by Roy Jenkins
Should Politicians Know History?
This essay is based on a talk given in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, in June 1988.
The Question to which I address myself today is whether or not a lively awareness of history is going the way of a classical education and becoming a discarded attribute for the leaders of the Western world? And second, if it is does it matter? And third, are there any great differences in this respect between the main states of the Atlantic basin?
First, has there in fact been a significant and secular decline in historical knowledge and interest? Cromwell said when laying down a prescription for the education of his third son Richard: ‘I would have him learn a little history’; and it has been written of Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries that compared with modern statesmen ‘they thought more about the future and knew more about the past’. But I am by no means sure how consistent was the historical erudition of nineteenth-century Presidents or Prime Ministers. I would not put Andrew Jackson in the 1830s -or indeed Andrew Johnson in the 1860s - very high in this respect, less so indeed than Lyndon Johnson a hundred years later, even though he would not be thought of as one of the most sophisticated intellectuals amongst American Presidents. British mid-nineteenth-century Prime Ministers were probably somewhat more informed, although I do not think that the historical knowledge of the Duke of Wellington or of Lord Grey or even of William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, was very meticulous.
What is certainly the case, however, is that for nearly twenty-five years from 1940 British governments were led by a series of men whose minds were to an exceptional extent moulded, refreshed and stimulated by their historical knowledge. Churchill (1940-5 and 1951-5) was of course the outstanding example. Although he had no formal training, he wrote history with a verve unequalled by any other British statesman and with a professionalism that could be rivalled in this category only by John Morley or James Bryce. Beyond that, his imagination was constantly seized by the tides of historical events and an epic view of how great men could divert them. He was undoubtedly much motivated by an awareness of his own historical destiny.
Clement Attlee (1945-51) saw himself and events less grandiloquently. He had no gift of narrative prose. But his training was historical, as were his continuing intellectual interests. He had an acute instinct for balance between change and continuity, and his laconic sense of proportion, which cut men and events down to size, owed much to his knowledge of the past.
Anthony Eden (1955-7) knew a lot about Persian and Arab history and came to acquire an encyclopaedic knowledge of the minutiae of diplomatic exchanges of the first half of this century. But his interests were more aesthetic than intellectual, and of this quartet his mind was probably the least conditioned by history, just as his term of office was much the shortest.
Its fourth member was Harold Macmillan (1957-63). He, like Attlee, had little of Churchill’s command over written English, and he could not therefore compete as a chronicler. But his knowledge was at least as great as Churchill’s, and indeed covered a wider span. He knew Greek and Roman history in a way that Churchill, whose interests were always concentrated on the past three hundred years, never did. Harold Macmillan was not a great writer of history (his six volumes of memoirs, unlike his wartime Mediterranean Diary, were pretty dull stuff). But his most characteristic speeches moved easily from the Peloponnesian War to the Battle of the Somme.
Since Harold Macmillan’s resignation in 1963 it has in Britain been gradually downhill nearly all the way so far as historical knowledge and interest are concerned. Alec Douglas Home (1963-4) has a history degree, but has maintained the amateur status of a gentleman commoner of Christ Church, Oxford; the knowledge of Harold Wilson (1964-70 and 1974-6) while by no means negligible is somewhat over-concentrated upon the American Civil War. Edward Heath (1970-4), although he thinks in broad and generous terms, has never much illuminated his speeches or writings with historical parallels going back beyond his own, now long, experience.
James Callaghan (1976-9) does not break the pattern, even though he, too, now likes to think broad. Margaret Thatcher (1979-90), while her own impact upon history will be great, is curiously bounded by her own period of office, and that of the previous Labour government. She is fond of argument by historical comparison, but it is almost invariably done in a scale of two, and her history does not often go back before 1974, the date of the beginning of the second Wilson Government. Nor does John Major (1990-?) or any likely alternative British Prime Minister show much sign of ability to reverse the trend.
