Plutarch's Ghost

He was not born into auspicious circumstances.

Thomas Pain (the ‘e’ at the end of his name would be added on his arrival to America in 1774) was born in Thetford, England in 1736 to an Anglican mother and a Quaker father. His schooling lasted until age 13, when his education ended and his apprenticeship began as a corset-maker, the trade of his father.  It would not be a speculation to assume that this life greatly bored Pain, for at age 16, young Thomas escaped Thetford, and made for the east coast of England to join the British Navy. His deployment aboard the British privateer The Terrible, in the command of a certain Captain Death, was scuppered by his Quaker father, Joseph, who arrived at quayside moments before Thomas boarded ship. Effectively talked out of this enterprise by Joseph, young Tom Pain soon found himself back in Theford, immiserated. However, three years after his first attempted escape, Pain did manage to get himself aboard another privateer, King of Prussia.  After seeing action against the French in the Seven Years War (or as we North Americans refer to it, the French-Indian War), and fortunate not to have been injured or killed by wood-shattering cannonball or other hazards of sea battle, he was discharged from the King of Prussia with some war-time spoils–naval service being a somewhat piratical enterprise in those days–and plotted his next move.

He inevitably settled in the town of Margate, England. Setting up shop as a corset-maker, this time as his own boss, he married and set out to have a family. But he was soon visited by bad fortune: his business went belly-up, his wife died in pregnancy, and to make matters worse, so too his child. For the next ten years, from 1759 on, he took a position as an excise officer for the crown, but was fired on an accusation that he purposely failed to properly inspect goods. Back to corset-making he went to make ends meet, but he got his job back as excise officer when the judgment against him was vacated. Ambulant again, he eventually landed in the town of Lewes, South Sussex, where he stayed until 1774, just long enough to marry (and separate) from  another woman, start (and fail) at another business venture (this time a tobacco shop), and get himself fired from his job as excise officer yet again. (There’s more to the story regarding his second sacking in this position. Ostensibly he was fired for leaving his post. But the real reason was probably due to his first foray into pamphleteering. In 1772, he wrote The Case of the Officers of Excise, which argued for better wages and working conditions for both he and his colleagues.  It sold four thousand copies, providing him a tidy profit and some notoriety. But it was a pyrrhic victory, for Pain’s dismissal two years hence was, in all likelihood, due to this broadside aimed at the crown and parliament.) Barely avoiding debtors prison after being brought to his knees financially, Pain made his way to London in 1774. It was there that he reconnected with an admired acquaintance, Benjamin Franklin—they had met several years earlier, and formed a mutual respect—and thus expressed a desire to Franklin to start afresh in the New World.  Franklin obliged Pain with a flattering letter of recommendation.  Tom Pain was about to become Thomas Paine, and the course of American history, and by extension world history, would be changed forever.

Mr. Paine Goes To America

“The bearer, Mr. Thomas Pain [sic], is very well recommended to me as an ingenious, worthy young man. He goes to Pennsylvania with a view of settling there.  I request you to give him your best advice and countenance, as he is quite a stranger there.  If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or an assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor (in all of which I think him very capable) so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country, you will do well, and much oblige your affectionate father”–Letter of Recommendation from Benjamin Franklin to his son William Franklin, Governor of New Jersey, regarding Thomas Paine, 1774

Pamphleteering was the equivalent of blogging in the 18th century; anyone with an opinion and access to a printing press could publish and distribute with relative ease. Thomas Paine, landing in Philadelphia in late 1774, found himself in “exactly the right place at the right time”[1].  Throwing himself head-first into the argy-bargy world of “tavern-based discussion groups”[2], he made all the right connections almost immediately. Robert Aitken was one of those connections. A bookstore owner and proprietor of the publication The Pennslyvania Journal, Aitken was on the prowl for talented writers. He asked Paine to join his operation as managing editor; Paine gladly accepted.  The quality of his work immediately showed him a natural.

First Blood–The Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770.

The French & Indian War (1754-1763) had been the catalyst for a great deal of conflict between the crown and the American colonies in the post-war years.  Due to the high costs of repulsing the French and protecting American colonial interests, parliament was of the mind that the Americans should pay back the favor–and the debts Britain incurred–in kind.  Beginning in 1765, a raft of taxes and other acts fell upon the colonies: the Stamp Act, the Townshend Act, the Quartering Act, the Tea Act. There was not one American MP (member of parliament) to argue on behalf of the colonies in the House of Commons.  Devoid of parliamentary representation to redress these grievances, cries of “no taxation without representation!” flew up. The more agitated the colonial populace became, the more heavy-handed British authorities responded.  Bloodshed seemed inevitable. In 1770, British soldiers in Boston fired at a rowdy– but unarmed–mob. In what is now known as the Boston Massacre, five colonists lost their lives. On the other end, British excise officers, intent on enforcing these parliamentary acts, were increasingly subjected to cruel acts of reprisal. (Tarring and feathering being the chosen method of inflicting retribution on the King’s excise agents.) In 1775, a full-blown skirmish erupted in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concorde between colonial militias and British troops.  Rebellion was in the air.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, an early supporter of Thomas Paine’s writing.

The problematic relationship with the British was widely discussed and debated, but even after the bloodshed of 1775, talk of independence still took a back-seat to talk of resolution. Enter Thomas Paine.  First writing under the nom de plume(s) Atlanticus or Amicus, Paine was under no misgivings as to what he though was the proper course of action: independence. “When I reflect…I hesitate not for a moment to believe that the Almighty will finally separate America from Britain. Call it independence or what you will, if it is the cause of God and humanity, it will go on.”[3]  But Paine’s writings for the Journal would come to an end under acrimonious circumstances towards the end of 1775.  Yet another reverse for the unfortunate Mr. Paine it seemed, but this time, good fortune lay just around the corner.  His dismissal from the Journal allowed him the freedom to write Common Sense.  

Common Sense

“Of ‘Commons Sense’ it can be said, without any risk of cliche, that is was a catalyst that altered the course of history.”–Christopher Hitchens

Common Sense, by Thomas Paine

It is alleged that Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense at the behest of his friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a lesser-known but prominent “Founding Father”, who was a signer of both the Declaration Of Independence and the United States Constitution.  Told by Rush to write a clearly-stated pamphlet in support of the American cause–while instructing him to avoid calling for all-out separation from the mother country–Paine chose to go the opposite route, vehemently calling for a complete decoupling from Great Britain.  He was an effective polemicist for the simple reason that he was  a self-educated man. As a result, he could communicate an intellectual argument for colonial self-rule in the language of the average, moderately educated reader. He was also a man with quite an ax to grind with the crown, due in no small part to his rough treatment at the hands of the British establishment in retribution for his pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise, years before. So…no half measures for Paine now. On Common Sense, none other than George Washington was later to say that Paine’s tract was instrumental in swaying a huge swath of the American public behind the movement for independence.  It was Paine’s phraseology as well–terse, economical, and on-point–that was so very persuasive to the man-on-the street:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”–The American Crisis, Thomas Paine, December 23rd, 1776

Paine, while giving deference to certain aspects of the unwritten British constitution, went all-out on the two most important aspects of British governance: monarchical rule, and hereditary transfer of governmental authority. He spared no harsh word in describing the absurdity of monarchy and heredity:

• “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” [4]
• “How a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.”[5]
• “It is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion.”[6]
• “In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight   hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”[7]

The response from the American public was electric. Released to the general public in January, 1776, it sold 100,000 copies within three months of release, and went on to sell 500,000, this in a land inhabited by a mere 2,000,000 free men and women. (In all, 25% of the country read Paine’s argument for dissolving the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain.) Paine continued to publish pamphlets under the title, The American Crisis, thirteen in all, between 1777 and 1783.  He was unrelenting, and his arguments continued to bolster the cause of independence from Great Britain by attacking the very foundations of the Anglo-American relationship.

On the topic of the shared ethnic heritage of American colonist to Englanders, he said:

“This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe…All Europeans meeting in America, or any other part of the globe, are countrymen. [But] not one third of the inhabitants [in America] are of English descent.” [9]

On the legitimacy of the English crown:

“No man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honorable one. A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.”[10]

The point of even having a king:

“In absolute monarchies the whole weight of business, civil and military, lies on the king; the children of Israel in their request for a king, urged this plea ‘that he may judge us, and go out before us and fight our battles.’ But in countries where he is neither a judge nor a general, as in England, a man would be puzzled to know what is his business.”[11]

Never flagging, even in light of considerably negative reverses to the colonial cause throughout the war, Paine wrote in the darkest days of the war that:

“The people of America, by anticipating distress, had fortified their minds against every species you could inflict. They had resolved to abandon their homes, to resign them to destruction, and to seek new settlements rather than submit. Thus familiarized to misfortune, before it arrived, they bore their portion with the less regret: the justness of their cause was a continual source of consolation, and the hope of final victory, which never left them, served to lighten the load and sweeten the cup allotted them to drink.” [12]

In this last point, Paine was quite correct. War had been visited upon the colonies for close to five years. Scores of lives, property, fortunes and livelihoods had been put to flame for the cause of independence, and morale throughout the colonies–and the fighting forces—had been brought low. Paine would have none of it.  If Paine was instrumental in mobilizing public opinion for fight for independence, he was similarly instrumental in mobilizing public opinion to continue the fight, no matter the costs.

The long war, begun in 1775 at Lexington and Concorde, concluded in 1782 with the American victory at Yorktown, Virginia.  Great Britain formally gave up its ties to the American colonies in the Treaty of Paris in September of 1783, giving birth to the new American republic. The Churchillian phrase, “words are weapons in the wars of ideas”, could not have been more clearly exemplified than in this case. Paine is due no small credit for American independence through the weaponizing of his words.  But he was not done.

Paine and the French Revolution

A bridge based on Thomas Paine’s original designs for an iron structure.

In the post-war period, Paine immersed himself in both inventing, drafting and selling a design for an iron bridge. (If viewed from the perspective that a bridge made of iron was but an extension of Enlightenment ideas, intent of remaking the old way of doing things, it seems a perfectly reasonable diversion.) In need of financial backing for his iron bridge, Paine journeyed to Europe, specifically France and England, in 1787. He struck up an easy friendship with Edmund Burke whilst in England, where they found common ground on myriad issues of the day. It would be a friendly acquaintance that would end acrimoniously three years later, after the seemingly progressive Burke published his acerbic, counter-revolutionary tract, Refections on the Revolution in France.

Consorting with republican, revolutionary types during his years in England (1787-1792) soon led to harassment by agents of the crown. It was in England that Paine started The Rights of Man, which argued for representative, republican governments throughout Europe. His agitations in England fueled his enemies within the British establishment. When informed of his imminent arrest, he took flight and crossed the English Channel. On landing in Calais, France, he was welcomed as a conquering hero. Clearly the French were familiar with his work.

One could say in this instance that lightning struck twice for Paine, in the sense that he found himself at the creation of not one, but two revolutions that shook the western world’s foundations.  But unlike the American Revolution, which could in some ways be described as a relatively conservative one, the French Revolution very quickly became a revolution dedicated to destroying all vestiges of the past with a new, more democratic society, one based on equality, fraternity, liberty, and above all, reason. To Paine, the American Revolution didn’t go far enough in eliminating all traces of the desiccated past, and so he saw a second opportunity to influence the future in a more concrete way.  Concurrently, the republican French saw an opportunity to recruit the author of Common Sense into their own movement, and made Paine an honorary Frenchman and a member of the new National Assembly.  With his writings having found a large and enthusiastic audience in France, it was too good a public relations coup to pass up for all parties. That he had little facility with the French language wasn’t seen as an impediment.

Paine started writing The Rights Of Man in 1791 whilst still in England, and put the finishing touches on it in France. Composed of thirty-one articles, it was not only a spirited defense of the ideals of the French Revolution, but also went deep into the very essence of what society is and should be. Governance, religion, societal interactions: all topics were on the table for Paine.  But if his philosophy could be pithily summed, it would be in this, “My motive and object in all my political works…have been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free and establish government for himself.” More succinctly put, “what matters most…is not..a sharp break from the patterns of the past, but that it is a replacement of wrong with right principles”. Pure consent of every citizen, or nothing at all, argued Paine. And as for those “false systems and false principles”, most everything fell into this category.  Paine even went so far as to advocate for the scrapping of all laws and constitutions, in the sense that they were, as he saw it, the tyranny of the dead imposed on the living. “The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.  Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow,” said he.[11]

But Paine’s involvement in the French Revolution soon turned into a dangerous situation for him.  While in full alignment with its philosophical underpinnings, it did not shield him from its wrath.  As the revolution developed a progressively radical—and murderous—tinge, Paine soon found himself labeled a counter-revolutionary. Indeed, he had allied himself with the Girondists, the more moderate faction of the nascent French Republic. Certainly, his arguments in the National Assembly–specifically that the King Louis XVI and Queen Mary Antoinette should be spared execution–won him no friends amongst the radical Jacobins, with a hostile Maximillian Robespierre at its head.  He inevitably was arrested by the Jacobins in 1793, and was slated for execution by guillotine soon after. Only due to random luck did he escape losing his head under the “national razor”. His freedom was secured, after much negotiation, by Ambassador to France James Monroe, in November of 1794, who effectively argued that Paine’s American citizenship precluded him from French juris prudence.  But feeling betrayed by the American government—he singled out then-President George Washington for particular opprobrium—for slow-walking (what he felt were) demands for his release, he remained embittered for the rest of his life. He was imprisoned for ten months; his health never truly recovered.

