citizenship,” or even creating local citizenships for French West Africa, FEA, or Madagascar, which would allow holders to benefit in their own countries from rights due a French citizen.26 This was an exciting time to imagine the possibilities that the postwar era might bring, including ideas of citizenship outside of empire.27 Léopold Senghor, POW, poet, and later the first president of independent Senegal, participated in postwar debates on the new French union. A brilliant intellectual, Senghor wanted France to have “citizens of empire” within a “polity” that encompassed different civilizations in a nonhierarchical whole.28 The war had shaken fundamental values, leaving space for African and French leaders to imagine new forms of political engagement and citizenship.29 René Pleven, de Gaulle’s commissioner for the colonies, made it clear at Brazzaville that this future was due to those who had participated in France’s victory. Hearing Pleven speak about France’s rebirth would have given even cynical observers goose bumps: This African conference has yet another significance. It marks a new phase in France’s recovery, and shows that France, rising from the debris of the past and ruins of the present, lifts her eyes forward towards the future. It emphasizes the determination of men who willed their country’s liberation and renaissance. It proves that we intend the native populations of our Empire to be fully associated in the benefits which we hope will accrue from its revival.30

In both a warning and a rallying call, Pleven reminded listeners that France would not always be beaten and broken. Change was coming and would bring improvements for all men, women, and children under the French flag. Pleven’s speech praised French willpower as the guiding force behind victory and reconstruction. However, Brazzaville was not a uniquely French moment. The organizers realized that certain global trends pushing change, like the Atlantic Charter, must be acknowledged if France were to retain or retake its place on the world stage. The Brazzaville conference was part of the effervescence of new declarations on humanitarian rights and laws that sprang up toward the end of the Second



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World War. Two weeks before the opening of the Brazzaville conference, Franklin Roosevelt gave his State of the Union address to the United States Congress outlining his goals for the future. Roosevelt declared “security”—economic, physical, social, and moral—within “a family of nations” as his priority.31 It was a powerful speech designed to reinforce the ideas he put forth in the 1941 Atlantic Charter. Perhaps due to the legacy of the French surrender in 1940, or his hostile relationship with de Gaulle, Roosevelt specifically mentioned working with the Italians, Russians, and British, but not the French: hence the need for a French conference using similar themes and vocabulary to show how France pictured the new world order. Brazzaville provided de Gaulle an international stage from which to reinsert France into a global conversation. In his opening speech, de Gaulle explained why a colonial power was holding a conference to discuss how imperialism must change: First and foremost, because this is France, that is to say a nation whose immortal genius is made for innovations which, little by little, lift men to the summit of dignity and brotherly love where, one day, all will meet. Second, because during the chaos which the temporary defeat had thrown, it was in the overseas territories, with people from all over the world who never wavered in their loyalty, where [France] found resources and a launchpad for her liberation; and because of that fact, there is an unbreakable tie between France and her Empire. Finally, because, learning from her defeat, France is animated by a zeal and wish for regeneration both for herself and for her dependencies.32

This was a huge recognition of the colonies’ contribution to the French war effort. De Gaulle acknowledged the need to rethink how France and the colonies would develop together. He reminded the French that as a strong imperial power, France would not be dependent on America for its greatness. At Brazzaville, de Gaulle publicly committed France to developing Africa through collaboration with neighboring colonies, improving infrastructure and giving more and more internal control to the indigenous populations. In declaring the Brazzaville conference open, de Gaulle invited the world to imagine a different face of colonialism. Nevertheless, de Gaulle’s choice of vocabulary, especially “the unbreakable tie between France and its empire,” put sharp boundaries on the new framework. The language of “unbreakable ties” was a warning not only for colonial subjects tempted by independence but also for the international community. Faced with two rising superpowers and a new world order, the declaration also served as a reminder to indigenous populations of France’s strength and position. When he reminded delegates and the press that only France would decide what changes would be made to its imperial sovereignty, de Gaulle was demonstrating publicly that, despite the circumstances, France should not be ignored or underestimated. The Brazzaville conference forced the world to confront France’s vision for the future. This gathering of leaders from across Africa was designed as a public display of French leadership, ingenuity, and “liberal imperial thinking,” and to remind the

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Americans and British that France still occupied a significant portion of the globe. Indeed, French and British imperial rivalry was long engrained in both countries’ histories and popular sentiments. Fundamentally, the Brazzaville conference was about French desires and goals for the future as imagined by de Gaulle. It was a way to re-stake the French flag throughout the African empire. The fact that metropolitan France had not yet been liberated in January 1944 created a space for theoretical discussions that might not have existed if practical solutions were immediately needed, as they would be eight months later. There was no budget to balance, and all financial questions were deliberately put off for some future date.33 For the French, Brazzaville was exciting and inspiring especially after four years of war, exile, dependence, and occupation. The conference promised a physically divided metropole and a morally divided empire that French grandeur and influence would continue to shine over the African continent, while bringing a glimmer of hope to the colonized peoples that the ties that bound them to France might be loosening. As Duff Cooper concluded, “To those who know M. Pleven and have savored the mystic touch of his Breton ancestry, this highly-colored and spiritual concept of what passed at Brazzaville will not come as a surprise. But sometimes the dreams of the dreamer come true.”34 In the short term it looked like they might: the D-Day landings were a success and within two months Paris was liberated. With the liberation of France, French priorities refocused on rebuilding the metropole, and the colonial subjects present in France witnessed this shift firsthand. Although the Brazzaville conference promised to usher in a new phase of French imperial planning, the events and decisions taken in the following months and years demonstrated that the new French empire was similar to the old one. The conference highlighted the tensions between French thinking and the international debates on self-determination and independence circulating at  the time. Delegates, all ranking members of the French colonial service, believed that French solutions were better suited to the African colonies, rejecting “the idea of self-government as inadequate and consider[ing] political rights in the colonies as something evolving.”35 While many of the conference proposals would bring concrete improvements, they were never intended to fundamentally change French rule, nor to question France’s right to rule over diverse African peoples and their territories. Even the economic development plan benefited France, as a wealthier colonial population would become a larger market for French goods.36 The conference was deliberately ambiguous on how the “natives” would benefit, and without delegates representing indigenous populations its recommendations would continue to be imposed by the French. Indeed, the Brazzaville conference approached the question of development in Africa as a simple administrative issue that could be solved by committed and enthusiastic civil servants who, by virtue of being French, knew best. Brazzaville was a continuation of the French civilizing mission, which assumed that imitating French civilization was the ultimate goal. It codified a sort of “trickle-down” political advancement by which improvements for the French and African elites in the colonies would eventually impact the masses.



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Despite reluctance by the French to fully acknowledge colonial contributions to the war, there was a sense that some recognition was needed, on a limited basis, for the “deserving.” The question of who deserved what and when became one of the defining debates at Brazzaville, and during postwar conferences on human rights. Generally, those who espoused French values—like monogamy, Christianity, or wealth—were deemed worthy of greater benefits. Brazzaville brought together white elites to discuss ideas and solutions that would then be imposed. Lamine Gueye, a politician and lawyer from Senegal, argued that although the conference sparked hope, the new legal code passed from its recommendations was a continuation of the worst practices of the Vichy era.37 Additionally, the experiences of African soldiers in Europe complicated the division between the elites and the masses. Returning soldiers had status and money and had met white people outside the hierarchies imposed in the colonies. Most importantly, they returned with a sense that they too deserved recognition.38 The benefits they expected varied as much as those claiming them. Examined cynically, the Brazzaville conference fits perfectly into international ideological discussions of the moment. Human rights discourse was never intended to challenge countries’ rights; even words like “civilization” and “humanity” were not meant to be universally inclusive.39 The speeches at Brazzaville reflected the flexible nature of global humanitarian discourse and its changing interpretations, and speakers chose their words carefully. The “brotherhood” evoked by de Gaulle was the least tricky of the republican trifecta, chosen purposely over “equality” or “liberty.”40 Indeed, Socialist Félix Gouin, member of the anti-Vichy Human Rights League, was categorical: the conference was not to discuss the rights of the African colonies, but rather a “noble and generous” gift from France.41 He confirmed France’s wish for international collaboration while firmly rejecting any claims that could be used to promote decolonization. He argued that in the great colonial France there are neither peoples to be emancipated nor racial discriminations to be abolished. There are but peoples who feel French, who wish to take, and to whom France wishes to give, an increasing part in the life and democratic institutions of the French community. There are peoples whom we intend to lead, step by step, towards consciousness and, in more mature cases, towards political liberties and who wish no other independence than that of France.

Gouin’s speech is an example of the persistent, reactionary, imperial view that without white guidance the colonies would never reach their potential as defined by the French. Many colonized peoples certainly held a different view of French rule. This infantilization of colonial subjects was common and persistent and had long-lasting and dangerous consequences. Even positive change, like banning the practice of forced labor, came cloaked in racist assumptions.42 Éboué’s belief, shared by many colonial leaders, that Africans generally did not have the discipline or rigor for regular paid work influenced how the policy was revised.43

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Over the next five years forced labor would be phased out and replaced with a one-year obligatory labor service for the “public good.” As such, Brazzaville was not a rupture in French colonial rule but rather an illustration of its development. This was for the French, as for the British, the beginning of the “second colonial occupation.”44 Brazzaville promised that things would change, but that change would happen within a French framework, not an indigenous one, and certainly not an Anglophile one. Events following the liberation of the metropole confirmed that France would not release its colonial territories easily.

Revolt and protest in the colonies With liberation, the maritime links between France and the colonies were slowly reestablished. De Gaulle consciously decided that healing internal French divisions was more important than vague wartime promises to France’s African subjects. In the metropole, food shortages and financial crises pushed domestic priorities to the forefront.45 Yet there remained colonial soldiers in France who had to return home. Some had participated in the landings in Provence with the Free French. Another 30,000 had been prisoners of the German Reich and held in France since 1940.46 French policy toward African soldiers, as after the First World War, aimed at their quick repatriation before they grew “too attached” to the metropole.47 The French regularly feared that the colonial soldiers were confusing what they were owed (very little in the French view) with what the French benevolently gave them, like the promises made in Brazzaville. This was felt especially acutely while the colonial prisoners were in German captivity, as the Vichy officials feared German propaganda would exacerbate their feelings of “entitlement.”48 This apprehension that small claims could snowball was a symptom of French colonization spanning both the Vichy and Free French regimes. It can be seen in the carefully chosen vocabulary used at Brazzaville—which espoused love, gifts from France, and development and avoided terms like “self-determination,” “rights,” or “independence.” The consequences of what might happen if colonial soldiers felt authorized to make demands haunted the French political and military authorities throughout the war. In the colonies, the defeat in 1940, the fragmented empire, independence of Syria and Lebanon in 1943, and the presence of the Allied powers and axis POWs in North Africa presented many postwar possibilities. Brazzaville meant to get ahead of these concerns by showing that France planned to move beyond its exploitative colonialism. The return home, then, became a defining moment in France’s relationship with its colonial veterans. Repatriation began in the autumn of 1944. In 6 months, 10,000 soldiers were returned to French West Africa.49 These men had significantly different wartime experiences: some had been prisoners, others fought with the Free French, yet they shared a growing disillusionment. Colonial soldiers in German captivity had been actively courted by the Vichy regime. Vichy felt that improving conditions for colonial POWs was a protection against German propaganda and a guarantee of future loyalty.50 French officials listened to the colonial prisoners’



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complaints and addressed them through improved food deliveries or parcels from charities.51 Official demonstrations of solidarity faded, however, when the colonial prisoners came under direct French control, at which point increased discipline was seen as the appropriate antidote to assertive behavior. Colonial soldiers with the Free French faced other forms of discrimination, like de Gaulle’s decision to “whiten” the First Army. Repressive colonial policies had withstood the transition from Third Republic to État Français, to provisional government. If anything, upheaval in France reinforced a desire to maintain the imperial status quo. Unlike during the Vichy years, when the threat of German or Anglo-French influence in the colonies meant that particular attention was paid to the colonial soldiers’ concerns, now the priority was reestablishing French dominance and colonial obedience. The first step was sending the African soldiers home. Repatriation became a large-scale logistical operation fraught with complications and tensions. The biggest concern for the soldiers was financial. Soldiers’ payments were delayed by a combination of organizational problems and paternalistic assumptions. Technically, payments for African soldiers were split between the transit camps in France and the colonies to ensure they did not “waste” their money on expensive gifts.52 Soldiers were repeatedly misled about when they would receive the money owed them. Often, soldiers were told that the balance would be paid in the villages, but local administrations were not given sufficient funds.53 Rumors spread to soldiers in France warning them not to leave without being paid. These issues came to a head in December 1944, when 1,200 former colonial soldiers arrived in Dakar and were transferred to military barracks at Thiaroye. The men had received different payments on their way home, making it difficult to determine who was owed what. Soldiers complained that their demobilization bonuses were still unpaid or were significantly less than expected. Other former prisoners carried large amounts of cash earned during captivity. Despite proof to the contrary, French officials assumed that this money had been stolen and, in some cases, confiscated it.54 Furthermore, the devaluation of the French franc decreased the prisoners’ savings.55 Failure to be paid substantiated a sense of distrust inherited from the previous generation of veterans who had likewise struggled to receive unpaid pensions or had to contend with complicated payment schemes, which disenfranchised many colonial veterans after the First World War.56 And so, in protest, on December 1, 1944, soldiers in the Thiaroye barracks refused orders and took several French officers hostage. In response, the French military fired on their soldiers, injuring hundreds and killing thirty-five men. The massacre immediately sent shock waves throughout the French and British colonies.57 The official report, written by those who had given the order to fire, claimed that the civilian and military authorities in French West Africa were blameless. Instead, they argued that the massacre at Thiaroye was the culmination of decisions made in France, which forced the authorities in Senegal to take action.58 There was some truth to that accusation. Not paying the soldiers before their return to the colonies, alongside inconsistent information regarding payment generally, certainly influenced the soldiers’ actions. These conclusions did not sit well with

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the authorities in France, most of whom fought with the Free French, while French West Africa remained Pétainist until after November 1942. Henri Laurentie, director of political affairs in the provisional government, felt the official report confirmed that “most of the Inspecteurs des Colonies, after having spontaneously failed at their national duty in 1940, remain incapable . . . of fulfilling the smallest demands of their professional duty.”59 The colonial soldiers’ demands were not considered when seeking an explanation for the revolt. Instead, the French clung to their habitual motif: German propaganda and “its disastrous effects on the mentality of the native ex-prisoners.”60 The massacre at Thiaroye revealed underlying tensions that threatened the colonial regime. It exposed the fissures that a paternalist rhetoric of imperial solidarity, propagated first by Vichy and then emphasized at Brazzaville, had sought to cover. It further demonstrated the challenges of demobilizing African soldiers whose war experiences had spurred legitimate claims against discriminatory policies.61 Additionally, it revealed, retrospectively, much of what was at stake while cultivating ties between African soldiers and France during the war. Stereotypes of West African soldiers painted them as loyal and childlike.62 Thiaroye directly contradicted these racist views and showed that colonial soldiers were prepared to take extreme measures to assert their rights. What caused these soldiers who had remained loyal to France throughout four years of captivity to revolt against their officers when they were so close to home? At Thiaroye, the consequences of five years of captivity for the ex-POWs, the hypermasculinity of the French army, combined with tensions and mistrust between previously Vichyist administrators and the new provisional government created a tinderbox. French authorities of both stripes had consistently underestimated the commitment of their African soldiers, while simultaneously praising imperial loyalty as the backbone of the French empire. That led to misinterpreting the returning colonial soldiers’ demands that the payment schedule, biased as it was against them, be enforced properly, as signs of a general revolt. The lack of experienced NCOs exacerbated the financial issue, and the soldiers’ suspicion that the situation would never be fixed contributed to their frustration generally and the events at Thiaroye specifically.63 NCOs are a key element in military structure serving as the link between the men and the upper echelons. Without effective NCOs and with the memory of the French Army’s failure to compensate veterans after the First World War, colonial soldiers were left alone to navigate increasingly harsh discipline and discriminatory payments. Gregory Mann correctly concludes that the Thiaroye massacre was neither an isolated event nor characteristic of the colonial prisoners’ repatriation.64 But Thiaroye did characterize the change the Second World War wrought on Franco-imperial relations. As Myron Echenberg argues, French officials did not recognize that captivity had changed and united African prisoners.65 The unity Echenberg evokes was the beginning of a collective awareness that captivity specifically, and military service for France generally, had meant something and that the colonial soldiers deserved more than a return to the harsh reality of forced labor and minimal rights. Popular opinion in France, however, remained in step with



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imperial ideology and was paternalist and often self-centered, hence the surprise when colonial populations started demanding change.66 To these arguments, one must add an additional complicating factor: the evaporation of solidarity with colonial POWs during their captivity and the return to the harsh reality of life in the French colonies. Any hope for change that had been sparked by Vichy rhetoric and confirmed at the Brazzaville conference had once again been quashed by violent reactionary efforts to reassert control over the indigenous populations. The colonies had fought for France during the war; some had even continued fighting after the armistice, but at the end of the day very little changed for them. France had changed during the Second World War, but the colonial and military hierarchies had not, and the real repercussions of the war were to come slowly. Despite refusing to acknowledge that the soldiers who revolted at Thiaroye had legitimate complaints, the French government did subsequently make changes which significantly reduced the potential for further conflict. Soldiers received payments before leaving France, which improved their “behavior,” and four million West African francs were sent to Dakar to reimburse saving accounts opened during captivity and finalize all payments due at the end of service.67 Nevertheless, France consistently refused to acknowledge that colonial soldiers had reasonable grievances: “Far from their country and separated from their officers for five years, successively subjected to captivity then freedom that did not often assuage their discipline, sometimes chosen as insidious propaganda instruments, often abusively spoiled, the Senegalese ex-prisoners suffer from the turmoil that follows troubled times and particularly affects crude natures.”68 The idea that colonial soldiers had been “spoiled” in France during the war certainly exacerbated the repressive measures taken in response to their perceived challenge to the colonial regime. It also protected French stereotypes of pathologically loyal African soldiers, upon which decades of military recruitment had been based: from this perspective, it was not French colonialism, but rather German captivity and Vichy’s missteps which caused “crude natured” soldiers to act out.

Conclusions In 1944, there was a general sense that the war had changed or redefined the bonds between France and its empire. The Brazzaville conference showcased French willingness to engage with these questions at least superficially. Yet at the end of the war, when the colonies began to demand recognition for their contribution to the war, the French returned to the repressive practices of the conquest era. An official report to the minister of colonies after the Thiaroye massacre confirmed that “the results of this path will be positive and will see our protégés fully realize, again, the greatness and the civilizing power of France.”69 This interpretation allowed, even justified, repression as the way to bring colonial soldiers back into the imperial fold. Thiaroye was symptomatic of the structural violence inherent in colonialism. Thirty-four protesters, or “rebels,” were sent to prison. A general amnesty was

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announced in June 1947, by which time five men had died. After Thiaroye, there had been a concerted effort to prevent further unrest by paying soldiers before they left France, which was exactly what they had wanted. At Thiaroye, soldiers were not resisting French rule, but rather insisting that the rights they had been granted, limited as they were, be respected. In 1944, while Europe began celebrating victories, the colonies were struggling with the continuing realities of colonialism. Despite the reluctance of many colonial soldiers to be sent to war in 1940, once engaged, they were loyal to France. The Atlantic Charter, the Brazzaville conference, and later the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1949 Geneva Convention all suggested that change was in the air. Yet some intellectuals from the global south, like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, felt these ideas of “humanity” were merely rebranded imperial ideologies.70 That was certainly the case for the Brazzaville conference, which brought the French colonial dream to the forefront in 1944, proposed governing the colonies without soliciting their input, and limited the participation of indigenous populations in their own postwar future. In 1944, it was clear to African soldiers, however, that the discourse of solidarity, brotherhood, and unbreakable ties were repackaged colonialism. The real change came slowly, from below, with small protests, acts of violence, political debate, and a refusal to return to the imperial status quo.

Notes 1 Eric T. Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: The African Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 250. 2 Charles-Robert Agéron, “L’Exposition coloniale de 1931: mythe républicain ou mythe impérial?” in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 505; Martin Evans, “Culture and Empire: An Overview,” in Culture and Empire: The French Experience 1830-1940, ed. Martin Evans (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 2. 3 Evans, “Culture and Empire,” 3. 4 See Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940 - 1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972, 2001); Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 5 Jennings, Free French Africa, 176. 6 Martin Thomas, The French Empire at War, 1940-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 70. 7 Ruth Ginio, French Colonialism Unmasked: The Vichy Years in French West Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), xiv. 8 Archives nationales de France [Henceforth AN], F/41/273, brochure, “L’Empire notre meilleur chance, retour sur le passé” [no date]. 9 AN, F1a/3653, La France socialiste, 28 August 1942; see also AN, F1a/3653, InterFrance, “les délais d’achèvement” [no date]. 10 Ginio, French Colonialism Unmasked, 76–77. 11 Jennings, Free French Africa, 191. 12 Ibid., 57. 13 The National Archives, Kew [Henceforth TNA], FO 371/42216, BBC Monitoring report, Extract. February 4, 1944.



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14 TNA FO 371/42216, Duff Cooper to Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, copied to Resident Minister Accra and consuls in Dakar and Brazzaville, January 22, 1944. 15 Paxton, Vichy France, 240. 16 Jackson, The Dark Years, 129. 17 AN, F1a/3653, L’Oeuvre, August 12, 1942; SHD, 2P82, Admiral Darlan, report on Franco-British relations, May 31, 1941. 18 Archives départementales [Henceforth AD] Gironde, 61W5, Giberton, monthly report, November 1942. 19 Charles de Gaulle, speech at the opening of the Brazzaville conference, January 30, 1944, http:​//dev​.char​les-d​e-gau​lle.o​rg/en​g/l-h​omme-​du-ve​rbe/s​peech​es/30​-janu​ary-1​944-s​ peech​-at-t​he-op​ening​-of-t​he-br​azzav​ille-​confe​rence​.html​ (accessed July 17, 2017). 20 Jennings, Free French Africa, 203. 21 Service historique de la Défense [Henceforth SHD], 1P200, intelligence from an escaped prisoner, Centre de rassemblement de Marseille, July 30, 1941; SHD, 1P200 note, intelligence on German propaganda for North African prisoners, August 23, 1941; Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 61. 22 TNA, FO 371/42216, Commissariat aux colonies to Gouveneur-Général de l’AEF, Liste recapitulative des principales questions qui devront être traitées au cours de la Conférence Africaine de Brazzaville, n.d. 23 Ibid. 24 TNA, FO 371/42216, Correspondence Duff Cooper to Anthony Eden, sent February 26, 1944, received March 7, 1944. 25 TNA, FO 371/42216, Liste recapitulative des principales questions. 26 TNA, FO 371/42216, Programme général de la Conférence de Brazzaville, January 1944. 27 Samuel Moyn, “Human Rights Are Not Enough,” The Nation 306, no. 10 (2018): 20–22. 28 Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 36. 29 Cooper, Citizenship between Empire, 25. 30 TNA, FO 371/42216, BBC Monitoring report, Extract. February 4, 1944. 31 Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union Message for Congress, January 11, 1944, http:​//doc​s.fdr​libra​ry.ma​rist.​edu/0​11144​.HTML​ (accessed July 17, 2017). 32 De Gaulle, speech at the opening of the Brazzaville conference. 33 TNA, FO 371/42216, Correspondence Duff Cooper to Anthony Eden, February 26, 1944. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 TNA, FO 371/42216, Duff Cooper to Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, January 22, 1944. 37 Jennings, Free French Africa, 251. 38 Sarah Frank, “Colonial Prisoners of War and French Civilians,” in Everyday Life in Vichy France, ed. Lindsey Dodd and David Lees (London: Bloomsbury, June 2018). 39 Paul Betts, “Universalism and Its Discontents: Humanity as a Twentieth Century Concept,” in Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practices from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, ed. Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 2016), 59–60.

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40 Johannes Paulmann, “Humanity - Humanitarian Reason - Imperial Humanitarianism: European Concepts in Practice,” in Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practices from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, ed. Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 2016), 304. 41 TNA, FO 371/42216, Félix Gouin’s speech, BBC Monitoring report, Extract. February 4, 1944. 42 Jennings, Free French Africa, 251. 43 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 179. 44 John Lonsdale and Anthony Low, “Introduction: The Second Colonial Occupation,” in The Oxford History of East Africa, vol. III, ed. D.A. Low and Alison Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). 45 Julien Fargettas, Les tirailleurs sénégalais. Les soldats noirs entre légends et réalités, 1939-1945 (Paris: Edition Tallandier, 2012), 264. 46 After the armistice, 1.8 million French soldiers were in German captivity. The Germans opted to segregate prisoners and sent white POWs to Germany, while approximately 85,000 Colonial POWs remained in German-run camps located across occupied France. SHD, 9P8, information on numbers in the Frontstalags, July 31, 1944; AN, F/9/2351, Approximations concerning prisoners from Algeria, the colonies, protectorates and countries under mandate for General Andlauer, May 5, 1941. 47 Nancy Lawler, Soldiers of Misfortune: Ivorien Tirailleurs of World War II (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 196; Michel, Appel à l’Afrique, 198. 48 AD Ardennes, 1W146, L. Bonnaud to Contrôleur de l’armée sous-directeur de Service des prisonniers de guerre, August 19, 1942. 49 SHD, 5H16, De Boisboissel to Ministre de la Guerre, Direction des troupes coloniales, March 29, 1945. 50 Sarah Frank, “Helping ‘Our’ Prisoners: Philanthropic Mobilization for French Colonial Prisoners of War, 1940-1942,” in Wartime Captivity in the 20th Century: Archives, Stories, Memories, ed. Anne-Marie Pathé, et Fabien Théofilakis (New York: Berghahn, 2016). 51 SHD, 2P78, Jean Detroyat, report of visit to Frontstalag 121 Epinal, March 27, 1941; see also AN, F/9/2351, CRF, automobile section of Bordeaux, report on camp visits in Landes, October 15, 1941; Archives nationales du Sénégal, 2D23/28, Boisson to Secretary of State for Colonies, POWs service, November 7, 1941. 52 Marc Michel, Les Africains et la grande guerre, l’appel à l’Afrique 1914-1918 (Paris: Karthala, 2003), 201. 53 Lawler, Soldiers of misfortune, 198. 54 Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857-1960 (London: James Currey, 1991), 101; Lawler, Soldiers of Misfortune, 199. 55 Lawler, Soldiers of Misfortune, 198. 56 Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 115; JO AOF, 8 mai, 5 juin, 18 octobre, 8 novembre 1919 in Michel, Appel à l’Afrique, 201. 57 SHD, 5H16, Boisboissel to Ministre des Colonies, Direction des Affaires Militaires, December 21, 1944. 58 SHD, 5H16, Merat, detailed report on the events at Thiaroye, February 14, 1944. 59 SHD, 5H16, Laurentie, note for M. le Ministre, March 31, 1945. 60 SHD, 5H16, Boisboissel to Cournarie, December 14, 1944.



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61 Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, 97–98. 62 Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Nanterre [Henceforth BDIC], S Pièce 8551, General Langlois, Manuel élémentaire à l’usage des officiers et sous-officiers appelés à commander des indigènes coloniaux (Indochinois-SénégalaisMalgaches) dans la métropole, Fascicule n. 2 Sénégalais (Paris: Ministère de la Guerre, 1923), 9, 16. 63 Eric Deroo and Antoine Champeaux, La Force noire, gloire et infortunes d’une légende coloniale (Paris: Editions Tallandier, 2006), 201. 64 Mann, Native Sons, 117. 65 Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, 103. 66 Charles-Robert Ageron, “Vichy, les Français et l’Empire,” in Le Régime de Vichy et les Français, ed. Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 131–32. 67 SHD, 5H16, Boisseau to Colonies. Paris, February 25, 1945; Boisboissel to Ministre de la Guerre, Direction des troupes coloniales, March 14, 1945; Boisboissel, report, February 8, 1945; report of March 29, 1945. 68 SHD, 5H16, De Perier, appendix to report on the events at Thiaroye, [n.d.]. 69 SHD, 5H16, Digo for the absent governor-general to Ministre des Colonies, December 22, 1944. 70 Betts, “Universalism and its Discontents,” 66.

CChapter 5 “VILLAGE LIFE AND HOW TO IMPROVE IT”: TEXTUAL ROUTES OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN THE LATE BRITISH EMPIRE1 Radhika Natarajan

As the end of the Second World War approached, Frank Lugard Brayne worried about the demobilization of two million Indian soldiers. Brayne was an officer in the Indian army welfare branch and approaching retirement after nearly forty years in the Indian civil service. In his 1944 Winning the Peace, Brayne argued that the Indian government needed to invest in community development because ex-soldiers presented a “source of potential danger to the peace of [this] country.”2 During the war, Indian soldiers had traveled to new places, seen new technologies, and observed new ways of living. Would they settle into the old pattern of their lives once they returned to their villages? Or would they want more? Whose vision of the future would they embrace? That offered by the British government of India? Or by anti-colonial nationalists? While Brayne published his book to convince government officials in India to undertake a comprehensive program of community development, the pamphlet “Village Life and How to Improve It,” also published in 1944, translated Brayne’s work for an African audience. Both works anticipated anti-colonial ferment in the years following the war and identified ex-soldiers as an important force in the contest for the postwar future. Colonial officials like Brayne and missionary organizations like the International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa sought to harness a desire for change to moderate plans for self-government within the empire. Brayne might have focused on political participation or civic education, but his schemes for the reorganization of village life called attention to dirt, or “matter out of place.” The anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that there is no universal definition of “dirt,” but rather that disgust reactions are contingent and enmeshed in wider social beliefs.3 For sociologist Imogen Tyler, disgust “functions to affirm the boundaries of the social body (the body politic) through the (actual or symbolic) expulsion of what are collectively agreed to be polluting objects, practices or persons.”4 Community development, which focused on transforming the practices of colonial populations, was a site in which colonial subjects were deemed to be “disgusting.” By drawing a distinction between reformers and those in need of reform, development advocates argued that the objects of reform could



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not yet participate in the body politic. Thus, community development literature reproduced the exclusions of colonial governance even as it claimed to prepare colonial subjects for independence. Tracing the textual routes of community development brings into relief the making of abject objects of development. As embodiments of an imperial information system, these two texts reveal a connected history of development spanning multiple colonial locations.5 The end of the war and the problem of demobilizing colonial soldiers created an opportunity for proponents of community development. The wide embrace of community development was made possible by evangelical ideologies and missionary networks. Brayne’s work looked back to a longer history of evangelical campaigns in Britain and empire. On the translation of his programs to Africa, Christian missionaries claimed a postwar role as educators in development. Whereas previous scholarship has located the origins of Britain’s postwar development efforts in labor unrest during the interwar period, Winning the Peace and “Village Life and How to Improve It” reveal the impact of demobilization on development planning. As imperial agents throughout the empire imagined the postwar future, their embrace of community development as the means of preparing colonial subjects for independence created the object of development reform as perpetually abject.

“Brayne ki jai!” In the historiography of South Asia, the history of development in the late colonial period has been largely overlooked. This is perhaps not surprising as scholars have sought to understand the trajectory and turning points of the Indian freedom struggle. The focus on constitutional struggles and communalism has shed light on how British India gave rise to the independent nation-states of India, Pakistan, and eventually Bangladesh.6 Meanwhile, histories of colonial development have focused on the implementation of modernist visions of economic transformation, and as postwar planners found the continent of Africa to be their main concern, South Asia has received less attention.7 However, following the textual routes of community development reveals continuities between earlier sites of imperial improvement and postwar development in Africa. When we think of development less as a particular high modernist set of ideologies and practices and more as an attempt to reform individuals to embrace an improvement mind-set, a larger field of ideas and practices comes into focus. Frank Lugard Brayne, author of Winning the Peace, was concerned in his own time by the Indian government’s disregard for the condition of the Indian peasantry. He argued that attention to political questions had caused the government as well as Indian political leaders to forget the condition of the vast majority of Indian people. Rural reconstruction would not only improve agricultural efficiency and spur individual savings but also keep Indians “busy, body and mind” and could ease “the constitutional problem,” by convincing the people of “the goodwill of Government and its desire and capacity to win the peace as well as the war.”8

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Winning the Peace drew from Brayne’s twenty years of rural reconstruction work to make the case for a coordinated program of development that encompassed state investment as well as education. Development has a long history in colonial policy and practice, but in the interwar period there was a shift in the designation of the proper agents of development. From the beginnings of settler colonialism in North America and elsewhere, the transformation of natural resources into individual, commercial, and imperial wealth was thought to depend upon the migration of individuals from Britain to the colonies. The British-born and their descendants were marked as the true agents of improvement in lands whose natives were deemed incapable of maximizing the resources available to them. In the subject empire as well, the colonial government saw its role as stewarding colonial progress through the expropriation of natural resources.9 Beginning in the years after the First World War, due to anti-colonial ferment and changing international scrutiny of empire, the British empire asserted its purpose as trusteeship, tutoring colonial subjects in economic modernity, and preparing them for eventual independence. Development took on a technical aspect, as trained individuals assisted colonial societies in their transition to a more advanced economic stage. From resource extraction for the benefit of the metropole, development began to be something done “to and for” colonies and colonial subjects.10 Development encompassed large-scale projects that required capital investment and technical expertise as well as small-scale projects to improve the economic outcomes of rural people.11 Community development promised economic advancement, and it required ethical transformation. People had to be inspired to improve; they needed to be taught to want something better than they had. But a desire for a better life was also dangerous under colonial conditions. The Second World War intensified the instability of the imperial social formation in three ways: colonial soldiers were exposed to different ways of living and different ideas through their travels and personal encounters; the Atlantic Charter made self-determination one of the “common principles” of the United States and the United Kingdom and created an opening for anti-colonial nationalists to make claims on the imperial state; and wide discussion of postwar reconstruction for Europe provided a contrast to what colonial governments promised their colonial subjects.12 In India, massive and violent demonstrations forced the imperial state to promise self-determination at the war’s close. The challenge for the Indian government was to demonstrate to publics in India, the United Kingdom, the United Sates, and among the United Nations that colonial rule served the interests of the Indian people.13 The postwar moment presented an opportunity to expand community development, but the ground was prepared and the seeds sown in the interwar period. While Brayne argued that the government of India and nationalist politicians had overlooked the rural question, interwar India saw a proliferation of projects to transform the social conditions of peasant cultivators. Rabindranath Tagore implemented a project of “economic and moral rehabilitation” on one of his Bengali estates, Sriniketan. In southern India, the YMCA began the Martandam



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Project, to foster “self-help with intimate expert counsel.” In Baroda, Madras, and the United Provinces, villages became sites of contestation for differing views of peasant transformation.14 In his enormous written output, Brayne rarely mentioned these other visions of rural reconstruction and claimed that he alone was troubled by the condition of the Indian peasant and possessed the means to transform rural life. In many accounts of Brayne, written during his career and to the present day, his personality overwhelms analysis of his project. Brayne was born in rural Norfolk in 1882. His father was an Anglican clergyman, and his mother was the aunt of Frederic Lugard, the governor of Nigeria known for his implementation of indirect rule. Brayne attended Cambridge, then joined the Indian civil service in 1905. He worked in Delhi and the Punjab before military service in the First World War interrupted his career. On his return to India, he married Iris Goodeve Goble and became deputy commissioner of Gurgaon in the Punjab in 1920. There he instituted his program of village improvement. Village improvement sought to transform the economic conditions of rural people by cultivating their potential for thrift, efficiency, and self-help. Once possessed of an improvement mind-set, rural people would survey village conditions and assess how to create savings, reduce waste and effort, and work together to help themselves and their community. As Clive Dewey argues, Brayne was shaped by his evangelical roots, and village improvement in India drew on English rural reconstruction programs. The agricultural depression of the 1870s and 1880s spurred the migration of rural people to towns and generated anxiety that the village, the imagined heart of British social life, was dying. Voluntary societies emerged to preserve disappearing folkways and to energize the communal bonds of rural society by engaging ordinary people in the organization of their own lives. In a context of declining church attendance, Anglican clergy found a new role for themselves. The parish priest, particularly in rural areas, began to expand his pastoral care through new institutions that touched every aspect of social life.15 Brayne’s father’s work as a rural priest, and his childhood in Norfolk, shaped Brayne’s vision for the Indian village. In India, it was not priests, but soldiers who would transform village life. The Indian army in the Second World War was one of the largest voluntary armies ever assembled in history. In 1939 the Indian army comprised 229,000 soldiers, of whom 182,000 were Indians.16 In 1945, its ranks had swelled to over two million soldiers who came from the length and breadth of India, and the Indian army constituted nearly 20 percent of the total manpower of the British empire in the war.17 Indian soldiers participated in combat operations in Southeast Asia, the  Middle East, North Africa, East Africa, and Europe. The Indian soldier helped the British empire win the war, and according to Brayne, now he would help them win the peace. The soldier had experienced new circumstances and encountered new ways of living in his service. He had also learned discipline and hygienic habits. In Brayne’s view, this experience made him the perfect agent of village improvement on his return home.18 Winning the Peace did not confine itself to outlining a project for soldiers, but rather emphasized the role that soldiers could play in the broader work of

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improvement. It was necessary to raise the standard of living of the entire nation, and because of his “comradeship, initiative, and training,” the ex-soldier could be the pioneer of a “new way of life.”19 However, for all that Brayne praised soldiers, he also was wary of their commitments. He saw soldiers as potential sources of discontent that could be swayed to the side of anti-colonial agitation.20 As Sarah Frank’s essay in this volume shows, demobilized soldiers were a source of concern for the French as well as the British empire. Veterans were a general problem, and in India, fears of postwar unrest were heightened by violent anti-colonial agitation during the war. In Bengal, the publicity department coordinated rural development work as a covert strategy of counterterrorism. In the United Provinces, Aman Sabhas, or anti-revolutionary leagues, encouraged their participants to “Be True to Your King and Country” and proclaimed that “Peace and Order Are Necessary for all Human Progress.”21 Brayne argued that a coordinated All-India campaign of village improvement was necessary to usefully marshal a soldier’s energies and his desire for a better life. In Winning the Peace, Brayne made his case to British elites in India. The book was a restatement of arguments he had been making for over twenty years, redeployed in anticipation of the Allied victory. In 1929, Brayne wrote Socrates in an Indian Village, a series of dialogues written for those tasked with village improvement. Whereas for the Athenian Socrates, the goal of such dialogue was recognition of ignorance, for Brayne’s village Socrates, the desired end was the submission of villagers to improvement. Brayne’s Socrates frequently encountered ex-soldiers, whom he described as “peacocks sitting on a muck heap.”22 The soldiers wore their uniforms and medals and did nothing to improve their villages. Socrates called them “ticks”: Now you come home on pensions paid for by the villagers, and instead of setting them an example of uplift and of good housing, good farming, avoiding disease; instead of teaching them to honour their women-folk, educate their girls and boys, you drop back into the same old squalor as they are in, you shed your culture with your uniform, and you are just a lot of idlers who know better but are too lazy to act on your knowledge.23

Socrates’ insults lead the soldiers to recognize that they have been neglectful, and they resolve to act in the interests of the village. The book ends with the village animals admiring their improved surroundings with shouts of “Socrates ki jai!”24 Like many other proponents of development within the government of India, Brayne possessed a bias toward agriculture and the peasant cultivator as the objects of reform. While Indian nationalists critiqued deindustrialization and the drain of wealth as reasons for poverty in India, in Winning the Peace, Brayne critiqued the inefficiencies of the Indian peasant. Efficiency encompassed the prevention of soil erosion, improvement of seed quality, and the scientific breeding of cattle. Brayne also sought to reform land title, both to discourage the division of property and to change the forms of land revenue and tenure so that more farmers owned their land rather than having their labor contribute to the profits of non-cultivating rights-



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holders, landlords, and banks. Finally, he believed that farmers should learn new developments and discoveries in agricultural science and put them into practice.25 An increase in agricultural efficiency would raise the “purchasing power and the taxability of the common people,”26 leading to greater wealth for individuals and the nation. He saw a role for the government to invest in the transportation and communications infrastructure that would allow farmers to more easily bring their goods to market. The government could also cultivate a foreign market for agricultural goods.27 Brayne’s vision for prosperity linked individual wealth to India’s further integration into the imperial economy as an agricultural producer. While Brayne envisioned a prosperous future for India and Indians rooted in their relation to the land, the changes necessary for this future would only come about with a shift in the mind-set and culture of Indians. In Brayne’s estimation, Indians were responsible for their poverty because of their specific cultural habits and their broader fatalism. The “psychological problem” of Indians that depressed their standard of living was the mind-set of “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”28 Indian villagers were content to do things the way that they had always done them, for instance, the reliance in the Punjab on cow dung for household fuel. This practice posed four challenges for Brayne: cow dung was a constant presence in the Indian home, cooking fires were smoky and unhygienic, manure would more efficiently be used as fertilizer, and Indian women could better spend their time creating hygienic and happy homes rather than collecting cow dung and shaping patties. Indians did not know how to properly utilize cow feces, and they were also unable to properly dispose of human feces. Brayne railed against the practice of using village streets and fields as toilets. In his broader work, waste management—the construction of latrines and compost pits—was a major component of his plan for village improvement. Brayne’s attention to the misuse of cow dung and the improper disposal of human waste reveal not simply the unhygienic practices of Indian peasants, but his own disgust. Brayne concerned himself with reforming waste management in Indian villages because they offended his social beliefs, particularly those beliefs rooted in his evangelical background regarding efficiency and cleanliness. The filthy condition of villagers was heightened for Brayne by their adornment with gold and silver jewelry. In a dialogue titled, “Jewellery and the Proper Position of Women,” Socrates scolded villagers: “You allow yourselves and your families to go dirty and in rags when washing costs nothing and clothes not a very great deal, and then counteract the slovenly and dirty result by expensive jewellery? God made them beautiful, and you spoil what God made with rags and dirt, and then try and hide it with jewellery!”29 The juxtaposition of dirt and precious metals was particularly distasteful to Brayne. The possession of gold and silver jewelry provided him with further evidence of the misplaced priorities that kept Indian villagers unhealthy and poor and prevented them from becoming modern economic actors. The money spent by poor villagers on jewelry confounded him, as villagers wasted what little capital they had on precious metals that could not circulate in the economy or be spent on agricultural improvement, mosquito nets, quinine, or education.30 Brayne could not see the significance of precious

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metals as an important source of wealth for women and leverage in their families. Additionally, precious metals were an asset that could be sold by farmers when the price of crops fell, such as during the Depression.31 Rather than recognizing the economic significance of gold and silver jewelry, Brayne argued that if women desired beautiful objects, they should learn lace-making and embroidery, which would provide beauty and instill a productive sense of competition.32 In Brayne’s efforts to reform the Indian village, women were the key figures of transformation, and not only because they needed to be taught to desire lace instead of gold. Brayne saw Indian women as a significant constraint on the progress of India because their lack of education perpetuated a “medieval” mindset. Civilization could not be spread by “men only,” and any policy that did not include women would be “unique, expensive, and disastrous.”33 Brayne repeatedly emphasized that girls should receive education, but solely for the purpose of creating healthy homes and raising obedient children. A good home was above all things hygienic, clean, and ventilated. It was surrounded by well-ordered gardens, tidy yards, and fruit trees. The organization of the garden supported cooking in the kitchen. The housewife understood the basic principles of nutrition and prepared balanced meals. She maintained a supply of essential medicines. She made and mended clothes, knitted, and decorated her home simply. Above all else, a good housewife ensured that her children were “clean, neat, disciplined, healthy, happy” and attended school. Because the housewife created the home, women’s welfare, education, and training had to be at the core of national progress and development. In seeking to transform the Indian village, Brayne called repeatedly on the rhetoric of the United Nations to make his argument for community development. He held no commitment to abstract principles, but he recognized the impact of the United Nations on Indians, and on soldiers in particular. In 1942, India, with twenty-five other countries, signed the “Declaration by United Nations,” which affirmed the principles of the Atlantic Charter. Brayne argued that soldiers had been told they were fighting for a “new world of ‘happiness and justice,’” and after the war they could be put to work to “lift their country to a great place among United Nations.”34 But, “The soldier must never be allowed to forget that he was once a soldier. The virtues of the soldier must be carefully preserved and applied to the purpose of peace and good citizenship.”35 Unlike after the First World War, ex-soldiers should form clubs in every village and town and be encouraged to mark Armistice Day and hold rallies and reunions. Allowing an ex-soldier to forget he was once a soldier created the possibility that on his return to the village, he would “slip back into the easy-going groove of the ancient ways and customs.” Or worse, he might “explore and become either a fervent reformer, a red-hot enemy of all government, or a violent and dangerous criminal.”36 The colonial government needed to aid the soldier in implementing the ideals of the United Nations or risk the danger of the disenchanted veteran. Brayne’s ideas presented a transformative vision of community development, in which ordinary individuals could overcome their poverty through thrift, discipline, and an improvement mind-set. But his books concealed the failures of his programs. As deputy commissioner of Gurgaon from 1920 to 1928, Brayne



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bankrupted the district, imposed an authoritarian form of leadership, and failed to garner popular support for his projects. Brayne’s efforts to build health centers, or buy Hissar bulls to improve local herds, caused financial distress for district councils. Gurgaon residents also critiqued Brayne’s projects as unsuitable to the particular conditions of the region. Gurgaon was a very poor area, with little rainfall and difficult agricultural conditions. Hissar bulls were too big for small holdings, challenging to control, and ate specific fodder that was difficult for villagers to procure.37 Other district officers in the province found that Brayne bullied his employees, who then threatened villagers with fines or imprisonment if they failed to implement his ideas.38 On hearing of the Gurgaon experiment, M. K. Gandhi sent an investigator to write a four-part series for his newsletter Young India. Lala Deshraj documented Brayne’s extravagant spending, the failures of his various projects, and the authoritarian way Brayne achieved the appearance of progress.39 The example of Gurgaon led Gandhi to consider the conditions in which people could be encouraged to cultivate improvement. According to Gandhi, Brayne failed because he threw money at problems and imposed practices from above.40 And as a representative of the British Government of India, Brayne’s position was an impediment to reform because his programs could never be disaggregated from imperial rule. Colonial development, Gandhi suggested, was an irreconcilable contradiction. Brayne, however, represented himself as a heroic transformer of peasant conditions. His refusal to admit difficulties and setbacks shaped the forms of coercion through which his projects were enacted. He enumerated the iron plows distributed, manure pits dug, pukka wells built. He never wrote about how many iron plows, manure pits, and Persian wheels were used. As Brayne depended upon subordinates for implementing programs, his view of progress differed from experiences on the ground. Raja Mohammed Afzal, who served under Brayne for two years, described revenue staff, village headmen, village guides, and ordinary people doctoring books and concealing customary practices to satisfy Brayne and avoid punishment. When dignitaries visited, villagers opened their ventilators (which were otherwise covered to keep their homes cool and safe), cleaned streets, covered up manure piles, and hid cow dung cakes. On one occasion, when visitors were shown inside a model house in a model village, they asked to see the contents of a beautiful box. The woman who lived in the house refused but was subsequently forced to open the box by a village official. Inside were cow dung cakes.41 E. N. Mangat Rai, one of Brayne’s deputies who held the responsibility to clean up villages ahead of official tours, called village improvement a “farce.”42 Within Gurgaon, people witnessed the failure of village improvement. The provincial government knew the financial catastrophe Brayne wrought. But Brayne shaped how the wider world perceived his experiment, and it was the promise of village improvement, rather than its limits, that reached an international audience. Gandhi argued that Brayne’s statements on India were “calumnies” addressed to English audiences with little experience of actual conditions.43 With publications like Winning the Peace, Brayne carefully controlled the framing of his project and elided the problems. When he did mention criticisms, he argued that

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lack of funding constrained his vision, and he continued to press the government to support his program. In addition to publishing books on the Gurgaon experiment, Brayne traveled widely in Britain, met with Members of Parliament, gave lectures to the East India Association, formed an Indian Village Welfare Association, spoke at a missionary training college, and attended conferences of village societies.44 This advocacy work in the metropole enraged other Indian civil service officers who deemed it inappropriate, but this work served Brayne’s interests as it created the means through which his ideas traveled beyond India. As Clive Dewey argues, enthusiasm for Brayne’s ideas increased the further the distance from Gurgaon.45 The textual history of community development in the late empire is not only a story of how ideas traveled but also one about how books concealed crucial contexts.