The case could therefore be regarded as superficially proved: twenty-three years from 1940 to 1963 producing four Prime Ministers, of whom at least three were impregnated with historical sense; and thirty years from 1963 to 1993 with six Prime Ministers on an incline of descent towards indifference or ignorance. History appears to be in retreat.
Yet might it not have been the first rather than the second period that was exceptional? If we consider the eight preceding Prime Ministers who took office since 1900, this looks quite plausible. Arthur James Balfour (1902-5) brooded on the likelihood of cosmic doom when ‘the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude’, but this grand pessimism did not encourage much detailed historical application, even though one of his dominant political thoughts was that he was determined not to be like Robert Peel in 1846 and ‘betray his party’. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905-8) was an indolent Cambridge classicist who preferred French novels to English political biography, and managed more on a mixture of shrewdness and niceness than on historical thought or erudition.
H. H. Asquith (1908-16) had absorbed a lot of history, as his smoothly purring brain absorbed almost everything, and could have easily held a historical conversational candle to Attlee or Macmillan, as he frequently did to Churchill who was a young minister in his government. But he was no writer - except of personal letters to ladies, frequently penned with great fluency during Cabinet meetings over which he was presiding. Lloyd George (1916-22) made a lot of history, but he was always too much a man of the moment to be greatly influenced by historical lessons. In his oratory he preferred topographical imagery - ‘the great peaks … of honour, duty, patriotism and … sacrifice’ contrasted with ‘the enervating valley’ of selfishness - to historical analogy.
Bonar Law (1922-3) knew the works of Thomas Carlyle inside out, and his historical reading beyond the works of that ‘sage of Chelsea’, eclectic though these were, was remarkably thorough and wide for a commercially educated accountant of rather rigid views. Stanley Baldwin (1923, 1924-9 and 1935-7) loved the rhythms of the English countryside and had a strong sense of continuity, but although he claimed (not wholly plausibly) to have been most influenced by the writings of Sir Henry Maine, his favourite historical author was probably the somewhat more middle-brow Arthur Bryant.
Ramsay MacDonald (1924 and 1929-35) attached considerable importance to political theory, but found more parallels in biological evolution than historical precedent for the form of socialism that he wished to introduce. Neville Chamberlain’s (1937-40) practical and somewhat intolerant mind did not much require the support or the recreation of history.
Nevertheless, I think that on balance this group of early twentieth-century Prime Ministers knew more history than do their successors of the last decade or so, and they were certainly buttressed by other ministers - Lloyd George by Curzon, Milner and H. A. L. Fisher, MacDonald by Haldane and Sydney Webb, the early Baldwin by Churchill and L. S. Amery, the later Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain by Halifax and Duff Cooper, to take some random examples - who knew incomparably more than do those who are ministers or likely ministers today. The case for secular decline can therefore be regarded as substantially if not overwhelmingly proved for Britain. And the early part of the twentieth century was already a significant decline from the habits which had prevai
led in the nineteenth century.
What about other countries? First the United States. The American pattern of decline is much less clear. The early Virginian and Massachusetts Presidents are naturally thought of as gentlemen of eighteenth-century squirearchical culture, as at home amongst their books as in the saddle and the open air. And of Jefferson, the two Adams, Madison and probably Washington, this must be allowed, although with the exception of John Quincy Adams’s diary their literary output was exiguous, even if, in the cases of Jefferson and Madison at least, its constitutional impact was vast. Their minds were set in a constitutional and historical mould by the objective circumstances of creative flux in which they lived. James Monroe does not seem to me to be in the same category of library culture, although his doctrine has echoed down a century or more.
