May 2, 2017
The current president of the US announced yesterday that a former president, Andrew Jackson, was angry about the Civil War and would have avoided it. Never mind that Jackson died 16 years before the war started. The media was buzzing with historians pointing out Trump’s ignorance about history as well as his embrace of a populist role model. The implicit message that a strong-man slaveholder would have gotten it right pointed to a position that the assumptions underlying slavery – the racial hierarchy that allows perceived superior Whites to own perceived inferior Blacks – are acceptable. The claimed causes of the war – slavery vs states’ rights – are of course still debated by historians with different political bends.
What caught my eye, though, was an opinion piece that compared Trump to Kaiser Wilhelm II, both with regard to relentless, manic communications that did not mind being self-contradictory and with regard to “idiotic bellicosity.”
World War I started during Wilhelm II’s reign, and many historians have wondered, just as about the Civil War, what led to the slaughter of 17 million people, or what could have prevented it. Cohen’s article recommends Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, a learned treatise on the causal circumstances of World War I. On my reading list is a book that covers the same topic, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963.
The reason for my choice is first of all that I yet have to read a Tuchman book that isn’t challenging, informative and deeply influential at the same time that it is a fun read. More importantly, this particular book influenced another president of our nation, J.F.Kennedy, to narrowly skirt another war during the Cuban missile crisis. He read. He processed what he read. The lessons from history mattered. Here is a link to a short analysis of how J.F.K’s reading of Tuchman guided his decision making process.
http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/how-barbara-tuchmans-guns-of-august.html
Photographs are from Berlin, Germany where the last German Emperor and King of Prussia lived.
Eric Brody
Each day brings “new” revelations of the kind of person for whom some people voted. None are really new; all reiterate what most of us know for years about him. His “followers” continue to be unwavering despite his outright lies and obfuscations. I genuinely despair for our country and our world. I no longer listen to or watch the news, even OPB (I used to be a total news junkie). Garrison Keillor said he cannot be “my president” because he does not read. You cited a great example of why reading matters, and, of course being able and willing to actually think about what one reads.
Martha Ullman West
Thank you for citing Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August. My late husband was an historian of 20th century Germany, specifically Weimar Germany, and he greatly admired Tuchman’s book on the causes of WWI. Also The Proud Tower, the next book she published. Photographs of Berlin needless to say are wonderful.
I do question the assumption about Trump’s thinking (scarcely the operative word in this connection!) about Jackson as slaveowner, white superiority over black inferiority–suspect he thought he was visiting a 19th century Mar a Lago when he saw Jackson’s plantation outside Nashville and doubt he saw the slave quarters.
Very interesting post this morning, making me think, for which I thank you again.
Deb Meyer
Our current President is ignorant and certainly doesn’t understand or know American history well enough to talk intelligently about it. I am so embarrassed for my Country. I too used to be a news junkie, but not anymore. The only news I get now is listening to NPR or OPB driving in the car and whenever anything about what Trump is doing comes on I literally turn down the volume. Thanks for an interesting article this morning, it made me think about a lot of things and actually thinking about something one is reading about is a vital connection.