Modern Lessons From Medieval History 4
Created | Updated Nov 24, 2011
Part 4. AN AGE OF THE COMMON MAN
When William Cobbett wrote: “If he play the tyrant, even little men will rise against him, and it is right they should have the power so doing” he was referring to what he believed to have been a longstanding English tradition that was disappearing in Great Britain.
THE FACES OF THE FUTURE
Marx and Engels saw things differently projecting back into time and space the unhappy plight of the masses in the new industrialized Lancashire. But they were not alone in finding the Face of the Future there. Richard Cobden and "The Manchester School" also hailed King Cotton, but for them it was all ,like the Liverpool-Manchester Railway, "Grand" and "Experimental". And it is true that Lancashire had real cost-advantages for the entrepreneur for in its new found trade and industry it had none of the regulations and traditions that underpinned the "Commonweal" in other port-hinterlands like the London region and Yorkshire.
So Industrial Lancashire spawned two great Victorian global visions: Cobden's one of world, peace, harmony and wealth through the kind of deregulation and Free Trade that had helped Lancashire to prosper, and Marx's vision developed through his own “Historical science” of the eternal and universal war of the classes with the ongoing struggle of the masses against those who exploited them from above bringing about finally the massed urban industrial Proletariat, "industrial armies" that could finally overthrow the exploiters and oppressors.
During the optimism of the mid-Victorian Boom years after 1851, when there seemed to be good reasons to believe in progress for all in the spirit of "The Great Exhibition of the Works of All the Nations",it was more comforting to consider Richard Cobden as "the man of the moment, perhaps of the future, not yet merely of the past". Donald Read quotes this obituary tribute to Cobden in the 'Leeds Mercury' in his 1967 study of "Cobden and Bright". And, much as G.K.Chesterton thought that the 1920's were in need of a reconnection with William Cobbett's vision of the little man, Donald Read saw the Sixties as a time to rediscover Richard Cobden.
"But Cobden..was more than simply a notable Victorian. He was an internationalist and a democrat who has stood out as an inspiration not only for his own time, but for future time, including our own. The era of high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism, which began after his death, and which culminated in two world wars, is now seen as a disastrous interlude. In an important sense the world of the 1960s is continuing from a point where Cobden hopefully left the world of the 1860's a century ago" (Read pages 248 & 249)
During that "disastrous interlude" the internationalist visions of Marx and Cobden were only two of the future visions that struggled for support out of the new historiography and new understandings of the laws of existence, and "men of peace and harmony" like Cobden went out of fashion.
By the last decades of the Nineteenth Century much of the logic of the times argued for militarism. Of the three strands of Previte Orton’s Ancient “Golden Age”, the “law and government” of Rome had come to dominate thinking in an age of Darwinian struggle. German historians in particular tackled new and old questions about the respective roles of Roman and Teuton. The Roman was citizen and soldier: and the Teuton was slave, barbarian and Roman mercenary or provincial administrator. And other studies of the role of German Emperors during the Middle Ages and of the wider role of the Medieval Papacy reflected a shifting of gravity from the states West of the Rhine and the Alps.States that had dominated so much of Modern European and indeed world history. In 1914 the actions of (a)the Triple Alliance, especially of Germany and Austria-Hungary, (b)the Balkans states, notably Serbia and (c)the Russia Empire dragged the West of the Rhine countries of Belgium, France and Great Britain into The Great War.
PULLING BACK FROM THE BRINK
After two world wars, Professor Barker could write in 1951 : “Indeed it was sometimes suggested in a phase of opinion current at the beginning of this century that we English were progressing and ought to progress still further, by way of a regression back to the epoch of the Middle Ages- that paradise of voluntary groups and Eden of pure society. But there is a great difference, in this respect, between the Middle Ages and our own age. Groups flourished in the Middle Ages in the absence of an effective State and an operative scheme of law and order; but the price paid for their flourishing was so heavy that men turned by preference to an effective State and sacrificed groups on its altar. Groups flourish today, if with less luxuriance, in the presence and under the shelter of an effective State; and for us to go back to the Middle Ages, in the sense of abandoning an effective State, might mean a sacrifice of the groups we have for groups we should hardly like to have- on such conditions and at such a price.” (page 50)
By this time Professor Barker was in his seventies, old enough to have been a young boy when Gladstone, the Grand Old Man of the Liberal Party, had served his last term as Prime Minister as the only credible leader of the traditionally "progressive party" within British politics, having embraced reform in his old age.
Like Cobden Gladstone believed in the practical pursuit of Christian values. But even with, or perhaps because of, his near prophetic stature, Gladstone was listened to with respect as the relic of an earlier and more optimistic age. For even the much younger Lord Rosebery, a friend of some intimacy, could not follow Gladstone politically on issues like Home Rule for Ireland and in particular the issue of the Naval budget submitted by the Admiralty. To Gladstone Britain should not be investing so heavily in war when there was so much else that was more worthy of public expenditure:and military spending increases war-readiness and therefore the risk of war.
But when Gladstone retired in the absence of the backing of his cabinet, and many people looked to Rosebery to take up the Liberal leadership, he had neither the inclination, nor the clear vision of a future direction in those times necessary to take up the challenge. His ideas were largely piecemeal and came out in occasional speeches. He has been categorised as a champion of "Liberal Imperialism", as the result of the most complementary remarks about what British colonists had achieved and were achieving in Australia. It was an Age of Imperialism and the Athenian City State of the Fifth Century BC may have been, as Matthew Arnold wrote, one of the "Golden Ages" of history, but history moves on. Greece gave way to Rome, which after all had spread Christian Civilization to Western Europe through its military strength and its ability to impose law and order. By common consent for the last couple of centuries England and then Great Britain had the best political and consitutional system in the world, and for a hundred years the best economy.
So Professor Barker was of a generation that had been brought up to believe the study of such Ancient Civilizations and their ability to make invaluable contributions to the ongoing challenges of the present and future. And in 1951 ,in the light of that bygone age, he added as an appendix to his book on 'Principles of Social and Political Theory' the preamble of the new constitution of India: “I am the more moved to quote it because I am proud that the people of India should begin their independent life by subscribing to the principles of a political tradition which we in the West call Western, but which is now something much more than Western” (page vi)
In fact it was almost certainly because he had been able to "keep the faith" through the Age of Catastrophe that some of his old students from the inter-war period had urged him to work up his Professorial lecture notes into this book form. And, considering what he could contribute to the practical challenges of another post-war age he could write: “A reflection occurred to my mind which I drew from my master Aristostle. In a passage in the third book of his Politics he draws a distinction between those who are ‘executants’, or ‘men of directing skill’, in any given field of activity, and those who are simply ‘cultivated’, or possessed of some general knowledge; and he then goes on to suggest that persons belonging to the latter class may be credited with a power of judgement which entitles them to be heard. It is on this ground that he bases an argument for the right of the ordinary citizen to have some say in politics.” (pages v-vi)
Thus Professor Barker justified his own offering to the reading public; and he may well have been aware that his comments about "progressing backwards" towards the Middle Ages could have been applied to some of the aspirations that carried through from the Edwardian era into the inter-war period. After the initial war fervour that amounted to a mood of euphoria the Great War became "The War to End All Wars" and Americans could look on just another episode in a sad history of conflicting States and Churches that their forefathers had opted out of.
Ultimately, however, when the USA could not keep out of a World War, President Woodrow Wilson put forward his "Fourteen Points" that should make sure that it truly would be last great war and Wilson's vision raised hopes all around the world; hopes that globally those who had felt themselves and their nations to be mere “little men” in a world of Imperial ‘big beasts’ might be able to run their own affairs in future. And they were encouraged by the American President’s distaste for imperialism and his belief in national self-determination. And they were encouraged too by the association of America with the Liberty of the common man in a country without an established Church, aristocracy or monarchy.
