Was the Cold War Inevitable? Considering the “What-If” of a Wallace Presidency

Henry Wallace was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third-term vice president. He had been forced off the Democratic ticket by Democratic Party leaders in 1944. But what would have happened had he won? Here, Benn Steil considers what could have happened to the Cold War.

Henry Wallace in 1940.

In a 2012 “documentary” film and book titled The Untold History of the United States, filmmaker Oliver Stone contended that there would have been “no Cold War” had Henry Wallace, FDR’s third-term vice president, not been forced off the ticket by reactionary Democratic Party leaders in 1944.[1] Wallace, rather than Harry Truman, would have become president on FDR’s death the following April, and would, Stone claims, have successfully pursued a policy of peace.

Based on a multitude of primary-source accounts of the nomination battle between Wallace and Truman, and my review of the careers of all 1,176 Democratic convention delegates, who Stone (and others) have alleged were bribed with ambassadorships and the like, I can safely conclude that this was no case of a “stolen election”—Truman won fairly and convincingly.[2] But this paper will look at the much more compelling and interesting question—which has been raised not just by the polemicist Stone, but by serious scholars—of whether the Cold War was avoidable with a different American president, pursuing very different policies.  In the case of a Wallace presidency, we know that there would been no Truman Doctrine, no Marshall Plan, no NATO, no West Germany, no western European integration, and no policy of containment.  All of these initiatives, foundational to what has been called “the American Century,” Henry Wallace denounced as imperialistic and unjustifiably hostile to the Soviet Union.

Wallace’s Beliefs

With utter conviction, Henry Wallace believed that friendly, trusting cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union was essential to spreading global peace and prosperity after the Second World War.  He also believed that the fault for rapidly deteriorating relations between the two great powers after the February 1945 Yalta conference lay primarily with the United States (and Great Britain), whose original sin was to oppose the Bolsheviks’ rise to power after 1917.  Wallace, a deeply religious man, abhorred Communism as a misguided godless ideology, but admired major elements of Soviet planning, such as agricultural collectivization, on the grounds that they were, to his mind, being driven by technocrats in the interest of advancing industrial progress and “economic democracy.” He was convinced that building a global “Century of the Common Man” required a blending of American political democracy with the Soviet economic version.

Though Wallace was a brilliant agricultural geneticist, who with great insight and persistence revolutionized the development of superior strains of crops, he was also fascinated, throughout his adult life, with what he considered alternative ways of “knowing.” These included astrology, theosophy, and mysticism.  He defended these interests on the basis of the writings of the neo-transcendentalist psychologist and philosopher of religion William James—highly controversial writings about the rationality of “belief.”

James was not interested in whether Jesus was the messiah, or whether the Jews were chosen.  For James, a “true” belief was one that was useful to the believer.  It was neither necessary nor useful to inquire as to whether a belief was true in the sense that it corresponded to some objective external reality, since that might be unknowable.  It was necessary only to ask whether the belief had practical value for the believer here and now, which in turn depended on the use to which he or she put it.  This conception of truth derived from the tenets of the pedigreed philosophical program of pragmatism.

Since much of what we require to make sense of the world is simply not available to us, it was, James argued, only rational to evaluate a belief based on whether it helped the believer to cope effectively.[3] Understanding “true” belief as being a property of the believer, and not something that could necessarily be shared by others, may not be commonplace.  Yet for those like Wallace, who internalized it, pragmatism freed them to examine spiritual systems and to reserve judgment until their effect on one’s ability to navigate the world could be evaluated.  Wallace embraced James’s controversial argument that it was often rational to believe without evidence, for the reason that access to evidence may first require the adoption of certain beliefs.[4] As a political figure, particularly at the apex of his career, Wallace would elevate James’s “beliefs about beliefs” to a central place in his quest to transform not just the content of American foreign policy, but the very way in which America conducted diplomacy.  He would never, however, take to heart the philosopher’s warning: that whereas “we have the right to believe” without evidence, we do so “at our own risk.”[5]

Wallace believed that peace with the Soviet Union would come naturally once Joseph Stalin and his government saw that American leaders truly believed in it—and set policy as if they believed it.  In Jamesian fashion, Wallace did not claim to have evidence that the Soviets would pursue peaceful policies if America did—that is, if it abandoned its overseas air bases, withdrew its troops from Asia, put its atomic bombs into UN escrow, and foreswore military and financial support for Greece, Turkey, and nationalist China.  Running for president as the Progressive Party candidate in 1948, Wallace explained that “you get peace by preparing for peace rather than for war.”[6] That is, peaceful behavior begets peaceful behavior in others.  He thus denied any legitimate role for military readiness or deterrence, contravening a basic tenet of thinking in international relations.  As observed by the scholar Hans Morgenthau, “the political aim of military preparations is . . . to make the actual application of military force unnecessary by inducing the prospective enemy to desist from [its] use.”[7] Consistent with Morgenthau’s thinking, Wallace had, in 1940, under the banner of “total preparation,” defended the buildup of American naval and air force bases in the Western Hemisphere.  “If we are properly prepared, we shall not have war on this hemisphere.”[8] His post-war political thinking therefore deviated radically not just from conventional thinking, but from his own pre-war expressions of it.

A few months after Wallace announced his candidacy for president, the U.S Representative on the new UN Commission on Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had staunchly opposed his removal from the ticket in 1944, wrote that Wallace was now “doing more wishful thinking than realistic facing of facts.” The Soviets, she said, “understand strength, not weakness.”[9] After garnering barely a million votes, and no electoral votes, in the 1948 election—coming in fourth behind Dixiecrat segregationist Strom Thurmond—Wallace became a political irrelevance to both the Soviets and the American Communists.  Stalin and six other Politburo members handling major foreign policy decisions voted in January 1949 to cease contacts with him.

With the advent of the Korean War in June 1950, however, Wallace found a convenient pretext to assert that the break with Moscow was his own doing.  Wallace condemned the Soviets for precipitating the North Korean invasion, and resigned from the Progressive Party.  Stalin, he asserted rightly (though without the documentary evidence we have now), precipitated the invasion to incite war between the United States and China.  He was now, he said in December, “convinced that Russia is out to dominate the world.”[10]

In 1952, he wrote a piece in the New York Times entitled “Where I Was Wrong,” in which he confessed his failure to see “the Soviet determination to enslave the common man morally, mentally, and physically for its own imperial purposes.” Though he had in 1948 blamed the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia on the U.S. ambassador and “rightists” in the Czech government, he now regarded his earlier defense of Prague’s “Moscow-trained Communists” as “my greatest mistake.”

In a New York Times interview eleven years later, he went further.  “I was mistaken,” Wallace confessed, “in my estimate of the Russians’ intentions.  I believed then that Stalin was prepared to be the kind of partner in peace that he had been in war.  I believed that, if we could overcome the Russians’ centuries-old distrust of Western imperialism and their later fear of Western capitalism, they would collaborate in the rebuilding of a truly democratic world.”[11]

These were remarkable admissions, unacknowledged by Stone and other prominent Wallace acolytes, that he had been unjustified in blaming the United States for what he had previously termed “defensive” acts of Communist aggression and expansion.  “[W]e can do a great deal to end any abuses on [Russia’s] part,” he had said in 1947, “through economic assistance and sincere pledges of friendship with the Russian people.”[12]  Still, in spite of his now condemning “Russian Communism” as “something totally evil,” he maintained, illogically, that “the whole course of history” would have been different had Roosevelt “remained alive and in good health”—as if Roosevelt could have vanquished “evil” with unilateral disarmament and words of peace.[13]

 

Soviet Beliefs

On Wallace

The Soviets began paying keen attention to Wallace in 1942, when Andrey Gromyko, then counselor at the Soviet embassy in Washington, learned, and independently corroborated, that Wallace had defended the Soviet invasion of Finland three years prior.  Gromyko cabled the information to Moscow, stressing that Wallace was “the most probable Democratic Presidential candidate” in the 1944 election.[14]

In late May of 1944, less than two months before the Democratic convention at which Truman would replace him on the ticket, Wallace began a four-week tour of Siberia—a tour mischievously suggested by FDR after refusing Wallace’s request to visit Moscow.  The Soviets, at great cost, constructed a Potemkin continent for him, disguising labor camps and shepherding him, under intensive NKVD watch, through suddenly stocked stores, enterprises newly staffed by Communist officials, and concerts performed by political prisoners.  Despite the vice president’s glowing praise for Stalin’s accomplishments in Asia, intelligence agents stole and copied his diary—before confirming for Moscow that his public sentiments appeared genuine.

Wallace went on to meet with Chiang Kai-shek in Chunking, where the Soviets spied on him intensively.  They discovered that Wallace had, outside earshot of his State Department minder, urged Chiang to make territorial and commercial concessions to Moscow to smooth relations after the war.  The intelligence find naturally went up to Stalin.  The Soviets interpreted Wallace’s extraordinary unauthorized intervention as a sign that the U.S. administration would give them a free hand in Manchuria, leading to rapacious nine-month occupation of the region from August 1945 to May 1946.  By the end of that occupation, Mao’s forces were able to use it as a base to defeat Chiang’s Kuomintang and unify the mainland under Communist control.

In perhaps the most concise summary of Soviet views of Wallace, assistant foreign minister Andrey Vyshinsky, lead prosecutor at the notorious Moscow show trials of 1934 to 1938, reported to Stalin in October 1947, after meeting with Wallace at the Soviet consulate in New York, that the soon-to-be Progressive Party presidential candidate was both “sympathetic to us” and “somewhat naïve.”[15] In March and April 1948, Wallace would meet secretly with Gromyko, now UN ambassador, to plead for Stalin’s endorsement of his peace ideas—ideas that Wallace said that Stalin could draft for him.  Yet the Soviets would still not accept his sincerity.  Gromyko cabled Moscow that Wallace’s thoughts on disarmament were, lamentably, “much like the official position of the Americans and the British, who consider trust a prerequisite for disarmament.” The Soviets were demanding immediate American nuclear disarmament, while rejecting their own participation in any international inspections regime; neither trust nor verification were to be part of the equation.  The Soviet treatment of Wallace, their most consistent and genuine friend in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, bore out George Kennan’s quip, in 1946, that even if the United States were to disarm entirely, deliver its “air and naval forces to Russia,” and resign “powers of government to American Communists,” the Soviets would still smell a trap.[16]

The wider point is that the Soviets never showed the slightest regard for Wallace’s Jamesian belief in world peace. Wallace was an avowed capitalist (albeit one with an aberrant love of planning), and part of an imperialist establishment with which peace was only possible as a temporary political expedient.  To be sure, Stalin would have welcomed a Wallace presidency, but not because it would have reduced the need for expanded frontiers in eastern and central Europe and northeast Asia, or rapid development of an atom bomb.  Though Wallace insisted publicly that Stalin wanted peace “above everything else,” and that Soviet policy was directed at “the achievement of economic and social justice,”[17] the truth was quite different.

 

On Imperial Expansion

“I saw my mission in extending the borders of our Motherland as far as possible,” Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s longtime foreign minister, would explain in retirement.  “It seems, Stalin and I, we coped with this task pretty well.”[18]  In Russian security thinking, there was never a meaningful distinction to be drawn between offense and defense.  With a western border stretching thousands of miles through unprotected plains, defense always required, in their view, extending Russian domination further into new “buffer” zones.  Stalin and Molotov would therefore have welcomed a Wallace presidency not because it meant “peace” but because it would have lessened American resistance to Soviet expansion.

Particularly telling is Molotov’s explanation of why Moscow abandoned territorial claims on Turkey and withdrew its 300,000 troops from the country’s borders in 1946.  “It was a good thing we retreated in time,” he said, referring to Truman’s warnings and show of naval force in the region.  “Otherwise it would have led to a joint [Anglo-American] aggression against us.” It was not American disarmament, military retrenchment, and pledges of peace that saved Turkey, but rather American resolve.[19] Yet Wallace opposed financial and military aid to Turkey in 1947, declaring blithely that “there is no Communist problem in Turkey.”[20]

In Greece, where there was most assuredly “a Communist problem,” Wallace opposed aid on the grounds that “Truman’s policy will spread Communism.” Each Communist death “by American bullets,” he said, would bring forth ten more Communists.[21]  Yet by October 1949, thanks to U.S. aid, the Communist guerillas would be defeated.  And in February 1952, Greece would become a member of the new U.S.-led NATO security alliance.  Stalin stayed out of the Greek civil war, and scolded the Yugoslavs to do so as well, not because of American peace pledges, but because he knew that Truman would not let the Communists win. “"[D]o you think that . . . the United States, the most powerful state in the world,” he scolded Yugoslav diplomats in early 1948, “will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean?  Nonsense!”[22]

In Germany, the heart of the early Cold War conflict, Wallace opposed the creation of a separate democratic state in the west.  Whereas Wallace believed that division of the country would lead to war with the Soviets, division in fact prevented it, as neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could countenance a united Germany being an ally of the other.  Stalin’s determination to dominate a unified country is clear.  “All of Germany must be ours,” he told Bulgarian and Yugoslav leaders in 1946.  “That is, Soviet, Communist.”[23]

In June of 1950, Stalin gave North Korean leader Kim Il-sung permission to invade the South, and urged Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung “to immediately concentrate nine Chinese divisions on the Korean border for volunteer action in case the adversary crosses the 38th parallel.” He pledged “to provide air cover” to protect them.[24]  His secret aim, Stalin explained to the Communist Czech president Klement Gottwald, was to “pull China into the struggle” and force the United States to “overextend itself.” This would “provide the time necessary to strengthen socialism in Europe” and “revolutionize the entire Far East.”[25]  These were hardly the words of a Soviet leader who, in Wallace’s eyes (until 1950), “really wants peace,” and was only reacting to American aggression.[26] Wallace concluded in 1952 that, “knowing more about Russia’s methods,” it had been “a serious mistake when we withdrew our troops” from the region in 1949—a withdrawal he had back then deemed essential to promoting world peace.[27]  He further explained that “Russian aggression” had caused him to reverse his opposition to the atom bomb.  Korea, he explained, now “justified” holding on to it.[28]

 

On Atom Bomb Development

On June 14, 1946, Bernard Baruch presented the U.S. atomic regulation plan to the new United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC).  Andrey Gromyko countered with the Soviet plan five days later.