The good news of development Brayne brought evangelical zeal to the work of village improvement, and his ideas were spread by missionaries who were reframing their position in the postwar world. Margaret Wrong, the secretary of the International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa (ICCLA), was one such figure, and like Brayne, she saw in the postwar moment an opportunity for community development: Africa has not remained unshaken by the world crisis. As in the last war, when the fighting men of Africa return, they will come from a world of new things and new experiences which will not fit into the old mould. New and perplexing problems have had to be faced by the thinking men and women of the new Africa and by the young people in schools. Propaganda for the war effort has claimed that they must take a share in the fight for right and they have responded. . . . In world reconstruction they must have their place. Their question is where are they to find that place and make the best contribution in their power. The Christian opportunity is to supply the answer.46

As the war came to a close, North Atlantic experts perceived a new African with a transformed relationship to the nation, and a new Africa with a remade relationship to the world. As in India, the postwar African village would be a site of winning the peace. Community development found wide support after the Second World War because of the particular contexts of education and welfare in the interwar empire. After the First World War, the Colonial Office took interest in education in British African territories due to both new international scrutiny of empire and new political contexts within colonies. In the interwar period, education was “adapted” to the particular conditions of Africans and designed to meet their needs.47 That is, a wide range of individuals translated ideas and practices of education developed in Europe and North America for African contexts. These actors were aided by British and American NGOs. The American Phelps-Stokes Commission sought to



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shape education in Africa based on their arguments that “Negro Education” in the US South should improve the agricultural practices of African Americans through instruction in modern techniques. In the United States, critics such as W. E. B. Du Bois challenged the politics of reinforcing the agricultural condition of African Americans at the expense of educating them to see the forms of oppression and injustice that constrained their opportunities.48 As Chike Jeffers shows, in 1944, African Americans from across the political spectrum argued that improvement in the condition of African Americans could only come about through full political rights and an end to segregation. However, as in the United States, education in British colonial contexts would focus on reforming subordinate populations through emphasis on individual initiative. Brayne was an officer in the Indian civil service and an agent of the colonial government. But colonial states were not the only entities interested in the postwar possibility of rural reconstruction. Missionaries also articulated a new role for themselves as proponents of community development. Between 1940 and 1951, the African Home Library, an outreach effort of the ICCLA, published 124 fifteen-page pamphlets for use in mission schools and in the homes of improvement-minded Africans. In 1944, the forty-fourth title in the series, “Village Life and How to Improve It,” presented an abridged version of Brayne’s essays on rural reconstruction for African audiences. In bringing village improvement to colonial Africa, the African Home Library argued that transforming agricultural, cultural, and women’s habits was necessary for the political and economic future of the continent. In the years of decolonization, liberal missionaries at times challenged colonial governments and at times cooperated in the project of trusteeship, or preparation for self-government. Their positions depended upon the political situation within colonies as well as the demands of their churches and their relations with the wider network of missionary organizations.49 The ICCLA was founded in 1929 as a subcommittee of the International Missionary Council. Based in London, it brought together missionary societies, Bible societies, and religious publishing houses in order to foster “the preparation, publication, and distribution of literature for use in connection with missionary work in Africa.”50 The ICCLA worked with other mission organizations to promote literacy and to commission materials suitable for newly literate and newly Christian autochthonous Africans.51 In London, Margaret Wrong, the organization’s Canadian secretary belonged to the Fabian Colonial Bureau, worked for the BBC during the Second World War to develop radio broadcasts for Africa, served on Colonial Office committees, and regularly invited African students and travelers in the metropole to the home she shared with her partner, the social anthropologist Margaret Read.52 She worked through these networks to advocate for more resources for African literacy and for education in African languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and on the continent. She traveled to the United States to raise funds and enthusiasm for her work, and she traveled extensively in sub-Saharan Africa, developing relationships with missionary societies, publishers, colonial officials, and scholars.

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The African Home Library met two needs of African colonies during the late empire: a supply of cheap materials to promote literacy and the content to affect shifts in political, economic, and ethical subjectivities. The ICCLA published the first volumes of the African Home Library in 1940. The booklets were printed in London by the Sheldon Press, founded as the “general interest” imprint of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), an important press for missionaries throughout the world.53 The British and American missionary authors published in the series reveal an older missionary world giving way to a new world of technocratic expertise.54 Religious texts and biographies of figures such as Florence Nightingale and St. Columba were published alongside titles written by a new cadre of global development experts, drawn from both the private and public sectors. The St. Lucian labor economist W. Arthur Lewis contributed a pamphlet on the West Indies; the Gold Coast official William A. R. Walker wrote two tracts addressing political development, “The Good Citizen” and “The Law”; and Walter Clay Lowdermilk contributed “The Eleventh Commandment, or, Care of the Land,” a celebration of conservation efforts made by European Jewish settlers in Palestine. Like “Village Life and How to Improve It,” published in the same year, Lowdermilk’s pamphlet translated for an African context a set of ideas and practices developed elsewhere.55 The pamphlet was one of several African Home Library titles translated into Kikuyu, Swahili, or Luo, showing the focus of the ICCLA’s efforts in Kenya. Land alienation was a major issue for many groups in colonial Kenya and a source of anti-colonial ferment. Eliud Mathu, Henry Thuku, and other mission-educated Kenyans organized the Kenya African Study Union in 1944, which gave rise to the most significant political party in the era of decolonization and after. These mobilizations against colonial rule provide context and a counterpoint to publications like Lowdermilk’s. By constructing the Jewish settlers of Palestine as universal villagers responsibly tending their land, the publication of Lowdermilk’s pamphlet depoliticized the structuring conditions of landlessness both in Palestine and in Kenya, a practice that was echoed in the broader work of translation undertaken by the ICCLA. The African Home Library also published autochthonous writers, albeit in a limited manner. K. A. Busia, one of the first “local” assistant district commissioners appointed in Africa, wrote “West Africa and the issues of the War” in 1942. He argued that people in West Africa believed the war was a “war of ideals of freedom against slavery, humanity against savagery, reason against jungle law.”56 Busia would later become the second prime minister of Ghana.57 E. I. Ekpenyon published a pamphlet describing his experiences as an air-raid warden in London during the blitz.58 Chief Mwase, from Nyasaland, traveled to London and published a memoir of his journey as “My Visit to England.”59 While pamphlets published during the war presented a vision of Africans as part of the larger British imperial world, as the war ended, titles focused on local conditions. F. M. Inoti’s two titles drew from stories based in Meru, Kenya, while John Derbi Okae published “Why So Stories” drawn from Twi.60 Margaret Wrong and the ICCLA contributed to the growth and availability of published materials in Africa, but they sought to expand education and reform



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individual habits not fundamentally transform social conditions. The ICCLA’s investment in literacy and education in Africa was linked to a particular vision for decolonization. The problem for colonial governments was how to “evolve” “native” political institutions to meet the “modern needs of the people.” Political development, in Wrong’s view, faced two challenges. The first was overcoming the heterogeneity of religion, language, and culture within colonies in the interests of common government. Wrong believed that Africans had yet to demonstrate sufficient unity, which precluded them from responsible government of the people as a whole. The second challenge was evolutionary—how could existing forms of “traditional” rule be incorporated within a larger political structure?61 Wrong argued that to meet these challenges, Africans needed to assimilate “political, economic and social conceptions from without” and transform “traditional authorities from within.” Village improvement would demonstrate the readiness of rural cultivators to participate in civic life. “Village Life and How to Improve It” tied the reformation of the African mind to the physical work of development. Brayne’s assessment of the fatalism of the Indian mind-set was transferred to the African villager. In the opening pages of the pamphlet, an African villager claims the following: What improvement is possible? There is no better way of doing these things than the way we do them here. If God wills we are hungry, and if God wills we are well fed. Our children are healthy or sickly as God wills. It would be wrong to live in any other way, for this is how our fathers taught us to live.62

Because they did not know a better village was possible, they farmed, raised their children, and organized village life according to immemorial custom. African villagers were content in their ignorance, and ignorance kept children unwashed and sickly, crops poor, and villages dirty. In fifteen pages, the ICCLA presented a picture of traditional village life, a plan for its transformation, and a vision of the new village that could emerge. If villagers embraced this plan, their village would pass the four tests of civilization: cleanliness, the position given to women, intelligence used in work, and efficient use of spare time and money. The traditional village was metaphorically dark and literally dirty. “Village Life and How to Improve It” brought Brayne’s evangelical ideas to the surface by explicitly referencing God and by using Christian metaphors of darkness and light. The expansion of European colonization in late-nineteenth-century Africa created hygiene as a new basis for social distance between the races. The “dirty, unredeemed” African body was constructed in opposition to the clean, civilized, and Christian European body through mission education, domestic training, and state propaganda. A 1939 handbook for teaching hygiene in schools argued, “No real Christian . . . will allow his body to be dirty, nor will he let his home and village become dirty places.”63 Brayne’s ideas found purchase in African missionary circles because they shared a disgust reaction. As the ICCLA saw it, the African village was dirty “because people’s habits are dirty.” Villagers threw garbage in the streets, they relieved themselves everywhere

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“like dogs and hens,” and they taught their children to behave in the same way. The current state of the village was disorder, with no clear boundaries between what was clean and promoted health and wealth and what was dirty and promoted illness and poverty. The pamphlet claimed cleanliness and hygiene were the basis of transformed material conditions. Rubbish pits and latrines would reduce the presence of flies, which would lead to less illness. Personal hygiene would lead to better health and would also foster village sanitation. The removal of dirt from the village streets would not only reduce disease but also promote wealth. In a village, the foundation of wealth was the land and—in addition to spending money on good seed and working hard to cultivate the land—fertilizer was needed to ensure crops grew well. Villagers were overlooking an important supply of fertilizer: human waste could be combined with organic waste to produce manure, and with a steady supply of manure, agriculture would thrive. As in Brayne’s assessment of the Indian village, the presence of rubbish and excrement in the African village represented the poor economy of villagers, who wasted their most basic means of fertilizing their crops and thus reduced an opportunity for capital expansion. Reorganizing waste in the village would not only lead to financial gain but also foster an improvement mind-set by teaching that “God helps those who help themselves”64 and that “time is money.” 65 If dirt was darkness, education was light.66 Cleanliness and education went hand in hand in the improvement of village life. Those who had seen the light must “wake the people up to live a new and better life.”67 School teachers were key figures because they not only taught reading and writing, or the “preparation of body, mind, and soul for life” but also could cultivate hygienic habits in their pupils.68 Schools possessed latrines, rubbish pits, and facilities to wash children. School was a site where teachers could “kill bad habits in children” and to teach them “to hate dirt.”69 The organization of space at school would be a model for the organization of space at home. As in India, women’s work was crucial to creating the “good village,” and African women played an important part in improvement through their role as homemakers and mothers. The individual lives of women were linked to the fortunes of their nation: “The centre of the country is the home. The centre of the home is the woman. Women are responsible for nine-tenths of the life of the village.” It was important to educate girls so that they could be good mothers. They would raise disciplined children who ate at regular hours, relived themselves at regular hours, and who said “please and thank you.” Disciplined children would keep their bodies, their homes, and their village clean. These children would learn to “obey.”70 The work of women as mothers would lead to the social transformation necessary for eventual self-government. The religious character of “Village Life and How to Improve It” reflects the aims of the African Home Library to produce texts for mission schools and for newly literate Africans. The ICCLA harnessed the project of village improvement to Christian ethics of cleanliness, thrift, self-discipline, and initiative. The pamphlet sought to create villagers who prayed, “God make the world a better place through me.”71 In translating Brayne for African villages, the ICCLA turned away from



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agricultural efficiency to emphasize cultural transformation and ethical values. In the space of fifteen pages, they obscured the structural conditions that shaped village life, including labor migration that sent men to cities and industrial areas, the lack of investment in infrastructure, and the ways that village life was shaped by global economies. If God willed improvement, but there was no change in material conditions, the onus of poverty could be placed on the intractable African villager.

Conclusion: The afterlife of village improvement Through the textual routes of community development, a set of practices created in rural Punjab were translated for the universal villager. The end of the Second World War shaped both F. L. Brayne and Margaret Wrong’s concern that demobilizing colonial soldiers needed constructive projects to absorb their energies and harness their desire for improvement. Community development would have an even greater role to play as the world moved on from the immediate concerns of the war. In 1947, perhaps because the Indian government did not heed Brayne’s advice, India and Pakistan became independent states. Indian independence, coupled with the expulsion of missionaries from China in 1950, caused missionaries to rethink their work. While the ecumenical movement argued that global problems required spiritual solutions, examining the connected history of village improvement reveals how Christian ethics infused a broader range of projects to transform material conditions.72 In India, Brayne put into practice the evangelical lessons of his childhood, and missionary networks allowed those lessons to be spread in the postwar world. The African Home Library begat the Caribbean Home Library produced by Jamaica Welfare, an organization committed to independence for the British West Indies. In 1951, a Black social worker, Edmund N. Burke, wrote in “Village Life in the Caribbean and How to Improve It,” “God make the place where I live better through me.”73 Burke did not share Brayne’s imperial commitments, but his program was almost an exact replica of the Gurgaon experiment. Through this process of translation, community development shed its colonial roots and became a universal project of transformation. While the political contexts differed between Brayne and his successors, emphasis on the improvement mind-set did not. In rewriting Brayne’s project for African contexts, the imperial conditions that gave rise to community development were obscured and the abject object of development reproduced. The heroic district officer was replaced by the mission educator as the instigator of development, but the burden of transformation remained on the shoulders of rural cultivators, and particularly on women. This was made possible because Brayne’s ideologies and program of uplift traveled these textual routes, but the limitations of his approach did not. These two texts presented a vision of the good village, but obscured inequality and the failures of governance that constrained progress. In setting out the importance of an improvement mind-set, these 1944 narratives established the recalcitrant villager as the real barrier to structural transformation.

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Notes 1 I am thankful to Kirrily Freeman, John Munro, and Aaron Windel for their invaluable help with this essay. 2 F. L. Brayne, Winning the Peace. Oxford Pamphlets on Indian Affairs, No. 25 (Bombay: Humphrey Milford, 1944), 7. 3 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; London: Routledge, 2003). 4 Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013), 23. 5 On an imperial history of books as “material form and geopolitical influence,” see Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyer, eds. Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 6 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 7 Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 8 Brayne, Winning the Peace, 14. 9 Heinz Arndt, “Economic Development: A Semantic History,” in The Development Reader, ed. Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge (London: Routledge, 2008), 51–57. 10 Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backwards Africans, and the Development Concept,” in International Development, ed. Cooper and Packard, 64–92. 11 Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 12 On the Atlantic Charter, see Mark Reeves, “‘Free and Equal Partners in Your Commonwealth’: The Atlantic Charter and Anticolonial Delegations to London, 1941–3,” Twentieth Century British History, 29, no. 2 (2018): 259–83. 13 Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 99–106. 14 B. S. Murthy, “Foreword,” in Evolution of Community Development Programme in India (Faridabad: Ministry of Community Development, Panchayati Raj and Cooperation, Government of India, 1963), i; Spencer Hatch, “Early Times at the Martandam Project,” in Evolution of Community Development (Faridabad: Ministry of Community Development, Panchayati Raj and Cooperation, Government of India, 1963), 19; V. P. Pande, Village Community Projects in India: Origin, Development and Problems (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1967). 15 Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London: The Hambledon Press, 1993), 31–37. 16 Kaushik Roy, India and World War II: War, Armed Forces, and Society, 1939–45 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), 9. 17 Keith Jeffrey, “The Second World War,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. IV, The Twentieth Century, ed. Judith M. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 308. 18 Brayne, Winning the Peace, 3. 19 Ibid., 4. 20 Ibid. 21 Zachariah, Developing India, 115–17.



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22 F. L. Brayne, Socrates in an Indian Village (Dehati Socrati) (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 45. 23 Brayne, Socrates, 51. 24 “Socrates ki jai!” loosely translates to “Victory to Socrates!” Brayne, Socrates, 122–24. 25 Brayne, Winning the Peace, 16. 26 Ibid., 10. 27 Brayne, Socrates, 15–16. 28 Ibid., 12. 29 Ibid., 13–14. 30 Ibid., 17. 31 Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, 81–83. 32 Brayne, Socrates, 19. 33 Ibid., 13. 34 Ibid., 4, 6, 26. 35 Ibid., 7. 36 Ibid., 4. 37 Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, 48. 38 Ibid., 94. 39 Lala Deshraj, “Is It Village Uplift? Pt. IV,” Young India, 11, no. 45 (November 7, 1929): 366–68. 40 M. K. Gandhi, “Village Improvement,” Young India, 11, no. 46 (November 14, 1929): 369–71. 41 Afzal, Reflections on Rural Reconstruction, 21–25. 42 Quoted in Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, 96. 43 Gandhi, “Village Improvement,” 371. 44 Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, 49, 60. 45 Ibid., 94. 46 Margaret Wrong, Five Points for Africa (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1944), 132–33. 47 Aaron Windel, “British Colonial Education in Africa: Policy and Practice in the Era of Trusteeship,” History Compass, 7, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. 48 Windel, “British Colonial Education,” 7–8. 49 John Stuart, British Missionaries and the End of Empire: East, Central, and Southern Africa, 1939–64. Studies in the History of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). 50 Ruth Compton Brouwer, “Books for Africans: Margaret Wrong and the Gendering of African Writing, 1929–1963,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 31, no. 1 (1998): 58. 51 Brouwer, “Books for Africans,” 59. 52 Ibid., 55. 53 W. K. Lowther Clarke, A History of the SPCK (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1959), 200. 54 The most prolific author in the series William Millman (1872–1956) first traveled to the Congo as a missionary in 1897. His African Home Library contributions include religious texts and biographies of John Bunyan, Florence Nightingale, and William Wilberforce. Jane Marshall, “Millman, William,” Dictionary of African Christian Biography, https://dacb.org/stories/congo/millman-william/ (accessed June 22, 2018). The nine titles written by D. M. McFarlan, a missionary with the Church of Scotland based in Nigeria, included profiles of St. Columba and a collection of Bible prayers.

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64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Reading the Postwar Future Esma Rideout Booth (1902–88) and Jewel Huelster Schwab (1879–1972) were both American missionaries with connections to the Methodist Church, academic anthropology, and the liberal Civil Rights movement in the United States. Booth’s titles focused on stories about African children, while Schwab wrote a Christian parenting guide and profiles of Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman. British and American missionary authors wrote not only on religious topics but also on a broader range of matters, such as cooperatives, natural history, and geography. “The Eleventh Commandment” was translated to Kikuyu in 1946. K. A. Busia quoted in Wrong, Five Points for Africa, 20. K. A. Busia, West Africa and the Issues of the War (London: Sheldon Press, 1942). E. I. Ekpenyon, Some Experiences of an African Air-Raid Warden (London: Sheldon Press, 1943). Chief Mwase, My Visit to England (London: Sheldon Press, 1941). F. M. Inoti, Stories of Life (London: Sheldon Press, 1948); F. M. Inoti, More Stories of Life (London: Sheldon Press, 1949); J. D. Okae, Why So Stories: Twi Stories Collected by JD Okae (London: Sheldon Press, 1946). Margaret Wrong, “The Evolution of Local Government in British African Colonies,” International Affairs, 22, no. 3 (1946): 418–21. Village Life and How to Improve It (London: Sheldon Press, 1944), 5. G. E. P. Broderick, Personal Hygiene for Elementary Schools in Africa (London: United Society for Christian Literature, 1939), quoted in Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 39. “Village Life,” 11. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 11. Elisabeth Engel, James Kennedy, and Justin Reynolds, “Editorial - the theory and practice of ecumenism: Christian global governance and the search for world order, 1900-80,” Journal of Global History 13 (2018): 157–64. Edmund N. Burke, Village Life in the West Indies and How to Improve It (Kingston: Caribbean Home Library, 1951), 9.

CChapter 6 CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY AS A DECOLONIAL TEXT: LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD1 Ajay Parasram

Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery has been a milestone in the historiography of slavery, West Indian history, and capitalism since its publication in 1944. In this chapter, I revisit the text to consider the role it plays in asserting and projecting a postcolonial West Indian future in that volatile moment. My primary goal is not to weigh in on the debates concerning the core arguments of the text, as economic historians and historians of slavery have already attended to this important task.2 Instead, I take the text as a turning point in history and politics through which we might observe the simultaneousness of colonial and decolonial thought in the intellectual and political leadership of Eric Williams and his cohort of postcolonial elites. In this way, Capitalism and Slavery offers critical insight into the normative, historical, and political struggles of formal decolonization in the West Indies in 1944. Williams’s scholarship, alongside others in the late colonial and early postcolonial period, marked a critical juncture where the humanity of formerly enslaved Africans might breathe life into dehumanized statistics taken out of colonial logbooks. His was a political and normative project, as well as a historical project, aimed at destabilizing British historical assumptions about their own morality. In so doing, Capitalism and Slavery boldly asserts Caribbean agency in historiography and the practice of postcolonial politics at the crossroads of 1944. Despite the radical significance of the text and its author, there remain important limitations that merit our attention, not only as critics so many decades later but as scholars still drawing colonial biases from our work like venom from wounds. I seek to explore how some of these biases are imbricated with the historical method. Reading Capitalism and Slavery as a decolonial text demands that we pay attention to its epistemic limitations that enable key Eurocentric assumptions to contour the book and the futures it helped to midwife. In the discussion that follows, I first consider how the impetus for a scientific and “objective” history arises in response to the previous status quo of philosophical generalization—not to argue against the desire for objectivity but, rather, to outline how the method of hard empiricism, within which a scholar like Williams was trained, has obscured some of the normative dimensions of his history of capitalism and slavery that are of

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particular importance to the futures of 1944. The idea of objectivity and neutrality is, I argue, a theoretical position, because it mistakes European ontological starting points for universal ones. Next, I consider Williams’s situation as a graduate student at Oxford—a colonial subject seeking to wield the best tools at his disposal to tell a history of capitalism as if colonized people mattered, but being nonetheless methodologically constrained by the coloniality of the archive. In section two, I examine the question of objectivity in historical research by emphasizing how the Eurocentricity of the historical method helps us understand Williams’s academic context in the 1930s. In section three, I revisit some of Capitalism and Slavery’s contributions with a view to highlighting how it might be remembered not only as an empirical but also as a political contribution to asserting the validity of Caribbean agency at the end of formal empire.

Embodied satellites in the metropole In 1946, the British historian D. A. Farnie opined, in his review of Capitalism and Slavery, that Williams was writing only to his own community, “with the sustaining myth that ‘capitalism’ was responsible for their condition[,] a view that has not found favor in Western Europe, where history has been separated from its tap-root in myth, but has been found highly acceptable to the educated elites of Africa and Asia.”3 Farnie’s reading of the text offers insight into the everyday white supremacy of the scholarly world of the 1940s. Note the developmentalist assumptions in Farnie’s assessment that European historians had advanced beyond a more primitive level of analysis, while educated Africans and Asians remained lacking in intellectual sophistication. I will return to this problem, but in terms of tracing the daily life of Williams as a racialized graduate student in the metropole prior to the Second World War, it is important to stress that Farnie’s assumption of the superiority of Europe was not something that required proof; it was selfevident throughout much of British society, not to mention its overwhelmingly white and male professoriate. After winning a prestigious island scholarship in Trinidad and beginning his postsecondary studies in Britain, Williams came face to face with daily aggressions of intellectual and practical racism at Oxford in a way that he was unaccustomed to in his multiethnic, middle-class family in Trinidad.4 He despised colonialism, and as his biographer Colin Palmer reminds us, he detested the indignities he saw served to his father, a bureaucrat in the colonial administration of Trinidad, as intellectually inferior colleagues with suitably light complexions leapfrogged over him.5 Williams set to using his intellect to dismantle the prevailing opinion that slavery had been brought to an end because of the moral direction of the British empire. In challenging this moral dimension, Williams reinserted the enslaved back into the history of abolition. This intellectual and political project was representative of the concerns of his generation of colonial elites. To look forward, Williams looked backward, inserting into world history if not the subjectivity of Africans, then at least the objective existence of Africans as human beings within

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history, itself a radical contribution for a world that continued to actively ignore the agency of colonial and subaltern subjects. The failure of the international system to recognize the humanity of African people would have been impossible for a young Williams and his cohort to ignore in the 1930s. In 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie condemned to deaf ears the barbarism of Fascist Italy in its war of extermination against the people of Ethiopia. His League of Nations audience remained more interested in facilitating the hubris of European balance of power through imperial expansion than preventing the murder of Africans.6 Although Capitalism and Slavery (and especially the doctoral dissertation that informed the book) is presented in mostly empirical terms, the book is alive with Williams’s ethical refusal to accept a merely numeric accounting of African bodies in historical treatments of slavery. One can imagine how the League’s failure to regard Ethiopians as humans worthy of life might have influenced Williams when he wrote of the existence of Africans in eighteenthcentury commercial law as nonhumans to the court system: In 1783, moreover, the same Mansfield handed down a decision in the case of the ship Zong. Short of water, the captain had thrown 132 slaves overboard, and now the owners brought an action for insurance alleging that the loss of the slaves fell within the clause of the policy which insured against “perils of the sea.” In Mansfield’s view “the case of the slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.” Damages of thirty pounds were awarded for each slave, and the idea that the captain and crew should be prosecuted for mass homicide never entered into the head of any humanitarian.7

As Robbie Shilliam has argued in his analysis of eighteenth-century political economy and the discourse of English freedom, we might do better to remember the period’s radical “unfreedom” in order to apprehend a more complete political and economic history of the time.8 Such a consideration of unfreedom is precisely what Williams forced in 1944. Williams the graduate student was trained with the goal of engaging an “objective” colonial archive in which “facts” might be collected via the tools of empirical historical methodology. The anti-colonial intellectual project, by 1944, was one in which the colonial historian enters the archive of the colonizer, unable to vocalize his normative position for fear of being discredited, but confident in the possibility of mining the archives for evidence of another story to explain the present and imagine a future after colonial rule. By shining a light on the embodied presence of enslaved Africans and their relative absence in British histories, Capitalism and Slavery compels readers to pay attention to the agency of these survivors’ descendants in the West Indies.9 Williams’s book—groundbreaking and bold—reads in many ways like a dissertation, because the bulk of the research was done as a graduate student struggling to make ends meet in the imperial metropole. He reflects in subsequent writing on the financial and bureaucratic hardships facing “colonials” studying in England that betrayed the hypocrisy of empire. As he recollects in his

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autobiography, Inward Hunger, “I was severely handicapped in my research by my lack of money. The extra year of the Trinidad scholarship was only enough to cover one year of my research work. And so I was continually on the search for more funds. I was turned down everywhere I tried.”10 Williams wrote a powerful letter to his university outlining the hypocrisy encountered by colonial scholars: What increasingly strikes me is the vast difference between those professions of one empire, one king, loyalty to the Throne, etc., which I heard almost ad nauseam at home and still hear in England, and the actual practice. I have lived in the colonies, and I have no hesitation in saying than an Englishman in the colonies not only has every opportunity that a local man has, but indeed many more. .  .  . No West Indian would dream of making any distinction between Englishmen and local West Indians, or even for that matter Chinese and Japanese . . . and now I am told bluntly that money which in the last analysis comes from the English taxpayer cannot be used to subsidise a colonial. I am told to pack up and go home. Outside of St. Catherine’s I meet hemming and hawing, shillyshallying and excuses which would not deceive a babe in arms.11

Within this economic and social context of life in England as a Black man from the Caribbean, Williams sought to use the best historical tools at his disposal to make an argument that could not be ignored by his white, male colleagues and professors. Readers of this volume can learn more of this in Chike Jeffers’s chapter on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. In the case of Williams, working within the framework of empirical history, he internalizes other more insidious forms of colonial epistemology such as the linearity of development and the erasure of Indigenous agency. Part of the limitation of Capitalism and Slavery is its anchoring in the methodological and epistemic assumptions of social science research, in effect, treating the archive as a physical structure containing pieces of the past which might be found and arranged into histories, albeit in a new way. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith has cogently described, with reference to Indigenous people and the historical method, “Our colonial experience traps us in the project of modernity.”12 In this way, Williams is very much a product of his time—a brilliant and resourceful modern historian, simultaneously mesmerized and horrified by the normalized white supremacy of the metropole and seeking to pick up the tools to mine the archive and demonstrate within the prevailing intellectual structure that colonized subjects must become authors of their own histories. In doing so, he came face to face with the gap and fundamental unfairness of being “a colonial” in the metropole.13 According to some of his critics, it was his post-dissertation days as a young professor at Howard University in Washington and his involvement in the political project of postcolonial formation in the West Indies that led to the more assertive tone of Capitalism and Slavery relative to the more modest doctoral version of the work.14 At Howard, Williams was under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Following up on information gleaned from an unnamed informant, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ordered a special agent to keep track of Williams’s

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alleged involvement with the American Student Committee and the International Club at Howard. According to declassified dossiers, the FBI’s suspicions about Williams were unfounded.15 Simply being a “colored” professor was enough to be threatening in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Emboldened with the relative security of academic freedom, Professor Williams could write more confidently than Williams the student could. While some of Williams’s critics take issue with the historical accuracy of some of his claims, it is arguably the bolder assertions in Capitalism and Slavery that helped set a political agenda that centered West Indian history and politics and the agency of embodied, West Indian survivors of slavery. In the context of late British empire in the West Indies, we see important intellectual antecedents of what would later be called postcolonial thought in Williams’s work. This is a project that defined not only Capitalism and Slavery but also Williams’s intellectual and political legacy as the leader of independent Trinidad and Tobago. Williams’s public lectures and political speeches from Woodford Square in downtown Port of Spain showcased the convergence of the historical and the political, none perhaps more clearly than “Massa Day Done” on March 22, 1961, a lecture concerned with the constant expropriation of West Indian resources to England and the dehumanizing degradation of Caribbean migrants.16 Whereas Williams’s dissertation and his subsequent scholarly book challenged a position in British historiography, as a professor-turned regional bureaucrat-turned national politician, his emphasis shifted to the expropriation of West Indian resources and people as sufficient basis for grounding oneself. The historical and political focus moved from British to West Indian history; both intimately related, but organized around quite different concerns. The convergence of the historical and the political is a significant break from scholarly conventions at the time, and though Williams did not intend an epistemological critique of the historical method, he nonetheless provides the basis from which future scholars can document this tension. Like many late colonial and postcolonial nationalist historians, Williams mobilized historical materialism to explore what he saw as the internal contradictions of British commerce in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In doing so, he preserved the epistemological conventions of universalist history in the Marxist tradition. This has led to many of his bold claims being challenged on empirical bases—in particular, his claims concerning the causal aspect of economic factors and the economic impact of the American Revolution, as well as the fact that plantations tended to “bounce back” economically in the early nineteenth century.17 As Andrew O’Shaughnessy has observed, debates over the accuracy of Williams’s economic history have been concerned with trade figures and plantation accounts mobilized to disprove or prove an aspect of a given argument. This has enabled critics to read his work as merely an empirical case to be tested, often missing the normative and political contributions that he made in bringing to light the discourses of planters and imperial officials’ fears and anxieties.18 As Robin Blackburn argues, “The ‘Williams thesis’ has fuelled decades of debate and controversy. While it needs to be refined and reformulated, it did quite correctly identify the very great intimacy between the surge of slave

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produce and slave-trading, on the one hand, and British capitalist development and industrialization on the other.”19 Blackburn investigates this dimension of the Williams thesis in considerable detail and concludes that though slaverelated profits could not have “caused” the Industrial Revolution in the sense that Williams leads his readers to believe, the empirics do indeed support the argument that the profits accrued from slavery greatly stimulated the imperial economy not only in direct ways that can be accounted for but also as indirect “subsidies” of sorts, in that enslaved Africans were self-sufficient, and dips in consumer demand for plantation crops would not have had as dire an impact as they would have in a waged labor context.20 Williams’s former teacher, C. L. R. James, was perhaps more correct to draw attention in 1938 not to the American War of Independence, but to the Haitian Revolution and the existential threat to European supremacy posed by the hard-fought victory of self-liberated enslaved Africans against waves of Europeans.21 Reading Capitalism and Slavery alongside The Black Jacobins helps us to see the importance of how perceptions of historical moments—be they the Haitian Revolution or the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act—discursively impact perceptions and policy even if the math does not always add up. It also perhaps highlights the importance of lived experience in shaping research questions and historical narratives in the liminal period of colonial pasts and postcolonial futures. For all its imperfections, the thrust of the historical argument within Capitalism and Slavery that the anachronism of slavery alongside modern capitalism forced an internal contradiction in the logic of mercantilism remains a forceful contribution to the study of political economy and the making of the modern, colonial world that cannot be reduced to numbers. As Seymour Drescher has observed, Capitalism and Slavery “made it impossible for historians to return to the posture of splendid moral isolation which had characterized the story of British slave emancipation for more than a century.”22 In the next section, I argue that the separation of a “past” that can be mined and narrated into different accounts of a present fails to account for the coloniality of the archive structure itself.

Objectivity or Eurocentricity? The concept of the “geopolitics of knowledge” draws attention to the fact that European philosophers, in designing universalist philosophies, were never thinking (and could never have been thinking) from the standpoint of the rest of the world.23 Coined by the Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel, the geopolitics of knowledge describes the disproportionate and hegemonic influence of ideas that are situated and deeply grounded within a European epistemic and ontological context.24 A consequence of this grounding, and the empirical histories of colonial modernity, is the presumption by Europeans that Western intellectualism is universally valid, with the result that other societies have been scripted through colonial encounters as being inferior.25 As Donna Haraway noted decades ago, the idea of a universal and objective perspective relies on an ideology of science that is impossible in practice.26 This geopolitical epistemological grounding of European

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thought takes on material meaning because the influential philosophies that have informed the modern period exist within a system of knowledge in which it is deemed possible and desirable to speculate about universal experiences using intellectual and empirical points of reference relevant only to Europe to explain the rest of the world as well. We might also consider Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to “provincialize Europe,” building as it does on subaltern historiographical work that sought to explain the arrival of India in the rhythm of “world history” through the narration of an Indian past in a prose of kings and queens.27 With reference only to Europe-centric beginning points, we see the project of enlightenment and modernity as a period of intellectual emancipation, where ideas grounded in rationality, progress, and objective evidence offered a new universalizing lens. Gurminder Bhambra argues, in challenging the Eurocentricity of Fernand Braudel’s economic history, that part of the founding myth of European modernity has been the belief that important events like the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution were somehow endogenous to Europe without regard for the inherent connectivities that demand a global understanding of modernity from the onset.28 As Cristina Rojas, working from Enrique Dussel, has described, The myth of modernity explains the disdain that thinkers like Hegel felt for nonEuropeans, a sentiment motivated by the thought that Europe has its own origin and, consequently, has nothing to learn from other cultures. Dussel concludes that the “totalization” of Western thought holds the possibility of an exchange of knowledges. Moreover, this myth hides the other side of history: Europe’s centrality was built upon a colonial project premised upon conquest of the Americas (and of course, Africa and parts of Asia). Accordingly, there is no modernity without coloniality.29

Part of the bias of Western epistemology is its investment in the “ego politics of knowledge” over the “geopolitics of knowledge” and the “body-politics of knowledge,” which placed modernist blinders on the radical potential of third world projects in 1944 and beyond, as I aim to show below. This is an important point in 1944 because Williams, like Marcus Garvey before him, was deeply concerned with the emancipation of the colonized mind from the shackles of mental slavery, a public commitment Williams would frequently deliver in his lectures at Woodford Square.30 The deductive paradigm that dominated historical writing in Europe held that one could start with essential ideas possessing universal validity from which explanations could be sought to explain the manifest world. Historians in the lateand post-Enlightenment era were philosophical in their approach, in a tradition that took for granted certain Christian and European ontological starting assumptions upon which to base the pursuit of truth. The perceived universality of Christian reason and rationality was, for Hegel for example, a starting assumption upon which to build a philosophy of world history in which the divine spirit makes itself known in its highest form as a Christian state.31 Leopold von Ranke’s first book, History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 – 1514 (1824), broke from this

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long-established tradition. Methodologically, Ranke emphasized primary sources over influential secondary histories, drawing upon a wide range of material, including diaries, memoirs, letters, and government documents. The early Ranke “faced the problem of trying to make more scientific a historical approach which had for centuries refined its methodologies according to the canons of ancient Greek and Roman historians like Thucydides and Plutarch.”32 Ranke took particular issue with the “moral purpose” that dominated history writing, in which the role of the historian was to inspire moral action from political leaders. He makes this clear in the preface to History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples: “To history has been given the function of judging the past, of instructing men for the profit of future years. The present attempt does not aspire to such lofty undertaking. It merely wants to show how it essentially was.”33 Following Ranke, the task of the historian is not to be the moral voice of reason to those who ruled society; rather, the historian ought to objectively investigate the empirical particularities of their study and look for the ultimate ideas or concepts that underlay the development of universal history as a whole.34 In Ranke’s words, the historian looks for “major tendencies” underlying history in order to establish “the great history of mankind which was the complex of these diverse tendencies.”35 In this way, Ranke embraced the universal aspiration of history, but rejected the prevailing deductive epistemological approach, which he saw as moralistic and unscientific.36 Keen to bring a sense of disciplinary autonomy to history as a developing academic field, Ranke saw historical science grounded in a commitment to deep empiricism as the future of an improved, “scientific” history.37 The idea of progress, development, and the overall movement of history was something that Ranke believed in, but the method for studying and understanding these guiding ideas ought to start with the realities on the ground. Only out of deep empiricism could more general theories be discovered, an important critical juncture in the development of the historical method. Part of the overlap in the deductive and inductive approaches to the philosophy of history articulated by Hegel and Ranke is the strength of the human spirit within naturally defined “nations.” This spirit reconciles the general, universal direction of human development with the vast asymmetries of development or achievement of different nation-states. In other words, one could think of the development of the state as a kind of scatterplot, in which those nations possessed of the right kind of spirit clustered close to the trend line, while those nations lacking in these attributes represent deviations from the general direction of social evolution. Progress, therefore, is not inevitable. Rather, progress is a function of national volition—and in the nineteenth century, that national volition was truly imperial.38 It is not incidental that those nations who possessed the “spirit” tended to be European, Christian states, and those who deviated from the path of universal history were colonies. This mapping of a Christian and Eurocentric bias onto a universal vision for history is an epistemic leap between the deductive approach of Kant and Hegel and the inductive approach of Ranke and his successors. Taking historical and global Eurocentricity to be universally true positions relegated the colonies and their inhabitants permanently to the margins of world history.

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Rankean empiricism, for its time and context, was innovative and sophisticated, but not well calibrated to bring into focus histories capable of understanding otherthan European people.39 Yet this was precisely the challenge taken up by Williams, beginning in Capitalism and Slavery and subsequently in his publications and political career. This is not to say that Williams succeeded in accomplishing such a monumental task, only that he significantly broadened the scope of whose histories mattered. Williams’s work is certainly complicit with the linear movement of history: it treats Indigenous territory and territorial practices as prehistorical and politically irrelevant. But Williams’s economic determinism nevertheless enables a critique of the internal contradictions of imperial political economy, though it leaves him with little to say about altering the institutional structure of the colonial state along with its economy. In drawing attention to the Rankean insistence that history be written “as it was,” I mean to highlight the ways in which the idea of an archive is not necessarily in tune with the ways in which terminology, vocabulary, and latent assumptions about the linear evolution of human society permeate the very evidence a scholar seeks to engage. Theory can help us begin to decolonize the ontological assumptions within archival practice, but, ultimately, working in colonial archives is a lot like working in a coalmine. Without constant attention to the canary warning miners to resurface for fresh air, one could easily fall victim to the noxious fumes. W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, G. C. Mendis, Eric Williams, C. R. De Silva, and whole generations of racialized scholars mined archives against considerable odds to break ground for the acceptance of postcolonial studies long before it was named. They worked in the very institutions that a few generations before had been tasked with collecting and producing the intellectual and practical knowledge to govern the British empire. They also engaged in the practical, day-to-day work of building postcolonial states, and like early coalminers, were less equipped to notice the subtle and gradual influence of epistemic violence contouring their studies—that we can do so today is because of this intellectual inheritance.

South-North international development and empire Eric Williams’s work brought attention to the fundamental immorality of the slave trade’s end. The problem was the commodification rather than subjugation of African people, which actually breaks with older historical traditions of engaging Africa on more equal terms historically.40 Many readers have noted that Williams argues that racism was not at the heart of slavery, rather it was economic determinism and a general willingness to accept the use of unfree labor: “Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequences of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.”41 This statement speaks to Williams’s interest in the economic structure of imperial capitalism which, in the Marxist tradition, has been similarly invested in a

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scientific and universal understanding of the workings of political economy and not particularly attuned to the operation of race as an organizing principle of modern, colonial society. Marx’s own views on colonialism were directed at understanding the functioning of capitalism as a structure apart from its agents and relied as well on the assumption of a developmentalist logic for human societies. Writing about the British colonial encounter jolting India into social revolution, Marx told his New York Tribune readers that “English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindu spinner and weaver, dissolved these small, semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and, to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”42 Williams’s chapters devoted to understanding the triangular pattern of trade in the rise of British capitalism show that mercantilist trade policies deliberately directed low value products to northern British colonies (specifically New England and Newfoundland) or back to England where they would be refined and sold in Africa and the West Indies. Moreover, mercantilist policies deliberately sought to prevent the development of value-added industries in the West Indian colonies, because monopoly pricing ensured an artificially high market price for raw materials. Williams effectively shows that it was competitive pressure from Spanish and French colonies in the region (which could produce sugar more efficiently and at 20 percent of the asking price set by British West Indian planters) that was—in his reading—the economic ruination of the slaving system.43 What Williams did not make explicit was the racialization of preferential treatment for the northern settler-colonies, which were allowed to dump low-quality surplus commodities like fish from Newfoundland on West Indian markets, on fundamentally unfair terms. In taking for granted the structure and centrality of the colonial state and government, Williams neglects an important racial dimension in his analysis of capitalism, as the consumers of that dumped fish were commodified non-agents under imperial law. Williams describes that which could be found in the colonial archive, but departing from that objectivity—in other words, politicizing his findings—would render them “subjective” and therefore discredit them. In effect, what Williams was arguing in 1944 was that triangular trade “developed” the British at the expense of the West Indian colonies, which he goes to great length throughout the book to document empirically as being the economic engine of the British empire in the eighteenth century, only to be overtaken by India in the late nineteenth century: In exchange for their provisions the mainland [North American] colonists took West Indian sugar, rum and molasses, in such quantities that as early as 1676 the English merchants complained that New England was becoming the great mart and staple of colonial produce. It was a mutual interdependence between the two units. The maintenance of harmony imperatively demanded two things: island production of sugar and molasses must be sufficient to satisfy mainland consumption; island consumption of mainland staples must keep pace with mainland production.44

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Here we see Williams making a structural Marxist argument that does not necessarily rely on race to explain what neo-Marxist theories twenty years later would name “World Systems Theory” and “Dependency” theory. I raise this not to say something about the genealogy of neo-Marxism, but rather to highlight the fact that, in 1944, Williams would have had little need to explicitly say much about race, because the “backwardness” of those who were colonized was an already accepted condition in the lineage of history writing that extends from Hegel, through the scientific turn in Ranke, and also through the radical tradition of Marx. To think otherwise would be to engage in Farnie’s aforementioned “taproot mythology” of believing Africans, Asians, and Indigenous peoples were agents of history along ontological premises that might be dissimilar to Europe; a charge, as we have seen, Capitalism and Slavery was met with in any case. If we read Williams in the tradition of historical research in which he was trained, we can understand race in his writing in two ways: as an external condition within the course of world history, and as the embodied, empirical basis upon which the wealth of empire was sustained. This competing yet interdependent tension of race is present in Williams’s writing. In many ways, we read Williams without reading between the lines—in laying out an empirical case for the fundamental conflict between colonial mercantilism embodied in monopolistic and economic nationalist principles within empire, the sophistication of capitalism which leads to demands for economic productivity and competition that comes naturally from it will ultimately pit interests against one another. As he explains, The attack on the West Indians was more than an attack on slavery. It was an attack on monopoly. Their opponents were not only humanitarians but the capitalists. The reason for the attack was not only that the West Indian economic system was vicious but that it was also so unprofitable that for this reason alone its destruction was inevitable.45

As Andrew O’Shaughnessy has argued, Williams underestimated the importance of British opinions on slavery, noting that the British Parliament passed an abolition bill through first reading in 1796, but it failed to move beyond second reading by a margin of four votes. “Abolition,” writes O’Shaughnessy, “was postponed by the conservative backlash to the French and Haitian Revolutions.”46 But the important tension that he brings out here is that within empire, there are contradictory economic interests that are qualitatively experienced and expressed. It is the capitalists and laissez-faire proponents who have common interest with the abolitionists within England in dismantling slavery by the early nineteenth century, and Williams’s argument is that we have favored the latter without looking to how the internal contradictions of imperial capitalism influenced its own demise. For example, in 1821, the British Parliament debated the issue of duties being levied on sugar produced in the East Indies, relative to the West Indies. The liberal political economist and MP for Portarlington, David Ricardo, participated in the discussions and voted against applying extra duty on sugar produced in one part of the empire versus another; there was no mention of the morality or immorality of slavery.47

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Williams and the postcolonial West Indies Largely absent from Williams’s empirical account is the agency and subjectivity of enslaved Africans, Indigenous people of the Caribbean, and, later, indentured servants. But, as I suggested at the outset of this chapter, Williams’s project was arguably about inserting African objectivity into the rhythm of world history. The tools of scientific history and the resources of the colonial archive/coal mine were incapable of injecting African subjectivity into the discourse of colonial capitalism because the records were never designed to suggest that an enslaved person would be anything more than a statistic or “exceptional” commodity.48 Williams tells us little about civilization and race because there was no need, in 1944, to state the obvious within the intellectual discourse to which he contributed. In 1944, it was an accepted “fact” that racial superiority was the only way to make sense of the innovative, economic advancement, grit, and ingenuity of the European Industrial Revolution. Williams’s great contribution has been to throw a wrench into that machine, ripping the origins of the Industrial Revolution out of Manchester or Liverpool and placing them in the plantations of Barbados, Trinidad, Haiti, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. It is only under the guise of “post-racial” society that we must reiterate the presence of white supremacy discourse—in 1944, it was not disputed. It is revealing of the period that even though Williams specifically argued that economics was more important than race in the development of capitalism, FBI informants would report that Williams was a “racist rabble-rouser” accused of “racial bias in advancing his racist theories.”49 In terms of thinking through the coloniality of the archives in which he was seeking objective facts to narrate into history, Williams, like Marx, remains complicit with the false thesis that Indigenous people simply succumbed to the forces of invasion. He neglects to connect the development of capitalism to Indigenous dispossession in the same way that he did with slavery. Williams, the young scholar in the 1930s, can be forgiven this omission in light of the context within which he worked, but the fact that progressive scholarship remained within a universalistic and Eurocentric frame has limited the scope of much radical scholarship and contributed to misunderstandings of hundreds of years of ongoing Indigenous resistance to colonial and capitalist occupation. Williams the scholar was determined to advocate and advance history of and by Caribbeans, and such histories would not be exclusively in the domain of the Eurocentric ivory tower. In 1944, Williams sought a meeting with the head of a British committee established to consider higher education in the Caribbean. Inspired by similar movements for regional university education in South Asia (specifically Ceylon), Williams argued that a West Indian university system need not be tethered to Britain and, in fact, ought not to be, in order to best serve the interests of West Indians.50 He sought permission to submit a formal proposal and consulted with the American professor John Dewey, to whom he wrote, “In my view this University, wisely planned, could make a double contribution—both to the immediate problems of the Caribbean people and to university education of the larger world.”51 Upon reading the memorandum, the British committee

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wrote that while the arguments were well researched and enthusiastic, Williams ultimately sets his sights too high and that the West Indies were not ready for such an institution. Williams reflects, “It was astonishing how, time and again, whatever I was involved in with the British, this comment appeared—‘too high’. I asked myself whether it ever occurred to them that the problem was that their sights were ‘too low.’”52 Professor Dewey wrote a forward to the manuscript that emerged from this memorandum, but Williams was unable to find an academic publisher interested enough in the idea of West Indian education to justify the expense of publishing it. Ultimately, Education in the British West Indies was published in Trinidad, sponsored by the Teachers’ Economic and Cultural Association.53 In the years following the publication of Capitalism and Slavery, Williams returned to Trinidad as deputy chairman of the Caribbean Research Council of the Caribbean Commission. In his discussion of his frustrations of working within the Caribbean Commission, of particular note are his observations about the importance of hiring West Indians instead of European expats: I tried, as far as possible, to get West Indian staff. They could work—unlike the expatriate who told me over his third gin and tonic at lunchtime that the climate made it difficult for him to work after noon—and they shared the West Indian aspirations. I opposed the emphasis on transient, temporary, commuting experts, who lack elementary knowledge of the Caribbean background, and who carry away with them at the end of their assignment, such experience, in the main valuable, as they may accumulate during their Caribbean peregrinations.54

In this quotation, we see the praxis of Capitalism and Slavery. The logic of empire, and more importantly, the meaning of postcolonial futures, cannot be built from the standpoint of the master alone. Williams, from the 1930s to the 1950s, and in particular through Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, deployed the best intellectual tools at his disposal—that of empirical and objective history—which brought forth a powerful and controversial challenge to the internal logic of empire on the one hand, but made the broader normative implications of the imperial mind-set more difficult to discern on the other.

