Only death is inevitable. Short of that nothing is inevitable until it happens, and everything is inevitable once it has happened. The historian deals with past events and therefore to him all history is inevitable. But these past events were once in the future and then they were not inevitable.
-- A.J.P. Taylor
In The Summer the Archduke Died, Louis D. Rubin Jr. infuses his elegant, absorbing collection of review essays with Taylor's credo. He explains not only the vagaries of history, particularly how we look back at wars and their origins, but also the role of those who led their nations in those decisive moments and how their choices determined the anything-but-predetermined outcomes. A literary critic who spent his career teaching English at the University of North Carolina, Rubin doesn't explicitly answer the question: "Does the man make history, or history make the man?" But there's no doubt that he's in the "man makes history" school.
Rubin was always fascinated by epic conflicts. Born in 1923 into a Reform Jewish family that had arrived in Charleston in the mid-19th century, he recalls witnessing the last Confederate reunion in Richmond in 1932. Looking back at that event, "I could feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck--seventy-five years ago as I write this." His father was a sergeant in the Marine Corps in World War I, and the "Great War" exerted a similar claim on his imagination.
In the course of his writings, he reflects on his childhood emotions and develops his adult conclusions. As for how those conclusions may apply to the world today, he leaves it to the reader to take that next step, providing plenty of ideas to ponder.
Nowhere is Rubin more convincing than in his exposition on the origins of World War I. In contrast to World War II, where the stakes were clear and Hitler left others no choice but to submit or resist, "the Great War need not and ought not to have been fought," he argues. The primary culprit, in his eyes, was Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose chauvinistic policies and massive miscalculations amounted to "a catastrophic failure of statecraft." The interlocking system of alliances, ostensibly designed to protect each country, triggered the well-known escalation of local conflicts into a European-wide war. As a result, 10 million men died for no apparent gain.
While explaining the mechanisms that made war appear inevitable, he keeps returning to the theme of the responsibility of those who set up the alliances, dictated the timetables, and triggered the clashes. Times were different then, he points out, with almost no avenues open for negotiations. "No United Nations, no councils or forums were available for extending and broadening discussions and circulating proposals and responses," he writes. Just as he implicitly approves of those kinds of institutions today, his warnings about the dangers of alliances with automatic triggers are clearly meant to convey a contemporary message, arguing for more flexible defense arrangements among allies.
All of which gets back to his thesis about the central role of leadership. Hence his fascination with two men he considers giants of the last century: Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Among the striking parallels: "Both were renowned for their furious activity, and apparently both were manic depressives. Both were aristocrats." While he is by no means blind to TR's "touch of megalomania," or his more erratic behavior, he admires his outsized personality.
So, too, with Churchill who "was no stranger to ambition or to egocentricity." True enough, but Rubin keeps the British leader's singular accomplishment in clear focus: recognizing the evil of Nazi Germany early, and then leading his nation in its fight for survival, saving the Western world.
Little wonder that Rubin has no patience for the revisionists of the New Left in the 1960s or a later generation of "young Englishmen of right-wing persuasion" who praise Hitler's appeasers and condemn Churchill, blaming him for allegedly dragging Britain into a war it should have avoided. He icily points out, for example, that John Charmley's 300,000-word biography of Churchill never mentions "Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc." The real source of such revisionism, he argues, is frustration with Britain's loss of empire and influence after World War II, allowing the United States to emerge as the new dominant force in the world. In essence, he concludes, the revisionists' arguments amount to "a fond wish that the twentieth century hadn't happened."
He is equally scathing about the snobbery of British military historians who dismiss the popular books of Martin Gilbert, with their focus on the human suffering in war as much as on grand strategy. One reason, he suggests, for their condescension: "Gilbert is a third-generation English Jew of Polish descent." Rubin is intrigued by the behavior patterns of the British Establishment in all its bizarre manifestations. He writes about the infamous Mitford sisters, who included "one Nazi, one Fascist, one Communist, and one novelist." Unity hobnobbed with Hitler and gushed about his culture and charm. As Rubin notes, this "supposedly justified the Kristallnacht and similar social events." But he explains that her rebellion was more a personal than an ideological one, which fits in perfectly with his notion that people's motives can't be reduced to impersonal political forces.
This also means that the way we look at history is as much a reflection of our current mood and anxieties as it is of what really happened. But if a more distant perspective can distort our view, sometimes the passage of time is precisely what's needed to bring it into clearer focus, stripping away the myths of those too close to the actual events. Certainly that was the case with the Civil War. It wasn't till the civil rights era and the "momentous change in historical attitudes," Rubin points out, that Shelby Foote's three volume The Civil War: A Narrative appeared, something he characterizes as "a genuinely objective work of history."
Rubin is equally fascinated by the natural cycles that produce histories of wars, or the disruptions that lead to some wars' receiving disproportionate coverage at the expense of others. His own preoccupations make him acutely conscious of the fact that probably five times as many books have been published about World War II as about World War I. That has less to do with the fact that the latter conflict produced approximately five times as many deaths than with other reasons. Normally, after a first outpouring of books, it takes time for the former warriors to retire and reflect before they produce their memoirs and studies. But by that time, the world had plunged into a new conflagration, which only underscored the fact that the Great War had settled nothing.
"It was deficient in dramatic resolution," he writes.
But Rubin and others have contributed to a revival of interest in this epic conflict that received short shrift. For him, history never quite recedes--or, if it does, only for awhile. This is quite a different view of memory than the one presented by Milan Kundera. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the Czech emigré bemoaned the cascade of news events, with each cancelling out the memory of the previous one--everything from the massacres in Bangladesh to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Salvador Allende and the Cambodian bloodbath, "and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten."
Not Rubin. Truly a gentleman and scholar of the old school in the best sense of that term, he assiduously studies the record of wars and warriors, and the writings of those who shape our vision of those events. He's impatient with conspiracy theories that fly in the face of common sense and common decency, and always recognizes that history is the product of many moveable parts and of the best and worst in human behavior. He expounds, but doesn't pontificate.
Yes, like a schoolmaster of old, he had this reader reaching for his dictionary on a couple of occasions (if you can't immediately define "perihelion," don't scoff). But he's neither pretentious nor pedantic--and besides, figuring out the meaning of a word is good exercise for the mind. So, too, is accompanying Rubin on his exploration of the meaning of history, its bloodiest conflicts, and why memory matters.
Andrew Nagorski, director of public policy and senior fellow at the EastWest Institute, is the author of The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II.