The two plans were fundamentally different.  The United States wanted internationalization of atomic energy control, but insisted on effective machinery for inspection and enforcement before giving up its bombs or the industrial technique to make them.  The Soviets held that international inspection would constitute intolerable interference into national sovereignty.  They wanted immediate American disarmament, and violations of any future treaty subject to remedy only by approval of the Security Council—and even then, only in cases involving “aggression.”[29] This framework appeared to give Moscow carte blanche to develop and deploy atomic bombs while America disarmed. Even if the Soviets were to use such bombs for “aggression,” they could veto any punishment.

Wallace, as Commerce secretary, had, in a July 23 letter to the president, attacked the U.S. atomic plan for its “fatal defect . . . of requiring other nations to enter into binding commitments not to conduct research into the military uses of atomic energy and to disclose their uranium and thorium resources while the United States retains the right to withhold its technical knowledge of atomic energy until the international control and inspection system is working to our satisfaction.”

“Is it any wonder,” Wallace asked rhetorically, “that the Russians did not show any great enthusiasm for our plan?” He predicted that the Russians would now “redouble their efforts to manufacture bombs,” and “may also decide to expand their ‘security zone’ in a serious way.” Such aggressive efforts would then be the fault of the United States.

But Wallace (or, rather, the Soviet agent who had drafted his letter—Harry Magdoff) had grossly mischaracterized the U.S. plan.  Rather than the various stages of disarmament and information-sharing being set according to U.S. whim and diktat, as Wallace had charged, Baruch’s proposal called for staged action according to “pre-arranged schedules.” This structure was precisely what Wallace was urging.

Wallace’s mischaracterizations were clearly taken from an article in the June 24 issue of Pravda, in which the Soviet journalist Boris Izakov charged, with no basis, that “the U.S. government [was] likely counting on determining on its own discretion the terms within which it will permit the international agency—‘in successive stages’—to take a peek at [its atomic] secrets.” It was, Izakov wrote, expecting “all other nations [to] show blind trust in [its] intentions.”[30]Wallace had, in fact, discussed the Pravda “atomic blast” with the Times’s Felix Belair back on June 25, and referred to it in his July 23 letter to Truman.

The resemblance between the Pravda and Wallace critiques of Baruch is uncanny.  Wallace had simply accepted a Soviet caricature of U.S. policy as accurate, and had not even bothered to speak with his own country’s U.N. delegation before sending his letter to the president.[31] Once confronted with clear evidence from Baruch that his claims were inaccurate, however, not to mention damaging to the credibility of U.S. negotiators, he might have been expected to concede his mistakes.  Instead, he chose to reiterate his original position—that is, Pravda’s position.

Wallace’s July 23 letter had also offered a muddled defense of Gromyko’s counterproposal.  The Soviets wanted the United States to destroy all stocks of atomic weapons, finished or unfinished, within three months of an agreement’s signing.  In this respect, at least, according to Wallace, Moscow’s plan “goes even further than our[s]” toward international control of atomic energy.

But this assertion was nonsensical, since Moscow’s plan contained no provision for international inspection and no mechanism for punishing violations.  What Wallace had not understood was that completing a Soviet bomb had, since Potsdam, become Stalin’s overriding national objective.  “International” control—which Stalin understood to be synonymous with American control—could not have been of less interest to him.

The purpose of the Gromyko plan, unveiled in June 1946, was, the State Department’s George Kennan argued, to exploit “the merciless spotlight of free information” in America to compel U.S. disarmament while the Soviets “proceed[ed] undisturbed with the development of atomic weapons in secrecy.”[32] For Washington, therefore, any credible international plan to eliminate the weapons had to manage the processes of disarmament, inspection, and control simultaneously.

Underscoring the seriousness with which the Baruch plan took the integrity of such efforts, it required the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to renounce their vetoes with respect to any agreement.  This provision was meant to ensure that no U.N. member could stymie the legitimate sanctions authority of the new atomic control agency.  But the Soviets refused to accept any weakening of veto rights.  To do so, Izakov wrote in Pravda, would mean “renouncing their sovereignty . . . in favour of the USA.” Wallace, notably, defended the Soviets by arguing that the veto was “completely irrelevant,” since the treaty signatories could simply declare war on a violator.  Yet this point underscored that no action short of war—war unsanctioned by any international authority—would be available to the signatories if a Security Council veto could block enforcement or punishment action.

The New York Times concluded, charitably, that the “vagueness” of Wallace’s attack on U.S. policy reflected a failure to “fortify his idealism with the necessary facts.” Moreover, in being “unpardonably careless with the deadly fireworks of atomic policy,” he had undermined prospects for success in critical and delicate negotiations.[33] What even Baruch had not understood at the time, though, was that these negotiations never stood any practical chance of success.

On June 21, 1946,[34] two days after Baruch presented his plan to the UNAEC, former NKVD head Lavrenty Beria, now supervising the Soviet bomb project, submitted to Stalin for approval a draft decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR to begin actual production of atom bombs—the first one to be ready for testing by January 1, 1948 (too optimistic by twenty months).[35] All technical hurdles had been surmounted.  Stalin was now sure he had his bomb in sight, and so his diplomacy aimed at pressuring the United States to disarm while spinning out U.N. negotiations until it could be completed.

The appointment of the relentless Gromyko as Soviet representative to the UNAEC was central to carrying out the strategy of badger and delay.  “[T]he American project [remains] unacceptable in substance,” according to instructions he received from the Soviet Foreign Ministry on December 27, 1946.[36] “For tactical reasons,” however, “we believe that it is necessary not to decline discussion, but to suggest its discussion point by point, simultaneously insisting on introducing amendments.  Such tactics are more flexible and may give better results.” By rejecting Soviet counterproposals, the Americans would “bring odium on themselves for the break up.”[37]

That, however, would not happen.  On December 30, Baruch, with Truman’s backing, demanded that the UNAEC vote.  It went 10–0 in favor of the United States, with abstentions by the Soviet Union and Poland.  The Soviet proposals of 1947, following a joint statement by Canada, China, France, and the U.K. condemning them, would be officially rejected on April 5, 1948, by a vote of 9–2.[38] The Soviets got their stalemate, but failed to achieve any propaganda victory.

It may be argued that since nothing like the Baruch plan could ever have secured Soviet support, given Stalin’s determination to build the bomb, Wallace’s attack on it did little damage.[39] The plan, however, represented a sincere and serious approach to marrying disarmament with a robust inspection regime, one widely supported by top peace-loving, internationalist-minded American scientists, as well as prominent liberal political figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt.  As such, it deserved better than the glib treatment to which Wallace had subjected it.[40] At the very least, Wallace, by parroting Pravda and discrediting Baruch’s efforts among many progressives, only helped the Soviets escape their share of responsibility for the horrific atomic arms race that followed.

 

So Was the Cold War Inevitable?

In short, Wallace’s Jamesian belief in peace was gravely misguided.  From what we today know of Soviet ambitions in the early postwar years, a Wallace presidency could only have resulted in a delayed Cold War—delayed, that is, until November 1948, at which time he would almost surely have been defeated in an election.  Wallace himself doubted he could have swung Congress or “public opinion” in his favor.  “[I]t is a very grave question whether I would have been [elected] with the tactics that I would have used in order to preserve the peace,” he reflected in retirement.  Most likely, he concluded, “I was done a very great favor when I was not named in ’44.”[41]

In any case, a delayed Cold War would have come at great cost to U.S. security and economic interests.  A failure to resist and deter Stalin would likely have meant Soviet domination of northern Iran, eastern Turkey, the Turkish straits, Hokkaido, the Korean Peninsula, Greece, and all of Germany.  Stalin, contrary to Wallace’s professions of belief, coveted these territories, and never valued peace for its own sake.  As Churchill said in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946, Stalin did not desire war but “the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of Soviet power and doctrines.”[42] And so he valued the occasion that a passive United States would have afforded him to expand his empire.  In light of both Russian history and geography, one may choose to characterize Soviet expansionism as either opportunistic offense or pre-emptive defense, but expansionist probing and penetration was inevitable—whoever was in the White House.

Benn Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author, most recently, of The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century.

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——— .  “The Fight for Peace Begins.” The New Republic. March 24, 1947

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[1] Stone and Kuznick (2012).

[2] See chapter 8 of Steil (2024).

[3] See, in particular, James (1902).

[4] James (1896 [1912]): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-h/26659-h.htm.  For an excellent critique of James’s “ethics of belief,” see Pigliucci (August 31, 2022): https://philosophyasawayoflife.medium.com/the-ethics-of-belief-f1d459c572e3.

[5] James (1896 [1912]).

[6] Wallace (January 5, 1948).

[7] Morgenthau (1948 [1993]: 34).

[8] Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier (1968: 259).

[9] January 2, 1948, “My Day” by Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, George Washington University. Roosevelt (1999: 245). Devine (2013: 68).

[10] New York Times (December 4, 1950).

[11] Phillips (October 6, 1963).

[12] MacDougall I (1965: 170-171).

[13] New York Times (March 18, 1952). Wallace (September 7, 1952).

[14] A. Gromyko, “Record of conversation with Counsel (in the rank of Minister) of the Mexican government in Washington—Don Louis Quintanilla,” September 30, 1942, AVP RF, Fond 0129, op. 26, P 143, file 2, p. 27. A. Gromyko, Counsel, Soviet Embassy in the USA, to A.Ja. Vyshinsky, Assistant People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, November 13, 1942, AVP RF, Fond 0129, op. 26, P 143, file 6, p. 28 (NKID US Department entry stamp—January 23, 1943).

[15] “Record of conversation of Assistant Foreign Minister A.J. Vyshinsky and V.A. Zorin with US politician H. Wallace on Soviet-American relations, New York, October 14, 1947, Top Secret,” RGASPI, Fond 82, op. 2, file 1308, p. 68. L. Baranov to M. Suslov, February 27, 1948, RGASPI, Fond 17, op. 128, file 1138, p. 59.

[16] The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State, March 20, 1946, in FRUS, 1946, VI: 721–23.

[17] Feinberg (March 20, 1946). New York Times (March 22, 1946).

[18] Chuev (1991).

[19] Pechatnov and Edmondson (2001: 119).

[20] Wallace (March 24, 1947).

[21] Wallace (January 5, 1948).

[22] Djilas (1962: 141)

[23] Grieder (2000: 12); Djilas (1962: 139); Pechatnov (2010: 103); Pechatnov and Edmondson (2001: 109).

[24] Filippov [Stalin] to Soviet ambassador in Peking for Zhou Enlai, July 5, 1950—RGASPI, Fond 558, op. 11, file 334, p. 79.

[25] Filippov [Stalin] to Mikhail Silin, Soviet Ambassador in Prague, for passing the message orally to Klement Gottwald, August 27, 1950, Wilson Center Digital Archive, referring to a still classified file in RGASPI, Stalin Papers, Fond 558, op. 11, file 62, pp. 71–72.

[26] Wallace (December 23, 1946).

[27] Wallace (September 7, 1952).

[28] New York Times (August 11, 1950). See also Correspondence from Henry A. Wallace to Wayne T. Cottingham dated September 11, 1950, Henry A. Wallace correspondence [reel 47], August 1950–January 1951—Ia47-0439–Ia47-0440, Henry A. Wallace Collection, University of Iowa.

[29] Gerber (Winter 1982). Hamilton (September 20, 1946).

[30] Izakov (June 24, 1946) (italics added). 

[31] Krock (October 4, 1946).  Blum (1973: 581–82).

[32] Memorandum for Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, July 18, 1946, in FRUS, 1946, I: 861–62.

[33] New York Times (October 3, 1946).  New York Times (September 18, 1946), “Text of Secretary Wallace’s Letter to President Truman on U.S. Foreign Policy.”  New York Times (October 4, 1946).  New York Times (October 6, 1946).  Krock (October 4, 1946). Baldwin (October 6, 1946).Izakov (June 24, 1946).

[34] It may have been shortly before June 21, 1946, but no later than that date.

[35] The letter of L.P. Beria to I.V. Stalin, submitting for [his] approval the draft of the Decision of SM [Council of Ministers] of the USSR, “On the plan for the development of works of CB [Construction Bureau]-11 under Laboratory No. 2 of the AN USSR Academy of Sciences of the USSR,” no later than June 21, 1946. Strictly Secret (Special File), referring to Ryabev II (1999: 432–34); sourced from AP RF, Fond 93, file 99/46, p. 20.

[36] Malkov (2003: 311)

[37] Soviet-American Relations VI (2004: 356–57).

[38] Goldschmidt (March 1986: 62–63).

[39] For a Russian (post-Soviet) statement of this position, see Batiuk (1995: 85–98).

[40] Gerber (Winter 1982) argues, unconvincingly, that Baruch’s position was so unyielding that it never represented a credible effort to reach agreement with the Soviets.  But Baruch was always willing to negotiate within the confines of the U.N. General Assembly’s mandate to the UNAEC, to which the Soviet Union subscribed, which included setting up “effective safeguards” to prevent the misuse of atomic energy.  The Soviets never made a counterproposal which encompassed such safeguards.

[41] Reminiscences of Henry Agard Wallace, CCOH, pp. 4567–70.

[42] Churchill, speech, “Sinews of Peace,” March 5, 1946: https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/sinews-of-peace-iron-curtain-speech.html.

Elizabeth Fenning: A Miscarriage of Justice in 19th Century England

On July 26, 1815, a 20-year-old woman named Elisabeth Fenning dressed in a white high-waist muslin gown. She had personally made it for her wedding to her fiancé Edward, a day that would have begun a new chapter in her life. Sadly the day never came. Instead the dress was being worn for the final chapter of her life, her death. She was preparing for the gallows where she was going to die for a crime she most likely didn't commit. Her story is one of the worst cases of miscarriage of justice in Britain.

Nonye Ugo explains.

A dpecition of Elizabeth Fenning awaiting her execution. This is from the 1912 book William Hone: His Life and Times. Image in the Public Domain.

Elizabeth “Eliza” Fenning was born on June 10, 1793 in the Caribbean island of Dominica.

Her parents William and Mary Fenning had a total of ten children, but only Elizabeth survived to adulthood, a common occurrence due to the high infant mortality rate at the time.

Her father had been a soldier. Upon his discharge, the family settled in London and he transitioned to selling potatoes.

