WELCOME TO THE SHIPWRECK by Rory Olcayto
23rd January 2024
COALITION OF WATERS: On Wounded Bodies in Capitalistic Time Rupali Patil & Agnieszka Kilian
13th February 2024Putting the recent writing and rewriting of state affairs by politicians in a long and broadly detailed context, Owen Dudley Edwards wonders if ‘The self-destruction of the would-be partisan is becoming a literary form in UK political life’?
On 9 October 1964 President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-73 President from 22 November 1963, elected 1964), was running for election to the Presidency he had inherited as Vice-President when John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-63, elected President 1961) was assassinated. At New Orleans, Louisiana, in a fund-raising dinner on that date at the Jung Hotel, Johnson deliberately discarded his ambition to carry the Presidential election by winning every state. His inspiration as Congressman (1937-49) had been Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945, President 1933-37, 1937-41, 1941-45, 1945), Johnson initially elected to the House of Representatives from April 1937 serving until 1948 and then Senator 1949-61: so Johnson began as federal legislator in the aftermath of Roosevelt’s 1936-37 re-election in every US state other than Maine and Vermont. 1964 had looked like a year when Presidential vote records might be broken — and in the event LBJ would win an unprecedented 42,825,463. He lost the home state of his Republican opponent Barry Goldwater (1909-98, Senator from Arizona 1953-64, then 1969-87), and perhaps he might have lost it anyway, although in the event it went Republican only by 1% or 5000 votes. But it was a fleaweight in the storm which swept Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina out of Johnson’s total and the hurricane which devastated Republican fortunes everywhere else. (Florida was close with Johnson winning at 51%, Virginia next at 53.5% (Nixon had won them both in 1960), while Goldwater took Georgia at 54%, Louisiana at 57%, South Carolina at 59%, Mississippi at 87%; Alabama prevented Johnson electors from being on the ballot at all.)
Johnson had every reason to assume from the start that Goldwater’s candidacy was doomed. It was one of his most lucrative legacies from Kennedy. During the JFK Presidency MAD magazine produced characteristically incisive analyses of political prospects, this time through the medium of parodies of Gilbert and Sullivan (MAD’s delicacy — much stronger than that of conventional media — vetoed its reprint after 22 November 1963). It was shrewd: Kennedy’s mother was described as the best touch-football player in the family, meaning (absolutely correctly) that Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890-1995) was the supreme Machiavelli of the clan. Eisenhower as the ‘modern White House resident’ summed up his own mastery of public and foreign relations:
I looked at every program that appeared upon my TV set —
De Gaulle once called at ‘GUNSMOKE’ time and I’m afraid he’s waiting yet —
I never cared a fig about the way the press was burning me,
I simply went and hid among the bunkers out at Burning Tree.
MAD‘s JFK remembers Nixon in their (real) post-election pre-inaugural meeting mourning his election defeat like the suicide bird singing ‘Tit Willow’:
In a house by the ocean Dick Nixon cried out
‘Damn that TV! damn TV! Damn TV!’
And I said to him ‘Dickie-boy, why do you shout
“Damn that TV! damn TV! damn TV!”
Is it Westerns that sicken you, Dickie?’ I cried
‘Or commercials that make you feel all bad inside?’
‘Oh, no, no, it’s the lousy debates’ he replied,
‘Damn that TV, it killed me, damn TV.’
Intellectual analysis of the Presidential debates of 1960 has blithered about television lighting of the participants determining the outcome, which is nonsense. TV threw Nixon into ugly relief when he was relieving himself ugly, such as complaining that Kennedy should have reproved ex-President Harry Truman (1884-1972, President 1945-53) for bad language in saying the farmers ought to go to hell if they didn’t vote Democratic on which Kennedy won elderly hearts by boyishly disclaiming any ability to reprove President Truman who was ‘old enough to be my father’ (a neat way to distance himself from his repulsive real father, the skeleton in the piggy-bank: actually Truman himself had hit the jackpot initially by saying Kennedy’s trouble ‘isn’t the Pope: it’s Pop’). And MAD summed up by having Kennedy in the White House determine that if the Republican Presidential candidate of 1964 would prove more handsome, more charismatic, or brighter than he — Presidential debates on TV would be vetoed. LBJ as the actual Democratic incumbent in the White House in 1964 had no interest in modern gimmicks such as highly artificial debates. His campaigning was based on the kind of history he knew, not Harvard-provided parodies of Abraham Lincoln (1809-65, President 1861-65) and Senator Stephen Douglas (1831-61) in 1858. He was a schoolteacher by profession, and a folklorist in historical scholarship, happiest with Texas scholars such as the great Walter Prescott Webb (1888-1963) author of the classic The Great Plains. Johnson’s ideal campaign method was to bellow through a loudhailer ‘Come down an’ hear the speakin’!’ which had a traditional wisdom of public relations about it beyond the ken of modern artificialities. He understood in some ways better than Kennedy what the world of the intercontinental ballistic missile meant to his countrymen: his own reaction to the Russian Sputnik was to write that ’these skies might not always belong to Texas’. And Texas was important (LBJ would take it by 63% in 1964). Kennedy would have lost the 1960 election without it — and without LBJ, as he foolishly failed to acknowledge sufficiently or to use Johnson when Vice-President in Kennedy’s weak Congressional relations. (The Senate had the feeling that in Kennedy’s career-moves it had been a stepping-stone more than a Senate.)
The opponent Kennedy had feared was Nelson Rockefeller (1908-79 Elected Governor of New York 1958, 1962, 1966, 1970, Vice-President 1974-77). Nixon for the time being had committed hara-kiri in his defeat as candidate for California Governor in 1962 followed by a press conference enacting a dime-store Othello (‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more! This is my last press conference!’) which the Atlanta Journal critiqued as self-portrayal by a ‘fraud and a bore and a muddle-headed ham’. Rockefeller’s most obvious vulnerability especially in the American West was his unbelievable wealth, its inevitable ostentation, and the folk-memories of his grandfather John D. Rockefeller accumulating it so brutally, summed up ‘But his mouth was a slit, like a shark’s’. Nelson Rockefeller like Kennedy was a natural conservative courting liberalism, and if anything a more ruthless cold warrior and political operator, with even greater instant charm. He had intervened from New York during Nixon’s Chicago Presidential convention of 1960 forcing the candidate to fly from party apotheosis to Rockefeller headquarters in New York for the humiliation of having his defence policy changed for a Rockefeller recipe. And when defeated in the Republican candidates’ battles of 1964, Rockefeller’s Philippics against the witch-hunting Republican Presidential convention delegates appeared to unmask their amiable bonehead Goldwater as the nominee of a lynch-mob.
Larry O’Brien (1917-90), master-mind of the Kennedy victory team which won the Democratic Primaries of Spring 1960 and the many local peculiarities in state delegate selection, then assembled a privately-circulated book embodying the triumphs, disasters and fundamental lessons of the campaign. JFK gave it to Goldwater. Jack Kennedy had always liked Goldwater. Kennedy was bright, too bright not to be too obviously bright, but comfortably brighter than his fellow-Senator Barry. He enjoyed being photographed by Goldwater and signing the photograph ‘To My Friend Barry Goldwater with all good wishes for his career as a Photographer’. Goldwater proudly kept it on his desk throughout his terms in the Senate. While Kennedy was alive Goldwater campaigned against him with such pearls as ‘we have a grandson now and we’re very worried about him. He’s two years of age. He’s too young to vote and too old to be Attorney-General’: the point was Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s Attorney-General, supposedly one of the youngest holders of that office ever. Anyone who had any political dealings with Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-68) would be very unwise to make much of his youth. Of all the leading American politicians of his day, he would be the most frequently identified as ‘ruthless’. He had become Attorney General at the same age — 35 — as the first and sixth in American history. Barry Goldwater’s conservatism did not extend much into history (unlike JFK’s or LBJ’s). Goldwater in the JFK years would even try to imitate Kennedy’s accent, saying we must accept or reject something ‘with vigah’. It seemed a little as though Barry had accepted a Kennedy invitation to join in the family game of touch-football.
