Thinking About the Forgotten Front

Listening to Thomas Laqueur’s History 5 at Berkeley reminded me of one of the best things about the demise of the Soviet Union: now it’s all right to focus on all of the history that was out of bounds before 1989. Foremost of this is the nature of the Eastern Front in the Second World War. The good war was fundamentally fought with neither the Americans nor the British. The horrible Eastern campaigns, fought in cold and mud with pack animals and wooden carts, exhausted the German army, destroyed the credibility of fascism, and spent the youth of an entire generation on both sides. For Western Europeans the Great War was the First, for the Germans and Russians, the Second. Entire armies numbering into the hundreds of thousands were taken prisoner on both sides, and the killed and wounded eclipsed the losses in the West by an order of magnitude. This entire episode has been almost ignored in the Western Hemisphere for sixty years, and is only now beginning to get a little recognition (with Enemy at the Gates as probably the best representative.) This is a forgotten piece in the Anglo-American psyche; as Mr. Laqueur put it, “why did these people put up with so much from the communists in the 60’s? Because they believed they’d saved their country from destruction during the war.” It’s worth remembering that Khrushchev was the political member during the war – at Stalingrad.

Maybe now the story can be told by both sides, both for good and bad.

Questioning American History

Not too long ago I finally finished Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now [1875] after what seemed like a million days on the train, and it asked me a question (yes, it talks): How much of the American enterprise was built with British (imperial) capital? The premise of Trollope’s (English) story is the rise and fall of a Nineteenth-century financier trying to make a quick buck under the table by pumping up stock in a North American railroad. Obviously parallel to (if not directly based on) the whole Credit Mobilier thing (i.e. the swindle that eventually turned into the trans-continental railroad,) it’s based on the willingness of investors from the home country to sink their money into high-yield schemes in the Wild West.

It occurred to me that I’d heard this story before. J.P. Morgan, the quintessential robber baron, made his money as the New York outpost of his father’s London banking house. In other words, the basic source of his business was channeling British investments into high-yield American industry. He, of course, was not alone. (Who was in Germany?) I haven’t been able to find good numbers, but it seems that much of the seed money for Messrs. Gould, Fisk, and Carnegie (how much Imperial interest was there in the Pennsylvania Railroad?) came from sources elsewhere, maybe even from the India trade. It’s kind of a new wrinkle in mythic history if the lords of the sanctimonious Union during Reconstruction were building their house with the proceeds of forced labor in Calcutta under the Raj.

There’s a modern parallel here somewhere. It might be all of the foreign investment capital that parks itself in the U.S. as a safe haven once it’s been stolen from its rightful owners in the less-politically-stable parts of the world. It could also be all of the Western capital pouring into the Far East with dubious oversight and no-questions-asked qualifications. Maybe it’s both.

If only my History were better.

This Evening has a Poem

IN THOSE YEARS

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible;
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I

-Adrienne Rich, 1991

(With thanks to JS.)