Nor were the mid-century Presidents between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln acquired his considerable historical knowledge rather in the way that Harry Truman did seventy years later: through solitary, sometimes unselective reading more than through structured teaching or the interplay of ideas with members of a group of equals who were interested and informed. But as a composer of memorable prose and an importer of the sweep of history into oratory he was clearly in a different category from Truman. Truman’s ‘the buck stops here’ and ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’ are good adages but not exactly of the quality of ‘four score and seven years ago our fathers called forth upon this continent a new nation …’
After Lincoln we have to wait until the turn of the century before we get back into significant historical hills let alone into the commanding peaks of knowledge. I suppose the twentieth century might be very crudely categorized by saying that Wood-row Wilson knew a vast amount, that Theodore Roosevelt (in a not very applied way), Truman (in a plodding way), and Kennedy (perhaps more through associates than by detailed study) knew quite a lot; that Taft, Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon and perhaps Carter knew some, Coolidge and Ford a little, and that Harding, Eisenhower and Reagan have practised a very rigid economy of historical reading. Bush ought to have picked up some at Phillips’ Andover Academy and at Yale, but I do not think it was very profound, and he certainly cannot be counted a master of structured historical or any other sort of prose.
In Europe I have mostly found the French to be more interested and better informed than the Germans and most others, although with the Belgians and some Italians inclining more to the French category. Both President Giscard and President Mitterrand combine knowledge and interest, although the former has more detail and the latter, like de Gaulle in this respect, more sweep. De Gaulle indeed was as dominated by a sense of historical sweep and destiny as was Churchill. Helmut Kohl looks likely as the Chancellor of German unity to make a lot of history, but has no great interest in it as a study. But nor did Helmut Schmidt, who was the most constructive statesman of my time as President of the European Commission. I think that for someone of Schmidt’s generation the immediate past constituted a noxious barrier which discouraged him from retrospective peering. Adenauer almost was history. He was first Mayor of Cologne in 1917, forty-six years before he ceased to be Chancellor. He was first mooted as Reichskanzler in 1921. Even so I do not think he was a great amateur of history.
Does this catalogue tell us much about how desirable a qualification for statesmanship is historical knowledge? On the whole, and surprisingly cautiously, I think it can be said that those with knowledge and interest performed better than those without, with, on the European side of the Atlantic, Lloyd George and Schmidt providing notable exceptions one way, and Eden a less certain one the other. On America I am more hesitant to pronounce.
Why should this be so? The most obvious explanation is that history helps to lengthen perspective and by so doing discourages excessive partisanship. This must, however, be qualified by saying that it applies to a reasonably detached study of history and not to living in its shadow with an obsessive concentration. No communities are more difficult to bring together - Northern Ireland, Cyprus - than those where the contemplation of ancient wrongs is a way of life. It could also be cited in contrary evidence that few politicians have been more short-sighted than the elegant biographer Harold Nicolson, with his five switches of party, or more partisan than were the great constitutional historians A. V. Dicey and William Anson at the time of the Parliament Act of 1911. I suspect it is more that historical knowledge stems from a mixture of curiosity and a generally well-stocked mind, and that those with these attributes are better equipped than those without.
There has been another recent development of possible beneficial importance: this is the enormous growth of memoir writing. It applies on both sides of the Atlantic. Of the eleven British Prime Ministers between 1880 and 1940 none of them wrote anything approaching full-scale memoirs. Balfour wrote a fragment of autobiography and Lloyd George a major pièce justificative about his stewardship of World War I, but not an autobiography. Of the nine Prime Ministers since 1940, only Edward Heath and Mrs Thatcher, both said to be busy writing or in the latter case being written for, have been silent.
In the United States there were twelve Presidents between 1880 and 1945. Three of them (Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge and Hoover) did write memoirs. But since 1945, of the eight who have gone from the highest office, no one has remained silent except for John Kennedy who obviously had no choice. Even George Bush has already produced an interim volume of autobiography, memorable, if for nothing else, for its sole reference to Britain, which was a statement that ‘Barbara and I met with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Norman.’
The inevitability of the political memoir has become a fact of political life. This may not produce much good literature, or even in some cases satisfactory narrative reading, but it does, I believe, make the prospective authors a little more aware of how their actions may look in longer perspective and of their comparative performance vis-à-vis others who will be working at the memoir face alongside them. And the effects of this are more likely to be good than bad.
