Monthly Archives: December 2021

By Michael F. Duggan

The First World War was the most seminal event of modern history.  To this day it pays dividends.

The Russian Revolution and Civil War (and thus the rise of Marxist-Leninism), the rise of fascism—and thus the Spanish Civil War and Italian adventures in Africa in the 1930s, and a far more destructive Second World War (and Holocaust) ending with the use of atomic weapons—the Cold War with all of its brushfire wars, and the Islamic Revolution are all the spawn of the Great War.  To understand the far-reaching influence of the war, one need only consider that the borders of modern Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were drawn at Versailles—drawn with little or no sensitivity to ethnic or religious distinctions in the region.  There was also a delegation from French Indochina that petitioned for the rights of the Vietnamese people at Versailles.  The young man who presented the petition would later call himself Hồ Chí Minh.  He was roundly snubbed by Wilson and by the other leaders of the great Western powers. 

Before the onset of the pandemic, I bought a used copy Witness to a Century, the memoir of George Seldes, a remarkable American journalists whose life spanned the 20^th century.  Born in Pennsylvania in 1890, he lived to be 104. He covered Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to Pittsburgh in 1910. He published his memoir in 1987.

Seldes was thrown out of the Soviet Union by Lenin, thrown out of Italy by Mussolini, and thrown out of a hotel room by William Jennings Bryan, who he had caught wearing long underwear (complete with a flap in the back) while trying to get an interview as a cub reporter.  He knew or met virtually everybody and the index of his book is like a Who’s Who of the 20^th century.  Like a good reporter, he seemed to be everywhere at the right time. He was with Lincoln Steffens in a bar during the Genoa Conference of April 1922 (a follow-up to Versailles), where they taught a young Ernest Hemingway an abbreviated style of writing for the wire services called “cablese.”¹  Even if his name is unfamiliar to you, you might have caught a fleeting glimpse of him as one of the witnesses in the movie Reds. One of his few lines is near the beginning of the film: “Jack [Reed]… Well, I wouldn’t call him a playboy, but some people did.”

Recently I picked up his book again and found him to be a lively, amusing, and insightful writer.  I would like to think that he never reported to the Kremlin—he sometimes spoke out against the American Communist Party. But who knows what a progressive journalist might have done as a young man.

Seldes tells an amazing story about how he crossed the lines on the Western Front at the end of WWI, went to Kassel and conducted an exclusive interview the German Chief of Staff, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg.  During the interview, Hindenburg is supposed to have said that, militarily speaking, it was the American infantry in the Argonne that had been the decisive factor in Germany’s defeat. After that the general broke down in tears.

When Seldes crossed back to the Allied side, Pershing and his censors detained him and would not let him send the story or even write about the incident.  Of this he writes:

“If the Hindenburg confession had been passed by Pershing’s (stupid) censors at that time, it would have been headlined in every country civilized enough to have newspapers, and undoubtedly would have made a lasting impression on millions of people and become an important page in history; and I believe it would have destroyed the main planks of the platform on which Hitler rose to power, it would have prevented World War II, the greatest and worst war in all history, and it would have changed the future of all mankind.”²

Would Hindenburg’s admission of the defeat of the Imperial German Army in the field have stopped the “stab in the back” narrative in its tracks? Hard to say.  To his eternal dishonor, Hindenburg never publicly repeated his admission, and in fact was a progenitor of the stab in the back myth.

Seldes might have been naïve in thinking that a single news story, even an important one, would have detailed a major current of history and prevented the rise of the Third Reich.  Hitler and his thugs would have still issued their false narrative and would have called his story a lie (Seldes was Jewish, so a denial of the story would have fit in with Hitler’s phobic view of the world and would have found a ready audience in those who followed him).

We will never know if Seldes’s Story of the Century would have guided that century in a more peaceful direction.  At the very least, we can say that the world would have probably been a better place if it had know that the German Chief of Staff knew that his armies had been defeated militarily and not stabbed in the back on the home front. And it might have prevented the largest war in history.

Notes

1. George Seldes, Witness to a Century, Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs (New York: Ballantine Books 1987) 311-313.  Denis Brian, The True Gen, an Intimate Portrait of Hemingway by Those Who knew Him (New York: Grove Press 1988) 37.
2. Seldes, Witness to a Century, 100.