Paine stayed in France for several years thereafter, however.  As a result of the Thermidor Revolt in July of 1794, which overthrew the Jacobin faction and put Robespierre and his junto under the guillotine’s blade, Paine was no longer in imminent danger.  Perhaps due to the abrupt end to the Reign of Terror and the liquidation of the henchmen that ran the Committee of Public Safety (i.e. the leaders of the Jacobin party),  Paine still maintained at least some faith that the French Revolution could be put to rights. Whilst still imprisoned, he started yet another group of articles that were to make up The Age of Reason. This time he had institutionalized religion in his sights: “The most detestable wickedness, the most horrible cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.”[12] He was just getting warmed up: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”[13] Paine now staked out the deist ground, claiming that, “We have no idea of His wisdom but by knowing the order and manner in which it acts.  The principles of science lead to this knowledge; for the Creator of man is the Creator of science, and it through that medium that man can see God, as it were, face to face.”[14] In perhaps what was the most important thought expressed in The Age of Reason, Paine wrote:

The inquisition of Spain does not proceed from the religion originally professed, but from this mule-animal, engendered between the church and the state…Persecution is not an original feature of any religion; but it is always the strongly-marked feature of all law-religions, or religions established by law.  Take away the law-establishment, and every religion reassumes its original benignity.  In America, a Catholic priest is a good citizen, a good character, and a good neighbour [sic]; an Episcopalian Minister is of the same description; and this proceeds, independently of the men, from there being no law establishment in America.[15]

Paine Returns To America

Thomas Paine stayed in France long enough to see Napoleon Bonaparte, the so-called “grave-digger of the revolution”, assume full dictatorial powers.  It proved to be too much for Paine, and so in 1803, after a sixteen year odyssey that took him from America to England to France, he found himself back in America.  This time, though, he was not a hero. His views on religion were not well-received, and while many (if not most) of what we now call the “founding fathers” of the United States might’ve been in synch with Paine’s deist, enlightenment views, the rank-and-file common man–i.e. Paine’s core readership–was not. However, he did still have friends in high places. Maintaining a friendship through correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, who was then president, he prevailed upon the president to make the Louisiana Purchase. While his influence in this endeavor was noted, Paine did not successfully dissuade Jefferson to prohibit African slavery west of the Mississippi. It was a tremendous blown opportunity for Jefferson, but it spoke well of Paine that he at least tried to dissuade Jefferson to settle those lands with “thrifty German settlers” and freed slaves.  The roots of the American Civil War, it can be argued, began with this decision. Bleeding Kansas was a mere fifty years away.

Paine is said to have lived a barely subsistent life whilst late in life.  His imprisonment in France during the time of the Reign of Terror left his health irreversibly damaged.  With a reddened, splotchy visage, both critics and enemies would spread rumors that he had an addiction to strong waters, and would dismiss his anti-religious polemics as the rantings of a soft-brained drunk. He continued to write—of particular note was his pamphlet Agrarian Justice—but he was a shunned individual.  That said, he held to his convictions until his dying day, having been said to have expelled two Presbyterian ministers who took it upon themselves to save his soul from damnation by scolding them that he’d have “none of [their] Popish stuff!”  

He died on June 8th, 1809.  He was buried on the grounds of his farm in New Rochelle, NY.  Six people attended his funeral.

References

• [1] Hitchens, Christopher Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Grove Press, 2006
• [2] Ibid.
• [3] Thomas Paine“A Serious Thought”, Pennsylvania Journal, 18 October, 1775
• [4] Common Sense, Thomas Paine, Section II
• [5] Ibid.
• [6] Ibid.
• [7] Ibid.
• [8]  Ibid.
• [9] Ibid.
• [10] Thomas Paine The American Crisis Section VIII
• [11] Thomas Paine, The Rights Of Man—Being an Answer to Mr. Burkes Attack on the French Revolution—Part 1 of 16
• [12] Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
• [13] Ibid.
• [14] Ibid.
• [15] Ibid.

La Bastille occupied the center of Paris, and though it held a total of seven prisoners–four forgers, two noblemen accused of immoral behavior, and a murder suspect who in all likelihood was criminally insane–it stood as a stark reminder of monarchical oppression. The year of 1789, specifically the summer had been a tough one for the citizens of Paris: oppressively hot, a scarcity of bread, and a general annoyance with the French government, if not outright hatred. Harsh taxation made things worse, and solutions proposed by otherwise competent and popular financial advisors, such as Jacques Necker, were blithely dismissed by the monarchy of Louis XVI. Economic issues that had been percolating for decades, and the continued failure of the royal French government to credibly deal with them, were threatening to boil over. In late April, the peasantry of Paris had destroyed the factory and home of industrialist Jean-Baptiste Reveillon, who was rumored to have made statements that worker wages should be lowered. (To the contrary, he said their wages should be raised, but his statements were distorted.) The mob also raided his wine cellar, which contained over two thousand bottles; many Parisians remained smashed for weeks. The Reveillon Riot, as it was soon named, was considered by many historians to be the event that gave the Parisian mobs confidence that they could take over the city. Finally, on July 14, 1789, they mobilized. Approximately a thousand Parisians attacked that hated symbol of oppression, the Bastille. Close to one hundred lost their lives in doing so–in comparison to six to eight of the guards and their officers defending it–but the die had been cast. When told of the events of July 14th, King Louis XVI was said to have asked an adviser, “Is this a revolt?”; the advisor is said to have retorted, “No, this is a revolution.”

Jean-Paul Marat, murdered in his medicinal bathtub by Girondist sympathizer Charlotte Corday, on July 13, 1793. Painting by Jean-Louis David.

The storming of the Bastille by an angry Parisian mob was just the start of a very long, incarnadine movement in France. At first, it appeared that a constitutional monarchy was possible. But Louis and his ostentatious Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, saw to it that this opportunity was foreclosed by scheming with outside forces to reverse the gains of the revolution. The more moderate forces of reform soon gave way to revolutionaries bent on eradicating all vestiges of the ancien regime, as well as the presence of the Roman Catholic Church, so intrinsically linked to it, from French soil. Arising from within this more radicalized movement was a lawyer, Maximillian Robespierre, of the Jacobin party. With cold ruthlessness, he and his minions would not only seek to defend the gains of the revolution but push it faster and farther than any had initially anticipated in the summer of 1789. By 1793, the revolutionaries did the unthinkable–they put king and queen to la guillotine. Worse, spurred on by the assassination of prominent Jacobin Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday in 1793, the Jacobins violently eliminated the more moderate revolutionaries, the Girondist party. By 1794, the Girondists, initially, heroes of the revolution, were heading towards the “the national razor” en masse: Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Pierre Phillipeaux. A “Cult Of Reason” replaced Roman Catholicism as the official state religion; indeed, religion itself was rendered illegal by the new French “First Republic” under Robespierre. Not content to stop there, the Jacobins renamed the days of the week, the months of the year, and the year itself. In essence, they were starting at Year Zero: a clean, complete break with everything that came before it.

The reverberations of so violent a revolution spread throughout all of royalist Europe, but none more so than in England. The English were not without their destabilizations, mind: the English Civil War (from 1642-1651) culminated in the execution of Stuart King Charles I. But the revolution was not about the destruction of the monarchical system; if anything, it strengthened it, as the conflict was, at its core, a fight to define the role of the king in relation to parliament in the governance of England, and how far both of their respective powers extended. Since defined for both, there had been intermittent, but never system-threatening, chafing between the monarchy and parliament. The Glorious Revolution of 1688–which threw out the Roman Catholic James II in place of the Protestant William Of Orange and his wife (and James II’s daughter) Mary–was mostly peaceful, and established once and for all that no Catholic would sit on the throne of England thenceforward, a prohibition that persists to this day. England had achieved something on its own that no other monarchy in Europe had so much as ventured to do: it achieved a constitutional monarchy, a balance of power between commoner, noble, and royal. Starting with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, which was the first check on abuse of power by a king (in this case, King John), through the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, England was the most stable monarchical government in Europe. It was hard-won, but in this age of Enlightenment and revolution, some felt it didn’t go nearly far enough.

All was not well in England during the outbreak of the French Revolution. The French Revolution certainly had its sympathizers, not the least of which were those “republican” types who sought to emulate the complete overthrow of the entire monarchical system and replace it with a system of governance that abolished all forms of hereditary rule. A very real threat to the British system, this. Into this fray jumped one of the greatest writers and orators in British history, if not Western Civilization. A member of the House Of Commons representing the City of Bristol, England, his name was Edmund Burke. Burke took it upon himself to stymie the spread of this most dangerous republican revolution from spreading across the English Channel and can claim–if not fully, then certainly to a very large extent–credit for having done so. In essence, Burke arguably was responsible for saving the British government, and in a wider sense, preserving the concept that traditions, precedents, and social relationships mattered more than the individual liberties and “natural rights” advocated by many political philosophers of the day. Quoth Burke, “Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

The Right Honorable Gentleman From Dublin

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1729. His father was a successful attorney in the Anglican (Church of Ireland) faith. His mother, a Roman Catholic woman from County Cork, allowed Edmund to be brought up in his father’s denomination. Given the time, it isn’t beyond reason to surmise that both parents realized that Edmund’s future would be considerably brighter if he stayed on the “right” side of Anglo-Irish society–his formative years being under the Protestant Ascendancy. Thus, he was brought up in the predominant faith of the British ruling class. (Burke’s sister, Juliana, was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith; clearly, there were differing future concerns afoot for each child. As it would turn out, his political enemies would accuse him of secret Catholic sympathies throughout his political career as a member of Parliament.) He attended Trinity College in Dublin in 1744 through 1748, an exclusively Protestant establishment at the time; it would remain so until close to the turn of the 18th century. At his father’s behest, he pursued a degree in law but soon dropped it, devoting himself to writing. Through his writings he found himself in the orbit of political figures and prominent intellectuals; in turn, he entered the political arena in 1765, as an MP representing the English city of Bristol. His “maiden speech” to his constituents was one for the ages, according to William Pitt the Elder (one of the more noteworthy Prime Ministers in British history), who exclaimed, “[He had] spoken in such a manner as to stop the mouths of all Europe”. But it was his speech in 1774 to the electors of the City of Bristol that encapsulated Burke’s thinking on all matters of government, and in a wider sense, society as a whole:

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. [1]

Burke was a Whig, a member of the progressive party in the House of Commons; he would remain both a Whig and an MP for the next twenty-nine years. Members of Parliament, similar to members of the United States Congress, are rarely noteworthy in history; indeed, many prime ministers and presidents are historically non-entities as well. But in the case of Burke, he expounded with all force of intellect on all matters big and small within the British Empire: India, Ireland (and the rights of Catholics within it), and America, specifically in Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents in 1770. One would think, given his pedigree, that Burke would shy away from all these things, being of Irish stock, and worse (in the eyes of his predominantly Anglo-Saxon/Anglican colleagues), the son of a Roman Catholic mother, which in turn led to suspicions of disloyalty to the crown. But to Burke it mattered not: fair was fair, and he used his considerable intellectual gifts, voiced through his articulate speeches and writings, to give notice of them. On India, he vehemently disliked how the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, governed the colony. Calling Hastings “the governor-general of iniquity”[2], whose heart was “gangrene to the core”[3], Burke attacked his corruption in report after report, eventually securing an indictment against Hastings in 1788 through the House of Commons. (The House of Lords would overrule, however, and Hastings was acquitted by that upper chamber.) Regarding Ireland, Burke wrote, “that in Ireland particularly the Roman Catholic religion should be upheld in high respect and veneration.” That there was British discrimination against the indigenous Irish in their homeland, particularly of those who paid their obeisance to the Latin church, was undoubted, but it particularly rankled Burke, whose family connections were profoundly Irish-Catholic. To publicly announce this in the House of Commons, despite the inherent political risks to his career prospects, ranked Burke up there with the great crusaders for fairness and decency of the ages. But Burke’s courage stretched even further, for he was an open advocate for the Americans during the rebellion in America. As Burke saw it, the cry of “no taxation without representation” was a legitimate one, as there was indeed taxation without redress for the Americans. Their rights as Englishmen were being trampled. His speech to the House of Commons stated as much:

In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate, without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood. [4]

To understand Burke is to understand that even though he was a progressive of his day, his primary goal in these criticisms of British policy towards its colonies (Ireland, India, America) was to maintain them as colonies through the discontinuation of harsh, punitive, and ultimately offensive policies, replacing them with more benign, moderate rule from London. The change was imperative to maintain the status quo; Burke had no interest in severing these pieces of the British Empire from the mother country per se. Only through an enlightened change of policy could these colonies be maintained, as Burke saw it, and the present policies concerning all three would only result in their disconnection from Great Britain. (As it was, Ireland gained Free State status in 1922, and severed all ties to the crown in 1937; India gained full independence in 1948; America gained its sovereign republican status in 1782.) And so it was no stretch for his contemporaries to assume that Burke would’ve supported the revolt of the people of France against their oppressive monarchy and its retrograde governance. But Burke was–at his core–a traditionalist, if not conservative. And the French Revolution was anything but conservative.

The Revolution Comes To France

“Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, on the recovery of his natural rights?”–Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, pg. 151

The storming of La Bastille, July 14th, 1789.