Conclusion Postcolonial national elites internalized colonial epistemological and ontological biases. This led, in part, to sovereignty-seeking movements in the mid-twentiethcentury “British” world organizing to inherit the reins of state power, rather than radically transforming state structures. The future, from the perspective of the West Indies in 1944, was one in which the colonial empire seemed destined to fall, but the makeup of the postcolonial order was far from certain. Concerned with correcting the overt white supremacy of hegemonic accounts of the development of capitalist political economy and forcing into the limelight the embodied presence of enslaved Africans, Williams’s text has been foundational for its audacity in

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arguing against the generally accepted thesis that internal moral pressure from Christians and liberals within the empire brought about the end of slavery. Capitalism and Slavery was not a flawless book, and its author not a flawless man. But viewed from the vantage point of articulating a political and historical agenda at the critical turning point of 1944, this text is significant for forcefully pushing back against conventional imperial wisdom and imagining postcolonial futures in which the colonized matter. Reading Capitalism and Slavery as a decolonial text sees the book as an audacious statement that the humanity of the enslaved ought to be accounted for in addition to their existence as numbers in colonial records and that the moral logic of empire must be challenged using the best tools at one’s disposal. Faced with the practical realities of being a Black graduate student in England in the 1930s, Williams picked up the tools of empirical history. But from 1944 onward, he wrote more freely to articulate the importance of education and agency for and of the Caribbean. Like most historians and politicians of his generation, he nonetheless internalized many colonial assumptions about universal history. Williams did not seek to disrupt modernity, only to insert his understanding of Caribbean agency within it—a task he was not at all content to leave to the shelves of academic study. Nevertheless, as his critic Seymour Drescher writes, “By the 1950s Williams’s theses were already ‘orthodox’ at the University College of the West Indies. They became integral elements of the ‘Caribbean School’ of social scientists and historians.”55 In the mid-twentieth century, historians focused on the empirical details of the past without a great deal of interest in how academic study perpetuates Eurocentric assumptions about things as everyday as the naturalness of states, the objectiveness of temporality, or the epistemic biases associated with treating archives as containers of facts. Then and now, too little attention is paid to how our studies of the past contour our visions for the future, and this is but one of many reasons that revisiting Capitalism and Slavery remains instructive today.

Notes 1 I gratefully acknowledge the intellectual space of the “Textual Turning Point” workshop at Saint Mary’s University in the fall of 2017. I am particularly grateful to John Munro, Kirrily Freeman, Chike Jeffers, and Fazeela Jiwa for their careful reading and suggestions and to Jai Parasram for making available his extensive collection of West Indian history books. 2 See Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press, 1977); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011). 3 D. A. Farnie cited in Colin Palmer, Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 31–32. 4 Palmer, Eric Williams, 7. 5 Ibid. 6 Haile Selassie, “Appeal to the League of Nations,” Geneva, June 1936. Available online: https​://ww​w.mth​olyok​e.edu​/acad​/intr​el/se​lassi​e.htm​

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7 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1944), 46. 8 Robbie Shilliam, “Forget English Freedom, Remember Atlantic Slavery: Common law, Commercial Law, and the Significance of Slavery for Classical Political Economy,” New Political Economy 17, no. 5 (2012): 591–609. 9 I’m grateful to Kirrily Freeman for helping to clarify this connection. 10 Eric Williams, Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969), 51. 11 Ibid. 12 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies (London: Zed Books, 1999), 35. 13 Williams, Inward Hunger, 30–54. 14 Seymour Drescher, “British Capitalism and British Slavery,” History and Theory 26, no. 2 (1987): 183–86. 15 Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dossier on Eric Eustace Williams, 1941. Document number: 32962343. 16 Eric Williams, “Massa Day Done,” Callaloo 20, no. 4 (1997): 725–30. 17 Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, “Eric Williams as Economic Historian,” in Capitalism and Slavery: Fifty Years Later, ed. Heather Cateau and SHH Carrington (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000), 107; Robin Blackburn, American Crucible, 307. Seymore Drescher, “Capitalism and Slavery after Fifty Years,” in Cateau and Carrington, Capitalism and Slavery: Fifty Years Later (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000), 81–97. 18 O’Shaughnessy, “Eric Williams as Economic Historian,” 99–100. See also Blackburn, American Crucible, 105. 19 Blackburn, American Crucible, 101. 20 Ibid., 107. 21 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938; New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 22 Drescher, “After Fifty Years,” 90. 23 Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1 (2002): 65–66. 24 Enrique Dussel, Filosofía de Liberación (México: Edicol, 1977). 25 Ramón Grosfoguel, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 211. 26 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privileging of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 581. 27 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (New York: Colombia University Press, 2002). 28 Gurminder Bhambra, Connected Sociologies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 40–44. 29 Cristina Rojas, “Contesting the Colonial Logics of the International: Towards a Relational Global Politics for the Pluriverse,” International Political Sociology 10, no. 4 (2016): 375. 30 Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies (London: Andre Deutsch Limited, 1966), 11–13. 31 G. W. F. Hegel, “The Course of World History,” in Lectures on The Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 124–51. 32 Helen Liebel-Weckowicz, “Ranke’s Theory of History and the German Modernist School,” Canadian Journal of History 23 (April 1988): 76. 33 Ranke, cited in Andreas Boldt, “Ranke: Objectivity and History,” Rethinking History 18, no. 4 (2014): 463.

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34 Liebel-Weckowicz, “Ranke’s Theory of History,” 77; Boldt, “Ranke: Objectivity and History,” 463–64. 35 Ranke, cited in Liebel-Weckowicz, “Ranke’s Theory of History,” 80. 36 Boldt, “Ranke: objectivity and history,” 464. 37 Liebel-Weckowicz, “Ranke’s Theory of History,” 78. 38 Gurminder Bhambra, “Comparative Historical Sociology and the State: Problems of Method,” Cultural Sociology 10, no. 3 (2016): 335–51. 39 Guha, History at the Limit of World History, 41. 40 Siba Grovogui, “Regimes of Morality: International Morality and the African Condition,” European Journal of International Relations 8, no. 3 (2002): 315–38; Robbie Shilliam, “Forget English Freedom. Remember Atlantic Slavery,” 591–609. 41 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 7. 42 Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India (June 10, 1853),” in On Colonialism: Articles from the New York Tribune and Other Writings by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 40. 43 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 122. 44 Ibid., 112. 45 Ibid., 135. 46 O’Shaughnessy, “Eric Williams as Economic Historian,” 106. 47 “Duty on East India Sugars.” United Kingdom, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Second Series (1820-1830) Volume 5, CC 508 - 510 (May 4, 1821). 48 Shilliam, “Forget English Freedom. Remember Atlantic Slavery,” 591–609. 49 FBI, Dossier on Eric Eustace Williams. 50 Williams, Inward Hunger, 98. 51 Ibid., 97. 52 Quoted in Williams, Inward Hunger, 98–99. 53 Ibid. 54 Williams, Inward Hunger, 106–107. 55 Drescher, “British Capitalism and British Slavery,” 188.

RECONSTRUCTIONS

A 1944 Hollywood war film, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, dramatized the April 1942 Doolittle Raid and one airman’s quest to get home to his pregnant wife.1 The raid, in retaliation for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, saw a small group of American flyers drop bombs on Japan, before running out of fuel and crash-landing off the coast of China. The crew’s wearying journey to first reach the Nationalists in China, and then return home to the States, sets up many emotionally and politically charged scenes: a group of Chinese school children sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” an American airman reassures a Chinese doctor, “We’ll be back . . . you’re our kind of people,” and at the end of the film the protagonist tells his wife, “When things were the worst, I could see your beautiful face.” The film’s heavily patriotic and propagandistic tone was intended to inspire faith in the American cause and sympathy for the Chinese Nationalist one, to help viewers imagine a future in which the Japanese threat was eliminated and the United States and its allies—including Nationalist China—prevailed, but also to personalize the war and postwar in a way that emphasized beauty and emotion. Two of the three chapters in this section take films as their central text and, between them, reflect many of the themes evident in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. In the first chapter, on the 1944 Akira Kurosawa film The Most Beautiful, Chikako Nagayama argues that, while most scholars identify the film’s overt militarism as central to its propagandistic character, the film’s engagement with beauty, emotion, and humanity is also central to its mobilizing message. Kurosawa intended the film to be, literally, “the most beautiful” and—especially—more beautiful than American films. The beauty of the Japanese war effort reflected in Kurosawa’s film was meant to mobilize the viewing public through their affective response. National governments were not the only ones to use film as propaganda to mobilize support for their cause. In the second chapter of this section, Suzanne Langlois describes the internationalist propaganda films of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) including the 1944 National Film Board of Canada (NFB) film In the Wake of Armies and a follow-up filmstrip UNRRA goes into Action (1945), both of which highlighted the plight of displaced persons and the continued need for aid and intervention in Europe. UNRRA’s cinematic message was, above all, that a coordinated, large-scale “aid effort”—in continuation (and not only as an outcome) of allied involvement in Europe— would require the same structures, commitments, and sacrifices as the “war effort.” Indeed, on the Allied side, the militarization of the future peace had its roots in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radio broadcast of December 9, 1941, on the American

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declaration of war with Japan, when Roosevelt promised the American people, “we are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows.”2 The idea of “winning the peace” resonated widely—as we saw in the title of Frank Lugard Brayne’s community development pamphlet in the previous section—and this sentiment defined the Allied cause. FDR’s promise to fight a war “not for conquest, not for vengeance” but for ideals became enshrined in the Atlantic Charter later that year and laid the foundations for the future United Nations. The third chapter in this section, by Katherine Rye Jewell, reveals the extent to which the 1944 party platform of Roosevelt’s Democratic Party sought to preserve wartime ideological goals in the peace to come, as well as enshrine internationalism in American foreign policy. The 1944 Democratic Party Platform, like Kurosawa’s film, and the NFB filmstrip UNRRA goes into Action, framed future domestic matters through the lens of war, reminding us that although postwar futures could at this point be imagined, the total war present still colored that imagining. The idea that peace would bring battles that must also be won illustrates the extent to which wartime and the postwar were connected by a militarized discourse of continued mobilization on all sides. All three chapters in this section illustrate this military idiom in action and how it was harnessed to reconstruction. Ultimately, these chapters illustrate the extent to which rebuilding—whether political parties, particular industries, the nation, or the international order— dominated thinking. The challenge, also revealed in these chapters, was to secure continued public support and commitment—indeed continued mobilization—for these engagements.

Notes 1 Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1944). Trailer available online at: https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=70o​03FbZ​CsM 2 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “On the Declaration of War with Japan,” December 9, 1941. Available online: http:​//doc​s.fdr​libra​ry.ma​rist.​edu/1​20941​.html​

CChapter 7 PROJECTING GENDER AND EMOTION IN 1944 JAPAN: YOUNG WOMEN AND AFFECT IN KUROSAWA AKIRA’S THE MOST BEAUTIFUL1 Chikako Nagayama

The spectator is fascinated by—and sees beauty in—a film because of what they have in their own heart. I must seek out where their heartstring is, to begin with . . . . As soon as possible, we must foster the national film to become the most beautiful one [for the Japanese audience among films to be screened].2 [The Most Beautiful was] not a major picture but the dearest one [kawaii eiga] to me.3 In his 1943 essay entitled “The Most Beautiful” (Ichiban utsukushiku), Kurosawa Akira ponders the ideal characteristics of national film in Japan (kokumin eiga): What should national films endeavor to achieve in order to compete with American films in their appeal to Japanese audiences? “To win [this battle],” Kurosawa argues, “we must make national films more amusing [omoshiroi] than American films.”4 From the moment Japan entered the Second World War in December 1941, US films were not available for public screening.5 However, their strong influence on the Japanese film industry remained, and they served as a model counterpart for Kurosawa to formulate an idea about Japan’s cinematic identity. Whereas American films had already prevailed on this front with their “perfect tactics” to appeal to any audience, Kurosawa wanted to articulate “a sort of beauty” that Japanese film audiences would appreciate. As a case in point, he recalls an elderly woman that he saw at a prescreening of the 1942 Toho film, The Naval Battle of Malaya (directed by Yamamoto Kajirō).6 With her hands clasped together at the sight of a Japanese aviator’s suicide attack against an Allied warship on screen, she appeared to be “intoxicated by something that is extremely beautiful.”7 From this instance, Kurosawa draws his insight about national film. For him, as this passage implies, film aesthetics and audience affect are deeply connected. Employing a semidocumentary style, Kurosawa Akira’s explicitly pro-war, morale-boosting film The Most Beautiful (1944) depicts a group of young women

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who struggle to surpass production quotas at a factory producing lenses for bombsights. The film’s theme reflected the mobilization of female youth as workers at war-related factories, which had included students since January 1944. Initially, the navy had asked Kurosawa to shoot a combat film featuring Zero fighter planes, but “they really couldn’t have spared any fighters to make a movie, and I never heard anything more about it.”8 The Most Beautiful was shot instead with the working title Nihon no seishun (Japan’s Youth). The training of actresses for the film began in September 1943. Nearly twenty performers used pseudonyms and took up work alongside regular female “devotees” (teishintai) at a Japan Optics factory from December 1943 to January 1944.9 They also lived with other factory workers in a workers’ dormitory. Kurosawa even revised his script based on the actresses’ reflective essays about their work and dormitory life. The film was subsequently released under the title The Most Beautiful. This chapter critically examines the film, which was Kurosawa’s only work to explicitly support Japan’s military effort during the Second World War. By interweaving biographical accounts, film reviews, film-text analysis, and historical contextualization, I will compare two points of view to evaluate the ways in which the film supported Japan’s total mobilization. By highlighting its “spiritist” ideology and its alignment with the “collective war effort,” today’s critics tend to emphasize the film’s obvious pro-war stance.10 The chapter examines this perspective through the historical lens of film censorship and student labor mobilization. Two contemporary critics, however, responded differently to the film by emphasizing the various emotions provoked by the film’s young female protagonists. Inspired by these critics, the chapter discusses the film’s unique arrangement of voices and bodies—some scenes illuminate a typical relationship between authority and the national subject, while others depict variations of body movements and vocal sounds that deviate from this norm. Ultimately, the film’s affective character complicates its mobilizing message and its apparent pro-war politics. Kurosawa called this film “the dearest one” (ichiban kawaii eiga).11 Today’s film critics tend to relate this remark to the fact that, after The Most Beautiful premiered, the director married the actress Yaguchi Yōko, who played the lead role in the film.12 However, a closer look at Kurosawa’s biography leads to a different perspective. Kurosawa’s marriage to Yaguchi was most likely not the result of a courtship during shooting, but was rather based on a Toho executive producer’s recommendation (a few years earlier, Kurosawa had experienced serious heartbreak with the star actress Takamine Hideko).13 Perhaps, rather than reflecting romance, kawaii instead refers to the affective aspect of the film. The word kawaii can be translated as “sweet” or “cute,” but also “lovely” and “beloved.” I would like to consider this concept as a description of the film subject as a whole. In successfully capturing young female actors’ myriad vocal and physical expressions—something Kurosawa rarely does in other works— The Most Beautiful presents a complex, multilayered narrative that goes beyond the typical cinematic vocabulary of wartime mobilizing propaganda (Figure 7.1).



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Figure 7.1  A promotional photo for Kurosawa Akira, The Most Beautiful (1944). © 1944 TOHO CO., LTD. All Rights Reserved.

The Most Beautiful as propaganda Prior to The Most Beautiful, Kurosawa directed a film about a judo champion, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), which became a huge commercial success.14 After The Most Beautiful, he made a sequel to Sanshiro Sugata, which again did not contain an obvious militaristic tone. He wrote scripts for war propaganda films such as Seishun no kiryu (Air Wave of Youths, 1942)15 and Tsubasa no gaika (Songs for the Wings, 1942),16 but these were essentially youth dramas with limited depictions of warplanes or military combat. Kurosawa later proclaimed that his involvement in script writing for these wartime mobilization films was not thrilling, “nor a kind of work that I could devote myself to—I wrote them rather quickly only by making use of script writing techniques [that I had acquired].”17 Compared to his reluctance to adhere to pro-war ideology in other films, The Most Beautiful’s seemingly full support of wartime ideology appears “outstanding and peculiar” to today’s critics.18 Kurosawa’s creative pursuit must certainly have been compromised by wartime censorship. Before becoming a filmmaker, Kurosawa studied painting. His ideologically charged works, such as “Opposition against Imperialism,” “For Farmers Union,” and “Workers’ Union,” were presented at the second Proletarian Artist Great Exhibition in Tokyo in 1928.19 When Kurosawa gave up on making a living from painting and became an assistant director at the Photo Chemical

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Laboratory in 1936, film censorship had already come into effect.20 The Japanese government directly and indirectly influenced film content during the Fifteen Years’ War (1931–45). Film censorship was initiated by the Home Ministry in 1925, and content depicting insults against the emperor and royal family, physical cruelty, sexual intercourse, naked adults, and kissing were removed from all films except armature productions.21 In the 1920s, the Ministry of Education also began to promote specific films in order to inform the public, teachers, and producers about desirable content from an educational and cultural perspective. In addition to these existing regulatory frameworks, politicians and administrators became keen on furthering regulations on film production due to an increased recognition of—and greater expectations regarding—the impact of cinema on viewer psychology. In 1935, the idea of national policy films (kokusaku eiga) was first officially expressed upon the establishment of the Great Japan Film Association, which aimed “to have cinema participate in national policy and .  .  . to realize cinematic patriotism [Eiga hokoku 映画報国] by fully utilizing films’ strengths in advertising and education.”22 In 1937, immediately before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japan War, the production of national policy films was further encouraged by expanding the Home Ministry’s censorship fee exemption from education and government publicity to general films produced in Japan. The Japanese government’s intervention in film production became even more pronounced after December 1941. The intensified war situation motivated military officers’ involvement in the censorship process.23 Additionally, since Japanese film companies fully depended on raw film imports from the United States, the war against the United States resulted in severe shortages of this crucial material for filmmaking. In addition to the existing major companies, Toho and Shochiku, a new film production company, Daiei, was established by merging Nikkatsu, Shinko, and Daitō. Quotas of produced films and prints for distribution were specifically allocated to each company. From the summer of 1940, film projects came under scrutiny at their planning stage, and film scripts were modified or discarded according to censor recommendations. Some scripts prepared by renowned filmmakers such as Ozu Yasujirō and Itami Mansaku were not allowed to go into production.24 It is likely that Kurosawa, like other Japanese filmmakers, had diminishing opportunities to make films without referring to war-related themes. Some filmmakers, including Kurosawa’s mentor Yamamoto Kajirō, however, took an opportunistic approach and altered their films’ political stance to suit the authorities. Although a former communist, Yamamoto directed The Naval Battle of Malaya, which was a commercial and critical success and supported Japan’s imperial agenda. After Japan’s surrender, Yamamoto made films that reflected the values of the new occupation forces. When preparing to shoot Ashita wo tsukuru hitobito (People who Make Tomorrow, 1946), Yamamoto was asked if he should perhaps stop making films under the Allied occupation and wait for a few years to see how things turned out.25 The ideological discrepancy between Yamamoto’s war films prior to 1945 and the prodemocratic messages he was supposed to send out under the supervision of the supreme commander of Allied Powers might



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appear hypocritical. Yamamoto responded, “Filmmakers are like news reporters. You keep following the changing trend of a society. Don’t worry.”26 Although not as blatant as Yamamoto’s war-themed films, with The Most Beautiful Kurosawa did not escape other filmmakers’ fate. As Yoshimoto aptly states, Kurosawa’s wartime motifs “could easily be appropriated by the militarist government to legitimize mass mobilization for the war.”27 To confirm its pro-war stance, today’s film scholars have noted The Most Beautiful’s “spiritist message” and its emphasis on the “collective war effort.”28 In the film’s opening scene, the factory manager (Shimura Takashi) yells in an ear-splitting voice: “Only an indomitable spirit of deep responsibility can achieve outstanding production results. There can be no improvement in production without an improvement in personal character!”29 The National General Mobilization Law in 1938 allowed the government authority to regulate and manage material and human resources for the war effort. Due to severe labor shortages, a cabinet decision in January 1944 implemented the mobilization of students for war plants over a fourmonth period that was extended to one year that March. The age limit of youth mobilization was gradually expanded, and all schools stopped their classes in March 1945, with the exception of elementary schools. In diaries written by Osaka Prefectural Women’s High School students, for example, the spirit of the collective war effort was vividly enacted and embodied. They expressed their excitement and determination regarding mobilization—“[The student] mobilization order has finally been released. My heart is pounding with great excitement. . . . Today is the entrance ceremony. I’m filled with great emotions from the moment that I stepped into the factory. . . . With immense joy, we entered through the factory gate. As if celebrating our joy, the sky was clear all day.”30 As Fumio Sashida has argued, beyond the film’s literal alignment with the general mobilization, the finely crafted Kurosawa film effectively stokes the war spirit: contrasts are carefully created between “the grace and kindness of the dorm matron played by Irie Takako, Yokoyama Unpei playing a janitor with innocent humor, and dynamism depicted through the girls’ fife and drum band’s march and volleyball match.” Sashida especially emphasizes that the cutback between the march and the young women’s facial expressions is “magnificent and extremely demagogic.” He, like many present-day critics, considers that this film served to “lift the audience’s fighting spirit.”31 The apparent propaganda content of the film and its effects place The Most Beautiful within the patriotic, artistic, and cultural efforts that supported wartime mobilization.

Affect and ambiguity Reviews published after the film’s 1944 premier, however, reveal that contemporary critics’ interpretations were in fact contrary to today’s scholarly views. While present scholars focus on the film’s direct reference to war mobilization efforts, the 1944 reviewers agreed that the central motif of The Most Beautiful—the female protagonists’ expressions of joy and sorrow—would touch audiences the most.

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One critic in the magazine Nihon Eiga (Japan Film) initially admits that the appropriateness of the film’s motif—female youth workers’ efforts to surpass the production quota—is “admirable” (kenage) and “the viewer should favorably respond to the film’s efforts to depict the women’s sincerity,” because “it takes seriously that even young women are contributing to the [nation’s] expansion of fighting force.”32 Nevertheless, he was disappointed with the film because “it emphasizes what should not be emphasized,” namely, the film’s lyrical depictions of protagonists’ sentiment—such as a worker’s return home due to illness and a long farewell with her fellow workers.33 The critic was concerned that the depiction of negative aspects of factory work might interfere with the producer’s intention to support the mobilization of female youth in factory labor. Another critic, Sugiyama Heichi, on the other hand, appreciated the film’s ability to channel the women’s sentiments: “The audience too enjoys and feels fulfilled by seeing the process of the girls’ collective joy and sorrow and their vivid liveliness.”34 For Sugiyama, the film successfully and freely captures the female factory workers’ facial expressions. Moreover, the film is able to match music with the girls’ shifting feelings and psychological transitions. Sugiyama also appreciated that the depictions of their emotions were carefully controlled and not excessively dramatized. As a result, Sugiyama considers that the film continuously shows each character’s “beautiful sides as a human being” and consciously embraces “human imperfection (ningensei no yowasa).”35 “Girl workers’ confrontation with each other, and their sandals being messily piled near the front door during the supervisor’s absence—these scenes don’t shy away from [real] humanity, that conveys a sense of beauty.”36 Surprisingly, the review does not mention the film’s usefulness or effectiveness as a mobilization tool in total war. However, perhaps to avoid other critics’ and censors’ commentary on the reviewer himself, Sugiyama shifts to a militaristic tone toward the end of the review: “Nonetheless, by seeing the truth of the human heart and truth in the actors’ facial expressions, our desiccated wartime life is given [life] force and our soul becomes awakened.”37 In short, the first critic is cautious about the film’s resonance with “war weary films” that attempt to curtail people’s elevated pro-war spirit, while the second critic shows his enjoyment of The Most Beautiful’s affective impact and human elements. In a further example of their opposing approaches, these critics comment on the same scene toward the end of the film but propose contrasting interpretations. In the scene, the main character, Watanabe Tsuru, is so absorbed in her work of inspecting corrupted lenses that she ends up not leaving the factory all night despite her mother’s illness. After she finishes all the necessary inspections, she finds out that her supervisor and plant manager have been waiting for her. According to the first reviewer, this scene was depicted with “too much care and attention to detail.”38 But the second reviewer praised the nuanced way in which Watanabe hums the military song “Genkō,” which gradually merges with a chorus of other girls at the end to reflect the workers’ accumulating fatigue. These critics’ responses indicate that the film’s complex and fluid narrative allows for multiple interpretations. The Most Beautiful, rather than delivering a simplistic militaristic message, portrayed “real humanity.” This human element



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was a key aspect of artistic survival among some Japanese filmmakers during this challenging period. Toho producer Honda Sōichirō recalls the following: Yamamoto and I always said this to each other—if we are to make war films, we want to depict a human. Whether they are dealing with subjects such as military men or something else, if a film focuses on just the superficial scheme of winning or losing battles, or aims at the promotion of the war spirit and provoking the audience’s antagonistic feeling against devilish Americans and British, then it would end up being a boring piece of work. We could at least try to depict an actual, moving human who is [also] a military man.39

Kurosawa’s first film, Sanshiro Sugata, was one of those films in which the viewer would have perceived an “actual, moving human.” Sanshiro Sugata, “an entertainment film packed with action spectacles,” was one of the two national policy films that the government commissioned from Toho for 1942, and it received the Information Bureau Award.40 Film critic Kobayashi Nobuhiko, who saw Sanshiro Sugata as a third grader at the time of its release, later recalled that it “was welcomed by the audience with extraordinary enthusiasm because it was a film that doesn’t preach to the audience, which was rare to find during the war. It was an oasis in a society [where everything else was] colored with militarist uniformity.”41 Director Masumura Yasuzō saw Sanshiro Sugata five times and attributed its success to Tomita Tsuneo’s popular entertainment novel upon which the film was based, calling the story “easy to grasp and amusing.”42 Cinematic depictions of humanity not only increased the entertainment value of film but also had a transgressive impact that sometimes concerned the censors at the Home Ministry. When the documentary Tatakau heitai (Fighting Soldiers) was being prepared for submission to the Home Ministry in 1940, the managing director at Toho, Mori Iwao, was told that he should reconsider the submission.43 Mori read between the lines and shelved the film for good. The censors were already joking that the film should have been given the title “Tired Soldiers.”44 However, the film’s director, Kamei Fumio, asserted that it was not at all his intention to create an antiwar statement, though “many claim to perceive defeatism or pacifism in the film.”45 Despite “the original plan of depicting our fighting soldiers as a unified mass,” Kamei “switched to portrayals of them as individuals. My idea was to treat not the war per se but the men caught in the winds of war.”46 Also, Kamei explained that the military information bureau officers initially “didn’t want another glossy treatment like the standard news films, but rather a probing of the deeper aspects of the war, of its hidden dimensions.”47 In A History of the Development of Japanese Cinema (1980), film critic Tanaka Jun’ichiro recalls his first impression of the film in 1939, shortly before it was suppressed: “Even now I remember the mood as all the reels unspooled; rather than exuberant battles, I felt as if I touched the quiet souls of soldiers who are facing death, wearing shoes with holes, and marching as asleep. It made my heart freeze.”48 Since Japan was their enemy, few Americans paid serious attention to Japanese film. But the photographer and filmmaker Frank Capra and the anthropologist Ruth Benedict did pay serious attention to Kamei’s

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war documentaries. Capra stated, “We can’t beat this kind of thing. We make a film like that maybe once in a decade.”49 This admission of the narrative and emotional force of enemy film resembles Kurosawa’s point of view about American film suggested in his essay, “The Most Beautiful.”50 It seems that the powerful emotion provoked in film had the potential to unsettle the binary, us-against-them rhetoric reinforced by the war.

The politics of voice and body As shown earlier, filmmakers maneuvered to explore aesthetic and affective elements that were not in the standard cinematic lexicon of propagandistic war films. Contemporary critics would also play a role in shedding light on these aspects of the films. Overall, and unlike Nazi propaganda, the Japanese government did not seek to implement a coherent visual style in film production.51 Due to the quota and censorship systems, the thematic component of films—their literal meanings—were systematically regulated, but there was room for experimentation in terms of cinematic style and vocabulary. Meanwhile, censors and film critics were still able to judge—or even more precisely, feel—films’ sensory impact to varied degrees depending on their relevance to the urgent situation (hijo jitai) of total war, as demonstrated by the case of Fighting Soldiers and The Most Beautiful. The concept of “total mobilization of the national spirit” became centered in cultural policies since the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in September 1937. Hideto Tsuboi argues that the cultural mobilization campaigns intended to regulate artistic productions, consequently becoming an apparatus to collect and assemble personal feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations into the public cause of the wartime regime.52 In 1940, the well-known poet and sculptor Takamura Kotarō (1883–1956) wrote a poem that succinctly illustrates the artist’s role in encouraging ordinary people at home, far from the frontlines of the war, to give up their personal grievances in order to serve the public good: Shall we stop these now Petty greed, petty discontent Petty complaint, petty anger Those annoying, trivial things Ah, let’s stop them now, altogether. Personal concerns, causing ugly wrinkles in our faces Shall we stop these, that turn our lives into hell.53

In Takamura’s poem, emotion (discontent, anger, worry, etc.) is placed side by side with moral judgments (such as greed) and secondary thoughts (annoying, trivial things). Readers are made aware that they do not experience their feelings individually or in isolation, but rather, their emotions are seen by others—and the manifestation of their negative feelings are unpleasant (“ugly wrinkles in our



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faces”). A person’s discomfort might derive from her dissonance with others— possibly other people’s perceptions about the war, or new policies to support the war effort. The poet suggests, however, that negative feelings are the cause, not the result, of a difficult situation. “Relax and go carefree,” Takamura continues, “we shall forget about them and live together with everyone else. . . . Together with others to laugh and cry, let’s live the lowest and highest way.” In the context of this poem, the “lowest way” is to eliminate one’s personal desires. This should result in the “highest way,” to serve the public good. In other words, one’s emotional discipline should lead to everyone’s happiness, but one’s mental and physical reality must be set aside—even suppressed—in order to align the immediate reality with the greater goal of a society. Along with Ozaki Kihachi (1892–1974), Takamura was the most recited poet during the Asia-Pacific war. A poetry recitation movement spread across Japan as the war on the Chinese mainland expanded. From 1935, war-related public events, along with news, music, and entertainment, were broadcast by radio across the country. The emperor’s declaration of war was announced over the radio; the nation gathered to listen to his sacred words transmitted through loudspeakers at local meeting places and school grounds on December 8, 1941. In this moment, people became national subjects by listening to these official announcements. With the declaration of war against the United States and listening established as a vital component of membership in the nation, an increasing number of poets recited their war verses on the radio and in public gatherings. Students were also encouraged to read war-themed and other poems aloud, by themselves and in class.54 According to Tsuboi, “personal matters,” such as one’s sentiments, physical sensations, and thoughts, gained significance through their expression and visibility in public, particularly through poetry recitation. “This system of publicization, that collects personal matters through individual consensus and participation, can also be thought as nationalization or the making of a national public sphere.”55 When their personal feelings were progressively made invisible or silenced in public, artists employed their professional outlets to speak on behalf of ordinary citizens. In doing so, they participated in the building of a national public sphere, supposedly formed through people’s discursive activities such as reading, writing, and discussion.56 At the beginning of The Most Beautiful, the plant manager delivers a speech from a microphone: “Only an indomitable spirit of deep responsibility can achieve outstanding production results.”57 While the audience hears this male voice, a close shot of the manager is crosscut with a shot of two loudspeakers along with front views of boy workers and rear views of adult male workers all neatly lined up in various places around the factory building. This sequence clearly conveys the sociocultural regime of national subject-making discussed above. The transmitted voice, reading from a prepared script, is showering over children and adults scattered across space, and at the same time, their bodies are positioned in a rigid order to passively receive the voice. In daily social interactions, each body comes from and occupies a particular place, which shapes its unique socioeconomic circumstances, experiences, and memories.58 When bodies are made to line up in order, however, the qualitative significance that

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constitutes each individual’s distinctive position is minimized, and a quantifiable sameness is visually foregrounded. Meanwhile, bodies are situated as if they were empty containers to be filled with meaning—in this case, the “spiritist message”— poured into them from outside.59 In such a way, bodies are made to give up their capacity to feel and think for themselves. “The lived body” is, as Vivian Sobchack suggests, essential in “making ‘meaning’ out of our bodily ‘sense.’”60 “Consciousness . . . is not a pure self-presence; the subject is present to and knows itself only through the mediation of the body, which is to say that this presence is always mediated, i.e., is indirect and incomplete.”61 The standing silent bodies and the external voice are both clear indicators that the workers’ embodied consciousness is literally out of touch with their immediate surroundings and their own feelings. The Most Beautiful’s opening sequence echoes the government’s militarist slogan that appears in text before the film starts: “Uchiteshi yamamu (We’ll cease fire only when we defeat the enemy).” Like other wartime mottos, this phrase purports to express ordinary citizens’ desires on their behalf, and audience members are supposed to silently comply. After this slogan, a Toho Film Company logo appears with an aureate trumpet fanfare, followed by several seconds of women’s chorus, singing “hanayaka na midori yo, akarui midori yo (Ah, splendid green forests, bright green forests),” while the film title, Ichiban utuskushiku (The Most Beautiful), is shown. The chorus is then abruptly interrupted by a voice shouting from two loudspeakers, followed by an interior shot of the factory manager’s room. Although this contrast between two kinds of voice—male authority and female youth—is presented in a subtle way, it can be read as the filmmaker’s commentary on Japan’s wartime situation. Moreover, it signals an interesting perspective from which to consider the film as a whole. What if this audible juxtaposition is a secret “establishing shot,” which succinctly conveys the film’s central theme in an unconventional way? A notable contrast with the lined up workers’ bodies is found in the middle of the film, when approximately twenty female youth workers are gathered around their supervisor. Mutual care and trust between the young women and the adult man are conveyed through their relaxed exchange. They have a humorous conversation about a raccoon previously sighted in the neighborhood of the factory’s dormitory. Before this interaction, the dorm matron had left to meet with Miss Sugimura, the worker who was ill and returned to her countryside home: Supervisor: Well, you’ve become orphans [now that the dorm matron is gone], haven’t you? [A stir sweeps among the young women.] Worker A: We’re alright. Most of all, she is going to bring back Miss Sugimura. I’m looking forward to it. [Some women chuckle.] Supervisor: You say you’re alright, but you know, this area called Hiratsuka used to be a raccoon mecca. [Young women’s high pitched hum of voices; various responses such as “Gee!” and a cackle of laughter]



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Supervisor: Under the moonlight, you hear the raccoons’ marching band playing, “peep, peep,” in a grove in the village. [Soft chuckle followed by a burst of laughter] Supervisor: If you say it’s a lie, you will . . . in the dorm’s courtyard, perhaps tonight . . . . [A burst of laughter, even louder than the previous one] Worker B: Oh, no, you are so mean! Worker C: It’s alright. I will catch and eat them!62 In this interaction, the group shot of the women shows their proximity to each other—the physical boundaries of their bodies are blurred as their murmurs, giggles, and laughter overlap with each other. The man’s body on a chair in front of the women adds a focal point in the scene, while highlighting the mass of the group in contrast. By reflecting their surprise, excitement, and joy, the sounds they make change, while the women who are standing behind the man voluntarily move their bodies. The physical movements and polyphonic sounds are organic and spontaneous in this sequence. The young women’s vocal expressions immediately inform the audience of how they feel, and their bodies are not isolated from their voices. This relationship between body, voice, consciousness, and agency provides a stark contrast with the opening sequence that showcases a model of national subject-making through the authoritative voice permeating ordered bodies reduced to passive vessels. The opening sequence of the film—in which the male voice is broadcast and people in line listen passively—illustrates a most typical relationship between governmental authority and the national subject. Such regimentation is not limited to male workers in the film. In another scene, young women gather in a large room to chant the Asano chikai (Morning Oath). With dim natural light from the windows, their faces are hardly seen. Their voices sound almost emotionless as they routinely repeat a memorized script out loud by following the dorm matron. This sequence illustrates their physical movement and speech under maximum control. On the other hand, when the women sing the military song, “Genkō,” in regular pacing as they march on the street to come back from work, their chorus starts to speed up as they approach the dorm, and when they surround the dorm matron at the front door, the song is almost too fast to sing along. Their singing ends with group laughter. The formal dynamism of this scene was evocative, as indicated by the film critic Sugiyama’s insight: “The audience enjoy it and feel content [to see] the course of joy and sadness and the overflowing life force of female youths.”63 This remark implies that Kurosawa’s intention to tug at the audience’s heartstrings, which he expressed in the essay “The Most Beautiful,” seems to have been successfully realized in the film. Ironically, however, it was in its alienation from the public sphere that the female body’s exotic status was bolstered through the filmmaker’s gaze. While male citizens were expected to serve their country as soldiers, women were meant to become “good wives and wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo), according to Japanese

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political and intellectual leaders.64 Labor laws in the Meiji era limited the hours of factory work for women, out of a concern over the impact of physical labor on women’s reproductive and maternal health. Women’s key role in reproduction was even more emphasized during the war era by government slogans such as “Bear children and multiply” (ume yo fuyase yo), which circulated in 1941. But by 1944 this concept was in conflict with increasing demand for women’s contributions in the workforce, due to labor shortage as more and more of the male working population was drafted. The idealized agency projected onto female youth in The Most Beautiful was, in a way, a well-fabricated fiction which neglected women’s actual negotiation of conflicting expectations, and their changing circumstances, influenced by governmental and economic demands.

Conclusion Although this chapter has examined The Most Beautiful’s careful treatment of diverse forms of movement, voice, and speech, it would be premature to conclude that these scenes would have resulted in the cultivation of a critical awareness among audiences of the wartime regime’s control over their bodies and minds. As varied interpretations by scholars and critics have revealed, group shots of female youth allowed for ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, responses from viewers. They could mean a positive interpretation of the collective spirit for some viewers, but they could also make some audience members feel various sentiments that were not explicitly encouraged by war mobilization campaigns. At the same time, however, I hesitate to define this film as a proof of Kurosawa’s active resistance against the status quo. His essay “The Most Beautiful,” discussed at the beginning of this chapter, suggests his intention to materialize a sort of beauty that deeply moves Japanese audiences. If The Most Beautiful is an outcome of Kurosawa’s creative efforts to realize this goal, it simultaneously supported the total mobilization campaign. Audiences were possibly as impressed by the young women’s disciplined movements as they marched in the streets, as they were with their relaxed expressions in the dorm. Kurosawa was certainly aware that various scenes in this film would evoke patriotic feelings. Meanwhile, it is possible that he considered the film’s aesthetic strengths independently from its conformity with the government’s cultural tools for total mobilization (such as the repetition of the popular military song “Genkō” and young women’s marching scenes in The Most Beautiful). At the very least, I would argue that his audience-based idea about national films—and his curiosity toward unique responses from viewers—might still be distinct from the core ideology of “total mobilization of the national spirit” that rather seeks to solidify the monolithic response of national subjects toward artistic expression. Although the film accommodates the government’s mobilization campaign, The Most Beautiful also projects the notion of human agency and resilience, as it depicts in a positive light the young female protagonists’ spontaneous release from a suppressed, controlled state.



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In June 1944, the Allied forces began to conduct air raids on Japanese cities, which intensified after the United States took the Mariana Islands in November 1944. From that point, B-29 Superfortress bombers reached Japan’s main island. Young women’s agency, and the optimism provoked by it in The Most Beautiful, appears superficial when contrasted with the death of countless civilians, including female factory workers. Yet news of the Japanese military’s losses on the warfront was strictly suppressed, and the majority of the Japanese populace, including filmmakers, were not aware of Japan’s approaching defeat until the very moment the emperor made the announcement on August 15, 1945. At the time The Most Beautiful was filmed and screened, the director and actors did not know what their country would face in the coming months. While The Most Beautiful was clearly the filmmaker’s thoughtful response to censorship under the war regime, I would also suggest that the film reflects early to mid-1944 as an historical moment. Due to progressively tightening restrictions in the film industry and the loss of Japanese filmmakers’ lives at the warfront, Kurosawa’s hope for a brighter future might already have been curtailed by 1944.65 Yet the film gently embraces young female protagonists’ agency and beauty as if these were the last resort to keep humanity alive at this time. The filmmaker, however, would abandon this nuanced approach in post-1945 films. After witnessing the ruthless reality of total war and Japan’s pro-democratic transition under the Allied occupation in 1945, his films would begin to raise questions about human agency and resilience in a more blatant manner.66

Notes 1 The name order of Japanese actors, critics, film directors, and producers follows Japanese convention: the given name follows the family name. Authors’ names are cited with the given name preceding the family name regardless of the language of publication. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 2 Akira Kurosawa, “Ichiban utuskushiku,” Shin eiga (March 1943) in Kurowawa akira taikei 1 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2009), 154. 3 Kurosawa Akira, Gama no abura (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984) cited in Peter B. High, The Imperial Screen. Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2003), 419. 4 Akira Kurosawa, “Ichiban utuskushiku.” 5 Mamoru Makino, Nihon eiga kenetsu shi (Tokyo: Pandora, 2003), 490. 6 Yamamoto Kajirō, Hawai marē oki kaisen (Tokyo: Toho Ltd., 1942). 7 Kurosawa, “Ichiban utuskushiku.” 8 Kurosawa, Goma no abura, 132; cited in High, Imperial Screen, 418. 9 Kurosawa, “Ichiban utsukushiku (Watanabe Tsuru tachi kaidai) no hōkoku,” Shin eiga (February 1944) in Kurowawa Akira Taikei 1, 155; Kurosawa, “Ichiban utsukushiku no enshutsu,” Shin eiga (April 1944) in Kurowawa Akira Taikei 1, 162. 10 High, Imperial Screen, 418; Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 88. 11 Kurosawa, Gama no abura. 12 High, Imperial Screen, 419.

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13 Toshirō Ogata, Kyojin to shōnen: Kurosawa Akira no josei tachi (Tokyo: Bungei shunju, 1992), 32–38. 14 Kurosawa Akira, Sugata Sanshirō (Tokyo: Toho Ltd., 1943). 15 Fushimi Shu, Seishun no kiryu (Tokyo: Toho Ltd., 1942). 16 Yamamoto Satsuo, Tsubasa no gaika (Tokyo: Toho Ltd., 1942). 17 Kurosawa, Gama no abura, 257. 18 Fumio Sashida, Kurosawa Akira no jūjika: Sensō to tsuburaya tokusatsu to chōhei kihi (Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu, 2013), 73. 19 Tōki Okamoto and Fumio Matsuyama, eds., Nihon puroretaria bijyutsu shi (Tokyo: Zōkei sha, 1967). 20 The Photo Chemical Laboratory (also known as PCL) was one of four companies, along with PCL filmmaking studio, Toho Eiga distribution, and JO studio, that merged to establish the stock company Tōhō Eiga (or Toho Film). 21 Takahisa Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga: hitobito wa kokusaku eiga wo mitaka (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbun kan, 2003), 39–40. 22 Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 32–33. 23 Makino, Nihon eiga kenetsu shi, 506–507. 24 Ozu Yasujiro’s Ochazuke no aji (The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, 1952) was developed from a script that was initially turned down in 1940. The original story was about a man who eats a bowl of green tea over rice after he receives a draft notice. Makino, Nihon eiga ken’etsu shi, 494–95. 25 Yamamoto Kajirō, Ashita wo tsukuru hito bito (Tokyo: Toho Ltd., 1946). 26 Sashida, Kurosawa Akira no jūjika, 83, 31. 27 Yoshimoto, Kurosawa, 87. 28 High, Imperial Screen, 418; Yoshimoto, Kurosawa, 88. 29 High, Imperial Screen, 418. 30 Quotations of two students’ diaries from June 30, 1944, November 2, 1944, and November 1, 1944, in Ōsaka furitsu toyonaka kojo gakuto dōin kiroku no kai, ed., Sensō to heiwa shimin no kiroku 5: Homura no ni tatsu - Ōsaka furitsu toyonaka kojo gakuto dōin ki (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 1992). At the same time that Japanese students were mobilized, the number of Korean and Chinese workers and Chinese prisoners of war who were forcibly relocated to work at mines and farms in the Japanese archipelago increased. NPO Hanaoka heiwa kinenkai, ed., Hanaoka heiwa kinenkan: Kioku wo kokoronni kizamu (Odate, Akita: 6.30 Jikko iinkai, 2015); Masaru Tonomura, Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2012). 31 Sashida, Kurosawa Akira no jūjika, 90. 32 Anonymous, “Ichiban utsukushiku,” Nihon eiga 31 (1944): 94. 33 Ibid. 34 Sugiyama Heiichi, “Sakuhin geppyō,” Eiga hyōron 1, no. 6 (1944): 18. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Anonymous. “Ichiban utsukushiku,” 95. 39 Sashida, Kurosawa Akira no jūjika, 72. 40 Yoshimoto, Kurosawa, 69. The annual schedule terminated at the end of March 1943 and Sanshiro Sugata was released on March 25. See Furukawa, Senjika no nihon eiga, 183. 41 Nobuhiko Kobayashi, Wareware ha naze eigakan ni iru no ka? (Tokyo: Shobunsha, 1975), 63–64, cited in Sashida, Kurosawa Akira no jūjika, 78.



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42 Yasuzō Masuda, “Sodai ni shite hiso na tensai,” Kinema jumpo (May 1974), cited in Sashida, Kurosawa, 79. 43 Kamei Fumio, Tatakau heitai (Tokyo: Toho Ltd., 1940). 44 High, Imperial Screen, 113. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 108. 47 Ibid., 113. 48 Abé Markus Nornes, “The Typical Genius of Kamei Fumio,” in Kamei Fumio Retrospective 1908-1987 (Tokyo: Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, 2001), 14. 49 Nornes, “Typical Genius,” 13. 50 For more discussion on international rivalries across enemy lines, see Chikako Nagayama, “Show Your Face: Racialization of War Crimes in the NFB’s The Mask of Nippon (1942),” in Screening Justice: Canadian Crime Films, Culture and Society, ed. Steven Kohm, Sonia Bookman, and Pauline Greenhill (Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2017), 40–60. 51 Yoshimoto, Kurosawa, 84. 52 Hideto Tsuboi, “Jojō to sensō: Sensō shi no shutai ni okeru kō to shi,” Iwanami kōza, ajia taiheiyō sensō: Dōin, teikō, yokusan (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2006). 53 The poem was originally titled “Ōkiku ikiyō” (“Live big”) when it was published in the magazine Ieno Hikari in 1940. It was renamed “Let’s live the lowest and highest way” in the 1942 collection of his poems, Ōinaru hi ni (On a Great Day). 54 Tsuboi, Jojō to sensō. 55 Ibid., 15. 56 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–90. 57 High, Imperial Screen, 418. 58 These circumstances, experiences, and memories can be at least partially grasped along the intersecting lines of gender, class, race/ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and so on. 59 High, Imperial Screen, 418. 60 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 1. 61 Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 4. 62 Kurosawa, Ichiban utuskushiku. 63 Sugiyama, “Sakuhin geppyō,” 18. 64 Robin Kietlinsky, “Sports, Motherhood, and the Female Body in Contemporary Japan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 11, iss. 7, no. 3 (2013); Kathleen S. Ueno, “Womanhood, War and Empire,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, ed. B. Molony and K. Ueno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 493–519. 65 In an autobiographical novel, Sokoku sōshitsu (1952), Yoshie Hotta depicts a young Japanese patriot who loses all hopes and escapes to Shanghai after the air raids began over major cities across Japan. 66 See, for example, No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kui nashi, 1946), featuring the star actress Hara Setsuko.

