Trollope’s Great Reset

In April, “Tales for Our Time” featured Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period. It is a flight of fancy, like his Chronicles of Barsetshire, an imaginary English county. Trollope published The Fixed Period  in 1882.  It involves an imaginary South Pacific island named Brittanula, settled by young New Zealanders. Mr. Steyn writes:

The book was a flop when first published in 1882, and it remains an oddity in Trollope’s oeuvre. But these last two very strange years have brought it bobbing up to the surface. In the age of Covid and Climate, we have under-reported news stories about the vulnerable elderly slaughtered en masse in so-called “care homes”…. And so we come to Britannula, a former Crown Colony whose political class, as its president explains in our first episode, has been thinking outside the box and come up with its own Great Reset—the Fixed Period.

The Fixed Period

Trollope’s narrator, Britannula’s “President Neverbend,” explains how the island-republic solves the problem of old age: Reaching 67 1/2, each citizen is “deposited” in a luxurious “College of the Fixed Period.” There amid pleasant surroundings they are lovingly prepared, celebrated and honored for their termination and cremation within twelve months. The Fixed Period, Neverbend explains,

consists altogether of the abolition of the miseries, weakness, and fainéant imbecility of old age, by the prearranged ceasing to live of those who would otherwise become old…. Such old age should not, we Britannulists maintain…be prevented, in the interests both of the young and of those who do become old when obliged to linger on after their “period” of work is over.

WSC at age 67 1/2

“If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”

Trollope’s fantasy puts me in mind of a stunning Churchill counterfactual: “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” Churchill’s yarn has a happier and more uplifting ending. As much as I despise jargon and Newspeak, I will use a word I ordinarily shun. His Lee tale is “awesome.”

Churchill’s screed was explained in detail by Professor Paul Alkon, and excerpted on this website. Briefly, Robert E. Lee wins the Battle of Gettysburg and compels peace. Then, rising to the pinnacle of the Confederacy, he declares the South independent, and the slaves free. With their reverence for Lee, Southerners’ resentment is muted after he appeals to their better nature. There is no Jim Crow. or the dreadful injustices of the carpetbaggers and Reconstruction.

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“Sir Winston’s Gettysburg essay…

...is a fantasy which transcends all my objections to exploring the what-ifs and might-have-beens in that great war.” —Shelby Foote

“If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, December 1930 (Cohen C344). It resurfaced a year later in a collection of alternate histories, If It had Happened Otherwise (Cohen B43). Its last appearance, in 1975, was in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, (Cohen 286). A copy is available by email for personal use but not for reproduction. —RML

Paul Alkon on Churchill at Gettysburg

Dr. Paul A. Alkon was Bing Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at the University of Southern California. His appreciation of Churchill’s Gettysburg alternative history is the best I’ve read. It is excerpted below from Paul’s book, Winston Churchill’s Imagination, by kind permission of Ellen Alkon. To this I added brief excerpts (italics) from Churchill’s actual 1930 essay.

1930: Gettysburg imagined

“Once a great victory is won it dominates not only the future but the past…. Still it may amuse an idle hour [if] we meditate for a spell upon the debt we owe to those Confederate soldiers who by a deathless feat of arms broke the Union front at Gettysburg and laid open a fair future to the world.”¹

Experience in battle on four continents gave Churchill a horror of war. He also gained an ability to imagine alternate scenarios. It is shocking to realize that the worst possible outcome after the First World War came to be, just two decades later. Contemplating the causes of that war, Churchill with his historic imagination conjured up a scenario which might have prevented it—in 1863.

“If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” is Churchill’s only freestanding speculation about a different historical outcome. It is a classic of the genre “alternative history” in science fiction. Some historians refer to it—often suspiciously—as “counterfactual history.”

Churchill presents his story as written in a world where Lee did win the Battle of Gettysburg. As a consequence the South won the American Civil War. Implausibly from our viewpoint, we are told that Lee’s victory precipitated a sequence of events leading to the abolition of slavery, closer links among the English-Speaking Peoples, avoidance of the First World War, and the prospect of a United States of Europe led by Kaiser Wilhelm II.

