How to build peace: History without War

 Historian Eileen Power lights up the pages of Francesca Wade's Square Hauntings: Five Lives in London between the War. Seven years younger than Woolf, she and Virginia were at least casual friends: Woolf attended "kitchen dances" at  Power's home in Mecklenburgh Square and remembers in her diary entry of 6 January1940  that she and Humbert Wolfe once "shared a packet of choc. creams at Eileen Power's." Humbert Wolfe, a poet, had died on 5 January 1940, and Power herself would die of heart failure on on 8 August 1940, at only 51 years old.  Both Eileen and the Woolfs were also associated with Richard Henry Tawney, a radical socialist with whom Leonard collaborated on a pamphlet in 1926.

Power circa 1915 (around age 26) at Girton College, Cambridge

Like Woolf and many in the Bloomsbury world--including classicist Jane Harrison--Power was a committed pacifist. A historian and second ever female chair of economic history at London School of Economics, Power wished to write history that was both accessible to ordinary people and focused on the "obscure" person. She was more interested in “the introduction of the turnip to England in 1645 …rather than the beheading of Charles I.” Woolf read her work, including  her bestselling 1924 Medieval People. Power, in turn, admired H.G. Well’s  The Outline of History because it organized itself around “humanity’s shared endeavors," rather than war. Power appreciated too the moral dimensions of Toynbee's A Study of History. While Power and Harrison were pursuing scholarship that put an emphasis on the peaceful and communal aspects of history, the French Annales school was springing up as well, also focusing on ordinary lives, but over greater sweeps of history and in more aggregate terms--and without the passionate agenda of inspiring social change by writing history in a way that would promote peace and a leveling of social hierarchy.

Power was a feminist who married a younger man in the last three years of her life. Wade writes that Power stated that the “abstract” cause most important  to her was “the cause of women,” putting her in league with Woolf. 

Power comes across today as mixture of anachronism and prescient commentator whose words resonate with our own times, most powerfully in her description of life in the Roman Empire described in her  Medieval People as that empire was disintegrating:

...  on the surface all is going on exactly as before. Gaul is shrunk, it is true, to a mere remnant ... but ... there is the luxurious villa, with its hot baths and swimming pool, its suites of rooms, its views over the lake; and there is Sidonius inviting his friends to stay with him or sending round his compositions to the professors and the bishops and the country-gentlemen. Sport and games are very popular--Sidonius rides and swims and hunts and plays tennis. ...  There are games of tennis on the lawn before breakfast or backgammon for the older men. There is an hour or two in the library before we sit down to an excellent luncheon followed by a siesta. Then we go out riding and return for a hot bath and a plunge in the river.

We can see the same going on today--and Power's audience, at least a well-heeled portion of it reading in 1924, would have found poignant reminders of what had beens swept by World War I. Later, readers like Woolf would have perceived a parallel looming in the guise of Nazi Germany with just as little being done to acknowledge it. Today, with wildfires burning out of control, global sea levels rising, and pandemics bringing the world to a halt, we can glimpse again that how we live must change--a lesson that two world wars still hasn't taught. 

Power writes, and it is worth quoting her at length of the end of the Roman empire: 

Going, going, gone....These were the men who lived through the centuries of Roman fall and Barbarian triumph, and who by virtue of their elevated position, their learning, and talents, should have seen, if not foretold, the course of events. ...  one is, I think, impelled to ask oneself the question why they were apparently so blind to what was happening.     In the first place the process of disintegration was a slow one …It was the affairs of the moment that occupied them; for them it was the danger of the moment that must be averted and they did not recognize that each compromise and each defeat was a link in the chain dragging them over the abyss. ...  people were deluded by the same error, the belief that Rome ... was not a mere historical fact with a beginning and an end, but a condition of nature like the air they breathed and the earth they tread.  Ave Roma immortalis, most magnificent,  most disastrous of creeds! The fact is that the Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the ... solidity and comfort, a material existence which was the very antithesis of barbarism.

These words speak to us across decades: one might think of Jarrod Diamond's Collapse, making the same point about the "going, going, gone ..." 

Power, like Caroline Stephen, wrote a book about nunneries: Stephen's was focused on nineteenth century nunneries. Both were interested in women's communities. 