By Michael F. Duggan

A great man of science is gone.

A gentle man of large ambition and focus and a world-historical intellect, Wilson was one of the great minds of the late 20th-early 21st century and likely the greatest biologist of his time. He wrote about 50 books (many over the age of 80) and contributed parts to about 100 more. He was a wonderful stylist and for the past 25 years, he was one of my favorite writers and his Pulitzer Prize-winning On Human Nature is one of my favorite books. Widely considered to be the father of modern sociobiology, he was “Darwin’s natural heir” for our time. He died on December 26.

Wilson was the world authority on ants. Because the behavior of most ants is instinctive—hardwired—Wilson decided to address questions on the sociobiological basis for human behavior. It became the second great prong of his professional career.

Over the next half-century, sociobiology/evolutionary psychology became a counterbalance to a purely social science approach to questions related to nature and nurture in human life. For this he was pilloried and was actually assaulted by social science advocates for merely suggesting that the underlying behavior of human beings was in part the result of hundreds of thousands of years of natural sculpting and trial-and-error. As he wrote in his 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth, “History makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He never said that his view was the final word (for me his 1998 book, Consilience is likely a bridge too far in its universality on the unity of knowledge), and taken together, sociobiology and the social sciences explain a lot more than either does by itself. If you do not know what we are as an animal, then you have little understanding of yourself or your kind.

I met him once at a lecture he gave at the National Academy of Science years ago, and he seriously entertained a question I asked (“does the pheromone communication of ants have an equivalent to the deep grammar of human generative language?” I was being the precocious recently-minted Ph.D.).

There are many evolutionary biologists I have read and admired over the years—Niles Eldridge, Stephen J. Gould, Ernst Mayr, Lynn Margulis, James A. Shapiro—but Wilson was a singular Napoleonic figure who towered above them all. He was also a tireless champion of the environment (a third prong) and wrote wonderfully and with admonishment on biodiversity and even provided a basis—the minimum requirements—for saving the planet (Half-Earth, 2016).

If you are in need of a suggestion for a charitable donation this year, you could do worse than investigate the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. https://eowilsonfoundation.org/

As when Stephen Hawking died in 2018, I feel as if a calm, rational, and wise presence has left an increasingly chaotic world when he and his kind are needed the most. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was 92.

By Michael F. Duggan

T223. Regret to inform you that Lieut. R.A. Leighton 7th Worcesters died of wounds December 23rd. Lord Kitchener sends his sympathy.
Colonel of Territorial Forces, Records, Warwick.

One hundred six years ago today (December 26, 1915), Lt. Roland Leighton, age 20, of the 7th Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, was buried at the British military cemetery in Louvencourt, France. He had been shot while leaving a trench to inspect barbed wire in need of repair in front of the British positions on the moonlit night of December 22. Hit in the lower abdomen, Leighton died late the following day. He had been scheduled to go home for Christmas leave on December 24.

His fiance, Vera Brittain, would live until 1970 and would write Testament of Youth (along with 28 other books), one of the most important memoirs of the First World War. She would also lose her only sibling, Edward, and friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow—essentially all of her male circle of friends (Edward, Roland, and Victor were her “Three Musketeers”)—in the war. Edward, Roland, and Vera had all been accepted at Oxford, but she would go alone (she left Oxford to serve as a VAD nurse in France and Malta, but would return after the war).

In 2014 Testament of Youth was made into a feature film with Alicia Vikander (Laura Croft: Tomb Raider) and Kit Harington (Game of Thrones). Even with historical inaccuracies and omissions, it is a hard-hitting movie about human promise squandered in war. Brittain’s wartime diaries were published as Chronicle of Youth in 1981. Her correspondences were issued in 1998 as Letters from a Lost Generation.

Roland also had literary ambitions. On April 25, 1915, he wrote the poem Violets, which he showed to Vera while on leave that August. On the day he wrote the poem, he had enclosed violets in a letter to her. Nascent, but showing real potential, it rings of the Georgian Poets like Rupert Brooke, but gently anticipates Graves, Owen, and Sassoon.