1863: Lee the Emancipator

“If Lee after his triumphal entry into Washington had merely been the soldier, his achievements would have ended on the battlefield. It was his august declaration that the victorious Confederacy would pursue no policy towards the African negroes which was not in harmony with the moral conceptions of Western Europe, that opened the high roads along which we are now marching so prosperously.”*

As the story unfolds, Lee’s army marches victoriously to Washington, Lincoln’s government having fled to New York. Here Churchill must explain how Lee acquired plenary authority. Churchill deftly explains that Gettysburg threw Confederate President Jefferson Davis “irresistibly, indeed almost unconsciously, into the shade.” There is a grain of reality here, for Lee had warned Davis that slavery was the unacceptable wrong that would doom their cause. The North began the war fighting against Secession, Churchill explains. But “the moral issue of slavery had first sustained and then dominated the political quarrel.”

1905: The “English-Speaking Association”

Given the North’s preponderance of wealth and industry, losing at Gettysburg would not have daunted Abraham Lincoln. But in Churchill’s vision, “Lee’s declaration abolishing slavery…undermined the obduracy of the Northern States:

“Lincoln no longer rejected the Southern appeal for independence. ‘If,’ he declared…‘our brothers in the South are willing faithfully to cleanse this continent of negro slavery, and if they will dwell beside us in goodwill as an independent but friendly nation, it would not be right to prolong the slaughter on the question of sovereignty alone’…. The Treaty of Harper’s Ferry, which was signed between the Union and Confederate States on 6 September 1863, embodied the two, fundamental propositions: that the South was independent, and the slaves were free.”* 

The United and Confederate States of America, riven after Gettysburg, thus become permanent republics. They live peaceably side by side—both armed to the teeth—through 1905. When war scares erupt in Europe, they join with Great Britain to form the “English-Speaking Association.” The signatories are President Theodore Roosevelt, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, and Woodrow Wilson, “the enlightened Virginian chief of the Southern Republic.” Not a decade later, the “E.S.A.” forestalls world catastrophe.

1914: “Saved! Saved! Saved!”

Everyone remembers the perilous days of 1914, Churchill writes. The murder of the Austrian Archduke precipitated general mobilization. It was “the most dangerous conjunction which Europe has ever known. It seemed that nothing could avert a war which might well have become Armageddon itself.” Desultory firing had already broken out when the English-Speaking Association

“…tendered its friendly offices to all the mobilized Powers, counselling them to halt their armies within ten miles of their own frontiers, and to seek a solution of their differences by peaceful discussion. The memorable document added ‘that failing a peaceful outcome the Association must deem itself ipso facto at war with any Power in either combination whose troops invaded the territory of its neighbour.’ Although this suave yet menacing communication was received with indignation in many quarters, it in fact secured for Europe the breathing space which was so desperately required.”*

The French Republic, the Emperor Franz Joseph and Czar Nicholas quickly acceded to the E.S.A.’s “friendly offices.” The German Kaiser was the last to agree. Some say Wilhelm was determined on war regardless. Others insist he uttered “a scream of joy and fell exhausted into a chair, exclaiming, ‘Saved! Saved! Saved!’”

Our world as dystopian and improbable

Churchill’s imaginary resident of this imaginary world speculates in vintage prose about what dreadful events Lee’s victory prevented. Had the Union triumphed, armies of carpetbaggers might have descended to exploit the newly freed slaves. The South, simmering in resentment, might have invoked racial oppression. Benjamin Disraeli, that Liberal reformer, might have become a Tory! “The sabres of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry and the bayonets of Pickett’s division” turned William Gladstone from a Liberal to a “revivified Conservative.” (In reality, of course, Disraeli was the Tory, Gladstone the Liberal.) Churchill waxes lyrical in his fantasy:

“Once the perils of 1914 had been successfully averted and the disarmament of Europe had been brought into harmony with that already effected by the E.S.A., the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’ was bound to occur continually. The glittering spectacle of the great English-Speaking combination, its assured safety, its boundless power, the rapidity with which wealth was created and widely distributed within its bounds, the sense of buoyancy and hope which seemed to pervade the entire populations; all this pointed to European eyes a moral which none but the dullest could ignore.”*

The reader sees from a surprisingly utopian perspective, our own world as both dystopian and implausible. So the narrator mentions Jan Bloch’s once-famous book, The Future of War, which predicted with what proved remarkably accurate military detail the devastation that would attend war between major European states. But Bloch insisted that such a war would never happen.²

But Churchill asks: Suppose it had? A prostrate Europe might have descended into depression, unemployment, Bolshevism and fascism. Why, today in Britain the income tax might even be 25%! (In actuality, as we sadly know, all those things happened.)