It didn’t take Burke long to detect an insidious radicalism within the fervor of the French Revolution. By February 1790, a mere seven months after the storming of the Bastille, and a full three years before the insanely genocidal Reign of Terror, Burke started to speak up. His opening salvo was fired specifically at Welsh political philosopher, preacher, and pamphleteer Richard Price. In a speech titled “Discourse on the Love of Our Country”, Price stated that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was merely the precursor to the French Revolution of 1789, in that the former was necessary to pave the way for the republican one to come. Price hoped that the revolution in France would make its way to the shores of England. He was not alone in this sentiment. Charles James Fox, Whig MP and a colleague of Burke concurred, stating that the French Revolution was “greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!”[5] The Whigs, being the party of progress, largely embraced Fox’s sentiment, and eventually the party would soon break into two factions over the revolution, with Burke standing with the “Old Whigs”, Fox with the “New Whigs”. Burke addressed this schism early on: “[They] would abandon their best friends, and join [their] worst enemies to oppose either the means or end; and to resist all violent exertions of the spirit of innovation, so distant from all the principles of true and safe reformation; a spirit well calculated to overturn states, but perfectly unfit to amend them.”[6] To put this into more modern parlance, Burke loathed the idea of tearing down the current system in place of some revolutionary experiment with inevitable, unforeseen results. He much preferred employing retro-fits to the present one, which was well-suited, in his mind, to embrace them. It would be an argument he’d make again and again for the rest of his days and would be the cornerstone of his broadsides against the French Revolution, mainly in his tract Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Historian Niall Ferguson speculates, probably correctly, that Burke was ahead of virtually every prominent British (Fox, Price) and American (Jefferson, Paine) intellectual in predicting the murderous turn the French Revolution would take for one simple reason: he’d read The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

If the American Revolution could claim Englishman John Locke and his philosophical stance as its guiding spirit, then Rousseau was that for the French Revolution. To Burke, it was a recipe for pure mob rule, expressed in the sentiment that the only abiding law is that of the people, or “general will”. And there it was, that phrase, “the general will”, clearly stated in the founding document of the first French Republic, the Declaration of the Rights of Man:

• Law is the expression of the General Will.
• No one shall be disquieted on account his opinions, provided their manifestations do not disturb public order established by law. 
• Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall demand it.

[All italics/bold Niall Ferguson]

In essence, every right can be taken away if the mob deems it counter-revolutionary, meaning no one had any rights at all if the “general will” deemed it so. The caveats italicized –according to Ferguson–put Burke into a state of intense discomfort. In his speech to Parliament on February 1, 1790, he stated:

The French [have] rebel[led] against a mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult than every any people has been known to rise against the illegal usurper or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession…their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities…They have found their punishment in their success: laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power…held out as a currency for the support of an empire. [7]

Louis XVI, at this point known as by his non-royal name, Louis Capet, shortly before meeting his end under the “national razor”.

Burke was just getting started. With “astonishing prescience”, in the words of Ferguson, Burke stated that, “at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows”. Burke was only wrong about the last word, for it would be the guillotine that would “do in” more than sixteen thousand French “enemies of the revolution”; in all, forty thousand would lose their life. Burke further stated that the revolution would progress to a “mischievous and ignoble oligarchy”, and inevitably, to a military dictatorship. Burke was right on all counts, and predicted all this in 1790-91, a full two years before the Reign of Terror, approximately nine years before Napoleon would assume tyrannical powers in 1799, and eleven years before he crowned himself emperor, in 1801.

The broader argument, more than the French Revolution itself, was what a society should be. Burke opened up a front in the war of ideas with his tract, Reflections on the Revolution in France, which brought to the fore arguments that, to some extent, are still being played out the world over: tradition versus a sharp break from the past; Monarchy versus pure republican democracy; the laws and customs of generations past versus re-writing all existing laws to accommodate the living, and only the living. Historian Yuval Levin summed up the debate more succinctly: “What authority should the character of the given world exercise over our sense of what we would like it to be?” The ideal make-up of a society should not be, according to Burke, based on the individual rights of man, based on the assumed, inherent characteristics that he possessed “pure reason”, translated to mean that men can act rationality to both his and his fellow man’s benefit. To Burke, if one “leave[s] a man to his passions…you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature”[8]. It is only the bonds of community, tradition, and respect for authority, both temporal and metaphysical, that bind a society together peacefully, in Burke’s mind:

We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty. [9]

To Burke, the central insidious characteristic of the French Revolution pertained to its adherence that the past had nothing to inform the living and that all previous social and governmental structures required razing because of this. In his opinion, the godlessness of the French Revolution would lead to licentiousness, theft, murder, and–worst of all, chaos. All of Burke’s prophecies made in 1790-91 in Reflections–much to the chagrin of those that advocated for the French Revolution and all its ideals–would be realized in full by 1799, when Napoleon assumed absolute power:

Napoleon Bonaparte, “The Gravedigger of the Revolution”.

In the weakness of one kind of authority, and the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself…but the moment in which that event shall happen the person who really commands the army is your master…the master of your whole republic. [Emphasis mine][10]

CONCLUSION

Burke certainly had detractors, both during his life and after–Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were particularly critical, as was Karl Marx, several decades later–but none could discount his prophetic skills when it came to the French Revolution. He had it dead-to-rights–predicting the Reign of Terror, the ineffectiveness of the Directory, and the military coup d’etat of Napolean, anywhere from three to ten years in advance of all these events occurring. But the wider reason that Burke remains an important political philosopher, as one who advocated for slower modifications to already existing societal and/or governmental structures, can be seen in the movements that occurred in the 20th century that took the Year Zero approach. The October Revolution in 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks to power and birthed the Soviet Union, serves as a primary example. In that revolution, the old societal structure was entirely thrown out as well: religious, financial, governmental, legal. The result was the deaths of tens of millions, the collapse of Russian society, and the inevitable rise of another strongman in the person of Josef Stalin. Similar things occurred in the communist revolutions of China, Cambodia, Cuba, and Vietnam. Starting at Year Zero, discarding all that came before it, inevitably led to chaos, loss of life, loss of property, loss of the ties that bind neighbor to neighbor, and family to family. Burke perhaps had a considerably more romantic view of king and country than it deserved–Thomas Paine’s glib zinger about the concept of hereditary monarchy being an assumption, “as absurd as a hereditary mathematician, or wise-man, and as ridiculous as a hereditary poet-laureate”[11] remains an indisputable conclusion. But monarchies, to Burke’s mind, existed to maintain order, above all else. And while England–and after its union with Scotland in 1707, Great Britain–could counter bad kings with restraining parliaments, no parliamentary restraint existed in France at the time of revolution. (The Estates General, the French equivalent of a parliament, had not gathered since 1614. Louis XVI called them together in 1787, two years before the outbreak of the revolution. It failed to accomplish anything of note and did nothing to stem le deluge that would soon overwhelm them all in the summer of 1789.) So perhaps nothing could have been done to save the ancien regime, though Burke thought a successful retro-fit possible. That stated, his writings in Reflections on the Revolution in France still resonate, and still serve as a warning to those seeking to completely upend those existing societies, long in place and gradually altered over time, in place of a radical rewriting of all rules, laws, and customs. In Burke’s case, at the very least, he served as a herald to history on the perils to taking this direction. In the words of Christopher Hitchens, “Edmund Burke understood before anyone else that revolutions devour their young—and turn into their opposites”.[12]

Footnotes

[1] The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. 6 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854–56.

[2] The History of the Trial of William Hastings, Esq., Late Governor General of Bengal Before The High Court of Parliament in Westminster Hall, pg 476.

[3] Ibid.

[4] The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, 22 Mar. 1775 6 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854–56.

[5] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Charles James Fox (1749-1806) Mitchell, Leslie (2004). Retrieved 8 March 2008.

[6] The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Speech on the Army Estimates 1790, Vol. III, pg. 209-81.

[7] Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke, pg. 190

[8] The Works and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume 8, pg. 186

[9] Reflections, pg. 132

[10] Reflections, pg. 323

[11] The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, published 1792, pg. 41

[12] Reactionary Prophet–Edmund Burke, book review in The Atlantic, April 2004, by Christopher Hitchens

References

The following three books served as invaluable resources regarding the subject written about in this article:

• Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Conor Cruise O’ Brien, Pelican Books, 1968
• Civilization, The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson, Penguin Books, 2011
• The Great Debate–Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, by Yuval Levin, Basic Books, 2014

In his book, “The Great War & Modern Memory”, author and WWII veteran Paul Fussell drew on the connections between the language and culture of the First World War, particularly in Great Britain, to the actual battlefield realities its soldiery were burdened with.  It was a seminal work, dedicated to a certain Sgt. Hudson, who was Fussell’s company second-in-commmand.  (Sgt. Hudson died due to shrapnel wounds, physically next to Fussell when hit on the French-German border, in January, 1945.)  Through Fussell’s book, published in the mid 1970’s, the works of three major authors/poets re-entered into literary consciousness:  Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon.  In these three writers, Fussell sought to come to grips with his own memories of loss and trauma as a result of his Second World War experiences.  But more importantly, the entire modern anti-war movement in the English-speaking world, at least in a literary and/or poetic sense, was arguably ignited by these three men and their writings.  All three were members of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front, and their observations stripped away all the romance, adventure and glory that war had been adorned with up to that point, revealing it for the experience it truly was.  All future writers on war would take note, and paeans to the glories of combat would give way to gritty warnings of its damaging effects, both physically and psychologically.

Glory

But and if he escape the doom of outstretched Death and by victory make good the splendid boast of battle, he hath honour of all, alike young as old, and cometh to his death after much happiness; as he groweth old he standeth out among his people, and there’s none that will do him hurt either in honour or in right; all yield him place on the benches, alike the young and his peers and his elders. This is the prowess each man should this day aspire to, never relaxing from war.–Tyrtaeus, 650 B.C. (est.)

In Alfred Lord Tennyson’s epic poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, he recounts the doomed charge of  British soldiers in a brave but futile push in a battle during the Crimean War.  Of this, he wrote:

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Doomed they were, but still given a gloried, posthumous varnish.  Poetry and literature, from Antiquity through the 19th Century,  was typically written in this manner: They’d “given” their lives for a greater cause, their bravery echoing through eternity as a result. (Paul Fussell referred to Tennyson’s writings as “Arthurian”[1], referencing–quite obviously–the legend of King Arthur.) Chivalry, courage, valor, glorious death on the battlefield, one’s honor resounding through the ages…these were the sentiments conveyed by poets dating back to the ancient Greeks like Homer and Tyrtaeus,  straight through William Shakespeare, and to poet laureate of the British Empire, Alfred Lord Tennyson. However, the First World War, fought between 1914 through 1918, was a different kind of war, as technology had outpaced strategy. Commanders utilizing outdated military stategems had not the military knowledge or experience to deal with rapid-fire machine guns or powerful artillery pieces. A far cry from cavalry charges, uniforms bright red, brass buttons and swords agleam, this.  And so a four year slaughter commenced, a “no man’s land” developed: a line stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss border, with trenches no further than a few hundred (or less) yards away from each other, no ground permanently gained by either side for four years.

Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen, through their works, obliterated the glorification of war, perhaps for all time.  All three saw heavy combat, and lived life in the insalubrious, grubby trenches that were endemic of the Western Front. All intersected with each other at certain points during the war.  Graves had met Sassoon as a result of being officers in the same battalion. Sassoon met Owen whilst convalescing at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, a facility specifically set up to treat neurasthenia, or what is commonly known as “shell shock”.  All were upper-middle class young men, educated in private (or as the British refer to it, public) institutions, and schooled in the classics of poetry and literature.  Sassoon and Graves, and later Sassoon and Owen, became good friends due to their shared educational and social backgrounds.  Graves was the first to grow disillusioned by the war; Sassoon would still cling to his idealism a bit longer. Early on, whilst comparing writings, Sassoon would tell Graves that his writings were too harsh in their depictions of war. Graves, the more experienced of the two, said to Sassoon that he’d soon see it differently: “I had one or two drafts…and showed them to Siegfried. He frowned and said that war should not be written about in such a realistic way…Siegfried had not yet been to the trenches. I told him, in my old-soldierly manner, that he would soon change his style.”[2] He did.

Robert Graves–“Wars don’t change except in name”

Robert Graves survived the war.  He would go on to write “Goodbye To All That“, a semi-autobiographical account of his wartime experiences.  Some of its veracity was questioned, but Graves maintained any semi-truths were inserted into its texts to reach “higher truths” about the war. It remains amongst the most important pieces of anti-war literature of all time nonetheless. He is well-known for the aforementioned tome, as well as his literary contributions, “I, Claudius”, “Claudius the God”, and his translations of Omar Khayyam’s “Rubaiyat”. Lesser known–but just as important–is his poetry, where the echoes of his experiences can be read throughout. In one such poem, Graves writes of as a chance meeting with a certain Corporal Stare. On leave from the war and throwing a dinner for his staff, a  haunting encounter occurs:

Five hungry lads welcomed the fish
With shouts that nearly cracked the dish;
Asparagus came with tender tops,
Strawberries in cream, and mutton chops.

A good time being had by all, they broke into a post-dinner, drunken revelry:

We bawled Church anthems in choro
Of Bethlehem and Hermon snow,
And drinking songs,
a mighty sound
To help the good red Pommard round.
Stories and laughter interspersed

Then, through the window, Graves and his men see a departed comrade-in-arms: Corporal Stare. “Badges, stripes, and medals all complete, he staggered up the street”, as if still alive. But he wasn’t. He’d been killed the month before, torn apart by machine gun fire. But there he was:

He paused, saluted smartly, grinned,
Then passed away like a puff of wind,
Leaving us blank astonishment.
The song broke, up we started,
leant out of the window—nothing there,
Not the least shadow of Corporal Stare,
Only a quiver of smoke that showed
A fag-end* dropped on the silent road.

*Note: British slang for a cigarette butt.

In “The Next War”, Graves confronts those youngsters who see battle-glory in their future with cold advice: they will not like what they’ll find.

You young friskies who today
Jump and fight in Father’s hay 
With bows and arrows and wooden spears, 
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers, 
Happy though these hours you spend,
Have they warned you how games end?

From that same hour by fate you’re bound 
As champions of this stony ground, 
Loyal and true in everything,
To serve your Army and your King, 
Prepared to starve and sweat and die 
Under some fierce foreign sky, 

And then the final punch, the coup de grace:

By the million men will die 
In some new horrible agony;
And children here will thrust and poke, 
Shoot and die, and laugh at the joke, 
With bows and arrows and wooden spears, 
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers.*

*Note: Graves was a captain in the Royal Welch (Welsh) Fusiliers.