The family was very poor, as such there were very few opportunities available to Elizabeth. She learnt to read and write, and by the age of 14 she entered service, working as a domestic servant.

By 23 she got a job as a cook to the wealthy Turner family, joining a staff that consisted of a maid, Sarah, and two male apprentices.

Olibar Turner, a wealthy tradesman lived at Chancery Lane, London with his wife, Margret, son Robert, and daughter in law Charlotte. Elizabeth was an easy going, dedicated worker, but a few weeks into her employment she had a falling out with Charlotte Turner, who threatened her with dismissal, for entering the room of an apprentice, partially dressed, to borrow a candle. Given the morals of the time partially dressed could even mean not wearing her stockings.

Dumplings

Elizabeth was hurt by what she considered a questioning of her morals and confided her feeling to Sarah, hinting that she now disliked Charlotte.

On March 21, Elizabeth asked to showcase her dumpling making skills and was granted permission to make dumplings and potatoes for the family lunch, and steak pie for the servants.

The Turner’s, with the exception of Margret who was absent, immediately became violently ill after eating the pudding. Elizabeth and an apprentice who had also eaten the pudding became just as sick.  A doctor was called. He diagnosed arsenic poisoning and after a brief investigation, concluded it had been mixed in the dumplings.

On April 11 while the family was recovering from the effects of the poison, a still unwell Elizabeth was arrested and tried for attempted murder.

The  case was presided by Sir John Sylvester at the Old Bailey. The evidence against Elizabeth was circumstantial, the state claimed she had motive, (revenge against Charlotte who had earlier reprimanded her) opportunity, (being alone in the kitchen) and means, (access to arsenic, normally used to kill rats, kept in the apprentice room drawer). Despite all their evidence being countered by facts, such as that Elizabeth had also eaten the dumplings and become sick, the drawer containing the arsenic was assessable to every member of the household, no arsenic had been found in the flour used to prepare the dumplings, and five witnesses who testified to Elizabeth’s good and honest character, the jury sentenced her to death by hanging, the then punishment for attempted murder.

Working people, angered by the injustice of the trial and convinced of her innocence, started a petition to have her reprieved. Even the Turners doubted her guilt and were ready to sign the petition but changed their minds, after being warned that they would be investigated for the crime if Elizabeth was reprieved. The reprieve was denied.

Death

So on July 26, wearing what was originally intended as a wedding dress, Elizabeth Fenning was hanged. She maintained her innocence till the end. Her funeral was held on July 31.

Immediately after, an angry mob surrounded the Turner home threatening to burn it down. They were dispersed by police, who remained days after to prevent harm to the family.

But the hatred of the Turners remained. They eventually went bankrupt and Robert Turner ended up in a workhouse. People, especially the working class, saw the injustice of her death. They knew it was a message to the poor servants: Don’t ever even think of harming your rich masters.

So did Elizabeth Fenning really try to poison the Turners?

I strongly believe that she did not. One, there was no real evidence of the sickness being caused by arsenic poisoning. The doctor, Dr. John Marshall, only assumed it was because, arsenic was in the home, and the cutlery used in eating the pudding had turned black, which he claimed was the result of arsenic on silver. That claim was later proved to be false. For all anyone knew the Turners may have been suffering food poisoning. And, just before the trial Elizabeth was given a choice - trial or deportation to a colony. She chose going to trial, obviously because she knew she was innocent and felt it would be proven.

Two, if arsenic was used Elizabeth wasn’t the only one with access to it. The two apprentices and maid Sarah did too, and Elizabeth did leave briefly to go to the butcher shop while the dumplings were being prepared. Anyone in the household could have poisoned them in her absence.

So if the Turners were poisoned, who did it?

Maybe Sarah, taking advantage of Elizabeth’s strained relationship with Charlotte, tried to poison the family knowing Elizabeth would be accused. Robert Turner on his death bed was said to have admitted to the crime.

Whatever the truth, the fact remains there was no evidence against Elizabeth Fenning. She was convicted because she was a poor Irish servant and her supposed victims were a rich English family. Her sentence and execution was one of the worst miscarriages of British justice.

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Just what was the Varangian Guard?

Tales of warriors and elite guards often evoke images of honor, loyalty, and legendary feats. Among these, the Varangian Guard stands out as a formidable force, renowned for their loyalty, discipline, and fierce combat prowess. Originating from the distant lands of Scandinavia, these warriors left an indelible mark on the Byzantine Empire, serving as its elite protectors for centuries. To understand the Varangian Guard, it is vital to explore their origins, composition, duties, and the pivotal role they played in the Byzantine Empire.

Terry Bailey explains.

Here, is a picture of the Varangian Guard per thethe 11th century chronicle of John Skylitzes. Here, the body of Leo V is being dragged to the Hippodrome through the Skyla Gate.

Origins and Formation

Byzantine Emperor Basil II suffered a major defeat against the Bulgarians in 986, at Trajan's Gate, a strategic mountain pass in Bulgaria. The rebels Bardas Sclerus and Bardas Phocas renewed their attempts to supplant Basil and seize the Byzantine throne for themselves. Surrounded by enemies both within and without the empire, Basil desperately needed help and turned to Prince Vladimir of Kiev. Vladimir sent 6,000 Varangian mercenaries to aid Basil.

Thus the Varangian Guard's story began in the turbulent times of the Byzantine Empire. Grappling with external threats and internal strife, foreign mercenaries were vital to the continuation of the empire. It was during this time that the Byzantine Emperor harnessed the potential of the Scandinavian warriors. The term "Varangian" originally referred to Scandinavian and Viking adventurers who ventured far from their homelands in search of riches and glory. These Norsemen hailed from regions encompassing modern-day Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and their reputation as fearsome warriors preceded them across Europe. The Byzantine Emperor saw an opportunity in their martial skills and offered them employment as his bodyguards.

Composition and Recruitment

The Varangian Guard was comprised primarily of Norsemen, Swedes, Danes, and later, Anglo-Saxons, forming a diverse force bound by a common purpose. Recruitment into the Varangian Guard offered these warriors lucrative incentives, including generous pay, plunder, and land grants. Additionally, the promise of adventure and the allure of serving a powerful emperor in a distant land appealed to the Viking spirit of exploration and conquest.

To join the Varangian Guard, candidates underwent rigorous selection criteria, including physical prowess, combat skills, and loyalty. Those deemed worthy were sworn into service, pledging allegiance to the Byzantine Emperor and vowing to defend the empire with their lives. Once inducted, Varangian warriors adopted a distinct attire, often adorned with symbols of their Scandinavian heritage, such as runes and Viking motifs.

Duties and Responsibilities

The primary duty of the Varangian Guard was to protect the Byzantine Emperor and the imperial family. Stationed in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, these elite warriors formed an impenetrable shield around the emperor, deterring would-be assassins and safeguarding the throne from internal and external threats. Their presence instilled fear in the hearts of adversaries, earning them a reputation as the emperor's loyal guardians.

Beyond their role as bodyguards, the Varangian Guard played a crucial role in Byzantine military campaigns. Renowned for their ferocity and combat prowess, they served as shock troops in battle, leading the charge against enemy forces with unmatched bravery and determination. Their proficiency in wielding axes, swords, and shields made them formidable adversaries on the battlefield, striking fear into the hearts of their foes.

One notable campaign where the guard was vital to Byzantine victory under the emperor John II Komnenos was at the Battle of Beroia in 1122. The Varangians hacked their way through the enemy's circle of Pecheneg wagons, collapsing the Pecheneg position and causing a general rout in their camp.

In addition to their martial duties, members of the Varangian Guard served as elite palace guards, maintaining order within the imperial court and ensuring the security of key strategic locations. Their presence symbolized the emperor's authority and power, serving as a visible reminder of the empire's military might and prestige.

Prominence and Influence

Throughout its existence, the Varangian Guard played a pivotal role in shaping the destiny of the Byzantine Empire. The presence of these elite warriors bolstered the emperor's authority and deterred rebellions and coups, ensuring the stability and continuity of the imperial regime.

Their loyalty to the emperor was unwavering, earning them the trust and admiration of successive rulers who relied on their protection and counsel. Moreover, the Varangian Guard's influence extended beyond the confines of the imperial palace.

As foreign mercenaries serving in a distant land, they brought with them elements of their Scandinavian culture and traditions, enriching the culture of Byzantine society. Their presence in Constantinople contributed to the exchange of ideas, technologies, and customs between the Byzantine Empire and the northern realms of Europe, fostering cross-cultural interactions and mutual understanding.

Decline and Legacy

Despite their illustrious history, the fortunes of the Varangian Guard began to wane in the latter years of the Byzantine Empire. The decline of the empire, coupled with internal power struggles and external threats, weakened the once-mighty Varangian Guard. As the Byzantine Empire faced mounting challenges from Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, and other adversaries, the Varangian Guard found themselves overstretched and outnumbered.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 marked the end of an era for the Varangian Guard. With the demise of the Byzantine Empire, the once-vaunted Varangian Guard was disbanded, However, their legacy was immortalized in tales of velour and heroism. Despite their eventual disbandment, the Varangian Guard's impact on Byzantine history and culture remains undeniable evidence of the enduring spirit of the Norse warriors who ventured far from their homelands to carve out a place in history.

Needless to say, the Varangian Guard stands as an enduring legacy of the Norse warriors who served as the elite protectors of the Byzantine Empire. Originating from distant lands, these fierce warriors left an indelible mark on Byzantine history, shaping the destiny of an empire and earning a place of honor in military history. Their loyalty, discipline, and unmatched combat prowess continue to inspire awe and admiration, providing a powerful reminder of the enduring power of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

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Note of interest

A renowned figure of the Varangian Guard was Harald Sigurdson (Hardrada), who is well known for his invasion of Northern England in 1066, where he was engaged by Harold Godwinson ruler of England at the Battle at Stamford Bridge.

However, Harald Sigurdson (Hardrada), was struck in the throat by an arrow and killed early in the battle in a state of berserkergang, (berserker rage), wearing no body armor and fighting aggressively with both hands around his sword.

However, Harold Godwinson's victory over Harold Sigurdson, (Hardrada), was short-lived, as only a few weeks later he was defeated by William the Conqueror and killed at the Battle of Hastings when he was struck in the eye by an arrow.

The fact that Harold Godwinson had to make a forced march to fight Hardrada at Stamford Bridge and then move at utmost speed south to meet the Norman invasion, all in less than three weeks, is widely seen as a primary factor in William's victory at Hastings over Godwinson's army.

What were the Origins of the Internet? Counterinsurgency, Surveillance and the Vietnam War

A 1998 U.S. Department of Commerce report provided the following assessment on the emergence of the internet:

"The internet's pace of adoption eclipses all other technologies that preceded it. Radio was in existence 38 years before 50 million people tuned in; TV took 13 years to reach that benchmark. Sixteen years after the first PC kit came out, 50 million people were using one. Once it was opened to the general public, the Internet crossed that line in four years".

Here, Felix Debieux returns to the site and considers the military origin of the internet - and the role of the Vietnam War in that.

A DEC PDP-10 computer. Source: Gah4, available here.

Despite the hold that the internet now has on everyday life, it is difficult to imagine it as something that was ever invented. Unlike the car, the telephone, or the aeroplane, the internet by comparison has managed to achieve ubiquity without us being able to point to an obvious creator. Of course, we see traces of the internet in apps, video games and email, but there is nothing we can picture holding, touching, or turning over in our hands for inspection.

Maybe it is the ubiquity of the internet which makes it such a daunting prospect for historians. With so many applications, how would one even begin to trace its origins? Historians might also be put off by the technical workings of the internet – the circuit boards, networks and switches. The truth, however, is that the history of the internet is more straightforward than we might expect. In fact, if it was not for its simplicity, it is arguable that the meteoric success of the internet would never have occurred.

The emergence of the internet is a story of global proportions. Its inventors (yes, there were inventors!) include the French government-sponsored computer network Cyclades, England’s National Physical Laboratory, Xerox, and the University of Hawaii. Normally placed at the foreground of the typical story are the freewheeling creatives and plucky entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. Here, the internet is typically cast as a great liberating force that helped to decentralise power and spread democracy around the globe.

The glitz of this conventional narrative, however, obscures a much more sinister history explored in great detail by investigative reporter Yasha Levine. In Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, Levine shifts the focus of the story onto one of its most important and yet consistently overlooked characters: The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). A generously funded research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPA was born out of America’s insecurities during the Cold War. Its remit grew quickly, however, to encompass a wide array of counterinsurgency and surveillance projects which played a key part in the genesis of the internet.

The best starting point for this story is the Cold War, when ARPA first appears on the scene.

The Cold War and ARPA

The origins of the internet are rooted in the heightened international tensions of the Cold War, a period during which the U.S. and Soviet Union vied for technological supremacy. Each boasted a deadly arsenal of nuclear weapons, and populations on both sides lived in fear of surprise attack. In the U.S., paranoia peaked in 1957 with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1. The success of the Soviet’s in reaching space first shattered America’s sense of exceptionalism. Politicians seized on the launch as a sign of U.S. military and technological weakness. How had America fallen behind the reds in something so vital?

President Dwight Eisenhower was vilified for appearing to have fallen asleep at the wheel. Generals and political rivals spun tales of an impending Soviet conquest of Earth and space, and pushed for greater military spending. Even Vice President Richard Nixon publicly criticised Eisenhower, informing business leaders that the technology gap between America and the Soviet Union was too great for them to expect a tax cut. As the public reeled from defeat in the so-called Space Race, Eisenhower knew that the only way to save face was to do something big, bold and very public.

It was against this backdrop that Eisenhower established ARPA in 1958. The idea was straightforward. With a small staff count and a large budget, ARPA would function as a civilian-led unit housed by the Pentagon. It would neither build or run its own research facilities, but instead would operate as an executive management hub that identified priorities and then siphoned the research out to universities, private research institutes, and military contractors. ARPA would bring together some of the top scientific minds in the country, with the aim of keeping American military technology ahead of the communists. One area given priority were the perceived vulnerabilities in U.S. computer communications. Indeed, military commanders were very keen to develop a computer communications system without a central core, and with no obvious headquarters that could easily be knocked out by a single Soviet strike (thus crippling the entire U.S. network).