1932: Implausible reality

The brilliance of Churchill’s essay also lies in his decision to shift its narrative viewpoint. We readers must not only consider the consequences of a Confederate victory—including the absence of the First World War. We must also imagine how inconceivable our world might seem if things had worked out differently.

“Whether the Emperor Wilhelm II will be successful in carrying the project of European unity forward by another important stage at the forthcoming Pan-European Conference at Berlin in 1932 is still a matter of prophecy. Should he achieve his purpose he will have raised himself to a dazzling pinnacle of fame and honour…and no one will be more pleased than the members of the E.S.A. to witness the gradual formation of another great area of tranquility and cooperation like that in which we ourselves have learned to dwell….”*

Churchill’s political imagination also allows him to portray dramatically different outcomes of a situation. So he invokes the implausibility of what actually happened—the gigantic slaughter of the Civil War and First World War. This foreshadows the rhetoric which in 1940 rallied his country by inviting contemplation of a Nazi victory. Too many dismissed such a thought. But Churchill knew a Hitler triumph would plunge the world “into the abyss of a new Dark Age.”

That chilling thought acquires much of its power by inviting imagination of one possible future: An alternative, feudal period, and technological development more accelerated than anything during the medieval era.

“Broad, sunlit uplands”

In June 1940, Churchill invited Britons to think of the worst possible outcome of Britain’s fight against Hitler’s Germany—not as a unique situation, incomparable with anything that had gone before, but also an alternative past wrenched out of time. He then invokes the more desirable outcome: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.”³ Churchill’s skill as an alternative historian notably enhanced the rhetoric that he so famously mobilized for war.

“If this prize should fall to his Imperial Majesty, he may perhaps reflect how easily his career might have been wrecked in 1914 by the outbreak of a war which might have cost him his throne, and have laid his country in the dust. If today he occupies in old age the most splendid situation in Europe, let him not forget that he might well have found himself eating the bitter bread of exile, a dethroned sovereign and a broken man loaded with unutterable reproach. And this, we repeat, might well have been his fate, if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg.”*

Endnotes

¹ Winston S. Churchill, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” in Michael Wolff, ed., The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), IV Churchill at Large, 73. All subsequent italicized excerpts (*) are from this edition, pages 73-84.

² Ivan (Jan) Bloch, The Future of War in Its Technical, Economic and Political Relations: Is War Now Impossible?, trans. R.C. Long (Boston: Ginn, 1899). abridged edition, also 1899.

³ “Their Finest Hour,” House of Commons, 18 June 1940, in Winston S. Churchill, Blood, Sweat, and Tears (New York: Putnam, 1941), 314.

So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps vital, to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat. —Churchill, House of Commons, 12 November 1936

Brexit Bedlam

For me the most adroit analysis of Britain’s Brexit Bedlam we can read to date was by Andrew Roberts in the Sunday Telegraph. You can register for free to read the article.

Will this be the year May ends before April? If Prime Minister Theresa May lasts through 5/31, Roberts says she will beat Gordon Brown (two years, 319 days) and the Duke of Wellington (two years, 320 days). Big whoopee.

Dr. Roberts goes on to opine what the right course would have been from the outset:

The cautious, bishop-like approach when she became prime minister would have been to have prepared business, the civil service and the country for a managed, World Trade Organisation-based, no-deal Brexit, without giving Brussels any guarantees on security, future domicile status for EU citizens, a divorce pay-out or indeed anything else until a negotiating timetable was agreed that was fair to both sides. Any fifth columnists in the Civil Service who were actively undermining the strategy should have been demoted; it would not have taken long for the rest to have got the message. The squealing of the Remainers would have been loud and long—especially of course on the BBC—but nothing like as bad as it has been.