CChapter 8 1944: THE LAUNCH OF THE ALLIED FILM CAMPAIGN FOR CIVILIAN RELIEF Suzanne Langlois

The films commissioned internationally to support the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) between 1944 and 1947 represented an experiment in internationalist propaganda by an agency of the United Nations. In 1944, the Allies’ focus was on military planning and victory, toward a future that would hopefully become reality in the short term and open a new era. Writings, speeches, radio broadcasts, newsreels, photographs, and motion pictures reinforced that message. Following successful operations, the Allies knew that they would find millions of civilians in need of urgent help—UNRRA would see to that relief mission. At this juncture, and using the keywords of the period, the public information program stressed peace, international cooperation, interdependence, citizen action, social progress, and greater freedom; this rhetoric informed the conceptual construction of “winning the peace” that would shape Allied actions on the ground. This essay considers some lesser known cinematographic sources which, as we shall see, functioned as mediating agents between UNRRA and its diverse audiences. I examine three documents prepared by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) for UNRRA in 1944 and 1945, as the agency aimed to articulate its priorities for the postwar—as well as what “relief and rehabilitation” might entail—through a visual medium. While contributing to a unifying, internationalist message across different media, the documentary material considered here exploited audio and visual sources to accentuate a discourse of humanitarian relief and the continued engagement and mobilization upon which it would depend (Figure 8.1). The Second World War demonstrated the power and potential of film propaganda. In 1944, UNRRA could not reach a broad audience without a strong cinematic presence, whether in theatrical or nontheatrical settings. Film, which had followed the drum of war, would now open new paths presenting humanitarian relief as an essential component of victory and a moral obligation for UNRRA member states. Yet, preparing to face a chaotic situation while trying to strengthen a viable peace took the United Nations into territory where the failures of the interwar period loomed large. At the founding meeting of UNRRA in Atlantic City on November 10, 1943, Herbert Henry Lehman, the organization’s first director,



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Figure 8.1  Waiting for food. In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA (1944). National Film Board of Canada.

stated, “We have been called upon twice, within the span of a lifetime, to devise a peace in which all men could live in freedom from fear and from want. We failed once. We dare not fail again.”1 In November 1943, President Roosevelt declared that the alliance of the fortyfour United Nations, representing 80 percent of humanity, “share a common determination to build for the future a world of decency, and security, and, above all, peace.”2 This brief statement encapsulates UNRRA’s mission to heal the suffering caused by the war by meeting needs for food, shelter, medical care, the repatriation of displaced persons (DPs) and, ultimately, by creating a new cooperative world in peacetime. The discursive strategies chosen by the NFB to highlight UNRRA’s mission deliberately emphasized the civilian point of view while correlating the level of immediate and longer-term need in war-torn areas with the capacity of allied economies to provide emergency supplies. UNRRA needed to build a link between North American audiences and populations in liberated but devastated areas. It presented relief as a comprehensive strategy with connections to world resources, international peace, and national security. Along with the other authors who have contributed to this volume, I focus on an experience set in a brief and intense period when perspectives opened, sometimes in unexpected ways. Like Katherine Rye Jewell and Chike Jeffers, I find in 1944 a significant recurrence of keywords and hopes, a fundamental affirmation of dignity and peace. I concur with Luke Foster that texts about similar concerns can be brought into a fruitful dialogue. The three NFB films discussed in this essay provide an emotional summary of the humanitarian challenge in the final months of the war and a rational discourse on the planning of civilian relief for the immediate postwar period. The context of the films’ creation exemplifies how film production and distribution worked in

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this period and how film’s formal elements—sounds and images—worked to form an injunction for a widespread audience. Information and propaganda were the two complementary missions of UNRRA’s films during this very difficult phase. They would remain so in the longer term, both missions making their way into the public information schemes of the UN and UNESCO.3 During its brief existence, UNRRA eagerly collected visual material on the difficult conditions of civilian life in devastated areas, as well as the efforts by the citizens of Allied countries to answer those urgent needs. These images would be used by the agency to inform, to convince, and to mobilize in favor of its mission. UNRRA was made visible on the world’s screens through newsreel items, documentary films, discussion trailers, and filmstrips, which circulated in well-established theatrical and nontheatrical distribution networks. Despite the large and widespread audiences for UNRRA’s films, only limited cinematographic material ended up in the Film Footage Library of the United Nations. Largely because of perceptions of UNRRA as chaotic and ineffective—and because the Cold War paradigm did not provide a space to think about internationalist productions—this significant cinematic experiment was forgotten. UNRRA’s short motion pictures can thus be considered “orphan films” in the broader sense of the term—films that are neglected and often inaccessible, or mixed with other material—despite their significant national and international distribution.4 The years from 1944 to 1947 correspond to what historians conceptualize as the sortie de guerre (transition to peace). Just as the entry into war and the efficient mobilization of resources for the total war effort took time, so did the emergence from the conflict. The well-intentioned but inadequate philanthropy that followed the First World War would be replaced by preparation at the highest levels to address the urgent needs of millions of civilians, and the huge task of repatriating further millions of DPs scattered across the globe. Planning discussions started very early in the war and became the realm of both internationalists and medical authorities who warned of great disaster in the days, weeks, and months following the end of military operations. The visual texts discussed here—two of which were produced in 1944, the third in 1945—address this pressing need by emphasizing hope for the future and an order of priorities for the present, both anchored in a visionary plan for action.

From raw footage to films The first UNRRA film to address these challenges was In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA. Produced in August 1944 by the NFB, this short documentary was part of the “Canada Carries On” series and, in keeping with the NFB’s central role in UNRRA’s larger film campaign, In the Wake of Armies enjoyed wide national as well as international distribution during the entire period from 1944 to 1947.5 Accompanied by a short discussion film for nontheatrical distribution through rural and industrial circuits in Canada, the film also reached millions of workers.6 In addition to producing films and newsreels, the NFB also collected raw footage



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that could be used by UNRRA as part of its public information program.7 UNRRA worked hard to gain access for film crews to all newly liberated theaters of war, whether in Europe or in Asia. Despite a desire to document as broadly as possible, Western Europe was more readily accessible than Central and Eastern Europe.8 In Asia, the visual material was mostly collected in China and Formosa, despite the urgent relief evaluations already reaching UNRRA in 1944 about other areas of Southeast Asia. Everywhere, extraordinary planning was on the agenda, and from its inception, UNRRA struggled to determine how many people would need immediate help. Numbers kept growing, and estimations were well below figures revealed at the end of the war.9 DPs formed the most pressing issue, and UNRRA was at the forefront of organizing large-scale repatriation. The NFB’s work on In the Wake of the Armies made use of diverse film material and footage collected during the Second World War by different agencies and Allied military film corps, as well as visual evidence gathered by its own cameramen and photographers. In addition, the NFB had access to exceptional film material in Ottawa, which held the British Commonwealth’s depository for captured enemy footage.10 There were plenty of wartime stock shots and clips, but now they would be used in support of a different perspective. From images of war, the NFB would create an alternative vision of hope and peace. The Canadian government allocated 50,000 dollars of its UNRRA administrative contribution to film services to be supplied by the NFB.11 In the Wake of the Armies was the first film to arrive on screens: UNRRA was still in its infancy, more a promise than an actuality. The parallel timeline of creating an organizational structure while having its very first film commissioned indicates just how urgent UNRRA considered its propaganda campaign to be. While the NFB’s archival documentation concerning the making, content, and distribution of this film reveals its prototypical function for later productions, international archives in New York and Washington, DC testify to the real extent of its circulation.12 The seventeen-minute documentary was produced even before UNRRA’s Public Information Division was formally organized in April 1944. Patricia J. Torson, who in 1947 wrote the earliest scholarly study on this film experiment, explained that footage was selected as early as December 1943 and that the editing and scripting took place in February 1944. In the Wake of the Armies preceded by a full year any other documentary film released by UNRRA.13 When the film was shown at a preview in Washington on June 20, 1944, Lehman pointed to the successful establishment of an empathetic link between North American audiences and the populations of devastated areas: “[The task of relief] has been shown to us as something related to the daily lives of the people of Canada—indeed, of North America as a whole. .  .  . I think it is immensely valuable to have these two aspects related so closely.”14 Images of destroyed cities in liberated areas, hungry victims of persecution, and homeless refugees underscored the urgency of the task, as North Americans were called upon to continue, and even extend, their commitment to helping populations overseas. Images focused on liberated areas and civilian victims of war and occupation, however, because UNRRA had stringent rules about who was to receive immediate help: enemy civilians were not included.

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In the Wake of the Armies was shown in many parts of the Americas, in the British Empire, in North Africa, in Europe, and—after spring 1945—even in DP camps in former enemy countries.15 In the Wake of the Armies, then, not only called on Canadians to help populations in need and to support the task of relief—as Lehman mentioned—but also introduced the North American donors and suppliers of aid to those newly liberated civilians and DPs benefiting from relief. UNRRA’s Public Information Programme deliberately stressed the necessary connection between contributor and recipient countries.16 Although the names of donating countries were shown prominently on relief supplies, the film reached beyond national entities in connecting donors and recipients of aid. It emphasized that help came not from faceless governments and organizations, but from ordinary civilians just like those receiving aid. Despite distance, this visual dialogue was a meaningful way of crossing the line between “looking” and “seeing.” It exemplified the compassion, intelligence, and imagination necessary to face the human condition in wartime and create a foundation for present and future international solidarity. This way of connecting the abstract to the concrete, of relating the problems and needs of distressed civilians in ruined war zones to North American concerns, was in line with the long-held views of the NFB commissioner, John Grierson. For him, as for Lehman, success lay in relating larger issues to the interests of ordinary people. In April 1944, the American journalist and radio broadcaster Dorothy Thompson reported on Grierson’s address to a meeting of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in New York. Thompson spoke highly of Grierson: “He has revolutionized, with films, mass education in Canada.” Mr. Grierson is a forthright man. What he told the ILO was that their brilliant studies about labor conditions and problems, all international matters in general, would get little response unless they found means to reach the people in terms of their own work, their own jobs, their own interests. He warned the delegates that the ordinary man from one end of the world to the other is fed up with abstractions about international co-operation and leagues of nations. . . . He excoriated the concentration on flag-waving and general patriotic ballyhoo, instead of realizing that the people everywhere are hungry for a knowledge of the future, for a chance to understand what is in the making, and how they can participate in it, not only as to its benefits but as to its duties.17

Before international cooperation would be possible, Grierson concluded, education in internationalism must be developed, and it must begin at the grassroots. To talk of internationalism, then, was not enough: it had to be defined, explained, and understood, and only public education could achieve that. Grierson insisted, as he had previously done for the ILO back in 1938, that UNRRA “carry the message in terms of the common man.”18 He brought this same spirit to the NFB and later to UNESCO. In the Wake of the Armies was also able to nuance official relief discourse through the polysemy of images. The very name of the agency was a challenge.



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If the word “relief ” carried a more immediate meaning in health and welfare services, assistance to DPs, and essential supplies, the term “rehabilitation” was much broader, covering the restoration of supplies and services as well as public utilities, which involved extensive infrastructures—light, water, sanitation, transport, communications, and educational equipment. In addition, written documentation from UNRRA divided victors from vanquished and presented assumptions and challenges about the responsibilities of the Allies, the treatment of enemy and displaced populations, the political reconstruction of nationstates, and their role in civilian relief and respect for human rights. By 1944, however, the scope of UNRRA promises had narrowed from that of earlier iterations. In 1941, Stuart Legg produced the NFB film Food - Weapon of Conquest explaining how Nazi-occupied countries were forced to hand over their farm produce to Germany and consequently suffered from hunger. This film explained that “the Western world must now not only feed its own overseas armies, but must also meet the challenge of feeding hundreds of millions in continental Europe and Asia during the postwar years.”19 This declaration repeated the idea expressed by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, on August 20, 1940: Let Hitler bear his responsibilities to the full, and let the peoples of Europe who groan beneath his yoke aid in every way the coming of the day when that yoke will be broken. . . . There will always be held up before the eyes of the peoples of Europe, including—I say deliberately—the German and Austrian peoples, the certainty that the shattering of the Nazi power will bring to them all immediate food, freedom and peace.

This was a promise and a call to resistance against Nazism and occupation. In an address broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on February 24, 1945, Lehman repeated UNRRA’s guiding principles concerning the respect for national sovereignty in dealings with liberated nations. Lehman noted that UNRRA was no superstate, and so the success of relief operations required the full cooperation of all governments concerned. He reminded his audience “that the United Nations have solemnly and of their own accord undertaken this responsibility for caring for the relief and rehabilitation needs of liberated peoples.”20 In the opening of the film, a voiceover mentions that rehabilitation seems to mean reconstruction, as the United Nations are facing “an even more profound test of their strength: the rebuilding of the war-shattered countries—the planning of peace.” Similarly, an information sheet issued by the NFB in August 1944 explained that the film was about UNRRA’s planning of peace and rebuilding shattered countries.21 In his February 1945 address to the members of the UNRRA training center in College Park, Maryland, Henri Bonnet, French Ambassador to the United States and a former member of the League of Nations Secretariat, presented this promise in a more realistic way: “UNRRA affords a unique opportunity to restore faith and confidence in international action, at the same time serving as an opening wedge to the enormous program of reconstruction. The work of rebuilding will necessarily extend far into the future . . . , the main

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thing is to begin—and that UNRRA is doing.”22 By the time UNRRA was supposed to fulfill its promises, there were mounting political, financial, and logistical obstacles.23 Ordinary people even questioned the very idea of waiting for victory and liberation before acting on the relief part of the UNRRA mission.24 Nevertheless, through its images and commentary, the first production of August 1944 stressed a broad civilian point of view while stating that “destruction has sapped the life of a continent”: Poland was destroyed, and from the “shelled and bombed cities of Italy, Germany and France, refugees have fled toward some pitiful mirage of safety.”25 In the Wake of the Armies was indeed able to blur the strict victim/enemy divide and focus on the tragic lot of common people in a Europe devastated by war. The film emphasized a different and reassuring binary between the chaotic images and sounds of civilians in distress and the calm solemnity of UNRRA meetings and orderly relief preparations. The rapid montage and cacophonic sounds mixing human shouts and dramatic music take the viewer right into pre-UNRRA unorganized food queues in Italy or follow refugees painfully making their way on a muddy mountain road in Greece. The firm and quiet stance of UNRRA leaders such as President Roosevelt and Herbert Lehman brought the promise of help. After discussing the contribution of Canadians to the relief effort and the advantages it would bring them, the film returns to the actuality of war. The final images show women and children in desperate need of help; they become the iconic representation of the suffering of innocent people. This gendered imagery was—and still is—an efficient and common visual strategy in the depiction of the effects of war on civilians. The year 1944 presented a unique vantage point for combining planning and acting in the present and thinking of the future, stressing that if relief must follow military operations, only a long-term commitment to reconstruction would prevent failure. When the broader audiences in Europe and in DPs’ camps are taken into account, it makes for an additional and unexpected twist in the message, especially as it pointed to the problems of the League of Nations’ experiment and more specifically to the flaws of the post-First World War relief experience: it was an incomplete private venture and it humiliated the Europeans.26 UNRRA leaders stressed that “bread without jobs and relief without reconstruction” could only lead to failure. The assessment of the earlier failings of international relief and the promise not to repeat the errors of the past were addressed to all audiences, including in liberated areas and in refugee camps. In the Wake of the Armies took the viewer through a triptych that tacked from factual to visionary to factual in order to emphasize both the necessity and the commitment of UNRRA. This structure invited North American audiences to react to the reality of desperate food shortages in liberated areas with meaningful action, such as augmenting food production or accepting rationing. As for recipients, they recognized their immediate conditions, but were also introduced to the agency planning their relief. Simultaneously, they discovered on screen the ordinary people—from half a world away—working to lessen their suffering. At the NFB, meanwhile, more productions for nontheatrical distribution were being prepared.



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Let’s talk! The role of discussion trailers An elaborate set of additional material—to supplement viewing In the Wake of the Armies—was developed for noncommercial circuits using 16 mm films. When a screening took place before a designated group, such as in a factory, the audience then discussed the issues raised by the film in connection with their daily lives. The rural and industrial circuits were vital noncommercial networks connecting Canadians in all regions of the country. Schools, churches, and community associations were also groups of interest for these kinds of activities. The Canadian Forum of February 1945 describes an example of a post-screening debate involving organized labor.27 Brought to workers through trade union circuits, the film programs were attractive: “Union members and their leaders have taken to this medium of visual information with an eagerness that speaks well for the positive role of film in Canada.” Screening for organized labor existed before, but the project of the trade union circuits came into existence in April 1943 as the result of a joint agreement between the National Film Board, the Workers’ Educational Association, the Canadian Congress of Labor, and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada. Monthly attendance figures of about 1,000 people quickly grew to showings attracting over 50,000 workers who would then have “current world issues and vital domestic problems brought right into their union halls” every month.28 In addition to In the Wake of Armies, Our Northern Neighbour and Tyneside Story were also shown to union members in late 1944 and early 1945.29 The screenings themselves might be only about fifteen to twenty-five minutes, but the subsequent discussion often took several hours: “Their function is the presentation of facts: facts selected, organized and heightened by the dramatic nature of the visual medium. What happens to those facts as they become integrated and applied is the business of the audiences that see the films.”30 The purpose of discussion trailers was precisely to get the conversation going; they were part of the regular plan for trade union screenings (and other noncommercial circuits) and shown immediately following the main feature documentary. Often very short, at just three to five minutes, they would be followed by questions, answers, opinions, counter-opinions, and lively audience debate. In light of the success of several monthly meetings featuring documentary films and post-film discussion, Canadian unions became interested in setting up education committees where films were presented as part of special educational nights: “Leaders of the labor movement are zealously exploring the value and application of mass education techniques,” concluded director and producer Morton Parker. Grierson must have been delighted. In late 1944, the trade union circuits presented In the Wake of the Armies during a screening which also featured the four-minute discussion trailer Getting the most out of a film: UNRRA - In the Wake of the Armies.31 It was the second discussion trailer made by the NFB specifically for the trade union circuit, the first having dealt with Our Northern Neighbour.32 In the trailer, the leader of the filmed discussion was John Wigdor of the Workers’ Educational Association. The filmed audience brought up a number of issues: Canadian representation in UNRRA,

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how the organization obtained its funds, what impact support for UNRRA would have on the jobs of Canadian workers, whether supplies sent by UNRRA would be used as a political weapon, and so forth. The trailer then recommended pamphlets containing further information on the scope and nature of UNRRA and its mission.33 The NFB’s discussion trailers reached a significant number of viewers, with rural circuits alone attracting a yearly audience of four million, while 1,000 industrial plants throughout Canada screened the UNRRA documentaries.34 The documentaries were accompanied not only by filmed discussions, as we have seen, but also by focus questions to engage live audiences. Extensive documentation including information sheets, booklets, commentaries, and factual data were provided so that organizers could answer spectators’ questions easily and correctly. In addition, short questionnaires were collected from audiences after the film and discussion, and viewers could also share their reactions orally. Together, these sources help to assess both the desired and actual reception of the films, always a challenging methodological issue in cultural history. All the documentation explained ordinary topics in their larger context, and their significance in political and sociological terms was always demonstrated.35 This was an important aspect of the NFB’s work during the early years of its existence.

UNRRA Goes into Action (summer 1945) The forty-eight-frame filmstrip UNRRA Goes into Action (July 1945) illustrated how UNRRA’s unprecedented mission was beginning to unfold.36 It fused the hopeful vision of 1944 with the harsh reality at war’s end. UNRRA Goes into Action was part of a considerable increase in UNRRA film activity in June 1945, including the release of newsreels, the filming of new material by civilian and military units, and the collection of all available footage on UNRRA actions.37 Joining what historian Reinhart Koselleck later called the “horizon of expectation” and the “space of experience,” this arc connects the hope of relief and rehabilitation promised in 1944 with the difficult present of 1945.38 It was a sobering exercise (Figure 8.2). Filmstrips were an inexpensive, light, and versatile technology, which made use of photographs, drawings, or diagrams mounted on a continuous strip of 35 mm film. Between the 1920s and the late 1960s, filmstrips were a true mass medium: a complete teaching tool reaching sizeable audiences through national and international noncommercial distribution networks, mostly in educational and associative settings.39 Filmstrips could be mute or come with a sound accompaniment that was synchronized with the images. In contrast to the nuanced depiction of boundaries between enemies and occupied civilians in 1944’s In the Wake of Armies, the commentary just a year later in UNRRA Goes into Action insists on “liberated people who have suffered most in this war,” emphasizes the consequences of enemy “bombing, burning, murdering, pillaging,” and refers to enemies, invaders, and war crimes carried out against millions of victims.



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Figure 8.2  A displaced family. UNRRA Goes into Action (1945). National Film Board of Canada.

UNRRA Goes into Action is much more direct not only in identifying perpetrators and connecting causes and consequences but also in explaining the functioning of UNRRA, its sources of money and goods, and how they were distributed. It presents the pressing issues on the ground—transportation, medicine, food, and clothing—and the situation of DPs in Europe and the Middle East, where UNRRA was administering refugee camps. UNRRA Goes into Action was, in effect, a summary of essential information with the clear objective of educating its audiences about the purpose, actions, and limitations of UNRRA. The script as well as most of the photographs and negatives were sent from the UNRRA office in Washington, DC to the NFB in Ottawa, with instructions to add maps, titles, additional photographs, and visual aids.40 This filmstrip exemplifies the challenge of combining the intellectual framework of internationalism with the practical task of producing films using very limited resources. Like In the Wake of the Armies, UNRRA Goes into Action was commissioned through a production system familiar to documentary filmmaking since the interwar period. It made the most of technical, personnel, and financial resources that were increasingly limited in the postwar years. It used the capacity and expertise of existing film units located in different cities, often in different countries, to facilitate and accelerate production. It had been recommended that UNRRA should turn to existing agencies to develop its film program, rather than attempt to duplicate a whole film section that would be difficult to put into place.41 This way of functioning on a low budget was also internationalism in action, as was revealed by my efforts, with the aid of the NFB, to reconstitute the filmstrip.42 Each element of UNRRA Goes into Action came from a different location: the written commentary from UNRRA archives in New York; the visuals, from the NFB archives in Montréal; the sound disc from the Library of Congress in Washington.

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In addition to this now complete visual source, institutional paper archives provide essential information—quantitative and qualitative—on production, distribution, and sometimes on audience reception. In the case of UNRRA Goes into Action, we learn that, in May 1945, an initial twenty-five prints with sound recording were made for UNRRA.43 The rather plain-spoken commentary and the emotional force of the film strip’s images and music create layers of meaning. The factual content described the role of UNRRA, and the filmstrip informed its audiences that the relief mission suffered from an alarming lack of funding. Maurice Liu, acting chief of the visual media branch of UNRRA, provided the commentary for the filmstrip, but the fact that Liu was the narrator seems to indicate either a lack of resources or a lack of understanding of the importance of the role of the narrator accompanying visual material. Liu was not a professional, he reads the commentary line by line, and there is even a slip that remains in the final sound track, indicating that there was no option, or no interest, in rerecording the take. Beyond presenting UNRRA and the main issues and difficulties the relief agency faced, the filmstrip deliberately presents a reassuring view of the refugee question, and it suggests a definition of resistance that endures in postwar interpretations. Among UNRRA’s recent operations in the spring of 1945—which involved taking over relief responsibilities in Greece and Yugoslavia and sending supplies to Poland and Czechoslovakia—the filmstrip emphasizes, both visually and aurally, the plight of approximately 25,000 Yugoslav refugees in the El Shatt camp in Egypt.44 When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia in early 1944, these refugees and their families, many of whom were partisans, were evacuated by the British to southern Italy, and then to Egypt. For the millions fleeing war zones in Eastern and southeastern Europe, the Middle East was among the few places to find refuge.45 By June 1944, UNRRA was already taking care of 45,000 Yugoslav, Greek, and Polish refugees in its camps in the Middle East and Southern Europe.46 By November 1944, the 6 UNRRA refugee camps in the Middle East held 54,000 people, and UNRRA established a 7th camp at Philippeville in Algeria.47 By June 1945, there were still 40,000 refugees in those camps.48 The Yugoslavs of El Shatt serve as an example of the situation of refugees and the process of repatriation. Yet, UNRRA knew that the greatest refugee crises were in Europe and China, where the logistics of regrouping DPs, providing food and shelter, and maintaining adequate sanitary conditions were extremely challenging. Of the refugees from El Shatt, about 1,200 men and women had returned to Yugoslavia by December 1944 to enlist in the National Yugoslav Army.49 The remaining Yugoslav refugees were well organized and well connected: they had received 57,000 dollars from the United Yugoslav Relief Fund of America at the beginning of 1945 for use in UNRRA camps housing Yugoslav refugees. Most of the money was intended to provide educational, vocational, and recreational programs, including documentary and “self-help” films, as well as moving picture equipment and films to be circulated through the two Middle East camps that held Yugoslav refugees—El Shatt (near Suez) and Tolumbat (near Alexandria)— and in an UNRRA assembly center near Lecce in southern Italy.50 It is almost



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certain that most of the 30,000 refugees in these camps would have seen In the Wake of the Armies. The situation depicted in UNRRA Goes into Action, however, was not representative of the experiences of the majority of refugees and DPs in continental Europe. While pledges of money and supplies were ridiculously inadequate, the perception of the situation UNRRA was facing one year into its mission was one of absolute urgency. Fears of catastrophic sanitary conditions were fueled by epidemiological reports from its various missions on the ground. Those problems were expected from the start, but they were most threatening during the very last weeks of the war. The announced disaster did not materialize, however, and while today we can explain the reason for this, at the time, showcasing the Middle East camps provided a reassurance that the situation was under control, with the happy images of some refugees already returning home. At the same time, the guerilla war fought by Yugoslav partisans was presented as a model and hailed as “a miracle of the war” in the filmstrip’s spoken commentary. Even though military resistance to invasion and occupation was also canonized in other places after the war, such as in France, the Yugoslav case was unique. The Yugoslav partisan movement was a mass armed resistance movement, which resulted in the liberation of Yugoslavia and the establishment of a communist state under the charismatic Josip Broz Tito. Despite the presence of Yugoslavs of different political orientations in the Middle East camps, it was this communist resistance that the filmstrip emphasized. It did so, evocatively, through music: the filmstrip begins and ends with measures from a popular Red Army song from 1922—“Through the Valleys and over the Hills”—about the victory of the partisans of the Amur against the White Army and their revolutionary campaign that ended at the Pacific Ocean.51 Many versions of this song exist, in multiple languages. Not all refer to the Red Army victory in 1922, but all honor partisans. Indeed, Yugoslav partisans sang a Serbo-Croatian version of the song during the Second World War. In this tribute to Yugoslavia’s communist resistance, then, one can also read an homage to the Soviet Union and its own partisans and an emphasis on guerilla war and armed resistance as the most significant contributors to liberation.

Why these films matter The UNRRA experiment was limited—it lasted from November 1943 to June 1947—but it used film material on a large scale to introduce itself and its mission to national and international audiences. UNRRA films created, supported, and maintained a program that called for the commitment of ordinary people far removed from the theaters of war to assisting distressed civilians in war-torn areas and for renewed attempts at long-term international cooperation. Sarah Frank’s essay in this book refers to some mistrust voiced by Aimé Césaire against a humanitarian discourse seen as camouflaging the survival of the imperial framework. If UNRRA functioned within the same postwar intellectual framework of internationalism and humanitarianism, it projected the concerns of ordinary

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people about ordinary people. Texts such as the films examined here effected a crucial and humane transition at the close of the Second World War. The wartime work of the NFB, on the other hand, has often been portrayed as a propaganda endeavor that would contribute to nation-building. The internationalist material produced by the NFB for UNRRA adds a further dimension to our understanding of Canadian film production in the context of the Second World War. UNRRA’s film program, with the NFB at its heart, exposed a broad international viewership to the plight of civilian victims and connected the donors and suppliers to those benefiting from relief. This dual objective was an innovative aspect of the 1944 short film, In the Wake of the Armies. The production of the 1945 filmstrip UNRRA Goes into Action was internationalism in practice, although its message of continued solidarity with international communism would become increasingly at odds with the emerging Cold War paradigm. Ultimately, the examination of this film material matters because political interpretations of the postwar years—and national and institutional assumptions about the work of the NFB and its audiences—have constrained our understanding of the period and of the production and dissemination of internationalist films. Negative perceptions of UNRRA as a dysfunctional agency, colored no doubt by anticommunist perspectives, have left little space to think about the alternate visions that were developing at the same time. The postwar period was complex, and assumptions about its priorities are difficult to uproot. Relief and rehabilitation were ambitious goals presented as a comprehensive strategy in order to confront the exceptional consequences of the war. To consider the immediate and longerterm process promised in 1944 opens various spaces and phases, making tangible the experiences and expectations of a time frame that goes well beyond the years of the UNRRA mission itself. If In the Wake of the Armies opens a path from the factual to the visionary, the filmstrip works from the visionary to the factual. Mixing the emotional and the rational across multiple film platforms, they nurtured the internationalist imagination at least until the end of the 1940s.

Notes 1 In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA (August 1944), [Film] Dir./ed. Guy Glover, narrator Lorne Greene, National Film Board of Canada, seventeen minutes, black and white, series “Canada Carries On.” Excerpt from Herbert H. Lehman speaking at the first meeting of UNRRA, November 10, 1943, min. 9’23–9’41. The author wishes to thank Albert Ohayon, collection curator at the NFB, for helping to make this title available online: https​://ww​w.onf​.ca/f​i lm/u​nrra_​in_th​e_wak​e_of_​the_a​rmies​/. [I use the title In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA as it appears on screen and in the NFB paper archives]. 2 In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA, min. 2’58–3’08. 3 UN Archives (New York), Department of Public Information (DPI) Records/S-0540-0056, UN Film Board, “Consultative Committee on Public Information of UN and Specialized Agencies,” restricted, 17.10.1946, p. 3, intervention by Mr. Free.



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4 For research on 16 mm films, see Learning with the Light Off. Educational Film in the United States, eds. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also, Paolo Cherchi-Usai (George Eastman House) on “What is an Orphan Film? Definition, Rationale and Controversy,” September 23, 1999, http:​//www​.sc.e​du/fi​lmsym​posiu​m/arc​hive/​orpha​ns199​9/2.1​ %20Pa​olo%2​0Cher​chi-U​sai.h​tm 5 Suzanne Langlois, “‘Neighbours half the world away’. The National Film Board of Canada at work for UNRRA (1944-1947),” Canada and the United Nations: Legacies, Limits, and Prospects, eds. Robert Teigrob and Colin McCullough (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016): 44–81. 6 Getting the most out of a film: UNRRA-– In the Wake of the Armies (1944), four minutes, series “Getting the most out of a film,” Prod. Stanley Hawes. 7 The Union List of U.N.R.R.A. Film (1949) indicates even more footage shot mostly in 1945 and 1946 by NFB cameramen in devastated areas of Europe and China. 8 UNRRA Monthly Review, no. 7, March 1945, 5. See also UN Archives, PAG-4/1.5.0. UNRRA, OPI, General Files, Box 2, Visual Media Branch Report, February 1945. William H. Wells to Morse Salisbury, March 1, 1945. Only in the fall of 1946 did UNRRA’s cameraman, Peter Hopkinson, get permission to film relief operations in Poland, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. 9 UNRRA. Organization. Aims. Progress (Washington, DC: 1944), 11. In summer 1944, UNRRA estimated twelve million DP in Europe—nine million in Germany alone, not including POWs—and forty million displaced persons in China. 10 William Goetz, “The Canadian Wartime Documentary: ‘Canada Carries On’ and ‘The World in Action,’” Cinema Journal 2 (Spring 1977): 63. 11 UN Archives, PAG-4/1.5.0. UNRRA, OPI, General Files, Box 2, Visual Media Branch Report, December 1944. Overall, the recommended contribution of each member country for UNRRA’s relief operations was 1 percent of its national income for the year ending June 30, 1943; for Canada this amounted to an authorized contribution of $77,000,000. Some Facts about UNRRA (Washington, DC: Office of Public Information, November 1944), 6. 12 NFB Archives, Memorandum . . . , July 15, 1944, 5–6. Also, PF 1042 and a short eightpage guide, “In the Wake of the Armies. Raw material for screen writers, directors, producers, story editors,” March 1946. 13 Patricia Joan Torson, The Film program of U.N.R.R.A. A study in international cooperation for the promotion of international understanding (MA Diss., Dept. of International Relations and Organization, American University, Washington, DC, 1947), 105. 14 NFB Archives, PF 1042, In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA, press release by UNRRA, Washington, DC, June 19, 1944 for release to morning papers of Wednesday, 21 June. Copy forwarded by the Canadian Embassy. 15 Langlois, “Neighbours half the world away,” 63–64. 16 George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, Vol. I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 280. 17 Dorothy Thompson, “On the Record. The Right Kind of International Education,” Globe and Mail, April 28, 1944, 6. 18 Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 114; Thompson, “On the Record.” 19 Food – Weapon of Conquest (1941), [Film] Dir. Stuart Legg, NFB Canada, twentytwo minutes, series “World in Action” and “Canada Carries On.” Legg also directed

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and produced Food: Secret of the Peace (July 1945), eleven minutes, series “World in Action.” This film presents an analysis of the chief postwar problem in liberated Europe: food queues and hunger riots point to the political danger that exists in starvation conditions. 20 Monthly UNRRA Review, no. 7, March 1945, 13. 21 NFB Archives, PF 1042, In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA, Information Sheet, Distribution Department, August 1944. 22 UNRRA Monthly Review, no. 7, March 1945, 16. 23 Ben Shephard, “‘Becoming Planning Minded’: The Theory and Practice of Relief, 1940-1945,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (July 2008): 405–19. 24 NFB Archives, PF 1092, In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA, copy of a letter by J. R. Spendlove, from Montreal, to Herbert Lehman, June 22, 1944, 2 p. The fact that this letter is in the NFB production file also indicates concerns that should be addressed. 25 Audio commentary, In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA. 26 Viewers see Herbert Hoover on screen—although he is not named—to refer to the American Relief Administration (ARA) mission to Europe and postrevolutionary Russia following the end of the First World War. This initiative saved lives, but was also intended to stop the spread of Bolshevism. 27 Morten Parker, “Films for Trade Unions,” Canadian Forum (February 1945): 258–59. Morten Parker (1919–2014) was a director, writer, producer, and educator. He was particularly interested in addressing labor and social issues. http:​//blo​g.nfb​.ca/b​log/2​ 014/0​6/11/​in-me​moria​m-mor​ten-p​arker​/ (accessed July 24, 2017). 28 Parker, “Films for Trade Unions.” 29 Our Northern Neighbour (1944), [Film] Dir. Tom Day, NFB, 25 min: https​://ww​w.onf​ .ca/f​i lm/o​ur_no​rther​n_nei​ghbou​r/; Tyneside Story (1943), [Film] Dir. Gilbert Gunn, UK: fourteen minutes: http:​//www​.iwm.​org.u​k/col​lecti​ons/i​tem/o​bject​/1060​00632​8. Part of “The World in Action” series, Our Northern Neighbour looks at Soviet foreign policy from 1917 through the Second World War and considers the historical and political value of the Soviet Union as an ally. Tyneside Story, which was sponsored by the British Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Information, takes up the issue of postwar employment through a dramatized account of the reopening for war production of the Tyneside shipbuilding yards closed by the Depression. 30 Parker, “Films for Trade Unions.” 31 There were ten films in the series “Getting the most out of a film.” 32 NFB archives, PF 1042, In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA, internal NFB memorandum to Sydney Newman, coproducer of the “Canada Carries On” Unit, August 23, 1944, informing him of the project of a discussion trailer. 33 NFB archives, PF 1042, In the Wake of the Armies: UNRRA, Information Sheet, UNRRA - In the Wake of the Armies (Getting the most out of a film #2), 1944. 34 Torson, The Film Program of U.N.R.R.A., 125. 35 Other examples of such trailers are Getting the most out of a film: Now - the Peace (1945), ten minutes. Union members from the Vancouver area express hope that the newly established United Nations, with its Economic Council, will be able to reduce the threat of war and increase security and prosperity of workers everywhere. Food: Secret of the Peace [Discussion Trailer] (1946), five minutes. 36 UNRRA Goes into Action (July 1945) [Filmstrip] with 1 sound disc: analog, 33 1/3 rpm, mono.; 16 in. Visuals by the National Film Board of Canada (April–May 1945). Total duration: 11 min 45 sec. 37 UNRRA Monthly Review, no. 11, July 1945, 19.



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38 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 255–75. 39 See Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) and Orgeron et al., Learning with the Light Off. 40 NFB archives, production file of UNRRA Goes into Action, letter from William H. Wells (Chief, Visual Media Branch, Office of Public Information of UNRRA) to Ross McLean (NFB), 12 April 1945. 41 NFB Archives, “Memorandum to Mr. Salisbury on UNRRA’s film activities following special work by representatives of the National Film Board of Canada, lent to UNRRA as advisers on a film program,” July 15, 1944. 42 For this research, the NFB technicians in Montréal reunited the filmstrip’s components, a very encouraging step in the preservation of this rare material. 43 UNRRA, OPI, Visual Media Branch Report, Maurice Liu to Morse Salisbury, June 4, 1945. The UNRRA Monthly Review (no. 10, June 1945, 18) informs its readers that the commentary was recorded at the studio of the United States Recording Co. in Washington DC. 44 Eleven slides out of forty-eight (22 percent) comprise three minutes out of eleven minutes forty-five seconds (26 percent); the singing is heard for almost six minutes amounting to half the duration of the filmstrip. 45 There are presently numerous articles and reports recalling this episode of the Second World War when tens of thousands of Europeans found refuge in the Middle East: in the current situation in the Mediterranean, however, European states closest to the war zone in Syria have resisted assisting refugees. See “During WWII, European refugees fled to Syria. Here’s what the camps were like,” Public Radio International (PRI), April 26, 2016. The webpage contrasts photographs from 1945 and 2013–15. https​://ww​w.pri​.org/​stori​es/20​16-04​-26/w​hat-i​t-s-i​nside​-refu​gee-c​amp-e​urope​ans-w​ ho-fl​ed-sy​ria-e​gypt-​and-p​alest​ine-d​uring​ 46 UNRRA. Organization. Aims. Progress (1944), 4, 11. 47 Some Facts about UNRRA (Washington, DC: Office of Public Information, November 1, 1944), 6–7. 48 UNRRA Monthly Review, no. 10, June 1945, 11. 49 Ibid., no. 7, March 1945, 15. 50 Ibid., no. 7, March 1945, 17. 51 Through the Valleys and over the Hills, by the Russian poet Pyotr Semyonovich Parfenov (1894–1937) dates from 1922. A version sung by the Red Army Choir can be found here: https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=bdw​5L9At​IxE. The filmstrip includes other musical pieces, likely in Serbo-Croatian and/or Dalmatian, sung by a choir and solo singers. The music used for the filmstrip was recorded by the BBC on location at El Shatt.

CChapter 9 CHAMPIONS OF DIGNITY? THE 1944 DEMOCRATIC PARTY PLATFORM Katherine Rye Jewell

In 1944, an immensely popular US president who guided the country through depression and a world war stood for an unprecedented fourth election. The Republican Party seemed incapable of offering a viable alternative in its previous candidate, Wendell Willkie, whose vacillations on the New Deal encapsulated the GOP’s inability to offer a different vision to confront the economic crisis. Thomas Dewey, a former prosecutor of organized crime and governor of New York, could not attract broad support to crack the Democrats’ power in the Solid South as Herbert Hoover had in 1928. The Dewey campaign’s unwillingness to strongly criticize Roosevelt’s war leadership—or the president’s growing frailty—left Dewey impotent in the face of the Democratic juggernaut.1 What seemed an inevitable result came true: Dewey carried only twelve states, winning a mere ninety-nine electoral votes to FDR’s 432. The incumbent earned 53.4 percent of the popular vote, notching another win in a string of landslide reelections for the New DealDemocratic coalition. It is tempting to write off the 1944 election as a footnote in American political history. No overt political realignment occurred. The vice presidential nomination fight captures the majority of attention from chronicles of the Democratic Party convention.2 Moreover, the convention’s debates offered few new directions in leadership or ideology; no intraparty fireworks or walkouts materialized, as they would in 1948. Insurgents failed to mount any significant challenge to the power structure, which they felt maintained enough sway to prevent an overt Civil Rights plank. The party avoided any commitment to proposals that would challenge the South’s racial caste system, keeping Dixie in the fold.3 Yet the Democratic platform of 1944 signified a party and a nation in transition. American politics reoriented from confronting the depths of economic depression to the mandates of leading on the world stage. Influenced by domestic politics, party divisions, and warring constituencies, it also communicated new ideas and political rhetoric that would shape future American domestic and foreign policy. The president’s failing health remained veiled in the press, though rumors circulated widely. Convention attendees understood the significance of the vice presidential selection, but Roosevelt remained a savvy campaigner



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and the leader of his party, and larger forces shaped the Democrats’ guiding document.4 Political platforms must accomplish two key goals. A platform signifies the wishes of “[a party’s] only meaningful organ, the nominating convention,” and the party presents the document to the voters to “fully represent the party’s intentions.”5 Drafted by representatives from every state, platforms have the potential to unite but also to incite revolts. They must make sense of past actions and stances, claim accomplishments, or explain failures. Their narrative justifies election or reelection, reifies central principles, and appeals to key constituencies. Platforms establish a party’s record as an effective partisan instrument while they are also “products of ideological compromise” that “consolidate diverse interests.”6 These purposes can be in conflict, as in 1944, when the party had been in power for so long. The Democrats could claim stewardship of the nation through depression and war, with the tide finally turning and peace in sight. They leveraged the atmosphere of national unity during wartime to tamp down on internal dissent.7 As V. O. Key observed just before the 1948 election, “dissident groups usually had no special desire to form a minor party” as long as they found purchase among “dominant elements” in the party.8 The 1944 platform facilitated such healing of fissures that had emerged in the Democratic ranks over both domestic and foreign policy, particularly with the peacetime conversion looming. With this opportunity, the Democrats linked the past, though tumultuous, to the future that they charted for the nation and the world. The document thus functions as more than a political document; it captures the possibilities and tenuous nature of the emerging postSecond World War order.9 The war and pending conversion to peacetime shaped the document, which ultimately marks the turn toward a strong American state with influence both abroad and in the lives of its citizens—though within certain limits. The wartime partnership between government and big business demonstrated how a robust federal bureaucracy could benefit citizens and consumers. Still, the Democrats sought to preserve New Deal liberalism while ensuring this ongoing collaboration. An empowered federal government, aligned with large corporations and labor organizations, could protect against abuses and foster prosperity and full employment, as well as protect ideological wartime goals in the coming peace. The New Deal’s legacy of increasingly assertive rights permeates the document in references to citizens, but it stopped short of an outright demand for comprehensive equal justice—a compromise reflecting the limits of public-private partnerships as well as underlying intraparty divisions visible at the convention. Key terms from the document determine this chapter’s structure. Unraveling the implicit meaning of these words reveals what they could not say, but also how they often attempted to assert two, or even several, meanings at the same time— revealing broad and deep developments across the American political, social, and cultural landscape during the war years. The first two sections of this essay, divided into domestic and foreign affairs, use the text as a lens for transformations in the Democratic Party, the American electorate, statecraft, and foreign policy. The third section considers the platform as a dual-purpose party document designed

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to create a more unified partisan organization. Such a document thus operated at multiple levels of politics, envisioning a party with the power to shape American politics, statecraft, and foreign policy in the post-Second World War era.

Domestic affairs Global conflict permeated almost all aspects of the 1944 election. Although domestic affairs dominated the text, the Democrats predicated all their goals on the cession of hostilities. The Democrats focused the platform text on “statements of rhetoric and general approval of the party” rather than policy approval and criticism to capitalize on a popular incumbent.10 Yet the Democratic platform had to address the United States’ role in the postwar world. The Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms established ideological goals, and still fully a quarter of the document’s text reaffirmed pledges regarding foreign policy and defense.11 Franklin Roosevelt, with an idealistic perspective, looked to enshrine internationalism at the center of American foreign policy, building on economic policies directed by former secretary of state Cordell Hull. New potential rivalries emerged over postwar possessions in Europe, however, and the matter of victory was still to be realized.12 As such, the Democratic Party introduced its platform as “standing” upon the president’s record in both peace and war. In the opening lines, the drafters referred to peace first among the objectives of the party’s political agenda. Without peace, full employment and prosperity—the core objectives of the following policy prescriptions—could not be achieved. The invocation of peace functioned as a political tool and a policy framework. It recast the past through the lens of the war, reframing the New Deal and justifying the reelection of a president for an unprecedented fourth term. It also marked a turning point in Democratic policy toward a new set of ideas and policies. By using the war as a lever toward the future, peace and war provided an interpretive binary to shift toward new actions and arrangements between government, business, and labor. Regarding the past, peace meant the time before the war. Yet these years were not marked by the document’s other objectives of full employment and prosperity. Although New Deal-style policy objectives would continue, the Democrats framed their resumption of those objectives through the lens of wartime. Because the party looked to elect Franklin Roosevelt for a fourth term, even with the president’s ailing health, the drafters had to emphasize the actions and successes of more than a decade of policy while also underscoring actions yet to be pursued—keeping in mind that the years of crisis would also soon, as they projected, abate. Free enterprise Recent developments in ideological language and the Democrats invocation of free enterprise framed future peacetime successes. The “Democratic Administration,” the document stated, “saved our system of free enterprise,” a reference to the New



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Deal and defending its program against critics who called them socialistic. The term “free enterprise” spread widely after 1938, adopted by conservative New Deal critics after the defection of conservative southern Democrats from the administration in the midterm election of that year. In 1944, a scholar defined the term as one “used by those who demand a hands-off program on the part of the government.” Free, he wrote, “signifies no charge or bounds,” and enterprise suggested “initiative, industry, and adventure.”13 Employing this term signified an acknowledgment of rising business opposition to the New Deal, a constituency needed for the successful prosecution of the war and for amiable postwar reconversion.14 With the signpost of free enterprise established, the document vaguely referenced the “action” taken, extolling the achievements of past years without naming specific policies. Still, domestic concerns regarding the economy, labor, agriculture, natural resources, and welfare dominated the text.15 Above all, the Democrats curbed the “abuses” that had led to economic depression. The implication of this claim is that the New Deal saved capitalism, implementing the proper rights and reforms to ensure its continuation and universal participation in its fruits. The Democrats claimed success with the resumption of employment in industry and agriculture, the establishment of a social safety net in the form of social security, unemployment assistance, environmental conservation, and financial industry regulation. Full employment The platform linked prosperity and internationalism, aided by a robust federal state. New Deal programs, to which the Democrats pledged “continuance and improvement,” facilitated wartime triumphs, particularly with the opening of a second European front after D-Day. While highlighting the reforms implemented to preserve free enterprise, the platform transitions to explain how these programs facilitated the nation’s early “awakening” to the dangers abroad. The document used these connections to not only reinforce the just cause of war but also signal Americans’ acceptance of a strong central state. Strong federal power implemented wartime preparation and procurement on the backs of New Deal reforms, the Democrats asserted. The 1944 Democratic Party Platform served to envision a postwar liberal consensus, but its significance is in its symbolic vision rather than its full realization. Labor organizations such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) influenced convention proceedings. The AFL lobbied in the proceedings and more than fifty members served as delegates. Both organizations promoted full employment strategies to follow the war—and including this concept reflected labor’s influence and kept its voters solidly in the Democratic fold.16 Still, the platform contains evidence of underlying conflicts that complicate this narrative. A prominent example of such evidence is the claim that financial regulations saved free enterprise. Stated as having “eliminated abuses” that “imperiled” free

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enterprise, this broad category referred to financial and securities regulations. The Democrats extolled their use of “the powers of government to provide employment in industry and to save agriculture.” No clearer connection between prosperity, full employment, and federal power emerges in the document. The Democratic Party in 1944 redefined the relationship between the state and citizens through bureaucracy, administration, and private labor organization. But conservative elements remained. Financial and securities regulation, and the guard against “abuses,” serve as bedrock upon which private enterprise could function. In 1944 the Democrats still embraced the state as a facilitator of private exchange and contract, such as in the case of labor-management relations.17 Beyond embracing full employment and free enterprise as part of a vision for a postwar political consensus, the Democrats redefined modern political economy by promoting systematic practices in the relationship between labor and managers. While business had for decades been grappling with how to manage labor—whether through welfare capitalist practices or company unions—the New Deal resolved many of these outstanding questions and implemented, through the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the National Labor Relations Board, systematic rules and structures through which negotiations and relationships occurred. The Democrats in 1944 called this arrangement a “new Magna Carta for labor.” Reference to the medieval document recalled the redefinition of individual rights and signified the centrality of labor legislation to this redefinition of the citizen-state relationship. The federal backing of workers’ right to collectively bargain redefined notions of citizenship and the nature of rights in American political economy, and also became the foundation of the Democratic Party’s political base for decades to come. Thus, in looking to “peacetime” the Democrats referred to the emergence of a new policy environment. That environment emerged from the development of a federal social safety net, reflecting a sense of obligation to the nation’s most vulnerable populations, the establishment of federal support for the nation’s financial structures through federal bank deposit insurance and securities regulation, and the commitment to the conservation of the natural environment for the sake of posterity, through soil conservation and other environmental policies. All of these policies were to be the foundation upon which the federal government would build prosperity for workers in agriculture and industry, preserving private property—namely farms and homes—and enabling their inhabitants to partake in the capitalist consumer economy by ensuring “profitable prices” and parity between farm and industrial incomes. As the war intensified after 1941, many conservatives criticized the Roosevelt administration for attempting to continue New Deal rules and regulations related to the workplace—particularly hourly maximums in the midst of a growing labor shortage as men went to war. In looking to reconversion, Democrats sought to define forthcoming economic policy through the rights that were at stake during the war. Peace meant the bureaucratic regulation of relations between labor and management and the resumption of capitalist investment and consumption. The platform set the agenda to be realized in laws such as the Full Employment Act of 1946, only to be followed by political pushback, such as with