The ARPANET

ARPA was therefore tasked with testing the feasibility of a large-scale computer network. Lawrence Roberts, the first person to have succeeded in connecting two computers, was responsible for developing the network, and collaborated closely with scientist Leonard Kleinrock. By 1969, the first packet-switch network was developed and Kleinrock successfully used it to send messages to another site. The ARPA Network, or ARPANET - the grandfather of the internet as we know it - was born.

Originally, there were only four computers connected when the ARPANET was created. These were located in the computer labs of UCLA (Honeywell DDP-516 computer), Stanford Research Institute (SDS-940 computer), University of California, Santa Barbara (IBM 360/75) and the University of Utah (DEC PDP-10). The first data exchange over this new network was between computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. On their first attempt to log into Stanford's computer by typing "log win," UCLA researchers crashed their computer after typing the letter “g”.

In time the network would expand, and different models of computer were connected. This gave rise to inevitable compatibility issues. The solution rested on an improved set of protocols called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) that were designed in 1982. This worked by breaking data into IP (Internet Protocol) packets, akin to individually addressed digital envelopes. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) then ensured that the packets were delivered from client to server and reassembled in the right sequence.

Through the ARPANET, we see the emergence of several computing innovations which we take for granted today. Notable examples include email (or electronic mail), a system that allows for simple messages to be sent to another person across the network (1971), telnet, a remote connection service for controlling a computer (1972) and file transfer protocol (FTP), which allows information to be sent from one computer to another in bulk (1973).

In its early days, the ARPANET was seen largely as a tool for academic engineers and computer scientists. It linked departments at several universities into a wider network, which by 1973 had expanded to over 30 intuitions in locations as far apart as Hawaii and Norway. While we could choose to end the story of the ARPANET here, it is only by following the roots deeper that we are able to acquire a fuller understanding of how the technology came to be. Indeed, while academic scientists were busy using the ARPANET to establish connections between research sites, it was a conflict taking place thousands of miles away which provided the perfect conditions for the technology to be tested and refined.

Vietnam

Some further context is likely to be useful here.  During the Cold War, the U.S. faced regional insurgencies against allied governments. From Algiers to Laos, from Nicaragua to Lebanon, most of these conflicts shared common characteristics. They were born out of local movements, they recruited local fighters, and they were supported by local populations. No matter how many nuclear weapons the U.S. boasted, countering insurgencies of this nature was not something that a conventional military operation was equipped to deal with. There was an obvious need to modernise and expand U.S. military capabilities, the case for which was made very clear by President Kennedy in his 1961 message to Congress:

“The Free World’s security can be endangered not only by a nuclear attack, but also by being slowly nibbled away at the periphery, regardless of our strategic power, by forces of subversion, infiltration, intimidation, indirect or non-overt aggression, internal revolution, diplomatic blackmail, guerrilla warfare or a series of limited wars […] we need a greater ability to deal with guerrilla forces, insurrections, and subversion”.

In essence, Kennedy envisioned cleverer and more sophisticated ways of fighting communism. What better institution was there than ARPA to develop the modern technological capabilities which the U.S. so desperately needed? In response to Kennedy’s speech, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department drew up plans for a massive programme of covert military, economic, and psychological warfare initiatives to deal with one of America’s key geopolitical problems: the growing insurrection in Vietnam.

Among the biggest beneficiaries in the funding pipeline was ARPA’s Project Agile, a high-tech counterinsurgency programme which aimed to support the government of South Vietnam in researching and developing new techniques for use against the Vietcong. More specifically, Project Agile sought to develop weapons and adapt counterinsurgency gadgets suited to the dense, sweltering jungles of South East Asia. Some of the initiatives in the project included:

§  Testing light combat arms for the South Vietnamese military, which led to the adoption of the AR-15 and M-16 as standard-issue rifles.

§  Developing a light surveillance aircraft that glided silently above the jungle canopy.

§  Formulating field rations and food suited to the hot, wet climate.

§  Developing sophisticated electronic surveillance systems and elaborate efforts to collect all manner of conflict-related intelligence.

§  Working to improve the function of military communication technology in dense rainforest.

§  Developing portable radar installations that could be floated up on a balloon.

Through Project Agile, ARPA would push the boundaries of what contemporaries considered technologically possible. It pioneered electronic surveillance systems that were decades ahead of their time.

Agile was by no means the only ARPA battlefield project. Indeed, among ARPA’s most ambitious initiatives was Project Igloo White, a multi-billion-dollar computerised surveillance barrier. Operated out of a secret air force base in Thailand, the project involved depositing thousands of radio-controlled seismic sensors, microphones, and heat and urine detectors in the jungle. These eavesdropping devices, disguised as sticks or plants and usually dropped from aeroplanes, transmitted signals to a centralised computer control centre which alerted technicians to any movement in the bush. If movement was detected, an air strike was called in and the area was blanketed with bombs and napalm. Igloo White could be described as a giant wireless alarm system that spanned hundreds of miles of jungle. As the US Air Force explained: “we are, in effect, bugging the battlefield”.

Soon we will see how ARPA’s burgeoning surveillance and counterinsurgency expertise fed into the development of the ARPANET. But first it is necessary to understand ARAP’s deepening role in the conflict.

Know thy enemy

While the development of high-tech counterinsurgency and surveillance equipment was an important dimension of ARPA’s role in the war, key to our story is the application of the technology to the examination and study of rebellious peoples and their culture. This was the truly visionary part of ARPA’s mandate: to use advanced science not just to develop weapons, but to beat the motivated and well-disciplined Vietnamese insurgents. The idea was to understand why they resisted, to weaken their resolve, to predict insurgency, and to prevent it from maturing. The value of this science to the U.S. military, deployed to a hostile environment which they did not understand, was obvious.

In a step up of its activities, ARPA was given license to figure out how to weaponize anthropology, psychology, and sociology in support of the military’s counterinsurgency work. ARPA doled out millions of dollars to studies of Vietnamese peasants, captured Vietcong fighters, and rebellious hill tribes of northern Thailand. Swarms of ARPA contractors—anthropologists, political scientists, linguists, and sociologists—put poor villages under the microscope. Their work involved measuring, gathering data, interviewing, studying, assessing, and reporting on their inhabitants. As Levine explains, “the intention was to understand the enemy, to know their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their social networks, and their relationships to power”.

Studies commissioned by ARPA contractors sought answers to the questions which nagged at the American psyche: why were North Vietnamese fighters not defecting to our side? What was so appealing about their cause? Don’t they want to live like we do in America? Why was their morale so high? 2,400 interviews of North Vietnamese prisoners and defectors were conducted, generating tens of thousands of pages of intelligence. Perhaps the clearest illustration of ARPA’s application of science to socio-cultural problems was its work on the Strategic Hamlet Programme. The programme was a pacification effort that had been developed as part of Project Agile, and involved the forced resettlement of South Vietnamese peasants from their traditional villages into new areas that were walled off and made “safe” from Vietcong infiltration.

In addition, ARPA funded several projects which sought to pinpoint the precise socio-cultural indicators that could be used to predict when tribes would go insurgent. One initiative involved a team of political scientists and anthropologists sent from UCLA and UC Berkeley to Thailand to map out the religious beliefs, value systems, group dynamics and civil-military relationships of Thai hill tribes, focusing in particular on predictive behaviour. A project report summarised the objective: “to determine the most likely sources of social conflict in north east Thailand, concentrating on those local problems and attitudes which could be exploited by the communists”.

Not content with merely gathering intelligence, ARPA also experimented with how it could shape indigenous populations. For example, one study carried out for ARPA by the CIA-connected American Institutes for Research (AIR) attempted to gauge the effectiveness of counterinsurgency techniques deployed against rebellious hill tribes. Techniques included assassinating tribal leaders, forcibly relocating villages, and using artificially-induced famine to pacify rebellious populations. A 1970 investigation for Ramparts magazine detailed the effects of these brutal counterinsurgency methods on the Meo hill tribe: “conditions in the Meo resettlement villages are harsh, strongly reminiscent of the American Indian reservations of the 19th century. The people lack sufficient rice and water, and corrupt local agents pocket the funds appropriated for the Meo in Bangkok.”

While ARPA’s activities in Vietnam were certainly disturbing, we have yet to explain their relevance to the creation of the ARPANET. An understanding of how ARPA’s science projects were adapted from the jungles of Vietnam and used back home on American citizens will bring us closer to an explanation.

Spying at home

To contemporaries, America in this period must have felt like it might explode at any second. Race riots, militant black activism, left-wing student movements, and anti-war protests were rife. In 1968 alone, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both assassinated, the death of the latter sparking riots across the country. In November the following year, three hundred thousand people descended on Washington D.C. for the largest anti-war protest in American history. Suspicion of communist agitation was high, and U.S. intelligence services focused their resources on weeding out communist troublemakers - both real and alleged.

This climate of suspicion and paranoia afforded ARPA the perfect conditions in which to refine everything it had learned in Vietnam in a domestic setting. Take its work on the Strategic Hamlet Programme. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the initiative is that it was, at least in part, always intended to serve as a model for counterinsurgency operations elsewhere in the world – including against black Americans living in inner cities back home. This was made explicit in the project proposal:

“The potential applicability of the findings in the United States will also receive special attention. In many of our key domestic programs, especially those directed at disadvantaged sub-cultures, the methodological problems are similar to those described in this proposal […] the application of the Thai findings at home constitutes a potentially most significant project contribution”.

Once the war in Vietnam had concluded, ARPA researchers returned to the U.S. and began applying the lessons of the programme to the domestic problems of racial and socio-economic inequality.

One of the strongest insights we have into ARPA’s domestic turn comes from a shocking exposé, which dragged the agency’s work out into the sunlight. From 2nd June 1975, NBC correspondent Ford Rowan appeared on the evening news every night for a week to warn millions of viewers that the country’s military had built a sophisticated computer communications network and was using it to spy on Americans:

“Our sources say, the Army’s information on thousands of American protesters has been given to the CIA, and some of it is in CIA computers now. We don’t know who gave the order to copy and keep the files. What we do know is that once the files are computerized, the Defense Department’s new technology makes it incredibly easy to move information from one computer to another […] this network links computers at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, more than 20 universities, and a dozen research centres, like the RAND Corporation”.

Rowan was no doubt talking about the ARPANET, and warning his fellow citizens of the threat that its networking capabilities posed to American freedoms. This was a story which Rowan had pieced together from the testimony of whistleblowing ARPA contractors, who had grown increasingly uncomfortable with this new application of the ARPANET. His reporting offers a vital window into how the U.S. defence and intelligence communities were using network technology to snoop on Americans in the very earliest version of the internet. Surveillance was baked into its original design.

A demonstration of the technology in action can be gleaned from its use against communists, both real and alleged, living in American.

Targeting communists

One of the most illustrative domestic counterinsurgency and surveillance operations conducted against Americans went by the name CONUS Intel (Continental United States Intelligence). Managed by U.S. Army Intelligence Command, CONUS Intel deployed thousands of undercover agents with the aim of infiltrating anti-war groups, monitoring left-wing activists, and filing reports in a centralised database on millions of U.S. citizens. The scale of CONUS Intel was far reaching. Agents reported on the smallest of protests, monitored labour strikes, and kept detailed notes on union supporters. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention they even tapped the phone of Senator Eugene McCarthy, a vocal critic of the Vietnam War. Agents infiltrated a meeting of Catholic priests who protested the church’s ban on birth control. They spied on the funeral of Martin Luther King, mingling with mourners and recording any discussions they heard. They even infiltrated the 1970 Earth Day festival, photographing and filing reports on anti-pollution activists.

In January 1970, former military intelligence officer and whistleblower Christopher Pyle published an exposé in the Washington Monthly which revealed details of CONUS Intel to the public. “When this program began in the summer of 1965, its purpose was to provide early warning of civil disorders which the Army might be called upon to quell in the summer of 1967,” reported Pyle. “Today, the Army maintains files on the membership, ideology, programs, and practices of virtually every activist political group in the country”. This is identical to the way in which ARPA had curated the lives, behaviours and cultures of Vietnamese insurgents.

Pyle’s exposé went on to describe how CONUS Intel’s surveillance data was encoded onto IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) punch cards and fed into a computer located at the Army Counter Intelligence Corps Centre at Fort Holabird. The centre was equipped with a terminal link that could be used to access almost a hundred different information categories and to print out reports on individual people. As Pyle explained:

“In this respect, the Army’s data bank promises to be unique. Unlike similar computers now in use at the FBI’s National Crime Information Center in Washington and New York State’s Identification and Intelligence System in Albany, it will not be restricted to the storage of case histories of persons arrested for, or convicted of, crimes. Rather it will specialize in files devoted exclusively to the descriptions of the lawful political activity of civilians”.

As with Rowan’s exposé, Americans were warned again that their freedoms were under threat. In this case, we see how ARPA’s techniques and technology - which had first been used to predict communist uprisings in Vietnam - were now being applied for precisely the same purpose against perceived domestic enemies. Indeed, the same ARPANET which academics had used to link research sites also provided the intelligence community with some of its earliest network surveillance capabilities. On a fundamental level, the academic and military applications were no different. Weeding out communists required surveillance, intelligence, computers to process the intelligence, and networks to transmit the intelligence between advisors in remote locations and their commanding officers in the Pentagon, Whitehouse, or elsewhere. Surveillance of this kind cannot be separated from either the creation of the ARPANET nor the emergence of the internet.

Conclusion

In examining the military origins of the internet we are confronted with a paradigm shift. Over a short span of time, we see how counterinsurgency and surveillance capabilities came to play a much greater role on the battlefield than trained soldiers. ARPA played a critical role in this shift. Indeed, its work on the ARPANET provided the ability to manage counterinsurgency and surveillance operations on an unprecedented scale. The networking technology it provided transformed the way in which enemies were monitored and studied, and the ways in which intelligence was gathered, processed and deployed. While ARPA outwardly preferred to talk up the academic benefits of the ARPANET, we cannot escape the military imperatives at the heart of its development.

Taking this a step further, the development of the ARPANET demonstrates how the boundaries between military and civilian life - already eroded by previous 20th century conflicts - took on a disturbing permanence during the Cold War era. Indeed, technology ostensibly developed for academic use proved highly effective in military operations. In turn, military operations provided the conditions needed for the further experimentation and refinement of the technology. In this context, the fine points of distinction between enemies on the battlefield and civilians back home seemed unimportant. The latter increasingly came to be seen as legitimate targets for counterinsurgency and mass surveillance.