And then Kennedy was dead, the great unspoken theme of the Presidential election of 1964.
Johnson had won the Kennedy election of 1960, and Kennedy was going to win the Johnson election of 1964.
Granted, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in 1960 won by the closest margin in US Presidential Election history, and Johnson in 1964 had hopes of one of the greatest (including, as would prove, the record popular vote). Kennedy won the mid-term Congressional elections of 1962 by masterly use of the Cuban missile crisis, thus defeating conservative Republicans up for Congressional re-election who had cried ‘Wolf’ too early and dangerously. Johnson’s 1964 New Orleans speech Johnson would pay graceful tribute to that statesmanship. Kennedy’s assassination had convulsed the country transforming widespread white favour for national racial integration into passionate demands for the far more radical Civil Rights Act which Johnson would sign on 2 July 1964. But privately Johnson himself had long held similar radical conviction, where Kennedy as President had favoured integration legislation chiefly as the popular thing to do especially after police dogs in Birmingham Alabama had been unleashed by the local Police Commissioner against civil rights demonstrators (including small black children) led by Martin Luther King (1829-68) in May 1963. Thereafter President Kennedy approved and advocated shop-window integration; President Johnson would lead something far deeper. Having been the cautious Senate Majority Leader seeking as much consensus as he could get for mild civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960, he knew far better than Kennedy the strengths and weaknesses of white segregationist political leadership. He saw that while civil rights had been slowed down and thwarted by power brokers within the Democratic party, his Civil Rights Act was sending a political revolution on its way. Shortly after signing the Act he reflected philosophically to one of his staff ‘I think we delivered the South to the Republican Party in your lifetime and mine’. Goldwater had been nominated for President by the Republicans on 13-16 July 1964. The segregationist Roy V. Harris (1895-1985) of Georgia sourly recalled ‘we took four states for Goldwater in 1964 and, hell, we didn’t even like him. He voted against the Civil Rights Act, and we just showed our appreciation.’ Rabid racist as he was, Harris saw it as gesture politics so much as to forget that Goldwater had actually carried five states in the Deep South.
Johnson in New Orleans almost a month before the election scheduled for 3 November 1964 was more memorable. It was to be his greatest major speech in a Presidential campaign of hard work on the ground rather than high media spots although he had spoken that day in Louisville (he’d take Kentucky on Election Day at 64%), and Nashville (he’d take Tennessee at 55.5%). He had given the greatest speech of his life to Congress and the nation on 27 November 1963 beginning ‘All I have I would have given not be to be standing here today’ and became as best he could the healer of a horror-stricken people. Politically he now looked far beyond Election Day to a Voting Rights Act (ultimately passed on 6 August 1965) which would enforce integration at the ballot box.
He began with graceful compliments to prominent local politicians: to Governor John Julian McKeithen (1918-99, elected March 1964 serving till 1972, official segregationist but would collaborate with Johnson administration in 1965 protecting integrationists with state troops where necessary and appointing black judges in contrast to all other Deep South Governors); to Senator Allen J. Ellender (1890-1972 serving from 1937, intransigently segregationist all the way); to Senator Russell Long (1918-2003 Senator 1948-87 sole Deep South Senator publicly to endorse LBJ’s Presidential candidacy (on TV shortly before Election Day), Senate Whip 1965-69)); to his cousin Congressman Gillis Long (1923-85 Congressman 1963-65, 1973-85) already defeated in the Democratic Primary on 27 July 1964 by another cousin Speedy Long ((1928-2006 served 1965-72) — Speedy was his real name bestowed at his premature birth) who alleged that Gillis Long had aided the passage of the Civil Rights Act in House committee manipulation although voting against it, Speedy then demanding ‘Vote Against the Man Who Voted Against the South’); to Congressman James H. Morrison (1908-2000 served 1943-67, voted against Civil Rights Act 1964, voted for Voting Rights Act 1965, and hence defeated 1966 election); to Congressman Thomas Hale Boggs (1914-72 served 1943-5, 1947-72, voted against Civil Rights Act 1964, voted for Voting Rights Act 1965, House Majority Whip 1962-71); to Congressman Theo Thompson (1916-65, serving 1953-65, voted against Civil Rights act 1964, killed in car accident 1 July 1965 8 days before House vote on Voting Rights).
It was a victory speech, saluting those who would publicly support him, those who might secretly support him, those opponents weakened by his compliments, those politically or otherwise about to die, and those who might resurrect in the future.
It defined a new egalitarian future across racial and economic lines, and with characteristic panache invoked Deep Southern history to his purpose. It demanded a revolution, declared Deep Southern politics self-destroyed by its own racism, and called its witnesses from the dead in the abominable language in which its putrefaction had flourished.
II.
Election speeches by US politicians, delivered in a state adjoining their own, play politely with common nostalgia. There are dangers. New Hampshire dislikes patronising from Massachusetts where so many of its emigrants sought their fortunes. Oregon resents ‘Californication’.
So Lyndon Johnson (knowing how much the self-importance of Texas grinds the teeth of Louisiana and Mississippi) recalled his own starry-eyed political apprenticeship in Washington DC ‘in the Dark days of the Depression as a young country kid from the poor hills of Texas’, a rookie staffer (1932-35) to Texas Congressman Richard M. Kleberg (1887-1955 serving 1931-45), alerted whenever Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long (1893-1935, Governor 1928-32, Senator from 1930) would address the US Senate, how Long thought that every man had a right to a job (‘and this was long before the Full Employment Act’), that every boy and girl should have a chance for all the education they could take (‘and this was before the GI Bill of Rights’), that old folks ought to have social security and went on a nation-wide radio hook-up talking for old age pensions (’and out of that probably came our social security system’). ‘He believed in medical care for them so that they could live in decency and dignity in their declining years without their children having to come and move them into their house with them. He was against poverty and hated it with all his soul and spoke until his voice was hoarse.’
‘I saw a man’, LBJ recalled simply, ‘who was frequently praised, and a man who was frequently harassed and criticized, and I became an admirer of his because I thought he had a heart for the people.’
For that moment LBJ touched political mysticism; and the Louisiana Kingfish was reborn without his corruptions, worshipped again by the once innocent boy who momentarily testified as his disciple. Otherwise Huey Long lived still in Louisiana folklore as the brutally authoritarian philanthropist, destroyed by his stranglehold on power immortalised by the novel All the King’s Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren (1905-89) and its eponymous movie (1949). (‘He did more good, and more bad, than any man we ever had’ was one Louisiana epitaph.) What Johnson had not said but assumed rightly so many of his hearers knew, was that Huey Long was the only Southern dictatorial demagogue of his time lacking in racial prejudice: the rest were voices to inspire lynch-mobs and obstruct their prosecution. Out-of-town journalists reporting the New Orleans speech remarked it made no mention of Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights programs: his 1500 hearers in the hotel Grand Ballroom knew that it was all about integration:
Well, like Jack Kennedy, [Huey] believed in those same things [Medicare being a neat link for two somewhat improbable allies]. But their voices are still tonight, but they have left some to carry on. And as long as the good Lord permits me, I am going to carry on.