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the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Still, the platform and its vision proved foundational in defining post-Second World War political culture and the idea of the liberal consensus. Egalitarianism, liberal universalism, and basic human rights regardless of race, religion, or gender infused the document. The Democrats envisioned equal pay for equal work, “regardless of sex,” and an equal rights amendment for women. These planks buttressed faith in federal action in education and the environment. The economically underdeveloped South, stymied particularly by underfunded educational and public institutions, informed Democrats’ interpretation of regional deficiencies. Federal aid to education promised access to quality education and to address deficiencies in spending at the state and local levels to provide broader access to and accountability in education. Yet the plank emphasized the limits of this controversial proposal, ensuring that funding would be “administered by the states without interference by the federal government,” preserving a commitment to federalism in the delivery of federal dollars to the states. Such a funding mechanism echoed those of the New Deal relief programs such as Federal Emergency Relief Act—pointing to the political limits of the vision and divisions within the party. Reconversion and economic stability dominated the Democrats’ domestic policy considerations in 1944. While including a specific plank about extending assistance to ex-servicemen, particularly disabled veterans, the “economic security” that appeared in the plank permeated the document. For farmers, the federal government would provide price guarantees and crop insurance to ensure farmers the income to consume at the level of factory workers. Rural electrification brought cheap power to farm households and opened up a new world of consumer goods, backed by American foreign trade policy that would “develop broader domestic and foreign markets for agricultural products.” Security was the purview of the federal government, in this document, right down to the vacuum cleaners that farmers would be able to buy with their earnings, or the loans they signed for their property.18 Yet the ideological goals of the convention shaped in positive and negative terms what the Democrats could pursue. Private industry enjoyed an improved public reputation because of wartime production. Manufacturers advertised their willing conversion of facilities as testament to their patriotic commitment. During Roosevelt’s first term, the press excoriated business leaders for greeddriven overproduction and for degrading labor by preventing wages from increasing alongside profits during the 1920s. Corporate leaders such as Donald Nelson, the former executive vice president of Sears Roebuck who was tapped to manage war production, also helped resuscitate business’ reputation. New Dealers embraced corporate liberalism and placed economic goals behind other priorities to ensure that large corporations remained allied with the growing federal government. Freedom and liberty—as well as wariness of conscription and state power—inspired Democrats’ commitment to private property and private enterprise. Democrats also emphasized egalitarianism and color and sex blindness. Human rights and democracy, in 1944, depended on an expansive, universalist vision of

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rights. Roosevelt had extended that right to service members in January 1944, in a Fireside Chat. In that address, he introduced his “economic bill of rights” for those who had fought and sacrificed to ensure victory and cemented New Deal liberalism and an activist government that would advocate for expanded social rights at the center of American political life. The New Deal’s envisioning of more equitable workings of capitalism yielded a new role for the American state. As historians such as James Sparrow have contended, the “warfare state” and the demands of total war “changed the stakes of national government” and reoriented the American people toward the federal government, realizing the hopes and tentative plans of previous crafters of the state.19 The Democratic platform, a political document that affirmed the party’s policy agenda, also marked a fundamental transformation of American statecraft and liberalism. When Churchill, in 1945, referred to the United States as sitting at the “pinnacle” of the world, its influence depended on an activist, interventionist, and bureaucratic state able to marshal resources for total war. The platform’s cadence of “humanitarian, labor, social and farm legislation” linked New Deal programs to the ideological cause of the war, thus affirming the New Deal and committing to continued reform. Through that reform and expansion of rights would come an acceptance of corporations and their cooperation in achieving reconversion, full employment, and economic prosperity. That participation was affirmed in the language of rights and the freedom of commercial enterprise. Historians have explored the role that the First World War played in creating a more activist state that could mobilize the nation quickly for war and direct activities in the area of procurement and public relations. The Great War introduced the United States as a leading capitalist economy, but following the war the state’s role subsided and business emerged as the focus of American life in the 1920s. Ellis Hawley and “organizational synthesis” scholars assert that bureaucratic governance, with even Republican presidents like Hoover pursuing “associationalism,” contributed to the centralization of planning and organization. Local associations and state administration governed relations between citizens and government through 1920s and during the Roosevelt years. For the Democrats, having to own both the era preceding the war and that which would follow in peacetime, the emphasis on continuity and triumph masks 1944 as a key turning point. At the same time, because of the Democrats’ rational party and political goals for the document, including relying on a popular incumbent, the longer trajectories of American statecraft that facilitated a more activist, bureaucratic state (with limits), are obscured.20

Foreign affairs The 1944 Democratic Party Platform constitutes a turning point document because it framed all domestic matters through the lens of the war—yet remained a remarkably forward-looking piece. It connected peacetime and wartime through the process of militarization. As the document stated, during this



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period of building a “road to prosperity through production and employment” the “Democratic Administration awakened the Nation, in time, to the dangers that threatened its very existence.” Although limited by public opinion and by Congress through the Neutrality Acts, Roosevelt gradually built a campaign to highlight the dangers mounting abroad. Roosevelt’s first term held few opportunities for the president to resume and surpass Wilson’s internationalism. He misled the American public about his intentions regarding Nazi Germany.21 He focused on the economic crisis and implementation of domestic policy. In foreign affairs, international trade took center stage. The administration in 1934 resumed trade with the Soviets, engaging with Stalin to triangulate Germany, but these efforts languished. As Hitler’s power grew, Roosevelt talked of a “moral embargo” and “quarantine” of aggressors, but his rhetoric reflected the popular sentiment that Europe was addicted to war. The platform reveals the slow unveiling of Roosevelt’s internationalism with the phrase “in time,” particularly regarding delayed promises for self-determination. Less restrained by a racially hierarchical view of the world than his predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points had helped inspire anticolonial nationalism, Roosevelt and the Democrats nonetheless faced obstacles to visions of self-determination and human rights outlined in the Atlantic Charter.22 In time The phrase “in time” symbolizes Roosevelt’s emerging commitment to American involvement in the war. After the Munich agreement in 1938, Roosevelt still, as historian Cathal Nolan explained, “had to concern himself with the appearances of neutrality, even as he became more assertive about defense preparedness.” To “shatter complacency” Roosevelt went directly to the public, via the press, and used what Nolan referred to as “scare tactics” about German, Italian, and Japanese aggression.23 Roosevelt spoke, as he often did, in different terms to the public and to his private advisers. Publicly, Roosevelt’s emphasis on defensive rearmament and programs to maintain hemispheric strength tied the United States to the Allied cause while achieving the appearance of neutrality and avoidance of war. In reality, Roosevelt, through Lend-Lease and deals with Great Britain, moved the United States closer to military preparedness capable of directly confronting fascism on the battlefield. “In time” also suggested the long effort to “awaken” the American people and Congress to the threat of fascism on the march. Still limited by public opinion and congressional policy, his reelection to an unprecedented third term in 1940 allowed FDR to take greater risks in aiding France and Great Britain. After the fall of France in June 1941, followed by the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, public opinion shifted, prompting Congress and the president to put the nation into full wartime mode. The document then suggests that delayed American involvement ensured victory because it yielded “the best-trained and equipped army in the world, the most powerful navy in the world, the greatest air force in the world, and the largest merchant marine in the world” and that time was “saved

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for our country” by its “powerful allies.” Rather than delaying because of reigning isolation and public opinion that was averse to engagement, the document casts American neutrality as a strategic move. Once the material and diplomatic footing for war had been established, the nation was ready “when war came” to work out its “effective grand strategy” with allies to defeat collective enemies. The document asserted that Roosevelt had laid the groundwork in aiding Great Britain, France, and later the Soviet Union through Lend-Lease; creating a stronger American military force; and establishing ideological ties with Great Britain through the Atlantic Charter. A tension underlies this triumphal narrative of preparation, strategy, and eventual execution, in which “the tide of battle was turned.” Roosevelt’s internationalism and commitment to confronting fascism ran counter to public opinion and Congress until 1940. The Democrats’ use of “awakened” to refer to the threat from enemies, juxtaposed with “peace,” suggests the limits FDR faced in foreign policy since his third reelection. The tension released by the war against powers that stood opposed to democracy marks the 1944 election as a clear turning point in the Democratic Party and its ability to resume its agenda both at home and abroad. Thus, while the platform repurposed the Depression in a positive sense, as years of peace with meaningful reforms achieved, the reference to future peace established the vision for the United States’ postwar global role and its ideological commitments. With war justifying the nation’s pursuing military might, the platform linked domestic and international affairs through New Deal idealism. The platform connected party policy priorities to democracy and self-determination abroad, though wartime considerations limited support for more robust advocacy of decolonization.24 The Democratic Party in 1944 sought to solidify the new relationship between the American people and the federal government while reorienting the nation’s position in foreign affairs. High destiny Another key phrase in the document is “high destiny,” which heralded a new direction in both domestic and foreign affairs for the United States and marked a transition in American politics. This high destiny invoked the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms. The Democrats “pledged support” to these documents and to “the application of the principles enunciated therein to the United Nations and other peace-loving nations.” This pledge was at once specific and backwardlooking, as well as setting a new precedent for the United States on the world stage. Both documents appeared three years before the Democratic platform, though both affirmed their principles after the election of 1940. The Four Freedoms appeared first, on January 6, 1941, in Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress. While the president directed the speech to Congress and the American people, and its dissemination and interpretation took the form of affirming core American ideals, Roosevelt intended that the statement undergird American support of Great Britain. The document ultimately helped shape the Atlantic Charter, signed by Winston Churchill and Roosevelt later that year, on August 14, 1941. Having



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secured reelection, the Four Freedoms speech, as the January 1941 Annual Message came to be known, made Roosevelt’s case for greater involvement in the emerging global conflict, including increased direct support for Great Britain, as well as greater war production. The speech enumerated practical goals—goals counter to American public opinion, though measures of such sentiments were still rudimentary—in a reframing of American core principles. Yet framing grand strategy in the language of destiny and resources marked the ideological nature of New Deal liberalism and its potential partisan challenges. The emphasis on sovereign equality raised some potential political concerns, and tensions remained regarding the postwar order sought by the Democrats and Roosevelt. The grand strategy that the Allies implemented to achieve their war aims included elements that embodied this revived sense of “high destiny” and reflected the ideals of New Deal liberalism that when implemented would turn “the tide of battle” toward democracy. That strategy “held the line against wartime inflation,” allocated resources such as food on a “fair share-and-sharealike distribution” and directed all resources to fight “side by side with the United Nations.” The emphasis on equality and reciprocity underscored the redefined rights of citizens and the war’s idealistic aims. Cooperation in wartime would yield cooperation in peacetime, and the relationships built among citizens in the nation would produce a society that shared its resources equitably. Yet when it came to politics, in highlighting the United Nations and strategic cooperation in the image of destiny, the Democrats rebuked isolationists.25 Onethird of the text was dedicated to foreign affairs, which previewed the forthcoming United Nations. But the political situation grew more tenuous by 1944, with the president’s ill health and growing conservative opposition in Congress stemming from the administration’s “insistence” that the New Deal continue during wartime. These new political factors shaped how the platform’s authors balanced domestic and foreign concerns in their document.26 The platform’s authors asserted that politics ended at the water’s edge—a sentiment that had prevented the United States from assuming membership in the League of Nations after the First World War.27 In 1944, the Democrats asserted, “Our gallant sons are dying on land, on sea, and in the air. They do not die as Republicans. They do not die as Democrats. They die as Americans.” After affirming this nonpartisan sense of wartime sacrifice, the platform then established the principle of postwar American leadership—so “that their blood shall not have been shed in vain.” Not only was this commitment to leading as a global power, forging a Wilsonian, internationalist vision of foreign affairs, but it was a “challenge” America must meet as a matter of “divine providence” and “high destiny.” While internationalists successfully established the United States as a global superpower, particularly as tensions with the Soviets arose, the Democrats faced a number of obstacles to achieving their grand vision and redefinition of America’s high destiny. Domestic politics and internal party divisions were never far from platform committee concerns, particularly when it came to expanding the New Deal and extending its policies to all Americans—and the guarantee of full access to the rights of citizenship for minorities.

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A political document Business had to contend with the fully functional bureaucratic state armed with the power of taxation, procurement, and wartime regulations that extended New Deal wage and hour regulations, and more. The federal minimum wage, established under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), made few inroads in raising incomes and reforming regressive labor markets in the few years it existed before the war—but wartime conditions put an upward pressure on pay scales across the nation. Textile manufacturers in the South protested the FLSA’s undermining of regional wage differentials, but it was not until wartime price and wage controls, and the bargains struck between government, management, and labor, that the federal government’s actions in the economy incited a broad political revolt among southern Democrats and business interests. Although the New Deal coalition had begun to fracture in 1938, the means of its undoing began to be clear in 1944. With the war cementing state workings, particularly the cooperation between the military and industry, the Democrats clarified their peacetime agenda within that language.28 Such partnerships would build the postwar economy, encouraging “risk capital, new enterprise, development of natural resources in the West and other parts of the country” and facilitating “competitive private enterprise, free from control by monopolies, cartels, and any arbitrary private or public authority,” as the Democrats envisioned in their platform. Conservatives and business leaders, particularly in the South, objected to such activist government. They had protested the New Deal’s continuation in wartime, using the conflict as pretext to argue for an end to federal maximum hour and minimum wage rules. Politically, a robust liberalism and state crafted by the experiences and execution of total war raised further potential for political conflict from within the Democratic Party. Business leaders had been able to raise fears of communist infiltration during the primary season, after the CIO political action group helped defeat three House Committee on un-American Activities members. The CIO “flexed its muscle at the Democratic convention and geared up for an all-out Roosevelt effort,” drawing further criticism from business leaders who detested the New Deal but who also had been powerless, whether through lack of political organization or public reputation, to end it. The CIO-PAC influence and its communist links became a central campaign issue. But it was among conservatives that potential insurgencies remained.29 Harry F. Byrd, the senator from Virginia, detested federal expansion (except in cases that favored his constituents, rural white southerners). He targeted waste and striking labor groups for undermining the war effort with the larger goal of thwarting the expansion of state power. He, along with other conservative southern Democrats, targeted waste and “nonessential” spending to emphasize that the expansion of government power was for “emergency” purposes. As chair of the Joint Committee on Reduction of Non-essential Federal Expenditures, he issued numerous reports on wartime spending. As his biographer noted, Byrd’s tactic was to overwhelm readers with the sheer volume of spending. “A Byrd committee report was usually crammed full of figures,” Ronald Heinemann explained, “that



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tried to persuade by their number and magnitude that waste was present,” and Byrd boasted of his own committee’s scant spending.30 By 1944, conservative Democrats like Byrd had long registered their protest to “New Dealism” and sought to reorient the Democratic Party back toward its Jeffersonian-Jacksonian roots. Historians tend to focus on 1948 as the fulcrum of change in southern politics, an election that revealed signs of distress in the region’s one-party system. Dixiecrats, as George Brown Tindall explained, “under the time-honored code name of states’ rights, championed both racial and economic conservatism.”31 However, events in 1944 reveal that business interests, with a specific and elaborate set of economic, social, and cultural motivations, already sought changes in party leadership. Southern business interests, particularly grounded in raw materials—rich areas of production such as the Gulf Coast, Texas, and textile and lumber areas, sought to draft Byrd as their candidate in that year’s election and to influence the platform.32 Their failure to influence the document stands out, yet their influence also shaped the platform’s notable weaknesses and evasions.33 The 1944 election not only signaled the strength of this political action group but also taught them lessons about crafting a successful political platform. Certainly, the Draft-Byrd-for President movement, discussed below, revealed that southern conservatives’ insistence on specific policy for their region, and power based in white supremacist politics, meant sectionalism would continue to cause the Democratic Party trouble and tear at its underlying coalition. More importantly, in 1944 politically active southern business interests effectively organized to modernize southern conservatism from the top down, and their repeated failures to do so from within the party created the momentum that would realign southern politics. The 1944 election taught them that sectionalism was an imperfect foundation for a political movement. Byrd possessed all the attributes desired by southern conservatives; he was a staunch conservative, he called for a balanced budget, restraint in spending, and opposed all aspects of a welfare state, his penny pinching committee serving as an example of this obsession with saving money and attacking expansive federal spending. He appealed to the anti-labor and anti-black sentiments when he railed against labor leaders and “minority groups” who were leading the Democratic Party astray. Southern Democrats valued the appearance of respectability. Demagogues like Theodore Bilbo, the representative of Mississippi, openly used racial epithets against blacks, Jews, and other minority groups to inflame his base of support among white southerners, but senators like Byrd, Richard Russell, and others tried to mask their white supremacy in the language of democracy, rights of individuals, and humanitarian goals. The Democrats’ inclusion of language regarding “social justice” and including a plank that “racial and religious minorities have the right to live, develop and vote equally with all citizens and share the rights that are guaranteed by our Constitution” did not threaten them, as long as states had the right to set the laws and scustoms that governed those interactions. They chafed at the statement declaring, “Congress should exert its full constitutional powers to protect those rights,” but they felt safe because southern Democrats controlled the

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powerful committees, serving as a seemingly impenetrable barrier to legislation that might upend the South’s racial caste system and limits on black franchise. Business leaders seeking to draft Byrd were concerned that the Democratic liberal wing supported federal intervention on behalf of Civil Rights, but they also protested commitments to the New Deal state and this expansive vision for activist government. To protest, these party insiders sought Byrd’s nomination.34 Byrd often contended that he did not want to be president, but he was honored by the attempt to draft him as a candidate. In 1944, he expressed his unwillingness to enter the national race, but several leaders held out hope that they could influence electoral politics in their home states to stymie Roosevelt’s reelection. Byrd never renounced the candidacy, preferring to court attention and keep his supporters close. He saw any electoral failure, even as a protest vote, as a weakness that might damage his powerful political machine in Virginia, but Byrd appreciated the limelight.35 Southern conservatives faced a tactical decision. One wing pushed for an overthrow. Led by New Orleans rope manufacturer, John U. Barr, a Draft-Byrdfor-President campaign emerged. For Barr, a vocal, trenchant critic of Roosevelt’s presidency, conservative organization could redirect the party to its core “principles.” He expressed desire for a “regular” Democrat to reclaim the party from “radicals” and “minorities.”36 Barr entertained forming a third party. Yet other conservatives preferred to maintain power and influence within the party, especially since the South’s power in the Senate could block most proposals deemed unsavory to the white South. Draft supporters settled on an electoral protest vote. They knew they had no hope of challenging Roosevelt’s nomination outright, and they could only muster a symbolic protest vote. Barr contented himself with the possibility that his efforts would weaken the Democrats’ New Deal commitments, and perhaps throw the election into the House of Representatives. At the convention, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and a faction of Texas Democrats, known as the Texas “Regulars,” supported Byrd. The Texas Regulars were a group of oilmen and politicians that included Eugene B. Germany, a politically active businessman who had run John Nance Garner’s bid for the presidency in 1940. Germany and the Regulars resented unionization and Smith v. Allwright, the Supreme Court decision outlawing the white primary decided in April 1944. Mrs. Fred Toomey, wife of a construction company owner, issued Byrd’s name for nomination. Toomey hailed from Jacksonville, Florida, an urban stronghold of SSIC support and site of several annual conferences. In the nomination vote, Byrd received eighty-nine votes to Roosevelt’s 1,086. Virginia delegates pledged all their electors to Byrd, and he received a smattering of votes from Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama.37 Although the Draft-Byrd-for-President movement failed to challenge FDR’s nomination, and the nation resoundingly reelected the president with strong southern support, revelations bolstered conservative hopes. Votes were diffuse, scattered among local groups with various motivations and allegiances, but the Draft-Byrd movement showed the possibility of intra-regional cooperation for conservative political economy. As a result, Barr, to a meeting of Byrd-drafters, envisioned the South’s role in national politics. The region would not, he asserted,



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“play stooge for elected Democrats” who relied on their party unity to “[deliver] our party and country to alien borers from within.”38 Barr hoped labor and New Deal supporters, whom he described as aliens, outsiders, and minorities, would desert a party dominated by conservatives. But his statement also revealed his willingness to abandon the Democrats. In sum, regional divisions thus limited the Democratic platform. It addressed concerns of regional economic development and natural resource procurement, but certain party members resented the use of federal power for even the benefit of southern business. The platform’s language of free enterprise kept that constituency in the party fold, for the time being. Conservatives’ power effectively thwarted planks that would intervene in the South’s Jim Crow system. These planks gave the appearance of commitment to equal rights and justice, but the South’s power in Congress would block any meaningful legislation. The plank committing to the rights of minorities looked to Congress, not the attorney general, to intervene on behalf of minorities’ rights as citizens. No commitment to establishing a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) with investigatory powers and the power to initiate lawsuits appeared. Without such a mechanism, enforcement of these promises would prove difficult. Despite these limitations, the Democratic Party Platform of 1944 established a new direction in American liberalism. Core principles defined by depression and global war appeared, seeking human rights at home and abroad. The Democrats reoriented New Deal liberalism for the postwar era using the Four Freedoms speech and the Atlantic Charter. Although commitments to private enterprise and cooperation between the military and industry represented compromises to the pledge for greater equality, long-simmering fissures continued to rankle party unity. Although the Democrats failed to commit to federal intervention for Civil Rights, the stage was set for outright revolt in 1948.39 In all, the Democratic Party in 1944 reoriented New Deal liberalism toward economic reconversion and regional underdevelopment, but hints of seismic shifts to come appeared. Yet the Party’s claim to a robust vision for the federal government, tested and proven by its preparation for war in Europe and Asia, placed the United States at the center of international politics. The platform affirmed the emergence of a new kind of American state and liberalism that would define political rhetoric— and political conflict—for the forthcoming decade and beyond.

Notes 1 Stanley Weintraub, The Last Victory: FDR’s Extraordinary World War II Presidential Campaign (Boston, MA: DaCapo Press, 2012); Hugh E. Evans, The Hidden Campaign: FDR’s Health and the 1944 Election (Armonk: Sharpe, 2002), 107. 2 Weintraub, The Last Victory, 31; William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Legacy of FDR,” The Wilson Quarterly (1976–) 6, no. 2 (Spring, 1982): 78; Miles S. Richards, “Notes and Documents: James F. Byrnes on the Democratic Party Nomination for Vice President, July 1944,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 109, no. 4 (October 2008): 301.

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3 Truman’s selection, pushed by the “urban machine faction of the party,” also placated southern Democrats. Although Truman as president would inflame a revolt of southern Democrats with his support for Civil Rights, many African Americans considered his nomination a “conciliation” with the white South. Robert J. Williams, “Harry S. Truman and the American Presidency,” Journal of American Studies 13, no. 3 (December 1979): 394; Richard S. Kirkendall, “Truman’s Path to Power,” Social Science 43, no. 2 (April 1968): 71–72; Eliot Goldman, “Justice William O. Douglas: The 1944 Vice Presidential Nomination and His Relationship with Roosevelt, an Historical Perspective,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 12, no. 3, Presidents, Vice Presidents and Political Parties: Performance and Prospects (Summer, 1982): 378; Lee Sigelman and Paul J. Wahlbeck, “The ‘Veepstakes’: Strategic Choice in Presidential Running Mate Selection,” The American Political Science Review 91, no. 4 (December 1997): 855–64. 4 Weintraub, The Last Victory. 5 Gerald Pomper, “‘If Elected, I Promise’: American Party Platforms,” Midwest Journal of Political Science 11, no. 3 (August 1967): 319. 6 Larry David Smith, “The Party Platforms as Institutional Discourse: The Democrats and Republicans of 1988,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 22, no. 3, Eisenhower and Presidential Elections (Summer 1992): 532. 7 Pomper, “If Elected, I Promise,” 347. 8 V. O. Key, Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1947), 243. 9 Paul T. David, “Party Platforms as National Plans,” Public Administration Review 31, no. 3, Special Symposium Issue; Changing Styles of Planning in Post-Industrial America (May–June 1971): 303–305. 10 Pomper, “If Elected, I Promise,” 330. 11 Ibid., 331. 12 E. David Cronon, “Interpreting the New Good Neighbor Policy: The Cuban Crisis of 1933,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 39, no. 4 (1959): 538–67; Arthur W. Schatz, “The Anglo-American Trade Agreement and Cordell Hull’s Search for Peace 1936-1938,” The Journal of American History 57, no. 1 (1970): 85–103. 13 Frank T. Carlton, “What Is Free Enterprise?” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 3, no. 4 (1944): 655–59. 14 See Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009). 15 The 1944 platform distributed topics as such: Economics, 23 percent; Labor, 5 percent; Agriculture, 18 percent; Resources, 8 percent; Welfare, 8 percent, with 8 percent for Government and 5 percent for Civil Rights. Pomper, “If Elected, I Promise,” 331. 16 Alfred Brunthal, “American Labor in Politics,” Social Research 12, no. 1 (February 1945), 4, 6, 18. 17 Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 28. 18 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003). 19 James Sparrow, Warfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5. 20 Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions 1917-1933, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979); David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society



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(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921-1928,” The Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (1974); Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 128. 21 Cathal Nolan, “Bodyguard of Lies: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Defensible Deceit in World War II,” in Ethics and Statecraft: The Moral Dimensions of International Affairs (New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004); Robert A. Divine, The Illusion of Neutrality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 228, 334. 22 Elizabeth Borgwardt demonstrates how the Atlantic Charter served as the key moment that linked political rights, law, and international institutions to economic and human rights. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 5–12. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13, 224. 23 Nolan, “Bodyguard of Lies,” 41. 24 For example, military necessity complicated Roosevelt’s feelings regarding India’s independence. The Anglo-American partnership and defeat of Japan took precedence. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, 1995), 326–27. 25 Julian Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security - from World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 26 Meg Jacobs, “‘How About Some Meat?’: The Office of Price Administration, Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom Up, 1941-1946,” The Journal of American History 84, no. 3 (1997): 910–41. 27 Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy. 28 Paul A. C. Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1940-1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). 29 Prolabor Catholic activists disagreed about how to contend with the communists in the CIO-PAC. Steve Rosswurm, “Communism and the CIO: Catholics and the 1944 Presidential Campaign,” U.S. Catholic Historian 19, no. 4, Social Catholicism: Essays in Honor of Monsignor George Higgins (Fall, 2001): 74, 76, 80. 30 Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry F. Byrd (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 225. 31 George Brown Tindall, The Disruption of the Solid South (New York: Norton, 1972), 36. 32 Dewey Grantham, The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988), 117. 33 Black activists from South Carolina used the Byrd defections to strengthen advocacy for Civil Rights at the convention and created stronger links between Civil Rights activists and the national Democratic Party. Miles S. Richards, “The Progressive Democrats in Chicago, July 1944,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 102, no. 3 (July 2001): 221, 236–37. 34 Barr to Byrd, July 14, 1944, Harry Flood Byrd, Sr. Papers 1911–1965, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, 9700, 9700-b, folder 171 (hereafter cited HFB, folder number). 35 Barr to Grinalds, August 30, 1944, HFB 171. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia, 237–39. 36 Barr to Charles Hall Davis, August 5, 1944, HFB 171.

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37 Julian M. Pleasants, “Claude Pepper, Strom Thurmond, and the 1948 Presidential Election in Florida,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 76, no. 4 (Spring 1998): 439, 441; William Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon Johnson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 135; Grantham, The Life and Death of the Solid South, 118. 38 John U. Barr, press release, June 1, 1944, HFB 171. John Gibson to Josiah Bailey, April 6, 1944, The Josiah William Bailey Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, box 478. 39 Still, it took widely publicized racial violence to elicit Truman’s actions on Civil Rights. Harvard Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948: The Coming of Age of Civil Rights in American Politics,” The Journal of Southern History, 37, no. 4, (November 1971): 599.

EMANCIPATIONS

In the middle of February 1944, Langston Hughes received a request. Left-wing activist and intellectual Louis Burnham asked the celebrated and multitalented artist if he might compose some lines for the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC, sometimes called “the first SNCC”), an early Civil Rights organization for which Burnham served as the executive secretary.1 Hughes replied with the three-stanza “Lenin,” which after two quatrains about how the Bolshevik’s legacy transcended borders, races, and languages, closed as follows: Lenin walks around the world, The sunset is our scar. Between the darkness and the dawn, There rises a red star.2

Burnham thanked Hughes for reminding readers of how Lenin was “everywhere, and common people everywhere know it,” and Hughes and Burnham remained on cordial terms in the McCarthyite environment that was to follow the war, but the poet was no militant Communist.3 Rather, Hughes’s poem and his political connections were evidence of the remarkable breadth of the anti-fascist alliance that the Second World War brought into being. In a context in which the Soviet Union shouldered an outsized share of the conflict’s appalling burden and in which a capitalist president, Communist general secretary, and an imperialist prime minister led the “Big Three,” leftist culture gained new legitimacy around the world.4 To be sure, the Grand Alliance was cemented by realpolitik, not romance, as Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin’s napkin-scrawled “Percentages Agreement” that sought divvy future influence in South-Eastern Europe illustrated, but anti-fascism also destigmatized, to a degree, the communist idea within the capitalist world.5 One reason for this was genuine and popular opposition to what the Axis powers represented. Another was the fact that pro-Communist politics resonated with autonomous liberation struggles—with the Black freedom struggle in the United States, for example. When W. E. B. Du Bois said of his alma mater that he had been “in” Harvard University, “but not of it,” he may well have been referring to his experiences with the leftist popular front milieu that held sway in the United States during the war.6 Within and beyond the United States, the popular front assisted and at times hindered Black challenges to white supremacy.7 The Du Bois who emerges in Chike Jeffers’s discussion of “My Evolving Program for Negro

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Freedom” is one whose thinking about race was clearly influenced by Marxism and the Soviet experiment, but was just as assuredly not reducible to them. Jeffers shows how Du Bois’s “Marxian privileging of economic relations” stood alongside other ideas about social justice advocacy and scientific inquiry, the cosmopolitanism of blackness, and the psychological investments in whiteness which ensured that any movement against white supremacy would have a long road ahead of it. Like Du Bois, Howard Fast was also interested in roads to freedom. And like Langston Hughes (and, again, Du Bois), Fast was an ally to the SNYC. In fact, Freedom Road was a favorite in SNYC circles, and Du Bois and Fast would share the stage at a major SNYC conference in 1946.8 The novel drew on the past to speak to its present, but as this volume’s penultimate chapter brings to light, Fast’s 1944 best seller had plenty to say about ensuing events. As Alan Wald points out, “Freedom Road perseveres as indispensable reading about race in the United States; the dispute about the past that Fast addresses is also about what was happening in his own time as well as what would happen in the future.” And an important part of why the novel continues to reward our returning to it over seventy years after its publication is its insistence that the overthrow of racial capitalism would be no easy feat. Here again, Fast aligned with Du Bois. Both understood that any march toward freedom was to be a long one. Mao Zedong knew something about long marches, and about Marxism. By 1944, he had been at his base in Yan’an for almost a decade, having arrived there in the mid-1930s with what was left of his forces after their punishing, protracted retreat from Jiangxi. Having to contend with both Guomindang rivals and Japanese occupiers, China’s Communists had much to deal with during the Second World War. But by 1944, Mao’s power had stabilized within China and at the top of the Communist power structure, and it was time to look ahead. He envisioned, as Rebecca Karl explains, what it might take to make the East Red.9 In recent years, Mao’s “Serve the People” dictum may have descended from product of mass politics to mass-produced cliché in a People’s Republic of China whose leaders have long abandoned socialist principles. But as Karl argues, Mao’s tribute to fallen soldier and worker Zhang Side, in contrast to competing calls to service under conditions of inequality, summoned “revolutionary political and social unity as the historically mandated form of ethical social activity in the now and for the prospective future.” Here was a leftist legitimacy that was to greatly influence, and be greatly contested, in the postwar world to come.

Notes 1 Louis Burnham to Langston Hughes, February 15, 1944, box 37, folder 649, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. On the Southern Negro Youth Congress and its longer-term impact, see James Smethurst, “SNYC, Freedomways, and the Influence of the Popular Front in the South on the Black Arts Movement,” Reconstruction 8, no. 1 (2008), Available online: http:​//rec​onstr​uctio​ n.ese​rver.​org/I​ssues​/081/​smeth​urst.​shtml​

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2 Langston Hughes, “Lenin,” part 2, reel 8, frame 901, undated, National Negro Congress Records, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. 3 Louis Burnham to Langston Hughes, August 3, 1944, box 37, folder 649, Hughes Papers. 4 See, for example, Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997); Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 278–98; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie; The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 346–99; Kristen Ghodsee, The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 47–68; A. James McAdams, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 183–221. 5 Albert Resis, “The Churchill-Stalin Secret ‘Percentages’ Agreement on the Balkans, Moscow, October 1944,” American Historical Review 83, no. 2 (April 1978): 368–87. 6 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 136. 7 Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 119–137; Margaret Stevens, Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico, and the West Indies, 1919-1939 (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 177–273. Beyond his chapter in this volume, Alan Wald has constructively encapsulated this dynamic: “The Popular Front, especially after 1941, created a dilemma for movements of the racially oppressed, because these rebellions often had their own dynamic and the most militant of the oppressed participants refused to wait for Euro-Americans to change their consciousness.” Alan M. Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 64. 8 “‘Freedom Road’ Author to Attend Southern Youth Legislature,” undated press release, box 8, folder 53, Southern Negro Youth Congress Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 522–24. 9 For Mao’s wartime life and politics in greater context, see Rebecca E. Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 247–84.

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CChapter 10 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD FROM AFRICAN AMERICA IN 1944: W. E. B. DU BOIS’S “MY EVOLVING PROGRAM FOR NEGRO FREEDOM” Chike Jeffers

Kenneth Robert Janken, in his biography of the African American historian Rayford W. Logan, encourages us to give the 1944 collection of essays that Logan edited, What the Negro Wants, “more than a passing glance.”1 Janken notes that its publication and the controversy surrounding it has long been considered “an intriguing footnote in the prehistory of the civil rights movement,” and he affirms that, if one gives the book an ear, “one can hear the gathering of Afro-America’s collective voice for full equality that would begin to register in the national conscience a decade later.”2 Thus, if we are interested in seeing how the future looked from the perspective of 1944, and particularly how African American thinkers and activists were envisioning a freer and better future in the time leading up to the iconic struggles for justice of the 1950s and 1960s, then examining this book is a promising enterprise. In what follows, I will focus on just one of its essays—the one by that towering black historian, sociologist, journalist, creative writer, activist, and (importantly for me) philosophical thinker W. E. B. Du Bois. “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” his essay in Logan’s book, may not be one of his best-known writings, but I have become convinced that it is among his most important and most insightful reflections on the nature and requirements of anti-racist struggle. After some remarks on What the Negro Wants in the first section of this chapter, I will discuss the following topics: Du Bois’s evolving thoughts on the relationship between scientific research and anti-racist activism, his investments in various forms of group partiality and cosmopolitanism, and his anticipation in 1944 that the future fight against anti-black oppression in America would be a long one. The major theme of “My Evolving Program” is dynamism in thought in response to shifts in experience and circumstances, which makes it extremely valuable as an account of a significant life (albeit one that would continue for almost two more decades afterward), as a look back at the past and forward to the future (a future that is now, for us, the past), and as a general affirmation of the necessity and value of intellectual evolution, especially for those of us whose area of study—not to mention sphere of activism—is the volatile world of racial politics.

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What the Negro Wants In the original 1944 edition, after a short preface by Logan, What the Negro Wants features a “publisher’s introduction.” It is among the oddest introductions one may read, as it is, in essence, a declaration by the publisher of the book that the contents of the book are misguided and wrongheaded. The contributors to the book called for an end to segregation and they assumed that black people are not inferior to white people. But it was evident to the publisher, W. T. Couch, director of the University of North Carolina Press, that “the Negro’s condition is produced by inferiority” and also that, while this inferiority and the prejudice that results from it may be overcome, “the main part of the task rests on the Negro.”3 As Logan explains in a new introduction added to the 1969 reprint of the book, Couch had requested that Logan put the book together but, after the submission of the manuscript, decided that it was “not publishable.”4 In response to Logan considering options including legal action, Couch agreed to publish the book but on the condition that it contain an opening statement by him. Thus the spectacle of his introduction. But what accounts for Couch’s opposition to publishing a book that he commissioned? If, as he says in the introduction, the idea for the book was that “the country, and particularly the South, ought to know what the Negro wants” and, as he goes on to admit, there is “strong evidence” that the contributors can be viewed as “representing their people faithfully, that the Negro really wants what they say he wants,” then what could possibly be the problem?5 The disconcerting nature of the collection, from the point of view of Couch and other southern white liberals or moderates like himself, stemmed almost certainly from its impressive unanimity. Couch encouraged Logan to include a spectrum of voices in the book, from radical to conservative. Logan worked to accomplish this, achieving the participation of five contributors intended to represent the left (Du Bois, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, George Schuyler, and Doxey Wilkerson), five to represent a black liberal position (Logan himself, Sterling A. Brown, Willard S. Townsend, Charles H. Wesley, and Roy Wilkins), and four to represent conservative black leadership (Mary McLeod Bethune, Gordon B. Hancock, Leslie Pinckney Hill, and Frederick D. Patterson). This group ranged from Wilkerson, then a member of the Communist Party, to Hancock, who was known at one point for the motto “hold your job,” through which he encouraged black workers to accept whatever treatment and restrictions they had to in order to remain employed. Despite this range, every single essay in What the Negro Wants demands equal rights for African Americans and an end to segregation. The new militancy suggested by this consensus makes What the Negro Wants a wonderful expression of the sentiments and general orientation that would soon give rise, in the wake of the end of the Second World War, to the Civil Rights movement as we know it. To see one example of this striking shift, consider Bethune, the lone female contributor, who was chosen, as noted above, as one of the representatives of conservatism among black leaders. Her essay,



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“Certain Unalienable Rights,” begins by comparing and linking the Harlem Riot of 1943, which resulted from the killing of a black soldier by a police officer, with the Boston Tea Party, thus radically associating urban black rebellion in her time with the spirit of the American Revolution! Bethune argues that black riots in Harlem and elsewhere must be understood as expressions of “the growing internal pressure of Negro masses to break through the wall of restriction which restrains them from full American citizenship.”6 What the Negro Wants is remarkable for the way it raises such a unified voice of protest against the denial of full citizenship.

Research and activism “My Evolving Program” contributes to the militant message of What the Negro Wants as a whole not just by looking forward to what might and what ought to happen but also—indeed, primarily—by looking back from 1944 over the course of Du Bois’s life. It is an intellectual autobiography that ties together the theme of pursuing a personal life plan and the theme of the collective struggle for black freedom, treating these two forms of striving as intertwined and as evolving on the basis of how events and obstacles led to changes in direction or emphasis. While doing this, Du Bois not only tells us about the shape of his life but also brings into focus a number of philosophical issues of great depth and practical importance. I will begin in this section with the epistemological, moral, and political problem of how scientific research regarding social matters relates or ought to relate to the attainment of social progress. Starting with his childhood, Du Bois charts the evolution of his relationship to the so-called Negro problem, which we can broadly define in this context as the problem of antiblack oppression in the United States. As a child in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the 1870s and 1880s, Du Bois did not experience segregation, and his consciousness of the systematic nature of black disadvantage was very limited. His naive view was that there was ultimately “no real discrimination on account of color—it was all a matter of ability and hard work.”7 In contrast to this childhood naiveté, he speaks of his arrival in the South in 1885 to attend Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, as an experience of being “tossed boldly into the ‘Negro problem.’” Here, no amount of talent and effort could hide the fact that this was a “world split into white and black halves, and . . . the darker half was held back by race prejudice and legal bonds, as well as by deep ignorance and dire poverty.”8 Despite this new awareness of a serious problem to overcome, Du Bois claims that the “net result” of his time at Fisk was “to broaden the scope of my program of life, not essentially to change it.”9 What he means is that he left behind the idea that individual striving for excellence through study was all that was needed for succeeding in his goals, but he now saw the task of freeing black people from oppression as a matter of a sufficient number of black people excelling in learning

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in order to provide leadership to the masses. We have here the beginning of his early trust in the attainment of knowledge as a solution to the problem of racism. The means to success for black leadership was, he believed, “broad, exhaustive knowledge of the world; all other wisdom, all method and application would be added unto us.”10 After Fisk, Du Bois went to Harvard, where he completed a second undergraduate degree (1890), a master’s degree (1892), and, after time spent studying at the University of Berlin, a PhD (1895). His concentration for the first of those degrees was philosophy but he subsequently became invested in social science, attaining his graduate degrees in history in part because Harvard did not yet offer degrees in sociology. Reflecting on the whole of his education at Harvard, he claims that he sought “to know what man could know and how to collect and interpret facts face to face,” as well as “what ‘facts’ were.”11 He credits his time studying in Berlin with leading figures in the development of the social sciences such as Gustav Schmoller, Adolf Wagner, and Max Weber with helping him to “understand the real meaning of scientific research and the dim outlines of methods of employing its technique and its results in the new social sciences for the settlement of the Negro problems in America.”12 The first fruits of this orientation came in the pioneering sociological study undertaken under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania and published as The Philadelphia Negro (1899). As significant as that book is, though, it is the path of research he began to lay out after joining the faculty of Atlanta University in 1897 that best exemplifies his approach to dealing with the problems facing African Americans during this early period of his career. The Atlanta University Studies that resulted from research presented at an annual conference at the university represent one of the most impressively ambitious attempts to investigate and understand black life in the history of modern scholarship. In “My Evolving Program,” he evokes the goal of the studies by speaking of what the “proverbial visitor from Mars” might look into if trying to study African Americans: the people “as physical specimens, as biological growths; as a field of investigation in economic development from slave to free labor; as a psychological laboratory in human reaction toward caste and discrimination; as a unique case of physical and cultural intermingling.”13 Studies were published on the status of African Americans in business, education, religion, health, family structure, and more. Even more significant for our purposes than what was actually accomplished, though, was the nature of the plan for continued study. Du Bois intended and began to accomplish before support ran out not just a series but a cycle of studies, returning every ten years to the same topic, so that through “repetition of each subject or some modification of it in each decade, upon a progressively broader and more exact basis and with better method,” the studies would gradually achieve “a foundation of carefully ascertained fact” and thus “a basis of knowledge, broad and sound enough to be called scientific.”14 This was sociological research aspiring to an unprecedented level of comprehensive coverage and penetrating depth. Overlapping with the period during which the Atlanta University Studies were being produced, however, is the period during which Du Bois developed into one



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of the best-known and most influential African American activists. His criticism of Booker T. Washington in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) made him a prominent voice calling for firm opposition to segregation in contrast with Washington’s accommodationist approach. In 1905, he founded the Niagara Movement as an organization that could help lead this struggle for full rights and equality. Although the organization was short lived, it led to his participation in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, which brought about his departure from Atlanta University to serve the NAACP as director of publications and research. His chief task in this role was editing the organization’s journal, The Crisis. When Du Bois describes this phase of his career in “My Evolving Program,” he refers to it as the “The First Re-adaptation of My Program” and reflects on how this new involvement in activism stood in tension with and revised his previous selfconception as a researcher.15 In order to understand the tension here, it is useful to turn to a much earlier essay of his, “The Study of the Negro Problems,” which was presented at a meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1897 and published in their journal the following year. “Study” features this clear statement of Du Bois’s early position on the relationship between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of social change: Students must be careful to insist that science as such—be it physics, chemistry, psychology, sociology—has but one simple aim: the discovery of truth. Its results lie open for the use of all men—merchants, physicians, men of letters, and philanthropists, but the aim of science itself is simple truth. Any attempt to give it a double aim, to make social reform the immediate instead of the mediate object of a search for truth, will inevitably tend to defeat both objects.16

In “My Evolving Program,” Du Bois indicates that the Atlanta University Studies conformed to this principle: When I took charge of the Atlanta Conference . . . only one conference had been held and a second planned. These followed the Hampton and Tuskegee model of being primarily meetings of inspiration, directed toward specific efforts at social reform and aimed at propaganda for social uplift in certain preconceived lines. This program at Atlanta, I sought to swing as on a pivot to one of scientific investigation into social conditions, primarily for scientific ends: I put no especial emphasis on specific reform effort, but increasing and widening emphasis on the collection of a basic body of fact concerning the social condition of American Negroes, endeavoring to reduce that condition to exact measurement whenever or wherever occasion permitted. As time passed, it happened that many uplift efforts were in fact based on our studies: the kindergarten system of the city of Atlanta, white as well as black; the Negro Business League, and various projects to better health and combat crime. We came to be however, as I had intended, increasingly, a source of general information and a basis for further study, rather than an organ of social reform.17

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In accord with the view put forward in “Study,” Du Bois suggests here that the Atlanta University Studies can be valued in part for facilitating the efforts at uplift that he mentions, but that it is precisely, if paradoxically, by refraining from aiming to be useful in these or any other ways that the studies could be recognized as credibly scientific in ways that rendered them useful. There is a wistful tone to Du Bois’s recollection. He writes that it was “crazy” for him to dream that black scholars at a black university would at that time— “the dawn of the Twentieth Century, with Colonial Imperialism, based on the suppression of colored folk, at its zenith”—be encouraged, much less adequately financed, in carrying out the colossal long-term undertaking he envisioned. Still, he asks, “If it could have been carried out even imperfectly and with limitations, who can doubt its value today, not only to the Negro, but to America and to the still troubled science of sociology?”18 Despite this remaining attachment to the value of his old scholarly plan, there can be no mistaking that Du Bois underwent a change not merely in focus but in perspective as he turned to activism and journalism. To explain this change, he talks about the time in 1899 that Sam Hose, a black farm laborer, killed his white employer and went on the run while a white mob was riled up by stories of the rape of the employer’s wife. Du Bois wrote a letter to the Atlanta Constitution about the matter and was on his way to deliver it when he found out that Hose had been caught and lynched and that a butcher shop he would pass on his way was displaying some of Hose’s fingers. Du Bois turned around and went home and, in 1944, reflects, “Something died in me that day.”19 It seems clear that his ideal of a calm and detached scientist seeking the truth and nothing else took a strong blow. The most dramatic way in which Du Bois describes his change in perspective appears to be a total repudiation of the distinction in “Study” between the neutral attainment of knowledge about social affairs and the politically motivated application of such knowledge: “Gradually and with increasing clarity, my whole attitude toward the social sciences began to change: in the study of human beings and their actions, there could be no such rift between theory and practice, between pure and applied science, as was possible in the study of sticks and stones.”20 But why is no such separation possible? Du Bois criticizes the Atlanta University Studies as distant from “the hot reality of real life,” suggesting that their orderly accumulations of facts and statistical measurements naturally missed something of the fast-moving drama of African American life.21 He writes of being confronted in his new roles as activist and journalist by “situations that called—shrieked—for action, even before any detailed, scientific study could possibly be prepared.” The wrestling with urgency evoked here is further explained through two metaphors: he compares himself to a “bridge-builder” who is “compelled to throw a bridge across a stream without waiting for the careful mathematical testing of materials” and refers to himself as a “surgeon probing blindly,” aiming to prevent social death.22 It is not totally clear whether Du Bois is arguing in “My Evolving Program” that the separation of the pursuit of knowledge from the pursuit of social reform is impossible particularly in the specific circumstance of the mistreatment of African



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Americans in his time or that it is impossible in any social circumstance whatsoever. It is significant that the metaphors he uses evoke situations in which it would be conceivable and preferable to have the time to investigate and plan carefully rather than having to proceed with the occurrent limitations in knowledge. Even the elaboration of the metaphors seems to tell against seeing neutral observation as completely fictitious and not worth striving to achieve. For example, testing the materials in bridge-building is “indispensable,” Du Bois tells us, and so, while it is unfortunate that “it had to be done so often in the midst of building or even after construction, and not in the calm and leisure long before,” it nevertheless had to be done.23 All this points toward seeing Du Bois as seeking a compromise in light of the fact of urgency rather than completely abandoning the view expressed in “Study.” Du Bois best clarifies the nature of the compromise in this key paragraph: I realized that evidently the social scientist could not sit apart and study in vacuo; neither on the other hand, could he work fast and furiously simply by intuition and emotion, without seeking in the midst of action, the ordered knowledge which research and tireless observation might give him. I tried therefore in my new work, not to pause when remedy was needed; on the other hand I sought to make each incident and item in my program of social uplift, part of a wider and vaster structure of real scientific knowledge of the race problem in America.24

The first sentence of the quotation above clearly shows the need for a middle path, given that Du Bois is rejecting both the idea of disconnecting research completely from the exigencies of activism and the idea of failing to hold attempts to understand and change the social world to any standards of objectivity. The sentence that follows should be appreciated as doing more, however, than simply exemplifying a middle path. Du Bois describes a creative break with common assumptions about how research and activism can be related, for whether one envisions studies of society as necessary preliminaries to collective action aimed at bettering society or whether one sees them as potentially beneficial but not needing to precede the initiation of ameliorative endeavors, it is generally taken for granted that research is what can inform activism and not the other way around. Du Bois radically rearranges things by proposing that we see engagement with the world through activism as itself a possible mode of social scientific research. This bold move makes “My Evolving Program” among the richest texts one can read on the relationship between research and activism.

