Review of The First World War, by Hew Strachan

Several one volume summaries have been written about World War One. John Keegan, Martin Gilbert, and others have written accounts that are highly regarded. So how does one choose which one to read? Hew Strachan complicates the decision with The First World War, a concise (under 400 pages) account that provides a complete overview of that cataclysmic event that not only convers the military aspects of the war, but social and economic viewpoints as well.

This volume was written to be the basis of a 2003 television documentary of the same name. The creators of the documentary had read Strachan’s well-received first volume of a planned trilogy of the war, To Arms, and worked with Strachan on producing an accurate account. The ten chapters of this book mirror the ten-episode series. (I have seen the excellent presentation; it is comparable to the one on the Civil War by Ken Burns)

Strachan clearly shows why he is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the conflict. He skillfully weaves his narrative to touch on all the key aspects of the war. From its troubled beginnings in the Balkans, to its spread across the globe (it was truly a world war), and the terrible bloodbaths at places like the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele, Strachan guides the reader to understand all its complexities. He covers the battles and campaigns and does not get preoccupied with the famed Western Front but gives all theaters their just due. Fighting in Africa, the Middle East, and Italy as well as on the sea gets equal billing. He takes time to discuss how advances in technology with tanks, planes and artillery led to unfathomable casualties. Strachan claimed that trenches were not areas of death that are portrayed in literature and media, but lifesavers as it was only when men left them that mortality rates skyrocketed.

After Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia, entangling alliances transformed the conflict from a regional conflict in the Balkans to a global war. Germany, the ally of the Hapsburgs, hoped to secure a victory by quickly defeating France as it knew it could not win a prolonged two front war. Its hopes were dashed with a loss at the Marne, one of the most decisive battles in world history. Germany would have to bear the share of the fighting as it soon learned its allies were not able to pull their weight. “Shackled to a corpse” accurately described Germany’s relationship to Austria-Hungary as well as the Ottomans.  Bloody stalemate took place for the next four year and even Germany’s gamble to launch simultaneous attacks on the western front with divisions pulled from the east after Russia pulled out of the war failed to make a difference. The United States’ entrance into the war brought an abundance of fresh men and economic power that Germany could not withstand.

The war does overly dominate the story as Strachan takes time to discuss the critical events along the home fronts.  Economic impacts and social upheavals were also key factors that led to the fall of the Central Powers. The author also discusses the theme of liberalism throughout and how soldiers felt they were truly fighting for the continued progress of civilization. Eventually, an armistice is signed and months later a treaty which places the war’s blame clearly on Germany’s shoulders.  Many Germans believed there were not truly defeated and this idea along with hatred over the treaty would be major factors that in just twenty years lead to a more horrific world war.

Strachan ends his narrative with several conclusions. The war toppled topped empires (Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Turkey), the Russian Revolution led to the foundation of the Soviet Union, and the United States entered the world stage as a global power. It created short term solutions to problems in the Balkans and laid seeds for future strife in the Middle East. World War One truly shaped the world for the twentieth century.

The First World War is a quick-moving narrative that keeps the reader engaged by never getting too detailed in its descriptions. That positive is at times a negative as covering such a vast and complex war in so few pages makes it impossible to tell a complete story. Major events and battles are covered in paragraphs leaving this reader seeking more information. (I made many notes on topics to seek out more detailed accounts.) This issue aside, Strachan has skillfully written a masterful account of the “War to End All Wars” that touches upon all the key themes and events. Anyone wanting a solid overview of the war would be hard pressed to find a better single volume.

CPW

Review of Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie

Freedom’s Dominion, the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Jefferson Cowie, uses several unfortunate episodes in the history of Barbour County, Alabama as a lens through which to view the worst of America’s troubled past regarding race relations. Local connections to a range of Southern stories are all here: illegal settlement on Native American lands and the sordid sage of Indian Removal; the proliferation of the institution of slavery and the rise of state’s rights political theory aimed at its preservation in the antebellum era; support for secession; mob rule, disfranchisement, and lynching following Reconstruction; mill paternalism and race-based employment in the early 1900s; resistance to desegregation; and support of neo-conservative politicians such as local product George Wallace in the twentieth century. Thus the touchstones of what Cowie presents as a manifestation of a peculiar concept of freedom—the freedom to control others—are all showcased as but different acts in one long American drama.

Barbour County is as good of a backdrop for such a story as can be found. On the very frontier of the American border with the Creek Nation in the 1830s, the county embraced both the rich plantation lands of the famed Black Belt and the scrubby pine woods of the southeastern corner of the state. Including small crossroads villages and the antebellum riverside boomtown of Eufaula—at one point one of the wealthiest and most politically influential communities in the state—Barbour can be understood as illustrative of a virtual cross-section of early Alabama. Local leaders played an outsized role in the drive for Alabama’s secession from the union in 1861, and the violence and disorder which occurred there in the postwar years (by far not the most notorious in the region but nonetheless tragic and drawing statewide notice) render its history almost as exemplary of that of the region as a whole in the decades between the Civil War and the turn of the century. During the 1950s to the 1970s, the city of Eufaula resisted federally-mandated segregation in ways similar to other Southern cities as long as it could. What makes Barbour uniquely sufficient to tell the story Cowie seeks to tell, however, may lie in the fact that this erstwhile agricultural community for a short time hosted textile mills and mill villages on par with what those that could be found in more populous areas elsewhere, and above all that the county was the home of one of the most divisive firebrands of late twentieth century American politics, George C. Wallace.