To end on an optimistic note, we should also reflect on the importance of whistleblowers, testimony and exposé. At different points during our story, figures like Ford Rowan and Christopher Pyle were willing – some might even say brave – to call out what they saw as the immoral use of new technology against civil liberties. Their efforts to warn Americans of the dangers of mass surveillance and intelligence gathering played a part in holding those with power to account. This feels particularly important today. In recent years, we have seen the reach of the state dwarfed by the emergence of new players in the form of Big Tech. These companies, and the products and services they provide, have opened up new concerns about the way in which the internet works and who benefits from it. While these concerns are not likely to be resolved any time soon, it is worth remembering how people in the past sought to address the earliest ethical questions of the internet.

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References

Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2019)

In the Beginning, There Was Arpanet | Air & Space Forces Magazine (airandspaceforces.com)

Inside DARPA, The Pentagon Agency Whose Technology Has 'Changed the World' : NPR

The Emerging Digital Economy | U.S. Department of Commerce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Hamlet_Program

How the internet was invented | Internet | The Guardian

INTERNET Prehistory: ARPANET Chronology

The Origin and Nature of the US “Military-Industrial Complex”

The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand: 110 Years Ago

June 28 this week marks the 110th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The assassination was one of history's greatest turning points, putting into play the diplomatic crisis that led to the First World War. However, it happened by accident, as a result of a whole series of mistakes and missed opportunities.

Alan Bardos, author of a related novel (Amazon US | Amazon UK) explains.

A depiction of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo. From Domenica del Corriere, by Achille Beltrame.

Oskar Potiorek

Bosnia and Herzegovina was a hotly disputed territory in 1914. It had been annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1910 from the crumbling Ottoman Empire, but was also claimed by neighboring Serbia and had a growing nationalist movement amongst its youth who wanted it to be part of a South Slav state. The decision to send the crown prince of Austro-Hungary into such an unstable region, to attend army maneuvers, was largely made in an attempt to strengthen the monarchy’s rule; charming the local population and demonstrating its military might.

The security for Franz Ferdinand’s visit fell to the military governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, General Oskar Potiorek. Potiorek wanted to become the Chief of the General Staff and saw the visit as an opportunity to stake his claim. Franz Ferdinand was a fastidious man, prone to fits of rage and was known as ‘The Ogre’ in court circles. A single error could have finished the governor’s career. The Archduke had already blocked Potiorek’s promotion, twice.

Potiorek paid close attention to every aspect of the Archduke’s needs during the visit. He had an extraordinary eye for detail. He over saw all arrangements, from ensuring that the Archduke’s wine would be served at the correct temperature, to building him a private chapel.

Nothing was left to chance, that is except the security of Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo. Austro-Hungarian intelligence was aware of plots against Archduke Ferdinand and the danger posed by Serbia who were attempting to resist Austro-Hungarian expansion in the region. There was however no definite evidence of a plot against Archduke Franz Ferdinand, threats of this kind were not unusual in the increasingly volatile Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

A schoolboy conspiracy

Unlike other areas of the Monarchy there had not been any violence attributed to nationalism in Bosnia. Potiorek did not recognize the growing nationalism among the youth that had inspired a Young Bosnia Movement and the assassins.

This reflects the Austro-Hungarian Government’s attitude to the threat placed by the nationalist movements in their Balkan provinces. No attempt was made to counter them because the security services did not believe they existed. The idea that half-starved schoolboys could be any kind of a threat was too ridiculous to contemplate.

There were officials in Sarajevo who did understand the growing danger from these “schoolboys” and that they were working with Serbia. The police commissioner for Sarajevo, Dr Edmund Gerde, advised Potirok that there was a conspiracy, two weeks before Franz Ferdinand’s visit. Dr Sunaric the vice president of the Bosnian Parliament urged Potiorek to cancel the archducal visit because of possible Young Bosnia activity. Potiorek dismissed these warnings.

Archduke Ferdinand himself was warned about the possibility of an assassination attempt, but travelled to Bosnia nonetheless, albeit reluctantly. Franz Ferdinand’s wife Sophie insisted on accompanying her husband when she heard of the threats, as she did not believe anyone would shoot at him if a woman was by his side.

The night before the Royal couple were due to visit Sarajevo, Sophie met Doctor Sunaric at a state dinner and told him that he was wrong. Wherever they had been, ‘everyone had greeted them with great friendliness’. Doctor Sunaric responded ‘Your Highness, I pray to God that when I have the honor of meeting you again tomorrow night, you can repeat those words to me.’

One of the most tragic aspects of the whole affair is that Archduke Franz Ferdinand decided to cancel the visit to Sarajevo following the state dinner, possibly having been warned by the local police, but he was persuaded to complete the planned itinerary by Colonel von Merizzi, Governor Potiorek’s aide-de-camp.

Sarajevo, Sunday morning, June 28, 1914

Potiorek left the protection of Franz Ferdinand largely to the officers of the Archduke’s entourage. There were only 120 gendarmes lining the streets, to provide security in a city of over 50,000 people. Bringing in additional policemen was deemed to be too expensive, as all of the budget had gone on building the chapel for Franz Ferdinand. Potiorek also refused to use the troops from the maneuvers as extra security. He felt a strong military presence would offend the local inhabitants and the soldiers did not have their dress uniforms.

Consequently one of the conspirators in the assassination plot, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, was able to throw a bomb at the Archduke’s car as it drove to the official reception. The bomb missed, but when the motorcade reached the reception Potiorek took full responsibility and assured Franz Ferdinand that the danger had passed.

Potiorek spurred the suggestion that troops be used to clear the streets stating, ‘do you think that Sarajevo is full of assassins?’ Potiorek did suggest cutting the Archduke’s itinerary short and proceeding to his residence for lunch. To avoid any further danger in the narrow backstreets that the Archduke was scheduled to drive through.

The Archduke however wanted to visit the wounded from the earlier bombing. In the ensuing confusion the change of route was not communicated to the driver of the first car in the Archduke’s motorcade. When the motorcade left the reception the lead driver stuck to the original route and turned into a backstreet.

As the Archduke’s car began to follow, Potiorek realized the mistake and ordered the driver to stop. In front of 19 year old Gavrilo Princip, who fired twice with a Browning model semi-automatic pistol, killing the Archduke and Sophie, and sparking the First World War.

The fact that Potiorek was in the car and that Princip claimed to be shooting at him when he shot Franz Ferdinand’s wife, has meant that Potiorek was never held to account for his actions. The blame was placed on Serbia. The assassins were aided by elements in Serbian intelligence, but if Potiorek had followed the advice of his police chief; or acted decisively following the first assassination attempt, Gavrilo Princip and the ensuing war could have been stopped.

The events depicted in this article inspired Alan Bardos’ novel ‘The Assassins’, which can be purchased here: Amazon US | Amazon UK

Sources

'One Morning in Sarajevo', David James Smith

'The Archduke and the Assassin', Lavender Cassels

'The Road To Sarajevo', Vadmire Dedijer

'The Desperate Act', Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht.

'Archduke of Sarajevo: The Romance & Tragedy of Franz Ferdinand of Austria', Gordon Brook-Shepherd

'The Assassination of the Archduke', Greg King & Sue Woolmans

Did One Man Really Connect Abraham Lincoln’s Death and the Identity of Jack the Ripper?

One man links two of the most notorious crimes of the nineteenth century – an Irish American by the name of Francis Tumblety. It stretches credulity but this individual, arrested in 1865, as a suspected member of the gang behind the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, was also detained by Scotland Yard in 1888 over the Jack the Ripper case.

Tony McMahon, author of a related book (Amazon US | Amazon UK), explains.

Francis Tumblety in a military uniform.

If the story rested on the bizarre coincidence of the arrests in 1865 and 1888, that would be compelling enough. But during my research, I encountered an extraordinary figure whose life consisted of a series of crises and scandals. It included two manslaughter cases; violent assaults; arrests for gross indecency; and accusations of business fraud. Then add to that being arrested as a suspected co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination and Scotland Yard drawing up charges in relation to the Jack the Ripper case.

Even after the 1888 arrest over the Ripper murders - when Tumblety jumped bail and escaped to New York - he was soon in court for striking a young man while Manhattan later shuddered in horror at news of a copycat Ripper killing in a hotel. New Yorkers were convinced the Whitechapel murderer was in their midst and the newspapers pointed an accusing finger at Tumblety.

Tumblety did not operate in the shadows. Far from it. Styling himself the Indian Herb Doctor, he was a high-profile medicine man skillfully using the emerging mass circulation newspapers to transform himself into a nineteenth century celebrity, known throughout north America (Canada and the United States). In fact, his celebrity, and the networks he developed in high society, played a key role in protecting him from imprisonment on multiple occasions. It may also explain why he was not extradited from the United States to face the Ripper charges in London after absconding.

Tumblety’s sexuality

As an LGBT historian, I am fascinated by Tumblety’s very open homosexuality. The term was yet to be popularized in the mid-nineteenth century but nobody needed sodomy to be defined. Gay men were recognized in clubs, theatres, and taverns. Journalists commented on the doctor's nocturnal cruising and very literal clashes with younger men he picked up, then fell out with bitterly. He supplied great copy for the gossip columns of the newspapers given his repeat brushes with the police and courts. For decades he was tailed by the Pinkerton detective agency who seemed obsessed by the doctor’s man problems.

While he has been recognized as a Ripper suspect since his arrest, Tumblety’s sexuality has often been skirted around, maybe to save the blushes of some Ripperologists. Also because it raises awkward questions about his motives in the Ripper murders, which I set out to tackle in the book. To understand the kind of life he led and how he came to be implicated in these two enormous crimes, it’s impossible not to put his homosexuality center stage.

Tumblety claimed to be disinterested in the opposite sex after marrying a woman he then discovered was a prostitute. I suspect this story, told by Tumblety in his multi-edition slim autobiography, may not be true. It offered a cover for his same sex preference coupled with a violent misogyny noted by the American police and shared by them with Scotland Yard. The London police were further convinced he was Jack the Ripper after reports in the American press that Tumblety owned a grotesque collection of uteruses in glass jars which he displayed at his all-male dinner parties. The Ripper’s second victim, Annie Chapman, was missing her uterus when her body was discovered.

America

This intriguing figure began his life in Dublin but like many Irish at the time, including many of my ancestors, he boarded a ship for a new life in America. His family set up home in Rochester, New York, and the Irish teenager lived in miserable poverty. But he was growing up in a country experiencing rapid growth where hucksters and opportunists changed their backstory, adopted a glamorous persona, and fleeced the vulnerable, making considerable fortunes. This was capitalism at its most unregulated and freewheeling.

Clearly not without talent, Tumblety set himself up as a completely unqualified doctor with a flamboyant persona. To promote his dubious medical business, he processed down main street on a circus horse with a plumed helmet and assistant dressed as a native American handing out leaflets. With bombastic language, he declared war on mainstream physicians and claimed his herbal cures could tackle everything from pimples to cancer.

The association with Lincoln began with an astonishing appearance on horseback behind Lincoln’s carriage when the newly elected president processed through New York, having just been elected president in early 1861. Journalists were aghast at this unlikely vision, as the herb doctor was embroiled at that moment in a rather sordid legal case involving one of his young male assistants. Yet Tumblety ignored the brouhaha and set out to ingratiate himself with the president by moving to Washington DC, attending Lincoln’s public appearances.

However, he seems to have been playing a double game. I’ve uncovered evidence linking Tumblety to at least two members of the gang that plotted Lincoln’s assassination and a newspaper article from 1914 that proves he knew the man who fired the fatal bullet: John Wilkes Booth. Little wonder that Tumblety was arrested and held at the Old Capitol Prison in the aftermath of the presidential slaying. Somehow, though, he was able to walk out of jail a free man.

After Lincoln

The quarter of a century between the Lincoln killing and the Ripper murders saw Tumblety flitting between America and Europe. The police and Pinkerton agency continuing to keep tabs on this strange character. I believe he contracted syphilis at some point and that the condition impacted both his physical and mental health as we approach 1888. The alleged manslaughter of a patient in Liverpool led to no conviction, possibly the result of an out-of-court settlement. Then the herb doctor was arrested over gross indecency with four men. While he was being held, Scotland Yard changed tack, realizing he was Jack the Ripper.

Without giving too much away, he ends up back in the United States and it’s his last years, neglected up until now, that are very revelatory. There is clear proof that Tumblety had cultivated networks in the Irish American diaspora and what passed for a gay community. In two cases, respected political figures rescued him from criminal convictions – but for what reason?

Conclusion

American journalists had no doubt that Tumblety was the notorious serial killer who had struck terror into the streets of Whitechapel. I share some ideas, based on his life experience and character, that explain why a gay man would have committed such heinous acts. His sexuality does not rule him out at all. Reporters speculated on other crimes that he may have been linked to and the possibility that one of his “valets” – young male employees – could have helped him on his murder spree.

To me, Tumblety presents a far more intriguing prospect as Jack the Ripper than a rogue member of the Royal Family or a conspiracy by Freemasons. He was a rags to riches story that guides us through Civil War America, the Gilded Age, and on to the streets of Victorian London. His life was turbulent, violent, and scandalous. What he did was unforgivable and sheds so much light on the sexual politics, media landscape, and precarious existence that millions of people led during this period.

Tony McMahon’s new book Jack the Ripper and Abraham Lincoln: One man links the two greatest crimes of the 19th century is available here: Amazon US | Amazon UK

The Chinese Boxer Rebellion: A Clash of Cultures and Powers

In the twilight of the 19th century, the world watched as China convulsed in a tumultuous uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion. This cataclysmic event, which erupted in 1900, was not merely a clash of arms, but a collision of civilizations, ideologies, and ambitions. At its core, the Boxer Rebellion was a struggle for the soul of China, pitting traditional values against encroaching foreign influence.

Here Terry Bailey delves into the multifaceted dimensions of the rebellion, outline the foreign powers involved, their political aims, the valor recognized through decorations like the Victoria Cross and Congressional Medal of Honor, and the perspectives of the Chinese Boxers, including the pivotal role played by Empress Dowager Cixi.

The photo shows foreign forces inside the Forbidden City in Beijing in November 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion.