AMERICA AS THE SAVIOUR OF THE OLD WORLD
Of course the idea that the New World might save the Old World went back for some people to the very first English colonies in New England. David Stannard in his 1977 study “The Puritan Way of Death” shows how the Puritan colonies were part of a wider Puritan project to usher in the Millennium:
“As long as the New Englanders maintained their identities as Englishmen, as long as English Puritanism provided a model and England promised an eventual home for them, as long as they felt themselves part of the forces of history at work in their homeland, the Puritans of New England were culturally and psychologically at one with their relatives and friends on the opposite side of the Atlantic. ….Combined with the belief that they would eventually return to England in glorious victory was the conviction of the first Puritan settlers in Massachusetts Bay that Christ’s Second Coming was near at hand. …John Cotton, New England’s leading theologian during this period, delivered a series of widely read sermons during the late 1630’s and 1640’s, predicting the imminence of that great day- even to the extent of pinpointing the date the prophecy would be fulfilled “at about the time 1655”. ..
As the forces of Puritanism rose to power in the 1640’s, there appeared the first signs of the anticipated return exodus of those New Englanders who would be the most needed in the Puritan capital. In 1640 alone, 10% of those men in New England with some university training returned to England, and for the next several years the great majority of new graduates from Harvard College eagerly followed them. But it was a stunted and short-lived exodus.. ..New England became, as Perry Miller has put it, “not the vanguard of Protestantism, but an isolated remnant.” (pages 122-4 “The American Way of Death”- David E, Stannard-)
In fact, when the Restoration of Charles II brought back the monarchy in England, the next major wave of emigrants was rather different from the Puritans, for George Fox had created the “Society of Friends”. And writing in the midst of another great struggle for Christian Civilization in 1943 Aldous Huxley ended his study of the “Grey Eminence”, Father Joseph, with a tribute to George Fox:
“Born at the very moment when Richelieu was made president of the council and Father Joseph finally committed himself to the political life, Fox began his ministry the year before the Peace of Westphalia was signed. In the course of the next twenty years the Society of Friends gradually crystallized into its definitive form…. The society he founded has had its ups and downs, its long seasons of spiritual torpor and stagnation, as well as its times of spiritual life; but always the Quakers have clung to Fox’s theocentrism, and along with it, to his conviction that, if it is to remain at all pure and unmixed, good must be worked for upon the margin of society, by individuals and by organizations small enough to be capable of moral, rational and spiritual life.”(page 255)
In fact theocentrism was a common theme during the Age of Reason as people tried to make sense of a much greater and more complex world than even the great thinkers of classical times had known about. Yet above and beyond all the apparent differences, and deeper and more profoundly as well, there were continuities of Nature and a Creator thereof.
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.
THE FRONTIERSMAN AND THE NOBLE SAVAGE
The men who drafted the Declaration of Independence were not backwoodsmen, as Bronowski and Mazlich put it. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was a cultured and well-educated man, a great landowner with a country house every bit as "picturesque" as any mansion in England : and Jefferson's reading included the works of the French philosophers at the cultural heart of European. Culture or civilization?
Jean Jacques Rousseau had responded in his own way to the unfolding knowledge of the peoples of the world by writing a prize-winning essay condemning the impact of Civilization in 1749 and praising the ‘Noble Savage”. Then,as Europe was still recovering from the Seven Years War, the French explorer Bougainville arrived in Tahiti in 1768: and Bougainville's subsequent account of this remote island paradise prompted the French intellectual Diderot to write a supplement to the work in which he attacked the probable future invasion of this pagan arcady by Christianity and the evils that made Europe such a sad place, destroying the simple life that the tropical island isolation had made possible.
In that Age of Reason Diderot's friend Rousseau went on to describe a new and better political order in which the old order would be swept away and government would be entrusted to a brilliant philosopher, who would know how to read “the general will”. In some ways the France conceived of in Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” was that same ideal France as the reign of Saint Louis, but ‘Reason’ and a true understanding of Nature would replace Christianity, for the Medieval "pillars" of monarchy, the aristocracy and the Church had lost all credibility.
The American experience of "the wilderness" had been rather deeper and more extensive than Bougainville fourteen days in Tahiti and perhaps not all Americans believed that the success of the Pilgrim Fathers was totally down to the hand of Divine Providence and the virtues and strengths of the Puritan colonists. Divine Providence may have looked over them, but the merchants contracted to take them to Virginia, eventually put them down near Cape Cod, a great "European" fishery region for a century or so, where European ships had made landfall for essential supplies and repairs. It was a place where they could be befriended by Tisquanto, an Amerindian who had lived for a while in England and who could speak English. Tisquanto could handle relations with the local tribes and The Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers recount how, among other things, Tisquanto encouraged them to blast some gunpowder just to emphasize the "special powers" of this "new tribe".
One way or another the development gap between the Europeans and the Amerindians had implications for both friendly and hostile relations. Of course someone arguing the Rousseau/Diderot thesis could argue that the arrival of the Europeans and their spread of Protestant and Roman Catholic religions also spread the European habit of great wars that magnified the war-party raids of more "savage" societies, and Amerindian allies where enlisted in the wars between European states. But it was only after considerable growth and expansion within the thirteen colonies, and the defeat of French, Spanish and Dutch ambitions in North America concluded by the Seven Years War that the "Americans" began to feel that they could now "go it alone" confident that they could handle any future "Indian Wars" without back-up from "the Mother Country".
It is very difficult to argue with Professor Barker’s assertion that really some kind of social order, some tradition of sticking together needs to exist before a State can be founded, and one might add that a social order needs economic foundations that create some sense of material security. It was no accident that Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. It was a cry for an end to economic controls and mercantilism and in favour of free trade, and in fact free economies where human conduct would be guided by the laws of economics as if by some “invisible hand” that would steer humankind into an era of peace, after decades of colonial and trade wars. It was the kind of economic change that the Founding Fathers of the USA wished to have, because the Mercantilist System had checked and distorted economic growth. And after Independence was won the political classes running the 13 colonies became the political class of the United States, and its economic and social history was now able to pursue its natural evolution in what might be called "English revolutionary" style. The existing colonial governments with their assemblies base upon the English parliamentary tradition became States in their own right acting as partners in a Federal State. But it was in France and its Empire that the implication of the new ideas and the American example was truly revolutionary.
France was encouraged by some of those Frenchmen who had taken part in the American Revolution, and by Americans like Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine who brought the spirit of a New World to the Old World. In 1789 the French National Assembly produced its own Declaration of the Rights of Man featuring the rights to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Within a few years France rid itself of the pillars of the ‘Old Regime’ and set up the Worship of Nature. And this was more truly a revolution, a new beginning, than what had happened in America.
In Paris, no more than in Philadelphia, did those who declared that men are created equal and have an inalienable right to their Liberty seem to consider the implications for the African slaves working within their economies. In the USA legal slavery lasted for nearly another hundred years. But in the French island of Haiti, the declaration of the Rights of Man by a French National Assembly was immediately seized upon by the slaves.
What happened in Haiti was described by C.L.R. James in his study of Toussaint L’Ouverture. L’Ouverture had been more domestic staff than slave and he drove his master and the family to get them safely to a port from which they could escape. Then in nights of blood the freed slaves avenged themselves and formed into armies. In the fighting L’Ouverture earned his name as a general and once the fighting was over he had achieved the leadership status that inspired James’ title of “The Black Napoleon”. But where was he to lead them to? The emancipated slaves were happy to divide up the land into small subsistence plots, enough to feed and house themselves. L’Ouverture rode around the island trying to explain that they needed to carry on the work that had made the plantations such potent generators of wealth. An Haitian republic, he argued, would need wealth in order to be viable. They would need armed forces to preserve their independence and security. They would need hospitals and schools, and money to buy all kinds of things from the outside world that Haiti could not supply. That may have sounded to some very much like choosing to go back into slavery for Haiti had never been a Society merely a slave plantation
colony.
The revolution descended into bloodshed, massacre and Terror in France too, with the nominal government eventually resorting to the classic policy of directing the violence abroad, in this case to carry revolutionary war across Europe. But, as T.B. Macaulay said in a speech when he returned to politics a couple of years after the last upsurge of the Age of Revolution in 1848, though in that "European Year of Revolution" the great cities of Europe once more saw streets running with rivers of blood and the threat of the descent of a new Dark Age, Britain had not seen that kind of violence.
