“Story of Civilization. Volume 9: The Age of Voltaire”, by Will and Ariel Durant

 

898 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0671013257

The Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books by the American writers, historians and philosophers Will and Ariel Durant that focuses on a philosophical understanding of Western history that was intended for the general reader. Written over a period of more than fifty years, Volume 9: The Age of Voltaire was originally published in 1965, and covers the Age of Enlightenment as exemplified by Voltaire, focusing on the period between 1715 and 1756 in France, Britain and Germany. This volume differs somewhat from those that came before in that it is structured around the life and times of one man, namely, François-Marie Arouet: Voltaire, a man who touched and was touched by the intellectual flowering of the era as none of his contemporaries were. Beginning with a brief summary of the life of Voltaire, they pen a history of Britain from 1714 to 1756, including all of their major rulers, philosophers, scientists and artists (a not inconsiderable task, seeing as his was the time of George I and II, William Pitt, John Wesley, David Hume, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding and George Frideric Handel.

Returning to France after this Albion idle, he writes fiery pieces that force him to flee once again, this time to Cirey in Haute-Marne and Émilie du Châtelet, his life-long paramour and the translator of Newton as Voltaire takes up the mantle of the scientist – however, these experiments in love and science fail, and Voltaire eventually decamps to Prussia on the invitation of Frederick the Great where he experiences Sparta by day but Athens by night. Voltaire, naturally, writes more sharply than he thinks and wears out his welcome at Frederick’s court, eventually moving to Geneva and its more tolerant climate. The Durants take the opportunity afforded by Voltaire’s to this army with a state to cover the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach, who is neither witty nor fashionable and, consequently, not at all famous during his lifetime, but whose works will nevertheless survive long after Voltaire’s vanish. Johann Sebastian’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, has more success and finds his way to Frederick’s court, who plays the flute and pretends to be a composer; Frederick, for his part, is philosopher enough to be a skeptic, skeptical enough to be a cynic, and cynical enough to be an effective king.

The Durants use this pause in their tale to discuss the many great advancements in science being made during this most interesting of times, with men like Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon virtually founding the sciences of Geology, Botany, Zoology and Psychology. From there the Durants lead us onwards to the philosophes, that most influential of French intellectuals (not necessarily philosophers in the strictest sense) who attempt to reform the world around them using the force of reason. They are not academics, but rather public intellectuals who write with grace and charm, especially against Christianity and the hammer-lock the Catholic Church had over the intellectual life of France in particular and much of Europe in general. The outstanding work of these philosophes is the Encyclopédie, a massive attempt to systematize and rationalize our understanding of the world, and Denis Diderot, the editor of this project, is the most important of this crowd after Voltaire, although there are many other contributors: Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm and Julien Offray de La Mettrie.

The Durants are particularly drawn to the conflict between reason and religion, as should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the preceding books in this series. Convinced that it is the defining struggle of the age, they rehash all of the arguments for and against religion to exhaustion, going so far as to append an imaginary dialogue between Pope Benedict XIV and Voltaire to examine the argument once more. But if one had simply read the so-called “Apology” to The Age of Voltaire, the reader would have discovered this beforehand:

Blame for the length of this volume must rest with the authors fascinated to exuberant prolixity by the central theme – that pervasive and continuing conflict between religion and science-plus-philosophy which became a living drama in the eighteenth century, and which has resulted in the secret secularism of our times. How did it come about that a major part of the educated classes in Europe and America has lost faith in the theology that for fifteen centuries gave supernatural sanctions and supports to the precarious and uncongenial moral code upon which Western civilization has been based? What will be the effects – in morals, literature, and politics – of this silent but fundamental transformation?

The Durants state categorically that “Voltaire is without question the most brilliant writer that ever lived…His ideas were seldom original, but in philosophy nearly all original ideas are foolish, and lack of originality is a sign of wisdom”. After completing The Age of Voltaire, one would find this a difficult conclusion to argue with.

“Interior States: Essays”, by Meghan O’Gieblyn

 

240 pages, Anchor Books, ISBN-13: 978-0525562702

Man, my local library is becoming one of my go-to places for books; every so often they have a book sale featuring books patrons have dropped off, which is when I picked up Interior States: Essays by Meghan O’Gieblyn for a mere – are you ready? – 50¢. As to why I picked up this book, if you recall (and I’m sure that you do) I mentioned in my review of Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation by Paul Kriwaczek (reviewed on June 10^th, 2022) that “I decided to expand my horizons a tad and start buying books outside of my comfort zone about subjects I had, hitherto, little or no knowledge of”. And so I have. Interior States is not  book I would have even looked at just a few years ago, seeing as it has nothing to do with wars and great men and whatever, which is why I took the 50¢ gamble.