Fourteen years later in 1938, on the eve of World War II, with greater urgency, but making the same argument, Power published “The Eve of the Dark Ages: a Tract for the Times.” She focused her attention again on  5th and 6th century Rome, the parallels to 1938 obvious, when the “lights were going out all over Europe,” asking why people didn’t realize “the magnitude of the disaster befalling them?”  They “blithely” dismissed danger, couldn’t believe their culture would disappear.  Power attributes it to flawed education: what they were taught had no relation to  real world:

Bred in them the fatal illusion that tomorrow would be as yesterday, that everything was the same, whereas everything was different.

Today we live under such illusion too--at least the elite classes do and perhaps all of us--even with existential threats more urgent than ever. As I listen to Trump and Kushner tell the various governors of the states that they are on their own in the worst crisis since World War II, I am reminded of the history Power recounts when we do finally get down to the nitty gritty of how the Roman empire ended: at a certain point a part of Gaul was under attack and Rome simply said: "You are on your own. We are not sending you troops." Gradually, then, a bit of Gaul was taken by the Germans--and Rome let it go--and then another and another. After awhile, there weren't enough citizen troops to defend the empire, and so Rome let in legions of mercenaries under the command of  "barbarian" generals  as willing to attack Rome as defend it. 

Where will it end, I wonder, in our day, as I listen to states, in a dire emergency, being told to compete with each other for scarce supplies, bidding up prices and having to grovel to a president as narcissistic as any emperor. Is the state itself--the United States--that concept and that reality--truly to be wholly subordinated to the capitalist system and the grasp for profit at any cost? Can we hold together as a country or will we gradually disintegrate into civil war, like the former Yugoslavia. Chris Hedges, who covered that dissolution, says yes, this is where we are headed. 

Like many others, I understand that  our democratic and mixed economy (still a mix of private and state run enterprises) is despised by an executive branch and party that wants to dismantle it and replace with an oligarchic capitalist dictatorship.  In the hatred of the governing for the government, we are like Yugoslavia: what destroyed it was the ascension, through legitimate Party channels, of leaders utterly opposed to communism and its ideals.  A situation chillingly like one that could be our own grew from July 1988 to March 1989 in Yugoslavia.  

Under the auspices of what pretended to be  spontaneous, grass-roots "anti-bureaucratic" movements in Serbia and Montenegro, Slobodan Milosevic, later arrested for war crimes, orchestrated the ouster of existing governments.  New governments were brought in that were directly loyal not to the state, but to Milosevic.

Milosevic supporters insisted that  the anti-bureaucratic revolution was a true grass-roots populist movement in which the little folk swept Milosevic into power as a man they thought could get things done. Milosevic's critics more plausibly argue that the so-called  anti-bureaucratic revolution was not a spontaneous grassroots movement but was orchestrated from the top to strengthen Milosevic's political power. Stjepan Mesic, the last president of  united Yugoslavia, said that Milosevic used the pretense of a grass roots movement to destroy Yugoslavia.” Slovene president Milan Kucan stated that "none of us believed in Slovenia that these were spontaneous meetings and rallies." 

Is this going to happen here? I have to hope there is still time to avert catastrophe, but are we as blind as the Roman elites or the elites before World War I? Can this country, with a history of unification, break up? 

Power--hoped the past would inform the future

Moving back to the interwar years, Woolf was also writing furiously in this interwar period, in the same vein, but looking forward already past the doom that was descending to a new age in essays such as 1940s "The Leaning Tower," calling for a new education to encompass the working classes and new world in which class was erased.  If Power was hoping to address peace through a new way of writing history, Woolf attacked patriarchy and war head on in extended essays like Three Guineas. Harrison was dead by the time the Nazi threat came on the scene and another war became inevitable, but she was deeply shocked by World War I and spent her life trying to paint a picture of different kind of community that would build peace.

Power's writing is anachronistic in a way Woolf's is not: it is flowery and Victorian (no doubt to be accessible) and her history relies on first-person accounts that we might today consider dubious. But the larger point is that she was impelled to write history a certain way to correct distortions that located what was important in history in warfare.

By the time of Woolf's death, the situation in Europe must have seemed hopeless. All these multiple lifetimes of work and writing and passion for nothing.  But was it for nothing? To be continued ...