Now the people who would use us and destroy us first divide us. There is not any combination in the country that can take on Russell Long, Allen Ellender, Lyndon Johnson, and a few others if we are together. But if they divide us they can make some hay. And all these years they have kept their feet on our necks by appealing to our animosities and dividing us.‘
This picked the six-guns from the holsters of the segregationists and their Goldwater Republican allies, who had noisily complained that Civil Rights legislation divided the USA. In reality the President had no hope of the very Right-wing white supremacist Ellender, but disarmed where he could not convert by touching Ellender’s political origins in Huey Long’s ranks. Russell Long, 18 years of age when his father was assassinated, had made his profitable peace with big business but his genius shared Huey’s politics of paradox and in joining a filibuster against the 1960 Civil Rights bill he had delivered a delicious denunciation of racial segregation in the northern United States. LBJ in New Orleans fulsomely thanked Ellender for standing lunch to Lady Bird Johnson but had saluted Russell Long as ‘my longterm and my valued friend and colleague, one of the most promising young men in the nation’ (who like Johnson had entered the Senate 16 years earlier): it heralded Russell Long’s subsequent endorsement of the Johnson election ticket as inheriting his father’s kingdom, and his future as LBJ’s necessary ally Senate Majority Whip. Goldwater could compete with Johnson in few political arts, and certainly not in dividing his opponents.
(If there is one recent Scottish politician resembling President Lyndon Johnson in that speech, it is Alex Salmond (born 1954, First Minister of Scotland 2007-14) comparable in folk wisdom, diplomacy, wit and conviction.)
And then the President reached the heart of his evangel. He talked of an old Southern Senator, born in an adjoining unidentified state easily recognisable as Mississippi, a political migrant to Texas, and when retiring in early 1913 interviewed by a Texas freshman Congressman Sam Rayburn (1882-1961 elected 1913, House Speaker from 1940 overall for 17 years, Lyndon Johnson’s Mentor). Again , veterans and historians could easily identify the veteran: Joseph Weldon Bailey (1863-1929, Texas Congressman 1897-1900, Senator 1900-13). What Johnson quoted was half a century old, but its origin was virtually ceremonial, a memorialist transmitting political identity to Rayburn a statesman aborning, to guide a remote future, and doing it by reflection on the testator’s own birthplace. Johnson the first victorious Presidential election candidate from a former Confederate state knew how far slavery and its sequels had dragged the South down mentally and morally for the last century. And of all Southerners LBJ knew the wisdom of the South’s most intellectual statesman Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, President 1801-09) in prophesying the probable impact of slavery controversy on the expanding USA as he wrote to John Holmes on 22 April 1820:
… this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.
Rayburn probably transcribed Bailey’s farewell during or after its delivery, to be quoted by Johnson at the climax of his speech in New Orleans:
I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel like I have one in me. The poor old state, they haven’t heard a Democratic speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is ‘nigger, nigger, nigger’.
It lashed our faces like a slave-driver’s whip whether we were listening to its broadcast or reading it in next day’s papers.
III.
Lynchings in Mississippi were the highest in the USA from 1877 to 1950. In the 1912 election James K. Vardaman (1861-1930, Governor 1904-08, Senator 1913-19) had triumphed in a campaign where he demanded the repeal of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the American Constitution of 1868-70, because of the rights they affirmed for blacks. (They were devised, evangelised, and affirmed through the Republicans in post-war Reconstruction; today’s Republicans denounce their use as ‘archaic’.) Vardaman had previously affirmed that if necessary every black person in the state would be lynched. Senator Bailey was testifying to Rayburn that Mississippi politics had suicided, and Lyndon Johnson reaffirmed it for Deep Southern opposition to integration in 1964-65.
The word ‘nigger’ has been outlawed chiefly by public relations operatives with sanctimonious expressions predictable in a prostitute profession. In fact Johnson’s testimony reminds us that it implied far, far worse than is nowadays realised: it was essential to the language of genocide as well as destroying democratic discourse.
Therefore to outlaw its usage in scholarly citation means to deny the horror to which innumerable blacks in the Deep South had been subjected or threatened a hundred years ago. This censorship masquerades as compassionate, and is in fact a counsel of cowardice. The genteel tradition becomes the alibi of the genocide tradition.
Initially, the word was freely used in British society, when a frontier of the frontier: imperial profiteers returned to London luxuriating in their frontier manners while their frontier profits won their places in high society. Victorian and post-Victorian children’s literature freely called black inhabitants of colonies ‘niggers’ even if they became heroes without whom white boys would have perished. Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) ended ‘The Fiend of the Cooperage’ (Queen 1897) with two Englishmen, terrified by what had seemed a homicidal ghost, watching it depart proving itself a gigantic python, and then taking precautions lest ‘some of those niggers might think that we had been frightened’, using the word to buttress white cowardice and hypocrisy to maintain power. In both UK and US cultures the word implied a status and creation inferior to whites, whether enslaved, colonised or even citizen or subject.
That was the word, the man, the place and the time. Johnson was never known to have used the word with approval. He was in fact the first (and the last?) President of the USA to have ‘sat in’ a segregated restaurant with a black companion — one of his female secretaries: he did it in Austin, Texas, during his Vice-Presidency, at the request of his friends the historians in the University of Texas whose inter-racial hospitality to visiting fellow-historians was befouled by rejection from the nearest eating-place. (The venue integrated for good next day.) Without being foul, Johnson’s own language was free in the style of Southern populism. When asked — when President — why he didn’t fire J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924), LBJ said with infallible truth ‘better to have him inside the tent pissin’ out than outside the tent pissin’ in’, an American deStalinization of the hitherto sacrosanct king witch-hunter.
Historians at the time worried as to whether the government and media reports would emasculate the Presidential language. They had good reason. Official texts of the New Orleans speech rendered the triple vile regurgitation as ‘Negro, Negro, Negro’. This reduced Johnson’s revolutionary climax to gibberish. No white segregationist leader would have used the word ‘Negro’ as a racist rallying-cry: the nearest the racists came to civilized utterance in the 1960s was occasionally to substitute ‘nigra’ for their customary epithet. But texts issued since Johnson’s death by the US National Archives and by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Johnson City, Texas, have forged ‘Negro’ in place of the original word. It is 1984-style historical revisionism crucifying Presidential integrationism on the altar of gentility, and apparently doing so as automatic official policy regardless of meaning and intent of the original speaker. (But how far can their successors clean up Trump?)
Some person or persons attempted with varying success to ban from libraries and classrooms one of the greatest books by an American author, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain (aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910)): most recently an edition has been perpetrated which removes the frequently-used ‘nigger’ and substitutes ‘slave’ thus distorting history and literature at one ignorant blow. Apparently the editor sold vast numbers presumably on the customary advertisers’ gimmick that the book is now ‘new, improved’, and in fact is profiteering from slavery. The concept is not original: Henrietta Bowdler (1754-1830) and Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) emasculated the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) as The Family Shakespeare (1807, 1818) on similar philanthropic principles.
The great if ruthlessly elitist English critic Frank Raymond Leavis (1895-1978) wrote that ‘Huckleberry Finn has as a central theme the complexity of ethical valuation in a society with a complex tradition — a description that applies (for instance) to any Christian society’. It is the supreme fictional achievement in preservation and development of American folk tradition from its linguistic roots. Ethically it is one of the greatest books ever written, in itself a Mississippi river transforming racial prejudice into mutual admiration and love, evolving Huck from a small outlaw whose contemptible father is forever complacent in his utterly selfish brutal life by the superiority it claims over blacks, enslaved or free, on whom he perpetually expectorates ‘Nigger’. Symbolically, Pap Finn is the logical basis of white civilization self-defined by Negrophobia, and out to murder its own posterity as Pap tries to kill Huck. At the book’s heart, Huck even condemns himself to Hell when convinced God affirms the eternal legality of slavery against Whom Huck must ensure Nigger Jim’s freedom.
IV.