Macaulay ascribed this to the English constitutional tradition in which the State over the centuries found ways to accommodate itself to new situations and discontents. In fact the American Revolution had been followed by something of an "English Revolution" between 1782 and 1832 that had allowed a shift of power away from the established Church, the Aristocracy and the monarchy towards the new masters of legitimacy and wealth. It was not a revolution without casualties since the guiding Laws of Nature lacked the humanity or the "good naturedness" that Lord Clarendon had said that England had been famous for. But there was always emigration to North America, an option that William Cobbett considered and rejected, but Highland Clans and Irish Catholics after the great famines took out of grim necessity.
THE AMERICAN DREAM
For without the British convicts and African slaves of the Eighteenth Century, the USA had attracted the work force that it needed in order to meet its Labour needs by developing its image as the land of opportunity for “the common man", personal land-ownership being one of the great attractions to "land-hungry" people from Europe. At the same time the Land and Labour of the whole American hemisphere increasingly attracted Capital investment by Britain and America increasingly could be seen as "The Land of Opportunity" and the "Face of the Future", especially when the Civil War revealed to the world the face of the most modern industrialised warfare and the impact of economic blockade in an increasingly global economy. As Niall Ferguson described in his work "Colossus. The Rise and Fall of the American Empire" the innovative federal republic was now revealed as no lose confederation but a Union held together by preponderant power: and the logic of State power and militarism in pursuit of political objectives was one of the factors that undermined Cobden's optimistic hopes for an international community based upon Christian principles of peace and cooperation.
By the late 1860s Matthew Arnold became very concerned about the “Americanization” of Britain itself for the worship of the common man began to cross the Atlantic as an “invisible import”. And, just as the achievement of Independence and the deregulation of trade produced the conditions that shaped the Zong Affair and allarmed Americam Quakers that the USA would become almost one huge slave plantation, the defeat of the Confederacy and the consequences, produced the age of “The Carpet-Baggers”. These adventurers descended from the North to take advantage of the vast economic potential of the South, and the growing trans-continental railway system offered new opportunities for the exploitation of the continent’s vast natural resources. As in other lightly inhabited parts of the world it became possible for the common people to “stake a claim” to pieces of farm land or to places where the Earth contained natural resources that were worth a fortune in the global commodity markets.
The whole American Dream came to be based upon the idea of the chance of a New Start in terms of material rather than spiritual goals like those of the Puritan pioneers. On becoming “American” a person's "counter" was set at zero and prestige would in future be based upon how people “made it” in the New World.
Matthew Arnold felt that the American way was to heap praise upon people who only managed to come up to the mere average.Where was the pursuit of excellence? A few years later, when Arnold made a lecture tour of the USA, he could feel that that country was not without minds worthy of respect, and able to respect him. But it remained the case that the major tests of “making it” in the USA were based upon quantitative and not qualitative values. Who made or had the most money? Who had the largest, biggest, fastest, heaviest etc of anything? Who was the most famous or infamous? And in many US cities multi-millionaires like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford had power to rival that of the Medici family in Florence.
In fact in the early years of the twentieth century a groups of “muck-raking” journalists exposed the corruption of American life by big money and President ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt led the way in passing new laws to regulate and control those vices. For the great American “melting pot” had found it difficult in the age of Heroic Materialism to maintain the dream of a New World worthy of the Creator in the face of such massive new inputs of Capital and Labour. T.R. Glover, an earlier academic at a mid-west university [Ontario], could bring out similarities between America in this period and key moments in the story of Ancient Rome in his 1935 study of "The Ancient World". But the broader social and economic model changes that America was going through were essentially similar to changes that Dr. Thomson described in Europe of the Fourteenth Century:
“The economy of the Middle Ages had been largely agricultural. Medieval society had been for the most part one of fixed classes- the nobility, the clergy, the worker on the land. There was essential truth in the three-fold grouping of the ‘dwellers in God’s house’ as those whose respective duties were …to fight, to pray, to work”. (page 216) Their interdependence and collective dependence upon God’s Creation and its mysterious ways bound them together as a social entity. But Thomson then set out to show how and why cities had grown all over Europe since the eleventh century.
“Obviously the towns had prospered through the initiative and sagacity of individuals. As opportunity offered, these individuals established themselves as leaders in their trade or occupation and consolidated their positions. A local merchant who developed good connections with travelling merchants, so that he could buy his goods at satisfactory price and sell them at a profit, would naturally wish to maintain control both of his source of goods and his market. Competition established him, but, once established, he would naturally not want too much of it. The result of this attitude was the organization of merchant guilds, consisting of entrepreneurs trading in a single article or group of related products, such as wine, corn, wool, meat, wood, leather goods, or salt.
As commerce grew in volume and variety, a need arose for the organization of trade on a national and an international scale. Wholesale trade required- and produced- large quantities of capital. Profits were impressive. Those who were fortunate or aggressive enough to get in at the beginning of this trade became the upper crust of the mercantile class. The center of the international groups was northern Italy; the Lombards- the Genoese, Florentines, Sienese, and Lucchese financiers- had branch offices and warehouses in all the principal cities of northern and eastern Europe and of England. In Paris alone there were, at the end of the thirteenth century, sixteen branches of various Italian mercantile houses. This monopoly was broken during the fourteenth century when Catalans, southern Frenchmen, and Lowland German merchants, having learned the tricks of international commerce and finance from the Italians, invaded the field and captured generous portions of the trade.” (page 220)
THE "WORLD OF THE CITY" AND THE WAGES OF SIN
In Medieval Europe and in the modern USA there was a similar situation of a key and in many ways dominant region of ports with effective monopoly access to a continent/region of greater wealth and development. In the earlier period it was especially the Italian City states and their "factories" with access to the Middle East and Asia. In the later period it was the States of the US North-Eastern Atlantic seaboard with access to Europe.
In both cases this "entrepot" region created transport and trade links right across a less developed continent rich in raw materials and commodities that it could process into higher value goods to send back to the producing regions or could trade along with some of the raw materials and commodities for a whole range of goods from the more developed region. And in both cases the "terminus" of those routes was an ocean seaboard with no really profitable routes going further to the West. Thus the Atlantic seaboard of North Western Europe in the Middle Ages had much in common with the Pacific seaboard of the modern USA. And in both cases the "entrepot" region became the great centre of wealth and government, with all the controversies inherent in a dynamic that was man-made and not Natural. Lord Acton began his lectures on Modern History with the situation in Italy where the Middle Ages turned into the Modern Age with city-states like Venice, Genoa and Florence at the heart of trade, industry and finance, and Rome seeking to cement its authority and status as the seat of the Pope and the centre of the Government of the Catholic Church. In the USA New York was the great Metropolis and Washington D.C. the Federal Capital.
Reading these "lessons from History" Dr. Thomson could note the wave of discontent through almost all of the city states of Italy, and then across Europe in the fourteenth century. It could be seen as a sign of a "systematic" failure within economic development as the increasing power and riches of the few aggravated and aggrieved the many producing those resentments that created discontent among the "common people" who felt that they were being denied "their simple rights as human beings". For in keeping with some important schools of History as a science and Societies/ States and Civilizations having a "Natural Historical" cycle like all living things, whether Marxist or not, the sense of "The Decline of the West" was palpable in the decade down to 1914 and Oswald Spengler wrote his famous book of this title years before it was published at the end of the First World War.
During the first decade of the twentieth century the British Socialist Tom Mann made an extended tour of the globe in order to study the international workers' movements and he was very impressed with the strength of Syndicalism in the USA. Syndicalism was the product of the French Socialist School which pre-dated the Marxist one. It emphasized the need for "industrial" rather than "trade unions", which joined up people of one trade like engineering across the whole economy. Syndicalists believed in combining all the workers in one industry, which made the union boss a person of real power when dealing with the employers in a US economy that had a tendency towards monopolisation through cartels and conglomerates. Syndicalism also asserted that the "syndicats" were the more democratic than parliaments and political assemblies: more truly representative of the common man. In the UK Syndicalism was strong in South Wales and influenced the industrial strife of the years just before the First World War.
