The Proud Tower – Barbara Tuchman, 1966 ★★

Arranging the Deck Chairs

Did the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand cause World War I? Was it rather another assassination which took place hours before the war began, that of French socialist Jean Jaurès?

Or perhaps one too many feisty tone poems by Richard Strauss?

Maybe if the post-Victorian British weren’t so snooty and class-conscious, or the Americans had just heeded their anti-imperialist Speaker of the House, circumstances would have been different and mankind would have avoided one of its greatest calamities. Somehow.

Reading Barbara Tuchman rail against humankind’s past follies is fun for a while, but the lack of a compelling thesis here really tells.

The Proud Tower is a book that attempts to be about everything and ends up being about nothing, other than the need for the author to follow on her sensational The Guns Of August and get more mileage from her ample research for that project.

Winston Churchill may be regarded today as a bulwark of conservatism, yet in 1904 he defected to the Liberals looking to make a bigger splash, as Tuchman relates. During a 1907 visit to Manchester, he mused: “Fancy living in one of those streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury – never saying anything clever!” Image from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/15/young-titan-churchill-shelden-review.

She explains her approach in a brief Foreword:

In choice of subjects the criterion I used was that they must be truly representative of the period in question and have exerted their major influence on civilization before 1914, not after. This consideration ruled out the automobile and airplane, Freud and Einstein and the movements they represented. I also ruled out eccentrics, however captivating.

That would seem to leave out Anarchists, but they get a chapter anyway. So do the Socialists, who exerted their influence more after World War I. The chapters are long and broad as Tuchman covers the waterfront in terms of land mass. But what does it mean? And why that title?

An opening epigram links it to a poem by Edgar Allen Poe: While from a proud tower in the town/Death looks gigantically down… This suggests something about the forces that combined to cause World War I, setting up The Guns Of August. But this book’s aim is never that clear.

The Haymarket Riot of 1886 was one of several U. S. labor protests that turned violent. William Howard Taft is quoted by Tuchman: “It will be necessary for the military to kill some of the mob before the trouble can be stayed. They have only killed six…as yet. This is hardly enough to make an impression.” Image from https://www.history.com/news/remembering-the-haymarket-riot.

What I did like and enjoy about The Proud Tower is the pleasure of Tuchman’s company. Few writers, let alone historians, bring together eloquence and wit so elegantly as she did when she lights upon some curiosity of ages past:

On philosophy:

Nietzsche stated his credo, not in logical declarative language, but in a kind of prose poetry like the Psalms, meandering and obscure, full of mountain tops and sunrises, the singing of birds and dancing of girls, perorations to Will, Joy and Eternity and a thousand colored metaphors and symbols carrying Zarathustra on his soul’s quest toward the goals of humankind.

On anarchism:

So enchanting was the vision of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him, that six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914.

But in dashing off these and other bon mots, Tuchman might have been too much her own biggest fan. After The Proud Tower, Tuchman became less historian and more commentator, her histories playing like allegories; eventually producing collections of essays like The March Of Folly where her sardonic opinions became more the focus than ever.

“That’s Lenin. Observe his obstinate self-willed skull.” So did radical Rosa Luxemburg comment about one fellow socialist at the global Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, Germany in 1907. Another young socialist with a big future Tuchman notes at the same conference: Benito Mussolini. Image from https://www.bolshevik.info/lenin-his-youth-and-his-formation.htm.

The chapters of The Proud Tower appear as long essays, unconnected. Tuchman’s opinions are not as out in force as they would be, but I felt them coming on more than I did with The Guns Of August, which despite its unmistakable animus against the Germans is fairly straightforward.

In Guns Of August, German overreach leads to World War I. In The Proud Tower, there is something ominous in the air, but this time Tuchman isn’t even trying to pin down what it is, let alone assign blame.

She suggests the turn of the century could have something to do with it:

The year 1900, rather than 1899, the Astronomer Royal had decided, after much weighing of the pros and cons, was the hundredth and last year of the Nineteenth Century. The moment of its passing was at hand; the end of the most hope-filled, change-filled, progressive, busiest and richest century the world had ever known. Three weeks after it closed, on January 24, 1901, Queen Victoria died, redoubling the general sense of an era’s end.

The above is from the opening chapter, one of two spotlighting Great Britain. The others feature Anarchists, the United States, France, the Hague peace conferences, Germany, and finally Socialists.

French socialist leader Jean Jaurès in action. Tuchman writes of him: “He was always the bridge, between men as between ideas. He was a working idealist.” Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/paille-fr/15112743341.