Siegfried Sassoon–“Mad Jack”

As for Sassoon, his works did turn out to be significantly harsher, even more than Graves’.  As his battlefield experiences accrued, he became battle-hardened. Psychologically pushed to the edge, he grew into an epic risk-taker.  He acquired the sobriquet “Mad Jack” for his actions, and betrayed a sort of death-wish. This became particularly so when he was informed of the death of his brother Hamo, who was killed in action in the Gallipoli assault.  He also earned a Military Cross, one of the highest military awards for gallantry in the British armed services. If Graves still maintained a sort of eloquence of phrasing, Sassoon went for stunning, straight wording, eloquence stripped away:

‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said 
When we met him last week on our way to the line. 
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead, 
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine. 
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Sassoon’s works spare nothing in their depictions of the effects of war. Combat was only one dimension he explored. There was the crushing psychological effects of trench life, depicted in “Suicide in the Trenches”:

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

Sassoon wrote of the lies told to a grieving mother by the officer who delivered the condolences of her son’s death in battle. The officer fills her head with tales of her boy’s non-existent bravery, in the poem “The Hero”.

‘Jack fell as he’d have wished,’ the mother said,
And folded up the letter that she’d read.
‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something broke
In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.
She half looked up. ‘We mothers are so proud
Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.
He’d told the poor old dear some gallant lies
That she would nourish all her days, no doubt
For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes
Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,
Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.

He thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how he’d tried
To get sent home, and how, at last, he died,
Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care
Except that lonely woman with white hair.

In “Decorated”, a poem written about a scene he witnessed whilst in civilian life, Sassoon observes a vicious street fight.  The murderous winner of this brawl kills five adversaries. The crowd loves him for it. He may be a violent, drunken bum, but he’s a war hero. The man, deranged due to combat fatigue, can do no wrong in the eyes of his civilian admirers:

I watched a jostling mob that surged and yelled,
And fought along the street to see their man:
Was it some drunken bully that they held

For justice – some poor thief who snatched and ran?
I asked a grinning news-boy, ‘What’s the fun?’
‘The beggar did for five of ‘em!’ said he.
‘But if he killed them why’s he let off free?’
I queried – ‘Most chaps swing for murdering one.’
He screamed with joy; and told me, when he’d done –
‘It’s Corporal Stubbs, the Birmingham VC!’*

*Note: The Victoria Cross is the highest award for conspicuous bravery under fire in the British military. It is the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

On leave from the front in July of 1917, Sassoon typed a letter of protest against the war.  First published in newspapers throughout Great Britain, it eventually found its way to the House of Commons, where it was read aloud to a stunned–and in many cases, indignant–assembly of MPs, and published in the Times of London.  Titled “Finished With The War: A Soldier’s Declaration”, Sassoon said he was “making this statement as an act of wilfull [sic] defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers.” This was treasonous talk, and a lesser connected, less decorated individual would’ve been tried and shot as a traitor; indeed, many had already met that fate in the field for far less serious offenses.  But Sassoon was already a war hero whose exploits were already the stuff of legend.  Certainly being awarded the Military Cross kept him from an otherwise certain fate in front of a firing squad. It was obvious to those in high offices that Sassoon’s execution would not have played well on the home front, not with casualty notifications arriving with alarming frequency to homes throughout Britain. Robert Graves, also politically connected, lobbied on Sassoon’s behalf to avert a capital sentence. (Sassoon supposedly was unhappy with Graves for interceding on his behalf.) But Sassoon, the British government, and BEF high-command found an out: he was declared mentally unfit to report back to duty due to shell-shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, a facility specializing in the treatment of the aforementioned condition.  It was there that he met 2nd Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, fresh off the line and in a state of severe battle fatigue.

Wilfred Owen–The Doomed Youth

Sassoon and Owen became fast friends.  Owen was clearly suffering from shell-shock; he was once caught in a trench for several days, unable to exit due to incessant enemy fire on his position. His predicament was made considerably worse by the dead officer whose remains were never more than a few feet away the whole time. He was a great admirer of Sassoon’s poetry and his stance against the war. Like Sassoon, he felt the nagging guilt every good officer had for being away from his men, unable to keep them safe.  Sassoon mentored Owen, nurtured his talent, made suggestions and gave encouragement if and when necessary.  Owen, also an educated, intellectual officer, was a kindred spirit for Sassoon.  It was at Craiglockhart that Owen wrote the first draft of what is perhaps the most well-known war poem of all time, the one that some scholars called “the poem that changed poetry forever”.

Owen had been subjected to gas attacks whilst on the line.  The horror of it all is most effectively conveyed in “Dulce et Decorum Est”, a title taken from the Roman lyrical poet Horace’s Odes. (Dulce et decorum pro patria mori: it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country, reads the English translation of this Latin phrase.) The dark irony of the title is revealed in the words thereafter. The first part of the poem sets the scene. First, exhaustion:

Bent double,
like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags,
we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares
we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

So exhausted, Owen’s company was, that they’re oblivious “to the hoots of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.” (Five-Nines: gas shells.) “Drunk with fatigue” though they were, an immediate adrenaline rush ensues, the survival instincts in full effect, an intense desperation to get the gas masks on before the chlorine shells release their toxic fumes:

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea,
I saw him drowning.

Desperation, helplessness, a mad and futile attempt at survival, “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” This is what the effects of a gas are on a man, one too unfortunate to have gotten his mask on quick enough. Owen witnesses it, first-hand:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Goodbye To All That

Robert Graves, having survived the war, eventually made his way to Spain. He pursued a career in writing, and managed to secure some semblance of financial security  through the royalties of his memoir. He was in and out of academia. He married, divorced, remarried, relocated from England to Spain, then back again, if only to avoid the Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s.  He eventually spent the remainder of his life in Spain.  His son, John David Graves, would lose his life in the Second World War in 1943, killed in action.  He died in 1985, in Majorca, Spain.

Siegfried Sassoon became literary editor of The Daily Editor, and dabbled in socialist politics.  Though involved in a number of same-sex relationships, he later married and fathered a son.  He authored a fictional biography, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and later a genuine, three volume biography of his life, which was critically acclaimed.  He was bestowed with an Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1951; a significant turn, considering his published, open defiance of the British government and military command during the war.  He died in 1975, age 81.

Wilfred Owen did not survive the war. Despite the entreaties of his friend Siegfried Sassoon to opt out of the war–he had been given the option of a non-combat assignment by British military command–Owen decided to go back front-line duty in late 1917.  He couldn’t reconcile in his mind that he was safe in England at the same time the men he left behind in France were still in peril on a daily and nightly basis, and so he returned to his unit. He left England without telling Sassoon he was going back to the Western Front; he knew Sassoon would make every attempt to stop him, and could well have succeeded, and so he bid Sassoon no farewell.  He was killed in action on November 4th, 1918, a mere seven days before the cease-fire of November 11th.  His parents received his death notice as church bells in Oswestry, England rang in celebration of the declared armistice. Siegfried Sassoon later commented in his autobiography that he was “unable to accept [Owen’s] disappearance philosophically.”

Lieutenant W.E.S. Owen, M.C.,Manchester Regiment
4th November, 1918, Age 25
“Shall Life Renew These Bodies? Of a truth all death will annul”-W.O.

All three are commemorated, along with thirteen other “war poets”, at Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey

Footnotes:
[1] Fussell, Paul The Great War and Modern Memory, pg. 21 (Oxford University Press, 1975)
[2] Graves, Robert Goodbye To All That, pg. 174-175 (Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1929)
References:
Fussell, Paul Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Backbay Books, 1996)
BBC Documentary: Wilfed Owen-A Remembrance Tale, 2012

“By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.”-Edmund Burke, Anglo-Irish Statesman (1729-1797)

 In a wilderness of mirrors…what will the spider do, suspend operations, will the weevil delay?–Gerontion, T.S. Eliot

James Jesus Angleton

He’s been called “dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world”[1] by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Richard Helms, and a man who “saw a mole [i.e. double-agent] under every chair”, by Rolfe Kingsley, director of the Soviet Division of the CIA in the late 1960’s, who further described him as “a menace” [2]. He was said to have chain-smoked Virginia Slims, downed bourbon habitually, worked in a darkened, cigarette smoke-filled room surrounded by mountains of files. He had a habit of accusing those that disputed his conspiratorial theories as “one of them”, ostensibly inferring Soviet sympathies or worse. He obsessively cultivated orchids, as he felt that they showed “how deception works in the real world” [3].  He has been described as “brilliant”, yet alternately depicted as a paranoid, destructive conspiracy-monger. He was James Jesus Angleton. He studied poetry at Yale University, joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS—the forerunner of the CIA) during WWII, then transitioned into the CIA thereafter. He would serve in the American intelligence services to 1975, when he was unceremoniously sacked by President Gerald Ford’s appointee as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), William Colby. His reign as Chief of Counter-Intelligence (CI) is still strongly discussed, his legacy still hotly debated. (He was CI for twenty years between 1955 to 1975.) But more than that, Angleton played a central role in one of the most damaging and confusing events to ever grip the American intelligence apparatus. It is the story of two Soviet defectors, both of whom gave conflicting and contradicting information to the CIA, and who forced every major player in the CIA and the FBI to take sides as to which of the two was real, and which one was the agent provocateur. It has been called “the war of the defectors”–an apt description. This is the story of Yuri Nosenko, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and James Angleton. It is the story of a game where every player lost, and no player won.

A Spy Comes In From The Cold

Anatoliy Golitsyn

December 15, 1961, Helsinki, Finland: A man in a heavy overcoat walks into the American embassy and asks for the CIA station chief, Frank Friberg. The fact that someone could walk off the street in a snowstorm and ask for Frank Friberg—that he even knows who he is–stuns the staff at the American embassy from the start.  His name is Anatoliy Golitsyn, a consul at the Soviet embassy. Friberg meets with him immediately, and in that first meeting on that snowy day, Golitsyn hands over a pile of classified documents lifted from the Soviet embassy. More to come, he says. Friberg asks him if he could stay where he is within the Soviet embassy, as an “asset in place”—act as a double-agent and filter important info back, but without defecting.  An impossibility,  says Golitsyn. He has to defect by December 25^th, as he is scheduled for reassignment back to Moscow. He insists that his wife and daughter be allowed to defect with him.  Additionally, he says that the KGB has ways of finding out who’s feeding the CIA classified info, and that he will be found out and executed thereafter…in fact, he is already vulnerable.  Nothing short of asylum is an option.

Friberg thinks this an astounding development, not just because Golitsyn volunteers highly-classified information unprompted, but also due to the revelation that the CIA has been so infiltrated by the KGB that an individual like Golitsyn can be found out to be a double-agent. Getting wind of this, the brass back at CIA headquarters frantically search out Golitsyn’s background. The files on him are skint, but an earlier KGB defector in 1954 mentioned Golitsyn as a possible recruit for the CIA as an “asset”—one within the Soviet apparatus capable of filtering secrets to the Americans. His bona fides tentatively established, Golitsyn and his family board a military personnel plane and head to West Germany on December 25^th,, 1961.

Back in Frankfurt, West Germany, Golitsyn writes out his entire C.V. with the KGB from the beginning of his career to present-day. He is given numerous lie-detector tests. He is interrogated for days on end. His answers stand up well, matching up with information the CIA interrogators already know to be true, whilst providing additional information to fill in blank spaces. “By the end of the first week, the CIA [is] fully persuaded that he [is] a bona fide defector who has indeed held the positions in the KGB he claimed” [3] On arrival to the States, Golitsyn is further debriefed, and provides extraordinary information regarding the KGB’s penetration of western intelligence agencies:

To the amazement of his debriefers, he not only revealed knowledge of a wide range of secret NATO documents — but he identified them by their code numbers.  He explained that for convenience the KGB used the NATO numbering system to request specific documents, which would than arrive from its source in France in 72 hours.[3]

The Golitsyn defection reaches the level of President Kennedy, who  makes an unfortunate call to Charles de Gaulle, president of France, to tell him that according to Golitsyn, French intelligence has been compromised and infiltrated at the highest levels by the KGB.  The French send their own intelligence agents to interrogate Golitsyn, and come away shocked: Golitsyn tells them about top secret data that only those at the highest echelons of the French government could’ve possibly known.

Golitsyn is the real thing, determines CI James Angleton, who bestows his benediction—bona fide–on the Soviet defector. One more thing, says Golitsyn…the KGB will send over another defector to discredit me, to muddy-up the veracity of my information.  It will happen soon. Caveat.

 A Drunk Get Rolled In Geneva

June 8^th, 1962:  A man attached to a Soviet delegation arrives in Geneva, Switzerland for an eighteen-nation conference to discuss disarmament. On his first night in Geneva, he manages to get himself extremely inebriated on vodka, then proceeds to get rolled for $900 ($200 in US dollars) in Swiss francs by a prostitute. He is a KGB man, having managed entry to the organization, despite his taste for vodka and disreputable women, due to his family connections. (His late father was a confidante of Soviet Premier of Nikita Khruschev, and so many looked the other way at the young man’s proclivities.) Fearing severe retribution by his superiors for having lost money in such a careless way—the KGB did not look kindly on their agents getting rolled by ladies of the night, or by anyone else for that matter—the man approaches a member of the American delegation at the conference. “I’d like to talk to you, but not here,” he says. He proposes lunch with the American.  They meet at a restaurant a day or two thereafter. The Russian pitches the American diplomat: I’ll provide you classified information, but I need money, lest my superiors find out about my escapade. The American diplomat cautions the Russian that he’s about to commit treason. It matters not to the Russian; let’s meet again, and I’ll have some valuable information for you.  They decide on a meeting the next day at a less conspicuous location. The American diplomat notifies Washington of this development.