Entry into the First World War and reconnecting with the trouble and strife of the "Old World" seemed almost guaranteed to make matters worse. But the USA was forced into the war in 1917 and US armies had gone to fight in Europe. They went especially to the Western Front in a France that had a long experience of keeping lonely men happy who were only too mortal. Paris had been one of the great attractions of the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century for it had allowed young men to sell their wild oats in some of the best “red-light districts” of Europe. "How're you gonna keep em down on the farm after they've seen Paree". It would be necessary to launch a new struggle for the very soul of America: and ratification of the Prohibition Amendment to the US Constitution, completed early in 1919, reflected concern in the USA over the future growth of a “Bright Lights Big City” lifestyle that was anathema to the Puritan tradition.
In the land of the inalienable right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” it became illegal to have any involvement in the drinking of alcohol, or in gambling or prostitution: and, consequently, during the “Roaring Twenties”, as America experienced a wave of immigration from non “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” Europe, urban industrial America saw the two extremes of, on the one hand affluence and the dream eventually summed up as “two cars in every garage. Two chickens in every pot”, and, on the other hand, strikes, lock-outs and the killing and/or prosecution of dangerous agitators in industrial centres, while in the heart of the cities significant sections of the population defied the law to engage in newly criminalised activities that put them into the hands of the criminal underworld. Big city life became associated with gangsterism and urban warfare between the gangs and the forces of law and order. “A house divided against itself will fall”. These dynamics all contributed to or coincided with the Wall Street Crash that led into the Great Depression of the Thirties, and to right and left wing extremism both in the USA and in the wider world.
"ROME WAS NOT BUILT IN A DAY"
Richard Cobden, however, understood the problem of the new industrial city rather differently through the experience of Manchester and the other great new cities of "King Cotton". In fact they were not properly cities at all but mere "populous districts" that had sucked in adventurers and refugees into overcrowded, unmanaged and ungoverned "townships". As in the "Peterloo Massacre" such authorities and structures that did exist had been set up for an essentially rural and thinly populated region. Parliament accepted this analysis of the problem and passed "The Municipal Corporations Act" in 1835, and Cobden led the campaign for Manchester to use the acts powers in order to become a city with a City Corporation that could properly tackle Manchester's problems.
Over the next half-century there were several drives to address the fact that these cities that had mushroomed with the industrial revolution were dominated by the concept of private ownership, which clearly brought out the difference between rich and poor. Perhaps to some people this was "as it should be" in accordance with that Puritan spirit which had each person "standing alone before God", each one of the road to Heaven or Hell. Matthew Arnold was far from being the only British visitor to Italy in that period who could feel that England, while it had gained much by distancing itself from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, had lost the sense of togetherness that was evident in the great festivals and processions that he witnessed in Roman Catholic Italy. And many like the young Gladstone could feel the seismic impact of entering the great and glorious spaces of the Italian Churches. So Victorian England saw a huge burst of Church building in order to tackle the physical impossibility of everyone going to Church on a Sunday: and the widespread introduction of the Church organ and in many places a return to "ritualism" tried to increase the sense, and the pleasure, of communal worship.
As the enclosure movement came towards completion some of the old commons near towns and cities were preserved as public rather than private spaces, and drive for "green spaces" was taken up by the Parks Movement. Often this was associated with philanthropists, the movement traditionally being dated from the art lesson that John Ruskin gave to Octavia Hill who said that if she had the money she would provide a space for people like her "slum" tenants to take some fresh air and exercise. Ruskin Park is still there, and unlike the commons such parks, often the parks of great houses now swallowed up in the urban sprawl, had exotic flower gardens and trees. Perhaps the greatest of all these public assets was the Crystal Palace complex out in Sydenham, still in the countryside to the south of London.
There were also town halls, libaries, public baths, and a huge school-building programme. But "new plantations" have to be nursed, and nurtured, and provided with the ingredients that build a sense of tradition, pride and common purpose. And in many places the pace of change had become too rapid and push-and-pull factors forced people out of rural societies into urban conglomerations and from one continent to another with a sense of living through catastrophe.
So working in Colorado, USA, in the aftermath of the Age of Catastrophe, it may well have been difficult for Dr. Thomson to appreciate the very real difference between living as a “ragbag” in twentieth century New York rather than Medici Florence, or the Cambridge of Dr. Orton, or in fact that "other place".
J.R. Green, both an Oxford “Townee” and an Oxford “Gownee”, in his radical “History of the English People” in the 1870’s had addressed the prospect of the right to vote being extended to the lower middle class and the prosperous working class. In so doing he referred to the living evidence of the role of such people in the surviving urban fabric of Medieval Oxford, when the affairs of the town and later city had been controlled largely by such men and their organizations like the guilds. For Medieval cities had not been built in the same spirit as Manhattan, if “spirit” is an appropriate word. As Lord Clark observed, the whole of Manhattan was constructed in about the same time that it took to "grow" a Medieval Cathedral.
One might say that its shows. For midway between those two extremes of urban environments, the very early Medieval town and the twentieth century Metropolis, in both Medici Florence and Humanist Oxford in a very real way the city itself became a public work of art celebrating the very best of a common Humanity that all could share: an open book for the citizens who wished to learn lessons from the past.
By the time of Medici Florence and the Oxbridge of Thomas More and Erasmus a couple of centuries of the study of classical authors in expanding libraries had finally broken the silence of the stone remnants of antiquity. They spoke to people as they did to the great art historian Burckhardt, and so the material world of stone and plaster and pigment could once again be made into things of timeless and ageless humanity. And, though wealth was vital to the whole process, when, for example, Florence needed great doors worthy of its new cathedral, they invited artist-craftsmen to submit their suggestions with specimens to show what kind of message they would place into the massive wood. These were far too important judgments not to be made on the basis of sheer quality. Only the best would be good enough, and that meant the best materials as well as workmanship. And on completion the artist got his fee, but the value of his work was often priceless and his fame and standing as a great master too had nothing to do with material wealth.
So surely there were “ragbags” in the crowd that turned up to watch the unveiling of Michelangelo’s new statue of David that had been commissioned by the government of Florence, and felt, along with everyone else, then and since, how powerfully that masterpiece spoke to the observer. To Florence the Biblical David had a particular significance in the light of the city’s long struggles against the “Goliath” power of Rome. To the learned of that age it spoke of connection with antiquity, Greek Roman and Hebrew. But even to simple men and women it spoke and continues to speak of the potential of Humankind to achieve great and noble things in an age of decaying and corrupted institutions of a Medieval order that had to give way to a new age. It was to be a new age, however, walled around, protected and structured above all by the two increasingly important and interdependent professions- lawyers and bankers.
Medici Florence showed how great mercantile wealth could be used to create “benevolent despotism”, but it was obvious to British visitors to Italy in an age when “Heroic Materialism” had created huge “populous districts” in the volatile industrial areas that there was more to successful urban civilization than massive “promiscuity”- as the Victorians referred to such compressed humanity. Material wealth was not enough. The industrial revolution had not allowed time for villages to grow into towns and towns into cities where the actual fabric gave the citizens examples of successful past masters in collective and communal living.
So Dr. Thomson in the University of Colorado in 1963 had his reasons for stressing the importance of the growth of great universities during the later Middle Ages. For the success or failure of both the American melting pot and even of the new world order that would be needed to prevent a third world war, depended upon the ability of Universities both in the USA and around the world to produce a generation that would learn the lessons of History. And in this respect the American campus was well-placed to make a major contribution, drawing upon a population with roots all over Europe, much of Africa, parts of the Far East and some parts of Latin America. So too, to a lesser degree, was Great Britain with its legacy of Empire and Commonwealth.
Like Medici Florence student campuses around the world became real “happening places”, where it seemed possible “to dream the impossible dream” and at least attempt to do something radically new and better.