Many colleagues reply to this by saying, “Sure, but hindsight is cheap.” Au contraire. Mrs. May, who is an admirable PM in many respects, had those options from the get-go. She knew she had them. She rejected them. Brexit still offers them. It is not likely that she will opt for them.

Churchill and Europe: Then

It almost seemed that every speaker at the recent Hillsdale College Churchill Conference was asked about Brexit in one way or another. We convened to study Churchill and the movies, one of them “Henry V.” Another kerfuffle with the French, but 600 years ago. The best insight into Churchill’s thinking is his own words. So when asked about Brexit I offered two Churchill quotations:

We are not seeking in the European movement … to usurp the functions of Government. I have tried to make this plain again and again to the heads of the Government. We ask for a European assembly without executive power.” —House of Commons, 10 December 1948

* * *

At Zürich in 1946 I appealed to France to take the lead in Europe by making friends with the Germans, “burying the thousand-year quarrel.” … As year by year the project advanced, the Federal Movement in many European countries who participated became prominent. It has in the last two years lost much of its original force. The American mind jumps much too lightly over its many difficulties. I am not opposed to a European Federation including (eventually) the countries behind the Iron Curtain, provided that this comes about naturally and gradually.

But I never thought that Britain or the British Commonwealths should, either individually or collectively, become an integral part of a European Federation, and have never given the slightest support to the idea. We should not, however, obstruct but rather favour the movement to closer European unity and try to get the United States’ support in this work. —Memorandum to the Cabinet, 29 November 1951

Churchill and Europe: Now?

That answer was incomplete, so a second question arose. “You gave us two Churchill quotes in which he opposed Britain joining a federal Europe. Does that mean you think he would be in favor of Brexit?”

Answer: No. To so conclude would violate his daughter’s First Commandment. Lady Soames always said, “Thou shalt not declare what Papa would say about any modern issue. After all, how do YOU know?”

I offered those quotes only to refute the opposite argument we hear all the time. Because Churchill wanted Franco-German rapprochement after World War II, he would now favor the creation of a European super-state.

Theresa May has much to answer for before the bar of history. But it is unfair to blame her alone for the current shambles of irresolution. The mistakes began long ago, under governments both Labour and Tory. They led to de Gaulle‘s rejection of British membership in the European Economic Community in the 1960s. After he’d left, Britain applied to join again. Even then, Britain joined a free trade association, not a federal union regulated by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

“If Churchill Had Not Won the 1945 Election”

In 1930, Churchill wrote a marvelous essay, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” It is presented as if written by someone in an alternate world where Lee DID win the battle of Gettysburg. This precipitated (implausibly from our viewpoint) a sequence of events leading to the abolition of slavery, a fraternal association of English-Speaking Peoples, the prevention of World War I, and with it German fascism and Russian Bolshevism. By 1930 there is the prospect of a Council of Europe led by Kaiser Wilhelm.

I have written, but not yet published, a parallel essay entitled “If Churchill Had Not Won the 1945 Election.” Using some of his phrases, it explains how Churchill DID win, resulting (also implausibly from our viewpoint), in a prosperous, reinvigorated British Commonwealth, a rollback of Soviet expansion, a free Poland, an Arab-Israeli settlement, a democratic China, the evolution of Iran to a constitutional monarchy. It ends with the prospect of a Latin American free trade association led by Che Guevara. Che, an educated, practical man, has pronounced communism a failure and deposed Castro.

Safely reelected in 1945, Churchill renounces the Dunbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods agreements, in which the United States demanded an end to Imperial Preference. Britain then organizes SAFTA, the Sterling Area Free Trade Association. The first of its kind, SAFTA spans the British Commonwealth, including India and Pakistan. They both get independence, but only after the border questions are settled and millions of lives saved by avoiding strife. SAFTA gets along fine with the U.S. and Europe. Free trade blossoms in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Back to Reality

The mistakes leading to the present Brexit debacle began with abandoning Imperial Preference. Churchill himself had supported that from 1932. Failing to render the Commonwealth a free-trade association of independent states hammered home the error.

So on Brexit, we must NOT proclaim what Churchill would say about a situation he never contemplated.

As for the present Brexit shambles, a Norwegian friend of mine offered an answer. “The best thing to do would be to go back to 1945 and start all over again.”