Two CIA interrogators are rushed to Geneva for the meeting with the KGB man: Tennent “Pete” Bagley, a member of the Soviet Division at the CIA, comes in from nearby Bern, Switzerland; George Kisevalter, considered to be the primary spy-handler in the CIA, comes in from headquarters. The KGB man is Yuri Nosenko…and he arrives drunk as a skunk to the meeting. They have a few more meetings at various safe-houses. Nosenko comes through with the information he promised his CIA handlers. He answers in the negative when asked if he wished to defect; he has a wife and kids in Russia.  Pete Bagley, euphoric that a genuine “asset in place” has been successfully recruited, cables HQ and says that Nosenko is the real thing, his bona fides proven. The CIA will have a genuine mole in the KGB—a serious win.

The case file winds up on the desk of James Angleton. Angleton’s job is similar to a fact-checker at a newspaper or an internal investigations officer in a police department, only his responsibilities are to see that agents in the field don’t get gulled by their Soviet counterparts, or that one of them doesn’t wind up becoming a KGB asset—a turncoat.  Bagley isn’t a direct subordinate of Angleton’s, but thinking it a smart political move to keep Angleton in the loop, he consults him; Angleton is entirely too powerful within the agency to ignore. Arriving at HQ, Angleton hands Bagley a file to read. He is told the file is so highly classified that it cannot leave the office.  Bagley gets down to reading it…and is horrified. The information he received from Nosenko isn’t fresh or new, but in fact terribly suspicious:

Each point in Nosenko’s story paralleled information given by the earlier defector.  When the two stories were compared, it became clear that Nosenko was a “provocation”, sent to Bagley in Geneva by the KGB to supply clues that would divert from and confuse the intelligence the CIA already had from the real defector.  Bagley understood, even before Angleton told him, that he had been duped by Nosenko. [4]

For his part, Angleton isn’t terribly surprised or concerned. In fact, he views these developments as somewhat of a positive. He tells Bagley that the information he just read was supplied to the CIA by a defector—he refers to him as “Mr. X”—who came over in December of 1961 through the US embassy in Helsinki. Angleton’s conclusion is that Nosenko is clearly a “controlled source”, meaning he was still being controlled by the KGB. He is there to spread disinformation, to damage Mr. X’s credibility.  Why not turn the tables and feed him disinformation, essentially deceiving the deceivers? Bagley soon returns to Geneva. He doesn’t hear back from Nosenko after returning from Washington.

The Golitsyn Prophecy Fulfilled

Yuri Nosenko

President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, November 22, 1963.  All levels of the US government are on high alert. Lee Harvey Oswald emerges as the assassin.  He is an avowed communist, known for distributing leaflets published by the “Fair Play For Cuba Committee” on street corners in New Orleans. (Oswald is the only member of the aforementioned committee.)  He is married to a Russian woman, having met and married her during his time in Moscow a few years earlier.  He is a former Marine, trained in aircraft surveillance and radar, stationed at a naval airbase in Atsugi, Japan. His resume is terribly suspicious. Questions immediately arise. Was he alone in this? Was he a KGB assassin?  A sitting president killed by an avowed communist who spent three years in the USSR, then re-emigrates back to the US…very suspicious, indeed.  Yuri Nosenko surfaces and makes contact with the CIA six weeks after the Kennedy assassination. He wants to meet Bagley when he is back in Geneva the next week.  On January 23^rd, 1964, he meets Bagley at a safe house, pours himself a drink, and declares that he is ready to defect. Bagley knows that Nosenko is utterly useless as a defector, particularly if he is still controlled by KGB, which is the consensus opinion at the CIA. But then Nosenko drops an even bigger bombshell: he has information about Lee Harvey Oswald.  He goes on to explain that he has seen the KGB file on Oswald; after all, he was Oswald’s case officer.  But he has to defect before February 4^th, when he’s scheduled to return to Moscow. He fears he’ll be arrested.  Given the circumstances, the CIA had no choice but to sneak Nosenko out. The Kennedy assassination is too fresh, so many questions yet unanswered; to risk letting a KGB agent go who says he has critical information about Oswald’s time in the USSR would destroy careers at the CIA.

After a stopover in Frankfurt to debrief, Nosenko arrives in Washington on February 11^th, 1964.  Nosenko is now a defector. More debriefs. He’s now in a CIA safe house. A few things are determined: a.) If Oswald had made contact with the KGB during his time in the Soviet Union, he would’ve been handled by the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate Tourist Department, b.) Yuri Nosenko was a part of the Second Chief Directorate,  c.) One of the Second Chief Directorate’s duties is “wet work”, i.e. assassinations.  As for Nosenko, his information on Oswald is rather flat and anti-climactic. Oswald was mentally unstable, he says, and we had no use for him; we suggested he go home to the United States. And that was that.

James Angleton thinks this patently false.  Nosenko, it seems, has been caught out in several untruths already, among them: he exaggerated his rank within the KGB (he said he is a colonel, when in fact he is a captain), and more importantly, the National Security Agency (NSA)—charged with monitoring Soviet communications—finds no evidence that any cable arrived from Moscow stating Nosenko was to return.  There was no recall order. Additionally, if Oswald was based at Atsagi Naval Air Base, was an aviation electronics specialist, he must’ve had some value to the Soviets, no? His story doesn’t make sense. Angleton decrees that Nosenko is lying.

Three Years In Hell

Nosenko floods his CIA handlers with a torrent of secrets.  It is not enough, and not what they’re looking for. He is not coughing up the critical data, specifically regarding the Kennedy assassination, nor his true role in all of this.  Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of the slain president, approves the consignment of Yuri Nosenko to solitary confinement. He is subjected to sleep deprivation, lousy food, no human contact, very little light, and no time outdoors. He is worked over psychologically and physically, specifically by Ted Bagley, his initial CIA handler in Geneva.  CIA Chief Richard Helms notifies Chief Justice Earl Warren, the man in charge of investigating the Kennedy assassination, that the CIA has Nosenko in custody. Despite Nosenko’s connection to Oswald, his name is omitted from the Warren Report.   And all the while, through it all, Nosenko sticks to his stories.  He never breaks–despite the interrogations and ill-treatments–for three years.

Concurrently, deep schisms develop within the intelligence apparatus of the United States.  The FBI is now involved, as Director J. Edgar Hoover sees Nosenko as a bona fide defector.  Hoover pokes his nose in to the CIA’s business due to the fact that he has two KGB moles of his own, codenamed Fedora and Top Hat, who have been providing the FBI with secrets while maintaining positions within the Soviet delegation to the United Nations in New York City since 1962.  The diplomatic positions are a cover; they’re both KGB operatives.  Both of these moles are ostensibly acting separately from each other. Their stories match up with the information that Nosenko has provided, almost verbatim.  The ultimate arbiter, Angleton, thinks they are “dangles”: KGB agents sent to provide bogus information to the Americans, to throw more mud into the already opaque waters.  Careers begin to get damaged: William C. Sullivan, FBI man in charge of counter-intelligence, runs afoul of Hoover by claiming that Fedora and Top Hat are double-agents, and by extension, Nosenko. Sullivan’s opinion implies that Hoover has been duped. Sullivan soon becomes persona non grata at the FBI.  Angleton maintains that Nosenko is bogus, and worse, part of a conspiracy to derail any leads that follow back to the KGB with regards to the murder of President Kennedy.  But with the pressure to get Nosenko to confess comes increased pressure from forces outside the CIA—Hoover at FBI, members within the American political sphere privy to his existence—to release him from his indefinite detention.  By 1967, unable to coax a confession out of him, the CIA has no choice but to release him.

Who Was Real?

Anatoliy Golitysn’s bona fides are never doubted by Angleton, who is the only man with whom such things truly matters at CIA.  But there are those who have their doubts.  Despite Golitsyn’s initial debriefs, rich with good, high-level information, he subsequently feeds Angleton strange theories. Angleton, with a unshakeable belief in Golitsyn’s value, acts on these theories, none of which yield anything of value. Golitsyn tells Angleton that there’s a mole within the CIA with a Slavic last name that starts with the letter K. An agent by the name of Peter Karlow pays dearly for this, losing his position at the CIA in 1963; he eventually is cleared of all wrongdoing in 1988, twenty five years after his name is sullied.  Golitsyn feeds him some more strange theoreticals: One claims the rift between the Red Chinese and the Soviets in 1961 (the Sino-Soviet split) is a ruse to fool the West, with its intent on splintering solidarity amongst the western powers; better to pick them off one by one, as Golitsyn tells Angleton, who runs with it. (DI Richard Helms dismisses this as nonsense.) Golitsyn also feeds Angleton the theory that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is a Soviet mole; MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI, finds nothing.  He accuses Canadian Prime Ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau of similar activities. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) find nothing on either man. The Canadian Ambassador to the USSR, John Watkins, is not so lucky: he dies during interrogations by the CIA and the RCMP. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is also accused of being a Soviet mole by Angleton; Kissinger’s responds accurately by stating that no matter how brilliant and loyal Angleton may be, there’s no way he could stay in counter-intelligence for so long without going mad with paranoia. But Angleton’s faith in Golitsyn–the source of these theories–remains unshakeable. Important intelligence from other sources gets thrown in the bin, much to the resentment of others in the agency, who worked so hard to obtain it. Angleton runs all data past Golitsyn, who usually sits in negative judgment of these offerings.As a result, Angleton becomes the most hated and feared man in the CIA by those within the organization. Golitsyn’s reputation plummets along with Angleton’s.

Freed in 1967 with an apology and a consulting job with the CIA, Nosenko’s reputation concurrently rises as the Golitsyn’s and Angleton’s reputations decline. Angleton staves off all attempts at removal as CI by coming up with a critical and timely piece of intelligence: weeks in advance of its occurance, he accurately reports that Jordan, Egypt, and Syria are mobilizing to attack Israel. The event comes to be known as the Six Day War.  Even President Johnson is impressed by this intelligence coup.  Angleton remains secure until late 1974, despite his tattered reputation. Golitsyn, by extension of having Angleton’s ear, continues to feed Angleton questionable intelligence.

 In The End…

Inevitably, no one to this day is fully sure who the real defector was.  Angleton gets fired by Richard Helms’ replacement, William Colby, under direction of President Gerald Ford. (Angleton suspects Ford of being a Soviet spy as well.)  Golitsyn inevitably gets dismissed as a crackpot.  One source in MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA, claims that Golitsyn was a genuine defector that simply ran out of bona fide intelligence and lapsed into fantasy to keep himself relevant.  Yuri Nosenko is subsequently credited for the following:

[Nosenko] has identified, or produced investigative leads on, some 200 foreigners and 238 Americans in whom the KGB had displayed interest.  He has fingered some 300 Soviet intelligence agents and overseas contacts, and roughly 2000 KGB officers.  He has pinpointed fifty-two hidden microphones that the Soviets had placed in the American embassy in Moscow.  He has expanded the CIA’s knowledge of how the Soviets sought to blackmail foreign diplomats and journalists.[6]

To put it into further perspective, one writer on the subject stated that one must take on faith that “Moscow would trade all that information to protect one mole” [7].

As for Angleton, he still has his defenders, who point to the fact that during his twenty year tenure, the CIA had no high-level moles within the agency.  Aldrich Ames, considered to be the most damaging double-agent in agency history, begins feeding critical information to the Soviets a full ten years after Angleton resigns as Director of Counter-Intelligence.  Angletonians claim an agent such as Ames would’ve never have gone undetected if Angleton were still CI. As for Golitsyn, he goes on to write books such as The Perestroika Deception, which claims that the Soviet initiatives undertaken during the tenure of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev were a ruse to lull the West into a sense of false security.  In another of his books, New Lies For Old, Golitsyn postulates that the Soviet Union will fake its collapse, with the express purpose of gulling the West, only to reconstitute itself with leadership derived from the KGB.  (His prediction that the USSR would collapse was made in 1984, some seven years before it did so.) Given the current state of Russia, with former KGB operative Vladimir Putin at the helm, Golitsyn might have been onto something. As for the two KGB moles who corroborated Nosenko’s resume and information, Fedora and Top Hat, the consensus thinking is that Fedora was in fact a double-agent. On the other hand, Top Hat, later identified as Dmitri Polyakov, turned out to be a genuine CIA asset within the KGB.  He is identified as such by turncoat Aldrich Ames, and executed by the Soviets in 1988.

Yuri Nosenko dies in 2008.  James Angleton goes to his grave (he passes in 1987) believing that Nosenko is bogus.  Ted Bagley, his initial handler back in the early 60’s, writes in 2007 that Nosenko was a “provocateur and a deceiver”.  For his part, Angleton claims he saw no need to keep Nosenko in detention for the better part of three years; that was the decision of others in the CIA Soviet Division.  But there can be little doubt that it was Angleton’s “not bona fide” malediction that consigned Nosenko to his hellish detention.

In 1975, Nosenko looks up Angleton in the Virginia phone directory. Strangely, he is listed. He calls and gets Angleton on the phone. Perhaps looking to square the circle, Nosenko queries Angleton as to why he was treated the way that he was. Angleton answers that he had nothing to do with his detention and treatment thereafter, but he still feels that he is a fraudulent defector.  “I have nothing more to say to you,” says Angleton. Nosenko responds in kind, and hangs up the phone. Nothing get settled. It still hasn’t, almost fifty years later.