When William Cobbett wrote: “If he play the tyrant, even little men will rise against him, and it is right they should have the power so doing” he was referring to what he believed to have been a longstanding English tradition that was disappearing in Great Britain.
THE FACES OF THE FUTURE
Marx and Engels saw things differently projecting back into time and space the unhappy plight of the masses in the new industrialized Lancashire. But they were not alone in finding the Face of the Future there. Richard Cobden and "The Manchester School" also hailed King Cotton, but for them it was all ,like the Liverpool-Manchester Railway, "Grand" and "Experimental". And it is true that Lancashire had real cost-advantages for the entrepreneur for in its new found trade and industry it had none of the regulations and traditions that underpinned the "Commonweal" in other port-hinterlands like the London region and Yorkshire.
So Industrial Lancashire spawned two great Victorian global visions: Cobden's one of world, peace, harmony and wealth through the kind of deregulation and Free Trade that had helped Lancashire to prosper, and Marx's vision developed through his own “Historical science” of the eternal and universal war of the classes with the ongoing struggle of the masses against those who exploited them from above bringing about finally the massed urban industrial Proletariat, "industrial armies" that could finally overthrow the exploiters and oppressors.
During the optimism of the mid-Victorian Boom years after 1851, when there seemed to be good reasons to believe in progress for all in the spirit of "The Great Exhibition of the Works of All the Nations",it was more comforting to consider Richard Cobden as "the man of the moment, perhaps of the future, not yet merely of the past". Donald Read quotes this obituary tribute to Cobden in the 'Leeds Mercury' in his 1967 study of "Cobden and Bright". And, much as G.K.Chesterton thought that the 1920's were in need of a reconnection with William Cobbett's vision of the little man, Donald Read saw the Sixties as a time to rediscover Richard Cobden.
"But Cobden..was more than simply a notable Victorian. He was an internationalist and a democrat who has stood out as an inspiration not only for his own time, but for future time, including our own. The era of high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism, which began after his death, and which culminated in two world wars, is now seen as a disastrous interlude. In an important sense the world of the 1960s is continuing from a point where Cobden hopefully left the world of the 1860's a century ago" (Read pages 248 & 249)
During that "disastrous interlude" the internationalist visions of Marx and Cobden were only two of the future visions that struggled for support out of the new historiography and new understandings of the laws of existence, and "men of peace and harmony" like Cobden went out of fashion.
By the last decades of the Nineteenth Century much of the logic of the times argued for militarism. Of the three strands of Previte Orton’s Ancient “Golden Age”, the “law and government” of Rome had come to dominate thinking in an age of Darwinian struggle. German historians in particular tackled new and old questions about the respective roles of Roman and Teuton. The Roman was citizen and soldier: and the Teuton was slave, barbarian and Roman mercenary or provincial administrator. And other studies of the role of German Emperors during the Middle Ages and of the wider role of the Medieval Papacy reflected a shifting of gravity from the states West of the Rhine and the Alps.States that had dominated so much of Modern European and indeed world history. In 1914 the actions of (a)the Triple Alliance, especially of Germany and Austria-Hungary, (b)the Balkans states, notably Serbia and (c)the Russia Empire dragged the West of the Rhine countries of Belgium, France and Great Britain into The Great War.
PULLING BACK FROM THE BRINK
After two world wars, Professor Barker could write in 1951 : “Indeed it was sometimes suggested in a phase of opinion current at the beginning of this century that we English were progressing and ought to progress still further, by way of a regression back to the epoch of the Middle Ages- that paradise of voluntary groups and Eden of pure society. But there is a great difference, in this respect, between the Middle Ages and our own age. Groups flourished in the Middle Ages in the absence of an effective State and an operative scheme of law and order; but the price paid for their flourishing was so heavy that men turned by preference to an effective State and sacrificed groups on its altar. Groups flourish today, if with less luxuriance, in the presence and under the shelter of an effective State; and for us to go back to the Middle Ages, in the sense of abandoning an effective State, might mean a sacrifice of the groups we have for groups we should hardly like to have- on such conditions and at such a price.” (page 50)
By this time Professor Barker was in his seventies, old enough to have been a young boy when Gladstone, the Grand Old Man of the Liberal Party, had served his last term as Prime Minister as the only credible leader of the traditionally "progressive party" within British politics, having embraced reform in his old age.
Like Cobden Gladstone believed in the practical pursuit of Christian values. But even with, or perhaps because of, his near prophetic stature, Gladstone was listened to with respect as the relic of an earlier and more optimistic age. For even the much younger Lord Rosebery, a friend of some intimacy, could not follow Gladstone politically on issues like Home Rule for Ireland and in particular the issue of the Naval budget submitted by the Admiralty. To Gladstone Britain should not be investing so heavily in war when there was so much else that was more worthy of public expenditure:and military spending increases war-readiness and therefore the risk of war.
But when Gladstone retired in the absence of the backing of his cabinet, and many people looked to Rosebery to take up the Liberal leadership, he had neither the inclination, nor the clear vision of a future direction in those times necessary to take up the challenge. His ideas were largely piecemeal and came out in occasional speeches. He has been categorised as a champion of "Liberal Imperialism", as the result of the most complementary remarks about what British colonists had achieved and were achieving in Australia. It was an Age of Imperialism and the Athenian City State of the Fifth Century BC may have been, as Matthew Arnold wrote, one of the "Golden Ages" of history, but history moves on. Greece gave way to Rome, which after all had spread Christian Civilization to Western Europe through its military strength and its ability to impose law and order. By common consent for the last couple of centuries England and then Great Britain had the best political and consitutional system in the world, and for a hundred years the best economy.
So Professor Barker was of a generation that had been brought up to believe the study of such Ancient Civilizations and their ability to make invaluable contributions to the ongoing challenges of the present and future. And in 1951 ,in the light of that bygone age, he added as an appendix to his book on 'Principles of Social and Political Theory' the preamble of the new constitution of India: “I am the more moved to quote it because I am proud that the people of India should begin their independent life by subscribing to the principles of a political tradition which we in the West call Western, but which is now something much more than Western” (page vi)
In fact it was almost certainly because he had been able to "keep the faith" through the Age of Catastrophe that some of his old students from the inter-war period had urged him to work up his Professorial lecture notes into this book form. And, considering what he could contribute to the practical challenges of another post-war age he could write: “A reflection occurred to my mind which I drew from my master Aristostle. In a passage in the third book of his Politics he draws a distinction between those who are ‘executants’, or ‘men of directing skill’, in any given field of activity, and those who are simply ‘cultivated’, or possessed of some general knowledge; and he then goes on to suggest that persons belonging to the latter class may be credited with a power of judgement which entitles them to be heard. It is on this ground that he bases an argument for the right of the ordinary citizen to have some say in politics.” (pages v-vi)
Thus Professor Barker justified his own offering to the reading public; and he may well have been aware that his comments about "progressing backwards" towards the Middle Ages could have been applied to some of the aspirations that carried through from the Edwardian era into the inter-war period. After the initial war fervour that amounted to a mood of euphoria the Great War became "The War to End All Wars" and Americans could look on just another episode in a sad history of conflicting States and Churches that their forefathers had opted out of.
Ultimately, however, when the USA could not keep out of a World War, President Woodrow Wilson put forward his "Fourteen Points" that should make sure that it truly would be last great war and Wilson's vision raised hopes all around the world; hopes that globally those who had felt themselves and their nations to be mere “little men” in a world of Imperial ‘big beasts’ might be able to run their own affairs in future. And they were encouraged by the American President’s distaste for imperialism and his belief in national self-determination. And they were encouraged too by the association of America with the Liberty of the common man in a country without an established Church, aristocracy or monarchy.