The self-destruction of the would-be partisan is becoming a literary form in UK political life. Two cases are at hand: Theresa May’s The Abuse of Power and Chris Bryant’s Code of Conduct. Let us add Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge, which may merit a longer lease of life than either, but all carry noteworthy identities beyond their books.
(On the other hand, writing may be less dangerous to the Partisan politician than mere speech. On Wednesday 17 January 2024 the Rt Hon Thomas Pursglove (born 1988) PC, MP, Minister of State in the Home Office for Legal Migration and Delivery, told BBC viewers ‘Rape is an absolute priority of the Government’.)
Theresa May (b. 1956, Prime Minister 2016-19) is the one tragic hero of modern Downing Street (apart from Gordon Brown allowing himself to be swindled out of the Labour party leadership and subsequent premiership when assured that English Labour party members would despise his Scottishness). May campaigned against Brexit up to its Referendum and fought her last battle on 21 June 2016 speaking in Northern Ireland which voted as she demanded by almost 56% two days later. She was thus virtually unique among British politicians in acknowledging that the people of Northern Ireland were as concerned in the outcome as those in Great Britain. The victorious Brexiteers talked endlessly about Britain, boycotting mention of Northern Ireland, implicitly accepting Sinn Fein/IRA’s denial of its existence in the UK. Brexiteers declared Brexit would give back control of UK borders, utterly oblivious to its revival of the most lethal border in Europe. Theresa May warned the Northern Ireland voters of their peril, and they agreed with her. Then, after the UK narrowly voted for Brexit, she accepted its premiership promising to implement what she had so conspicuously opposed. It was as though Winston Churchill (1864-1965), having become Prime Minister in May 1939, thereupon began peace negotiations with Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).
Her full book-title The Abuse of Power — Confronting Injustice in Public Life becomes its own executioner. Her premiership became the supreme abuse of power by choosing to exist. Rory Stewart in Politics on the Edge recalls his first meeting (as a UK official in Afghanistan in 2006) with the Leader of the Opposition David Cameron (born 1966, elected Tory leader December 2005, Prime Minister 2010-16) who answered private official criticism of policy in war-wracked Afghanistan by saying there must be unqualified acquiescence with UK policy while UK troops were ‘on the ground’ and aides explained this dogma because as an MP Mr Cameron had voted for the war in Iraq. In 2010 Mr Stewart sought and won a Parliamentary seat in hopes of showing Mid-Asian realities to Tory rulers who proved uninterested in hearing them. Theresa May was then Tory Home Secretary (2010-16). But having privately and publicly worked, spoken and campaigned against Brexit, she became its Prime Minister. Cameron cabinet ministers did not follow Cameron consistency.
Theresa May had told the truth in Northern Ireland and thereafter her perceptions were left to haunt her new partisanship. As Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) sang in The Promise of May (1882):
But a red fire woke in the heart of town,
And a fox from the glen ran away with the hen,
And a cat to the cream, and a rat to the cheese,
And the stock-dove coo’d, till a kite dropt down,
And a salt wind burnt the blossoming trees;
O grief for the promise of May, of May,
O grief for the promise of May.
Hamlet (IV.iv.46) reflected that ‘Examples, gross as earth, exhort me’. The grossest example under Theresa May’s eyes was the Prime Minister she had served with little audible question until he took to his heels rather than lead a post-Referendum Government. (What a contrast from Sir Keir Starmer (born 1962) who measures the shortening of his distance from the policies of the Tory Government day after day, until he proves to all the world that he can out-measure it on the number of angels who should dance on the point of a pin, such angels to include himself and the late Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013, Prime Minister 1979-90).) Rishi Sunak (b. 1980, Prime Minister since 2022) unlike Burke (1792-1829) and Hare (? – ?) has proved himself a grave-robber, parking the political corpse of David Cameron in the House of Lords thus reminding Theresa May that she could have found a similar post-Brexit career for herself with sufficient patience. Today my lord Cameron tells Laura Kuenssberg that Rishi Sunak has ‘a huge brain’: tomorrow he may even complete his own resurrection by succeeding him, thus claiming a huger.
We might prefer to imagine Theresa May as a Hamlet rushing to action, killing the king, and ruling thereafter as though this proved sufficient qualification for succession. But she is female to a degree that Thatcher never was (Thatcher may have found her true Thespian exemplar as Tamora Queen of the Goths in Titus Andronicus). Lady Macbeth might seem all too appropriate, save that Nicola Sturgeon (b. 1970, First Minister of Scotland 2014-23) pre-empted the role in public and in private. Cordelia would seem the answer, ready to negative the self-deceptions of any available Lear, and unable to realise that the ensuing tragedy would not have happened without her decision.
But have not previous Prime Ministers reversed their previous Ciceronian evangels? Not on the basis of a plebiscite at General Election or otherwise. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81, Prime Minister 1867-68, 1874-80) and William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98, Prime Minister 1868-74, 1880-85, 1886, 1892-94) having started as very Right-wing Tories competed with one another in 1867 as to which would bring the first really radical measure of Parliamentary Reform, and in 1868-69 as to which should disestablish and disendow the established Church of Ireland to which both were hitherto pledged; but their competition removed any question of principle dividing their appeals to the electorate on the issues. Anthony Trollope (1815-82) in one of the finest of all political novels, Phineas Redux (1973) ,makes his version of Disraeli say in a Parliamentary speech declaring of the legislative intention of his version of Gladstone :
Coming from the mouth of the right honourable gentlemen, the proposition would probably be made in this form: — ‘That this House does think that I ought to be Prime Minister now, and as long as I may possess a seat in this House’.
Its applicability goes far beyond Disraeli and Gladstone, and it is an abuse of power that Commons combatants do not admit its perpetual truth.
The Abuse of Power won’t admit Theresa May’s great tragedy, apart from an eerie grace-note at the outset. It remarks (pp. 9-10):
There were times when I have stopped myself from making a funny aside or what I thought was a humorous quip because it could have been taken out of context. And so, while I consider it has stood me in good stead, in today’s world of social media, rolling TV news and personality politics, it has meant that I have been seen as being too careful with my words, not sufficiently willing to open up, robotic and uninteresting.
In fact, she emitted some wit. Her first Tory Conference as Prime Minister began with her sardonic wonder as to what uncertainties might lie ahead in which she included ‘will Boris stay on message for three days?’ prophesying her own ultimate downfall as she knew it might. Yet the same occasion involved a 1984-style obliteration of her own anti-Brexit past. She evidently pondered the better comedians among her journalist critics. Originally the Guardian’s best and brightest, John Crace (born 1956), declared her a latter-day Thatcher (unaware that Sir Keir would later seek to outstrip her): it was obvious journalist banality with which to greet a second Tory woman premier. But by 8 November 2016 he had X-rayed her: ‘the Prime Minister is increasingly acting like someone who is more robot than human’, and gave her a new baptism:
Inside the Maybot, the last shards of the real Theresa were fighting to get out. She was not a number. Especially not 350 million. She was a person in her own right. She did still have a mind of her own. Then the malware took over again.
‘Whirr. The referendum took. Clunk. Place. I’m focussing …’. She wasn’t. She really wasn’t.
His development of the Maybot was perhaps the most memorable feature of the Theresa May administration, but he wasn’t original here either. John Major (born 1943, Prime Minister 1890-97) had been habitually caricatured as a piece of machinery from his first days in 10 Downing Street. And then viewers and hearers began to find his voice pleasant, courteous, unabrasive — above all peaceful in place of the hectoring snobberies of his predecessor. It may very well have won him the election of 1992. Theresa, vulnerable above all to her own silenced conscience, could not relax. Like Jonah she could never know peace after denying God, until her shipmates threw her into the sea, and by opposing ended her.