The postscript on the Nosenko affair is best summed up by the obituary written in The Economist for Yuri Nosenko in 2008, “America’s spies were as thoroughly divided about him as any KGB agent could have wished.”[8] If Nosenko was indeed an agent provocateur, he succeeded beyond all expectations.  One might say the same for Anatoliy Golitsyn.  As for Pete Bagley, he wrote extensively about the Nosenko affair in his book, Spy Wars, published in 2007.  He was scheduled to give a talk on the book at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC to coincide with its release. But at the last moment, he was abruptly cancelled by museum director Peter Earnest.  Bagley bitterly complained that it was, “because the old spies that run the place back the official CIA position that Nosenko . . . was legit, not a provocateur.” For his part, Earnest states on the record that he has heard from old CIA alumni “whose careers were ruined” by the whole affair. As Earnest puts it, “interestingly, forty years later, feelings are [still] very sharp.”

• [1] Richard Helms, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (Random House, 2003) pg.27
• [2] Ron Kessler, The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror, (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004) pg. 56
• [3] Edward J. Epstein, Deception: The Invisible War Between the CIA and the KGB, (Simon & Schuster) pg. 57
• [4] Edward J. Epstein, Through The Looking Glass, article. http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/looking.htm
• [5] Edward J. Epstein, Deception—The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA, (Simon & Schuster) pg. 16.
• [6] Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes—The History of the CIA, (Anchor Books, 2008) pg. 270
• [7] Ibid.
• [8] The Economist, Yuri Nosenko Obituary http://www.economist.com/node/12051491
• Also consulted: David Wise, Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA, (Random House, 1992)

Describing the Cold War to someone who did not grow up during it is a bit odd.  It wasn’t a “hot” war, such as the Second World War was, nor was it like Iraq or Afghanistan.  It did occasionally flare up in certain places, like Korea or Vietnam, but it never got into an all-out military action.  It was war of rhetoric, economics, occasional threat-behavior, and when things did get ornery, grisly proxy wars in Third World locations. But it was not a war of bullets and bombs between the chief antagonists.  It is also hard to describe it to someone too young to have lived through it since it was fought against an enemy that hasn’t existed for over two decades: the Soviet Union (USSR).  It is further difficult to describe, given the fact that the system employed by the USSR (communism) has ceased to be utilized as a means of governance and economics in all but the smallest corners of the planet, such as Cuba and North Korea.  But unlike even the First or Second World Wars, this “war” was the only one that brought the world to within hours of total annihilation, not once, but twice.The Cuban Missile Crisis has been well-documented, an event that has berthed countless books, movies, and commentary.  However, nearly twenty-one years later, an event that was arguably as dangerous and provocative occurred, but hasn’t been as remotely documented as the aforementioned Cuban affair. It started as a mere military exercise amongst the forces of NATO and almost ended as a nuclear war.  The zeitgeist of the times, exacerbated by the hyper-paranoid personalities of the Soviet side (Yuri Andropov) and the harsh rhetoric emanating from the American (Ronald Reagan), contributed to a poisonous atmosphere that nearly blundered the world into nuclear annihilation.  This is the story of Able Archer 83.

Yuri Andropov

Yuri Andropov assumed the Soviet premiership in November, 1982, following the death of Leonid Brezhnev.  He was 68, his ascension to the highest office in the USSR being the fulfillment of his lifelong ambitions.  In the West, he was perceived as a liberal reformer–a rather strange characterization, given his instrumental role in the violent suppression of the Hungarians in 1956 (he was USSR ambassador to Hungary and was an eyewitness to the uprising) and the Czechoslovakians in 1968. He was head of the KGB from 1967 to his assumption of the Soviet premiership in 1982.  A man thoroughly schooled in the black arts of espionage, skullduggery and assassinations (Andropov was rumored to have been behind the dispatch of two political rivals in the years leading up to his grabbing the top spot), he was also man with a reputation for incorruptibility. Otherwise, he was “bitter, frightened and deeply pessimistic.” [1] Additionally, he attained power at a very tense moment in Soviet history.  In Poland, the Solidarity labor movement had gained steam and was causing headaches for Polish premier, Wojciech Jaruzelski, and by extension, the Soviets.  To compound matters, there was “that insolent priest” (to purloin a phrase from Henry II of England, another monarch given headaches by an earlier, upstart clergyman, Thomas Beckett) in Rome, Pope John Paul II, who Andropov characterized as “hold(ing) extreme anti-Communist views…he has criticized the way in which State agencies of the People’s Republic function [Poland].”[2] When Ronald Reagan, on assuming the United States presidency in January 1981, wrote to General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev proposing a meeting to discuss nuclear weapons, it was Yuri Andropov that told Premier Leonid Brezhnev that it was “a phony gesture” and a waste of time [3].  Deeply unhealthy, he was also suffering from kidney problems; his dialysis treatments, received twice a week, left him in a state of exhaustion four out of seven days.

RYAN, PSYOPS, Flight 007

In May of 1981, Andropov called a top-secret meeting of all the top Soviet KGB and military officers to discuss the state of things with the West.  Leonid Brezhnev, still at the helm of the USSR, was invited to attend.  There, Andropov “told a surprised audience of his conviction about the imminent first-strike threat from Washington”[4].  The directive from that point was for the “KGB to co-operate with the Russian army in the biggest intelligence gathering-operation the Soviets had ever conducted in peacetime.”[4]  Codenamed RYAN (acronym: raketno yadernoye napadenie), the directive was for KGB agents abroad to search for any and all evidence pointing to an imminent NATO attack on the USSR.  Some indicators: high-level military personnel in NATO countries showing increased mobility;  convergence of top military brass and their families into civilian defense shelters; increased efforts to augment supply of blood through blood drives–all these factors would construe potential attack.  The KGB observed with eagle-eyes any strange movements that would tip off an imminent attack.

Simultaneously, a program of PSYOPS (psychological operations) was being executed by American forces throughout the globe.  American ships and planes would veer dangerously close to Soviet sea and air space, particularly into areas of military significance. Per Dr. William Schneider, at the time Undersecretary of State handling military and technological matters, “it really got to them..they didn’t know what it all meant. A squadron would fly straight at Soviet airspace…then would peel off and return home”.  [5]

Korean Air Flight 007, shot down by Soviet fighters over the Sakhalin Islands.

Adding to this toxic mix was the tragedy of Korean Airlines Flight 007, shot down in September, 1983.  A commercial passenger airline, Flight 007 blundered into Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula.  The order to shoot it down while it was leaving Soviet airspace over the Sakhalin Islands went out; the plane was probably downed in international waters.  The worldwide reaction was one of shock and revulsion, for aboard Flight 007 were 269 innocents, including passengers and crew. The Soviets at first denied wrongdoing, but that only made things worse for them. The world-wide bad press further set them on edge.

The Near Apocalypse

Able Archer was the code name for a NATO exercise that encompassed the whole of the NATO defenses.  It was meant to simulate an attack from the east by the Soviets; it was the largest and most realistic drill attempted by NATO thus far.  In the interest of not exacerbating Soviet tensions and paranoia, NATO gave the Soviets ample warning that this was only a drill and not actual military action.  The Soviets got the memo, but didn’t believe it.  Yet again, NATO planes scrambled and flew near Soviet airspace, NATO submarines tested Soviet waters, and NATO personnel converged throughout Europe and the States into command centers that doubled as bunkers. As part of the drill, British PM Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl of Germany, and other NATO leaders took part by going to fortified command/control locations. It was all a drill, but to the Soviets, this was not a drill.  All of Andropov’s suspicions, strange as they seemed in May of ’81, appeared at that moment to be well-founded.  All elements of the Soviet armed services were put on highest alert.  Jets were scrambled, subs were armed and ready to battle, tanks and men east of the European dividing line that split the spheres of influence were out of barracks and were ready for deployment.  The war…was here.

The Americans leadership had a quite different take. Thinking that this was nothing more than sabre-rattling of a more strident kind, they failed to believe that this was anything other than posturing. But a few well-placed and influential people in the CIA got word to President Reagan that the Soviets truly believed Able Archer was no exercise but a genuine military attack, albeit in its early stages.  Reagan was reportedly stunned. He accurately intuited that his anti-Soviet verbal bellicosity no doubt contributed to a heightened paranoia on the part of the Soviet leadership, and course-corrected in the years after. Reagan’s pronouncement of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” didn’t help matters, accurate though that phrase was. Reagan dispatched high-level members of his administration to lessen tensions, to minimal effect, but at the very least, nuclear war was averted.  In the end, Reagan wrote this in his journal about this episode: “Three years has taught me something surprising about the Russians. Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans.  This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.”[6]

• [1] Sebestyen, Victor, Revolution 1989, pg. 79 (Vintage Press, 2012)
• [2] Sebestyen, Victor, Revolution 1989, pg. 22 (Vintage Press, 2012)
• [4] Sebestyen, Victor, Revolution 1989, pg. 81 (Vintage Press, 2012)
• [5] Zubok, Vladislav, A Failed Empire, pg. 278 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
• [6] Reagan, Ronald, An American Life: The Autobiography (Simon and Schuster, 1990)

Though the Fourth is generally regarded as the day the Declaration of Independence was ratified and signed, this was not the case. The motion for independence was ratified on July 2nd, whereas the final document was ratified on July 4th. All the necessary signatories didn’t add their names to it until weeks after. John Adams, more responsible than any other colonial delegate for the ultimate vote to break away from Great Britain, wrote this in one of his letters to his wife, Abigail:

“The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.”

Thomas Jefferson’s original draft was cut down and/or changed significantly by approximately 25%, according to author David McCullough. Sitting next to Benjamin Franklin on July 3 and 4 as Franklin removed or changed significant pieces of the document, Jefferson “is not known to have uttered a word in protest, or in defense of what he had written. Later he would decribe the opposition to his draft as being like ‘the ceaseless action of gravity weighing upon us night and day’.”

Jefferson’s original draft actually blamed George III for the slave trade, which was promptly extricated for any number of reasons, among them that a.) Jefferson himself owned a plethora of slaves, b.) a large amount of the Continental Congress owned slaves, and c.) George IIII didn’t start slavery, and it was silly to say that he did, particularly in so important a document. That said, the slavery issue hung over the revolutionary delegates’ heads. In the end, they punted on the issue. The roots of the abolition movement can be traced to before the Declaration of Independence, but the time for abolition had not come. Eighty years later, it would; the proverbial “kicking the can down the road” resulting in the disastrous carnage of “Bleeding Kansas” and the American Civil War.

John Adams was also intimately involved in the editorial process of the Declaration. Gone from the document, vis-a-vis Adams, were Jeffersonian flights of bathos, such as: “These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren…we must endeavor to forget our former love for them. We might’ve been a free and great people together”. But the one phrase–mostly Jeffersonian, but with small touches from Adams–to survive the editorial process was this:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

And In the Beginning….

This “separation of Church & State” concept….where did it come from, why does it exist, and how did it come to pass that this is an overriding concept of our lovely republic?  Very simple this phrase, yet very complex. Long historical precedents got us to this point, but it started with one very pithy and evasive utterance, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”.  That was the answer to a trick question, you see: legend has it that this question was posited to Christ, with both answers perilous:

Jesus was asked the question about paying taxes in hope that he would answer “yes” or “no”. Answering “yes” would have left him open to the accusation that he was in opposition to Jewish resistance to the Roman occupation and therefore (given the assumption by the Jews that they still held privileged nation status with God at this time) against God, too. Answering “no” would have given those present an opportunity to report him to the Roman authorities as someone who was trying to incite a revolt. His questioners had assumed that there was an inevitable (and hazardous) dichotomy between discharging one’s obligations to the state and discharging one’s obligations to God, but Jesus refused to confront the dichotomy as framed by his hostile questioners and instead pointed to the assumptions behind it. [1]

Constantine the Great at the Council of Nicea, 325 A.D.

Clever one, that JC. But though Christianity (obviously) was founded the moment Christ started ministering (and someone other than himself started listening), the concept of separation of Church & State took a lot longer to take hold.  The first wholly Christian government, realized when the Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine made a plea to “the Christian god” for victory (in return for conversion of his empire) over his Western Roman Emperor/competitor Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, was founded when Constantine magically saw a cross in the sky (whilst dreaming) prior to military engagement and, even more magically, won.  A deal’s a deal, thought Constantine, and anyway, the empire was being swept up in Christian fervor, particularly amongst the humiliores, who’s lives were–charitably put–a miserable grind from birth to (in most cases, early) death. (The prospect of a better afterlife would obviously have tremendous appeal to this lot.) But though Constantine was the first openly Christian emperor, what to do about that pesky “render to Caeser/render to God” thing? After all, in pagan Rome, the emperor was also THE pontifex maximus–the head of the state religion, in addition to being head of everything else.  What now? Simple: he did as any good Roman emperor would do–he held the title, and disregarded that famous “render to Caesar/render to God” comment. There it would stay  in the list of imperial titles held by the emperor until close to fifty years later, when a successor (Gratian) acceded the title to an actual pope, though certainly not with much power attached to it.  (In the Eastern Roman Empire, the emperor retained the title pontifex maximus for many years after, the Eastern Roman Empire living well past the Western Roman Empire by approximately one-thousand years. The Eastern Roman Empire resided in what is now modern-day Turkey, its capital Constantinople, now known as Istanbul.

And Then There Was…Darkness

The Sack Of Rome, 410 A.D.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire is usually traced to the year 410 AD, when Alaric, King of the Visigoths, sacked Rome.  All of Western & Central Europe was thrown into the dark for close to a thousand years.  The Roman Catholic Church continued to expand and develop at this point, but it was vulnerable to the thuggishness of warlords, castellans and kings bent on controlling papal decisions.  The old Roman bureaucracy, capable as it was of maintaing social order and lawfulness for approximately a millenium, was dead, and in its place sprouted chaos, violence, feudal warlord-ism–an entire continent predicated on gangsterism. The Church would minister and expand, adding formerly pagan peoples like the Poles and the Hungarians to its roster of followers, but it had no real power.  Should a king act in an “un-Christian” manner–and rare the king that didn’t–a pope was powerless.  The appointment of bishops–important positions to midieval kings, as they maintained social order and acted as feudal lords themselves–was the domain of kings, and popes could only advise and approve said appointments; to do otherwise risked disposal of said pope.  They were, in every sense of the word, puppets to be controlled by the most powerful warlords and/or kings of the day.