AMERICA AS THE SAVIOUR OF THE OLD WORLD
Of course the idea that the New World might save the Old World went back for some people to the very first English colonies in New England. David Stannard in his 1977 study “The Puritan Way of Death” shows how the Puritan colonies were part of a wider Puritan project to usher in the Millennium:
“As long as the New Englanders maintained their identities as Englishmen, as long as English Puritanism provided a model and England promised an eventual home for them, as long as they felt themselves part of the forces of history at work in their homeland, the Puritans of New England were culturally and psychologically at one with their relatives and friends on the opposite side of the Atlantic. ….Combined with the belief that they would eventually return to England in glorious victory was the conviction of the first Puritan settlers in Massachusetts Bay that Christ’s Second Coming was near at hand. …John Cotton, New England’s leading theologian during this period, delivered a series of widely read sermons during the late 1630’s and 1640’s, predicting the imminence of that great day- even to the extent of pinpointing the date the prophecy would be fulfilled “at about the time 1655”. ..
As the forces of Puritanism rose to power in the 1640’s, there appeared the first signs of the anticipated return exodus of those New Englanders who would be the most needed in the Puritan capital. In 1640 alone, 10% of those men in New England with some university training returned to England, and for the next several years the great majority of new graduates from Harvard College eagerly followed them. But it was a stunted and short-lived exodus.. ..New England became, as Perry Miller has put it, “not the vanguard of Protestantism, but an isolated remnant.” (pages 122-4 “The American Way of Death”- David E, Stannard-)
In fact, when the Restoration of Charles II brought back the monarchy in England, the next major wave of emigrants was rather different from the Puritans, for George Fox had created the “Society of Friends”. And writing in the midst of another great struggle for Christian Civilization in 1943 Aldous Huxley ended his study of the “Grey Eminence”, Father Joseph, with a tribute to George Fox:
“Born at the very moment when Richelieu was made president of the council and Father Joseph finally committed himself to the political life, Fox began his ministry the year before the Peace of Westphalia was signed. In the course of the next twenty years the Society of Friends gradually crystallized into its definitive form…. The society he founded has had its ups and downs, its long seasons of spiritual torpor and stagnation, as well as its times of spiritual life; but always the Quakers have clung to Fox’s theocentrism, and along with it, to his conviction that, if it is to remain at all pure and unmixed, good must be worked for upon the margin of society, by individuals and by organizations small enough to be capable of moral, rational and spiritual life.”(page 255)
In fact theocentrism was a common theme during the Age of Reason as people tried to make sense of a much greater and more complex world than even the great thinkers of classical times had known about. Yet above and beyond all the apparent differences, and deeper and more profoundly as well, there were continuities of Nature and a Creator thereof.
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.
THE FRONTIERSMAN AND THE NOBLE SAVAGE
The men who drafted the Declaration of Independence were not backwoodsmen, as Bronowski and Mazlich put it. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was a cultured and well-educated man, a great landowner with a country house every bit as "picturesque" as any mansion in England : and Jefferson's reading included the works of the French philosophers at the cultural heart of European. Culture or civilization?
Jean Jacques Rousseau had responded in his own way to the unfolding knowledge of the peoples of the world by writing a prize-winning essay condemning the impact of Civilization in 1749 and praising the ‘Noble Savage”. Then,as Europe was still recovering from the Seven Years War, the French explorer Bougainville arrived in Tahiti in 1768: and Bougainville's subsequent account of this remote island paradise prompted the French intellectual Diderot to write a supplement to the work in which he attacked the probable future invasion of this pagan arcady by Christianity and the evils that made Europe such a sad place, destroying the simple life that the tropical island isolation had made possible.
In that Age of Reason Diderot's friend Rousseau went on to describe a new and better political order in which the old order would be swept away and government would be entrusted to a brilliant philosopher, who would know how to read “the general will”. In some ways the France conceived of in Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” was that same ideal France as the reign of Saint Louis, but ‘Reason’ and a true understanding of Nature would replace Christianity, for the Medieval "pillars" of monarchy, the aristocracy and the Church had lost all credibility.
The American experience of "the wilderness" had been rather deeper and more extensive than Bougainville fourteen days in Tahiti and perhaps not all Americans believed that the success of the Pilgrim Fathers was totally down to the hand of Divine Providence and the virtues and strengths of the Puritan colonists. Divine Providence may have looked over them, but the merchants contracted to take them to Virginia, eventually put them down near Cape Cod, a great "European" fishery region for a century or so, where European ships had made landfall for essential supplies and repairs. It was a place where they could be befriended by Tisquanto, an Amerindian who had lived for a while in England and who could speak English. Tisquanto could handle relations with the local tribes and The Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers recount how, among other things, Tisquanto encouraged them to blast some gunpowder just to emphasize the "special powers" of this "new tribe".
One way or another the development gap between the Europeans and the Amerindians had implications for both friendly and hostile relations. Of course someone arguing the Rousseau/Diderot thesis could argue that the arrival of the Europeans and their spread of Protestant and Roman Catholic religions also spread the European habit of great wars that magnified the war-party raids of more "savage" societies, and Amerindian allies where enlisted in the wars between European states. But it was only after considerable growth and expansion within the thirteen colonies, and the defeat of French, Spanish and Dutch ambitions in North America concluded by the Seven Years War that the "Americans" began to feel that they could now "go it alone" confident that they could handle any future "Indian Wars" without back-up from "the Mother Country".
It is very difficult to argue with Professor Barker’s assertion that really some kind of social order, some tradition of sticking together needs to exist before a State can be founded, and one might add that a social order needs economic foundations that create some sense of material security. It was no accident that Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. It was a cry for an end to economic controls and mercantilism and in favour of free trade, and in fact free economies where human conduct would be guided by the laws of economics as if by some “invisible hand” that would steer humankind into an era of peace, after decades of colonial and trade wars. It was the kind of economic change that the Founding Fathers of the USA wished to have, because the Mercantilist System had checked and distorted economic growth. And after Independence was won the political classes running the 13 colonies became the political class of the United States, and its economic and social history was now able to pursue its natural evolution in what might be called "English revolutionary" style. The existing colonial governments with their assemblies base upon the English parliamentary tradition became States in their own right acting as partners in a Federal State. But it was in France and its Empire that the implication of the new ideas and the American example was truly revolutionary.
France was encouraged by some of those Frenchmen who had taken part in the American Revolution, and by Americans like Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine who brought the spirit of a New World to the Old World. In 1789 the French National Assembly produced its own Declaration of the Rights of Man featuring the rights to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Within a few years France rid itself of the pillars of the ‘Old Regime’ and set up the Worship of Nature. And this was more truly a revolution, a new beginning, than what had happened in America.
In Paris, no more than in Philadelphia, did those who declared that men are created equal and have an inalienable right to their Liberty seem to consider the implications for the African slaves working within their economies. In the USA legal slavery lasted for nearly another hundred years. But in the French island of Haiti, the declaration of the Rights of Man by a French National Assembly was immediately seized upon by the slaves.
What happened in Haiti was described by C.L.R. James in his study of Toussaint L’Ouverture. L’Ouverture had been more domestic staff than slave and he drove his master and the family to get them safely to a port from which they could escape. Then in nights of blood the freed slaves avenged themselves and formed into armies. In the fighting L’Ouverture earned his name as a general and once the fighting was over he had achieved the leadership status that inspired James’ title of “The Black Napoleon”. But where was he to lead them to? The emancipated slaves were happy to divide up the land into small subsistence plots, enough to feed and house themselves. L’Ouverture rode around the island trying to explain that they needed to carry on the work that had made the plantations such potent generators of wealth. An Haitian republic, he argued, would need wealth in order to be viable. They would need armed forces to preserve their independence and security. They would need hospitals and schools, and money to buy all kinds of things from the outside world that Haiti could not supply. That may have sounded to some very much like choosing to go back into slavery for Haiti had never been a Society merely a slave plantation
colony.
The revolution descended into bloodshed, massacre and Terror in France too, with the nominal government eventually resorting to the classic policy of directing the violence abroad, in this case to carry revolutionary war across Europe. But, as T.B. Macaulay said in a speech when he returned to politics a couple of years after the last upsurge of the Age of Revolution in 1848, though in that "European Year of Revolution" the great cities of Europe once more saw streets running with rivers of blood and the threat of the descent of a new Dark Age, Britain had not seen that kind of violence.