Rory Stewart (born 1973) has already played his role in one of the finest schoolboy performances ever seen at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, some 32 years ago while still at Eton (shrewdly disguising itself as ‘Double Edge’) where he played an incomparable Philoctetes in the version of Sophocles’s eponymous play by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) renamed The Cure at Troy (1990), and it should have brought Sophocles back from Hades (or Heaven) saying that was what he meant. It certainly was what Heaney meant, bravely calling on his fellow-Catholics of Northern Ireland to mitigate their perennial suspicion and repudiation of the bullying and treachery of Ulster Protestant Unionists, substituting ecumenism to end the endless conflict. Philoctetes holds the bow he inherited from his master Heracles and once would have taken it to conquer Troy with the Greeks, but his foul wound stank so much that the Greeks marooned him on Lemnos, and now he is most reluctantly induced to return to their ranks. Grown to man’s estate Rory Stewart once more played Philoctetes attempting the cure at Troy when he accepted nomination as Tory MP becoming the most civilised member of the Conservative governments of 2010-19, and was then once more betrayed, repudiated and dishonoured by contemptible leaders. His book tells his story of his engagement with Parliament reaching depths of objectivity and understanding beyond what Theresa May and Chris Bryant (born 1962, MP since 2001) could know. Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) in The Wound and the Bow (1941)used Philoctetes for the creative writer whose perceptions make him immortal and hateful to the audience he faces in mutual dependence. Rory Stewart’s sometimes bitter self-mockery confronting his own successive delusions leaves the false modesty of his two fellow-authors tinkling too abrasively. There is a tragedy in his story as told in this memoir, but his very perceptions — his readiness to begin his story ‘my final sense is one of shame’ — makes him too good a teacher to perish in his own regrets. His lessons will remain for us to consult again and again, when Theresa May has departed into her civilised oblivion.
His book contains its errors and weaknesses (it has delighted Ian Murray (born 1976), Labour MP for Edinburgh South since 2010, by reporting all Labour MPs in Scotland defeated in the General Election of 2015, an obliteration actually achieved by one sole major political party — the Scottish Tories in 1997). Politics on the Edge — a Memoir from Within reaches an honesty and dignity in teaching from suffering whose kinship we can recognise to St Augustine’s Confessions, St Patrick’s Confession, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s To Katanga and Back, Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father, the more fittingly admitted among them as we think on Patrick’s enslavement, Bunyan and Wilde writing in prison, and Rory Stewart’s service as minister for Prisons recorded with such wisdom and such compassion here.
Sir Chris Bryant MP — formerly the Reverend Christopher Bryant — also lives in ancient Greek drama, once more by Sophocles, King Oedipus, where he plays the blind oracle Teiresias trying to save the hero — Parliament — from the effects of its own endless meaningless utterances, intoxication by union with its ancestors, lightly cited here and carefully avoiding purges and dismissals once ordered by Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658). Parliament from 1641 to 1650 may in fact be the closest precedent to the recent years of Tory Government with its coups, rumps, executions, dismissals, insurrections, loyalty tests, theological pretensions, and submissions to Lords Protector, parallels amongst all parties including Scottish and Welsh nationalists. He mourns the betrayal of manners and morals by recent Parliaments although finding it increasingly difficult to crack the code of conduct by convincingly grading the relative depravity of each crime. Sometimes the public can best be served by MPs being brave enough to break a Commons procedural regulation. The events have varying interest, but in the more rational cases the reader should be told more directly why protests were made.
Sir Chris as a good Labour party man (occasionally a rebel sometimes retrospectively self-critical) balances subservience to party whips and constituency preferences. He is mildly snooty about the deference of Edmund Burke (1729-97) to constituency obligations while asserting the primacy of conscience, and implies that Burke’s failure to visit his constituency — Bristol — often enough merited his rejection in 1780 (ignoring eighteenth-century transport problems, and his issues on his conscience as Catholic emancipation, the American Revolution, &c).
But Theresa May’s adoption of Brexit after the Referendum was no mere constituency matter. What was at stake was her fitness to rule a government implementing Brexit having so ably denounced it, and having done so in the terrain and on the issue of Northern Ireland itself otherwise ignored broadcast by her English colleagues, thus thrusting it under deeper contempt than did her colleagues who merely told the electorate it didn’t exist. And then in Northern Ireland politics she declared alliance with its Brexiteer Paisleyites. The Ulster folk who had agreed and voted with her against Brexit included many Protestants as well as Catholics, and most Brexiteer Paisleyite Protestants would have denied her Protestantism while accepting her patronage. She thereby destroyed self-respect for her premiership.
(Lyndon Johnson resembled none of the three, for his tragedy was the Vietnam war in which he had no real interest, being always indifferent to foreign affairs, and obstinately assuming the competence of the Harvard ‘B’ team and the former Ford executive Robert Strange McNamara (1916-2009)) whom he had inherited from Kennedy.)
V.
Parliament and its endless cascades of words and rituals, gorging it in perpetual solipsism and surfeit, inspire critiques of varying value of which recent Scottish nationalism (particularly in Nairn-Ascherson reflections) is one of the most positive.
But the triple thinkers under review here have their own curious linkage: all are significantly religious.
Theresa May is the daughter of a very High Anglican priest who argued with her about cricket and whose wife timed his sermons if over ten minutes. Her tragic error in seeking the premiership renewed old enmities and won her many new, but few can grudge her the charm of her memories of parents in contrast to most politicians’ shmaltz on their families and sporting loyalties. The nearest she comes to acknowledging her own moral suicide is on the abuse of power by politicians psychologically and sexually exploiting staff and colleagues:
Indeed it is politically dangerous for parties — which will, by definition be a broad church of views underpinned by a set of values — to set too much store by whether an individual candidate has a particular viewpoint on a specific issue. In the Conservative Party, the latter tendency has been seen most recently in relation to Brexit. The danger is that in looking for a specific stance on one issue, the wider questions about character and integrity get overlooked. (Pp. 39-40.)
In other words she discovered that having decided that her premiership required her to rat on Brexit, she was never trusted by the original Brexiteers who preferred their own rogue elephant Boris Johnson (born 1964), sacrificing anyone and anything to the sound of his own trumpet. She resorts to self-destructive cliché such as ‘To be honest’ (p. 198) or ‘If I’m honest’ (p.199) which whether she knows it or not implies that she isn’t honest the rest of the time. Yet she will sometimes see the dishonesty of some of her Tory predecessors and successors, noting (p. 194) how the example of her efforts to keep police ‘stop and search’ within the law should have reduced the disproportionality, bringing us closer to a position where people are not being stopped and searched solely because of the colour of their skin. But the approach was misunderstood by too many in the police force and by too many politicians interested in burnishing their credentials for supporting the police. Bless her for saying it, even if it self-serves that the world would have been worse off if she had not been Home Secretary (2010-16) or Prime Minister (1916-19).
Her parents’ (and perhaps her own) religion asserts her useful authority on clerical paedophilia, quoting from an Independent enquiry (p. 167):
‘The [Roman Catholic] neglect of the physical, emotional and spiritual well-being of children and young people in favour of protecting its reputation was in conflict with its mission of love and care for the innocent and the vulnerable.’
(Note the use of the same language regarding its mission as for the Anglican Church.)
That is a text for either faith to preach and ponder, realising that ecumenism should face common guilt in common sins. She also saw in it the readiness of political parties to sacrifice principle to party image, thus imitating clerical leadership in public. And as with parties and churches, so with institutions such as the police (and the armed forces and civil service).
This desire to shield the institution at all costs corrupts the thinking inside the institution, its purpose and hence its actions [P. 202].
Sir Chris Bryant was a priest in the Church of England (though of Welsh and Scottish parents) before concluding that his homosexual identity was impossible of honest fulfilment while in holy orders. And it is a pleasure to witness that he can speak on moral questions today where fifty years ago his equivalent could be victimised by every blackmailer in church and media from Rupert Murdoch down. His book impressively shows that his days in the pulpit have trained him well.