Fast forward to year 800 AD.

Charlemagne, King of the Franks and the most powerful king in Europe, was on friendly terms with the papacy, and took it upon himself to protect it (and Rome).  For this he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, on Christmas Day, 800 AD.  A bit of papal manipulation, this, for the pope at the time (Leo III) had made the cynical calculation that bestowing the (then unheard of) crown of the Holy Roman Emperor would engender said emperor to protect Rome (in perpetuity), and rule over  a (theoretically) reconstituted Roman Empire. The papacy now had a protector, but despite eighteen children, Charlemagne had only four legitimate heirs. The Franks had a maddening habit of settling their royal inheritances by splitting kingdoms based on the number of sons produced.  An admirable and equitable thing in our modern-day world (removing the sexist element to the equation, mind, as only male heirs got inheritance), but not terribly helpful in the Middle Ages. As luck (or poor luck, depending on where you stood) would have it, Charlemagne’s sons all died young, and only his son Louis survived to inherit the throne.  Louis, in contrast to his father, produced three healthier heirs, who immediately squabbled over the scraps of their father and grandfather’s kingdom.  In time, the line of Charlemagne, known to history as the Carolingian line, would splinter…its powers divided and lessened with every inheritor.

Charlamagne gets crowned Holy Roman Emperor, Christmas, 800 A.D.

Charlemagne had conquered the pagan Saxons in the 800’s, and over time, the converted Saxons would gain control over wide swathes of Europe.  Control over Rome eventually fell into the hands of the Saxon king Henry III, who scrapped three popes in one stroke (1046 AD)–one for the record books, no doubt–and installed “his guy”, Pope Clement II, a fellow Saxon, shortly thereafter.  Pope Clement duly returned the favor, crowning Henry III Holy Roman Emperor. The precedent at that point was firmly established–kings control popes, not the other way around.  And besides, a pope may claim to be “the vicar of Christ”, but were kings not divinely annointed as well?  And who does the warring, and specifically the dying in defense of the Roman church: the pope, or the Holy Roman Emperor?  With regards to the pope, Joseph Stalin once famously sniffed–when informed of papal disapproval of his actions in central and eastern Europe post-WWII, “Well, how many divisions does HE have?”  A thousand years prior, warlords, princes, and kings could have–and probably DID–posit that question to themselves and their minions, and the answer obvious: none.

Enough Is Enough

Pope Gregory VII, aka Hildebrandt

After centuries of multiple ignominious reigns from popes who bought their way into the position (a practice known as “simony”), a sentiment started to take hold in the Roman Church: reform.  Despite Clement II’s ascension to the papacy via Henry III’s power move, Clement took reform seriously, starting with the banning of simony.  Clement was duly rewarded for his efforts by having a ten month run, ending in poisoning.  (This is historically unverified, but highly likely to have happened.) His poisoner was, in all likelihood, his predecessor, the previously deposed Benedict IX, a man first appointed (through extreme simony) to the papacy at the at age of 18, occupied the office three separate times, and “was generally far too busy indulging his insatiable sexual appetites”[2], and described by Peter Damian, a prominent theologian of the time, as a man who “feasted on immorality”.  A spate of popes and counter-popes, some reform-minded, some determined to retain the rotting status quo, ensued. A cross-current of factionalism, a virtual civil war for the soul of the Church, ended with the acclaim of another prominent reform-minded theologian of the time, Hildebrand.  Following the death of Pope Alexander II, the people of Rome rose up, weary of the factionalism and corruption endemic to the office, and declared “Hildebrand for pope!”.  And so it was done, approval for office by cardinal election being a foregone conclusion.  At the heart of Hildebrand’s agenda was this: no more corruption, no more simony, the whole of the Church should be “virgins, marrieds, and those who hold themselves in restraint”[3], as Hildebrand (now known by the papal name assumed upon ascension, Gregory VII) wrote to the Bishop Otto of Constance in a particularly snarky correspondence.  No more would bishops or priests be with concubines, wives, mistresses, or have illegitimate children.  Furthermore, no more bishops gaining appointment to their posts from kings, princes or warlords; these appointments alone were now the domain of the papacy.  An agenda that had been set by a group of reform-minded priests and theologians like Peter Damian and Cardinal Humbert years before was now set for implementation by Gregory VII.  Peter Damian referred to Hildebrand as “my holy Satan” for his determination and perceived self-aggrandizement–a title Hildebrand chafed at. One thing was certain, however: he was not to be trifled with.  Neither, however, was the Saxon King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, who learned what to do with oppositional and cantankerous popes by the actions of his forebears, not the least of whom was his father, Henry III, he of the triple papal wipeout decades before.

Face Off

The Second Coming, or so it was thought at the time, was imminent.  The year 1000 AD had mystical implications, for the Anti-Christ was to arrive first, and then the Christ would arrive to vanquish him, with the end of the world and the great rapture to occur…all according to the prophecies of the time.  Year 1000 came and went, so then the expectation became the 1100 AD, the year when it would all come to pass.  Much like one cleans house in expectation of important guests, the Church needed a good sweeping, and Hildebrand/Gregory VII was just the guy to do it.

Henry IV had other ideas.

Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor. Not a fan of upstart popes, and particularly not a fan of Hildebrandt, who he refused to address by his papal name, Gregory.

It all came to a head over who would be the Archbishop of Milan.  Gregory VII pushed his man for the post, and backed him up with some goonish muscle.  The position was traditionally under the control of Saxon kings, not the least of which was his father, Henry III. Henry IV by no means would let this snotty, upstart pope get his way by investing his man in what he considered his territory.  Back and forth the position swung, to Gregory’s man, back to Henry’s, street fights erupting in gangland style throughout Milan, Gregory employing his “patarines”, artisans and working men dedicated to his cause, Henry employing his hired goons as well. Henry would consequently convene his Saxon bishops–all his appointments, mind–and elect his own pope.  Installation of a hand-picked pope would follow, no doubt with some world-class muscle behind it.  Hostile letters went back and forth between Henry and Gregory throughout this struggle. To wit:

Gregory to Henry:

“Gregory, bishop, servant of God’s servants, to King Henry, greetings and the apostolic benediction–but with the understanding that he obeys the Apostolic See [another name for the papacy] as becomes a Christian king…“[emphasis mine]

Henry responding to Gregory:

“[From] Henry, King not by usurpation, but by the pious ordination of God, to Hildebrand, now not Pope, but false monk…” [emphasis mine]

(The tone degenerated accordingly, ending with Henry imploring Gregory to resign at once…)

“I, Henry, King by the grace of God, together with all our bishops, say to you: Descend! Descend!“ [emphasis mine, once again]

Gregory, left no choice, excommunicates Henry.  At first, Henry is blase.  His plans to depose Gregory and install a vassal pope to do his bidding and preserve the status quo remain unchanged.  But in Henry’s bishops, there descends a deep foreboding.  Would they risk excommunication with resultant damnation ad infinitum on behalf of their king?  Sure, they must’ve thought, he invested us with the requisite staff and ring–the symbols of bishopric investiture, representing the spiritual care and tending of the flock–but what of our own potential excommunication?  Indeed, in Henry’s bull of excommunication, Gregory stated with dramatic clarity thus, “I absolve the Christian people of any oath they have taken, or shall take, to him.  And I forbid anyone to serve him as king.” [4]  Henry’s bishops, in a tizzy and highly “anxious for their own souls, hurried to make peace with Gregory–who, for his part, was diplomatically quick to welcome them back into the fold”[5]  But Gregory was playing a deeper, more insidious game: he was supporting Henry’s rival, Rudolf of Swabia, as well as other rebellious Saxon princes licking their chops for an opportunity to knock off Henry and gain the throne.  Gregory was looking to do something that had never before been attempted by a pope, and in retrospect, turned out to be a drastic overstepping of boundaries: he was looking for full domination, both politically as well as spiritually, of all of Western Christendom.  No more kowtowing to thuggish kings, princes, noblemen and warlords for protection.  No more cowering in the face of their swords.  Gregory would rip their souls from them and condemn them to the confines of Hell if they dare defy him.  There for all to read in Dictatus Papae, published in March of 1075, it stated as much [all italics/bold mine]:

•    That the Pope is the only one whose feet are to be kissed by all princes.
•    His title is unique in the world
•    That he may depose emperors.
•    That he himself may be judged by no one.

Not content to leave it at wresting the power of investiture when it came to bishoprics, Gregory was claiming superiority over every king and prince in Europe and beyond, and in Henry’s case, superiority over even a Holy Roman Emperor.

Canossa

Henry, left with Rudolf of Swabia threatening his position, his bishops and noblemen disassociating themselves from him for fear of excommunication, did the only thing he could do: he repented.  Seeking out Gregory, who left Rome specifically to conference with Henry’s enemies (in Augsburg, Germany), Henry managed to intercept the pope’s journey at the mountain redoubt of Canossa. High in the mountains, in the dead of winter, Henry stood at the gates of fortress Canossa, barefoot and penitent, awaiting readmittance to the communion of the Church.  Gregory, far from feeling self-satisfied about humbling this most haughty of monarchs, had a quandary on his hands: if he took Henry in, allowed him to make a full act of contrition, permitted him to satisfy all acts of penitence, he would have no choice but to readmit him into the good graces of the Church.  This in turn would set off feelings of betrayal by the German princes, Rudolf of Swabia primary among them, that he broke his alliance with them.  If he did not allow contrition and penitence….well, then what kind of Man of God would do that, worse still…what kind of pope? Was not the central tenet of Christianity forgiveness?

A humbled and freezing Henry awaits his absolution outside the fortress of Canossa.

Gregory left Henry outside the gates of Canossa for three days in the bitter cold of January 1077, high up in the Italian Alps. On the third day, the doors opened. Henry was allowed to make his full confession, perform his acts of contrition, was allowed back into the Church.  He was forced to sign the humiliating oath guaranteeing the supremacy of the pope in all matters of investiture, and that he would defend all actions of the pope by force, if necessary.  And with that, Henry was readmitted to the Church…but did not regain papal recognition as either King of the Saxons or as Holy Roman Emperor.  To regain those titles, Henry would have to fight it out with Rudolf. Leaving Canossa without papal recognition of his position as king would be a slight Henry would not forget.

Gregory’s Reverse

Henry IV set to work on defeating Rudolph of Swabia for the coming years, in Germany and great central Europe.  For his part, Gregory was boxed: the Saxon princes, aligning behind Rudolph, indeed felt betrayed by Gregory, who they felt pulled the rug out from under them at a most critical time and when Henry was most vulnerable.  For three years a civil war raged between Henry and Rudolph, the pope refusing to publicly support for either man.  Eventually, Gregory had no choice but to lay down his bet: Rudolph would be his man, his putative Holy Roman Emperor.  It seemed a good wager at the time: Henry was suffering reverses on the battlefield, Rudolph was ascendant, and it also placated those Saxon princes who felt so betrayed by Gregory’s acceptance of Henry’s contrition and subsequent re-communication.  But at the Battle of Elster in 1080, Henry IV lost the battle but won the war, for Rudolf lost his life in the engagement.  The man at the center of the rebellion–Rudolf–was dead, and support for rebellion against Henry soon petered out.

Henry set about for Rome thereafter, intent on being re-coronated king and emperor.  Gregory, defenseless, attempted another excommunication of Henry, but this time it had no efficacy. Gregory soon found himself taking refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo, a prisoner in his own city, Henry’s forces laying seige.  Appeals to another warlord, Robert Guiscard, a Norman who then dominated northern Italy, to come to the aid of Gregory, were received and acted upon.  Henry, uninterested in warring with the Norman warlord (if for no other reason than it offered no advantage), withdrew.  Robert’s forces, far from being liberators, set about sacking Rome for three days.  Gregory was, for lack of a better term, abducted by Robert’s forces from Rome.  He died in Salerno, Sicily, exiled from Rome and a “guest” of Robert Guiscard’s, in 1085.  His last words, attributed to him or written for him, were thus, “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore, I die in exile.”

Legacy

Gregory, in his dying moments, had failed…or so he thought. But reform of the Church hadn’t failed.  The fight over the right of investiture had been settled in 1122 during the Concordat of Worms: no longer could kings appoint bishops with full spiritual and temporal powers.  The practice of simony was prosecuted with greater vigor.  The Church rid itself of priests and bishops indulging in concubinage, cohabitation, and marriages-on-the-sly.  (Though not completely, as evidenced by the conduct of Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, who gained his office through simony and openly retained both wife, children and mistresses.) But the marker had been laid down; the Church could no longer govern its disciples in its previously rotten, immoral condition.  And the precedent of independence of the Church from outside, secular interference from warlords and kings bent on turning papal decisions their way, had been set.  It didn’t end with Gregory, but rather started.  These practices continued, but they were no longer considered commonplace, but rather sinful and aberrant.  State could no longer interfere with Church without consequences.  That is the legacy of Canossa.