And what is Interior States about? In O’Gieblyn’s words, “[w]hat does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts?” It does not take you, the Reader, very long to discern that our Author is in fact a Midwestern girl at heart, but that is all she is: she frequently describes herself as a (new) non-believer, so the promotion of this book starts off misleading from the get-go. Interior States is as much a dissertation on how one woman became an ex-Christian as it is a tale of one who is unhappy with “the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere”. While we follow her around to various locales over Fly-Over Country (like my dear-old Greenfield Village, about which she has little good to say), she tells us a great deal about modern-day Evangelical educational practices, culture and outlook, and how she slowly but eventually turned her back on it all and found herself…well, she doesn’t really know.

Which I found to be tragic. Meghan O’Gieblyn’s travels around the interior states of the United States forced her to confront her own interior state, and thus Interior States is more a spiritual biography of one woman’s loss of faith than it is about the Great American Midwest. Which is fine, but if I had spent more than half-a-buck for this thing I would have been REALLY upset as this is NOT what I thought I was getting myself into (that, and her takedown of Greenfield Village was really irksome). So this book is ultimately and principally a tragic tale of one Christian woman who leaves the faith of her fathers, and not a tour of Central Americana, which makes this tale doubly disappointing.

“Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850”, by Linda Colley

 

464 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0385721462, Anchor Books

In Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850, Linda Colley describes a different perspective of Imperial Britain that goes against traditional history – at least up until our modern, damn-it-all present. Although Britain experienced expansion at an unprecedented rate during the late 1600s up until the mid-1800s, it had spread itself too thinly across the globe, and the Royal Navy found itself unable to effectively control the vast number of territories claimed by Britain, whose money and physical presence was never fully effective at dominating the areas they painted British pink; rather, these territories often influenced their colonial governments more than traditional historians care to admit.

In order to better describe her viewpoint, Colley has divided her book into three sections: the first concentrates on Britain in the Mediterranean, a costly venture seldom mentioned in British Imperialism, while the second and third focuses on the relationship between the British and natives in North America and how the fear of captivity influenced those that colonized America for Britain. Oh, and India, the country whose rough relationship with Britain both made and destroyed careers. While the history of African slavery in the West is immense, accounts of British slavery in the Eastern Hemisphere was seldom recorded and receives less research from both older and newer historians.

Colley hides no biases as she uncovers a history that she argues has been neglected for far too long, a history that exposes a dirty secret of the British Empire: that there is an imbalance in the records that exist between the West and the East. Colley suggests that the research is stifled largely because during this time it was legal for the Royal Navy – and, therefore, the English government – to enslave their own citizens who chose to forfeit military service, as slavery was a more viable option than execution – this was the invention of the “Press Gangs”, the taking of men into a military or naval force by compulsion, usually without notice, whenever a Royal Navy vessel needed men to fill out its crew.

And so Colley opens a new phase in British historiography by revealing a glaring failure: how many remember Britain’s occupation of Tangier on the west coast of Africa? Hm? Well?! The city was part of a Catherine of Braganza’s dowry in 1661 when she married King Charles II, giving Britain a control point over the Mediterranean trade routes. With Spain, France and some of the Italian states (not to mention the Dutch) all expanding their sea-going commerce, Tangier was a key location, and the British poured immense sums into Tangier to create a fortified city – but it was lost less than a generation later (no wonder the Brits chose not to remember such a costly introduction into World Empire).

Colley examines “a quarter of a millennium” in an overview of three stages of Britain’s expansionist adventure. From the start, she reminds us, Britain’s miniscule population and limited resources made it an unlikely candidate for global expansion. Contending with nations better prepared or more experienced in empire-building, the founding of the British Empire was typified by false starts and unlikely events. In using the accounts of prisoners – kidnappees, prisoners of war or other captives – Colley is able to point out how both public views and policies changed during the growth of the Empire. Most important, she argues, is the need to dispel notions that the empire was monolithic in concept or development.