Rory Stewart (MP 2010-19) is less theological than the others, but is occasionally roused in response to the more revolting professions of Christianity by the European Research Group whose researches should have begun with what Jesus said about Pharisees. He told Harry Smart in interview that ‘If I’m thinking about a politician’s relation to society, I will naturally frame it in terms of a priest’s relationship to their parish ‘ (‘priest’ implying Catholicism, ‘their’ a possible female clergy). He might be a Christian had he fewer uncertainties about the Resurrection as distinct from his erstwhile colleagues who proclaim their own Christianity without a thought of any resurrection except (politically speaking) their own. He certainly has been a dignified martyr to principles few of his colleagues and critics understood. Yet his constituency (however peculiarly contemptible his ejection from it in the vengeance of Boris Johnson) reflected intra-party as well as inter-party procedure inherited by Christendom from ancient pagan ritual, as commemorated by Macaulay (1800-59) in ‘The battle of Lake Regillus’:
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
Mr Stewart’s supplanter as MP has now himself been rejected for the next Election (2024?). Yet Mr Stewart, although Scottish by parentage and Hong Kong by birth, came to love his Penrith constituency in 2010-19 and in a captivating TV programme even claimed a kind of national identity for it and its north English hinterland, ranging back two thousand years to Roman quaestores — a relatively original answer to nationalism in his ancestral Scotland.
All three might recall another tragic hero — Ophelia — in responding to her brother’s preaching (Hamlet I.iii.44-50):
I shall th’ effect of this good lesson keep,
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven;
Whilst, like a puf’t and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.
That these three critics of Parliament should seem contextualised in Christianity however limited in application reminds us that secularism remains superficial and its greatest strength comes from its Christian legacies, or from their fraternal systems Judaism and Islam. The critics’ greatest danger lies in demanding that Parliament reform itself by the use of its own standards. Charm they ever so wisely, Mother Theresa, ex-Reverend Chris, and the latest (and perhaps greatest?) Stewart, must truckle to Parliament’s sense of its own superiority. Any listener to the zoological sounds of the faithful Commons pretending to listen to one another must wonder, what possible respect can anyone have for the honourable and right honourable brutes when expressing themselves collectively? The Scottish Parliament was supposed to be better but grows worse, living as it does in permanent consciousness of Westminster which itself wants to keep Scotland as far from its minds as it can. Rory Stewart told Henry Smart:
It’s difficult for me to remain optimistic about our political system while at the same time acknowledging how awful how much of what I saw was.
MPs like the late Lord James Douglas-Hamilton (1942-2023) and Rory Stewart himself were genuine sensations in the House of Commons where their characteristic courtesy was otherwise almost unknown. The Commons perpetually belched delight in its own Englishness, deaf and blind to admission that its democratisation had been thrust on it by intrusive outsiders — Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1901), Edward Carson (1854-1935), Keir Hardie (1856-1915), David Lloyd George (1863-1945, Prime Minister 1916-22). Winston Churchill was widely detested in the House as a half-American bounder. Has Boris Johnson’s bad press been exacerbated by his American birth, not to speak of his astounding discovery that he is the first Roman Catholic Prime Minister? Do our authors ask themselves sufficiently if he a symptom or an exception in parliamentary decline?
Our current crop of Burkes and Bagehots could show better sense of history in pronouncing on an institution officially so conscious of it, although few of its present overlords show much genuine authority in it. Theresa May rejects Hamlet and hence explains her resultant problems in a venomous vendetta against Speaker John Bercow (born 1963) whose office she seems to imagine was held hitherto in a crude compliance with Government but himself ‘was deliberately using his power in a way that favoured those who wanted to try to overturn the democratic will of the people’ (p. 47). (The democratic will of the people receives brazen obeisance from the Commons with little awareness of its threadbare clothing, with little or no proportional representation. ) What of the Speaker who allowed a wrecking amendment so that the Referendum on Scottish devolution of 1979 if passed (which it was) could not be implemented without reaching a 40% vote? What of the Speaker Sir Henry Brand (1841-1906) who rejected the will of the Northamptonshire voters in 1880 when they elected the atheist Charles Bradlaugh (1833-91) or Brand’s successor Arthur Wellesley Peel (1829-1912) after the next election who rejected Bradlaugh’s opponents? She assumes that the Humble Address to the monarch which replies to the King’s Speech (a document written by the Government) was in her premiership misused by Speaker and Opposition which was not just an affront to parliamentary procedure, it also involved Her Majesty in ongoing political debates in a way which ran roughshod over the accepted lines between the role of the elected House and the constitutional monarch. In my view this was completely unacceptable [p. 46].
‘Unacceptable’ is another modern cliché masquerading as authority: its obvious but oft-ignored question ‘unacceptable to whom?’ should remind us how easily pompous prejudice is swallowed as Holy Writ, and how easily it could be turned against its original maker. The partisan is trapped in his debating devices. In this case, the claim of even recent monarchical neutrality is historically invalid. Victoria (1819-1901, reigned from 1837) chose her favourite, Archibald Primrose fifth Earl of Rosebery (1847-1929, Prime Minister 1894-95), as premier against the wishes of his Liberal party and outgoing party leader Gladstone. George V (1865-1936, King from 1910) insisted on a second General Election in 1910 although it merely reaffirmed the earlier result that year. George VI (1895-1952, King from 1936) prevented Winston Churchill from leading UK troops in the D-day invasion by the unanswerable statement that if His Majesty’s first minister went, His Majesty would go too. Elizabeth II (1926-2022) told Harold Macmillan (1894-1986, Prime Minister 1957-1963) and not R. A. Butler (1902-82) to form a Government in 1957 after the Suez debacle.
Theresa May on the same theme cites ‘my firm belief that it would have been unthinkable to bring the monarch into these matters’ (47). So her firm belief negated thought where monarchy was involved. It plays directly into the hands of republicans.
But Queen Elizabeth bowing her head in Dublin over the graves of the republican leaders executed for treason against her grandfather in the Great War showed that she could think, even if the process is forbidden to Prime Ministers.
Sir Chris is on surer ground in keeping history to chatty short jumps (p. 146):
Many prime ministers flourished despite complex (not to say curious, or at least not entirely monogamous) private lives including Palmerston, Melbourne, Rosebery, Gladstone and Lloyd George.
Henry John Temple 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865, Prime Minister 1855-8, 1859-65)) still in purple-died whiskers was still in power in all senses at the age of 80, rape included. William Lamb 2nd Viscount Melbourne (1779-1848, Prime Minister 1834, 1835-41)) was charged correctly though not convicted of co-respondence in adultery when premier. Rosebery is unlikely to have committed heterosexual adultery but when Prime Minister was in danger of public accusation of homosexual entanglement. David Lloyd George as Prime Minister had as his secretary Frances Stevenson (1888-1972) also his mistress. William Ewart Gladstone apparently remarked that 8 of the 11 Prime Ministers he had known had been adulterers, but he was almost certainly not one of them.
VI.
Sir Chris Bryant, however superficial, brings it home to us that Parliament by procedure creates and demands its own partisan prohibitions to the point of self-destruction. A liar — even of the wholesale achievements by Boris Johnson — may not be called a liar save by accusation of ‘terminological inexactitude’ (in which euphemism Winston Churchill showed his own contempt for Parliament’s fear of truth-telling). Parliament ensures that words destroy its cure. Sir Chris’s Code of Conduct subtitles itself ‘Why We Need to Fix Parliament and How to Do It’, oblivious of its own proof that Parliament is permanently skilled in fixing itself, and will fix its benefactors who try. It makes laws and prevents their observation within its precincts. It uses words to avoid description of its conduct, and avoids their usage in real description. The media are required to to observe such usage and non-usage.