Conversely, the powers of the papacy had been demonstrated to be ineffective in matters of state.  Gregory proved himself to be terribly bad at secular politics, as evidenced by his backing of Rudolf over Henry, and by doing so, tearing central Europe into chaos and civil war.  In the end, what was established was this: popes can’t do the brutal job of kings, nor can kings do an effective job of tending to the spiritual needs of their people.  The whole affair was succinctly put by midieval historian Brian Tierney:

Henry insisted that his authority came from God alone and that only God could depose him–certainly not the pope.  But he also insisted that the two swords of spiritual and temporal government should remain separate from one another and did not claim both for himself.  His assertion that Gregory alone was guilty of confusing the two orders of government may seem disingenuous since it was the king’s insistence on his right to appoint bishops that caused  the whole dispute.  But Henry did not maintain, at least in principle, that all spiritual and temporal authority belonged to him as vicar of God.  The assertions of both rulers thus fell far short of claims to absolute theocratic power.[6]  [Emphasis mine]

One can draw a very clear line through the thousand years since this occurred to our modern-day American republic.  Granted, there were countless religious disputes after the investiture controversy, not the least of which was the break from the Church by Martin Luther and his followers close to four hundred years later, followed by Henry VIII of England’s break a few years thereafter, for state, rather than religious, reasons. (Or more accurately, for procreative reasons.) In the end, those that were present at the creation of our republic figured it best, for myriad reasons, to leave the whole state/church fusion, or more accurately–confusion–in the dust, and leave it to the citizenry to make their decisions with regards to worship, or even no worship.  As the investiture controversy between Henry IV and Gregory VII so clearly demonstrated, governing by theocratic means was and is an unworkable method of governance. The realization of this sentiment reached its apotheosis in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof“.  Whereas this critical portion of the First Amendment pertained specifically to George III of England being both King and highest official of the Church of England (Anglican Church), and the prohibition of such offices in the new American republic, the first definitive example of the unworkability of a church/state fusion goes right back to the clash between Gregory VII and Henry IV in the 1070’s.

References

[1]  The Law of Christ respecting civil obedience, especially in the payment of tribute, John Brown (London: William Ball, 1839) 3rd. ed, p. 182
[2] The Forge of Christendom, The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West, Tom Holland pg. 258.
[3] Letters of Gregory to Otto, Bishop of Constance, December 1074 AD, translated by E. Emerton, The Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII, pg. 52-53.
[4] Gregory VII, Register 3.10a.
[5] The Forge of Christendom, The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West, Tom Holland, pg. 369
[6] The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300, Brian Tierney, pg. 57

John Adams on Benjamin Franklin:

“His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and to decency.”

Benjamin Franklin on John Adams:

“He means well for his country, is always and honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”

Thomas Jefferson on John Adams:

“He hates Franklin, he hates [John] Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English. To whom will he adhere?”

Open letter to George Washington from Thomas Paine:

“…the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.”

John Adams on Thomas Paine:

” [He is] the satyr of the age…a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a butch wolf…”

John Adams on Alexander Hamilton:

“That bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar [sic]”

Adams later stated in regards to Hamilton:

“I shall pay no regard to his puppyhood.”

Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson could be the two most intellectually important figures in American history. (James Madison also deserves honorable mention.)

And they hated each other.

On the one side there was Hamilton. Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was the illegitimate son of a ne’er-do-well Scottish nobleman and a still married (she fled her first husband to escape an unhappy union) mother. His childhood got off to an unfortunate start, and it stayed that way. The chain events of his life read like a modern-day tale filled with dysfunction, abandonment, and alienation. His father abandoned his mother; his mother died of fever; her first husband successfully claimed her estate as his own, leaving the illegitimate Hamilton and his younger brother with nothing; subsequently adopted by a cousin who then committed suicide thereafter, he was permanently separated from his brother as a result. Hamilton’s saving grace(s) were books. Denied legitimacy by the Church of England due to being born out of wedlock, he was excluded from Anglican financed religious and educational studies. As a result, Hamilton was occasionally tutored privately, and attended Jewish private schools on occasion. Working as a clerk for an import/export company as a young man in St. Croix, Hamilton penned an essay for a local newspaper that so impressed the publishers and the readers that a collection was taken to send Hamilton to America to get a proper education; he eventually landed at King’s College (now Columbia University).

Thomas Jefferson’s upbringing couldn’t have been more different. One of ten children born into a prominent Virginia planter family, Jefferson was brought up in wealth and privilege. When his father passed, a 14-year-old Jefferson inherited 5,000 acres of land and dozens of slaves. He attended the most prestigious schools and was tutored by the best educators available, learning Latin, Greek, and French in his early teens. In short, an upbringing diametrically different than that of Alexander Hamilton’s.

Competing Visions For The Young Republic-Thomas Jefferson

“I think our government will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural.”-Thomas Jefferson

Like many of his day, Jefferson did not consider himself to be an American first; he was a Virginian. The perception of the day was that one hailed from their state, not from America as a whole. It was provincialism of the first order. (One could even say this about George Washington, though less so; Washington’s policy preference whilst president clearly angled towards Hamilton. More on that later.) All forms of centrality of government were anathema to Jefferson. He had no interest in a strong, central core to the United States. His vision was of a nation of gentlemen-farmers, where local issues were decided on a local level, and that only in times of crisis would the other states form a union of sorts to fend off foreign threats. His distaste for central power can be thus summed up by an excerpt from a letter that he wrote to Abigail Adams in 1787: “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.” [One can detect elements of Tea Party sentiment in that one. It is always best to refresh one’s memory with a dose of history just to remember that these sentiments are hardly original.] A considerably more chilling sentiment was revealed in another letter to a compatriot: “What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” This from the author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s vision for America can be succinctly summed up in the following passage from Paul Johnson’s excellent “A History of the American People”:

He believed that the new republic would flourish only if the balance of power within it was held by its farms and planters, men who owned and got their living from the soil. His reasoning was entirely emotional and sentimental, and had to do with the Roman republic, where Cicero had made the same point. Farmers, he believed, were somehow more virtuous than other people, more staunch in their defense of liberty, more suited to run a res publica.

In other words, Jefferson opposed any and all centralized, official institutions. That would include:

1. A standing army and navy
2. A national treasury
3. A central bank

A betrayal of simple, agrarian republican virtues as Jefferson saw it, these were. Banking was “in infinity of successive felonious larcenies”, as he wrote in a letter to John Adams, who was only slightly less suspicious of such things. (Jefferson’s aversion to a national standing army no doubt derived from his knowledge of the actions of Sulla Felix and Julius Caesar, the two most culpable for extinguishing the Roman Republic.)

Competing Visions For The Young Republic-Alexander Hamilton

” If banks, in spite of every precaution, are sometimes betrayed into giving a false credit to a person described, they more frequently enable honest and industrious men of small or perhaps no capital to undertake and prosecute business with advantage to themselves and to the community.” -Alexander Hamilton

Perhaps as a result of his experiences working in the import/export firm Beekman & Cruger whilst an adolescent in the West Indies, Hamilton had a nose for business, money, finance, economics and what made an economy tick. Many historians (Paul Johnson, Ron Chernow, Richard Brookhiser) have rated Hamilton as the only real bona fide genius amongst the first great American statesmen. He commanded artillery effectively during the Revolutionary War without the benefit of military training, but rather through reading about artillery techniques and strategy in books. He acted as Washington’s aide-de-camp throughout the war, and was instrumental in no small way in getting requisitioned materiel to the right places at the right times. He kept squabbling amongst the officer class to a minimum, ensuring Washington’s travails didn’t get any worse than they already were at certain points. As president, Washington lent his complete confidence to all of Hamilton’s financial blueprints: establishing a treasury, forming a central bank, and developing an industrial base in the United States. Nothing could be more horrifying to Jefferson than these concepts realized.

There had been personality conflicts between Jefferson and Hamilton for some time. Prior to Hamilton’s appointment as the first Secretary of Treasury, Hamilton was instrumental in effectively arguing for the need to replace the failing Articles of Confederation in the Federalist Papers and at subsequent constitutional conventions. Jefferson, away in France on diplomatic mission, had no hand in the Constitution other than correspondence with fellow Virginian and constitutional architect James Madison. He was not wholly in disagreement with it, but he was extraordinarily uncomfortable without a strongly enunciated list of inherent rights, thus the Bill of Rights was added to the document.

When both were in the Washington’s first administration, Hamilton proposed that all state debts get rolled into government treasuries. Initially against this, Jefferson reluctantly accepted Hamilton’s proposition in return for Hamilton’s agreement to move the seat of government south.* (See fuller explanation of this below.) Jefferson rued the day that he made this deal, called “the Compromise of 1790”, but even this wasn’t what permanently ruptured any and all relations with Hamilton. That would come about when Hamilton took it a step to far: the proposition of a national central bank in the form of the Bank of the United States. Nothing could have horrified Jefferson more, nothing could have cut right to the core of everything he envisioned the United States NOT to have morphed into. This may not have been too much of a surprise to Hamilton to have Jefferson come out against it, but he was terribly shaken by the schism with James Madison, his partner in writing both the Federalist Papers and the Constitution. Madison declared that, “In reviewing the Constitution, it was not possible to discover in it the power to incorporate a bank”. Madison, no doubt in thrall of not only Jefferson but also his Virginian agrarian farming constituents tried to stop the central bank. Hamilton countered with a reading of the “necessary and proper clause” of the Constitution, driving the point home by reading an excerpt from the Federalist Papers (#44) in Congress, “No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power for doing it is included.” Implicit in this reading of this excerpt of the Federalist is that the very person opposed to the central bank was the one that wrote that excerpt: Madison.

Jefferson, for his part, considered the formation of the central bank a capital offense. Clearly he didn’t recognize that the Constitution had effectively trumped state law for federal law. But that didn’t stop him from having sentiments that said, “The power of erecting banks and corporations was not given to the general government; it remains then with the state itself. Any person to recognize a foreign legislature [he’s speaking of the US Congress, btw.] in a case belonging to the state itself is an act of treason against the state. And whoever shall do so…shall be adjudged guilt of high treason and suffer death accordingly by the judgment of the state courts.” Harsh words for this forerunner, the Bank of the United States, to our present central bank, The Federal Reserve. Jefferson hated it that much, and the man wholly responsible for it was his bete noir, Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton for his part saw no other way for the United States to compete and prosper. A student of Adam Smith (of “Wealth of Nations” fame and considered the father of modern economics), Hamilton saw the British economic model as worthy of duplication, to be expanded upon. It was industrialization, not agro-economics that would take the United States forward. Hamilton saw the United States for what it now is: an economic powerhouse. A sleepy agrarian economy of yeoman-farmers in the Jeffersonian mode was to be “scoffed [by Hamilton] as such puerile reasoning” (1). A few years later, Hamilton submitted his Report on Manufactures to Congress. Jefferson was apoplectic. It represented everything anathema to Jefferson’s agro-utopian vision for America: industrial mills financed by speculation and loans from banks. It was shelved by Congress and was never translated into legislation, but it caused quite a ruckus. Jefferson “wondered somberly whether Americans still lived under a limited government….for Jefferson this [general welfare clause] ‘permitted Congress to take everything under their management which they should deem for the public welfare’.” (These sentiments echo through the ages right to our present day.) That said, the Report on Manufactures clearly had significant impact on the formation of industrialized America. Hamilton’s vision won, as it should have.

Conclusion

This post probably came off overly negative towards Jefferson. It was not necessarily meant to do so. The importance of Thomas Jefferson with regards to enshrining the almost-libertarian mind-set into the American consciousness was and still is crucial. Jefferson was wrong about almost everything with regards to economics, but he was right about liberty and the vigilance required to maintain it. It is a vigilance bordering on paranoia, sometimes out of hand, but a necessary streak in the personality of the American nation. He, along with James Madison, were instrumental in getting a Bill of Rights inculcated into the American Constitution. (Even as he was in France on diplomatic mission.) He was wrong to some extent on insisting on the supremacy of state authority in comparison to federal authority, though not entirely: even to this day, some issues cannot be successfully decided and implemented in a “one size fits all” kind of way, taking into no account the differing peoples, cultures, and geographies of our states. He opposed a standing army, feeling that it was a threat to the nascent republic, yet founded the United States Military Academy at West Point. He hated the idea of a central treasury, yet found it very useful when he assumed the presidency. A mass of contradictions, that Jefferson.

Hamilton was right about finance, economics and a forward vision for the United States. He was wrong about many other things, not the least of which was his philosophy that the republic should be ruled by an intellectual elite. In this, Jefferson had the philosophical upper hand. One would think that the forerunner of the modern Republican Party would be Jefferson, given his “states rights” inclination, his distrust of banks (particularly a central bank) and his embrace of the agrarian ethos; it would be mistaken to do so. Jefferson is considered the godfather of the modern Democratic Party, mainly for his populist, anti-elitist sentiments. Conversely, Hamilton is considered to be the godfather of the Republican Party, as he was the advocate for the monied classes, the industrialists, the bankers, and the speculators. But he also favored a strong central government, one that was dominant over all state legislatures. This is a very Democratic Party sentiment. And so neither figure fits neatly into the ideological order of the modern American political parties.

Concerning the central bank–the Bank of the United States–it continued its charter with the federal government until Andrew Jackson, a Jeffersonian to the core, discontinued its charter. He subsequently moved all its assets into state-run banks; runaway inflation and the Panic of 1837 were the end result. Another panic, in 1907, led to the reformation of a central bank in 1913, this time under the name “Federal Reserve” . Like Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry, and Andrew Jackson (all southerners, not coincidentally) before them, we have those attacking the Fed, like Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). Some things never change. The ghosts of Hamilton and Jefferson are still squabbling, two centuries later.

*Explanation: the State of New York had been decimated by the Revolutionary War both physically and economically. By comparison, Virginia had been only lightly affected and was financially solvent. Hamilton suggested that all states pool their debts into national debt, therefore enabling financially weak states to recover whilst stronger states shoulder more debt burden. “Assumption” as it is called, enabled the original United States (13 of ’em) to recover and prosper. Had Jefferson not agreed to this, certain northeast states that had been routed by the British would’ve gone under.

(1) Excerpt from “The History of the American People”, by Paul Johnson

Other books consulted in the writing of this post:
a.) “John Adams” by David McCullough
b.) “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow
c.) “Alexander Hamilton-American” by Richard Brookhiser