Well-written and highly entertaining, Captivity sheds new light on a force of nature that changed the world. Using autobiographies, adventure stories, sermons, written accounts of public speeches and the like, Colley brings to life the fragile truth of British colonization: that Britain was never in full control of the vast lands she acquired. Its 438 pages capture the big picture of Britain’s expansion throughout the world as well personalizing the journeys of those who lived and died in strange new worlds.

“1920: The Year of the Six Presidents”, by David Pietrusza

 

592 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0786721023

Perhaps I read this book too soon after completing Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom by Conrad Black (reviewed on August 9^th, 2021), but I found 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza to be…blah. This is weird, because 1920 is not an unimportant year in American History; I mean, just look at all that was going on, from the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, both awful commentaries on American Justice and the Wilson Administration, to say nothing of all those Jim Crow laws, of which the racist Wilson cared nothing about. But for all that, 1920 while rather a chore to complete, it is not without value, as it sheds light on many (to me) unknown subjects, such as the process for selecting presidential candidates. Harding was a nonentity whose agenda was merely to return the nation to “normalcy”, a vague notion at best but one which resonated with millions of Americans; his opponent, Ohio governor James M. Cox, never developed a coherent stance concerning Wilson’s policies or on such controversial issues as Prohibition (unsurprisingly, Harding’s administration was essentially a disaster, with several officials being convicted of crimes of corruption).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is Pietrusza’s detailing of the strange, obsessive, and contradictory personality of Wilson: he trusted no one and was quick to take offence, cutting off friends at the merest hint of a slight or differences in policy or contradictory opinions. His inability to relate to others is seen in his tendency to lecture others in most any gathering, while his progressivism – or rather, “progressivism” – was at best a thin veneer scarcely concealing his prejudices over race, labor, women’s rights, etc. While his insistence on personally conducting treaty negotiations in France is a perfect example of his compulsiveness, maybe his most egregious act was to leave the nation essentially leaderless during the last year of his presidency as a result of his medical condition by creating a façade of being alert and in charge.

But it is Pietrusza’s failure to provide context for the issues he records that is his most egregious failure, nowhere more in his handling of the labor question. While he acknowledges Eugene Debs, the imprisoned socialist candidate for president and labor leader, as a champion of the working class, he in no way captures the decades-long discord between labor and ownership in American industries (interestingly, the Wilson administration’s mandate that employee work councils be established within workplaces – not mentioned by the author – to ensure labor peace was consistent with his call for “making the world safe for democracy”). However, after the War, employers and government turned on striking workers with a vengeance, capped by the excesses of the Attorney General Mitchell Palmer in his roundup of militants and the summary deportation of several hundred of others. Furthermore, Pietrusza’s focus on political personalities and considerations relegates the many important issues in the post WWI period to mostly cursory and fragmented treatment, such as the tough economic times with high inflation and unemployment, the flagrant suppression of the labor movement and dissent in general (that is, the Red Scare), and Wilson’s incessant, insistent pushing of the League of Nations, part of his plan for the settlement of the War. Also, both prohibition and women’s suffrage, with an emphasis on political maneuvering, receive some attention.

Both party nominating conventions and the election are subject to detail overkill by the author: all manner of meetings with every attendee noted, whose standing is now up or down, manipulative strategies and deals of the moment, statistics of trips taken and speeches made, etc. The winners at those conventions, Republican Warren Harding and Democrat James Cox, were both second-rate, second-tier candidates; it is only partially clear as to why Republican front-runners Leonard Wood and Frank Lowden and, to some extent, Democratic leaders William McAdoo and A. Mitchell Palmer faded so badly. Pietrusza’s supplying of the vote totals of each round of balloting, while unnecessary, does explicitly show the changes in fortunes. Again, the smoking backroom negotiations are, at times, enlightening and even interesting, but really now, the back-and-forth horseracing manner becomes tedious after a few pages.

All-in-all, 1920 is a rather shallow, miscellaneously detailed (to the point of tedium) book that looks at the many flawed, mediocre individuals who vied, or were otherwise involved, for the 1920 Presidency, Republicans and Democrats both. Some details of their backgrounds are provided, but most important to the author are their personality quirks and shortcomings, the various antagonisms that existed among them, and, how they did or did not cope with political forces, including the media. The title of the book well overstates the prominence of those involved in the election of 1920. The two actual presidents exerted minimal influence on the process: Theodore Roosevelt died well before the conventions and Woodrow Wilson, after suffering several strokes, was bed-ridden during the entire election cycle. The others, FDR, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Warren Harding were relatively unimportant politicians at the time and were more or less dragged along by the course of events. Not bad, I guess, but just dry as toast under the sun in the Sahara.