Origins of the Boxer Movement

To comprehend the Boxer Rebellion, one must understand its roots deeply entwined with China's history of internal strife and external pressures. The late 19th century saw China reeling from a series of humiliations at the hands of foreign powers, compounded by internal turmoil and economic distress. The Boxers, officially known as the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, emerged as a grassroots movement fueled by resentment towards foreign domination and perceived cultural erosion.

The International Response

As the Boxer movement gained momentum, foreign nationals and missionaries in China became targets of violent attacks, triggering international alarm. In response, an Eight-Nation Alliance composed of troops from Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom intervened to quell the rebellion and protect their interests in China.

Each member of the alliance had its own political aims and agendas driving their involvement in the conflict. For instance, European powers sought to safeguard their economic privileges and spheres of influence in China, while Japan seized the opportunity to assert its growing regional power. The United States, keen on preserving its ‘Open Door Policy’ and ensuring the safety of American citizens, also joined the intervention force.

The Boxers' Perspective

Contrary to portrayals by Western accounts, the Boxers were not merely mindless fanatics but individuals driven by a complex blend of nationalism, religious fervor, and socio-economic grievances. Comprising primarily of peasants and martial artists, the Boxers perceived themselves as defenders of Chinese tradition against the encroachment of Western imperialism and Christian missionary activities.

For the Boxers, their struggle was not just against foreign powers but also against the corruption and decadence of the Qing dynasty. Their rallying cry, "Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners," encapsulated their belief in restoring China's glory by expelling foreign influence and purging the nation of perceived traitors.

Empress Dowager Cixi's Role

At the heart of the Boxer Rebellion stood Empress Dowager Cixi, a formidable figure whose political maneuvering would shape the course of Chinese history. Initially hesitant to openly support the Boxers, Cixi eventually threw her support behind the movement, viewing it as a means to bolster her own waning authority and expel foreign influences.

Cixi's decision to align with the Boxers proved fateful, leading to a declaration of war against the Eight-Nation Alliance. Despite her efforts to galvanize Chinese forces, the coalition's superior firepower and logistical prowess ultimately overwhelmed the Boxer forces and brought about the collapse of their rebellion.

Legacy of the Boxer Rebellion

The Boxer Rebellion left an indelible mark on China and the world, reshaping geopolitical dynamics and fueling nationalist sentiments. While the intervention of the Eight-Nation Alliance temporarily quelled the uprising, it also deepened China's resentment towards foreign powers and sowed the seeds of future conflicts, in addition to further internal strife.

The rebellion's aftermath witnessed the imposition of harsh indemnities on China, further weakening the Qing dynasty and hastening its eventual collapse. The events of 1900 served as a stark reminder of the perils of imperialism and the enduring struggle for national sovereignty.

Sun Yat-sen, known in China as Sun Zhongshan was the eventual galvanized the popular overthrow of the imperial dynasty through his force of personality. Which occurred on the 19th of October 1911. At the time of the eventual successful overthrow of the 2000 year old dynasty Sun Yat-sen was in America attempting to raise funds for the future of China.

He was a highly educated individual who was strongly opposed to the actions of the Boxers before and during the rebellion, knowing that violent offensive action against the strong foreign powers would be detrimental to China’s future.

In conclusion

The Boxer Rebellion is an outstanding example of the complexities of history, where competing interests, ideologies, and aspirations converge in a crucible of conflict. Reflecting on this turbulent chapter, it is possible to be reminded of the enduring quest for dignity, autonomy, and justice that transcends borders and generations.

Additionally, the history of the Boxer rebellion should provide a stark reminder for any nation that decides to intervene into another nation’s concerns where the intervening power has hidden political agenda residing below the surface.

This reminder should be dealt to all nations, not only where a political fueled agenda influences an intervention by military force but any intervention that the preservation and protection of life is not the prime concern of military action.

“war is a continuation of politics by other means,”

Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, 1st of July 1780 – 16th of November 1831

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Victoria Cross and Congressional Medal of Honor Recipients

The Boxer Rebellion witnessed acts of exceptional bravery and heroism, recognized through prestigious military decorations such as the Victoria Cross and Congressional Medal of Honor, for soldier of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the United States of America.

Victoria Cross recipients

General Sir Lewis Stratford Tollemache Halliday VC, KCB

General Sir Lewis Stratford Tollemache Halliday VC, KCB (14th of May 1870 – 9th of March 1966) was an English recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.

Rank when awarded VC (and later highest rank): Captain RMLI, (later General)

His citation reads:

Captain (now Brevet Major) Lewis Stratford Tollemache Halliday, Royal Marine Light Infantry, on the 24th June, 1900. The enemy, consisting of Boxers and Imperial troops, made a fierce attack on the west wall of the British Legation, setting fire to the West Gate of the south stable quarters, and taking cover in the buildings which adjoined the wall. The fire, which spread to part of the stables, and through which and the smoke a galling fire was kept up by the Imperial troops, was with difficulty extinguished, and as the presence of the enemy in the adjoining buildings was a grave danger to the Legation, a sortie was organized to drive them out.

 A hole was made in the Legation Wall, and Captain Halliday, in command of twenty Marines, led the way into the buildings and almost immediately engaged a party of the enemy. Before he could use his revolver, however, he was shot through the left shoulder, at point blank range, the bullet fracturing the shoulder and carrying away part of the lung.

Notwithstanding the extremely severe nature of his wound, Captain Halliday killed three of his assailants, and telling his men to "carry on and not mind him," walked back unaided to the hospital, refusing escort and aid so as not to diminish the number of men engaged in the sortie.

Commander Basil John Douglas Guy VC, DSO

Commander Basil John Douglas Guy VC, DSO (9th of May 1882 – 29th of December 1956) was an English recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.

Rank when awarded VC (and later highest rank): Midshipman RN, (later Commander)

London Gazette citation

“Mr, (read Midshipman), Basil John Douglas Guy, Midshipman of Her Majesty’s Ship “Barfleur”.

On 19th July, 1900, during the attack on Tientsin City, a very heavy cross-fire was brought to bear on the Naval Brigade, and there were several casualties. Among those who fell was one A.B.I. McCarthy, shot about 50 yards short of cover.

Mr. Guy stopped with him, and, after seeing what the injury was, attempted to lift him up and carry him in, but was not strong enough, so after binding up the wound Mr. Guy ran to get assistance.

In the meantime the remainder of the company had passed in under cover, and the entire fire from the city wall was concentrated on Mr. Guy and McCarthy. Shortly after Mr. Guy had got in under cover the stretchers came up, and again Mr. Guy dashed out and assisted in placing McCarthy on the stretcher and carrying him in.

The wounded man was however shot dead just as he was being carried into safety. During the whole time a very heavy fire had been brought to bear upon Mr. Guy, and the ground around him was absolutely ploughed up.

Congressional Medal of Honor Recipients

During the Boxer rebellion, 59 American servicemen received the Medal of Honor for their actions. Four of these were for Army personnel, twenty-two went to navy sailors and the remaining thirty-three went to Marines. Harry Fisher was the first Marine to receive the medal posthumously and the only posthumous recipient for this conflict.

Side note:

Total number Victoria Crosses awarded

Since the inception of the Victoria Cross in 1856, there have been 1,358 VCs awarded. This total includes three bars granted to soldiers who won a second VC and the cross awarded to the unknown American soldier.

The most recent was awarded to Lance Corporal Joshua Leakey of 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment, whose VC was gazetted in February 2015, following an action in Afghanistan on 22nd of August 2013, this information was correct at the time of writing.

Total number of Congressional Medal of Honor, (MOH), awarded

Since the inception of the MOH in, 1861 there have been 3,536 MOH awarded.

The most recent was awarded was made to former Army Capt. Larry L. Taylor during a ceremony at the White House, by President Joe Biden, Sept. 5, 2023, this information was correct at the time of writing.

The Medal of Honor was introduced for the Naval Service in 1861, followed in 1862 a version for the Army.

The Inquisitions of the Middle Ages - Part 2: Who were the Feared Inquisitors?

The Inquisitions of the Middle Ages were a series of judicial procedures led by the Roman Catholic Church in the later Middle Ages in response to movements that the Church considered heretical.  Here, Jeb Smith continues his series by looking at just who the inquisitors were.

Part 1 on an introduction to the inquisitions is here.

A depiction of Bernard Gui receiving a blessing from Pope John XXII.

It is sometimes portrayed that whenever an Inquisitor came to a district the people ran and hid for their lives, fearing an overzealous murderous madman who falsely accused anyone who floats! But nearly the opposite is true. The people desired and even celebrated the death of condemned heretics. Even an accused heretic would feel safer with an Inquisitor than in the hands of a mob.

Contrary to popular belief, Inquisitors only had authority over baptized Christians and did not investigate Jews, Muslims, or pagans. Further, the death penalty was typically only used in specific cases. For the most part, those who were considered heretics received less severe punishments, such as penances, confiscation of property or, in the worst cases, imprisonment. Instances of the death penalty were rare and usually limited to the most zealously unrepentant among those investigated.

Generally, the people pushed for authorities, lords, and the Church to deal with heretics among them; most of the authorities only did so “reluctantly.”[1] The ordeal was more of a “will of the people,” a democratic reaction to fear, as the people beseeched authorities to ease their concerns. Concern over God’s judgment on the realm if they allowed heresy to spread, and other motivators,[2] led emotional mobs to accusing and murdering innocents for heresy or witchcraft without trials. The heretic lacked rights and protections enjoyed by faithful Catholics. Angry mobs brought supposed heretics to court, seeking swift punishment, which too often was granted by the courts and rulers. And so, desiring to put a stop to it, the Church sent out trained authorities to “inquire” into these claims and ensure a fair trial.[3] A mid-13th century Inquisitor manual declares, “To no one do we deny a legitimate defense,” and the same manual stated, “we do not proceed to the condemnation of anyone without clear and evident proof or without his own confession, nor God permitting, will we do so.”[4] The statement emphasizes the importance of fair and just trials.

Fair outsiders

Having a fair and impartial outsider who is trained and knowledgeable about conducting trials can make a significant difference in saving lives from enraged mobs. An excellent example of this is during the middle of the witch craze hysteria in 1612 when Spanish inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías investigated 1,802 people accused of witchcraft and, after careful examination of their claimed magical powers and alleged sex with demons, declared, “I have not found even indications from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred.”[5] Had these accused individuals been left to the mercy of an angry and fearful mob, it is unlikely that many would have survived.

In many instances, the inquisitors were able to save lives; overall, it is hard not to see them as doing so. For example, in 1256, the inquisitors were able to save Jews who had been falsely accused of ritual murder.[6] There were, of course, overzealous Inquisitors. One such figure was Robert the Dominican, who during the 13th century sent 180 heretics to the stake along with a local bishop who gave them their freedom. However, for his actions Robert was suspended by the Pope and imprisoned for life.[7] Also, during the Middle Ages, local bishops and lords complained about the Inquisitor Conrad of Marburg’s excessive use of torture and heavy punishments; the Inquisitor was eventually assassinated for his abuses.

The investigators tried to avoid punishing the accused and guided them to avoid punishment. Professor Rodney Stark wrote, “It was the inquisition that prevented the murderous witch craze, which flourished...during the sixteenth and seventeenth century...instead of burning witches, the inquisitors sent a few people to be hanged because they had burned witches.”[8] It was the Catholic Clergy that first stamped out the witch craze and were first skeptical of it.[9]

Debate

Inquisitors would engage in ongoing and lengthy debates with Jews who had relapsed; these were not hasty trials and verdicts but rather actual investigations, inquiries into the mind of the heretic to render accurate judgments, the exact opposite of emotional mob outrage.[10]

Contrary to popular portrayals, the Inquisitor’s job was not to seek out and destroy heretics; their goal was to ensure a fair trial for the accused and bring them back to the Catholic fold. Medieval scholar Thomas Madden tells us that the “Inquisitions was originally set up to save lives.”[11] They first sought to correct false beliefs and cause the heretic to repent. In 1206, a Papal Bull stated the Church must “go humbly in search of heretics and lead them out of error.”[12]Most of the cases of heresy were simply misunderstood positions that were quickly corrected by the trained Inquisitor, and the cases dismissed.[13] The most common punishments (or penances) for heresy included fasting, pilgrimage, wearing a yellow cross in public, or scourging. As previously emphasized, very few heretics received the death penalty. A medieval guide by Saint Raymond of Peñafort described multiple levels of heresy, from those who listened to them preach, to those who helped, to those who defended the heresy. Only unrepented defenders were set to receive the death penalty.

Bernard Gui

The most famous inquisitor of the medieval period was Bernard Gui, who presided over 930 cases where the accused were found guilty of heresy, but sent only 42 people to the secular authorities for execution.[14] Willful heresy was not at all common.  Giving a heretic over to the local authorities for capital punishment was “an act of desperation.”[15] It was a last resort taken only after the Inquisitor failed to convert his subject. Professor Edward Peters studied the manuals of the Inquisitors and remarked that the procedures employed by them against heretics were “not from zeal for righteous vengeance, but out of love of correcting an erring brother”[16] and “the essential purpose of the Inquisition was to save the souls of heretics and those close to them and to protect the unity of the church.”[17]

The Church prioritized letting the guilty go free over falsely condemning the innocent. This meant that there must be substantial evidence or a genuine confession that proves the accused’s guilt beyond doubt. Historian Will Durant wrote, “In general the inquisitors were instructed that it was better to let the guilty escape than to condemn the innocent, and that they must have either clear proof or a confession.”[18]

Further, the Church and its servants, the Inquisitors, never executed a single heretic directly. They would however give up their rescue mission when a heretic remained unrepentant and defiant. Instead, they would turn them over to local authorities, who would condemn them to death.[19] Heretics were only put to death after a long, unrepentant period of maintaining their stance.[20]

Repentance

By setting up their courts, inquisitors enabled heretics to legally repent, be protected by the Church, have a fair trial, and avoid mob violence. The Inquisitor sought to prevent guilty verdicts and encourage repentance; they were the heretics’ friend, not their enemy as commonly believed. Likewise, Inquisitors never forced anyone to convert to Catholicism. The Inquisitors made sure that the accused fully understood and acknowledged that their beliefs were heretical, and that they persisted in holding them. During the interview process, the Inquisitors were often willing to meet with the accused on multiple occasions over several years in an attempt to dissuade them from facing trial.