Macaulay ascribed this to the English constitutional tradition in which the State over the centuries found ways to accommodate itself to new situations and discontents. In fact the American Revolution had been followed by something of an "English Revolution" between 1782 and 1832 that had allowed a shift of power away from the established Church, the Aristocracy and the monarchy towards the new masters of legitimacy and wealth. It was not a revolution without casualties since the guiding Laws of Nature lacked the humanity or the "good naturedness" that Lord Clarendon had said that England had been famous for. But there was always emigration to North America, an option that William Cobbett considered and rejected, but Highland Clans and Irish Catholics after the great famines took out of grim necessity.
THE AMERICAN DREAM
For without the British convicts and African slaves of the Eighteenth Century, the USA had attracted the work force that it needed in order to meet its Labour needs by developing its image as the land of opportunity for “the common man", personal land-ownership being one of the great attractions to "land-hungry" people from Europe. At the same time the Land and Labour of the whole American hemisphere increasingly attracted Capital investment by Britain and America increasingly could be seen as "The Land of Opportunity" and the "Face of the Future", especially when the Civil War revealed to the world the face of the most modern industrialised warfare and the impact of economic blockade in an increasingly global economy. As Niall Ferguson described in his work "Colossus. The Rise and Fall of the American Empire" the innovative federal republic was now revealed as no lose confederation but a Union held together by preponderant power: and the logic of State power and militarism in pursuit of political objectives was one of the factors that undermined Cobden's optimistic hopes for an international community based upon Christian principles of peace and cooperation.
By the late 1860s Matthew Arnold became very concerned about the “Americanization” of Britain itself for the worship of the common man began to cross the Atlantic as an “invisible import”. And, just as the achievement of Independence and the deregulation of trade produced the conditions that shaped the Zong Affair and allarmed Americam Quakers that the USA would become almost one huge slave plantation, the defeat of the Confederacy and the consequences, produced the age of “The Carpet-Baggers”. These adventurers descended from the North to take advantage of the vast economic potential of the South, and the growing trans-continental railway system offered new opportunities for the exploitation of the continent’s vast natural resources. As in other lightly inhabited parts of the world it became possible for the common people to “stake a claim” to pieces of farm land or to places where the Earth contained natural resources that were worth a fortune in the global commodity markets.
The whole American Dream came to be based upon the idea of the chance of a New Start in terms of material rather than spiritual goals like those of the Puritan pioneers. On becoming “American” a person's "counter" was set at zero and prestige would in future be based upon how people “made it” in the New World.
Matthew Arnold felt that the American way was to heap praise upon people who only managed to come up to the mere average.Where was the pursuit of excellence? A few years later, when Arnold made a lecture tour of the USA, he could feel that that country was not without minds worthy of respect, and able to respect him. But it remained the case that the major tests of “making it” in the USA were based upon quantitative and not qualitative values. Who made or had the most money? Who had the largest, biggest, fastest, heaviest etc of anything? Who was the most famous or infamous? And in many US cities multi-millionaires like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford had power to rival that of the Medici family in Florence.
In fact in the early years of the twentieth century a groups of “muck-raking” journalists exposed the corruption of American life by big money and President ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt led the way in passing new laws to regulate and control those vices. For the great American “melting pot” had found it difficult in the age of Heroic Materialism to maintain the dream of a New World worthy of the Creator in the face of such massive new inputs of Capital and Labour. T.R. Glover, an earlier academic at a mid-west university [Ontario], could bring out similarities between America in this period and key moments in the story of Ancient Rome in his 1935 study of "The Ancient World". But the broader social and economic model changes that America was going through were essentially similar to changes that Dr. Thomson described in Europe of the Fourteenth Century:
“The economy of the Middle Ages had been largely agricultural. Medieval society had been for the most part one of fixed classes- the nobility, the clergy, the worker on the land. There was essential truth in the three-fold grouping of the ‘dwellers in God’s house’ as those whose respective duties were …to fight, to pray, to work”. (page 216) Their interdependence and collective dependence upon God’s Creation and its mysterious ways bound them together as a social entity. But Thomson then set out to show how and why cities had grown all over Europe since the eleventh century.
“Obviously the towns had prospered through the initiative and sagacity of individuals. As opportunity offered, these individuals established themselves as leaders in their trade or occupation and consolidated their positions. A local merchant who developed good connections with travelling merchants, so that he could buy his goods at satisfactory price and sell them at a profit, would naturally wish to maintain control both of his source of goods and his market. Competition established him, but, once established, he would naturally not want too much of it. The result of this attitude was the organization of merchant guilds, consisting of entrepreneurs trading in a single article or group of related products, such as wine, corn, wool, meat, wood, leather goods, or salt.
As commerce grew in volume and variety, a need arose for the organization of trade on a national and an international scale. Wholesale trade required- and produced- large quantities of capital. Profits were impressive. Those who were fortunate or aggressive enough to get in at the beginning of this trade became the upper crust of the mercantile class. The center of the international groups was northern Italy; the Lombards- the Genoese, Florentines, Sienese, and Lucchese financiers- had branch offices and warehouses in all the principal cities of northern and eastern Europe and of England. In Paris alone there were, at the end of the thirteenth century, sixteen branches of various Italian mercantile houses. This monopoly was broken during the fourteenth century when Catalans, southern Frenchmen, and Lowland German merchants, having learned the tricks of international commerce and finance from the Italians, invaded the field and captured generous portions of the trade.” (page 220)
THE "WORLD OF THE CITY" AND THE WAGES OF SIN
In Medieval Europe and in the modern USA there was a similar situation of a key and in many ways dominant region of ports with effective monopoly access to a continent/region of greater wealth and development. In the earlier period it was especially the Italian City states and their "factories" with access to the Middle East and Asia. In the later period it was the States of the US North-Eastern Atlantic seaboard with access to Europe.
In both cases this "entrepot" region created transport and trade links right across a less developed continent rich in raw materials and commodities that it could process into higher value goods to send back to the producing regions or could trade along with some of the raw materials and commodities for a whole range of goods from the more developed region. And in both cases the "terminus" of those routes was an ocean seaboard with no really profitable routes going further to the West. Thus the Atlantic seaboard of North Western Europe in the Middle Ages had much in common with the Pacific seaboard of the modern USA. And in both cases the "entrepot" region became the great centre of wealth and government, with all the controversies inherent in a dynamic that was man-made and not Natural. Lord Acton began his lectures on Modern History with the situation in Italy where the Middle Ages turned into the Modern Age with city-states like Venice, Genoa and Florence at the heart of trade, industry and finance, and Rome seeking to cement its authority and status as the seat of the Pope and the centre of the Government of the Catholic Church. In the USA New York was the great Metropolis and Washington D.C. the Federal Capital.
Reading these "lessons from History" Dr. Thomson could note the wave of discontent through almost all of the city states of Italy, and then across Europe in the fourteenth century. It could be seen as a sign of a "systematic" failure within economic development as the increasing power and riches of the few aggravated and aggrieved the many producing those resentments that created discontent among the "common people" who felt that they were being denied "their simple rights as human beings". For in keeping with some important schools of History as a science and Societies/ States and Civilizations having a "Natural Historical" cycle like all living things, whether Marxist or not, the sense of "The Decline of the West" was palpable in the decade down to 1914 and Oswald Spengler wrote his famous book of this title years before it was published at the end of the First World War.
During the first decade of the twentieth century the British Socialist Tom Mann made an extended tour of the globe in order to study the international workers' movements and he was very impressed with the strength of Syndicalism in the USA. Syndicalism was the product of the French Socialist School which pre-dated the Marxist one. It emphasized the need for "industrial" rather than "trade unions", which joined up people of one trade like engineering across the whole economy. Syndicalists believed in combining all the workers in one industry, which made the union boss a person of real power when dealing with the employers in a US economy that had a tendency towards monopolisation through cartels and conglomerates. Syndicalism also asserted that the "syndicats" were the more democratic than parliaments and political assemblies: more truly representative of the common man. In the UK Syndicalism was strong in South Wales and influenced the industrial strife of the years just before the First World War.