For example, on 27 May 1976 Michael Heseltine (born 1933) shadow minister on the Tory Opposition’s front bench rushed across the chamber, seized the Speaker’s Mace, and brought it crashing down towards the head of the Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan (1912-2005, premier 1976-79), Heseltine’s arm being pulled back by his colleague James Prior (1927-2016) while Callaghan being seated leaned hurriedly away from the descending weapon. The following day at the SNP Party Annual Conference I privately and separately asked three SNP MPs whether they thought Heseltine had intended to murder the Prime Minister, aware that all three were as neutral observers as any MPs in the Chamber could have been. Margaret Bain (1945-2006, later Ewing) said she thought murder had been intended, and so did George Reid (born 1939). Douglas Henderson (1935-2006) said yes, he remembered thinking ‘Now we’ll find out if Jim Callaghan has any brains, or not’. If the blow had landed, Heseltine could not have been arrested unless and until the House voted to hand him over to what the Inquisition used to call ‘the secular arm’, and had he so acted outside the House should have been indicted for attempted murder. But no further action was taken: he did not even apologise until the next day, Margaret Thatcher as Leader of the Opposition took no disciplinary action against him, the media afterwards referred to Heseltine having ‘handled’ the Mace, later accounts spoke of his having raised the Mace above his own head or mockingly seeming to hand it to the Labour Front Bench. Sir Chris ignores it, possibly judging it a Fix too Far.
VII.
The first James Bond novel Casino Royale, by the English-born, Scots-descended Ian Lancaster Fleming (1908-64), was due to be published in April 1953 by London’s Jonathan Cape, but three months earlier Fleming was already deep,in research and writing in New York City (including its great black district Harlem) on its successor Live and Let Die. For Bond to become a financial success his US publication would be vital. He secured this with Macmillan New York (released in 1951 from control by its London parent company). Casino Royale’s name advertised settings in European luxury gambling salons or saloons (and the UK had seldom if ever hitherto produced fiction so conscious of fashion and brand in its stage management). Fleming’s executive retainer from the London Sunday Times granted him luxury locations for investigation, but memories of service in World War 2 Naval Intelligence could be rewarmed while tarted up with Cold War conventions and conversations as well as current controversial chatter.
In May 1941 Commander Ian Fleming had found himself in the USA as deferential attendant to Rear-Admiral Sir John Godfrey (1888-1970) on Naval Intelligence operations in the still neutral USA, meeting local counterspy overlords with (very) diplomatic benediction from President Franklin D. Roosevelt specifically permitting tutelage from the dictator of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover lived all his life in Washington DC, where slavery had been legal until 1862 and which remained rabidly racist in commercial hospitality until the 1950s, while the city — ‘the nation’s capital’ — remained about 30% black, climbing to 35% in 1950, 54% in 1960, 71% in 1970 and its entire population doubled from 331,069 in 1910 to 663,153 in 1940. In 1950 blacks were 35% of 802,178, and in 1960 54% of 763,956.
Hoover grew up a fan of the racist fiction of Thomas Dixon Jr (1864-1946) notably The Clansman (1905), valorizing the Ku Klux Klan, filmed in 1914 by D. W. Griffith (1875-1948) as Birth of a Nation, and in either form prompting several lynchings, their climax being black attempts to rape white women. Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924 President 1913-51 white Southern born and raised, historian by profession) said after a White House screening ‘It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true’. Attempts to pass federal anti-lynching laws in the mid-1930s were supported by Communists, who included some of the few white historians attacking white supremacist history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, anxious to distance unduly sympathetic Communists from his overwhelming victory in 1936-37, encouraged Hoover investigation of Communist penetration of influential mobilisers of public opinion. The President’s wife Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was a vocal and visible crusader for racial integration. Hoover believed her to be a member of Communist front organizations: he himself insisted the Communists controlled the NAACP — National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples — founded 1909, its Legal Defense and Education Fund founded in 1939. The first union of non-white workers, the Brotherhood of Sleeping-Car Porters, had won success in negotiations with their employers. Their founder and leader A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) called for a massive March on Washington against racial segregation and discrimination especially under government-controlled institutions, the march to happen on 1 July 1941. During the Godfrey-Fleming visit Franklin Roosevelt was negotiating with Randolph to stop the March to prevent possible explosion into street violence, meeting with Randolph and the NAACP leader Walter White (1893-1955) on 18 June 1941. Federal anti-lynch Congressional law had been aborted by influential Southern Senators publicly or privately claiming dangers of black intercourse with white women: white Southern historians have remarked that beneath this was the white male fear that white women would prefer inter-racial intercourse. With the Second World War apparently imminent, FDR answered Randolph on 29 June 1941 by issuing Executive Order 8802 outlawing discrimination based on race, colour, creed, and national origin in the Federal Government and defense-related industries, and establishing the Federal Employment Practises Committee to ensure implementation. (Segregation in the armed forces was ended by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948 by President Harry Truman (1884-1972 succeeding Roosevelt on 12 April 1945).)
Live and Let Die (as drafted mostly in the US in early 1953) assumes a conspiracy between the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the USSR organization SMERSH, Voodoo in the Caribbean and throughout the USA, and the NAACP. Conspiracies dominated the election won by General Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969 President 1953-61) and the Republicans in November 1952, triumphantly headed in individual state battles by the spectacular Red-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy (1909-57, Senator from 1949). In 1952 the NAACP (mobilising its Legal Defense and Education Fund) had gathered its forces to outlaw US segregation (specifically demolishing the fraudulent doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ previously claimed in white supremacist legal decisions); and by December 1952 it had presented its case before the Supreme Court for its command, the Court having had already declared against segregation in university postgraduate education in 1950.
The NAACP’s legal team was led through the Federal Courts by the most famous black lawyer in American history — and unequalled in UK history — Thurgood Marshall (1908-73, appointed (the first Black) Supreme Court Justice by President Lyndon Johnson 1967). His name was on American lips of all colours, and he made no secret of his accumulation of evidence by personal experience, such as in the small town of Mississippi where he was told by a local resident, ‘Nigguh, I thought you ought to know the sun ain’t nevah set on a live nigguh in this town’, so Marshall ‘wrapped my constitutional rights in cellophane, tucked them in my hip pocket’ and left town by the next train. He brought the massive case for the plaintiff in Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (drawing on international expertise in law, history, sociology, anthropology, medicine and the moral obligations of the USA as victor in a war which became in its course a crusade against racialist mass murder) to overturn all precedents favouring segregation in US education under US authority.
As the world waited to see whether Thurgood Marshall was about to crown his unmatched career by spearheading the death of legal segregation, Fleming was producing his counterpart the black leader intoning a judicial prologue to death-sentence on ‘Mister Bond’ (a much more respectful form of address than Thurgood Marshall had normally received when appearing as advocate before Southern white judges):
‘In the history of negro emancipation’, Mr Big continued in an easy conversational tone, ‘there have already appeared great athletes, great musicians, great writers, great doctors and scientists. In due course, as in the developing history of other races, there will appear negroes great and famous in any other walk of life.’ He paused. ‘It is unfortunate for you, Mister Bond, and for this girl, that you have encountered the first of the great negro criminals. I use a vulgar word, Mister Bond, because it is the one that you, as a form of policeman, would yourself use. But I would prefer to regard myself as one who has the ability and the mental and nervous equipment to make his own laws and act according to them rather than accept the laws that suit the lowest common denominator of the people. …’
Sherlock Holmes in ‘Silver Blaze’ (Strand December 1892) drew the attention of the local police officer ‘to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time’, and when told that the dog did nothing in the night-time said ‘that was the curious incident’. (The otherwise vigilant stable dog did nothing when the race-horse was abstracted, so the human who removed it was someone the dog knew.) The silent dog here is Mr Big’s failure to include great negro lawyers in his litany, although in his extra-legal activities lawyers must require constant reference. His plagiarized Nietzscheanism demands his declaring himself his own legislator and enforcer. Unconsciously Mr Big is also plagiarizing Bond’s rather fatuous instructor M at the story’s outset:
‘the negro races are just beginning to throw up [sic] geniuses in all the professions — scientists, doctors, writers. It’s about time they turned out a great criminal. After all, there are 250,000,000 of them in the world. Nearly a third of the white population. They’ve got plenty of brains and ability and guts. And now Moscow’s taught one of them the technique.’