Group partiality and cosmopolitanism Another fascinating and strikingly insightful aspect of “My Evolving Program” is the way Du Bois reflects throughout the essay on the meaning of group membership. We have seen how Du Bois describes his New England boyhood as resulting in a lack of consciousness concerning racism. Toward the end of this first

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period of his life, though, he began to feel increasingly isolated: “Unconsciously, I realized, that as I grew older, the close social intermingling with my white fellows would grow more restricted.”25 This influenced his decision to go to Fisk, despite having previously been set on going straight to Harvard. So what did it mean to go from Great Barrington to Nashville? It meant going to a world severed in two in a way that his world back home was not, with the black half of this segregated world suffering from legal, political, and economic subordination. And yet, despite this cleavage and the suffering of the half he entered, Du Bois speaks of a broadening of his world. Coming to the South where black people lived in large numbers, Du Bois joined “not a little lost group, but a world in size and a civilization in potentiality.”26 The small black community to which he had access up north, which he gratefully admits “furnished me as a boy most interesting and satisfying company,” could not compare as a field of interaction and activity with this large black world within a world down South.27 It remains the case that, in another sense, this entry was simultaneously a contraction of sorts. He describes himself as leaping into this world with “provincial enthusiasm” and claims that a “new loyalty and allegiance replaced my Americanism: henceforward I was a Negro.”28 Insofar as he suggests that he previously identified with the nation (i.e., the United States) as a whole, there is a kind of narrowing in the fact that he now identified primarily with a nation within the nation. This identification and allegiance did not reverse itself when he returned to Massachusetts to go to Harvard. He associated mainly with black people in the Boston area and felt ready to “encase myself in a completely colored world, self-sufficient and provincial, and ignoring just as far as possible the white world which conditioned it.”29 This was interrupted, however, by his trip to Europe. On a steamer traveling the Rhine after first arriving in Rotterdam, he experienced interactions with white people that made him feel accepted as equal in a way he had come to not expect in America. As a result of “this unhampered social intermingling with Europeans of education and manners,” he “emerged from the extremes of my racial provincialism.” In Europe, he “became more human.”30 Thus we have a journey from attachment to America as a whole to immersion in a particularly African American world to a cosmopolitan embrace of being human. Even if the story were to end here, it would already represent something more complicated than a linear development from group partiality to the embrace of all humanity, given the fascinating mixture of broadening and contraction involved. It does not, however, end there. As his story continues, we learn of his excitement at the anti-racist cosmopolitanism of the First Universal Races Congress, which he attended in London in 1911, and his determination upon returning home to work toward the ideal of the “Internation.” He explains this as replacing the ideal of African Americans simply becoming Americans with the ideal of America managing to build a truly “interracial culture, broader and more catholic than ours.” This new orientation was roughly interrupted, though, as “World War fell on civilization



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and obliterated our dreams.”31 This interruption prompted a kind of reversal, as Du Bois found himself falling back upon the old ideal of making African Americans into Americans. Even as the strategic nature of his response to the outbreak of war is obvious, he speaks about the reversal—marked as the beginning of “The Second Re-adaptation of My Program”—as a kind of craziness: I was fighting to let the Negroes fight; I, who for a generation had been a professional pacifist; I was fighting for a separate training camp for Negro officers; I, who was devoting a career to opposing race segregation; I was seeing the Germany which taught me the human brotherhood of white and black, pitted against America which was for me the essence of Jim Crow; and yet I was “rooting” for America; and I had to, even before my own conscience, so utterly crazy had the whole world become and I with it.32

Thus fluctuation in allegiance continued. Du Bois speaks of regaining “mental balance” at the end of the war, when he came to France in December 1918 with plans of investigating the treatment of black soldiers by the US army and, most importantly for our purposes, organizing a PanAfrican Congress that took place in February 1919 in Paris and brought together delegates from across the black world.33 Reflecting on not only the Paris meeting but also the Pan-African Congresses of 1921 (held in London, Brussels, and Paris) and 1923 (held in London and Lisbon) and unaccountably leaving out the 1927 meeting in New York, Du Bois calls them “chiefly memorable for the excitement and opposition which they caused among the colonial imperialists.”34 Writing in 1944, he would not have been able to speak yet of the notable success of the Fifth Pan-African Congress, which was held in Manchester in 1945 and famously attended by many who went on to lead independence movements in Africa in years to come. What sticks out for him, writing at this point, is the antipathy of the NAACP toward this Pan-Africanist movement. “The board was not interested in Africa. Following post-war reaction it shrank back to its narrowest program: to make Negroes American citizens, forgetting that if the white European world persisted in upholding and strengthening the color bar, America would follow dumbly in its wake.”35 Thus Du Bois writes of having ended up in the unfortunate position of having worked to develop “a program of Pan-Africanism, as organized protection of the Negro world led by American Negroes” only to discover that “American Negroes were not interested.”36 As a final example of the ever-changing relationship Du Bois had with the world around him, note the importance he places on his visit to the Soviet Union in 1928, precisely in the wake of a period during which he had been reading more and more of Karl Marx. Under the heading of “The Third Modification of My Program,” Du Bois tells us of the lasting impact this visit had on him: “Russia was and still is to my mind, the most hopeful land in the modern world.”37 The experience led him to think in new ways about what African Americans should be striving to accomplish through their own political and economic self-organization, an aspect of his thinking that I will discuss further in the following section.

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If one looks for patterns in the forms of group identification that Du Bois highlights over the course of “My Evolving Program,” it is tempting to give up and see only endless vacillation: now inward to blackness, now outward to the world, now inward to America, back to blackness, and so on. Vacillation or not, though, there are some very valuable lessons here. Note first that the various allegiances that Du Bois describes can certainly stand in tension with each other and exert pulls in different directions, but they are, at the same time, all ultimately compatible: one can identify with and value being black, American, and human simultaneously. What we ought to take from Du Bois in “My Evolving Program,” then, is the importance of recognizing and valuing the productive tension between these noncontradictory allegiances. The cosmopolitan orientation Du Bois embraces in Europe did not negate his investment in black identity, only “the extremes” that veer in the direction of chauvinism and automatic hatred of others, especially white people. Meanwhile, the black-oriented activity Du Bois focused on after the First World War symbolizes how “utterly crazy” he found his own support for war and for racist America, necessitating a reorientation that could provide “mental balance.” And yet, in the final future-oriented section of “My Evolving Program,” Du Bois speaks fondly of the past and present reality of a “virile and progressive American Culture” arising out of the mix of elements from elsewhere brought together in that country, thus displaying a distinctively multiculturalist but nevertheless fervent American pride.38 The other lesson I find important relates specifically to his black allegiances. I have emphasized already how he found in Southern blackness a kind of expansion of his world. We can furthermore connect this to his Pan-Africanism, treating it as the next natural step in world expansion, especially given the fact that this wider commitment must be recognized as in its own way a kind of cosmopolitanism. PanAfricanism is an embrace of blackness at the expense of privileging borders and regional differences, requiring a sense of the globe as a whole as home. It is a project that, at least in Du Bois’s hands, involves bringing together diverse peoples for the common cause of greater freedom for all people. What this means is that investment in blackness is not necessarily a retreat into isolation and singular particularity, despite the fact that certain ways of being invested in blackness fit that description. Du Bois, in “My Evolving Program,” helps us recognize the value of expansive, cosmopolitan forms of blackness that remain compatible, if also in productive tension, with maximally expansive commitments to humanity as a whole.

The long road ahead At the very end of “My Evolving Program,” Du Bois summarizes the different ways he had thought about the path toward freedom as three distinct—though overlapping—steps or phases. First, from 1885 to 1910, “The Truth shall make ye free.”39 Significantly, he notes that this plan was “directed toward the majority of white Americans,” as it rested on the assumption that once they learned the truth about race relations in the United States as demonstrated by scientific research,



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they would take action to correct the grievous wrongs inherent in the situation.40 Second, from 1900 to 1930, “United action on the part of thinking Americans, white and black, to force the truth concerning Negroes to the attention of the nation.”41 This plan rested on the assumption that “the majority of Americans” (note the lack of racial specificity) would rush to defend democracy once they realized how racism threatens it, not just for black Americans but for all Americans and not just in America but in the world as a whole. Finally, from 1928 to 1944, “Scientific investigation and organized action among Negroes, in close co-operation, to secure the survival of the Negro race, until the cultural development of America and the world is willing to recognize Negro freedom.”42 I will quote in full his explanation of this third approach to the problem, the final words of the essay as a whole: This plan realizes that the majority of men do not usually act in accord with reason, but follow social pressures, inherited customs and long-established, often sub-conscious, patterns of action. Consequently, race prejudice in America will linger long and may even increase. It is the duty of the black race to maintain its cultural advance, not for itself alone, but for the emancipation of mankind, the realization of democracy and the progress of civilization.43

We see here that, looking forward from 1944, Du Bois did not envision a straightforward and reasonably short path to the goal of overcoming American racism. Indeed, we know that the thoughts here on how “race prejudice in America will linger long and may even increase” came from a point of view that could scarcely conceive that the legal structure of Jim Crow would crumble in just a couple of decades. We know this because, writing in 1960, Du Bois anticipates that “we are definitely now approaching a time when the American Negro will become in law equal in citizenship to other Americans,” and he states explicitly, “This day has come much earlier than I thought it would.”44 On the other hand, one can respond to this by pointing out that the term “race prejudice” evidently covers more than segregation and subordination in law, which means that it is possible to consider our current situation, over seven decades after Du Bois wrote these words, as verifying his prediction. What I hope to illuminate in this final section is why Du Bois envisioned such a long road ahead in the fight for black freedom. Among the factors alluded to in his explanation of the third approach, quoted above, is his growing appreciation of Marx and also Sigmund Freud. Du Bois is explicit about the influence of Marx earlier in “My Evolving Program”: “I believe in the dictum of Karl Marx, that the economic foundation of a nation is widely decisive for its politics, its art and its culture.”45 He explains, at that point, that his old faith in what would be delivered to African Americans by securing the right to vote was replaced by a sense that the ability to earn a decent living was of primary importance. When he speaks in his explanation of the third approach of “social pressures” trumping reason in governing how people act, we may take him to be referring in large part to the Marxian privileging of economic relations that he had come to endorse. His talk of

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“often sub-conscious” patterns of action relates to this privileging of economics as well, given the correlative point that economic factors may motivate our behavior without us recognizing them as doing so, but there is also an implicit reference here to the influence of Freud. He is more explicit about this influence in Dusk of Dawn, published four years earlier: The meaning and implications of the new psychology had begun slowly to penetrate my thought. My own study of psychology under William James had pre-dated the Freudian era, but it had prepared me for it. I now began to realize that in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determination of white folk to oppress us; we were facing age-long complexes sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge, which demanded on our part not only the patience to wait, but the power to entrench ourselves for the long siege against the strongholds of color caste.46

There is a long road ahead, then, not only because the most needed change is ultimately economic change but also because political and economic change is rendered difficult to attain, according to Du Bois, by the way that white supremacy is upheld in significant part by psychodynamic factors that by their very nature resist being addressed by efforts to inform people and rationally motivate them to create change. This explains Du Bois’s call for “organized action among Negroes, in close co-operation, to secure the survival of the Negro race.” If there is reason to fear on psychological grounds that the end of the systematic exclusion and mistreatment of black people in America must be very far off and if this problem, including its psychological aspect, is foundationally a matter of economics (Du Bois speaks in Dusk of Dawn of recognizing that the problem with white people was that “their race prejudice was . . . increasingly built on the basis of the income they enjoyed and their anti-Negro bias consciously or unconsciously formulated in order to protect their wealth and power”), then the most prudent plan of action for black people must be to exert whatever power they can to control and ameliorate their economic circumstances.47 This amelioration could not, however, be a matter of enriching a few at the expense of the many, which would be simply to reproduce the larger problem underlying racial inequality within the race itself. Du Bois therefore writes in “My Evolving Program” of his hope that a people where the differentiation in classes because of wealth had only begun, could be so guided by intelligent leaders that they would develop into a consumer-conscious people, producing for use and not primarily for profit, and working into the surrounding industrial organization so as to reinforce the economic revolution bound to develop in the United States and all over Europe and Asia sooner or later.48

Unfortunately, according to Du Bois, the Depression hampered his efforts to get African Americans to adopt this program (specifically, through making The



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Crisis dependent on the charity of people who had no sympathy for this proposed reorganization of effort). In the section of “My Evolving Program” entitled “My Present Program,” he writes mainly of the “scientific investigation” aspect of the third approach, detailing how his resignation from the NAACP and reappointment at Atlanta University led to the writing of three books (Black Reconstruction in America, Black Folk Then and Now, Dusk of Dawn), efforts to fund his dream of an “Encyclopedia of the Negro,” the founding of the academic journal Phylon, and the organizing of a new Atlanta Conference, supported by all the land-grant black colleges of the South. After the last of these accomplishments, the section ends abruptly: “Then, without warning, the University retired me from work and gave up this renewed project.”49 Even before this, though, there is a sense of frustration and stifled progress in this section, the last autobiographical section of the essay. It is expressed most acutely in a passage that exemplifies how much Du Bois understood autobiography as a way of telling not only his story but also the story of African America at large, arguably sometimes to the point of megalomania. Describing his departure from the NAACP and move back to Atlanta, he writes, “With the unexpected coming of a Second World War, this move of mine has proved a relief. However, it only postpones the inevitable decision as to what American Negroes are striving for, and how eventually they are going to get it.”50 One need not be making the mistake of underestimating the significance of Du Bois as a leader of thought and action to find the lack of distinction here between his career moves and the overall advance or stagnation of black people in America a bit shocking. Thankfully, “My Present Program” is the penultimate rather than final section of “My Evolving Program.” The final section, entitled “Summary,” is concerned above all with spelling out what exactly freedom for African Americans means. He presents this definition: “By ‘Freedom’ for Negroes, I meant and still mean, full economic, political and social equality with American citizens, in thought, expression and action, with no discrimination based on race and color.”51 This uncompromising definition encapsulates the spirit pervading the entirety of What the Negro Wants. As Du Bois goes on to explain it further, he concentrates especially on the idea of social equality, admitting the vagueness of the two constituent terms but affirming nevertheless its utility particularly in relation to the situation of African Americans. He divides social activities into a list of three categories: “Private social intercourse (marriage, friendships, home entertainment),” “Public services (residence areas, travel, recreation and information, hotels and restaurants),” and “Social uplift (education, religion, science and art).”52 The discussion he then provides of the first category is arguably the part of the book that did the most to inflame Couch and inspire his oppositional introduction to What the Negro Wants. Janken claims that “if the contributors’ unanimity on the issue of segregation dismayed Couch, some of their treatment of interracial marriage gave him apoplexy.”53 Of these treatments, Janken notes, that which could be found in Du Bois’s essay was, “from the standpoint of the white southerner, most impertinent of all.”54 Janken follows Logan in pointing to Du Bois’s account of his first trip to Europe as the greatest problem, as he tells the story of “blue-eyed Dora”

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in Germany who confessed her readiness to marry him but was turned down by Du Bois, who thought it wrong to bring a white bride back to America.55 More direct, in my view, is Du Bois’s unwavering defense in the “Summary” of social equality in the case of private social intercourse as “the right to select one’s own mates and close companions.”56 He asserts that the verdict of modern science is that there is nothing wrong whatsoever with miscegenation. One suspects that Du Bois would highlight his Freudian turn in trying to explain the disproportionate obsession of people like Crouch with the single issue of miscegenation, but he does not shy away at all from affirming that freedom for African Americans must include freedom to intermarry. With regard to the second category, public services, he asserts that the right to choose is limited by “the fact that the whole social body is joint owner and purveyor of many facilities and rights offered” and thus social equality requires the denial of “the right of any discrimination and segregation which compels citizens to lose their rights of enjoyment and accommodation in the common wealth.”57 For this reason, in spite of his turn to focus on the survival of African Americans through economic cooperation, he continues to hold that it is necessary to “attack Jim Crow legislation: the freezing in law of discrimination based solely on race and color—in voting, in work, in travel, in public service.”58 Finally, with regard to the category of social uplift, he notes that some organizations that aim at social uplift have private membership and thus may choose members as they please. He warns, however, that such organizations must be careful not to present themselves as providing a service to the public at large: “If a church is a social clique, it is not a public center of religion; if a school is private and for a selected clientele, it must not assume the functions and privileges of public schools.”59 He goes on to emphasize the importance of the public school system to the development of a flourishing democracy, thus making clear how enforced segregation in schooling must cease for America to flourish. As he brings the essay to a close, Du Bois argues that the problem with discrimination is not that it is bad to weed out the worst and protect the best but that it remains always a serious danger that what one will weed out is “the Different and not the Dangerous” and that what one will protect is “the Powerful and not the Best.”60 The only safeguard is to err toward allowing the widest amount of human contact possible. This is the path that will lead to what Du Bois describes, in a passage reminiscent of John Stuart Mill, as “real freedom, toward which the soul of man has always striven: the right to be different, to be individual and pursue personal aims and ideals.”61 This is the freedom that is made possible by a democracy in which the basic needs of all for food, shelter, and organized security are met. Under such conditions, the value of variety and artistic freedom is bound to emerge. Right before the closing list of the three approaches, then, Du Bois ties together the themes of equality and freedom by claiming that “the hope of civilization lies not in exclusion, but in inclusion of all human elements” and that “worldwide equality of human development is the answer to every meticulous taste and each rare personality.”62 This lofty vision is what precedes the list that we earlier recognized as culminating in the apparent pessimism of the view that the end of



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racial oppression in America is far, far away. There is, strictly, no contradiction between the loftiness and the sobriety here, as the lofty vision is of what we must strive to achieve in the long run while the sober doubt that freedom will come soon is a prediction about just how long the long run will be. Still, there is, I would argue, productive tension between the optimism of his vision of what is possible and ought to be sought after, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the unhappy recognition of how much stands in the way. As productive as it is, I will end by noting that this tension finds some resolution in the way that Du Bois conceives of the inward turn that he believes African Americans ought to make in order to develop an anti-capitalist path to economic subsistence and flourishing. Du Bois hopes that African Americans will, in this way, not only meet needs left unmet by racist America but also provide a model of egalitarian development that could inspire the rest of America and elsewhere. Adjustment to bad circumstance will thus, he dares to dream, facilitate leadership toward the achievement of the highest social good. Thus he proudly, passionately, and optimistically implores, as previously quoted: “It is the duty of the black race to maintain its cultural advance, not for itself alone, but for the emancipation of mankind, the realization of democracy and the progress of civilization.”

Notes 1 Kenneth Robert Janken, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 145. 2 Ibid. 3 W. T. Couch, “Publisher’s Introduction,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Rayford W. Logan (1944; New York: Agathon Press, 1969). 4 Rayford W. Logan, “Introduction to the Reprint,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Rayford W. Logan (1944; New York: Agathon Press, 1969), unnumbered. 5 The evidence Couch has in mind comes from Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, published earlier that year. 6 Mary McLeod Bethune, “Certain Unalienable Rights,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Rayford W. Logan (1944; New York: Agathon Press, 1969), 250. 7 W. E. B. Du Bois, “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Rayford W. Logan (1944; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 33. 8 Ibid., 36. 9 Ibid., 38. 10 Ibid. Note the allusion here to Mt. 6:33 (KJV). 11 Du Bois, “My Evolving Program,” 39. 12 Ibid., 42. 13 Ibid., 46–47. 14 Ibid., 48. 15 Ibid., 52. 16 Du Bois, “The Study of the Negro Problems,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 11 (January 1898): 16. 17 Du Bois, “My Evolving Program,” 46.

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18 Ibid., 49. 19 Ibid., 53. 20 Ibid., 56. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 57. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 35. 26 Ibid., 36. 27 Ibid., 35. 28 Ibid., 36. 29 Ibid., 40. 30 Ibid., 42. 31 Ibid., 58. 32 Ibid., 58–59. 33 Ibid., 59. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 60. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 67. 39 Ibid., 70. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Du Bois, “Whither Now and Why,” in The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960, new edition, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 193. 45 Du Bois, “My Evolving Program,” 61. 46 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 296. 47 Ibid. 48 Du Bois, “My Evolving Program,” 61. 49 Ibid., 64. 50 Ibid., 63. 51 Ibid., 65. 52 Ibid. 53 Janken, Rayford W. Logan, 152. 54 Ibid. 55 Du Bois, “My Evolving Program,” 42. 56 Ibid., 66. 57 Ibid., 66, 67. 58 Ibid., 68. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 69. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 69, 70.

CChapter 11 BACK TO THE FUTURE IN HOWARD FAST’S FREEDOM ROAD Alan M. Wald

Triple thinking Every book is about its own historical moment even if its topic at first appears to be adamantly rooted in the past. Howard Fast’s Freedom Road, published at the climax of the Second World War but set in the late nineteenth century, goes one step further: it has features of a history of tomorrow. The novel records the ordeal of Gideon Jackson in Reconstruction-era South Carolina, fresh from service in the Union army. In the course of a decade, Jackson rises from the status of a nearilliterate former slave, who can barely read a newspaper, to become a compelling orator in the state government. Jackson is also the leader of a community of Blacks and poor whites who have pooled their resources to purchase land once owned by the wealthy Carwell family. After the Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877, wherein Republicans returned Northern troops to the barracks in return for the Democrats’ acquiescence in the disputed presidential race, the Ku Klux Klan goes into action. Manipulated by the ruthless Stephen Holmes, a vigilante army is formed to slaughter Jackson and his followers who have organized an armed selfdefense in the main house of the former plantation. Freedom Road was the seventh of Howard Fast’s sixty-five novels. In the genre of radical historical fiction writers, Fast was a superstar. The book has never been out of print and is usually available in sundry editions, from pulp to scholarly.1 Sales are now over thirty million copies with translations into eighty-two languages.2 Leading specialists of the post-Civil War era from W. E. B. Du Bois to Eric Foner have vouched for its authenticity.3 For those with more of a popular culture sensibility, Freedom Road was made into a 1979 television movie starring boxer Muhammad Ali and singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson. Recently, a Black scholar of South Carolina in the Reconstruction era, Robert Bland, observed that the film, “in showing [Muhammad] Ali’s [Gideon] Jackson journey from being a union soldier, a participant in South Carolina’s 1868 Constitutional Convention, a state legislator, and US Senator, Freedom Road placed the Popular Front radicalism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Howard Fast in direct conversation with the Third World Solidarity espoused by Muhammad Ali.” Bland quotes Ali as proclaiming of Jackson: “He’s not afraid; he stood up against the structures like I did with the draft

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board and by becoming a Muslim. And he’s got an idea for freedom and justice for all people . . . he’s the kind of man I would have been if I was living then.”4 Bland’s insights confirm the central links between the novel and critical periods in radical, anti-racist history. Looking backward from the new millennium, then, we can see that Fast (1914– 2003) published a book in 1944 that helped to sculpt the struggle for a world without racism and economic injustice for decades to come and also addresses historical fabrications that plague us to the present. The thirty-year-old author may have set out to borrow critical moments in the late nineteenth century that related to shifting economic and social issues of the mid-1940s, but the finished project resonates in an uncanny way with elements of the thinking and activism of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras: mass resistance inaugurated by African Americans, occupation of forbidden spaces, Black pride as a precondition of unity with whites, armed self-defense, and self-determination. Nearly eighty years after it appeared, Freedom Road perseveres as indispensable reading about race in the United States; the dispute about the past that Fast addresses is also about what was happening in his own time as well as what would happen in the future. By his own account, Fast was looking to achieve something far more germane to promoting anti-racism in his own moment than a mere reenactment of history. He recalled in an afterword that what he sought was mainly proof that an eightyear “experiment” in equality and successful governing between Black ex-slaves and poor whites during South Carolina’s Reconstruction era “had worked.”5 What he actually produced was a new and defamiliarized version of the past—class conscious and race conscious—pointing to the direction of underlying social and political currents that would not be resolved in his own time and thereby suggested something of a projection of events to come. Such partaking of multiple objectives is characteristic of Fast’s complicated and contested legacy.6 For example, it is commonly noted that he effectively mixed commercial and ideological goals in books such as Conceived in Liberty (1939), The Last Frontier (1941), Citizen Tom Paine (1943), My Glorious Brothers (1948), Spartacus (1951), and more. Freedom Road is the surprising outcome of at least three other objectives because of Fast’s extraordinary ability to plunge himself wholeheartedly into the racial reality of US capitalism over the centuries. These are as follows: (1) selectively renovating material from the past; (2) forging a work of art devoted to the destruction of persisting myths of African American history; and (3) presenting a clarifying perspective on what is to be done to achieve racial equality. This last unexpectedly turned out to be a precursor of things to come: a postwar reactionary upswing and then the Black politico-cultural renaissance starting with the Civil Rights movement.7 The recognition of a threefold set of aims is why some variant of the term “Triple Thinker” seems apt for characterizing the author of Freedom Road, although not in every respect. The term was probably coined by Gustave Flaubert in the midnineteenth century to indicate that a true intellectual should be a thinker “to the nth degree,” skeptical of everything.8 This definition barely applies to Fast who, in his own politics, was selectively skeptical along Manichean lines, rarely defining



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his views in shades of grey. Edmund Wilson redeployed the phrase in his 1948 essay collection The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects to indicate artists seeking tensions between the inner and outer world, thereby making an imaginative leap to art as a moral guide.9 This has greater pertinence to Freedom Road in that the protagonist, the formerly enslaved Gideon Jackson, finds himself in an emotional war between what white society has tried to make him—an ignorant beast of labor—and his desire to change through personal agency. More commonly “Triple Thinker” is used, as in John Rodden’s work on Irving Howe, to indicate that the writer has the capacity to effectively integrate multiple loves, allegiances, or scholarly areas of expertise.10 It is mainly in this sense that Fast turns out to be a variant of a “Triple Thinker,” with the result that he brought forth a mold-breaking narrative with bracing clarity. His style may not be especially forceful or original, but he writes with a sweeping sense of history; has the capacity to muster and dramatize an extraordinary mass of evidentiary detail; and the tale he tells is haunting.

A curious genealogy What, then, were the historical and personal factors that nurtured Fast’s unique ability to resuscitate events of an earlier century in a fashion responsive to the Zeitgeist of his own time while also crafting an epic, debate-shifting book tapping into profound underground streams of politics and culture that would burst to the surface in a later era? Here one must turn to the curious genealogy of Freedom Road as a prominent contribution to the anti-racist critique of the United States. Mostly that inheritance is rock solid from the standpoint of radical bona fides and renown. After all, the author of this historical narrative about Reconstruction in South Carolina was a working-class Jewish American Marxist who joined the Communist Party of the United States on the eve of the book’s publication. Nonetheless, the appearance of Freedom Road in the pivotal year of 1944, when the Allies were on the verge of victory over the Axis, and the Communist-led Left was on the precipice of a political sea change, points to ironic and complicating aspects of its composition, the original orchestration of its impact on the Left, and its stunning afterlife. The chief irony to which I am referring is the contradiction between the politics of the novel and the wartime Popular Front politics to which Fast adhered in 1944. That Fast was addressing his novel to contemporary participants in the Second World War is clear in the original dedication to Freedom Road: “To the men and women, black and white, yellow and brown, who have laid down their lives in the struggle against fascism.”11 The paradox is found in the evidence that, while the Communist Party was at this time unrelentingly anti-fascist in foreign policy, it was mind-bogglingly conciliatory with the capitalist order on the domestic and international fronts. Communist publications after the 1941 demise of the Hitler-Stalin pact included support of the No Strike Pledge, endorsement of Japanese-American internment, opposition to the Double V (the movement of African Americans to fight racism

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at home in tandem with fascism abroad), acquiescence in a segregated military, down-grading of its call for self-determination of African Americans in the Black Belt, indictment of the 1942 race rebellions in Harlem and Detroit as fascistinspired, and backing of the very Smith Act (outlawing advocacy of violent revolution) under which the party itself would be prosecuted in 1949.12 Moreover, there was no uncertainty in any wing of the Popular Front as to what would follow the period of fighting in Europe and the Pacific: Communists and liberals pledged to make US capitalism work. For the three years before Freedom Road appeared, the sanctioned ideology of the New Deal state had been Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” auguring the promise of a democratic and nonviolent postwar future. Simultaneously, the Communist Party, the hegemonic force on the Left, enthusiastically preached a parallel vision of postwar social peace known as “Browderism,” at least since its General Secretary Earl Browder’s book Victory and After was published in 1942. Along comes Fast with his alternative mental picture of a coming reaction and a fight for social justice that is more or less the opposite of postwar peace. That is, in Freedom Road, the victory of the North in the Civil War is followed by a mass voting to reconstruct South Carolina in a way that permits former slaves and poor whites to purchase land for a racial utopia and open an integrated public school, but the upshot is the violent obliteration of the commonly owned territory and its inhabitants at the hands of the rich and powerful. Any thought of solving socioeconomic problems through interracial brotherhood or class collaboration with the “good” capitalists has gone out the window as Fast’s protagonist, Gideon Jackson, is blown to pieces in the closing pages. Voting won’t work; a radical transformation in power relations is required. Simply put, if the Civil War and the Second World War are regarded as in any way analogous—as the rare wars for capitalist democracy actively supported by Communists—the end of neither will bring peace because the ruling class still reigns and class struggle is necessary.13

Past, present, and future Fast was a novelist who all his life aimed for a disruptive challenge to national myths. It is unsurprising, therefore, that at a moment of national unity, Fast, an author very sure of his storytelling gifts, was opting to rebut classic ones about Reconstruction. But what accounts for the stunning audacity of making his vehicle for this task a stirring narrative of Blacks with guns in South Carolina fighting to the death for social justice against the revived capitalist order in the Reconstruction era? As noted, his message is obviously that voting is not enough. This is underscored by the bifurcated structure of the book. There is a “Part One: The Voting,” followed by a “Part 2: The Fighting.” One could hardly find a more apt summary of the evolution in US politics from the Civil Rights movement, represented by voter registration, to the Black Power movement, symbolized by armed self-defense. Such an advance from electoral betrayal to a fortified standoff would seem to anticipate Malcolm X’s 1964 speech on “The Ballot or the Bullet.”



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By reaching into the past, Fast unearthed the explosive connections between US capitalism and white supremacy that underpinned all three time periods. The triple thinking that went into Fast’s novel is behind his facility to offer a nineteenth-century history that crystalizes trends persisting in his 1940s present and pointing to the future. To begin with, Fast’s narrative disinters the past; that is, Freedom Road is a work of research that reinterprets the post-Civil War Reconstruction (1865–77) to provide a compelling repudiation of the prevailing scholarly tradition launched by Columbia University historian William A. Dunning. Dunning’s landmark Reconstruction, Political and Economic (1907) depicted the era as one of unscrupulous victimization of the South by the North, a racist rendition that would be widely disseminated through fiction turned into films. The two nonpareil illustrations of this mass-culture popularization are Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the KKK (1905), which became D. W. Griffith’s silent moving picture Birth of a Nation in 1915, and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), a classic produced by David O. Selznick under the same title in 1939. Although the consensus of serious historians rejects such depictions of Reconstruction, there still exist sections of the US population that adhere to them and believe that the white South was unfairly treated after the Civil War. Second, the project was prompted by Fast’s optimism for the anti-fascism of his present; that is, while Fast was employed by the Office of War Information in 1942–43, anti-Nazi sentiment was at such a fever pitch that he was inspired to craft a novel to push such democratic and anti-racist attitudes further to embrace African American liberation. Although Fast had witnessed racist behavior as a child in New York and hitch-hiked through the South in the 1930s, the idea for Freedom Road gelled when he was assigned to investigate the possibility of Black integration into the US army at the same time as he absorbed reports about Jews in concentration camps. A research visit to South Carolina gave him raw materials to conjure up composite figures and incidents for a fact-based story of interracial resistance, unity, and betrayal by the capitalist system. Finally, Fast made no secret that his new novel was “a weapon” aimed to alter the future; that is, while completing the book, Fast and his sculptor wife, Bette, were coming to the decision to join the Communist Party.14 As revolutionary activists, they would be making what they thought was a lifelong pledge to creating a new society where the socioeconomic foundations of racial oppression were overthrown. So how did the incompatibility between the novel Fast wrote and the wartime Popular Front that he approved become reconciled? The answer is simple if one checks the reviews in the most authoritative Communist Party organs, The Communist and the New Masses. Both published substantial commentaries that carefully rewrote the argument of Freedom Road in different ways; in one case by aggressively imposing the current Communist Party position and in the other by simply ignoring Fast’s main point. The goal of defeating the Axis was not in dispute. Domestically, the most pressing need of the Communist Party was giving all-out support to electing the Democratic Party candidates in the 1944 election. In the extensive review of

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Freedom Road in The Communist, leading African American Party spokesman Doxey Wilkerson (1905–93) explained, As we approach the crucial day of decision, November 7, 1944, it is absolutely imperative that we build the closest possible unity between the democratic white and Negro people of America—and the mass reading of Howard Fast’s great book would contribute mightily to that end. Widespread dissemination of the lesson of Negro-White unity, the novel’s main thesis, is urgently essential to guarantee that we not send another Rutherford B. Hayes to the White House in this year of people’s victories again to obstruct our progress along “Freedom Road.”15 This is a clear instance of a Marxist critic seeing “art as a weapon” in a direct and simple way.

Writing in the New Masses, Samuel Sillen (1911–73) skirted direct reference to the topic of the 1944 election but presented a summary of the novel that was just as politically eviscerated. As an authoritative literary spokesman for the Communist Party, Sillen had for several years urged the wartime literary Left to create “a fighting literature,” one that revealed not just “how” the fight for democracy was occurring but “why.” His main criticism of the left’s pre-Popular Front literature, generally called “Proletarian Literature,” was that it failed to celebrate President Roosevelt. Required now was less a literature of resistance and opposition than one boldly positive so that the momentum of the anti-fascist Popular Front not be lost.16 The great value of Freedom Road, in Sillen’s eyes, was its demonstration of how ignorance can be conquered (thereby exposing the slander about Reconstruction by Southern white rulers), and the depiction of the friendship possible between the formerly enslaved and poor whites. That brotherhood was precisely the democratic promise for which anti-fascists were fighting, and the danger ahead was the “poison” of those “who hate and fear the people.”17 Changing socioeconomic relations was not in the picture. Wilkerson and Sillen got what they wanted. Roosevelt was indeed reelected in 1944, yet by 1946 a national and international political makeover had occurred. Fast, the former government employee of Voice of America, suddenly found himself living as a near exile in a new country where the irrepressible combativeness of Freedom Road, and its urgent message of militant struggle, made more sense than anything found in the gutted interpretations that had appeared in 1944 in the Communist or New Masses.  As the Cold War accelerated, Fast was quickly demonized by the US state and the popular press in 1946 and again 1950 when summoned repeatedly before the House Committee on un-American Activities. The consequence of the first interrogation, where he refused to name names of financial donors to the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, was a conviction for contempt, and Fast was incarcerated in federal prison for six months. Then, in 1956, the international Communist movement itself imploded with news of Nikita Khrushchev’s speech revealing a portion of Stalin’s crimes, and Fast’s Marxist halo quickly evaporated as he wrote a mind-numbing work of apostasy, The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party (1957). Here he



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dispensed every Cold War cliché about writers selling their souls to the devil when they embraced the party. The result was that, for a time, Fast was as despised on the Left as he had previously been on the Right, although he somewhat improbably managed to make a comeback writing and selling a massive amount of books in all genres no matter which way the political winds were blowing. Thus it came to pass that Freedom Road was taken up by the 1960s New Left as an anti-racist classic, along with W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935), C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938), Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), and Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Later on, “Freedom Road” even became the name of a Marxist group or two. By the time of his death, moreover, Fast had reconciled himself with his Communist past through a sentimental memoir, Being Red (1990).

Blacks with guns Too often hindsight reduces a complex, contingent sequence of events to a smooth progression. In this instance, it is easy to imagine that Freedom Road expresses the views of the Communist Party, since there was no evidence of public criticisms of it in the Communist press. Such a linkage between “Party line” and novel might be reinforced by a number of intelligent critics who have detected in Freedom Road a decline in Fast’s writing from the immediately preceding The Last Frontier, in a manner implying that his new Communist ideological commitments were squeezing out the art.18 Yet it is far more accurate and intriguing that Fast’s Communist Party connection provided the novel with a large ironic dimension because it was so contrary to the wartime orientation in several respects. In The Naked God, Fast spends several pages discussing the controversy that ensued within the communist leadership over whether Fast might even be expelled due to deviations found in Freedom Road prior to publication. Fast himself provides just one example of an alleged deviation—objections to his use of the word “Nigger,” inasmuch as he was attempting to reproduce authentic speech.19 However, Gerald Sorin’s well-researched biography points out that there were two more worries among party leaders about matters in 1943 to which the wily Fast may not have wanted to draw attention in 1957 at the height of the Cold War: that Fast’s narrative undermined the new reform orientation of the party and that it also promoted the self-determination for African Americans that had been abandoned.20 In the end, it appears that the leader of the party’s New York cultural section, Lionel Berman (1906–68), managed to assuage the party leadership’s concerns, paving the way for favorable reviews. In his recent book about the culture of the 1940s, George Hutchinson aptly observes that Freedom Road was “seemingly driven by a premonition of the assault on the New Deal and the rise of reaction following the Second World War.”21 Yet the source of such prescient political insight in Freedom Road was not because Fast knowingly saw further than the party, which had no such expectation. Fast’s prescience was because he was putting forward politics that actually corresponded

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to an earlier time in Communist policy. That is, the 1930s, Fast’s formative years, was a long decade. The presence of a Great Depression orientation is why Robert Bland, in linking the era of Muhammad Ali to that of Freedom Road, explains that the novel’s view of Reconstruction was as a “rare moment when blacks and whites in the postbellum South recognized their shared economic interests and could have built a biracial working class movement that mirrored the CPUSA’s organizing campaigns in the interwar South.” In other words, Bland identifies the political orientation not with campaigns during the Second World War, but in the 1920s and 1930s. What might appear to be Fast’s clairvoyance was substantially due to a backward connection. Yes, Fast did propose Communist Party membership for himself in late 1943, with the novel in galleys, but his Communist sympathies went back to the early 1930s. These were the pre-Popular Front days, when he was attracted to the Partyled John Reed Club and under the influence of Sarah Kunitz (?–1981), sister of a leading Communist intellectual, Joshua Kunitz (1896–1980). Fast’s political activities throughout the 1930s seem minimal in comparison to what came after, but Fast would later claim to have been profoundly affected by the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, and he also wrote a formidable anti-lynching novelette in 1939, The Children. Fast came to Communist membership by his own route and his own way, but it’s unlikely that he passed through the 1930s among party friends and connections while being unaware of the Scottsboro campaign, the battles of the Sharecroppers Union, the writings on self-determination, the Moscow Trials, and the HitlerStalin pact. There are, in fact, indications that his new-found over-the-top ardency for Stalin and the party stemmed from a need to compensate for an earlier lack of commitment, including the apolitical early novels with which he began his career.22 In certain respects Freedom Road was much more appropriate to being a novel of the 1930s than a book compatible with the guidance of the wartime New Masses through articles by Sillen. In particular, like most of the strike novels of the 1930s and the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, Fast’s narrative ends in a crushing defeat as the victorious whites survey the damage: “The men around the Carwell House, the men who hid their faces from the sun with white hoods, watched the old place burn. The wood was dry, and once the flame had started, nothing on earth could have put it out. All day long the house burned, and by nightfall, nothing was left except the seven tall chimneys.”23 While not cynical or despairing, the conclusion of the novel was so bleak that the director of the television film invented a coda wherein a Black child is depicted as surviving the slaughter. Still, even though Gideon is killed with a memory of his achievement in equality in his mind—“the thing indefinable and unconquerable”—Fast has in no way written a tale of justice triumphing and the good guys coming out on top.24 Fast would certainly agree with Martin Luther King that “the arc of the moral universe is long,” but there is no suggestion in Freedom Road that “it bends toward justice.”25 The arc of Freedom Road—its justified armed uprising and bloody defeat— is much more in harmony with the fiction about racism of the pro-Communist



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writers of the 1930s than those of the war period; for example, Guy Endore’s Babouk (1934), Grace Lumpkin’s A Sign for Cain (1935), Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1940 edition), and William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge (1941). In all of these one finds a basic pattern of the development toward a hopeful movement of unity and liberation that is utterly destroyed in a bloody finale. In contrast, when we turn to several outstanding wartime anti-racist novels by white Communist authors, such as John Sanford’s The People from Heaven (1943) and Alexander Saxton’s The Great Midland (1948), there is violence but it is followed by a channeling of righteous anger about atrocities that points to a possible way forward. What we have in Freedom Road is essentially an unvarnished revisiting of a historic crime. Perhaps through certain imaginative comparisons—the Bolshevik Revolution under siege by enemies; the Spanish Republic destroyed due to the failure of democracies to come to its aid—the massacre at the Carwell planation might be interpreted as a struggle that will survive and eventually be redeemed by future generations. After all, those massacred are not depicted as victims but soldiers who are martyred in a battle for justice. Yet how much analytical mileage can be extracted from such analogues is not clear. The creation and annihilation of the Carwell community is climactic but not all enveloping; much of the novel is aimed at giving us psychological access to the world that gave birth to a person like Gideon Jackson and his dream. This is because, while a Marxist, Fast was no determinist; ideas play a critical role in all that happens—through the admirable leadership of Gideon Jackson as counterpoised to the conspiracy and duplicity of his opponents.

Blurring the borders What, then, might be concluded about Freedom Road as a work of art, in light of Fast’s threefold perspective? Trying to comprehend Freedom Road as a paint-by-numbers polemic at the service of the Popular Front doesn’t work. Fast’s undoubted accord with the Popular Front perspective was partially shed, undermined, or contradicted as he pulled together his heartfelt narrative: one of a near-lost moment in history when blatant evil ran rough-shod over comradeship and decency. The essential politics of Freedom Road bears a message similar to pre-Popular Front Communism and even to that of left critics of the party. For example, the Trotskyist C. L. R. James argued that African Americans could win over whites to their cause if they don’t hold back and if they take militant action first, as a vanguard, inspiring whites to join them as the spearhead of a mass movement.26 This is a perspective unmistakably dramatized by Gideon Jackson in Freedom Road, who takes the initiative in purchasing the Carwell acres and then in organizing armed defense.27 Also, the celebratory review of Freedom Road in the paper of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party, the Militant, emphasizes the very lesson of the novel that the Communist press failed to promote: “Gideon soon learns that freedom cannot be won or held by the ballot alone.”28

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A contextualized examination of Freedom Road demonstrates that a writer’s adherence to formal ideology—surely the case with Fast—should be regarded as noteworthy yet hardly a factor that a priori governs artistic outcome. Howard Fast must be perceived through a dual perspective. On the one hand, there is no doubt that Fast wrote with many axes to grind and that he is obviously at farthest remove from the kind of writer who adopts a position of Olympian detachment. Most specifically, general Popular Front influences would remain with him for the rest of his life and shape his perspectives. He was also a devotee of a utilitarian notion of his craft; he chose to write about the past when it was useful to envisioning the future, centering his storylines on episodes from history that have something to teach radicals in their contemporary struggles and that might provide a legacy on which to build. On the other hand, his views on white supremacy in Freedom Road did not amount to simply taking on the accoutrements of Communist Party culture. As he read and researched the background of events, he came to believe that he saw a different and truer racial past than conventional historians. This drove him to tell a story that did not focus on “brotherhood”—as the Communist and New Masses claimed—but on Black initiative and leadership. Moreover, his opinions did not change when he departed the party. Where ideology became most important was in Fast’s public, nonfiction declarations on literary matters. These evolved over the 1940s from modesty in the early part of the decade to a stilted and arrogant dogmatism by the time he published the execrable Literature and Reality (1953), a catalogue of crude denunciations of many major authors, under party auspices.29 For example, when asked to explain his relationship to the historical novel shortly after joining the party in January 1944, he wrote: “I can’t say why I write historical novels, because, to me, nothing I write comes under that heading. . . . A novelist works with the most flexible and variable form in all the arts; so broad a classification, indeed, that the novel, as a form, completely denies definition.”30 Two years later Fast participated in the 1946 debate that started in the New Masses over Albert Maltz’s concern that political criticisms of a writer were being used to make judgments on the quality of his or her art. At this point Fast declared himself 100 percent behind the slogan “art as a weapon” and announced his mechanical belief that art is the product of conscious picking and choosing: “The writer, however, has a singular responsibility; for he must select from life those factors which suit his purpose; he must turn them into word-pictures and thought-pictures.”31 Speaking to a crowd of 3,500 at a Manhattan Center rally, he declared, “books have always been the strongest medium through which ideas can be presented to the masses” and (quoting Joseph Stalin) that “all art must be directed toward attaining socialism.”32 Thirty-five years later, Fast made an oft-quoted 1981 statement that “I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.”33 What needs to be added is that he voluntarily agreed with most of it, and, at the time he joined, the party was relatively latitudinarian under Browderism. Novelist James T. Farrell points this out in his critical articles on the Communist Party and literature during the Second



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World War period and just after: “In recent years, the social patriotic Stalinists had a corresponding cultural orientation corresponding to their politics: this was expressed in a vague patriotic populism. So long as a writer did not attack the party line he was allowed a certain latitude in which to move and yet be praised and accepted by the Stalinist critics.”34 When Communists, internationally, began to tighten up their ideology and take a sectarian turn under the lead of Andrei Zhdanov in the late 1940s, there was still a policy of tolerance for established artists who maintained a pro-Soviet stance—Pablo Picasso, Pablo Neruda, Thomas McGrath, and Bertolt Brecht. The artistic choices made by Fast in Freedom Road came not from reading the editorial pages of the Daily Worker, but from his desire to document that African Americans and poor whites were capable of governing. However, he occasionally saw the past through a prism of values he shared with the Communists starting in the 1930s, which gives a certain anachronistic slant to some of his perceptions. For example, the Carwell community created by African Americans and poor whites has a markedly socialist character and culture—something like a collectivized farm, although the products go on the market. Also, the chief enemy of this new society, the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan, is depicted as a movement of the lumpenproletariat that is manipulated by the wealthy; this is more or less the same way that Communists perceived fascists in the 1930s. The leading scalawag conspirator, Stephen Holmes, frequently sounds like a Nazi leader. Nevertheless, even if these and other aspects are dramatized in a somewhat distorted manner, blurring some of the boundaries between fact and fiction, Fast is true to the pulse of the history of time and place. He also faithfully carries out the literary mandate of the historical novelist to show how events affected people by personalizing them, making them resonant and emotional in individual stories. In his political goal of depicting how the poor and oppressed could make their own destiny and possess the moral capacity to lead society, he pulls out all stops to create empathy with the general plight of the former slaves and poor whites. His artistry here allows us to be transported to another era so that we can see the operations of racial prejudice and how they can be overcome when a common enemy is recognized. What hooks and holds the reader is the magnetic emotional pull of one’s identification with the choices made by Gideon Jackson. Technically, Fast’s creative talents come together in a satisfying narrative. His recreation of the true and fundamental issues of Reconstruction is an extraordinary feat of historical imagination. He has the rare ability to take huge ideas and render them into human drama. He loads every chapter with information without losing the clarity of the story. Much is explained by Fast but the account is relatively simple and not weighted down by abstract ideas and unassimilated erudition. His sentences cannot be described as intricate, imbricated, or dizzying, but his granular reimagining evokes interactions and mental states in vivid detail. What one takes away is an understanding that history is not made by forces of nature or anonymous “masses,” but by groups of people who pursue their causes. The results, then, are not accidental but brought about by the decisions that are made and the resources available to either side.

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Nonetheless, if the reader is attracted mainly to characters with mixed motives, complex personalities, and nuanced actions, Freedom Road is unlikely to make the cut. This is not a modern novel about shifting realities and unstable identities. Jackson is a steadily advancing protagonist and unquestionably stands as convincing proof of the argument that the recently enslaved were quite capable of governing in a just manner. But rarely does he have a humanizing thought in terms of a moment when he is tempted to take action for personal profit or extra security; despite some marital estrangement and long periods of living apart from Rachel, his wife, lustful desires are absent from his consciousness; there are oddities in his favoritism toward his younger son, Marcus, over the older son, Jeff, yet this is barely explored beyond the idea that Jeff thinks the racists can be reformed (a naive blindness that seems to be crudely symbolized by Jeff ’s choice of a wife who is sightless). Jackson’s foil, Stephen Holmes, is evil incarnate and talks openly of his schemes and machinations, revealing little else. Additional villains are depicted through a simplified, single dimension of hate, greed, and prejudice imposed on human behavior. Further limitations to Freedom Road can be cited, starting with a purposeful muddying of lines between reality and imaginativeness, such as his exaggeration of the intermixing of poor whites and Blacks in daily living.35 This may discomfort skeptical readers, although the listing of sources in the afterward should assuage some of the reservations.36 The unvarying style of the novel seems barely twentieth century. The character of Gideon is depicted as being on journeys from 1867 to 1877, each new adventure introduced with unpromising, folksy subtitles such as “How Gideon Jackson Came Home from the Voting,” “How Gideon Jackson Went to Charleston and the Adventures That Befell Him on the Way,” and “How Gideon Jackson Went Home to His People.” During his endless peregrinations, an omniscient third person narrator tells us Gideon’s thoughts and doubts as he rises from being an uneducated man to an elected official who travels to meet with President Grant in Washington, DC. There he makes an astonishingly eloquent attempt to persuade Grant to intervene against the disastrous Compromise of 1877, which left Southern Blacks unprotected. Not every reader will find this particular dialogue convincing. So why is it that Fast managed to keep many readers turning the pages undeterred by even his most didactic stretches? Even when he is mainly recreating the environment and atmosphere, the narrative rarely sags. Part of this grip on the reader emanates precisely from the power achieved through the risk he took in seeing the situation in the postwar South from the point of view of recently freed slaves. He accomplished this in a way that offers emotional sweep; readers of the time and even later might feel as if they are being “red-pilled,” as in The Matrix (1999). To be sure, this novel isn’t a complete study of the period, which would require thousands of pages. But Fast displays uncanny skill in selecting episodes and providing descriptions full of suggestiveness to evoke the color and mood of the era. The result is that he brings the past to life with all the excitement and imaginative power at his disposal in order to reach as wide a public audience as possible.