I therefore give my vote in favour of history and memoir writing rather than in favour of Henry Ford’s dictum that history is bunk, but I do so with suitable caution and reservation. What I really believe is that those with curiosity, whatever their educational and occupational backgrounds, are bound to have interest in and acquire some knowledge about the past; and that those without it are likely to be dull men and uncomprehending rulers.
Oxford’s Appeal to Americans
This is based on an article written for The American Oxonian magazine in March 1989.
I Am Writing this article on the evening of Easter Sunday, 1989, twenty-four hours after attending my first University Boat Race for thirty years. On the previous occasion in 1959 I watched from the Hammersmith riverside house of A. P. Herbert, author, musical comedy librettist, and the last MP for Oxford until the abolition of the university seats in the House of Commons in 1950. He and I were currently engaged in a joint enterprise to liberalize the law relating to literary censorship.
The three-decade interval makes it clear that I was not and am not a rowing man. But this year I gladly accepted an invitation to go on the Oxford launch and follow a few yards behind the umpire’s craft, which was itself accused of being too close behind the Cambridge boat - the Oxford boat, after the first half-mile, being happily outside its reach. The pressure for my presence arose out of the attendance for the first time of the Cambridge Chancellor, Prince Philip. I could hardly be expected to balance him in rank (Oxford, despite its more royalist history, has been consistently faithful to political, non-princely and elected Chancellors since the eighteenth century), but at least I would have prevented the Oxford crew being bereft of any official support in the event of defeat, and in victory was able to commiserate with Prince Philip (who had elided gracefully from Cambridge partisan to independent royal personage) for his having to present the Beefeater Gin Trophy (sponsorship seems unavoidable these days) to the r
ival crew.
Oxford on this occasion slipped through to victory rather against the expectations. But as it was the fourteenth Oxford victory over the past fifteen years it could hardly be regarded as an underdog’s triumph. Underdoggery is certainly not one of Oxford’s characteristics, although it must be said that in this specialized sport of propelling boats through the water, Oxford, in spite of the triumphs of the 1970s and 1980s, has never since the beginning of the event in 1829 been ahead of Cambridge. It has, however, been consistently ahead in other concours, such as producing Prime Ministers, Archbishops of Canterbury and Lord Chancellors.
Our traditional role as a repository and guardian of humanistic learning set in an almost unique framework of man-made beauty remains intact. The Bodleian Library, judged by a mix of the three criteria of range of contents, interest of buildings and intensity of use, has no earthly rival. Together with its outstation, Gibbs’s domed Radcliffe Camera, which is the centrepiece of the Oxford skyline, the Sheldonian Theatre, which was Wren’s first architectural design, the Theatre’s near contemporary the Old Ashmo-lean, the Clarendon Building which Hawksmoor did fifty years afterwards, and the late mediaeval Divinity School, it constitutes the most remarkable group of university buildings in the world (the glory of Cambridge is almost all in the individual colleges), and is less spoilt than it was a generation ago because of the substantial exclusion of motor cars from Radcliffe Square.
To set out this list of unmatched physical assets (buttressed of course by all the individual quality of the colleges) sometimes arouses in my mind the fear that we might cease to live up to them and become a British version of a Hofburg without the Habsburgs. That has certainly not happened up to the present. The fame of Oxford alumni has survived at least as well as the fabric of its buildings. In the past hundred years out of a total of twenty-one home Prime Ministers, eleven (from Gladstone to Mrs Thatcher) have been Oxonians, as well as a clutch of overseas ones, including Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, and the last two Australians (the second surprisingly buttressed in that almost aggressively independent country by a third of his Cabinet), as well as the King of Norway and the President of the Federal Republic of Germany. There is as yet no American President, but with five current US Senators, including one or two who are distinctly papabile, there is always hope.1
