What I Am Reading: "The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914" by Barbara W. Tuchman

This will be my last blog post of this nature, which I will discuss below. But first: the book.

This is the first book I’ve read by Barbara Tuchman, who wrote The Guns of August and other famous mid-century histories. Since the book is a broad survey of the situation in Western Europe in the years leading up to World War One, I decided a couple of months ago to beef up my knowledge of that era with some informal pre-reading before I launched into this. To that end, I read The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse by Piu Eatwell, Twilight of Empire by Greg King and Penny Wilson, The Dreyfus Affair by Piers Paul Read, and Death in the Tiergarten by Benjamin Carter Hett. This marks the book as a direct culmination of this reading list; but there are enough connections to other books I wrote about on this blog to make it an appropriate overall culmination. It also serves as a bookend to Margaret MacMillan, whose Paris 1919, which I read early (though not first) in my blogging career, was a similar broad survey of the world right after the war.

The Proud Tower has eight long chapters, each on a separate subject but, of course, with many links and connections between them. There is one each on the United States, France, and Germany, two on Britain, and one each on Anarchism, Socialism, and the fledgling international peace conferences at The Hague. The chapters were not formulaic, as they looked at each country through different angles. The chapters on Britain, differentiated by chronology, focused first on the upper classes and high society when the Conservatives were in power in the 1890s, then on the working classes and the rise of Labour when the government changed in 1906. Eatwell’s book prepared me for some of this, especially for the rising prominence of the press and public opinion; but I was also well-served by books like John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee or The Long Weekend, about the English country house (though that was from after the war); or even Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

The section on France focused almost entirely on the Dreyfus Affair and the resulting social divisions, which were covered admirably in Read’s book. The section on Germany focused fairly heavily on German high culture, especially on the modernist operas of Richard Strauss, and there was only a little on what a drab city Berlin was at the time; if anything, Hett’s book had more information on German society, especially lower-class society. High culture is interesting too, though; I was helped along a bit by a timely article on Wagner I read recently. Overall the Germans at the time viewed themselves as a nation on the rise, overcoming weaker and inferior nations, and their culture reflected this with pomp and grandiosity while still nurturing a strong undercurrent of morbidity.

All three chapters on broader political tendencies were interesting. The chapter on Anarchism was largely about the era of propaganda of the deed, including assassinations of various world leaders and monarchs and an era of bombings in France from 1892 to 1894. The anarchists come across as deluded idealists unwilling to put any effort into the sort of organizing obviously required to bring about worldwide revolution; but their theorists (Bakunin, Kropotkin) are interesting and charismatic as they are shown mingling in high society, and the social conditions that spawned them are, of course, appalling by modern standards. The section on peace conferences is a good break for some of the international diplomacy that Tuchman presumably brings to bear in The Guns of August. All of the main European countries had little interest in the conferences as they were willed into being by activists, but none wanted to be the one to pull the trigger, even obstructionist and authoritarian Germany. There were national imperatives and compelling International Relations logic behind countries’ positions on arms limitations, whereby those behind wanted delays in innovation to allow time to catch up. There were also interesting experiments in the fields of arbitration (courtesy of, of all people, perpetually-belligerent Theodore Roosevelt) and fumbling efforts to restrict things like the “launching of projectiles from balloons,” which didn’t have its own term in 1899. I find things like the League of Nations interesting, an international institution that the world (or at least the Republican Senate caucus) wasn’t ready for; so proto-League ideas are interesting as well. They are like the ghosts of our existing United Nations, imported from some steampunk story of “the same world, but with top hats and zeppelins.”

The final chapter is that on socialism, and isentitled “The Death of Jaures. It culminates in the great French leader’s assassination on the eve of the war he had tried to prevent, a topic which I first learned about in Lacoture’s Leon Blum. This section focused on classic themes of orthodox Marxism versus “Revisionism,” or the cooperation with bourgeoise governments, a problem that would later be hashed out by socialist parties in France, Germany, and elsewhere during the interwar years. It also covered the socialist conceptions of the approaching war, as some viewed it as necessary in a Marxian sense to help hasten the downfall of capitalism, some reconciled themselves to fighting on behalf of the national governments that they had become tied to by cooperation (especially in Germany), and some favored prevention of the war, whether through implausible and likely self-defeating tactics such as a general strike or through other, less radical methods. It is a melancholy chapter in an ultimately melancholy book. Any book that covers a topic prior to such a calamity will be both melancholy and in some sense teleological, though Tuchman explicitly resists any opportunities to follow up on anything after 1914, and frames the book in her introduction as an antidote to rose-colored views of the world before the war.