Originally, Bishops would determine if the accused were heretics, and they would move on, not staying in one place. It was common for those accused of heresy or questioned by the Inquisitor to inform other heretics in the town of the Inquisitor’s arrival, leading to the heretics fleeing the area to escape interrogation.

Inquisitors came to an area, announced they were there, and gave a grace period (where heretics could confess and repent and be forgiven) of 30-40 days – they would also teach and preach the faith. The most well-known Inquisitor of the medieval period, Bernard Gui, stated in his Inquisitors’ manual that heretics should receive a written warning and one year to repent.[21] After the grace period was over, the people would bring one accused of heresy (Inquisitors did not hunt them down, and those who accused others would face a penalty if the accused were not actually guilty), and the evidence was gathered to bring a heretic to court where they would be tried. The defendant could gather evidence (and witnesses), and everything said was recorded and written down. If they were found guilty, the inquisitors would try to show the heretic why they are wrong and why their soul is in danger and try to bring them back.

The heretics received a written notice containing accusations before being charged. Heretics were protected from personal enemies, who couldn’t testify due to bias.[22] False witnesses who accused others faced a lifetime in prison on bread and water as a form of penance.[23] After admitting guilt, heretics voluntarily went to the Inquisitor’s prison instead of secular ones. They were not shackled and dragged into the Inquisitor’s custody; they selected this option for better conditions.[24]

Those who were accused of sorcery and witchcraft sought out the more forgiving Inquisitor courts, as they were typically given a light punishment for their offenses, similar to heretics. For punishment, heretics who confessed their guilt were usually given the penance of giving alms, perhaps going on a pilgrimage, or wearing a yellow cloth with a cross for a specified period.

During medieval times, people believed that lying would lead to punishment from God. As a result, individuals were often trusted when they gave their word, as breaking the commandment against lying under oath (Exodus 20:16) was seen as a serious offense. Those who falsely accused others of heresy were warned that if they lied, they themselves would be punished not just by the Inquisitors, but by God.

The Inquisitor prisons were created to mimic monastic isolation as a means of repentance and atonement for deviating from God. Those who were imprisoned were permitted to have visitors and communicate with others, and minor offenders were even granted gifts and time off.

Torture

The use of torture during the Inquisitions has been greatly exaggerated, and many other related misunderstandings have endured.  For example, torture was not used by the Church until it was reintroduced through Roman law, and secular courts used torture before the Church first approved it in 1252.[25] Inquisitors then began using it, but only when there was substantial evidence of heresy and no confession was given. Most inquisitors chose not to utilize torture, and many questioned its usefulness. Back in 866, Pope Nicholas I had written, “A confession must be voluntary and not forced. By means of torture an innocent man may suffer to the uttermost without making any avowal—in such a case what a crime for the judge! Or a person may be subdued by pain, and acknowledge himself guilty, though he be innocent—which throws an equally great sin upon the tribunal.”[26] The use of torture was also regulated; historian Will Durant wrote, “The popes advised that torture should be a last resort, should be applied only once, and should be kept ‘this side of loss of limb and danger of death.’”[27]The torturers were not viewed with distaste by society but instead accepted as a necessary evil.[28] The modern Catholic Church has since regretted its involvement in torture during the Inquisitions.[29]

The Inquisitors were not like the typical portrayal of angry, bloodthirsty lunatics enjoying torture. In fact, they were often educated and morally upright men who were seeking the truth. The previously-mentioned Bernard Gui, one of the most well-known Inquisitors, believed that an Inquisitor should be honest, maintain self-control at all times, and proceed slowly in his legal cases to arrive at the best possible judgment.[30]

Torture could only be used once during the interrogation process, and a local priest, Inquisitor, doctor, and, at times, local bishop must be present for it. Although the image of dark dungeons and secret trials, torture and murders is commonly shared, everything was actually written down and recorded. Two witnesses had to observe, and a notary or scribe had to authenticate the exchanges. There were often many witnesses present, for example, those listed during the "Confession of Arnaud  Gélis" were "in the presence of the religious persons my lord Germain de Castelnau, archdeacon of the church of Pamiers, Brother Gaillard de Pomiès, brother Arnaud du Carla of the order of Preachers of the convent of Pamiers, Brother Jean Estève, of the same order, companion of my said lord inquisitor, and Brother David, monk of Fontfroide, witnesse to the preceding, and of Masters Guillaume Peyre-Barthe, notary of my lord bishop and Barthélemy Adalbert, public notary by royal authority and the charge of the inquistor, who were present at all the proceedings of this day and approved them."[31]There were times when over a dozen people were involved as witnesses.[32]

Torture was only used when a guilty verdict seemed inevitable but the guilty refused to confess. Further, confessions made under torture must be repeated the next day without the use of torture. Neither the death penalty nor torture were standard in the Middle Ages; French historian Régine Pernoud states, “Of the nine hundred and thirty convictions recorded by the inquisitor Berard Gui during his career, those involving the death penalty total forty two. As for torture, one finds only three cases when it was applied for certain, during the whole history of the Inquisition in Languedoc.”[33]

Torture was not a form of punishment; it was only to bring forth truth. Steve Weidenkopf explained, “In the medieval inquisitor courts, torture was never used as a punishment for heresy ...not approved until 1252... and never became common...several groups of people were automatically exempted, including children, the elderly, pregnant women, knights, members of the nobility, and in some cases clergy.”[34]

Jeb Smith is the author of Missing Monarchy: What Americans Get Wrong About Monarchy, Democracy, Feudalism, And Liberty (Amazon US | Amazon UK) and Defending Dixie's Land: What Every American Should Know About The South And The Civil War (written under the name Isaac. C. Bishop) - Amazon US | Amazon UK

You can contact Jeb at jackson18611096@gmail.com

 

Bibliography

-Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. New York, London: J.M. Dent; E.P. Dutton, 1910.

-Burman, Edward. The Inquisition: The Hammer of Heresy. Dorset Press, 1992.

-Carroll, Warren H. 1993. The Glory of Christendom. N.p.: Christendom Press.

-Catechism of the Catholic Church: Complete and Updated. Crown Publishing Group, 1995.

-Kors, Alan Charles, and Edward Peters, editors. Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated, 2001.

-Davis, Michael Warren. The Reactionary Mind: Why Conservative Isn't Enough. Regnery Gateway, 2021.

-Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Age of Faith (The Story of Civilization, Volume 4) (Story of Civilization). Simon & Schuster, 1980.

-Ferrara, Christopher A. 2012. Liberty, the God That Failed: Policing the Sacred and Constructing the Myths of the Secular State, from Locke to Obama. N.p.: Angelico Press.

-Hoffmann, Richard. An Environmental History of Medieval Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

-Holmes, George, ed. 1988. The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe. N.p.: Oxford University Press.

-Jarrett, Bede. 2007. Social Theories of the Middle Ages, 1200-1500. N.p.: Archivum Press.

-Jones, Andrew W. 2017. Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX. N.p.: Emmaus Academic.

-Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. Yale University Press, 2014.

-Kors, Alan Charles, and Edward Peters, editors. Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated, 2001

-L. PLUNKET, IERNE L. 1922. EUROPE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai, England: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.

-Madden, Thomas, director. “The Modern Scholar: Heaven or Heresy: A History of the Inquisition.” 2008.

-Madden, Thomas. “The Medieval World, Part II: Society, Economy, and Culture.” The Great Courses Series, 2019.

-The following citation were derived from Medieval Sourcebook Fordham University (“Confession of Arnaud Gélis, also called Botheler "The Drunkard" of Mas-Saint-Antonin”)(“Confession of Baruch, once a Jew, then baptized and now returned to Judaism”) (GUI, BERNARD, and Translation by David Burr. “BERNARD GUI: INQUISITOR'S MANUAL.”.)(Schroeder, H. J., translator. The Disciplinary Decrees of the Ecumenical Counci,. St. Louis:, B. Herder Book Co., 1937).(Agobard of Lyons, and Translated by W. J. Lewis (aided by the helpful comments and suggestions of S. Barney) from the Latin text in p. 3-15 of: Agobardi Lugdunensis Opera Omnia, edidit L. Van Acker. Turnholt: Brepols, 1981 (Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis, 52);.Agobard of Lyons (9th Century): On Hail and Thunder.”)

-Pernoud, Regine. Glory of the Medieval World. Dobson Books Ltd, 1950.

-Peters, Edward. Inquisition. University of California Press, 1989.

-Rawlings, Helen. The Spanish Inquisition. Wiley, 2006.

-Smith, Jeb. 2024. Missing Monarchy: What Americans Get Wrong About Monarchy, Democracy, Feudalism, And Liberty.

-Smith, Jeb. 2023. The Road Goes Ever On and On. N.p.: Christian Faith Publishing, Incorporated.

-Stark, Rodney. Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History. Templeton Press, 2017.

-Thatcher, Oliver J. “The Library of Original Sources - Vol. IV: The Early Medieval World, pp. 211-239.” Milwaukee: University Research Extension Co, 1901.

-Tierney, Brian, and Sidney Painter. Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 300-1475: Formerly entitled a History of the Middle Ages, 284-1500. 4th ed., Knopf, 1983.

-Weidenkompf, Steve, director. The Real Story of the Inquisitions. Catholic Answers.

-Weidenkopf, Steve. The Real Story of Catholic History: Answering Twenty Centuries of Anti-Catholic Myths. Catholic Answers, Incorporated, 2017

-Wickham, Chris. Medieval Europe. Yale University Press, 2017.

[1] (Durant 1950, 777-778)

[2] (Smith 2024)

[3] (Davis 2021 30-31)

[4] (Peters 59)

[5] (Burman 182)

[6] (Durant 1950, 780)

[7] (Durant 1950, 780) (Burman 38)

[8] (Stark 6)

[9] (Stark 127-128)

[10] (“Confession of Baruch, once a Jew, then baptized and now returned to Judaism”)

[11] (Madden 2019)

[12] (Burman 27)

[13] (Madden 2019)

[14] (Weidenkopf 2017, 121) (Durant 1950, 783)

[15] (Burman 72)

[16] (Peters 56)

[17] (Peters 64)

[18] (Durant 1950, 781)

[19] (THATCHER and SCRIBNER’S, n.d. Bull of Nicholas III Condemning all Heretics, 1280) (GUI and Burr)

[20] (Kors and Peters 222-223)

[21] (GUI and Burr)

[22] (Peters 66)

[23] (Kors and Peters 222)

[24] (Burman 51)

[25] (Weidenkopf 2017, 119)

[26] (Davis 166)

[27] (Durant 1950, 781)

[28] (Davis 166)

[29] (Catechism of the Catholic Church: Complete and Updated paragraph #2298)

[30] (Burman 53)

[31] (“Confession of Arnaud Gélis, also called Botheler "The Drunkard" of Mas-Saint-Antonin”)

[32] (“Confession of Baruch, once a Jew, then baptized and now returned to Judaism”)

[33] (Pernoud 115)

[34] (Weidenkopf 2017)

The First British Labour Government – What did it Achieve?

The British Labour Party has long been at the forefront of progressive social change in the United Kingdom, introducing such policy innovations over the years as the NHS, comprehensive education, and the national minimum wage. Labour has also left its mark in local government, where historically the party has often been successful in putting its socialist principles into practice. Early Twentieth Century Labour councils built a reputation not only for providing more generous levels of social assistance in comparison to non-Labour councils, but also for fostering improvements in education and public health, lowering rates for municipal gas and electricity rates, and serving as good local employers. However, it is nationally that Labour has had the greatest impact on people’s lives; a trend that started exactly 100 years ago.

Vittorio Trevitt explains.

Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (middle of bottom row in lighter suit) and his ministers in January 1924.

This January marked the centenary of the formation of the First Labour Government. The product of an inconclusive election the previous month, in which the Conservatives won the most seats but were unable to win a parliamentary vote of confidence, Labour was able to form a minority government with the backing of the Liberal Party.

The coming to power of the First Labour Government has long been of great interest, due to the fact that it marked the first time that Labour, a democratic socialist party committed to radical social change, had come to lead the United Kingdom. Unsurprisingly, Labour’s ascension caused mixed reactions, with elements of the press incredulous at the thought of socialist “wildmen” running Britain, while the Annual Register, by contrast, referred to this historic event as representing ‘A revolution in British politics as profound as that associated with the Reform Act of 1832’. It also led to an overhaul of the two-party system, where for decades power had alternated between the Conservatives and Liberals; their traditional rivals. It was now Labour that held the mantle of chief rival of the Conservative Party; a role that it has continued to play to this day. Symbolically for a worker-oriented party, the new prime minister Ramsay MacDonald was the first person from a working-class background to hold that notable position.

Apart from the symbolism of Labour finally holding the reins of power after years in opposition, it is important to ask oneself what the Party actually achieved in office. One should not, I believe, celebrate a socialist government coming into being if it is unable to implement policies of social justice that represent the ideals of democratic socialism. The First Labour Government’s actions, however, certainly lived up to these.

War’s end

Labour came to power during a period following the end of the First World War when a number of other socialist parties came to power throughout Europe for the first time, either as senior or junior partners in coalitions. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party (the nation’s longest-established party) formed an all-socialist administration, while other European states like Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and Austria witnessed members of social-democratic parties assuming ministerial positions in office, enabling their members to have the opportunity to drive and influencepositive social change. British Labour was no different, although numerous policy proposals put forward during Labour’s time in opposition failed to see the light of day, hampered by the Party’s minority status in Parliament. A proposed capital levy never materialised, while Labour failed to secure passage of a number of bills such as one aimed at regulating rents and a private bill focusing on shop assistants’ hours of work. Despite these shortcomings, Labour succeeded in implementing a broad range of reforms during their relatively short period in office, many of which left an indelible stamp on society. Duties on certain foodstuffs were reduced, while improvements were made in financial support for the unemployed. Benefits were increased by a fifth for men and women, eligibility for payments to dependents was widened while more people were brought under the umbrella of unemployment insurance, and a statutory right to cash benefits was introduced. The government also acted to improve conditions for pensioners; raising pensions and extending the old-age pension to all those over the age of 70 in need. In regards to earnings, action was taken on trade boards, with the number of minimum rate enforcement inspectors increased by a third, Grocery Trade Boards revived (after having previously lapsed) and an official investigation launched into certain sections of the catering trade. Additionally, machinery for fixing minimum wage rates for agricultural workers (which was dismantled in 1921) was re-established.