Some characters show up in more than one chapter, but except for the second British chapter, all are stand-alone essays with no common thesis, just a shared note of foreboding.

Tuchman has her heroes and villains, which were employed to good effect in Guns Of August and would define her later histories with diminishing returns. Here her profiles provide some needed focus if also some gushing, like about Jaurès the martyred socialist and Thomas Reed, the sardonic Republican speaker of the House of Representatives.

Tuchman writes about Reed:

He was instant in rejoinder, terse, forcible, lucid. He could state a case unanswerably, illuminate an issue, destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else.

Walking down a street, Tuchman notes, Thomas Reed was described as “a human frigate among shallops.” He was much the same in the halls of Congress, where he was known as “Czar” Reed. Image from https://www.npr.org/2011/05/29/136689237/the-most-important-politician-youve-never-heard-of.

Reed wasn’t Speaker very long, and his contrary views on American global expansion were effectively neutered within his own party, making Tuchman’s lavishing a whole chapter on him seem excessive.

Similarly, the French chapter is devoted to the Dreyfus affair, which broke the country apart between those who saw in a Jewish army officer all that was evil and corrupt in France, and others who saw an innocent man being persecuted for the sake of a deep-state cover-up.

“The Dreyfus Affair was a human crisis, less extended and less prolonged in time but no less violent than the French Revolution,” Tuchman quotes future French Prime Minister Léon Blum musing. Tuchman uses the Dreyfus case to explore the internal turmoil then tearing France apart, and specifically how it fed into revanchist sentiment against Germany, which had taken French territory in 1871.

French novelist Émile Zola is depicted leading the pro-Dreyfus forces in his scathing attack on French national policy. “Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it,” he thundered. Zola was sent to prison and Dreyfus to Devil's Island before the Dreyfus verdict was finally reversed. Image from https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-dreyfus-affair. 

But did the Dreyfus Affair have anything to do with World War I? Tuchman didn’t convince me so, if she indeed was trying to.

The German chapter was the biggest mystery to me. Why Tuchman felt Richard Strauss would be a perfect avatar for Teutonic warmongering is lost on me. In her own telling, Strauss was a peaceful, apolitical Bavarian effectively dominated by his harpy of a wife. But Tuchman keeps shifting in that chapter between Strauss’s latest composition, some of which have heroic themes, and the bellicosity of German politicians:

It was the right and duty of the nobler, stronger, superior race to extend its rule over inferior peoples, which, in the German view, meant over the world. To other nations it meant over colonies. Darwinism became the White Man’s Burden. Imperialism acquired a moral imperative.

This sort of snarky reductivism serves Tuchman well as a writer, but it glides over a lot of cross currents. Or try this: If you are going to play fast and loose to support your thesis, at least have a thesis first.

Richard Strauss with his wife Pauline and son Franz. Tuchman notes Pauline dominated her happy hubby so much she dictated when he would start composing on a given day, and when he would stop. Image from http://ufomeaningmystery.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-music-of-west-richard-strauss.html. 

Russia was a major player in the run-up to the war, but figures here only as the instigator of the Hague Convention of 1899, the first of two peace conferences held over the course of eight years which, Tuchman notes, accomplished little but showcasing the ineptitude of the peacemakers.

“The humanizing of war! You might just as well talk of humanizing Hell!” scoffed British Admiral Sir John Fisher in the midst of one.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, and the hapless Ottomans are barely mentioned, though each contributed their share to the start of World War I; more anyway than the United States.

The chapters work fine as essays. Tuchman is an engaging writer who marshals tons of research to edify and entertain. For example, the rise of the Liberals in Great Britain brings out amusing anecdotes and sharp observations worth reading. “These termagants, these unsexed viragoes, these bipeds!” whines a Nonconformist minister about the Suffragettes.

A suffragette is force-fed during a hunger strike, standard British policy and cause of further social unrest. One activist, Emily Davison, threw herself at a galloping horse at the 1913 Derby, killing herself. Tuchman notes how the brutality against suffragettes “was the most unsettling phenomenon of the Liberal era.” Image from https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/hunger-strikes-and-force-feeding-spark-protests-around-the-country.

Or how Socialism was checked by the rise of living standards among the working classes:

Hegel had laid it down; Marx had hardened it; but history, with a Mona Lisa smile, had gone her own way, eluding the categorial imperative.

You are never too far away from nuggets of gold like that when reading Tuchman. It just takes a bit longer this time and you notice more how tailored the history is to buttress her conclusions.

That is, if she only had some conclusions to offer, other than what fools these mortals be. Which isn’t much of a takeaway after 543 pages, even if you find yourself agreeing with the premise.