“To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight”, by James Tobin

 

 

448 pages, Free Press, ISBN-13: 978-0684856889

 

Who hasn’t heard of the Wright Brothers? As a former Presenter at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, I can attest to the indisputable fact that Orville and Wilber hold pride of place in the Village (second only to Thomas Edison), what with their workshop and family home now residing in suburban Detroit, after Henry Ford transported them both from Dayton, Ohio. When I found James Tobin’s To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight at 2^nd & Charles (after having turned in a bunch a DVDs), I picked it up for free and, jeez, am I ever glad that I did. Throughout, the Wrights are portrayed much as I was taught that they were: austere, persistent with a kind of mule-like stubbornness and blessed with episodes of inspired brilliance. And it’s all true. 

 

The Wrights – they are discussed as a tandem throughout much of the book, except for those rare instances where they were separated – invented the three-axis control system for their flyers after absorbing damn-near everything ever written on the subject of powered human flight, by meeting with everyone they could who actually attempted what they were now exploring, by observing the world around them – especially birds and the way they flew and, just as importantly, hovered in the air, and especially through lots and lots and LOTS of trial and error. While their development of wing-warping (discovered by twisting a thin box) ultimately proved to be less than ideal and didn’t seem to understand adverse yaw, for all that their powered Flyer flew first, making them the rightly-celebrated inventors we know today.

 

But for all that, To Conquer the Air is more than just the tale of the Wright brothers and their world-changing achievement, as Tobin manages to interweave the stories of other pioneers of the air into his work: such as Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution and his assistant, Charles Manly; the Wright’s friend and patron Octave Chanute; the mostly unknown Wright father, other brother and their sister Kate; and even Alexander Graham Bell and Glenn Curtiss, founders of the Aerial Experiment Society and the Wright’s principal rivals. Tobin has managed to wright a book that tells the complete story of how Man conquered the air in less than 500 pages, bringing together all of the technical details without talking down or past the reader.

“Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania”, by Erik Larson

 

 

480 pages, Broadway Books, ISBN-13: 978-0307408877

 

On May 7^th, 1915, the HMS Lusitania, the pride of the British Cunard Line, was torpedoed by the German Unterseeboot U-20, 12 miles off the coast of southern Ireland, not far from Queenstown. She sank in 18 minutes, taking 1198 passengers and crew down with her, including 123 American citizens and even three German stowaways; there were only 764 survivors. Of the twenty-two available life boats only six managed to be launched, while many of the passengers who drowned did so because they had incorrectly donned their lifejackets and could not keep their heads above water; seeing as many of the crew were killed by the initial torpedo attack and couldn’t assist with the lifeboats, and that the passengers weren’t trained how to use their life jackets, there can be little surprise as to why there was such a great loss of life.

 

All of this and more is recorded in Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson, in which said crossing is recreated in minute detail as to the movements and motivations of all involved. The respective captains of Lusitania and U-20, many of the passengers and crew of the doomed vessel and the powers that be of all the nations involved. These include the men who inhabited Room 40 in the British Admiralty who were responsible for breaking the German codes and transmitting the information to British and Allied forces, or President Wilson, trying to keep the still-isolationist United States out of war while wrestling with the loss of his first wife. We even get to meet Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, as he shuttles back and forth between England and France in the wake of the sinking.

 

But it is still HMS Lusitania and her doomed passengers that is at the forefront of Dead Wake, and by introducing the reader to these cursed souls, Larson humanizes this most avoidable of tragedies. We see these fellow human beings, civilians traveling from the New World to the Old for personal or professional reasons; essentially, these score-or-so passengers are representative for the 2000+ souls on the ship whom we never meet or get to know. Joseph Stalin said in 1947 that “[i]f only one man dies…that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics”. While this is no doubt Stalin being his typical compassionate self, I think the sonovabitch was on to something: it is impossible for a human being to fathom the deaths of such a large number of people, but quite easy to imagine a few. By shrinking the number, Larson makes the horror more accessible to the average person.