Entry into the First World War and reconnecting with the trouble and strife of the "Old World" seemed almost guaranteed to make matters worse. But the USA was forced into the war in 1917 and US armies had gone to fight in Europe. They went especially to the Western Front in a France that had a long experience of keeping lonely men happy who were only too mortal. Paris had been one of the great attractions of the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century for it had allowed young men to sell their wild oats in some of the best “red-light districts” of Europe. "How're you gonna keep em down on the farm after they've seen Paree". It would be necessary to launch a new struggle for the very soul of America: and ratification of the Prohibition Amendment to the US Constitution, completed early in 1919, reflected concern in the USA over the future growth of a “Bright Lights Big City” lifestyle that was anathema to the Puritan tradition.
In the land of the inalienable right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” it became illegal to have any involvement in the drinking of alcohol, or in gambling or prostitution: and, consequently, during the “Roaring Twenties”, as America experienced a wave of immigration from non “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” Europe, urban industrial America saw the two extremes of, on the one hand affluence and the dream eventually summed up as “two cars in every garage. Two chickens in every pot”, and, on the other hand, strikes, lock-outs and the killing and/or prosecution of dangerous agitators in industrial centres, while in the heart of the cities significant sections of the population defied the law to engage in newly criminalised activities that put them into the hands of the criminal underworld. Big city life became associated with gangsterism and urban warfare between the gangs and the forces of law and order. “A house divided against itself will fall”. These dynamics all contributed to or coincided with the Wall Street Crash that led into the Great Depression of the Thirties, and to right and left wing extremism both in the USA and in the wider world.
"ROME WAS NOT BUILT IN A DAY"
Richard Cobden, however, understood the problem of the new industrial city rather differently through the experience of Manchester and the other great new cities of "King Cotton". In fact they were not properly cities at all but mere "populous districts" that had sucked in adventurers and refugees into overcrowded, unmanaged and ungoverned "townships". As in the "Peterloo Massacre" such authorities and structures that did exist had been set up for an essentially rural and thinly populated region. Parliament accepted this analysis of the problem and passed "The Municipal Corporations Act" in 1835, and Cobden led the campaign for Manchester to use the acts powers in order to become a city with a City Corporation that could properly tackle Manchester's problems.
Over the next half-century there were several drives to address the fact that these cities that had mushroomed with the industrial revolution were dominated by the concept of private ownership, which clearly brought out the difference between rich and poor. Perhaps to some people this was "as it should be" in accordance with that Puritan spirit which had each person "standing alone before God", each one of the road to Heaven or Hell. Matthew Arnold was far from being the only British visitor to Italy in that period who could feel that England, while it had gained much by distancing itself from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, had lost the sense of togetherness that was evident in the great festivals and processions that he witnessed in Roman Catholic Italy. And many like the young Gladstone could feel the seismic impact of entering the great and glorious spaces of the Italian Churches. So Victorian England saw a huge burst of Church building in order to tackle the physical impossibility of everyone going to Church on a Sunday: and the widespread introduction of the Church organ and in many places a return to "ritualism" tried to increase the sense, and the pleasure, of communal worship.
As the enclosure movement came towards completion some of the old commons near towns and cities were preserved as public rather than private spaces, and drive for "green spaces" was taken up by the Parks Movement. Often this was associated with philanthropists, the movement traditionally being dated from the art lesson that John Ruskin gave to Octavia Hill who said that if she had the money she would provide a space for people like her "slum" tenants to take some fresh air and exercise. Ruskin Park is still there, and unlike the commons such parks, often the parks of great houses now swallowed up in the urban sprawl, had exotic flower gardens and trees. Perhaps the greatest of all these public assets was the Crystal Palace complex out in Sydenham, still in the countryside to the south of London.
There were also town halls, libaries, public baths, and a huge school-building programme. But "new plantations" have to be nursed, and nurtured, and provided with the ingredients that build a sense of tradition, pride and common purpose. And in many places the pace of change had become too rapid and push-and-pull factors forced people out of rural societies into urban conglomerations and from one continent to another with a sense of living through catastrophe.
So working in Colorado, USA, in the aftermath of the Age of Catastrophe, it may well have been difficult for Dr. Thomson to appreciate the very real difference between living as a “ragbag” in twentieth century New York rather than Medici Florence, or the Cambridge of Dr. Orton, or in fact that "other place".
J.R. Green, both an Oxford “Townee” and an Oxford “Gownee”, in his radical “History of the English People” in the 1870’s had addressed the prospect of the right to vote being extended to the lower middle class and the prosperous working class. In so doing he referred to the living evidence of the role of such people in the surviving urban fabric of Medieval Oxford, when the affairs of the town and later city had been controlled largely by such men and their organizations like the guilds. For Medieval cities had not been built in the same spirit as Manhattan, if “spirit” is an appropriate word. As Lord Clark observed, the whole of Manhattan was constructed in about the same time that it took to "grow" a Medieval Cathedral.
One might say that its shows. For midway between those two extremes of urban environments, the very early Medieval town and the twentieth century Metropolis, in both Medici Florence and Humanist Oxford in a very real way the city itself became a public work of art celebrating the very best of a common Humanity that all could share: an open book for the citizens who wished to learn lessons from the past.
By the time of Medici Florence and the Oxbridge of Thomas More and Erasmus a couple of centuries of the study of classical authors in expanding libraries had finally broken the silence of the stone remnants of antiquity. They spoke to people as they did to the great art historian Burckhardt, and so the material world of stone and plaster and pigment could once again be made into things of timeless and ageless humanity. And, though wealth was vital to the whole process, when, for example, Florence needed great doors worthy of its new cathedral, they invited artist-craftsmen to submit their suggestions with specimens to show what kind of message they would place into the massive wood. These were far too important judgments not to be made on the basis of sheer quality. Only the best would be good enough, and that meant the best materials as well as workmanship. And on completion the artist got his fee, but the value of his work was often priceless and his fame and standing as a great master too had nothing to do with material wealth.
So surely there were “ragbags” in the crowd that turned up to watch the unveiling of Michelangelo’s new statue of David that had been commissioned by the government of Florence, and felt, along with everyone else, then and since, how powerfully that masterpiece spoke to the observer. To Florence the Biblical David had a particular significance in the light of the city’s long struggles against the “Goliath” power of Rome. To the learned of that age it spoke of connection with antiquity, Greek Roman and Hebrew. But even to simple men and women it spoke and continues to speak of the potential of Humankind to achieve great and noble things in an age of decaying and corrupted institutions of a Medieval order that had to give way to a new age. It was to be a new age, however, walled around, protected and structured above all by the two increasingly important and interdependent professions- lawyers and bankers.
Medici Florence showed how great mercantile wealth could be used to create “benevolent despotism”, but it was obvious to British visitors to Italy in an age when “Heroic Materialism” had created huge “populous districts” in the volatile industrial areas that there was more to successful urban civilization than massive “promiscuity”- as the Victorians referred to such compressed humanity. Material wealth was not enough. The industrial revolution had not allowed time for villages to grow into towns and towns into cities where the actual fabric gave the citizens examples of successful past masters in collective and communal living.
So Dr. Thomson in the University of Colorado in 1963 had his reasons for stressing the importance of the growth of great universities during the later Middle Ages. For the success or failure of both the American melting pot and even of the new world order that would be needed to prevent a third world war, depended upon the ability of Universities both in the USA and around the world to produce a generation that would learn the lessons of History. And in this respect the American campus was well-placed to make a major contribution, drawing upon a population with roots all over Europe, much of Africa, parts of the Far East and some parts of Latin America. So too, to a lesser degree, was Great Britain with its legacy of Empire and Commonwealth.
Like Medici Florence student campuses around the world became real “happening places”, where it seemed possible “to dream the impossible dream” and at least attempt to do something radically new and better.