So Thurgood Marshall, the law, and his possible impending triumph are obviously present in Fleming’s mind in early 1953 and memorable to readers when the book was published in the UK in April 1954. (It lacked US publication until 1955.)
In January 1953 the verdict in Brown was still uncertain. In December 1952 the decision was agreed to be postponed so that the nine Justices would reconsider the case and draw their individual conclusions together by December 1953. The Justices included some of the foremost legal intellects in the world frequently in passionate disagreement with one another, among whom Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954 serving from 1941) had led the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials of the surviving Nazi leaders. His natural brilliance led him first to oppose, then to accept the verdict on Brown from his colleagues (while for lengthy reasons differing from them), and finally simply to concur after suffering a massive heart attack from which he returned on 17 May 1953, the day Brown was handed down unanimously, Jackson dying some months later. His draft opinion if pressed might have alienated several colleagues and appalled prevailing white Southern opinion; it deplored Thurgood Marshall’s use of sociology notably in reliance on the massive An American Dilemma — The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) by the Swedish economist-sociologist Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) commissioned by the Carnegie corporation . Yet Jackson’s draft showed historical wisdom, redacted by David Halberstam ((1934-2007) The Fifties (1993) p. 421):
The time was ripe for an assault on legal segregation, he wrote. The racism of the Nazis had caused a broad and powerful sense of revulsion among the American people, which extended even to our own treatment of the Japanese-Americans. It was foolish to say that blacks were not ready for greater political freedom, and it was a mistake to cite the Constitution of the United States as the reason to deny those freedoms. It was not the Constitution that had changed in the past sixty years but the blacks themselves; according to Jackson, they had shown a far greater capacity for assimilation than had been thought possible in the days of Plessy [v Ferguson (1896) when the Court had justified segregation].
… The mixing of the races, Jackson said, had already far outstripped the speed of the courts, and ‘an increasing part of what is called colored population has as much claim to white as to colored blood’.
But as 1953 wended its way with Eisenhower installed as President on 20 January, prospects were very uncertain, several other Supreme Court justices also doubtful as to the fitness of the Court to launch revolution, and even if a majority were to affirm, a 5-4 decision might excuse a secretly hostile President Eisenhower from enforcement of education integration. Four judges were from segregationist Southern states: but then the most passionate supporter of racial integration was probably Hugo Lafayette Black (1886-1971 serving from 1937) a former Senator from Alabama (1927-37), previously a member of the Ku Klux Klan (1923-25). Chief Justice Fred Vinson (1890-1953, serving from 1946) died of a heart attack on September 8. For his successor, Eisenhower nominated Earl Warren (1891-1974), Republican Governor of California 1943-53, Chief Justice 1953-69). Earl Pollock (1928-2023), law clerk to Vinson and Warren, formalised the new Chief Justice’s opinion for delivery in Brown as an early duty, fixed its specific repudiation of Plessy, and remarked much later that three things mattered to Warren: ‘equality, education, and the right of young people to a decent life’. Warren affirmed that the law could not ‘in this day and age’ set black and white children apart in education. He made no pretence of legal acumen comparable to his fellow-judges but his political skills ensured he sought and got unanimity.
Eisenhower initially sought to condition Warren for the Court by inviting the Californian to dinner at the White House, placed beside John W. Davis (1873-1955) former Democratic Presidential candidate (1924) and now leading counsel for South Carolina in trials arising from Brown. After dinner Eisenhower took Warren‘s arm, walking him towards the sitting room as he remarked of the Southerners present: ‘These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big black bucks’. The bestialization involved in the latter term was more odious, and potentially more homicidal, than ‘nigger’. Above all, it was associated with Birth of a Nation and the lynchings that spun from captions included in the silent movie. No doubt it had been a popular item when Ike served with the 19th Infantry at Fort Sam Houston Texas in 1915-17 after graduation from West Point.
Fleming may have assumed that if the decision was still hanging fire while he was writing — December 1953 had passed with no stated resolution — perhaps Live and Let Die might influence waverers! The UK cultural establishment in those days was inclined to credit itself excessively with influence on American decision-making processes, as indeed Live and Let Die assumes. The US Constitution had been designed and amended to allow the wisdom of the past to restrain and perhaps improve the impulse of the present with an eye to the perils of the future, and perhaps excessively leaned on eighteenth-century British convention, but Bond offered chiefly a fraying imperialism chiefly expressing its superiority to its American big brother by tourist whines about American cuisine and derision at American speech (notably among the blacks of Harlem). Thurgood Marshall and NAACP demanded American constitutional recovery of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments sharpened by Jackson’s conviction of their contemporary necessity. Fleming’s contribution to this was Sleeping-Car Porter mafiosi, Russian subversion, professionalised black criminality, Caribbean pirate treasure quests, soft porn, and Voodoo. Nineteenth-century England had worried about witch-doctors subverting landlord and government via Irish Catholic clerics and their more remote spiritual and oratorical equivalents where the sun never sets: Voodoo up-to-date was intended to show the barbarism of civil rights legal action.
VIII.
The US edition of Live and Let Die excised a few Briticisms, notably chapter 5 — ‘Nigger Heaven’ — being retitled ‘Seventh Avenue’. Fleming’s first choice here was not so much racism in your face as tourist showing-off. The words were plagiarised from the title of an avant-garde novel of 1926 by Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) celebrating the Harlem Renaissance and honouring its writers and artists. Macmillan New York also dropped some of Fleming’s most painful banalities in attempting Harlem dialogue. (President John Fitzgerald Kennedy after election would express enjoyment of a later Bond, From Russia With Love (1957), much as his fellow-American millionaires hired English butlers: also it reassured hedonists (accurately) that the Catholic President was no Puritan.)
In 2023 Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. produced a new edition, announcing:
This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.
In fact this is a case of poor exploited American publishers denied acknowledgment by their UK profiteers. The main changes in 2023 were those made in New York for the first American publication in 1955, and were probably occasioned by a new sensitivity in the months after Brown, when non-violent blacks began to teach courage to whites. The one substantial 2023 revision was dropping the word ‘negro’ where it seemed possible. In 1953 ‘negro’ was the universally acceptable term but it was given a capital ‘N’ by liberals, and denied it by segregationists. Some major history books printed it both ways, depending on the personal bias of the author of the relevant chapter (e.g. The Ordeal of the Union (vol. 1. (1947)) nominally by Allan Nevins (1890-1971)).
Presumably Live and Let Die as a title was intended to align Bond, Britain, J. Edgar Hoover, the CIA, &c, on one side as the Living, and the NAACP, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, SMERSH, Voodoo on the other side as the Undead whose defeat should liberate their captive Zombies.
But the latest UK emendations might make a reader assume Bond’s enemies a multi-racial body instead of the non-white Voodoo-conditioned criminal fraternity Fleming intended: ‘negro’ in the 2023 version frequently becomes ‘man’, for instance. This last might symbolise the effect of the Supreme Court judgment in Brown v the Board of Education but is far from the author’s intention. It creates its own form of partisan suicide.