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With his large social vista, Fast nevertheless manages to provide a many-layered account. Particular care is given to allusions and activities of the period, often using newspapers. This is much more than meticulous reporting. Using scene-by-scene construction as the foundation of the narrative, there is also a documentary feel. Fast has the gift for imagining dialogue and effectively creates the illusion of how people would have talked in their day. He is a skilled social observer of past epochs, seeming to engage in an immersive reporting of history; words pour out with the fluency of a Balzac. We learn what books would have been available for Gideon’s self-education, clothing worn in different situations, types of food prepared, and what was served on various occasions. Thus the character of Gideon is steadily developed as the plot advances, all leading to the violent showdown between good and evil that comes with the chapter suggestively headed, “How Gideon Jackson Fought the Good Fight” (“The Good Fight” was expression common among the 1930s Left for the Spanish Civil War). Fast is outstanding in depicting the particularities of the African American experience, and special attention is paid to Black psychology in the face of unrelenting hate. We witness Gideon coming to terms with his self-limitations; he feels intellectually inferior but recognizes that this perception is due to slavery, not anything innate or from a lack of capacity. The book builds to a crescendo in a head-spinning series of violent events as Gideon’s friend Trooper and his family are slaughtered by the Klan when they try to defend their cottage; Gideon’s younger son Marcus is gunned down in an effort to send a telegram from Charleston for help; Gideon’s white ally Abner Lait is whipped to death by the vigilantes when trying to deliver a second call for help; and Gideon’s older son, Jeff, is murdered after providing medical aid to a wounded Klansman. Part of the prejudice against Fast as an authentic artist is connected with his prodigious output and the fact that he was able to marry his large talent to real money early on. With a writer who was a whopping commercial success, spending so much of his career in the kingdom of the bestsellers, it is difficult to refrain from dismissing him as a producer of clever commercial vehicles. Fast barely seemed to take a breath before the next novel was released. Was he really a heroic truth-teller or just a self-aggrandizing grandstander? Yes, Fast did become rich while writing about the poor, but the evidence for his being commercial-minded falls down in the instance of Freedom Road. By the 1940s, there was a clearly established market niche for books about the Civil War; in contrast, books about the postwar era were more risky and were successful only if they took the white southern point of view. Fast’s decision to take this gamble in time period and perspective is why Freedom Road amounts to more than just an insightful reappraisal of Reconstruction; it is a book that encourages us to look at the deep roots of the economic and cultural dynamics of racial inequality over the centuries with fresh and newly opened eyes. Fast’s dramatized argument about Reconstruction particularly begs to be reassessed in light of five decades that scholars now call “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” the 1930s through the 1970s.37 The novel is also pertinent in 2018, when a memorial to “victims of racial terror lynchings” was opened in Montgomery, Alabama. This followed a year of national debate about whether to

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remove some of the thousands of confederate monuments across the South; most of these were built in the 1890s to 1920s to bolster the false historical narrative of an allegedly perfidious role played by the federal government in league with Blacks during Reconstruction.38 An awakening to the facts is necessary even today, as Eric Foner observed in early 2018 when he described the beneficial impact of Ron Chernow’s new biography of Ulysses S. Grant: Once dismissed as a sordid period of corruption and misgovernment brought about by the unpardonable mistake of granting voting rights to black men, Reconstruction is now seen as a noble experiment, a precursor to the modern civil rights revolution (sometimes called the Second Reconstruction). Chernow’s book will bring this outlook to a broad audience where it has not yet fully penetrated.39

The urgency of education along these lines has only increased as the divisive polarization around race continues under the presidential reign of Donald Trump. An author’s intense identification with a dramatic display of resistance, as is the case of Fast with Gideon Jackson’s, can paint reality in all its richness and confusion. Fast unabashedly took a prosecutorial stance against the Confederacy and its heirs that will seem to be intemperate and blinded by zeal to those who do not share his politics. But Fast has fictionalized history in sufficiently smart and attentiongrabbing ways to the extent that millions of readers have embraced Freedom Road as a lively, provocative historical drama that runs on its own nonstop creative fire. He understood, and fully conveyed, that Reconstruction was a revolution that stood unfinished in the 1940s, as it does today. In creating art that bears witness to the long shadow of slavery, he produced a book that also turned out to be a history of the future. This is because Fast grasped the social and economic currents of his time, and the direction in which they were, and were not, taking the United States. All these trends, visible in 1944, were burdened by a color line derived from the same racial inequality and myths against which anti-racists fought in the 1870s, 1930s, and 1960s and against which we are fighting today. Freedom Road is writing that made a difference in shaping the national memory of the United States.

Notes 1 For example, compare the 1979 Bantam paperback edition which accompanied the television movie with the 1995 M. E. Sharpe edition that includes primary documents and appeared in the series “American History Through Literature.” 2 Among other places, this information is reported in Gerald Sorin, “The Long Unfinished Journey of Howard Fast’s Freedom Road,” Available online: http:​//iup​ress.​ typep​ad.co​m/blo​g/201​4/11/​guest​-post​-the-​long-​unfin​ished​-jour​ney-o​f-how​ard-f​asts-​ freed​om-ro​ad.ht​ml 3 See Howard Fast, Freedom Road (New York: ME Sharpe, 1995), ix–xvii.



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4 Robert Bland, “Muhammad Ali, Freedom Road, and the Legacy of Reconstruction,” Black Perspectives, June 24, 2016, Available online: https​://ww​w.aai​hs.or​g/muh​ammad​ -ali-​freed​om-ro​ad-an​d-the​-lega​cy-of​-reco​nstru​ction​/ 5 Howard Fast, “An Afterword,” Freedom Road, 263. 6 I first began to explore this topic in “The Legacy of Howard Fast,” Radical America 17, (January–February 1983): 43–51. See also my review of Gerald Sorin’s biography, “Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Fast Lane,” American Communist History 14, no. 3 (December 2015): 270–75. 7 This three-part description of Fast’s goals resembles Manning Marable’s contention that Black Studies should be descriptive, corrective, and prescriptive. See “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain,” Souls 2, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 17–36. 8 See Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 73–74. 9 John Rodden, The Unexamined Orwell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 67. 10 John Rodden, Irving Howe and the Critics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2005), 22. 11 In 1995, the dedication was changed to the following: “To the memory of my beloved wife, Bette Fast.” 12 For documentation and discussion of all this, see Alan M. Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), especially pp. 108–45. 13 Fast describes the Civil War as “at the time, the greatest people’s war the world had ever known,” suggesting an identification with the Second World War. Fast, Freedom Road, 3. 14 Fast was an ardent supporter of the Communists’ “Art as a Weapon” slogan, see footnote 31. 15 Doxey Wilkerson, “Freedom Road: Weapon of Democracy,” The Communist, October 1944, 495–51. 16 See documentation and discussion in Alan M. Wald, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), especially 60-75. 17 Samuel Sillen, “Freedom Road,” New Masses, January 25, 1944, 22–23. 18 See the discussion in Walter B. Rideout’s The Radical Novel in the United States: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 275–80. 19 Howard Fast, The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party (New York: Praeger, 1957), 137–39. 20 Gerald Sorin, Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Fast Lane (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 65–71. Also see Frank Campenni, Citizen Howard Fast: A critical biography (Ph. D. Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971), 176–80. Although the takeover of the Carwell plantation was by an integrated group, Blacks were by far in the majority and took the leadership of the community. 21 George Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss: American Literature in the 1940s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 245. 22 Campenni notes that Fast had hesitated to join the Communist Party until he had achieved success and economic security and consequently suffered a “guilt feeling” about his failure to join his political principles with action in the 1930s. See Campenni, “Citizen Howard Fast,” 170, 172. 23 Fast, Freedom Road, 261. 24 Ibid.

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25 The phrase was used in King’s “Where Do We Go From Here” speech, which can be heard and seen on YouTube: https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​reloa​d=9&v​=yeVI​ TdHsY​6I 26 See online at: https​://ww​w.mar​xists​.org/​archi​ve/ja​mes-c​lr/wo​rks/1​939/0​8/neg​ro2.h​tm 27 See online at: https​://ww​w.mar​xists​.org/​archi​ve/ja​mes-c​lr/wo​rks/1​939/0​8/neg​ro2.h​tm 28 Bill Morgan, “Review of Freedom Road,” The Militant, July 20, 1944, 4. 29 The crude socialist-realist polemic accuses the work of Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot, John Steinbeck, and many others as comprising “a cultural dung-heap of reaction.” Years later Fast said he was ashamed of the book and stopped listing it among his publications. See online at: https​://ww​w.tru​ssel.​com/h​f/plo​ts/t2​19.ht​m 30 Howard Fast, “History in Fiction,” New Masses, January 18, 1944, 8–9. 31 Quoted in James T. Farrell, “Stalinist Literary Discussion,” New International 12, no. 4 (April 1946): 112–15. 32 Sorin, Life and Literature in the Fast Lane, 95. 33 Quoted in Edwin McDowell, “Behind the Best Sellers: Howard Fast,” New York Times, October 22, 1981, Available online: https​://ww​w.bra​inyqu​ote.c​om/au​thors​/howa​rd_fa​ st, https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/1​981/1​1/22/​books​/behi​nd-th​e-bes​t-sel​lers-​howar​d-fas​ t-101​913.h​tml 34 Quoted in James T. Farrell, “Stalinist Literary Discussion,” New International 12, no. 4 (April 1946): 112–15. 35 Eric Foner, “Introduction,” Freedom Road, xv. 36 Strangely missing from the list are W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and James Allen’s Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy, 1865-1876 (1937), both of which resemble Fast’s view and of which he surely knew. 37 This is the periodization suggested by Jacqueline Dowd Hall, who first formulated the argument. See the discussion and critiques online: https​://s-​usih.​org/2​014/0​2/the​ -long​-civi​l-rig​hts-m​oveme​nt-an​d-int​ellec​tual-​histo​ry/ 38 See Nina Silber, “How the New Monument to Lynching Unravels a Historical Lie,” Washington Post, May 2, 2018, Available online: https​://ww​w.was​hingt​onpos​t.com​/ news​/made​-by-h​istor​y/wp/​2018/​05/02​/how-​the-n​ew-mo​numen​t-to-​lynch​ing-u​nrave​ ls-a-​histo​rical​-lie/​?nore​direc​t=on&​utm_t​erm=.​36011​6c900​18 39 Eric Foner “The Awkward Age,” Times Literary Supplement, January 26, 2018, 3.

CChapter 12 “SERVE THE PEOPLE”: AN EXEMPLARY CHINESE SOCIALIST TEXT OF 19441 Rebecca E. Karl

In September 1944, Mao Zedong eulogized a just-deceased soldier, Zhang Side, as a paragon of “serving the people” (wei renmin fuwu, 为人民服务). While a common soldier’s death in wartime is always tragic, it is not usually the cause for a major tribute, much less for the coining of a vital phrase that, after a half century of earnest usage, has now become a commodified cliché imprinted on bags, lunchboxes, and any number of other marketable items. Yet, if we clear away the clutter, in this small piece of oratory—the text is no more than a few paragraphs long—we can retrieve a phrase that called into being and now can recall an entire kind of history—a prospective and prescriptive socialist history of China. In this phrase is embedded a political injunction, a social ideal, a cultural expectation, and an economic norm. The phrase and what it summoned became for a time a form of common sense—an ideology: a potential enabler of a social cohesion and unity that, while never achieved or even achievable, was nevertheless lived as a concrete abstraction, or that type of abstraction that becomes true in practice. This chapter takes up an analysis of Mao Zedong’s eulogy, “Serve the People,” in order to examine not only its historical context and textual resonances, but, more important, to specify its philosophical-political relevance in reorganizing social relations in its time. In historical terms, the paper proposes that, to properly grasp the significance of the phrase, we need to consider the two dominant modes of thought about the organization of political-social relations in twentiethcentury China: the Maoist version, articulated in/by “to serve the people,” and the Sun Zhongshan version, as articulated in/by the phrase “all under heaven for the public/everyone” (tianxia weigong, 天下为公). I take these two phrases as encapsulating competing worldviews and competing ideas about the social relations not only of modern China but of the modern world. While the one— Mao’s phrase—has become a matter of sarcastic popular reference, dogmatic repetition, and lampooning exaggeration, the other—Sun’s phrase—has been re-elevated in the PRC to a new pinnacle of political-social relevance. (It should be noted that Sun’s version reigned in the politics of the Republic of China [Taiwan] until very recently.) The paper suggests in its conclusion that what has facilitated

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the reversal in the PRC from a socialist political-social proposition to what is taken as a more normative state-centered version is the thorough repudiation of socialism as an unachievable and properly abandoned mass democratic project in the contemporary world. There are different levels to Mao’s 1944 text. On the surface, the tribute was penned for a cherished comrade, Zhang Side, who had worked his way from poor peasant obscurity in Sichuan into the Communist Party as a soldier in an elite armed division. He had completed the Long March in 1935, thence becoming quite close to Mao Zedong and other central leaders, and he had died at the age of thirty-two in 1944 in the course of performing labor, when a kiln collapsed on him during the process of making charcoal, just as the Guomindang (GMD, the Nationalists) were besieging Yan’an, the Communist base area that housed their ostensible allies in the ongoing War of Resistance against Japan. At one step’s remove, through Mao’s tribute, Zhang Side was rendered into a repository of all the elements of an emulative model of socialist becoming and selflessness—a bangyang (榜样); indeed, he became one of the first such models. In this process of abstraction, Zhang Side’s particularities came to be dissolved into a universal type—a dianxing (典型)—through which the timelessness of service and the timeliness of socialism could be endlessly produced. At the same time, in the memoration of Zhang Side, Zhang himself was detached from chronological time and forced to float through and in time in unpredictable and contingent ways that, given subsequent usage, now may seem historically overdetermined. For, as it turns out, Mao’s tribute to Zhang became one of the three “constantly read articles” of socialist education campaigns—he was joined in his position as a model by two others: the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune and the mythical figure of the foolish old man who moved mountains (yu gong, 寓公)2—making of Zhang’s sacrifice at once a lived memory and a rotely repetitive memoration. Through this process, Zhang was rendered both an open totality and a completed circuit. The phrase he inspired proposed a new form of social relation, a socialist organization of time that is at once abstract and concrete, lived and yet-to-bemade, remembered and not-yet-existing. Even so, the potential radical openness of the meaning of Zhang Side’s service soon enough was closed down into a ritualized rhetorical formula. Rather than dwell exclusively on the dogmatic denouement, I want to open out a discussion of the ways in which the concrete abstraction of “service” (fuwu, 服务)—an abstract ethical norm and simultaneously a concrete form of affective and productive labor—is hitched to the revolutionary potentiality and actualization of “the people” (renmin, 人民) in Mao’s text and beyond.3 After a whirlwind 1944 contextualization, I then will cast a comparative glance at Sun Zhongshan’s version of what social life is “for” (wei, 为), as designated in the phrase tianxia weigong (天下为公 / All under heaven is for everyone), which was and remains a vital competing political analysis of and prescription for social life in China.4 Next, I disarticulate Mao’s phrase and, through a close textual analysis, derive a theorization of the political as a practice of sociality that grounds and shapes a prospective history of socialism, in China and beyond.



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The year 1944 in/and China Before I embark on my analytic journeys, I want to compile a brief and incomplete catalog of consequential texts of 1944, as they touch on or were produced in China. This compilation skews toward those texts that are implicated in explicating, depicting, or otherwise figuring within themselves some form of service at roughly mid-century; the compilation is intended to provide a larger contextual milieu for the ensuing discussion of Mao’s particular version of service and sacrifice. In August 1944, Paris was liberated from German occupation (for how that was or wasn’t epochal, see Sarah Frank in this volume), an event heavily covered in the newspapers of China across the fraught political spectrum as well as heralded in the US and the UK as a sure sign that the endgame of the European war was nigh. At the same time, the US army shot and released its military propaganda film, “The Battle for China.” (For cognate films made in that year, see Suzanne Langlois, in this volume.) The Frank Capra-directed documentary used parts of the film version of Pearl Buck’s novel, The Good Earth, where Chinese are played in yellow face by white actors—Paul Muni was a Jew, and Luise Rainer a German-American— to dramatize the simultaneous helplessness and worthiness of the Chinese, even while it slandered the Japanese in the causal and casual racist ways characteristic of Hollywood at the time. The intent of this propaganda documentary, as is well known, was to shift American focus from the war in Europe to that in Asia-Pacific, just as the tide of the European fighting was turning and the Asian theater was clearly looming as the last frontier of the anti-fascist Allied endeavor. The film argued that the American people now had to sacrifice for and the army needed to serve in China, to achieve the final defeat of the German-Japanese threat. While “The Battle for China” was not shown or seen anywhere in China at that time (it was barely even aired in the United States), a number of films were produced in 1944 in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong by Chinese film studios, all of which concertedly avoided conflictual contemporary politics and the war. For instance, Bu Wancang’s hugely successful filmic adaptation of Honglou meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber), a classic Ming-dynasty novel, presented the dramatic emplotment of the love triangle that is one center of that novel’s narrative in an era and a place distanced from the depressing present and thus appropriate to a purely entertainment film. This escapist focus fit the 1944 cinematic mold, according to Poshek Fu, which saw a more thorough turn in Chinese filmmaking in Japanese-occupied Shanghai toward entertainment, and particularly toward stories of tragic romances that valorized “traditional values (family morality and caring for loved ones).”5 Many of these films concentrated on service as a traditional ideal of Chinese family life. While Japanese leaders in China were not impressed with such films—they did little to promote the Greater Asian Prosperity Sphere or Japanese imperial dominance—this disapproval did not stop their production or popularity. A counterexample in this regard can be found in the Chongqing-produced Qizhuang shanhe (气壮山河, The Magnificent Ones), directed by He Feiguang and starring one of the most famous actresses of her time, Li Lili. This film tells the tale

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of a youth-led military group which heads out to Burma to secure the rear areas of the war zone; in the process they infiltrate and break apart a Japanese spy ring, even while the main Chinese character, played by the actor Wang Hao, falls in love with the overseas Chinese beauty played by Li Lili.6 A formulaic film of conflictual fighting and romantic-geographical reconciliation, Qizhuang shanhe never found much of an audience in China, even while it did have a brief afterlife in Nationalistruled Taiwan after 1949. In contrast to the heroic filmic images of GMD soldiers securing the Burmese rear against Japanese incursions—representations that probably appeared unconvincing and thus unappealing to audiences under GMD rule now inured to the party’s vast corruption and ineffectual propaganda—the cartoonist Ding Cong (Xiao Ding) published, also in the GMD-headquarters of Chongqing, one of his most famous wartime series, “The Social Phenomenon,” which, in historian Chang-tai Hung’s words, “painted a gloomy picture of society plagued by social ills and economic dislocation. In Ding’s piece, GMD society was a world populated by ruthless officials, profiteers, and penniless intellectuals.”7 Presented in a hybrid Chinese-Western style, this series of cartoons unfolds in the traditional Chinese handscroll format, while it utilizes the figure drawing earlier learned and incorporated into Chinese practice from Honoré Daumier as well as the exaggerated pose and gestures appropriated from Käthe Kollwitz.8 Ding’s critical attitude toward the GMD along with his drawings that resonated with people’s experiences and lives garnered him huge popularity in GMD-controlled areas and ensured a large audience for his satirical lamentations in visual form. Meanwhile, in the Communist base areas headquartered in Yan’an, film stock was so precious that few movies were made. Even so and despite GMD blockades, several documentaries were produced demonstrating the appeal of Yan’an to Chinese youth and/or extolling the ways in which production and military struggle were combined to create a unique social formation conducive to the sustaining and protraction of guerilla war behind enemy lines.9 Some of the images survive, although few of the CCP-produced films did. Five years after the Western media corps had been invited for the first time to Yan’an, another foreign correspondents’ trip to the Communist base area was arranged after a year-long struggle against the Nationalists’ blockades and news censorship. In May 1944, six Chongqing-based foreign journalists managed to gain permission from Chiang Kai-shek to travel north. The Polish Jewish journalist who later became a naturalized Chinese citizen, Israel Epstein, was among this group. In the context of the largely positive reports filed at the time about the incorruptibility of the CCP leadership (especially as compared to the Nationalist leaders, who had long since forfeited the sympathy of the foreign press corps and become not only the subjects of cartoons such as Ding Cong’s but the objects of intraparty struggle and US derision), Epstein’s book I Visit Yenan (Wo fangwen Yan’an, 我访问延安) stands out as a ringing endorsement of the Chinese Communists’ politics, energy, and enthusiasms.10 As others of the group extolled as well, Yan’an was a veritable community of learning, where “anyone could tell a communist from a noncommunist” based on their clothes, speech patterns, and personal bearing.11 Given the Chinese national situation at the time—with the Japanese advancing, the



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United States allied irrevocably with the Nationalists, the Nationalist-Communist United Front in tatters, and the Nationalist-area economy in almost complete collapse—the CCP, whose real commitments to communism were hotly debated by some at the time in the Western press and most vigorously by American policymakers, seemed to emerge as a potential appealing force for wartime unity and postwar reconciliation.12 Indeed, in the archives of Colonel David D. Barrett, the leader of the American army’s so-called Dixie Mission to Yan’an of 1944, a rare and beautiful color-film clip of life and struggle in the base area survives as a testament to the (ultimately abortive) prospect of CCP-US postwar cooperation.13 Even if film production was all but impossible in Yan’an, in the Communistheld areas, cultural production flourished. Most prominently, the rather sexualized Northern folk dance known as the yangge (秧歌) was just then being reformed into a type of struggle dance. Progressively shorn of its sensual movements and filled with new revolutionary content, military performance groups, whose renditions of the yangge were simplified into a few basic moves, joined all-female yangge groups, which sprang up in the villages, in widely promoting this new dance form. As the historian Florence Bideau notes in her book on the phenomenon, 1944 saw the reorganization of artist associations under the control of the Propaganda Department centered in Yan’an, in an effort to displace the chaos of village dancing—dubbed merely “fanfares full of noise and bluster”—and replace it with the more measured sounds and moves of performers trained to help transform rural culture into a more controlled socialist-revolutionary bastion of political progressivism.14 A number of yangge plays, some revolving around current events and most around the task of building a new socialist life after the war, were penned for village performances; these included such titles as Husband and Wife Learn to Read (fuqi shizi, 夫妻识字), A Red Flower (yiduo honghua, 一朵红花)—a film about female model workers—and so on.15 Marking a turn from mobilization for war to mobilization for socialist reconstruction, many of these 1944–45 cultural products were fledgling attempts by petit bourgeois urban intellectuals to put Mao’s Yan’an Talks on Art and Literature into practice: they strove to combine so-called high or urbanized cultural forms and norms with mass rural content and popular concerns to achieve and create a new type of socialist cultural environment, in a dialectic through which intellectuals could massify their cultural products even while the masses rusticated intellectuals and inculcated into them new appreciations and understanding for rural life. Through this effort, as the literary critic Cai Xiang demonstrates in his book on revolutionary culture, “just as socialist society in China was to be informed by and was intended to serve, while also strengthening, the peasantproletariat alliance, socialist works of art needed to embody, create, and represent the class stand of these leading revolutionary classes.”16 It is within this generalized cultural and social contextual imperative to “serve”—as simultaneously an act of creation and representation; at once both an abstract ethic and a form of concrete labor—along with the political necessity to form and transform the class alliance that was to lead the postwar national unity of revolutionary people, that Mao’s short eulogy for Zhang Side can be located.

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And yet, before Mao seized the cultural-discursive and sociopolitical space for his version of who was serving whom and what for which historical purpose, Sun Zhongshan’s injunction on “all under heaven” held political and social sway.

天下为公/Tianxia weigong: All Under Heaven for Everyone Tianxia (天下)—“all under heaven” is the standard translation for this hugely complex concept—is a statist notion of “China.” In very early days, tianxia described a political space where various peoples were brought together under the authority of a single ruler or ruling house. This political bringing-together evolved from the Zhou dynasty (1022 BCE–256 BCE) through the Spring-and-Autumn Period and the Warring States (771 BCE–476 BCE and 475 BCE–221 BCE) and reached one culminating form under the multiethnic trans-regional polity known as the Han state (206 BCE–220 AD). By the Ming period—over a millennium later (1368–1644)—tianxia had come to define a culturally privileged space from which the imperial family could (ideally peaceably, although in practice militarily) rule over and direct various peoples’ desired or forced assimilations into and contributions to certain Han-centered civilizational norms. These conventional understandings of tianxia—substantially adopted by the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911)—received a great blow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as China’s strength was sapped and its traditional political order was questioned and altered under the force of capitalist-imperialist invasion. Under Mao, from 1949 onward, the idea of tianxia lost most of its purchase. However, in recent years, such scholars as Prasenjit Duara, Wang Ban, and Wang Hui, among others, have been tempted to reclaim tianxia as an “alternative universalism” to that of the Eurocentric “West” or of the Communist promise. Whatever its current conceptual fate—and I tend to agree strongly with theorist Dai Jinhua, that tianxia is today an entirely empty signifier, a MacGuffin, whose contemporary mobilization and idealization is an anti-political gesture concealing and condoning the essential violence of contemporary political life in China and globally—its statist-culturalist essence remains its most prominent feature.17 This state-centrism is well established as a historical principle. When situated in Sun Zhongshan’s time and the GMD Nationalists’ subsequent usage (1900s to 1940s), the concept of tianxia was mobilized as an anti-dynastic Republican ideal, intended to rescue some imperial ruins for a newly established yet already floundering nation-state. In its early twentieth-century connection to republicanism in China, tianxia thus names a top-down state-led ideal intended to inscribe in a newly territorialized Chinese nation-space among other territorialized nations an enduring cultural gong (公, public/everyone)—ideally undifferentiated by class or other divisive markers—that not only is outside of the guan (官, official sphere) but also pertains to a proposed socially harmonious unity with the state’s hegemonizing process. It appeals, therefore, on the one hand, to a duality—guan/ gong (official/public or state/society)—that retains while reinscribing some of



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the idealistic harmonious dynastic connotations whence it harks, and yet it also appeals in a utopian fashion to a Sinocentrically produced concept of one world— all under heaven—whose limits and borders and particular features are gathered into a putatively enduring cultural sphere marked by and through the historical persistence and essential ruling capacities of the perdurable Chinese state. In its basic thrust, then, tianxia weigong is a form of timelessness that is not transformative but preservative: it is intended to preserve a Chinese statecultural norm/essence as an ideal that is in danger of disappearing under the onslaught of modernization/imperialism. It evokes for this preservative mission an enduring “spirit” embodied in and by the transhistorical Chinese state. It is to this ahistorical abstraction of State that the gong (public, everyone, not-state) pertains.18 That is, the gong in this phrase is also a pure ahistorical abstraction: not formed by the State, nor informed by its historical becoming in particular struggle relational to the State, but rather an ontological given. It is the public/ the social as a thing not a processual or historical relation. Not only are the State and the “everyone” (public, society) enduringly abstract but the wei (为, for/for the purpose of) is also a generalized rather than an historicized principle. As mobilized in this phrase, wei is purposively unidirectional. In its connection to its original roots in the fourth-century BCE philosopher Mozi’s thought, it retains the sense that all activity, in order to be considered moral or ethical or socially meaningful, needs to make a selfless contribution to the stability of the state. The ahistorical and timelessly transhistorical pro-statist principle as purely distilled in this phrase thus is particularly suited to being placed on the arched entrances to Sun Zhongshan’s various tombs and memorials. However, as a form of idealized sociopolitical relations, it could not be further from Mao’s materialist contingency of politicized mass revolutionary necessity.

为人民服务/Wei renmin fuwu: Serve the People In China’s official historiographical understanding, “serve the people” is primarily an ideal ethical demand and injunction. It is a demand for pure selflessness and individual sacrifice, ideally through death, for the revolutionary collective. As “serve the people” became incantatory during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), its prescriptive and inscriptive scope narrowed to the sole demand to “wholly and entirely .  .  . live or die for the people.”19 While the modifying “wholly and entirely” (quanxin quanyi, 全心全意) was a later addition (1945) to the basic (1944) phrase, by the time of the Cultural Revolution, this attitudinal directive as well as the narrowing of the definition of “service” to a willingness to die rather than a commitment to labor had stuck, as if original to the pronouncement.20 It is the rigid dogmatic version of the phrase and the social relations ideally produced therein and thereby that is lampooned in Yan Lianke’s scandalous novel, Serve the People, originally serialized in 2005 in a literary magazine, and then immediately banned from being published as a book for PRC distribution.21 The phrase, now

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as empty incantation, is emblazoned above many police station doorways in the PRC, and it remains visible, if now entirely unseen, in public life more generally in China today. In this ubiquity leading to invisibility, the phrase can be read as mocking rather than guiding public service. Yet, it is well to recall that when Mao spoke the phrase, on September 8, 1944, at the mass meeting to commemorate the September 5 death of Zhang Side, “serve the people” was not an already codified demand and nor did it express only an ambition for a concrete behavior abstracted in meaning for a collective. Rather and perhaps more important, it indicated a method through which the enduring and repetitive fact of human death could be wedded to the ethical imperative and materially spontaneous creation of the revolutionary unity, the people, whose lives could and would be dedicated to the realization of socialism in the present and future. That is, Mao’s injunction to “serve” must be seen as a method in the widest Marxist sense: as a “practice of theory.”22 Indeed, while the locution wei . . . fuwu [serve for . . .] had been used in a more limited sense by Mao in his 1942 speeches on literature and culture—the Yan’an Talks—when he proposed that the purpose of socialist culture was “to serve the masses” (wei dazhong fuwu, 为大众服务), this directive was part of the definition of “popularization” or “massification” of literature, a way to make the cultural sphere speak to and of, as well as to form and transform the rural Chinese context in which it was embedded in Yan’an.23 It was initially through the discursive and material process of promoting the welding of cultural production as a form of abstract intellectual labor—in the sense of a social ontology (Lukács)24—to the very historical materialist meaning of revolutionary culture in China that “service” came to be elevated to the pinnacle of socialist expectation as a creative principle. With the Zhang Side eulogy, this principle was expanded and deepened to speak to the production not only of the masses as a cultural core of socialist life but of the people-as-unity who were the objects and subjects of revolution and indeed history itself. Thus, while in the Yan’an Talks there is still a plausible separation between intellectuals—culture producers—and the masses they are culturally producing in the name of the revolution, in “Serve the People,” the objects and subjects of service have merged into the same revolutionary productive process: one is to become properly part of the renmin (人民, revolutionary people) by serving and being worthy of being served. “To serve” here becomes a concrete abstraction: both indifferent to space/time and also productive of a determinative space/time.25 This becomes more evident when we take the component parts of the locution apart and delve more deeply into the particular as well as general valences of the phrase. “To serve”—which, in its compound linguistic form of fuwu (服务) is relatively new in Chinese—in the first instance pertains and appeals to a kind of enduring history different from and yet made to engage with a socialist one. That is, even while “the people” is a peculiarly revolutionary conceptual formulation that is as spontaneously political as it is specific to the socialist era, the durational “service” modifies and is embedded through the spontaneous creation of the “people” in very specific ways. How do the two temporalities of the enduringly



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persistent and the momentously revolutionary form and formulate a historical moment shaped through and by the proscriptive and prescriptive socialist task? To properly explore this question we must go back. First, a caution: this glance back is not intended to suggest that the Chinese language is a linguistic prison house; to the contrary, it is intended to suggest that the live audience for this eulogy, especially in Mao’s time in the Yan’an gathering where the phrase as a political imperative was given its first full airing, would have had reference to some or all of the sociolinguistic resonances noted below as part of their everyday life.26 In this sense, the backward glance is less philological than socially philosophical; the audience would not have had the textual sources to hand, but they would have had the lived experiences to which the texts point fully engrained within their everyday lives. An important textual and experiential history to the injunction “to serve”—as an ethic and also as a form of labor—resides in filiality. The textual locus classicus for filial service comes in the Confucian analects, Book 2.8. After the statement, “The duties of filial piety must be performed with a cheerful countenance,” the following explication occurs: 子夏問孝。子曰：“色難。有事，弟子服其勞；有酒食，先生饌，曾是以 爲孝乎？ Zixia wenxiao. Zi yue: “Se nan. Youshi, dizi fuqilao; you jiuyan, xiansheng zhuan, cengshi yiwei xiao hu?” Zi Xia asked about filial piety. The Master says, “What is important is the expression you show in your face. You should not understand ‘filial’ to mean merely the young doing physical tasks for their parents, or giving them food and wine when it is available.”27

In other words (and mine is not a reading informed by deep familiarity with the huge tradition of classical commentary on this passage), service is a form of labor (服其劳, fuqilao) that must be expended with the proper expression or countenance (se, 色). Here, then, labor-as-service or service-as-labor is not merely the adequate performance of an atomized task but rather its performance with an “expression” appropriately commensurate to the project of creating or (re) producing stable social relations. Labor is an embedded form of social relation, here, in filial terms, named service. For Confucius and the tradition that follows from his teachings, the social relations sought after through the appropriate acts of labor in its service form were those defined by and through the family, understood as the performance of hierarchical filiality: when a father acts like a father then a son must act like a son, for example. By contrast, of course, the desired social relations in Mao’s China were intended to produce a very different social formation altogether: one defined by and through egalitarianism and social equality in a pointed counterpoint to the hierarchies of the Confucian past and the semicolonial global capitalist inequities of China’s midcentury present. So Mao, whose knowledge and mobilization of the classics was constantly and seamlessly incorporated into his revolutionary theorizing, integrated

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the expectation of “countenance” (se, 色) into what came to be known in Mao Zedong Thought as “attitude” (taidu, 态度), to create a new meaning for “service.” This is clear through his citation of Sima Qian, the ancient historian. On the one hand, while in Chinese “tradition”—in Sima Qian or Xun Zi, both favorites of Mao’s in citational practice—patterns of history are seen as repeatable (giving rise to the fixed Sinological idea that Chinese time is cyclical and not progressive), nevertheless, in Mao’s usage, the major flow of historical time was certainly not cyclical, nor was it merely from the past to the present or from the present to the future. Rather, in Mao’s historicity, time flowed from a predicated future to the present and the past. In this instance, for Mao, service properly rendered in the present with the attitude appropriate to the predicated socialist future will have created the conditions not for the mutually binding reproduction of hierarchical social relations, but rather for the social possibility of their undoing. At the same time, it will have provided the possibility to reread the past in a predicated socialist future light. In this regard, in Mao’s speech, the meaning of labor/service (or sacrifice) is historically contextualized and determined, a historicity dependent on the individual attitude of the performer and the moment of her performance as well as the historical predicate of such acts. Here, attitude becomes particularly political. Specifically, Mao says, “People die, yet the meaning of their deaths is variable” (ren zongyao side, dan si de yiyi youbutong/人总要死的，但死的意义有不同). How is one to understand the historical meaning of death? The reference to Sima Qian carries the correct mode for determining the answer to this question: the meaning of the death can be heavy or light depending on the dialectical relation between personal intention/countenance/expression (attitude) and the historical situation. From that principle, Mao derives the concrete meaning of the moment in which the sacrifice (service) occurs: in the eulogy, to die for the benefit (liyi, 利益) of the people (renmin, 人民) is as weighty as Mount Tai, whereas to die on behalf of fascism, exploitation, or oppression is featherlight. The signifying contrast between “the people” as a revolutionary concept, whose equality of benefit is created while it is being secured, and “fascism/exploitation/oppression” as its opposite, is thus established. This provides the historical specificity required to materially produce the particular moment and meaning of Zhang Side’s death, both as an enduring and iconically repeatable essence and a specific temporal principle pertaining to the historicity of producing revolutionary necessity. Hence, while the people (renmin, 人民) will have been created—as a predicated future perfect—as revolutionary, they will have created and led that revolution through service rendered to one another, as masters (zhurenweng, 主人翁) shaping and realizing their own histories.28 The enduring temporality of service is thus thoroughly hitched to the ongoing and repetitively creative labor of the people as a revolutionary unity in the making. By drawing on the resonant filiality of “service” as a lived everyday of peasant life, Mao is able to redirect it toward entirely other, more egalitarian, and revolutionary social and political goals. Alongside the filial, then, there are other possible resonances of the concept of service (fuwu, 服务) that Mao’s articulation may have recalled to his audience, if not consciously then as a political and social unconscious. Yet, as with the altered filial



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version, whatever popular resonances the call to service had, we may be sure that Mao’s usage completely reconfigured the meaning. Among the other possible resonances: (1) In the early twentieth century, the anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen (何殷震) had launched a totalizing critique of the Chinese sociopolitical and textualscholarly traditions. In the course of her 1908 essay “On the Revenge of Women” (女子复仇论) she had already noted how fu (妇), one part of a compound word for “woman” (funv, 妇女), had long since come to be glossed as fu (服), the word for service. That is, as she argued, concealed in the lived Confucian social relation named woman (fu, 妇) was always already the social expectation of service (fu, 服). This woman-as-service is a relation of familial hierarchical social reproduction: it reproduces the gendered social hierarchy of and in the family. It names and perpetuates an enduring and endlessly reproduced form of gendered social subordination. This form of socially expected family-embedded gendered subordination would have been quite familiar to any Chinese audience at mid-century (and beyond). (2) Slightly earlier even than He-Yin Zhen, in the 1870s, the two components fu (服) and wu (务) had been conjoined for the first time by Christian missionaries. This new compound word— fuwu (服务)—was their translation into Chinese of the Christian ideal of human service to God and the divine. It appeared first in an 1873 issue of the foreign-owned Shanghaibased journal Shenbao (申报)29 and continued in this Christian usage thereafter. While it is unlikely that among Mao’s peasant audience in Yan’an there were many Christians (if any), it is not unlikely that this idea of service had already entered the language and speech of the area by 1944. (3) The first appearance of fuwu (服务) in its secular usage seems to come in Sun Zhongshan’s series of lectures entitled “Three Principles of the People” (sanmin zhuyi, 三民主义). In the third of the lectures, on popular sovereignty (minquan zhuyi, 民权主义), delivered and refined in the early 1920s, Sun raises and discusses the ideal relation between “everyone” (renren, 人人) and the state in terms of “service” (fuwu). Here, in Sun, the undifferentiated “everyone” (unlike Mao’s renmin, who are specifically revolutionary) and the state should work in harmony toward a stable social ideal. The rearticulated republican ideal of a state-everyone harmony might have been vaguely familiar to a Yan’an audience; certainly, the call for “service” to the state would have resonated widely. In each of these non-Maoist cases, fuwu (服务, service) is mobilized in the form of a sociopolitical hierarchy intended to reproduce unequal social relations. Mao’s purpose in mobilizing and stretching the concept can be seen as an attempt to socially reshape the expectation of service into a different and more equal social form. It is quite evident, then, that at the same time as the eulogy extols the merits of a soldier who died in the course of the anti-Japanese war, the text is already looking forward to the end of the war against Japan and to the coming civil conflict between the CCP and GMD. As Tony Saich, historian of the CCP, notes, by July 1944

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internal CCP directives clearly demonstrate a feeling that the war against Japan was winding down. Much of the organizing in the CCP-held base areas from this point onwards was thus aimed both at transforming rural society into ideological and military bastions of socialism in preparation for the civil conflict to come, and, at the same time, establishing urban work plans that would provide guidance for the expansion of the CCP from its rural northwestern bases into cities. Part of the former plan included the expansion of the popular education movements focused on literacy and economic skills. Thus, the 1944 slogan “develop production, expand the schools” was not merely a technocratic problem of management, but rather—as with “serve the people”—it functioned as an ideological imperative to “overcome barriers between mental and manual labor, to unite thought and action, to bring together those who worked with their hands and those who worked with their minds.”30 Thus, “to serve the people” in 1944 was not only about honoring the dead but also about creating the ideological social conditions necessary to bring together the revolutionary forces needed to secure the future. This creation of revolutionary unity brings us back to temporalities and historicity, abstraction and concreteness. That is, we cannot treat the problem of unity only in a sociological sense of class alliance, where each ready-made constituent part of society occupies its proper place. Rather, unity is a socio-ideological problem of producing through class alliance the possibility for a new social formation altogether. Mao’s “serve the people” calls exactly for this practice of theory, which is the realm of politics, or the realm of the futurity whose glance back toward the present calls into being the necessity for an ethical form of social relations in the here and now. Entirely unlike Sun Zhongshan’s tianxia weigong (天下为公), the perfect expression of that political desire to ahistorically reproduce the statist-culturalist unity of a putatively one “China,” and also unlike any Confucian notion of fuqilao (服其劳, filial service), aimed at transhistorically reproducing a social hierarchy where everyone occupies and performs their allotted social place, Mao’s “serve the people” names the revolutionary political and social unity as the historically mandated form of ethical social activity in the now and for the prospective future. The imperative to serve is not only an injunction to properly pursue class struggle and class alliance but, in addition and perhaps more important, it is an imperative to create out of the contingent historical moment marked by the spontaneity of “the people” as a revolutionary force a potential to realize an abstract revolutionary unity that, because never free of actual conflict would also and always be a concrete politics.

Conclusion In conclusion, “serve the people” names a revolutionary principle that can only be realized daily in the living labor of the people and in the commemorating of death by those left behind. It is not a procedural plebiscite or referendum, as Ernest Renan had it for nationalism in the 1880s, nor is it the expression of an imagined community.31 Even less is it a freeze-frame endlessly reproduced in the name of the preservation of the ahistorical State through social stability, harmony,



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or stasis, as with Sun Zhongshan’s tradition of state-cultural synthesis. Nor was it destined to be merely a merchandisable cliché for today’s kitsch market. Rather, in its Maoist instantiation, “serve the people” indicated a form of affective and productive labor that was both transformatively concrete and ethically abstract. Only in that dialectic could it help inform the revolutionary people so as to create a different kind of history altogether. It is in this sense that the temporality of a prospective socialist future requires a new way of thinking history and the past, not as a problem of sacred salvation but as a problem of organizing social time anew.32 This temporality produces the politics of the collective present and future even as it announces the irreducible specificity of the political (Figure 12.1). In the injunction “to serve”—where the affective labor of love (of the party for the people, for example) mixes with the labor of realizing “benefit” (liyi, 利益)—the non-correspondence of China’s primarily agrarian social structure with a socialist objective is rendered into the dynamic condition of possibility for revolutionary actualization. Indeed, as Marxist theorist Daniel Bensaïd has observed, revolution “never occurs in the present” because it is “always too soon and too late.”33 Revolution always demands a mingling of times even as it must be made in this time. In 1944, in China, in the context of the global war against fascism and, on the horizon, an impending civil war that would violently clarify whose history was serving for whom, Mao Zedong’s “serve the people” is an exemplary socialist text. Due to its superficial simplicity and directness, soon enough it became a symptom of much that was wrong with actually existing socialism in

Figure 12.1  The Hungarian-made motorcycle “Iron Man Wang [Jinxi]” rode in the Daqing oil fields in the 1960s. “Iron Man Wang” was a Mao-era model worker. The oil tank is inscribed, in Mao’s calligraphy, with the political injunction, “Serve the People.” The motorcycle is on display at the Wang Jinxi Memorial Hall in Daqing. Photo by Maggie Clinton.

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China: the rigid dogmatism against which Mao originally fought but to which he eventually succumbed. And yet, as a product of its particular time and in its simultaneous timeliness and timelessness, the underlying complexity of the text as a living document alerts us to the possibility of retrieving concrete abstraction as a practice of revolutionary theory in the making of a history that could be universal, not because ideally immanent to itself (the Hegelian version), but because socially immanent to the world in which it could be thought and actually practiced. This is the text’s politics of possibility; this is its possibility of politics.

Notes 1 I thank John Munro, Xiaoping Sun, and Kirrily Freeman for inviting me to participate in the Textual Turning Point conference in October 2017, for which a first version of this essay was written. The conference attendees were generous with their insights and comments. I am grateful to Angela Zito for discussing filiality with me and to Tani Barlow for commenting on a draft of the essay. In addition, I presented versions of this at Hong Kong Polytechnic University—invited by Brian Tsui—where the audience was extremely helpful on the question of “service”; at Huanan Normal University—invited by Teng Wei—where students were curious about Mao and Xi Jinping; and at NYUShanghai, where I was engaged on multiple levels of historical analysis. I am grateful to everyone for their energy, time, erudition, and contributions. Thanks to Maggie Clinton for the trip to Daqing and the motorcycle picture. 2 The three “constantly read articles” (lao sanpian老三篇) included the one in memory of Norman Bethune, the Canadian surgeon who, after service in the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, became a constant presence in Yan’an until his death in 1939; and another entitled “The Foolish Old Man who Removed the Mountains” that recasts a legend of foolishness into an enabling myth of self-reliance. These three articles—all short—became by the early 1960s, and into the Cultural Revolution, compulsory reading for elementary school children and mandatory recitation materials for the general population. Most Chinese of a certain age who grew up in the PRC can still recite these pieces from memory, as several friends demonstrated when I told them the topic of this essay. 3 The concept of a concrete abstraction derives from Marx’s discussion of the value form. I thank Benjamin Kindler for his discussion of this point. 4 The phrase tianxia weigong is much contested in its translation into English. There are many translations of tianxia (all under heaven; metaphysical human life; the world; the one world; and so on), of gong (the public; everyone; humanity; all; community; and so on), and even of the conjunction wei (an empty word indicating directionality; for; belonging to; and so on). The phrase is emblazoned on Sun Zhongshan’s mausoleum in Nanjing as well as in Taipei; it is on the entranceway arches to many Chinatowns in the United States and Europe; it has become an all-purpose rallying cry to a nonsocialist cosmopolitanism in the past couple decades; at the same time, tianxia has become the Chinese state’s desired mode of expressing the new-old centrality of China to global affairs. In these ways, tianxia weigong encapsulates an entirely different form of history and the historical than does wei renmin fuwu. (I thank a very well-timed phone conversation with Tani Barlow, marooned in Houston during Hurricane Harvey, who suggested that I bring Sun’s phrase into my discussion of Mao’s text.)



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5 Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 123. 6 Huang Ren (黄仁), Enduring Megastars of Chinese and Foreign Film (中外电影永远的巨星) (Taipei: Xiuwei chuban, 2010), 58. 7 Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945 (Oakland: University of California Press, 1994), 120. 8 Hung, Popular Culture, 120. 9 Yingchi Chu, Chinese Documentaries: From Dogma to Polyphony (London: Routledge, 2007). 10 For a good discussion of this trip, see Warren Tozer, “The Foreign Correspondents’ Visit to Yenan in 1944: A Reassessment,” Pacific Historical Review 41, no. 2 (May 1972): 207–24. 11 David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 131. 12 See Tozer, “Foreign Correspondents,” 214–15. 13 CCTV report: https://youtu.be/ZsCrplJhzw4 (accessed September 12, 2017). 14 See Florence Graezer Bideau, La danse du yangge: Culture et politique dans la Chine du XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2012), 96–100. 15 David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 289–94. Hung, War and Popular Culture, 231. 16 Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong, “Introduction to the English Translation,” Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 19491966, ed. Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), xvii. 17 There was a conference at Stanford in 2011 on tianxia, in which several of these views—Duara’s and Dai’s—were expounded upon. See the next note for more. 18 For a concentrated version of this, in the present, see “Editorial: The Heritage of T’ien-hsia, All-Under-Heaven,” China Heritage Quarterly no. 19 (September 2009). The Quarterly consciously appeals to the 1935 inaugural issue of the Tianxia yuekan (天下月刊, Tianxia Monthly) and indeed includes a tab under which relevant tianxia/t’ien-hsia excerpts from the Monthly are printed. The Quarterly is supported by the writing of such figures as Geremie Barme, who advocates what he calls a “new Sinology” that repositions a non-Communist China-ideal as a potential for a future center of the world. Many Chinese intellectuals, including formerly critical intellectuals such as Stanford’s Wang Ban, have flocked to the rearticulation of tianxia/t’ien-hsia as a China-centered cosmopolitan ideal. 19 “Study ‘Serve the People,’” Peking Review 10, no. 2 (January 6, 1967): 9–13. Originally published in Jiefangjun bao [PLA Daily], November 30, 1966. 20 “Wholly and entirely” was added in an April 1945 report to the CCP about the prospective postwar coalition government. In this speech, Mao is exhorting Communists to distinguish themselves from Nationalists in their willingness to “wholly and entirely serve the people.” Mao Zedong, “论联合政府” (“On a coalition government”) in Mao Zedong Xuanji (毛泽东选集) 3, 1029–1100. 21 Yan Lianke, Serve the People, trans. Julia Lovell (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2008). 22 Stavros Tombazos, Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s Capital (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2014), 310. 23 Mao Zedong, Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature. See https​://ww​w.mar​ xists​.org/​refer​ence/​archi​ve/ma​o/sel​ected​-work​s/vol​ume-3​/mswv​3_08.​htm (accessed August 2017).