Violets from Plug Street wood, Sweet, I send you oversea. (It is strange they should be blue, Blue, when his soaked blood was red, For they grew around his head: It is strange they should be blue.) Violets from Plug Street Wood, Think what they have meant to me— Life and hope and love and you. (And you did not see them grow, where his mangled body lay, Hiding horror from the day; Sweetest it was better so) Violets from oversea, To your dear, far, forgetting land, These I send in memory, Knowing you will understand

By Michael F. Duggan

In his World War II memoir, Doing Battle: the Making of a Skeptic, Paul Fussell observes:

“Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all American males?  Killed off in their tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers had the effect, welcomed or not, of improving the breed.  Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust.”  

When I first read this stark observation, I didn’t want to believe it.  It seemed cynical, illiberal, a paragraph designed to grab the attention.  Wasn’t the U.S. fighting against an ideology that embraced eugenics (and “improving the breed” sounds like the language of Nazism or at least animal husbandry)?¹ 

I wrote it off as the bitter remembrance of a combat infantry officer who, like Robert Graves before him, disliked the men with whom he trained, “men whose company, in many cases, I would have run miles to avoid.”²  Any “war buffs” taken in by the élan and esprit de corps of Band of Brothers and other books about elite units, should read this book if they want to know what life was like for a 20-year-old officer in an ordinary leg infantry unit in the Vosges Mountains in 1944-45.  It is a wonderful tonic to balance out the uncritical solemnity that infuses myths of the “Good War” (they should also read Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed).  Although I never accepted Greatest Generation heliographies uncritically, Fussell’s point seemed to go too far.   

But leaving aside such promising individuals as George H.W. Bush, John and Joseph Kennedy, Jr., Lewis Nixon, Eugene Sledge, John Paul Stevens, Byron White, and Fussell himself—all of whom were from the educated middle and upper classes—I now think that he has a point: policy may consciously or unconsciously push unspoken trends and attitudes that are reprehensible when said aloud.  After all, the various U.S. wars in the Middle East provided convenient venues to test new weapons under real world conditions, but we would never say so.   

Today, an unspoken justification for some bad behavior and policy—the flouting of vaccines and vaccine mandates—is the view that a large majority of those who die are no longer of much importance to the community, economy, and the gene pool.  If anything, these people are a burden.  Like Fussell’s de facto eugenics of military service, this result may not be intended, but it is real, and some people don’t care enough to use personal responsibility to prevent thousands of deaths in what is now the deadliest single event in U.S. history.

People won’t tell you this, but beloved grandmothers, grandfathers, and the odd special needs child aside, most of those dying of COVID-19 are nameless, faceless numbers of the aged, infirm, and weak.  Don’t let some anti-vaxxer tell you that they are bravely advocating greater “freedom.”  What they are advocating is a vulgar, primitive understanding of natural selection for the purpose of social improvement, that is akin to the obtuse nineteenth-century construction of evolution as “survival of the fittest.”  Clearly they do not understand more nuanced parts of evolution, like group selection. 

About 75% of those dying of COVID-19 in the United States are over 65.  Those with mental disabilities are also at much greater risk of dying from the disease than the general population.  In the eyes of some anti-vaxxers (and in the hearts of those who whip them up), these are people would have died soon anyway or are otherwise costly to society.

Flouting masks and vaccines has nothing to do with courage, Jesus, manhood, patriotism, or “rights.”  It is all about callousness to the point of criminality.  The result has been a mostly preventable holocaust, a “thinning of the herd” by culling the weak from the herd through the sickness of those healthy enough to endure it.  How can this be anything but eugenics?  It certainly isn’t Christian.      

Although the number of their fatalities is not as great, we should remember that natural selection cuts both ways, and hospital wards and cemeteries are also filling up with younger anti-vaxxers as well as the old and infirm, about whom many couldn’t care less. How would they feel if people began writing off their lives as instances of self-inflicted natural selection that improved the gene pool?     

Notes

1. Paul Fussell, Doing Battle (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1996) 171-72.
2. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, quoted by Fussell in Doing Battle, 77.