Infrastructure

Emphasis was placed on developing infrastructure, with money made available for drainage, roads, and repairs and improvements for dwellings dating back to the First World War. Also of significance was the setting up of Royal Commissions on schooling and health insurance to formulate plans for delivering future changes in those areas (with the latter focusing on the uneven coverage of health insurance in Britain, amongst other aspects of the system), together with a Royal Commission on mental illness law, whose work culminated in important developments in provisions for people with mental illnesses in later years. Agricultural research received a sizeable cash injection, while the Small Debt (Scotland) Act offered support to poorer individuals in that part of the UK, with provisions such as a rise in the amount that could not be attached from wages and the direct payment by instalments of sums found due in small debt courts in rent arrear cases. As a sign of the spirit of the times, a parliamentary motion was adopted in March 1924 calling on the government to establish a Commission of Inquiry to look into the setting of minimum pay scales for working people.

The grant terms of the Unemployment Grants Committee, a body set up 4 years earlier to provide grants to local authorities offering work schemes to jobless persons, were also improved. More areas, for instance, became eligible for grants, while a 6 month probation of 75% or 87.5% of wages was eliminated and a stipulation introduced whereby contracts had to include Fair Wage Clauses. Provisions for war veterans and dependents were also improved, in keeping with the commitment made by Labour in its election programme to ensure “fair play” for this segment of British society.

True to its progressive principles, the First Labour Government reversed various austerity measures introduced in the years following the Armistice, which had entailed cutbacks in areas such as health, education, and housing. Cuts made to the educational system (including the abolition of state scholarships to universities) were reversed, a grant for adult education was bolstered, and an easing of regulations on the construction of schools was carried out. Efforts were made to reduce the number of unqualified teachers, while class sizes in elementary schools were brought down.Reflecting a policy adopted by Labour a year earlier to make universal secondary education a reality, the government increased the number of free secondary school places available; a policy development that resulted in nearly 50% of all secondary school children receiving their education for free by 1931.

Housing Act of 1924

Arguably the most radical measure of the First Labour Government was the Housing Act of 1924. The result of the work of health minister John Wheatley, this far-reaching piece of legislation, which raised government subsidies to housing let at regulated rents, facilitated the construction of more than half a million homes, increased the standard of council housing built, and included a fair wages clause for those involved in the building of these homes. This landmark law was, according to one historian, the First Labour Government’s “most significant domestic reform,” and to me represents a perfect example of progressive politics in action.

Despite these noteworthy accomplishments, Labour’s aforementioned lack of a legislative majority meant that it was unable to implement (in comparison with future Labour administrations) a programme of radical change, and lasted less than a year before losing the support of the Liberals and failing to win a snap election. In the run-up to this election, Labour was confronted with accusations that it was “soft” on the USSR, as arguably demonstrated by its recognition of and promise of a loan to the latter; decisions which possibly contributed to its electoral defeat.

The fate of Labour’s first administration was sealed by the controversy surrounding the “Campbell Case,” in which the government dropped a case put against the left-wing journalist John Campbell, who was accused of encouraging British troops to commit acts of mutiny by calling on soldiers to ignore orders to fire on striking workers if ever told to do so. A vote of confidence was held which Labour lost, and in the subsequent election, the Conservatives returned to office with a massive majority of seats in Parliament. Anti-communist propaganda deployed by Conservatives during the election campaign arguably contributed to Labour’s loss, with various Tory candidates equating the Labour Party with communism or leading Britain down this path. Both the Campbell case, along with the government’s building of bridges with the Soviet Union, gave ample ammunition for right-wing propagandists.

What helped their successful anti-socialist crusade was the publication in the Daily Mail (a few days prior to the election) of the Zinoviev Letter. Presumably from Communist International president Grigory Zinoviev to an official of the British Communist Party, the letter encouraged British communists to foment revolution. Although its authenticity remains open to debate, its likely that this document played a part in turning potential voters against Labour, bringing its first stint in power to a premature end.

Conclusion

In spite of its brevity in office, and the challenges it faced, it is to Labour’s credit that it was able to do so much, while demonstrating to voters that Labourites were democrats who believed in change through constitutional means and could be trusted to safely run the country while also being a credible alternative to the Conservatives. Undoubtedly, the positive achievements of the First Labour Government under the circumstances it found itself in demonstrated both Labour’s effectiveness as a governing party and its commitment to changing Britain for the better.

The lesson that progressives can learn from the record of the First Labour Government is that social change can be achieved even when a reforming administration lacks a majority in the chambers of power, as long as there is the will to do so. At the time of writing, Labour looks set to emerge victorious in the upcoming general election. If it does, a Starmer Administration should, in the face of a difficult economic situation, do its best to carry out as much in the way of social-democratic reform as possible if it wishes to make Britain a more just society for all in the years ahead. To do so would not only be to the benefit of ordinary people, but would serve as a great tribute to the memory of the First Labour Government.

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America’s 2021 Afghanistan Withdrawal – Lessons Not Learned?

Today, when most people think of Afghanistan, they recall the Biden administration’s calamitous withdrawal in the summer of 2021 and the end of what many have termed a ‘forever war.’ Tragically, the Taliban’s victory reversed two decades of effort to establish liberal institutions and women’s rights in the war-ravaged country. Many commentators have compared America’s retreat from Afghanistan to the country’s hasty evacuation of Vietnam in 1975. Indeed, there are similarities in the chaotic nature of the two withdrawals and the resulting tragic effects for the people of Afghanistan and Vietnam, respectively.

Brian Morra looks at the lessons the Biden Administration could have taken from earlier Soviet and American wars in Afghanistan.

Soviet troops atop a tank in Kabul in 1986.

Regarding Afghanistan, Americans are less likely to remember the Soviet Union’s war there and Moscow’s own rather ignominious pull out. This is unfortunate because there are lessons to be learned from the USSR’s ill-fated foray into Afghanistan that US policymakers ought to have heeded during our own twenty-year war. My latest historical novel, The Righteous Arrows (Amazon US | Amazon UK), published by Koehler Books, devotes a good deal of ink to the missteps made by Washington and Moscow in that long-ago war. My intention with The Righteous Arrows is to entertain while providing the reader with a sense of what should have been learned from the Soviets’ failed adventure in Afghanistan.

What was Moscow’s war in Afghanistan all about?

Like many wars, it began with what seemed to be good intentions. The Kremlin leaders who made the decision to go to war thought that it would not really be a war at all but a ‘police action’ or a ‘special military operation’ if you like. The Kremlin leadership expected their engagement in Afghanistan to be sharp and quick. Instead, it turned into a decade-long, bloody slog that contributed to the later implosion of the USSR itself. Talk about unintended consequences!

How did the Soviet foray into Afghanistan start?

It began over the Christmas season in 1979 when the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was convinced to come to the aid of a weak, pro-Russian socialist regime in Kabul. The initial operation was led by the KGB with support from the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) and Army Airborne units. After initial success, the Kremlin quickly became embroiled in a war with tribal militias who did not like either the socialist puppet regime that Moscow was propping up or the Soviet occupation.

What was supposed to be a quick operation became a ferocious guerrilla war that lasted most of the 1980s and killed some 16,000 Soviet troops. The war sapped the strength of the Soviet armed forces and exposed to anyone who was paying attention just how weak the USSR had become. By 1986, the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had decided to get out of the bloody quagmire in Afghanistan. He found it was not that easy to leave and the last Russian forces did not depart Afghanistan until February 1989.

United States’ involvement

Beginning with the Jimmy Carter administration, the United States provided arms to the Afghan Islamic rebels fighting the Soviets. Military support from the US grew exponentially under President Ronald Reagan and by 1986 Washington was arming the Mujaheddin with advanced weapons, including the Stinger surface-to-air missiles that decimated Soviet airpower. America’s weapons turned the tide against the Soviet occupiers, but Washington also rolled the dice by arming Islamic rebels that it could not control.

Not only did the Afghan Islamic fighters become radicalized, but they were also joined by idealistic jihadis from all over the world. The Soviets’ ten-year occupation of Afghanistan became a magnet for recruiting jihadis, as did NATO’s two-decades long occupation some years later. The founder of al Qaeda, Usama bin Laden, brought together and funded Arab fighters in Afghanistan, ostensibly to fight the Russians, but mainly to build his own power base. Although Washington never armed bin Laden’s fighters, he used his presence in Afghanistan during the Soviet war and occupation as a propaganda bonanza. He trumpeted the military prowess of al Qaeda, which was largely a myth of bin Laden’s own creation, and claimed that he brought down the Soviet bear. His propaganda machine claimed that if al Qaeda could defeat one superpower (the USSR), then it also could beat the other one (the USA).

During the 1980s, Washington officials downplayed the danger of arming radical Islamic fighters. It was far more important for the White House to bring down the Soviet Union than to worry about a handful of Mujaheddin. One must admit that the Americans’ proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan was the most successful one it conducted during the entire Cold War. On the other hand, Washington opened a virtual Pandora’s box of militarized jihadism and has been dealing with the consequences ever since.

The aftermath

The Soviet occupation encouraged most of Afghanistan’s middle class to flee the country, leaving an increasingly radicalized and militarized society in its wake. This was the Afghanistan the United States invaded in the fall of 2001, shortly after bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks on Wall Street and the Pentagon. Policymakers in Washington failed to grasp just how radically Afghan society had changed because of the Soviet occupation.

There was discussion in Washington’s national security circles in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, warning of the dangers of fighting in Afghanistan. Bromides were offered, calling the country the ‘graveyard of empires’, but none of it had much impact on policy. Most officials in the George W. Bush administration did not understand how radicalized Afghan society had become and how severe the costs of fighting a counter-insurgency operation in Afghanistan might turn out to be.

The CIA-led operation to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s with small numbers of Americans was the game plan Washington also used in the fall of 2001 to defeat al Qaeda and bring down the ruling Taliban regime. The playbook worked brilliantly in both cases. Unfortunately, for the United States and our NATO allies, the initial defeat of the Taliban did not make for a lasting victory or an enduring peace.

For twenty years, the United States fought two different wars in Afghanistan. One was a counter-terror war, the fight to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates and to prevent them from reconstituting. The other war was a counterinsurgency against the Taliban and their allies. The reason the United States and NATO went into Afghanistan was to prosecute the first war – the anti-terror war. We fell into a counterinsurgency conflict as the Taliban reconstituted with help from Pakistan and others. This was a classic case of ‘mission creep’ and it required large combat forces to be deployed, in contrast to the light footprint of the counter-terror operation. The first war – the counter-terror war – prevented another 9/11 style major attack on the United States, while the second one required the US and NATO to deploy massive force and – ultimately – depended on the soundness of the Afghan government we supported.

The sad fact is that the successful campaign against the Taliban and the routing of al Qaeda in 2001 and 2002 led to an unfocused twenty-year war that ended with the Taliban back in charge and a humiliated United States leaving hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Afghan allies behind. In sworn Congressional testimony, General Milley, who in 2021 was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and General Mackenzie, who was Commander of Central Command, have stated that they forcefully advised President Biden to leave a small footprint of US forces and contractors in Afghanistan to prosecute the counter-terror war. Our NATO allies were willing to stay and in fact increased their forces in Afghanistan shortly after Biden was inaugurated. Not only did President Biden not heed his military advisors, but he also later denied that they ever counseled him to keep a small force in Afghanistan. Some have described Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan as ‘pulling defeat from the jaws of victory’.

President Biden further asserted that, by withdrawing, he was merely honoring the agreement President Trump had made earlier with the Taliban. This claim does not stand up to objective scrutiny because the Taliban repeatedly violated the terms of the Trump agreement, which gave the White House ample opportunity to declare it null and void.

What are the lessons the United States should have learned from the Soviet and American wars in Afghanistan?

1. Keep your war aims limited and crystal clear.

2. Fight mission creep and do not allow it to warp the original war aims or plans for a light footprint of forces.

3. Beware of the law of unintended consequences. Consider the downside risks of arming the enemy of one’s enemy.

4. Be willing to invest for the long-term or do not get involved. The United States still has forces in Germany, Italy, and Japan nearly eighty years after the end of World War II. Some victories are worth protecting.

5. Ensure that the Washington tendency toward ‘group think’ does not hijack critical thinking. Senior policymakers must think and act strategically, so that ‘hope’ does not become the plan.

Footnote on Ukraine

I will close with a footnote about the Russian war in Ukraine. The Soviet war in Afghanistan has dire similarities with Russia’s ‘special military operation’ underway today in Ukraine. In Afghanistan, Soviet forces killed indiscriminately and almost certainly committed numerous war crimes. The war also militarized Afghan society – a condition that persists to this day, and one that had a profound impact on America’s war in Afghanistan. In Ukraine, Russia’s invasion has been characterized by war crimes, mass emigration, and the militarization of Ukrainian society.

Much as in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior US policy in Ukraine is failing to identify clear strategic outcomes. It is the role of our most senior policy officials to focus on strategic outcomes and an exit strategy (if one is warranted) beforecommitting American forces or treasure to foreign wars. Too often, platitudes have masqueraded as strategy. When one thinks of great wartime presidents like Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, the trait they shared was a singular focus on strategic outcomes and on how to shape the post-war environment. The Soviets failed to do so in their war in Afghanistan. The US also fell short in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the banalities that pass for foreign policy strategy we hear in Washington today indicate that we have not learned from the past.

Brian J. Morra is the author of two historical novels: “The Able Archers” (Amazon US | Amazon UK) and the recently-published “The Righteous Arrows” (Amazon US | Amazon UK).

More about Brian:

Brian a former U.S. intelligence officer and a retired senior aerospace executive. He helped lead the American intelligence team in Japan that uncovered the true story behind the Soviet Union's shootdown of Korean Airlines flight 007 in September 1983. He also served on the Air Staff at the Pentagon while on active duty. As an aerospace executive he worked on many important national security programs. Morra earned a BA from William and Mary, an MPA from the University of Oklahoma, an MA in National Security Studies from Georgetown University, and completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School. He has provided commentary for CBS, Netflix and the BBC. Learn more at: www.brianjmorra.com