The segment that I did not prepare for was that on the United States. I had thought that it would largely be old hat, and to some extent it was, covering the Spanish-American war, Mahan, jingoism, and increasing international involvement, as I have read about in connection with everyone from Gore Vidal to Hiram Bingham. However, it gave me a new window into proceedings, and tugged on my brain-strings a bit, by focusing on Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the House of Representatives for the 51st, 54th, and 55th Congresses. At a time when I am leaving one legislative job to take up another in Washington, Reed reminded me a little of the grandeur and drama of legislative work that is a pretty big draw for shallow old me, demonstrated best when he broke the “silent quorum” in 1890. This was a method (also called the “disappearing quorum”) whereby members who were present would not respond to a quorum call; thus, if the numbers were right, depriving the majority of the ability to conduct business. Confronted with a close Congress during Benjamin Harrison’s administration, Reed, a learned and sarcastic self-made-man from Maine, was thus denied a quorum when settling the question of several contested elections. He proceeded to “[direct] the Clerk to record the names of the following members present and refusing to vote…” which caused a massive legislative fight that ultimately resulted in victory for the Republicans. The section on the U.S. caused me to add a few new books to my reading list as a postscript to this one, including a new book on the Gilded Age and a book perpetually on the edge of my reading list since it came out, The War Lovers.

Reed was a very Vidalian character: a successful, bitter, world-weary, sarcastic, and a principled anti-imperialist who lost in the end. I am surprised that I didn’t learn about him from Gore Vidal himself. Then again, maybe he was in Empire, I haven’t read it since I was a teenager and I have quite forgotten. I intend to refresh my memory soon, though. At some point post-college, when I hadn’t read Vidal, my favorite novelist, for five or six years, I decided that a re-read would make me miss my dearly-departed DC too much, and that I would wait to read them until I returned. Now, most of a decade and one unexpected tenure in New Jersey later, that day is finally at hand, as I am moving next week to take up a position at the Congressional Research Service.

I started this blog as a project to cope with being in a new place that I had never been before. I had intended to discontinue it once I left New Jersey, or possibly when I hit 200 books. As it turns out, both happened simultaneously. This blog was a good project for me to be able to focus my intellectual efforts on, and forced me to get some practice at both writing and at organizing my thoughts. I was not always successful at that; partly because I always wrote a post on the day I finished a book, and there were definitely times that I was too tired or too indifferent to a book to say something intelligent or offer more than a summary barely above the level of a bullet-pointed chronology. However, I am pretty happy with at least a few of these blog posts, and I hope that perhaps one or two of my scarcely-existent readers found something worthwhile in them. As a longtime heavy reader, I have become pretty good at winnowing my reading list to books that I will like or that will interest me, so for better or worse there weren’t many duds here, though I was probably meaner to a few books than they deserved.

It also gave me the raw data to analyze my reading patterns and confirm that I still have a long way to go in reading books that aren’t by white men. This data is from a quick once-over, but out of the 177 different authors that I read, 45 were women (25%) and 22 were people of color (12%). A year ago, after the Black Lives Matter protests gained steam, I tried to do a better job reading writers of color. My numbers show a long way to go, but this effort definitely caused me to seek out books that I likely would not have found otherwise, and has helped me to at least incrementally expand my horizons. I am hoping to continue on this trajectory. For some other data points: there were 7 books with two authors, and 30 repeat books, by an author I had read earlier in this timeframe.

A year of isolation in a new place followed by a year of isolation from the pandemic meant that I got a lot of reading done, possibly the most I will ever do in my life. Summer is a time for fiction, and I am looking forward to a few new “projects” such as pre-Tolkien fantasy of Lord Dunsany and Mervyn Peake; my annual summer reads on polar exploration and of Murakami; some dreary contemporary Europeans like Thomas Bernhard (and less dreary ones like Elena Ferrante); and some more Barbara Tuchman and (throwback to the beginning) Margaret MacMillan when nonfiction makes a big return in the autumn. I have a solidifying intention to do monthly posts with brief (brief!) notes about what I have read that month, and hopefully to become a little more active with my Goodreads account. I think the latter could be a good social media venture for me if I can get some engagement going. I have also considered a retrospective ranking of the books I’ve made posts on; but I also considered that after each year and never did it, so take that as you will. Most of all, though, I look forward to sitting in a cool DC park and reading Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire series for the first time since I was a teenager, when they shaped so much of my personality and interests.

Thanks for reading.