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24 Georg Lukács, “The Dialectic of Labor: Beyond Causality and Teleology,” Telos (Fall 1970): 162–74. To be clear, a social ontology is quite different from an ontology of the social. 25 This derives from an analogous point raised in a talk by Alberto Toscano at Columbia University on January 26, 2012. 26 See Frederic Jameson, The Prisonhouse of Language (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 27 Charles Muller’s translation: http:​//www​.acmu​ller.​net/c​on-da​o/ana​lects​.html​#div-​3 (accessed August 31, 2017). 28 There is, of course, quite a bit of contemporary scholarship in China that disputes any aspect of this idealism. For example, the scholar Ren Bumei rejects any hint that Mao was anything other than a despot and tyrant; for him, the logic of “serve the people” could only have been “serve Mao himself.” See Ren Bumei, “Xueshu shiye zhongde Mao Zedong sixiang” [学术界中的毛泽东思想 Mao Zedong’s Thought from an Academic Perspective],” Available online: http://bmzy.126.com (accessed August 2017). 29 I am indebted to my audience at Hong Kong Polytechnic in April 2018 for raising this question and proposing Christianity as a source for the compound term, and to Lydia Liu for finding the reference for me. 30 Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China, 1st edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 271. 31 Ernest Renan, “What is a nation?” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 8–22; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). 32 Some of the points here derive from my reading of Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory Eliott (New York: Verso, 2002), 69–94. 33 Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times, 89.

CONCLUSION John Munro

“Hell,” it was first said on a Paris stage that May, “is other people.”1 And given all that had happened and all that was yet to come, it was an understandable sentiment. No Exit’s theatrical popularization of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism struck a chord, unsurprisingly, in light of the daily struggle for scarce necessities for those still living under Nazi occupation in the French capital, the barbarism the war had given license to, and fears of what the future would bring. Just as Dialectic of Enlightenment lent itself, as Michael D’Arcy shows in Chapter 2 of this volume, to readings that emphasized Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s alleged pessimism, Sartre’s misery-is-company drama bolstered claims that existentialism was more doctrine of doom than theory of radical freedom. In 1944, pessimistic accounts of both intellect and will were not exclusive to philosophical writing, as Billy Wilder’s film Double Indemnity, the product of another German exile in Hollywood, attested to. But beyond the existence of competing interpretations of all of these texts, if the future-oriented visions produced that year had to be summed up in a word, “pessimism” and “optimism” would be likely contenders. In this conclusion, I will dwell a little on the circulation of these two feelings, both of which motivated and gave texture to wartime thoughts of the future, before turning to the structures of power that provided their context. Like the Enlightenment, existentialism was not an entirely European invention. In fact, the very same month that No Exit came to the Parisian stage, at Egypt’s King Faud University, an audience of hundreds turned out to witness philosopher Abd al-Rahman Badawi defend a dissertation on existentialism which helped, as historian Yoav Di-Capua puts it, process “the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre into an entirely new intellectual tradition that was European in origin and Middle Eastern by design.”2 After the war, Heidegger’s ideas would be introduced in France, where they were to have a considerable influence on Michel Foucault among others, in large part through the efforts of Sartre.3 But in 1944, the German philosopher resigned his rectorate position at the University of Freiburg and, despite his consistently pro-Nazi stance, had been called up to help build fortifications along the Rhine as part of the Volkssturm militia.4 The success of the D-Day landings in June made thoughts of the future all the more difficult in Germany where, tellingly, the escapist comedy film Die Feuerzangenbowle was one of the more notable texts of 1944. For those who chose to look, the writing on the wall was already visible before the year began. Stalingrad had been decided

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in February of 1943, and in that battle’s wake, Joseph Goebbels’s call for total war and Heinrich Himmler’s order that murder-scene evidence in the form of 700,000 buried Jewish bodies at Treblinka be exhumed and cremated exemplified an awareness of Nazism’s reversed fortunes.5 The dawning of such realizations did not, of course, mean a cessation of the murders. As Kirrily Freeman points out at the end of this book’s introduction, the willful foreclosing of so, so many futures in 1944 was one of the year’s most abominable and consequential legacies. If escapism, itself an ideologically complex proposition, was not difficult to detect in German movie houses, it could readily be found elsewhere too.6 An “escapist focus,” Rebecca Karl observes in Chapter 12, also “fit the 1944 cinematic mold” in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong.7 What a contrast to Mao Zedong’s notion that “serving the people” would create the conditions of social possibility through which a socialist future could come into being. And yet, despite the fact that 1944 arrived with a downsized defense perimeter for the Japanese empire following defeats at Midway, Guadalcanal, and the Marshall Islands, within Japan itself, as Chikako Nagayama’s discussion of Akira Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful in Chapter 7 reveals, film could certainly do more than enlist audience support for martial mobilization. Joy and sorrow competed with pessimism to define the mood of the moment. So did hope. The liberation of Sartre’s Paris was, as Rebecca Karl also indicates, subject to extensive newspaper coverage across China. The circulation and contestation of pessimism and optimism were, in such ways, global. But the dominant ideas and emotions of 1944 did not, as the field of global history’s attention to nation and region should predispose us to anticipate, flow freely across war-torn borders and continents.8 They were connected to and constrained by structures of power, of which I will consider three in what remains of this conclusion: race, empire, and economics. The coinage in 1944 of one of the postwar world’s most consequential concepts marks but one of many possible places to begin when thinking about race and racism in that year. Writing in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and indeed waiting until the last chapter of the book’s first part to explain his neologism, legal theorist Raphael Lemkin described as “genocide” eight techniques that German occupiers deployed against Jewish communities across Europe.9 Ranging from political and cultural destruction to physical killing, Lemkin’s definition was wide in scope and, as future research in the field of genocide studies came to demonstrate, implications.10 His generative scholarship also opened a window onto some of the horrific backdrop to the work that faced the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in its attempt to aid those who lost everything, including the rights of the citizen, as Suzanne Langlois takes up in Chapter 8. Often remembered as a sui generis innovation that encapsulated the idealist internationalism of its moment, UNRRA applied lessons learned in the course of interwar and wartime relief efforts to the problem of people without a place, even if the Second World War produced human suffering on such a scale and severity as to overwhelm the imagination.11 In these circumstances, Franz Kafka, whose earlier literary meditations on the legal fictions and lived realities

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of placelessness caught Hannah Arendt’s sustained attention in 1944, had become, then and since, a particularly relevant moral guide.12 For its part, Axis Rule also conveyed something of the stakes involved in the writing of Story of a Secret State, by Lemkin’s fellow Pole Jan Karski.13 While Lemkin’s situation as a Jewish exile was different than that of Karski the Catholic diplomat, both found themselves in the United States by 1944—Karski after several hair-raising intelligence gathering missions into the Warsaw Ghetto and a transit camp on the way to Bełżec—and each used their books of 1944 to raise the alarm about fascism’s crimes.14 It was no coincidence that the United States to which Lemkin and Karski arrived, shaped as it was by centuries-long foundations of racial slavery and settler colonialism, was, like the county from which they had fled, a site of racism’s terrors. Some of Nazism’s direct inspiration had been drawn from the United States, but perhaps more fundamental were shared, underlying racial logics.15 Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe puts the matter memorably: “Slavery’s brutal arithmetics are precursive to those of the Holocaust.”16 In 1944, no one had thought more deeply about such connections than had W. E. B. Du Bois. His subsequent reflections on wartime mass racial violence within Europe entrenched his global understanding of white supremacy, and in 1952 Du Bois would pen an article for Jewish Life entitled “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto.”17 As was his habit, Du Bois’s transnational perspective did not distract him from the specific dynamics of anti-Black racism in the United States. His contribution to What the Negro Wants, as Chike Jeffers convincingly explains in Chapter 10, concluded that neither speedy nor straightforward dismantlement of white supremacy would feature in any realistic reading of the postwar future. The future indeed proved the prescience of Du Bois’s analysis, based as it was on a deep reading of the past. The Reconstruction experiment in abolition democracy that followed the US Civil War was one of the most significant events in the history that Du Bois had carefully studied. In his words, Reconstruction’s defeat and the restoration of lethal, overt white supremacy in the US South meant that the following decades constituted an “age of triumph for Big Business, for Industry, consolidated and organized on a worldwide scale, and run by white capital with colored labor.”18 But Reconstruction, as Du Bois’s monumental study of 1935 had already shown, also offered a usable and inspirational past in the arc of the Black freedom struggle. Novelist Howard Fast was one anti-racist who was inspired by that past and by Du Bois’s Depression-era interpretation of it. Freedom Road looked unflinchingly at the barbarity that accompanied Reconstruction’s overthrow, and still, as Alan Wald contends in Chapter 11, in emphasizing militant resistance, the novel was also “‘a weapon’ aimed to alter the future.” Fast and Du Bois shared more than an insistence on Reconstruction’s democratic and revolutionary nature; their focus on white supremacy and capitalism’s entanglement went against the grain of economist Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 American Dilemma and its nationally circumscribed argument that white attitude adjustments might suffice to usher racism out of the United States.19 If racism was intrinsic to US capitalism, it was also mediated through law and the state. In Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the legality

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of mass removal and internment of Japanese Americans, thus demonstrating that while anti-Black racism had specific contours, it did not stand alone. The Court’s decision also maintained a fictional but enduring rhetorical separation between racism and national security that would, over seven decades later, justify the Court’s support in Trump v. Hawaii for travel bans from selected nations in North Africa and the Middle East.20 Being an election year, 1944 was also a big one for the US state. Given the integral role of Southern Democrats within that party’s coalition, and the president’s popularity as leader through depression and war, the safe money was always on the continued dominance of Jim Crow and Franklin Roosevelt. And yet this was also a moment of political reorientation, as Katherine Jewell makes clear in Chapter 9. The New Deal had altered the relationship between citizen and state, and the Democratic Party’s 1944 platform sought to cement that closer relationship while preparing the populace for a global rendezvous with destiny into the future’s longer term. Put differently, 1944 marked a pivotal moment in the history of US empire. The Democrats who gathered in Chicago for their National Convention were not alone in helping shape the transnational shifts in imperial relations intensified by world war. Guatemalan Juan José Arévalo overthrew US client Jorge Ubico in 1944, presenting a clear challenge to Washington. But given that both Arévalo and Ubico’s supporters took considerable political inspiration from Spain and the opposing sides in its by-then concluded civil war demonstrate the irreducibility of Guatemala’s transnational history to its imperial relations with the United States.21 Here, as elsewhere, empire was important, as well as imbricated with other dynamics. In Jamaica, colonial authorities granted universal suffrage in time for the election of 1944, this right being a victory for earlier labor rebellion and representing an important step on the road to formal independence.22 When women got the vote in Martinique that same year, intellectual and activist Paulette Nardal formed a Women’s Assembly, which amplified a feminist politics on the eve of the age of decolonization.23 Writing on the selfsame island with words that would impact French imperial thought, Aimé Césaire advocated for the indispensable value of poetic knowledge in his 1944 essay “Poetry and Knowledge.”24 Across the Atlantic, events in Brazzaville and Thiaroye, documented in detail by Sarah Frank in Chapter 4, demonstrated that Gaullist inclinations toward colonial reform were clearly and narrowly circumscribed. In the British empire, the late-career efforts of Frank Lugard Brayne gave further evidence that by 1944, imperial elites could sense the coming wind of change. Both of Brayne’s publications examined in Chapter 5 by Radhika Natarajan further revealed how colonially derived notions of community development, whether with an eye to the African continent or Indian subcontinent, were able to peer ahead to the postcolonial world. But both the suzerains and the subaltern “abject objects of development” they saw there looked a lot like those of formal imperialism. In ways that would have been hard for men like Brayne and de Gaulle to comprehend, by 1944, the decolonization of the metropole itself was already underway.25 One important aspect of this complex process was the revision of scholarship and even of what counted as knowledge production. Enter Eric

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Williams. In a classic if underappreciated essay, the great Cedric Robinson argued that what accounts for the long line of Capitalism and Slavery’s detractors has had less to do with the particulars of the past and more with what the book implied about the continuities between profit accumulation during and after slavery. In Chapter 6, Ajay Parasram picks up on just this idea, on how Capitalism and Slavery’s “critical insight into the normative, historical, and political struggles of formal decolonization in the West Indies in 1944,” not to mention the postwar future, is what made the book so contentious. Indeed, as political theorist Adom Getachew has argued, the book was among a group of classics which “rewrote the history of African enslavement in service of the impending anticolonial revolutions in the black world.”26 At the same time, no book can critique every condition that made it possible, and as Parasram argues, an insufficiently antiempiricist anti-imperialism will equip a given critic to undermine only so many of empire’s foundations. Though Williams was the only one to include the word in his title, the texts under discussion throughout this volume concern themselves in one way or another with capitalism. Which brings us, of course, to Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi. Their perspectives clashed, to borrow Radhika Desai’s apt metaphor from Chapter 1 of this volume, in titanic fashion, even if the sound of their collision has become muffled since 1944. The gist of The Road to Serfdom’s diatribe against planning and The Great Transformation’s lament for markets embedded within social relations are widely known. Due in no small measure to the influence of John Maynard Keynes and his predecessors, both Hayek and Polanyi staged their arguments in a setting which offered no return to the nineteenth-century nostrums of economic liberalism’s past.27 What neither author could have predicted in 1944 was the influence that their books were to have on the future. Initially turned down by three presses, Hayek’s book was ultimately taken on by the University of Chicago Press in the editor’s hope that with an introduction written by a better known author, it might sell a thousand copies or so.28 But successful it was, and Hayek’s contemporaries were quick to respond. Motivated by a “politics deeply concerned with the survival and preservation of Christian civilization in Britain,” T. S. Eliot, as Luke Foster argues in Chapter 3, reproved Hayek’s liberal economic enthusiasms from the right. From the social democratic left, as Or Rosenboim’s work has shown, sociologist Barbara Wootton’s Freedom Under Planning had Hayek’s theses about planning’s alleged economic inefficiencies and abridged liberties in its sights within a year.29 In time, the endurance of Serfdom’s influence and its rendering of moral and political questions as individual economic ones was best represented by Margaret Thatcher, and in turn best encapsulated by Stuart Hall, who noted how the prime minister “grasped intuitively Hayek’s argument that the ‘common good’ either did not exist or could not be calculated.”30 If Serfdom was initially a surprise hit, Transformation was the sleeper. Desai notes that Polanyi, unlike his Viennese counterpart, was marginalized after the war. But Polanyi’s arguments of 1944 were, like those of Keynes, very much alive in the long run. In its insistence on industrialization’s role in “disembedding” market from society, Transformation influenced both E. P. Thompson and James Scott.31

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More recently, its effect can be found in feminist political economy, Indigenous political theory, ethnic studies, and in diagnoses of contemporary populism.32 Both Serfdom and Transformation have had an undeniably wide influence. Nonetheless, in terms of 1944 and the history of capitalism, it was perhaps the conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire that mattered most. Sustaining the coloniality of Western neoliberalism, culminating some of the proposals for international economic cooperation debated and discussed by Mexican officials since the Depression began, and inaugurating the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the meeting symbolized the financial transfer of power from the UK to the US.33 It also created a system that, as Quinn Slobodian explains, “realized parts of the neoliberal dream while also deviating radically in other ways.” That is, Bretton Woods provided a framework for capitalist finance and development at the global scale, but allowed national governments more autonomy than neoliberals would have liked, especially when decolonization was before long to add a good number of new nations to the planet’s roster.34 The many texts written up at Bretton Woods must be counted among those that saw 1944 shape the decades to come. Between Howard Fast’s road to freedom and the one that led to freedom for capital in Friedrich Hayek’s writing, there was more than one possible future that might have followed the war. Between moods of pessimism and optimism, and among analyses of race, empire, and economics, there was certainly a profusion of visions produced in 1944, the impact of which was discernible as well as difficult to measure. As this volume has endeavored to demonstrate, texts teach us much about history, especially when their analysis is informed by the lessons of transnational intellectual history.35 Some of those lessons that Reading the Postwar Future takes to heart include thinking expansively about terms like “text” and “intellectual” and keeping intellectual history in conversation with interdisciplinary analyses of politics, economics, race, and culture.36 Doing so connects the important ideas found within books to that which lies outside of the text, while continuing to ask just what constitutes a text in the first place. Some of the texts of 1944 were really of their time, others had greater staying power, and still others appear to speak directly to our moment. George Cukor’s film Gaslight, and not least Ingrid Bergman’s performance within it, falls into the latter category, but no more than does Charles White’s painting Headlines. White depicted the vibrancy and multiplicity of Black life in the United States in paintings and murals during the decades now often periodized by historians as the “long civil rights movement,” and his entire oeuvre remains very relevant today.37 But with its featured subject’s anxious face, set against a backdrop of newspaper clippings announcing antisemitism, anti-Black racism, and how fascism divides the working class, the painting speaks to the awful power of lies, the violence of white racism, and the overwhelming pace of incoming information. White’s artistry called attention to the realities of life in 1944 that demanded action toward a different future, thus compelling viewers to conceive of what theorist Tina Campt has called “a future that hasn’t yet happened but must.”38 Seventy-five years later, we find ourselves living in a future that in many ways seems to have either returned to or remained in White’s present. Headlines also offered a critical

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assessment of No Exit’s famous last line: the painting suggests in its way that hell is not simply comprised of other people, but of the behavior of certain people for whom intersecting structures of power enable individual and collective advantage. It is our hope that by thinking about the texts of 1944 as a whole, we can imagine and move ourselves to something better than the present that White’s painting so powerfully captures, and the one inundated by the too-often hellish realities brought to us by our own news screens.

Notes 1 Alan Riding, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (New York: Knopf, 2010), 221; Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life (1987; New York: New Press, 2005), 212. 2 Yoav Di-Capua, “Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (October 2012): 1061. 3 Robert Nichols, The World of Freedom: Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), especially 101. 4 Timothy O’Hagan, “Philosophy in a Dark Time: Martin Heidegger and the Third Reich,” in Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel, ed. Julien Durlant, David Fassio, and Anne Meylan (Geneva: Université de Genève, 2014), 944–60, Available online: http:​//www​ .unig​e.ch/​lettr​es/ph​ilo/p​ublic​ation​s/eng​el/li​beram​icoru​m 5 Jochen Hellbeck, Stalingrad: The City That Defeated the Third Reich (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), 12–13, 2–3. 6 Scott Spector, “Was the Third Reich Movie-Made? Interdisciplinarity and the Reframing of ‘Ideology,’” American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (April 2001): 460–84. 7 In 1944’s Romances, life in Shanghai under occupation was also rendered by one of China’s most prominent writers of the period, Aileen Chang. See Xiaojue Wang, Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 259–60; Jiwei Xiao, “Belated Reunion? Eileen Chang, Late Style and World Literature,” New Left Review 111 (May/June 2018): 89–110. 8 On global history’s entanglement with various spatial scales of analysis, see Richard Drayton and David Motadel, “The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (March 2018): 1–21. 9 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (1944; Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2005), 79–95. Also see Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 86–93. 10 See, for example, Benjamin Madley, “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods,” American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (February 2015): 98–139; Dorota Glowacka, “‘Never Forget’: Indigenous Memory of the Genocide and the Holocaust,” in Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World, ed. Shirli Gilbert and Avril Alba (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, forthcoming 2019). 11 Jessica Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of UNRRA,” Past and Present 210, Supplement 6 (2011): 258–89. 12 Lyndsey Stonebridge, Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 30–45. Also see Hadji Bakara, “Our Placeless

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13 14 15

16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26

Reading the Postwar Future Condition,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 11, 2019, Available online: https​:// la​revie​wofbo​oks.o​rg/ar​ticle​/our-​place​less-​condi​tion/​ Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World (1944; New York: Penguin, 2011). Molly Crabapple, “My Great-Grandfather the Bundist,” New York Review of Books, October 6, 2018, Available online: https​://ww​w.nyb​ooks.​com/d​aily/​2018/​10/06​/my-g​ reat-​grand​fathe​r-the​-bund​ist/ James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). There is a vigorous debate within German historiography over whether North American settler colonialism provided inspiration for Nazi expansionism. Compare, for example, Carroll P. Kakel, III, American West and Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretative Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Ostkreig and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 69. Eve Darian Smith, “Re-reading W. E. B. Du Bois: The Global Dimensions of the US Civil Rights Struggle,” Journal of Global History 7, no. 3 (November 2012): 483–505; Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 111–34. W. E. B. Du Bois, “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Rayford W. Logan (1944; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 50. Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Roderick Ferguson, “The Relational Revolutions of Antiracist Formations,” in Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice, ed. Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez Hosang, and Ramón A. Gutiérrez (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019), 86. Paul A. Kramer, “Enemies of the State,” Slate, June 29, 2018, Available online: https​ ://sl​ate.c​om/ne​ws-an​d-pol​itics​/2018​/06/t​rump-​trave​l-ban​-the-​supre​me-co​urt-h​as-lo​ ng-en​abled​-exec​utive​-powe​r-to-​discr​imina​te.ht​ml Kirsten Weld, “The Other Door: Spain and the Guatemalan Counter-Revolution, 1944-1954,” Journal of Latin American Studies (January 14, 2019), doi:10.1017/ S0022216X18001128. Colin A. Palmer, Freedom’s Children: The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Birth of Modern Jamaica (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Imabong D. Umoren, Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 76. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 264–68. “The process of decolonization,” Kennetta Hammond Perry explains, “much like that of Empire building, involved the reconfiguration of political, cultural, and racial ideologies that simultaneously implicated the colonies and the metropole.” Kennetta Hammond Perry, London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 12. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 80.

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27 On the significance of Keynes and the origins of his thought, see Geoff Mann, In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution (New York: Verso, 2017). 28 Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 41. 29 Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 162–67. 30 Stuart Hall, “The Neoliberal Revolution,” Cultural Studies 25, no. 6 (November 2011): 707. Also see Corey Robin, “Economics after Neoliberalism,” Boston Review (March 3, 2019), Available online: http:​//bos​tonre​view.​net/f​orum/​econo​mics-​after​-neol​ibera​ lism/​corey​-robi​n-uni​nstal​ling-​hayek​ 31 Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 52. 32 Nancy Fraser, “A Triple Movement? Parsing the Political Crisis after Polanyi,” New Left Review 81 (May–June 2013): 119–32; James Tully, “Reconciliation Here On Earth,” in Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler Relations and Earth Teachings, ed. Michael Asch, John Borrows, and James Tully (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 83–130; Ralph Callebert and Raji Singh Soni, “A Political Economy of the Poor People’s Campaign: From MLK to Polanyi to Trump,” Sikh Formations, October 8, 2018, Available online: https​://do​i.org​/10.1​080/1​74487​27.20​18.15​28039​; Adam Tooze, “Balancing Act,” Dissent, Fall 2018, Available online: https​://ww​w.dis​sentm​agazi​ne.or​ g/art​icle/​balan​cing-​act-c​apita​lism-​democ​racy-​globa​l-pol​itica​l-eco​nomy 33 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 196–98; Christy Thornton, ‘“Mexico had the Theories’: Latin America and the Interwar Origins of Development,” in The Development Century: A Global History, ed. Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 263–82; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 91. 34 Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 119. 35 For recent state-of-the-field collections, see Samuel Moyn and Andrew Satori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer, eds., New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018); and Raymond Haberski and Andrew Hartman, eds., American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). 36 My thinking on expansive notions of what counts as intellectual history and who counts as an intellectual is influenced by, among others, Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems,” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1980), 2–35; George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995); Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996); Denning, The Cultural Front; Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Jordan T. Camp, “Black Radicalism, Marxism, and Collective Memory: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley,” American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March 2013): 215–30; Emma Hunter, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy, and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization (New York: Cambridge

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University Press, 2015); Nick Mitchell, “Intellectual,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 86–94; Emily Rutherford, “Intellectual History from Below,” JHIBlog, May 18, 2016, Available online: https​://jh​iblog​.org/​2016/​05/18​/inte​llect​ual-h​istor​y-fro​ m-bel​ow/. Thank you to Jordan T. Camp for thinking through this question with me in the context of this concluding essay. 37 Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–63; André-Naquian Wheeler, “MoMA Is Finally Giving Legendary Black Artist Charles White His Due,” Vice Magazine, October 25, 2018, Available online: https​://ww​w.vic​e.com​/en_u​k/art​ icle/​xw9j4​q/mom​a-exh​ibiti​on-bl​ack-a​rtist​-char​les-w​hite 38 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 17.

CONTRIBUTORS Michael D’Arcy is Associate Professor of English at Saint Francis Xavier University. His publications include The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture (2016). Radhika Desai is Professor of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Group at the University of Manitoba. Her publications include Theoretical Engagements in Geopolitical Economy (2015) and Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization, and Empire (2013), and her articles have appeared in a range of scholarly and popular venues, including the Guardian and New Left Review. Luke Foster is a PhD student at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Sarah Frank is Associate Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St. Andrews and External Research Fellow with the International Studies Group, University of the Free State. Her publications include “Colonial Prisoners of War and French Civilians” (2018) and “Helping ‘Our’ Prisoners: Philanthropic Mobilization for French Colonial Prisoners of War, 1940-1942” (2016). Kirrily Freeman is Associate Professor of History at Saint Mary’s University. Her publications include Bronzes to Bullets: Vichy and the Destruction of French Public Statuary, 1940-1944 (2009). Chike Jeffers is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University. His publications include Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy (2013). Katherine Rye Jewell is Assistant Professor of History at Fitchburg State University. Her publications include Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century (2017). Rebecca E. Karl is Professor of History at New York University. Her publications include The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China (2017), Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (2010), and Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (2002).

242 Contributors

Suzanne Langlois is Associate Professor of History at Glendon College, York University. Her publications include La Résistance dans le cinéma français, 19441994 (2001). John Munro is Lecturer in United States History at the University of Birmingham. His publications include The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, 1945–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Chikako Nagayama is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities at Nagoya University. Her publications include “Women’s Desire, Heterosexual Norms and Transnational Feminism: Kitahara Minori’s ‘Good-bye Hallyu’” (2016) and “Race as Technology and Blurred National Boundaries in Japanese Imperialism” (2012). Radhika Natarajan is Assistant Professor of History at Reed College. Her publications include “Performing Multiculturalism: The Commonwealth Arts Festival of 1965” (2014). Her writing has appeared in Open Democracy UK and Public Books. Ajay Parasram is Assistant Professor of History and International Development Studies at Dalhousie University. His publications include “Orbits of Influence: The Sino-Indian Waltz in South/Southeast Asian New Regionalism” (2016) and “Postcolonial Territory and the Coloniality of the State” (2014). Alan M. Wald is Professor Emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan. His publications include American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (2012), Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (2002), Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics (1994), and The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (1987).

INDEX Adorno, Theodor  5, 7, 14, 43–52, 54–6, 58 n.33, 121–5, 231 AFL see American Federation of Labor (AFL) African Americans  7, 105, 183–97, 200–2, 205, 207, 209 African Home Library  105, 106, 108–9, 111 n.54 Africans  80, 87, 104–5, 104–9, 107–8, 113–15 Brazzaville conference and  79 in the eighteenth-century  115 enslaved  78, 115, 118, 123–5 subjectivity of  114–15, 124 After 1945 (Gumbrecht)  44 Afzal, Raja Mohammed  103 Agnell, Norman  26 Algiers  79, 80 Ali, Muhammad  199, 206 American Dilemma, An (Myrdal)  8, 233 American Federation of Labor (AFL)  165 American Negro Slave Revolts (Aptheker)  205 Anderson, Perry  38 anti-Black racism  233, 234, 236 anti-fascism  203 anti-racism  200 antisemitism  45, 46, 47, 236 Aptheker, Herbert  205 Arendt, Hannah  233 Arévalo, Juan José  234 Arnold, Matthew  69 Ashita wo tsukuru hitobito (People who Make Tomorrow, 1946)  134 Asia  81, 97, 99, 114, 122, 124, 149, 151, 175, 217 Atlanta University  186–8 Atlantic Charter  82, 84–5, 92, 98, 102, 130, 164, 169, 170, 175, 177 n.22 Attaway, William  207

Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Lemkin)  8, 232, 233 Babouk (Endore)  207 Badawi, Abd al-Rahman  231 Bangladesh  97 bangyang  216 Barone, Enrico  22 Barr, John U.  174 Barrett, David D.  219 Being Red  205 Belgian Congo  82 Benedict, Ruth  137 Benjamin, Walter  48–9 Bensaïd, Daniel  226 Bergman, Ingrid  236 Berman, Lionel  205 Bernstein, Eduard  23 Bethune, Mary McLeod  8, 184, 185 Bethune, Norman  216, 228 n.2 Beyond Politics  71 Bhambra, Gurminder  119 Bienno Rosso, Italy  20 Bilbo, Theodore  173 Birth of a Nation  203 Blackburn, Robin  117–18 Black Folk Then and Now  195 Black Jacobins, The (James)  118, 205 Black Power movement  202 Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois)  195, 205 Bland, Robert  199, 206 Blood on the Forge (Attaway)  207 Bolshevik Revolution  207 Bonnet, Henri  151 Booth, Esma Rideout  111–12 n.54 Braudel, Fernand  119 Brayne, Frank Lugard  6, 7, 77–8, 96, 97–109, 130, 234 Brazzaville conference  77, 80–1, 82–8, 92

244 Index Brecht, Bertolt  209 Bretton, Woods  30, 236 Bretton Woods Agreement  8, 63 Broken Column, The (Kahlo)  9 Browder, Earl  202 Browderism  202, 208 Brown, Sterling A.  184 Buck, Pearl  217 Burke, Edmund  62, 109 Burma  218 Burnham, Louis  179 “Burnt Norton”  69 Busia, K. A.  106 Byrd, Harry F.  172–4 Cai Xiang  219 Cain, or Hitler in Hell (Grosz)  9 Cameroon  81, 82 Campt, Tina  236 Capa, Robert  8 Capagorry, Jean-Charles André  82 capitalism  13, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 33–4, 236 authoritarian  46 British  122 critique of  24, 30 decolonization and  113–26 history of  114–18 labor and  20, 43, 45 neoclassical economics and  21 post-liberal  14, 44–5 state  44–7, 50 US  200, 202–3, 233–4 Capitalism and Slavery (Williams)  6, 78, 113–26, 205, 235 Capra, Frank  137–8, 217 Caribbean Home Library  109 Césaire, Aimé  92, 157, 234 Chad  82 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  119 Chang-tai Hung  218 Chernow, Ron  212 Chiang Kai-shek  218 Children, The  206 China  7, 8, 129, 149, 180, 215-230 tianxia weigong in  216, 220–1, 226 wei renmin fuwu in  221–6 Christianity  5, 66–8, 78, 83, 87 Churchill, Winston  151, 179

CIO see Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Citizen Tom Paine (Fast)  200 Civilian Relief, Allied Film Campaign for  146–58 Civil Rights movement  7, 200, 202, 211 Clansman: A Historical Romance of the KKK, The (Dixon)  203 Clark, Christopher  26 classical political economy  20, 23 and Marxism  36 vs. neoclassical economics  21 Cold War  3, 204–5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  66, 69 colonialism  85, 88, 91–2, 98, 114, 122, 233 Communism  13, 72 Communist, The  203, 204 Communist Party, US  201–12 Community and Society (Tönnies)  24 community development  96–109 soldiers and  97–104 women and  101–2, 108–9 Conceived in Liberty (Fast)  200 Ding Cong  218 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)  165 Conservatives  68, 172, 175 Cooper, Duff  86 Corn Laws  34 Couch, W. T.  184, 195 Cournarie, Pierre  82 Criterion, The (Eliot)  60, 67, 74 Cukor, George  236 Cultural Revolution (1966-76)  221, 228 n.2 Czechoslovakia  156 Dai Jinhua  220 Daiei, film production company  134 Dakar  80, 82 Dale, Gareth  24 Daumier, Honoré  218 Dawson, Christopher  69, 71 D-Day  1, 79, 86, 231 decolonization  5–6, 30, 77–8, 87, 105, 113–26 de Gaulle, Charles  1, 5, 8, 77, 79–89, 234 democracy  37, 66, 167–8

Index Democratic Party, US  6–7, 8, 162–75, 234 Dependency theory  123 de Pompignan, Charles Assier  82 de Saint-Mart, Pierre  82 Deshraj, Lala  103 De Silva, C. R.  121 Deutscher, Issac  38 Dewey, Clive  99, 104 Dewey, John  124, 125 Dewey, Thomas  162 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno)  5, 14, 43–56, 231 dianxing  216 Di-Capua, Yoav  231 Dicey, A. V.  35 Die Feuerzangenbowle (film)  231 Disraeli, Benjamin  66 Dixie Mission to Yan’an of 1944  219 Dixon, Thomas  203 Double Indemnity (film )  231 Douglas, Mary  96 Draft-Byrd-for President movement  173–5 Drescher, Seymour  118, 126 “Dry Salvages, The” (Eliot)  69 Duara, Prasenjit  220 Du Bois, W. E. B.  7, 105, 116, 121, 179–80, 183–97, 199, 205, 233 Dunning, William A.  203 Dusk of Dawn (Du Bois)  194, 195 Dussel, Enrique  118, 119 “East Coker” (Eliot)  69, 70 Éboué, Félix  81, 82, 87 Echenberg, Myron  90 Ekpenyon, E. I.  106 Eliot, Thomas Stearns  5, 8, 14, 60–2, 66–71, 235 Endore, Guy  207 England  18 Enlightenment  43–56 Epstein, Israel  218 État Français (see also Vichy regime)  79 Ethiopia  115 Eurocentricity  114, 118–21 Europe  2, 3, 6, 20, 26, 38, 44, 52, 60, 61, 62-4, 73, 80–3, 87, 92, 98, 99, 104,

245

106, 107, 114–25, 129, 149–52, 155–7, 164, 169, 190 Eastern  1, 8, 32, 60 Western  60, 64, 114, 118, 149 European Coal and Steel Community  60 existentialism  231 Fabians  23 Fanon, Frantz  92 Farnie, D. A.  114, 123 Farrell, James T.  208 fascism  17–18, 29, 32, 37, 47, 72, 201–2, 227, 236 Fast, Howard  7, 180, 199–212, 236 FEA see French Equatorial Africa (FEA) Fighting Soldiers  138 First Universal Races Congress  190 Flaubert, Gustave  200 Foner, Eric  199, 212 Food - Weapon of Conquest (film)  151 Formosa  149 Foucault, Michel  231 Four Freedoms  164, 170–1, 175, 202 Four Quartets (Eliot)  5, 60, 61, 69–70, 72 France and the French empire  1, 77, 79–80, 88–91, 152, 169, 170, 231 Brazzaville conference and  77, 80–1, 82–8 Franco-German armistice  81 Frankfurt School  43-59 Freedom Road (Fast)  7, 199–212, 233 Freedom Under Planning (Wootton)  235 Free French colonies  81, 82, 83–8 French Equatorial Africa (FEA)  81, 84 Freud, Sigmund  193–4 fuqilao  226 fuwu  222, 225 Gabon  82 Gandhi, M. K.  103 Garner, John Nance  174 Garvey, Marcus  119 Gaslight (film)  236 Gellhorn, Martha  1, 8 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade  61 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, The (Keynes)  30 Geneva Convention, 1949  92

246 Index Germany  3, 29, 82, 152, 169 Nazi  60, 61, 66, 71, 169 November Revolution  20 Getachew, Adom  235 Geulen, Eva  43 Goble, Iris Goodeve  99 Goebbels, Joseph  232 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell)  203 gong  220–1, 228 n.4 Good Earth, The (Buck)  217 Gouin, Félix  82, 87 Grant, Ulysses S.  212 Great Britain see United Kingdom Great Depression  25, 29, 206 Great Illusion, The (Norman)  26 Great Japan Film Association  134 Great Midland, The (Saxton)  207 Great Transformation, The (Polanyi)  5, 13, 18, 19, 29, 30, 33–5, 64, 235 Greece  156 Grierson, John  150, 153 Griffith, D. W.  203 guan  220–1 Gueye, Lamine  87 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich  44 Gurgaon  103–4 Habermas, Jürgen  43 Haitian Revolution  118 Hall, Stuart  235 Hancock, Gordon B.  184 Haraway, Donna  118 Hawley, Ellis  168 Hayek, Friedrich August von  5, 8, 13–14, 17–19, 22, 25, 27, 30–4, 36–9, 60–73, 235–6 He Feiguang  217 He-Yin Zhen  8, 225 Hegel, G. W. F.  45, 49, 55–6, 119, 120, 123, 228 Heidegger, Martin  231 Heinemann, Ronald  172 Hemmingway, Ernest  8 Herf, Jeffrey  43 Hideto Tsuboi  138 Hill, Leslie Pinckney  184 Himmler, Heinrich  1, 232 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács) 46, 57 n.9

History of the Development of Japanese Cinema, A (Tanaka)  137 History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494–1514 (von Ranke)  119–20 Hobson, J. A.  26 Homer  48–51, 54–5 Honda Sōichirō  137 Hong Kong  232 Honglou meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber)  217 Hoover, Herbert  162 Hoover, J. Edgar  116 Horkheimer, Max  5, 7, 14, 43–55, 231 Hughes, Langston  179, 180, 184 Hull, Cordell  164 humanitarianism  157–8 human rights  87, 167–8 Hungarian Revolution  20 Husband and Wife Learn to Read (film)  219 Hutchinson, George  205 ICCLA see International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa (ICCLA) Idea of a Christian Society, The (Eliot)  61, 66, 67, 71 ILO see International Labor Organization (ILO) Indian Village Welfare Association  104 Innset, Ola  37 Inoti, F. M.  106 International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa (ICCLA)  96, 104–9 International Labor Organization (ILO)  150 International Missionary Council  105 In the Wake of Armies (film)  6, 129, 148–58 Inward Hunger (Williams)  116 Italy  115, 152, 169 Itami Mansaku  134 I Visit Yenan (Epstein)  218 Jamaica  109, 234 James, C. L. R.  118, 121, 205, 207 Janken, Kenneth Robert  183, 195

Index Japan  3, 6, 131–43, 169, 232 Jeffries, Stuart  14 Jevons, Stanley  20 Jewell, Katherine Rye  6, 129, 147, 162–75, 234 Jim Crow system  175, 193 Johnson, Lyndon  64 Kafka, Franz  232 Kahlo, Frida  9 Kamei Fumio  137 Kant, Immanuel  63, 120 Karski, Jan 233 kawaii  132 Kenya  106 Key, V. O.  163 Keynes, John Maynard  18, 29, 30, 33, 36, 235 Khrushchev, Nikita  204 King, Martin Luther, Jr.  206 Kirchheimer, Otto  44 Kobayashi Nobuhiko  137 Kojecky, Roger  67, 68, 73 kokusaku eiga  134 Korematsu v. United States  233–4 Koselleck, Reinhart  154 Kristofferson, Kris  199 Ku Klux Klan  199, 209 Kunitz, Joshua  206 Kunitz, Sarah  206 Akira Kurosawa  6, 7, 8, 129–30, 131–43 labor  20, 21, 24–5, 45, 46 laissez-faire  14, 29, 31, 34–5, 66, 123 Lange, Oskar  22 Last Frontier, The (Fast)  200, 205 Latini, Bruno  70 Laurentie, Henri  82, 90 Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Hayek)  61, 64 Legg, Stuart  151 Lehman, Herbert Henry  146, 149–51 Leisure: The Basis of Culture (Pieper)  72 Lemkin, Raphael  8, 232 Lewis, W. Arthur  106 Li Lili  217–18 Lianke Yan  221 liberalism  26–7, 34, 62, 64-66, 71

247

The New Deal and  163, 164–5, 167–8, 171–5 Literature and Reality (Fast)  208 “Little Gidding” (Eliot)  69, 70–1 Liu, Maurice  156 Logan, Rayford  7, 183–4, 195 Lonsdale, John  6 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot)  60 Low, David  6 Lowdermilk, Walter Clay  106 Lugard, Frederic  99 Lukács, Georg  46, 57 n.9 Lumpkin, Grace  207 MacArthur, Douglas  77, 78 Madagascar  84 Maltz, Albert  208 Mann, Gregory  90 Mao Zedong  7–8, 180, 215–27, 232 Marginalist revolution  20, 21 Maritain, Jacques  69 Martandam Project  98–9 Marx, Karl  13, 20–4, 28, 122, 191, 193 Marxism  5, 7, 8, 13, 14, 18, 22–6, 28, 34, 36, 38, 43–4, 47, 56, 117, 121, 123, 180, 201, 204, 207, 222 Masumura Yasuzō  137 Mathu, Eliud  106 McGrath, Thomas  209 Mendis, G. C.  121 Menger, Carl  20, 22 Migone, Andrea  36 Miller, Lee  1–3, 8 Mirowski, Philip  37–8 Mitchell, Margaret  203 Mondrian, Piet  9 Mont Pelerin Society  38 Mori Iwao  137 Moscow Trials  206 Most Beautiful, The (film, Kurosawa)  6, 129, 131–43 Muni, Paul  217 Munich agreement of 1938  169 “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” (Du Bois)  183–97 My Glorious Brothers (Fast)  200 Myrdal, Gunnar  8, 233 myth  46, 50–4, 55–6

248 Index NAACP see National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party, The (Fast)  204, 205 Nardal, Paulette  234 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)  187, 195 National Film Board of Canada (NFB)  6, 129, 130, 146–56, 158 nationalism  7–8, 26, 29, 169, 226 Naval Battle of Malaya, The (film)  131, 134 Nazism  27, 29, 32, 151 Nelson, Donald  167 neoclassical economics  20-2, 23, 36 neoliberalism  5, 19, 36, 39, 61, 236 Neruda, Pablo  209 Neurath, Otto  22 New Masses  203, 204, 208 NFB see National Film Board of Canada (NFB) Niagara Movement  187 Nihon Eiga (Japan Film)  136 No Exit (Sartre)  8, 231 Nolan, Cathal  169 North Atlantic Treaty Organization  64 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (Eliot)  61, 66, 68 Nussbaum, Felix  9 Odysseus Excursus  48–51 Odyssey, The (Homer)  48, 51, 52 Okae, John Derbi  106 O’Shaughnessy, Andrew  117, 123 Oubangui  82 Our Northern Neighbour (film)  153 Ozaki Kihachi  139 Ozu Yasujirō  134 Pakistan  97 Palestine  106 Palmer, Colin  114 Pan-African movement  191–2 Papua New Guinea  1 Parker, Morton  153 Passagenwerk (Benjamin)  48

Patterson, Frederick D.  184 Penelope’s maidservants  47–50, 53 People from Heaven, The (Sanford)  207 Pétain, Philippe  79 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois)  186 Philippines  77 Picasso, Pablo  209 Pieper, Josef  72–3 planning  4, 13, 17–19, 22–3, 27, 31–6, 35, 64, 69, 86, 97, 134, 146–52, 168 Pleven, René  82, 84, 86 Plutarch  120 Poland  152, 156 Polanyi, Karl  5, 7, 13, 14, 18–19, 22-5, 30–1, 34–9, 64, 235 political economy  45, 46, 47, 49, 56, 61–2, 64, 115, 122 Pollock, Friedrich  44 Popular Front  8, 199, 201–4, 206–8 Poshek Fu  217 Postone, Moishe  45, 58 n.45 Qizhuang shanhe (film)  217–18 racism  7, 121, 123, 184–97, 200–12, 232 Rai, E. N. Mangat  103 Rainer, Luise  217 Randolph, A. Philip  184 Read, Margaret  105 Reader’s Digest  18 Reagan, Ronald  62 Reconstruction, Political and Economic (Dunning)  203 Red Emigration  38 Red Flower, A (film)  219 Red Vienna  18, 20, 31 refugees  152, 155, 156 Ricardo, David  20, 123 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek)  5, 13–14, 17–19, 27, 29, 31–3, 60, 62, 64, 66, 72, 235 Robbins, Lionel  18 Robinson, Joan  36 Rogué, Jacques  82 Rojas, Cristina  119 Roosevelt, Franklin D.  30, 83, 85, 129–30, 147, 152, 162–4, 166–72, 174, 202, 204, 234 Russell, Richard  173

Index Russian Revolution  20, 22, 26 Rychmans, Pierre  82 Saich, Tony  225 Saint-Malo  1–2, 8 Sanford, John  207 Sanshiro Sugata (film)  133, 137 Sartre, Jean-Paul  8, 231 Sashida, Fumio  135 Sautot, Henri  82 Saxton, Alexander  207 Schmoller, Gustav  186 Schuyler, George  184 Scott, James  235 Second Bill of Rights  8 Seishun no kiryu (Air Wave of Youths, 1942)  133 Selassie, Haile  115 Senegal  84 Senghor, Léopold  84 service  223–6 Shanghai  217, 232 Shilliam, Robbie  115 Shochiku, film production company  134 Sign for Cain, A (Lumpkin)  207 Sillen, Samuel  204 Sima Qian  224 slavery  113–26, 233 Slobodian, Quinn  236 Smith, Adam  20 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai  116 Smith v. Allwright  174 SNYC see Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) Sobchack, Vivian  140 socialism  17–18, 23, 27, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 66, 208, 215-28 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK)  106 Socrates  100 Socrates in an Indian Village (Brayne)  100 Sorin, Gerald  205 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois)  187 Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC)  179 Soviet Union  1, 13, 45, 66, 170, 179, 191 Spanish Civil War  206, 228 n.2 Sparrow, James  168

249

Spartacus  200 SPCK see Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) Sriniketan  98 Stalin, Joseph  179, 208 Stars and Stripes  4 Story of a Secret State (Karski)  233 “Study of the Negro Problems, The” (Du Bois)  187 Sugiyama Heichi  136, 141 Sulzer, Hans  38 Sun Zhongshan  215, 220–1, 225–7, 228 n.4 Tagore, Rabindranath  98 Taiwan  218 Takako Irie  135 Takamine Hideko  132 Takamura Kotarō  138–9 Tanaka Jun’ichiro  137 Tatakau heitai (Fighting Soldiers)  137 Thatcher, Margaret  62, 235 Thiaroye  80, 89–92, 234 Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (film)  129 “Thirty Years’ Crisis”  25, 26, 29 Thompson, Dorothy  8, 150 Thompson, E. P.  235 Thucydides  120 Thuku, Henry  106 tianxia weigong  216, 220–1, 226, 228 n.4 Tindall, George Brown  173 Tito, Josip Broz  157 Toho, film production company  134 Tomita Tsuneo  137 Tönnies, Ferdinand  24 Toomey, Fred Mrs.  174 Torson, Patricia J.  149 Townsend, Willard S.  184 Trinidad  6, 114, 116, 117, 124, 125 Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects, The (Wilson)  201 Triumph of Death, The (painting)  9 Trump, Donald  212 Trump v. Hawaii  234 Tsubasa no gaika (Songs for the Wings, 1942)  133 Tyler, Imogen  96 Tyneside Story (film)  153

250 Index Ubico, Jorge  234 Ukelina, Bekeh  6 Uncle Tom’s Children (Wright)  207 United Kingdom  67, 98, 169-71 United Nations  64, 102, 170–1 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)  6, 129, 146–58, 232 United States  7–9, 18, 26, 39, 45, 61, 64, 77, 98, 105, 129, 134, 139, 143, 151, 164, 168–71, 175, 179, 180, 185, 192, 200–1, 212, 219, 233–4, 236 Universal Declaration of Human Rights  92 Unpei Yokoyama  135 UNRRA see United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) UNRRA Goes into Action  129, 154–7 US Democratic Party see Democratic Party, US Versailles Treaty  67 Vichy regime  79, 80–3, 87–91 Victory and After (Browder)  202 Victory Boogie-Woogie (painting)  9 Vienna  18, 38 Vogue magazine  8 von Mises, Ludwig  22, 29, 37 von Ranke, Leopold  119–21, 123 Wagner, Adolf  186 Walker, William A. R.  106 Walras, Leon  20 Wang Ban  220 Wang Hao  218 Wang Hui  220 Washington, Booker T.  187 “Waste Land, The” (Eliot)  60 Watanabe Tsuru  136 Weber, Max  21, 186 wei  221, 228 n.4 wei renmin fuwu  221–6, 228 n.4 Wesley, Charles H.  184 West Indies  106, 109, 113, 115-17, 122, 124-5, 235 What the Negro Wants (Logan)  7, 183, 184–5, 233 White, Charles  236–7

white supremacy  114, 116, 124, 125, 173, 179–80, 194, 203, 208, 233 Wigdor, John  153 Wilberforce, William  111–12 n.54 Wilder, Billy  231 Wilkerson, Doxey  184, 204 Wilkins, Roy  184 Williams, Eric  6, 7, 8, 78, 113–26, 205, 234–5 Willkie, Wendell  162 Wilson, Edmund  201 Wilson, Woodrow  169 Winning the Peace (Brayne)  6, 77, 96, 97–100, 103 women equal rights for  167 freedom for  9 French  8–9 Indian  101–9 as mothers  108 role in reproduction  142 war and  8 wealth for  102 young  131–43 Wootton, Barbara  235 World Systems Theory  123 World War I  22, 26, 29, 30, 80, 88, 90, 98, 148, 168 World War II  4, 17, 25, 30, 43, 61, 80-2, 90, 96, 98, 99, 131, 132, 146, 149, 158, 179, 201, 202, 208–9, 232 Wright, Richard  207 Wrong, Margaret  8, 104, 105, 106–7, 109 Xun Zi  224 Yaguchi Yōko  132 Yamamoto Kajirō  131, 134, 135 Yan’an  218–19 Yan’an Talks on Art and Literature (Mao)  219 yangge  219 Yeats, W. B.  70 Yugoslavia  156 Yugoslav partisan movement  157 Zhang Side  180, 215–16, 219, 222, 224 Zhdanov, Andrei  209