Indeed almost half of the book is about Wallace and his brand of race and class-based conservative politics. A pugnacious and focused man born in humble circumstances, Wallace through trial and error figured out what most animated voters, fears of integration and a consequent loss of social and economic status by whites, and played on it relentlessly. So it was that at the height of the Civil Rights Movement a man who might otherwise have been a relatively minor player in regional affairs launched himself into a position as perhaps the leading spokesman for resistance to federal authority in the nation. He parlayed this role into presidential campaigns that garnered far from insignificant support. All this is to say that Barbour County’s past lends itself to being as convenient a laboratory as any to examine the currents of racism and the governmental policies it inspired in nineteenth and twentieth century America.

It is an intriguing concept fleshed out in the book, but one that inherently presents one side of a community’s rich history in the worst possible light. It cannot be argued that the shameful episodes focused on by Cowie are a part of Barbour County’s past, and are events that in many ways yet resonate on its scenic rural byways and within the shady, tree-lined streets of Eufaula’s scenic historic district, which is home to one of the largest assemblages of antebellum and early twentieth century architecture in the state and wider region. The excesses of Wallace the community is forever inextricably linked with, too, even if it is just because he was simply born in the county seat of Clayton. But Eufaulans and residents of Barbour County will barely recognize their communities in the in the monotone portrait Cowie paints, and will certainly take exception to being portrayed as steadfastly in support of the worst impulses of regional leaders who once held sway within their borders. There is no good side of racism, but there is a heck of a lot more to a community’s history than is presented in this book, and it is unfortunate that Cowie’s national focus—this book probably could be as convincingly a study about Wallace as his home county—conflates every white citizen at every moment as being in lock-step with only the darkest of motivations in America’s past. I will admit to having reservations about the county’s portrayal here owing to having spent considerable time in Eufaula and knowing there is much more to its story, but whatever community Cowie had chosen to focus on would suffer in the same way. Unfortunately there are more places that might well illustrate the story Cowie wants to tell than we would probably like to admit.

I have to wonder at our collective willingness, even desire, to continue to try to understand people of the past in such simplified terms, though. Perhaps it makes events of long ago easier to understand, somehow. At one point in Southern history, those who were writing its story for the public attempted to focus only on the most noble virtues of its people, disregarding or minimalizing their complicity in unfortunate episodes which allowed the color of one’s skin to determine the freedoms to be enjoyed by citizenship. The portrait they painted of a universally righteous population we today scorn as laughably biased and untrustworthy. Yet in much contemporary scholarship, we seem to endorse an understanding of the region’s past as just the opposite—legions of citizens animated solely and entirely by the desire to ensure those of darker skin were never given a chance in their society. As in all things, the truth is much more complicated than these simplistic caricatures. The past is filled with people very much like us, consumed with their immediate day to day lives and paychecks, and all too willing to be manipulated at the polling place by the politics of fear orchestrated by self-serving leaders who seek to gain power through the indignation they inspire.

Cowie is clearly a thorough and professional historian, as well as a gifted writer. His narrative in Freedom’s Dominion flows at a deliberate pace and with a near-righteous purpose reminiscent of a soaring account of a Civil Rights triumph. The James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, he has also taught at the University of New Mexico and Cornell University. His previous books, including Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (2001), Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010), and The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (2016) have won numerous awards and honors. Here he does nothing less than attempt to illustrate what he believes is a continuity in the story of American racism, exclusion, and disfranchisement in stirring prose.

Freedom’s Dominion is a useful history that will draw widespread interest, both for readers wanting to understand local and national events and their continuing relevance whether in Barbour County or any part of the American South. Yet for all of the thorough research and narrative flair, I came away from the book wondering if I had truly learned anything new about the broader currents of racism and its role in the Southern past I did not already know. In fairness I could probably say the same about many other volumes I have read about topics that interest me—I often read to see a familiar story retold and hoping only to truly learn a few specifics. I know, for example, who won a Civil War battle and why well before opening a book on any particular clash, and I know the basic context in which the whole thing unfolded in most instances. So it is with this book. Racism is deeply rooted in the Southern past, and those in power in the region have consistently played on racial fears to aggrandize themselves and keep control of economic resources. Widespread resistance to social change, ranging from unfair laws to inexcusable violence, occurred throughout the region, in truth the country, during the twentieth century. If you would like to read a deep dive into the particulars of how all this unfolded in this specific region with an emphasis on national race-baiting politics in the 1960s and 1970s, you will enjoy this book. If you are looking for a revelation as to the origins of such concepts and why they were adhered to with such persistence, you will need to look elsewhere.

JMB